Lonely Road

by Nevil Shute

  It would be idle to deny that he impressed me with his reasoning. He had a keen, clear mind, and much of what he said was pitifully true. I sat there motionless as he was talking, staring out of the window to the bright sunshine of the court. I had lost everything I had to lose in this affair. Had I been altogether wrong in my demand for justice, too severe?

  I raised my head, and he was speaking of the course that I had told him I was going to take. “If you do this,” he said, “these things will happen. You must not deceive yourself.” He smiled a little. “I can assure you that I am not thinking of myself, although the prospect of exposure is not … very palatable, I admit. But leave that out. If you expose this matter in the Press, you will be swinging the country solid to the Labour interests, and the consequences which I have outlined to you will occur. That is mere cause and effect.”

  He paused. “If on the other hand, you stop this Press campaign, the matter rests as it is. You tell me that no action is to be taken by the police till after the election has passed by. That means that the election will take place without bias in either way. I cannot swing it to Conservative, as I would have done. I am asking you not to swing it to the Labour interest, and I have told you why.”

  He stopped speaking, and there was a long silence in the sunlit room. “That lets you out of it all right,” I said cynically. “I see that.” He flushed but did not speak, and I moved over to the window and stood looking down upon the creeper-covered walls and the smooth turf.

  And presently I turned to him. “Five men have been killed in this affair, and one girl. Three of the men were your agents, and as murderers of the others they deserved to die. Marston was one of those; if he had not been drowned he’d have been hung. That is what you made of him.” I paused. “One of the others was your lorry driver, and it may be that he was so involved as to be culpable in this affair.”

  I smiled at him, without mirth. “In fact, all your agents have received their punishment, and only you are left.”

  He did not speak.

  I went on: “But it’s about the last two that I am concerned. You’ve played your fancy game, and you’ve committed murder. You’ve murdered two quite innocent people. One was a police official, a married man with children. They’ll be left pretty badly off. The other was a little dancing girl, from Leeds. She never did you any harm.”

  I paused. “I should like to know what you are going to do about these murders, first.”

  He inclined his head. “About those”—he hesitated for a moment—“murders, as you call them, nothing can be done, except financially. I should myself refer to them as accidents, in that they were not planned or willed by anyone. In this matter we were playing for a great stake. We were playing for the future of this country and this Empire. You run great hazards when you play for a great stake like that.”

  He turned on me. “You must keep a sense of proportion,” he exclaimed. “These deaths are lamentable. But it is this country and this Empire we are dealing with. The issue is the place that Britain” takes, the future of the Empire in the world. And you are putting in the scale against all that, a policeman and a dancing girl!

  “Think of it, man,” he cried. “A girl that you could pick up for a sovereign in the street! What does one girl of that description matter in a thing like this?”

  CHAPTER XV

  THERE was a silence after he said that. Down in the court I heard the voices of the undergraduates talking and chaffing by the doorway of some staircase. They were talking about a round of golf, and dinner at some pub up-river late that night. I remember that, because it was listening to them that helped me fight my anger down as I stood there. For the moment I was seeing red; it was as if he had slashed me in the face with a whip. And I think he saw that something had gone wrong, because he was very quiet when I came to answer him.

  I moved across the room, and sat down again in my old position at the table, facing him. “I have listened to what you have to say,” I said harshly, “especially the last part. And I regard it as a pack of nonsense. The whole thing is a figment of your own imagination, nurtured by your own conceit.” And then I shot at him, suddenly: “Have you ever lived in Manchester?”

  He shook his head.

  “Or Newcastle, or Birmingham? Tell me, have you ever earned your living in any great industrial town?”

  He said: “We have considerable industries here in Cambridgeshire. But I am a scientist of economics, as you might say. Not an industrialist.”

  I nodded slowly. “Leeds is a town as well as Cambridge, but about thirty times as many Englishmen live there. And you know nothing of them, nor of Birmingham, nor Newcastle, nor Manchester. You’ve lived your life out in this little hole among your little class, and yet you’ve got the most disastrous conceit to legislate for them, the people that you do not know. How do you know what may be good for them or bad, or what they may do or they may not do?”

  I stared at him. “Time you were out of this,” I said. “You’d better pack your bag and get away. This matter will go on.”

  He had gone white again. “What do you mean to do?”

  I rose to my feet and faced him across the table. “I mean to drive you out of this into the world, for the bloody murderer and scoundrel that you are. You’ve got three days in which to get away before I start this thing, and if you don’t get out, on Sunday you will be arrested as a criminal. You will be tried for murder, and I think that you may hang. The Government and all the country will be crying for your death. But if you get off that, you won’t get off a term of penal servitude. That means the end of everything for you.” I stared around his delicately furnished, scholarly room. “You’ve done with all this.”

  “Yes,” he said quietly.

  I eyed him for a moment. “If I were you I should get off to South America.”

