THE END OF THE FLYING MACHINE RIOTS, PANICS, ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS.
May 24:—Today with that same light in his eye, St. Friend preaches back
at Avanel the sermon she preached to him last evening with, of course,
many turns of his own. I sit with her quite close to the pulpit of the
Cathedral. The place is packed to the doors.
“You all know my aversion to the motion picture. It is one element in
the university about which I differ from the majority of the board. If I
express an equal distrust of the flying machine, you will say I am
probably against all mechanical advancement.
“Such advancement is but a qualified gift to man. The best wings are
spirit wings, however we fly with them. It is better to be like Shelley
than to have the glory of Langley and Wilbur and Orville Wright.
“I deeply mourn that Springfield has been almost ready to bleed and die
over the flying-machine issue. I am sorry that either our good or our
bad people are obsessed. The father of the souls of many of our young
people seems the telegraph, the mother, the railroad. There does not
appear to be a filament of their minds made of anything more human than
the uncanny filament of the incandescent light. When they peer into the
future of our city, they imagine our optical factories and the like,
hard at work producing things like the new lens gun but more ingenious.
The odor of acids is ever on their garments, never the incense of some
future Christmas day. They envy the discovery of the three new
infinitesimal elements by the chemists of Singapore. No wonder some of
them finally turn to the green and speckled lotus and the cocaine
Buddha.
“The service this type of imagination has done our city is calculable,
definite. People moved by it have made our factories the most notable of
the kind in this region of the United States. And they give us also an
airship of the mind that carries us far into the future and we return
heavily ladened. We examine the treasure. It is a funny little creature
called ‘man,’ carrying an extraordinary world conquering device, some
amorphous, dubious toy, akin to the ancient phonograph.
“Let us agree that whatever carries bread across the world is of
service. Whatever puts a roof over the head of democracy is worth while.
Whatever puts clothing on the back of mankind must be respected. And
because they fetch and carry well, such gifts as the dragons of Eric
Hedder are not to be gainsaid in this place.
“But let us not hesitate to examine such devices and consider where this
matter of toy-making is going to lead us. Will the millennial future be
a tin and wire world, an electrical experiment station, and no more?
“We compare it to the automobile. The advantage is all on the side of
the flying machine. The automobile is a sort of racing hog. The flying
machine is, by comparison, a wild swan. And, crossing world oceans, it
works for world unity.”
Avanel’s face is taking on the deepest crimson I have ever seen upon it.
About every tenth sentence is her own. St. Friend laughs, the
congregation supposes, at his own wit. He continues:—
“And for the fatness of the overfed automobile driver we substitute the
leanness of the bird-boned boy or girl aviator. The flying machine is a
representative of the perilous privilege of physical aspiration. But
what goes up must come down. The aviator is sure of a return journey.
Portia will tell us, in an exalted mood, that the aviator is up there to
investigate the great milky way for us. She will tell us that clouds and
sky now enter into the pleasure landscape of democracy. She makes it
plain to us that the tops of the sunset towers, of the man-built Truth
Tower, are not the top of the Universe.
“‘The Aviator,’ she says, ‘is our delegate to the congress of planets.’
Yet if we agree with every song of Portia, there is even more to be said
for looking out upon the fields from no higher point of vantage than the
footpath, if we be taking such a pilgrimage as that of St. Scribe of the
Shrines, beginning with the first shrine, the Tomb of Lincoln, and
praying the prayers St. Scribe has written down for us, as we go around
the world to the one hundred shrines of the one hundred religions. We
may take part of that journey by steamship and airship but it is when we
are afoot we gain wisdom.” And so St. Friend, the Giver of Bread,
continues upon his favorite theme of “The Pilgrimage” and urges upon us
that life is a glorious adventure and was never meant to be a matter of
merely mechanical achievement or cold calculation for physical power.
And Avanel’s heightened color continues.
