Empire

1

IN THE BRIGHT WINTER SUNLIGHT, Henry Adams, like some ancient pink-and-white orchid, sat in the window seat and stared down at Lafayette Square, while John Hay sat opposite him, studying the latest dispatches from Moscow. Hay was delighted to have lived long enough to welcome Adams home from Europe.

The summer and fall had nearly ended him. On Theodore’s orders, he had been obliged to speak at Carnegie Hall in New York City to sum up the achievements of the Republican Party in general and of Theodore Rex in particular. Hay had enjoyed perjuring himself before the bar of history. Of Roosevelt’s bellicosity, Hay had proclaimed, with a straight face, “He and his predecessor have done more in the interest of universal peace than any other two presidents since our government was formed.” Adams had thought the adjective “universal” sublime. “He works for universal peace-whatever that is-stasis?-through terrestrial warfare. You have said it all.” But Hay was well-pleased with the speech, as was the President. The emphasis was on the essential conservatism of the allegedly progressive Roosevelt. The tariff needed reform, true, but that was best done by the magnates themselves. This went down very well in New York City, where the President had been obliged to go, hat in hand, to beg money from the likes of Henry Clay Frick. Thanks to the essential conservatism of Parker, the great magnates, from Belmont and Ryan to Schiff and Ochs, were financing the Democratic Party. Roosevelt, with no Mark Hanna to raise money, was obliged to make any number of reckless accommodations in order to extort money from the likes of J. P. Morgan and E. H. Harriman. Meanwhile Cortelyou was blackmailing everyone he knew to give to the campaign.

Hay had never seen anything quite like Roosevelt’s panic: there was no other word to describe his behavior during the last few months of a campaign that he had no chance of losing. Bryan had stayed aloof until October; then he moved amongst his people warning them of Roosevelt’s shady campaign financing practices and of his love for war. Bryan seldom had much to say about Parker, who ended by losing not only the entire West but New York State, the source of his support. It was the greatest Republican victory since 1872. Theodore was-and continued to be-ecstatic. He had also insisted that Hay stay on for the second term.

“I should get a telescope.” Adams squinted in the bright sun. “Then I could see who pays calls on Theodore. I’ve been waiting for a glimpse of J. P. Morgan’s incandescent nose ever since I got back.”

“That particular incandescence is probably already out of joint. I don’t think Theodore will humor him, or any of the others.”

“Betrayal?” Adams’s eyes shone.

“Fidelity to… earlier principles. You know, Bryan’s in town, holding court at the Capitol. He’s been praising Theodore…”

“A bad sign.”

“He also says that if the Democrats were to come out for nationalizing the railroads, they would sweep the country.”

“Why not?” was the response of the co-author of Tales of Erie, easily the most savage indictment ever made of the railroad owners, and their exuberant, never-ending corruption of courts, Congress, White House. Then, triumphantly, “Here they come!”

Hay managed to be perpendicular when Lizzie Cameron entered the room with her daughter, Martha, who was, at eighteen, larger, darker, duller than her mother, who was still, in Hearts’ eyes at least, the world’s most beautiful woman, the Helen of Troy of Lafayette Park, now resident, mysteriously, at the Lorraine, a New York City residential hotel in Forty-fifth Street, convenient to the theaters, and Rector’s, and museums, where Martha was to be finished off at last and then, her mother prayed, grandly married. “La Dona.” Adams welcomed his beloved with a deep bow; bestowed a kiss on Martha’s cheek. “I never thought to see the two of you here again.”

“Oh, yes, you did. John,” Lizzie took Hay’s hand and gave him the cold appraising Sherman look, “go to Georgia. This minute. You are mad to stay on here. I’ll wire Don…”

“I’d be madder to go now we’ve got you back, if only for the Diplomatic Reception.” Lizzie had asked Henry to put her and Martha on the guest list for the January 12 Diplomatic Reception at the White House. This would be, in effect, Martha’s official, and inexpensive, social debut.

“I’m a pauper!” Lizzie let drop her ermine cape on the small chair by the fire, where Adams always sat. Then she sat on the cape.

“You’re not a pauper. Don’t be dramatic, Mother.” Martha had her father’s weighty manner if not actual weight. “Mother wants to reopen Twenty-one. I think she’s mad.”

