HOW I MAKE CERTAIN EXPLORATIONS OF THE GREAT DEEP. HOW I LATER FIND MYSELF THE MALAY SLAVE OF THE MAN FROM SINGAPORE AND THEREBY GET AN ENTIRELY NEW ANGLE ON NEW SPRINGFIELD.  
July 2, 2018:—This morning Avanel telephones to me as she is looking out of her bedroom window over Mulberry Boulevard and South Grand Avenue, she wants me to meet her at once on her lawn and to hurry, for there is a strange giant bird like a burst of flame, in a mulberry treetop. And so before it goes, (and it was there yesterday morning at dawn and hurried away), I am able to meet the Lady Avanel, as she stands in her hasty kimono and bedroom slippers, and goes wild over the marvel singing overhead and eating mulberries for all it is worth. It is a kind of Singing Bird of Paradise, lost here unaccountably from the tropics. Birds of Paradise do not sing, but most sweet music this one makes. He flies down the street and away into the sun at the moment the whole 227orb appears. He seems to go to the center of it, like an arrow of a demi-god.
This afternoon and evening are the final drill times for the solemn festival in praise of Hunter Kelly, on July the eleventh. I watch the rehearsal. It is directed by Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third. The main dances, especially the drills on chosen white ponies are directed by the Lady Avanel, being modifications of the solemn marchings and countermarchings of the Gordon Craig Theatre. In this eleventh of July festival to celebrate Hunter Kelly’s first planting of the Amaranth Orchards, there are to be great comic dancers, and clowns, but they are completely overshadowed by the devout ceremonial processions, horseback or afoot. Like all rehearsals, the affair drags interminably; much of the stateliness is still to be taken for granted, till the final occasion. It is a weary Avanel, who sends her pony home by a friend, and takes dinner with me in the Lincoln Park Pavilion and her eyes are unnaturally bright and she is silent and half crying. She pulls her napkin to pieces and then the card, from nervousness.
She says:—“Why are you here with me, awkward and ill dressed man! Unmannerly and uncouth man! Yokel and anarchist! Why 228run around with that mussy old Sparrow Short all the time and then expect to appear in fashionable places?”
And then, after a silence, she continues:—“There is nothing respectable about you. All the best people of the city make fun of you and wish you would leave town. Why do you stay here? Why not go to some other town and start fresh? You have offended all our first families by your queer manners and gauche ways. And you will never improve them as long as you run around with that mussy old Sparrow Short. Certainly none of the real people, accomplishing anything, have any use for you. I do not believe you even know how to make out a check or keep a bank book. And how on earth you expect to get along in Springfield without dancing or playing cards I cannot understand.
“Why are you here, you silly man?”
And so I say to her: “Do you think it has cost me nothing to struggle up through the dust and the dead grass and walk beside you? Do you think it has cost me nothing of pain to beat with my poor bare knuckles through the years?”
But when I say such things to Avanel, she does not hear them.
But I am determined and I say: “Last 229March you came galloping up the Northwest Road on your white pony, and I was buried too near the highway to sleep, with such glory going by. A man may hardly expect to live again beyond the life of that little earth that surrounds his bones, and feeds the roots of the nearest tree. He may, perhaps give life through the leaves of that tree to the locust in the bark, or to the squirrel in the branches, but your song came past my grave like a fairy’s breath, and my ashes are again man or fire or weed or living thorns, or what you will them to be. If you will have nothing of a man, why give life to his dust?”
But when I say such things to Avanel, she does not hear them. I am a gauche beau, that is all.... The mists sweep down upon us, and we are on the very eastern edge of Chaos, where it storms in upon the shore of created things. And Avanel’s eyes are sleepy and her voice is faint and far away. But she says: “Do you think I dance for temporal Springfield, or make my pony dance for such a city? We dance for an audience of the great deep.”
Looming across the gulf is the gigantic porch of the Palace of Eve, its pillars reaching up into the highest clouds of the storm, pillars that are Doric, archaic, immemorial. 230And out of the gulf between rises the vague splendor of Avanel’s Dream City of the Great Deep. Avanel says:—
“Any one with Daniel Boone’s hunting knife in her belt needs no pompous false prophets of democracy to tell her the road to freedom. In this gulf alone is freedom, if it is to be found, and in this gulf only, is tomorrow.”
