Empire

1

FROM ONE END TO THE OTHER of the Brooklyn Bridge, electric lights spelled out “Welcome, Dewey,” so many points of arctic light against the night sky; while downriver, the Admiral’s flagship, the Olympic, was equally illuminated. Sirens blared. Occasional fireworks exploded along the Palisades. The hero of Manila had come home.

Blaise sat beside the Chief in the back of his motor car, the top put down the better to enjoy the display, and the cool autumn night. Madame de Bieville sat in the seat opposite, next to Millicent and Anita Willson. To Blaise’s surprise, Anne was amused by the girls and, like all women, bemused by the Chief. For a week, Anne had taken the girls shopping in order to dress them up-or rather down-for Europe. Hearst had decided to go to Europe in November; winter would be spent aboard a yacht, on the Nile. Although Blaise had been cheated of his return to Europe, Anne’s arrival was consolation. Together they had gone to Newport, Rhode Island, and the fierce Delacroix grandmother had been openly scandalized and privately thrilled by the liaison between her youthful grandson and this French woman of the world. But like all good Newporters, Mrs. Delacroix dearly loved a French lady and a moneyed one was even more loveable. She had installed Madame in the east wing of her Grand Trianon and Blaise in the west wing, and when Mrs. Fish had suggested that there might be wedding bells between June and October, Mrs. Delacroix had said, in a voice, reputedly, of thunder, “Mamie, mind your own business.” Mrs. Fish had done so: a business that included a picnic on the rocks by the sea, with Harry Lehr in charge of an artificial waterfall; but instead of water, champagne, sold by Lehr on commission, cascaded over the rocks.

Anne had said to Blaise that she now understood the French Revolution. Blaise had said that he now understood why there could never be an American revolution. The sumptuous extravagance of the rich suited everyone, particularly the readers of the Journal It was still believed, he was magisterial, that in the United States anyone could strike it rich, like the Chief’s father, and, once rich, “anyone” was obliged to live out every dream that everyone had ever had. There was still wealth to be had for the lucky; as for the rest, they could daydream, their imaginations fed by the Journal. Anne could not believe that it was possible to keep the unlucky forever content with stories of the fortunate and their extravagances, but Blaise thought it possible to string them, as the Chief would say, along forever, or as long as there were still mountains of gold and silver to be broken into and new inventions to be thought of. The native-born American still believed that hard work would earn him all the beef his family required; believed, also, that blind luck might translate him overnight to a palace on Fifth Avenue. The immigrants were somewhat different.

Blaise recalled a conversation with a manufacturer at Mrs. Fish’s dinner table: “The Germans are the best workers, if they haven’t been told about socialism and labor unions. The Irish are the worst, and always drunk. Dagos and niggers are lazy. All in all, the best worker is still your average Buckwheat.” A “Buckwheat,” it turned out, was the name employers gave to any sturdy young native-born Protestant from the countryside. The Buckwheat obeyed orders, worked hard and stayed sober. If he dreamed, he dreamed only the right sort of dreams, which might even come true. Anne found all of this mystifying. In France everyone knew his place; and wanted to change it or, more exciting, change someone else’s for the worst. Of course, France was filled up, while the United States was still relatively empty. Although the frontier had ended with the invention of California, the newly acquired Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean were now American lakes, filled with rich islands and opportunities, and the far-away look could once again be detected in the noble Buckwheat’s eyes. Blaise had composed a panegyric to the Buckwheat, and gave it to the managing editor, Arthur Brisbane, who took out everything original, including the word “Buckwheat,” and published it in the Sunday Journal: “No derogatory nicknames for the native-born American,” said Brisbane.

The Chief told the chauffeur to drive them downtown. “I want to see the arch lit up,” he said. “I want to see Dewey,” he added, looking at Blaise, as if Blaise were the Admiral’s keeper. “I want to talk to him.”

Blaise did his best to give an impression that he would deliver the Admiral to the Journal offices for the next day’s editorial meeting. “The messenger to Manila,” as the Chief’s courier was known at the paper, had got nothing at all out of the old hero, who seemed interested only in his new admiral-ate. Mention of the presidency bored him, the courier had reported.

As the motor car glided through the cool autumnal darkness of Central Park, the Willson girls broke beautifully into song: “I Met Her by the Fountain in the Park,” a particular favorite of the Chief, as well as of the girls, whose father, a buck-and-wing dancer-singer, had made the song famous in vaudeville. Hearst’s high toneless voice joined in. Anne beat time with a gloved hand, and smiled at Blaise, who felt embarrassed. It was always hard to present the Chief to the world as a serious man; yet he was.

Just north of Madison Square on Fifth Avenue, the crowds began. Everyone was moving toward the arch which had been built over the avenue at Twenty-third Street. Special lights had been craftily arranged to illuminate the white magnificence of what the Journal had called the most splendid triumphal arch ever shaped by the hand of man. Mr. Brisbane, not Blaise, was the author of this hyperbole. But the huge version of Rome’s arch of Septimius Severus was indeed impressive, despite the streetcars that passed, diagonally, in front of it, toward Broadway as it converged with Fifth Avenue. Three sets of columns on either side of the avenue made an approach to the arch. On top of the arch, a statue of Victory held a laurel wreath. Life-size military figures, entwined with banners, sabres, guns, adorned column-bases; upon the arch itself, the Admiral was depicted, a latter-day Nelson come home to glory in a confusion of flood-lights, hansom cabs, motor cars and red-white-and-blue bunting, courtesy of Knox’s Hats on the Avenue’s east side. The Hearst car stopped in front of Knox’s, and even the Chief was impressed by the masses of people who, although it was after midnight, wanted to pay homage to the hero-or his monument.

As the horse of a hansom cab predictably reared in passing the alien motor car, the Chief observed with predictable pleasure, “Roosevelt must be chewing up the carpet with those big teeth of his.” But Anne said, shrewdly, Blaise thought, “Why should he chew? The Admiral’s old. He’s young.”

“Dewey’s sixty-two. That’s not too old to be president.” The Chief looked uncharacteristically sullen. “He’s in love.”

“At sixty-two?” The Willson girls spoke as one; and everyone laughed. A newsboy, selling the Journal, waved a paper in Hearst’s face. “Evening, Chief!”

“Hello, son.” The Chief was again smiling; he gave the boy ten cents, to the ragged accompaniment of a group of Sixth Avenue types who were now singing “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” Opposite them, beneath a column, a well-dressed woman wept. “He’s all set to marry John McLean’s sister. She’s a general’s widow. He’s a widower. She’s Catholic,” the Chief added, brightening somewhat.

“There is still such a feeling against Catholics?” Madame de Bieville looked almost her age by the harsh light of a street lamp directly overhead. Blaise wished she would turn her head to the left an inch, and allow flattering shadows to mask her. Talk of age always disturbed him when she was present. The Willson girls had already worked out his relationship to what, in their eyes, despite her foreign glamour, was an old woman. If the Chief suspected, he made no allusion. But then, in sexual matters, he had a maiden’s tact.

“Well, it’s the Irish mostly that keep on giving Catholics such a bad name,” said Hearst vaguely. “Germans, too, I guess. He’s a powerhouse, her brother.” The Chief looked at Blaise, without reproach, which was the worst reproach of all.

