“I’ve a bit of business in your line,” the officer said. “This day, each month, you’re to give me one pound, and for every day I get back, I give you a shilling. What do you say?”
MacWyrglinchbeath smoked slowly, holding the cigarette as though it were a dynamite cap. “And thae days when ye’ll no fly?”
“Just the same. I owe you a shilling.”
MacWyrglinchbeath smoked slowly for a while. “Wull ye gang wi’ me as ma obsair-rver-r?”
“Who’ll take up my bus? No, no: if I flew with you, I’d not need underwriting.… What do you say?”
MacWyrglinchbeath mused, the cigarette in his soiled hand. “ ‘Twill tak’ thinkin’,” he said at last. “A’ll tell ye the mor-rn.”
“Right. Take the night and think it out.” The officer returned to the mess.
“I’ve got him! I’ve got him hooked.”
“What’s your idea?” the C.O. said. “Are you spending all this ingenuity for a pound which you can only win by losing?”
“I just want to watch the old Shylock lose flesh. I should give his money back, even if I won it.”
“How?” the C.O. said. The officer looked at him, blinking slowly. “They have an exchange basis between here and Gehenna?” the C.O. said.
“Look here,” Robinson said, “why don’t you let Mac be? You don’t know those people those Highlanders. It takes fortitude just to live as they do, let alone coming away without protest to fight for a king whom they probably still consider a German peasant, and for a cause that, however it ends, he’ll only lose. And the man who can spend three years in this mess and still look forward to a future with any sanity, strength to his arm, say I.”
“Hear, hear!” someone cried.
“Oh, have a drink,” the other said. “I shan’t hurt your Scot.”
The next morning MacWyrglinchbeath paid down the pound, slowly and carefully, but without reluctance. The officer accepted it as soberly.
“We’ll start wi’ today,” MacWyrglinchbeath said.
“Righto,” the officer said. “We’ll start in a half hour.”
Three days later, after a short conversation with Robinson, the C.O. called MacWyrglinchbeath’s client aside.
“Look here. You must call that silly wager off. You’re disrupting my whole squadron. Robinson says that if you’re anywhere in sight, he can’t even keep MacBeath in their sector long enough after the battery fires to see the bursts.”
“It’s not my fault, sir. I wasn’t buying a watchdog. At least, I thought not. I was just pulling Mac’s leg.”
“Well, you look him out tomorrow and ask him to release you. We’ll have Brigade about our ears at this rate.”
The next morning the client talked to MacWyrglinchbeath. That afternoon Robinson talked to MacWyrglinchbeath. That evening, after dinner, the C.O. sent for him. But MacWyrglinchbeath was firm, polite and without heat, and like granite.
The C.O. drummed on the table for a while. “Very well, sergeant,” he said at last. “But I order you to keep to your tour of duty. If you are reported off your patrol once more, I’ll ground you. Carry on.”
MacWyrglinchbeath saluted. “Verra gude, sir-r.”
After that he kept to his tour. Back and forth, back and forth above the puny shell puffs, the gouts of slow smoke. From time to time he scanned the sky above and behind him, but always his eyes returned northward, where the other R. E. was a monotonous speck in the distance.
This was day after day, while Mr. Robinson, with his binocular, hung over the leading edge of the nacelle like a man in a bath who has dropped the soap overside. But every day the client returned, daily the shillings grew, until that day came when the shilling was profit, followed by another and another. Then the month was complete, and MacWyrglinchbeath paid down another pound. The profit was gone now, and his gaze was a little more soberly intent as he stared northward at brief intervals.
Mr. Robinson was leaning, down-peering, over the nacelle when the heavy engine behind him burst into thunderous crescendo and the earth pivoted one hundred and eighty degrees in a single swoop. He jerked himself up and looked behind, swinging his gun about.
The sky was clear, yet they were moving at the R.E.’s sedate top speed. MacWyrglinchbeath was staring straight ahead and Robinson turned and saw, indicated by A-A bursts, the other R.E. plunging and darting like an ancient stiffkneed horse. Shrapnel unfolded and bloomed above it, and at last he made out the Fokker clinging to the R.E.’s blind spot. He swung his gun forward and cleared the mechanism with a short burst.
