by Nevil Shute
He took the Laverock up again next morning and got three more miles out of her, reaching a speed of one hundred and eighty-one miles an hour. This, curiously enough, coincided almost exactly with the estimated speed from wind-channel figures – a coincidence only too infrequent. He managed to steal a glance at the air speed indicator as he landed; it registered eighty-three miles an hour. He thought he could have brought her in a little slower than that.
He had telegraphed to Bevil Crossways announcing his arrival and, with a bit of a scramble, caught the afternoon train down to Gloucestershire. It was good for him to get away for a little before this race, if only for one night. He enjoyed travelling like a gentleman in a train for once in a way. He travelled first-class; it accentuated the pleasurable feeling that he was not responsible for the transport. That responsibility was one that he seldom managed to evade nowadays; whether on the road or in the air he was always controlling the machine. He was tired; it was time he took a decent holiday. He hadn’t had a proper holiday since the war. Perhaps after this race … he would ask the people at the Crossways if they could have him for a little then.
At the station he found that no car had been sent to meet him. This was very unusual; he wondered if by any chance they had not got his wire. In that case his arrival would be an unexpected pleasure for his hostess. He took one of the station taxis and drove the three miles through the sweet-smelling, stone-walled lanes. He lay back in the old car, very content. Yes, he needed a holiday.
They turned in at the lodge gates and ran up the half-mile of drive, through the rhododendron coppice. There was the house, mellow and grey in the afternoon light, and there on the steps was Helen, waiting for him.
She ran down towards him as the car came to a standstill.
‘Oh, Malcolm,’ she cried. ‘I’m so awfully glad you’ve come. I’ve sent the car for Dr Hastings – Mother’s away and I’m all alone.’
It seemed that old Sir James Riley had fallen down two steps out of his bedroom into the passage half an hour before. He was eighty-one years old.
It was immensely unfortunate. Lady Riley had dimly foreseen the possibility of such a disaster and had frequently urged him to move into the south bedroom, used only as a spare room for infrequent visitors. Tenacious of his prestige, the old man had clung to his bedroom approached by the two steps he knew so well. It gave him a feeling of independence to be two steps above the level of the passage; moreover, to give in over this matter of the room would have been a confession of that weakness whose approach he was determined to defer as long as possible. And now the expected had happened. For once the immense foresight of the Lechlanes was at fault, in that the brass carpet-rails on the two steps had not been replaced by oaken ones. Brass rails had to be taken out to be cleaned, and servants seemed to have grown so careless nowadays.
Still, it might have been much worse. No very great damage had been done; the old man had suffered a severe shock and would not be himself for many days. It would be as well, said the doctor, if someone were to sit up with him all night in case of further trouble; Helen took the first watch and Malcolm relieved her at one. As he sat by the side of the peacefully slumbering old gentleman, he turned over the position in his mind. He had had no opportunity to speak to Helen on the subject that he had come for; he saw now that there would be no opportunity forthcoming. Well, it must wait. He must not waste any time over it, though. He would write to Helen immediately after the race, telling her about this business of Morris. He could put it quite simply and briefly, and could suggest that if she wanted any further details, he would come down for a few days – otherwise he would forget all about it. That would be the sort of letter to send; he would post it immediately after the race. That would give him two or three days in which to concoct it.
Back at Southall there was not much to be done. He packed a suitcase and took it up to London, to Baynes, with whom he made the final arrangements. Baynes was going over the evening before he started and was to meet him on Brussels aerodrome when he landed; he was to wait till after lunch before starting.
He spent the evening gossiping with Morris and went to bed early. He was not feeling so awfully fit; it was a pity he had had to be up all last night. He tumbled into bed and slept soundly for ten hours; in the morning he was himself again.
Morris came down to the hangars with Rawdon the next afternoon to see him off. The Laverock had been smartened up a good deal since last she flew; all paintwork had been carefully cleaned and touched up, all woodwork polished over. She was painted a pure white, only relieved by dark-blue registration letters on the wings and fuselage and a dark-blue spinner to the propeller. All her rigging wires were blued, the struts were white, and to the rudder somebody had fixed a little blue silk streamer.
‘She’s a pretty little machine,’ said Morris.
Rawdon nodded. ‘Make them sit up with her finish,’ he said, ‘if not with her speed.’
Riley was taking a last look round the machine, dressed in a tweed suit and a filthy old trench coat, his soiled flying-helmet the only badge of office. Then he got into the machine, levering himself down into the tiny cockpit. He called Rawdon up to him as he was settling into his seat; the designer went and stood beside him.
‘I’ll send you a wire to let you know I got there all right,’ said Riley.
‘Right you are. You’ve got that paper of weights and data? And don’t forget what the Blundell people told us – about the Benzole. You’ll be able to get it over there – Baynes fixed up all that, I know.’
Riley nodded. ‘By the way, you might have my car put under cover, will you? It’s in front of the offices. Now we’ll get her running.’