“Everyone, it would appear, is mad today.” Hay sat on a sofa’s arm, from which he could stand up without effort. “Don’t discourage your mother. We want her back. Next door to us. Forever.”

“See?” Lizzie stared up at Martha, whose body now blocked the fire. In the bright air Hay watched as motes of dust floated and glittered like minuscule fragments of gold, a pretty sight-if of course he was not having another seizure like the one where he had imagined himself in Lincoln’s office. He dared not ask the others if they, too, noted the bright dust.

Then Clara greeted mother and daughter, and their diminished circle was closed at last. “What sort of husband would you like?” asked Clara, as if she herself could provide one, according to Martha’s specifications.

“Rich.” Lizzie was still radiant, Hay decided; and unchanged.

Adams was still besotted with her; and unchanged. “The rich are boring, La Dona.”

“I think I’d like Mr. Adams.” Martha was cool. “He is never boring, except when he sees a dynamo.”

Clara, a master of small talk, disliked idle talk. “Blaise Sanford. He’s the right age. He’s built himself a palace in Connecticut Avenue. He’s half-owner of the Tribune, so he has something to do, always important. And he lives part of the year in France. I think,” she turned to Hay, “we should set things in motion.”

“You set them in motion, I have the Russians to deal with. They’ve just surrendered Port Arthur to the Japanese.” Hay held up the folder containing the Moscow dispatches.

Adams was suddenly alert. “Now the pieces rearrange themselves. Brooks predicted this, you know. Now let’s see if his next prediction comes true. Russia will undergo some sort of internal revolution, he says, and their empire will then fall apart or, if they survive the revolution, expand at our expense. England is at an end, civilization shudders to a halt, and…”

“I cannot get enough of your gloom.” Hay did enjoy the Porcupine’s chiliastic arias. “But we’ve got Japan to deal with in Asia, and a peace to be made in order to keep…”

“Open doors.” Everyone, including Martha, repeated the magic meaningless phrase.

“I would rather be known for that than for ‘Little Breeches.’ ”

“I’m afraid, sonny,” said Adams contentedly, “your future fame will rest on an ever greater vulgarity, ‘Perdicaris alive…’ ”

“ ‘… or Raisuli dead!’ ” the others intoned.

“The fatal gift for phrase,” sighed Adams, as happy as Hay had ever seen him, with Lizzie beside him, and all the remaining Hearts in the room. Then, as if to complete Adams’s felicity, the door to the Bright study now framed the thick rotundity of his houseguest, whose bald head shone in the winter light, like Parian marble, whose great eyes looked merrily but shrewdly on the company. “I have,” intoned Henry James, “already, in the literal sense, merely, broken my fast, but as rumors of a late-ah, collation is being served à la fourchette, so much tidier than au canif, I have hurried home from my morning round of calls, filling the city with a veritable blizzard of pasteboard.” Then, ceremoniously, James greeted Lizzie and Martha, while Adams took a calling-card from his vest pocket, and presented it to James.

“What-or, rather, who is this?” James held the card close to his eyes.

“Delivered by its owner while you were out.”

“ ‘George Dewey,’ ” James read in a voice resonant with awe, “ ‘Admiral of the Navy.’ My cup runneth over, with salt water. Why,” he addressed the room, “would a national hero, whom I’ve not had the pleasure-honor-distinction of meeting, descend, as it were, from the high, glorious-ah, poop-deck of his flagship, which I can imagine moored with chains of gold in the Potomac, all flags unfurled, and submit himself to dull earth in order to pay a call on someone absolutely unknown in heroic circles, and less than a ripple, I should think, in naval ones?”

Hay found James in his old age far more genial and less alarming than in his middle age. For one thing, the appearance was milder since he had shaved off his beard; in fact, the resulting combination of bald head and rosy smooth ovoid face put one in mind of Humpty Dumpty. “You are a fellow celebrity,” said Hay. “That’s all. The press, which defines us all, celebrates both you and him. Now he comes to celebrate you and, in the act, celebrates himself yet again.”

“He is a wondrous fool,” said Adams. “Stay longer and I’ll invite him here.”

“No. No. No. The ladies of America are waiting for me to tell them about Balzac. So much-ah, money can be earned by lecturing, I had no idea.”

