“On the wings?” the English boy said. “Why coffee on the wings.”
“Stow it, I said, Mac,” Bogard said. “Come along.”
They recrossed the aerodrome, approaching the muttering banks of flame. When they drew near, the guest began to discern the shape, the outlines, of the Handley-Page. It looked like a Pullman coach run upslanted aground into the skeleton of the first floor of an incomplete skyscraper. The guest looked at it quietly.
“It’s larger than a cruiser,” he said in his bright, interested voice. “I say, you know. This doesn’t fly in one lump. You can’t pull my leg. Seen them before. It comes in two parts: Captain Bogard and me in one; Mac and ’nother chap in other. What?”
“No,” McGinnis said. Bogard had vanished. “It all goes up in one lump. Big lark, eh? Buzzard, what?”
“Buzzard?” the guest murmured. “Oh, I say. A cruiser. Flying. I say, now.”
“And listen,” McGinnis said. His hand came forth; something cold fumbled against the hand of the English boy—a bottle. “When you feel yourself getting sick, see? Take a pull at it.”
“Oh, shall I get sick?”
“Sure. We all do. Part of flying. This will stop it. But if it doesn’t. See?”
“What? Quite. What?”
“Not overside. Don’t spew it overside.”
“Not overside?”
“It’ll blow back in Bogy’s and my face. Can’t see. Bingo. Finished. See?”
“Oh, quite. What shall I do with it?” Their voices were quiet, brief, grave as conspirators.
“Just duck your head and let her go.”
“Oh, quite.”
Bogard returned. “Show him how to get into the front pit, will you?” he said. McGinnis led the way through the trap. Forward, rising to the slant of the fuselage, the passage narrowed; a man would need to crawl.
“Crawl in there and keep going,” McGinnis said.
“It looks like a dog kennel,” the guest said.
“Doesn’t it, though?” McGinnis agreed cheerfully. “Cut along with you.” Stooping, he could hear the other scuttling forward. “You’ll find a Lewis gun up there, like as not,” he said into the tunnel.
The voice of the guest came back: “Found it.”
“The gunnery sergeant will be along in a minute and show you if it is loaded.”
“It’s loaded,” the guest said; almost on the heels of his words the gun fired, a brief staccato burst. There were shouts, the loudest from the ground beneath the nose of the aeroplane. “It’s quite all right,” the English boy’s voice said. “I pointed it west before I let it off. Nothing back there but Marine office and your brigade headquarters. Ronnie and I always do this before we go anywhere. Sorry if I was too soon. Oh, by the way,” he added, “my name’s Claude. Don’t think I mentioned it.”
On the ground, Bogard and two other officers stood. They had come up running. “Fired it west,” one said. “How in hell does he know which way is west?”
“He’s a sailor,” the other said. “You forgot that.”
“He seems to be a machine gunner too,” Bogard said.
“Let’s hope he doesn’t forget that,” the first said.
- 4 -
Nevertheless, Bogard kept an eye on the silhouetted head rising from the round gunpit in the nose ten feet ahead of him. “He did work that gun, though,” he said to McGinnis beside him. “He even put the drum on himself, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” McGinnis said. “If he just doesn’t forget and think that that gun is him and his tutor looking around from a Welsh alp.”
“Maybe I should not have brought him,” Bogard said. McGinnis didn’t answer. Bogard jockeyed the wheel a little. Ahead, in the gunner’s pit, the guest’s head moved this way and that continuously, looking. “We’ll get there and unload and haul air for home,” Bogard said. “Maybe in the dark—Confound it, it would be a shame for his country to be in this mess for four years and him not even to see a gun pointed in his direction.”
“He’ll see one tonight if he don’t keep his head in,” McGinnis said.
