He might keep up the struggle, chance his luck; no destiny attacks us from outside. But, within him, man bears his fate and there comes a moment when he knows himself vulnerable; and then, as in a vertigo, blunder upon blunder lures him.
And, at this very moment, there gleamed above his head, across a storm rift, like a fatal lure within a deep abyss, a star or two.
Only too well he knew them for a trap. A man sees a few stars at the issue of a pit and climbs toward them, and then--never can he get down again but stays up there eternally, chewing the stars...
But such was his lust for light that he began to climb.
XVI
He climbed and it grew easier to correct the plunges for the stars gave him his bearings. Their pale magnet drew him up; after that long and bitter quest for light, for nothing in the world would he forego the frailest gleam. If the glimmer of a little inn were all his riches, he would turn around this token of his heart's desire until his death! So now he soared toward the fields of light.
Little by little he spiraled up, out of the dark pit which closed again beneath him. As he rose the clouds began to shed their slime of shadow, flowing past him in cleaner, whiter billows. Fabien rose clear.
And now a wonder seized him; dazzled by that brightness, he had to keep his eyes closed for some seconds. He had never dreamt the night clouds could dazzle thus. But the full moon and all the constellations were changing them to waves of light.
In a flash, the very instant he had risen clear, the pilot found a peace that passed his understanding. Not a ripple tilted the plane but, like a ship that has crossed the bar, it moved across a tranquil anchorage. In an unknown and secret corner of the sky it floated, as in a harbor of the Happy Isles. Below him still the storm was fashioning another world, thridded with squalls and cloudbursts and lightnings, but turning to the stars a face of crystal snow.
Now all grew luminous, his hands, his clothes, the wings, and Fabien thought that he was in a limbo of strange magic; for the light did not come down from the stars but welled up from below, from all that snowy whiteness.
The clouds beneath threw up the flakes the moon was pouring on them; on every hand they loomed like towers of snow. A milky stream of light flowed everywhere, laving the plane and crew. When Fabien turned he saw the wireless operator smile.
"That's better!" he cried.
But his words were drowned by the rumor of the flight; they conversed in smiles. I'm daft, thought Fabien, to be smiling, we're lost.
And yet--at last a myriad dark arms had let him go; those bonds of his were loosed, as of a prisoner whom they let walk a while in liberty amongst the flowers.
"Too beautiful," he thought. Amid the far-flung treasure of the stars he roved, in a world where no life was, no faintest breath of life, save his and his companion's. Like plunderers of fabled cities they seemed, immured in treasure vaults whence there is no escape. Amongst these frozen jewels they were wandering, rich beyond all dreams, but doomed.
XVII
One of the wireless operators at the Commodoro Rivadavia station in Patagonia made a startled gesture and all the others keeping helpless vigil there crowded round to read the message.
A harsh light fell upon the blank sheet of paper over which they bent. The operator's hand seemed loath to do its task and his pencil shook. The words to write were prisoned in his hand, but already his fingers twitched.
"Storms?"
He nodded assent; he could hardly hear for interferences. Then he scrawled some illegible signs, then words; then, at last, the text came out.
"Cut off at 12,000 feet, above the storm. Proceeding due west toward interior; found we had been carried above sea. No visibility below. Impossible know if still flying over sea. Report if storm extends interior."
By reason of the storms the telegram had to be relayed from post to post to Buenos Aires, bearing its message through the night like balefires lit from tower to tower.
Buenos Aires transmitted a reply. "Storm covers all interior area. How much gasoline left?"
"For thirty minutes." These words sped back from post to post to Buenos Aires.
In under half an hour the plane was doomed to plunge into a cyclone which would crash it to the earth.
XVIII
Riviere was musing, all hope lost; somewhere this plane would founder in the darkness. A picture rose in his mind of a scene which had impressed him in his boyhood; a pond that was being emptied to find a body. Thus, till this flood of darkness had been drained off the earth and daylight turned toward the plains and cornfields, nothing would be found. Then some humble peasants perhaps would come on two young bodies, their elbows folded on their faces, like children asleep amid the grass and gold of some calm scene. Drowned by the night.
Riviere thought of all the treasure buried in the depths of night, as in deep, legendary seas. Night's apple trees that wait upon the dawn with all their flowers that serve as yet no purpose. Night, perfume-laden, that hides the lambs asleep and flowers that have no color yet.
Little by little the lush tilth, wet woods, and dew-cool meadows, would swing toward the light. But somewhere in the hills, no longer dark with menace, amid the fields and flocks, a world at peace again, two children would seem to sleep. And something would have flowed out of the seen world into that other.
Riviere knew all the tenderness of Fabien's wife, the fears that haunted her; this love seemed only lent her for a while, like a toy to some poor child. He thought of Fabien's hand which, firm on the controls, would hold the balance of his fate some minutes yet; that hand had given caresses and lingered on a breast, wakening a tumult there; a hand of godlike virtue, it had touched a face, transfiguring it. A hand that brought miracles to pass.
