An Old Captivity (13 page)

“I should put these on, Miss Lockwood,” he said impassively. She could not walk up to the hotel without a shoe.

She took them without a word.

The pilot joined them in the boat, and in the golden summer afternoon they were carried to the shore in silence. Ross spoke a few words to the boatman to arrange for him to be available in half an hour to refuel the seaplane; then they were at the jetty and he was helping the Lockwoods from the boat. They walked up through the little town to the hotel with hardly a word spoken.

The hotel was a good one, situated in the middle of the one street of the little town; it was owned and run by the
British Government. There were no warships in the firth, and the hotel was practically empty. Ross made arrangements for their rooms, and they went to them at once.

Lockwood came into the pilot’s room with him. “I’m sorry my daughter said what she did,” he said directly. “I saw the whole thing. It was a pure accident.”

Ross smiled. “Don’t think any more about it, sir. She’s probably a bit tired. Anyway, I ought never to have let her get down on the float in shoes like that. She’ll be all right in the morning.”

The don bit his lip. “I shall have to have a talk with her,” he said at last.

“I wouldn’t do that, sir. Let it blow over. I’ll see if I can think up some other way of picking up the moorings.”

“I don’t see how you can do the whole thing. You must have somebody to help you.”

He walked over to the window and stood looking out over the sunlit blue water of the firth, the purple, heather-covered hills. The air was fresh and sweet. He turned back to Ross. “I know you would rather have had a young man on this trip, in place of Alix,” he said. “I’m beginning to see what you meant.”

The pilot lit a cigarette. “I’ve no quarrel with Miss Alix, sir,” he said. “I should be quite prepared to carry on as we are. But you’ve got to understand what we’re in for. I reckoned Invergordon as an easy landing, and it was. From now onwards we’re going to have a whole lot of difficulties that we haven’t had yet. This is a tough trip, Mr. Lockwood. I’ve said so all along, and nobody believed me. We can make it all right if we all pull together. But the sort of little accident we had to-day is going to happen every day, in one form or another. We’ll have to get out of the way of slanging at each other, or we shan’t get very far.”

“That’s very true.”

Ross said: “I expect she’s tired. After all, it’s the first flight she’s ever made, except the short one we had yesterday.
You have a cup of tea with her alone, sir. Then we’ll meet for dinner, and I’ll see if I can make things right with her this evening.”

The older man looked at him. “What are you going to do?”

“I’ve got to see to the refuelling, and look over the engine. Don’t worry about me.”

“How long will that take?”

“Two or three hours.”

“I’ll come and give you a hand.”

Ross shook his head. “You stay with Miss Alix, sir. The boatman can give me all the help I want. I’ll meet you for dinner.”

“You must have a cup of tea yourself before you go.”

The pilot smiled. “I’ll get something. Then this evening I’ll ring up the Air Ministry for a weather forecast. If it’s any good, I’ll get another one at four o’clock in the morning. If that’s all right, we’ll make a start for Reykjavik. If not, we’ll have to wait until it is all right. I want decent weather for the big crossing.”

The don left him and went to his own room. Ross undid his personal kit, sponged his face, and went down to the jetty again to meet the boatman and commence refuelling.

A quarter of an hour later Lockwood tapped at the door of his daughter’s room. She opened it to him, clad in a kimono and very little else. He could see that she was still very angry; her clothes were in a wet heap on the floor. “How are you getting on?” he asked. “Put on some things, and come down and have tea.”

“I can’t come down. I haven’t got anything to change into.”

“But you’ve got other clothes?”

“I’ve got everything except a skirt. I thought that one would do.”

He said: “There are shops here. I’ll go out and get you one. What size waist?”

She sniffed despondently. “I don’t suppose there’ll be a thing that I can wear.”

He was suddenly cross with her. “You’ll wear what I get you,” he said sharply. “What size waist?”

“Twenty-five inches, Daddy.”

He went out and down into the wide, straight street. The only draper’s shop could make a skirt in half a day, but had nothing in stock. They directed him to the ironmonger’s, a comprehensive establishment that sold everything from sheepskin rugs to sporting cartridges and salmon rods. Here he got a tweed skirt of the right waist measurement from a dusty package labelled July 1923.

