Ten hours later he waked blinking into the fierce eye of an electric torch. The dim ceiling bulb was out; the garments now hung motionless among their shifting shadows as the torch moved. This time the two men wheeled up to flank him with such wooden and interlocked precision that he needed neither the white gaiters nor the rifles to tell him they were marines. “Nah then, Kitchener,” a voice beyond the torch said, and he recognised that too—the composite voice of the Chief Warrant Officer within three or four years of honorable retirement, whose only superior in uniform or out of it was that one of equal age and rank in the battle fleet flagship. “Who’s in charge of this party?” Sartoris said. “I’m an officer. If I’m under arrest, it must be—”
“Hup,” the voice beyond the torch said. They tramped back up the dim corridor empty now of any shudder and murmur of motion. They wheeled. The torch went off behind him and they wheeled again. Then he was in a hard black wind, rainless now and much colder, beneath a low driving scud. Then he began to see a little; it was the deck where he had crashed. Three shadows waited.
“Right, Bos’un?” a new voice said, an officer’s voice this time.
“Right, sir,” the voice of the torch said. Then Sartoris could see the shape and angle of the officer’s cap.
“Look here,” he said.
“Right, then,” the new voice said. They crossed the deck. There was a rope ladder beyond the rail; it might have descended the black and eyeless iron flank into the North Sea itself. But something containing human life surged toward him and sank away and surged up beneath him again; hands touched him, a voice said, “Let go,” and he was in the longboat. He was in something, sitting on a thwart between his two marines, among the shadowy unison of oars, aware of the strong running of the black sea, the black depths of the strong sea, a thin plank’s thickness away. Then there was another ladder, another black iron flank, after the first one so shallow seemingly that he might have stood up in the boat and caught the gunwale. But it was taller than that. Then he was on another lightless and cluttered deck. There was a shape which he did not know yet was a torpedo tube, a canted muzzle which he did know was an archie gun, and four raked funnels out of all proportion to the hull they rose from, which, as he walked on it, surged into violent motion. It heeled; it seemed to squat and then rush with a roar of water into full speed as aeroplanes themselves did not do.
He saw that speed once. He was following the officer. They were climbing; abruptly the hard black wind leaned at him; there was a motionless shape bulky in garments, with a binocular, then across the canvas bridge screen he saw the narrow and driving bows between two boiling and tremendous wings of white water. Then the wind was gone. He sidled past a dim light in which the spokes of a mahogany wheel shifted slightly. A door closed behind him and beyond a table on which a chart was spread beneath a downward-hooded light, he presently distinguished a man in a leather jacket looking at him. The man said nothing at all. He just sat behind the table, looking at Sartoris, then, without moving whatever, he stopped. “This way,” the officer said. Then they were dodging along a cramped passage humming with that speed and narrow as a bright-lit tomb.
“What was that for?” Sartoris said.
“Nothing,” the officer said. “He just wanted to look at you.” The wardroom was oblong, steel-painted. It contained a long table and little else. When they entered, the boatswain said, “hup!” and the two marines came to attention and once more fell in on either side of him with that metronome-like precision. Now there were six midshipmen coming to attention in their simple and unrelieved blue, resembling any six boys out of any high school team back home in America; resembling six elected out of a nation’s junior entirety by some standard of incredible excellence. “Dammit,” the officer said, “I told you to beggar off.” They went out, dissolved, vanished. The officer unbuttoned his peacoat and muffler. His face was perhaps thirty, blunt and quite cold. One whole side of it was covered by a puckered, sheet-lightning scar. Then Sartoris saw beneath the peacoat, unrelieved by any other ribbon and so near the same color as the tunic as to be almost indistinguishable, the ribbon of the Victoria Cross. “What do you call yourself?” the officer said.
“Second Lieutenant, Flying Corps,” Sartoris said. “See?” He opened his sidcot until his wings were exposed. The other glanced at them for a moment absolutely without interest.
“That’s not hard to come by,” he said.
“Not hard?” Sartoris said. “It took me eight months. I never heard of anybody doing it much quicker.”
