The Judges of the Secret Court (10 page)

For the first time, he saw Stanton hesitate. “I am going at once,” he said. “I think it is your duty to go.”

Stanton drew back. “This is not my carriage,” he said. A Grand Inquisitor may not respect anything else, but he does respect property. So do the new men. Men, women, children, and the emotions count for nothing. It is their right to suffer, for they are guilty and deceitful. But property is real.

Welles was not of that temperament. He said it was no time to argue about the ownership of a carriage.

Stanton was forced to agree, but all the same, he leaned out of the carriage window and asked Chief Justice Carter, who had also been at Seward's, to come with them. That would give the commandeering of the carriage a respectability at law. For the rest, he saw this murder as part of an immense plot. He ordered the declaration of martial law. He set a guard around the other Cabinet members. He ordered everyone at Ford's Theatre arrested, from stableboy to manager, which is what had made life awkward for Laura Keene in the front parlour.

He had taken only the briefest of glimpses at Lincoln, and those unwillingly. Unlike the women, he had no affection for deathbed scenes. He did not like to be moved, and the sight of that inert, dying body moved him. He had intrigued against Lincoln for years. Lincoln had been too clement. And now it had come to this.

Stanton, it was his justification, acted always for the public good, which was an abstraction, and had nothing to do with men or women. Yet that body in there had rattled him. As he had looked down at the President's face, the mouth had pulled sharply to the left, in a sort of jeer. The doctors said he was beyond conscious thought. But Stanton did not care for the look of that jeer. In fifteen minutes it stopped, and the face smoothed away. But Stanton remembered it. His master had been more astute than his daily kindness would have indicated. It bothered him, that jeer. It seemed a jeer at him, as though this murder were nothing but a reflection upon his own efficiency.

Now these witnesses said the crime was Booth's doing. That was impossible. No one man could defeat Stanton. His net was cast too wide. Therefore there must be some vast conspiracy.

He felt confused, not by the evidence, but by those who gave it. He seldom interviewed people himself. He found them too distracting to the cause of justice and pursuit. Besides, he was worried about his own part in all this. He had conspired against the President, lied to the President, evaded the President, and despised the weakness of the man. And in a funny, patronizing, grudging way he had loved him. For the first time in his life he wanted to cry. He did not do so. He had never had the habit. It was his duty to maintain order and to prosecute the criminal. Without him, the Union would have collapsed years ago. He had not the time for tears. As soon as he was through with the witnesses, he had them sent to the Old Capitol Prison. It
must
be a widespread plot. How else could he have been defeated?

When Andy Johnson arrived at last, to look in on the President, he did not even stop on his way out to ask how things were going. That made Stanton feel a little desperate. Johnson did not like him. He had to prove his efficiency, or be sacked, and what would happen to the country without its Secretary of War? He became more peremptory with his witnesses.

Johnson had been asked not to come, his well wishers had said the trip might be dangerous, but he had come anyway, walking all the way from Kirkwood House. His reasons were in part mere expediency. He wanted no one to say either that he had cringed indoors or that he had rejoiced at this tragedy. But in fact it was something else that had drawn him here. He could not stay away.

He stood at the foot of the bed, wondering what the difference between himself and Lincoln was. Robert Lincoln stood at the head of the bed, alternating between that post and the problems of his mother in the parlour. There was nothing much to Robert Lincoln. He had neither his mother's brilliance nor his father's brains. He was just a mediocre young man, capable of feeling, no doubt, but not of thought. Johnson recognized him at once as that simple but unpredictable thing, a born constituent.

The body in the bed was something more.

What was that difference, anyhow? He could not fathom it. Each was a self-made man. Each came a little from the west of this puzzling, treacherous, and so-called civilized world of Washington City. They had played the same political tricks. They had the same political wisdom, the same wariness. And yet the difference was more than one of mere cleverness. The difference was something they could always recognize in Kentucky, poor white trash that they were, even if folks didn't do so in Washington.

