Seventy

It came in at the window as he woke, a fine hard rattle on the glass like shot, and he knew before he had opened his eyes what kind of a New Year’s Day it was going to be.

Snow, and then hail, and then sleet, and then snow again, by turns, all morning, out of a low brown sky that seemed to rest on the roofs; the Avenue a river of grey slush with a crust of ice on it that broke under the wheels; the gutters running; the trees along the Axis cased in ice to the smallest twig, so that when the wind moved them they clashed together like glass. Clay lay and listened to it for a while, and thought about the two hundred callers who would not be calling on anybody today, and about the old man on the Rise who would be standing in his hall from eleven o’clock in his black coat to receive them, as he had stood every New Year’s Day for five years, and who would stand there today, Clay had not the smallest doubt, if nobody came at all.

Charles brought up the hot water at seven, and the shaving things, and stood a moment with the towel over his arm before he began, which he did not usually do.

“The trader is dead, sir,” he said. “Under the hill. Robey. In the night. They were saying it in the kitchen.”

Clay looked at him in the glass.

“Which trader?”

“The one with the fiddler, sir,” said Charles; and put the towel round Clay’s neck, and began.

Clay sat still and was shaved, and did not say anything, and neither did Charles. There was nothing in the house but the sleet on the window, and the razor, and somewhere below, faint, the girls in Mrs Arguelles’s kitchen laughing at something, as girls in kitchens will on a holiday whoever has died. He thought about the old man with the fiddle, at the head of the column under the hill, in November, in his new coat, playing the people down to the boat; and he thought, as he had not let himself think in November, that a trader’s people were part of a trader’s estate, like his horses and his furniture and his debts, and that when a trader died his estate was sold.

He thought that it would very likely be in the spring. He thought that he would be very busy in the spring.

“Thank you, Charles,” he said, when it was done; and Charles said yes, sir, and took the basin, and went down.

---

He went up the Rise at noon, in a hack, because no man could have walked it.

He had meant to go at eleven, with the first of them, as the Prime Minister should; but the hack had not come till half past, and had then taken three-quarters of an hour to get the length of the Axis, sliding and slithering in the ruts with the horse half down twice and the driver swearing at it in the voice of a man who was being paid by the hour and knew it. Clay sat inside with his collar up and watched the sleet stream down the glass, and the white ruined trees go by, and the Palace come up out of the murk at the end, shuttered, with icicles a yard long hanging from its portico like the teeth of some great beast; and he counted the carriages on the road, out of habit, and there were four.

There were usually a hundred. On New Year’s Day in New Westminster everybody called on everybody; it was the one day in the year when the whole city, members and judges and clerks and generals and the corps diplomatic and the ladies of the boarding houses and the wives of the shopkeepers on the Avenue, put on its best clothes and went from door to door wishing itself a happy new year, and drinking eggnog, and being seen; and every caller in the city went first to Government House, because the Crown was there, and paid his respects to the Governor-General before he went anywhere else, as his father had paid them to the old Governors in the days before the Charter. The line of carriages on the Rise on New Year’s Day, in a fine year, went half the way down to the Palace. Today there were four, and one of them had lost a wheel at the bottom and been abandoned there, with its horse, and its driver, who was sitting under the portico of the Palace out of the wet, drinking out of a bottle.

---

The old man was in his hall, as Clay had known he would be, in his black coat, with his right arm in its sling and his left hand ready, standing very upright by the fire with his daughter-in-law beside him; and there were perhaps a dozen people in the room, members mostly, with their wives, and a judge, and the Russian minister and his young wife, who had come together in a sleigh with bells and furs and a great deal of noise and looked as if they were enjoying the weather.

“Your Excellency,” said Clay, and bowed, and took the left hand. “A happy new year to you, sir. I can assure you that nothing but my devotion to Your Excellency could have induced me to come out of my lodgings on such a day as this.”

“You said the same to me a year ago, Mr Clay,” said Adams, “in the sunshine.”

“Then it was true a year ago, sir, and it is twice as true today.”

Adams looked at him, and for a moment Clay thought that he would be rebuked; and then the old man’s mouth moved, very slightly, at one corner, which was as near as he came, in company, to a smile. “Go and get warm,” he said. “There is eggnog in the dining room, which my wife has made, and which I am told is very strong. I have not tasted it. I shall need you afterwards. Stay.”

Clay stayed.