James had not been in Washington since 1882; and he had not been in the United States for some years. “Contemptible, effete snob!” Theodore Rex would roar whenever the name was mentioned. But Theodore was himself sufficiently a snob, if not effete, to realize that since the reigning novelist of the English-speaking world had come home to take one last long look at his native land, the President must invite him to the Diplomatic Reception. With each passing year in the White House, Theodore became more royal, and his receptions and dinner parties now had a definite Sun King style to them. Therefore, protocol required that America’s great writer be received by his sovereign. James had been delighted and, wickedly, amused by the invitation; his view of the President was every bit as dark as the President’s of him, but where Theodore thundered, James mocked softly; Theodore Rex was simply a noisy jingo, not to be encouraged.

“We are,” observed James, as Adams led them into the dining room, where silver and crystal sparkled, and William stood at benign attention, “re-creating the house-party at Surrenden Dering. Mrs. Cameron. The delicious Martha-now grown. Ourselves…”

Hay thought, with a sudden guilty pang, of Del, whom he almost never thought of any more. James, aware that the party had lost a member to death, shifted swiftly to Caroline. “What of her?” he asked. Adams told him. James was interested, as always, in variations from the usual. A young American woman who chose to publish a newspaper was not quite within his grasp, but Hay had the sense that by the time James’s visit to what he called “the city of conversation” was over, Caroline would be defined in Jamesian terms.

Lizzie asked James, point-blank, what he thought of Washington. The Master’s frown was not without charm, as he affected an air of total concentration, like a man doing a complex sum in his head. “The subject so-vast. The language so-inadequate,” he began, a stick of Maggie’s cornbread breaking off in his hand. “One must be subjective, no other approach will do, so-to live here, for me, not John, a great minister of state or, in short, a statesman in his proper state, the capital, or Henry, the historian, the observer, the creator of theories of history and-ah, energy, what better place to watch the world from? You, too, Mrs. Cameron, are of this world, though divided in allegiance, I suspect, with a bias for our shabby old European world, but I see you here, glittering at the center, with Mrs. Hay and, perhaps, Martha, too, but as for me-ah, my passion for crudely chipped beef is still remembered in this house.” James filled his plate without dropping so much as a single syllable of a speaking style which hardly varied now from his novels, which were, for Hay, unlike the writer himself, too long of wind for the page while delightful when accompanied by James’s beautiful measured voice, far less British in its accent than that of Henry Adams, who sounded exactly like the very Englishmen who had so resolutely snubbed him and his father during the latter’s ministry to St. James’s. “… as for me to live here would be death and madness. The politics are of no account when one is not a politician, while the constellation-not to mention promiscuous congregation-of celebrities would quite smother me…”

2

CAROLINE WAS SURPRISED at how few disagreements there were between herself and Blaise. The new publisher knew his job, if not Washington. Trimble continued to put out the paper. Caroline gladly surrendered to Blaise the task of wringing advertising money from their mutual relatives, and everyone else. He had gone twice to Mrs. Bingham’s; and showed no great disdain. Although Frederika was helping him furnish the palace, he seemed to have no particular interest in her, or in anyone. He had become, in some mysterious way, a creature of Hearst. It was as if their close association had made it impossible for him to find anyone else interesting; yet Blaise did not much like Hearst personally. Obviously, this was a case of inadvertent fascination. Luckily, it was a very useful one for the Tribune. Blaise, was, by any standard, an excellent publisher.

As Marguerite helped Caroline dress for the Diplomatic Reception, she counted the number of days which would bring her to the magic, if not exactly joyous in itself, twenty-seventh birthday: fifty-two days, and she would be able to soar, on eagle-wings of gold. But soar where? What would change? other than the constant dull worry that money was in short supply. John had paid his debts; and remained, at her request, in New York. Jim seldom missed a Sunday; and she was reasonably content. But Marguerite, who was not always-as opposed to usually-wrong, was right when she said that so ridiculous a situation could not go on forever. Mrs. Belmont had made it possible, if not exactly fashionable, to divorce a husband and still remain within the world. That was progress. But divorce implied an alternative, in the form of yet another marriage, and except for Jim, there was no one who interested her; and Jim was beyond her reach, even if she had been so minded to reach out, which she was not. Still, it was now an absolute fact that Caroline had no more use for John Apgar Sanford; and he had none for her. Only Emma was satisfactory.

