I ENTER INTO THE NEW SPRINGFIELD OF 2018. I AM SNUBBED BY AVANEL, SHE RELENTS, SHOWING ME MANY PANORAMAS OF NEW SPRINGFIELD. WE CONFESS TO HAVING THE SAME DREAM OF DEVIL’S GOLD.  
But it is not after the noble manner of these others that I enter at last into the vision of 2018.
There is deep darkness, and time passing by without end, and shade. There is the fear of the moles that will not leave me alone, who make nests of alien dust, beneath my ribs. And my bones crumble through the century, like last year’s autumn leaves. Then there is, alternating with drouth, bitter frost. And roots wrap my heart and brain. And there is sleep.
Then a galloping and gay shrieking, away on the road, to the East of Oak Ridge! And though I am six feet beneath the ground the eyes of the soul are given me. I see wonderful young horsewomen out on that Great Northwest Road and the ancient clay between me and that cavalcade turns to air and to 67light. And I am asking myself as the Girl Leader goes by like a meteor: “Am I coming up again through the earth as weed or flame or man? If I rise from this grave, I am coming but to praise her, if I may.”
There is deep darkness again, and sleep, and when next I awake I am in the midst of a terrible March rain, and I run for refuge into Dodds’ Drug Store. It is the old Fifth and Monroe corner. I buy the early afternoon Register from a bawling newsboy. It is dated March first, 2018. Soon the storm abates a little, but it is a freezing, thawing, wind-whistling, late afternoon. It is dusk, and I am walking South on what was once Third Street, but is now Mulberry Boulevard, with the Chicago and Alton railroad long gone. And I am with that girl who awakened me, Avanel Boone, and there is no poetry about it at all. It is obvious by the air with which she takes possession of me and hustles me down that rain and sleet-scourged avenue, that she considers herself the heroine of my story. But dear me, what stubborn material for a heroine. Here, after a century, woman is the same she always was.
To put it in restrained phrases she is, in her disposition, like the weather. She scolds me 68for the unpressed state of my clothes, and my mussed hair, and my lack of air of distinction. She says I have slept in my clothes so much that they are in a perfectly abused condition.
I admit that I have not consulted a tailor for some little time. She says I carry myself as though I were a ditch digger or were following the plough, instead of walking with a lady. She lashes me for what she alleges are my ridiculous ideas, and goes over the catalogue till it is impossible to enjoy the panorama that I glimpse through the bracing sleet and rain, and I scarcely care to look at her, the little devil,—though she is to be my heroine.
The only flattering thing about the encounter is the air of settled proprietorship of this young lady.
At length there is silence and I chase along meekly beside her under the umbrella, and cool down, and do her the honor to look her over as well as I can in the storm. Her face is half hidden by her flapping waterproof cape and we are walking under tremendous shade trees. I note her chin quite high in the air, her spirited profile set straight forward, and her cheeks, with color that goes like a blown-out flame and then comes again like a heart-beat.
March 2, 2018:—I am again in my New City. 69I begin the day by reading the Illinois State Journal of March 2; it is the same paper as of old. I note the advertisements of laundries, screen factories, cleaners and dyers, apple merchants, dealers in hats and caps, dealers in hay, grain and feed, places for the purchase of fish, game and oysters, poultry and eggs, etc. I note ladies’ furnishing establishments, retail dry goods stores, bakeries, headquarters for cash registers, meat markets, the establishments of upholsterers, places where may be found parcel delivery messengers, lists of dealers in flour and feed, various advertisements of baggage and transfer companies, dealers in wall paper, paints, oils and varnish, and everything in advertisements in the Journal to convince me that this is the same old paper, and the same old capital city.
Yet I am endowed with new powers. I go about the streets as a sort of a millennial chameleon. I find myself wearing various bodies. First I am but myself, kneeling before the Image of the Virgin, in the church of St. Peter and St. Paul. In an hour I am a City Hall stenographer, in the office of the Mayor. This Mayor is referred to in the Journal as “Slick Slack Kopensky.” Later in the morning I am clerk for Justice of the Peace John Boat, whose office is right by the jail. 70And both the jail and the office stairs have the same old skunk smell that has distinguished jails and the stairs of justice from the beginning. Later, in the afternoon, I am an emergency messenger for the Japanese department of the World’s Fair of the University of Springfield, and am, to all appearances, a Japanese. I find myself wearing the clothes and shoes of these various supernumeraries, and in my double consciousness, knowing their affairs all through, as though I had lived in their frames twenty years. Yet no matter whose body I seem to wear or whose tongue I seem to be wagging, I step back into the same yokel when, once in the morning, and once in the afternoon, between these episodes I find myself cowering in the presence of Comrade Avanel. It is a cloudy, foggy day, and fog seems to come between us whenever I try to look at her. In the morning I win her hard consent to take yesterday’s walk again, and she promises not to scold me, only flinging out the assertion that I am a diamond in the rough and that it is her business to polish me:—a statement I seem to have heard before somewhere.