He stayed through the whole of the afternoon, as the callers came, by ones and twos, out of the sleet, with their cloaks steaming and the ice in their hair, and stood a quarter of an hour by the fire, and drank the eggnog, which was very strong, and said that they had never seen such a day, and went away again into it. He counted them. He counted everything. They were members, almost all, and a good many of them were his own men, which pleased him more than he would have admitted, and some of them were the other side’s, which pleased him more still; men who had stood in the shut chamber on the seventh of December and said God save the King with the rest, and had kept it, so far as Clay could discover, very nearly to themselves. Webster came, with his cold back again, and stood in the window like a thundercloud and was gracious to the ladies. Meacham came, very large, in a coat that was wet through, and shook Clay’s hand without a word and went to the fire. The member from the Western Reserve came, by himself, on foot, the whole way from the Avenue in the sleet, and paid his respects to the Governor-General in four sentences, and declined the eggnog, and went away; and Clay, who had not expected to see him, saw that Adams had expected it, and was moved by it, and did not say so.

And at half past one the British minister came, in his black gloves and his evening pallor, very correct, looking as if he had been got out of his bed to come, which, since he never went to it until it was light, he very likely had; and he bowed to the Governor-General, and wished him the compliments of the season, in the King’s name and his own, and spoke of the weather, and of the Russian minister’s sleigh, and of nothing else whatever. And then he crossed the room to Clay, by the fire, and bowed again, and said in his quiet English voice, without any expression at all:

“I am told, Mr Clay, that your House of Commons began its session with prayers.”

“It does every day, sir,” said Clay. “The chaplain sees to it.”

“So I understand,” said the minister; and looked at him a moment longer, with something in his pale face that might have been amusement, and bowed, and went away into the sleet to his carriage, which was the only closed carriage on the Rise that day.

Clay watched him go. He thought that the minister had known of the seventh of December by the eighth, and had very likely written it to London by the ninth, in a dispatch that would be in Palmerston’s hands by now, or nearly; and he thought that it did not matter in the least. It was what he had meant. A thing that a Prime Minister could tell to two hundred men was a thing he did not mind London knowing. It was only a thing in the Journal that he minded.

At three the callers stopped. Adams counted them over, from a list that Mary had kept in the hall, in pencil; and they came to seventy-one, counting the Russian minister’s wife, and the member from the Western Reserve, and Clay. In a fine year it was two hundred. The old man stood looking at the list for a while, by the window, in the last grey light, with the sleet still coming down past the glass.

“Donec eris felix,” he said, “multos numerabis amicos.” He put the list down. “Ovid. While you are fortunate you will count many friends. He goes on to say what happens when the weather changes. I have never thought it applied to the weather in the literal sense. Come into the study, Mr Clay. Mary will bring us tea.”

---

They sat in the study, the two of them, with the curtains drawn against the sleet and the lamp lit, and the fire up, and the tea between them on the desk, which Mary poured and then left; and for some time neither of them said anything, which Clay found was a thing he could do with Adams now, and could not have done a year ago, and could do with almost nobody else in the world.

“I have been writing the year up,” Adams said at last. “In the diary. I do it every New Year’s Day, the last thing, after the callers have gone: what was given, and what was taken away, and what I ought to have done that I did not. I have done it every year for sixty years.” He looked at the fire. “I find that I cannot write the summer.”

Clay waited.

“I can write what happened,” said Adams. “I have written it. Every day of it, from the eighteenth of July, as it happened, in Mary’s hand. The British Queen at New York, and you at five in the morning, and the House rising, and my letter to Story, and Story’s to me, and the law officers, and the Council, and the proclamation, and the guns, and the King’s letter, and my answer. It is all there. It is all true. And when I come to sit down at the end of the year and write what it was, what it amounted to, who did it, I find that I cannot. I find that there is nobody in it who did it. There is an old man who asked a question, and a judge who wrote a private letter, and a clerk who made red marks in a newspaper, and twelve men round a table who said nothing; and a Prime Minister who asked another question that assumed its own answer and went about all summer seeing to it that nobody had to decide anything. And the Crown of the Union went from a dead girl to a man none of us has ever seen, and every lawyer in America will tell you for a hundred years how it went, and why it went, and that it could not have gone otherwise; and not one of them will ever be able to tell you who sent it.”

“Nobody sent it, sir,” said Clay. “It went.”

“So you have told me. You told me in August. You will tell me so, I suppose, until one of us is dead.” The old man turned his head. “Did you decide it, Mr Clay?”

Clay considered the question, as he had considered few questions in his life: honestly, and from all sides, with the tea going cold.

