ignite popular opinion despite the anti-Hearst press (the entire press not owned by Hearst), which was outdoing even Hearst himself when it came to inventions and libels. But the voters appeared unimpressed. “I’ve never seen such crowds.” Hearst’s pale eyes glittered. “And they’ll be back in two years’ time.”
“What about the Archbold letters?” For Blaise, the letters were the essential proof of the rottenness of a system that could not survive much longer. Either the people would overthrow the government or, more likely, the government would overthrow the people, and set up some sort of dictatorship or junta. Blaise suspected that if it came to the latter, Roosevelt would do a better job than Hearst.
“I don’t need the letters. I’m winning. The letters are for 1908. In case I have problems. You see, I’ll be the reform candidate then.”
“If I were you, I’d use them now. Hit Roosevelt before he hits you.”
“Why bother?” Hearst chewed on a lump of sugar. “There’s nothing Four Eyes can do to me, in this state, anyway.”
The following Sunday, Blaise arrived at Caroline’s Georgetown house; on the first of the year she would move into her new house in Dupont Circle, close by the Pattersons.
Blaise knocked on the door; there was no answer. He tried the door handle; it turned. As he stepped inside the entrance foyer, Jim Day appeared on the staircase, tying his tie.
For an instant they stared, frozen, at each other. Then Jim finished his tie, as coolly as he could; the face was attractively flushed, the way it had been on the river-boat in St. Louis. “Caroline’s upstairs,” he said. “I have to go.” They met on the stairs; but did not shake hands. As Jim passed him, Blaise smelled the familiar warm scent.
Caroline was in her bed, wearing a dressing gown trimmed with white feathers. “Now,” she greeted Blaise, in a high tragic Olga Nethersole voice, “you know.”
“Yes.” Blaise sat opposite her, in a love-seat, and tried to look for signs of love-making. Except for a large crumpled towel on the floor, there were no clues to what had taken place-how many times? and why had he never suspected?
“It is all quite respectable. Since Jim is Emma’s father, we must keep this in the family. Don’t you agree?”
“Yes.” Blaise saw the whole thing clearly at last, including the otherwise meaningless marriage to John. He did his best not to imagine Jim’s body on the bed, all brown skin and smooth muscles. “It would be the end of him, if Kitty knew,” he added, gratuitously.
“Or the beginning.” Caroline was airy. “The world doesn’t end any more with an affair.”
“It does in politics, in his state.”
“If she were to divorce him, I’d fill the breach, as best I could. That’s not the worst fate, is it?”
“For him, probably.” Blaise was, obscurely, furious.
But what might have been obscure to him was blazingly plain to Caroline. “You’re jealous,” she teased. “You want him, too. Again.”
Blaise thought that he might, like some human volcano, erupt with-blood? “What are you talking about?” He could do no better, aware that he had given himself away.
“I said-I repeat we should keep all this in the family as,” she smiled mischievously, “we seem to have done, anyway. We have the same tastes, in men, anyway…”
“You bitch!”
In the back of Blaise’s mind, there had always been the thought-hope-that he and Jim might one day reenact what had happened aboard the river-boat. But, ever since, the embarrassed Jim had kept his distance; and once again, Caroline was triumphant. From
“The White House thinks that Hearst will win.” Caroline was at her dressing table, rebuilding her hair.
“So do I. So does he. So does the animated feather-duster.”
“Mr. Root is going to Utica.” Caroline pulled her hair straight back and stared into the mirror, without apparent pleasure.
“What does that mean?”
“The President is sending him. To Hearst.”
“Too late.”
“Mr. Root carries great weight in New York. As the President’s emissary… I would be nervous if I were Mr. Hearst.”
But all Blaise wanted to speak of was Jim, and that, of course, was the only subject that he and Caroline could never again mention to each other.
Blaise was with the Chief in New York City when the Secretary of State spoke in Utica. It was the first of November. The weather was peculiarly dismal, even for New York, and a drizzle that was neither snow nor rain made muddy the streets.
Hearst had his own news-wire in his study, set up between busts of Alexander the Great and-why?-Tiberius. Blaise was at his side as the message from Utica came through, even as Root was speaking. Elsewhere in the room, Brisbane kept a number of politicians in a good mood, an easy task since none doubted that soon they would all be going to Albany in the train of the conquering Hearst.
As read, line by line, the speech was lapidary. Root’s style was Roman, school of Caesar rather than Cicero. The short sentences were hurled like so many knives at a target; and none missed. Absentee congressman. Hypocrite-capitalist. False friend of labor. Creature of the bosses. Demagogue in the press and in politics, pitting class against class.
“Well,” said the Chief, with a small smile, “I’ve heard worse.”
But Blaise suspected that he was indeed about to hear worse; and he did, toward the end. Root read Ambrose Bierce’s quatrain, calling for McKinley’s murder. Hearst stiffened as the familiar words stuttered past them on the wire. Root quoted other Hearstian indictments of McKinley, inciting the mad anarchist to murder. Then Root quoted Roosevelt’s original attack on the “exploiter of sensationalism” who must share, equally, in the murder of the beloved-by-all President McKinley.
Hearst was now very pale, as the thin ribbon of text passed through his fingers to Blaise’s. “I say, by the President’s authority, that in penning these words, with the horror of President McKinley’s murder fresh before him, he had Mr. Hearst specifically in mind.”
“The son of a bitch,” whispered Hearst. “When I finish with him…”
The message went on: “And I say, by his authority, that what he thought of Mr. Hearst then he thinks of Mr. Hearst now.”
So it would be on the charge of regicide that Hearst was to be brought down at last. Blaise marvelled at the exactness with which Roosevelt, using Root for knife, struck the lethal blow.
“Champagne?” Brisbane approached with a bottle in hand.
“Why not?” The Chief, who never swore, having just sworn, who never drank, now drank. Then he turned to Blaise. “I want you to go over the Archbold letters with me.”
“With pleasure, if I can publish first.”
“Simultaneously, anyway, with me.”
3
CAROLINE WAS SHOWN INTO the Red Room, forever referred to by Roosevelt loyalists as the Room of the Great Error. She had received a last-minute invitation to a “family” dinner, which could well mean, considering the Roosevelt family, fifty people. But it was indeed, for the most part, family. Alice and her husband, Nick Longworth,
