Read Ebook: Exiles of the sky by Spewack Samuel Tomaso Rico Illustrator

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Ebook has 122 lines and 7256 words, and 3 pages

The man who writes this vivid tale of a pilot in the commercial air service of Europe today knows the scenes of which he writes and the spirit of the people who inhabit them, for, since the war, he has been one of the most active of all the American correspondents in Germany and Russia.

He walked unseeing into the Tiergarten. It was winter--the sunless winter of Berlin, when trees sway like despairing skeletons praying to the wind for snow to cover their bones.

The man pressed the collar of his sheepskin coat closer to his throat, shivering not with cold but with an aching sense of the world's injustice to man--to himself. He was dazed with constant rehearsing of the scene that had taken place in the director's office only half an hour ago. The scene itself had taken but a few minutes. Directors of passenger airplane services have very little time to waste, their secretaries will tell you.

"We have no use for pilots who crash," the director had shouted, but those words had not hurt.

True, he had crashed. But he had never crashed before. Why couldn't the director give him a second chance? Bookkeepers, captains of industry, doctors, editors and statesmen err, and are forgiven. And other pilots had crashed. Why, that Westphalian pilot had had two crashes and had not been dismissed. If only that little cowardly merchant had not complained! But who would have thought that he would? Instead of commending him for his skill and quick wit in preventing their all being crushed to dust, that damned little merchant had testified, unsolicited, that the pilot had had two glasses of vodka in quick succession in the flying-field waiting-room at Reval.

The wretched man began mumbling to himself as he plunged deeper into the park.

Yes, he had had two drinks. But a man could not get drunk on two glasses of vodka, particularly a Russian. He had crashed because the cooler had sprung a leak. The motor had stopped. But he had glided to earth. Was this not proof enough that he was sober? And the plane was not even damaged. Not even a scratch on her wings. And he had never had a crash before. He'd asked the director that, but the director had been too busy finding the red pencil to answer. Well, had he?

No. Never. Never! Nobody could say that Vladimir Uspensky had ever had a crash before.

Consumed by his misery, the man looked neither to right nor left. Yes, he had had two drinks.

"And after four years of service with us, are you still unacquainted with our regulations?" the director had asked sarcastically.

"And dumb beast that I am, I couldn't even answer him," Vladimir remembered bitterly.

Yes, he had taken two drinks. He'd taken them, too, because he was coming back to Berlin, when he longed with all his being for Moscow.

Vladimir Uspensky hated Berlin. It was such an ugly city, with a soul as cold and sterile as the Prussian soil upon which it squats. It was a city where men shouted and women whined, where the purple apoplexy of the struggle against defeat had displaced the grace of living. Uspensky knew all the capitals. For him New York had movement, Paris beauty, London age. But there was only one city that he loved, and that was Moscow. Loverlike, he credited to that blood-stained snow-mound the movement of New York, the beauty of Paris, the age and dignity of London.

It had been a sudden pang of homesickness, and had come upon him unawares. Vladimir had never before let homesickness interfere with the business of flying. But this time--it had caught him like the springtime desire of a young girl to be loved....

A park bench by a still, dirt-screened pond greeted the unhappy man icily. He had no sooner fallen onto it when overhead a metal bird hummed in flight. He looked up--a Fokker monoplane, blue and brown. He knew it. He knew the pilot. He had often saluted him in the air when their paths crossed between Amsterdam and Berlin.

The thundering thing came nearer, taunting the discredited pilot on the bench. "You, there," it roared, "you can never fly again."

Vladimir rose unsteadily to his feet. No--he could never fly again.

Suddenly he buried his head in his coat, and cried. An old derelict shuffling up looked at him anxiously.

"Are you sick?" the stranger quavered at Vladimir.

Vladimir looked back quickly.

"No, no," he coughed, clearing his throat. "I am not sick. Not sick."

The derelict hurried on. The metal bird had faded in the gray sky. One could hear only a thin, persistent thrumming. Vladimir put his hands to his ears.

He walked out of the park, through the rectangular streets that seemed to squeeze him like a giant maw. He paused at a dim Weinstube, hesitated and then entered. The plump barmaid brought him a vodka. He looked at it, and then at her. She edged away. His eyes frightened her.

Vladimir brushed the glass from the table. The crash startled the proprietor, who came panting from the kitchen.

"Another crash!" shouted Vladimir. "Do you see it? I am that glass. I crashed too."

"Crazy Russian," growled the proprietor. "Pay and get out."

