whose heart lay, a palpable lump of cold lead in the pit of his stomach,
and whose knees were turning to jelly as he went?
If Cousin Pat, when she begged him not to go, had known how badly he,
Bawne, had wanted to hold her round the neck and beg her not to let him,
he would at this moment have been unheroically safe.
She was so big. He had most dreadfully wanted to cling to her and
cry--imagine a fellow of twelve doing anything so kiddish. But he had
swallowed the unmanly tears, and wriggled out of her strong protecting
arms.
He looked back and saw her tall white figure, standing near the hulking
black-clad shape of the Doctor, who had pulled his hat-brim low down
over his eyes, and did not seem to be talking or laughing at all. Davis
was doing something with a spanner to the Bird's under-carriage, and the
long, thin shadow of her in combination with the squat shadow of the
little stooping Welshman, stretched eastwards over the dry green grass.
He heaved a big sigh and followed his man in. Von Herrnung was already
trying on pneumatic coats, swearing in nervous German when they were not
big enough. At last he was caparisoned, in a heavy suit of
flannel-lined Carberrys and a buttonless hooded jacket. He had stripped
the burst glove from his wounded hand, thrown it away, and replaced the
magpie pearl ring upon his little finger. He had put on a woollen helmet
and tied over that a flapped cap with goggles and ear-pieces. While he
attended to his outfit, the leather satchel lay at his feet, or
sometimes between them, or he would keep a boot-toe on a corner of it.
And his hard blue eyes were vigilantly watchful against surprise.
Sherbrand and the dresser--who presided over a long room of shelves and
pegs laden with queer garments, and who looked like a washed mechanic in
spotless blue overalls--put Bawne into a woollen sweater, and added to
the panoply he had worn already that morning, and which consisted of
leggings, slip-strapped to a webbing waistbelt, a pneumatic jacket, a
knitted helmet such as von Herrnung wore, and a pair of goggles. They
looked like the Eskimo hunter and his little boy in the "Book of The
Arctic"--a volume specially beloved of Saxham's small son.
It was five minutes past the half-hour when they emerged from the
dressing-shed. Saxham came to meet them, turned and walked by his son's
side. Davis, whose weakness as regards the sex we know, had pinched
from the visitor's enclosure a green-painted iron chair for Patrine. She
half-rose, stung by an impulse of escape, when she saw von Herrnung
approaching, and then controlled herself and sat down again.
Nothing escaped her long eyes. They saw Sherbrand glance from Saxham to
von Herrnung, and read the intention of an introduction in his look. He
had just begun:
"Doctor, I don't think you have met Captain----" when von Herrnung
lengthened his long stride, outstripped his companions, and went over
swiftly and stood beside Patrine.
*CHAPTER XXXI*
*VON HERRNUNG BAITS THE HOOK*
She knew that he had interpreted her movement as an invitation.
He saluted her and said, speaking thickly:
"It is necessary that I have a word with you. Walk with me for one
moment. I shall not keep you more!"
He bulked huge in his rig-out, but looked thoroughly at home, and deadly
workmanlike. He pushed up his goggles as though conscious that they
discounted his personal attractions, and his blue eyes were stony and
glittering, and his full mouth showed pale and hard-set under the
scarlet roll of his moustache.
"I shall not see you again to-day, and I have something important to
tell you." He spoke rapidly and his breathing was harsh and loud. "I
have been recalled by my Chiefs and return to Germany in--another two or
three days. That we do not meet again before I leave is possible,
therefore I wish to give you my address."
She did not look up. A white hand with red hairs growing thick on the
back of it offered her a pencilled card. She made no movement to take
it. He said, thrusting the card underneath her eyes:
"It is printed here in German letters. You read and speak my language
badly, so I will translate for you--'Squadron-Captain-Pilot Count
Theodor von Herrnung, Imperial Field Flying Service, Flight Station
XXX., Taubefeld, near Diebrich, West Hessen, Germany.' Write your
letter to me in English. The address copy from this. Will you not take
the card?"
"There is no need to. I do not mean to write to you!"
"_Danke_. You are candid," he said, "at least. You give me to
understand that whatever happens--" he repeated the words with a
singular inflection "_whatever happens!_--you will have no more to do
with me?"
"Have I not told you so twice already?"
