"We've all done things," I said. "It's part of the game the world makes us play. If they want to arrest you--and you've got no cards in your hand--! They mustn't arrest you."
"No. That's partly why I went to Richmond. But I never thought--"
His little bloodshot eyes stared at Crest Hill.
"That chap Wittaker Wright," he said, "he had his stuff ready. I haven't. Now you got it, George. That's the sort of hole I'm in."
IV
That memory of my uncle at the gate is very clear and full. I am able to recall even the undertow of my thoughts while he was speaking. I remember my pity and affection for him in his misery growing and stirring within me, my realisation that at any risk I must help him. But then comes indistinctness again. I was beginning to act. I know I persuaded him to put himself in my hands, and began at once to plan and do. I think that when we act most we remember least, that just in the measure that the impulse of our impressions translates itself into schemes and movements, it ceases to record itself in memories. I know I resolved to get him away at once, and to use the Lord Roberts B in effecting that. It was clear he was soon to be a hunted man, and it seemed to me already unsafe for him to try the ordinary Continental routes in his flight. I had to evolve some scheme, and evolve it rapidly, how we might drop most inconspicuously into the world across the water. My resolve to have one flight at least in my airship fitted with this like hand to glove. It seemed to me we might be able to cross over the water in the night, set our airship adrift, and turn up as pedestrian tourists in Normandy or Brittany, and so get away. That, at any rate, was my ruling idea.
I sent off Cothope with a dummy note to Woking, because I did not want to implicate him, and took my uncle to the pavilion. I went down to my aunt, and made a clean breast of the situation.
She became admirably competent. We went into his dressing-room and ruthlessly broke his locks. I got a pair of brown boots, a tweed suit and a cap of his, and indeed a plausible walking outfit, and a little game bag for his pedestrian gear; and, in addition, a big motoring overcoat and a supply of rugs to add to those I had at the pavilion. I also got a flask of brandy, and she made sandwiches. I don't remember any servants appearing, and I forget where she got those sandwiches. Meanwhile we talked. Afterwards I thought with what a sure confidence we talked to each other "What's he done?" she said.
"D'you mind knowing?"
"No conscience left, thank God!"
"I think--forgery!"
There was just a little pause. "Can you carry this bundle?" she asked.
I lifted it.
"No woman ever has respected the law--ever," she said. "It's too silly.... The things it lets you do! And then pulls you up--like a mad nurse minding a child."
She carried some rugs for me through the shrubbery in the darkling.
"They'll think we're going mooning," she said, jerking her head at the household. "I wonder what they make of us--criminals."
... An immense droning note came as if in answer to that. It startled us both for a moment. "The dears!" she said. "It's the gong for dinner!... But I wish I could help little Teddy, George. It's awful to think of him there with hot eyes, red and dry. And I know--the sight of me makes him feel sore. Things I said, George. If I could have seen, I'd have let him have an omnibusful of Scrymgeours. I cut him up. He'd never thought I meant it before.... I'll help all I can, anyhow."
I turned at something in her voice, and got a moon light gleam of tears upon her face.
"Could SHE have helped?" she asked abruptly.
"SHE?"
"That woman."
"My God!" I cried, "HELPED! Those--things don't help!"
"Tell me again what I ought to do," she said after a silence.
I went over the plans I had made for communicating, and the things I thought she might do. I had given her the address of a solicitor she might put some trust in.
"But you must act for yourself," I insisted.
"Roughly," I said, "it's a scramble. You must get what you can for us, and follow as you can."
She nodded.
She came right up to the pavilion and hovered for a time shyly, and then went away.
I found my uncle in my sitting-room in an arm-chair, with his feet upon the fender of the gas stove, which he had lit, and now he was feebly drunken with my whisky, and very weary in body and spirit, and inclined to be cowardly.
"I lef' my drops," he said.
He changed his clothes slowly and unwillingly. I had to bully him, I had almost to shove him to the airship and tuck him up upon its wicker flat. Single-handed I made but a clumsy start; we scraped along the roof of the shed and bent a van of the propeller, and for a time I hung underneath without his offering a hand to help me to clamber up. If it hadn't been for a sort of anchoring trolley device of Cothope's, a sort of slip anchor running on a rail, we should never have got clear at all.
V
The incidents of our flight in Lord Roberts B do not arrange themselves in any consecutive order. To think of that adventure is like dipping haphazard into an album of views. One is reminded first of this and then of that. We were both lying down on a horizontal plate of basketwork; for Lord Roberts B had none of the elegant accommodation of a balloon. I lay forward, and my uncle behind me in such a position that he could see hardly anything of our flight. We were protected from rolling over simply by netting between the steel stays. It was impossible for us to stand up at all; we had either to lie or crawl on all fours over the basket work. Amidships were lockers made of Watson's Aulite material,--and between these it was that I had put my uncle, wrapped in rugs. I wore sealskin motoring boots and gloves, and a motoring fur coat over my tweeds, and I controlled the engine by Bowden wires and levers forward.
