“THE WAR ENDED last night, Caroline. Help me with these flowers.” Elizabeth Cameron stood in the open French window, holding a large blue-and-white china vase filled with roses, somewhat showily past their prime. Caroline helped her hostess carry the heavy vase into the long cool dim drawing room.
At forty, Mrs. Cameron was, to Caroline’s youthful eye, very old indeed; nevertheless, she was easily the handsomest of America’s great ladies and certainly the most serenely efficient, able to arrange a platoon of flower vases before breakfast with the same ease and briskness that her uncle, General Sherman, had devastated Georgia.
“One must always be up at dawn in August.” Mrs. Cameron sounded to Caroline rather like Julius Caesar, reporting home. “Servants-like flowers-tend to wilt. We shall be thirty-seven for lunch. Do you intend to marry Del?”
“I don’t think I shall ever marry anyone.” Caroline frowned with pleasure at Mrs. Cameron’s directness. Although Caroline thought of herself as American, she had actually lived most of her life in Paris and so had had little contact with women like Elizabeth Sherman Cameron, the perfect modern American lady-thus, earth’s latest, highest product, as Henry James had not too ironically proclaimed. When Del asked Caroline to join the house-party at Surrenden Dering, deep in the English countryside, she had not even pretended to give the matter thought. She had come straight on from Paris, with a single night at Brown’s Hotel in London. That was Friday, and the United States and Spain had been at war for three exciting months. Now, apparently, the war was over. She tried to recall the date. Was it August 12 or August 13, 1898?
“Mr. Hay says that the President agreed to an armistice yesterday afternoon. Which was last night for us.” She frowned. “Those roses look rather awful, don’t they?”
“They’re a bit… dusty. I suppose from all that heat.”
“Heat!” Mrs. Cameron laughed, a fairly pleasant sound so unlike the stylized staccato screech of a Paris lady. “You should try Pennsylvania this time of year! My husband has two places. Each hotter than the other, with mosquitoes and gnats and something very small and vile that burrows like a mole under your skin and raises a welt. You would make a good wife for Del.”
“But would he make a good husband for me?” Through the tall windows Caroline could see her co-host, Don Cameron, on the grassy lower terrace. He was driving a buggy, drawn by a pair of American trotting-horses. Senator Cameron was a red-faced, heavily moustached but modestly bearded man, older by a quarter century than his wife. As she could not abide him, she treated him with exquisite courtesy and deference; just as she treated in a rather cool and offhanded way Caroline’s other co-host, the equally ancient Henry Adams, who entirely adored her as she entirely accepted him. According to Del, the trio had struck Henry James, who lived a few miles away at Rye, as “maddeningly romantic.” When Del had repeated this to Caroline, both agreed that although antiquity might indeed be instructive, exotic, even touching, no couple so aged could ever be romantic, maddeningly or otherwise. But then the celebrated expatriate Mr. James was like some highly taut musical string of feline gut, constantly attuned to vibrations unheard by cruder ears.
Yet old as Mrs. Cameron was, Caroline could not help but admire the slender waist, which seemed unstayed; also, the heat had so flushed her cheeks that she looked-Caroline finally capitulated-beautiful, at least this morning, with naturally waved, old-gold hair, cat-like blue eyes, straight nose and straight mouth, framed by the square jaw of her celebrated uncle. Had Caroline not been so recently and so arduously finished at Mlle. Souvestre’s Allenswood School she might have offered herself as an apprentice to Mrs. Cameron: “Because I want to live forever in America, now that Father’s dead.” Caroline heard herself say rather more than she had intended.
“Forever is a long time. But if I had forever to spend somewhere it wouldn’t be there, let me tell you. It would be Paris.”
“Well, since I’ve spent most of my life-so far-in Paris, home looks all the greener, I suppose.”
“May you find it so,” said Mrs. Cameron vaguely, her attention now distracted by the cook, an elderly woman who was at the door, with the day’s menus to be discussed. “Oh, Cook! What a triumph last night! Senator Cameron admired-and couldn’t stop eating-the sweet potatoes.”
“Impossible things he gives me to prepare.” In a long white dress, the cook looked like an abbess in a novel by Scott.
Mrs. Cameron laughed without much joy. “We must do our best to please. All of us. My husband,” she turned to Caroline, just as Don Cameron made a second appearance on the lower terrace, waving a whip, his trotting-horses busily trotting, “hates English food. So he sends home to Pennsylvania for everything we eat. Tonight we shall have corn.”
“But which is it, ma’am?” The cook looked desperate; the abbey besieged.
“It is green and cylindrical and should be shucked of its covering and boiled, but not too long. We’ll have the watermelon with the other fruits. I trust you with the rest, dear Cook.”
“But…” The abbess wailed, and fled.
Mrs. Cameron sat on a sofa beneath a Millais portrait of a lady of the previous generation; and looked, in her yellowy-white lace, as if she, too, belonged to that earlier time, before the new era of loud clattering railroads, sinister silent telegraphs, garish electric lights. Caroline noticed a delicate line of perspiration on her hostess’s upper lip while a vein at the forehead’s center pulsed. Caroline thought of goddesses as she gazed upon Mrs. Cameron; thought of Demeter’s long search for her daughter Persephone in hell; thought of herself as Persephone and Mrs. Cameron as the mother that might have been. On the other hand, was she herself in any sense in hell? And if she was, would Mrs. Cameron rescue her? But Caroline was quite aware that she had never really known anything except her life just as it was; yet she also knew enough of metaphysics to realize that it is often a condition of hell not to suspect the existence of any alternative to one’s life. Caroline had gone from nuns to a freethinkers’ school. From one concentric ring of hell, she now decided, to another. Yes, she was in hell-or Hades, at least, and though regnant over the dead, she eagerly awaited the earth-mother goddess to free her from Death’s embrace and restore-oh, the glamor of Greek myth!-springtime to all the frozen world above.
A shaft of bright morning light suddenly made Mrs. Cameron’s face glow like pink Parian marble, made the hair gold fire, prompted the goddess to turn her glittering blue gaze on Caroline and say-now for the oracle! thought Caroline, the next thing she says to me will change my life, liberate me from the underworld: “I allow the servants exactly eight percent for graft. But not a penny more.” Demeter radiated earthly light. “As there is no reforming them-or anyone else-I believe in keeping graft to an agreed-upon but never mentioned figure. That is how my husband governs Pennsylvania.” Well, I have the message, thought Caroline; now I must interpret it.
Caroline answered in kind. “My father could never bear the commissions servants take. But then he never got used to France.”
In fact, Colonel Sanford had refused, on what he claimed to be moral grounds, ever to speak French. He thought the French indecent and their language an intricate trap laid for American innocence. During the Colonel’s long widowhood, a series of intensely moral English, Swiss and German ladies had interpreted for him, pale successors to Caroline’s mother, Emma, alleged by all to have been vivid; she had died not long after Caroline’s birth; she had been dark. For Caroline, Emma was not even a memory, only a portrait in the main salon of their chateau, Saint-Cloud-le-Duc.
Mrs. Cameron was now ablaze with August light. “Why did he exile himself?” Mrs. Cameron was suddenly almost personal; as opposed to inquisitive.
“I’ve never known.” But of course Caroline and her half-brother, Blaise, had their suspicions, not to be voiced even to an earth-goddess. “It was after he married my mother. You see, she was really French. I mean, she was born in Italy, but her first husband was French.”
“She was born a Schermerhorn Schuyler.” Mrs. Cameron was prompt. Everyone knew everyone else’s connections in the grand American world, so unlike Paris, where only a few deranged spinsters in the Faubourg Saint-Germain busied themselves with genealogy. “Your mother was a bit before my time, of course. But people still talked of her when I was young.”
Actually, Caroline knew that Mrs. Cameron had married the Senator in the obviously astounding year of her own birth and Emma’s death, 1878: a silver box on a console gave the wedding date, a gift from Mrs. Cameron’s other famous uncle, a longtime senator who had been, until that spring, President McKinley’s secretary of state. The great career had been brought to an abrupt and ignominious end when Secretary Sherman had had a lapse of memory while talking to the Austrian minister at Washington, no bad thing in itself but when it developed that he thought that he was the Austrian minister and lapsed into German, which he did not know, President McKinley was obliged, sadly, to let him depart. Mrs. Cameron was still upset. “After all, Uncle John signed my passport,” she would say.
Now Mrs. Cameron wanted to know what would become of the Colonel’s celebrated place at Saint-Cloud. Caroline said, truthfully, that she did not know. “Everything has been left to Blaise and me. But the will hasn’t been properly-what is the word?”
“Probated,” said the goddess brightly. “Let us hope the division will be equal.”
“Oh, I’m sure it probably is.” But Caroline had her doubts. Over the years, Colonel Sanford had progressed from pronounced eccentricity to the edge of madness, obliging the butler to double as taster at mealtimes: the Colonel feared poison. In the warm weather, the Colonel preferred daughter to son; then, just as the leaves started to turn, he preferred son to daughter. During alternating equinoxes, new wills would be drawn. As luck would have it, he had died in cold weather, when the horse he was riding across the railroad track at Saint-Cloud shied, and threw him in the path of the Blue Train itself. Death was swift. That was a year ago; and the lawyers in New York were still unravelling the various wills. In September, Caroline and Blaise would know who had got what. Fortunately, the Sanford estate was supposed to be large enough for two. The “house” at Saint-Cloud was a palace built by one of Louis XV’s less able-and so enormously wealthy-finance ministers. In Caroline’s youth there had never been fewer than forty servants in the chateau while two villages on the estate provided farm labor. But as madness began to claim the Colonel, potential murderers were summarily dismissed until there was hardly anyone left to keep up the splendor paid for by Sanford Encaustic Tiles (made in Lowell, Massachusetts) as well as the Cincinnati-Atlanta Railroad, a profitable postwar invention, built to replace the railroad that Mrs. Cameron’s Uncle Cump (William Tecumseh Sherman-hence, Cump) had smashed to bits on his exuberant march to the sea.
