CHAPTER XIV

 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 227orb 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 228run 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 229March 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. 230And 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 231of 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 232in 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 233like 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 234if 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 235referendum. 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.
236Now 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 237Letters 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 238into 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 239coast, 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 240few 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 241work 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 242for 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.”