CHAPTER I THE CAMPBELLITE, THE FLORIST AND THE HOSTESS

In this, our town, we call “New Springfield,” David Carson, a young minister of the Disciples of Christ is a near neighbor of mine. He is a graduate of Bethany College. His great-grandfather studied there before him, when Alexander Campbell, the founder of Bethany, was in his prime. If you want to know of this man as we know him, read Richardson’s staid old biography, or walk the shades of Bethany, West Virginia. Campbell, in our eyes, was the American pioneer theologian.

He was devoted to the union of the churches of Christendom. He pleaded that all disciples of Christ call themselves “simply” Christians, and unite on those symbols and ordinances which Christendom has in common. If it would not make our great-grandfathers turn over in their graves, I and my neighbor would call ourselves “simply” Campbellites. We would do it for a human, and not lofty reason. It seems that those spiritually or physically descended from the early Campbellites 4are on family terms, no matter how they seem to roam in thought or experience, or no matter what their hereditary argumentative disposition. For a “Campbellite” is sure to argue, on the least provocation. There are traces of this tendency even in Richardson’s reverent biography.

Ultra modern followers of Campbell hang in their libraries with unlimited pride a certain Rembrandtesque lithograph of the great man, an heirloom that is now quite rare, and to be classed in its southern way, as the spinning wheels and old Bibles of the Mayflower are classed in a northern way. This lithograph is the enlargement of the engraving in the front of the Richardson biography, but much color and magic have been added. Out of the darkness emerges a smooth-shaven, high bred, masterful physiognomy more like that of the statesmen who were the fathers of the republic, than of a member of any priesthood. Campbell’s cheeks and eyes are still fired with youth and authority militant. He has a head bowed with thought, crowned with grey hair, and beneath his chin is the most statesmanlike of cravats, with a peculiarly old-fashioned roll. Thus he must have looked, at the height of debate with the infidel.

This is the man who put so much learning, 5and deathless controversy, and high distinction into the log cabins of the Ohio river basin, especially the romantic regions of Mason and Dixon’s line. On west of the Mississippi his followers carried his light to Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles, and the cities of Alaska and Canada and the farms between. And they start ’round the world with it all over again at this hour. Yet in the end that light is apt to have a color of its origin, touched with Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky;—a southern gospel, far indeed from Plymouth Rock, or Manhattan Island.

I can never forget the copy of the lithograph that hung over my grandmother’s front room fireplace in the patriarchal Frazee farm house in Indiana. Under it I heard proverbs from Campbell every summer, from the time I can remember anything. All those sayings were mixed up with stories that came with my people along the old Daniel Boone trail from Kentucky and Virginia. And when that old frame house was new and novel, and most other dwelling houses near were log cabins, Campbell had been a guest received with breathless reverence. Under that picture I was personally conducted through all the daguerreotypes and records pertaining to the Kentucky pioneers of our blood.

6And now, in Springfield, under the same rich lithograph my neighbor keeps the bound volumes of Campbell’s Christian Baptist and Millenial Harbinger, once the arsenal of every debating “elder” of our persuasion. My grandfather’s copies were marked, every page, and these are marked by my radical friend, but with a different point of view.

On a certain evening I am in the pastor’s study tracing with astonishment the suggestion of Christian Socialism in the first number of the Harbinger. My Grandma had said nothing about that!

Few of Campbell’s older followers dwell on the hope of a practical City of God that shouted from the covers even before they were opened. This reasonable, non-miraculous millennium is much in the mind of my neighbor, and he tells me again and again of a vision that he has of Springfield a hundred years hence. But more of this later.

