Empire (6 page)

“Money makes the difference.” Hay took a deep puff of his Havana cigar: what on earth, he suddenly wondered, were they to
do
with Cuba? Then, aware not only of the vapidity of what he had said but also of the thin blue smile beneath the thick blue beard in the chair beside him, he added, “Not that gilded porcupines would know—except by hearsay—what it is like to be poor and struggling.”

“You wrench my heart.” Adams was sardonic. “Also, my quills were not heavily gilded at birth. I have acquired just enough shekels to creep through life, serving the odd breakfast to a friend …”

“Perhaps you might have been less angelic if you’d had to throw yourself into …”

“… wealthy matrimony?”

A spasm of pain forced Hay to cough. He pretended it was cigar smoke inhaled, as he maneuvered his spine against the pillow. “Into the real world. Business, which is actually rather easy. Politics, which, for us, is not.”

“Well, you’ve done well, thanks to a rich wife. So has Whitelaw Reid. So has William Whitney. So, would have Clarence King had he had your luck—all right, good sense—to marry wealthily and well.”

Below the terrace, in the dark woods, owls called to one another. Why, Hay wondered, was the Surrenden nightingale silent? “Why has he never married?” asked Hay: their constant question to one another. Of the three friends, King was the most brilliant, the handsomest, the best talker; also, athlete, explorer, geologist. In the eighties all three had been at Washington, and, thanks largely to King’s brilliance, Adams’s old house became the first salon, as the newspapers liked to say, of the republic.

“He has no luck,” said Hay. “And we have had too much.”

“Do you see it that way?” Adams turned his pale blue head toward Hay. The voice was suddenly cold. Inadvertently, Hay had approached the forbidden door. The only one in their long friendship to which Hay had not the key. In the thirteen years since Adams had found his dead wife on the floor, he had not mentioned her to Hay—or to anyone that Hay knew of. Adams had simply locked a door; and that was that.

But Hay was experiencing vivid pain; and so was less than his usual tactful self. “Compared to King, we have lived in Paradise, you and I.”

A tall, tentative figure appeared on the terrace. Hay was relieved at the diversion. “Here I am, White,” he called out to the embassy’s first secretary, just arrived from London.

White pulled up a chair; refused a cigar. “I have a telegram,” he said. “It’s a bit crumpled. The paper is so flimsy.” He gave the telegram to Hay, who said, “Am I expected, as a director of Western Union, to defend the quality of the paper we use?”

“Oh, no. No!” White frowned, and Hay was suddenly put on his guard by his colleague’s nervousness: it was part of White’s charm to laugh at pleasantries that were neither funny nor pleasant. “I can’t read in the dark,” said Hay. “Unlike the owl … and the porcupine.” Adams had taken the telegram from Hay; now he held it very close to his eyes, deciphering it in the long day’s waning light.

“My God,” said Adams softly. He put down the telegram. He stared at Hay.

“The German fleet has opened fire in Cavite Bay.” This had been Hay’s fear ever since the fall of Manila.

“No, no.” Adams gave the telegram to Hay, who put it in his pocket. “Perhaps you should go inside and read it. Alone.”

“Who’s it from?” Hay turned to White.

“The President, sir. He has appointed you … ah … has offered to appoint you …”

“Secretary of state,” Adams finished. “
The
great office of state is now upon offer, to you.”

“Everything comes to me either too late or too soon,” said Hay. He was unprepared for his own response, which was closer to somber regret than joy. Certainly, he could not pretend to be surprised. He had known all along that the current secretary, Judge Day, was only a temporary appointment. The Judge wanted a judgeship and he had agreed to fill in, temporarily, at the State Department as a courtesy to his old friend the Major. Hay was also aware that the Major thought
highly of his own performance, in which he had handled a number of delicate situations in a fashion that had enhanced the President’s reputation. Now, in John Hay’s sixtieth year, actual power was offered him, on a yellow sheet of Western Union’s notoriously cheap paper.

Hay was conscious of the two men’s intent gaze, like a pair of predatory night birds in the forest. “Well,” said Hay, “late or soon, this is the bolt from the blue, isn’t it?”

“Surely,” said Adams, “you have something more memorable to say at such a time.”

