When we, the Prognosticator’s Club, come together for our meetings it is inevitable that our talk should be of the Springfield of our fancy and of the manner in which the vision has come to each one. The first to testify, when we call the members together in the Sun Parlor of the Leland Hotel is the young Campbellite minister. He tells us of a dream that has come to him on many evenings by his study fire.
In a vision he is reborn three or four generations in the future. He is a priest of the Catholic Church. He is known as St. Friend, the Giver of Bread. He is almost alone in a vast Gothic Cathedral. He is astonished to find himself changed in body, conviction, and habit from all his former routine, but enough memory remains for the comparison, and he knows he is still himself. But of this another time.
There are a few people praying at the stations 20of the cross, in this, Springfield’s new church of St. Peter and St. Paul, on the old site of Sixth and Reynold’s Streets. The time is All Saint’s Day, Anno Domini, 2018. As he tells us the story, the very picture springs before me in elaborate detail, as though I witnessed the event in my own person. The church is indeed gigantic for so small a town to build, and in many particulars as well as general type it is like Notre Dame, Paris. We behold with him how a book of air, gleaming with spiritual gold, comes flying in through the walls as though they were but shadows. It is a book open as it soars, and every fluttering page is richly bordered and illuminated. It has wings of black, and above them wings of azure. Long feathers radiate from the whirring, soaring pennons. The book circles above the heads of the congregation. From the sky comes music incredibly sweet.
The book flies toward the altar, where St. Friend finds himself standing. The wings fade. This day moves with rapid breath. The congregation has been trooping in as the visitant from the world of spirit-wonder has been settling into its own holy place on the altar.
Now St. Friend is in the act of reading the gleaming volume. It is a book of homilies, addressed directly to New Springfield. Day 21after day the whole population flocks to the cathedral to hear, in the blazing kaleidoscopic costumes of that time,—all kinds of people, saints and sinners. But to speak briefly of the essential story, the town is transfigured and redeemed beyond any merely mundane plan. And so we call 2018 the Mystic Year, and give it other honorable titles of similar import. For the town, then, becomes half-way millennial. Of these qualified but stirring wonders, another time. Let us turn for the moment to the second witness, and hear her version of the appearance of the Golden Book.
The florist had already revealed to me, when I was buying red roses in her gorgeous greenhouse, that she had a strange recurrent picture of the days of Johnny Appleseed’s triumph going through her head. She repeats her story to the other members of the club.
It is of Anno Domini 2018, and though she is still a florist she wears her rue with a difference. She finds herself the exponent of a religion of flowers. Her name is Roxana Grey. She is daughter of a “Mother Grey,” who was in like manner daughter of a “Mother Grey.” There is much interesting detail irrelevant to the present point, but I may say she is first moved to tell me the story because she finds my name on the roll of the backsliders 22among the devotees of this 2018 religion of flowers. She has a double consciousness that keeps a mind in both periods, but is surprised to find both my name and my very self in the new time.
But as to Johnny Appleseed, which is more to the point of this chapter, she is most uplifted of heart to find that he at last comes into his own in our city and his name is whispered there perpetually.
In his name Springfield has developed the great Amaranth Apple Orchards; it is said, from seeds he gave in his lifetime to a certain pioneer, Hunter Kelly. And it is taught in his name, or with the mood he engenders in our hearts, that he who eats of the Amaranth Apple is filled with a love of eternal beauty, and it is used as the City’s understood symbol of beauty.
Then there is a teaching in his name that he who, after certain prayers, eats of certain acorns, or walks under the oak saplings that come from them, accepts in some sense promptings toward eternal goodness. It has come about that eating the acorn, is the city’s accepted metaphor for the search for righteousness. The earlier devotees of the oak, planted a notable group that have of late grown taller than the California redwoods. 23They are in a complete circle of twelve, surrounding the very edges of the city. The first two, which are the tallest, are by the inside northwest gate, put there long before there was any gate, by Hunter Kelly, of whom more hereafter. But these oaks, the pillars of Springfield’s temple-cathedral-synagogue, whose roof is the sky, are made the theme of many varieties of teaching, all of which goes back to Johnny Appleseed, who gave to Hunter Kelly the original acorns that made the trees of Oak Ridge, and these pillar oaks as well.
