Mysterious Aviator Read Free Page A

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 threelittle 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 meabout 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.
    Perhaps, if they had had a land machine they might have got away with it, in spite of their total lack of business experience. Lenden, with the knowledge that he had gained in later years, had no illusions on that point. But he himself put down their failure to the difficulty of operating the machine from the beach of a crowded seaside resort, and he talked for a long time about that.
    “Handling the machine on to the beach. That’s what did us in—properly. Damn it, it took the hell of a time. Days when there was a sea breeze I’d come in to land over the town, sideslipping down over the houses and the promenade. We were always getting pulled up for flying too low over the promenade. They didn’t think about our having a living to get out of their ruddy town.”
    He stared morosely at the table-cloth. “The sea breeze was hell. I’d land a couple of hundred yards out, and then turn to taxi in to the beach. Then the fun began, and we’d come taxi-ing in to the beach with a twenty-mile wind behind, blowing us straight on to the sand. We hit the beach like that once or twice when we were new to the game, an’ stove in a float each time. When we got sick of patching floats I used to try and swing her round into the wind again at the last moment, to check her way. Often as not I’d get outside the stretch of shore the Council had roped off for us in doing that, and go driving in among the bathers. That meant stopping the prop for fear of