Wyndham Smith

by S. Fowler Wright

  When the tempest parted for a moment, it showed a pale sun high in the sky, and clouds that raced across it at a fantastic speed. It was not a sufficient glimpse to enable them to judge the direction in which they flew, but it showed them that they were going the way of the wind, which was contrary to what they had supposed.

  “I understood,” Wyndham said, “from something Pilwin let out, that there would most probably be a great wind from the north. If that be so, we are going in the right direction now.”

  “It may be only because the plane has been blown off its course, the wind being too strong to face. But are you sure you are right? By the way the sleet falls behind, I should have said we were flying dead into the wind.”

  “I should say that is because we are leaving the wind behind. We are flying faster than it.”

  So it was. Whether it had no strength to outface the gale, or because they were both of the same mind, the plane flew the wind’s way, and had put on its utmost speed, as though in haste to reach the safety of solid ground before more turmoil should vex the air.

  There was no change for the next hour, except that once they had a glimpse, at no great distance beneath, of a most turbulent sea. They could not guess whether they had come so low by the plane’s choice, or whether it were being forced down by the elemental violence through which it flew. They took what comfort they could from the thought that, had they continued eastward, land would have been a more likely sight.

  After that the plane, no less sensitive to nearness of water or land than if its controls had been subject to the caprices of human hands, soared upward to such a height that they were surrounded by blinding snow. There was no change of temperature in the cabin, but they saw wings and body steam as the ice which had been swiftly forming upon them was melted away.

  “I had heard that they used to be fitted with this device,” Wyndham said, “though I supposed that it would have been given up, not being required in our day. The upper surfaces heat themselves if the ice form. I suppose we steam overhead in the same way.”

  “I know little about these planes. If we are heading for Taormina, how soon shall we be due?”

  “In about two hours, by a schedule that I saw at the landing ground. Mount Ida, would, of course, be a longer flight. But in this storm? We might either have been blown out of our course, or helped by a following wind so that we should be sooner there.”

  So they might. They could only wait the event, not knowing the destination which they struggled to reach, nor how far the plane might be equal to the conditions through which it flew. Indeed, as the gale increased to hurricane violence, striving and buffeting the great bird in whose head they still lay till it seemed a miracle that it did not tear off those wide-beating wings, they could not even guess whether they were in exceptional storm, or whether such experiences had been the routine of those who flew in the heavens of ancient days.

  They could only comfort themselves with the vague knowledge that the plane was so constructed that it would become aware of, and turn away from, any threatening contact of land or water, except only at the landing-places it knew, to any of which, when it should near them, it would be magnetically drawn in such a way that under peaceful skies, its landing would have been safe and sure.

  And the time of waiting was not long, for, a full hour before, by Wyndham’s reckoning, they should have been over the Sicilian coast, they became aware that the plane was no longer content to go, more or less, by the way that the tempest drove.

  It beat up into the wind, heeling over as it did so until it seemed that one lifted wing pointed to heaven and one earthward into the black abyss of the storm. But even then its head remained little inclined, and in the end it came round with broad wings lying upon the wind.

  But if it had intended to plane downward against the strength of the gale, it was a miscalculation of its mechanism which must be changed for a more strenuous descent. It must fight with hard-beating wings for every yard of its downward course, that the hurricane should not sweep it away, until, beneath the barrier of a mountain height that was yet not visible in the storm, it came to a lesser rage of what was still no less than a shrieking gale. Steadily it came to rest on a level place.

  The day was still far from spent, but they could see nothing of where they were through that blackness of beating storm. It would have been folly to venture out, even had they been free from the vague terror of Pilwin’s threat.

  As it was, they barred the only entrance to the interior of the plane, which was at the rear of the main cabin, and waited with what patience they could for the coming of clearer skies.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Wyndham waked to look up to a blue sky, and a risen sun.

  He thought, “Though we die, as it is most likely we shall—and sure at last—in a painful way, we can have no envy for those who have gone to death by a duller road.

  Yet he had hope, even that it might not be till a distant day, as he saw that the storm had fallen to nothing more than a strong wind from the north, which swept through an empty sky; and this rose the more when he saw Mount Etna’s long snow-topped crest—which he knew from pictures the librarian had brought out, at which he had glanced while he had affected a greater interest in Mount Ida, and other places—looking as though it were no great distance away.

  He saw that the plane had been true to the direction that it received, and if Pilwin had baited some cunning trap on the assumption that it would be Mount Ida to which they would take their flight, it might be hoped that it would end in nothing worse than the snapping of empty jaws.

  He guessed correctly that, through whatever cause, these automata of the skies did not fly from one station to another by direct routes, but along the lines of invisible rectangles of the air. Their course must have been north-easterly until they had approached the great barrier of the Alps, and then turned southeastward along the course of the Rhone valley, at the time when the mercy of circumstance had brought the full force of the storm upon them from the northwestern quarter.

