First, between girls on horseback, carrying the Star Spangled Banner and the International flag, rides Patricia Anthony, forewoman of the lens factory, and, after her, march or ride the strikers, in all possible glittering and glassy spangles, to show their trade and their gaiety. And then comes King Coal in chains. He is presumed to be an excellent portrait of the head of the Rock family. He is built of actual coal, in parts, and black pasteboard also. Elegant minions of King Coal are impersonated by masked people, in caricatures of the fastidious Singaporian costume, and they wear light chains that, nevertheless, hold them in leash to the great image.
Everyone jeers with emphasis when King Coal goes by, and many people on the street sing and shout:—“The Song for All Strikers” composed by Portia, the Singing Aviator, for this especial parade.
There is an interminable miscellany of floats, reiterating with less and less force, the general theme of the occasion, and I am about tired out. Then Avanel comes by at the head of her Amazons and Michaelites, all riding milk white ponies. It is the first time I have seen Avanel in command, and Boone did not mention this cavalcade in his paper. Indeed, it is remarked upon as a most arbitrary use of military forces that are accepted by the International Government. Avanel is every inch the commander and, for all she is so slender and young, looks the immortal, Athena, leading forth her city. There must be something, not rumored in the coffee houses, or this demonstration in force would not be permitted this mile of riders. Their faces are not masked as were those of the ancient Ku Klux Klan but the costume is, indeed, as singular. It is, for both the men and the women, in the pattern of the old hunter and trapper outfit of coonskin cap and fringed shirt, jacket, leggins and moccasins. But it is all white leather, with touches of long white fur. The girl’s costumes are cut a bit like the conventional riding habit. The dazzling whiteness would not have been possible before the days of smoke consumers and dustless streets. I behold an avalanche of thundering snow.
It is late in the evening, and I am helping the tired Avanel dismount from her pony. Then, we sit together by her unlit fireplace. She has put the hunting knife and the sword back on the mantle and they seem but family relics, and the parade seems but a tale she has told me, and her horse but a thought that she rode today. I walk home through the midnight, under newly blossoming trees. The rich and heavy perfume of the Apple-Amaranth flowers, that are looming delicately against the moon, sweeps around me. It is as though every cluster were a censer from heaven, devised by a lazy and luxurious angel.
CHAPTER XI
MATTERS TOUCHING ST. FRIEND, THE GIVER OF BREAD, AND HIS ORDER OF THE STRICT OBSERVANCE AND HIS ORDER OF THE LIBERAL OBSERVANCE.
June 1, 2018:—In the capital of Illinois, in this year of grace, St. Friend is a healer of the body and soul. He is more of a philosopher than the fuming Black Hawk Boone, that is, he has a cooler disposition. Yet Boone heals by hard maxims, given with that lovely fruit, the Amaranth-Apple. St. Friend heals by sermons and prayers and the pictured parables, the rituals envisaged and illuminated in the celebration of the Office of the Blessed Bread.
The real name of our saint, which no one ever hears, is Hugh Adams Matheney. He is, away and beyond, the oldest of the Board of Education or of any of the leaders of the city. He has little fire in his blood, but has still the greatest reserve battery of nervous force. He was, even as a little boy, a protege and disciple of St. Scribe of the Shrines, who was then in the height of his glory as a leader of our town. He preceded St. Friend as the dominating figure of the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul and handed down to him and to the whole city the old doctrine, with a new emphasis, that the whole human race is the mystical body of Christ, soon to be raised from the dead. On his mother’s side St. Friend is a descendant of a long line of members of the Church of the Disciples. On his father’s side his ancestors are notable in several lines, for instance, the Matheneys of Springfield. The original Matheneys put up one of the first three settlers’ log cabins ever erected in this county. The Adams strain is from New Harmony, Indiana. There they were bakers for several generations. The cottage of St. Friend has his baker’s coat of arms painted over the little front door, over the tremendous open fireplace, and in the little dining room. On one slender pole, in front of his cottage, all of his family flags are flying. The most important of the flags, in the estimation of St. Friend, is that of the clan of these same Adams people from New Harmony.
St. Friend is the last of his actual clan to be a baker, though the town is full of his first and second cousins;—and third cousins, indeed, that claim him proudly. He has adopted a son, an orphan boy, early apprenticed to his flour barrels by the school authorities, a boy of Thibetan ancestry and one of a small local group of Thibetans. He is now grown. Except for ceremonial occasions he has long graduated from baking. He is occupied in designing more exquisite and slender sunset towers, of the school of Louis H. Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, to add one more circle to the outer ring, when purple cottages and old buildings have been sufficiently cleared away. He is known as the “young St. Friend” or the “Thibetan boy.”
When I have passed him on the street, I have observed him muttering to himself or occasionally walking and arguing with the other Thibetans. He looks every inch the stranger, with square face and almond eyes, and skin brickdust red, with heavy bronze beneath it.
The sister of St. Friend, living in the same cottage, a mild, ghostly creature, creeping about, is more than a centenarian. She remembers the celebration of Armistice Day, November 11, 1918. She was then a baby in her father’s arms, and held out her hands to catch the falling showers of confetti thrown from the high buildings. She thought it was snow.