John R. McLean was the owner of the Cincinnati Enquirer. He lived in Washington where his mother and wife jointly reigned much as Mrs. Astor did, alone, in New York. McLean was fierce, partisan, powerful. He would do anything to keep Hearst out of Washington. Blaise’s failure to buy the Tribune was a blow to Hearst, who was not about to begin, from nothing, a newspaper in the capital. The Tribune had been an ideal acquisition, and Blaise could never adequately explain to his partner-employer no longer: Blaise merely lent the Chief money at the going rate-that he had lost the paper to his own sister, who, to his surprise, eight months later, was still, if only barely, in business. They now communicated through lawyers. Anne thought that he should come to terms with Caroline, but Blaise refused. He would fight her to the end, which would come, rather anti-climactically, one way or another, in five years.

“Who built the arch?” Anne changed the dangerous subject.

“A committee,” said Blaise. “The National Sculpture Society.”

“The American style.” She smiled into the light; and the resulting lines made Blaise both nervous and sad. “And what is the arch made of? Marble? or stone?”

“Plaster and cheap wood,” said the Chief with obscure pleasure. “And lots of white paint.”

“But then when the winter comes…”

“It will fall apart.” The Chief’s tone was dreamy.

“But there’s a subscription to rebuild it in marble. This is just the model.” As a young, new New Yorker of means, Blaise had already made his contribution to the fund.

“It doesn’t look at all temporary.” Anne was admiring.

“That’s the American way,” said the Chief. America personified, Hearst thought of himself; and, perhaps, thought Blaise, he was. Everything here was equally new, self-invented, temporary.

2

THE SECRETARY OF STATE and the new Secretary of War, Elihu Root, stared at one another across Hay’s desk. Root had replaced Alger in August. A New York lawyer of uncommon brilliance and sly wit, Root gave Hay more pleasure than the rest of the admittedly dim Cabinet combined. Root’s hair was cut short like Julius Caesar’s, with a dark fringe over the brow, and a modest moustache. The black eyes were as quick as the wit; and the swift smile was both frank and agreeably murderous. “If you really want the Philippines,” said Hay, “you can have them. I’ve got too much on my hands as it is.”

“I don’t want them, dear fellow. I’ve got quite enough with Cuba.” Root lit a cigar. “In fact, I’ve told the President that State should have all our island possessions. War just isn’t suited to run a peacetime colonial government. Of course, Cuba isn’t really a colony.” Root frowned. “I wish we could think of a better word than ‘possession’ for our…”

“Possessions?” Hay smiled; the pains in his back were in remission. A summer in New Hampshire had restored if not his weary soul his spinal column. “We must face what they are.”

“I’ve just divided Cuba into four military districts, rather the way we did the South in 1865. In due course, we’ll come home, but then what happens to Cuba?”

“Germany?” Lately the “German menace” was much discussed at Cabinet, where it was generally thought that the German fleet was making itself too much at home in both the Caribbean and the Pacific; and all-or almost all-agreed that if Germany were to obtain a single port anywhere in the Caribbean, there would be war.

The Major’s recent discovery of the Monroe Doctrine had been galvanizing. But then, as Henry Adams always said, his family’s masterpiece only came to irritable life once every other generation or so. Plans were now afoot to buy the Virgin Islands from Denmark; unfortunately, the Danes had assumed that the government of the United States was so corrupt that it would be necessary to pay off the relevant officials. Hay himself had been crudely approached; severely, he had told the eager Dane, “You must pay off Senator Lodge first. He is the key, and a very expensive one, too, because he is from Massachusetts, and their senators still idolize-and emulate-Daniel Webster, who was ‘retained’ by everyone.” Cabot had not been amused by the subsequent advances. Adams had not stopped laughing for a day.

“I don’t think Germany is going to amount to much on this side of the Atlantic.” With a forefinger, Root dusted the silver-framed portrait of the Prince of Wales. “Poor man. He’ll never be king, will he?”

“Queen Victoria cannot live forever, as far as we know. She has been queen all my life; yours, too. She adds whiskey to her claret at table.”

“That explains her longevity. It’s going to be Leonard Wood in Cuba.”

“As governor-general?”

Root nodded. “Or whatever we’ll call him. He wants to clean up, literally, Cuba. You know, collect the garbage. Educate the children. Give them a constitution where only men of property can vote.”

Hay inhaled the smoke from Root’s cigar: Cuban, he noted, of the best quality. “No one can ever accuse us of exporting democracy. Poor Jefferson thought that he had won, and now we are all Hamiltonians.”

“Thanks to the Civil War.”

Adee opened the door, and put his elegant head into the room. “They are coming, Mr. Hay,” he softly quacked.

“Who,” asked Hay, “are they?”

A high screeching falsetto shouting “Bully!” promptly identified one of them.

“I should have warned you,” said Root, baring his teeth in an anticipatory smile.

“Theodore approaches…” Hay held on to the edge of his desk, as if battening down, whatever that nautical verb meant, a hatch.

“With his invention…”

The door was flung open and in the doorway stood the portly young Governor of New York, and the portly old Admiral Dewey. “There you two are! We’ve been with Secretary Long. Nice to have the three of you all in the same building. You look bully, Hay.”

“I feel… bully, Theodore.” Hatch battened down, Hay had risen to his feet with some pain. Root’s murderous smile was now in place. He started to shake the Admiral’s right hand; and was given the left. “My arm’s still paralyzed from shaking hands in New York,” he said. Dewey was small and sunburned, with snow-white hair and moustache.

“The hero of the hour,” said Root, reverently.

“Hour? The century!” shouted Roosevelt.

“Which ends in less than two months.” Hay was pleased to deflate Theodore. “Then we shall be, all of us, adrift in the frightening unknown of the twentieth century.”

“Which begins not in two months but in a year and two months from now.” Root was pedantic. “On January one, 1901.”

“Surely,” Hay began; but Roosevelt broke in.

“Why frightening?” The Governor removed his glasses and cleaned them with a silk handkerchief. “The twentieth century-whenever it starts-will see us at our absolute high noon. Isn’t that right, Admiral?”

Dewey was staring out the window at the White House. “I don’t,” he said, “suppose it’s very difficult, being president.”

The three men were too startled to react either in or out of character. “I mean, it’s just like the Navy. They give you your orders and you carry them out.”

“Who,” said Root, the first to recover, “do you think will give you your orders, President Dewey?”

“Oh, Congress.” The Admiral chuckled. “I’m a sailor, of course, and I have no politics. But I know a thing or two about the trade. My wife, as of tomorrow my wife, that is, likes the idea. So does her brother, John R. McLean. He’s very political, you know. In Ohio.”

Hay was watching Roosevelt during this astonishing declaration-or, more precisely, meditation. Theodore’s teeth were, for once, entirely covered by lips and moustache. The blue eyes were astonished; the pince-nez fallen.

“The house is certainly an enticement.” Dewey indicated the White House, with a martial wave. “But, of course, I have a house now, at 1747 Rhode Island Avenue. The people’s gift, which I’ve just deeded over to my wife-to-be.”

