BLAISE DELACROIX SANFORD had little appetite for food and less for drink, and so he had got into the habit of turning the lunch hour into a long walk up Fifth Avenue, starting at the Journal office and ending with a visit to the Hoffman House bar in Madison Square. Here he would drink a mug of beer and dine off the vast buffet, the only tariff, as it were, the expected twenty-five-cent tip to the waiter, which insured the solid clientele of New York’s most sumptuous bar against the hordes of hungry dangerous men who lived beneath the elevated railroad along Sixth Avenue a block away. Although there was an unwritten treaty that there be no traffic between wealthy Fifth and depraved Sixth Avenues, the idle stranger had been known to appear in the bar-rooms of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, that acropolis among hotels, and wolf down a complete meal from the celebrated “free lunch,” some sixty silver platters and chafing dishes containing everything from terrapin stew to a boiled egg.
Blaise, in his sturdy youth, preferred the boiled egg to any other food. He had been so spoiled by great cooking all his life in France that simplicity at table was a bleak joy he could now indulge in. As he stood at the bar, beer mug in hand, he looked about the glittering high-ceilinged rooms that ran the hotel’s length. Slender, fluted Corinthian columns supported an elaborately coffered ceiling. Every square inch of wall was vividly decorated: half-pilasters in elaborate stucco, painted Arcadian scenes in gilt frames, cut-crystal gas-lamps now electrified, and in the place of honor over the mahogany bar the famed nude woman, the notorious masterpiece of a Parisian unknown to the Parisian Blaise, one Adolphe William Bouguereau. The painting was still regarded by New York men as “hot stuff.” For Blaise it was simply quaint.
As Blaise studied the stout burghers who came and went, talking business, he was relieved to see none of his fellow journalists. Although he enjoyed their company, to a point, that point was often too swiftly reached whenever a bottle was produced. He had known a few heavy drinkers at Yale; had even been drunk himself; but he had never encountered anything quite like the newspapermen, as they called themselves. It seemed that the more talented they were, the more hopeless and helpless they were in the presence of a bottle.
There was a mild stir in the bar as the former Democratic president Grover Cleveland, a near-perfect cube of flesh, as broad as he was tall, made a stately entrance, shook a number of hands absently, and then took the arm of the smooth Republican Chauncey Depew and together they vanished into an alcove.
“Who’d think they were once mortal enemies?” Blaise turned and found himself looking into the handsome, if somewhat slant-eyed, face of his Yale classmate Payne Whitney. The young men shook hands. Blaise knew that although his classmates considered him somewhat scandalous for not bothering to graduate, he was thought to be highly enterprising-in a criminal sort of way-for having gone to work for William Randolph Hearst and the Morning Journal, a newspaper whose specialty, according to the newspapermen, was “crime and underwear,” an irresistible combination that had managed to bring, in two years, Pulitzer’s New York World to its knees. At thirty-five, Hearst was the most exciting figure in journalism, and Blaise, who craved excitement-American excitement-had got himself introduced to the Chief. When Blaise had said that he had left Yale, just as Hearst had left Harvard, in order to learn the newspaper business, the Chief had been noncommittal; but then, at best, he found it difficult to express himself in spoken words. Hearst preferred printed words and pictures; he was addicted to headlines, exclamation points, and nude female corpses found, preferably in exciting chunks all round the town. But when the Chief had learned that young Mr. Sanford was heir to a considerable fortune, he had smiled, boyishly, and welcomed him into the bosom of the Journal.
Blaise sold advertising; rewrote stories; did a bit of everything, including expeditions into darkest Sixth Avenue, and Stygian Hell’s Kitchen. He had been bitterly disappointed when the Chief had not taken him to Cuba to enjoy Hearst’s victory over Spain. Theodore Roosevelt may have won a small battle but everyone conceded that Hearst had himself started and won a small war. Without Hearst’s relentlessly specious attacks on Spain, the American government would never have gone to war. Of course, the sinking of the Maine in Havana harbor had been decisive. The plot had been as crude as it was lurid: a ship of a friendly nation on a friendly visit to a restive Spanish colony sinks as the result of a mysterious explosion, with the loss of many American lives. Who-or what-was responsible? Hearst had managed to convince most Americans that the Spanish had deliberately done the deed. But those who knew something of the matter were reasonably certain that the Spanish had had nothing to do with the explosion. Why should they antagonize the United States? Either the ship had exploded from a spontaneous combustion in the coal-bins, or a floating mine had accidentally hit a bulkhead, or-and this was currently being whispered up and down Printing House Square-Hearst himself had caused the Maine to be blown up so that he could increase the Journal’s circulation with his exciting, on-the-spot coverage of the war. Although Blaise rather doubted that the Chief would go so far as to blow up an American warship, he did think him perfectly capable of creating the sort of emotional climate in which an accident could trigger a war. Currently, Hearst was involved in an even more fascinating plot. At one-thirty, Blaise, a principal in the plot, was to report to the Chief at the Worth House, where Hearst lived in unlonely bachelor splendor.
Payne Whitney wanted to know what Hearst’s next move might be. Blaise said that he was not at liberty to say, which caused a degree of satisfying annoyance. But then Blaise was now in the world while Whitney and his Yale roommate, Del Hay, were still boys, on the outside.
“I heard from Del, in England. He said your sister…”
“Half-sister,” Blaise always said, and did not himself know why. It was not as if anyone cared.
“… was visiting the same house. I think Del likes her.” Whitney looked like a ruddy-faced Chinese boy; a very wealthy Chinese boy between his father, William Whitney, who had been involved in numerous streetcar and railroad ventures, many of them honest, and his doting uncle, Oliver Payne, known to Blaise’s father as one of the truly “filthy rich,” which always put Blaise, as a boy, in mind of a dark dirty man wearing a large diamond stickpin. Whitney ordered the Hoffman House special cocktail, the razzle-dazzle.
“I think Caroline likes him, too. But she does not exactly share her heart with me.” At the thought of Caroline, Blaise had started to think in French, a bad habit, because he found himself translating automatically in his head from French to often-stilted English. He wanted to be entirely, perfectly, indistinguishably American.
“I suppose they are all coming back, now Mr. Hay’s secretary of state. Just as I was about to go over, and start my grand tour.”
“Oh, this is the grand tour!” Blaise, perhaps too Gallically, used both hands to embrace the Hoffman House bar, a habit he must break, he reminded himself. American men never used their hands, except to make fists in order to punch one another. Once angered, Blaise’s own instinct was not to punch but to draw a knife, and kill.
Payne Whitney laughed. “Well, you were born on the grand tour. I haven’t made mine yet.” He finished his cocktail; and said good-by. At exactly one-thirty Blaise left the Hoffman House by the Twenty-fifth Street entrance. The sky was an intense cloudless blue. The wind was like gusts of cool electricity, vitalizing everyone, including the old hack-horses. A solitary motor car cruised noiselessly along the street; then the reason for the absence of noise became evident-the engine had stopped. The hack-drivers were delighted and, as always, someone shouted, “Get a horse!” Meanwhile, on every side, men-women, too-could be seen, puffing hard as they succumbed to the latest fad, bicycling.
Just opposite the huge marble Hoffman House was the small Worth House. Blaise was respectfully greeted by a chasseur in a splendid, for no reason, Magyar officer’s uniform. An ornate fretwork lift slowly lifted him to the third floor-the whole of it rented by Hearst; here he was greeted by George Thompson, a plump blond man in frock-coat and striped trousers. George had been the Chief’s favorite waiter at the Hoffman House. When the Chief had decided to set up housekeeping, he had asked George to keep house for him, which George was happy to do, regulating the traffic so that the Chief’s mother on one of her impromptu visits from Washington never actually met any of the ladies who were apt to be visiting her son at unconventional hours.
“Mr. Hearst is in the dining room, sir. He says you’re to join them, for coffee.”
“Who’s them?”
“He’s with Senator Platt, sir. Just the two of them.”
“Not much talk?”