There is a woman who is florist of our town, Anne Morrison a descendant of the Chapman family. She holds in special reverence, John Chapman, (Johnny Appleseed,) who began his labors in a region a little north of Alexander Campbell’s diocese, in the Ohio basin. He remains a tradition among the more northern group of those who worshipped Campbell, and 7among similar pioneers. He is especially honored by that splendid sect, the Swedenborgians, for he was a preacher and teacher of the doctrines of Swedenborg. But he was even more notably a nurseryman. He was deserving of the laurels of Thoreau, three times and more, and by the test of life rather than writing, to him belongs nearly every worth-while crown of Whitman. He skirmished on the very edge of the frontier, but fought the wilderness, not the Indian. The aborigines thought him a great medicine man and holy man, because of his magical bag of seeds, for along their trails, wherever he tramped, there soon came up pennyroyal and all beneficent herbs. With the tenderness of St. Francis he wept over every wounded bird,

and with the steadiness of a nation builder, he planted orchards of apples in the openings of the forest, fenced them in, and left them for the pioneers to find, long after. He wore for a shirt and sole article of clothing an old gunny-sack with holes cut for arms and legs, and winter or summer slept in the hollow tree on the pile of old leaves, and weathered it past seventy years, while the great Whitman lived in houses, and Thoreau was on Walden but a season or two. These men left behind them certain writings, but Johnny Appleseed 8left behind him apples, orchards heavy with fruit, beauty from the very black earth, and a tradition whose wonder shall yet ring through all the palaces of mankind. He was swift as the deer, and gentle as the fawn,—and stern with himself, as the Red Indian. Like Christ and Socrates he wrote only in the soil. He was welcomed more like an angel than a man in the pioneer cabins, and if ever there was an American saint left uncanonized in 1920, it is John Chapman, Johnny Appleseed, and by 2018 he is canonized indeed, and has

his niche in the Springfield Cathedral, according to Anne Morrison’s revelation.

Another friend is a great hostess of Springfield, Eloise Terry, by name. Her enemies declare that she is the representative of her family fortune, and little else. But they are apt to be people who do not attend her quite earnest parties, where every ramification of the social fabric is candidly examined, at least for one evening. The most competent person is brought in to speak of his strand of the web, be he bootblack or jailbird or poet. But this is an advance on her family who are dully conventional, to the core of their souls. And her constant companions, though they are in fact people of the same general stratification of good fortune as herself, are selected 9for their human interest in her unconsciously inhuman inquisitions. And inquisitions, after all, come but once a month or so. In general she and her cronies are taking a decent part in politics, and their wealth does not interfere with an unprejudiced estimate of candidates, entirely apart from bank accounts. Her presence in town makes for the truth, and for progress that much. Liars hate her intensely.

Petty political lies fade before her, however poor her remedies may be for the great lies. She is a golden-haired girl, around thirty years of age, with three thriving and well-reared children. Her distinction, in my eyes, is not her opinions, but the fact that she dresses in schemes allied to the gold of her hair. I meet her on the street like a bit of blessed sunshine. Also her heart is quite warm. If she had been a musician, instead of a kind of contemporary conversational historian, she would have talked of music, instead of events, with the same ardor and fine tone, to a similar circle of friends, and brought in the singers, to sing for them, from the very gutters if necessary, and have been as decent to such songbirds as she knew how.

CHAPTER II THE PROGNOSTICATOR’S CLUB

The young disciple minister and I decide that the people of Springfield who see the vision of the city of the future should be brought together, and we write some carefully worded invitations. We organize a Prognosticator’s Club and meet in the Sun Parlor of the Leland Hotel.

One of the first to join, after our florist friend and the great hostess of Springfield, is John Fletcher, a Doubter. He is a person in whom we place much confidence in practical affairs. He is high authority in the financial circles of Springfield. He is religious, on Sunday only, from eleven till twelve-thirty, when he sits in his pew. He represents the present State House view which takes for granted that the fewer ideas men have the better, if only the crowd in power “get theirs.” The general assumption is:—politics is business and business is politics and the only worth while citizens are those that “get the money,” and, of course, those others who keep it safely and who correctly add the accounts till the money is wanted. They hate any new current in any party. And they hate the idea of any clan wanting anything 11except established well-dressed bank accounts to rule the city. Children are sent to universities to polish their manners, but not to bring back any changed thoughts on these subjects.

