The baby had finished his nightly sham battle against tub, water, and his father, and after he had eaten lustily we had tucked him drowsily into bed. Jim had wandered out into his newly planted garden and thither I followed him. The fact that I stumbled a little with fatigue made the sight of his quiet figure and broad back all the dearer to me. He was on his knees, digging gently with one finger into the soil; and I slumped down on the sand beside him, resting my elbows on my knees.
“Not a sprout yet,” he murmured in amused alarm without looking around. “What do you reckon has happened to the darned things?”
“My dear,” I said earnestly, “how would it do to leave them rather quietly in the soil—I mean the sand—for a few days so that they can make up their minds about this sprouting business. It’s really unfair of you to break into their privacy each evening to see if they’ve been doing their duty.”
“If they really would get down to business I’d leave them alone. There are gardens everywhere in Lakehurst and yet the baby is still waiting for that superchow we’ve planned for him.”
“Might it not speed up the process if there were suddenly a little less water in the lake and a little more of it just hereabouts?” I suggested affably. “After all, there is a drought, you remember.”
For answer Jim rolled over on his back, caught one of the dog’s long curly ears in his hands, and rubbed it as he grinned drowsily.
“I was on the point of suggesting the lake, but only in connection with a swim. Leave it to the aerologists to place moisture where nature intended. Anyhow, this being my first garden, I can’t set a bad precedent. How about a shot or two of Badminton and then a cool swim? Dinner’s under way, I take it.”
I straightened my back, which ached a little, and wondered vaguely how I could manage to hold a racket in a hand afflicted with a burnt finger. But the proposition was too tempting, and in a moment Jim had brought out my sneakers and was stretching the net across the little patch of stubbly grass which we called a court.
The swift flight of the tiny feathered ball seemed to renew my energy and we were soon fiercely intent upon the game. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was wondering, as usual, how anyone could be as quiet as Jim was, and yet so gay. At that moment a soft purring noise forced its way into my consciousness. I stopped the swing of my racket so suddenly that I nearly pitched headlong in my effort to stand still and listen. Jim, too, had swung around with his back to me and was searching the sky.
“I know, I know!” I cried idiotically. “It’s the same noise that we heard over Boston that night. Jim, can it possibly...”
“There she is,” he said softly, and started at a dog trot for the edge of the lake where the view of the sky was less obstructed than it was on the court. Climbing up on a log bench by the water, he sat on its back with his feet on the seat. His eyes were the only part of his relaxed body which gave me an inkling of his excitement.
While we had played our game the color of the lake had deepened into its evening purple, and at our backs the sunset was softening. Out of it came the airship; and the manner of its moving was beautiful. Few inanimate objects attain beauty in the pursuance of their courses, and yet, to me, at least, the flight of this ship was far lovelier than the swooping of a bird or the jumping of a horse. For it seemed to carry with it a calm dignity and a consciousness of destiny which ranked it among the wonders of time itself.
It was the Akron returning from her first western cruise; and this was our first sight of her. My hand was so cold and trembling that I drew it away from Jim's and clasped it over my other in my lap. Jim's eyes had become dreamy and speculative, yet alert.
I wondered if it were only the beauty of the ship which aroused my emotions so keenly or if it were because I vaguely realized that our lives would become so involved in her fate.
On she came toward us with a motion as smooth as a glide, though by the steady, droning music of her engines I knew her to be a powerful creature going calmly about her business. Lower and lower she slid as she circled wide above the lake. And so still was the water that the ship's reflection seemed more clearly formed than was she herself. The whole life of the evening was attuned to her rhythm.
Neither picture nor painting could convey even the half of her. For it could not portray adequately her great power and strength, nor the amazing three-dimensional life of her. And often, especially when I saw her in flight, the realization of her great size would entirely elude me, perhaps because she was so perfectly proportioned.
But that night, at my first sight of her, she overawed me as nothing else has ever done. She was so huge and strong, so inspiring of emotion and at the same time so remote from it herself that I experienced none of the depressing sensation of weight which almost always accompanies the sight of an object of great mass. But perhaps the strongest magic which she exerted came from the fact that her hues, and hence her moods, were ever changing. She never looked the same, for no two days are ever quite alike; and her silvery hull took to itself the color and feeling of every time of day or night in which she flew.
“They’re coming in for a landing,” Jim said. “Do you see the flag? There it is fluttering below the control car.”
