Chapter V

As Jennie had said, her emotions, touching Billy Cobb and the air, were conflicting and contradictory. Yet they were not difficult to render into logic.

This girl who had breathed the atmosphere of the airdrome all her life must inevitably have done one of two things; either grown to hate and fear the element that exacted mortal toll of its servants or grown to worship it. And she had done the latter. For she had the intellectual stability to perceive that if men were killed by the air it was because of their own unworthiness, the imperfections of themselves and of their implements of flight, not because of any inherent malignity in the air. And she foresaw with clear conviction the coming of a day when toll would no longer be exacted, when man’s mastery of the air would be at least as secure and complete as his domination of the sea and the land. So she did not hate the air. For she knew it a reluctant and involuntary killer, asking nothing better than to abandon its rôle of murderous tyrant and assume the benevolent part of the willing and faithful jinni.

Instead of hating the air she regarded it, therefore, as a deity more sinned against than sinning. And it was natural that, in Jennie’s eyes, the early airfarers, the men who offered their lives to the cause of air conquest, should be glorified. She invested them with the romantic glamour that is the meed of the pioneer in every fresh field of hardship and hazard. She set them above other men. In fact, she considered the existence of other men scarcely at all. And when they did cross her thoughts she saw them simply as an alien race of animated lay figures that did not live on airdromes. She could not conceive of a complete, satisfactory and thoroughly real man who should be anything but a flyer.

It was inevitable, therefore, that her choice for the man of men should fall on a flyer. And it was impossible that the man who won her favor should hold the precious gift unless he kept faith with the air--as Billy Cobb would have phrased it--to the last crash. For she could respect none but the men of the air, the only men she knew and understood. And there is more depends upon respect in love than many folk suppose.

On the other hand, Jennie was a woman. She was a very complete and thoroughgoing woman. And she had her full share of the woman’s primitive maternal instinct, which is the protecting and sheltering instinct. The primitive-woman part of Jennie was a quite distinct part. It was not a reasoning component. It was emotional solely and concerned with the fundamental realities, not with intellectual ideals.

The intellectual, idealistic part of Jennie Brent loved Billy Cobb the flyer, the pioneer, the potential martyr for a cause. But the instinctive-woman part loved Billy Cobb the man. And the maternal urge, the sheltering element in Jennie the primal woman demanded the protection of Billy the man regardless of ideals and abstract traditions. It revolted violently at the grisly vision of his crushed and battered body lying some day in a crazy pyramid of wreckage.

Which explains convincingly enough why Jennie Brent was at the same time afraid to trust her lover to the air and fearful of winning him from it. But this much, as she told Billy, was evident to her. Whether he flew or not the woman of her would always love him. While, if he turned traitor to the air, shed the romance of his calling, and became one with the animated lay figures who lived outside the airdrome, the intellectual ideal-worshiping part of her could no longer love him--even though his renunciation of the air were for her sake only.

And so, with rare understanding and insight, she made her decision. The protective urge which had come with love and bred fear must be dominated and stilled--or, failing that, the anguish borne patiently. The alternative was even worse than the vision of Billy in the wreckage.

Out on the screened veranda Billy held her close and long. Off in the dark, where the squat little huts of the post lay along in orderly, shadowy rows, lights in windows began winking out, one by one. Then a tremulous cry floated over hut and hangar.

Taps!

Billy released her. They crossed to the door. She put a hand on his arm.

“It will be all right, dear. I have been foolish. Don’t mind me. I feel so much better already, now that I have told you! But you mustn’t think of it any more--never. I can beat it. I am sure I can. And of course you will be safe! The air won’t hurt two people who love it as much as you and I do. Now, mind! Forget all about this. I promise you I shall. Good night, Billy dear. And dream about--about October.”

But Billy did not dream about October. He dreamed of crashes. That was something he had never done before. The horrible thing about the crashes he dreamed of was that they didn’t hurt him--they hurt Jennie. She seemed always to be there watching when they came, looking on in frozen helplessness, speechless, anguished, mortally stricken, while shadowy figures dashed toward the wreckage to drag him out, dead.

Once his ship caught fire. And then he saw Jennie go white, sway, and sink to the ground, to lie there pitifully at peace until some fool revived her and brought back her hopelessness.

Cobb was not aware in these dreams of the absurdity of dying and watching himself die at the same time. It seemed quite natural and horribly real and vivid.

Some time before morning the dreaming stopped. And all that remained to Billy of that night of horrors when he opened his eyes in the gray light of the oncoming day was an oppressive sense of foreboding.

“What’s the matter with me?” he muttered sitting up in his Q. M. cot and blinking questioningly at the recumbent form of his roommate, Norris, who was snoring comfortably in another cot. Norris did not answer.

