Raintree County (142 page)

OUR AMERICAN COUSIN
Starring
LAURA KEENE

Johnny and Bessie waited in the carriage.

In a few minutes, the Perfessor returned with tickets for the play.

—Here they are, he said. We're lucky to get them. The President's expected to be there with General Grant.

—What kind of play is it? asked Bessie.

—A prickmedainty piece of fooling, the Perfessor said. Neither fish nor flesh.

So there was time again for third-rate plays. There was time for the theatre. There was time for the ladies to deck their bodies for pleasure and seduction. There was time to lean back in a carriage and dream of a young woman from the City, an actress whose talented body lured perfumed gallants to the stagedoor with bouquets of roses in their hands.

The carriage had crossed the Avenue, going south. Four or five
blocks from the hotel was a wide gray sheet of water and beside it a stump of stone.

—I especially wanted to see this, Johnny said. I suppose a dime I gave years ago added a mite to this monument. How tall is it now?

—Just a minute, the Perfessor said.

He had the driver stop and called to a crowd of Negro boys playing near-by.

—How tall is the monument, boys?

—Yassuh, Generl Wash'ton's Monument, one of the boys said as he walked out of the group, reciting monotone. Present height thee hunud and thutty-thee feet. Dammeter at base, thutty feet. Jected height foh hunud and fitty-fah feet. Talles' structure inna world.

—Thank you, my boy, the Perfessor said, pitching him a dime.

—What's this river? Bessie asked.

—This is the Puttoric Histommac, the Perfessor said, across which the General is reputed to have thrown a dollar. In Greece, the hero skins a lion. In America, he slings a dollar.

—The General's dollar fell on fertile ground, Johnny said, judging from the size of this big stone flower.

—The Republic has a poorer memory than any schoolboy, the Perfessor said. A boy ties a string around his finger, but the Republic can't remember anything without piling up several hundred feet of stone.

In the mist beside the Potomac, the Washington Monument was an amputated finger of frustration, indicating an undivined and un-divinable future.

—There's the White House, the Perfessor said, indicating a graceful pillared front a long way off across a parklike lawn.

Raindrops began to fall. The carriage crossed a small bridge over an arm of water, went through a block of shabby houses, and came out on a walk skirting the President's Park.

—It'd be nice to see the President, Johnny said.

—Anyone can see Abe, the Perfessor said. Just walk right in, spit on the floor, and make yourself at home. Perhaps you'll be there yourself some day, boy.

—I decline the nomination, Johnny said.

—Poor old Abe! the Perfessor said. He's barely pulled the Republic
through a victorious War and the wolves are already at him again. That speech he made a few days ago raised quite a stink. His Reconstruction policy is too gentle to suit most people.

As they returned to the hotel, the mist closed down so thick that the Capitol was no longer visible. The City of Washington was a waste of ugly buildings in rain.

At the hotel, they began to have a good time. They had lunch and got a table in the bar, where they watched the crowds come and go. The Perfessor knew almost everyone of importance and was up and down like a jack on a spring to greet people and bring them to the table. Everyone was drinking and proposing toasts, and toward the dinner hour people got to singing war songs. Corporal Johnny Shawnessy had a good time just sitting there in a blur of faces, colors, sounds.

Along in the afternoon, Bessie tried to get him to tell about his hero experiences. When he declined out of modesty, the Perfessor, who was in vein, put together an ingenious fiction in which Johnny held off a whole regiment of Georgia militia singlehanded while help came up. The story included a Southern beauty, buried treasure, gory fighting, and everything incorrect that people associated with the March to the Sea. Johnny topped the story with a palpable fraud about the Perfessor riding a horse three days and three nights through hostile country, risking his life twenty times, in order to file a dispatch to his paper.

—Oddly enough, said the Perfessor, I felt no fear at the time.

People kept stopping at Johnny's table and saying,

—So you're the boy from Sherman's Army.

When things got a little wild around seven o'clock in the evening and everyone was singing the new song ‘Marching Through Georgia,' the crowd made Johnny stand on the table.

