Airman's Odyssey (32 page)

The answer appalled him.

“Commodoro reports: Impossible return here. Storm.”

He was beginning to measure this unforeseen offensive, launched from the Cordillera toward the sea. Before he could make them the storm would have burst upon the cities.

“Get the San Antonio weather report.”

“San Antonio reports: West wind rising. Storm in the west. Sky three-quarters overcast. San Antonio picking up badly on account of interferences. I'm having trouble too. I shall have to pull up the aerial on account of the lightning. Will you turn back? What are your plans?”

“Stow your damned questions! Get Bahia Blanca!”

“Bahia Blanca reports: Violent westerly gale over Bahia Blanca expected in less than twenty minutes.”

“Ask Trelew.”

“Trelew reports: Westerly gale; a hundred feet per second; rain squalls.”

“Inform Buenos Aires: We are cut off on all sides; storm developing over a depth of eight hundred miles; no visibility. What shall we do?”

 

A shoreless night, the pilot thought, leading to no anchorage (for every port was unattainable, it seemed), nor toward dawn. In an hour and twenty minutes the fuel would run out. Sooner or later he must blindly founder in the sea of darkness. Ah, if only he could have won through to daylight!

Fabien pictured the dawn as a beach of golden sand where a man might get a foothold after this hard night. Beneath him the plains, like friendly shores, would spread their safety. The quiet land would bear its sleeping farms and flocks and hills. And all the flotsam swirling in the shadows would lose its menace. If it were possible, how gladly he would swim toward the strand of daylight! But, well he knew, he was surrounded; for better or
for worse the end would come within this murk of darkness.... Sometimes, indeed, when daybreak came, it seemed like convalescence after illness.

What use to turn his eyes toward the east, home of the sun? Between them lay a gulf of night so deep that he could never clamber up again.

“The Asuncion mail is making good headway; it should be in at about two. The Patagonia mail, however, seems to be in difficulties and we expect it to be much overdue.”

“Very good, Monsieur Rivière.”

“Quite possibly we won't make the Europe mail wait for it; as soon as Asuncion's in, come for instructions, please. Hold yourself in readiness.”

Rivière read again the weather reports from the northern sectors. “Clear sky; full moon; no wind.” The mountains of Brazil were standing stark and clear against the moonlit sky, the tangled tresses of their jet-black forests falling sheer into a silver tracery of sea. Upon those forests the moonbeams played and played in vain, tingeing their blackness with no light. Black, too, as drifting wreckage, the islands flecked the sea. But all the outward air route was flooded by that exhaustless fountain of moonlight.

If Rivière now gave orders for the start, the crew of the Europe mail would enter a stable world, softly illuminated all night long. A land which held no threat for the just balance of light
and shade, unruffled by the least caress of those cool winds which, when they freshen, can ruin a whole sky in an hour or two.

Facing this wide radiance, like a prospector eyeing a forbidden gold field, Rivière hesitated. What was happening in the south put Rivière, sole protagonist of night flights, in the wrong. His opponents would make such moral capital out of a disaster in Patagonia that all Rivière's faith would henceforth be unavailing. Not that his faith wavered; if, through a fissure in his work, a tragedy had entered in, well, the tragedy might prove the fissure—but it proved nothing else. Perhaps, he thought, it would be well to have look-out posts in the west. That must be seen to. “After all,” he said to himself, “my previous arguments hold good as ever and the possibilities of accident are reduced by one, the one tonight has illustrated.” The strong are strengthened by reverses; the trouble is that the true meaning of events scores next to nothing in the match we play with men. Appearances decide our gains or losses and the points are trumpery. And a mere semblance of defeat may hopelessly checkmate us.

He summoned an employee. “Still no radio from Bahia Blanca?”

“No.”

“Ring up the station on the phone.”

Five minutes later he made further inquiries. “Why don't you pass on the messages?”

“We can't hear the mail.”

“He's not sending anything?”

“Can't say. Too many storms. Even if he was sending we shouldn't pick it up.”

“Can you get Trelew?”

