by Nevil Shute
I put it to him bluntly. “Been up on the down this morning?” I inquired. He hadn’t. “Well, I’ve got an aeroplane up there.”
He nodded slowly. “Nasty dangerous things,” he said at last. “You don’t want to go messing about with them no more. Thought you’d had your fill in the war.”
I laughed. “It’s nothing to do with me. I’ve not been flying it. But I know the pilot. He’s an old friend of mine; he landed here late last night. He’s had to go to London in a hurry; I said I’d look after it for him, and see that it was picketed down somewhere in shelter from the wind. He said he reckoned to leave it here a week.”
It was a thin tale.
“Aye,” said Spadden phlegmatically. “Where’ll we put it?”
I thanked God for him. “Bring it down into the hollow here,” I said, “and picket it under the lee of the barn. It’s quiet enough down here.”
“Aye,” he said again. “It’s quiet down here.” He stared around. “Never a great wind down here. If you put it here the sheep’ll be worrying it.”
“They can’t hurt it.”
“Reckon they’ll rub.”
“Let ’em,” I said. There was very little chance, I thought, that anyone would ever want to fly it again.
He went off and fetched one of his labourers, and then we went trudging up to the top of the down. There we cut loose the lashings that held her, lifted the tail shoulder-high, and began to wheel her down to the barn. It was all downhill, or we’d never have got her there. We must have put her down a dozen times for a spell. She was a big machine, that Breguet, and a heavy one to handle on the ground. I know that by the time we got her down to the barn I—for one—was wishing most heartily that I’d never set eyes on her.
There was everything we needed in that barn, right on the spot. We drove stakes into the ground beneath the wing-tips with a wooden mallet, and lashed her to them loosely to enable her to ride a little in the wind. We lashed sacking down over the engine, the propeller, and the cockpit. I made a proper job of the controls. By the time I’d done with her she was a fixture, and fit to lie out there for a winter without taking any great harm. Apart from the sheep, that is.
I made a rough examination of her before I left. There was an oil pipe broken in the engine mounting; a bit of rubber piping that connected the oil tank to the engine, perhaps an inch in diameter, frayed and burst. There was a great slaver of oil all about that had come from this pipe. That was the trouble that had brought him down. Something must have made the pipe burst, I supposed; some stoppage in the circuit, but what it was I did not know.
I left her then. Spadden said he’d keep an eye on her and see that she didn’t suffer too much from the sheep. I took the occasion to urge him not to talk about her. But there was little need for that. He didn’t want a lot of sightseers wandering about all over his land.
I went back to Under for breakfast well satisfied with myself. The machine couldn’t be seen from the road, and I had left her in as great concealment as could be contrived in England. It is no easy matter to hide an aeroplane. It is a most conspicuous thing, and every village constable seems to have an official interest in it, on all occasions.
I drove back to the Hall, put my car in the coach-house, and went across to my own place. They had made my bed and had begun to lay the table for breakfast. I looked into my spare room. Lenden was asleep in bed, flushed and breathing heavily. I closed the door softly and went out.
Then I crossed the yard and went to the gun-room in the mansion. The morning papers generally tarry a while there on their way to the breakfast table; whenever I want to know any particular item of news in a hurry, I go and look through them there before breakfast. I spread them out upon the gun-room table that morning and glanced quickly through the lot, half-hoping to find a second paragraph about fireballs over Portsmouth. I found nothing at all.
I gave it up at last, rang the bell and sent for Sanders, the butler. He came in due course, grey-headed, lean, and infinitely well bred.
“Morning, Sanders,” I said. “I brought a gentleman back with me from Winchester last night, and stuck him in my spare room. I expect the maid told you.”
He inclined his head gravely. “She did, sir.”
“Well,” said I. “I think he’s going to be ill.”
He looked concerned. “I am very sorry to hear that, sir.”
“Yes. So am I. As a matter of fact, I don’t think it’s anything very bad. Touch of malaria, I should think—he’s not long back from the East. Shivering fits, and a temperature. He took enough quinine to kill a dog when we got in last night, and went off to bed. I’ve just looked in on him now. He’s asleep.”
I paused, and thought for a minute. “I’ve got to go to Pithurst for a sale to-day—I can’t miss that. I’ll be out to lunch. He’ll probably stay in bed all day, I should think. Will you see Mrs. Richards about it, and get him some lunch taken over? Something pretty light—bit of fish, or something. I’ll see if there’s anything he wants before I go. And I’ll be back about tea-time.”
“Very good, sir. He might fancy a grape-fruit, with the fever.”
I nodded. “Good scheme. You might send one over in the middle of the morning, if he’s awake.”
He went away, and I turned again to the papers. Relations with Russia were more strained than they had been since the time of the General Strike; the Mail, in particular, was very insistent on the subject. The Times was frankly concerned over the reception of our Note. I spread it out upon the gun-room table and became immersed in the leading article. I don’t generally read the leaders in The Times. They’re not much in my line. I’ve never taken much stock of politics or legislation or the affairs of state. But that day it was different. I wanted to find out exactly how matters stood, and as I sat there that morning, on the edge of the gun-room table in the sunlight, reading that leading article, I realised that things had gone further in the direction of a breach with Russsia than I had dreamed.