Blaise arrived in a motor car, with a handsome uniformed driver, who helped Caroline into the back seat, where Blaise was resplendent in white tie. “We are,” Caroline observed, “a couple.”

“For the purposes of Diplomatic Receptions, anyway.” He was more relaxed with her now. The meeting on the river-boat had been their lowest moment. Relations could only improve, or break off entirely. They had improved. “Court will be unusually brilliant tonight.” Caroline turned into the Society Lady. “Mr. Adams is not coming, but he is sending not only Henry James but Saint-Gaudens and John La Farge-literature, sculpture, painting will celebrate our sovereign and decorate his court.”

“He is so full of himself.”

“No more than Mr. Hearst.”

“Hearst’s an original. He’s done something.”

“Isn’t the… the… the Panama Canal something?”

“Nothing compared to reporting…”

“… and inventing…”

“… news.” This was an old debate between them, or, rather, discourse, since they were generally in agreement. To determine what people read and thought about each day was not only action but power of a kind no ruler could, with such regularity, exercise. Caroline often thought of the public as a great mass of shapeless modelling clay which she, in Washington, at least, could mould with what she chose to put in the columns of the Tribune. No wonder that Hearst, with eight newspapers, and a magazine or two, felt that he could-even should-be president. No wonder Theodore Roosevelt genuinely hated and feared him.

The East Room of the White House had been simplified to the point of brilliance, and the result was more royal than republican. Also, the Roosevelts had increased the number of military aides, their gold-braid loopings complementing the quantities of gold-and-silver braid worn by the diplomatic corps. The astonishing McKinley pumpkin seats, each fountaining a sickly palm, had long since vanished; the mustard rug was now only a memory of a time when the East Room was like the lobby of a Cleveland hotel. The floor was now shining parquet, the chandeliers were more elaborate than ever, while the sparse furniture was much gilded and marbled. Red silk ropes were everywhere, in order to control the public, which were allowed, at certain hours, to wander through their sovereign’s palace.

The President and Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt stood at the room’s center, shaking hands, as glittering aides discreetly moved the guests along. Theodore was more than ever stout, and hearty, and delighted with himself, while Edith Roosevelt was her usual calm self, ever ready to curb her volatile mate, whose self-love was curiously contagious.

“Very sound. Very sound on Japan, Mrs. Sanford,” was his greeting to Caroline. “Things are about to happen.” Then he looked very grim, as Cassini, dean of the diplomatic corps, approached, Marguerite in tow. Caroline exchanged amiable whispers with Edith Roosevelt, and moved on. President and Russian Ambassador had nothing to say to each other, and contrary to all diplomatic usage said nothing to each other. Marguerite looked worn. She had had a love affair that had gone wrong, and now the word was that Cassini was to be replaced. End of glory, thought Caroline, as Henry James, the embodiment of all literary glory, shook her hand warmly and said, “At last. At last.”

“It has been almost seven years since Surrenden Dering,“ Caroline observed, with some not entirely banal wonder at the rapidity of time’s passage.

“You never come to our side of the water, so I’ve come to yours.” James lowered his voice in mock fear, as if Theodore might be listening. “Ours. Ours! What have I said? Lèse majesté des États-Unis.”

“I shall be on the other side this summer,” said Caroline, as they crossed the room, for the most part filled with people that she knew. Washington was indeed a village still; and so a newcomer like Henry James was a mild sensation. Once the diplomatic reception was concluded, there would be a supper for the chosen few, among them James and Caroline but not Blaise.

They paused in an empty corner, as the Hays made their entrance. “Our Henry refuses to come,” James observed with quiet satisfaction. “He was here earlier this month, and he has now declared that he has had his absolute fill of the sublime Theodore, whilst conceding how strenuous, vigorous and, yes, let us acknowledge it, supple, our sovereign is, the sun at the center of the sky, with us as… as…”

“Clouds,” Caroline volunteered.

James frowned. “I once was obliged to let go an excellent typewriter-operator because whenever I paused for a word, she would offer me one, and always not simply the wrong word, but the very worst word.”

“I’m sorry. But I quite like us as clouds.”

“Why,” asked James, “with the delicious exception of yourself, are there no beautiful women at court?”

