“Surrenden Dering?”
“The same. He’s posted in Petersburg. He came all the way to Bad Nauheim to tell me that Russia’s falling apart. It seems that the Tsar is a religious maniac, and so the thirty-five grand dukes are running the country, which is to say they create endless confusion. The workers are on strike. The students are on strike. Maybe Brooks is right, after all. They’ll have their French Revolution at last. Meanwhile, what government they have has instructed Eddy to tell me that they’d like a convention with us, and I had to tell him that, thanks to the Senate and dear Cabot, there is no way of getting such a treaty as long as any senator has one constituent who might object.”
Adams joined them. He seemed immeasurably old to Caroline; yet, paradoxically, he never aged. He simply became more himself: the last embodiment of the original American republic. “I like your sister-in-law. She knows what not to show you on a tour of the house.”
“There’s so much not to be seen. There is dry-rot…”
“I think that’s what I’ve got.” Hay sighed. “I was finally examined by an austere Bavarian doctor who assured me, with touching Teutonic modesty, that he was the greatest expert on the heart in the world. As I believe everything I’m told, I said, ‘So what’s wrong?’ He said, ‘You have a hole-or a bump,’ he was not consistent, ‘in your heart.’ When I asked why all the other great heart specialists had not noticed this hole or bump, he said, ‘Maybe they didn’t see it, or maybe they didn’t want to worry you.’ ‘Is it fatal?’ I asked. ‘Everything’s fatal,’ he said, with a confident smile. I must say he sort of grew on me. Anyway, he said he could delay the final rites, which, apparently, is a cinch for him.”
“I hate doctors. I never go to one.” Adams was firm. “They make you sick. Anyway, you look no worse-and no better-for all the waters that have flowed through you…”
“… and over me.” Hay stretched his arms. “I can’t wait to see Theodore, and tell him that I’ve been right all along about the Kaiser. Theodore thinks that because the Kaiser is, as Henry James says of Theodore, ‘the embodiment of noise,’ that he is mindless…”
“Like Theodore himself?”
“Now, Henry. Theodore has a mind that is chock-a-block with notions…”
“Thoughts, too?”
“Splendid thoughts. Anyway, the latest information is that the Kaiser, after pushing his stupid cousin, the Tsar, into declaring war on Japan, now realizes that Russia is too weak, even for his purposes, so he now is making frantic love to Japan, and to Theodore, too.”
“They are made for each other.”
“Not yet. But the Kaiser has a plan. Would to God I could go to Berlin to see him. He may be a reckless orator but he is a cold calculator.”
Two menservants appeared, pushing a tea-table; and the croquet players joined them. Frederika did the honors, while Caroline and Clara walked beside the lake, keeping a careful distance from the swans. “He seems better.” Caroline could think of nothing else to say on that subject.
Clara was now huge, even monumental; her manner, as always, secure, declamatory. “He could live another year. Maybe more, if only he would leave Washington.”
“He won’t?”
“Not yet. We go to London, incognito, June second. Then we sail on the Baltic. Then he insists on going back to the State Department before we go on to New Hampshire. He does not trust Theodore.” Clara exhorted a willow tree’s reflection in the lake.
“Perhaps it’s best, to keep on, till…” Caroline did not finish.
“I wonder about you and Del.” Clara spoke for the first time to Caroline about her son. “I’m not sure-now-it would’ve been for the best.”
“We’ll never know, will we?”
“No. We never will. It’s when I see all this, I realize you are foreign. He was not.”
“I’m both. Or, maybe, neither.” Caroline was amused that Clara was still making censorious divisions between what was foreign, and probably bad, and what was American and entirely good. “At least I don’t publish the Tribune in French.”
Clara smiled, as she always did when she suspected that someone had made a joke. “Do you and Blaise get on?”
“We do now. We probably won’t in the future.” Caroline was surprised, as always, when she said what she actually thought.
“That’s my impression, too. The girl’s nice. But he does want to be like Mr. Hearst…”
“No more than I do…”
“Caroline! You are a lady.”
“But foreign.”
“Even so, you could never want to be like that dreadful man. Henry James returned our latch-key.” Clara’s mind was so constituted that she could make the leap from yellow journalism to the fact that Henry James, who had gone off with the key to the front door of the Hay house, had returned it; and make the non sequitur seem part of some significant whole, which perhaps it was, un-grasped by Caroline, who suddenly recalled her discussion of keys with Blaise, both real and metaphysical.
“Will you see Mr. James in London?”
“If we have the chance. I don’t want John to see anyone except old friends. But the King insists. So we go to Buckingham Palace.”
“The King is political.”
“He likes John. I said, No food! The King eats for hours. We shall stay exactly one half hour, I said, no longer.” The two women sat on a bench, and watched the others at tea. Adams was walking up and down excitedly, a good sign. Hay sat huddled in his throne, a study in gray and white. Blaise sat on the edge of his chair like an attentive schoolboy. “Divorce still shocks me.” Clara hurled the commandment down the length of her figure, which even seated suggested Mount Sinai.
“We were never really married.” Caroline started to tell the truth, but then, not wanting to spend the rest of her life in France, she told not the truth but something true. “I was alone, after Del died. So I married a cousin for-protection.” Caroline hoped that she could successfully portray herself as helpless.
She could not, to Clara, at least. “I know.” She was peremptory. “Rebound. From grief. Even so, one might have waited until there was not a cousin but a true husband.”
“That’s all past. I’m alone now, and quite content. There’s Emma. What,” asked Caroline, imitating the manner of Clara, the non sequitur without ellipsis, “ever became of Clarence King’s children by the Negress?”
Clara blushed. Caroline knew victory. “They are still in Canada, I think. John and Henry help out. They tell me nothing, and I never ask.” Clara rose, ending the subject. Attended by Caroline, the mountain returned to the tea-table.
Hay was describing his meeting with the French foreign minister. “I was expressly forbidden by the President to speak to him, since I hadn’t first seen the Kaiser. But I, too, must be allowed my diplomacy. All the troubles in Morocco-no, not Perdicaris, not Raisuli…”
“Spare us your high drama.” Adams ceased pacing and sat in a chair too large for him. The two tiny glittering black patent-leather shoes were an inch from the ground.
“… are coming to a head, and the Kaiser is imposing himself on the French, and threatens to go to Morocco himself to take it away from them. Poor Delcassé is filled with gloom. With Russia on the verge of a revolution, the Kaiser has the only important army in Europe. The French don’t breed enough, he complained, and the English army is too small, so the Kaiser can do as he pleases, unless Theodore puts down his great boot…”
“Stick, isn’t it?” Adams interjected. “The one he says he carries when he speaks with a soft voice. The reverse, of course, is the case. He bellows, and there is no stick at all.”
“A large navy, Henry, is a big stick…”