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Title: Into the blue
Author: F. Britten Austin
Release date: May 4, 2024 [eBook #73541]
Language: English
Original publication: Chicago, IL: The Consolidated Magazines Corporation, 1924
Credits: Roger Frank and Sue Clark
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INTO THE BLUE ***
INTO THE BLUE
By F. Britten Austin
The strange and tremendously dramatic story of an airplane
pilot, intoxicated with the exaltation of great altitudes,
setting his course, with his sweetheart, for the stars--by the
distinguished author of “Nach Verdun” and “Out of the Night.”
It was in a bitterly pessimistic frame of mind that, having seen my
baggage into the hotel, I went for a first walk along the asphalted
esplanade of Southbeach. I had no pleasure in the baking sun, in the
glittering stretch of the English Channel that veiled itself in a
fine-weather mist all around the half-horizon. The exuberant, bold-eyed
flappers, promenading in groups of three or four, the vivid
polychromatism of their taste in sports-coats, seemed to me merely
objectionable. The hordes of worthily respectable middle-class families
complete with children--with many children--that blackened the sands
and overflowed into the fringe of the water oppressed my soul with
their formidable multiplicity.
I thought, in a savage emphasis of contrast, of the neat little yacht
that should now be bearing me across the North Sea to the austere
perfection of the Norwegian fiords. And I cursed myself for the
childish imbecility of exasperation with which--when, at the last
moment, with my suitcases all packed, I had received a telegram
informing me that the yacht had come off second-best in a collision
with a coaltramp--I had picked up Bradshaw and sworn to myself to go to
whatever place I should blindly put my finger upon as I opened the
page. The oracle had declared for Southbeach--Southbeach in mid-August!
I shrugged my shoulders--so be it! My holiday was spoiled anyhow. To
Southbeach I would go. And now, as I contemplated it, I was appalled.
What was I going to do with myself?
A paddle-wheel excursion-steamer came up to the pier, listing over with
the black load aboard of her. Up and down the beach, in five-minute
trips, a seaplane went roaring some eight hundred feet above the heads
of the gaping crowd. I had done all the flying I wanted in the war,
thank you very much. Other potentialities of amusement there were
apparently none. If I could not discover a tolerably decent
golf-course, I was a lost man.
I am not going to give the chronicle of that first day. It would be a
study in sheer boredom. That night, after one of those execrable
dinners which are the peculiar production of an English seaside hotel,
I had pretty well made up my mind that--oracle or no oracle--I would
shake the sand of Southbeach off my feet on the morrow. Sitting over my
coffee in the lounge, I was in fact already consulting the time-table
for a morning train, when my cogitations were suddenly interrupted by a
violent slap on the shoulder.
“Hello, Jimmy!”
I looked up with a start, before my identification of the voice had
time to complete itself.
“_Toby!_--Toby Selwyn--by all that’s splendid!” It was years since I
had seen him, but in this dreary desert of uninteresting people he came
like an angel of companionship, and I welcomed him with delight. “Sit
down, man. Have a drink!”
* * * * *
He did so, ordered a whisky-and-soda from the hovering waiter. I looked
at him as one looks at an acquaintance of old times, seeking for
changes. I had not seen him since the Armistice, when our squadron of
fighting scouts was demobilized and a cheery crowd of daredevil pilots
was dispersed to the four quarters of the globe.
He had not greatly altered. His face was a little thinner, more mature.
His hair was still the same wild red mop. His eyes--peculiar in that
when he opened them upon you, you saw the whites all round the
pupil--had still that strange look in them, as though somewhere deep
down in them his soul was like a caged animal, supicious and restless,
which I so well remembered. The reason for his nickname jumped back
into my mind. It was from his little trick of suddenly and
disconcertingly going “mad dog,” not only when he swooped down, against
any sort of odds, upon a covey of Huns, but in the mess. Some one had
called him “Mad dog;” it had been affectionately softened to “dog
Toby;” and “Toby” he remained.
“And what on earth are you doing here?” I asked.
He smiled grimly.
“Earning my living, old bean. Introducing all the grocers in England to
the poetry of flying, at ten bob a head.”
“So that was _your_ machine I saw going up and down the sea-front
today?”
“It was. Five-minute trips--two bob a minute, and cheap at the price.
Had to do something, you know. So I hit on this. There are worse
things. Put my last cent into buying the machine--ex-Government, of
course. She’s a topping bus!” His voice freshened suddenly with
enthusiasm. “It’s almost a shame to use her for hacking up and down
like this. You must come and have a look at her.”
“Thanks,” I replied, “I’d like to, but--”
* * * * *
Our conversation was abruptly interrupted. Toby had jumped to his feet.
Coming in through the door of the lounge was--miracles never happen
singly!--an only-too-familiar, smiling and middle-aged married couple
and--_Sylvia_! Toby obscured me from them for an instant as he went
eagerly toward them--an instant where I weighed the problem of whether
to stay or bolt. The last time Sylvia and I had met she had told me,
with a pretty sympathy that ought to have softened the blow, that she
would always be glad to have me as a _friend_, but-- The problem was
resolved for me, before I could decide. Toby was leading the trio up to
me.
“I want to introduce an old pal of mine--Jimmy Esdaile.”
