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precarious and liable to be withdrawn to one waiting trial for World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.”