They are going toward the grave of Hunter Kelly, to take part in the solemn festival in the groves there, and along the great Northwest Road, the festival in celebration of the planting of the first Amaranth orchard there. The girls go by like a white whirlwind, and they give the old Springfield cry used in battle in Asia by their mothers who were young amazons before them. It shrieks and screams and sings down the street: “Springfield Awake! Springfield Aflame!” They know they are going by the house of Mara of Singapore but not one eye turns her way. But the swords, the swords, the Damascus blades, are hissing and glittering in the air. And the Man from Singapore, apparently intent upon his affairs does not turn to look out of the window of the book room. He does not so much as look up from his book of Malay lyrics. He utters one phrase: “The Cats of Cambyses, if we are to take Black Hawk Boone at his word.”
I am temporarily of the Singaporians, in my way. I have their poisoned eyes, it seems. So, while I have watched, horse and rider have faded into something new and strange. They go by in semblance as beautiful white tigers.
But what of Mara, who regards me as an article of furniture? What has she seen? Apparently nothing but Springfield girls on a wild, lovely, sweet, shrieking revel to which she has not been invited. She feels “snubbed.” She is lonely, weary, in this house and city, though she has a lover and a convert coming within the hour.
For, after these girls have gone by, she turns to the Cocaine Buddha. She bows with hands and arms outspread. Hers is a strange cry and prayer:—
“Master of the World, tell me, am I more beautiful than Avanel Boone?”
Which proves to me that Mara is only a girl.
July 12:—I find myself in all respects an American citizen of Springfield, Illinois, today, as of old. The hours with Mara and her father are as a “tale of little meaning, though the words are strong.” As I wander through a July rain in our streets, and parks, many vague hands seem stretched from the ground, catching me by the heels.
It is much later in the afternoon. The storm is gone, and I am walking with the lady Avanel, and she has looked into my eyes and given me my life again.
We confess to one another that these days are certainly not the millennium, that many of them are as grotesque as the early geologic ages, that had their monster sloths and lizards big as whales, and what you will. Avanel says with her happy laughter: “Let no man declare that the end of time is soon approaching.”
The lady Avanel has sometimes what might be called the mood of butterfly wings, and this afternoon, as we go further north across the fields, we are suddenly walking on a crimson cloud a little above the trees and then that cloud on its borders takes on slowly, first from the edges, the aspect of the wings of a giant butterfly whose body is at last the raft on which we stand and ride. And toward the North Star we go, and when we reach it, there sits a most grotesque and turtle-headed dwarf that Avanel calls a gnome. The North Star is really a hill of dandelions, and the dwarf is sitting at the foot of the hill.