“Beautiful, wonderful, holy—my lover, whom I love!”
He was suddenly aware of a great rush of wind and of the delirious, gripping sensation of falling. Drunk with her voice and beauty, he had forgotten warping-wheel, rudder-bar, elevator-yoke, everything. The cutting air roused him; frantically he threw the elevator down, drawing her head backward before the yoke to his breast. The great bird shuddered, and swung dizzily to one side. He remembered that she was blocking the rudder-bar; painfully, ineffectually, as in a dream, he warped down the lower wing, biting his lips in an agony of helplessness.
“Why struggle further? You have attained—you have attained!” he heard her siren’s voice chanting in his ears; her lithe arms sprang to meet each other about his neck. “Kiss me—kiss me, Spirit!” she cried, with her icy cheek pressed to his. “I am height!”
He threw her off.
“No,” he shouted, struggling to keep his eyes open and his hands on the wheel, “you are mad—we are both mad! Don’t you understand? This is death!”
“Kiss me!” she repeated in her voice of ice and silver. “How wonderful is this death! Where are your arms, Spirit? Am I not beautiful? Look at me!”
Her breath enveloped him, numbing him, filling him with a Lethean languor; but still, with all the strength of his instinct and training, he struggled to bring the machine back under his command. Despite her presence, he managed to get his feet on the rudder-bar. They whirled downward, listing so far that he felt the grip of the straps that bound him to his seat. He worked the controls, holding her away from him with elbows and knees. They dashed into a blinding mist, beginning to circle at last, and he threw all his remaining power into a desperate attempt to warp the wings back into equilibrium. At the same time he forced the rudder-bar over to turn the machine in the direction away from the lowered side.
The great bird righted, and began to swoop as lightly as a descending gull. He cut out the engine. “There!” he bellowed, crazy with triumph and with the sudden increase of oxygen in his starved lungs. “I’ve saved you despite yourself! Your idea was all very romantic—” His head whirled again as she lifted herself in his arms.
“You were afraid,” she whispered, catching his face to her breast—“afraid! Your fear was greater than your love—of me!”
“You don’t understand; you don’t—this is how—I am afraid!” he concluded in a sudden deathlike abandon; and lifted his arms from the wheel to hold her to him. He felt the ineffable, keen sweetness of her lips on his. Then consciousness went like a blown-out candle. The perfectly balanced monoplane continued its slow, even swoop toward the earth.