“He’s very much,” said McKinley, “the way his father must have been when he was here.” Del had told Caroline that the President seldom mentioned any of his predecessors by name, a perhaps unique trait that he shared with Lincoln. “I think Pretoria will season him and then…” The appearance of Senator Lodge caused the President to smile with what looked to be genuine warmth. There was, thought Caroline, a lot to be learned about acting from Mr. McKinley. Meanwhile, Del, out of earshot, was screening would-be celebrators of the new year-new century-with the President. At the far end of the room, Marguerite Cassini looked very lovely; indeed, like a ballet girl, dressed up, thought Caroline with swift unkindness, as a lady. She was enchanting a number of elderly congressmen, her eyes on Del; apparently, he had flirted more seriously with Marguerite than he had ever admitted to Caroline, who was disturbed to find herself jealous; and was not jealousy a sign of love? she asked her own Marguerite, who had replied sourly, “More likely a sign of a very selfish disposition.”
The President had finished congratulating Senator Lodge on his awesome brilliance; and Lodge turned to Caroline, with a foxy smile. “You are still enjoying this barbaric country?”
“ ‘Barbaric’ is your word, Mr. Lodge. I am enamored of your-our civilization. A light to all the world, I should say.”
“You do say in the Washington Tribune.”
“Oh, I never read the leaders. I only like…”
“Murders?”
“Lost children is our current passion. But I didn’t think that you read our paper.”
“Oh, I keep careful track of you.”
“Our murders?”
“Lost children, too.”
“Treaties?” Caroline struck, sweetly she hoped. She had the pleasure of producing a frown on the stern senatorial face. Lodge was suspected of working against his friend Hay’s canal treaty.
“My dear Miss Sanford. A treaty is only a Platonic essence before it comes to the Senate. Then we-two-thirds of us-make it corporeal.”
“May I quote you?”
“Let me quote myself first in the Senate. Then it is all yours. You will go on?”
Caroline was now quite used to the question. “Why not? Besides, Mr. McLean is willing to finance me.”
“McLean? Why?”
“So that I won’t be obliged to sell out to Mr. Hearst.”
“Oh!” Lodge was delighted. “You’ll find a lot of us will pay you anything you like to keep him out of Washington.” Lodge looked at Del. “When does he go to Pretoria?”
“Next month.”
“Alone?”
“Alone.”
2
HENRY ADAMS GAVE the farewell dinner for Del; and Adams was, Hay thought, every bit as grim as February itself, Washington’s least favored month. Hay arrived first; and found Adams looking more like a diabolic hedgehog than the legendary angelic porcupine of Lafayette Square.
“I have lost all interest in tobacco and champagne.” Adams stood beneath Blake’s celebration of Nebuchadnezzar’s madness. William brought more wood for the fire.
“You still have La Dona.” Hay lit his forbidden-by-Clara before-dinner cigar.
“She is the muse of a poet, Heaven help us. A ridiculously young poet.” Adams was very round indeed; and almost as irritable as he claimed to be. “I’ve had a letter from Don Cameron. He’s down in St. Helens and wants me to visit. I remind him of his wife, I suppose. If it were not for the thirteenth century, I would kill myself.”
“Then we have more to thank Madame Poulard for than her omelettes.”
“They, too, are as Gothic as Mont-St.-Michel.” Hay was not as enamored of the idea of the Virgin as Adams had become. He was beginning to fear that his old friend might yet turn Catholic on him.
“Perhaps too agreeable an image. Cabot is not coming tonight.”
Hay felt a sciatic thrill in his left leg. “Does this mean he’ll oppose the treaty?”
“I don’t know what he means any more. He is as bad as Brooks.”
Hay had just read Brooks Adams’s most recent novelty, Natural Selection in Literature. With all the positiveness of a Karl Marx, Brooks traced England’s decline through its literature, from vigorous rural warrior Walter Scott to effete, urban, cowardly and fearful Charles Dickens. Apparently, the rise of Mr. Micawber heralded England’s eclipse. “Brooks writes me regularly,” said Hay, somewhat cautiously, aware how much younger brother irritated older brother. “He has decided that Russia must either undergo a social revolution internally or expand externally.”
“Why not both?” Adams was more than ever bristling porcupine.
“He prefers either-or to simultaneity. He has confided to me that if the Russians and the Germans were to obtain China’s Shansi province, we would be at their mercy…”
“So we must arm to the teeth. That means more ships, more Admiral Mahan, more noise from Teddy! Oh, I am sick of the whole lot.” The fire, sympathetically, exploded behind Adams. Both men started. Then Adams sat in his favorite small leather chair opposite Hay’s favorite small leather chair. The children’s study, the large Clara had called the room, designed as it was entirely for the comfort of great small men, and charming nieces. “I admire Brooks’s theory as far as I can understand it-nations as organisms. Nations as stores of energy, slowly depleting unless refuelled. I grasp all that. But I want only to understand the theory, which I don’t, really, and neither does he, while Brooks wants to apply the bloody thing. He’s mad. He’s got all sorts of people who should know better excited, including you.”
“Nothing excites me, Henry, except your excitement.”
“Well, I am excited when I think of him. Brooks thinks England will collapse soon. So do I. He thinks we’ll inherit their empire. I don’t, at least not for long. I want us to build a sort of Great Wall of China, and hide behind it as long as possible. In the next quarter century the world’s going to go smash. Well, I’m for staying out of the smash as long as possible. You see, I’m anti-imperialist. Don’t tell Teddy or Lodge or Mahan. I’m for letting the whole thing smash up, and then, later, we might find some pieces worth picking up. Meanwhile, forget the Philippines. Forget China. Let England sink. Let Russia and Germany try to run the machine, while we live on our internal resources, which are so much greater than theirs. They’ll end by going bust, and why should we go bust with them?”
“Perhaps,” said Hay, startled by so much unexpected vehemence, not to mention so vast a sea-change in the Adams cosmogony, “we shall not be allowed to stay out, in order to pursue your-scavenger policy, of picking up the pieces.”
“Scavengers thrive on the battles of others. Anyway, we are getting in much too deep in Asia.”
“I thought you always wanted us to have Siberia…”
“But only as a scavenger, as loot, after the Tsar and his idiot court-those thirty-five grand dukes-have managed to destroy their ramshackle empire. I certainly wouldn’t send Admiral Dewey and General Miles to Port Arthur.”
“What about Teddy? We could always send him, alone, with a gun over Petersburg. In a balloon, of course.”
“Filled with air from his own strenuous lungs. I saw him when he was here last week. He swore, yet again, that he did not want to be vice-president.”
Hay sighed. “The Major doesn’t want him. Mark Hanna has already had one heart attack, attributable to Teddy. He was at his desk in the Senate, reading a newspaper account of Teddy’s fierce determination not to be vice-president, when, with a terrifying cry, he slumped to the floor, near dead of a Teddy-inspired heart attack.”
“Well, he is now completely recovered.” Adams stared gloomily into the fire. “He was brought here to breakfast.”