# Into the Blue

From the The Blue Book magazine, March 1924, pp. 36–46. Title illustration may be omitted.
Into the Blue
The strange and tremendously dramatic story of an airplane pilot, intoxicated with the exaltation of great altitudes, setting his course, with his sweetheart, for the stars—by the distinguished author of “Nach Verdun” and “Out of the Night.”
By F. Britten Austin
IT was in a bitterly pessimistic frame of mind that, having seen my baggage into the hotel, I went for a first walk along the asphalted esplanade of Southbeach. I had no pleasure in the baking sun, in the glittering stretch of the English Channel that veiled itself in a fine-weather mist all around the half-horizon. The exuberant, bold-eyed flappers, promenading in groups of three or four, the vivid polychromatism of their taste in sports-coats, seemed to me merely objectionable. The hordes of worthily respectable middle-class families complete with children—with many children—that blackened the sands and overflowed into the fringe of the water oppressed my soul with their formidable multiplicity.
I thought, in a savage emphasis of contrast, of the neat little yacht that should now be bearing me across the North Sea to the austere perfection of the Norwegian fiords. And I cursed myself for the childish imbecility of exasperation with which—when, at the last moment, with my suitcases all packed, I had received a telegram informing me that the yacht had come off second-best in a collision with a coal-tramp—I had picked up Bradshaw and sworn to myself to go to whatever place I should blindly put my finger upon as I opened the page. The oracle had declared for Southbeach—Southbeach in mid-August! I shrugged my shoulders—so be it! My holiday was spoiled anyhow. 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.
I am not going to give the chronicle of that first day. It would be a study in sheer boredom. That night, after one of those execrable dinners which are the peculiar production of an English seaside hotel, I had pretty well made up my mind that—oracle or no oracle—I would shake the sand of Southbeach off my feet on the morrow. Sitting over my coffee in the lounge, I was in fact already consulting the time-table for a morning train, when my cogitations were suddenly interrupted by a violent slap on the shoulder.
“Hello, Jimmy!”
I looked up with a start, before my identification of the voice had time to complete itself.
“Toby!—Toby Selwyn—by all that's splendid!” It was years since I had seen him, but in this dreary desert of uninteresting people he came like an angel of companionship, and I welcomed him with delight. “Sit down, man. Have a drink!”
HE did so, ordered a whisky-and-soda from the hovering waiter. I looked at him as one looks at an acquaintance of old times, seeking for changes. I had not seen him since the Armistice, when our squadron of fighting scouts was demobilized and a cheery crowd of daredevil pilots was dispersed to the four quarters of the globe.
He had not greatly altered. His face was a little thinner, more mature. His hair was still the same wild red mop. His eyes—peculiar in that when he opened them upon you, you saw the whites all round the pupil—had still that strange look in them, as though somewhere deep down in them his soul was like a caged animal, supicious and restless, which I so well remembered. The reason for his nickname jumped back into my mind. It was from his little trick of suddenly and disconcertingly going “mad dog,” not only when he swooped down, against any sort of odds, upon a covey of Huns, but in the mess. Some one had called him “Mad dog;” it had been affectionately softened to “dog Toby;” and “Toby” he remained.
“And what on earth are you doing here?” I asked.
He smiled grimly.
“Earning my living, old bean. Introducing all the grocers in England to the poetry of flying, at ten bob a head.”
“So that was your machine I saw going up and down the sea-front today?”
“It was. Five-minute trips—two bob a minute, and cheap at the price. Had to do something, you know. So I hit on this. 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! Toby obscured me from them for an instant as he went eagerly toward them—an instant where I weighed the problem of whether to stay or bolt. The last time Sylvia and I had met she had told me, with a pretty sympathy that ought to have softened the blow, that she would always be glad to have me as a friend, but— The problem was resolved for me, before I could decide. Toby was leading the trio up to me.
“I want to introduce an old pal of mine—Jimmy Esdaile.”
Mr. and Mrs. Bryant shot a swift smile at each other and then to me as we shook hands. Sylvia almost grinned. I felt a perfect fool. “Good evening, Mr. Esdaile,” said Sylvia in her sweetest tones, her gray eyes demurely alight.
