Airman's Odyssey

  ANDRE GIDE

  I

  Already, beneath him, through the golden evening, the shadowed hills had dug their furrows and the plains grew luminous with long-enduring light. For in these lands the ground gives off this golden glow persistently, just as, even when winter goes, the whiteness of the snow persists.

  Fabien, the pilot bringing the Patagonia air mail from the far south to Buenos Aires, could mark night coming on by certain signs that called to mind the waters of a harbor--a calm expanse beneath, faintly rippled by the lazy clouds--and he seemed to be entering a vast anchorage, an immensity of blessedness.

  Or else he might have fancied he was taking a quiet walk in the calm of evening, almost like a shepherd. The Patagonian shepherds move, unhurried, from one flock to another; and he, too, moved from one town to another, the shepherd of those little towns. Every two hours he met another of them, drinking at its riverside or browsing on its plain.

  Sometimes, after a hundred miles of steppes as desolate as the sea, he encountered a lonely farmhouse that seemed to be sailing backwards from him in a great prairie sea, with its freight of human lives; and he saluted with his wings this passing ship.

  "San Julian in sight. In ten minutes we shall land."

  The wireless operator gave their position to all the stations on the line. From Magellan Strait to Buenos Aires the airports were strung out across fifteen hundred miles and more, but this one led toward the frontiers of night, just as in Africa the last conquered hamlet opens onto the unknown.

  The wireless operator handed the pilot a slip of paper: "There are so many storms about that the discharges are fouling my earphones. Shall we stop the night at San Julian?"

  Fabien smiled; the sky was calm as an aquarium and all the stations ahead were signaling, Clear sky: no wind.

  "No, we'll go on."

  But the wireless operator was thinking: these storms had lodged themselves somewhere or other, as worms do in a fruit; a fine night, but they would ruin it, and he loathed entering this shadow that was ripe to rottenness.

  As he slowed down his engine for the San Julian landing, Fabien knew that he was tired. All that endeared his life to man was looming up to meet him; men's houses, friendly little cafes, trees under which they walk. He was like some conqueror who, in the aftermath of victory, bends down upon his territories and now perceives the humble happiness of men. A need came over Fabien to lav his weapons down and feel the aching burden of his limbs-for even our misfortunes are a part of our belongings--and to stay a simple dweller here, watching from his window a scene that would never change. This tiny village, he could gladly have made friends with it; the choice once made, a man accepts the issue of his venture and can love the life. Like love, it hems him in. Fabien would have wished to live a long while here--here to possess his morsel of eternity. These little towns, where he lived an hour, their gardens girdled by old walls over which he passed seemed something apart and everlasting. Now the village was rising to meet the plane, opening out toward him. And there, he mused, were friendliness and gentle girls, white napery spread in quiet homes; all that is slowly shaped toward eternity. The village streamed past beneath his wings, yielding the secrets of closed gardens that their walls no longer guarded. He landed; and now he knew that he had seen nothing at all, only a few men slowly moving amongst their stones. The village kept, by its mere immobility, the secret of its passions and withheld its kindly charm; for, to master that, he would have needed to give up an active life.

  The ten minutes' halt was ended and Fabien resumed his flight. He glanced back toward San Julian; all he now could see was a cluster of lights, then stars, then twinkling star dust that vanished, tempting him for the last time.

  "I can't see the dials; I'll light up."

  He touched the switches, but the red light falling from the cockpit lamps upon the dial hands was so diluted with the blue evening glow that they did not catch its color. When he passed his fingers close before a bulb, they were hardly tinged at all.

  "Too soon."

  But night was rising like a tawny smoke and already the valleys were brimming over with it. No longer were they distinguishable from the plains. The villages were lighting up, constellations that greeted each other across the dusk. And, at a touch of his finger, his flying-lights flashed back a greeting to them. The earth grew spangled with light signals as each house Ut its star, searching the vastness of the night as a lighthouse sweeps the sea. Now every place that sheltered human life was sparkling. And it rejoiced him to enter into this one night with a measured slowness, as into an anchorage.

