Night Flight (6 page)

Those green tablecloths over which he had leaned, his chin propped on his arm, well he remembered them! And his feeling of power as he heard the others' quibbles! Futile these had seemed, doomed from the outset by the force of life. He felt the weight of energy that gathered in him. And I shall win, thought Rivière, for the weight of argument is on my side. That is the natural trend of things. They urged him to propose a Utopian scheme, devoid of every risk. “Experience will guide us to the rules,” he said. “You cannot make rules precede practical experience.”

After a hard year's struggles, Rivière got his way. “His faith saw him through,” said some, but
others: “No, his tenacity. Why, the fellow's as obstinate as a bear!” But Rivière put his success down to the fact that he had lent his weight to the better cause.

Safety first was the obsession of those early days. Planes were to leave only an hour before dawn, to land only an hour after sunset. When Rivière felt surer of his ground, then and only then did he venture to send his planes into the depth of night. And now, with few to back him, disowned by nearly all, he plowed a lonely furrow.

Rivière rang up to learn the latest messages from the planes in flight.

Now the Patagonia mail was entering the storm and Fabien abandoned all idea of circumventing it; it was too widespread for that, he reckoned, for the vista of lightning flashes led far inland, exposing battlement on battlement of clouds. He decided to try passing below it, ready to beat a retreat if things took a bad turn.

He read his altitude, five thousand five hundred feet, and pressed the controls with his palms to bring it down. The engine started thudding violently, setting all the plane aquiver. Fabien corrected the gliding angle approximately, verifying on the map the height of the hills, some sixteen hundred feet. To keep a safety margin he determined to fly at a trifle above two thousand, staking his altitude as a gambler risks his fortune.

An eddy dragged him down, making the plane tremble still more harshly and he felt the threat of unseen avalanches that toppled all about him He dreamt an instant of retreat and its guerdon of a hundred thousand stars, but did not shift his course by one degree.

Fabien weighed his chances; probably this was just a local storm, as Trelew, the next halt, was signaling a sky only three-quarters overcast. A bare twenty minutes more of solid murk and he would be through with it. Nevertheless the pilot felt uneasy. Leaning to his left, to windward, he sought to catch those vague gleams which, even in darkest nights, flit here and there. But even those vagrant gleams were gone; at most there lingered patches in the mass of shadow where the night seemed less opaque, or was it only that his eyes were growing strained?

The wireless operator handed him a slip of paper.

“Where are we?”

Fabien would have given much to know. “Can't say exactly,” he answered. “We are flying by compass across a storm.”

He leaned down again. The flame from the exhaust was getting on his nerves. There it was, clinging to the motor like a spray of fireflowers, so pale it seemed that moonlight would have quelled it, but, in this nothingness, engulfing all the visible world. He watched it streaming stiffly out into the wind, like a torch flame.

Every thirty seconds Fabien bent down into the cockpit to check the gyroscope and compass. He dared not light the dim red lamps which
would have dazzled his eyes for some moments, but the luminous dial hands were ceaselessly emitting their pale and starry radiance. And in all those needles and printed figures the pilot found an illusive reassurance, as in the cabin of a ship swept by the waves. For, like a very sea of strange fatality, the night was rolling up against him with all its rocks and reefs and wreckage.

“Where are we?” the operator asked again.

Fabien drew himself up and, leaning to the left, resumed his tremendous vigil. He had no notion left how many hours more and what efforts would be needed to deliver him from fettering darkness. Would he ever come clear, he wondered, for he was staking his life on this little slip of dirty, crumpled paper, which he unfolded and re-read a thousand times to nurse his hopes:
Trelew. Sky three-quarters overcast. Westerly breeze.
If there still remained a clear patch over Trelew, he would presently glimpse its lights across a cloud rift. Unless....

That promise of a faint gleam far ahead beckoned him on; but, to make sure, he scribbled a message to the radio operator. “Don't know if I can get through. Ask if the weather's holding out behind.”

The answer appalled him.

“Commodoro reports: Impossible return here. Storm.”

