Empire

1

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY BEGAN, according to Hay, but did not begin, according to Root, on January 1, 1900. Although in idle moments John Hay had been practicing writing “19” he could not get used to the change from the familiar, even consoling “18” into which he had been born and during which he had now lived more than sixty years to the somewhat ominous “19” which, if nothing else, would mark his end. At best, he might have ten years more; at worst, when the pains began, he prayed for prompt extinction.

Hay and Clara breakfasted alone in a window recess of the great dining room, with a view of Lafayette Park and the White House beyond. The park was full of snow that had fallen during the night. In the White House driveway black men were covering white snow with sawdust. Comforted by the labor of others, Clara ate heartily. Hay ate sparingly. With time’s passage, she had grown larger and larger; he smaller. Another century and she would quite fill the room at her present rate, while he would have shrunk to nothing. Between them, on the breakfast table, was a telegram from Henry Adams in Paris. “Sail from Cherbourg January 5.”

“I can’t wait to see the Porcupine in action again, keeping Cabot in line, and all the senators.” Actually, Hay dreaded the presentation to the Senate of what was now known as the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, a document carefully designed to place in a new perspective relations between England, busily at war in South Africa, and the United States, busily at war in the Philippines. For once, the United States was, if not in the lead, in the higher ascendant. White reported to Hay regularly on the purest honey that dropped from the British ministry whenever relations with the now imperial republic were mentioned. Boundary problems with Canada were no longer of any urgency. Let the Canadians work out their own dimensions, the Prime Minister had been heard to say, the partnership of London and Washington was the hope of the world, not to mention of the busy, efficient, right-minded Anglo-Saxon race.

“It will be a nightmare.” Clara put down the Washington Post. The pale gentle moon face shone upon Hay. “The trains,” she added; and moaned.

“You seem to have travel on your mind. But we are going nowhere. There are no trains in our immediate future, nightmarish or not.”

“The reception today. There.” She indicated the White House. “The ladies. They have. All of them. Trains. This year.” The pauses were accompanied by a thoughtful chewing of cornbread, from a special coarse meal water-ground at Pierce’s Mill beside the Rock Creek.

“Trains to their dresses.” Hay understood. “But what’s so bad about that?”

“In the crush? A thousand ladies, each with a three-foot train?”

Hay understood. “We shall be there for the entire twentieth century.”

“Mrs. McKinley has said that she will come down.” Clara sighed. “I’ve noticed that she is at her best when others are uncomfortable. The Green Room was seriously overheated last week. Two ladies fainted. But Mrs. McKinley looked in her element, and stayed on and on.”

“A hot-house blossom. What a wretched life those two must have.” Hay was surprised at his own observation. He made it a point never to speculate on the private lives of others, particularly with Clara, who sat in constant judgment, studying every shred of evidence, and weighing all hearsay in the scales of her own perfect justice.

“I don’t think they know they are wretched.” Clara held up a napkin as if to blindfold herself, like Justice, and pronounce verdict. “They do go on and on about the child they lost. But I think that gives them something to talk about. She worships him, you know. While he…” Clara stopped to give Hay his moment in the stand to speak as witness for the male.

“He seems devoted. There is no one else, either.”

Clara began to frown: irregularity in marriage disturbed her almost as much as an ill-run house. Hay quietly added, “I speak, my dear, of friends, men or women. The Major is quite alone, it seems to me, which makes him very like the President.”

“He is the President.”

Hay smiled; pushed a crumb out of his beard. “When I say the President like that, seriously, I mean only one.”

“Mr. Lincoln. I wish I’d known him.”

“I wish I had, too.” Hay tried to visualize the Ancient, but could only summon up the dead life-mask in his study. Lincoln had been erased from his mind by too much-or too little?-thought upon the subject. “But no one knew him, except Mrs. Lincoln, who was often mad, while no one at all really knows the Major…”

“Not even the dreadful Mr. Hanna?”

“Particularly not the dreadful Marcus Aurelius Hanna. No, Mr. McKinley has done it all alone.” Hay laughed.

Clara looked at him sharply. She hated to be excluded from anything. Whenever she caught him smiling at remembered dialogue or rehearsing phrases to be used, she would say, “Tell me! Tell me what you’re smiling about. It must be very funny.” Now she added, “What are you thinking of?”

“I was thinking of something the Major said the other evening. We were in the upstairs oval room, the two of us, and he said, ‘From the Mexican war in 1848 until 1898, we were sound asleep as a nation. Internationally, that is. Happy in our isolation. Now all that has changed. We are everywhere. We are treated now with a respect which we were not when I was inaugurated.’ ”

Clara blinked. “True enough, I suppose. But why did you laugh?”

“I laughed because when I reminded him that, originally, he had been inclined to give the Filipinos their freedom, he said that that had never been his intention. From the beginning, he said, he had meant to hold on to everything. When I reminded him of his conversation with God, he gave me his secret kindly Borgia smile.”

“Is he greater than Lincoln?”

“He is as… crucial, which puts them on a par, in a way.” Hay picked up the Washington Tribune. A headline celebrated the burning of a livery stable in Arlington. “Our putative daughter-in-law has a fixation about fire.”

“If she would only confine herself to that sort of flame.” Clara was severe.

“I quite like what she does,” said Hay, who quite liked Caroline. “Del is lucky.”

“I think I like her, too. But she is not like us. She is French, really.”

“The French are not, all of them, so very wicked. Look at M. Cambon.”

Throughout their marriage Clara had been torn between a desire, on the one hand, to know everything about Hay’s many years in Europe and a conviction, on the other, that she must keep all knowledge of sin from her. She vacillated between frivolous desire and stern conviction. She vacillated now. “I suppose it’s her independence that I can’t get used to. She is like a young man…”

“Rather better to look at than any young man I’ve ever met.”