  He faced me, very white. “I want you to understand that I am not speaking for myself. But for the country. I believe that if you do this thing it means disaster, irretrievable. I would not have that happen, quite apart from what may happen to myself.” He paused, and then said earnestly: “I want to explore every avenue. Is there nothing that will influence you to change your mind about this Press campaign?”

  There was a heavy silence in the room. “Nothing whatever, while you are alive,” I said evenly.

  There was a long silence, broken only by the voices of the undergraduates below, and the low twittering of some bird among the creepers near his window-sill. “I thought that might be it,” he said at last. A wintry smile appeared upon his face. “De mortuis nil nisi bonum.…”

  “Exactly,” I replied.

  He moved across the room and came and sat down opposite to me. “I see that you have all the power in this thing,” he said, and it was as if we had been putting through some hard-fought business deal. “I want to be quite certain of your terms. Do I understand, then, that if anything should happen to me in the next two days, the general election would take place unbiased either way? The Press campaign you speak of, would that be withheld?”

  “Certainly.” I stared him in the eyes. “I am concerned with justice in this matter, not with politics.”

  He got up from the table, and I rose with him. He inclined his head. “I appreciate your position. Very well, Commander Stevenson. I will consider what you have said.” He moved towards the door. “Perhaps you will hear from me in London.”

  I took up my hat and gloves. “There’s one thing you should know, perhaps,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  I smiled. “The dancing girl of whom you spoke to sympathetically,” I replied. “She was going to become my wife.” And with that I left him, and went blundering down the dark stone stairs into the sunlit court.

  I must have driven back to town that afternoon, because I know I spent that evening in the club. I dined there alone, staring absently at the portraits of the benefactors that hung upon the walls, and mechanically eating what was put in front of me. I went up to the smoking-roo
m after dinner, and sat there with my whisky before the fire, staring into the coals, and watching till they fell.

  And presently, because I was very tired, and not so well, I went upstairs and went to bed. I lay for a long time in my bare, comfortable little room, reluctant to face the dark, listening to the rush and whirr of the taxis passing down Pall Mall in the summer night. Then I put out my light.

  And after a long time of wakefulness I raised my head, and stirred a little on the pillow. There was water trickling all down my face and salt upon my lips, and the bed that I was lying on was wallowing, so that I knew that the ship was in no good shape. I opened my eyes, and I was lying in a slop of blood and water that went streaming from me over the planking as the vessel rolled, and back to me again. I tried to sit up then, but somebody pressed me down from behind, and whispered: “Keep down, sir.” And then I saw Osborne creeping towards me under the lee of the bulwarks with a pannikin of water in his hand.

  They gave it to me to drink, and I asked: “How many of us are there now?”

  And Osborne said: “There’s only us.”

  I looked around the deck, and the thought came into my mind that we were done for, and that nobody would ever know how we had died. The little schooner was settling by the stern; it seemed to me that the whole stern must have been blown clean out of her by the explosion of the magazine, and most of the barrels in her hold stove in. I asked: “What’s happening?”

  And the snotty said: “They stopped the shelling ten minutes ago. They’re practically dead ahead, sir. A little on the port bow.”

  I asked what had happened to the panic party, and he said: “They’ve been shelling the boat, sir. It’s not playing the game.…”

  I nodded slowly. “What armament have we got left?”

  The leading seaman answered me. “The port six-pounder, and eight rounds, sir. I don’t think there’s any more ammunition. She’ll want to be lying broad on the beam for it to bear, the way the ship is, but the gun’s all right.”

  I could see it concealed on its mounting behind the bulwarks; it had not been touched. I lay for a little time, feeling the rotten, sogging movements of the vessel under us; she lay like a log, so that each swell sluiced down the bulwarks, pretty nearly swamping her, so that each time I thought that she would never rise again. Astern she was awash and in the house she was on fire, smouldering and smoking where the paint-store had been. I thought of all my friends who had gone along this road in the last years.

  I said: “This is the end of us. It’s no good surrendering.”

  And then the snotty whispered to me from the hawse-hole: “She’s coming round on to the beam.”

  I dragged myself beside him, and looked out. The submarine was running slowly across our bows, submerged but for the conning-tower and periscopes; from time to time the swell lifted her, and as the water sluiced away we could see the gun. Then she went down another five feet and was hidden but for the periscopes, and she began on a slow circle round us. We lay absolutely motionless upon the deck.

  She passed astern of us and came up upon the starboard quarter, and passed up alongside, distant only fifty yards away, submerged all but the periscopes. Then she turned slowly across our bows and broke surface almost dead ahead, according to the snotty. And when next she came into my view she was running on the surface very slowly, perhaps two hundred yards away, and turning to pass down our port side again.

  “Come up to finish us off, I reckon,” said Wallis.

  I said: “Stations for the port forrard gun. Be ready for it.”

  Her speed slowed to a crawl. A man appeared in the conning-tower, and then an officer. And then in a moment there were men on her deck and round about the gun, and I said:

  “Action stations. Get to it.”

