And add to this that quasi-religious bond of the air that makes of two men twins in one womb....
I repeat, Maxwell did himself a quite radiant honor.
"What sort of a fellow was Maxwell to look at?" I asked by and by.
The answer was almost startlingly ready. This lad who had bolted from Malvern, forced his way into an Embassy and demanded to be taken in the service of a foreign Power, unbuckled the watch from his wrist.
I found myself looking at a young but curiously worn face, with a great width of brow, eyes that seemed to hold I knew not what nameless expression of disillusion and fatality, and a firm and sweet mouth. That face had certainly lost nothing spiritually by its ungrudged and generous homage. Yet he too had probably jazzed and pink-ginned and drummed ragtime on cases of stuffed birds. Strange days! Wisdom and experience under young brilliantined hair, and the bald and reverend dome accepting the result on hearsay! Slang, and an undreamed-of valor; Magalhaens' vision, and a lark at a Grafton Ball! By being "frightfully keen on Air-geography" Smith merely meant what Columbus and Cabot and the Navigator had meant; by wanting to "get on one of these Expeditions" he was willing to dare for discovery's sake some monstrous Baffin's Bay of the air. "Not to miss anything," he fumed and fretted over Maxwell's equations and made them part of the Dream and the Desire. He was brooding over it now as we lay there together, I with his watch in my hand.... And all this, I ought to say, was at the time when the last of the Santon hay was barely stacked, and John Alcock and Whitten Brown had just flown the Atlantic in sixteen hours. It was when the headland was pale cloth-of-gold with the ripening corn, and the R. 34 had crossed to America and returned. It was when the ditches were yellow with hawkweed and the copses pink with campion, and no man living could have told you what the intentions of the Air Ministry were. Smith was lying there brooding, not on the carriage of a few pounds' weight of letters nor on prizes of £10,000, but on the problems of man's unchanged and warring heart. He dreamed of Imperial Defense. He was "keen" on making India and Egypt secure. He was "dead nuts" on the safety of Africa, "all out" for Australia's protection, and "tails up" if any other nation jolly well interfered.