So he pulled away and smoothed out his engine, whereupon at once he began to draw ahead of Atkinson. But he knew about where the aerodrome was, and Atkinson watched him draw away without showing any concern. So he must be going in the right direction. He could find some aerodrome anyway; the wrong one wouldn’t matter since a frightened person is really not responsible. And sure enough, there was something which must be the church at Amiens standing up out of the plain; he saw the multiple spring-branch beginnings of the Somme and then the incredibly straight road which went to Roye. Then he saw the aerodrome; it was an aerodrome all right because there was the railroad right beside it. He looked back. Atkinson was coming sedately along three or four miles back, so it must even be the right aerodrome, and when he saw the train moving along at full speed beside the aerodrome a good deal faster than a man could walk, he knew it was. There really should be a telephone line along the track, though the train would probably be enough since he would either have to land cross-wind or come in over the train since he would run out of petrol if he sat upstairs and waited for it to finish passing, as a Camel only flew three hours by using the gravity tank when the other went dry. Only he was afraid; he couldn’t seem either to keep on remembering that or forgetting that or something; he would be afraid of trains too maybe; certainly he was afraid of France and so he couldn’t be expected to land on it: he would naturally be expected to land on the tarmac in front of the mess door. So he came along full-out and cross-wind about ten feet above the moving train as though he were going to land on it and then banked into the wind until he was going straight toward the mess and when he believed he had just enough speed to roll him up in front of the mess he shut off and let the Camel settle. He had a little too much speed, if anything, but then he intended to make one of those side-slipping Sibleigh landings where when you started it you had to go on and make it because it was too late then to change your mind, so he slipped until he was exactly right for his roll and straightened out, getting his tail down, getting it down a little more; only in the split second before hand, he knew he hadn’t got it down enough. He bounced. The mess looked closer than the ship had looked, though not as large. But he would have to get over it. He slapped at the throttle. But instead of the throttle, his hand struck the mixing-valve. The engine popped and died. The Camel bounced again and went over on its back.
He was farther from the mess than it had seemed; the people watching him in front of it no longer seemed to be standing on his lower wing. It was quite a big field; he seemed to walk for a good while, leaning the flow of his bleeding nose away from himself (he still had no handkerchief) until he reached them. An orderly almost met him at the door with the damp towel. Britt watched him. “Feel all right now?” Britt said.
“It was just my nose,” Sartoris said. “You would think it would have got used to crashing by this time.”
“It’s young yet,” Britt said. “Give it time.—Look here,” he said. “We aren’t together somehow. I dont believe you quite have the right point of view about this. It cost the government the equivalent of three enemy aircraft to train you and get you out here. And now you have washed out three of ours before you have seen the front lines. Dont you see? you will have to shoot down six huns before you can even start counting.” The orderly came up with something else. It was a pair of goggles. Then Sartoris discovered that this time only the rims of his own sat on his forehead. Britt took the goggles from the orderly and handed them to him.
“What’s this for?” he said.
“They’re goggles,” Britt said. “You fly with them. You are going to Candas to get a Camel. And look. Get back and crash this one before tea if you can.” Sartoris took the goggles.
“Wont dinner do?” he said. “This one may burn. It would be prettier after dark.”
“No; tea,” Britt said. “General Ludendorff should be here by then with your iron cross. He’s only over beyond Amiens now.”
Snow
“Father,” the child said, “what was Europe like before all the people in it began to hate and fear Germans?”
The man didn’t answer. He sat behind the opened newspaper so that all visible of him were his hands in their braided khaki sleeves and his legs in pale cuffless gabardine and his feet in strapped military shoes. On the Sunday of Pearl Harbor he was an architect, successful, a husband and father, in his late thirties. On the next day he dug up the old records of the military school of his youth and now he was a subaltern of engineers, at home with three days’ leave between his refresher-course and active duty, where, he did not yet know.
He didn’t answer the child. The paper didn’t even rattle while he looked at what was not even a column head on that inside page but just a caption: Nazi Governor of Czodnia Slain by Companion, and below the caption, the two blurred telephoto pictures: the cold, satiated, handsome Prussian face which he had never seen and would not see now and did not want to, and the woman’s face which he had seen once and did not want ever to see again either—a face a little older than when he had seen it fifteen years ago and no longer a peasant’s face now, anything but a peasant’s now that the mountains and the quiet valley which had bred it had been blotted forever from it by the four or five years’ triumphal pageantry of power and destruction and human suffering and blood, and below the two faces, the three lines of type enclosed in a neat box like an obituary: It is reported from Belgrade that the German Governor of Czodnia, General von Ploeckner, was stabbed to death last week by the Frenchwoman who had been his companion for several years.
“Except she wasn’t French,” the man said. “She was Swiss.”
“What, Father?” the child said. “What did you say?”