Out on the airdrome some one opened a throttle. The sudden roar of an engine struck on Billy’s ears with ominous impact. That gave him the answer. An icy current coursed his spine and he was instantly aware of a panicky urge to duck under the bedclothing and shut out the hideous turmoil. Instead he swung his bare feet to the floor and sat there, gripping the cold frame of the iron cot and shivering.

He had heard of this thing before, this pilot’s sickness, this miserable cringing and shrinking at the voice of an airplane. He remembered that Norris once----

But he refused to think of it. He got up hastily, shook himself, and hurried into his clothes. He went out into the chill of the pink dawn and headed resolutely toward the hangars.

His morning’s allotment of propaganda hoppers were waiting for him, punctual with the punctuality of eagerness. They stood in an animated group discussing the mysteries of the lumbering two-passenger DH that squatted in readiness for Billy’s coming, the engine idling patiently. It seemed to Billy that the bubbling of the exhaust manifolds had changed character overnight. Usually the engine greeted him in the morning with a warm welcoming pur. Now the pur held a sinister note. It sounded cunningly gratified instead of frankly glad, and there was a siren quality of oily venom, and a leering chortle in the voice of the engine.

Billy waved a passenger into the rear cockpit and made his accustomed round of inspection while the man was fussing with his helmet and goggles and fumbling with the safety belt. But he might just as well have foregone the tour for he did not consciously see a single cotter pin or turnbuckle. His vision was all of the inward-looking variety. He was acutely aware of Jennie. He saw her sitting as she sat the night before in the dim aura of the colonel’s reading lamp on the screened veranda. He saw her humid eyes turned on him, pleading. He sensed the faint chill of her tears on his cheek. He felt the clinging warmth of her beseeching arms about his shoulders.

Those arms! They were the arms of Jennie the woman--protecting, maternal arms. He could feel them poignantly now, drawing him back, back from this treacherous monster of wood and wire and fabric with the voice of flame; back from the brooding hangars; back from the waiting air!

And he wanted to go. How he wanted to go! His feet itched to be off, to run with him to Jennie. If he could only do it--go to her now, without delay--and tell her he had renounced every service but hers. He knew how it would be with her this morning. She would be lying abed wide-eyed and fearful, listening to the hum of his engine, straining for the first sound of disaster, the little deprecatory cough, the sudden silence that would follow, and then, perhaps, the rending explosion of--the last crash! Not until he had come in from his final hop and given the ship over to Hansen would she relax and turn to her pillow to sleep again--perhaps. And if----

Billy stopped his pacing round the waiting ship. He realized that Hansen was eying him queerly.

“Hell!” he grunted to himself and swung up the fuselage and into his seat.

In the ship he felt better. The touch of the controls steadied him. The familiar dials, staring at him like great round eyes from the instrument board, reassured him somewhat. He tested the engine. The needle on the tachometer jumped obediently to fifteen-fifty. The engine didn’t sound so badly now.

He fancied the attack was passing. “Must be something I ate last night,” he told himself as he settled his goggles and waved to Hansen to clear away the blocks. Then he tried to swallow and it hurt. His throat was like parchment. He ran his tongue over his lips. They felt like crinkled cardboard.

He swore hoarsely under his breath and headed the ship for the starting line, allowing himself twice as much run for the take-off as even his conservative principles habitually dictated. In the air he was painfully conscious of being careful. He had always been careful but never consciously so. Now, on the turns, he found himself constantly twitching the stick to get the feel of the ailerons and make sure of his flying speed. DH’s are not healthy in a spin, it is true. He had never spun a DH. But he had never been afraid of spinning one. Now he was afraid. If he should lose speed on a turn and she should drop into that eccentric corkscrew descent--and shed a wing----

He had a picture of Jennie sitting bolt upright in bed, paralyzed with horror as the echoes of the thud and crash reverberated through the post. Of the crash itself, what it would do to him, he never thought. It was Jennie alone, her tragedy, that fixed his troubled attention.

He circled the field and measured off the distance for his landing. He gave the matter of landing many seconds of intense calculation. Not even in his cadet days had he ever concentrated deliberately on the problem of bringing a ship safely to the ground. He had done it without thought, automatically, and always just right. Now he reasoned about it. Moderate speed, settling gradually with a swift rush, tail skid and wheels brushing the ground simultaneously--that was the best way, for the ship. And the danger of a blowing tire was so remote that it wasn’t worth consideration. But Billy considered it. With the ship running free a blown tire might mean a crumpled wheel, a fast nose over, and--fire or a broken neck! Better to lumber in slowly, level off high, and drop to the ground with most of the headway lost before she touched. A tire was more likely to burst, but then there wouldn’t be enough speed to hurt anything but the ship. Plenty of time as her nose went down and the propeller snapped to cut the switch and nip the fire in the bud. And a hand braced against the cowl would take up the shock. Yes, that was the best way to land--not for the ship but for Jennie. Clumsy, inelegant, unprofessional perhaps, but--safe, eminently safe!

