As news spreads of The Prognosticator’s Club, and of the remarkable tales and visions that are unfolded there, new men and women come to us, with the word that they, too, have a dream, persistent and recurring, of the Springfield of the next century. One such is Joseph Bartholdi Michael—whose father’s story belongs here in our narrative. While many of the blacksmith shops of Springfield have slowly changed to garages, there is one in especial that has resisted the tide in a formidable way. It is the shop located on the southeast corner of Fifth Street and Capital Avenue. This place has kept most of the fancy horse-shoeing trade of the city in 1920.
The aged proprietor-patriarch, “The Iron Gentleman,” still does the heavy part of the work. He has,—with their own help, indeed, put three sons and three daughters through college, handsomely. He has trained his sons to his business and the extraordinary secrets of his shop, of which the whole tribe are inordinately proud.
50In early youth he discovered the process of hammering out the old Damascus blades, and vastly improved upon it, and struck off a new type of sword for the world, and his work has remained in undeviating pattern and quality ever since. At his simple forge he hammers out those wonderful swords in plain sight of the passer-by or the detective from Europe. They cannot grasp the secret. He named his gift to the world, “The Avanel Blade.” It is waspish and supple, all-conquering in body and soul. Sideways it can be wound like watch spring steel, or even a coil of narrow ribbon. Edgewise it can cut more human flesh and bone than the heavy guillotine, it can cut straight through an iron or granite block of any thickness, as though it were cutting snow. In its standard form it is longer than the longest cavalry sword. It is the assumption of the strange old “Iron Gentleman” that it will be used mostly by women, his descendants, and in battle for this land. Legend has it that the blade is named for a sweetheart who died in his youth. Certainly there is no living Avanel. He and his sons and daughters, all of them trained to his trade, have shod the horses of the notables of the country round, of more than one president of the United States, and of innumerable forgotten 51candidates for the presidency who began their careers by ostentatiously going to his humble shop.
His daughters are quite accomplished in light, ornamental iron work. They are well bred, high strung girls, and have the vitality of young tigers. These girls and their father are responsible for the most remarkable phenomenon of the streets of Springfield in 1917. Inspired by the Amazons of the Russian Revolution, at the very beginning of that revolution, before it was declared a failure by the western world, they filled out an idea which had long been forming in their minds, and organized a troop of girl cavalry and offered it to the government for service against Germany. The girls were fully disciplined and equipped at the time of the declaration of war. Their services were refused, and almost all of the girls went into the stereotyped war work, many of them overseas. But now the whole body of troops is together again, riding our streets night and day, armed with the Avanel sword, and led, quite haughtily, by the Iron Gentleman’s youngest daughter.
The brothers have organized a similar group of cavalry, armed with the same blade, and call it The Horse Shoe Brotherhood. 52But, of course, it has not attracted the same attention as the dazzling girls. The Horse Shoe Brotherhood was not accepted by the government as a body. They enlisted, or were drafted, one at a time, in a conventional fashion. Many of the cavalry girls, following the example of the Michael women, are often gritty enough to shoe their own horses.
The “Iron Gentleman” is lean and ruddy, with a hooked and hatchet face. He has the habit of pointing his long, skinny fingers at the enemy he denounces, who may be present in imagination, or even in fact, while the oratory flows. Every street corner of Springfield is haunted with the legends of a series of fist fights in the boyhood biography of “The Iron Gentleman,” election scrimmages of his young manhood, and the like. It is said that at the interesting age of fourteen he broke half the street lamps of Springfield with well thrown cinders until one evening when he had his jacket thoroughly dusted by a most energetic father. He had several personal encounters on the streets of Springfield in middle age, horsewhipping some hereditary enemy, or thwarting some hereditary enemy who threatened, imminently, to horsewhip him.