We jumped into our old car and raced for the landing field, hoping to be in time to see the ship make contact with the mooring mast. As we approached we noticed that a strange atmospheric condition existed which lent a mystery to her, a mystery which has haunted me ever since. A ground fog of the early evening had risen to about forty feet, or nearly half way up the sides of the ship. It was an opaque fog which made it appear that the ship was floating, not in the air, but upon a still, white ocean.
Soon darkness enveloped her, and beams of light played back and forth along her hull, illuminating also the intent groups of men who were working to prepare her for the hangar. How different she had become since I had watched her in the sky a short time ago!
Several weeks later Jim came home with the news that he was to make his first flight in the Akron at dawn the next day. The “zero hour” had been set for 4:30 a.m. and he carried with him a soft-spoken alarm clock. It did but little good, however, for my excitement made sleep almost impossible. At last Jim awoke and switched off the alarm before it had had time to fulfill its mission. When he saw that I apparently had one eye open he came over to say good-by. After he went down stairs I slid out of bed and followed him, blinking sheepishly as I walked into the lighted dressing-room. He glared at me with a terrible fierceness but in a few moments we were drinking hot coffee quite merrily. As we perched on the kitchen table a new sound came through the windows, a sound for which I seem to have waited through great spaces of time during my next months at Lakehurst. It was a whistle whose note resembled that of a fog horn and which, I learned, announced the intended approach or departure of the ship. It had a long throaty note which made me shudder a little and which seemed to be the very breath of the still, dark morning through which we groped our way to the car.
The tall walls of the hangar soon became visible ahead of us in the darkness. Inside and on top of it were many lights which gave the building an air of busy preoccupation. Jim drove around one side of it, pulled his bag from the rear seat of the car, and went off into the towering walls. I parked the car near the front of the hangar and waited. The revolving signal beacon on the roof kept up its slow, swirling movement, and I, a mere earth traveler, felt lost and insignificant in a world of new conquests and alien interests.
The waiting seemed endless and the sky began to brighten slowly. My impatience had increased to an almost unbearable pitch when at last I saw a sailor climb into a tiny engine-room which was built into the framework of the huge door of the hangar. In a moment the singing noise of electric motors began and inch by inch the doors slid back, letting a stream of light out into the darkness about me. Soon they were far enough apart to enable me to see the black iron mast to which the rounded nose of the Akron was coupled. When the doors were entirely opened (a process which took about ten minutes) I saw that the mast and the ship were being pulled along some tracks by an engine. As the ship came abreast of my car I climbed out and stood in absolute awe with head far back to watch the enormous, seemingly endless, silver shape move slowly past me. It was at that time that I had my first adequate idea of her size and fully appreciated her great length of nearly 800 feet. For, after she had passed me, the atmosphere seemed very bright and I noticed that the sun had come up behind her.
Swarming groups of sailors walked casually by her sides and held her guy ropes as she was drawn down the tracks, her nose and stern held rigidly by the mechanical handling gear. When she reached the “hauling-up” circle her rear fin was freed from the heavy beam which held it and a taxi wheel was substituted. Then she was swung down into the “mooring” circle with her nose into the wind and other adjustments were completed. Already she seemed so small that I was sure I had ridiculously overestimated her size.
At last the sailors released her yaw lines; and at the command, “Up Ship” she slipped her moorings and floated free of her mast, the wind pushing her back ever so little. Suddenly her engines began to purr, at first very gently and then louder and louder until their steady hum was a splendid rhythm of strength. Her tilted propellers took command of her, she ceased floating and almost leapt forward, seeming to feel no hesitancy nor uncertainty. The red, white, and blue coloring on her fins and the great star on her breast sparkled in the sunlight. Her beauty embodied such a sense of strength that I remembered I had heard her called a “roving mountain peak.”
My elation went with her, however. As I climbed back into the car and rattled homeward I wondered jealously why I was fated to be tied to the earth. But as I left the car a swarm of rollicking puppies at tacked me and we raced to the shore of the lake. After all, the earth was glorious, and the puppies knew it. We romped on the shore until I heard another kind of chirping inside the house and went in to see the always amazing phenomenon of round pink cheeks and merry eyes.
