Mysterious Aviator (18 page)

And then I realised what I was looking at. There was
The Aeroplane
, and
Flight
and
Airways
—all three of the English ones. Then there were the Americans, the
Aerial Age
, and
Aviation
, and
The Flying World
. And there was the
Aero Revue Suisse
, and
L’Air
, and the
Illustrierte Flug-Woche
, and
La Rivista Aeronautica
, and
L’Ala d’Italia
, and a whole heap of others, in all languages. She must have given a wholesale order to some agency and paid a mint of money to have every aeronautical publication in the world sent to her by post. For months.

I could picture her sitting there at that table in the evenings, surrounded by those papers that she couldn’t read, very grave and serious.

She saw what I was looking at, and raised her eyes inquiringly.

I indicated them. “These papers,” I said. “You’ve been reading them every week?”

She nodded. With the red-haired girl to help her she had waded through the lot of them, night after night, for over a year. She had let the girl deal with the English ones because they were easier, while she looked for his name in the foreign journals, line by line.

“You see, I knew he’d turn up in aviation some time,” she said simply. “He loves it so—it’s the only thing he can do really well, and he can’t keep away from it. We tried giving it up before, you know, and it didn’t work….” She hesitated.
“That’s what made me write to Major Robertson and the others. Because I knew that where there was flying, Maurice’d turn up sooner or later.”

I could find nothing to say to that.

She turned away, and sat down at the littered desk. She pulled out a sheet of notepaper from a pigeon-hole. “If I write a little note to Maurice,” she said gravely, “will you take it to him?”

I nodded. “I’m going straight back home from here,” I said. “He’ll get it to-night.”

She raked about among her papers till she found a little blunt stump of pencil, and bent over the desk. I sat down on the edge of the table and began to turn over a copy of
Aviation
. Before I had looked half-way through that issue she had finished her letter and was sealing it deliberately in an envelope. That must have been a very short note that she wrote to him.

And then she got up and stood there fingering the envelope for a minute. “He thinks we’re divorced,” she explained. “But we aren’t really, and he ought to know, oughtn’t he? Because he might be wanting to marry again, and he couldn’t, you see. And so I’ve just told him that, and what I’m doing, and perhaps he’ll be able to come over and see me before he goes back. Do you think he will?” She stood there eyeing me gravely, and a little wistfully.

“Why,” I said, “I’m sure of it, Mrs. Lenden.”

She nodded. “You see, we were going to be divorced,” she said. “And it was only when it all began that I saw what a rotten, cheap sort of way out it was, and how it wasn’t going to work—not properly. It all depends on how you’re made if you can get to be happy that way, and I couldn’t. And it might have been different if he’d been well off and had lots of money, but he wasn’t; and it was a rotten trick to go leaving him like that, and I’ve been most frightfully … ashamed. And then, when I wanted to find him to tell him about it, he’d gone away.”

Her voice died into the silence, but presently she began again.

“A man isn’t like a girl,” she said quietly. “That’s what I didn’t know, and it was all my fault, really. A girl gets married,
and she wants a home, and children, and a quiet time. And she puts all that first, and she hasn’t got much patience with anything else. And I think a man’s a bit like that, too, but only a bit. A man gets keen on other things that don’t seem to be any good at all, and he goes and spends all his life on them, even if they don’t lead to the quiet time that he really wants. Even if he can’t make enough money at them to live properly … He won’t give up.”

I could find nothing to say to her.

She went on, speaking half to herself. “It’s like a kid with its toys. Music, or the sea, or … or flying. A man has to have his toys, and if you try and take them away from him—you just kill him.” She stood there gazing at me from her quiet, dark eyes. “I know, because I tried it. Maurice was in the City for two years, you know, and all that time we weren’t half so happy as we’d been when he was doing his own job. Even if it did mean that he was out of work half the time. Nothing like.”

I nodded, and she stirred a little beside me, as if she had forgotten I was there. “And what I thought we could do,” she said practically, “was this. I’ve got this shop now, and it’s doing nicely, and it makes quite enough to keep us both if it had to. And what I thought was that Maurice could go on flying and have this for his home, and then when he was out of a job for a bit he could come back here, and there’d always be the shop to keep us, you see. Before, when he was out of a job, there wasn’t any money, and that was so rotten for him. But I thought that this way, it’d be all right.”