But the boy did not do that. Not even when they had reached the objective and McGinnis had crawled down to the bomb toggles. And even when the searchlights found them and Bogard signaled to the other machines and dived, the two engines snarling full speed into and through the bursting shells, he could see the boy’s face in the searchlight’s glare, leaned far overside, coming sharply out as a spotlighted face on a stage, with an expression upon it of childlike interest and delight. “But he’s firing that Lewis,” Bogard thought. “Straight too”; nosing the machine farther down, watching the pinpoint swing into the sights, his right hand lifted, waiting to drop into McGinnis’ sight. He dropped his hand; above the noise of the engines he seemed to hear the click and whistle of the released bombs as the machine, freed of the weight, shot zooming in a long upward bounce that carried it for an instant out of the light. Then he was pretty busy for a time, coming into and through the shells again, shooting athwart another beam that caught and held long enough for him to see the English boy leaning far over the side, looking back and down past the right wing, the undercarriage. “Maybe he’s read about it somewhere,” Bogard thought, turning, looking back to pick up the rest of the flight.
Then it was all over, the darkness cool and empty and peaceful and almost quiet, with only the steady sound of the engines. McGinnis climbed back into the office, and standing up in his seat, he fired the colored pistol this time and stood for a moment longer, looking backward toward where the searchlights still probed and sabered. He sat down again.
“O.K.,” he said. “I counted all four of them. Let’s haul air.” Then he looked forward. “What’s become of the King’s Own? You didn’t hang him onto a bomb release, did you?” Bogard looked. The forward pit was empty. It was in dim silhouette again now, against the stars, but there was nothing there now save the gun. “No,” McGinnis said: “there he is. See? Leaning overside. Dammit, I told him not to spew it! There he comes back.” The guest’s head came into view again. But again it sank out of sight.
“He’s coming back,” Bogard said. “Stop him. Tell him we’re going to have every squadron in the Hun Channel group on top of us in thirty minutes.”
McGinnis swung himself down and stooped at the entrance to the passage. “Get back!” he shouted. The other was almost out; they squatted so, face to face like two dogs, shouting at one another above the noise of the still-unthrottled engines on either side. of the fabric walls. The English boy’s voice was thin and high.
“Bomb!” he shrieked.
“Yes,” McGinnis shouted, “they were bombs! We gave them hell! Get back, I tell you! Have every Hun in France on us in ten minutes! Get back to your gun!”
Again the boy’s voice came, high, faint above the noise: “Bomb! All right?”
“Yes! Yes! All right. Back to your gun, damn you!”
McGinnis climbed back into the office. “He went back. Want me to take her awhile?”
“All right,” Bogard said. He passed McGinnis the wheel. “Ease her back some. I’d just as soon it was daylight when they come down on us.”
“Right,” McGinnis said. He moved the wheel suddenly. “What’s the matter with that right wing?” he said. “Watch it.… See? I’m flying on the right aileron and a little rudder. Feel it.”
Bogard took the wheel a moment. “I didn’t notice that. Wire somewhere, I guess. I didn’t think any of those shells were that close. Watch her, though.”
“Right,” McGinnis said. “And so you are going with him on his boat tomorrow—today.”
“Yes. I promised him. Confound it, you can’t hurt a kid, you know.”
“Why don’t you take Collier along, with his mandolin? Then you could sail around and sing.”
“I promised him,” Bogard said. “Get that wing up a little.”
“Right,” McGinnis said.
Thirty minutes later it was beginning to be dawn; the sky was gray. Presently
McGinnis said: “Well, here they come. Look at them! They look like mosquitoes in September. I hope he don’t get worked up now and think he’s playing beaver. If he does he’ll just be one down to Ronnie, provided the devil has a beard.… Want the wheel?”
- 5 -
At eight o’clock the beach, the Channel, was beneath them. Throttled back, the machine drifted down as Bogard ruddered it gently into the Channel wind. His face was strained, a little tired.
McGinnis looked tired, too, and he needed a shave.
“What do you guess he is looking at now?” he said. For again the English boy was leaning over the right side of the cockpit, looking backward and downward past the right wing.
“I don’t know,” Bogard said. “Maybe bullet holes.” He blasted the port engine. “Must have the riggers—”
“He could see some closer than that,” McGinnis said. “I’ll swear I saw tracer going into his back at one time. Or maybe it’s the ocean he’s looking at. But he must have seen that when he came over from England.” Then Bogard leveled off; the nose rose sharply, the sand, the curling tide edge fled alongside. Yet still the English boy hung far overside, looking backward and downward at something beneath the right wing, his face rapt, with utter and childlike interest. Until the machine was completely stopped he continued to do so. Then he ducked down, and in the abrupt silence of the engines they could hear him crawling in the passage. He emerged just as the two pilots climbed stiffly down from the office, his face bright, eager; his voice high, excited.