“Conversation flagged, sir, after the fish. There has been mostly silence since, I fear.”
Blaise knew that he would be needed as a conversational buffer. Although Hearst was not particularly shy, he gave that appearance because no one had ever explained to him just how conversation worked. He had a good deal to say in his office; and even more to say in the composing room. But that was that. For Hearst the ideal evening would be a show, preferably one starring Weber and Fields, who would tell jokes that made Hearst laugh until he wept with delight. He also liked minstrel shows, chorus girls, late nights. Yet he neither drank nor smoked.
The dining room was panelled with dark walnut. Italian paintings hung over the sideboard and the mantelpiece; several leaned against the walls, as they waited their turn to be hung. Hearst bought objects with the same boyish greed that he bought writers and artists for his two newspapers.
Hearst was six feet two inches tall, heavily built and not very well put together, to Blaise’s critical eye; but then Blaise was a natural athlete, and though only five feet nine inches tall, he carried himself like a circus acrobat, according to Caroline. The muscular body balanced, often as not, on his toes, as if he were about to make a double somersault in the air. Blaise also knew that with his blue eyes and dark blond hair he was definitely, perhaps even permanently, handsome, unlike Hearst, whose pale face with its long thin straight nose and wide thin straight mouth was seriously uninteresting except for the close-set eyes, which were very difficult to look into, more like an eagle’s than a man’s-the palest blue irises rimmed black pupils that seemed to be forever acquiring whatever he looked at, the brain within a camera obscura in which, given time, he would have the whole world’s image fixed and filed. Hearst’s clothes were definitely “Broadway.” Today he wore a plaid suit in which there was a bit too much green and yellow; while the necktie was, simply, a sunset.
On Hearst’s right sat the white-haired benign Senator Platt, the Republican boss of New York State. Although Hearst himself was nominally a Democrat, he dealt even-handedly with politicians of every sort. They needed him, he needed them. But the Chief was not to be taken for granted. To everyone’s amazement, in the election of ’96, he had not supported his father’s friend the Major. Instead, Hearst attacked the Major as a puppet of the archetype Ohio boss Mark Hanna; he also tried to get Payne Whitney’s father to be the Democratic candidate. But when it was plain that William Whitney could not be nominated, the young William Jennings Bryan took the convention by storm. Bryan was a formidable populist orator who had but one speech, “the cross of gold,” on which the wealthy had crucified the American people, and the only way to get them down from the cross would be to increase the money supply by coining silver at a rate of sixteen silver units to one of gold.
Although every businessman in the country regarded Bryan as not only mad but potentially revolutionary, Hearst’s Journal had been the only major paper in New York to support the Democrats. Personally, Hearst thought that Bryan’s silver policy was absurd. But Hearst was a Democrat, with populist tendencies. He enjoyed supporting the party of the people against the rich. He also enjoyed Bryan’s marvellous oratory. But then who did not? Despite McKinley’s election, Bryan was still a great force in the country, and Hearst was his high priest in Babylon, as New York was known to the South and the West where Bryan’s strength lay. As George pulled out a chair for Blaise to sit at Hearst’s left, Senator Platt said, “I knew your father.”
“I heard him speak of you many times, Senator,” said Blaise, whose father had never mentioned Platt, or any senator for that matter, except one named Sprague who had married Kate Chase, to his father’s fury.
After Senator Platt’s confession and Blaise’s lie, the room was silent except for the sound of George, filling coffee cups. Plainly, the Chief and the Republican boss had exhausted their small talk while their big talk could never be shared with someone as junior as Blaise. The Senator took a cigar from a box that George offered him; then he asked, “Are you a Methodist, Mr. Sanford?”
Blaise felt his cheeks grow warm, and knew that they were now bright red. “No, sir. We are-my half-sister and I-Catholic.”
“Ah.” There was a world of regret and contempt in that single exhalation. “France, I suppose. All those years. Explains why you’re a Democrat, like Mr. Hearst.”
“Oh, Blaise and I aren’t what you’d call good party men.” Hearst’s voice was high and slightly quavery. “If we were, we wouldn’t be breaking bread with the Republican czar of New York.”
“There are times when serious men must unite. You know what Scripture says.” They did not know. He told them. Blaise was much amused to learn that New York’s great lord of corruption was also a deeply committed Christian, active in the Methodist church, and an enemy of all vice that was not directly profitable.
“That’s why I thought you’d cotton on to Theodore.” Platt blew not smoke rings but cloudy globes of impressive diameter.
“Well, we invented him.” Hearst was sour. But then Theodore Roosevelt was the only man that the Chief ever showed signs of envying. Theodore was only six years older than Hearst; yet he was now being given credit for Admiral Dewey’s conquest of the Philippines, while his own victory in the field at Kettle Hill-renamed San Juan in the interest of euphony and dignity-had been played up by Hearst himself as a battle equal to Yorktown or Gettysburg, and all for the sake of increasing the Journal’s circulation in the real war, which was against not Spain but the World.
“Yes, you invented him, all right, and I had to take him.”
“Didn’t you want him to run for governor?” Blaise did his best to appear innocent. Everyone knew that Platt had only taken the “reformer” because thanks to a series of scandals involving the Erie Canal, the Republican Party was in danger of a serious defeat. “We’re always open to the better element.” Platt was serene. “We welcome reformers.”
“Better to have them inside the tent than out,” Hearst agreed.
“I’m just sorry you don’t see your way to helping out.”
“We’re committed to the Democrats this time. We’re for Judge Van Wyck all the way.” The Chief made an effort to sound enthusiastic. “I hate those pink shirts.”
“What pink shirts?” Blaise was intrigued.
“Roosevelt’s. I also saw him once with this silk… thing,” the Chief’s vocabulary was not rich, “around his waist instead of a waistcoat.”
“He wears statesman’s black now,” said Platt, moodily eyeing Hearst’s sunset cravat and riotous plaid.
“I don’t like the way he talks either.” The Chief’s voice quavered, his own accent was Western, modified by Harvard, while Roosevelt’s accent was all Harvard. Worse, Roosevelt’s voice became falsetto when he orated. Over the years, sensitive to charges of effeminacy, Roosevelt had learned to box and to shoot; had written popular books about his heroic exploits as a rancher in the Badlands, equalled now by his hour of immortal glory in Cuba, charging, ever charging amongst the flying bullets-and the writing journalists-up Kettle Hill.
After another long silence-Platt’s defense of his candidate stopped short of a defense of the voice-the Senator rose to go. He made a few cryptic remarks, which the Chief understood; and Blaise did not. Then the long smooth papery hand shook Blaise’s somewhat sweaty youthful paw. “You can find me most afternoons at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. I like to sit there in the long corridor, and watch the world go by.”
“You sit there and you tell it where to go!” The Chief laughed at his own marvellous acuity. Then the Senator departed; and Blaise followed Hearst into his study, which looked onto the marble façade of the Hoffman House. Hearst sat at an Empire table, all gold eagles and honey-bees, beneath a portrait of Napoleon, one of his heroes; the others were all equally heroic heroes, world conquerors. Blaise found himself vacillating between amazement at the Chief’s simplicity and absence of even the sort of culture that Harvard might have given him had he bothered to notice that such a thing existed and the marvellous energy and inventiveness that he demonstrated when it came to publishing a newspaper. Hearst alone had discovered a truth so obvious that Blaise, a fascinated newcomer to the American world, was amazed that no one else had grasped it: if there is no exciting news to report, create some. When the artist Remington had cabled Hearst that he wanted to come home from Cuba as there was nothing happening for him to draw, Hearst had replied, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.” Whether or not Hearst had literally sunk the Maine was irrelevant, because he, far more than Roosevelt, had made war not only inevitable but desirable. Now the Chief had a new project, and Blaise was at its center because, among other things, he knew French.
“You bring the latest dispatches from Paris?”
