Avanel admits that her father had to roar in this case, for the crowd was large, and, speaking from a station platform in the open air, the loudest man cannot be heard with traffic going by and newsboys selling extras about the event before it happens. We walk just a little south along the viaduct on Tenth from the great New Union Depot to a most familiar and ancient structure, a kind of rough memorial shrine, which was once the station whence the Lincoln presidential train left for Washington and where Lincoln gave his parting word to the City of Springfield. Outside the door of the museum, Avanel and I re-read Lincoln’s famous farewell to his fellow citizens, cast in bronze and set up for a tablet long ago.
Then, being in the mood of reminiscence, we walk past the Lincoln residence and Avanel begins to compare Lincoln to Jesus and speak of him as the greatest person sent to men since Jesus. And I think the sibyl has at last permanently emerged and that my companion is finally with me.
But there is a devil in this Avanel. And so she says, partly because she thinks it, and partly because she knows it will annoy me: “I wonder if the Lincoln residence was located among the best people when it was built?” And then, as the silence grows deadly on my side of the conversation: “My grandmother once told me that Mrs. Lincoln was really a fashionable person and not of poor-white stock like Lincoln and I am glad to hear it. He must have been a great trial to her, with her refined instincts.”
My silence growing even more deadly she continues:—“I am sorry the Lincoln residence is not in a more fashionable region today. I wonder if they can move it out by the Country Club. Springfield is all ‘society,’ you know, and you might as well admit it.... I wish if they leave the residence here they would move these common houses and build a great Greek Temple over the Lincoln home, and make a park for about two hundred yards each way and have big avenues leading up to it and allow no common person to live anywhere near here. Lincoln was after all the greatest person since Jesus and we ought to show some sense of it.”
We stroll on and on, and Avanel, being not yet twenty, as this world counts the years, is somewhat forgiven for these discursive remarks. She does not want to be forgiven, and hates my pious forbearance and at last says: “I simply cannot stand that cheap cowboy hat you wear. It is simply a ridiculous pose or else the instinct of a rotter.”
So I take Miss Avanel Boone firmly by the arm and turn her toward town and at my insistence we step into the first gentlemen’s furnishing store we encounter and I urge her to help the clerk pick out a hat for me. They select one that is hardly a hair’s breadth different from the one I have been wearing. I pay for it in paper money, “to please old Black Hawk Boone,” as I explain to the humorous clerk. Avanel seems placated by this quip, though there is no reason on earth why she should be. She begins to behave like a Christian at once and stays so, all the way to her door. And I bid her good evening and she gives me the word I may soon see her dancing.
CHAPTER IX
TEMPEST IN A TEAPOT OVER WHETHER PEOPLE WITH BURIED GOLD SHALL MONOPOLIZE THE FLYING PRIVILEGE.
May 15, 2018:—It is the evening of this day and Avanel is quite busy in her parlor with costumes. I am invited for dinner with her and old Boone. I am to help her immediately after to the theatre with her costumes that I am to carry in two heavy suitcases. Three friends of Avanel’s have prepared the dinner and serve it in true communal fraternity. According to their chatter the coming event is all in the spirit of a college lark or grand commencement occasion, rather than a churchly event.
But when I sit in the Gordon Craig Theatre, strangers to the right and left of me, the theatre darkened and the stage a temple steps, the Avanel emerges that has refused so many times to come forth at my petition. Her face and carriage convey the sibyl, the saint, the mother of great sages of our city and the muse of poets of our city. She hardly knows this, for the innocence of her unspoiled youth tells its gentle, overwhelming story. As for the alleged dance, it is more procession than anything else: boys and girls, men and women, moving to varied chants or measured silences or amid wonderful and measured lights. There is no very direct allusion to the Birthday of St. Scribe. Old political parades are suggested and historical triumphs, but mostly the type of parade that might be held of a Sunday before a religious service, ending at a shrine or an altar. There are ceremonies from the book of St. Scribe of the Shrines. His favorite shrines are suggested, beginning with the Grave of Lincoln at Oak Ridge. The dancers are crowned with Apple-Amaranth leaves, which are larger than ordinary apple-leaves and a paler green. Avanel’s part in the pageantry is but that of a leader and partner of the chief marching man, young Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third. Avanel is closely followed in glory and significance by the whole company. And Michael deftly takes his place as a proper background for Avanel, for which I thank him. Therefore when Avanel sits with me a little by her open fire tonight, all tired out and very solemn, she knows she has vindicated herself in my eyes a little and she tosses her head and wears jauntily one young green Apple-Amaranth leaf which still gleams brightly in her black hair.
She asks, as a child: “Did it seem as though we were at shrines together or walking in the woods together?” And so I answer: “I have never yet been at any of these shrines but that of Lincoln and that many, many years ago. But it did seem as though we were walking in the woods together among the very oldest trees. I want to go to shrines with you soon.”