“Yet their children know these secret treasuries and meet in these halls to corrupt all the other children of the city. From way below gilded roofs the poison venders ascend by tortuous and shameful passages and go forth to dance and destroy and defeat the plain will of the people as recorded in initiative, referendum, and recall, and elections at the polls and guild elections:—and even, at the height of their folly, to whisper Singaporian treason.”
And so St. Friend has done and Surto Hurdenburg beside me takes him with exceeding literalness and goes forth to agitate and organize even more zealously till this battle is over.
Monday, June 16:—Such is the protean character of human nature that at least one third of that congregation of yesterday, having their costumes already prepared, think it is a pity not to use them, and are in the parade this afternoon, which comes immediately after business hours, at four o’clock.
The parade is led by Velaska, and her minions are scattering giant asters from her yellow barge. She is an unknown and wears a yellow mask. All this is a tradition of these parades. The pantomime acts and dances, the width and length of the block, made up of a thousand clowns and jesters with baubles, go by; and Falstaffs without number. Because of the vacuum-cleaned streets and streets not so hard as of old underfoot, endless dancing and delicate and crisp and diaphanous effects can be secured and kept effective. But it is all yellow, not orange:—from Bacchus and Ariadne to the April gods and goddesses of all of Asia. Three great ballets, the New York, the New Orleans and the St. Louis, are imported to dance their way down the streets. The parade follows the exact route of the other and pours north on Sixth defiantly past the Cathedral, where I am watching it as it ends. The crowd has begun to clear away. There is a rabble of automobiles. Then there is a queer hush. The auto horns stop blowing.
There comes the palanquin of the Man of Singapore, followed by that of his daughter, Mara:—such familiar sights to a certain number of Springfield citizens, that the element they add to the day’s pageantry is nominal, but to those sensitive on the issue it is everything politically. The Boone Ax reporters scan once more, for the thousandth time, the unreadable faces of the two, searching out the Mystery of Asia. The man bows to his friends and the girl does the same and, according to those who have seen them many times before, their aspect is not one hair’s breadth changed from former occasions. The blazing green, in the name of the Green Glass Buddha of Singapore is, if anything, a rest to the eyes after the uncanny yellow in the name of other less mysterious gods.
I am most of all impressed with the fact, seeing him for the first time, that the Man from Singapore is, after all, in his Asiatic way, a superb gentleman. His daughter seems to me the most high bred of gazelle-like ladies, which, indeed, I had known from her child portrait by Sparrow Short and by Short’s careful report of her ways.
So it is hard for the honest puritans of The Boone Ax, even those who were not born yesterday, to find legitimate place for a new denouncing of the Professor of Malay Arts and Letters and his daughter. And so the late evening edition of The Boone Ax calls them “the two strangers.” That is all.
I have a jolly evening with Old Sparrow Short in the Tom Strong Lunch Room. There with many others, friends of the halls, Short is quite frank over the issue of tomorrow and prattles away at the pessimists. He feels, for a certainty, all needed is that everyone there glow and enthuse. Coffee Kusuko owns most of the Yellow Halls, of course. That means he uses them any way Slick Slack Kopensky and Mayo Sims direct, at a crisis, and tonight the talk at the neighboring tables is all for the Yellow people and as loud as possible to be skillful. This is true in the Drug Stores of Smith as well, no doubt, for they are in the same combination.
Then later in the evening we go together to take Avanel to the Hall of Velaska, somewhat to the astonishment of Short, who knows she hates him. But she wants to give him a chance at her approval, through his pictures. When the revellers sight my lady, the leers fade, and the boa constrictor dances of Singapore subside. And the gray head of Short puts them somewhat on their dignity, even if they merely regard Avanel with spite. But so many of them are sage and solemn with her and bow so carefully!
“They are trying too hard,” says Avanel.