Blaise gave the Chief a series of cables which had arrived that morning from France; a number were written in a code of his own excited devising. Since January, the Chief had had his heart set on what Blaise thought of as “the French Caper.” But the war with Spain had intervened and all other projects were suspended, as Hearst orchestrated public opinion with the magical reverberant phrase “Remember the Maine! And buy the Journal!” When Hearst’s war was declared, he had offered to finance and command a regiment. McKinley had said no; he had not forgotten those cartoons of him on Hanna’s knee. Ever the gracious patriot, Hearst then made the Navy a present of his yacht, aptly named the Buccaneer; with his own military services included. The Navy took the ship but refused the services. So Hearst commandeered another ship and went to war on his own and in style, accompanied by Journal writers, artists and photographers.
The Chief’s dispatches from the front, including his personal capture of twenty-nine Spanish sailors, had caused great distress to Mr. Pulitzer at the World. The Chief was also obliged to play up Colonel Roosevelt’s derring-do; and he did so conscientiously but without relish. Instinctively, the dashing politician knew almost as much about publicity as the Chief himself. Certainly, from the Chief’s occasional remarks about the Colonel, it was plain to Blaise that each had seen the war as his war and that each had wanted to capitalize politically on the subsequent victory, not to mention imperium. But of the two, the Colonel, if elected governor, seemed to be in the better position. On the other hand, Hearst had now decreed that Judge Van Wyck be governor; and the fact that Senator Platt had come to the Chief to cut, as the politicians would say, a deal was proof that the Democrats were comfortably in the lead. But if Hearst’s next coup were to succeed, the election might easily be obscured by William Randolph Hearst’s daring.
The plan was nothing less than the removal from Devil’s Island, in the Safety Islands off Guiana on the South American coast, of the world’s most celebrated prisoner, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, who had been accused, falsely according to Hearst and half the world (but not Blaise’s half), of giving French military secrets to the Germans. Although the case had been reopened in Paris, and the actual spy supposedly identified, the French General Staff would not admit that justice, no matter how skewed by fashionable anti-Semitism, had miscarried. They acquitted the actual spy; and kept Dreyfus in solitary confinement on Devil’s Island. At that moment, in January, the Chief had said to Blaise, “You work this one out. You’re French. Make the case for what’s-his-name. We’ll pour it on. Every day. Then if the French don’t let him go, I’ll outfit the Buccaneer, and we’ll go down there and shoot our way in and bring that Jew back to civilization, and if the French want to take us on in a war, we’ll knock those frogs to bits.”
Before January, it had never occurred to Blaise that Captain Dreyfus might be innocent. But the more that he investigated the case, the more certain he was that Dreyfus had indeed been falsely accused. When “that French dirty writer,” as Hearst always called him, “you know, the one whose name begins with Z, like Zebra,” Emile Zola, accused the French government of covering up the truth, he was obliged to flee to England. That was when the Chief gave orders for the Buccaneer to stand by. He himself would lead the attack on Devil’s Island, with Blaise as his eager second-in-command. But then Spain not France became the enemy of Truth and Civilization; and the spring and summer were devoted to the expansion of the Journal’s circulation and, incidentally, the American empire. Now, as Colonel Roosevelt ran up yet another hill, as a politician, Hearst was prepared, at the least, to offer himself to the world as a hero; at the most, to change world history by precipitating a war with France.
The Chief put his feet upon the desk, and daydreamed, eyes half-shut. “We’ll need, maybe, a thousand men. We might hire some of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, that’d embarrass him.” The Chief giggled. Blaise, his eyes on Bonaparte, wondered if that world hero was prone to daydreaming and giggling. “Check out the Rough Riders. Don’t tell them what we’ve got in mind. Just say a filibuster. You know, an adventure. In Latin America. Go after the tough ones, the real Westerners. We don’t want any New York swells.”
Blaise felt that he should interpret the latest news from Paris. “The government’s just promised a new trial for Dreyfus.”
“Court-martial is the phrase, I heard.” Just when Blaise had decided that Hearst was totally ineducable, not to mention in thrall to his own daydreams, he would suddenly demonstrate that in his crude but highly intuitive way he had got the point, usually before anyone else. “They’ll drag it out another year at least. We need a good story for the fall. Before November. Before election. This should do in Roosevelt.”
“How can you and Captain Dreyfus lose him an election in New York State?” Usually Blaise could follow Hearst’s peculiar logic: the key to it was entertainment. What would most excite the average uneducated man?-who would then part with a penny to read the Journal.
Hearst opened very wide his pale blue eyes and the usually straight brows arched with what looked to be wonder: he was ready to part with that penny. “Don’t you see? It’s all the same. Teddy winning a battle that was already won but getting the credit because he is who he is and all the newspaper boys were right there with him because I’m selling the war to the world. He couldn’t lose because I couldn’t lose. Well, if I break into Devil’s Island and free that poor innocent Jew, why, no one will pay any more attention to Teddy, who’ll be last summer’s news while I’m this fall’s news, and so Van Wyck gets elected.”
In a lunatic way, Blaise saw the point. Hearst’s meddling in French internal affairs, successful or not, would certainly be a sensation; and a diversion from the election. Blaise was also beguiled by the fact that Hearst could never remember Dreyfus’s-or any Frenchman’s-name.
“You’ve got the plans of the fort, haven’t you?” Hearst gazed out the window at the Hoffman House, where a line of carriages were depositing the guests for some sort of Democratic meeting. As the Fifth Avenue Hotel was sacred to the Republicans, so the Hoffman House was to the Democrats.
“Yes, Chief. They’re in your safe at the office. Also, the size-estimated-of the garrison, and the number of guards that look after Dreyfus.”
“I don’t suppose we could free all the frog prisoners.” Hearst’s imagination seemed now to be positively Mosaic, as he led all of those who had been slaves into the promised land of Manhattan.
“I think you’ll have quite enough to do just freeing Dreyfus.”
“I suppose you’re right. Well, I’ll go over all this with Karl Decker. He’ll be your side-kick. He’s got a real gift for these… uh, things.”
Karl Decker was a knowledgeable journalist who had managed to free from a Cuban prison an attractive young woman, who had been a passionate-what else?-enemy of Spain and its beast-like governor. Hearst had got a lot of play out of that adventure; now he wanted more. “I expect you to be right there with us, in the lead, after me.” The Chief looked very much like a small boy about to play pirate.
“I’d like nothing better.”
“Because you’re the only one who can talk to what’s-his-name. You know? In French. I never could pick up the lingo. You think you like publishing?” The small boy pirate had suddenly turned into a bland full-grown businessman, the worst of pirates.
“Oh, yes!” Blaise was as enthusiastic as he sounded. “I think it’s more exciting than anything else, especially the Journal.”
“Well, I have my critics.” The blandness was now absolute. Although Hearst was daily denounced by all right-thinking men and women, he seemed perfectly indifferent to the opinions of others. He liked stories, adventures, fun. He liked being number one in circulation if not yet in advertising, “I’ve also pretty much used up my mother’s… present. These wars can cost you a lot of money.”
Blaise was surprised not that Hearst had spent the seven and a half million dollars that Phoebe Hearst had given him three years earlier but that Hearst would admit it; however, that was part of the Chief’s enigmatic charm, to know who was what and how he should be treated. Employees were always treated with grave politeness; and Hearst’s voice was seldom raised. He was generous, in every sense; all he wanted in return was the absolute best of its kind. But he did not make friends with those he hired, even the editors. He was not to be seen in the bars around Printing House Square. He was also not to be seen in the men’s clubs of his class for the excellent reason that a cannonade of black balls would have shot down any proposal that he might be made a member of any one of them. “I’ve also been on the outside here,” he would say, more to himself than to Blaise; and Blaise decided that the Chief was quite happy to remain where he was, outside, yes, but terrorizing those inside.
When Blaise had left Yale in his junior year, Colonel Sanford had been furious. “What will you do? What are you equipped to do in life?” Blaise was too tactful to point out that the Colonel himself had not been equipped to do anything at all in life except spend the money that he had inherited from his family; although to be fair-something Blaise found difficult to be with a father who had always embarrassed him-the Colonel had, rather absently, made a second fortune after the war in railroading, using Delacroix money, a source of irritation to the family of Blaise’s mother, since none of it ever came their way.
