Part 3

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!”

VI.

August dragged along its procession of heat-smitten ’teens and twenties. Billy Cobb grew thinner and more miserable. A ray of hope appeared to him, however. There was the “609.”

The 609, in the parlance of the air service, is the rigid physical test that every army flyer must survive twice yearly. A man who can triumph over the 609 is verging on bodily perfection. There is no other examination so searching.

And Billy judged that he was a long way from physical impeccability. He prayed that he might not pass the test. It was the only honorable avenue of escape from the incubus of fear that was slowly breaking Jennie and, through Jennie, breaking him, too.

Of course he could have failed to qualify by deliberate deceit. It would be the easiest matter in the world to claim that his eyes were weakening and to prove his claim by false readings of the testing charts. And there were other possibilities. But deceit was a world away from Billy’s code. He had to keep faith and a clean conscience for Jennie. He would do his honest best to qualify--and hope to fail honestly.

Late in the month he reported to the flight surgeon. He was feeling particularly rocky that morning. Which--paradoxically--made him almost cheerful.

“I’ll flunk it sure,” he told himself.

He watched the face of the orderly who took his pulse, blood pressure and temperature anxiously. But the man was an automaton. He was not interested in anything he might discover about Billy’s condition. His face betrayed nothing but boredom.

The junior surgeon who put Billy through the nauseating gates of the revolving chair was professionally discreet.

On the eye charts Billy read a perfect “twenty-twenty” with either eye and then essayed a discouragingly successful “twenty-fifteen.” But he had expected this.

“Not so bad--not so bad,” commented the junior surgeon. “I’ll hand you over to Captain Weyman. He wants to look at you before we turn you loose.”

Billy undressed in the examining room. The dismal conviction was growing on him that he would qualify after all. Nobody had batted an eye or shaken a head. Still, hope was not entirely dead. Weyman might find something. Weyman was thorough.

The surgeon came in and set to work. He waived the minor preliminaries.

“You’re thin,” he said, “but that’s nothing this kind of weather. I hear you’ve been overdoing the flying a bit. I’ll look into that.”

He went over Billy with a stethoscope. Billy could not believe that the excited pounding of his heart would escape comment. Finally Weyman put the stethoscope away. He misread the anxious light in Billy’s eyes.

“Oh,” he said, “you needn’t worry this time. You’ll do. But you’ve got to ease up. I’ve been looking over the reports on the other tests. Blood pressure pretty high. And your heart doesn’t sound as good as the last time. But you’ll do. Get more sleep. Cut down the flying by half. A rest will fix you up like new. You’re taking a spell off in October. You’ll be a new man after that. Well, come back here in February. See you at the club tonight.”

He clattered out and Billy sat down suddenly. He felt very faint.

Then he remembered that he was to lunch with Jennie. He struggled into his clothes. He had been picturing to himself how he would break the good news of his disqualification. He had visioned the little play of dismay she would make when he told her. He had painted on his mind’s eye the flush of happiness that would relieve the pallor of her cheeks, betraying her gladness in spite of pretended concern.

Now it would not happen. There would be the same mummery of pretense that had been going on for the past month between them, the same transparent mask of unconcern that covered up but did not hide. By tacit consent they would talk of casual things casually. They would smile brightly for each other’s benefit. They would discuss some new phase of the plans for October with the colonel. But neither would be deceived. In the depths of Jennie’s wistful eyes Billy would see the lurking specter of fear. In the deepening lines of Billy’s haggard face Jennie would read the story of his yearning to ease her trouble. And in the back of their minds, while they mouthed inconsequentialities, would be the relentless query of their common obsession: “The last crash--when?”

Billy decided that he couldn’t face Jennie now. It would be turning the knife. He would beg off, have a bite at the club, and bury himself in work. In the evening he would call. By then the edge of his disappointment would have worn off. He could dissemble better then. In the evening----

But would there be any evening?

