The Golden Book of Springfield

by Vachel Lindsay

We stare silently into the windows at adding machines, mantels, grates, and tiles. We pass a wholesale house for barber supplies, and Avanel says I need a hair cut. We pass the business houses of feather-renovators and dealers, of dealers in safes and locks, and rubber stamps. I note aloud in passing that Avanel has many rubber stamp ideas and needs to alter them if she would do justice to her glorious face. She answers not. We walk on. We pass through a wholesale region, and while the fog still conceals the towers of the town and comes lower, we can look into the windows yet, and I note that this is not as in the century before. Almost every wholesaler has a dazzling insignia and coat of arms. This is true for instance of the manufacturing machinists and millwrights, the headquarters for tempering and dies. It is true, even, of the dealers in sand and gravel, the tinners and slate roofers, the transfer and trucking companies, the brick and tile manufacturers, the soda water manufacturers, the pump manufacturers, the cigar manufacturers, the leather and belting men, and many others that to me were most commonplace of old. But their window displays are as the throne rooms of knighthood.

March 3:—Mist and darkness of soul are clearing away. And I am welcomed in my real and permanent aspect in the streets of the New Springfield, by many fellow citizens that it appears I have known for long. I am to them also the yokel Avanel thinks me to be, and I meet with many covert smiles. It seems I have returned after years of art study in New York, and it is the first time many of them have seen me for quite awhile. I am welcomed back to town a slightly boresome but harmless cousin. But everyone calls his worst enemy cousin, as in a Kentucky village. Young Jim Kopensky asks in a cousinly manner why I start art classes here, if I had any kind of prospects in New York, rather implying that I am here because I have nowhere else to go. He takes up a strain remarkably like that of Avanel, and insists that I failed with the great metropolitan oracles of art because of uncreased trousers, and merely stares with incredulity when I insist that their trousers are often uncreased, and some of them dress like rag bags. Despite many similar greetings, I inwardly vow to start my art classes anyhow, and I spend a morning having a most fraternal chat with Sparrow Short. He is retouching a portrait of Mara of Singapore, painted several years ago when she was a young girl, and the political issue between Singapore and America was not so keen. Short is determined to exhibit it at the August opening of The World’s Fair of the University of Springfield. In this picture I behold her in her glory, a premature creature of thirteen, a Singaporian Juliet, Short says “more hectic in her aspect than she is now. At the present she is an exceedingly cool panther.” The days Short painted this portrait, she was deeply reading the most inflaming Singaporian romance, and in the portrait it flashes recklessly from her, and her eyes and mouth are round with the thought of the loves of the lost gods, who flourished before the prophet of the Cocaine Buddha of Singapore killed them all in the jungle. She is dressed in green silk and in her hands is a great green feather fan. Short is painting out certain vague white blossoms on a bush in the background and turning them to green buds, for Mara has imperiously demanded it.

I am living near the studio of Sparrow Short, in one of the old houses of Springfield on South Fourth Street which existed in my previous life, and where once lived a dear friend of mine.

Everything in the old house is disposed and ordered as formerly, and it is only when I step out on the front lawn and pass under a certain mulberry tree that I seem to be in the New Springfield.

I pass under this tree. I walk a little way to the house of Avanel, and we saunter abroad. And the fogs are blowing away and she is in a most amiable mood, and I am able to note that our city is indeed a flying, fluttering place.

Confectioneries, auto trucks, popcorn vans, pleasure machines, and the passing crowds are decked with ribbons and streamers. Many families have a flag pole in the front yard with a row of tiny ancestral flags, one over the other, each indicating some form of skilled or unskilled manual labor by which the ancestors of the house made their way, and it is considered a disgrace to display any other type of ancestral flag, but one which shows some form of manual labor.

But many staffs have only three flags, that of the town, that of the International Government, and above these, the Star Spangled Banner. These people pride themselves in being more democratic, and not parading their ancestry. Nearly all business houses, particularly the large and wholesale houses, have their own especial banners and bunting, and some give out toy balloons and the like to the children, marked with the same schemes. The Star Spangled Banner is above everything, even on the International buildings, to indicate that the United States has the old South Carolina privilege of secession from the World Federation, whenever she pleases.

And so I am walking with Avanel, on the late afternoon of March third, 2018. We find ourselves very near the center of the group of slender Sunset Towers. Seven of them are of the seven colors of the rainbow, one for each color, placed in a circle around the Truth Tower, which is in the very center of the star-plan system of boulevards. We climb the Truth Tower and look about. The Truth Tower is also called The Edgar Lee Masters Tower, and it is high above the rest. At the foot of it is the circular green with Golden Rain-Trees from New Harmony, Indiana. This is called the Edgar Lee Masters Park. Near by is the Lincoln Memorial Park, containing the marked sites of Lincoln’s three law offices, and in the center our first State House, now the Lincoln museum. On the sides of all the Sunset Towers that one may see from the old public square is spread the Red Star of Springfield, set in the White Star of Illinois. Searchlights blaze through it, spreading red and white light. Outside the white Truth Tower that soars above all the city, and outside its rainbow circle of campaniles, the ninety-two other campaniles shimmer in the sun, their hues ranging from grey to rose-grey, and grey-gold to rose-gold. And they grow wilder in the red, black and white gorgeousness of the night.

The fifty towers on the outermost circle are the newest. They are the only separate buildings of the World’s Fair of the University of Springfield, except one long street called “The Street of Past History,” which is about a mile to the south beginning at Bunn Park and sweeping toward the northwest in a quarter of a circle to the high hill of Washington Park. Every building in the city is officially a part of the fair and in theory at least, the City is the Fair.

It is late in the evening, and I am with Avanel on top of the Truth Tower, and she is relenting, not so much toward me, as toward her town. It is the first time she has taken in the panorama, since the last circle of towers was completed and The Street of Past History illuminated.