The Trail of the Hawk Part 26

Never again would he be so splendidly young, never again so splendidly sure of himself and of his medium of expression. He was to gain wisdom, but never to have more joy of the race.

He was sure now that he was destined to pa.s.s Tad Warren.

The sun was ever brighter; the horizon ever wider, r.i.m.m.i.n.g the saucer-shaped earth. When he flew near the Sound he saw that the fog had almost pa.s.sed. The water was gentle and colored like pearl, lapping the sands, smoking toward the radiant sky. He pa.s.sed 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 ma.s.s 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 flas.h.i.+ng 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 crus.h.i.+ng 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 c.o.c.kpit 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, gos.h.!.+ 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-flas.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sage, 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 wis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.s 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., a.s.sistant 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 alt.i.tude 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 d.a.m.nation of Theron Ware_ (wonder what he d.a.m.ned), 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 amus.e.m.e.nt; 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-a.n.a.lysis 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 gra.s.s 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 pa.s.senger. Roomy c.o.c.kpit 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 b.u.t.ting 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 a.s.sociated Order of the Pyramid and just now he is sitting out in front of his tent talking to some of the Grand Worthy High Mighties of it I guess--fat old boy with a yachting cap and a big bra.s.s watch chain and an Order of Pyramid charm big as your thumb, and a tough young fellow with a black sateen s.h.i.+rt and his hat on sideways with a cigarette hanging out of one corner of his mouth.

Since I wrote the above a party of sports, the women in fade-away gowns made to show their streamline forms came b.u.t.ting in, poking their fingers at everything, while the slob that owned their car explained everything wrong. "This is a biplane," he says, "you can see there's a plane sticking out on each side of the place where the aviator sits, it's a new areoplane (that's the way he p.r.o.nounced it), and that dingus in front is a whirling motor." I was sitting here at the work-bench, writing, hot as h.e.l.l and sweaty and in khaki pants and soft s.h.i.+rt and black sneakers, and the Big Boss comes over to me and says, "Where is Hawk Ericson, my man." "How do I know," I says. "When will he be back," says he, as though he was thinking of getting me fired p. d. q. for being fresh. "Next week. He ain't come yet."

He gets sore and says, "See here, my man, I read in the papers to-day that he has just joined the flying colony. Permit me to inform you that he is a very good friend of mine. If you will ask him, I am quite sure that he will remember Mr. Porter Carruthers, who was introduced to him at the Belmont Park Meet. Now if you will be so good as to show the ladies and myself about----" Well, I asked Hawk, and Hawk seemed to be unable to remember his friend Mr. Carruthers, who was one of the thousand or so people recently introduced to him, but he told me to show them about, which I did, and told them the Gnome was built radial to save room, and the wires overhead were a frame for a little roof for bad weather, and they gasped and nodded to every fool thing I said, swallowed it hook line and sinker till one of the females showed her interest by saying "How fascinating, let's go over to the Garden City Hotel, Porter, I'm dying for a drink." I hope she died for it.