Raintree County

by Ross Lockridge

  —Yes. But here, we talk about you.

  —Well, suppose you were baffled by someone and that someone gave you a key to her Forbidden Room, do you think you would understand her any better?

  —Perhaps.

  —Where are you, Johnny? I can’t even find you.

  He felt her cool hands catching at his, and his own hands touched her smooth arms and slid on the warm velvet of her back, his face brushed her sideheld head, her hips pressed momentarily hard against him, his foot tripped on the curtain, she seemed to elude him in the folds, her laughter was vaguely repeated in the darkened theatre.

  —Come on, silly man, she said. We’re late for the Ball.

  Not until they were outside the theatre and riding in a carriage did he make fully sure that while they had touched each other on the stage, she had indeed thrust the key—a small plain one—into his left coatpocket.

  On the way, they passed a square where a mass meeting was being held by people in sympathy with the Railroad Strike. He put this other world out of his mind, and he pressed his hand deep into the pocket of his coat, holding the little key.

  In the ballroom of Laura Golden’s house on Fifth Avenue stood Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles presiding at the punchbowl. Everyone was chattering about the Strike. John Shawnessy felt that he had stepped once more into a cheating stageset briefly peopled with these women in flamboyant gowns, these men in tails and ties. But the world out of which this playlet had been engendered—the world Behind the Scenes—was simply the nocturnal City—its strewn alleys, gaslit parks, belching factories, masted harbor—where people toiled namelessly through dingy nights and days so that from time to time this waxen flower of gaiety might bloom briefly Before the Footlights.

  Cash Carney appeared striding among the dancers with a rolled newspaper in his hand. Everyone gathered around him to know the latest news of the Strike.

  —Public opinion is beginning to react in our favor, he said. My old friend Senator Garwood B. Jones made a humdinger of a speech yesterday, and it’s quoted in all the evening papers.

  Cash opened the paper and read a little from Garwood’s speech. The Statesman from Indiana, serving his third year in the United States Senate, had begun by challenging any man to show more genuine concern for the welfare of the Common Laboring Man than he, Garwood B. Jones. But it was one thing for the laboring man to ask for a better wage, and it was quite another thing for a mob of hoodlums, incited by foreignborn bombslingers, to rape, burn, and pillage the fairest cities of the Republic. He, Garwood B. Jones, would be doing a disservice to the thousands that had made him their spokesman . . .

  —By God, he knew he’d better get up and have his say, Cash said. We pumped a cold fifty thousand into his campaign fund.

  The newspaper was passed around, and people read the Senator’s address.

  —Yessirree, Cash Carney said, and that isn’t all. I have it on the highest authority that this thing will be killed and killed dead in a matter of days.

  Mr. Carney stayed another five minutes and then, looking at his watch, spit a cigarbutt in an ornamental urn, and left.

  —Jesus, the Perfessor said, doesn’t Laura look stunning tonight! Ah, John, tell me now, where do they all go, these lovely girls, these lushloined girls! But where are the snows of yesteryear? John, I’ll tell you a secret. The mistress of this mansion is mad about you.

  —What makes you think so?

  —I’ve talked with her since we got back from Pittsburgh, and we talked about you. She has you on her mind. You baffle her.

  —We baffle each other.

  —I swore on my mother’s grave that I wouldn’t tell you a word of all this, so keep it under your hat. But she asked some very searching questions about you. Unless I’m losing my acuteness, you’re a candidate for initiation into that room on the top floor.

  —Where is this famous room?

  —Third floor up. Last door on the left, the Perfessor said. Once when I was here and no one was watching, I slipped up just for the hell of it and went all over the house. I found the room all right, but I couldn’t get in. It was locked. You see, I too have knocked. But to him who knocks it shall not be opened. And he who seeketh not shall find.

  Just then Laura approached.

  —I want you two big cowards to come with me, she said.

  They followed her into an alcove off the main hall where a glass decanter full of a pale green liquid stood on a table. She poured three wideglobed glasses brimming.

  —There, she said. Just for us three. A toast.

  —To what? the Perfessor said.

  —To Johnny’s play, she said.

