Hope Takes Flight (23 page)

T
he year 1917 had been a bitter time for both the Allies and Germany. Now, as Christmas came, cold, hard weather fell over France.

Gavin walked the streets of Paris, the snow-laden skies overhead reflecting the mood that had controlled him for weeks. Walking past the Lycee Henri Quatre, the ancient church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, and the windswept Place du Pantadon, he cut in for shelter to the right and finally came out on Boulevard St. Michel. Hunching his shoulders against the wind, he pushed on until he came to a café he had visited before.

He entered, hung up his raincoat and his cap on the rack, and looked around eagerly. Seeing Heather seated in a booth beside the window, he rushed over to join her and put out his hand to grasp hers.

“Oh! Your hand's cold!” she said. “Sit down and thaw out.”

Slipping into the booth, Gavin rested his elbows on the table, cupped his chin, and stared at her. She was so fresh-looking that he was reminded of the flowers he had seen in her garden the previous spring. Her lips were pink, her cheeks were aglow with good health, and her shiny ash-blond hair fell over her shoulders in a silken cascade. “You look beautiful,” he said simply.

A flush came to her cheeks and she smiled. “You soldiers are all alike! Always trying to get next to a girl.” And then, because she knew he was not that sort, she reached for him again. “Here, let me warm your hands.” He extended them eagerly, and she enclosed them in her own, which were small with long tapering fingers.

As the feeling returned, he turned one of her hands over and stared down at it. “Blisters!” he said and grinned up at her, cocking his head to one side. “I didn't know royalty ever got blisters.”

“I've told you a thousand times I'm not royalty! I'm not even nobility! When Father dies, the title will go, and we'll be just people again. That's all we are now, really.”

Just then the waitress appeared and asked for their order. Gavin said, “You order for me. I still don't speak enough French to ask for a hamburger.” He listened as Heather gave the order, and when the waitress was gone, he said, “I'm glad you've come back. It's been a cold, lonely place without you.”

She had gone to England when winter had come, but a week earlier he had received a handwritten note from her, saying:
I'm back in Paris. Come to me when you can.
He had written her a note telling her to meet him here. Now he stared at her almost hungrily, and as the numbness in his body thawed, so did his spirit.

“Tell me about your family,” he said at last. “I want to visit them if I ever get across to England.”

“Father would love that,” she said. “He's been practicing up to beat you at chess.”

As Heather began to speak of her family, a feeling of nostalgia overcame Gavin—a longing for his own home and family. And when she had finished, he leaned back and sighed. “I wish there were no war. I wish the thing would end today.” His tone was laced with bitterness. “I guess I'm fed up. A thing like this eats at a man.”

“I know,” Heather said softly. “I've seen it destroy some men…and some women, too.”

“What are you doing here? Are you going back to nursing at the hospital?”

“Yes. I felt so useless at home with nothing to do but roll bandages and be a night air raid warden. It's hard at the hospital, of course, seeing the young men…and the older ones, too…come in all shot to pieces. But at least it's something I can do.”

They spoke of the war. Gavin told her what he had been doing, leaving out much of it. Finally the waitress brought the food, and both of them fell on it and ate hungrily. After the meal, they sat for a long time, drinking the strong black coffee.

It was getting late and Heather said, “We can't stay here forever. Let's go to my place.”

He paid the bill, helped her on with her coat, then moved across the room and picked up his own. Fixing his hat firmly in place, he said, “We'd better take a cab. It's cold out there.”

“No, let's walk. The exercise is good. Besides,” she added, “I think it's going to snow.” As they walked along she continued, “I hope it does snow. I love it!”

“So do I. Makes me think of wintertime back in Arkansas. Even though we didn't have warm enough clothes, all of us kids would get out and romp around in it. When it got deep enough, we'd make snowballs and build snowmen.” He paused, a faraway look in his eye. “That was a good time.”

