I WAS AWAKE VERY early the next morning. I wakened with a half-conscious sense of something wrong, and after a time I remembered. My riding clothes, neatly laid out on a chair, reminded me. Somewhere the wretched youth who was going to take me up was probably splashing in a shower bath and singing, and equally calm and cheerful mechanics were eating ham and eggs, preparatory to putting gas and oil into the airplane for what might be its last flight. I rang for coffee and lay back trying to remember exactly what the Secretary of War told me was the low percentage of casualties counted by flying hours.
But I had a moment of hope too. It was foggy. I considered that no aviator in his senses would go up in that fog. I lay back and read the morning paper. Half of the first column dealt with an airplane crash the day before.
When the Japanese boy brought in the coffee I said hopefully: “I’m afraid it’s going to be a bad day.”
He replied with the calmness of a people which commits hari-kari as complacently as we have our tonsils out. “It clear up all right,” he said. “Fine day. Forgot spoon. Come back soon.”
He then departed, and left the world to sadness and to me. Shortly after that the field called up and said the fog would lift soon and to come right along. We would hop off at nine o’clock.
I dressed very carefully. If anything happened I felt it only due to my reputation to pass out with all my buttons on, and in my best silk stockings. I had also had a shampoo and a manicure. I meant to be a tidy corpse.
Everyone at the field was very cheery. They held out a little book for me to sign, however, exonerating them from all responsibility in case of trouble. They said it was a mere formality, because they had never had any trouble and didn’t expect any. But as I now had an audience I signed it as casually as I would a club check.
Here is a curious thing about courage. It comes quite often by pretending one has it. It is a sort of acting in which one gets very thoroughly into the part. And the calmness of my pilot cheered me. He was a blithe young man who gave no evidence of having made his last will and testament. He did not seem to be saying farewell to life. He pointed out the fine lines of the machine and patted it a bit, as if he liked it.
“Fine little ship,” he said. “Going to have a great ride. Mind the fog?”
“Not a bit,” I observed in a brave loud voice.
“All right,” he said. “Get in yourself?—or need help?”
I was now smiling, but the smile was slightly set.
“No help, thank you.”
I then watched him get in and made an attempt to follow. But he was twenty-three and I am—well, I am not. I needed help. Afterward I learned the trick of it, and I can now get in with quite a professional swing. Indeed I do it so well—especially if there is a crowd round, that I quite give the impression, in case of the pilot swooning, of being able to crawl over and—you know: “The daring woman, seeing death below, crept forward, inch by inch, until the precious lever was within her grasp. With a quickjerk——”
I was now in and tightly strapped. The pilot was saying “Contact” ever and anon, and somebody was cranking the propeller. There was a terrific noise and wind. We were moving. Farewell, earth. Farewell, sweet life. Farewell, family. Ah, if only they knew that while they still slept peacefully I was bound on this desperate enterprise!
Off the earth! Actually off the earth! Not very far off, but off. Heavens, will we miss those trees? We do. Well, this isn’t so bad. One might live through it.
The pilot looks back at me and points a hand below; I am to look down. I don’t want to look down. I might upset the thing. Anyhow, I can't turn my head. Every muscle is rigid. The pilot looks back again. Great Scott, why doesn’t the boy watch where he is going? He points up this time. There is a hole in the clouds, and we are making for it, exactly like hitting a hole in shrubbery or a gate in a fence. I would rather look up than down, so I watch that.
That is enough of the present tense. It makes hard reading.
We struck the hole and went through. Another machine had followed us up. It contained a man with a camera, behind the pilot. And therewith hangs a tale.
I began to relax, bit by bit. The white ocean of clouds below shut off the earth, and I now released my frenzied grasp of the fuselage and found I could turn my head. I wasn’t enjoying it but I was enduring it, and I was still alive. The other car was now very close, and the camera was focused on us! I waved to show how easy I felt, but cautiously, because I didn’t want to overbalance anything.
Now one thing I had always known: So long as the engine runs one is safe. It is when it stops that one dies. I had therefore a vision, the moment the roaring ceased, of crashing to earth and being the aforesaid tidy remains. The engine stopped.
Farewell, clouds. Farewell, sweet life. Farewell——
“Great up here, isn’t it?” said the pilot.
Merciful powers! He had shut off the engine for a bit of conversation!
“Fine!” I said with stiff lips.
He started the engine again.
The other plane kept hanging round, for pictures. At times the wings almost touched. But I was growing calm. I had bethought me of the clever idea of writing a note or two while in the air, subsequently mailing them to admiring friends. I now did so, for my consummate desire to pose as calm under trying circumstances still obsessed me. I should like to see those notes sometime. Once at the Front in France I undertook to make a record of events during an air bombardment. I felt very cool, but the next day this is what I read:
“Town is now being bombarding by sixteen aeroplanes. Sixty sick bombs have already fallen.”
The pilot shut off the engine again, turned and said something. But by that time I was deaf with the altitude and the noise. I was enjoying it, so I nodded a vigorous “Yes.”
What he had really asked me was if I would like to do some stunts!
When I realized it I was too late. He waved an arm to the camera man, and speeded up his engine, stopped it and—horrors, we were turning over! We turned clear over, and I said the shortest and briefest prayer of my life.
One would think that that was enough—but no, not at all. We turned entirely over the other way. Then for fear the camera man hadn’t got it we did it again. Both ways. Then we did a few other trifles, such as a tail spin and so on. That pilot didn’t have any inner ears to set spinning. He ate it up. His very back said: “Watch this!”
The camera man said later it made him dizzy to watch us. Well, he hadn’t anything on me.
When we were level once more the pilot turned again.
“Want to do some more?” he asked.
I was doing some quick lip reading by that time, and I said “No.” I said I had loved it; it was the greatest experience of my life. I didn’t see how people got through life without it. But I wasn’t any pig about it. I’d get along as it was. I’d manage somehow.
After that cataclysm straight flying was so simple and felt so safe that I enjoyed it. The California summer landscape; brown meadows, with green oases where the faithful garden sprinkler had labored; the moving-picture studios, where during weekdays I was struggling to learn the technique of a new art; the palatial residences of those moving-picture actors who were later on to condescend to leave their happy homes for me and to spend a brief time daily trying to show in six reels what it had taken me a year to write—all these were below me.
I had looked up at those stars in their canvas firmament until my neck ached. Now I looked down.
But the pilot wasn’t through. Dear me, no! We were now going to see how low we could go without hitting a fence. Until that time we had not seemed to be going fast, but now——
Some time later after I had made a safe landing and gone back to the hotel, stopping ever and anon on the verandas to state modestly that I had been flying, the family came in from riding. I did not tell them at once. I waited, as a child will with a piece of candy. I felt patronizing, benevolent and slightly headachey.
“Well,” they said, “d’you know what happened just now? We met a surveyor in the road, and what d’you think? A couple of darned fools in an airplane nearly took off his head in a bean field, and his horse ran away. He’s still hunting it.”
Never until now have I acknowledged my complicity.