In the afternoon she behaves, and the fog blows away after a while and I am able to enjoy the vision of this proud quivering young 71body and soul. From beneath the bantam-rooster air emerges a little glimpse of the sibyl.
For all her tailor-made smartness, she is like the Indian, and walks unimpeded as though in moccasins. Her hair is black and long and straight, and today her fashion plate profile is changed to something more native American. Yet her skin is so white and her cheeks are so red, and the flush comes and goes so fast, the Indian illusion has completely disappeared when she turns her face to me. Her changing elusive face has a haunting kinship to the countenance of my favorite and adored image of the virgin that has been for much more than a century to the north of the high altar of the church of St. Peter and St. Paul, where I have been again meditating this very morning. And I try to tell her that she is a more earthly younger sister of this virgin, but indeed of the same tribe and house of saints.
When she bows her head in what may be dreaming, there is to my foolish imagination a hint of Pallas Athena about the action. When she lifts her head, and looks me full in the face all the upper part of her countenance is definitely a feminized portrait of Shelley, and she wears those curls hiding either ear 72after the smartest fashion of 2018. They are called the Harriet Beecher Stowe curls, and copied from those in the most frequent portrait of Harriet Beecher Stowe, when she was a dazzling young woman. I try to tell Avanel how her beauty seems, but my speeches are not eloquent and my heroine is neither poetess nor prophetess in her replies. She says “I cannot be all of those creatures. Your figures contradict.”
I answer: “Step into my hall of mirrors, and you will discover yourself to be all I have said, and a devil in the bargain.”
She drifts to speaking of her father, born in southern Illinois, descendant on one side from Daniel Boone, and on another from a Kentucky Indian chief of long ago. For the first time that high throaty snobbish mannerism and affected even tone disappear from her voice, and she speaks as a human creature should. She cannot be a society chatterbox when discussing her clan.
She goes on to tell how her mother came of two long lines of Springfield Catholics. And I gather, as Avanel talks on and on, and I piece it out from dim memories that float about the back of my head, that two lines of her mother’s house were the one Irish, and the other Lithuanian, and that long ago this 73woman was the most famous dancer of The Gordon Craig Theatre. She died in Avanel’s fifteenth year. And it seemed in the local fitness of things for the little girl with the same talent to go forward bearing the same responsibilities as soon as she could carry them, dancers coming to their own early, if they ever have a place. She was soon the head of all those who could make Springfield’s devotional ideals clear and appealing, through those inherited rituals. Avanel and her group have danced for the Churches at Christmas and other times, and, in the history of her art most important of all, the festivals of Johnny Appleseed, and of St. Scribe and Hunter Kelly. And now I begin to remember with her some of those occasions as through rifts of cloud.
Now Avanel says she does not want me to be seen in the audience where she gives a religious dance. She is angry with herself and me, because she is herself flattening out so, after talking on religious matters. But I am philosophical about this young woman, today, and look about at what we are passing.
We stare silently into the windows at adding machines, mantels, grates, and tiles. We pass a wholesale house for barber supplies, 74and Avanel says I need a hair cut. We pass the business houses of feather-renovators and dealers, of dealers in safes and locks, and rubber stamps. I note aloud in passing that Avanel has many rubber stamp ideas and needs to alter them if she would do justice to her glorious face. She answers not. We walk on. We pass through a wholesale region, and while the fog still conceals the towers of the town and comes lower, we can look into the windows yet, and I note that this is not as in the century before. Almost every wholesaler has a dazzling insignia and coat of arms. This is true for instance of the manufacturing machinists and millwrights, the headquarters for tempering and dies. It is true, even, of the dealers in sand and gravel, the tinners and slate roofers, the transfer and trucking companies, the brick and tile manufacturers, the soda water manufacturers, the pump manufacturers, the cigar manufacturers, the leather and belting men, and many others that to me were most commonplace of old. But their window displays are as the throne rooms of knighthood.