There is another teaching, abroad in Springfield, 2018, the teaching of Democracy, of which the Symbol is the Golden Rain-Tree brought from New Harmony, Indiana. It is said in Springfield, and taught with especial emphasis by the devotees of the Flower Religion, that he who enters under the shade of the Rain-Tree boughs and leaves and flowers, enters the gate of eternal democracy, and so the trees are often called Gate-Trees.
And then having told us so much, my friend speaks again and shows to our spirit eyes an out-of-door statue of John Chapman, Johnny Appleseed, near which she finds herself just before sunrise of All Saint’s Day, Anno 24Domini, 2018. Roxana is there to watch for the dawn. She walks alone, according to the discipline, saying certain prayers. The park is on the edge of the Governor’s yard.
A great rose-colored, egg-shaped boulder is dug from the midst of the lawn of the Governor’s yard. She hides in a clump of bushes to watch; for the digging is by no mortal hand, but by spiritual presences which are the souls of the primeval trees of the city, looming, whispering, rustling above the place. Then the boulder is there, rolled over on the grass, and a bolt from the clear starry heaven strikes it. The book comes flying forth. It has the same airy, other-worldly presence and power as when described by the first witness. But it soars to the Shrine of Flowers consecrated to the especial sect and the esoteric teachings of Roxana Grey and her immediate predecessors. But she does not know where it has gone, it has circled and wandered so, appearing and disappearing. And it is with a tremendous leaping of the heart she finds it next day on her altar with wings gone but with pages open to be read to the faithful. Its main themes are the teachings of the trees, of which we have spoken, woven with her own traditional doctrines of the flowers, but all these teachings in most heightened and glorified 25aspects. Along the margins are old texts from the special books of her shrine, and from Swedenborg and the Old and New Testaments.
When the great hostess of Springfield begins her testimony my first question, since I am but a man, is whether her hair in 2018 gleams with the same darling golden hue.
And have the red-haired girls the courage to dress like daffodils, in 2018? She insists I am the wicked one to be pressing this devilish investigation, when there are rarer things to impart,—but in the glad Mystic Year, since I must know, she is endowed with the hair of what might be called her 1920 Grandmother-self, and the only change she notices is a more painful tendency to freckles, from riding horseback in a certain notable cavalry, behind a certain young lady commander, Avanel Boone,—of whom more anon.
The most important revelation to her, sociologically, is that she finds herself no longer one of “our best people.” That is, she has not much money, and no privilege of collecting rents in the style that is now the sole reason many of the “old families” are in Springfield for a part of the year. She is in Springfield because she loves a certain factory. She loves it because she is Patricia 26Anthony, forewoman, and can order people about. Her factory is at Ninth and Converse Streets, on the same ground with The Illinois Watch Company and The Sangamon Electric Company. It is a place where telescopic and microscopic lenses are made. As for the Golden Book about which she is all aquiver, she finds the volume when she is inspecting the place in the late afternoon of All Saint’s Day, Anno Domini, 2018. She says I am there with her, carrying on, as of old, in the same conceited, philandering way. I am helping take inventory of the supplies needed for the next week, as my excuse for the tour. The factory echoes hollow with our solitary steps. Indeed it takes her aback to meet the book in such an off-hand, teasing moment.
But there is The Golden Book. Every transparent page, which flutters as though with the gusty thoughts of our spirits, is written in letters of fire. On the first leaf is an inscription delivering the work to her by name: “Patricia Anthony.”
She was always a conceited woman, and here is the first thing that ever happened to her to justify it, I say to her, speaking as one 1920 person to another.
But on, to 2018: For all the Golden Book is penned so gorgeously, the discussion is 27largely economic. There are citations from Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Henry George, and on, forward, to Joseph Bartholdi Michael the second, and Black Hawk Boone,—Springfield sages of 2018. All these are cited to corroborate, in various items, piecemeal, an absolutely new economic remedy for the world.
