Empire

“How funny!” Plon laughed delightedly.

“Why funny?”

“It’s my English, I suppose, but for a moment I thought you said he made ‘milk.’ ” Caroline let the subject go. Plon was better in Paris. Blaise-and she-were better suited to this new world of energetic and mindless splendor, of waste-of absolute waste of everything and, she wondered, suddenly feeling disagreeably faint, of everyone?

EIGHT

1

FOUR OF THE ORIGINAL Five Hearts were gathered in Henry Adams’s study, to John Hay’s delight. Although the pale April sun filled the study, Adams as always had a fire blazing and the smell of wood-smoke mingled agreeably with that of the masses of daffodils and lilies-of-the-valley the incomparable servant, Maggie, had placed everywhere. The fourth Heart-Clarence King-stood with his back to the fire, Adams to his right, all admiration like a schoolgirl, and Clara to his left, all fondness like a sister, while King talked rapidly and brilliantly and coughed and laughed at his own coughing, and coughed again. “I have a spot on my lung now, the size of a dollar-why always a dollar, I wonder? But better the coin than the greenback. I thought the sun would cure me, as it always has before, but Florida has failed me, as Florida has failed so many before me, including you, John. Didn’t you want to be a congressman from there in 1864?”

“From there, oh, yes,” said Hay. “I like to pretend it was President Lincoln’s idea, to get friends into Congress. But the carpetbag I took to Florida was all my own…” And then, Hay completed to himself, just as I was about to quit as the President’s secretary, he was shot. Hay wondered, yet again, how strange it was that he, who dreamed now so much at night, no longer encountered the Ancient in his dreams.

Although Clarence King was dying, he was determined to go in a great display of mind and wit and energy. He was bearded like Hay and Adams: the three had more or less synchronized their beards, each allowing the rakish moustaches of youth to act as foundation for the stately beards of middle age.

Hay had been shocked at the change in King, who had arrived some days before, haggard and ill-kempt. But William and Maggie had taken him in hand; put him to bed; fed him magnificently. “Tuberculosis does wonders for the appetite,” King had announced at the first meal-High Communion, Adams had called it-of the Hearts, and Hay noticed that a fifth place had been left at table for the fifth never-to-be-mentioned Heart, Clover Adams. Except that King, quite naturally, would repeat something that Clover had said, and Adams seemed not at all perturbed; but then King could do no wrong for Henry Adams, who had declared his friend the greatest man of their generation, causing Hay a pang of ignoble envy; but then Henry Adams had always been in love-there was no other word-with the geologist, naturalist, philosopher, world-traveller, creator of mining enterprises, Renaissance man who, now that his life was near its end, had managed to fail on the grandest scale. He had been wiped out in the depression of ’93, and though he still went exploring in the Yukon and other parts of the world, he was now merely a brilliant geologist, employed by others. There would be no King Mine, no King fortune, no King widow and children; only the memory that the Hearts all had of a glorious companion who could sit up till dawn speaking on the origins of life, and, presumably, they could go look at a mountain called Clarence King, a superb peak in the Sierra Nevada.

A mountain and a memory were not much, thought Hay; but then what a life King had had. While Adams and Hay had sat at desks, reading and writing, or hovering on the periphery of power, King had explored and mapped the West, and written marvellously of the new world he had discovered, not to mention the geological wealth that other men would exploit. So taken with the idea of King was Adams that he had fled from Harvard to the Far West to travel with King, to rough it. In later years they had often travelled together, most recently to Cuba. Each had developed a passion for Polynesian women, “old-gold girls,” as they would cryptically refer to these palpable visions, unknown to Hay. Then, in 1879, King became director of the United States Geological Survey, a bureau created largely for him, with considerable assistance from Senator James G. Blaine, who was less than amused when the novel Democracy, suspected to be a work by one of the Hearts, lampooned him as the venal Senator Ratcliff. Hay had often wondered if Henry Adams had, somehow, instinctively, harmed the man he loved and envied above all others. By 1880, King had departed the only office that he had ever wanted; he had also entered the lives of John and Clara Hay; and, thus, due to highly elective affinities, Five Hearts beat as one until Clover Adams swallowed potassium cyanide; and then there were Four. Soon, Hay thought bleakly, as April light made glitter King’s feverish eyes, there would be Three; then Two, One, None. Why?

