"Storm at Mendoza, too?"
"No. The sky was clear when I made my landing, not a breath of wind. But the storm was at my heels all right!"
It was such a damned queer business, he said; that was why he mentioned it. The summits were lost in snow at a great height while the lower slopes seemed to be streaming out across the plain, like a flood of black lava which swallowed up the villages one by one. "Never saw anything like it before...." Then he relapsed into silence, gripped by some secret memory.
Riviere turned to the inspector.
"That's a Pacific cyclone; it's too late to take any action now. Anyhow these cyclones never cross the Andes."
No one could have foreseen that this particular cyclone would continue its advance toward the east.
The inspector, who had no ideas on the subject, assented.
The inspector seemed about to speak. Then he hesitated, turned toward Pellerin, and his Adam's apple stirred. But he held his peace and, after a moment's thought, resumed his air of melancholy dignity, looking straight before him.
That melancholy of his, he carried it about with him everywhere, like a handbag. No sooner had he landed in Argentina than Riviere had appointed him to certain vague functions, and now his large hands and inspectorial dignity got always in his way. He had no right to admire imagination or ready wit; it was his business to commend punctuality and punctuality alone. He had no right to take a glass of wine in company, to call a comrade by his Christian name or risk a joke; unless, of course, by some rare chance, he came across another inspector on the same run.
"It's hard luck," he thought, "always having to be a judge."
As a matter of fact he never judged; he merely wagged his head. To mask his utter ignorance he would slowly, thoughtfully, wag his head at everything that came his way, a movement that struck fear into uneasy consciences and ensured the proper upkeep of the plant.
He was not beloved--but then inspectors are not made for love and such delights, only for drawing up reports. He had desisted from proposing changes of system or technical improvements since Riviere had written: Inspector Robineau is requested to supply reports, not poems. He will be putting his talents to better use by speeding up the personnel. From that day forth Inspector Robineau had battened on human frailties, as on his daily bread; on the mechanic who had a glass too much, the airport overseer who stayed up of nights, the pilot who bumped a landing.
Riviere said of him: "He is far from intelligent, but very useful to us, such as he is." One of the rules which Riviere rigorously imposed--upon himself--was a knowledge of his men. For Robineau the only knowledge that counted was knowledge of the orders.
"Robineau," Riviere had said one day, "you must cut the punctuality bonus whenever a plane starts late."
"Even when it's nobody's fault? In case of fog, for instance?"
"Even in case of fog."
Robineau felt a thrill of pride in knowing that his chief was strong enough not to shrink from being unjust. Surely Robineau himself would win reflected majesty from such overweening power!
"You postponed the start till six fifteen," he would say to the airport superintendents. "We cannot allow your bonus."
"But, Monsieur Robineau, at five thirty one couldn't see ten yards ahead!"
"Those are the orders."
"But, Monsieur Robineau, we couldn't sweep the fog away with a broom!"
He alone amongst all these nonentities knew the secret; if you only punish men enough, the weather will improve!
"He never thinks at all," said Riviere of him, "and that prevents him from thinking wrong."
The pilot who damaged a plane lost his no-accident bonus.
"But supposing his engine gives out when he is over a wood?" Robineau inquired of his chief.
"Even when it occurs above a wood."
Robineau took to heart the ipse dixit.
"I regret," he would inform the pilots with cheerful zest, "I regret it very much indeed, but you should have had your breakdown somewhere else."
"But, Monsieur Robineau, one doesn't choose the place to have it."
"Those are the orders."
The orders, thought Riviere, are like the rites of a religion; they may look absurd but they shape men in their mold. It was no concern to Riviere whether he seemed just or unjust. Perhaps the words were meaningless to him. The little townsfolk of the little towns promenade each evening round a bandstand and Riviere thought: It's nonsense to talk of being just or unjust toward them; they don't exist.