“Why were you on that ship?”
“I crashed on it.”
“I know. Why?”
“I didn’t see it. I had my head down inside out of the rain. When he blew the whistle at me, I just had time to pull straight up. I stalled. Did they expect me to go into the water?”
“Cant say,” the other said. “Where were you going?”
“Trying to catch up with my squadron,” Sartoris said. “Where would I be going out there where that ship was?”
“Cant say,” the other said. “Have you had anything to eat?”
“Not since breakfast.”
“Have the steward get him what there is,” the officer said.
“Hup,” the boatswain said.
The new room was even smaller than the one in the other ship; the marine standing just inside the door, his rifle at order arms and his head within four inches of the ceiling, seemed to fill it, dwarf it to the proportions of a child’s doll-house. For just a moment it resembled the other. There was the built-in bunk, but with clean blankets, and the washstand. But there was not even a black-painted port; the walls were unbroken, and he had re-entered not only the sound of the speed but of the water too. It seemed to him that he could have laid his hand against the wall and felt the steel shell trembling to the long and constant roar of flying water just outside of it.
The steward entered, with a mug of strong hot bitter tea and some cold meat and bread. He ate and then he wanted a cigarette, but they had been in the same knee-pocket where he had wadded the bloody handkerchief yesterday; they were gone too. So he lay on the clean bunk beneath the single bright bulb, within two feet of the lock of the sentry’s rifle, listening to the seethe and roar of water just beyond the steel wall, until after a while it seemed to him that the intact fragility of the shell depended upon its speed alone for intactness as aeroplanes did and that if it ever slowed, it would be crushed inward by the very weight of water in which it would come to rest. He didn’t know where he was going. He had thought he did yesterday, and he had been wrong. But he had never heard of a destroyer up the Thames as far as London. And he had slept at least ten hours yesterday before the flashlight waked him. So he must have been well up the North Sea by then, and he tried to remember some East Coast ports but he could not. Besides, they were probably somewhere up about the Firth of Forth anyway; maybe that’s where they were going. Which meant that he probably wouldn’t get back to Brooklands to get another Camel until the day after tomorrow; when he reached the Squadron now, Britt would probably have him shot. V.C., he thought, feeling the roaring drive of the hull. But you had to be British-born to get that, or Britt’s M.C. either, which in his opinion was next. But I’m going to get something, he thought. He was. He was going to get it on the coming fifth of July. But he would have only to have been born at all to get what he was going to get. Maybe I can shoot dice with somebody for a spare iron cross, he thought.
This time he was being shaken awake. It was a first lieutenant with the Provost Marshal’s brassard. The vessel was still now; there was no seethe and roar of water, and when he crossed the deck between two armed land military police, there was no longboat, no black ocean. Instead, the vessel lay alongside a stone quay and there was a harbor beneath the beginning of dawn, and a dark encircling city. But it was not London. “It’s not London,” he said.
“Hardly,” the lieutenant said. So he was somewhere in the Firth of Forth, as he had anticipated. Maybe
Edinburgh, since it seemed to be a city—if Edinburgh came down to the water. Then he might reach London tonight. Then he could spend tomorrow explaining about the old Camel and getting a new one. He might reach the Squadron the day after tomorrow. There was a sentry at the end of the pier. A warrant officer-of-the-guard had to be turned out before they could pass—why, Sartoris didn’t know, since the lieutenant and his two men must have passed him once already, and all any of them could possibly want would be for them to pass and get on. But even in just two days he had forgotten the land, forgotten the old stale smell of base-colonel’s hat. But maybe in two days he would be in France; Britt and Tate and Sibleigh all said that when you got really close to the war, you were free of it.
Then they were in a car among the dark and empty streets; presently they turned into a courtyard where other cars and motorcycle couriers came and went before a big house with lights in it. It may not have been just what he had expected of an Edinburgh courtyard, but it was no railway station, not even a Scottish one, and he had been to Turnberry and Ayr. Then he found that he had expected that too; he was inside, in a tremendous orderly room full of couriers and messengers and corporal clerks and telephonists, busy, peaceful, and reeking with the olden invincible stink; he might have been trying to find someone to give him another aeroplane for all the attention which was paid him. “Listen,” he said. “I’m—” It seemed like a week; it was incredible that the Squadron had left for France only two days ago. “—two days behind my squadron now. Maybe you’d better telephone—” he named the colonel at the aerodrome from which the Squadron had departed.