The two R.E.’s approached at a quartering angle, the first zigzagging just above the clinging German, all three losing altitude. The first and last intimation the German had of the presence of the second R.E. was a burst from Robinson’s gun. The German shot straight up, stalled, and burst into flames. Then MacWryglinchbeath, yawing violently to dodge the zooming German, saw Robinson fall forward over the edge of the nacelle, and at the same time a rake of tracer smoke along the fuselage beside him.
He swerved; without pausing, the second German shot past and plumped full upon the tail of the first R.E., and again bullets ripped about MacWyrglinchbeath, coming from beneath now, where British infantry were firing at the German.
The three of them were not a hundred feet high when they flashed above the secondary lines and the tilted pink faces of the A-A battery. The German utterly disregarded MacWryglinchbeath. He hung upon the tail of the first R.E., which was still zigzagging in wild and sluggish yaws, and putting his nose down a little more and unfastening his belt, MacWryglinchbeath brought his machine directly above the German and a little behind him.
Still the German seemed utterly unaware of his presence, and MacWyrglinchbeath put one leg over the nacelle and got from directly beneath the engine and pushed the stick forward. The German disappeared completely beneath the end of the nacelle and Robinson’s dead body sprawled there; immediately afterward, MacWyrglinchbeath felt the prolonged shock. He cut the switch and climbed free of the nacelle, onto the bottom wing, where the engine wouldn’t fall on him. “Sax shillin’,” he said as the sudden earth swooped and tilted.
III
He climbed stiffly down from his Bristol and limped across the tarmac, toward his hut. His limp was pronounced now, a terrific crablike gait, for in the wet, chill October days his broken hips stiffened, even after fourteen months.
The flight was all in, the windows of the officers’ mess glowed cheerily across the dusk; he limped on, thinking of tea, a drink, a cozy evening in his hut behind the locked door. That was against the young devils from the mess. Children they took now. The old pilots, mature men, were all dead or promoted to remote Wing offices, their places filled by infants not done with public school, without responsibility or any gift for silence. He went on and opened the door to his hut.
He stopped, the open door in his hand, then he closed it and entered the cubbyhole of a room. His batman had built the fire up in the miniature stove; the room was quite warm. He laid his helmet and goggles aside and slowly unfastened and removed his flying boots. Only then did he approach the cot and stand there, looking quietly at the object which had caught his eye when he entered. It was his walking-out tunic. It had been pressed, but that was not all.
The Royal Flying Corps tabs and the chevrons had been ripped from shoulder and sleeve, and on each shoulder strap a subaltern’s pip was fixed, and upon the breast, above the D.S.M. ribbon, were wings. Beside it his scarred belt lay, polished, with a new and shining shoulder strap buckled on. He was still looking soberly at them when the door burst open upon a thunderous inrush.
“Now, old glum-face!” a young voice cried. “He’ll have to buy a drink now. Hey, fellows?”
They watched him from the mess windows as he crossed the aerodrome in the dusk.
“Wait, now,” they told one another. “Wait till he’s had time to dress.”
Another voice rose: “Gad, wouldn’t you like to see the old blighter’s face when he opens the door?”
“Old blighter?” a flight commander sitting with a newspaper beneath the lamp said. “He’s not old. I doubt if he’s thirty.”
“Good gad! Thirty! Gad, I’ll not live to see thirty by ten years.”
“Who cares? Who wants to live forever?”
“Stow it. Stow it.”
“Ave, Cæsar! Morituri—”
“Stow it, stow it! Don’t be a mawkish fool!”
“Gad, yes! What ghastly taste!”
“Thirty! Good gad!”
“He looks about a hundred, with that jolly walnut face of his.”
“Let him. He’s a decent sort. Shame it wasn’t done sooner for him.”
“Yes. Been a D.S.O. and an M.C. twice over by now.”
“Got quite a decent clink record too. Deserted once, you know.”
“Go on!”
“ ‘Struth. And first time he was ever off the ground he nipped off alone on a pup. No instruction; ack emma then. Sort of private solo.”
“I say, do you know that yarn they tell about him about hoarding his pay against peace? Sends it all home. Done it for years.”
“Well, why not?” the flight commander said. “If some of you young puppies would just—” They shouted him down. “Clear off, the lot of you!” the flight commander said above the din. “Why don’t you go and fetch him up here?”
They charged from the room; the noise faded in the outer dusk. The three flight commanders sat down again, talking quietly among themselves.
“I’m glad too. Trouble is, they should have done it years ago.
