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Title: The Golden Book of Springfield
Author: Lindsay, Vachel
Language: English
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THE GOLDEN BOOK OF SPRINGFIELD
LIST OF THE BOOKS OF VACHEL LINDSAY
Prose:—
A Handy Guide for Beggars.
Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty.
The Art of the Moving Picture.
The Golden Book of Springfield.
Verse:—
General William Booth Enters Into Heaven and Other Poems.
The Congo and Other Poems.
The Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems.
The Golden Whales of California and Other Rhymes in the American
Language.
THE GOLDEN BOOK OF SPRINGFIELD
BY
VACHEL LINDSAY
A CITIZEN OF THAT TOWN
Being the review of a book that will appear in the autumn of the year
2018, and an extended description of Springfield, Illinois, in that
year.
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1920
_All rights reserved_
Copyright, 1920
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1920.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Campbellite, the Florist and the Hostess 3
II. The Prognosticator’s Club 10
III. How People of 1920 Think the Book Will Come, in 2018 19
IV. History of the Michaels 49
V. I Myself Enter into the Springfield of 2018 66
VI. Kopensky Versus Boone 90
VII. The Drug Stores, Coffee Houses and Dance Halls 103
VIII. The Springfield Flag 117
IX. The Beginning of the Flying Machine Riots 137
X. The End of the Flying Machine Riots 154
XI. St. Friend, and His Two Religious Orders 171
XII. The Yellow Dance Halls Are Abolished 192
XIII. Surto Hurdenburg is Lynched 209
XIV. In the House of the Man From Singapore 226
XV. Further Experiences in That Strange Mansion 243
XVI. The Return of Joseph Bartholdi Michael 266
XVII. The Lynching of Boone. An interregnum of the Diary. How
The Golden Book Appears 287
XVIII. St. Friend and Avanel Read From The Golden Book 305
XIX. Avanel and I Ascend to the Jungles of Heaven 318
THE PROGNOSTICATOR’S CLUB
1920 2018
David Carson, Campbellite minister,
becomes St. Friend
Anne Morrison, a florist,
becomes Roxana Grey
Eloise Terry, the hostess,
becomes Patricia Anthony
Clara Horton, a school teacher,
becomes Josephine Windom
Gregory Webster, an artist,
becomes Sparrow Short
Nathan Levi, a Jewish boy,
becomes Rabbi Terence Ezekiel
Margaret Evans, a Christian Scientist,
becomes Rachel Madison
Daisy Pearl Johnson, a negress,
becomes Mary Timmons
Nathaniel Davidson, an evangelist,
becomes Cave Man Thomas
Ruth Everett, a welfare worker,
becomes Gwendolyn Charles
John Fletcher, the doubter,
becomes Dr. Mayo Sims
Joseph Bartholdi Michael, I,
becomes Joseph Bartholdi Michael, II
THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED TO ISADORA
CHAPTER I
THE CAMPBELLITE, THE FLORIST AND THE HOSTESS
In this, our town, we call “New Springfield,” David Carson, a young
minister of the Disciples of Christ is a near neighbor of mine. He is a
graduate of Bethany College. His great-grandfather studied there before
him, when Alexander Campbell, the founder of Bethany, was in his prime.
If you want to know of this man as we know him, read Richardson’s staid
old biography, or walk the shades of Bethany, West Virginia. Campbell,
in our eyes, was the American pioneer theologian.
He was devoted to the union of the churches of Christendom. He pleaded
that all disciples of Christ call themselves “simply” Christians, and
unite on those symbols and ordinances which Christendom has in common.
If it would not make our great-grandfathers turn over in their graves, I
and my neighbor would call ourselves “simply” Campbellites. We would do
it for a human, and not lofty reason. It seems that those spiritually or
physically descended from the early Campbellites are on family terms, no
matter how they seem to roam in thought or experience, or no matter what
their hereditary argumentative disposition. For a “Campbellite” is sure
to argue, on the least provocation. There are traces of this tendency
even in Richardson’s reverent biography.
Ultra modern followers of Campbell hang in their libraries with
unlimited pride a certain Rembrandtesque lithograph of the great man, an
heirloom that is now quite rare, and to be classed in its southern way,
as the spinning wheels and old Bibles of the Mayflower are classed in a
northern way. This lithograph is the enlargement of the engraving in the
front of the Richardson biography, but much color and magic have been
added. Out of the darkness emerges a smooth-shaven, high bred, masterful
physiognomy more like that of the statesmen who were the fathers of the
republic, than of a member of any priesthood. Campbell’s cheeks and eyes
are still fired with youth and authority militant. He has a head bowed
with thought, crowned with grey hair, and beneath his chin is the most
statesmanlike of cravats, with a peculiarly old-fashioned roll. Thus he
must have looked, at the height of debate with the infidel.
This is the man who put so much learning, and deathless controversy, and
high distinction into the log cabins of the Ohio river basin, especially
the romantic regions of Mason and Dixon’s line. On west of the
Mississippi his followers carried his light to Seattle, Portland, and
Los Angeles, and the cities of Alaska and Canada and the farms between.
And they start ’round the world with it all over again at this hour. Yet
in the end that light is apt to have a color of its origin, touched with
Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky;—a southern gospel, far indeed
from Plymouth Rock, or Manhattan Island.
I can never forget the copy of the lithograph that hung over my
grandmother’s front room fireplace in the patriarchal Frazee farm house
in Indiana. Under it I heard proverbs from Campbell every summer, from
the time I can remember anything. All those sayings were mixed up with
stories that came with my people along the old Daniel Boone trail from
Kentucky and Virginia. And when that old frame house was new and novel,
and most other dwelling houses near were log cabins, Campbell had been a
guest received with breathless reverence. Under that picture I was
personally conducted through all the daguerreotypes and records
pertaining to the Kentucky pioneers of our blood.
And now, in Springfield, under the same rich lithograph my neighbor
keeps the bound volumes of Campbell’s _Christian Baptist_ and _Millenial
Harbinger_, once the arsenal of every debating “elder” of our
persuasion. My grandfather’s copies were marked, every page, and these
are marked by my radical friend, but with a different point of view.
On a certain evening I am in the pastor’s study tracing with
astonishment the suggestion of Christian Socialism in the first number
of the _Harbinger_. My Grandma had said nothing about _that_!
Few of Campbell’s older followers dwell on the hope of a practical City
of God that shouted from the covers even before they were opened. This
reasonable, non-miraculous millennium is much in the mind of my
neighbor, and he tells me again and again of a vision that he has of
Springfield a hundred years hence. But more of this later.
There is a woman who is florist of our town, Anne Morrison a descendant
of the Chapman family. She holds in special reverence, John Chapman,
(Johnny Appleseed,) who began his labors in a region a little north of
Alexander Campbell’s diocese, in the Ohio basin. He remains a tradition
among the more northern group of those who worshipped Campbell, and
among similar pioneers. He is especially honored by that splendid sect,
the Swedenborgians, for he was a preacher and teacher of the doctrines
of Swedenborg. But he was even more notably a nurseryman. He was
deserving of the laurels of Thoreau, three times and more, and by the
test of life rather than writing, to him belongs nearly every
worth-while crown of Whitman. He skirmished on the very edge of the
frontier, but fought the wilderness, not the Indian. The aborigines
thought him a great medicine man and holy man, because of his magical
bag of seeds, for along their trails, wherever he tramped, there soon
came up pennyroyal and all beneficent herbs. With the tenderness of St.
Francis he wept over every wounded bird, and with the steadiness of a
nation builder, he planted orchards of apples in the openings of the
forest, fenced them in, and left them for the pioneers to find, long
after. He wore for a shirt and sole article of clothing an old
gunny-sack with holes cut for arms and legs, and winter or summer slept
in the hollow tree on the pile of old leaves, and weathered it past
seventy years, while the great Whitman lived in houses, and Thoreau was
on Walden but a season or two. These men left behind them certain
writings, but Johnny Appleseed left behind him apples, orchards heavy
with fruit, beauty from the very black earth, and a tradition whose
wonder shall yet ring through all the palaces of mankind. He was swift
as the deer, and gentle as the fawn,—and stern with himself, as the Red
Indian. Like Christ and Socrates he wrote only in the soil. He was
welcomed more like an angel than a man in the pioneer cabins, and if
ever there was an American saint left uncanonized in 1920, it is John
Chapman, Johnny Appleseed, and by 2018 he is canonized indeed, and has
his niche in the Springfield Cathedral, according to Anne Morrison’s
revelation.
Another friend is a great hostess of Springfield, Eloise Terry, by name.
Her enemies declare that she is the representative of her family
fortune, and little else. But they are apt to be people who do not
attend her quite earnest parties, where every ramification of the social
fabric is candidly examined, at least for one evening. The most
competent person is brought in to speak of his strand of the web, be he
bootblack or jailbird or poet. But this is an advance on her family who
are dully conventional, to the core of their souls. And her constant
companions, though they are in fact people of the same general
stratification of good fortune as herself, are selected for their human
interest in her unconsciously inhuman inquisitions. And inquisitions,
after all, come but once a month or so. In general she and her cronies
are taking a decent part in politics, and their wealth does not
interfere with an unprejudiced estimate of candidates, entirely apart
from bank accounts. Her presence in town makes for the truth, and for
progress that much. Liars hate her intensely. Petty political lies fade
before her, however poor her remedies may be for the great lies. She is
a golden-haired girl, around thirty years of age, with three thriving
and well-reared children. Her distinction, in my eyes, is not her
opinions, but the fact that she dresses in schemes allied to the gold of
her hair. I meet her on the street like a bit of blessed sunshine. Also
her heart is quite warm. If she had been a musician, instead of a kind
of contemporary conversational historian, she would have talked of
music, instead of events, with the same ardor and fine tone, to a
similar circle of friends, and brought in the singers, to sing for them,
from the very gutters if necessary, and have been as decent to such
songbirds as she knew how.
CHAPTER II
THE PROGNOSTICATOR’S CLUB
The young disciple minister and I decide that the people of Springfield
who see the vision of the city of the future should be brought together,
and we write some carefully worded invitations. We organize a
Prognosticator’s Club and meet in the Sun Parlor of the Leland Hotel.
One of the first to join, after our florist friend and the great hostess
of Springfield, is John Fletcher, a Doubter. He is a person in whom we
place much confidence in practical affairs. He is high authority in the
financial circles of Springfield. He is religious, on Sunday only, from
eleven till twelve-thirty, when he sits in his pew. He represents the
present State House view which takes for granted that the fewer ideas
men have the better, if only the crowd in power “get theirs.” The
general assumption is:—politics is business and business is politics and
the only worth while citizens are those that “get the money,” and, of
course, those others who keep it safely and who correctly add the
accounts till the money is wanted. They hate any new current in any
party. And they hate the idea of any clan wanting anything except
established well-dressed bank accounts to rule the city. Children are
sent to universities to polish their manners, but not to bring back any
changed thoughts on these subjects.
The gentleman who incarnates this dream lives in the north, is therefore
a Republican. He is quite sure the Emancipation Proclamation meant that
millionaires are exempt from criticism, except from other millionaires
or their shrewedest lackeys, and that the Emancipation Proclamation was
sent forth into the world to establish more thoroughly the lackey, the
toady, the tuft hunter, the snob, the bootlicker, and the parasite, in
the service of the stupidest holders of money and land. He will defend
this position quite ardently, almost in those terms, and he is quite
sure that anyone who protests against his views is a “red.” And “red,”
“radical,” “anarchist,” and “liberal” are absolutely synonymous,
according to his thinking. He is sure that anyone who does not want to
be a millionaire or serve one well is contemplating arson. He is quite
sure that every large bank account is automatically moral, that every
small one is almost moral, and the one crime is to be without money. He
is quite convinced that Abraham Lincoln died to establish such ideals
more firmly in the Republican Party, and when he is in the South he
maintains that Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson lived and toiled and
suffered to establish them in the Democratic Party, and did it with
eminent success: that all other notions have been recently imported from
the shameful streets of Russia. When he sent his son to college he urged
him to spend money on the conservative professors and their sons and
daughters, and to put the radical professors in bad odor with the “best
fellows,” and get them fired as soon as the trustees would listen to one
so young.
All this point of view is in my friend’s tone of voice and gesture. He
has inherited part of his money, and married the rest, and the income
pays for a good caretaker. He himself is a physician for the most
extensively landed families in central Illinois. He dresses well, so
people think he knows all about medicine. He is squarely set, has a
heavy jaw, a steadying manner, a kindly disposition, pays the best
salaries to his office boy and secretaries and the people who work his
farms. He has the greatest aversion to oaths, bad manners, adultery, and
has a literary turn. Though he looks like an old prize fighter with a
touch of deacon-sleekness, he reads Montaigne, Lord Chesterfield,
Thackeray, Shakespeare, and the like. He enjoys discussing in the most
sympathetic way every human trait that has to do with purely domestic
dramatic and personal emotions. His wife is a valiant Daughter of the
American Revolution and his daughter belongs to the most snobbish
sorority to be discovered for miles. He has been “right in the wagon”
whenever a bit of near royalty has passed through Springfield, and his
manner though blunt, was deferential. His wildest turn is for radical
painters, and he has the best collection west of the Hudson of the now
forgotten cubists.
Of far different sort is the next member of our Club. She is of the fine
nerved creatures of this world, a spring beauty in whose conversation I
take delight. She is a teacher in one of the Springfield ward schools,
and a sober little reader of _The Atlantic Monthly_, and we quarrel a
bit about that. But her taste there represents her desire for fine
grained English whatever the thought conveyed. When Clara Horton takes
delight in life, it comes in a flash that sets her friends aflame. The
school marm is gone. She ceases to admonish me. The imaginary eyes of
her censorious pupils are banished, and I am no longer a pupil, and she
is the daughter of a nymph of the most delicate mood and a faun of the
gentlest sort. Her whole physical fabric is aglow with the idea of the
book or the event or the mere day’s sunshine or tomorrow’s movie. Her
skin shows the whiteness of a stock that has been too inbred for many
generations for complete vigor, the gentle nymph and the gentle faun met
too often, and there were not quite enough bullies or peasants among her
far European ancestors. Her people have been for many generations in
America. Every line of her family, north and south, has been remembered
with the greatest comprehension of every taste and impulse. She gets her
silky black hair from one grandmother, and her thousand dimples from
another no doubt. She openly hates the complacency of our “first
families.” Ideas go pouring through her head, all the time.
As for the families representing the defended and entrenched fortunes of
Springfield, theirs is still the practice of keeping their children out
of public school, for fear of contamination with teachers who read such
papers as _The Atlantic Monthly_, and other vulgar publications. The
children must be sent off to teachers who flatter and flatter and
flatter. But we do not talk about these matters generally. We talk about
New Springfield.
The Prognosticators discover that still others have been dreaming
joyfully all alone of the future of Springfield. One fiery artist of our
town brings in quite definite testimony. He was born in the village of
Rochester, near to Springfield, but has no sign in his manner of being a
citizen of the United States. Quite an old man, Gregory Webster has the
ways of boulevard heroes of Paris who swung their canes like
swashbucklers, among the cafes, in 1876. He speaks English with a French
accent. Yet he has been a tremendous force for good in the history of
American Art. Thousands upon thousands of pupils have passed through his
studios. He has been a courageous patron of young artists. With
infallible taste he has purchased their best pictures, as soon as their
pictures were good, thereby giving them reputations twenty years sooner,
and himself “going broke.” He has championed the most elegant
craftsmanship. In torrents of tireless language, with an unflagging zeal
and animation, he has talked down and out the cheap and popular
conception of the uses of art. He has exalted the great portrait
masters. He has exalted brushwork and drawing into a ritual, and good
color into a finality of the soul. He has been marvelously generous in
his sympathy and his patience with budding talent, and therefore the
artists’ aspiration of America for a whole generation has come to his
front door. He is, in actual subject matter, in his own pictures an
unimaginative creature. He is able to paint fishes better than men and
rabbits better than women, and yet, since he painted fishes and rabbits
with Olympian finality, they have been enshrined in the highest
galleries of the world next to portraits of human creatures by Rembrandt
and Hals and Velasquez.
A stranger to these others comes to me. Nathan Levi, son of one of the
Rabbis of our tiny Springfield Ghetto. He at once wins my heart. I have
always found myself in peculiar sympathy with the Jews. Once past the
moment of shyly seeking my confidence, he is full of the Jewish
expressiveness and demonstration. He is astonished beyond measure to
discover a double consciousness within himself. In this century he is as
orthodox as his father, and a young man devoted to the routine of the
pawn shop. In 2018 he is in a hundred ways opposite.
Another newcomer, Margaret Evans, is a Christian Science Reader. She is
beautiful, in this day, and though she does not speak of her mirror in
2018, as does the headlong Jewish boy, I know she will always be
beautiful in body and soul. She has fathomed the holy grace and immortal
gladness of her teaching, and I can well believe she is immortal in this
place, under our oak and apple trees.
Still another is a Springfield Negress who is a preacher among her own
people. She has not a single Caucasian contour to her face or figure,
yet all the world must admit that Daisy Pearl Johnson is beautiful as
she is divinely young. She is “black but comely,” according to the
scripture. And she is eager in all the matters of the mind and spirit.
Another prophet, Nathaniel Davidson, gathers several denominations under
one temporary roof, and preaches to them about hell. He was once a Y. M.
C. A. physical director, and he ranges in attributes from Caliban to
higher things, and looks much like Douglas Fairbanks and William. A.
Sunday. He receives an invitation to join the Prognosticator’s Club.
Then there is a woman who was a welfare worker in France. Ruth Everett
has such a sleek and sophisticated grace, and her face is so snobbish
yet so Alexandrian Greek that I have often called her “The Daughter of
Lysippus.” In every line is the elegance that old sculptor might have
loved. In pomp, upon her throne, and she makes any chair her throne, she
is like “Sara Siddons as the Tragic Muse” as painted by Sir Joshua
Reynolds.
And here you have men and women who see the vision, each in a strange
and mystical fashion.
CHAPTER III
HOW PEOPLE OF 1920 THINK THE GOLDEN BOOK WILL COME IN 2018
When we, the Prognosticator’s Club, come together for our meetings it is
inevitable that our talk should be of the Springfield of our fancy and
of the manner in which the vision has come to each one.
The first to testify, when we call the members together in the Sun
Parlor of the Leland Hotel is the young Campbellite minister. He tells
us of a dream that has come to him on many evenings by his study fire.
In a vision he is reborn three or four generations in the future. He is
a priest of the Catholic Church. He is known as St. Friend, the Giver of
Bread. He is almost alone in a vast Gothic Cathedral. He is astonished
to find himself changed in body, conviction, and habit from all his
former routine, but enough memory remains for the comparison, and he
knows he is still himself. But of this another time.
There are a few people praying at the stations of the cross, in this,
Springfield’s new church of St. Peter and St. Paul, on the old site of
Sixth and Reynold’s Streets. The time is All Saint’s Day, Anno Domini,
2018. As he tells us the story, the very picture springs before me in
elaborate detail, as though I witnessed the event in my own person. The
church is indeed gigantic for so small a town to build, and in many
particulars as well as general type it is like Notre Dame, Paris. We
behold with him how a book of air, gleaming with spiritual gold, comes
flying in through the walls as though they were but shadows. It is a
book open as it soars, and every fluttering page is richly bordered and
illuminated. It has wings of black, and above them wings of azure. Long
feathers radiate from the whirring, soaring pennons. The book circles
above the heads of the congregation. From the sky comes music incredibly
sweet.
The book flies toward the altar, where St. Friend finds himself
standing. The wings fade. This day moves with rapid breath. The
congregation has been trooping in as the visitant from the world of
spirit-wonder has been settling into its own holy place on the altar.
Now St. Friend is in the act of reading the gleaming volume. It is a
book of homilies, addressed directly to New Springfield. Day after day
the whole population flocks to the cathedral to hear, in the blazing
kaleidoscopic costumes of that time,—all kinds of people, saints and
sinners. But to speak briefly of the essential story, the town is
transfigured and redeemed beyond any merely mundane plan. And so we call
2018 the Mystic Year, and give it other honorable titles of similar
import. For the town, then, becomes half-way millennial. Of these
qualified but stirring wonders, another time. Let us turn for the moment
to the second witness, and hear her version of the appearance of the
Golden Book.
The florist had already revealed to me, when I was buying red roses in
her gorgeous greenhouse, that she had a strange recurrent picture of the
days of Johnny Appleseed’s triumph going through her head. She repeats
her story to the other members of the club.
It is of Anno Domini 2018, and though she is still a florist she wears
her rue with a difference. She finds herself the exponent of a religion
of flowers. Her name is Roxana Grey. She is daughter of a “Mother Grey,”
who was in like manner daughter of a “Mother Grey.” There is much
interesting detail irrelevant to the present point, but I may say she is
first moved to tell me the story because she finds my name on the roll
of the backsliders among the devotees of this 2018 religion of flowers.
She has a double consciousness that keeps a mind in both periods, but is
surprised to find both my name and my very self in the new time.
But as to Johnny Appleseed, which is more to the point of this chapter,
she is most uplifted of heart to find that he at last comes into his own
in our city and his name is whispered there perpetually.
In his name Springfield has developed the great Amaranth Apple Orchards;
it is said, from seeds he gave in his lifetime to a certain pioneer,
Hunter Kelly. And it is taught in his name, or with the mood he
engenders in our hearts, that he who eats of the Amaranth Apple is
filled with a love of eternal beauty, and it is used as the City’s
understood symbol of beauty.
Then there is a teaching in his name that he who, after certain prayers,
eats of certain acorns, or walks under the oak saplings that come from
them, accepts in some sense promptings toward eternal goodness. It has
come about that eating the acorn, is the city’s accepted metaphor for
the search for righteousness. The earlier devotees of the oak, planted a
notable group that have of late grown taller than the California
redwoods. They are in a complete circle of twelve, surrounding the very
edges of the city. The first two, which are the tallest, are by the
inside northwest gate, put there long before there was any gate, by
Hunter Kelly, of whom more hereafter. But these oaks, the pillars of
Springfield’s temple-cathedral-synagogue, whose roof is the sky, are
made the theme of many varieties of teaching, all of which goes back to
Johnny Appleseed, who gave to Hunter Kelly the original acorns that made
the trees of Oak Ridge, and these pillar oaks as well.
There is another teaching, abroad in Springfield, 2018, the teaching of
Democracy, of which the Symbol is the Golden Rain-Tree brought from New
Harmony, Indiana. It is said in Springfield, and taught with especial
emphasis by the devotees of the Flower Religion, that he who enters
under the shade of the Rain-Tree boughs and leaves and flowers, enters
the gate of eternal democracy, and so the trees are often called
Gate-Trees.
And then having told us so much, my friend speaks again and shows to our
spirit eyes an out-of-door statue of John Chapman, Johnny Appleseed,
near which she finds herself just before sunrise of All Saint’s Day,
Anno Domini, 2018. Roxana is there to watch for the dawn. She walks
alone, according to the discipline, saying certain prayers. The park is
on the edge of the Governor’s yard.
A great rose-colored, egg-shaped boulder is dug from the midst of the
lawn of the Governor’s yard. She hides in a clump of bushes to watch;
for the digging is by no mortal hand, but by spiritual presences which
are the souls of the primeval trees of the city, looming, whispering,
rustling above the place. Then the boulder is there, rolled over on the
grass, and a bolt from the clear starry heaven strikes it. The book
comes flying forth. It has the same airy, other-worldly presence and
power as when described by the first witness. But it soars to the Shrine
of Flowers consecrated to the especial sect and the esoteric teachings
of Roxana Grey and her immediate predecessors. But she does not know
where it has gone, it has circled and wandered so, appearing and
disappearing. And it is with a tremendous leaping of the heart she finds
it next day on her altar with wings gone but with pages open to be read
to the faithful. Its main themes are the teachings of the trees, of
which we have spoken, woven with her own traditional doctrines of the
flowers, but all these teachings in most heightened and glorified
aspects. Along the margins are old texts from the special books of her
shrine, and from Swedenborg and the Old and New Testaments.
When the great hostess of Springfield begins her testimony my first
question, since I am but a man, is whether her hair in 2018 gleams with
the same darling golden hue.
And have the red-haired girls the courage to dress like daffodils, in
2018? She insists I am the wicked one to be pressing this devilish
investigation, when there are rarer things to impart,—but in the glad
Mystic Year, since I must know, she is endowed with the hair of what
might be called her 1920 Grandmother-self, and the only change she
notices is a more painful tendency to freckles, from riding horseback in
a certain notable cavalry, behind a certain young lady commander, Avanel
Boone,—of whom more anon.
The most important revelation to her, sociologically, is that she finds
herself no longer one of “our best people.” That is, she has not much
money, and no privilege of collecting rents in the style that is now the
sole reason many of the “old families” are in Springfield for a part of
the year. She is in Springfield because she loves a certain factory. She
loves it because she is Patricia Anthony, forewoman, and can order
people about. Her factory is at Ninth and Converse Streets, on the same
ground with The Illinois Watch Company and The Sangamon Electric
Company. It is a place where telescopic and microscopic lenses are made.
As for the Golden Book about which she is all aquiver, she finds the
volume when she is inspecting the place in the late afternoon of All
Saint’s Day, Anno Domini, 2018. She says I am there with her, carrying
on, as of old, in the same conceited, philandering way. I am helping
take inventory of the supplies needed for the next week, as my excuse
for the tour. The factory echoes hollow with our solitary steps. Indeed
it takes her aback to meet the book in such an off-hand, teasing moment.
But there is The Golden Book. Every transparent page, which flutters as
though with the gusty thoughts of our spirits, is written in letters of
fire. On the first leaf is an inscription delivering the work to her by
name: “Patricia Anthony.”
She was always a conceited woman, and here is the first thing that ever
happened to her to justify it, I say to her, speaking as one 1920 person
to another.
But on, to 2018: For all the Golden Book is penned so gorgeously, the
discussion is largely economic. There are citations from Adam Smith,
Karl Marx, Henry George, and on, forward, to Joseph Bartholdi Michael
the second, and Black Hawk Boone,—Springfield sages of 2018. All these
are cited to corroborate, in various items, piecemeal, an absolutely new
economic remedy for the world.
Patricia sees herself reading the volume to the workers, through the
lunch hour. The book keeps its wings. Often, as though stirred with
divine impatience, it dashes and flutters on through the walls, as
though they were shadows, then comes soaring back again. Each time it
returns the work is re-opened, at the first page, and newer and more
difficult teaching is written there, till the volume is no longer
economic. It is as though a work by Henry George had been changed into a
work by Swedenborg! Now it shows how to make microscopes that will
enable all Springfield to find the fairies of the fairies, and
telescopes that will discover the angels that guard the angels. At last
the book instructs the devout how to woo and win these creatures,
without turning upon them any glass of cold scrutiny, how to see them
with the natural eye, and touch them with the natural hand.
The little school teacher finds herself reborn in 2018 as head of the
three-color printing department of the school where she teaches. In the
reincarnation she bears the name of Josephine Windom. She stands
helpless when a Rock and Kopensky mob, and children of Doctor Mayo Sims
seize the winged volume from the altar of St. Friend, apparently against
its will, like a hundred men binding an angel. Near the market house
between Fourth and Fifth on Monroe they pile firewood upon the book.
They pour on oil. They light the pyre. All is turned to ashes. Later a
band of Municipal University rescuers arrives. They are led by her
assistant in the color printing department, Horace Andrews.
Slowly as though greeting this band the flames renew themselves, and
take form. There is the book again, but four times as large, with wings,
binding, leaves, and letters of fire. Then suddenly it is flying above
the city. Its covers are of the iridescence of a shell, with a golden
shimmering. The wings are music making.
The book is a friend of men. It is disposed to descend to its friends.
It is carried in flying and fluttering state to the three-color printing
department of the school, where hundreds of rainbow replicas of the
pages are made, though not on this earth can replicas of the wings be
made. And while the book is within the four walls, the school becomes a
place of fairyland. Every cottage has its own copy of the volume in
time. Edition after edition goes out, first from the school, then from
the greater, more dazzling printing presses of the University, to the
scholars and artists of Europe and Asia, through their colleagues who
are attending the World’s Fair of the University of Springfield. But the
book itself, having once been copied in the printing room there, flies
around the Truth Tower, the center of town; it goes up in higher and
wider circles. At last it is seen, a star among the stars. Meanwhile the
transfiguration of the city begins.
The future plays a curious trick with our artist friend, the valiant and
patriotic American who sent forth all his sons against the Germans. He
is astonished to find himself reborn a pacifist, Anno Domini, 2018. And
there are other sad changes. He sees himself in a mirror as a
long-haired creature, a ragged libel of the William Cullen Bryant type,
with similar features, but dressed in ready made garments, and with much
food spilled down the front of his vest. His nickname in 2018 is “Old
Sparrow Short,” because at that time the sparrow is his favorite bird,
and because he is tall. This increased height is the only concession to
his vanity in the revelation, for in 1920 he has been obliged to stand
on his toes over and over, to give any impression of height.
In 2018, though a pacifist, he is still militant in the aesthetic field.
He is a leader of a group of young Springfield painters, sculptors, and
architects who are always dynamiting our stagnant exhibitions with
appropriate bombs of paint. He insists it is the painting and sculpture
of his followers that make Springfield such a dazzling success. He is
still the head teacher of the Springfield Art Association which has its
headquarters at the Edwards Place on North Fifth, as of old.
His political hobby in 2018 is that we should return to the glory of the
ancient time of the unchained nations, especially, as he hears himself
say, the era of peace and good will when the Czar instituted the Hague
tribunal, and Andrew Carnegie sent out his peace lecturers. He is sent
to our local World Government prison which is built across the street
from the City and County Jails on Seventh and Jefferson Streets. He is
here locked up for emphasizing his views to the point of world-treason.
The book flies in through the walls of his cell as though those walls
were shadows, and as though the book were made of but air and sunshine,
woven together. He who is doomed to become this awful Sparrow Short
declares that the principal mandate of the volume is for the immediate
dissolution of the entire International Government. It demands a
restoration of the conditions of 1913. The mandate of the volume for the
artist is the same as for the nation. “_Live like the Sparrow. Be
yourself completely. Utter your soul, regardless of cost._” This
condition, universally accepted, will secure a real world-peace, and one
that is not hypocrisy or oppression.
It comes the turn of the Jewish boy I so much admire. He says that in
2018 he is “Rabbi Terence Ezekiel,” a rank heretic, and an old man. He
dreams of himself as being the grandson and the son of two other Rabbis
of the same name and as having a rebel congregation all his own in 2018,
of being in their estimation and that of many others, the leading
citizen of the community. His temple is on the site of the old Isador
Kanner Synagogue. He it is, who, as the leading champion of the
aggrandizement of the photoplay as a general social factor, fights his
best chum, St. Friend, when films are a public issue, because St. Friend
preaches against them from the Cathedral. No longer is his life the
slow, devious midnight-lamp technique of the pawnshop, the furtive, the
futile, the too confidential. Not his the bad street abounding in
second-hand stores and cheap rooming lofts.
To his temple come the wise of all the world, and there is preached the
gospel of righteousness as symbolized by the planting all around the
world of the Ezekiel Oak (for thus he has taken a leaf from the
testimony of Roxana Grey), and the distribution of all other great
trees, including the Golden Rain-Tree and the Apple Amaranth. But within
this wave of beneficence his sect has a peculiar and especial
discipline, as rigid and elaborate as Leviticus, which is, in another
set of forms, essentially the same curious flowering of the Jewish mind
on the same general level of the soul. When he looks into the glass he
sees, in 1920, a young rascal who has stooped shoulders, from long
bending over the jewelry and watches he has mended. He sees dull-brown
hair and eyes, a blank face, a heavy jaundiced skin, all of which give
the lie to the great brain. And he is five feet in height.
In 2018 he is six feet four, an old man, but with a blazing eye and a
voice like the surf in a storm. His hair is brilliant black, his face is
that of the Arabian war horse and the American eagle. Into his temple
come all the wise of the world, week after week, and he introduces them,
and they speak to his people and the rest. But he is to deliver his own
discourse on a certain day in the autumn of the Mystic Year. It is a
little before the beginning of the services. Amid faint music from afar
the light before the doors of the tabernacle is suddenly enriched in
color and splendor. The holy doors swing open with a noble deliberation,
and there, instead of the Torah, is The Book of Air and Wonder,—The
Golden Book, poised like a cloud and a moon and a bird. It has six
wings, woven from the rays of a strange moonrise, perhaps like the wings
of the cherubim, that bent above the ark long ago. The book settles on
the desk. The pennons fade. The volume is open at the beginning of a
series of prophecies about the soul of Springfield, as though
Springfield were a living personality and not a mere assembly of
citizens, and as though the book were a person, and not mere wings of
air.
He tells us that he sees a face much like mine in the assembly of 2018,
and I have not changed, but have the same yellow hair and pale face, as
he says, “still look like a Swede,” and, (as he insists, with the
pawnbroker’s emphasis on material texture), I wear the same suit of
clothes, and carry the same iron and leather cane.
And so he tells us his tale of double consciousness, with the honest
glow of the blood that I love in all leaders of his race, with that
thick fire which no other race can equal. His synagogue is rebuilt on a
vast scale in 2018 to hold Golden Book devotees; And this is but the
beginning of his history of great affairs in Springfield.
The Christian Science Reader says she sees my face in the Sunday morning
Christian Science congregation of her vision. We are one and all given
new names. Her name in 2018 is Rachel Madison, and, though I am not of
her faith today, in the new time I have grown toward this light, and she
sees me with my unfortunate yellow hair and my iron cane, for all the
world as the young pawnbroker does, but sitting in the back of the
Christian Science temple listening attentively, Sunday after Sunday. She
says that it is a silver book that we see upon the great day of November
1st, 2018. It sheds an ineffable white light, it is almost as impalpable
as a comet in the sky, yet a substance that comes flying through the
walls as though they were but gleaming shadows. The air is filled with
music from all the high heavens. The book spreads six wings, like those
of celestial swans. The pages have no illuminations or other abominable
traces of the Gothic.
The book circles above the ecstatic and transfixed assembly, then it
settles upon the desk between the two older books there, and in its
presence they become like itself, books of air.
And so she reads to the people, with the other reader, who stands beside
her according to old custom. They read as though by long understanding,
but actually led as in a trance, through alternate pages of the three
books.
Almost in a day the church is rebuilt. It becomes a tremendous white
dome, a house of devotion, where the whole city worships as one soul.
Then begins the one new evolution of the town toward healing, and the
peace of the clear sky.
The negress who sees prophetic visions is easily persuaded to add her
testimony about the book. Her name in 2018 is Mary Timmons, and she is
nicknamed “Pious Mary.” She is most voluble concerning the wonders of
the new time. But to the matter of the book at once. She finds herself
in her church, in the place where the Baptist Evangelical chapel stood a
century before. And it is still called the “Baptist Evangelical.” The
house of worship is now gorgeous with curious jungle-mooded ornaments,
pillars which are so carved as to seem moss-hung and vine-wound. It is
as though we were in the shade of things too high for man. All this
house of worship has been evolved by her cousin, the great architect
John Emis, who is also a member of this congregation, and a powerful
exhorter among his own people, despite all his world fame among paler
races. It is in the midst of his designs she moves, on this great day.
With pentecostal power her people are singing “Swing Low, Sweet
Chariot.” While the faces are uplifted, the book of air, the book that
gleams with spiritual gold, flies in through the walls as though they
were but shadows. There is a mighty glory shout from the congregation.