Mr. and Mrs. Bryant shot a swift smile at each other and then to me as
we shook hands. Sylvia almost grinned. I felt a perfect fool. “Good
evening, Mr. Esdaile,” said Sylvia in her sweetest tones, her gray eyes
demurely alight.
_Mr._ Esdaile! The last time, it had still been “Jimmy.” It is true
that since I had somewhat boorishly informed her, upon that occasion,
that I had no manner of use for being her _friend_, I had scarcely a
legitimate grievance if now she chose to be frigid.
“Wont you sit down, all of you?” I suggested. “Mr. Bryant, you’ll take
a Grand Marnier with your coffee, I know.”
“Thanks, Jimmy, I will,” said Mr. Bryant, seating himself. I saw Toby
stare. His astonishment visibly increased as Mrs. Bryant, having
comfortably disposed herself upon the settee, added in her motherly
fashion: “And what in the world are _you_ doing here, Jimmy?”
“That’s what I’m asking myself,” I replied. Toby cut me short in what
might have been a witty answer had I been allowed to finish it.
“You people know each other, then?” he demanded.
Mr. Bryant smiled.
“Yes. We’ve met Jimmy before--haven’t we, Sylvia?”
“He used to be an acquaintance of ours in London,” corroborated Sylvia
imperturbably, delicately underlining the word acquaintance.
Toby probed me with a peculiar look, suddenly almost hostile. I could
guess that he was asking himself whether I had come to Southbeach in
pursuit of Sylvia. One did not need to be a detective to discover his
own eager interest in her. It was patent, with no attempt at
concealment. Those strange hungry restless eyes of his seemed to devour
her. Quite apart from any personal feelings--any time during the last
six months I could have assured you, with perfect sincerity, that my
heart was stone dead,--I didn’t like it. Toby was not the sort of
chap--
But I had no opportunity to intervene. Mr. and Mrs. Bryant, with a
genuine kindly interest in me and my doings that at any other time I
should have appreciated, monopolized me. And Sylvia flirted with him,
demurely but outrageously. She called him Toby with the most natural
ease in the world. He, poor devil, was awkward in an uncertainty
whether she were playing with him, jerkily spasmodic in his answers,
devouring her all the time with those strange eyes of his, wherein I
recognized that same caged-animal look familiar to me as a preliminary
to an outburst of “mad dog” on those nights when there was ragging in
the mess. She, I could see, was enjoying herself at playing with fire.
* * * * *
At last I could stand it no longer. I switched off from the amiable
platitudes I was exchanging with her parents, interrupted her in her
markedly exclusive conversation with him.
“I didn’t know Toby was a friend of yours, Syl--Miss Bryant,” I said.
She turned candid eyes upon me.
“Oh, yes, we have known Toby quite a long time--soon after you dropped
us--nearly six months, isn’t it, Toby?”
She took, evidently, a malicious pleasure in reiterating his Christian
name. I messed up the end of my cigarette before I remembered not to
chew it. Toby looked up suspiciously.
“I had no idea, either, that you were a friend of the family, Esdaile,”
he said. He also had dropped the “Jimmy.”
Sylvia answered for me.
“Not exactly a _close_ friend,” she said sweetly. “Are you, Mr.
Esdaile? We had almost forgotten each other’s existence.”
I could have smacked her.
Toby looked immensely relieved. I could see that, for the moment at
least, he definitely put certain doubts out of his mind. He seemed to
be trying to make up for his spasm of hostility when next he spoke.
“He’s an old pal of mine, anyway, aren’t you, Jimmy? It’s like old
times to see you again. D’you remember that little scrap with a dozen
Huns over Charleroi? That was a good finish-up--the day before the
Armistice.”
I remembered well enough--remembered that after that last fight, at the
very end of the war, I had landed by a miracle with my nerve suddenly
gone. I had never been in the air since--for a long time could not look
at an airplane without a fit of trembling.
Sylvia glanced at me in surprise. The secret humiliation of that finish
had made me pretty close about my war-doings.
“Oh, you two knew each other in the war, then?” she said.
“I should rather think we did!” replied Toby. “Jimmy was my
squadron-leader--and he’s some scientist in the air, let me tell you.”
His tone of admiration smote me like a bitter irony. “Don’t forget
you’re coming to look over that bus of mine tomorrow morning, Jimmy.”
“I don’t know that I can,” I replied. “I’m off back to town tomorrow.”
I said this with a glance to Sylvia which found her quite unmoved.
“Are you, really?” she said. “What, on a _Sunday_?” Her eyebrows went
up in mocking admiration for my courage.
Confound it! I remembered suddenly that tomorrow _was_ Sunday. I can
put up with any reasonable amount of hardship, but the prospect of a
Sunday train on a South Coast railway!
“_Kamerad!_” I surrendered. “I go back on Monday.”
“Good!” said Toby. “The tender conscience of the local municipality
does not permit them to allow me to earn my living on the Sabbath.
Tomorrow is a _dies non_. We’ll spend the morning tinkering about the
machine together. It’ll be like old times, before we went up for a
jolly old scrap with the Hun-bird. She’s worth looking at, too--built
for a radius of a thousand miles and a ceiling of over twenty thousand
feet.”
“Really!” I said, with a touch old-time professional interest. “But
what on earth do you want a machine like that for? She’s surely
scarcely suitable for giving donkey-rides up and down a beach?”
