Unicorns Part 16

Flying in heavier-than-air machines fascinated me. The fantastic stories of H. G. Wells were ever a joy. When the Argonauts of the Air appeared, flying was practically a.s.sured, although a Paris mathematician had demonstrated with ineluctable logic that it was impossible; as proved a member of the Inst.i.tute a century earlier that birds couldn't fly. It was an illusion. Well, the Wrights flew, even if Langley did not--Langley, the genuine father of the aeroplane.

Living so long in France and Belgium, I had grown accustomed to the whirring of aerial motors, a sound not unlike that of a motor-boat or the buzzing of a sawmill. I became accustomed to this drone above the housetops, and since my return to America I have often wondered why in the land where the aeroplane first flew, so little public interest was manifested. To be sure, there are aero clubs, but they never fly where the interest of the greater public can be intrigued.

Either there is a hectic excitement over some record broken or else the aviator sulks in his tent. Is the money devil at the bottom of the trouble? Sport for sport's sake, like art for art's sake, is rarely encountered. The government has taken up flying, but that is for pragmatic purposes. The aeroplane as a weapon of defence, not the aeroplane as a new and agreeable pleasure. We are not a disinterested nation; even symphony concerts and opera and the salvation of souls are commercial propositions. Else would our skies be darkened by flying machines instead of smoke, and our churches thronged with aviators.

Walking on the famous and fatiguing Boardwalk of Atlantic City I suddenly heard a familiar buzzing in the air and looked up. There it was, a big flying boat like a prehistoric dragon-fly, speeding from the Inlet down to the million-dollar pier. Presently there were two of them flying, and I felt as if I were in a civilised land. On the trolleys were signs: "See the Flying Boats at the Inlet!" I did, the very next morning. I had no notion of being a pa.s.senger. I was not tempted by the thought. But as Satan finds work for idle hands, I lounged down the beach to the Kendrick biplane, and stared my full at its slender proportions. A young man in a bathing-suit explained to me the technique of flying, and insinuated that hundreds and hundreds had flown during the season without accident. Afternoon saw me again on the sands, an excited witness of a flight; excited because I stood behind the motor when it was started for a preliminary tryout--"tuning up" is the slang phrase of the profession--and the cyclonic gale blew my hat away, loosened my collar, and made my teeth chatter.

Such a tornadic roar! I firmly resolved that never would I trust myself in such a devil's contrivance. Why, it was actually riding the whirlwind--and, perhaps, reaping a watery grave. What else but that? On a blast of air you sail aloft and along. When the air ceases you drop (less than forty-five miles an hour). And this in a flimsy box kite. Never for me! Not to-day, baker, call to-morrow with a crusty cottage! as we used to say in dear old "Lunnon" years ago. Nevertheless, the poison was in my veins; cunningly it began to work. I saw a pa.s.senger, a fat man, weighing two hundred and four pounds--I asked for the figures--trussed up like a calf in the arms of a slight, muscular youth, who carried him a limp burden and deposited him on a seat in the prow of the boat. I turned my head away. I am not easily stirred--having reported musical and theatrical happenings for a quarter of a century--but the sight of that stout male, a man and a brother (I didn't know him from Adam), evoked a chord of pity in my breast. I felt that I would never set eyes again on this prospective food for fishes. I quickly left the spot and returned to my hotel, determined to say, "Retro me, Sathanas!" if that personage should happen to show me his hoofs, horns, and hide.

But he did not. The devil is a subtle beast. He had simply set jangling the wires of suggestion, and my nerves accomplished the rest. One morning, a few days later, I awoke parched with desire. I drank much strong tea to steady me and smoked unremittingly. Again, during the early afternoon, I found myself up the beach. "My feet take hold on h.e.l.l," I said to myself, but it was only hot sand. I teased myself with speculations as to whether the game was worth the candle--yes, I had got that far, traversing a vast mental territory between the No-Sayer and the Yes-Sayer. I was doomed, and I knew it when I began to circle about the machine.