  With the wind’s buffeting help they had not merely arrived, but done the distance in one or two hours less than the scheduled time. Their greatest peril, the extremity of which he was unable to judge, had been when it had become necessary to resist the gale and reach the landing-ground in defiance of its furious strength. But the event had proved that these automata had been designed with sufficient subtlety and resource to overcome the caprices of weather which had for so long been banished from peaceful skies.

  The thought led him to ponder whether there might not be further use for so efficient a servant. He supposed that this place where it had settled would be provided with reservoirs of fuel and oil from which it would replenish itself, if he should give it the signal to set out on another flight. But he put the idea aside, except for a final extremity. If they should find climatic or other conditions impossible here, or if it should become necessary to flee the nameless terror which still threatened Vinetta’s life, it might become wise to fly to a distant place.

  But he saw that, two only as they now were in an empty world, they must not seek to find adventures of land or air, but in every way to avoid danger, to play for safety at every point. There would be enough of unavoidable hazard, of difficult chance, that would come to them. It was their part to conserve their own lives until their children should reach sufficient age to be independent of them—and life, so lived, might become very dear, very delightful, in quiet, laborious days—only supposing that Pilwin’s words should prove to have been no more than a baseless threat, or to have told of an arrow that missed its mark.

  But though the plane might have taken its last flight, and be destined never again to spread its now indrawn wings in the lawless skies, he saw that it might be put to another use.

  It would give them shelter, though it would not maintain the equable heat in the living-cabin which had rendered them indifferent to the icy heights through which they had flown. That had been derived from th
e heat generated in its flight. But it would still be a protection from cold wind or the blaze of a too ardent sun. So he thought, striving to make imagination supply that which experience was unable to yield.

  There was security, too, of a kind, in its metal walls, strong though light, and its bolted door. If he only knew the danger from which he must guard her who had become so finally irreplaceable, so inexpressibly dear!

  The thought drew his eyes to Vinetta, awakened now and coming into the main cabin.

  “It seems queer,” she said, “to be able to sleep at what hours we will, and to eat in the same way.”

  She looked round as she spoke. More quickly even than Wyndham had done, she recognized the contour of Etna against the sky. “It seems, she said, “that we have come to the right place. We have won the first bout, if no more. But where is the mist? At this time of year, I had heard that you can’t see ten yards, even at noon.”

  “I suppose the tempest swept it away.”

  “So you said it would. You were right about that. I wonder what the orchards look like. Isn’t it true that the oranges grow in the misty months, and when the sun comes they are soon ready to pick?”

  “Yes. So I was told. An orchard must be a strange sight. It is hard to imagine thousands of trees with growing fruit on them in no order at all. I believe all the millenniums of cultivation haven’t succeeded in making it grow in regular rows, or equally on all branches, as you would think that it would. Of course, the leaves in the hothouses were in the same mess.”

  “Well, we can see them when we have fed. They can’t be very far from here. And it’s too early in the season for the automata to be coming picking the fruit, even if they will still go on doing it from now on.”

  “We mustn’t go far from here. We shall have to leave everything that we can’t carry about; and I thought we could use this as a house. It’s a safer one than we should be able to make for ourselves, and, if we don’t start it again, it will stay here for ever.”

  She considered this with a doubtful frown. “We should have to promise each other that we’d come in and out at the same time. I don’t mind, if we do that.”

  He thought her reception of his idea cold, and her condition fantastic. “I don’t see,” he replied, “why we need trouble about that. It can’t move, if we don’t start it again. Why worry as though we thought it might?”

  “Well, I should. And suppose it did? It might carry one of us away where we should never get back or, if we did, after years, we should and the other had wandered off, looking for us.”

  Put thus, it was not a pleasant idea, and so, seeing the gravity of her eyes, he assented to a proposal which, in any event, might not have been far from what would have occurred; for neither of them was likely to go far from the other’s sight, being alone together as they were, and she under a menace which, as they could not tell what it was, must still walk beside them, a constant, indestructible fear.

  After that, being in full accord, and with a pleasant sense of exhilaration at the novelty of the coming days vanquishing colder fears, they ate together—an anarchistic novelty in itself—and decided to leave the plane and set out to explore the land which was to be theirs in the coming years.

  What was there to fear, though they should leave all their possessions in the plane, and be away till the twilight came? They had not been used to entertain the dreads, or to take the precautions, which had been normal in lawless times. The idea of theft, its use or occasion, had left the world. Fears of savage men or wild beasts had been equally obsolete for many generations past. They had been taught to believe that beasts of prey, and most others, had been cleared from the whole face of the earth. Certainly, if any remained, it had become a matter for the automata, not for them. The age when men had sought the wilderness that they might find beasts there, and kill them in dirty, dangerous ways, had been succeeded by saner ideals and cleaner customs. And now, even the harmless fellow-beings among whom they had grown up had elected to leave the world. They were alone on an empty earth.