“Del seems so young beside her.” Clara shifted ground. She had never been able to accommodate the unusual, which Hay not only accommodated easily, but often courted.

“There is always,” Hay noted that the snow was now starting to fall again, as it always did once the White House carriage ways had been laboriously cleared, “the Cassini girl.”

“Do you think he likes her?”

“I told him to woo her, for his country’s sake.”

“Patriotism!” Clara sighed. Hay was never certain that his wife understood his jokes. She registered them politely; but seldom laughed, once the registration had been made.

“She’s uncommonly pretty…”

“But not legitimate, they say.” Clara was remorseless in such matters. In July, she had refused to attend Kate Chase’s funeral in Glenwood Cemetery. Husband and wife had quarrelled; and Hay had gone alone to say good-by-to himself. Kate herself had been said good-by to when he last saw her, with bloated face, dyed hair, trying to sell him eggs from her Maryland farm.

“No. She is legitimate. I had our ambassador in Petersburg find out. But after Cassini’s other wives, and all his losses at gambling, he never dared asked the Tsar for permission to marry her mother, an actress, someone so far beneath him, hard as that is to visualize.” Across the square the sky was like a gray iron plate, and the shovellers at the White House were now striking attitudes of despair, as the snow began, once more, to pile up. The reception was going to be chaos. Snow and trains. He shuddered.

“What matters,” said Clara, “is Del. The young people seem to think that he is in love with Mlle. Cassini. Ever since he took her to the Bachelors’ German at the Armory.”

“Where you presided.”

“Of course I have no objections to…” Clara’s unfinished sentences were often her judgments.

“To foreign girls like Marguerite Cassini or Caroline Sanford, who is as good as foreign. But you prefer the native stock for Del.”

“Am I wrong?”

“You are never wrong, Clara.”

“There are so many girls right here, like the Warder girls, and Bessie Davis and Julia Foraker…”

“Don’t! You make me think of votes in the Senate. As for Del and the Cassini girl, I’ve learned a lot. The Russians and the French plot against us and the British in China.” Hay relayed to Clara what Del had learned about Holy Russia’s intentions in Asia; and Clara smiled approvingly, and listened not at all. Marriage mattered. China did not. Meanwhile, the White House had disappeared behind a screen of falling snow. Fortunately, the Hays would not be obliged to join the long procession of carriages. Since Vice-President Hobart’s death, John Hay was now the President’s constitutional heir, a matter of midnight panic, when he saw himself suddenly elevated by death to the presidency, an office which he had always pined-rather than fought-for, and now no longer had the strength to fill. Fortunately, McKinley’s health was excellent.

On the other hand, Hay suddenly found that he did have the unexpected strength to join Clarence and some of his friends in a pillow fight in the rough-room; and only Clara’s warning, “We’ll be late if you don’t get dressed,” stopped the delightful game. Clarence was both thoughtful and playful; unlike the ever-mysterious Del, who had said that, yes, he would be at the White House reception but, no, he would get there on his own.

The snow had stopped falling as Hay and Clara got into their carriage. Driveways that had been cleaned of snow that morning now resembled the steppes of Siberia. An endless line of carriages moved slowly beneath the portico of what Count Cassini had referred to as “a pleasant country home.” Groundmen scattered sawdust beside the driveway as, in pairs, pedestrians moved slowly along Pennsylvania Avenue and into the White House grounds.

By earlier agreement with Mr. Cortelyou, Hay’s carriage went round the White House to the south entrance, which was used only for special visitors. As the city vanished beneath feathery fronds of snow, he tried to recall what winters had been like in Lincoln’s day; but as he had been young then, all that he could recall of that far-off time was a constant, languorous high summer, broken by fits of malarial fever.

One of the German door-keepers helped the Hays from their carriage. “Mr. Cortelyou would be pleased, sir, if you were to go directly to the Blue Room.”

In the relative gloom of the lower White House corridor, Hay and Clara, arm in arm (she supporting him more than he her), made their way up the stairs just back of the Tiffany screen which hid the state apartments from the sort of curious crowd that was now gathering in the entrance hall. Green, Red, and Blue Rooms were already filled with distinguished guests. As Clara had predicted, the trains were a nightmare, not improved by the slush and mud from shoes. The carpets were like wet burlap sacking, reminding Hay of Congress in his youth when tobacco-chewing was universally popular and, at session’s end, the deep red carpet of the Senate would be river-mud brown.

The Blue Room contained the members of the Cabinet and the chiefs of diplomatic missions. As always, Hay was charmed and amused by the costumes of the-he always thought of them as his-diplomats. Pauncefote wore what looked to be an admiral’s uniform laced with enough gold to please a Byzantine emperor. Lady Pauncefote, plain and mild in everyday life, had suddenly grown from her mouse-gray hair, like antlers, a tiara so splendid that it seemed to aspire to be a crown. In her silver dress, she reminded Hay of an icon; even her constitutionally sallow face looked as if it might have been darkened by the smoke of votive candles. She was in marked contrast to her usual untidy self, invariably wearing a highly unbecoming shawl, “the gift,” she would murmur, “of our dear Queen.” Cambon was red and gold; Cassini more gold than anything else, while his daughter, Marguerite, glowed at his side, the only youthful, beautiful object in the room. If Hay had been Del, he would have carried her off and married her.

The ambassadors greeted Hay with the punctiliousness that his rank required. Clara flattered the wives. In the entrance hall, the Marine band played.

Mr. Cortelyou drew Hay to one side. “We have a problem, sir.”

“Never say ‘we’ to me. You have a problem, and I won’t take it on.”

“Well, sir. It’s protocol…”

“Ask Mr. Adee. He loves protocol.”

“It’s the Navy, sir.”

Hay was now interested. “They want to take precedence over the Army?”

“Yes, sir. It’s been a terrible week. It’s due to the war, and what the Navy did…”

Hay knew the problem; all Washington did. “Admiral Dewey outranks General Miles,” said Hay promptly, “so he wants the Navy to go in to see the President ahead of the Army.”

