Empire

to sound enthusiastic. “I hate those pink shirts.”

“What pink shirts?” Blaise was intrigued.

“Roosevelt’s. I also saw him once with this silk… thing,” the Chief’s vocabulary was not rich, “around his waist instead of a waistcoat.”

“He wears statesman’s black now,” said Platt, moodily eyeing Hearst’s sunset cravat and riotous plaid.

“I don’t like the way he talks either.” The Chief’s voice quavered, his own accent was Western, modified by Harvard, while Roosevelt’s accent was all Harvard. Worse, Roosevelt’s voice became falsetto when he orated. Over the years, sensitive to charges of effeminacy, Roosevelt had learned to box and to shoot; had written popular books about his heroic exploits as a rancher in the Badlands, equalled now by his hour of immortal glory in Cuba, charging, ever charging amongst the flying bullets-and the writing journalists-up Kettle Hill.

After another long silence-Platt’s defense of his candidate stopped short of a defense of the voice-the Senator rose to go. He made a few cryptic remarks, which the Chief understood; and Blaise did not. Then the long smooth papery hand shook Blaise’s somewhat sweaty youthful paw. “You can find me most afternoons at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. I like to sit there in the long corridor, and watch the world go by.”

“You sit there and you tell it where to go!” The Chief laughed at his own marvellous acuity. Then the Senator departed; and Blaise followed Hearst into his study, which looked onto the marble facade of the Hoffman House. Hearst sat at an Empire table, all gold eagles and honey-bees, beneath a portrait of Napoleon, one of his heroes; the others were all equally heroic heroes, world conquerors. Blaise found himself vacillating between amazement at the Chief’s simplicity and absence of even the sort of culture that Harvard might have given him had he bothered to notice that such a thing existed and the marvellous energy and inventiveness that he demonstrated when it came to publishing a newspaper. Hearst alone had discovered a truth so obvious that Blaise, a fascinated newcomer to the American world, was amazed that no one else had grasped it: if there is no exciting news to report, create some. When the artist Remington had cabled Hearst that he wanted to come home from Cuba as there was nothing happening for him to draw, Hearst had replied, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.” Whether or not Hearst had literally sunk the Maine was irrelevant, because he, far more than Roosevelt, had made war not only inevitable but desirable. Now the Chief had a new project, and Blaise was at its center because, among other things, he knew French.

“You bring the latest dispatches from Paris?”

Blaise gave the Chief a series of cables which had arrived that morning from France; a number were written in a code of his own excited devising. Since January, the Chief had had his heart set on what Blaise thought of as “the French Caper.” But the war with Spain had intervened and all other projects were suspended, as Hearst orchestrated public opinion with the magical reverberant phrase “Remember the Maine! And buy the Journal!” When Hearst’s war was declared, he had offered to finance and command a regiment. McKinley had said no; he had not forgotten those cartoons of him on Hanna’s knee. Ever the gracious patriot, Hearst then made the Navy a present of his yacht, aptly named the Buccaneer; with his own military services included. The Navy took the ship but refused the services. So Hearst commandeered another ship and went to war on his own and in style, accompanied by Journal writers, artists and photographers.

The Chief’s dispatches from the front, including his personal capture of twenty-nine Spanish sailors, had caused great distress to Mr. Pulitzer at the World. The Chief was also obliged to play up Colonel Roosevelt’s derring-do; and he did so conscientiously but without relish. Instinctively, the dashing politician knew almost as much about publicity as the Chief himself. Certainly, from the Chief’s occasional remarks about the Colonel, it was plain to Blaise that each had seen the war as his war and that each had wanted to capitalize politically on the subsequent victory, not to mention imperium. But of the two, the Colonel, if elected governor, seemed to be in the better position. On the other hand, Hearst had now decreed that Judge Van Wyck be governor; and the fact that Senator Platt had come to the Chief to cut, as the politicians would say, a deal was proof that the Democrats were comfortably in the lead. But if Hearst’s next coup were to succeed, the election might easily be obscured by William Randolph Hearst’s daring.

