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. I 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. And 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 body 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 after 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 woman 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.