He saluted her and said, speaking thickly:
"It is necessary that I have a word with you. Walk with me for one moment. I shall not keep you more!"
He bulked huge in his rig-out, but looked thoroughly at home, and deadly workmanlike. He pushed up his goggles as though conscious that they discounted his personal attractions, and his blue eyes were stony and glittering, and his full mouth showed pale and hard-set under the scarlet roll of his moustache.
"I shall not see you again to-day, and I have something important to tell you." He spoke rapidly and his breathing was harsh and loud. "I have been recalled by my Chiefs and return to Germany in—another two or three days. That we do not meet again before I leave is possible, therefore I wish to give you my address."
She did not look up. A white hand with red hairs growing thick on the back of it offered her a pencilled card. She made no movement to take it. He said, thrusting the card underneath her eyes:
"It is printed here in German letters. You read and speak my language badly, so I will translate for you—'Squadron-Captain-Pilot Count Theodor von Herrnung, Imperial Field Flying Service, Flight Station XXX., Taubefeld, near Diebrich, West Hessen, Germany.' Write your letter to me in English. The address copy from this. Will you not take the card?"
"There is no need to. I do not mean to write to you!"
"Danke. You are candid," he said, "at least. You give me to understand that whatever happens—" he repeated the words with a singular inflection "whatever happens!—you will have no more to do with me?"
"Have I not told you so twice already?"
He gritted his teeth and said, controlling furious anger:
"Erklären Sie! Was giebt es? Why are you so—rottenly furious with me? You have yourself to thank for—what has happened! You led me on. You made me crazy about you. And the devil of it is I am so still! The sight of you maddens me! Listen! Do not be stupid—unkind to yourself and to me! In three days from now, you will get an envelope at your Club with plenty of money. Join me at my headquarters at Taubefeld and then—you will see! We will be happy—you shall have plenty of money to throw about when we visit Berlin and other big cities, and jewels, dresses, pleasure, admiration—everything a beautiful woman wants! Grosse Gott! Can I offer anything more tempting? What are you saying? 'Yes!' or 'No!'"
Her narrowed eyes looked like long black slits in her white face. The pale lips barely moved to answer:
"Neither! Are you proposing to marry me?"
He laughed woodenly, and repeated:
"Marry you! Ha, ha! What verdammt nonsense are you talking? What has love to do with getting married? Nothing that I have ever heard! Of course I shall marry—my family have arranged all that for me. But my Countess will not interfere with my mistress—that I promise you! Come, be kind, my beautiful Isis! Whisper now that you agree!"
He bent his head to hear. The whisper came from the pale lips:
"I will see you in Hell first!"
He started, taken aback. Her own utterance had shocked her. "Am I a street-walker already," she asked herself, "that I begin to curse and swear?"
A whistle trilled. He started and said:
"So then, all is over between us?"
She bent her head assentingly, and her glance fell guiltily on Bawne who was standing near. Von Herrnung, aware of him at the same instant, turned on him with a scowl and the harsh demand:
"What is this? Do little English boys pry and listen?"
Bawne returned, looking at the other squarely:
"Beg pardon, but Mr. Sherbrand's calling you. He says it's getting jolly late."
"So!" Von Herrnung glanced at his wrist-watch, in the act lifting the brown leather satchel into fullest view. The boy queried with open-eyed innocent curiosity:
"Shall I carry that? Are you going to take it with you?"
"Es mag wohl sein," von Herrnung answered. Then he clicked his heels and bowed formally, and kissed Patrine's cold and heavy hand. She felt his teeth grit as he did it. She knew he was swearing in his way.
"Adieu, then," he said, smiling at her maliciously. "Will you not wish me Angenehme Reise?"
"Certainly. A pleasant voyage, and a safe landing!" Her eyes fell on Bawne's little, oddly garbed figure and her woman's heart spoke in spite of her. "Take care of my dearest!" broke from her, and von Herrnung answered:
"He is your dearest? Ah yes! I will certainly take very good care of him!"
He bowed, wheeled about and walked from her with his long strides, and the boy, with a face all flushed and quivering, suddenly jumped at her neck and hugged her; bringing with the rough little embrace the queer scent of water-proofed material and dubbined leather, knocking the silver-spangled hat awry, loosening divers tortoiseshell hairpins and an amethyst slide-buckle holding up the heavy tresses of the dead beech-leaf coloured hair, as he whispered:
"Remember I love you, Pat. Don't mind!"
And she shuddered as he freed her, and ran from her, asking herself: How much had the child overheard of von Herrnung's proposal? What had he comprehended of what he had heard?
Next, she was aware of the pleasant voice of Sherbrand calling, and saw von Herrnung imperiously beckoning. A cold sickness of dread assailed her, and her knees trembled underneath her weight. A mechanic came running past, carrying away the chair Davis had brought her. He set it down at a safe distance from the aëroplane, and she staggered to it, leaning on the long staff of her sunshade, and sat heavily down, feeling chilly and old....
