July 6, 2018:—This afternoon Mara sends me to find Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, and report once more. I discover that he has been at work according to his pledge, and with a bricklaying machine. There are more than enough, both of machines and Springfield workers to complete the Street of Past History on time.
And so, this evening, the Kling beauty dawdles through her black wine and cigarettes looking at her father with an indulgent and patronizing squint, completely at ease in the possession of his heart. Though with so many other strains of ancestry, the Malay manner predominates tonight, in her as in him, an outer appearance of super languor, a suggestion of nerve force accumulating 244through long seasons, to be discharged in one day of supreme achievement, or of “running amuck.”
Suddenly Mara asks her father, as though to plague him all she dares and startle him from his languor: “How do I differ from Avanel Boone? We are, for instance, the same age.” He answers without a quiver: “She is a worthy daughter of Black Hawk Boone, except that she will not dye her left hand or wear her hair on her shoulders, and you are a worthy daughter of your father, except that you like to quiz.”
And she opens her eyes and they seem the wide gates of his Prophet’s heaven. And they have, to him, all the dewiness of honest youth. She asks with earnestness:—
“But how do we differ?”
He defies those eyes. He says: “Both have dark hair, but Avanel’s is straight like that of the Japanese, and yours is a storm cloud about your head.
“But how do we differ? You need not deny you have studied that girl like a book. I have seen you watching her as though she were a growing scorpion, looking her over and over, at the Gordon Craig Theatre.
“She is no scorpion, but an artless child. Her eyes are blue. Your eyes are black. 245Avanel’s skin is white and rose. You are more golden than any coin, or any sunrise. That is the difference.” And he smiles with an air of mock finality.
But there is more difference and my American soul fights my Malay body and mind, as I apprehend this distinction, while they argue of other matters. I find torturing the very depths of me, that which loves Avanel, though I lie in this Malay grave. Yet the comparison is not all to the advantage of the daughter of Boone.
Avanel follows the most conventional of Vanity Fair and Vogue fashion plates, when not a marching, dancing priestess or an equestrienne in white. The Kling beauty is in her library or in her palanquin wrapped in endless easy swathings of green silk from breast to knee. Her bare shoulders and knees and feet and hands are her father’s pride. He thinks there is nothing like their slender modelling in all the west. She is a singer with the Borneo harp. Avanel in her life as a religious dancer and leader of maiden cavalry and of the Horseshoe Brotherhood, is an unmaidenly horror to Mara, who prides herself on her seclusion. Avanel’s omnipresence on the streets, as the town heroine, seems to Mara America’s most complete scandal.
246Yet Mara has often been out in her palanquin, behind that of her father, ostensibly to please him, but actually to see if by chance this hated Avanel will go by. And she has brooded in seclusion over Avanel as much as such a gentle nature can.
Finally, and chiefly, that rare mask, the face of Mara is the same her father wears, and so is half a world away from the open countenance of the lady who carries Daniel Boone’s direct ancestral dagger. Yet there are things readable in the Singaporian countenances. The sincere passion for jungle beauty revealed in the face of Mara can be discerned. The Asiatic necromancy, the instinct for intrigue, is hidden by the innocence of the experiences of her sheltered days, and also, as in the face of her really wicked father, it is hidden by that University air of submitting absolutely to the open finalities of scholarship. And so they will often submit, where Singapore is not concerned. But one would say all Mara’s scholars are poets to her, and of her father all his scholars are statesmen. Each is the other’s flattering image. Each is disarmed in the presence of the other, artless and fond and kind.
She continues this evening by talking frankly with her father about her suitors. I 247am as a well worn article of furniture. My ears do not trouble her. Are we not all members of the order that has sworn in a great whisper to conquer the world in the name of the holy green glass image that dwells in the temple on the far off Raffles plain?
She asks her father which man will be of the greater service to Our Lord of Cocaine? Will it be the son of Slick Slack Kopensky, Crawling Jim:—or Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, who thinks he has converted my good mistress to Mary of Bethlehem and all the saints of the western heaven. Shall she do lip service to his faith, when he is present, till the day of all days when Singapore ceases to whisper and comes roaring against the world? Or shall she take Crawling Jim for all time?
She is remarkably interested in both men. I am all curiosity over her tenderness for Jim. She calls him James. To be sure, he has undertaken a perilous thing for a son of Springfield. He has already discarded the wearing of anything white.
