So Disdained (2 page)

"I should be very grateful for a lift into Under, if you're going that way."

The rain streamed down into the headlights, and the wiper flicked uneasily upon the windscreen. "You won't get a train from Under tonight," I said, "and you'll have your work cut out to wake them at the pub. It's a rotten hole. If you're Lenden, you'd better come along back with me. There's a
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spare room in my place that you can have. Dare say I can fix you up with a pair of pyjamas, too."

He was about to say something, but hesitated. And then: "It's very good of you," he muttered. "But I'd rather go on."

I sat there staring at him in perplexity. He was hugging a little square, black case in the crook of his arm, but at the moment it didn't strike me what that was. I couldn't understand why he had given me a false name. And then it struck me that he'd made a damn poor show of it if he wanted to get away unnoticed, and that I could have done it very much better myself. But that was in keeping with the man as I remembered him. He was a simple soul, and quite incapable of any sustained deception.

"Look here," I said at last. "Purely as a matter of general interest—where have you come from? You've been flying, haven't you? I see you're in flying kit."

He didn't answer for a minute, but then: "I had a forced landing," he said.

"Here?"

He jerked his head towards the down. "Just over there."

I wrinkled my brows. "How long ago?"

"About an hour. Hour and a half perhaps. Just before the rain came."

I leaned forward on the wheel and stared at him. I couldn't make out for the moment whether to believe a word of what he said. There was something wrong about him, and I didn't know what it was. He wasn't drunk. I thought it might be drugs. He didn't sound natural. His talk about a forced landing seemed to me to be all nonsense. I've been a pilot myself, and I know. When one is in sole charge of a machine worth several thousand pounds, and one has just put it down very suddenly and unexpectedly and hard—one doesn't just go off and leave it. Especially on a night like that.

The rain drummed steadily upon the fabric of the hood.

"You are Lenden, aren't you?" I inquired.

He laughed shortly, and a little self-consciously. "Yes, I'm Lenden," he said. "Just my infernal luck, running up against
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a man like you. I've been a regular Jonah lately." And he laughed again.

"Thanks," I said dryly.

He stirred uneasily in his seat. "Let's get on," he muttered.

"Right you are," I said, and slipped in the gear. I didn't want to go ferreting about in his affairs if he wanted to keep them to himself. "You weren't speaking the truth, by any chance, when you said you'd had a forced landing?"

That stung him up a bit.

"You'll know in the morning, I suppose," he replied. "They'll find the machine."

I slipped it out again. "Damn it," I said. "Do you mean you've got an aeroplane out there?"

He nodded.

"Did you crash her?"

"No, she's all right, but for the oil pressure. It was that that brought me down."

I could make nothing of his way of treating the affair.

"What have you done with her?" I asked. "There's a barn about half a mile down the hill over there. Did you get her under the lee of that?"

He looked embarrassed. "I just left her where she was."

I gazed at him blankly, hardly able to believe my ears. It was the sort of thing a novice might have said—not a pilot of his experience. After all, one expects a man to do his best for the machine.

"Do you mean she isn't pegged down, or anything?"

He shook his head. "I just left her."

I leaned forward and switched off the engine of the car. "But damn it all," I said, "she'll blow away!"

He didn't stir.

"Let her," he said.

I knew then that it must be drugs.

"We can't do that," I said irritably. "She'll be blowing about all over the country, on a night like this." It riled me that I should have to get out of the car into the rain in my dinner-jacket to go and tie up this man's aeroplane, but there seemed
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to be nothing for it. I reached out and took an electric torch from the dashboard pocket, and nudged him.

"Come on," I said. "Get out. We're going to peg her down. Get on with it."

He didn't move. I paused for a moment.

He seemed to make something of an effort. "Look here, Moran," he said. "Let's get going to Under. That machine's all right where she is."

"Leaving her loose?" I asked.

He nodded. "That's right. Leave her loose. Look here, I don't want to bother about her. Just take me along to Under and drop me at the station."

Well, drugs are the devil.

