Airman's Odyssey (34 page)

The realization irked her that in this room she was the envoy of a hostile creed and almost she regretted having come; she would have liked to hide somewhere and, fearful of being remarked, dared neither cough nor weep. She felt her presence here misplaced, indecent, as though she were standing naked before them. But so potent was
her
truth, the truth within her, that furtively their eyes strayed ever and again in her direction, trying to read it on her face. Beauty was hers and she stood for a holy thing, the world of human happiness. She vouched for the sanctity of that material something with which man tampers when he acts. She closed her eyes before their crowded scrutiny, revealing all the peace which in his blindness man is apt to shatter.

Rivière admitted her.

So now she was come to make a timid plea for her flowers, the coffee waiting on the table, her own young body. Again, in this room, colder even than the others, her lips began to quiver. Thus, too, she bore witness to her truth, unutterable in this alien world. All the wild yearning of her love, her heart's devotion, seemed here invested with a selfish, pestering aspect. And again she would have liked to leave this place.

“I am disturbing you—”

“No,” said Rivière, “you are not disturbing me. But unfortunately neither you nor I can do anything except—wait.”

There was a faint movement of her shoulders and Rivière guessed its meaning. “What is the use of that lamp, the dinner waiting, and the flowers there when I return?” Once a young mother had confided in Rivière. “I've hardly realized my baby's death as yet. It's the little things that are so cruel—when I see the baby clothes I had ready, when I wake up at night and there rises in my heart a tide of love, useless now, like my milk ... all useless!” And for this woman here, Fabien's death would only just begin tomorrow—in every action, useless now, in trivial objects ... useless. Little by little Fabien would leave his home. A deep, unuttered pity stirred in Rivière's heart.

“Madame—”

The young wife turned and left him with a weak smile, an almost humble smile, ignoring her own power.

Rivière sat down again rather heavily. “Still she is helping me to discover the thing I'm looking for.”

He fingered absent-mindedly the messages from the northern airports. “We do not pray for immortality,” he thought, “but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.”

His gaze fell on the telegrams.

“These are the paths death takes to enter here—messages that have lost their meaning.”

He looked at Robineau. Meaningless, too, this fellow who served no purpose now. Rivière addressed him almost gruffly.

“Have I got to tell you what your duties are?”

Then he pushed open the door that led into the Business Office and saw how Fabien's disappearance was recorded there in signs his wife could not have noticed. The slip marked
R.B.903,
Fabien's machine, was already inserted in the wall index of Unavailable Plant. The clerks preparing the papers for the Europe mail were working slackly, knowing it would be delayed. The airport was ringing up for orders respecting the staff on night duty whose presence was no longer necessary. The functions of life were slowing down. That is death! thought Rivière. His work was like a sailing ship becalmed upon the sea.

He heard Robineau speaking. “Sir, they had only been married six weeks.”

“Get on with your work!”

Rivière, watching the clerks, seemed to see beyond them the workmen, mechanics, pilots, all
who had helped him in his task, with the faith of men who build. He thought of those little cities of old time where men had murmured of the “Indies,” built a ship and freighted it with hopes. That men might see their hope outspread its wings across the sea. All of them magnified, lifted above themselves and saved—by a ship! He thought: The goal, perhaps, means nothing, it is the thing done that delivers man from death. By their ship those men will live.

Rivière, too, would be fighting against death when he restored to those telegrams their full meaning, to these men on night duty their unrest and to his pilots their tragic purpose; when life itself would make his work alive again, as winds restore to life a sailing ship upon the sea.

Commodoro Rivadavia could hear nothing now, but twenty seconds later, six hundred miles away, Bahia Blanca picked up a second message.

“Coming down. Entering the clouds....”

Then two words of a blurred message were caught at Trelew.

“... see nothing...”

Short waves are like that; here they can be caught, elsewhere is silence. Then, for no reason, all is changed. This crew, whose position was unknown, made itself heard by living ears, from somewhere out of space and out of time, and at the radio station phantom hands were tracing a word or two on this white paper.

