A RACE WITH DAWN
In that furious pace toward Aoyama, Daunt had been consumed by one
thought: that upon his single effort hung the saving of human lives--the
covering of a shame to his own nation--the turning away of a foul
allegation from the repute of a friendly Empire. He knew that minutes
were valuable.
On the long, dimly-lighted roadways where the flying hoofs beat their
furious tattoo, few carts were astir, and the trolleys had not yet
appeared on the wider thoroughfares. The rain had washed the air clean,
the wind was dustless and sweet, and the stars were palely bright. Once
a policeman signaled and the driver momentarily slackened speed--then on
as before. The horses were white with foam when they reached the
parade-ground. Here Daunt leaped down and wrenched both lamps from the
carriage. "Go home," he said to the _betto_, and running through a clump
of trees, struck across the waste.
The Japanese stared after him mystified, then with a philosophic
objurgation, turned and drove the sweating horses home at a walk.
Daunt ran to a low door in the long garage. The key was on a ring in his
pocket. He went in, locking the door behind him. There were no electric
lights--he had been there heretofore only by day--and the carriage lamps
made only a subdued glimmer that was reflected from the polished metal
of the great winged thing resting on its carrier. He threw off his
evening coat and set feverishly to work. After its single trial the new
fan-propeller had been unshipped for a slight alteration, and the
flanges had not yet been reassembled. There were delicate adjustments to
be made, wire rigging to be tautened, a score of minute tests before all
could be safe and sure. He worked swiftly and with concentration,
feeling his mind answering to the stress with an absolute coolness.
At length the last attachment was in place, the final bolt sent home and
one of the lamps lashed close in the angle of the wind screen. He took
his place and the engine started its familiar double rhythm:
pst-pst--pst-pst--pst-pst, as the explosive drop fell faster and faster.
He leaned and broke the clutch which held the big double doors of the
building. They swung open and he threw on the gear.
And suddenly, as the propeller began to spin, in the instant the Glider
started in its rush down the guides, Daunt was aware that some one had
darted through the doors. He had a flashing view of a white, disheveled
face, heard a cry behind him--then the prow of the Glider tilted
abruptly, the air whistled past the screens, the great flat field sank
away, and he was throbbing steeply upward, against the sweep of the
wind.
Daunt threw himself forward--the bubble in the spirit-level clung to the
top of its tube. Rapidly he warped down the elevation-vanes till slowly,
slowly, the telltale bubble crept to the middle of the level. What was
the matter? The engine was working well, yet there was a sense of
heaviness, of sluggishness that was unaccountable. He looked to either
side, before him, behind him.
His fingers tightened on the clutches. Just forward of the whirling
propeller he made out the figure of a man, lying flat along the ribs of
the Glider's body, clutching the steel guys of the planes, looking at
him.
For a moment he stared motionless. It was this extra weight that had
sent the Glider reeling prow-up--had made it unresponsive to control.
The man who clung there had aimed to prevent the flight! Daunt leaned
to let the full beam of the flaring lamp go past him. A quick
intuition had told him whose were the eyes that had glittered across
the throbbing fabric; but the face he saw now was infuriate with a new
look that made him shiver. It was incarnate with the daredevil of
terror. Phil had been a drunkard; he was drunk now with the calculate
madness of overmastering fear. As he gazed, a flitting, irrelevant
memory crossed Daunt's mind, of a day at college, years before, when
by a personal appeal, he had saved Phil from the disgrace of
expulsion. And now it was Phil--_Phil!_--clinging there, with
desperate, hooked fingers, struggling to consummate a crime that must
sink him for ever!
Pst-pst--pst-pst--pst-pst; on the Glider drove. With a fierce effort,
Daunt crushed down the sense of unreality and swiftly weighed his
position.
The other was directly in front of the propeller, a perilous place. Only
the guy-wire was in his reach. Between them was a shuddering space. To
land in the darkness to rid the aëroplane of that incubus, was
impossible. He must go on. Could he win with such a terrible handicap?
He set his teeth. Tilting the lateral vanes, he soared in a wide
serpentine, peering into the deep, resounding dark below.