Courteously the bonny youth explained matters. It was a Glenn H.

Curtiss hydro-aeroplane, furnished with one of the new Curtiss engines of ninety horse-power, capable of flying seventy to ninety miles an hour, of lifting four hundred pounds, and weighing in all about a ton. Was it safe? Were the taut, skinny piano wires that manipulated the steering-gear and the plane durable? Didn't they ever snap? Of course they were durable, and, of course, they occasionally snapped. What then? Why, you drop, in spiral fashion--volplane--charming vocable! But if the engine?--same thing.

You would come to earth, rather water, as naturally as a child takes the breast. Nothing to fear.

Young Beryl Kendrick is an Atlantic City product--he was a professional swimmer and life-guard--and will look after you. The price is fifteen dollars; formerly twenty-five dollars, but compet.i.tion, which is said to be the life of trade, had operated in favour of the public. Rather emotionally I bade my man good day, promising to return for a flight the next morning, a promise I certainly did not mean to keep. This stupendous announcement he received coolly. Flying to him was a quotidian ba.n.a.lity.

And then I noticed that the blazing sun had become darkened. Was it an eclipse, or were some horrid, monstrous shapes like the supposit.i.tious spindles spoken of by Langley devouring the light of our parent planet? No, it was the chamber of my skull that was full of shadows. The obsession was complete. I would go up, but I must suffer terribly in the interim.

Why should I fly and pay fifteen good shekels for the unwelcome privilege? I computed the cost of various beverages, and as a consoling thought recalled Mark Twain's story of the Western editor who, missing from his accustomed haunts, was later found serenely drunk, pa.s.sionately reading to a group of miners from a table his lantern-illuminated speech, in which he denounced the cruel raw waste of grain in the making of bread when so many honest men were starving for whisky. Yet did I feel that I would not begrudge my hard-earned royalties (I'm not a best-seller), and thus tormented between the devil of cowardice and the deep sea of curiosity I retired and dreamed all night of fighting strange birds that attacked me in an aeroplane.

I shan't weary you with the further a.n.a.lysis of my soul-states during this tempestuous period. I ate a light breakfast, swallowed much tea. Then I resolutely went in company with a friend, and we boarded an Inlet car. I had the day previous resorted to a major expedient of cowards. I had said, so as to bolster up my fluttering resolution, that I was going to fly; an expedient that seldom misses, for I should never have been able to face the chief clerk, the head waiter, or the proprietor at the hotel if I failed to keep my promise.

"Boaster! Swaggerer!" I muttered to myself en route. "Now are you satisfied? Thou tremblest, carca.s.s! Thou wouldst tremble much more if thou knewest whither I shall soon lead thee!" I quoted Turenne, and I was beginning to babble something about Icarus--or was it Phaeton, or Simon Magus?--brought to earth in the Colosseum by a prayer from the lips of Saint Peter--when we arrived. How I hated the corner where we alighted. It seemed mean and dingy and sinister in the dazzling sunlight--a red-hot Sat.u.r.day, September 11, 1915, and the hour was 10.30 A. M. A condemned criminal could not have noted more clearly every detail of the life he was about to quit. We ploughed through the sand. We reached the scaffold--at least it looked like one to me. "h.e.l.lo, here's a church. Let's go in," I felt like exclaiming in sheer desperation, remembering d.i.c.kens and Mr.

Wemmick. I would have, such was my blue funk, quoted Holy Scripture to the sandlopers, but I hadn't the chance.