“She does all right,” replied Toby. “And I like to feel that I’ve got
something with power to it. That I could if I wanted to--” His curious
restless eyes lost expression, as though the soul behind them no longer
saw me, contemplated something remote.
“Could what?” I challenged him.
* * * * *
He came back to perception of my presence.
“Eh? Oh, nothing.” He looked at me with that familiar sudden
suspiciousness which seemed to accuse one of attemped espionage into
the secrets of his soul. I remembered that even in the mess, intimate
as we had all been together, he had always been a queer chap. One had
never really known what he was thinking or planning. He turned now to
Sylvia.
“Miss Bryant has promised me that one day she will let me take her for
a flight,” he said, banishing the hardness of his eyes with that little
smile of his which was so peculiarly attractive when he chose to exert
his charm.
“I’ll come tomorrow,” she replied promptly. “And then you’ll have to
take me gratis.”
“Of course I will!” he answered, clutching at her promise with a flash
of eager delight in his eyes. “You didn’t imagine I was going to charge
you for it, did you? That’s settled, then.”
Mrs. Bryant interposed in motherly alarm.
“Oh, Sylvia! Don’t do any of your madcap tricks!--You _will_ be
careful, wont you, Mr. Selwyn?” She turned to me. “Are you sure she
will be safe with him, Jimmy?”
“My dear Mrs. Bryant,” I assured her, “if there is a better pilot in
the world than Toby, I don’t know him.”
Mr. Bryant took the pipe from his mouth and glanced cautiously at his
wife.
“I’d rather like to go up too,” he said.
But Mrs. Bryant vetoed this volubly and emphatically.
“No, no, no!” she exclaimed. “Not two of you together! Suppose anything
happened!”
I smiled at her nervous fears.
“Nothing _will_ happen, Mrs. Bryant--make your mind easy. Toby’s
perfectly safe. And if Mr. Bryant would like a flight, I’m sure Toby
would be pleased to take him.”
Toby was looking at Sylvia’s father with his enigmatic eyes.
“Of course I will,” he said. “But I don’t want to worry Mrs. Bryant. I
will take Mr. Bryant another time.”
The conversation drifted off to other topics. At last, Mrs. Bryant rose
for bed.
“And mind, Mr. Selwyn,” she warned him smilingly as she shook hands
with him, “I shall try hard to persuade Sylvia not to go.”
“But you wont succeed, Mother!” announced Sylvia radiantly. “Good
night, Toby. Good night, _Mr._ Esdaile!” With which parting shot she
left us, and the lounge was suddenly horribly empty.
* * * * *
We sat there for yet some time, Toby and I, puffing at our pipes in
silence. He leaned back on the settee, with his eyes closed. I was
thinking--never mind what I was thinking; but my thoughts ranged far
into the dreary future of my life. My glance fell on him, scrutinizing
him, probing him, weighing him, as he lay there all unconscious of it.
About his feelings I had no doubt. Were they reciprocated? I remembered
that peculiarly attractive smile of his, the alluring touch of mystery
about him--and almost hated him for them. That was the kind of thing
which appealed to women, I reflected bitterly.
He opened his eyes.
“‘Puro è disposto a salire alle stelle,’” he murmured to himself,
staring as at a vision where this somewhat gaudy hotel lounge had no
place.
“What’s that?” I said, not quite catching his words.
“Eh?” He looked at me as though he had forgotten my presence, was only
now reminded of it by my voice. “Oh, that’s the last line of the
Purgatorio--where Dante, having drunk forgetfulness of the earth from
Lethe, is ready to ascend with Beatrice into the stars of the Paradiso.
.... All right, Jimmy,” he added, with a smile of sardonic superiority
which irritated me, “don’t worry yourself with trying to understand.
You wont. You’re one of those whose idea of the fit habitation for the
divine soul shining through the eyes of your beloved is a bijou
residence in a London suburb. After a few years of you, your wife,
whoever she is, will be another Mrs. Bryant.”
“Many thanks!” I replied, somewhat nettled, and a little puzzled also.
This was a new Toby. We were not given to cultivating poetry in our
mess. “But since when have you taken to studying Dante in the
original?”
“Oh, I’ve had plenty of time,” he answered, his eyes straying away from
me evasively. “I’ve lived pretty much by myself these last few years.”
He rose to his feet, cutting short the subject. “Let’s go for a stroll,
shall we? Get a breath of fresh air into our lungs.”
* * * * *
I assented willingly enough. At the back of my mind was an obscure idea
that, in the stimulated sense of comradeship evoked between two friends
who walk together under a night sky, he might open himself to some
confidence that would help me to a more precise definition of the
relationship that subsisted between himself and Sylvia. In this I was
disappointed. He walked along the asphalt promenade, now almost
deserted, with the sea to our left marked only by an irregular faintly
gleaming line of white in the black obscurity, without a word. He did
not even respond to my efforts at conversation. Apparently he did not
hear them. Overhead, the metallic blue-black heaven was powdered with a
multitude of stars, twinkling down upon us from their immense
remoteness. He threw his head back to contemplate them as we walked in
silence. He baffled me, kept me somehow from my own private thoughts.
Suddenly he switched upon me.