“Well, there is Mrs. Cameron-if not Martha.”

“Alas, not Martha. But Mrs. Cameron’s a visitor. What I take to be the local ladies here are plainer than what one would find at a comparable-if anything in poor shabby London could be compared to this incomparability-reception.”

Caroline repeated the Washington adage that the capital was filled with ambitious energetic men and the faded women that they had married in their green youth. James was amused. “The same doubtless applies to diplomats…”

They were joined by Jules Jusserand, the resplendent French ambassador, and the three lapsed into French, a language James spoke quite as melodiously as his own. “What did the President say to you?” asked Jusserand. “We were all watching the two of you, with fascination.”

“He expressed his delight-the very word he used, as, apparently, he always does-at my-and his-election to something called the National Institute of Arts and Letters, which has, parthenogetically, given birth to an American Academy, a rustic version of your august French Academy, some half a hundred members whose souls if not achievements are held to be immortal.”

“What,” said Jusserand, “will you wear?”

“Ah, that vexes us tremendously. As the President and I tend to corpulence, I have proposed togas, on the Roman model, but our leader John Hay favors some sort of uniform like-Admiral Dewey’s.” James bowed low, as the hero passed by them. “He is my new friend. We have exchanged cards. I know,” James swept the air with an extended arm, “everyone at last.”

“You are a lion,” said Caroline.

Supper was served in the new dining room, where a number of tables for ten had been set. Henry James was placed at the President’s table, a Cabinet lady between them. Saint-Gaudens was also at the monarch’s table, with Caroline to his right. Edith Roosevelt had come to depend upon Caroline for those occasions where the ability to talk French was necessary, not that the great American Dublin-born sculptor, despite his name, spoke much French. He lived in New Hampshire, not France. Of Lizzie Cameron, who had posed for the figure of Victory in Saint-Gaudens’s equestrienne monument to her uncle General Sherman, he said, “She has the finest profile of any woman in the world.”

“How satisfactory, to have such a thing, and to have you acknowledge it.”

Unfortunately, a table of ten was, for the President, no place for the ritual dinner-party conversation: first course, partner to right; second course, partner to left; and so on. The table for ten was Theodore’s pulpit, and they his congregation. “We must see more of Mr. James in his own country.” Theodore’s pince-nez glittered. As James opened his mouth to launch what would be a long but beautifully shaped response, the President spoke through him, and James, slowly, comically, shut his mouth as the torrent of sound, broken only by the clicking of teeth, swept over the table. “I cannot say that I very much like the idea of Mark Twain in our Academy.” He looked at James, but spoke to the table. “Howells, yes. He’s sound, much of the time. But Twain is like an old woman, ranting about imperialism. I’ve found there’s usually a physical reason for such people. They are congenially weak in the body, and this makes them weak in nerves, in courage, makes them fearful of war…”

“Surely,” began James.

The President’s shrill voice kept on. “Everyone knows that Twain ran away from the Civil War, a shameful thing to do…”

To Caroline’s astonishment, James’s deep baritone continued under the presidential tirade. The result was disconcerting but fascinating, a cello and a flute, simultaneously, playing separate melodies.

“… Mr. Twain, or Clemens, as I prefer to call him…”

“… testing of character and manhood. A forge…”

“… much strength of arm as well as, let us say…”

“… cannot flourish without the martial arts, or any civilization…”

“… distinguished and peculiarly American genius…”

“… desertion of the United States for a life abroad…”

“… when Mr. Hay telephoned Mr. Clemens from the Century Club to…”

“… without which the white race can no longer flourish, and prevail.” The President paused to drink soup. The table watched, and listened, as Henry James, master of so many millions of words, had the last. “And though I say-ah, tentatively, of course,” the President glared at him over his soup spoon, “the sublimity of the greatest art may be beyond his method, his-what other word?” The entire table leaned forward, what would the word be? and on what, Caroline wondered, was James’s astonishing self-confidence and authority, even majesty, based? “Drollery, that so often tires, and yet never entirely obscures for us the vision of that mighty river, so peculiarly august and ah-yes, yes? Yes! American.”

Before the President could again dominate the table, James turned to his post-soup partner, and Caroline turned to Saint-Gaudens, who said, “I can’t wait to tell Henry. The reason he won’t set foot ever again in this house is that he’s never allowed to finish a sentence and no Adams likes to be interrupted.”

