A shoreless night, the pilot thought, leading to no anchorage (for every port was unattainable, it seemed), nor toward dawn. In an hour and twenty minutes the fuel would run out. Sooner or later he must blindly founder in the sea of darkness. Ah, if only he could have won through to daylight!
Fabien pictured the dawn as a beach of golden sand where a man might get a foothold after this hard night. Beneath him the plains, like friendly shores, would spread their safety. The quiet land would bear its sleeping farms and flocks and hills. And all the flotsam swirling in the shadows would lose its menace. If it were possible, how gladly he would swim toward the strand of daylight! But, well he knew, he was surrounded; for better or for worse the end would come within this murk of darkness.... Sometimes, indeed, when daybreak came, it seemed like convalescence after illness.
What use to turn his eyes toward the east, home of the sun? Between them lay a gulf of night so deep that he could never clamber up again.
XIII
"The Asuncion mail is making good headway; it should be in at about two. The Patagonia mail, however, seems to be in difficulties and we expect it to be much overdue."
"Very good, Monsieur Riviere."
"Quite possibly we won't make the Europe mail wait for it; as soon as Asuncion's in, come for instructions, please. Hold yourself in readiness."
Riviere read again the weather reports from the northern sectors. "Clear sky; full moon; no wind." The mountains of Brazil were standing stark and clear against the moonlit sky, the tangled tresses of their jet-black forests falling sheer into a silver tracery of sea. Upon those forests the moonbeams played and played in vain, tingeing their blackness with no light. Black, too, as drifting wreckage, the islands flecked the sea. But all the outward air route was flooded by that exhaustless fountain of moonlight.
If Riviere now gave orders for the start, the crew of the Europe mail would enter a stable world, softly illuminated all night long. A land which held no threat for the just balance of light and shade, unruffled by the least caress of those cool winds which, when they freshen, can ruin a whole sky in an hour or two.
Facing this wide radiance, like a prospector eyeing a forbidden gold field, Riviere hesitated. What was happening in the south put Riviere, sole protagonist of night flights, in the wrong. His opponents would make such moral capital out of a disaster in Patagonia that all Riviere's faith would henceforth be unavailing. Not that his faith wavered; if, through a fissure in his work, a tragedy had entered in, well, the tragedy might prove the fissure--but it proved nothing else. Perhaps, he thought, it would be well to have look-out posts in the west. That must be seen to. "After all," he said to himself, "my previous arguments hold good as ever and the possibilities of accident are reduced by one, the one tonight has illustrated." The strong are strengthened by reverses; the trouble is that the true meaning of events scores next to nothing in the match we play with men. Appearances decide our gains or losses and the points are trumpery. And a mere semblance of defeat may hopelessly checkmate us.
He summoned an employee. "Still no radio from Bahia Blanca?"
"No."
"Ring up the station on the phone."
Five minutes later he made further inquiries. "Why don't you pass on the messages?"
"We can't hear the mail."
"He's not sending anything?"
"Can't say. Too many storms. Even if he was sending we shouldn't pick it up."
"Can you get Trelew?"
"We can't hear Trelew."
"Telephone."
"We've tried. The line's broken."
"How's the weather your end?"
"Threatening. Very sultry. Lightning in the west and south."
"Wind?"
"Moderate so far. But in ten minutes the storm will break; the lightning's coming up fast."
Silence.
"Hullo, Bahia Blanca! You hear me? Good. Call me again in ten minutes."
Riviere looked through the telegrams from the southern stations. All alike reported: No message from the plane. Some had ceased by now to answer Buenos Aires and the patch of silent areas was spreading on the map as the cyclone swept upon the little towns and one by one, behind closed doors, each house along the lightless streets grew isolated from the outer world, lonely as a ship on a dark sea. And only dawn would rescue them.
Riviere, poring on the map, still hoped against hope to discover a haven of clear sky, for he had telegraphed to the police at more than thirty upcountry police stations and their replies were coming in. And the radio posts over twelve hundred miles of country had orders to advise Buenos Aires within thirty seconds if any message from the plane was picked up, so that Fabien might learn at once whither to fly for refuge.
