She clasps her hands and looks silently over the city, her eyes wide and leaping with delight over the glory of the illumination. I say to Avanel: “My Fathers have been long in the grave, and my own dust has long been buried in other dust. I walk with you, only because my heart loved you, one hundred years ago.” But she does not understand me in the least, when I talk in this fashion.
March 4:—It is such an established custom among the young people of 2018 to watch the sunset from the great uninterrupted glass spaces of the upper halls of these sunset towers that there may be found the most famous cafeterias of the town. We dine at the top of one of them. There with gay singing the young democracy, and the young cocks of the walk as well, linger and wait till long past the afterglow. This evening the haughty Avanel consents to take dinner with me, that she may reprove me once more, seeing that, in general, my name is mud, however I may try to improve.
The catalogue of her hoity-toity friends rolls on forever and I can only protest by saying that while these are undeniably good citizens, they are all sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles of those who are invited to Mara’s parties, and thus quite near to treason.
But now the town choir sings the civic hymn from a tower near by:—“Springfield Awake, Springfield Aflame” and all the young people about join in the chorus, and as Avanel sings devoutly she cannot help but be the other self whose existence she tries to deny.
March 7:—I am dining again in the tower cafeteria with Avanel, a quite early dinner, and while the afterglow still blazes we look down upon the clustered cottages of our town. They are, in design, dominated by the so-called “Violet Curve,” a complex rhythm, which is magnified from the whorls of the violet petals, and the cottages are generally violet in hue. Some of the roofs and cupolas are beginning to be gilded. Springfield extends over the whole county through the taking in of countless groves, orchards, and aviation fields.
Not only in their special groves, but everywhere titan Amaranth Apple vines rise on trellises high above the other trees, for this famous Amaranth is a kind of a tree-vine that is in the fall thick with red and white blossoms and clusters of red apples. There are many parks in the New Springfield that were not in the old Springfield: Rankin, Sandburg, Humphrey, Roberts, Joyce Kilmer, Masters, Untermeyer, and others. Avanel points out the public schools beneath us, often rebuilt on the old sites or near them, and bearing the same names. Ancient streets keep their names, except where boulevards have replaced them.
East of Tenth Street is the Negro district, all new, beautiful, flamboyant jungle houses, constructed for his people by John Emis, and through his influence not one slack old building remains, though, “most of them still hold slack colored people,” Avanel says. These houses are far richer than the towers and other buildings of the World’s Fair, for only here in Africa has John Emis an unrestrained hand.
March 8:—Avanel, with a view to my further chastisement, takes me about, scolding again, and we encounter a row of grotesques on great pedestals, which she confesses were put up by a group of young Boones who came from near Cairo, led by her father in his more fiery youth, when the Boones had by no means so strong a hold on the city.
They are in Liberty Park, near Concordia College, whose golden pinnacles glitter through the bare limbs of the trees. On the central pedestal of the grotesques is inscribed: “To the cornerstones of the town; to the newspaper and motion picture and stage censors; to the respectables, the lady bountifuls, the so-called senior families; to the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution; to the Sons and Daughters of the Ancient Democrats, and the Sons and Daughters of the Ancient Republicans; and in general, to the dragon-quack worm of respectability, that dieth not.” Avanel says these were put up the day the “Boone Ax” newspaper was founded.
On the central pedestal, which is higher and more massive than the rest, crawling down from the top, is a dragon with a duck’s head. On the top of the other pedestals are the stone images of a fretful ape, an enormous frog, a long nosed ant eater, a laughing idiot, a hawk, a goat, a three-legged bull dog wearing a plug hat, a chicken without feathers, and a hog wearing trousers.