The Golden Book of Springfield

by Vachel Lindsay

As for the lynching, the court proceedings promise to drag on, as they always have in such cases. Everyone knows nothing will be done except postpone. Everyone knows it was Jim, yet no one knows it, and the Janitor of the Yellow Hall is the only person whose name gets into the papers.

June 28:—The Thibetan Boy, that the Romanoff dubbed the Muttering Thibetan, now swings into my life, and as though he were a guide sent from wonderland, with sealed orders just opened, he takes me the rounds of Springfield and the whole city becomes new. It is not a place of individual sinners and saints. The City’s architecture seems to breathe and live for him. The tiniest gargoyle takes on personality and citizenship. All this morning he has been taking me through the gardens of Mother Grey. These gardens seem built rather than planted. The trees are green walls and roofs. I am amused to note there is no prejudice against dandelions, since, in a former existence, I had so many to dig up. They now make the carpets. He takes me into the temple studio of Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, who is especially busy for young university student girls who expect to be June brides in the next two or three days. This studio is a place established for the innermost circles of the flower religion. Before each altar is a design to be set up and kept glorious in some new cottage. Several of these are for a new row of cottages near Washington Park called Bridal Row. The temple is full of the fluttering brides of tomorrow, seeing the last touches and consulting about what candles and incense to burn, and asking over and over what flowers are permitted by the Flower Religion Marriage Service, which is the one most preferred by the exquisites of 2018.

June 29:—Avanel and I have developed a favorite walk: the Lincoln’s monument region. We pass under many of the Golden Rain Trees and Ezekiel Oaks, to the Apple-Amaranth Grove that was the first in Sangamon County, and the Grave of Hunter Kelly, in the midst of it. There are the old pick and spade of the Devil, always left on the grave. When we do not walk in this region we are apt to be looking this way from the Truth Tower, from the lookout room of the newspapers, or looking back from the telescope room of the Ashland Gate. Avanel is generally very solemn looking this way, planning new processions and dances in praise of Hunter Kelly and the next festival of Hunter Kelly, July 11.

June 30:—Avanel has four suitors in Springfield. I am often but a ghost in my own eyes and always but shadow to them. On the hot summer days she goes with three of them to the gigantic porcelain-lined swimming pool of Bunn Park, with two girls, a merry six. I hardly have my turn with her for several days at a time.

One of her suitors is an engineer. One is a motor-truck driver. One is an aviator. I sometimes find myself the servant of all three men, but ignored as servants may be. As clouds, mists and smoke seems to choke me, through the whirlwind, I am sometimes the absurd unregarded dragon engine bearing her and the engineer to Chicago. While she laughs as his guest in the engine cab I must look down the track through the murk, and I cannot turn round and see the face of her lover, and the skies are laughing at me forever. Sometimes I am in my dream the absurd auto-truck engine, carrying her and the driver, as he delivers his last consignment of goods from the central market. Even the stones of the street laugh at me as we rattle over them. I am only a mechanical toy, and the traffic in the street, preparing for the great World’s Fair, drowns out the whispers of the young people.

Sometimes I am the ridiculous flying machine in which she rides as though to mock me, with the third lover. I must soar on and carry them and they go through fearful storms and up through inconceivable blackness and I cannot see before or after. Even the sound of the rushing wind drowns out their words.

And as these men dismount from their chariots, and as they are on the point of passing by me, with their lordly airs, I turn to dust. I am as dust of the road swept up by a little puff of wind. And then the witchcraft continues and I find myself a coal digger in the mine beside young Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, or laying brick with him somewhere, and I know that I am such stuff as dreams are made of.

My fourth rival is the one I most fear. He is a twenty year old libertine, a kind of a Lord Byron. He loves her now, for a day. His name is TIME. To torture me the more and lure me on from the desire for perpetual death and to prepare me again for a more futile struggle, he gives me deep and curious days with Avanel, when we seem to be twin explorers of the Universe. And then I have big athletic days with her when I seem, not a ghost, but something as substantial as a strutting turkey gobbler.

So this last day of June, in the Mystic Year, after a big swim at Bunn Park, amidst thousands of gay mermen and mermaids, we plan an all-afternoon and all-evening walk. And we go west on Wellesley Avenue and north on Sixth Street, all the way to the Sangamon River and to Sangamon River Park. We find there a cage we have never seen before. It is between the ice pit of the grizzly bears and the yard of the giraffes. It is a large cage. In it a pair of new animals pace back and forth, trailing their quills on the ground. The cage is marked. “Quilled Lions from Java.” They do not seem as fierce as lions, but have a more human peering, way. They seem to be deeply interested in the world rather than angry with it. The male animal marches round and round his mate. She is like him even to the collar of gorgeous quills that rise and fall. The heads of these sagacious beasts differentiate them further from lions. They have a bit more skull structure, and at the same time are more Satanic in their foreheads and their faces. They seem to speak to each other by signs, by glances, and mere pacing together. It gives the impression of being most detailed and constructive conversation. Meanwhile, the crests go through chameleon changes. The beasts watch the setting sun as intently as we have ever done, and the spike-quill collars follow every evanescent turn of the hues.

Avanel says: “Whatever these animals are, they ought not to be in a cage. If they could only be taught the English language, or we could learn theirs, we might make them mascots for the city, or even Lord Mayor and Wife.”