Stephen Morris and Pilotage

by Nevil Shute

  The machine, running at ten knots, took the beach with a lurch and a jar, rearing her long bow up the sand. Morris gave her a burst of engine; she wallowed forward and crawled out of the water upon her wheels and up the beach. Another burst, and she was ploughing through powdery sand above high water level. The sand, caught up by the propeller, beat stingingly against their faces.

  Morris leaned clumsily forward to the instrument-board and switched off the engine. The rumble died to an irregular, intermittent coughing; the engine choked and came to rest. From all sides the silence closed in upon them strangely, so that their tiniest movements made a rustling that their stunned ears were able to detect and wonder at.

  For a long time they sat motionless in the machine. At last Morris put up a hand and tugged feebly at the straps of his helmet. Dennison followed his example, unfastened the chin-strap with fumbling hands, and pulled the helmet from his head.

  Morris sighed deeply, tried to raise himself from his seat, and sank back with a spasm of cramp. ‘Poop off a Very light,’ he said.

  Dennison felt for the pistol in the rack beside his seat. Pistol and rack were gone. ‘I smashed against it when we landed,’ he said. ‘I expect it’s gone down into the bilge.’

  With an effort he heaved himself from his seat, drew his legs over the gunwale, and dropped down on to the sand. Morris followed him; they stumbled painfully a little way along the beach, working their cramped muscles. Presently Dennison climbed back into the machine and searched vainly for the pistol; it had slipped somewhere into the recesses of the hull beyond his reach.

  ‘Leave the bloody thing,’ said Morris from the beach. ‘It will be light in a few hours. I’m going to lie down up in those sandhills. Chuck down the seat cushions and my helmet.’

  Dennison dropped down from the cockpit and they went ploughing through the heavy sand to the dunes at the top of the beach, clumsy in their fleece-lined suits.

  They found a hollow and threw themselves down. Morris scraped a hole for his hip, drew up the deep fur collar about his ears, and shifted the leather cushion beneath his head.

  ‘Thank God that bloody job’s over,’ he said sourly, and fell immediately into a heavy, restless sleep.

  Slowly the dawn came. The east grew grey, then rose colour as the light spread over the estuary. In the sand-hills one or two birds began to stir and twitter in the spear-like grasses; on the edge of the grassland appeared the dim forms of the rabbits in little clusters. A shaft of sunlight struck the summit of Stepper Point; the sleepers stirred and blinked uneasily at the night.

  Dennison roused, raised himself on one elbow, and watched Morris go stumbling down to the water’s edge. As he walked he loosened the heavy collar from his neck and pulled the suit open a little. He reached a little pool of sea water in the sand, knelt down beside it, and began to bathe his face.

  Dennison sat up and looked about him, moistening his dry lips. His mouth was dry and gritty with the sand, and his head, enveloped in fur, was hot and stuffy. He pulled the helmet off and threw it on the sand, stooped down, and began to unfasten the flying-suit from his ankles and wrists. Presently he wriggled out of it and felt better.

  He looked about him. On the beach lay the flying-boat lying over on one wing-tip with a rakish air of dissipation, one wheel buried in the sand. Behind her, on the far side of the estuary, lay the town, brown and gabled and without a sign of life. A brown-sailed lugger was creeping into the river from the sea, hugging the opposite shore.

  Dennison looked for Morris. He was on the machine, standing up on the lower plane, doing something to the engine with a spanner. Dennison watched him curiously. Presently he produced from his pocket the little cup from the top of the empty Thermos-flask.

  He was drawing a little water from the radiator for a drink.

  Dennison, his mouth parched and dry, got to his feet and went down to the machine, drawn as by a magnet. The water from the engine tasted very cool and sweet.

  ‘It’s been well boiled, anyway,’ said Morris.

  Dennison went down and completed his toilet in the sea. Returning, he found Morris looking intently over at the town.

  ‘I suppose we stay here till somebody happens to wonder what we are and comes to have a look,’ said Dennison.