“We can't hear Trelew.”

“Telephone.”

“We've tried. The line's broken.”

“How's the weather your end?”

“Threatening. Very sultry. Lightning in the west and south.”

“Wind?”

“Moderate so far. But in ten minutes the storm will break; the lightning's coming up fast.”

Silence.

“Hullo, Bahia Blanca! You hear me? Good. Call me again in ten minutes.”

Rivière looked through the telegrams from the southern stations. All alike reported: No message from the plane. Some had ceased by now to answer Buenos Aires and the patch of silent areas was spreading on the map as the cyclone swept upon the little towns and one by one, behind closed doors, each house along the lightless streets grew isolated from the outer world, lonely as a ship on a dark sea. And only dawn would rescue them.

Rivière, poring on the map, still hoped against hope to discover a haven of clear sky, for he had telegraphed to the police at more than thirty upcountry police stations and their replies were coming in. And the radio posts over twelve hundred miles of country had orders to advise Buenos Aires within thirty seconds if any message from the plane was picked up, so that Fabien might learn at once whither to fly for refuge.

The employees had been warned to attend at 1
A.M
. and were now at their posts. Somehow,
mysteriously, a rumor was gaining ground that perhaps the night flights would be suspended in future and the Europe mail would leave by day. They spoke in whispers of Fabien, the cyclone and, above all, of Rivière whom they pictured near at hand and point by point capitulating to this rebuff the elements had dealt.

Their chatter ceased abruptly; Rivière was standing at his door, his overcoat tight-buttoned across his chest, his hat well down upon his eyes, like the incessant traveler he always seemed. Calmly he approached the head clerk.

“It's one ten. Are the papers for the Europe mail in order?”

“I—I thought—”

“Your business is to carry out orders, not to think.”

Slowly turning away, he moved toward an open window, his hands clasped behind his back. A clerk came up to him.

“We have very few replies, sir. We hear that a great many telegraph lines in the interior have been destroyed.”

“Right!”

Unmoving, Rivière stared out into the night.

 

Thus each new message boded new peril for the mail. Each town, when a reply could be sent through before the lines were broken, announced the cyclone on its way, like an invading horde. “It's coming up from the Cordillera, sweeping everything before it, toward the sea.”

To Rivière the stars seemed over-bright, the air too moist. Strange night indeed! It was rotting
away in patches, like the substance of a shining fruit. The stars, in all their host, still looked down on Buenos Aires—an oasis, and not to last. A haven out of Fabien's range, in any case. A night of menace, touched and tainted by an evil wind. A difficult night to conquer.

Somewhere in its depths an airplane was in peril; here, on the margin, they were fighting to rescue it, in vain.

Fabien's wife telephoned.

Each night she calculated the progress of the homing Patagonia mail. “He's leaving Trelew now,” she murmured. Then went to sleep again Presently: “He's getting near San Antonio, he has its lights in view.” Then she got out of bed, drew back the curtains and summed up the sky. “All those clouds will worry him.” Sometimes the moon was wandering like a shepherd and the young wife was heartened by the faithful moon and stars, the thousand presences that watched her husband. Toward one o'clock she felt him near her. “Not far to go, Buenos Aires is in sight.” Then she got up again, prepared a meal for him, a nice steaming cup of coffee. “It's so cold up there!” She always welcomed him as if he had just descended from a snow peak. “You
must
be cold!” “Not a bit.” “Well, warm yourself anyhow!” She had everything ready at a quarter past one. Then she telephoned. Tonight she asked the usual question.

“Has Fabien landed?”

The clerk at the other end grew flustered. “Who's speaking?”

“Simone Fabien.”

“Ah! A moment, please....”

Afraid to answer, he passed the receiver to the head clerk.

“Who's that?”

“Simone Fabien.”

“Yes. What can I do for you?”

“Has my husband arrived?”

After a silence which must have baffled her, there came a monosyllable. “No.”

“Is he delayed?”

“Yes.”

Another silence. “Yes, he is delayed.”

“Ah!”

