Mysterious Aviator

  I got to Winchester at about four o’clock, wishing vaguely that I was a clergyman. They seem to have the knack of butting in adroitly. I was very conscious that I hadn’t.

  It had seemed the only thing to do. I retired to my club after I left Robertson, picked up a novel off the table as I passed into the smoking-room, and sat there for half an hour trying to read it. At the end of that time, I turned back to the beginning and began again. By the time I had got to page forty for the second time, I had come to the conclusion that the only thing to do was to go down to Winchester that afternoon and find out how the land lay. Having once started butting in, I might as well go through with it.

  The shop was in between the Close and the main street, in rather a quiet little by-way. At first sight one would not have known it for a shop at all. It was a square, uncompromising Georgian house that stood directly on the pavement; through the open windows of the ground floor one could see that the whole of the front rooms of the house had been knocked into one, and were set with little tables. A small, brightly-coloured sign over the door announced the calling of that house, and a little white notice on the door impressed upon me that it was under the entirely new management of Mrs. Mary Lenden. Home-made cakes, it seemed, were a speciality.

  I got out of my car and went up the three steps into the big room among the little oak tables, and stood there for a minute waiting for something to happen. It was evident to me that the tea trade was slack in Winchester on Mondays; it was after four o’clock, but I was the only person in the room. And then there was a rustling in a back region, not unlike somebody laying down the Daily Mail, and a girl came out from behind a brightly-coloured curtain that hung across the back of the room.

  “Good afternoon,” she said quietly. “Can I get you tea?”

  I suppose she might have been twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, medium in height, and with brown hair that she wore long and dressed smoothly back over her head, giving her a very quiet air. She was dressed in a long white overall, and I stood there wondering for a minute if she were the girl I’d come to look for.

  She looked at me inquiringly. My courage went trickling away through my boots, and I ordered tea.

  I sat over that for half an hour. Not many people came into the shop; by half-past four there may have been half a dozen in the room. I was rather surprised at that because the tea was one of the best I’ve ever had the good fortune to sit down to. Mrs. Lenden knew her job all right, so far as that was concerned.

  I very soon came to the conclusion that it was Mrs. Lenden that I had met as I entered. There was another of them there, a red-haired girl of about eighteen who seemed to do most of the running about. It couldn’t be her. Unless there were more of them behind the scenes, Mrs. Lenden must be the one that I had spoken to at first. And then, as she came through the curtain with a fresh supply of cakes to set on a little table by the wall, I noticed what I suppose I should have seen before if I’d had any sense. She wore a wedding ring.

  That room faced the sun, a wide, airy place, and not too crowded with tables. There was a little jug of snowdrops before my plate, and the sun came in through the window by my side and lit up these flowers, and the light oak of the table, and the bright mats upon it. I nodded to her, and she came over to tell me how much I owed.

  She stood beside me, and cast a rapid eye over the table. “Three cakes?” She considered for a minute. “That’ll be one and fivepence, then.”

  I fished it out. “You are Mrs. Lenden, I suppose?”

  She nodded. “We haven’t been open for very long. I took this shop over from the other people when they went away, about six months ago. Did you know it then?”

  She was very grave and courteous and kind, and she stood there eyeing me directly.

  I shook my head. “I’ve never been here before. But Major Robertson sent me down here. He told me that I’d find you here. You know him, don’t you? Sam Robertson. He’s back from the Argentine.”

  If I had expected to surprise her, I was mistaken. She showed no change, but she nodded gravely. “Major Robertson is a very old friend of my husband’s,” she said simply. “We know him quite well.”

  She wasn’t giving anything away, that girl.

  “I know,” I said. “I saw him this morning. He gave me this, and told me to come and see you.” And I pushed her letter across the table towards her.

  A donkey cart passed slowly by the window in the street outside, loaded with yellow bananas and red oranges, and all manner of bright things in the sun. She stood there fingering the letter, and she was silent for a minute.

  “He gave you this,” she said at last. “Then you know something about Maurice?”

  “He’s staying with me now,” I replied.

  “He’s—he’s quite all right?”

  I glanced up at her sharply, and looked away again. “He’s perfectly fit,” I said gently. “Just had a touch of malaria that’s kept him in bed for a couple of days, but nothing to worry about. He’s quite all right now.”

  She nodded. “Did he get his mixture made up?” And then, as if she was ashamed to talk to me of trivialities, she said:

  “You must come upstairs. Please, if you don’t mind. We can’t talk here.”

  She had recovered, and seemed as impassive as she had been when she was giving me my bill. That was a way of hers. She never showed one very much of what she felt, even when things were very difficult for her.

  She took me to a room on the floor above, looking out on to an uneven array of roofs and an untidy little yard at the back. It was their sitting-room. There were a couple of basket chairs, and a low smouldering fire in the grate, and a little writing-desk littered with account-books and loose bills. Half sitting-room, half office, this was evidently where they lived.

  In the room she turned to face me. “What’s your name? I’m sorry….”

  “My name’s Moran,” I said. “I live over in Sussex, about forty miles from here. I was in the same squadron as Lenden in 1917.”

  She wrinkled her brows.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of me,” I said. “I hadn’t seen him since those days—till last week.”

  “You’ve come from Major Robertson?” she asked.

  I nodded. “He sent me here. Your husband’s in a bit of trouble, Mrs. Lenden. I went to Robertson because he seemed to be a pretty old friend, and because he was handy. In Town.”

  She was quite collected now. “What’s the trouble?” she inquired. “Where’s he been?”

  There was no point in beating about the bush. “He’s been in Russia,” I said frankly, “and that’s the trouble.”

  And then there was a sudden commotion on the stairs, and there was the red-haired girl, who said there was a party of four asking for poached eggs, and there weren’t any eggs, and should she send Lizzie out for eggs or should she tell them that they couldn’t have eggs? And when that was settled and the commotion had died away downstairs again, Mrs. Lenden was silent for a little time, and then:

  “I knew that was where he’d been,” she said at last. “It was the only place.” And then she turned to me. “Where is he now? What’s he going to do?”

  “He’s staying in my house for the present. He’s going back to Russia to-morrow or the next day.”

  “Why’s he going back there?”

  “He’s got a job out there.” I paused for a moment, and then decided it was best to take that fence at once.

  “From his point of view, there’s nothing to keep him in England. He hasn’t any ties or anything.

  “You see,” I said gently, “he thinks he’s divorced.”

  She dropped her eyes to the table. “I know,” she said quietly. “I know he does.”

  There was a little silence then. She stood there with her eyes fixed upon the table, and I followed her glance. It was a heavy old refectory table backed up against the wall, and as I stood there waiting for her to say something I took notice of what was on it. Stacked up aga
inst the wall there were great heaps of weekly periodicals—I dare say there may have been a couple of hundred there, of all shapes and sizes. A few of them were scattered loose upon the table, and I glanced at the titles.

  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.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  LENDEN 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….”