  ‘If they don’t come soon,’ said Morris, ‘I’m going to totter away inland and look for breakfast. I saw a farm just up there, about half a mile away.’ He strained his eyes at the town. ‘As a matter of fact, there’s a boat coming out to us now.’

  On the still morning air they caught the beat of an engine; a small brown motor-boat crept out of the harbour and headed straight for them.

  There were five people in the boat, one evidently the fisherman owner.

  ‘Rawdon and Sir David,’ said Morris, ‘and my wife. I don’t know who that is with her. There’s a buckshee girl there. Look.’ He turned to Dennison, and saw that he was looking. He laughed, and turned away. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You can have that one.’

  Dennison did not answer. The boat drew nearer; he turned to Morris.

  ‘That’s Miss Wallace,’ he said. ‘Jimmie Wallace’s sister. I suppose your wife brought her for company.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Morris. The boat grounded on the beach a hundred yards away; they walked down to meet it.

  The greetings over, Morris turned to the baronet.

  ‘We’ve made a mess of this, I’m afraid,’ he said.

  Sir David glanced at the machine and back to Morris. ‘In what way?’ he inquired.

  ‘We haven’t brought the dummy mail,’ said Morris. ‘We had five hundred pounds of firebars nicely done up in sacks and sealed. I got the wind up at the last moment and tipped them out and put in petrol instead – thirty cans. We used that to get here. We haven’t brought anything at all – barring empty cans.’

  There was a deep sigh of comprehension from the party.

  ‘I’m damn sorry about it,’ said Morris. ‘It happened like this. We’d arranged to get away about six in the morning, G.M.T. Well, at six we were seventy miles too far out. That put us in a fix, you see. I didn’t dare to push off at that distance; it would have been running it too fine. I decided to wait till ten – and even that gave us more distance than we wanted. I couldn’t leave it any later than that because I didn’t want to fly at night – no landing-lights or anything, you know.

  ‘So I decided to tip out the cargo. It didn’t much matter what we brought so long as it weighed five hundred pounds, you see – and I thought it might as well be petrol. I don’t mind telling you, I had the wind up – we were running it a bit fine. Anyhow, I loaded her up with thirty cans and we pushed off at about ten. She got off quite well. Much better than when we tried her at full load before. Funny. We had a light breeze from the south-west which must have helped a bit, of course.

  ‘Well, we went trundling on our way. We saw one liner outward bound about half an hour after starting, and after that we never saw a soul. It was damn lonely. I managed to persuade her up to five thousand feet in an hour or so, and we kept at that, cruising at about ninety-eight. It was a beautiful day – a regular joy-ride. I had to undo my Sidcot, I got so hot.

  ‘At noon Dennison got a shot at the sun and worked it. We’d been flying just over two hours, and it showed that we’d made good a hundred and eighty-seven miles. It was a bit on the low side, but I didn’t worry much – particularly as Dennison said he couldn’t guarantee it to within eight miles.’

  Rawdon turned to Dennison. ‘You used an ordinary sextant?’

  Dennison nodded. ‘We had a pretty good horizon most of the day,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ said Morris, ‘we trundled on a bit and at two o’clock he got another shot. This showed we’d made good a hundred and sixty-two miles in the last two hours – or only three-forty-nine since we started.’

  He paused a little.

  ‘It made me laugh like hell,’ he said grimly. ‘Damn funny and all that. It was pretty obvious we were up against a wi
nd of sorts. Dennison said that if we went down close to the water he’d try and spot what it was. Well, we went down and flew along about twenty feet up. There was a rotten-looking swell running, and with our speed and the swell and the wind across the swell – I was damned if I could tell which way the wind was. Dennison was pretty clear about it, though. He knows more about that sort of thing than I. He said it was south-east and about fifteen miles an hour. I asked him how he knew it, and he said because he saw a puffin.’

  ‘Perfectly correct,’ said Dennison. ‘There was a little flock of them all steaming head to wind. I didn’t know they went so far out.’

  ‘Fifteen miles an hour and south-east,’ said Morris. ‘That checked fairly well with our progress – it would have been stronger up above, you see. So we went up a bit and thought it over.’