  He bent down into the cockpit; the luminous dial hands were beginning to show up. The pilot read their figures one by one; all was going well. He felt at ease up here, snugly ensconced. He passed his fingers along a steel rib and felt the stream of life that flowed in it; the metal did not vibrate, yet it was alive. The engine's five-hundred horse-power bred in its texture a very gentle current, fraying its ice-cold rind into a velvety bloom. Once again the pilot in full flight experienced neither giddiness nor any thrill; only the mystery of metal turned to living flesh.

  So he had found his world again.... A few digs of his elbow, and he was quite at home. He tapped the dashboard, touched the contacts one by one, shifting his limbs a little, and, settling himself more solidly, felt for the best position whence to gage the faintest lurch of his five tons of metal, jostled by the heaving darkness. Groping with his fingers, he plugged in his emergency lamp, let go of it, felt for it again, made sure it held; then lightly touched each switch, to be certain of finding it later, training his hands to function in a blind man's world. Now that his hands had learnt their role by heart, he ventured to turn on a lamp, making the cockpit bright with polished fittings and then, as on a submarine about to dive, watched his passage into night upon the dials only. Nothing shook or rattled, neither gyroscope nor altimeter flickered in the least, the engine was running smoothly; so now he relaxed his limbs a little, let his neck sink back into the leather padding and fell into the deeply meditative mood of flight, mellow with inexplicable hopes.

  Now, a watchman from the heart of night, he learnt how night betrays man's presence, his voices, lights, and his unrest. That star down there in the shadows, alone; a lonely house. Yonder a fading star; that house is closing in upon its love.... Or on its lassitude. A house that has ceased to flash its signal to the world. Gathered round their lamp-lit table, those peasants do not know the measure of their hopes; they do not guess that their desire carries so far, out into the vastness of the night that hems them in. But Fabien has met it on his path, when, coming from a thousand miles away, he feels the heavy ground swell raise his panting plane and let it sink, when he has crossed a dozen storms like lands at war, between them neutral tracts of moonlight, to reach at last those lights, one following the other--and knows himself a conqueror. They think, these peasants, that their lamp shines only for that little table; but, from fifty miles away, some one has felt the summons of their light, as though it were a desperate signal from some lonely island, flashed by shipwrecked men toward the sea.

  II

  Thus the three planes of the air-mail service, from Patagonia, Chile, and Paraguay, were converging from south, west, and north on Buenos Aires. Their arrival with the mails would give the signal for the departure, about midnight, of the Europe postal plane.

  Three pilots, each behind a cowling heavy as a river barge, intent upon his flight, were hastening through the distant darkness, soon to come slowly down, from a sky of storm or calm, like wild, outlandish peasants descending from their highlands.

  Riviere, who was responsible for the entire service, was pacing to and fro on the Buenos Aires landing ground. He was in silent mood, for, till the three planes had come in, he could not shake off a feeling of apprehension which had been haunting him all day. Minute by minute, as the telegrams were passed to him, Riviere felt that he had scored another point against fate, reduced the quantum of the unknown, and was dra
wing his charges in, out of the clutches of the night, toward their haven.

  One of the hands came up to Riviere with a radio message.

  "Chile mail reports: Buenos Aires in sight."

  "Good."

  Presently, then, Riviere would hear its drone; already the night was yielding up one of them, as a sea, heavy with its secrets and the cadence of the tides, surrenders to the shore a treasure long the plaything of the waves. And soon the night would give him back the other two.

  Then today's work would be over. Worn out, the crews would go to sleep, fresh crews replace them. Riviere alone would have no respite; then, in its turn, the Europe mail would weigh upon his mind. And so it would always be. Always. For the first time in his life this veteran fighter caught himself feeling tired. Never could an arrival of the planes mean for him the victory that ends a war and preludes a spell of smiling peace. For him it meant just one more step, with a thousand more to follow, along a straight, unending road. Riviere felt as though for an eternity he had been carrying a crushing load on his uplifted arms; an endless, hopeless effort.