I asked my friend, and my voice sounded steady enough, whether the wind and weather seemed propitious for flying. Never better was the reply, and my heart went down to my boots. I really think I should have escaped if a stout man with a piratical moustache hadn't approached me and asked: "Going up to-day?" I marvelled at his calmness, and wished for his instant dissolution, but I gave an affirmative shake of the head. Cornered at last! Handing my watch, hat, and wallet to my friend, I coldly awaited the final preparations. I had forgotten my ear protector, but cotton-wool would answer the purpose of making me partially deaf to the clangorous vibration of the propeller blades--which resemble in a magnified shape the innocent air-fans of offices and cafes. I essayed one more joke--true gallows humour--before I was led like a lamb (a tough one) to the slaughter. I asked an attendant to whom I had paid the official fee if my widows would be refunded the money in case of accident; but this antique and tasteless witticism was indifferently received, as it deserved. Finally the young man gave me a raincoat, grabbed me around the waist, and bidding me clasp his neck he carried me out into shallow water and sat me beside the air-pilot, who looked like a mere lad in his bathing-clothes. My hand must have been trembling (ah, that old piano hand), for he inquiringly eyed me. The motor was screaming as we flew through the water toward the Inlet. I hadn't courage of mind to make a farewell signal to my companion. Too late, we're off! I thought, and at once my trepidation vanished.

I had for some unknown reason, possibly because of absolute despair, suffered a rich sea-change. We churned the waves. I saw tiny sails studding the deep blue. Men fished from the sh.o.r.e. As we neared the Inlet, where a shambling wooden hotel stands on the sandy point, the sound of the motor grew intenser. We began to lift, not all at once, but gradually. Suddenly her nose poked skyward, and the boat climbed the air with an ease that was astonishing. No shock. No jerkiness.

We simply glided aloft as if the sky were our native heath--you will pardon the Hibernicism--and as if determined to pay a visit to the round blazing sun bathing naked in the brilliant blue. And with the mounting ascent I became unconscious of my corporeal vesture. I had become pure spirit. I feared nothing. The legend of angels became a certainty. I was on the way to the Fourth Dimensional vista. I recalled Poincare's suggestion that there is no such thing as matter; only holes in the ether. Nature embracing a vacuum instead of abhorring it. A Swiss cheese universe. Joseph Conrad has said "Man on earth is an unforeseen accident which does not stand close investigation." But man in the air? Man is destined to wings. Was I not proving it? Flying is the sport of G.o.ds, and should be of humans now that the motor-car is become slightly "promiscuous."

The Inlet and thoroughfare at my feet were a network of silvery ribbons. The heat was terrific, the glare almost unbearable. But I no longer sneezed. Aviation solves the hay-fever problem. The wind forced me to clench my teeth. We were hurled along at seventy miles an hour, and up several thousand feet, yet below the land seemed near enough to touch. As we swung across the masts of yachts I wondered that we didn't graze them--so elusive was the crystal clearness of the atmosphere, a magic mirror that made the remote contiguous. The mast of the sunken schooner hard by the sand-bar looked like a lead-pencil one could grasp and write a message to Mars.

h.e.l.lo! I was become lyrical. It is inescapable up in the air. The blood seethes. Ecstasy sets in; the kinetic ecstasy of a spinning-top. I gazed at the pilot. He twisted his wheel nonchalantly as if in an earthly automobile. I looked over the sides of the cedar boat and was not giddy, for I had lived years at the top of an apartment-house, ten stories high, from which I daily viewed policemen killing time on the sidewalks; besides, I have strong eyes and the stomach of a drover. Therefore, no giddiness, no nausea. Only exaltation as we swooped down to lower levels. Atlantic City, bizarre, yet meaningless, outrageously planned and executed, stretched its ugly shape beneath us; the most striking objects were the exotic hyphenated hotel, with its Asiatic monoliths and dome, and its vast, grandiose neighbour, a mound of concrete, the biggest hotel in the world. The piers were salient silhouettes. A checker-board seemed the city, which modulated into a tremendous arabesque of ocean and sky. I preferred to stare seaward. The absorbent cotton in my ears was transformed into gun-cotton, so explosive the insistent drumming of the motor-engine. Otherwise, we flew on even keel, only an occasional dip and a sidewise swing reminding me that I wasn't footing the ordinary highway. The initial intoxication began to wear off, but not the sense of freedom, a glorious freedom; truly, mankind will not be free till all fly.