A sudden spasm of pain made Hay gasp the word “Yes.” Then: “I could. But won’t.” But inside his head an aria began: Because, if I were to tell the truth I would have to confess that I have somehow managed to mislay my life. Through carelessness, I have lost track of time and now time is losing, rapidly, all track of me. Therefore, I cannot accept this longed-for honor because, oh, isn’t it plain to all of you, my friends and foes, that I am dying?

White was speaking through Hay’s pain: “… he would like you to be in Washington by the first of September so that Judge Day can then go to Paris for the peace conference with Spain.”

“I see,” said Hay distractedly. “Yes. Yes.”

“
Is
it too late?” Adams had read his mind.

“Of course it’s too late.” Hay managed to laugh; he got to his feet. Suddenly, the pain was gone: an omen. “Well, White, we have work to do. When in doubt about anything, Mr. Lincoln always wrote two briefs, one in favor, one opposed. Then he’d compare the two and the better argument carried the day, or so we liked to think. Now we’re going to write my refusal of this honor. Then we’re going to write my acceptance.”

Henry Adams stood up. “Remember,” he said, “if you don’t accept—and I think you shouldn’t, considering your age—our age—and health, you will have to resign as ambassador.”

“On the ground …?” Hay knew what Adams would say.

And Adams said it. “If you were just an office-seeker, it would make no difference either way. But you are
in
office. You are a man of state; and you are serious. As such, you may not refuse the President. One cannot accept a favor and then, when truly needed, refuse a service.”

Thus, the Adamses—and the old republic. Hay nodded; and went inside. All deaths are the same, he thought. But some are Roman; and virtuous.

C
AROLINE
had escaped what was left of the house-party in order to explore, alone, the woods below the house. As always, she was impressed by the stillness. No breeze stirred as she made her way between huge rhododendrons, their white flowers wilting, long past their season—dusty flowers, she thought, and wondered yet again why dust and its connotations, decay, should be so much on her mind just as she was about to spread her own wings at last and begin her flight through the long-awaited life that she had dreamed of. It must be her European childhood, she decided, that was ending, dustily, so that she, the oldest child on earth, might now become, brilliantly, the youngest woman.

A deer metamorphosed in a clearing at whose center was an attractive—to the deer at least—muddy pond. Caroline stood very still; hoped that the animal would come toward her; but the dark brown eyes blinked suddenly and where the deer had been there was now only green.

The problem of Del, she began to herself, contentedly. But the problem of Del was promptly replaced, like a magic lantern slide, by the problem of Blaise. Moodily, she sat on a log near the mud pond; was it England or Ireland that had no snakes?

When she had written Blaise that she was staying at Surrenden Dering, he had answered that he was more impressed than not; although Del Hay was “perfectly suitable,” a condescending fraternal phrase, she ought to meet a few more men first. He then filled a page with admiring references to “the Chief,” Mr. Hearst, and Caroline wondered if the actress-loving Mr. Hearst, still in his thirties and unmarried, might be Blaise’s candidate for her valuable hand. But then Blaise had suggested that after England she go back to Saint-Cloud and look after the old place until he was properly settled in New York. At the moment he was living in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and that was hardly a proper home for a
jeune fille de la famille
. The rest of the letter was in French, rather the way their conversations tended to be; thoughts, too. He reminded her that the will was still making its leisurely way through probate and nothing would be decided before the first of the year. Meanwhile, although he hoped that she was enjoying her new status as an orphan in Paris, he recommended that she take on one or another of the numerous d’Agrigente old maids or widows as a duenna. “Appearances count for everything in this world,” he wrote,
reverting to sententious English. But then Blaise should know. As a journalist, he was now a creator, an inventor of appearances.

“Caroline!” Del’s voice recalled her to the house. Del was standing on the lower terrace, waving a paper at her. “A telegram!” Suddenly, he was no longer standing on the terrace; he was sliding down it on his ample backside. “Damn!” he said, standing up. “Damn,” he repeated, looking at the grass stains on his handsome tweed. “Sorry,” he said; and smiled. He
was
attractive, she decided. If only a bit of the smooth fleshy lower face could be moved above the eyebrows; and the eyes themselves, perhaps, enlarged.

