"_Officiers Aviateurs_, telegraphists and mechanics of the French _Service Aeronautique_"--you are listening to Franky--"tremendously well-organised compared with our little footling Flying Corps, tinkered fourteen months ago out of the old Air Battalion of the R. E. These chaps are Engineers--goin' by the dark red double stripes on their overalls and their dark blue _kepis_. Some of their machines'll be out for practice. Despatch-droppin' or bombs. Here's a man with brass on his hat, coming our way.... Takes me for a German soger-orficer I shouldn't wonder!--lots of 'em get their clothes cut in Bond Street. But though you can hide Allemand legs in English trousers"--Franky was recovering his customary cheeriness--"and some of 'em do it uncommon cleverly--you can't deodorise an accent that hails from Berlin."
The officer approaching--a youthful, upright figure walking quickly, with the short, springy steps of a man much in the saddle--proved to be grey-haired and grey-moustached. The double-winged badge of his Service was embroidered in gold upon the right sleeve of his tunic, and upon the collar, a single wing in this case, ending in a star. He carried binoculars suspended from his neck by a rolled-leather thong, and a revolver in a black-leather case was attached to the belt about his middle. There was thick white dust upon the legs and uppers of his high polished black boots, which the grass had scoured from the toes and soles. His bright blue-grey eyes ran over Franky as the slight soldierly salute was exchanged. He said, speaking in excellent English:
"If Monsieur, the English officer, will obligingly mention his name, rank, and regiment, it might be possible to allow him to continue his promenade with Madame, the invention we are testing being the patent of his countryman, and already familiar to the Authorities at the British War Office."
Thus coerced, Franky produced his card, Margot dimpled into smiles, the polite officer saluted again, introduced himself as Raymond, Capitaine-Commandant pilot of the --th _escadrille_, wheeled and walked away. But he returned to say, this time directly addressing Margot:
"Should Madame la Vicomtesse desire to witness the test of her countryman's--apparatus, there can be no objection to her doing so. But that Madame should keep clear of the vicinity of the"--he pointed to the two oblong strips of white canvas adorning the middle of the expanse of green,--"the signal, intended for the guidance of the aviator, is of absolute necessity, Madame must understand!"
"There won't be any...?" Margot was beginning, nervously.
"_Mais non, Madame_. _Pas d'explosion_," the officer assured her, and stiffened to attention facing eastwards, and scanning the sky with eyes that blinked in the dazzling glare of early noon. For the droning whirr of a plane just then reached them, drowning the sign of the hot south breeze that rustled in the tops of the acacias and oaks, ilexes and poplars, that rose about the arena of open ground....
*CHAPTER V*
*THE BIRD OF WAR*
"The _avion_ comes from Drancy." The speaker looked back at Margot as he focussed his binoculars. "It is not one of our Army machines, but a British monoplane built by your countryman and fitted with the invention whose usefulness we are here to test." He continued: "Should the _officier-pilote_ in charge of the--apparatus--and who for the time being represents an enemy--succeed in poising"--he hesitated a bare instant--"for a stipulated number of moments over the target--those two lengths of white canvas approximating on the grass represent the target--he scores a bull's-eye."
He blinked a little, and before Franky's mental vision rose the aggregation of Government buildings near the _Carrefour des Cascades_, marked "_Magazins et depots_" on Baedeker's maps.
"He scores a bull's eye," resumed the speaker. "He has already paid one visit of the requisite duration to an address near the Porte d'Aubervilliers." Franky had a mental vision of the array of big, bloated gasometers pertaining to the Strasbourg Railway Yards. "He has made a similar call at a point indicated between the station of the Batignolles and the station of the Avenue de Clichy"--the well-preserved teeth of the officer showed under the grey moustache as he smiled, and Franky had another vision of the huge _Gare aux Marchandises_ tucked in the angle between the Railway of the Geinture and the Western Railway lines, as the speaker went on suavely "and the target succeeding this will be the last. It is situated on the Champ de Manoeuvres at Issy. The wireless-telegraph operator of my _escadrille_ informs me that two bull's eyes have already been registered--which for your countryman's invention presages well."
