“Envoy, you can’t bring all the pictures.’
“How about passports?”
The visitors from the town, having nothing to pack, did what they could to help the others.
“I’ve never been up before. I’m told it often makes people unwell.”
“Poor Mr. Raith.”
Basil, suddenly reduced to unimportance, stood by and watched the preparations, a solitary figure in his white Sakuyu robes leaning over his rifle like a sentinel.
Prudence joined him and they walked together to the edge of the compound, out of sight behind some rhododendrons. She was wearing a red bcret jauntily on one side of her head.
“Basil, give up this absurd Emperor, darling, and come with us.”
“Can’t do that.’
“Please.”
“No, Prudence, everything’s going to be all right. Don’t you worry. We’ll meet again somewhere.”
Rain clouds on the horizon grew and spread across the bright sky.
t8s “It seems so much more going away when it’s in an aeroplane, if you see what I mean.”
“I see what you mean.”
“Prudence, Prudence,” from Lady Courteney be-yond the rhododendrons. “You really can’t take so many boxes.”
In Basil’s arms Prudence said, “But the clothes smell odd.”
“I got them second-hand from a Sakuyu. He’d just stolen an evening suit from an Indian.”
“Prudence!”
“All right, mum, coming… sweet Basil, I can’t really bear it.”
And she ran back to help eliminate her less serviceable hats.
Quite soon, before any one was ready for them, the five aeroplanes came into sight, roaring over the hills in strictly maintained formation. They landed and came to rest in the compound. Air Force officers trotted forward and saluted, treating Sir Samson with a respect which somewhat surprised his household.
“We ought to start as soon as we can, sir. There’s a storm coming up.”
With very little confusion the party embarked. The Indian troopers and the Goan butler in one troop carrier, the children, clergy and senior members in the other. Mr. Jagger, William and Prudence took their places in the cockpits of the three bombers. Just as they were about to start, Prudence remembered something and clambered down. She raced back to the Legation, a swift, gay figure under her red beret, and returned panting with a loose sheaf of papers.
“Nearly left the Panorama of Life behind,” she explained.
The engines started up with immense din; the machines taxied forward and took off, mounted steadily, circled about in a neat arrow head, dwin-dled and disappeared. Silence fell on the compound. It had all taken less than twenty minutes.
Basil turned back alone to look for his camels.
Prudence crouched in the cockpit, clutching her beret to her head. The air shrieked past her ears while the landscape rolled away below in a leisurely fashion; the straggling city, half shrouded in smoke, disappeared behind them; open pasture dotted with cattle and little clusters of huts; presently the green lowlands and jungle country. She knew without particular regret that she was leaving Debra-Dowa for good.
“Anyway,” she reflected, “I ought to get some new ideas for the Panorama,’
‘ and already she seemed to be emerging into the new life which her mother had planned for her, and spoken of not long ago seated on Prudence’s bed as she came to wish her good-night. Aunt Harriet’s house in Belgrave Place; girls’ luncheons, dances and young men, week-ends in country houses, tennis and hunting; all the easy circumstances of English life which she had read about often but never experienced. She would resume the acquaintance of friends she had known at school, “and shan’t I be able to show off to them. They’ll all seem so young and innocent…” English cold and fog and rain, grey twilight among isolated, bare trees and dripping coverts; London streets when the shops were closing and the pavements crowded with people going to Tube stations with evening papers; empty streets, late at night after dances, revealing unsuspected slopes, sluiced by men in almost mediaeval overalls… an English girl returning to claim her natural herit-age…
The aeroplane dipped suddenly, recalling her to the affairs of the moment. The pilot shouted back to her something which was lost on the wind. They were the extremity of one of the arms of the V. A goggled face from the machine in front looked back and down at them as they dropped below him but her pilot signalled him on. Green undergrowth swam up towards them; the machine tilted a little and circled about, looking for a place to land.
“Hold tight and don’t worry,” was borne back to her on the wind. An open space appeared among the trees and bush. They circled again and dropped precisely into place, lurched for a moment as though about to overturn, righted themselves and stopped dead within a few feet of danger.
“Wizard show that,’
‘ remarked the pilot.
“Has anything awful happened?”
“Nothing to worry about. Engine trouble. I can put it right in two shakes. Stay where you are. We’ll catch them up before they reach Aden.”
