Part 2

“I never saw anything so perfect,” she breathed. “You brought her to my feet!”

Perhaps already Jennie dimly perceived something symbolic in the landing of Billy Cobb--at her feet.

She gave him her small firm hand to steady him when he heaved himself up from the cockpit and leaped to the ground. They walked off the field together and down the gaunt post street between bare rows of flimsy frame huts.

Jennie stopped before one of them larger than the rest that boasted a screen-inclosed veranda. Odd lots of weird furniture--the potpourri of outlandish home equipment that bespeaks the officer of many “fogies” who has gathered his store of household gods in all the ports of the seven seas--littered the minute grass plots on either side of the cinder path to the door. Sweating men in dingy overalls and campaign hats were bearing it in, table by table, chair by chair, trophy by trophy, to a running fire of humorous comment.

“I live here,” said Jennie.

“Oh,” said Billy, “you’re the new C. O.’s family, aren’t you?” It was the first time he had considered who she might be or where she had come from, so completely had he accepted her on sight.

“I’m Jennie Brent, yes.”

“Sure,” said Billy. “Now I get why you’re so--so--dog-goned--well, full out!”

She colored very pleasantly.

“Oh,” she smiled--and in her smile there was a combination of pleasure and wistfulness hard to picture and harder to interpret--“you think that?” She turned wholly serious and wholly wistful. “Why?”

“Gosh!” he temporized, “I--I don’t know. But anyway, Colonel Brent’s daughter----”

She flushed with pleasure and interrupted:

“You know daddy, then?”

“You bet!”

“Then you’ve got to come in for tea this afternoon. We’ll be all settled by then. I’ll tell daddy you’re coming. Oh, and I almost forgot--how shall I describe you to him?”

“But--but I was going to take a flying kiwi up for his pay hops.”

“Why,” exclaimed Jennie in mock astonishment, “I thought you knew Colonel Brent!”

It was Billy’s turn to be astonished.

“What’s that got to do----” he began.

“Don’t you know what daddy does with flying officers who daren’t fly without a nurse?”

“I--I’m afraid I don’t.”

“He lets them live on base pay until they’re transferred to the infantry, where they belong. Daddy sees that they’re transferred, too. So, you see, you’re not going to fly a kiwi this afternoon after all.”

“Hallelujah! What time’s tea?”

“Five o’clock. Who’s coming, please?”

“Bill Cobb.”

“I thought so,” declared Jennie.

“Hunh?” he grunted, taken aback. “How come?”

“I heard you were stationed on this post, and you check with the specifications, sir. You are not without honor among your own people, you know.”

She turned up the cluttered cinder path, annexing a bamboo stool with one capable hand and a teakwood humidor with the other as she went. Billy stood shamelessly and stared after her until she disappeared in the house.

III.

It is told of Billy Cobb that he never had to woo the air.

The first instructor to take him up reported back to the pilotage office an hour later in a semihysterical condition.

“Say,” he demanded of the senior instructor who had assigned him to introduce Cadet Cobb to the opening chapter of the flying primer, “what’re you trying to do--kid me?”

“Kid you! How come?”

“This What’s-his-name cadet--this Cobb! If he’s a cadet I’m an ostrich!”

“What’s the trouble with Cobb?”

“Trouble with Cobb? Trouble with me, you mean! He’s been showing me how to fly for the last half hour. Come out to the line. You’ve got to see this!”

Of course it was weeks before Billy was officially turned loose and rated for his wings. The office of the D. M. A. is a stickler for preservation of the forms and appearances. But actually the marvel spread through hangar, shop, and barrack that day. Cobb was “over the hump!”

It was the first day, mind you, he had ever warped a wing or kicked a rudder bar. He had laid his hand on the airplane and the airplane in that instant had become his to do with as he willed. And this was so, of course, precisely because some occult well of sympathy within him taught the man exactly what he must will to do--and what must not be willed.

There was that same sympathy in him where Jennie was concerned. And he won her, as he won the air, instantly--without wooing. His spirit laid its spell upon her heart just as his hand had set its cunning on the airplane. The air and Jennie. Both became his in the hour of meeting. He was not then aware of it but when Jennie Brent had slipped the strap through the buckle of his helmet at that first encounter she already belonged to him. The gesture was the first signal between them of dedication on her part and consecration on his. Once again Bill Cobb was “over the hump.”

In all their brief life together the analogy between Jennie and the air with respect to Billy Cobb holds true. Thus, it was nothing but the idle matter of appearances that kept Cobb waiting those weeks succeeding his conquest of the airplane before his pilot’s rating was bestowed. And it was the same matter of appearances that withheld for a space the open avowal of Jennie’s surrender. A woman has need to be at least as jealous of the forms as the D. M. A.