Late in the summer when the ship was due to dock at 4:30 A.M. two of us determined to go up to the landing field to watch her come in. The weather appeared to be rather foggy as we slipped out of the quiet house but it was still too dark to be sure. When my hand touched the steering wheel of the car I found it dripping with moisture; and as we paused at the sentry house on the Air Station I saw by the car lights that the mist was almost a rain.
"Ugh," I thought. "This doesn't promise a happy landing."
We parked the car and waited; but the density of the fog increased as the dawn began. Even the neon lights on the aerology building a short distance from us were invisible. The dreary note of the station whistle penetrated the foggy morning for ten seconds every minute.
Many times during several hours of waiting we distinctly heard the humming motors of the Akron above our heads. Once or twice we could even see the long black shadow of the ship silhouetted against the opaque fog, and we would become tense with baffled excitement. But in an instant it would disappear and with it the muffled sound of the engines, leaving us desolate in the thick pearl grey of the enveloping fog, wondering if we had been seeing a specter. The continual moaning of the fog horn accentuated the feeling.
Suddenly I turned and saw one of the most beautiful sights I have ever known. The fog had rolled back in just one place and through it the sunlight poured radiantly. Between these walls of grey the ship appeared, her upper half still veiled in long wisps of delicate grey while her lower portion was glistening and silvery. The fog horn ceased, the air seemed to clear abruptly, and the ship came steadily, even placidly, down to her mast and the waiting crowd of men. Some months later I had my first chance to watch airplanes hook on to the ship while both were in flight. It was at night and “the Admiral” was aboard. Jim had said good-by early in the evening just before the moan of the zero hour whistle had sounded. Several hours later I became conscious that the air outside the house was vibrating with the roar of planes and the softer purr of the ship. Snatching up a coat I ran out into the night and looked up.
The stars in the sky were brilliant; and their casual twinkling was in marked contrast to the rhythmic flash of the varicolored lights on the great black hull of the ship silhouetted against them. The Akron seemed more ablaze with lights than I had ever known her to be. For besides the lights on bow and stern, and her green and red port and starboard running lights, the openings along the catwalks gave the effect of broad luminous streaks running her entire length. The control car was, of course, gleaming with lights and the opening around the trapeze in the bottom of the ship was illuminated.
All around the Akron flew her planes, just discernible by the lights on their wing tips. I could see that they were flying in formation or soaring and diving through the air before they settled into the steady, persistent climb up to the trapeze. Just as the ship passed over the house one of the planes made contact with the ship, hung motionless for a moment, then swooped down and away in a perfect spiral as another plane shot forward to take its place under the ship.
I wondered whether some persons would resent the intrusion of these inventions of man upon the natural beauty of the starry night: whether they would prefer the intermittent twinkling of the stars to the rhythmic pulsations of the lights aboard the ship. To me it was a happy demonstration of the harmonious co-operation possible between natural elements which had seemed to remain the same since time began and the triumphant dreams of earth creatures. My hand was resting on the old sun dial of which we were so fond and I was reminded of the comparatively short span of years since man began his struggle to conquer the air. How new it all was! And there was still so very much to be learned. Yet that was the fact which interested the men who were flying up there tonight. The ship was heading out to sea, and in my mind I pictured an era when great air liners would be soaring from continent to continent, intent on promoting the happiness and the needs of man.
A plane flew up under the Akron, hovered for a few moments in the light around the trapeze, and then was drawn slowly into her black hull. The port closed, the ship faded into the night, and I went slowly back into the old house where I could only sit and stare into the fire.
Next morning while I was ardently trying to disprove the proverb that cooks are born and not made, I again heard the Akron overhead. My experimental mood fled, with me as I ran out into the sunshine. There was the ship indeed; but what a different ship! No air of mystery surrounded her now. She was another creature, her hull ablaze with sunlight, while she slipped lazily along in the still air like a huge droning bee. All around her buzzed her coterie of mosquito-like planes. They seemed to be having great sport up there in the blue sky. Around and around flew the planes, looping and circling. When they shot up to hook on to the ship it looked, I decided, like a very lively brood of chickens pecking about an old hen. While I watched they seemed to bear out my simile even further. One by one they crept up to the ship for a few moments, then disappeared inside her as she sailed out of sight, much as a motherly old hen clucks to her brood and settles snugly down over them to rest.
