The telephone rang. Nelly ran to it. “Oh, it’s you, Stanley? Well? Ah! The newspapers received my marconigrams! Speak faster. He’s been seen? Three ships have encountered him? In one hour? You’re sure? Thanks, Stanley! Telephone as soon as you’re sure of anything, I beg you!”
Before hanging up the receiver, the young woman threw her arms around her aunt’s neck. “Oh, I knew that he’d succeed!”
“But you just said that it was mad, impossible.”
“That was nothing. I’m a little crazy too, today. Joy, fear...”
“Love...”
“Well, yes, love! It’s him who is the cause of this great event…and if a discovery is to revolutionize humanity, advance progress by several centuries, perhaps it’s to the bad temper of a woman in love that we’ll owe it...”
“Yes, you’ve collaborated in it.”
IX. At a Hundred an Hour, or Death!
Something had happened to Rozal that he had not anticipated—something terrible, distressing and tragic, which threatened to transform a triumphant arrival into a rightful catastrophe.
As soon as he had perceived New York, the entrance to the harbor, the colossal statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn suspension bridge, he had immediately slowed down his engine, because he could not make out the place that had been prepared for him to land at a speed of 440 kilometers per hour. Having become master of his senses again, rendered confident by the certainty of arrival, with New York before his eyes, success close at hand and his golden laurels already visible, he had not wasted any time getting ready for the banal maneuver of the descent, already carried out in innumerable machines in very various circumstances in the last five years. For him, that was child’s play.
Very rapidly, accustomed to distinguishing the details of the ground from the air, he had discovered the long wooden platform at the entrance to the East River, in the middle of an agglomeration of small boats of every sort, so tightly packed that one could not even see the water of the river. Fortunately, he thought, I’m used to difficulties! But what impressed him most was the compact crowd massed all around, on the docks, on the boat-bridge, in the vessels with which the water as covered.
“Let’s go!” cried the aviator.
And, as he had done hundreds of times before, having calculated the distance, he switched off his motor in order to glide down. Abruptly, he had the sensation that the apparatus was no longer gliding on its wings along an inclined plane, but that it was falling vertically, inert, like a carved stone.
One of Rozal’s most appreciable qualities was self-control, a decisive mind. He did not understand what had happened, but, having observed it, within a tenth of a second, instinctively, he carried out the vital gesture that arrested the fall: he started the turbine again.
Fortunately, the engine resumed functioning without hesitation, and the monoplane immediately righted itself. The pilot accelerated and the bird, sure of itself, soon resumed describing circles above the place where it was due to land.
For a few minutes, the engineer reflected. What was the cause of the accident from which he had just miraculously escaped? Doubtless he had not maintained a speed sufficient for the glide to continue after he switched off the engine. Thus, he had only to begin again.
This time, Rozal headed out to see in order to make his approach. He traversed the whole of New York Bay lengthwise, climbed very high, fixed his speed at 200 kilometers an hour and, when he judged the moment propitious, stopped the turbine again.
As he was forewarned, a veritable anguish oppressed him while he awaited the result of his action—and when he had observed, for a second time, that the air was no longer supporting him as soon as the bird was no longer flying at 100 kilometer an hour, at least, and that he fell into the void like a lifeless body, he was afraid!
Nothing similar had ever happened to him before. He realized that he could not resume contact with the ground, other than catastrophically, and that he was condemned—in order to avoid or delay, that moment—to describe interminable circles in the air...
Nevertheless, he resolved to take the experiment as far as possible. With his hand on the lever commanding the turbine, he let himself fall, trying even so to glide by describing spirals—but the apparatus did not obey him. Weight, whose power increased incessantly, nullified the resistance of the excessively small wings. In half a second, the fall would be irremediable, the impact brutal, at random, on the platform, the dock, a transatlantic liner or—the aviator having been unable to move away, like a gentleman—into the compact crowd that was proclaiming its admiration from him!
