HOW BLUE-FACED SURTO HURDENBURG IS LYNCHED. HOW THE TOWN SWEEPS ON INTO THE GLORIES OF SUMMER AND JUNE BRIDES AND THE GORGEOUSNESS OF THE TOWERS FROM NIGHTFALL TILL MIDNIGHT. HOW MY LOVE AND I ARE AGAIN ENSNARED BY DEVIL’S GOLD.  
June 20, 2018:—Last night was presumably the time of the final closing of the halls, at precisely five minutes of twelve. So at five minutes of eight or thereabouts, one of the younger members of the Montague Rock family brings, with great secrecy and under special devices of disguise, a treasury of wine from beneath some cellar of his clan and distributes it to a carefully censored company in the Yellow Hall of the Mythical Velaska. The world begins to burn for those here assembled for their farewell dance. It so happens that Hurdenburg, intoxicated from the mere drink of victory, hears the noise as he passes. He mounts the stairs. He breaks past a guard who has himself had enough drink to make 210him too easy. But the remainder of the company have had enough to make them too stern and at the very sight of the “puritan” Hurdenburg, they turn to beasts. They have been saying, moreover, that they were going to hang the whole Board of Education and “every other damned hypocrite in town.” They have been denouncing, with some shrieks, “the millions of rank hypocrites” with which America is beset, hypocrites who banish the gold and the alcohol to the cellars and will not permit people to be “honest millionaires” and “honest drunkards” when they please. “What the town really needs,” they have been saying,—and Crawling Jim, slayer of Beau Nash, has been saying it the loudest,—is a vigilance committee. What the “holy city of Springfield needs is a committee to hang with ropes all people who attempt to regulate the religion or the habits of their neighbors.” By religion, Jim probably means the Singaporian religion but does not stress that point.
And so, at sight of Hurdenburg, the infamous minion of the wicked St. Friend, Hurdenburg drunk on political and ecclesiastical power, they make a rush for him, and, led by crawling Jim, this crew, in the masks of the Mythical Velaska, tie Surto Hurdenburg to a 211pillar. They drink more buried treasure, as they decide what to do with him. They formally and solemnly conclude that they will be merciful and not follow the well established American lynching custom of burning alive, though Hurdenburg, in this case, deserves such treatment. They untie him from the pillar, and carry him to the foot of a Golden Rain Tree of Democracy. Crawling Jim puts the noose in place. Then Hurdenburg is hanged by the neck till he is dead. And the merrymakers go back to the hall undisturbed and dance till five minutes before twelve and then the city police close the hall, according to expectations. The followers of the masked Velaska go home, apparently satisfied with one night’s work, most of them in the arms of one another and quite drunk with wine. It is toward morning a policeman finds Hurdenburg, cut down by an unknown hand, lying in the grass.
June 24:—All local papers, including The Boone Ax, roar about the lynching for one day, then proceed to minimize it as much as possible. So I will do the same in this chronicle, being loyal to my city. A Chicago paper of infamous repute is glad to “have something on” Springfield and sends down gloating reporters, who make the very worst of it, 212rehash Springfield’s political history for the last month, putting the ugliest face on everything, tracing through the city their own kind of history.
June 25:—Rumors of the threatened lynching of all the accepted leaders of the town are circulating from the City Hall, though the City Hall people are with the greatest impartiality included in the rumors. The Board of Education is not frightened. The city today proceeds to give Hurdenburg a wonderful funeral. This funeral seems to ring the doom of infamous Yellow Halls for all time. Saint Friend preaches a funeral sermon with tremendous fire.
June 26:—It appears that the bad bloods of the town are frantically devouring their own souls, or leaving. The city has been losing, since the election and the lynching, as much genius as it does deviltry. Sparrow Short who has been obliged to take down his pictures and hang them defiantly in his own studio, has turned into a profane old varlet, amazing to hear, and is inciting as many pupils of ours as possible to leave Springfield. He is himself threatening to leave. But he does not leave. “Certainly it is no hardship,” as the Sentimental Romanoff says, in 213The Boone Ax, “to see departing the most of those with a special talent for raising Cain.” And he remarks on what an awful row they would have made, had they been sent out of town. The coffee houses still exist. There is no denying that they are getting pretty lively, considering that nothing but coffee is dispensed.