The difference was that Lincoln was a gentleman. Not one of the high flown, dangerous, New York, New England, mercantile kind, not even the ostentatious or the workhorse kind, like Lee, but still, the calibre was unmistakable. It always had been, and it was no less so here on the bed. He did not even die like an ordinary man. He was too big. The brain was gone completely, so the doctors said. And yet the cachet remained, rawboned, maybe, and defenceless now, but real.

What the hell was it that made the gentleman? It was not the habit to command and be obeyed, though some people thought so. Lincoln had commanded nothing. And yet he had been obeyed. Perhaps it was some kind of integrity that lay behind decisions, and had nothing to do with what one said or did. And yes, for oratory was sometimes accurate, as well as moving, it was perhaps the ability to accept God as an equal. In that sense, to be a gentleman was nothing but the strength to walk alone.

He, Johnson, was a son of the people. That meant he always had to be justified. He had to ask for approval, and stoop to win it. But a gentleman, he saw, did not have to be justified, for a gentleman, in being beyond it, has no difficulty in accepting the world. His sigh may be a little sad, his smile a little withdrawn, but he does not really want anything. He is only there to do his duty.

Looking down at that body, Johnson knew that now he would do his. The mechanics of conversion are best casual. But really, no matter how beastly they may be, men only want something to admire, in order to become admirable, and in this poor living corpse Johnson had found it. Three weeks before, to win votes, he had said he would hang every rebel he could catch. He knew now that was one promise he did not mean to keep. He looked, saw nothing and everything, and turned away. A man in his late fifties does not cry. But sometimes we see things, once it is too late, which make us want to cry. He had seen, not Lincoln, but that selflessness which defeats the self. He had seen the burden, which is also the backbone, of the gentleman, for in this life, given self-respect, we must carry our own load.

That visit changed him. He went into the front room, which he would not have done in the same way ten minutes before, to hold Mary Lincoln's hand. Then he went back to Kirkwood House.

Others in that room did not take the matter so deeply. Sumner sat there all night. He was watching the death of an old enemy, and that was all he saw. Earlier he had bowed his head and begun to sob. But though he was moved, nothing inside him moved. He was a good hater.

But he was a bad everything else.

All the same he sat there, hour after hour. He was fascinated. Nothing would ever make him understand that a good man may have the manners of a labourer, or that a mediocre demagogue may yet be raised above himself. He came from Boston. In Boston life was not conducted so. In Boston they had some feeling for the forms of life, for the forms, and for little else. Lincoln had been beyond those forms. Therefore, though Sumner was moved, he was not touched.

His only thought was that Johnson would be worse, and yet at the same time easier to handle than Lincoln had been; and that somehow the power of the land was ebbing from Boston, and that this death had something to do with that. The power was floating to what he hated, which was the far west, Kentucky and Kansas, and other lands of the unregenerate baboon. Sumner had also, had he but realized it, the face of a baboon, even in grief, but it was the face of a baboon trained to wear clothes. That is what he meant by the proper forms. And for that matter, what is grief? It does not touch us, and yet when we assume it it is real. It is the assumption, then, that is real. So much for forms.

In the front room Mrs. Lincoln screamed.

That was most unfortunate. Stanton had work to do. He was dictating the announcement of Lincoln's death. There remained only the time to be filled in. Mrs. Lincoln had heard him. He had to send her back to the parlour. Then she went to the deathbed. She was a nuisance there. “Take that woman out,” he said loudly. “And do not let her in again.” He had never liked her. She had no right to interfere, when there was so much to be done.

The night dripped by.

At three in the morning Stanton had to face the truth. He wired New York, and for the first time admitted Booth was the assassin. Then he went to work to catch him. Once caught, he could be made to confess anything. Jefferson Davis was in the matter somewhere, and if he was not, soon would be. Of that Stanton was sure. He worked on.