‘Good luck,’ said the designer, and stepped back. The propeller was hauled over and presently the engine burst into life. Riley ran her up slowly, three men clinging to the tail, shut her down again, and waved his hand. The chocks were pulled from under the wheels; he waved again to Rawdon and Morris, and the Laverock moved slowly out over the aerodrome. A hundred yards away he faced into the wind and stopped, remaining stationary with the engine ticking over.
Then the low rumble rose to a higher note, and higher yet. The Laverock seemed to lean forward and began to move. Almost immediately the tail came off the ground; she spun along over the grass and into the air, a wonderful, delicate little thing.
They watched her as she circled the aerodrome on a great climbing turn, as she headed for the south; watched her till she was merely a speck against a cloud, far in the distance. Then she was gone.
‘He’s coming down at Lympne for Customs,’ said Rawdon.
And now the story must be told without embellishment, a plain record of the facts. It ought to have succeeded, this little venture. It was a generous thing – but even generous things may come to failure. It failed, principally through lack of time for the proper preparation of the machine, as so many enterprises in aviation have failed. But the real cause of the disaster lay farther back than that, in the circumstances that led to Britain being represented in a race of such importance by such an entry. If we attempt to follow the cause of this little disaster back still further we quickly get beyond our depth in a morass of arguments hinging on the lack of money to enter a machine properly, the poverty of the British aircraft industry, the defence of the Empire, and the payment of the American debt. The pound goes up in New York – an aeroplane comes down in Kent. There is little connection? Perhaps that is so.
There was only one man, apparently, who actually saw the Laverock come down. He was digging in his cottage garden, which stood beside the biggest meadow for miles around. He was accustomed to aeroplanes. He had never seen one close to, because they never landed anywhere near, though there had been one or two round about in the war. But they passed over his head every day, often as many as a dozen in a day. He had heard they went to Paris and other foreign places. That was what they said at the ‘Admiral’.
So when, that afternoon, he heard a rumble in the air,
he had not particularly remarked it till it stopped suddenly. True, he thought afterwards on being questioned that it had been a little irregular in its note, but that may only have been the effect of suggestion. What really drew his attention was the stoppage of the noise; he lifted his head and straightened his stiff back to look for the thing.
Sure enough, there it was up there, a pretty little white thing it looked against the sky, going round and round in big circles and coming down with each one. It was coming down somewhere – it was quite close to the ground.
It was coming down in Mr Jameson’s meadow.
It seemed very small, and suddenly it seemed to be going very fast, fast as a train, faster. It barely scraped over the hedge into the meadow and flew along just above the grass, in perfect silence. Well, why didn’t it stop and settle – flying on like that at such a pace! It couldn’t now! it wouldn’t have time to stop before it fell into the dike.
There – it had touched lightly and risen a little. It touched again, very close to the dike. It would have to go up again; it should have landed before, right away back.
It was going up; it was hopping the dike to land again on the other side. But it did not seem happy in the air this time. It went up quite steeply and seemed to hang for a moment in the air, some twenty feet up. Then it put its nose down in an odd way and plunged down to the earth on the far side of the dike. It hit with an ugly, crunching noise and seemed to collapse with the impact, tipped forward, stood on its nose for a moment, rolled over on to its back, and lay still.
It was a considerable time before it occurred to him that perhaps there might have been a man in it.
The news came to Morris that afternoon as he was getting out some preliminary figures for the new Commercial Sesquiplane. The Sesquiplane, built in any size, was rather a new departure in aeroplane design, and introduced some novel features. Rawdon was keen on it; Morris believed he had an order for the machine.
Adamson, the works manager, came swiftly into the office, to Morris’s desk.
‘Come outside a moment, Mr Morris,’ he said incisively.
Morris followed him out into the road.
‘Riley’s down near Hurstony,’ he said, ‘crashed. The police have just telephoned through. I’m having the Ratcatcher got out; I want you to go down there.’
Rawdon came out of the offices and joined them.
‘I gather from the police that Riley isn’t dangerously hurt,’ he said. ‘They say he’s got two ribs broken. He was conscious when they got him out – in a good deal of pain. He was able to give full instructions about letting us know. They’ve taken him to the cottage hospital in Hurstony.’
‘I’d better go and see him,’ said Morris. ‘I know him pretty well.’
Adamson nodded. ‘I want you to take the Ratcatcher down with a couple of mechanics – I’ve told them off. Then you must get the wings off the machine and get it loaded on to a lorry and bring it back here. You’d better land there – it’s three and a half miles south-east of Hurstony – and leave the men to get the wings off her while you go and find a lorry.’
‘Go and see Riley first,’ said Rawdon. ‘In the cottage hospital. You might ring us up and let us know how he is. And do everything you can for him. I’ll be responsible for any expense, a separate room, extra nursing, or anything of that sort. See that he’s made really comfortable.’
‘You’ll want some money probably,’ said Adamson. They moved towards his office.
‘Damn it, I wish we hadn’t let him do it,’ muttered Rawdon.
A rumble from beyond the hangars indicated that the engine of the Ratcatcher was running. Morris came out of the office, fetched a helmet and coat from beside his desk in the drawing-office, and went to the machine. He found the mechanics waiting for him.