  He leaned against the wing of the machine. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it was pretty evident that if we went on we should be down before we got here. It didn’t really matter, of course – we’d got the petrol to finish the trip. But that swell had put the wind up me. I thought that if we put down in that to fill our tanks … well, it wasn’t good enough, you know. For one thing, I don’t think she’d have got off the water again in the swell that was running then. I’m not sure – I don’t think so. No, it was pretty evident that we must get into smooth water to refill. And that meant Ireland.

  ‘So at about a quarter to three we set a fresh course and made for Baltimore. The engine ran beautifully all the time – like a sewing-machine. Dennison got another shot at the sun to check our position, and we trundled on till we made out Ireland about seven o’clock.

  ‘Well, we didn’t go to Baltimore. You see, all we meant to do was to find a patch of smooth water where we could put down, fill our tanks, and get away again. We only meant to stay half an hour, and then get on and finish the flight in daylight. It struck me that if we went near civilisation, there’d be police and Customs and harbourmasters – people in motor-boats crashing alongside and sticking boat-hooks through the wings – you know. We’d never have got away before next morning. Dennison knew the coast, and he took us to an island, not very far from Baltimore, where there was a little landlocked pool of a harbour with a sandy beach. It was an ideal place for the purpose, and nobody about to worry us.’

  ‘Sherkin Island,’ said Dennison. ‘The harbour was Kinish.’

  They found smooth water under the lee of Sherkin and put down just outside the entrance to the little landlocked harbour. On the water Morris turned the machine and taxied into the pool through the rocky entrance.

  Inside there were firm, sandy beaches running gently down into the water. They got the wheels down and taxied up on to the beach, turned so as to face the water, and taxied down a little way so that the rising tide would lift the machine should she sink too far into the sand. Then they stopped the engine.

  With the first move that they made from their seats came the realisation of their fatigue. They had been flying for nine hours; every muscle ached and quivered uncontrollably. They were stupid with noise, and shouted at each other in hoarse voices. It was impossible to continue the flight at once.

  ‘It means flying at night if we don’t,’ said Morris huskily. ‘There’ll be a good moon.’

  They decided to rest for an hour. Wearily they clambered out of the machine and walked a little way up the sand to the top of the beach. There Dennison began to shed his clothes.

  ‘What does A do?’ he said, weakly facetious. ‘Answer adjudged correct; A has a cold bath.’

  Morris stared at him blankly for a minute, then laughed and followed his example. They wriggled out of their fleecy suits and out of their clothes, and hobbled down the beach to the water. A short bathe and they were dressing again, cool and fresh and only very tired.

  They took their full hour of rest. Taking the remainder of their food, they climbed up on to a knoll that dominated the harbour and sat down to eat their meal. Near by they found a spring from which they drank their fill in company with two sheep, the only living creatures that they saw upon the island.

  Then for the precious minutes that remained they sat and watched the sun drop down towards the sea.

  It was a sunset such as only the west of Ireland can afford. Away to the north lay Mizzen Head, shrouded in a thin, opalescent haze; to the east the bay swept round towards them dotted with promontories and islands, clear in the sunset light. To Morris, stretched comfortably upon the soft turf, life was suddenly very sweet. His eye fell upon the flying-boat below them on the sand, and suddenly he wondered why they should go on at all. Here they were in the British Isles, having brought their cargo in up to time. To go on meant that they would expend the petrol that was their cargo. Surely, to have got the cargo so far was as good as to go on to Padstow without it? He thought of his little house in the suburbs, and the unfinished paths in his garden, and his wife, and his puppy.

  He had never flown a flying-boat at night before, far less landed one in the darkness with no flares. They would touch the water at not less than fifty miles an hour.

  Then came to his mind a quaint pride in their achievement. True, they would have expended four-fifths of their cargo. They would still have one-fifth to take to Padstow – the empty petrol-cans. If they were to stop now, Sir David would count the flight as a failure; it was little use commercially to land a cargo two hundred miles from the spot intended. To give up now would be – failure.

