Lonely Road Read Online Free PDF

he returned with orders for over a hundred Dabchicks, booked upon the way. He took a cinema camera with him and made films which were worth a considerable sum; his machine was literally plastered with the advertisements of the firms who had supplied him with equipment free. His flight showed a profit of six hundred per cent on the capital involved, an achievement only comparable with that of his progenitor, Sir Francis Drake.
    His knighthood created a situation in my family which was not without its quiet humour. Joan had married him in 1925, and had gone to live with him in Golders Green, in undistinguished style. The family didn’t like it a bit, Stenning was a professional pilot, and for a long time after their marriage, if you flew from London to Paris, the chances were that you would see him sitting patiently in the cockpit of the aeroplane, high above your head, as you embarked. Even now, if you go to the Rawdon Aircraft Company to charter an aeroplane the chances are that you will be chauffeured by a Knight of the British Empire. The material profits of his flight went mostly to the financiers who had backed him, leaving him with little but his knighthood and experience.
    My family didn’t quite know what to do about it. Sir Philip Stenning could no longer be ignored; it was no longer possible to refer to Lady Stenning as poor Joan. I wrote to congratulate him, and got a letter back from Joan in which she asked if I would like to run her up to Scotland for a week.
    I really wasn’t fit to drive again, but I wanted that holiday with Joan. It took me two days to get to London because I had to stop in Shaftesbury and go to bed. Stenning had goneto Greece to try and get rid of a few more Dabchicks. I hadn’t let anyone know that I’d been ill, but Joan was very decent about it, and after a couple of days we set off up north, Joan driving the Bentley.
    We got to the MacEwens’ at Carthness in time for dinner on the second day; if I had been fit we should have done it in a day and not been tired. I stayed up there for ten days playing golf with Joan, and sailing their dinghy, and watching the birds. In that ten days my headaches went away, and I never got them back again. I get over these things pretty quickly as a rule.
    Joan was up there for a month, but ten days was all that I could spare from the yard, and so I started off for home one morning in the Bentley. I took it easily because Joan had made me promise to spend two nights upon the way, and as she had been decent and not worried me about the crash I was inclined to keep my promise to her.
    By six o’clock I was at Boroughbridge and wondering where I should put up for the night. York was not very far away, but I had stayed at York on the way up in a very famous hotel with faded lace curtains in the dining-room, and had not been impressed. And so for a whim, and because I wanted to see people of the sort that I do not usually meet, I went to Leeds and stayed in a very large and rather garish hotel in the middle of the town.
    I was very lonely that night. I had left people who liked me in Scotland to come back down south to my empty house and to my own work, and though I knew that I should be content with my life when I got back to Dartmouth, for the moment I was discontented and upset. I dined alone and rather expensively in the more select of the two restaurants of the hotel, and at the table beside me there was a party of young men and women dining not wisely but too well. In the south they would have been thrown out with the hors d’œuvres, but they were having the devil of a good time and I would have given my eyes to have been with them. There were two or three parties of elderly business men with their unattractive wivesdrinking champagne in solemn state, and there were two or three fat, elderly foreigners dining alone like me and, like me, trying to pretend that they were enjoying their dinner. I got tired of the pretence half-way through and cut it