  Her eyes widened and then narrowed to their habitual heavylidded languor as she raised the glass and drank it off. John Shawnessy thought he never would drain the deep green pool of his glass. It had a taste of licorice and fire.

  —Ouch! the Perfessor said, Where did you get this stuff, dear?

  —It’s something from France, she said.

  —Hmmmm, the Perfessor said, pouring himself another glass. Pass this stuff around, and we’ll have a Roman Holiday here.

  —It’s quite harmless, Laura said.

  She poured herself another glass and drank it. She poured John Shawnessy’s glass full.

  —There now, she said, this is just for us. It’s a special night.

  —I can see that, dear, the Perfessor said. Laura, you’re damnably beautiful tonight.

  He bowed gravely to her and then allowed his thin form to move sedately around her, like a starved satellite revolving around a plump-bodied planet. She remained calmly posed, head thrown back. Still bowing gravely, the Perfessor backed out of the alcove.

  Alone with Laura, John Shawnessy suddenly had a strong desire to escape. His head swam. He leaned against the wall to steady himself. He expected her to say something, but instead, she pressed the full glass into his hand, and looking back over her shoulder, she stood a moment at the door, her face proud, challenging, defiant, enigmatic.

  He left the alcove and entered the hall. A great stair, ten feet wide, flanked with marble balustrades and cushioned with red plush, rose without a turn to the second floor. The hall was empty.

  On a sudden impulse, clenching his fist on the little key, he ran two steps at a time up the Great Stair, as though he were being pursued. On the second floor of the mansion a few lights were burning. It was after he had started up a narrow stair to the third floor and was almost hidden in the darkness of it that the Perfessor passed along the secondfloor hall below with a woman giggling on his arm. John Shawnessy was sure that the Perfessor’s black, busy eyes had seen him.

  There was a window at the landing halfway up to the third floor. Looking out, he saw the jet of a fountain falling on a melancholy group of iron gods and goddesses, saw parallel iron spears of the fence hugely repeated on the lawn by the glare of a streetlamp. Stretching beyond and away was the City, a tenebrous, winking world of roofs and chimneytops.

  On the third floor he made his way down the lighted hall to the farthest door on the left. He found the knob and the keyhole, fitted the key in and turned it. After all, he had been given permission. The door opened noiselessly, and he stepped in. He gave a violent start.

  A great many people seemed to encircle him in a room palely lighted from the hall and the streetlamp outdoors. Suddenly he realized that the room was walled with mirrors. In fact, it was not a bedroom at all—at least in the usual sense—but a kind of little private theatre with its own little stage and an audience of receding mirror reflections.

  It seemed to him then that the woman who had teased him with the enigma of herself during his sojourn in the City had given him at last a revelation of herself. It seemed to him that perhaps with the little key he held in his hand he was touching that naked, unpredictable thing—a human soul.

  Baffled, he seated himself in a large chair facing the small stage and waited. Slowly the echoes of the Ball expired in nether chambers of the mansion. How litt
le, after all, his world and Laura Golden’s had overlapped! She was still to him a sphinx recumbent. As this woman, of whom indeed he knew so little, lingered on the threshold of becoming real, she became still more enigmatic. A disturbing question flickered in his brain. Had all those rumored lovers really come to this private theatre on the third floor, or was the innocent hero from Raintree County perhaps the only one who had reached so far?

  At any rate, she herself had offered this rehearsal and dénouement of the play they had jointly written. Doubtless the last act was to be simply her charming amenity of surrender.

  He felt vaguely alarmed and unhappy. He no longer desired to finish the play. A memory of Raintree County and another scarred young woman came to him like a sad-eyed protectress. He had a great desire to escape from something, to sleep. The beverage he had drunk and the smell of the room—an odor of theatre ointments—drugged him cruelly. The voluptuous chair heavily embraced him. Of course, he must stay awake. Under the circumstances, it wouldn’t do at all for him to go to sleep. Besides, the train would be stopping soon, and he could get off and stretch his limbs. Yes, the train would be stopping, and he would get off for that rendezvous in . . .

