by Nevil Shute
Norman broke in. “We have the most complete reports upon the situation in Glanferis,” he remarked. “This comes as a complete surprise. We cannot imagine what section of the disputants could find it to their interest to arm their men. The use of force against the Crown cuts clean across the policy of every party in that district. It would mean political disaster for the party that attempted it. It’s inconceivable.”
“Still,” I said, “there the guns are. You can’t get away from that.”
Sir David sighed. “Yes, there they are.” I was a little sorry for him in his great responsibility.
He pursued his discourse. “I am taking it upon myself to delay the seizure of those guns,” he said quietly. “I would not have you think that we are shirking from our duty on account of the election, for fear of the effect that may be produced upon the electorate if guns should be discovered in Glanferis. We are rather concerned to ensure that when the matter is made public for the first time, the whole story shall be quite complete. I would not bring it out in bits and pieces. I want the directing intelligence behind those guns. I want evidence which will show for what reason they are there—in comparison with that evidence the guns are nothing.” He turned to me. “This country stands on the eve of a poll, Commander Stevenson. We seem to be in the unfortunate position of having to produce a bombshell for the public, another Zinovieff letter which may change the whole course of the election. If we have to do that we must have solid facts behind us—not merely guns and theories as to what they were intended for. The public must be told the whole truth of this affair if it be told anything at all.”
“I’m with you there,” I said. “Give the country the whole truth of whatever may be going on, and let it do what it thinks best. It won’t go wrong.”
He inclined his head. “Exactly so.”
Fedden stirred. “That leads us to the man Gordon,” he said. It was the first time he had spoken.
I raised my eyebrows. “How does he come into it?”
Sir David Carter said: “We propose to use him for the next few days for information purposes.”
I was about to speak, but he stopped me. “I will tell you first what we propose. We shall send him back to his work at Gloucester, keeping him quietly under observation there. We shall give him to understand that no proceedings will be taken for the slight irregularities of which he may be guilty, on the condition that he supplies us with the information that we want. We want the man Palmer, primarily. Next, we want information about the next landing of arms to enable us to make a capture of the boat. Given those two, I think we shall secure sufficient evidence for us to put the matter to the public for its judgment.”
He paused. “I would not have you think that we enjoy these methods that we have to use,” he said a little sternly, looking straight at me. “Our business is to catch criminals, and to find out the truth.”
I nodded. “I appreciate that point.”
I sat and thought about it for a minute, and there was a silence in the room. Their attitude was reasonable; it was the only way to get the information quickly that would settle this affair. Billy must go back to Gloucester and deliver the man Palmer over to the police.
I saw now why they wanted me. They were no fools, and they knew that I had influence with Mollie. They could not make the man go back to Gloucester if he did not want to; they could not make him betray his associates. They were relying on Mollie and myself to influence him that that would be the right thing to do; they must have seen that threats would be of no avail. There was good stuff in that chap.
I could not deny that they were right, nor could I deny them help. The matter was too serious for that. Against my will they’d got me into it again.
I raised my head. “And you want me to do … what?”
It was exactly as I had thought. They had not seen Gordon or put this thing to him; they wanted me to do that. They wanted me to represent to him that the police were his friends, only anxious to help him in his difficulties and to guide him out of the mess that he had got into. I was to have a quiet talk with him with Mollie, and then to take him along and introduce him to one or two plain-clothes men the next day. Then he was to go back to Gloucester, and wait for developments.
“There isn’t any danger in it,” Norman said. “I can assure you that it’s a procedure which is often used.”
I stared at him. “I am quite ready to believe it,” I remarked, a little grimly.
I turned to Carter. “I will see what I can do,” I said. “You understand that I can promise nothing—nothing whatsoever. I’ll put it to them, and I’ll telephone to you this afternoon.”
I left the Yard and went back to the hotel. Mollie was out somewhere with her brother—shopping, I suppose. I waited in the lounge for them. They came in presently and we had lunch, and after lunch I took them up into my bedroom for our talk.
I put it to them as fairly as I could. I told them all that I had heard at Scotland Yard, and I told them what the police wanted to find out. I explained as clearly as I could the political reasons underlying the whole thing; I think that Billy understood that more than Mollie did. He was accustomed to reading newspapers. I told them, frankly, that I thought they ought to help; that what the police were asking was a reasonable thing. In his small way Billy had helped to get the country into some sort of a mess, and it was up to him to help to get it out again.
“I dunno what to say,” he said. “It don’t seem right to me.…”
But Mollie broke in there. “Don’t act so soft,” she said. “The Commander knows what’s best.…”
Eventually we all went round to Jenkinson, and put the thing to him. He could not help us very much, beyond the general advice that where the police demands were reasonable they should be met so far as possible. He was inclined to think that their demands were reasonable now, and that our best course was to fall in with their plans.
So we agreed, and Billy was content to go. I rang up Norman and arranged for Billy to visit Scotland Yard that afternoon, and to go down to Gloucester that same evening; it was obviously desirable that he should get back there as soon as possible. Mollie and I escorted him to Scotland Yard and said good-bye to him; he was diffident and uneasy in his new rôle. I was uneasy, too, but I could see no other way of handling the situation.