Six children now filled the room as if they were twelve. There were two nieces of Mrs. Cameron, her stolid twelve-year-old daughter, Martha, one Curzon girl, two small Herbert boys, and Clarence, the plain young brother of Adelbert Hay and son of the house celebrity, John Hay, American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Mrs. Cameron now directed their revels with brisk authority. “You are to go outside, girls. To the stables. There’s a cart. And Mr. Adams-Uncle Dordie-has got you two ponies. Boys, there is lawn tennis in Pluckley…”
“We’ve won the war, Mrs. Cameron,” said Clarence, in a voice that kept cracking. “On Father’s terms, too. Cuba’s forever free,” he suddenly boomed, as the voice dropped an octave, to everyone’s delight. “But we get to keep Puerto Rico. For ourselves.”
“The question, actually,” said the grave Herbert child, all nose and high color, “is the matter of the Philippines. You Americans must really keep them, you know. In all of this-”
“We shall decide the Philippines at lunch,” said Mrs. Cameron; and dismissed the lot.
Caroline had now moved to the great table between the terrace windows. Cameron stationery, Surrenden Dering stationery, United States embassy stationery were scattered over the worn pear-wood surface. Blaise must be written: her hand hovered over the table. Although it was tempting to write on embassy paper, she decided that that might be misrepresenting herself, and so she reached for the pale gray Surrenden Dering writing paper. As she did, she saw a small stock of old-ivory note-paper, each sheet emblazoned with five small Chinese-red hearts, arranged like those of a playing card.
“What is this, Mrs. Cameron?” Caroline held up one of the sheets.
“What’s what?” Mrs. Cameron shut the door after the last of the children.
“Writing-paper. With,” Caroline looked down at the tiny scarlet hearts, “the Five…”
“… of Hearts.” Mrs. Cameron took the stationery from Caroline. “I can’t think who left them here. I would appreciate it if you said nothing about it.”
“A secret society?” Caroline was intrigued.
“Something of a secret, yes. And something of a society, too.”
“But what… who are the Five of Hearts?”
Mrs. Cameron smiled with no great evident joy. “You must guess. Besides, there are only four now. Like those ladies-in-waiting to Mary Queen of Scots.”
“They were four to begin with.”
“Well, these were five. But like the old ballad, where once there were five, there were then four, where four three…” Mrs. Cameron suddenly swallowed very hard. “In time, there will be none.”
“Are you one?”
“Oh, no! I am not so good as that.” Mrs. Cameron was gone, the mystery clutched in her long capable hand.
Caroline was halfway through her letter to Blaise when Del Hay came in from the terrace. He was very like his mother, Clara Hay, a heavy, large-boned, handsome woman who had produced an equally heavy, rather broad-hipped son, with more face below the eyes than above, the reverse of Caroline, whose face tended to the triangular and broad-browed. “We’ve won the war,” said Del.
“As a general greeting, I prefer good-morning.” Caroline was cool. “So far, today, everyone’s told me that we’ve won the war, and no one’s mentioned the weather. Besides, I haven’t won the war. You and your father have.”
“You, too. You’re an American. Oh, it’s a great day for all of us.”
“A very hot day. I’m writing your former classmate. Any message?”
“Tell him he should be happy. At least his employer should be. The New York Journal must be frothing at the mouth, like some rabid…”
“Eagle. May I write him on your father’s stationery?”
“Why not? This is the summer embassy.” A young man with hair parted neatly in the middle looked into the room. “Have you seen the Ambassador?”
“He’s in the library, Mr. Eddy. Did you just come down from London?”
“I was here last night for dinner.” Mr. Eddy was reproachful. “Of course, there were so many people.”
“I’m sorry,” said Del. “But there were so many. What’s the latest news?”
“I don’t know. The telegraph office in the village has either broken down or just shut down. They’ve never had so much work, they say. But Mr. White’s on his way from London. He’ll have the latest news.” Mr. Eddy left the room to Caroline and Del, who left the room altogether. Caroline held on to Del’s arm as they stepped out onto the stone terrace with its long view of the Weald of Kent. Although Caroline did not know just what a weald was, she assumed that it must contain green woods and distant hills-the vista before them, in fact. They moved toward the one end of the terrace that was in shade, from a giant gnarled diseased oak. The soft green English countryside was beginning to shimmer as the before-noon sun burned a hole in a sky that ought to have been pale blue but instead was white from heat.
“You should be more interested in our war.” Del teased her as they sauntered decorously in the shade, gravel crunching beneath their feet. Below them, on a grassy terrace, a somber peacock glared, and unfurled a far too brilliant tail. Everywhere, the bright, if dusty, overblown roses grew in remarkably ill-tended plots. But then Caroline had spent her life seeing to gardens and houses. “She will make some fine lord a splendid hostess,” said her father’s last but one “translator,” a Miss Verlop from The Hague. “Or,” said Blaise maliciously, “some fine capitalist a good factory boss.” But Caroline had no intention of being either a hostess or a wife, though a factory boss sounded interesting. Of course, she had had no desire to be a daughter or a half-sister, either. But she had dutifully served her time as the first-and duly matriculated; as for the second, Blaise was good company; and she quite liked him, so long as he did not steal her share of the estate.
“Why should he?” Del stopped beneath a vast-again dusty-rhododendron.
Del looked as surprised as Caroline felt: she had not realized that she had spoken aloud. Was this madness? she wondered. The Sanford family was full of eccentricity, to put the matter politely, which is how they put it to one another, quite aware that a number of them, including her father, enjoyed the homely modifier “mad as a hatter.”
“What did I say just now?” Caroline was determined to be scientific; if she was to be like the other Sanfords, she wanted to know every phase of her descent. She would be like M. Charcot, clinical.
“You said you didn’t care if anyone were ever to remember the Maine again…”
“True. Then?”
“You said you thought Mr. Hearst and Blaise probably sank it together.”
“Oh, dear. But at least I tell the truth in my delirium.”
“Are you ill?”
“No. No. Not yet, anyway. Not that I know of. How did I get from the Maine to my father’s will?”
“You said… Are you making fun of me?” The small gray eyes in the large face were kind, with a tendency to absorb rather than reflect the now intense August light.
“Oh, Del!” Caroline seldom used a young man’s first name. After all, her first language was French, with its elaborately gauged and deployed second person. On the subtle shift from intimate “you” to formal “you” an entire civilization had been built. Although Caroline had never been in love (if one did not count a fourteen-year-old’s crush on one of her teachers at Allenswood), she knew from the theater and books and the conversation of old ladies what love must be like and she fancied herself best as Phaedra, consumed with lust for an indifferent stepson; worst, as a loving wife to a good man like Adelbert Hay, whose father, the celebrated John Hay, was once private secretary to Abraham Lincoln, and now ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. John Hay was himself not only civilized to the extent that any native American could be (Caroline was never quite sure just how deep the veneer could ever be of any of her countrymen) but wealthy as a result of his marriage to one Clara Stone, an heiress of Cleveland, who had borne him two sons and two daughters. As luck insisted on having it, the eldest son had been at Yale with Caroline’s half-brother, Blaise Delacroix Sanford; and Caroline had met young Mr. Hay twice in New Haven and once in Paris; and now they were houseguests in Kent, contemplating the question she had allowed herself to ask, quite unaware that she was literally speaking her mind, something not encouraged outside the bluestocking academy of the grand Mlle. Souvestre: “Will Blaise try to take all my money now that he’s sunk the Maine?”
Caroline did her best to pretend that she had been joking-about the money if not the Maine; and so she managed to convince Del that she was not joking. He shut his eyes a moment. Two tiny lines formed a sort of steeple between his brows, filial imitation of the Ambassador’s deep lines. “Blaise is very-fierce,” said Del. The peacock shouted harsh agreement beneath them. “But he is also a gentleman.” Del opened his eyes: the matter was, for him, satisfactorily resolved.
“You mean he went to Yale?” Caroline had a truly French distaste for the Anglo-American word-not to mention romantic concept-“gentleman.”
“Of course, he didn’t graduate. But even so…”
“He is half a gentleman. And, of course, he’s only half my brother. I wish I were a man. A man,” Caroline repeated, “not a gentleman.”
“But you would be both. Anyway, why be either?” Del sat on a bench carved from dull local stone. Caroline arranged herself, at an angle, beside him. How pleased, she thought, Sanfords and Hays would be to see so inevitable a young couple merging like fragments of mercury into the silvery whole of marriage. Del would one day be as huge-no other word-as his mother, Clara. But then Caroline knew that she could very well become as huge as the Colonel, who, at the end, gave up going to the theater because he could no longer fit in any seat, and refused to arrange for a special chair to be placed in a box as his one-time friend the even more enormous Prince of Wales did.
“We could be fat together,” murmured Caroline, wondering if she had revealed herself in a murmured aside about Blaise, or had the voice been normal? Normal, she decided, when the puzzled Del asked her to repeat herself. She asked, “What is your impression of his character?”
“I don’t know any more. I haven’t seen him since he quit Yale and went to work for the Morning Journal.”
“Even so, you were his classmate. You know him better than I do. I’m just the half-sister, back home in France. You’re the-contemporary in America.”
“I think Blaise wanted to get his life started earlier than most of us do. That’s all. He was-he is-in a hurry.”
“To do what?” Caroline was genuinely curious about her brother.
“To live it all, I suppose.”
“And you’re not?”
