Raintree County
Page 94
Alone of all the faces in this jungle of weeping, talking, grieving, hating, loving human beings, the face of Johnny Fabrizio was tranquil. It was a face unwasted by age or disease, and as such, reminded John Shawnessy of many a face he had seen in death during the War. It was not a handsome face, but death had touched it with a hand of sleep and silence, had left it without pain or anger or desire.
On the way back to the hotel, the Perfessor made a gesture, indicative of the swarming streets and deserted mills.
—Listen to them! he said. They can’t win. A few of them get shot, and they shoot a few other poor bastards in uniform who are merely obeying orders. Meanwhile, Cash Carney and a gang of fat millionaires sit around a table in perfect safety and coldly lay a trap for them. All this shooting will antagonize the newspapers and the so-called American Public, more troops will be rushed into the City, the ringleaders will be arrested and probably strung up, and after starving a few weeks, these poor creatures will come crawling on their knees begging to be taken back by the companies at any price.
—But there are so many of them! John Shawnessy said. If they only had a leader and a plan, they might come out of this jungle and rule it instead of being ruled by it.
—See those factories! the Perfessor said. Someone has to work them. Accept life for what it is, boy, and be happy that it wasn’t you lying there in that stinking room with a hunk of lead in your heart.
—But if we can just manufacture enough human beings in this country, along with the trains and the sewing machines, enough people of passion and indignation, we might get somewhere.
—That may be, the Perfessor said. All that may be so—but what will bring back Johnny Fabrizio? Well, anyway, the boy is being wept into his grave. Perhaps in this, the poor have their triumph—there are so many of them, and they feel so sorry for each other. My God, did you ever see so many tears! I don’t suppose a pint of water will be poured on the memory of Jerusalem Webster Stiles, when the Great Mother gathers him to her loathsome bosom. And yet he was a not inconsiderable figure in his day, wrote verses that scanned indifferently well, composed a number of salty epigrams, even made a few feminine hearts flutter at a faster tempo. Pah—it’s a dirty thing to die—to be dead! Life! Life! Well, I’ll give Johnny Fabrizio a brief fame. He shall die on the front page of the Nation’s greatest daily. Is that a small thing? Vanderbilt did no more. And they buried him—or was it Jim Fisk?—in a casket that weighed a ton!
When they got to the hotel around midnight, John Shawnessy took Laura up to her room. The lights were out in the upper floors of the hotel, and they had a hard time finding the door. He was about to say good night to her, realizing that for a while he had ignored her as much as she had him; but she turned now and leaned back against the door as if at bay. In the darkness he could barely see her face.
—You hate me, don’t you, Johnny?
He was shocked by this question asked in a calm, matter-of-fact voice.
—Why—no. Of course not, Laura. I—
—You hate me, she said, because I wanted to get my troupe back to New York. No doubt I have offended your great pure innocent soul.
The words were cuttingly said in a distinct, lowtoned voice.
—I—why, no, Laura. I assure you. It’s quite understandable—I- I don’t hate anybody. On the contrary, I—
—O, yes. she said. In a way, I’m not good enough for you, Mr. John Wickliff Shawnessy. And it’s true. I’m not. Because I hate lots of people and lots of things.
—Laura, dear, I—
—You don’t understand me at all, she said. You think you do, but you don’t.
—I don’t think I do, and I’m quite sure that I don’t, he said fatuously.
—You saw those people, she said. You saw them—where they lived. Well, let me tell you something, Mr. John Shawnessy, those people are my people. Because that’s where I came from. I came from all that!
She made a fierce gesture. Better accustomed now to the darkness, he could see her face. The mouth curled with contempt, the cheeks were deadpale, the eyes were long glittering slits. He touched her arms, as if in a gesture of self-defense.
—Take your hands off me, Mr. Shawnessy. I may not be good enough for you. But I know something that you don’t know. I know that when you come from that, you get hurt, and it does something to you. I’ve been hurt plenty. I’ve seen men kill each other before. I hate the world of men. They have hurt me too and killed something in me. No man will ever hurt me again. I don’t care for them—that much! I don’t care for you either—Mr. Shawnessy—that much!
She tossed her head and snapped her fingers under his nose. The thing that always shocked him was that when women became outspoken, they became so terribly outspoken.
—Laura, he said, the world may have hurt you, but I haven’t hurt you, have I?
—I read your play, she said. And I read your letters. If you don’t understand me, neither do I understand you. You are the most maddening man, sir.
—I? he said. My dear child, I—
—Don’t dear child me, she said. I know things that would make you pale.
The narrow eyes watched him. With all her powder and rouge gone, the scar on her lip was unusually distinct, a little white line in the deep flesh.
—As for the play, he said, I feel now as if I had left everything important out of it.
Suddenly, it was over. Her laughter reverberated in the empty corridors of the hotel. She seemed very much amused.
—Don’t mind me, dear, she said, touching her temples and patting her tangled hair. You know I loved your play. And I loved your letters too. I’m not an easy person to understand, dear. I don’t understand myself. All I know is that getting my troupe to New York and opening when I say I’ll open are more important to me than anything in the world. Can you understand that?