“Oh, I say.’ Oh, good gad! What a chap. What a judge of distance! If Ronnie could only have seen! Oh, good gad! Or maybe they aren’t like ours—don’t load themselves as soon as the air strikes them.”
The Americans looked at him. “What don’t what?” McGinnis said. “The bomb. It was magnificent; I say, I shan’t forget it. Oh, I say, you know! It was splendid!”
After a while McGinnis said, “The bomb?” in a fainting voice. Then the two pilots glared at each other; they said in unison: “That right wing!” Then as one they clawed down through the trap and, with the guest at their heels, they ran around the machine and looked beneath the right wing. The bomb, suspended by its tail, hung straight down like a plumb bob beside the right wheel, its tip just touching the sand. And parallel with the wheel track was the long delicate line in the sand where its ultimate tip had dragged. Behind them the English boy’s voice was high, clear, childlike:
“Frightened, myself. Tried to tell you. But realized you knew your business better than I. Skill. Marvelous. Oh, I say, I shan’t forget it.”
- 6 -
A marine with a bayoneted rifle passed Bogard onto the wharf and directed him to the boat. The wharf was empty, and he didn’t even see the boat until he approached the edge of the wharf and looked directly down into it and upon the backs of two stooping men in greasy dungarees, who rose and glanced briefly at him and stooped again.
It was about thirty feet long and about three feet wide. It was painted with gray-green camouflage. It was quarter-decked forward, with two blunt, raked exhaust stacks. “Good Lord,” Bogard thought, “if all that deck is engine—” Just aft the deck was the control seat; he saw a big wheel, an instrument panel. Rising to a height of about a foot above the free-board, and running from the stern forward to where the deck began, and continuing on across the after edge of the deck and thence back down the other gunwale to the stern, was a solid screen, also camouflaged, which inclosed the boat save for the width of the stern, which was open. Facing the steersman’s seat like an eye was a hole in the screen about eight inches in diameter. And looking down into the long, narrow, still, vicious shape, he saw a machine gun swiveled at the stern, and he looked at the low screen—including which the whole vessel did not sit much more than a yard above water level—with its single empty forward-staring eye, and he thought quietly: “It’s steel. It’s made of steel.” And his face was quite sober, quite thoughtful, and he drew his trench coat about him and buttoned it, as though he were getting cold.
He heard steps behind him and turned. But it was only an orderly from the aerodrome, accompanied by the marine with the rifle. The orderly was carrying a largish bundle wrapped in paper.
“From Lieutenant McGinnis to the captain,” the orderly said.
Bogard took the bundle. The orderly and the marine retreated. He opened the bundle. It contained some objects and a scrawled note. The objects were a new yellow silk sofa cushion and a Japanese parasol, obviously borrowed, and a comb and a roll of toilet paper. The note said:
Couldn’t find a camera anywhere and Collier wouldn’t let me have his mandolin. But maybe Ronnie can play on the comb.
MAC.
Bogard looked at the objects. But his face was still quite thoughtful, quite grave. He rewrapped the things and carried the bundle on up the wharf and dropped it quietly into the water.
As he returned toward the invisible boat he saw two men approaching. He recognized the boy at once—tall, slender, already talking, voluble, his head bent a little toward his shorter companion, who plodded along beside him, hands in pockets, smoking a pipe. The boy still wore the pea-coat beneath a flapping oilskin, but in place of the rakish and casual cap he now wore an infantryman’s soiled Balaclava helmet, with, floating behind him as though upon the sound of his voice, a curtainlike piece of cloth almost as long as a burnous.
“Hullo, there!” he cried, still a hundred yards away.
