Kingsblood Royal by Lewis Sinclair 1885-1951

Author:Lewis, Sinclair, 1885-1951
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature
Publisher: The University of Adelaide Library
Published: 2004-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

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Last updated on Mon Mar 29 13:16:26 2010 for eBooks@Adelaide.

Sinclair Lewis

Kingsblood Royal

Chapter 30

He would hear this Reverend Dr. Jat Snood and see whether the fellow was as eloquent or as evil as the admiring world declared, and he would take Vestal with him into this obscure suburb of the dark city of man. For however jumpily Sophie might attract him, it did not occur to Neil that his devotion to Vestal could ever diminish—a phenomenon which has been the cause of rage to free women in their contest with secure wives throughout history.

When he suggested the spiritual slumming, the joke was that Vestal protested, “Why, I’m surprised at you, wanting to hear a vicious Ku Kluxer like Snood and his race-prejudices!”

“Oh, I’m all against him. I have a considerable respect for Negroes,” said Neil, affably.

“Since when?”

—Could she really stand it if I came out and told her? Oh, don’t be a fool, Kingsblood!

His cousin, Patricia Saxinar, former officer of the Navy, was about the house that evening of early fall, and they took her along. “Though,” said Pat, “I never did like to hear little dogs yap.”

“God’s Prophecy Tabernacle” was as humble as the stable in which the Savior was born, but much better publicized. It was a shed holding eight or nine hundred people, built of secondhand boards so cheaply painted over that you saw the old nail-holes. As you crossed the weedy and stinking waste-lot, scattered with ancient tires and decayed shoes, on the side of the tabernacle you read a sign in three-foot letters, “Low-down on the international conspiracy, revealed by God’s Word & Dr. Snood.”

The unplastered walls inside were scrofulous with red signs depicting both the Soviet premier and the Pope as demons leering through the flames—“which seems fair enough,” said Pat Saxinar. Hung at the far end was a diagram indicating that Napoleon, Tom Paine and all the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts were in hell, which promised a highly diverting show, lasting through eternity with tickets free, for the poor bakers and butchers and factory-workers who filled the hall. They gave the place a pleasant domestic flavor: hard-working fathers and mothers, in Sunday best, with children sucking lollipops. They were the salt of the earth; also, when used by dictators, they could become the saltpeter of the earth.

Pat fluttered, “Nice, plain folks, and my word, how they would enjoy a nice, plain lynching to break up the monotony. As a worshipper of Abe Lincoln, I love ’em, but I’d be terrified of this Old Testament gang, led by a Snood, if I were a Jew or an Italian or a Negro.”

Neil remembered that Pat’s relationship to Xavier Pic was of the same degree as his own. He could see these neighborly faces, these worn, bleached faces, horrible in the torchlight of his dream.

Before the service, the audience strolled at the back of the tabernacle, gossiped, agreed that the rain and the machinations of the Vatican had been somethin’ fierce here lately. Children ran after dogs and dogs ran after black beetles.

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