Rabbi Ezekiel, moreover, with all care to defer to the aged St. Friend in a personal way, declares that the photoplay movement, being no longer in alliance with questioned places, is destined to go forward with fresh life. He admits that the abolition of the halls is justified, though he took no part in it. But he is a motion picture fan, whatever the turn of history.
June 27:—My whole feeling over the fights about the halls is that I have not had much chance, after Avanel’s promise to dance there with me. I have had only an evening or so.
As for the lynching, the court proceedings promise to drag on, as they always have in such cases. Everyone knows nothing will be done except postpone. Everyone knows it was Jim, yet no one knows it, and the Janitor of the Yellow Hall is the only person whose name gets into the papers.
214June 28:—The Thibetan Boy, that the Romanoff dubbed the Muttering Thibetan, now swings into my life, and as though he were a guide sent from wonderland, with sealed orders just opened, he takes me the rounds of Springfield and the whole city becomes new. It is not a place of individual sinners and saints. The City’s architecture seems to breathe and live for him. The tiniest gargoyle takes on personality and citizenship. All this morning he has been taking me through the gardens of Mother Grey. These gardens seem built rather than planted. The trees are green walls and roofs. I am amused to note there is no prejudice against dandelions, since, in a former existence, I had so many to dig up. They now make the carpets. He takes me into the temple studio of Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, who is especially busy for young university student girls who expect to be June brides in the next two or three days. This studio is a place established for the innermost circles of the flower religion. Before each altar is a design to be set up and kept glorious in some new cottage. Several of these are for a new row of cottages near Washington Park called Bridal Row. The temple is full of the fluttering brides of tomorrow, seeing the last touches and consulting 215about what candles and incense to burn, and asking over and over what flowers are permitted by the Flower Religion Marriage Service, which is the one most preferred by the exquisites of 2018.
June 29:—Avanel and I have developed a favorite walk: the Lincoln’s monument region. We pass under many of the Golden Rain Trees and Ezekiel Oaks, to the Apple-Amaranth Grove that was the first in Sangamon County, and the Grave of Hunter Kelly, in the midst of it. There are the old pick and spade of the Devil, always left on the grave. When we do not walk in this region we are apt to be looking this way from the Truth Tower, from the lookout room of the newspapers, or looking back from the telescope room of the Ashland Gate. Avanel is generally very solemn looking this way, planning new processions and dances in praise of Hunter Kelly and the next festival of Hunter Kelly, July 11.
June 30:—Avanel has four suitors in Springfield. I am often but a ghost in my own eyes and always but shadow to them. On the hot summer days she goes with three of them to the gigantic porcelain-lined swimming pool of Bunn Park, with two girls, a merry six. 216I hardly have my turn with her for several days at a time.
One of her suitors is an engineer. One is a motor-truck driver. One is an aviator. I sometimes find myself the servant of all three men, but ignored as servants may be. As clouds, mists and smoke seems to choke me, through the whirlwind, I am sometimes the absurd unregarded dragon engine bearing her and the engineer to Chicago. While she laughs as his guest in the engine cab I must look down the track through the murk, and I cannot turn round and see the face of her lover, and the skies are laughing at me forever. Sometimes I am in my dream the absurd auto-truck engine, carrying her and the driver, as he delivers his last consignment of goods from the central market. Even the stones of the street laugh at me as we rattle over them. I am only a mechanical toy, and the traffic in the street, preparing for the great World’s Fair, drowns out the whispers of the young people.
Sometimes I am the ridiculous flying machine in which she rides as though to mock me, with the third lover. I must soar on and carry them and they go through fearful storms and up through inconceivable blackness and I cannot see before or after. Even 217the sound of the rushing wind drowns out their words.
And as these men dismount from their chariots, and as they are on the point of passing by me, with their lordly airs, I turn to dust. I am as dust of the road swept up by a little puff of wind. And then the witchcraft continues and I find myself a coal digger in the mine beside young Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, or laying brick with him somewhere, and I know that I am such stuff as dreams are made of.
My fourth rival ............