“Yes,” somebody said. “Jolly.”
“But dangerous, what?”
“A little faster than tennis,” another said. The guest looked at him, bright, affable, intent.
Another said quickly, “Bogard says you command a vessel.”
“Hardly a vessel. Thanks, though. And not command. Ronnie does that. Ranks me a bit. Age.”
“Ronnie?”
“Yes. Nice. Good egg. Old, though. Stickler.”
“Stickler?”
“Frightful. You’d not believe it. Whenever we sight smoke and I have the glass, he sheers away. Keeps the ship hull down all the while. No beaver then. Had me two down a fortnight yesterday.”
The Americans glanced at one another. “No beaver?”
“We play it. With basket masts, you see. See a basket mast. Beaver! One up. The Ergenstrasse doesn’t count any more, though.”
The men about the table looked at one another. Bogard spoke. “I see. When you or Ronnie see a ship with basket masts, you get a beaver on the other. I see. What is the Ergenstrasse?”
“She’s German. Interned. Tramp steamer. Foremast rigged so it looks something like a basket mast. Booms, cables, I dare say. I didn’t think it looked very much like a basket mast, myself. But Ronnie said yes. Called it one day. Then one day they shifted her across the basin and I called her on Ronnie. So we decided to not count her any more. See now, eh?”
“Oh,” the one who had made the tennis remark said, “I see. You and Ronnie run about in the launch, playing beaver. H’m’m. That’s nice. Did you ever pl—”
“Jerry,” Bogard said. The guest had not moved. He looked down at the speaker, still smiling, his eyes quite wide.
The speaker still looked at the guest. “Has yours and Ronnie’s boat got a yellow stern?”
“A yellow stern?” the English boy said. He had quit smiling, but his face was still pleasant.
“I thought that maybe when the boats had two captains, they might paint the sterns yellow or something.”
“Oh,” the guest said. “Burt and Reeves aren’t officers.”
“Burt and Reeves,” the other said, in a musing tone. “So they go, too. Do they play beaver too?”
“Jerry,” Bogard said. The other looked at him. Bogard jerked his head a little. “Come over here.” The other rose. They went aside. “Lay off of him,” Bogard said. “I mean it, now. He’s just a kid. When you were that age, how much sense did you have? Just about enough to get to chapel on time.”
“My country hadn’t been at war going on four years, though,” Jerry said. “Here we are, spending our money and getting shot at by the clock, and it’s not even our fight, and these limeys that would have been goose-stepping twelve months now if it hadn’t been—”
“Shut it,” Bogard said. “You sound like a Liberty Loan.”
“ — taking it like it was a fair or something. ‘Jolly.’” His voice was now falsetto, lilting. “‘But dangerous, what?’”
“Sh-h-h-h,” Bogard said.
“I’d like to catch him and his Ronnie out in the harbor, just once. Any harbor. London’s. I wouldn’t want anything but a Jenny, either. Jenny? Hell, I’d take a bicycle and a pair of water wings! I’ll show him some war.”
“Well, you lay off him now. He’ll be gone soon.”
“What are you going to do with him?”
“I’m going to take him along this morning. Let him have Harper’s place out front. He says he can handle a Lewis. Says they have one on the boat. Something he was telling me — about how he once shot out a channel-marker light at seven hundred yards.”
“Well, that’s your business. Maybe he can beat you.”
“Beat me?”
“Playing beaver. And then you can take on Ronnie.”
“I’ll show him some war, anyway,” Bogard said. He looked at the guest. “His people have been in it three years now, and he seems to take it like a sophomore in town for the big game.” He looked at Jerry again. “But you lay off him now.”
As they approached the table, the guest’s voice was loud and cheerful: “. . . if he got the glasses first, he would go in close and look, but when I got them first, he’d sheer off where I couldn’t see anything but the smoke. Frightful stickler. Frightful. But Ergenstrasse not counting any more. And if you make a mistake and call her, you lose two beaver from your score. If Ronnie were only to forget and call her we’d be even.”
III
At two o’clock the English boy was still talking, his voice bright, innocent and cheerful. He was telling them how Switzerland had been spoiled by 1914, and instead of the vacation which his father had promised him for his sixteenth birthday, when that birthday came he and his tutor had had to do with Wales.
But that he and the tutor had got pretty high and that he dared to say — with all due respect to any present who might have had the advantage of Switzerland, of course — that one could see probably as far from Wales as from Switzerland.
