The two women shivered, and Nelly went white. “My God!” she murmured. “As long as nothing happens to him!”
How she loves him! the banker thought. He hastened to reassure her. “Don’t be afraid, Mesdames. Rozal’s experiments and research have no other goal than to ensure that aircraft can fly safely and securely. He’s on the eve of bringing the marvelous invention he’s been working on to perfection, and I’m certain that, thanks to him, aviation will become a very agreeable means of infinitely rapid transport and distant tourism.”
“Oh, so much the better!” Nelly exclaimed, her expression blooming.
“And I hope that it’s by airplane that you and he will set off on your honeymoon.”
The young woman blushed, then sighed: “If he wants me, why is he avoiding meeting me?”
Nasenberg was quick to seize the opportunity. “Would you permit me to talk to him, Miss?”
“Oh no!” Nelly cried. “I wouldn’t want a reflective love, yielding to incitement.”
“I understand. But it’s not forbidden for me to contrive a meeting between you, as if by chance, at the home of mutual friends, on the occasion of some celebration?”
The young woman lowered her head and said: “That’s not forbidden, if you swear to me not to talk to him about me…especially about that which I’ve been feeble enough to confess!”
“Oh, I swear.”
The banker took his leave. He was in a hurry to leap into his automobile and race to Nanterre, where he hoped to find the engineer. Well, well—in spite of everything, hazard is always the god of the shrewd.
X. The Pursuit of a Bird
As he climbed into his limousine, he said to his chauffeur: “To the Rozal factory, and quickly!”
“I’d like to be quick, Monsieur, but the Saint-Germain road is terrible, and there are road-works all along the Suresnes route. So...”
Nasenberg growled: “I said quickly. In fourth gear all the way; I need to get my hands on that animal before nightfall!”
“Very well, Monsieur.”
The car moved off, leapt forward and shot away, to the sound of its disengaged clutch.
At Nanterre, the banker had a disappointment; Rozal was not at the factory. That morning, in company with Turner, he was testing an apparatus to which he had, it appeared, fitted a new propulsion-unit, at the aerodrome in Buc.
Nasenberg got back into his automobile and was taken to Buc. “I have to find him, so that he can explain his conduct to me,” he muttered. “And if he wants to play a crooked game, we shall see. He’s not yet married; I’ve got him under my thumb. Nobody turns Nasenberg over like that...”
XI. The Air Station
On the airfield, dusk was falling.
On the edge of the little grey plain, a trifle sad, stood the hangars of canvas or wood, from which the great human-built birds came in an out in their turn, like monstrous hawks.
In front of the nests, a few machines were at rest, waiting. Beside them, in a group, the aviators were chatting among themselves.
In the background, on the horizon, the outlines of the already-leafless crowns of distant trees designed a bizarre lacework against the sky. Here and there, the slender silhouettes of poplars were profiled. A pool in the plain displayed the surface of its glaucous waters, covered with yellow leaves chased by the wind, heaped up on one bank among the reeds and large water-lilies.
Above the autumnal décor was a heavy and low sky, obscured by a fleecy mass of grey and white clouds with rounded forms and soft nuances, opaque and translucent, superimposing trenchant lines of shade upon on another.
Beneath that vault of thick vapor, to which the dying rays of the sun added a reddish gleam, six airplanes were flying. They were describing sure and majestic circles, gracefully inclining their wings in the turns, and sometimes flying straight ahead, like migrating birds returning to their winter quarters. They seemed to become smaller because they were gaining altitude. They continued climbing and made contact with the clouds, which they punctured and into which they entered, like a flotilla of fishing-boats in a sea-mist.
Then, all of a sudden, bolides fell from on high, at the fearful speed of projectiles. Some, resembling heavy, inanimate masses, looked as if they were about to smash into the ground. Others, reminiscent of dead leaves or pigeon-feathers, described rapid and vertiginous spirals instead of plunging vertically, gliding before touching the Earth. The spectacle was terrifying.