He gritted his teeth and said, controlling furious anger:
"_Erklaeren Sie_! _Was giebt es_? Why are you so--rottenly furious
with me? You have yourself to thank for--what has happened! You led me
on. You made me crazy about you. And the devil of it is I am so still!
The sight of you maddens me! Listen! Do not be stupid--unkind to
yourself and to me! In three days from now, you will get an envelope at
your Club with plenty of money. Join me at my headquarters at Taubefeld
and then--you will see! We will be happy--you shall have plenty of
money to throw about when we visit Berlin and other big cities, and
jewels, dresses, pleasure, admiration--everything a beautiful woman
wants! _Grosse Gott_! Can I offer anything more tempting? What are
you saying? 'Yes!' or 'No!'"
Her narrowed eyes looked like long black slits in her white face. The
pale lips barely moved to answer:
"Neither! Are you proposing to marry me?"
He laughed woodenly, and repeated:
"Marry you! Ha, ha! What _verdammt_ nonsense are you talking? What
has love to do with getting married? Nothing that I have ever heard! Of
course I shall marry--my family have arranged all that for me. But my
Countess will not interfere with my mistress--that I promise you! Come,
be kind, my beautiful Isis! Whisper now that you agree!"
He bent his head to hear. The whisper came from the pale lips:
"I will see you in Hell first!"
He started, taken aback. Her own utterance had shocked her. "Am I a
street-walker already," she asked herself, "that I begin to curse and
swear?"
A whistle trilled. He started and said:
"So then, all is over between us?"
She bent her head assentingly, and her glance fell guiltily on Bawne who
was standing near. Von Herrnung, aware of him at the same instant,
turned on him with a scowl and the harsh demand:
"What is this? Do little English boys pry and listen?"
Bawne returned, looking at the other squarely:
"Beg pardon, but Mr. Sherbrand's calling you. He says it's getting
jolly late."
"_So!_" Von Herrnung glanced at his wrist-watch, in the act lifting the
brown leather satchel into fullest view. The boy queried with open-eyed
innocent curiosity:
"Shall I carry that? Are you going to take it with you?"
"_Es mag wohl sein_," von Herrnung answered. Then he clicked his heels
and bowed formally, and kissed Patrine's cold and heavy hand. She felt
his teeth grit as he did it. She knew he was swearing in his way.
"Adieu, then," he said, smiling at her maliciously. "Will you not wish
me _Angenehme Reise_?"
"Certainly. A pleasant voyage, and a safe landing!" Her eyes fell on
Bawne's little, oddly garbed figure and her woman's heart spoke in spite
of her. "Take care of my dearest!" broke from her, and von Herrnung
answered:
"He is your dearest? Ah yes! I will certainly take very good care of
him!"
He bowed, wheeled about and walked from her with his long strides, and
the boy, with a face all flushed and quivering, suddenly jumped at her
neck and hugged her; bringing with the rough little embrace the queer
scent of water-proofed material and dubbined leather, knocking the
silver-spangled hat awry, loosening divers tortoiseshell hairpins and an
amethyst slide-buckle holding up the heavy tresses of the dead
beech-leaf coloured hair, as he whispered:
"Remember I love you, Pat. Don't mind!"
And she shuddered as he freed her, and ran from her, asking herself: How
much had the child overheard of von Herrnung's proposal? What had he
comprehended of what he had heard?
Next, she was aware of the pleasant voice of Sherbrand calling, and saw
von Herrnung imperiously beckoning. A cold sickness of dread assailed
her, and her knees trembled underneath her weight. A mechanic came
running past, carrying away the chair Davis had brought her. He set it
down at a safe distance from the aeroplane, and she staggered to it,
leaning on the long staff of her sunshade, and sat heavily down, feeling
chilly and old....
Saxham had squeezed Bawne's shoulder and kissed him, and then withdrawn
to a distance whence he could see all that took place. He watched Davis
and Sherbrand help the boy into the forward cockpit, and fasten about
him the safety belt attached to the fuselage on either side of the fixed
bamboo seat.
"You are sure you really want to fly again? Mind, I believe you're as
safe with him as houses, but if you don't want to go, say the word, and
you shan't!"
Sherbrand whispered the words as he busied himself with the boy. And
Bawne set his small teeth and squared his sturdy boyish shoulders,
registering an unspoken vow to go in spite of all....