Had the fuel run out already or was the pilot, before catastrophe, playing his last card: to reach the earth again without a crash?

Buenos Aires transmitted an order to Trelew.

“Ask him.”

The radio station looked like a laboratory with its nickel and its copper, manometers and sheaves of wires. The operators on duty in their white overalls seemed to be bending silently above some simple experiment. Delicately they touched their instruments, exploring the magnetic sky, dowsers in quest of hidden gold.

“No answer?”

“No answer.”

Perhaps they yet might seize upon its way a sound that told of life. If the plane and its lights were soaring up to join the stars, it might be they would hear a sound—a singing star!

The seconds flowed away, like ebbing blood. Were they still in flight? Each second killed a hope. The stream of time was wearing life away. As for twenty centuries it beats against a temple, seeping through the granite, and spreads the fane in ruin, so centuries of wear and tear were thronging in each second, menacing the airmen.

Every second swept something away; Fabien's voice, his laugh, his smile. Silence was gaining ground. Heavier and heavier silence drowned their voices, like a heavy sea.

“One forty,” some one murmured. “They're out of fuel. They can't be flying any more.”

Then silence.

A dry and bitter taste rose on their lips, like
the dry savor of a journey's end. Something mysterious, a sickening thing, had come to pass. And all the shining nickel and trellised copper seemed tarnished with the gloom that broods on ruined factories. All this apparatus had grown clumsy, futile, out of use; a tangle of dead twigs.

One thing remained; to wait for daybreak. In a few hours all Argentina would swing toward the sun, and here these men were standing, as on a beach, facing the net that was being slowly, slowly drawn in toward them, none knowing what its take would be.

To Rivière in his office came that quiet aftermath which follows only on great disasters, when destiny has spent its force. He had set the police of the entire country on the alert. He could do no more; only wait.

But even in the house of death order must have its due. Rivière signed to Robineau.

“Circular telegram to the northern airports.
Considerable delay anticipated Patagonia mail. To avoid undue delay Europe mail, will ship Patagonia traffic on following Europe mail.
“

He stooped a little forward. Then, with an effort, he called something to mind, something important. Yes, that was it. Better make sure.

“Robineau!”

“Sir.”

“Issue an order, please. Pilots forbidden to exceed 1900 revs. They're ruining my engines.”

“Very good, sir.”

Rivière bowed his head a little more. To be alone—that was his supreme desire.

“That's all, Robineau. Trot off, old chap!”

And this, their strange equality before the shades, filled Robineau with awe.

Robineau was drifting aimlessly about the office. He felt despondent. The company's life had come to a standstill, since the Europe mail, due to start at two, would be countermanded and only leave at daybreak. Morosely the employees kept their posts, but their presence now was purposeless. In steady rhythm the weather reports from the north poured in, but their “no wind,” “clear sky,” “full moon,” evoked the vision of a barren kingdom. A wilderness of stones and moonlight. As Robineau, hardlv aware what he was up to was turning over the pages of a file on which the office superintendent was at work, he suddenly grew conscious that the official in question was at his side waiting with an air of mocking deference to get his papers back As if he were saying “That's my show. Suppose you leave me to it eh?”

Shocked though he was by his subordinate's demeanor, the inspector found himself tongue-tied and, with a movement of annoyance, handed back the documents. The superintendent resumed his seat with an air of grand punctilio. “I should have told him to go to the devil,” thought Robineau. Then, to save his face, he moved away and his thoughts returned to the night's tragedy For with this tragedy all his chief's campaign went under and Robineau lamented a twofold loss

The picture of Rivière alone there in his private office rose in Robineau's mind; “old chap,” Rivière had said. Never had there been a man so utterly unfriended as he, and Robineau felt an infinite compassion for him. He turned over in his mind vague sentences that hinted sympathy and consolation and the impulse prompting him struck Robineau as eminently laudable. He knocked gently at the door. There was no answer. Not daring in such a silence to knock louder, he turned the handle. Rivière was there. For the first time Robineau entered Rivière's room almost on an equal footing, almost as a friend; he likened himself to the N.C.O. who joins his wounded general under fire follows him in defeat and in exile plays a brother's part “Whatever happens I am with you”—that was Robineau's unspoken message.

