For him it meant just one more step, with a thousand more to follow, along a straight, unending road. Rivière felt as though for an eternity he had been carrying a crushing load on his uplifted arms; an endless, hopeless effort.

“I’m aging.” If he no longer found a solace in work and work alone, surely he was growing old. He caught himself puzzling over problems which hitherto he had ignored. There surged within his mind, like a lost ocean, murmuring regrets, all the gentler joys of life that he had thrust aside. “Can it be coming on me—so soon?” He realized that he had always been postponing for his declining years, “when I have time for it,” everything that makes life kind to men. As if it were ever possible to “have time for it” one day and realize at life’s end that dream of peace and happiness! No, peace there could be none; nor any victory, perhaps. Never could all the air mails land in one swoop once for all.

Rivière paused before Leroux; the old foreman was hard at work. Leroux, too, had forty years of work behind him. All his energies were for his work. When at ten o’clock or midnight Leroux went home it certainly was not to find a change of scene, escape into another world. When Rivière smiled toward him, he raised his heavy head and pointed at a burnt-out axle. “Jammed it was, but I’ve fixed it up.” Rivière bent down to look; duty had regained its hold upon him. “You should tell the shop to set them a bit looser.” He passed his finger over the trace of seizing, then glanced again at Leroux. As his eyes lingered on the stern old wrinkled face, an odd question hovered on his lips and made him smile.

“Ever had much to do with love, Leroux, in your time?”

“Love, sir? Well, you see—”

“Hadn’t the time for it, I suppose—like me.”

“Not a great deal, sir.”

Rivière strained his ears to hear if there were any bitterness in the reply; no, not a trace of it. This man, looking back on life, felt the quiet satisfaction of a carpenter who has made a good job of planing down a board: “There you are! That’s done.”

“There you are,” thought Rivière. “My life’s done.”

Then, brushing aside the swarm of somber thoughts his weariness had brought, he walked toward the hangar; for the Chile plane was droning down toward it.

III

The sound of the distant engine swelled and thickened; a sound of ripening. Lights flashed out. The red lamps on the light-tower silhouetted a hangar, radio standards, a square landing ground. The setting of a gala night.

“There she comes!”

A sheaf of beams had caught the grounding plane, making it shine as if brand-new. No sooner had it come to rest before the hangar than mechanics and airdrome hands hurried up to unload the mail. Only Pellerin, the pilot, did not move.

“Well, aren’t you going to get down?”

The pilot, intent on some mysterious task, did not deign to reply. Listening, perhaps, to sounds that he alone could hear, long echoes of the flight. Nodding reflectively, he bent down and tinkered with some unseen object. At last he turned toward the officials and his comrades, gravely taking stock of them as though of his possessions. He seemed to pass them in review, to weigh them, take their measure, saying to himself that he had earned his right to them, as to this hangar with its gala lights and solid concrete and, in the offing, the city, full of movement, warmth, and women. In the hollow of his large hands he seemed to hold this folk; they were his subjects, to touch or hear or curse, as the fancy took him. His impulse now was to curse them for a lazy crowd, so sure of life they seemed, gaping at the moon; but he decided to be genial instead.

“...Drinks are on you!”

Then he climbed down.

He wanted to tell them about the trip.

“If only you knew...!”

Evidently, to his thinking, that summed it up, for now he walked off to change his flying gear.

As the car was taking him to Buenos Aires in the company of a morose inspector and Rivière in silent mood, Pellerin suddenly felt sad; of course, he thought, it’s a fine thing for a fellow to have gone through it and, when he’s got his footing again, let off a healthy volley of curses. Nothing finer in the world! But afterwards ... when you look back on it all; you wonder, you aren’t half so sure!

A struggle with a cyclone, that at least is a straight fight, it’s real. But not that curious look things wear, the face they have when they think they are alone.