Then there came to him a terrible image in which Garwood Jones achieved the very conquest that Johnny Shawnessy had dreamed a hundred times for himself. Strangely, this vision was not entirely unpleasant to him—he had some fierce joy in it, or else why did he repeat it obsessively?
And now it seemed to him that he must never love or pursue Nell Gaither again, for she was certainly another’s and laughed at him and cared nothing for him and never could understand his great soul.
And in that thought his love achieved its hopeless climax of desire.
This desire had acquired new backdrops for its tireless make-believe. In the interiors of an extinct Opera House, the ghost of his play lingered, aspiring to be something high, tragic, and meaningful, the Great American Drama, more wondrous than the plays of Shakespeare. It hovered wistfully, all entangled with something confused, remorseless, yet beautiful, the Comedy of Life. Unpencilled and unvocalized, scenes of this greater Play crowded against halfopening curtains of Time. Some day he would write this play, the image of his great desire.
His day would come.
For him, deepfleshed thighs waited in the night under velvet costumes, up stairs that the sceneshifters mount. For him (the intemperate young man), the City great and gray. For him, kisses like alcohol, green inundations of desire.
His desire was of the river, but it was also of the train and its quavering whistle in the night and of the City to which the train was speeding. Desire hunting through the rooms of an old opera house had found its way into a bigger opera house and behind the scenes of an immense stage where the firstnight audience was a lake of murmuring faces. And here Mr. John Wickliff Shawnessy, the greatest playwright of the age, sought a green-eyed girl up the most winding stairs and into the most neglected room, where no one else ever came. Desire was of the river, but the weedy Shawmucky flowed from Raintree County to a joining with greater rivers gemmed with cities in the night! And if not now, then some day, the river nymph would yield herself to a more sophisticated Johnny. He would find on a certain deep, mysterious mound a little hieroglyph, the birthmark of the river. Then, he too would be erring, he too would drink a drink that maddened, a beverage of kisses and of fame, and it would be running in his veins like this fever of the river that he couldn’t lose, and it wouldn’t be at all like the effect of that purest and most excellent of all beverages,
THAT TRANSPARENT RESTORER OF OUR
STRENGTH, BARTENDER, BRING
ME
—A GLASS OF WATER, Niles, if you don’t mind. I’ll just step into the office with you and get the paper.
They stepped through the door of the newspaper office, and Niles went to a stack of fresh papers.
—Here you are, he said. I’ve had a lot of fun putting it together. It stirs up old memories. By the way, thanks for your ‘History of the County.’ No one else knows it so well.
Mr. Shawnessy took the fat memorial newspaper and turned the pages.
—If I could have four or five extra copies, Niles, I’d like to give them to friends at Waycross. The Senator will want a copy. Cash Carney is going to stop off for a little while on his way to Pittsburgh. I’d like to have a copy for him.
—Help yourself, John. Be sure to give one to General Jackson too. I understand he’s going to lead a march of G.A.R. veterans to point up the pension issue.
—Garwood thought of everything.
—Are we ever going to stop fighting that damn war? Niles said from a back room.
He returned with the water.
—I’ve given nearly the whole front page, he said, to the big doings in Waycross. Did you ever stop to think, John, how many great men Raintree County has given to the Nation? Here’s Garwood Jones, a distinguished U.S. Senator for eighteen years and favorably mentioned for the Presidency in the next election, and here’s Cassius Carney, a big railroad magnate, one of the richest men in the country, and of course General Jackson, an outstanding hero of the War—all three of them returning to the County today for this big celebration. I don’t suppose anything like it ever happened before. And to think that you and I knew all those people in the Old Days!
Niles looked out of the front window at the Court House, through the reversed letters of the paper’s name.
—How the face of the County has changed since I founded the Free Enquirer fifty years ago! Just take, for example, those illustrations accompanying your article—the Old Court House, the Old Methodist Church, the Old Opera House, and the Academy. All gone now.
—I thought the Academy Building was still up.
