by Nevil Shute
There was a sound of voices outside the door and Rawdon entered the room, followed by Morris. The latter greeted Dennison, crossed to the settee, and began to tidy up the papers.
‘I forgot we left all this stuff out last night,’ he said. ‘Mr Evans usually tidies it up – Sir David’s secretary – but he turned in early last night with a headache.’
‘There’s no need to put it away on my account,’ said Dennison. ‘I mean – that sort of thing is a sealed book to me.’
Morris laughed. ‘There’s nothing here that we mind you seeing,’ he said. He turned to Rawdon waving the blue-print in his hand. ‘Where do we keep the arrangement of the catapult?’
‘In the table drawer, I think,’ said Rawdon. Dennison rose to his feet as Sir David entered the room.
‘Good morning,’ said the baronet incisively. ‘A little late, I’m afraid. A good morning for a turn down to the Forts and back. A fine sailing breeze.’ He turned to Rawdon. ‘You are spending the morning ashore at the yard?’
‘I think so,’ said Rawdon. ‘They’re putting the engine in this morning – and Flanagan was worrying about his slipway, too. I’ll go ashore after breakfast, before you get under way.’
Here Dennison broke in and diffidently set out his plan to leave the vessel. He proceeded in an embarrassing silence; the suggestion that he had thought would be so welcome to them was evidently received with something approaching consternation. Presently Dennison stopped talking and looked from one to the other, utterly at a loss. Sir David stepped into the breach.
‘I shall be very disappointed if you leave us, Mr Dennison,’ he said genially. ‘As a matter of fact, I was hoping that you would take the helm this morning and wake up my crew for me. These are some of the men that I shall put in the Chrysanthe. Of course, we can’t do very much till we get her in commission. I thought of having a turn round the buoys, though, to try and rub some of the corners off.’
Dennison flushed with pleasure. ‘It would be a great treat to me,’ he said. ‘But I must tell you, I’ve never handled a crew before – racing, that is, and I’ve never happened to sail a vessel with a wheel.’
‘The skipper does the hazing,’ said the baronet equably, ‘you just tell him what you want. As for the wheel, I shouldn’t think that ought to worry you very much. Really, I should be very glad if you would take her round a course this morning.’
After breakfast, Rawdon went ashore alone. He paused on the jetty and watched his boat row back to the Clematis, watched it hoisted on the davits and secured. Then the mainsail crept to the hounds and took shape, to the accompaniment of a slow rattle of chain from the bows. Finally she broke out a jib and bore away towards the mainland, cutting her anchor and crowding on sail as she went, white and majestic in the sunshine. Rawdon turned and made his way to the yard.
Three hours later Flanagan pointed out to Rawdon the Clematis returning; he left the large hangar and walked to the jetty. The vessel did not come to an anchor as he had expected, but dropped her topsail and lay to outside the Roads, lowering a dinghy. Presently it arrived at the jetty; he embarked and was rowed out to the vessel.
Morris met him at the gangway. ‘Sir David thinks of running down to the Needles this afternoon,’ he said. ‘It’s a great day for sailing.’ They dropped into a pair of basket-chairs. ‘I say, that chap Dennison’s nuts at this game.’
Rawdon glanced round the deck. ‘Where is he now?’ he asked. ‘Have you seen him yet?’
Morris shook his head. ‘Not yet. He’s in the saloon, talking to Sir David about the Chrysanthe. Sir David’s all over him – it was an extraordinarily good show, apparently. Even I could see he knew the job all right.’ He paused, and laughed suddenly. ‘It was the funniest thing out. When he took over, the skipper sort of stood over him to tell him what to do. It took this chap just about five seconds to put him in his place, and then they stood together side by side. I never heard him give any orders, but now and again he’d say something confidentially to the skipper and I tell you – the skipper got those fellows moving all right. Fair made me sweat to watch ’em.’
Rawdon smiled. ‘Where did you go?’