March 3:—Mist and darkness of soul are clearing away. And I am welcomed in my real and permanent aspect in the streets 75of the New Springfield, by many fellow citizens that it appears I have known for long. I am to them also the yokel Avanel thinks me to be, and I meet with many covert smiles. It seems I have returned after years of art study in New York, and it is the first time many of them have seen me for quite awhile. I am welcomed back to town a slightly boresome but harmless cousin. But everyone calls his worst enemy cousin, as in a Kentucky village. Young Jim Kopensky asks in a cousinly manner why I start art classes here, if I had any kind of prospects in New York, rather implying that I am here because I have nowhere else to go. He takes up a strain remarkably like that of Avanel, and insists that I failed with the great metropolitan oracles of art because of uncreased trousers, and merely stares with incredulity when I insist that their trousers are often uncreased, and some of them dress like rag bags. Despite many similar greetings, I inwardly vow to start my art classes anyhow, and I spend a morning having a most fraternal chat with Sparrow Short. He is retouching a portrait of Mara of Singapore, painted several years ago when she was a young girl, and the political issue between 76Singapore and America was not so keen. Short is determined to exhibit it at the August opening of The World’s Fair of the University of Springfield. In this picture I behold her in her glory, a premature creature of thirteen, a Singaporian Juliet, Short says “more hectic in her aspect than she is now. At the present she is an exceedingly cool panther.” The days Short painted this portrait, she was deeply reading the most inflaming Singaporian romance, and in the portrait it flashes recklessly from her, and her eyes and mouth are round with the thought of the loves of the lost gods, who flourished before the prophet of the Cocaine Buddha of Singapore killed them all in the jungle. She is dressed in green silk and in her hands is a great green feather fan. Short is painting out certain vague white blossoms on a bush in the background and turning them to green buds, for Mara has imperiously demanded it.
I am living near the studio of Sparrow Short, in one of the old houses of Springfield on South Fourth Street which existed in my previous life, and where once lived a dear friend of mine.
Everything in the old house is disposed and ordered as formerly, and it is only when I step out on the front lawn and pass under 77a certain mulberry tree that I seem to be in the New Springfield.
I pass under this tree. I walk a little way to the house of Avanel, and we saunter abroad. And the fogs are blowing away and she is in a most amiable mood, and I am able to note that our city is indeed a flying, fluttering place.
Confectioneries, auto trucks, popcorn vans, pleasure machines, and the passing crowds are decked with ribbons and streamers. Many families have a flag pole in the front yard with a row of tiny ancestral flags, one over the other, each indicating some form of skilled or unskilled manual labor by which the ancestors of the house made their way, and it is considered a disgrace to display any other type of ancestral flag, but one which shows some form of manual labor.
But many staffs have only three flags, that of the town, that of the International Government, and above these, the Star Spangled Banner. These people pride themselves in being more democratic, and not parading their ancestry. Nearly all business houses, particularly the large and wholesale houses, have their own especial banners and bunting, and some give out toy balloons and the like to the children, marked with the same schemes. 78The Star Spangled Banner is above everything, even on the International buildings, to indicate that the United States has the old South Carolina privilege of secession from the World Federation, whenever she pleases.
And so I am walking with Avanel, on the late afternoon of March third, 2018. We find ourselves very near the center of the group of slender Sunset Towers. Seven of them are of the seven colors of the rainbow, one for each color, placed in a circle around the Truth Tower, which is in the very center of the star-plan system of boulevards. We climb the Truth Tower and look about. The Truth Tower is also called The Edgar Lee Masters Tower, and it is high above the rest. At the foot of it is the circular green with Golden Rain-Trees from New Harmony, Indiana. This is called the Edgar Lee Masters Park. Near by is the Lincoln Memorial Park, containing the marked sites of Lincoln’s three law offices, and in the center our first State House, now the Lincoln museum. On the sides of all the Sunset Towers that one may see from the old public square is spread the Red Star of Springfield, set in the White Star of Illinois. Searchlights blaze through it, spreading red and white light. Outside the white Truth Tower that soars above all the city, and 79outside its rainbow circle of campaniles, the ninety-two other campaniles shimmer in the sun, their hues ranging from grey to rose-grey, and grey-gold to rose-gold. And they grow wilder in the red, black and white gorgeousness of the night.
The fifty towers on the outermost circle are the newest. They are the only separate buildings of the World’s Fair of the University of Springfield, except one long street called “The Street of Past History,” which is about a mile to the south beginning at Bunn Park and sweeping toward the northwest in a quarter of a circle to the high hill of Washington Park. Every building in the city is officially a part of the fair and in theory at least, the City is the Fair.