Mr. Esdaile! The last time, it had still been “Jimmy.” It is true that since I had somewhat boorishly informed her, upon that occasion, that I had no manner of use for being her friend, I had scarcely a legitimate grievance if now she chose to be frigid.
“Wont you sit down, all of you?” I suggested. “Mr. Bryant, you'll take a Grand Marnier with your coffee, I know.”
“Thanks, Jimmy, I will,” said Mr. Bryant, seating himself. I saw Toby stare. His astonishment visibly increased as Mrs. Bryant, having comfortably disposed herself upon the settee, added in her motherly fashion: “And what in the world are you doing here, Jimmy?”
“That's what I'm asking myself,” I replied. Toby cut me short in what might have been a witty answer had I been allowed to finish it.
“You people know each other, then?” he demanded.
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. Quite apart from any personal feelings—any time during the last six months I could have assured you, with perfect sincerity, that my heart was stone dead,—I didn't like it. Toby was not the sort of chap—
But I had no opportunity to intervene. Mr. and Mrs. Bryant, with a genuine kindly interest in me and my doings that at any other time I should have appreciated, monopolized me. And Sylvia flirted with him, demurely but outrageously. She called him Toby with the most natural ease in the world. He, poor devil, was awkward in an uncertainty whether she were playing with him, jerkily spasmodic in his answers, devouring her all the time with those strange eyes of his, wherein I recognized that same caged-animal look familiar to me as a preliminary to an outburst of “mad dog” on those nights when there was ragging in the mess. She, I could see, was enjoying herself at playing with fire.
AT last I could stand it no longer. I switched off from the amiable platitudes I was exchanging with her parents, interrupted her in her markedly exclusive conversation with him.
“I didn't know Toby was a friend of yours, Syl—Miss Bryant,” I said.
She turned candid eyes upon me.
“Oh, yes, we have known Toby quite a long time—soon after you dropped us—nearly six months, isn't it, Toby?”
She took, evidently, a malicious pleasure in reiterating his Christian name. I messed up the end of my cigarette before I remembered not to chew it. Toby looked up. suspiciously.
“I had no idea, either, that you were a friend of the family, Esdaile,” he said. He also had dropped the “Jimmy.”
Sylvia answered for me.
“Not exactly a close friend,” she said sweetly. “Are you, Mr. Esdaile? We had almost forgotten each other's existence.”
I could have smacked her.
Toby looked immensely relieved. I could see that, for the moment at least, he definitely put certain doubts out of his mind. He seemed to be trying to make up for his spasm of hostility when next he spoke.
“He's an old pal of mine, anyway, aren't you, Jimmy? It's like old times to see you again. D'you remember that little scrap with a dozen Huns over Charleroi? That was a good finish-up—the day before the Armistice.”
I remembered well enough—remembered that after that last fight, at the very end of the war, I had landed by a miracle with my nerve suddenly gone. I had never been in the air since—for a long time could not look at an airplane without a fit of trembling.
Sylvia glanced at me in surprise. The secret humiliation of that finish had made me pretty close about my war-doings.
“Oh, you two knew each other in the war, then?” she said.
“I should rather think we did!” replied Toby. “Jimmy was my squadron-leader—and he's some scientist in the air, let me tell you.” His tone of admiration smote me like a bitter irony. “Don't forget you're coming to look over that bus of mine tomorrow morning, Jimmy.”
“I don't know that I can,” I replied. “I'm off back to town tomorrow.” I said this with a glance to Sylvia which found her quite unmoved.
“Are you, really?” she said. “What, on a Sunday?” Her eyebrows went up in mocking admiration for my courage.
Confound it! I remembered suddenly that tomorrow was Sunday. I can put up with any reasonable amount of hardship, but the prospect of a Sunday train on a South Coast railway!
“Kamerad!” I surrendered. “I go back on Monday.”
“Good!” said Toby. “The tender conscience of the local municipality does not permit them to allow me to earn my living on the Sabbath. Tomorrow is a dies non. 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. That I could if I wanted to—” His curious restless eyes lost expression, as though the soul behind them no longer saw me, contemplated something remote.