Cold sweat pearled on Rozal’s temples. He experienced the despair of observing the imperfection of his discovery. The image of Nelly passed abruptly before his eyes. Who could tell? Perhaps she was there, mingling with the anonymous crowd. Even his circling in the New York sky might be reproaching her for her unjust cruelty, her blind pride—but he could not, however, crash before her eyes, lamentably, like a puppet deprived of support! No, he wanted, even so, a magnificent victory!
Then he shoved the lever to its limit—and at the precise moment when the bird was about to crash into the steel hull of a steamer, it made a sudden leap, instantly rose up like an arrow, and regained the height at which, with the ease an eagle, it moved superbly again.
Then, the engineer resumed his reflection. Now he knew. The second experiment had demonstrated the fault of the engine that he had thought impeccable—it was the revenge of nature, which he had wanted to tame! To attain speeds that no bird had ever approached, he had been obliged to create an apparatus conceived according to different principles. The arrow in which he was flying was heavy, powerful, slender: it resembled a torpedo. Now, to ensure its flight through the air at an ordinary speed, he would have had to furnish it with considerable lift-providing surfaces, a large wingspan. But then, hampered by that supportive equipment, it would not have been much faster than a monoplane of the type currently adopted by the army.
In order to get rid of the resistance in advance, he had reduced those wings to restricted dimensions, and, if he flew anyway—if he sustained himself in the air, cutting through the most terrible wind, it was because, from the outset, he went at a speed o extraordinary that it compensated for the bird’s lack of lift-providing surfaces. But, although he was perfectly safe at great speed, when she slowed down, the monoplane ceased to support itself, fell…and crashed! It was therefore necessary to land at 200, or, at the very least, 100 kilometers an hour. Which came to the same thing—to hit the ground at that velocity would be certain disaster. What, then, could he do?
A sharp anxiety caused him the minutes during which he never ceased to circle seem very long. Was he, then, going to circle for his entire life? Would nature take its revenge by obliging him to continue his fantastic journey until death? He glimpsed madness close at hand, threatening. He was afraid again, with an urge to weep.
At one time, he imagined letting himself fall into the sea, which would render the fall less tragic. Even so, he anticipated the result of such an experience: the plunge into the water of the iron eagle tumbling from the clouds, too heavy, with neither wood not canvas; he would drown; the bird would be lost, in any case, even if, by some miracle, he could get out of the cockpit alive.
For several minutes more, he reflected. He had tested the apparatus with Turner. They had not crashed. Why? Very rapidly, he deduced the answer. In the first trial flight, a terrible tempest had been blowing: a formidable contrary wind, passing beneath the bird’s wings. And Rozal remembered quite clearly that, at times, when he slowed down, with the engine still spinning fast enough to travel at 500 kilometers an hour, he had almost remained “in place.” Thus, when he had wanted to land, the wind had taken the place of speed. In those bizarre, exceptional circumstances, he had been able to resume contact with the ground—brutally, to be sure, but nevertheless without breaking anything.
Today, alas, there was a magnificently pure July sky, in which the Sun was shinin
g brightly. Oh, if only a frightful tempest might get up! But the horizon, clear in all directions, did not presage any storm. Only one chance of salvation remained, therefore: to resume his interrupted progress, to head north for the cold plains of Canada, to keep on flying, until he was able to encounter a storm!
But Rozal was at the end of his tether. His nerves, stretched by violent emotion, threatened to betray him: he could see death coming.
Nevertheless, he would fight to the end! Since there was no salvation other than in the hazard of that fantastic flight, he would attempt it!
As he happened to be, at that moment, above the sea, he set a course north-westwards, turned the turbine up to maximum power, and flew away, straight ahead, passing over the picturesque valleys, hills and forests of Long Island. But he wanted to admire that strip of land to which he knew, by her own admission, that his wife had retired—that land where Destiny would not permit him to land.
