A Case in Camera
hand over ships. But every Zepp or plane you get out of her you'll have
to get with a pair of pincers. Then ... swift? Swift won't be the
word.... Oh, don't I wish I could get on one of these Expeditions!"
I made no comment on this, since I know nothing about the air. These
were merely the words of Charles Valentine Smith, who did.
IV
He knew very little about himself--hardly seemed aware that there was
anything of importance to know. It was all Maxwell--"Bobby was the whole
show." And I had a very keen sense of the honor the dead man had done
himself in denying this. "Frightfully hot stuff on maths," said Smith;
and the world is full of men who are "frightfully hot stuff on maths,"
in that sense; but it is rarely that you find one of these not too
absorbed in the technique and detail of his own activities to be aware
of a vision beyond. I know this in my own business. I see men working
with an appalling intensity, a new and wild and squandering energy that
has long ago passed from me; but for their Muse I look in vain. An altar
is set up, not to any god known or unknown, but to itself. I speak
diffidently, but I seldom see that any flame from Elsewhere descends
upon it. This is hard to say, since I too rub my two sticks together
with my fellows, hoping they may kindle. I should not say it except that
I was now trying to arrive at some comprehension of Maxwell, the
competent and efficient man, exposed to all manner of temptations to
narrowness and complacency and inertia, but who could yet see in this
unsuspecting youngster something he himself did not and could never
possess.
And add to this that quasi-religious bond of the air that makes of two
men twins in one womb....
I repeat, Maxwell did himself a quite radiant honor.
"What sort of a fellow was Maxwell to look at?" I asked by and by.
The answer was almost startlingly ready. This lad who had bolted from
Malvern, forced his way into an Embassy and demanded to be taken in the
service of a foreign Power, unbuckled the watch from his wrist.
"Here he is," he said.
I found myself looking at a young but curiously worn face, with a great
width of brow, eyes that seemed to hold I knew not what nameless
expression of disillusion and fatality, and a firm and sweet mouth. That
face had certainly lost nothing spiritually by its ungrudged and
generous homage. Yet he too had probably jazzed and pink-ginned and
drummed ragtime on cases of stuffed birds. Strange days! Wisdom and
experience under young brilliantined hair, and the bald and reverend
dome accepting the result on hearsay! Slang, and an undreamed-of valor;
Magalhaens' vision, and a lark at a Grafton Ball! By being "frightfully
keen on Air-geography" Smith merely meant what Columbus and Cabot and
the Navigator had meant; by wanting to "get on one of these Expeditions"
he was willing to dare for discovery's sake some monstrous Baffin's Bay
of the air. "Not to miss anything," he fumed and fretted over Maxwell's
equations and made them part of the Dream and the Desire. He was
brooding over it now as we lay there together, I with his watch in my
hand.... And all this, I ought to say, was at the time when the last of
the Santon hay was barely stacked, and John Alcock and Whitten Brown had
just flown the Atlantic in sixteen hours. It was when the headland was
pale cloth-of-gold with the ripening corn, and the R. 34 had crossed to
America and returned. It was when the ditches were yellow with hawkweed
and the copses pink with campion, and no man living could have told you
what the intentions of the Air Ministry were. Smith was lying there
brooding, not on the carriage of a few pounds' weight of letters nor on
prizes of £10,000, but on the problems of man's unchanged and warring
heart. He dreamed of Imperial Defense. He was "keen" on making India and
Egypt secure. He was "dead nuts" on the safety of Africa, "all out" for
Australia's protection, and "tails up" if any other nation jolly well
interfered.
And this was his next remark:--
"I say, sir, I think Joan got that Dunhill number wrong after all--I'll
swear there's latakia on this--don't tell Joan though--this is _entrez
nous_."
_Entrez nous!_ Between you and I! O modest flower tossed to the
welcoming hands of the Entente!
I handed him his watch back.
Strange, strange days!
V
Why did I not say straight out to him, "Look here, my young friend, this
is all extremely interesting, but what I don't understand is why you
shoot a man and then carry his picture on your wrist. In plain English,
now, why did you shoot him--always supposing you did?"
Well, I was trying to put myself in his place--trying to picture a
friendship such as he had had with this wistful, self-effacing young
fatalist whose picture I had just handed back to him. I have told you
how the more poignant of these experiences between man and man have been
denied me; a flying-friendship I could never by any possibility have
had; but I could reach out to it in my fancy. I could imagine with what
fierce jealousy I should have guarded a treasure so rich. Not a word,
not a breath from outside would I have suffered with regard to it. It
was not a question of mere impertinence. It was rather one of the
violation of a sacred place.
And it seemed to me that I now owed him no less than I would have
claimed for myself. It made no difference that he was twenty-four and I
within hand's-reach of fifty. Less than an hour had swept these
conventions aside, and thenceforward he was entitled to the full honors
of friendship and respect. He might tell me what he chose. Ply him with
questions, however, I could not.