“Could what?” I challenged him.
HE came back to perception of my presence.
“Eh? Oh, nothing.” He looked at me with that familiar sudden suspiciousness which seemed to accuse one of attemped espionage into the secrets of his soul. I remembered that even in the mess, intimate as we had all been together, he had always been a queer chap. One had never really known what he was thinking or planning. He turned now to Sylvia.
“Miss Bryant has promised me that one day she will let me take her for a flight,” he said, banishing the hardness of his eyes with that little smile of his which was so peculiarly attractive when he chose to exert his charm.
“I'll come tomorrow,” she replied promptly. “And then you'll have to take me gratis.”
“Of course I will!” he answered, clutching at her promise with a flash of eager delight in his eyes. “You didn't imagine I was going to charge you for it, did you? That's settled, then.”
Mrs. Bryant interposed in motherly alarm.
“Oh, Sylvia! Don't do any. of your madcap tricks! —You will be careful, wont you, Mr. Selwyn?” She turned to me. “Are you sure she will be safe with him, Jimmy?”
“My dear Mrs. Bryant,” I assured her, “If there is a better pilot in the world than Toby, I don't know him.”
Mr. Bryant took the pipe from his mouth and glanced cautiously at his wife.
“I'd rather like to go up too,” he said.
But Mrs. Bryant vetoed this volubly and emphatically.
“No, no, no!” she exclaimed. “Not two of you together! Suppose anything happened!”
I smiled at her nervous fears.
“Nothing will happen, Mrs. Bryant—make your mind easy. Toby's perfectly safe. And if Mr. Bryant would like a flight, I'm sure Toby would be pleased to take him.”
Toby was looking at Sylvia's father with his enigmatic eyes.
“Of course I will,” he said. “But I don't want to worry Mrs. Bryant. I will take Mr. Bryant another time.”
The conversation drifted off to other topics. At last, Mrs. Bryant rose for bed.
“And mind, Mr. Selwyn,” she warned him smilingly as she shook hands with him, “I shall try hard to persuade Sylvia not to go.”
“But you wont succeed, Mother!” announced Sylvia radiantly. “Good night, Toby. Good night, Mr. Esdaile!” With which parting shot she left us, and the lounge was suddenly horribly empty.
WE sat there for yet some time, Toby and I, puffing at our pipes in silence. He leaned back on the settee, with his eyes closed. I was thinking—never mind what I was thinking; but my thoughts ranged far into the dreary future of my life. My glance fell on him, scrutinizing him, probing him, weighing him, as he lay there all unconscious of it. About his feelings I had no doubt. Were they reciprocated? 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.
“What's that?” I said, not quite catching his words.
“Eh?” He looked at me as though he had forgotten my presence, was only now reminded of it by my voice. “Oh, that's the last line of the Purgatorio—where Dante, having drunk forgetfulness of the earth from Lethe, is ready to ascend with Beatrice into the stars of the Paradiso..... 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?”
“Oh, I've had plenty of time,” he answered, his eyes straying away from me evasively. “I've lived pretty much by myself these last few years.” He rose to his feet, cutting short the subject. “Let's go for a stroll, shall we? Get a breath of fresh air into our lungs.”
I ASSENTED willingly enough. At the back of my mind was an obscure idea that, in the stimulated sense of comradeship evoked between two friends who walk together under a night sky, he might open himself to some confidence that would help me to a more precise definition of the relationship that subsisted between himself and Sylvia. In this I was disappointed. He walked along the asphalt promenade, now almost deserted, with the sea to our left marked only by an irregular faintly gleaming line of white in the black obscurity, without a word. He did not even respond to my efforts at conversation. Apparently he did not hear them. Overhead, the metallic blue-black heaven was powdered with a multitude of stars, twinkling down upon us from their immense remoteness. He threw his head back to contemplate them as we walked in silence. He baffled me, kept me somehow from my own private thoughts.
Suddenly he switched upon me.
