Gore Vidal - Empire

“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.”

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.”

“Mark Hanna!” Hay was horrified; no one so low had ever come to an Adams breakfast. “Who dared bring him?”

“Cabot. Who else? It was, he said, for my-education.”

“Clara and Helen made a joint entrance. Adams and Hay rose to greet them as if they had not all just met at tea beneath their joint roof. In order to maintain perspective, as Hay put it, meaning sanity, he walked every afternoon, no matter how cold, with Adams; then they would join Clara at her tea-urn. During these long walks, Hay was able to relate exactly what was on his mind while Adams was able to tell him, with great charm, what was not on the Secretary of State’s mind but ought to be.

Helen was now thinner; and altogether lovely to her father’s prejudiced eye. It was taken for granted that, in a year’s time, she would marry Payne Whitney, a handsome son of a handsome father, who was also deeply corrupt politically, and a master of Tammany. William C. Whitney was also a maker of money and, like Hay himself, a marrier of money, in the form of the large-why were heiresses always so large?-Flora Payne, who had died, leaving not so much a bereaved husband as a bereaved bachelor brother, Oliver Payne, the wealthiest of the lot. Then when Whitney remarried, Oliver Payne declared war on his one-time brother-in-law and with extraordinary and elaborate monetary bribes detached two of Whitney’s four children from their father: a daughter, Pauline, and a son, Harry Payne Whitney. Happily, the stormy brothers-in-law that once had been both approved of Helen, who behaved like a minister plenipotentiary as she made her way between the warring houses. William Whitney, once spoken of for president, was now being investigated by Governor Roosevelt because he owned streetcar lines in New York City. Whitney had been in Cleveland’s Cabinet; was an ally of Bryan; was, thought Hay, more than a match for Teddy, whose reforming tendencies, thus far, were more rhetorical than real.