aviator fussing about the plane which was to take them up. Instantly
Ronny’s fear leaped and tore at him again. A line of perspiration was
cold on his upper lip. He was afraid. He could not go up in that thing,
to those terrible heights of thin air. He could not. He would not.
He would tell his father that he wasn’t well. He did feel slightly
nauseated already, and dizzy, as if he were looking down from a high
building. Little tremors crawled beneath his skin. Nothing in the world
could make him go up in that thing, even his father’s furious contempt.
Somebody gave him a soft leather helmet, and he buckled it under his
chin with clammy fumbling fingers. Colonel Kinney was putting one on
over his shiny bald spot. His father never wore anything on his head in
Florida, and Gloria and Mrs. Kinney said their hats were quite tight
enough. Then they were walking down the slippery plank and getting into
the plane.
It was a three-seater. Mrs. Kinney and the colonel took the third seat
and Gloria and his father the second. The women got in alertly, their
high heels clicking on the deck, their sleek knees flashing among their
skirts. His father motioned Ronny to sit next to the aviator, because
it was his birthday treat. Ronny got in.
It was like sitting on a leather cushion in a high-sided tin bathtub,
behind the smudged dimness of the short windshield. There were
things--rods and handles--dangerous-looking things, between Ronny’s
feet, which he would not have touched for worlds, and behind, overhead,
the loom and shadow of the great wings.
Gloria’s jewelled hand patted his shoulder. “So nice of you, darling,
to have this marvellous birthday!” she was crying, in that gay scream
which made his very eardrums cringe. Suddenly the roar of the engine
exploded in a thuttering numbness of sound that clamped mufflers on
their hearing. Ronny felt his skin chill and crawl. They were off.
At the same time he had a flash of panicky decision that he must not
clench his hands where this aviator could see them. There was something
careless and matter-of-fact and young about him, which Ronny suddenly
wished that he could emulate. So that, while the plane taxied out on
the smooth bay water, rocking a little as it curved and thundered
between the high black sides of oil tankers, past white bows of yachts,
in an increasing blur of speed, he was equally concerned in watching
his hands, fixed in a pose of relaxation, on his knees. He was bracing
himself for what he knew must come, the first sickening leap upward.
It did not come. There was only a slight adjustment in the angle of
the seat. The water at a distance looked lower than it had been. And
he suddenly realized that they were up, although he could feel no
sensation in himself but a quickening of his heartbeats.
All around the plane the sapphire level of the bay was deepening and
lowering. The plane ground ceaselessly, climbing with a great, roaring
steadiness the orderly staircase of the wind. There was reality in
it, and stolidity. Ronny felt a strange sense of lifting upward into
a freedom from earthly things, a consciousness of wide salt wind and
tremendous reaches of sunny air. He had forgotten about relaxing his
hands now, and his heart was pounding, but in him climbed, as the plane
climbed, an amazement and a new delight. He was hardly afraid at all.
It was astonishing. It was delicious.
As the plane wheeled, lifted its nose, climbed, wheeled, and lifted in
enormous roaring circles, the earth wheeled slowly beyond the side. The
checkered green, the crowded glistening roof tops of Miami, stretching
west to a mist of Everglades and sky, wheeled also. The blue bay floor
wheeled, which was at this height bright turquoise, streaked with lime
green, which whitened lightly on each side of the lean elbow of the
causeway, where cars slid like beetles. Beyond Ronny’s right bathtub
rim circled the straight lines of trees and streets that were Miami
Beach; the apron patches of green that were golf links; the small
squares that were hotel roofs, house roofs, patches and rectangles of
colour flattened on the ground. Then, as they climbed higher and the
plane lurched a little, heading into the vast sea wind, there before
them, dim through the windshield, reaching out tremendously to right
hand and to left, lay the ocean, a vast lavender miracle, wrinkling a
little and reaching out, reaching out so enormously to the stretched
horizon that it seemed to rise to meet it, to melt into it, and mingle
in, the distance all one smoking, imperceptible blue.
High and far above it, yet somehow not remote, because there was
nothing with which to measure the distance between, the plane snored
straight eastward now upon the crystal level of its pathway, rocking a
little upon its invisible cradling of air, strangely real, strangely
prosaic, a thing of wood and metal, weighty, hard to the touch, solid
to rest upon, commonplace in a world gone wonderful with high magic,
all blue air and bluer unbelievable sea.
