Empire (7 page)

“I know absolutely nothing,” said Henry Adams, abruptly sitting up. “Except that I want my drive.”

“To Rye. With me,” said Henry James, moving away from the balustrade. “I go home,” he said to Mrs. Cameron. “I’ve invited your Henry—ah, and mine, too—for tea. We shall travel in a hired electrical-motor conveyance of local provenance.”

Henry Adams was calling. “Hitty! Hitty! Where are you?”

But Hitty, the niece Abigail, was not to be found. And so it was that in the interminable confusion of Henry James’s farewell, Henry Adams took Caroline’s arm. “I must have a niece of some sort with me, at all times. It is the law. You are chosen.”

“I am honored. But …”

There were no buts, as Henry Adams fled his brother Brooks, Caroline in tow, to be thrown, she thought, like dinner to wolves if Brooks were to draw too close to James’s rented troika or, to be precise, and James was nothing but that, electrical-motor car. At the last moment Del was included. Yet even in the driveway, to the astonishment of Mr. Beech, Brooks continued to hold forth as the uniformed chauffeur got the two Henrys, the one Del and the one Caroline into their high motor car.

“War is the natural state of man. But for what? For energy …”

“Oh, for energy!” simultaneously shouted Henry Adams, as the ungainly electrical-motor car, driven by the uniformed chauffeur, glided through the park, to the further astonishment of Mr. Beech—and of the deer. In the back seat Caroline and Adams faced Del and Henry James.

“I have never heard Brooks in such good and, may I say,
abundant
voice.” Henry James smiled the mischievous small smile that Caroline had come to find enchanting; although he missed nothing, he seemed never, as far as she could tell, to sit in judgment.

“He wears me out,” Adams sighed. “He is a genius, you know. Unfortunately, I am the genius’s hard-working older brother. So he comes to … to
mine
me, like an ore of gold, or more likely, lead. You see, I have a number of cloudy theories, which he makes into iron-bound laws.”

“Are there really laws to history?” asked Del, suddenly curious.

“If there were not, I wouldn’t have spent my life trying to be an historian.” Adams was tart; then he sighed again. “The only thing is—I can’t work them out properly. But Brooks can—to a point.”

“Well, what are they?” Yes, Del was genuinely curious, thought Caroline, and she was pleased because she was enough of a French woman to take pleasure, no matter how cursorily, in the elegant generality made flesh by the specific.

“Brooks’s law is as follows.” Adams stared off into the middle distance where, invisible for the moment, stood Hever Castle, which he had already shown Caroline and a raft of nieces. She thought of Anne Boleyn, who had lived there, and wondered if, when Henry VIII cut off her head, he was obeying a law of history which said, Energy requires that you now start the Reformation: or did he, simply, want a new wife, and a son?

“All civilization is centralization. That is the first unarguable law. All centralization is economy. That is the second—resources must be adequate to sustain the civilization, and give it its energy.
Therefore
all civilization is the survival of the most economical system …”

“What,” asked Del, “does most economical mean?”

“The cheapest,” said Adams curtly. “Brooks thinks that there is now a race between America and Europe to control the vast coal mines of China, because whichever power has the most and the cheapest energy will dominate the world.”

“But we have so much coal and oil at home.” Del was puzzled. “So much more than we know what to do with. Why go to China?”

“To keep others from going. But your instinct is right. If Brooks’s law holds, we shall have got—and won—everything.”

“Is this—dare one ask?—a
good
thing?” James was tentative.

“A law of nature is neither good nor ill; it simply is. If not us, Russia? Superstitious, barbaric Russia? No. If not us, Germany? A race given to frenzy—and poetry? No.”

“What then are
we
given to, that is so immeasurably superior?” James was staring, Caroline noticed, directly into Adams’s face—something he, with his endless tact, seldom did. He appeared to be reading Adams’s face, like a book.

“We are given to Anglo-Saxon freedom and the common law and …” Adams paused.

“And we are—extraordinarily and absolutely … we.” James smiled, without, Caroline thought, much pleasure.