Hay was speechless. For the first time in American history, a subscription had been raised to reward an American hero with a house. When General Grant had died in poverty, editorials were written about Blenheim Palace and Apsley House, national gifts to Britain’s victorious commanders. Did not the United States owe her heroes something? Shortly after Admiral Dewey’s return, a house in the capital was presented to him, according to his reasonably modest specification: the dining room must seat no fewer than fourteen people, the Admiral’s idea of the optimum number. Now the Admiral had blithely given away the nation’s gift. “Is this wise?” asked Hay. “The people gave you the house.”

“Exactly. Which means that it’s mine to do with as I please, and I want Mrs. Hazen to have it now that she’s to be Mrs. Dewey. All in all,” he continued, without a pause, “I think one must wait till the people tell you just when they want you to be president before you yourself say or do anything. Don’t you agree, Governor?”

Roosevelt’s screech sounded to Hay’s ear like a barnyard chicken’s first glimpse of the cook’s kitchen knife.

As always, Root rallied first; and said smoothly, “I’m sure that the thought of being president has never occurred to Colonel Roosevelt, who is interested not in mere office or its trappings or, indeed, the housing that goes with office. No. For the Governor, service is all. Am I not right, Colonel?”

Roosevelt’s huge teeth were again in view, but not in a smile; rather, he was clicking them like castanets, and Hay shuddered at the sound of bony enamel striking bony enamel. “You certainly are, Mr. Root. I set myself certain practical goals, Admiral. At the moment, as governor, I wish to tax the public franchise companies so that-”

“But doesn’t your legislature tell you what you should do?” The Admiral’s homely dull face was turned now toward the Governor.

“No, it doesn’t.” The teeth snapped now like rifle shots. “I tell them what to do. They’re mostly for sale, as it is.”

“May I quote you, Governor?” Root’s killer’s smile gave Hay great joy.

“No, you may not, Mr. Root. I have enough troubles…”

“The Albany mansion is comfortable,” said the Admiral thoughtfully: plainly, housing was much on his mind.

“Perhaps you might want to be governor of New York,” Hay proposed, “when Colonel Roosevelt’s term ends, next year.”

“No. You see, I don’t like New York. I’m from Vermont.”

Hay changed the delicious subject. After all, the Admiral was a McKinley-made hero, and to tarnish him would, in the end, tarnish the Administration. “How long do you think it will take us to pacify the rebels in the Philippines?”

It was hard to tell whether or not the Admiral was smiling beneath the huge moustaches, like a snowdrift on his monumental face. “Forever, I suppose. You see, they hate us. And why not? We promised to free them, and then we didn’t. Now they are fighting us so that they can be free. It’s really quite simple.”

Roosevelt was very still in his self-control. “You do not regard Aguinaldo and his assassins as outlaws?”

Dewey looked at Roosevelt with something dangerously like contempt. “Aguinaldo was our ally against Spain. My ally. He’s a pretty smart fellow, and the Filipinos are a lot more capable of self-government than, say, the Cubans.”

“That,” said Root, “will be the position the Democrats take next year.”

“Damnable traitors!” Roosevelt exploded.

“Oh, I don’t think that’s quite right.” Dewey was mild. “There’s a lot to be said for good sense, Governor.”

Adee was again at the door. “Admiral Dewey, the reporters are waiting for you in the Secretary’s office.”

“Thank you.” Dewey turned to Roosevelt. “So you agree with me that when it comes to the presidency we just bide our time until the nation calls?”

A strangled cry was Roosevelt’s only response. Smiling graciously, Admiral Dewey bade the three men of state a grave farewell. When the door shut behind him, Hay and Root broke into undecorous laughter; and Roosevelt slammed Hay’s desk three times with the palm of his right hand. “The greatest booby that ever sailed the seven seas,” he pronounced at last.

“I’m told that Nelson was also a fool.” Hay was judicious; and highly pleased that he had witnessed Theodore’s embarrassment, for he had, from the beginning, taken full credit for Dewey’s career and famous victory.

“Let’s hope,” said Root, mildly disturbed, “he’ll keep quiet about the Philippines in front of the press. Let’s also,” he smiled sweetly, “hope that he remembers to tell them about that house.”

“The man’s mad.” Roosevelt was emphatic. “I hadn’t realized it. Of course, he’s old.”

“He’s my age,” said Hay gently.

“Exactly!” boomed Roosevelt, not listening.

“At the moment,” said Root, “Dewey could probably have the Democratic nomination.”

“And McKinley would win again,” said Roosevelt. “I am not, by the way, gentlemen, at all interested in the vice-presidential nomination next year. If nominated, I warn you, I won’t accept.”

“Dear Theodore,” Root’s smile glittered like sun on Arctic ice, “no one has even considered you as a candidate because-isn’t it plain?-you are not qualified.”

That does it, thought Hay, Theodore will bolt the party and we shall lose New York.

But Roosevelt took this solid blow stolidly. “I’m aware,” he said, quietly, for him, “that I am considered to be too young, not to mention too much a reformer for the likes of Mark Hanna-”

“Governor, no one fears you as a reformer.” Root was inexorable. “ ‘Reform’ is a word for journalists to use, and the editor of The Nation to believe in. But it’s not a word that practical politicians need take seriously.”

“Mr. Root,” the voice had attained now its highest register, “you cannot deny that I have the bosses on the run in New York State, that I have-”

“You don’t have breakfast any more with Senator Platt. That’s true. But if you run again, you and Platt will work together again, as you always have, because you’re highly practical. Because you’re full of energy. Because you are admirable.” Root’s fame as a lawyer rested on an ability to pile up evidence-or rhetoric-and then, to his opponent’s consternation, turn all of it against the point that he appeared to be making. “I take it for granted that you must be president one day. But today is not the day, nor even tomorrow, because of your passion for the word ‘reform.’ On the other hand, the day that you cease to use that terrible word, so revolting to every good American, you will find that the glittering thing will drop-like heavenly manna-into your waiting lap. But, for now, we live in the age of McKinley. He has given us an empire. You-you,” if air could bleed, Root’s razor-like smile would now so have cut it that there would be only a crimson screen between him and the stunned Roosevelt, “you have given us moments of great joy, ‘Alone in Cuba,’ as Mr. Dooley expressed it, referring to your book on the late war. You also gave us Admiral Dewey, a gift to the nation we shall never cease to honor you for-or let the nation forget. You say unpleasant things about arrogant corporations, whose legal counsel I happen to be. And I thrill at your fierce words. You have been inspiring in your commentaries on the iniquities of the insurance companies. Oh, Theodore, you are a cornucopia of lovely things! But McKinley has given us half the islands of the Pacific and nearly all the islands of the Caribbean. No governor of New York can compete with that. McKinley, working closely with his God, has made us great. Your time will come, but not as vice-president to so great a man. It is also too soon to remove yourself from the active life of strenuous reformation, not to mention the vivacious private slaughter of animals. You must allow yourself to grow, to see points of view other than the simple, deeply held ones that you have evolved so sincerely and so publicly. Work upon understanding our great corporations, whose energy and ingenuity have brought us so much wealth…”

With a cry, Roosevelt turned to Hay. “I said it was a mistake to put a lawyer in the War Department, and a corporation lawyer at that…”

“What,” asked Root, innocently, “is wrong with a corporation lawyer? What, after all, was President Lincoln?”

