"AFRICA FLIGHT"

Wairarapa Times-Age, 11 January 1940, Page 10

"AFRICA FLIGHT"

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT. COPYRIGHT.

By

VAL GEILGUD.

(Author of “Announcer’s Holiday,” “Beyond Dover,” Etc.

Hendon —and high summer! The sun blazing down out of a cloudless sky; glittering on. the hundreds and hundreds of ranked cars, parked together for the occasion of Empire Air Day; setting off to the best possible advantage the new London season's hats and frocks. Thousands and thousands of people crowded together, their faces intermittently turning skywards from the stands. Young Antony Sothern pushed his exquisite grey hat back from his forehead, and mopped that same forehead with a grey silk handkerchief. The expression on his good looking face was definitely petulant, while the single glass jammed over his right eye added affectation to what might otherwise have passed for mere foppishness. Not that young Sothern was an idler or a wastrel. True, he was an Honourable. True that his hair curled naturally, that he dressed too well, that he spoke with an Eton and Oxford voice, and declined to be ashamed of doing so—having been at Eton and Oxford. But he had come down with the best scientific degree of his year. And in the normal course of events he worked ten hours a day in the capacity of private secretary to Professor Hubert Manson, the celebrated archaelogist, and worked exceedingly hard. Something of his petulance could at the moment be ascribed to the fact that Antony would have infinitely/preferred to have been at the British Museum than at Hendon. “I don’t know why on earth you' wanted to come out to such a god-for-saken sort of jamboree!” he grumbled. “I just wanted to come,” said Carol Manson. And in that little phrase she revealed to anyone who might have been listening the principal motor-muscle of her existence to date. Carol Manson was Professor Manson’s niece, which accounted for Antony’s release from his day’s work. Motherless since the age of seven, the only- child of Sir George Manson, chairman of Associated Airways, Limited, and blessed with good looks farabove the ordinary, Carol Manson had seldom had even to argue about getting her own way. On the occasion of Empire Air Day she was just three weeks past her 19th birthday, blonde, grey-eyed, slim, and as well-dressed as a girl can be in England. There was an understanding—not an engagement, because Sothern had no money apart from his job, and because she was still so young—between her and her uncle's secretary. Carol sometimes wondered what motive she had had for coming to that understanding, apart from curiosity. This was one of the times when that wonder was acutely emphasised.' Carol liked Antony Sothern a great deal. She liked, his looks, the perfection of the pose with which he faced the world, the seriousness with which he took his job, his undoubted affection for herself. But she did not love him, and she knew it. At least did she know it? Love was so far to Carol Manson a book firmly closed. She had longed to open it. She had come to that “arrangement” with Antony just because she hoped to open it in the company of someone she knew well, and liked. But she had been disappointed. And she realised that it could not be very long before Antony would have to be told.. She felt that when she told him he might be tiresome. He could be very tiresome in his own essentially gentlemanly way—he was being tiresome now. “But why did you want to come. Carol?” Antony persisted. They were sitting in Sir George’s newest car—a huge black sports twoseater, which Carol drove with a certain desperate brilliance. Few of the passers-by failed to glance twice at the exceptionally good-looking young couple in the exceptionally large and expensive car. More than a few recognised Carol Manson, who was a favourite with Press photographers. “I should have though you’d have had all the aeroplanes you wanted in the home,” said Antony Sothern. “I didn’t' come to see ’planes,” said Carol, who seemed entirely occupied in focusing a pair of field-glasses. “Then what did you come to see?" “Did you ever hear a proverb Antony, about curiosity killing the cat?',’ Sothern lighted a cigarette. “Of course if you get a kick out. of making a mystery!" he muttered. But Carol kept her temper, rather surprisingly perhaps. “I'll tell you. if and when I spot him,” she said. “Him?” “Rupert Larrimore, Tony.” “And who the deuce is Rupert Larrimore?" Carol dropped the glasses into her lap and faced him. "Are all scientists quite such dumbbells?” she demanded, less of Sothern than of the world at large. “I take it," pursued Sothern. quite unaffected, “that Mr Larrimore has something to do with flying.” "You take —not only it. but the cake, the doings, and the works!” said Carol: “Don’t you really remember, Tony? The man who was the first to fly the South Pacific solo from Valparaiso to Sydney? The man whose stunt exhibition sent the Slates crazier than any man since Lindbergh?” “I think I do remember the name now you mention the details.” “You can't get me down, Antony, however hard you try. Rupert Larrimore is about the only romantic figure left in the world. I’m mad about him. I think he’s marvellous! It was simply foul the way the dreary old Air Ministry went and pulled him back into the ' service after that American tour. He was doing a darped sight more for