“There can’t be nothingness all the way, can there?” he demanded of me
with a curious vehemence of interrogation. His hand made an involuntary
half-gesture toward the scintillating dome of stars. “There must be
_something_!” His manner had the disconcerting intensity of a man who
has been brooding overlong in solitude. “At a distance everything melts
into the blue. I have seen blank blue sky where on another day there’s
a range of mountains sharp and clear across the horizon. And they
pretend that in all those millions of miles there is nothing--nothing
but empty space!” He finished on a note of scorn.
“But surely the astronomers--” I began.
“Pah!” he interrupted me. “What do you or the astronomers know about
it? Shut up!”
Shut up, I did. He was evidently not in the mood for reasonable
conversation. He also shut up, pursuing in silence thoughts I could not
follow. At last he brusquely suggested returning to the hotel.
* * * * *
Next morning, when I met him in the breakfast-room, he was quite his
old cheery self, and whatever resentment of his last night’s rudeness
still rankled in me, vanished in the odd charm of his smile. He
reminded me of my promise to spend the morning with him tinkering about
his seaplane. I acquiesced, for two reasons. First, I had nothing else
to do, and I still retained enough of the impress of my old flying days
to be genuinely interested in looking over a machine. Secondly, Sylvia
would be coming to it for her flight. An uneasy night had not brought
me to any satisfying theory of her real attitude toward him.
It was a bright sunshiny morning as we left the hotel, but a southwest
breeze ruffled the surface of the sea; and the white isolated clouds
that drifted across the blue overhead were evidently the advance-guards
of a mass yet invisible beyond the horizon. Within an hour or two the
sky would almost certainly be overcast. For the moment it was fine,
however, and I enjoyed the fresh clarity of the air as we walked down
the pier together. At its extremity, on the leeward side of the steamer
landing-stage, the seaplane rode the running waves like a great bird
that had alighted with outspread wings, the water splashing and sucking
against her floats as she jerked and slackened on her mooring-ropes.
We hauled in on them, clambered down into her. She was, as he explained
to me, intended for a super-fighting-scout, with an immense radius, a
great capacity for climb, and a second machine-gun. The space where
this second machine-gun had been, just behind the pilot, was now filled
with four seats, in pairs behind each other, for the passengers, and he
had had her landing-wheels replaced by floats. The morning was still
young--nine o’clock struck just as we got on board the machine; and for
the next two hours we pottered about her, cleaning her powerful motor,
tautening the wire stays to her wings, looking into a hundred and one
technical details that would have no interest for anyone but the
expert. I enjoyed myself, and Toby was almost pathetically delighted to
have some one with him who could enter into his enthusiasms. He had, I
could guess, been leading a very solitary life for a long while.
Apparently he almost lived on board her. All sorts of gear were stowed
away in her. In one of the lockers I found quite a collection of books,
including the Dante he had quoted, and a number of others of a
distinctly mystical type--odd reading for a flying man. In another,
close to the pilot’s seat, was a German automatic pistol.
“Souvenir of the great war, Daddy!” he smiled at me as I handled it.
“But do you know it’s loaded?” I objected disapprovingly.
“Yes,” he replied. “I shoot sea-gulls with it sometimes--chase ’em in
the air. It’s great sport.”
I shrugged my shoulders. Chasing seagulls with a pistol was just one of
those mad things I could well imagine Toby doing.
We gave her a dose of oil, filled up her petrol-tank--one of her
original pair had been removed to make space for the passengers, but
she still had a five-hundred-mile radius, he told me--and looked round
for something else to do.
“Would you like to take her up and see how she climbs?” he invited me.
“No, thanks!” I replied hurriedly, uncomfortable in a sudden
embarrassment. I had, thanks to the Armistice, managed to conceal my
humiliating loss of nerve from the other fellows. “I’ve given up
flying.”
His queer eyes rested upon me for a penetrating glance, and I felt
pretty sure that he guessed. But he made no comment.
“All right,” he said. “I expect Miss Bryant will be along presently.
We’ll sit here and wait for her.”
* * * * *
We ensconced ourselves in the passengers’ seats and sat there smoking
our pipes. The mention of Miss Bryant’s name seemed to have killed
conversation between us. We sat in a silence that I, at least, felt to
be subtly awkward. The intimacy of the morning was destroyed. Each of
us withdrew into himself, each perhaps preoccupied with the same
problem. Once, certainly, I caught his glance hostile upon me.
As I had expected, heavy clouds had come up from the southwest, and the
sky was now almost completely overcast. But immediately overhead there
was still a clear patch where, through a wide rift in the gray wrack,
one looked into the infinite blue. Leaning back in his seat, he stared
up at it with eyes that were dreamy in a peculiar fixity of expression.
“Jimmy,” he said suddenly, in a voice that was far away with his
thoughts, “in the old days, when you were flying high to drop on a
stray Hun,--say, at twenty thousand feet, with the earth miles away out
of touch,--didn’t you ever feel that if you went a little
higher--climbed and climbed--you would come to something--some other
place? Didn’t it almost seem to you that it would be as easy as going
back?”
I glanced at him. Into my mind flitted a memory of his last night’s
wild talk about the stars. He had always been a little queer. Was
he--not quite right?
“I can’t say it did,” I replied curtly. “I was always jolly glad to get
down again.”