July 7:—There are not many other Singaporians in the city, and tonight comes an all-Caucasian party except for servants, host and hostess. My amazement about Mara’s attitude 248toward James now ceases. In this company he is a new creature.
The ladies and gentlemen who come in for initiation into that curiosity, a Sumatra chess game are many of them Jim’s most devoted henchmen in Jim’s presumably highly democratic and now triumphant Robin Redbreast Aviation Club. They were deft enough to capture the club for him. They are people of breeding and assurance. As long as it existed, at the house of the Mythical Velaska the most famous yellow dance hall, they set the pace. Tonight they talk openly of their jolly little lynching of Surto Hurdenburg. They talk of how to bring back to town all the malcontents who have left because of the suppression of the Yellow Halls. They speak of them as martyrs and heroes. And then they talk as though they will leave also. With scarcely an exception they belong to Springfield’s senior families, many of whom have been here as long as the Boones, and some of them before the Michaels. Scions of the house of Montague Rock are among them, including Montague Rock, Junior.
By their voices and a thousand impalpable signs I know that, with scarcely an exception, they have been educated out of town at male 249and female finishing schools, on funds or power secured by the secret sale of their hereditary buried gold and buried alcohol. These schools are, obviously, the last stand of American plutocracy, that has grown most subtle in what appears to be its final battle. Here, at this party among friends, with no spies, and in perfect confidence, they use with an exaggerated freedom all the secret codes, passwords, and hints of manner that indicate the hidden masters of the land, the tribes with buried gold and buried alcohol.
They are well grounded in the main books of plutocratic and alcoholic apologetics, one of which has been written by a fellow townsman, and it appears today, in Coe’s Book Store:—“The Graces of Bacchus and Mammon” by Doctor Mayo Sims. Every poet, architect, artist, or musician who in any fine indirect way licks the boots of money, or sings sweetly of strong drink, has their approval. Many such craftsmen have been induced by gentle means to drop a delicate word for Singapore as the ultimate land of real aristocracy, and dangerous but marvelously inspiring cocaine.
Mara’s guests have been taught in these out of town schools to hate our educational 250system from the World’s Fair of our University down to the first grade, ward school. They are taught in their male and female finishing schools that the whole city of Springfield and all such cities are infamously democratic. These children are taught they must not let one tone of voice indicate anything more than a suffering tolerance of that system of which, in this city, Black Hawk Boone is the official head.
As the evening progresses, all this crowd gaily says that Jim’s luck in aviation holds in Sumatra chess, and the ladies whisper in their delicate fashion that they hope he stays lucky when it comes to love.
Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, enters late. He says he is tired from bricklaying and slumps into the most conspicuous chair like a second rate actor’s idea of a martyr to patriotism. Michael, the Third, will not play Sumatra or any other chess. He will not bet on any other man’s chess playing. He glares at the merry Jim, or in his general direction. He stalks around, like a stork at a dinner of foxes.
The crowd thins out, and at length the two men are left with Mara, because J. B. Michael, the Third, has not sense enough to go. She 251has given Jim Kopensky every sign and Michael, the Third, no signs at all.
She wants this exquisite scion of the Blacksmith clan to play the game, and take his chance. But he is more at ease in his patriotic overalls, laying bricks to hurry up the final official opening of the Fair, and the Street of Past History.
So she helps Kopensky to back Michael to the door, which is done by a simple process of walking toward him with a certain air.
He is overwhelmed at Jim’s assurance and vital power. But Jim is one of those whom love makes a man for an hour in a lifetime. As I open the door for the exquisite Michael, I divine Mara’s pity for him. But what can a woman do? No proud Singaporian can have mercy on an unmagnetic fool. It is not a conspiracy against the loser. It is an elemental contest. This red oriental heart is for the man who wins this doorstep fight. Religion and destiny wait. And J. B. Michael, the Third, of his own weakness goes out the door in defeat.
But Mara, having, without an uttered word, chosen this James Kopensky for what she can make of him, turns at once to the cocaine Buddha around the corner of the hall. Religion comes next.
252The triumphant Jim follows her thought. He takes a candle from the table. He holds it in front of the august image, that seems to him more like green air than glass. He bows, the complete devotee before that ironical god whose doctrines are absurd, even to me, though I am for a season in a Malay mind. But what doctrines are not absurd to that soul that refuses to receive them?