“My son’s a Delacroix,” Sanford would say expansively, “you’ll get it back through him.” But when that same son left Yale, and moved to New York, and said that he wanted to go into the newspaper business, the Colonel was appalled; he was even more distressed when Blaise, who had always been fascinated by newspapers, declared that it was his ambition to be exactly like William Randolph Hearst, whose very name was a synonym for cad in the Sanford world. But the Colonel had yielded to the extent of instructing his lawyer, Dennis Houghteling, to arrange a meeting between Blaise and the dark-or rather bright yellow-prince of journalism.
Hearst had been gravely interested in the young man. “The business part’s easy to learn,” he said. “You just hang around the people who sell the advertising, and the people who do the accounting, and then you try to figure out how the more papers I sell, the more money I lose, and the more red ink they write their numbers with.” Hearst’s smile was not exactly winning. “The other end, the paper…”
“That’s what I like!” They were seated in the Chief’s office, overlooking Park Row. Hearst had rented the second and third floors of the Tribune Building, that monument to the honest founder of all that was best-if hectoring-in modern journalism, Horace Greeley. From Hearst’s window the domed City Hall was visible while the magnificent new Pulitzer Building was not visible, unless you put your head as far as you could out the window and looked up the block and so saw the skyscraper headquarters of “the enemy” World.
“Well, the other end of putting out a paper depends partly on how much money you’ve got to spend and partly on how good you are at keeping the folks interested in… in…”
“In Crime and Underwear?” Blaise was brash.
The Chief frowned uncomfortably. “I don’t use words like that,” he said, somewhat primly. “But the folks like scandal. That’s true. They also need to be looked out for because there’s no one in a city like this who will take the side of the average citizen.”
“Not even the politicians?”
“They are what you have to save the folks from, if you can. I suppose you’ll want to invest in a paper.” Hearst looked at a number of random tear-sheets on the floor; they would, once he’d arranged them in order, become the Sunday Journal.
“As soon as I know what I’m doing, if I’ll ever know, of course. You don’t learn much at Yale, I’m afraid.”
“I was kicked out of Harvard, and glad to go. Well, you can start in here anytime; and we’ll see what happens.” Not long after this exchange, Hearst had declared war on Spain and won it. Now he would free Captain Dreyfus. Defeat Colonel Roosevelt. Start a dozen new papers. Everything seemed possible except, and the Chief looked Blaise in the eye, the face as tense as that of Bonaparte behind him, “I’ve used up all the money Mother gave me, and we’re still in the red.”
“Ask her for more.” Blaise was brisk; he saw what was coming.
“I don’t like to. Because…” The high voice gave out. The Chief scratched his chin; then his ear. “I saw Houghteling yesterday. At the Fifth Avenue Hotel.”
“He’s a good Republican.” Blaise braced himself for the assault.
“I suppose so. But he don’t like pink shirts any more than I do. He tells me your father’s will is coming up for probate.”
“Well, it’s a slow process.” The Colonel had been killed in February; now it was September. The process of the law had stopped during the summer. “It might not be before the first of the year.”
“Houghteling says next week.” The Chief’s voice was flat. “There’s a lot of money there.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Blaise was beginning to feel clammy. “Anyway there are two of us, my sister-half-sister-and me.”
“Now is the time to get in on the ground floor,” said Hearst. “Now’s your chance. I’ve got my eye on Chicago, Washington, Boston. I want a paper in every big city. You…” The voice trailed off.
“Aren’t I sort of young to be… a partner?” Blaise suddenly went on the offensive. Why, after all, should he be nervous with Hearst when he had-or would soon have-the money that Hearst needed?
“Well, no one said anything about you being a partner.” Hearst might have laughed if he had thought of it. But he did not; he continued to frown. “I guess you could certainly buy an interest.”
“Well, yes. I guess I could.” But Blaise had spent enough time with the Journal’s dispensers of red ink to know that everything belonged to Hearst, personally; and there was, thus far, no sort of “interest” that could be sold. Blaise chose not to press the matter. He had his own plan, which might, or might not, include the Chief. More to the point, “I really don’t know how much I’m going to end up with, or for how long,” he added cryptically.
“Well, that’s your affair.”
George was at the door. “Miss Anita Willson and Miss Millicent Willson to see you, sir.” George kept the straightest of faces.
“Tell them to wait in the parlor.” Hearst rose.
“Get on to Decker.”
“Yes, sir.”
As Blaise walked down the hall, he saw the Willson sisters, staring at themselves in a mirrored screen in the parlor. They were plump, pretty, blond. At the paper there were those who thought that the Chief favored Millicent, who was only sixteen; others thought that he preferred the older Anita; a few thought that he enjoyed each of them, either separately or together, according to what degree the imagination of the speculating journalist had been depraved. All agreed that the two girls were very effective as part of a dancing group called the Merry Maidens, currently appearing at the Herald Square Theater in The Girl from Paris. As George opened the front door for Blaise, the Chief must have entered the parlor, because there were delighted cries. “Oh, Mr. Hearst! Mr. Hearst! We never dreamed there was that much chocolate in the world!” The voices were tough Hell’s Kitchen Irish. Hearst’s response was not audible. George’s eyes became slightly more round. Blaise stepped into the elevator.
Park Row was crowded with end-of-day traffic. Streetcars rattled down the center of the street while smart and less smart carriages stopped at City Hall. Blaise made his way, tentatively, from street corner to curb, careful to avoid as best he could the mounds of horse manure that the Mayor had promised would be removed at least twice a day. Blaise tried to envisage a city without horses; in fact, he had already tried his hand at fantasy. In the Sunday Journal, he had described a future world of horseless carriages. As it was, the Chief himself drove a flashy French automobile, fuelled by gasoline. Unfortunately, the only vivid difference between a horseless future and the present would be the necessary and un-mourned absence of something that Blaise and the Sunday editor, the young indecorous Merrill Goddard, spent a whole morning trying to find euphemisms for. At the end, Goddard had shrieked, “Sanford, call it shit!”
Blaise smiled at the memory, and started unconsciously to mouth the word as he crossed the coupolaed hall at whose center a number of Tammany types had gathered about His Honor the Mayor, Robert Van Wyck, brother to the gubernatorial candidate.
But Blaise was doomed never to know what wisdom the Mayor was dispensing in the rotunda, because a tall old man with silver hair and rose-tinted side-whiskers, Dennis Houghteling, the Sanford family lawyer, signalled him from the marble staircase. “I have been with the Clerk of Wills,” he said in a low conspiratorial voice, the only voice that he had. Because the Colonel refused even to visit, much less live, in the United States, Mr. Houghteling had been, in effect, the Sanford viceroy at New York, and once a month he reported in careful detail the state of the Sanford holdings to its absent lord. Since Blaise had known Mr. Houghteling all his life, it was only natural that when it came time to probate the last of his father’s many wills, the matter would be entrusted to the senior partner of Redpath, Houghteling and Parker, attorneys-at-law.
“All is well,” whispered Houghteling, putting his arm through Blaise’s, and steering him to an empty marble bench beneath a statue of De Witt Clinton. “All is well as far as the law is concerned.” Houghteling began to modify; and Blaise waited, with assumed patience, for the lawyer to tell him what the problem was. Meanwhile, the Mayor was making a speech beneath the cupola. The vowels echoed like thunder while the consonants were like rifle shot. Blaise understood not a word.
“As we know, the problem is one of interpretation. Of cyphers; or of a single cypher to be precise-and its ambiguity.”
Blaise was alert. “Who will ever contest our interpretation of an ambiguous cypher?”
“Your sister will certainly contest our interpretation…”
“But she’s in England, and if the will’s been probated, as you say…”
“There has been a slight delay.” Houghteling’s whisper was more than ever insinuating. “Your cousin has spoken up, on behalf of Caroline…”
“Which cousin?” There were, that Blaise knew of, close to thirty cousins, in or near the city.