Del smiled; the teeth were like a child’s first set, small irregular pearls; he also had dimples and a turned-up nose. “I’m lazy. Like my father says he is, but isn’t. I don’t know what I shall do with myself. But Blaise knows just what he wants.”
Caroline was surprised. “Last year he wanted to study law. Then he quit Yale and went to work for a newspaper, of all things. And what a newspaper!” Caroline had yet to hear anything good of the Journal or its proprietor, the wealthy young Californian William Randolph Hearst, whose mother had recently inherited a fortune from his near-illiterate father, Senator George Hearst, a crude discoverer of gold and silver mines in the West. It was the Senator who had set up his cherished only son as a newspaper proprietor, first with the Daily Examiner in San Francisco and then with the Morning Journal in New York, where young Hearst had spectacularly succeeded, through a form of sensational journalism known as “yellow” (fires, alarums, scandals), in surpassing Mr. Pulitzer’s original “yellow” New York World. The Journal was now, in its own words, “the most popular newspaper on earth.” “And Blaise delights in Mr. Hearst,” said Caroline. “And I delight in hearing about Mr. Hearst.”
“But you’ve never met him?”
“No. No. He is not to be met, I gather. He goes to Rector’s with actresses. Two very young actresses, I am told. Sisters.”
“He is a cad.” Del said the final word; there would be no appeal.
“So why does Blaise want to work for him?”
This time Del’s smile was more grown-up and knowing: the baby teeth unrevealed by smooth lips. “Oh, Miss Sanford, has no one told you yet about power?”
“I read Julius Caesar’s handbook in school. I know all about it. You start at first light and then, by forced marches, you surprise the enemy and kill them. Then you write a book about what you’ve done.”
“Well, the newspapers are now the book you write. Blaise has simply taken a shortcut. He has gone straight to the end-result.”
“But isn’t it better-if that’s what you want-to win a war first?”
“But that’s exactly what Mr. Hearst has done, or thinks he’s done. All those stories of his about how the Spanish blew up our battleship.”
“Didn’t they?”
“Probably not, according to Father. But it’s the way that things are made to look that matters now. Anyway, Blaise is in the midst of it. He wants to be powerful. We all noticed that.”
“Don’t you?”
“I’m far too easy-going. I’d rather marry, and be happy, like my father.”
“But the Ambassador has always been at the center of-forced marches at first light.”
Del laughed. “It was the others who got up early to do the marching. Father just wrote the book.”
“Ten volumes, in fact.” Caroline had yet to meet anyone who had been able to read all the way through the ten-volume life of Abraham Lincoln by John Hay and his fellow secretary to the President, J. G. Nicolay. Caroline had not even made the attempt. The Civil War had no interest for her, while Lincoln himself seemed as remote as Queen Elizabeth, and rather less interesting. But then she had been brought up on Saint-Simon, in whose bright pages there were no saints with stovepipe hats making sententious appeals to the Almighty, only a king who was compared, quite rightly, to the sun, in bed and out.
Mrs. Cameron appeared on the terrace. “Del!” she called. “Your father wants you. He’s in the library.” She went inside.
“What,” asked Caroline, as they returned to the house, “are the Five of Hearts?”
“Where did you hear about that?”
“I saw some letter-paper. I asked Mrs. Cameron. She was mysterious.”
“Well, don’t mention the subject to Mr. Adams, ever.”
“Then he must be a Heart?”
“It was long ago,” was all that Del said.
Caroline returned to her room; and dressed for lunch. She had come to Kent without a maid; old Marguerite had gone to Vichy to take the waters. In the past, Caroline had always travelled with a mademoiselle, who was half governess and half maid. But now, in her twenty-first year, Caroline was an orphan; and she could do as she pleased. The problem was that she was not certain where pleasure for her might ultimately lie. In any case, until the Sanford estate was settled, she was in limbo. And so she had chosen to spend August with Del and his family at the “summer embassy,” presided over by the Camerons and the Porcupinus Angelicus, their name for Henry Adams, who was indeed prickly as a porcupine if not always much like an angel.
But, happily, Adams was now in a celestial mood, at least with Caroline, who found him alone in the yellow drawing room, so called because, with age, the frayed green damask on the walls had turned a sickly yellow, made even sicklier by the contrast with the heavily gilded-and dusty-furniture. Was dusty to be emblematic of the state of an English August, or merely her own state of mind?
Henry Adams was shorter than Caroline; and she was less than Amazonian. At sixty, Adams, grandson and great-grandson of presidents, as he was inexorably identified, possessed a full white beard, carefully barbered to a point, a full moustache, a high, pink, shining bald head-the Adams birthright, he liked to say-and a full paunch held ever so slightly forward in order to balance properly the small round figure that existed only to support the large round brain-crammed head of America’s great historian, wit, dispenser of gloom-not to mention lover of Lizzie Cameron. But were they, actually, lovers? wondered Caroline, realizing that the country of her father was not that of her own birth and education, and as the chronicler, Adams, was no Saint-Simon, there were no rogue bastards to occupy his pen, though such things did exist in American history, but hidden from view, like the old story that her own grandfather, Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, was the bastard son of that dark son of the American republic Aaron Burr, who had, so tremendously, like Lucifer, fallen.
“Dear Miss Sanford.” Henry Adams’s old bright eyes were very alert; but the smile was curiously tentative for one so venerable. “You do illuminate at least one sexagenarian’s summer.” The accent was British. But then Adams had matured in England, as his father’s secretary when that dour and gelid statesman had been President Lincoln’s minister at London during the Civil War. Like so many entirely Anglicized Americans, Adams affected to despise the British. “They are impenetrably stupid,” he would say, with quiet delight when confronted with some new demonstration of British dimness.
“Mr. Adams.” Caroline mocked a reverent curtsey. “Is the war concluded to your satisfaction?”
“Well, it is all over, which satisfies me. But then for two years the Cuban business drove me so wild that there was a movement to confine me to the Washington Zoo. At the mention of ‘Cuba Libre,’ I would howl-like a wolf at the full moon.” Adams bared his teeth; looked to Caroline not unlike a wolf at noon. “But then I always lose my head when others are calm. The moment they get off their heads, I am calm. Once the war began, I was serene. I knew we had our man of destiny securely in place.”
“Commodore Dewey?”
“Oh, infant! Commodores are simply playthings in war-time.”
“But he took Manila, and defeated the Spanish fleet, and now everyone wants us to stay, at least the English do.”
Adams tugged the tip of his pointed beard with, she noted, a small rosy hand that was more like a baby’s than that of an old man. He cocked his head to one side. “We students of history-no matter how dull-like to know just who it was who put an admiral, like a chess piece, in Far Eastern waters-soon to be called Far Western, as what’s west to us is what’s true west.”
“My brother Blaise says it was Mr. Roosevelt, when he was at the Navy Department. Blaise says he did it without telling his superiors.”
Adams nodded approvingly. “You are getting closer. Our young bumptious friend Theodore-a student of my young bumptious brother Brooks-deserves more credit, certainly, than the knight-admiral, that is-I think in chess terms-that checkmated Spain. But whose hand directed our castle Theodore?”
A flight of children, led by Martha, filled up the room. All the girls surrounded Uncle Dordie, a name Martha had invented for Mr. Adams, whose pockets turned out to be filled with hard candies, that were promptly and ruthlessly suppressed by Mrs. Cameron. “Not before mealtimes, Dor!” she announced, confiscating whatever she could pry loose from clenched fists.
Other houseguests were now entering the drawing room, without announcement, to the butler’s sorrow. But Mrs. Cameron’s word was final at the summer embassy. Only officialdom was proclaimed. The rest came pell-mell.
To Caroline’s surprise, Adams turned back to her and resumed their conversation where it had broken off. “In those affairs where the balance of power in the world suddenly shifts, there must be a consummate player, who calculates his moves. This player puts Theodore at the Navy Department so that he will put the Admiral at Manila; he then responds to the sinking of the Maine with a series of moves that lead to a near-bloodless war, and the end of Spain as a world-player, and the beginning of the United States as an Asiatic power…”
“I am in suspense, Mr. Adams! Who is the consummate player?”
“Our first man of destiny since Mr. Lincoln-the President, who else? The Major himself. Mr. McKinley. Don’t laugh!” Adams frowned severely. “I know he is supposed to be a creature of Mark Hanna and all the other bosses, but it’s plain to me that they are his creatures. They find him money-a useful art-so that he can deliver us an empire, which he has! The timing is exquisite, too. Just as weak England begins to loosen her grip on the world, just as Germany and Russia and Japan are jostling one another to take England’s place, the Major preempts them all, and the Pacific Ocean is ours! Or soon will be, and the new poles of power will be Russia on the eastern landmass and the United States on the west, with England, ours at last, in between! Oh, to be your age, Miss Sanford, and to see the coming wonders of our Augustan age!”
“In Paris, Mr. Adams, you once told me that you were a lifelong pessimist.”
“That was on earth. I am now in Heaven, dear Miss Sanford, and so my pessimism ended with my earthly life. Up here, I am not even a porcupine.” The moustache twitched at the corners as he looked up at her-how small he was, she thought, angelic and diabolic.
They were joined by Don Cameron, who smelled of whiskey, and by the stout, bald, bearded figure of Henry James, who had just arrived from his house at Rye. When Caroline was very young, the novelist had been brought to Saint-Cloud by the Paul Bourgets. She had been impressed when James had spoken to her entirely in unaccented French; she had also been intrigued by an American whose two Christian names were affixed to no family name-Henry James What? she asked her father. The Colonel neither knew nor cared. He disliked literary men, except for Paul Bourget, whose aggressive snobbism gave Sanford quiet pleasure: “Can’t read his books. But he knows le monde de la famille.” When the Colonel did use a French phrase, it was always eerily mispronounced; yet the Colonel had a good ear; and loved music if not musicians. He had even written an opera about Marie de’Medici, which no one would put on unless he himself paid for the production. But as he was the sort of man who would never spend a penny that might give himself pleasure, there was no production of the opera in his lifetime; no life, either. Caroline vowed that she would not make the same mistake.
