Empire

“Measure up,” James murmured, with mysterious, to Caroline, approval. “Yes, yes, yes,” he added to no one, as Theodore told them how he had invented, first, Panama, and then the canal. He did not lack for self-esteem. James kept repeating, softly, “Measure up. Measure up. Yes. Yes.”

3

BLAISE DELIVERED WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST into the eager presence of Mrs. Bingham. “I can never thank you enough,” said Frederika, as she and Blaise stood at one end of the Bingham drawing room and together watched Mrs. Bingham’s perfect ecstasy at so great a catch. The Chief could now talk and smile at the same time, a valuable political asset that he had finally acquired.

“I hope Mr. Sullivan has not been invited.” Blaise looked at Frederika with a sudden fondness, the result of having got to know, at last, someone well. The experience of furnishing a house with another person was, he decided, the ultimate intimacy: each comes to know the other through and through until the very mention of Louis XVI sets off endless reverberations in each.

“Mr. Sullivan has been warned away. Did you hear Mr. Hearst’s speech yesterday?”

Blaise nodded. “He was remarkably good.” Sullivan, an iconoclastic Democrat, had seen fit to attack Hearst on the floor of the House. Until that moment, Hearst had never made a speech; he also left to others the presentation of his own bills, of which the latest, to control railroad rates, had distressed Sullivan. The attack on Hearst as an absentee congressman was answered with an attack on Sullivan in the New York American. Sullivan again rose in the House, and this time he inserted into the record a libellous attack on Hearst, made years earlier in California. Hearst was depicted as a diseased voluptuary, a blackmailer and bribe- taker, to the delight of the nation’s non-Hearstian press. Sullivan described Hearst as “the Nero of modern politics.”

The Chief then rose to make his maiden speech to the House. He spoke more in sorrow than in anger, a style he had become remarkably good at. The California attack had been made by a man who was once indicted for forgery in New York State; and fled to California, under another name. As for Sullivan, Hearst shook his head sadly. He remembered Sullivan altogether too well from his Harvard days. Sullivan and his father were proprietors of a saloon that Hearst had never visited, as he was temperance. But the saloon was known to everyone in Boston after a drunken customer was beaten to death by Sullivan and his father.

Blaise was seated with Brisbane in the crowded press gallery when the House exploded with joy and fury. Various friends of Sullivan shouted at the Speaker to stop Hearst, but Mr. Cannon, a Republican, was delighted by this battle between two Democrats, and Hearst was allowed to end his attack with the pious hope that he would always be considered the enemy by the criminal classes.

Later, the Chief had been in an exuberant but odd mood. “I won that,” he said, “but I can’t win the party. I’ve got to start a third party. That’s the only way. Or knock off half the politicians in the country, which I could do, if I really wanted to get even.” When Blaise asked how this might be done, the Chief had looked very mysterious indeed. “I’ve got a lot of research on everybody.” Meanwhile, he was preparing to run for governor of New York in 1906; and from Albany, he would try again for the presidency in 1908.

James Burden Day introduced Blaise to a recently elected Texas congressman. “John Nance Garner,” said James Burden Day. “Blaise Sanford.” Once again, Blaise felt somehow nude without the third all-defining name so valued by his countrymen. Garner was a cheerful young man with quick bright eyes.

“We were talking about Mr. Hearst,” said Frederika. “And Mr. Sullivan.”

“Sullivan’s a polecat,” observed Garner. “I’m for Hearst. We all are in my neck of the woods, now Bryan’s drifted off.”

Blaise looked at Jim, who seemed tired and distracted. The previous fall, he had failed to be elected to the Senate; and he was restive in the House. Kitty was a good political partner, but nothing more. Blaise suspected that Jim had another woman. But Blaise did not ask; and the prudent Jim did not volunteer. On the other hand, Jim had been delighted to go with Blaise to New York’s most elegant bordello, in Fifth Avenue. Here Jim had performed heroically, and surpassed in popularity Blaise, who was never more contented than when he could play sultan in his rented harem, with a friend like Jim. “I like our colleague,” said Jim, indicating Hearst’s back, “but those who don’t really don’t.”

“A third party?” Blaise repeated not only the phrase but imitated the Chief’s tone of voice.

“They don’t work, ever,” said Garner. “Look at the Populists. They’re going nowhere like a bat through hell.”

“So are we.” Jim was grim. “The country’s Republican now, and we can’t change it. TR’s pulled it off. He talks just like us and acts just the way the people who pay for him want him to act. Hard to beat.”

Mrs. Bingham drew Blaise into her orbit where Hearst now moved, larger than life. “He is my ideal!” she exclaimed.

“Mine, too.” Blaise winked at Hearst, who blinked, and smiled, and said, “I’m running for mayor of New York. This year.”

Mrs. Bingham emitted a tragic cry. “You’re not going to leave us? Not now. We need you. Here. You are excitement.”

“Oh, he’ll be back.” But Blaise wondered how anyone with the Chief’s curious personality could prevail in politics. Then he thought of those cheering delegates in St. Louis; and of the sizeable majorities Hearst obtained in his congressional district. “What about Tammany?” asked Blaise. The Democratic candidate for mayor was almost always a Tammany creature.

“I’m running on a third-party ticket.” The Chief looked suddenly mischievous, and happy. “Tammany’s going to run McClellan again. I’m going to beat him.”

Blaise was amused by the Chief’s confidence. George B. McClellan, Jr., son of the Civil War general, had been a New York City congressman; now he was the city’s mayor. Despite the support of “Silent” Charlie Murphy, the head of Tammany, McClellan was honest and civilized and, Blaise thought, impregnable. “But I’ll beat him. I’m putting together my own machine.”

“Like Professor Langley.” Mrs. Bingham could be tactless.

“This won’t crash.” Hearst was serene. “I’m coming out for the public ownership of all utilities.”

“Isn’t that socialism?” Mrs. Bingham’s eyes widened, and her lips narrowed.

“Oh, not really. Your cows are safe,” he added.

“Mr. Bingham’s cows. I’ve never met them.”

“Have you done ‘research’ on McClellan?” Blaise was still intrigued by the Chief’s reference to what sounded like police dossiers on his enemies.

“ ‘Research’?” The Chief stared blankly. “Oh, yes. That. Maybe. I know a lot now. But I can’t say how, or what.”

As it turned out, two weeks later, Blaise knew what the Chief knew. The Tribune was now housed in a new building in Eleventh Street, just opposite the department store of Woodward and Lothrop. Blaise’s office was on the first floor, in one corner; Caroline was installed in the opposite corner; between them, Trimble; above them, the newsroom; below them, the printing presses.

In front of Blaise stood a well-dressed young Negro, who had been admitted, after considerable discussion, by Blaise’s disapproving stenographer. In Washington even well-dressed Negroes were not encouraged to pay calls on publishers. The fact that the young man was from New York City had, apparently, tipped the scale, and Mr. Willie Winfield was admitted. “I’m a friend of Mr. Fred Eldridge.” Winfield sat down without invitation; he gave Blaise a big smile; he wore canary-yellow spats over orange shoes.

“Who,” asked Blaise, perplexed, “is Mr. Fred Eldridge?”

“He said you might not remember him, but even so I was to come see you, anyways. He’s an editor at the New York American.”

Blaise recalled, vaguely, such a person. “What does Mr. Eldridge want?”

“Well, it’s not what he wants, it’s maybe, what you want.” The young man stared at a painting of the gardens of Saint-Cloud-le-Duc.