“No, sir,” he said at last. “I did not. I decided a great many small things, every day of the summer; I decided what to ask the Attorney-General, and in what words, and when to send for the Clerk, and whom to find for the Council, and on what day, and that the House should rise and not sit. I decided all of those. But I never decided the thing itself. I don’t believe I could have. If anybody had put it to me in so many words, in July, Mr Clay, shall the Crown of the Union pass to the King of Hanover by the law of the Charter at the instant of the Queen’s death, without any act of ours, I should have had to say yes or no; and whichever I said, half the House would have been against me by night, and the other half by the morning. Nobody put it to me. I took a good deal of trouble to see that nobody did.” He was quiet a moment. “Did you, sir?”

“No,” said Adams. “I asked. That is all I did. I asked, and the answer came back from every direction at once, and none of it was mine.” He set down his cup with his left hand, carefully. “I suppose that is how it is with all the great settlements. One reads about them in books, and they seem to have been made by men of genius at a table, deliberately, as the Charter was made, or as we are told it was. And then one is in one, and finds it is made by old men with bad arms, in the heat, asking each other questions and not answering them. I shall put that in the diary, I think, since I can put nothing else. It was done, and nobody did it.” He looked at Clay. “You will not like that.”

“I like it very much, sir. It is the truth. I only hope nobody reads it for fifty years.”

“They will read it in a hundred,” said Adams, “and they will not believe it. They will say that I must have done it, because I was the Governor-General, or that you must have done it, because you were clever, and they will be quite certain, and quite wrong, and it will not matter, because by then it will be the law, and the law does not care who made it.” He was silent for a while. “That is the summer. I wished to have it said once, between us, before the year was out. It is said. We need not say it again.”

---

It was nearly dark. The sleet had turned to rain, and was running down the window in sheets, and somewhere in the house a door was banging in the wind, and Mary’s voice could be heard above, with Louisa, who was keeping her room; and the lamp made a small warm circle on the desk, with the two cups in it, and the old man’s left hand lying beside his cup, and Clay’s snuffbox, which he had taken out and not opened.

“Robey is dead,” said Adams.

Clay looked up. He had not known that the news had reached the Rise; but news always reached the Rise, he had found, by some road of its own, as it reached Mrs Arguelles’s kitchen.

“So I am told, sir.”

“His people will be sold to pay his debts. In the spring, I suppose, when the roads are open. The ones in the pen, and the ones he had hired out, and the old man with the fiddle.” Adams did not look at him. “I have heard that fiddle every night for five summers, Mr Clay, from that window, when the wind was right. I knew what it was the first summer. I asked. I have always asked. And I have sat at this window every summer since, and listened to it, and written in my diary that I heard it, and done nothing whatever; because I am the Governor-General, and the Governor-General may not do anything, and I have sworn to the Charter, and the Charter says nothing about it, and was written so as not to, by men I knew, one of them my father.” He turned his head and looked at Clay directly. “And you will let them be sold.”

“I shall let the law take its course, sir,” said Clay, “as you let it take its course with your sister’s son.”

It was a hard thing to say, and he had not known that he was going to say it until it was said; and he saw it go home, and was sorry, and did not take it back.

Adams was quiet for a long time.

“Yes,” he said at last. “That is just. I let it take its course. It came out right, in William’s case, because the law happened to be on his side; and it will come out wrong for the old man with the fiddle, because the law happens to be on Robey’s creditors’. That is the whole difference between them. It is not a difference that does the law much credit, or me.” He looked down at his hand on the desk. “I will tell you what I think, Mr Clay, since it is New Year’s Day, and there is nobody to hear us but the rain, and you have just been honest with me, which I do not suppose you can afford to be often.”

“Please, sir.”

“I think that the Union will break on it.”

Clay said nothing.

“Not yet. Not in my lifetime; I am seventy-three, and I cannot hold a pen in my right hand, and I shall not see it. Very likely not in yours. But it will break, on that, on what is under the hill, and on nothing else. The King is nothing. The King is a storm in the summer; he will blow, and he will go on blowing, very likely, for as long as he lives, and we shall shut the windows and wait, as we did this year, and in the end he will die, and there will be another King, and the windows can be opened again. That is not the danger. The danger is the thing we do not ask. You keep it shut, Mr Clay, as you kept the King’s question shut this summer, by asking every question but that one, and seeing that nobody else asks it either; and you are very good at it, better than any man alive, and it will hold, while you are there to hold it. And one day you will not be there, and it will not hold. And when it goes, it will go exactly as the King’s question went this July: on a hot night, by a steamer, with the House about to rise and nobody ready. And there will be no Story to write a private letter, and no Clerk to make red marks, and no silence round a table that will be enough. There will only be the question, and the men who have to answer it, and every one of them will have spent his life being told by you that it need not be answered yet.”