Rivière said nothing; his head was bowed and he was staring at his hands. Robineau's courage ebbed and he dared not speak; the old lion daunted him, even in defeat. Phrases of loyalty, of ever-growing fervor, rose to his lips; but every time he raised his eyes they encountered that bent head, gray hair, and lips tight-set upon their bitter secret. At last he summoned up his courage.

“Sir!”

Rivière raised his head and looked at him. So deep, so far away had been his dream that till now he might well have been unconscious of Robineau's presence there. And what he felt, what was that dream, and what his heart's bereavement, none would ever know.... For a long while Rivière looked at Robineau as at the living witness
of some dark event. Robineau felt ill at ease. An enigmatic irony seemed to shape itself on his chief's lips as he watched Robineau. And the longer his chief watched him, the more deeply Robineau blushed and the more it grew on Rivière that this fellow had come, for all his touching and unhappily sincere good will, to act as spokesman for the folly of the herd.

Robineau by now had quite lost his bearings. The N.C.O., the general, the bullets—all faded into mist. Something inexplicable was in the air. Rivière's eyes were still intent on him. Reluctantly he shifted his position, withdrew his hand from his pocket. Rivière's eyes were on him still. At last, hardly knowing what he said, he stammered a few words.

“I've come for orders, sir.”

Composedly Rivière pulled out his watch. “It is two. The Asuncion mail will land at two ten. See that the Europe mail takes off at two fifteen.”

Robineau bruited abroad the astounding news; the night flight would continue. He accosted the office superintendent.

“Bring me that file of yours to check.”

The superintendent brought the papers.

“Wait!”

And the superintendent waited.

The Asuncion mail signaled that it was about to land. Even at the darkest hour, Rivière had followed, telegram by telegram, its well-ordered
progress. In the turmoil of this night he hailed it as the avenger of his faith, an all-conclusive witness. Each message telling of this auspicious flight augured a thousand more such flights to come. “And, after all,” thought Rivière, “we don't get a cyclone every night! Once the trail is blazed, it must be followed up.”

Coming down, flight by flight, from Paraguay, as from an enchanted garden set with flowers, low houses, and slow waters, the pilot had just skirted the edge of a cyclone which never masked from him a single star. Nine passengers, huddled in their traveling-rugs, had pressed their foreheads on the window, as if it were a shop front glittering with gems. For now the little towns of Argentina were stringing through the night their golden beads, beneath the paler gold of the star cities. And at his prow the pilot held within his hands his freight of lives, eyes wide open, full of moonlight, like a shepherd. Already Buenos Aires was dyeing the horizon with pink fires, soon to flaunt its diadem of jewels like some fairy hoard The wireless operator strummed with nimble fingers the final telegrams, last notes of a sonata he had played
allegro
in the sky—a melody familiar to Rivière's ears. Then he pulled up the aerial and stretched his limbs, yawning and smiling; another journey done.

The pilot who had just made land greeted the pilot of the Europe mail, who was lolling, his hands in his pockets, against the plane.

“Your turn to carry on?”

“Yes.”

“Has the Patagonia come in?”

“We don't expect it; lost. How's the weather? Fine?”

“Very fine. Is Fabien lost then?”

They spoke few words of him, for that deep fraternity of theirs dispensed with phrases.

The transit mailbags from Asuncion were loaded into the Europe mail while the pilot, his head bent back and shoulders pressed against the cockpit, stood motionless, watching the stars. He felt a vast power stirring in him and a potent joy.

“Loaded?” some one asked. “Then, contact!”