It is, according to Mary Timmons, answered by music from “the highest
sanctorium of the meridian sky.” There are twenty heavenly doves soaring
in a circle around the book. Outside of them is a circle of robins. All
these birds fly through the walls and away, while the book settles upon
the reading desk. The wings do not fade, but cover the pulpit with
plumes of azure, plumes of ebony, peacock feathers, each with three
eyes, and long feathery golden threads that are spreading and scattering
like loose silk. Yet these things seem but as clouds spun by necromancy
and as words of the angels made visible.
Then Mary Timmons takes a strange turn, and insists it is, after all,
only a copy of the Bible, open at the Beatitudes. Glorified in this way
it brings about the higher emancipation of her people. Beginning with
this congregation they are stirred to the depths of their more creative
selves. Devout composers, the kind that once gave birth to one line
spirituals, sung like “rounds,” now develop epic forms of composition
that are allied to these, so that great and musical shouts echo from
mouth to mouth and breast to breast with three hundred singing, and then
the whole African race singing. And instead of simply expressing the
massed devotion of Africa, as of old, these more personal spirituals
record the lyric cry of this or that black poet. Africa-in-America now
sings the special story of the black statesman, the black farmer, or
even the devout architect John Emis and the like. And the people and
race of Mary Timmons, once natural orators, but no one a better creator
than another, suddenly flower individually. Their genius becomes
intensely centered in a few, and there are speakers with definite,
individual messages, who shout not only wonderful round rolling words,
but phrases with whip lash and sentences with sword edge, in orations as
individual as the world demands that art shall be. The African man with
the soul of the fox, now speaks like the fox, as is his right and duty,
the man with the soul of the elephant now speaks like the elephant, as
is his right and duty, and the woman with the heart of the nightingale
now speaks like the nightingale.
Our evangelist reveals to us his dream that in the Mystic Year 2018, he
is the Vice-President of the Springfield Athletic Union and his nickname
is Cave Man Thomas. On a certain day, in the fall of 2018, the president
of the Athletic Union is dying. He is “said to be” poisoned by a
political foe. He hands a key to Cave Man Thomas. It opens the official
roller-top desk, which is in a building on the site of the present Y. M.
C. A. on Seventh Street and Capital Avenue. There is a book, the size
and shape and general appearance of Spaulding’s Athletic Guide, with the
same man with a baseball bat, on the cover. The near pamphlet has no
wings or other such fantastic ornament. It is mundane paper and ink,
with a yellow back.
According to his tale, we two read it alone of nights. We follow its
counsel as one would secret foot-ball signals. We do not betray the
source of our wisdom to any but Mayor Kopensky and his friend Dr. Sims.
We see large results of our labors. We two, acting for the Mayor and the
Doctor, smash the face of everyone who does not submit to our dogmas
about Hell, which we get from the very front pages of the book. We have
more sluggers on our side every hour. We give God and the Mayor and the
Doctor the glory, and take none of it ourselves. We hear no music in the
air or such like nonsense, while these things are going on. The Cave Man
insists that the town is much improved by our policy. Of his predestined
valor I may discourse at an opportune time. But meanwhile let me show
you a further variation from the typical story about The Golden Book.
I am more eager to know how the welfare worker finds herself in the
mirrors of 2018 than to receive any other news of that time from her.
Despite all her graces she has no especial personal vanity. She is more
imperious than vain. But I gently insist upon her confidence till she
confesses that she finds herself in the mirrors of 2018 much the same,
but with a greater rush of blood through all that magnificent slender
frame, and a consequent higher color. In her dream she rejoices in a
great resiliency, a greater long-bow curve in action, as she walks with
even more of her humorously commanding way. Her name in the new time is
Gwendolyn Charles.
Gwendolyn Charles is, in 2018, a motion-picture director and scenario
writer. She claims Rabbi Terence Ezekiel and many other choice spirits
among her stockholders and backers.
For her enterprise generally runs at a loss, like Grand Opera, and great
orchestras, and great universities.
I must at this time concern myself with her story of All Saints’ Day,
2018. Very early in the morning she finds herself in her leading theatre
which is on the site of the Old Fancy Bazar on the South side of the
Square; by her side is the aged Rabbi Terence Ezekiel muttering
enthusiastically to himself over strange and magnificent doings. With
him are the inner company of enthusiasts for her film enterprise. And
the body of the theatre is filled up with its regular patrons, in a most
unusual frame of mind.
There is thrown upon the screen the production of the studios for that
month, the story of Hunter Kelly, the founder of Springfield, whose
regular solemn festival is July eleventh, but who is celebrated in a
thousand ways; all year. Unexpected things are happening in the
operator’s box. And it is a new kind of a projecting machine, utterly
beyond the current devices. But let us consider the story of Hunter
Kelly, as it rolls by on the screen, the early part of which, to the
year 1920, has been long known to me.
Hunter Kelly was an Irish Catholic boy reared in a Pittsburgh orphan
asylum. In the very first years of the nation he met, and became an
ardent disciple of, John Chapman—Johnny Appleseed, and differed from him
seriously on only two points, the Catholic Church, and hunting. Kelly’s
dearest devotion was re-reading St. Augustine’s “City of God,” which he
carried always in his hunter’s pouch, by his powder horn. And Johnny
Appleseed’s dearest devotion was in reading and re-reading Swedenborg’s
“Heaven and Hell,” which he carried in his seed-sack. And Hunter Kelly
would shoot deer, over whom Johnny Appleseed would weep. So these two
were separated when Kelly’s lust for hunting was on him like the passion
of mighty Nimrod. Then he would live through an almost vegetarian
period, travelling and planting with John Chapman—Johnny Appleseed, and
listening to his great monologues.
They began together, exploring the primeval forests near Pittsburgh.
Each season they marched further west, returning in the fall to the
cider mills of Western Pennsylvania, to beg and sort apple seeds for
next spring’s excursion beyond where any other white men fought or
explored. Kelly and John Chapman parted at last where is now Fort Wayne
in Northern Indiana. They said “goodbye” in great love and devotion,
Kelly swearing on St. Augustine’s “City of God” to plant in honor of
Johnny Appleseed, a city like an apple tree, with its highest boughs in
Heaven, and to begin by sowing there a special breed of apple seeds the
saint gave him with his old leather seed-sack for a token.
Kelly joined a group of settlers going further west of the same name,
but no kin. He entered what was then known as the “Sangamaw” Country
with them and lived in their cabin a while. In this region he planted
the world’s first orchards of Apple Amaranth trees, from the old leather
sack.
The first settlers were the Kellys, Matheneys and Elliots. The young
sower of mysteries lived alternately in their great log houses, and sat,
at the end of his great wolf-hunts, by their open fireplaces. The chief
of the local wolf-pack was the Devil, and refused to be slain. At last
he took on his true form and came alone to Kelly when he stood
meditating among the first sprouts of the famous Apple Amaranth Orchard,
and there gave the young fellow words of admiration for his valor. For
the Devil is often a true sport.
There Kelly made a compact to submit himself to torture for many years
if the pioneer city of his vow to Johnny Appleseed might be built here.
He and the Devil swore the compact on St. Augustine’s “City of God.”
The Devil pledged himself that if the young hunter’s soul would submit
itself to long suffering, the place could be evolved in time. Old Satan
laughed, and said his little subordinate devils would then be guided to
build better than they knew. The Devil did not carry Hunter Kelly to
Hell, but devised a special torment. He buried the mystic a few hundred
feet below the orchard. In the hunter’s living skull and heart were
entangled the roots of the first Apple-Amaranth Trees, and from them all
others of this region come.
The Devil has a great respect for his contracts. Every year, for a
century he dug up the mystic on Hallowe’en night, and showed him the
city, and every time Kelly said: “Take me back to my torture. The City
is not yet started.” At last, when the lads returned from the war with
Germany, and the girls returned from Red Cross work, and the like, in
the summer of 1919, and the city began to take on glory both visible and
invisible, Hunter Kelly said to the Devil: “I will now trust my town to
go on. At last they are eating of the Apple Amaranth, which they thought
was poison. They are even transplanting it.”
Thereupon Hunter Kelly drove the Devil away with the great pickaxe and
spade, the same which had often dug the hunter from the ground.
From this pickaxe on, the story was entirely new to the screen, and much
of it new to the audience.
Kelly then built himself a cell in Heaven out of old and broken
fragments of forgotten palaces in the far jungles. There he wrote The
Golden Book for our little city far below. By day he lived as that boy
of Springfield who grew up as Saint Scribe of the Shrines, and
established the discipline and ritual of _The One Hundred Shrines of the
World_. He was rumored among a few of us to be the reincarnation of
Hunter Kelly. He became the first teacher of St. Friend, who wore his
mantle well after him. And now he is pictured, in many a dazzling
flame-like color, throwing down from the window of his cell in heaven,
this very hour of All Saint’s Day, The Golden Book of Springfield.
All this is the first intimation to Gwendolyn Charles that stranger
things than we know may happen in heaven and on earth. As the wonder
upon the screen moves on, with no formula of orthodox religion, and
indeed with a sense of humor, like the laughter of the skies, she
understands not what world she is in, and the lovely hedonist and artist
is shaken with the passions of the mystic St. Catharine of Sienna.
She is concerned to know that in the box of the projecting machine is a
dazzling presence, a sort of giant fairy, a little larger than a man, an
operator, indeed, one she has not hired. There is an orchestra of giant
fairies, who play such tunes as blue bells should give forth in the wild
woods.
And meantime, according to her tale, the book is there, pictured on the
screen, circling around the domes and towers of Rabbi Terence Ezekiel’s
heretical synagogue on east Mason Street. And so the Rabbi makes haste
to that place, and a few friends follow. But many people in the audience
of quite different faiths declare that those are their own church
steeples and not his temple towers, and hasten to the houses of their
belief. Which is not so strange, to one who has been in a law court, for
there it is demonstrated that a witness is somewhat apt to see and
remember what he desires to see and remember. And so each finds the book
where he has faith to find it.
The Doubter is the next member of our club to testify and he tells of
the midnight visions he has already described to me.
He is reborn as Mayo Sims, physician of all the great saints and sinners
in the town. Incidentally he is the political ally of the Rock and
Kopensky families, people obscure in 1920, since they are but tenants on
his farms, but in 2018 in the city government, along with the tribe of
Cave Man Thomas and others.
The physician tells first to me, then to the rest of the group of
forecasters, that he has seen how the book with all its chronicles and
exhortations, rituals and parables, is utterly rejected by the mass of
the citizens of the Mystic Year. They refuse to let the pages draw
conclusions for them from the past or move them with hopes for the
future. According to his tale the volume raises a faction of desperate
malcontents, whose business, beside fomenting strikes, is to sing in a
particularly nasal whine. Some of the rank and file of this group are
shot down, after the city has endured five days of hideous “racket,” and
more hideous vocal music. There is no magic ballad or hymn in the air.
There is but one copy of the book, “thanks be.” It is full of sedition,
and therefore tabooed, but dog-eared from being much passed around in
secret. To be sure it has a cheap gilt paper cover. It is captured and
carried ten miles east of the city by certain friends of law and order,
members of the Rock and Kopensky families, led by Cave Man Thomas. It is
dropped into an abandoned coal-shaft. It goes down like lead. It has no
wings. It was written by hair-brained sociologists, some of the wild
ones from the absurd University of Springfield, not by “practical
business men.”
It is not rescued, from the shaft. The writers of the work go back to
their legitimate teaching, and are heard from never again.
The Doubter goes on to give the genuine psycho-analytical data on most
of the saints of Springfield at that time. These accounts are from his
confidential records. For he treats the holy ones for all varieties of
nervous disorder, epilepsy, and the like. He is quite sure Christ and
Mohammed were epileptics, and that settles it with all such foolishness.
But perhaps you too have doubted.
The Doubter’s variety of revelation during double consciousness is not
all certified by the man who dreams he becomes Cave Man Thomas. It is
not quite Y. M. C. A. enough.
CHAPTER IV
HISTORY OF THE MICHAELS FROM 1920 TO 2018
As news spreads of The Prognosticator’s Club, and of the remarkable
tales and visions that are unfolded there, new men and women come to us,
with the word that they, too, have a dream, persistent and recurring, of
the Springfield of the next century. One such is Joseph Bartholdi
Michael—whose father’s story belongs here in our narrative.
While many of the blacksmith shops of Springfield have slowly changed to
garages, there is one in especial that has resisted the tide in a
formidable way. It is the shop located on the southeast corner of Fifth
Street and Capital Avenue. This place has kept most of the fancy
horse-shoeing trade of the city in 1920.
The aged proprietor-patriarch, “The Iron Gentleman,” still does the
heavy part of the work. He has,—with their own help, indeed, put three
sons and three daughters through college, handsomely. He has trained his
sons to his business and the extraordinary secrets of his shop, of which
the whole tribe are inordinately proud.
In early youth he discovered the process of hammering out the old
Damascus blades, and vastly improved upon it, and struck off a new type
of sword for the world, and his work has remained in undeviating pattern
and quality ever since. At his simple forge he hammers out those
wonderful swords in plain sight of the passer-by or the detective from
Europe. They cannot grasp the secret. He named his gift to the world,
“The Avanel Blade.” It is waspish and supple, all-conquering in body and
soul. Sideways it can be wound like watch spring steel, or even a coil
of narrow ribbon. Edgewise it can cut more human flesh and bone than the
heavy guillotine, it can cut straight through an iron or granite block
of any thickness, as though it were cutting snow. In its standard form
it is longer than the longest cavalry sword. It is the assumption of the
strange old “Iron Gentleman” that it will be used mostly by women, his
descendants, and in battle for this land. Legend has it that the blade
is named for a sweetheart who died in his youth. Certainly there is no
living Avanel. He and his sons and daughters, all of them trained to his
trade, have shod the horses of the notables of the country round, of
more than one president of the United States, and of innumerable
forgotten candidates for the presidency who began their careers by
ostentatiously going to his humble shop.
His daughters are quite accomplished in light, ornamental iron work.
They are well bred, high strung girls, and have the vitality of young
tigers. These girls and their father are responsible for the most
remarkable phenomenon of the streets of Springfield in 1917. Inspired by
the Amazons of the Russian Revolution, at the very beginning of that
revolution, before it was declared a failure by the western world, they
filled out an idea which had long been forming in their minds, and
organized a troop of girl cavalry and offered it to the government for
service against Germany. The girls were fully disciplined and equipped
at the time of the declaration of war. Their services were refused, and
almost all of the girls went into the stereotyped war work, many of them
overseas. But now the whole body of troops is together again, riding our
streets night and day, armed with the Avanel sword, and led, quite
haughtily, by the Iron Gentleman’s youngest daughter.
The brothers have organized a similar group of cavalry, armed with the
same blade, and call it The Horse Shoe Brotherhood. But, of course, it
has not attracted the same attention as the dazzling girls. The Horse
Shoe Brotherhood was not accepted by the government as a body. They
enlisted, or were drafted, one at a time, in a conventional fashion.
Many of the cavalry girls, following the example of the Michael women,
are often gritty enough to shoe their own horses.
The “Iron Gentleman” is lean and ruddy, with a hooked and hatchet face.
He has the habit of pointing his long, skinny fingers at the enemy he
denounces, who may be present in imagination, or even in fact, while the
oratory flows. Every street corner of Springfield is haunted with the
legends of a series of fist fights in the boyhood biography of “The Iron
Gentleman,” election scrimmages of his young manhood, and the like. It
is said that at the interesting age of fourteen he broke half the street
lamps of Springfield with well thrown cinders until one evening when he
had his jacket thoroughly dusted by a most energetic father. He had
several personal encounters on the streets of Springfield in middle age,
horsewhipping some hereditary enemy, or thwarting some hereditary enemy
who threatened, imminently, to horsewhip him.
“The Iron Gentleman” is a savage only two or three days in the year in
his old age. He tells his boys’ and girls’ children and grandchildren,
that they are to shoe horses and ideas forevermore, and send these ideas
galloping across the world, sure footed; and his family are to keep on
doing this, whether the town likes it or not. He tells them to hammer
out swords perfectly tempered and to put their own souls on the anvil
and hammer them till they are swords likewise, and to go forth and cut
their way through the world, and bring back the heads of their enemies
to Springfield and hang them in rows in front of their forges, whether
the town likes it or not.
“The Iron Gentleman” and his sons have revived the cult of boxing and
bare fist fighting, and as a result there is many a black eye and bloody
nose among both “delicate,” and “muckers” of Springfield. We are as
thoroughly damaged as German duelling students, though with not quite
the same marks. And the boy scouts are getting battered up, and
something must be done to put a stop to this.
“The Iron Gentleman” and his two older sons have the forge-burned faces
of blacksmiths. But though the youngest excels in their accomplishments,
he is more a brother of his father’s cavalry-sword, the Damascus Blade.
Like the rest he is tall and slender, but there is a difference. He
hardly needs his father’s gift to the world; he is such a fencer with
the shorter and more conventional blade. He looks like the flattering
portraits of Louis Fourteenth of France, that were made in that
monarch’s youth. He has a great turn for pageantry, though with him it
has taken a completely democratic phase. There is no sounder citizen in
all his works and ways than this Joseph Bartholdi Michael. He has
studied long under Thomas Wood Stevens, William Chauncey Langdon, and
Percy Mackaye. And so he has established a pageantry calendar for the
city which has been adopted by the City Commissioners, backed by the
Chamber of Commerce, the Art Association, the Rotary Club, the Lion’s
Club, and the Optimist’s Club.
He has somewhat mitigated the “scrapping” of the boy scouts by evolving
a code book of chivalry for them, and it endeavors to impart taboos,
observances, and as well, honorifics for real merit. He ties up all
these with the pomps of his calendar. He it is that imparts to his
youthful followers a special consideration for the ladies, and reverence
for their beauty.
He fought at the Meuse-Argonne, was all through the battle of a little
more than five weeks’ length from September 26, 1918, on through hell
and glory to November first, when the American First Army cut like magic
swords through those four intricate systems of German defenses, that
were spread out over those famous ten miles. On November the first he
and many Springfield boys, including his two blacksmith brothers, were
going on like fate, like their own irresistible blades which they
managed to carry into that long five weeks’ battle. In all this Joseph
Bartholdi Michael, the exquisite, was the dashing leader of his group, a
private in the ranks, but from the beginning to the end, _a sword_. And
they swept forward with the American First Army till the very end of
hostilities on the eleventh of November. They did their full share of
the work of that American First Army, which, the experts say, took
sixteen thousand prisoners, 468 guns, 2,664 machines guns, 177 trench
mortars, made an advance of 34 miles in 47 days and set free 1,550
square kilometers of French ground and 150 villages.
Indeed they took their due part in that battle which saved the world.
It is at the end of this battle, at the dawn before Armistice Day,
November 11, 1918, that Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the exquisite, has his
vision of the year 2018. He dreams of leaving Springfield for a similar
battle in Asia, with a far more uncertain outcome. He is about to go
forth with The Horse Shoe Brotherhood and the Amazon Riders, armed one
and all with the Avanel Sword, against the strange nation of the
Singaporians, who are blasting the world with their demon ambition as
did the Germans of 1914. And he bears the same name. He is known as
Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second, is an old man, with a pageant
leader for a son:—Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third.
Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second, has reverted to an exaggeration of
“The Iron Gentleman.” His son, on the other hand, is in 2018 an
exquisite: almost gone to seed, a histrionic silly. Bartholdi Second
that is to be, touches on the history of the clan for one hundred years,
for the benefit of the Prognosticator’s Club. On looking deeply into his
dream he finds that his father is still known among the descendants as
“The Iron Gentleman.” About 1925 the children and grandchildren took for
their family flag the picture of six anvils, and above them six hammers.
In the Mystic Year the cottages of these people are scattered in every
quarter of the town, and the flag with the six anvils and six hammers
flies in front of almost every cottage of a descendant, man or woman.
The male descendants, of whatever name or high education, are
blacksmiths and forge workers and makers of the Avanel blade, as are
indeed many of the women. It seems to take the Michael hammer stroke to
make that blade. With a few temporary exceptions, the men are busy
horse-shoeing for the Amazons and making swords.
And with the exception of a few too exquisite creatures like Joseph
Bartholdi, III, the clan is not inbred. The greater part of the brains
of the tribe is still in their legs and arms, not off in a separate
compartment in their skulls.
By dint of earnest cross-questioning, I get it from Joseph Bartholdi
Michael, that he has been a figure in Illinois in dreams of 2000–2018.
He has been the author in precocious youth of a book, entitled: “Paper
Made Nations,” a treatise on the laws of flying machine commerce, and it
became the basis of the economic side of Black Hawk Boone’s pet theory
and way of life.
According to the model, Joseph Bartholdi, in his reincarnation, has shod
the horses of many a governor of Illinois and President of the United
States, and President of the World Government. This husky, distinguished
democracy combines with the prestige of his precocious book to make him
the most distinguished representative of the teeming 2018 Middle West,
in the World Government. He champions there the ceremonies and honors
due the International Flag with the loyalty to what they like and a
sense of the depths of pageantry, that has distinguished the Michael
following from the beginning. Portia, the Singing Aviator, has in the
generation of the Mystic Year, written the local song about “The
Patchwork Flag of Michael and the World.” And she calls it in the same
song: “Joseph’s Coat of Many Colors” or “The Flag of Joseph’s Coat” in
allusion to his fashion of almost draping it around him, with the Star
Spangled Banner, when he is speaking on high occasions, on international
issues.
Instead of an exquisite, he is lean, wiry, with a hooked and hatchet
face, burned, cooked, in the forge. He finds he has the habit of
pointing his long, skinny fingers at the enemy he denounces. He finds
that, like his progenitor, “The Iron Gentleman,” he has a record of
putting things through with sheer fury when there is no other weapon
handy.
He tells the Prognosticator’s Club, that, through the century, the flag
with the six hammers and the six anvils has been smeared by renegades.
But the proud truth-speaking custom has tortured the whole clan till
some one has risen to confess the sins of the name, and start new.
And the Michaels have been hated off and on for a whole century because
of these things, and because they were always hating some one, even
without cause. They were apt to be jealous of other vigorous citizens,
considering themselves the sole saviors of the principle of defiant
democracy. But all the century the leading Michaels have seemed to be
saying: “A town well hammered into shape is better than fortune or
fame.” Few Michaels were guilty of living a private and secluded
existence.
Few maidens were crowned with lovelier hair or carried themselves with
finer mien than the granddaughters and great granddaughters of the “Iron
Gentleman.” The stock has gone on in beauty and strength through the
vision of a century. Yet in 2018 it seems that the scepter is just a
little departing from the younger generation. It is not that they are
ousted from public office. The fearless voice of a Michael always counts
most as a private citizen, and, whenever Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the
Second, returns from The World Government, he takes his place in the
Horse Shoe Brotherhood as a private in the ranks beside his son Joseph
Bartholdi, the Third, and it is their full intention, according to
hereditary political habit, to ride against Singapore, when the time is
ripe, as privates in the ranks.
But a new clan has come up from Cairo, Illinois, led by Black Hawk
Boone. Many of their young girls look more like young Indian maids from
a government reservation school, than people of Caucasian stock. But,
for all that, they have their own original ways of delicate manner and
address, most disconcerting to the fixed limits of Springfield’s
conventionality. They are rather short and heavy-set. Their merry young
men and middle-aged men have, most of them, long, curly black lovelocks
to the shoulders, not carefully combed, and nearly all defiantly wag big
black beards in every argument, when all other men in the modern world
are shaved clean.
They cheerfully hate the blacksmith clan which they are ousting by a
greater talent for fury, preaching, and cursing, and by having just a
little more brain at the back of the neck.
The town wits say these clans hate each other because, on the whole,
they are so much alike, and always vote the same way at a crisis. The
locks of both the Boone men and women stream back over their shoulders,
and their left hands are dyed crimson as a proud perpetual reminder to
themselves and all the world that among their ancestors were aborigines.
But America has not suffered the regime of nigh two hundred years of
baseball umpires:—and presidential elections accepted by November 15 by
the defeated party, without a disposition to be good sports on the part
of self-respecting clans like these. And so it comes about to stir the
romantic soul of the town that the Avanel Blade of the “Iron Gentleman”
of 1920 has become a woman in 2018, but a woman no kin to the Michaels.
In 2018 Horse Shoe Brotherhood and Michael Amazons are under one
commander, the lovely Lady Avanel Boone, and, though they be armed with
the Avanel Blade indeed, she scores a point in family pride and makes
them swear fealty on Daniel Boone’s old hunting knife, which she carries
in her belt as a token of her Kentucky forbears.
And now, as the son of the “Iron Gentleman” tells the story, it comes as
a clouded vision before me, as though I were half in the vision and
beginning a destiny of my own.
It is the snowy morning of All Saint’s Day, 2018, the Michael Clan and a
general assembly of Springfield people are at the crossing of Fifth
Street and Capital Avenue, and by the ancestral forge on the southeast
corner. The fire is burning high and the bellows is roaring. The horse
of the conquering Avanel Boone is to be shod by that good sport Joseph
Bartholdi Michael, the Second, who has just returned from the World
Government to take his modest place in the ranks of her following. And
then there are these curly haired, black browed, black bearded rascals
to whom all Michaels must be polite, and these Red-Indian looking girls
and boys, Avanel’s innumerable adoring cousins who are publicly admiring
her with hectic words and kissing her with sugar sweetness and honest
family idolatry. There is a touch of the uncanny, the restless, the
Ishmaelite about all these Boones, they have no business in the streets
of a town. They look like dressed-up wood-choppers, all but that trim
Avanel.
While the snow is blowing into the shop, white-haired Joseph Bartholdi
Michael, the Second, has taken the old shoes from the dainty feet of the
white pony, and, just as he is lifting a new shoe from the fire and the
flames leap up, there is a music incredibly sweet, and with a great
whirring of wings and terrible thunder “The Book” flies out of the fire,
and circles above these two clans. Avanel with eyes fixed and strained
in wonder, follows it on her unshod horse. The Book settles into her
arms, and I see her sit above the company like a fairy in a trance, and
read with adoring voice from the snow white book while the assembled
clans and all the citizens gather close to hear.
The first pages of the volume give in jewelled and flaming letters a new
charter and constitution for the World Government, based on the life and
teaching of Springfield’s deathless citizen, Abraham Lincoln.
There is in the air an exquisite song and around the consecrated Avanel
a glory ineffable, for she is the High Priestess of The Book for her
people. The song in the air praises her, and urges her, and all those
she commands, to valor for the Heavenly Star Spangled Banner and the
Heavenly International Flag. And the song whispers that the book, in
many strange forms, will appear in many a green field of our middle west
this day, in many a pulpit and many a lonely mourner’s house to give
life and eternal light.
But, as my neighbor from the blacksmith shop of 1920 tells the tale more
slowly, the vision turns to mere words again, and then to dust and
ashes. And I myself seem but ashes on the winds of time.
The histories of the future in the Prognosticator’s Club are no more
contradictory than the accounts our fathers give of the leading events
of the Civil War.
Everywhere South of Mason and Dixon’s line they say that Grant
surrendered to Lee. It is in every southern school book. When we look
into history we are made dizzy by cloud and flame. And we shall still be
partizans in the highest Heaven. There are many earthly languages. There
are many heavenly languages. There are many blazing, blinding tomorrows.
But they all lead to the same glorious tomorrow at last.
The Prognosticators are a dithyrambic, chanting, improvising howling
dervish set, with a certain sense of humor among all these blinding
lights, which is but to say they have elasticity of soul and mind.
Many of the Michael Clan of Springfield, of 1920, returned soldiers, Red
Cross nurses, and other workers, saw kindred visions of the Flying Book
of Springfield blazing above the trenches at midnight for their comfort,
while voices in the air sang them stories of home.
Reader, in your town many like these are brooding alone over
unaccountable vistas of the future of their city, that have come to them
in battle or by the fireside or in the storm. They have found themselves
standing momently at cross streets of vision, before they felt their
hearts to be as dust again. Call them together. Blow ashes into flame.
Start a brotherhood of your own. Live in the New City that is revealed
to you, as we are living in our City and in the streets of our Tomorrow.
CHAPTER V
I ENTER INTO THE NEW SPRINGFIELD OF 2018. I AM SNUBBED BY AVANEL, SHE
RELENTS, SHOWING ME MANY PANORAMAS OF NEW SPRINGFIELD. WE CONFESS TO
HAVING THE SAME DREAM OF DEVIL’S GOLD.
But it is not after the noble manner of these others that I enter at
last into the vision of 2018.
There is deep darkness, and time passing by without end, and shade.
There is the fear of the moles that will not leave me alone, who make
nests of alien dust, beneath my ribs. And my bones crumble through the
century, like last year’s autumn leaves. Then there is, alternating with
drouth, bitter frost. And roots wrap my heart and brain. And there is
sleep.
Then a galloping and gay shrieking, away on the road, to the East of Oak
Ridge! And though I am six feet beneath the ground the eyes of the soul
are given me. I see wonderful young horsewomen out on that Great
Northwest Road and the ancient clay between me and that cavalcade turns
to air and to light. And I am asking myself as the Girl Leader goes by
like a meteor: “Am I coming up again through the earth as weed or flame
or man? If I rise from this grave, I am coming but to praise her, if I
may.”
There is deep darkness again, and sleep, and when next I awake I am in
the midst of a terrible March rain, and I run for refuge into Dodds’
Drug Store. It is the old Fifth and Monroe corner. I buy the early
afternoon _Register_ from a bawling newsboy. It is dated March first,
2018. Soon the storm abates a little, but it is a freezing, thawing,
wind-whistling, late afternoon. It is dusk, and I am walking South on
what was once Third Street, but is now Mulberry Boulevard, with the
Chicago and Alton railroad long gone. And I am with that girl who
awakened me, Avanel Boone, and there is no poetry about it at all. It is
obvious by the air with which she takes possession of me and hustles me
down that rain and sleet-scourged avenue, that she considers herself the
heroine of my story. But dear me, what stubborn material for a heroine.
Here, after a century, woman is the same she always was.
To put it in restrained phrases she is, in her disposition, like the
weather. She scolds me for the unpressed state of my clothes, and my
mussed hair, and my lack of air of distinction. She says I have slept in
my clothes so much that they are in a perfectly abused condition.
I admit that I have not consulted a tailor for some little time. She
says I carry myself as though I were a ditch digger or were following
the plough, instead of walking with a lady. She lashes me for what she
alleges are my ridiculous ideas, and goes over the catalogue till it is
impossible to enjoy the panorama that I glimpse through the bracing
sleet and rain, and I scarcely care to look at her, the little
devil,—though she is to be my heroine.
The only flattering thing about the encounter is the air of settled
proprietorship of this young lady.
At length there is silence and I chase along meekly beside her under the
umbrella, and cool down, and do her the honor to look her over as well
as I can in the storm. Her face is half hidden by her flapping
waterproof cape and we are walking under tremendous shade trees. I note
her chin quite high in the air, her spirited profile set straight
forward, and her cheeks, with color that goes like a blown-out flame and
then comes again like a heart-beat.
March 2, 2018:—I am again in my New City. I begin the day by reading the
Illinois State Journal of March 2; it is the same paper as of old. I
note the advertisements of laundries, screen factories, cleaners and
dyers, apple merchants, dealers in hats and caps, dealers in hay, grain
and feed, places for the purchase of fish, game and oysters, poultry and
eggs, etc. I note ladies’ furnishing establishments, retail dry goods
stores, bakeries, headquarters for cash registers, meat markets, the
establishments of upholsterers, places where may be found parcel
delivery messengers, lists of dealers in flour and feed, various
advertisements of baggage and transfer companies, dealers in wall paper,
paints, oils and varnish, and everything in advertisements in the
Journal to convince me that this is the same old paper, and the same old
capital city.
Yet I am endowed with new powers. I go about the streets as a sort of a
millennial chameleon. I find myself wearing various bodies. First I am
but myself, kneeling before the Image of the Virgin, in the church of
St. Peter and St. Paul. In an hour I am a City Hall stenographer, in the
office of the Mayor. This Mayor is referred to in the Journal as “Slick
Slack Kopensky.” Later in the morning I am clerk for Justice of the
Peace John Boat, whose office is right by the jail. And both the jail
and the office stairs have the same old skunk smell that has
distinguished jails and the stairs of justice from the beginning. Later,
in the afternoon, I am an emergency messenger for the Japanese
department of the World’s Fair of the University of Springfield, and am,
to all appearances, a Japanese. I find myself wearing the clothes and
shoes of these various supernumeraries, and in my double consciousness,
knowing their affairs all through, as though I had lived in their frames
twenty years. Yet no matter whose body I seem to wear or whose tongue I
seem to be wagging, I step back into the same yokel when, once in the
morning, and once in the afternoon, between these episodes I find myself
cowering in the presence of Comrade Avanel. It is a cloudy, foggy day,
and fog seems to come between us whenever I try to look at her. In the
morning I win her hard consent to take yesterday’s walk again, and she
promises not to scold me, only flinging out the assertion that I am a
diamond in the rough and that it is her business to polish me:—a
statement I seem to have heard before somewhere.
In the afternoon she behaves, and the fog blows away after a while and I
am able to enjoy the vision of this proud quivering young body and soul.
From beneath the bantam-rooster air emerges a little glimpse of the
sibyl.
For all her tailor-made smartness, she is like the Indian, and walks
unimpeded as though in moccasins. Her hair is black and long and
straight, and today her fashion plate profile is changed to something
more native American. Yet her skin is so white and her cheeks are so
red, and the flush comes and goes so fast, the Indian illusion has
completely disappeared when she turns her face to me. Her changing
elusive face has a haunting kinship to the countenance of my favorite
and adored image of the virgin that has been for much more than a
century to the north of the high altar of the church of St. Peter and
St. Paul, where I have been again meditating this very morning. And I
try to tell her that she is a more earthly younger sister of this
virgin, but indeed of the same tribe and house of saints.
When she bows her head in what may be dreaming, there is to my foolish
imagination a hint of Pallas Athena about the action. When she lifts her
head, and looks me full in the face all the upper part of her
countenance is definitely a feminized portrait of Shelley, and she wears
those curls hiding either ear after the smartest fashion of 2018. They
are called the Harriet Beecher Stowe curls, and copied from those in the
most frequent portrait of Harriet Beecher Stowe, when she was a dazzling
young woman. I try to tell Avanel how her beauty seems, but my speeches
are not eloquent and my heroine is neither poetess nor prophetess in her
replies. She says “I cannot be all of those creatures. Your figures
contradict.”
I answer: “Step into my hall of mirrors, and you will discover yourself
to be all I have said, and a devil in the bargain.”
She drifts to speaking of her father, born in southern Illinois,
descendant on one side from Daniel Boone, and on another from a Kentucky
Indian chief of long ago. For the first time that high throaty snobbish
mannerism and affected even tone disappear from her voice, and she
speaks as a human creature should. She cannot be a society chatterbox
when discussing her clan.
She goes on to tell how her mother came of two long lines of Springfield
Catholics. And I gather, as Avanel talks on and on, and I piece it out
from dim memories that float about the back of my head, that two lines
of her mother’s house were the one Irish, and the other Lithuanian, and
that long ago this woman was the most famous dancer of The Gordon Craig
Theatre. She died in Avanel’s fifteenth year. And it seemed in the local
fitness of things for the little girl with the same talent to go forward
bearing the same responsibilities as soon as she could carry them,
dancers coming to their own early, if they ever have a place. She was
soon the head of all those who could make Springfield’s devotional
ideals clear and appealing, through those inherited rituals. Avanel and
her group have danced for the Churches at Christmas and other times,
and, in the history of her art most important of all, the festivals of
Johnny Appleseed, and of St. Scribe and Hunter Kelly. And now I begin to
remember with her some of those occasions as through rifts of cloud.
