Raintree County (120 page)

The City was perhaps, most of all, a place where people came to see the City.

The City was the place where the great newsstories were manufactured out of ink and blood. The young man from Raintree County was amazed to see how blindly the people of the City ingurgitated print. The City was the newsboy on the corner. (O, little shaghaired shouter of headlines! O, little seedling of the asphalt!) The hoarse cry of the newsboy on the corner was the voice of Providence addressing Mankind.

The City was A Great Calamity, Sensational Fire, Terrific Loss of Life (Git Yuh Papuh Heah), Custuh Massacree, Centennial Exposition Closes (Git Yuh Papuh Heah), Great Train Wreck in Ohio, Terrific Loss of Life, Election in Dispute (Git Yuh Papuh Heah), Southerners Massacree Negroes, Terrific Loss of Life, Negro Lady Names Attackers, Hayes Elected (Git Yuh Papuh Heah). The City was the Great American Newsstory.

The epic of the City in the Centennial Year was the epic of the Custers, roaring with their boots on hell-for-leather out of the smoke of the Great War and across the plains, driving a lot of savages from their own land with the utmost dash and dare. But the West kept its secret from the City, and the City didn't really understand or care that on the sunbaked Western plain, which was America, the body of the Civil War was lying, with brave boots on and an anachronistic arrow in its guts.

The City was the story of closing up the Centennial Exposition in the autumn of the year. The little city of strange domes beside the
river was instantly old, naked, forlorn, as time rushed on, panting and wailing down the rails, burning out boxes on the Western plain, and spawning cities, cities, cities, cities, all in the image of the City.

The City was words, it was brown days and months and years of words that flowed across the face of time.

The City was a lonely, desirous young man from Raintree County reading to late hours in a great municipal library endowed by a multimillionaire who made his money out of railroads that bled the farmers back in Raintree County. One of the saddest images of the City was the young man from the West reading in one of the hundred million books, feeling the brevity of his time within the City and the eternity of the City's spawning of ideas, images, and words. And even as he plowed a puny path through the mounded lore of ages, the City went on with gushing presses, drowning him with words. The magazines were printing poems, stories, novels, the City was a waste of books and words in which a man might sink from sight and never be heard of again. Brown bindings stamped with gilded words turned beneath his hands. In the late hours, he left the echoing building and stepped out again into the stale valleys and caverns of the City, and the City roared around him, multitudinous, unsubdued, uncaring. There were so many books. A hundred lives would not suffice to read the City's own outpouring.

What was the poem that would tell the City—its vastness, richness, cruelty, the beauty of its women, the pathos of its crammed, explosive life, the victories, joys, defeats, frustrations of its days!

When John Shawnessy listened for the voices of famous poets then living, to see whether they were reaching to express this thing, the City, he was disappointed. The laureate voices of the City were singers of poor small songs, sentimental lyrics in the columns of the newspapers, the fancy doggerel of Stedman, the watered nightingale notes of Aldrich. Whitman, though not stilled, had sung his greatest songs, had never made the epic of his people. Emerson was an old man who couldn't remember faces of his youth. Hawthorne, Thoreau were dead. The great voices were all in one way or another casualties of the Great War. The epic of America, her youth, her martial vigor, her innocent dedications, her great crusades, were back in the years when a divided people fought, each side for its dream of human freedom, when a race had been emancipated, when the face of
Abraham Lincoln brooded above the wartorn nation. The City and the Nation had fallen on degenerate days.

He sought the secret of the City also in the theatres. Here he saw the foppish posturings, the sentimental attitudes of a Gilded Age. To express its turbulence and passion, its laughter and tears, the City required a Shakespeare; it had to be satisfied with Boucicault.

When at last shyly he had revealed some of his own unfinished work to certain literary persons of the City, he was coldly rejected. All at once he knew the sinister selfishness of mankind, the infinite gap between his own vision of himself and the brief, indifferent viewing of other people. He knew then all at once how lucky and rare it is for anyone to make his world acceptable to anyone else. He knew then how vain he had been to suppose that the City would be eager to receive him, caress him, lionize him, make him her poet. His manuscripts came back to him devoid of comment, scarcely read.