“Then you do know, sir?”

“No, I didn’t know. But I’m pretty good at figuring out this sort of thing. Stupidity has always been kind of a specialty of mine. Now I suggest the person you deal with…”

“… is me.” Elihu Root now stood between them. “I gave a very hard ruling. Since the beginning of the country, the Army has taken precedence over the Navy. And that’s that, I told Dewey.”

“What did he say to you, sir?”

“He said I should talk to Mrs. Dewey.” The Root smile glittered like a knife. “I told him I was much too busy. I also have no small talk.”

“I never realized that before,” said Hay comfortably. “Is all your talk big?”

“Gargantuan.”

“Well, mine’s all small. So I guess I don’t ever really understand a word you say.”

Cortelyou hurried away; unamused by senior-statesman facetiousness. Root then came to the point. “Ten dollars, Hay. Fork it over. I win.”

“About the start of the century?”

Root nodded; he withdrew a press cutting from his frock-coat. “This is authority,” said Root. “The Review of Reviews.”

“Hardly…” Hay began.

But Root was inexorable; he read: “ ‘With December 31 “… Dr. Shaw is referring to yesterday…’we completed the year 1899-that is to say, we round out ninety-nine of the hundred years that are necessary to complete a full century.’ Now, dear Hay, attend closely to his reasoning…”

“You know I’m hopeless when it comes to figures, dear Root.”

“As your vast real estate holdings testify. Anyway, you are sufficiently numerate to get this point. ‘We must give the nineteenth century the three hundred sixty-five days that belong to its hundredth and final year, before we begin the year one of the twentieth century.’ You will like this part.” Root beamed contentedly. Just back of him, Hay noted that Mrs. Dewey, all sapphire blue, had somehow got herself to the Blue Room’s center, where Cortelyou stared at her, deeply alarmed.

Root continued, unaware of the drama in the making. “ ‘The mathematical faculty works more keenly in monetary affairs than elsewhere…’ One would think that Dr. Shaw knew you personally, Hay.”

“I am Everyman, Root. You know that. An on-going exemplar of the ordinary and the modest. Something to be found on any grandmother’s sampler.”

“Be that as it may, none of the people who have prepared to allow ninety-nine years to go for a century would suppose that a nineteen-hundred-dollar debt had been fully met by a tender of eighteen hundred and ninety-nine dollars. Well?”

“You are brutal.” Hay gave Root ten dollars. “You win. And now it is possible-probable even-that I shall have my wish and die in the nineteenth century.”

“What a curious ambition. My God, there’s Mrs. Dewey.”

“She has captured Mr. Long. He is her Cavite Bay.”

The great china-doll eyes of Mrs. Dewey were turned on the Secretary of the Navy, while a tiny doll’s hand rested gently, imploringly, on his forearm.

“Mischief is afoot,” Hay began; but then the Marine band broke into “Hail to the Chief,” and the guests who had been waiting in Green, Red, and Blue Rooms now stationed themselves at the foot of the stairs as the President and-to general amazement-Mrs. McKinley made their slow, stately descent. She clung to him; he held her upright. There was something poignant, Hay felt, in their perfect ordinariness. The other guests were already crowded into the East Room.

McKinley nodded, first, to Hay, who bowed; and then fell in behind the last of the diplomatic corps, the Cabinet behind him.

Suddenly, Hay was aware that Mrs. Dewey had moved into position at his left elbow, while clinging to the right arm of the Secretary of the Navy. “Happy New Year, Mr. Hay!” She was brightly innocent; even the eyelashes were like those of a doll, in odd clusters, giving a starry artificial look to the china-blue eyes.

“What a joy,” murmured Hay, never so happy as when he was able to indulge in a minor insincerity, “to find you here with us, in the Cabinet.”

“It was dear Mr. Long who took me in. I told him that the Admiral and I must leave early, and if we were to wait until Cabinet, Court, diplomats, Congress and Army went through the line, why, we’d be here longer than my Admiral’s whole war, and Mr. Long said he’d take me through. So kind…”

Hay felt Clara’s disapproval on his right; and saw Root’s amused anger or angered amusement at Mrs. Dewey’s bold victory over the Army, and himself.

At the door to the East Room, the President paused; and looked anxiously down at Mrs. McKinley, who looked up, wanly, at him. Then the President made his entrance, going straight to the throne-like blue chair at the room’s opposite end; here he deposited Mrs. McKinley, who sank into the chair, clutching a bouquet of orchids to her bosom.

As Hay and Clara entered the crowded room, he was careful to avoid, as always, his single superstition, the cleared space at the center, where Lincoln had lain in his coffin. Otherwise, the East Room had no particular significance for Hay. It had always been a sort of theater, whose star was the president of the moment, whose audience were the dignitaries who came and went, usually without trace; yet, simultaneously, Washington was a city that although it never missed anyone never forgot anyone, either. Again, Hay thought of the house-the city, too, and the republic beyond-as a theater, with a somewhat limited repertory of plays; and types. The only time the East Room had ever come alive was during the weeks that a Kentucky regiment of volunteers, eager to protect President Lincoln, had bivouacked in the room, where they had used the fireplaces for cooking. Later, Mrs. Lincoln would make the East Room splendid, at a stunning cost to the government and to her husband, who insisted on paying for some of her madder luxuries. Now the East Room was, again, shabby, and depressing; rather like a resort hotel out of season. Where Mrs. Lincoln’s glorious sea-green carpet had unfurled its expansive expensive length there was now a bright yellow mustard-colored carpet, presently a bright perfect foil for muddy footprints. Between windows and fireplaces rows of shabby, pumpkin-shaped seats were placed, each with a stricken palm tree rising from its center. The effect was peculiarly dismal in the glare of the huge electrified chandeliers.