He intensely disliked her for this remark.
—Perhaps.
—Don’t think I’m heartless, dear, she said, trying to rearrange her bodice. Everyone has to have something to love. I’ve hardly ever had anything to love—to really love—that I could love. I’ve had my work. If I didn’t have my work, then I’d be lost, wouldn’t I? Everyone’s lost, Johnny, don’t you see? We’re all lost, and we never find anything or anybody, do we, dear? It’s like your play, hunting around for its Fifth Act. If I wasn’t a trouper, then I’d be lost too—like all those people we saw today. They’re all lost.
—They have each other.
—But that’s all they have. And then they don’t even have each other. Because they get killed.
He became aware that her eyes were fixed on him with a curious intentness.
—What gave you the idea for such a play? she asked softly.
—Laura Recumbent, he said slowly.
She continued exactly the same expression, but her voice was musical and mocking.
—But you haven’t seen Laura recumbent. I haven’t posed for you, dear, have I? You haven’t had enough sittings—or shall we say recumbencies!
—I suppose not.
—Well, I’ll make you a bargain, dear! I’ll finish your play for you. You shall have a special performance of it—just for you—before the footlights and behind the scenes. Now what do you think of that? Would you like that?
He couldn’t tell whether she was making fun of him or not.
—Of course. And when does the show begin?
—When I get back to New York, she said. All you have to do is help me get my things and get back.
—It’s a bargain.
—And come around to the Broadway Wednesday night to the stage door after the show.
—I shall be waiting for you there.
—And escort me home to the Ball. Here.
She reached into the torn bodice and extracted a card that must have been prepared and placed there much earlier in the day.
—This will admit you to my dressing room. Good night, Johnny dear.
—Good night, Laura.
The Perfessor was up when John Shawnessy got to their room. Cash Carney had just dropped in. He was waving a telegram sent by the Governor of the State authorizing a ruthless suppression of the Strike.
—Yes, sir, Cash said. Yessirree, we’re going to whip this thing. My God, what kind of a country is it that can’t protect the sacred right of the individual to own property, invest capital, and use his wealth as he sees fit? Where would we all be if it weren’t for old Cash Carney, Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and other men of vision, who built those roads and gave America an iron roadway from sea to shining sea.
—The audience is invited to join on the chorus, the Perfessor said.
Cash looked out of the window toward the burning yards. He seemed to be apart from the scene, a lean, winged, lascivious god, peering down on a Homeric conflict without danger to himself.
—Don’t they know it isn’t us they’re fighting? he said. It’s the Law of Supply and Demand. Labor and Capital are complementary forces. You can’t change it, and I can’t change it. Let Capital alone and it’ll provide as many jobs and as much money as the times allow. The comeback is certain all in good time. Thank God, we’ve got courts and congresses that understand these things. God, it’ll be good to see the troops really come in and mash hell out of Those Bastards. Good night, boys. See you in New York at Laura’s Ball. By the way, I located her stuff all right, and it’s safe.
John Shawnessy couldn’t get to sleep. He lay and listened to the explosions and distant shouts. It seemed to him that Humanity was in convulsion. While he had pursued his private dream, suddenly he had been permitted to glimpse a million faces pale in the redlit darkness and a million hands reaching for bread and completing the baffled gesture by making fists. They had been there a long time, they would be there a long time, and he hadn’t really known it. Something blindly convulsive stirred like a buried titan beneath the pyramiding cities of America.
—John, are you awake?
—Yes.
—Me too, the Perfessor said. I keep thinking of that poor dead boy.
John Shawnessy lay there in the lurid dawn also thinking of the dead boy, Johnny Fabrizio, who had been dead now for ages and forever. And he thought of other dead men, comrades—marchers and fighters. He thought of Flash Perkins who had lain in the arms of Corporal Johnny Shawnessy (also dead), Flash Perkins, a Union soldier, a bloodstained recumbent form in the glare of a distant fire. Had mankind, then, come so very far from the Great Swamp that was the underside of Raintree County?
And as he lay there, he wound and unwound in his mind the skein of a life that was lived in the City and knew nothing but the City for a home, a life rooted in the shadow of the factories, flowering in a space of sunlight between the fences and the sheds where the great trains thundered day and night, living a brief while in the crammed rooms of the City, and returning suddenly into darkness, the same web of darkness and blind hunger from which it had arisen.
Then he thought of another creature of the City, a woman whose recumbent form lay voluptuous in the darkness in a room not far from his. And it seemed to him that he was moving slowly through a drama of gorgeous and confused rhetoric toward a climactic scene that would perhaps show to him at last the answer to his quest in the City.