Alas! though we become winged we remain mortal. We may shed our c.u.mbersome pedestrian habits, but we take up in the air with us our petty souls. I found myself indulging in very trite thoughts. What a pity that war should be the first to degrade this delightful and stimulating sport! Worse followed. Why couldn't I own a machine?

Base envy, you see. The socialistic leaven had begun to work. No use; we shall remain human even in heaven or h.e.l.l.

I have been asked to describe the sensation of flying. I can't. It seems so easy, so natural. If you have ever dreamed of flying, I can only say that your dream will be realised in an aeroplane. Dreams do come true sometimes. (Curiously enough, I've not dreamed of flying since.) But as there is an end even to the most tedious story, so mine must finish.

Suddenly the sound of the engine ceased. The silence was thrilling, almost painful. And then in huge circles, as if we were descending the curves of an invisible corkscrew, we came down, the bow of the flying boat pointing at an angle of forty-five degrees. Still no dizziness, only a sense of regret that the trip was so soon over. It had endured an eternity, but occupied precisely twenty-one minutes.

We reached the water and settled on the foam like a feather. Then we churned toward the beach; again I was carried, this time on to solid land, where I had ridiculous trouble in getting the cotton from my hara.s.sed eardrums. Perhaps my hands were unsteady, but if they were, my feet were not.

I reached the Inlet via the Boardwalk, making record time, and drew the first happy sigh in a week as I sat down, lighted a cigar, and twiddled my fingers at a waiter. Even if I had enjoyed a new pleasure I didn't propose to give up the old ones. Then my nerves!

And when I meet Gabriele d'Annunzio I can look him in the eye. He flew over Trieste, but I flew over my fears--a moral as well as a physical victory for a timid conservative.

CHAPTER x.x.x

PRAYERS FOR THE LIVING

(From the editorial page of the New York _Sun_, December 31, 1916)

It is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from their sins; and it is as holy a prayer that begs from the G.o.d of chance his pity for the living. Aye! it is those who are about to live, not to die, that we should salute. Life is the eternal slayer; death is but the final punctuation of the vital paragraph. Life is also the betrayer. A cosmical conspiracy of deception encircles us. We call it Maya, and flatter our finite sense of humour that we are no longer entrapped by the shining appearance of things when we say aloud: Stay, thou art so subtle that we know you for what you are--the profoundest instinct of life: its cruel delight in pretending to be what it is not. We are now, all of us who think that we think, newly born Fausts with eyes unbandaged of the supreme blinders, Time and s.p.a.ce. Nature clothes the skeleton in a motley suit of flesh, but our supersharpened ears overhear the rattling of the bones. We are become so wise that love itself is no longer a sentiment, only a sensation; religion is first cousin to voluptuousness; and if we are so minded we may jig to the tune of the stars up the dazzling staircase, and sneer at the cloud-gates of the infinite inane. Naught succeeds like negation, and we swear that in the house of the undertaker it is impolite to speak of shrouds. We are nothing if not determinists. And we believe that the devil deserves the hindmost.

We live in order to forget life. For our delicate machinery of apperception there is no longer right or wrong; vice and virtue are the acid and alkali of existence. And as too much acid deranges the stomach, so vice corrodes the soul, and thus we are virtuous by compulsion. Yet we know that evil serves its purpose in the vast chemistry of being, and if banished the consequences might not be for universal good; other evils would follow in the train of a too comprehensive mitigation, and our end a stale swamp of vain virtues.

Resist not evil! Which may mean the reverse of what it seems to preach. The master modern immoralist has said: Embrace evil! that we may be over and done with it. Toys are our ideals; glory, goodness, wealth, health, happiness; all toys except health; health of the body, of the soul. And the first shall be last.

The human soul in health? But there is no spiritual health. The mystic, Doctor Tauler, has said: "G.o.d does not reside in a vigorous body"; sinister; nevertheless, equitable. The dolorous cert.i.tude that the most radiant of existences ends in the defeat of disease and death; that happiness is relative, a word empty of meaning in the light of experience, and non-existent as an absolute; that the only divine oasis in our feverish activities is sleep; sleep the prelude to the profound and eternal silence--why then this gabble about soul-states and the peace that pa.s.seth all understanding?

