The stair leads us up and through a dark pass and down into a deeper twilight. And the stair, slowly descending, whispers to us: “Follow.” And thus we go, into the most abysmal and curious of valleys, whence, perhaps, ages ago, many spirits fled affrighted because of the loneliness.
We walk amid rich ruins, miles and miles of vaulted halls, deep sheltered recesses, heaped with the purple dust of dead tapestries, mouldering porticos shaken by the wind. Avanel, fearing not, follows the steps that still call: “Follow, follow.” She is eating of the Amaranth that still blooms and bears fruit, eating the fruit from many stars, breathing strange perfume, humming her old songs and new songs, with heart aflame, a dauntless prophetess, prodigal and guide.
But now even her spirit is weary and her soul has earth thoughts again, as we wander through the echoing throne rooms. She tries in vain to laugh in the desolate halls. In a fever and a fret and in unutterable, earthly weariness, we shuffle amid heaps of old shields of blackened silver, amid helmets of brass and iron, amid ivory chariots and rotted harps and broken crowns and swords of rusted gold. And then we see a campfire we know and smell the familiar fragrance of pine wood and, in the crossing of two tremendous grass grown streets, we find him we found, first in a dream in springtime, and then at midsummer midnight of a far off June at Fifth and Monroe. The Handsome Medicine Man, Devil’s Gold, is saying to us, as though resuming a conversation in which he had quite the best of us a moment ago:
“After all, people are ranked in Springfield according to their money. People with six thousand dollars apiece a year are considered decent and no questions are asked. People with a million in buried gold or alcohol are on a level of righteousness with the world saints, who are, of course, admitted to their class by generous dispensation. Heaven may be a jungle but nothing will ever alter this great law,” and the handsome jester, Devil’s Gold, is shaking his bead-covered rattle, making medicine and calling us by name. We are so tired from our long walk that we cannot but admire his gilded face and his yellow magic blanket. And, holding each other’s hands like lovers, we stoop and admire ourselves in the golden pool that flickers in the great campfire he has impudently built at the crossing of two streets in Heaven.
But we do not step into the pool as before-time. Our boat is beside us, it has overtaken us like some faithful tame giant swan, and Avanel whispers: “Take us where The Golden Book was written.” And thus we are up and away. The boat carries us deeper, down the valley. We find the cell of Hunter Kelly,—St. Scribe of the Shrines. Only his handiwork remains to testify of him. Upon the walls of his cell he has painted many an illumination he afterward painted on The Golden Book margins and, in a loose pile of old torn and unbound pages, the first draft of many a familiar text is to be found. His dried paint jars are there and his ink and on the wall hangs the empty leather sack of Johnny Appleseed, from which came the first sowing of all the Amaranths of our little city, and the Amaranth that led us here.
And Avanel whispers:—“I ask my heart:—Where is Hunter Kelly, and my heart speaks to me as though commanded: ‘The Hunter is again pioneering for our little city in the little earth. He is reborn as the humblest acolyte of the Cathedral, a child that sings tonight with the star chimes, a red-cheeked boy, who shoes horses at the old forge of the Iron Gentleman. Let us also return’.”
It is eight o’clock in the evening, at Fifth and Monroe. It is Saturday night, and the crowd is pouring toward The Majestic, and Chatterton’s, and The Vaudette, and The Princess and The Gaiety.
It is a lovely, starry evening, in the spring. The newsboys are bawling away, and I buy an Illinois State Register. It is dated March 1, 1920.
Avanel of Springfield is one hundred years away.
The Register has much news of a passing nature. I am the most interested in the weather report, that tomorrow will be fair.