by Nevil Shute
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” I said. “It’s Miss Corser, is it?”
She had risen to her feet as I entered. “Corder,” she said. “I have a letter for you, sir, from Mr. Honey.” She opened her bag and gave it to me. “He said that it was very urgent, so I thought it would be better if I brought it down by hand.”
“Oh—thank you,” I said. “When did he give you this?”
“Last night, sir,” she said, “at about ten o’clock—just before I left Gander.” She explained, “I was one of the stewardesses on the Reindeer that got damaged at Gander, the one that Mr. Honey crossed in. Most of the aircrew are staying at Gander with the aircraft, but we stewards were recalled to London. I suppose they’ll put me in another aircraft; there’s no point in keeping us with the machine till it’s repaired. So as I was to come back last night, Mr. Honey asked me if I would bring this letter with me and let you have it immediately I landed. I thought I’d better bring it down at once.”
“You landed this morning?”
“Yes, sir.”
She stood silent, holding her bag in her hands before her while I opened and read the letter.
It was not a very long one. He said that I must know all the facts by that time from Miss Teasdale. He had been thinking it all over, and while he did not see what else he could have done, he realised that his action must have let down the reputation of the R.A.E. He said that for some time past he had felt that perhaps he was out of place in the department, and it might well be that this was the time when he should make a break and find some other employment. He did not want to embarrass me in any way, but he would like me to consider that letter as his resignation.
I said quietly, “Oh, damn …” and read it through again, biting my lip. It was another complication in this business; if Honey resigned, how could I maintain my attitude of taking a firm line by showing confidence in his judgment? He would have to be persuaded to withdraw his resignation and fight this thing through with me, and now he was in Gander, inaccessible. I raised my eyes, and the dark stewardess was staring at me in distress.
I said, “Well … thank you for bringing me this, Miss Corder. I’ll have to think it over.” I paused, and then said, “Do you know what’s in it?”
“I think so—more or less.” She stared at me appealingly.
“It’s his resignation, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “That’s right. I didn’t want him to resign.”
“You didn’t want him to? He thought you’d all be so angry with him.”
I cursed the comedy of misunderstandings. “I’m not angry with him,” I replied. “I wish he hadn’t had to stop it flying in that way, but if that was the only way to ground it, then I think he did quite right. I’m backing him up all I can. Probably lose my own job over this before we’re through.”
“Oh,” she said, relieved. “I wish he’d known that.”
I chucked the letter on to my desk. “You’ll have a cup of tea?” She protested, but I opened the door and told Miss Learoyd to see if she could raise two cups of tea, and coming back I made the stewardess sit down beside my desk. I offered her a cigarette, which she refused. “Tell me,” I said, “how is Honey, in himself? is he worrying about this very much?”
“He is, rather,” she said. “You see, he hasn’t anything to do, and the crew said some horrid things to him after it happened. Not Captain Samuelson, but some of the others.” I sat watching her as she talked, wondering who did the picking of the stewardesses and where they found such very charming girls. “I though a little exercise might take his mind off it, sir, so I got him to take me for a long walk yesterday, and I think that helped. He’s very fond of hiking.”
I smiled. “You’ve been looking after him, have you?”
“He was the only passenger I had left,” she replied. “All the others went on, the same day.”
I nodded. “Tell me just what happened.”
7
WHEN THE REINDEER settled down upon the tarmac she went slowly; the men standing in the flight deck staggered and reached for something to hang on to, but they were not thrown down. They stood petrified for an instant after the fuselage reached the ground, listening aghast to the rending and crashing noise of crumpling propeller blades and duralumin panels as the weight came on to yielding parts of the structure; then there was silence, and they came to life again.
Samuelson was the first to speak. He said dully, “Well, that’s the bloody limit.” And then he turned to Symes, the inspector. “Come outside, Mr. Symes.”
