The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life
saucer-shaped earth. When he flew near the Sound he saw that the fog
had almost passed. The water was gentle and colored like pearl,
lapping the sands, smoking toward the radiant sky. He passed over
summer cottages, vacant and asleep, with fantastic holiday roofs of
red and green. Gulls soared like flying sickles of silver over the
opal sea. Even for the racer there was peace.
He made out a mass of rock covered with autumn-hued trees to the left,
then a like rock to the right. "West and East Rock--New Haven!" he
cried.
The city mapped itself before him like square building-blocks on a
dark carpet, with railroad and trolley tracks like flashing
spider-webs under the October noon.
So he had arrived, then--and he had not caught Tad Warren. He was
furious.
He circled the city, looking for the Green, where (in this day before
the Aero Club of America battled against over-city flying) he was to
land. He saw the Yale campus, lazy beneath its elms, its towers and
turrets dreaming of Oxford. His anger left him.
He plunged down toward the Green--and his heart nearly stopped. The
spectators were scattered everywhere. How could he land without
crushing some one? With trees to each side and a church in front, he
was too far down to rise again. His back pressed against the back of
the little seat, and seemed automatically to be trying to restrain him
from this tragic landing.
The people were fleeing. In front there was a tiny space. But there
was no room to sail horizontally and come down lightly. He shut off
his motor and turned the monoplane's nose directly at the earth. She
struck hard, bounced a second. Her tail rose, and she started, with
dreadful deliberateness, to turn turtle. With a vault Carl was out of
the cockpit and clear of the machine as she turned over.
Oblivious of the clamorous crowd which was pressing in about him,
cutting off the light, replacing the clean smell of gasoline and the
upper air by the hot odor of many bodies, he examined the monoplane
and found that she had merely fractured the propeller and smashed the
rudder.
Some one was fighting through the crowd to his side--Tony Bean--Tony
the round, polite Mexican from the Bagby School. He was crying:
"_Hombre_, what a landing! You have saved lives.... Get out of the
way, all you people!"
Carl grinned and said: "Good to see you, Tony. What time did Tad
Warren get here? Where's----"
"He ees not here yet."
"What? Huh? How's that? Do I win? That----Say, gosh! I hope he hasn't
been hurt."
"Yes, you win."
A newspaper-man standing beside Tony said: "Warren had to come down at
Great Neck. He sprained his shoulder, but that's all."
"That's good."
"But you," insisted Tony, "aren't you badly jarred, Hawk?"
"Not a bit."
The gaping crowd, hanging its large collective ear toward the two
aviators, was shouting: "Hoorray! He's all right!"--As their voices
rose Carl became aware that all over the city hundreds of
factory-whistles and bells were howling their welcome to him--the
victor.
The police were clearing a way for him. As a police captain touched a
gold-flashing cap to him, Carl remembered how afraid of the police
that hobo Slim Ericson had been.
Tony and he completed examination of the machine, with Tony's
mechanician, and sent it off to a shop, to await Martin Dockerill's
arrival by speed-boat and racing-automobile. Carl went to receive
congratulations--and a check--from the prize-giver, and a reception by
Yale officials on the campus. Before him, along his lane of passage,
was a kaleidoscope of hands sticking out from the wall of
people--hands that reached out and shook his own till they were sore,
hands that held out pencil and paper to beg for an autograph, hands of
girls with golden flowers of autumn, hands of dirty, eager, small
boys--weaving, interminable hands. Dizzy with a world peopled only by
writhing hands, yet moved by their greeting, he made his way across
the Green, through Phelps Gateway, and upon the campus. Twisting his
cap and wishing that he had taken off his leather flying-coat, he
stood upon a platform and heard officials congratulating him.
The reception was over. But the people did not move. And he was very
tired. He whispered to a professor: "Is that a dormitory, there
behind us? Can I get into it and get away?"
The professor beckoned to one of the collegians, and replied, "I
think, Mr. Ericson, if you will step down they will pass you into
Vanderbilt Courtyard--by the gate back of us--and you will be able to
escape."
Carl trusted himself to the bunch of boys forming behind him, and
found himself rushed into the comparative quiet of a Tudor courtyard.
A charming youngster, hatless and sleek of hair, cried, "Right this
way, Mr. Ericson--up this staircase in the tower--and we'll give 'em
the slip."
From the roar of voices to the dusky quietude of the hallway was a
joyous escape. Suddenly Carl was a youngster, permitted to see Yale, a
university so great that, from Plato College, it had seemed an
imperial myth. He stared at the list of room-occupants framed and hung
on the first floor. He peeped reverently through an open door at a
suite of rooms.
He was taken to a room with a large collection of pillows, fire-irons,
Morris chairs, sets of books in crushed levant, tobacco-jars and
pipes--a restless and boyish room, but a real haven. He stared out
upon the campus, and saw the crowd stolidly waiting for him. He
glanced round at his host and waved his hand deprecatingly, then tried
to seem really grown up, really like the famous Hawk Ericson. But he
wished that Forrest Haviland were there so that he might marvel: "Look
at 'em, will you! Waiting for _me!_ Can you beat it? Some start for my
Yale course!"
In a big chair, with a pipe supplied by the youngster, he shyly tried
to talk to a senior in the great world of Yale (he himself had not
been able to climb to seniorhood even in Plato), while the awed
youngster shyly tried to talk to the great aviator.
