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.
CHAPTER V
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 light. 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 for 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.