Nay, it even seemed to me now that I should have to drop my point before
Philip also. However much I had been put on my mettle by those
discoveries I had made on that Sunday afternoon in his studio, to drag
them up again now would merely be to attack Chummy at one remove. If I
could not have it from himself I could hardly have it at all, and the
Case, which had unfolded as a conjuror's pilule unfolds into a flagrant
and morbid-hued passion-flower, looked like shutting itself up again and
being as if it had never been.
Yet the discoveries of that Sunday had been much on my mind. Especially
that gold ring that had once belonged to Audrey Cunningham had been on
my mind. That the circumstances in which I had found it were directly
connected with the rupture between her and Monty I could hardly doubt,
and several times, as a mere man, I had been on the point of confessing
my share in the incident to Mollie Esdaile.
If Mollie has a little dropped out of the picture, let me now bring her
in again as she brought herself in as Chummy Smith and I lay on the turf
that morning.
I forget for what delinquency Alan and Jimmy had spent some hours in
disgrace; I think they had been cutting one another's hair. But
apparently all was now expiated. With joyous cries they dashed over a
low brow, Mollie's head and shoulders rising behind them, and flung
themselves upon us with the jubilant announcement that they were good
again and that the hens had laid eleven eggs.
"One's a duck's----"
"Two's duck's----"
"I'll bet you----"
"I'll bet you my purple pencil----"
"I'll bet you my Bible an' all my shells----"
"Where's daddy?"
"Hasn't he finished painting Auntie Joan yet?"
Mollie was laughing and telling Chummy not to get up. She "goes to
pieces" a little in the country in the matter of dress, and wore her
mallow-flower of an old sunbonnet and her gray sandshoes. As Smith
reached for his stick and got up on to his feet she caught my eye and
laughed again. She had suffered from big-ends and magnetos too.
"Did Philip bundle you both out?" she asked.
"He bundled this man out. I was behaving myself."
"Well," quoth Smith, "we only gave him till twelve o'clock, and it's
five to now. You coming, kids?"
They were not merely coming; they were already twenty yards on the way,
with Chummy pegging after them. Had Mollie and I followed, Philip would
merely have commandeered us for the carrying home of his
painting-tackle. Instead we turned along the cliff-tops in the opposite
direction, towards the zigzag path that dropped steeply to the beach.
Since that impetuous dash of hers to London she had shown herself from
time to time--I will not say brooding (that is too strong a word), but
frequently withdrawn, pensive, _rêveuse_. She was as brisk and practical
as ever about the house or in the arranging of picnics and excursions,
but somehow the routine of her daily life struck me as a series of
detached and separate efforts, that for some reason or other never
acquired momentum. I admit, however, that it would be easy to make too
much of this change in her, if change there was.
"Shall we go down?" she said as we paused at the top of the path. "I
haven't seen the sands for two days. 'Man works till set of sun----'"
"Come along," I said, giving her a hand; and we began the descent.
The Santon sands were a rather wonderful sight that morning. The tide
was at its farthest out, and some mysterious wave-action had rolled out
the wide spaces, not to an even flatness, but into regular parallel
striations of wet and dry, the wet so mirror-like and shining that the
sky was perfectly reduplicated in it and the flight of the seabirds far
under our feet could be distinctly seen, the dry portions the
intervening footings from one to the next of which we stepped. Our feet
left no prints on the firm surface, so that looking behind the illusion
was still the same--the dry stripes, the sudden brilliant chasms in
between, everywhere the interrupted inversions of blue and white and
dazzling sun.
"Well, I've been having my first real talk with your Chummy," I remarked
as the alternations slowly flowed under our feet.
"Oh? What about?" she asked.
"About his aims and so on--what he wants to do. Apparently he wants to
get on some sort of an Expedition. But is it likely he'll ever fly
again?"
"I don't know," she said; and walked a little way before adding, "I
shouldn't think he'd want to."
"He does."
She looked straight before her, as if to rest her eyes from the passing
immensities underfoot. There was indeed a fantastic sort of consonance
between flight and the phenomenon of the shore that midday. I do not
know, however, whether this vague association prompted the huge
implication of her very next words--an implication which I now had from
her for the first time.
"You know what I mean," she said quietly.
I tried to steal a glance at her face, but saw only the folds of the
sunbonnet.
"And that it isn't the kind of thing anybody wants to talk about," she
added, leaving me to take the hint.
"No," I agreed mechanically; but for all that I needed a few moments in
which to think.
Obviously I was not there to get out of Philip's wife something that
Philip himself refused me; but the immensity of her quiet assumption had
pulled me up short. I was assumed to know the whole--the whole--of "what
she meant." It was left to my good sense to see that it was not a thing
to talk about. There was to be no argument; she merely expected an equal
simplicity in return, and with a woman like Mollie to expect such a
thing is to get it. I watched a cloud of sheldrake that wheeled and
broke over their own images a few yards away to our left, and then I
turned to her.
"My dear, I'm not sure that I do understand altogether, but we certainly
won't talk about it. I should, however, like to mention one little thing
that I don't think even Philip knows."
She turned quickly. "What is that?"
"Nor Smith."
"What is it?"
"Nor, I should say, you yourself."
"If only you'll tell me what it is----!"