then are forgotten tomorrow. But he’s different. Even allowing for the playboy, romantic element in all his adventures, he couldn’t have kept his grip on the popular imagination unless he was something out of the ordinary run of “heroes”. It must be some greatness of integrity that keeps the fires of hero worship burning still for him.’
‘Well, as you say, you’d rather I formed my own impressions,’ said Nigel provocatively. ‘But I’d be glad of the outside dope, so to speak, if you’ve got time. I’ve rather lost touch with the O’Brien saga.’
‘I expect you know the salient points all right. He had a bag of sixty-four Germans by the end of the war : used to go out alone and sit up in a cloud all day, waiting for them. The Germans were quite convinced he had a charmed life: used to attack anything of theirs short of a circus. The chaps in his squadron really began to be a bit afraid of him themselves. Day after day he’d go out, and come back with the fuselage looking like a sieve and half the struts nearly shot through. MacAlister in his mess told me it looked as if O’Brien deliberately tried to get killed and just couldn’t bring it off; might have sold his soul to the devil, for all anyone knew. And what’s more, he did it without drink. Then, after the war, there was his solo flight to Australia in an obsolete machine, flying one day and every other day tying the pieces together after the crack-up. And, of course, there was that incredible exploit of his in Afghanistan, when he took a whole native fort single-handed. And the stunting he did for that film company, chucking his machine all over the place between the peaks of a mountain range. I suppose the culminating feat was his rescue of that explorer woman, Georgia Cavendish. Went looking for her all over some godless part of Africa, landed in impossible country, picked her up out of it and brought her home. That seems to have sobered even him a bit. The crash at the end of it may have had some effect, too. Anyway, it was only a few months after that he decided to give up flying and bury himself in the country.’
‘Um,’ said Nigel, ‘a colourful career all right.’
‘But it isn’t these spectacular feats—the things every schoolboy has heard about—that have made the legend, so much as the things the public
hasn’t
heard of—officially, that is to say, the things that never got into the newspapers, but were passed from mouth to mouth; dark hints, rumours, superstitions almost—some of them fiction, no doubt, and most of them exaggerated, but the greater part founded on fact. All these have swelled up to make a really gigantic mythical figure of him.’
‘Such as?’ asked Nigel.
‘Well—one absurd little detail: they say he always fought best in carpet slippers—used to keep a pair in his plane and put ’em on when he got to a thousand feet or so; no idea if there’s any truth in it, but those slippers have become as legendary as Nelson’s telescope. Then there was his hatred of brass hats—common enough, of course, amongst those who had to do the fighting—but he took active steps about it. Later on in the war, when he had become a flight commander, some B.F. at Wing Headquarters ordered his flight out to do some ground strafing in impossible weather conditions over a nest of machine guns. You know the idea—just to keep ’em busy and justify the brass hat’s existence. Well, they were all shot down except O’Brien. After that, they say he spent most of his spare time flying about behind the lines looking for the staff cars. When he saw one, he’d chivvy it all over the countryside, with his wheels a couple of feet above the brass hat’s monocle. They say he used to drop homemade stink bombs into the tonneaux, too; fairly frightened ’em out of their wits. But they couldn’t exactly prove who it was; and anyway, O’Brien being the popular idol he was, I doubt if they’d have dared to take action.