53“The Iron Gentleman” is a savage only two or three days in the year in his old age. He tells his boys’ and girls’ children and grandchildren, that they are to shoe horses and ideas forevermore, and send these ideas galloping across the world, sure footed; and his family are to keep on doing this, whether the town likes it or not. He tells them to hammer out swords perfectly tempered and to put their own souls on the anvil and hammer them till they are swords likewise, and to go forth and cut their way through the world, and bring back the heads of their enemies to Springfield and hang them in rows in front of their forges, whether the town likes it or not.
“The Iron Gentleman” and his sons have revived the cult of boxing and bare fist fighting, and as a result there is many a black eye and bloody nose among both “delicate,” and “muckers” of Springfield. We are as thoroughly damaged as German duelling students, though with not quite the same marks. And the boy scouts are getting battered up, and something must be done to put a stop to this.
“The Iron Gentleman” and his two older sons have the forge-burned faces of blacksmiths. But though the youngest excels in 54their accomplishments, he is more a brother of his father’s cavalry-sword, the Damascus Blade.
Like the rest he is tall and slender, but there is a difference. He hardly needs his father’s gift to the world; he is such a fencer with the shorter and more conventional blade. He looks like the flattering portraits of Louis Fourteenth of France, that were made in that monarch’s youth. He has a great turn for pageantry, though with him it has taken a completely democratic phase. There is no sounder citizen in all his works and ways than this Joseph Bartholdi Michael. He has studied long under Thomas Wood Stevens, William Chauncey Langdon, and Percy Mackaye. And so he has established a pageantry calendar for the city which has been adopted by the City Commissioners, backed by the Chamber of Commerce, the Art Association, the Rotary Club, the Lion’s Club, and the Optimist’s Club.
He has somewhat mitigated the “scrapping” of the boy scouts by evolving a code book of chivalry for them, and it endeavors to impart taboos, observances, and as well, honorifics for real merit. He ties up all these with the pomps of his calendar. He it is that 55imparts to his youthful followers a special consideration for the ladies, and reverence for their beauty.
He fought at the Meuse-Argonne, was all through the battle of a little more than five weeks’ length from September 26, 1918, on through hell and glory to November first, when the American First Army cut like magic swords through those four intricate systems of German defenses, that were spread out over those famous ten miles. On November the first he and many Springfield boys, including his two blacksmith brothers, were going on like fate, like their own irresistible blades which they managed to carry into that long five weeks’ battle. In all this Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the exquisite, was the dashing leader of his group, a private in the ranks, but from the beginning to the end, a sword. And they swept forward with the American First Army till the very end of hostilities on the eleventh of November. They did their full share of the work of that American First Army, which, the experts say, took sixteen thousand prisoners, 468 guns, 2,664 machines guns, 177 trench mortars, made an advance of 34 miles in 47 days and set free 1,550 square kilometers of French ground and 150 villages.
56Indeed they took their due part in that battle which saved the world.
It is at the end of this battle, at the dawn before Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, that Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the exquisite, has his vision of the year 2018. He dreams of leaving Springfield for a similar battle in Asia, with a far more uncertain outcome. He is about to go forth with The Horse Shoe Brotherhood and the Amazon Riders, armed one and all with the Avanel Sword, against the strange nation of the Singaporians, who are blasting the world with their demon ambition as did the Germans of 1914. And he bears the same name. He is known as Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second, is an old man, with a pageant leader for a son:—Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third.
Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second, has reverted to an exaggeration of “The Iron Gentleman.” His son, on the other hand, is in 2018 an exquisite: almost gone to seed, a histrionic silly. Bartholdi Second that is to be, touches on the history of the clan for one hundred years, for the benefit of the Prognosticator’s Club. On looking deeply into his dream he finds that his father is still known among the descendants as “The Iron 57Gentleman.” About 1925 the children and grandchildren took for their family flag the picture of six anvils, and above them six hammers.
In the Mystic Year the cottages of these people are scattered in every quarter of the town, and the flag with the six anvils and six hammers flies in front of almost every cottage of a descendant, man or woman. The male descendants, of whatever name or high education, are blacksmiths and forge workers and makers of the Avanel blade, as are indeed many of the women. It seems to take the Michael hammer stroke to make that blade. With a few temporary exceptions, the men are busy horse-shoeing for the Amazons and making swords.
