The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life
Gothic on the porch, blistered paint, and the general lines of a
prairie barn, but the living-room was more nearly beautiful than any
room Carl had seen. In accordance with the ideal of that era it had
Mission furniture with large leather cushions, brown wood-work, and
tan oatmeal paper scattered with German color prints, instead of the
patent rockers and carbon prints of Roman monuments which adorned the
houses of the other professors. While waiting with Genie Linderbeck
for the Frazers to come down, Carl found in a rack on the oak table
such books as he had never seen: exquisite books from England, bound
in terra-cotta and olive-green cloth with intricate gold designs,
heavy-looking, but astonishingly light to the hand; books about Celtic
legends and Provencal jongleurs, and Japanese prints and other matters
of which he had never heard; so different from the stained text-books
and the shallow novels by brisk ladies which had constituted his
experiences of literature that he suddenly believed in culture.
Professor Frazer appeared, walking into the room _after_ his fragile
wife and gracious sister-in-law, and Carl drank tea (with lemon
instead of milk in it!) and listened to bewildering talk and to a few
stanzas, heroic or hauntingly musical, by a new poet, W. B. Yeats, an
Irishman associated with a thing called the Gaelic Movement. Professor
Frazer had a funny, easy friendliness; his sister-in-law, a Diana in
brown, respectfully asked Carl about the practicability of motor-cars,
and all of them, including two newly come "high-brow" seniors,
listened with nodding interest while Carl bashfully analyzed each of
the nine cars owned in Plato and Jamaica Mills. At dusk the Diana in
brown played MacDowell, and the light of the silken-shaded lamp was
on a print of a fairy Swiss village.
That evening Carl wrestled with the Turk for one hour,
catch-as-catch-can, on the Turk's bed and under it and nearly out of
the window, to prove the value of Professor Frazer and culture. Next
morning Carl and the Turk enrolled in Frazer's optional course in
modern poetry, a desultory series of lectures which did not attempt
Tennyson and Browning. So Carl discovered Shelley and Keats and Walt
Whitman, Swinburne and Rossetti and Morris. He had to read by crawling
from word to word as though they were ice-cakes in a cataract of
emotion. The allusiveness was agonizing. But he pulled off his shoes,
rested his feet on the foot-board of his bed, drummed with a pair of
scissors on his knee, and persisted in his violent pursuit of the
beautiful. Meanwhile his room-mate, Plain Smith, flapped the pages of
a Latin lexicon or took a little recreation by reading the Rev. Mr.
Todd's _Students' Manual_, that gem of the alarm-clock and
water-bucket epoch in American colleges.
Carl never understood Genie Linderbeck's conviction that words are
living things that dream and sing and battle. But he did learn that
there was speech transcending the barking of the Gang.
In the spring of his freshman year Carl gave up waiting on table and
drove a motor-car for a town banker. He learned every screw and spring
in the car. He also made Genie go out with him for track athletics.
Carl won his place on the college team as a half-miler, and viciously
assaulted two freshmen and a junior for laughing at Genie's legs,
which stuck out of his large running-pants like straws out of a
lemonade-glass.
In the great meet with Hamlin University, though Plato lost most of
the events, Carl won the half-mile race. He was elected to the
exclusive fraternity of Ray Cowles and Howard Griffin, Omega Chi
Delta, just before Commencement. That excited him less than the fact
that the Turk and he were to spend the summer up north, in the
hard-wheat country, stringing wire for the telephone company with a
gang of Minneapolis wiremen.
Oh yes. And he would see Gertie in Joralemon.... She had written to
him with so much enthusiasm when he had won the half-mile.
CHAPTER VII
He saw Gertie two hours after he had reached Joralemon for a week's
stay before going north. They sat in rockers on the grass beside her
stoop. They were embarrassed, and rocked profusely and chattily. Mrs.
Cowles was surprised and not much pleased to find him, but Gertie
murmured that she had been lonely, and Carl felt that he must be nobly
patient under Mrs. Cowles's slight. He got so far as to sigh, "O
Gertie!" but grew frightened, as though he were binding himself for
life. He wished that Gertie were not wearing so many combs stuck all
over her pompadoured hair. He noted that his rocker creaked at the
joints, and thought out a method of strengthening it by braces. She
bubbled that he was going to be the Big Man in his class. He said,
"Aw, rats!" and felt that his collar was too tight.... He went home.
His father remarked that Carl was late for supper, that he had been
extravagant in Plato, and that he was unlikely to make money out of
"all this runnin' races." But his mother stroked his hair and called
him her big boy.... He tramped out to Bone Stillman's shack, impatient
for the hand-clasp of the pioneer, and grew eloquent, for the first
time since his home-coming, as he described Professor Frazer and the
delights of poesy. A busy week Carl had in Joralemon. Adelaide Benner
gave a porch-supper for him. They sat under the trees, laughing, while
in the dimly lighted street bicycles whirred, and box-elders he had
always known whispered that this guest of honor was Carl Ericson, come
home a hero.
The cycling craze still existed in Joralemon. Carl rented a wheel for
a week from the Blue Front Hardware Store. Once he rode with a party
of boys and girls to Tamarack Lake. Once he rode to Wakamin with Ben
Rusk, home from Oberlin College. The ride was not entirely enjoyable,
because Oberlin had nearly two thousand students and Ben was amusedly
superior about Plato. They did, however, enjoy the stylishness of
buying bottles of strawberry pop at Wakamin.
