TEMPEST IN A TEAPOT OVER WHETHER PEOPLE WITH BURIED GOLD SHALL
MONOPOLIZE THE FLYING PRIVILEGE.
May 15, 2018:—It is the evening of this day and Avanel is quite busy in
her parlor with costumes. I am invited for dinner with her and old
Boone. I am to help her immediately after to the theatre with her
costumes that I am to carry in two heavy suitcases. Three friends of
Avanel’s have prepared the dinner and serve it in true communal
fraternity. According to their chatter the coming event is all in the
spirit of a college lark or grand commencement occasion, rather than a
churchly event.
But when I sit in the Gordon Craig Theatre, strangers to the right and
left of me, the theatre darkened and the stage a temple steps, the
Avanel emerges that has refused so many times to come forth at my
petition. Her face and carriage convey the sibyl, the saint, the mother
of great sages of our city and the muse of poets of our city. She hardly
knows this, for the innocence of her unspoiled youth tells its gentle,
overwhelming story. As for the alleged dance, it is more procession than
anything else: boys and girls, men and women, moving to varied chants or
measured silences or amid wonderful and measured lights. There is no
very direct allusion to the Birthday of St. Scribe. Old political
parades are suggested and historical triumphs, but mostly the type of
parade that might be held of a Sunday before a religious service, ending
at a shrine or an altar. There are ceremonies from the book of St.
Scribe of the Shrines. His favorite shrines are suggested, beginning
with the Grave of Lincoln at Oak Ridge. The dancers are crowned with
Apple-Amaranth leaves, which are larger than ordinary apple-leaves and a
paler green. Avanel’s part in the pageantry is but that of a leader and
partner of the chief marching man, young Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the
Third. Avanel is closely followed in glory and significance by the whole
company. And Michael deftly takes his place as a proper background for
Avanel, for which I thank him. Therefore when Avanel sits with me a
little by her open fire tonight, all tired out and very solemn, she
knows she has vindicated herself in my eyes a little and she tosses her
head and wears jauntily one young green Apple-Amaranth leaf which still
gleams brightly in her black hair.
She asks, as a child: “Did it seem as though we were at shrines together
or walking in the woods together?” And so I answer: “I have never yet
been at any of these shrines but that of Lincoln and that many, many
years ago. But it did seem as though we were walking in the woods
together among the very oldest trees. I want to go to shrines with you
soon.”
And Avanel asks me: “Do you think we will get on better in woods?”
And so I answer, not quite to the point: “A tree a thousand years old
has leaves in the spring, as green as when a sapling. But if my dust had
lived to this hour, it would have been the semblance of a palsied man, a
horror more than grave clothes. Such as I am, I pray to the God of
Heaven that I may be the green leaf in your hair.”
May 16:—I find myself walking in the shadows, where there is neither
Springfield nor Jerusalem nor any other known place, where there is
neither calendar nor clock nor sun. The clouds of meditation are beneath
my feet, storm overhead. One flash of lightning lasts for an eternity
and the thunder roll is as long.
May 17:—I walk with Avanel again through our town. As we pass beneath
the splendid and soaring towers, we note the signs of the various
citizens who occupy the shops, facing the street. As we pass the ladies’
tailoring establishments, we see fancy dress and religious costuming, to
be used for ceremonials such as the festival of Hunter Kelly. They are
carefully made, these costumes, for permanent and individual use. Many
people, men and women, pass us on the street well fitted out, splendid,
yet realistic, off hand, casual, and unconcerned, citizens in all sorts
of well fitting, brightly dyed ceremonial gear. It is rather the custom
of the city to come out more and more gaily for the spring, summer and
autumn. In the cold weather it is the idea to dress as of old and
according to the customs of the United States, in routine garments.
And now, being light hearted, Avanel and I make an amusement of going
the rounds of the more fancy ice-cream parlors. They bear the old names,
Maldener’s, Kutrakon’s, Bonansinga’s, Stuart’s, and there is the
beautiful place of Najim, the Syrian. Stuart’s is conducted by a direct
descendant of the original family, as also Bonansinga’s. Some of the
places are in the hands of new firms but keep the old names.