Don Cameron’s voice was slow, rumbling, hoarse. “Well, you could at least try it out.”
“But, my dear Senator, I am already so beautifully machined. At Lamb House, I am fitted out like the latest, most modern manufactory, geared for the most intense production, with a chief engineer who is hopelessly wedded to that intricate, fine-grinding mill that he performs upon with a positively virtuoso’s touch…” Henry James spoke in a low, deep resonant voice, well-produced by a huge barrel of a chest that contained a singer’s lungs, thought Caroline, for his breath never gave out, no matter how long and intricate the sentence.
Cameron was persistent. “You’ll never regret trying it out. I know. I tried it out. I’m no writer but it could change your life.”
“Ah, that!” began James.
Adams broke in. “What is it?”
“I already showed you.” The small, red, suspicious eyes turned toward Caroline now. “I’m selling the thing-the rights, that is-for Europe. Exclusive rights.”
“Our senatorial friend,” Caroline noted that Henry James had taken a very deep breath before he spoke; thanks to the Colonel, she knew rather a lot about the tricks of opera singers as well as opera, “has now in his exile… no, his highly thoughtful refuge from the clamorous Senate House, turned the full ripeness of his attention onto a commercial object which he quite rightly suspects is, to me, of all people here, at least, of poignant importance-and interest, although whether or not the Senator, as emptor-or tempter-will make on Miss Sanford the same profound effect that he has made on me, with his description-ever so lucid, so compelling, even-of that commercial object of which you, my dear Henry, now inquire the identity, I cannot, at hazard, guess. Mais en tout cas, Mademoiselle Sanford, I cannot think that you, as the chatelaine of the great palace of Saint-Cloud-le-Duc, would even find Senator Cameron’s utensil of any intrinsic-or even extrinsic, I am impelled to add-interest save…”
“What… what is it?” cried Henry Adams, as the sentences slowly looped around them, verbal equivalents of Laocoön’s serpent.
“It’s this typewriter I’ve been promoting,” said Senator Cameron.
“For an instant, I thought it was some sort of home guillotine,” said Caroline.
“Homely utensil?” Adams asked; then answered his own question. “Well, why not? We could certainly use one in Lafayette Square.”
“Now if Mr. James would just give us an endorsement,” began Senator Cameron.
“But I am wedded, Senator, to another. I am-let me pronounce once and for all the honorable name-united to the Remington typewriter-machine, and have been for close to two wonderfully contented and happy years.”
“You manipulate it yourself?” Caroline could not visualize the ponderous Mr. James confronting a metal machine, stubby fingers tapping.
“No,” said Henry Adams. “He paces about the garden room of his house and unfurls his sentences into the ear of a typewriter-machinist who turns them into Remingtonese.”
“Which is, at its best, so like English,” added Henry James, eyes sparkling. Caroline vowed that she must one day really read him. Except for Daisy Miller, required reading for every American girl in Europe, Caroline had always steered clear of the books of the man that so many knowing Americans in Paris referred to as the Master.
“I’ll bring it over to your place anyway.” Cameron was dogged. “Get your man to try it out. There’s a fortune in these new gadgets. Where’s Lizzie?”
No one knew. She was not in the room. As Cameron made his way through a group of children to the hallway, Mr. Eddy bowed low to the statesman, who did not see him.
“Our good Don is persistent,” said Henry Adams; and though the tone was agreeable, the expression of the face was not. Caroline saw that James had noticed, too.
“It must be very hard, no longer being in the Senate, after so many years, at the center.” James was uncharacteristically tentative.
“Oh, I think he has a good enough time. He’s rich, after all. He’s got the place in South Carolina to worry about…”
“It must be even harder for La Dona, as you, not I, call her.” James was studying Adams’s face with acute interest.
“She has not been well.” Adams was neutral; flat. “That’s why Don and I formed our syndicate, to take this place for the summer, to unite us all.”
“She is thriving then?”
But Henry Adams was saved from answering by the butler, who was at last permitted to come into his brilliant own. The long cadaverous figure of Mr. Beech stood very straight in the doorway, as his basso voice ecstatically proclaimed, “His Excellency, the Ambassador of the United States of America, and Mrs. John Hay.”
“I shall now say ‘hurrah’ three times, I think,” said Henry James, “and very loud, too.”
“Don’t,” said Adams.
The Hays were a curious-looking couple. He was small, slender, bearded, with, at a distance, a boy’s face that, close up, was like a delicate much-wrinkled beige chamois skin. Hay wore a pointed beard, like all the others; his full head of hair was parted in the middle and dyed the same dull chestnut color as the hair of his tall, fleshy, large-faced wife, who looked even larger and more formidable than she was when standing beside her husband. Caroline could see Del’s face peering out of Clara’s; but except for the turned-up nose, saw no resemblance to Del at all in Hay, who came toward them, hand outstretched to greet Henry James. They were old friends.
“In fact,” said James, more to Caroline than to anyone, “when I needed employment on this side of the water, Mr. Hay-this was a quarter-century ago, and the world was younger, as were we, to strike the Dickensian note of spacious redundancy-Mr. Hay, as an editor of the New York Tribune, persuaded, with who knows what wiles, that worthy paper to take me on as its inadequate Paris correspondent.”
“Easily the wisest thing I ever did.” Hay’s voice was low and precise and, that rare thing to Caroline’s critical ear, agreeably American. “Now you are become so great that I have your bust in my library, along with Cicero’s. Adams often compares the two of you-the originals, that is, not the busts. Every day he thinks up something new to say, when he pays me a call.” Del had told Caroline a good deal about the curious Hay-Adams living arrangements at Washington.
Ever since the Civil War, Hay and Adams had been friends; the wives, too, had liked each other, a source of amazement to Caroline, who said as much, amazing Del, who was innocent. When the Hays at last abandoned Cleveland, Ohio, where Hay had first worked for-and then with-Mrs. Hay’s father, they had come to Washington to live, largely because Henry Adams lived there; and he lived there because, as he had told Caroline, it is a law of nature that Adamses gravitate to capitals. Since he would never be president like his two ancestors, he could at least live opposite the White House, where each Adams had, so disastrously, presided; and thus, close to “home,” he could write, think, and even make-through backstage maneuvering-history.
In due course, Hay and Adams had built a double house in Lafayette Square, a red brick Romanesque affair, whose outside Caroline already knew from photographs and whose inside Del intended for her to get to know. But though the two houses were physically joined, there was no connecting inner door. In this joint house, Hay had finished his interminable life of Lincoln while Adams had written much of his long account of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, demonstrating, as Del had observed, how the Adamses, though seldom mentioned in the text, had almost never been wrong-unlike their opponents, Jefferson and Madison and the terrible Andrew Jackson, whose statue at the center of Lafayette Park was daily visible to Henry Adams, who, daily, chose not to look at this ungainly reminder of his grandfather’s political ruin, not to mention that of the republic. For was it not with Jackson that the age of political corruption which now flourished began? But despite the city’s ever-present mephitic corruption, the two wealthy historians lived contentedly side by side, influencing events through various chosen instruments, among them Senator Don Cameron, hereditary czar of Pennsylvania. When Lincoln wondered if Don’s father, Simon Cameron, would steal once he was secretary of war, a Pennsylvania colleague observed that, well, he would probably not steal a red-hot stove. When Simon had heard this, he demanded an apology. The congressman complied, with the words “Believe me, I did not say that you would not steal a red-hot stove.”
Hay’s career had seemed at an end when he moved into the Romanesque fortress opposite the White House. But then, as the political dice were again cast and Ohio, yet again, was about to produce a president, the obvious candidate was the state’s governor, one William McKinley, known as the Major-pronounced Maj-ah. A Civil War veteran and longtime member of the House of Representatives, the Major had sworn eternal loyalty to the tariff, the creed of the higher Republicans, and so gained the attention and loyalty of the party’s leaders, the merchant princes. For them, McKinley was immaculate. He was poor-hence, honest; eloquent but without ideas-hence, not dangerous; devoted to I his wife, an epileptic who always sat next to him at table so that when she went into convulsions, he could tactfully throw a napkin over her head and continue his conversation as though nothing had happened; when the convulsions ceased, he would remove the napkin and she would continue her dinner. Although Mrs. McKinley was not entirely an asset as a potential first lady, the fact that she was an “invalid” (and he deeply devoted to her) counted for a great deal in the republic’s numerous sentimental quarters.
Unfortunately, McKinley went bankrupt at the start of the campaign. Out of friendship, he had signed his name to a note, which the friend in question could not redeem, to the amount of $140,000. The McKinley campaign was about to end before it started, giving the election to the so-called boy-orator of the Platte, that fire-breathing populist and enemy of the rich, William Jennings Bryan. As blood would obscure the moon for a generation if Bryan should prevail, McKinley’s campaign manager, a wealthy grocer named Mark Hanna, appealed to a number of other wealthy men, among them Hay, to pay off the note and save the moon from a sanguinary fate. The Major was grateful. Hay, who had been passed over for high diplomatic office by an earlier president because “there was just no politics in appointing him,” now found himself in high favor with the latest Ohio management across the road.