I arranged with him that I would take his sister back to Dartmouth and we would wait there till this affair was over. As soon as he was free he would come down to us there.
And so we left him, and went back to the hotel.
Mollie was absent-minded and uneasy all that night. We dressed and dined, and I took her out to a revue; she enjoyed it, but her mind was never very far away from Billy. She kept on asking little, difficult questions of the work that we had sent him on—was it often done that way, and was it ever dangerous? I answered these to the best of my ability and reassured her, I suppose; I wish I could have reassured myself. Not one of our better evenings, taking all in all, and I was glad to go to bed.
We took a morning train to Exeter next day, and Adams met us with the car. I drove and Adams sat behind; it was a warm and sunny afternoon. As we got on the road our spirits rose: the Yard seemed very far away from Devonshire that day. We went down through Newton Abbot and Totnes, with Mollie lighting cigarettes for me, and marvelling at the automatic lighter as it glowed.
We got to Dartmouth just in time for tea; it was good to be back home again. I don’t like London, and though one goes up there from time to time on business or for boredom, I am always best pleased with my own place, with the sea and with my work. This afternoon as we sat having tea together in the library, with Mollie prattling away of the things that she had done and things that she would like to do in London, I remember thinking what a very good place home was.
And I remember thinking what a dreary place my home had been before the girl had come to stay with me. I remember wondering what I should do when this was over and she went away.
We went down int
o the garden after tea and picked some roses for her room; she loved her flowers. And then we went a little way down the fuzzy, till we stopped where I had had a seat put up, and we sat there in the evening sun while I smoked a pipe, looking out over the Range and the wide sea. And as we sat there a vessel came into sight from the west, a little cutter under all plain sail, making for the Range and Dartmouth on the evening flood.
“Hullo,” I said, and pointed with my pipe. “There’s Stenning.”
It was only four days since we sailed together, but it seemed much more to us. Stenning had been on a short pleasure cruise while we had been in town, and here he was again, slipping in quietly to his moorings off my quay. “They’ll probably stay for the night with us,” I said. “They won’t fly back to-night.”
She glanced up at me. “Couldn’t we go down and meet them?” she inquired. “I mean, it might be nice for them if we did that?”
And so we walked back up the fuzzy to the stable, took the Bentley, and went down to my yard. We got there before the Irene; I took the yard punt and we went out to the moorings on the calm evening water to wait until they came. Near the mooring buoy I pulled in oars, and we sat and drifted, smoking and talking till they came.
The vessel came slowly into sight, more or less becalmed among the hills, drifting slowly into moorings on the flood with the light airs. Stenning is like me, he never motors, if he can avoid it, in a yacht. Joan was at the helm, anxiously striving with the erratic airs; the vessel came slowly to us, with Stenning busy forward with the gear. He dropped the foresail and set up his topping lift, then with the boot-hook in his hand he turned and hailed us as they drifted slowly close.
“Been far?” I asked.
“Only to Salcombe and the Yealm,” he said. “This is a holiday, this is.”
He caught his mooring deftly and pulled the chain on board; the vessel turned slowly and swung to the tide. I pulled the punt alongside and we went on board.
I went forward to help Stenning with the main; Mollie went below with Joan. “You’re not going back to-night, are you?” I asked. “I’ve got a lot I want to talk to you about.”
He cocked an eye at me. “About this other business?”
I nodded.
“Right,” he said; “we’ll stay and drink your port for you.” Stenning has a practical mind.
We gathered up their belongings and transferred them to the punt, and squared up the vessel for the night. One of the advantages of a shipyard is that you can bring your yacht in and leave her more or less as she arrives, secure in the knowledge that she will be properly attended to. We got the sail-covers on and locked the cabin up, and then we were ready to depart.
Dinner that evening was a pretty cheerful meal. Joan and Stenning were fit and sunburned with their little cruise, and in good spirits. I was surprised and pleased, too, to see how well Mollie was going down with them. She had lost her shyness and was chatting to them freely about her life up in the North, with little anecdotes about the people she had met and places she had seen. But she didn’t like the North, she said. The South was ever so much nicer, with the sea and everything.
She talked a lot about the sea. She was always wanting to know things about it—why the tide went up and down the coast instead of coming in and out, and whether seagulls went south for the winter, and how far out to sea they went. Funny questions of that sort that seemed inspired by nothing but sheer interest—and she never forgot anything I told her in that way. I found her very quick.
I sat with Stenning that evening when the ladies had gone out, and over the port I told him all that had happened in the last four days. Rather to my surprise, I found him seriously concerned about Gordon. He has had more experience of the rough-and-tumble side of life than I have had, and he was by no means certain that the police had power to protect informers from the remainder of the gang. He pointed out what would happen to Gordon if this thing had happened in America; he would have been “taken for a ride,” and nobody would be able to do much about it. Certainly this was not America, but the ways of gunmen were becoming universal in the world. He thought that we were taking a considerable risk.
