“All right,” I said, feeling ghastly. “I’ll come.”
Toby stopped in the act of pulling on his flying-coat, and looked at
me. His face was livid, his eyes almost insanely malignant in a sudden
fury of bad temper.
“Don’t think you’re going to spoil it!” he said, through his teeth.
“I’ll see to that!”
With that cryptic remark, he swung himself into the pilot’s seat and
started the engine with a jerk that almost threw me into the water. I
slid down to the seat beside Sylvia. Toby had already cast off the one
remaining mooring-rope, and with a whirring roar that gave me an odd
thrill of old familiarity, the propeller at our nose a dark blur in its
initial low-speed revolutions, we commenced to move over the waves.
For a moment we had a slight sensation of their rise and fall as we
partly tore through them, partly floated on their lifting crests, and
then suddenly the engine note swelled to the deafening intensity of
full power; the blur of the propeller disappeared; a fount of white
spray, sunlit from a rift in the clouds, sprang up on either hand from
the floats beneath us, hung poised like jeweled curtains at our flanks,
stung our faces with flying drops. For yet a minute or two we raced
through the high-flung water; and then abruptly the glittering
foam-curtains vanished. Our nose lifted. We sagged for another splash,
lifted again, on a buoyancy that was not the buoyancy of the sea. I
glanced over the side, saw the tossing wave-crests already twenty feet
below us.
Instinctively I looked round to Sylvia to see how she was taking it.
Her eyes were bright, her face ecstatic. I saw her lips move as she
smiled. But her words were swallowed in the roar of the engine, and the
blast of air that almost choked one, despite the little mica
wind-screen behind which we crouched. I bent my ear close to her face,
just caught her comment as she repeated it.
“It’s--wonderful!” she gasped.
Then she clutched my arm in sudden nervousness as the machine banked
side-wise. Below us, diminished already, the pier, the long promenade
of Southbeach, whirled round dizzily in a complete circle, got yet
smaller as they went. Toby was putting the machine to about as steep a
spiral as it could stand. As we went round again and yet again, with
our nose seeming to point almost vertically up to the gray ceiling of
cloud and our bodies heavy against the backs of our seats, I had a
spasm of alarm that turned to anger. What was he playing at? It was
ridiculous to show off like this! I did not doubt his skill--but it
would not be the first airplane to stall at so steep an angle that it
slipped back in a fatal tail-spin. I noticed that Sylvia was not
strapped in her seat, and promptly rectified the omission. It might be
all right, but with an inexperienced lady-passenger, it was as well to
take precautions if he was going to play tricks of this sort.
* * * * *
Up and up we went in those dizzy spirals, Southbeach--disconcertingly
never on the side on which one expected it--miniature below us; and I
could not help admiring, despite my sickening nervousness, the masterly
audacity with which he piloted his machine on the very limit of the
possible. He never turned for a glance at us, but sat, lifted slightly
above us by our slant, doggedly crouched at his controls. I could
imagine his face, his lips pressed tight together, his queer eyes
alight with the boyish exultation of showing us--or perhaps showing
_me_?--what he could do. I did not need the demonstration. I had seen
him climb often enough like a circling hawk, gaining height in an
almost sheer ascent, racing a Hun to that point of superior elevation
which meant victory.
There had been a time when I could have beaten him at it. But there was
no necessity to play these circus-tricks now--above all, with a lady on
board. Why could he not take her for an ordinary safe flight over the
sea, gaining, in the usual way, a reasonable margin of height on an
angle that would have been almost imperceptible? I quivered to clamber
forward and snatch the controls from him as still we rose, perilously
high-slanted, in sweep after circular sweep. The gray-black stretch of
cloud was now close above us, the rounded modeling of its under-surface
like a low roof that seemed to forbid further ascent.
Again Sylvia clutched at my arm, her face alarmed, and I bent my head
down to catch the words she shouted against the all-swallowing roar of
the engine. They came just audible.
“Is he--going--through this?”
Toby was still holding her nose up, plainly intending to get above the
clouds. I saw no sense in making her uneasy. I put my mouth close to
her head.
“Blue sky--above!” I shouted.
She nodded, reassured.
The next moment we had plunged into the mass. Except for the sudden
twists as we banked, we seemed to be motionless in a dense fog. But the
engine still roared, and drops of congealed moisture, collecting on the
stays of the upper wings, blew viciously into our faces. The damp cold
struck through me to my bones, and I remembered suddenly that I was in
my extremely unsuitable ordinary clothes. There was no saying to what
height this mad fool might take us--he was still climbing steeply--and
I had no mind to catch my death of cold. Hanging on with one hand to
the side of the canted-up machine that threatened to fling me out
directly I rose from my seat, I managed to reach the locker where he
kept the flying-coats for his passengers, wriggled somehow into one of
them.
It was only by setting my teeth that I did it, for my head was whirling
dizzily and, cursing the day I had strained my nerves beyond
breaking-point, I had to fight back desperately an almost overmastering
panic that came upon me in gusts from a part of me beyond my will. I
could not have achieved it, had it not been for the fog which, blotting
out the earth beneath us, obliterated temporarily the sense of height.
