“Any one with Daniel Boone’s hunting knife in her belt needs no pompous false prophets of democracy to tell her the road to freedom. In this gulf alone is freedom, if it is to be found, and in this gulf only, is tomorrow.”
And as she speaks Avanel’s Dream City of the Great Deep takes form and is a picture of the Springfield we have left behind, but utterly transcendent, with the Sunset Towers in jewelled glory, with the Truth Tower like a pillar hewn from the white mountains of the sun, and around the town, star shaped double walls, with the pillar oaks between them. But even that dream crumbles and falls into nothingness. It becomes a great cloud plain, a bridge for spirit-feet, over the gulf. And then I see, as I sit lonely, the real dance and ceremonial of Hunter Kelly begin. I see Avanel on her dancing pony of white fire, surrounded by her devoted maidens, while dim and shadowy similitudes of branches of the Amaranth-Apple, made gigantic to shade the Universe, bend above the far off ministers of stately cosmic festival.
As I watch the dance with eyes like those of a far-seeing bird, I behold a dim flashing under the shadow of the gigantic pillars of the Palace of Eve. As it were, a candle flame in the storm, Mother Eve, the immortal, looks up and down those great pillars and up to the clouded and roaring zenith with its tossing flowering boughs, and then to the solemn dances, far away. She sees her fairest daughters do honor to Hunter Kelly, pupil and friend of Johnny Appleseed. Nothing stranger or more beautiful ever happened in the shadow of her palace or beneath a flowering storm.
July 4:—I am today in the wonder of a triple consciousness. To the sense of being an Anglo Saxon of the centuries of 1920 and 2018 is added that of being a Malay of 2018: I find myself in the house of the Man from Singapore, his Malay slave. I find myself equipped with singular habits, ideals, and ideas, as though I were the mainspring of a most unfamiliar clock. I am interested in the wheels that keep going.
It is a blasting Fourth of July and one of the second servants, whom I have haughtily sent down town on an errand, tells me, on returning, that the thermometer at Dodds’ drug store already registers one hundred and ten in the shade. But we are so much over arched by old trees, our house is cool enough.
Remembering various ill-reports when I lived in other bodies in Springfield at this time, I am astonished to find the Man from Singapore a person of domestic grace. He has consideration for my feelings as a slave. He has an outstanding gallantry toward the darling of his heart, his only child, Mara, the queen of his house. The picture of her departed mother hangs in the book room of the Professor of Malay Arts and Letters. It looks down gently upon many lounging mats and books left open. The face is all dignity and languor and devotion.
My master’s ancestors, according to his conversation with his daughter at late breakfast this morning, had an original Malay strain.
But added to that was a peculiar mixture of Anglo Saxon remittance man, Chinese banker and Arab trader. It is the combination that crystallized into the caste to which he now belongs, the caste that finally gave distinctive energy to his polyglot, worldshaking city, and lifted the mystic diabolism of the Cocaine Buddha into aggressive imperialism. His new caste found themselves resolving to make Singapore a city worshipped like Mecca, if they had to cut the throats of two thirds of the human race to bring it about.
And so, at this late breakfast, he looks into his coffee languidly, but as though he saw pictures of history there. He says that the English admixture in his caste has long given them insight into the west, and kept English for their main language. The English strain has also given the Singaporian a facility in taking on the most modern scientific devices, and has endowed the proud island with political common sense for routine political tasks. The Chinese blood has given them patience and iron, to work on a hundred-year plan, first in their trade relations and banking arrangements, and then in all policies linked up with these. But now it is the sword of the far off ancient Arab disposition that is beginning to flash.
The Man from Singapore speculates, drinking more coffee, and looking reverently at his daughter. He wonders what he and others will pay, for almost breaking caste in their joining themselves with the honorable but too voluptuous and beautiful Kling caste. So many of them are marrying women of her mother’s race, and paying the high priests tremendous sums for the privilege. He wonders if it will bring them to inefficiency, and smother the Arab before it has a chance for complete expression. At least her mother’s tribe brought them their first energy, for they owe the gift of the Cocaine Buddha, nearly a century ago, to the Kling Prophet.