Mrs. McKinley endured her high estate for an hour; then the President himself took her upstairs; and the guests were now free to roam outside their hierarchical orders. Mrs. Dewey’s preemptory strike had been noticed by all; and General Miles looked very grim indeed. The Admiral seemed not to have noticed anything as he and triumphant wife departed, while Hay was taken to one side by Lord Pauncefote. Across the room the Russian Ambassador glared at the two conspirators. Hay knew that Cassini regarded him as not only an Anglophile but a dupe of England. Actually, in most matters of any consequence to the United States, England followed America’s lead; in exchange, the Administration reciprocated by tacit encouragement in South Africa. Hay was prepared to discuss the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, soon to go to the Senate, but to his surprise, Pauncefote had not canals but China on his mind. “You know, Mr. Hay,” the old man’s seductive barrister’s voice buzzed agreeably in Hay’s ear, “that the dismemberment of China continues, with the Russians busiest of us all…”

“ ‘Us’? We are not busy.”

“I speak of wicked Europe, of course, not innocent America.”

“Thank you.”

“They are consolidating Manchuria. They will soon be Russifying Peking and North China, an essential market for your textile industries, which the Russians mean to close.”

Cassini, a few yards away, clamped his monocle into his left eye-socket; and glared at them over the head of Cambon. Cassini seemed to be listening to every word.

“The New England delegation to Congress is very sensitive to all this.” Hay was soothing. “And so am I. Did you know that Mr. Henry Adams thinks that Russia will disintegrate in the next twenty-five years, and that we shall then be obliged to Americanize Siberia, the only territory worth having in Asia?”

Lord Pauncefote gave Hay a sharp look to see if this might be some sort of Yankee joke to which he had not got the point. When Hay said no more, Pauncefote smiled. “Mr. Adams does not hold office, does he?”

“No. Alas. For us.”

“Yes,” said Pauncefote, Adams forever dismissed from his mind. He then steered Hay to one of the depressing pumpkin seats, where, beneath a palm whose fronds were brown from overheating, he came to his point. “Unlike Russia, China is already disintegrating. The question is, who shall pick up the pieces? Russia and Japan have got the most already. The Kaiser fishes wherever he can. The French…”

“As you know, we are the only non-fishers.” Hay wondered to what extent he should take Pauncefote into his confidence. Hay had already worked out a formula which, he was certain, would place the United States at the center of the entire China equation; yet cost nothing. Hay proceeded, by instinct. “We sit on our extremely uncomfortable Philippines and stare with dismay at the Gold Rush for China. Of course we’re nervous about the Shansi province. Will Russia shut the north of China to us? If they do, will our textile industry collapse? I have,” Hay decided to take a shallow, experimental plunge, “gone round Cassini, who is impossible to deal with, as we all know. He is vain and somewhat silly. Worse, he’s also been ambassador in China, and he knows, perhaps, too much for… our good. So I’ve been dealing directly with Count Mouravieff in Petersburg. Last week he wrote me a straightforward letter-straightforward, that is, for a Russian. I had asked for only one thing. An open door to China for all nations. He wrote me that outside of the territories currently leased by China to Russia-”

“Leased!” Pauncefote shook his head; shut his eyes, to blot out the extent of human perfidy.

“Isn’t Kowloon leased to England by China?”

“A straightforward business, involving a single port.” Pauncefote was quick. “Nothing like taking over all Manchuria, and Port Arthur, a whole kingdom.”

“Anyway, he guarantees Russia will honor the old Chinese treaties with each of us.”

“Do you believe him?”

“Of course not. But I have forced him to make a move, something Russians hate. They want nothing spelled out, ever. Well, now he’s given me an opening to put as large a construction as I can on his words. So, in a few months, I shall make my move. I think that I-that we, dear Pauncefote-can box them all in.”

“You seem to be getting the hang of this.” Pauncefote was dry.

“I appeal only to the decent instincts of all mankind.”

“Wait till you deal with the Japanese. They are not decent. They are not even mankind.”

“Extra-terrestrial?”

“Lunatics, yes! Moon-men.”

The President was again in the East Room. But this time he was accompanied not by Mrs. McKinley but by Del and Caroline. “They look like son and daughter,” said Pauncefote, without much tact.

“Surely son and daughter-in-law,” Hay rallied. He had yet to comprehend what attraction Del had for the President. Certainly, Del told him nothing. Only by accident did he ever learn that Del had had a family dinner with the McKinleys or that he had accompanied the President on a drive. Plainly, the boy was a born courtier.

Caroline had thought the same but now she was not so certain. For the first time, she had been invited to “supper” with the McKinleys. The other guests were Del and Mr. and Mrs. Charles G. Dawes. She now inclined to the son-that-he-never-had view. It was the President who played courtier to Del, advising him on everything, including what to eat. As it was, the food in the family dining room was plentiful. The conversation was not. Mrs. McKinley drank consommé; and ate a chicken wing. The Daweses talked and laughed enough for four, their function, Caroline decided. The President ate for two; and Del was demure.

Now they stood in front of a marble fireplace at one end of the truly, to Caroline’s eye, hideous East Room, and the President shook hands and made stately conversation with those who came up to him. In the brief intervals between what Caroline had come to think of as the laying on of hands, the President talked to her of Del. “As long as I am here,” he said, in his mellifluous, even to Caroline’s critical ear, voice, “he will go very far indeed. He is the sort of person we need in this place where…” Somehow or other, McKinley never allowed any potentially interesting sentence to arrive at a conclusion; thus, he avoided, masterfully, ever being quotable. Caroline had first been bored by the President; then she was fascinated by the perfect caution with which he spoke, allowing fortune not a single hostage. If not intelligent, he was highly subtle in the practice of his political art. But then Caroline had already realized that her own criterion for intelligence was both conventional and European. For her, intelligence was, simply, to what degree a mind had been civilized. As a result, she had been in no way prepared for a mind that, innocent of civilization, was still capable of swift analysis and shrewd action. McKinley barely knew of Caesar and Alexander; yet he had conquered almost as much of the earth as either, without once stirring from the ugly national house with its all-important telegraph-machine and no less potent telephone.

