Against the Day (3 page)

Close to sundown, south of the city,
as the
Inconvenience
bobbed in fitful breezes above a sweeping stretch
of prairie which was to be the site this week of the great international
gathering of aeronauts being held in conjunction with the World’s Fair,
“Professor” St. Cosmo, spying at length a clear patch ofmeadow among the vast
population of airships already berthed below, had given the order, “Prepare to
descend.” The state of reduced attention into which he seemed then to have
drifted was broken soon enough by Lindsay, advising, biliously, “As I am sure
it has not escaped your attention, Blundell’s ineptness with the Main Valve,
grown I fear habitual, has increased the speed of our descent to a notable, if
not in fact alarming, degree.”

Indeed, the wellmeaning but far from
dextrous Miles Blundell had somehow contrived to wrap the pullrope leading to
the valve mechanism around his foot, and could be seen moving that extremity to
and fro, a bewildered look on his wide, honest face, in hopes that the
springloaded valve would thus, somehow, close again—for it had already
allowed an enormous quantity of hydrogen gas to escape the envelope in a sudden
rush, causing the ship to plummet toward the lakeside like a toy dropped by
some cosmic urchin.

“Blundell, what in Heaven’s name!”
Randolph exclaimed. “Why, you will destroy us all!”

“Say, it just got tangled up,
Professor,” declared Miles, plucking ineffectually at the coils of hemp, which
only grew more snarled as his efforts continued.

With an inadvertent yet innocuous
oath, Lindsay had sprung to the side of young Blundell, grasping him about his
ample waist, in an attempt to lift him, in hopes that this would relieve the
tautness in the pullrope and allow the valve to close. “Here, Counterfly,” the
secondincommand snapped at Chick, who, jeeringly amused, had been lounging
against a gear locker, “do rouse yourself for a moment and bear a hand with
Blundell,” that awkward fellow, disposed to ticklishness, meanwhile having
begun to scream and thrash about in his efforts to escape Lindsay’s grasp.
Chick Counterfly rose indolently and approached the lurching pair with some
caution, unsure of which part of Miles to take hold of, lest it but increase
his agitation.

As the vital gas continued to stream
in unsettling shriek from the valve overhead, and the airship to plunge ever
more rapidly Earthward, Randolph, gazing at the feckless struggling of his
crew, understood too well that the responsibility for the disaster nearly upon
them was, as always, none but his own, this time for having delegated duties to
those unskilled in them
. . . .

His broodful reflections were
interrupted by Darby, running over to tug at the sleeve of his
blazer—“Professor, Professor! Lindsay has just now made a defamatory
remark about Miles’s mother, yet he’s forever after me about using ‘slang,’ and
is that fair, I ask you?”

“Insubordinate drivel, Suckling,”
sternly declared Lindsay, “will earn you someday what is known among the lower
seafaring elements as a ‘Liverpool Kiss,’ long before you ever receive one of
the more conventional variety, save perhaps for those rare occasions upon which
your
mother, no doubt in some spell
of absentmindedness, has found herself able to bestow that astonishing yet, I
fear (unhappy woman), misplaced, sign of affection.”

“You see, you see?” squealed Darby,
“going after a fellow’s mother—”

“Not now!” screamed Randolph,
flinging off the young mascotte’s importunate grasp and frightening him nearly
out of his wits. “Counterfly, the ballast, man! leave that spastical oaf be,
and jettison our sandbags, or we are done for!”

Chick shrugged and released his grip
on Miles, proceeding lackadaisically to the nearest gunwale to unlash the
ballast bags there, leaving Lindsay, with no time to adjust to the increased
burden, to crash to the deck with a panicked cry, and the now all but
hysterical Miles Blundell on top of him. With a loud twang that may as well
have been the Crack of Doom, the line around his foot was yanked free of its attachment
to the Main Valve, though not before pulling beyond its elastic limit the
spring meant to restore it to a safelyclosed position. The valve now remained
ajar—the very mouth of Hell!

“Suckling! aloft, and quickly!”