  He glanced at his watch. Their time was up.

  ‘Let’s get down to the machine,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ said Morris. ‘By the time we’d got the petrol into the tanks it was a quarter to nine. The sun was getting pretty low, but I didn’t care much about that – the moon was up already. And then came the real difficulty – starting her up again. I don’t know now what it was; it may have been that we got her too rich – I don’t know. We were both pretty tired to begin with, and we took turns at swinging on that bloody crank till we were pretty nearly sick, while the other sat and twiddled the starting mag. And all the time it was getting darker.

  ‘We got her going at last. It was half-past nine by the time she fired, and then we had to get our things on and get settled down. It was practically dark when we taxied out of Kinish and took off.’

  He paused, weary of his tale. ‘Well, that’s about all there is to it. We put down here about one-fifteen. I didn’t risk the crossing direct to Cornwall, though it would have been much shorter, of course. The only light we’d got was that rotten little torch, and if that had packed up when we were half-way across so that we couldn’t see the compass … It wasn’t good enough. We came home with one foot on dry land. We went along the south of Ireland and crossed by the Fishguard Route, and then along the south of Wales nearly up to Cardiff, till we could see the other side. We went pretty far up, you see. Then we came down the north coast of Devon. We found this easily enough – it’s a good mark on the coast. I put her down rather badly, as a matter of fact – we nearly as possible went over – cross wind, you know. You’d have banked on it blowing up and down the river, wouldn’t you? Well, it wasn’t. And then when we came to look for it we found we’d lost the perishing Very pistol … ’

  He answered one or two questions, then turned to Sir David with a sudden spasm of nervous energy. ‘Look here,’ he said. ‘It’s just damn silly trying to do this flight direct. I didn’t see that before, but I do now. Look. Wash out Padstow and make the terminus Milford Haven. Then the machine can make for the west of Ireland and come along the south coast, easy as shelling peas. Then you can have an emergency refuelling station at Baltimore, in case you get a head wind. You won’t need it one flight in ten – but if it’s there you can take more chances.’

  They broke into a discussion on the commercial aspects of the scheme.

  Tiring of the discussion of ways and means, Dennison turned away and began to walk up the beach to the sand-hills to collect his kit. He had not spoken to Sheila. Once he had glanced at the gir
l, but she had avoided his eyes. After that he had concentrated on the story of the flight that Morris told.

  At the top of the beach he glanced backward. She had left the others and was coming up the beach towards him. Blindly he stooped and fumbled with his flying-suit upon the sand. Then, as the girl drew near, he turned to face her.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said gently.

  The girl faced him steadily, bareheaded against a deep blue sea breaking on the yellow sands. ‘I oughtn’t to have come, of course,’ she said. ‘But I got worried, and I wanted to come and say I was sorry. And then Helen said she’d bring me down here, and I came.’

  ‘I see,’ said Dennison. He glanced at her, and laughed suddenly. ‘Half a minute,’ he said.

  The girl stood gazing at him anxiously.

  He raised his head. ‘Before you say any more,’ he said, ‘I want you to think of one thing. It’s never very wise to make a decision in a hurry, or under exceptional circumstances – if you can put it off. This flight has put us all out of step a bit. Suppose we put off discussing it – till next week?’

  The girl smiled. ‘But I only heard of this flight a week ago. And before then I had written to you to – to say that I’d changed my mind, and … I’d come to Hong Kong with you, if you’d have me.’

  And after that there was no more to be said.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ said Dennison a little later, ‘the Hong Kong scheme is off.’

  The girl drew herself up and looked at him in wonder. ‘But, Peter,’ she said, ‘is there anything else? What are we going to do?’

  ‘I couldn’t very well go to Hong Kong,’ said Dennison. ‘I’ve got to sail Chrysanthe, Sir David’s new yacht, at Cowes. I shall have to do that every season, I expect, so of course, I couldn’t go abroad.’ He spoke seriously, but there was a gleam of humour in his eyes.

  ‘But Peter, dear,’ said the girl. ‘You can’t let that decide – everything … ’