A few meters from the muddy runway, however, the canvas birds were suddenly seen to right themselves with a flick of the wings, climb again, glide once more, and touch down delicately, with great precision, each in front of its nest.
Indifferent, almost blasé, the aviators who were chatting to one another near the hangars gazed vaguely at these banal feats. Some were playing cards under the wing of a monoplane.
Suddenly, instinctively, they all raised their heads. A strange apparatus, of a new dorm, arrived overhead, fanatically fast, like a giant arrow. The wings and tail were not much different from those of other mechanical birds, but the nose, pointed, swollen and triangular, like a horizontal jib, realized an unprecedented conception—rational, it seemed, since that point of penetration seemed to open up the sway for the body of the apparatus, diminishing the resistance without any displacement of air.
“That’s Rozal,” someone said.
“Another new trick he’s trying out!”
Their words overlapped:
“He’ll end up breaking his back.”
“Do you think so? He’s the strongest of us all.”
“He’s taken his knocks, like the rest of us.”
“But with every experiment, he finds an improvement. If he continues, I’m afraid that our machines, compared with his bird, will soon look like antique poultry-cages.”
“So much the better! He’s a good lad, Rozal. If he discovers an automatic stabilizer, and an engine with neither shafts nor pistons, we’ll all be indebted to him for our safety.”
The conversations continued in this vein, while Rozal came in to land. The engineer was everyone’s friend, for he had never competed in any richly-endowed trial; in consequence, no one was jealous of him, although they knew that he could have been a serious competitor. His advice was also appreciated, and more than one comrade had found a useful indication, given at the last minute at the start of a race, regarding the ingenious correction of some instrument.
Now the bird about which everyone was talking touched down.
“He’s not often mistaken, that brother!” remarked a mechanic, amazed by the mastery and precision with which Rozal effected his landing.
Indeed, the great white bird came to a halt five meters from the hangar that served as its nest.
Everyone ran forward. Twenty hands reached for the engineer’s. He was glad to find himself among his friends of disparate sorts—for there were technicians there, lured away from their static machines, automobile racers, football-players, a former taxi-driver and an explorer. The rest were anonymous mechanics, intellectually uncultivated but doggedly energetic, illuminated by the frenzy of their passion and their faith, all brave and cordial, sympathetic and devoted.
They were astonished by the unprecedented propulsion-unit that Rozal had fitted to his apparatus: a propeller with four short, swollen branches of an implausible design, the blades of which made a very pronounced acute angle with the axle-tree.
“Always something new?” exclaimed Turner, greeting his friend.
Content with himself, Rozal replied: “Yes, old chap, it works. You’ll see! Would you like to take a turn?”
“With pleasure. Piloted by you, where wouldn’t I go?”
The engineer climbed back into his seat, and helped Turner to climb up behind him. Curiously, the aviators gathered round the plane, their eyes glued to the bizarre propeller. When the engine was started up, it went into action brutally, carving a formidable hole in the air—which could not be seen, of course, but the sudden importance
of which they divined by the violent shock of the molecules striking their faces and the furious whirlwinds that seemed to grip them.
In the roar of the powerful propeller, the airplane departed, moving straight ahead like an arrow, flying barely ten meters above the ground; then, like an albatross skimming the waves, it shot away toward the horizon without a flicker of its wings—master of the air and the wind.
Darkness fell. The sun hid behind the distant curtain of trees. Now a somber patch in the darkening air, Rozal’s bird reached the clouds.
A jolting automobile had just drawn up in front of the hangars. Nasenberg got out. He was well-known, for no one was unaware that he was Henri Rozal’s backer; he was seen on a regular basis, at serious meetings in the aeronautic club—but the banker was not well-liked, in spite of the fact that he had put a French mask—a Parisian one, in fact—over his Teutonic origins.
He advanced toward the group. “Bonjour, friends. Have you seen Rozal?”