He looked at me.
“Yes--I suppose so!” he commented. There was almost an insult in his
tone.
Before I could decide whether to resent it or to humor him, I saw
Sylvia approaching us along the pier, charming in her summer dress, but
prudently with a raincoat over her arm.
“Here’s Miss Bryant!” I said, glad of this excuse to put an end to the
conversation.
He leaped to his feet with a peculiar alacrity.
“At last!” he ejaculated, as though an immeasurable time of waiting was
at an end. He quenched a sudden flash of excitement in his eyes as he
caught my glance on his face.
She stood above us on the pier, smiling.
“Here I am!” she said. “But it isn’t a very nice morning, is it?”
“It will be all right up above,” replied Toby. “Come along--down that
next flight of steps.” He was trembling with eagerness. I wondered
suddenly whether I was wise in letting her go up with him. The man’s
nerves were obviously strung to high pitch. On the other hand, I had
the greatest confidence in his skill--and it was only too likely that
she would misinterpret any objections from me, would refuse to listen
to them.
While I was hesitating, she had already descended to the lower stage,
and Toby had helped her along the gangplank into the machine.
“You see I’ve brought my raincoat,” she said. “It’ll be cold up there,
wont it?”
“That’s no use,” replied Toby with brutal directness. “Here!” He opened
a locker where he kept the flying-coats for his passengers. “Put that
on.”
* * * * *
I helped her with it. She looked more charming than ever in the thick
leather coat, the close-fitting leather helmet framing her dainty
features. Then I made a step toward the gangplank.
“But aren’t you coming too?” she demanded in surprise.
Toby answered for me.
“Esdaile doesn’t care for flying,” he said with a sardonic smile,
looking me straight in the eyes. There was a sort of mocking triumph in
that unmistakable sneer.
“Oh--but _please_!” Sylvia turned to me pleadingly. “Do come!”
“I’d rather take you up alone,” said Toby in a stubborn voice, looking
up from the mooring-rope he had bent to untether.
She ignored him, laid a hand upon my arm.
“Wont you?” she asked.
“I should infinitely prefer not to,” I replied awkwardly. I cursed
myself for my imbecility, but the mere idea of going up in that machine
made me feel sick inside, still so powerful was the memory of that
moment long ago when, ten thousand feet up with a Hun just below me
plunging in flames to destruction, I had felt my nerve suddenly break,
my head go dizzy in an awful panic. “Please excuse me.”
She could not, of course, guess my reason.
“I sha’n’t go without you,” she said obstinately. Her eyes seemed to be
telling me something I was not intelligent enough to catch. “And I want
to go. Please-- _Jimmy_!”
I surrendered.
“All right,” I said, feeling ghastly. “I’ll come.”
Toby stopped in the act of pulling on his flying-coat, and looked at
me. His face was livid, his eyes almost insanely malignant in a sudden
fury of bad temper.
“Don’t think you’re going to spoil it!” he said, through his teeth.
“I’ll see to that!”
With that cryptic remark, he swung himself into the pilot’s seat and
started the engine with a jerk that almost threw me into the water. I
slid down to the seat beside Sylvia. Toby had already cast off the one
remaining mooring-rope, and with a whirring roar that gave me an odd
thrill of old familiarity, the propeller at our nose a dark blur in its
initial low-speed revolutions, we commenced to move over the waves.
For a moment we had a slight sensation of their rise and fall as we
partly tore through them, partly floated on their lifting crests, and
then suddenly the engine note swelled to the deafening intensity of
full power; the blur of the propeller disappeared; a fount of white
spray, sunlit from a rift in the clouds, sprang up on either hand from
the floats beneath us, hung poised like jeweled curtains at our flanks,
stung our faces with flying drops. For yet a minute or two we raced
through the high-flung water; and then abruptly the glittering
foam-curtains vanished. Our nose lifted. We sagged for another splash,
lifted again, on a buoyancy that was not the buoyancy of the sea. I
glanced over the side, saw the tossing wave-crests already twenty feet
below us.
Instinctively I looked round to Sylvia to see how she was taking it.
Her eyes were bright, her face ecstatic. I saw her lips move as she
smiled. But her words were swallowed in the roar of the engine, and the
blast of air that almost choked one, despite the little mica
wind-screen behind which we crouched. I bent my ear close to her face,
just caught her comment as she repeated it.
“It’s--wonderful!” she gasped.
Then she clutched my arm in sudden nervousness as the machine banked
side-wise. Below us, diminished already, the pier, the long promenade
of Southbeach, whirled round dizzily in a complete circle, got yet
smaller as they went. Toby was putting the machine to about as steep a
spiral as it could stand. As we went round again and yet again, with
our nose seeming to point almost vertically up to the gray ceiling of
cloud and our bodies heavy against the backs of our seats, I had a
spasm of alarm that turned to anger. What was he playing at? It was
ridiculous to show off like this! I did not doubt his skill--but it
would not be the first airplane to stall at so steep an angle that it
slipped back in a fatal tail-spin. I noticed that Sylvia was not
strapped in her seat, and promptly rectified the omission. It might be
all right, but with an inexperienced lady-passenger, it was as well to
take precautions if he was going to play tricks of this sort.