Beside Ronny, the aviator’s sunburned profile was calm. His hands
moved only occasionally now on the controls. His manner was easy and
assured. From time to time he glanced about him, out at the sea below
his left shoulder; once across Ronny at the sky; and once, with a
long narrowed glance, at something behind and overhead, at a wire or
strut or something, which for some imperceptible reason had caught
his attention. Ronny followed his glance with a little prickling
thrill, but found himself nodding and grinning at Mrs. Kinney in the
back seat, beyond his father’s shoulder, and at Gloria’s brilliant,
enthusiastic face. His father and Colonel Kinney grinned at him
briefly, eyes narrowed and faces still, with the manner of men enjoying
themselves sedately. Ronny felt a sudden glow of friendship for all
of them. Against the vastness of the background, underlaid still with
the thought of his fear, they were familiar and dear and reassuring.
He was overwhelmed with thankfulness that he had not shown them how
much he had been afraid. The thuttering roar of the engines which shut
about them so completely was not so noticeable. Ronny felt a sudden
impulse to lean over and tell his father now all about how afraid of
things he was. It seemed as if an ordinary tone could have carried
and that in this moment of exultation his father would understand and
forgive everything. As if Ronny did not know well enough, at the same
moment, that the difference between his father and himself was more
impenetrable than the roar.
The plane had been moving steadily upon its level above the vast
wrinkled ultramarine of ocean for some thirty minutes now. Far behind,
the mainland had melted into the mist, that at the horizon blurred from
sea colour into sky colour, like the bloom on a grape. Before them the
islands were equally obscured. Occasionally the plane lifted or joggled
slightly, as the wings bucked the booming trade wind, but on the
whole it was stable, lulling into oblivion remembered fears. Ronny was
growing happier and happier in knowing himself relaxed, even sleepy,
under the numbing drone.
He could let his glance fall down over the side for a minute or two,
with no feeling in the pit of his stomach. He grew bolder, making
himself stick his head out almost into the wind to stare down. But
suddenly then, like a dropped weight, he was hit by a dreadful image
of himself leaping to his feet and pitching over there, head first,
and hurtling down the vast empty drop. The suddenness of it caught him
in the stomach and the throat so that his spine crept. He withdrew
his glance hurriedly to the comfortable commonplace within--dials and
indicators, floor boards, the aviator’s strong freckled hands, and
his own feet. They helped to steady him physically, but horror still
mounted within him, not so much at the outside world, perilous as
it had become again for him, but at the suddenly revealed depths of
strangeness in himself. Perhaps it was not only that he was utterly
unlike his father but that he was different from all normal men.
Perhaps within his very brain crawled the maggots of imbalance. At that
moment he felt it was even possible for him to go mad and scream, and
leap screaming over there. Ugh! Yet, of course, it was not so. It was
only his imagination. But a he man would never have been troubled by
fancies as sick as that.
It was at that moment that Ronny, fighting to calm the tumult in him
by staring fixedly at the aviator’s hands, saw the right one jerk as
the whole plane lurched sideways. He saw the aviator throw a glance
over his shoulder even while his hands and feet made curt gestures with
the controls. The plane righted, but tossed violently before lurching
again. Ronny, throwing a look back and up, saw a broken thing hanging
and banging at one wing--a great blue hole and long rags of canvas. The
vast circle of the sea below them was tipping up and circling like the
surface of water in a tilted cup. The man beside him, working tensely,
shot a look at him, a queer, tight-lipped grin, and the plane slid
downward slowly, circling and nosing, with occasional moments of level.
The engine roared as usual, and the air seemed calm.
The conviction that something was wrong, that something was awfully
wrong, came to Ronny with a surprising slowness. The very worst things
happened to him only in his imagination. When it was a matter of
outward affairs which older men had always controlled so much better
than he, it was hard to believe them capable of accident. The dark
floor of the sea was rushing toward them in dizzy circles. And yet
there was no horror in this for him, as there had been in the thought
of plunging alone. Something had gone wrong, that was all, and the
aviator had told him in that one glance that he was going to make a
landing. Ronny had much more confidence in him than he would ever have
in himself. They would probably land all right.
