May 15, 2018:—It is the evening of this day and Avanel is quite busy in her parlor with costumes. I am invited for dinner with her and old Boone. I am to help her immediately after to the theatre with her costumes that I am to carry in two heavy suitcases. Three friends of Avanel’s have prepared the dinner and serve it in true communal fraternity. According to their chatter the coming event is all in the spirit of a college lark or grand commencement occasion, rather than a churchly event.
But when I sit in the Gordon Craig Theatre, strangers to the right and left of me, the theatre darkened and the stage a temple steps, the Avanel emerges that has refused so many times to come forth at my petition. Her face and carriage convey the sibyl, the saint, the mother of great sages of our city and the muse of poets of our city. She hardly knows this, for the innocence of her unspoiled youth tells its gentle, overwhelming story. As for 138the alleged dance, it is more procession than anything else: boys and girls, men and women, moving to varied chants or measured silences or amid wonderful and measured lights. There is no very direct allusion to the Birthday of St. Scribe. Old political parades are suggested and historical triumphs, but mostly the type of parade that might be held of a Sunday before a religious service, ending at a shrine or an altar. There are ceremonies from the book of St. Scribe of the Shrines. His favorite shrines are suggested, beginning with the Grave of Lincoln at Oak Ridge. The dancers are crowned with Apple-Amaranth leaves, which are larger than ordinary apple-leaves and a paler green. Avanel’s part in the pageantry is but that of a leader and partner of the chief marching man, young Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third. Avanel is closely followed in glory and significance by the whole company. And Michael deftly takes his place as a proper background for Avanel, for which I thank him. Therefore when Avanel sits with me a little by her open fire tonight, all tired out and very solemn, she knows she has vindicated herself in my eyes a little and she tosses her head and wears jauntily one young green 139Apple-Amaranth leaf which still gleams brightly in her black hair.
She asks, as a child: “Did it seem as though we were at shrines together or walking in the woods together?” And so I answer: “I have never yet been at any of these shrines but that of Lincoln and that many, many years ago. But it did seem as though we were walking in the woods together among the very oldest trees. I want to go to shrines with you soon.”
And Avanel asks me: “Do you think we will get on better in woods?”
And so I answer, not quite to the point: “A tree a thousand years old has leaves in the spring, as green as when a sapling. But if my dust had lived to this hour, it would have been the semblance of a palsied man, a horror more than grave clothes. Such as I am, I pray to the God of Heaven that I may be the green leaf in your hair.”
May 16:—I find myself walking in the shadows, where there is neither Springfield nor Jerusalem nor any other known place, where there is neither calendar nor clock nor sun. The clouds of meditation are beneath my feet, storm overhead. One flash of lightning lasts for an eternity and the thunder roll is as long.
140May 17:—I walk with Avanel again through our town. As we pass beneath the splendid and soaring towers, we note the signs of the various citizens who occupy the shops, facing the street. As we pass the ladies’ tailoring establishments, we see fancy dress and religious costuming, to be used for ceremonials such as the festival of Hunter Kelly. They are carefully made, these costumes, for permanent and individual use. Many people, men and women, pass us on the street well fitted out, splendid, yet realistic, off hand, casual, and unconcerned, citizens in all sorts of well fitting, brightly dyed ceremonial gear. It is rather the custom of the city to come out more and more gaily for the spring, summer and autumn. In the cold weather it is the idea to dress as of old and according to the customs of the United States, in routine garments.
And now, being light hearted, Avanel and I make an amusement of going the rounds of the more fancy ice-cream parlors. They bear the old names, Maldener’s, Kutrakon’s, Bonansinga’s, Stuart’s, and there is the beautiful place of Najim, the Syrian. Stuart’s is conducted by a direct descendant of the original family, as also Bonansinga’s. Some of 141the places are in the hands of new firms but keep the old names.
The sign-painters’ shops are a wilderness of bedevilment. They are almost official extensions of the art department of the World’s Fair of the University of Springfield. They are full of everything that may be painted to bring rejoicing to the fastidious stranger.