A joker with a mocking expression pointed at the sky where the monoplane’s slender silhouette was outlined. “If you want to talk to him, take the elevator.”
They laughed frankly at that joke from the hero of the Paris-Moscow flight. Nasenberg shrugged his shoulders.
The joker, an aviator named Larégneux, continued, still sardonically: “Say the word and I’ll take you up there in the taxi.”
“The “taxi” was a well-proven apparatus with a weak and wheezy engine, used for the instruction of student pilots. With its patched stays, its badly-hung canvas and it warped landing-gear, it looked like a poor, worn-out and despicable thing, tucked away in a corner.
Nasenberg adopted a cocksure attitude. “It’s not that I’m afraid to go up there to look for Rozal, but in that machine, no thank you...”
Larégneux then signaled to two mechanics, who brought out the machine in which he had made a journey to Stockholm a month earlier.
“If Monsieur would care to take his place,” he said, bowing with a deliberately comical obsequiousness, indicating the airplane to the banker.
Nasenberg had no desire to risk his life in the air, however.
His nose, the mischievous Larégneux thought, ceasing to bow down before the golden calf, gives too much purchase to the wind.
“It’s too dark,” said the banker.
Indeed, the night was getting rapidly darker. Then Larégneux, mocking and courageous, showed that he also had, in addition to his gaiety, a spiritual and poetic soul. High up in the vault formed by the accumulation of white and grey clouds, a kind of blue hole was visible: the distant sky, visible through that gap in the fleecy mass. At the moment when the monoplane carrying Rozal and Turner, flying into the clouds, disappeared from view, Larégneux pointed at the opening and said: “Would you like me to go and tell Rozal that you’re waiting for him? The weather’s still good on the other side.” As his companions looked at him dubiously, he added: “A bottle of champagne at the Paradis, Monsieur Nasenberg, for carrying out your commission, passing through the window?”
“I’ll give you half a dozen!” offered the banker.
“All right!”
Larégneux leapt into his biplane; his mechanics started up the engine, and the bird took off. Ten minutes later it passed between the clouds through the little blue opening, and disappeared from the spectators’ view, in pursuit of Rozal and Turner.
Nasemberg muttered briefly: “To give me such anguish! What if he falls?”
The banker was only thinking about Rozal; the other two, Turner and Larégneux, did not cause him any anxiety. He was thinking, above all, about the spoiled business deal, and the lost millions, in case of a fatal crash. I have to make him give up this game, he decided, internally, until the marriage.
From a tent in which a cunning merchant had installed a canteen, he ordered the promised bottles of champagne. Then, his eyes scanning to the sky periodically, he waited the return of the bold adventurers.
He was looking up in the air when two swift shadows appeared to the right, skimming the ground. Soon they were close to the hangars, coming to a halt. Rozal and Turner got down from their aircraft, Larégneux from his. Then the three men, chatting together, came to mingle with the group in the middle of which—increasingly anxious, now—Nasenberg was playing the pylon of a crane, running his lorgnette over the clouds. The comrades, naturally, had seen the two airplanes return, and it was to hide them from the financier that they grouped themselves around him. They were all talking and gesticulating, with regard to the danger that the three comrades might be running, in the darkness and the impending storm. Thus, like children, the aviators spent their time at the aerodrome merrily, the slightest event providing them with a pretext for amusing themselves.
Rozal tapped the resident alien on the shoulder. “How are you, Monsieur Nasenberg?”
The person addressed turned round abruptly, pale with surprise and emotion. “Where did you come from?” he stammered.
Rozal lifted his forefinger toward the sky. “The land of blue dreams. When one’s up there, humans seem so small and so ugly, like insects—larvae crawling in dirt—that one is ashamed to belong to that insignificant species. Then, one would like never to come down.”
The banker sniggered. “You’re too poetic, my friend. That’s a pity. But we don’t always creep in the mud down here. I learned today that you don’t scorn pretty pathways paved with gold.”