“John Apgar Sanford. He is a specialist in patent law, actually…”
Blaise had met Cousin John, a hearty dull man of thirty, with an ailing wife, and many debts.
“Why has he got himself involved?”
“He is representing your sister in this.”
Blaise felt a sudden chill of anger. “Representing Caroline? Why? We’re not in court. There’s no contest.”
“There will be, he says, over the precise age at which she comes into her share of the estate…”
“The will says that when she’s twenty-seven, she’ll inherit her share of the capital. Until then I have control of the entire estate. After all, Father wrote that will himself, with his own hand.”
“Unfortunately, he-who usually refused to speak French-wrote his will in rather faulty French, and since the French number one looks just like an English seven, though unlike a French seven, your cousin is taking the position that the Colonel intended for this will to conform with the earlier ones; and that your father meant for Caroline to inherit at twenty-one, not twenty-seven, half the estate.”
“Well, it looks like twenty-seven to me. How did it look to the clerk?”
“I translated the text for him. Of course, the English version says twenty-seven…”
“So what’s the problem?”
“Twofold. Your cousin says that we have deliberately misinterpreted your father, and he will now contest our… interpretation of the figure.”
“He will? How can he? Only Caroline can and she’s three thousand miles away.”
“Your first supposition is correct. He obviously cannot contest a will with which he has nothing to do. Your second supposition-the geographical one-is mistaken. I have just spoken to your sister. She arrived this morning from Liverpool. She is stopping at the Waldorf-Astoria.”
Blaise stared at the old lawyer. In the background, someone proposed three cheers to Mayor Van Wyck, and the rotunda reverberated with cheering; like artillery being fired. Martial images filled Blaise’s head. War. “If they contest what my father wrote, I shall take them through every court in the country. Do you understand, Mr. Houghteling?”
“Of course, of course.” The old man tugged at his rose-pink whiskers. “But, perhaps, it would be more seemly to come to an agreement. You know? A compromise, say. A settlement…”
“She must wait for her share.” Blaise got to his feet. “That’s what my father wanted. That’s what I want. That’s what it is going to be.”
“Yes, sir.” Thus, the crown passed from Colonel Sanford to Blaise, who was now sole steward, for the next six years, of fifteen million dollars.
JOHN HAY STOOD AT THE WINDOW of his office in the state War and Navy Building, a splendid sort of wedding cake designed, baked and frosted by one Mullett, an architectural artificer who had been commissioned a dozen years earlier to provide mock-Roman shelter for the three great departments of state, all in a single building within spitting distance of that gracious if somewhat dilapidated Southern planter’s home, the White House, to the east. From the window of the Secretary of State’s office the unlovely greenhouses and conservatories of the White House-like so many dirt-streaked crystal palaces-were visible through the trees, while in the distance Hay could make out, across the Potomac, the familiar green hills of Virginia, enemy country during the four years that he had been President Lincoln’s secretary.
Now here I am, he thought, trying hard to summon up a sense of drama or, failing that, comedy; he got neither. He was old; frail; solitary. Clara and the children had stayed on at the Lake Sunapee house in New Hampshire. Accompanied only by Mr. Eddy, Hay had marched into the State Department that morning at nine o’clock, and taken control of the intricate and confusing department, where more than sixty persons were employed in order to… what?
“I am curious, Mr. Adee. What does the Secretary of State actually do?” Hay shouted at his old friend, dear friend, Alvey A. Adee, the second assistant secretary of state. They had first met when both had been posted in Madrid during the time that the self-styled hero of Gettysburg, the one-legged General Dan Sickles, American minister to Spain, was scandalously ministering to Spain’s queen as her democratic lover. Seven years Hay’s junior, Adee had even collaborated with Hay on a short story that had been published in Putnam’s; and, joyously, they had divvied up the cash. Madrid had been a quiet post in the late sixties.
Now Adee carefully groomed his gray Napoleonic beard and moustaches; he used a tortoise-shell comb but, happily, no pocket mirror as in the old days. Adee was the most exquisite of bachelors, with a high voice which, in moments of stress, broke into a mallard’s cackle. Although deaf, he was very good at guessing what it was that people said to him. All in all, he was the ablest man in the American foreign service as well as a superb literary mimic. At a moment’s notice, Adee could write a poem in the manner of Tennyson or of Browning; a speech in the style of Lincoln or of Cleveland; a letter in the style of any and every sort of officeholder. “Each of the secretaries comes here with his own notion of work.” Adee put away the comb. “Your immediate predecessor, Judge Day, spent his five months here fretting about his next judgeship. Of course, he only took the job as a favor to the President when poor Mr. Sherman…” Adee sighed.
Hay nodded. “Poor Uncle John, as we call him, was too old by the time he got here. If this were a just world…”
“What a conceit, Mr. Hay!” Adee produced an amused quack.
“I am prone to the sententious. Anyway, he should have been president years ago.”
“Well, the world’s all wrong, Mr. Hay. Anyway, you tried hard enough to get the old thing elected.” Adee took a small vial of cologne from his pocket and shook a drop or two on his beard.
Hay rather wished that Adee were able to present a somewhat more virile face to the world. As it was, the Second Assistant was not unlike Queen Victoria, with a glued-on beard. “Obviously, I don’t work hard enough. But my question’s quite serious. What do I do?”
“What you should do is let me do most of it…”
“Well, we are old collaborators, of course…”
“I’m serious, Mr. Hay. Why wear yourself out for nothing? There are dispatches from all around the world to be read-and replied to. I do most of that, anyway. I also write a really masterful letter of sympathetic rejection to would-be office-seekers, many of them nephews to senators.”
Hay had a sudden, vivid vision of the tall fragile figure of President Lincoln, looking very much like “the Ancient” that his two young secretaries had nicknamed him, besieged in the upstairs corridor of the White House by men and women, shoving petitions, letters, newspaper-cuttings at him. “Whitelaw Reid now wants the embassy at London,” Hay began.
But Adee was studying his glistening nails, and did not hear him. He must read lips, Hay thought. When Adee’s eyes are not upon your mouth, he does not hear. “You’ll be relieved to know that you now have nothing to offer anyone. The President has given away just about all the posts to keep his senators happy.”
“I can still pick the first assistant secretary…”
“There is a rumor…” Adee began; but a soft knock at the door interrupted him. “Come,” said Adee, and a smiling Negro messenger entered to present Hay with a silver-framed photograph. “This just arrived, Mr. Secretary. From the British embassy.”
Hay placed the extravagantly signed photograph on his desk, so that Adee could also enjoy the figure depicted, a somewhat larger, stouter, bemedalled version of Adee’s own. “The Prince of Wales!” Adee’s accent now became, unconsciously, British. He mimicked compulsively, as the chameleon shifts its color to suit the landscape. “We’ve all heard what a success you were with the royal family. In fact, Her Majesty was quoted in the Herald, indirectly, of course, as saying that you were the most interesting ambassador that she had ever known.”
“Poor woman,” said Hay, who had read the same story with quiet pleasure. “I told her Lincoln stories. And dialect stories. It was like being out on the Lyceum circuit. No matter how old the joke-or the Queen-the audience laughs.”
Adee’s accent recrossed the Atlantic and hovered somewhere near Hay’s native Warsaw, Illinois. “I reckon your main job will be to help our good President, who knows nothing of foreign affairs and has no time to learn. He is mortally tired now of having been his own secretary of state for two years while running and winning a war and instructing our delegation to the peace conference in Paris, except he’s not sure what he wants them to do.” Adee stared at Hay’s lips. “As far as I can tell, that is,” he added.
Hay had heard the same rumor: indecision in the White House; hence, confusion in Paris. “Do get me all the Paris dispatches. I’d better find out just what’s been said so far.”
Adee frowned. “I’m afraid we don’t get to see them here. Judge Day always reported directly to the President.”
“Oh.” Hay nodded, as if he approved. But the first warning bell had now sounded. Unless he acted quickly, he was to be excluded from the peace treaty by his predecessor’s indifferences.