  The trainshed of the Pennsylvania Railroad was an enormous room with exits in distant corners. On the footworn floor men, women, and children flowed in tidal rhythms to intersections beyond the station walls. Dreaming, he saw a woman leaning on an upright girder. He started toward her, but her face, which was without precision, dissolved into the thousand faces of the crowd, and he was walking in a park of soft lawns where fountains made green jets of coolness in the air. Thousands of healthy, enterprising Americans were hurrying to see the Grand Ceremonies. He consulted his guidebook.

  VOICE OF GUIDE

  golden and masterful,

  —The banners of the Modern Age triumphantly unfurled!

  Centennial Exposition of the Progress of the World!

  CENTENNIAL LADIES

  in strophes of song,

  —He sought the gaudy goddess of the re-redundant curve

  In the scintillating city of unsisterly reserve!

  He joined the seeking thousands as they walked through clanging gates to see the last great exhibit. But the day darkened suddenly. . . .

  A great rose of fire burned in the middle of the railroad yards. It was night. A pale horde marched past him, men and women.

  MARCHER

  a blurred face in the darkness,

  —Quo vadis?

  He turned then, remembering brown decades, squat temples erected to degenerate gods, lewd pomps and prurient games in a mammonloving republic. These pale faces marching in darkness were being sacrificed to make a Roman Holiday. Joining the throng, he walked at their head, leading the way across railroad tracks half-buried in sand under the balconies of a coliseum. Chariots thundered ceaselessly on the circular track, voices cried blood and death, bodies were torn and trampled on the course beneath the wheels and hooves of hurrying chariots.

  CROWD

  ranked in tiers of seats, yelling with thumbs down,

  —Give them to the beast! Blood! Blood!

  EMPEROR JUSTINIAN WEBSTER STILES

  leaning from the imperatorial box, pale temples wreathed in vine-leaves, hands hanging languidly down,

  —I’ve done all I could, boy. But you know the Populus Americanus as well as I do. They will have their little pomps and games. After you’ve been suitably mangled, I’ll see that you get a write-up on the front page of the Sol Quotidianus. How about it, Senator, can we get this boy off?

  SENATOR CIGARIUS BOVOCACUS JONES

  toga, cigar,

  —No one is more concerned about the lot of the Common Man than I. But I wouldn’t fairly represent the thousands that have made me their spokesman if——

  LAURA GOLDEN

  costume of Empress Theodora, in Roman attitude of accubation,

  —You are the most maddening man, dear.

  The gates under the imperial stand opened; a blacksnouted locomotive roared out, bell clanging, and ran butting hither and thither in the darkened arena. The rim of a volcano glowed scarlet in the purple night. Death rained on the City. Doomed hands clutched skyward. Troops, strikebreakers, Pinkertons ran about clubbing, shooting, raping.

  CROWD

  in streets, voices fading,

  —God is dead! God is dead!. . .

  In Machinery Hall, an odor of decayed flesh floated off the couched bodies of the machines. Stained light filtered to the cold stone floor. A locomotive lay on its back under the chancel. The wreck of its dinosaur bones thrust through the rotting rind.

  REPORTER STILES

  —To understand this life in all its aspects, Before the Footlights and Behind the Scenes, one must take a little verbal tour with us. . . .

  Backstage in the Broadway Theatre he wandered waiting for his cue, trying to remember his part in the play. Standing on a darkened stage, he saw the pale faces of the audience ranked in receding balconies to the sky misted with stars. Apparently it was a performance of his own play, though he hadn’t sufficiently rehearsed it and couldn’t even remember his own lines. He was wandering then backstage, hunting for the young woman who had the leading female part. He heard the sound of a train passing in the night. In the far places of the City, across the stony squares and vacant lots steeped by the pale moon, the whistle of the train was loud. The train was rushing from the City, the funnel was a flare of fire, the passengers were homeward-going. He thought of the place where the great trains came to rest, vast sheds of lonely sound, and there among the shapes of steel, the strikers moved, a wan horde waiting for the light. . . .

  Somehow he had come to be in an Egyptian temple where stone idols to lascivious gods stood between brownstone columns. Priestesses naked except for belts of the brown tobacco leaf scattered gold coins at the base of an idol of pure gold, which, changing slowly, became Mr. Cassius P. Carney, the high priest of the temple, in ceremonial robes stained with tobacco juice.