One had been told to drop a word to Sherbrand if one found oneself in a
tight place. But could one ever hold up one's head again before the
Patrol, if one did this? To share one's Mission with another when the
Chief had said "I'd rather you'd carry through on your own" wasn't to be
thought of. Mother--he swallowed hard at the thought of her--would say
so too.
It troubled his faithful little soul that he could no longer see von
Herrnung. He heard him talking in his guttural English, to Davis, whom
Bawne could not see either--as he stood near the nose of the machine, in
readiness to start the tractor--any more than the two mechanics who
steadied the Bird, pressing each a toe on the axle of the under-carriage
as they held on to a steel rod that ran along under the rearward edges
of her single plane.
His final directions sharply given, von Herrnung stepped up on the
under-carriage, threw a long leg over the bulwark of the fuselage, and
stepped into the pilot's pit. Bawne screwed his head round and saw,
through and over a low talc wind-shield, the upright torso of the
German, big, hard, and indomitable, the leather satchel still gripped in
his strapped-up left hand.
"Are you going to take that leather case along with you?" Sherbrand's
voice had a note of surprise in it. "You'll find it a handicap, let me
say. You can't sit on it or lean against it, and if you tried to put it
under you, you'd find it dead-certain to foul the controls."
To Sherbrand's voice, von Herrnung's answered harshly and rather
angrily:
"Surely I shall be able to carry this? It is nott-thing but a folding
camera, with a telephoto lens made especially for Survey and
Reconnaissance. There is still a good light. If I fly with the sun
behind me, I shall be able to take quite a panorama of London
North-West. It is not forbidden--no? Your Government would not
object?"
"I don't suppose my Government would care a little hang!" Sherbrand's
voice answered. "But--this isn't one of your German Army Albatros's or
Kondors, and I don't see where you're to stow your camera, unless in the
observer's pit. Of course the hovering installation takes up a lot of
room, and I can't possibly risk your hampering the controls."
"_Ganz recht_! Very good!" came von Herrnung's voice, giving in with
simulated heartiness. In another moment his long legs, followed by his
great body, came scrambling into the forward cockpit, and his hands
busied themselves about the stout belt of pig-leather that secured the
boy in the observer's seat.
"Look here, my fellow! You will take care of this for me? See, I have
passed the belt-strap through the handle. Do not touch it!" The
guttural whisper had menace in it. "I shall be sure to know if you
touch it, or try to unbuckle the strap."
"What's up?" Sherbrand's head and shoulders came thrusting over the
other side of the cockpit. "Why did you unstrap him?" he demanded
brusquely of von Herrnung. "Don't you know that he is my friend's son,
and that it is my business to see to this?" Sherbrand's hand felt over
Bawne's belts and bucklings before his head and shoulders vanished.
Then von Herrnung's big body withdrew itself. His voice, sounding from
the pilot's pit on the other side of the low wind-shield, gave a
peremptory order, and the tractor began slowly to revolve. An instant
later, with a blinding flash, it began to roar and whizz round
furiously. The Bird, freed from the hands that detained her, leaped
forwards, hurtling over the smooth turf at the speed of a racing
motor-car. The smooth floor of the cockpit unexpectedly tilted up, and
a rough cold wind buffeted Bawne about the head and shoulders, sent
eddies down about his dangling feet, bellowed in his covered ears and
made him gasp for breath. Then--houses and people, trees, and hangars
fell suddenly away, and he knew that the Bird was rushing upwards at the
bidding of its "Gnome" motor--long superseded now, but then the latest
marvel in aerial engineering--towards the blue sky with its lines of
gilt mackerel clouds. On each side of the roaring, flashing whirl that
meant the tractor, spread North Middlesex, with its fields fast
diminishing to the size of billiard tables. That patch no bigger than a
garden-lawn, with a row of wooden things like dog-kennels and
chicken-coops, must be--Bawne knew that it was--the aerodrome. Deafened
by the noise and a little sick, for the roaring, striving, hurtling
Thing in whose body he sat fastened, stank horribly of castor oil, and
seemed to agonise and call on Bawne to suffer with it--he looked up and
took courage from the warm, blue, beautiful, cheerful sky.
He was quitting himself like a man. Nobody could say otherwise. How
high, how much higher was the Bird going to climb?