Mr. Eddy was at the door. “The White House just telephoned, sir. The President can see you anytime now.”
“Have we a telephone?” asked Hay, who disliked the invention, not only for its dreadful self but for its potential threat to his beloved Western Union.
“Oh, yes,” said Adee. “We are very modern over here. We have one in our telegraph office. Personally, I hear nothing at all when I put it to my ear. But others claim to hear voices, like Joan of Arc. There’s also one in the White House, in what was the President’s war-room.”
“Surely, the President doesn’t, personally, use that… that menacing contraption?”
“He says that it is addictive.” Adee was judicious. “He says that he enjoys the knowledge that he can always hang up when he is being told something that he doesn’t want to hear, and then he can pretend that the connection was broken by accident.”
“The Major has become guileful.”
“He’s a successful war-leader. It is inevitable,” said Mr. Adee. “Shall I walk you over to the mansion?”
Hay shook his head. “No, I’ll go alone. I need to arrange my thoughts, such as they are.”
“What to do with the Philippines?”
“Above all.” Hay sighed. “We must decide, and soon.”
Hay stepped out into the dim high-ceilinged corridor, where a single policeman stood guard. Usually, the State Department was one of the most tranquil, even somnolent, of the government’s ministries, on the order of Interior, where, barring the rare excitement of the odd Indian war, a man could sleep his way through the life of an administration, or get a book written. But since the events of the summer, new translators had been added to the State Department, and the slow stream of paper into and out of Mr. Mullett’s masterpiece was now engorged.
Hay was greeted respectfully by numerous functionaries whose functions were as unknown to him as their persons. But he pretended to recognize everyone, the politician’s trick, with a raise of an eyebrow if the face looked remotely familiar, a bob of the head if not; geniality was the politician’s common tender.
Outside, in Pennsylvania Avenue, Hay was pleased at the absence of journalists. He was not expected until the next day, when he would take the oath of office. For now, no one paid the slightest attention to him except an old black man who was pushing a cart that contained everything needed for the sharpening of knives, the repair of scissors. They had seen each other for years in the street. After a solemn greeting, the old man said, “I didn’t know you was living on this side of the road.”
Hay laughed. “No. I’m still living there.” He pointed to the dark red brick fortress, all turrets and arches, where he and Adams, like two medieval abbots, lived. “But I’m working here now.”
“What sort of work they do in there?” The old man was genuinely curious. “I watched them building the thing. They say it’s, oh, just government, when I asked.”
“Well, that’s what it still is. Remember the old State Department Building there?” Hay pointed roughly to what was now a section of the huge gray-stone Treasury Building which nicely obstructed any view of the Capitol from the White House.
The old man nodded. “I can still see Governor Seward, with that big nose of his and those baggy pants, going back and forth across the road here, with this big cigar all the time.”
“Well, I’ve taken his place, and now we do in here what he used to do in that little shack.”
“Everything keeps getting bigger,” said the old man, without much pleasure. “This was a real small town back then.”
“Well, now it’s a real small city,” said Hay, and continued on his way. He was pleased to note that the brilliant pains in his lower back had migrated to his left shoulder, where they gave him less dazzling discomfort. For an instant, a particle of an instant, John Hay remembered what it was like to be young, as he walked up the familiar semi-circular driveway to the north portico of the White House where, thirty-three years earlier, he had been Lincoln’s “boy” secretary. Somehow or other in the blurred interval between then and now, a generation had come and gone, and quick-stepped boy had changed to slow-moving man.
In front of the portico Hay paused; and looked up at what had been the window to the office that he had shared with the first secretary, John G. Nicolay; and half-hoped to see his own young self, with dashing new moustaches, look out the window at his future self, with… disgust, Hay decided, accurately. He had not, like so many old men, forgotten the boy that he had once been. The boy was still alive but locked up for good-or life, anyway-in an aging carcass.
The head doorkeeper, one Carl Loeffler, was waiting for Hay; plainly, the telephone wire between White House and Mullett’s masterpiece was in good working order. “Mr. Secretary, sir.” The stocky German-in Hay’s day, only Hibernians were entrusted with the door-showed Hay into the entrance hall where the enormous, even astonishing, Tiffany screen, a fantasy of stained glass and intricate leading, rose from tessellated floor to ornately stuccoed ceiling, the gift of that most elegant of all presidents, Chester Alan Arthur, who had dared to do what other presidents had wanted to do but dared not. He had put up a screen in order to hide the state apartments, the Red, Blue and Green Rooms, from the eyes of the multitudes who came to do business with the President, whose office and living quarters were still, as in Lincoln’s day, on the second floor, and reached by a shabby old staircase to the left of the entrance. Hay noted that the heavy dark wood railing was more than ever shiny with sweat, from the nervous hands of office-seekers. At present, a mere dozen political types were ascending, descending.
As the head doorkeeper showed Hay up the staircase, he said, “Mr. McKinley’s in his office,” as if the President might have been in the boiler room. Suddenly, with wonder, Hay realized that he had not walked up this particular staircase since Lincoln’s time. Although he had been assistant secretary of state under President Hayes, he had never been summoned to the President. So, accompanied by a lifetime of ghosts, not least among them his youthful self, Hay stepped out into the long corridor that bisected the second floor from the offices at the east end, where he now was, and the living quarters at the west. The oval library, a no-man’s-land in the middle, followed the oval shape of the Blue Room directly beneath. The Lincolns had used the upstairs oval as a sitting room; other presidents had used it as an office.
The corridor was much the same; but the world was different. Where once there had been new gas-lamps, there were now electric lights, with dangling wires crisscrossing the shabby walls in every direction. Fortunately, the unlovely greenhouses did produce quantities of flowers and plants that were placed on every table and in every corner; as a result, the inevitable tobacco and whiskey smell of politicians was hardly detectable in that rose-crowded place, where efficient-looking, highly modern young men strode decisively, at least whenever they got near the reception room where the petitioners gathered daily. The effect of a swift-moving modern office was somewhat undone by the floor, which not only shook with every step but vibrated whenever a streetcar passed. Termites, Hay thought; and knew that he had come home.
Hay entered his old office, with its view-now of Hay’s own house across Pennsylvania Avenue. But instead of his own young self, he was greeted, somewhat to his disappointment, by George B. Cortelyou, the President’s second secretary. “Mr. Hay!” Cortelyou was in his forties; a short-haired, short-moustached, straight-featured, short man. McKinley, in an uncharacteristic move, had hired a Connecticut swell named Porter as secretary. But Porter had proved disastrously inept, and so McKinley had, with characteristic tact, turned over Porter’s duties to Cortelyou, managing to offend no one. “Can’t tell you, sir, how happy-how relieved-I am that you’re here and that it’s-well, it’s you.”
“Your predecessor?” Hay indicated the office. “I always sat back to the window. The stove was there. I see you’ve got a steam radiator. This place gets cold in winter.”
“I often think of you in this room, sir. And Mr. Nicolay across the way.”
“Do you, really?” Hay could not believe that those two young men of long ago were remembered by anyone, except their aging, ailing selves. Nicolay was often ill these days. Fortunately, he had a small pension from his days as marshal of the Supreme Court; and there was still income from the various Lincoln books that, together with Hay and separately, he was involved in.
“I particularly thought of you during the war this summer. The scale was different from your war, naturally, but…”
Hay nodded. “The anxieties are always the same. You never know when you start where and how you’ll end.”
“You were lucky, sir. So were we. So far.” Cortelyou led Hay out into the corridor. “We’ve changed a lot of things around since your day. In fact, since Mr. Cleveland was here. The secretary-Mr. Porter, that is-has the comer office at the end there, and the President has the middle office. Then there’s the Cabinet room, which connects with the oval library. Only the President can’t put up with the crowds, so he’s moved out of his office, which we now use for the visitors, and into the Cabinet room, where he camps out, he says, quite comfortably, at one end of the Cabinet table.”
“How is Mr. McKinley?”
“He’s weary, sir. The pressures are very great from the Hill…”
“The Senate…?”