He was beginning to measure this unforeseen offensive, launched from the Cordillera toward the sea. Before he could make them the storm would have burst upon the cities.

“Get the San Antonio weather report.”

“San Antonio reports: West wind rising. Storm in the west. Sky three-quarters overcast. San Antonio picking up badly on account of interferences. I'm having trouble too. I shall have to pull up the aerial on account of the lightning. Will you turn back? What are your plans?”

“Stow your damned questions! Get Bahia Blanca!”

“Bahia Blanca reports: Violent westerly gale over Bahia Blanca expected in less than twenty minutes.”

“Ask Trelew.”

“Trelew reports: Westerly gale; a hundred feet per second; rain squalls.”

“Inform Buenos Aires: We are cut off on all sides; storm developing over a depth of eight hundred miles; no visibility. What shall we do?”

 

A shoreless night, the pilot thought, leading to no anchorage (for every port was unattainable, it seemed), nor toward dawn. In an hour and twenty minutes the fuel would run out. Sooner or later he must blindly founder in the sea of darkness. Ah, if only he could have won through to daylight!

Fabien pictured the dawn as a beach of golden sand where a man might get a foothold after this hard night. Beneath him the plains, like friendly shores, would spread their safety. The quiet land would bear its sleeping farms and flocks and hills. And all the flotsam swirling in the shadows would lose its menace. If it were possible, how gladly he would swim toward the strand of daylight! But, well he knew, he was surrounded; for better or
for worse the end would come within this murk of darkness.... Sometimes, indeed, when daybreak came, it seemed like convalescence after illness.

What use to turn his eyes toward the east, home of the sun? Between them lay a gulf of night so deep that he could never clamber up again.

“The Asuncion mail is making good headway; it should be in at about two. The Patagonia mail, however, seems to be in difficulties and we expect it to be much overdue.”

“Very good, Monsieur Rivière.”

“Quite possibly we won't make the Europe mail wait for it; as soon as Asuncion's in, come for instructions, please. Hold yourself in readiness.”

Rivière read again the weather reports from the northern sectors. “Clear sky; full moon; no wind.” The mountains of Brazil were standing stark and clear against the moonlit sky, the tangled tresses of their jet-black forests falling sheer into a silver tracery of sea. Upon those forests the moonbeams played and played in vain, tingeing their blackness with no light. Black, too, as drifting wreckage, the islands flecked the sea. But all the outward air route was flooded by that exhaustless fountain of moonlight.

If Rivière now gave orders for the start, the crew of the Europe mail would enter a stable world, softly illuminated all night long. A land which held no threat for the just balance of light
and shade, unruffled by the least caress of those cool winds which, when they freshen, can ruin a whole sky in an hour or two.

Facing this wide radiance, like a prospector eyeing a forbidden gold field, Rivière hesitated. What was happening in the south put Rivière, sole protagonist of night flights, in the wrong. His opponents would make such moral capital out of a disaster in Patagonia that all Rivière's faith would henceforth be unavailing. Not that his faith wavered; if, through a fissure in his work, a tragedy had entered in, well, the tragedy might prove the fissure—but it proved nothing else. Perhaps, he thought, it would be well to have look-out posts in the west. That must be seen to. “After all,” he said to himself, “my previous arguments hold good as ever and the possibilities of accident are reduced by one, the one tonight has illustrated.” The strong are strengthened by reverses; the trouble is that the true meaning of events scores next to nothing in the match we play with men. Appearances decide our gains or losses and the points are trumpery. And a mere semblance of defeat may hopelessly checkmate us.

He summoned an employee. “Still no radio from Bahia Blanca?”

“No.”

“Ring up the station on the phone.”

Five minutes later he made further inquiries. “Why don't you pass on the messages?”

“We can't hear the mail.”

“He's not sending anything?”

“Can't say. Too many storms. Even if he was sending we shouldn't pick it up.”

“Can you get Trelew?”

“We can't hear Trelew.”

“Telephone.”

“We've tried. The line's broken.”

“How's the weather your end?”

