Beryl of the Biplane. William Le Queux
taken the silencer off,” Ronnie remarked. “She’s in a hurry, no doubt.”
“That silencer of yours is a marvellous invention,” George declared. “Thank goodness Fritz hasn’t got it!”
Ronnie smiled, and selecting a cigarette from his case, tapped it down and slowly lit it, his eyes upon the machine now hovering like a great hawk above them.
“I can run her so that at a thousand feet up nobody below can hear a sound,” he remarked. “That’s where we’ve got the pull for night bombing. A touch on the lever and the exhaust is silent, so that the enemy can’t hear us come up.”
“Yes. It’s a deuced cute invention,” declared his partner. “It saved me that night a month ago when I got over Alost and put a few incendiary pills into the German barracks. I got away in the darkness and, though half-a-dozen machines went up, they couldn’t find me.”
“The enemy would dearly like to get hold of the secret,” laughed Ronnie. “But all of us keep it guarded too carefully.”
“Yes,” said his partner, as they watched with admiring eyes, how Beryl Gaselee, the intrepid woman aviator, was manipulating the big battleplane in her descent. “Your invention for the keeping of the secret, my dear fellow, is quite as clever as the invention itself.”
The new silencer for aeroplane-engines Ronnie Pryor had offered to the authorities, and as it was still under consideration, he kept it strictly to himself. Only he, his mechanic, Beryl and his partner George Bellingham, knew its true mechanism, and so careful was he to conceal it from the enemy in our midst, that he had also invented a clever contrivance by which, with a turn of a winged nut, the valve came apart, so that the chief portion—which was a secret—could be placed in one’s pocket, and carried away whenever the machines were left.
“I don’t want any frills from you, old man,” laughed the merry, easy-going young fellow in flannels. “I’m only trying to do my best for my country, just as you have done, and just as Beryl is doing.”
“Beryl is a real brick.”
“You say that because we are pals.”
“No, Ronnie. I say it because it’s the rock-bottom truth; because Miss Gaselee, thanks to your tuition, is one of the very few women who have come to the front as aviators in the war. She knows how to fly as well as any Squadron Commander. Look at her now! Just look at the spiral she’s making. Neither of us could do it better. Her engine, too, is running like a clock.”
And, as the two aviators watched, the great battleplane swept round and round the aerodrome, quickly dropping from twelve thousand feet—the height at which they had first noticed its approach—towards the wide expanse of grass that was the landing-place.
At last “The Hornet,” humming loudly like a huge bumblebee, touched earth and came to a standstill, while Ronnie ran forward to help his well-beloved out of the pilot’s seat.
“Hullo, Ronnie!” cried the fresh-faced, athletic girl merrily. “I didn’t expect to find you here! I thought you’d gone to Harbury, and I intended to fly over and find you there.”
“I ran out here with George to see that new engine running on the bench,” he explained. “Come and have some tea. You must want some.”
The girl, in her workmanlike air-woman’s windproof overalls, her “grummet”—which in aerodrome-parlance means headgear—her big goggles and thick gauntlet-gloves, rose from her seat, whilst her lover took her tenderly in his arms and lifted her out upon the ground.
Then, after a glance at the altimeter, he remarked:
“By Jove, Beryl! You’ve been flying pretty high—thirteen thousand four hundred feet.”
“Yes,” laughed the girl merrily. “The weather this afternoon is perfect for a stunt.”
Then, after the young man had gone to the exhaust, unscrewed the silencer and placed the secret part in his pocket, the pair walked across to the tea-room and there sat tête-à-tête upon the verandah gossiping.
Beryl Gaselee was, perhaps, the best-known flying-woman in the United Kingdom. There were others, but none so expert nor so daring. She would fly when the pylon pilots—as the ornate gentlemen of the aerodromes are called—shook their heads and refused to go up.
Soft-featured, with pretty, fair and rather fluffy hair, and quite devoid of that curious hardness of feature which usually distinguishes the female athlete, her age was twenty-three, her figure slightly petite and quite slim. Indeed, many airmen who knew her were amazed that such a frail-looking little person could manage such a big, powerful machine as Ronnie Pryor’s “Hornet”—the ’bus which was the last word in battleplanes both for rapid rising and for speed.
The way in which she manipulated the joy-stick often, indeed, astonished Ronnie himself. But her confidence in herself, and in the stability of the machine, was so complete that such a thing as possible disaster never occurred to her.
As she sat at the tea-table, her cheeks fresh and reddened by the cutting wind at such an altitude, a wisp of fair hair straying across her face, and her big, wide-open blue eyes aglow with the pleasure of living, she presented a charming figure of that feminine type that is so purely English. They were truly an interesting pair, a fact which had apparently become impressed upon a middle-aged air-mechanic in brown overalls who, in passing the verandah upon which they were seated, looked up and cast a furtive glance at them.
Both were far too absorbed in each other to notice the man’s unusual interest, or the expression of suppressed excitement upon his grimy face, as he watched them with covert glance. Had they seen it, they might possibly have been curious as to the real reason. As it was, they remained in blissful ignorance, happy in each other’s confidence and love.
“Just the weather for another Zepp raid to-night,” Ronnie was remarking. “No moon to speak of, wind just right for them, and a high barometer.”
“That’s why you’re going to Harbury this evening, in readiness to go up, I suppose?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You’ll let me go with you, won’t you?” she begged, as she poured him his second cup of tea with dainty hand.
“You were up last night, and you’ve been for a long joy-ride to-day. I think it would really be too great a strain, Beryl, for you to go out to-night,” he protested.
“No, it won’t. Do let me go, dear!” she urged.
“Very well,” he replied, always unable to refuse her, as she knew full well. “In that case we’ll fly over to Harbury now, and put the ’bus away till to-night. I’ve sent Collins out there in readiness.”
Then, half-an-hour later, “The Hornet,” with Ronnie at the joy-stick and Beryl in the observer’s seat, rose again from the grass and, after a couple of turns around the pylons, ascended rapidly, heading north-east.
As it did so, the dark-eyed mechanic in the brown overalls stood watching it grow smaller until it passed out of sight.
For some minutes he remained silent and pensive, his heavy brows knit as he watched. Then, suddenly turning upon his heel, he muttered to himself and walked to one of the flying schools where he, Henry Knowles, was employed as a mechanic on the ’buses flown by the men training as air-pilots for the Front.
In a little over half-an-hour the big biplane with its loud hum travelled nearly forty miles from Hendon, until at last Ronnie, descending in search of his landmark, discovered a small river winding through the panorama of patchwork fields, small dark patches of woods, and little clusters of houses which, in the sundown, denoted villages and hamlets. This stream he followed until Beryl suddenly touched his arm—speech being impossible amid the roar of the engine—and pointed below to where, a little to the left, there showed the thin, grey spire of an ivy-clad village church