  PERFESSOR

  small potbelly, wearing a Saturnian mask, revolving on goatsfeet around a statue of the Venus Callipygos,

  —Goddess gaily unbedight,

  Will you be my moon tonight?

  Beck and quip and dance and nod

  For the jolly Roman god?

  Saturn’s self entreats thy tail,

  Goddess eminently frail!

  The broad stone steps rising to the altar became narrower as he ascended. A noise of telegraph keys sounded far off, monotonous, disturbing. It seemed to him that perhaps he was climbing a spiral stair that the sceneshifters mount, or perhaps it was the tower of the Raintree County Court House. The ticking noise grew louder.

  VOICE

  waning down the corridors, musical, lonely,

  —Beautiful river and change everlasting. The clock is ticking in the tower. Have you seen from a window (as you hurried up the narrowing stair to the third floor), have you perceived how the late pedestrians hurry home, and how their footfalls hollowly reverberate in the hushed lawns of the City, and have you seen the sad glowing of the lights—and their extinction one by one?

  PERFESSOR

  appearing in medieval jerkin and hose, peaked sandals, having the sad, lecherous, pointed face of François Villon, reciting,

  —Where is the maiden whose long hair shaken

  Over her shoulders was ravendark,

  Whose dreambound spirit would not awaken

  Because of her body’s scarlet mark?

  And where is she that was lost on the dark,

  The mystic water of love’s old tears—

  A white oar driving a drifting bark?

  But where are the rains of the rivered years?

  Sickness of love flowed up his loins. Floor after floor turned dizzily beneath him. He seemed to be walking through galleries of photographs, and the many and many faces of the beautiful young women of his memory silted like leaves around him. The noise of the clock had become a hard, tapping sound, rh
ythmical and mocking. And even after it had stopped, it seemed to reverberate in his dream for a long time. He kept listening for it and trying to awaken. . . .

  Slowly he became aware that someone was calling his name.

  —Johnny! Johnny!

  He awoke from the dream, aware that while he had been sleeping he had heard the noise of footfalls on the stair, a hard, pointed sound rising through the dark empty halls and chambers of the City, approaching the door. He started up immediately and left the room of mirrors. At the head of the stair, he met Laura Golden, breathless, holding something in her hand.

  —It’s a telegram for you, Johnny, she said. It was left at your lodgings and a friend brought it over here. It must be something important.

  He tore open the telegram, read it, and handed it to Laura. Together they began slowly to descend the stair. He had been recalled to Raintree County.

  At the door of Miss Laura Golden’s mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York City, Mr. John Shawnessy lingered a moment. The woman, who had perhaps loved him and whom he had perhaps loved in a rather characteristic Raintree County way, held up her face for him to kiss. This time it was he whose lips were cold and passionless, while the mouth that clung a moment hungrily to his was the mouth of a woman distraught with passion. It was a very imperfect kiss.

  —Come back, Johnny, she said, when you can, and we’ll give the play a more pleasing dénouement. I’ll wait in the wings for you—if need be—forever.

  This beautiful invitation was in fact a farewell, for Mr. John Shawnessy returned immediately to his lodgings, packed his belongings, and boarded the first train home.

  And so he said good-by to the City, carrying in his luggage some hieroglyphs and indications of a soul—the memory of an unexplained but perhaps not inexplicable woman—Laura, whose stately name had become his symbol of the City. And as for his play, well, he would leave it unfinished, without its fifth and climactic act, deciding that he hadn’t made a very good job of it anyway. He had only approached and barely touched the real self of the woman who had inspired the play.

  Around him now, as he looked from the departing train and saw a last gray dawn rising on the City, he imagined a whole republic of men drowning in neglect and hunger, desperate and lost—as Miss Laura Golden had been, hunting for love and something to believe in through a universe of receding mirror illusions. Who was to help these drowning millions? Was there no hero to stand up each time a human being held out a hand in panic from the swallowing night, and say, Here, take my hand. By God, you shall not go down