So Disdained (6 page)

He flung his half-smoked cigarette into the fire, and lit another.

"It burnt for about thirty seconds. I flew straight over the target and got in three good shots one after the other, that would join up to make a long strip photograph, you see. When the sights ceased to bear, I chucked her round in a quick turn and made another run over the target. I went slower over the ground that time because I was flying against the wind. I got in five shots on that run and I passed the flare about half-way, a little below me and to starboard. I swung her round again at the end of that run and got in two more shots as I headed east over the thing. In the middle of the second one the light went out. I tell you, it was a fine flare, that. There wasn't even a red glow to show where it had been and make them smell a rat. It just flicked clean out into the darkness."

He was heading east when that happened. He didn't linger over Portsmouth, but went straight on ahead and back the way he came. He kept his machine flying slowly and quietly till he was well out at sea past the Nab, then opened up his engine and made straight along the coast for Dover.

I got up from my chair and crossed to the back of the room. The daily papers generally lie about there for a week or so before they disappear, and I had no difficulty in finding the one I wanted. That passage was there as I remembered it.

FIREBALL AT PORTSMOUTH

I showed it to Lenden. He read it through, and smiled.

"You got back all right, then?" I asked.

He was staring into the fire, and shivering a little. "Yes, I got back," he said slowly. "I landed at about four o'clock. It was twice as long a flight as the one from Kieff, but I didn't feel it half so much. I was tired, of course, but nothing beyond the ordinary. It hadn't been so cold, for one thing."

As soon as he landed they set about pegging down the machine for the night, and draining the radiator. Then they went to get the plates from the camera. He said that the plates for that camera were held in two chargers; they were all in one box to start with, and as you exposed each plate it slid over to the other box automatically leaving a fresh plate all ready over the lens. They went to take off the box of exposed plates. It didn't come away freely, and when they finally got it off there was a crack and a tinkle of glass.

He glanced at me. "The first plate had jammed," he said quietly. "It was the tripping gear. They hadn't been passing the lens at all. I'd taken all the ten exposures on the one plate. I'd done it all, and flown all that way—for nothing."

It was bad luck, that, from his point of view. It meant that the flight all had to be done again. He told me that he was forced to leave it for a day or two. He'd done two long night flights on two successive nights, and he wasn't fit to do another one straight off. He had to have some rest; he said that he was getting jumpy and feverish with the exposure. He talked it over with the Jews, and they made it Thursday night for the second shot; the interval he spent mostly in bed.

"There was another thing," he said. "I knew there'd be some
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risk about the second trip. I mean to say, whatever it is that's going on there, it's pretty secret. One can't go on letting off fireballs over Portsmouth indefinitely, and think they won't tumble to the game. And it's a protected area, you know. They've got every right to shoot you down if you go monkeying about over that sort of place. It had been all right the first time; I'd taken them by surprise. But I knew it wasn't going to be so easy the second time."

He paused. "And, by God, it wasn't!"

He shivered violently, and drew up closer to the fire. He flew over in exactly the same way. He found the same subdued light in the middle of the entrance, but the thing had moved nearer to the Gosport shore. And as he drew closer, he saw one thing that scared him stiff and put the wind up him properly. They had the landing-lights out on Gosport aerodrome.

He sat there very still, staring at the glowing embers of the fire. "I could see that I was in for it then," he said very quietly. "And from our own people. I knew that as soon as I let off my flare it'd be like poking a stick into a wasps' nest. I knew there'd be machines coming up from the aerodrome after me, and that in a few minutes I might have something like a Gamecock hanging on behind me, and then I'd have to land or be shot down."

He was silent for a minute.

"The worst part of it—what put the wind up me most"—he was speaking so quietly that I could hardly hear what he said—"was that they'd be our own people. Somebody like Dick Scott or Poddy Armstrong, that I'd played pills with at the Royal Aero Club, sitting there in the Gamecock pooping off tracer bullets at me, and thinking he was doing a damn good job. . . ."

He pulled himself together and lit another cigarette. He was still shivering a bit; I wondered if he had taken cold.

He said that the job went through almost exactly as it had before. He set his flare off on the Gosport side of the harbour and began taking photographs as he went east. As he turned the machine at the end of that run he saw the first of the green lights come up.

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They were setting off green rockets from Gosport, in groups of three at a time. It was the signal to land at once. The things rose to a height of about a thousand feet and burst in a cluster of green stars. They were shooting them up in groups of three at intervals of about ten seconds. Lenden paid no attention to them, but he got in five photographs on his way west over the target. He took nine exposures in all, and then swung the machine round and went straight out to sea.

"I didn't dare to open out my engine. The Breguet can do about a hundred and sixty miles an hour, but to do that you've got to make a noise. I kept her throttled down and silent, and went drifting out towards the Island, doing about eighty. I turned in my seat as I went, and had a good look at the aerodrome behind me. They had stopped sending up the rockets, and as I watched I distinctly saw a machine sweep across the aerodrome in front of the landing-lights as she took off. I knew then that they were after me."

He sat playing with the poker for a bit. "Well," he said. "They didn't find me."

They didn't get their searchlights going fast enough. By the time the first of those came up he was miles away, right out to sea above Spithead. He carried on like that till he was somewhere off St. Helen's; then he thought that his best course was to put on speed and get clear. So he switched on the little shaded light over his instruments and, with an eye wandering over the dials, thrust forward the throttle. He saw the needle of the oil gauge go leaping up till it jammed at the limit of the dial.