“The Senate. On top of that he’s developed eye-strain; can’t read small print, has headaches. He also doesn’t get enough exercise, but I tell him that that’s his fault. He used to ride. But now he doesn’t.” Cortelyou stopped at the dark mahogany door to the Cabinet room. A doorkeeper stood guard. Cortelyou signalled the man to open the door.
Cortelyou stood in the doorway and said, “Mr. President, Colonel Hay is here.” Then Cortelyou shut the door behind Hay, who crossed what had been, in his day, the Reception Room to the long table at whose end, beneath an elaborate bronze lighting fixture, stood William McKinley, a man of medium height with a large full smooth-shaven face and an equally large high firm paunch contained by an elegant white piqué waistcoat. The frock-coat was open, as if to frame the splendidly clothed, curved belly; in the presidential lapel a dark red carnation glowed like some exotic foreign order. The entire effect was impressive; and highly agreeable. McKinley’s smile was always directed at the person to whom he was speaking and not set in permanent place by grim necessity. As Hay shook hands, he stared for a moment into the large, marvellously expressive-but of what other than generalized good will?-eyes, and, suddenly, for no reason at all, Hay recalled that as Lincoln had been the first bearded president, McKinley was now the first clean-shaven one in a generation. Why, Hay wondered, had he thought of that? In his place, Adams would be drawing some vast historical Plutarchian distinction between two paragons while all Hay could think of was beards; and hair coloring. The President, he noted, did not dye his thin graying hair, unlike Hay, who had recently taken to using some of Clara’s Special Gentlelady’s Henna, with a reasonably authentic result. Clara claimed that he still wanted to be the youth he had been rather longer than most men; and Clara was right.
“Come, Colonel. Pull up a chair next to me. Take that one there, on the right. That will be the one you will sit in when the Cabinet meets.” The Major’s voice was deep and mellifluous. Although he had no discernible style in what he said, the way that he spoke was, simultaneously, inspiring and soothing. Hay tended to agree with Adams that McKinley, whether by accident or by design, was the first great president since Lincoln. Hay looked, inadvertently, at McKinley’s hand. The President smiled, and raised his right hand; he wore a thin gold ring on the third finger. “I almost always wear your ring. For luck, which I’ve been in need of almost constantly.”
“Which you’ve deserved.” Hay was sincere. He also sincerely hoped that McKinley had honored his request never to reveal who it was who gave him, just before the inauguration, a gold ring containing a lock of George Washington’s hair. Hay had had engraved on one side of the ring the initials “G.W.” and on the other “W.M.” He had also written the Major, whom he had never known particularly well, a somewhat too effusive letter, expressing the hope that he would indeed be the new Washington. The cynically minded-the Five of Hearts, say-might have thought that ring, letter and financial contribution had got Hay first his embassy and now the greatest appointed office of state. And the cynically minded, Hay knew, would not have been entirely wrong, for he had indeed made one last effort, at age fifty-nine, to obtain an office so that he might exert power in a field where he knew that he was more competent than any other possible contender, foreign affairs. The Major had nicely taken the bait, and the world generally applauded. After all, as an editor of the Tribune, John Hay was the cultured voice of the Republican Party; as a man-of-letters, its poet laureate; as a man, its living link to the martyred Lincoln. The President produced a box of cigars. Then, with practiced hand, McKinley snipped the ends of two of them. “From Havana,” he said, contentedly.
“The spoils of victory?”
“You might say. I cannot thank you enough.” The Major took a long draw on his cigar; and Hay was aware that he was now an intimate of a president who was never seen to smoke, or drink anything but iced water. “For the way you handled Whitelaw Reid in London. He is the most… well, touchy man.”
“Not to mention ambitious. He lusts for office.” Hay wondered at the spontaneity of his own hypocrisy: he sounded, he thought with some amusement, like Cincinnatus, torn from his plow to do reluctant service to the state. But, to be fair, his own ambition was a small thing compared to that of his old friend and colleague Whitelaw Reid, who had inherited the editorship of the New York Tribune horn Horace Greeley, and then passed it on, in ’89, to Hay, when President Harrison appointed Reid minister to France; later, Reid was Republican candidate for vice-president, on a losing ticket. Now Reid wanted to be ambassador to England. “But Senator Platt has said no.” McKinley shook his head sadly. “And I can’t appoint a New Yorker without Mr. Platt’s consent-and advice, which I get quite a lot of as it is.”
“I told Reid to make up with Senator Platt, but he won’t.”
“Or can’t. Mr. Platt’s a very hard sort of man,” said the soft-looking President, contentedly puffing smoke at Hay, who congenially puffed smoke back at his chief. “I am so relieved to have you here, Colonel. I don’t think I have ever, in my life, been so tired and so… torn, as the last few months, and so without any help of any kind when it comes to foreign relations.”
“You may be tired, sir, but you’ve accomplished a great deal more than any president since Mr. Lincoln, and even he didn’t acquire an empire for us, which you have done.” Hay laid it on, with sincerity.
McKinley liked having it laid on-who does not? thought Hay. But the Major was too shrewd not to anticipate fortune’s capriciousness. “We are going to have to decide, in the next weeks, whether we are really going to set up shop in the empire business or not.”
“There is a question?” Hay sat up very straight; and was rewarded with what felt like a meat-cleaver fairing hard on his lower spine.
“Oh, Mr. Hay, there is the biggest question of all in my mind.” McKinley looked oddly bleak for someone whose whole physiognomy was, essentially, cheerfully convex. “I came here to help the backbone of this country, business. That’s what our party’s all about. We are for the tariff. We are for American industry first, last and always, and we have a very big country right here to look after. Now we’ve got to decide if we really want to govern several million small brown heathens, who live half the world away from us.”
“I think, sir,” Hay was diffident, “that the Spanish converted most of the Filipinos. I think they’re just about all of them Roman Catholics.”
“Yes.” McKinley nodded; he had not been listening. “All of them heathen and completely alien to us, and speaking-what?”
“Spanish, most of them. Of course, there are local dialects…”
“I’ve tried everything, Mr. Hay, including prayer, and I still can’t decide whether or not it’s in our interest to annex the Philippines.”
“But we must keep Manila, sir. We must have fuelling stations all across the Pacific, and up and down the China coast, too.” Hay began to sound, a bit anxiously, like a state paper. “The European powers are getting ready to divide up China. We’ll lose valuable markets if they do, but if we are entrenched nearby, in the Philippines, we could keep the sea lanes open to China, keep the Germans and the Russians and the Japanese from upsetting the world’s balance of power. Because,” Hay realized glumly that he was parroting Brooks Adams, “whoever controls the land-mass of Asia controls the world.”
“Do you honestly think we’re quite ready for that?” McKinley suddenly resembled nothing so much as a seventeenth-century Italian cardinal: bland, clever, watchful.
“I don’t dare speculate, sir. But when history starts to move underneath you, you’d better figure how you’re going to ride it, or you’ll fall off. Well, sir, history’s started to move right now, and it’s taking us west, and we can’t stop what’s started even if we wanted to.”
The Italian cardinal produced a faint self-deprecating smile. “Mr. Hay, I can still get off the horse, if I need to. I can let the Philippines go.”
“Would you leave them in Spanish hands?”
“Between us, I’m tempted to keep Manila. As for the other islands, if they seem incapable of self-government, like most of those natives out there, I’d let Spain stay on. Why not? Oh, Mr. Hay,” the cardinal was now a harassed Republican politician from Ohio, “I never wanted any of this war! Naturally, I wanted Spain out of the Caribbean, and that we’ve done. Cuba is now a free country, and if the Puerto Ricans were capable of self-government, I’d free them, too, because I honestly believe it’s a mistake for us to try to govern so many colored heathens whose ways are so different from ours.”