It is growing toward evening and my dear lady has signified that she will consent to eat with me in that restaurant room of glass, that high tower place, where she gave me my first view of the new city. And, as we walk that way, we are amazed at something as novel to her as to myself. We have been almost noting it to one another all day. With glowering faces and ugly looks, two factions in costume are passing and re-passing one another. And there are threats of fist fights between the young men and some appointments for real battles without gloves are obviously made, with those euphuisms that in the old day covered appointments for pistol deeds.
There are two factions of aviators, one dressed somewhat in the color scheme of the robin, including the vest, which follows the red color of the breast of that bird. The rival 142faction are the Snobs, who are out with it, make no quibble about being snobs, and are costumed with hints of the wasp and bee. There are as many girls and women, as boys and men, in the Snob and Robin costumes. All this has sprung up from the ground in a few days and is not in the pageant and festival calendar of the city. The aviator’s day for dressing up is in early October. But the surprise is not so much the new costumes as the increasing sharpness of the controversy. Most of the children of the Boone and Michael clans, rivals though they be, are dressed as Robins and expound to us their side of a complicated matter. The substance is that the city is liable to a riot over the use and monopoly of the flying machines by the Snobs, led by one John Nash, sometimes called “Beau Nash,” and the Snobs are defying their enemies and spoiling for a riot. While Avanel and I have our customary little dinner in what was once a quiet corner, two young Booneites we have previously interviewed, having finished their chocolate, come to us and roar their anger again in our ears and seek to recruit our good opinions, as they nerve themselves to subdue the Snobs and if necessary shoot holes in their machines.
May 18:—The costumes of the rival factions 143have disappeared from these streets. All noise and argument have disappeared. The city goes about the even tenor of its way. The papers are full of the social and military affairs of the Amazons and the Horseshoe Brotherhood and denunciations of the world’s common enemy, Singapore. I am wondering why I have never gone to Camp Lincoln to see these Amazons and Michaelites drilling in full panoply of war and wondering even more why the child Avanel is at the head of them. She must be a sort of “daughter of the regiment,” as one may say, decorative royalty, with the real management in other hands. But I always speak in her presence of military matters as though she were in actual command. Tonight I meet her near her home as she comes riding from Camp Lincoln on her white war pony. She is a centauress.
Not only is her pony white but every thread of her riding habit is white. I help her down from her pony, go through the entirely unnecessary motion of doing so, and we lead the tired steed around to the stable in the rear of the Boone cottage and old Boone is there, waiting to feed and water the creature. The father is ignored and the horse is spoken 144to by Avanel in terms of endearment. We go into the house and sit by that unlit fireplace and wait for Black Hawk to come in to dinner. All of which is, by the way, preliminary to the fact I wish here to record, that the tired Avanel draws from her belt an old hunting knife and its heavy white sheath and puts it on the mantle with the unbuckled Avanel sword and sheath, then allows me to take them down, and answers my questions about the knife.
“This is the hunting knife my remote ancestor, Daniel Boone, carried into the wilderness of Kentucky in his first discovery of the blue grass region that was to him new Eden.... This hunting knife means more to me than pride in fighting blood. It may go through the heart of some cocaine-crazy creature in far Asia. But it means that other thing to me, the sanctity of the log cabin, or the cottage which we must defend as Boone defended the first cabins in the blue grass. To him they were pavilions of new patriarchs, not barnyards or forts.”
May 19:—By this time all the trees are putting forth their second leaves, and smaller blossoms than before the frost. But everyone is rejoicing for it is spring of a sort. The air is filled with hovering branches in palest 145green, a good gift to man. The town knows it and walks abroad gaily, this morning of May nineteenth.
Then, late in the afternoon, local war breaks out suddenly and we know nothing about the trees, and care less. It is a Springfield utterly new and terrible to its citizens. The star chimes are not allowed to ring. I am with Comrade Avanel in the very top of the Truth Tower. The terrors of flight and pursuit sweep over the far sections of Springfield given over to aviation fields, orchards and the like.