“There’s not a great demand for these goods,” the man told him. “Just once and again.”

It was a bright green tweed. He knew she would not like it, but he bought it and took it back to the hotel with him. He took it up and gave it to her in her room; she took it meekly and without a word. He told her to come down to tea.

She joined him a quarter of an hour later, silent and subdued. She was wearing a pale blue roll-neck sweater with her vivid green skirt, a combination which was impressive but not pleasing. The tea refreshed the girl; by the end of the meal she was venturing a little conversation with her father.

When it was over, Lockwood suggested that they went out to explore the little town. In the warm summer evening they found their way down to the jetty, built out on piles into the firth. From there they could see the seaplane at her moorings with the boat alongside. Ross was in the cabin engaged in the endless, wearisome task of filling the contents of seventy petrol cans into the big tank, stopping from time to time to pump fuel from the big tank into the service tanks up in the wings. From the shore the Lockwoods could not see exactly what was going on. They saw enough to make it clear to them that the pilot, as tired as they were, was still working.

Lockwood said gently: “You’ll have to take back what you said to him this afternoon, Alix.”

She did not speak.

“It was a pure accident, you know.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“Now you’re being silly. He couldn’t possibly have done anything else.” In a few words he told her what had happened. “He’s very worried that you should have thought he did it on purpose.”

She said in a low tone. “He never wanted me to come upon this trip at all.”

Her father smiled. “Well, that’s perfectly true. He said that if another person was to come, it ought to be a young man, who could help him. And all you’ve done so far has gone to prove him right.”

The evening sun beat down upon the timbers of the jetty, bringing out the scent of tar and creosote from the wood. Beneath their feet the calm water lapped, and shoals of grey fish moved unmolested. Presently the girl said quietly:

“Does this mean you want me to go home, Daddy?”

He considered before speaking, and her heart sank. “I can’t have you quarrelling with Mr. Ross like this, Alix,” he said at last. “It’s not fair to him. On a difficult trip like this, it may even be dangerous to all of us unless we can be good friends. I want you to come on with us. But if you feel that you can’t hit it off with him, then you must say so before you leave here and I’ll get an undergraduate to come up and join me. Collins would come, and be glad to get the chance.”

“I see.”

He laid his hand upon her shoulder. “Have a talk with him,” he said gently. “He wants to be friends.”

She stared out over the firth to where the pilot was still working on the seaplane. “He’s such a queer sort of man—all machinery and stuff. And half the time he talks American. I don’t know what he thinks about, or likes.”

“You’ve got to make your mind up by to-night, Alix. I can’t have any more rows like we had to-day.”

The girl nodded. “I see that, Daddy. If I go home, you’d wait till someone else could join you? You wouldn’t go alone?”

He hesitated. “I don’t think so. I think there’s enough time to wait a day or so.”

She said: “Will it do if I think it over, and tell you to-night?”

He nodded: “Think it over.”

They went back to the hotel. Lockwood turned into the lounge; the girl went thoughtfully to her room and gave her wet clothes to the maid to be dried. When Ross returned, a little after seven o’clock, she was waiting for him on the wide veranda facing on the street.

He was very tired and hot and dirty. He said: “Good evening, Miss Lockwood.”

She said hesitantly: “Good evening, Mr. Ross. Did you get all your jobs done?”

He paused on the steps. “She’s all O.K. now—filled right up. If it’s like this when we take off we’ll have to dump some of it, I expect.” She did not understand him in the least. “I got the filters cleaned, too, and the sumps checked. So she’s all ready to go.”

She knew, vaguely, that this meant he had been doing a good deal of work; she wanted to say something about it, but she didn’t know quite what to say. At last she said: “If I’d known, I’d have come with you.”

He smiled. “That’s very good of you, Miss Lockwood. But that boatman knows his stuff all right. He gave me a hand.”

“Oh?” She hesitated for a moment, and then said: “My father has been explaining to me what happened when we landed. I didn’t understand.”

He nodded; this was hopeful. “I’ve been wanting to speak to you about that, Miss Lockwood. I’m afraid I was very much to blame. We ought to have practised it at Hythe. And I should never have let you go down on the float in those shoes, and without a lifebelt on.”

