EVEiYN EATON FLIGHT Flight soaring away from the world she knows transports Martia Deane on what the reader soon realizes is not an ordinary airplane trip. Tension mounts with an increas- ing awareness that Martia does not know and cannot control her destination, until at last the reader's premonition grows to certainty that Martia and the other passengers are on the ultimate journey, that they are in fact dead. What happens thereafter in this extraor- dinary story must be left to the author's artistry to portray. Skillfully interweaving the strange and vivid events of this final journey with retrospective flashes into her heroine's past, Miss Eaton creates an electrically ex- citing story and a character with wh' reader quickly identifies himself. m^fie a success of her life by most standards: despite a disastrous ending ' sh^ 1 on to achieve earjp marriage, gone some fame as a pho. ; )her. She had raised -^ hfcr daughter * li M x>bed the depths of *** feeling \v-rli - \\uich was denied her. Beauty, terror, pity and hope flash through thWe pages as we see her weighed in terms of what lies beyond Martia, with clarity and final perspective, reviews her life* Miss Eaton has not hesitated to use com- %onplace accessories in her highly original presentation of experience after life. Yet the Whole striking concept is presented with rev- erent*. The book is rich with excitement and mounting tension, but behind this moving, pro- found story is the wise and tender understand- ing of the cravings of the human heart, As Flight advances toward its powerful climax, it will be a stony reader indeed who is not KANSAS CITY, MO PUBLIC UBRARY DDD1 030*1776 fl Copy 1 Eaton, Evelyn Sybil Mary, 1902- Plight, a novel* [1954] 3T 3C FLIG JAN3u.'64 f - -rr- "**> we&i BKANCH -7. JUN 30 ' LUUiS GECRG * ^ kg- rfu, Jf IX - \ PREVIOUS BOOKS BY EVELYN EATON! NOVELS: Pray to the Earth Quietly My Captain Waits Restless Are the Sails The Seals So Wide In What Torn Ship Give Me Your Golden Hand ***** COLLECTIONS OF SHORT STORIES: Every Month Was May The North Star Is Nearer A NOVEL iff EVELYN EATON THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY, INC. INDIANAPOLIS PntlisJiers NEW YORK COPYRIGHT, 1954, BY EVELYN EATON PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 54-6054 FIRST EDITION Lines from "The Rabbi's Song" from Actions and Reactions, by Rudyard Kipling. Copyright 1909 by Rudyard Kipling. Reprinted by permis- sion of Mrs. George Bambridge and Doubleday & Company, Inc. Material on pages 20 and 21 originally appeared in different form as story in The New Yorker. AUTHOR'S NOTE "Fugue, from the Latin fuga, a Flight; a composition in parts that do not all begin at once, but follow or pursue each other successively." Webster's Dictionary "A Fugue 'is composed of a Subject, the theme on which the whole composition is founded; the Exposi- tion, that part of the Fugue during which the Voices make their first entries in succession, and which extends as far as the conclusion of the subject; Episodes, that part of the Fugue in which for a time neither subject nor answer is heard; Stretto, from the present participle of the verb 'stringendo,' in the sense of pressing on or hurrying up the time, that part of the Fugue in which the entries of the subject follow one another at a shorter time than in the first exposition; and the Answer. A real Answer is always possible." From Fugue, by E. PROUT. Flight follows, roughly, the construction of a fugue as given above. It is dedicated to good friends and un- derstanding neighbors in New Hampshire, the Robin- sons, Bob, Kay, Angela and Tammy, with my love. EVELYN EATON Boulderfalls, 1953. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS THE author wishes to express her gratitude for permis- sion to quote from the following works: Lines from "The Rabbi's Song" from Actions and Reactions, by Rudyard Kipling. Copyright 1909 by Rudyard Kipling. Selections from The Jade Mountain translated by Witter Bynner, Copyright 1949 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Lines from Le Potomac by Jean Cocteau. Reprinted by permission of Librairie Gallimard, all rights re-* served. FLIGHT FAR as she could see, without bending forward and rousing the pain in her head, there was no sign of shore. Disappointment nudged her, to have missed the last of it. She knew how it would look: first the river, then green woods, checker- board squares with straight black roads and curving white ones crossing them, then the sea, this sea that she was flying over now and would be for how many hours? She shook her head. Immediately PAIN rose up in a crested wave, towering