“He’s very much,” said McKinley, “the way his father must have been when he was here.” Del had told Caroline that the President seldom mentioned any of his predecessors by name, a perhaps unique trait that he shared with Lincoln. “I think Pretoria will season him and then…” The appearance of Senator Lodge caused the President to smile with what looked to be genuine warmth. There was, thought Caroline, a lot to be learned about acting from Mr. McKinley. Meanwhile, Del, out of earshot, was screening would-be celebrators of the new year-new century-with the President. At the far end of the room, Marguerite Cassini looked very lovely; indeed, like a ballet girl, dressed up, thought Caroline with swift unkindness, as a lady. She was enchanting a number of elderly congressmen, her eyes on Del; apparently, he had flirted more seriously with Marguerite than he had ever admitted to Caroline, who was disturbed to find herself jealous; and was not jealousy a sign of love? she asked her own Marguerite, who had replied sourly, “More likely a sign of a very selfish disposition.”

The President had finished congratulating Senator Lodge on his awesome brilliance; and Lodge turned to Caroline, with a foxy smile. “You are still enjoying this barbaric country?”

“ ‘Barbaric’ is your word, Mr. Lodge. I am enamored of your-our civilization. A light to all the world, I should say.”

“You do say in the Washington Tribune.”

“Oh, I never read the leaders. I only like…”

“Murders?”

“Lost children is our current passion. But I didn’t think that you read our paper.”

“Oh, I keep careful track of you.”

“Our murders?”

“Lost children, too.”

“Treaties?” Caroline struck, sweetly she hoped. She had the pleasure of producing a frown on the stern senatorial face. Lodge was suspected of working against his friend Hay’s canal treaty.

“My dear Miss Sanford. A treaty is only a Platonic essence before it comes to the Senate. Then we-two-thirds of us-make it corporeal.”

“May I quote you?”

“Let me quote myself first in the Senate. Then it is all yours. You will go on?”

Caroline was now quite used to the question. “Why not? Besides, Mr. McLean is willing to finance me.”

“McLean? Why?”

“So that I won’t be obliged to sell out to Mr. Hearst.”

“Oh!” Lodge was delighted. “You’ll find a lot of us will pay you anything you like to keep him out of Washington.” Lodge looked at Del. “When does he go to Pretoria?”

“Next month.”

“Alone?”

“Alone.”

2

HENRY ADAMS GAVE the farewell dinner for Del; and Adams was, Hay thought, every bit as grim as February itself, Washington’s least favored month. Hay arrived first; and found Adams looking more like a diabolic hedgehog than the legendary angelic porcupine of Lafayette Square.

“I have lost all interest in tobacco and champagne.” Adams stood beneath Blake’s celebration of Nebuchadnezzar’s madness. William brought more wood for the fire.

“You still have La Dona.” Hay lit his forbidden-by-Clara before-dinner cigar.

“She is the muse of a poet, Heaven help us. A ridiculously young poet.” Adams was very round indeed; and almost as irritable as he claimed to be. “I’ve had a letter from Don Cameron. He’s down in St. Helens and wants me to visit. I remind him of his wife, I suppose. If it were not for the thirteenth century, I would kill myself.”

“Then we have more to thank Madame Poulard for than her omelettes.”

“They, too, are as Gothic as Mont-St.-Michel.” Hay was not as enamored of the idea of the Virgin as Adams had become. He was beginning to fear that his old friend might yet turn Catholic on him.

“Perhaps too agreeable an image. Cabot is not coming tonight.”

Hay felt a sciatic thrill in his left leg. “Does this mean he’ll oppose the treaty?”

“I don’t know what he means any more. He is as bad as Brooks.”

Hay had just read Brooks Adams’s most recent novelty, Natural Selection in Literature. With all the positiveness of a Karl Marx, Brooks traced England’s decline through its literature, from vigorous rural warrior Walter Scott to effete, urban, cowardly and fearful Charles Dickens. Apparently, the rise of Mr. Micawber heralded England’s eclipse. “Brooks writes me regularly,” said Hay, somewhat cautiously, aware how much younger brother irritated older brother. “He has decided that Russia must either undergo a social revolution internally or expand externally.”

“Why not both?” Adams was more than ever bristling porcupine.

“He prefers either-or to simultaneity. He has confided to me that if the Russians and the Germans were to obtain China’s Shansi province, we would be at their mercy…”

“So we must arm to the teeth. That means more ships, more Admiral Mahan, more noise from Teddy! Oh, I am sick of the whole lot.” The fire, sympathetically, exploded behind Adams. Both men started. Then Adams sat in his favorite small leather chair opposite Hay’s favorite small leather chair. The children’s study, the large Clara had called the room, designed as it was entirely for the comfort of great small men, and charming nieces. “I admire Brooks’s theory as far as I can understand it-nations as organisms. Nations as stores of energy, slowly depleting unless refuelled. I grasp all that. But I want only to understand the theory, which I don’t, really, and neither does he, while Brooks wants to apply the bloody thing. He’s mad. He’s got all sorts of people who should know better excited, including you.”

“Nothing excites me, Henry, except your excitement.”

“Well, I am excited when I think of him. Brooks thinks England will collapse soon. So do I. He thinks we’ll inherit their empire. I don’t, at least not for long. I want us to build a sort of Great Wall of China, and hide behind it as long as possible. In the next quarter century the world’s going to go smash. Well, I’m for staying out of the smash as long as possible. You see, I’m anti-imperialist. Don’t tell Teddy or Lodge or Mahan. I’m for letting the whole thing smash up, and then, later, we might find some pieces worth picking up. Meanwhile, forget the Philippines. Forget China. Let England sink. Let Russia and Germany try to run the machine, while we live on our internal resources, which are so much greater than theirs. They’ll end by going bust, and why should we go bust with them?”