He taxied the machine out on to the aerodrome, took off, and headed for Hurstony. It was rotten luck. He supposed it had been engine failure – Riley must have turned her over on landing. Well, that wasn’t so very serious – but how had he managed to bust a rib if that was it? He’d seen lots of people turn a somersault in the war and come out as right as rain. Anyhow, he’d soon know – already they were well clear of London. It was rotten luck about the machine – Riley had told him how it had come to be entered for the race. Poor old man – he must be feeling sick as muck at having crashed it. It was a wicked little machine for a forced landing.
He was approaching Hurstony. One of the men, seated in the cockpit behind him, stood up against the rush of air and touched Morris on the shoulder. He was pointing forward over the nose of the machine and shouting something in his ear. Morris could not hear what he was saying, but he followed the direction in which he pointed with his eyes.
Right ahead of them in the distance was a large field, crossed near one end by a dark line. On the farther side of this line was a patch of white upon the ground, crumpled and misshapen like a dropped handkerchief, surrounded by a small group of people. That would be the Laverock.
Morris flew on for a little, then throttled his engine and came quite low. He came down to about a hundred feet, flew over the field, and noted the dike running across. It was a good level field; he could land in the larger half of it. That, he supposed, was what Riley had tried for.
He circled round into the wind, slipped in over the hedge, and put her down into the field. She touched lightly, ran along, and came to rest about a hundred yards from the dike; almost before she had stopped the men were out of her and running to the wreck. Morris followed them.
The Laverock lay on her back on the farther side of the dike; from the story of the one spectator and from the evidence of the ground, Morris was able to reconstruct the accident. Riley seemed to have landed on the right side of the dike, and had touched the ground much too close to be able to stop before it. Rather than run straight into it, he seemed to have hoicked her off the ground again to hop it, after she had really lost flying speed. It was a thing that in the hands of such a pilot as Riley might well have come off. Apparently she had risen higher than was necessary, perhaps because he had had to give a violent heave on the stick to get her off the ground at all. Morris was puzzled. It was not like Riley, that; he knew the delicacy of his touch so well. Perhaps he should have taken a holiday before taking on such a job as this – Morris could not say. The machine had stalled hopelessly, put her nose down, and crashed.
The nose of the machine was crushed and shapeless. She must have hit very heavily upon it.
With the help of the spectators, Morris got her turned right way up. In the cockpit one end of the safety belt was broken from its stay; the instrument board in front of the pilot was split in two, and dials crushed and broken. On the seat lay a glove, one of Riley’s gauntlets, mutely eloquent. Morris picked it up and put it in his pocket.
He stood for a moment, fingering the broken belt, looking at the crushed instruments. One of the men came up and touched him on the arm. ‘Better get the wings off, hadn’t we?’ he said.
‘Oh … yes,’ said Morris. ‘Carry on. I’m going into the town now – at once. I’ll get a lorry there and bring it out. Carry on and get her ready.’
He commandeered the farmer’s Ford and was driven into Hurstony. He found the cottage hospital without much difficulty, and was ushered into a bare little waiting-room, a little sunlit palace of white paint and green distemper. Morris sat down and waited. Outside in the street a man was walking along selling the local newspaper, clanging a dinner bell to announce his advent; inside there was a quick step dying away along a tiled passage, and a faint odour of iodoform. Morris waited, uneasily. His hands were very dirty from the machine, his hair was rumpled, and he had no hat but the helmet in his hand.
He waited. The dinner bell died into the distance.
A heavier step sounded along the tiled passage; the door opened and Morris rose to his feet. It was a surgeon, a small, dapper little man with a sharp, tanned face, carrying a green pencil in one hand.
‘Good afternoon,’ said
Morris.
‘Good afternoon.’ The surgeon glanced sharply at the helmet he carried in his hand. ‘You have come about the airman, Mr Riley?’
‘I’ve come to take all responsibility for him,’ said Morris. ‘I represent his firm – the Rawdon Aircraft Company. I want to make all arrangements possible for his comfort – as regards money, if that is of any consequence.’
‘I see,’ said the other. He did not volunteer any remark, but stood tapping his pencil delicately on one thumb-nail, staring out of the window up the street.
‘How is he?’
The other glanced at him. ‘You are a personal friend of his? You have been very quick in coming.’
‘I know him pretty well,’ said Morris.
There was a pause; the surgeon mechanically tapped his pencil on his nail and gazed out of the window at a great cumulus of cloud, beginning to take a faint, rosy colour from the sunset. Somewhere a thrush was calling impudently through the evening; in the bare little room the silence grew pregnant.
‘I see,’ said Morris quietly. ‘He is very bad?’
The surgeon turned from the window and put the pencil in his pocket.
‘He is dying,’ he said simply. ‘You must telephone for his people.’
Chapter Six
Riley died without regaining consciousness, early the following morning. Morris had telephoned to his invalid brother Benjamin, who arrived with his wife late that evening. But Riley said nothing intelligible. Once, indeed, he seemed to rouse a little and muttered something about bright colours and a spectroscope – it was queer that such an instrument should come into his head. But then, as the nurses told them, nobody could tell what a sick man would say.