For him, a man was a mere lump of wax to be kneaded into shape. It was his task to furnish this dead matter with a soul, to inject will power into it. Not that he wished to make slaves of his men; his aim was to raise them above themselves. In punishing them for each delay he acted, no doubt, unjustly, but he bent the will of every crew to punctual departure; or, rather, he bred in them the will to keep to time. Denying his men the right to welcome foggy weather as the pretext for a leisure hour, he kept them so breathlessly eager for the fog to lift that even the humblest mechanic felt a twinge of shame for the delay. Thus they were quick to profit by the least rift in the armor of the skies.
"An opening on the north; let's be off!"
Thanks to Riviere the service of the mails was paramount over twenty thousand miles of land and sea.
"The men are happy," he would say, "because they like their work, and they like it because I am hard."
And hard he may have been--still he gave his men keen pleasure for all that. "They need," he would say to himself, "to be urged on toward a hardy life, with its sufferings and its joys; only that matters."
As the car approached the city, Riviere instructed the driver to take him to the Head Office. Presently Robineau found himself alone with Pellerin and a question shaped itself upon his lips.
V
Robineau was feeling tired tonight. Looking at Pellerin--Pellerin the Conqueror--he had just discovered that his own life was a gray one. Worst of all, he was coming to realize that, for all his rank of inspector and authority, he, Robineau, cut a poor figure beside this travel-stained and weary pilot, crouching in a corner of the car, his eyes closed and hands all grimed with oil. For the first time, Robineau was learning to admire. A need to speak of this came over him and, above all, to make a friend.
He was tired of his journey and the day's rebuffs and felt perhaps a little ridiculous. That very evening, when verifying the gasoline reserve, he had botched his figures and the agent, whom he had wanted to catch out, had taken compassion and totted them up for him. What was worse, he had commented on the fitting of a Model B.6 oil pump, mistaking it for the B.4 type, and the mechanics with ironic smiles had let him maunder on for twenty minutes about this "inexcusable stupidity"--his own stupidity.
He dreaded his room at the hotel. From Toulouse to Buenos Aires, straight to his room he always went once the day's work was over. Safely ensconced and darkly conscious of the secrets he carried in his breast, he would draw from his bag a sheet of paper and slowly inscribe Report on it, write a line or two at random, then tear it up. He would have liked to save the company from some tremendous peril; but it was not in any danger. All he had saved so far was a slightly rusted propeller-boss. He had slowly passed his finger over the rust with a mournful air, eyed by an airport overseer, whose only comment was: "Better call up the last halt; this plane's only just in." Robineau was losing confidence in himself.
At a venture he essayed a friendly move. "Would you care to dine with me?" he asked Pellerin. "I'd enjoy a quiet chat; my job's pretty exhausting at times."
Then, reluctant to quit his pedestal too soon, he added: "The responsibility, you know."
His subordinates did not much relish the idea of intimacy with Robineau; it had its dangers. "If he's not dug up something for his report, with an appetite like his, I guess he'll just eat me up!"
But Robineau's mind this evening was full of his personal afflictions. He suffered from an annoying eczema, his only real secret; he
would have liked to talk about his trouble, to be pitied and, now that pride had played him false, find solace in humility. Then again there was his mistress over there in France, who had to hear the nightly tale of his inspections whenever he returned. He hoped to impress her thus and earn her love--his usual luck!--he only seemed to aggravate her. He wanted to talk about her, too.
"So you'll come to dinner?"
Good-naturedly Pellerin assented.
VI
The clerks were drowsing in the Buenos Aires office when Riviere entered. He had kept his overcoat and hat on, like the incessant traveler he always seemed to be. His spare person took up so little room, his clothes and graying hair so aptly fitted into any scene, that when he went by hardly any one noticed it. Yet, at his entry, a wave of energy traversed the office. The staff bustled, the head clerk hurriedly compiled the papers remaining on his desk, typewriters began to click.
The telephonist was busily slipping his plugs into the standard and noting the telegrams in a bulky register. Riviere sat down and read them.