She laughed: “I can swim all right.”

He smiled slowly. “I saw that.” He hesitated in turn and then said: “Would you like a glass of sherry before dinner?”

“If you’re having one.”

“I’ll have a tomato drink. Look, I’ll order them and go and have a wash. I’ll be right back.”

He came back in about five minutes; the drinks were standing on a table by her side. He lifted his tomato cocktail. “Here’s luck.”

She drank with him. “What sort of shoes ought I to wear, Mr. Ross, for getting down on to the float?”

He did not answer her directly. “I’ve been trying to scheme out ways of doing it myself,” he said. “I think it could be done, if we brought the cable up the front strut to the fuselage and I had a Grabit boathook.”

The last part of that was Greek to her. She said: “But that isn’t necessary. I can do it all right. We did the actual mooring all right to-day.”

He glanced at her in surprise. “That’s so. Are you sure you wouldn’t mind doing it again?”

“Not if I had proper shoes. Would sand-shoes be all right?”

He thought about it for a minute. “I think that would be best—sand-shoes and no stockings. Then it wouldn’t matter if your feet did get wet a bit. Of course, you could wear gum-boots and keep dry, but then if you did happen to fall in again they wouldn’t be so good to swim in.”

She smiled a little. “I’m not going to make a habit of falling in, Mr. Ross.”

“Of course not.”

“I’d rather it was sand-shoes than gum-boots.”

“Well, we could get those up the street here, after dinner.”

He lit a cigarette; she refused one. They sat in silence for a time. Presently she said: “It’s not only my shoes.”

“I know. I ought to have seen you had a lifebelt on. They’re stowed in the rack at the back of the cabin.”

She shook her head. “I didn’t mean that. It’s all my clothes—I feel I’m not dressed right for this sort of expedition.” She glanced down. “Daddy got me this awful skirt, because mine was wet.”

He eyed her for a moment. “Would you consider wearing an overall suit, Miss Lockwood?”

“You mean without a skirt at all?”

“That’s right. A boiler suit, like mechanics wear.”

“It’d look awfully funny in the hotel.”

“You could wear your ordinary clothes in the hotel, except when you’re going backwards and forwards to the machine. Besides, there won’t be many more hotels, you know. There’s one at Reykjavik, and that’s the lot.”

She stared at him in wonder; they were getting very near to the unknown. “I suppose that’s so.”

He nodded.

“It would be more practical, wouldn’t it?”

He nodded again. “We might be able to get a white one. They look very nice.”

They finished their drinks and went to look for Lockwood; they found him in the lounge, and went in to dinner. The don was relieved to see that they had come to some kind of understanding; he did not want to lose his daughter and have to wait till he could get an undergraduate to join him. Besides, the whole thing was absurd. Alix had got to learn to get along with people.

Ross left them sitting over their coffee, and went and stood for an interminable half-hour in the telephone box in the hall. He had arranged for a special series of weather reports for the crossing to Iceland. In the end he got through to the Air Ministry; they told him:

He scribbled this down upon the back of an envelope, and rang off. He took it to Lockwood in the lounge; the girl had gone upstairs.

“I don’t know that I’m so struck on this, sir,” he said.
“The wind at dawn—that’s fine. Just what we want to get us off with a good load of fuel. But the cloudy to one thousand feet and the fog patches aren’t so good.”

“I’ll leave it to you, Mr. Ross. If you’d like to wait for better weather, we’ve got plenty of time in hand.”

The pilot stared at the envelope. “Considerable fog patches …” He shook his head. “I think I’d wait a day, sir. It’s over five hundred miles of open sea from the Hebrides to Vik. We don’t want to run into trouble at the end of that.”

The don nodded. “I think that’s very wise. We’ll wait here for a day or two.”

The pilot left him, and went out and down the street to the cottage of the boatman. He was a little worried about the wind of twenty-five miles an hour that was coming to them. He got the man out, and they went down to the jetty, got the motor boat, and went out to the machine again in the dusk. They worked for nearly an hour, passing a stronger bridle from the bollards on the floats direct to the mooring chain, in order to eliminate the risk of the light aviation cables parting in a strong blow.