When machines overtake each other there is, so far, no shooting or the like, only a veering to the right or left. It might be a game of tag, were it not for the symbolism in decoration put on by the two factions driving the machines. There is a big death’s head painted near the front of every Snob machine, and the hunting knife of Daniel Boone painted on the front of every Robin Redbreast machine.
Neither Black Hawk Boone nor Avanel has authorized any such use of this symbol. The whole threat and roaring are unauthorized by any of the leaders of factions. The “People” have escaped the leash.
Avanel is the only reporter her father will 146trust tonight and she has come to the top room of the Truth Tower, because it is the observation and news gathering room for things that may be untangled from a tower. All the papers have made common cause tonight. All the telescopes are in use, looking to the borders just beyond the City Wall, the borders of Morgan, Menard, Logan, Macon, Christian, Montgomery and Macoupin Counties. The news is assembled and everything observed is explained by telephones from these regions and re-telephoned into the various offices and rewritten there and then telegraphed to all the world that cares. Newsgathering remains what it has been for a century and a half. Boone is at the opposite end of the phone from Avanel and the first definite effects of the threatened air-riot are to make that gentleman quite profane.
The flying machines were at first not public property. But so much crowding out of the truly skilled flyers came about by the monopolists with buried gold, that machines are now rented to private citizens by the state or city for a nominal fee and deposit for damages. To enter the examinations in the autumn and to fly for the year is, in theory, one of the privileges of highly skilled, athletic people. Our friend, Portia, the Singing 147Aviator, is with us tonight and helping unravel the story of the rise of factions. And the gentle creature has written of the uppermost blue and of the dawn clouds and of the map of the earth and of sailing around the curve of the earth. This young girl is appalled to be obliged to take sides in the controversy and enlist for a possible battle of mere children. The most famous aviators on each side come from the High Schools. She does not want to paint war insignia upon her machine. But already her literary imitators have done so. Her three most sedulous apes in the High School, John Nash and Findlay Bryson and Margaret Rand, who have diluted her innocent and heroic songs, turning them into society verses, now demand that she put the death’s head upon her machine, or lose them as disciples. And Portia is appalled to find that the names she once chose in sport to classify the machines are now used to represent actual factions in the threatened war. The Robin Redbreast and Carrier-Pigeon machines are all on the side of the Robins, and the Snobs are subdivided into the Don Juan, the Raider, the Flamboyant, the Brahmin and the Bird of Paradise. It is the exceedingly high priced Brahmin and Bird of Paradise machines that make the trouble.
148People go to the High Schools past their twenty-first year. And the town is first torn up by High School pupils, children of the local multimillionaires, such of them as still have brains and body enough to go through the rigid examinations for aviation. These children of men with buried gold are again and again at the top of the aviation waiting-lists. This is especially exasperating because having a private fortune is proclaimed in every political speech to be against the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Illinois.
And so youngsters of the Wicked Standings, the Cheerful Radleys, the Arrogant Rocks, the Fat Zebeskys, the Nervous Kusukos, the Slick Slack Kopenskys, the Shrewd Sims family, and all that set try successfully to monopolize the priceless Brahmin and Bird of Paradise. Their sinecure is defended in silly verse by Findlay Bryson, John Nash, sometimes called “Beau Nash,” and Margaret Rand.
May 20:—Many of those parading the streets in the Redbreast costume are skillful High School seniors, young men and women, licensed graduate aviators, whose machine rent-money has been refused through the quibbling of the corrupted authorities. 149The only work left open to them is drilling for the work of mail carriers for the International Government. Word comes to the news room at the top of the Truth Tower that all through the counties touching the Springfield wall, wherever Brahmin and Bird of Paradise machines reach the ground, the farmers taking Springfield affairs a little more seriously than we do, proceed to set torch to the wings.