‘Twice round some buoys, down about as far as Ryde. It was really rather odd to see him standing there sort of whispering shyly to the skipper now and then, and the men sweating blood as a result. There was that spinnaker, for instance … I couldn’t judge the whole nicety of it, of course. I noticed one or two things. Whenever we had to cross the tide between two buoys, he set a course directly we came about that looked as if it would miss the other buoy by half a mile. Well, each time I watched the compass, and I swear he never altered course a degree, but we hit the buoy to within ten yards each time. And another thing I noticed was how smoothly it all went. No fuss, no waste of time, no talking – a clean turn at each buoy and away on the new course like a knife. I’m really very glad to have seen it.’
They lunched, and after lunch got under way again. Morris and Dennison went up on deck; Sir David and Rawdon stayed in the saloon with their cigars.
Rawdon glanced at the other. ‘So he did well?’ he said.
The baronet blew a long blue cloud. ‘Very well,’ he said quietly. ‘Very well indeed. It’s not the first time that Flanagan has put me right.’
Morris and Dennison went up on deck and sat in the basket-chairs, watching the Island slip past them. Dennison was tired and willing enough to rest; the act of standing all morning had made his side ache painfully, though he had not noticed it at the time.
‘You must be an authority on this coast,’ said Morris. ‘I suppose you know pretty well every harbour and inlet in the south.’
Dennison lit a pipe. ‘I know a good many,’ he said cautiously.
‘Do you know Padstow?’
‘Not very well. I’ve been in there two or three times. But one doesn’t cruise up that coast much, you know. Padstow and Bideford are the only two possible inlets, and they’re neither of them much fun to get into except in clear weather. Bideford dries out pretty well at low water, and Padstow’s got a shocking great sandbank right across the entrance. You have to go carefully into both of them.’
‘You know the west coast of Ireland, too, don’t you?’
‘Lord, no,’ said Dennison. ‘I spent one summer holiday mucking about between Baltimore and Valentia, but that’s all.’
A gull swooped down upon the vessel, made a circuit or two, approached the stern, hovered for a moment, and dropped accurately to perch on top of the mizzen mast. Both watched it intently.
Morris laughed. ‘Slow landings,’ he said. ‘It’s having the nerves next to the muscles, I suppose. We’ll never get it quite like that.’
The helmsman waved his arm and the gull flew away. Dennison turned to Morris.
‘Your business is flying, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I remember Miss Wallace mentioned you once.’
‘That so?’ said Morris. ‘Yes, my business is flying. Though I work chiefly on design stuff now, under Captain Rawdon. I fly most of the Rawdon machines on test.’
‘One sees a lot about commercial aviation in the papers,’ said Dennison. ‘It doesn’t pay, does it?’
‘No,’ said Morris. ‘It doesn’t pay to run a regular service – yet. That’s why it’s called commercial, of course. A pious hope.’
He tilted his chair back. ‘I can talk till tea-time on that subject, of course,’ he said. ‘Probably bore you stiff. But as for civil aviation, it’s coming, you know. It’s coming faster than you think. One never hears anything in the papers of the steady progress that is made – one only hears of the accidents. But nowadays you can fly fairly reliably twice a day to Paris or Brussels or Rotterdam at any time of year. And that’s something.’ He paused.
‘And of course, the mails … ’ he said. He paused thoughtfully and then continued, picking his words with care.
‘Communications … ’ he said. ‘It seems to me that communications are the whole keynote of present-day politics. One has mean
s for limited rapid communication already, of course, by wireless and cable. But think what it would mean if one could carry bulky documents rapidly. Or people. Think what it would have meant if in August 1914 we could have had every Dominion Prime Minister in London within a week. By air.’
He leaned back in his chair and ran on. ‘Suppose we could expedite the mails to America. Suppose we could start a mail service to America that only took five days instead of seven, and suppose we were able to run that service with, say, eighty per cent regularity. Do you see how we should improve our position with America? Look at the pull that it would give us over every other country in Europe. Suppose we could do that by surprise, and suddenly one day reduce the time from London to New York to five days – and we can save more than two days.’