  It was true that some of the automata might still be—indeed, almost certainly were—pursuing their daily tasks, indifferent to the fact that their masters controlled no more. There must be respect for them. There might be need to keep out of their way. But, intricately and inter-dependently though they were made, and much as they could do without immediate direction or supervision, it was yet only in pre-designed repetitional ways. None of them—if there were any here, of which there was no sign—would attack the plane. They would not even know that it would be there.

  The sun shone, though the sky was streaked in places with flying cloud. It shone on a peaceful scene, not suggesting fear. They stepped out to feel at once its warmth, and a wind that was chill to them. They had not thought until now of clothes as a protection from cold. The single garment and the flexible sandals they wore had been nothing more than a conventional mode, part of the negative reticence to which existence had sunk; but they saw now that there would be more urgent considerations to replace those which had died with yesterday’s funeral pyres.

  “If we climb, Wyndham said, “to the highest point we can find, we shall see what the land is like, and decide where it will be best to explore. Besides, as the day will grow in heat, we cannot tell how much we shall be going up to a cooler place, and coming down again as the heat declines.” He attached great importance to that, interpreting a fact which he had been told without the qualifications which it required.

  Vinetta assented willingly. Theorising, perhaps reasoning, less than he, she was alert to circumstance, waiting to learn quickly by the event, willing for him to decide whenever her own instincts were still. And as they climbed easily upward by ancient, half-crumbled paths which had been made before history was, to tame the precipitous hills, their gymnasium-trained bodies making no difficulty of the steep ascent, it seemed that Wyndham’s reason might have been good, for they took a side which avoided the northern wind, and yet did not protect them from the heat of the mounting sun. Had they been used to variations of temperature, there would have been little cause for anything less than satisfaction in that. For Sicily, as it had been in the ancient days, it was no more than a sunny noon of the middle spring, but when Wyndham said, “If we find it beyond endurance, we may have to fly to another place,” she thought it a sensible word.

  As the climb began, they passed barren, broken slopes and craggy hollows which had been luxuriantly fertile in ancient days, but now, having been regarded by the automata as too irregular for cultivation—they having more of flatter, richer land than the satisfaction of their masters’ demands required—had been drenched, as had more level stretches of stony ground, with a liquid potent to destroy not only plant, but all insect or other life that the soil contained. Now it lay barren and brown to the scorching sun. No errant seeds could be blown from it by any wind to the detriment of the vineyards and orange and citron groves that flourished in the inland valleys

  Yet, as they rose, they observed numerous signs that, in these places of permitted cultivation at least, the suppression of promiscuous life had not been as absolute as they had been taught to believe. They came to a jutting angle of rock where they could not only look out to a width of sea, with the opposite Italian coast receding eastward beyond their sight, but down on a land-locked cove with a strip of white-shining sand, where a colony of herring-gulls screamed and flew, looking from above as though they flew low, skimming the sea.

  More portentous, and more alarming to those to whom it was so unaccustomed a sight, a golden eagle, with a stretch of wings that seemed enormous to those who looked up, passed over their heads, and then came again, lower, nearer, having no appearance of fearing men, but rather as considering whether they were fit to be meat to him, or perhaps warning them to climb no nearer to where he made his dwelling above the clouds.

  At the third swoop he came so near that Wyndham struck at him with the sword that was already bare in his hand. He thought to hack at a wing
which aimed a buffet at him, but the great bird shunned the blow with an ease of rapid motion which showed how delusive was the seeming laziness of these slow-beating pinions.

  After that, he kept at a greater distance, and after a time, when they turned to another path, lost interest in them, and disappeared over the mountain-top.

  The gulls might thrive on that which the sea gave, until, if ever, the posthumous devisings of Pilwin-C6P should take it away, but on what could the eagles feed? It was a question which might have been more puzzling to those with more knowledge of the habits of such birds than either Wyndham or Vinetta had, but it was answered in the next hour.

  Climbing higher, they came to grassy hollows among the rocks which the automata had not reached to destroy. Under the temperate mist which had covered the whole Mediterranean basin during the last six months, above which the sun had moved like a dim, white shield, the grass had grown to a vivid green such as that land had seldom known in its natural climatic conditions. Crocus and asphodel flowered, which might have descended from those which bent to Ulysses’s feet.

  They looked round and down on as fair a scene as the earth can show, with many mountains behind, and beneath the intense blue sea, and on the right Etna’s long, snow-sided, serrated edge, with its plume of smoke that trailed away on the wind. They looked with eyes from which the influence of the deadening drug which had wrecked their race had been cleared away, aware once more of beauty and sorrow, of joy and pain, and of the wisdom of God when he paused on the seventh day to observe that the earth was good.

  Going upward still, they came to a cave that had been there perhaps for ten thousand years, during which it had more than once been lost and found and opened again, and yet, for all its age, was not the work of nature, but of human hands.