He perceived luxurious houses on the hillsides, surrounded by well-kept grounds. Racehorses were capering in a meadow. Further on, golfers stopped playing to watch him pass over.
He experienced nostalgia for the Earth that it was necessary for him to abandon, and, as his regret became sharper, he made an unconscious gesture that brought the monoplane closer to the ground. When he was no more than ten meters from the treetops, he regulated his horizontal velocity in order to enjoy the spectacle that unfolded vertiginously beneath his eyes. And as he perceived, further ahead of him, the arm of the sea limiting the island, he pulled the control-lever backwards, in order to progress only at the minimum speed that prevented him from falling.
With his eyes fixed on Long Island, where his wife lived with her aunt, unable to stop, he let himself soar through the warm air of that July afternoon, in the torpor of speed and sun.
X. The Iron Eagle’s Fall
On the side of a hill, a mansion in white stone, elegantly outlined, raised up its French-style silhouette, reminiscent of some Trianon erected there to the vanity of a billionaire. Rozal noticed it, and contemplated it momentarily.
He was about to maneuver the altitude tiller in order to climb a little higher, for he had a forest of young trees ahead of him, not very tall but very bushy, when a woman appeared at one of the windows. It was Nelly, his wife!
He had eyes still too full of her cherished image; he had a heart and mind too steeped in her; his thoughts were too haunted by her memory. He could not be mistaken!
Even if that person had not been Nelly, the illusion would have been sufficient to case him a real, dramatic disturbance—and his eyes would have misted over just the same. He was no more than thirty meters from the window now, and he was hurtling by like a bolide, perhaps never go return!
“Nelly!” he stammered.
As if the apparatus had divined, from afar, what his lips had plaintively murmured, Rozal saw two arms reaching out toward him.
“My wife!” he shouted, this time.
And in that second of common emotion, that short moment when their gazes, in spite of the distance, tried to penetrate one another, the entire past they had shared, the entire loving past, was resuscitated. Face to face, for the interval of a lightning-flash, everything ugly and cruel that had happened between them, the lamentable error of their separation was cancelled out, and nothing remained of it.
She was, perhaps, even more beautiful and more attractive because of the harm that she had done him.
“I shall go no further,” he swore.
But how could he stop? How could he succeed, there, in what he had not dared to attempt just now in the bay? He needed, immediately, to put pressure o the controls in order to pass over the verdant obstacle, or to steer sideways in order to come about. What good were such maneuvers? Rozal’s only thought was to bring the matter to a close, to let himself fall—a premeditated crash, for he preferred to die there, in front of her—into the forest of young trees.
Densely packed, high enough to form a natural mattress, they had rounded crowns, whose soft, light branches formed a kind of sea of foliage a few meters from the ground. Rozal had just seen them as a kind of brake, a means, something resistant and soft at the same time—a shock-absorber, in sum, which might retain him, gradually, without a violent impact or a mortal shock. Who could tell?
Calculating his height, he lined up the bird, and boldly flew over the fleece of branches, fifty centimeters from the highest treetops. He leaned over; the trees and bushes were so numerous, their crowns so thick, that the ground could not be seen.
He continued, then, drawing back the altitude tiller slightly. Almost immediately, he perceived a friction beneath him; he experienced a sharp impression of being aboard a ship running on to a sandbank. He brought the tiller back a little further to increase the effect of the progressive braking, which was almost ideal—but then there was a terrible impact in front. The propeller had just shattered. The pilot had forgotten that, in making his hull slide over the branches, he would provoke a contact between his propeller and the surface. The loss of the propeller was an immediate, brutal arrest.
Traveling at more than 100 kilometers an hour, the monoplane dived head first into the think, soft mass of branches. Retained at the prow, still maintaining its momentum, it stood upright, tail toward the sky, flipped over, turned over again, and spun twice or three times more, dragged and tumbled in turn by its remaining momentum and its gradually-triumphant weight—and finally cut through the frail carpet of branches that was supporting it, crashing on to rocks that were scarcely masked by grayish moss.
