“But surely the astronomers—” I began.
“Pah!” he interrupted me. “What do you or the astronomers know about it? Shut up!”
Shut up, I did. He was evidently not in the mood for reasonable conversation. He also shut up, pursuing in silence thoughts I could not follow. At last he brusquely suggested returning to the hotel.
Next morning, when I met him in the breakfast-room, he was quite his old cheery self, and whatever resentment of his last night’s rudeness still rankled in me, vanished in the odd charm of his smile. He reminded me of my promise to spend the morning with him tinkering about his seaplane. I acquiesced, for two reasons. First, I had nothing else to do, and I still retained enough of the impress of my old flying days to be genuinely interested in looking over a machine. Secondly, Sylvia would be coming to it for her flight. An uneasy night had not brought me to any satisfying theory of her real attitude toward him.
It was a bright sunshiny morning as we left the hotel, but a southwest breeze ruffled the surface of the sea; and the white isolated clouds that drifted across the blue overhead were evidently the advance-guards of a mass yet invisible beyond the horizon. Within an hour or two the sky would almost certainly be overcast. For the moment it was fine, however, and I enjoyed the fresh clarity of the air as we walked down the pier together. At its extremity, on the leeward side of the steamer landing-stage, the seaplane rode the running waves like a great bird that had alighted with outspread wings, the water splashing and sucking against her floats as she jerked and slackened on her mooring-ropes.
We hauled in on them, clambered down into her. She was, as he explained to me, intended for a super-fighting-scout, with an immense radius, a great capacity for climb, and a second machine-gun. The space where this second machine-gun had been, just behind the pilot, was now filled with four seats, in pairs behind each other, for the passengers, and he had had her landing-wheels replaced by floats. The morning was still young—nine o’clock struck just as we got on board the machine; and for the next two hours we pottered about her, cleaning her powerful motor, tautening the wire stays to her wings, looking into a hundred and one technical details that would have no interest for anyone but the expert. I enjoyed myself, and Toby was almost pathetically delighted to have some one with him who could enter into his enthusiasms. He had, I could guess, been leading a very solitary life for a long while.
Apparently he almost lived on board her. All sorts of gear were stowed away in her. In one of the lockers I found quite a collection of books, including the Dante he had quoted, and a number of others of a distinctly mystical type—odd reading for a flying man. In another, close to the pilot’s seat, was a German automatic pistol.
“Souvenir of the great war, Daddy!” he smiled at me as I handled it.
“But do you know it’s loaded?” I objected disapprovingly.