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.