“What indeed?” Hay was enjoying himself hugely. “Of course, Lincoln was just beginning to make money as a railroad lawyer when he was elected president, while you, Mr. Root, are the master lawyer of the age.”

“Do not,” whispered Root, with a delicate gesture of humility, “exaggerate.”

“Oh, you are both vile!” Roosevelt suddenly began to laugh. Although he had no humor at all, he had a certain gusto that eased relationships which might have proven otherwise to be too, his favorite word, strenuous. “Anyway, I don’t want the vice-presidency, which others, Mr. Root, want for me, starting with Senator Platt…”

Root nodded. “He will do anything to get you out of New York State.”

“Bully!” The small blue eyes, half-hidden by the plump cheeks, shone. “If Platt wants me out I must be a pretty good reformer.”

“Or simply tiresome.”

Roosevelt was now on his feet, marching, as to war, thought Hay. He never ceased to play-act. “I’m too young to spend four years listening to senators make fools of themselves. I also don’t have the money. I have children to pay for. On eight thousand dollars a year, I could never afford to entertain the way Morton and Hobart did.” At the mantel, he stopped; he turned to Hay. “How is Hobart?“

“He is home. In Paterson, New Jersey. He is dying.” The President had already warned Hay that in accordance with the Constitution, the Secretary of State would soon become, in the absence of an elected vice-president, heir to the presidency should the President himself die. Hay was agreeably excited at the thought. As for poor Hobart himself, Hay had only a secular prayer; and the practical hope that, were the Vice-President to die, Lizzie Cameron could return to the Tayloe house in Lafayette Square a year before she had planned, thus keeping happy the Porcupinus, who was still in Paris, porcupining for Lizzie, who, in turn, was in love with an American poet, twenty years her junior. As she had made Adams suffer, so the poet made her suffer; thus, love’s eternal balance was maintained: he loves her, and she loves another who loves-himself. Hay was quite happy to have forgotten all about love. He had not Adams’s endless capacity; or health.

“I’ve proposed you, Mr. Root, for governor, if I don’t run again.” Roosevelt gave a small meaningless leap into the air.

“I have never said that you were not kindness itself.” Root was demure. “But Senator Platt has already told you that I’m not acceptable to the organization.”

“How did you know?” There were times when Hay found the essentially wily Roosevelt remarkably innocent.

“I have an idle interest in my own affairs.” Root was equally demure. “I hear things. Happily, I don’t want to be governor of New York. I don’t want to know Platt any better than I do; and then, like Admiral Dewey, I dislike Albany.”

“But the Admiral does like the governor’s mansion,” Hay contributed.

“He is a simple warrior, with simple tastes. I am sybaritic. In any case, Governor, you’ll be happy to know that I have surrendered to you. Next month your friend Leonard Wood will become military governor of Cuba.”

“Bully!” Two stubby hands applauded. “You won’t regret it! He’s the best. Who’s for first governor-general of the Philippines?”

“You?” asked Root.

“I would find the task highly tempting. But will the President tempt me?”

“I think he will,” said Root, who knew perfectly well, as did Hay, that the farther away McKinley could send Roosevelt, the happier the good placid President would be. The Philippines were Roosevelt’s anytime he wanted them, once the bloody task of pacification was completed. Tens-some said hundreds-of thousands of natives had been killed, and though General Otis continued to promise a complete submission on the part of Aguinaldo and the rebels, they were still at large, dividing the United States in what would soon be an election year, while Mark Twain’s answer to Rudyard Kipling would, Hay had been told by their common friend Howells, soon be launched. Meanwhile, the old Mississippi boatman, now of Hartford, Connecticut, had told the press that the American flag’s stars and stripes should be replaced with a skull and crossbones, acknowledging officially the United States’ new role as international pirate and scavenger.

“The Major,” Hay was cautious, “has said you’d be an ideal governor once the fighting stopped.”

“I might be helpful there,” said Roosevelt, wistfully: he truly liked war, as so many romantics who knew nothing of it tended to. One day’s outing with bullets in Cuba was not Antietam, Hay thought grimly, where five thousand men died in less than an hour. It was generally assumed that because Roosevelt’s father had so notoriously stayed out of the war, the son, filled with shame, must forever make up for his father’s sin of omission. Hay could never decide whether he very much liked or deeply disliked Roosevelt. Adams was much the same: “Roosevelts are born,” he had observed, “and never can be taught,” unlike Cabot Lodge, a creature of Adams’s own admittedly imperfect instruction.

“Save yourself, Governor.” Root rose; and stretched. “We have so much to do right now. There is an ugly mood out there.” An airy wave of an arm took in the mud-streaked glass of the White House conservatories. “And an election next year.”

“Ugly mood?” Roosevelt sprang to his feet. For a man so plump, he did exert himself tremendously, thought Hay, whose every rise from a chair was a problem in logistics, and a source of pain.

“Yes,” said Hay. “While you have been enjoying the company of Platt and Quay and the refinements of the Albany mansion, we-the Cabinet and the Major-have been ricocheting about the country for the last six weeks. As there were elections in-”

“Ohio and South Dakota. I’m a Dakotan myself. When I-” Roosevelt got everything back to “I.”

Root raised a hand. “We shall all read The Winning of the West. To think! You are not only our Daniel Boone but our Gibbon, too!”

Roosevelt blew out his upper lip so that lip and moustache fluttered against the tombstone teeth. “I hate irony,” he said with, for once, perfect sincerity.

“It will do you no harm,” said Root. “The fact is the labor unions are giving us more and more trouble, particularly in Chicago. We barely squeaked through in Ohio, where the President made a special effort, and though Mark Hanna spent more money than ever before, John McLean engineered a big victory in Cleveland for the Democrats.”

“Out of the twelve states voting, we carried eight.” Roosevelt was brisk. “Only cranks opposed us…”

“But in our own party,” Hay began.

“Every party has its lunatic fringe.” Roosevelt’s recent coinage of this phrase had given him great pleasure, which he shared with the world. “Luckily for us, the Democrats have Bryan. He’s just carried his Nebraska with a fusion ticket, which means he’ll be nominated, which means we will win.”

“Unless the Admiral hears the unmistakable cry of a grateful people,” said Hay, working himself out of his chair, “and puts himself forward as a candidate opposed to the very same empire that he-guided by you, Theodore-brought us. Now that would be a splendid big election.”

“That would be a nightmare,” said Root.

“That won’t happen,” said Roosevelt.

Adee appeared yet again in the doorway. “Colonel Roosevelt, Admiral Dewey wants to know if you would be willing to submit yourself,” for some reason, today, of all days, Adee was more than ever quacking like a duck, thought Hay, as he shoved himself to his feet, “to something of a photographical nature, which sounds like-our telephone has developed a strange sea-like sound, like the inside of a sea-shell when you hold it to your ear…”

“Mr. Adee is stone-deaf,” said Hay to the others, his face averted from Adee, who could then neither hear his voice nor read his lips.

“Sounds like what?” Roosevelt’s eyes gleamed. He loved all forms of publicity.

“Biograph, Governor.”

“Biograph?” Hay was puzzled.

“It is a moving-picture,” said Roosevelt, bounding toward the door. “Gentlemen, good day.”

“Do nothing, Governor,” Root was beaming, “until you hear the unmistakable call of the people.”