The Major appointed Hay ambassador to the Court of St. James’s; and Hay had arrived in London the year before, accompanied by Henry Adams, whose father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had each held the same post. The ambassadorial party had been met at Southampton by Henry James, who was never seen anywhere near the world of politics or near-politics or even plain celebrity. But there he most loyally was at the customs house, crushed by the international press. After observing Hay’s dexterous handling of the thorny flower of the British press, James had whispered to Hay, in a voice audible to more than a few, “What impression does it make on your mind to have those insects creeping about and saying things to you?”
“I do not know this man,” Hay said with mock severity, getting into his carriage.
“Anyway,” Del had told Caroline, summing up, “the firm of Hay and Adams prospered from the day they moved into their joint house.”
But Caroline had been conscious of an omission. “Weren’t there, to begin with, two couples who were friends?”
“Yes. My father and mother. And Mr. and Mrs. Adams.”
“What became of Mrs. Adams?”
“She died before they could move into the house. She was small and plain. That’s all I remember. People say she was brilliant, even witty, for a woman. She took photographs, and developed them herself. She was very talented. Her name was Marian, but everyone called her Clover.”
“How did she die?”
Del had looked at her, as if uncertain whether or not she was to be trusted-but trusted with what? Caroline had wondered. Surely he knew nothing that others did not know. “She killed herself. She drank some sort of chemical that you use to develop pictures. Mr. Adams found her on the floor. It was a painful death.”
“Why did she do it?” Caroline had asked, but there had been no answer.
As the lunch party began to drift toward the dining room, with its southern exposure of quantities of Kentish Weald, Mrs. Cameron hurried toward John Hay. “He’s come! He says you invited him…”
“Who?” asked Hay.
“Mr. Austin. Our neighbor. Your admirer.”
“Oh, God,” murmured Hay. “He thinks I’m a poet, too.”
“But so triumphantly you were-” began James.
“Tell Mr. Austin there’s been a mistake…”
But there was no telling Mr. Beech, who was now declaiming, “The Poet Laureate of All England and Mrs. Alfred Austin!”
“What joy!” Hay exclaimed so that all could hear and relish. Then he hurried to greet what many believed was the dullest poet in all England.
Caroline sat at table between Del and Henry James. The dining room was easily the most agreeable of the old house’s state apartments, and here Mrs. Cameron presided efficiently over children, young adults, statesmen and-now-a dim poet, wreathed in courtly laurel. “Mr. Austin is under the impression that our friend Hay is the American poet laureate,” said James, doing justice to a quantity of turbot in fresh cream. Across the table a very small Curzon girl sniffled next to a nanny who had apparently invoked an unfair prohibition.
“Father keeps telling Mr. Austin that he hasn’t written a line since…”
Like the low rumbling note of an organ the voice of Henry James began, through a last mouthful of turbot, to intone:
“And I think that saving a little child,
And fetching him to his own,
Is a derned sight better business
Than loafing around The Throne.”
At the quatrain’s end, half the table applauded: Mr. James’s voice was unusually sonorous and compelling.
“I always find that part the most moving,” said the Laureate, “if not theologically tactful.”
“I hate it,” said Hay, who looked most embarrassed.
“I am sure that Dante must have felt the same whenever the Inferno was quoted.” Adams was most amused.
“What on earth is it?” Caroline whispered to Del, but Henry James’s ear was sharp.
“ ‘Little Breeches,’ ” he boomed, “the poignant narrative-nay, epic-of a four-year-old boy saved from the wreckage of some sort of rustic conveyance that was drawn, most perilously, as it proved, by horses, the sort of conveyance, ill-defined, I fear, and of vague utility, what one might term…”
“A wagon?” Caroline contributed.
“Precisely.” James was enjoying himself. The first of several roast fowls had now appeared, further brightening his mood. “The small boy-hardly more than what Adams would call an infant, except to Adams an infant is any unmarried maiden who might be his niece, and this child-Little Breeches,” again the name vibrated in the air and Caroline could see Hay cringe, and even Del cleared his throat, preparatory to drowning out James’s inexorable voice, “-apparently, this small untended rustic person fell from the moving conveyance and was saved by a rustic hero, who deliberately sacrificed his own life for this pair of, as it were, small trousers, or, rather, its contents, and for this noble act, despite a terrestrial life of some untidiness-even sin-he was translated to Paradise.”
“The churches still complain about Father’s poem.” Del was more than ready to change the subject.
“But it sold, as a pamphlet, in the untold millions,” said James, dislodging with a forefinger a morsel of chicken from between his two front teeth. “Like the later and, perhaps, more profound ‘Jim Bludso,’ your father’s most celebrated ballad, the hero of which gave his life to save those of his passengers aboard a-this time nautical-conveyance, the Prairie Belle. Mr. Hay’s fascination with the hazards of American travel was very much the spirit of the seventies. In any event, this steam-propelled barque explodes, if memory serves, in some wild American river, enabling the paragon to give his life for innumerable little breeches, not to mention other garments, including maidenly costumes, all the passengers in short, thus ensuring himself a direct passage to Paradise on the democratic ground-highest of all grounds-that ‘Christ ain’t going to be too hard on a man who died for men.’ ” But this time James dropped his voice dramatically and no one but Caroline heard. To her left, Del was talking to Abigail Adams, one of Henry’s actual nieces, a large plain girl, recently broken out of a Paris convent.
As boiled beef relentlessly followed fowl, and the conversation in the dining room grew both louder and slower, Henry James said that, yes, indeed he had met Caroline’s grandfather. “It was in ’76.” He was suddenly precise. “I had decided to make my… deliberate removal to Europe, like Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, who had made his thirty years earlier. He had always intrigued me, and I had noticed, most favorably, for The Nation, his Paris Under the Communards. I can still see him in bright summer Hudson riparian light, on a lawn at river-side, somewhere north of Rhinecliff, a Livingston house behind us, all white columns and cinnamon stucco, and we spoke of the necessity, for some, of living on this side of the Atlantic, some distance from our newspapered democracy.”
“Was my mother with him?”
James cast her a sidelong glance; and helped himself to horseradish sauce. “Oh, she was there, so very much there! Madame la Princesse d’Agrigente. Who can forget her? You are very like her, as I told you at Saint-Cloud…”
“But not so dark?”
“No. Not so dark.” James was then drawn by his other table partner, Alice Hay, who resembled her father-small, shrewd, quick-witted; also, pretty. Although Caroline had not found either of Del’s sisters particularly sympathetic, she did not in the least mind their company, particularly that of Helen, who sat across the table, next to Spencer Eddy, who seemed infatuated with Helen’s precociously middle-aged radiance. She was like her mother, large-bodied, with glowing eyes and quantities of glossy hair, all her own.
Suddenly, Senator Cameron shouted, “What’s this?” He sat at the head of the table, as befitted the married co-host. In one hand he held a silver serving-spoon from which hung a gelatinous mass, rather like a jellyfish, thought Caroline.
“A surprise,” said Mrs. Cameron, from her end of the table. The Curzon child promptly burst into tears: the word “surprise” had not a happy association.
“What is this?” Senator Cameron turned his small fierce eyes upon the butler.
“It is the… corn, sir. From America, sir.”
“This is not corn. What is this mess?”
From behind the coromandel screen that hid pantry from dining room, the cook appeared, like an actress who had been waiting in the wings for her cue. “It is the corn, sir. As you said to make it. Boiled, sir. Should I have left the seeds in it?”
“Oh, Don!” Mrs. Cameron laughed, a most genuine sound in that often dramatically charged household. “It’s the watermelon. She mistook it for the corn.” In the general laughter, not shared by Cameron, the cook vanished.
“Father thinks now that we shall keep all the Philippines,” said Del. “The Major has come round, he says. But it hasn’t been easy. All those people who didn’t want us to take on Hawaii last summer are at it again. I can’t think why. If we don’t take up where England’s left off-or just given up-who will?”
“Does it make so much difference?” Although Caroline had been delighted by the war’s excitement, she could not see that there had been any earthly point to it. Why drive poor weak old Spain out of the Caribbean and the Pacific? Why take on far-off colonies? Why boast so much? It was not like Napoleon, who did appeal to her because he had, himself, wanted the world, which Mr. McKinley did not seem to want to be bothered with, unlike that friend of her hosts, a man to whom they all referred, with an inadvertent baring of teeth, as Thee-oh-dore, who had managed, under fire, to lead some of his friends to the top of a small hill in Cuba, without once breaking his pince-nez. The fuss in the newspapers over Colonel Theodore Roosevelt and his so-called Rough Riders was as great as the fuss over Admiral Dewey, who had actually defeated Spain’s Pacific fleet and occupied Manila. For reasons obscure to Caroline, the newspapers thought “Teddy” the greater of the two heroes. Therefore: “Does it make so much difference?” was not idly posed.
Del told her of all the dangers that might befall the world if the German kaiser-whose fleet was even now in Philippine waters-were to acquire that rich archipelago in order to carry out the current dream of every European power, not to mention Japan, the carving up of the collapsed Chinese empire. “We had no choice, really. As for allowing Spain to stay on in our hemisphere, that was an anachronism. We must be the masters in our own house.”
“Is all the western hemisphere, even Tierra del Fuego, a part of our house?”
“You’re making fun of me. Let’s talk about the theater in Paris…”
“Let’s talk about men and women.” Caroline felt suddenly as if she had had a revelation about these two hostile races. The differences between the two sexes were known to her in a way that they could never be known to an American young lady. Although American girls were given a social freedom unknown in France, they were astonishingly sheltered in other crucial ways, their ignorance nurtured by anxious mothers, themselves more innocent than not of the on-going plan of Eden’s serpent. Del looked at her, startled. “But what shall we say about-about men and women?” Del’s flush was not entirely from the August heat and the heavy meal.
