A Small Table

He woke before it was light, as he always did, and lay for a moment in Mr Hancock’s best bed, under Mr Hancock’s best canopy, and did not know where he was; and then knew, and lay a moment longer, listening to the house, which was quiet, and to the wind off the water, which was not.

It was a cold clear morning when Will Lee drew the curtains. The house stood high on the side of the hill above the Common, a great square house of stone with a balcony over the door, and from the window of the bedroom Washington could see the whole of it laid out below him in the first light: the Common with the cows on it, and the Mall with its elms going yellow, and the roofs of the town beyond, going down in steps to the harbour, and the harbour itself, very blue, with the islands in it; and far out, low on the water, the long grey shape of Castle Island, with a flag over the Castle that he could not see the colours of at that distance and did not need to.

Will Lee shaved him, and dressed him, and stood back to look at him, as he had every morning of the war, and for a good many years before it.

“Will that do, Will?”

“That will do, General,” said Will Lee, and went to see about the boots.

---

He had decided it at West Point, in September, on the night the flag came up the river.

He had read Sir Henry Clinton’s letter three times, standing, in the parlour of Mr Moore’s house, with the young English officer who had brought it waiting very politely by the door; and then he had sent the young man off to dinner with the family, and sat down at the table by himself, and read it again. He had understood at once what it was. He had understood it better than he would have liked, because he had been waiting for it for six months without letting himself say so, since the night at Middlebrook when he wrote to Mason about a decisive turn of affairs in Europe; and here it was, a letter from New York in a stiff, careful, rather bad hand, proposing a cessation of arms, and Boston, and commissioners.

And he had seen, sitting at the table, what it would mean for him, and what it would look like, which was not the same thing.

He would sign it. Somebody would have to, for the army, and it would be him, because it could be nobody else. And from the moment he signed it, he would be the most dangerous man in America. He would be a general who had not been beaten, at the head of an army that had not been paid, in a country with a Congress that had no money and no Parliament and no power to make anybody do anything, at the end of a war that the army would believe, very soon, that it had won; and there would be men in the army, and men out of it, who would come to him in the next year or the next with that in their faces, and say that the Congress could not govern, and that somebody must. He had read enough history to know how that went. He had read about Cromwell. He had read about Caesar; and he had seen Mr Addison’s Cato more times than he could count, and could say most of it.

So he had written to the Congress, the same night, at the end of his letter, the paragraph about the commission. He had written it plainly, in his own hand. He had thought about it for a long time first, and then not at all, which was how he generally decided things; and when it was written he had read it over once and sealed it, and gone to bed, and slept better than he had slept in a month.

---

They walked down to the State House at half past ten, because it was not far and because he wanted the town to see him walk.

Mr Hancock had wanted a coach. Mr Hancock had wanted, Washington understood, a good deal more than a coach: a procession, and the militia under arms, and the town’s bells, and a salute of thirteen guns from Fort Hill, and a dinner afterwards for two hundred, and fireworks; and he had been persuaded out of most of it, gently, over three days, by Tilghman, who could persuade anybody out of anything if he were given three days. Hancock loved a ceremony above anything in the world. Washington liked him for it, rather, and was sorry to have to disappoint him, and had disappointed him. There would be no bells but one. There would be no guns at all. It was not that kind of day.

So they walked: Washington, and Tilghman, and Hamilton, and Knox, who was a Boston man and had kept a bookshop in Cornhill before the war, and had been walking about the town since Saturday being recognised by everybody he had ever sold a book to; and Mr Hancock beside him, in a suit of crimson velvet, very pale and very happy, with his gout in a flannel shoe; and behind them the Council of the Massachusetts Bay, in black. They went down Beacon Street and along Tremont Street and down the hill into the old crooked streets of the town, past the King’s Chapel and the Old South, with Will Lee a little way behind, carrying the General’s cloak in case of the wind. The streets were full of people. They stood on both sides, all the way, on the steps of the houses and in the doorways and at every window, men and women and children, in their Sabbath clothes on a Tuesday; and they did not cheer. Washington had expected them to cheer. They stood and looked at him going by, very quietly, the whole way, as people look at a funeral that is not their own, or at a wedding; and the only sound was the feet, and the wind, and a child somewhere asking its mother a question and being hushed.