King answered, as if he had looked into Hay’s mind. “When I went mad that day in the lions’ house in Central Park, I was positive that I had seen God, and He was, simply, a huge mouth, maw, with teeth, sharp, sharp-and hungry, oh, so hungry to dine on us. That’s why we exist, I thought, to feed Him. Then a Negro-someone’s butler from a house in Madison Avenue-enraged me, and I struck him. One tends to violence in the lion house, particularly in the presence of one’s Maker who is also one’s devourer, and I was taken away by the police in a state of purest ecstasy, and committed to the Bloomingdale Asylum…”

“On Halloween,” said Adams, happy to contemplate, yet again, the sacred story. “Then we went off to Cuba in February. There were no lions there.”

“Ah, but there was that maw, always in attendance. Always hungry. Is Theodore as dreadful as ever, now he’s vice-president?”

“I had hoped that name would not be spoken on this day of days,” said Adams. “Theodore’s luck is relentless and inexorable, like the Chicago Express.”

“He was,” said Clara, justly, “less noisy than usual. You must give him credit for that, Henry.”

“But there weren’t many occasions for noise.” Hay had been surprised by the dignity of Teddy’s inaugural speech to the Senate, given during a lull in a particularly squalid filibuster. In that cigar-smelling chamber where weary senators dozed, Teddy had taken the oath of office as vice-president; and then, cryptically, he had spoken of the great things in store for this particular generation of Americans. “As we do well or ill, so shall mankind in the future be raised or cast down.” At that moment, a storm broke over the Capitol and the sound of rain on the skylights of the Senate chamber put Hay, suitably, in mind of war. Given the chance, Teddy would try to expand the American empire; but vice-presidents are not given such opportunities, as Teddy knew. “This office is the ultimate grave of my political career,” he had said to Lodge accusingly; but then he liked to blame Lodge for driving him to accept a nomination never offered him by President or party leaders. Teddy had simply seized the prize-or, as Hay always thought of the vice-presidency, “persimmon.” During the autumn, he had spoken in twenty-four states to audiences that so thrilled him that he was inspired to refer to William Jennings Bryan as “my opponent.” The Major said that he had been amused by these slips; but Hay suspected that the Major’s tolerance for the Colonel was not great. Certainly, the overwhelming Republican victory in November was spoiled for McKinley by’ those who suggested that it was not he but his glamorous running-mate who had ensured the million votes by which the Republicans had won.

“Teddy was not in town very long,” said Adams. “He presided over the Senate on March fourth. Then Congress adjourned until next December, and he went home to that ugly house of his on Long Island.”

“I wonder,” said the practical Clara, “where they will live. And how. Edith says there’s no money, and all those children. Bamie-his sister-has found a house here, but only for herself.”

“Our Madame Maintenon?” asked King, moving from fireplace to an armchair too low and narrow for the second-largest of the Hearts. Clara, the largest, had her own special non-Adams-proportioned chair. “Otherwise, I shall simply stand when I’m in your study.”

“We could do worse.” Adams extended alabaster hands toward jonquil-yellow flames. “She’s sounder than Teddy. But he’ll vanish from public life. He was astonished to find that between March fourth and next December, the vice-president has no duties at all. He will probably write another half-dozen books.”

“No,” said Hay, delighted that he could delight his fellow Hearts with the higher gossip. “Teddy has suddenly succumbed to ambition. He means to… what word shall I use? He means to do something that only Clarence among us has ever done.”