Lying in a patch of gorse, his arms crossed, with a broken branch in his right hand, to which he had tried to cling, the inventor was sprawled lamentably a few meters from his apparatus, when Nelly Rozal, Mrs. Flower and several other people arrived.
“Henri! Henri...! My darling…! There’s blood in his eyes! Oh that wound at the back of his head! It’s horrible…! Henri!”
“Calm down, Nelly. Perhaps it isn’t serious...”
“Not serious! Oh, Aunt! He’s not responding…and his eyes have shut!”
The two women, having run out immediately after the accident in company with servants and other people, whose number was increasing continually, were in tears.
Nelly, her hair in disarray, because she had wanted to be the first to reach her beloved, her eyes full of tears, clutched the quivering body despairingly. With her lace handkerchief, she wiped away a trickle of blood that obstinately continued to run down the side of his head. From time to time, she leaned avidly over the face of the injured man—perhaps dying, she could not tell!—and proclaimed her despair:
“Henri, my love! Wake up, answer me! It’s your wife who’s here, my Henri…your Nelly, who loves you!” She became desperate. “He’s going to die without regaining consciousness, and I’m the one who’s killed him! Oh, wretched madwoman that I am! I’ve destroyed my own happiness! Forgive me, my Henri! If you die, I shall die!”
Incoherently, in disordered phrases, her pain and her sentiments succeeded one another, sincere and heartbroken. It was hard to watch. Her distressed aunt pulled her away.
“Come on—let the men carry him back to the house. We’ll look after him!”
“Oh, yes! Has anyone telephoned the doctor?”
A chambermaid came forward. “Yes, Madame. He’ll be here in a minute, for he’s coming by car...”
Slightly reassured, she allowed herself to be led away, like a little child, by Mrs. Flower, while the gardeners carried Rozal away on an improvised stretcher. Meanwhile, curiosity-seekers from the neighborhood, were gathering on every side, picking up, in order to keep them as souvenirs or sell them, the scattered, lamentably broken pieces of the fabulous bird that had just crossed the Atlantic Ocean in one day, like an arrow.
Thus, humans never, with impunity, score a victory over nature, which is difficult to tame!
Invisible supernatural powers lie in wait for the audacious man of genius who desires, in his turn, to be a god. He only
perceives the great difficulties of the problem; he aims at obstacles that have remained inviolate, insuperable, for thousands of centuries—but he does not suspect the grain of sand that will lodge itself, slyly, in the gears of his machine, the minuscule pebble on which it stumble, when he wishes, having accomplished his effort, to claim his triumph, ensuring his forehead, before his contemporaries and the future, of the coveted laurels.
The Evil One, with more cunning than talent and genius, knows how to make use of sure weapons to combat them. And it has often been Love, in all eras, that has brought down the strongest. Delilah betrayed Samson, Circe transformed men into pigs, Cleopatra doomed Antony.
If Rozal had remained himself, implacably isolated, invulnerable, while he held the controls of his marvelous machine in his hands, he would doubtless have ended up landing, if not normally, at least triumphant over peril, as he desired, and as his determined and resolute intelligence would have ensured. But a bizarre destiny had caused the iron bird to pass before a window at which a young woman was holding out her loving arms—and Rozal’s head had been turned!
Then, the miraculous machine that had just traveled through the air above the Ocean for hundreds of leagues, in irresistible flight, toying with tempests, the fury of the elements, the efforts of the Heavens, the wind and the Ocean, had stumbled into the trees, like a scatterbrain drunk on the blood of the vine. While its pilot was in agony, his head split open, his skull breached, it was now lying on the ground, one wing here and another there, disemboweled, its gross bumble-bee head—not that of an eagle—shattered on a rock, in the depths of a sort of clearing created by its fall into a twenty-year-old forest, pretty and verdant, with its rustling leaves, its bird-calls, its cool shade, its hum of insects in search of food…and the impassive Sun overhead.
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