"You think I am crazy? Perhaps you think I am drunk too. It is your city that crashed me, your damn' city without a sun, without a soul. I hate it. I hate you--all of you. You robbed me of my plane. You robbed me of my life--"

"If you don't get out this minute, I'll call the police." The proprietor moved to the door.

Vladimir surrendered. He threw a two-mark note upon the bar.

He lumbered up the avenue of commercialized gayety--Kurf?rstendamm--where even in the mottled afternoon painted women sat together in the huge cafes, waiting. Orchestras played with Teutonic discipline one-year-old jazz, born of a primitive people and now, robbed of its abandonment, employed to stimulate these human automatons. Vladimir did not see, nor hear. He walked on.

Toward evening he found himself at Templehof--the flying field. What was he doing here? This patch of green in the wilderness of factory lands, where the flight of men began and ended, was his no longer. What matter if he knew it from the sky as other men know a beloved face? He was now an exile from the sky and from this field, which brought men to the sky. This field to him had become home when revolution had exiled him from his home. And now he had lost this too.

Even the night watchman--silly doddering old fool--had his place here. But Vladimir Uspensky, proudest of pilots, had none. Probably the night watchman knew of his disgrace, and would pity him. What irony! But wait. Perhaps he did not know. They would not tell him until the next day. Then--

The plan was born.

He slept in a draughty little hotel near the field. He rose at four. It was still dark. He dressed slowly, paid his bill, and found his way to the hangars.

The night watchman greeted him with customary obsequiousness. He did not know.

"I came out early to tune up the machine myself," explained Vladimir. "I don't trust these mechanics any more."

With the aid of the night watchman he rolled the machine out of the hangar, and started the engine. Vladimir listened carefully to the jangled symphony of the motor, noting beat and pitch with musicianly intensity. He was satisfied. The motor sang gloriously.

And the sole purpose of his flight was to convince the sneering director that Vladimir Uspensky was not through, that Vladimir Uspensky had been grossly libeled, that Vladimir Uspensky was not a drunkard but a careful, competent pilot.

He stepped into his flying suit, adjusted his helmet and his goggles, saw that the rolling map was fixed in its proper place. He looked at his wrist-watch. In another hour flying officials would begin to descend upon the field. He must be off. He clambered up the metal rests of the wings and strapped himself into the pilot's seat.

His eyes sparkled exultingly as he bent low. The plane rattled over the field, faster and faster. He turned. The motor subsided, and then leaped into hammering life again. He began to rise over the hangars, higher and higher. A thin morning sun melted the surrounding haze, and the mist on his wind-shield and goggles. Below, factory chimneys yawned, and the trains in the railroad yards turned and twisted like black snakes.

It was good to be in the air again! How he would laugh at them when he returned! Show them he had been to Danzig and back again, in schedule time, without a scratch. Could a drunkard do that?

East he flew, over the pines of Brandenburg, over the marshes beside the hard-won little fields and the precise farmhouses. He knew this land. He slipped lower in his seat and gave himself up to the blended roar of wind, motor and propellers, and the gentle heave of the metal bird. Thus for two hours.

He craned his neck over the wind-shield. He did not like the sky, nor the clouds, nor the fog spreading over the earth. But fortune was with him today. Fortune must be with him today. He would show them that even a storm was but a slight obstacle to Vladimir Uspensky. On, on! The speedometer quivered at one hundred and ten. The plane shook as if in fever. He sat bolt upright.

The wind charged him from the side, and it took all his strength to right the plane.

Now the fog choked him in gray darkness, and he had only instinct and a pathetically inadequate compass as his guide. A strange fear gripped him in this mist-woven wilderness of sky. Suddenly the image of the director drawing the red pencil through his name reappeared.... But the fat-jowled, thin-lipped face had no eyes--just sockets.

To the fear-crazed pilot, this was the writing in the sky--the red pencil was Death and the eyeless face was Fate.

"A man can fight Death--but not Fate," shouted Vladimir, but no one heard. And no one saw when, slumping to his knees, he clutched the control lever as if in prayer. The plane with its unconscious burden crazily sank.

He opened his eyes in a snug attic with a roof so low that he could touch it with his hand, if he felt like trying. But Vladimir didn't feel like trying. Didn't feel like moving at all. Underneath the warm feather-bed, his body lay stiffly tired. But his eyes roved fearfully from wooden ceiling to whitewashed walls and unpainted door. No thought disturbed the vacancy of his gaze.

Vladimir recognized it with difficulty as the German spoken in bleak Pomerania.

"Feeling better?" the old fellow repeated, louder and with a hint of irritation.

Vladimir nodded.

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