When we came around the mountain’s shoulder, we could see the sun again. Beyond the curving rampart of dirty snow the plows had thrown up, the whole valley lay full of sun beneath us—a tranquil and silent golden wash as still as a millpond, holding in suspension the violet-shadowed snow of the valley floor and touching in the last slow fading moment of day’s withdrawal the steeple of the church and the taller chimneys and the flanks of the mountains themselves as they boomed, rushed upward in soundless rigidity of rock, to the rose and saffron and lilac of the high snows which would never melt although in the valley it was spring and in Paris the chestnuts would be already in bloom.
Then we saw the funeral. Don had stopped at the dirty tumbled parapet and was looking down into the valley through the glass, the half-Zeiss, which he had bought for fifty lire in the Milan pawnshop. It had only one lens but as Don said it cost only two dollars and forty-something cents and a Zeiss without any lenses at all would be worth that; a Zeiss autograph on two tomato cans would be worth that. But in its day it must have been the best glass Zeiss ever made because now, during the time you could bear to look through it at all, without the other eye to brace against you could feel your eyeball being pulled out of your skull like a steel marble to a magnet. But we soon learned to turn the glass over every few seconds and divide the strain, as Don was doing now as he stood spraddled against the dirty parapet like a ship’s officer behind his bridge dodger. He was from California. He was about the shape of a grain elevator and almost as big. “I love snow,” he said, turning the glass. “At home we never have it except in Hollywood. When we leave Switzerland tomorrow I’m going to fill the other side of the glass with it to remember you by.”
“A little snow might help that glass anyway,” I said.
“Or a piece of beefsteak,” he said.
Then I noticed that he hadn’t turned the glass in five or six and then eight and then ten seconds; I could feel my eyeball too being drawn to that unendurable moment just before the burst and spring of the blind annealing water. Then he lowered the glass and turned his head and his streaming eye, bending over a little as if his nose were bleeding while the water ran down his face. “That’s a man they’re carrying,” he said.
“A man who’re carrying?” I said. Then I had the glass and then I could actual
ly feel it: not just the one eyeball drawing out of my skull but dragging the other one behind it, around behind my nose to fill the vacated socket, and I turned the glass and then again. But I had already seen them too, crawling black and tiny across the valley floor, toward the village, their crawling shadows long across the snow before them—a dot, then two sets of dots joined together by what they carried, then one dot and then two more in single file, and the one directly behind the men who bore the body wore skirts too.
“The one in front’s a priest,” Don said. “Give me the glass.” Then we had it in turn, but each time there was nothing behind them but the jumble of rock at the mountain’s base from which they had emerged: no house nor hut from which a body could have been borne but only the jumbled base and then the soundless roar of cliff to which even ice could not cling, up and up to where the shadow of the ledge which turned its hip was as trivial as a thread. Then I also saw that the snow-furrow the crawling dots were making lay not only behind them but in front of them too. I handed the glass toward Don and mopped my face off with my handkerchief. “They went to get him and are coming back,” Don said. “He fell.”
“Maybe it’s a path. A road.”
Don took the glass and slipped the strap over his head. The pawnshop man never could find any case for it. Maybe he had already sold it to somebody else for fifty lire. “He fell,” Don said. “You no like?”
“I said all right,” I said. “Come on. Dont you see the sun?” Because it was gone. It had left the valley while we stood there; only the high snow held it now, lying rosy and substanceless as cloud against the sky already changing from green to violet. We went on; the road looped and switch-backed away beneath us, into dusk. There were lights in the village now, flickering and trembling as lights do across water or maybe from beneath water, and then suddenly there was no more snow. We had left it, emerged from it, whereupon it was instantaneously colder, as if there had been something of warmth in the snow’s radiance but now there was nothing but the twilight and the cold. And then between two blinks the village itself had tilted onto one edge and I thought again how no square foot of this country was really level; even the villages in the valleys only looked level from above. So maybe all the earth looked flat while you were falling toward it or maybe you couldn’t bear to look or maybe you couldn’t help but look. “You like snow still?” I said. “Maybe we fill spyglass for now, before we run out of it.”
“Maybe I no like for now,” Don said. He was in front; he always went down hill faster. So he was in the valley first, the mountains ceasing as the snow had ceased and becoming the valley and almost at once the valley was the village, the road a cobbled street, mounting again, and he was there first too. “They’re in the church now,” he said. “Some of them are. One or two of them must be. At least one of them is.” Then I saw it too: the little harsh square stone-steepled box that looked like it might have dated back to the Lombard kings, the candle-light falling out through the open door, and the people—men and women and even a child or two—gathered quietly before the door as I once saw a group waiting outside the blank wall of a little Alabama jail where a hanging was to take place. Our hobnails clashed and rang on the cobbles like the hooves of drayhorses on a hill as without even breaking stride Don slanted off toward it.
“Wait,” I said. “He fell. So what? Come on. I’m hungry. Let’s go eat.”
