Chapter IV

The wedding was set for late October. Jennie had sounded out the attitude of authority toward an earlier consummation.

“Any time you say, youngster,” agreed the C. O. “But the service needs your bridegroom pretty badly this summer. Wouldn’t October do?”

“Daddy! Over three months!”

Old “Full-out” Brent, tall and lean, keen-eyed, straight-nosed, straight-browed, square-chinned, and square-souled, looked down at his daughter. A whimsical smile twitched his short mustache.

“I remember a similar occasion,” he reminisced slowly, “when a girl waited three years for me, because the service asked it.”

Jennie studied her father’s boots.

“I forgot,” she pleaded. “I belong to the service, too.”

Billy took it philosophically.

“Come to think of it,” he acquiesced, “there is a lot to do around here this summer. And it takes at least six weeks to be decently married. October’s a bully month, too.”

During July Billy worked prodigiously. It was unreasonably hot, and the engineering section, which Billy directed, got the reaction in the shape of an endless procession of stricken motors.

The post was overrun, too, with visiting officers of every clan and nation of the army--officers of the line, officers of the staff, officers of the quartermaster and ordnance and signal corps, officers of the reserve, shavetails of the National Guard, and even a detachment of cadets from the Academy--most of them detailed to look on and grow wise, some of them detailed for technical work, but all of them crowding, elbowing and clamoring for a taste of the air.

And Billy did his bit with the rest of the post to satisfy them--so much so that five hours of grueling work with the stick, in heavy DH’s, with the air a bedlam of cross-chopping heat bumps to make it more interesting, was an average component of his routine day. This, you understand, “in addition to his other duties” with the engineering section.

His working day started on the flying line an hour before reveille and ended, as a rule, in the repair shop, any number of hours after tattoo. He might have side-stepped the flying, in his capacity of engineer, but he would not. He knew that the ground lubber who has once made a flight talks about it with expansive enthusiasm for the rest of his life. And he made it his job to see that no ground lubber left Langstrom Field without a mouthful of nice things to say about the air. Smooth ladylike flights he gave them, ironing out the heat bumps to the limit of his ability with deft twitches of the stick, wheeling ponderously around the turns, emphasizing the ease and simplicity of flight, minimizing the intricacy and hazard.

“Propaganda hopping,” he called it.

In one sense he welcomed the heavy program. It kept him too busy and too tired to dwell on the tantalizing weeks that stretched drearily ahead between him and the dazzling goal of October. But the grind told on him heavily. Only his burning enthusiasm for the advancement of the flying idea kept him at it. No other pilot on the field--and there were other enthusiasts at Langstrom that summer--could have equaled the pace he set. The groundsman has no conception of what air fatigue can do in a few hours. Cobb grew lean and gray. The change was gradual but by August it had become distinctly noticeable.

And Jennie, watching him jealously, protested at last.

“Billy,” she chided one steaming evening when, for a miracle, he had escaped the slavery of the shop--or rather repudiated it out of sheer weariness--“you are a wreck! I suppose you’ve got to keep the Liberties turning up but you might let down a little on the propaganda hops. Are they necessary, so many of them?”

“I think they are. Aviation is in a bad way, Jennie. You know that. It’s crash, crash, crash, the way these barnstormers at the summer resorts and half-winged kiwis on some of the army posts handle ships. We don’t crash on this field. Not since the colonel came and weeded out the duds, God bless him. We don’t joy hop. We really do aviate. And the more of it we do, the better for the general average, don’t you see? Why, we’ve scored a hundred hours a day with only thirty ships active since July first. And not a shock absorber sprained yet, excepting by some of these outside birds from the reserve and the guard. That’s something to shout about. That’s what makes the ground grippers take heart. It’s the sort of thing we’re doing here this summer that makes the good name of aviation, in the long run--not speed records and cross-continent flights. It’s the good work, Jennie, and we’ve got to keep it up--keep it up till the last crash!”

Jennie drew a quick breath.

“But must you wear yourself out to do it, dear? Is it--is it quite safe for you to go on when you’re so tired? Can’t you ease off, just a little?”

“Really, I don’t mind. I’m tired, maybe, but aside from that I feel great. And winter’s coming. Lots of rest then. In the meantime, every outsider I take up top, Jennie, is going to head straight away from this post and ‘tell the world.’ Fly ’em sweet and often and land ’em safe. They never forget it! Keep at it everlastingly. That’s the only way. Till the last crash!”