—Only half of it. Up to two years ago it was a cheap hotel. Then the railroad decided to extend the yards into that lot. They ripped off the front half of the old building and put a platform on. I think they’re using it for storing grain and coal now.
Mr. Shawnessy had found the picture on page eighteen over the words:
THE OLD PEDEE ACADEMY
—Say what you will, John—those were the Good Old Days! I still remember as clear as anything how we brought higher education to Raintree County.
Standing in the office of the Free Enquirer, sniffing the odor of damp newsprint, Mr. Shawnessy ran his eye over the manycolumned ‘History of Raintree County,’ a mist of fine words flowing around the stiff engravings of buildings old and new and scenic views. He remembered then the old Academy Building, a place of young voices and tattered books. He remembered chalked words, light in the little lecture hall, changing with the changing seasons of the County. And he seemed to remember also the frustrate dream of a young republic, an academic dream of pillars and perfection, which had thrust itself to flower in the dark chaos of time and had left a white remembrance on the lips of men. There came to him a noise of waters beating on leaguelong beaches. Undraped forms rose from a shrine in Raintree County, as from a womb of fair and fecund issue.
A forgotten youth sprang toward the forms of that adolescent republic, with a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in his hand.
He remembered reeds made vocal by the passion and pursuit of nymph and god down by the riverside.
And he remembered especially a winged visitor from the direction of the sun, who had alighted walking on the fields of that republic, teaching a forbidden music on his unusual lyre.
Mr. Shawnessy folded the papers and piled them on the face of the Raintree County Historical Atlas.
They were all gone, slain by a smoky dragon, driven from their groves beside the river. The beautiful young gods had abandoned Raintree County. He remembered
1857—1859
HOW A QUAINT VISITOR ARRIVED IN THE GARDEN OF RAINTREE COUNTY
bringing much learning from the East. In September of 1857 the following article appeared in the Free Enquirer:
AN INSTITUTION OF HIGHER LEARNING
Raintree County is to have an institution of higher learning. This temple of Minerva, which at the request of its financial sponsors will bear the dignified and not unsonorous appellation of Pedee Academy, is to be instituted in the large brick building formerly known as the Taylor Boarding House. The new college is to be conducted upon the most progressive modern principles. Female as well as male students are desiderated. Courses in Latin, English Rhetoric, Philosophy, Natural History, Mathematics, and Ancient and Modern History will be offered with a diploma after two years of study. Also classes will be conducted in which adults may learn to read and write.
The principal of the new college, Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles, has studied in the best schools of the East, including Harvard, and has spent some years abroad. A native of the County, he was born on the very day, January 28, 1830, on which Webster delivered the classic reply to Hayne. Hence the name bestowed upon him by his pious and patriotic parents. Professor Stiles is conversant with several languages and is a man of great personal amiability.
Republican Institutions cannot be maintained without universal enlightenment. Let all the intellect and enterprise in Raintree County flock to the new Academy and demonstrate to the worl
d that we have as much gray matter under our hats as the next fellow.
Johnny Shawnessy was among the dozen Raintree County citizens who answered this challenge. During the year that had passed since the Temperance Play, he had been teaching at a school—his first—at Summit in the north-central part of the County. He had lost sight of Nell Gaither, but heard that she had returned to live in the East. It seemed unlikely that he would see her again in Raintree County. Meanwhile, he had gone on writing for the Enquirer, reading all the books he could get his hands on, versifying, and in general preparing to be a Great Man. As winter passed and spring and summer came again, he was annoyed at times by an inability to call up a precise image of Nell’s face. For diversion he attended the usual taffy pulls, square dances, husking bees, barbecues, and ice-cream socials by means of which the County placed its young people in legitimate proximity. Johnny was popular on these occasions and began to lose a little of his shyness. In fact, he kissed and was kissed by several Raintree County girls, who showed great interest and proficiency in the sport. All of them talked a good deal in his presence about friends of theirs who had been recently married.