to break on her. She lay rigid, waiting for the crash, the suffocation, the foam, the fragments. * It receded. It was hovering half an inch away. If she could concentrate on something, on anything, it might subside. She grasped at what she remembered of the take-off, smooth, without even the small metallic gluph parody- ing human catch of the breath. The plane was simply higher, a little higher, higher, and at last high. She had closed her eyes then, intending to open them im- 9 EVELYN EATON mediately. She must have blacked out which was not surprising. The PAIN moved a fraction toward her and she held it away by recalling the time before the take- off. It was raining when she reached the airport, a bleak gray day with gusts of bitter wind. She watched the passengers ahead of her duck through the gate, one by one, blurred distorted figures in wind-shaken clothes. She could see the plane beyond them, expectant, blunt- nosed, gray, tail swung round, door open* Planes had these doors like darning-needles* eyes; darning needles were dragonflies. This, that she must take, looked like a dragonfly, with cruciform, glistening body, poised by rain-swept reeds. Ground mist helped the illusion. It might have been the dawn mist rising from Loon Lake* There was a heavy fog. This was a grim day, with poor visibility, not a day she would choose to fly* There could be nothing optional about the trip. It was her turn to pass the barricade. She shivered, drawing her collar close about her throat, hanging back, dismayed. Where were Debby and Don? Late as usual, but this once it mattered, this once they might have arrived in time to say good-by. Suddenly she saw them, peering at her through the glass walls of a closed-in promenade, making regretful gestures that they were prevented from coming nearer* "By red-tape regulations," she guessed impatiently, re* 10 Flight membering the casual freedom of the first rickety can- vas crates in which she used to fly the Channel between England and France, after what she still forgetfully sometimes called "the war." There had been two wars since. In die second, shp was flying forty thousand miles over twenty countries, and across the Hump, without too much visible red tape. Now because Debby and Don were a few minutes late at a civilian airport, some bureaucratic jerk would not let them through. Don had his arm around Debby, holding her hand in his. Their faces were tense and sad as they strained against the glass, looking remorsefully at her, anxious and concerned. She forgave them their lateness, mouthed "I love you both," waved and went forward awkwardly, burdened with her things. Then she turned at the gangway to blow them her last kiss. A cloud burst. A violent gust of wind threw her off her balance. She was already blinded by the rain. She staggered, groped toward the plane, and struck her head against the framework of the door. It was a brutal crack, a sickening, tearing pain, an agony. No wonder she was feeling dazed, groggy from the blow, and groggy from the shots she had taken before it "immunization" from smallpox, paratyphoid, ty- phoid, yellow fever, cholera, plague, pestilence, battle, murder and from sudden death ... no, that was the litany. How modern and appropriate it sounded, an ii EVELYN EATON indictment of die age, as shots were an indictment of those places where such ills existed, with yaws, syphilis, leprosy and always malnutrition. Now she was sam- pling some of them in miniature. "I wish my head would clear/' She raised her heavy eyelids with an effort. She was in her preferred seat, by accident, the first she had lurched into, after she hit her head. She always chose to sit at the hack, well behind the wings. She got the impression, from its fitttings and shape, that this was a -54. It was lined with a tasteful, quilted effect, the curtains and the cushions rose, the padded upholstery gray. The scat beside her was empty. She counted fifteen passengers, six women, nine men, settled in attitudes she would come to know as characteristic later, if she came to know anything with clarity again. She sighed, closing her eyes. The pretty stewardess with the dc rigucur profes- sional smile would be bending over soon to ask: "Your name and destination?" "Martia Deane." "Your destination?" She would sound like the moron she felt, for she did not know. "I can tell you my name and address, the name and address of my daughter, Mrs. Donald Spade, as in shovel I can give you her telephone number and my 12 Flight own, but I cannot tell you my destination, nor my reasons for going there. I am feeling ill. I hit my head when I boarded the plane.