He came round the corner into King Street, and there was the State House at the head of it, brick and white, with its tower and its balcony; and the lion and the unicorn on the gable, gilt, very bright in the sun, with the sundial between them, which said that it was a quarter to eleven. In March of seventy-six, the day after the King’s army sailed, he had been asked whether the town should take them down, and had said that it was a matter for the town. The town had not taken them down.

There were guards at the door. On the left of it stood a company of the General’s own Guard, in their blue and buff, with their colours uncased; and on the right of it, drawn up just as squarely, with its colours uncased too, a company of the King’s foot from the Castle, in red, who had come up from the Long Wharf an hour before with a drum and taken their post without a word to anybody. Neither company had been told to lower anything, and neither did. They stood there, red and blue, a dozen yards apart, with their officers in front of them and the crowd packed into King Street behind them as far as the Long Wharf; and over their heads the two flags stood out in the wind off the water, side by side, the King’s colours on the right of the door and the Congress’s on the left, thirteen stripes of red and white with the King’s Union in the corner.

Washington looked at the two flags for a moment as he came up the street. They had the same thing in the corner. He had known that for four years, as a man knows the pattern of his own coat; but he had never seen the two of them side by side, and he did not suppose that anybody else in King Street had either. He did not say anything about it, and went in.

---

Sir Henry Clinton was waiting in the council chamber, standing.

He had come in from the Castle by water at ten, with two officers, and walked up King Street from the Long Wharf through the same crowd, which had looked at him in the same silence. He was standing at the far side of the room by the fireplace, with his officers behind him, when Washington came in at the door; and Washington, who had fought him for four years, and seen his army at Long Island and across the Jerseys and on the plain at Monmouth, and read a good many of his letters, and never once seen his face, stopped inside the door and looked at it.

He was not what Washington had expected. He did not know quite what he had expected; something taller, he supposed, and older, and with more of the look of a man who had commanded the King’s army for a year and a half. Sir Henry was a stoutish, middle-sized man of about fifty, in a scarlet coat and the red ribbon and star of the Bath, with a heavy pale face and pale eyes and a mouth that had been held still for a long time; and he stood very straight, with his hat under his arm, and looked at Washington across the room with an expression Washington knew, and could not for a moment place. Then he placed it. It was the look of a man who has been dreading a thing for a month, and has arrived at it, and finds that it is only a room.

Washington thought, with surprise, that Sir Henry was shy. He had not known that a general could be.

They bowed. Sir Henry said that he was very happy to make His Excellency’s acquaintance; he had a low, rather harsh voice, which he did not raise. Washington said that he was obliged to Sir Henry, and that he hoped Sir Henry had had a good passage round; and Sir Henry said that it had been tolerable, and that the Castle was very comfortable, and that he was obliged to the Council of the Massachusetts Bay for the arrangements; and there was a silence, in which both of them understood that that was all either of them was going to be able to say, and that it did not matter.

The room was the council chamber, at the east end of the upper floor, where the King’s governors had sat with their councils for seventy years: about the size of a large drawing room, panelled, with tall windows down the sides, and a door at the end that gave on to the balcony over King Street. The Council’s long table had been taken out of it for the day, and a small one brought in and set in the middle of the floor, with a green cloth on it and two chairs, one on each side, and the two copies of the articles lying on the cloth, engrossed fair by the Council’s clerk, with pens and ink and sand. That was Hamilton’s doing and André’s. They had settled it all between them on the Monday, at the Castle and then at the Bunch of Grapes, the table and the chairs and who should come in at which door and who should sign first and where; and they had settled the last of these, Hamilton told him afterwards, out of a book, with great enjoyment, by the alternat, under which each of them would sign first on the copy he was to keep, and then they would change, so that neither name stood above the other on either paper. Washington thought that it was very well done, and that it was very like the two of them to have enjoyed it so much. They were standing together now by the window, Hamilton and the young Englishman, as easy as cousins; and he remembered that they had sat up half the night at West Point a month ago arguing about Pope, and wondered whether either of them knew how lucky they were to be so young, and alive, and in the same room.