Meanwhile the City had an insatiable appetite for words and drugged itself with the thin music of a billion clichés.

There were nights when he lay in his room in one of the crammed apartment regions of the City and felt a sick despair rising up around him in the night. The City was this despair, it was the steady pounding of his heart, his face on the pillow, the brown shadows of the room, the winking jungle of the walls, the sound of time ebbing on the shelved and shadowy ramparts of the City in the night.

So like that other gifted young poet, Mr. William Shakespeare, Mr. John Shawnessy had left the little rural water where he had spent his youth and had come (if somewhat belatedly) to the Great City. And to fulfill an ancient dream of his he began to write a play. The epic that he had meant to finish in the City was set aside, for into it had crept the City's own moral and artistic confusion. The play on which he worked ceaselessly now was itself an image of the City. He called it by a somber, glittering phrase that had lodged in his memory and turned to stone,
Sphinx Recumbent.
A verse-drama gorgeous with rich words and violent scenes, it had for its heroine a woman sensual, proud, enigmatic. He set her in the gilded world of the City like an idol blazing with a stony light, against which men beat themselves to death. But there was one, a poet lost for a time in the chambers of the City, between whom and this woman a contest rose, each seeking to find and possess the other's soul—she through cruel conquest, and he through virile identity.

Thus through the long months of his life in the City, Mr. John Wickliff Shawnessy—in his best Raintree County tradition—built a fictitious woman from a woman of flesh and blood named Laura Golden, who became, unknown to her, the subject of a play on the theme of love—love jealous, love tumultuous, love sensual and brooking no restraint.

For there was one thing he wanted in the City more even than fame and fortune. It was love. The City was this love.

The City was Miss Laura Golden posed in attitudes of fear, love, joy, rejection, loathing, horror, surprise. It was her swift body disappearing in the wings, the crashing of the curtain, her gracious encores, the kissing of her hand to voluptuous, noisy gentlemen in the boxes. It was the terrible power of the actress multiplied a hundredfold by the hundred costumes in which her graceful body was masked and a thousandfold by the thousand hushed faces that watched her from the darkened theatre.

But who this woman really was—except that she was the City and his dream of it—he couldn't say. For who could follow the progress of this face through the twisted years? Who could follow it through many loves and many days back to its beginnings in the City? Who could describe the gray lights and seasons of the City, the old brown stridulous fabric of its days, the clamor of its streets and stunted words?

Mr. John Shawnessy saw little of Miss Laura Golden during the first year of his sojourn in the City, except in the theatres where she played. He was never one of those many bachelors with gold watchchains and greased mustaches who, like Mr. Cassius P. Carney, waited so often at the stage door of the Broadway Theatre with roses in their hands. He did meet her a few times at the Perfessor's quarters, where, in the spring of 1877, a characteristic dialogue occurred between the two principal characters in Mr. John Wickliff Shawnessy's own private drama of
Sphinx Recumbent.

—Hello, Johnny. Where have you been? I haven't seen you for weeks.

—I've been writing.

—But you can't write all the time. What do you do for amusement?

—I take walks—over the nocturnal City.

—How thrilling! Alone, dear?

—Yes.

—I can't understand it. Aren't you interested in a woman?

—Well, yes. I
am
intensely preoccupied with a certain woman.

—How exciting! Tell me about her. Are you very much in love with her?

—I think about her all the time.

—How lucky she is! I'm positively jealous,
dear!

—You needn't be. She's no more lovely than you.

—O, but I'm sure she is. Is she—an actress?

—How did you know?

—Just guessing. By the way, when do I get to see your play?

—When it's finished.

—I'm very impatient, dear. You must show it to me the first of all. But I suppose you'll show it to her first.

—I promise to show it to you first.

—You're sweet. Johnny dear, will you do me a favor?

—Of course.

—Write me a letter on my tour.

—Where are you going?

—Out to your country—Ohio, Michigan, Nebraska, Idaho, California—I don't know where all.