“Perhaps,” said Hay, startled by so much unexpected vehemence, not to mention so vast a sea-change in the Adams cosmogony, “we shall not be allowed to stay out, in order to pursue your-scavenger policy, of picking up the pieces.”

“Scavengers thrive on the battles of others. Anyway, we are getting in much too deep in Asia.”

“I thought you always wanted us to have Siberia…”

“But only as a scavenger, as loot, after the Tsar and his idiot court-those thirty-five grand dukes-have managed to destroy their ramshackle empire. I certainly wouldn’t send Admiral Dewey and General Miles to Port Arthur.”

“What about Teddy? We could always send him, alone, with a gun over Petersburg. In a balloon, of course.”

“Filled with air from his own strenuous lungs. I saw him when he was here last week. He swore, yet again, that he did not want to be vice-president.”

Hay sighed. “The Major doesn’t want him. Mark Hanna has already had one heart attack, attributable to Teddy. He was at his desk in the Senate, reading a newspaper account of Teddy’s fierce determination not to be vice-president, when, with a terrifying cry, he slumped to the floor, near dead of a Teddy-inspired heart attack.”

“Well, he is now completely recovered.” Adams stared gloomily into the fire. “He was brought here to breakfast.”

“Mark Hanna!” Hay was horrified; no one so low had ever come to an Adams breakfast. “Who dared bring him?”

“Cabot. Who else? It was, he said, for my-education.”

“Clara and Helen made a joint entrance. Adams and Hay rose to greet them as if they had not all just met at tea beneath their joint roof. In order to maintain perspective, as Hay put it, meaning sanity, he walked every afternoon, no matter how cold, with Adams; then they would join Clara at her tea-urn. During these long walks, Hay was able to relate exactly what was on his mind while Adams was able to tell him, with great charm, what was not on the Secretary of State’s mind but ought to be.

Helen was now thinner; and altogether lovely to her father’s prejudiced eye. It was taken for granted that, in a year’s time, she would marry Payne Whitney, a handsome son of a handsome father, who was also deeply corrupt politically, and a master of Tammany. William C. Whitney was also a maker of money and, like Hay himself, a marrier of money, in the form of the large-why were heiresses always so large?-Flora Payne, who had died, leaving not so much a bereaved husband as a bereaved bachelor brother, Oliver Payne, the wealthiest of the lot. Then when Whitney remarried, Oliver Payne declared war on his one-time brother-in-law and with extraordinary and elaborate monetary bribes detached two of Whitney’s four children from their father: a daughter, Pauline, and a son, Harry Payne Whitney. Happily, the stormy brothers-in-law that once had been both approved of Helen, who behaved like a minister plenipotentiary as she made her way between the warring houses. William Whitney, once spoken of for president, was now being investigated by Governor Roosevelt because he owned streetcar lines in New York City. Whitney had been in Cleveland’s Cabinet; was an ally of Bryan; was, thought Hay, more than a match for Teddy, whose reforming tendencies, thus far, were more rhetorical than real.

“Colonel Payne is coming, isn’t he?” asked Helen, with more anxiety than her father felt warranted.

“He is doing me the honor, dearest infant. But then I hold open house for all Ohio, always. It is the Adams destiny in the fourth generation.”

Clara laughed. “One Stone and one Payne are hardly all Ohio.”

“But one Mark Hanna and one McKinley are one nation,” said Hay.

“One Republican Party, anyway. It seems,” said Adams, brightening, “that all presidents now come from Ohio. Garfield, Hayes, the Major. And they have quite obliterated the founders with their Western Reserve glory.”

“Dear Henry,” murmured Hay, “you do lay it on.”

The room filled up. Adams had invited twenty guests, the optimum number, he felt, for a dinner party. There was a possibility of general conversation, if someone other than the host proved to be brilliant. If no such paladin emerged, guests could speak across the table if they chose, an impossibility at a vast formal dinner where conversation, in Noah’s Ark twos, shifted to left and right with each course.

Hay noted several senators of the sort that Adams would never have invited were it not for Hay’s treaty: he appreciated the Porcupine’s sacrifice. Dowdily, Lord and Lady Pauncefote arrived, an equally dowdy daughter in tow.

Adams-the worst of guests; in fact, guest no longer of anyone except the Hays-was the best of hosts. Expertly, he moved his menagerie around the study like a sheepdog. But Del got past him to speak to his father. As they talked, Hay studied his own nose at the center of Del’s face; thus, nature would continue him through Del and, after Del, their plainly unlosable nose would be carried on into future generations, a reminder of one Johnny Hay from Warsaw, Illinois, master of all trades, as he once vaingloriously proclaimed to Adams, and a jack of none.

“The President says you’re to instruct me, Mr. Secretary.”

“You have no instructions, Consul-General, except the general one that I always give. What you have never said cannot be used against you.”

“I shall be silent to the Boers and silent to the English…”

“But write long reports to me and-to the President?” Hay was curious to know just what the Major expected of Del.

“I am to keep him informed, he said. Nothing more. You know how he is.”

“Not as well as you.” Del blushed at this. “You have his confidence.” Hay was aware of the sententious note in his voice. “Do not abuse it.” Why, Hay wondered, was he so expert at always striking the wrong note with Del when, with everyone else, he had always had-owed his career to, in fact-perfect pitch?