“You,” said Roosevelt, waving a fist at Hay, “and Henry Adams have a great deal to answer for, with your deprecatory ironic style, which is like… like yellow fever, this unremitting cynicism.” Roosevelt was gone.

Hay looked at Root and said, “If nothing else, Teddy’s more fun than a goat.”

“Unremitting cynicism.” Root laughed. “He comes to Washington as a candidate for vice-president with the backing of Platt and Quay, the two most corrupt political bosses in the union.”

“Doubtless, he means to betray them, virtuously, in the interest of good government and, of course, reform…”

Root nodded thoughtfully. “I confess that to betray without cynicism is the sign of a master politician.”

“Certainly, the sign of an original.” Hay started to the door. “I must visit the Major.”

“I must go to work.” Root opened the door, and stood to one side so that the senior Cabinet member could go first. Hay paused in the doorway. Adee was at his desk, back to them; thus, wrapped in impenetrable silence. Hay looked at Root and said, “You know who the Major wants for vice-president?”

“Don’t tell me Teddy…”

“Never Teddy. He wants,” Hay studied Root’s face, “you.”

Root was impassive. “The Republican National Committee wants me,” he said precisely. “I don’t know that the President was ever influenced by them.”

“He isn’t.”

“It is,” said Root, “a long time until next summer and your-not my-twentieth century.”

Behind Adee’s back, Hay bet Root ten dollars, even money, that the new century began the coming first of January, 1900, and not a year from that day.

3

FOR CAROLINE, MARRIAGE TO DEL was postponed until he had returned from Pretoria, in a year’s time. Yes, she would come to South Africa to see him. No, she did not want a formal engagement. “A woman does that sort of thing for a mother, and I am not so burdened.” They came to these terms in the large victoria which was used by the Secretary of State for weddings, and funerals.

They drove through a light rain across Farragut Square to the K Street house of Mrs. Washington McLean, who, with her daughter-in-law Mrs. John R. McLean, as vice-reine, presided jointly over Washington society in a way that no President’s wife could, even were she not epileptic. The senior Hay had decided not to attend the afternoon reception for Mrs. Washington McLean’s daughter, Millie, now wife to Admiral Dewey. As head of Ohio’s Democratic Party and proprietor of the Cincinnati Enquirer, John McLean, now the Admiral’s brother-in-law, was particularly unpopular with the Administration. But Del saw no reason why he shouldn’t go, and Caroline was eager to meet her fellow publisher, Mr. McLean. Thus far, their paths had not crossed in Washington’s jungle. But then Caroline had kept pretty much to her own bailiwick throughout the summer, which had proved to be as equatorial as Cousin John had promised. Fortunately, to Caroline’s surprise, she had proved as strong as she had boasted. There was no gasping retreat to Newport, Rhode Island, or Bar Harbor, Maine. She had divided the furnace-season between Georgetown and Market Square; and duly noted that by mid-July the city was entirely African. The President had retreated to Lake Champlain. Congress had gone home and the gentry had fled to cool northern spas. As a result, she had never so much enjoyed Washington. For one thing, there was the newspaper to be fathomed. For another, there were the legal maneuverings of Houghteling and Cousin John. To make no progress was Houghteling’s masterly aim; and no progress had been made. Meanwhile, Trimble taught Caroline the newspaper business, which seemed to have very little to do with news, and even less with business, in a profitable sense. Yet circulation had begun, slowly, to increase, thanks to Caroline’s bold imitation of Hearst. Both the Post and the Star had sent reporters to interview her, but she had refused to see them.

In a city where all power was based on notoriety, she was thought eccentric-a rich young woman perversely playing at being a newspaper proprietor. She was not distressed by what they wrote. She now knew, at first hand, that nothing written in a newspaper should ever be taken seriously. She might herself not know how to produce a successful newspaper but she certainly had learned how to read one. Simultaneously, Trimble had shown an unexpected, even original, interest in the corruption of city officials, and though she doubted that the subject was of much general interest, she encouraged him to reveal what crimes he could. Meanwhile, she exulted in the river’s catch of beautiful bodies, often torn, literally, to bits by raging passions. She was now experimenting with abandoned live babies in trash-cans, having failed to ignite the city’s compassion with abandoned dogs and cats.

“How long will you keep it up?” asked Del. In front of them, Admiral Farragut, all in metal, rested a spy-glass on his raised left knee. Farther on, off the square in K Street, stood the McLean mansion.

“Oh, forever, I suppose.” Their carriage now joined a long, slow line in front of the K Street mansion.

“But doesn’t the paper lose a good deal of money?”

“Actually, there is a small profit.” She did not add that the profit still came from calling-cards, and now that Congress was due to assemble in December, orders were coming in at rather more than the seasonal rate. “Anyway, I do it to amuse myself, and others.”

Del tried not to frown; squinted his eyes instead. Caroline had come to know all his expressions; there were not many but they were, for the most part, agreeable to her. He had grown more confident since his diplomatic appointment; and somewhat stouter. He was his mother’s child. “You do find quite a lot of crime here.” Del tried to sound neutral. “I suppose people like to read about that.”

“Yes, there is a lot of crime to be found here. But the real point is,” and Caroline frowned, not for the first time, at the thought, “does it make any difference if you tell people what is actually happening all around them? or do you ignore the real life of the city and simply describe the government in the way that it would like you to?”

“You are a realist. Like Balzac. Like Flaubert…”

“Like Hearst, I’m afraid. Except that Hearst’s realism is to invent everything because he wants to own everything, and if you’ve invented the details of a murder or a war, why, then it’s your murder, your war, not to mention your readers, your country.”

“Do you invent?”

“We-I do nothing, really. Like Queen Victoria I encourage, advise and warn-we sometimes put in what others leave out…”

“As a matter of good taste…”

Caroline laughed. “Good taste is the enemy of truth!”

“Who is truth’s friend?”

“No one in Washington-that I’ve met, anyway. I hope my peculiar métier doesn’t embarrass you.” To say that Del was conventional was to say everything.

“No, no. You are like no one else, after all.”

“You will do well in…”

“Diplomacy?”

“Pretoria.” They both laughed; and entered the “sumptuous mansion,” as the Tribune always described any home with a ballroom, at whose center stood the splendid Mrs. Washington McLean, flanked by her daughter Millie, a handsome little woman, aglitter with diamonds, and the happy white-haired, teak-faced, gold-braided bridegroom. Although Caroline had not been to many of Washington’s hard-pan affairs (so named because these new rich had, often as not, made their millions with a hard pan in some Western creek, prospecting for gold), she recognized from her own newspaper’s reports numerous city celebrities, permanent residents, often from the West, builders of new palaces along Connecticut and Massachusetts Avenues, those two great thoroughfares of the fashionable West End. She herself always caused something of a stir, as a grand Northern or European, or whatever she was, personage who had taken on the proprietorship of a dull small-town newspaper and made it incontrovertibly and shockingly yellow. No one could guess her motive. After all, she was a Sanford; engaged, more or less, to the equally rich Del Hay; yet she spent her days in Market Square, dealing in murders and, lately, civic corruption; and her evenings at home, where few of Washington’s cliff-dwellers or hard-panners were ever invited, assuming that they would come to the house of so equivocal a maiden.