All that he read, the Chile episode excepted, told of one of those favored days when things go right of themselves and each successive message from the airports is another bulletin of victory. The Patagonia mail, too, was making headway; all the planes were ahead of time, for fair winds were bearing them northward on a favoring tide.
"Give me the weather reports."
Each airport vaunted its fine weather, clear sky, and clement breeze. The mantle of a golden evening had fallen on South America. And Riviere welcomed this friendliness of things. True, one of the planes was battling somewhere with the perils of the night, but the odds were in its favor.
Riviere pushed the book aside.
"That will do."
Then, a night warden whose charge was half the world, he went out to inspect the men on night duty, and came back.
Later, standing at an open window, he took the measure of the darkness. It contained Buenos Aires yonder, but also, like the hull of some huge ship, America. He did not wonder at this feeling of immensity; the sky of Santiago de Chile might be a foreign sky, but once the air mail was in flight toward Santiago you lived, from end to journey's end, under the same dark vault of heaven. Even now the Patagonian fishermen were gazing at the navigation lights of the plane whose messages were being awaited here. The vague unrest of an airplane in flight brooded not only on Riviere's heart but, with the droning of the engine, upon the capitals and little towns.
Glad of this night that promised so well, he recalled those other nights of chaos, when a plane had seemed hemmed in with dangers, its rescue well-nigh a forlorn hope, and how to the Buenos Aires Radio Post its desperate calls came faltering through, fused with the atmospherics of the storm. Under the leaden weight of sky the golden music of the waves was tarnished. Lament in the minor of a plane sped arrowwise against the blinding barriers of darkness, no sadder sound than this!
Riviere remembered that the place of an inspector, when the staff is on night duty, is in the office.
"Send for Monsieur Robineau."
Robineau had all but made a friend of his guest, the pilot. Under his eyes he had unpacked his suitcase and revealed those trivial objects which link inspectors with the rest of men; some shirts in execrable taste, a dressing set, the photograph of a lean woman, which the inspector pinned to the wall. Humbly thus he imparted to Pellerin his needs, affections, and regrets. Laying before the pilots eyes his sorry treasures, he laid bare all his wretchedness. A moral eczema. His prison.
But a speck of light remained for Robineau, as for every man, and it was in a mood of quiet ecstasy that he drew, from the bottom of his valise, a little bag carefully wrapped up in paper. He fumbled with it some moments without speaking. Then he unclasped his hands.
"I brought this from the Sahara."
The inspector blushed to think that he had thus betrayed himself. For all his chagrins, domestic misadventures, for all the gray reality of life he had a solace, these little blackish pebbles--talismans to open doors of mystery.
His blush grew a little deeper. "You find exactly the same kind in Brazil."
Then Pellerin had slapped the shoulder of an inspector poring upon Atlantis and, as in duty bound, had asked a question.
"Keen on geology, eh?"
"Keen? I'm mad about it!"
All his life long only the stones had not been hard on him.
Hearing that he was wanted, Robineau felt sad but forthwith resumed his air of dignity.
"I must leave you. Monsieur Riviere needs my assistance for certain important problems."
When Robineau entered the office, Riviere had forgotten all about him. He was musing before a wall map on which the company's airlines were traced in red. The inspector awaited his chief's orders. Long minutes passed before Riviere addressed him, without turning his head.
"What is your idea of this map, Robineau?"
He had a way of springing conundrums of this sort when he came out of a brown study.
"The map, Monsieur Riviere? Well--"
As a matter of fact he had no ideas on the subject; nevertheless, frowning at the map, he roved all Europe and America with an inspectorial eye. Meanwhile Riviere, in silence, pursued his train of thought. "On the face of it, a pretty scheme enough--but it's ruthless. When one thinks of all the lives, young fellows' lives, it has cost us! It's a fine, solid thing and we must bow to its authority, of course; but what a host of problems it presents!" With Riviere, however, nothing mattered save the end in view.