It was like sliding down an enormous shoot-the-chute, even to the water
at the bottom. The ocean was there, rushing up to the pitch of the
plane’s nose, a ridged, blurry surface of deep blue. They were going to
land all right. Ronny was certain. He was growing a little pleased with
himself. There was even a breath of relief at the more familiar level
after all that breathless height.
The engine subsided into a low growl. The wind screamed in the wires
as if for the first time, and below grew the long rustling rumour of
the waves. He could see whitecaps flashing now over brilliant sapphire
hollows. Why, these waves were high, he thought confusedly, leaning
back against the steepness. The faint scream of a woman behind him
came only a second before the shock and bounce of landing, with the
crash and drench of flying cold water. When their bouncing slide lost
momentum, they were immediately bucked about, tossed and dropped and
flung on the strong new element as if in a light, top-heavy dory. The
hiss and surge of waves were around them, dark blue water hurling
itself northwestward, blue blacks in the hollows and laced with snowy
streaks of foam.
Ronny turned at once to look back and grin at his father, still
exhilarated with himself and with his sudden sense of adventure. It
was like looking at people whom he had not seen for years, who were
changed, yet completely familiar. His father met his glance with a
face like bronzed rock, in which the eyes were a little fixed. He and
they all were engaged in the almost violent business of keeping their
balance in the lurching dip and rise of the plane, topheavy as it was
and beaten by the wind, upon the strong waves which rose before them,
jagged and frowning, which heaved them up with an unremitting power
and passed behind them for others hurrying and trampling on.
Gloria Cargill was clinging with one hand to his father’s arm, and
with the other was straightening her bright green hat. Mrs. Kinney’s
plucked eyebrows were lifted over the roundness of her eyes in an
almost ridiculous expression of amazed protest, and Colonel Kinney,
holding her tightly, was crimson to his heavy dewlaps, and swearing
visibly. Ronny was happy that he had not yet revealed himself to these
courageous people.
The aviator jerked off his helmet and became immediately individual and
human. His blue eyes were anxious in a bony, sun-reddened face. His
bleached hair bristled on his head, and his eyelashes were bleached.
Ronny remembered suddenly that his name was Bill. He looked more
disturbed than any of them.
“Well, folks,” he said, “I sure am sorry. That strut busted like a
match stick. Somebody will get murdered for this, if I have to do it
myself. Hope the ladies are all right. There’s nothing to worry about,
of course. Perhaps I can patch it.” He crawled backward between them
and on to the back of the fuselage.
“Want any help?” Andrew Burgess called, with his eyes warm and lively
again. “Rotten luck. I’ve been ready for a bottle of beer for the last
fifteen minutes. Hope this won’t make us too late for lunch.”
Ronny, looking up at Bill as he climbed over the seat and seeing the
curious slant look he cast down at his father’s nonchalance, knew as
suddenly as if he had spoken that the matter was to be graver than
that. He clung to the edge of his seat as the plane swung down in a
smashing burst of spray that flew over them and stung their faces,
considering the thing soberly. The violence of those Gulf Stream waves
was still almost unbelievable. They had looked down so long upon the
seeming flatness of this water. Ronny’s clothes were getting wet and he
shifted about on his seat to avoid the stinging spray that came inboard.
His father and Gloria Cargill were singing “Where do we go from here?”
and “When do we eat?” with voices that seemed a little too boisterous.
He knew that Gloria was showing what a good sport she could be, for his
father’s admiration, who watched her powder her nose and rouge, and do
over her lips with the scarlet lipstick. Gloria was lovely, glancing
sidewise into her tiny mirror, sidewise up at him. Mrs. Kinney was not
singing. Her plump cheeks had gone a little sallow under the rouge, and
her bright yellow hat and bright yellow dress looked startling on her.
She sat hunched up very close to her husband, with her eyes fixed upon
the lifting wave tops. Colonel Kinney patted her hand regularly and
watched Bill.
As the plane lifted to a racing wave Ronny could look out over the
sea to some distance to more racing blue wave tops with flashes of
white boiling at their crests, under the dazzling beat of the sun.
