Airman's Odyssey (29 page)

“An opening on the north; let's be off!”

Thanks to Rivière the service of the mails was paramount over twenty thousand miles of land and sea.

“The men are happy,” he would say, “because they like their work, and they like it because I am hard.”

And hard he may have been—still he gave his men keen pleasure for all that. “They need,” he would say to himself, “to be urged on toward a hardy life, with its sufferings and its joys; only that matters.”

As the car approached the city, Rivière instructed the driver to take him to the Head Office. Presently Robineau found himself alone with Pellerin and a question shaped itself upon his lips.

Robineau was feeling tired tonight. Looking at Pellerin—Pellerin the Conqueror—he had just discovered that his own life was a gray one. Worst of all, he was coming to realize that, for all his rank of inspector and authority, he, Robineau, cut a poor figure beside this travel-stained and weary pilot, crouching in a corner of the car, his eyes closed and hands all grimed with oil. For the first time, Robineau was learning to admire. A need to speak of this came over him and, above all, to make a friend.

He was tired of his journey and the day's rebuffs and felt perhaps a little ridiculous. That very evening, when verifying the gasoline reserve, he had botched his figures and the agent, whom he had wanted to catch out, had taken compassion and totted them up for him. What was worse, he had commented on the fitting of a Model B.6 oil pump, mistaking it for the B.4 type, and the mechanics
with ironic smiles had let him maunder on for twenty minutes about this “inexcusable stupidity”—his own stupidity.

He dreaded his room at the hotel. From Toulouse to Buenos Aires, straight to his room he always went once the day's work was over. Safely ensconced and darkly conscious of the secrets he carried in his breast, he would draw from his bag a sheet of paper and slowly inscribe
Report
on it, write a line or two at random, then tear it up. He would have liked to save the company from some tremendous peril; but it was not in any danger. All he had saved so far was a slightly rusted propeller-boss. He had slowly passed his finger over the rust with a mournful air, eyed by an airport overseer, whose only comment was: “Better call up the last halt; this plane's only just in.” Robineau was losing confidence in himself.

At a venture he essayed a friendly move. “Would you care to dine with me?” he asked Pellerin. “I'd enjoy a quiet chat; my job's pretty exhausting at times.”

Then, reluctant to quit his pedestal too soon, he added: “The responsibility, you know.”

His subordinates did not much relish the idea of intimacy with Robineau; it had its dangers. “If he's not dug up something for his report, with an appetite like his, I guess he'll just eat me up!”

But Robineau's mind this evening was full of his personal afflictions. He suffered from an annoying eczema, his only real secret; he would have liked to talk about his trouble, to be pitied and, now that pride had played him false, find solace in humility. Then again there was his mistress over
there in France, who had to hear the nightly tale of his inspections whenever he returned. He hoped to impress her thus and earn her love—his usual luck!—he only seemed to aggravate her. He wanted to talk about her, too.

“So you'll come to dinner?”

Good-naturedly Pellerin assented.

The clerks were drowsing in the Buenos Aires office when Rivière entered. He had kept his overcoat and hat on, like the incessant traveler he always seemed to be. His spare person took up so little room, his clothes and graying hair so aptly fitted into any scene, that when he went by hardly any one noticed it. Yet, at his entry, a wave of energy traversed the office. The staff bustled, the head clerk hurriedly compiled the papers remaining on his desk, typewriters began to click.

The telephonist was busily slipping his plugs into the standard and noting the telegrams in a bulky register. Rivière sat down and read them.

All that he read, the Chile episode excepted, told of one of those favored days when things go right of themselves and each successive message from the airports is another bulletin of victory. The Patagonia mail, too, was making headway; all the planes were ahead of time, for fair winds were bearing them northward on a favoring tide.

“Give me the weather reports.”

Each airport vaunted its fine weather, clear sky,
and clement breeze. The mantle of a golden evening had fallen on South America. And Rivière welcomed this friendliness of things. True, one of the planes was battling somewhere with the perils of the night, but the odds were in its favor.

