July 2, 2018:—This morning Avanel telephones to me as she is looking out of her bedroom window over Mulberry Boulevard and South Grand Avenue, she wants me to meet her at once on her lawn and to hurry, for there is a strange giant bird like a burst of flame, in a mulberry treetop. And so before it goes, (and it was there yesterday morning at dawn and hurried away), I am able to meet the Lady Avanel, as she stands in her hasty kimono and bedroom slippers, and goes wild over the marvel singing overhead and eating mulberries for all it is worth. It is a kind of Singing Bird of Paradise, lost here unaccountably from the tropics. Birds of Paradise do not sing, but most sweet music this one makes. He flies down the street and away into the sun at the moment the whole orb appears. He seems to go to the center of it, like an arrow of a demi-god.
This afternoon and evening are the final drill times for the solemn festival in praise of Hunter Kelly, on July the eleventh. I watch the rehearsal. It is directed by Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third. The main dances, especially the drills on chosen white ponies are directed by the Lady Avanel, being modifications of the solemn marchings and countermarchings of the Gordon Craig Theatre. In this eleventh of July festival to celebrate Hunter Kelly’s first planting of the Amaranth Orchards, there are to be great comic dancers, and clowns, but they are completely overshadowed by the devout ceremonial processions, horseback or afoot. Like all rehearsals, the affair drags interminably; much of the stateliness is still to be taken for granted, till the final occasion. It is a weary Avanel, who sends her pony home by a friend, and takes dinner with me in the Lincoln Park Pavilion and her eyes are unnaturally bright and she is silent and half crying. She pulls her napkin to pieces and then the card, from nervousness.
She says:—“Why are you here with me, awkward and ill dressed man! Unmannerly and uncouth man! Yokel and anarchist! Why run around with that mussy old Sparrow Short all the time and then expect to appear in fashionable places?”
And then, after a silence, she continues:—“There is nothing respectable about you. All the best people of the city make fun of you and wish you would leave town. Why do you stay here? Why not go to some other town and start fresh? You have offended all our first families by your queer manners and gauche ways. And you will never improve them as long as you run around with that mussy old Sparrow Short. Certainly none of the real people, accomplishing anything, have any use for you. I do not believe you even know how to make out a check or keep a bank book. And how on earth you expect to get along in Springfield without dancing or playing cards I cannot understand.
“Why are you here, you silly man?”
And so I say to her: “Do you think it has cost me nothing to struggle up through the dust and the dead grass and walk beside you? Do you think it has cost me nothing of pain to beat with my poor bare knuckles through the years?”
But when I say such things to Avanel, she does not hear them.
But I am determined and I say: “Last March you came galloping up the Northwest Road on your white pony, and I was buried too near the highway to sleep, with such glory going by. A man may hardly expect to live again beyond the life of that little earth that surrounds his bones, and feeds the roots of the nearest tree. He may, perhaps give life through the leaves of that tree to the locust in the bark, or to the squirrel in the branches, but your song came past my grave like a fairy’s breath, and my ashes are again man or fire or weed or living thorns, or what you will them to be. If you will have nothing of a man, why give life to his dust?”
But when I say such things to Avanel, she does not hear them. I am a gauche beau, that is all.... The mists sweep down upon us, and we are on the very eastern edge of Chaos, where it storms in upon the shore of created things. And Avanel’s eyes are sleepy and her voice is faint and far away. But she says: “Do you think I dance for temporal Springfield, or make my pony dance for such a city? We dance for an audience of the great deep.”
Looming across the gulf is the gigantic porch of the Palace of Eve, its pillars reaching up into the highest clouds of the storm, pillars that are Doric, archaic, immemorial. And out of the gulf between rises the vague splendor of Avanel’s Dream City of the Great Deep. Avanel says:—