“Mr. James is indeed a master.”

“Of an art considerably higher than mere politics.” Saint-Gaudens reminded Caroline of a bearded Puritan satyr, if such a creature was possible; he seemed very old in a way that the lively Adams, or the boyish if ill Hay, did not. “I wish I had read more in my life,” he said, as a fish was offered up to them.

“You have time.”

“No time.” He smiled. “Hay was furious at Mark Twain, who wouldn’t answer the telephone. We knew he was home, of course, but he didn’t want to join us at the Century Club. What bees are swarming in that bonnet! Twain’s latest bogey is Christian Science. He told me quite seriously, after only one Scotch sour, that in thirty years Christian Scientists will have taken over the government of the United States, and that they would then establish an absolute religious tyranny.”

“Why are Americans so mad for religion?”

“In the absence of a civilization,” Saint-Gaudens was direct, “what else have they?”

“Absence?” Caroline indicated James, who was smiling abstractedly at the President, who was again in the conversational saddle, but only at his end of the table. “And you. And Mr. Adams. And even the Sun King there.”

“Mr. James is truly absent. Gone from us for good. Mr. Adams writes of Virgins and dynamos in France. I am nothing. The President-well…”

“So Christ Scientist…”

“Or Christ Dentist…”

“Sets the tone.” Caroline never ceased to be amazed at the number of religious sects and societies the country spawned each year. Jim had told her that if he were to miss a Sunday service at the Methodist church in American City, he would not be re-elected, while Kitty taught Sunday school, with true belief. If for nothing else, Caroline was grateful to Mlle. Souvestre for having dealt God so absolute a death blow that she had never again felt the slightest need for that highly American-or Americanized-commodity.

The voice of Theodore was again heard at table. “I stood in the Red Room, I remember, on election night, and I told the press that I would not be a candidate again. Two terms is enough for anyone, I said, and say again.” Henry James stared dreamily at the President, as if by closely scrutinizing him he might distil his essence. “Politicians always stay on too long. Better to go at the top of your form, and give someone else a chance to measure up, which is what it is all about.”

“Measure up,” James murmured, with mysterious, to Caroline, approval. “Yes, yes, yes,” he added to no one, as Theodore told them how he had invented, first, Panama, and then the canal. He did not lack for self-esteem. James kept repeating, softly, “Measure up. Measure up. Yes. Yes.”

3

BLAISE DELIVERED WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST into the eager presence of Mrs. Bingham. “I can never thank you enough,” said Frederika, as she and Blaise stood at one end of the Bingham drawing room and together watched Mrs. Bingham’s perfect ecstasy at so great a catch. The Chief could now talk and smile at the same time, a valuable political asset that he had finally acquired.

“I hope Mr. Sullivan has not been invited.” Blaise looked at Frederika with a sudden fondness, the result of having got to know, at last, someone well. The experience of furnishing a house with another person was, he decided, the ultimate intimacy: each comes to know the other through and through until the very mention of Louis XVI sets off endless reverberations in each.

“Mr. Sullivan has been warned away. Did you hear Mr. Hearst’s speech yesterday?”

Blaise nodded. “He was remarkably good.” Sullivan, an iconoclastic Democrat, had seen fit to attack Hearst on the floor of the House. Until that moment, Hearst had never made a speech; he also left to others the presentation of his own bills, of which the latest, to control railroad rates, had distressed Sullivan. The attack on Hearst as an absentee congressman was answered with an attack on Sullivan in the New York American. Sullivan again rose in the House, and this time he inserted into the record a libellous attack on Hearst, made years earlier in California. Hearst was depicted as a diseased voluptuary, a blackmailer and bribe-taker, to the delight of the nation’s non-Hearstian press. Sullivan described Hearst as “the Nero of modern politics.”

The Chief then rose to make his maiden speech to the House. He spoke more in sorrow than in anger, a style he had become remarkably good at. The California attack had been made by a man who was once indicted for forgery in New York State; and fled to California, under another name. As for Sullivan, Hearst shook his head sadly. He remembered Sullivan altogether too well from his Harvard days. Sullivan and his father were proprietors of a saloon that Hearst had never visited, as he was temperance. But the saloon was known to everyone in Boston after a drunken customer was beaten to death by Sullivan and his father.