“Why should I?” The gentle Del was now angry; and Hay could not think how to placate him. He looked for a diversion, and one stood in the doorway, the last of the guests, wearing a splendid dark gold gown. Caroline was greeted by Adams, who kissed her hand, something he rarely did with nieces, but then she was more fine Paris lady than humble American niece. Hay had always thought her a splendid catch, unlike Clara, who was less than enthusiastic but could give no reason why Del ought not to marry someone so extraordinarily rare. Yet Clara still went on and on about foreignness as if she had never left Amasa Stone’s house in Cincinnati. It was Hay’s fear that Caroline would take the year of Del’s absence and find someone more grand. Hay did not have the usual American nouveau riche conviction that to be new and rich was a sign of God’s anointment and so to be preferred to quarterings and coronets and money that had been aged in land. He had come from nowhere, like his father-in-law, and he could, he always feared, revisit nowhere at a moment’s notice. Fortunes lost were less of a novelty at century’s end than fortunes won.

Caroline joined them. “You’re late,” said Del.

“I have been,” suddenly Caroline stammered, “at the office. Isn’t that a terrible thing for a woman to say?”

“Say or do?” asked Hay, charmed.

“Both. At first, the fact that I have an office was a novelty here. Now it is a source of-chagrin.” She used the French word.

“The other girls are just jealous,” said Del.

“Oh, the ‘other girls’ rather like the idea. It means that I am completely out of the way, and no competition. It’s the men who grow distressed.”

“We are the superfluous sex.” Del looked at her more than fondly. If he was as much in love as Hay suspected, he was to be envied; at least, by his father, whose fondness for Clara had never once resembled love. Of course, he and Clara had been older when they met; and the world much younger; and marriage a matter, mostly, of sets of silver and linen, and relatives to be shared and propitiated, and money.

“What kept you at this sinister office of yours?” Hay quite liked the idea of a young woman publishing a newspaper in sordid Market Place.

“You,” said Caroline; the hazel eyes looked directly into his own. Wildly, he imagined that he, not his son, was engaged to this splendid creature, who had, on her cheek, like a beauty mark, a small delicate charming smudge of printer’s ink. Hay had spent much of his own youth among printing presses.

“What about Father?” Del seemed anxious. Hay could only delight in the pale rose-pink cheek with its coquettish dot of blue-black ink.

“Wouldn’t you rather wait until after dinner?” Caroline started to back away, and stepped into Root, who was approaching them.

“I won’t be able to eat unless I know what horrors the press plans to rain down upon my head.” Hay could not make up his mind which he despised more, the loud ignorant venal Senate or the equally loud ignorant venal press. On balance, as he had been both a journalist and an editor, he despised the press more. He understood the journalist in a way that he could never understand the egomaniacal senator, who saw himself as the nation incarnate and mindless, and loud, loud, loud.

“Miss Sanford, don’t keep us in suspense. What has come over the wire?” Root looked at Hay. “The War Department has been cut off from the world ever since the last freeze. We could be invaded, and never know it.”

“The New York Sun would probably keep you informed,” said Caroline, producing from her handbag a press cutting. “This is tomorrow’s Sun. Governor Roosevelt has attacked your treaty.”

Hay took the cutting, and pretended to read, though he could see nothing without the pince-nez which rested on his chest. “I suppose,” he observed mildly, “that this is why Cabot did not come tonight.”

“I grow bored with Teddy,” said Root, baring his teeth. He took the cutting from Hay. “He wants the canal to be armed, by us.”

“If the Senate does not accept the treaty,” Hay’s words sounded to himself as if from a great distance, “I shall have no choice but to resign.”

“If you do,” said Root thoughtfully, “you will take Teddy down with you. The President will never forgive him.”

“Then I shall have done two excellent things.” Hay remembered to smile. “Let us not,” he said, “discuss this with the others. Let them read of my shame tomorrow.”

He turned to Caroline. “You are publishing Teddy’s statement?”

“On page three…”

“Where it belongs,” said Root.

“I have an entire family murdered by a single ax, on page one,” said Caroline.

“Good girl!” Hay was amused at last. “First things first, always. Is Del’s nose like mine?”

“Yes. A perfect copy. I’m fascinated at the way physical features continue in families from generation to generation.” She echoed, nicely, his own perception.

“Your mother…”

“I know.”

But Hay was certain that Caroline did not know the rumors about the famous Princesse d’Agrigente.

After dinner, Caroline and Del and Helen Hay were bundled into the back of a sleigh for a long moonlight ride to the hamlet of Chevy Chase.

“Russia must be like this. Just like this!” Helen exclaimed, as they passed from town into open snowy country: a world without color, only black, white and shades of gray, and sudden flashes of diamond-glitter as moonlight struck ice. Clara had insisted, without subtlety, that Helen join them on their last ride, and Caroline had been as pleased as Del was displeased. Caroline got no joy from having her hand pressed beneath a sable rug, while a stolen kiss, anywhere, simply depressed her. She was not like other girls; she had accepted her uniqueness without distress; she was prepared, or so she thought, for everything, including the whole business of two anatomies entwined, and the prickling of fig-leaves or whatever, but she could not bear the step-by-careful-step American courtship. At least in Paris, marriages were business affairs, like the mergers of railroads.

Helen chattered incessantly of Payne. How he and his sister Pauline had chosen their bachelor uncle, Oliver, over their handsome-handsome, she repeated-father. She would make no judgment, while the other brother, Harry, and sister, Dorothy, chose to remain with their father. “You cannot know, Caroline, what it is like to live in a family with such, such Shakespearean emotions, emotions!”

“But I can imagine, Helen.” Actually, Caroline suspected that there had been something Jacobean about her own parents. Why did her father never mention the, always, “dark” Emma? Why had Blaise told her that Mrs. Delacroix’s eyes entirely vanished at the mention of Emma? Then, back of all, there was Aaron Burr, worth a dozen Whitneys, a gross of Paynes. Nevertheless, old Oliver Payne, who seemed to Caroline to be all malignancy, coming between father and children and buying two of them outright from their father because the father had remarried three years after the death of Oliver’s sister, Flora, deified by brother, it was said, as once he had deified or at least revelled in his handsome, handsome, as Helen would say, brother-in-law. “But then we always think our own families more original than anyone else’s.” Caroline thought that she had scored a point as their driver hurtled over a smooth untracked ivory field, close by a farmhouse where a single window filled space and time with a square of yellow light, the only color in their night world.

