It was not as far as he had thought; he had not finished his cigarette when a motorcycle and sidecar burst through the hedgerow and came up. It contained a private and a corporal. “Shouldn’t be smoking, sir,” the corporal said. “Against regulations to smoke near a crash.”
“This is not a crash,” Sartoris said. “All I did was bust the prop.”
“It’s a crash, sir,” the corporal said.
“Well, I’m going to get away from it,” Sartoris said. “I take you both to witness: the clock was still on it when you took over.”
“It’s all right, sir,” the corporal said. Sartoris got into the sidecar. On the road they passed the lorry and crew going to dismantle the Camel and fetch it in. The private took him to the orderly office. There was a captain with a black eye-patch and a casual’s blue armband, and a major wearing an observer’s single wing.
“Hurt?” the major said.
“Just my nose bled a little,” Sartoris said.
“What happened?”
“Pressure blew, sir.”
“Did you switch to gravity?”
“Yes, sir,” Sartoris said. “Your corporal’s probably found the valve still over.”
“Doubtless,” the major said. You could have come up there and looked at it too, Sartoris thought. I’d have liked to see you making that landing. “Your people have gone on. I dont know anything for you to do but report to Pool. Do you?”
“No, sir,” Sartoris said.
“Ring up Pool, Harry,” the major said. The adjutant talked into the phone for a while. Then the major talked into it. Sartoris waited. He was beginning to itch a little inside his sidcot in the warm room. “They want to talk to you,” the major said. Sartoris took the phone. It was a colonel’s voice, maybe even a general’s, though he decided at once that it knew too much what it was talking about to be a general’s:
“Well? What happened?”
“Pressure blew, sir.”
“I suppose you dived it right off the aeroplane,” the voice said.
“Yes, sir,” Sartoris said, looking out the window and scratching himself where the knitted vest beneath his shirt was really beginning to itch.
“What?” the voice said.
“Sir?”
“I asked you if you dived deliberately until you lost your pres—”
“Oh. No, sir. I thought you asked if I had switched to gravity.”
“Of course you switched to gravity!” the voice said. “I never yet knew a pilot with a dud engine who ever failed to do everything, including standing on the wing and cranking his own propeller. Report to your aerodrome tonight. Then in the morning you will go to Brooklands. They will have another Camel for you. Take it and proceed—” with caution and dispatch, Sartoris thought. But the voice did not say that. It said, “—without blowing any more pressure gauges until you overtake your squadron. Do you think you can find it?”
“I can ask along,” Sartoris said.
“You can what?” But that was all right; the connection was broken by then, and if Sartoris knew military telephone systems, that particular number could not possibly come up again for at least thirty minutes, by which time he should be well on his way back to London.
This was by way of the daily leave-train up from Dover—a casual among the other casuals though not yet maimed. But when he reached London, he decided not to report at the aerodrome. A casual, officially in France and corporeally in England, he therefore did not exist at all; he decided to preserve that anonymity. Even if nothing unpleasant occurred to him at the aerodrome, he knew and respected the infinite capacity and fertility, not so much of the complex military hierarchate itself, as of some idle staff-wallah waking suddenly from a doze. Certainly he would have been forced to present himself to the Transport Officer for the zone of South England and the Channel. And he could imagine that—himself who since noon yesterday had not existed in England at all, despite the fact that he still occupied space, projected suddenly among the orderly hum of clerks and N.C.O.’s and subalterns and at last captains who not only had never heard of him, they would not want to; would merely be exasperated at this interruption of the busy peaceful forms to be countersigned; would merely be enraged by his patient and passive need.
So he left his flying gear at the Royal Automobile Club and, alien and unattached and almost obfuscate, he stood at the curb-edge of that London, that England in that spring of 1918—the women, the soldiers, the women, the Waacs, the V.A.D.’s, the women in the uniforms of bus- and tram-conductors and in the no-uniform of the old trade, the old dishonored one which always flourishes in wartime since the quick-wived know that death will probably cuckold them anyhow—the posters: ENGLAND EXPECTS; the placards: BEAT THE BOCHE WITH BOVRIL; the bulletins: LINES HOLDING BEFORE AMIENS, OLD SOMME BATTLEFIELDS—and moved among them, the foreigner come out of curiosity to chance his life in the old-men’s wars, not even aware that he was watching the laboring heart of a nation in one of its blackest hours.
When he reached Brooklands the next morning, it was raining. The Camel was ready, though the guns were not mounted. Also, they tried with logic and reason to dissuade him. “It’ll be filthy over the Channel. You’re a casual; why dont you wash yourself out, go back to town until tomorrow?”
