There were some clouds, of course. Another letter from the Perfessor failed to sound very exultant. One part of it in especial disturbed Johnny.
As for a dark suspicion you say I mentioned in my last letter, I can’t even remember what it was, so it must not have been very important. Forget it, my boy, and be happy. You have a beautiful girl who loves you and whom you love. By all means, my boy, marry her, love her, beget broods of happy cherubim, go on, my boy, to greater and better things. . . .
This stereotype sounded vaguely familiar and thoroughly insincere to Johnny, and besides it was out of tune with the rest of the letter, which made merry at the expense of the sacred human institution of marriage.
As for the evasive remark concerning a dark suspicion, Johnny was perfectly well aware that Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles never forgot anything.
The worst thing about it all was that Johnny hadn’t stopped loving Nell Gaither. Everything he had done with Susanna and even Susanna’s beauty had merely inflamed the passion that he had for his own privately created Venus with the Raintree County face. In a way he felt that he had not been unfaithful to her. What had happened to him had been a strange accident of fate, caused by occult events and surroundings.
In that wild taking in deep grass under the tree, where the sun fell steeply slanting on two stones, and the leaves had dropped a thin brightness like sifted sunshine, and the tree had swayed, a slender and great reed, and he had seen not very far away the river where it was hardly to be told from the lake (or the lake where it was hardly to be told from the river—green waters swollen with beautiful lifeforms), then he had known that the secret of Raintree County was indeed a secret of water and earth and tree, stone, and the living golden seed, and he had known too that it was a shared secret and could only be carried in the vessel of a woman’s body, and he knew also that it must be brought from afar and bear a rhythmical (though, for the moment, a forgotten) name and that she who brought it must be likewise a creature of the river, though whether her hair was black or brown or golden did not greatly matter, and he had known too that she must bear upon her body a secret imperfection and he had known too, even in that savagely sweet moment, he had known already by anticipation that to learn the secret was also to learn duty and hot tears.
As he rode home in the night to the Home Place after the bachelor party, that secret plagued him with a delicious sorrow. The secret of human love and desire was to discover something that was at once universal and particular—beauty and a person. At Lake Paradise, he had been lost in the universal. It was only later that he realized that all life is personal beyond escape.
Ever since the Fourth of July outing, he had avoided seeing Nell and had allowed her note of reconciliation to go unanswered. Of course, it had been necessary to go to church, where she appeared without fail, imperially calm as usual. When he reminded himself that this person had once been naked in his arms and that her flowerlike mouth had clung to his in long, long kisses, he was sick with love.
It was not mere longing of the flesh; it was a total longing to possess someone. To him, Nell Gaither was an entire republic of beauty and nostalgic memory, which now he had to relinquish.
When he reached the Home Place, it was after midnight, and everyone else had gone to bed. He went to his room and undressed in the dark. When he pulled back the covers and lay down, his face touched something pinned to his pillow. It had been concealed under the cover. He lit a lamp and unpinned an envelope addressed, ‘To Johnny.’ Inside was a piece of letterpaper beautifully inscribed with a message:
One for whom you once professed affection would esteem it a generous action on your part, though undeserved on hers, if you would see her once again before you leave the County. She will be waiting near a certain spot sanctified to the memory of a profane but sweet encounter. Let your heart and the memory of a blissful hour (perilous, yes, but alas! all the more precious in recollection to one at least who shared its raptures) tell you the name of her who penned these lines.
He reread the note several times, savoring its stylistic beauties, which were as good as a signature. Probably one of his sisters (who were not very happy about the coming marriage) had connived in placing it on his pillow.
With perhaps insufficient reflection, he dressed again and started to slip out of the window, which was on the ground floor. Then he crawled back in and got a big volume out of the bookcase. He hunted among some private papers and keepsakes in a drawer and put something in the book. Then he climbed out of the window again and slipped out to the road. He crossed it and walked through a field following a lane that led to the river. He stayed out of the forest fringe of the river but followed it north along the Indian Battleground. Halfway up the long northwardflowing arm, he cut into the forest, walking among the leafless trees. The ground was deep with damp leaves. There was a cold, dripping mist in the air, almost a rain. He could hear the river trickling between dissolving banks. As he neared the bank opposite the Johnny Shawnessy oak and the pool where he and Nell had swum together, he made out the form of a young woman muffled in a long furcollared coat. She stood by the trunk of a big tree. She was hatless, and she had a large dark object under her arm.
—Hello, Nell.
—Hello, Johnny.
—I got the note, he said. It—it was beautifully written. I—I appreciate your thinking of me, especially at this time.
The tree under which they stood had extinguished the smaller trees within its widebranching circumference, and now that it stood in wintry nudity, the space beneath it was less dark than the forest around. The river swirled not five feet below them. He could make out Nell’s face, small and piquant at the top of her muffled form. It had a pensive, distant look.
—I have something, Johnny, I feel I ought to return to you, she said. I thought probably you would want it back, now—now that I don’t mean anything to you any more.
She held out the big dark object. It was no doubt The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
—And I’ve left in it your image, she said, which I would like to keep, but considering the poem on the back, feel I am no longer entitled to.
