“There is still such a feeling against Catholics?” Madame de Bieville looked almost her age by the harsh light of a street lamp directly overhead. Blaise wished she would turn her head to the left an inch, and allow flattering shadows to mask her. Talk of age always disturbed him when she was present. The Willson girls had already worked out his relationship to what, in their eyes, despite her foreign glamour, was an old woman. If the Chief suspected, he made no allusion. But then, in sexual matters, he had a maiden’s tact.
“Well, it’s the Irish mostly that keep on giving Catholics such a bad name,” said Hearst vaguely. “Germans, too, I guess. He’s a powerhouse, her brother.” The Chief looked at Blaise, without reproach, which was the worst reproach of all.
John R. McLean was the owner of the Cincinnati Enquirer. He lived in Washington where his mother and wife jointly reigned much as Mrs. Astor did, alone, in New York. McLean was fierce, partisan, powerful. He would do anything to keep Hearst out of Washington. Blaise’s failure to buy the Tribune was a blow to Hearst, who was not about to begin, from nothing, a newspaper in the capital. The Tribune had been an ideal acquisition, and Blaise could never adequately explain to his partner-employer no longer: Blaise merely lent the Chief money at the going rate-that he had lost the paper to his own sister, who, to his surprise, eight months later, was still, if only barely, in business. They now communicated through lawyers. Anne thought that he should come to terms with Caroline, but Blaise refused. He would fight her to the end, which would come, rather anti-climactically, one way or another, in five years.
“Who built the arch?” Anne changed the dangerous subject.
“A committee,” said Blaise. “The National Sculpture Society.”
“The American style.” She smiled into the light; and the resulting lines made Blaise both nervous and sad. “And what is the arch made of? Marble? or stone?”
“Plaster and cheap wood,” said the Chief with obscure pleasure. “And lots of white paint.”
“But then when the winter comes…”
“It will fall apart.” The Chief’s tone was dreamy.
“But there’s a subscription to rebuild it in marble. This is just the model.” As a young, new New Yorker of means, Blaise had already made his contribution to the fund.
“It doesn’t look at all temporary.” Anne was admiring.
“That’s the American way,” said the Chief. America personified, Hearst thought of himself; and, perhaps, thought Blaise, he was. Everything here was equally new, self-invented, temporary.
2
THE SECRETARY OF STATE and the new Secretary of War, Elihu Root, stared at one another across Hay’s desk. Root had replaced Alger in August. A New York lawyer of uncommon brilliance and sly wit, Root gave Hay more pleasure than the rest of the admittedly dim Cabinet combined. Root’s hair was cut short like Julius Caesar’s, with a dark fringe over the brow, and a modest moustache. The black eyes were as quick as the wit; and the swift smile was both frank and agreeably murderous. “If you really want the Philippines,” said Hay, “you can have them. I’ve got too much on my hands as it is.”
“I don’t want them, dear fellow. I’ve got quite enough with Cuba.” Root lit a cigar. “In fact, I’ve told the President that State should have all our island possessions. War just isn’t suited to run a peacetime colonial government. Of course, Cuba isn’t really a colony.” Root frowned. “I wish we could think of a better word than ‘possession’ for our…”
“Possessions?” Hay smiled; the pains in his back were in remission. A summer in New Hampshire had restored if not his weary soul his spinal column. “We must face what they are.”
“I’ve just divided Cuba into four military districts, rather the way we did the South in 1865. In due course, we’ll come home, but then what happens to Cuba?”
“Germany?” Lately the “German menace” was much discussed at Cabinet, where it was generally thought that the German fleet was making itself too much at home in both the Caribbean and the Pacific; and all-or almost all-agreed that if Germany were to obtain a single port anywhere in the Caribbean, there would be war.
The Major’s recent discovery of the Monroe Doctrine had been galvanizing. But then, as Henry Adams always said, his family’s masterpiece only came to irritable life once every other generation or so. Plans were now afoot to buy the Virgin Islands from Denmark; unfortunately, the Danes had assumed that the government of the United States was so corrupt that it would be necessary to pay off the relevant officials. Hay himself had been crudely approached; severely, he had told the eager Dane, “You must pay off Senator Lodge first. He is the key, and a very expensive one, too, because he is from Massachusetts, and their senators still idolize-and emulate-Daniel Webster, who was ‘retained’ by everyone.” Cabot had not been amused by the subsequent advances. Adams had not stopped laughing for a day.
“I don’t think Germany is going to amount to much on this side of the Atlantic.” With a forefinger, Root dusted the silver-framed portrait of the Prince of Wales. “Poor man. He’ll never be king, will he?”
“Queen Victoria cannot live forever, as far as we know. She has been queen all my life; yours, too. She adds whiskey to her claret at table.”
“That explains her longevity. It’s going to be Leonard Wood in Cuba.”
“As governor-general?”
Root nodded. “Or whatever we’ll call him. He wants to clean up, literally, Cuba. You know, collect the garbage. Educate the children. Give them a constitution where only men of property can vote.”
Hay inhaled the smoke from Root’s cigar: Cuban, he noted, of the best quality. “No one can ever accuse us of exporting democracy. Poor Jefferson thought that he had won, and now we are all Hamiltonians.”
“Thanks to the Civil War.”
Adee opened the door, and put his elegant head into the room. “They are coming, Mr. Hay,” he softly quacked.
“Who,” asked Hay, “are they?”
A high screeching falsetto shouting “Bully!” promptly identified one of them.
“I should have warned you,” said Root, baring his teeth in an anticipatory smile.
“Theodore approaches…” Hay held on to the edge of his desk, as if battening down, whatever that nautical verb meant, a hatch.
“With his invention…”
The door was flung open and in the doorway stood the portly young Governor of New York, and the portly old Admiral Dewey. “There you two are! We’ve been with Secretary Long. Nice to have the three of you all in the same building. You look bully, Hay.”
“I feel… bully, Theodore.” Hatch battened down, Hay had risen to his feet with some pain. Root’s murderous smile was now in place. He started to shake the Admiral’s right hand; and was given the left. “My arm’s still paralyzed from shaking hands in New York,” he said. Dewey was small and sunburned, with snow-white hair and moustache.
“The hero of the hour,” said Root, reverently.
“Hour? The century!” shouted Roosevelt.
“Which ends in less than two months.” Hay was pleased to deflate Theodore. “Then we shall be, all of us, adrift in the frightening unknown of the twentieth century.”
“Which begins not in two months but in a year and two months from now.” Root was pedantic. “On January one, 1901.”
“Surely,” Hay began; but Roosevelt broke in.
“Why frightening?” The Governor removed his glasses and cleaned them with a silk handkerchief. “The twentieth century-whenever it starts-will see us at our absolute high noon. Isn’t that right, Admiral?”