Night Flight (4 page)

“Pellerin's a great friend of yours, isn't he, Robineau?”

“Well—”

“I'm not reproaching you.”

Rivière made a half-turn and with bowed head, taking short steps, paced to and fro with Robineau. A bitter smile, incomprehensible to Robineau, came to his lips.

“Only ... only you are his chief, you see.”

“Yes,” said Robineau.

Rivière was thinking how tonight, as every night, a battle was in progress in the southern sky. A moment's weakening of the will might spell defeat; there was, perhaps, much fighting to be done before the dawn.

“You should keep your place, Robineau.” Rivière weighed his words. “You may have to order this
pilot tomorrow night to start on a dangerous flight. He will have to obey you.”

“Yes.”

“The lives of men worth more than you are in your hands.” He seemed to hesitate. “It's a serious matter.”

For a while Rivière paced the room in silence, taking his little steps.

“If they obey you because they like you, Robineau, you're fooling them. You have no right to ask any sacrifice of them.”

“No, of course not.”

“And if they think that your friendship will get them off disagreeable duties, you're fooling them again. They have to obey in any case. Sit down.”

With a touch of his hand Rivière gently propelled Inspector Robineau toward the desk.

“I am going to teach you a lesson, Robineau. If you feel run down it's not these men's business to give you energy. You are their chief. Your weakness is absurd. Now write!”

“I—”

“Write.
Inspector Robineau imposes the penalty stated hereunder on Pellerin, Pilot, on the following grounds.
... You will discover something to fill in the blanks.”

“Sir!”

“Act as though you understood, Robineau. Love the men under your orders—but do not let them know it.”

So, once more, Robineau would supervise the cleaning of each propeller-boss, with zest.

***

An emergency landing ground sent in a radio message.
Plane in sight. Plane signals: Engine Trouble; about to land.

That meant half an hour lost. Rivière felt that mood of irritation the traveler knows when his express is held up by a signal and the minutes no longer yield their toll of passing hedgerows. The large clock hand was turning now an empty hemicycle within whose compass so many things might have fitted in. To while away the interval Rivière went out and now the night seemed hollow as a stage without an actor. Wasted_a night like this! He nursed a grudge against the cloudless sky with its wealth of stars, the moon's celestial beacon, the squandered gold of such a night....

 

But, once the plane had taken off, the night once more grew full of beauty and enthralment; for now the womb of night was carrying life, and over it Rivière kept his watch.

“What weather have you?”

He had the query transmitted to the crew. Ten seconds later the reply came in : “Very fine.”

There followed a string of names, towns over which the plane had passed and, for Rivière's ears, these were so many names of cities falling one by one before a conqueror.

An hour later the wireless operator on the Patagonia mail felt himself gently lifted as though some one were tugging at his shoulder. He looked around; heavy clouds were putting out the stars.
He leaned toward the earth, trying to see the village lights, shining like glowworms in the grass, but in those fields of darkness no light sparkled.

He felt depressed; a hard night lay before him, marches and countermarches, advances won and lost. He did not understand the pilot's tactics; a little further on and they would hit against that blackness, like a wall.

On the rim of the horizon in front he now could see a ghostly flicker, like the glow above a smithy. He tapped Fabien's shoulder, but the pilot did not stir.

Now the first eddies of the distant storm assailed them. The mass of metal heaved gently up, pressing itself against the operator's limbs; and then it seemed to melt away, leaving him for some seconds floating in the darkness, levitated. He clung to the steel bulwarks with both hands. The red lamp in the cockpit was all that remained to him of the world of men and he shuddered to know himself descending helpless into the dark heart of night, with only a little thing, a miner's safety lamp, to see him through. He dared not disturb the pilot to ask his plans; he tightened his grip on the steel ribs and bending forward, fixed his eyes upon the pilot's shadowed back.

