IT IS PERFECTLY UNDERSTANDABLE. We have not, either by heredity or training, any natural inclination for flying. It is an acquired taste. Man takes to the air about as normally as a fish does, only he can be trained to it and the fish cannot. It is, of course, quite true that some people have no fear from the beginning, but they are, generally speaking, the lymphatics, the unimaginative folk who have no temperament and little imagination. They do not make the best flyers, however. They are not quick thinkers, and flying takes head work. Of course in time it becomes more or less automatic, like driving a car, a matter of the spinal cord rather than the brain.
I have been up four times. On my fourth time up I made a long-distance flight of 150 miles. Before this is published I shall probably have been up a number of times.
(Author’s Note: This was written some time ago. I have never been up since!)
At this moment my leather coat, helmet and goggles are lying on a chair. And if tomorrow is a good day——I like it when I am in the plane; really like it. But it still takes all the moral courage I’ve got to get me in. I’m cursed with imagination. My eyes pick out the airplane casualties in the morning paper with a sort of fatal facility. I ride in a motor, but I can read calmly and courageously of automobile mishaps. I can read of drownings and then swim in deep water with a stroke of my own, which sets swimming instructors crazy, and show no violent terror. I can read of a family laid by the heels with cold-storage turkey, and go out fearlessly and order a cold-storage turkey and digest it without a qualm.
But I cannot understand the psychology of the aviator. Once I saw a pilot starting out, and if he kissed anyone good-bye I did not notice it. He tucked a bathing suit into the machine, put on a helmet and a pair of goggles, said he was going to the beach for a swim, and got in. I was dazzled by his aplomb. I sat in the security of my automobile and faced the facts. I was afraid to go up. I had done a good many rash things in my life, but I was afraid. A good many people thought I was a brave woman, but they did not know that I was afraid of cows. To the world at large I was a dauntless woman, without nerves.
It was perfectly clear that I would have to fly, not at once, but sometime. Next month. Or next year.
I remember coming home from the early months of the Great War, with what is now the commonplace story of shells and No Man’s Land. Partly by accident, partly by not wanting to show the white feather, I had had rather a thrilling time.
I had, before I went abroad, been learning to drive a car. I hold the record as the only woman in my town who ever mounted a curbstone in a machine, ran it along the pavement inside two trees and a telegraph post, and out again onto the street without mishap—but also without intention.
On my return, therefore, it behooved me to back that car out of the garage, giving it a twist to avoid the flower garden and another twist to avoid taking off a fender. I waited until I was alone. Then taking my courage in my hands I approached the monster. I was very uneasy in my mind, but the gardener was there, so I commenced operations with the sang-froid of a woman who had been to war and had a reputation to uphold. I started the thing, gripped the wheel, let in the clutch and shot forward as if I had been fired out of a gun. I smashed the gardener’s potting bench, all the spring tomato plants, ruined a bicycle and narrowly escaped going through the rear wall.
“Got into the wrong gear,” I observed to the gardener with a sickly smile. “All right now.”
I then got into reverse, backed out, crumpled a mud guard, took a six-inch panel off the door and fetched up in a bed of early peonies.
But I conquered that car in the end. Now here was something else. Heavens, life was just one thing after another! By the time I’d learned to like flying probably parachuting would have come in, and we would have natty little parachute bags to carry round, and I would have to prove my courage by slipping off into space to make an afternoon call. It is really a dreadful time in which to live.
However, the way that aviator went off to take a swim had impressed me. I began to play with the thought of how I would look debonairly stepping into one of the death traps. Hands in pockets I would saunter up to the thing, cast a professional eye over it, leap in and be gone. When I came down I would be met by a number of newspaper men, who would ask me if there was anything I was afraid to do; and if so, what?
However, I only dramatized myself getting in and getting out. In between was a dark gulf, a bottomless abyss, where my imagination scared like a frightened pup and crawled under the porch.
One day passing a shop in town I saw some leather airplane coats for women. They were selling airplane coats for women. Therefore other women flew. Was I going to let other women fly while I remained a craven, earth-rooted?
Yes, I was. I had a family. Not for my sake, but for the family’s, I must relinquish the thought of adventure. The family was pretty tired of watching me prove to outsiders how brave I was. The family knew. They knew I turned on all the lights below before I went downstairs at night, and that I consider every cow in a field a steer until proved otherwise. I put it on the family for several days. I would probably be doing it yet, but one day I met a man who was a part owner of that aviation field and its deadly trio.
And he said: “You’ve done all sorts of things, so I suppose you’ve been up too?”
“No,” I replied, “I haven’t. It’s odd, isn’t it? I’ve had one or two arrangements made at various times, but something always happened.”
I did not know about his owning stock in that company or I would have made a different reply. I might have mentioned heart trouble.
“Well!” he said, “we’ll just fix that. How about going up tomorrow morning?”
I broke into a clammy sweat.
“Fine,” I replied. “I’m perfectly mad to do it! At what time?”
Now I am going to say this about that man. He owned stock in the company, and he was a thoroughly nice person, but I learned later on that he had never been up himself. I got even with him. Before a large crowd on a Sunday afternoon I urged him to try it. And because he hated to seem afraid and didn’t think of having a heart lesion, he had to do it. He said when he came down that it was the most wonderful experience of his life, but he hasn’t been up since.