The sign-painters’ shops are a wilderness of bedevilment. They are
almost official extensions of the art department of the World’s Fair of
the University of Springfield. They are full of everything that may be
painted to bring rejoicing to the fastidious stranger.
It is growing toward evening and my dear lady has signified that she
will consent to eat with me in that restaurant room of glass, that high
tower place, where she gave me my first view of the new city. And, as we
walk that way, we are amazed at something as novel to her as to myself.
We have been almost noting it to one another all day. With glowering
faces and ugly looks, two factions in costume are passing and re-passing
one another. And there are threats of fist fights between the young men
and some appointments for real battles without gloves are obviously
made, with those euphuisms that in the old day covered appointments for
pistol deeds.
There are two factions of aviators, one dressed somewhat in the color
scheme of the robin, including the vest, which follows the red color of
the breast of that bird. The rival faction are the Snobs, who are out
with it, make no quibble about being snobs, and are costumed with hints
of the wasp and bee. There are as many girls and women, as boys and men,
in the Snob and Robin costumes. All this has sprung up from the ground
in a few days and is not in the pageant and festival calendar of the
city. The aviator’s day for dressing up is in early October. But the
surprise is not so much the new costumes as the increasing sharpness of
the controversy. Most of the children of the Boone and Michael clans,
rivals though they be, are dressed as Robins and expound to us their
side of a complicated matter. The substance is that the city is liable
to a riot over the use and monopoly of the flying machines by the Snobs,
led by one John Nash, sometimes called “Beau Nash,” and the Snobs are
defying their enemies and spoiling for a riot. While Avanel and I have
our customary little dinner in what was once a quiet corner, two young
Booneites we have previously interviewed, having finished their
chocolate, come to us and roar their anger again in our ears and seek to
recruit our good opinions, as they nerve themselves to subdue the Snobs
and if necessary shoot holes in their machines.
May 18:—The costumes of the rival factions have disappeared from these
streets. All noise and argument have disappeared. The city goes about
the even tenor of its way. The papers are full of the social and
military affairs of the Amazons and the Horseshoe Brotherhood and
denunciations of the world’s common enemy, Singapore. I am wondering why
I have never gone to Camp Lincoln to see these Amazons and Michaelites
drilling in full panoply of war and wondering even more why the child
Avanel is at the head of them. She must be a sort of “daughter of the
regiment,” as one may say, decorative royalty, with the real management
in other hands. But I always speak in her presence of military matters
as though she were in actual command. Tonight I meet her near her home
as she comes riding from Camp Lincoln on her white war pony. She is a
centauress.
Not only is her pony white but every thread of her riding habit is
white. I help her down from her pony, go through the entirely
unnecessary motion of doing so, and we lead the tired steed around to
the stable in the rear of the Boone cottage and old Boone is there,
waiting to feed and water the creature. The father is ignored and the
horse is spoken to by Avanel in terms of endearment. We go into the
house and sit by that unlit fireplace and wait for Black Hawk to come in
to dinner. All of which is, by the way, preliminary to the fact I wish
here to record, that the tired Avanel draws from her belt an old hunting
knife and its heavy white sheath and puts it on the mantle with the
unbuckled Avanel sword and sheath, then allows me to take them down, and
answers my questions about the knife.
“This is the hunting knife my remote ancestor, Daniel Boone, carried
into the wilderness of Kentucky in his first discovery of the blue grass
region that was to him new Eden.... This hunting knife means more to me
than pride in fighting blood. It may go through the heart of some
cocaine-crazy creature in far Asia. But it means that other thing to me,
the sanctity of the log cabin, or the cottage which we must defend as
Boone defended the first cabins in the blue grass. To him they were
pavilions of new patriarchs, not barnyards or forts.”
May 19:—By this time all the trees are putting forth their second
leaves, and smaller blossoms than before the frost. But everyone is
rejoicing for it is spring of a sort. The air is filled with hovering
branches in palest green, a good gift to man. The town knows it and
walks abroad gaily, this morning of May nineteenth.
