Marazan (3 page)

Maddison, on the other hand, retained Eminent Counsel for his defence at a perfectly incredible fee, and got off. Maddison was never very bright at the best of times. With a touching faith in the integrity of the
Law he paid Eminent Counsel to get him off and gave him a free hand. The result was perfectly appalling. Eminent Counsel started away back in 1915 and took the court through every little crash Maddison had had in ten years’ flying. He must have been a pretty dud pupil; we heard that he wrote off two machines in 1915, three in 1916, and two more later in the war. Eminent Counsel was a little hard up for post-war crashes to account for Maddison’s mental state, but he made such play with the material at his disposal that by the time he’d finished Maddison was a clear case for detention during His Majesty’s pleasure and the Bench were inquiring how it was that the prisoner was apparently licensed to carry passengers in aeroplanes for hire or reward. At that point Eminent Counsel began to hedge a little. Maddison got off, but the evening papers made such play with him that the Air Ministry had to cancel his licence. That was a pity, because he was quite a good pilot.

The Air Ministry had a smack at me when I came out, but nothing like such a hard smack as that. The firm looked a bit old-fashioned at me, too; I didn’t really blame them. They were all good sorts, though, and I think each of them felt secretly that it was up to somebody who had never happened to be drunk in charge of a motor-car to cast the first stone. In a month it had all blown over.

But all this is a digression. I sat on the ground in the rain for a bit and looked at the convict, and the convict looked at me.

‘What the devil are you doing here?’ I said.

I noticed that he was keeping his eyes open for anyone that might be coming to have a look at the machine. He didn’t seem to have heard me; I spoke to him again.

‘What are you doing here?’ I said.

He looked down at me as I sat on the ground, and smiled at me vaguely.

‘What a damn silly question!’ he said gently. ‘I’m looking for the Philosopher’s Stone; or—the Tree of Knowledge. One should have learned the difference between Good and Evil by this time, though, don’t you think?’ His voice drifted away into silence. ‘But I doubt if it grows in this wood.…’ He roused himself. ‘I don’t think you’re much hurt.’

I blinked at him. ‘You’d better get back into that wood and go on looking for it, pretty damn quick,’ I said. ‘There’ll be people here in a minute.’ It was a wonder the crowd had not arrived already.

He nodded. ‘Perhaps that would be wisest,’ he said reflectively. I noticed that he spoke like an educated man. ‘Are you sure you’ll be all right now? That’s good.’ He moved towards the trees.

‘Half a minute,’ I said weakly. ‘What about you?’ I tried painfully hard to collect my wits. ‘Do you want any help—is there anything I can do?’

He asked me if I meant it.

There was a sort of wheel and ratchet going round inside my head and I was feeling very sick. I wasn’t at all sure that I did mean it; at the moment I hadn’t enough go left in me to pull a sprat off a gridiron. I climbed slowly to my feet and stood there swaying gently in the breeze; he ran up and caught hold of my arm to steady me.

My head began to clear a little. ‘Of course I mean it,’ I muttered. ‘One thing I … one thing. What did they get you for?’

He looked at me in a way that made me feel pretty rotten for having asked.

‘Embezzlement,’ he said shortly.

I planted my feet farther apart on the grass and found it an assistance. ‘Well, that’s a good clean sort of crime,’ I said vaguely. ‘So long as it wasn’t anything to do with dope or children.…’ I pulled myself up; I was beginning to ramble.

But he looked at me curiously. ‘You don’t like dope?’ he said.

I made an effort and pulled myself together a little. ‘Get back into the hedge and don’t stand talking in the middle of this field like a ruddy fool,’ I said. He scuttled back to the edge of the wood. ‘Now see here,’ I said, ‘I’ll do whatever I can to help you get away. I owe you that. What is it you want—food and clothes? Do you want to get out of England?’

He looked at me suspiciously. ‘You’re not going to give me up?’

I told him to talk sense. ‘For one thing,’ I said, ‘I could give you away now without bothering to get you into a trap, simply by going away and telling people that I’d seen you here. But here I am. I’ll do what I can for you if you’ll let me, or if you don’t want any help I’ll go away and forget I’ve seen you. Now that’s square.’