He turned away without a word to Mr. Honey, who got up from the control pedestal that he had been embracing, his face scarlet and with tears running down his cheeks. The inspector looked him up and down, snorted, and followed the captain down into the saloon and so to the ground, to view the damage from outside.
In the control deck Dobson turned to Honey. “You bloody little squirt,” he said. “Pleased with what you’ve done?”
Mr. Honey made a helpless gesture with his hands, but said nothing. Behind them the note of the auxiliary motor dropped and died; the engineer had switched it off, in case of fire.
Dobson said again, “Pleased with what you’ve done?”
Honey raised his head. “It was the only thing to do. You wouldn’t believe me. If you’d gone on everybody might have been killed.”
Cousins, the engineer, pressed forward passionately. He loved his aircraft. He had worked upon it for three months before it flew; since then he had lived in it for much of the time, and he had tended it lovingly; he existed for nothing else. “Nonsense,” he said passionately. “There was nothing wrong with that tail, and you know it. Who the hell are you, anyway? Just a bloody penpusher and slide-rule merchant. What the hell do you know about aircraft?”
Dobson said, “That’s right. Have you ever flown anything? Ever piloted anything yourself? Come on, speak up.”
“No,” said Honey helplessly, “I’ve never been a pilot.”
“What the hell do you know about aeroplanes, then, if you’ve never had to do with them? You say you come from Farnborough. God, I’ve heard some tales about that place, but this beats everything.”
Cousins laughed bitterly. “That’s what they do there, come around and smash things up. He’ll get an O.B.E. for this, you see.” He turned to Honey passionately. “Get out of here, you dirty little swine, before I sock you one.”
Honey turned and went down into the saloon without a word. From the ground Samuelson called up to Dobson to bring down a signal pad. The two pilots stood in front of the wrecked Reindeer drafting a quick signal to their Flight Control in London; then Dobson went hurriedly with it to the control tower, passing Miss Corder on the way.
Mr. Honey stood around upon the tarmac for an hour, with nobody paying any attention to him. There was a bitter north-east wind and he grew colder and colder; presently he got back into the fuselage and sat down in his seat, miserable and chilled. Miss Corder, coming to the aircraft presently to clean up and remove the unused food, observed him sitting in the unlit cabin half-way down the aisle.
She went up to him, “I should go into the lounge, sir,” she said. “In the restaurant building. All the other passengers are there.”
He said dolefully, “I don’t think they’d be very pleased to see me.”
She said, “Oh … But have you had any breakfast?”
He shook his head. “I don’t want any.”
“But you must have some breakfast!” She thought for a moment. “I know,” she said. “There’s a little private office you can use. Come with me.”
He followed her obediently out of the aircraft and across the tarmac and into the main building by a side door. She took him to a little room marked on the door PASSPORTS AND IMMIGRATION. It was rather a bare room with a deal table, ink-stained, and a few hard chairs, but it was warm and it was private. She said, “Stay here and make yourself comfortable, Mr. Honey. I’ll bring you some breakfast.”
She
came back presently with a tray of eggs and bacon and coffee and toast and marmalade, and set it down before him on the table. “There,” she said. “Get that in you and you’ll feel better.”
He said warmly, “It’s terribly kind of you to look after me like this, especially when I’ve made such a lot of trouble.”
She smiled at him. “You’ve not made any trouble for me,” she said.
“What about the other passengers? What’s going to happen to them?”
“We’ve had a signal that a Hermes is coming up to fetch them,” she said. “It’s arriving about two o’clock.” She hesitated, and then said, “Will you be going on with them, sir?”
“I don’t know. I should like to have a talk with Captain Samuelson as soon as he can spare the time.”
She nodded. “I’ll tell him. Now, eat your breakfast. I’ll be along for the tray presently.”
Mr. Honey was hungry, and made quite a substantial meal. When it was over he lit a cigarette, feeling more at ease. Samuelson, coming in to see him, found him sitting in a chair beside the radiator.
