The Man who Missed the War (31 page)

‘What whaling station?’ asked the Russian.

‘Why, the one you spoke of yourself only an hour ago. When we first met you jumped to the conclusion that I had come from it.’

‘You are mistaken. I asked you only if you had come from a whaling station, because I thought that the most natural explanation of your presence.’ As he spoke Fedor Solgorukin’s face remained quite expressionless, yet Philip felt certain that he was lying. He went on briskly: ‘Now, as we have far to go we should lose no time. We will make the tent into a hammock and use its support pole as a carrying rod.’

‘But what would this place be to which you’re going to take us?’ Gloria asked. ‘Surely you don’t live all on your own up in those mountains?’

His teeth showed white against the blackness of his beard as he smiled. ‘There are stranger things in heaven and earth than most men wot of! Those mountains hold a secret that many a scientist would give his eyes to unravel. I shall say no more at the moment than that there is a place there where I can offer you food and warmth for as long as you wish, it is my kingdom, and you, Madame, are the guest that I shall delight to honour in it.’

Never in his life had Philip had more difficulty in making a decision. On the face of it the Russian seemed to be talking the most arrant nonsense, yet, if they did not go with him, what were they to do? They could only revert to their plan of fetching fresh supplies from the raft, and that was fraught with eight or ten days of appalling anxiety for them both and the awful hazard that they might lose each other in this wilderness of rocks and rifts. The thing that finally decided him was a half-humorous taunt from the Russian, who, seeing his hesitation, suddenly said:

‘Come along! What are you afraid of? I won’t eat you—yet!’

‘I’m not afraid of anything,’ retorted Philip. ‘I was only wondering how you’ve managed to come so far without any tent or even enough camp equipment to cook yourself a hot meal?’

The other shrugged. ‘I was born in a cold country. One of my father’s estates was in the far north of Russia, and I spent several winters there as a boy. I learnt then not to mind the cold. I am very fit and on an expedition of a week or so, such as this, I require little to eat, and hot food or drink is a luxury; so why should I burden myself with a lot of unnecessary paraphernalia? I bring the sledge only so that I can drag the seal meat back on it, but a hammock will be much more comfortable for Madame. As for the nights, at this season of the year my furs are all that I require to keep me from freezing. I’m afraid you’ll find it pretty cold, though, as you have neither furs nor leather clothing.’

‘If it’s only for five or six nights I’ll manage somehow,’ said Philip, and together they began the business of converting the tent into a hammock.

Half an hour later, after a simple meal, they set off. The Russian naturally led the way, with the fore-end of the hammock pole on one shoulder and his rifle on the other. He proved extremely surefooted and had a quick eye for spotting the best way across a
piece of broken country. Gloria lay rather awkwardly in the improvised hammock, and Philip brought up the rear with the rest of the equipment piled on the sledge, which he dragged behind him.

Soon after twilight began to fall their leader selected a camping site under the lee of a big overhanging rock. Gloria still could not rest her weight on her foot without pain, but sitting down she cooked them quite a passable dinner from their slender resources, in which the Russian did not hesitate to participate.

Philip was tired and sore from the long hours of unaccustomed exertion that he had been through that afternoon, but he was still mentally excited by the new turn which their fortunes had taken through his meeting with Fedor Solgorukin. After the meal, he began to ask their new companion all sorts of questions.

With many of them, particularly those concerning the place to which they were going, the Russian fenced and was casually evasive; but when Philip said: ‘You were saying this morning that you were once an officer in the Royal Navy. How long ago was that?’ he replied at once:

‘I entered Dartmouth in Nineteen-Nineteen, after I escaped from Russia.’

‘You will have been in the Revolution then,’ said Gloria. ‘So was me mother. She was the daughter of an Irish merchant trading in Saint Petersburg. The Bolsheviks killed him and looted his store; but by that time me mother was married to an English war correspondent and he got her safely away to Canada.’