Now Avanel says she does not want me to be seen in the audience where
she gives a religious dance. She is angry with herself and me, because
she is herself flattening out so, after talking on religious matters.
But I am philosophical about this young woman, today, and look about at
what we are passing.
We stare silently into the windows at adding machines, mantels,
grates, and tiles. We pass a wholesale house for barber supplies, and
Avanel says I need a hair cut. We pass the business houses of
feather-renovators and dealers, of dealers in safes and locks, and
rubber stamps. I note aloud in passing that Avanel has many rubber
stamp ideas and needs to alter them if she would do justice to her
glorious face. She answers not. We walk on. We pass through a
wholesale region, and while the fog still conceals the towers of the
town and comes lower, we can look into the windows yet, and I note
that this is not as in the century before. Almost every wholesaler has
a dazzling insignia and coat of arms. This is true for instance of the
manufacturing machinists and millwrights, the headquarters for
tempering and dies. It is true, even, of the dealers in sand and
gravel, the tinners and slate roofers, the transfer and trucking
companies, the brick and tile manufacturers, the soda water
manufacturers, the pump manufacturers, the cigar manufacturers, the
leather and belting men, and many others that to me were most
commonplace of old. But their window displays are as the throne rooms
of knighthood.
March 3:—Mist and darkness of soul are clearing away. And I am welcomed
in my real and permanent aspect in the streets of the New Springfield,
by many fellow citizens that it appears I have known for long. I am to
them also the yokel Avanel thinks me to be, and I meet with many covert
smiles. It seems I have returned after years of art study in New York,
and it is the first time many of them have seen me for quite awhile. I
am welcomed back to town a slightly boresome but harmless cousin. But
everyone calls his worst enemy cousin, as in a Kentucky village. Young
Jim Kopensky asks in a cousinly manner why I start art classes here, if
I had any kind of prospects in New York, rather implying that I am here
because I have nowhere else to go. He takes up a strain remarkably like
that of Avanel, and insists that I failed with the great metropolitan
oracles of art because of uncreased trousers, and merely stares with
incredulity when I insist that their trousers are often uncreased, and
some of them dress like rag bags. Despite many similar greetings, I
inwardly vow to start my art classes anyhow, and I spend a morning
having a most fraternal chat with Sparrow Short. He is retouching a
portrait of Mara of Singapore, painted several years ago when she was a
young girl, and the political issue between Singapore and America was
not so keen. Short is determined to exhibit it at the August opening of
The World’s Fair of the University of Springfield. In this picture I
behold her in her glory, a premature creature of thirteen, a Singaporian
Juliet, Short says “more hectic in her aspect than she is now. At the
present she is an exceedingly cool panther.” The days Short painted this
portrait, she was deeply reading the most inflaming Singaporian romance,
and in the portrait it flashes recklessly from her, and her eyes and
mouth are round with the thought of the loves of the lost gods, who
flourished before the prophet of the Cocaine Buddha of Singapore killed
them all in the jungle. She is dressed in green silk and in her hands is
a great green feather fan. Short is painting out certain vague white
blossoms on a bush in the background and turning them to green buds, for
Mara has imperiously demanded it.
I am living near the studio of Sparrow Short, in one of the old houses
of Springfield on South Fourth Street which existed in my previous life,
and where once lived a dear friend of mine.
Everything in the old house is disposed and ordered as formerly, and it
is only when I step out on the front lawn and pass under a certain
mulberry tree that I seem to be in the New Springfield.
I pass under this tree. I walk a little way to the house of Avanel, and
we saunter abroad. And the fogs are blowing away and she is in a most
amiable mood, and I am able to note that our city is indeed a flying,
fluttering place.
Confectioneries, auto trucks, popcorn vans, pleasure machines, and the
passing crowds are decked with ribbons and streamers. Many families have
a flag pole in the front yard with a row of tiny ancestral flags, one
over the other, each indicating some form of skilled or unskilled manual
labor by which the ancestors of the house made their way, and it is
considered a disgrace to display any other type of ancestral flag, but
one which shows some form of manual labor.
But many staffs have only three flags, that of the town, that of the
International Government, and above these, the Star Spangled Banner.
These people pride themselves in being more democratic, and not parading
their ancestry. Nearly all business houses, particularly the large and
wholesale houses, have their own especial banners and bunting, and some
give out toy balloons and the like to the children, marked with the same
schemes. The Star Spangled Banner is above everything, even on the
International buildings, to indicate that the United States has the old
South Carolina privilege of secession from the World Federation,
whenever she pleases.
And so I am walking with Avanel, on the late afternoon of March third,
2018. We find ourselves very near the center of the group of slender
Sunset Towers. Seven of them are of the seven colors of the rainbow, one
for each color, placed in a circle around the Truth Tower, which is in
the very center of the star-plan system of boulevards. We climb the
Truth Tower and look about. The Truth Tower is also called The Edgar Lee
Masters Tower, and it is high above the rest. At the foot of it is the
circular green with Golden Rain-Trees from New Harmony, Indiana. This is
called the Edgar Lee Masters Park. Near by is the Lincoln Memorial Park,
containing the marked sites of Lincoln’s three law offices, and in the
center our first State House, now the Lincoln museum. On the sides of
all the Sunset Towers that one may see from the old public square is
spread the Red Star of Springfield, set in the White Star of Illinois.
Searchlights blaze through it, spreading red and white light. Outside
the white Truth Tower that soars above all the city, and outside its
rainbow circle of campaniles, the ninety-two other campaniles shimmer in
the sun, their hues ranging from grey to rose-grey, and grey-gold to
rose-gold. And they grow wilder in the red, black and white gorgeousness
of the night.
The fifty towers on the outermost circle are the newest. They are the
only separate buildings of the World’s Fair of the University of
Springfield, except one long street called “The Street of Past History,”
which is about a mile to the south beginning at Bunn Park and sweeping
toward the northwest in a quarter of a circle to the high hill of
Washington Park. Every building in the city is officially a part of the
fair and in theory at least, the City is the Fair.
It is late in the evening, and I am with Avanel on top of the Truth
Tower, and she is relenting, not so much toward me, as toward her town.
It is the first time she has taken in the panorama, since the last
circle of towers was completed and The Street of Past History
illuminated.
“I must admit,” she says, “the civic patriotism of two most
unfashionable persons. Old Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second, who is
away now at the legislature of the World Government, is the head of our
whole architectural project. He is something of a Smart Set person, and
is in fact an old West Pointer. But the real work was done by the most
unpopular Thibetan Boy and the architectural planning and imagining was
by the negro John Emis. Old Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second, has
lent his name to protect these people, and leave them unmolested in
their project. As it is, he turns his appropriation over to them. The
city would not give either of such a salary. It will give the Thibetan
Boy a little credit, when all is over, but John Emis none at all,
because he is a negro. When you go down into the streets again you will
find a black stripe tucked away in some odd corner of the design of
every building in The Street of Past History. If you look you will see
that same stripe now, on the outer circle of towers. It goes slenderly
around the fourth story and the tenth. That black stripe is the personal
secret signature of John Emis, the negro architect.”
The voice of this woman beside me alters to that gentle and human tone
in which she spoke of her mother, as though this city, too, has its hand
somewhat on her heart. Yet she is proud and almost barks at me when I
attempt any kind of understanding, and to her I am not of this city, and
my sole excuse for living is that I admire her, and therefore must be
forgiven every other trait in my character till she has time to mend my
ways. My scalp must dangle at her belt.
“I begin to be almost reconciled to living in Springfield,” she muses,
“Springfield is all society, you know, and it is hopeless to try to make
it anything else. Of course there are some places where it pays to have
ideas, but here a girl must conceal ideas if she has them.”
Then, in an instant, another Avanel seems to flash forth. “You think I
am a snob and a fool, you silly art student, but I would die for the
International Flag far sooner than people like your idol Sparrow Short.”
Avanel points out to me old Camp Lincoln, northwest, beyond the towers.
There she leads the Amazonian Cavalry and the Horseshoe Brotherhood in
bi-weekly drill, in preparation for the possible war against Singapore.
Looming like the dome of the Taj Mahal above the trees is a gigantic
world globe, which marks the center of the field. Around this shining
map of everything her drills are held.
But I answer her cut: “Sparrow Short is no idol of mine, and you know
it. I regard him as the best teacher of art in Springfield, but I do not
accept his international views.”
“It seems to me,” she gives reply, “that you are always finding excuses
for dubious revolutionaries, whose spirits and bodies are rag bags.”
About nine in the evening, there are star-chimes from all the towers.
The bells are singing the song of Portia, the aviator:—“Look up at the
far-off suns, Oh hearts of eternal desire.”
Avanel speaks to me in a swearing tone of voice: “I think I cut fewer
people than you do. I should not be elected the head of the Amazons if I
were a fool about exclusiveness. As a matter of fact I cut those who go
to the parties of Mara, the daughter of the Man from Singapore. It is
plain she gets those people under her roof to poison them against the
world government or at least muffle their suspicions of her father’s
doings and the doings of his like. You are the only person who thinks I
cut loyal patriotic people.”
I am wondering why I like this Avanel. I conclude it is because of her
overwhelming vanity and unbreakable pride. She has the soul of a
thousand peacocks and there is a potential lioness in her beside.
She clasps her hands and looks silently over the city, her eyes wide and
leaping with delight over the glory of the illumination. I say to
Avanel: “My Fathers have been long in the grave, and my own dust has
long been buried in other dust. I walk with you, only because my heart
loved you, one hundred years ago.” But she does not understand me in the
least, when I talk in this fashion.
March 4:—It is such an established custom among the young people of 2018
to watch the sunset from the great uninterrupted glass spaces of the
upper halls of these sunset towers that there may be found the most
famous cafeterias of the town. We dine at the top of one of them. There
with gay singing the young democracy, and the young cocks of the walk as
well, linger and wait till long past the afterglow. This evening the
haughty Avanel consents to take dinner with me, that she may reprove me
once more, seeing that, in general, my name is mud, however I may try to
improve.
The catalogue of her hoity-toity friends rolls on forever and I can only
protest by saying that while these are undeniably good citizens, they
are all sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles of those who are invited to
Mara’s parties, and thus quite near to treason.
But now the town choir sings the civic hymn from a tower near
by:—“Springfield Awake, Springfield Aflame” and all the young people
about join in the chorus, and as Avanel sings devoutly she cannot help
but be the other self whose existence she tries to deny.
March 7:—I am dining again in the tower cafeteria with Avanel, a quite
early dinner, and while the afterglow still blazes we look down upon the
clustered cottages of our town. They are, in design, dominated by the
so-called “Violet Curve,” a complex rhythm, which is magnified from the
whorls of the violet petals, and the cottages are generally violet in
hue. Some of the roofs and cupolas are beginning to be gilded.
Springfield extends over the whole county through the taking in of
countless groves, orchards, and aviation fields.
Not only in their special groves, but everywhere titan Amaranth Apple
vines rise on trellises high above the other trees, for this famous
Amaranth is a kind of a tree-vine that is in the fall thick with red and
white blossoms and clusters of red apples. There are many parks in the
New Springfield that were not in the old Springfield: Rankin, Sandburg,
Humphrey, Roberts, Joyce Kilmer, Masters, Untermeyer, and others. Avanel
points out the public schools beneath us, often rebuilt on the old sites
or near them, and bearing the same names. Ancient streets keep their
names, except where boulevards have replaced them.
East of Tenth Street is the Negro district, all new, beautiful,
flamboyant jungle houses, constructed for his people by John Emis, and
through his influence not one slack old building remains, though, “most
of them still hold slack colored people,” Avanel says. These houses are
far richer than the towers and other buildings of the World’s Fair, for
only here in Africa has John Emis an unrestrained hand.
March 8:—Avanel, with a view to my further chastisement, takes me about,
scolding again, and we encounter a row of grotesques on great pedestals,
which she confesses were put up by a group of young Boones who came from
near Cairo, led by her father in his more fiery youth, when the Boones
had by no means so strong a hold on the city.
They are in Liberty Park, near Concordia College, whose golden pinnacles
glitter through the bare limbs of the trees. On the central pedestal of
the grotesques is inscribed: “To the cornerstones of the town; to the
newspaper and motion picture and stage censors; to the respectables, the
lady bountifuls, the so-called senior families; to the Sons and
Daughters of the American Revolution; to the Sons and Daughters of the
Ancient Democrats, and the Sons and Daughters of the Ancient
Republicans; and in general, to the dragon-quack worm of respectability,
that dieth not.” Avanel says these were put up the day the “_Boone Ax_”
newspaper was founded.
On the central pedestal, which is higher and more massive than the rest,
crawling down from the top, is a dragon with a duck’s head. On the top
of the other pedestals are the stone images of a fretful ape, an
enormous frog, a long nosed ant eater, a laughing idiot, a hawk, a goat,
a three-legged bull dog wearing a plug hat, a chicken without feathers,
and a hog wearing trousers.
I say, on looking at these: “Avanel, I desire to meet your father, the
honorable Black Hawk Boone. I darkly suspect he is one of those who go
about in unpressed clothes and will doubtless furnish me with words to
say to you. I should say that the daughter of such a father should be
willing to dye her left hand crimson, for him, proudly.”
Avanel answers with a tearful solemnity, positively babyish:—“If you
truly love me you will not use my father against me. While I respect
him, I cannot respect all his clan and ideas and I am even more vexed
over his way of mixing with mussy people. If I must have that kind of
thing, I go to the saint who does it for religion and not from
philosophy. I want you to meet St. Friend.”
March 10:—Late this evening I buy a sack of popcorn and walk about the
shopping district alone, eating the well-buttered corn from my pocket,
and swinging my cane, and observing the beauty of the ladies as they go
into the theatre with their escorts. Many of them remind me of girls I
used to eye with breathless reverence in Springfield. I am glad to
wonder over beauty without being vexed with it, and I stand in the
shadow, inwardly defying Miss Avanel. And having defied her about an
hour, I call at nine o’clock, feeling perfectly emancipated, and tell
her the following story:—
“Avanel, last night we went abroad into Dreamland together, hand in hand
and heart in heart, looking with equal guilt for the Golden Pool of the
Handsome Medicine Man, Devil’s Gold. It was way past midnight when we
found him, in the midst of the black prairies of Dreamland I well know.
He was making his medicine, and dishonoring our souls, by calling our
names across the plain. We did not flinch. We walked straight to his
yellow campfire, and looked into his gilded face and admired his yellow
blanket, and right by his fire we satisfied our wicked desire by
admiring ourselves in his golden pool.
“Our faces were close together, and as we looked into the pool, we saw
ourselves in a mundane world, so perfect that its materialism became
magical.
“We walked down through the pool, as though into an underground house,
and we looked into each others faces again. And we were moving, gilded
images from head to feet, and we were satisfied with each other at last,
and I knew I wanted you to be gilded as much as you desired me to be so,
and we took the wickedest pleasure in looking upon the yellow world
around us.”
“Yes,” said Avanel, “I walked there with you in my dream last night, and
I hope we will walk in houses of holiness together and I am sorry we
walked in the pool of gold. Come with me to St. Friend.” After that,
Avanel is more of a Christian.
CHAPTER VI
THE TWO FACTIONS:—MAYOR SLICK SLACK KOPENSKY AND HIS BOSS, MAYO SIMS;
_VERSUS_ BOONE, PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF EDUCATION.
April 3, 2018:—It is a sunny April morning. I note some tiny spring
beauties in the patches of snow. Every cloud threatens, but every cloud
rolls by. I begin to apprehend April’s pretty promise of final
deliverance from frost and snow. I am loafing around the coffee houses,
listening to the talk, and being received as one of the more obscure
inhabitants. Occasionally some one asks, with an effort at interest, if
I am starting my art classes soon. But the most lofty and the most
humble call me “cousin,” as they do one another. I am sounded a bit as
to whether I share the political opinions of Sparrow Short, and
incidentally if we belong to the same school of art teaching, and if he
will give my classes a criticism from time to time. I write down the
name of the youth who seeks me out desiring to enroll and am for the
first time flattered.
By putting fugitive bits of loud talk with observations of the last few
mornings, I begin to get the social fabric, and take a lesson in New
Springfield’s politics.
More women vote than men. Woman is the housekeeper and municipal
politics is a kind of nest building and a house keeping of a sort.
The women follow their old occupations. And they have many new ones.
They are locksmiths, safe experts, confectioners, cigar factory workers
and owners, makers of advertising novelties for the whole world, eye,
ear, nose and throat physicians, bill posters, wallpaper cleaners,
opticians, dog, cat, and bird doctors, barbers, undertakers,
auctioneers, dentists, and a thousand other things. But this does not
mean that women monopolize such occupations. It is only a minority that
leaves the home. But it is a majority that floods the elections. They
are about equally divided between the established factions among the men
and perhaps getting the mass of their opinions from the men but
certainly furnishing their own steam.
I note many curious phases of caste, if there may be said to be such in
a fluent community where everyone may change his status before nightfall
by doughty deed or awful failure. There is an exalted status to
occupations that were once deemed commonplace. There is yet the same
distinction that used to go to lawyer or doctor or head of a university
department, but it is extended to such seemingly miscellaneous
occupations as conductors of Turkish baths, special gymnasiums and mud
baths, billiard halls, bowling alleys. Stores for sporting and athletic
goods convey great distinction. And the demi-god of these, Cave Man
Thomas, is indeed held in high regard and his minions have almost the
same lustre, and so he is one of the eleven city commissioners.
But the end of these surprises is not complete. There is a particular
dignity given to junk dealers, cobblers, garbage handlers, and
manufacturers, and devisers of patent medicines. They stand as did the
lords, dukes, knights, and bishops of old, if there is a charm to their
private characters equal to that of their public service.
I find that a special training, and therefore a special distinction, is
involved in being shoddy manufacturers, pawnbrokers, silo manufacturers.
And many other once simple ways of making a living have become so
complex and fastidious that they are the signs of nobility. But
respectability, in man or woman, is, as a matter of fact, not always a
thing of occupation in the final analysis. It may be a matter of race or
of personal record. And sometimes it seems to be a matter of party
politics.
The really significant party lines are local. The Democratic and
Republican parties have their turn every four years at national
elections but at all other seasons new ideas come into the local
commissioners, platforms that cannot be classed as Democratic or
Republican ideas and the people do not array themselves under those
banners but rather the banners of Doctor Mayo Sims on the one hand and
Black Hawk Boone on the other.
New Harmony, Indiana, is particularly distinguished for sending in civic
and social recruits to Boone’s faction, though the nucleus of the
faction came up with him from Cairo. While New Harmony was founded by
those who protested against mystical religion, many of the present waves
of enthusiasm from that exceedingly vital place were born in the New
Harmony Methodist and Episcopal churches. They take to Boone by
affinity, and hate Mayo Sims by instinct.
With no particular support from Boone, they have cultivated the mania
for planting the highly specialized ever-blooming Golden Rain Trees from
New Harmony as symbols of democratic feeling and as a way of saying that
all men are created equal. And they call them The Gate Trees, since,
passing under them, we enter the gate to the free land of democracy in
symbol if not in fact. The horticulturists from New Harmony are making
newer and more magnificent varieties of the tree and sending them across
the world.
But in the Mystic Year, Springfield is rather to be discussed, for
instance—as a convention center, which has at last evolved into the home
of a perpetual World’s Fair. It is as of old, a travelling man’s home
city, a retired farmer’s place of sleep, a state official’s paradise.
Agricultural experts, coal mining experts, would-be statesmen of the
middle west, have the same general relation to the city about them that
they had in the ancient days of the horse-cars, and the Sangamon County
Fair. The town has many of its ancient types. But they are overshadowed
by the sculptors, the motion picture scenario writers, the motion
picture directors and actors, and the prophets and sibyls of all the
arts that go to make up a University Fair. The entrance examination for
permanent residence in Springfield, except for the native-born, is the
same as that for the Universities of America. The native-born, no matter
how stupid or cranky, cannot be banished. There are so many extreme
followers of the various local religious and philosophical sects that
Springfield is as much a Hobby Horse Fair as University Fair, if we are
to believe the wits and the laughing poets.
One index of the hobby riding character of the place is the way the
humorous columnist, Romanoff, in the _Boone Ax_ characterizes
conspicuous people, even at the risk of suit. Today’s _Boone Ax_
contains a new epithet: “The Muttering Thibetan,” a name for the young
architect and protege of St. Friend, the Bread Giver. This youth makes
his acquaintances impatient by talking to the empty air as he walks the
streets.
The columnist names himself: “The Sentimental Romanoff.” He it is who
named John Short, political rebel and painting teacher: “Sparrow Short.”
He perpetually hounds the mayor with the nicknames: “Slick Slack
Kopensky” and “Sims’ Bitters.” This last is because Mayo Sims is deemed
the boss and Kopensky his dose to be administered to the town in regular
spoonsful.
The deathless industrial revolution that followed the war with Germany
still rumbles along elsewhere, with strikes, boycotting, blacklistings,
picketings, street barricades, dynamitings, massacres, and general
annoyances and bedevilment:—advancing, retreating, and advancing again,
through three generations and around the world.
But, for the most part, the soreheads outside of Springfield,
particularly those stewing in their own caldrons in Chicago, serve
vicariously to set us free. We are wrestling with more up-to-date
nuisances, with a brighter goal in sight.
It is the dream of a human beehive far from the Marxian society. It is
something on the newest New Harmony model, a Springfield that is
democratic, artistic, religious, and patriarchal, and therefore
following many of the most ancient forms and metaphors of orthodoxy, as
an electric light may be softened and given its final character by the
shell of an ancient horn lantern.
April 7:—This evening I take Avanel Boone to the Henry George dinner.
When I see that long array of distinguished citizens and Avanel names
off to me their offices and attributes, I realize that Henry George
triumphs in an especial manner over the soul of Springfield, and I
rejoice in this with all my heart, for I deeply revere the man and glory
in his influence. Avanel first points out to me the followers of her
saints:—St. Scribe of the Shrines, who has only recently departed this
world, and St. Friend, The Bread Giver, who is still to be seen in the
Springfield Cathedral, active and wonderful. And here are some of the
principal followers of this dynasty of saints:—the pious Darsies, the
wholesome Hollys, the sad Rancies, torch bearers of liberalism. Among
them are endless officers and privates in the ranks of the Amazonian and
the Horseshoe Brotherhood, all religious and political radicals. Avanel
is much amused to point out at the dinner an equal number of opposites,
though often of the same nominal allegiances, the snobbish Rues, the
wirehaired Radleys, the iron-ribbed Standings, and some of the less
powerful of the mayor’s faction, some young Kopenskys, Rocks, and the
like, who have no more to do with the spirit of Henry George than they
have to do with the New Testament.
My dear Avanel grows more sarcastic and almost breaks up the meeting at
our end of the table when Jefferson Radley, henchman and slave of the
wicked Doctor Mayo Sims, opens the evening with a speech in which he
names Henry George and Alexander Hamilton, in the same tone of voice and
with the same praise.
And now I get my first sight of Black Hawk Boone. As he rises to speak,
my dear Avanel blushes with ill-repressed pride and she cannot keep the
sparkle from her eyes and the tension of embarrassment and love from her
face as Black Hawk shakes his mane.
He is a short man, with a curly big black beard such as Ashurbanipal and
Nimrod must have shaken at their foes. His cheek is flushed with anger
and his midnight eyes give out lightning and he hits the table till the
dishes rattle and as good as denounces Jefferson Radley as a hypocrite
and a scoundrel. He is plainly one of those accustomed to having his way
completely, as far as he has it at all, for few people will have the
energy to combat the wrath he puts into any battle or into such a thing
as a pretty after-dinner tribute to a saint. Boone howls, and snaps his
teeth together. His terrible sneer would destroy all but a rhinoceros or
a seasoned politician.
At length Boone possesses himself enough to speak clearly and with much
economic eloquence, a perfect bore to Avanel and myself. She is trying
to fascinate me by allowing me to hold two of her fingers under the
table. Then suddenly the banquet ends and she goes home with her father,
looking severely at me. And she kisses her father, and whispers in his
ear—no doubt that he made an excellent speech. Boone does not so much as
glance my way and I must wait till another time to talk to him. He has
never been at home when I have called on his daughter.
April 10:—The city hall is apparently less rigid than of old, a
masterpiece of the happy-go-lucky. Mayor Slick Slack Kopensky, “Sims’
Bitters,” is sitting next to me at a coffee house table with Sims and
Kusuko and Cave Man Thomas, all parts of the City Hall machine. Kopensky
looks like the pictures of President William McKinley. While by no means
so large a character, he is, by all reports, much more picturesque in
his political methods. He is even now saying to his coterie and with
intent that those near by may hear if they so desire: “All the
governments above that of the city weigh on the people like a hat of
lead. But the government of our City Hall, as long as I have my way, is
going to be as gay and easy as safety will allow. As long as the Public
School bunch act like a bunch of regulators and hoot-owls, we will beat
them to pulp.”
April 12:—Now I note certain established and accredited loafers, who are
assumed to be part of the landscape. I find that the gang of Kopensky,
Sims, and so forth have not failed to annex every one of such, who can
tell a smutty story to some jolly group of pornographically inclined
gentlemen. Mayo Sims believes in the medicine of laughter to cure the
sickness of a political machine, and with Kopensky’s help has made it
appear on the surface that the issue is between the laughing City Hall
and the militant and irksome University. So I get a public-school map of
the city from the Board of Education offices and hire a taxi and make a
quick still hunt around all the old and new sites. Judging by the
equipment alone, I conclude at once that the public schools of
Springfield have gone on like a line of irresistible battle-tanks. There
is a complete material ladder from the first grade, on through the
awards and honors of The University World’s Fair that sets itself in
rigid competition with the masters of the world. But there are, no
doubt, many qualifications to this outline to be offered by friends and
enemies of the system. It is plain in one taxi ride that the system has
commanded rivers of ungrudged money and I can well believe that outside
the political field the system has had an unbroken and unchallenged
prestige.
In the coffee houses and the gigantic loafing lobbies of the
motion-picture theatres and over the endless ice cream tables of the
drug stores and confectioneries and in the lounging rooms of the
dance-halls everywhere the argument roars and rattles and clatters and
squeals and shrieks and splutters and swears. Every kind of a skirmish
between Catholic and Protestant, aristocrat and democrat, labor and
capital, is obliterated or merged into this main war. Springfield is
Black Hawk Boone, President of the Board of Education and the World’s
Fair of the University of Springfield and editor of the relentless
_Boone Ax_:—_versus_ this gang composed of Mayor Kopensky, Sims, his
boss, and the laughing, dancing crew led by Drug Store Smith and Coffee
Kusuko and Cave Man Thomas.
Practically all the religious leaders and all the people with names of
real distinction and untainted standing are with Black Hawk Boone. His
School Board includes among others Rabbi Terence Ezekiel, Roxana Grey,
Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, son of the Senator who represents
us in the World Government, St. Friend, the Bread Giver, Rachel Madison,
the Christian Science Reader, Mary Timmons and John Emis,
representatives of the African Race, Gwendolyn Charles, the Motion
Picture Director and scenario writer, Patricia Anthony, Josephine Windom
of the Three Color Printing Department. They are a dithyrambic, chanting
improvising howling-dervish set, with a local millennial dialect of
their own and lacking mainly in that sense of humor and everydayness and
that cold political self-control with which the City Hall is fully
supplied.
CHAPTER VII
FURTHER DISCUSSION OF THE POLITICAL MACHINERY, INCLUDING THE CITY HALL
DRAG NET OF DRUG STORES, COFFEE HOUSES AND DANCE HALLS.
April 11, 2018:—Mayor Kopensky is particularly deep in Singapore
learning. He conceals his well-beloved studies in public, as senators of
old used to conceal their wealth. He must, of course, get his majorities
from the University students, who are the majority of the population, so
many are studying even after marriage, and so many men continue their
studies after entering business.
In political hours the attitude even of the older students of the
University of Springfield is seemingly ungrateful. It is that of the
traditionally impudent college freshman toward the imaginary greasy
grind and toward the professor who eggs him on to scholarship. They
think the names of these City Commissioners: “Cave Man Thomas,” “Sparrow
Short,” “Coffee Kusuko,” “Montague Rock,” “Drug Store Smith,” “Jefferson
Radley,” “Mayo Sims,” mean dash and romance.
This is the “City Hall” block of seven people in the city commission of
eleven. The Mayor is the eighth. He seldom has occasion to use his
prerogative of the casting vote, for it is not often five to five on a
side. There are only three people in the commission who represent the
School Board, one of them is Black Hawk Boone.
Boone roars away with the others, who are on his right and left, like
Aaron and Hur holding up the hands of Moses. And it is only at the end
of some long and well dramatized skirmish that Boone wins by forcing the
issues in his paper the _Boone Ax_ and scaring a more cowardly four in
Kopensky’s faction to vote with him temporarily on what seems a purely
educational issue. It is not always the same four he bulldozes and many
and obvious are his plots.
Drug Store Smith and Coffee Kusuko supply about one-fifth of cold
science to the Mayor’s City Hall stew. They represent the “slick” side
of Kopensky. They have natty ideas of dress and natty ideas of
administration. The remainder of Kopensky’s routine political workers
are slack in every way except in the matter of secret party-discipline.
The columnist Romanoff in a charitable mood says, in the _Boone Ax_ for
April 11, 2018:—“When we view the soggy-souled but amiable group of city
fathers around Kopensky, we rejoice. There is no sign of a complete
clean-up of the ages. The patriot is still at home in the government.
And, as Andrew Jackson knew, there is an intrinsic governing power in
any mass of humanity linked by friendship and under American skies.
Along with the City Hall dishonesty there goes a certain mercy and
fraternity, far from the sternness of the editor of this paper, who may
take my remarks for what they are worth, and he may fire me if he
chooses. Let my boss, the editor, admit, since he must, that the City
Hall gang keep our more angular truth-telling moods from torturing the
town beyond reason. As it is, I declare myself the only real jester
among all our children of light.”
April 15:—As I wander about, I am glad that in my former life I was a
member of the Anti-Saloon League of Central Illinois. There is no such
thing as a saloon to be seen. The bar room is as extinct as the
trilobite. Coca-Cola and Bevo have their new successors every day, along
with mysterious elaborations of coffee and tea, and spiced drinks from
the Jungles of South America. And, of course, after a hundred
non-alcoholic years the soda fountains have tremendous importance. Drug
Store Smith, member of the city council, is the local Soda Fountain
King. He is now the owner of all the drug stores, including Dodds’ Drug
Store, which keeps its old location at Fifth and Monroe.
I have indeed a curious impression as I go into Dodds’ for a soda. Fifth
and Monroe reminds me of a century before. It is still the street-car
center of our town. There are as of old long benches in Dodds’ where
people are waiting to take street cars and there are the same revolving
stools along the soda fountain counter but that counter is twice as long
and there are tables for customers now. The sodas are as good as those
wonders Jim Sylva used to mix, but no better.
Across the street is the old Coe’s Book Store, owned by some descendant
of the original Coe family. There is, as of old, a great counter of
magazines, some of them better, some of them rawer than the old list.
Many of them are now published in Springfield or near by. The majority
of the motion picture magazines are full of simpering photographs of Los
Angeles ladies in bathing suits. They are, of course, delightful to
behold but the mystery still remains as to what this has to do with the
art of the motion picture. Of the literary magazines, the _Atlantic
Monthly_ and _Poetry_, a _Magazine of Verse_, still survive. The
_Atlantic_ still keeps its brick red cover and its nippy New England
style and _Poetry_ still has Pegasus on the cover and new poets on the
inside. _Vogue_ and _Vanity Fair_ are still for sale. I wander out and
watch the Fifth and Monroe crowd again. It is Saturday, nine o’clock in
the evening, and the automobile horns are deafening and the crossing
policeman is quite busy.
And now I have gone to a good old slapstick movie, by a descendant of
Charlie Chaplin, and I am standing again on the corner and it is half
past ten. Many people are looking up at the passing figures in the dance
hall in the third story over the theatre. Windows are open and wild
Singaporian music pours out into the streets. There are great yellow
Singaporian lanterns hanging in front of the open windows and yellower
light is pouring from the hall itself. It is one of the chain of Yellow
dance halls in the syndicate owned by Kusuko and part of his political
machine, along with his chain of Coffee houses. This particular place is
called “The Hall of Velaska.”
There was a man who sat by me in the movie laughing like a boy. He is
now beside me again. He is a gigantic black haired but aged Jew,
obviously the Rabbi Terence Ezekiel, heretic, and planter of the Oaks of
Springfield. He is in most matters a henchman of Boone and a political
“scrapper,” whose deeds have set the town ringing. We are friends in a
minute. He has seen me with Avanel in his synagogue—takes me as a matter
of course, asks me to go with him to the Tom Strong Coffee House and
Restaurant, just east of the Gaiety Theatre. There we encounter Boone
and the over-sensitive quivering Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third.
They are enjoying eleven o’clock salt mackerel together. They take along
with it the knockout coffee of Kusuko, who owns all the coffee houses
under whatever name, new or old.
And so the Rabbi and I join in these refreshments and have a jolly
midnight with the heart of political and educational Springfield and, as
long as the Rabbi leads the argument, there is more than enough wit in
the assembly. He has the Jewish turn for puns and it is plain that
Doctor Mayo Sims and Kopensky have a second laughing foeman.
But amid the jokes the Rabbi is not a bit backward about hatching local
empires along with this inbred Michael and this black-haired descendant
of Daniel Boone. Their present campaign, which they do not conceal in
its tactics from me, their “cousin,” is, of course, an effort to
out-maneuver the Mayor. Kopensky wants to bring cheap unskilled labor to
town, leaving out the usual University entrance-examination. His
ostensible reason is that the World’s Fair buildings will not be
completed August 15, the date of opening, without this aid. It is
obviously but a maneuver to bring more City Hall votes to town and votes
of a manageable type.
And so I talk politics with these three. Boone proclaims that the
presence this evening of Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, is an
evidence that the Boones and the Michaels can pull together from time to
time and the Rabbi and the lad seem completely ruled by this headlong
Boone who cannot eat mackerel without glowering as though he were
devouring his enemies.
The other two are jollying him out of his intensity and he seems to
thank them for it. He really relaxes a little toward midnight, as
though, after all, this is a festive occasion of red blooded lads in a
coffee house. As I think it over, walking home alone, there is an
elusive impression that young Michael was being given an extra show of
confidence for “reasons” by the apparently headlong older gentlemen.
April 17:—I have been asking questions about Drug Store Smith. It seems
this person, Smith, has aspirations, and values his exceedingly nominal
place among the scientific chemists of America and will leave the town
any time to attend a congress of such, where he receives due
invitation:—and it is part of the tactics of Boone to lure him out when
his vote will be an inconvenience. But it is not always easy to get him
sufficient honors of this kind for he is not a benevolent scientist. The
charm of his tonics and beverages is deemed specious, though some of
them are discreetly marked: “Highly recommended by Doctor Mayo Sims.”
“They say” he did some sound chemical and biological research in his
youth in the Springfield University laboratories.
I have been asking questions and am beginning to understand Coffee
Kusuko. He has a chain of coffee houses as long as Smith’s chain of
pharmacy-post-office-street-car-station-patent-medicine-confectionery-
cigar-stand-and-soda-fountain establishments. Kusuko has made the black
demi-tasse the special Springfield vice and there are no deeper addicts
than those who fight him politically.