For company, Caroline had taken up with the Europeans, particularly with Cambon, the French minister; and with the recently ennobled British ambassador, Lord Pauncefote. Although she found the twice-divorced Russian ambassador, Count Arthur (surely, Arturo? she had said) Cassini, amusing and predictably gallant, she had followed Mrs. Hay’s advice and steered clear of him and his beautiful sixteen-year-old “niece,” who was, actually, his daughter by a one-time “actress,” now installed at the Russian embassy as the girl’s governess. The Washington newspapers had been almost as savage as the Washington gossips. Out of deference to Clara Hay, Caroline had avoided the Cassinis and the McLeans. Now she felt exhilarated as she stepped into the gilded room. Where the Hays and the Adamses and the Lodges were discreetly wealthy, and lived lives of muted splendor, prisoners to good taste and devotees of civilization at its most refined, the McLeans flaunted the inexhaustible contents of their hard pan. Guiltily, Caroline was more delighted by the vulgar kingdom than by the known one.

Caroline and Del made their way down the receiving line. The Admiral was gracious. “Tell Mr. Hay how much I appreciated his letter.”

“I will, sir.”

“Is Mr. Hay coming?” asked Millie, a pretty woman, Caroline decided, for forty-nine.

“I believe he is with the President tonight,” Del lied smoothly, and Caroline was pleased that he had taken so well to the world that he would be obliged to make his way in.

“We expected the President.” The new Mrs. Dewey smiled hugely; the teeth were discolored. But the huge doll’s eyes were a marvelous blue.

“There is a crisis,” murmured Del. “In the Philippines.”

The small, imperial Mrs. Washington McLean regarded the young couple with mild curiosity. “We don’t see much of you, Mr. Hay,” she said. “We don’t see you at all, Miss Sanford.” This was neutral. The style was very much that of the Mrs. Astor.

“I hope,” said Caroline, “that that will change.”

“I do, too.” A thin smile hardly lit a face entirely shadowed by a diamond-studded bandeau lodged half an inch above small eyes. “I shan’t be here forever.”

“You go back to Cleveland, to be renewed?”

“No. To Heaven, to be redeemed.”

Then Caroline found herself face to face with John R. McLean himself. He was tall, with the limpid blue eyes of his sister, and a neatly trimmed moustache. “Well, it’s you,” he said, staring down into Caroline’s face. “Come on. Let’s talk. Unless you want money from me. I don’t give money, outside the family.”

“How wise.” Then, exquisitely pretentious, Caroline began to quote Goethe in the original German: apropos a father’s duties.

Startled, McLean completed the quotation, in German. “How did you know I speak German?”

“You were at school at Heidelberg. You see? I study my fellow publishers.”

McLean began to hiccup, eyes misty with pleasure, or so Caroline hoped. “My stomach,” he said, “has been eroded by its own acids. Come into the library. Away from these people.”

They sat before a huge fireplace, where great logs burned. The firelight was reflected in the dark blue leather bindings of the books, arranged like so many Union soldiers on parade in their mahogany shelves. “You can never make that paper a success.” He gave her a glass of champagne; he poured himself soda water. The library door was firmly shut to the other guests. When McLean noticed that her eyes were on the door, he laughed. “Two publishers can’t compromise each other.”

“Let us hope Mr. Hay sees our relations so practically.”

“I am told that he’s an agreeable young man. We’re all of us from Ohio, you know. At least Clara Stone is. John Hay’s from nowhere. A sort of gypsy who’s taken to stealing power instead of babies.”

“How else,” asked Caroline, displeased, “is power obtained if it is not taken from someone else? I realize, of course, some power is inherited, the way you inherited the Enquirer …”

McLean was amused. “Me, an idle heir! Well, that’s a new one. I built on an inheritance, you might say-like your friend Hearst.” From a log, bright blue Luciferian flowers suddenly bloomed.

McLean stared at Caroline a moment. “I won’t ask you why you’re doing this,” he said finally. “I get pretty tired of people asking me that. If they can’t see why you-why we-do it,” he was suddenly attractive to her, now that he was collegial, “there’s no way of telling them. But since you’re a handsome young woman with a fortune, and Del Hay to marry, how long can you be so… original?”

“As long as you, I suppose.”

“I’m a man. We’re allowed to marry and we’re allowed-delighted to do business. No lady that I know of has ever set out, so young, while single, to do anything like this.”

Caroline studied the white smoke which had replaced the blue flame-flowers. “Why,” she asked, “are you so eager to be president?”

“How do you know I am?”

“That’s coy, Mr. McLean. That is maidenly. You give me the sort of answers that I’m supposed to give you. Why do you want it so badly that you took on the President in his own home state, and lost, as you knew you were going to?”

McLean’s hiccups returned, louder than the fire’s hissing and sputtering. “I didn’t expect to lose. It was close. The President’s on spongy ground back home. This empire business isn’t popular with the folks.”

“But prosperity is, and the President’s clever. That war of his ended the bad times, and even the farmers are complaining less than usual, which means that McKinley will defeat Bryan again.” How proud, Caroline thought, Mlle. Souvestre would be: one of her girls dealing with a man on equal terms.

McLean stared at Caroline with true wonder. “Somehow or other, I got the impression that you were only interested in the more revolting contents of our city’s morgue.”

Caroline laughed. “I’m not entirely ghoulish. In fact, I don’t like the contents of the morgue at all. But I am curious as to how living people manage to end up on marble slabs, and I share my curiosity with our readers, few as they are.”

“Mr. Hay-the father-must talk freely with you.”

“I listen-freely-to everyone.” Caroline stood up. “We’ve been here too long. I am compromised. Shall I scream?”

“I would be deeply flattered, and Mrs. McLean would be deeply proud-of me.” McLean got to his feet. They stood in front of the fire. Over the mantel hung a splendid fraudulent Rubens. Caroline had seen two exact copies of the same painting in New York. In dealing with innocent Americans, Old Europe’s forgers had grown careless. “You are interested in our political life, and I am surprised. Most young… most women are not. How did this happen?”

“I went to a good school. We were taught to question everything. I do. Now then, Mr. McLean, which of us-the Enquirer or the Tribune-shall question the war?”

“The war?” McLean blinked. “What war?”

“The Filipino war of independence, what else? We seem to be losing it.”

“Losing it? I guess you didn’t see this morning’s Associated Press wire. General Otis has captured the president of the so-called Philippines Congress, and has made secure all of central Luzon. The war, as you call it, is just about over.”

“Aguinaldo is still free. But you know far more than I about all this.” Half-heartedly, Caroline turned herself into polite jeune fille. “I had only hoped that someone might explain just how the… the morgues in those islands got so filled up, and why.”

McLean took her arm; he was suddenly paternal, and almost, for him, affectionate. “You know more than any young woman I’ve ever met. But you haven’t quite got the clue to all of this…”

“Clue?”

McLean nodded. They were at the door. “I’m not going to tell you, either. You’re too smart as it is.”

The door was flung open, and there stood Mrs. John R. McLean, small of chin, blue of eyes, dark of skin. “You two are a scandal,” she observed mildly.

“We are at that.” McLean was wry. “But then that’s our business. Now, young lady, a question.”

“Before my very eyes,” said Mrs. McLean, plainly not disturbed.

