So Disdained (16 page)

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"Don't worry. I'm motoring in, and I'll be passing through Knightsbridge. At the Phalanx, then, at ten o'clock to-morrow morning."

"Right. I'll be pleased to meet you. Good-bye."

I rang off, and sat for a little at my desk, staring out of the window at the timbered house opposite. I've always kept pretty well to myself, and I've never gone about poking my nose into other people's affairs. But when you find a chap down and out and on his beam-ends, it seems to me that the least you can do is to go and tell his friends about it.

For one thing, it rids you of the responsibility for him.

I shut up the office soon after that, and went back to my house for tea. Lenden had disappeared; for the moment I had the wind up that he'd vanished for good, until I saw the pack of plates still lying on top of the safe where he had left it. I knew that he wouldn't have gone away without those, and I didn't think he'd have gone away without telling me.

I spent an hour or two at the piano after tea, running over the passages of my play. I very soon became immersed in it, and I dare say that I may have gone on for an hour or so without noticing very much. And when I looked up in the end and glanced round the room, there was Sheila Darle standing before the fire and laughing at me.

I dropped my hands from the piano and swung round. "I'm most awfully sorry," I said. "I never heard you come in. Have you been here long?"

She stood there on the fender in imitation of my own habit, with the laughter still bright in her eyes as she looked down on me. "About ten minutes or so. What's that you were playing then?"

I looked up and grinned at her. "A fairy tale."

She came a little closer to the piano. "What's it about?"

I turned round again to the keys. "It's a thing I take up now and again when I've nothing better to do. I'll play you a bit of it, if you like."

She came and sat down on a little stool beside the instrument. I played a few bars of the overture, and stopped. "It's about a
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Princess who went walking in the forest alone," I said, "and got chased by a bear. And she ran away very fast, which was about the best thing she could do in the circumstances, and the bear ran after her. And they ran faster and faster through the wood—I'll play you that bit—till the Princess really thought she was done for that time. And then a Woodman came along and killed the bear."

"Bit o' luck that," said Sheila phlegmatically.

I nodded. "That sort of thing always happens in that sort of wood. Grimm and Perrault, you know."

"Like a conventional fairy tale, you mean?"

"That's right."

"I see. That might be rather nice. What happened then?"

"The Woodman killed the bear with his knife. And the Princess was so grateful and she thought the Woodman was such a He-Man that she fell in love with him and went away and lived with him in his hut in the woods. Under the trees, in the sunlight. It was always sunny there."

"Was she pretty?"

"Very pretty. As pretty as a picture."

"That was nice for the Woodman, then," said Sheila demurely.

"It was. Frightfully nice. He liked it no end. Never had such a nice thing happen to him in his life before, I should think. I must say, I'd kill a bear with a knife myself—any day—if I thought that'd happen. And all the Court and all the Knights and Squires and Varlets came riding through the woods to look for the Princess, but they didn't find her because she was in the hut with the Woodman. She wasn't going to let herself be caught and taken away."

"How long did she live with him?"

"Weeks and weeks."

"I don't think she'd been very well brought up."

"She hadn't. She wasn't really a very nice girl, but she was pretty and very much in love with the Woodman, so that part of it was all right. But she didn't get on very well with cooking his dinner, and emptying the slops, and washing up, and
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cleaning his boots. She used to shirk that sort of thing a bit, and then he'd come in tired and all of a muck o' sweat and see it wasn't done, and he'd buckle down and do her job for her. Almost every day."

"He'd have got on a lot better if he'd given her a good spanking."

"I know," I agreed. "But she was a King's daughter, you see, and I expect he didn't like to do that. But the result of it all was that he began to get more and more like a Prince within the hut, and she got more and more like a peasant girl, because she was always shirking her job. He got taller and straighter and handsomer, and she got shabbier and shabbier because she hadn't any new clothes and the old ones weren't standing the strain very well. And at last they were just about as shabby as each other, and it was perfectly obvious then, when you looked at them side by side, that he was a King's son, and she was just an insignificant little person that he'd picked up somewhere or other."