There were perhaps twenty people in it altogether. The Council, along the panelling, in their black. Mr Hancock. Knox, very large, with his hands behind him. Sir Henry’s officers. Tilghman, by the door. And along the wall at the back of the room, by the fireplace, three or four servants who had come up with the gentlemen and stood against the wall as servants did, with their hands at their sides, looking at nothing; and Will Lee among them, holding the General’s cloak.

Mr Samuel Adams was not there. He had sent word that he was unwell. Washington, who had known him since the first summer of the war, did not believe it, and did not blame him.

---

They sat down at the table.

It was very small. That was what he remembered most clearly afterwards, of the whole of it: that the table was so small that when they had both sat down their knees were almost touching under it, and he could see the grain of the leather on Sir Henry’s sword belt, and a place on the cuff of Sir Henry’s coat where it had been mended, very neatly, and a little ink on the second finger of his right hand, which was the hand of a man who wrote a great deal himself. Washington’s own hand had ink on it too. He noticed that.

The clerk of the Council read the articles aloud, all ten of them, standing at the end of the table, because the Council had wished it, and because it was the custom in that room that a thing be read before it was signed. It took a quarter of an hour. Washington did not listen to most of it. He knew it by heart; he had read it every night for a week, and Hamilton and André had been over every word of it at the Castle, and the heads in the fifth article were the Congress’s heads, in Mr Dickinson’s English, which Sir Henry had accepted with the order of two words changed. He sat with his hands on the green cloth and listened to the sound of the clerk’s voice instead, a dry Boston voice, and to the wind at the windows, and to the crowd in King Street, which was so quiet that he could hear a horse somewhere stamp on the cobbles.

That if there should be any doubtful expressions in these articles, they are to be interpreted according to the common meaning and acceptation of the words.

The clerk put the paper down. Sir Henry took up a pen, and Washington took up another, and each drew towards him the copy that was his, and signed it.

He wrote his name as he always wrote it, at the foot of the paper, under Sir Henry’s blank space, the G and the Washington run together with the long tail under, as he had signed ten thousand orders and returns and letters in four years, without thinking. He sanded it. Then they changed papers across the table, and Sir Henry’s copy was in front of him with Sir Henry’s name on it, in a stiff careful hand that sloped backwards a little, H. Clinton; and he dipped his pen again, and began to write his name underneath it.

And the bell began.

It was a long way off. It came in through the windows on the wind, from the north, from the far side of the town, very clear in the cold air: one bell, a big one, rung slowly, as a bell is rung for something that matters, and then again, and again, steadily, without any hurry. Somebody in the room drew a breath. Washington did not stop writing. He had got as far as the W, and he went on, and finished it, and the tail under it, and put the pen down, and sanded the name, while the bell went on ringing over the town; and he did not look up from the paper until he had done, and then he did not look at the window.

It was the bell of Christ Church in the North End. He knew that, because Hancock had told him at breakfast that it would be rung; it was the steeple the lanterns had been hung from, the night the regulars went out to Lexington, and the town had thought it fitting, and the vestry had agreed, though it was a Church of England church and its rector had gone off to Halifax with the King’s army in seventy-six. It was to have been rung at noon, when the cessation took effect. It was twenty minutes to twelve. Somebody had not waited. Somebody on the balcony, or in the street, or at the foot of the steeple, had seen or heard or guessed that the thing was done, and given the word, and somebody else had taken hold of the rope.

He never knew who it was. He asked, afterwards, more than once, and nobody could tell him; the man on the balcony said he had given no signal, and the ringers said they had been given one, and nobody ever found out by whom. He thought, when he had stopped asking, that it was very like the beginning, which nobody had ever been able to account for either.

---

They stood up. The clerk took the two papers and gave one to Hamilton and the other to André, and the two young men put them into their cases, and the thing was done; and Washington and Sir Henry stood on either side of the little table, a yard apart, with nothing on it now but the green cloth and the sand, and the bell ringing outside, and twenty people looking at them; and neither of them knew what to do with his hands.

Sir Henry spoke first. He spoke in his low harsh voice, not loudly, looking at Washington and not at anybody else, as though it were a thing he had been carrying about with him for some time and had decided he had better put down.

“Neither of us has won, General.”