Rozal, surprised but understanding the reference, clenched his fists. “What do you mean?”
“To congratulate you. At least business is easy, with you. I’m glad to know that you haven’t wasted any time since I pointed you toward the gold-field.”
Rozal controlled himself, but he took his adversary to one side. “You’ve come to talk to me, so be it. I can’t say anything in reply in front of my comrades. We’ll go back together, and we’ll talk in the automobile. I have a few words to say to you, too.”
“I only need one!”
“You shall have it,” said Rozal, with an enigmatic smile.
By the time they had finished drinking the champagne, the wind was freshening. It was completely dark. Little blurred leaves were flying over the runway; the thick grey clouds, suspended in the air as if immobile a little while before, were on the way to other horizons for other destinies. The canvas of the tents was beginning to flap, the machines that were still outside were starting to rear up. Immediately, the mechanics and their assistants ran to get them inside.
Within a few minutes, the storm broke.
Nasenberg waited patiently for Henri Rozal. The engineer, in the midst of his comrades, was in no hurry to leave. In that ambience of heroism, he was experiencing delightful emotions that intoxicated him, making him forget the dolor that had been tormenting him for ten days.
A lightning-flash striped the darkness.
“Are you coming, Rozal?”
But the engineer looked at the sky, where the clouds had changed color. At present, they were like an utterly black chaos in which fiery steaks sometimes appeared.
A brown-haired young man whose moustache had upturned tips, with a broad and high forehead, had also been looking at the vault where the impressive spectacle was in preparation for a little while. He hesitated for a few minutes, then, without saying anything, he went into a hangar with an aide, and bought out his monoplane.
Larégneux raced forward. “No, Colon, old chap—you’re not going to play the fool?”
The young man with the soft eyes replied, in a clear but slightly timid voice: “I have a yen to take a little turn up there, just to see.”
“To see? Never—I won’t let you go!”
“Let it go, old man. I’ve done the same many times, in America, when it was necessary to fly, under the threat of 20,000 spectators armed with revolvers.”
“Yes, but that was to earn a living!”
“It’s much more amusing when one takes the risk solely for oneself...”
Larégneux studied the comrade admiri
ngly, and Rozal ran forward to shake his hand. “I wish I were going with you,” he murmured.
Germain Colon stared at him. The two men’s eyes met, one thought communicating itself between them, transmitted by the sudden lightning-flash of their pupils. Colon took Rozal’s arm, drew him away, and whispered in his ear: “The woman I love has betrayed me...”
“The one I love is inaccessible.”
“Stay, then. Wait for her, because you will, I’m sure, be the greatest of us all; you’ll fly the furthest and the highest.”
He tore himself free, leapt into the narrow cockpit of the monoplane and started up the propeller. Two minutes later, he flew into the darkness, and rose up amid the din of the first thunderclap. They saw the plane two or three times, by the glare of the lightning; it was like a wild seagull lost in the tempest.
With every passing second, an obscure heroism was born here and there across the aerodrome, and Rozal, gripped by the spectacle, intoxicated by the nerve-racking spectacle, subject to the contagion of desperate audacity, the very folly of implausible conceptions, clenched his fists and thought: Oh, that alone can cure me of her and offer me sublime joys that will make me forget my unfortunate love!
Within a second, he envisaged everything that he would realize in the exasperation of his despair. Yes, he would fly higher and further than the others; he would forge his kingdom in the air; he would cross the Ocean, and land, by way of the sky, on the distant shores of that America—on which Christopher Columbus had landed after months of navigation, whereas he, Henri Rozal, would do so in thirty hours, without stopping en route, better than a seabird taking temporary refuge on a pointed reef projecting above countless waves.
“Are you coming, Rozal?”
Finally, without saying a word, the engineer followed Nasenberg.
The automobile went forward, guided by the luminous beams of its powerful headlights. A profound silence reigned between the two men, neither of them wanting to disturb it.
The Human Arrow Page 9