—Speech! Speech! they yelled.

—Tell us about the March, boy! they yelled.

—It was nothing, Johnny said. We just walked.

Everyone applauded.

—Isn't he sweet! a girl said.

Johnny said something about his comrades in the hospital and about how much victory meant to them.

—Sure! Sure! everyone yelled.

People pumped his hand, swatted him on the back, and tried to establish mutual friendships back in Indiana. A girl came over and put her arms around him and kissed him on the lips.

—Honey, I'd kiss every man in Sherman's Army, if I got a chance, she said.

—Maybe I could stand proxy for the rest, Johnny said.

Everyone laughed.

—Time to go, someone said.

It was the Perfessor, leaning through the liquorcolored air.

—Play starts at eight-thirty, I think. We've just time to go over and get settled. It seems certain Lincoln and Grant will be there.

Bessie Dietz giggled, and Johnny got unsteadily to his feet. He hadn't drunk much, but he was still wobbly. His ears sang. But he felt very happy when they were outside driving away somewhere through the misty evening. Pennsylvania Avenue was two wavering rows of gaslamps. The illuminated dome of the Capitol seemed suspended in the mist.

The carriage left the Avenue and turned into a narrower way. In a few minutes, they were before the theatre. Johnny's head was far from clear as he joined the crowd crossing over the wooden platform built out across the gutter. As they went up the steps to the entrance, he noticed that the brick front of Ford's Theatre was hung with bunting.

Everyone in the crowded lobby was talking about the end of the War, the latest news from Sherman's Army, the expected appearance of the President and General Grant at the theatre. Someone said that the General wasn't coming after all.

—Maybe the President won't come either, someone said.

They went upstairs to the balcony. People were stirring in the aisles, hunting for seats.

Someone pointed out the President's box projecting over the right side of the stage and ten feet above it. A chandelier hung close by, and a picture was suspended between the folds of an American flag draped over the edges of the box. The double arches were curtained and dark. The curtain hiding the stage showed an autumntinted landscape and a bust of Shakespeare. Hardly were they seated when the houselights were darkened, and the curtain went up for the opening scene in the play called
Our American Cousin.

Johnny, who had seen few plays in his time and none at all for two years, was thrilled by the garish color and unreality of the stage. The Play itself was a vapid little thing in which bogus Englishmen made laughter over a bogus American. The voices had the artificial hoarseness of veteran performers trying to fill up the back spaces of a theatre. There was much trained gesture and forced laughter. The posturing mannequins on the stage had names—Florence Trenchard, Lord Dundreary, Asa Trenchard.

The performance was spirited, and people laughed and applauded now and then. But the Play itself made no difference. The actors were only supposed to present a little tableau of the times, while everyone, audience and players together, collaborated in a more significant drama. People had come to the theatre, as perhaps they always did, to satisfy an ancient yearning, to find a place of gaiety and mystery with a thousand of their fellows, and to behold time, fate, and the Republic expressed both inside and outside the artificial boundaries of the stage.

As the Play continued, the feeling of excitement subsided only to return again. People moved restlessly in their seats, waiting for the entrance of a more important actor than those now posturing on the stage.

Johnny had become absorbed in the Play and was a little surprised when the actors paused in the midst of some punning on the word ‘draft.' There was a disturbance in the balcony.

—The President! someone said.

—And there's Mrs. Lincoln with him!

A murmur ran over the balcony and lower floor as people craned for a look. Four people were walking along the dress-circle that divided the balcony. Johnny stood up, applauding with the others. A little fattish woman led the way, and behind her walked a tall, sloped man. Johnny could have reached out and touched the President as he passed. The party made their way to a door that led down a hidden corridor to the box at the side of the theatre. They entered the door and passed from sight. In a few moments, the President's face appeared in the box overlooking the stage, as if he were leaning forward preparatory to sitting back. Then he disappeared.

—Ha! Ha! Ha!

It was Lord Dundreary on the stage hollowly laughing.

ALL

—What's the matter?