“Morning, Mr. Honey,” he said. “You wanted to see me?”
Honey got up from his chair. “I wanted to apologise for all the trouble that I’ve caused you,” he said simply. “Not for the Reindeer—that had to be grounded anyway. But I’m sorry about the work I’ve had to put on you and for the inconvenience to all the other passengers.”
The pilot laughed shortly. “Don’t bother about me. If I wasn’t doing this I’d be doing something else.”
Mr. Honey asked, “Is the aircraft very much damaged?”
“I don’t know. Until we raise her up we can’t make a proper inspection, and that won’t be for some time. There’s no equipment here to lift an aircraft of this size. We’ve got no air bags. They’ll have to be shipped from England. The whole job may take months.”
The scientist said nothing.
The captain said, “I’ve had to send a full report about it all to Headquarters, Mr. Honey. The other passengers are going on to Montreal this afternoon, but I’m rather doubtful if C.A.T.O. will carry you—after this. I think you may have to go down to St. John’s and go on by boat.”
Mr. Honey blinked at him. “Oh …”
“Well, look at it from their point of view. They don’t have to carry you if they’re afraid of you damaging their equipment.”
“I don’t make a habit of doing this,” said Honey unhappily. “I don’t do it every time.”
“No. Well, it will all have to be sorted out in London. I expect we’ll get some signals as the day goes on.”
“I don’t know what the R.A.E. will want me to do” said Mr. Honey, “after this. They may cable me and tell me to come home and not go on to Labrador.”
“I see …” The pilot glanced at him. “You were going out to reopen an inquiry on Bill Ward’s crash?”
“Er—the Reindeer that fell in Labrador.”
“That’s right. The one that is supposed to have flown into the hill. Bill Ward’s crash.”
“That’s the machine. I was to inspect the spar fractures in the tailplane and bring samples back for metallurgical examination.”
“You think the tail came off that aircraft in the air, don’t you?”
“It might have done,” said Mr. Honey. “It had flown nearly 1,400 hours, which comes in very close accord with the estimated time to failure.”
The pilot stared out of the window. “Bill Ward never flew into a hill,” he said. “He couldn’t have done. I knew that part of the accident report was utter nonsense from the first.”
Mr. Honey blinked at him. “You think that something else happened? Something like a tailplane failure?”
The pilot said, “I just don’t know, and it’s not for me to guess. But strictly between you and me, Mr. Honey, I’m not sorry personally that you’ve taken a strong line, in spite of all the trouble that it’s going to mean for both of us. If I’d been able to, I’d have taken that machine on to Montreal. But as things are, I can’t say that I’m sorry. I don’t aim to be the bravest pilot in the world. Just the oldest.”
He went away, and crossing the waiting-room he had to run the gauntlet of the passengers. He answered a number of questions about transport on to Montreal; then came the film actress, Miss Teasdale.
She said, “Say, Captain, I don’t see Mr. Honey anywhere around. Is he here some place?”
He told her where she could find him, and presently she tapped at Mr. Honey’s door. He called out, “Er—come in,” and she opened the door and stood there looking at him quizzically.
“Well,” she said, “you certainly have got the strength of your convictions, haven’t you?”
He smiled weakly. “You’ve got to do what you can. Won’t you come in and sit down? I’m afraid it’s not very clean in here.”
She seated herself on a hard chair on the other side of the table, and lit a cigarette with a gold lighter. “How do you think your people back at Farnborough will react now?” she asked.
Honey said, “I don’t know and I don’t much care. You’ve got to do the best you can,” he repeated a little desperately. “You’ve got to do what you think is the right thing to do.”
She nodded. He was terribly like what Eddie Stillson had been, thirty years ago—always worrying about doing the right thing. She asked, “This Dr. Scott that you were speaking of. He’s the boss, isn’t he? How will he take it?”
