What was President Abraham Lincoln thinking in his forever lonely, barriered world? What were his own memories of the Republic in War and Peace, as he sat brooding in his box above the stage? Was his world the world of Corporal Johnny Shawnessy? Did they not together share the meanings of an eternal republic that both were striving to build, the one by statesmanship, the other by poetry?
Yes, the times were changing. The soldiers were waiting to go home. Now that the battle-years were nearly over, what was it that waited for the Republic and for John Wickliff Shawnessy? All stages were like great stereopticons into which one looked with an illusion of depth and reality. Might not a man of keen vision look into the boxlike diorama of the stage and see shining cities on the land, exultant tomorrows!
The stage was empty, as two ladies went off to the right and a man to the left. Over the ebbing applause and laughter, there had been a sharp, hard sound that made Corporal Johnny Shawnessy vaguely uneasy as he tried to fit it into the Play. He seemed to be trying to remember something that he ought not to have forgotten.
Just then an amazing thing happened to the Play.
A man was falling through the air, violently swinging his arms, tipping over precariously and landing heavily on the stage. It seemed a furious and fantastic piece of nonsense. The man had landed on his bent leg and hands, he was scrambling to his feet with a catlike, frantic speed, he stood up, half-ran, half-hopped like a crazy cripple to the middle of the stage brandishing a dagger, his white face was lit with two black balls of eyes, his mouth spat a deformed ejaculation into the hushed theatre, and then with maimed fury he ran off the stage on the left side.
So unexpected was this apparition that it seemed to Johnny it might have shot dreamlike from the musing part of himself across the outward world. Like everyone else in the theatre he went on watching and waiting for some sequel to explain the thing.
—Where’d he come from? someone said.
Just then, across the growing tumult of the theatre a woman’s shriek lay like a lash, raw with anguish and unbelief. People began to look toward the President’s box, from which and only which the dark, dagger-carrying man could have leaped.
For the moment, nothing could be seen in the President’s box. But the stage had lost its look of legend and fixity. The actors were walking across it, making natural gestures, their faces expressive of real emotions. One was trying to tell the crowd something. Words came from somewhere and began to be repeated in the crowd.
—The President has been shot!
Suddenly, what had been a pointless farce had pulled off its little grinning mask and had taken for its stage the whole Republic, for its lines history, for its audience the generations. In the darkness and confusion of Ford’s Theatre, Corporal Johnny Shawnessy and his companions had become supernumeraries in the cast, anonymous faces in a cry of citizens.
—Well, damn it, why don’t somebody do something instead of just standing around!
—Why’d they let the fella get away?
—Who done it?
—Maybe it’s a trick.
—I thought it was part of the celebration.
—Well, why don’t somebody do something instead of just standing around!
Most of the crowd in the balcony were just standing or trying vaguely to go somewhere. Many people hadn’t seen what happened. Most of them hadn’t heard the shot. The Perfessor, as usual, kept his head.
—I’m going down to see what I can find out, he said. If I’m not mistaken, I know the man who leaped down to the stage. Pardon me, folks, I’ll see you later at the hotel.
The Perfessor pushed off into the crowd and disappeared, leaving Johnny to take care of Bessie.
There was a clot of confusion now at the door leading to the President’s box. The door was suddenly broken through, and an usher let someone in. A young man in uniform was at the door, his arm bleeding.
Now people began jamming to the exits or pushing toward the front of the theatre. Someone kept crying out,
—Clear the theatre! Clear the theatre!
From the pit, someone was lifted up and shoved bodily into the President’s box, several hands reaching out for him. An actor ran across the stage and passed up a basin and a white sheet. Someone was trying to shout something to the crowd from the stage, but no one could hear it.
—What’s he saying?
—Why don’t he talk louder?
—Why don’t they get out and catch that fella?
—I don’t see the President. Do you suppose he’s dead?
—What’s he saying down there anyway?
A great many people decided to remain in the balcony. People were trying to get in through the exits as others pushed to get out.
Johnny and Bessie talked excitedly with each other and the people around them, all saying the same things over and over. No one had any idea what had happened, and many expected to find that it was all an accident or a false scare of some kind.
Johnny shared the general feeling of helplessness and confusion. Life had been proceeding with a pretense of orderliness, and now abruptly chaos had come, leaving individual human beings weakly shaking at the ends of strings, puppets whose purposeful motion had abruptly been suspended. He had had this feeling often before and had hoped never to repeat it. It was a feeling that men often had in battle.
In a little while four soldiers came from the corridor leading to the President’s box. They were bearing a long, limp body as tenderly as they could.
—It’s him.
The crowd was made to stand back as the soldiers carried the body down the stair. The crowd poured after, funneling into the jammed stairway. When Johnny and his companions reached the street, they saw six men holding the President’s body, standing in the middle of the street, waiting for something. A young man in Army uniform was pointing and shouting. The soldiers then carried their burden across the street, up the steps of a house, and through the front door.