“There can't be nothingness all the way, can there?” he demanded of me with a curious vehemence of interrogation. His hand made an involuntary half-gesture toward the scintillating dome of stars. “There must be something!” 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!” He finished on a note of scorn.
“But surely the astronomers—” I began.
“Pah!” he interrupted me. “What do you or the astronomers know about it? Shut up!”
Shut up, I did. He was evidently not in the mood for reasonable conversation. He also shut up, pursuing in silence thoughts I could not follow. At last he brusquely suggested returning to the hotel.
NEXT morning, when I met him in the breakfast-room, he was quite his old cheery self, and whatever resentment of his last night's rudeness still rankled in me, vanished in the odd charm of his smile. He reminded me of my promise to spend the morning with him tinkering about his seaplane. I acquiesced, for two reasons. First, I had nothing else to do, and I still retained enough of the impress of my old flying days to be genuinely interested in looking over a machine. Secondly, Sylvia would be coming to it for her flight. An uneasy night had not brought me to any satisfying theory of her real attitude toward him.
It was a bright sunshiny morning as we left the hotel, but a southwest breeze ruffled the surface of the sea; and the white isolated clouds that drifted across the blue overhead were evidently the advance-guards of a mass yet invisible beyond the horizon. 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.
We hauled in on them, clambered down into her. 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; and for the next two hours we pottered about her, cleaning her powerful motor, tautening the wire stays to her wings, looking into a hundred and one technical details that would have no interest for anyone but the expert. I enjoyed myself, and Toby was almost pathetically delighted to have some one with him who could enter into his enthusiasms. He had; I could guess, been leading a very solitary life for a long while.
Apparently he almost lived on board her. All sorts of gear were stowed away in her. In one of the lockers I found quite a collection of books, including the Dante he had quoted, and a number of others of a distinctly mystical type—odd reading for a flying man. In another, close to the pilot's seat, was a German automatic pistol.
“Souvenir of the great war, Daddy!” he smiled at me as I handled it.
“But do you know it's loaded?” I objected disapprovingly.
“Yes,” he replied. “I shoot sea-gulls with it sometimes—chase 'em in the air. It's great sport.”
I shrugged my shoulders. Chasing sea-gulls with a pistol was just one of those mad things I could well imagine Toby doing.
We gave her a dose of oil, filled up her petrol-tank—one of her original pair had been removed to make space for the passengers, but she still had a five-hundred-mile radius, he told me—and looked round for something else to do.
“Would you like to take her up and see how she climbs?” he invited me.
“No, thanks!” I replied hurriedly, uncomfortable in a sudden embarrassment. 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. The intimacy of the morning was destroyed. Each of us withdrew into himself, each perhaps preoccupied with the same problem. Once, certainly, I caught his glance hostile upon me.
As I had expected, heavy clouds had come up from the southwest, and the sky was now almost completely overcast. But immediately overhead there was still a clear patch where, through a wide rift in the gray wrack, one looked into the infinite blue. 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? Didn't it almost seem to you that it would be as easy as going back?”
I glanced at him. Into my mind flitted a memory of his last night's wild talk about the stars. He had always been a little queer. Was he—not quite right?
“I can't say it did,” I replied curtly. “I was always jolly glad to get down again.”
He looked at me.
“Yes—I suppose so!” he commented. There was almost an insult in his tone.
Before I could decide whether to resent it or to humor him, I saw Sylvia approaching us along the pier, charming in her summer dress, but prudently with a raincoat over her arm.
“Here's Miss Bryant!” I said, glad of this excuse to put an end to the conversation.
He leaped to his feet with a peculiar alacrity.
“At last!” he ejaculated, as though an immeasurable time of waiting was at an end. He quenched a sudden flash of excitement in his eyes as he caught my glance on his face.
She stood above us on the pier, smiling.
“Here I am!” she said. “But it isn't a very nice morning, is it?”
“It will be all right up above,” replied Toby. “Come along—down that next flight of steps.” He was trembling with eagerness. I wondered suddenly whether I was wise in letting her go up with him. The man's nerves were obviously strung to high pitch. On the other hand, I had the greatest confidence in his skill—and it was only too likely that she would misinterpret any objections from me, would refuse to listen to them.