People feel quite sure his drink contains some more sinister ingredient
from the Malay peninsula. And he it is who sees to it that all the
business offices are equipped with coffee urns that whistle through the
late afternoon:—the custom of mixing business and coffee having
originated with his great great grandmother, a famous local
stenographer, who in the end became lady mayor, through her
stenographers’ guild. Politics and coffee are hereditary with Kusuko.
In the legitimate organization which ministers to this drinking habit,
Kusuko has concealed his henchmen, who bring him all needed information
and carry abroad all necessary orders. And they have a considerable
opportunity to serve him. Drinking begins in the offices at 4.30 P. M.
and in the more fastidious business groups with many forms, till it is
near to resembling the Japanese tea-ceremony. Stenographers, some
austere and some luxurious, mingle with women political leaders, such as
Orator Carrie Moore, Portia, the Singing Aviator, and others. These help
materially to make up the sum of grace and bedevilment of the business
and political day. A little later people who are still restless and do
not want to go home drift off toward the motion picture houses, or the
drug stores or the coffee houses of Kusuko.
As to the coffee houses, I make my tours through many and find these
places extraordinarily varied in design, though the same general average
of a crowd is in most of them. There is a Chinese-looking place called:
“The Opium Fish.” There is a place hung with copies of Velasques, Goya,
Sorolla, and others, called: “The Spanish Gypsy.” This is a place
quieter than most. Then there is a kind of a Jazz emporium with copper
and brass decorations, called “The Whing Whang Tree.” There are two
other places that specialize in chop suey, called: “The Mock Duck” and
“The Fire Cracker King” and then I loaf in “The Pig and the Goose,” and
“The Sword of the Skallawag,” etc. In these last two on slightly raised
platforms the Malay storytellers sit cross-legged. They unroll the
beautiful ensnaring legends of the Malay peninsula and the islands
around it. These storytellers appear occasionally in some of the other
coffee houses, also, along with negro singers, etc.
And now comes Kusuko’s last touch, where he has completely replaced the
old political functions of the American saloon, as an acceptable harness
for the social brigands. There is always some allusion in the coffee
houses, some implication, that the next real thing to do will be
dancing, later in the evening, in wonderful Yellow Dance Halls. These
are also owned by Kusuko and are the very keystone of his system. I
follow the drifting tide of jolly good fellows several evenings and it
leads me inevitably to the halls before midnight.
They are never too near the coffee houses and soda fountains and never
too far away. There is nothing on the surface to make one apprehensive
in the halls, except some very daring social dancing. There is often a
motion picture show for part of the evening just off the lounging
hallway and place of promenade. The crowd is not much below the average
of the regular Fifth and Monroe crowd of all kinds of people.
April 20:—I attend this evening, at the invitation of two prospective
art students, a session of the Board of Education. They explain the
session to me, while we sit in the gallery and look down upon the
general tempestuousness.
Boone is not only the presiding officer but has the impression that he
is the whole Board of Education. Despite this they are fond of him on
the board, but row with him till the men cuss before the ladies in
desperate efforts to hold him down, and keep him down, and prevent his
bullying the whole assembly out of existence. He insults everybody
mercilessly and wags his black beard at them till they quail and quake.
It is a joy, a sorrow, an amazement, and a wonder to me to see people
who look so much like the old Prognosticator’s Club, fighting away, and
when I meet them all at the end of the verbal war none of them see me
except as a casual bystander.
April 21:—I have had a jolly evening at Tom Strong’s with my beloved
Rabbi. Boone is our inevitable theme in the end. The Rabbi, as we drink
the black coffee and eat the salt mackerel, confirms my tentative remark
that Boone, as president of the Board of Education, enforces its edicts,
though few of the decrees are those into which from the standpoint of
strategy, or even conviction, he can put his private heart. But, the
Rabbi points out, they are all clubs with which Boone can pound the
Mayor’s majority in the city commission and he backs the board’s edicts,
every one, in _The Boone Ax_, and ever so often forces something through
the council.
Boone is also University Professor, one hour a week, and in his
professorial special pleading, which he excludes from his activities as
chairman of the Board of Education, he presents to the University and
the world a new doctrine of health and economics, called: “Boonism” by
his followers, and “The Complete Healing” in his text book.
The Rabbi expounds: “Boonism denounces metal money for a starter.
Boone’s aversion to it has come through millionaires burying their money
and bringing out coins one at a time. Boone advocates a special system
of paper currency for an economic remedy, and as a means of abolishing
millionaires. So Kusuko allows only metal money to be used in his
places, which regulation Boone, after some contests, has accepted with a
sense of humor, since he likes black coffee and cannot deny it and wants
a jolly place to meet his friends. And meanwhile millionaires, though
forbidden by the constitution to exist, keep on hiding money.”
According to the Rabbi:—“The most outstanding prescription in the
personal health chapters of ‘The Complete Healing’ is the Apple Amaranth
orchard. The devotee is to walk in the orchards summer and winter,
breathing the breath of the bark, blossoms, apples, and leaves, with
certain well-worded philosophic meditations. In general Boone condemns
drugs, so there is a personal reason for making war on him on the part
of Smith and Sims and their followers.
“The Amaranth Apple orchard, around the grave of the Sangamon County
pioneer and saint, Hunter Kelly, is particularly esteemed by the Boone
following.”
But I cannot imagine Boone or any remotely resembling imitator indulging
in philosophic meditations. I could rather imagine him climbing a tree
like a cinnamon bear, only with more speed and fidgets.
CHAPTER VIII
THE NEW SPRINGFIELD FLAG AND THE STAR PLAN MAP FOR WHICH IT STANDS,
INCLUDING THE DOUBLE WALLS ON THE FAR BORDERS OF THE CITY, BUILT LONG
AGO BY RALPH ADAMS CRAM.
May 4, 2018:—I make an early afternoon call on Avanel. First we mourn
over the scene outside, for Apple Amaranths and all are nipped by the
frost and from all over the United States come reports that the peach
crop once more is blighted. Then Avanel is in her most “young ladyfied”
mood and complains fondly of her father’s general code of behavior. I
gather the impression that her ideal has no big black beard and no long
curly oily locks, no fashion of getting angry. She is just the age when
they palpitate between fond indulgence of “father” and black fury at his
goat-like intractability to all plain suggestions that he make a change
in himself. Boone being a widower and Avanel his only child, she is his
shepherdess most emphatically.
Meanwhile Avanel hand-embroiders a gorgeous Springfield Flag and allows
me to help her untangle several skeins of red silk and in general to
play the idle dangler as well as I can. I am quite aware I do not do it
in the off-hand manner I should. I am a little too heavy with the silk
but she admits that I do not roar at the least tangle, as her father
might.
Anyway, the flag is finished. And just as I begin to get what might be
called “in earnest” with Avanel, a lot of disgusting young dandies,
whose names I do not know, come in for tea. And I am obliged to stay and
drink the stuff and I would rather drink rain water off the roof of a
soot-factory, that’s what I would.
May 5:—I have seen in waking dreams, as I walk on the edge of New
Springfield, at the prairie end of a shadowed deserted street, a great
open door into the deep of eternity and, hovering above the great deep,
Springfield, when it becomes the perfect and transcendent city. I look
down upon towers so packed together in a sheaf and the flags so mighty,
it seems but a fantasy of celestial flagstaffs and pinnacles. There are
many flags of the International Government and many flashes of the Star
Spangled Banner. But one flag stirs me the most. It is the one
embroidered with the very silk and with the very same stitches I have
seen Avanel put in with much silly chat so lately. It is the flag
nearest. It is on a tower rising from the deep, a neighbor, it seems, I
can almost touch. But as I look there are thousands of flags like it
suddenly unfurled on a myriad pinnacles of the city below.
May 6:—All the city is mourning the blighting of the season’s acorns and
Amaranth Apples and the buds of the Golden Rain Tree. Almost all the
boughs have the little blackened tufts of buds and leaves. Avanel meets
me at the door in the evening. Her father has given her a terrific
scolding for what she says is “nothing much” and she is glad to walk and
walk for miles and cool off in the clear starry air. I get it out of
her, she has been trying to stop her father’s smoking. But she is
forgetting it and taking on her sibyl mood. Later she confesses she has
been trying to get her father to cut his hair and quit dyeing his left
hand crimson and that he has been trying to get her to dye her hand and
unbind her hair as a Boone should. So, sore of heart, she is willing
that we should be true comrades in the midst of this universe. And at
once we are, as it were, brothers and sisters of the stars. She goes so
far as to take my arm.
She agrees to my proposal that we pluck out the mystery of the souls of
our city’s flags together, if two young creatures may get such wisdom.
May 7:—Avanel this evening takes me to call upon St. Friend, The Giver
of Bread. It is, in her eyes, quite a religious function. And we are to
inquire formally about flags. St. Friend knows me not, though there is
something in his voice that goes back one hundred years, and I dimly
remember, in my double consciousness, visits with a friend who had much
the same furniture, and some of the same turns of phrase, but he had not
the face or figure of this man. We are by the open fireplace, under the
old lithograph of Alexander Campbell. Flashing in the firelight, is the
old bookcase to the left, containing the bound volumes of the _Millenial
Harbinger_ and Richardson’s old life of Campbell and all the rest of it.
St. Friend, the Giver of Bread, is indeed an old man, a little lame,
leaning on a cane. He is much over six feet tall, when straightened, and
with a smooth shaven countenance, but looking as Abraham Lincoln might
have done, had he lived into another century and grown grayer with no
other sign of the passing of the years. St. Friend, the Giver of Bread,
receives Avanel as a favorite daughter and convert and indeed I feel in
the air the justification for my estimate of this girl. In his presence
she puts aside all vestige of nonsense. It is Church to her to be with
him.
St. Friend disgraces himself by taking the oldest kind of a corncob pipe
from a shelf inside the fireplace and smoking like a chimney. He asks
Avanel if she cares and she says, “No, certainly not.”
We get to the matter of the flags quite late in the evening.
St. Friend tells how in his youth when Apple-Amaranth blossoms had as
now a touch of red in the hearts, those hearts began to be called, “The
Blood of Hunter Kelly,” and St. Friend suggests that the saying be
restored to its former place on the tongues of Springfield, especially
since the red and white star in the municipal flag is copied from this
flower.
Then much of what he and Avanel have to say to each other about the flag
he declares he will put into his next sermon. It is plain to me that
this gray mind leans for vitality upon the mind of the proud young
child. She knows it not but only thinks herself a kind of playmate in a
solemn way.
On the way home Avanel is much ashamed of herself for staying so long
and says that I am an awkward lummox, and I can walk home my own way.
Therefore I make my speech, as I take her sternly to her door. She holds
herself straight as a ramrod, with lips stubbornly pursed together, as I
say:
“Your name is Springfield. If there is any banner of the soul flying
above me, your name is written on it and the white is the pride that
makes you so angry and the red is the strength that makes you an Amazon,
and the blue of the flag is the prairie sky, of which you are the
vainest, loveliest daughter.” Avanel goes into the house with a sharp
“Goodnight.”
May 8:—It is a blazing spring day and everything that was not frosted is
getting quite green. Baby carriages are abroad, with the pink darlings
crowing within them, welcoming the sun. The streets are full of spring
finery. About four o’clock on this jolly afternoon I meet Rabbi Terence
Ezekiel in Tom Strong’s. We fill up on rousing coffee and I manage to
get the conversation around to the Springfield flag about which I am
endlessly curious.
The Rabbi says:—“The star of red and white in the heart of the flag,
being the twenty-first star in the design, indicates, in the official
interpretation, that Illinois was the twenty-first state admitted to the
Union and the red part indicates Springfield, the capital.” But Rabbi
Ezekiel prefers the idea that this red and white star indicates in the
year 2018 the coming of age of Illinois and America.
May 10:—It is Sunday morning, and I am in the Great Cathedral of St.
Peter and St. Paul with Avanel. The whole picture is clean cut around
me. Every word and whisper is clear. There are no clouds at all. Yet the
Cathedral is indeed gigantic. I am reminded of majestic Notre Dame in
Paris. It is the same combination of styles, and St. Friend begins his
sermon with an appeal for a special fund to add the steeples. As in
cathedrals of Europe, only the rectangular foundations of the spires, a
little higher than the roof, are in place.
He preaches the sermon, which Avanel helped him build, which touches on
the flag:
“Visitors to the Fair may care to know the path of white around the red
star of Springfield is the map of our five-pointed system of double
walls and within them a star-plan system of avenues. This system, like
this star, is a symbol of the relation of Springfield to all the outside
world. The top of the star points north to Chicago by way of the
outerwall gate at Mason City. Tomorrow the corn dragon engines begin to
take that route. They are to be dedicated with honors that I hope all
who hear me will be there to endorse and acclaim. The star-point,
indicating northeast, starts our flying machine trip over the inner-wall
gate at Illiopolis and the outerwall gate at Warrensburg and on to
Danville, if you please, and to New York and the sea journey to the
capital of the International Government, which government is looked to
with loyalty by all patriots and honorable men. Highways running
parallel to the air lines in this direction are haunted by memories of
Johnny Appleseed, in the regions of Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Massilon,
Ohio. The roads are of some distinction in all the fruit and flower
religions of Springfield. Our city sends pilgrims that way in the spring
who will yet replant the whole world in glory with many a sacred grove.
But the southeast point of the Springfield star system is a road that
passes through the inner-wall gate at Taylorville and the outer at Pana,
and points in the direction of Virginia and Richmond. Our fruit and
flower devotees take all roads, but because of the wonders of the early
southern spring many of them deem this the holiest way. There are found,
more than other where, the botanizing pilgrims of the faiths of my
friend Rabbi Terence Ezekiel and my friend Mother Grey and her daughter
Roxana. There many of the Rabbi’s young oaks have sprung up in the name
of universal righteousness and that way he still takes his pilgrimage,
according to the mystical doctrine of the Oak which is the foundation of
our Rabbi’s dreams. This road goes through New Harmony, Indiana, before
it turns south into Kentucky. Many pilgrims pass that way to do honor to
the original home of the Golden Rain Tree of Democracy.
“The point in the star-plan system of boulevards that becomes a road
passing through the inner-wall gate at Modesta and the outer at Palmyra
starts the fancy moving along a certain classic flying-machine route
over Alton and St. Louis, southwest to the tremendous motion-picture
studios of the Los Angeles region and the radical educational
institutions evolved from them, which are so great a peril to the land.
This air route I call ‘The Path of Ill Learning.’ It is constantly
travelled by our motion-picture educators and artists who go to exchange
ideas and refresh themselves at Los Angeles, that great seat of
spiritual lies.”
At this point Avanel frowns; indeed she will not be bullied out of her
movies. But she grows grave again and she takes earnestly what else he
has to say:
“The star-point indicating northwest with the inner gate at Ashland and
the outer at Virginia is the one that interests me most. There are three
orders of discipline in connection with this Cathedral. The newest is
the Order of the Blessed Bread of the More Liberal Observance, in whose
name we are to have the great bread distribution on June the eighth. The
one a little older is The Order of the Blessed Bread of the Strict
Observance, a discipline for those lost in despair and determined to
seize one more hope, if there be one, before they consent to die.
“But the oldest order, the darling of the founder of the greater work of
this Cathedral, is the order of the Pilgrimage, founded here seventy-five
years ago by St. Scribe of the Shrines, now gone to his reward. And
the road northwest, as all but strangers in the city know, leads from
the first shrine, which is the tomb of Lincoln, through the gates at
Ashland and Virginia, straight north to Havana and the classic land of
Spoon River and Lewiston, to North Dakota and the coast, and so on
around the world to the hundred shrines. How many young pilgrims have
turned back before they reached the outer gate at Virginia, held more by
soul’s weakness than by bodily weariness, within the double walls built
so long ago by Ralph Adams Cram! But some here present today have
continued the not too difficult journey and have returned to live within
these double walls again and adore the Host upon this altar.”
They have taken the ocean ships or airships of Seattle, they have gone
afoot and by every known vehicle through Asia. It is a journey
unforgettable—to the holy land of Confucius and to his holy grave, to
the Blessed Bohdi Tree of Buddha, to the bathing places of Benares, to
the holy places of Mecca, Jerusalem, Assisi, Rome, Lourdes, and London.
I, too, in my youth, with a fiery young company from Springfield made
this pilgrimage which was first undertaken by St. Scribe and written
down later in his little book of Discipline called: ‘The Hundred
Shrines.’ We went by motor, by steamship, by flying machine, but
whenever possible, afoot. Let the visitor in this audience note that he
who prays at these shrines, according to the office of The Brotherhood
of The Hundred Shrines, has made, we think, the true beginning of life
for a modern soul.
“Every shrine is a modern Station of the Cross. Between shrine and
shrine, await many desperate foes of the soul. And so I have often
called it ‘The Road to Heaven and Hell.’ There is no nominal way to take
this discipline. He who is a little hurt by this discipline is
destroyed.”
May 11:—Avanel and I are taking lunch together at the Fire Cracker King
Restaurant and Coffee House. She is, indeed, giving her absent father a
scolding. It seems that Black Hawk Boone has presumed to “offer advice.”
And she “hates him.” I venture to inquire wherein he has been so
presumptuous as to attempt to guide her wandering feet. And it seems
that he thinks she is too fond of long rehearsals for the celebration of
the festival of St. Scribe, May fifteenth in the Gordon Craig Theatre,
and not enough devoted to the Amazonian drill ground. He wants three
drills a week, not two. He says we may be at war with Singapore any day
and she cannot dance to victory and had best quit religious dancing,
till after the war. My reply is quite deft. I insist that I, at least,
am prepared to appreciate her dancing and am only waiting the next
appearance at the Gordon Craig Theatre and she continues to scowl but
says I have but till the fifteenth to wait. It is now about two in the
afternoon and we are going to hear some speeches. Avanel explains to me
that the first Corn Dragon Engines are starting, with great ceremony, to
Chicago and we are to hear orations at the station before they go. The
transportation district centering in Illinois has, through Eric Hedder,
a ploughboy from near Cairo, evolved a type of a dragon engine, a mate
to the dragon-fly flying machine. A complete set of these engines have
just been finished for the Springfield and Chicago division. They are
equipped with silvery horns instead of shrill whistles. The exercises
are, of course, at the gigantic Union Depot at Tenth and Washington. The
passengers of honor include this Eric Hedder, the Mayor and some of his
political enemies, including Black Hawk Boone, who is making the speech
of the afternoon. This prospect seems to please his daughter fairly
well, considering how she hates him. But now we are there, and Boone is
already speaking:
“You all know that my Kentucky forbears went west and settled down near
Cairo, Illinois, and also that I feel no odium in the appellation
‘Egyptian.’ Possibly the name of the region, ‘Egypt, Illinois’ derives
from the fact that there is an older Cairo, in Egypt. Then Memphis,
Tennessee is not so far away. Possibly the floods and the malaria and
the frogs and the languor and the witchcraft of legend, where the Ohio
comes rolling down into the swamps, help out the Egyptian idea. The time
was when ‘Egypt’ meant, exclusively, that part of Illinois by Cairo. Now
it is applied in derision to all down state Illinois, by the peanut
politicians of Chicago. In a whirlwind world, independent languor
becomes a virtue, and meditation engenders a finer art than any
nervousness.”
Here Avanel whispers to me: “He is a great one to prate of languor.” But
now her father is mentioning an artist she admires.
“Eric Hedder, who designed these engines, is a ploughboy from near my
home-town of Cairo. The corn dragons are indeed messengers from Egypt to
Chicago, and other where. The corn-dragon engine is a giant wound-up
mechanical toy but something more. It is a kind of citizen, through its
Egyptian soul, and through the soul of the engineer who happens at any
time to inhabit it. He is one of our new type of aristocracy. The older
aristocracies indicated their worth by having themselves photographed in
the midst of their athletic sports, at the race track, or playing golf
or croquet, or in soldier’s uniform. But in this year of grace, 2018,
they are depicted as amateur or professional railroad engineers, or the
like. To hold so many lives in trust and to discharge the obligation
year after year without faltering is classed as the occupation of a
scholar and a gentleman. And so, as is the case of all special
privilege, the chariot of privilege is decorated and starred and given
plumes like the corn and made glorious.
“To me this is a journey from the State of Illinois to somewhere else.
Loyalty to Chicago is a commendable thing in itself, but Chicago is the
commercial center of the entire United States, and the only way to keep
it from tipping and teetering the state clean over, is to bring forward
other than commercial considerations. Loyalty to Chicago is loyalty to
Florida and California, Oregon and Maine. These are all of them quite
commendable commonwealths. But loyalty to Springfield is the distinctive
sign of loyalty to Illinois.
“The engines will rush back, bringing skilled mechanics, wise industrial
statesmen, and world leaders in art for little Springfield, down here in
Egypt. Such people are held in infinitely higher honor here than in the
Chicago that made them. All men and women seem to have increased in
vanity in this year 2018, and this is a highly commendable change. I
rejoice that citizens of the United States now live upon honor and its
power more than upon the desire for mere currency. So the corn-dragons
will always be robbing Chicago, America’s commercial capital, of her
best. People will keep coming here for much smaller salaries and for
more passionate praise. [Applause!]
“I hope that the whizzing and whistling of these engines, henceforth
more musical than of old, will be the war cry of our whole Egyptian
village and countryside. I hope that for generation after generation
many dragons of this breed will whirl by, and many another ploughboy,
sighting them through the cornfields, will not only catch the original
vision of Eric Hedder, but new untamed dreams of art and glory and
creation will be engendered on such days.
“Without haste, without rest, our rewards and appreciations pay for our
creations. Let the young Egyptian patriot see these dragons as big
brothers that sweep through the high growing corn armies, messengers
flying from county to county, crying in the trumpet glory of their
silver voices, that art and life are married in the region of the
capital.” [Great Applause!]
Avanel admits that her father had to roar in this case, for the crowd
was large, and, speaking from a station platform in the open air, the
loudest man cannot be heard with traffic going by and newsboys selling
extras about the event before it happens. We walk just a little south
along the viaduct on Tenth from the great New Union Depot to a most
familiar and ancient structure, a kind of rough memorial shrine, which
was once the station whence the Lincoln presidential train left for
Washington and where Lincoln gave his parting word to the City of
Springfield. Outside the door of the museum, Avanel and I re-read
Lincoln’s famous farewell to his fellow citizens, cast in bronze and set
up for a tablet long ago.
Then, being in the mood of reminiscence, we walk past the Lincoln
residence and Avanel begins to compare Lincoln to Jesus and speak of him
as the greatest person sent to men since Jesus. And I think the sibyl
has at last permanently emerged and that my companion is finally with
me.
But there is a devil in this Avanel. And so she says, partly because she
thinks it, and partly because she knows it will annoy me: “I wonder if
the Lincoln residence was located among the best people when it was
built?” And then, as the silence grows deadly on my side of the
conversation: “My grandmother once told me that Mrs. Lincoln was really
a fashionable person and not of poor-white stock like Lincoln and I am
glad to hear it. He must have been a great trial to her, with her
refined instincts.”
My silence growing even more deadly she continues:—“I am sorry the
Lincoln residence is not in a more fashionable region today. I wonder if
they can move it out by the Country Club. Springfield is all ‘society,’
you know, and you might as well admit it.... I wish if they leave the
residence here they would move these common houses and build a great
Greek Temple over the Lincoln home, and make a park for about two
hundred yards each way and have big avenues leading up to it and allow
no common person to live anywhere near here. Lincoln was after all the
greatest person since Jesus and we ought to show some sense of it.”
We stroll on and on, and Avanel, being not yet twenty, as this world
counts the years, is somewhat forgiven for these discursive remarks. She
does not want to be forgiven, and hates my pious forbearance and at last
says: “I simply cannot stand that cheap cowboy hat you wear. It is
simply a ridiculous pose or else the instinct of a rotter.”
So I take Miss Avanel Boone firmly by the arm and turn her toward town
and at my insistence we step into the first gentlemen’s furnishing store
we encounter and I urge her to help the clerk pick out a hat for me.
They select one that is hardly a hair’s breadth different from the one I
have been wearing. I pay for it in paper money, “to please old Black
Hawk Boone,” as I explain to the humorous clerk. Avanel seems placated
by this quip, though there is no reason on earth why she should be. She
begins to behave like a Christian at once and stays so, all the way to
her door. And I bid her good evening and she gives me the word I may
soon see her dancing.
CHAPTER IX
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.
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.
“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.
CHAPTER XI
MATTERS TOUCHING ST. FRIEND, THE GIVER OF BREAD, AND HIS ORDER OF THE
STRICT OBSERVANCE AND HIS ORDER OF THE LIBERAL OBSERVANCE.
June 1, 2018:—In the capital of Illinois, in this year of grace, St.
Friend is a healer of the body and soul. He is more of a philosopher
than the fuming Black Hawk Boone, that is, he has a cooler disposition.
Yet Boone heals by hard maxims, given with that lovely fruit, the
Amaranth-Apple. St. Friend heals by sermons and prayers and the pictured
parables, the rituals envisaged and illuminated in the celebration of
the Office of the Blessed Bread.
The real name of our saint, which no one ever hears, is Hugh Adams
Matheney. He is, away and beyond, the oldest of the Board of Education
or of any of the leaders of the city. He has little fire in his blood,
but has still the greatest reserve battery of nervous force. He was,
even as a little boy, a protege and disciple of St. Scribe of the
Shrines, who was then in the height of his glory as a leader of our
town. He preceded St. Friend as the dominating figure of the Cathedral
of St. Peter and St. Paul and handed down to him and to the whole city
the old doctrine, with a new emphasis, that the whole human race is the
mystical body of Christ, soon to be raised from the dead. On his
mother’s side St. Friend is a descendant of a long line of members of
the Church of the Disciples. On his father’s side his ancestors are
notable in several lines, for instance, the Matheneys of Springfield.
The original Matheneys put up one of the first three settlers’ log
cabins ever erected in this county. The Adams strain is from New
Harmony, Indiana. There they were bakers for several generations. The
cottage of St. Friend has his baker’s coat of arms painted over the
little front door, over the tremendous open fireplace, and in the little
dining room. On one slender pole, in front of his cottage, all of his
family flags are flying. The most important of the flags, in the
estimation of St. Friend, is that of the clan of these same Adams people
from New Harmony.
St. Friend is the last of his actual clan to be a baker, though the town
is full of his first and second cousins;—and third cousins, indeed, that
claim him proudly. He has adopted a son, an orphan boy, early
apprenticed to his flour barrels by the school authorities, a boy of
Thibetan ancestry and one of a small local group of Thibetans. He is now
grown. Except for ceremonial occasions he has long graduated from
baking. He is occupied in designing more exquisite and slender sunset
towers, of the school of Louis H. Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, to
add one more circle to the outer ring, when purple cottages and old
buildings have been sufficiently cleared away. He is known as the “young
St. Friend” or the “Thibetan boy.”
When I have passed him on the street, I have observed him muttering to
himself or occasionally walking and arguing with the other Thibetans. He
looks every inch the stranger, with square face and almond eyes, and
skin brickdust red, with heavy bronze beneath it.
The sister of St. Friend, living in the same cottage, a mild, ghostly
creature, creeping about, is more than a centenarian. She remembers the
celebration of Armistice Day, November 11, 1918. She was then a baby in
her father’s arms, and held out her hands to catch the falling showers
of confetti thrown from the high buildings. She thought it was snow.
St. Friend graduated from the Hay-Edwards school. He went through one of
Springfield’s High Schools. He continued on for a while through the
Municipal University of the town. He attended a college of his faith at
Washington, D. C. He then became a novice of the order of St. Scribe of
the Shrines and took that discipline as literally as possible.
St. Friend is a close correspondent of the hundred radical bishops who
are, often in remoter fashion, followers of St. Scribe of the Shrines,
while at the same time they are conserving the results of the Church
Revolution. Two of these bishops, the present leaders of the order, were
young pilgrims with him when he made the journey commanded by St.
Scribe, the pilgrimage around the world to the one hundred shrines of
the one hundred religions, beginning with the Tomb of Lincoln. The boy
returned while St. Scribe was still in his prime and a rousing,
dominating figure in the city. The boy became the private secretary of
the Saint. When the saint was an old man, the disciple was his
confidential adviser and finally, when the great man departed this life,
the office of leading the Cathedral flock naturally devolved upon the
disciple. It was about this time that the rumor began to move among the
people that the departed St. Scribe was once Hunter Kelly and it slowly
became the fashion, with some of the more fanciful citizens, to speak of
Hunter Kelly-St. Scribe as though they were one guardian spirit. St.
Friend was offered the headship of the order of St. Scribe but he
refused it and, without abandoning his place and the prescribed forms
and prayers of this discipline, he set up quite a separate order of his
own, the Order of the Blessed Bread of the Strict Observance, and today
he has proclaimed from the Cathedral pulpit the setting up of a more
popular order, of the more liberal observance, and though there is much
not yet cleared up by the sermon, Avanel is resolved to join, if
possible, and recruit me, if it may be done.
This is the history of The Order of The Strict Observance:—For many
years St. Friend has given himself, in true devotion, as a member of the
Springfield Associated Charities, to provide for the handful of
defectives, drug fiends, and those outlaws who are now classed with them
by common consent:—the unskilled laborers. St. Friend finds in his heart
a great Franciscan pity for them. He finds there a sharp social
rebellion that there should be any outlaws or helpless ones whatever. So
he has become, by acclamation, the perpetual head of the Associated
Charities, and these feverish wanton ones have been cheerfully left to
his over-solicitude. The entire contingent of the socially crippled cuts
as small a figure on the general horizon of the city as did the group of
the professional paupers in the days when blind men turned hand organs.
The educational machinery is such that within the double city walls,
built long ago by Ralph Adams Cram, the so-called “exploited” have long
been kept out. People in general are well-fed, super-skilled laborers.
And they have about all the carnal bread and all the carnal circuses
they can well digest.
But St. Friend, who in his youth wept for every fallen sparrow till he
could weep no more, has long maintained his Order of the Blessed Bread
of the Strict Observance for those left behind in the race, generally
degenerate sons and daughters of old settlers. The order is properly
called the “Brotherhood of the Blessed Bread.” Those who join eat of a
bread baked from a special Sangamon County wheat, planted between the
inner and the outer wall by some of the various sects of the Flower
Religion and the Park Religion. St. Friend cares not what sect plants
the wheat, so it be planted by those who believe in democracy and
prayer.
After due vigil, the bread is skilfully baked by the Thibetan boy, or
other chosen members of the society. Those who eat of it are exhorted,
but not commanded, to take the oath before John Boat, for the bread,
till now, has been primarily intended for the Brotherhood of the Strict
Observance.
This oath before John Boat or other cooperating justice of the peace is
printed in the little book of devotion that goes with the Strict
Observance. The book and oath are intended for the most hopeless
derelicts only. Presumably the bread is eaten for the first time by
these, after the oath is administered.
The gray-headed old justice of the peace furnished the idea himself,
when he and St. Friend were young men, and St. Friend kept the copy of
the oath and brooded upon it long before he felt it politic to found the
order. John Boat had observed, in his experience as a notary, that men,
who seem but animated putrescence, still regard their sworn word in
court. It is the last chance to put iron into them. This thought in
mind, the oath is administered with the solemnity that went into the old
monastic vows. From the many who have been given life by the oath, St.
Friend has taken great assurance that he is on the road to a tremendous
social amelioration.
June 2:—Because Avanel and I have decided to join the more liberal
observance of the Order of the Blessed Bread, though we, as yet, know
little about it, she is eager to show to me the occasion of the
administering of the oath of the Strict Observance. This Monday morning
we are taking the back bench in the shadowy corner of the justice court
to watch the older ceremonial. Now most oaths in court are rattled off
like parrot words, but to John Boat this is an occasion when he is a
priest after the order of Melchizedek. He gives a seeming dignity to the
most carping and exacting demand of the pledge, reading it line upon
line. Blue-faced Surto Hurdenburg, the derelict, echoes him with full
and honest intent, repeating every line after the learned court with
great respect and devotion.
This is the text of the pledge:—
State of Illinois
City of Springfield,
June 2, 2018.
I, Surto Hurdenburg, accepting the lordship of Christ, do solemnly
swear, by the everliving God, that from this time henceforth I will
support the Constitution of the World Government, the Constitution of
the United States, the Laws of Illinois, the Ordinances of Springfield,
that I will faithfully observe and keep inviolate the moral laws of the
community; that I will carefully and faithfully observe my duty to my
neighbor, recognizing his rights at all times; that I will endeavor to
become an expert workman and member of a guild; that I will faithfully,
honestly and conscientiously exercise my rights of franchise as a member
of my guild and a citizen of the community, with a firm determination to
bring about the best results for clean and honest government, and that I
will devote as much strength as possible to the study of civic reform,
examining at all times the opinions of clean-minded radical citizens and
acting on them according to the dictates of my conscience. I
specifically promise to abstain from motion-picture shows, yellow dance
halls, bad women, alcoholic liquors and narcotics, and to denounce and
work against in every way possible the traffic in Singaporian cocaine.
Further and finally, I promise to eat the Blessed Bread of this Order of
the Strict Observance, according to the manner and at the times laid
down in the Book of Devotion, and to follow the discipline for body and
soul there prescribed and imposed for the good of the order and the
health and well-being of my city.
(Signed) Surto Hurdenburg.
Subscribed and sworn to before me this Second Day of June, 2018.
(Seal) John Boat
Notary Public.
I conclude that, in the light of Springfield life as I have seen it
these strange days, it will be easier for such as Surto Hurdenburg to
keep the more literal specifications of the pledge, such as the ban on
motion pictures, than to enter into the deep mazes of citizenship with
judgment. He will keep close to St. Friend and the order, who hate the
films, and thereby be able to let the films alone. Most photoplays
outside of the educational buildings or beyond the immediate
jurisdiction of the World’s Fair authorities are shown on the right or
left of the sauntering corridors opening on the Yellow Dance Halls on
the same floors. Here half-hour lengths of film are run through, when
the crowd sweeps in to rest. The merits of the exceedingly artistic
studio and theatre, called “The Egyptian Photoplay Association,” headed
by Gwendolyn Charles and Rabbi Terence Ezekiel remain unappreciated by
St. Friend and the members of the Order of the Strict Observance. This
in spite of the fact that the Photoplay Association in question now has
in charge most of those exquisite and unimpeachable film theatres of the
University World’s Fair and several other worth-while film-theatre
circuits in Central Illinois. “The Egyptian Photoplay Association” will
rent slightly worn films to Yellow Dance Halls, after first runs in
these others, and thereby make the films in the eyes of the Order of the
Strict Observance, mere devil’s nets for fish.
So, though the highly esteemed Rabbi Terence Ezekiel tries to act as
mediator, there is eternal war between the fiery Gwendolyn Charles and
this saint.
For a long time back truly aesthetic and truly educational motion
pictures have been shown in the school and University class rooms. Many
of them are scientific and historical records and renderings. In the odd
hours of loafing through these three months I have noted many of them as
of the best gifts of the new time. But our stubborn St. Friend, as a
member of the school board, generally votes against them, and in
solitary grandeur. While at one with the general policies of the
educational system, he makes many a speech before the members for the
restoration of the regime of the book and the blackboard. He truly says
that these are now almost abolished in the presence of the protean
triumphant films, of the street pageantry, the training of skilled labor
in the high schools, of the oral, the phonographic, telegraphic and
telephone methods, applied to all forms of teaching. And only last week
he met what appeared to be his Waterloo when it was voted to extend and
enlarge the entirely respectable, if a little frigid, university dance
halls and to include motion picture loafing rooms, the better to run
competition with the Yellow Halls.