Simply because the red corpuscles that rule our destinies are, when dynamic, mighty breeders of hope; if the powers and princ.i.p.alities of darkness prevail, our guardian angels, the phagocytes, are dominated by the leucocytes. G.o.ds and devils, Ormuzd and Ahriman, and other phantasms of the sky, may all be put on a microscopic slide and their struggles noted. And the evil ones are ever victors in the diabolical game. No need to insist on it. In the heart of mankind there is a tiny shrine with its burning taper; the idol is Self; the propitiatory light is for subliminal foes. Alas! in vain.

We succ.u.mb, and in our weakness we sink into the grave. If only we were sure of the River Styx afterward we should pay the ferry-tax with joy. Better Hades than the poppy of oblivion. "Ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever," as Sir Thomas Browne sagely remarks.

The pious and worthy Doctor Jeremy Taylor, who built cathedral-like structures of English prose to the greater glory of G.o.d and for the edification of ambitious rhetoricians, has dwelt upon the efficacy of prayer in a singularly luminous pa.s.sage: "Holy prayer procures the ministry and services of angels. It rescinds the decrees of G.o.d.

It cures sickness and obtains pardon. It arrests the sun in its course and stays the wheels of the chariot of the moon. It rules over all G.o.d's creatures and opens and shuts the storehouses of rain. It unlocks the cabinet of the womb and quenches the violence of fire. It stops the mouths of lions and reconciles our sufferance and weak faculties with the violence of torment and sharpness of persecution. It pleases G.o.d and supplies all our needs. But prayer that can do this much for us can do nothing at all without holiness, for G.o.d heareth not sinners, but if any man be a worshipper of G.o.d and doth His will, him He heareth."

It should not be forgotten that Taylor, perhaps the greatest English prose-master save John Milton, was a stickler for good works as well as faith. He was considered almost heterodox because of his violence of speech when the subject of death-bed repentance became a topic of discussion; indeed, his bishop remonstrated with him because of his stiff-necked opinions. To joust through life as at a pleasure tournament and when the dews of death dampen the forehead to call on G.o.d in your extremity seemed to this eloquent divine an act of slinking cowardice. Far better face the evil one in a defiant spirit than knock for admittance at the back door of paradise and try to sneak by the winged policeman into a vulgar bliss: unwon, unhoped for, undeserved. Therefore the rather startling statement, "G.o.d heareth not sinners," read in the light of Bishop Taylor's fervent conception of man's duty, hath its justification.

But this atmosphere of proverbial commonplaces and "insp.i.s.sated gloom" should not be long maintained when the coursers of the sun are plunging southward in the new year; when the Huntsman is up at Oyster Bay and "they are already past their first sleep in Persia."

What a bold and adventurous piece of nature is man; yet how he stares at life as a frowning entertainment. Why must we "act our antipodes" when "all Africa and her prodigies are in us"? Ergo, let us be cheerful. G.o.d is with the world. Let us pray that during the ensuing year no rust shall colour our soul into a dingy red. Let us pray for the living that they may be loosed from their politics and see life steadily and whole.

Let us pray that we may not take it on ourselves to feel holier than our neighbours. Let us pray that we be not cursed with the itching desire to reform our fellows, for the way of the reformer is hard, and he always gets what he deserves: the contempt of his fellow men.

He is usually a hypocrite. Let us pray that we are not struck by religious zeal; religious people are not always good people; good people are not envious, jealous, penurious, censorious, or busybodies, or too much bound up in the prospect of the mote in their brother's eye and unmindful of the beam in their own.

Furthermore, good people do not unveil with uncharitable joy the faults of women. Have faith. Have hope, and remember that charity is as great as chast.i.ty.

