“You seared?” the aviator repeated in a jeering tone, but he too glanced back at Bayard’s bleak arrogant face. “I bet you don’t even need a horse.”
“You don’t know him,” the girl rejoined, and she clutched his hand and struck her body shivering against his, and though his arm tightened and his hand slid down her back a little, it was under cover of the shuffling throng into which they were wedged, and a little warily, and he said quickly:
“Ease off, Sister: he’s looking this way. I saw him knock two teeth out of an Australian captain that just tried to speak to a girl he was with in a London joint two years ago.” They moved on until the band was across the room from them. “What’re you scared of? He’s not an Indian: he won’t hurt you as long as you mind your step. He’s all right. I’ve known him a long time, in places where you had to be good, believe me.”
“You don’t know,” she repeated, “I—” the music crashed to a stop; in the sudden silence the shabby man’s voice rose from the nearby table:
“—could just get one of these damn yellow-livered pilots to—” his voice was drowned again in a surge of noise, drunken voices and shrill woman-laughter and scraping chairs, but as they approached the table the shabby man still talked with leashed insistent gestures while Bayard stared across the room at whatever it was he watched, raising his glass steadily to his mouth. The girl clutched her partner’s arm.
“You’ve got to help me pass him out,” she begged swiftly. “I’m scared to leave with him, I tell you.”
“Pass Sartoris out? The man don’t wear hair, nor the woman either. Run back to kindergarten, Sister.” Then, struck with her sincerity, he said: “Say, what’s he done, anyway?”
“I don’t know. He’ll do anything. He threw an empty bottle at a traffic cop as we were driving out here. You’ve got—”
“Hush it,” he said. The shabby man ceased and raised his face impatiently. Bayard still gazed across the room.
“Brother-in-law over there,” he said, speaking slowly and carefully. “Don’t speak to family. Mad at us.” They turned and looked.
“Where?” the aviator asked. Then he beckoned a waiter. “Here, Jack.”
“Man with diamond headlight,” Bayard said, “Brave man. Can’t speak to him, though. Might hit me. Friend with him, anyway.”
The aviator looked again. “Looks like his grandmother,” he said. He called the waiter again, then to the girclass="underline" “Another cocktail?” He picked up the bottle and filled his glass and reached it over and filled Bayard’s, and turned to the shabby man. “Where’s yours?”
The shabby man waved it impatiently aside. “Look.” He picked up the napkins again. “Dihedral increases in ratio to air speed, up to a certain point. Now, what I want to find out—“
“Tell it to the Marines, buddy,” the aviator interrupted. “I heard a couple of years ago they got a airyplane. Here, waiter!” Bayard was watching the shabby man bleakly.
“You aren’t drinking” the girl said. She touched the aviator beneath the table.
“No,” Bayard agreed. “Why don’t you fly his coffin for him, Monaghan?”
“Me?” The aviator set his glass down. “Like hell. My leave comes due next month.” He raised the glass again. “Here’s to wind-up,” he said. “And no heel-taps.”
“Yes,” Bayard agreed, not touching his glass. His face was pale and rigid, a metal mask again.
“I tell you there’s no danger at all, as long as you keep the speed below the point I’ll give you,” the shabby man said. “I’ve tested the wings with weights, and proved the lift and checked all my figures; all you have to do—”
“Won’t you drink with us?” the girl insisted.
“Sure he will,” the aviator said. “Say, you remember that night in Amiens when that big Irish devil, Comyn, wrecked the Cloche-Clos by blowing that A.P.M.’s whistle at the door?” The shabby man sat smoothing the folded napkins on the table before him. Then he burst forth again, his voice hoarse and mad with the intensity of his frustrated dream:
“I’ve worked and slaved, and begged and borrowed, and now when I’ve got the machine and a government inspector, I can’t get a test because you damn yellow-livered pilots won’t take it up. A service full of you, drawing flying pay for sitting in two-story dancehalls, swilling alcohol. You overseas pilots talking about your guts! No wonder you couldn’t keep the Germans from—”
“Shut up,” Bayard told him without heat, in his bleak, careful voice.
“You’re not drinking,” the girl repeated, <4Won’t you?” She raised his glass and touched her lips to it and extended it to him. Taking it, he grasped her hand too and held her so. But again he was staring across the room. ‘
“Not brother-in-law,” he said. “Husband-in-law. No. Wife’s brother’s husband-in-law. Wife used to be wife’s brother’s girl. Married, now. Fat woman. He’s lucky.”
“What’re you talking about?” the aviator demanded. “Come on, let’s have a drink.”
The girl was taut at her arm’s length, with the other hand she raised her glass and she smiled at him with brief and terrified coquetry. But he held her wrist in his hard fingers, and while she stared at him widely he drew her steadily toward him. “Turn me loose,” she whispered. “Don’t,” and she set her glass down and with the other hand she tried to unclasp his fingers. The shabby man was brooding over his folded napkins; the aviator was carefully occupied with his drink. “Don’t,” she whispered again. Her body was wrung in her chair and she put her other hand out quickly, lest she be dragged out of it, and for a moment they stared at one another—she with Wide and mute terror; he bleakly with the cruel cold mask of his face. Then he released her and rose and kicked his chair away.
“Come on, you,” he said to the shabby man. He drew a wad of bills from his pocket and laid one beside her on the table. ‘That’ll get you home,” he said. But she sat nursing the wrist he had held, watching him without a sound. The aviator was discreetly interested in the bottom of his glass. “Come on,” Bayard repeated, and he stalked steadily on. The shabby man rose and followed rapidly.
In a small alcove Harry Mitchell sat. On his table too were bottles and glasses, and he now sat slumped in his chair, his eyes closed and his bald head in the glow of an electric candle was dewed with rosy perspiration. Beside him sat a woman who turned and looked full at Bayard with an expression of harried desperation; above them stood a waiter with a head like that of a priest, and as Bayard passed he saw that the diamond was missing from Harry’s tie and he heard their bitter suppressed voices as their hands struggled over something on the table between them, behind the discreet shelter of their backs, and as he and his companion reached the door the woman’s voice rose with a burst of filthy rage into a shrill hysterical scream cut sharply off, as if someone had clapped a hand over her mouth.
* * *
The next day Miss Jenny drove in to town and wired him again. But when this wire was dispatched, Bayard was sitting in an aeroplane on the tarmac of the government field at Dayton, while the shabby man hovered and darted hysterically about and a group of army pilots stood nearby, politely noncommittal The machine looked like any other bi-plane, save that there were no viable cables between the planes, which were braced from within by wires on a system of tension springs; and hence, motionless on the ground, dihedral was negative. The theory was that while in level flight dihedral would be eliminated for the sake of speed, as in the Spad type, and when the machine was banked, side pressure would automatically increase dihedral for maneuverability. The cockpit was set well back toward the fin. “So you can see the wings when they buckle,” the man who loaned him a helmet and goggles said drily. “It’s an old pair,” he added. But Bayard only glanced at him, bleakly humorless. “Look here, Sartoris,” the man added, “let that crate alone. These birds show up here every week with something that will revolutionize flying, some new kind of mantrap that flies fine—on paper. If the C.O. won’t give him a pilot (and you know we try anything here that has a prop on it) you can gamble it’s a washout.”