Jim blows out the candle, and with it his former life, and, in intention, every western desire, and all for the glory of the holy islands of southeast Asia. He relights the candle at a taller one that is burning in front of the image.
Just then a telegram comes. Later I am reproved for letting the boy make the turn in the hall that enables him to see Crawling Jim light the candle. It is a real telegram, that has to do with an out-of-town lecture to be given by the Man from Singapore, on “The Republic of Letters.” And so the lord of the house comes in for it, reads it, and signs. The boy is not hustled to the door. He lingers. Our little ceremony is quite interrupted.
At last the slow youth goes. He is the son of a Japanese Industrial Commissioner to the World’s Fair. It seems that this man and the Chinese Commissioner are sufficiently Asiatic 253to understand my master, and their subterranean feud with him and his ally, Old Montague Rock, never has an end. The Man from Singapore says: “They must have had their spy at the party tonight. And this telegram has been delayed as part of their game.”
And so, soon after, the flustered Jim bids his lady a devout good evening.
July 8:—Mara has been nervous about the Springfield fortunes of her accepted suitor all day, but he reports this evening that there is no cause for apprehension, that he has not noted one more fluttering eyelid than usual today. He is still in place, in Springfield.
Then Mara makes ardent haste to talk with Jim of the religion into which he took a decisive, if interrupted, first step last evening. There is a bit of a suppressed strain and the harshness of argument in her voice, as though she were debating with all Springfield, though Springfield is not here. She is showing Jim that the Singaporian aversion to white, colorless things, is in no way unreasonable, since the religion was born in a sweet shadowed jungle. The whitest thing to be found in such a woods is the patch of dried grass in the opening of the trees under the blasting rays of the noonday sun. The living creature who lingers there must die. The prophet had 254talked so long to the religious beasts that he learned the inner wisdom of this fear. By listening long to their stories and their teachings, white came to mean the death of the soul to him. When he returned to Singapore and preached his first sermon that shadowy evening on the Raffles plain, proclaiming the religion of night, the religion of prowling, of rich wines and sweeping hanging moss, he gave them the Holy Green Glass Idol, and extended the doctrine of the fear of whiteness. It was there revealed to him, as he spoke with inspiration, that the whiter the silver, the whiter the horse, the whiter the armor, the whiter the plume, the more dangerous the foe. And so Mara assures Jim that all the deadliest enemies of the faith will come in the open noonday, dressed in white. If Singapore conquers all things white, and all the noonday races of men it will win the world. If once it falls before an army in white, it will be utterly annihilated, and the Holy Religion of Cocaine will perish from the earth.
Mara asks Crawling Jim if this is not perfectly reasonable, as doctrine and as prophecy. He falls before her. He embraces her golden knees with his crazy arms. He says 255it is perfectly reasonable, as doctrine and as prophecy.
But she lifts him up and she preaches and kisses away the hours, like any devout lady in like case.
July 9:—Mara is saying to Jim this evening that while in the by streets of her holy city among the dregs of the world’s population, much cocaine is taken, in the presence of grotesque libels of the Green Glass Buddha, as a matter of fact, that is a degenerate form of the religion. It is well enough since it keeps the outcasts happy and in subjection, more easily led, yet fierce in battle like the old hashish-eating assassins. But the esoteric, the masters, do not take cocaine. She speaks lovingly of the Green Glass Buddha, but saying finally of him, with the University Tone of Voice, that he is the god of wine. Like Dionysius he is especially the inspiration of the drama and all the arts that gather round it. Upon those patrons of drugs, the two greatest civilizations have been founded and the fairest catalogue of the arts.
It seems to me this evening, that the lessons are done. Mara has called to me to go for her father. I have ushered him into the room, and he is receiving Jim, the son of the Mayor 256of Springfield, as his own son. The Man from Singapore takes on a manner Jim has never seen. There are tears in his carved eyes. He is the headlong devotee in the infatuation of proselyting.
He tells Jim that those who are faithful take on the soul of the holy green glass idol, which was long ago the pure and transparent spirit of the first king of the boa constrictors, who, it is recorded, ruled his tribe in integrity and crystal honor. It is in his service that Singapore goes forth to choke the earth. From the god of glass emanate rays of psychic force that extend world wide, and give his followers spiritual eyes so they can do battle for him in the forest of Christianity and civilization. The war is really between these faithful ones and the tiger souls that infest the jungle. The vendetta of the serpents against the tigers has gone on through the ages since before there were men. It will not be ended till all the tigers are gone and the Great Boa Constrictor swallows the world as though it were a rabbit.
