The cost of wings, and other stories

by Richard Dehan

THE COST OF WINGS

SHELDRICK, returning, refreshed and exhilarated, from a spin with a friend who had brought down a racing car of forty horse-power and an enthusiasm to match, found his wife sitting in the same chair, in the same attitude, as it seemed to him, in which he had left her, in the bare, dull sitting-room of their quarters at the Pavilion Hotel, on the edge of Greymouth Links, from which starting point Sheldrick, in fulfillment of his recent engagement with the Aero Club of France, had arranged to take wing for Cherbourg, wind and weather permitting, on the morrow.

It would be difficult exceedingly to imagine Caruso as an engineer or a bank manager, or in any capacity other than that of operatic star. It would be equally difficult to picture Shackleton as a side-splitting antic and quip-monger, or Pélissier in the rôle of the dauntless explorer. Sheldrick, the most recent idol of the flying world, was the type-ideal of the aviator.

Mathematician, engineer, meteorologist, and athlete, his tall, lightly built but muscular frame carried the head of an eagle. The wide forehead, sloping to the temples, the piercing prominently set eyes, the salient nose, and the wide, firm, deep-cut mouth characterizing the long-winged birds of powerful flight, were Sheldrick’s. His, too, the long, supple neck, the curiously deceptive shoulder slope that disguises depth of chest while his long arms looked as though, were they clothed with feathers, they might cleave the air; and his feet gripped the ground through the thin, soft boots he always wore, as the eagle’s talons grip the rock.

Perhaps he was not unaware of the suggested resemblance. He had certainly christened his recently completed monoplane “Aquila,� and had piloted her to victory in two minor events at the Moncaster Spring Flying Meeting in April of that year, and at the Nismes Concours des Aviateurs of three weeks before had carried off the Grand Prix of 25,000 francs for the longest flight under favorable weather conditions. And at the Club dinner following the presentation of the prizes, Sheldrick, flushed with conquest and congratulations, had given that pledge whereby the soul of the woman who yet loved him was wrung to torture anew.

“After all that I have borne,� Mrs. Sheldrick had said to herself, sitting in her hideous red moreen-covered chair by the green Venetian-blinded window of the staring hotel sitting-room—“after three years of agony, silently, patiently endured—after all his promises, I am still upon the rack.�

She looked rather like it as she sat by the window, the center one of three that gave a view across the gray-green links, and the gray-brown beach of smooth, sliding pebbles that gave place to the gray-white, throbbing water of the English Channel. And the white, drawn face that masked her frenzy of anguish, and the dark-gray, haunted eyes through which her suffering spirit looked, greeted her husband as he burst into the room, fresh from his banquet of speed and clean, salt, buoyant air, and sympathetic, enthusiastic companionship, like an unexpected douche of ice water.

“Haven’t you been out?�

Sheldrick uttered the words recorded, upon a pause implying the swallowing of others less neutrally amiable. And his face, which had already clouded, darkened sullenly as his wife replied: “I have traveled some distance since you left here with your friend.�

“Where have you been?� asked Sheldrick unwillingly, as a man who suspects that the question may open some unwelcome topic.

Mrs. Sheldrick looked at her husband full; and, though it had seemed to him that he had read the book of her beauty from preface to finis, there was something new to him in her regard as she answered:

“I have gone over in memory every week of the last three years that we have spent together, Edgar; and the road has been a rough and stony one, without one green patch of grass to rest on by the wayside, or one refreshing spring at which to drink. But I was patient while I plodded after you, because I saw an end to what I was enduring. Now it seems that I am mistaken. It is only my endurance that is at an end.�

“Why do you talk in allegory, Ella?� Sheldrick broke out impatiently. He threw down his leather motoring cap with the talc eye shields upon the sofa, and pitched his heavy overcoat upon a chair in a corner of the ugly room, and let his long, lithe body down into a hideous Early Victorian plush armchair beside the empty fireplace, where nothing crackled but some fantastically bordered strips of red and green gelatine paper, shuddering under the influence of a powerful chimney draught. “I’m not an imaginative man,� he went on. “Even if my mind were not occupied with a dozen affairs of supreme urgency I should still boggle at interpreting your cryptic utterances. If you want them understood, make them to some minor poet at a garden party or an At Home. You’ve stacks of invitations from the nicest people to all sorts of functions ever since I pulled off those two events at Moncaster and the Grand Prix at Nismes. And now that it’s May, and the season in full swing, you might be having no end of a capital time at home in London instead of——� She interrupted him with a passionate gesture.

