The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life
make a Chanute glider--just a plain pair of sup'rimposed planes,
instead of one all combobulated like a bat's wings, like Lilienthal's
glider was.... Or we could try some experiments with paper
models----Oh no! Thunder! Let's make a glider."
They did.
They studied with aching heads the dry-looking tables of lift and
resistance for which Carl telegraphed to Chicago. Stripped to their
undershirts, they worked all through the hot prairie evenings in the
oil-smelling, greasy engine-room of the local power-house, in front of
the dynamos, which kept evilly throwing out green sparks and rumbling
the mystic syllable "Om-m-m-m," to greet their modern magic.
They hunted for three-quarter-inch willow rods, but discarded them for
seasoned ash from the lumber-yard. They coated cotton with thin
varnish. They stopped to dispute furiously over angles of incidence,
bellowing, "Well, look here then, you mutton-head; I'll draw it for
you."
On their last Sunday in the town they assembled the glider,
single-surfaced, like a monoplane, twenty-two feet in span, with a
tail, and with a double bar beneath the plane, by which the pilot was
to hang, his hands holding cords attached to the entering edge of the
plane, balancing the glider by movements of his body.
At dawn on Monday they loaded the glider upon a wagon and galloped
with it out to a forty-foot hill. They stared down the easy slope,
which grew in steepness and length every second, and thought about
Lilienthal's death.
"W-w-well," shivered the Turk, "who tries it first?"
All three pretended to be adjusting the lashings, waiting for one
another, till Carl snarled, "Oh, all _right_! I'll do it if I got to."
"Course it breaks my heart to see you swipe the honor," the Turk said,
"but I'm unselfish. I'll let you do it. Brrrr! It's as bad as the
first jump into the swimming-hole in spring."
Carl was smiling at the comparison as they lifted the glider, with him
holding the bars beneath. The plane was instantly buoyed up like a
cork on water as the fifteen-mile head-wind poured under it. He
stopped smiling. This was a dangerous living thing he was going to
guide. It jerked at him as he slipped his arms over the suspended
bars. He wanted to stop and think this all over. "Get it done!" he
snapped at himself, and began to run down-hill, against the wind.
The wind lifted the plane again. With a shock Carl knew that his feet
had left the ground. He was actually flying! He kicked wildly in air.
All his body strained to get balance in the air, to control itself, to
keep from falling, of which he now felt the world-old instinctive
horror.
The plane began to tip to one side, apparently irresistibly, like a
sheet of paper turning over in the wind. Carl was sick with fear for a
tenth of a second. Every cell in his body shrank before coming
disaster. He flung his legs in the direction opposite to the tipping
of the plane. With this counter-balancing weight, the glider righted.
It was running on an even keel, twenty-five feet above the sloping
ground, while Carl hung easily by the double bar beneath, like a
circus performer with a trapeze under each arm. He ventured to glance
down. The turf was flowing beneath him, a green and sunny blur. He
exulted. Flying!
The glider dipped forward. Carl leaned back, his arms wide-spread. A
gust struck the plane, head on. Overloaded at the back, it tilted
back, then soared up to thirty-five or forty feet. Slow-seeming,
inevitable, the whole structure turned vertically upward.
Carl dangled there against a flimsy sheet of wood and cotton, which
for part of a second stuck straight up against the wind, like a paper
on a screen-door.
The plane turned turtle, slithered sidewise through the air, and
dropped, horizontal now, but upside down, Carl on top.
Thirty-five, forty feet down.
"I'm up against it," was his only thought while he was falling.
The left tip of the plane smashed against the ground, crashing,
horribly jarring. But it broke the fall. Carl shot forward and landed
on his shoulder.
He got up, rubbing his shoulder, wondering at the suspended life in
the faces of the other two as they ran down-hill toward him.
"Jiminy," he said. "Glad the glider broke the fall. Wish we had time
to make a new glider, with wing-warp. Say, we'll be late on the job.
Better beat it P. D. Q."
The others stood gaping.
CHAPTER VIII
A pile of shoes and nose-guards and bicycle-pumps and broken
hockey-sticks; a wall covered with such stolen signs as "East College
Avenue," and "Pants Presser Ladys Garments Carefully Done," and "Dr.
Sloats Liniment for Young and Old"; a broken-backed couch with a
red-and-green afghan of mangy tassels; an ink-spattered wooden table,
burnt in small black spots along the edges; a plaster bust of Martha
Washington with a mustache added in ink; a few books; an inundation of
sweaters and old hats; and a large, expensive mouth-organ--such were a
few of the interesting characteristics of the room which Carl and the
Turk were occupying as room-mates for sophomore year at Plato.
Most objectionable sounds came from the room constantly: the Gang's
songs, suggestive laughter, imitations of cats and fowls and
fog-horns. These noises were less ingenious, however, than the devices
of the Gang for getting rid of tobacco-smoke, such as blowing the
smoke up the stove.
Carl was happy. In this room he encouraged stammering Genie Linderbeck
to become adaptable. Here he scribbled to Gertie and Ben Rusk little
notes decorated with badly drawn caricatures of himself loafing. Here,
with the Turk, he talked out half the night, planning future glory in
engineering. Carl adored the Turk for his frankness, his lively
speech, his interest in mechanics--and in Carl.
