Mysterious Aviator Read Online Free PDF

luck,” he said. “After that happened everything went wrong. We started off again from Gloucester to do the south coast, and at every place we went we showed a loss. At every ruddy place. Places like Taunton and Honiton, where we’d been really busy a couple of years before—if we got a dozen of them into the air it was all we did. People seemed to have got tired of it. We carried on that way for a couple of months, and then the directors got tired of it too. I brought the machine up to Croydon to be sold, and that was the end of that.”
    He lit another cigarette. “I hadn’t got a home to go to then,” he said.
    He said no more than that, but something in the way he said it revealed to me something of what that meant to him. I know now that he was a man of little stamina. In all his roving and uncertain life since the war he had always had a base, somewhere to retire to, to be alone with his wife and to regain his self-respect. I think his wife must have been a great backbone to him. He wasn’t the sort of man ever to make a name for himself alone, and in the loss of his wife he had suffered a grave injury.
    “I had about fifty pounds in hand, and while that lasted I hung about Croydon touting for a job. But there wasn’t much doing there. Stavanger gave me a few odd taxi trips to do for him, but nothing regular. And then I went and did my Reserve training, and that carried me on for a few weeks.
    “By the end of the summer I was on the street,” he said. “It was either earn something or starve then. I got a job in a garage, as a fitter. In Acton. Two pounds ten a week.”
    He grinned unpleasantly at me. “Temporary, of course. Just till something else turned up. I suppose that’s how everyone looks at it when they go down the drain.”
    He told me about his life in the garage in little short, cynical sentences. From something that he said I gained a very clear impression that he had been drinking heavily ever since his wife left him, a circumstance which probably accounted for his failure to get a flying job. Unlike the other failures to which he likened himself, however, he hated the garage enough to rouse himself to get out of it. Possibly he gave up drinking—I don’t know about that. At all events, he told me that he began to look about for a chance to get out of the country. He thought that if he could get out to Australia he might be able to pick up a job in aviation again. He said he wanted to get out of England.
    He could have got a free passage to Australia, but he didn’t know that.
    And then a queer thing happened to him. He used to takea packet of lunch to work with him from his fifth-rate lodgings in Harlesden, and every other day he bought a copy of the
Daily Mail
to read in the lunch hour. And there, one day, he read an article about the Red Menace.
    He lit another cigarette. “Bit of luck I got the paper that day,” he said. “I might have missed it. God knows what would have happened then—I was about through with fitter’s work. It said in the article that the Russians were building up the hell of an air service that was getting to be a menace to the whole of the rest of Europe. I’d heard somewhere or other that they were enlarging their service, but I’d no idea till I read that bit in the paper that it was anything like that. And then it went on to say how they were getting hold of British ex-officers and sending them out to Russia to train the Red Army in the latest tricks of aerial warfare, and what a sin and a shame it was that Englishmen should go and do that, and how the Government ought to stop it. It went on like that for a couple of columns. It said that they were paying as much as a thousand a year to these chaps.”
    He lifted his eyes from the fire and stared across at me. In the firelight and the shadows of the room there was a momentary pause. “Well,” he said at last, “so they were.”
    I stirred in my chair, a little uneasily. “You went after it,