In that obscurity the pilot's head and shoulders were all that showed themselves. His torso was a block of darkness, inclined a little to the left; his face was set toward the storm, bathed intermittently, no doubt, by flickering gleams. He could not see that face; all the feelings thronging there to meet the onset of the storm were hidden from his eyes; lips set with anger and resolve,
a white face holding elemental colloquy with the leaping flashes ahead.

Yet he divined the concentrated force that brooded in that mass of shadow, and he loved it. True, it was carrying him toward the tempest, yet it shielded him. True, those hands, gripping the controls, pressed heavy on the storm, as on some huge beast's neck, but the strong shoulders never budged, attesting vast reserves of force. And after all, he said to himself, the pilot's responsible. So, carried like a pillion-rider on this breakneck gallop into the flames, he could relish to its full the solid permanence, the weight and substance implicit in that dark form before him.

On the left, faint as a far revolving light, a new storm center kindled.

The wireless operator made as if to touch Fabien's shoulder and warn him, but then he saw him slowly turn his head, fix his eyes a while on this new enemy and then as slowly return to his previous position, his neck pressed back against the leather pad, shoulders unmoving as before.

Rivière went out for a short walk, hoping to shake off his malaise, which had returned. He who had only lived for action, dramatic action, now felt a curious shifting of the crisis of the drama, toward his own personality. It came to him that the little people of these little towns, strolling around their bandstands, might seem to
lead a placid life and yet it had its tragedies; illness, love, bereavements, and that perhaps—His own trouble was teaching him many things, “opening windows,” as he put it to himself.

Toward eleven he was breathing more easily and turned back toward the offices, slowly shouldering his way through the stagnant crowds around the cinemas. He glanced up at the stars which glinted on the narrow street, well-nigh submerged by glaring sky signs, and said to himself : “Tonight, with my two air mails on their way, I am responsible for all the sky. That star up there is a sign that is looking for me amongst this crowd—and finds me. That's why I'm feeling out of things, a man apart.”

A phrase of music came back to him, some notes from a sonata which he had heard the day before in the company of friends. They had not understood. “That stuff bores us and bores you too, only you won't admit it!”

“Perhaps,” he had replied.

Then, as tonight, he had felt lonely, but soon had learnt the bounty of such loneliness. The music had breathed to him its message, to him alone amongst these ordinary folk, whispered its gentle secret. And now the star. Across the shoulders of these people a voice was speaking to him in a tongue that he alone could understand.

On the pavement they were hustling him about. “No,” he said to himself, “I won't get annoyed. I am like the father of a sick child walking in the crowd, taking short steps, who carries in his breast the hushed silence of his house.”

He looked upon the people, seeking to discover
which of them, moving with little steps, bore in his heart discovery or love—and he remembered the lighthouse-keeper's isolation.

 

Back in the office, the silence pleased him. As he slowly walked from one room to another, his footsteps echoed emptiness. The typewriters slept beneath their covers. The big cupboard doors were closed upon the serried files. Ten years of work and effort. He felt as if he were visiting the cellars of a bank where wealth lies heavy on the earth. But these registers contained a finer stuff than gold—a stock of living energy, living but, like the hoarded gold of banks, asleep.

Somewhere he would find the solitary clerk on night duty. Somewhere here a man was working that life and energy should persevere and thus the work goes on from post to post that, from Toulouse to Buenos Aires, the chain of flights should stay unbroken.

“That fellow,” thought Rivière, “doesn't know his greatness.”

Somewhere, too, the planes were fighting forward; the night flights went on and on like a persistent malady, and on them watch must be kept. Help must be given to these men who with hands and knees and breast to breast were wrestling with the darkness, who knew and only knew an unseen world of shifting things, whence they must struggle out, as from an ocean. And the things they said about it afterwards were—terrible! “I turned the light on to my hands so as to see them.” Velvet of hands bathed in a dim red
dark-room glow; last fragment, that must be saved, of a lost world.

