“Ease off, sister; he’s looking this way.
I saw him knock two teeth out of an Australian captain that just tried to speak to a girl he was with in a London dive two years ago.” They moved on until the band was across the floor from them. “What’re you scared of? He’s not an Indian; he won’t hurt you as long as you mind your step. He’s all right. I’ve known him a long time, in places where you had to be good, believe me.”
“You don’t know,” she repeated. “I—”
The music crashed to a stop; in the sudden silence the shabby man’s voice rose from the near-by table: “—could just get one of these damn yellow-livered pilots to—”
His voice was drowned again in a surge of noise: drunken voices and shrill woman-laughter and scraping chairs, but as they approached the table the shabby man still talked with leashed insistent gestures while Bayard stared across the room at whatever it was he watched, lifting his glass steadily to his lips. The girl clutched her partner’s arm.
“You’ve got to help me pass him out,” she begged swiftly. “I’m scared to leave with him, I tell you.”
“Pass Sartoris out? The man don’t wear hair, nor the woman neither. Run back to kindergarden, sister.” Then, struck with her utter sincerity, he said, “Say, what’s he done to you, anyway?”
“I don’t know. He’ll do anything. He threw an empty bottle at a traffic cop as we were driving out here. You’ve got—”
“Hush it,” he commanded. The shabby man ceased talking and looked up impatiently. Bayard still gazed across the room.
“Brother-in-law over there,” he said, speaking slowly and carefully. “Don’t speak to family. Mad at us. Beat him out of his wife.” They turned and looked.
“Where?” the aviator asked. He beckoned a waiter. “Here, Jack.”
“Man with diamond headlight,” Bayard said. “Brave man. Can’t speak to him, though. Might hit me. Friend with him, anyhow.”
The aviator looked again. “Looks like his grandmother,” he said. He called the waiter again, then to the girl: “Another cocktail?” He picked up the bottle and filled his glass and renewed Bayard’s and turned to the shabby man. “Where’s yours?”
The shabby man waved it impatiently aside. “Look,” he picked up the napkins again. “Dihedral increases in ratio to air pressure. By speed up to a certain point, see? Now, what I want to find out—”
“Tell it to the Marines, buddy,” the aviator interrupted. “I heard a couple of years ago they got a airyplane. Here, waiter!” Bayard was now watching the shabby man bleakly.
“You aren’t drinking,” the girl said. She touched the aviator beneath the table.
“No;” Bayard agreed. “Why don’t you fly his coffin for him, Monaghan?”
“Me?” The aviator set his glass down. “Like hell. My leave comes due next month.” He raised his glass again. “Here’s to wind-up,” he said, “and no heeltaps.”
“Yes,” Bayard agreed, not touching his glass. His face was pale and rigid, a metal mask again.
“I tell you there’s no danger at all, as long as you keep the speed below a point I’ll give you,” the shabby man said with heat. “I’ve tested the wings with weights, and proved the lift and checked all my figures; all you have to—”
“Won’t you drink with us?” the girl insisted.
“Sure he will,” the aviator said. “Say, you remember that night in Amiens when that big Irish devil, Comyn, wrecked the Cloche-Clos by blowing that A.P.M.’s whistle at the door?” The shabby man sat smoothing the folded napkins on the table before him. Then he burst forth
again, his voice hoarse and mad with the intensity of his frustration:
“I’ve worked and slaved, and begged and borrowed, and now when I’ve got the machine and a government inspector, I can’t get a test because you damn yellow-livered pilots won’t take it up. A service full of you, drawing flying pay for sitting on hotel roofs swilling alcohol. You overseas pilots talking about your guts! No wonder the Germans—“
“Shut up,” Bayard told him without heat, in his cold, careful voice.
“You’re not drinking,” the girl repeated. “Won’t you?” She picked up his glass and touched her lips to it and extended it to him. Taking it, he caught her hand too and held her so. But again he was staring across the room.