And with the exception of a few too exquisite creatures like Joseph Bartholdi, III, the clan is not inbred. The greater part of the brains of the tribe is still in their legs and arms, not off in a separate compartment in their skulls.
By dint of earnest cross-questioning, I get it from Joseph Bartholdi Michael, that he has been a figure in Illinois in dreams of 2000–2018. He has been the author in precocious youth of a book, entitled: “Paper Made Nations,” a treatise on the laws of flying machine 58commerce, and it became the basis of the economic side of Black Hawk Boone’s pet theory and way of life.
According to the model, Joseph Bartholdi, in his reincarnation, has shod the horses of many a governor of Illinois and President of the United States, and President of the World Government. This husky, distinguished democracy combines with the prestige of his precocious book to make him the most distinguished representative of the teeming 2018 Middle West, in the World Government. He champions there the ceremonies and honors due the International Flag with the loyalty to what they like and a sense of the depths of pageantry, that has distinguished the Michael following from the beginning. Portia, the Singing Aviator, has in the generation of the Mystic Year, written the local song about “The Patchwork Flag of Michael and the World.” And she calls it in the same song: “Joseph’s Coat of Many Colors” or “The Flag of Joseph’s Coat” in allusion to his fashion of almost draping it around him, with the Star Spangled Banner, when he is speaking on high occasions, on international issues.
Instead of an exquisite, he is lean, wiry, with a hooked and hatchet face, burned, 59cooked, in the forge. He finds he has the habit of pointing his long, skinny fingers at the enemy he denounces. He finds that, like his progenitor, “The Iron Gentleman,” he has a record of putting things through with sheer fury when there is no other weapon handy.
He tells the Prognosticator’s Club, that, through the century, the flag with the six hammers and the six anvils has been smeared by renegades. But the proud truth-speaking custom has tortured the whole clan till some one has risen to confess the sins of the name, and start new.
And the Michaels have been hated off and on for a whole century because of these things, and because they were always hating some one, even without cause. They were apt to be jealous of other vigorous citizens, considering themselves the sole saviors of the principle of defiant democracy. But all the century the leading Michaels have seemed to be saying: “A town well hammered into shape is better than fortune or fame.” Few Michaels were guilty of living a private and secluded existence.
Few maidens were crowned with lovelier hair or carried themselves with finer mien than the granddaughters and great granddaughters of the “Iron Gentleman.” The stock 60has gone on in beauty and strength through the vision of a century. Yet in 2018 it seems that the scepter is just a little departing from the younger generation. It is not that they are ousted from public office. The fearless voice of a Michael always counts most as a private citizen, and, whenever Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second, returns from The World Government, he takes his place in the Horse Shoe Brotherhood as a private in the ranks beside his son Joseph Bartholdi, the Third, and it is their full intention, according to hereditary political habit, to ride against Singapore, when the time is ripe, as privates in the ranks.
But a new clan has come up from Cairo, Illinois, led by Black Hawk Boone. Many of their young girls look more like young Indian maids from a government reservation school, than people of Caucasian stock. But, for all that, they have their own original ways of delicate manner and address, most disconcerting to the fixed limits of Springfield’s conventionality. They are rather short and heavy-set. Their merry young men and middle-aged men have, most of them, long, curly black lovelocks to the shoulders, not carefully combed, and nearly all defiantly wag big black 61beards in every argument, when all other men in the modern world are shaved clean.
They cheerfully hate the blacksmith clan which they are ousting by a greater talent for fury, preaching, and cursing, and by having just a little more brain at the back of the neck.
The town wits say these clans hate each other because, on the whole, they are so much alike, and always vote the same way at a crisis. The locks of both the Boone men and women stream back over their shoulders, and their left hands are dyed crimson as a proud perpetual reminder to themselves and all the world that among their ancestors were aborigines.