Rivière opened the door of the Traffic Office. A solitary lamp shone in one corner, making a little pool of light. The clicking of a single typewriter gave meaning to the silence, but did not fill it. Sometimes the telephone buzzed faintly and the clerk on duty rose obedient to its sad, reiterated call. As he took down the receiver that invisible distress was soothed and a gentle, very gentle murmur of voices filled the coign of shadow.

Impassive the man returned to his desk, for drowsiness and solitude had sealed his features on a secret unconfessed. And yet—what menace it may hold, a call from the outer darkness when two postal planes are on their way! Rivière thought of telegrams that invaded the peace of families sitting round their lamp at night and that grief which, for seconds that seem unending, keeps its secret on the father's face. Waves, so weak at first, so distant from the call they carry, and so calm; and yet each quiet purring of the bell held, for Rivière, a faint echo of that cry. Each time the man came back from the shadow toward his lamp, like a diver returning to the surface, the solitude made his movements heavy with their secret, slow as a swimmer's in the undertow.

“Wait! I'll answer.”

Rivière unhooked the receiver and a world of murmurs hummed in his ears.

“Rivière speaking.”

Confused sounds, then a voice: “Til put you on the radio station.”

A rattle of plugs into the standard, then another voice: “Radio Station speaking. I'll pass you the messages.”

Rivière noted them, nodding. “Good.... Good...”

Nothing important, the usual routine news. Rio de Janeiro asking for information, Montevideo reporting on the weather, Mendoza on the plant. Familiar sounds.

“And the planes?” he asked.

“The weather's stormy. We don't hear them tonight.”

“Right!”

The night is fine here and starry, Rivière thought, yet those fellows can detect in it the breath of the distant storm.

“That's all for the present,” he said.

As Rivière rose the clerk accosted him: “Papers to sign, sir.”

Rivière discovered that he greatly liked this subordinate of his who was bearing, too, the brunt of night. “A comrade in arms,” he thought. “But he will never guess, I fancy, how tonight's vigil brings us near each other.”

As he was returning to his private office, a sheaf of papers in his hand, Rivière felt the stab of pain in his right side which had been worrying him for some weeks past.

“That's bad....”

He leaned against the wall a moment.

“It's absurd!”

Then he made his way to his chair.

Once again he felt like some old lion fallen in a trap and a great sadness came upon him.

“To think I've come to this after all those years of work! I'm fifty; all that time I've filled my life with work, trained myself, fought my way, altered the course of events and here's this damned thing getting a hold of me, obsessing me till it seems the only thing that matters in the world. It's absurd!”

He wiped away a drop or two of sweat, waited till the pain had ebbed and settled down to work, examining the memoranda on his table.

“In taking down Motor 301 at Buenos Aires we discovered that ... The employee responsible will be severely punished.”

He signed his name.

“The Florianopolis staff, having failed to comply with orders...”

He signed.

“As a disciplinary measure Airport Supervisor Richard, is transferred on the following grounds...”

He signed.

Then, as the pain in his side, slumbering but persistent, new as a new meaning in life, drove his thoughts inward toward himself, an almost bitter mood came over him.

“Am I just or unjust? I've no idea. All I know is that when I hit hard there are fewer accidents. It isn't the individual that's responsible but a
sort of hidden force and I can't get at it without—getting at every one! If I were merely just, every night flight would mean a risk of death.”

A sort of disgust came over him, that he had given himself so hard a road to follow. Pity is a fine thing, he thought. Lost in his musings, he turned the pages over.

“Roblet, as from this day, is struck off the strength....”

He remembered the old fellow and their talk the evening before.

“There's no way out of it, an example must be made.”

“But, sir.... It was the only time, just once in a way, sir ... and I've been hard at it all my life!”

“An example must be made.”

“But ... but, sir. Please see here, sir.”

A tattered pocketbook, a newspaper picture showing young Roblet standing beside an airplane. Rivière saw how the old hands were trembling upon this little scrap of fame.