Some of these things I go over with Avanel, as we walk home from
witnessing Surto Hurdenburg’s oath, and we wonder just what of the
forbidden things, besides motion pictures, St. Friend will include in
his pledge for the Liberal Observance. Avanel says: “I admit that the
men who are sworn in, like this Surto Hurdenburg, are apt to become
useful, if fanatical, citizens. Their poor strength must be economized
in narrow channels if it is to last and be recuperated. But if St.
Friend tries to put such a set of chains on me I will not speak to him
for a month.”
Saturday, June 7:—St. Friend has today given it out by word of mouth and
by editorials in the five papers that the whole world is welcome to his
bread. The Order of the Liberal Observance is already more popularly
called by the alternate descriptive title: “The Citizens in the
Communion of the Blessed Bread.” There is no oath; even a Quaker may
join.
Sunday, June 8:—It is the warmest morning of the year, so far, in an
exceedingly backward summer. It is the first real June weather, and all
the people rejoice in it. Avanel walks to church in the most wonderful
of white airy dresses. And in these vacuum-cleaned streets, with no soot
and no coal dust and no factory grime, people, working or playing, can
be dressed all day as for a party if they choose.
All day yesterday couriers of all faiths, representing St. Friend’s
personal rather than his religious companions, have been out inviting
the people. At least one member of each family has been asked to bring
his tribe to the Cathedral green and to listen and carry the message
back with the bread.
Avanel and I are early for Church and so we make a circuit, enjoying the
airy splendors of the crowd. And we go around by St. John’s Hospital, so
lately rebuilt by the insistence of Mayo Sims, to vindicate his
scientific zeal, and they say it is a splendid scientific monument to
any man. It is east of the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, as it
has been for over four generations. And the heretic synagogue and the
school for teaching Hebrew, conducted by Rabbi Terence Ezekiel, are on
the sites where the two orthodox synagogues were, one hundred years ago.
The green in front of the Cathedral was enclosed by a beautiful Gothic
wall long ago, at the same time the devout congregation rebuilt the
church. The enclosure is rapidly filling with people. St. Friend is to
speak to the whole city from the Cathedral steps.
Piled on great wooden trays on the side of the Cathedral steps are the
splendid brown loaves, put there for all the world by the Brotherhood of
the Strict Observance, who are about in their almost monkish official
robes, proud indeed to be so prominent.
Blue-faced Surto Hurdenburg, so lately sworn in, is an ex-headwaiter of
alleged New York hotel training and he is now to prove his mettle. He is
about his task decorously and swiftly enough, for those seated and
settled already have the tissue-wrapped loaves in their laps, and all
through the sermon, as fast as our citizens are settled, they are given
their loaves without a sound or a grimace, and Hurdenburg, the
efficient, rises high at once in the estimation of the children of
light.
But now the saint rises to speak. He is indeed a figure; his white hair
gleams in the June morning air. His face is the face of Lincoln, grown
old, with a touch of St. Francis eternally young. He straightens to his
full height. He is fifty years younger. He is one of those capable of
seeming collapse for weeks, when it is but the storage time, and then
the lightning is discharged in one tremendous hour.
There is a certain vast medieval humor about him. He is vested in his
ceremonial baking apron and Avanel giggles till he actually begins to
speak. This is the end of his sermon:—
“Pray consider that, in your freedom from vows this splendid June day,
you are nevertheless dubbed knights, my fellow citizens. In medieval
times monks and knights served the Church with the same divine vocation
and devotion.
“The Church of Springfield has come. It is the sunlit grass of this
park; it is this Illinois sky. Under the roof of this Cathedral behind
me and of all the churches, temples, and synagogues of this town, its
primer work has been done and will be done. It will begin with sheltered
faiths and will not contradict or undermine any.
“It seems that we must periodically sing hymns and look at the little
jeweled holy things and read the precious little books, or we cannot go
on and out and up. There was only one Johnny Appleseed in the history of
mankind. His image is in our Cathedral, but even he read Swedenborg and
clung to that system. Yet sooner or later, like that great saint Johnny
Appleseed, we awaken to our great outdoors, and all the visions there.
“All Holy worship, learned, as when Johnny Appleseed walked the
highroad, or the primer lesson when he first read Swedenborg beneath his
boyhood roof, makes over the mere bread of comradeship into this blessed
bread which will heal our shameful diseases of body and of soul.
“Share it, share it! When we have shared the blessed bread, communing
like true friends, the beauty of all Heaven, the sea in which we move
that is above all and through all and in all, will gild more perfectly
the Springfield daily grind and the Springfield sabbath. The devout
convert and his child and his grandchild will build his house as
beautifully as our Sacred Apple Tree is made, as righteously as the
Sacred Oak Tree, as democratically as the Golden Rain Tree, which
spreads its branches like a gate for all of us to pass through in
equality. The devout convert will build such architecture as glitters in
the songs and books of devotion of St. Scribe.
“The voices of the children will be as noble as the discourses of the
prairie winds that catch our tree boughs at sunset. Every house will be
as delicate and subtle as the ferny hollows of the Sangamon. The convert
will name many birds that will come at his call and he will feed them
crumbs of this Blessed Bread in friendship.
“When Springfield has partaken of this manna for a generation, all
things will become new. Leavening thoughts will come from all the street
corners. Novel fancies will come from the coffee houses. The conferences
and colloquies of fallible men will take on something of the aspect of
the meetings of the inspired souls of Heaven.
“We walk our plain path! We eat our plain bread in a rare fellowship!
Therefore all things become eternal. The Church of Springfield, the
church of this sunlit grass, the church of a million days and nights, is
proclaimed from the steps of this Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul
this day.”
And now Avanel comments:—“If you look deeply into the aphorisms my
father serves with his apples and with his paper money theory, you will
find, though he is no atheist or mocker, he is a son of the narrow, dry
antagonisms of some of the village atheist stock with which our blood
mingled during our sojourn in Egypt. I glory in my Indian ancestry, even
if I do not make myself conspicuous with my hair loose and my left hand
crimson. But as to my father’s village-infidel streak, I have no use for
it. Moreover, I heard him ding dong his doctrines in my childhood at
times when he was not at his best. I know better how to take St. Friend.
Both are narrow as mousetraps on their literal side, if one has a turn
for being caught.
“I think I choose St. Friend for my guide, because he begins and ends
with prayer. I do not stay away from motion pictures, as he commands,
nor from the Yellow Dance Halls, as he and my father both command. But I
distrust these places, because of the warnings of these good men. I will
eat this bread, you and I will eat it together, though I know it is
railed at in the Yellow Dance Halls, and I know the keen things that are
said there against such superstitions. We will continue to eat together
the Amaranth-Apples that are tabooed there. We will read together the
proverbs and songs and prayers of St. Scribe and, while our feet may be
in the Yellow Halls, our souls will be making the pilgrimage of the one
hundred religions. We will be thinking together how the whole human race
is the body of Christ, soon to be raised from the dead.”
And so this evening Avanel invites me to her own select table in the inn
at the top of one of the great northwest gates, the inner gate, that
overlooks the former village of Ashland, Cass County, and is one of the
chief glories of the Inner Wall. It is the Musicians’ Building and from
here oftener than anywhere else on this wall, sound the special evening
hymns and organ solos and chimes, over this whole segment of the city
and over the forest parks to the north, between the walls. Pilgrims pass
through the gate beneath us. They have visited, according to the ritual,
Lincoln’s monument, the First Shrine of St. Scribe—Hunter Kelly, and
they are hurrying along his great highway leading northwest through the
Gate of the Outer Wall, that overlooks the former village of Virginia in
old Cass County.
Our refractory is called:—The Pilgrim’s First Inn. It is on the
cafeteria principle but is a most spacious place, being the whole floor
of the tower, with tremendous sheets of glass for windows, so that an
aviator, circling it, can see straight through it from every angle, and
all the colored and decorative searchlights of this happy June evening
sweep through it as the twilight comes on, lights for the most part of
the delicate tints of the towers:—more like rapid clouds, left over from
the sunset, than sharp, searching, swords.
So Avanel and I find our table, in proper chatting distance from several
others, some of whom have also brought their brown loaf. And we carry
from the counter a few things like coffee and butter and Amaranth-Apples
and we banquet. She speaks more lovingly of her father’s many moods. She
divides the apples, uttering at the same time scraps of his philosophy.
At last we take the bread of St. Friend. It is our communion service,
High Mass of comradeship.
Avanel quotes from the Gospel of Luke,—from Luke’s deathless story of
the first communion.
There is a ringing of bells all over the city, silvery and sweet, and in
every tower of the walls:—the ringing of the star chimes. It is a clear
night. The sweeping colored lights are gone. We go to the great expanse
of windows and look up.
Avanel says:—“The trouble with this breaking of bread is that it is a
pledge to break our bodies. I do not want to break mine for a long time,
if ever.”
“Yet,” I say, “You ride your pale war horse.” Avanel, the dancer,
replies:—“Let us hope that the war will never come. Let us hope, before
the time war is due, the body of Christ, the whole human race, will be
raised from the dead.”
CHAPTER XII
HOW THROUGH SERMONS BY ST. FRIEND AND BY POLITICAL ACTIVITY, SUCH AS
THAT OF SURTO HURDENBURG, THE YELLOW DANCE HALLS ARE VOTED OUT FOR GOOD.
June 9, 2018:—I have given up art teaching in a separate studio of my
own and have been, for some time, merely writing verses and loafing
about and peering into the town, often with old Sparrow Short. This
comes about because I have sent my few pupils over to him. He is a most
likable fellow. He puts on no airs whatever. We find we have a great
ocean of common opinions and identical prejudices in the field of art
and an equal love of feeding crumbs to the English sparrows and other
such birds and we keep off ground where we would be hostile in argument.
I think I did the town a good turn when I persuaded such people as
showed symptoms of studying with me, to study with him. In return he
urges me to give criticisms in his life classes when I feel the urge to
impart to youth, or when he is out loafing, or helping decorate some of
the newly revamped yellow halls, particularly the Hall of Velaska. The
latest occasion when I took over his place came about because he was
locked up for days without anyone to go his bail all for alleged treason
to the World Government. At last Boone lets him out, by going bond, with
a roaring lecture, which is replied to in kind, they say, with no show
of gratitude whatever. But the privilege of being out on bond is
precarious and liable to be withdrawn to one waiting trial for World
Treason and Short keeps me in sight for emergencies. Sparrow Short is,
of course, passionately loyal to the Star Spangled Banner and
Washington’s Farewell Address but that is considered only one half of
patriotism and called “World-Anarchy” now. Most of the people who study
under him do not care what his views may be on any subject but art. He
is the best teacher and that is enough for them. And, as a matter of
fact, in expressing his international views which he does out of
teaching hours, he is a roaring baby and unworthy of the attention of
grown up politicians. But I tell him that even grown ups in politics
should not be too much censured for misunderstanding him. People, like
Short, who fight for individuality and whose whole object as teachers is
to promote the diversity of their pupils, cannot see why the world
cannot be one great art class. They are, indeed, in strong contrast with
state builders, who build with men in masses and blocks.
This morning Short takes me around to the Hall of Velaska, when it is
absolutely deserted except by ourselves, and shows me with pride the
pictures he has given the hall. These pictures are so set in the walls,
they seem painted there, and the whole color scheme that Short has long
planned holds them together. There is a defiant touch of Singaporian
green in it, sometimes with the glisten of the hated green glass, but
the place is otherwise in the most quiet and inoffensive taste.
The first picture is the one that he had long planned for the World’s
Fair, till it was debarred on account of its subject:—the portrait of
_Mara of Singapore_, when she was the age of Juliet. Next is what Short
calls a Fairy Fashion-plate, a gown to be worn at the funeral of an
exceedingly wealthy bumblebee. If we are to believe our guide, Mr.
Short, here is depicted an occasion when one must wear a look of grief
and resignation and an appropriate costume. Short explains that all
bootlicking fairies consider it good form to blacken the face on such
occasions. They will not blacken their faces for bumblebees who are
poor. But, when a deal of honey is left to sustain the mourners, it has
become a convenient manner of expressing grief for the honeyeater to
steal an ink bottle off a writing table and spill the ink all over one’s
self. One looks more crestfallen than in any conventional black. So this
fairy manikin is dressed in gray dove’s feathers and ink poured on her
in streaks and her little face is all smudged with it. Soon she will
hurry home, take a complete bath, and eat the honey.
The Boy and the Ostrichissimus:—The Ostrichissimus is a bird about three
times the size of the ostrich and with ostrich plumes all over it, and
some of them so long behind, it has not the insulting shape of the
ostrich. A more graceful neck helps also. Its head is not so bald. The
Ostrichissimus is driven with a silk cord, passed through the mouth, for
a bridle. The boy driving holds on tight with both knees and is a little
scared but enjoying himself immensely. They are hurrying across the
Sahara desert.
The Devil is Making Candy:—Short explains that this is a picture with a
purpose. The Devil, in a cook’s costume, is bending over the usual candy
kettle. Peeping in at the door are those that wait for his candy. These
are the usual run of sinners, types that appear in sermon pictures, the
miser with his gold and the Magdalene with her painted jaws, etc. The
devil looks exceedingly sly but Short explains that there is nothing for
him to look sly about. It is only fudge. The Devil tests it by dipping
in his finger, which, of course, he can do without burning himself.
“Yet,” says Short, “I would not eat after the Devil’s fingers. Would
you?”
The Sewing Machine of Fate:—Fate is an old woman among the stars, big as
a sign of the zodiac. She is crouched in a heap over a sewing machine.
It is a little too small for her clumsy hands but she can use it.
Forever and forever, with eyes that never lift from the plunging needle,
she bends over her task, sending through new cloth from the looms of
time. When this cloth has passed under the needle, it is written with
characters that can never be snipped out. This inscription is all she
lives for. Yet, like the inscriptions of the temples of Yucatan, it is
forever unreadable except to ghosts, hobgoblins, spooks, and such like
creatures, with whom sensible people have nothing to do.
There is one great blank space on the wall, for the portrait of the
mythical queen of the revels in this particular Yellow Hall, Sally Mary
Ann Velaska Harris, familiarly called “Velaska.”
Sunday, June 15:—I find myself this morning in the loft of the gigantic
Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul with Surto Hurdenburg. His face is
still painted blue by mother nature, as a reminder of his long struggles
with alcohol. But there are new unquenchable fires within. He looks like
a broken down but repentant Bill Sykes. He takes the sermon with great
literalness, as I know, by his asides to me.
St. Friend’s voice is much more quavering and old than last Sunday. He
is living in the reaction from that tremendous physical outlay. It is as
though we were endowed with a special sense of hearing and were
listening from celestial parapets to the cry of a sick man on the earth.
Such is the magnificence and medievalism of the old church, so brilliant
are its windows, so austere its pillars and niches for the saints, and
the images of those saints, that it seems to have been built a thousand
instead of a hundred years ago. Yet here are not only images of St.
Peter and St. Paul, but of a long line of saints, as beautiful as
America itself all the way to yesterday. Here are Saint Francis and
Swedenborg, and Johnny Appleseed before whom candles are burning:—Hunter
Kelly, in his aspect of St. Scribe of the Shrines, and Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Mary Baker Eddy, and the first Mother Grey, founder of the
flower religion and Jane Addams and that tremendous and divine jester
and poet and sage, Abraham Lincoln. There are a hundred other niches
with the American saints and world saints and a hundred others waiting
for the saints of tomorrow.
But Surto Hurdenburg is listening to the sermon. Here is a fragment
thereof:—
“The solution of the problem of the social evil can be given in four
words: ‘THE PROUD CITIZEN WOMAN.’
“Springfield has no tenements but until the life of the United States
outside of Springfield has its larger hours of leisure and more green
clear spaces in which to cultivate codes and fine observances between
boy and girl, the custom of selling the young girls to the slaughter
will leap over double Gothic walls and invade those groves and parks we
call ‘Springfield.’ We have the beginning of chivalry in many ways, such
as the public school honor pageants and athletic honor tournaments and
all the fine codes of Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the First, in connection
therewith. We still need more sense of honor, honor beyond the point of
Bayard and the Cid.
“There is only one issue for sweethearts:—honor or dishonor, citizen or
slave. So it has been from the beginning of time, so it will continue
till woman’s redemption and complete emancipation. The fantastic Hindu
would die ten thousand deaths before he would break caste.
“The stubborn Mohammedan or Jew will yet be torn to shreds before he
will consent to offer to an idol. Not all the tides of the world
cynicism has changed these. The Japanese would cut out his tongue before
he would speak a slighting word against the flag or honor of Japan or do
a work in her despite. Are these people to be mocked for having a code?
“By standing by those Don Quixotic notions they prove they are men, not
cattle. America, led by such orchard cities as Springfield and the other
capitals that are turning their streets into parks of worship, should
have one patriotism, one caste rule, one religion, the religion of
honoring woman as a comrade citizen.
“The Yellow Dance Halls are deceits. They dance lies. Their unwritten
laws are poisonous Singaporian devices that in the end make beasts of
boys and girls and take cocaine for granted. And in the sporting,
boastful excitement of cocaine, ill things are born, vendettas that only
yesterday brought mortal bloodshed upon our streets and tricks that
shamed us before the ages.
“The election is coming Tuesday, the Yellow Dance Hall Parade, tomorrow.
Let us remember that this referendum election has been brought about by
the signatures of the entire Board of Education, of over half the City
Council and of a completely representative host of citizens of all
families and clans and faiths. If we who have signed that paper win our
petition, it is the last and third call and the voters will grant that
The Yellow Dance Halls be banished from our city forever. Tomorrow the
Yellow Parade is coming. There will be every effort on the part of the
yellow claque to laugh down the seriousness of the issue. Let no friend
of this Cathedral take part in that parade. Let all good citizens, at
every spare moment from this hour to the election, go forth to urge
their immediate kith and kin and fellow clansmen to turn out at the
polls and vote for the banishment of these places and let my friends who
have taken the especial Oath of the Strict Observance consider this
election their charge and let them leave nothing undone that will secure
a full showing at the polls of the voters of whatever persuasion. The
only way to lose this election is by staying at home.”
The voice of the aged and weary St. Friend rises almost to a shriek. He
pauses many times for breath but goes on, clinging to the pulpit as he
may, exhausted by vigil and anger:—
“The Yellow Halls, where all public gambling is carried on and all
election money passes! The Yellow Halls, where, despite the legislation
of a clearly established majority, through a hundred years, the gold and
alcohol from far beneath the gilded roofs, is brought forth from mouldy
hiding places and doled out to corrupt the electorate and thwart the
clearly recorded will of the people. How long shall we endure these
secret multimillionaires and secret wine kings and secret cocaine kings,
despising every phase of thoroughbred and honor-bound American
Democracy? Despite all the doings of the month of May, not one hiding
place of their gold has been unearthed, not one case of their wine has
been dug up and confiscated by the Federal Government.
“Yet their children know these secret treasuries and meet in these halls
to corrupt all the other children of the city. From way below gilded
roofs the poison venders ascend by tortuous and shameful passages and go
forth to dance and destroy and defeat the plain will of the people as
recorded in initiative, referendum, and recall, and elections at the
polls and guild elections:—and even, at the height of their folly, to
whisper Singaporian treason.”
And so St. Friend has done and Surto Hurdenburg beside me takes him with
exceeding literalness and goes forth to agitate and organize even more
zealously till this battle is over.
Monday, June 16:—Such is the protean character of human nature that at
least one third of that congregation of yesterday, having their costumes
already prepared, think it is a pity not to use them, and are in the
parade this afternoon, which comes immediately after business hours, at
four o’clock.
The parade is led by Velaska, and her minions are scattering giant
asters from her yellow barge. She is an unknown and wears a yellow mask.
All this is a tradition of these parades. The pantomime acts and dances,
the width and length of the block, made up of a thousand clowns and
jesters with baubles, go by; and Falstaffs without number. Because of
the vacuum-cleaned streets and streets not so hard as of old underfoot,
endless dancing and delicate and crisp and diaphanous effects can be
secured and kept effective. But it is all yellow, not orange:—from
Bacchus and Ariadne to the April gods and goddesses of all of Asia.
Three great ballets, the New York, the New Orleans and the St. Louis,
are imported to dance their way down the streets. The parade follows the
exact route of the other and pours north on Sixth defiantly past the
Cathedral, where I am watching it as it ends. The crowd has begun to
clear away. There is a rabble of automobiles. Then there is a queer
hush. The auto horns stop blowing.
There comes the palanquin of the Man of Singapore, followed by that of
his daughter, Mara:—such familiar sights to a certain number of
Springfield citizens, that the element they add to the day’s pageantry
is nominal, but to those sensitive on the issue it is everything
politically. _The Boone Ax_ reporters scan once more, for the thousandth
time, the unreadable faces of the two, searching out the Mystery of
Asia. The man bows to his friends and the girl does the same and,
according to those who have seen them many times before, their aspect is
not one hair’s breadth changed from former occasions. The blazing green,
in the name of the Green Glass Buddha of Singapore is, if anything, a
rest to the eyes after the uncanny yellow in the name of other less
mysterious gods.
I am most of all impressed with the fact, seeing him for the first time,
that the Man from Singapore is, after all, in his Asiatic way, a superb
gentleman. His daughter seems to me the most high bred of gazelle-like
ladies, which, indeed, I had known from her child portrait by Sparrow
Short and by Short’s careful report of her ways.
So it is hard for the honest puritans of _The Boone Ax_, even those who
were not born yesterday, to find legitimate place for a new denouncing
of the Professor of Malay Arts and Letters and his daughter. And so the
late evening edition of _The Boone Ax_ calls them “the two strangers.”
That is all.
I have a jolly evening with Old Sparrow Short in the Tom Strong Lunch
Room. There with many others, friends of the halls, Short is quite frank
over the issue of tomorrow and prattles away at the pessimists. He
feels, for a certainty, all needed is that everyone there glow and
enthuse. Coffee Kusuko owns most of the Yellow Halls, of course. That
means he uses them any way Slick Slack Kopensky and Mayo Sims direct, at
a crisis, and tonight the talk at the neighboring tables is all for the
Yellow people and as loud as possible to be skillful. This is true in
the Drug Stores of Smith as well, no doubt, for they are in the same
combination.
Then later in the evening we go together to take Avanel to the Hall of
Velaska, somewhat to the astonishment of Short, who knows she hates him.
But she wants to give him a chance at her approval, through his
pictures. When the revellers sight my lady, the leers fade, and the boa
constrictor dances of Singapore subside. And the gray head of Short puts
them somewhat on their dignity, even if they merely regard Avanel with
spite. But so many of them are sage and solemn with her and bow so
carefully!
“They are trying too hard,” says Avanel.
Sparrow Short shows us the mottoes he has painted high on the walls:
“Good Cheer Can Save the Soul.”
“Let us Cultivate the Patience of Humor.”
“Let us Seek the Humility of Humor and Laugh at Ourselves.”
“The Touch of Humor is in all Successful Politics.”
“No Man is Too Awkward to Dance.” (But he has never danced in his life!)
Then he shows us the picture of Velaska, the mythical muse of the Hall.
Velaska is expecting her lover. She is dressed in the heaviest and most
pretentious of yellow silks; were it not for her veil, there would be no
harmony. But it is iridescent, covers her from head to foot, blending
and modifying all.
She wears her yellow mask. Short says:—“Her lover will not see her face
till the dawn, when she lays aside her veil also.”
He is quite proud of his picture. Avanel is politely interested and no
more. The picture gives me the headache, I am sure it is the poorest
thing Short has done. He thinks it is the flag of liberty, almost equal
to the Star Spangled Banner, and the Declaration of Independence, and
Washington’s Farewell Address. Avanel dances with many loving and
devoted boys. Avanel admires enthusiastically all the other pictures of
Short and his decorations. But it is plain, when the evening is over,
they still hate each other.
Tuesday, June 17:—Today “Velaska” and her train are voted out “for good
and all.” Blue-faced Surto Hurdenburg and a thousand like him have gone
from house to house, talking incessantly. Morality is always keener in
the followers than the leaders, and Hurdenburg and his kind worked among
the sharp strong-minded semi-obscure people, just a little better than
themselves, whose edge is not dulled by many successes or the paradoxes
and mixed alliances that come about through the long possession of
power.
Some Yellow Dance Hall people charge that Drug Store Smith, Coffee
Kusuko, and Slick Slack Kopensky pocketed the campaign fund of the
dug-up gold, to bury it in their own pits.
The “dead game sports” of the city roar themselves purple about a
“tyrannical minority” and “horrible puritanism” despite the heaviest
majority against them that the laughing city ever polled on any issue.
They try to spread the wild rumor that “tobacco and coffee will go next
and then the theatre.”
CHAPTER XIII
HOW BLUE-FACED SURTO HURDENBURG IS LYNCHED. HOW THE TOWN SWEEPS ON INTO
THE GLORIES OF SUMMER AND JUNE BRIDES AND THE GORGEOUSNESS OF THE TOWERS
FROM NIGHTFALL TILL MIDNIGHT. HOW MY LOVE AND I ARE AGAIN ENSNARED BY
DEVIL’S GOLD.
June 20, 2018:—Last night was presumably the time of the final closing
of the halls, at precisely five minutes of twelve. So at five minutes of
eight or thereabouts, one of the younger members of the Montague Rock
family brings, with great secrecy and under special devices of disguise,
a treasury of wine from beneath some cellar of his clan and distributes
it to a carefully censored company in the Yellow Hall of the Mythical
Velaska. The world begins to burn for those here assembled for their
farewell dance. It so happens that Hurdenburg, intoxicated from the mere
drink of victory, hears the noise as he passes. He mounts the stairs. He
breaks past a guard who has himself had enough drink to make him too
easy. But the remainder of the company have had enough to make them too
stern and at the very sight of the “puritan” Hurdenburg, they turn to
beasts. They have been saying, moreover, that they were going to hang
the whole Board of Education and “every other damned hypocrite in town.”
They have been denouncing, with some shrieks, “the millions of rank
hypocrites” with which America is beset, hypocrites who banish the gold
and the alcohol to the cellars and will not permit people to be “honest
millionaires” and “honest drunkards” when they please. “What the town
really needs,” they have been saying,—and Crawling Jim, slayer of Beau
Nash, has been saying it the loudest,—is a vigilance committee. What the
“holy city of Springfield needs is a committee to hang with ropes all
people who attempt to regulate the religion or the habits of their
neighbors.” By religion, Jim probably means the Singaporian religion but
does not stress that point.
And so, at sight of Hurdenburg, the infamous minion of the wicked St.
Friend, Hurdenburg drunk on political and ecclesiastical power, they
make a rush for him, and, led by crawling Jim, this crew, in the masks
of the Mythical Velaska, tie Surto Hurdenburg to a pillar. They drink
more buried treasure, as they decide what to do with him. They formally
and solemnly conclude that they will be merciful and not follow the well
established American lynching custom of burning alive, though
Hurdenburg, in this case, deserves such treatment. They untie him from
the pillar, and carry him to the foot of a Golden Rain Tree of
Democracy. Crawling Jim puts the noose in place. Then Hurdenburg is
hanged by the neck till he is dead. And the merrymakers go back to the
hall undisturbed and dance till five minutes before twelve and then the
city police close the hall, according to expectations. The followers of
the masked Velaska go home, apparently satisfied with one night’s work,
most of them in the arms of one another and quite drunk with wine. It is
toward morning a policeman finds Hurdenburg, cut down by an unknown
hand, lying in the grass.
June 24:—All local papers, including _The Boone Ax_, roar about the
lynching for one day, then proceed to minimize it as much as possible.
So I will do the same in this chronicle, being loyal to my city. A
Chicago paper of infamous repute is glad to “have something on”
Springfield and sends down gloating reporters, who make the very worst
of it, rehash Springfield’s political history for the last month,
putting the ugliest face on everything, tracing through the city their
own kind of history.
June 25:—Rumors of the threatened lynching of all the accepted leaders
of the town are circulating from the City Hall, though the City Hall
people are with the greatest impartiality included in the rumors. The
Board of Education is not frightened. The city today proceeds to give
Hurdenburg a wonderful funeral. This funeral seems to ring the doom of
infamous Yellow Halls for all time. Saint Friend preaches a funeral
sermon with tremendous fire.
June 26:—It appears that the bad bloods of the town are frantically
devouring their own souls, or leaving. The city has been losing, since
the election and the lynching, as much genius as it does deviltry.
Sparrow Short who has been obliged to take down his pictures and hang
them defiantly in his own studio, has turned into a profane old varlet,
amazing to hear, and is inciting as many pupils of ours as possible to
leave Springfield. He is himself threatening to leave. But he does not
leave. “Certainly it is no hardship,” as the Sentimental Romanoff says,
in _The Boone Ax_, “to see departing the most of those with a special
talent for raising Cain.” And he remarks on what an awful row they would
have made, had they been sent out of town. The coffee houses still
exist. There is no denying that they are getting pretty lively,
considering that nothing but coffee is dispensed.
Rabbi Ezekiel, moreover, with all care to defer to the aged St. Friend
in a personal way, declares that the photoplay movement, being no longer
in alliance with questioned places, is destined to go forward with fresh
life. He admits that the abolition of the halls is justified, though he
took no part in it. But he is a motion picture fan, whatever the turn of
history.
June 27:—My whole feeling over the fights about the halls is that I have
not had much chance, after Avanel’s promise to dance there with me. I
have had only an evening or so.
As for the lynching, the court proceedings promise to drag on, as they
always have in such cases. Everyone knows nothing will be done except
postpone. Everyone knows it was Jim, yet no one knows it, and the
Janitor of the Yellow Hall is the only person whose name gets into the
papers.
June 28:—The Thibetan Boy, that the Romanoff dubbed the Muttering
Thibetan, now swings into my life, and as though he were a guide sent
from wonderland, with sealed orders just opened, he takes me the rounds
of Springfield and the whole city becomes new. It is not a place of
individual sinners and saints. The City’s architecture seems to breathe
and live for him. The tiniest gargoyle takes on personality and
citizenship. All this morning he has been taking me through the gardens
of Mother Grey. These gardens seem built rather than planted. The trees
are green walls and roofs. I am amused to note there is no prejudice
against dandelions, since, in a former existence, I had so many to dig
up. They now make the carpets. He takes me into the temple studio of
Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, who is especially busy for young
university student girls who expect to be June brides in the next two or
three days. This studio is a place established for the innermost circles
of the flower religion. Before each altar is a design to be set up and
kept glorious in some new cottage. Several of these are for a new row of
cottages near Washington Park called Bridal Row. The temple is full of
the fluttering brides of tomorrow, seeing the last touches and
consulting about what candles and incense to burn, and asking over and
over what flowers are permitted by the Flower Religion Marriage Service,
which is the one most preferred by the exquisites of 2018.
June 29:—Avanel and I have developed a favorite walk: the Lincoln’s
monument region. We pass under many of the Golden Rain Trees and Ezekiel
Oaks, to the Apple-Amaranth Grove that was the first in Sangamon County,
and the Grave of Hunter Kelly, in the midst of it. There are the old
pick and spade of the Devil, always left on the grave. When we do not
walk in this region we are apt to be looking this way from the Truth
Tower, from the lookout room of the newspapers, or looking back from the
telescope room of the Ashland Gate. Avanel is generally very solemn
looking this way, planning new processions and dances in praise of
Hunter Kelly and the next festival of Hunter Kelly, July 11.
June 30:—Avanel has four suitors in Springfield. I am often but a ghost
in my own eyes and always but shadow to them. On the hot summer days she
goes with three of them to the gigantic porcelain-lined swimming pool of
Bunn Park, with two girls, a merry six. I hardly have my turn with her
for several days at a time.
One of her suitors is an engineer. One is a motor-truck driver. One is
an aviator. I sometimes find myself the servant of all three men, but
ignored as servants may be. As clouds, mists and smoke seems to choke
me, through the whirlwind, I am sometimes the absurd unregarded dragon
engine bearing her and the engineer to Chicago. While she laughs as his
guest in the engine cab I must look down the track through the murk, and
I cannot turn round and see the face of her lover, and the skies are
laughing at me forever. Sometimes I am in my dream the absurd auto-truck
engine, carrying her and the driver, as he delivers his last consignment
of goods from the central market. Even the stones of the street laugh at
me as we rattle over them. I am only a mechanical toy, and the traffic
in the street, preparing for the great World’s Fair, drowns out the
whispers of the young people.
Sometimes I am the ridiculous flying machine in which she rides as
though to mock me, with the third lover. I must soar on and carry them
and they go through fearful storms and up through inconceivable
blackness and I cannot see before or after. Even the sound of the
rushing wind drowns out their words.
And as these men dismount from their chariots, and as they are on the
point of passing by me, with their lordly airs, I turn to dust. I am as
dust of the road swept up by a little puff of wind. And then the
witchcraft continues and I find myself a coal digger in the mine beside
young Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, or laying brick with him
somewhere, and I know that I am such stuff as dreams are made of.
My fourth rival is the one I most fear. He is a twenty year old
libertine, a kind of a Lord Byron. He loves her now, for a day. His name
is TIME. To torture me the more and lure me on from the desire for
perpetual death and to prepare me again for a more futile struggle, he
gives me deep and curious days with Avanel, when we seem to be twin
explorers of the Universe. And then I have big athletic days with her
when I seem, not a ghost, but something as substantial as a strutting
turkey gobbler.
So this last day of June, in the Mystic Year, after a big swim at Bunn
Park, amidst thousands of gay mermen and mermaids, we plan an
all-afternoon and all-evening walk. And we go west on Wellesley Avenue and
north on Sixth Street, all the way to the Sangamon River and to Sangamon
River Park. We find there a cage we have never seen before. It is
between the ice pit of the grizzly bears and the yard of the giraffes.
It is a large cage. In it a pair of new animals pace back and forth,
trailing their quills on the ground. The cage is marked. “Quilled Lions
from Java.” They do not seem as fierce as lions, but have a more human
peering, way. They seem to be deeply interested in the world rather than
angry with it. The male animal marches round and round his mate. She is
like him even to the collar of gorgeous quills that rise and fall. The
heads of these sagacious beasts differentiate them further from lions.
They have a bit more skull structure, and at the same time are more
Satanic in their foreheads and their faces. They seem to speak to each
other by signs, by glances, and mere pacing together. It gives the
impression of being most detailed and constructive conversation.
Meanwhile, the crests go through chameleon changes. The beasts watch the
setting sun as intently as we have ever done, and the spike-quill
collars follow every evanescent turn of the hues.
Avanel says: “Whatever these animals are, they ought not to be in a
cage. If they could only be taught the English language, or we could
learn theirs, we might make them mascots for the city, or even Lord
Mayor and Wife.”
The attendant says: “Do not go too near. Those quills are poison.”
“Yes, indeed,” answers Avanel as the light dawns instantly. “And Java is
almost the same as Singapore. We might have known such beasts came from
near Singapore. I have heard of them. They are the Singaporian lions.”
Then we forget these beasts and walk eastward along the Sangamon River
Drive. Through the openings of the trees and from the higher points we
look back southward. We have had our feast and our Amaranth-Apples in
the Sangamon Park pavilion. The star chimes are ringing. The towers are
there to the south. What torch bearers before time have equalled these
priest-wizards with entrails of fire? They are sterner than priests.