“And ears,” her husband added. He turned to Caroline. “Do you mean to sell out to Hearst?”

“No. I also don’t mean, if I can help it, to sell out to my brother-half-brother-Blaise.”

“If you can help it?” McLean watched her face closely, as though studying a clock which may or may not be keeping correct time.

“Blaise has tied up my share of our inheritance. I may not get what is mine until 1905. It is possible that I shall run out of money before then…” Caroline could see that Mrs. McLean was far more shocked by this talk of money than she would ever have been by the thought of a romantic interlude between husband and young woman. But McLean had seized the point.

“If you ever need money for the Tribune,” he said, “come to me.”

“Pop!” Mrs. McLean’s dark complexion seemed smeared with ash by firelight. The pale eyes protruded.

“Mummie!” McLean responded in kind, their princely eminence abandoned for the homely lowland of the common hard pan. McLean turned to his wife and took her arm. “Don’t you see that the best thing in the world is for me to have this lovely child running the Tribune, with my money, rather than have her go sell it to that bastard…”

“Pop!” The voice resounded like thunder.

“I have heard the word,” said Caroline. “In Market Square,” she added, demurely.

“… William Randolph Hearst.” McLean concluded; and led the two ladies back into the ballroom.

Caroline was greeted by her new friends of the diplomatic corps. Jules Cambon was a lively cricket of a man, always pleased to see what he regarded as a countrywoman. He was also, he liked to say, an American bachelor: Madame Cambon had refused to join him in the Washington wilderness. Lord Pauncefote was a lawyer turned diplomat; he had been posted to Washington for ten years, and knew the intricacies of the capital even better, Hay liked to say, than the Secretary of State. Pauncefote’s face was wide, made even wider by fleecy side-whiskers, whose white was emphasized by the rich red claret color of the huge face. Pauncefote was also an expert on the legal intricacies governing international canals. He had been involved in the creation of the Suez Canal; now he was again at work, with Hay, drawing up the protocols which would govern the canal that the United States was planning to build across the Central American isthmus. Once Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were connected, America’s military power would be doubled, while, it was whispered in the Senate cloakroom, England’s would be halved.

“We are hopeful,” said the old man to the group of government officials surrounding him. As Congress was not yet in session, there were few tribunes of the people present to celebrate the hero of Manila Bay. Pauncefote bowed to Caroline. “Miss Sanford. I am speaking shop, and will now desist.”

“Don’t! Go on. It is my shop, too. The Tribune has already thundered its approval of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty.”

“Would that the Senate will do the same next month.” Actually, the Tribune editorial, the work of Trimble, had suggested that since the United States was building-and paying for-the canal, the United States must have the right to fortify the canal, which the treaty, out of deference to an 1850 convention between England and the United States, would deny. But just as Pauncefote began to express his government’s views of canals, Mrs. Admiral Dewey joined them, a sumptuous doll, Caroline decided, who had at last found herself a proper doll’s house. She explained to Caroline, “We couldn’t live in that tacky house in Rhode Island Avenue. So I’ve bought Beauvoir, a pretty place in Woodley Lane. Do you know it?”

Caroline did not.

“It’s like being in the country, but still in the town. I can’t wait to start fixing it up. For years I’ve owned quantities of the most lovely blue-and-white Delft tiles, and now I’m going to be able to use them.”

“In the kitchen?”

Mrs. Dewey’s huge doll’s eyes blinked like-a doll’s. “No. In the drawing room. Of course, the house is rather small, but then we don’t need anything large. There are no children now. Only my husband’s trophies. And what trophies! You saw the gold sword the President gave him at the Capitol?”

“From a great distance.” The ceremony had been impressive, if somewhat bizarre. Never before had a reigning president sat in front of the portico while the center of attention was not himself, the sovereign, but a military man. McKinley had carried off his difficult assignment with his usual papal charm, and Caroline had accepted, gratefully, Hay’s characterization of the President as a medieval Italian prelate. While the Admiral was being celebrated by the vast crowd, the President had smiled beautifully at no one. Only once was he utilized. He was obliged to present a gold sword to the Admiral, with a few murmured words, no doubt in Church Latin.

“The sword’s only gold plate, by the way. Too shocking! Congress said that it was to be solid gold, of the highest quality…”

“And from the hardest pan?” Caroline could not resist.

But Millie Dewey seemed not to know the phrase. “I would have thought solid gold would be the only thing suitable for the first admiral we’ve had in thirty years. The Admiral now outranks every military man in the country,” she added proudly. “Which is causing all sorts of problems, I can tell you. You see, General Miles,” and, indeed, Caroline could, literally, see that warrior, formidable in appearance with his equally formidable wife, Mary Sherman, the older sister of Lizzie Cameron, “well, General Miles may be chief of staff of the Army but he is only a lieutenant general, while my husband is admiral of the Navy, the first to hold that rank since Farragut, who only won a little victory in Mobile Bay during the War of Secession while my admiral gave us all Asia…”

“Surely, not all. There is still China.”

“We shall have that, too, he says, if the Russians and Japanese don’t get there first. Speaking of Russians, this is my Aunt Mamie.” They were joined by a small, fat woman with dyed red hair; quantities of huge jewels, set in massive gold, were attached to her ears, bosom, waist. She looked Byzantine; and she was. “Madame Bakhmetoff lives in St. Petersburg, far, far from home.”

“About as far as one can get,” Caroline agreed. The ramifications of the hard-pan families never ceased to amaze her. One sister might be a farmer’s wife in Iowa; another Duchess of Devonshire.

“The Russians aren’t civilized,” said Madame; then added, unexpectedly, “That’s why I feel at home there. We’re so much alike, Americans and Russians. Here’s mine.”

Mamie’s Russian was as ugly as she. He wore a monocle; and presented to the world a gargoyle’s face, scarred deeply from smallpox. He kissed Caroline’s hand; and without thinking-or did he calculate?-slipped into French, presumably excluding Mamie and Millie. “You are an unexpectedly splendid apparition for this bleakest of capitals.” Bakhmetoff’s tone was agreeably flattering; and sharp.

“How could you tell I am not a native?”

“First, I know who you are…”

“You have been to Saint-Cloud-le-Duc…”

“No. But I admired your mother a century ago. You must come see us one day, at the edge of the Arctic Circle.”

“I prefer the equator, for now.”

Mrs. Dewey, in perfect if heavily accented French, said, “I understand every word. After all, my late husband and I were at the Austrian court for ages…”

Del saved Caroline from further displays of international glamour. “They are Beales, and can never forget it.”

“What’s a Beale? And why can such a thing never be forgotten?”

“Their father. He was a general in the war, and then he struck it rich in California…”

“To strike…” Caroline paused. “What a funny expression, ‘to strike it rich,’ like a blow of some kind against someone else.”

“Well, many people never recover from those strikes.”

“I think,” said Caroline, “my father might have been one.”

“But he was very rich to start with.”

“He made more, like Mr. McLean.”

Lord Pauncefote stopped Del at the door to the ballroom. “We have had good news from South Africa,” he said. Caroline turned her back on them, so that the old man could tell whatever it was that he wanted Del, in turn, to repeat to his father. As Caroline surveyed the room, she saw the exquisite figure of the Cassini child, as elegantly dressed as a Paris lady of fashion, with a round chubby face, small features, and the bright eyes of a young fox. “They say,” said Mrs. Benedict Tracy Bingham, “that she is neither daughter nor niece but,” the low excited voice dropped even lower and became more excited, “mistress.”

