Part 2

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.]