Honey said, “I think he’ll be all right. He’s quite a young man, much younger than I am. I think he’ll see it was the only thing to do. But he’s not the head of the Establishment by any means—and then there’s the Ministry over the whole lot of us. I’m afraid there’ll be a great deal of trouble.”
She laughed. “I’ll say there’ll be some trouble. You should hear the second pilot talking, Mr. Dobson. He takes it kind of personally.” She paused. “What do you plan to do now, Mr. Honey? Will you go on to Labrador?”
He shook his head. “I can’t make up my mind. But from what the captain said I can’t go anywhere—by air, that is. He says the company won’t take me.”
She nodded. There had been some very frank talk in the waiting-room about the passenger who had become mentally deranged by the excitement of the flight. “It’s just a lot of hooey,” she said. “But if they won’t carry you by air you can’t make them, though your office might be able to.”
“I don’t know what to do,” he said irresolutely. “If I write a letter it would take about three days to get to Farnborough. I suppose I ought to try and send a cable somehow, and ask what I’m to do.”
“What do you want to do, yourself?” she asked. “Go on to Ottawa or go back to Farnborough?”
He replied, “Oh, I’d like to go back. I didn’t want to come away at all. You see, there’s nobody looking after Elspeth except Mrs. Higgs, and she isn’t very reliable. I’d much rather go back to Farnborough. After all, the basic work is more important than this sort of thing.”
They talked about his movements for some time. She learned that he had little interest in his mission to Canada; the travelling, the change of scene, did not excite him. He regarded it as so much time wasted from the progress of his real work, as a distraction which he had been forced by discipline to submit to. She found him restless and unhappy, uncertain whether he could exploit the damage to the Reindeer as an excuse to give up his mission in Canada and to return to the work he loved, and to his home.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I can’t make up my mind. And one can’t put it all into a cable, either.”
They sat talking of his difficulties for some time. For many years the actress had been out of touch with the hard realities of life. She had not been short of money for thirty years and she would never be again. All her working life had been spent in the facile world of honky-tonk, of synthetic emotion and of phoney glamour. Now she was getting a glimpse into a new world, a world of hard, stark facts, a world in which things had to be exac
tly right or people would be killed. There was no place for glamour or emotion in a world that had to say if the Reindeer tail was going to break or not. She was beginning to perceive that little insignificant men like Mr. Honey were the brains behind that world, just as lame Eddie Stillson had been the coming brain of the Century Insurance office. The perception brought out everything that was still good in her; nineteen-year-old Myra Tuppen came to life again, suppressing Monica Teasdale. As she sat talking to Mr. Honey the desire to help him grew; she felt that she could play a small part in a bigger production than any she had starred in. And help she could; in travelling Monica Teasdale had unquestioned priority.
She said, “Say, Mr. Honey, how would it be if I went back to England and took a letter to your Dr. Scott? It would get to him first thing tomorrow morning, that way. I’d be real pleased to go, if it would help any.”
He was staggered at the suggestion. Unused to travelling himself, it seemed extraordinary to him. “You mean, you’d fly back to England? But you’re going on to Montreal, aren’t you?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not dated up. I’ve got to be in Hollywood on the twenty-seventh, but that’s eleven days from now. I was reckoning I’d stop off in Indianapolis for a few days before flying on home, but I’d just as soon stop over those few days at Claridge’s in London. I kind of like London, for all it’s such a dirty town.”
He blinked at her. “But it would be so expensive for you to go back.”
She said simply, “I wouldn’t pay. All my travelling goes on to the expense account. Honestly, Mr. Honey, I’d be real glad to do that if it would help.”
He was bewildered by this woman, whom with his dead wife he had adored upon the movies; bewildered by her hard competence, by her sophistication, by her carefully tended beauty and her luxurious clothes, by the incongruous kindliness and small-town warmth of her consideration. He had never met anyone in the least like her before, never had dealings with anybody from her world. He said uncertainly, “Well, that would be very helpful, certainly, Miss Teasdale. But it seems an awful lot to ask you to do.”