“Oh, surely not!” Caroline was mildly shocked. She might have been even more shocked had she not known Mrs. Bingham altogether too well. Mrs. Bingham was Galatea to Caroline’s Pygmalion, monster to Caroline’s Baron Frankenstein. Ever since she had so off-handedly thrust Mrs. Bingham and her fabulous jewels, aristocratic lineage, magisterial presence onto the front page of the Tribune, she had received not only a number of advertisements for the Silversmith Dairies but a large number of invitations to Mrs. Bingham’s “sumptuous mansion,” where, at last, Caroline met all of her Apgar connections as well as much of pre-hard-pan Washington. The cave-dwellers, or cliff-dwellers as they were alternately known, seldom mingled in the new palaces of the West End and never in the world of official Washington. But Mrs. Bingham, and one of the Apgar ladies, were twin poles of Washington’s high if dowdy social world, to which Cousin John had assigned Caroline her place, a place she filled as little as possible and then only on condition that in return for the pleasures of her company she be given advertising for the Tribune. As a result of her relentlessness, she had increased the paper’s revenues by twelve percent, much to Trimble’s amazement. “It is a charge,” Caroline had explained, “for my appearance at their functions. They think I am rich, so they are willing to give me money. If they knew how poor I really am, I’d be cut dead.”

As it was, every mother of a marriageable son wanted to entertain Caroline, with due pomp and gravity; the present mootness of Caroline’s heiressdom was either not known or not understood. The fact that her brother Blaise was never to be seen had been noted by all, and the Apgars, rehearsed by Cousin John, spoke sadly of an estrangement. Meanwhile, Caroline’s proprietorship of what was, after all, the cave-dweller’s favorite unread newspaper was considered a charming folly due to her European upbringing.

Certainly, Mrs. Bingham revelled in the fact. Until Caroline’s highly creative account of the Connecticut Avenue robbery, Mrs. Bingham had led a decorous life, a monarch of much of what she surveyed, including the ancient dairyman, her husband. But once identified as a sort of Mrs. Astor disguised as a Washington milkmaid, there was now no stopping her. She courted the press. Every visiting celebrity was summoned to her mansion; and those few who obeyed her summons were then written up at length in the Star, Post and Tribune. All in all, Caroline quite enjoyed her monster. For one thing, Mrs. Bingham was a treasury of scandal. There was no one that she did not know something discreditable about; best of all, there was no one whom she would not slander, joyously, to her inventrix, Caroline, who now stared at the lean, yellow-faced woman of sixty, whose moustache was like fluff of the sort that Marguerite constantly found under Caroline’s bed, and could not persuade the African either to acknowledge or identify, much less remove.

“How can you tell? I mean that she’s his mistress?”

The deep voice sounded like a cello when a bass chord is, mournfully, struck. “My butler’s sister is upstairs maid at the Russian embassy. She says, late at night, there are footsteps from his room to hers.”

“A heavy Cossack tread?”

“Booted and spurred!” roared Mrs. Bingham, delighted at her own wit. Caroline suspected her of constant improvisation. Mention Queen Victoria, and she would promptly give lurid details of the Queen’s secret marriage to a Scots servant, in a cottage at Balmoral; and mourn the fact that the Queen, once a symbol of fertility for all the world, was now so many decades past the ability to conceive: “Otherwise, there would be Morganatic Claimants to the Throne!” This said in a hushed voice, awed by the grandeur of her subject.

“You must ‘do’ society for me, Mrs. Bingham. You know everything.”

“But I say nothing,” said Mrs. Bingham, who said everything but not to everyone. “Another proof that she is his mistress,” she began, true artist, to ornament her invention, “is the fact that he insists she act as his official hostess, and attend state dinners. One doesn’t do that with a daughter…”

“In Russia, always,” Caroline smoothly invented. “The wives are left home in their, ah, dachas, and the oldest daughter always escorts her father to court.”

“Curious, I have never heard that before.” Mrs. Bingham gave Caroline a suspicious look. Unlike most liars she was seldom taken in by the lies of others. “I’ll ask Mamie Bakhmetoff,” she said, ominously.

“Oh, she will lie. To save face. They all do.” With that, Del took Caroline’s arm, but before they could escape, Mrs. Bingham struck hard.

“Mr. Hay can tell you all about Mlle. Cassini. He sends her flowers.”

Del coughed nervously. In Washington, when a man sent flowers to an unmarried girl, it meant that he was courting her. “I didn’t know,” said Caroline.

“I’m sorry for her, that’s all. Poor girl.” As they crossed the room, he bowed to the Cassini girl, and whispered to Caroline, “Father wants me to keep an eye on the Russians.”

In the carriage, en route to Caroline’s house, Del told her that, contrary to what Pauncefote had told him, things were not going well for the British in Africa. “The Boers are on the warpath, which is good for us.”

“Aren’t we-your father, anyway-pro-British?”

“Of course. But we’ve got the treaties to think about. When England’s riding high, they oppose us everywhere from habit. When things go badly for the English, they are very agreeable. This means they’ll accept Father’s treaty, without fuss.”

“But will the Senate?”

“Why not? Lodge is there, and the President’s popular.”

“But next year’s election…”

Del was staring out the window at the Treasury, like a granite mountain in the rain. “There’s talk in New York, of Blaise and an older woman, a Frenchwoman.”

“Madame de Bieville? Yes. I know her. She has great charm. They are old friends.”

“But isn’t she married?”

“Not seriously,” said Caroline. “Anyway, she is now a widow.” Caroline was obliged, always, to conduct herself with rather more caution than was natural to her whenever this sort of subject came up. Did Americans really believe what they said or were they simply fearful of that ominous majority whose ignorance and energy set the national tone? They certainly never ceased to pretend in public that marriage was not only sacred but the stately terminus to romance. Although she constantly heard, and not just from Mrs. Bingham, of this or that bad marriage, adultery was seldom alluded to within the pale of respectability.

Del confirmed her not so native caution. “Blaise ought to remember that New York’s not Paris. We have different standards here.”

“What about Mr. Hearst?”

Del flushed. “First, he is outside society. Second, he is never without a chaperon, as far as one knows. He is afraid of his mother, after all, and she has the money.”

Caroline nodded, as gloomy now as the November day. “She’s struck it rich again, with a silver mine somewhere.”

“Copper. In Colorado.”

“She’s giving him money again.”

“To buy the Tribune?” Del looked at Caroline, most curiously. She knew that he was mystified by her life as a publisher; scandalized, too, she feared. Ladies did not do such things. Ladies did not, in fact, do anything at all but keep house and wear the jewels that the gentlemen they were married to gave them, as outward symbols not of love or of fidelity but of the man’s triumphant solvency in the land of gold.

“Oh, I won’t sell, ever. Besides, he now has his eye on Chicago. He needs the Midwest. He wants everything, of course.”

“Like you?” Del smiled.

But Caroline took the question seriously. “I want,” she said, “to be interested. That is not easy for a woman. In this place.”