While I was hesitating, she had already descended to the lower stage, and Toby had helped her along the gangplank into the machine.
“You see I've brought my raincoat,” she said. “It'll be cold up there, wont it?”
“That's no use,” replied Toby with brutal directness. “Here!” He opened a locker where he kept the flying-coats for his passengers. “Put that on.”
I HELPED her with it. She looked more charming than ever in the thick leather coat, the close-fitting leather helmet framing her dainty features. Then I made a step toward the gangplank.
“But aren't you coming too?” she demanded in surprise.
Toby answered for me.
“Esdaile doesn't care for flying,” he said with a sardonic smile, looking me straight in the eyes. There was a sort of mocking triumph in that unmistakable sneer.
“Oh—but please!” Sylvia turned to me pleadingly. “Do come!”
“Id rather take you up alone,” said Toby in a stubborn voice, looking up from the mooring-rope he had bent to untether.
She ignored him, laid a hand upon my arm.
“Wont you?” she asked.
“I should infinitely prefer not to,” I replied awkwardly. I cursed myself for my imbecility, but the mere idea of going up in that machine made me feel sick inside, still so powerful was the memory of that moment long ago when, ten thousand feet up with a Hun just below me plunging in flames to destruction, I had felt my nerve suddenly break, my head go dizzy in an awful panic. “Please excuse me.”
She could not, of course, guess my reason.
“I sha'n't go without you,” she said obstinately. Her eyes seemed to be telling me something I was not intelligent enough to catch. “And I want to go. Please—Jimmy!”
I surrendered.
“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 sidewise. 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.
HE 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? think you'll be able to follow us? But you wont! You get out—here and now—d'you understand?”
I tried to be cunning.
“But Toby!” I objected. “I think I know the way—better than you do, perhaps. Change places and let me take the machine.”
It was a false move.
“What?” he cried. “You think you know the way, do you? 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!” He gestured over the side, into the blue abyss above which we circled. “Quick!”
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. In a flash I had ducked, flung myself over the slight partition between us, wrenched at his wrist. Risky as it was, it was certain death to all of us if this homicidal maniac was not dealt with. His awkward half-turned position put him at a disadvantage, but he fought grimly, with all a maniac's strength, trying to point the muzzle of that pistol at my body. Automatically, of course, he rose to face me, relinquished the controls to use both hands. I felt the machine lurch and plunge dizzily nose downward. I had one lightning-quick thought—thank God, Sylvia was strapped!—and then I tumbled over the partition head-first into the cockpit.
It was not thought but instinct with which I clutched the steering-stick,—one had not much time for thought when fighting the nimble Fokker,—got into some sort of position on the seat. We were vertically nose down, spinning horribly—but not once but many times in the war I had shammed dead, gone rushing earthward in a realistic twirling spin and then abruptly flattened out of it upside down and come up like a rocket over the pursuing Hun. This was simpler. I had only to pull her out of it—and only when I pulled her out of it, circled her round once for a long steady glide, did I realize that I was alone in that cockpit. There was no Toby!
I glanced back to Sylvia. She sagged in her seat against the straps—fainted. Just as well, I thought grimly. I touched the engine to a momentary activity to test it, shut it off again for a long circling descent toward the cloud-floor far below. An exultation leaped in me, the exultation of old days of peril in the air. I thought of Toby, with whom I had shared so many, with a sudden warming of the heart. Poor old Toby! He had died as after all he perhaps would have wished to die, high up in the infinite blue—dead of shock long before he reached the earth. I thrilled with the old-time sense of mastery over a fine machine, delicately sensitive to the controls, as that massed and pinnacled cloud-landscape grew large again beneath me. My one anxiety was whether it hid sea or land. Then, just as we drew near, I saw a deep black gulf riven in its snowy mass—saw down through that gulf a tiny model steamship trailing a long white wake.....
The wedding? That was last year.
   “The Spin of the Wheel,” another unusual, vivid and dramatic story by the gifted F. Britten Austin, will appear in our forthcoming April issue.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1941, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 82 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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