And as she speaks Avanel’s Dream City of the Great Deep takes form and is a picture of the Springfield we have left behind, but utterly transcendent, with the Sunset Towers in jewelled glory, with the Truth Tower like a pillar hewn from the white mountains of the sun, and around the town, star shaped double walls, with the pillar oaks between them. But even that dream crumbles and falls into nothingness. It becomes a great cloud plain, a bridge for spirit-feet, over the gulf. And then I see, as I sit lonely, the real dance and ceremonial of Hunter Kelly begin. I see Avanel on her dancing pony of white fire, surrounded by her devoted maidens, while dim and shadowy similitudes of branches of the Amaranth-Apple, made gigantic to shade the Universe, bend above the far off ministers of stately cosmic festival.
As I watch the dance with eyes like those 231of a far-seeing bird, I behold a dim flashing under the shadow of the gigantic pillars of the Palace of Eve. As it were, a candle flame in the storm, Mother Eve, the immortal, looks up and down those great pillars and up to the clouded and roaring zenith with its tossing flowering boughs, and then to the solemn dances, far away. She sees her fairest daughters do honor to Hunter Kelly, pupil and friend of Johnny Appleseed. Nothing stranger or more beautiful ever happened in the shadow of her palace or beneath a flowering storm.
July 4:—I am today in the wonder of a triple consciousness. To the sense of being an Anglo Saxon of the centuries of 1920 and 2018 is added that of being a Malay of 2018: I find myself in the house of the Man from Singapore, his Malay slave. I find myself equipped with singular habits, ideals, and ideas, as though I were the mainspring of a most unfamiliar clock. I am interested in the wheels that keep going.
It is a blasting Fourth of July and one of the second servants, whom I have haughtily sent down town on an errand, tells me, on returning, that the thermometer at Dodds’ drug store already registers one hundred and ten 232in the shade. But we are so much over arched by old trees, our house is cool enough.
Remembering various ill-reports when I lived in other bodies in Springfield at this time, I am astonished to find the Man from Singapore a person of domestic grace. He has consideration for my feelings as a slave. He has an outstanding gallantry toward the darling of his heart, his only child, Mara, the queen of his house. The picture of her departed mother hangs in the book room of the Professor of Malay Arts and Letters. It looks down gently upon many lounging mats and books left open. The face is all dignity and languor and devotion.
My master’s ancestors, according to his conversation with his daughter at late breakfast this morning, had an original Malay strain.
But added to that was a peculiar mixture of Anglo Saxon remittance man, Chinese banker and Arab trader. It is the combination that crystallized into the caste to which he now belongs, the caste that finally gave distinctive energy to his polyglot, worldshaking city, and lifted the mystic diabolism of the Cocaine Buddha into aggressive imperialism. His new caste found themselves resolving to make Singapore a city worshipped 233like Mecca, if they had to cut the throats of two thirds of the human race to bring it about.
And so, at this late breakfast, he looks into his coffee languidly, but as though he saw pictures of history there. He says that the English admixture in his caste has long given them insight into the west, and kept English for their main language. The English strain has also given the Singaporian a facility in taking on the most modern scientific devices, and has endowed the proud island with political common sense for routine political tasks. The Chinese blood has given them patience and iron, to work on a hundred-year plan, first in their trade relations and banking arrangements, and then in all policies linked up with these. But now it is the sword of the far off ancient Arab disposition that is beginning to flash.
The Man from Singapore speculates, drinking more coffee, and looking reverently at his daughter. He wonders what he and others will pay, for almost breaking caste in their joining themselves with the honorable but too voluptuous and beautiful Kling caste. So many of them are marrying women of her mother’s race, and paying the high priests tremendous sums for the privilege. He wonders 234if it will bring them to inefficiency, and smother the Arab before it has a chance for complete expression. At least her mother’s tribe brought them their first energy, for they owe the gift of the Cocaine Buddha, nearly a century ago, to the Kling Prophet.
July 5:—I find myself at a civic reform rally late this afternoon, after business hours. I am still the Malay servant. I am sent by Mara, the good and beautiful, to watch from a distance the doings of the young artist, altar-builder, coal miner, bricklayer, exquisite and civic patriot:—Joseph Bartholdi Michael, ............