* * * * *
Up and up we went in those dizzy spirals, Southbeach--disconcertingly
never on the side on which one expected it--miniature below us; and I
could not help admiring, despite my sickening nervousness, the masterly
audacity with which he piloted his machine on the very limit of the
possible. He never turned for a glance at us, but sat, lifted slightly
above us by our slant, doggedly crouched at his controls. I could
imagine his face, his lips pressed tight together, his queer eyes
alight with the boyish exultation of showing us--or perhaps showing
_me_?--what he could do. I did not need the demonstration. I had seen
him climb often enough like a circling hawk, gaining height in an
almost sheer ascent, racing a Hun to that point of superior elevation
which meant victory.
There had been a time when I could have beaten him at it. But there was
no necessity to play these circus-tricks now--above all, with a lady on
board. Why could he not take her for an ordinary safe flight over the
sea, gaining, in the usual way, a reasonable margin of height on an
angle that would have been almost imperceptible? I quivered to clamber
forward and snatch the controls from him as still we rose, perilously
high-slanted, in sweep after circular sweep. The gray-black stretch of
cloud was now close above us, the rounded modeling of its under-surface
like a low roof that seemed to forbid further ascent.
Again Sylvia clutched at my arm, her face alarmed, and I bent my head
down to catch the words she shouted against the all-swallowing roar of
the engine. They came just audible.
“Is he--going--through this?”
Toby was still holding her nose up, plainly intending to get above the
clouds. I saw no sense in making her uneasy. I put my mouth close to
her head.
“Blue sky--above!” I shouted.
She nodded, reassured.
The next moment we had plunged into the mass. Except for the sudden
twists as we banked, we seemed to be motionless in a dense fog. But the
engine still roared, and drops of congealed moisture, collecting on the
stays of the upper wings, blew viciously into our faces. The damp cold
struck through me to my bones, and I remembered suddenly that I was in
my extremely unsuitable ordinary clothes. There was no saying to what
height this mad fool might take us--he was still climbing steeply--and
I had no mind to catch my death of cold. Hanging on with one hand to
the side of the canted-up machine that threatened to fling me out
directly I rose from my seat, I managed to reach the locker where he
kept the flying-coats for his passengers, wriggled somehow into one of
them.
It was only by setting my teeth that I did it, for my head was whirling
dizzily and, cursing the day I had strained my nerves beyond
breaking-point, I had to fight back desperately an almost overmastering
panic that came upon me in gusts from a part of me beyond my will. I
could not have achieved it, had it not been for the fog which, blotting
out the earth beneath us, obliterated temporarily the sense of height.
I was shaking all over as I got back into my seat. I glanced at Sylvia.
She was sitting quiet and brave, a little strained, perhaps, staring at
the blank fog through which we drove in steadily upward sweeps.
* * * * *
Suddenly we emerged into dazzling sunshine, warm despite the cold rush
of the air. All above us was an infinite clarity of blue. Sylvia--I
guessed rather than heard--shouted something, waved her arm in
delighted surprise, pointing around and beneath. Close below us was no
longer the earth, but that magical landscape which is only offered by
the upper surface of the clouds. We rose for yet a minute or two before
we could get the full impression of it. At our first emergence, great
swelling banks of sunlit snow overtopped us here and there, blew across
us from moment to moment, uncannily unsubstantial as we went through
them, in mere fog. Then finally we looked down upon it all, the eye
ranging far and wide over a magnificent confusion of multitudinous
rounded knolls, of fantastic perilously toppling lofty crags from which
streamed wisps of gossamer vapor, of grotesque mountains and tremendous
chasms, such as the wildest scenery of earth can never show.
Familiar as it was to me, I could not help admiring anew the immense
sublimity of that spectacle which drifts so brilliantly under the blue
arch of heaven when the shadowed earth below teems with rain, that
spectacle which the eye of earth-bound man never sees. To the extreme
limit of vision it stretched, apparently solid, a fairy country
gleaming snow-white under the vertical sun, across which our shadow,
growing smaller at each instant, flitted like the shadow of a great
bird.
I felt Sylvia’s hand squeeze me in her delight. My exasperated
annoyance with Toby died down, all but vanished. Perhaps he wasn’t such
a fool, after all. It was worth while to show her this. That was what
he had climbed so steeply for. Now he would flatten out, circle once or
twice to imprint this fairy scene upon her memory, and then descend.
But he did not. He did not even glance round to us. He held the nose of
the machine up, climbed still, higher and higher, in those sheer and
dizzy spirals.
This was getting beyond a joke. I glanced at my watch, computed the
minutes since we had risen from that gray-green sea now out of sight
beneath the horizon-filling floor of cloud. We must be already over
five thousand feet up. That was surely quite enough. He might lose his
direction, cut off from the earth by that great cloud-layer, miss the
sea for our return. A forced landing upon hard ground with those
water-floats of ours would be a pretty ugly crash. I craned forward,
looked over his shoulder at the dial of the barograph. We were _seven
thousand_! What on earth--
I shouted at him, but of course he did not hear it in the deafening
roar of the engine. I caught hold of his shoulder, shook him hard. I
had to shake a second time before his face came round to me. It
startled me with its strange set fixity of expression, the wild eyes
that glared at me. I gesticulated, pointed downward. He opened his lips
in a vicious ugly snarl, shouted something of which only the ugly
rebuff of my interference was intelligible, turned again to his
controls, lifted the machine again from its momentary sag.