“Surely in your love for England,” Adams delicately pricked his expatriate friend, “you must have found qualities here that you think superior to those of every other country—and you could have chosen to live anywhere, including our own turbulent republic. Well; then think of the United States as an extension of this country, which you do love and trust. So think of us as simply taking up the Anglo-Saxon radical task, shouldering it for these islands as they begin to lose their—economy.”

James spread his hands placatingly. “You speak of laws of history, and I am no lawyer. But I confess to misgivings. How can we, who cannot honestly govern ourselves, take up the task of governing others? Are we to govern the Philippines from Tammany Hall? Will we insist that our oriental colonies be run by bosses? Will we insist that our Spanish possessions be administered by the caucus which has made our politics so vile that every good American—and bad, too, let me hasten to add—cringes when he hears our present system mentioned?”

Adams frowned, not pleased. “We are in a bad way, it is true. But the England of Walpole was far more corrupt and narrow and provincial …”

“True. But the acquisition of an empire civilized the English. That may not be a law but it is a fact.” Henry James looked at Adams very hard. “But what civilized them might very well demoralize us even further.”

Adams did not answer. Del looked worried. “Have you talked like this to Father?”

James’s voice lightened. “No, no. Poor man. He has the weight of the world on him as it is. I think him noble beyond description to offer himself, at his age and in such—wintry health, on the altar of public service.”

Suddenly, James began to intone, the great organ notes quite filling the village through which they were passing. “ ‘He seen his duty, a dead sure thing. And went for it thar and then.’ ”

“What,” asked Caroline, alarmed, “is that?”

“From ‘Jim Bludso,’ ” said Del. “Father does hate to hear it.”

“Well, ‘Father’ is not here, and I do like the roll of it. What might he not have made, in his marvelously rhythmical chronicles, dedicated to the hazards of transportation, out of a runaway—let us say—electrical-motor car in which an historian and giver of immutable laws is saved from extinction by the swift strong arm of a mere storyteller from Albany, New York, but currently domiciled at Rye.…”

By the time that James had finished elaborating on this mock-Hay ballad, even Henry Adams was laughing.

Lamb House proved to be a miniature stone manor house with a garden in disarray, all weeds and, yes, dust, thought Caroline obsessively. At the door a man and woman greeted them.

“The Smiths,” said Henry James, with uncharacteristic brevity.

Joyously, the Master and his guests were greeted by the Smiths, who dropped his baggage repeatedly, as they hurried, swinging from side to side, into the house’s small drawing room.

“The Smiths are a legend,” whispered Del, as Henry James seated Henry Adams in an armchair next to the empty fireplace.

“Why?”

As if challenged to dramatize the legend, Mrs. Smith began to sink slowly, almost gracefully, to the floor, a gentle smile on her lips.

“Mr. Smith.” Henry James’s voice betrayed no agitation, as Mr. Smith, thus summoned, fell into the doorway from the hall. “Sir?” his voice rang out.

“It would appear that Mrs. Smith’s siesta, interrupted by the excitement of our arrival, has been resumed upon the drugget.”

“Ah, poor woman!” Smith shook his head. “It is the new medicine the village doctor gives her, not at all what she’s used to in London, in Harley Street.” During this, Smith had pulled his smiling unconscious wife to her feet, and sleep-walked her to the door. “Hers,” Smith declared proudly, “is … a highly sensitive sort of organism.” They were gone. Henry Adams had succeeded in not laughing but the tip of his neat beard was twitching. Henry James looked endlessly melancholy, even Byronic, thought Caroline, who said, “But surely, Mr. James …”

There was a terrible crash at the back of the house: plainly, both Smiths had surrendered to gravity’s stern law. “They are indeed, surely, as you put it, to put it finely, the Smiths, a couple richly experienced in domestic matters, but prone in the wastes, as it were,
of unfamiliar country life to exceed—go past, even the earliest of warning signals …”

“Drunk!” Henry Adams’s laugh was so startingly loud and uninhibited that Caroline could not stop herself; nor could Del.

The Master, however, was a study in polite anguish. “I’m sorry,” he said, “that your introduction to Lamb House should be so spoiled by the Dionysian—no, Bacchic—transports of the loyal good Smiths whose transference from their native London to the unfamiliar countryside has tended to overstimulate them, in every sense.…” The sound of crockery crashing caused James’s large smooth brow delicately to furrow.