The horizon that had shrunk to this, from the vast sweep of the air,
was jagged and uneasy with waves, and the sky beyond it was a remote
unnoticed blue. It was the sea that had suddenly taken the menace that
the air had had; the sea, looming and tossing around the incongruous
smallness of the plane, an awkward alien, unfitted for this heavier
element. It seemed to Ronny that they sat a little lower among these
waves than they had at first.
The aviator, Bill, was slashing at a tangle of stiff canvas and wires
and broken sticks under the lower wing. Ronny saw him slip and the
tangle drop into the water, where it hung and splashed, held by a
single wire. The plane veered suddenly at the crest of a wave and Ronny
saw it plunge, stern down, on the wreckage. With a scream from Mrs.
Kinney, a broken strut crashed through a thin floor board and in the
jagged rip sea water bubbled smoothly, wetting their feet and ankles
and legs.
“Hey, look here!” Ronny’s father called suddenly. “We’re getting wet!
Here, Bill; come here and fix this! Put your feet up, Gloria. It’s all
right, Mrs. Kinney. We’ll be all right presently.”
Ronny had been certain his father would take charge of things. He was
splendid. His voice was loud and confident and reassuring. Only Ronny
could not make himself believe that nothing was the matter. Things
looked bad to him. Bill’s face told him the same thing, slipping and
splashing back along the wet fuselage, like a whale back, low in the
water.
The water was rapidly filling the cockpit. There wasn’t any use
being too cheerful, Ronny was thinking, climbing up to sit crouched
uncomfortably on the back of the seat. His father and Gloria did it,
laughing. But Mrs. Kinney had to be helped up and then held, perched
precariously, her round dismayed eyes still fixed on the coming
water. Colonel Kinney held her, with his ruddy face turning a curious
congested purple. Ronny saw suddenly that the Kinneys were afraid, and
he was sorry for them. It was dreadful to be afraid.
The plane had sunk with the weight of water in the cockpit, but now it
seemed not to be sinking any more.
Bill scrambled wetly up beside Ronny and spoke to the others, “This
isn’t so good, folks, but it isn’t so bad. The old bus is knocked out,
but it can’t sink any more and we’re not so far from Bimini now. We may
even drift quite near, the way the stream runs. Somebody’s sure to pick
us up almost any minute, because we’re in the direct line of boats from
Miami to Bimini and they’ll report by and by that we haven’t arrived.
All we’ve got to do now is hang on.”
His glance met Ronny’s on the last words, and Ronny saw that in
spite of his cheerful, matter-of-fact voice, his eyes were wide and
unwinking. Ronny’s own eyes were like that. As they stared at each
other for a long moment, Ronny felt a sudden warmth of understanding
and comradeship leap between them. After all, Bill was not so very much
older than he was, for all the weathered maturity of his face. That
glance linked them, by their youth, by their common ability to look at
the situation, without too much fear or too much optimism. These others
must be protected at all costs.
“Are you with me?” said Bill’s glance to Ronny, and Ronny’s answered
instantly, “You betcha life.”
Bill withdrew his gaze abruptly to unlace his shoes and take them off.
Ronny did the same, glad to feel his toes free in the water. He watched
one shoe float a minute and then go over the side in a slap of water
from a running wave. Bill was plucking up the wet cushions from the
seats below the water.
“They’ll float,” he said briefly. “You hang on to this one, Mrs.
Kinney. And listen here. The backs of these seats are going to get
awfully uncomfortable in about a minute. It would be easier if we all
got down on the fuselage, even if it is partly in the water. Then the
ladies can hang on to these cushions, too. That’s right, isn’t it, sir?”
He appealed to Andrew Burgess, and Ronny saw his father brighten
visibly, as if glad of something to do. “Perhaps you could show them,
sir,” Bill further suggested, and Andrew turned and slid back gingerly
over the wet surface, lowering himself with one hand on a strut down on
the incline, so that he rested with his legs in the water, but his body
supported.
“It is better,” he said promptly. “Come along, Gloria. Help Mrs.
Kinney, Colonel. Here, grab my hand. You won’t get any wetter than you
are now. It’s not half bad.”
Ronny and Bill and the colonel, splashing in the water, held Mrs.
Kinney and lowered her, quite mute now, down to Andrew Burgess. Gloria
went next, laughing. Her green silk dress clung wetly to her lithe
figure, and she moved with much more assurance than the other woman,
and seemed somehow more suited to the watery and difficult background.