The employees had been warned to attend at 1 A.M. and were now at their posts. Somehow, mysteriously, a rumor was gaining ground that perhaps the night flights would be suspended in future and the Europe mail would leave by day. They spoke in whispers of Fabien, the cyclone and, above all, of Riviere whom they pictured near at hand and point by point capitulating to this rebuff the elements had dealt.
Their chatter ceased abruptly; Riviere was standing at his door, his overcoat tight-buttoned across his chest, his hat well down upon his eyes, like the incessant traveler he always seemed. Calmly he approached the head clerk.
"It's one ten. Are the papers for the Europe mail in order?"
"I--I thought--"
"Your business is to carry out orders, not to think."
Slowly turning away, he moved toward an open window, his hands clasped behind his back. A clerk came up to him.
"We have very few replies, sir. We hear that a great many telegraph lines in the interior have been destroyed."
"Right!"
Unmoving, Riviere stared out into the night.
Thus each new message boded new peril for the mail. Each town, when a reply could be sent through before the lines were broken, announced the cyclone on its way, like an invading horde. "It's coming up from the Cordillera, sweeping everything before it, toward the sea."
To Riviere the stars seemed over-bright, the air too moist. Strange night indeed! It was rotting away in patches, like the substance of a shining fruit. The stars, in all their host, still looked down on Buenos Aires--an oasis, and not to last. A haven out of Fabien's range, in any case. A night of menace, touched and tainted by an evil wind. A difficult night to conquer.
Somewhere in its depths an airplane was in peril; here, on the margin, they were fighting to rescue it, in vain.
XIV
Fabien's wife telephoned.
Each night she calculated the progress of the homing Patagonia mail. "He's leaving Trelew now," she murmured. Then went to sleep again Presently: "He's getting near San Antonio, he has its lights in view." Then she got out of bed, drew back the curtains and summed up the sky. "All those clouds will worry him." Sometimes the moon was wandering like a shepherd and the young wife was heartened by the faithful moon and stars, the thousand presences that watched her husband. Toward one o'clock she felt him near her. "Not far to go, Buenos Aires is in sight." Then she got up again, prepared a meal for him, a nice steaming cup of coffee. "It's so cold up there!" She always welcomed him as if he had just descended from a snow peak. "You must be cold!" "Not a bit." "Well, warm yourself anyhow!" She had everything ready at a quarter past one. Then she telephoned. Tonight she asked the usual question.
"Has Fabien landed?"
The clerk at the other end grew flustered. "Who's speaking?"
"Simone Fabien."
"Ah! A moment, please...."
Afraid to answer, he passed the receiver to the head clerk.
"Who's that?"
"Simone Fabien."
"Yes. What can I do for you?"
"Has my husband arrived?"
After a silence which must have baffled her, there came a monosyllable. "No."
"Is he delayed?"
"Yes."
Another silence. "Yes, he is delayed."
"Ah!"
The cry of a wounded creature. A little delay, that's nothing much, but when it lasts, when it lasts....
"Yes. And when--when is he expected in?"
"When is he expected? We ... we don't know exactly A solid wall in front of her, a wall of silence, which only gave her back the echo of her questions.
"Do please tell me, where is he now?"
"Where is he? Wait...."
This suspense was like a torture. Something was happening there, behind that wall.
At last, a voice! "He left Commodoro at seven thirty this evening."
"Yes? And then?"
"Then--delayed, seriously delayed by stormy weather."
"Ah! A storm!"
The injustice of it, the sly cruelty of that moon up there, that lazing moon of Buenos Aires! Suddenly she remembered that it took barely two hours to fly from Commodoro to Trelew.
"He's been six hours on the way to Trelew! But surely you've had messages from him. What does he say?"
"What does he say? Well, you see, with weather like that ... it's only natural ... we can't hear him."
"Weather like--?"
"You may rest assured, madame, the moment we get news of him, we will ring you up."
"Ah! You've no news."