But what is the real Avanel? As we leave church, we look up and she
shrieks with delight. Every known variety of machine is in long line, is
in cavalry formations in which she delights, some of which she uses with
her own Amazons, and she shouts the orders and claps her hands and tries
to anticipate each new maneuver with her orders, like chanticleer
crowing, and ordering the sun to rise. She stands amid the purple
cottages like a fairy in a bed of violets and it is as though all the
butterflies of the Sangamon Valley land had become gorgeous giants for
us and were flying for our delight. For overhead friend and foe are
celebrating truce, if not peace, and the whole remaining populace is in
the street to behold it.
May 25:—I am reading in the Truth Tower, in the newspaper lookout room,
last evening’s _Boone Ax_ with Avanel and talking it over with her. It
seems that the inside political whispers convey to the intelligent the
fact that Mayo Sims has sent out his dragnet:—his jesters, his
druggists, his coffee house wits, to talk among the older people and get
their youngsters in hand. And he has been strongly abetted by the
arrogant Rock family.
The arrogant Rock family have other, if limited, claims to
consideration. They have rightly prided themselves on being experts on
the coal question. Some of the most offensive of them are indeed learned
in this matter. It remains a family talent and accomplishment, when
nothing else can be said for these people. For many a day, and indeed
for two generations, on behalf of the city and state, they have been
flying from mine to mine in their working hours, giving expert advice or
exercising stern authority, according to their specific offices.
The Rock family began as the Michaelites began. For a long time it was a
tradition that every boy of the Rock clan must dig coal with the pick
for a certain number of years, and belong to the Miner’s Union. But
these people gradually rose from labor-union officers, who dug, in a
nominal way, to able but unwholesome fops who would rather be hanged
than dirty their own hands in coal.
They hate the Michaelites in a very special way for going doggedly and
literally on with their horse-shoeing and hammering out swords. But the
Rock family know when they have had enough and hate the open accusation
of Singaporianism that is the result of the antics of “Beau Nash.”
It seems that “Beau Nash” has become a fanatic, he has been initiated
into the devilish religion, and he defies the committee from Mayo Sims,
Slick Slack Kopensky, and the Rocks, that has subdued all the other
young representatives of the flying snobs. He says he will do as he
pleases, and do it soon, that this is a land of religious liberty, that
he chooses the green glass god of Singapore, of his own free will, and
there is no treason in it, that he will have the law on whoever molests
him.
Now there are shouting and cries below and there are jinglings of all
the phones in the lookout rooms and when we answer one we are told that
Nash has already ascended and is coming from the west. Almost instantly
we see him and then he is directly above the Truth Tower, circling,
going up, and circling and going down, while his own old faction, in the
street, grow angrier every minute. He has painted his whole machine the
Singaporian green and there are all the special signs and seals of
Singapore he can put there, upon the body of his machine, and finally,
in insult to our virtuous city, he flies low that we may see them and
then flies high that we may hate him.
But on his third descent, a Robin Redbreast machine, with all speed on,
sweeps up from the north. Nash expects a threat, but the man in the
other machine begins to shoot at Nash, just as he is above Washington
Park, and down comes the dead man by the Washington Park Pavilion, with
a terrific crash of broken wings, and absurd Singapore has her first
American martyr.
The newspaper people come pouring into the Truth Tower. We all send the
story to the papers as we can. It seems that the avenger is the son of
the Mayor. It is “Crawling Jim Kopensky,” the new President of the Robin
Redbreast flying association. He has been president twenty-four hours
and has made haste to vindicate his office.
Of course there will be no prosecution of Jim. In the first place he is
the son of the Mayor. In the second place he is now a newspaper hero. In
the third place he has removed the blasphemer, hated alike by those with
millions in gold and alcohol buried away, and those with teetotal
tendencies and no money but their legal salaries.
May 26:—Everyone has forgotten the flying machine feud. An
Anti-Singapore panic is on. St. Friend has started a series of weekday
sermons against Singapore in the Cathedral and Rabbi Ezekiel is doing
the same in his Temple and they are moving all secular forums to
co-operate. And _The Boone Ax_ whacks and chops at the issue for no one
hates a Singaporian better than Black Hawk Boone, the roaring cinnamon
bear. It is hard to make out any justification of a war at this exact
hour.