I was shaking all over as I got back into my seat. I glanced at Sylvia.
She was sitting quiet and brave, a little strained, perhaps, staring at
the blank fog through which we drove in steadily upward sweeps.
* * * * *
Suddenly we emerged into dazzling sunshine, warm despite the cold rush
of the air. All above us was an infinite clarity of blue. Sylvia--I
guessed rather than heard--shouted something, waved her arm in
delighted surprise, pointing around and beneath. Close below us was no
longer the earth, but that magical landscape which is only offered by
the upper surface of the clouds. We rose for yet a minute or two before
we could get the full impression of it. At our first emergence, great
swelling banks of sunlit snow overtopped us here and there, blew across
us from moment to moment, uncannily unsubstantial as we went through
them, in mere fog. Then finally we looked down upon it all, the eye
ranging far and wide over a magnificent confusion of multitudinous
rounded knolls, of fantastic perilously toppling lofty crags from which
streamed wisps of gossamer vapor, of grotesque mountains and tremendous
chasms, such as the wildest scenery of earth can never show.
Familiar as it was to me, I could not help admiring anew the immense
sublimity of that spectacle which drifts so brilliantly under the blue
arch of heaven when the shadowed earth below teems with rain, that
spectacle which the eye of earth-bound man never sees. To the extreme
limit of vision it stretched, apparently solid, a fairy country
gleaming snow-white under the vertical sun, across which our shadow,
growing smaller at each instant, flitted like the shadow of a great
bird.
I felt Sylvia’s hand squeeze me in her delight. My exasperated
annoyance with Toby died down, all but vanished. Perhaps he wasn’t such
a fool, after all. It was worth while to show her this. That was what
he had climbed so steeply for. Now he would flatten out, circle once or
twice to imprint this fairy scene upon her memory, and then descend.
But he did not. He did not even glance round to us. He held the nose of
the machine up, climbed still, higher and higher, in those sheer and
dizzy spirals.
This was getting beyond a joke. I glanced at my watch, computed the
minutes since we had risen from that gray-green sea now out of sight
beneath the horizon-filling floor of cloud. We must be already over
five thousand feet up. That was surely quite enough. He might lose his
direction, cut off from the earth by that great cloud-layer, miss the
sea for our return. A forced landing upon hard ground with those
water-floats of ours would be a pretty ugly crash. I craned forward,
looked over his shoulder at the dial of the barograph. We were _seven
thousand_! What on earth--
I shouted at him, but of course he did not hear it in the deafening
roar of the engine. I caught hold of his shoulder, shook him hard. I
had to shake a second time before his face came round to me. It
startled me with its strange set fixity of expression, the wild eyes
that glared at me. I gesticulated, pointed downward. He opened his lips
in a vicious ugly snarl, shouted something of which only the ugly
rebuff of my interference was intelligible, turned again to his
controls, lifted the machine again from its momentary sag.
I sank back into my seat, quivering. Sylvia glanced at me inquiringly.
I shrugged my shoulders. She had not, I hoped, seen that ugly snarl
upon his face. The cloud-floor was now far below us, its crags and
chasms flattened to mere corrugations on its gleaming surface. The
seaplane rose, circling round and round untiringly, corkscrewing ever
up and up into the infinite blue above us.
I was now thoroughly alarmed. What was he playing at? I worried over
the memory of his furious face when I had made my gestured
expostulation. Surely he could have no serious purpose of any kind in
thus climbing so steeply far above any reasonable altitude. There was
no serious purpose imaginable. Unless--no, I refused to entertain the
sudden sickening doubt of his sanity. He was playing a joke on us, on
_me_. Guessing that I had lost my nerve, and angry with me for spoiling
a _tête-à-tête_ flight with Sylvia, he was maliciously giving me a
twisting. Presently he would get tired of the joke, flatten out.
* * * * *
But he did not get tired of it. Up and up we went, in turn after
turn--rather wider circles now, for the air was getting rare and thin,
and sometimes we sideslipped uncomfortably, and the engine flagged,
threatening to misfire, until he readjusted the mixture--but still
climbing. Far, far below us the cloud-floor was deceptive of our real
height in its fallacious similitude to an immense horizon of
snow-covered earth.
I glanced at my watch, calculated again our height from the minutes. We
must surely now be over twelve thousand feet! I shrank nervously from
the mere thought of again moving to look over his shoulder at the
barograph. An appalling feeling of vertigo held me in its clutch. That
last glance over the side had done it, reawakening all the panic terror
which had swept over me that day when--at such a height as this--I had
seen that Hun plunge to destruction and had suddenly realized, as
though I had but just awakened from a dream, my own high-poised
perilous instability. I sat there clutched and trembling, could not
have moved to save my life. I would have given anything to have closed
my eyes, forgotten where I was, but the horrible fascination of this
upward progress held them open as though mesmerized. I tried to compute
the stages of our ascent from our circling sweeps. Thirteen
thousand--thirteen thousand five hundred--fourteen thousand--fourteen
thousand five hundred--fifteen thousand--I gave it up. It was icily
cold. My head was dizzy, my ears sizzling with altered blood-pressure.