Rivière pushed the book aside.

“That will do.”

Then, a night warden whose charge was half the world, he went out to inspect the men on night duty, and came back.

 

Later, standing at an open window, he took the measure of the darkness. It contained Buenos Aires yonder, but also, like the hull of some huge ship, America. He did not wonder at this feeling of immensity; the sky of Santiago de Chile might be a foreign sky, but once the air mail was in flight toward Santiago you lived, from end to journey's end, under the same dark vault of heaven. Even now the Patagonian fishermen were gazing at the navigation lights of the plane whose messages were being awaited here. The vague unrest of an airplane in flight brooded not only on Rivière's heart but, with the droning of the engine, upon the capitals and little towns.

Glad of this night that promised so well, he recalled those other nights of chaos, when a plane had seemed hemmed in with dangers, its rescue well-nigh a forlorn hope, and how to the Buenos Aires Radio Post its desperate calls came faltering through, fused with the atmospherics of the storm. Under the leaden weight of sky the golden music of the waves was tarnished. Lament in the minor
of a plane sped arrowwise against the blinding barriers of darkness, no sadder sound than this!

 

Rivière remembered that the place of an inspector, when the staff is on night duty, is in the office.

“Send for Monsieur Robineau.”

Robineau had all but made a friend of his guest, the pilot. Under his eyes he had unpacked his suitcase and revealed those trivial objects which link inspectors with the rest of men; some shirts in execrable taste, a dressing set, the photograph of a lean woman, which the inspector pinned to the wall. Humbly thus he imparted to Pellerin his needs, affections, and regrets. Laying before the pilots eyes his sorry treasures, he laid bare all his wretchedness. A moral eczema. His prison.

But a speck of light remained for Robineau, as for every man, and it was in a mood of quiet ecstasy that he drew, from the bottom of his valise, a little bag carefully wrapped up in paper. He fumbled with it some moments without speaking. Then he unclasped his hands.

“I brought this from the Sahara.”

The inspector blushed to think that he had thus betrayed himself. For all his chagrins, domestic misadventures, for all the gray reality of life he had a solace, these little blackish pebbles—talismans to open doors of mystery.

His blush grew a little deeper. “You find exactly the same kind in Brazil.”

Then Pellerin had slapped the shoulder of an
inspector poring upon Atlantis and, as in duty bound, had asked a question.

“Keen on geology, eh?”

“Keen? I'm mad about it!”

All his life long only the stones had not been hard on him.

 

Hearing that he was wanted, Robineau felt sad but forthwith resumed his air of dignity.

“I must leave you. Monsieur Rivière needs my assistance for certain important problems.”

When Robineau entered the office, Rivière had forgotten all about him. He was musing before a wall map on which the company's airlines were traced in red. The inspector awaited his chief's orders. Long minutes passed before Rivière addressed him, without turning his head.

“What is your idea of this map, Robineau?”

He had a way of springing conundrums of this sort when he came out of a brown study.

“The map, Monsieur Rivière? Well—”

As a matter of fact he had no ideas on the subject; nevertheless, frowning at the map, he roved all Europe and America with an inspectorial eye. Meanwhile Rivière, in silence, pursued his train of thought. “On the face of it, a pretty scheme enough—but it's ruthless. When one thinks of all the lives, young fellows' lives, it has cost us! It's a fine, solid thing and we must bow to its authority, of course; but what a host of problems it presents!” With Rivière, however, nothing mattered save the end in view.

Robineau, standing beside him with his eyes
fixed on the map, was gradually pulling himself together. Pity from Rivière was not to be expected; that he knew. Once he had chanced it, explaining how that grotesque infirmity of his had spoilt his life. All he had got from Rivière was a jeer. “Stops you sleeping, eh? So much the better for your work!”

Rivière spoke only half in jest. One of his sayings was: “If a composer suffers from loss of sleep and his sleeplessness induces him to turn out masterpieces, what a profitable loss it is!” One day, too, he had said of Leroux: “Just look at him! I call it a fine thing, ugliness like that—so perfect that it would warn off any sweetheart!” And perhaps, indeed, Leroux owed what was finest in him to his misfortune, which obliged him to live only for his work.