“They will attend to that,” the lieutenant said.
“Who will?” Sartoris said.
“They will,” the lieutenant said. “If they want him.”
In comparison to the other two, his new room looked like a flying field. He lay on that iron cot too, taking his helmet off—he had pushed his goggles back over his head just before he cut the Camel’s switch; they were all right—since he would be here some time, waiting until they should send for him; he wished now that he hadn’t slept so much since noon yesterday. After a while they brought him breakfast. It was a good enough breakfast, but it stank too of the old curse of the Sam Browne belt married to the typewriter, and since he was in Scotland now, he could have done with a native breakfast; they could even keep the food. Well, he would probably even get that drink in about two days when he got to France. So he lay on the cot while the handless watch inside his right wrist ticked and ticked. Now I’ve been here two hours, he thought. Now I’ve been here four hours, he thought. Then he had been there six hours, because a corporal finally came to the door and gave him a cigarette and told him it was twelve minutes to eleven oclock. So he quit waiting, because they would never send for him. He would never get to France. He had tried once, and he was in Scotland. Next time he would be somewhere in the Baltic countries or Scandinavia, the third time it would be Russia or Iceland. He would become a legend in all the allied armed forces; he saw himself an old man, wild-faced and with a long white beard, scrabbling up the cliff somewhere between Brest and Ostend fifty or sixty years from now, piping the number of a disbanded and forgotten squadron, crying, “Where’s the war? Where is it? Where is it?” … The sentry and the same lieutenant were at the door. Sartoris rose from the cot.
“Are they ready for me?” he said.
“Yes,” the lieutenant said. Sartoris came toward the door. “Dont you want your hat?” the lieutenant said.
“Wont I be coming back here?” Sartoris said.
“I dont know. Do you want to?” So Sartoris went back and got his helmet. Then the three of them were in a long corridor. Then Sartoris and the lieutenant were mounting stairs. There was another corridor where the couriers came and went. Then the lieutenant was gone, and another man was standing against the light, looking at him. It was Britt.
“What are you doing in Scotland?” Sartoris said.
“Gad’s teeth,” Britt said. “Put on your bloody hat and come along out of here.”
3
“I’m in France,” Sartoris said. They were in the courtyard where the motorcycles of the couriers rushed and popped; there was a flight-commanderish looking car and a motorcycle sidecar with an Ak Emma driver waiting.
“You’re in France,” Britt said. “The name of this place is Boulogne. How old are you?”
“I’ll be twenty-one next month,” Sartoris said. “If I can stay out of jail that long.”
“You really ought to write your memoirs. If you wait until you are thirty, so much will have happened to you that you cant remember it. You pick out the one ship in all European waters probably that really doesn’t want anyone to look at it, and you land an aeroplane on it—”
“They were not Spicks,” Sartoris said. “That was a Spick flag of some sort, but they were English. They hauled me out of that Camel without even stopping to see if I was hurt or not and threw me—”
“And just who commissioned you to go scouring up and down the Channel examining ships?”
“But there was something funny—”
“Certainly there was,” Britt said. “That’s why they locked you up so quickly and called for someone to come get you. Very likely they thought you were a hun spy—or worse still, from the Hague. But anyway, that ship is not your business; it’s theirs—the war-wallahs in London or wherever. You are not even supposed to have seen any ship at all; I promised that in your name. There’s a lot goes on in this war, and the others too I suppose, that subalterns and captains too are not supposed to see.”
“All right,” Sartoris said. “Then what did I do?”
“Then you were taken off it by a destroyer. Not just any ordinary boat; one of his Majesty’s ships of war—just because it wasn’t a first class battleship doesn’t signify—is detached from submarine patrol three hundred miles away and sent under forced draught at night to intercept you and take you aboard like you had been the first sea lord himself, and bring you back. Dont you think that’s worth going into the book?”