And that was the way he landed. A turtle jumping from a table would have been equally graceful--and not half as secure. The big DH floated ponderously into the airdrome under Billy’s restraining guidance, dropped its tail three feet over the grass tops, yawed along hesitantly for a hundred-odd feet, and then literally sprawled onto the turf with a thump and a bounce and a creaking and straining of struts and wires and longerons. She all but stopped in her tracks. It was a scandalous performance and Hansen, the crew chief, groaned with reprobation when he thought of the ship. He had been with Cobb for a year and had seen nothing to approach this for clumsiness in all that time.

“Holy smoke!” the mechanic snorted. “A major general couldn’t have done it worse!”

But Billy was satisfied. He wasn’t thinking of his reputation as a technician with the stick. He wasn’t thinking of the DH. He was thinking of the girl who lay with straining ears in a chintz-curtained bedroom somewhere to the rear of a one-story hut fronted by a wide screened veranda. When the bumping and the creaking were over and he knew he was safe--for that time--he experienced a shameless sense of prayerful relief.

But what about the next time? He wished there were never another passenger on any airdrome in all the world. But there were nine more on this very one, all waiting for him, all ignorant of the girl who lay and listened. He cursed them all, severally and collectively. Then he gritted his teeth and taxied around to pick up another.

When that morning’s propaganda hopping was over Hansen was ready to burst into tears. He spent the rest of the forenoon and part of the afternoon with plumb lines and a level straightening out the kinks in Billy’s abused ship. But it did little good, for the same thing happened the next day, and the next, and the next, until Hansen was beside himself and almost ready to desert.

He thought his pilot had lost his eye. But he was wrong. Billy’s eye was as good as ever. His hand was as cunning, his brain as quick. Physically there was nothing wrong with him. But he was in a bad way none the less. And two persons at Langstrom Field knew what the trouble really was. One of these was Norris, his roommate--who was also his confidant. The other, of course, was Jennie.

Billy Cobb, they knew, was becoming a very sick man, not in body but in spirit. Billy Cobb had “the wind up.” Jennie knew this because she was Jennie. Norris knew because, watching Billy grow gaunter and more morose, day by day, and observing that he tossed about in bed at night and often lay for hours on end smoking cigarettes in a chain, he had asked him bluntly what the matter was. And Billy had told him. He trusted Norris.

“John,” confessed Billy, “I’ve got what you had once, I guess.”

“I thought so, Bill,” said Norris. “Well, I beat it--more or less. You’ll beat it too. But it’s certainly hell, ain’t it?”

“It’s hell,” groaned Billy. “And I won’t beat it, John.”

“Shucks! ’Course you will, Bill. Don’t tell me anything I could do you can’t!”

“I won’t beat it, John. I’ve simply got to live with it till the last crash. There’s no way out for me.”

“Don’t be a fool, Bill. You’ve just got nerves. Workin’ too hard. Twice as hard as anybody on the post. And since you’ve had the wind up you’ve worked harder still to ease your conscience. Let up, old-timer. Let ‘George’ do some of the work.”

“John, I tell you I’ll never hear an engine again as long as I live without getting the hoo-haws. And I’ll tell you why. Jennie worries!”

“What? Not Jennie Brent?”

“John, she’s worrying herself sick. You watch her eyes the next time you see her. And she’s losing weight. Think I can beat a thing like that, John?”

“My God, Bill!” said Norris, “I don’t know. But it’s bad--bad! To think that Jennie Brent, of all----”

“And she won’t let me quit, either. I’ve promised her to stay with it, whatever.”

“Well, that sounds like Jennie, anyhow. All grit. Always thought so.”

“But it’s killing her slowly!” wailed Billy. “I can see it.”

“Bill,” said Norris, “damned if I know what to say. You’re in an awful fix now, all right. And so is Jennie. But perhaps,” he added brightening, “she’ll get over it after a while--after you’re married.”

Billy shook his head.

“She won’t,” he denied. “It’s getting the best of her by the minute, John.”

Norris considered, puffing at the black brier clenched in his teeth.

“I give it up,” he conceded at last. “But I’ll tell you what I think, Bill. This is a funny game we’re in. Queer things are always happening as if--as if they were made to order. You know what I mean. Take me. I had the wind up for six months--you remember? And nobody suspected a thing--only you. Then just when I was walking in on the C. O. to tell him I was through the adjutant stopped me and handed me my orders to fly the _XT-1_ from Aberdeen to San Diego. I said I couldn’t. But the C. O. and the D. M. A. insisted that I not only could but I would. Well, when I finished that hop to California alive I figured nothing was going to happen to me until it happened. I was cured. Something always turns up in this game, Bill. Something’ll turn up for you. And remember this, Bill. Things don’t _happen_ in this world. It is my belief that they’re _arranged_.”

“If I could catch the bird who does my arranging for me, then,” exploded Billy, “by golly, I’d----”

“Bill,” warned Norris, “that’s sacrilegious!”