My lungs heaved in this rarefied atmosphere. I glanced at Sylvia. She
looked ill; her lips were blue; she was gasping as though about to
faint.
She looked at me imploringly, made a gesture with her hand toward
Toby’s inexorable back. I shrugged my shoulders in sign that I had
already protested in vain. But nevertheless I obeyed. Once more I
leaned forward and clutched at his shoulder. Once more, after I had
shaken him furiously, he turned upon me with that savage snarl, shouted
something unintelligible, and switched round again to his controls.
Sylvia and I looked at each other. This time she had seen. In her eyes
I read also that doubt of his sanity which was torturing me. She
motioned me toward the cockpit, pantomimed my taking over control. It
was impossible. I gestured it to her. Even if my nerves had been
competent to the task, it was certain that Toby would not voluntarily
relinquish his place. To have attempted to take it from him--if he were
indeed mad--would have resulted in a savage struggle where the
equilibrium of the machine would inevitably have been lost--in about
two seconds we should all of us be hurtling down to certain death. The
only thing to do was to sit tight--and hope that he would suddenly have
enough of this prank, and bring us earthward again. But even if he had
suddenly vanished from his place, to clamber over into the cockpit and
take charge was more than I could have done at that moment. There was a
time when I might have done it. But now I was shaking like a leaf. I
could not have pushed a perambulator, let alone pilot an airplane.
And still we climbed, roaring up and up. The yellow canvas of the lower
plane, gleaming in the sunshine, seemed curiously motionless against
the unchanging blue that was all around us. The earth, the very clouds
below us, seemed totally lost. I could not bring myself to venture a
glance down to them. We seemed out of contact with everything that was
normal life, suspended in the infinite void. And yet the engine roared,
and I knew that we still climbed.
* * * * *
We must have been somewhere about twenty thousand feet. My head seemed
as though it would burst. I was breathing with difficulty. A little
higher, and we should need oxygen. Toby’s face was of course hidden
from me, but he sat steadily at his controls, apparently in no
embarrassment. Probably he had recently been practicing flying to great
heights--it would be his queer idea of amusing himself--and was more
habituated to changes of atmospheric pressure. I looked at Sylvia. She
was plainly much distressed--and more than distressed, _frightened_. I
cannot describe the anguish which gripped me as I contemplated her.
Whatever I had tried to pretend to myself down there on that distant
earth in those six dreary months since my pride had been wounded, I
knew now, with an atrocious vividness of realization, that I loved her.
And I could do nothing--_nothing_--to save her, if that lunatic in
front did not come to his senses! The imploring look she fixed upon me
was exquisite torture. Speech was impossible in that deafening roar of
the engine, but she made me understand--the bitter irony of it!--that
it was in me she trusted. I took her hand, pressed it to my lips. If we
were to die, she should at least know what I felt for her. And
then--oh, miracle!--I felt my hand pulled toward her, taken to her
lips. She met my eyes with a wan smile of unmistakable meaning.
And then, just as I was all dizzy with the shock of it, the roar of the
engine ceased. There was a sudden silence that was awesome in its
completeness. Our nose came down to slightly below the horizontal.
Thank heaven, he was tired of the joke, was flattening out, was going
to descend! We began, in fact, to circle in a wide, very slightly
depressed, slanting curve. Toby twisted round from his seat, one hand
still upon the controls. There was a grim little smile on his face as
his eyes, curiously glittering, met mine.
“You get out!” he said curtly. His voice sounded strangely toneless,
far off, in that rarefied upper atmosphere.
For a moment I had a spasm of alarm, but I could not believe he was
serious. It was too fantastic, at twenty thousand feet in the air.
“Don’t be a silly ass, Toby! Take us down. The joke has gone far
enough.” My own voice was thin in my ears.
He ignored my protest.
“This is where you get out!” he repeated stubbornly.
Was the man really mad? I thought it best to humor him, managed to
force a little laugh.
“Thanks very much, but I’d rather go back with you,” I said.
“We’re not going back,” he replied with grim simplicity. “But you
are--here and now.”
This was madness right enough! Our only chance was to get him into
conversation, turn the current of his thoughts somehow, coax him back
to earth.
“Not going back?” I grinned at him as if he were being really funny.
“Where are you going, then?”
“We’re going on--Sylvia and I.”
* * * * *
He smiled at her fondly, nodded as though sure of her assent. She
uttered a little cry of alarm, clutched at me. All the time, while we
were speaking, he was steering the airplane automatically with one
hand, bringing her round and round in wide, flat circles where we lost
the minimum of height.
“On?” I said in innocent inquiry, while my brain worked desperately.
Curiously enough, in that moment of crisis, I found my head as clear,
my nerves as steady, as they had ever been in my life. All my dizzy
turmoil had vanished. I forgot that I had ever had a panic in the air.
I was merely trying to think of some scheme by which I might be able to
replace him at those controls. “On--where?”
He jerked his hand upward.
“Up there! On and on, until we come to--” He stopped himself suddenly,
his face diabolically suspicious. “You think I’m going to tell you,
don’t you? You think you’ll be able to follow us? But you wont! You get
out--here and now--d’you understand?”