The next day John Shawnessy and the whole party returned to New York. And in the days that followed, the newspapers reported the continuing of the Great Strike and the spread of it from city to city in the Nation’s transportation system. The Constitution of the United States was invoked against the Strikers, troops were sent in to quell the riots, and the great republic that had come one hundred years along the Path of Progress went on bleeding, groaning, blaspheming, and mutilating itself as
IT BEGAN THE SECOND HUNDRED YEARS
ON THE ROAD
TO
—PERFECTION, the Perfessor was saying, isn’t attainable in human institutions. When I say I prefer a Communist State, with all wealth vested in the People, share and share alike, I don’t mean to say that we’ll have the Millennium. Human beings seem to have an invincible talent for being unhappy under all forms of government. But by taking money and property away from the individual, you take away most of his power to do evil to himself and others. Three-fourths of human vanity is derived from property. Property, money, all symbols of personal wealth nurture the illusion that the individual amounts to something, that he has a permanent vested right in the earth from which all blessings flow, and that his dividends will go on forever in the land which the Lord God Mammon has given him. Even a little property makes him one of the chosen—with all the arrogance of the chosen. Property’s a religion, and like most religions, succeeds in keeping its priests fat and few and its devotees many and hungry. And all of its dividends belong conveniently to the Future, which is known as Heaven or Prosperity for All.
—If equal distribution of wealth would make men happier and better, let it come, say I, Cash Carney said. But it won’t. Instead of the present ten percent wealthy and ninety percent poor with a chance of improvement, you’ll have a hundred percent poor and no chance of improvement. Why? Because man’s a competitive animal. If we haven’t yet reached a condition in which all the people are well off, it’s because we’re still building America and because the world keeps pouring millions of poor dagos into this country to enjoy the advantages of our system. We just can’t catch up with all that poverty overnight.
—But the capitalist state will never catch up, the Perfessor said. It derives its very life from the current set up between the two poles of enormously hungry demand and enormously profitable supply.
—What do you think about this, John? Cash said.
—My economics is improvised—like the Republic’s. Capitalism and Communism in their pure form are both contrary to the spirit of American democracy. They both make slaves out of men—slaves to economic principles. The Capitalist stretches man on the rack of Supply and Demand. The Communist sticks him in an economic class and tells him that history will look after him. Both appeal to the Nature of Nature for their principles. Neither Capitalism nor Communism was foreseen by those who founded America. The Declaration of Independence isn’t an economic document. Jefferson wrote the economics out of it when he changed the classic formula of the time from Life, Liberty, and Property to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
—But, John, the Perfessor said, let’s admit it—the Declaration of Independence is a wonderful old piece of scripture that hasn’t any more resemblance to the truth of man’s nature than the first chapter of Genesis has to the real beginnings of the earth. We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal. Dammit, that’s the most self-evident lie ever told! If you want truth, go to the Origin of Species. There we have the word of an honest scientist. Darwin cooked Tom Jefferson’s goose for good and all. In fact, what is Communism but an effort to give some truth to the Declaration?
—The Declaration was true, Mr. Shawnessy said. The Signers spoke the language of moral beings, and what they said was true for the republic of men’s souls. All men, as men, are created equal. Of course they aren’t created equal as animals, as Darwinian contenders for life, as economic equations, as class-slaves and wage-slaves, as Proletarians and Capitalists. The Republic of the United States of America was intended as a government for men, animated by the virtues that we associate with mankind. This ideal republic was superimposed on the Darwinian Swamp, and the result has been this magnificent pageant of crusade and confusion known as American History.
Cash Carney consulted his gold watch. He fondled the solid, palm-smoothed lump of it in his left hand, pondering.
—
It’s all right for you fellas that have no responsibility to sit around and criticize, he said. But suppose you had gradually got involved, as I have, in the economic and political life of this Nation. Suppose you were one of the men who thought of building railroads through the West when there weren’t any and took the necessary steps and the necessary personal risk to build ’em and operate ’em. Do you think you could ever have stopped anywhere along the line? Do you think I can stop now, with other men like me, who came up the hard way, trying to horn in on my holdings, trying to squeeze me out?
Cash was breathing hard. His eyes had a fixed stare.
—You talk of security, he said. I’ll be perfectly frank with you. I never have had a feeling of security in this country. I haven’t had any more security than the guy that throws the switch out there. I feel driven all the time. Anything that threatens the financial stability of the Nation threatens everything I have. I tell you, I don’t feel I can let up one minute. Every now and then I look at myself and wonder how it all happened, and I realize that it’s all just on paper and I’m just one weak bastard holding together factories, railroad systems, and whole cities by my single vision and my willingness to take risks. Believe me, boys, I have to feel that the Government is back of me when I do that. Even now, with this Populist agitation and these big labor outbreaks and the clamor for cheap money, I begin to feel the whole thing trembling crazylike. Sometimes I dream that I’m in the middle of my office in Wall Street, and all of a sudden people start coming in waving bills, bonds, mortgages, stocks, contracts, leases, demanding payments, deliveries, foreclosures. And I haven’t any way to meet ’em. I haven’t got a red cent. It was all a dream. And there I am trying to hold up the whole works all by myself, and the whole goddam business toppling around me and trying to crash.
Cash kept sucking on his cigar as he spoke, not aware that it was dead. He sucked harder and harder, stood up, his jaundiced cheeks hollowed with the effort, his eyes bulging. He took the cigar and threw it at the tracks and immediately went down into his pockets for another, as if something might happen to him if he didn’t hurry. He got a light from the Perfessor, sucked his cigar to flame, and sank back on the bench. He was breathing hard and still holding his watch.