It is late in the evening, and I am with Avanel on top of the Truth Tower, and she is relenting, not so much toward me, as toward her town. It is the first time she has taken in the panorama, since the last circle of towers was completed and The Street of Past History illuminated.
“I must admit,” she says, “the civic patriotism of two most unfashionable persons. Old Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second, who is away now at the legislature of the World Government, 80is the head of our whole architectural project. He is something of a Smart Set person, and is in fact an old West Pointer. But the real work was done by the most unpopular Thibetan Boy and the architectural planning and imagining was by the negro John Emis. Old Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second, has lent his name to protect these people, and leave them unmolested in their project. As it is, he turns his appropriation over to them. The city would not give either of such a salary. It will give the Thibetan Boy a little credit, when all is over, but John Emis none at all, because he is a negro. When you go down into the streets again you will find a black stripe tucked away in some odd corner of the design of every building in The Street of Past History. If you look you will see that same stripe now, on the outer circle of towers. It goes slenderly around the fourth story and the tenth. That black stripe is the personal secret signature of John Emis, the negro architect.”
The voice of this woman beside me alters to that gentle and human tone in which she spoke of her mother, as though this city, too, has its hand somewhat on her heart. Yet she is proud and almost barks at me when I attempt 81any kind of understanding, and to her I am not of this city, and my sole excuse for living is that I admire her, and therefore must be forgiven every other trait in my character till she has time to mend my ways. My scalp must dangle at her belt.
“I begin to be almost reconciled to living in Springfield,” she muses, “Springfield is all society, you know, and it is hopeless to try to make it anything else. Of course there are some places where it pays to have ideas, but here a girl must conceal ideas if she has them.”
Then, in an instant, another Avanel seems to flash forth. “You think I am a snob and a fool, you silly art student, but I would die for the International Flag far sooner than people like your idol Sparrow Short.”
Avanel points out to me old Camp Lincoln, northwest, beyond the towers. There she leads the Amazonian Cavalry and the Horseshoe Brotherhood in bi-weekly drill, in preparation for the possible war against Singapore. Looming like the dome of the Taj Mahal above the trees is a gigantic world globe, which marks the center of the field. Around this shining map of everything her drills are held.
82But I answer her cut: “Sparrow Short is no idol of mine, and you know it. I regard him as the best teacher of art in Springfield, but I do not accept his international views.”
“It seems to me,” she gives reply, “that you are always finding excuses for dubious revolutionaries, whose spirits and bodies are rag bags.”
About nine in the evening, there are star-chimes from all the towers. The bells are singing the song of Portia, the aviator:—“Look up at the far-off suns, Oh hearts of eternal desire.”
Avanel speaks to me in a swearing tone of voice: “I think I cut fewer people than you do. I should not be elected the head of the Amazons if I were a fool about exclusiveness. As a matter of fact I cut those who go to the parties of Mara, the daughter of the Man from Singapore. It is plain she gets those people under her roof to poison them against the world government or at least muffle their suspicions of her father’s doings and the doings of his like. You are the only person who thinks I cut loyal patriotic people.”
I am wondering why I like this Avanel. I conclude it is because of her overwhelming 83vanity and unbreakable pride. She has the soul of a thousand peacocks and there is a potential lioness in her beside.
She clasps her hands and looks silently over the city, her eyes wide and leaping with delight over the glory of the illumination. I say to Avanel: “My Fathers have been long in the grave, and my own dust has long been buried in other dust. I walk with you, only because my heart loved you, one hundred years ago.” But she does not understand me in the least, when I talk in this fashion.
March 4:—It is such an established custom among the young people of 2018 to watch the sunset from the great uninterrupted glass spaces of the upper halls of these sunset towers that there may be found the most famous cafeterias of the town. We dine at the top of one of them. There with gay singing the young democracy, and the young cocks of the walk as well, linger and wait till long past the afterglow. This evening the haughty Avanel consents to take dinner with me, that she may reprove me once more, seeing that, in general, my name is mud, however I may try to improve.
The catalogue of her hoity-toity friends rolls on forever and I can only protest by saying 84that while these are undeniably good citizens, they are all sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles of those who are invited to Mara’s parties, and thus quite near to treason.
But now the town choir sings the civic hymn from a tower near by:—“Springfield Awake, Springfield Aflame” and all the young people about join in the chorus, and as Avanel sings devoutly she cannot help but be the other self whose existence she tries to deny.