‘What a small world it is!’ exclaimed Solgorukin. ‘I was living with my family in Saint Petersburg during those awful days, and perhaps the very same gang of murderers who killed your grandfather killed my parents. They would have killed me too, although I was scarcely more than a child, if they had had the chance. My tutor turned out to be one of the Communist students so many of whom, as we learned later, had turned our universities into secret revolutionary clubs. The little rat loathed me and planned to hand me over to the mob, but he was fool enough to tell me his intentions. I was only twelve, but the use of weapons is one of the first things taught to the boys of all noble Russian families, and things were already so unsettled that I was
carrying a revolver. I pulled it out and shot him. I shall never forget the look of astonishment on his mean, stupid face. He was the first man I had ever killed, and I rather enjoyed it.’

Solgorukin paused for a moment, evidently savouring anew this jolly memory, before he went on: ‘That same evening the mob broke into our palace and murdered not only my father, mother, sister, an old aunt and two cousins, but nearly all our faithful servants. I was saved by our chief huntsman, little Sergi, who happened to be in Saint Petersburg on a visit. Actually, he was a huge man, and he was very fond of me. We had many adventures together and killed quite a number of Reds before we eventually succeeded in reaching the Crimea, where he handed me over to my godmother, Her Imperial Majesty the Dowager Empress.

‘It was she who brought me to England when she was forced to leave Russia herself, and was taken off in a British destroyer. I was so thrilled with the guns and the sailors that she thought it would be a good thing for me to go into the Navy. As you may remember, she was Queen Alexandra’s sister, and she used her influence to get me taken into Dartmouth, although I was by then above the usual age. Then later, when it was clear that there would be no going back to Russia for us exiles, I took out British naturalisation papers and was granted a commission.

‘By then I was quite disillusioned of any idea that it would be fun to spend most of my life at sea, but nothing remained of the great fortune I should have inherited, so it seemed that going into the Navy was the only way in which I could support myself until I was old enough to marry. With many of my brother officers I got on famously. For good humour, courage, sound common sense and general kindliness of nature I have never met any body of men to equal the officers of the Royal Navy; but there was one little man whom I loathed.

‘He was a Socialist, and he would insist on talking about Russia without knowing anything about it. The result was, perhaps, unfortunate, although it only accelerated my leaving the Navy a year or so before I would otherwise have done. The thing that everyone seemed to take such exception to was the fact that I used a knife, although the injury I inflicted was by no means serious. Having no source of income but my pay, I had rather a
difficult time for a few months, but I contracted a suitable marriage and settled down to enjoy the sort of life that a person of my birth is entitled to expect. I have been married four times, altogether, but, unfortunately, all four of my wives were bores.’

The Russian ceased his flow of reminiscences as though bored himself with the tale he was telling; but the recital had forced Philip considerably to modify his opinion. The whole sequence of events, even the details of which most people would have been far from proud, had such a ring of truth that he could no longer doubt that Fedor was a prince, or that he had been an officer in the Royal Navy. Yet, if these things were true and he were not mad, this made his references to his ‘kingdom’ even more mysterious.

‘Where’s your last wife, Prince?’ asked Gloria. ‘I mean your present one. Will we be meeting her up there?’ She nodded in the direction of the chain of mountains towards which they had been heading all the afternoon.

Solgorukin threw back his head in one of his gargantuan bursts of laughter. ‘Good God no!’ he chuckled, as soon as he had recovered a little. ‘I wouldn’t have brought Cornelia here even if I’d had the chance. She was the worst bore of them all. It was her insistence that we should go on a trip to the Grand Canyon while I was having a very pleasant love affair in New York that finished things between us. I went—I had to, because my bankers were making an intolerable nuisance of themselves, and the woman I was in love with had no money. But Cornelia and I had our final quarrel while we were supposed to be admiring the beauties of the Yosemite Valley, and I left her there to—er—find her own way home.’

‘From what you say I gather you managed to lead a pretty luxurious life between the two wars,’ remarked Philip. ‘Why on earth did you chuck all that up to come to this god-forsaken part of the world?’

