Kenneth Latour

“ And Cobb was by no means the first nerve-broken pilot to know that strange contradiction of desire for the thing feared. Not a few of the men but all of the men whom the air has broken have carried, or are carrying, that same fierce longing for the blue remotenesses on with them to their graves. In some the longing has waxed, at length, even greater than their fear and they have returned. ”

“ Billy never disregarded flying regulations. He would have landed the way the T pointed if there hadn’t been another plane to cut his right of way within a million miles.
As a matter of fact there was another plane, but Billy didn’t know it. A strange, battered affair it was, with patched and tattered wings, that came coughing along, low down, out of the west; a disreputable gypsy of the air, a mangy sky pariah, seeking lodging for the night. Just above the treetops it scuttled, driving heedlessly for shelter, its pilot intent only on reaching a safe field before his gas was spent. ”

“ Billy waved a passenger into the rear cockpit and made his accustomed round of inspection while the man was fussing with his helmet and goggles and fumbling with the safety belt. But he might just as well have foregone the tour for he did not consciously see a single cotter pin or turnbuckle. His vision was all of the inward-looking variety. He was acutely aware of Jennie. He saw her sitting as she sat the night before in the dim aura of the colonel’s reading lamp on the screened veranda. He saw her humid eyes turned on him, pleading. ”

“ Back and forth above the field Billy shuttled the ship, his turns at the end of each soaring leg crackling with precision. At five thousand he caught the cloud, drove up under it, passed it, spun around on a wing tip, and shot downward. The wisp of drifting vapor engulfed the airplane for an instant. Then with gun cut and wires screaming the silver scout emerged, whooping groundward with flaunting tail waving the astonished cloud an impertinent Godspeed. ”

“ It came with a stunning burst of blue-white light and a blast that drowned the shouting of the manifolds and the screaming of the wires. A giant hand reached down out of the gray cloud bluff ahead, clutched the DH in invisible tentacles and swept it irresistibly into the smother. The hand was the first cloud current. And there were more waiting. Billy knew them. The clouds are full of currents. They grapple with a ship. They hurl it back and forth from one to another. They thrust it up. ”

“ Whispering gratulatingly the DH settled groundward, her tail dropping inch by inch as the furrows rose to brush the wheels.
She touched smoothly. And then Billy saw that fate was set against him. A crazy gray form lay dead ahead, a weather-beaten plow, waiting like a grim skeleton. He kicked the rudder bar violently. But too late. The ship ground into the obstacle with a snarl. Her undercarriage crumpled. She plunged her heavy nose into the rain-soaked earth, stopped with a crash of snapping spars, and quivered her upflung tail helplessly at the moon. ”

“ Norris went up her ladder and into the pilot’s cabin at the tip of the snout. Behind him, on either side of the fuselage, the twin propeller blades projecting from the motor housings on the wings whirled idly with a vicious whisper. He taxied out to the line and took off for a final air test. The steel-winged monster moved with no effect of speed whatever. She left the ground reluctantly. She climbed reluctantly, although her load was not yet aboard. She turned reluctantly. There was no spontaneity in anything she did. Decidedly she was a flying machine and no airplane. ”

“ Why should a ship running free and smooth catch fire in the air, for no good reason that is earthly?
“There is a reason, of course, but it has nothing to do with physical or mechanical flaws, if you ask me. The flaw is not the cause. You’ve got to look for the cause in something behind the flaw. Did you ever hear of ‘Last Crash’ Cobb?”
The story of Billy Cobb, and how he came to his last crash, was one of Norris’ classics. There is no denying that it points a moral if you want to look at it that way.
This is what Halliday, the old crew chief, told the accident-investigating officer. ”

“ Norris was confident he could coax her off. There was a fair mile-and-a-quarter stretch available for the take-off, with no obstacles higher than a man’s head for another quarter mile beyond. If the wind-speed gauge played true he could drop the tail when the needle read seventy and trust to the god of aviators to yank her wheels off the grass. Once in the air it would be a question of what the cellars of Panama could provide for a celebration. Norris was not concerned with anything that lay along the two-thousand-odd miles between the boundaries of Langstrom and the hangars of Cristobal. ”