Caroline opened the telegram. It was from her cousin, and lawyer, John Apgar Sanford. Shortly before Colonel Sanford’s death, John had come to Saint-Cloud and he had said to Caroline, apropos nothing at all, “If anything should ever happen to your father, you’ll need a lawyer. An American lawyer.”

“You?”

“If you like.” At the time Caroline thought the possibility of her father’s death remote: Sanfords lived forever, enjoying to the full ill-health. But when the Blue Train had so abruptly transported Colonel Sanford prematurely to another plane, Caroline had written to John Apgar Sanford, to Blaise’s disgust: “Everything was all set. All arranged. Now you’ve gone and complicated things.” When Blaise had written her that the probate would not be settled until January, she had felt guilty. Plainly, she
had
complicated things. Now John Apgar Sanford urged: “Come to New York fastest will to be probated September fifteen don’t worry.”

“What is it?”

“I’ve been told not to worry—about something. I suppose that means I should be very worried.”

“Are you?”

Caroline put the telegram inside her reticule; and chose not to answer Del. “That poor telegraph lady in Pluckley. How busy we’ve all kept her!”

“She has asked Her Majesty’s Government for help. Otherwise, she says she will shut down.” Del smiled. “Come on. Uncle Dor’s brother, Brooks, has just arrived. He is something to see. And hear.”

Caroline took Del’s arm. “Can the embassy get me on a ship, to New York?”

“Of course. I’ll tell Eddy. When?”

“Tomorrow evening, if possible. Or the next day.”

“What’s happened?”

“Nothing. That is—nothing yet. It’s just business,” she added lightly, and paused for fear of stammering before the “b,” something she was prone to do when nervous.

Brooks Adams was holding court—no, she thought, more like a papal conclave—on the upper terrace. Brother Henry had so curled himself in a chair that he looked like a spineless porcupine, at bay. Henry James leaned against the nearby balustrade and studied the papal Adams with narrowed eyes. A plain little woman, Mrs. Brooks Adams, sat next to Mrs. Cameron, just out of range of her husband’s eccentric orbit; and it was an orbit that he was making as he waltzed excitedly … a pope with St. Vitus’ dance … about his seated older brother; yet of the two, Brooks, white of head and beard, looked the older. “Here they are,” the thin cultivated voice was inexorable, “the best of France, the military elite, brought into court, bullied, badgered, humiliated by a gang of dirty Jews.”

“Oh, no!” Caroline could not face another discussion of the case of Captain Dreyfus that had divided France for so long, boring her to death in the process. Even Mlle. Souvestre had lost her classical serenity when she defended the hapless Dreyfus to her students.

“Oh, yes,” murmured Del. “Mr. Adams’s rabid on the subject. So is Uncle Dor, but he’s less monotonous.”

Brooks Adams looked at the newcomers without interest. Then he included them in his moving orbit. He resumed his crooked circumnavigation of the chair that held his brother. “Now you may say, suppose Captain Dreyfus is innocent of giving secrets to the enemy?”

“I should never
say
such a thing,” murmured Henry Adams.

Brooks ignored his brother. “To which
I
say, if he is innocent, so much the worse for France, for the West, to allow the Jew—the commercial interest—to bring to a halt—for nothing—a great power. England and the United States, the one decadent, and the other ignorant but educable—our task—to side with the Jew-interest, which, simultaneously, may save us in the coming struggle between America and Europe, which I have calculated should start no later than 1914, because there are only two possible victors—the United States, now the greatest world sea-power, and Russia, the greatest world land-power. Germany—too small for world power—will be crushed, and France and England will become irrelevant, and so that leaves us, facing vast ignorant Russia, dominated by a handful of Germans and Jews. But can Russia
withstand us in her present state of development or non-development? I think not.”

Brooks Adams’s irregular ellipse now brought him face to face with his brother. “Russia must either expand drastically, into Asia, or undergo an internal revolution. In either case, this gives us our advantage. This is why we must pray for war
now
. Not the great coming war between the hemispheres.” Brooks’s odd circuit brought him to Henry James, who gazed like a benign bearded Buddha upon the febrile little man. “But the war to secure us all Asia. McKinley has made a superb beginning. He is our Alexander. Our Caesar. Our Lincoln reborn. But he must understand
why
he is doing what he is doing, and that is where you, Henry, and I and Admiral Mahan must explain to him the nature of history, as we know it …”