“Nothing _will_ happen, Mrs. Bryant--make your mind easy. Toby’s
perfectly safe. And if Mr. Bryant would like a flight, I’m sure Toby
would be pleased to take him.”
Toby was looking at Sylvia’s father with his enigmatic eyes.
“Of course I will,” he said. “But I don’t want to worry Mrs. Bryant. I
will take Mr. Bryant another time.”
The conversation drifted off to other topics. At last, Mrs. Bryant rose
for bed.
“And mind, Mr. Selwyn,” she warned him smilingly as she shook hands
with him, “I shall try hard to persuade Sylvia not to go.”
“But you wont succeed, Mother!” announced Sylvia radiantly. “Good
night, Toby. Good night, _Mr._ Esdaile!” With which parting shot she
left us, and the lounge was suddenly horribly empty.
* * * * *
We sat there for yet some time, Toby and I, puffing at our pipes in
silence. He leaned back on the settee, with his eyes closed. I was
thinking--never mind what I was thinking; but my thoughts ranged far
into the dreary future of my life. My glance fell on him, scrutinizing
him, probing him, weighing him, as he lay there all unconscious of it.
About his feelings I had no doubt. Were they reciprocated? I remembered
that peculiarly attractive smile of his, the alluring touch of mystery
about him--and almost hated him for them. That was the kind of thing
which appealed to women, I reflected bitterly.
He opened his eyes.
“‘Puro è disposto a salire alle stelle,’” he murmured to himself,
staring as at a vision where this somewhat gaudy hotel lounge had no
place.
“What’s that?” I said, not quite catching his words.
“Eh?” He looked at me as though he had forgotten my presence, was only
now reminded of it by my voice. “Oh, that’s the last line of the
Purgatorio--where Dante, having drunk forgetfulness of the earth from
Lethe, is ready to ascend with Beatrice into the stars of the Paradiso.
.... All right, Jimmy,” he added, with a smile of sardonic superiority
which irritated me, “don’t worry yourself with trying to understand.
You wont. You’re one of those whose idea of the fit habitation for the
divine soul shining through the eyes of your beloved is a bijou
residence in a London suburb. After a few years of you, your wife,
whoever she is, will be another Mrs. Bryant.”
“Many thanks!” I replied, somewhat nettled, and a little puzzled also.
This was a new Toby. We were not given to cultivating poetry in our
mess. “But since when have you taken to studying Dante in the
original?”
“Oh, I’ve had plenty of time,” he answered, his eyes straying away from
me evasively. “I’ve lived pretty much by myself these last few years.”
He rose to his feet, cutting short the subject. “Let’s go for a stroll,
shall we? Get a breath of fresh air into our lungs.”
* * * * *
I assented willingly enough. At the back of my mind was an obscure idea
that, in the stimulated sense of comradeship evoked between two friends
who walk together under a night sky, he might open himself to some
confidence that would help me to a more precise definition of the
relationship that subsisted between himself and Sylvia. In this I was
disappointed. He walked along the asphalt promenade, now almost
deserted, with the sea to our left marked only by an irregular faintly
gleaming line of white in the black obscurity, without a word. He did
not even respond to my efforts at conversation. Apparently he did not
hear them. Overhead, the metallic blue-black heaven was powdered with a
multitude of stars, twinkling down upon us from their immense
remoteness. He threw his head back to contemplate them as we walked in
silence. He baffled me, kept me somehow from my own private thoughts.
Suddenly he switched upon me.
“There can’t be nothingness all the way, can there?” he demanded of me
with a curious vehemence of interrogation. His hand made an involuntary
half-gesture toward the scintillating dome of stars. “There must be
_something_!” His manner had the disconcerting intensity of a man who
has been brooding overlong in solitude. “At a distance everything melts
into the blue. I have seen blank blue sky where on another day there’s
a range of mountains sharp and clear across the horizon. And they
pretend that in all those millions of miles there is nothing--nothing
but empty space!” He finished on a note of scorn.
“But surely the astronomers--” I began.
“Pah!” he interrupted me. “What do you or the astronomers know about
it? Shut up!”
Shut up, I did. He was evidently not in the mood for reasonable
conversation. He also shut up, pursuing in silence thoughts I could not
follow. At last he brusquely suggested returning to the hotel.
* * * * *
Next morning, when I met him in the breakfast-room, he was quite his
old cheery self, and whatever resentment of his last night’s rudeness
still rankled in me, vanished in the odd charm of his smile. He
reminded me of my promise to spend the morning with him tinkering about
his seaplane. I acquiesced, for two reasons. First, I had nothing else
to do, and I still retained enough of the impress of my old flying days
to be genuinely interested in looking over a machine. Secondly, Sylvia
would be coming to it for her flight. An uneasy night had not brought
me to any satisfying theory of her real attitude toward him.
It was a bright sunshiny morning as we left the hotel, but a southwest
breeze ruffled the surface of the sea; and the white isolated clouds
that drifted across the blue overhead were evidently the advance-guards
of a mass yet invisible beyond the horizon. Within an hour or two the
sky would almost certainly be overcast. For the moment it was fine,
however, and I enjoyed the fresh clarity of the air as we walked down
the pier together. At its extremity, on the leeward side of the steamer
landing-stage, the seaplane rode the running waves like a great bird
that had alighted with outspread wings, the water splashing and sucking
against her floats as she jerked and slackened on her mooring-ropes.