“Perspire as much and breathe as hard, anyway,” he added. And about him the Americans sat, a little hard-bitten, a little sober, somewhat older, listening to him with a kind of cold astonishment.
They had been getting up for some time now and going out and returning in flying clothes, carrying helmets and goggles. An orderly entered with a tray of coffee cups, and the guest realized that for some time now he had been hearing engines in the darkness outside.
At last Bogard rose. “Come along,” he said. “We’ll get your togs.” When they emerged from the mess, the sound of the engines was quite loud — an idling thunder. In alignment along the invisible tarmac was a vague rank of short banks of flickering blue-green fire suspended apparently in mid-air. They crossed the aerodrome to Bogard’s quarters, where the lieutenant, McGinnis, sat on a cot fastening his flying boots. Bogard reached down a Sidcott suit and threw it across the cot. “Put this on,” he said.
“Will I need all this?” the guest said. “Shall we be gone that long?”
“Probably,” Bogard said. “Better use it. Cold upstairs.”
The guest picked up the suit. “I say,” he said. “I say, Ronnie and I have a do ourselves, tomor — today. Do you think Ronnie won’t mind if I am a bit late? Might not wait for me.”
“We’ll be back before teatime,” McGinnis said. He seemed quite busy with his boot. “Promise you.” The English boy looked at him.
“What time should you be back?” Bogard said.
“Oh, well,” the English boy said, “I dare say it will be all right. They let Ronnie say when to go, anyway. He’ll wait for me if I should be a bit late.”
“He’ll wait,” Bogard said. “Get your suit on.”
“Right,” the other said. They helped him into the suit. “Never been up before,” he said, chattily, pleasantly. “Dare say you can see farther than from mountains, eh?”
“See more, anyway,” McGinnis said. “You’ll like it.”
“Oh, rather. If Ronnie only waits for me. Lark. But dangerous, isn’t it?”
“Go on,” McGinnis said. “You’re kidding me.”
“Shut your trap, Mac,” Bogard said. “Come along. Want some more coffee?” He looked at the guest, but McGinnis answered:
“No. Got something better than coffee. Coffee makes such a confounded stain on the wings.”
“On the wings?” the English boy said. “Why coffee on the wings.”
“Stow it, I said, Mac,” Bogard said. “Come along.”
They recrossed the aerodrome, approaching the muttering banks of flame. When they drew near, the guest began to discern the shape, the outlines, of the Handley-Page. It looked like a Pullman coach run upslanted aground into the skeleton of the first floor of an incomplete skyscraper. The guest looked at it quietly.
“It’s larger than a cruiser,” he said in his bright, interested voice. “I say, you know. This doesn’t fly in one lump. You can’t pull my leg. Seen them before. It comes in two parts: Captain Bogard and me in one; Mac and ‘nother chap in other. What?”
“No,” McGinnis said. Bogard had vanished. “It all goes up in one lump. Big lark, eh? Buzzard, what?”
“Buzzard?” the guest murmured. “Oh, I say. A cruiser. Flying. I say, now.”
“And listen,” McGinnis said. His hand came forth; something cold fumbled against the hand of the English boy — a bottle. “When you feel yourself getting sick, see? Take a pull at it.”
“Oh, shall I get sick?”
“Sure. We all do. Part of flying. This will stop it. But if it doesn’t. See?”
“What? Quite. What?”
“Not overside. Don’t spew it overside.”
“Not overside?”
“It’ll blow back in Bogy’s and my face. Can’t see. Bingo. Finished. See?”
“Oh, quite. What shall I do with it?” Their voices were quiet, brief, grave as conspirators.
“Just duck your head and let her go.”
“Oh, quite.”
Bogard returned. “Show him how to get into the front pit, will you?” he said. McGinnis led the way through the trap. Forward, rising to the slant of the fuselage, the passage narrowed; a man would need to crawl.
“Crawl in there and keep going,” McGinnis said.
“It looks like a dog kennel,” the guest said.
“Doesn’t it, though?” McGinnis agreed cheerfully. “Cut along with you.” Stooping, he could hear the other scuttling forward. “You’ll find a Lewis gun up there, like as not,” he said into the tunnel.
The voice of the guest came back: “Found it.”
“The gunnery sergeant will be along in a minute and show you if it is loaded.”
“It’s loaded,” the guest said; almost on the heels of his words the gun fired, a brief staccato burst. There were shouts, the loudest from the ground beneath the nose of the aeroplane. “It’s quite all right,” the English boy’s voice said. “I pointed it west before I let it off. Nothing back there