When, in his youth, St. Friend made the Pilgrimage of St. Scribe he
heard certain strange political talk near the dazzling temple of the
cocaine Buddha of Singapore. Three half-English Eurasians were deep in
future world politics. This conversation temporarily spoiled his
meditations on the real and beautiful Prince Gautama, which otherwise
continued throughout the whole of Asia. Ever since that day, St. Friend
has been giving his attention to the Japanese and Chinese denunciations
of the Singaporians, especially since those denunciations have been so
stoutly re-echoed by Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second, the greatest
American representative in the legislature of the World Government. That
tremendous hall has rung with the hammer-blows of Michael, the
Blacksmith, against international treason, the arrogant Singaporian cry
of “States Rights.”
St. Friend and the Rabbi and Boone, backed by the Board of Education,
proclaim that they have been studying the wily local policy of the man
from Singapore. It seems to be first, to promote confusion. St. Friend
declares that the stranger has incited “by peculiar and devious means”
all the recklessness of the children of the city and that “the defiance
of Beau Nash was a test case” and that “the man from Singapore hoped, if
the Beau survived, to build a green glass temple here.” The man from
Singapore is really a public benefit judged by the mere surface of
things, since he is the scapegoat for all our recent fights and fevers.
But no man touches him. He goes on teaching in the University,
unmolested. His classes in the Malay Peninsula languages and literature
are well attended by the sons and daughters of those who denounce him.
Many wait for any slip of the tongue or wrong turn of the voice and
cannot catch him.
They cannot help liking the jolly old Malay lore about things which have
nothing to do with politics and which are the whole theme of the brown
professor’s discourses.
May 27:—Boone and his faction have slacked up on the Singaporian scent
and are back on the old argument. Boone declares that the University
must be put more firmly in the position of censor of the administration,
and after all there are, by actual count, a larger group of those,
supposed to have buried gold and buried alcohol, still using flying
machines than the list of our “common people.” The Snobs have merely put
on the Robin Redbreast uniform. And he boldly prints the list of those
morally certain to have much buried alcohol and gold but puts it so
deftly there is no risk of suit. And so, to make good, the City Hall
starts an informal flying festival this afternoon and crowds anyone who
can fly at all into machines that come pouring down from Chicago in
response to orders from our City Hall. But they are all Robin Redbreast
machines.
May 28:—The Mayor is winning. Simply by giving everyone a ride who can
possibly be persuaded to ride, he has outnumbered in one day, by actual
count of temporary flyers, the active Boone constituency, and what is
called: “The Moral Issue” has completely disappeared. But Boone turns
today to a personal issue. He gives all possible attention through
coffee-house henchmen, and openly, in _The Boone Ax_, to the
discrediting of “Crawling Jim.” And true or false, the stories are
whispered around the town about Jim that will spoil him as a political
asset and ruin his glory as the punisher of “Beau Nash.”
He has been guilty of certain cruelties to animals and children. It is
whispered that the police have clearly established it. They are keeping
the records. They are hoping they may some day have the freedom to act.
And so Boone gets Jim “where he lives,” for rumor hurts Jim to the soul.
Since he is himself a peddler of little scandals, it is his world. He is
said to be a carrier of everything in the way of poisoned small-talk to
that strange beauty, Mara, the daughter of Singapore. When the small
talk turns against him, as he gathers it, he droops and mopes indeed for
an hour or two.
But he is still president of the Robin Redbreast Club and he takes his
consolation this afternoon by extraordinary evolutions in the air, near
where he killed Beau Nash. He goes through as many curves as a pigeon
bred for flying tricks. And it is said on the street that the Robin
Redbreast Club will keep him in office out of respect for his luck. He
has always been a reckless but endlessly successful trick flyer. So by
midnight Jim has won the cheap rumor battle in the coffee houses and
Yellow Dance Halls and drug stores. And why not? Boone should be in
better business.
May 29:—The town wakes up this morning to find the Snobs asserting
themselves again, though now it is the parents and grandparents that are
more at fault, not the high school aviators. The families on the list
Boone has published, along with their sympathizers, have in the night
put gold-foil on conspicuous portions of the cupolas of their cottage
roofs or the roofs of their club houses.