There it was again! The obsession! He hurled the thought from him. But it would come back! In a moment it would be there dogging him again!

He thought bleakly of the years ahead that he must live with that leering, tantalizing demon mocking him from the back of his brain.

And then it was back, confronting him again! Years ahead? Perhaps only hours! He was scheduled to fly at five o’clock! He decided he would lunch with Jennie after all. It might be the last----

“God!” he choked, tugging at a boot.

She was waiting for him behind the screens on the veranda. She sat listlessly, staring off at distant things. She wondered if Billy suspected a tithe of the whole truth--that she had not slept seven hours in the past week; that she could no longer eat excepting under the compulsion of her father’s watchful eye, or Billy’s; that it was increasingly difficult for her to muster the strength to rise from a chair; that the sound of an engine made her faint and giddy.

She wondered how long it would be before she must give up, must go to bed, must stay there. It wouldn’t be until the sheer impossibility of physical resistance forced it--but that might be any day. She dreaded the revelation the day would bring. She was afraid of its effect on Billy. But she held to her resolution. It was the air or nothing for them.

The crunching of Billy’s boots on the path roused her.

She was standing at the door, holding it ajar, as he came up the two short steps. She was smiling--a pathetic, lying smile.

He led her back to her chair. It occurred to her that if he hadn’t done that she must have sunk to the floor and been carried. She thought she would have liked that. Yet she had the courage to sit erect and smile at him.

“Did you pass all right, dear?” she questioned.

“Yes,” he said dully; “I passed.”

“Oh, Billy, that’s good. I was afraid you might have been overdoing. I wondered. I’m awfully glad, dear.” It was a supreme show of pathetic courage.

He revolted.

“Jennie,” he exclaimed, “I wish to Heaven I’d failed! You’re going out on your feet. I can see it. I confess, I never in my life hoped for anything as I hoped today that Weyman would turn me down! I’ve told Norris about this--he’s the only one that knows. And he said one night that something always turned up. I thought it might be true. I thought the 609 would be the thing. It only proves that Norris----”

“No, Billy dear. It only proves what I have told you--the air needs you, even more than I.”

“It isn’t so Jennie! I know it isn’t so. I’m going to quit. You come first!”

“You are not, Billy Cobb!! That was settled a month ago. You know you’re not. I understand, dear--how you feel. But it can’t be. I won’t permit it. Now come in to lunch and don’t let’s discuss anything gloomier than October. You promise?”

There was nothing else he could do. They went in silently. The colonel was already at table.

* * * * *

The red rim of the sun was just dipping out of sight behind the western hills that evening when Jennie, dressed in white of a crispness that belied the drooping state of her spirits, slipped away from the screened veranda and made painfully off toward the hangars. All afternoon the sultry air had screamed and reverberated with the voices of engines. But now only one ship remained aloft, doggedly circling the field in the falling twilight with throttled motor droning sullenly. The ship was Billy’s. Soon he would make the field and taxi in to the hangar. Jennie meant to be there to meet him. She wanted to let him know in this fashion that she approved and that her strength was equal to the ordeal even of watching him fly.

It was hard going. She stumbled innumerable times. Once she all but fell. But she reached the hangar at length and pulled herself together for the benefit of Hansen, who was waiting with his crew.

Billy’s ship was still circling. Hansen brought Jennie a folding camp stool to sit on while she watched. He never suspected how grateful she was for that small piece of hesitant courtesy.

The mechanic dug a heavy watch from the breast pocket of his oil-stained coveralls and consulted it.

“Been up twenty-five minutes on this hop, Miss Brent,” he said. “He’ll be coming in any minute now.”

As he spoke Billy commenced a sedate spiral at the northern extremity of the field. He was coming in. Not a breath of air stirred. He might have landed equally well from the east, the west, or the south. But the “T” in the white circle clearly pointed the only right way. Billy never disregarded flying regulations. He would have landed the way the T pointed if there hadn’t been another plane to cut his right of way within a million miles.