Carl was still out for football, but he was rather light for a team
largely composed of one-hundred-and-eighty-pound Norwegians. He had a
chance, however. He drove the banker's car two or three evenings a
week and cared for the banker's lawn and furnace and cow. He still
boarded at Mrs. Henkel's, as did jolly Mae Thurston, whom he took for
surreptitious rides in the banker's car, after which he wrote
extra-long and pleasant letters to Gertie. It was becoming harder and
harder to write to Gertie, because he had, in freshman year, exhausted
all the things one can say about the weather without being profane.
When, in October, a new bank clerk stormed, meteor-like, the Joralemon
social horizon, and became devoted to Gertie, as faithfully reported
in letters from Joe Jordan, Carl was melancholy over the loss of a
comrade. But he strictly confined his mourning to leisure hours--and
with books, football, and chores for the banker, he was a busy young
man.... After about ten days it was a relief not to have to plan
letters to Gertie. The emotions that should have gone to her Carl
devoted to Professor Frazer's new course in modern drama.
This course was officially announced as a study of Bernard Shaw,
Ibsen, Strindberg, Pinero, Hauptmann, Sudermann, Maeterlinck,
D'Annunzio, and Rostand; but unofficially announced by Professor
Frazer as an attempt to follow the spirit of to-day wherever it should
be found in contemporary literature. Carl and the Turk were bewildered
but staunchly enthusiastic disciples of the course. They made every
member of the Gang enroll in it, and discouraged inattention in the
lecture-room by dexterous side-kicks.
Even to his ex-room-mate, Plain Smith, the grim and slovenly
school-teacher who had called him "bub" and discouraged his
confidences, Carl presented the attractions of Professor Frazer's
lectures when he met him on the campus. Smith looked quizzical and
"guessed" that plays and play-actin' were useless, if not actually
immoral.
"Yes, but this isn't just plays, my young friend," said Carl, with a
hauteur new but not exceedingly impressive to Plain Smith. "He takes
up all these new stunts, all this new philosophy and stuff they have
in London and Paris. There's something besides Shakespeare and the
Bible!" he added, intending to be spiteful. It may be stated that he
did not like Plain Smith.
"What new philosophy?"
"The spirit of brotherhood. I suppose you're too orthodox for that!"
"Oh no, sonny, not for that, not for that. And it ain't so _very_ new.
That's what Christ taught! No, sonny, I ain't so orthodox but what I'm
willing to have 'em show me anything that tries to advance
brotherhood. Not that I think it's very likely to be found in a lot of
Noo York plays. But I'll look in at one lesson, anyway," and Plain
Smith clumped away, humming "Greenland's Icy Mountains."
Professor Frazer's modern drama course began with Ibsen. The first
five lectures were almost conventional; they were an attempt to place
contemporary dramatists, with reflections on the box-office
standpoint. But his sixth lecture began rather unusually.
There was an audience of sixty-four in Lecture-room A--earnest girl
students bringing out note-books and spectacle-cases, frivolous girls
feeling their back hair, and the men settling down with a "Come, let's
get it over!" air, or glowing up worshipingly, like Eugene Field
Linderbeck, or determined not to miss anything, like Carl--the
captious college audience, credulous as to statements of fact and
heavily unresponsive to the spirit. Professor Frazer, younger than
half a dozen of the plow-trained undergraduates, thin of hair and
sensitive of face, sitting before them, with one hand in his pocket
and the other nervously tapping the small reading-table, spoke
quietly:
"I'm not going to be a lecturer to-day. I'm not going to analyze the
plays of Shaw which I assigned to you. You're supposed to have read
them yourselves. I am going to imagine that I am at tea in New Haven,
or down in New York, at dinner in the basement of the old Brevoort,
talking with a bunch of men who are trying to find out where the world
is going, and why and when and how, and asking who are the prophets
who are going to show it the way. We'd be getting excited over Shaw
and Wells. There's something really worth getting excited over.
"These men have perceived that this world is not a crazy-quilt of
unrelated races, but a collection of human beings completely related,
with all our interests--food and ambitions and the desire to
play--absolutely in common; so that if we would take thought all
together, and work together, as a football team does, we would start
making a perfect world.
"That's what socialism--of which you're beginning to hear so much, and
of which you're going to hear so much more--means. If you feel
genuinely impelled to vote the Republican ticket, that's not my
affair, of course. Indeed, the Socialist party of this country
constitutes only one branch of international socialism. But I do
demand of you that you try to think for yourselves, if you are going
to have the nerve to vote at all--think of it--to vote how this whole
nation is to be conducted! Doesn't that tremendous responsibility
demand that you do something more than inherit your way of voting?
that you really think, think hard, why you vote as you do?... Pardon
me for getting away from the subject proper--yet am I, actually? For
just what I have been saying is one of the messages of Shaw and Wells.
"The great vision of the glory that shall be, not in one sudden
millennium, but slowly advancing toward joys of life which we can no
more prevision than the aboriginal medicine-man could imagine the
X-ray! I wish that this were the time and the place to rhapsodize
about that vision, as William Morris has done, in _News from Nowhere_.
You tell me that the various brands of socialists differ so much in
their beliefs about this future that the bewildered layman can make
nothing at all of their theories. Very well. They differ so much