Frederick Britten Austin

“ 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. ”

“ To Southbeach I would go. And now, as I contemplated it, I was appalled. What was I going to do with myself?
A paddle-wheel excursion-steamer came up to the pier, listing over with the black load aboard of her. Up and down the beach, in five-minute trips, a seaplane went roaring some eight hundred feet above the heads of the gaping crowd. I had done all the flying I wanted in the war, thank you very much. Other potentialities of amusement there were apparently none. If I could not discover a tolerably decent golf-course, I was a lost man. ”

“ Mr. Bryant smiled.
“Yes. We've met Jimmy before—haven't we, Sylvia?”
“He used to be an acquaintance of ours in London,” corroborated Sylvia imperturbably, delicately underlining the word acquaintance.
Toby probed me with a peculiar look, suddenly almost hostile. I could guess that he was asking himself whether I had come to Southbeach in pursuit of Sylvia. One did not need to be a detective to discover his own eager interest in her. It was patent, with no attempt at concealment. Those strange hungry restless eyes of his seemed to devour her. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I GLANCED at Sylvia. She was sitting numbed with horror, incapable of speech. As I looked, she jerked forward in a gesture of wild protest abruptly checked by the straps which held her in her seat. The airplane rocked in its now tender equilibrium just as something went crack! past my head. My eyes were back on Toby in the fraction of an instant. Still twisted in his seat, he was leveling that automatic pistol at me. I could see by his eyes that he was in the very act of pressing the trigger for the second time.
Four years' war-service in the air make a man pretty quick. ”

“ We'll spend the morning tinkering about the machine together. It'll be like old times, before we went up for a jolly old scrap with the Hun-bird. She's worth looking at, too—built for a radius of a thousand miles and a ceiling of over twenty thousand feet.”
“Really!” I said, with a touch old-time professional interest. “But what on earth do you want a machine like that for? She's surely scarcely suitable for giving donkey-rides up and down a beach?”
“She does all right,” replied Toby. “And I like to feel that I've got something with power to it. ”

“ 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!” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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?” ”

“ You think you know the way beyond the stars?” He burst suddenly into a hideous laugh, thin and cackling in the awesome silence of that upper air. “Then you'll never get there! I'll see to that! Get out!” ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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, 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ There are worse things. Put my last cent into buying the machine—ex-Government, of course. She's a topping bus!” His voice freshened suddenly with enthusiasm. “It's almost a shame to use her for hacking up and down like this. You must come and have a look at her.”
“Thanks,” I replied, “I'd like to, but—”
THE conversation was abruptly interrupted. Toby had jumped to his feet. Coming in through the door of the lounge was—miracles never happen singly!—an only-too-familiar, smiling and middle-aged married couple and—Sylvia! ”