We hauled in on them, clambered down into her. She was, as he explained
to me, intended for a super-fighting-scout, with an immense radius, a
great capacity for climb, and a second machine-gun. The space where
this second machine-gun had been, just behind the pilot, was now filled
with four seats, in pairs behind each other, for the passengers, and he
had had her landing-wheels replaced by floats. The morning was still
young--nine o’clock struck just as we got on board the machine; and for
the next two hours we pottered about her, cleaning her powerful motor,
tautening the wire stays to her wings, looking into a hundred and one
technical details that would have no interest for anyone but the
expert. I enjoyed myself, and Toby was almost pathetically delighted to
have some one with him who could enter into his enthusiasms. He had, I
could guess, been leading a very solitary life for a long while.
Apparently he almost lived on board her. All sorts of gear were stowed
away in her. In one of the lockers I found quite a collection of books,
including the Dante he had quoted, and a number of others of a
distinctly mystical type--odd reading for a flying man. In another,
close to the pilot’s seat, was a German automatic pistol.
“Souvenir of the great war, Daddy!” he smiled at me as I handled it.
“But do you know it’s loaded?” I objected disapprovingly.
“Yes,” he replied. “I shoot sea-gulls with it sometimes--chase ’em in
the air. It’s great sport.”
I shrugged my shoulders. Chasing seagulls with a pistol was just one of
those mad things I could well imagine Toby doing.
We gave her a dose of oil, filled up her petrol-tank--one of her
original pair had been removed to make space for the passengers, but
she still had a five-hundred-mile radius, he told me--and looked round
for something else to do.
“Would you like to take her up and see how she climbs?” he invited me.
“No, thanks!” I replied hurriedly, uncomfortable in a sudden
embarrassment. I had, thanks to the Armistice, managed to conceal my
humiliating loss of nerve from the other fellows. “I’ve given up
flying.”
His queer eyes rested upon me for a penetrating glance, and I felt
pretty sure that he guessed. But he made no comment.
“All right,” he said. “I expect Miss Bryant will be along presently.
We’ll sit here and wait for her.”
* * * * *
We ensconced ourselves in the passengers’ seats and sat there smoking
our pipes. The mention of Miss Bryant’s name seemed to have killed
conversation between us. We sat in a silence that I, at least, felt to
be subtly awkward. The intimacy of the morning was destroyed. Each of
us withdrew into himself, each perhaps preoccupied with the same
problem. Once, certainly, I caught his glance hostile upon me.
As I had expected, heavy clouds had come up from the southwest, and the
sky was now almost completely overcast. But immediately overhead there
was still a clear patch where, through a wide rift in the gray wrack,
one looked into the infinite blue. Leaning back in his seat, he stared
up at it with eyes that were dreamy in a peculiar fixity of expression.
“Jimmy,” he said suddenly, in a voice that was far away with his
thoughts, “in the old days, when you were flying high to drop on a
stray Hun,--say, at twenty thousand feet, with the earth miles away out
of touch,--didn’t you ever feel that if you went a little
higher--climbed and climbed--you would come to something--some other
place? Didn’t it almost seem to you that it would be as easy as going
back?”
I glanced at him. Into my mind flitted a memory of his last night’s
wild talk about the stars. He had always been a little queer. Was
he--not quite right?
“I can’t say it did,” I replied curtly. “I was always jolly glad to get
down again.”
He looked at me.
“Yes--I suppose so!” he commented. There was almost an insult in his
tone.
Before I could decide whether to resent it or to humor him, I saw
Sylvia approaching us along the pier, charming in her summer dress, but
prudently with a raincoat over her arm.
“Here’s Miss Bryant!” I said, glad of this excuse to put an end to the
conversation.
He leaped to his feet with a peculiar alacrity.
“At last!” he ejaculated, as though an immeasurable time of waiting was
at an end. He quenched a sudden flash of excitement in his eyes as he
caught my glance on his face.
She stood above us on the pier, smiling.
“Here I am!” she said. “But it isn’t a very nice morning, is it?”
“It will be all right up above,” replied Toby. “Come along--down that
next flight of steps.” He was trembling with eagerness. I wondered
suddenly whether I was wise in letting her go up with him. The man’s
nerves were obviously strung to high pitch. On the other hand, I had
the greatest confidence in his skill--and it was only too likely that
she would misinterpret any objections from me, would refuse to listen
to them.
While I was hesitating, she had already descended to the lower stage,
and Toby had helped her along the gangplank into the machine.
“You see I’ve brought my raincoat,” she said. “It’ll be cold up there,
wont it?”
“That’s no use,” replied Toby with brutal directness. “Here!” He opened
a locker where he kept the flying-coats for his passengers. “Put that
on.”
* * * * *
I helped her with it. She looked more charming than ever in the thick
leather coat, the close-fitting leather helmet framing her dainty
features. Then I made a step toward the gangplank.
“But aren’t you coming too?” she demanded in surprise.
Toby answered for me.
“Esdaile doesn’t care for flying,” he said with a sardonic smile,
looking me straight in the eyes. There was a sort of mocking triumph in
that unmistakable sneer.
“Oh--but _please_!” Sylvia turned to me pleadingly. “Do come!”
“I’d rather take you up alone,” said Toby in a stubborn voice, looking
up from the mooring-rope he had bent to untether.
She ignored him, laid a hand upon my arm.
“Wont you?” she asked.
“I should infinitely prefer not to,” I replied awkwardly. I cursed
myself for my imbecility, but the mere idea of going up in that machine
made me feel sick inside, still so powerful was the memory of that
moment long ago when, ten thousand feet up with a Hun just below me
plunging in flames to destruction, I had felt my nerve suddenly break,
my head go dizzy in an awful panic. “Please excuse me.”
She could not, of course, guess my reason.
“I sha’n’t go without you,” she said obstinately. Her eyes seemed to be
telling me something I was not intelligent enough to catch. “And I want
to go. Please-- _Jimmy_!”