Eight weeks to a day after Billy’s first encounter with the air--in ’seventeen things happened faster in the service than they do now--his rating had come through. Was it blind coincidence, or was it a cunningly fitted fragment in that symbolic mosaic of analogy which made their relationship so remarkable, that Jennie’s overt surrender should likewise have chanced exactly eight weeks after their first meeting?

June was passing in the farewell blaze of an incomparable sunset. A little wind wandered curiously into the airdrome bringing a breath of grassy freshness from the tablelands beyond the coastal hills to mingle with the acrid bouquet of fresh-burned castor oil and gas. It rippled the canvas curtains of the Bessoneau hangars where they stood in a massive row, shoulder to shoulder, silent, placid, like elephants chained and sleeping, long shadows stretched behind them. It quivered the flaccid form of the landing sock, hanging nerveless against its staff by the door of the pilotage hut at the end of the hangar line. But most of all it stirred the heart of Jennie, standing near an open Bessoneau, peering steadfastly into the gold and glory of the west, and waiting. For at the same time that it kissed and cooled her cheek it murmured in her ear a faintly intoned chantey--the song of a distant homing motor.

Billy was coming at last! He was an hour overdue, the longest hour Jennie could recall. But it was all right now. She could hear the singsong shouting of the full-out engine clearly.

“Billy is coming!” That was the burden of the engine’s song that reached her down the wind. Jennie marveled at the sweetness of that music.

Her eyes confirmed the message of the wind. High above the purple summit of a rose-framed thunder head she made him out, a buoyant purple speck in a dazzling flood of wine-clear gold. She watched the speck until it grew to a flake, the flake until it became an airplane, the airplane until it roared above her head, crossed to the downwind limit of the field, spun about with a flash of upflung wing and flirting tail, and shot for the landing with a sudden hushing of the deep-voiced engine.

The silver ship rolled up with friendly little snorts and chuckles and stopped beside her. Billy took her upstretched hand and jumped down. They left the plane to Hansen and his crew and walked away together in the twilight down the row of brooding hangars.

“Oh,” Jennie sighed happily, “I am glad, Billy!”

“Glad? Why, particularly, Jennie?”

“I--I don’t know. How was the ship today?”

“Better than ever, Jennie.”

He paused, hesitating to voice the thought that followed, groping, too, for words to give it form. Then:

“Do you know,” he said, “there’s something about that ship and you, Jennie, that---- Well, what I mean is that when I am with that ship and when I am with you I sort of feel--the same way. Kind of comfortable and--and, well, happy, Jennie. Do you know what I mean?”

He felt her sway toward him. He felt her hand on his arm.

“Perhaps”--she answered, a little breathlessly, “perhaps I do, Billy--tonight!”

“Why ‘tonight,’ Jennie?”

“Because--because----”

They walked on with no more speech until they reached the pilotage hut beyond the hangars. It was dim and silent. They sat down, side by side, on the low step before the door. Excepting where Hansen and his crew were tucking the silver ship to bed by the flitting light of a trouble-shooter’s lamp, two hundred yards away, no life appeared anywhere on the glooming expanse of the quiet field.

“Jennie,” said Billy Cobb, “I know why that little ship reminds me of you.”

“Why, Billy?”

“Because I love it, too.”

There was just enough of the blue-gray twilight left for Billy to see the widening of her eyes at that and the accentuation of the wistful curve at either corner of her mouth.

She sat considering his face intently. Then she turned away, leaned a little forward, clasped her hands about her knees, and stared off at something he could not see--something in the remote distance, beyond the faintly outlined crests of the western hills.

“You are sure,” she asked at length, very softly, “that it is true--what you have said about the ship and me, Billy?”

“I am sure,” he said. “It is true now, it will always be true, Jennie--till--till the last crash.”

He thought she shuddered just a little. Then:

“Why do you always say that--that--about the last crash, Billy?”

“Why--why, I don’t know. Just a habit--means something a long ways off, I guess.”

“Oh!” said Jennie, a faint tremor in her voice. “I--I hope so, Billy.”

“Why, Jennie----”

“Nothing, Billy--nothing at all. A foolish idea. It’s gone.”

She paused, looked away, then turned her face to his again.

“And just what,” she questioned, a little timidly, a little eagerly, “did you mean, Billy, about--about the ship--and--and me?”

Billy Cobb drew a deep breath.

“I will show you--dear,” he said.

At ten o’clock a single figure moved through the moon-cast shadow of the pilotage hut. At the edge of the shadow the figure paused. There was a little noise--such a noise as tokens the parting of close-pressed lips. The single figure became twain. Billy Cobb and Jennie Brent emerged reluctantly into the argent flood that bathed the airdrome and passed again along the row of canvas stables where the airplanes slept, under the silver benediction of the moon.

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.

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.