They are the soldier-machines of liberty that will sweep the world. They
are the Macedonian phalanx that will decide for another century every
field upon which they will appear. The merchants of Singapore refuse to
use the Sunset Towers, when they build their new cities in their battle
for world supremacy, and even by that they are doomed. The houses and
commercial palaces and temples of Singapore crouch little and low, like
huts in a forest, or glass pagodas in little stage comedies. They are
fearful of the incantations hatched in our hives of electrical flame
that shine on to the glory of Louis H. Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright,
who planned the first ones, a century ago, and the Thibetan Boy and John
Emis, who build them today.
Avanel and I walk south to the city down beautiful Fifteenth Street. The
city is the Fair and the Fair is the city, though there has not yet come
the formal proclamation to the world of the opening. There is not one
heart on the street but seems to be beating happily. The elation in the
air on this perfect June night is worth a lifetime of groans. It seems
to me that for this hour Springfield has been patiently toiling and
staggering on, despite much sorrow and sin, for a century. All the
children of this generation seem to sweep by us and to be spending the
stored up capacity of themselves and all their ancestors for jubilation.
There are hundreds of unspoiled sightseers in the crowd looking on the
lights of Springfield, often for the first time. These visitors will not
wait for the Mayor’s proclamation, that the Fair has begun.
And they are happy, but not as we two are. The bass viol orchestra of
the lacquered and rumbling pleasure wagons sings a special song to us
though we be independent walkers. We hear them, we boast, better than
they hear themselves. There is a babble and a roar that is the beating
of the vast heart of Springfield. Its rhythm goes into our footfalls
every instant.
It is late, and Avanel insists on going on, in the intoxication of
weariness, and will not let me take her to her house on Mulberry
Boulevard. She leads me into the very thick of the great forest of
Sunset Towers again, now “midnight towers,” she says to me, with her
face flushed to a deep crimson from utter weariness, and her eyes heavy
with the desire for sleep, and her determined little feet still dancing
nervously on. And this is what her soul says to me, and what we say to
one another, in our fashion, as we whirl on: “Not until another
civilization rises here, will there be a rival form to these towers. It
is only a matter of years till the type be perfected by John Emis or the
Thibetan Boy or their kind. The first generation of ripened builders
came a century ago. That was our Early Renaissance. At last our High
Renaissance has come. The ripe architectural genius will appear who will
gather to himself all that can be known of beam and girder and truss, of
foundation and wind pressure and the distribution of light, all that can
be learned about hollow brick and tile, of pillar and elevator and
fireproofing. He will understand the chances peculiar to his materials
and town. His imagination will be a smelter, a mastered volcano. He will
have visions of welded steel that will put all men to shame but the
builders of the Parthenon, the hewers of the Sphinx. There shall be no
borrowings from Paris or Rome.
“The least minor decoration shall reflect the majesty of the dream, as
the Gothic altar carving repeated the flying buttress and the spires
leaping heavenward.
“Because we take our pleasure at the feet of the Sunset Towers, now
‘midnight towers’ while the midnight stars go by, they shall be
reembodied and perfected in the sons that shall spring from them like
light.
“They are the rose and gold progenitors of Springfield, the rainbow
patriarchs of Springfield. They stand proudly through the night and the
lighted streets below them are like a carpet of goldenrod and dandelions
unrolled at their feet. Their heads are so far in the heavens they
converse with their serene sister the moon. They look out together to
the Springfield University and the Sangamon River where the bridges
sweep to the north, sparkling threads in the mist. They look south to
the Street of Past History that bends around till it meets them.
“Who shall dispraise the excellence of our towers? They look west with
all the pioneers, and the very soul of far off, west-going Daniel Boone
is in them.
“We take our pleasure, honorable, or philosophical, innocent or stupid
or guilty, at their feet, and where pleasure is, there art is born. Many
songs shall be sung to them, many new names given to them. Their
children shall rise up to call them blessed. Their children shall be a
world-conquering city all about them, before the relentless sun looks
down upon their ruins, before that blazing lion of time shall have eaten
their bones of steel.
“They were born from the black soil of Illinois and from the heart of
the Thibetan and from the Red Indian and the Afro-American and all the
tribes of the earth. There is in them many an antithesis to all the old
architectures and structures.
“The noblest thing to be seen from their heights is the mighty northwest
road. For the souls’ highway will stay open and crying for the souls of
men to follow when these towers are dead and gone.”
Now it is way past midnight, and we are at old Fifth and Monroe, and all
the street cars and vehicles have long stopped, and the light in Dodds’
drug store is dim, and the all-night clerks are nodding behind the
cases, or chatting at the ice cream tables, half awake.
And so Avanel and I, walking in one dream together, know not whether we
see with the human eyes that perish or the eyes of eternity.
Suddenly something of the cry of the earth reaches us, and there,
camping at the crossing of the street car tracks of Fifth and Monroe is
the Handsome Medicine Man, Devil’s Gold. He is shaking his bead covered
rattle, making medicine, and dishonoring our souls with his leer. And he
calls us by name as we stand directly in front of him. We are so tired
from our long walk, we cannot but admire his gilded face and his yellow
magic blanket.
Holding each other’s hands like lovers we stoop and admire ourselves in
the golden pool that flickers in the great campfire he has impudently
built at the crossing of the street car tracks.
We walk down through the pool into a mundane world, so perfect its
materialism becomes magical, and into many an underground field and
forest of wonder, and as we look into each other’s faces and admire one
another we are moving gilded images from head to feet. But since we are,
at least, together, a hundred-year hunger in the very midst of my heart
is thus terribly satisfied, though I am frightened at a betrayal I
cannot understand, as though the heavens themselves had lied. We take
the wickedest pleasure in looking upon the yellow world around us. And
we hear on the air the laughter of the Handsome Medicine Man, Devil’s
Gold.
CHAPTER XIV
HOW I MAKE CERTAIN EXPLORATIONS OF THE GREAT DEEP. HOW I LATER FIND
MYSELF THE MALAY SLAVE OF THE MAN FROM SINGAPORE AND THEREBY GET AN
ENTIRELY NEW ANGLE ON NEW SPRINGFIELD.
July 2, 2018:—This morning Avanel telephones to me as she is looking out
of her bedroom window over Mulberry Boulevard and South Grand Avenue,
she wants me to meet her at once on her lawn and to hurry, for there is
a strange giant bird like a burst of flame, in a mulberry treetop. And
so before it goes, (and it was there yesterday morning at dawn and
hurried away), I am able to meet the Lady Avanel, as she stands in her
hasty kimono and bedroom slippers, and goes wild over the marvel singing
overhead and eating mulberries for all it is worth. It is a kind of
Singing Bird of Paradise, lost here unaccountably from the tropics.
Birds of Paradise do not sing, but most sweet music this one makes. He
flies down the street and away into the sun at the moment the whole orb
appears. He seems to go to the center of it, like an arrow of a
demi-god.
This afternoon and evening are the final drill times for the solemn
festival in praise of Hunter Kelly, on July the eleventh. I watch the
rehearsal. It is directed by Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third. The
main dances, especially the drills on chosen white ponies are directed
by the Lady Avanel, being modifications of the solemn marchings and
countermarchings of the Gordon Craig Theatre. In this eleventh of July
festival to celebrate Hunter Kelly’s first planting of the Amaranth
Orchards, there are to be great comic dancers, and clowns, but they are
completely overshadowed by the devout ceremonial processions, horseback
or afoot. Like all rehearsals, the affair drags interminably; much of
the stateliness is still to be taken for granted, till the final
occasion. It is a weary Avanel, who sends her pony home by a friend, and
takes dinner with me in the Lincoln Park Pavilion and her eyes are
unnaturally bright and she is silent and half crying. She pulls her
napkin to pieces and then the card, from nervousness.
She says:—“Why are you here with me, awkward and ill dressed man!
Unmannerly and uncouth man! Yokel and anarchist! Why run around with
that mussy old Sparrow Short all the time and then expect to appear in
fashionable places?”
And then, after a silence, she continues:—“There is nothing respectable
about you. All the best people of the city make fun of you and wish you
would leave town. Why do you stay here? Why not go to some other town
and start fresh? You have offended all our first families by your queer
manners and gauche ways. And you will never improve them as long as you
run around with that mussy old Sparrow Short. Certainly none of the real
people, accomplishing anything, have any use for you. I do not believe
you even know how to make out a check or keep a bank book. And how on
earth you expect to get along in Springfield without dancing or playing
cards I cannot understand.
“Why are you here, you silly man?”
And so I say to her: “Do you think it has cost me nothing to struggle up
through the dust and the dead grass and walk beside you? Do you think it
has cost me nothing of pain to beat with my poor bare knuckles through
the years?”
But when I say such things to Avanel, she does not hear them.
But I am determined and I say: “Last March you came galloping up the
Northwest Road on your white pony, and I was buried too near the highway
to sleep, with such glory going by. A man may hardly expect to live
again beyond the life of that little earth that surrounds his bones, and
feeds the roots of the nearest tree. He may, perhaps give life through
the leaves of that tree to the locust in the bark, or to the squirrel in
the branches, but your song came past my grave like a fairy’s breath,
and my ashes are again man or fire or weed or living thorns, or what you
will them to be. If you will have nothing of a man, why give life to his
dust?”
But when I say such things to Avanel, she does not hear them. I am a
gauche beau, that is all.... The mists sweep down upon us, and we are on
the very eastern edge of Chaos, where it storms in upon the shore of
created things. And Avanel’s eyes are sleepy and her voice is faint and
far away. But she says: “Do you think I dance for temporal Springfield,
or make my pony dance for such a city? We dance for an audience of the
great deep.”
Looming across the gulf is the gigantic porch of the Palace of Eve, its
pillars reaching up into the highest clouds of the storm, pillars that
are Doric, archaic, immemorial. And out of the gulf between rises the
vague splendor of Avanel’s Dream City of the Great Deep. Avanel says:—
“Any one with Daniel Boone’s hunting knife in her belt needs no pompous
false prophets of democracy to tell her the road to freedom. In this
gulf alone is freedom, if it is to be found, and in this gulf only, is
tomorrow.”
And as she speaks Avanel’s Dream City of the Great Deep takes form and
is a picture of the Springfield we have left behind, but utterly
transcendent, with the Sunset Towers in jewelled glory, with the Truth
Tower like a pillar hewn from the white mountains of the sun, and around
the town, star shaped double walls, with the pillar oaks between them.
But even that dream crumbles and falls into nothingness. It becomes a
great cloud plain, a bridge for spirit-feet, over the gulf. And then I
see, as I sit lonely, the real dance and ceremonial of Hunter Kelly
begin. I see Avanel on her dancing pony of white fire, surrounded by her
devoted maidens, while dim and shadowy similitudes of branches of the
Amaranth-Apple, made gigantic to shade the Universe, bend above the far
off ministers of stately cosmic festival.
As I watch the dance with eyes like those of a far-seeing bird, I behold
a dim flashing under the shadow of the gigantic pillars of the Palace of
Eve. As it were, a candle flame in the storm, Mother Eve, the immortal,
looks up and down those great pillars and up to the clouded and roaring
zenith with its tossing flowering boughs, and then to the solemn dances,
far away. She sees her fairest daughters do honor to Hunter Kelly, pupil
and friend of Johnny Appleseed. Nothing stranger or more beautiful ever
happened in the shadow of her palace or beneath a flowering storm.
July 4:—I am today in the wonder of a triple consciousness. To the sense
of being an Anglo Saxon of the centuries of 1920 and 2018 is added that
of being a Malay of 2018: I find myself in the house of the Man from
Singapore, his Malay slave. I find myself equipped with singular habits,
ideals, and ideas, as though I were the mainspring of a most unfamiliar
clock. I am interested in the wheels that keep going.
It is a blasting Fourth of July and one of the second servants, whom I
have haughtily sent down town on an errand, tells me, on returning, that
the thermometer at Dodds’ drug store already registers one hundred and
ten in the shade. But we are so much over arched by old trees, our house
is cool enough.
Remembering various ill-reports when I lived in other bodies in
Springfield at this time, I am astonished to find the Man from Singapore
a person of domestic grace. He has consideration for my feelings as a
slave. He has an outstanding gallantry toward the darling of his heart,
his only child, Mara, the queen of his house. The picture of her
departed mother hangs in the book room of the Professor of Malay Arts
and Letters. It looks down gently upon many lounging mats and books left
open. The face is all dignity and languor and devotion.
My master’s ancestors, according to his conversation with his daughter
at late breakfast this morning, had an original Malay strain.
But added to that was a peculiar mixture of Anglo Saxon remittance man,
Chinese banker and Arab trader. It is the combination that crystallized
into the caste to which he now belongs, the caste that finally gave
distinctive energy to his polyglot, worldshaking city, and lifted the
mystic diabolism of the Cocaine Buddha into aggressive imperialism. His
new caste found themselves resolving to make Singapore a city worshipped
like Mecca, if they had to cut the throats of two thirds of the human
race to bring it about.
And so, at this late breakfast, he looks into his coffee languidly, but
as though he saw pictures of history there. He says that the English
admixture in his caste has long given them insight into the west, and
kept English for their main language. The English strain has also given
the Singaporian a facility in taking on the most modern scientific
devices, and has endowed the proud island with political common sense
for routine political tasks. The Chinese blood has given them patience
and iron, to work on a hundred-year plan, first in their trade relations
and banking arrangements, and then in all policies linked up with these.
But now it is the sword of the far off ancient Arab disposition that is
beginning to flash.
The Man from Singapore speculates, drinking more coffee, and looking
reverently at his daughter. He wonders what he and others will pay, for
almost breaking caste in their joining themselves with the honorable but
too voluptuous and beautiful Kling caste. So many of them are marrying
women of her mother’s race, and paying the high priests tremendous sums
for the privilege. He wonders if it will bring them to inefficiency, and
smother the Arab before it has a chance for complete expression. At
least her mother’s tribe brought them their first energy, for they owe
the gift of the Cocaine Buddha, nearly a century ago, to the Kling
Prophet.
July 5:—I find myself at a civic reform rally late this afternoon, after
business hours. I am still the Malay servant. I am sent by Mara, the
good and beautiful, to watch from a distance the doings of the young
artist, altar-builder, coal miner, bricklayer, exquisite and civic
patriot:—Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third. He is her adorer. She
sends me with a note to him, urging him to come to a suddenly improvised
Sumatra chess party. Like Cleopatra, she urges me to observe his doings
narrowly, and his moods when he reads her note.
Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, is on the back row of seats. He
will take no part in the meeting, though urged to do so by many friends
around him. The Mayor’s proposition has been voted down at the polls,
his desired legislation to let great masses of unskilled labor into the
city’s double walls without a time limit on their stay and without the
usual University examination. Now he proposes another referendum. He
wants to introduce his huskies temporarily, especially Singaporian
bricklayers from California, since, as he says, our bricklaying machines
have broken down and there is great haste to complete, in time, the
building of the Street of Past History of the World’s Fair of the
University of Springfield.
The meeting, squeezed in between the coffee house chats and dinner time,
has been called by Michael the Third’s best chums among the older
men:—Boone, and the Rabbi, who hope to defeat the new measure. The
speakers maintain that, once these laborers are admitted inside our
double Gothic walls, it will be impossible to expel them, even after the
Street of Past History is finished. They prove that there are enough
bricklaying machines to fill all the present contracts on time. They
maintain that there are endless boys in the High School Labor Department
trained to follow up and finish the work in the wake of such machines as
may surely be impressed into service.
All this while that solemn conceited pumpkin Joseph Bartholdi Michael,
the Third, thinks he is brooding like Prince Hamlet himself. He will not
say how much he believes of these accusations hurled about.
Now rises old Black Hawk Boone and I am indeed amazed to see him through
Singaporian eyes. He looks almost like a whey-faced creature, he is so
much whiter than my master. And he looks like the world’s greatest
fidget, my master is such a languorous cat. And for all Boone’s shrewd,
cinnamon bear countenance, he seems to me a simple baby, my master looks
so wise. And when he speaks of my master by implication, I cannot but be
insulted. For my body and nerves tonight are Malay, whatever my soul may
be. And at the same time I am in a terrible fear of Boone as one would
be of a child with lighted matches in a powder mill. There is in him a
certain divination by force of fury that I cannot but shrink to
apprehend, though I utterly despise his mind, as long as I wear this
Malay body as a garment and make shift with these Malay eyes and ears
and this Malay sixth sense.
Boone’s fury is everything. His words are nothing. In his capacity as
editor and citizen, and not as President of the Board of Education, he
denounces my master, who is entitled to official courtesy as a member of
the University faculty. But it is plainly in Boone’s thought that the
time has almost come for the parting with the course in Malay Arts and
Letters and Allied Studies, and the dismissal of all oracles therein,
though they be the most learned oracles in the whole world, and the most
courteous creatures above ground. Boone snaps out his words like a beast
straining at a chain.
He says these conspirators have long thought they could buy everything,
including the souls of all state capitals. He tells how, nearly a
century ago, Singapore purchased its freedom from the British Government
at an enormous fee, furnished by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce of that
city. He tells how the port was immediately lifted from the rank of
seventh to the rank of first in the world. He shows how, after the death
of the prophet of the Cocaine Buddha and the local triumph of the
religion, this zeal for purchase became Singapore’s most eloquent
service in that Buddha’s name. They bought at any price every island
north of Australia and south of Japan, including America’s own
Philippines. He charges that the war in southeast Asia, a generation
ago, was stirred up by their spies, and while they were ostensibly with
the World Government, the war ended with a vast increase of their
territory by direct purchase of land and the bribing of many new and
feeble legislatures to vote themselves into the Singaporian Union.
Finally he rises to the height of mere abuse. He lets slip a most
appalling avalanche in the name of his western God. And he says this
Mayor and his boss have in some way been over-persuaded by a Singaporian
spy, present in the city or writing to them, and petitioning that they
send for these workmen, who come in as rough labor. But that “labor”
will send by wireless, code reports to the high priests of the Cocaine
Buddha.
The whole house rises, and the harder Boone denounces, the more they
seem to approve, and some of them seem to have the hydrophobia. Race
hate sweeps the hall like a blasting wind. And Boone crouches at the
very edge of the footlights, and roars on.
He declares that some of this alleged rough labor is morally certain to
be a group of high officers of the army, here to paralyze America at the
exact second the high priests of Singapore shall choose, using that
dreadful secret gun, that it is whispered through all the world, is two
steps beyond the terrible lens gun.
Meanwhile these Singaporians, open and secret, will corrupt the wild and
innocent young blood of our city. Boone charges that the island capital
is the world’s Barbary coast, the one infamy beyond Suez. Among all the
world’s red-eyed and fish-eyed human derelicts, where cocaine is used to
over-energize, and to make men flashy and reckless, there always their
spies are busiest, and their missionaries are most pertinacious and
successful. The world around, “SINGAPORE IS COCAINE.”
Boone continues, in an utterly different manner. There is that curious
slender girl near the front seat with her companions, the Lady Avanel,
and he does not want to seem to be speaking of her. But he says that
these Singaporians are as afraid of white as the native soldiers of the
Indian mutiny were afraid of breaking caste in their fashion, or the
Egyptians were,—which enabled Cambyses to defeat them by heading his
procession against them with a small and famous army of kittens. He says
they are as afraid of white as the negroes of the South were afraid of
it, which enabled the Ku Klux to send them scattering. It is no idle
fancy of his that these people are as superstitious as the blacks of the
old days. He says that in the last war of the World Government against
the rebels of Asia, where Chinese, Japanese and Americans won so great a
victory for world unity, there were a few Singaporians among the rebels,
denounced by the Singaporian high priests, but these rebels seemed
secretly authorized, and they had the typical lens gun equipment and the
complete cocaine soul. And Boone tells what is evidently a familiar
story, how one of the Springfield Amazons found a mysterious white pony
on the battlefield, after her own had been shot under her. She rode him
to the front line and drove a whole company of those cocaine fiends in
flight, lens guns and all, with nothing in her hand but her Michael-forged
blade. Boone says the Singaporians hate white because it is the
color of truth and daytime and decency, and as for him, if he had had
his way he would have painted every tower of this World’s Fair white,
and the inner and outer walls of the city white, to keep out the
Singaporian spies and missionaries, but Slick Slack Kopensky and Mayo
Sims won a victory for the present color scheme.
Then young Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, to keep himself right
with his friends, throws off his coat, and goes forward in the
bricklayer’s clothes he has been wearing beneath. As a former High
School student-bricklayer and one often practicing that profession
still, he pledges himself to go out and work one of the bricklaying
machines, or use the old fashioned trowel, as is needed, until the Fair
buildings are done. And he calls for volunteers to join him, and many of
the gay young bloods do so at once.
So this evening as I serve the black Siamese wine to the Man from
Singapore and his daughter, and I stand respectfully at her left hand,
and give my report while her wonderful smiles come and go, she clasps
her hands and tries to be gay over old Boone. But her eyes are tragic
pools, indeed, when I speak of her lover, and of the evident conflict in
his heart. And now it is her father’s turn to laugh and try to shift her
mood.
“They blame me with their own petty doings and are always suspicious at
the wrong time. They never know when I am fighting the real tigers in
the holy cause of our High Priests. Not as a Singaporian, but as a man,
I am going to give this town a blow with my left hand. One more word
from that baby, that bawling Boone, holding me in contempt, and then let
him look to himself. It is done more simply than he knows. The distrust
of all leaders of every faction from Mayo Sims to Boone is growing every
hour. Even those leaders love a lynching, if it removes an enemy. They
went to the funeral of Surto Hurdenburg for respectability’s sake, not
to mourn him. Not one of all the City Council or the Board of Education
put in an extra hour seeing that his lynchers were brought to trial.
They are all lynchers and one needs hardly to accelerate their natural
gait a bit, but only to fail to warn them of what their own may do.
Certainly the Board of Education would be insulted if they knew that
Sims and Kopensky are as alien and unknown to us as are Boone and Saint
Friend. If they are putting on their fights to edify us, the attempt is
a failure. I sincerely hope that Sims and Kopensky and Boone are hanged
by their adoring citizens side by side on the same tree. But Montague
Rock, I hope, will be spared to us. He is a fine paw. I will tell you
that much, little Mara.”
CHAPTER XV
HOW AS A MALAY I WITNESS THE CONVERSION OF YOUNG KOPENSKY TO THE COCAINE
BUDDHA, LATER WHEN I AM MY AMERICAN SELF THE THIBETAN BOY TAKES ME
BEYOND THE NORTH STAR AND SHOWS ME THE TRUE BUDDHA.
July 6, 2018:—This afternoon Mara sends me to find Joseph Bartholdi
Michael, the Third, and report once more. I discover that he has been at
work according to his pledge, and with a bricklaying machine. There are
more than enough, both of machines and Springfield workers to complete
the Street of Past History on time.
And so, this evening, the Kling beauty dawdles through her black wine
and cigarettes looking at her father with an indulgent and patronizing
squint, completely at ease in the possession of his heart. Though with
so many other strains of ancestry, the Malay manner predominates
tonight, in her as in him, an outer appearance of super languor, a
suggestion of nerve force accumulating through long seasons, to be
discharged in one day of supreme achievement, or of “running amuck.”
Suddenly Mara asks her father, as though to plague him all she dares and
startle him from his languor: “How do I differ from Avanel Boone? We
are, for instance, the same age.” He answers without a quiver: “She is a
worthy daughter of Black Hawk Boone, except that she will not dye her
left hand or wear her hair on her shoulders, and you are a worthy
daughter of your father, except that you like to quiz.”
And she opens her eyes and they seem the wide gates of his Prophet’s
heaven. And they have, to him, all the dewiness of honest youth. She
asks with earnestness:—
“But _how_ do we differ?”
He defies those eyes. He says: “Both have dark hair, but Avanel’s is
straight like that of the Japanese, and yours is a storm cloud about
your head.
“But _how_ do we differ? You need not deny you have studied that girl
like a book. I have seen you watching her as though she were a growing
scorpion, looking her over and over, at the Gordon Craig Theatre.
“She is no scorpion, but an artless child. Her eyes are blue. Your eyes
are black. Avanel’s skin is white and rose. You are more golden than any
coin, or any sunrise. That is the difference.” And he smiles with an air
of mock finality.
But there is more difference and my American soul fights my Malay body
and mind, as I apprehend this distinction, while they argue of other
matters. I find torturing the very depths of me, that which loves
Avanel, though I lie in this Malay grave. Yet the comparison is not all
to the advantage of the daughter of Boone.
Avanel follows the most conventional of _Vanity Fair_ and _Vogue_
fashion plates, when not a marching, dancing priestess or an
equestrienne in white. The Kling beauty is in her library or in her
palanquin wrapped in endless easy swathings of green silk from breast to
knee. Her bare shoulders and knees and feet and hands are her father’s
pride. He thinks there is nothing like their slender modelling in all
the west. She is a singer with the Borneo harp. Avanel in her life as a
religious dancer and leader of maiden cavalry and of the Horseshoe
Brotherhood, is an unmaidenly horror to Mara, who prides herself on her
seclusion. Avanel’s omnipresence on the streets, as the town heroine,
seems to Mara America’s most complete scandal.
Yet Mara has often been out in her palanquin, behind that of her father,
ostensibly to please him, but actually to see if by chance this hated
Avanel will go by. And she has brooded in seclusion over Avanel as much
as such a gentle nature can.
Finally, and chiefly, that rare mask, the face of Mara is the same her
father wears, and so is half a world away from the open countenance of
the lady who carries Daniel Boone’s direct ancestral dagger. Yet there
are things readable in the Singaporian countenances. The sincere passion
for jungle beauty revealed in the face of Mara can be discerned. The
Asiatic necromancy, the instinct for intrigue, is hidden by the
innocence of the experiences of her sheltered days, and also, as in the
face of her really wicked father, it is hidden by that University air of
submitting absolutely to the open finalities of scholarship. And so they
will often submit, where Singapore is not concerned. But one would say
all Mara’s scholars are poets to her, and of her father all his scholars
are statesmen. Each is the other’s flattering image. Each is disarmed in
the presence of the other, artless and fond and kind.
She continues this evening by talking frankly with her father about her
suitors. I am as a well worn article of furniture. My ears do not
trouble her. Are we not all members of the order that has sworn in a
great whisper to conquer the world in the name of the holy green glass
image that dwells in the temple on the far off Raffles plain?
She asks her father which man will be of the greater service to Our Lord
of Cocaine? Will it be the son of Slick Slack Kopensky, Crawling Jim:—or
Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, who thinks he has converted my good
mistress to Mary of Bethlehem and all the saints of the western heaven.
Shall she do lip service to his faith, when he is present, till the day
of all days when Singapore ceases to whisper and comes roaring against
the world? Or shall she take Crawling Jim for all time?
She is remarkably interested in both men. I am all curiosity over her
tenderness for Jim. She calls him James. To be sure, he has undertaken a
perilous thing for a son of Springfield. He has already discarded the
wearing of anything white.
July 7:—There are not many other Singaporians in the city, and tonight
comes an all-Caucasian party except for servants, host and hostess. My
amazement about Mara’s attitude toward James now ceases. In this company
he is a new creature.
The ladies and gentlemen who come in for initiation into that curiosity,
a Sumatra chess game are many of them Jim’s most devoted henchmen in
Jim’s presumably highly democratic and now triumphant Robin Redbreast
Aviation Club. They were deft enough to capture the club for him. They
are people of breeding and assurance. As long as it existed, at the
house of the Mythical Velaska the most famous yellow dance hall, they
set the pace. Tonight they talk openly of their jolly little lynching of
Surto Hurdenburg. They talk of how to bring back to town all the
malcontents who have left because of the suppression of the Yellow
Halls. They speak of them as martyrs and heroes. And then they talk as
though they will leave also. With scarcely an exception they belong to
Springfield’s senior families, many of whom have been here as long as
the Boones, and some of them before the Michaels. Scions of the house of
Montague Rock are among them, including Montague Rock, Junior.
By their voices and a thousand impalpable signs I know that, with
scarcely an exception, they have been educated out of town at male and
female finishing schools, on funds or power secured by the secret sale
of their hereditary buried gold and buried alcohol. These schools are,
obviously, the last stand of American plutocracy, that has grown most
subtle in what appears to be its final battle. Here, at this party among
friends, with no spies, and in perfect confidence, they use with an
exaggerated freedom all the secret codes, passwords, and hints of manner
that indicate the hidden masters of the land, the tribes with buried
gold and buried alcohol.
They are well grounded in the main books of plutocratic and alcoholic
apologetics, one of which has been written by a fellow townsman, and it
appears today, in Coe’s Book Store:—“The Graces of Bacchus and Mammon”
by Doctor Mayo Sims. Every poet, architect, artist, or musician who in
any fine indirect way licks the boots of money, or sings sweetly of
strong drink, has their approval. Many such craftsmen have been induced
by gentle means to drop a delicate word for Singapore as the ultimate
land of real aristocracy, and dangerous but marvelously inspiring
cocaine.
Mara’s guests have been taught in these out of town schools to hate our
educational system from the World’s Fair of our University down to the
first grade, ward school. They are taught in their male and female
finishing schools that the whole city of Springfield and all such cities
are infamously democratic. These children are taught they must not let
one tone of voice indicate anything more than a suffering tolerance of
that system of which, in this city, Black Hawk Boone is the official
head.
As the evening progresses, all this crowd gaily says that Jim’s luck in
aviation holds in Sumatra chess, and the ladies whisper in their
delicate fashion that they hope he stays lucky when it comes to love.
Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, enters late. He says he is tired
from bricklaying and slumps into the most conspicuous chair like a
second rate actor’s idea of a martyr to patriotism. Michael, the Third,
will not play Sumatra or any other chess. He will not bet on any other
man’s chess playing. He glares at the merry Jim, or in his general
direction. He stalks around, like a stork at a dinner of foxes.
The crowd thins out, and at length the two men are left with Mara,
because J. B. Michael, the Third, has not sense enough to go. She has
given Jim Kopensky every sign and Michael, the Third, no signs at all.
She wants this exquisite scion of the Blacksmith clan to play the game,
and take his chance. But he is more at ease in his patriotic overalls,
laying bricks to hurry up the final official opening of the Fair, and
the Street of Past History.
So she helps Kopensky to back Michael to the door, which is done by a
simple process of walking toward him with a certain air.
He is overwhelmed at Jim’s assurance and vital power. But Jim is one of
those whom love makes a man for an hour in a lifetime. As I open the
door for the exquisite Michael, I divine Mara’s pity for him. But what
can a woman do? No proud Singaporian can have mercy on an unmagnetic
fool. It is not a conspiracy against the loser. It is an elemental
contest. This red oriental heart is for the man who wins this doorstep
fight. Religion and destiny wait. And J. B. Michael, the Third, of his
own weakness goes out the door in defeat.
But Mara, having, without an uttered word, chosen this James Kopensky
for what she can make of him, turns at once to the cocaine Buddha around
the corner of the hall. Religion comes next.
The triumphant Jim follows her thought. He takes a candle from the
table. He holds it in front of the august image, that seems to him more
like green air than glass. He bows, the complete devotee before that
ironical god whose doctrines are absurd, even to me, though I am for a
season in a Malay mind. But what doctrines are not absurd to that soul
that refuses to receive them?
Jim blows out the candle, and with it his former life, and, in
intention, every western desire, and all for the glory of the holy
islands of southeast Asia. He relights the candle at a taller one that
is burning in front of the image.
Just then a telegram comes. Later I am reproved for letting the boy make
the turn in the hall that enables him to see Crawling Jim light the
candle. It is a real telegram, that has to do with an out-of-town
lecture to be given by the Man from Singapore, on “The Republic of
Letters.” And so the lord of the house comes in for it, reads it, and
signs. The boy is not hustled to the door. He lingers. Our little
ceremony is quite interrupted.
At last the slow youth goes. He is the son of a Japanese Industrial
Commissioner to the World’s Fair. It seems that this man and the Chinese
Commissioner are sufficiently Asiatic to understand my master, and their
subterranean feud with him and his ally, Old Montague Rock, never has an
end. The Man from Singapore says: “They must have had their spy at the
party tonight. And this telegram has been delayed as part of their
game.”
And so, soon after, the flustered Jim bids his lady a devout good
evening.
July 8:—Mara has been nervous about the Springfield fortunes of her
accepted suitor all day, but he reports this evening that there is no
cause for apprehension, that he has not noted one more fluttering eyelid
than usual today. He is still in place, in Springfield.
Then Mara makes ardent haste to talk with Jim of the religion into which
he took a decisive, if interrupted, first step last evening. There is a
bit of a suppressed strain and the harshness of argument in her voice,
as though she were debating with all Springfield, though Springfield is
not here. She is showing Jim that the Singaporian aversion to white,
colorless things, is in no way unreasonable, since the religion was born
in a sweet shadowed jungle. The whitest thing to be found in such a
woods is the patch of dried grass in the opening of the trees under the
blasting rays of the noonday sun. The living creature who lingers there
must die. The prophet had talked so long to the religious beasts that he
learned the inner wisdom of this fear. By listening long to their
stories and their teachings, white came to mean the death of the soul to
him. When he returned to Singapore and preached his first sermon that
shadowy evening on the Raffles plain, proclaiming the religion of night,
the religion of prowling, of rich wines and sweeping hanging moss, he
gave them the Holy Green Glass Idol, and extended the doctrine of the
fear of whiteness. It was there revealed to him, as he spoke with
inspiration, that the whiter the silver, the whiter the horse, the
whiter the armor, the whiter the plume, the more dangerous the foe. And
so Mara assures Jim that all the deadliest enemies of the faith will
come in the open noonday, dressed in white. If Singapore conquers all
things white, and all the noonday races of men it will win the world. If
once it falls before an army in white, it will be utterly annihilated,
and the Holy Religion of Cocaine will perish from the earth.
Mara asks Crawling Jim if this is not perfectly reasonable, as doctrine
and as prophecy. He falls before her. He embraces her golden knees with
his crazy arms. He says it is perfectly reasonable, as doctrine and as
prophecy.
But she lifts him up and she preaches and kisses away the hours, like
any devout lady in like case.
July 9:—Mara is saying to Jim this evening that while in the by streets
of her holy city among the dregs of the world’s population, much cocaine
is taken, in the presence of grotesque libels of the Green Glass Buddha,
as a matter of fact, that is a degenerate form of the religion. It is
well enough since it keeps the outcasts happy and in subjection, more
easily led, yet fierce in battle like the old hashish-eating assassins.
But the esoteric, the masters, do not take cocaine. She speaks lovingly
of the Green Glass Buddha, but saying finally of him, with the
University Tone of Voice, that he is the god of wine. Like Dionysius he
is especially the inspiration of the drama and all the arts that gather
round it. Upon those patrons of drugs, the two greatest civilizations
have been founded and the fairest catalogue of the arts.
It seems to me this evening, that the lessons are done. Mara has called
to me to go for her father. I have ushered him into the room, and he is
receiving Jim, the son of the Mayor of Springfield, as his own son. The
Man from Singapore takes on a manner Jim has never seen. There are tears
in his carved eyes. He is the headlong devotee in the infatuation of
proselyting.
He tells Jim that those who are faithful take on the soul of the holy
green glass idol, which was long ago the pure and transparent spirit of
the first king of the boa constrictors, who, it is recorded, ruled his
tribe in integrity and crystal honor. It is in his service that
Singapore goes forth to choke the earth. From the god of glass emanate
rays of psychic force that extend world wide, and give his followers
spiritual eyes so they can do battle for him in the forest of
Christianity and civilization. The war is really between these faithful
ones and the tiger souls that infest the jungle. The vendetta of the
serpents against the tigers has gone on through the ages since before
there were men. It will not be ended till all the tigers are gone and
the Great Boa Constrictor swallows the world as though it were a rabbit.