The cry of a wounded creature. A little delay, that's nothing much, but when it lasts, when it lasts....

“Yes. And when—when is he expected in?”

“When is he expected? We ... we don't know exactly

A solid wall in front of her, a wall of silence, which only gave her back the echo of her questions.

“Do please tell me, where is he now?”

“Where is he? Wait....”

This suspense was like a torture. Something was happening there, behind that wall.

At last, a voice! “He left Commodoro at seven thirty this evening.”

“Yes? And then?”

“Then—delayed, seriously delayed by stormy weather.”

“Ah! A storm!”

The injustice of it, the sly cruelty of that moon up there, that lazing moon of Buenos Aires! Suddenly she remembered that it took barely two hours to fly from Commodoro to Trelew.

“He's been six hours on the way to Trelew! But surely you've had messages from him. What does he say?”

“What does he say? Well, you see, with weather like that ... it's only natural ... we can't hear him.”

“Weather like—?”

“You may rest assured, madame, the moment we get news of him, we will ring you up.”

“Ah! You've no news.”

“Good night, madame.”

“No! No! I want to talk to the director.”

“I'm sorry, he's very busy just now; he has a meeting on—”

“I can't help that. That doesn't matter. I insist on speaking to him.”

The head clerk mopped his forehead. “A moment, please.”

He opened Rivière's door.

“Madame Fabien wants to speak to you, sir.”

“Here,” thought Rivière, “is what I was dreading.” The emotional elements of the drama were coming into action. His first impulse was to thrust them aside; mothers and women are not allowed in an operating theater. And all emotion is bidden to hold its peace on a ship in peril; it
does not help to save the crew. Nevertheless he yielded.

“Switch on to my phone.”

No sooner did he hear that far off, quavering voice, than he knew his inability to answer it. It would be futile for both alike, worse than futile, to meet each other.

“Do not be alarmed, madame, I beg you. In our calling it so often happens that a long while passes without news.”

He had reached a point where not the problem of a small personal grief but the very will to act was in itself an issue. Not so much Fabien's wife as another theory of life confronted Rivière now. Hearing that timid voice, he could but pity its infinite distress—and know it for an enemy! For action and individual happiness have no truck with each other; they are eternally at war. This woman, too, was championing a self-coherent world with its own rights and duties, that world where a lamp shines at nightfall on the table, flesh calls to mated flesh, a homely world of love and hopes and memories. She stood up for her happiness and she was right. And Rivière, too, was right, yet he found no words to set against this woman's truth. He was discovering the truth within him, his own inhuman and unutterable truth bv an humble light the lamplight of a little home!

“Madame...!”

She did not hear him. Her hands were bruised with beating on the wall and she lay fallen, or so it seemed to him, almost at his feet.

***

One day an engineer had remarked to Rivière, as they were bending above a wounded man, beside a bridge that was being erected: “Is the bridge worth a man's crushed face?” Not one of the peasants using the road would ever have wished to mutilate this face so hideously just to save the extra walk to the next bridge. “The welfare of the community,” the engineer had continued, “is just the sum of individual welfares and has no right to look beyond them.” “And yet,” Rivière observed on a subsequent occasion, “even though human life may be the most precious thing on earth we always behave as if there were something of higher value than human life But what thing?”

Thinking of the lost airmen, Rivière felt his heart sink. All man's activity, even the building of a bridge, involves a toll of suffering and he could no longer evade the issue—“Under what authority?”

These men, he mused, who perhaps are lost, might have led happy lives. He seemed to see as in a golden sanctuary the evening lamplight shine on faces bending side by side. “Under what authority have I taken them from all this?” he wondered. What was his right to rob them of their personal happiness? Did not the highest of all laws ordain that these human joys should be safeguarded? But he destroyed them. And yet one day, inevitably, those golden sanctuaries vanish like mirage. Old age and death, more pitiless than even he, destroy them. There is, perhaps, some other thing, something more lasting, to be saved; and, perhaps, it was to save this
part of man that Rivière was working. Otherwise there could be no defense for action.