Her voice died away into a silence. “You’ll tell him about this, won’t you?” she said. “You’re a great friend of his?”

I cleared my throat. “I’ll tell him that. I think it’s a good idea. It’s just what would work with him. You want to leave him pretty free.”

She was pursuing her own train of thought. “I don’t want you to persuade him, or anything.” She gazed at me steadily. “You won’t, will you? Because it wouldn’t be fair, and it’s awfully easy to persuade him into anything. You must just tell
him what you’ve seen here, and tell him what I’ve been doing and why I’ve done it. And tell him that if he’d like to have a go at being married to me again, I think it might work this time.”

I nodded. “I’ll tell him that.”

She dropped her eyes from my face with a little sigh, and handed me the note. “Then that’s all, I think.”

She had a great presence with her, that girl. I paused for a minute before going downstairs.

“You’d better have my address,” I said.

She sat down at the little desk and took it down in her neat, round hand. Then she accompanied me down through the shop, and came out with me into the street to where my car was parked. I got in and started up the engine.

“You’ll tell him what I said, won’t you?” she said wistfully. “I know he’ll be most awfully busy, and I expect he’s got to get back to Russia. But I’d love just to see him before he goes…”

“I’ll tell him that, Mrs. Lenden,” I replied. And then she stepped back from the car, and I slipped in the gear, and she was gone.

L
ENDEN DIDN’T RETURN
till half an hour after I come in. He had been out all day with the dog; from what he said I gathered that he must have been pretty well as far as South Harting along the down, because he described passing a big white house in the middle of the hills. I put that down as Beacon House, where Sir John Worth lives and breeds his bloodhounds. He must have been twenty miles. Kitter’s dog returned in a state of prostration—and a good job too. It doesn’t get enough exercise, that beast.

I let him have his dinner before I started. There’s no sense in expecting a hungry man to listen to reason, and Lenden was very healthily weary. He spoke very little during the meal, but he mentioned Keumer once, and it was clear that he was as far from a decision on that affair as he had been in the morning. After dinner he left the table and flung himself down in a long chair before the fire, and with his first words he gave me the opportunity that I wanted.

“D’you hear anything more about Russia in Town?” he inquired.

I shook my head. “Not a word. I left soon after lunch. But I saw your pal Robertson this morning.”

He took the cigarette from his lips and stared at me. “Sam Robertson? Where did you see him?”

“In Knightsbridge,” I replied. “At his club.”

“What d’you go there for?”

I crossed the room, switched on the reading-lamp, and sat down on the music-stool before the piano. “Bit of officiousness, I suppose,” I said quietly. “Can’t think of any other reason.”

He didn’t speak.

“You may as well know what I think about this thing,” I said. “For myself, I don’t care a damn what you do. It doesn’t
affect me. You can walk out of this place when you like—to-night or next month—and I don’t suppose we’ll meet again for some time. I’ll get rid of that aeroplane for you. But when you do go, I honestly think you’ll be a ruddy fool if you go back to Russia. There’s going to be bad trouble there, and there’ll be hell to pay if you’re caught out there then. You can see that for yourself.”

He brushed that aside. “I know all that. But what did you want to go and see Robertson for? Was it about me?”

“I went to Robertson because I knew damn well you wouldn’t go yourself,” I said. “Not my business, I know. But that’s what I did.”

He thought about it for a minute. “What happened?” he inquired.

I filled a pipe, and lit it before replying. “He ended by offering you a job on his survey,” I said at length, and glanced towards him through the smoke. “At four hundred and fifty—to start with. Plus a share of the profits.”

He stared at me incredulously. “Did he offer that—on his own?”

“He did.”

“Without wanting any capital put into the business?”

“Not a bean.”

He laughed. “He must have changed his mind since last I saw him, then.”

“You’ve got to remember that his business has expanded since you saw him last,” I said.