"Can't do that, old boy," I said cheerfully. "She's on our land—Lord Arner's land. It might cost us a couple of pounds if she blew through a hedge, leaving her loose like that. More, perhaps."

I shoved him towards the door. "Come on. Let's go and have a look at her."

He shrugged his shoulders. "If you like."

I had a couple of garden forks and a hank of cord in the back of the car, as luck would have it, that I'd got in Winchester for the house. There was a strap in the dickey, too. I took the lot out, wrapped my raincoat closely round me, swore a little, and set out with Lenden across the down.

It was infernally dark. The lights of the car behind us gave us a direction and prevented us from wandering in circles on the slopes. Lenden didn't know where he had left the machine, but thought that he had walked for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour before it hit the road. We went stumbling on into the darkness for a bit, flashing my torch in every direction.

Presently I stopped. It was pretty hopeless to go on groping for her that way on a night like that.

"Did you land into wind?" I asked.

He nodded. "It was pure guesswork, of course. The wind must have been a bit under the starboard wing, because she went down to port as I touched. Still, I got her up again, so
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she can't have been far wrong."

"Right," said I. "Now, did you land uphill or down?"

He considered for a moment. "Uphill, by the feel of it," he said vaguely. "She pulled up pretty quickly. Yes, I'm sure it was uphill. Not much of a slope, though."

"You had lights to land by?"

"Wing-tip flares. They burnt out as soon as I was on the ground, so I couldn't see much." He hesitated. "I say, let's leave the ruddy thing."

I disregarded that, and stood thinking about it for a minute. If he had landed uphill and into wind it localised the machine pretty well, especially as it was only ten minutes' walk from the road. I bore round to the right, and began to traverse the only uphill slope that faced into the wind.

We found her at the top of the down, where the slope was gentle. I heard her before we got the light on her, a series of drumming crashes as the loose rudder flicked over from hard-a-port to hard-a-starboard, and then to port again. I switched the light in that direction, and there she was, facing more or less into wind with the controls slamming free. He hadn't even troubled to drop the belt around the stick.

"Damn fine way to leave a machine," I muttered. If he heard, Lenden did not reply.

That was a very big aeroplane. I hadn't flown myself since 1917, when I went down with a bullet through my chest to spend the remainder of the war in Germany. I thought that I had forgotten all about that game. But now I am inclined to regard it as one of those things that no man ever really forgets; an old pilot will always linger a little over the photographs of aeroplanes on the back page of the
Daily Mail
. That is the only way in which I can account for the fact that I knew that machine by sight. The French had been doing a number of record-breaking long-distance flights upon the type; I stood there in the rain for a minute playing the torch upon the wings and fuselage, and wondered what on earth Lenden was doing with a French high-speed bomber.

"Where d'you get the Breguet from, Lenden?" I asked.

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He hesitated for a moment. "I've been doing a job on her," he said vaguely.

There was no point in standing there in the rain questioning a man who didn't want to talk. The first thing was to stop those controls slamming about; I made him get up into the cockpit and tighten the belt around the stick. He obeyed me quietly. Then we set about pegging her down for the night.

In a quarter of an hour it was done. We'd buried the garden forks beneath each wing-tip and stamped the sods down over them, lashing the wing loosely to them with the cord. That was the best that we could do in the circumstances. It was a pretty rotten job when it was done, but it only had to hold till daylight. I didn't think it was going to blow hard.

I went all round before we left to have a final look that everything was shipshape. The wind went sighing through the wires in the darkness, and the rain beat and drummed most desolately upon the fabric of the wings. Flashing my light under the fuselage I saw a sort of blunt snout four or five inches in diameter sticking out down below the clean lines of the body. I stooped curiously, and ran my fingers over the bottom of it. There was a lens.

"All right," said Lenden from the darkness behind me. "It's a camera."

I straightened up and thought of the black packet that he had left in the car. But I had had enough of asking questions.

"Let's get along back to Under," I said, and turned towards the lights of the car. "Unless you're staying here?"