Hay now presented his own foreign policy, already rehearsed in the course of several well-received speeches in England. “Mr. President, I have always thought that it was the task of the Anglo-Saxon races, specifically England, now shrinking, and ourselves expanding, to civilize and to,” Hay took a deep breath, and played his best if most specious card, “Christianize the less developed races of the world. I know that England is counting on us to continue their historic role, and they believe, as I believe, that the two of us together can manage the world until Asia wakes up, long after we’re gone, I pray, but with our help now, a different sort of Asia, a Christian Asia, civilized by us, and so a reflection of what was best in our race once history has seen fit to replace us.”
McKinley stared a long moment at Hay. Then he said, “Colonel Bryan was in here last week.”
Hay felt deflated; his eloquence for naught. But then he had forgotten the first rule of politics: never be eloquent with the eloquent. “Who is Colonel Bryan, sir?”
McKinley’s smile was both warm and malicious. “He is a very new untested Army colonel, stationed in Florida. You perhaps know him better as William Jennings Bryan.”
“The cross of gold?”
“The same. My opponent. He came here to try to get me to release him from the Army, but as we still have military problems in the Philippines, I took the position that I just can’t let every politician go home when he pleases.” McKinley was enjoying himself. “Particularly when there’s an election starting up.”
“On the other hand, you let Theodore go home and run for governor.”
“How could I say no to a genuine war hero? Colonel Roosevelt is a special case.”
“As well as a Republican.”
“Exactly, Mr. Hay.” Suddenly, McKinley frowned. “Mr. Platt’s worried. He tells me it’s going to be a pretty close race for us in New York. Of course, the mid-term election’s always bad for the incumbent party.”
“Not when the party leader’s fought and won a war in a hundred days.” All in all, Hay rather wished that he had not used the now much quoted phrase “a splendid little war,” as if he were a jingo, which he was not. The phrase had come to him as he somberly compared the war with Spain to the Civil War, and found the war with Spain both splendid and blessedly unlike the bloody ordeal of Lincoln’s war to preserve the union. Hay had long known that it was good politics never to try to have the last word in a dispute; now he had begun to see the wisdom of not trying to have the first word either.
“I have the impression,” said the Major, stumping out his cigar in a cheap ceramic souvenir mug, depicting his own head with a detachable Napoleonic hat for a lid, “that Bryan is going to give us a difficult time on annexation. His people-the South, the West, the farmers, the miners-seem to have lost interest in free silver, which, thank Heaven, he has not.”
“But the speech is so good he’ll never give it up.”
“Luckily for us. Even so, there is a feeling out there that we ought not to be like the European powers, with colonies full of heathens and so on, and I understand that feeling because I share it, to a point. But Cleveland-usually very sound-is being very difficult while Andrew Carnegie…”
“Has he written you, too?” The wealthy irascible Scots-born Carnegie had been bombarding Hay with letters and messages, denouncing the annexation of the Philippines, or anything else, as sins against the Holy Ghost of the Republic.
“Yes, yes, he has.” McKinley held up the Napoleonic mug, as if searching for some secret message hidden in what, after all, was his own smooth painted face. “I shall go to Omaha,” said the President; he had obviously received a secret message from his ceramic self.
“Omaha? And what will you do in Omaha?”
“I shall make a speech. What else?” The small cardinal’s smile was visible again; the large eyes glowed. “Omaha is Mr. Bryan’s city. Well, I shall begin my tour of the West-which I haven’t visited since ’96-with Omaha. I’ll beard him in his own town, and I’ll persuade the folks to…” The President paused.
“To welcome the annexation of the Philippines?”
“I’ll see what I find there first.”
Hay nodded. There were those who liked to think that McKinley was Mark Hanna’s puppet, but anyone who had known either man back in Ohio, as had Hay, knew that the President was the perfect political animal, endlessly cunning and resourceful with a genius for anticipating shifts in public opinion, and then striking the right note. Hanna-now a senator from Ohio-was simply McKinley’s crude moneyman. Currently, he was “milking,” as he put it, every wealthy Republican in the country to ensure Republican majorities in the Senate and the House of Representatives.
“How are the negotiations in Paris?” Hay realized that McKinley was not going to volunteer anything.
“There are problems. The first is, simply, what do we want? I’ll know that better at the end of October. I’m going to St. Louis, too. When in doubt, go to St. Louis.” The Major looked cryptic; a cardinal again. “The Spaniards will cede whatever we want. But there is bad feeling.”
“I would suggest a payment for the islands.”
McKinley looked surprised. “I thought the cost of the war was the cost of the islands.”
Hay had given the matter some thought. He had also got the idea from his old friend John Bigelow. “If we pay, as we did for Louisiana and Alaska, then there is no doubt of the legitimacy of the ownership. The bill of sale is the proof. Otherwise, we can be accused of theft, or brutal imperialism, which is not our way, or ought not to seem to be our way.”
“That is a very good idea, Mr. Hay.” McKinley got to his feet. He touched a button on his desk. “Explain it here tomorrow morning, when the Cabinet meets. But I warn you. Foreign relations are now your department. I am free of such entanglements.”
“Except for the peace conference in Paris.” Hay was dogged. Should he be left out of that, he might as well have stayed on in London; or retired to 1603 H Street.
“Judge Day likes to deal with me. But while I’m gone, Cortelyou will keep you informed. When does Mrs. Hay join you?”
“In a couple of weeks.” Cortelyou was now in the doorway. “She has to stop off in New York to do the Christmas shopping.”
“Christmas shopping? In September?” The Major was astonished.
“Actually September’s a bit late for my wife. She usually does all her Christmas shopping in August.”
“We could certainly have used her at the War Department.” McKinley put his arm through Hay’s and they crossed together to the door.
“How is Mrs. McKinley?“ The delicate subject.
“She is-comfortable, I think. You will come to dinner, I hope. We don’t really go out. What is your son Adelbert doing now?”
“I didn’t know you knew him.” Was this the politician’s trick of boning up in advance whenever someone important called? or had Del, unknown to him, got to know the President?
“He was down here in June, before he graduated. Senator Lodge brought him by. I was most impressed. I envy you, having a son.” The McKinleys’ daughter had died young. It was said that their bedroom was a shrine to the dead child. “Perhaps we can find some work for your boy here.”
“You are kind, sir.” Actually, Hay had considered taking on Del at the State Department, but then decided against it. They did not, for reasons obscure to him, get on. There was never unpleasantness; there was simply no sympathy. Hay was happier with daughters; as Adams was happiest with nieces, real or honorary.
As the President and Hay stepped into the corridor, a tall, gaunt figure stared intently at Hay, who stared, bewildered, back. McKinley said, “You remember Tom Pendel, don’t you? He’s been a doorkeeper here ever since your day.”
Hay smiled, not recognizing the old man. “Why yes,” he began.
“Johnny Hay!” The old man had no teeth. But his handclasp was like a vise. “I was new here, remember? One of the guards back then when you and Mr. Robert were in the parlor there, when I came in to tell you the President had been shot.” Hay had a sense of vertigo. Was he about to faint? or, perhaps, poetically, die? Then the world righted itself.
“Yes,” he said, inadequately. “I remember.”
“Oh, it was terrible! I was the last one here to see Mr. Lincoln into his carriage, and he said to me, ‘Good-night, Tom,’ just like that.”
“Well, the sentiment, under the circumstances, was not unnatural.” Hay tried to make light of the matter. He had been warned that McKinley did not enjoy hearing about his predecessors.
“I was also the last man here to see off General Garfield that summer morning when he left for the depot, and said, ‘Good-by, Tom.’ Just like that, and then he was shot, in the depot, and lingered on and-”
McKinley was growing restive. “Our Tom has seen so many of us come and go.” Cortelyou signalled the President. “I must go to work. I’ll see you tomorrow morning. Cabinet meets at ten.” McKinley and Cortelyou vanished into the Cabinet room. A dozen ladies, making a tour of the White House, stared with awe at the President’s back.
As Hay extricated himself from the highly historic Tom Pendel, he was told that Colonel Crook, who had been Lincoln’s bodyguard, was also still on duty. “But the rest are all gone, sir, like snowflakes upon the river. You were so young back then.”
“I am not,” said Hay, “young now.”