Just go back and say, “Look here, dear—”
He wasn’t sure what he was to say after “Look here, dear,” but he would be ever so affectionate and convincing. He did love her! Fran, with her eager eyes—
But what about Kurt von Obersdorf?
Well—belligerently—what about it! Either she was still innocent, and did not understand her danger, or she had fallen, and would regret it. In either case, when he had paternally explained the danger of freelance lovers like Kurt, she would come to her senses and laugh with him at this make-believe enmity between them—yes! that was it—all a make-believe, an exciting game, like so many things in her secret and dramatic life! And they would go home together.
He would hasten to her. Now! If possible he would fly! He would see her late this very afternoon!
He had never been in an aeroplane, for all his professional interest in aviation engines. Like most sound people, he had always been slightly afraid of flying, but in his ardor now he despised his fear.
Then there rose such a hubbub of efficiency as he had not experienced since the most critical days of Revelation Motors. A demand that the porter find at what time the Berlin plane flew—it went at nine, two hours from now. Telephoning to demand a ticket. The room-waiter rushing down for Sam’s bill. The valet de chambre packing. A motor ordered to take him to the flying-field.
Driving out, he felt a slight agitation. His much motoring had not hardened him to flying. But his apprehension was overcome by the prospect of seeing Fran in a few hours, and when he dismounted at the flying-field, when he saw the great plane, its metal body and thick crimped metal wings as solid-looking as a steamer, when he saw how casually the pilot took his place in front and the attendants loaded luggage, all nervousness vanished in exultation. He climbed up a tiny stepladder, walked across the left-hand wing, and entered the little door like a child taken on a boat ride.
The cabin was like that of a very large limousine or a rather small omnibus. The seats were of leather, deep and easy as chairs in a club; the cabin walls were covered with stamped leather; the pilot was to be seen, with his intricacy of instruments before him, only through a tiny window forward. Save when he glanced out of the window beside him, Sam had no sense of being in anything so fantastic and fragile as an aeroplane. His half-dozen fellow passengers seemed casual about the whole thing. One of them, as soon as he was seated, opened a book and did not look up for an hour.
Sam was vastly ashamed that he had been diffident. He almost hoped for a little danger.
They started with no ceremonies—just at a gesture from the official in charge. They trundled along the ground for so long a time that Sam wondered whether they were overloaded, unable to rise. Suddenly a little qualm came—oh, it would be all right of course when they were high in air, going a steady course, but wouldn’t it be rather nasty to leave the ground, to spin and toss as they climbed?
Actually, he never did know when they left the ground. They were bumping along the turf, very noisily, the propeller draft blowing the grass stalks backward; then, magically, they were ten feet up in the air, they were above the hangar roofs, they were as high up as the distant Eiffel Tower, and as for sensations, there were none save the lively inquiry as to why he didn’t have any sensations.
He noted that the country below him was like a map; he told himself that he was thrilled when they passed over something like a fog bank—and rather more like a wash of soap suds—and he realized that it was a cloud and that they must be nearly a mile high in air. But he had read of the country looking like a map, of passing over clouds. In fact he experienced nothing of which he had not read many times—until he noted, and this was something he had never read, that aeroplane travel, in calm weather, is the most monotonous and tedious form of journeying known to mankind, save possibly riding on a canal boat through flat country. How tired he got of looking at maps, hour on hour! He had less relationship to the country than in the swiftest motor, the most violent train.
It was so monotonous and safe-seeming that he laughed to remember his nervousness; laughed the more when a French business man took out his portable typewriter, set it on a suitcase on his knees and, a mile up in the air, began placidly to type a letter.
He forgot, then, all about aviating and, just glancing out occasionally at distant green hills, he gave himself up to the thought of Fran. Oh, he would do anything for her … he would make her understand it … surely such devotion would bring her to his arms!
They had left Paris at nine; they were due to alight in Germany, at Dortmund, at twenty minutes to three. Before one they ran into a thundershower, and all the commonplace dullness of their flight was instantly snatched away.
Their little cabin seemed gruesomely insecure as the lightning glared past them, as they quivered in a blast of wind, as they ran into a dark cloud and for two minutes seemed lost in midnight, as they came out of the cloud into rain which crashed against the windows. Sam, who had cheerfully enough driven with motor racers at a hundred and ten miles an hour, was distinctly bothered. He was helpless! There was no ground to step out on, not even a sea to swim in, only the treacherous and darkened air.
The man across the little aisle from Sam—and Sam never did find out what was the snarly language he spoke—looked over, laughed deprecatingly, took out a bottle