“Oh, we’re not original,” said Helen. “We are very dull, aren’t we, Del?”

“Some of us more than others.” Del was judicious. Under the robe his hand, a trifle damp, held Caroline’s.

“But your father’s life has been so interesting.” Caroline was now working herself up to the eventual embrace that their last evening together required. At times, she felt that she was involved in an elaborate peasant dance, which had not been entirely explained to her. Now the hand is held; now the heel is stamped; now the head turns; and then the kiss.

“I don’t think Father really believes he lived it,” said Helen, unexpectedly.

“Who does he think did?” Caroline stared at Helen’s profile, back-lit by snow-glare.

“I don’t think he thinks about that. He’s always in the present, you see; and there’s something always wrong, so he’s disturbed. I showed him a copy of that famous picture of him with Nicolay and President Lincoln. You know, sitting in front of the fireplace in the President’s office, and he said he had no memory when it was taken, but he was certain that he’d never once laid eyes on the skinny young man who called himself John Hay.”

“He remembered enough about the picture to say it was made in a studio and that the background was painted in later.” Del clutched hard Caroline’s hand. Should she clutch back?

“I hope I’ll never be so old.” Helen sounded as if she meant what she said. “I think he will resign, if the Senate rejects his treaty.”

“I don’t,” said Del; and Caroline withdrew her hand, and made a fist. “The President needs him. And what would he do if he went? Hatred of the Senate keeps him alive.”

In Chevy Chase, they stopped at an eighteenth-century tavern; and drank hot buttered rum in front of a great fire. At the next table what looked to be four local farmers played cards in silence. Helen, tactfully, excused herself.

“I wish you were coming to Pretoria.”

“So do I.” Caroline was almost sincere. After all, was there anyone nicer than Del? “But I’ve got the paper, and I’ve got Blaise to deal with.”

“Why does he take so hard a line with you? After all, you’ll inherit anyway in a few years.”

“Because my plan misfired. He’s more like me than I suspected. I thought he’d give way once I had something that he wanted. Now, of course, he’ll never give way.”

“Are you like that?”

“If tested, yes, I think so. Anyway, that is the way I am with him. Mr. Hearst is also very angry with me,” she added happily.

“When we’re married…”

The dance had started up again; a moment of panic; what was her next step? “Yes, Del?”

“You won’t go on, will you?”

“You’d rather I didn’t?”

“Do you think it’s the sort of thing a wife should do?”

“There are,” said Caroline, sagely, “wives and wives. Wouldn’t I be more useful to your father and the President with a paper than without?”

“Would you be more useful to me?”

“I don’t know.” Caroline had given the matter no thought. She realized that she was now several steps behind in the mating dance. “If you’re to be a diplomat and live abroad-well, no. But you say you’d rather be here after Pretoria-in politics!”

“Or business. I don’t know. Pretoria’s for the President. He wants someone there he can trust to tell him what’s really going on between the English and the Boers. He thinks Father is too…”

“Pro-British?”

Del laughed. “I can’t say that to a newspaper publisher, can I?”

“Fortunately, you don’t have to. The Tribune is already on record. Remember?”

“When some senators complained to the President that the Secretary of State was a product of the English school…?”

“The President said, ‘I thought he was a product of the school of Abraham Lincoln.’ Yes, we got that story first. And everyone’s copied us.”

“Was it true?”

Caroline laughed. “The gist of it, yes. I am in too deep at the Tribune, for now.”

“But if I were to buy it…?”

“Oh, I’d warn you against buying! I owe you that much.”

“You lose a great deal?”

“We make a small amount.” Actually, between the increase in the newsstand sales and the additional advertising revenue relentlessly extorted by Caroline from Mrs. Bingham’s friends, not to mention all of Apgardom, the paper was for the first time, if barely, in the black. Mr. Trimble was suitably awed; and Caroline suitably conceited. “I have something for you.” Caroline now chose to adapt the dance to her own measure. She removed a small-package from her handbag; and noted that Del was astonished at this change in the dance’s familiar pattern: a german had become a waltz. He opened the package; and took out a heavy gold ring in which was set a dark fire opal. “This was my father’s,” said Caroline, suddenly uneasy. Had she gone too far? “Opals bring bad luck but it brought him good luck and if it’s your birthstone…”

“As it’s mine,” he said, and slipped on the ring, and kissed her, as indifferent to the card players as those solemn men were to the young, now engaged, couple. Caroline had been openly wearing her sapphire, without explanation, for a month. Marguerite had complained, as had the ancient Miss Faith Apgar, who now lived under the eaves of N Street, an official duenna, put in place by the Apgars. Without a formal engagement, no man’s ring could be worn. Now a woman’s ring was in place on a man’s finger; and the scandal, if anyone were to know, would echo from flashy Lafayette Square to stolid Scott Circle. Apparently, no girl had ever given a man a ring before.

But Del did not mind; quite the contrary. “Look!” He showed Helen the ring, as she sat down.

“Good Heavens! How beautiful! How daring! How unlucky!”

“Not for me, the opal,” said Del.

“My father wore it, and lived a long time; happily, I suppose.”

“He died in an accident,” Helen began.

“Rather a better end than most of his contemporaries made,” said Caroline. “He was old,” she added.

“As a poet, I am thrilled. Thrilled!” Helen had published one volume of verse quite as good, if not as popular, as her father’s youthful work. “As a sister, I think we should take a mutual vow of silence until you two are safely married.”

The three drank to that, and Caroline felt herself, suddenly, part of a most agreeable family, something she had never known at home and only caught glimpses of on visits to the houses of school friends. Was it possible, she wondered, as they took the sleigh back to the city, that she would not always be alone?