Washington looked at him. He thought of a good many things that might be said to that, and found that he did not want to say any of them, to this stiff unhappy man who had come all the way from New York by sea to say the one honest thing anybody was going to say that day.

“No, sir,” he said.

That was all. He did not know, then or afterwards, whether it was enough. Something in Clinton’s heavy face eased, as a man’s face eases when he has put a thing down and found it was not so heavy as he thought; and he held out his hand across the table, and Washington took it. The hand was hard and dry. They shook once and let go.

Neither of them looked towards the window. There were a great many people in King Street, and some of them were looking up.

---

He did look, later. When Sir Henry had gone down the stairs with his officers, and out at the door between the two guards, and down King Street towards the Long Wharf and his barge, with the crowd opening for him in silence and closing again behind, Washington went to the window at the end of the room, beside the balcony door, and stood there, a little back from it, where he could not be seen, and watched the two guards march away.

The King’s company went first. It faced to the right in front of the door, and its drum beat, and it went off down the street towards the water behind Sir Henry, with its colours flying, as it had come. Then the Guard went, the other way, up the street towards the Common, with its colours flying too; and the crowd stood back for both of them and looked at both of them, and the bell rang over all of it from the North End, slowly, on and on, as though whoever had hold of the rope had decided that if he had begun too soon he would at least not finish too soon as well.

At noon the sheriff went out by the door beside him on to the balcony, with a trumpeter and a paper, and read the proclamation of the cessation to King Street, as the King’s proclamations had been read from that balcony for seventy years, and as the Congress’s Grievances had been read from it in the July of seventy-six. Washington did not go out on to the balcony. He stood inside the door and listened to the sheriff’s voice going out over the street, and to the silence that came back after it, which was the strangest sound he had ever heard a crowd make; and then, at the end, from somewhere down by the Long Wharf, one man began to cheer, and stopped, as though he had thought better of it, and nobody took it up.

Then the people began to go home. He watched them from the window for a long time, going away down all the streets out of King Street, slowly, in their Sabbath clothes, without saying much; and he thought that he had never in his life seen a town so little sure what to do with itself, and that it was a very good sign.

---

He gave back his commission at six o’clock, by candlelight, in the hall of the Representatives, which was the large room in the middle of the upper floor, because the council chamber would not hold the people who had asked to come.

It would not quite hold them either. The gallery at the west end was full, mostly of ladies, and the floor was full of gentlemen, standing, and the officers of his army who were in Boston, and the Council, and as many of the town as could get up the stairs; and Mr Hancock sat in the chair at the head of the room, as the deputy of the Congress, with the Council on either side of him, all of them covered, according to a form that Hamilton had found, as he found everything, in a book. Washington came in at the door at the end, with Tilghman and Hamilton on either side of him, and the room stood up, and he walked up the room between them all to the chair that had been set for him in front of Mr Hancock’s table, and bowed to Mr Hancock, and the Council uncovered, and did not bow; and he sat down.

Mr Hancock rose and said that the Congress of the United Colonies, by whose deputation he sat there, was prepared to receive His Excellency’s communications.

Washington stood up, and took the paper out of his coat, and read it.

He had written it himself, at Mr Hancock’s house, on the Sunday and the Monday, in his own hand, in the plain words he always used, and torn it up twice. He had thought it would be easy to read. He had read harder things aloud to harder rooms. But his hand shook so that the paper rattled, at the first sentence, and he had to hold it in both hands to steady it, and he heard his own voice go out over the room not quite as he had meant it to, and the room so quiet that he could hear the candles.

He said that the event on which his resignation depended having that day taken place, he had now the honour of presenting himself before the deputy of the Congress, to surrender into its hands the trust committed to him, and to claim the indulgence of retiring from the service of his country. He said that he resigned with satisfaction the appointment he had accepted with diffidence: a diffidence in his abilities to accomplish so arduous a task, which had however been superseded by a confidence in the rectitude of their cause, the support of the Congress, and the patronage of Heaven. He said that while he repeated his obligations to the army in general, he should do injustice to his own feelings not to acknowledge, in that place, the services of the gentlemen who had been attached to his person during the war; and his voice went then, a little, and came back, and he did not look at Hamilton or Tilghman, and they did not look at him.