The ready little fellow scurried up
the lines, as Randolph, preoccupied with the crisis and staggering across the
deck, somehow tripped over Lindsay Noseworth attempting to extricate himself
from beneath the squirming mass of Miles Blundell, and abruptly joined his
horizontal shipmates. Looking up, he observed Darby Suckling gazing down at
him, inquisitively.

“What is it that I am to do up here,
Professor?” called the ingenuous mascotte.

As tears of frustration began to
gather in Randolph’s eyes, Lindsay, sensing in his chief a familiar inertia,
his speech only temporarily muffled by Miles’s elbow, rushed, or more
accurately crawled, into the vacuum of authority. “Return the valve manually,”
he shouted up at Darby, “to its closed position,” adding, “you little fool,” in
a barely audible tone. Darby, his uniform fluttering in the outrush of gas,
gallantly hastened to comply.

“Like me to break out some of them
parachute rigs, Noseworth?” drawled Chick.

“
Mr.
Noseworth,” Lindsay corrected him.
“No, Counterfly, I think not, there scarcely being time—moreover, the
complexities that would attend rigging Blundell in the necessary paraphernalia
would tax the topological genius of Herr Riemann himself.” This irony was lost,
however, on Chick as well as its object, who, having at last somehow regained
his feet, now went stumbling with serene insouciance over to the rail,
apparently to have a look at the scenery. Above him, Darby, with a triumphant
“Hurrah!” succeeded in closing the valve, and the huge airship accordingly
slackened in its downward hurtling to a velocity no more ominous than that of a
leaf in autumn.

“Well, we certainly scared those
chaps down there, Professor,” commented Miles, gazing over the side. “Dropping
all those sandbags, I’ll wager.”

“Eh?” Randolph beginning to regain
his air of phlegmatic competence. “How’s that?”

“Well, they’re running just
licketysplit,” Miles continued, “aand say, one of them hasn’t even got any
clothes on, that’s sure what it looks like all right!” From an instrument
locker nearby, he produced a powerful spyglass, and trained it upon the objects
of his curiosity.

“Come, Blundell,” Randolph arising
from where he had fallen, “there is quite enough to be done at the moment
without more idle shenanigans—” He was interrupted by a gasp of terror
from Miles.

“Professor!” cried that lad, peering
incredulously through the burnished cylinder, “the unclad figure I
reported—it is not that of a chap, after all, but rather
of
. . .
a
lady!
”

There was an “eager stampede” to the
rail, and a joint attempt to wrest the telescope from Miles, who, however,
clung to it stubbornly. All meanwhile stared or squinted avidly, attempting to
verify the reported apparition.

Across the herbaceous nap below, in
the declining light, among the brighter starshapes of exploded ballastbags,
running heedless, as across some earthly firmament, sped a stout gentleman in a
Norfolk jacket and plusfours, clutching a straw “skimmer” to the back of his
head with one hand while with the other keeping balanced upon his shoulder a
photographic camera and tripod. Close behind him came the female companion
Blundell had remarked, carrying a bundle of ladies’ apparel, though clad at the
moment in little beyond a floral diadem of some sort, charmingly askew among
masses of fair hair. The duo appeared to be making for a nearby patch of woods,
now and then casting apprehensive looks upward at the enormous gasbag of the
descending
Inconvenience,
quite as if it were some giant eyeball,
perhaps that of Society itself, ever scrutinizing from above, in a spirit of
constructive censure. By the time Lindsay could remove the optical instrument
from the moist hands of Miles Blundell, and induce the consequently disgruntled
youth to throw out grapnels and assist Darby in securing the great airship to
“Mother Earth,” the indecorous couple had vanished among the foliage, as
presently would this sector of the Republic into the falling darkness.

·
    
·
    
·

Darby swung like
a regular little monkey hand over
hand down the anchor line, gained the ground and, tripping briskly about beneath
Inconvenience,
adroitly caught each of the mooring lines flung down to
him by Miles Blundell. With a mallet driving home, one by one, sturdy wooden
pegs through the eyesplices at the ends of the hempen strands, he soon had the
giant vehicle, as if charmed into docility by some diminutive beastwrangler,
tethered motionless above him.