Her voice had a sweet, trailing, rehearsed sound.
—I won’t take it, Johnny said. I’m entirely at fault in this thing, and for that reason I feel that I ought in all honor to return something to you which is more precious to me than life itself but of which I have shown myself unworthy.
He held out the book he had brought with him, a large dark volume. Doubtless, it was a copy of The Complete Poetical Works of Lord Byron.
—And I’ve left in it your image, he said, the image of your beautiful face, which I will always remember with love and admiration.
—I won’t take it, Nell said.
They stood in darkness awkwardly presenting these two huge volumes, some twelve pounds of words, Johnny reflected, by two of the greatest poets of the English language, twelve pounds of distilled, passionate, violent, rhythmical, confused language, the outpouring of man’s desire for life, beauty, and the good, words of the wonderful tragi-comedy of human life.
—I really don’t want to give mine up, Nell said, her voice beginning to sound more and more dim and rehearsed. It’s just because I know you don’t care for me any more and because you’re being married. I just wanted to say to you, Johnny, in the words of that dear book which you gave me and inscribed to me, If ever thou didst hold me in thy——
Her voice, which had been getting smaller and higher, suddenly dissolved in a little shriek of anguish. Johnny tossed his book on the ground and put his arms around Nell. He turned her face up to his, and when he did, this face, which he had always seen (except once) so deceptively composed, was all wet with tears, and the flowerlike mouth kept turning down at the corners and emitting cries of sorrow. Then the mouth found his mouth and kissed him again and again as if it would devour him with hunger. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare fell on the ground. The two bodies tightened to each other. H
e kissed her mouth, her eyes, her forehead, her hair, her cheeks, her chin, her throat, and again and again her mouth, which melted into his with a taste of passion and farewell.
The old image of escape flashed into his mind. It would be so easy. He knew with a tempting certainty that he had only to say the word. Together they would slip away in the night. They would catch the early morning train at Three Mile Junction, and by morning they would have left Raintree County far behind. Somewhere in the West, the great and golden West, a man might begin life all over again and——
But he knew that he couldn’t say the word. Somehow the whole thing had been decided when he stood by the rock at the limit of the land. One betrayal was enough. Then he had said good-by to an older, sunnier County. Then the borders of his private little earth had dissolved into something called the Republic, full of duty and the memory of a crime.
—Nell, he said, I love you, and will always love you. I tell you now in the most absolute secrecy that my marriage is the result of an error on my part. My wife-to-be is a lovely woman whom I admire and whom I hope I may learn to love, but I wouldn’t now be saying good-by to you—forever—if I hadn’t made a slip. It was the afternoon of the Fourth of July, I had drunk all that whiskey, which wasn’t exactly my fault, and then we went on that picnic and——
—Everyone knows about that, Johnny, Nell said. O, dear! Johnny, why do you have so much conscience!
This remarkably feminine statement, so subtly illogical, startled him and brought him more or less to his senses. If everyone knew, then he was indeed right in pursuing the path of rectitude and in clearing his honor and good name before the County.
—That’s just like you, Johnny, Nell said fiercely, beginning to cry again with sharp intakes of breath after every few words. Why can’t you be a little bit bad like me! Maybe that’s why I love you so much! O, dear heaven, I wish I didn’t love you so much! O, Johnny, I do love you so much!
The turn of the last phrase twisted a cold knife in his heart. He began trying to get control of the situation. At last, after an interval during which her face had been hidden on his shoulder, Nell stepped back. There was a mournful dignity in her manner.
—We can always be friends, Johnny, she said in the best tradition of Raintree County.
—Sure, he said.
Now he was the one who felt like crying.
—I want to tell you, Johnny, that I haven’t lost my faith in you. Some day you will be a great man.
After the events of the last hour, Johnny tacitly agreed.
—Since we won’t either one of us take back the things, Nell said, maybe we’d best destroy them.
—Not the books, Johnny said. We’ll keep our books.
Even for a romantic gesture, he knew he couldn’t do malice on the Complete Works of Lord Byron and William Shakespeare. Besides there was nothing incriminating in the books.
That was why Johnny Shawnessy and Nell Gaither, both twenty years old, standing on a bank over the Shawmucky River at three o’clock of a raw December morning, opened their hands and allowed two stiff little cards to flutter into the cold pool of the river. That was why the eponymous monster of the river, the legendary Shawmucky himself, squatting goggle-eyed at the bottom of that wintry water, perhaps saw the innocent faces of a boy and girl fixed in attitudes of a lost republic, turning over and over and trailing lightly and sadly away in the pale stream.
And that was why Johnny Shawnessy stood in the twilight of early December dawn and watched the figure of a girl in a furcollared coat disappear in the forestfringe of the river.
Then he turned and walked home.
It was somehow in the best Johnny Shawnessy tradition that he was not exactly sad at this moment. He was filled with a young exultation neither joy nor sorrow. A wondrous secret had been almost shown to him. It had come to him out of cold and darkness and across fields of gray December and had thrust itself upon him, feminine and pleading. It said, I waited for you here beside the river, I am still waiting, I will always wait. It said, I love you, I love you, I have always loved you. This secret was a face from which he parted in the springtime of life. It was the bright little smiles of Raintree County that he would never see again. It was millions of such faces in the night, all wishing and waiting for the morrow and trying to find each other in the dark maze of time.