  Then we were on our feet and racing for the gun. It swung up smoothly and the breech clanged home, and I laid her on the water line below the conning-tower. The vessel rolled as I fired, and it was an over, and almost immediately there was a blinding crash as their first shell went home upon our forecastle. None of us were more than shaken by the blast; we pulled ourselves together, and I laid and fired again. And that went better, for I holed her on the water-line and that shell burst inside. I laid my next shot carefully upon their gun and it burst just below; at that range there could be no missing, given time. With the fourth shot I holed her once again behind the conning-tower, and I think I must have started fire inside that narrow hull, for smoke was coming out of her towards the end.

  She began to blow her tanks, and the water came foaming up around her all white and creamy, and mingled with a little oil. She took a list to port, and then the hatches opened forward, and then aft, and men began to stream up on to her deck from the forward hatch, and one or two of them were waving white things at us, shirts perhaps.

  With the fifth shot there came a hitch. I swung the breech wide and the case clanged out, but the next shell was not there, and instead of passing it the boy was yelling some infernal nonsense of his own. And then as I snarled at him he said: “Aren’t they surrendering?”

  I ripped out an oath and a command, and he slid the shell into the bore. I slammed the breech and swung the gun until it bore upon the forward hatch. And that damned boy was staring at me with a sort of horror, and I cursed at him and fired, and an inferno of flame shot up about the hatch, and I went on loading and firing like a man possessed.…

  And so, with a cry of terror, I was fumbling at the door, and out into the silent, moonlit passage, and I went down it blundering from side to side towards something concrete that I knew, away from all the terrors of my bed, running as though all the devils in hell were at my heels. And by the stairs a light switched on ahead of me and checked me in my rush, and I was shivering and in a wringing sweat, and steadying myself against the wall. And there the night porter found me.

  He said quickly: “Is anything the matter, sir? I thought I heard a crying out, downstairs.”

  I passed my hand over my eyes, and stared at him. “It’s all right. I’m sorry. I must have had a bad dream, I think.” And then I asked him: “What’s the time?”

  “Half-past three, sir.”

  I was dead cold, and wringing wet with sweat. I asked: “Is there a fire downstairs?”

  He said: “I think there’s still a little fire left in smoking-room. I could make it up if you wanted it, sir.”

  I nodded. “That’s best. You might bring me a double whisky down there. I shan’t sleep again to-night.” And so I fetched my dressing-gown and went down to the empty, silent room and sat there in my chair before the fire till the dawn came, and long after that. Until a startled housemaid found me sitting there as she came in to do the room.

  Then I went up and had a bath, and dressed, and came downstairs an hour later to my breakfast in the coffee-room. There was nothing in The Times that touched on my affair, for I went through it carefully. And then I settled down to plan my Press campaign. I made a list of the connections I could make in Fleet Street, and I spent a long time planning who should launch the matter first. That day was Thursday. On Friday afternoon, I thought, the matter should be put in train. I knew that it would go all right.

  I had all that day to kill. I cannot remember where I went or what I did; I think that for the greater part of it I must have been wandering aimlessly around and looking at the shops. I know that late in the afternoon I was at the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, and I sat there for a long time upon a chair, watching the birds and the children with their boats, and the swift rippling of the waves along the concrete verge.

  And presently I left that place, cold and a little tired, and went back to the club. It was half-past six or so when I got back, and the evening papers had come in. And picking up the first that came to hand, I saw the news that I had been expecting all along.

  It read: “Sad fatality at Cambridge.” I knew the rest of it, but I read down the column carefully. It seemed that he had fallen from his window into the court during
the night, a drop of forty feet. The theory was put forward that he had been opening the window, and had been seized with dizziness. It seemed quite reasonable, the way that it was put. A short obituary followed the account.

  So it was over.

  I stood there with the paper in my hand, re-reading the account, and a plump old man that I have sometimes spoken to came doddering to me and looked over my shoulder. “I see that you are reading about poor Ormsby,” he remarked. “So dreadfully sad. Did you ever meet him?”

  “No,” I said shortly.

  He went rambling on. “I used to know him slightly, just a little, you know, but I knew his cousin very much better. She married a connection of my own, a Colonel Wilkinson, in the Artillery, and they live down at Bognor now. Bognor Regis, we must call it. They used to live at Camberley, but now they live at Bognor—Bognor Regis. I feel very much for her. She will be broken-hearted at this news—quite broken-hearted.”

  At that moment something in me seemed to snap, and I turned viciously on him. “That’s all nonsense,” I said unevenly. I stared at him for a moment. “It must be.… Nobody ever yet died of a broken heart. That’s not one of the killing diseases.…”

  And with that I turned on my heel and went away to find some place where I could be alone. I believe he spoke to the Secretary about me.

  And I went in and had my dinner in the enormous, silent dining-room, where the food is the best in London and the wine without an equal in the country, I suppose. Where we all sit down at little separate tables by ourselves, our backs against the wall, eating alone and talking now and then to the ancient, friendly servants when the loneliness becomes intolerable. That night I was restless after dinner. I had my coffee and went wandering from room to room, picking up papers and reviews and putting them down again, longing for some occupation for the mind.