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.