But America has not suffered the regime of nigh two hundred years of baseball umpires:—and presidential elections accepted by November 15 by the defeated party, without a disposition to be good sports on the part of self-respecting clans like these. And so it comes about to stir the romantic soul of the town that the Avanel Blade of the “Iron Gentleman” of 1920 has become a woman in 2018, but a woman no kin to the Michaels. In 2018 Horse Shoe Brotherhood and Michael Amazons are under one commander, the lovely Lady Avanel Boone, and, though they be armed with the Avanel Blade indeed, she 62scores a point in family pride and makes them swear fealty on Daniel Boone’s old hunting knife, which she carries in her belt as a token of her Kentucky forbears.
And now, as the son of the “Iron Gentleman” tells the story, it comes as a clouded vision before me, as though I were half in the vision and beginning a destiny of my own.
It is the snowy morning of All Saint’s Day, 2018, the Michael Clan and a general assembly of Springfield people are at the crossing of Fifth Street and Capital Avenue, and by the ancestral forge on the southeast corner. The fire is burning high and the bellows is roaring. The horse of the conquering Avanel Boone is to be shod by that good sport Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second, who has just returned from the World Government to take his modest place in the ranks of her following. And then there are these curly haired, black browed, black bearded rascals to whom all Michaels must be polite, and these Red-Indian looking girls and boys, Avanel’s innumerable adoring cousins who are publicly admiring her with hectic words and kissing her with sugar sweetness and honest family idolatry. There is a touch of the uncanny, the restless, the Ishmaelite about all these Boones, 63they have no business in the streets of a town. They look like dressed-up wood-choppers, all but that trim Avanel.
While the snow is blowing into the shop, white-haired Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second, has taken the old shoes from the dainty feet of the white pony, and, just as he is lifting a new shoe from the fire and the flames leap up, there is a music incredibly sweet, and with a great whirring of wings and terrible thunder “The Book” flies out of the fire, and circles above these two clans. Avanel with eyes fixed and strained in wonder, follows it on her unshod horse. The Book settles into her arms, and I see her sit above the company like a fairy in a trance, and read with adoring voice from the snow white book while the assembled clans and all the citizens gather close to hear.
The first pages of the volume give in jewelled and flaming letters a new charter and constitution for the World Government, based on the life and teaching of Springfield’s deathless citizen, Abraham Lincoln.
There is in the air an exquisite song and around the consecrated Avanel a glory ineffable, for she is the High Priestess of The Book for her people. The song in the air praises her, and urges her, and all those she commands, 64to valor for the Heavenly Star Spangled Banner and the Heavenly International Flag. And the song whispers that the book, in many strange forms, will appear in many a green field of our middle west this day, in many a pulpit and many a lonely mourner’s house to give life and eternal light.
But, as my neighbor from the blacksmith shop of 1920 tells the tale more slowly, the vision turns to mere words again, and then to dust and ashes. And I myself seem but ashes on the winds of time.
The histories of the future in the Prognosticator’s Club are no more contradictory than the accounts our fathers give of the leading events of the Civil War.
Everywhere South of Mason and Dixon’s line they say that Grant surrendered to Lee. It is in every southern school book. When we look into history we are made dizzy by cloud and flame. And we shall still be partizans in the highest Heaven. There are many earthly languages. There are many heavenly languages. There are many blazing, blinding tomorrows. But they all lead to the same glorious tomorrow at last.
The Prognosticators are a dithyrambic, chanting, improvising howling dervish set, with a certain sense of humor among all these 65blinding lights, which is but to say they have elasticity of soul and mind.
Many of the Michael Clan of Springfield, of 1920, returned soldiers, Red Cross nurses, and other workers, saw kindred visions of the Flying Book of Springfield blazing above the trenches at midnight for their comfort, while voices in the air sang them stories of home.
Reader, in your town many like these are brooding alone over unaccountable vistas of the future of their city, that have come to them in battle or by the fireside or in the storm. They have found themselves standing momently at cross streets of vision, before they felt their hearts to be as dust again. Call them together. Blow ashes into flame. Start a brotherhood of your own. Live in the New City that is revealed to you, as we are living in our City and in the streets of our Tomorrow.