The Play was over. And the Play was not over, but would go on forever.
—What can we do?
—Is he dead?
—I don’t know.
—Where was he shot?
—Through the head, they said.
—It’s bad then.
—He can’t live. They say he can’t live.
—What can we do?
The street began to fill up with more and more people from all parts of the City. Rumors flashed up and down the crowd, crackling from lip to lip, leaving crisscrossed trails of alarm.
—Secretary Seward’s been murdered in his bed. It’s a plot to wipe out the Government.
—Whole Cabinet’s been assassinated.
—They say Grant was attacked on the train.
—Vice-President Johnson was killed in his bed.
—They couldn’t win fair, so they tried foul, goddamn them!
A shout of angry voices came from down the street. A man was being pushed and struck by the crowd.
—What’d he do?
—Is that the murderer?
—I think he called the President a name.
—Yes, he said he was glad the son of a bitch got shot.
—Hang the son of a bitch up!
—Hang him, hell! Hanging’s too good for him.
—Poor old Abe. Goddammit, why’d they have to pick on him now for!
—It’s a plot to wipe out the Government.
The crowd was so thick and wild that Johnny decided to take Bessie back to the hotel. There was no use trying to meet Miss Daphne Fountain.
Everywhere, the feeling was the same. Almost everyone looked and talked as if an unbearable personal calamity had occurred.
—What’s going to happen now?
—Poor old Abe.
—I hope he pulls through.
—What’s going to happen now?
—What’ll we do without Abe?
—My God, Johnson will be President now. I always thought it was a mistake to elect him.
—
Johnson, hell! He’s been killed too, they say. And the whole Cabinet. We won’t have any Government.
—Poor old Abe. I hope he pulls through.
—What’s going to happen now?
At the hotel Johnny stayed with Bessie a few minutes and then said good night. He felt all shocked and trembling as if a musketball had torn through his belly.
He went back out into the streets. He wanted to be out hunting for someone or something, awake and helping. And yet he had seldom before felt so helpless.
A feeling of ubiquitous disaster hung over the people. It was as though the whole city were bleeding from the pistol bullet that had felled the President.
As the night passed, Corporal Johnny Shawnessy walked through the streets, his face fevered and dripping from the mist. He kept thinking of the Army. If only he felt around him the confident strength of those sixty thousand young men, his comrades, and the fierce leadership of Sherman!
Reports kept coming all night long about the President’s condition. The President was steadily sinking, and no hope was held for his recovery.
In the cold, small hours of the night, the Play streamed meaninglessly on, could not be stopped, must be played out. The body of Abraham Lincoln lay dying in the night with a bullet in the brain.
Black despair, beginning to take more and more the form of anger, sat upon the City. Men waited everywhere for a cold dawn.
In the morning came the report that the President had died at twenty-two minutes after seven. It seemed that, after all, the Government stood. Seward was wounded but not dead. No one else had been attacked. The situation was under control. Johnny went back to Ford’s Theatre where he was in time to see a dark casket carried from the house across the street. To a sound of bells tolling and a lowering of flags to halfmast, the coffined body was borne away by soldiers up the muddy street. In the dismal weather, Ford’s Theatre still had the rainlimp bunting on its face.
Sleepless for a night, exhausted, sick, Corporal Johnny Shawnessy wandered in the City of Washington. He kept feeling that he was himself obscurely at fault. I was in the theatre, he told himself. I might have reached out and prevented the thing from happening. The President passed as close to me as the length of my arm, and was alive and surrounded by friends. Then Death came in and cut him down.
It was some consolation to Johnny to see that others were grieving like himself. Hundreds of people wept openly in the streets, in the churches, in crowded cabs and public buildings. In one great death, all the deaths of the War achieved a representative.
Late in the day, he got back at last to the hospital. He was so sick and weak he was ashamed to see the staff, but for a while no one paid attention to him. The inmates of the hospital were fretfully gloomy. Later, a doctor found him lying in bed.
—Where’ve you been, Shawnessy?
—Celebrating.
The doctor looked him over.
—You’ve got three degrees of fever. Fine thing.
Johnny knew he had had a relapse. He lay in bed, hot and breathless.
I must live, he kept telling himself. I must live and get well.
He thought of the President’s body in state somewhere in the Capital City, of the blackedged newspapers, of the silent crowds all over the Republic, of his own people back in Raintree County. He wondered if they were thinking of him, if they were saying prayers for him.
Waves of alternate exaltation and sorrow went over him as he thought of Abraham Lincoln. In this death, the War had had its last great death. He must bear the memory of this great death tenderly. It was good to die for mankind—it was a good and great thing to give one’s life in battle for one’s fellows.
