Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 11
Of course, I wanted a minute, and much more than that, with her; but how were we to have it?
She had not assimilated, I thought, her realization of her situation. She left the table, as though she were free to walk off and I free to accompany her. I arose and followed. No one hindered; and I caught step with her at the end of the terrace where she led me upon a path under the trees.
Still no one interfered. The company of the table sided, I realized, with Sally Gessler rather than with Bane in regard to the brown head beside me. They would welcome a break between Bane and the girl to whom he had insisted that the army flier and the mail pilot merely had "fallen". None of them, who watched us from the table, cared to assume the personal responsibility of her further information; but none interposed between her and me.
She walked a little ahead of me on the narrow path with her head bent down; but she saw nothing on the ground, for she stumbled over a root. I snatched forward and caught her and held her trembling in my hands.
"He killed them; he killed them; he's been killing them!" she cried to me, as I turned her toward me.
"Yes," I said.
"All four?"
I knew whom she meant—our two pilots and the army man and the mail flyer.
"I haven't a doubt of it," I told her.
She twisted, tensely; not with any effort to escape me; it was a convulsive shudder which my hands helped her to control.
"This morning, just before I talked to you, he tried to kill you."
"Not me; Logan," I corrected her. "He'd just smashed Logan down."
"I see that's what you meant; that's what you were talking about."
"Yes."
"How did he do it? How?"
I saw in her grey eyes and I felt in her, under my hands, that she knew now; she knew; but she had to have me tell her, too.
"The automatic airplane," I said. "Surely you've seen it."
"Seen it? Of course, I have. He was perfecting it to give to the government, he told me." She repeated, hollowly, "he told me. He put me in the seat; he runs it under a figure of me."
"Yes," I said.
"You've seen it, then? I mean, the figure of me."
"I've seen the figure of you. Logan, you understand, at first thought it was you who smashed him down."
The grey eyes gazed into mine but no longer followed my thought; "He made it," she said to me. "He made it of me, himself, of wax and wood. He's a sort of an artist, you see." And my hands became helpless to quiet her quivering.
"He's been using it—me—to kill four men."
I only held her firmly.
"Why? What's he doing? What's he—planning?" She gasped at me; and I saw, with her word, that fear of far more than the terror already told, had come to her. "Why has he killed them? Why?"
"He told us this morning," I said. "He told Logan and me part of his plan and the reason he does these things. I don't know whether it's true, whether it's the real reason. But this is what he said. When he was a child, his father was murdered and the murderers were tried and freed—with cheers. His mother brought him up; he was devoted to her, adored her. She was killed by a man, who already had done murder and had been sentenced to imprisonment for life but was freed by a governor to do a politician a political favor. After the murder of his mother by this man, the governor who pardoned him was re-elected by a big majority. Bane said he stood with them when they were cheering the re-election on the street. It made him 'completely sane', he said; mad, of course, he means. What he told me would explain him, if it's true. I don't know anything at all as to whether it's true."
"I do!"
"What?"
"It's true. Oh, it's true; it's true!"
She wrenched from me, fought off my hands again and stared past me down at the terrace and the table which Bane and she and I had deserted. Another place was empty; four altogether, I counted. The fourth was her father's.
"Father," she said, strangely whispering. "Where's he gone?"
"I don't know."
"Father," she repeated and again said, "father," before she succeeded in telling me, "father was that politician."
"What politician?"
"For whom the governor did the favor."
"What?"
"That's it, I tell you. That man—that murderer—once delivered votes for father; so the governor freed him. He killed again; and father supported the governor for re-election, too."
We stood silent, side by side, in the little wood. Silence with its trivial sounds, is what I remember for that moment when my mind tried to take in, all at once, what she had told me, and, unable to, left me listening to the cheep of birds and the echo of an airplane motor from across the lake. Whose? I wondered with total inconsequence.
What drummed in my brain was that this light, lovely girl was trapped in this business of Bane with which she, herself, had had no direct concern, until through her father it enmeshed and ensnared her far more hopelessly and helplessly than it held Pete and me. Her father's name ran familiarly to me; a politician, as she had said, in power in his party.
"Father heard of him at the time," she said to me. "It was in the papers, of course; for Harry had to be taken to a sanitarium on that election night. Father felt—terribly."
She stopped and struggled in the silence to think it out. "But he didn't feel to blame. I didn't feel him—to blame. Pardons are part of politics; they have to be; they're necessary; they're right—some of them anyway." Desperately she labored against her own honesty to be loyal to her father in his defense. "It seemed only a sort of frightful accident that happened to Harry Bane. We did everything we could for him. I used to go to the sanitarium to try to help him."
"Oh," I said. "That's where it began between him and you."
"That's where it began. He liked me; he begged me again and again to come. He seemed to depend on me; so I came very often. It seemed to help him. It seemed even to cure him."
"He was cured, you thought?"
"Yes; he was cured—we thought. The sanitarium people said so. They dismissed him. Then he wanted to marry me."
"Oh."
"When I couldn't, he thought it was because I didn't believe he was cured. He said he'd give me time and prove himself; he went away. I got letters and cards from him anywhere and everywhere for two years. Then this spring he came and called for father and me and brought us—here. He seemed sane. He said he had these people here perfecting a special sort of plane to give to the government. Hie'd made money, he said; and now was perfecting the airplane. . . Only a couple of days ago, things seemed queer. He'd taught me to fly; and this morning I followed him; I lost him; then I talked with you on the sea."
I longed for her in my arms again; I longed to try to quiet and comfort her; but the tumult of the trembling of that slight, lovely body was beyond me. She turned to me and cried, "What have we done?"
"You've done nothing wrong. Your father—I can't say."
"You know better than I. Harry's talked to you. He's been killing people in practice for what?"
"He has tremendous plans."
"With his airplanes, of course."
"Airplanes," I said. "And ton bombs of TNT."
She winced away from me; and her eyes, roving over the house and the lake, sought again the table on the terrace where the same four places remained empty.
"Where's father?" she repeated to me. "This morning, he must have found out something. When I was away. He couldn't tell it to me."
"There's Bane," I said. He was coming from the house and of the house, rather than of him, she spoke.
"It's not headquarters," she reminded me. "You heard them laugh."
I nodded.
"What we've seen is only a part—part," she repeated, "of something frightful they're preparing to do—for which we're to blame, father and me."
"Not you," I denied.
Bane halted at the table only for a word with Boggs who pointed to our path. I know now that we had no chance whatever of escape; probably I realized it then. But the idea of seeking safety for herself never entered the brown head beside me. She advanced to meet Bane who approached as overbearing as before and angry, too. For we had disobeyed him; she had learned, and I had told her, what he had forbidden her to hear.
I could see, as he came up, that he was choosing and discarding and choosing again what to say to us. Then the clatter on the lake gave him a satisfactory cue.
The airplane, tested a couple of minutes ago, moved over the water toward us; and we both glanced at it.
"Headquarters," Bane informed us, "headquarters has just sent for you."