The train clattered to a stop at the depot of a small town called, according to the paint-blistered sign, Heidegg. Clara and Abigail appeared in the doorway to the parlor. “We’re stopping,” Clara announced, in a loud authoritative voice.
“Actually, my dear, we’ve stopped.” Hay vaulted to his feet, an acrobatic maneuver which involved falling to the right while embracing with his left arm the back of the chair in front of him; gravity, the ultimate enemy, was, for once, put to good use.
Adams pointed to a small crowd at the back of the train. “We should go amongst the people in whose name we-you and Theodore, that is-govern.”
“We’ll be here fifteen minutes, Uncle Henry,” said Abigail, and led him to the back of their private car, where a smiling porter helped them onto the good Ohio (or was it now Indiana?) earth. Hay stepped into the cool day, which had been co-existing separately from that of the railroad car, whose atmosphere was entirely different, warmer, redolent of railway smells, as well as of a galley where a Negro chef in a tall white cap performed miracles with terrapin.
For a moment, the earth itself seemed to be moving beneath Hay’s feet, as if he were still on the train; slightly, he swayed. Clara took his fragile arm in her great one and then the four visitors from the capital of the imperial republic, led by John Hay, the Second Personage in the Land, mingled with the folks.
The American people, half a hundred farmers with wives, children, dogs, surrounded the Second Personage in the Land, who smiled sweetly upon them; and lapsed into his folksy “Little Breeches” manner which could outdo for sheer comic rusticity Mark Twain himself. “I reckon,” he said, with a modest smile, “that well as I know all the country hereabouts-” He was positive that he was now in Indiana, but one slip… “-I’ve never had the luck to be in Heidegg before. I’m from Warsaw myself. Warsaw, Illinois, as I ’spect you know. Anyway, we’re on our way now to the big exhibition in St. Louis, and when I saw that sign saying Heidegg, I said, let’s stop and meet the folks. So, hello.” Hay was well pleased with his own casualness and lack of side. He did not dare look at Henry Adams, who always found amusing, in the wrong sense, Hay’s Lincolnian ease with the common man.
The crowd continued to stare, amicably, at the four foreigners. Then a tall thin farmer came forward, and shook Hay’s hand. “Willkommen,” he began; and addressed the Second Personage in the Land in German.
Hay then asked, in German, if anyone in Heidegg spoke English. He was told, in German, that the schoolteacher spoke excellent English, but he was home, sick in bed. Hay ignored the strangled cries of Henry Adams, trying not to laugh. Fortunately, Hay’s German was good, and he was able to satisfy the crowd’s curiosity as to his identity. The word had spread that he was someone truly important, the president of the railroad, in fact. When Hay modestly identified himself, the information was received politely; but as no one had ever heard of the-or even a-secretary of state, the crowd broke up, leaving the four visitors alone on a muddy bank where new grass was interspersed with violets. As Abigail collected violets, Adams was in his glory. “The people!” he exclaimed.
“Oh, do shut, up, Henry!” Hay had seldom been so annoyed with his old friend, or with himself for having handled with unusual clumsiness an occasion fraught with symbolism of a sort that Adams would never cease to remind him.
As they dined, Adams talked and talked. Clara ate and ate, course after course, marvelling, occasionally, at what remarkable dishes were emerging from the small galley. Abigail stared out the window at a great muddy river, surging through the twilight, from the Great Lakes to New Orleans. “You must-Theodore must-someone must,” Adams declared, “cross the country, like this, by car, and stop-but I really mean stop, and stay, and look and listen. The country’s full of people who are strange to us, and we to them. That river,” Adams pointed dramatically at the river on whose banks were set square frame houses with square windows in which lights now began to gleam; each house was set in its own yard, strewn with scrap iron, scrap paper, cinders, “could be an estuary of the Rhine or the Danube. We are witnessing the last of the great tides of migration. We are in Mitteleuropa, surrounded by Germans, Slavs and-what were the people of Heidegg?”
“Swiss,” said Hay, deciding that he would take his chances with broiled Potomac shad and its roe.
“You were born on this river, John, and now it’s stranger to you than the Danube. When Theodore goes on and on about the true American, his grit, his sense of fairness, his institutions, he doesn’t realize that that American is as rare as one of those buffalos he helped to kill off.”
“We shall,” said Hay, mouth filled with roe, “transform those Germans and Slavs into… buffalos. All in due course.”
“No,” said Adams, revelling as always in darkness, “they will transform us. When I was writing about Aaron Burr…”
“Whatever became of that book?” asked Clara, addressing herself to what looked like a side of buffalo.
“I have burned it, of course. Publish in total secrecy, or burn…”
“In secret, too?” Hay remembered that Clover had said that her husband’s life of Burr was far superior to his published life of John Randolph. Hay had always thought Burr an ideal scamp to write about. But something in Burr’s character or life had made Henry uneasy; he had decided that Burr was not a “safe” scoundrel to deal with, and if he were let out of the history books where he had been entombed alongside Benedict Arnold, he might cheat the world all over again. Hay rather suspected that Adams had not destroyed the book but used parts of it for his study of Jefferson.
“In his old age, Burr was walking down Fifth Avenue with a group of young lawyers, and one of them asked him how he thought some aspect of the Constitution should be interpreted. Burr stopped in front of a building site, and pointed to some newly arrived Irish laborers, and he said, ‘In due course, they will decide what the Constitution is-and is not.’ He understood, wicked creature, that the immigrants would eventually crowd us out and re-create the republic in their own image.”
Abigail looked at her uncle, who had, happily, run out of breath, and said, “But the country’s not all Catholic yet. That’s something.”
“Everyone in the Swiss Indiana village of Heidegg was Catholic…”
“Lutheran,” said Hay, who was quick to learn essentials whenever votes were involved.
“Anyway, I incline now to Catholicism, too,” said Adams perversely.
“Mariolatry.” Hay’s heart fluttered disagreeably. He had a vision of himself addressing twenty thousand people at the fair; and dropping dead.
“Catholic maids are always pregnant. I can’t think why,” said Clara.
“Luckily, steam-power, like this train, is going to make all these different races into one. The way the idea of the Virgin-hardly Mariolatry-united the Europeans of the twelfth century.”
Abigail interrupted her uncle. Hay silently commended her bravery. “Why St. Louis for a world’s fair?”
Hay, as the Nation’s Second Personage, answered: “It is the fourth-largest city in the country. It is centrally located. The new Union Station is the world’s largest, or so they claim. Finally, the late revered William McKinley, whenever he was in doubt as to what the people of this great nation wanted him to do, would say, ‘I must go to St. Louis.’ The city is our heartland. Now the city fathers, to celebrate the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase-illegal purchase by Mr. Jefferson,” Hay added for Adams’s pleasure, “are holding the largest fair of its kind in the history of the world. There will be,” he added ominously, “innumerable dynamos and other pieces of dull machinery.”