The rain ran down the glass.

“Then we must see to it,” said Clay, “that it does not come yet.”

“Yet,” said Adams. “There is your whole philosophy, Mr Clay, in one word.”

“It is the only word in politics that I have ever found to be true, sir.” Clay opened the snuffbox at last, and took a pinch, and shut it. “You name it. I know you do. You have named it for twenty years, sir, to anybody who would listen and a great many who would not; and you were right every time, and you never moved one vote. I can’t name it. If I name it, I lose the House by night, and then there is nobody holding anything. So I put it off. I put it off a session at a time, a vote at a time, a member at a time, and I buy each one as it comes, at whatever it costs, and I never buy the end of it, because I can’t afford the end of it, and neither can the Union, yet. I know what that is. I’m not a fool, sir, whatever else I am. I know it is not a cure. It is the only medicine I have.” He put the snuffbox away. “And the difference between us, sir, is that you will be right, and I shall have kept it going until you were.”

Adams looked at him for a long time across the lamp.

“When I am gone,” he said, “they will put you in this chair.”

“I hope not, sir. I should have to stop counting.”

“You will never stop counting. You will count in your sleep. You will sit up here at this desk with nothing to do, and the whole House under your window, and every man in it a man you know the price of; and you will not be allowed to pay it. You will have to sit and keep the table laid, and watch it crack, and count the plates.” The old man’s mouth moved at the corner again. “I should like to see that. I shall not. But I should like to.”

“So should I, sir,” said Clay, “on the whole. If I have to see it at all.”

---

He went down the Rise at six, in the dark, in the hack, which had waited for him, at a price that he did not like to think about; and the rain had stopped, and the wind had dropped, and the whole city was dripping and ticking in the black wet quiet, with the ice coming off the trees along the Axis in long sliding falls and crashing on the road.

He did not go straight home. He told the driver to go round by the south side of the Axis, under the hill; and the driver looked at him, and went. They went slowly along the road below Charter Hill, in the wet, past the high board fence and the long low whitewashed house behind it, where the pen was. There was a light in one window. There was nobody at the gate. There was no sound from the yard at all, not a voice, not a footstep, not a fiddle; only the water dripping from the eaves of the house into the slush, and somewhere a dog. Clay sat in the hack with the window down, in the cold, and listened to the silence where the fiddle had been every night since June, and could not have said what he was listening for.

Then he told the driver to go on.

At Mrs Arguelles’s the others were at dinner, and loud, and he did not join them. He went up to his room and lit his own candle, and sat down at the table, and wrote two letters.

The first was to Lucretia, as he wrote to her every New Year’s Day, wherever he was: that it was the worst New Year’s Day he had seen in thirty years in this city, and that he had called on the Governor-General, and that the Governor-General was well, considering, and had been more agreeable to him than in all the years he had known him, which made Clay suspect that they were both growing old; that he was well himself, and the cough was better; that he sent his love to her, and to the children, and to Henry’s children, every one; and that she was to tell Aaron that Charles was well. He did not say anything else about Aaron. He did not know what else there was to say.

The second was shorter. It was to his man of business in the city, the same man who had done his business here for twelve years, and had done it in the August of ‘thirty, at Clay’s direction, with the marshal and the jail at Alexandria; and it asked him to attend the sale of the late Mr Robey’s people, whenever it should be, and to buy for Mr Clay the old man who played the fiddle, at any price in reason, and to send him word.

He did not say what he would do with the old man when he had him. He did not know. He had not decided. He sat for a long while with the pen in his hand, by the candle, looking at the letter, trying to decide, and found that he could not, or would not, which came, at the end of a long day, to the same thing; and he sealed it as it was. It was one man. He could do one man. He could do one at a time, a vote at a time, a soul at a time, at whatever it cost, for as long as he lived; and he could not do the end of it, and he knew it, and he had said so that afternoon to the one man in America who already knew.

He put the two letters together on the table for the morning post. Then he sat on by the candle, with the rain beginning again on the window and the house quiet below him, and the snuffbox in his hand, unopened; and listened, out of a habit of six months, for the fiddle down the hill towards the river; and heard nothing.