She laughed. "What happened then?"

"Why," I said, "they went back to the castle and got married. And everybody said it was a very suitable match and they were all frightfully pleased about it, and they went about telling each other what a good job it was, because they thought she was never going to get off, and now she'd gone away and found such a nice young man all by herself, and so well connected. And they said he must be the son of the King of Tenebroc, and the Princess whispered to him that that was eighteen months' journey away, and so he said—Well, perhaps he was. And so that was all right, and they lived happily ever after."

"Is that all?"

"That's all. I'll play you some of it now."

She settled herself upon the little stool by the keyboard, and I began upon the overture. That evening stands out very clear and distinct in my memory, even at this distance of time. It came as an oasis, an interlude in that rather trying period. Throughout that evening I was able to forget the whole affair—aeroplanes, espionage, and everything. For that interlude I was
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grateful at the time, and I have seen more reason to be grateful since.

Some time after that—perhaps as much as an hour later—Lenden came in. I had finished the play by then, and was playing bits of things to her at random—Chopin mostly, I think. And we were talking. Lenden hesitated in the doorway.

I swung round, and introduced him to Sheila. He shook hands vaguely. "I—we've met before. Didn't you come over to look after me the other day?"

She nodded. "Mm. You're much better now, aren't you?"

He hesitated. "Yes," he said quickly. "I'm quite all right again now. It was awfully good of you to come over. Not used to people bothering—like that." He smiled shyly.

"You're quite all right again?"

"Yes. Fine."

"Well enough to come over to the house for supper? With him." She jerked her head at me.

He glanced at me inquiringly. "It sounds awfully nice."

She turned to me. "Did you know that Arner went up to Curzon Street this afternoon?"

I shook my head, surprised. "He didn't say anything about it to me."

She nodded. "I forgot to tell you, with your playing. It was in the afternoon, when you'd gone down to the office. He got a telephone call. It was that I came over to tell you about, really. There's only me and Aunt Maud."

She swung round on Lenden, laughing. "So you needn't be frightened. You'll come, won't you? Both of you?"

I grinned. "We'd like to very much."

"All right," she said. "Half-past seven." And went.

Lenden had been out on the down above Under; he said that he had got fed up with the house and had gone out for a walk. He had taken a dog with him that he had found tied up in the stable-yard; it belonged to Kitter, the chauffeur. Kitter had been only too willing that the beast should get some exercise, and Lenden had gone wandering with his dog over the downs
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in the direction of Leventer. He told me where he had walked. He had certainly covered a good bit of ground in the time.

"And then," he said, "I came up over a bit of a hill by a beech wood and saw my Breguet, about a mile and a half away. She was covered up and pegged down in the lee of a barn. Did you do that?"

I nodded. "You'd see her from there. It's the only direction from which she's really conspicuous." I thought about it for a minute. "We'll have to do something with her soon."

He agreed that she couldn't stay there indefinitely. He told me that he had walked on over the down to have a look at her. Spadden was evidently sleeping in his house that Sunday afternoon, for Lenden saw nobody.

"She's quite all right," he said. "I slipped off the cover from the oil filter, and it was all bunged up with stuff from the inside of that bit of pipe. It's a rotten bit of stuff, that pipe. Like garden hose. All she wants is a new bit, and the oil tank cleaning out, I suppose. There's eight or nine hours' petrol in the tanks still . . .

"Might want her again yet," he said uneasily. "It'd be the easiest way of getting back to Russia."

His walk had done nothing to resolve his mind. I made no direct answer to that, but presently I said:

"I've got to go to Town to-morrow."

He was silent for a minute. "How long are you going to be away for?"

"It's only a morning appointment. I ought to be back here by tea-time."

"Any news of what's happening about Russia?"

I shook my head. "Nothing at all."

