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 118Springfield 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 119embroidered 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 120sisters 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 121done, 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 122upon 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 123manage 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:
124“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 125point 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 126region 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 127seventy-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 128which 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 129Craig 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 130Black 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 131from 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 132to 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 133the 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 134farewell 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 135would 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 136a 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.