Raintree County (82 page)

—Hosanna!

—For the Lord will not long permit this sinful dalliance. He will chastise it with a whip of flame. He will requite it with a scourge of fire. Praise the Lord!

—Praise the Lord, Brother Jarvey. I'm afraid we'll be heard outside, Brother.

The monotonous horn of Preacher Jarvey's voice had begun to blow high and hard, with a more and more rhythmical rise and fall. Now he muted it down to a hoarse whisper.

—I'm about to go to Sister Passifee's now, Brother Root, to inquire further into this matter with her. Tonight at eight o'clock I'll expect you in this tent. There will be some other men of God from this and neighborin' counties present, who will lend their wrath to ours when we expel these guilty creatures from the nest of their iniquity. Tell you the truth, the local people are not to be relied upon. They worship this scoundrel.

—I think it best, Brother Jarvey, if I keep kind of in the back.

—As you say, Brother, as you say.

Preacher Jarvey lifted the tent flap for Gideon Root and leaning out watched the broad form blur into a mist of green and gold.

He was alone once more in a craving void. Instantly he hungered to hurl himself upon it with voice and fist and starting eyeball and wrest from it some form of beauty that would still the hunger. Perhaps he could lure it by a savage cry, prolonged like a trumpet blown into the void, and name it into being. . . .

. . .

Evelina gave a last pat to her hair. As she turned away, watching her mirror twin sweep large-eyed into a duplicate world, she remembered her dream of the night before. She had lain awake a long time, thinking about many things: her long consultation with Mr. Shawnessy reviewing the last details of the program for the Fourth; the strange letter she had received from Professor Jerusalem Webster
Stiles; her plans for the day—picture-taking at the Senator's birthplace, a studied plea to the Senator for aid in obtaining woman suffrage, her chairmanship of the Program of the Day, and arrangements for the picnic of the Literary Society at her home in the evening. When finally she had slept, she had dreamed a wondrous, strange rehearsal of the day to come. Scenes from this dream, forgotten in the excitement of awakening (for she had risen to this day as to a contest), kept rising unexpectedly from limbo and untime, impinging on her day with a quaintly duplicate day in which a stately twin, more daring Evelina, made an immortal progress through the streets of time.

Carrying her pamphlets in a thin bundle under her arm, she opened the door, stepped forth to the verandah, went down the steps. The day assaulted her with heat, rising in soft globes rolling from the long lawn, shimmering over the cornfield across the road. Bouncing nervously on the springy substance of the path, she walked to the iron gates and into the National Road. Shading her eyes, she looked east into the flagbright Main Street of Waycross lined with wheels, alive with faces. She walked sedately in her peculiar undulant manner feeling the heatflush on her cheeks. A tall man detached himself from a group at the Senator's birthplace and nodded to her. It was Mr. Shawnessy, his eyes narrowed to slots of liquid blue. She made a little motion with her free arm and smiled. Another man with a huge black book under his arm waved to her and advanced, a tall, distinguished person with hawksharp face and glittering black eyes.

—Well, well! here she is, the Perfessor said, a figure of beauty and mystery, that very feminine feminist, Evelina!

Smiling with excitement, she held out her hand to the Perfessor, suddenly remembering . . .

EVELINA'S DREAM

She had been dreaming of preparations for a ritual day. Standing before her hallmirror she had put the last touch to her costume, pinning on a feminist pamphlet like a figleaf. When she opened the door, a flood of light and music struck her. Professor Stiles, dressed like a herald, rakethin legs in ceremonial tights, shouted through a megaphone:

—Introducing, Ladies and Gentlemen, our favorite woman of tomorrow!
Mrs. Evelina Brown, that distinguished poetess whose lyrical talents have often embellished our column!

She stepped to the front of a platform in a vast park ornamented by castiron statuary and surrounded by distant buildings, awesomely hideous and vaguely resembling photographs she had seen of Queen Victoria.

—Welcome, lords and ladies gay, she said in a thrilling sweet voice. This meeting of all the ladies from Aurora to dewy Eve has been arranged by the Waycross Literary Society to celebrate the completion of a Century of Progress in the attainment of woman's rightful position. . . .