Robineau, standing beside him with his eyes fixed on the map, was gradually pulling himself together. Pity from Riviere was not to be expected; that he knew. Once he had chanced it, explaining how that grotesque infirmity of his had spoilt his life. All he had got from Riviere was a jeer. "Stops you sleeping, eh? So much the better for your work!"
Riviere spoke only half in jest. One of his sayings was: "If a composer suffers from loss of sleep and his sleeplessness induces him to turn out masterpieces, what a profitable loss it is!" One day, too, he had said of Leroux: "Just look at him! I call it a fine thing, ugliness like that--so perfect that it would warn off any sweetheart!" And perhaps, indeed, Leroux owed what was finest in him to his misfortune, which obliged him to live only for his work.
"Pellerin's a great friend of yours, isn't he, Robineau?"
"Well--"
"I'm not reproaching you."
Riviere made a half-turn and with bowed head, taking short steps, paced to and fro with Robineau. A bitter smile, incomprehensible to Robineau, came to his lips.
"Only ... only you are his chief, you see."
"Yes," said Robineau.
Riviere was thinking how tonight, as every night, a battle was in progress in the southern sky. A moment's weakening of the will might spell defeat; there was, perhaps, much fighting to be done before the dawn.
"You should keep your place, Robineau." Riviere weighed his words. "You may have to order this pilot tomorrow night to start on a dangerous flight. He will have to obey you."
"Yes."
"The lives of men worth more than you are in your hands." He seemed to hesitate. "It's a serious matter."
For a while Riviere paced the room in silence, taking his little steps.
"If they obey you because they like you, Robineau, you're fooling them. You have no right to ask any sacrifice of them."
"No, of course not."
"And if they think that your friendship will get them off disagreeable duties, you're fooling them again. They have to obey in any case. Sit down."
With a touch of his hand Riviere gently propelled Inspector Robineau toward the desk.
"I am going to teach you a lesson, Robineau. If you feel run down it's not these men's business to give you energy. You are their chief. Your weakness is absurd. Now write!"
"I--"
"Write. Inspector Robineau imposes the penalty stated hereunder on Pellerin, Pilot, on the following grounds. ... You will discover something
to fill in the blanks."
"Sir!"
"Act as though you understood, Robineau. Love the men under your orders--but do not let them know it."
So, once more, Robineau would supervise the cleaning of each propeller-boss, with zest.
***
An emergency landing ground sent in a radio message. Plane in sight. Plane signals: Engine Trouble; about to land.
That meant half an hour lost. Riviere felt that mood of irritation the traveler knows when his express is held up by a signal and the minutes no longer yield their toll of passing hedgerows. The large clock hand was turning now an empty hemicycle within whose compass so many things might have fitted in. To while away the interval Riviere went out and now the night seemed hollow as a stage without an actor. Wasted--a night like this! He nursed a grudge against the cloudless sky with its wealth of stars, the moon's celestial beacon, the squandered gold of such a night....
But, once the plane had taken off, the night once more grew full of beauty and enthralment; for now the womb of night was carrying life, and over it Riviere kept his watch.
"What weather have you?"
He had the query transmitted to the crew. Ten seconds later the reply came in : "Very fine."
There followed a string of names, towns over which the plane had passed and, for Riviere's ears, these were so many names of cities falling one by one before a conqueror.
VII
An hour later the wireless operator on the Patagonia mail felt himself gently lifted as though some one were tugging at his shoulder. He looked around; heavy clouds were putting out the stars. He leaned toward the earth, trying to see the village lights, shining like glowworms in the grass, but in those fields of darkness no light sparkled.
He felt depressed; a hard night lay before him, marches and countermarches, advances won and lost. He did not understand the pilot's tactics; a little further on and they would hit against that blackness, like a wall.
On the rim of the horizon in front he now could see a ghostly flicker, like the glow above a smithy. He tapped Fabien's shoulder, but the pilot did not stir.