Gore Vidal - Empire

Adams frowned, not pleased. “We are in a bad way, it is true. But the England of Walpole was far more corrupt and narrow and provincial…”

“True. But the acquisition of an empire civilized the English. That may not be a law but it is a fact.” Henry James looked at Adams very hard. “But what civilized them might very well demoralize us even further.”

Adams did not answer. Del looked worried. “Have you talked like this to Father?”

James’s voice lightened. “No, no. Poor man. He has the weight of the world on him as it is. I think him noble beyond description to offer himself, at his age and in such-wintry health, on the altar of public service.”

Suddenly, James began to intone, the great organ notes quite filling the village through which they were passing. “ ‘He seen his duty, a dead sure thing. And went for it thar and then.’ ”

“What,” asked Caroline, alarmed, “is that?”

“From ‘Jim Bludso,’ ” said Del. “Father does hate to hear it.”

“Well, ‘Father’ is not here, and I do like the roll of it. What might he not have made, in his marvelously rhythmical chronicles, dedicated to the hazards of transportation, out of a runaway-let us say-electrical-motor car in which an historian and giver of immutable laws is saved from extinction by the swift strong arm of a mere storyteller from Albany, New York, but currently domiciled at Rye…”

By the time that James had finished elaborating on this mock-Hay ballad, even Henry Adams was laughing.

Lamb House proved to be a miniature stone manor house with a garden in disarray, all weeds and, yes, dust, thought Caroline obsessively. At the door a man and woman greeted them.

“The Smiths,” said Henry James, with uncharacteristic brevity.

Joyously, the Master and his guests were greeted by the Smiths, who dropped his baggage repeatedly, as they hurried, swinging from side to side, into the house’s small drawing room.

“The Smiths are a legend,” whispered Del, as Henry James seated Henry Adams in an armchair next to the empty fireplace.

“Why?”

As if challenged to dramatize the legend, Mrs. Smith began to sink slowly, almost gracefully, to the floor, a gentle smile on her lips.

“Mr. Smith.” Henry James’s voice betrayed no agitation, as Mr. Smith, thus summoned, fell into the doorway from the hall. “Sir?” his voice rang out.

“It would appear that Mrs. Smith’s siesta, interrupted by the excitement of our arrival, has been resumed upon the drugget.”

“Ah, poor woman!” Smith shook his head. “It is the new medicine the village doctor gives her, not at all what she’s used to in London, in Harley Street.” During this, Smith had pulled his smiling unconscious wife to her feet, and sleep-walked her to the door. “Hers,” Smith declared proudly, “is… a highly sensitive sort of organism.” They were gone. Henry Adams had succeeded in not laughing but the tip of his neat beard was twitching. Henry James looked endlessly melancholy, even Byronic, thought Caroline, who said, “But surely, Mr. James…”

There was a terrible crash at the back of the house: plainly, both Smiths had surrendered to gravity’s stern law. “They are indeed, surely, as you put it, to put it finely, the Smiths, a couple richly experienced in domestic matters, but prone in the wastes, as it were, of unfamiliar country life to exceed-go past, even the earliest of warning signals…”

“Drunk!” Henry Adams’s laugh was so startlingly loud and uninhibited that Caroline could not stop herself; nor could Del.

The Master, however, was a study in polite anguish. “I’m sorry,” he said, “that your introduction to Lamb House should be so spoiled by the Dionysian-no, Bacchic-transports of the loyal good Smiths whose transference from their native London to the unfamiliar countryside has tended to overstimulate them, in every sense…” The sound of crockery crashing caused James’s large smooth brow delicately to furrow.

But Henry Adams then took the lead; and the Smiths, as a subject, were banished; as a fact, however, they did produce a respectable tea, and Mr. Smith, having got a second wind, served efficiently.

Adams was curious about the neighborhood. Was there sufficient company? “As you prefer solitude to company, this means that you must have some very good company nearby so that not seeing them will be all the more agreeable and inspiring.”

“Well, there is the Poet Laureate.” James passed a plate of heavy cakes to Caroline, who refused; to Del, who took two. “I find that every day that I don’t see him is a pleasure. In fact, I see no one here. I did join the golf club, for the tea that they serve, not for the curious lonely game that precedes it, and though unanimously elected as vice-president of the cricket club, I declined the election, as the game is even more incomprehensible to me than golf, and no tea is served. I thought to embrace my solitude this summer little realizing that the Camerons, the Hays, the Adamses should all descend upon me, like a… like a…”

“I cannot wait to hear what he will say we’re like,” said Adams to Caroline, who rather wished the windows onto the garden were open: the room was close, and flies circled the cakes.

“I am torn,” said James, “between the image of a shower of gold and the lurid details of a passion play. In any case, were it not for you passionate visitors, I would be chained to my desk, writing…”

“Dictating…”

“The image is the same. I am chained to Mr. McAlpine, who is chained to his Remington, while I copiously dictate book reviews for Literature , a biography of William Wetmore Story…”

“That crushing bore?”

“You have put in a single phrase what I must make a book of. But as the heirs have paid me a useful sum to memorialize our old and, yes, boring friend, I must do the work to pay for these sticks and stones that compose the first-and last-house I shall ever own.”

Del asked James if he had met Stephen Crane, the young American journalist who was said to be living nearby. James nodded. “He is at Brede Place. He came to call before he went to Cuba, to describe the war. He is most talented, with a wife who…” James glanced at Caroline, and she realized that whatever the wife might be she, as a virginal girl of American provenance, was not about to be told. “… once kept an establishment in Jacksonville, Florida, I believe, named, most evocatively, the Hotel de Dream. Poor young Mr. Crane is also chained to his desk, only his desk is now in Havana-where he writes for a newspaper…”

“For the Journal ,” said Caroline. Blaise had told her how Hearst had managed to get Crane away from the World , where he had described, tactlessly, the cowardice of the 71st New York Volunteers. In a series of headlines, Hearst had denounced the World for insulting the valor of America’s brave fighting men; then he hired the author of the canard to write for him.

Henry Adams wondered how someone who had never seen a battle could have written such a fine war novel as The Red Badge of Courage . James reminded him that “the titanic Tolstoi” had, after all, not been alive during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, yet he could imagine that War as well as Peace, to which Caroline felt mischievously obliged to add, “Although Mr. Crane has never been a girl of any kind, much less one of the streets, he did create for us Maggie.”

“Dear, dear!” Henry Adams looked more than ever like an uncle. “You are not supposed to know of such things. Mlle. Souvestre has been lax.”

“But Miss Sanford is a product, Adams, of Paris, where everyone knows…” James’s voice dropped very low on the word “knows” and his eyes became very round and comical. Caroline and Del laughed. Adams did not because it was now time to talk of Thee-oh-dore. Caroline wondered if all Americans, of this particular set anyway, were obliged to speak of Theodore Roosevelt at least six times a day, rather the way convent nuns told their beads at regular intervals. She herself had never met the Colonel, as he was currently known, thanks to what John Hay had dubbed, publicly, “a splendid little war,” giving offense in many quarters, not all of them Spanish. But although Theodore and his Rough Riders had caught the popular imagination, Caroline found it odd that he should be so interesting to his social equals, not to mention elders. Adams sought to explain him: “He is all energy. I suppose that is his attraction…”