—I live in Indiana, dear.

—Well, that's what I said, didn't I? I'll be gone three months.

—I'll miss you, Laura.

—Dear, you're such a terrible liar. How can you miss me when you never see me?

—It's a talent that I have.

—Well, I shall miss you too, dear. So write to me, and I'll read your dear letters just before I go to bed,
dear,
in my lonely little bed.

Her laughter conjured up a picture of a very unlonely little bed. When he took her home that night to her big brownstone mansion on Fifth Avenue, which he had never entered, his goodnight kiss fell on curved lips still laughing, though, to his surprise, Laura's mouth twisted strangely at him just as he withdrew his lips. Or so he thought. But the door closed on her laughter, and he had the warm taste of her perfumed lips—deep, soft, and cruelly writhing—on his mouth. He lingered awhile just outside the parklike yard of her house until he saw a single yellow light go on behind closed curtains
in a thirdfloor room. No doubt some luckier, lustier lover had been waiting there in her notorious bedroom. She had seemed in a hurry to say good night. It had been after all a very imperfect kiss.

Why was it then that this woman, who (according to an astute biographer of metropolitan decadence) had made a profession of the theatre and a pastime of love, seemed so invulnerable to the Gentleman from Indiana? Perhaps this distant, amused reserve was intended as a pungent sauce to the appetite of her lovers. As the Perfessor had once remarked, Every whore has her amenity of surrender.

As for John Shawnessy, he told himself that what he felt toward Laura Golden was surely not love (he wasn't sure that he even liked her)—it was a species of intense curiosity, which had been transmitted to him with a vengeance by his old mentor. The pupil was simply making (as he had done before) more profound researches into a subject to which the Perfessor had devoted only a cursory inspection and a few brilliantly illuminating—though possibly erroneous—conjectures.

So he went home that night murmuring to himself, as he did so often in those days, the word ‘Laura.'

Laura. This name became his City—the City was this stately, sensual name of his gilded years. Laura.

Meanwhile in the gradual fashioning of his play, as he strove slowly toward a plausible and yet immensely novel climactic scene, he kept imagining how some night he himself would rise through the echoing chambers of the City and approach the door of that Forbidden Room, the City's ultimate chamber. In the door would be the face that brooded over his whole sojourn in the City, moonluscious, with its twisted smile. Then he would follow the jade eyes and the beckoning hand within, and he would solve at last the secret of the City, know it to its inmost meaning, and the City would have yielded to his heroic, lone assault.

And so he lived his season in the City, waiting until his play should have its great Fifth Act or the City

CHEAT HIM OF THE CLIMAX AND AWAKEN HIM
WITH THE SOUND OF A
COLD

B
ELL CLANGING,
the Eastbound Express thundered into Waycross Station, stopped, ejected from its long dark body an exceedingly rich man, and, bell clanging, resumed its way. Cassius P. Carney, the distinguished financier, carrying a grip and lipping a cigar, walked briskly up and shook hands with Mr. Shawnessy and the Perfessor.

—Hello, boys, he said, unsmiling, his brown eyes burning somberly, one delicate quick hand stroking his trim ball of beard, the other plucking the cigar from his mouth.

—Where's Laura? the Perfessor said.

—Didn't want to come through with me, Cash said. I can only stop off an hour. I've arranged to be picked up by the next train through. Got to get to Pittsburgh.

His eyes were probing the town, the Station, and the grain elevator beside the tracks.

—I'll be damned, he said. Is this where you been spending your life, John? I didn't know they built towns this small any more.

The remark seemed without humor, made as a practical observation.

—We've just had a big time here, Mr. Shawnessy said. Garwood pulled out on the Westbound just a few minutes ago. He must have passed you at Roiville.

—I wanted to see the Senator, Cash said, but it can wait. If you boys don't mind, I'll just sit down here in the Station and chat with you until the next train along.

—My wife and I would like to have you stay all night, Cash, if—

—No chance, Cash said. There's a hell of a situation shaping up in Pittsburgh, and a lot of my interests are involved. I got to get over there and look into it.