Patricia sees herself reading the volume to the workers, through the lunch hour. The book keeps its wings. Often, as though stirred with divine impatience, it dashes and flutters on through the walls, as though they were shadows, then comes soaring back again. Each time it returns the work is re-opened, at the first page, and newer and more difficult teaching is written there, till the volume is no longer economic. It is as though a work by Henry George had been changed into a work by Swedenborg! Now it shows how to make microscopes that will enable all Springfield to find the fairies of the fairies, and telescopes that will discover the angels that guard the angels. At last the book instructs the devout how to woo and win these creatures, without turning upon them any glass of cold scrutiny, how to see them with the natural eye, and touch them with the natural hand.
The little school teacher finds herself reborn in 2018 as head of the three-color printing department 28of the school where she teaches. In the reincarnation she bears the name of Josephine Windom. She stands helpless when a Rock and Kopensky mob, and children of Doctor Mayo Sims seize the winged volume from the altar of St. Friend, apparently against its will, like a hundred men binding an angel. Near the market house between Fourth and Fifth on Monroe they pile firewood upon the book. They pour on oil. They light the pyre. All is turned to ashes. Later a band of Municipal University rescuers arrives. They are led by her assistant in the color printing department, Horace Andrews.
Slowly as though greeting this band the flames renew themselves, and take form. There is the book again, but four times as large, with wings, binding, leaves, and letters of fire. Then suddenly it is flying above the city. Its covers are of the iridescence of a shell, with a golden shimmering. The wings are music making.
The book is a friend of men. It is disposed to descend to its friends. It is carried in flying and fluttering state to the three-color printing department of the school, where hundreds of rainbow replicas of the pages are made, though not on this earth can replicas of the wings be made. And while the book is within 29the four walls, the school becomes a place of fairyland. Every cottage has its own copy of the volume in time. Edition after edition goes out, first from the school, then from the greater, more dazzling printing presses of the University, to the scholars and artists of Europe and Asia, through their colleagues who are attending the World’s Fair of the University of Springfield. But the book itself, having once been copied in the printing room there, flies around the Truth Tower, the center of town; it goes up in higher and wider circles. At last it is seen, a star among the stars. Meanwhile the transfiguration of the city begins.
The future plays a curious trick with our artist friend, the valiant and patriotic American who sent forth all his sons against the Germans. He is astonished to find himself reborn a pacifist, Anno Domini, 2018. And there are other sad changes. He sees himself in a mirror as a long-haired creature, a ragged libel of the William Cullen Bryant type, with similar features, but dressed in ready made garments, and with much food spilled down the front of his vest. His nickname in 2018 is “Old Sparrow Short,” because at that time the sparrow is his favorite bird, and because he is tall. This increased 30height is the only concession to his vanity in the revelation, for in 1920 he has been obliged to stand on his toes over and over, to give any impression of height.
In 2018, though a pacifist, he is still militant in the aesthetic field. He is a leader of a group of young Springfield painters, sculptors, and architects who are always dynamiting our stagnant exhibitions with appropriate bombs of paint. He insists it is the painting and sculpture of his followers that make Springfield such a dazzling success. He is still the head teacher of the Springfield Art Association which has its headquarters at the Edwards Place on North Fifth, as of old.
His political hobby in 2018 is that we should return to the glory of the ancient time of the unchained nations, especially, as he hears himself say, the era of peace and good will when the Czar instituted the Hague tribunal, and Andrew Carnegie sent out his peace lecturers. He is sent to our local World Government prison which is built across the street from the City and County Jails on Seventh and Jefferson Streets. He is here locked up for emphasizing his views to the point of world-treason. The book flies in through the walls of his cell as though those walls were shadows, and as though the book were made 31of but air and sunshine, woven together. He who is doomed to become this awful Sparrow Short declares that the principal mandate of the volume is for the immediate dissolution of the entire International Government. It demands a restoration of the conditions of 1913. The mandate of the volume for the artist is the same as for the nation. “Live like the Sparrow. Be yourself completely. Utter your soul, regardless of cost.” This condition, universally accepted, will secure a real world-peace, and one that is not hypocrisy or oppression.