“I’ve thought of one difference. At least between American men and women. Mr. James called the United States ‘the newspapered democracy.’ ”
“Mr. Jefferson said that if he had to choose between a government without a press and a press without a government, he would choose a press without a-”
“How stupid he must have been!” But when Caroline saw Del’s hurt expression-plainly, he had identified himself with the sage of Monticello-she modified: “I mean, he was not stupid. He just thought that the people he was talking to were stupid. After all, they were journalists, weren’t they? I mean if they weren’t journalists of some sort, how would we know what he said-or might have said, or didn’t say? Anyway, back to men and women. We women are criticized, quite rightly, for thinking and, worse, talking about marriage and children and the ordinary people we have to deal with every day and the lives we have to make for our husbands or families or whatever, and this means that as we get older, we get duller and duller because we have, at the end, nothing left but ourselves to think about and talk about and so we become perfect-if we’re not already to begin with-bores,” Caroline concluded in triumph.
Del looked at her, quite bewildered. “So if you are-like that, then men are… what?”
“Different. Boring in a different way. Because of the newspapers. Don’t you see?”
“You mean men read them and women don’t?”
“Exactly. Most of the men we know, that is, read them, and most of the women we know don’t. At least, not the news-what a funny word!-of politics or wars. So when men talk to one another for hours about what they have all read that morning about China and Cuba and… Tierra del Fuego, about politics and money, we are left out because we haven’t read those particular bits of news.”
“But you could, so easily, read them…”
“But we don’t want to. We have our boredom and you have yours. But yours is truly sinister. Blaise says that practically nothing Mr. Hearst prints is ever true, including the story about how the Spaniards blew up the Maine. But you men who read the Journal, or something like it, will act as if what you read is true or, worse, as if, true or not, it was all that really mattered. So we are excluded, entirely. Because we know that none of it matters-to us.”
“Well, I agree newspapers are not always true, but if… foolish men think they are true-or perhaps true-then it does matter to everyone because that is how governments are run, in response to the news.”
“Then worse luck for foolish men-and women, too.”
Del laughed at last. “So what would you do if you could alter things?”
“Read the Morning Journal.” Caroline was prompt. “Every word.”
“And believe it?”
“Of course not. But at least I could talk to men about Tierra del Fuego and the Balance of Power.”
“I prefer to talk about the theater in Paris… and marriage.” Del’s lower larger face reddened; the small forehead remained pale ivory.
“You’ll be the woman? I’ll be the man?” Caroline smiled. “No. That’s not allowed. Because we are divided at birth by those terrible newspapers that tell you what to think and us what to wear and when to wear it. We cannot, ever, truly meet.”
“But you can. There is, after all, the high middle ground,” said Henry James, who had been listening, the ruins of an elaborate pudding before him.
“Where-what is that?” Caroline turned her full gaze on that great head with the gleaming all-intelligent eyes.
“Why that is art, dear Miss Sanford. It is a kind of Heaven open to us all, and not just Jim Bludso and his creator.”
“But art is not for everyone, Mr. James.” Del was respectful.
“Then there is something not unlike it, if more rare, yet a higher stage, a meeting ground for all true-hearts.”
On the word “hearts,” Caroline felt a sudden premonitory chill. Did he mean the specific mysterious five or did he mean just what he said? Apparently, he meant just that, because when she asked what this higher stage was, Henry James said, simply, for him: “Dare one say that human intercourse which transcends politics and war and, yes, even love itself? I mean, of course, friendship. There-you have it.”
IN WICKER CHAIRS, placed side by side on the stone terrace, John Hay and Henry Adams presided over the Kentish Weald, as the summer light yielded, slowly, very slowly, to darkness.
“In Sweden, in summer, the sun shines all night long.” Henry Adams lit a cigar. “One never thinks of England being almost as far to the north as Sweden. But look! It’s after dinner, and it’s light yet.”
“I suppose we like to think of England as being closer to us than it really is.” Carefully, John Hay pressed his lower back against the hard cushion that Clara had placed behind him. For some months the pain had been fairly constant, a dull aching that seemed to extend from the small of the back down into the pelvis, but, of course, ominously, the doctors said that it was the other way around. In some mysterious fashion the cushion stopped the pain from exploding into one of its sudden borealises, as Hay tended to think of those excruciating flare-ups when his whole body would be electrified by jolts of pain-originating in the atrophied-if not worse-prostate gland, whose dictatorship ordered his life, obliging him to pass water or, painfully, not to pass water, a dozen times during the night, accompanied by a burning sensation reminiscent of his youth when he had briefly contracted in war-time Washington a minor but highly popular venereal infection.
“Are you all right?” Although Adams was not looking at him, Hay knew that his old friend was highly attuned to his physical state.
“No, I’m not.”
“Good. You’re better. When you’re really in pain, you boast of rude health. How pretty Del’s girl is.”
Hay looked across the terrace to the stone bench where his son and Caroline had combined to make a romantic picture, suitable for Gibson’s pen, while the remaining houseguests-it was Monday-floated like sub-aquatic creatures in the watery half-light. The children had been removed, to Hay’s delight, Adams’s sorrow. “Do you recall her mother, Enrique?” Hay had a number of variations of Henry’s name, playful tribute to his friend’s absolute unprotean nature.
“The darkly beautiful Princesse d’Agrigente was not easy, once seen, ever to forget. I knew her back in the seventies, the beautiful decade, after our unbeautiful war was won. Did you know Sanford?”
Hay nodded. The pain which had started to radiate from the lumbar region suddenly surrendered to the pillow’s pressure. “He was on McDowell’s staff early in the war. I think he wanted to marry Kate Chase…”
“Surely he was not alone in this madness?” Hay sensed the Porcupine’s smile beneath the beard, pale blue in the ghostly light.
“We were many, it’s true. Kate was the Helen of Troy of E Street. But Sprague got her. And Sanford got Emma d’Agrigente.”
“Money?”
“What else?” Hay thought of his own good luck. He had never thought that he could ever make a living. For a young man from Warsaw, Illinois, who liked to read and write, who had gone east to college, and graduated from Brown, there were only two careers. One was the law, which bored him; the other, the ministry, which intrigued him, despite a near-perfect absence of faith. Even so, he had been wooed by various ministers of a variety of denominations. But he had said no, finally, to the lot, for, as he wrote his lawyer uncle, Milton: “I would not do for a Methodist preacher, for I am a poor horseman. I would not suit the Baptists, for I would dislike water. I would fail as an Episcopalian, for I am no ladies’ man.” This last was disingenuous. Hay had always been more than usually susceptible to women and they to him. But as he had looked, at the age of twenty-two, no more than twelve years old, neither in Warsaw nor, later, in Springfield, was he in any great demand as a ladies’ man.
Instead, Hay had grimly gone into his uncle’s law office; got to know his uncle’s friend, a railroad lawyer named Abraham Lincoln; helped Mr. Lincoln in the political campaign that made him president; and then boarded the train with the President-elect to go to Washington for five years, one month and two weeks. Hay had been present in the squalid boardinghouse when the murdered President had stopped breathing, on a mattress soaked with blood.
Hay had then gone to Paris, as secretary to the American legation. Later, he had served, as a diplomat, in Vienna and Madrid. He wrote verse, books of travel; was editor of the New York Tribune. He lectured on Lincoln. He wrote folksy poems, and his ballads of Pike County sold in the millions. But there was still no real money until the twenty-four-year-old Cleveland heiress Clara Stone asked him to marry her; and he had gratefully united himself with a woman nearly a head taller than he with an innate tendency to be as fat as it was his to be lean.
At thirty-six Hay was saved from poverty. He moved to Cleveland; worked for his father-in-law-railroads, mines, oil, Western Union Telegraph; found that he, too, had a gift for making money once he had money. He served, briefly, as assistant secretary of state; and wrote, anonymously, a best-selling novel, The Bread-Winners, in which he expressed his amiable creed that although men of property were the best situated to administer and regulate America’s wealth and that labor agitators were a constant threat to the system, the ruling class of a city in the Western Reserve (Cleveland was never named) was hopelessly narrow, vulgar, opinionated. Henry Adams had called him a snob; he had agreed. Both agreed that it was a good idea that he had published the book anonymously; otherwise, the Major could not have offered him the all-important embassy at London. Had the Senate suspected that Hay did not admire all things American, he would not have been confirmed.
“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.
CAROLINE 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 connotation, 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…”
“I know absolutely nothing,” said Henry Adams, abruptly sitting up. “Except that I want my drive.”
“To Rye. With me,” said Henry James, moving away from the balustrade. “I go home,” he said to Mrs. Cameron. “I’ve invited your Henry-ah, and mine, too-for tea. We shall travel in a hired electrical-motor conveyance of local provenance.”
Henry Adams was calling. “Hitty! Hitty! Where are you?”
But Hitty, the niece Abigail, was not to be found. And so it was that in the interminable confusion of Henry James’s farewell, Henry Adams took Caroline’s arm. “I must have a niece of some sort with me, at all times. It is the law. You are chosen.”
“I am honored. But…”
There were no buts, as Henry Adams fled his brother Brooks, Caroline in tow, to be thrown, she thought, like dinner to wolves if Brooks were to draw too close to James’s rented troika or, to be precise, and James was nothing but that, electrical-motor car. At the last moment Del was included. Yet even in the driveway, to the astonishment of Mr. Beech, Brooks continued to hold forth as the uniformed chauffeur got the two Henrys, the one Del and the one Caroline into their high motor car.
“War is the natural state of man. But for what? For energy…”
“Oh, for energy!” simultaneously shouted Henry Adams, as the ungainly electrical-motor car, driven by the uniformed chauffeur, glided through the park, to the further astonishment of Mr. Beech-and of the deer. In the back seat Caroline and Adams faced Del and Henry James.