On the day of his enrollment in the new college, Johnny walked to the Academy building, two blocks south of the Square, finding a comfortable two-story brick house set in the middle of a wide lawn shaded by elms. He walked up onto the verandah and through the front door into a hall where several prospective students were waiting to see the new professor. Among the young men, Johnny recognized Garwood Jones and Cassius Carney.
—Well, look who’s here, boys! Garwood said. High time someone connected with the Enquirer learned to read and write.
Just then a door opened, and from a side room where Professor Stiles was interviewing candidates a young woman appeared.
—Hello, Johnny.
The word was softly uttered and highly personal.
Instantly, as if it had only slept to increase its strength, an old passion came alive. The young woman who looked demurely up at him had not changed from his earlier memory of her.
—Hello, Nell, he said. Are you enrolling in the College?
—Yes, I am, Johnny.
—It’s awfully nice seeing you again, Nell.
—It’s nice seeing you again too, Johnny.
They were shaking hands and smiling in the best Raintree County tradition.
—Next! Come in, my boy! said a pleasant, high-pitched voice.
Blushing from this reunion with desire, Johnny Shawnessy walked through the door to his first meeting with Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles.
The man who stood in the little office room of the Pedee Academy made Johnny Shawnessy think of a huge, vivid insect that had flown from unknown parts and lit walking in Raintree County. Surely there was nothing else in the County like him. He was tall and thin. Black hair, split exactly in the middle, was slicked flat to a long, narrow head. The nose suggested a cutting instrument. Small piercing black eyes, not quite in focus, peered through pince-nez glasses. From that moment on, Johnny always had an uneasy presentiment that Professor Stiles was not there to stay. Sometime, in the very middle of a sentence, abruptly remembering whence and why he had come, he would rise to the points of his toes, his black coat-tails would erect themselves into shining wings, and his angular brittle body would shoot off the ground and go whirring down the air to some other temporary lodgment on the American earth.
Just now he was holding out a cigar to Johnny.
—Sit down, my boy. Smoke?
—No, thanks, Johnny said. I don’t smoke.
—Filthy habit. Never start it. Ah, to be innocent once again, my boy, as you are now, before women, tobacco, and bad whiskey ruined me!
The man behind the desk showed his even white teeth and shook soundlessly as if his body were being subjected to a series of galvanic shocks.
Johnny was quite certain then that he had never in his life seen anything or anybody remotely like the new teacher, and he had no reason to change that opinion in the weeks and months that followed as he became better acquainted with Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles.
From the beginning Raintree County called him ‘the Perfessor.’ Johnny Shawnessy, some cuts above the other hicks, as Cassius Carney had said, was careful always to preserve the first syllable pure, but the rest of the County said it perversely wrong; and even to Johnny this quaint distortion had an ideal fitness. For it was the same title that had been applied from time immemorial in the County to all the glib, fraudulent creatures who appeared at carnivals and festive anniversaries to sell hair tonic, quick success, and brand-new sexual potency to the common folk. Each of these egregious fakirs was known to his assistants and to the unschooled yokels as the Perfessor. It was a title of respect for an itinerant wizard who robbed the people by sheer power of language. Johnny had seen it happen a hundred times and never failed to enjoy the magnificently comic spectacle of a victory won by cunning from human hope and greed. So, too, Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles, most glittering and gifted of all the Perfessors who ever came to Raintree County, understood the aspirations and appetites of mankind. Quack and genius combined, he perpetrated on the citizens of Raintree County a continual farce, whipping and stinging them with the scorn of his incomparably superior intellect, yet in a manner so subtly ironic that they never perceived how entirely they were bilked. As for his Raintree County title, the Perfessor accepted it, as he accepted all things, with tolerant cynicism. In a way he belonged to Raintree County himself, and if he ever had a home, it was there.