It comes the turn of the Jewish boy I so much admire. He says that in 2018 he is “Rabbi Terence Ezekiel,” a rank heretic, and an old man. He dreams of himself as being the grandson and the son of two other Rabbis of the same name and as having a rebel congregation all his own in 2018, of being in their estimation and that of many others, the leading citizen of the community. His temple is on the site of the old Isador Kanner Synagogue. He it is, who, as the leading champion of the aggrandizement of the photoplay as a general social factor, fights his best chum, St. Friend, when films are a public issue, because St. Friend preaches against them from the Cathedral. No longer 32is his life the slow, devious midnight-lamp technique of the pawnshop, the furtive, the futile, the too confidential. Not his the bad street abounding in second-hand stores and cheap rooming lofts.
To his temple come the wise of all the world, and there is preached the gospel of righteousness as symbolized by the planting all around the world of the Ezekiel Oak (for thus he has taken a leaf from the testimony of Roxana Grey), and the distribution of all other great trees, including the Golden Rain-Tree and the Apple Amaranth. But within this wave of beneficence his sect has a peculiar and especial discipline, as rigid and elaborate as Leviticus, which is, in another set of forms, essentially the same curious flowering of the Jewish mind on the same general level of the soul. When he looks into the glass he sees, in 1920, a young rascal who has stooped shoulders, from long bending over the jewelry and watches he has mended. He sees dull-brown hair and eyes, a blank face, a heavy jaundiced skin, all of which give the lie to the great brain. And he is five feet in height.
In 2018 he is six feet four, an old man, but with a blazing eye and a voice like the surf in a storm. His hair is brilliant black, his face is that of the Arabian war horse and the 33American eagle. Into his temple come all the wise of the world, week after week, and he introduces them, and they speak to his people and the rest. But he is to deliver his own discourse on a certain day in the autumn of the Mystic Year. It is a little before the beginning of the services. Amid faint music from afar the light before the doors of the tabernacle is suddenly enriched in color and splendor. The holy doors swing open with a noble deliberation, and there, instead of the Torah, is The Book of Air and Wonder,—The Golden Book, poised like a cloud and a moon and a bird. It has six wings, woven from the rays of a strange moonrise, perhaps like the wings of the cherubim, that bent above the ark long ago. The book settles on the desk. The pennons fade. The volume is open at the beginning of a series of prophecies about the soul of Springfield, as though Springfield were a living personality and not a mere assembly of citizens, and as though the book were a person, and not mere wings of air.
He tells us that he sees a face much like mine in the assembly of 2018, and I have not changed, but have the same yellow hair and pale face, as he says, “still look like a Swede,” and, (as he insists, with the pawnbroker’s emphasis on material texture), I 34wear the same suit of clothes, and carry the same iron and leather cane.
And so he tells us his tale of double consciousness, with the honest glow of the blood that I love in all leaders of his race, with that thick fire which no other race can equal. His synagogue is rebuilt on a vast scale in 2018 to hold Golden Book devotees; And this is but the beginning of his history of great affairs in Springfield.
The Christian Science Reader says she sees my face in the Sunday morning Christian Science congregation of her vision. We are one and all given new names. Her name in 2018 is Rachel Madison, and, though I am not of her faith today, in the new time I have grown toward this light, and she sees me with my unfortunate yellow hair and my iron cane, for all the world as the young pawnbroker does, but sitting in the back of the Christian Science temple listening attentively, Sunday after Sunday. She says that it is a silver book that we see upon the great day of November 1st, 2018. It sheds an ineffable white light, it is almost as impalpable as a comet in the sky, yet a substance that comes flying through the walls as though they were but gleaming shadows. The air is filled with music from all the high heavens. 35The book spreads six wings, like those of celestial swans. The pages have no illuminations or other abominable traces of the Gothic.
The book circles above the ecstatic and transfixed assembly, then it settles upon the desk between the two older books there, and in its presence they become like itself, books of air.
And so she reads to the people, with the other reader, who stands beside her according to old custom. They read as though by long understanding, but actually led as in a trance, through alternate pages of the three books.
Almost in a day the church is rebuilt. It becomes a tremendous white dome, a house of devotion, where the whole city worships as one soul. Then begins the one new evolution of the town toward healing, and the peace of the clear sky.