“Threatening. Very sultry. Lightning in the west and south.”

“Wind?”

“Moderate so far. But in ten minutes the storm will break; the lightning's coming up fast.”

Silence.

“Hullo, Bahia Blanca! You hear me? Good. Call me again in ten minutes.”

Rivière looked through the telegrams from the southern stations. All alike reported: No message from the plane. Some had ceased by now to answer Buenos Aires and the patch of silent areas was spreading on the map as the cyclone swept upon the little towns and one by one, behind closed doors, each house along the lightless streets grew isolated from the outer world, lonely as a ship on a dark sea. And only dawn would rescue them.

Rivière, poring on the map, still hoped against hope to discover a haven of clear sky, for he had telegraphed to the police at more than thirty upcountry police stations and their replies were coming in. And the radio posts over twelve hundred miles of country had orders to advise Buenos Aires within thirty seconds if any message from the plane was picked up, so that Fabien might learn at once whither to fly for refuge.

The employees had been warned to attend at 1
A.M
. and were now at their posts. Somehow,
mysteriously, a rumor was gaining ground that perhaps the night flights would be suspended in future and the Europe mail would leave by day. They spoke in whispers of Fabien, the cyclone and, above all, of Rivière whom they pictured near at hand and point by point capitulating to this rebuff the elements had dealt.

Their chatter ceased abruptly; Rivière was standing at his door, his overcoat tight-buttoned across his chest, his hat well down upon his eyes, like the incessant traveler he always seemed. Calmly he approached the head clerk.

“It's one ten. Are the papers for the Europe mail in order?”

“I—I thought—”

“Your business is to carry out orders, not to think.”

Slowly turning away, he moved toward an open window, his hands clasped behind his back. A clerk came up to him.

“We have very few replies, sir. We hear that a great many telegraph lines in the interior have been destroyed.”

“Right!”

Unmoving, Rivière stared out into the night.

 

Thus each new message boded new peril for the mail. Each town, when a reply could be sent through before the lines were broken, announced the cyclone on its way, like an invading horde. “It's coming up from the Cordillera, sweeping everything before it, toward the sea.”

To Rivière the stars seemed over-bright, the air too moist. Strange night indeed! It was rotting
away in patches, like the substance of a shining fruit. The stars, in all their host, still looked down on Buenos Aires—an oasis, and not to last. A haven out of Fabien's range, in any case. A night of menace, touched and tainted by an evil wind. A difficult night to conquer.

Somewhere in its depths an airplane was in peril; here, on the margin, they were fighting to rescue it, in vain.

Fabien's wife telephoned.

Each night she calculated the progress of the homing Patagonia mail. “He's leaving Trelew now,” she murmured. Then went to sleep again Presently: “He's getting near San Antonio, he has its lights in view.” Then she got out of bed, drew back the curtains and summed up the sky. “All those clouds will worry him.” Sometimes the moon was wandering like a shepherd and the young wife was heartened by the faithful moon and stars, the thousand presences that watched her husband. Toward one o'clock she felt him near her. “Not far to go, Buenos Aires is in sight.” Then she got up again, prepared a meal for him, a nice steaming cup of coffee. “It's so cold up there!” She always welcomed him as if he had just descended from a snow peak. “You
must
be cold!” “Not a bit.” “Well, warm yourself anyhow!” She had everything ready at a quarter past one. Then she telephoned. Tonight she asked the usual question.

“Has Fabien landed?”

The clerk at the other end grew flustered. “Who's speaking?”

“Simone Fabien.”

“Ah! A moment, please....”

Afraid to answer, he passed the receiver to the head clerk.

“Who's that?”

“Simone Fabien.”

“Yes. What can I do for you?”

“Has my husband arrived?”

After a silence which must have baffled her, there came a monosyllable. “No.”

“Is he delayed?”

“Yes.”

Another silence. “Yes, he is delayed.”

“Ah!”

The cry of a wounded creature. A little delay, that's nothing much, but when it lasts, when it lasts....

“Yes. And when—when is he expected in?”