Lenden was awake when I got back to the house. I looked in at the door of his room for a moment before breakfast. He was very hot and restless in bed. He remarked thickly that he had a ruddy mouth like the bottom of the parrot’s cage.
He said there wasn’t anything that he wanted.
“Better stay where you are for the present, then,” I replied, and retired to my bacon and eggs.
I looked in on him again before I went out. He was feeling very thick and rotten, and was evidently in for a pretty sharp bout of fever. I sat chatting with him for a bit, and then rang up the housekeeper and asked her to send over a thermometer. He had a temperature of about a hundred and two.
In ordinary circumstances I’d have sent for a doctor at that point. You can’t afford to go messing about with a temperature like that. Lenden wouldn’t hear of it. He said he knew what had to be done—lie in bed and take quinine and neat brandy till it went off. That seemed very reasonable to me; in any case, it was the treatment that had cured this thing before. It might have been rather difficult to explain him to the doctor, too; I didn’t want his presence in Under advertised more than necessary, until I knew what he was going to do.
He didn’t want anything to eat. I made him comfortable and went over and had a chat with Mrs. Richards, the housekeeper. I wasn’t very happy about leaving him in a strange house in that condition, and told her to send over someone every couple of hours or so to see that he was all right. More than that I couldn’t do; I left him some books and a decanter of brandy, got out my car, and went off to my office in Under.
My office is in the main street of the town, about a hundred yards from the market. I rent a couple of rooms there for the business, in the same building as the Rural District Council and the Waterworks Company. I had a good bit to do that morning, I remember, because it was getting on towards Quarter Day. However, at about half-past eleven I left my clerk to cope with the rest of it, and got going on the road for Pithurst.
I had to go. There was a chap ther
e who’d made a real effort to get a pedigree herd of shorthorns together. Arner was keen on all pedigree stock, and we’d helped him quite a lot. This chap had put every bean he’d got into this herd, and borrowed a lot he hadn’t, and then died. It really was rather important that I should be there to watch the sale. I had a long chat with Arner about it a couple of days before. We fixed it that if things began to go badly I was to start running the price up on one or two of the young bulls; if they came to us by the hammer we could ship them out to Las Plantas and get a good bit of our money back that way.
As it happened, that wasn’t necessary. There was a fellow there who’d come up from Devon for the sale and really wanted the whole lot, I believe. Or at any rate, the heifers and young bulls. I’m not sure that if I’d gone to him privately he wouldn’t have made an offer for the whole issue as it stood; still, we’d arranged an auction, and there were a good many of the local people interested. This Devon chap would have had it all his own way in spite of that, if I hadn’t been there. Time after time I ran him up to a decent price for the beast when the locals had dropped out, and then left him to it. As things turned out he paid a pretty fair average price for what he had, and by the time we’d finished he was ready to see me dead. The locals took what was left. Not a bad sale, and I went home at the end feeling that I’d done a pretty good day’s work.
It was about five o’clock when I moved off. I went by the Under road, because I wanted to drop in at the office to sign my letters. I stayed there for a quarter of an hour or so, and then drove back to the Hall.
Now Under Hall lies about two and a half miles from the town, on the other side of the Rother. You come out of the town past the station and go on for about a mile or so, till you come to a humpy stone bridge across the river. Under Hall is about a mile farther on from that. I came swinging along that road in the Morris, thinking no evil, and pulled up with a squeal of brakes as I came upon the bridge. Sheila Darle was there, Arner’s niece, sitting on the stone parapet in one of the triangular recesses.
She hadn’t got a hat on, and I can remember that the wind was ruffling her short brown hair. That meant that she’d just strolled down from the Hall. She was sitting there on the bridge waiting for someone, and I had a feeling when I saw her that probably she was waiting for me.
I pulled up beside her.
“Good evening, Miss Darle,” I remarked.
Well, it was. It had been a fresh, windy sort of day. Now in the evening the wind had dropped, the clouds had turned white and the sky deep blue. The sun was setting behind the down.
She slid down from the parapet and came and leaned her arms upon the hood, on the opposite side of the car to me.
“Good evening, Mr. Moran,” she said. Somewhere behind her there was a thrush—the first I’d heard that year.
“Can I give you a lift back?” I asked. “I’m going straight home.”
She shook her head absently. “It’s a nice evening for walking. I wanted the walk.”
She glanced up at me. “Mr. Moran,” she said. “Who’s that you’ve got in your house?”
There was no point in wasting petrol. I leaned forward to stop the engine, and took my time over answering that question.
“A chap I used to know in the Flying Corps,” I replied, and stared her down. “I met him in Winchester, and brought him back with me last night. His name’s Lenden—Maurice Lenden.”
She smiled at me across the car. “Maurice Lenden,” she observed. “Now that’s about the only thing I didn’t know about him.”
I eyed her thoughtfully for a minute. “I see,” I said at last. “You’ve been doing a bit of Lady Investigating.”
She nodded.