But he would not. “I’m already a day late, besides washing out that aeroplane yesterday. Britt was cross-eyed then. He’ll be fit to be tied if I’m not there by lunchtime.” They had maps all ready for him, with his course plotted to the Squadron (it was just south of Amiens) and intermediate aerodromes where he could refuel. He had no requisition for the Camel either, but he had known that here he would be dealing with people who were anything in the world except professional soldiers—either actual flying people or people who, despite the last three and a half years, were still by inclination and thought and behavior civilians and so were interested only in getting on with the war. So they let him sign the receipt for the aeroplane and started him up. Just as he opened the throttle he thought he heard someone shouting, but he was already moving then so he went on and took off. When he could look back at the field again, he saw that they were waving at him, and when he made another circle, they had unrolled a groundstrip with the symbol to land. But if anything was wrong with the aeroplane, they would not have needed to run out a groundstrip to get him back down, and if it was something like a wheel missing so that he would have to crash to land, he might as well do that in France as here. Besides, there was nothing wrong with the Camel; he rocked it and horsed it about a little; it was a good Camel, only it was a little too light in the tail for him (They always were, as the factory or anybody else rigged them; he liked an aeroplane that, once the slightest pressure was removed from the stick, went upstairs like an express elevator. But that could be remedied at the Squadron.) and it handled like a feather; he came down onto the race track and ran his wheels the whole length of the back-stretch and, with the help of the crosswind which obtained at that point, made the three-quarters turn, skidding only a little and this only because of the mud, before he had to take off again to keep from hitting the outside rail.
He climbed to a thousand feet and got onto his course. The nimbus was there; he stayed just under it, passing from one rain-patch to the next. It never became severe, though it never let up either, so that, once the compass settled down and he had fiddled with the fine adjustment until he got the engine to running right, he got his head well down into the office below the windscreen, out of the rain. But presently the rain really began to come down. He could see off to his left the flat gleam where the Thames estuary began to open; he was off-course, too far east, so he corrected for it and flew on, whereupon suddenly and without warning he flew full tilt into wet invisibility. He put his nose down; the movement originated not in his brain but in his hand. The aeroplane had disappeared; there was only the edge of the windscreen, the instrument panel, the rim of the cockpit. The compass was jerking back and forth. When he tried to steady it, it began to oscillate
violently for ninety degrees or more, and although the throttle was full out, the air speed was dropping. For a second all pressure went completely off the stick and a terrific vibration set up; the brute was about to spin and he had less than a thousand feet.
He burst out beneath the cloud, into fleeing patches of scud and driving rain. When he breathed again and his heart was once more back where it belonged, he was flying due east at a hundred and forty miles an hour, less than five hundred feet above the scudding and streaming earth. When he got the spinning compass stopped at last and was back on course, there was neither glint nor gleam of water in front of him. Instead, he saw the fixed and steadfast rim of England annealed into a solid wall of eastward-slanting rain. There was a town beneath him; it could have been either Dover or Folkestone. There was a lighthouse on a headland; it could have been anywhere between the Lizard and the Downs for all he knew. There would be coast defense aerodromes along here, but if he landed at one of them he would once more relinquish without recourse and succumb without hope to the rigid brazen oakleaves and the iron scarlet tabs the instant his wheels touched the ground. And he was all right now; he could see for almost a mile and all he needed to do was to stay out of the clouds and as long as rain continued to fall out of them, they would remain at least five hundred feet up, propped by the myriad spears of rain itself.
So he didn’t even look for an aerodrome. With the twelve on his compass-spool rigidly bisected by the lubber’s line, he sped over the escarpment, the granite bastion of the land, and at a hundred and twenty miles an hour he let down to about fifty feet above the water and got his head back down beneath the windscreen out of the rain. The Channel was twenty-six miles at its narrowest point; even if he happened to be exactly there, which was not probable, he would have at least ten minutes before he would need to worry about the opposite cliff or however else France began. So he went on, his head well down in the office, one eye on his watch and the other watching the water between his left shoulder and the cockpit rim to hold his altitude and his course by the direction in which the chop was moving, when—it had not been six minutes; he was only halfway across—the air, the rain, roared with a tremendous bellowing. It was not in front of him, it was everywhere: above, beneath, inside of him; he was breathing it, he was flying in it as he had been breathing and flying in the air. He looked up. Directly in front of him and apparently about twenty-five feet away, was a tremendous Brazilian flag. It was painted on the side of a ship which looked as long as a city block and rose taller than any cliff. I’ve already crashed, he thought. He did three things as one: he slapped the throttle full on and snatched the stick back and shut his eyes; the Camel went up the side of the ship like a hawk, a gull up a cliff-face. Why dont I crash? he thought. He opened his eyes. The Camel was hanging on its propeller, no longer moving. Opposite it, the mast of the ship ended in a canvas-hooded crowsnest out of which two faces, rigid with soundless yelling, glared at him; later he remembered how even at that moment he thought, They aint Spick faces; they are English faces. But there was no movement; actually the two of them, the aeroplane and the crowsnest, hung as solitary and peaceful in the rainfilled nothingness as two last year’s birdnests. I’ve got my prop and wheels up over it, Sartoris thought. Now if I can just get my tail over. Only, if he tried to use his rudder, he would stall and spin. But I have already stalled, he thought. So he crossed the controls, he rammed one wing down and stamped the opposite rudder against the firewall. Then he was over; the crowsnest fled upward and away. The wing of the bridge shot past; there was a yelling and soundless English face on it too. There was a lifeboat in davits; he passed either above it or between it and the ship, he did not know which, though he had struck nothing yet. Then he knew that he had passed beneath a funnel-stay. He was travelling sideways down the after well-deck; there was a ventilator riding now in the angle between his wings and the aeroplane’s body though still he had felt no shock, and two seamen were running madly toward a door in the break of the poop. He cut the switch. If I dont crash quick I’m going to run out of ship and be in the ocean, he thought. The second man hurled himself through the door, leaving it open behind him. Sartoris realised that the Camel apparently intended to follow him. Anyway, he had two gun-butts to have to try to dodge this time. And suppose they had given him a night-flying Camel with wing-flares on it. Or just suppose it had had bombs.