‘I have told you that I was bored,’ the Prince replied sharply. ‘When Cornelia’s will was proved it was found that she had not left me one cent of her great fortune, and by that time I was already in South America, so——’

‘She’s dead then?’ Gloria broke in.

‘Yes, did I forget to mention that? She was a very stupid
woman, and when I drove off in the car—just to make her realise that money was not everything, you know, and that even a millionairess gets tired if she has to walk ten miles to the nearest road-house—she walked over a cliff in the dark; and there wasn’t much left of her when they found her some days later, as she had fallen a sheer thousand feet before she hit the rocks. Anyhow, as I was saying, finding myself in the Argentine with very little money I thought I’d put my old navigational knowledge to some use. I signed on as second officer to do a season’s whaling in the winter of ‘Forty to ‘Forty-One, largely for the fun of the thing, and a week or so after we landed I—er—well, I made a discovery which decided me to stay on.’

Both Philip and Gloria had already learned that it was no good pressing the Prince for information about his mysterious secret, and as they were both now very tired they decided to turn in; but before he dropped off to sleep Philip could not help wondering what had really happened to Cornelia. He had an uneasy suspicion that it was Fedor who planned that trip to the Grand Canyon, and that he had pushed the wretched woman over the cliff in the hope that he would inherit her fortune. Probably as a precaution against suspicion falling on him he had got out at once to South America; then learning perhaps that it had, he had shipped out in the whaler to the Antarctic to get beyond the reach of the United States police. All that fitted in nicely, but Philip had to admit to himself that he had no foundation whatever for his highly libellous theory and that he was considerably influenced by the fact that he had taken a very strong dislike to Prince Fedor Solgorukin.

Philip’s dislike of their new companion was not shared by Gloria, who found the Prince attractive and amusing. He, too, obviously liked her, and as the party trudged along during the days that followed they were always laughing and joking together. More than once Fedor inferred that there was a special bond between them owing to the fact that relatives of both of them had been murdered by the Bolsheviks, and it seemed that he treated her as an equal on this account, quite apart from the consideration he showed her as a woman; whereas to Philip he was often barely civil.

Hour after hour, while daylight lasted, they tramped doggedly
forward across barren, windswept icefields towards the great range of snow-topped mountains, which seemed to get ever higher the nearer they approached. During the daytime the movement kept Philip fairly warm, but at night he was bitterly cold, owing to his refusal to deprive Gloria of more than the single sleeping-bag which he had been going to take with him on his journey to the raft. She, too, felt the cold keenly, on account of her enforced inactivity, although she lay smothered in coverings both night and day.

On the fourth night they reached the base of the mountain range, and Fedor led them to a cave where they were able to make camp in considerably more comfort than they had known for some time. After the meal, an open row at last broke out between the two men over, of all things, the question of Big Ships.

The Prince had by this time heard most of their adventures, but Philip had rather skated over his original object in inventing his Raft Convoy; but when the subject cropped up again he saw no reason why he should preserve any particular secrecy about it, and went into full details of the project.

‘Well, as an ex-Naval man myself, I think you’re completely off the mark!’ shrugged Solgorukin. ‘It stands to reason that the country that builds the biggest, most heavily armed battleships will secure control of the seas the moment it has enough of them.’

‘You’re taking no account whatever of air power,’ protested Philip, and produced all his usual arguments.

‘That’s all very well,’ said the Princes, as soon as he could get a word in. ‘We all know that in these days it’s suicide for a big ship to go in anywhere within reach of land-based planes; but that is no longer the function of the Big Ship. It is to carry the war to the enemy’s territory in places where he has few, if any, aircraft to defend himself. No Battle Fleet now ever operates without its aircraft carriers, and they are not only its eyes but a shield against all but the heaviest scale of enemy air attack. They are also capable of striking most telling blows at enemy bases.’

Philip nodded. ‘Yes, I agree all that. But why not have your fleet entirely composed of aircraft carriers, with destroyers to protect them from U-boats?’

‘But, my dear fellow, that wouldn’t be any good if some of the enemy’s big ships came on the scene. You’d lose all your carriers. You must have big ships to protect them.’