But Henry Adams then took the lead; and the Smiths, as a subject, were banished; as a fact, however, they did produce a respectable tea, and Mr. Smith, having got a second wind, served efficiently.

Adams was curious about the neighborhood. Was there sufficient company? “As you prefer solitude to company, this means that you must have some very good company nearby so that
not
seeing them will be all the more agreeable and inspiring.”

“Well, there is the Poet Laureate.” James passed a plate of heavy cakes to Caroline, who refused; to Del, who took two. “I find that every day that I don’t see him is a pleasure. In fact, I see no one here. I did join the golf club, for the tea that they serve, not for the curious lonely game that precedes it, and though unanimously elected as vice-president of the cricket club, I declined the election, as the game is even more incomprehensible to me than golf, and no tea is served. I thought to embrace my solitude this summer little realizing that the Camerons, the Hays, the Adamses should all descend upon me, like a … like a …”

“I cannot wait to hear what he will say
we
’
re
like,” said Adams to Caroline, who rather wished the windows onto the garden were open: the room was close, and flies circled the cakes.

“I am torn,” said James, “between the image of a shower of gold and the lurid details of a passion play. In any case, were it not for you passionate visitors, I would be chained to my desk, writing …”

“Dictating …”

“The image is the same. I am chained to Mr. McAlpine, who is chained to his Remington, while I copiously dictate book reviews for
Literature
, a biography of William Wetmore Story …”

“That crushing bore?”

“You have put in a single phrase what I must make a book of. But
as the heirs have paid me a useful sum to memorialize our old and, yes, boring friend, I must do the work to pay for these sticks and stones that compose the first—and last—house I shall ever own.”

Del asked James if he had met Stephen Crane, the young American journalist who was said to be living nearby. James nodded. “He is at Brede Place. He came to call before he went to Cuba, to describe the war. He is most talented, with a wife who …” James glanced at Caroline, and she realized that whatever the wife might be she, as a virginal girl of American provenance, was not about to be told. “… once kept an establishment in Jacksonville, Florida, I believe, named, most evocatively, the Hotel de Dream. Poor young Mr. Crane is also chained to
his
desk, only his desk is now in Havana—where he writes for a newspaper …”

“For the
Journal
,” said Caroline. Blaise had told her how Hearst had managed to get Crane away from the
World
, where he had described, tactlessly, the cowardice of the 71st New York Volunteers. In a series of headlines, Hearst had denounced the
World
for insulting the valor of America’s brave fighting men; then he hired the author of the canard to write for him.

Henry Adams wondered how someone who had never seen a battle could have written such a fine war novel as
The Red Badge of Courage
. James reminded him that “the titanic Tolstoi” had, after all, not been alive during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, yet he could imagine that War as well as Peace, to which Caroline felt mischievously obliged to add, “Although Mr. Crane has never been a girl of any kind, much less one of the streets, he did create for us Maggie.”

“Dear, dear!” Henry Adams looked more than ever like an uncle. “You are not supposed to know of such things. Mlle. Souvestre has been lax.”

“But Miss Sanford is a product, Adams, of Paris, where
everyone
knows …” James’s voice dropped very low on the word “knows” and his eyes became very round and comical. Caroline and Del laughed. Adams did not because it was now time to talk of Thee-oh-dore. Caroline wondered if all Americans, of this particular set anyway, were obliged to speak of Theodore Roosevelt at least six times a day, rather the way convent nuns told their beads at regular intervals. She herself had never met the Colonel, as he was currently known, thanks to what John Hay had dubbed, publicly, “a splendid little war,” giving offense in many quarters, not all of them Spanish. But although Theodore and his Rough Riders had caught the popular imagination, Caroline found
it odd that he should be so interesting to his social equals, not to mention elders. Adams sought to explain him: “He is
all
energy. I suppose that is his attraction …”

“For those who find crude mindless energy attractive.” James put three teaspoons of sugar in his tea.

“Well, he is not mindless, entirely, that is.” Adams was judicious. “He wrote an excellent history of our Navy in the War of 1812 …”

“A subject that even at this far remove, causes my pulses to slow. Was that the war where the participants were exhorted not to shoot until the whites of certain distant hostile eyes were visible?”