It upset the whole apple-cart of his decisions once again. He didn’t say very much, but he sat there conning it over for a long time.

“I’d like to go with Sam again,” he said at last, a little uncertainly. “It was good of you to go and look him up for me. I wouldn’t have thought of it, myself. It’s a better show than going back to Russia. But I don’t know that I can cut off and leave the job like this….”

I might have told him there and then that his plates were spoilt, I suppose. But I didn’t.

“And then there’s Keumer and his wife,” he said. “I couldn’t go shooting off to the Argentine without getting that squared up somehow.” He turned to me. “D’you know, I thought of something to-day. Keumer’s got an uncle who keeps a retail grocery shop in Mannheim, in a pretty big way of business. I believe we might be able to trace his wife that way.” As a matter of fact, it was through that uncle that I found her in the end. But that was much later.

He sat there dithering over his decisions. I saw then very clearly that there was only person in the world who could resolve his mind for him. I suppose I had known it all along, in a way.

“There was one other thing happened up in Town,” I said nervously, and went fishing in the breast pocket of my coat.

“What’s that?”

I passed his wife’s letter to Robertson over to him to read. “Robertson gave me this after we’d done talking business,” I remarked. “You’ve turned up at last, you see.”

I didn’t watch him while he read that letter, but swung round on the music-stool and began polishing the white keys and the dark rosewood of the piano with my handkerchief. That piano stands beside me as I write, and presently, when I am tired of recalling those bad times, I shall get up and I shall play a little to Sheila before going up to bed. With my three stiff fingers my playing will never be a patch on what it was in the days of which I am writing—and that, I think, is the least price that I have had to pay for interference.

“I’ve read that letter,” I remarked, without looking at Lenden. “Robertson showed it to me.”

He didn’t make any comment.

“And then,” I said, “I went on down there this afternoon, and had tea.”

He stared at me darkly. “Oh. You went to Winchester?”

I nodded.

He was about to say something, but stopped. “Did you see Mollie?” he inquired.

“She gave me tea. And then I said I’d seen Robertson, and
she gave me a note for you.”

He blinked at me. “She all right?”

I got up from the piano. “She looked pretty fit,” I said casually. “She was very anxious to see you before you go back,” and I dropped her letter on the table by his side. “I’ve got to go down to Under this evening for a bit. There’s her note.”

He took it in his hands and sat there fingering it, and looking up at me. “How long’ll you be?” he inquired.

“About an hour or so, I suppose,” I said, and left him to it.

I walked down to Under. I had to go down there some time, and this was as good a time as any, because I knew that I should catch the crowd I wanted all together. There was an amateur dramatic show brewing, Gilbert and Sullivan, and because it was for charity they wanted the use of the hall without paying any rent.

I found them hard at it in the hall itself, rehearsing and quarrelling, and having a fine time generally. I might have seen eye to eye with them in the matter of the rent if they’d been red-hot in the cause of charity. But their chief trouble lay in the allocation of their mythical profits between the costumier and the charity; if they were to run to wigs by Parkinson, would there be anything left for Barnardo? I didn’t see why Parkinson should pouch the lot, and so I told their secretary that they could hold their show in the street for all I cared, but if they had the hall they’d pay for it.

Having made myself quite clear on that point, I stayed on for a bit and watched the progress of their rehearsal. They were doing
Patience
, and young Saven, whose father kept the Red Bear in the market, was playing some small part in the thing. I liked young Saven. He had recently come out of the Air Force; I think he had been one of the first batch of peace-trained recruits. He had attained the dignity of two stripes before he came out, and now he was opening a little garage at the back of his father’s inn.

We sat there smoking and gossiping for a bit. Then Nitter, the hairdresser, joined us, and with him came his brother.

Now, I’ve mentioned Nitter before—John Nitter, that is, who
keeps the hairdressing establishment in the Leventer Road, and talks Communism in the market on Saturdays. He’s a nice little man, and when he isn’t talking Communism he’s breeding Irish terriers, or children. There’s no harm in John Nitter, and for a long time I was puzzled to see where he got his Communist ideas from. And then one day I met his brother, and I knew.