Let us pray for the misguided folk who, forgetful of Mother Church, her wisdom, her consolations, flock to the tents of lewd, itinerant, mumbo-jumbo howlers, that blaspheme the sacred name as they epileptically leap, shouting glory-kingdom-come and please settle at the captain's office.

Though they run on all fours and bark as hyenas, they shall not enter the city of the saints, being money-changers in the Temple, and tripe-sellers of souls. Better Tophet and its burning pitch than a wilderness of such apes of G.o.d. Some men and women of culture and social position indorse these sorry buffoons, the apology for their paradoxical conduct being any port in a storm; any degrading circus, so it be followed by a mock salvation. But salvation for whom? What deity cares for such foaming at the mouth, such fustian? Conversion is silent and comes from within, and not to the din of bra.s.s-bands and screaming hallelujahs. It takes all sorts of G.o.ds to make the cosmos, but why return to the antics and fetishes of our primate ancestors, the cave-dwellers? This squirming and panting and brief reform "true religion"? On the contrary it is a throwback to b.e.s.t.i.a.lity, to the vilest instincts. A "soul" that has to be saved by such means is a soul not worth the saving. To the discard with it, where, flaming in purgatorial fires, it may be refashioned for future reincarnation on some other planet.

Abuse of drink is to be deplored, but Prohibition is more enslaving than alcohol. Paganism in its most exotic forms is preferable to this prize-ring Christianity. One may be zealous without wallowing in debasing superst.i.tion. Again, let us pray for these imbeciles and for the charlatans who are blinding them. Neither arts and sciences nor politics and philosophies will save the soul. The azure route lies beyond the gates of ivory and the gates of horn.

Let us pray for our sisters, the suffragettes, who are still suffering from the injustice of Man, now some million of years. Let us pray that they be given the ballot to prove to them its utter futility as a cure-all. With it they shall be neither happier nor different. Once a woman, always a martyr. Let them not be deceived by illusive phrases. If they had not been oppressed they would to-day be "free"! Alas! free from their s.e.x? Free from the burden of family? Free like men to carry on the rude labours of this ruder earth? To what purpose? To become second-rate men, when nature has endowed them with qualities that men vainly emulate, vainly seek to evoke their spirit in the arts and literature! Ages past woman should have attained that impossible goal, oppression or no; in fact, adversity has made man what he is--and woman, too. Pray, that she may not be tempted by the mirage into the desert, there to perish of thirst for the promised land. Nearly a century ago George Sand was preaching the equality of the s.e.xes, and rightly enough.

What has come of it? The vote? Political office? Professions, business opportunities? Yes, all these things, but not universal happiness. Woman's sphere--stale phrase!--is any one she hankers after; but let her not deceive herself. Her future will strangely resemble her past.

William Dean Howells was not wrong when he wrote: Woman has only her choice in self-sacrifice. And sometimes not even the choosing. Why?

Why are eclipses? Why are some men prohibitionists? Why do hens cluck after laying eggs? Let us pray for warring women that their politically ambitious leaders may no longer dupe them with fallacious promises--surely a "pathetic fallacy." But, then, females rush in where fools fear to tread.

And lastly, beloved sisters and brothers, let us heartily pray that our imperial democracy (or is it a democratic empire?), our plutocratic republic (or should we say republican plutocracy?) may be kept from war; avoid "the drums and tramplings of three conquests." But by the Eternal Jehovah, G.o.d of battles, if we are forced to fight, then let us fight like patriotic Americans, and not gently coo, like pacifists and other sultry south winds. A billion for "preparedness," but not a penny for "pork," say we.

And by the same token let us pray that those thundering humbugs and parasites who call themselves labour leaders--the blind leading the blind--for ever vanish. Because of their contumacious acts and egregious bamboozling of their victims, because of their false promises of an earthly paradise and a golden age, they deserve the harshest condemnation.

Like certain Oriental discourses, our little Morality which began in the mosque has rambled not far from the tavern. Nevertheless, let us pray for the living as well as the dead. Oremus!