"Good night, madame."
"No! No! I want to talk to the director."
"I'm sorry, he's very busy just now; he has a meeting on--"
"I can't help that. That doesn't matter. I insist on speaking to him."
The head clerk mopped his forehead. "A moment, please."
He opened Riviere's door.
"Madame Fabien wants to speak to you, sir."
"Here," thought Riviere, "is what I was dreading." The emotional elements of the drama were coming into action. His first impulse was to thrust them aside; mothers and women are not allowed in an operating theater. And all emotion is bidden to hold its peace on a ship in peril; it does not help to save the crew. Nevertheless he yielded.
"Switch on to my phone."
No sooner did he hear that far off, quavering voice, than he knew his inability to answer it. It would be futile for both alike, worse than futile, to meet each other.
"Do not be alarmed, madame, I beg you. In our calling it so often happens that a long while passes without news."
He had reached a point where not the problem of a small personal grief but the very will to act was in itself an issue. Not so much Fabien's wife as another theory of life confronted Riviere now. Hearing that timid voice, he could but pity its infinite distress--and know it for an enemy! For action and individual happiness have no truck with each other; they are eternally at war. This woman, too, was championing a self-coherent world with its own rights and duties, that world where a lamp shines at nightfall on the table, flesh calls to mated flesh, a homely world of love and hopes and memories. She stood up for her happiness and she was right. And Riviere, too, was right, yet he found no words to set against this woman's truth. He was discovering the truth within him, his own inhuman and unutterable truth bv an humble light the lamplight of a little home!
"Madame...!"
She did not hear him. Her hands were bruised with beating on the wall and she lay fallen, or so it seemed to him, almost at his feet.
***
One day an engineer had remarked to Riviere, as they were bending above a wounded man, beside a bridge that was being erected: "Is the bridge worth a man's crushed face?" Not one of the peasants using the road would ever have wished to mutilate this face so hideously just to save the extra walk to the next bridge. "The welfare of the community," the engineer had continued, "is just the sum of individual welfares and has no right to look beyond them." "And yet," Riviere observed on a subsequent occasion, "even though human life may be the most precious thing on earth we always behave as if there were something of higher value than human life But what thing?"
Thinking of the lost airmen, Riviere felt his heart sink. All man's activity, even the building of a bridge, involves a toll of suffering and he could no longer evade the issue--"Under what authority?"
These men, he mused, who perhaps are lost, might have led happy lives. He seemed to see as in a golden sanctuary the evening lamplight shine on faces bending side by side. "Under what authority have I taken them from all this?" he wondered. What was his right to rob them of their personal happiness? Did not the highest of all laws ordain that these human joys should be safeguarded? But he destroyed them. And yet one day, inevitably, those golden sanctuaries vanish like mirage. Old age and death, more pitiless than even he, destroy them. There is, perhaps, some other thing, something more lasting, to be saved; and, perhaps, it was to save this part of man that Riviere was working. Otherwise there could be no defense for action.
To love, only to love, leads nowhere. Riviere knew a dark sense of duty, greater than that of love. And deep within it there might lie another emotion and a tender one, but worlds away from ordinary feelings. He recalled a phrase that he once had read: "The one thing is to make them everlasting.... That which you seek within yourself will die." He remembered a temple of the sun god, built by the ancient Incas of Peru. Tall menhirs on a mountain. But for these what would be left of all that mighty civilization which with its massive stones weighs heavy, like a dark regret, on modern man? Under the mandate of what strange love, what ruthlessness, did that primeval leader of men compel his hordes to drag this temple up the mountainside bidding them raise up their eternity? And now another picture rose in Riviere's mind; the people of the little towns strolling bv nights around their bandstands. That form of happiness, those shackles ... he thought. The leader of those ancient races may have had scant compassion for man's sufferings, but he had a boundless pity for his death. Not for his personal death, but pity for his race, doomed to be blotted out beneath a sea of sand. And so he bade his folk set up these stones at least, something the desert never would engulf.