“Do you hear from your people often?”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “They were real worried while I was in prison camp.” He grinned then and took her arm. “You know what they ask about most though? You. My younger brothers and sisters want to know if I'll be Lord Gavin when I come home…if I marry you.” He had mentioned marriage almost unconsciously, and now that it was out, he was surprised himself.

But it was no surprise to Heather. Though she knew Gavin would likely go back to America after the war, and she, to England to care for her aging parents, Heather
had
thought about what it would be like to be married to Gavin. She shouldn't have, she knew. Gavin was a man who hadn't found God, and she could never give herself to a man like that. But she had thought of it.

“The man I marry will definitely be a lord,” she said, her eyes twinkling merrily. He turned to look at her and thought he had never seen anything more beautiful. “You know, the Bible says that Sarah called Abraham ‘lord.' So if I married you, you'd be Lord Gavin to me.”

“Sounds like a winner.” Gavin grinned. “But I don't have a castle to put you in. Best I could offer would be a sharecropper's shack back in the woods of Arkansas.”

“That would be fine,” she said. “When you love someone,” she said softly, “wherever you are…wherever you live…is a castle.”

They walked along in silence after that. Her words had caught his attention. Gavin had not had much experience with women. But this woman had worked her way into his spirit and, now that the word
marriage
had been mentioned, he was considering it seriously, though too shy to pursue the subject. Mirroring her thoughts, he pondered the obstacles that loomed as high as the Alps between them. Well, he would just have to be satisfied with the time they had together. Nobody knew what tomorrow would bring anyway.

They arrived at Heather's room, which was not really an apartment, but had a small table and stove. She made tea while he stood at the window, looking down at the white stripes that were beginning to form on the street.

“It's snowing now,” he said. “We'll go out later and have a snowball fight.”

She moved efficiently, as she did everything, and when the tea was ready, they sat down at the tiny table in the two hard-backed chairs and talked for a long time.

Later they did go out. The snow was only an inch deep, but they managed to make a few snowballs which they tossed at each other. Soon they were laughing like children, and when Heather caught Gavin full in the mouth with a hard-packed snowball, it made his eyes blink with pain. She came running up to him, gasping, “Oh, Gavin, I'm sorry! I didn't mean to hurt you!” and she put her fingers on his lips.

“Back home when I got hurt,” he said, “Mama would kiss the place and make it well.”

She hesitated, then reached up, pulled his head down, and kissed him lightly on the lips. “There,” she said, “it's all well now.” She smiled and again touched his lips lightly with her fingertips. “Come now. No more snowballs. Let's go inside and have some more tea.”

His time with Heather was an oasis of peace, for Gavin's work at the aerodrome had grown deadly serious. What he had not told her, and what he had tried to forget during their times together, was that as he fought the Germans, he was beginning to see in each face the enemy Baron Manfred von Richthofen.

He knew it was foolish, and that his fellow pilots thought he was going over the edge. “It won't do to hate these fellas too much, Gavin,” Bill Thaw warned him. “A man who's full of hate can't think. And that's the sort of thing that gets a guy killed.”

Gavin had agreed, but as the weeks went by and his score had increased to twenty-eight kills, he found himself more and more in the grip of a bitterness and a hatred he could not shake off. Part of this was due to the letters he received from his sister Lylah. Though they could not meet, she wrote regularly, and the last letter or two had been rather strange and even rather mysterious. He knew Lylah. He knew her speech, he knew how she thought, and those letters had been vague and obscure.

She's hiding something
, he thought. He longed to go to her.
She'd never tell anything if she didn't want to; hot pincers couldn't drag it out of her. But she might tell me if I could just see her
. The dread continued to grow and he could not purge himself of it.

He knew that von Richthofen had apparently recovered from his wounds and was again knocking British and French planes out of the sky diligently. He knew also that, according to the papers, the Baron had been sent to visit Russia to fight on the eastern front; and with the knowledge that von Richthofen was out of his life, Gavin had calmed down and found some peace. But as soon as the Flying Circus received their leader back on the western front and von Richthofen began shooting down planes, the bitterness came upon him like a black cloud again.