The negress who sees prophetic visions is easily persuaded to add her testimony about the book. Her name in 2018 is Mary Timmons, and she is nicknamed “Pious Mary.” She is most voluble concerning the wonders of the new time. But to the matter of the book at once. She finds herself in her church, in the place where the Baptist Evangelical chapel stood a century before. And it is still 36called the “Baptist Evangelical.” The house of worship is now gorgeous with curious jungle-mooded ornaments, pillars which are so carved as to seem moss-hung and vine-wound. It is as though we were in the shade of things too high for man. All this house of worship has been evolved by her cousin, the great architect John Emis, who is also a member of this congregation, and a powerful exhorter among his own people, despite all his world fame among paler races. It is in the midst of his designs she moves, on this great day. With pentecostal power her people are singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” While the faces are uplifted, the book of air, the book that gleams with spiritual gold, flies in through the walls as though they were but shadows. There is a mighty glory shout from the congregation. It is, according to Mary Timmons, answered by music from “the highest sanctorium of the meridian sky.” There are twenty heavenly doves soaring in a circle around the book. Outside of them is a circle of robins. All these birds fly through the walls and away, while the book settles upon the reading desk. The wings do not fade, but cover the pulpit with plumes of azure, plumes of ebony, peacock feathers, 37each with three eyes, and long feathery golden threads that are spreading and scattering like loose silk. Yet these things seem but as clouds spun by necromancy and as words of the angels made visible.
Then Mary Timmons takes a strange turn, and insists it is, after all, only a copy of the Bible, open at the Beatitudes. Glorified in this way it brings about the higher emancipation of her people. Beginning with this congregation they are stirred to the depths of their more creative selves. Devout composers, the kind that once gave birth to one line spirituals, sung like “rounds,” now develop epic forms of composition that are allied to these, so that great and musical shouts echo from mouth to mouth and breast to breast with three hundred singing, and then the whole African race singing. And instead of simply expressing the massed devotion of Africa, as of old, these more personal spirituals record the lyric cry of this or that black poet. Africa-in-America now sings the special story of the black statesman, the black farmer, or even the devout architect John Emis and the like. And the people and race of Mary Timmons, once natural orators, but no one a better creator than another, suddenly 38flower individually. Their genius becomes intensely centered in a few, and there are speakers with definite, individual messages, who shout not only wonderful round rolling words, but phrases with whip lash and sentences with sword edge, in orations as individual as the world demands that art shall be. The African man with the soul of the fox, now speaks like the fox, as is his right and duty, the man with the soul of the elephant now speaks like the elephant, as is his right and duty, and the woman with the heart of the nightingale now speaks like the nightingale.
Our evangelist reveals to us his dream that in the Mystic Year 2018, he is the Vice-President of the Springfield Athletic union and his nickname is Cave Man Thomas. On a certain day, in the fall of 2018, the president of the Athletic union is dying. He is “said to be” poisoned by a political foe. He hands a key to Cave Man Thomas. It opens the official roller-top desk, which is in a building on the site of the present Y. M. C. A. on Seventh Street and Capital Avenue. There is a book, the size and shape and general appearance of Spaulding’s Athletic Guide, with the same man with a baseball bat, on the cover. The 39near pamphlet has no wings or other such fantastic ornament. It is mundane paper and ink, with a yellow back.
According to his tale, we two read it alone of nights. We follow its counsel as one would secret foot-ball signals. We do not betray the source of our wisdom to any but Mayor Kopensky and his friend Dr. Sims. We see large results of our labors. We two, acting for the Mayor and the Doctor, smash the face of everyone who does not submit to our dogmas about Hell, which we get from the very front pages of the book. We have more sluggers on our side every hour. We give God and the Mayor and the Doctor the glory, and take none of it ourselves. We hear no music in the air or such like nonsense, while these things are going on. The Cave Man insists that the town is much improved by our policy. Of his predestined valor I may discourse at an opportune time. But meanwhile let me show you a further variation from the typical story about The Golden Book.
I am more eager to know how the welfare worker finds herself in the mirrors of 2018 than to receive any other news of that time from her. Despite all her graces she has no especial personal vanity. She is more imperious 40than vain. But I gently insist upon her confidence till she confesses that she finds herself in the mirrors of 2018 much the same, but with a greater rush of blood through all that magnificent slender frame, and a consequent higher color. In her dream she rejoices in a great resiliency, a greater long-bow curve in action, as she walks with even more of her humorously commanding way. Her name in the new time is Gwendolyn Charles.