He motioned to me to come close; he seemed suddenly afraid. ‘It’s most frightfully good of you,’ he said, ‘and I do want a bit of help. It’s a thing that you can do quite easily, without any risk to yourself. There’s a house about four miles from here on the other side of Stokenchurch. The house is called Six Firs. It’s not my home—I daren’t go near home. They’ll be on the look-out for me there. But there’s a cousin of mine lives with her people in this house—a girl, oh, a damn good sort. She’ll fix me up if she knows I’m here. Go to the house and get hold of her, and tell her. Don’t let her people know—they’re too old. Tell her I’ll be
outside the house from eleven o’clock onwards. Tell her to leave the morning-room window open and to switch on the light in her bedroom when it’s safe for me to come in.’

‘She won’t believe me if I go and tell her that,’ I said. ‘No girl would. She’d think I was trying it on.’

He gripped me by the arm. ‘You’ve got to make her believe,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to—you simply must. I must see her—she may have heard—she may know something. Man, I tell you, I’ve got to be free for the next ten days. After that.… But she may know what’s happening.’

He was becoming rapidly incoherent. I freed myself gently from his grip on my arm.

‘I’ll do the best I can,’ I said. ‘Six Firs, at eleven o’clock, with a light in her bedroom window. By the way, what’s her name?’

‘Stevenson,’ he said, ‘Joan Stevenson. My name is Compton.’

‘Right you are,’ I said. ‘I’ll go there and do the best I can. And see here—if I can’t convince her I’ll be near the gate myself at eleven o’clock to-night. Now you’d better cut off into cover.’

He turned and ran into the wood through the trees till he was out of sight. I noticed that he ran with a limp.

Well, there I was—and the devil of a fine position to be in, too. I turned and walked unsteadily towards the machine. She was in a shocking mess. I looked first at the engine. One of the connecting-rods had poked its way through the side of the crank-case and made a hole big enough to put my head into; through the hole one could see the mincemeat inside. I judged the machine to be a complete write-off; the port wings crumpled up and the fuselage badly injured close behind
the engine. It was the worst crash I had had since the war.

I stood looking at it all for a minute, and it struck me that I was very lucky to have got out of it alive. It was now a quarter of an hour or more since it had happened, and nobody had arrived in the field. And then I thought that if Compton had not turned up I should still have been in the machine, pinned upside down, unconscious and dying—if not already dead. The thought of it fairly made me sweat with fright.

I was feeling much better by now. My neck had had a beastly wrench, but I could walk without holding on to it, and apart from that I was hardly hurt. I left the machine and began to walk along the edge of the wood in the direction of Stokenchurch. In all the half-mile that I walked through the fields to the road I never saw a soul. It was evident that nobody had seen me come down; that wasn’t difficult to understand, because it was a brute of an evening and I had been flying very low above the trees, half hidden in the clouds. As I went on through the fields and met nobody I realised that I owed my life to this fellow Compton. I don’t imagine that my life is worth much or that I’ve ever done much good with it; at the same time—it’s all one has. And then as I walked on I knew that it was up to me to see this business through to the end and to back Compton in every way I could—even if it were to mean another spell in quod for me. Looking back now over the years I’m glad to be able to remember that I stuck to that decision, and backed him till he had no further need of me.

I went on, and presently I came to a road. A little way along it I met a Ford van delivering groceries to some outlying village. I stopped it and asked the boy for a lift in to Stokenchurch. He stammered and looked
at me as if I was a ghost, said something in refusal, and tried to drive on. I jumped on to the running-board, leaned in over the wheel, and soon put a stop to that. And then I realised that appearances were against me. The hand that I switched off his engine with was covered in blood and oil; I had no hat and I could feel that something had happened to my hair. I discovered later that there was a deep cut over my right eyebrow that had bled all down the side of my face; it was drying now and my hair was all stuck up with blood on my forehead. I had been feeling so generally ill that I hadn’t noticed it.

I told the boy what had happened. When I got him to believe me, his one idea was to go off and have a look at the machine. I told him I was going into Stokenchurch in his Ford whether he drove me or not. He perked up a bit at that, but I pretty soon unperked him, and at last we got going on the road to Stokenchurch.

