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.”