“Yes,” he replied. “I shoot sea-gulls with it sometimes—chase ’em in the air. It’s great sport.”
I shrugged my shoulders. Chasing seagulls with a pistol was just one of those mad things I could well imagine Toby doing.
We gave her a dose of oil, filled up her petrol-tank—one of her original pair had been removed to make space for the passengers, but she still had a five-hundred-mile radius, he told me—and looked round for something else to do.
“Would you like to take her up and see how she climbs?” he invited me.
“No, thanks!” I replied hurriedly, uncomfortable in a sudden embarrassment. I had, thanks to the Armistice, managed to conceal my humiliating loss of nerve from the other fellows. “I’ve given up flying.”
His queer eyes rested upon me for a penetrating glance, and I felt pretty sure that he guessed. But he made no comment.
“All right,” he said. “I expect Miss Bryant will be along presently. We’ll sit here and wait for her.”
We ensconced ourselves in the passengers’ seats and sat there smoking our pipes. The mention of Miss Bryant’s name seemed to have killed conversation between us. We sat in a silence that I, at least, felt to be subtly awkward. The intimacy of the morning was destroyed. Each of us withdrew into himself, each perhaps preoccupied with the same problem. Once, certainly, I caught his glance hostile upon me.
As I had expected, heavy clouds had come up from the southwest, and the sky was now almost completely overcast. But immediately overhead there was still a clear patch where, through a wide rift in the gray wrack, one looked into the infinite blue. Leaning back in his seat, he stared up at it with eyes that were dreamy in a peculiar fixity of expression.