Tokyo lay a vast network of tiny pin-pricks of fire. He had never been
so high before, had been content to sweep the tree-tops. To the left a
bearded scimitar of light, merged by blackness, marked the bay. Daunt
swung parallel with this. Pst-pst--pst-pst--pst-pst. The wind tore in
gusts through the structure, the planes vibrating, the guys humming like
the strings of a gigantic harp. His clothing dragged at his body. He was
too high; he leaned over the mass of levers and the Glider slid down a
long, steep descent, till in the starlight he could see the blue-gray
blur of roofs, the massed shadows of little parks of trees. Now he was
passing the edge of the city--now below him was the gloom of the
rice-fields. A low sobbing sound came in the wind; it was the bubbling
chorus of the frogs, and across it he heard the bark of a peasant's dog.
To the right a dark hill loomed without warning, with a dim
congeries of red tea-houses. It was the famous Ikegami, the shrine
of the Buddhist saint Ichiren, famed for its plum-gardens. It fell
away behind, and now, far off, a score of miles ahead, grew up on
the horizon a misty blotch of radiance. Yokohama! He swerved,
heading out across the lagoon, straight as the bee flies for the
shimmering spot. Pst-pst--pst-pst--faster and faster spat the tiny
explosions. The Glider throbbed and sang like a thing alive, and the
hum of the propeller shrilled into a scream.
Tokyo was far behind now, the pale glow ahead rising and spreading. To
the right he could see the clumped lights of the villages along the
railroad, Kamata--Kawasaki--Tsurumi. He dropped still lower, out of the
lash of the wind.
Suddenly a flying missile struck the forward plane, which resounded like
a great drum. A drop of something red fell on his bare hand and a
feathered body fell like a stone between his feet. A dark carpet, dotted
with foam, seemed to spring up out of the gulf. Daunt threw himself at
the levers and rammed them back. The Glider had almost touched the
sea--for a heartbreaking instant he thought it could never rise. He
heard the curl of the waves, and a cry from behind him. Then, slowly,
slowly, breasting the blast, it came staggering up the hill of air to
safety.
The sky was perceptibly lightening now. Daunt realized it with a
tightening of all his muscles. It was the first tentative withdrawal of
the forces of the dark. Should he be in time? With his free hand he
loosened the coil of the grapnel. Suddenly the chances seemed all
against success. A feeling of hopelessness caught him. He thought of the
two men he had left behind, waiting--waiting. What message would come to
them that morning?
The engine was doing its best, every fiber of tested steel and canvas
ringing and throbbing. But the creeping pallor of the night grew apace.
Kanagawa:--the Glider swooped above it, left it behind. The misty glow
was all around now, lights pricked up through the shadow. Yokohama was
under his feet, and ahead--the darker mass toward which he was
hurtling--was the Bluff.
Slowly, with painful anxiety, he swung the huge float in to skirt the
cliff's seaward edge. There was the naval hospital with its flag-staff.
There beyond, was the familiar break in the rampart of foliage--and
there, flapping in the wind, was the awning on the flat roof of the
Roost. In the dawning twilight, it seemed a monstrous, leprous lichen,
shuddering at the unholy thing it hid. Daunt threw out the grapnel.
He curved sharply in, aslant to the wind, flung down his prow and
swooped upon it. There was a tearing, splintering complaint of canvas
and bamboo; the Glider seemed to stop, to tremble, then leaped on.
Turning his head, Daunt saw the awning disappear like a collapsed kite.
He caught a glimpse, on the steep, ascending roadway of a handful of
naked men running staggeringly, one straggler far behind. The thought
flashed through his mind that these were the cadets from the Naval
College. But they would be too late! The sun was coming too swiftly. The
sky was a tide of amethyst--the dawn was very near! He came about in a
wide loop that took him out over the bay, making the turn with the wind.
For a fraction of a second he looked down--on the Squadron of
battle-ships, a geometrical cluster of black blots from which straight
wisps of dark smoke spun like raveled yarn into the formless obscurity.
A shrill, mad laugh came from behind him.
Daunt was essaying a gigantic figure-of-light whose waist was the flat
bungalow roof. It was a difficult evolution in still sunlight and over a
level ground. He had now the semi-darkness, and the sucking down-drafts
of the wind that made his flight, with its driving falls and recoveries,
seem the careless fury of a suicide. Yet never once did his hand waver,
never did that strange, tense coolness desert him.
