INTO THE BLUE By F. Britten Austin The strange and tremendously dramatic story of an airplane pilot, intoxicated with the exaltation of great altitudes, setting his course, with his sweetheart, for the stars--by the distinguished author of “Nach Verdun” and “Out of the Night.” It was in a bitterly pessimistic frame of mind that, having seen my baggage into the hotel, I went for a first walk along the asphalted esplanade of Southbeach. I had no pleasure in the baking sun, in the glittering stretch of the English Channel that veiled itself in a fine-weather mist all around the half-horizon. The exuberant, bold-eyed flappers, promenading in groups of three or four, the vivid polychromatism of their taste in sports-coats, seemed to me merely objectionable. The hordes of worthily respectable middle-class families complete with children--with many children--that blackened the sands and overflowed into the fringe of the water oppressed my soul with their formidable multiplicity. I thought, in a savage emphasis of contrast, of the neat little yacht that should now be bearing me across the North Sea to the austere perfection of the Norwegian fiords. And I cursed myself for the childish imbecility of exasperation with which--when, at the last moment, with my suitcases all packed, I had received a telegram informing me that the yacht had come off second-best in a collision with a coaltramp--I had picked up Bradshaw and sworn to myself to go to whatever place I should blindly put my finger upon as I opened the page. The oracle had declared for Southbeach--Southbeach in mid-August! I shrugged my shoulders--so be it! My holiday was spoiled anyhow. To Southbeach I would go. And now, as I contemplated it, I was appalled. What was I going to do with myself? A paddle-wheel excursion-steamer came up to the pier, listing over with the black load aboard of her. Up and down the beach, in five-minute trips, a seaplane went roaring some eight hundred feet above the heads of the gaping crowd. I had done all the flying I wanted in the war, thank you very much. Other potentialities of amusement there were apparently none. If I could not discover a tolerably decent golf-course, I was a lost man. I am not going to give the chronicle of that first day. It would be a study in sheer boredom. That night, after one of those execrable dinners which are the peculiar production of an English seaside hotel, I had pretty well made up my mind that--oracle or no oracle--I would shake the sand of Southbeach off my feet on the morrow. Sitting over my coffee in the lounge, I was in fact already consulting the time-table for a morning train, when my cogitations were suddenly interrupted by a violent slap on the shoulder. “Hello, Jimmy!” I looked up with a start, before my identification of the voice had time to complete itself.