We got to Stokenchurch at about half-past five. I went straight to the inn, postponed giving an account of myself and got on the telephone to Morris, while the crowd fluttered about outside and peeped in at me through the door of the room.

I told him what had happened. ‘I hadn’t an earthly,’ I said. ‘The clouds were right down on to the hills—I was only a hundred feet up when the engine conked. I told you it was running rough. What? Oh yes, the machine’s a write-off—absolutely, I’m afraid. What’s that? Well, I can’t say that it worries
me
much—only too glad to be well out of it. I don’t give a damn about the machine. Yes, I dare say you do, but that’s your worry. Oh, nothing to write home about, thanks. I got shaken up a bit and cut my eyebrow—nothing serious. I’m sorry it’s happened, but I’m not taking any responsibility for it at all. I told you I wasn’t fit to go. As a
matter of fact, fit or not, it wouldn’t have made any difference to what happened.’ Which was a lie.

Rather to my surprise he said he was sending down the breakdown gang at once, and told me to fix up a meal for them. I rang off, and immediately found myself the sensation of the evening. I should think half the village crowded into the passages of the pub, all eager to see me and condole before I had my face washed. I managed to get away from the crowd, and the landlord’s wife took me upstairs and bathed my eyebrow for me; I would have preferred the barmaid, but didn’t like to say so. It was a clean cut and she made quite a good job of it for me, fixing it up with a bit of lint and sticking-plaster. Then I went down and saw the landlord and arranged about a meal for the mechanics over a stiff whisky.

Presently I began to throw out feelers about the Stevensons, and the house called Six Firs.

I said that I thought I knew some people called Stevenson who lived near Stokenchurch; at least, I knew of them but had never met them. He said that they would be the people at Six Firs. I was told that the house was about a mile from the village; with a little encouragement he told me the whole family history—so far as there was anything to tell. Arthur Stevenson, Esq., C.B., was a man of about seventy, several years retired from the Treasury. His wife was only a little younger, and both were passionately fond of gardening. They always took first prize for sweet-peas at the local flower show. Before moving to Stokenchurch on their retirement they had lived for thirty years in Earl’s Court. Their pew in church was close under the pulpit because the old lady was getting very deaf. There was a son in India, a major in the Indian Army. There was a daughter about twenty-five years old who lived at home and
painted pictures—water-colours, I gathered—which had been exhibited at High Wycombe. They had a Morris Cowley which the daughter drove. The barmaid had a cousin who was their cook. That was all.

I said that my father had been at school with old Mr. Stevenson, and I thought that I would walk up and call on them. He offered to send a boy with me to show me the house, but I got out of that and got directions instead. I borrowed one of his hats, and set off up the street.

As I went I realised the utter futility of the whole thing. It was impossible that such a household should shelter an escaped convict. It struck me at once that it wasn’t fair on the old people; at all costs they must be kept out of it. It was evident that if there was any help at all coming from that house it must come from the girl; I can’t say that I was too sanguine about her. From the landlord’s description she sounded a blue-stocking of the most virulent description; it seemed to me that water-colours and escaped convicts were unlikely to go well together. Evidently I must try the house, but I thought it was more probable that Compton would have to stay in the woods for a day or two till I could get some clothes for him and smuggle him away.

As I drew nearer to the house I began to wonder how I should get hold of the girl without her parents. A succession of ideas passed through my head and were rejected one by one. I might say that I was soliciting custom for a projected milk round—but that wouldn’t work in the country. Nor would the gas-meter do, where there was probably no gas. Finally, I fixed on the car as being the one thing in the house that would be solely the domain of the daughter, and decided to make that my line of attack.

The house was a pleasant-looking place on the wooded
side of a hill, standing well back from the road in three or four acres of land. It was not a large house, but it was beautifully cared for; the gardens were small, but very neat. There was a large paddock with a decrepit-looking pony in it. It was about seven o’clock when I got there; the rain had stopped and the clouds were clearing off before the sunset. The garden smelt wonderful after the rain.

I rang the bell and a maid came to the door. ‘Can I see Miss Stevenson?’ I said. ‘It’s about the car—I’m from the garage.’