*CHAPTER XXXII*
*ADVENTURE IN THE AIR*
He looked down, and under his feet, left of the long transparent case
that housed the horizontal hovering gear, was a little steel-framed
glass port. Seen through this, the ground with its trees, fields and
houses, hurried along beneath him as though a comet, travelling in the
opposite direction, had been harnessed to our old earth, and was towing
her away.
The floor of the cockpit suddenly altered its angle. It had tilted
upwards. Now it tilted all to one side. Sick and dizzy, but secure,
the boy hung in his straps as she lay over, and saw on his left hand a
wing of the Bird rising and blotting out the heavens, while on his right
hand the earth reared up so horribly that Bawne could only shut his eyes
tight and hold on to the arms-straps of his seat, and gasp out a little
prayer. Then the cockpit floor became more level, and the wind buffeted
less. The roar of the tractor and the twanging drone of the wires made
one's bones hum and tingle to the very ends of one's teeth and
finger-tips. But nothing had happened. Perhaps nothing would!
He drew a great breath of relief, and his heart left off bumping. His
mouth was cold inside and his tongue felt dry and stiff. Only Our Lord
and Our Lady and his guardian Angel had seen him funky, and for this
Bawne was grateful. They understood, and--people--would not.
He guessed it about a quarter to six o'clock. By the genial warmth on
one cheek and shoulder, and the way his shadow stretched over the pale
grained ash-wood that lined the cock-pit, he knew the west must be upon
the left.
He raised himself, craning his neck, and through the low wind screen
behind him, against the background of a sky all flaming and boiling with
molten gold and liquid amber, he saw the wide square shoulders and tall
helmeted head of von Herrnung, the hard eyes staring unflinchingly
through their round glass goggles, the mouth set in a straight
inflexible line under the tight red roll of the moustache.
The red-moustached mouth opened, and von Herrnung shouted something.
Nothing reached the boy but a sort of muffled roar. He shook his head
vigorously, and then--one does not wear the Signaller's Badge for
nothing!--released a stiff little gloved hand from its grip on the
arm-rest, and rapped out with his clenched right fist on the edge of the
fuselage:
"_I--can't--hear!_"
The Code was understood. The helmeted head, some four feet distant,
nodded. One of von Herrnung's gauntleted hands freed itself from the
steering-bar. Its knuckles drubbed out the question:
"Have you the brown satchel?"
Bawne had quite forgotten the brown satchel. He screwed back his head
and looked down and there it was, lying on the numb knees of him,
buckled to him by the tough strap of pigskin that held him in his seat.
He nodded assent, and signalled:
"All right!"
"Good!" von Herrnung signalled back through the hurly-burly of the
Bird's transit. Bawne mustered courage to knock out:
"Where are we? When shall we go down?"
Von Herrnung's right hand lifted itself, and described a sweeping
half-circle. The brusque gesture answered Bawne's first question,
bidding him look and see.
The boy, impeded in his view by reason of his small proportions,
wriggled in his straps so as to get his chin well over the gunwale of
the Bird's fuselage and the buffetting wind that was dug up and spaded
over her bows by the dizzying revolutions of the tractor, got hold of
him and pummelled and buffetted him again. Her course was still north,
the sun was setting in great smoking lakes of gold and sulphur on her
left as she flew. Thick patches of dark green bushes that probably were
woods, reddish-green blotches that might be heathy commons, shiny,
square patches that he guessed at as reservoirs, toybox villages that
were thriving suburban boroughs, specks that were villas, glittering
ribbons that suggested canals, and one broad shiny stripe that was a
river with tiny boats upon it, were swirling from right to left,
sweeping along in the opposite direction, under the rushing body of the
winged thing that bore him, ruled by the hand of von Herrnung upon the
steering-wheel.
Behind her a chaotic, formless greyness brooded on the horizon,
innumerable spires rose out of it and a glittering haze hung over all.
That was London, the great grimy Mother of Cities tearing away from her
little son at eighty miles an hour. The shriek of an engine and the
rumble of a train reduced by distance to infinite tenuity pulled the
boy's eyes downwards. A weeny mechanical toy that meant one of the
double-humped colossi of steam traction, dragging a string of match-box
goods trucks, raced another locomotive, towing a crowded passenger-train
neck and neck along the spider-fine perspective of gossamers that meant
the Great Eastern Railway. Now fear was swamped in the sheer joy of the
experience. This thin air that kept you perpetually gulping and
swallowing saliva, made you feel more than ever how good it is to be
alive.