“I have never heard Brooks in such good and, may I say, abundant voice.” Henry James smiled the mischievous small smile that Caroline had come to find enchanting; although he missed nothing, he seemed never, as far as she could tell, to sit in judgment.
“He wears me out,” Adams sighed. “He is a genius, you know. Unfortunately, I am the genius’s hard-working older brother. So he comes to… to mine me, like an ore of gold, or more likely, lead. You see, I have a number of cloudy theories, which he makes into iron-bound laws.”
“Are there really laws to history?” asked Del, suddenly curious.
“If there were not, I wouldn’t have spent my life trying to be an historian.” Adams was tart; then he sighed again. “The only thing is-I can’t work them out properly. But Brooks can-to a point.”
“Well, what are they?” Yes, Del was genuinely curious, thought Caroline, and she was pleased because she was enough of a French woman to take pleasure, no matter how cursorily, in the elegant generality made flesh by the specific.
“Brooks’s law is as follows.” Adams stared off into the middle distance where, invisible for the moment, stood Hever Castle, which he had already shown Caroline and a raft of nieces. She thought of Anne Boleyn, who had lived there, and wondered if, when Henry VIII cut off her head, he was obeying a law of history which said, Energy requires that you now start the Reformation: or did he, simply, want a new wife, and a son?
“All civilization is centralization. That is the first unarguable law. All centralization is economy. That is the second-resources must be adequate to sustain the civilization, and give it its energy. Therefore all civilization is the survival of the most economical system…”
“What,” asked Del, “does most economical mean?”
“The cheapest,” said Adams curtly. “Brooks thinks that there is now a race between America and Europe to control the vast coal mines of China, because whichever power has the most and the cheapest energy will dominate the world.”
“But we have so much coal and oil at home.” Del was puzzled. “So much more than we know what to do with. Why go to China?”
“To keep others from going. But your instinct is right. If Brooks’s law holds, we shall have got-and won-everything.”
“Is this-dare one ask?-a good thing?” James was tentative.
“A law of nature is neither good nor ill; it simply is. If not us, Russia? Superstitious, barbaric Russia? No. If not us, Germany? A race given to frenzy-and poetry? No.”
“What then are we given to, that is so immeasurably superior?” James was staring, Caroline noticed, directly into Adams’s face-something he, with his endless tact, seldom did. He appeared to be reading Adams’s face, like a book.
“We are given to Anglo-Saxon freedom and the common law and…” Adams paused.
“And we are-extraordinarily and absolutely… we.” James smiled, without, Caroline thought, much pleasure.
“Surely in your love for England,” Adams delicately pricked his expatriate friend, “you must have found qualities here that you think superior to those of every other country-and you could have chosen to live anywhere, including our own turbulent republic. Well, then think of the United States as an extension of this country, which you do love and trust. So think of us as simply taking up the Anglo-Saxon radical task, shouldering it for these islands as they begin to lose their-economy.”
James spread his hands placatingly. “You speak of laws of history, and I am no lawyer. But I confess to misgivings. How can we, who cannot honestly govern ourselves, take up the task of governing others? Are we to govern the Philippines from Tammany Hall? Will we insist that our Oriental colonies be run by bosses? Will we insist that our Spanish possessions be administered by the caucus which has made our politics so vile that every good American-and bad, too, let me hasten to add-cringes when he hears our present system mentioned?”
Adams frowned, not pleased. “We are in a bad way, it is true. But the England of Walpole was far more corrupt and narrow and provincial…”
“True. But the acquisition of an empire civilized the English. That may not be a law but it is a fact.” Henry James looked at Adams very hard. “But what civilized them might very well demoralize us even further.”
Adams did not answer. Del looked worried. “Have you talked like this to Father?”
James’s voice lightened. “No, no. Poor man. He has the weight of the world on him as it is. I think him noble beyond description to offer himself, at his age and in such-wintry health, on the altar of public service.”
Suddenly, James began to intone, the great organ notes quite filling the village through which they were passing. “ ‘He seen his duty, a dead sure thing. And went for it thar and then.’ ”
“What,” asked Caroline, alarmed, “is that?”
“From ‘Jim Bludso,’ ” said Del. “Father does hate to hear it.”
“Well, ‘Father’ is not here, and I do like the roll of it. What might he not have made, in his marvelously rhythmical chronicles, dedicated to the hazards of transportation, out of a runaway-let us say-electrical-motor car in which an historian and giver of immutable laws is saved from extinction by the swift strong arm of a mere storyteller from Albany, New York, but currently domiciled at Rye…”
By the time that James had finished elaborating on this mock-Hay ballad, even Henry Adams was laughing.
Lamb House proved to be a miniature stone manor house with a garden in disarray, all weeds and, yes, dust, thought Caroline obsessively. At the door a man and woman greeted them.
“The Smiths,” said Henry James, with uncharacteristic brevity.
Joyously, the Master and his guests were greeted by the Smiths, who dropped his baggage repeatedly, as they hurried, swinging from side to side, into the house’s small drawing room.
“The Smiths are a legend,” whispered Del, as Henry James seated Henry Adams in an armchair next to the empty fireplace.
“Why?”
As if challenged to dramatize the legend, Mrs. Smith began to sink slowly, almost gracefully, to the floor, a gentle smile on her lips.
“Mr. Smith.” Henry James’s voice betrayed no agitation, as Mr. Smith, thus summoned, fell into the doorway from the hall. “Sir?” his voice rang out.
“It would appear that Mrs. Smith’s siesta, interrupted by the excitement of our arrival, has been resumed upon the drugget.”
“Ah, poor woman!” Smith shook his head. “It is the new medicine the village doctor gives her, not at all what she’s used to in London, in Harley Street.” During this, Smith had pulled his smiling unconscious wife to her feet, and sleep-walked her to the door. “Hers,” Smith declared proudly, “is… a highly sensitive sort of organism.” They were gone. Henry Adams had succeeded in not laughing but the tip of his neat beard was twitching. Henry James looked endlessly melancholy, even Byronic, thought Caroline, who said, “But surely, Mr. James…”
There was a terrible crash at the back of the house: plainly, both Smiths had surrendered to gravity’s stern law. “They are indeed, surely, as you put it, to put it finely, the Smiths, a couple richly experienced in domestic matters, but prone in the wastes, as it were, of unfamiliar country life to exceed-go past, even the earliest of warning signals…”
“Drunk!” Henry Adams’s laugh was so startlingly loud and uninhibited that Caroline could not stop herself; nor could Del.
The Master, however, was a study in polite anguish. “I’m sorry,” he said, “that your introduction to Lamb House should be so spoiled by the Dionysian-no, Bacchic-transports of the loyal good Smiths whose transference from their native London to the unfamiliar countryside has tended to overstimulate them, in every sense…” The sound of crockery crashing caused James’s large smooth brow delicately to furrow.
But Henry Adams then took the lead; and the Smiths, as a subject, were banished; as a fact, however, they did produce a respectable tea, and Mr. Smith, having got a second wind, served efficiently.
Adams was curious about the neighborhood. Was there sufficient company? “As you prefer solitude to company, this means that you must have some very good company nearby so that not seeing them will be all the more agreeable and inspiring.”
“Well, there is the Poet Laureate.” James passed a plate of heavy cakes to Caroline, who refused; to Del, who took two. “I find that every day that I don’t see him is a pleasure. In fact, I see no one here. I did join the golf club, for the tea that they serve, not for the curious lonely game that precedes it, and though unanimously elected as vice-president of the cricket club, I declined the election, as the game is even more incomprehensible to me than golf, and no tea is served. I thought to embrace my solitude this summer little realizing that the Camerons, the Hays, the Adamses should all descend upon me, like a… like a…”
“I cannot wait to hear what he will say we’re like,” said Adams to Caroline, who rather wished the windows onto the garden were open: the room was close, and flies circled the cakes.
“I am torn,” said James, “between the image of a shower of gold and the lurid details of a passion play. In any case, were it not for you passionate visitors, I would be chained to my desk, writing…”
“Dictating…”
“The image is the same. I am chained to Mr. McAlpine, who is chained to his Remington, while I copiously dictate book reviews for Literature, a biography of William Wetmore Story…”
“That crushing bore?”
“You have put in a single phrase what I must make a book of. But as the heirs have paid me a useful sum to memorialize our old and, yes, boring friend, I must do the work to pay for these sticks and stones that compose the first-and last-house I shall ever own.”
Del asked James if he had met Stephen Crane, the young American journalist who was said to be living nearby. James nodded. “He is at Brede Place. He came to call before he went to Cuba, to describe the war. He is most talented, with a wife who…” James glanced at Caroline, and she realized that whatever the wife might be she, as a virginal girl of American provenance, was not about to be told. “… once kept an establishment in Jacksonville, Florida, I believe, named, most evocatively, the Hotel de Dream. Poor young Mr. Crane is also chained to his desk, only his desk is now in Havana-where he writes for a newspaper…”
“For the Journal,” said Caroline. Blaise had told her how Hearst had managed to get Crane away from the World, where he had described, tactlessly, the cowardice of the 71st New York Volunteers. In a series of headlines, Hearst had denounced the World for insulting the valor of America’s brave fighting men; then he hired the author of the canard to write for him.
Henry Adams wondered how someone who had never seen a battle could have written such a fine war novel as The Red Badge of Courage. James reminded him that “the titanic Tolstoi” had, after all, not been alive during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, yet he could imagine that War as well as Peace, to which Caroline felt mischievously obliged to add, “Although Mr. Crane has never been a girl of any kind, much less one of the streets, he did create for us Maggie.”
“Dear, dear!” Henry Adams looked more than ever like an uncle. “You are not supposed to know of such things. Mlle. Souvestre has been lax.”