“I have no home!�

“No?� said Sheldrick coolly, leaning back his head against the knobby back of the Early Victorian armchair.

“No!� said Mrs. Sheldrick, and her passion seemed to dash itself against and break upon the man’s composure as a wave beats and breaks upon a rock. “It was a home, once, when you were working partner in the firm of Mallard, Mallard and Sheldrick, Manufacturers of Automobiles; and the life you led was a normal, ordinary, everyday life, and the risks you ran were everyday, ordinary risks, such as a woman who loved you—note that I say who loved you—might bear without going mad or dying of terror. But it is a prison now. I cannot breathe in it. Even when you are there with me—and when every postman’s knock, or telegraph boy’s ring, or telephone message has for the moment ceased to be fraught with hideous, often-dreamed-of, never-forgotten possibilities ... when each newsboy’s voice, yelling in the streets, has temporarily ceased to be the voice of Fate for me—it is no longer home! It is a caravanserai, from which Hope and Content and Peace of Mind may go out before the next day’s dawning, leaving the door open that Death and Despair may the more freely enter in!�

“Ella!� exclaimed Sheldrick, looking at her open-eyed. She had always been such a quiet, calm, self-possessed woman, that now, as she rose up out of her chair suddenly, as though she had been prodded with a bayonet, she was strange and new, and rather awe-inspiring. As she stood before him, her passion-breathing face an ivory cameo between the drooping folds of her rich blue-black hair, her gray eyes glittering fiercely between the narrowed lids under the straight black brows, her lips two bitterly straightened lines of scarlet showing the gleaming teeth, her firm chin implacable in its set upon the dainty cravat of muslin and black silk ribbon, her slight bosom panting fiercely under her bodice folds, her slender limbs rigid beneath the sheath-fitting gown of silken chestnut-colored cloth, the man, her husband, looked at her more attentively than he had looked for years.

“Ella, what is the matter? What has upset you like this? If there is anything I can do to put things right, why not tell me, and—and——�

Sheldrick’s voice faltered, and his eyes looked away from his wife’s as he saw the reviving hope leap desperately into her face. It died instantly, leaving her gray eyes more somber, and the lines of her scarlet, parted lips more bitter than before.

“Ah, yes!� she said. “Why not tell you what you know already, and be coaxed and patted into compliance and meek, patient submission for the hundredth time! You will kiss me good-bye to-morrow morning, if the weather permits of your starting, and make this flight. It is to be the last, the very last, like the others that have gone before it; it is only so much more daring, only so much more risky, only so much more dangerous than the things that other aviators have dared and risked and braved. If it blows from the north you will not dream of making the venture—the jagged rocks and shoals, and the towering, greedy seas of the Channel Islands threaten things too grim. You will wait, and I with you—oh, my God!—for a favorable wind. Your successes at Brookfields and at Nismes have made the ‘Aquila’ patent worth a moderate fortune; they are turning out replicas of her at your workshops as rapidly as they can make them—your manager took on twenty more skilled hands only last week. You have done what you set out to do; we are freed from poverty for the rest of our lives—we might live happily, peacefully together somewhere, if this unnatural love of peril had not bitten you to the bone. ‘One more contest,’ you will keep on saying; ‘one more revenge I am bound to give this and that or the other man whom I have beaten, or who has challenged me.’� Her bosom heaved, and the ivory paleness of her face was darkened with a rush of blood. “Honor is involved. You are bound in honor to keep your word to others, but free to deceive, to defraud, to cheat and lie to—your wife!�

“Take care what you’re saying!�

Sheldrick leaped out of his chair, fiery red and glaring angrily. Mrs. Sheldrick looked at him out of her glittering, narrowed eyes, and laughed, and her laugh was ugly to hear.

“Your wife! Did you ever realize what it meant to me to be your wife? When we were married, and for eighteen months after that! Heaven upon earth! Have you ever dreamed what sort of life began for me when you were first bitten by this craze of flying, three years ago? Hell—sheer, unmitigated hell! To the public I am a woman in an ulster, or in a dust cloak and a silk motor veil, thick to hide the ghastly terror in my face!—a woman who kisses you before the start, and keeps pace with your aeroplane in an automobile through the long-distance flights, with what the English newspaper men describe as ‘unswerving devotion,’ and the French press correspondents term ‘a tenderness of the most touching.’ They are wrong! I am not conscious of any special devotion. The springs of tenderness have frozen in me. I am like every other spectator on the course, possessed, body and soul, by the secret, poignant, momentary expectation of seeing a man hurled to a horrible death. Only the man is—my husband! Now I remember this, Edgar, but a day will dawn—an hour will come to me—is coming as surely as there is a God in heaven—when he will be no more than the flying man who may possibly be killed!�

There was silence in the room, and the hoarse, dry sound that broke it was not a sob. It came from Sheldrick, a single utterance, like the sound of something breaking.