XV
That scrap of folded paper might perhaps save him yet; gritting his teeth, Fabien unfolded it.
"Impossible communicate Buenos Aires. Can't even touch the key, the shocks are numbing my hands."
In his vexation Fabien wanted to reply, but the moment his hands left the controls to write, a vast ground swell seemed to surge up across his body; the eddies lifted him in his five tons of metal and rocked him to and fro. He abandoned the attempt.
Again he clenched his hands upon the tempest and brought it down. Fabien was breathing heavily. If that fellow pulled up the aerial for fear of the storm, Fabien would smash his face in when they landed. At all costs they must get in touch with Buenos Aires--as though across the thousand miles and more a safety line might be flung to rescue them from this abyss! If he could not have one vagrant ray of light, not even the flicker of an inn-lamp--of little help indeed, yet shining like a beacon, earnest of the earth--at least let him be given a voice, a single word from that lost world of his. The pilot raised his fist and shook it in the red glow, hoping to make the man behind him understand the tragic truth, but the other was bending down to watch a world in ruins, with its buried cities and dead lights, and did not see him.
Let them shout any order whatever to him and Fabien would obey. If they tell me to go round and round, he thought, I'll turn in circles and if they say I must head due south.... For somewhere, even now, there still were lands of calm, at peace beneath the wide moon shadows. His comrades down there, omniscient folk like clever scientists, knew all about them, poring upon the maps beneath their hanging lamps, pretty as flower-bells. But he, what could he know save squalls and night, this night that buffeted him with its swirling spate of darkness? Surely they could not leave two men to their fate in these whirlwinds and flaming clouds! No, that was unthinkable! They might order Fabien to set his course at two hundred and forty degrees, and he would do it.... But he was alone.
It was as if dead matter were infected by his exasperation; at every plunge the engine set up such furious vibrations that all the fusela
ge seemed convulsed with rage. Fabien strained all his efforts to control it; crouching in the cockpit, he kept his eyes fixed on the artificial horizon only, for the masses of sky and land outside were not to be distinguished, lost both alike in a welter as of worlds in the making. But the hands of the flying instruments oscillated more and more abruptly, grew almost impossible to follow. Already the pilot, misled by their vagaries, was losing altitude, fighting against odds, while deadly quicksands sucked him down into the darkness. He read his height, sixteen hundred--just the level of the hills. He guessed their towering billows hard upon him, for now it seemed that all these earthen monsters, the least of which could crush him into nothingness, were breaking loose from their foundations and careering about in a drunken frenzy. A dark tellurian carnival was thronging closer and closer round him.
He made up his mind. He would land no matter where, even if it meant cracking up! To avoid the hills anyhow, he launched his only landing flare. It sputtered and spun, illumining a vast plain, then died away; beneath him lay the sea!
His thoughts came quickly. Lost--forty degrees' drift--yes, I've drifted, sure enough--it's a cyclone--Where's land? He turned due west. Without another flare, he thought, I'm a goner. Well, it was bound to happen one day. And that fellow behind there! Sure thing he's pulled up the aerial. ...But now the pilot's anger had ebbed away. He had only to unclasp his hands and their lives would slither through his fingers like a trivial mote of dust. He held the beating heart of each--his own, his comrade's--in his hands. And suddenly his hands appalled him.
In these squalls that battered on the plane, to counteract the jerks of the wheel, which else would have snapped the control cables, he clung to it with might and main, never relaxing his hold for an instant. But now he could no longer feel his hands, numbed by the strain. He tried to shift his fingers and get some signal they were there, but he could not tell if they obeyed his will. His arms seemed to end in two queer foreign bodies, insentient like flabby rubber pads. "Better try hard to think I'm gripping," he said to himself. But whether his thought carried as far as his hands he could not guess. The tugs upon the wheel were only felt by him as sudden twinges in his shoulders. "I'll let go for sure. My fingers will open." His rashness scared him--that he had dared to even think such words!--for now he fancied that his hands, yielding to the dark suggestion of his thought, were opening slowly, slowly opening in the shadow, to betray him.
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