The Man from Singapore says that the tigers feed on all men from wantonness, while the serpents kill only those who interfere with the spread of their beneficent kingdom and eat only when hungry. Before the eyes of the 257true priests of the serpent, all buildings turn to forest trees and all shadows to forest boughs, and all men to serpents or tigers or some neutral beasts. Thus we know our most dangerous foes. These are not necessarily the men who curse us. They are often our intended friends, but actually in the way of the God of Glass. Thus there is no real serpent among the citizens of Springfield but Montague Rock. He is indeed a good Singaporian. All the other men in power, be they friends or foes in the open, are tigers alike. Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second, at the seat of World Government, is the worst tiger of all. He is proscribed and doomed.
The Man from Singapore eyes Jim steadily and continues:—“Does that seem reasonable to you? And does all I have said seem clear, logical, infallibly convincing?”
Jim takes the hand of this man and says it is absolutely convincing. I note that Jim looks like a composite portrait of the heirs apparent of all the thrones left in Europe, a weak and pasty fool, but lit up by love.
July 10:—Crawling Jim lives but in the eyes of Mara. Everything Singaporian is reasonable while she smiles, and it is all reasonable to her. This doctrine of swallowing the world seems merciful because “father” 258says it is. And Jim seems to her like a man. He is aflame with desire, such as only the daughter of her voluptuous and gentle mother could provoke, and only such a strong soul as hers could harness. He is a mirror, pouring back the rays of her own romantic glory, and she knows it not. She is incredibly happy, for she thinks she has done a good stroke for Singapore and her own heart. I, even as a Malay, am stirred with a great pity for her.
Her father, also, sees Jim as a hero. The serpent Buddha has not made this man and his daughter infallible.
July 11:—Mara is near the window looking out through the black velvet hangings, watching for Jim, though it is not time for him to call. Meanwhile there is indeed an interruption to her fancies, she utters not a word, she does not flinch, while there comes north on Mulberry Boulevard Avanel Boone and her maiden cavalry.
They are going toward the grave of Hunter Kelly, to take part in the solemn festival in the groves there, and along the great Northwest Road, the festival in celebration of the planting of the first Amaranth orchard there. The girls go by like a white whirlwind, and they give the old Springfield cry used in battle in Asia by their mothers who 259were young amazons before them. It shrieks and screams and sings down the street: “Springfield Awake! Springfield Aflame!” They know they are going by the house of Mara of Singapore but not one eye turns her way. But the swords, the swords, the Damascus blades, are hissing and glittering in the air. And the Man from Singapore, apparently intent upon his affairs does not turn to look out of the window of the book room. He does not so much as look up from his book of Malay lyrics. He utters one phrase: “The Cats of Cambyses, if we are to take Black Hawk Boone at his word.”
I am temporarily of the Singaporians, in my way. I have their poisoned eyes, it seems. So, while I have watched, horse and rider have faded into something new and strange. They go by in semblance as beautiful white tigers.
But what of Mara, who regards me as an article of furniture? What has she seen? Apparently nothing but Springfield girls on a wild, lovely, sweet, shrieking revel to which she has not been invited. She feels “snubbed.” She is lonely, weary, in this house and city, though she has a lover and a convert coming within the hour.
For, after these girls have gone by, she 260turns to the Cocaine Buddha. She bows with hands and arms outspread. Hers is a strange cry and prayer:—
“Master of the World, tell me, am I more beautiful than Avanel Boone?”
Which proves to me that Mara is only a girl.
July 12:—I find myself in all respects an American citizen of Springfield, Illinois, today, as of old. The hours with Mara and her father are as a “tale of little meaning, though the words are strong.” As I wander through a July rain in our streets, and parks, many vague hands seem stretched from the ground, catching me by the heels.
It is much later in the afternoon. The storm is gone, and I am walking with the lady Avanel, and she has looked into my eyes and given me my life again.
We confess to one another that these days are certainly not the millennium, that many of them are as grotesque as the early geologic ages, that had their monster sloths and lizards big as whales, and what you will. Avanel says with her happy laughter: “Let no man declare that the end of time is soon approaching.”