I sank back into my seat, quivering. Sylvia glanced at me inquiringly.
I shrugged my shoulders. She had not, I hoped, seen that ugly snarl
upon his face. The cloud-floor was now far below us, its crags and
chasms flattened to mere corrugations on its gleaming surface. The
seaplane rose, circling round and round untiringly, corkscrewing ever
up and up into the infinite blue above us.
I was now thoroughly alarmed. What was he playing at? I worried over
the memory of his furious face when I had made my gestured
expostulation. Surely he could have no serious purpose of any kind in
thus climbing so steeply far above any reasonable altitude. There was
no serious purpose imaginable. Unless--no, I refused to entertain the
sudden sickening doubt of his sanity. He was playing a joke on us, on
_me_. Guessing that I had lost my nerve, and angry with me for spoiling
a _tête-à-tête_ flight with Sylvia, he was maliciously giving me a
twisting. Presently he would get tired of the joke, flatten out.
* * * * *
But he did not get tired of it. Up and up we went, in turn after
turn--rather wider circles now, for the air was getting rare and thin,
and sometimes we sideslipped uncomfortably, and the engine flagged,
threatening to misfire, until he readjusted the mixture--but still
climbing. Far, far below us the cloud-floor was deceptive of our real
height in its fallacious similitude to an immense horizon of
snow-covered earth.
I glanced at my watch, calculated again our height from the minutes. We
must surely now be over twelve thousand feet! I shrank nervously from
the mere thought of again moving to look over his shoulder at the
barograph. An appalling feeling of vertigo held me in its clutch. That
last glance over the side had done it, reawakening all the panic terror
which had swept over me that day when--at such a height as this--I had
seen that Hun plunge to destruction and had suddenly realized, as
though I had but just awakened from a dream, my own high-poised
perilous instability. I sat there clutched and trembling, could not
have moved to save my life. I would have given anything to have closed
my eyes, forgotten where I was, but the horrible fascination of this
upward progress held them open as though mesmerized. I tried to compute
the stages of our ascent from our circling sweeps. Thirteen
thousand--thirteen thousand five hundred--fourteen thousand--fourteen
thousand five hundred--fifteen thousand--I gave it up. It was icily
cold. My head was dizzy, my ears sizzling with altered blood-pressure.
My lungs heaved in this rarefied atmosphere. I glanced at Sylvia. She
looked ill; her lips were blue; she was gasping as though about to
faint.
She looked at me imploringly, made a gesture with her hand toward
Toby’s inexorable back. I shrugged my shoulders in sign that I had
already protested in vain. But nevertheless I obeyed. Once more I
leaned forward and clutched at his shoulder. Once more, after I had
shaken him furiously, he turned upon me with that savage snarl, shouted
something unintelligible, and switched round again to his controls.
Sylvia and I looked at each other. This time she had seen. In her eyes
I read also that doubt of his sanity which was torturing me. She
motioned me toward the cockpit, pantomimed my taking over control. It
was impossible. I gestured it to her. Even if my nerves had been
competent to the task, it was certain that Toby would not voluntarily
relinquish his place. To have attempted to take it from him--if he were
indeed mad--would have resulted in a savage struggle where the
equilibrium of the machine would inevitably have been lost--in about
two seconds we should all of us be hurtling down to certain death. The
only thing to do was to sit tight--and hope that he would suddenly have
enough of this prank, and bring us earthward again. But even if he had
suddenly vanished from his place, to clamber over into the cockpit and
take charge was more than I could have done at that moment. There was a
time when I might have done it. But now I was shaking like a leaf. I
could not have pushed a perambulator, let alone pilot an airplane.
And still we climbed, roaring up and up. The yellow canvas of the lower
plane, gleaming in the sunshine, seemed curiously motionless against
the unchanging blue that was all around us. The earth, the very clouds
below us, seemed totally lost. I could not bring myself to venture a
glance down to them. We seemed out of contact with everything that was
normal life, suspended in the infinite void. And yet the engine roared,
and I knew that we still climbed.
* * * * *
We must have been somewhere about twenty thousand feet. My head seemed
as though it would burst. I was breathing with difficulty. A little
higher, and we should need oxygen. Toby’s face was of course hidden
from me, but he sat steadily at his controls, apparently in no
embarrassment. Probably he had recently been practicing flying to great
heights--it would be his queer idea of amusing himself--and was more
habituated to changes of atmospheric pressure. I looked at Sylvia. She
was plainly much distressed--and more than distressed, _frightened_. I
cannot describe the anguish which gripped me as I contemplated her.
Whatever I had tried to pretend to myself down there on that distant
earth in those six dreary months since my pride had been wounded, I
knew now, with an atrocious vividness of realization, that I loved her.
And I could do nothing--_nothing_--to save her, if that lunatic in
front did not come to his senses! The imploring look she fixed upon me
was exquisite torture. Speech was impossible in that deafening roar of
the engine, but she made me understand--the bitter irony of it!--that
it was in me she trusted. I took her hand, pressed it to my lips. If we
were to die, she should at least know what I felt for her. And
then--oh, miracle!--I felt my hand pulled toward her, taken to her
lips. She met my eyes with a wan smile of unmistakable meaning.