“ Instead of hating the air she regarded it, therefore, as a deity more sinned against than sinning. And it was natural that, in Jennie’s eyes, the early airfarers, the men who offered their lives to the cause of air conquest, should be glorified. She invested them with the romantic glamour that is the meed of the pioneer in every fresh field of hardship and hazard. She set them above other men. In fact, she considered the existence of other men scarcely at all. ”

“ 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?” ”

“ He would appraise a craft at a glance and in that glance instantly catalogue its faults and its talents, knowing with a knowledge that is not promulgated in the manuals of the technical section just what might be expected of that ship—whether she were sluggish on the level, fast, or very fast; whether swift on the climb, long on the glide, tricky on the turns, treacherous on the landings, and all the other points that a pilot must canvass in his ship before he may invest her with his confidence. ”

“ She could not conceive of a complete, satisfactory and thoroughly real man who should be anything but a flyer.
It was inevitable, therefore, that her choice for the man of men should fall on a flyer. And it was impossible that the man who won her favor should hold the precious gift unless he kept faith with the air—as Billy Cobb would have phrased it—to the last crash. For she could respect none but the men of the air, the only men she knew and understood. And there is more depends upon respect in love than many folk suppose.
On the other hand, Jennie was a woman. ”

“ And having satisfied himself that all the cotter pins were clinched in place and the controls well greased at the bearings he would swing into the cockpit, buckle his safety belt, and command “Contact!” with the perfect assurance of the pilot who knows that barring an act of God he is safe in his own hands.
Some pilots fly on faith, others fly on nerve, but Last Crash Cobb flew on skill which was consummate and knowledge which was complete. It was no fault of his that tragedy entered his life by way of the air.
He was an aviator neither by chance nor by interest. He was an aviator by vocation. ”

“ Seven o’clock, the Chesapeake, and night drew on but not John Norris and the XT-6. Ten miles to the east or ten miles to the west they might be droning now, and still on their course. The highways of the air are something wider than the boulevards below. There is plenty of room to pass without a hail.
Off the tip of the Cape, Billy drew the throttle back. The XT-6 must be somewhere thereabouts and he knew at what altitude he ought to spy her. Two thousand feet, Norris had said the course would be. Billy coasted down to fifteen hundred and circled round a ten-mile radius. ”

“ For she had the intellectual stability to perceive that if men were killed by the air it was because of their own unworthiness, the imperfections of themselves and of their implements of flight, not because of any inherent malignity in the air. And she foresaw with clear conviction the coming of a day when toll would no longer be exacted, when man’s mastery of the air would be at least as secure and complete as his domination of the sea and the land. ”

“ Thus, it was nothing but the idle matter of appearances that kept Cobb waiting those weeks succeeding his conquest of the airplane before his pilot’s rating was bestowed. And it was the same matter of appearances that withheld for a space the open avowal of Jennie’s surrender. A woman has need to be at least as jealous of the forms as the D. M. A.
Eight weeks to a day after Billy’s first encounter with the air—in ’seventeen things happened faster in the service than they do now—his rating had come through. ”

“ A turtle jumping from a table would have been equally graceful—and not half as secure. The big DH floated ponderously into the airdrome under Billy’s restraining guidance, dropped its tail three feet over the grass tops, yawed along hesitantly for a hundred-odd feet, and then literally sprawled onto the turf with a thump and a bounce and a creaking and straining of struts and wires and longerons. She all but stopped in her tracks. It was a scandalous performance and Hansen, the crew chief, groaned with reprobation when he thought of the ship. ”

“ Billy had already typed the indorsement of approval for his signature. The colonel read it over slowly, shook his head dubiously, and signed.
“There you are,” he said and tossed the document in the outgoing-mail basket. “No more engines, no more ships, no more chasing clouds.”
“And no more crashes!” said Billy fervently. “Amen, and thank you, sir. I’m not happy about it. It’s a hard thing to do. It’ll take me a long time to get used to being a kiwi. But I’ll have Jennie—if she’ll have me now. And if she won’t, well, it’s for her good, anyway.” ”

“ They are the happy ones. For in those whose fear has proven the stronger urge the suffering bred of conflict between their fear and their desire has been intense. It was so with Billy Cobb. He suffered intensely.
So, haggard and drawn, dead for lack of sleep, worked to exhaustion, a prey to grief and to this strange mingling of fear and desire, he wore along hopelessly, watching Jennie burning lower and lower, through the heat of early September.
On the ninth the XT-6 was ready to the last safety wire. He told Norris, who was expecting it. ”