Twice Carl rode to Tamarack Lake with Gertie. They sat on the shore,
and while he shied flat skipping-stones across the water and flapped
his old cap at the hovering horse-flies he babbled of the Turk's
"stunts," and the banker's car, and the misty hinterlands of Professor
Frazer's lectures. Gertie appeared interested, and smiled at regular
intervals, but so soon as Carl fumbled at one of Frazer's abstract
theories she interrupted him with highly concrete Joralemon gossip....
He suspected that she had not kept up with the times. True, she
referred to New York, but as the reference was one she had been using
these two years he still identified her with Joralemon.... He did not
even hold her hand, though he wondered if it might not be possible;
her hand lay so listlessly by her skirt, on the sand.... They rode
back in twilight of early June. Carl was cheerful as their wheels
crunched the dirt roads in a long, crisp hum. The stilly rhythm of
frogs drowned the clank of their pedals, and the sky was vast and pale
and wistful.
Gertie, however, seemed less cheerful.
On the last evening of his stay in Joralemon Gertie gave him a
hay-ride party. They sang "Seeing Nelly Home," and "Merrily We Roll
Along," and "Suwanee River," and "My Old Kentucky Home," and "My
Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean," and "In the Good Old Summertime," under a
delicate new moon in a sky of apple-green. Carl pressed Gertie's hand;
she returned the pressure so quickly that he was embarrassed. He
withdrew his hand as quickly as possible, ostensibly to help in the
unpacking of the basket of ginger-ale and chicken sandwiches and three
cakes (white-frosted, chocolate layer, and banana cake).
The same group said good-by to Carl at the M. & D. station. As the
train started, Carl saw Gertie turn away disconsolately, her shoulders
so drooping that her blouse was baggy in the back. He mourned that he
had not been more tender with her that week. He pictured himself
kissing Gertie on the shore of Tamarack Lake, enfolded by afternoon
and the mystery of sex and a protecting reverence for Gertie's
loneliness. He wanted to go back--back for one more day, one more ride
with Gertie. But he picked up a mechanics magazine, glanced at an
article on gliders, read in the first paragraph a prophecy about
aviation, slid down in his seat with his head bent over the
magazine--and the idyl of Gertie and afternoon was gone.
He was reading the article on gliders in June, 1905, so early in the
history of air conquest that its suggestions were miraculous to him;
for it was three years before Wilbur Wright was to startle the world
by his flights at Le Mans; four years before Bleriot was to cross the
Channel--though, indeed, it was a year and a half after the Wrights'
first secret ascent in a motor-driven aeroplane at Kittyhawk, and
fourteen years after Lilienthal had begun that epochal series of
glider-flights which was followed by the experiments of Pilcher and
Chanute, Langley and Montgomery.
The article declared that if gasoline or alcohol engines could be made
light enough we should all be aviating to the office in ten years;
that now was the time for youngsters to practise gliding, as pioneers
of the new age. Carl "guessed" that flying would be even better than
automobiling. He made designs for three revolutionary new aeroplanes,
drawing on the margins of the magazine with a tooth-mark-pitted pencil
stub.
Gertie was miles back, concealed behind piles of triplanes and
helicopters and following-surface monoplanes which the wizard
inventor, C. Ericson, was creating and ruthlessly destroying.... A
small boy was squalling in the seat opposite, and Carl took him from
his tired mother and lured him into a game of tit-tat-toe.
He joined the Turk and the wire-stringers at a prairie
hamlet--straggly rows of unpainted frame shanties, the stores with
tin-corniced false fronts that pretended to be two stories high. There
were pig-pens in the dooryards, and the single church had a square,
low, white steeple like the paper cap which Labor wears in the
posters. Farm-wagons were hitched before a gloomy saloon. Carl was
exceeding glum. But the Turk introduced him to a University of
Minnesota Pharmacy School student who was with the crew during
vacation, and the three went tramping across breezy, flowered
prairies. So began for Carl a galloping summer.
The crew strung telephone wire from pole to pole all day, playing the
jokes of hardy men, and on Sunday loafed in haystacks, recalling
experiences from Winnipeg to El Paso. Carl resolved to come back to
this life of the open, with Gertie, after graduation. He would buy a
ranch "on time." Or the Turk and Carl would go exploring in Alaska or
the Orient. "Law?" he would ask himself in monologues, "law? Me in a
stuffy office? Not a chance!"
The crew stayed for four weeks in a boom town of nine thousand,
installing a complete telephone system. South-east of the town lay
rolling hills. As Carl talked with the Turk and the Pharmacy School
man on a hilltop, the first evening of their arrival, he told them the
scientific magazine's prophecies about aviation, and noted that these
hills were of the sort Lilienthal would probably have chosen for his
glider-flights.
"Say! by the great Jim Hill, let's make us a glider!" he exulted,
sitting up, his eyelids flipping rapidly.
"Sure!" said the Pharmacy man. "How would you make one?"
"Why--uh--I guess you could make a frame out of willow--have to; the
willows along the creeks are the only kind of trees near here. You'd
cover it with varnished cotton--that's what Lilienthal did, anyway.
But darned if I know how you'd make the planes curved--cambered--like
he did. You got to have it that way. I suppose you'd use curved stays.
Like a quarter barrel-hoop.... I guess it would be better to try to