He was intensely interested in the whole affair. “I must go back to-morrow,” he said. “I’m tied up with an appointment that I’ve got to keep. But if it’s any help to you, I’ll come down for a day or two after that—when this next landing’s due to be made.” He paused. “I don’t think I’d impress it upon Joan,” he said. “I’d like to see Irene on the slip, and I’d put it that way.”
I told him that that would help a lot. It would be good to have Stenning by my side if there was any trouble coming, and it was good of him to make the offer.
It was still light when we went through into the next room. I had some matters that I wanted to discuss with Joan, and so I cut her out from Stenning and Mollie, and we went walking down the garden in the dusk, talking of little, casual things, until we reached the rose garden and sat a little on the stone balustrade looking away up-river to the town. I came to the end of my trivialities down there, and blurted out:
“I came down here because I wanted to talk to you about marrying.”
There was a little silence after I said that; she did not reply at once. In the dim light her cigarette glowed softly as she drew. She blew the smoke out and inquired:
“You’re not married now, are you, Malcolm?”
I shook my head. “Not yet. I hope I’m going to be soon.” I stood and eyed her in the dusk. “You’re the only one of my relations that I give a damn about, and I’d somehow rather that you knew about it first.”
“It’s this girl here, is it?” she asked.
“I shall be asking her if she will marry me, quite soon,” I said.
Joan didn’t say anything to that, and her silence seemed like a rebuke to me. I wanted to explain to her, and so I said: “Even with all the money that I’ve got to give them, the sort of girl I want never falls for me. That’s idealism, I suppose. Seems to me that the present-day girl has a higher set of ideals than ever before—and I should know. I’ve tried no less than six times since the war, and failed, with all my money.” I laughed. “I must say, it’s been an interesting experience. Most instructive.”
Joan leaned forward suddenly, and touched my arm as I laughed. “Poor old Malcolm,” she said quietly.
I said, a little uncertainly: “I’ve got a chance of getting married now. I can’t go on like this, living alone. Dixon was right. I’ve tumbled on somebody who really cares for me at last—and not for my money, either. And I’m going to ask her to marry me.” I glanced at her. “I thought you’d better know.”
Joan said: “I see.”
Something in her tone pierced home and stung me up, and I said harshly: “All right. I know you think I’m messing up my life by marrying a girl like that. You needn’t put it into words.”
In the dim light I saw her looking up at me. “Well, old boy,” she said, “whatever you do now you couldn’t make it any worse, could you? Living alone, like you’ve been doing all these years.”
I stared at her blankly. “You think I’m doing the right thing?” I asked slowly. I had not thought that she would take it quite like that.
She stood up from the balustrade. “Oh, Malcolm,” she burst out, “you are so slow. I don’t believe you know yet what you’ve got. I don’t care where she comes from, or who her people are. You’ve got a girl in ten thousand. She simply adores you. She’s learnt your ways—she knows you better than I do myself. She’s even learning about boats and the sea, because that’s what you like. Do you mean to say that you can’t see it for yourself?”
I said: “I can see it for myself all right. But I didn’t think it was so plain to other people.”
She laughed. “My dear,” she said, “you give the game away a fresh way every five minutes—both of you.”
She threw her cigarette away and came a little closer to me. “Malcolm,” she said, “I think she’ll make you a good wife,
and I think that you’ll be happy. Don’t worry about what people will say. The family won’t like it, but that doesn’t matter two hoots. I’ve had my share of that, and I do know.”
“The times are changing,” I said absently. “The family have got to learn.”
She nodded in the dusk. “It’s not such good fun teaching them, though,” she said ruefully. She looked up at me. “You must be gentle with her, Malcolm. Sometimes she won’t do things the way you like them done, sometimes she’ll say the wrong thing and make you look a fool. But she’ll only do it once. You’ll find she never makes the same mistake again. And she’ll be worth a little trouble on your part.”
It was so dark that I could hardly see her as she stood beside me. “It’s good of you to talk like that,” I said. “I’d like to feel she had a friend in you.”
She said: “Oh, Malcolm! Give me another cigarette.” And when I had supplied a light for it she said: “You knew that you could count on me. We’ve never spoken of it, but didn’t you do the same for me, when I married Philip? You know, you were the only one of the relations who ever made him feel at home. And I know about the time at Courton, just after we became engaged.”
I laughed. “I didn’t cut much ice for you down there,” I said. “I’m not a hunting man, and that ended it.”
“I know they’re difficult,” she said. “But you went, and months afterwards I heard that you’d been there, and standing up for us. You don’t think I’ve forgotten that, do you?”
“No, Lady Stenning,” I said whimsically, “I don’t.”
She laughed. “Poor Philip! They put his garage rent up half-a-crown when he became a knight—he was furious!” And then more seriously she said: “Class doesn’t matter half so much these days. I wouldn’t change if I could have my time again, and you won’t want to either. Let me know as soon as she’s accepted you, and I’ll come down and see her, and we’ll go and see the family together.”
We moved towards the house. “I’ll hold you to that promise,” I remarked.