And then, just as I was all dizzy with the shock of it, the roar of the
engine ceased. There was a sudden silence that was awesome in its
completeness. Our nose came down to slightly below the horizontal.
Thank heaven, he was tired of the joke, was flattening out, was going
to descend! We began, in fact, to circle in a wide, very slightly
depressed, slanting curve. Toby twisted round from his seat, one hand
still upon the controls. There was a grim little smile on his face as
his eyes, curiously glittering, met mine.
“You get out!” he said curtly. His voice sounded strangely toneless,
far off, in that rarefied upper atmosphere.
For a moment I had a spasm of alarm, but I could not believe he was
serious. It was too fantastic, at twenty thousand feet in the air.
“Don’t be a silly ass, Toby! Take us down. The joke has gone far
enough.” My own voice was thin in my ears.
He ignored my protest.
“This is where you get out!” he repeated stubbornly.
Was the man really mad? I thought it best to humor him, managed to
force a little laugh.
“Thanks very much, but I’d rather go back with you,” I said.
“We’re not going back,” he replied with grim simplicity. “But you
are--here and now.”
This was madness right enough! Our only chance was to get him into
conversation, turn the current of his thoughts somehow, coax him back
to earth.
“Not going back?” I grinned at him as if he were being really funny.
“Where are you going, then?”
“We’re going on--Sylvia and I.”
* * * * *
He smiled at her fondly, nodded as though sure of her assent. She
uttered a little cry of alarm, clutched at me. All the time, while we
were speaking, he was steering the airplane automatically with one
hand, bringing her round and round in wide, flat circles where we lost
the minimum of height.
“On?” I said in innocent inquiry, while my brain worked desperately.
Curiously enough, in that moment of crisis, I found my head as clear,
my nerves as steady, as they had ever been in my life. All my dizzy
turmoil had vanished. I forgot that I had ever had a panic in the air.
I was merely trying to think of some scheme by which I might be able to
replace him at those controls. “On--where?”
He jerked his hand upward.
“Up there! On and on, until we come to--” He stopped himself suddenly,
his face diabolically suspicious. “You think I’m going to tell you,
don’t you? You think you’ll be able to follow us? But you wont! You get
out--here and now--d’you understand?”
I tried to be cunning.
“But Toby!” I objected. “I think I know the way--better than you do,
perhaps. Change places and let me take the machine.”
It was a false move.
“What?” he cried. “You think you know the way, do you? You think you
know the way beyond the stars?” He burst suddenly into a hideous laugh,
thin and cackling in the awesome silence of that upper air. “Then
you’ll never get there! I’ll see to that! Get out!” He gestured over
the side, into the blue abyss above which we circled. “_Quick!_”
* * * * *
I glanced at Sylvia. She was sitting numbed with horror, incapable of
speech. As I looked, she jerked forward in a gesture of wild protest
abruptly checked by the straps which held her in her seat. The airplane
rocked in its now tender equilibrium just as something went _crack_!
past my head. My eyes were back on Toby in the fraction of an instant.
Still twisted in his seat, he was leveling that automatic pistol at me.
I could see by his eyes that he was in the very act of pressing the
trigger for the second time.
Four years’ war-service in the air make a man pretty quick. In a flash
I had ducked, flung myself upon him over the slight partition between
us, wrenched at his wrist. Risky as it was, it was certain death to all
of us if this homicidal maniac was not dealt with. His awkward
half-turned position put him at a disadvantage, but he fought grimly,
with all a maniac’s strength, trying to point the muzzle of that pistol
at my body. Automatically, of course, he rose to face me, relinquished
the controls to use both hands. I felt the machine lurch and plunge
dizzily nose downward. I had one lightning-quick thought--thank God,
Sylvia was strapped!--and then I tumbled over the partition headfirst
into the cockpit.
It was not thought but instinct with which I clutched the
steering-stick,--one had not much time for thought when fighting the
nimble Fokker,--got into some sort of position on the seat. We were
vertically nose down, spinning horribly--but not once but many times in
the war I had shammed dead, gone rushing earthward in a realistic
twirling spin and then abruptly flattened out of it upside down and
come up like a rocket over the pursuing Hun. This was simpler. I had
only to pull her out of it--and only when I pulled her out of it,
circled her round once for a long steady glide, did I realize that I
was alone in that cockpit. There was no Toby!
I glanced back to Sylvia. She sagged in her seat against the
straps--fainted. Just as well, I thought grimly. I touched the engine
to a momentary activity to test it, shut it off again for a long
circling descent toward the cloud-floor far below. An exultation leaped
in me, the exultation of old days of peril in the air. I thought of
Toby, with whom I had shared so many, with a sudden warming of the
heart. Poor old Toby! He had died as after all he perhaps would have
wished to die, high up in the infinite blue--dead of shock long before
he reached the earth. I thrilled with the old-time sense of mastery
over a fine machine, delicately sensitive to the controls, as that
massed and pinnacled cloud landscape grew large again beneath me. My
one anxiety was whether it hid sea or land. Then, just as we drew near,
I saw a deep black gulf riven in its snowy mass--saw down through that
gulf a tiny model steamship trailing a long white wake....
The wedding? That was last year.
[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the March 1924 issue of
The Blue Book Magazine.]
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