Like Raoul Lufbery, Gavin now began taking off on his free hours and hunting Germans to shoot down on lone patrols. Several of the pilots tried to warn him. “Lufbery can do it, but he'll die sooner or later. And so will you when you're outnumbered someday.”

But Gavin paid no heed. He took off one cold February morning, knowing he shouldn't. The weather was so cold that motor oil had to be heated over an open fire, poured hurriedly into the reservoir, and the motor started immediately to keep it from freezing again. On top of that, when Gavin climbed to an altitude of 15,000 feet, he began to stiffen up almost at once, the subzero temperature penetrating to the very marrow of his bones. Despite three or four pairs of gloves, his fingers coiled around the stick were almost paralyzed within five minutes. He had to force them open in order to restore circulation. His feet became twin lumps of ice, rigid and unfeeling. His body was wracked with shooting pain. Even his eyeballs and teeth smarted and burned, and his icy scalp contracted until it felt as if his skull would explode in a shower of bones. He flew for two hours but saw nothing, no sign of an enemy plane. Then he turned and headed back for his own lines.

But just as he leveled off on his turn, making a sharp wingover, three German Albatrosses dropped on him, all of them from slightly different directions and with all guns blazing. Gavin threw his Nieuport into a quick turn. For the next few minutes he exercised every bit of skill at his command trying to lose the three planes. Finally he succeeded in hiding behind a cloud, but his hands were shaking—not entirely from cold—as he realized how close he was to being killed. His ancient Nieuport would have no chance at all against the late-model Albatroses.

He stayed in the clouds as long as he could, then dropped down to take a look around and saw nothing. But even as he dropped lower, he heard the stutter of guns. Panic-stricken, he turned and saw one of the German planes right behind him, both machine guns flaming. Soon his whole tail assembly was torn to pieces, and two of the wires controlling his elevator and rudder were hanging by one strand. There were holes in the wings and the fuselage, and he knew that, short of a miracle, he would not escape the German.

Once again he tried a half roll, a dive, a spin, but still the German hung on. While Gavin was maneuvering to shake off his enemy, an image was forming in Gavin's mind. He did not have time to think about it; it just happened. The plane that was shooting him to pieces was primarily painted black and yellow. But as he fought, somehow in his mind, it began to change color, and he began to see a scarlet Fokker triplane. In his imagination, the pilot at the controls was Manfred von Richthofen. The image filled him with hatred like a powerful drug and he wrenched his ancient plane around the skies so violently that he almost tore the wings off. In doing so, the pilot shot past him and suddenly Gavin saw his enemy ahead of him. The Albatros was much faster so he had only time for one burst and as soon as he fired it, he saw holes appear on the cowling and at once the white fumes issued that indicated a gas leak. When that happened, he knew it was the end. Either the plane would burst into flames, burning the pilot to death, or all the gas would miraculously leak out, and the plane would have to crash to the earth.

Gavin followed on the enemy's trail and finally observed the crash-landing in a field far from the front lines. Circling overhead, he saw the pilot struggle out and stumble away from the downed plane. Gavin wheeled his Nieuport around and dove straight at the figure of the pilot. When he was only a few hundred yards away, the German halted, turned, and lifted his hands in surrender.

To Gavin, it was the face of Manfred von Richthofen. His hands closed on the trigger, and as the Nieuport roared downward at full speed, the figure of the German loomed even larger. Hatred boiled over in Gavin's mind. As he thought of Lylah and the German who had defiled her, he squeezed the trigger.

The tracers plowed the ground in front of the Nieuport, raising the dust and stitching the German from stomach to chest. Driven backward, the pilot crashed to the ground and lay still. Then Gavin pulled the stick back sharply, sending the plane into a steep climb. Even as he did, revulsion for himself at what he had done swept over him. He knew, suddenly, that he had performed the most cowardly act of his life, one he had sworn he would never commit. Shaken and sick, he began to retch, and it was all he could do to keep the plane in the air.