Mysterious Aviator (15 page)

“I believe I could find the house if I was out there,” he said vaguely. “I know the look of it quite well, because he was always showing me the photos he had. It’s out in the suburbs, up on a little hill. There’s a water-tower near-by. That ought to make it easy to find.

“You see,” he said, “somebody’s got to go and tell them about it.”

I began to see his point. If things were left as they were, that German family would never even know that Keumer
was dead. The Russians would never do any notifying of that sort, especially in the circumstances. All that Keumer’s wife would ever know would be that the letters would stop coming, and the money. And then things would begin to run short—half-rations, as they used up their little funds and waited for the letters and the remittances that didn’t come. And for news.

“They’d think it was the post for a bit,” said Lenden. “It’s not very regular.”

I stirred uneasily on the table. “You’ll have to leave it till you get back to Kieff,” I said. “You’ll be able to get his address from the Russians then. And maybe you’ll be able to get the money that he ought to have had for the job, and get it sent off to them.”

He shook his head. “They’ll freeze on to that.”

There was a silence, and then he said: “I don’t know what to do. Not much catch going back there, now. It’ll be rotten out there without old Keumer. And if there’s going to be a war, or anything like that….”

I nodded slowly. I began to see it now. Keumer had been the only real friend he had in Russia, and now Keumer was dead. I hadn’t realised before that that might affect Lenden’s decision to go back.

I waited for a minute or two, and then said: “Your pal Sam Robertson’s in London.” And I told him what I had seen in the papers.

He was only mildly interested. “He’s doing damn well on that survey,” he remarked absently. “They all say so. He asked me to go in on it with him, but I couldn’t. I expect he’s come home to buy machines.”

“Any chance of a job with him?”

He looked up quickly, and stared at me across the table. It was quite a new idea, that. “There might be. Most likely he’s all fixed up, though. Still, it’d be damn good fun to get with Sam again.”

“It sounds worth trying,” I remarked.

He dropped his eyes on the map. “I can’t leave this infernal business like this,” he said morosely.

I left him to think it over then, and went off to the farm to have a look at that foal I hadn’t seen in the morning. There was nothing to be done until he had made up this mind, if that were possible for a man of his temperament. Whatever way he went now, he couldn’t do much harm to Sussex, and that was what I was chiefly concerned about. What worried me now was the man himself. I didn’t want to see him make a muck of things, and I didn’t in the least want to see him cut off back to Russia. I’d got to like him quite a lot. And yet, if he decided to go I didn’t see how I was going to stop him.

At lunch-time he asked me a whole lot of questions about the political situation. I told him all I knew, which was precious little. Things were very uncertain, and there was every chance of our turning out the Soviet. What would happen if we did so—I couldn’t tell him.

He thought that over for a bit. It was very evident that he was scared of getting caught in Russia if there was going to be a breach with England.

I left him again after lunch, and went down to the office. I was tired and upset, and I had a whole stack of work to get through before the Quarter Day. I thought that if I settled down to clear some of it off it might stop me havering about this other business, and I got out my files and ledgers in the intention of making an afternoon of it.

I never touched a pen. It was quiet in the office. The only sounds were the clicking of the footsteps and the giggling of the couples on the pavement below, and the church clock chiming the quarters. I sat there idle from a quarter-past two till four, leaning forward on the desk, my head in my hands. My work was spoilt, and to the best of my knowledge I was thinking of nothing at all. After all, I’d been up most of the night.

I say that to the best of my knowledge I had been thinking of nothing at all. But at four o’clock I reached out for the telephone and put in a trunk call to the Phalanx Club, in Knightsbridge.

It came in ten minutes or so.

“I want to speak to Captain Robertson—Sam Robertson, of the Argentine Survey. If he’s in the club.”

“Just one minute, please.” There was a pause.

In a little while he came to the instrument. “This is Robertson speaking. Who is that?”

It was an unusual voice, very soft and husky and deep. I put him down at once as a thirteen-stone man, and leaned forward to the instrument, prepared to lie confidently.

“My name is Moran,” I said. “Peter Moran. Good afternoon, Captain Robertson.”