“Not brother-in-law,” he said, “husband-in-law, No. Wife’s brother’s husband-in-law. Wife used to be wife’s brother’s girl. Married now. Fat woman. He’s lucky.”
“What’re you talking about?” the aviator demanded. “Come on, let’s have a drink.”
The girl leaned away from him at the length of her arm. With her other hand she lifted her glass and smiled at him with brief and terrified coquetry. He held her wrist in his hard fingers, and while she stared at him widely he drew her steadily toward him.
“Turn me loose,” she whispered. “Don’t.” And she set her glass down and with the other hand she tried to unclasp his fingers. The shabby man was brooding over his folded napkins; the aviator was carefully occupied with his drink. “Don’t,” she whispered again. Her body was twisted in her chair and she put out her hand quickly, lest she be dragged out of it, and for a moment they stared at one another—she with wide, mute terror; he bleakly, with the cold mask of his face. Then he released her and thrust his chair back.
“Come on, you,” he said to the shabby man. He drew a wad of bills from his pocket and laid one beside her on the table. “That’ll get you home,” he said. But she sat nursing the wrist he had held, watching him without a sound. The aviator was discreetly interested in the bottom of his glass. “Come on,” Bayard repeated to the shabby man, and the other rose and followed him.
In a small alcove Harry Mitchell sat. On his table too were bottles and glasses, and he now sat slumped in his chair, his eyes closed and his bald head rosy with perspiration in the glow of an electric candle. Beside him was a woman who turned and looked at Bayard with blazing and harried desperation.
Above them stood a waiter with a head like a monk’s and as Bayard passed he saw that the diamond was missing from Harry’s tie, and he heard their bitter suppressed voices as their hands struggled over something on the table beyond the discreet shelter of their bodies. As he and his companion reached the exit the woman’s voice rose with a burst of filthy rage into a shrill, hysterical scream cut sharply off, as if someone had clapped a hand over her mouth.
The next day Miss Jenny drove into town and wired him again. But when this wire was dispatched Bayard was sitting in an airplane on the tarmac of the government field at Dayton, while the shabby man hovered and darted here and there in a frenzied manner and a group of army pilots stood nearby, soberly noncommittal.
The machine looked like any other biplane, save that there were no visible cables between the planes, which were braced from within by wires on a system of springs; hence, motionless on the ground, dihedral was negative. The theory was that while in level flight, dihedral would be eliminated for speed, and when the machine was banked, side pressure would automatically increase dihedral for maneuverability. The cockpit was set well back toward the fin.
“So you can see the wings when they buckle,” the man who lent him helmet and goggles said drily. “It’s an old pair,” he added. Bayard glanced at him, coldly humorless. “Look here, Sartoris,” the other said, “let that crate alone. These birds show up here every week with something that will revolutionize flying, some new kind of mantrap that flies fine—on paper. If the C.O. won’t give him a pilot (and you know we try anything here that has a prop on it) you can gamble it’s a washout.”
But Bayard took the helmet and goggles and went on toward the hangar. The group followed him and stood quietly about with their bleak, wind-gnawed faces while the engine was warming up. But when Bayard got in and settled his goggles, the man who had lent them to him approached and put something in his lap. “Here,” he said brusquely. “Take this.” It was a woman’s garter, and Bayard picked it up and gave it back to him.
“I won’t need it,” he said. “Thanks just the same.”
“Well. You know your own business. But if you ever let her get her nose down, you’re going to lose everything but the wheels.”
“I know,” Bayard answered. “I’ll keep her up.” The shabby man rushed up again, still talking. “Yes, yes,” Bayard replied impatiently. “You told me all that before. Contact.” A mechanic spun the propeller, and as the machine moved out toward mid field the shabby man still clung to the cockpit rim and shouted at him. Soon he was running to keep up and still shouting, and Bayard lifted his hands off the cowling and opened the throttle.
When he reached the end of the field and turned into the wind the man was running toward him and waving his arm. Bayard opened the throttle full and the machine lurched forward, and when he passed the man in mid-field the tail was high and the plane rushed on in long bounds, and he
