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.