Franky, with British plumpness, queried:
"And the invention? Some new bomb-dropping device--planned to get rid of the way the engine always puts on 'em? If the English inventor-fellow has done that, his goods are worth buying, I should say!"
Raymond, _Capitaine-Commandant_, answered as the droning song from the sky grew louder:
"Of certainty, Monsieur, if his invention prove worth buying, my Government will undoubtedly purchase what has already been unavailingly offered to yours. It is our custom to examine and test, closely and exhaustively, new things that are offered. But what would you? We seek the best for France."
"He isn't flying his aeroplane himself, is he? Or working his own invention, whatever it may be?"
"But no, Madame! One of our* Officiers-Aviateurs* is acting as pilot, a skilled mechanic of our Service occupies the observer's place. Despite the Entente Cordiale--the happy relations prevailing between my country and England--it would hardly be _convenable_ or discreet to permit even an Englishman"--the tone of graceful, subtle irony cannot be conveyed by pen or type--"_even_ an Englishman to fly over Paris, or any other fortified city of France. But see! In the sky to the north-east--above that silvery puff of vapour--arrives now the _avion_ built and christened by your countryman."
Margot asked, narrowing her beautiful eyes as she searched out the darkish speck upon the hot blue background:
"The plane, you mean. What does he call it?"
Raymond answered without removing his eyes from his binoculars:
"Madame, he calls it 'The Bird of War.'"
The tuff-tuff of a motor-cycle sounded faintly in the distance, as the resonant vibrating noise of the aeroplane came more triumphantly out of the hot blue sky. Save for a scintillating white reflection to the north that might have been the crystal dome of the great big Palm House in the Jardin d'Acclimatation, and that unavoidable, useful ugliness, the gilded lantern of the Tour Eiffel, thrusting up into the middle distance over the delicately-rounded masses of new foliage upon the right-hand looking east, the glory and shame and magnificence and squalor of the Queen City of Cities might have lain a hundred leagues away, so ringed-in by delicate austere brown of serried tree-trunks, rising above rich clumps of blossoming lilac, syringa, yellow azalea, and pink, mauve, and snowy rhododendron, was the spacious green arena wherein Franky and Margot were destined to play their part.
Now, followed by the wide-winged shadow that the sun of high noon threw almost directly beneath her, darkening drifting cloud, and open city spaces, passing over breasting tree-tops and wide stretches of municipal greensward, the Bird of War drew nearer and more near.... And glancing up as the portentous flying shadow suddenly blotted out the sunlight, Franky realised that the two-seater monoplane was hovering, and buzzing as she hovered, like a Brobdingnagian combination of kite-hawk, dragon-fly, and bumblebee.
He pulled out a pair of vest-pocket field-glasses and scanned her as she hung there, gleaming in the sunlight, at a height of perhaps five hundred feet above the white cloths on the grass. He could make out the Union Jack on her underwings, the huge black raking capitals of her name BIRD OF WAR painted on the side of the tapering canvas-covered fuselage, the diamond-shaped tail swaying between the pendant flaps of the huge triangular elevators, clearly as though these features had been filmed upon the screen. In a curious misty circle, spinning under the fuselage, he suspected lay the secret of her kite-like poise and hover, and behind his immaculate waistcoat he was sensible of a thrill.
If the English inventor had not solved the baffling Problem of Stability, he had come uncommonly near it, by the Great Brass Hat! And the dud-heads at Whitehall had shown the door to him and his invention. "Good Christmas!--how like 'em!" reflected Franky, lowering the glasses to chuckle, and looking round for Margot.
There she was, some twenty yards distant, planted right in the middle of the avenue, lost to the wide in rapt contemplation of the hovering aeroplane.
"Kitts!" he called, but she did not hear, or disdained to pay attention. He tried to call again, but his mouth dried up and his feet seemed rooted to the ground. For, swinging round the turf-banked corner of the avenue at its junction with another, charging at a terrific pace down upon the little brilliant creature, came a whity-brown figure on a motorcycle, the frantic honking of its horn and the racket of its engine's open throttle mingling deafeningly with the tractor's roar.