The Man from Singapore says that the tigers feed on all men from
wantonness, while the serpents kill only those who interfere with the
spread of their beneficent kingdom and eat only when hungry. Before the
eyes of the true priests of the serpent, all buildings turn to forest
trees and all shadows to forest boughs, and all men to serpents or
tigers or some neutral beasts. Thus we know our most dangerous foes.
These are not necessarily the men who curse us. They are often our
intended friends, but actually in the way of the God of Glass. Thus
there is no real serpent among the citizens of Springfield but Montague
Rock. He is indeed a good Singaporian. All the other men in power, be
they friends or foes in the open, are tigers alike. Joseph Bartholdi
Michael, the Second, at the seat of World Government, is the worst tiger
of all. He is proscribed and doomed.
The Man from Singapore eyes Jim steadily and continues:—“Does that seem
reasonable to you? And does all I have said seem clear, logical,
infallibly convincing?”
Jim takes the hand of this man and says it is absolutely convincing. I
note that Jim looks like a composite portrait of the heirs apparent of
all the thrones left in Europe, a weak and pasty fool, but lit up by
love.
July 10:—Crawling Jim lives but in the eyes of Mara. Everything
Singaporian is reasonable while she smiles, and it is all reasonable to
her. This doctrine of swallowing the world seems merciful because
“father” says it is. And Jim seems to her like a man. He is aflame with
desire, such as only the daughter of her voluptuous and gentle mother
could provoke, and only such a strong soul as hers could harness. He is
a mirror, pouring back the rays of her own romantic glory, and she knows
it not. She is incredibly happy, for she thinks she has done a good
stroke for Singapore and her own heart. I, even as a Malay, am stirred
with a great pity for her.
Her father, also, sees Jim as a hero. The serpent Buddha has not made
this man and his daughter infallible.
July 11:—Mara is near the window looking out through the black velvet
hangings, watching for Jim, though it is not time for him to call.
Meanwhile there is indeed an interruption to her fancies, she utters not
a word, she does not flinch, while there comes north on Mulberry
Boulevard Avanel Boone and her maiden cavalry.
They are going toward the grave of Hunter Kelly, to take part in the
solemn festival in the groves there, and along the great Northwest Road,
the festival in celebration of the planting of the first Amaranth
orchard there. The girls go by like a white whirlwind, and they give the
old Springfield cry used in battle in Asia by their mothers who were
young amazons before them. It shrieks and screams and sings down the
street: “Springfield Awake! Springfield Aflame!” They know they are
going by the house of Mara of Singapore but not one eye turns her way.
But the swords, the swords, the Damascus blades, are hissing and
glittering in the air. And the Man from Singapore, apparently intent
upon his affairs does not turn to look out of the window of the book
room. He does not so much as look up from his book of Malay lyrics. He
utters one phrase: “The Cats of Cambyses, if we are to take Black Hawk
Boone at his word.”
I am temporarily of the Singaporians, in my way. I have their poisoned
eyes, it seems. So, while I have watched, horse and rider have faded
into something new and strange. They go by in semblance as beautiful
white tigers.
But what of Mara, who regards me as an article of furniture? What has
she seen? Apparently nothing but Springfield girls on a wild, lovely,
sweet, shrieking revel to which she has not been invited. She feels
“snubbed.” She is lonely, weary, in this house and city, though she has
a lover and a convert coming within the hour.
For, after these girls have gone by, she turns to the Cocaine Buddha.
She bows with hands and arms outspread. Hers is a strange cry and
prayer:—
“Master of the World, tell me, am I more beautiful than Avanel Boone?”
Which proves to me that Mara is only a girl.
July 12:—I find myself in all respects an American citizen of
Springfield, Illinois, today, as of old. The hours with Mara and her
father are as a “tale of little meaning, though the words are strong.”
As I wander through a July rain in our streets, and parks, many vague
hands seem stretched from the ground, catching me by the heels.
It is much later in the afternoon. The storm is gone, and I am walking
with the lady Avanel, and she has looked into my eyes and given me my
life again.
We confess to one another that these days are certainly not the
millennium, that many of them are as grotesque as the early geologic
ages, that had their monster sloths and lizards big as whales, and what
you will. Avanel says with her happy laughter: “Let no man declare that
the end of time is soon approaching.”
The lady Avanel has sometimes what might be called the mood of butterfly
wings, and this afternoon, as we go further north across the fields, we
are suddenly walking on a crimson cloud a little above the trees and
then that cloud on its borders takes on slowly, first from the edges,
the aspect of the wings of a giant butterfly whose body is at last the
raft on which we stand and ride. And toward the North Star we go, and
when we reach it, there sits a most grotesque and turtle-headed dwarf
that Avanel calls a gnome. The North Star is really a hill of
dandelions, and the dwarf is sitting at the foot of the hill.
We dismount from our cloud and the dwarf goes with us down a corridor in
the hill. There are on one side mirrors where details are dimmed, where
only big clear outlines of a possible new Springfield are shown, and
near by are shown plans for other similar villages in the world. On the
other side are mirrors into which we look and see greatly magnified the
raw machinery of a possible Springfield in sections that any one can
understand. Then we speed along through the passageway and at last come
through and see the light of the north sky on the other side of that
gorgeous dandelion hill.
The hill seems to be on the very edge of things, and though it has much
of the aspect of that place to the east where I saw the Great Palace of
Eve, once upon a time, the Dwarf calls this present cliff
disrespectfully: “The Jumping-off Place.” And Avanel seems amused and
exhilarated. But waves of outer darkness, into which I have looked so
often, dash upon the cliff.
The Dwarf says: “This particular Jumping-off Place is one of the
principal suburbs of Springfield, and I have seen all kinds of
Springfield people and dreams jump off here.”
Then, while we wait interminably, the gnome lets down an iron bucket by
a long rope, and brings it up full of the perpetually burning soul bones
of animals, men, and dreams that have jumped off. He says: “We live by
the death of these.” And he gathers the flames off the top as though
they were burning flowers and his hands were iron. And he pours the
bones back with a great thunder into the deep of the Jumping-off Place.
Then he eats of the terrible burning petals and makes us eat them. Then
he leads us back through the corridors and we seem to have been given
eyes to see and remember every detail of the microscopic cross section
of Springfield and he sends us back riding on the butterfly cloud, and
enjoins the Lady Avanel to help in the building of Springfield, day
after day.
July 13:—Today I meet the Thibetan Boy in Coe’s Book Store. We are both
rather aimlessly turning over the magazines, and, after I have observed
his idleness awhile, I take him out for a walk and say: “Why do you look
at me when you pass, with your eyes a story untold? All the while I have
walked the streets of this New Springfield, you have looked at me so.”
He answers slowly, almost whispering:—
“Your fathers came from the ancient Christian world. My fathers came
from the more ancient Buddhist world. Christ is my master but I cannot
deny that Buddha is my friend. This is the hour for friends. Come with
me.” We walk north on Mulberry Boulevard, past the House of the Man from
Singapore, and then west on Carpenter toward a little highway that
finally joins the great Northwest Road. But we have not gone far on the
Great Northwest Road till we flash past the Gothic double walls of our
city.
The Thibetan Boy takes me, in one instant, to the far edge of Space and
Time, way beyond the North Star and its dandelions. And as we stand on
the shaking shore of Space and Time we see and hear, rolling in from
Chaos, endless smoke and glory and darkness and dissolving foam.
Standing beside us, like a superb Gandhara sculpture that has taken on
life is that Prince Siddhartha who was the founder of Buddhism. He
stands in that aspect he had, while still a citizen and householder, and
twenty-four centuries before his green glass libel cursed mankind.
Before us is, indeed, a vision of Buddha the dreamer, superb,
thoroughbred, in all the jewels of his tribe. It is the hour before he
took chariot and drove forth from home. We are back in that hour when he
looked upon all things, and saw them as a dissolving foam, the hour
before he set forth for his victory over this crumbling universe. His
eyes are fixed upon those waves that roll in forever, that keep their
forms an instant, and are gone for all time: some of men, some of
wraiths and gods, some of planets and comets and suns.
He turns around and beckons and over the sand comes Channa, the superb
charioteer, and the horses of that chariot are nobler than the horses of
the sun. Prince Siddartha is in the chariot in an instant and they drive
out into that sea and the wheels of that chariot ride the waves. Those
horses are like lightning, climbing waves that are like hills and
mountains, till chariot, horses, and men all are veiled by the endless
smoke and glory and darkness and dissolving foam. The Thibetan boy says
to me: “It is the ‘Great Going Forth from Home,’ and thus Buddha becomes
a conquerer, and Chaos and the Universe are put beneath him.”
But the star chimes behind us are ringing new tunes and we are back in
our city again, leaving Prince Siddartha to conquer what he will.
CHAPTER XVI
THE RETURN OF SENATOR JOSEPH BARTHOLDI MICHAEL FROM THE WORLD GOVERNMENT
TO SPRINGFIELD. HIS CONVERSE OF HIGH IMPORT WITH A JAPANESE ELDER
STATESMAN WHO IS A COMMISSIONER TO OUR WORLD’S FAIR.
July 14, 2018:—The regular session of the World Senate has ended, and
all the talk in the coffee houses is of the imminent return of Joseph
Bartholdi Michael, the Second, namesake of the high dandy of one hundred
years ago, himself a reversion to tribe still further, in that he is a
replica of the Iron Gentleman, except that he has a hotter temper in old
age, which makes him a most tigerish fighter in the World Senate.
Today, being the Iron Gentleman’s birthday, is a family festival with
the Michaels and, in the very early morning, before there are any
passers by, the leading representatives of the family are hand in hand
in silence around the original forge of the Iron Gentleman, for a little
while. The bellows is blowing and the fire is high and there is the
beginning of a blade in the flame, for they remember that he has said:
“I will return to you only in the leaping flame of the forge fire.” Then
they repeat the Lord’s Prayer and disperse, before the town is awake,
leaving, according to custom, one man to finish the blade, at his
leisure:—in this case Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third.
St. Friend, the Giver of Bread, has told me that the Michaels in general
have old fashioned Bible reading in their homes, with old hymns and
family prayers, every morning or evening no matter what pet heresies may
be running through the tribe. Not many of them accept the formally
designed altars of Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, they have left
here hammering a blade, unless they are direct fanatical converts to the
Flower Religion.
This evening I find myself one of a party in the library of St. Friend.
We have been given an uplifting welcome by the saint, and the Thibetan
Boy. Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, the non-entity whose fortunes
seem always thrust upon me, is of the party. Black Hawk Boone is there.
Our special guest is Sake Shioya, one of the Elder Statemen of Japan,
and in America because he is head of the Department of Asiatic Art in
the World’s Fair of the University of Springfield. At home, when not in
the Japanese Cabinet, he is professor Sake Shioya of the Doshisha
University of Japan, and brother of Nataro Shioya, the leading Japanese
representative in the Senate of the World Government.
For a lifetime the brothers have shouted through Japan: “We will strike
off the head of the Singapore Snake with the Sword of the Samurai.” St.
Friend passes round the cigars and, himself, sticks to his corncob pipe.
Perhaps it is because we are under the portrait of Alexander Campbell
our talk turns to religious controversy. St. Friend says: “The world
over, Jew, Catholic, Protestant, used to hate each other to the point of
slaughter, though all spoke the name of Abraham and several other
patriarchs with the same reverence, and invoked Abraham’s tribal God.
Now the Marxians of the world revere Marx and Hegel as these others did
Abraham and Jehovah, but the only way to keep them from cutting each
other’s throats is for the World Government to stand between them.”
“Indeed it is true,” confirms Shioya, “The Purple Flag Marxians of
Japan, the Yellow Flag Marxians of China, the White Flags of Thibet, the
Black Flags of Russia, the Red Flags of Central Europe, the Gray Flags
of America, all conspire against one another, with at least five times
five which is twenty-five hates, in all, to be mathematical. Yet they
all read the same Marx to tatters. When the Yellow Flag Marxians of
China agree among themselves sufficiently to fall upon the Purples of
Japan, a thing we are momently expecting, the World Government will have
a stern police duty, especially since both sides are being urged on by
Singapore.”
Samiri Shioya, that austere old man, continues, saying that which he can
more gracefully say than any of the rest of us: “Instead of a world of
three classes, special privileged, middle class, and peasantry, as these
Marxians think it to be, it is, from my brother’s standpoint and my own,
a globe whose seas and continents are spread with fifty to one hundred
antagonistic races, mutually repellent. These fifty to one hundred races
dye thoroughly, with the dye of race-mysticism, any economic teaching
they take up. So practical world statesmanship, from the Japanese
standpoint and I am glad to say, from the standpoint of the fiery
Michael also, has dealt with race. Our statesmen advocated the principle
of one vote to every main tribe in the world and fractional votes in due
proportion to the size of the small tribes, long before your Michael
entered the Senate, and every speech he has made there to strengthen
that doctrine has been cheered from end to end of Japan.”
July 15:—Senator Joseph Bartholdi Michael is here and has refused the
conspicuous first place in the great sunset parade and drill held in his
honor and has taken his place in the ranks with his son, and has
demanded that the whole ceremony be in honor of the Star Spangled Banner
and the International Flag. Those flags have been put up in special size
and splendor, all over the town, even more than is the custom. And the
borders of the parks around Camp Lincoln are one tremendous fleet of
these banners. I find myself on the drill ground near the aged Japanese
statesman. I am huddled on the side of the reviewing platform with the
newspaper men, and we watch those strange Japanese eyes, and are amazed
at his fiery enthusiasm for the International Flag. The reviewing
platform is by the famous wrought-iron gates, hammered out by the Iron
Gentleman and his three sons and three daughters.
Just as he named the sword “The Avanel Sword,” knowing not of the child
who was coming in one hundred years, he named these “The Avanel Gates,”
for the perhaps mythical Avanel of more than one hundred years ago.
These gates are massive and towering, yet a little distance away are
wonderfully trellised vines, seeming to be climbing the white wall from
which the gates are swung.
In the center of each design is a Golden Rain Tree. The blossoms of the
tree are most delicately wrought, and shining with gold foil against the
black. These trees were, in especial, the work of the hammers of the
three daughters.
But now, to the delight of the old Japanese, and the delight of us all,
the magnificent cavalcade of men and women sweeps in from their city
parade through these ancestral gates, to the Camp Lincoln grounds, in
order, yet in riot, after the manner of a great dance of gay and
inspired horses and horsemen. And they are all within the command of
Avanel, standing high in her stirrups, and as much beneath her eye and
as subject to her entranced fancy, as has been St. Friend, the Giver of
Bread, when she uttered his sermons for him, hardly knowing how she did
it, except that she spoke her mind.
The men on horseback are but the background of the girls in their Diana
mood. The huntress, and yet the Pallas Athena, seems roused in all these
girls in white. Most of them are in their first strength:—high school
girls when they are still a bit Tom boy; that which is with every girl
for a year or half a lifetime as a reminiscence of the primeval girlhood
of her far grandmothers, when they rode the two-toed and three-toed
horse in equestrian dance and revel.
High above all the other flags, on gigantic poles on either side of the
reviewing stand, are the official flags of the field. The poles are of
equal height and the flags are of identical size and importance in the
eyes of the paraders, as they salute them and salute the Japanese each
time round the field:—while the afterglow turns the air to crimson and
orange and grey pearl.
They go by screaming and screeching with delight, and sweep and cut the
air with their Avanel blades in a sunset sword-drill. When they pass
Avanel, whose horse is now near us, the salute in sign of submission to
her pride, is given with all a girl Amazon’s fantastic chivalry: the
Boone dagger, lifted high overhead. In her person at least, the Boones
of Springfield have put the Michaels of Springfield under their feet.
And certainly the whitest thing in the whole whirlwind of white is the
spirited head of old Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second. Whatever the
morrow between these clans, his submission is made as she sights him,
and he bows and salutes in the last afterglow, and she forces him to
lead the review beside her.
The Japanese watches and wonders and says to the press gallery that of
course no day can be women’s day and men’s day equally, and this is one
of the days of the women.
Now all the while I have been wondering about a certain device that is
the millinery and nonsense of this drill park, the globe that is the
mechanical toy of these laughing girls. Now the whole company are
whirling round and round that giant school-globe that looms like the
dome of the Taj Mahal in the center of the field. Upon the surface of
the sphere of hollow crystal, the map of the world now begins to blaze
out as darkness comes on, the continents in the conventional colors of
the school globes from the beginning of the log school house days. The
interior of the sphere is a vapor, the color of the sea, but becoming
iridescent as though the world were but a bubble blown by the fancy of
one of the powers of the universe. The changes of light are painted upon
the faces of the riders and the flanks of the horses.
July 17:—The Japanese is addressing the leaders of the Horseshoe
Brotherhood and the Amazons. He says in conclusion:—“Hardly a man on the
earth wanted the war to come that was waged against the World Government
thirty years ago, if we are to believe the professions then made. So far
as I can discover not one responsible statesman expected or intended it.
Such dynamite may be touched off again, and this time it will be with
more cause and more open anticipation. So though the responsible ones
like Michael and my brother, if I may say so, are doing their best to
prevent war, half the world is drilling and riding and marching, and
flying about in practice war planes, and even here where the Great
World’s Fair of the University of Springfield is going on, that seems in
itself an assurance of international brotherhood forever, you are
drilling more zealously every day.
“Pardon me, if for a moment I speak as an old man to his grandchildren.
I ask to be forgiven if I am jealous of the furious and romantic years
just coming on, jealous for the farther future, and for its vindication.
The immediate years, I know, will fill our cups with sorrow whether we
live or die. But I ask of you one Spartan thing, beyond fighting ten
years—if ten years be necessary to subdue mad Singapore. Remember not
only the virtues but the follies of your mothers, the Amazons, and your
fathers, the Horseshoe Brotherhood, who rode side by side and fought so
nobly thirty years ago. I can speak of this because I can say without
flinching that our Japanese men and women Samurai went through the same
glories and follies, with them in the same battle line. Forever after,
they have lived in that war on that battle line. Do not go on
perpetually climbing into office because you can recount military
history, as many of our Samurai have done, drowning out the man or woman
who wants to speak of matters thirty years ahead and plan such a thing
as your Fair or University. No war ushers in the perfect state. The
great wars are not all fought with the sword. To speak in the Christian
phrase, remember that every yesterday is but a box of costly spikenard
to be broken on the feet of Holy Tomorrow. Though you fight ten wars,
let yesterday be your enemy. Otherwise you fight but as the nations that
died before Confucius, and Mencius.”
July 18:—The same group as on the 14th of July are around the library
table of St. Friend with the addition of the gigantic Joseph Bartholdi
Michael, the Second, who is among us as though he were in his boyhood
again, being as he says, “Back home, after so long.” The idolizing
friendship of the Japanese and his private secretary but provoke him to
franker monologues and a greater disposition to sprawl about with his
hair mussed up and his head on one side like an eagle acting the robin.
He has his arm around his son, as though he would push him in amongst
us. As the evening progresses, in reply to some quite pointed questions
from the Japanese, on behalf of his brother and himself, who want to act
upon the information, discreetly but definitely, Joseph Bartholdi
Michael, the Second, bawls out a confession:—
“First, let me say that no man ever held office in the world, who was
actually capable of running more than a village of ten thousand
inhabitants. All men who have been higher in apparent rank than village
mayors, have simply made shift: rattled about in their big chairs as
they could. The courageous man, knowing this, respects, but does not
fear or revere the alleged great. They all get the respect from me due
to a good mayor, and no more. No man should run for a great office
without expecting to make a botch of his administration. I dream of
something definite and quite selfish. I want to have my turn as
President of the World Government. This proclamation may be too much
American style for the stomachs of my Japanese friends here present. But
no one was ever elected dog catcher, coroner, governor, senator, or
president, in this United States, who did not first nominate himself. As
a matter of fact I know of no American politician who was ever urged to
run by his most admiring friend. I must keep my American political
habits if I am to feel at home in this contest and to retain even the
American vote. All this is by the way. I hope it is not too mysterious
to a Japanese.
“To continue as to my views around and about this office. A man may
serve but one term at best. We Michaels are a long lived set, and I am
hoping at the end of this war to have strength for one term.
“It is a long journey to the nomination past all other possible national
or international ambitions; for instance, in my case, past an ambition
to forge a thousand Michael blades.
“I admit I am an old man, and I know the ironies, or at least some of
them, if I win. Whoever is President of the World or mayor of a small
town is predestined to be overthrown by the ten most envious and
vigorous young men who want his place.”
And now the eagle begins to flame in the face of Michael and he speaks
most earnestly: “I can only hope that some of the envious will be from
Springfield’s freshman chivalry. I love the hate of young men and young
women when it is high and keeps them driving forward to unseat the older
generation in tournaments over noble issues. And whoever replaces me at
the World Capitol, either in the legislature or the supreme chair, I
hope to have made my bungling record there of such a sort, my foe,
equally human, will be obliged to do his noblest to unseat me. But the
sword of the Michaels has not been called the Avanel sword by divine
accident alone, and at the end of my turn, ten years hence, or so, I am
willing to be driven out of the supreme-chair by a Boone, of
Springfield, particularly if it is a girl, and particularly if she is
named Avanel.” Which ending is of course but gallant nonsense. But I
venture, from my dark corner to interrupt severely:—“The world would
have a princess, not a president. It would simply be the reiteration of
monarchy and idolatry from of old time.”
But no one seems to hear me. My voice comes from too far away.
July 21:—Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second, is talking with the two
Japanese and myself in Tom Strong’s Lunch Room, and, with most elaborate
and knightly deference to the extremely contrasting race character of
our guests, and is giving his theory of what he calls:—“The New
Springfield Race.” And his tone of voice is most diplomatically
ingratiating, as he touches on matters alien to Japanese thought.
“Just as the sea is naturally the world’s buffer state, and in area far
greater than the total of all the continents, with the happy
circumstance that the World Government is supported by a sea revenue, in
this same way and no other way, institutions like the University Fair
lie between all great enemies and factions of Springfield, a sea of
separation, cooling, and reconciliation.
“Springfield, in other ways, affords so good a symbol of desirable world
conditions, toward which the World Government should be, perhaps,
constructed, that I would like to put the city before you in that light.
“What is the ultimate citizen of Springfield? Already the race strains
that have mixed, have made an elastic, resilient type, that is one with
the city’s suddenest moves.
“Of course, one event or festival pleases the Italians most, another
seems to be in the Scandinavian mood, though both events represent
Springfield. Every new song or event or new idea goes echoing through
the various temperaments, and has a resonance that a thought cannot have
when it is echoed in only one kind of a corridor.
“And Springfieldians, for all their marvelous intermarriages, are not
mongrel. They have a special Springfield sense of the sacred mystery of
race, that keeps the great pronounced race types like the Japanese and
others in honored separation, while within one general type or kindred
tradition, there is much intermarriage.
“We Michaelites say to each other, and you will forgive a family
allusion, that the Springfield soul, which is so elastic, is like the
sword evolved by the Iron Gentleman, which can be coiled like a ribbon
from the side but, when cutting straightforward, can go through granite
without losing edge anywhere.
“As for the versatility and elasticity, the Irish grandmother of my pet
enemy will keep him in city hall politics, and one Russian
great-grandmother keeps him in the music department of the University,
as one of the leading composers. Or so we are accustomed to tracing out
family lines in this town.
“Another man is quite sure that his Portuguese great-grandfather gives
him the voice to be one of the city’s principals in local opera, and his
Scotch great-grandfather, at least in his own eyes, explains the fact
that he is an expert accountant.
“The mystery of race is first of all a sex mystery, and with endless
subtleties settled by instinct, on which no man can dogmatize, though
they have caused jealous Othello to misunderstand and kill Desdemona,
and Jessica to understand and wed Lorenzo, from the beginning. If race
is first of all a sex mystery, it is next a religious mystery, which is
more easily expounded, from the standpoint of politics, and touches,
perhaps more clearly, our theory of World Government. The prayers at our
family altars differ in tone and accent. The races with a turn for
sectarianism, like the Scotch, are still working in our blood while
others are the mainstay of the Cathedral. All phases of the race—the
religious mystery, moving in harmony, cleanness, and self respect are
not only a part of Springfield’s total personality, but of Springfield’s
government, in the midst of apparent mob-law.
“For instance, the fact that the Catholics have remained for these one
hundred years worshipping in their incense-haunted Churches in the
Springfield atmosphere, means that Springfield people, married before
Springfield Catholic altars, have become a special kind of dreaming
Catholics. Therefore, they have given us miracle-working, vision-seeing
saints, like Saint Scribe of the Shrines, to help unify our mood. And we
all worship in season at the Cathedral, and half of us are followers of
St. Friend, the Giver of Bread, whatever our religious belief.
“I say the Christian Science Church of Springfield has a most noble
history. It is made up largely of heretic Jews and proselytes from the
old Congregational New Englanders. This would not be so if the doctrine
were a pure abstraction appealing to all men equally. It is mixed in
some incalculable way with the mystery of race and the mystery of the
past, or it would not appeal so definitely to these two race traditions,
and so little to all others.
“The side of it that appeals to me is its history of freedom and its
chronicle of subdivision, which mean life, at least I hold that they do
in this case. And so we find the local Mother Church growing at first
strong, and then new teachers rising in the body of the Church’s life to
make more vital the friendly and hostile pulpits of the town, and
stimulate everywhere debate.
“The teachings of Rabbi Ezekiel of the Oak Religion and Mother Grey of
the Flower Religion may be largely classified as coming from Christian
Science. The wave of its tide is still strong among us, and we know not
what Christian Science may bring forth for Springfield tomorrow.
“Our sects quarrel, of course, but whatever quarrels they have divide
families only, never the city.
“I wish this could always be true of the races in the World Government.
“We have seen adorers of the truth, like close followers of Mother Grey,
the Florist, going from Synagogue to Church and from Church to the Open
Forum, and it is generally deemed a mark of a good citizen, certainly
among the descendants of the Iron Gentleman, to understand all of these
movements, and to love many, though they appear to contradict one
another. Within the dominion of the Springfield mind, there is a
principle:—one sect, one vote: one race, one vote. As florist Mother
Grey is willing to say to her most devoted following ‘Our religions and
races may be looked upon by the wise as many flowers of opposite design,
yet all making glad the Springfield garden.’ Yet there is no place in
the world where people are more loyal to their clans. Boones are Boones
forever.
“You, as a Japanese, will be glad and comprehend when I say that even
the religious life from the far east, except the teaching of Singapore,
moves up into this common denominator in Springfield that we call
citizenship. There are a few Mohammedan Philippinos, and I happen to
know, they are good citizens and good Americans, though they are allowed
but one apparent wife in these states. There is a group of Thibetans, of
whom the Thibetan Boy is one socially, if not religiously, who do not
find a contradiction between their Springfield patriotism that has gone
on these three generations, and their reformed Buddhism. Of course, they
marry for the most part among themselves, or bring Thibetans from New
York or San Francisco to build up their colony. Whatever church a group
of our people finds in tune with their race and sex and love-tradition,
no matter how separate they keep their race strains, or how guarded
their family altars and holy family flags, they surely belong to the
Springfield race and the Springfield Civic Religion. They are loyal to
the city as a scholar is to his University. This is the mood I would
like to get into World-Government-Flag-Patriotism, which is now too
crude. With obvious Singaporian exceptions, this Springfield civic
religion is preached by every philosopher and every local atheist. Even
Sparrow Short, though he seems to hate me and the World Government,
would count it as great a hardship to be banished from Springfield, as
Dante counted it, to be banished from Florence. I wish his kind could
see the World Flag as they see the Springfield Flag.
“You have wanted to understand my politics, to make it clearer to your
brother in Japan. In most things the city is a symbol and pattern to me
of World Unity and World Government and if there has been any
consistency in my battles in the World Senate, it is because I had faith
in this pattern.
“Within the range from Jew to Greek we openly trust one another’s
priesthood, realizing we are all kings and priests before God. Above all
races and their sects are the stars, and beneath them is the rich earth,
and between these our city climbs heavenward. I am sure that before a
thousand years go by, yes, before a hundred years go by, some image of
Prince Siddartha will stand beside the image of Johnny Appleseed, whose
soul was so much like his own. Our image of Johnny Appleseed would have
been equally impossible in the church of St. Peter and St. Paul that
stood on the site of our cathedral one hundred years ago. With such
practical unity of the main forces that have quarrelled immemorially in
the old lands, I have the hope that similar forces of race and sect,
with the buffer state of the ocean between them, to keep them cool, may
come to practical reconciliation under the World Flag:—that those that
can unite under the Flag of Springfield with joy, can some day unite,
the world over, under the flag of all mankind.” And so, till midnight
Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second, talks on and on, possibly
recruiting a member of his possible cabinet, if his dream comes true, of
being for one term the President of the World. And the Japanese Samurai
nods his gray head keeping time to the eloquence, till the one remaining
waiter gets us out of the restaurant by turning down the lights, and
handing us our hats.
CHAPTER XVII
HOW IN THE LATTER PART OF JULY BLACK HAWK BOONE IS OPENLY LYNCHED AND
JAMES KOPENSKY MYSTERIOUSLY STABBED ON THE SAME EVENING. HOW THREE
MONTHS LATER THERE IS NO SIGN THAT EITHER MURDER WILL BE PUNISHED. HOW
THE GOLDEN BOOK APPEARS ON THE MYSTIC DAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2018 AND HOW,
WHEN IT COMES DOWN TO THE MOURNING AVANEL, SHE TAKES COURAGE AND LEADS
HER PEOPLE AGAINST SINGAPORE, THAT WICKED NATION, THAT HAS DECLARED WAR
ON THE WORLD FLAG.
July 22, 2018:—This morning owing to new utterances on the part of
Sparrow Short and two others, more venomous than himself, brothers of
“Beau Nash,” he and they are put into the International Prison for world
treason, with all further bail and bond refused. Therefore tonight there
is a great torch-parade and ritual by St. Friend and his followers in
the cathedral. Debs, John Brown, Lovejoy, Liebknecht, are invoked.
Springfield’s fury, glory, and devotion are in every face and eye. St.
Friend, with unaccustomed fire for these his days of feebler health,
reviles the opinions of Short and his companions. But he demands their
liberation in the name of the Constitution of the United States and Free
Speech. St. Friend cries from the pulpit: “We preach not the low
revolution, but the high revolution, not the massacre in the street, but
the high unquenched torch of freedom and free speech in the unconsumed
cathedral.”
The smoke of those torches comes between me and St. Friend. Everything
on this day happens to me in such a fashion. There is much dust on the
dustless streets, at least when I pass by. And many streets are
unaccountably deserted, morning and afternoon, though there is a World’s
Fair crowd roaring somewhere near, I know. And the dust that sweeps up
with the autumn leaves from these streets has the taste of old years in
it, and the grave. It seems, some moments, as though I can keep my eyes
open no longer. I am not to take one step further. Some fate has
forbidden me to glimpse more of my City. But there is that in my will
and my soul that commands me to go forward one step further, and open my
eyes for one moment longer.
And so through this evening I realize that, dimly and dizzily, the
torches are being uplifted at the beginning of the star chiming hour.
Now the great Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second, is himself speaking
in the cathedral, and, if he testifies for old Sparrow Short, who shall
say that Short is a danger to the World Flag?
Michael says that just as freedom resides in the Declaration of
Independence, in trial by jury, and the like, which are immemorial,
crystallized institutions of the radicalism of ancient times, so
radicals with new thoughts should have every chance with their torch in
the church and not be forced to wave it in the street, and that “he is
indeed glad this meeting is being held in this place, etc., etc.”
July 23:—Sparrow Short is left locked up and forgotten, for today there
is a great war-music in the streets.
All Singapore is running amuck. The Horseshoe Brotherhood and the
Amazons are drilling double hours. Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second,
is firing his clan like an Arab Mahdi, preaching a new holy war. A new
group of trumpeters are to the fore, blowing slender trumpets, all of
them silver white, to frighten the Lord of Cocaine, trumpets whose cry
is that of birds that the Singaporians hold accursed; the eagle, the
turkey and the wild swan.
And to that music, there at Camp Lincoln, the maelstrom of cavalry goes
on, round and round their gigantic mechanical toy, their simple
childlike image of the earth, and its glow is turning to a glare as of a
smelter-furnace door, or the blaze of a little planet, newly whirled off
from the sun.
July 24:—War talk dies down and the whole town is full of hatred of its
leaders and feverish silly rumors against them. More and more openly the
small fry politicians of all factions seem to be justifying with
reminiscent emphasis the lynching of Surto Hurdenburg as an heroic act
of defiance of both the City Hall and the Board of Education. The actual
responsibility for the lynching is shifted from this one to that one,
but, whoever it was that led (if we are to believe the tone of the
coffee houses) is a hero.
The fairly well-meaning leaders of the town, comprising the majority of
both the Board of Education and the City Hall, are in new tremendous
offices, administering the growing responsibilities of the World’s Fair
and the war preparations also, and a gulf has been made between them and
the people with whom they have been on gossiping terms heretofore.
The old war between the town and the gown seems revived, with this
difference, that the natives of Springfield act like the University
students, and the finest World’s Fair visitors seem the real citizens of
the place, insulted at the deeds of the freshmen. The habit of turning
every spare village green into a summer camp ground for passing tourists
in automobiles, that has prevailed through the United States for a long
time, has established in all the counties adjoining Springfield an
enormous circle of village grounds, and here the great part of the Fair
visitors camp by their own machines and come in to the show by day, by
local transportation of all sorts. Their resentment of the frivolity of
the rank and file of the city grows, and nightly they are the more
appalled at the rumor as they chatter in their camps, that the
Springfield mob intends to lynch wholesale the only people who have
treated the Fair visitors with any degree of courtesy, namely:—the City
Council and the Board of Education.
Whole streets of the city are suddenly deserted and the business houses
closed, for this or that lightly given reason, and the next hour that
street, under obscure leaders may be filled with a howling mob, that
seems to be howling about nothing.
The slander still persists, with infinite variations, that the man who
poisoned Drug Store Smith and Coffee House Kusuko did it at the direct
instigation of old Boone. Such an action is indeed far from Boone’s
nature. And this, all discredited leaders, in a panic for their personal
safety, steadily maintain.
July 25:—I am again the Malay servant at the house of the Man from
Singapore.
The death of Drug Store Smith and Coffee House Kusuko was exacted of the
Mayor’s son by Montague Rock. It was an earnest of the sincerity of his
conversion to the Singaporian cult. The Man from Singapore had nothing
to do with it and, in fact, does not approve of the use of such a
drastic initiation, “But who can control these zealous proselytes, these
foreigners?” he says. The slandering of Boone, it appears, by the talk
of the Man from Singapore with his daughter, is also the work of this
fanatical convert, Montague Rock. It is not exactly the Singaporian way.
But again “who can control these foreigners?”
July 26:—About the beginning of July, four men come to town, who took
part in the burning alive of a negro in Chicago. The burning was
provoked by a yellow journal’s account, giving hear-say evidence against
the negro. Disturbing their minds not at all over the subsequent
vindication of the black man, his executioners come to Springfield,
intoxicated with their recent leadership, the first taste of public
power they have ever known, the smell of burning flesh delighting their
cannibal nostrils. They take odd jobs from Boone and profess to be his
violent partizans. They are more violent than he desires or uses.