The gentleman who incarnates this dream lives in the north, is therefore a Republican. He is quite sure the Emancipation Proclamation meant that millionaires are exempt from criticism, except from other millionaires or their shrewedest lackeys, and that the Emancipation Proclamation was sent forth into the world to establish more thoroughly the lackey, the toady, the tuft hunter, the snob, the bootlicker, and the parasite, in the service of the stupidest holders of money and land. He will defend this position quite ardently, almost in those terms, and he is quite sure that anyone who protests against his views is a “red.” And “red,” “radical,” “anarchist,” and “liberal” are absolutely synonymous, according to his thinking. He is sure that anyone who does not want to be a millionaire or serve one well is contemplating arson. He is quite sure that every large bank account is automatically moral, that every small one is almost moral, and the one crime is to be without money. He is quite convinced that Abraham Lincoln died to establish such ideals

12more firmly in the Republican Party, and when he is in the South he maintains that Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson lived and toiled and suffered to establish them in the Democratic Party, and did it with eminent success: that all other notions have been recently imported from the shameful streets of Russia. When he sent his son to college he urged him to spend money on the conservative professors and their sons and daughters, and to put the radical professors in bad odor with the “best fellows,” and get them fired as soon as the trustees would listen to one so young.

All this point of view is in my friend’s tone of voice and gesture. He has inherited part of his money, and married the rest, and the income pays for a good caretaker. He himself is a physician for the most extensively landed families in central Illinois. He dresses well, so people think he knows all about medicine. He is squarely set, has a heavy jaw, a steadying manner, a kindly disposition, pays the best salaries to his office boy and secretaries and the people who work his farms. He has the greatest aversion to oaths, bad manners, adultery, and has a literary turn. Though he looks like an old prize fighter with a touch of deacon-sleekness, he reads Montaigne, 13Lord Chesterfield, Thackeray, Shakespeare, and the like. He enjoys discussing in the most sympathetic way every human trait that has to do with purely domestic dramatic and personal emotions. His wife is a valiant Daughter of the American Revolution and his daughter belongs to the most snobbish sorority to be discovered for miles. He has been “right in the wagon” whenever a bit of near royalty has passed through

Springfield, and his manner though blunt, was deferential. His wildest turn is for radical painters, and he has the best collection west of the Hudson of the now forgotten cubists.

Of far different sort is the next member of our Club. She is of the fine nerved creatures of this world, a spring beauty in whose conversation I take delight. She is a teacher in one of the Springfield ward schools, and a sober little reader of The Atlantic Monthly, and we quarrel a bit about that. But her taste there represents her desire for fine grained English whatever the thought conveyed. When Clara Horton takes delight in life, it comes in a flash that sets her friends aflame. The school marm is gone. She ceases to admonish me. The imaginary eyes of her censorious pupils are banished, and I am no longer a pupil, and 14she is the daughter of a nymph of the most delicate mood and a faun of the gentlest sort. Her whole physical fabric is aglow with the idea of the book or the event or the mere day’s sunshine or tomorrow’s movie. Her skin shows the whiteness of a stock that has been too inbred for many generations for complete vigor, the gentle nymph and the gentle faun met too often, and there were not quite enough bullies or peasants among her far

European ancestors. Her people have been for many generations in America. Every line of her family, north and south, has been remembered with the greatest comprehension of every taste and impulse. She gets her silky black hair from one grandmother, and her thousand dimples from another no doubt. She openly hates the complacency of our “first families.” Ideas go pouring through her head, all the time.

As for the families representing the defended and entrenched fortunes of Springfield, theirs is still the practice of keeping their children out of public school, for fear of contamination with teachers who read such papers as The Atlantic Monthly, and other vulgar publications. The children must be sent off to teachers who flatter and flatter and flatter. 15But we do not talk about these matters generally. We talk about New Springfield.