When the racket of banging metal and tearing cloth and snapping sticks ceased, Sartoris, his nose bleeding again, was sitting on the deck beside a jagged hole (that ventilator had vanished completely; he had never seen it) from which a waft of hot oil came, and the quiet panting of engines. Then a harsh, embittered Liverpool-trawler voice said:
“Now yer for it. Dont you know you can be clinked for duration for landing in neutral territory?”
2
He was standing beside the Liverpool boatswain, leaning his flowing blood away from himself and groping for the knee-pocket of his sidcot where he had wadded the handkerchief yesterday, while another strong and enraged voice roared through a megaphone from the bridge: “Get it off the ship! Heave it overboard! Jump!” A second calmer voice said reasonably:
“It will float.”
“Let it! Get it off this ship! Break out axes and chop it up and heave it overboard!”
“Here,” Sartoris said, “I’ve got to get the clock.”
“And get that man below!” the megaphone roared. “Knock him in the head if you have to!” Now there was a second man at his other elbow. Then he was moving rapidly toward the door in the poop which the Camel had tried to enter.
“Wait,” he said. “I’ve got to get that clock—” Then he was passing through the door. Already he could hear behind him the sound of axes; looking back, he saw two men running toward the rail with the Camel’s entire tail-group.
He was being rushed through a long corridor lit at the far end by a single wan bulb. The deck felt not only cold but greasy; that was when he discovered that he was carrying his right flying-boot, still buckled, in his hand and that both the woolen sock and the silk one he had worn beneath it were gone. The men stopped, halting him; the boatswain opened a door. Beyond it was a room lit by another wan and dingy bulb; he remembered enough of the cattleboat in which he had come to Europe a year ago to enlist to recognise it as the third mate’s or the third engineer’s room. “Here,” he said. “Look here—” A hand came into his back. Almost impersonal, it shot him inward. He tripped over the sill and caught balance and turned as the door slammed in his face. He heard the bolt shoot home as he grasped the knob. “Dammit, I’m a Flying Corps officer,” he said. “You cant—” Only he must be a little hysterical still, shouting against a locked door that they couldn’t do something they had already done. But they would have to back him up that he had tried to get the clock.
He bathed his nose gingerly at the washstand. There was no mirror, but he could feel it; if he crashed another one, he would need a periscope merely to walk around with. Then he took off the other flying-boot and changed the woolen sock to his left foot, so that he now had a sock on each foot, and put on the boots and went and lay on the bunk, listening to the faint shudder and pulse of the engines and watching the faint swinging of the garments from the bulkhead hooks, among which no sleeve bore any stripe, no button any insigne.
Now Britt would be fit to be tied. He would have to go back to Brooklands and get another Camel. That meant he couldn’t possibly hope to reach the Squadron until tomorrow. The watch inside his right wrist still ticked, but the guard and crystal and all three of the hands were gone, vanished into that bizarre limbo of crashes where shoes and socks and luck tokens and goggles and sometimes even ties and braces disappeared; he didn’t know what time it was. But it had been four minutes past twelve a second before he looked up and saw the painted flag in front of him, and even if he should reach Brooklands in time to leave this afternoon, they probably wouldn’t let him have another Camel without an official order. That meant he would not only
have to spend the rest of the afternoon signing bumf as to what had become of the present one, he would have to explain how he had got hold of it to begin with without following authorised procedure. If he reached shore tonight, reached England again at all even. He had not recognised the flag he had almost flown through, except there was too much yellow and green in it to belong out of South America, yet the men who had hauled him out of the crash and flung him in here without even pausing to see if he were hurt or not, had been English. There was apparently skulduggery of some sort here; the ship might be going anywhere—Scandinavia or Russia even. There was a porthole just over the bunk, the glass painted heavily with black paint behind a heavy metal grating. If he only had a screwdriver or an icepick or something long enough to reach and break the glass, he would probably see land. It would be France (not that it would do him any good; even if the ship would stop and put him ashore in France, the best he could hope for would be to reach the Squadron sometime after dark, walking); the ship was going east and he had crashed on the right side of it, the Camel boring its willful and invincible head to start a right-hand spin and he was still on the right side of it. He even knew how the land would look, rising at long last out of the heaving desolation of the ocean as he had seen it after fifteen days in the cattleboat—a tall and sudden loom of mist-swathed perpendicularity out of a lateral and unstable waste above the green and crashing seas at dawn which a relieving lookout, passing him at the midships rail, had told him was Bishop’s Rock.…