But it was the second man that Bogard was watching, thinking to himself that he had never in his life seen a more curious figure. There was something stolid about the very shape of his hunched shoulders, his slightly down-looking face. He was a head shorter than the other. His face was ruddy, too, but its mold was of a profound gravity that was almost dour. It was the face of a man of twenty who has been for a year trying, even while asleep, to look twenty-one. He wore a high-necked sweater and dungaree slacks; above this a leather jacket; and above this a soiled naval officer’s warmer that reached almost to his heels and which had one shoulder strap missing and not one remaining button at all. On his head was a plaid fore-and-aft deer stalker’s cap, tied on by a narrow scarf brought across and down, hiding his ears, and then wrapped once about his throat and knotted with a hangman’s noose beneath his left ear. It was unbelievably soiled, and with his hands elbow-deep in his pockets and his hunched shoulders and his bent head, he looked like someone’s grandmother hung, say, for a witch. Clamped upside down between his teeth was a short brier pipe.
“Here he is!” the boy cried. “This is Ronnie. Captain Bogard.”
“How are you?” Bogard said. He extended his hand. The other said no word, but his hand came forth, limp. It was quite cold, but it was hard, calloused. But he said no word; he just glanced briefly at Bogard and then away. But in that instant Bogard caught something in the look, something strange—a flicker; a kind of covert and curious respect, something like a boy of fifteen looking at a circus trapezist.
But he said no word. He ducked on; Bogard watched him drop from sight over the wharf edge as though he had jumped feet first into the sea. He remarked now that the engines in the invisible boat were running.
“We might get aboard too,” the boy said. He started toward the boat, then he stopped. He touched Bogard’s arm. “Yonder!” he hissed. “See?” His voice was thin with excitement.
“What?” Bogard also whispered; automatically he looked backward and upward, after old habit. The other was gripping his arm and pointing across the harbor.
“There! Over there. The Ergenstrasse. They have shifted her again.” Across the harbor lay an ancient, rusting, sway-backed hulk. It was small and nondescript, and, remembering, Bogard saw that the foremast was a strange mess of cables and booms, resembling—allowing for a great deal of license or looseness of imagery—a basket mast. Beside him the boy was almost chortling. “Do you think that Ronnie noticed?” he hissed. “Do you?”
“I don’t know,” Bogard said.
“Oh, go
od gad! If he should glance up and call her before he notices, we’ll be even. Oh, good gad! But come along.” He went on; he was still chortling. “Careful,” he said. “Frightful ladder.”
He descended first, the two men in the boat rising and saluting. Ronnie had disappeared, save for his backside, which now filled a small hatch leading forward beneath the deck. Bogard descended gingerly.
“Good Lord,” he said. “Do you have to climb up and down this every day?”
“Frightful, isn’t it?” the other said, in his happy voice. “But you know yourself. Try to run a war with makeshifts, then wonder why it takes so long.” The narrow hull slid and surged, even with Bogard’s added weight. “Sits right on top, you see,” the boy said. “Would float on a lawn, in a heavy dew. Goes right over them like a bit of paper.”
“It does?” Bogard said.
“Oh, absolutely. That’s why, you see.” Bogard didn’t see, but he was too busy letting himself gingerly down to a sitting posture. There were no thwarts; no seats save a long, thick, cylindrical ridge which ran along the bottom of the boat from the driver’s seat to the stern. Ronnie had backed into sight. He now sat behind the wheel, bent over the instrument panel. But when he glanced back over his shoulder he did not speak. His face was merely interrogatory. Across his face there was now a long smudge of grease. The boy’s face was empty, too, now.
“Right,” he said. He looked forward, where one of the seamen had gone. “Ready forward?” he said.
“Aye, sir,” the seaman said.
The other seaman was at the stern line. “Ready aft?”
“Aye, sir.”
“Cast off.” The boat sheered away, purring, a boiling of water under the stern. The boy looked down at Bogard. “Silly business. Do it shipshape, though. Can’t tell when silly fourstriper—” His face changed again, immediate, solicitous. “I say. Will you be warm? I never thought to fetch—”
“I’ll be all right,” Bogard said. But the other was already taking off his oilskin. “No, no,” Bogard said. “I won’t take it.”