He had picked up a Yale catalogue and he vaguely ruffled its pages,
thinking of the difference between its range of courses and the petty
inflexible curriculum of Plato. Out of the pages leaped the name
"Frazer." He hastily turned back. There it was: "Henry Frazer, A.M.,
Ph.D., Assistant Professor in English Literature."
Carl rejoiced boyishly that, after his defeat at Plato, Professor
Frazer had won to victory. He forgot his own triumph. For a second he
longed to call on Frazer and pay his respects. "No," he growled to
himself, "I've been so busy hiking that I've forgotten what little
book-learnin' I ever had. I'd like to see him, but----By gum! I'm
going to begin studying again."
Hidden away in the youngster's bedroom for a nap, he dreamed
uncomfortably of Frazer and books. That did not keep him from making a
good altitude flight at the New Haven Meet that afternoon, with his
hastily repaired machine and a new propeller. But he thought of new
roads for wandering in the land of books, as he sat, tired and sleepy,
but trying to appear bright and appreciative, at the big dinner in his
honor--the first sacrificial banquet to which he had been
subjected--with earnest gentlemen in evening clothes, glad for an
excuse to drink just a little too much champagne; with mayors and
councilmen and bankers; with the inevitable stories about the man who
was accused of stealing umbrellas and about the two skunks on a fence
enviously watching a motor-car.
Equally inevitable were the speeches praising Carl's flight as a
"remarkable achievement, destined to live forever in the annals of
sport and heroism, and to bring one more glory to the name of our fair
city."
Carl tried to appear honored, but he was thinking: "Rats! I'll live in
the annals of nothin'! Curtiss and Brookins and Hoxsey have all made
longer flights than mine, in this country alone, and they're aviators
I'm not worthy to fill the gas-tanks of.... Gee! I'm sleepy! Got to
look polite, but I wish I could beat it.... Let's see. Now look here,
young Carl; starting in to-morrow, you begin to read oodles of books.
Let's see. I'll start out with Forrest's favorites. There's _David
Copperfield_, and that book by Wells, _Tono-Bungay_, that's got aerial
experiments in it, and _Jude the Ob--, Obscure_, I guess it is, and
_The Damnation of Theron Ware_ (wonder what he damned), and
_McTeague_, and _Walden_, and _War and Peace_, and _Madame Bovary_,
and some Turgenev and some Balzac. And something more serious. Guess
I'll try William James's book on psychology."
He bought them all next morning. His other belongings had been suited
to rapid transportation, and Martin Dockerill grumbled, "That's a
swell line of baggage, all right--one tooth-brush, a change of socks,
and ninety-seven thousand books."
Two nights later, in a hotel at Portland, Maine, Carl was plowing
through the Psychology. He hated study. He flipped the pages angrily,
and ran his fingers through his corn-colored hair. But he sped on,
concentrated, stopping only to picture a day when the people who
honored him publicly would also know him in private. Somewhere among
them, he believed, was the girl with whom he could play. He would meet
her at some aero race, and she would welcome him as eagerly as he
welcomed her.... Had he, perhaps, already met her? He walked over to
the writing-table and scrawled a note to Gertie Cowles--regarding the
beauty of the Yale campus.
CHAPTER XXII
(_Editor's Note_: The following pages are extracts from a diary kept
by Mr. C. O. Ericson in a desultory fashion from January, 1911, to the
end of April, 1912. They are reprinted quite literally. Apparently Mr.
Ericson had no very precise purpose in keeping his journal. At times
it seems intended as _materia_ for future literary use; at others, as
comments for his own future amusement; at still others, as a sort of
long letter to be later sent to his friend, Lieut. Forrest Haviland,
U.S.A. I have already referred to them in my _Psycho-Analysis of the
Subconscious with Reference to Active Temperaments_, but here reprint
them less for their appeal to us as a scientific study of reactions
than as possessing, doubtless, for those interested in pure narrative,
a certain curt expression of somewhat unusual exploits, however
inferior is their style to a more critical thesis on the adventurous.)
_May 9_, (_1911_). Arrived at Mineola flying field, N. Y. to try out
new Bagby monoplane I have bought. Not much accomodation here yet.
Many of us housed in tents. Not enough hangars. We sit around and tell
lies in the long grass at night, like a bunch of kids out camping.
Went over and had a beer at Peter McLoughlin's today, that's where
Glenn Curtiss started out from to make his first flight for Sci. Amer.
cup.
Like my new Bagby machine better than Bleriot in many respects, has
non-lifting tail, as should all modern machines. Rudder and elevator a
good deal like the Nieuport. One passenger. Roomy cockpit and enclosed
fuselage. Bleriot control. Nearer streamline than any American plane
yet. Span, 33.6 ft., length 24, chord of wing at fuselage 6' 5''.
Chauviere propeller, 6' 6'', pitch 4' 5''. Dandy new Gnome engine, 70
h.p., should develop 60 to 80 m.p.h.
Martin Dockerill my mechanician is pretty cute. He said to me to-day
when we were getting work-bench up, "I bet a hat the spectators all
flock here, now. Not that you're any better flier than some of the
other boys, but you got the newest plane for them to write their names
on."
Certainly a scad of people butting in. Come in autos and motor cycles
and on foot, and stand around watching everything you do till you want
to fire a monkey wrench at them.
Hank Odell has joined the Associated Order of the Pyramid and just now