Then, late in the afternoon, local war breaks out suddenly and we know
nothing about the trees, and care less. It is a Springfield utterly new
and terrible to its citizens. The star chimes are not allowed to ring. I
am with Comrade Avanel in the very top of the Truth Tower. The terrors
of flight and pursuit sweep over the far sections of Springfield given
over to aviation fields, orchards and the like.
When machines overtake each other there is, so far, no shooting or the
like, only a veering to the right or left. It might be a game of tag,
were it not for the symbolism in decoration put on by the two factions
driving the machines. There is a big death’s head painted near the front
of every Snob machine, and the hunting knife of Daniel Boone painted on
the front of every Robin Redbreast machine.
Neither Black Hawk Boone nor Avanel has authorized any such use of this
symbol. The whole threat and roaring are unauthorized by any of the
leaders of factions. The “People” have escaped the leash.
Avanel is the only reporter her father will trust tonight and she has
come to the top room of the Truth Tower, because it is the observation
and news gathering room for things that may be untangled from a tower.
All the papers have made common cause tonight. All the telescopes are in
use, looking to the borders just beyond the City Wall, the borders of
Morgan, Menard, Logan, Macon, Christian, Montgomery and Macoupin
Counties. The news is assembled and everything observed is explained by
telephones from these regions and re-telephoned into the various offices
and rewritten there and then telegraphed to all the world that cares.
Newsgathering remains what it has been for a century and a half. Boone
is at the opposite end of the phone from Avanel and the first definite
effects of the threatened air-riot are to make that gentleman quite
profane.
The flying machines were at first not public property. But so much
crowding out of the truly skilled flyers came about by the monopolists
with buried gold, that machines are now rented to private citizens by
the state or city for a nominal fee and deposit for damages. To enter
the examinations in the autumn and to fly for the year is, in theory,
one of the privileges of highly skilled, athletic people. Our friend,
Portia, the Singing Aviator, is with us tonight and helping unravel the
story of the rise of factions. And the gentle creature has written of
the uppermost blue and of the dawn clouds and of the map of the earth
and of sailing around the curve of the earth. This young girl is
appalled to be obliged to take sides in the controversy and enlist for a
possible battle of mere children. The most famous aviators on each side
come from the High Schools. She does not want to paint war insignia upon
her machine. But already her literary imitators have done so. Her three
most sedulous apes in the High School, John Nash and Findlay Bryson and
Margaret Rand, who have diluted her innocent and heroic songs, turning
them into society verses, now demand that she put the death’s head upon
her machine, or lose them as disciples. And Portia is appalled to find
that the names she once chose in sport to classify the machines are now
used to represent actual factions in the threatened war. The Robin
Redbreast and Carrier-Pigeon machines are all on the side of the Robins,
and the Snobs are subdivided into the Don Juan, the Raider, the
Flamboyant, the Brahmin and the Bird of Paradise. It is the exceedingly
high priced Brahmin and Bird of Paradise machines that make the trouble.
People go to the High Schools past their twenty-first year. And the town
is first torn up by High School pupils, children of the local
multimillionaires, such of them as still have brains and body enough to
go through the rigid examinations for aviation. These children of men
with buried gold are again and again at the top of the aviation
waiting-lists. This is especially exasperating because having a private
fortune is proclaimed in every political speech to be against the
Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of
Illinois.
And so youngsters of the Wicked Standings, the Cheerful Radleys, the
Arrogant Rocks, the Fat Zebeskys, the Nervous Kusukos, the Slick Slack
Kopenskys, the Shrewd Sims family, and all that set try successfully to
monopolize the priceless Brahmin and Bird of Paradise. Their sinecure is
defended in silly verse by Findlay Bryson, John Nash, sometimes called
“Beau Nash,” and Margaret Rand.
May 20:—Many of those parading the streets in the Redbreast costume are
skillful High School seniors, young men and women, licensed graduate
aviators, whose machine rent-money has been refused through the
quibbling of the corrupted authorities. The only work left open to them
is drilling for the work of mail carriers for the International
Government. Word comes to the news room at the top of the Truth Tower
that all through the counties touching the Springfield wall, wherever
Brahmin and Bird of Paradise machines reach the ground, the farmers
taking Springfield affairs a little more seriously than we do, proceed
to set torch to the wings.