The Prognosticators discover that still others have been dreaming joyfully all alone of the future of Springfield. One fiery artist of our town brings in quite definite testimony. He was born in the village of Rochester, near to Springfield, but has no sign in his manner of being a citizen of the United States. Quite an old man, Gregory Webster has the ways of boulevard heroes of Paris who swung their canes like swashbucklers, among the cafes, in 1876. He speaks English with a French accent. Yet he has been a tremendous force for good in the history of American Art. Thousands upon thousands of pupils have passed through his studios. He has been a courageous patron of young artists. With infallible taste he has purchased their best pictures, as soon as their pictures were good, thereby giving them reputations twenty years sooner, and himself “going broke.” He has championed the most elegant craftsmanship. In torrents of tireless language, with an unflagging zeal and animation, he has talked down and out the cheap and popular conception of the uses of art. He has exalted

the great portrait masters. He has exalted brushwork and drawing into a ritual, and 16good color into a finality of the soul. He has been marvelously generous in his sympathy and his patience with budding talent, and therefore the artists’ aspiration of America for a whole generation has come to his front door. He is, in actual subject matter, in his own pictures an unimaginative creature. He is able to paint fishes better than men and rabbits better than women, and yet, since he painted fishes and rabbits with Olympian finality, they have been enshrined in the highest galleries of the world next to portraits of human creatures by Rembrandt and Hals and Velasquez.

A stranger to these others comes to me. Nathan Levi, son of one of the Rabbis of our tiny Springfield Ghetto. He at once wins my heart. I have always found myself in peculiar sympathy with the Jews. Once past the moment of shyly seeking my confidence, he is full of the Jewish expressiveness and demonstration. He is astonished beyond measure to discover a double consciousness within himself. In this century he is as orthodox as his father, and a young man devoted to the routine of the pawn shop. In 2018 he is in a hundred ways opposite.

Another newcomer, Margaret Evans, is a 17Christian Science Reader. She is beautiful, in this day, and though she does not speak of her mirror in 2018, as does the headlong Jewish boy, I know she will always be beautiful in body and soul. She has fathomed the holy grace and immortal gladness of her teaching, and I can well believe she is immortal in this place, under our oak and apple trees.

Still another is a Springfield Negress who is a preacher among her own people. She has not a single Caucasian contour to her face or figure, yet all the world must admit that Daisy Pearl Johnson is beautiful as she is divinely young. She is “black but comely,” according to the scripture. And she is eager in all the matters of the mind and spirit.

Another prophet, Nathaniel Davidson, gathers several denominations under one temporary roof, and preaches to them about hell. He was once a Y. M. C. A. physical director, and he ranges in attributes from Caliban to higher things, and looks much like Douglas Fairbanks and William. A. Sunday. He receives an invitation to join the Prognosticator’s Club.

Then there is a woman who was a welfare worker in France. Ruth Everett has such a sleek and sophisticated grace, and her face is so snobbish yet so Alexandrian Greek 18that I have often called her “The Daughter of Lysippus.” In every line is the elegance that old sculptor might have loved. In pomp, upon her throne, and she makes any chair her throne, she is like “Sara Siddons as the Tragic Muse” as painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

And here you have men and women who see the vision, each in a strange and mystical fashion.

CHAPTER III HOW PEOPLE OF 1920 THINK THE GOLDEN BOOK WILL COME IN 2018

When we, the Prognosticator’s Club, come together for our meetings it is inevitable that our talk should be of the Springfield of our fancy and of the manner in which the vision has come to each one.

The first to testify, when we call the members together in the Sun Parlor of the Leland Hotel is the young Campbellite minister. He tells us of a dream that has come to him on many evenings by his study fire.

In a vision he is reborn three or four generations in the future. He is a priest of the Catholic Church. He is known as St. Friend, the Giver of Bread. He is almost alone in a vast Gothic Cathedral. He is astonished to find himself changed in body, conviction, and habit from all his former routine, but enough memory remains for the comparison, and he knows he is still himself. But of this another time.