“But Miss Sanford is a product, Adams, of Paris, where everyone knows…” James’s voice dropped very low on the word “knows” and his eyes became very round and comical. Caroline and Del laughed. Adams did not because it was now time to talk of Thee-oh-dore. Caroline wondered if all Americans, of this particular set anyway, were obliged to speak of Theodore Roosevelt at least six times a day, rather the way convent nuns told their beads at regular intervals. She herself had never met the Colonel, as he was currently known, thanks to what John Hay had dubbed, publicly, “a splendid little war,” giving offense in many quarters, not all of them Spanish. But although Theodore and his Rough Riders had caught the popular imagination, Caroline found it odd that he should be so interesting to his social equals, not to mention elders. Adams sought to explain him: “He is all energy. I suppose that is his attraction…”
“For those who find crude mindless energy attractive.” James put three teaspoons of sugar in his tea.
“Well, he is not mindless, entirely, that is.” Adams was judicious. “He wrote an excellent history of our Navy in the War of 1812…”
“A subject that, even at this far remove, causes my pulses to slow. Was that the war where the participants were exhorted not to shoot until the whites of certain distant hostile eyes were visible?”
“Oh, you expatriate! You will not allow us what history we have.”
“Of course I will. I just want a lot more of it; and written always by you. But what will become of the hero of our Cuban Iliad?”
“He is running for governor of New York State,” said Del. “The Republican machine had to take him. You see, he isn’t corrupt. And they are. So he will make them respectable.”
“But surely, they will make him corrupt, too, if they elect him.” Obviously, thought Caroline, Mr. James was more interested in American matters than he let on.
“I think he’s far too ambitious,” said Adams, “to be corrupted.”
“Then, there it already is! The true corruption. I’m afraid I cannot, dear Adams, in my heart, endure your white knight, Theodore. I have just-tell no one-reviewed his latest… latest… well, book for want of a description other than the grim literal paginated printed nullity, called American Ideals, in which he tells us over and over-and then over once again-how we must live, each of us, ‘purely as an American,’ as if that were something concrete. He also warns us that the educated man-himself, no doubt-must not go into politics as an educated man because he is bound to be beaten by someone of no education at all-this he takes to be some sort of American Ideal, which he worships, as it is American, but which, he concedes, presents a problem for the educated man, whom he then advises to go into the election as if he had had no education at all, and presenting himself to the electorate-yes, you have grasped it!-purely as an American, in which case he will win, which is what matters. There is, dear Adams, as far as I can detect, no mind at all at work in your friend.”
“Perhaps it is not mind so much as a necessary, highly energetic cunning. After all, he was useful at Washington on the Civil Service reform commission. He has also made a name as a reformer of the New York Police.”
“My father says that he has yet to meet a reformer who did not have the heart of a tyrant.” Del made his contribution.
“Let’s hope he keeps that cruel conviction a secret from Theodore.” Caroline could see that Adams wanted to defend Roosevelt but James’s contempt for his celebrated friend was plainly disturbing to him. “At least,” Adams rallied, “when he was assistant secretary of the Navy, he got the fleet ready, something the secretary and Congress were not about to do. He also ordered Admiral Dewey to the China coast, just in case of war. Then, when the war came, by resigning to go fight, he showed that he was entirely serious.”
“Serious?” James frowned. The light in the garden was turning from silver to deep gold. “Serious, as a jingo-yes, he is that. And also serious, I suppose you mean, purely as an American…?”
“Oh, James, you are too suspicious of a man who after all embodies the spirit of our race, as we now move onto the world stage, and take our part, the leading part, which history’s law requires.”
“What law, may I ask, is that?” James was mischievous.
“That the most efficient will prevail.”
“Ah, your brother’s law! Yes, that the world will go to the… uh, cheapest economy. Of course. And why not? We should do well to get ourselves an empire on the cheap, assuming that the British will let theirs go, which I don’t see them ever doing, not while German kaiser and Russian tsar and Japanese mikado are all rattling their sabres in the once peaceful stillness of the Orient…”
“A stillness we have broken. You know, Brooks is close to Theodore. Brooks is also close to Admiral Mahan. The three of them are constantly plotting our imperial destiny.”
“According to Brooks’s immutable laws of history?”
“Yes. Of course he likes to apply laws. I don’t. I prefer to understand them.”
“The Adamses…!” James’s exclamation was both comic and fond; and on that note, tea ended; and the electrical-motor car returned them, without incident-though not without numerous warnings from James that they might yet become the martyred subjects for one of Hay’s dread Transportation Ballads-to Surrenden Dering.
When Caroline came down to dinner, she found Clara Hay, swathed in pastel colors that made her large bulk seem more than ever monumental, at a desk, writing letters. “I am never caught up any more,” she said, smiling at Caroline. Is she to be my mother-in-law? Caroline wondered. Am I, at last, grown-up? She asked herself this question a dozen times a day. It was as if the prison door of childhood had simply opened of its own accord and she, without thinking and, certainly, without a plan-had stepped into the outside world. She had always wanted to do as she pleased; had never dreamed that such a thing was possible. Then the Colonel vanished, which was how she thought of his death; and she had slipped through the open door.
“Did you meet Clarence King this summer in Paris?” Clara continued to write.
“No. I met a George King, who had just married a girl from Boston.”
“That was Clarence’s brother. They were all together. Then Clarence went off-someplace. To look for gold, or whatever. He is our brilliant friend…”
Caroline saw that the letter-paper was the same that Elizabeth Cameron had confiscated. “The Five of Hearts,” she said.
Clara put down her pen; and looked at Caroline. “How do you know about that?”
“I saw the letter-paper, on the desk. Mrs. Cameron was very mysterious. She said I was not to mention the subject to Mr. Adams.”
“She’s right. You mustn’t. You see, once upon a time there were five of us, and we called ourselves the Hearts. This was in the early eighties, in Washington. There was Mr. Adams, Mr. King, Mr. Hay. There was also Mrs. Adams-now dead-and me. So there are only four Hearts left, of which three, I am happy to say, are here in this house, as I write to the fourth, in British Columbia.”
“But did you have-do you have a secret society? With passwords, and curious handshakes, like the Masons?” Colonel Sanford had been devoted to Masonry.
Clara laughed. “No, nothing like that. We were just five friends. Three brilliant men, and two wives, of whom one was brilliant and the other’s me.”
“How-nice that must have been.” Caroline was aware of the inadequacy of the word “nice” but then she was equally aware of the inadequacy of Clara’s explanation. “Mr. Adams never speaks of Mrs. Adams?”
“Never. But he does like it when people speak of the memorial to her, Saint-Gaudens’s statue in Rock Creek Cemetery. Have you seen it?”
“I’ve never been to Washington.”
“Well, we shall alter that soon, I hope.”
Brooks Adams entered the drawing room, talking. “A nation that faces two oceans must have colonies everywhere in order to protect itself.”
“Oh, dear,” murmured Clara Hay, folding the letter to King and placing it in an envelope. “Dear Brooks,” she added; and fled the room slowly.
“That is not just my view,” said Brooks, staring hard at Caroline. “It is Admiral Mahan’s. When was the last time you reread his The Influence of Sea Power upon History?”
“I’ve never actually read it once,” said Caroline, trying not to lose her balance and fall into those mad flinty eyes. “Or,” she added, finally detaching her gaze from his, “heard of it till now.”
“You must reread it at least once a year.” Brooks listened to no one but himself and Henry. “The logic is overpowering. Maintain a fleet in order to acquire colonies. Then, in turn, the colonies will provide you with new wealth in order to maintain an even larger fleet in order to acquire even more colonies. Theodore has finally learned this lesson. It took me years to bring him around. Now he understands that if the Anglo-Saxon race is to survive-and prevail-we must go to war.”
“With whom?”
“With anyone who tries to stop us from the acquisition of China. We shall need a different president, of course. McKinley has been superb. But now we need a military man, a dictator of sorts. I’m instructing the Democratic Party to support General Miles. He’s a war hero, after all. He’s commanded all our forces. He’s deeply conservative.”
“Will the Democratic Party do as you tell them?” Caroline was now convinced that Brooks Adams was more than a little mad.
“If they want to win, of course. Wouldn’t you vote for General Miles?”
“Women do not vote, Mr. Adams.”
“Thank God. But if you could?”
“I don’t know him.”
“You don’t know who?” Mrs. Cameron was brilliant in watered blue silk.
“Mr. Adams’s candidate for president, General Miles.”
“Nelson?” Mrs. Cameron’s eyebrows contracted.
“That’s right. He’s willing. We’re willing.”
“Then that’s that, I suppose.” Don Cameron and Henry Adams entered the room together, and Brooks abandoned the ladies for the real quarry. “Poor Brooks,” said Mrs. Cameron. “But then poor Nelson, too, if he’s got the bug.”
“Is Nelson General Miles?”
“Yes. He’s also my brother-in-law. I can’t imagine him as president. But then I can’t really imagine anyone until, of course, they are. Del says you are leaving tomorrow.”
Caroline nodded. “I must talk to lawyers. In New York.”
“Our summer’s ending far too soon. You to New York, Mr. Hay to New Hampshire, Mr. Adams to Paris…”
“Mrs. Hay just told me who the Five of Hearts are.”
Mrs. Cameron smiled. “So now you know who they are. But did she tell you what they are?”
“What they are?” Caroline was puzzled. “But weren’t they just five friends, to begin with?”
“No. They were not just friends.” Mrs. Cameron was suddenly, annoyingly, mysterious. “It is what they are that most matters.” Then Mrs. Cameron turned to greet two strange ladies, who had just arrived. Could it be, wondered Caroline, much intrigued, that these five-now four-elderly people are the gods of Olympus in disguise?