“I—understand!�

There was no response, for the woman, having unsealed and poured out the last drop of her vials of bitterness and wrath, was dumb. Sheldrick added, after a long pause:

“What do you ask? That I should give up the attempt to fly to Cherbourg? That I should break the engagement with the Aero Club—withdraw the challenge given to M. Ledru? Is that what you demand?�

She said with a hopeless gesture:

“I ask nothing! I demand nothing!�

Sheldrick muttered an oath. But in his soul he was yielding. “Aquila No. 1,� “Aquila No. 2,� and “Aquila No. 3� were dear to his soul. But he had awakened to the fact that his dearest possession was the love of his wife. And he had been killing it by inches. He met her eyes now—the stern gray eyes that had learned to see him as he was and look on the bare realities of life, shorn of its love glamour, and muttered:

“It is true. I have promised over and over.... And I owe it to you to take no more risks, even more than if we had a living child to.... Where are those cable-forms?�

He strode to the ink-splashed writing table between the windows, and routed the bundle of greenish papers out of the frowsy blotting book, and dipped the blunt pen into the thick, dirty ink, and wrote:

“To Ledru, Hôtel National, Cherbourg, France.
“Unavoidably compelled break engagement——�

He was struck by a sudden idea, ceased writing, and left the room, going into the adjoining bedroom. His wife, standing dumb and frozen on the gaudy hearthrug near the empty grate, heard him rummaging for something. He came back in a few minutes with a heavy brow and preoccupied look, and took a leather strap from the pocket of the heavy overcoat he had thrown upon the sofa. With this he went back into the bedroom. The door handle rattled as though something were being hitched about it, the stout door groaned and creaked under a violent pull from the other side, there was a horrible, suggestive crack, and a stifled oath from Sheldrick. Next moment he was back in the room, dipping the blunt pen into the bad ink, and finishing the cablegram:

“Left wrist badly sprained—Sheldrick, Pavilion Hotel, Links, Greymouth, England.�

Having finished writing, he brought the filled form to his wife. She read, and looked at him in eloquent silence. And, in answer to the question in her eyes, he held out his left hand, already swollen and purple, and with a swelling of the dimensions of a cricket ball, indicating the dislocated joint. A cry broke from her:

“Oh! how could you....�

“It was the easiest way,� said Sheldrick, flushed and scowling. “Call me a coward, if you like. I deserve it—as well as the other names!� He rang the bell, and fished with the sound hand for silver in a trouser pocket.

“We’ll send the cable now,� he said.

She bit her lips, that were no longer scarlet, and went to the blotted blotter, dipped the worn pen into the blobby ink, and made an alteration in the cablegram. Then she showed it to him, and the message ran:

“To Ledru, Hôtel National, Cherbourg, France.
“Unavoidably compelled postpone engagement. Left wrist badly sprained.—Sheldrick, Pavilion Hotel, Links, Greymouth, England.�

As Sheldrick looked at Mrs. Sheldrick, in intent amazement, the bell was answered by a German waiter. Mrs. Sheldrick took the silver out of Sheldrick’s sound hand, dismissed the attendant to dispatch the message, closed and locked the door of the sitting-room against intruders, and then went quickly to her husband and fell upon his breast. He clasped her with his sound arm as she broke into passionate weeping, and only whispered when at last she lifted her face to his:

“Why ‘postponed’?�

“Because,� whispered Ella Sheldrick, with her cheek against her husband’s, “because you are not chained to your rock, my darling, with iron bars between you and the free fields of space, forged by the wife you love. You are free to give and take as many challenges as you desire. When you have finished ‘Aquila No. 4,’ that shall be built with a seat for a passenger beside you, run what risks you choose, brave as many dangers as seem good to you; I will not say one word, provided that I share the risk and brave the danger too.�

This is why the successful aviator Sheldrick never flies without a passenger. And the story has a moral—of a kind.