He said that he considered it an indispensable duty to close this last act of his official life by commending the interests of their dearest country to the protection of Almighty God, and those who had the superintendence of them to His holy keeping.

His voice went altogether at that, and the room waited for him, and he stood with the paper in both hands until he could go on; and somewhere in the gallery one of the ladies was crying, and then a good many of them, and some of the gentlemen on the floor.

He said: “Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of action; and bidding an affectionate farewell to the august body under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life.”

Then he took the commission out of the breast of his coat, where he had carried it, folded, for four years and four months, since the June morning in Philadelphia when Mr Hancock had put it into his hand, and went forward to the table, and gave it back to him.

Mr Hancock took it. He looked down at it in his hands, at his own signature at the foot of it, in the great sprawling hand that the whole continent knew; and then he stood up, very pale, in his crimson velvet, with a paper of his own in front of him, a long one, which he had been writing since Saturday. He began to read it. He read the first sentence, which said that the Congress of the United Colonies received, with emotions too affecting for utterance, the solemn resignation of the authorities under which His Excellency had led their troops through a perilous and a doubtful war. And then he stopped, and looked at the paper, and Washington saw him understand that the sentence was true; and Mr Hancock, who had loved a ceremony above anything in the world, put the paper down on the table, and stood there with his mouth working and his hands at his sides, and could not go on, and did not; and after a while he sat down, and put his face in his hands.

Nobody in the room moved. Washington stood in front of the table and waited, until it was clear that there would be nothing more; and then he bowed to the chair, and the Council uncovered again, and he turned and walked down the room between the people, who stood back to let him by, and out at the door, and down the stairs, alone, without his aides, because he had asked them to let him go alone; and out between the two lanterns at the door of the State House into King Street, where it was dark and cold and there was nobody, and Will Lee waiting with the cloak.

---

He walked back up the hill.

He had told Mr Hancock’s people not to send the coach, and they had not, and he was glad. It was a clear night, very cold, with a great many stars, and the streets empty now, and the wind gone down; and he walked up through the dark crooked town with Will Lee a pace behind him carrying the lantern, and nobody knew him. A watchman called the hour and the weather, and touched his hat, and did not look twice. A dog barked at them from a yard and was told to be quiet by somebody inside. He was a private gentleman of Virginia walking home to his lodging after dinner, and he found that he could not remember when he had last been one, and that it was very strange, and that his legs felt it.

At the top of the hill, where the street came out above the Common, he stopped, and turned round, and looked back.

The town lay below him in the dark, going down to the water, with a light here and there in a window, and the steeples black against the stars; and out on the harbour, where they had burned every night for a year, the lights were burning on Castle Island and on Dorchester Heights, the King’s and the Congress’s, a mile of black water apart, as they always had. Nobody had told them to put the lights out. Nobody would, he supposed, for some time. They would go on burning out there tonight, and tomorrow night, with nobody watching either of them, until somebody remembered and gave the order; and he thought that he would very much like to be the one to give it, and that he had just given up the right.

He thought about Mount Vernon, which he would see in three weeks if the roads were good, and which he had not seen in four years and a half: the house, and the river, and Martha, who had gone home in June and would be at the door. He thought about the fields, and Lund’s accounts, which would be bad, and the people on the place, who had been worked for four years by an overseer while their master was at the war, and whom he and Lund had written about selling in the winter at Middlebrook and had not sold; and he thought about the sixth head, which he had signed that morning, with its last words, which he had read every night for a week and knew by heart. All other questions. He knew what was in it. He had known since the beginning of October, reading Mr Dickinson’s heads at West Point; he had known that morning at the little table, with his pen on the paper and the bell beginning. He thought about it now, standing on the hill in the dark with the lights out on the water, for longer than he usually let himself.

He thought, standing there in the cold, that things had a way of happening on the same days in this country, as though the country were keeping accounts. The nineteenth of April, at Lexington, in the morning, with nobody able to say who had fired. The nineteenth of October, at Boston, a little before noon, with nobody able to say who had rung.

Then Will Lee, behind him, shifted the lantern from one hand to the other, because his arm was tired, and the light moved on the ground; and Washington turned round, and went on up the street to Mr Hancock’s house, because it was late and cold and there was a great deal to do in the morning.