IT HAD BEEN MY plan to spring my experience at a dinner party. Not too large a dinner; one sufficiently small so that a slightly raised voice might be heard by all. And so I picked my dinner and made my announcement, but as somebody brought up the Prohibition question just then nobody heard me but a quiet man on my right.
“So you have been flying?” he inquired politely.
“Yes,” I said. “Several times, as a matter of fact. I have even done some stunt flying.”
“Really!”
His interest led me on. I needed little encouragement, and so for some time I discoursed volubly on aeronautics. I said, I remember, that there is a wonderful thrill about the Immelman turn and the falling leaf only perhaps equaled by the tail spin, but that for real rest without excitement, a sort of aerial vacation, I preferred long-distance flying. One came down so rested and refreshed. One felt akin to the birds. One has communed alone with the clouds and been a little sister of the sun. One has wiped off the earth dust for a few hours and breathed the ether of the high places. One—but he was only politely listening. I felt that at least a part of his mind was being devoted to light wines and beer.
So I said:
“Have you ever been up?”
“Oh, yes,” he affirmed, rather flatly.
“I flew a hundred and fifty miles once,” I told him. “Have you ever tried that?”
“Well, I have, rather.”
“Where?”
“The last time, I flew down to Panama.”
Well, he might have said that at the beginning and saved me a lot of trouble. He was one of our army’s crack fliers, but how was I to know that? If people in our services would only wear their uniforms it would be helpful. As it is now, I had only just learned to tell a General’s insignia from a Captain’s when they took off the whole business, except for Decoration Day and military funerals; and then they come out smelling of moth balls.
But now I am going to have an audience for those flying stunts of mine, where nobody can cut in and say in a bored voice that his last trip in the air was around the world. What is more, I am going to be the one unprofessional ex-passenger in an airplane to tell the truth about how I felt about it. But remember, I am not going to knock it. It is a great thing. It has come to stay. The time is almost here when we are going to stand out on the front lawn and scan the sky for our returning husbands at the evening hour, and have our monograms in electric lights on the roof so that the children can find their way home from dances or the movies. And we women will have little vanity cases in our smart little ships—that is a professional touch, that “ships”; aviators always say it—and buy air clothes instead of airy ones.
Do you think this is a dream of the future? All right. Watch the next few years. I can remember when a young man in my neighborhood took the family buggy and odd parts of an old express wagon—and probably the household teakettle, for he ran his engine by steam—and made a vehicle which scared the neighborhood doctor’s horse over a fence and stalled on all the car tracks. When that young man stopped inventing and went to the Spanish War everyone went in and congratulated his mother on his improved chances of life.
The airplane is past that stage, of course. It’s now, relatively, where the automobile was when one climbed three steps in the rear and got in between the two back seats. But it is with us tonight, and we may as well acknowledge it.
Why, when I had done a bit of flying and telephoned to a department store for a woman’s airplane coat they sent me one in a half hour, by a boy on a motor cycle!
And it is a matter of family record that once when going west to make a moving picture the studio telegraphed me to the train:
“Do you object to baby blimp meeting you at railroad station? Safer than taxicab.”
To which I replied with a directness and clearness equal to that of the original message:
“Greatly object to baby blimp meeting me at station. Much prefer taxicab.”
But as they had already applied for permission to bring the baby dirigible into town, they got the front page of the newspapers about it anyhow, which may possibly have been what they wanted.
But the plain truth is that no individual has yet came out, to my knowledge, and stated exactly how he felt on his first air flight, or before it. In fact, a form of genteel mendacity has become current, especially by the ones who shut their eyes the moment they hop off and never open them again until they get back, and who never draw a full breath until the pilot stops the engine and says: “Well, how was it?”
They release their stiffened fingers from the sides of the fuselage, which they have been clutching with frenzy, breathe, swallow, look round at the glorious solid earth, only five feet beneath them, and say: “Glorious! I felt like a bird. It is simply indescribable. The most exquisite calm! And that sense of freedom!”
They then crawl out and look down to see if the shaking of their knees is noticeable.
“I’ll be round tomorrow for another little jaunt,” they say. “How much are the blooming things anyhow? If I can persuade the family, and you don’t want a million dollars for it, I may buy a little bus.”
The pilot then unfastens the buckle of the enthusiast’s helmet, because the latter’s fingers are trembling too much; and he goes out and crawls into his automobile and rehearses all the way home how he is going to spring his heroic adventure on his friends. But he does not go back to the flying field. He takes another road so as not to pass it and be hailed and taken up on another joy-ride.