Saxham had squeezed Bawne's shoulder and kissed him, and then withdrawn to a distance whence he could see all that took place. He watched Davis and Sherbrand help the boy into the forward cockpit, and fasten about him the safety belt attached to the fuselage on either side of the fixed bamboo seat.
"You are sure you really want to fly again? Mind, I believe you're as safe with him as houses, but if you don't want to go, say the word, and you shan't!"
Sherbrand whispered the words as he busied himself with the boy. And Bawne set his small teeth and squared his sturdy boyish shoulders, registering an unspoken vow to go in spite of all....
One had been told to drop a word to Sherbrand if one found oneself in a tight place. But could one ever hold up one's head again before the Patrol, if one did this? To share one's Mission with another when the Chief had said "I'd rather you'd carry through on your own" wasn't to be thought of. Mother—he swallowed hard at the thought of her—would say so too.
It troubled his faithful little soul that he could no longer see von Herrnung. He heard him talking in his guttural English, to Davis, whom Bawne could not see either—as he stood near the nose of the machine, in readiness to start the tractor—any more than the two mechanics who steadied the Bird, pressing each a toe on the axle of the under-carriage as they held on to a steel rod that ran along under the rearward edges of her single plane.
His final directions sharply given, von Herrnung stepped up on the under-carriage, threw a long leg over the bulwark of the fuselage, and stepped into the pilot's pit. Bawne screwed his head round and saw, through and over a low talc wind-shield, the upright torso of the German, big, hard, and indomitable, the leather satchel still gripped in his strapped-up left hand.
"Are you going to take that leather case along with you?" Sherbrand's voice had a note of surprise in it. "You'll find it a handicap, let me say. You can't sit on it or lean against it, and if you tried to put it under you, you'd find it dead-certain to foul the controls."
To Sherbrand's voice, von Herrnung's answered harshly and rather angrily:
"Surely I shall be able to carry this? It is nott-thing but a folding camera, with a telephoto lens made especially for Survey and Reconnaissance. There is still a good light. If I fly with the sun behind me, I shall be able to take quite a panorama of London North-West. It is not forbidden—no? Your Government would not object?"
"I don't suppose my Government would care a little hang!" Sherbrand's voice answered. "But—this isn't one of your German Army Albatros's or Kondors, and I don't see where you're to stow your camera, unless in the observer's pit. Of course the hovering installation takes up a lot of room, and I can't possibly risk your hampering the controls."
"Ganz recht! Very good!" came von Herrnung's voice, giving in with simulated heartiness. In another moment his long legs, followed by his great body, came scrambling into the forward cockpit, and his hands busied themselves about the stout belt of pig-leather that secured the boy in the observer's seat.
"Look here, my fellow! You will take care of this for me? See, I have passed the belt-strap through the handle. Do not touch it!" The guttural whisper had menace in it. "I shall be sure to know if you touch it, or try to unbuckle the strap."
"What's up?" Sherbrand's head and shoulders came thrusting over the other side of the cockpit. "Why did you unstrap him?" he demanded brusquely of von Herrnung. "Don't you know that he is my friend's son, and that it is my business to see to this?" Sherbrand's hand felt over Bawne's belts and bucklings before his head and shoulders vanished. Then von Herrnung's big body withdrew itself. His voice, sounding from the pilot's pit on the other side of the low wind-shield, gave a peremptory order, and the tractor began slowly to revolve. An instant later, with a blinding flash, it began to roar and whizz round furiously. The Bird, freed from the hands that detained her, leaped forwards, hurtling over the smooth turf at the speed of a racing motor-car. The smooth floor of the cockpit unexpectedly tilted up, and a rough cold wind buffeted Bawne about the head and shoulders, sent eddies down about his dangling feet, bellowed in his covered ears and made him gasp for breath. Then—houses and people, trees, and hangars fell suddenly away, and he knew that the Bird was rushing upwards at the bidding of its "Gnome" motor—long superseded now, but then the latest marvel in aërial engineering—towards the blue sky with its lines of gilt mackerel clouds. On each side of the roaring, flashing whirl that meant the tractor, spread North Middlesex, with its fields fast diminishing to the size of billiard tables. That patch no bigger than a garden-lawn, with a row of wooden things like dog-kennels and chicken-coops, must be—Bawne knew that it was—the aërodrome. Deafened by the noise and a little sick, for the roaring, striving, hurtling Thing in whose body he sat fastened, stank horribly of castor oil, and seemed to agonise and call on Bawne to suffer with it—he looked up and took courage from the warm, blue, beautiful, cheerful sky.
He was quitting himself like a man. Nobody could say otherwise. How high, how much higher was the Bird going to climb?