DUNDREARY

—Why, that wath a joke, that wath.

FLORENCE

—Where was the joke?

The excitement of the audience lessened, and there was no further disturbance in the aisles as the Play went on. No one could see the President, unless possibly the people in the box immediately opposite his.

Once more, Corporal Johnny Shawnessy, Soldier of the Republic and unsung Hero-Poet of Raintree County, leaned back in his place, musing on the strange legend of his life. It seemed to him that he had assembled here the lost pages of a myth of himself and the Republic, and that he had only to put them together at last into a meaningful pattern. All was promise, excitement, near-fulfillment. The battle days were over. The Republic was in the ritual hour of exultation. Here was the shrine of that aspiring people, the Americans, their Capital City, rising from mist on its muddy plain, rising from April to eternal spring. Names of battles reverberated in the corridors of the sped years; a door was about to clang shut on the pantheon of a nation's sacrifice. And all was turning, turning toward a new day. The Republic was waiting for its poet, for him who could discover beauty in immortal phrases, for him whose being was attuned to the music of rivers on the land, for him who had known strong passion, love, and death, whose memories were memories of the Republic in War and Peace. Here all about him were the actors and the stage-props of the greatest of all dramas. An unknown actress waited for him somewhere behind the scenes. Pensive, alonely brooding in his box over the stage, was President Lincoln, the gaunt, tender father who had brought the Republic through the War, One Nation. In the camps, hospitals, barracks of the land, the men who had fought from Sumter to Appomattox were waiting for the bugles of the last encampment.

What was President Abraham Lincoln thinking in his forever lonely, barriered world? What were his own memories of the Republic
in War and Peace, as he sat brooding in his box above the stage? Was his world the world of Corporal Johnny Shawnessy? Did they not together share the meanings of an eternal republic that both were striving to build, the one by statesmanship, the other by poetry?

Yes, the times were changing. The soldiers were waiting to go home. Now that the battle-years were nearly over, what was it that waited for the Republic and for John Wickliff Shawnessy? All stages were like great stereopticons into which one looked with an illusion of depth and reality. Might not a man of keen vision look into the boxlike diorama of the stage and see shining cities on the land, exultant tomorrows!

The stage was empty, as two ladies went off to the right and a man to the left. Over the ebbing applause and laughter, there had been a sharp, hard sound that made Corporal Johnny Shawnessy vaguely uneasy as he tried to fit it into the Play. He seemed to be trying to remember something that he ought not to have forgotten.

Just then an amazing thing happened to the Play.

A man was falling through the air, violently swinging his arms, tipping over precariously and landing heavily on the stage. It seemed a furious and fantastic piece of nonsense. The man had landed on his bent leg and hands, he was scrambling to his feet with a catlike, frantic speed, he stood up, half-ran, half-hopped like a crazy cripple to the middle of the stage brandishing a dagger, his white face was lit with two black balls of eyes, his mouth spat a deformed ejaculation into the hushed theatre, and then with maimed fury he ran off the stage on the left side.

So unexpected was this apparition that it seemed to Johnny it might have shot dreamlike from the musing part of himself across the outward world. Like everyone else in the theatre he went on watching and waiting for some sequel to explain the thing.

—Where'd
he
come from? someone said.

Just then, across the growing tumult of the theatre a woman's shriek lay like a lash, raw with anguish and unbelief. People began to look toward the President's box, from which and only which the dark, dagger-carrying man could have leaped.

For the moment, nothing could be seen in the President's box. But the stage had lost its look of legend and fixity. The actors were
walking across it, making natural gestures, their faces expressive of real emotions. One was trying to tell the crowd something. Words came from somewhere and began to be repeated in the crowd.

—The President has been shot!

Suddenly, what had been a pointless farce had pulled off its little grinning mask and had taken for its stage the whole Republic, for its lines history, for its audience the generations. In the darkness and confusion of Ford's Theatre, Corporal Johnny Shawnessy and his companions had become supernumeraries in the cast, anonymous faces in a cry of citizens.