Billows and billows of green, interspersed with patches of purple
heather, meant Epping Forest, though he did not know it. A great
aggregation of grey walls and housetops, looking like a section of an
old wasp's nest, stood for Waltham Abbey as the Bird drove on. Quite a
tangle of the shiny grey-blue streaks that were rivers meant Lea and
Orwell, Ouse, and their trouty tributaries. East England rolled away
underneath like an endless carpet woven in irregular patches of many
hues. Green and brown, grey and yellow, and innumerable shades of
these, so tempting in their suggestions of good things to eat that a
most unheroic hunger reminded the schoolboy of tea-time, hours and hours
gone by.
He looked round in search of von Herrnung, who maintained unchanged the
same attitude, his shoulders level, his unseen hands steady as rock upon
the wheel of the steering-pillar, his mouth shut tightly, his hard eyes
ranging ahead or lowered, as he conned his course in masterly fashion by
aid of the roller-map, protected by its transparent, rainproof casing,
or the compass, clock, altimeter, and other instruments gimballed in the
wooden frame in front of the pilot's seat.
"How long?" the small fist rapped out. Von Herrnung detached a hand and
signalled in answer:
"One hour!"
"When do we go home?"
"We go home now!" the hand signalled, and the boy settled down in his
seat to wait.
Between hunger and weariness he dozed, and soon slept soundly, his hands
hanging laxly over the leather arm-rests and his head nodding over the
brown satchel lying on his knees. It figured in his dreams as something
huge, oppressive and uncanny, that suddenly took to itself malevolent
life, spread a pair of wide leathery bat-wings, and would have flown
away but that he gripped it fast.
"No, no! You shan't! I promised!" he heard himself crying, and
suddenly the thing collapsed limply in his grasp and became nothing but
a satchel, and he was awake. Awake and very stiff and rather sick and
sleepy, and with the salt smell in his nostrils and the salt taste in
his mouth that meant--that could only mean the Sea.
He looked over the gunwale and cried out in astonishment. For a vast
carpet of rounded woolly-grey-white clouds lay spread beneath. The
carpet beginning to rise and the cockpit floor to incline downwards, a
thin clammy fog suddenly blotted out everything. The Bird had dived
through a field of woolpack mixed with ground-fog. Now flying some
hundred feet beneath it, she regained her level, in the clear light
stained by the sunset as water in which a dash of red wine is mingled,
the light that is the aftermath of a radiant summer's day. And, with
the smell of the sea sharper in his nostrils, the boy became aware of
moving, muddy-grey water, with ships and boats and steamers on it, far
down below.
Now the southerly breeze that had steadily tagged on some twenty-three
miles an hour to the Bird's eighty odd, began to veer and come in
strengthening puffs and gusts from the north-west. Swirling eddies of
air came upwards from the water, rocking the machine as a swell takes a
boat at sea, and splashed upon the frail, silk-covered wings of the
aeroplane in deluges of invisible spray.
On the right hand and the left were wide stretches of muddy grey salt
water, banks of sand, and drain-piped foreshore merging in patches of
potato and swede and yellow squares of unripe corn. Clusters of white
dots, where shingle and sea-walls bordered the drab, restless water,
were fishing hamlets, villages and little coal-port towns. Upon the
north bank, rapidly receding in distance, could be dimly sensed, beyond
a dense fringe of masts standing close as pins in rows upon a
pincushion, the oblongs and squares and rectilinears of docks and
shipyards, stone quays, and piers and tide-basins, mixed up with blocks
and streets of sheds and warehouses, stations and goods-yards, and huge,
many windowed factories, whose towering chimneys yet belched forth thick
black smoke-gouts, licked by red tongues of flame. Though even if the
Saturday noon steam-siren had not silenced the throbbing of pneumatic
rivetting-hammers and the roaring of steam coal-shoots, hydraulic grain
dischargers and oil-pumps, and all the hellish hubbub accompanying the
huge export and import trade of Yorkshire and Lancashire with North
Europe and the Continent, these sounds would not have reached the ears
of the boy in the aeroplane save as a dull and muffled murmur, vaguely
sensed, through the musical moaning of the stay-wires and the racket of
the tractor-screw.
Now the sunset was behind. The land was rushing back upon the right and
left-hand. The two-mile-wide river was broadening to a great estuary,
vaster than the Thames, between Fort Victoria and Shoeburyness.