Vachel Lindsay

“ There is a babble and a roar that is the beating of the vast heart of Springfield. Its rhythm goes into our footfalls every instant.
It is late, and Avanel insists on going on, in the intoxication of weariness, and will not let me take her to her house on Mulberry Boulevard. She leads me into the very thick of the great forest of Sunset Towers again, now “midnight towers,” she says to me, with her face flushed to a deep crimson from utter weariness, and her eyes heavy with the desire for sleep, and her determined little feet still dancing nervously on. ”

“ The voices of the children will be as noble as the discourses of the prairie winds that catch our tree boughs at sunset. Every house will be as delicate and subtle as the ferny hollows of the Sangamon. The convert will name many birds that will come at his call and he will feed them crumbs of this Blessed Bread in friendship.
“When Springfield has partaken of this manna for a generation, all things will become new. Leavening thoughts will come from all the street corners. Novel fancies will come from the coffee houses. ”

“ There does not appear to be a filament of their minds made of anything more human than the uncanny filament of the incandescent light. When they peer into the future of our city, they imagine our optical factories and the like, hard at work producing things like the new lens gun but more ingenious. The odor of acids is ever on their garments, never the incense of some future Christmas day. They envy the discovery of the three new infinitesimal elements by the chemists of Singapore. No wonder some of them finally turn to the green and speckled lotus and the cocaine Buddha. ”

“ 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. ”

“ While the star chimes of the city ring new tunes, the weird sailors below us pour down a crimson wine from the sides of the boats, 322that mixes with the autumn leaves of the Amaranth Vine that swirl now between us and the whole towered city below. The wine and the leaves turn to crimson mist and crimson storm, filling the city canyons with rolling rivers of storm to the top of the Sunset Towers.
The boats rise, sailing as though travelling of their own knowledge. Even those that are empty and have no prophet sailors in them are up and away. ”

“ I am with Comrade Avanel in the very top of the Truth Tower. The terrors of flight and pursuit sweep over the far sections of Springfield given over to aviation fields, orchards and the like.
When machines overtake each other there is, so far, no shooting or the like, only a veering to the right or left. It might be a game of tag, were it not for the symbolism in decoration put on by the two factions driving the machines. There is a big death’s head painted near the front of every Snob machine, and the hunting knife of Daniel Boone painted on the front of every Robin Redbreast machine. ”

“ Every highest, furtherest bud that opens day after tomorrow, or in a thousand years, will flash with a spark and a flame, that has climbed up hundreds and thousands of miles from the roots that touch all the gardens of our city, up the old streets of Heaven, where this vine blooms today.
In the twinkling of an eye, while the star chimes of Springfield are ringing new tunes, from the dimmest stars of the blue, from east, 320west, north and south, magic boats sweep down to the Amazonian field. ”

“ 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. ”

“ These children will grow in stature and beauty for twenty years. And then these little sons of God will see the daughters of men, that they are fair, as it was in the book of Genesis, at the very beginning of time. The next generation of men in Springfield, born of the loves of these angels and daughters of the city, will be giants like Nimrod. These giants will drive out the former institutions with their own swords, forged for this special war. That generation will build many mansions of divine beauty, sheltering men and near-angels alike. ”

“ Avanel and I walk south to the city down beautiful Fifteenth Street. The city is the Fair and the Fair is the city, though there has not yet come the formal proclamation to the world of the opening. There is not one heart on the street but seems to be beating happily. The elation in the air on this perfect June night is worth a lifetime of groans. It seems to me that for this hour Springfield has been patiently toiling and staggering on, despite much sorrow and sin, for a century. ”

“ Mayo Sims believes in the medicine of laughter to cure the sickness of a political machine, and with Kopensky’s help has made it appear on the surface that the issue is between the laughing City Hall and the militant and irksome University. So I get a public-school map of the city from the Board of Education offices and hire a taxi and make a quick still hunt around all the old and new sites. Judging by the equipment alone, I conclude at once that the public schools of Springfield have gone on like a line of irresistible battle-tanks. ”

“ They look out together to the Springfield University and the Sangamon River where the bridges sweep to the north, sparkling threads in the mist. They look south to the Street of Past History that bends around till it meets them.
“Who shall dispraise the excellence of our towers? They look west with all the pioneers, and the very soul of far off, west-going Daniel Boone is in them.
“We take our pleasure, honorable, or philosophical, innocent or stupid or guilty, at their feet, and where pleasure is, there art is born. Many songs shall be sung to them, many new names given to them. ”