“Pellerin's a great friend of yours, isn't he, Robineau?”

“Well—”

“I'm not reproaching you.”

Rivière made a half-turn and with bowed head, taking short steps, paced to and fro with Robineau. A bitter smile, incomprehensible to Robineau, came to his lips.

“Only ... only you are his chief, you see.”

“Yes,” said Robineau.

Rivière was thinking how tonight, as every night, a battle was in progress in the southern sky. A moment's weakening of the will might spell defeat; there was, perhaps, much fighting to be done before the dawn.

“You should keep your place, Robineau.” Rivière weighed his words. “You may have to order this
pilot tomorrow night to start on a dangerous flight. He will have to obey you.”

“Yes.”

“The lives of men worth more than you are in your hands.” He seemed to hesitate. “It's a serious matter.”

For a while Rivière paced the room in silence, taking his little steps.

“If they obey you because they like you, Robineau, you're fooling them. You have no right to ask any sacrifice of them.”

“No, of course not.”

“And if they think that your friendship will get them off disagreeable duties, you're fooling them again. They have to obey in any case. Sit down.”

With a touch of his hand Rivière gently propelled Inspector Robineau toward the desk.

“I am going to teach you a lesson, Robineau. If you feel run down it's not these men's business to give you energy. You are their chief. Your weakness is absurd. Now write!”

“I—”

“Write.
Inspector Robineau imposes the penalty stated hereunder on Pellerin, Pilot, on the following grounds.
... You will discover something to fill in the blanks.”

“Sir!”

“Act as though you understood, Robineau. Love the men under your orders—but do not let them know it.”

So, once more, Robineau would supervise the cleaning of each propeller-boss, with zest.

***

An emergency landing ground sent in a radio message.
Plane in sight. Plane signals: Engine Trouble; about to land.

That meant half an hour lost. Rivière felt that mood of irritation the traveler knows when his express is held up by a signal and the minutes no longer yield their toll of passing hedgerows. The large clock hand was turning now an empty hemicycle within whose compass so many things might have fitted in. To while away the interval Rivière went out and now the night seemed hollow as a stage without an actor. Wasted—a night like this! He nursed a grudge against the cloudless sky with its wealth of stars, the moon's celestial beacon, the squandered gold of such a night....

 

But, once the plane had taken off, the night once more grew full of beauty and enthralment; for now the womb of night was carrying life, and over it Rivière kept his watch.

“What weather have you?”

He had the query transmitted to the crew. Ten seconds later the reply came in : “Very fine.”

There followed a string of names, towns over which the plane had passed and, for Rivière's ears, these were so many names of cities falling one by one before a conqueror.

An hour later the wireless operator on the Patagonia mail felt himself gently lifted as though some one were tugging at his shoulder. He looked around; heavy clouds were putting out the stars.
He leaned toward the earth, trying to see the village lights, shining like glowworms in the grass, but in those fields of darkness no light sparkled.

He felt depressed; a hard night lay before him, marches and countermarches, advances won and lost. He did not understand the pilot's tactics; a little further on and they would hit against that blackness, like a wall.

On the rim of the horizon in front he now could see a ghostly flicker, like the glow above a smithy. He tapped Fabien's shoulder, but the pilot did not stir.

Now the first eddies of the distant storm assailed them. The mass of metal heaved gently up, pressing itself against the operator's limbs; and then it seemed to melt away, leaving him for some seconds floating in the darkness, levitated. He clung to the steel bulwarks with both hands. The red lamp in the cockpit was all that remained to him of the world of men and he shuddered to know himself descending helpless into the dark heart of night, with only a little thing, a miner's safety lamp, to see him through. He dared not disturb the pilot to ask his plans; he tightened his grip on the steel ribs and bending forward, fixed his eyes upon the pilot's shadowed back.