Some Yellow Dance Hall people charge that Drug Store Smith, Coffee Kusuko, and Slick Slack Kopensky pocketed the campaign fund of the dug-up gold, to bury it in their own pits.
The “dead game sports” of the city roar themselves purple about a “tyrannical minority” and “horrible puritanism” despite the heaviest majority against them that the laughing city ever polled on any issue. They try to spread the wild rumor that “tobacco and coffee will go next and then the theatre.”
CHAPTER XIII
HOW BLUE-FACED SURTO HURDENBURG IS LYNCHED. HOW THE TOWN SWEEPS ON INTO THE GLORIES OF SUMMER AND JUNE BRIDES AND THE GORGEOUSNESS OF THE TOWERS FROM NIGHTFALL TILL MIDNIGHT. HOW MY LOVE AND I ARE AGAIN ENSNARED BY DEVIL’S GOLD.
June 20, 2018:—Last night was presumably the time of the final closing of the halls, at precisely five minutes of twelve. So at five minutes of eight or thereabouts, one of the younger members of the Montague Rock family brings, with great secrecy and under special devices of disguise, a treasury of wine from beneath some cellar of his clan and distributes it to a carefully censored company in the Yellow Hall of the Mythical Velaska. The world begins to burn for those here assembled for their farewell dance. It so happens that Hurdenburg, intoxicated from the mere drink of victory, hears the noise as he passes. He mounts the stairs. He breaks past a guard who has himself had enough drink to make him too easy. But the remainder of the company have had enough to make them too stern and at the very sight of the “puritan” Hurdenburg, they turn to beasts. They have been saying, moreover, that they were going to hang the whole Board of Education and “every other damned hypocrite in town.” They have been denouncing, with some shrieks, “the millions of rank hypocrites” with which America is beset, hypocrites who banish the gold and the alcohol to the cellars and will not permit people to be “honest millionaires” and “honest drunkards” when they please. “What the town really needs,” they have been saying,—and Crawling Jim, slayer of Beau Nash, has been saying it the loudest,—is a vigilance committee. What the “holy city of Springfield needs is a committee to hang with ropes all people who attempt to regulate the religion or the habits of their neighbors.” By religion, Jim probably means the Singaporian religion but does not stress that point.
And so, at sight of Hurdenburg, the infamous minion of the wicked St. Friend, Hurdenburg drunk on political and ecclesiastical power, they make a rush for him, and, led by crawling Jim, this crew, in the masks of the Mythical Velaska, tie Surto Hurdenburg to a pillar. They drink more buried treasure, as they decide what to do with him. They formally and solemnly conclude that they will be merciful and not follow the well established American lynching custom of burning alive, though Hurdenburg, in this case, deserves such treatment. They untie him from the pillar, and carry him to the foot of a Golden Rain Tree of Democracy. Crawling Jim puts the noose in place. Then Hurdenburg is hanged by the neck till he is dead. And the merrymakers go back to the hall undisturbed and dance till five minutes before twelve and then the city police close the hall, according to expectations. The followers of the masked Velaska go home, apparently satisfied with one night’s work, most of them in the arms of one another and quite drunk with wine. It is toward morning a policeman finds Hurdenburg, cut down by an unknown hand, lying in the grass.
June 24:—All local papers, including The Boone Ax, roar about the lynching for one day, then proceed to minimize it as much as possible. So I will do the same in this chronicle, being loyal to my city. A Chicago paper of infamous repute is glad to “have something on” Springfield and sends down gloating reporters, who make the very worst of it, rehash Springfield’s political history for the last month, putting the ugliest face on everything, tracing through the city their own kind of history.
June 25:—Rumors of the threatened lynching of all the accepted leaders of the town are circulating from the City Hall, though the City Hall people are with the greatest impartiality included in the rumors. The Board of Education is not frightened. The city today proceeds to give Hurdenburg a wonderful funeral. This funeral seems to ring the doom of infamous Yellow Halls for all time. Saint Friend preaches a funeral sermon with tremendous fire.
June 26:—It appears that the bad bloods of the town are frantically devouring their own souls, or leaving. The city has been losing, since the election and the lynching, as much genius as it does deviltry. Sparrow Short who has been obliged to take down his pictures and hang them defiantly in his own studio, has turned into a profane old varlet, amazing to hear, and is inciting as many pupils of ours as possible to leave Springfield. He is himself threatening to leave. But he does not leave. “Certainly it is no hardship,” as the Sentimental Romanoff says, in The Boone Ax, “to see departing the most of those with a special talent for raising Cain.” And he remarks on what an awful row they would have made, had they been sent out of town. The coffee houses still exist. There is no denying that they are getting pretty lively, considering that nothing but coffee is dispensed.
Rabbi Ezekiel, moreover, with all care to defer to the aged St. Friend in a personal way, declares that the photoplay movement, being no longer in alliance with questioned places, is destined to go forward with fresh life. He admits that the abolition of the halls is justified, though he took no part in it. But he is a motion picture fan, whatever the turn of history.
June 27:—My whole feeling over the fights about the halls is that I have not had much chance, after Avanel’s promise to dance there with me. I have had only an evening or so.