Blaise was seated with Brisbane in the crowded press gallery when the House exploded with joy and fury. Various friends of Sullivan shouted at the Speaker to stop Hearst, but Mr. Cannon, a Republican, was delighted by this battle between two Democrats, and Hearst was allowed to end his attack with the pious hope that he would always be considered the enemy by the criminal classes.

Later, the Chief had been in an exuberant but odd mood. “I won that,” he said, “but I can’t win the party. I’ve got to start a third party. That’s the only way. Or knock off half the politicians in the country, which I could do, if I really wanted to get even.” When Blaise asked how this might be done, the Chief had looked very mysterious indeed. “I’ve got a lot of research on everybody.” Meanwhile, he was preparing to run for governor of New York in 1906; and from Albany, he would try again for the presidency in 1908.

James Burden Day introduced Blaise to a recently elected Texas congressman. “John Nance Garner,” said James Burden Day. “Blaise Sanford.” Once again, Blaise felt somehow nude without the third all-defining name so valued by his countrymen. Garner was a cheerful young man with quick bright eyes.

“We were talking about Mr. Hearst,” said Frederika. “And Mr. Sullivan.”

“Sullivan’s a polecat,” observed Garner. “I’m for Hearst. We all are in my neck of the woods, now Bryan’s drifted off.”

Blaise looked at Jim, who seemed tired and distracted. The previous fall, he had failed to be elected to the Senate; and he was restive in the House. Kitty was a good political partner, but nothing more. Blaise suspected that Jim had another woman. But Blaise did not ask; and the prudent Jim did not volunteer. On the other hand, Jim had been delighted to go with Blaise to New York’s most elegant bordello, in Fifth Avenue. Here Jim had performed heroically, and surpassed in popularity Blaise, who was never more contented than when he could play sultan in his rented harem, with a friend like Jim. “I like our colleague,” said Jim, indicating Hearst’s back, “but those who don’t really don’t.”

“A third party?” Blaise repeated not only the phrase but imitated the Chief’s tone of voice.

“They don’t work, ever,” said Garner. “Look at the Populists. They’re going nowhere like a bat through hell.”

“So are we.” Jim was grim. “The country’s Republican now, and we can’t change it. TR’s pulled it off. He talks just like us and acts just the way the people who pay for him want him to act. Hard to beat.”

Mrs. Bingham drew Blaise into her orbit where Hearst now moved, larger than life. “He is my ideal!” she exclaimed.

“Mine, too.” Blaise winked at Hearst, who blinked, and smiled, and said, “I’m running for mayor of New York. This year.”

Mrs. Bingham emitted a tragic cry. “You’re not going to leave us? Not now. We need you. Here. You are excitement.”

“Oh, he’ll be back.” But Blaise wondered how anyone with the Chief’s curious personality could prevail in politics. Then he thought of those cheering delegates in St. Louis; and of the sizeable majorities Hearst obtained in his congressional district. “What about Tammany?” asked Blaise. The Democratic candidate for mayor was almost always a Tammany creature.

“I’m running on a third-party ticket.” The Chief looked suddenly mischievous, and happy. “Tammany’s going to run McClellan again. I’m going to beat him.”

Blaise was amused by the Chief’s confidence. George B. McClellan, Jr., son of the Civil War general, had been a New York City congressman; now he was the city’s mayor. Despite the support of “Silent” Charlie Murphy, the head of Tammany, McClellan was honest and civilized and, Blaise thought, impregnable. “But I’ll beat him. I’m putting together my own machine.”

“Like Professor Langley.” Mrs. Bingham could be tactless.

“This won’t crash.” Hearst was serene. “I’m coming out for the public ownership of all utilities.”

“Isn’t that socialism?” Mrs. Bingham’s eyes widened, and her lips narrowed.

“Oh, not really. Your cows are safe,” he added.

“Mr. Bingham’s cows. I’ve never met them.”

“Have you done ‘research’ on McClellan?” Blaise was still intrigued by the Chief’s reference to what sounded like police dossiers on his enemies.

“ ‘Research’?” The Chief stared blankly. “Oh, yes. That. Maybe. I know a lot now. But I can’t say how, or what.”