So did everyone. In the newspaper offices the staffs were up until dawn. The temper of the people had changed, and besides, there was the outside world to think of, and some sense of the fitness of things. Page after page of proof was ripped out and the set forms broken. The denunciations, the innuendoes, and the complaints about the President, the thought provoking, the witty, and the cruel editorials and cartoons, all had to be scrapped, down to the last insulting poem by the least known poetess. Into their place went laudations and long descriptions of the nation's grief. In the offices of the
National Intelligencer
, the sleepy daily poet ran up some passably convincing verses. Lincoln had been felled by a lone maniac. How else could it have happened, in a nation where everyone had loved him so?

That was the tone to take, though a few followed Stanton's lead and wrote of a widespread conspiracy.

In Washington City it began to be sallow dawn. No matter what happens, the milk cart must start out at the appointed hour, and the taverns open. In the public buildings the janitors had worked all night in the usual way. They were ready to go home now. The gas went off. The windows went up. At the Navy Yard, the sentries changed, and in an open field, Lewis Payne woke up in his tree and did not know where he was.

Only in the front parlour on 10th Street did the light have trouble seeping round the closed drapes. But even there the light began to grow stronger. There was no sound but that eternal military tramping in the corridor, and then, at first quietly, but then heavily, it began to rain.

At six Lincoln's pulse began to fail. His respiration was twenty-eight. By six thirty the breathing became unmistakable. His face began to glisten. At seven came the symptoms of immediate dissolution. The President began to moan, those long, frightening moans Lamon and Cook, his guards, had heard so often in the White House corridor, when he had his nightmare. His breathing became swift, his lips were everted. But his hands did not move on the coverlet. They were now incapable of motion.

Leale held one of them. He had done so all night. Lincoln was beyond reason, but should he regain consciousness, Leale wanted him to know that at least there was someone there to hold his hand.

Barnes, the Surgeon General, went to fetch Mrs. Lincoln. She was brought in, looked at Stanton from a distance he did not understand, and then allowed herself to be led away. Stanton remained. Sumner remained. Barnes looked at his watch. Dr. Gurley came in.

The chest of the body went up as usual, but did not inhale again. They watched it for a moment. The time was twenty-two minutes past seven. The world seemed motionless.

“Now he belongs to the ages,” said Stanton. Dr. Gurley began a prayer.

He was gone.

They had no precedent for such a thing. Neither had they had a precedent for such a man. The sound of the rain was unmerciful. He was gone, but he was more there than ever. And now he had gone, they could not get over the idea that more than a man had died, that, living, he had protected them from something which was plain to be seen, but which none of them wished to see.

And so he had. He was the last of the old men.

The new world began at once. That left them at a loss. Not even Dr. Gurley seemed to know what to say.

At six a.m. the Presidential guard, Parker, had wandered into a precinct station. He was drunk, but he knew he had to account for those missing eight hours somehow. So he brought along Lizzie Williams, one of his tarts, to have her booked for immoral conduct. The sergeant on duty refused. Lizzie Williams was let go. But beyond that there was nothing to say to Parker. He was a policeman in good standing, secure in his position. It did not even enter his head to ask what had happened to the President. He went home with an easy conscience. His job was still safe, and that was all that mattered to him.

At 10th Street the body lay ominous on its bed. Dr. Gurley went on praying. Leale walked out of the house. He noticed neither the rain nor that he had forgotten his hat. All around him the church bells of the city were beginning to toll. One after the other, from every direction, they began to ring out, solemn, insistent, and unnecessary. From the Navy Yard came the first funereal crash of cannon.

Dr. Leale realized that he was weeping, and must have been weeping almost since he had left the house. The tears poured down, even though he was calm with fatigue, and he did nothing to stop them. Digging his hands into his pockets, he walked through unfamiliar streets, though he supposed he knew them well enough. The crowds he walked through were either silent or weeping too.

As Mrs. Lincoln was helped down the stairs of the Petersen house, she saw the cold brick façade of Ford's Theatre, moist with rain, across the street.

“Oh, that dreadful house,” she said. “That dreadful house.”

There was nothing to do but agree, and to take her back to that no less dreadful house on Pennsylvania Avenue.