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 210him 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 211pillar. 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, 212rehash 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 213The 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.
214June 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 215about 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. 216I 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 217the 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 218north 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 219only 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 220their 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 221visitors 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. 222At 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 223at 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.
224“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 225built 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.