Endurance Heroes
376 T H E C O M M O N W E A L August I4, I929 THE physician who cannot heal himself, the lawyer who is sued for breach of promise, the pedagogue whose own olive-branches resist prunThe...
...All these stunts are as much a test of human patience, fortitude and compatibility as they are of the strength of machines...
...For the space of a year or two we might even remember their names...
...They add nothing to our store of knowledge...
...Wright can turn philosopher and say, "These, at least, are my public...
...Their motives are a secret between themselves and their own souls...
...After all, machines are built without nerves and sensibilities...
...which are characterized, similarly, by a great expenditure of effort, and no adventure, no accomplishment...
...These are heroes...
...And though each represents a peculiarly ironic defeat, none is a sufficiently ironic parallel...
...They are not adventurous...
...S. S. Van Dine's great detective, Philo Vance, has always been...
...Refueling in flight was the only problem...
...S. S. Van Dine...
...As it was, he could hang his story on the pleasures of the countryside, the conditions of the road, the customs of the villages through which he passed, the girls who came out from the fields to dance beside him for a mile or two, the landlords who entertained him at night, and the quality of the beef and ale that was everywhere set before him...
...Meanwhile, Mr...
...A bank messenger was shot, a payroll stolen, a car full of thugs seen escaping, a battered hat left behind...
...No man practising a profession is infallible, not even an engineer...
...Since then we have learned nothing from an endurance flight...
...New endurance flights are like the six-day bicycle races, only, since they lack the stimulus of immediate competition, somewhat less thrilling...
...A few weeks ago almost every city in the country had its endurance plane in the air, and pilots who failed to stay up at least a week had no chance of mention in the newspapers...
...We have remembered him partly, it is true, because he wrote an entrancing account of the trip...
...It was an adventure...
...For more than a year it has been known, through factory tests, that barring accidents and bad judgment on the part of the pilots, airplanes could remain aloft the better part of a month...
...Miiller wrecked his boat on rocks off the Carolina coast, but slived himself by swimming seven miles to an island...
...Kemp's nine-days' morris, now, has been held in affectionate memory by Englishmen for 3oo years...
...It was no great distance, perhaps...
...But infallible is precisely what Mr...
...Nor can we forget Franz Romer and Paul Mtiller, the two Germans who separately rowed across the Atlantic Ocean within the past year...
...But we have had notice recently of adventurers who belong to an order much nobler than this, and even more firmly grounded in antiquity...
...But the point is that if he had danced on a ballroom floor he would have had no account to write...
...and the margin of failure granted him in the nature of things may, if his star is baneful, cover his own case instead of the case of one of his clients...
...The participants would be going somewhere, and the winners would get somewhere...
...Kemp was gomg somewhereDthat was the fundamental purpose without which the fact that he danced a morris would be of no point or interest...
...Six months ago the Question Mark demonstrated its solution...
...Willard Huntington Wright is just now opening derisive letters from many who do not know him personally, and listening to jeers from many who do...
...ENDURANCE HEROES DLENTY of broken records these days testify to the continued virility of the race...
...376 T H E C O M M O N W E A L August I4, I929 THE physician who cannot heal himself, the lawyer who is sued for breach of promise, the pedagogue whose own olive-branches resist prunThe ing, the engineer whose own cellar fills Failure with watermthese are the best parallels of Philo which mere reality yields to the writer of detective stories who, when actually put to it, cannot detect...
...More directly they are comparable to the marathon dances which were receiving, only a few years back, quite as much publicity...
...They had no records to break, and no businesses to promote, nothing to gain and everything to lose...
...After reaching the West Indies, Herr Romer ran into the winter's worst hurricane and was lost...
...And it is always a new wonder to us when men give proof that in this respect they may be as good as machines over a long period...
...but it was a journey...
...We cannot find the counterpart of Kemp in marathon dancers who shuffle fifty miles around a room, or endurance fliers who circle above a landing field until they have covered a distance equal to the circumference of the earth, and are very well paid for doing it...
...They get nowhere...
...Outside of this small excitement, endurance flights are a dreary and vain business...
...So recondite is his knowledge, so powerful his ratiocination, that he has reconstructed the most baffling crimes and out-thought the most gifted criminals to be found anywhere on paper in our time...
...If marathon dances were conducted between Quebec and Montreal, or up the slopes of the Matterhorn, we might all of us take an interest...
...It is unhappily likely, therefore, that Mr...
...Wright has failed, in his capacity as Honorary Police Commissioner of Bradley Beach, to identify and trace the perpetrators of a quite ordinary murder in his territory...
...There is Alain Gerbault, for instance, who quit his tennis to sail a thirty-five-ton boat around the world, and was five years at the job...
...And Mr...
...Ah, well, when the tide of unkind comment widens to a sea, Mr...
...Indeed we think it a good deal more remarkable that two men should have been willing to confine themselves within the cramped quarters of a plane for three weeks than that the plane should have been able to stay aloft that length of time...
...Wright is, of course, the social and legal entity who encases Mr...
...From London to Bristol danced the Honorable Kemp...
...Wright is "without a theory...
...The pilots have simply been doing what everyone has known could be done...
Vol. 10 • August 1929 • No. 15
