THE MOMENT THE NOVICE gets his feet on solid earth he is willing to go up again. He feels so awfully safe then, and he forgets his fright, like a toothache. This condition lasts for about two hours. So it was that in that two hours I agreed to go up the next day. Overnight reflection rather altered this, but I had said I would. And I did.
It was at this time that I got in my revenge on the gentleman who owned stock in the company. It was a Sunday, and a large, interested but determinedly earth-bound crowd was on the field. Partly curiosity. Partly to see Charlie Chaplin go up.
Now Mr. Chaplin is a great artist, a real artist, and a charming young man. But he is about as fond of flying as he is of cholera morbus. He flies a great deal. But he is like all great artists, including myself! He has imagination. He likes it when he is up, but he hates the start. Or if he doesn’t he pretends to. The crowd was divided between pride and anxiety when he got in. He is a sort of national good-cheer asset, and they didn’t want to lose him.
Mr. Chaplin went up, and the gentleman who had urged me to my first flight was still on the ground. Before the crowd, then and there, I urged on him the beauties of the upper air, the sense of moving like a bird through the blue empyrean, and so on. And the crowd waited and grinned.
His eyes took on a hunted look, and at last he said: “Oh, all right. Get me a helmet, somebody.”
He got in, after ferociously signing his name in the anti-responsibility book. But before he moved off he said something to me.
“Look here,” he said. “I’ve had a couple of wisdom teeth to be pulled for about six months. D’you mind taking me to the dentist’s tomorrow?”
I had by now got that swing of the right leg which clears the back of the pit and gives a truly professional touch. I had done stunts. I had nearly killed a surveyor and made a horse run away. What was left? Had I had my last thrill? Was there nothing further? There was.
About to leave the field I mentioned my intention of motoring the next day a hundred and fifty miles to a more southern city.
“Motor?” they said. “Why don’t you fly down?”
Good heavens, were these people insatiable? Wasn’t enough enough? But then something entered my mind. By a long-distance flight I would have it all over a certain member of my family who had once looped the loop. Besides, I was by that time beginning to like flying. Also there was a crowd round. Also I had that peculiar sense of safety that comes after a flight, with one’s feet planted solidly on the ground.
Of course I would do it. And I would buy me one of those leather airplane coats in the shop window—instead of the coat belonging to the large pilot with an eighteen neck that I had been wearing—and get some real pictures. I did not mention photographers of course. I trusted to the field’s publicity instinct. And I was right. They had any number of still photographers on the field the next morning. And a camera man with a movie camera; and I had the coat. I held up the flight with iron determination until I got that coat.
I was prepared to break the news very gently to those junior members of the family who had gone West with me. But to my surprise they showed no anxiety whatever.
They were, on the contrary, rather peevish about it.
“Do you mean to say,” they exclaimed, “that you are going to fly there, and let us go in a poky old automobile?”
“Wh-what do you mean?” I asked.
Well, they wanted to fly too. They wanted another ship. Failing that they would sit on the wings. They’d hang on somehow. But I balked. They were young. They had their lives to live. I had lived considerably longer. I wouldn’t do it. But to this day they have not quite forgiven me for the stiff necks they got at the other end of the flight watching for mother to shoot out of space and land at their feet.
I was extremely calm that day. I sat all morning on the veranda of the hotel and waited for the coat and listened to a charming young man who had bought a ship of his own and was learning to pilot it. He told me about the various ways of crashing and about interesting things that had happened to men he knew in airplanes. I took a look at myself at a quarter to twelve, and I was wearing a sort of fixed grin, with my eyes sunk deep in my head. I had by that time decided that the propeller would probably drop off. It was the worst thing I could think of, so I fixed on that.
To ease my mind I ordered a luncheon to eat aloft. There was, I think, a sort of reluctant admiration in the hotel clerk’s eyes when I gave the order. I ordered plenty. But I forgot it entirely when the time came to go, and I finally went up with a sandwich and a banana, the luncheon of one of the mechanics at the field.
The head of my moving-picture company had come to see me. He shook hands three times with me and observed that I was a brave woman, I immediately became a brave woman, and indicated that the whole thing was a mere bagatelle. Then I signed the book again, and some businesslike person in the crowd asked if I had taken out any insurance lately, as some of the recent policies have an anti-flying clause. I then discovered that if this trip was successful it would inaugurate a passenger-carrying schedule. If?
Now I’ve undertaken to be honest. At the end of three or four hours in the air I looked at my watch. It had been seven minutes. I held like mad to my luncheon, because it might fall out and get caught in something and cause all sorts of damage. Once the sandwich slipped, and my heart almost stopped.
The propeller ahead obsessed me. Suppose it flew off! There were defects in steel every now and then. And how about catching fire? Hot gusts from the engine came back occasionally. Where was the gasoline tank? The pilot was in front of me, and kept looking over the edge. Why? Was anything wrong?
But after a half hour or so I began to relax. We were following the coast line, and I tried to find us on the map. The sun was hot, and far below and very small our shadow moved over the landscape, uphill and down, across plowed fields and dry river beds. The coast line was brown, the sea very blue and outlined with white stationary lines, which was the surf. The roar of the engine through the heavy helmet was soothing. The propeller seemed inclined to stay with us. My leaning over to look down did not seem to endanger our equilibrium. I felt hungry and a little drowsy.
Heavens, what was that? The ship shook, tilted one way and then the other, and dropped what seemed to be a quarter of a mile. It picked up, dropped again, trembled. Air holes. The pilot, whom I had suspected of napping, showed vigilance in the very back of his head. We rode through, and he turned round, smiled and pointed below. We were going over a range of bare precipitous hills and the air currents were uncertain.
I sat back again, and my mind wandered to those boys in France who had known this loneliness of the upper air and who had gone out, like knights of old, to solitary combat. What did they think of as, with every cloud a possible lurking place for an enemy, they sailed through those lonely spaces, eternally vigilant, eternally facing death? And I wondered then, and I wonder now, as I look over this great country, if we are quite worth the sacrifices they made.
I looked below and tried to imagine that peaceful terrain crumbled with bombardment, traced with trenches, filthy, sodden with blood, and buried in it those blind heroic souls for whom the air man was the eyes; and again I wondered.
After a time, everything seeming calm and the pilot still unexcited, I decided to eat. There were two olives stuck in the top of the sandwich, and I began on them. Almost immediately I was faced with the problem of what to do with the pits. Throw them overboard? But what if they stuck in something? Wasn’t even a small flying bird apt to wreak havoc with a propeller? And what if some law of suction, of which I knew nothing, drew them into the engine? I debated, but it was no time to take chances. I put them in my pocket.
Then I ate the banana, because I was tired of holding onto it. But here I faced the problem of garbage disposal. Suppose, for instance, that this thing became common, and airplanes overhead were as frequent as flivvers on a Sunday afternoon. And suppose they all took lunches and threw overboard the empty pop bottles and the tin cans and the wooden platters and a broken cup or two and emptied out the coffee grounds from above. No; I was a pioneer; I must set a good example. I put the banana skin in my pocket.
The remains of the sandwich, which was horrible, I held firmly to the end.