THE NEW SPRINGFIELD FLAG AND THE STAR PLAN MAP FOR WHICH IT STANDS, INCLUDING THE DOUBLE WALLS ON THE FAR BORDERS OF THE CITY, BUILT LONG AGO BY RALPH ADAMS CRAM.  
May 4, 2018:—I make an early afternoon call on Avanel. First we mourn over the scene outside, for Apple Amaranths and all are nipped by the frost and from all over the United States come reports that the peach crop once more is blighted. Then Avanel is in her most “young ladyfied” mood and complains fondly of her father’s general code of behavior. I gather the impression that her ideal has no big black beard and no long curly oily locks, no fashion of getting angry. She is just the age when they palpitate between fond indulgence of “father” and black fury at his goat-like intractability to all plain suggestions that he make a change in himself. Boone being a widower and Avanel his only child, she is his shepherdess most emphatically.
Meanwhile Avanel hand-embroiders a gorgeous 118Springfield Flag and allows me to help her untangle several skeins of red silk and in general to play the idle dangler as well as I can. I am quite aware I do not do it in the off-hand manner I should. I am a little too heavy with the silk but she admits that I do not roar at the least tangle, as her father might.
Anyway, the flag is finished. And just as I begin to get what might be called “in earnest” with Avanel, a lot of disgusting young dandies, whose names I do not know, come in for tea. And I am obliged to stay and drink the stuff and I would rather drink rain water off the roof of a soot-factory, that’s what I would.
May 5:—I have seen in waking dreams, as I walk on the edge of New Springfield, at the prairie end of a shadowed deserted street, a great open door into the deep of eternity and, hovering above the great deep, Springfield, when it becomes the perfect and transcendent city. I look down upon towers so packed together in a sheaf and the flags so mighty, it seems but a fantasy of celestial flagstaffs and pinnacles. There are many flags of the International Government and many flashes of the Star Spangled Banner. But one flag stirs me the most. It is the one 119embroidered with the very silk and with the very same stitches I have seen Avanel put in with much silly chat so lately. It is the flag nearest. It is on a tower rising from the deep, a neighbor, it seems, I can almost touch. But as I look there are thousands of flags like it suddenly unfurled on a myriad pinnacles of the city below.
May 6:—All the city is mourning the blighting of the season’s acorns and Amaranth Apples and the buds of the Golden Rain Tree. Almost all the boughs have the little blackened tufts of buds and leaves. Avanel meets me at the door in the evening. Her father has given her a terrific scolding for what she says is “nothing much” and she is glad to walk and walk for miles and cool off in the clear starry air. I get it out of her, she has been trying to stop her father’s smoking. But she is forgetting it and taking on her sibyl mood. Later she confesses she has been trying to get her father to cut his hair and quit dyeing his left hand crimson and that he has been trying to get her to dye her hand and unbind her hair as a Boone should. So, sore of heart, she is willing that we should be true comrades in the midst of this universe. And at once we are, as it were, brothers and 120sisters of the stars. She goes so far as to take my arm.
She agrees to my proposal that we pluck out the mystery of the souls of our city’s flags together, if two young creatures may get such wisdom.
May 7:—Avanel this evening takes me to call upon St. Friend, The Giver of Bread. It is, in her eyes, quite a religious function. And we are to inquire formally about flags. St. Friend knows me not, though there is something in his voice that goes back one hundred years, and I dimly remember, in my double consciousness, visits with a friend who had much the same furniture, and some of the same turns of phrase, but he had not the face or figure of this man. We are by the open fireplace, under the old lithograph of Alexander Campbell. Flashing in the firelight, is the old bookcase to the left, containing the bound volumes of the Millenial Harbinger and Richardson’s old life of Campbell and all the rest of it.
St. Friend, the Giver of Bread, is indeed an old man, a little lame, leaning on a cane. He is much over six feet tall, when straightened, and with a smooth shaven countenance, but looking as Abraham Lincoln might have 121done, had he lived into another century and grown grayer with no other sign of the passing of the years. St. Friend, the Giver of Bread, receives Avanel as a favorite daughter and convert and indeed I feel in the air the justification for my estimate of this girl. In his presence she puts aside all vestige of nonsense. It is Church to her to be with him.
St. Friend disgraces himself by taking the oldest kind of a corncob pipe from a shelf inside the fireplace and smoking like a chimney. He asks Avanel if she cares and she says, “No, certainly not.”
We get to the matter of the flags quite late in the evening.
St. Friend tells how in his youth when Apple-Amaranth blossoms had as now a touch of red in the hearts, those hearts began to be called, “The Blood of Hunter Kelly,” and St. Friend suggests that the saying be restored to its former place on the tongues of Springfield, especially since the red and white star in the municipal flag is copied from this flower.