Her face was not so tense either, but somehow the bright spots of
rouge on each cheek, the darkened eyelashes, the scarlet curve of
mouth seemed to stand away from her face a little, as if the flesh
were shrinking. After Colonel Kinney had followed them with ponderous
caution and a very tight grip of Ronny’s shoulder, the four hung there
in a row, their eyes looking upward at Bill and Ronny clinging above
them, and at the jagged wave crests racing down upon them, with the
same look. It was a mute look, guarded, expectant, a little humble.
Their lifted eyes made something in Ronny ache with pity for them. They
looked so helpless, hanging there, in the smashing dangerous water.
They were looking at Bill and him as if the two had suddenly taken on
an unguessed power and significance. Ronny tried to think of something
else to do for them to still the tightness in his throat.
“Let’s cut some of that wire, Bill,” he said. “Maybe we can put it
around them, so that they wouldn’t have to hang on so tightly. Got a
knife? I have.”
They worked, balancing, slipping, plunging about on top of the
fuselage, over which the highest waves sent a skim of water, twisting
and cutting and clinging to the wing frames as they could. When four
lengths of the wire had been hacked off, Bill slid down to the Kinneys,
Ronny to his father and Gloria. There was enough to twist around the
body of each, but it was hard to bend it around a strut so that it
would stay fastened against the roll and jerk of the plane. Half
the time Ronny was completely in the water, working with one hand,
sprawling, while his father helped. When a higher wave reared above
them, hissing, they had to stop working and hang on tightly, their
heads and shoulders barely above the smother, their bodies banging
against the wood.
Once Ronny lost the last piece of wire overboard and had to dive for
it, clutching it luckily in the boiling depth below. But the swimming
was actually a refreshment to him. To be able to move his cramped
limbs freely and surely in this sea removed much of its menace. It was
an element with which he was familiar. He came to the surface with a
sputtering rush and an overhand that carried him easily back, with a
grin for his father’s anxious eyes. Ronny had even time to realize
that he had never seen his father look at him like that. As Ronny put
the wire about him Andrew’s right hand lingered on his shoulder and he
said, “Nice work, old chap.”
Ronny was warm with gratitude for that. His father was being splendid.
His colour was good. His voice was assured. He joked occasionally
with Gloria or Mrs. Kinney, putting out a hand to help when he could.
That was what it meant to have been a good sport all his life, Ronny
thought. He simply did not know what fear meant.
Gloria’s hair looked funny, wet and plastered about her forehead like
that. She had lost her hat somehow, but she was game all right. She was
singing a lot of old songs, making them all sing things like “On the
Banks of the Wabash” and “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee.” Even Mrs.
Kinney smiled with stiff lips when there was anything to smile about.
There was not much to do after Bill and Ronny got the wires fixed.
They all hung there, the four with the wires, Ronny and Bill wherever
they could catch hold of something, half supported by the wallowing
fuselage, bumping and hanging in the flounder of water, watching to
duck a taller wave crest, and talking now and then, little bursts of
talk that ran from one to another of the soaking figures. Their words
lagged or renewed like a slow pendulum of vitality.
Presently Bill, who did a good deal of scrambling about, shinned up
so that he could hang from the upper wing frame and peer, long and
earnestly, out over the wave tops. Mutely everyone watched him. Ronny,
standing on the fuselage above them, noticed that the whites of their
eyes shone a little. Bill had been looking steadily at the same place
for several seconds. He drew himself up higher, shading his eyes.
“You’re looking at something!” Gloria called suddenly.
Bill did not answer. The faces were tense and a similar light seemed to
be upon them all--a light of pallor and suspense. They knew that Bill
was looking at something. Ronny leaped up beside him.
At first he could see nothing but scalloped blue wave tops and the
leap and flash of foam. Then, more to the right, he caught a steady
flash that was a wave, but a wave breaking before a boat’s bow. When he
looked intently he could see, now and then, the gray pointed mass of
the bow itself, appearing and disappearing. It was hard to tell how far
away it was, or whether it was moving in their direction. Bill waited,
motionless, and so did Ronny.
His father called suddenly below them, “For God’s sake, boys, if you
see something, tell us! And do something about it, can’t you? Wave
something! Shout!”