“Maybe he didn’t fall,” Don said. “Maybe a friend pushed him. Maybe he jumped off on a bet. We came to Europe to observe customs. You never saw a funeral just like this, even in Alabama.”
“All right,” I said. “Suppose he—” But we were too close now; you could never tell, at least in the parts of Europe we had seen, just what language anyone spoke or just how many different ones he didn’t quite speak. So we went on toward what still looked like an empty church because all the people that we could see were on the outside of it, the heads turning and watching us quietly as we came up.
“Messieurs,” Don said. “Mesdames.”
“Messieurs,” one of them said after an instant—a little man, fiftyish and snuffy: a mail carrier if I ever saw one, just as there had been a mail carrier with his leather pouch outside the Alabama jail that day. The other faces still turned and still watched us and then watched us no more when we stopped among them where we could see into the church too—a stone cubicle not much bigger than a sentry-box in which the soft cold candle-light, washing upward and already fading about the plaster agony of the shadowy lifesize crucifix, seemed to compound again the icy chill which our leaving the snow had seemed to establish, and the candles and the coffin and the woman kneeling beside it in a hat and a fur coat that were not bought in any Swiss city either, and the priest busy at something at the back with an air exactly like that of a busy and abstracted housewife, and the other man, a peasant with the mark of the mountains on him even if he hadn’t got it driving cattle back and forth to pasture at dawn and dusk, standing in a pew near the aisle halfway back. Then even as we looked into the church the priest crossed behind the coffin and paused beneath the crucifix, his robes hushed and sibilant as if the cold faint washing of the candlelight had become audible, and genuflected, curtsied almost as little girls are taught to do, and was gone, somewhere out the back or the side, and the other man came out of the pew and came up the aisle toward us. And I saw no movement, I merely felt it, but when the man reached the door and came out there were only three of us there—myself and Don and the little postman—as the man stooped and picked up an ice axe with five or six pitons strung on it and passed us without looking at us at all and was gone too. And the reason the postman was still there was because Don was holding him by the arm and I remembered how someone had told us before we left Paris that you could say anything you wanted to any European but dont put your hand on him and without doubt this one would be a servant of the State too and it would be the same as violating a gendarme or a station agent. I could not see the others at all, I could just feel them watching from the darkness while Don held the postman like a little boy caught stealing apples in front of the open door beyond which the woman in the fur coat and the Paris hat still knelt with her forehead against the coffin as if she had gone to sleep. Don’s French was all right. It never always said what he thought it was, but nobody ever failed to understand him.
“That dead,” he said. “He fell? He stroked himself to the foot of the mountain?”
“Yes, monsieur,” the postman said.
“And the woman who grieves. The milady from Paris. His wife?”
“Yes, monsieur.” The postman jerked at the arm Don held.
“I see,” Don said. “A stranger. A client for the climbing. A rich French. Or perhaps an English milord who buys his wife’s clothes in Paris.”
Now the postman was struggling. “No! No French! No English! Of this village! Assez, monsieur! Assez donc, alors—”
But Don held him. “Not the guide who came out of the church and picked up the ice axe and the little bijoux. The other one. Who remains. The husband who is dead in the box.”
But now it was too fast for me. The postman was free now and for a while even Don stood there like a silo with a hose of water or maybe of light gravel being played on it, until the postman ceased and flung up one arm and was gone too and only Don stood there blinking down at me, the half-Zeiss looking like a child’s toy on his chest.
“Of this village,” he said. “Her husband. And a Paris hat and I’ll bet you that coat cost thirty or forty thousand francs.”
“I heard that too,” I said. “What was he saying when he really pulled the plug?”
“That they were both guides, the one that came out and got the ice axe, and the one in the coffin. And all three of them are of this village, the Paris hat and that fur coat too. And she and the one in the coffin are married and one day last fall all four of them climbed—”
“All four of who?” I said.
“Yes,” Don said. “So would I.—climbed the mountain and y
ou dont often hear of professional guides falling but this one managed it somehow and it was too late to get him then until the snow went away again in the spring and so the snow went away again and yesterday his wife came back and this afternoon they fetched him in so his wife can depart again but as there is no train until tomorrow morning suppose we avail ourselves of her to satisfy our curiosity or better still mind our own business and so goodnight messieurs.”
“Came back from where?” I said. “Going back to where?”
“Yes,” Don said. “So do I. Let’s go find the inn.”
It could be in but one direction since there was but one street and we were already in it. And presently we saw it, our hobnails clashing in the chill air of full night now, the chill mountain air which was like ice water. But spring was in it: that vivid newness of spring which caused the lamps in the scattered windows rising tier by invisible tier against the slopes to flicker and tremble still even as distance had made them do. The door was two steps down from the street. Don opened it and we entered the low bright warm clean room with its stove and wooden tables and benches and the woman who knitted as always in the little cage at the end of the bar and the mountain men at the bar whose faces turned as one face when we entered.