Fabien was drifting now in the vast splendor of a sea of clouds, but under him there lay eternity. Among the constellations still he had his being, their only denizen. For yet a while he held the universe in his hand, weighed it at his breast. That wheel he clutched upbore a load of human treasure and desperately, from one star to the other, he trafficked this useless wealth, soon to be his no more.
A single radio post still heard him. The only link between him and the world was a wave of music, a minor modulation. Not a lament, no cry, yet purest of sounds that ever spoke despair.
XIX
Robineau broke in upon his thoughts.
"I've been thinking, sir.... Perhaps we might try--"
He had nothing really to suggest but thus proclaimed his good intentions. A solution, how he would have rejoiced to find it! He went about it as if it were a puzzle to be solved. Solutions were his forte, but Riviere would not hear of them. "I tell you, Robineau, in life there are no solutions. There are only motive forces, and our task is to set them acting--then the solutions follow." The only force that Robineau had to activate was one which functioned in the mechanics' shop; a humble force which saved propeller-bosses from rusting.
But this night's happenings found Robineau at fault. His inspectorial mandate could not control the elements, nor yet a phantom ship that, as things were, struggled no longer to win a punctuality bonus but only to evade a penalty which canceled all that Robineau imposed, the penalty of death.
There was no use for Robineau now and he roamed the offices, forlorn.
Riviere was informed that Fabien's wife wished to see him. Tormented by anxiety, she was waiting in the clerks' office till Riviere could receive her. The employees were stealing glances at her face. She felt shy, almost shamefast, and gazed nervously around her; she had no right of presence here. They went about their tasks as usual and to her it was as if they were trampling on a corpse; in their ledgers no human sorrow but dwindled to dross of brittle figures. She looked for something that might speak to her of Fabien; at home all things confessed his absence--the sheets turned back upon the bed, the coffee on the table, a vase of flowers. Here there was nothing of him; ah was at war with pity, friendship, memories. The only word she caught (for in her presence they instinctive
ly lowered their voices) was the oath of an employee clamoring for an invoice. "The dynamo account, God blast you! The one we send to Santos." Raising her eyes she gazed toward this man with a look of infinite wonder. Then to the wall where a map hung. Her lips trembled a little, almost imperceptibly.
The realization irked her that in this room she was the envoy of a hostile creed and almost she regretted having come; she would have liked to hide somewhere and, fearful of being remarked, dared neither cough nor weep. She felt her presence here misplaced, indecent, as though she were standing naked before them. But so potent was her truth, the truth within her, that furtively their eyes strayed ever and again in her direction, trying to read it on her face. Beauty was hers and she stood for a holy thing, the world of human happiness. She vouched for the sanctity of that material something with which man tampers when he acts. She closed her eyes before their crowded scrutiny, revealing all the peace which in his blindness man is apt to shatter.
Riviere admitted her.
So now she was come to make a timid plea for her flowers, the coffee waiting on the table, her own young body. Again, in this room, colder even than the others, her lips began to quiver. Thus, too, she bore witness to her truth, unutterable in this alien world. All the wild yearning of her love, her heart's devotion, seemed here invested with a selfish, pestering aspect. And again she would have liked to leave this place.
"I am disturbing you--"
"No," said Riviere, "you are not disturbing me. But unfortunately neither you nor I can do anything except--wait."
There was a faint movement of her shoulders and Riviere guessed its meaning. "What is the use of that lamp, the dinner waiting, and the flowers there when I return?" Once a young mother had confided in Riviere. "I've hardly realized my baby's death as yet. It's the little things that are so cruel--when I see the baby clothes I had ready, when I wake up at night and there rises in my heart a tide of love, useless now, like my milk ... all useless!" And for this woman here, Fabien's death would only just begin tomorrow--in every action, useless now, in trivial objects ... useless. Little by little Fabien would leave his home. A deep, unuttered pity stirred in Riviere's heart.
"Madame--"
The young wife turned and left him with a weak smile, an almost humble smile, ignoring her own power.
Riviere sat down again rather heavily. "Still she is helping me to discover the thing I'm looking for."
He fingered absent-mindedly the messages from the northern airports. "We do not pray for immortality," he thought, "but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself."
His gaze fell on the telegrams.
"These are the paths death takes to enter here--messages that have lost their meaning."
He looked at Robineau. Meaningless, too, this fellow who served no purpose now. Riviere addressed him almost gruffly.
"Have I got to tell you what your duties are?"
Then he pushed open the door that led into the Business Office and saw how Fabien's disappearance was recorded there in signs his wife could not have noticed. The slip marked R.B.903, Fabien's machine, was already inserted in the wall index of Unavailable Plant. The clerks preparing the papers for the Europe mail were working slackly, knowing it would be delayed. The airport was ringing up for orders respecting the staff on night duty whose presence was no longer necessary. The functions of life were slowing down. That is death! thought Riviere. His work was like a sailing ship becalmed upon the sea.
He heard Robineau speaking. "Sir, they had only been married six weeks."
"Get on with your work!"
Riviere, watching the clerks, seemed to see beyond them the workmen, mechanics, pilots, all who had helped him in his task, with the faith of men who build. He thought of those little cities of old time where men had murmured of the "Indies," built a ship and freighted it with hopes. That men might see their hope outspread its wings across the sea. All of them magnified, lifted above themselves and saved--by a ship! He thought: The goal, perhaps, means nothing, it is the thing done that delivers man from death. By their ship those men will live.
