“We’ll stay with it—with the air, dear—until—until the—the last crash!”
He gathered her up and folded her in his arms.
V.
As Jennie had said, her emotions, touching Billy Cobb and the air, were conflicting and contradictory. Yet they were not difficult to render into logic.
This girl who had breathed the atmosphere of the airdrome all her life must inevitably have done one of two things; either grown to hate and fear the element that exacted mortal toll of its servants or grown to worship it. And she had done the latter. For she had the intellectual stability to perceive that if men were killed by the air it was because of their own unworthiness, the imperfections of themselves and of their implements of flight, not because of any inherent malignity in the air. And she foresaw with clear conviction the coming of a day when toll would no longer be exacted, when man’s mastery of the air would be at least as secure and complete as his domination of the sea and the land. So she did not hate the air. For she knew it a reluctant and involuntary killer, asking nothing better than to abandon its rôle of murderous tyrant and assume the benevolent part of the willing and faithful jinni.
Instead of hating the air she regarded it, therefore, as a deity more sinned against than sinning. And it was natural that, in Jennie’s eyes, the early airfarers, the men who offered their lives to the cause of air conquest, should be glorified. She invested them with the romantic glamour that is the meed of the pioneer in every fresh field of hardship and hazard. She set them above other men. In fact, she considered the existence of other men scarcely at all. And when they did cross her thoughts she saw them simply as an alien race of animated lay figures that did not live on airdromes. She could not conceive of a complete, satisfactory and thoroughly real man who should be anything but a flyer.
It was inevitable, therefore, that her choice for the man of men should fall on a flyer. And it was impossible that the man who won her favor should hold the precious gift unless he kept faith with the air—as Billy Cobb would have phrased it—to the last crash. For she could respect none but the men of the air, the only men she knew and understood. And there is more depends upon respect in love than many folk suppose.
On the other hand, Jennie was a woman. She was a very complete and thoroughgoing woman. And she had her full share of the woman’s primitive maternal instinct, which is the protecting and sheltering instinct. The primitive-woman part of Jennie was a quite distinct part. It was not a reasoning component. It was emotional solely and concerned with the fundamental realities, not with intellectual ideals.
The intellectual, idealistic part of Jennie Brent loved Billy Cobb the flyer, the pioneer, the potential martyr for a cause. But the instinctive-woman part loved Billy Cobb the man. And the maternal urge, the sheltering element in Jennie the primal woman demanded the protection of Billy the man regardless of ideals and abstract traditions. It revolted violently at the grisly vision of his crushed and battered body lying some day in a crazy pyramid of wreckage.
Which explains convincingly enough why Jennie Brent was at the same time afraid to trust her lover to the air and fearful of winning him from it. But this much, as she told Billy, was evident to her. Whether he flew or not the woman of her would always love him. While, if he turned traitor to the air, shed the romance of his calling, and became one with the animated lay figures who lived outside the airdrome, the intellectual ideal-worshiping part of her could no longer love him—even though his renunciation of the air were for her sake only.