The lady Avanel has sometimes what might be called the mood of butterfly wings, and 261this afternoon, as we go further north across the fields, we are suddenly walking on a crimson cloud a little above the trees and then that cloud on its borders takes on slowly, first from the edges, the aspect of the wings of a giant butterfly whose body is at last the raft on which we stand and ride. And toward the North Star we go, and when we reach it, there sits a most grotesque and turtle-headed dwarf that Avanel calls a gnome. The North Star is really a hill of dandelions, and the dwarf is sitting at the foot of the hill.
We dismount from our cloud and the dwarf goes with us down a corridor in the hill. There are on one side mirrors where details are dimmed, where only big clear outlines of a possible new Springfield are shown, and near by are shown plans for other similar villages in the world. On the other side are mirrors into which we look and see greatly magnified the raw machinery of a possible Springfield in sections that any one can understand. Then we speed along through the passageway and at last come through and see the light of the north sky on the other side of that gorgeous dandelion hill.
The hill seems to be on the very edge of things, and though it has much of the aspect 262of that place to the east where I saw the Great Palace of Eve, once upon a time, the Dwarf calls this present cliff disrespectfully: “The Jumping-off Place.” And Avanel seems amused and exhilarated. But waves of outer darkness, into which I have looked so often, dash upon the cliff.
The Dwarf says: “This particular Jumping-off Place is one of the principal suburbs of Springfield, and I have seen all kinds of Springfield people and dreams jump off here.”
Then, while we wait interminably, the gnome lets down an iron bucket by a long rope, and brings it up full of the perpetually burning soul bones of animals, men, and dreams that have jumped off. He says: “We live by the death of these.” And he gathers the flames off the top as though they were burning flowers and his hands were iron. And he pours the bones back with a great thunder into the deep of the Jumping-off Place. Then he eats of the terrible burning petals and makes us eat them. Then he leads us back through the corridors and we seem to have been given eyes to see and remember every detail of the microscopic cross section of Springfield and he sends us back riding on the butterfly cloud, and enjoins the Lady 263Avanel to help in the building of Springfield, day after day.
July 13:—Today I meet the Thibetan Boy in Coe’s Book Store. We are both rather aimlessly turning over the magazines, and, after I have observed his idleness awhile, I take him out for a walk and say: “Why do you look at me when you pass, with your eyes a story untold? All the while I have walked the streets of this New Springfield, you have looked at me so.”
He answers slowly, almost whispering:—
“Your fathers came from the ancient Christian world. My fathers came from the more ancient Buddhist world. Christ is my master but I cannot deny that Buddha is my friend. This is the hour for friends. Come with me.” We walk north on Mulberry Boulevard, past the House of the Man from Singapore, and then west on Carpenter toward a little highway that finally joins the great Northwest Road. But we have not gone far on the Great Northwest Road till we flash past the Gothic double walls of our city.
The Thibetan Boy takes me, in one instant, to the far edge of Space and Time, way beyond the North Star and its dandelions. And as we stand on the shaking shore of Space and Time we see and hear, rolling in 264from Chaos, endless smoke and glory and darkness and dissolving foam. Standing beside us, like a superb Gandhara sculpture that has taken on life is that Prince Siddhartha who was the founder of Buddhism. He stands in that aspect he had, while still a citizen and householder, and twenty-four centuries before his green glass libel cursed mankind.
Before us is, indeed, a vision of Buddha the dreamer, superb, thoroughbred, in all the jewels of his tribe. It is the hour before he took chariot and drove forth from home. We are back in that hour when he looked upon all things, and saw them as a dissolving foam, the hour before he set forth for his victory over this crumbling universe. His eyes are fixed upon those waves that roll in forever, that keep their forms an instant, and are gone for all time: some of men, some of wraiths and gods, some of planets and comets and suns.
He turns around and beckons and over the sand comes Channa, the superb charioteer, and the horses of that chariot are nobler than the horses of the sun. Prince Siddartha is in the chariot in an instant and they drive out into that sea and the wheels of that chariot ride the waves. Those horses are like lightning, climbing waves that are like hills and 265mountains, till chariot, horses, and men all are veiled by the endless smoke and glory and darkness and dissolving foam. The Thibetan boy says to me: “It is the ‘Great Going Forth from Home,’ and thus Buddha becomes a conquerer, and Chaos and the Universe are put beneath him.”
But the star chimes behind us are ringing new tunes and we are back in our city again, leaving Prince Siddartha to conquer what he will.