British. flying by that sort of thing, than he can be by being a Flight Commander or whatever he is at this moment out there!” The girl made a gesture towards the huge arena of the flying ground. “And where did you meet him?" inquired Sothern, a shade less languidly than usual. He was used to Carol's blazing vitality and enthusiasms for this and that new thing. But he had never heard her speak in such terms of any man before, and he felt a vague sense —not of alarm; that was absurd —of disquiet, even apprehension. "I’ve never met him,” said Carol. “I wish I had.” “I see.” “I bet you don’t, Antony! I don’t believe you go in much for hero-wor-ship, or anything half so adolescent.” “Perhaps not. ■ So you dragged us out here on this diabolically hot day to see the hero perform? Well, I only hope the performance is worth it!’ By this Carol refused to be drawn. She had picked up her glasses again, and was scanning the aeroplane, and the tiny figures moving about them in the distance. Sothern leaned back in his seat, smoking gloomily, and reflecting that while it had been the devil of a job getting to Hendon, it was going to be infinitely worse trying to get away. Why did he love the girl beside him, as love her he did? Antony knew that they had frighteningly little in common apart from social background. He knew that Carol had no passion for him. He suspected that she never would have. And yet he adored her, from the waves of her shining head to the tips of her elegant shoes. A fantastic unsatisfactory business this love —for a scientist grotesque! And yet he couldn’t help it. And as far as he could see, there was nothing to be done about it. A sudden roaring in the sky, which seemed to be echoed back in a sort of thrilling murmur from the crowd, dragged him out of his reverie. He realised that Carol was standing up in the car, her glasses glued to her eyes.

A squadron of high-speed fighters had taken off for an aerobatics display. Sothern was frankly unimpressed as a rule by action. The deciphering of a papyrus thrilled him infinitely more than the finest feat of athletics or sport. He could watch the hardest game of polo, or the toughest motor race, without so much as a tremor of his eye-glass. But even he found himself gripping the wind-screen of the car in his excitement, as the planes hurtled past out of the sky, keeping perfect alignment and distance; spun, and looked, and climbed, and slid sideways like falling leaves; till it was almost impossible to believe that they were not sefitient in themselves, or that wood and metal could stand the strain.

Once again the squadron hurtled earthwards, as though out of the heart of the sun, this time flying in pairs, their wing tips seemingly not more than a foot apart. They flattened out perhaps twenty feet above the level of the ground, flew past the stands, climbed in a great triumphant arc —climbed —all but the last two machines. Sothern felt a desperate clutch tighten on his arm. as the last two planes flattened out. “One of em’s tilting!" came Carol’s voice, oddly shrill and at the same time toneless. “There’ll be a smash, a ghastly, screaming smash!” Sothern saw her whip the glasses, held in her other hand, away from her eyes. And on the instant it happened. The wing-tips of the two fighters touched, almost with the gentle precision of a kiss. There was no sound breaking the steady roar of the engines—but suddenly the fighter further away from the stands seemed to stand sideways, stagger drunkenly, and slide into the ground. There followed an explosion, a burst of flame, and a mercifully concealing cloud of black smoke. Every human being on the ground was on his or her feet, their faces blanched, as the ambulances tore out towards the wreck, followed by the fire-engine, staring, muttering, indulging in hysterics ... Carol, determined to look anywhere but at the wreck, and frightened to stop looking for fear she might be so old-fashioned as to faint, looked steadily at the second fighter. Following on the disaster, its pilot had flown in a half-circle, and now he landed not fifty yards away from where Sothern and Carol sat in the big car. He climbed out of the machine, and for an instant stood still beside it. Carol looked at him through her glasses. It took her a minute or so to steady her shaking hands. Then she drew in her breath sharply. “What is it, Carol?" “Antony! It’s Larrimore!” “Oh, rot!” ‘I tell you it is! I’d known him anywhere—l haven't had a picture of him for two years for nothing!” “But I thought you hadn't met him?” “I never have. I cut it out of an ■illustrated weekly after his .■ Pacific flight! Antony, how awful—it might have been him!” Sothern took the glasses and foscused them in his turn. He saw a man leaning against the aeroplane. To judge of his figure in the swathings of clumsy flying kit was impossible. But Sothern was looking at Rupert Larrimore’s face, and wondering how he could describe it. It was a long, lean face, with an arrogant nose and a decisive chin; a face that somehow seemed all bone. The eyes were deep-set, the cheek-bones high. The general impression was of an almost Waxen

pallor, broken by deep, hollowed patches of shadow. A queer, violent, uncomfortable face, now smeared and grimy and contorted . . . "Well?" said Carol. “Think you'll know him again?" Sothern nodded, and handed back the glasses. “I should judge." he said in his precise fashion, “that your friend was engaged in cursing fate for not havinglet it be him, contrariwise to you.” Carol Manson, stared, but said nothing. And she and Antony drove away from Hendon in silence. In such wise did those three —Carol Manson, Antony Sothern. and Rupert Larrimore —whose fates were to be so curiously interwoven and resolved, meet for the first time. (To be Continued.l