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.