Roseye, seeing my bus, thought I was flying it, but as she circled gracefully down she realised at last that it was Eastwell, and both machines, after making several fine circuits of the aerodrome, came to earth almost at the same moment.
I had been watching Roseye. For a woman, she was certainly a most intrepid flyer. Crossing to her, I glanced at her self-registering altimeter and saw that she had been up over eight thousand feet.
“I’ve been across to Dorking,” she laughed gaily, as she sprang out of her seat, raised her goggles and pulled off her heavy leather gloves. “I followed the railway from Dorking along to Guildford and met two men up from Farnborough. At Guildford I kept over the South Western line to Surbiton, and then steered back by compass.”
She also inquired how my stabiliser had worked, and I told her that Lionel had been trying it.
Later, Eastwell was full of most glowing praise of the new invention, after which I put my machine back into the hangar and, taking Roseye with me in my two-seater, deposited her at home in Cadogan Gardens in time for lunch.
Then, as was my habit, I went on to the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall, and, after my meal, sat in the window of the big smoking-room chatting with three of the boys—airmen all of them.
George Selwyn, a well-known expert on aircraft and editor of an aircraft journal, had been discussing an article in that morning’s paper on the future of the airship.
“I contend,” he said firmly, “that big airships are quite as necessary to us as they are to Germany. We should have ships of the Zeppelin and Schutte-Lanz class. The value of big airships as weapons of defence cannot be under-estimated. If we had big airships it is certain that Zeppelin raids—more of which are expected, it seems—would not be unopposed, and, further, we should be able to retaliate. We’ve got the men, but we haven’t got the airships—worse luck! The Invisible Hand of Germany has deceived us finely!”
“That’s so,” I chimed in. “The Germans can always soothe their own people by saying that, however dear food is and all that, yet they can’t be strafed from above—as we unfortunately are.”
“I quite agree,” declared Charlie Digby, a well-known pilot, and holder of a height-record. A tall, clean-shaven, clean-limbed fellow he was lying back in the deep leather armchair with his coffee at his side. “But is it not equally true that, if we had aeroplanes of the right construction and enough of them, we could give the night-raiders in Zeppelins a very uncomfortable time?”