“ Moderate speed, settling gradually with a swift rush, tail skid and wheels brushing the ground simultaneously—that was the best way, for the ship. And the danger of a blowing tire was so remote that it wasn’t worth consideration. But Billy considered it. With the ship running free a blown tire might mean a crumpled wheel, a fast nose over, and—fire or a broken neck! Better to lumber in slowly, level off high, and drop to the ground with most of the headway lost before she touched. A tire was more likely to burst, but then there wouldn’t be enough speed to hurt anything but the ship. ”

“ Most of the things he did to her were gratuitous. She didn’t need them, for at McCook, her home station, they are thorough before everything else. He did them to have something to do. Driving himself like a fury, driving his team of mechanics, up at dawn and in at midnight or after, he found that there were periods during the day, some of them as long as five minutes, when he ceased to think of the tragedy in the hushed bedroom at the rear of the colonel’s quarters. ”

“ Cobb was not aware in these dreams of the absurdity of dying and watching himself die at the same time. It seemed quite natural and horribly real and vivid.
Some time before morning the dreaming stopped. And all that remained to Billy of that night of horrors when he opened his eyes in the gray light of the oncoming day was an oppressive sense of foreboding.
“What’s the matter with me?” he muttered sitting up in his Q. M. cot and blinking questioningly at the recumbent form of his roommate, Norris, who was snoring comfortably in another cot. Norris did not answer. ”

“ The 609, in the parlance of the air service, is the rigid physical test that every army flyer must survive twice yearly. A man who can triumph over the 609 is verging on bodily perfection. There is no other examination so searching.
And Billy judged that he was a long way from physical impeccability. He prayed that he might not pass the test. It was the only honorable avenue of escape from the incubus of fear that was slowly breaking Jennie and, through Jennie, breaking him, too. ”

“ There was only one way to save Norris, and only one man to do it. He, Billy Cobb, was the man.
He tried to suppress the thought. Jennie! It would be the final blow to her. But she might not know. He would warn the colonel. And if all went well⸺ It wouldn’t, though. He had the washed-out pilot’s certainty of that. No flyer in Billy’s condition of air nerves ever believes he can fly without crashing. That is one of the unchanging symptoms that make the disease. And Billy’s plan to warn Norris involved flying. It involved not only flying. ”

“ Hansen’s fervid exclamation drew Jennie’s eyes from their anxious vigil over Billy’s landing. She saw the furtive gypsy shooting in at dead right angles to the course of the oncoming DH. And a rapid glance from ship to ship told her that the thing she had spent the last month dreading was at hand. There was going to be a crash. The gypsy and the DH had leveled off together. Both were losing flying speed. Neither could open out and pick up fast enough to gain the air and clear the other. They were going to meet—going to meet hard! ”

“ I only know⸺”
“I think,” said Jennie slowly, “there must be an Afterward. I almost know it now. I used to doubt and wonder. But now I am sure. Because, Billy, the air won’t need you always. There will be others, sooner or later, to take your place. But I shall need you, always—and there can be no others, ever. You will come to me—Afterward. It is only fair. It would be so-so cruelly futile and incomplete, otherwise. I have a certainty—something I can’t explain—but a certainty, that when the air is done with you we shall find each other—somewhere—somehow! ”

“ He lifted Jennie’s limp body and made off with her in his arms.
He reached the house unobserved. The inhabitants of the post were still idling over late dinners. Dinner is always late on an active flying field in summer. Billy was aware of a mournful gratitude that he had been spared the sympathetic importunities that an encounter must have evoked. He struggled through the screen door, found Jennie’s room, and laid her on her bed. He wondered where the colonel was. Then he remembered that Jennie’s father had left that morning in answer to a hurried summons from Washington. ”

“ Now a kiwi, “for the information of all concerned,” as the technical bulletins put it, is the human counterpart of a certain type of training plane with reduced wing surface which roars like a lion but never leaves the ground.
Billy was still thinking anathema on the score of kiwis in general and Weifer in particular when he reached the hangar and was confronted with Jennie. His own scout ship was standing just outside the curtains with the blocks at the wheels and the engine idling gently. The crew chief, Hansen, was in the seat, holding back the stick. ”