On the morrow he would rise and go forth and marry himself to a strange, wistful girl from the Deep South, and John Brown, too, would go forth to an equally ancient and mysterious wedding. Who were these two men and who were these millions waiting for the dawn, these citizens of the Republic, wounding and loving, losing and finding each other in the human landscape of time and fate? So long as John Wickliff Shawnessy could spring up joyous in the springing day, John Brown could never die, no one could ever die, and one heroic soul was enough to sustain the whole mass and fabric of the world. One hero who had found a white face in the night and had heard warm lips
THAT SHAPED HIS NAME, COULD BRING THE WHOLE RACE
AND THE WHOLE REPUBLIC TO
—‘A NEW LIFE,’ read the Senator, ‘began for me with my marriage at the close of the War, a life, which, alas, was fated to endure only a short time when the incomparable woman who became my wife was taken untimely to her . . .’ And so on and so on. I’ll skip a little in here.
The Senator shuffled the manuscript of his Memories of the Republic in War and Peace and stopped to relight his dead cigar.
—You know, boys, he said, it’s been a great political handicap to me not to have a wife and family.
—Your Midas touch has made ballot gold even out of that, Garwood, the Perfessor said. I’m planning to give that recent romantic gesture of yours a special column when I get back to New York.
The Senator wheezed amusement through the shattered stalk of his cigar, as he slowly pulled it into flame.
SENATOR KEEPS FIRE BURNING
IN HOLY SHRINE OF RECOLLECTION
(Epic Fragment from the Cosmic Enquirer)
In a private upstairs room of his palatial mansion in the Nation’s Capital, Washington, D. C., the distinguished Senator from Indiana was for a long time understood to keep the portrait of a mysterious woman, before which a flame perpetually burned. As the Senator has been for many years one of the most dashing bachelor attractions of Washington society, this rumor awakened a violent curiosity among Capital gossips. Several ladies were nominated by themselves and their friends to this secret niche in the Senator’s room. At last a malignant story gained wide circulation that the lady of the portrait was the wife of a foreign diplomat and that in the periods of her absence from Washington, the romantic Senior Senator from Indiana solaced himself by pagan rites before the image of his beloved. Unable any longer to ignore these invasions of his private life, the Senator invited the Washington press to his house, where, in a voice trembling with sorrow and indignation, he said:
’Gentlemen, for thirty-five years, I have endured in silence every species of abuse that unscrupulous enemies could heap upon me to discredit my long, and I hope honorable service to the Republic. But now that the venom of partisan hatred has crept into the most sacred recesses of my life, I can no longer be silent. I invite you to examine my home and satisfy your curiosity as to its contents. Go, gentlemen, I give you leave. Open the door. Enter. And, if you are so inclined, report what you see to the World, that the World may not again dare to invade the sacred privacy of a grieving human heart.’
Here, unable to continue, the Senator flung wide the door into the famous chamber. There, the gentlemen of the press beheld the portrait of a beautiful young woman, before which was a lamp burning with a clear white flame.
’This young woman,’ said the Senator, ‘was my wife, who died in childbirth in the year 1865 when I was an obscure young lawyer in my home state of Indiana.’
Like men caught in the commission of a foul crime, the newsmen slunk in shame from the room. Though all were members of a profession scarcely notorious for indulge
nce in the softer emotions, several eyes were observed to be filled with a sentimental moisture. This moving drama has touched the heart of the Nation and will, we believe, have no little effect in winning a tremendous victory for Senator Jones and his Hoosier supporters in the coming election. . . .
—I never had a wedding night, the Perfessor said. I must say I wouldn’t relish it. Marriage, I always thought, was a kind of funeral, in which we bury a part of ourselves.
The Senator laughed gently at this macabre witticism, but Mr. Shawnessy winced.
—Great institution, marriage, the Senator said. I remember my wedding night well enough.
He plucked from between his lips the halfspent cigar and holding it between his two fingers tipped the ash.
Mr. Shawnessy blushed, inhaled too much cigar smoke, coughed.
—Youth is a great thing, the Senator said. Ah, to be young again, gentlemen!
—Beauty is Youth, Youth Beauty, the Perfessor said.
—I remember the day of your first marriage, John, the Senator said. I’m afraid I was cockeyed. We sure gave you a hell of a send-off. Of course, no American then living will ever forget that day anyway. One of the most fateful and dramatic days in American History! That was the day they sent that damned old murderer and fanatic
December 2—1859
DOWN THE RIVER FOR YOU, MY BOY, GRAMPA PETERS SAID,
as he walked fatly up the bank to the churchyard. Johnny was leaning against a wagon surrounded by male friends and relatives. Fifty feet away, the church of Danwebster was whitely beautiful in the clear December morning.
—I’m plumb winded, Grampa Peters said. Must be a-gittin’ old. Had to come up, though, and see this boy hitched. Got yourself a fine looker, I hear. How long is it yit?