  "I'm aging." If he no longer found a solace in work and work alone, surely he was growing old. He caught himself puzzling over problems which hitherto he had ignored. There surged within his mind, like a lost ocean, murmuring regrets, all the gentler joys of life that he had thrust aside. "Can it be coming on me--so soon?" He realized that he had always been postponing for his declining years, "when I have time for it," everything that makes life kind to men. As if it were ever possible to "have time for it" one day and realize at life's end that dream of peace and happiness! No, peace there could be none; nor any victory, perhaps. Never could all the air mails land in one swoop once for all.

  Riviere paused before Leroux; the old foreman was hard at work. Leroux, too, had forty years of work behind him. All his energies were for his work. When at ten o'clock or midnight Leroux went home it certainly was not to find a change of scene, escape into another world. When Riviere smiled toward him, he raised his heavy head and pointed at a burnt-out axle. "Jammed it was, but I've fixed it up." Riviere bent down to look; duty had regained its hold upon him. "You should tell the shop to set them a bit looser." He passed his finger over the trace of seizing, then glanced again at Leroux. As his eyes lingered on the stern old wrinkled face, an odd question hovered on his lips and made him smile.

  "Ever had much to do with love, Leroux, in your time?"

  "Love, sir? Well, you see--"

  "Hadn't the time for it, I suppose--like me."

  "Not a great deal, sir."

  Riviere strained his ears to hear if there were any bitterness in the reply; no, not a trace of it. This man, looking back on life, felt the quiet satisfaction of a carpenter who has made a good job of planing down a board: "There you are! That's done."

  "There you are," thought Riviere. "My life's done."

  Then, brushing aside the swarm of somber thoughts his weariness had brought, he walked toward the hangar; for the Chile plane was droning down toward it.

  III

  The sound of the distant engine swelled and thickened; a sound of ripening. Lights flashed out. The red lamps on the light-tower silhouetted a hangar, radio standards, a square landing ground. The setting of a gala night.

  "There she comes!"

  A sheaf of beams had caught the grounding plane, making it shine as if brand-new. No sooner had it come to rest before the hangar than mechanics and airdrome hands hurried up to unload the mail. Only Pellerin, the pilot, did not move.

  "Well, aren't you going to get down?"

  The pilot, intent on some mysterious task, did not deign to reply. Listening, perhaps, to sounds that he alone could hear, long echoes of the flight. Nodding reflectively, he bent down and tinkered with some unseen object. At last he turned toward the officials and his comrades, gravely taking stock of them as though of his possessions. He seemed to pass them in review, to weigh them, take their measure, saying to himself that he had earned his right to them, as to this hangar with its gala lights and solid concrete and, in the offing, the city, full of movement, warmth, and women. In the hollow of his large hands he seemed to hold this folk; they were his subjects, to touch or hear or curse, as the fancy took him. His impulse now was to curse them for a lazy crowd, so sure of life they seemed, gaping at the moon; but he decided to be genial instead.

  "...Drinks are on you!"

  Then he climbed down.

  He wanted to tell them about the trip.

  "If only you knew...!"

  Evidently, to his thinking, that summed it up, for now he walked off to change his flying gear.

  As the car was taking him to Buenos Aires in the company of a morose inspector and Riviere in silent mood, Pellerin suddenly felt sad; of course, he thought, it's a fine thing for a fellow to have gone through it and, when he's got his footing again, let off a healthy volley of curses. Nothing finer in the world! But afterwards ... when you look back on it all; you wonder, you aren't half so sure!

  A struggle with a cyclone, that at least is a straight fight, it's real. But not that curious look things wear, the face they have when they think they are alone. His thoughts took form. "Like a revolution it is; men's faces turning only the least shade paler, yet utterly unlike themselves."

  He bent his mind toward the memory.