He shook his head, and we went stumbling through the rain over the down towards the car. I was thoroughly wet by the time we got there, and not in the best of tempers. I'd done my best to help the man for the sake of old times, but I couldn't help feeling a bit hurt at the way that he had received the assistance I had given him. And it was a funny business, too. I didn't see what he was doing with a Breguet XIX in England, and I didn't see what had brought him to make a forced landing with it in the middle of the night. And it was very evident that he didn't want to tell me.

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We reached the car in silence, and bundled in out of the wet. I paused for a moment before pressing the starter.

"You'd better come along back with me to my place," I suggested.

He seemed embarrassed at that. "It's very good of you," he said diffidently. "But I'd rather go straight to the station. I'm . . . in a hurry."

"You won't do much good at the station at this time of night," I remarked. "There isn't a train till twenty past seven."

I considered for a moment, and added: "You'd better come along with me and sleep on the sofa if you want to catch that train. There'll be a fire to sleep by, which is more than you'll find at the station." I eyed him thoughtfully. "There's nobody else in the house. I'm a bachelor." I don't quite know why I added that.

He hesitated again, and gave in. "All right," he said at last. "I'd like to very much."

We were about five miles from Under Hall. I lived there, in the Steward's House, just across the stable-yard from the mansion. It had been the most convenient arrangement in every way. Arner himself was over seventy years old, and too busy a man to occupy himself with the management of his estate; his only son was in Persia.

It was no great shakes as a job, but—it suited me. The screw wasn't much to boast about, but I had a small income of my own that was getting gradually larger with judicious nursing, and the family treated me as an equal. It's the sort of job that I'm cut out for. I was articled to a solicitor some years before the war, though I was country-bred. I tried it again for a year after the Armistice, and then I gave it up. I should have made a rotten lawyer.

I drove into the stable-yard at about a quarter-past two that night, left the car in the coach-house, and walked across to my own place with Lenden. The Steward's House at Under is built into the grey stone wall that separates the gardens from the stable-yard, and the one big living-room has rather a pleasant outlook on the right side of the wall. There are three
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little bedrooms and a kitchen. It suited me to live there.

They had banked up the fire for me, and left a cold meal on the table with a jug of beer standing in the grate. There was a cold pie, I remember, and a potato salad. I threw off my coat, kicked the fire into a blaze, gave Lenden the use of my room for a wash, and settled down with him for a late supper.

I didn't eat much at that time in the morning, but Lenden seemed hungry and made quite a heavy meal. I lit my pipe and sat there lazily with my back to the fire, waiting and smoking till he had finished. Between the mouthfuls he talked in a desultory manner about the war. The Squadron was re-equipped late in 1917, after I was shot down. With Bristol Fighters. I had heard that. Later they got moved to a place near Abbeville. He got shot through the thigh soon after that, and his observer was killed in the same fight, and he crashed in our support trenches. He became an instructor at Stamford when he came out of hospital. And afterwards at Netheravon. Yes, he supposed he'd been luckier than most.

"Damn sight better off than if you'd been in Germany," I said shortly. "You didn't stay on at all after the war?" I paused. "Someone told me that Standish had gone back," I said, and watched the smoke curl into the darkness above the lamp. "Short-service commission, or something. I forget who it was."

He nodded. "He did. But I came straight out at Armistice." He glanced at me darkly across the table. "I was married. Got married in August, 1918, an' I wanted to be out of it. Make a home for my girl, an' all that sort of thing." He grinned without laughing. "Like hell."

I nodded absently.

Lenden had finished eating. "Went joy-riding with a fellow from Twenty-one Squadron that summer," he said. "Early summer of 1919, just after the war. We had an Avro seaplane." He mused over it for a minute. "My God, we'd got a lot to learn in those days. We took our wives with us, for one thing. . . ."

He leaned his head upon his hands and began to tell me
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about this joy-riding concern. They spent practically the whole of their savings and gratuity upon this seaplane, and they started in with it to tour the South Coast towns, giving joy-rides at a guinea a head. In the prevailing optimism of those days they thought that they could make it pay.