Often the weather around Lakehurst was wild. The old trees surrounding our house would double up and moan as the relentless winds twisted and tore at them. My dog would creep close to my bed and stare with wide eyes when I arose in the middle of the night to inspect the antiquated furnace. Then I would crawl back to bed after a furtive glance at the baby and would lie for long minutes to await the return of sleep, wishing that the wind did not shake even the bed in which I lay. As the lightning flashed I would cover my eyes with my balsam pillow and tell myself that although there was a storm here, the weather was probably serene or at least navigable not far away. I began dreamily to picture the weather as a pleasant field dotted with mushrooms which were the storm areas, and this crude idea consoled me.
The Akron I knew to be three times stronger than the Shenandoah. She had already ridden out storms which would have wrecked the latter ship; and I was proud that she kept rigidly to her flight schedules. She was fulfilling her destiny.
Not long ago I watched the Akron sail off on her second southern cruise of the year. At half past four I was awakened by the sound of her engines and those of the planes accompanying her. A storm had raged for days. But it had ceased at midnight and the still atmosphere was absolutely electric with an almost golden moonlight. The ship came into our view from behind some trees and as she did so the moonlight struck full along her glistening hull. She herself seemed to radiate the light which made the night so beautiful.
Some two weeks later she returned to Lakehurst and settled calmly to the mast. Her engines were throttled down but I could see the silver fabric of her hull pulsating to their rhythm. Yet she looked to be the sturdy traveler that she surely was. For eighty hours she had explored the Caribbean and hovered over Panama. No ocean-going vessel of steel could have acquitted herself better.
While I watched the docking operations that afternoon I noticed on the ship’s tail a white patch. Amused at the idea of “salt on the tail of the birdie,” I looked more closely and discovered that the patch was snow.
One afternoon in early April I was standing in the nursery door gloating over a lovely little table and chair which had been sent up from the South for the baby's birthday. Jim and I had opened the crate together that noon, out on the front “stoop” over which an old wisteria vine cascaded its lavender blossoms.
While I was looking into the nursery an arm rested across my shoulders and Jim's voice said musingly,
"It'll be great to see both of them sitting there. This summer we'll rig up a workshop and I'll learn to use the new tools you got me. We'll try our hand at a bow and some arrows for you first, and then—oh, lots of things for the nursery. Did I tell you there is a zero hour at six tonight?"
"Dinner at five, then," I said mechanically. "I've planned an amazing salad."
We had a very gay meal, for we were in our most ardent window-shopping mood, where possibilities are far more exciting than actualities. Our coffee we had while we sat on the living-room settee, Jim holding his saucer with his left hand while he made wobbly drawings of a toy bench with his right.
The arrival of a friend's car interrupted us and Jim went off to the station, saluting me with a smile as he ran down the steps. After he had gone I stood at the window for a long time watching the feathery glory of the pale green larch tree.
"It is far too early for the sun to have set," I thought vaguely.
I had planned to see the ship go out but was delayed for a while in leaving the house. As I approached the landing field I noticed with surprise that a fog, about 100 feet above the ground, was creeping over the mooring circle. Broad beams of light were being played on the Akron as the last preparations were made for her flight.
Those lights went out, her own broke into their twinkling rhythm, and the command, “Up Ship” was given.
And then a strange thing happened. A moment before her sailing she appeared vital and strong. But as she ascended, the swirling mist seemed to take possession of her tentatively at first as if it were afraid of what it was doing, and then more imperatively. Her lights took on a ghostly hue and her gleaming shape became dim and elusive. For a few moments she was faintly visible to us. Then the mist renewed its purpose. And the ship had disappeared.
A few days ago I went into the hangar again. Its fourteen stories’ height yawned almost empty above me. Over at one side the gallant old Los Angeles looked tired and desolated. How the Akron had glistened, had breathed vitality in every sweeping line!
In one corner I saw a small pile of junk: old and distorted duralumin frames and some moldy pieces of fabric.
“Is that something they’re experimenting with?” I asked.
My escort said nothing for a minute and then, quietly, “That is all we’ve been able to salvage of the Akron.”
I needed to take a deep breath and so I turned away. There in another corner groups of men were working among stacks of shining new duralumin pieces.
“And that?” I said hastily.
“That is for shipment to the west coast. It’s for the new ship.”
“Oh, I am glad,” I murmured. “Progress is cruel only to the few.”
“Yes, and, remember this: for millions of years birds have flown successfully; yet when storms occur many birds succumb.”