“Afternoon.” There was a hoarse laugh. “I’m real sorry, Mr. Moran, but I’m afraid at the minute I can’t place you.”

I laughed in return. “Dare say not. But you’ll have heard of my brother. Jack Moran, of Stevenson and Moran, in Buenos Ayres. Shippers. Grain trade—you know them? I represent them on the Baltic.”

“I know.” He was doubtful, but making the best of it. “Never done any business with them myself, but I know of them. Glad to meet you, Mr. Moran.”

“Yes. I’m very sorry to disturb you on Sunday afternoon. I’ve got a long cable here from my brother that I want to come and talk to you about. It means fixing up quick transport between Buenos Ayres and a place up in Santiago, where Stevenson’s got an interest.”

He grunted. “We run pretty frequently to Rosario. Is it near there?”

“Madreguello,” I said, and for the spur of the moment I think that was a pretty good effort. “I’m not sure where it bears from Rosario.”

“Is this just occasional trips?”

“That’s right. Now look here, when can I come and see you?”

“Sooner the better, when it’s business. I’m free all day to-morrow, but for lunch.”

“Ten o’clock too early?”

“Not a bit, Mr. Moran. I’ll drop round to your office, if you like.”

“Don’t worry. I’m motoring in, and I’ll be passing through Knightsbridge. At the Phalanx, then, at ten o’clock to-morrow morning.”

“Right. I’ll be pleased to meet you. Good-bye.”

I rang off, and sat for a little at my desk, staring out of the window at the timbered house opposite. I’ve always kept pretty well to myself, and I’ve never gone about poking my nose into other people’s affairs. But when you find a chap down and out and on his beam-ends, it seems to me that the least you can do is to go and tell his friends about it.

For one thing, it rids you of the responsibility for him.

I shut up the office soon after that, and went back to my house for tea. Lenden had disappeared; for the moment I had the wind up that he’d vanished for good, until I saw the pack of plates still lying on top of the safe where he had left it. I knew that he wouldn’t have gone away without those, and I didn’t think he’d have gone away without telling me.

I spent an hour or two at the piano after tea, running over the passages of my play. I very soon became immersed in it, and I dare say that I may have gone on for an hour or so without noticing very much. And when I looked up in the end and glanced round the room, there was Sheila Darle standing before the fire and laughing at me.

I dropped my hands from the piano and swung round. “I’m most awfully sorry,” I said. “I never heard you come in. Have you been here long?”

She stood there on the fender in imitation of my own habit, with the laughter still bright in her eyes as she looked down on me. “About ten minutes or so. What’s that you were playing then?”

I looked up and grinned at her. “A fairy tale.”

She came a little closer to the piano. “What’s it about?”

I turned round again to the keys. “It’s a thing I take up now and again when I’ve nothing better to do. I’ll play you a bit of it, if you like.”

She came and sat down on a little stool beside the instrument. I played a few bars of the overture, and stopped. “It’s about a
Princess who went walking in the forest alone,” I said, “and got chased by a bear. And she ran away very fast, which was about the best thing she could do in the circumstances, and the bear ran after her. And they ran faster and faster through the wood—I’ll play you that bit—till the Princess really thought she was done for that time. And then a Woodman came along and killed the bear.”

“Bit o’ luck that,” said Sheila phlegmatically.

I nodded. “That sort of thing always happens in that sort of wood. Grimm and Perrault, you know.”

“Like a conventional fairy tale, you mean?”

“That’s right.”

“I see. That might be rather nice. What happened then?”

“The Woodman killed the bear with his knife. And the Princess was so grateful and she thought the Woodman was such a He-Man that she fell in love with him and went away and lived with him in his hut in the woods. Under the trees, in the sunlight. It was always sunny there.”

“Was she pretty?”

“Very pretty. As pretty as a picture.”

“That was nice for the Woodman, then,” said Sheila demurely.

“It was. Frightfully nice. He liked it no end. Never had such a nice thing happen to him in his life before, I should think. I must say, I’d kill a bear with a knife myself—any day—if I thought that’d happen. And all the Court and all the Knights and Squires and Varlets came riding through the woods to look for the Princess, but they didn’t find her because she was in the hut with the Woodman. She wasn’t going to let herself be caught and taken away.”

