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.
CHAPTER X
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.