Riviere, too, would be fighting against death when he restored to those telegrams their full meaning, to these men on night duty their unrest and to his pilots their tragic purpose; when life itself would make his work alive again, as winds restore to life a sailing ship upon the sea.
XX
Commodoro Rivadavia could hear nothing now, but twenty seconds later, six hundred miles away, Bahia Blanca picked up a second message.
"Coming down. Entering the clouds...."
Then two words of a blurred message were caught at Trelew.
"... see nothing..."
Short waves are like that; here they can be caught, elsewhere is silence. Then, for no reason, all is changed. This crew, whose position was unknown, made itself heard by living ears, from somewhere out of space and out of time, and at the radio station phantom hands were tracing a word or two on this white paper.
Had the fuel run out already or was the pilot, before catastrophe, playing his last card: to reach the earth again without a crash?
Buenos Aires transmitted an order to Trelew.
"Ask him."
The radio station looked like a laboratory with its nickel and its copper, manometers and sheaves of wires. The operators on duty in their white overalls seemed to be bending silently above some simple experiment. Delicately they touched their instruments, exploring the magnetic sky, dowsers in quest of hidden gold.
"No answer?"
"No answer."
Perhaps they yet might seize upon its way a sound that told of life. If the plane and its lights were soaring up to join the stars, it might be they would hear a sound--a singing star!
The seconds flowed away, like ebbing blood. Were they still in flight? Each second killed a hope. The stream of time was wearing life away. As for twenty centuries it beats against a temple, seeping through the granite, and spreads the fane in ruin, so centuries of wear and tear were thronging in each second, menacing the airmen.
Every second swept something away; Fabien's voice, his laugh, his smile. Silence was gaining ground. Heavier and heavier silence drowned their voices, like a heavy sea.
"One forty," some one murmured. "They're out of fuel. They can't be flying any more."
Then silence.
A dry and bitter taste rose on their lips, like the dry savor of a journey's end. Something mysterious, a sickening thing, had come to pass. And all the shining nickel and trellised copper seemed tarnished with the gloom that broods on ruined factories. All this apparatus had grown clumsy, futile, out of use; a tangle of dead twigs.
One thing remained; to wait for daybreak. In a few hours all Argentina would swing toward the sun, and here these men were standing, as on a beach, facing the net that was being slowly, slowly drawn in toward them, none knowing what its take would be.
To Riviere in his office came that quiet aftermath which follows only on great disasters, when destiny has spent its force. He had set the police of the entire country on the alert. He could do no more; only wait.
But even in the house of death order must have its due. Riviere signed to Robineau.
"Circular telegram to the northern airports. Considerable delay anticipated Patagonia mail. To avoid undue delay Europe mail, will ship Patagonia traffic on following Europe mail."
He stooped a little forward. Then, with an effort, he called something to mind, something important. Yes, that was it. Better make sure.
"Robineau!"
"Sir."
"Issue an order, please. Pilots forbidden to exceed 1900 revs. They're ruining my engines."
"Very good, sir."
Riviere bowed his head a little more. To be alone--that was his supreme desire.
"That's all, Robineau. Trot off, old chap!"
And this, their strange equality before the shades, filled Robineau with awe.
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XXI
Robineau was drifting aimlessly about the office. He felt despondent. The company's life had come to a standstill, since the Europe mail, due to start at two, would be countermanded and only leave at daybreak. Morosely the employees kept their posts, but their presence now was purposeless. In steady rhythm the weather reports from the north poured in, but their "no wind," "clear sky," "full moon," evoked the vision of a barren kingdom. A wilderness of stones and moonlight. As Robineau, hardly aware what he was up to was turning over the pages of a file on which the office superintendent was at work, he suddenly grew conscious that the official in question was at his side waiting with an air of mocking deference to get his papers back As if he were saying "That's my show. Suppose you leave me to it eh?"
Shocked though he was by his subordinate's demeanor, the inspector found himself tongue-tied and, with a movement of annoyance, handed back the documents. The superintendent resumed his seat with an air of grand punctilio. "I should have told him to go to the devil," thought Robineau. Then, to save his face, he moved away and his thoughts returned to the night's tragedy For with this tragedy all his chief's campaign went under and Robineau lamented a twofold loss
The picture of Riviere alone there in his private office rose in Robineau's mind; "old chap," Riviere had said. Never had there been a man so utterly unfriended as he, and Robineau felt an infinite compassion for him. He turned over in his mind vague sentences that hinted sympathy and consolation and the impulse prompting him struck Robineau as eminently laudable. He knocked gently at the door. There was no answer. Not daring in such a silence to knock louder, he turned the handle. Riviere was there. For the first time Robineau entered Riviere's room almost on an equal footing, almost as a friend; he likened himself to the N.C.O. who joins his wounded general under fire follows him in defeat and in exile plays a brother's part "Whatever happens I am with you"--that was Robineau's unspoken message.