“It’s not worth being arrested for.” Now Britt was looking at him. He looked up and met Britt’s cold eyes.
“That’s not what you were arrested for.” They looked at one another. “You were posted out to a squadron three days ago. You haven’t got there yet.”
After a moment Sartoris said, “So they thought I was afraid. You thought I was too.”
“What would you have thought? You are posted to France for the first time. You depart but you dont even get to the Channel. You pull out of formation for no reason—”
“There was somebody out of A flight right in front of me in that loop! I was close enough on him to see a bent pin in his hub!”
“—for no reason and climb up to eight thousand feet and dive the pressure right off and then, with a half-mile aerodrome not a mile away, you stand on your nose in a bit of grain that even Sibleigh couldn’t have flown a Camel out of. And then you disappear. You are ordered to report at a certain place. You dont report there. You aren’t heard of again until the next day, when you suddenly appear at Brooklands, where they have been ordered to have an aeroplane ready for you. They let you have it, though you have no authority to get it yet; you take off just before the message arrives to hold you. They signal you to land but you ignore it. Then you and the aeroplane disappear. You have departed ostensibly for your squadron in France; you should reach it in an hour and a half at the outside. But you dont. You vanish, until sometime that afternoon the master of that ship wirelesses frantically that you have apparently crashed deliberately on what you doubtless thought was a neutral vessel—which automatically means internment for duration, as you certainly knew.”
“I never saw it,” Sartoris said. “I just had time to pull up and stall. It was either the ship or the water. I—”
“It’s all right now,” Britt said. “I know better now, because no man is going to try deliberately to land a Camel on a sixty-foot steel deck in th
e middle of the Channel. All that’s forgotten now. You never saw any ship; no one need know where you were; you just crashed, and this morning you reached Boulogne and I met you.”
“What do you want me to do now?”
“The tender is for you. It will take you to Candas. Atkinson will meet you there, to show you the way back to the Squadron. You and he are to get two new Camels. The one you have will be yours. So right side up this time, what?”
“Dont bother,” Sartoris said. He got into the sidecar. He could have seen something of France, at least of the back areas of war. So they thought I was afraid, he thought. Atkinson was waiting at the aircraft park.
“Where have you—” he said.
“Never mind about that too,” Sartoris said. The Camels were ready too. Atkinson blinked at him.
“They are keeping lunch for us,” he said. “Come along.”
“I dont want any. You go on and eat.” So they thought I was afraid, he thought. Atkinson blinked at him.
“Then I shant either,” he said. “We can get something in the mess.” The mechanics started them up and they took off. It seemed as though he hadn’t even seen an aeroplane in a month. But he hadn’t forgotten it. He would never forget how to fly—even if he was afraid. He took off in a fierce climbing turn. This one was even lighter in the tail than the one at Brooklands and it pulled even better; he was upstairs before Atkinson was off the ground almost. He came around and overtook Atkinson and rammed his wing in between Atkinson’s wing and tailgroup, whereupon Atkinson’s head jerked around, shaped with alarmed yelling. Atkinson waved him frantically off and slipped away at last, whereupon Sartoris pulled up and climbed and came at Atkinson from behind now, seeing Atkinson’s alarmed face jerking back toward him first over one shoulder then over the other; he dogfought Atkinson for a while, chivvied him that is, since all Atkinson would do was to wave him off with that frantic rage, diving at him, zooming away, diving, going all out until he had pulled ahead enough to turn and come at Atkinson headon, until this time when he came up and set his wing into the notch between Atkinson’s wing and tailgroup, Atkinson did nothing save shake his fist at him. But his head kept on jerking around to watch Sartoris’ wingtip until presently Sartoris saw that Atkinson was flying gradually off to the right and soon they would be headed toward where Paris ought to be. Besides, he was having trouble holding his Camel back; it didn’t want to stay there; when he throttled back slow enough, vibration got so bad he couldn’t even read his compass.