May 21:—The Robin Redbreast people can work, at least, and their costume has now flooded the offices. There is such a tension everywhere (without the least thing really happening) and the streets are so full of marching Robins that the young sports say today that they have surrendered. There is much talk of peace and sentimental prattle about our dear little town and slush about all calling each other “cousin” again. But just before midnight The Boone Ax gets out an extra, charging that the Brahmin and Bird of Paradise machines are tied up to the snob children by long time leases and there is not one but still remains in the hands of the owner of a secret fortune or some directly obligated minion of the same.
May 22:—The sky is all gold today. The Snob machines reappear, defiantly gilded, and on the front of every one is painted the name 150of the Snob using it, and after his name the word:—“Owner.” And young John Nash has taken the fatal step and added a terrible element to what was before but a family row that was leading nowhere in particular. He has decorated his machine with green jade eyes and pictures of the green and speckled lotus of the Cocaine Buddha of Singapore and thereby added the final insult of “international and national treason” and utterly changed the spirit of the fight. All day the gilded machines go by unmolested among the angry Pigeons and Robins, but as Black Hawk Boone says in a big type evening editorial: “John Nash has tattooed himself with treason forevermore and it remains to be seen whether every gilded wing stands for treason.”
May 23:—The University set today bring forth legislation which is drawn up and sponsored by John Boat and St. Friend, the Giver of Bread. This emergency legislation, backed by the immediate surrender and burning of the arrogant leases, appears to insure uniform rents for all machines of whatever class. The fear of the curse of treason has made all the gold-foil faction meek as rabbits for a day. And so they consent to the cancellation of all previous lists and papers of all sorts 151and the re-enlistment of all aviators once a month. They consent to the proposal that it be made a jail offense to use the same machine longer than three months. Machines must be re-rented in order as registered. No classification to be made as to value of machine, or gold-foil on the wings, or type of machine:—every aviator to take his chance. St. Friend thinks that he and Justice of the Peace, John Boat, have done well. Certainly this afternoon, according to the new arrangement, it is as in Utopia and the rich and the poor, the privileged and unprivileged, have equal chances in the air.
We are alone in the Truth Tower, my love and I, and we are talking of St. Friend, who has brought this all about, and Avanel sends for him, to take in the view of the sunset with us, if he pleases, and wait with us for the returning star chimes. The evening and its beauty, after such days of empty stampede and panic, move my lady Avanel to deeper words than are her habit. And of the coming guest, she whispers:—“St. Friend represents, almost in spite of himself, the idea of thousands of laymen, that few priests have represented:—the general idea of religion, under a church roof, with one’s fellow human beings. The idea stands 152in contrast to any worship chained to a special list of teachings. St. Friend champions freedom, yet his kind of freedom goes to prayer, of its own choice, with no theological or creed fences, to what he calls, ‘the blessed company of all faithful people.’”
St. Friend comes to us, just before the star chimes begin to ring. He steps out from the noiseless elevator and is before us while we are speaking. Avanel pets him as she does her father when she is being especially good, and the aged guest likes it, of course. He sits in the largest and easiest chair which is reserved for guests in The Boone Ax room, and he hunches forward, a stooped giant. He looks through the top of his eyebrows at Avanel and he keeps time to his armchair talk, beating the arms of the chair slowly with his open hands, according to a habit from of old. He rubs his face and his old forehead with his palms as though to wake up and deliberately brings a flush to his forehead. By incessantly beating the chair and humming and hawing he seems to beat up a kind of nervous strength from some hidden source in the air and talks with increasing animation about the “strike” or “riot” or “whatever it may be called” and mentions with great complacency his measures against it. And 153now another curtain seems to lift from the soul of Avanel. The spirit of prophecy is upon her. The old man listens with fixed eyes. The youth of his immortal soul seems to me, in this hour of revelation, to depend upon clear speaking on the part of this young voice. She is denouncing with endless words the ironies of flying and material dreams, yet with girl slang and wit mixed in with it all.