And so tonight, while I am chained in the body of the Malay body-servant,
the news comes over the phone, particularly grieving the Man
from Singapore, that Boone has been hanged from the same tree at the
northwest corner of the State House ground, where Surto Hurdenburg was
hanged on the twentieth of June. The four men from Chicago, who lead the
mob, want to burn Boone to death, but the rest of the crowd insist on a
hanging. The crowd is not composed of partizans of the City Hall. There
are few people who were at the murder of Hurdenburg; according to the
report over the phone, equally obscure members of all factions are
represented.
The Man from Singapore says he deeply regrets the death of Boone who was
an honorable and open foe of Singapore. He almost weeps before the
beautiful Mara and, as to what she thinks, I know not. He says that if
he had had his way, Boone should have lived several years longer, but
the fashions, even of proselytes in Springfield, are past finding out.
“They are WHITE people, you know,” he says to Mara, “even if they are
converted.”
Then he is gone to his writing room in the white tower of his house, and
Mara sits waiting for Crawling Jim, who is due later this evening.
And here let it be recorded that, the Singaporian issue becoming more
bitter, the towers of Springfield and all the principal cities of the
United States have been painted white this last month, to drive out the
more fanatical Singaporians. In complete harmony with this hysterical
and fantastic and humorous procedure, Crawling Jim has been under the
necessity of wearing a small white plume in his hat, or resigning his
place as President of the Robin Redbreast Flying Club. Nothing is said
among the members. Plumes begin to appear one at a time. Soon a majority
have them. Jim put on his plume late yesterday. He values his supremacy
in that flying club more than any victory in love or any dogma of
religion.
But having had a part in the Judas tricks which have ended in the
hanging of Boone, he knocks most confidently on the door tonight, when
it is almost midnight, and I let him in. He carries in his hand the hat
with the white plume.
He walks into the book-room most jauntily. There the deep eyed Mara
awaits him with love. She is nestled among her books, just below her
mother’s languid picture. She lifts slow eyes that are heavy with love.
But she sees that white plume. And Jim has little time left in life to
have the Malay nature explained to him, the brief tale of how they may
run “amuck” without reason.
Mara cannot wait. Her dagger is out, and she is indeed running “amuck.”
They reach the hall together, and she stabs him before the eyes of the
green Glass Buddha. She stands stark and lonely above him, and screams
for her father to come down from his writing room.
* * * * *
October 29:—The body of Crawling Jim was found in a shadow, near the
tree where Boone was hanged, by the group of young Boones who came to
take away the body of their kinsman.
No one is in serious peril of being brought to justice for the death of
Boone, though that was three months and three days ago. This has always
been the case, in Springfield lynchings and murders. It is a thing still
taken for granted, as people look drearily in the direction of the
courts. The weekly magazines in Coe’s Book Store, from all over the
country, roar about the two unavenged and unspeakable Springfield
murders:—of the leading editor, and the son of the mayor on the same
night. This has been in the papers, on similar occasions, for a century.
And curiously enough, the town is blazing with international courage and
all tense with efficiency on international issues. We are more in
despair of bringing some sixty or one hundred masked murderers to
justice than of annihilating the whole nation and religion of Singapore
on the other side of the world. And there is, I admit, some
justification for our hope. America, paralyzed one minute, is like a
million bolts of lightning the next. There is something of the essence
of majority rule in this, if one might think it out. But to our story.
Singapore is about to proclaim an all-Asiatic alliance against the World
Government, with the ostensible object of an ultimate Pacific Ocean
Government, living in alleged reciprocity and amity with the World
Government, but not under one jurisdiction. Their newspaper editorials,
sent by cable, sound marvelously like the fulminations of South Carolina
in the days of Andrew Jackson, and further fulminations in the days just
before the Civil War.
Indo China joins the Singaporian league, Burmah, and certain provinces
of Southern China. But most of the Asiatic continent and all of Japan
remains actively loyal to the Flag of Joseph’s Coat. On the other hand
there are strange hesitancies in Europe and South America. There are
rumors of World Treason, even among American officials of the World
Government. Today the Singaporian declaration hangs.
I find myself again with the Japanese and his secretary on the reviewing
stand by the wrought iron gates of Camp Lincoln, as the Amazons once
more whirl by. They are valiant and potent as Britomart, and the
Japanese Samurai says “it is inconceivable that such creatures could let
a mob run away with their town, if such things had not happened hundreds
of times in the history of noble cities.”
I find a wan new hope pouring into my dusty veins as they pass us many
thousand strong, riding the best bred, the best shod horses in the whole
wide world, and flashing the finest swords ever made. And along with the
swords, the eyes of the horses flash as though they themselves were
shouting the song of the warrior maidens. It is the old song, sung now
with terrible irony and sweetness: “Springfield Awake, Springfield
Aflame.” And then there are strains of that World Government song,
beginning: “Every ship of every land, every wheel and every wing.”
The cheeks of the girls are sun-browned, and rosy as the Amaranth-Apples
in the orchards of Hunter Kelly.
The whole town is here; every faction, religion, tribe and tongue.
Besides all the Michaels, Boones and Darsies, Bonansingas, Romanoffs,
Fagins, Kopenskys, Rocks, Rues, Swartzes, McGinnisses, Ezekiels, Greys,
there are even girls of the negro Timmons and Emis families. There are
Hymans, Stanleys and Radleys, and all the rest. Each steed is like a
pale horse of death. I am thinking that when human beings go forward
like this, trained to the last inch, all whipcord and tempered steel, it
is no wonder that, left far behind, to make mischief, there are human
embers. This must be paid for, by the discarded creatures among us who
cannot stand this pace and who are not quite vile enough in ordinary
hours to be hid in jails or sanitariums, but who when their little time
suddenly arrives, go forth marauding according to their nature and their
good luck.
I am beneath the reviewing platform and, as I am meditating, the mayor’s
little sister stands up in her stirrups and cuts me across the face with
her whip, not checking her pace an instant. Some one behind and above me
says: “Evidently you did not see the flags.” It is the Japanese, all
courtesy and solicitude. But he has been fortunate enough to see in time
and to salute the meteors just ahead of this fiery little rider, the two
battle flags of the Amazons, the Star Spangled Banner and the
thousand-colored flag that will yet redeem mankind, made of all the flags
in the world, sewed into one glorious banner, the Flag of Joseph’s Coat.
But I have my excuse for not seeing the flags of my world. My eyes have
been dazzled by Avanel, who has been mourning and hidden three months
and three days; she is riding in from a boulevard to the left, hurrying
with her escort to the head of the cavalcade.
The meaning of her accoutrement is plain. She is saying, by what she
wears: “No Singapore intrigue can drive the child of Daniel Boone from
her destiny.” Never was she such a commander as she is in this twilight,
with _black horse, black gauntlets, black dress, black harness, black
plume, all things black_ and the only flash of white, her mourning face.
Her pride is laid low for a higher pride. For the first time her black
hair is combed back over her shoulders, after the manner and regulation
of the Boones, and she goes forward to resume her command, and the girls
cry out in passionate welcome, and there is a terrible mourning and a
terrible menace in their cry, when she takes her left hand from the
gauntlet, and it is dyed crimson, after the manner and regulation of the
Boones.
October 30.—The Amazons of the city, and the Horseshoe Brotherhood have
taken possession of the city, and until the day of their going, they
will police the city and none shall hinder them, and they ride down the
boulevards with little consideration or patience for the loitering of
passers by. More and more the Avanel blades hiss in the air, and there
is angry fear in the eyes of the women, that the mobs may again own
these streets, while the city’s warriors are away in Asia. And this
evening _The Boone Ax_, of which Avanel is now the nominal editor, comes
out with an editorial, front page, with her signature:—“I have railed in
my time at middle-class respectability. Yet _The Boone Ax_ trusts it
today as the one jewel case containing most of the gems of brotherhood.
Whatever its policy in the past _The Boone Ax_ now puts at the head of
its regular inside editorial page a picture of Confucius, and under it
this description:—‘The champion of old-fashioned, middle-class decency
and respectability, and the lawgiver for this paper.’
“The picture goes there as our only vengeance for the death of the
founder of this paper, and as our eternal reminder of that act.
“As a matter of getting down to the bed rock of civilization we turn to
the world’s most ancient champion of propriety and civility and fight
lynch law and all popular and ill-considered whirlwinds, until our paper
has won its battle, or is wiped from the face of the earth.”
November 1, 2018:—But Confucius is not the patron saint of the lady
Avanel.
It all comes as a clouded vision before me as though I were half in the
vision, and through it beginning a new and more desperate destiny of my
own. It is the snowy morning of All Saints’ Day. Representatives of the
Michael Clan, young and old, Horseshoe Brotherhood, Amazons and many
others are at the crossing of Fifth Street and Capital Avenue, by the
ancestral Blacksmith Shop. The horse of the conquering Avanel Boone is
to be shod by that good sport, Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second, as
a sign of fealty, and in final preparation for the going forth against
Singapore. Scattered among the Michaels are the long-haired, black-haired
Boones, with the locks of both the men and women streaming back
over their shoulders, after the manner and regulation of the Boones, and
their left hands dyed crimson, as a perpetual reminder to themselves and
all the world of certain strains of Red Indian ancestry.
While the snow is blowing into the shop, white-haired Joseph Bartholdi
Michael, the Second, aided by his son, the Third, have taken the old
shoes from the dainty feet of the white pony, and just as the old
warrior is lifting a new shoe from the fire, the flames leap up, there
is a music incredibly sweet and, with a great whirring of wings and
terrible thunder, the Golden Book flies out of the fire and circles
above these two clans and their satellites of renown.
And the swords of the Amazons are out in the air in involuntary
salutation, and the face of Avanel has the consecration of a nun, taking
her final vows. I wonder if all her girlish escort, so wonderstricken,
see, as I see. For to me, as I feel my feet sinking into the dust of the
ancient grave, this horse and rider move heavenward a little, it seems
as though Avanel’s horse’s hoofs no longer quite touch the ground; she
is a sort of celestial lady centaur. She and her horse have one pair of
wings that bind them together, and the wings are rays of light and the
same color as the wings of the book and akin. And even while I look, the
very glory of this vision of a young girl, receiving her commission from
the unseen world, burns me down like the last embers of a campfire blown
upon by a terrible wind from the skies. I am neither man nor weed nor
flame any more but something less than these and doomed by the years.
There is a flower of flame above her forehead that consumes my eyes;
there are flowers of flame above the foreheads of all her girl
companions.
Avanel, with eyes fixed and strained, follows the flying book on her
winged horse. The book settles into her arms and, though the snow and
autumn leaves swirl down and blind me, I see her there above the
company, like a fairy in a trance, while the assembled clans and all the
citizens gather close to hear every word. The first pages of the volume
give a new constitution for the World Government, based on the teachings
of Abraham Lincoln. The song in the air praises Avanel and urges her and
all she commands to valor for the Heavenly Star Spangled Banner and the
Heavenly International Flag.
But as for myself, I am sinking to my knees into yesterday, and this is
not Fifth and Capital Avenue, for me, for the wind says: “ashes to
ashes, dust to dust.” Then Avanel leans down. She gives her crimson hand
to me one moment. She gives me life for this war. This is the day of
going forth against Singapore.
CHAPTER XVIII
HOW SEVEN YEARS AFTER THE MYSTIC YEAR ST. FRIEND AND AVANEL READ FROM A
COPY OF THE GOLDEN BOOK AND HOW HE TELLS HIS VISION THAT CAME THE DAY
THE BOOK FIRST APPEARED. ON OTHER DAYS THE LADY AVANEL SOWS THE THISTLE
OF DREAMS AND THE APPLE AMARANTH SEEDS AND THE ACORNS OF EZEKIEL AND THE
SEEDS OF THE GOLDEN RAIN TREE AND THEREBY COME NEW VISIONS AND TEACHINGS
AND MAGIC WORKS.
Of the Singapore adventure, there is a song to be sung, some day, but we
cannot, by taking thought, sing of battles. The song of battle comes
when we least expect it, long after or long before the event that is so
moving to the heart.
But Singapore is indeed overthrown and for two seasons the young men and
maidens have been back from the Asiatic war front. To some of them, to
many, The Golden Book came before they left Springfield. To others it
appeared after the last battle, hovering above the trenches at midnight
and there were songs in the air calling them home. Or they found it
suddenly in their hands in camp shelters, and long litanies and
proclamations of the New Springfield and the New Earth flashed upon
their souls and burned eternal record there.
It is a gorgeous first of March afternoon and the wind has abated for a
few hours, and a few buds are out in Washington Park and we are hoping
that frost will not nip them in this exceedingly premature spring. The
lotus pond is still empty and leaden. It flowers only in the height of
July but we look to it in hope and with remembrance of other lotus days.
Avanel and I and St. Friend are in the Washington Park Pavilion. The
precocious spring is in the blood of the ancient saint. He is the
youngest of us, the gayest. Avanel is speaking of that morning in front
of the blacksmith shop when the great Book fluttered into her arms. “In
the fire flaming from the words of that book, I found power to go out
and fight for the International Flag, and make that the vengeance for
the death of my father.”
Now I draw from my coat pocket a tiny duplicate of the book, such as is
now in the hands of practically every Springfield citizen, printed by
Josephine Windom and Horace Andrews. As we three loaf in the pavilion:
St. Friend, Avanel and myself, and look at the leaden lotus pond, St.
Friend reads aloud the familiar opening sentences of St. Scribe of the
Shrines, who wrote the book in Heaven:—
“I have been long in the jungles of the Celestial Zion, speculating on
how the ruined mansions here, and how the earth itself, might be
rebuilt. Yet the true Heaven lies in a single flower, and more and more
my speculations turn on how my own city, Springfield, may be rebuilt.”
Then St. Friend, the Giver of Bread, at our urging, reads on and on. The
volume tells, for instance, how Heaven became a jungle within the
lifetime of an ordinary man. The book contains a sermon, which our saint
reads to us, on: “Your great great grandson’s neighbors.” It is a volume
no more consecutive than the Koran. Each dream is written down once for
all as it came to the tranced soul of St. Scribe, as he bent over the
page, with his terrible pen in his hand.
With endless reiteration the book denounces the diabolical works of the
Singaporian sect and their conspiring against world peace. It pronounces
a blessing on the predestined victorious armies of the World Government
and prophecies the triumph of their splendid flag.
Moreover, St. Friend reads, not only many of these things, but the
sermon on “The Rhythm of the Heart,” and the homily upon “The Good and
Evil of Beauty.” He reads the exhortation for “The Young Musician who
has not learned to Pray,” and the one for “The Young Politician who has
not learned to Pray,” and like discourses for many other occupations.
And then Avanel and I take turns reading on and on to him through the
specific directions for the founding of the schools of the Young
Prophets, and the discourse on the horror of the angels at all the World
Wars, and the tale of how the angels went out to redeem the stars from
war by surrendering themselves to crucifixion on millions of crosses on
millions of suns and stars and planets, and thus within the lifetime of
the generation now on earth, Heaven was left a jungle. This is followed
by an exhortation to make Springfield a city “worthy of the blood of the
crucified poured down upon it.”
But its powers are not directly in its interminable discourses. Always
it seems to be a person, not a book, and so, on this afternoon.
April 10, 2025:—Again it is a goodly afternoon, and we are still hopeful
for these precocious buds. As we sit in the sun in the Washington Park
Pavilion, Saint Friend, the Giver of Bread, tells us of the visions that
came seven years ago.
“I remember the Halloween of 2018, and the next few days, as no other
period in my life. I was in the Cathedral all the night, praying before
the Image of St. Scribe of the Shrines. And toward morning it took on
the appearance of breathing human flesh, but was Hunter Kelly of long
ago, in the hunter’s cap and deerskin dress, such as he wore when he
came to Illinois two centuries ago.”
And so Hunter Kelly, St. Scribe of the Shrines, made me forget all else,
telling me stories of the tomorrow of Illinois and giving clear
prophecies of the tomorrow of the Cathedral, in the city and the nation
and the world. He spoke of saints of the pattern of Abraham Lincoln, and
Johnny Appleseed, foreordained to live and breathe beneath our Cathedral
roof, before the ever living presence on the altar. Then he gave me the
joy of confession, and seemed to be St. Scribe, the master of my youth.
Then all was darkness and sleep.
“In the early morning I woke from my trance and found myself lying on
the floor of the Cathedral. The Image of Hunter Kelly-St. Scribe was
gone from the niche.
“In the late morning, when I found myself reading his Golden Book to the
people, it seemed as though I had known its every word for infinite
years.
“I read on and on. When I closed the book and dismissed the people, they
went out singing through the streets ‘Springfield Awake, Springfield
Aflame.’
“As I stood alone in the church, a vision of the war came to me.
“The angel of the Cathedral came down from the carved niche near the
roof. By many signs she was, indeed, the angel of Illinois. The stone
was transformed into a presence, delicate as the milkweed silk, ruddy as
the sunrise. Her hair was the hue of red corn. Her wind blown mantle was
the color of ripe wheat. Her wings were like those of the white eagle.
Her eyes were dark as the deep-digged mine. Her smile was the beginning
of visions.
“Circling her temple was an opalescent crown, twenty white stars, with
the twenty-first over the forehead, with the red blood of Hunter Kelly
in the heart’s core of it.
“Above her head appeared a great hand, swinging a censer through the
roof and walls of the building. The Angel of the Cathedral said to me,
as she stood beside me:—‘This is the Censer of Change. A great change is
coming to Illinois and the Capital of Illinois.’
“The smoke poured out and filled the streets. It penetrated every grove
of Springfield. It beat in the blood of every living creature.
“The Angel of Illinois said:—‘This is the Incense of Civic Genius. The
city shall be barren no longer but bring forth.’
“Then through the roof, as though there were a censer higher than the
first, clouds of many colors descended. These became gorgeous
cloud-winged children in wonderful, gleaming silks, flying through the
walls. And in the same stream Gothic grotesques walked and crawled down
the aisles and out into the streets, all singing: ‘Springfield Awake,
Springfield Aflame.’
“The angel of the Cathedral said: ‘These are the children of the New
Time and their playmates, the beasts of Innocent Fancy.’
“Then the dusty stone cherubim and seraphim that stood by the pillars of
the church, with their dusty cold trumpets, took on life. They blew a
long awakening cry. Every note was a delicate and heart-shaking
surprise. Then from above the high altar, from a fire which burned round
the Host on the altar, there came soldiers of Heaven, in very ancient
armor, but with newly pierced hands.
“The Angel of the Cathedral, the Angel of Illinois, said: ‘These are
they who shall live invisibly by every hearth and table throughout the
Capital.’
“There burst from the pavement smoke and dust and stones, and from there
arose the great glass image of the cocaine Buddha. Immobile as any other
stone, he was yet carried by invisible hands. He and his company rushed
with a great whistling like the hissing of serpents. They went out
through the walls into the streets as though the walls were nothing.
They had many kinds of monsters with them, and strangely singing birds
of paradise, and lions with poison quills.
“The Angel of Illinois said to me: ‘This glass image will turn to dust.’
Yet for every angel at a hearth of the city there will be a demon, a
quilled lion, and a singing bird of paradise. These will eat invisibly
at your tables and hearths, feeding upon the words and thoughts of the
household. They will breathe hell’s breath into the faces of the
children. But the Angel Soldiers of Heaven who have marched from out the
High Altar will be with the people also.
“These powers will be in perpetual truce and perpetual war in every
house in the Capital. But open war between nations and races of men will
soon be ended forever.
“These lions have crept and ramped through the dark valleys of Heaven
and they have the seeds of sweet flowers clinging to their feet and
these singing birds of paradise have flown through the dark trees of
heaven, and have the seeds of rare trees clinging to their pinions.
“These censers that have swung over the raw capital, will swing over
many another this day, and the angel soldiers will appear in many
another city around the world, and by many a far off hearthstone and
family and tribal table, with their demon foes beside them, in perpetual
truce, and perpetual war.”
May 15:—The premature, precocious buds and green twigs of the year are
surviving this perilous spring. There are showers and carpets of every
kind of blossom. It seems more like June fifteenth than May fifteenth.
Beautiful people, mothers and children, boys and girls, in the lightest
and whitest of summer masquerading costumes are walking and dancing over
the whitest, cleanest streets our city has ever known. But the Lady
Avanel and I confess to one another, as of old, that these days are not
the millennium, however gay they seem to be.
And yet my lady, this evening, becomes a thing not quite of this earth,
a spirit, yet a sower in earthly fields.
I whisper: “Lady Avanel, Miss Fantastic, while the star chimes are
ringing another new tune, what are you sowing from your close-woven
willow basket so full of seed?” The lady speaks with the voice of the
wind:—“I am sowing the torturing thistle of dreams. Some men do not see
this city as it is, because they have walked in easy and stupid ways.
They have never walked, as we do this evening, while the Thistle of
Dreams comes up. We see it springing from the ground in an instant. It
will go in an hour. But if we touch it we are blessed and tormented
forever by newer and newer dreams. And at last our eyes will see this
city as it is, a weed patch indeed, but of fancies. And more than a weed
patch of fancies,—a forest, but of gigantic dreams.
“The men who can see the dreams build the patterns into visible forms,
and then we have the Sunset Towers, and the Truth Tower, and the Street
of Past History, and the rest.
“Then I walk past these buildings and sow new thistle-down and thistles,
and they penetrate the very concrete of the sidewalk, splitting it for
their roots. Then younger men and women are stung with new visions, that
make the Sunset Towers seem commonplace, and all but the Springfield
Flag, the Star Spangled Banner, and the World Flag, dim things.”
The Thistle of Dreams is growing around Avanel as she speaks. It looks
like a gigantic fleur de lis, but from it comes endless silk as though
from the pods of the milkweed. She says of that silk: “It is full of
thorns sharper than Cupid’s arrows, more transforming than any drug from
Asia. They work their way to many a heart and brain. When the young
citizens are tormented by these they will build things greater than
Springfield has yet looked upon, people’s palaces, as yet without a
name.”
“And who are you, Lady Avanel, and by what authority do you speak?”
“I am only the breath of the prairie, I am only the West-going Heart,
and by that authority I speak to you, and by that authority I sow the
thistle.”
“Lady Avanel, Miss Fantastic, while the star chimes are ringing another
new tune, what are you sowing from your close woven willow basket, so
full of seed?”
“I am sowing the appleseeds of Johnny Appleseed and Hunter Kelly and the
Acorns of Rabbi Terence Ezekiel and the seeds of the Golden Rain Tree of
New Harmony. But they are now breathed on by the winds of chaos and
their glory comes suddenly.”
At once in her path appear saplings, then they become full grown trees.
And there are many earthquakes, as the boughs begin, this very midnight,
to bear flowers and fruit. Then come up from the roots explosive scraps
of earth and volcano coals. Treasure sacks of strange jewels, neither
scorched nor smoked, are tossed to the surface of the ground. These
sacks are full of coins of celestial gold, stamped with a picture of
Hunter Kelly, as though he were a President or an Emperor of some
strange dominion.
From each heap of celestial gold come two or three bright spirits with
wreaths of tiny leaves or flowers round their baby foreheads, weeping
angels, an hour old, little boys, most sturdy and kicking.
And now angels will come to bear them to the houses of the laughing
people. Citizens who are not at home will find them later on the table,
and in the wood box and in the waste-basket, strange little visitors and
sons.
“Lady Avanel, Miss Fantastic, what of these children from the sod?”
The lady answers: “These are the laughter of earth and heaven.
“These children will grow in stature and beauty for twenty years. And
then these little sons of God will see the daughters of men, that they
are fair, as it was in the book of Genesis, at the very beginning of
time. The next generation of men in Springfield, born of the loves of
these angels and daughters of the city, will be giants like Nimrod.
These giants will drive out the former institutions with their own
swords, forged for this special war. That generation will build many
mansions of divine beauty, sheltering men and near-angels alike. And the
houses of magical or heavenly aspect will mix with the plain, grimy or
earthen houses:—for the generations of Springfield will be forever a
mixed breed.”
CHAPTER XIX
HOW AT THE END OF ALL THESE WORKS AND DAYS, AVANEL AND I RISE IN A BOAT
THROUGH THE AIR, FOLLOWING THE GREAT NEW AMARANTH VINE FROM CAMP LINCOLN
TO THE PARAPETS OF HEAVEN. HOW WE TRACE ITS BANYAN-LIKE BRANCHES THROUGH
THE JUNGLES OF HEAVEN, AND HOW WE DEFY THE HANDSOME MEDICINE MAN,
DEVIL’S GOLD, AND HOW, LATER, WE FIND THE EMPTY SACK OF JOHNNY
APPLESEED. HOW I RETURN TO FIFTH AND MONROE AND AVANEL IS ONE HUNDRED
YEARS AWAY.
It is many years after the triumphant return of the Amazons and the
Horseshoe Brotherhood from the battles in Asia. Avanel and I are walking
again along the Great Northwest Road, and we reach the Old Camp Lincoln
grounds where the Horseshoe Brotherhood and the Amazons so often drill.
But this evening it is deserted, with neither tent nor horse nor rider
to be seen. It is autumn and leaves whirl between me and the Lady Avanel
and too often hide her from me. Many leaders of various sects of the
city are moving about or assembled. It has always been the holy region
of the city, near the Gardens of the Flower Religions and the Grave of
Lincoln and of Hunter Kelly.
Avanel and I are in the spirit on this evening. We walk, as though upon
carpets of glory, and we hear from the black lips of the humble earth
the cry: “Springfield Awake, Springfield Aflame.”
The old giant toy globe, that used to be in the center of this field, is
long gone. And where it stood, there has come up, since The Golden Book
appeared, a great Apple-Amaranth Vine, coming as it were, like Jack’s
beanstalk, suddenly.
It is autumn and the whole air is fragrant with the honey of the fruit
of this Apple-Amaranth, and bees are busy with the rich fruit.
Every highest, furtherest bud that opens day after tomorrow, or in a
thousand years, will flash with a spark and a flame, that has climbed up
hundreds and thousands of miles from the roots that touch all the
gardens of our city, up the old streets of Heaven, where this vine
blooms today.
In the twinkling of an eye, while the star chimes of Springfield are
ringing new tunes, from the dimmest stars of the blue, from east, west,
north and south, magic boats sweep down to the Amazonian field.
It is happiness to be even the oldest of the prophets, who wait
exhausted, after ages of service, praying and dreaming, stretched out on
the decks of their swift boats, consumed with beautiful sorrow and hope.
The honey of each different Amaranth, growing through the stars, has
burnt all the strength of their bodies away, yet it gives to them
stronger courage, hour by hour. When it touches their lips, all else is
vanity. It is the live coal from the altar and is their new Heaven.
The boats are now above the field, and some of them have rested near the
earth, and some of the prophets are standing round the tree. Among them
is that wild ancient man Isaiah. He gathers the whole company of
Springfield people who are there on the edges of the field. Then there
join, from the invisible world, many of the long dead Saints of
Springfield and many saints from other capitals of this land.
Isaiah speaks to us in words, such as he spoke to the Jews, when the
earthly Jerusalem had fallen, but they are words that shall ever be new
till the last millennium is achieved. He stretches forth his hand and
blesses our kneeling company and, with the honey of this new Amaranth
Flower still burning on his lips, like visible fire, he cries in a loud
voice his old prophecies of the coming of the restored and redeemed
Zion.
Avanel and I are now in our ship above the town, and looking down on the
sea of dim fleets. Avanel whispers: “There are prophets in those boats
from all the hermit caves and all the shrines in the moon and all the
planets and all the suns. There are prophets that once walked the
innermost streets of the far jungles of Heaven.
“Yet the song that comes up from that sea and shakes our sails is:
‘Springfield Awake, Springfield Aflame,’ because the song and heart and
blood of any prophet are for the city that will receive them.”
The boats are ranged in three great circles beneath us round the new
Amaranth Vine. These ride on invisible sea-levels. They are not air
ships with modern wings and propellers, but boats of the ancient type,
such as were used by Hiram, King of Tyre, when he brought the wood to
build the temple of Solomon, such as St. Peter used on Lake Galilee,
such as bore St. Paul to the ends of the world.
While the star chimes of the city ring new tunes, the weird sailors
below us pour down a crimson wine from the sides of the boats, that
mixes with the autumn leaves of the Amaranth Vine that swirl now between
us and the whole towered city below. The wine and the leaves turn to
crimson mist and crimson storm, filling the city canyons with rolling
rivers of storm to the top of the Sunset Towers.
The boats rise, sailing as though travelling of their own knowledge.
Even those that are empty and have no prophet sailors in them are up and
away. Some of them seem like exhalations from the perfume and gleam of
the gigantic vine or from the light and mist of the city below. And so
out to the stars scatter all these purposeful ships, some empty, some
with prophet crews, and every boat has blazing at its masthead the red
and white star of Springfield and Illinois.
And the song goes up with them to the stars: “Springfield Awake,
Springfield Aflame.” Avanel says, “That song comes because the song and
heart and blood of the proudest prophets from the proudest suns, are for
the city that will receive them.”
We let our ship blow and drift as it will. But it sweeps up and up, with
the swiftness of light. In less time than it takes a flower to open, we
are carried to the parapets of ancient Heaven. We find our great-leaved,
heavy-fruited Amaranth Vine, climbing up over the closed gates and high
wall-towers of Heaven and winding a long way into the old forest that
has overgrown the streets. We find the new all conquering Springfield
vine, spreading branches through the forest like a banyan tree.
As this Amaranth from our little earthly village grows thicker, we see
by its light a bit of what the ancient Heaven has been. And it is still
a solid place of soil and rock and metal. Where the Springfield Amaranth
blooms thickest, shedding luminous glory from the petals in the
starlight, this Heaven is shown to be an autumn forest, yet with the
cedars of Lebanon, and sandalwood thickets, and the million tropic trees
whose seeds have blown here from strange zones of the planets, and whose
patterns are not the patterns of those of our world. Among these,
vine-clad pillars and walls are still standing, roofed palaces, so gigantic
that, when our boat glides down the great streets between them, they
overhang our masts.
And from branches above us these strange manners of fruits tumble upon
our decks for our feasting and delight. And there are beneath our ship,
as it sails on as it will, little fields long cleared in the forest,
where grows weedy ungathered grain.
Through hours and hours of the night our boat goes on, whether we will
or no, through starlight and through storm-clouds and through flower-light.
And the red star at the masthead and the sight of the proud face
of Avanel keeps laughter in my bosom, and the heavenly breeze that blows
on the flowers still sings to our hearts: “Springfield Awake,
Springfield Aflame.”
Out of the storm now, three great rocks appear, giving forth white light
there on the far horizon, and this light burns on and on. At last our
ship approaches. We see the great rocks are three empty thrones.
These are the thrones of the Trinity, empty for these many years, just
as the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy of Holies were bereft of the
Presence, when Israel sinned.
And now we are near, and see that the light that hangs round these
mountain thrones is because of the vines of gigantic Amaranths, of
strange design and of many colors, that bloom upon them. These vines
have journeyed up through the ether and great spaces from many cities
and many stars.
Our boat sweeps to the side of the thrones, and we look down on what was
once the crystal sea, a wild green water now, with great fleets of idle
boats, moored by its marshy banks, the boats of dead prophets and angels
who lie turned to stone on their strange and beautiful decks. “These are
the souls who sinned by refusing to enlist in the crusade against world
wars,” or, at least, so Avanel tells me from her heart.
And this is all her dream, none of it mine, and without her all this is
nothing.
There are boats of the older days, galleons of rotted magnificence,
wrecked and high and dry upon the sand bars, and the skeletons and
driftwood of boats are scattered in the marshes by long forgotten storms
and cyclones.
We disembark and tread our perilous way among these strange appearances.
Sometimes they are as seemingly material as earth. Sometimes we are but
walking on the dust of nebulae.
Then we walk into the vine-clad forest that covers the pass between the
nearest throne mountains, where broken steps are still to be found in
the moss, and whisper to us to follow. There are many butterflies and
bees that have taken too much of the blood of the fruit of the Amaranth
Flower and are fallen down and some of them dead.
The stair leads us up and through a dark pass and down into a deeper
twilight. And the stair, slowly descending, whispers to us: “Follow.”
And thus we go, into the most abysmal and curious of valleys, whence,
perhaps, ages ago, many spirits fled affrighted because of the
loneliness.
We walk amid rich ruins, miles and miles of vaulted halls, deep
sheltered recesses, heaped with the purple dust of dead tapestries,
mouldering porticos shaken by the wind. Avanel, fearing not, follows the
steps that still call: “Follow, follow.” She is eating of the Amaranth
that still blooms and bears fruit, eating the fruit from many stars,
breathing strange perfume, humming her old songs and new songs, with
heart aflame, a dauntless prophetess, prodigal and guide.
But now even her spirit is weary and her soul has earth thoughts again,
as we wander through the echoing throne rooms. She tries in vain to
laugh in the desolate halls. In a fever and a fret and in unutterable,
earthly weariness, we shuffle amid heaps of old shields of blackened
silver, amid helmets of brass and iron, amid ivory chariots and rotted
harps and broken crowns and swords of rusted gold. And then we see a
campfire we know and smell the familiar fragrance of pine wood and, in
the crossing of two tremendous grass grown streets, we find him we
found, first in a dream in springtime, and then at midsummer midnight of
a far off June at Fifth and Monroe. The Handsome Medicine Man, Devil’s
Gold, is saying to us, as though resuming a conversation in which he had
quite the best of us a moment ago:
“After all, people are ranked in Springfield according to their money.
People with six thousand dollars apiece a year are considered decent and
no questions are asked. People with a million in buried gold or alcohol
are on a level of righteousness with the world saints, who are, of
course, admitted to their class by generous dispensation. Heaven may be
a jungle but nothing will ever alter this great law,” and the handsome
jester, Devil’s Gold, is shaking his bead-covered rattle, making
medicine and calling us by name. We are so tired from our long walk that
we cannot but admire his gilded face and his yellow magic blanket. And,
holding each other’s hands like lovers, we stoop and admire ourselves in
the golden pool that flickers in the great campfire he has impudently
built at the crossing of two streets in Heaven.
But we do not step into the pool as before-time. Our boat is beside us,
it has overtaken us like some faithful tame giant swan, and Avanel
whispers: “Take us where The Golden Book was written.” And thus we are
up and away. The boat carries us deeper, down the valley. We find the
cell of Hunter Kelly,—St. Scribe of the Shrines. Only his handiwork
remains to testify of him. Upon the walls of his cell he has painted
many an illumination he afterward painted on The Golden Book margins
and, in a loose pile of old torn and unbound pages, the first draft of
many a familiar text is to be found. His dried paint jars are there and
his ink and on the wall hangs the empty leather sack of Johnny
Appleseed, from which came the first sowing of all the Amaranths of our
little city, and the Amaranth that led us here.
And Avanel whispers:—“I ask my heart:—Where is Hunter Kelly, and my
heart speaks to me as though commanded: ‘The Hunter is again pioneering
for our little city in the little earth. He is reborn as the humblest
acolyte of the Cathedral, a child that sings tonight with the star
chimes, a red-cheeked boy, who shoes horses at the old forge of the Iron
Gentleman. Let us also return’.”
It is eight o’clock in the evening, at Fifth and Monroe. It is Saturday
night, and the crowd is pouring toward The Majestic, and Chatterton’s,
and The Vaudette, and The Princess and The Gaiety.
It is a lovely, starry evening, in the spring. The newsboys are bawling
away, and I buy an Illinois State Register. It is dated March 1, 1920.
Avanel of Springfield is one hundred years away.
The Register has much news of a passing nature. I am the most interested
in the weather report, that tomorrow will be fair.
Written in Washington Park Pavilion, Springfield, Illinois.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
2. Retained anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as
printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
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