He glanced at me. I had barely appreciated the significance of that; it was so long since I had flown. "It's rotten when a thing like that happens," he said quietly, "at night, and over strange country. And I was right out to sea, mind you—about five miles from land. I didn't see the fun in coming down in the water if my engine was going to pack up, and so I turned towards the coast, somewhere by Selsey. And then, quite suddenly, the gauge flicked down to zero, and oil began to come spraying down the fuselage from the engine, coating the windscreen
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and blowing in my face. Warm oil, all black and sticky in the darkness. . . .

"I knew that I was in for it then," he said. "And it was all dark below. Pitch dark, with only a little white surf to show the line of the beaches. No hope of being able to pick out a field to land in. And I knew that very soon the engine would pack up."

He was shivering again. I threw a lump or two of coal on the fire, and he crouched a little closer towards it. He said he made for the downs. He knew that part of the country fairly well from flying over it, and he knew that he could pull off a forced landing on the top of the downs without hurting himself. He didn't care a damn what happened to the machine so long as he could get down uninjured with the plates. His orders were that in such a case the machine was to be burnt.

"I went up between Chichester and Arundel. And as I went," he said, "I was climbing, climbing for all I was fit to get a bit of height while the engine lasted. I got her up to five thousand feet or so, a few miles inland from the coast. I knew it was all open grass land in front of me then, and every chance of a decent landing. I thought I might want the engine again at the last minute to pull me clear of a tree or a house, so I shut off before she seized up for good, and put the machine on the glide down to land. And then, as luck would have it, the moon came out for a couple of minutes and showed me the lie of the country. The only time I've seen the moon since I left Kieff. It was easy then. I set off a wing-tip flare at about fifty feet, and landed where you saw."

His voice died into the silence. He had come to the end of his story, it seemed, and now he was waiting for me to say something. I glanced uneasily about the room in search of inspiration, and saw the black tin case he had brought from the machine lying beside his chair. I would have picked it up, but he was before me.

"These are the photographs?" I asked.

He nodded, turning the box over and over in his hands.

I thought about it for a minute. "Why didn't you burn the machine?"

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Crouching towards the fire, he glanced up at me and grinned. "I hadn't got a match."

I suppose I looked doubtful.

He said that he had made a little pile of papers in the cockpit and soaked them with petrol. And then he went through his pockets and found he had one match—just the one. He hadn't thought about bringing proper incendiary materials with him. He struck the head off that match at the first go, and there he was. He tried to get a spark out of the lighting system for a time, but failed to ignite his papers. Then he tried to get one of the flares off the wing, and presently he had to give that up for lack of tools.

"Then it came on to rain in buckets," he said. "I was fed up with it by then. And left her."

That explained why he had not picketed the machine. Lenden crouched a little closer to the fire, and began shivering again. That drew my attention.

"You've got a chill," I said.

He sat back from the fire a little, and stopped shivering. "It's nothing," he replied. "I've had it for some days."

I eyed him thoughtfully for a minute, and wondered if he was going to be ill. He had flushed up in the last hour or so.

"Fever?"

He nodded. "Got it when I was out with Sam Robertson on the Patuca," he said. "I never give it much heed. It was the flight from Kieff that started it this time; I've had it intermittently since then. Off and on, you know. I'll take some quinine, if you've got any."

I went into my bedroom and returned with a bottle of tablets. He read the label, counted out about half the bottle into the palm of his hand, and swallowed them with the help of a glass of water from the table.

It was getting towards dawn. Outside, the lawns of the garden were beginning to show grey; through the uncurtained window I could see the outline of a flower-bed and a shadowy tree. I remained standing on the fender there before the fire, and staring down at him. I didn't know what to do.

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He was still handling that flat box of plates. I stood there in perplexity for a bit, and at last:

"What are you going to do with those?" I asked bluntly.

Lenden had begun to shiver again. He seemed not to have heard my question, but sat there crouching down over the fire. He had an odd, flushed look about him, I remember; his hair was ruffled and hanging down over his forehead, giving him a worn and dissipated appearance. I thought for a little.

"Are you on your way back to Russia?" I asked.

Presently I repeated the question.

He didn't take his eyes from the fire. "God knows," he said morosely. "I don't."

It was no use thinking of going to bed now. It was getting on for half-past five, and the daylight was growing fast outside the window. I stood there on the fender studying him for a bit longer, and then I crossed the room and sat down at the piano. It was a Baby Grand that I had bought a year or so before, and I was still paying for it. That piano stands beside me now. It had a pleasant, clean tone, with little volume to it, most suitable to the sort of room that I can afford.

I had done that before, and I have done it since. I've always lived a pretty healthy life. To lose a night's sleep means very little to me, if I may sit quietly at the piano for an hour at the beginning of the new day. I slid on to the stool that morning, dropped my fingers on to the keys, and began upon the overture to my play.

It goes gently, that overture, and in my hands of course it plays itself. I let it ripple on through the various themes, absently polishing it a bit as I went. Now and again I glanced across to Lenden. He was still sitting exactly as I had left him, crouching over the fire, his hair hanging down untidily over his forehead, fingering that infernal box, and shivering. It was pretty evident that he was going to be ill. And that wasn't surprising. He had been soaked to the skin when I met him on the road, and I hadn't thought of offering him a change of clothes. He had dried before the fire.

I finished the overture and began upon the plot. The forest
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scenes come first in the play; I don't suppose I shall ever really be satisfied with those forest scenes. I have polished and refined them out of all recognition—continually. I don't know how long I sat over them then, but I was startled by Lenden's voice.