Gwendolyn Charles is, in 2018, a motion-picture director and scenario writer. She claims Rabbi Terence Ezekiel and many other choice spirits among her stockholders and backers.
For her enterprise generally runs at a loss, like Grand Opera, and great orchestras, and great universities.
I must at this time concern myself with her story of All Saints’ Day, 2018. Very early in the morning she finds herself in her leading theatre which is on the site of the Old Fancy Bazar on the South side of the Square; by her side is the aged Rabbi Terence Ezekiel muttering enthusiastically to himself over strange and magnificent doings. With him are the inner company of enthusiasts for her film enterprise. And the body of the theatre is filled 41up with its regular patrons, in a most unusual frame of mind.
There is thrown upon the screen the production of the studios for that month, the story of Hunter Kelly, the founder of Springfield, whose regular solemn festival is July eleventh, but who is celebrated in a thousand ways; all year. Unexpected things are happening in the operator’s box. And it is a new kind of a projecting machine, utterly beyond the current devices. But let us consider the story of Hunter Kelly, as it rolls by on the screen, the early part of which, to the year 1920, has been long known to me.
Hunter Kelly was an Irish Catholic boy reared in a Pittsburgh orphan asylum. In the very first years of the nation he met, and became an ardent disciple of, John Chapman—Johnny Appleseed, and differed from him seriously on only two points, the Catholic Church, and hunting. Kelly’s dearest devotion was re-reading St. Augustine’s “City of God,” which he carried always in his hunter’s pouch, by his powder horn. And Johnny Appleseed’s dearest devotion was in reading and re-reading Swedenborg’s “Heaven and Hell,” which he carried in his seed-sack. And Hunter Kelly would shoot deer, over whom Johnny 42Appleseed would weep. So these two were separated when Kelly’s lust for hunting was on him like the passion of mighty Nimrod. Then he would live through an almost vegetarian period, travelling and planting with John Chapman—Johnny Appleseed, and listening to his great monologues.
They began together, exploring the primeval forests near Pittsburgh. Each season they marched further west, returning in the fall to the cider mills of Western Pennsylvania, to beg and sort apple seeds for next spring’s excursion beyond where any other white men fought or explored. Kelly and John Chapman parted at last where is now Fort Wayne in Northern Indiana. They said “goodbye” in great love and devotion, Kelly swearing on St. Augustine’s “City of God” to plant in honor of Johnny Appleseed, a city like an apple tree, with its highest boughs in Heaven, and to begin by sowing there a special breed of apple seeds the saint gave him with his old leather seed-sack for a token.
Kelly joined a group of settlers going further west of the same name, but no kin. He entered what was then known as the “Sangamaw” Country with them and lived in their cabin a while. In this region he planted the 43world’s first orchards of Apple Amaranth trees, from the old leather sack.
The first settlers were the Kellys, Matheneys and Elliots. The young sower of mysteries lived alternately in their great log houses, and sat, at the end of his great wolf-hunts, by their open fireplaces. The chief of the local wolf-pack was the Devil, and refused to be slain. At last he took on his true form and came alone to Kelly when he stood meditating among the first sprouts of the famous Apple Amaranth Orchard, and there gave the young fellow words of admiration for his valor. For the Devil is often a true sport.
There Kelly made a compact to submit himself to torture for many years if the pioneer city of his vow to Johnny Appleseed might be built here. He and the Devil swore the compact on St. Augustine’s “City of God.”
The Devil pledged himself that if the young hunter’s soul would submit itself to long suffering, the place could be evolved in time. Old Satan laughed, and said his little subordinate devils would then be guided to build better than they knew. The Devil did not carry Hunter Kelly to Hell, but devised a special torment. He buried the mystic a few hundred feet below the orchard. In the hunter’s living 44skull and heart were entangled the roots of the first Apple-Amaranth Trees, and from them all others of this region come.