Under the old appletree stood Senator Jones, in an authoritatively senatorial pose, left foot out, chest and paunch well forward, head and chin thrown back, hands holding coat lapels, thumbs up.

The Photographer pressed the bulb. Melting from granite into flesh, the Senator walked over to the road and swept broad hat from freeflowing locks.

—So this is the little lady who is going to handle the Grand Ceremonies this afternoon! I am honored and charmed to see you again, Mrs. Brown.

The Perfessor relinquished her hand.

—You can have it for a while, Senator. But remember, I want it back.

The Senator enclosed the small hand in his two great hands.

—It seems years since you were with us in Washington, dear, he said. You haven't given up the good fight, have you?

—Not at all, she said. I find I can carry it on here as well as in the Nation's Capital, that's all.

—How lovely you look, dear, the Perfessor said. Don't you agree, Senator, that Evelina ought to stop wasting all this charm on John and the local plowheads?

—Indubitably! the Senator said in his mellow bass.

—Let's have some more pictures under the appletree, Mr. Shawnessy said to the Photographer. With the lady included.

—By all means, the Senator said, leading Evelina over to the tree. Come on, Professor and John. You get into it too.

—May we look admiringly at the lady? the Perfessor asked the Photographer, who had said almost nothing so far.

—Of course, said the Photographer, ducking under the hood. What else?

—A perspicacious young man, said the Perfessor. He will go far in his profession.

Evelina leaned back on the old tree, looking up into the branches, through which the sifted sunlight fell. For a moment, she and the three men became quite still, as the Photographer reappearing from under the hood looked at them with a solicitous expression on his young face and pressed the bulb.

Their forms fled to the dusky inward of his mysterious box, written with a pencil of light upon a stuff of shadow. All else was lost on the Main Street of Waycross, the color of the thronging, curious faces, the boys with fists of firecrackers, the buggies passing. But in a timeconquering photograph four figures stood: a broad gentleman in a cutback coat with wideflung arm indicative of a tree; a longheaded gentleman in pince-nez dapperly leaning on a cane, the sly beginning of a smile on his thin, dry lips; a darkhaired gentleman with pensive, innocent eyes; herself, a lady in a green dress, hands folded coyly over the figleaf zone, eyes looking wistfully upward at the branches. . . .

EVELINA'S DREAM

The Perfessor, leaning forward like a traveling salesman, showed pages from a fashion magazine.

—Could I interest you, Madame, in the latest Stiles?
The Goddess Ladies Book,
featuring the newest Paris fashions. To the most stunning costume since Eve, we are awarding——

Mr. Shawnessy appeared with a golden apple in his hand, attired in his usual schoolmaster's costume. She perceived then that the apple was really the bulb-release of a camera. Mr. Shawnessy was setting up the oddshaped apparatus to take her picture, as she posed in a huge picture frame made of trellised roses.

—Latest Continental dispatches, he recited, record a breathtaking retrogression to fashions popular in the first centuries of this era. A certain notable lady whose mode of apparel has vitally affected all feminine adornment since her time was the first to adopt this charming
ensemble.

Except for her Princess Eugénie hat, she was posed in entire nudity. With shyly downcast eyes she studied the flow of her wellfleshed
thighs and calves to the prim little feet, one slightly advanced and both prettily turned out. There was a flash of rosecolored light, and as the fading fragments floated dreamily around her . . .

The Photographer closed the shutter.

—Young man, the Perfessor said, you have made us immortal.

—Senator, Evelina said, peeling off a pamphlet from the top of her bundle, could I have a word with you?

—The pleasure is mine, dear, said the Senator, looking at her with eyes of shrewd appraisal. I received your charming letter, by the way.

—I hope you will come out strongly for woman suffrage in the present campaign, Senator. The Populist Party, as you know, is going to make it a plank in their platform. Surely it's time that women were conceded equality on this point. If my personal wish can have any weight, I hope you will see fit to raise this great issue above partisanship. A statesman of your stature and popularity would have great weight.

—At a rough estimate, the Perfessor said, two hundred and fifty pounds.