But it was also a bad thing, it was a pitiful and dirty thing to die—to die with a bullet in the brain, to gasp life away in the night while the women sobbed and shrieked and the rain fell. And it was an awful thing to die with a bullet in the breast and rot in a nameless grave hundreds of miles from home. And it was a bad, dirty, pitiful thing to die in a hospital and become a yellow corpse when you were twenty-five years old and had the world before you.
Again he felt remorse, as if it were partly his own fault that he had permitted a figure to vault across the stage of Ford’s Theatre, coming out of the unexpected part of himself to burst the boundaries of the little farce. Through a lack of vigilance, he had let the web spin itself out of control for a moment, and this thing had happened. He kept returning to the fated moment and wondering if it were not all a dream. How easily time might have run on at that point, playing the farce to a conclusion! The slightest weakening in the murderer’s resolve, the least impediment thrown by chance in his way, and the thing wouldn’t have happened. The following morning, the newspapers would have carried a notice, saying that the President and his wife had spent a pleasant evening at Ford’s Theatre and had enjoyed the play.
And Corporal Johnny Shawnessy would have met a young woman named Daphne Fountain, who would always be now a fictitious girl waiting in the wings of a lost theatre, watching a never-finished play and expecting to meet a fictitious soldier named Corporal Johnny Shawnessy.
But now the thing was done. And now that it was done, it was part of the vast design; it had to be fitted to its place. It was all a legend now, a story of the Republic. And those who were young must survive and give the legend to their children. The light was breaking on the land. Abraham Lincoln was dead, but the Republic would live.
Corporal Johnny Shawnessy felt that he had come to Washington on a mysterious mission, one upon which hung the Fate of the Nation. He must be with the Army again, and tell them that he had completed his mission. It had been a strange mission—to be an image-bearer of the Republic. He had been brought delicately out of the fighting for this purpose. He must get well and be with the comrades again and march with them for a last time, and then he must go back at last, he must go back home.
Sometime in the afternoon of April 15, 1865, he finally went to sleep.
And he dreamed that he stood on a hill overlooking some historic river. Dense masses of soldiers were coming up to the river in the forlorn dawn. The tide of their ranked faces spread, engulfed the plain below him, rose in the streets of a little town, advanced with a shrill murmur. They came on crying the names of lost nations, states, commonwealths, cities on the delta. The cry went up and down their ranks, their ghastly drums beat up the charge, the officers turned and waved them forward with swords. They were entering the river, crossing to the attack. They foamed and swirled on little breasts of earth above the town. They choked the roads with wagons, the drivers cursed in high yelps, lashing the bodies of decayed horses.
They were all dead men. Lost faces, they passed him, risen from clotted waters. They fought a war of Events, historic, entirely legendary, in a world lost, lost. And somewhere among them, he remembered, was a young soldier of happy memory, long dead, marching forever in his sentimental landscape to a city on the sea.
If he could only stop them from repeating the somnambulism of the Great War and show them that it had all been only a dream in the first place, a nightmare of human contriving! But the dream went on as if to repeat every act of the Civil War and re-create all its dead thousands and hundreds of thousands. And he slept and dreamed in such a fevered and deep sleep that when he awoke on Sunday morning, it was a while before he remembered what city it was near which he was lying and
WHAT IT WAS THAT THE BIG BELLS OF THE CITY
WERE TOLLING SO MOURNFULLY ALL
THE
—TIME was, the Perfessor was saying, when a man’s life had a kind of sweet vagueness. Back in the Thirteenth Century a man lived in the bosom of the ages, even if he couldn’t flush the toilet. He never dreamed he wouldn’t go on living, although of course it might be in Dante’s Inferno. Since then we’ve come a long way. Today a thinking man knows that the earth spouted from the sun a few billion years ago, cooled down into a collection of atoms and finally became encrusted with something called life, an anomalous stuff tha
t scummed the place up. He knows that life, like the matter that spawned it, is regulated by brute causality. Man has emerged from the period of his illusions and is approaching the age of Science and the Machine.
—What will the Twentieth Century be like, Professor?
—Maybe you’ve seen my articles on the subject—the World Fifty Years From Now, and all that crap. My guess is that we’ll live in a world of pushbuttons, dynamos, motors. Man will find faster and faster ways of getting nowhere. They tell me there’s a chap up here in Kokomo who’s had some luck with a horseless carriage. Well, one of these days they’ll roll Dobbin up and put him under a hood. We won’t stop there. Man will conquer the air too in something faster than a balloon, and the earth will shrink. Nelly Bly’s globecircling antics will look pale by comparison. Jules Verne will be a quaint antiquity. Some day, no doubt, man will blow himself right up to the moon. It’s all a question of exploiting matter—coal, gasoline, electricity. Man makes a greater reliance on matter—that’s all—as he understands it better.