“ Then younger men and women are stung with new visions, that make the Sunset Towers seem commonplace, and all but the Springfield Flag, the Star Spangled Banner, and the World Flag, dim things.”
The Thistle of Dreams is growing around Avanel as she speaks. It looks like a gigantic fleur de lis, but from it comes endless silk as though from the pods of the milkweed. She says of that silk: “It is full of thorns sharper than Cupid’s arrows, more transforming than any drug from Asia. They work their way to many a heart and brain. ”

“ I can speak of this because I can say without flinching that our Japanese men and women Samurai went through the same glories and follies, with them in the same battle line. Forever after, they have lived in that war on that battle line. Do not go on perpetually climbing into office because you can recount military history, as many of our Samurai have done, drowning out the man or woman who wants to speak of matters thirty years ahead and plan such a thing as your Fair or University. No war ushers in the perfect state. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ The whole house rises, and the harder Boone denounces, the more they seem to approve, and some of them seem to have the hydrophobia. Race hate sweeps the hall like a blasting wind. And Boone crouches at the very edge of the footlights, and roars on.
He declares that some of this alleged rough labor is morally certain to be a group of high officers of the army, here to paralyze America at the exact second the high priests of Singapore shall choose, using that dreadful secret gun, that it is whispered through all the world, is two steps beyond the terrible lens gun. ”

“ So she helps Kopensky to back Michael to the door, which is done by a simple process of walking toward him with a certain air.
He is overwhelmed at Jim’s assurance and vital power. But Jim is one of those whom love makes a man for an hour in a lifetime. As I open the door for the exquisite Michael, I divine Mara’s pity for him. But what can a woman do? No proud Singaporian can have mercy on an unmagnetic fool. It is not a conspiracy against the loser. It is an elemental contest. This red oriental heart is for the man who wins this doorstep fight. Religion and destiny wait. ”

“ Friend, the Giver of Bread, at our urging, reads on and on. The volume tells, for instance, how Heaven became a jungle within the lifetime of an ordinary man. The book contains a sermon, which our saint reads to us, on: “Your great great grandson’s neighbors.” It is a volume no more consecutive than the Koran. Each dream is written down once for all as it came to the tranced soul of St. Scribe, as he bent over the page, with his terrible pen in his hand.
With endless reiteration the book denounces the diabolical works of the Singaporian sect and their conspiring against world peace. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The merchants of Singapore refuse to use the Sunset Towers, when they build their new cities in 220their battle for world supremacy, and even by that they are doomed. The houses and commercial palaces and temples of Singapore crouch little and low, like huts in a forest, or glass pagodas in little stage comedies. They are fearful of the incantations hatched in our hives of electrical flame that shine on to the glory of Louis H. Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, who planned the first ones, a century ago, and the Thibetan Boy and John Emis, who build them today. ”

“ Avanel walks to church in the most wonderful of white airy dresses. And in these vacuum-cleaned streets, with no soot and no coal dust and no factory grime, people, working or playing, can be dressed all day as for a party if they choose.
All day yesterday couriers of all faiths, representing St. Friend’s personal rather than his religious companions, have been out inviting the people. At least one member of each family has been asked to bring his tribe to the Cathedral green and to listen and carry the message back with the bread. ”

“ In the coffee houses and the gigantic loafing lobbies of the motion-picture theatres and over the endless ice cream tables of the drug stores and confectioneries and in the lounging rooms of the dance-halls everywhere the argument roars and rattles and clatters and squeals and shrieks and splutters and swears. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ July 23:—Sparrow Short is left locked up and forgotten, for today there is a great war-music in the streets.
All Singapore is running amuck. The Horseshoe Brotherhood and the Amazons are drilling double hours. Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second, is firing his clan like an Arab Mahdi, preaching a new holy war. A new group of trumpeters are to the fore, blowing slender trumpets, all of them silver white, to frighten the Lord of Cocaine, trumpets whose cry is that of birds that the Singaporians 290hold accursed; the eagle, the turkey and the wild swan. ”

“ The Asiatic necromancy, the instinct for intrigue, is hidden by the innocence of the experiences of her sheltered days, and also, as in the face of her really wicked father, it is hidden by that University air of submitting absolutely to the open finalities of scholarship. And so they will often submit, where Singapore is not concerned. But one would say all Mara’s scholars are poets to her, and of her father all his scholars are statesmen. Each is the other’s flattering image. Each is disarmed in the presence of the other, artless and fond and kind. ”