—I assure you, Madame, the Senator said, his voice becoming measured and louder, that I shall give this matter every attention within my power.

—Please take this pamphlet, Evelina said, in which I have summarized a century of striving toward our great goal. Senator, I earnestly beseech you to give us your backing.

The Senator accepted the pamphlet and adjusting a pair of glasses read stagily,

—A C
ENTURY OF
P
ROGRESS IN THE
A
TTAINMENT OF
W
OMAN'S
R
IGHTFUL
P
OSITION IN THE
W
ORLD
. Well, I shall certainly go into this with the utmost interest. Be sure to look me up the next time you're in Washington, dear, and we'll try to work something out.

—For my part, the Perfessor said, I think the ladies, God bless 'em, already rule us entirely. It's a woman's world and getting more so all the time. The books, magazines, and poems are written about, for, or by the ladies. Society is tied securely to the hump of milady's bustle. She queens it here, and she queens it there, she queens it covered, and queens it bare. It's no accident that this great century
will be called in history by the name of a fat empress, whose penchant for covering her flabby body with a hideous rind of respectability has been imposed upon the whole sex from the throne down. They have us where it hurts, gentlemen, and, believe me, we trot along briskly enough. For the ladies are in the sidesaddle and ride mankind. They let us go out and graze a little wild oats now and then, but it's only to slap us about the ears and lead us back firmly into the great stable of respectability, where we end up by nosing docilely into our stalls so that government of the ladies, by the ladies, for the ladies, goddamn 'em, shall not perish from the earth.

It was hard to be angry with the Perfessor, but Evelina felt her cheeks burning as if she had been caught in a peculiarly feminine deception. . . .

EVELINA'S DREAM

There was a loud flourish of trumpets. The Perfessor handed her up to a throne atop a carriage shaped like a pumpkin, drawn by six men in mouse costume.

—I crown you Evelina Regina!

As befitted a queen, her gown was a ceremonial costume stiff with jewels. Ladies in identical gowns stood in dense ranks along a wide way colorful with pennants. It was apparently the diamond jubilee of her reign. The Perfessor, assuming more and more the look of Lord Beaconsfield, led the singing:

—Lovely and glorious!

Our Queen Victorious,

Long to reign orious!

(God save the King.)

With gracious mien and little motions of her sceptre, an ivory stick with gaudy ball of gold bestuck with diamonds, she spoke in queenly accents:

—My subjects, it is now fifty years since the great discovery was made by one of our leading female novelists that the words describing the sexes had been exactly reversed by some philological error in the dawn of iniquity and what we have been calling men are actually——

Walking down the boulevard, Evelina Regina set her heels down primly on the necks of prostrate men, who licked her little glittering boots and squealed with pleasure at every touch. Somehow she felt a little dissatisfied with the progress of . . .

—Reform, the Perfessor was saying, leaning on the appletree and gesturing in his old classroom manner, is a feminine invention. The male of the species doesn't give a hoot for reform. In so far as he's male, he wants to destroy, rape, gorge, kill, revel, and rove at will in a world of selfish self-expression. But the female of the species finds it to her advantage to keep alive the old pathetic dream of remodeling humanity. All this is intended to make the obstreperous male a better mate and provider. The American woman, who is the most dominant of her sex since Theseus raped the Amazonian Queen, is especially talented along these lines. She's forever plucking the drink from our hand and the cigar from our mouth. Fact is, Evelina, really enlightened females like you are not doing the sex a service, as your more conventional sisters know. Equality in politics, love, and work may cause woman to surrender her subtle dominion in other things. And where will that get you? In the end?

—Our Evelinas, Mr. Shawnessy said, are a guarantee that tomorrow America will be more beautiful than today. They insure that the earth will be forever feminine—that is to say, mysterious, lovely, provocative.

—Amen, said the Perfessor. What rot I've been talking! For God's sake, Senator, give the bustle a ballot.

—I place in nomination the name of Mrs. Evelina Brown for the First Petticoat President of the United States, the Senator said.

—How about a drink to that, the Perfessor said, in yon healthful beverage?