As it turned out, two weeks later, Blaise knew what the Chief knew. The Tribune was now housed in a new building in Eleventh Street, just opposite the department store of Woodward and Lothrop. Blaise’s office was on the first floor, in one corner; Caroline was installed in the opposite corner; between them, Trimble; above them, the newsroom; below them, the printing presses.

In front of Blaise stood a well-dressed young Negro, who had been admitted, after considerable discussion, by Blaise’s disapproving stenographer. In Washington even well-dressed Negroes were not encouraged to pay calls on publishers. The fact that the young man was from New York City had, apparently, tipped the scale, and Mr. Willie Winfield was admitted. “I’m a friend of Mr. Fred Eldridge.” Winfield sat down without invitation; he gave Blaise a big smile; he wore canary-yellow spats over orange shoes.

“Who,” asked Blaise, perplexed, “is Mr. Fred Eldridge?”

“He said you might not remember him, but even so I was to come see you, anyways. He’s an editor at the New York American.”

Blaise recalled, vaguely, such a person. “What does Mr. Eldridge want?”

“Well, it’s not what he wants, it’s maybe, what you want.” The young man stared at a painting of the gardens of Saint-Cloud-le-Duc.

“So what do I-want?”

“Information about people, you know, bigwigs. Like senators and that stuff. You know John D. Archbold?”

“Standard Oil?”

“Yeah. The same. He looks after politicians for Mr. John D. Rockefeller. Well, my stepfather is his butler in the big house in Tarrytown, and Mr. Archbold, a very fine man, by the way, got me this job as office boy at Twenty-eight Broadway, where the Standard Oil is.”

Blaise tried not to look interested. “I’m afraid we’ve no openings here for an office boy,” he began.

“Oh, I’m out of that business now. Me and my partner, we’re opening up a saloon on a Hundred Thirty-fourth Street. Anyways, me and my partner, we went through Mr. Archbold’s files, where he has all these letters from the bigwigs in politics who he pays money to so they’ll help Standard Oil do different things. Anyways, I happened to come across Mr. Eldridge about that time, last December it was, and he asked me to bring the letters round to the American where he could photograph them, and then I could put them back in the files, so nobody’d know they was ever missing.”

Hearst had the letters. That was plain. But how would he use them? More to the point, how would-or could-Blaise make use of them? “I assume Mr. Eldridge told you that I might be a customer for the letters…”

“That’s about the size of it. Mr. Hearst paid us pretty good for the first batch. Then, a couple weeks ago, Mr. Archbold fired us, my partner and me. I guess we didn’t always put things back in the right order, or something.”

“Does he know which letters you photographed?”

Winfield shook his head. “How could he? He doesn’t even know that any of them was photographed. Because that was something only somebody like Mr. Eldridge could do, at a newspaper office-like this.”

There was a long silence, as Blaise stared at the window, which now framed a most convincing rainstorm. “What have you got to sell?” he asked.

“Well, when we was fired, I’d taken out this big letterbook for the first half of 1904. I’ve still got it…”

“Then you’ll go to jail when Mr. Archbold reports the theft…”

Winfield’s smile was huge. “He won’t report nothing. There’s letters in there from everybody. How much he paid this judge, how much he paid that senator, and other things, too. I offered to sell it to Mr. Eldridge, but he says the price is too high, and Mr. Hearst’s got enough already.”

“Did you bring the letterbook?”

“You think I’m crazy, Mr. Sanford? No. But I made out a list for you of some of the people who wrote Mr. Archbold thanking him for money paid, and so on.”

“Could I see that list?”

“That’s why I’m here, Mr. Sanford.” Two sheets of paper were produced; each filled with neatly typewritten names. Blaise put them on his desk. Where once railroads had bought and sold politicians, now the oil magnates did the same; and Mr. Archbold was Mr. Rockefeller’s principal disperser of bribes and corrupter-in-chief. The names, by and large, did not surprise Blaise. One could tell by the way certain members of Congress habitually voted who paid for them. But it was startling to see so many letters from Senator Joseph Benson Foraker of Ohio, the man most likely to be the Republican candidate for president in 1908. Blaise was relieved not to find Jim’s name on the first page. He picked up the second page. The first name at the head of the column was “Theodore Roosevelt.”

Blaise put down the page. “I think,” he said, “we can do business.”