The Devil has a great respect for his contracts. Every year, for a century he dug up the mystic on Hallowe’en night, and showed him the city, and every time Kelly said: “Take me back to my torture. The City is not yet started.” At last, when the lads returned from the war with Germany, and the girls returned from Red Cross work, and the like, in the summer of 1919, and the city began to take on glory both visible and invisible, Hunter Kelly said to the Devil: “I will now trust my town to go on. At last they are eating of the Apple Amaranth, which they thought was poison. They are even transplanting it.”
Thereupon Hunter Kelly drove the Devil away with the great pickaxe and spade, the same which had often dug the hunter from the ground.
From this pickaxe on, the story was entirely new to the screen, and much of it new to the audience.
Kelly then built himself a cell in Heaven out of old and broken fragments of forgotten palaces in the far jungles. There he wrote 45The Golden Book for our little city far below. By day he lived as that boy of Springfield who grew up as Saint Scribe of the Shrines, and established the discipline and ritual of The One Hundred Shrines of the World. He was rumored among a few of us to be the reincarnation of Hunter Kelly. He became the first teacher of St. Friend, who wore his mantle well after him. And now he is pictured, in many a dazzling flame-like color, throwing down from the window of his cell in heaven, this very hour of All Saint’s Day, The Golden Book of Springfield.
All this is the first intimation to Gwendolyn Charles that stranger things than we know may happen in heaven and on earth. As the wonder upon the screen moves on, with no formula of orthodox religion, and indeed with a sense of humor, like the laughter of the skies, she understands not what world she is in, and the lovely hedonist and artist is shaken with the passions of the mystic St. Catharine of Sienna.
She is concerned to know that in the box of the projecting machine is a dazzling presence, a sort of giant fairy, a little larger than a man, an operator, indeed, one she has not hired. There is an orchestra of giant fairies, who 46play such tunes as blue bells should give forth in the wild woods.
And meantime, according to her tale, the book is there, pictured on the screen, circling around the domes and towers of Rabbi Terence Ezekiel’s heretical synagogue on east Mason Street. And so the Rabbi makes haste to that place, and a few friends follow. But many people in the audience of quite different faiths declare that those are their own church steeples and not his temple towers, and hasten to the houses of their belief. Which is not so strange, to one who has been in a law court, for there it is demonstrated that a witness is somewhat apt to see and remember what he desires to see and remember. And so each finds the book where he has faith to find it.
The Doubter is the next member of our club to testify and he tells of the midnight visions he has already described to me.
He is reborn as Mayo Sims, physician of all the great saints and sinners in the town. Incidentally he is the political ally of the Rock and Kopensky families, people obscure in 1920, since they are but tenants on his farms, but in 2018 in the city government, along with the tribe of Cave Man Thomas and others.
The physician tells first to me, then to the rest of the group of forecasters, that he has 47seen how the book with all its chronicles and exhortations, rituals and parables, is utterly rejected by the mass of the citizens of the Mystic Year. They refuse to let the pages draw conclusions for them from the past or move them with hopes for the future. According to his tale the volume raises a faction of desperate malcontents, whose business, beside fomenting strikes, is to sing in a particularly nasal whine. Some of the rank and file of this group are shot down, after the city has endured five days of hideous “racket,” and more hideous vocal music. There is no magic ballad or hymn in the air.
There is but one copy of the book, “thanks be.” It is full of sedition, and therefore tabooed, but dog-eared from being much passed around in secret. To be sure it has a cheap gilt paper cover. It is captured and carried ten miles east of the city by certain friends of law and order, members of the Rock and Kopensky families, led by Cave Man Thomas. It is dropped into an abandoned coal-shaft. It goes down like lead. It has no wings. It was written by hair-brained sociologists, some of the wild ones from the absurd University of Springfield, not by “practical business men.”
It is not rescued, from the shaft. The writers 48of the work go back to their legitimate teaching, and are heard from never again.
The Doubter goes on to give the genuine psycho-analytical data on most of the saints of Springfield at that time. These accounts are from his confidential records. For he treats the holy ones for all varieties of nervous disorder, epilepsy, and the like. He is quite sure Christ and Mohammed were epileptics, and that settles it with all such foolishness. But perhaps you too have doubted.
The Doubter’s variety of revelation during double consciousness is not all certified by the man who dreams he becomes Cave Man Thomas. It is not quite Y. M. C. A. enough.