May 21:—The Robin Redbreast people can work, at least, and their costume
has now flooded the offices. There is such a tension everywhere (without
the least thing really happening) and the streets are so full of
marching Robins that the young sports say today that they have
surrendered. There is much talk of peace and sentimental prattle about
our dear little town and slush about all calling each other “cousin”
again. But just before midnight _The Boone Ax_ gets out an extra,
charging that the Brahmin and Bird of Paradise machines are tied up to
the snob children by long time leases and there is not one but still
remains in the hands of the owner of a secret fortune or some directly
obligated minion of the same.
May 22:—The sky is all gold today. The Snob machines reappear, defiantly
gilded, and on the front of every one is painted the name of the Snob
using it, and after his name the word:—“Owner.” And young John Nash has
taken the fatal step and added a terrible element to what was before but
a family row that was leading nowhere in particular. He has decorated
his machine with green jade eyes and pictures of the green and speckled
lotus of the Cocaine Buddha of Singapore and thereby added the final
insult of “international and national treason” and utterly changed the
spirit of the fight. All day the gilded machines go by unmolested among
the angry Pigeons and Robins, but as Black Hawk Boone says in a big type
evening editorial: “John Nash has tattooed himself with treason
forevermore and it remains to be seen whether every gilded wing stands
for treason.”
May 23:—The University set today bring forth legislation which is drawn
up and sponsored by John Boat and St. Friend, the Giver of Bread. This
emergency legislation, backed by the immediate surrender and burning of
the arrogant leases, appears to insure uniform rents for all machines of
whatever class. The fear of the curse of treason has made all the
gold-foil faction meek as rabbits for a day. And so they consent to the
cancellation of all previous lists and papers of all sorts and the
re-enlistment of all aviators once a month. They consent to the proposal
that it be made a jail offense to use the same machine longer than three
months. Machines must be re-rented in order as registered. No
classification to be made as to value of machine, or gold-foil on the
wings, or type of machine:—every aviator to take his chance. St. Friend
thinks that he and Justice of the Peace, John Boat, have done well.
Certainly this afternoon, according to the new arrangement, it is as in
Utopia and the rich and the poor, the privileged and unprivileged, have
equal chances in the air.
We are alone in the Truth Tower, my love and I, and we are talking of
St. Friend, who has brought this all about, and Avanel sends for him, to
take in the view of the sunset with us, if he pleases, and wait with us
for the returning star chimes. The evening and its beauty, after such
days of empty stampede and panic, move my lady Avanel to deeper words
than are her habit. And of the coming guest, she whispers:—“St. Friend
represents, almost in spite of himself, the idea of thousands of laymen,
that few priests have represented:—the general idea of religion, under a
church roof, with one’s fellow human beings. The idea stands in contrast
to any worship chained to a special list of teachings. St. Friend
champions freedom, yet his kind of freedom goes to prayer, of its own
choice, with no theological or creed fences, to what he calls, ‘the
blessed company of all faithful people.’”
St. Friend comes to us, just before the star chimes begin to ring. He
steps out from the noiseless elevator and is before us while we are
speaking. Avanel pets him as she does her father when she is being
especially good, and the aged guest likes it, of course. He sits in the
largest and easiest chair which is reserved for guests in _The Boone Ax_
room, and he hunches forward, a stooped giant. He looks through the top
of his eyebrows at Avanel and he keeps time to his armchair talk,
beating the arms of the chair slowly with his open hands, according to a
habit from of old. He rubs his face and his old forehead with his palms
as though to wake up and deliberately brings a flush to his forehead. By
incessantly beating the chair and humming and hawing he seems to beat up
a kind of nervous strength from some hidden source in the air and talks
with increasing animation about the “strike” or “riot” or “whatever it
may be called” and mentions with great complacency his measures against
it. And now another curtain seems to lift from the soul of Avanel. The
spirit of prophecy is upon her. The old man listens with fixed eyes. The
youth of his immortal soul seems to me, in this hour of revelation, to
depend upon clear speaking on the part of this young voice. She is
denouncing with endless words the ironies of flying and material dreams,
yet with girl slang and wit mixed in with it all.