The plan was nothing less than the removal from Devil’s Island, in the Safety Islands off Guiana on the South American coast, of the world’s most celebrated prisoner, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, who had been accused, falsely according to Hearst and half the world (but not Blaise’s half), of giving French military secrets to the Germans. Although the case had been reopened in Paris, and the actual spy supposedly identified, the French General Staff would not admit that justice, no matter how skewed by fashionable anti-Semitism, had miscarried. They acquitted the actual spy; and kept Dreyfus in solitary confinement on Devil’s Island. At that moment, in January, the Chief had said to Blaise, “You work this one out. You’re French. Make the case for what’s-his-name. We’ll pour it on. Every day. Then if the French don’t let him go, I’ll outfit the Buccaneer, and we’ll go down there and shoot our way in and bring that Jew back to civilization, and if the French want to take us on in a war, we’ll knock those frogs to bits.”

Before January, it had never occurred to Blaise that Captain Dreyfus might be innocent. But the more that he investigated the case, the more certain he was that Dreyfus had indeed been falsely accused. When “that French dirty writer,” as Hearst always called him, “you know, the one whose name begins with Z, like Zebra,” Emile Zola, accused the French government of covering up the truth, he was obliged to flee to England. That was when the Chief gave orders for the Buccaneer to stand by. He himself would lead the attack on Devil’s Island, with Blaise as his eager second-in-command. But then Spain not France became the enemy of Truth and Civilization; and the spring and summer were devoted to the expansion of the Journal’s circulation and, incidentally, the American empire. Now, as Colonel Roosevelt ran up yet another hill, as a politician, Hearst was prepared, at the least, to offer himself to the world as a hero; at the most, to change world history by precipitating a war with France.

The Chief put his feet upon the desk, and daydreamed, eyes half-shut. “We’ll need, maybe, a thousand men. We might hire some of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, that’d embarrass him.” The Chief giggled. Blaise, his eyes on Bonaparte, wondered if that world hero was prone to daydreaming and giggling. “Check out the Rough Riders. Don’t tell them what we’ve got in mind. Just say a filibuster. You know, an adventure. In Latin America. Go after the tough ones, the real Westerners. We don’t want any New York swells.”

Blaise felt that he should interpret the latest news from Paris. “The government’s just promised a new trial for Dreyfus.”

“Court-martial is the phrase, I heard.” Just when Blaise had decided that Hearst was totally ineducable, not to mention in thrall to his own daydreams, he would suddenly demonstrate that in his crude but highly intuitive way he had got the point, usually before anyone else. “They’ll drag it out another year at least. We need a good story for the fall. Before November. Before election. This should do in Roosevelt.”

“How can you and Captain Dreyfus lose him an election in New York State?” Usually Blaise could follow Hearst’s peculiar logic: the key to it was entertainment. What would most excite the average uneducated man?-who would then part with a penny to read the Journal.

Hearst opened very wide his pale blue eyes and the usually straight brows arched with what looked to be wonder: he was ready to part with that penny. “Don’t you see? It’s all the same. Teddy winning a battle that was already won but getting the credit because he is who he is and all the newspaper boys were right there with him because I’m selling the war to the world. He couldn’t lose because I couldn’t lose. Well, if I break into Devil’s Island and free that poor innocent Jew, why, no one will pay any more attention to Teddy, who’ll be last summer’s news while I’m this fall’s news, and so Van Wyck gets elected.”

In a lunatic way, Blaise saw the point. Hearst’s meddling in French internal affairs, successful or not, would certainly be a sensation; and a diversion from the election. Blaise was also beguiled by the fact that Hearst could never remember Dreyfus’s-or any Frenchman’s-name.

“You’ve got the plans of the fort, haven’t you?” Hearst gazed out the window at the Hoffman House, where a line of carriages were depositing the guests for some sort of Democratic meeting. As the Fifth Avenue Hotel was sacred to the Republicans, so the Hoffman House was to the Democrats.

“Yes, Chief. They’re in your safe at the office. Also, the size-estimated-of the garrison, and the number of guards that look after Dreyfus.”

“I don’t suppose we could free all the frog prisoners.” Hearst’s imagination seemed