* * * * *

Captain Drayton, whom Anthony consulted, said, “Leave him alone.”  Those painting and writing johnnies were a rum lot.  You couldn’t take them seriously.  The Desmond girl might be everything that Vera Harrison said she was.  He didn’t think, though, that the idea of making love to her would enter Nicky’s head if they left him alone.  Nicky’s head had more important ideas in it.

So they left him alone.

* * * * *

And at first Nicholas really was too busy to think much of Desmond.  Too busy with his assistant manager’s job at the Morss Motor Works; too busy with one of the little ideas to which he owed the sudden rise in his position:  the little idea of making the Morss cars go faster; too busy with his big Idea which had nothing whatever to do with the Morss Company and their cars.

His big Idea was the idea of the Moving Fortress.  The dream of a French engineer, the old, abandoned dream of the forteresse mobile, had become Nicky’s passion.  He claimed no originality for his idea.  It was a composite of the amoured train, the revolving turret, the tractor with caterpillar wheels and the motor-car.  These things had welded themselves together gradually in Nicky’s mind during his last year at Cambridge.  The table in Nicky’s sitting-room at the top of the house in Chelsea was now covered with the parts of his model of the Moving Fortress.  He made them at the Works, one by one; for the Morss Company were proud of him, and he had leave to use their material and plant now and then for little ideas of his own.  The idea of the Moving Fortress was with him all day in the workshops and offices and showrooms, hovering like a formless spiritual presence among the wheeled forms.  But in the evening it took shape and sound.  It arose and moved, after its fashion, as he had conceived it, beautiful, monstrous, terrible.  At night, beside the image of the forteresse mobile, the image of Desmond was a thin ghost that stood back, mournful and dumb, in the right-hand corner of the vision.

But the image of Desmond was there.

At first it stood for Nicky’s predominant anxiety:  “I wonder when
Desmond will have finished the drawings.”

The model of the Moving Fortress waited upon Desmond’s caprice.

The plans of the parts and sections had to be finished before these could be fitted together and the permanent model of the Moving Fortress set up.  The Moving Fortress itself waited upon Desmond.

For, though Nicky could make and build his engine, he could not draw his plans properly; and he could not trust anybody who understood engines to draw them.  He was haunted, almost insanely, by the fear that somebody else would hit upon the idea of the Moving Fortress; it seemed to him so obvious that no gunner and no engineer could miss it.  And the drawings Desmond made for him, the drawings in black and white, the