I had known Sheila Darle since first I came to Under. When first I came here she was still at school. She used to spend her summer holidays with her uncle at the Hall. One day that summer she went to London and had her hair bobbed in the Children’s Department at Harrod’s, and came back looking about ten years older. Fired by that, on the same evening, she took her uncle’s little Talbot two-seater—that we kept for running in and out of town—and proclaimed her intention of driving it. Drive it she did, too—very neatly and accurately into the gatepost of the stable-yard and the dog-kennel. That was my first acquaintance with Sheila Darle, when she came to me very nearly in tears about it, and wanted to know what she was to do. I was younger then than I am now, but not so young as to miss the implication that the damaged wing and radiator should be repaired before Lord Arner came back from Town. I got it done in time, but I made her go and tell him about it. That set the keynote to our relations. Since those days I had sent off a couple of men with a horse to bring her car in about once every six months. Sometimes it was too bad for that, and then we had to get the garage to go and fetch it in.
I knew she wouldn’t let me down in this.
“You’ve been talking to him?” I asked.
She shook her head. “He’s been talking, but not to me. He’s very ill.”
I wrinkled my brows. “He’s got a touch of fever,” I said. “He took a cold a few days ago, and made it worse last night. But he should be all right. D’you mean he’s off his head?”
She nodded. “Mm.”
I reached out and put my hand to the starter. “I’d better get along back to him.”
She didn’t move from her position, leaning against the car. “He’s all right now,” she said. “He was sleeping quite nicely when I came out, and Mrs. Richards is in the sitting-room. But you shouldn’t have left him like that. You gave Mrs. Richards a great fright.”
“I’m sorry about that,” I said. “I didn’t think he was going to be off his head. He gets this thing whenever he takes a bad chill. Malaria, or something. He picked it up out in Honduras.”
She didn’t make any reply to that, so that there was silence for a bit. Then she looked up suddenly.
“Is he an airman?” she inquired.
I nodded. “He was in my squadron in the war. He became a professional pilot after that.”
“And now,” she said casually, “he’s just come back from Russia.”
I glanced down at the river. It runs pretty fast over pebbles beneath that bridge, and with a rippling sound. I have heard that there are grayling in it, and I remember wondering then if that were true. And presently I glanced at her again.
“You’d better tell me about it,” I said quietly.
She laughed. “There’s nothing much to tell. Only it’s so funny. Mrs. Richards sent a maid over to him in the middle of the morning with a grape-fruit and some barley water, because she thought he’d like it. And the girl came back and said she couldn’t make him understand anything, but he was talking to himself all the time. Mrs. Richards thought you’d got a looney over there, and went over herself. And then she came and fetched me.”
“I see,” I muttered. “That’s how it was. Did you send for Armitage?” The local doctor.
She shook her head. “I didn’t think it was necessary unless he got worse. You see, you’d told them that he’d got malaria, and that he’d have to lie up for a bit. You hadn’t told them that he was going to be off his head, though. No, we just took it in turns to sit with him.”
“That was kind of you,” I said.
“Not a bit. He’s a nice man.”
I knew what she meant by that. There’s no better way to get to know a man’s character than to get him tight and see how he talks then. And I suppose delirium is much the same.
She leaned both arms upon the hood of the car and looked straight at me. “He was saying such funny things,” she remarked.
I nodded ruefully. “I expect he was. What did he say?”
She considered for a minute. “It was all so mixed up,” she said. “He seemed to be talking most of the time about a long night flight that he had made in the dark. In the cold.” She glanced at me. “Do you know where that was?”
I shook my head.
“It was over snowy country, and it was very
cold. He was frozen in his seat so stiff that he couldn’t move, and his head kept dropping forward with the sleepiness of it. And to keep himself awake he raised his goggles, and the cold bit his face and made his eyes water, and the tears froze on his cheeks. And he was most terribly frightened.”
She paused. “That’s one of them. He gets a sort of cold fit every now and again, and whenever he gets that he comes back to talking about that cold flight. He shivers.”
“Poor old soul,” I remarked. “What else did he say?”
“He was talking a lot about his wife. But I don’t want to repeat that, and there wasn’t anything that really mattered. Except to them.”
“All right. What else?”
It was very quiet by the river. “He was talking about a man called Poddy Armstrong that he used to meet at the Royal Aero Club. It was rather horrid, that. Where’s the Royal Aero Club, Mr. Moran?”
“It’s a London club,” I said. “In Clifford Street.” I glanced at her. “I suppose you’re going to tell me that Poddy Armstrong was chasing him in another machine, and trying to shoot him down in the dark.”
She stared at me. “How did you know?”
“Why,” I said simply, “he told me.”
“Why was Poddy Armstrong going to shoot at him?”
I took a long time over answering that question. “Perhaps they’d had a quarrel,” I suggested in the end.
She was about to say something to that, but checked herself. I knew that I had hurt her. In the end she smiled at me. “I know it’s not my business,” she said. “But one can’t help being curious.”
“Neither yours nor mine,” I said. “It’s his own affair. He’s been in a good bit of trouble lately, one way and another. He told me some of it last night, when we didn’t go to bed. Did he say anymore?”
