Young Beryl Kendrick is an Atlantic City product--he was a professional swimmer and life-guard--and will look after you. The price is fifteen dollars; formerly twenty-five dollars, but competition, which is said to be the life of trade, had operated in favour of the public. Rather emotionally I bade my man good day, promising to return for a flight the next morning, a promise I certainly did not mean to keep. This stupendous announcement he received coolly. Flying to him was a quotidian banality.
And then I noticed that the blazing sun had become darkened. Was it an eclipse, or were some horrid, monstrous shapes like the supposititious spindles spoken of by Langley devouring the light of our parent planet? No, it was the chamber of my skull that was full of shadows. The obsession was complete. I would go up, but I must suffer terribly in the interim.
Why should I fly and pay fifteen good shekels for the unwelcome privilege? I computed the cost of various beverages, and as a consoling thought recalled Mark Twain's story of the Western editor who, missing from his accustomed haunts, was later found serenely drunk, passionately reading to a group of miners from a table his lantern-illuminated speech, in which he denounced the cruel raw waste of grain in the making of bread when so many honest men were starving for whisky. Yet did I feel that I would not begrudge my hard-earned royalties (I'm not a best-seller), and thus tormented between the devil of cowardice and the deep sea of curiosity I retired and dreamed all night of fighting strange birds that attacked me in an aeroplane.
I shan't weary you with the further analysis of my soul-states during this tempestuous period. I ate a light breakfast, swallowed much tea. Then I resolutely went in company with a friend, and we boarded an Inlet car. I had the day previous resorted to a major expedient of cowards. I had said, so as to bolster up my fluttering resolution, that I was going to fly; an expedient that seldom misses, for I should never have been able to face the chief clerk, the head waiter, or the proprietor at the hotel if I failed to keep my promise.
"Boaster! Swaggerer!" I muttered to myself en route. "Now are you satisfied? Thou tremblest, carcass! Thou wouldst tremble much more if thou knewest whither I shall soon lead thee!" I quoted Turenne, and I was beginning to babble something about Icarus--or was it Phæton, or Simon Magus?--brought to earth in the Colosseum by a prayer from the lips of Saint Peter--when we arrived. How I hated the corner where we alighted. It seemed mean and dingy and sinister in the dazzling sunlight--a red-hot Saturday, September 11, 1915, and the hour was 10.30 A. M. A condemned criminal could not have noted more clearly every detail of the life he was about to quit. We ploughed through the sand. We reached the scaffold--at least it looked like one to me. "Hello, here's a church. Let's go in," I felt like exclaiming in sheer desperation, remembering Dickens and Mr. Wemmick. I would have, such was my blue funk, quoted Holy Scripture to the sandlopers, but I hadn't the chance.