“How long did she live with him?”

“Weeks and weeks.”

“I don’t think she’d been very well brought up.”

“She hadn’t. She wasn’t really a very nice girl, but she was pretty and very much in love with the Woodman, so that part of it was all right. But she didn’t get on very well with cooking his dinner, and emptying the slops, and washing up, and
cleaning his boots. She used to shirk that sort of thing a bit, and then he’d come in tired and all of a muck o’ sweat and see it wasn’t done, and he’d buckle down and do her job for her. Almost every day.”

“He’d have got on a lot better if he’d given her a good spanking.”

“I know,” I agreed. “But she was a King’s daughter, you see, and I expect he didn’t like to do that. But the result of it all was that he began to get more and more like a Prince within the hut, and she got more and more like a peasant girl, because she was always shirking her job. He got taller and straighter and handsomer, and she got shabbier and shabbier because she hadn’t any new clothes and the old ones weren’t standing the strain very well. And at last they were just about as shabby as each other, and it was perfectly obvious then, when you looked at them side by side, that he was a King’s son, and she was just an insignificant little person that he’d picked up somewhere or other.”

She laughed. “What happened then?”

“Why,” I said, “they went back to the castle and got married. And everybody said it was a very suitable match and they were all frightfully pleased about it, and they went about telling each other what a good job it was, because they thought she was never going to get off, and now she’d gone away and found such a nice young man all by herself, and so well connected. And they said he must be the son of the King of Tenebroc, and the Princess whispered to him that that was eighteen months’ journey away, and so he said—Well, perhaps he was. And so that was all right, and they lived happily ever after.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s all. I’ll play you some of it now.”

She settled herself upon the little stool by the keyboard, and I began upon the overture. That evening stands out very clear and distinct in my memory, even at this distance of time. It came as an oasis, an interlude in that rather trying period. Throughout that evening I was able to forget the whole affair—aeroplanes, espionage, and everything. For that interlude I was
grateful at the time, and I have seen more reason to be grateful since.

Some time after that—perhaps as much as an hour later—Lenden came in. I had finished the play by then, and was playing bits of things to her at random—Chopin mostly, I think. And we were talking. Lenden hesitated in the doorway.

I swung round, and introduced him to Sheila. He shook hands vaguely. “I—we’ve met before. Didn’t you come over to look after me the other day?”

She nodded. “Mm. You’re much better now, aren’t you?”

He hesitated. “Yes,” he said quickly. “I’m quite all right again now. It was awfully good of you to come over. Not used to people bothering—like that.” He smiled shyly.

“You’re quite all right again?”

“Yes. Fine.”

“Well enough to come over to the house for supper? With him.” She jerked her head at me.

He glanced at me inquiringly. “It sounds awfully nice.”

She turned to me. “Did you know that Arner went up to Curzon Street this afternoon?”

I shook my head, surprised. “He didn’t say anything about it to me.”

She nodded. “I forgot to tell you, with your playing. It was in the afternoon, when you’d gone down to the office. He got a telephone call. It was that I came over to tell you about, really. There’s only me and Aunt Maud.”

She swung round on Lenden, laughing. “So you needn’t be frightened. You’ll come, won’t you? Both of you?”

I grinned. “We’d like to very much.”

“All right,” she said. “Half-past seven.” And went.

Lenden had been out on the down above Under; he said that he had got fed up with the house and had gone out for a walk. He had taken a dog with him that he had found tied up in the stable-yard; it belonged to Kitter, the chauffeur. Kitter had been only too willing that the beast should get some exercise, and Lenden had gone wandering with his dog over the downs
in the direction of Leventer. He told me where he had walked. He had certainly covered a good bit of ground in the time.

“And then,” he said, “I came up over a bit of a hill by a beech wood and saw my Breguet, about a mile and a half away. She was covered up and pegged down in the lee of a barn. Did you do that?”

I nodded. “You’d see her from there. It’s the only direction from which she’s really conspicuous.” I thought about it for a minute. “We’ll have to do something with her soon.”