  He had been crossing peacefully the Cordillera of the Andes. A snow-bound stillness brooded on the ranges; the winter snow had brought its peace to all this vastness, as in dead castles the passing centuries spread peace Two hundred miles without a man, a breath of life, a movement; only sheer peaks that flying at twenty thousand feet you almost graze straight-falling cloaks of stone, an ominous tranquility.

  It had happened somewhere near the Tupungato Peak....

  He reflected.... Yes, it was there he saw a miracle take place.

  For at first he had noticed nothing much, felt no more than a vague uneasiness--as when a man believes himself alone, but is not; some one is watching him. Too late, and how he could not comprehend, he realized that he was hemmed in by anger. Where was it coming from, this anger? What told him it was oozing from the stones, sweating from the snow? For nothing seemed on its way to him, no storm was lowering. And still--another world, like it and yet unlike, was issuing from the world around him. Now all those quiet-looking peaks, snowcaps, and ridges, growing faintly grayer, seemed to spring to life, a people of the snows. And an inexplicable anguish gripped his heart.

  Instinctively he tightened his grasp on the controls. Something he did not understand was on its way and he tautened his muscles, like a beast about to spring. Yet, as far as eye could see, all was at peace. Peaceful, yes, but tense with some dark potency.

  Suddenly all grew sharp; peaks and ridges seemed keen-edged prows cutting athwart a heavy head wind. Veering around him, they deployed like dreadnoughts taking their positions in a battle line. Dust began to mingle with the air, rising and hovering, a veil above the snow. Looking back to see if retreat might still be feasible, he shuddered; all the Cordillera behind him was in seething ferment.

  "I'm lost!"

  On a peak ahead of him the snow swirled up into the air--a snow volcano. Upon his right flared up another peak and, one by one, all the summits grew lambent with gray fire, as if some unseen messenger had touched them into flame. Then the first squall broke and all the mountains round the pilot quivered.

  Violent action leaves little trace behind it and he had no recollection of the gusts that buffeted him then from side to side. Only one clear memory remained; the battle in a welter of gray flames.

  He pondered.

  "A cyclone, that's nothing. A man just saves his skin! It's what comes before it--the thing one meets upon the way!"

  But already, even as he thought he had recalled it, that one face in a thousand, he had forgotten what it was like.

  IV

  Riviere glanced at the pilot. In twenty minutes Pellerin would step from the car, mingle with the crowd, and kno
w the burden of his lassitude. Perhaps he would murmur: "Tired out as usual. It's a dog's life!" To his wife he would, perhaps, let fall a word or two: "A fellow's better off here than flying above the Andes!" And yet that world to which men hold so strongly had almost slipped from him; he had come to know its wretchedness. He had returned from a few hours' life on the other side of the picture, ignoring if it would be possible for him ever to retrieve this city with its lights, ever to know again his little human frailties, irksome yet cherished childhood friends.

  "In every crowd," Riviere mused, "are certain persons who seem just like the rest, yet they bear amazing messages. Unwittingly, no doubt, unless--" Riviere was chary of a certain type of admirers, blind to the higher side of this adventure, whose vain applause perverted its meaning, debased its human dignity. But Pellerin's inalienable greatness lay in this--his simple yet sure awareness of what the world, seen from a special angle, signified, his massive scorn of vulgar flattery. So Riviere congratulated him: "Well, how did you bring it off?" And loved him for his knack of only "talking shop," referring to his flight as a blacksmith to his anvil.

  Pellerin began by telling how his retreat had been cut off. It was almost as if he were apologizing about it. "There was nothing else for it!" Then he had lost sight of everything, blinded by the snow. He owed his escape to the violent air currents which had driven him up to twenty-five thousand feet. "I guess they held me all the way just above the level of the peaks." He mentioned his trouble with gyroscope and how he had had to shift the air-inlet, as the snow was clogging it; "forming a frost glaze, you see." After that another set of air currents had driven Pellerin down and, when he was only at ten thousand feet or so, he was puzzled why he had not run into anything. As a matter of fact he was already above the plains. "I spotted it all of a sudden when I came out into a clear patch." And he explained how it had felt at that moment; just as if he had escaped from a cave.