For the Perfessor had been born in Raintree County, had left it during his childhood, and had not returned until the opening of the Academy. He still talked the County’s tongue, though in some ways his speech had been slightly altered as if through contact with an older, more sophisticated culture. Often the words he used seemed not wholly spontaneous but as if recollected and put quaintly together from the pages of innumerable books. Exceptional was the Perfessor’s memory for quotations, which he would toss out in the course of lecture or conversation, with skipping irrelevance and a shy smile from his unfocused eyes. Johnny was not always sure whether the Perfessor was quoting or extemporizing. Once after he and the Perfessor had become well acquainted, Johnny asked him about it, and the Perfessor admitted that he wasn’t always sure himself.
—What is all speech, John, but a quotation? When we are not quoting from books, we are quoting from Nature.
Perhaps because of his youth—he was only twenty-seven—the Perfessor placed his students on a basis of entire equality with himself. The boys used to go up to his quarters on the second floor of the Academy and sit around talking literature, philosophy, and politics while the Perfessor presided like a scurrilous and skeptic Greek, sometimes dispensing corn liquor and always cigars. Everyone smoked and drank but Johnny.
The Perfessor imported a great many shocking ideas into Raintree County. In sex, religion, politics, and literature he was a radical departure from everything the County taught. In the classroom, he curbed himself, but in private talk he gave out heretical doctrine. Exchanging his classroom pointer for a cane, he would swing down a country road with one of his disciples—more often Johnny Shawnessy than not—quoting from the incredible grab-bag of his memory, skipping from theme to theme, casting off words and ideas that fell on the County’s fertile soil like seeds of exotic, fastgrowing flowers. His private talk was a mixture of the learned and the colloquial. When he was in vein, his speech was a ceaselessly bright torrent of ideas and witticisms. At first Johnny listened as if charmed. Later he found that he himself became more eloquent than usual in conversation with the Perfessor. It was a little like reading Shakespeare and then becoming one himself. For the Perfessor included among his gifts the power to follow the will-o’-the-wisp of ideas without rancor or arrogance wherever the chase might lead. It seemed to Johnny that in the Perfessor he had discovered an alter ego. His teacher’s words often came to him like queer half-recollections of something he himself m
ight have been or thought a long time ago. The Perfessor, for his part, regarded Johnny as a special being.
—John, he said once, you don’t know how gifted you are. All ideas seem to exist in you already and to await only touching into life. You understand by hints, where someone else must read whole books and live a lifetime. Yours is the poet’s mind—but not your little simpering metrist and maker of sweet parlor verse. No, you make me think of the young Plato, eager for ideas. Or Homer, hearkening to legends. Or the genial young Elizabethan himself, steeped in life. But Raintree County has added something American—a touch of innocence that is like the earth, the sunshine, and the river. Never lose, my boy, this eagerness for life and this primitive innocence. As, alas! I did long ago! Perhaps I should never have left the County.
And the Perfessor’s eyes acquired a look of fake sadness.
Most of the time his words were curling and crackling around ideas that shocked even such enlightened beings as Garwood Jones, Cash Carney, and Johnny Shawnessy.
—The Christian Religion, the Perfessor remarked once, is the product of a dreadful mistake. Somehow the mind of humanity got obsessed with the bloody Hebrew legends and has been lugging around ever since the burden of this vindictive old man called God, who is equally repulsive in his rages and in his self-glorifying love! Pass the cigars, John.
Slightly stunned, Johnny would pass the cigars.
—Perfessor, Garwood said, if one word of that got out to the wrong parties in the County, you’d go out of town on a rail. In fact, I wouldn’t mind daubing on the tar myself.
They all argued with the Perfessor about these matters. Garwood, in particular, appealed to a strict construction of the Bible, as he did of the Constitution in the political debates held at the Academy.
—As for the Bible, said the Perfessor, it’s just a lot of old Jewish myths and archives, some of it pretty dull stuff. If we have to believe in myths, what’s wrong with selecting something beautiful. I would rather contemplate Venus’ cute behind than old Moses’ withered puss. Not that the Hebrews didn’t toss off some wonderful poetry now and then. They were wise, those old beards, and they knew the wine and the roses of life, as well as the ashes. Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love. By the way, did you ever know any Jewish women, Garwood?
Raintree County Page 17