CHAPTER XVIII
rude were the surroundings where Carmeau turned out some of the best monoplane pilots America will ever see. There were two rude shed-hangars in which they kept the three imported Blériots—a single-seat racer of the latest type, a Blériot XII. passenger-carrying machine with the seat under the plane, and "P'tite Marie," the school machine, which they usually kept throttled down to four hundred or five hundred, but in which Carmeau made such spirited flights as the one Carl had first witnessed. Back of the hangars was the workshop, which had little architecture, but much machinery. Here the pupils were building two Blériot-type machines, and trying to build an eight-cylinder V motor. All these things had Bagby given for the good of the game, expecting no profit in return. He was one of the real martyrs of aviation, this sapless, oldish man, never knowing the joy of the air, yet devoting a lifetime of ability to helping man sprout wings and become superman.
His generosity did not extend to living-quarters. Most of the students lived at the hangars and dined on Hamburg sandwiches, fried eggs, and Mexican enchiladas, served at a lunch-wagon anchored near the field. That lunch-wagon was their club. Here, squatted on high stools, treating one another to ginger-ale, they argued over torque and angles of incidence and monoplanes vs. biplanes. Except for two unpopular aristocrats who found boarding-houses in San Mateo, they slept in the hangars, in their overalls, sprawled on mattresses covered with horse-blankets. It was bed at eight-thirty. At four or five Carmeau would crawl out, scratch his beard, start a motor, and set every neighborhood dog howling. The students would gloomily clump over to the lunch-wagon for a ham-and-egg breakfast. The first flights began at dawn, if the day was clear. At eight, when the wind was coming up, they would be heard in the workshop, adjusting and readjusting, machining down bearings, testing wing strength, humming and laughing and busy; a life of gasoline and hammers and straining attempts to get balance exactly right; a happy life of good fellows and the achievements of machinery and preparation for daring the upper air; a life of very ordinary mechanics and of sheer romance!
It is a grievous heresy that aviation is most romantic when the aviator is portrayed as a young god of noble rank and a collar high and spotless, carelessly driving a transatlantic machine of perfect efficiency. The real romance is that a perfectly ordinary young man, the sort of young man who cleans your car at the garage, a prosaically real young man wearing overalls faded to a thin blue, splitting his infinitives, and frequently having for idol a bouncing ingénue, should, in a rickety structure of wood and percale, be able to soar miles in the air and fulfil the dream of all the creeping ages.
In English and American fiction there are now nearly as many aeroplanes as rapiers or roses. The fictional aviators are society amateurs, wearers of evening clothes, frequenters of The Club, journalists and civil engineers and lordlings and international agents and gentlemen detectives, who drawl, "Oh yes, I fly a bit—new sensation, y' know—tired of polo"; and immediately thereafter use the aeroplane to raid arsenals, rescue a maiden from robbers or a large ruby from its lawful but heathenish possessors, or prevent a Zeppelin from raiding the coast. But they never by any chance fly these machines before gum-chewing thousands for hire. In England they absolutely must motor from The Club to the flying-field in a "powerful Rolls-Royce car." The British aviators of fiction are usually from Oxford and Eton. They are splendidly languid and modest and smartly dressed in society, but when they condescend to an adventure or to a coincidence, they are very devils, six feet of steel and sinew, boys of the bulldog breed with a strong trace of humming-bird. Like their English kindred, the Americans take up aviation only for gentlemanly sport. And they do go about rescuing things. Nothing is safe from their rescuing. But they do not have Rolls-Royce cars.
Carl and his class at Bagby's were not of this gilded race. Carl's flying was as sordidly real as laying brick for a one-story laundry in a mill-town. Therefore, being real, it was romantic and miraculous.
Among Carl's class was Hank Odell, the senior student, tall, thin, hopelessly plain of face; a drawling, rough-haired, eagle-nosed Yankee, who grinned shyly and whose Adam's apple worked slowly up and down when you spoke to him; an unimaginative lover of dogs and machinery; the descendant of Lexington and Gettysburg and a flinty Vermont farm; an ex-fireman, ex-sergeant of the army, and ex-teamster. He always wore a khaki shirt—the wrinkles of which caught the grease in black lines, like veins—with black trousers, blunt-toed shoes, and a pipe, the most important part of his costume.