“Billy! You’ve said that twice tonight. Please--please don’t!”

“Don’t what, Jennie?”

“That gruesome phrase about the last crash! Please--I don’t like it, Billy. It--it makes me think!” She shuddered.

Cobb was startled. He peered at her. They were sitting on the screen-inclosed veranda. Inside the house, where Colonel Brent was reading, a table lamp stood by a window and its shaded light, shining through ruffled chintz curtains, illumined Jennie’s profile with a soft glow. The subdued radiance was just sufficient for Billy to apprehend the fleeting contraction that swept her wistful features like a black gust. Just sufficient, but more than enough to show him the thing which then and there unsettled and reversed the entire philosophy he had lived by until that moment.

For the thing he had seen on Jennie’s face in that swift flash of revelation was more than distaste, concern, or anxiety. It was stark fear!

“Jennie!” he cried. “What----”

She bit her lip and looked away. The secret was out; the secret she had been trying to hide even from herself. She was afraid--terribly afraid--of the air. And she had spent her short life disdaining folk who were guilty of that same weakness!

But that was before she had met Billy. Then the air and the folk and the things of the air had been her chief interest. It had seemed to her natural and right that the air should be served with tribute of limb and of life, if need be. For that was the creed in which she had lived, under the tutelage of her father. Now she had a new creed, a new religion. The air had become a secondary faith. Billy Cobb was all that really mattered to her. He obscured all the old horizons she had known.

Yet, even as she realized this, she knew there was no alternative for what must lie ahead. It was Billy Cobb, the man of the air, that she loved, after all. As anything else, in any other rôle, she would not have loved him at the first. As anything else she could not think she might love him to the last. There could be no turning off or backing out. She must take him and the air of which he was an integral part together. She must either master her fear or live with and endure it.

Miserably she sat, with averted face, and stared into the dark, until she found the answer. She felt his troubled eyes seeking and questioning and turned at last to face him--and the issue.

“Billy, dear,” she said, “I am sorry--oh, so sorry--that I couldn’t spare you this. I scarcely knew it was there, myself, you see; and it popped out tonight, and you saw it, before I had learned to handle it. But sooner or later it must have come out. I couldn’t have locked it up inside me forever. So perhaps it is just as well we should have it out now, and over with.”

“You mean you really worry--about my flying, Jennie?”

“You have seen it, Billy. A lie about it now would do no good--only tantalize you.”

“But, Jennie, you never----”

“I know, dear. I never did, before.”

“Then why now?”

“Because--because--oh, it’s hard to talk of this, Billy dear! Because I never had anything quite--quite so--so precious at stake!”

“Oh, my gosh!” groaned Billy Cobb.

He hitched his armchair closer and took her hand in both of his.

“Listen, Jennie,” he pleaded; “this isn’t so. It can’t be so, it simply can’t! It’s the--the heat. And this--well, this waiting--for October, you know. Your nerves---- Look here! If I thought this would last I’d--yes, by gosh--I’d chuck----”

“No!”

The word was scarcely more than whispered but it carried the intensity and arresting power of an outcry.

“Billy! That was just what I was afraid you’d try to say. Don’t you see? You mustn’t--you can’t! Why, I wouldn’t marry you if you did. I’d hate myself too much. And--yes, it seems impossible but I know it’s true--I shouldn’t love you, either, as I do now. It’s so strange, so contradictory! I don’t try to understand it but I feel it and know it. I am afraid for you when you fly yet I couldn’t care for you, not wholly, if you didn’t. There is a part of you that belongs to the air. And that is the part that I love best. With that gone----” She dared not go on to the completion of the thought.

Billy Cobb drew a deep breath. He leaned far forward and kissed her. And when he took his face from hers there were tears on his cheek. But his own eyes were dry. He kissed her again and she clung to him forlornly.

At length they drew apart. Billy took her hand again and patted it.

“I understand,” he comforted. “It’s the same part of you that I love. The part that makes me think of airplanes way up top, and clouds, and the way an engine sounds, far off, when the wind is blowing. It may be hard on us to stick it out. Hard on you, because you worry, and hard on me because of you. But it would be a lot harder the other way. We couldn’t stick that out--not together--could we, Jennie?”

“We never could, dear. We’d be ashamed to look each other in the face.”

“It’s settled then. We’ll stay with it.”

“We’ll stay with it--with the air, dear--until--until the--the last crash!”

He gathered her up and folded her in his arms.