As he swept back, like a stone in the sling of the wind, he saw the
thing he had come to destroy. It had the appearance of a large camera,
set on a spidery tripod near the edge of the flat roof, its lens
pointing out over the anchorage. Landing was out of the question; to
slacken speed meant to fall. He must strike the machine with the body of
the Glider or with the grapnel. To strike the roof instead meant to be
hurled headlong, mangled or dead, his errand unaccomplished, down
somewhere in that medley of roofs and foliage. The chances that he could
do this seemed suddenly to fade to the vanishing point. A wave of
profound hopelessness chilled his heart.
With Phil's mad, derisive laughter ringing in his ears, he dropped the
Glider's stem and drove it obliquely across. The grapnel bounded and
clanged along the tiling, missing the tripod by three feet. On, in an
upward staggering lunge, then round once more, wearing into the wind.
There was no peal of laughter now from the man clinging to the steel
rib. With the clarity of the lunatic Phil saw how close the swoop had
been. The scourge of the wind and the rapid flight through the rarefied
air had exalted him to a cunning frenzy. He had no terror of the
moment--all his fear centered in the to-morrow. To his deranged
imagination the black square on the tripod represented his safety. He
had forgotten why. But Bersonin had made him see it clearly. It must not
be touched! Daunt was the devil--he was trying to send him to the
copper-mines, to work underground, with chains on his feet, as long as
he lived!
The Glider heeled suddenly and slid steeply downward. Daunt gripped the
levers and with all his strength warped up the forward plane. He felt a
pang of sharpened agony. He, too, would fail! The crash was almost upon
him. But the Glider hung a moment and righted. Farther and farther he
twisted the laterals, till she swam up, oscillating. A jerk ran through
her after framework; he turned his head. Clinging with foot and hand,
his hair streaming back from his forehead, his lips wide, Phil was
drawing himself, inch by inch, along the sagging guy-wire toward him.
For a rigid second Daunt could not move a muscle. Then, caught by the
upper wind, the perilous tilting of the planes awoke him. He swung head
on, wavered, and swooped a last time for the roof.
Pst-pst--pst-pst--Crash! The curved irons of the grapnel tore away the
coping--slid, screaming. A jolt all but threw him from his seat. There
were running feet somewhere far below him--a battering and shattering of
glass in the piazza. He felt a sudden clearance and the big aëroplane
plunged sidewise out over the bay, with a black, unwieldy weight, that
spun swiftly, hanging on its grapnel.
A shout tore its way from his lips. Heedless of direction, he wrenched
with his fingers to unship the grapnel chain. At the same instant the
first sunbeam slid across the waves and turned the misty gloom to the
golden-blue glory of morning.
And with it, as though the voice of the day itself, there went out over
the water, above the sweep of the wind, a single piercing-sweet note of
music, like the cry of a great, splendid bird calling to the sunrise.
Fishermen in tossing _sampan_, and sailors on heaving _junk_ heard it,
and whispered that it was the cry of the _kaminari_, the thunder-animal,
or of the _kappa_ that lures the swimmer to his death. An icy blast
seemed to shoot past the Glider into the zenith. Staring, Daunt realized
that one of the great planes, the propeller, the after-framework, with
the man who had clung to it, were utterly gone--that the Glider, like a
dead bird caught by the thudding twinge of a bullet, was lunging by its
own momentum--to its fall! Had Phil fallen, or was it--
Suddenly he felt himself flung backward, then forward on his face. The
spreading vanes, crumpled edgewise, like squares of cardboard, were
sliding down. He saw the shipping of the bay spread beneath him--the
twin lighthouses, one red, one white, on the ends of the breakwater--the
black Dreadnaughts--a steamer with bright red funnels--a fleet of
fishing _sampan_ putting out. All were swelling larger and larger. The
wind, blowing upward around him, stole his breath, and he felt the blood
beating in his temples. He heard ships' bells striking, and across the
sound a temple-bell boomed clearly. A mist was coming before his eyes.
Just below him was a white yacht; it seemed to be rushing up to meet him
like a swan.
Thoughts darted through his brain like live arrows. The battle-ships
were saved! No shameful suspicion should touch Japan's name in the
highways of the world! What matter that he lost the game? What did
one--any one--count against so much?
He thought of Barbara. He would never know now what she had been about
to tell him that night at the Nikko shrine! He would never see her
again! But she would know ... she would know!
The sound of the sea--a great roaring in his ears.