March 7:—I am dining again in the tower cafeteria with Avanel, a quite early dinner, and while the afterglow still blazes we look down upon the clustered cottages of our town. They are, in design, dominated by the so-called “Violet Curve,” a complex rhythm, which is magnified from the whorls of the violet petals, and the cottages are generally violet in hue. Some of the roofs and cupolas are beginning to be gilded. Springfield extends over the whole county through the taking in of countless groves, orchards, and aviation fields.
Not only in their special groves, but everywhere titan Amaranth Apple vines rise on trellises high above the other trees, for this famous Amaranth is a kind of a tree-vine that is in the fall thick with red and 85white blossoms and clusters of red apples. There are many parks in the New Springfield that were not in the old Springfield: Rankin, Sandburg, Humphrey, Roberts, Joyce Kilmer, Masters, Untermeyer, and others. Avanel points out the public schools beneath us, often rebuilt on the old sites or near them, and bearing the same names. Ancient streets keep their names, except where boulevards have replaced them.
East of Tenth Street is the Negro district, all new, beautiful, flamboyant jungle houses, constructed for his people by John Emis, and through his influence not one slack old building remains, though, “most of them still hold slack colored people,” Avanel says. These houses are far richer than the towers and other buildings of the World’s Fair, for only here in Africa has John Emis an unrestrained hand.
March 8:—Avanel, with a view to my further chastisement, takes me about, scolding again, and we encounter a row of grotesques on great pedestals, which she confesses were put up by a group of young Boones who came from near Cairo, led by her father in his more fiery youth, when the Boones had by no means so strong a hold on the city.
86They are in Liberty Park, near Concordia College, whose golden pinnacles glitter through the bare limbs of the trees. On the central pedestal of the grotesques is inscribed: “To the cornerstones of the town; to the newspaper and motion picture and stage censors; to the respectables, the lady bountifuls, the so-called senior families; to the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution; to the Sons and Daughters of the Ancient Democrats, and the Sons and Daughters of the Ancient Republicans; and in general, to the dragon-quack worm of respectability, that dieth not.” Avanel says these were put up the day the “Boone Ax” newspaper was founded.
On the central pedestal, which is higher and more massive than the rest, crawling down from the top, is a dragon with a duck’s head. On the top of the other pedestals are the stone images of a fretful ape, an enormous frog, a long nosed ant eater, a laughing idiot, a hawk, a goat, a three-legged bull dog wearing a plug hat, a chicken without feathers, and a hog wearing trousers.
I say, on looking at these: “Avanel, I desire to meet your father, the honorable Black Hawk Boone. I darkly suspect he is one of 87those who go about in unpressed clothes and will doubtless furnish me with words to say to you. I should say that the daughter of such a father should be willing to dye her left hand crimson, for him, proudly.”
Avanel answers with a tearful solemnity, positively babyish:—“If you truly love me you will not use my father against me. While I respect him, I cannot respect all his clan and ideas and I am even more vexed over his way of mixing with mussy people. If I must have that kind of thing, I go to the saint who does it for religion and not from philosophy. I want you to meet St. Friend.”
March 10:—Late this evening I buy a sack of popcorn and walk about the shopping district alone, eating the well-buttered corn from my pocket, and swinging my cane, and observing the beauty of the ladies as they go into the theatre with their escorts. Many of them remind me of girls I used to eye with breathless reverence in Springfield. I am glad to wonder over beauty without being vexed with it, and I stand in the shadow, inwardly defying Miss Avanel. And having defied her about an hour, I call at nine o’clock, feeling perfectly emancipated, and tell her the following story:—
88“Avanel, last night we went abroad into Dreamland together, hand in hand and heart in heart, looking with equal guilt for the Golden Pool of the Handsome Medicine Man, Devil’s Gold. It was way past midnight when we found him, in the midst of the black prairies of Dreamland I well know. He was making his medicine, and dishonoring our souls, by calling our names across the plain. We did not flinch. We walked straight to his yellow campfire, and looked into his gilded face and admired his yellow blanket, and right by his fire we satisfied our wicked desire by admiring ourselves in his golden pool.
“Our faces were close together, and as we looked into the pool, we saw ourselves in a mundane world, so perfect that its materialism became magical.
“We walked down through the pool, as though into an underground house, and we looked into each others faces again. And we were moving, gilded images from head to feet, and we were satisfied with each other at last, and I knew I wanted you to be gilded as much as you desired me to be so, and we took the wickedest pleasure in looking upon the yellow world around us.”
“Yes,” said Avanel, “I walked there with 89you in my dream last night, and I hope we will walk in houses of holiness together and I am sorry we walked in the pool of gold. Come with me to St. Friend.” After that, Avanel is more of a Christian.