Dennison glanced at Morris attentively. ‘I am no financier, but anyone can see that it would benefit us very greatly – if it could be done,’ he said.
Morris gazed over the blue water to the steep bluff of Egypt Point astern. ‘It would be done tomorrow,’ he said absently, ‘ – it could have been done last year. The Atlantic was flown in eighteen hours, years ago.’ He sat up and became animated. ‘The real point is this,’ he said. ‘Can it be done as a commercial proposition? Is it likely to pay? That’s the point.’
Dennison considered for a moment. ‘I always understood,’ he said, ‘that a scheme of that sort couldn’t pay, because it was all that an aeroplane could do to carry its own petrol across the Atlantic, without any cargo.’
‘Seventy years ago they were saying that of steamships,’ said Morris. Dennison was silent.
Morris continued after a moment. ‘We don’t propose to do it by direct flight. It isn’t possible at present; we can’t hope to make that a paying proposition. The scheme that we intend to try, briefly, is this. We carry a flying-boat on a liner, mounted on a sort of catapult arrangement. The aeroplane is loaded with a small amount of urgent mail which pays a special surcharge. When the liner is in mid-Atlantic, about a thousand miles from her destination, she turns full speed into the wind and catapults the machine off her deck. The machine then flies to land, taking just about ten hours over the thousand miles. In that way we hope to be able to carry five hundred pounds’ weight of urgent cargo.’
Dennison gazed at him attentively. ‘You say you are going to try this?’
‘In about six weeks’ time. One of Sir David’s vessels is in the Clyde now, being fitted with the catapult. I’m doing it, with another man – a navigator. We do it on the way home – it’s really a sort of a full-dress rehearsal. They shoot us off one morning about nine hundred and fifty miles out at sea, and we fly to Padstow. The natural thing would have been to have flown to Ireland, of course, but Sir David won’t have that. He doesn’t believe in basing any financial calculations on the stability of Ireland just at present.’
Dennison regarded him steadily. ‘It sounds to me an uncommonly risky experiment,’ he said.
Morris smiled, and picked his words carefully. ‘It has its risks,’ he said, ‘and one would be a fool to deny them. The first is that something may happen to us in the launching and we don’t get a clean start from the deck. In that case we flop down into the water under the vessel’s bows – and get run over. They won’t be able to dodge us, you know. The only other point is that we may have engine failure or run out of petrol, and have to come down. We minimise that by keeping directly on the track of the liner so that she comes along and picks us up – if we float so long.’ He blew a heavy cloud of smoke.
‘What made you choose Padstow?’ asked Dennison.
‘Because it’s the nearest harbour, and because it’s usually quite empty of ships. Falmouth was out of the question – too crowded and too public for this rehearsal. As a matter of fact, all this is being kept very dark at present. It may be convenient to publish the fact that we shall land at Falmouth later, if there’s much stir about it all. But it will really be Padstow.’
Dennison nodded in silence.
Morris tossed his cigarette over the rail and turned to him. ‘I don’t know if you are wondering why I’ve told you all this,’ he said evenly. ‘As it happens, there’s one point still incomplete. We’re still without a navigator. I’ve been wondering if you would care to take it on.’
‘I see,’ said Dennison slowly. ‘Are you the pilot?’
Morris nodded. ‘I ought to tell you one thing,’ he said. ‘This is a serious matter for us, and we didn’t want to let a complete stranger in on it. I went up to Town yesterday and got a sort of a reference of you from Jimmie Wallace. I hope you don’t mind. It was more a matter of form than anything else – to satisfy Sir David.’
‘How do you know I can navigate?’ asked Dennison suddenly.
‘For one thing, you told me you could. But as for that, the navigation will be very simple. What I really want is someone to work out courses for me in the air, look after the petrol pressure, and the food, and all that sort of thing. And, if we get a chance, to get a sight or two to check our position. The navigation is very simple – I could do it myself, only I shall be flying.’
‘I should be all right for that,’ said Dennison absently.