He relapsed into silence again, and presently we went to get ready for dinner. It was clear to me by that time that he was quite incapable of making up his mind. It was becoming more and more evident that he was reluctant to go back to Russia. I began to put considerable faith in the issue of this meeting with Robertson. It seemed to me that Lenden was in such a state of dither that he would go passively in any direction in which he
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were pushed. I had some hopes that Robertson might provide the push.

We went over to the mansion. That was a quiet evening, one of a type that I had grown familiar with through the years that I had spent at Under. Supper on Sunday evening is always the same in that great candle-lit room; I trust it always will be. There was a cold chicken, a smoked tongue, a potato salad, a caramel pudding, and a Camembert. And rather a good Barsac. Beyond the candles the portrait of Arner's grandfather stared down at me from above the mantelpiece, and I talked to Lady Arner about the garden and the tenants and Mattock's foal—which I didn't think much of. Mattock was a bit disappointed with that foal himself, as a matter of fact, and sold it over at Pithurst the other day.

Sheila had taken Lenden in hand, and was being very sweet with him. He was shy and restrained to begin with, I fancy, but by the time we reached the sweet the Barsac was at work, and he was talking to her quite fluently about his joy-riding experiences. I overheard some of it.

"Ten days in one place," he said, "and then move on. Just the two week-ends. However well you're doing, it never pays to stay longer than that. And it's never any good to put on a special show on market day, like you'd think. Never do much business then. Just the Saturday and Sunday—they're the big days. And little bits in the week. . . ."

"I expect you get most people to come up at the big seaside places, don't you?" inquired Sheila. "Places like Bournemouth and Brighton?"

He was entirely at his ease by now, and intent on telling her about the work he loved. "In a way," he said. "You can burn your fingers pretty badly there, though—they're mostly worked out. No, we stick more to the little places now—places about the size of Pithurst and Petersfield. You have to leave them for so long to recover. It's never any good going back for four years. That's the interval that you have to leave before you can do a good week's business again. Four years. . . ."

He mused a little. "Of course, some places you can go back
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to year after year, and still take up as many as you can manage. Clapton . . . I've taken money there year after year. And then, some day we'll get Bargate opened up."

Sheila interposed a question. "Does Bargate go on and on?"

He smiled shyly. He had rather an attractive smile, though I hadn't seen much of it since he'd been with me. But when he smiled, I remembered him as he used to be in the Service.

"Can't go to Bargate at all," he replied. "They won't look at an aeroplane now. O'Dare did that in for us."

"Why can't you go there? Won't they have you?"

He shook his head. "Corporation won't hear a word about it—not since 1919. You can't get permission to use a field within five miles of the place—not at any price. They're not going to have the reputation of their town blasted by a lot of flying men. Never no more. I dare say they're right."

He sighed regretfully. "I'd make a fortune in six months if I could get a field at Bargate. I'd be able to retire. . . ."

Sheila was intrigued. "What's the matter with them? What happened?"

Lenden hesitated. "It was a bad show," he said shyly. "It happened just after the war. O'Dare was the first of us to go to Bargate, and it was a little gold mine, I tell you. He got a field there just at the end of the promenade, by a bus stop. He was flying a three-seater Avro—he only had the one machine, and his ground engineer, and a clerk. And there'd never been any joy-riding in Bargate before, and the town was full of visitors. And every day when the boat came in from London they simply made one stream for his field. It was wonderful, I believe. He had a queue half a mile long from eight in the morning till dark, and the sole right for the place for the summer. He was in the air for thirteen hours a day, and in six weeks he'd cleared his expenses and paid for the machine and banked two thousand pounds clear profit."

He was silent for a minute.

"What happened then?" asked the girl.

Lenden smiled. "He took to shooting the bottles off the shelf over the bartender's head with his old service Webley," he explained.
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"In the Hotel Metropole, where all the Jews go. It was a shame that happened."

"And then?"

"Oh, then it all came to an end, of course. They ran him and his aeroplane out of the town next day, and closed down the field. And now if you so much as fly over Bargate to take a photograph, you hear about it afterwards from the Town Clerk."