The Jacob’sladder now came clattering
over the side, and upon it, presently, in uncertain descent, Miles, surmounted
by a giant sack of soiled laundry. There remained in the western sky only an
afterglow of deep crimson, against which could be seen Miles’s silhouette, as
well as those of the heads of the other boys above the curved rim of the
gondola.

Since that morning, before the first
light, a gay, picnicgoing throng of aeromaniacs of one sort and another had
been continuing all day now to
volàvoile
in, till long after sundown,
through the midwestern summer evening whose fading light they were most of them
too busy quite to catch the melancholy of, their wings both stationary and
aflap, gull and albatross and batstyled wings, wings of goldbeaters’ skin and
bamboo, wings laboriously detailed with celluloid feathers, in a great
heavenwide twinkling they came, bearing all degrees of aviator from laboratory
skeptic to Jesusrapt ascensionary, accompanied often by skydogs, who had
learned how to sit still, crowded next to them in the steeringcabins of their
small airships, observing the instrument panels and barking if they noticed
something the pilot had failed to—though others could be observed at
gunwales and flying bridges, their heads thrust out into the passing airflow,
looks of bliss on their faces. From time to time, the aeronauts hailed one
another through megaphones, and the evening was thus atwitter, like the trees
of many a street in the city nearby, with aviatory pleasantries.

In short order, the boys had set up
their messtent, gathered wood, and ignited a small fire in the galley stove,
well downwind of
Inconvenience
and its hydrogengenerating apparatus.
Miles busied himself in the miniature galley, and soon had fried them up a
“mess” of catfish, caught that morning and kept all day on ice whose melting
had been retarded by the frigidity of altitude. Around them the other groups of
skybrothers were busy at their own culinary arrangements, and roasting meat,
frying onions, and baking bread sent delicious odors creeping everywhere about
the great encampment.

After dinner and Evening Quarters,
the boys dedicated a few moments to song, as a group differently engaged might
have to prayer. Since their Hawaiian escapades a few years previous (
The
Chums of Chance and the Curse of the Great Kahuna
)
, Miles had become an enthusiastic ukulelist, and tonight,
after securing the scullery and restoring the mess decks to their usual spotless
state, he produced one of many of the fourstringed instruments which he kept in
his skychest, and, after strumming a brief introduction, accompanied the boys
as they sang,

There’s fellows live in little
towns,And those who live on farms,And never seem to wander farFrom smiles and
loving arms—They always know just who they areAnd how their lives will
go—And then there’s boys like us, who sayGoodbye before hello,For we’re
theAces of the AltitudesVagabonds of the Void
.
. . .
When some folks shrink with terror, say,We scarcely get annoyed.Let
the winds blow clear off the Beaufort Scale,And the nights grow dark as can
be,Let the lightning lash,And the thunder thrash,Only cheerful young hearts
have we!For . . .the Chum of Chance is a plucky soul,Who shall neither whine
nor ejaculate,For his blood’s as red and his mind’s as pure As the stripes of
his blaazer immaculate!

That evening Chick and Darby, as the
port section of the crew, had watchduty, while Miles and Lindsay were to be
allowed “groundleave” in Chicago. Each in his own way excited at the prospect
of attending the Exposition, the two lads shifted rapidly into dress uniform,
although Miles encountered such difficulty in lacing his leggings, knotting his
neckerchief with the needed symmetry, and securing correctly the fortyfour
buttons of his dickey, one for each State of the Union, that Lindsay, after
having applied a few drops of Macassar oil to his own locks and combing them
carefully, was obliged to go to his unskillful shipmate’s assistance.

When Miles had been rendered as fit
to be seen by the populace of “The Windy City” as he would ever be, the two
boys came smartly to attention, dressing right at close interval in the circle
of firelight, to await inspection. Pugnax joined them, tail still, gaze expectant.
Randolph emerged from his tent in mufti, every bit as spruce as his liberty
section, for he, too, was bound for earthly chores, his Chums of Chance flight
uniform having been replaced by a tastefully checked Kentucky hemp suit and
Ascot tie, with a snappy fedora topping off the
ensemble
.