Then much of what he and Avanel have to say to each other about the flag he declares he will put into his next sermon. It is plain to me that this gray mind leans for vitality 122upon the mind of the proud young child. She knows it not but only thinks herself a kind of playmate in a solemn way.
On the way home Avanel is much ashamed of herself for staying so long and says that I am an awkward lummox, and I can walk home my own way.
Therefore I make my speech, as I take her sternly to her door. She holds herself straight as a ramrod, with lips stubbornly pursed together, as I say:
“Your name is Springfield. If there is any banner of the soul flying above me, your name is written on it and the white is the pride that makes you so angry and the red is the strength that makes you an Amazon, and the blue of the flag is the prairie sky, of which you are the vainest, loveliest daughter.” Avanel goes into the house with a sharp “Goodnight.”
May 8:—It is a blazing spring day and everything that was not frosted is getting quite green. Baby carriages are abroad, with the pink darlings crowing within them, welcoming the sun. The streets are full of spring finery. About four o’clock on this jolly afternoon I meet Rabbi Terence Ezekiel in Tom Strong’s. We fill up on rousing coffee and I 123manage to get the conversation around to the Springfield flag about which I am endlessly curious.
The Rabbi says:—“The star of red and white in the heart of the flag, being the twenty-first star in the design, indicates, in the official interpretation, that Illinois was the twenty-first state admitted to the union and the red part indicates Springfield, the capital.” But Rabbi Ezekiel prefers the idea that this red and white star indicates in the year 2018 the coming of age of Illinois and America.
May 10:—It is Sunday morning, and I am in the Great Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul with Avanel. The whole picture is clean cut around me. Every word and whisper is clear. There are no clouds at all. Yet the Cathedral is indeed gigantic. I am reminded of majestic Notre Dame in Paris. It is the same combination of styles, and St. Friend begins his sermon with an appeal for a special fund to add the steeples. As in cathedrals of Europe, only the rectangular foundations of the spires, a little higher than the roof, are in place.
He preaches the sermon, which Avanel helped him build, which touches on the flag:
124“Visitors to the Fair may care to know the path of white around the red star of Springfield is the map of our five-pointed system of double walls and within them a star-plan system of avenues. This system, like this star, is a symbol of the relation of Springfield to all the outside world. The top of the star points north to Chicago by way of the outerwall gate at Mason City. Tomorrow the corn dragon engines begin to take that route. They are to be dedicated with honors that I hope all who hear me will be there to endorse and acclaim. The star-point, indicating northeast, starts our flying machine trip over the inner-wall gate at Illiopolis and the outerwall gate at Warrensburg and on to Danville, if you please, and to New York and the sea journey to the capital of the International Government, which government is looked to with loyalty by all patriots and honorable men. Highways running parallel to the air lines in this direction are haunted by memories of Johnny Appleseed, in the regions of Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Massilon, Ohio. The roads are of some distinction in all the fruit and flower religions of Springfield. Our city sends pilgrims that way in the spring who will yet replant the whole world in glory with many a sacred grove. But the southeast 125point of the Springfield star system is a road that passes through the inner-wall gate at Taylorville and the outer at Pana, and points in the direction of Virginia and Richmond. Our fruit and flower devotees take all roads, but because of the wonders of the early southern spring many of them deem this the holiest way. There are found, more than other where, the botanizing pilgrims of the faiths of my friend Rabbi Terence Ezekiel and my friend Mother Grey and her daughter Roxana. There many of the Rabbi’s young oaks have sprung up in the name of universal righteousness and that way he still takes his pilgrimage, according to the mystical doctrine of the Oak which is the foundation of our Rabbi’s dreams. This road goes through New Harmony, Indiana, before it turns south into Kentucky. Many pilgrims pass that way to do honor to the original home of the Golden Rain Tree of Democracy.
“The point in the star-plan system of boulevards that becomes a road passing through the inner-wall gate at Modesta and the outer at Palmyra starts the fancy moving along a certain classic flying-machine route over Alton and St. Louis, southwest to the tremendous motion-picture studios of the Los Angeles 126region and the radical educational institutions evolved from them, which are so great a peril to the land. This air route I call ‘The Path of Ill Learning.’ It is constantly travelled by our motion-picture educators and artists who go to exchange ideas and refresh themselves at Los Angeles, that great seat of spiritual lies.”
At this point Avanel frowns; indeed she will not be bullied out of her movies. But she grows grave again and she takes earnestly what else he has to say:
“The star-point indicating northwest with the inner gate at Ashland and the outer at Virginia is the one that interests me most. There are three orders of discipline in connection with this Cathedral. The newest is the Order of the Blessed Bread of the More Liberal Observance, in whose name we are to have the great bread distribution on June the eighth. The one a little older is The Order of the Bl............