Night Flight

  "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 know 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.

  "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 relap
sed 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
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  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!