May 30:—There is a scandal in the Microscope and Telescope Factory. Old
Montague Rock is one of the chief men of the factory. Patricia Anthony,
the Proud, is leading a strike against him because of a certain
contract, which he long ago secured, for lenses which have been
delivered for over a year in a steady stream to a firm on the western
coast. It now transpires that these people were agents for the
Singaporian Government and Patricia Anthony is morally certain,
Singapore is using these lenses in the new mysterious war machine which
is a step beyond the lens gun. The Singaporians are presumed to be
laying up these machines already, for the day of Singaporian rebellion
against the World Government.
Old Montague Rock has always had an irritating style of address and he
has made a speech to the strikers in a fashion that has not helped
toward peace one little bit. He has said this very morning that the
Singaporians are the souls of honor and most admirable, aside from their
religion, with which, of course, he has nothing to do. And that they are
the height of Asiatic aristocracy at all times. He has said our city
should be flattered to furnish them with lenses for guns for local
police work in Asia. And so he continues to paraphrase his speech in
conversations with reporters at Fifth and Monroe and in Coe’s Book
Store, and wherever he meets his friends and enemies, through the whole
afternoon.
So _The Boone Ax_ advocates a strikers’ parade for tomorrow afternoon
and Boone strains his whole credit and prestige in the city to make it a
success. Those societies, etc. that are to be the principal decorative
features are listed, in this afternoon’s papers, and the line of march
is printed. They are to assemble on Second and Monroe, near the old
arsenal, and march south on Second to Capital Avenue, east on Capital
Avenue to Fifth, north on Fifth to Monroe, east on Monroe to Sixth, etc.
May 31:—The Anti King Coal Parade goes by this afternoon with many
surprises, not in the official list of splendors. The event was
scheduled to be called: “The Parade of the Striking Lens Factory” but
Montague Rock being often called King Coal, the other title gets into
the headlines.
First, between girls on horseback, carrying the Star Spangled Banner and
the International flag, rides Patricia Anthony, forewoman of the lens
factory, and, after her, march or ride the strikers, in all possible
glittering and glassy spangles, to show their trade and their gaiety.
And then comes King Coal in chains. He is presumed to be an excellent
portrait of the head of the Rock family. He is built of actual coal, in
parts, and black pasteboard also. Elegant minions of King Coal are
impersonated by masked people, in caricatures of the fastidious
Singaporian costume, and they wear light chains that, nevertheless, hold
them in leash to the great image.
Everyone jeers with emphasis when King Coal goes by, and many people on
the street sing and shout:—“The Song for All Strikers” composed by
Portia, the Singing Aviator, for this especial parade.
There is an interminable miscellany of floats, reiterating with less and
less force, the general theme of the occasion, and I am about tired out.
Then Avanel comes by at the head of her Amazons and Michaelites, all
riding milk white ponies. It is the first time I have seen Avanel in
command, and Boone did not mention this cavalcade in his paper. Indeed,
it is remarked upon as a most arbitrary use of military forces that are
accepted by the International Government. Avanel is every inch the
commander and, for all she is so slender and young, looks the immortal,
Athena, leading forth her city. There must be something, not rumored in
the coffee houses, or this demonstration in force would not be permitted
this mile of riders. Their faces are not masked as were those of the
ancient Ku Klux Klan but the costume is, indeed, as singular. It is, for
both the men and the women, in the pattern of the old hunter and trapper
outfit of coonskin cap and fringed shirt, jacket, leggins and moccasins.
But it is all white leather, with touches of long white fur. The girl’s
costumes are cut a bit like the conventional riding habit. The dazzling
whiteness would not have been possible before the days of smoke
consumers and dustless streets. I behold an avalanche of thundering
snow.
It is late in the evening, and I am helping the tired Avanel dismount
from her pony. Then, we sit together by her unlit fireplace. She has put
the hunting knife and the sword back on the mantle and they seem but
family relics, and the parade seems but a tale she has told me, and her
horse but a thought that she rode today. I walk home through the
midnight, under newly blossoming trees. The rich and heavy perfume of
the Apple-Amaranth flowers, that are looming delicately against the
moon, sweeps around me. It is as though every cluster were a censer from
heaven, devised by a lazy and luxurious angel.