Morris rose to his feet. ‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘think it over. After dinner this evening we’ll talk about it again, if you like. There’s a lot that you ought to know before you decide. Sir David will be able to put the points of the scheme before you much better than I can and he’ll go into everything with you – money, for one thing. There’s a pretty good fee attached to it. But I told him I’d tell you about it first.’
Dennison rose and walked aft with him. ‘Thanks very much,’ he said. ‘I’ll think about it.’ He mused a little. ‘I’ve never seen a flying-boat close to.’
Morris laughed. ‘Soon put that right,’ he said. ‘We’ve got her in Flanagan’s yard.’
They cruised on down the Solent till tea-time, then came about and returned to Cowes in the dusk. They came to an anchor in their old place in the Roads just before dinner, and, after dinner, sat down to the usual round-table conference. This time, however, Dennison was of the party.
He had already made up his mind. He was tired of working, willing enough to go wandering for a little. He was willing enough to take some months’ leave from his office and come in on this experiment. He listened absently while Sir David laid the matter before him. It was dangerous – he knew that. That was beside the point. This was a thing that would amuse him. It was different. He was free to turn his interests where he liked; there was nobody that had a better claim on him than himself. If he had been engaged, or married, it would have been different. But now he was free, and this would be good fun and would give him something to think about.
He roused himself. ‘The real object of this experiment,’ Sir David was saying in his level, incisive tones, ‘is to demonstrate that the flight is a commercial proposition. This journey hasn’t merely got to be completed somehow or other – that’s no good at all. We know that it can be done. We know that it is possible to launch a machine from a ship and to fly a thousand miles on it. What we want to find out is if that can be done under the ordinary, normal conditions of service. That is, the flight has got to be done to a time-table. The aeroplane has to arrive at a stated place at a stated time, carrying a stated load. It has to do that under any weather conditions that happen to be prevailing – except a hurricane. If these conditions cannot be fulfilled, then the experiment is a failure.’
Rawdon broke in. ‘The weather conditions aren’t of any great importance at this time of year,’ he said in his soft little voice. ‘The flight will take place at the end of May and – as you know – the prevailing wind in the Atlantic is westerly. That, of course, will be a help in this flight – not a hindrance. A moderate westerly breeze would be the best thing possible for you.’
‘That’s practically a certainty at the end of May,’ said Dennison absently.
He offered evidence of his navigating ability, and they discu
ssed the details of the scheme for a little. Finally Sir David stated the fee that they were prepared to give for a navigator.
Dennison opened his eyes. It seemed a very large sum for a very little work.
‘It’s like a recruiting poster,’ said Morris flippantly. ‘See the world for nothing. It’s a joy-ride. A first-class trip to America – and half-way back.’
There was a pause. Dennison felt called upon to say something.
‘It should be pretty good sport,’ he said.
Chapter Six
It took a good deal to destroy the serenity of Jimmie Wallace’s outlook upon the world, but undoubtedly something had happened seriously to impair it. He sat idle at his desk in the palatial little office, chewing his penholder, about a month after Morris had visited him to inquire about Dennison. He was worried. He had dined with Morris the previous evening, when Morris had pledged him to secrecy and had broken to him the news of the wildcat scheme upon which he and Dennison were engaged. It had not altogether been news to Jimmie. Already rumours were beginning to circulate about the City of the great benefits that might accrue if such a scheme were suddenly to come into operation as a regular service; already there were guarded expressions of these rumours in the Press. He had not been long in connecting these tales with Morris’s visit to him. Here was confirmation of the whole thing.
He sat in his chair and chewed his penholder morosely. He did not know how this would affect his family – if at all. He did not know exactly what had passed between Dennison and his sister, though he was capable of making a tolerably good guess. He did not know to what extent his sister was responsible for what Dennison had done. In these first days he had got a very clear idea of the danger of the enterprise. He was a keen motorist, and knew sufficient about aeroplanes to appreciate the position. The success of the flight depended upon an ordinary petrol engine running steadily at full power for ten hours, without attention, under indifferent conditions. Well, it might. It was about a fifty per cent chance. And then there was the launching …