“I mustn’t blame you, Billy,” she had whispered at last; “it’s because I was so selfish. I wanted you all for myself. It’s my fault, dear. But, oh, I am sorry. And you will suffer for it more than I, I know. I should think you’d hate me.”
He had turned away and brushed a sleeve across his eyes at that.
Weyman allowed him a scant half hour with her each day, and he had chosen the time just before sundown, between five and six, when his crew of mechanics were at evening mess and there was a lull in the work at the XT’s hangar.
He would tiptoe into the room, in the failing light. She would smile her wistful greeting. He would sit beside the bed and lift her hand—which she could no longer raise herself—and hold it tight. Every day that hand grew more woefully thin, lighter, more transparent. And thinking of it at night, as he lay wide-eyed, Billy would grit his teeth in agony and groan softly, so as not to waken Norris, until the brief respite of sleep, which did not always come, stilled his misery.
During these days the voice of an airplane was sheer torture. It would break on his ears, a poignant reminder of the only two things he had cared for in life, the air and Jennie. And now he feared and had renounced the first; and the second was being swept away from him, under his eyes.
Once he had tried to vision what the world would be like with Jennie gone and the air denied him by his fear—for he scarcely doubted now that Jennie was doomed, and his present terror was too great to admit the supposition of a return to the air. He had revolted with a shudder from the bleakness of the prospect. He had a feeling that existence could not persist in the empty void of the barren future his brain conjured. His world must end with the passing of Jennie. He could perceive nothing beyond but interminable reaches of hopelessness.
Another thing added to the maze of troubles and questionings that enmeshed him. It was paradoxical, unbelievable, but he had discovered, now that the air was put from him definitely and for all time, that he wanted to fly again! Explain this as you will, it was so. And Cobb was by no means the first nerve-broken pilot to know that strange contradiction of desire for the thing feared. Not a few of the men but all of the men whom the air has broken have carried, or are carrying, that same fierce longing for the blue remotenesses on with them to their graves. In some the longing has waxed, at length, even greater than their fear and they have returned. They are the happy ones. For in those whose fear has proven the stronger urge the suffering bred of conflict between their fear and their desire has been intense. It was so with Billy Cobb. He suffered intensely.
So, haggard and drawn, dead for lack of sleep, worked to exhaustion, a prey to grief and to this strange mingling of fear and desire, he wore along hopelessly, watching Jennie burning lower and lower, through the heat of early September.
On the ninth the XT-6 was ready to the last safety wire. He told Norris, who was expecting it.
“Check!” agreed his friend. “God willing, I shall open a bottle of forbidden nectar at Cristobal, or vicinity on the eleventh. We hop tomorrow at four o’clock. Have the valet pack my toothbrush in the morning, Bill.”