Part 37 (1/2)
Therefore, if war came at the present juncture it was because the people of the United States had made up their minds they wanted a fight, they would have a fight, they didn't care whether they had an excuse or not.
The speech made a profound impression even in the agitated state of the public mind, for bitterly as North might be denounced he always was listened to. The press lashed itself into a fury and wrote head-lines which would have ridden its editors into prison had the country possessed libel laws adequate to protect a n.o.ble provision of the Const.i.tution. The temperate men in the country had been with North from the beginning, but the excited millions excoriated him the more loudly.
He was denounced at public banquets and accused by excited citizens all over the Union, except in his own State, of every depravity, from holding an unimaginable number of Spanish bonds to taking a ferocious pleasure in the sufferings of the reconcentrados.
And in the face of this he must cast his vote for war.
A weaker man would have held stubbornly to his position, made notorious by his personality, and a less patriotic have chosen the satisfaction of being consistent to the bitter end and winning some measure of approval from the unthinking.
But North was a statesman, and although Betty did not see him to speak to for many weeks after the Message went to Congress, she doubted if he had hesitated a moment in choosing his course. He was a man who made a problem of nothing, who thought and acted promptly on all questions great and small. It was his manifest duty to support his President, who was also the head of his party, and to do what he could to win the sympathy of Europe for his country by making its course appear the right and inevitable one.
North's position was the logical result of the deliberations and decisions of the year 1787. Hamilton, the greatest creative and constructive genius of his century, never so signally proved his far-sighted statesmans.h.i.+p as when he pleaded for an aristocratic republic with a strong centralized government. As he was capable of anything, he doubtless foresaw the tyranny of the people into which ill-considered liberty would degenerate, just as he foresaw the many strong, wise, and even great men who would be born to rule the country wisely if given the necessary power. If the educated men of the country knew that its destinies were wholly in their hands, and that they alone could achieve the highest honours, there is not one of them who would not train himself in the science of government. Such men, ruling a country in which liberty did not mean a heterogeneous monarchy, would make the lot of the ma.s.ses far easier than it is to-day. The fifteen million Irish plebeians with which the country is cursed would be harmlessly raising pigs in the country. Hamilton, in one of his letters, speaks of democracy as a poison. Some twenty years ago an eminent Englishman bottled and labelled the poison in its infinite variety, as a warning to the extreme liberals in his own country. We attempted one ideal, and we almost have forgotten what the ideal was.
Hamilton's could not have fared worse, and there is good reason to believe that educated and thinking men, unhampered by those who talk bad grammar and think not, would have raised our standards far higher than they are, even with men like North patiently and dauntlessly striving to counteract the poison below. At all events, there would be no question of a President's hand being forced. Nor would such a cla.s.s of rulers put a man in the White House whose hand could be forced.
Although Betty knew North would disregard the sneers of the press and of ambitious orators who would declaim while cannon thundered, she also knew that his impa.s.sive exterior hid a sense of humiliating defeat, and that the moment in which he was obliged to utter his aye for war would be the bitterest of his life. She fancied that he forgot her in these days, but she was willing to have it so. The intense breathless excitement of that time, when scarcely a Senator left his seat from ten in the morning till some late hour of the night, except to s.n.a.t.c.h a meal; the psychological effect of the silent excited crowds in the galleries and corridors of the Capitol and on its lawns and the immensity of its steps; the solemnity and incalculable significance of the approaching crisis, and the complete gravity of the man who possessed her mind, carried her out of herself and merged her personality for a brief while into the great personality of the nation.
XIV
It was half-past one o'clock in the morning of the nineteenth of April.
A thousand people, weary and breathless but intensely silent, were crowded together in the galleries of the Senate. They had been there all night, some of them since early afternoon, a few since twelve o'clock. Outside, the corridors were so packed with humanity that it was a wonder the six acres of building did not sway. For the first time in hours they were silent and motionless, although they could hear nothing.
On the floor of the Senate almost every chair was occupied, and every Senator was singularly erect; no one was lounging, or whispering, or writing to-night. All faced the Vice-President, alone on his dais, much as an army faces its general. Every foot of the wide semicircle between the last curve of chairs and the wall was occupied by members of the House of Representatives, who stood in a dignified silence with which they had been little acquainted of late.
The Senate no longer looked like a Club. It recalled the description of Bryce: ”The place seems consecrated to great affairs.”
The Secretary was about to call the roll for the vote which would decide the fate of Cuba and alter for ever the position of the United States in the family of nations.
Betty had been in the gallery all night and a part of the preceding day. When the Senate took a recess at half-past six in the evening, she and Mary Montgomery, while Mrs. Shattuc guarded their seats, had forced their way down to the restaurant, but had been obliged to content themselves with a few sandwiches bought at the counter. But Betty was conscious of neither hunger nor fatigue, although the strain during the last eight hours had been almost insupportable: the brief sharp debates, the prosing of bores, interrupted by angry cries of ”Vote!
Vote!” the reiterated announcement of the Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations that the conferees could not agree, the perpetual nagging of two Democrats and one Populist, the long trying intervals of debate on matters irrelevant to the great question torturing every mind, during which there was much confusion on the floor: the Senators talked constantly in groups except when the Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations brought in his amended bill;--all this had made up a day trying to the stoutest nerves, and more than one person had fainted and been carried from the galleries.
The blood throbbed in Betty Madison's head from repressed excitement and the long strain on her nerves. But the solemnity of the scene affected her so powerfully that her ego seemed dead, she only was conscious of looking down upon history. It seemed to her that for the first time she fully realized the tremendous issues involved in the calling of that roll of names. The att.i.tude of the American people which she had deprecated and scorned was dignified by the att.i.tude of that historical body below her. Even Senator North did not interest her. The Senate for the time was a unit.
It seemed to her an interminable interval between the last echo of the rumbling voice of the Clerk who had read the resolution amended by the report of the conferees, and the first raucous exasperated note of the Secretary's clerk, after a brief colloquy between Senators. This clerk calls the roll of the Senate at all times as if he hated every member of it, and to-night he was nervous.
Betty felt the blood throb in her ears as she counted the sharp decisive ”ayes” and ”nos,” although Burleigh, whom she had seen during the recess, had told her there was no doubt of the issue. As the clerk entered the M's, she came to herself with a shock, and simultaneously was possessed by a desire to get out of the gallery before Senator North's time came to say ”aye.” She had heard the roll called many times, she knew there were fourteen M's, and that she would have time to get out of the gallery if she were quick about it. She made so violent an effort to control the excitement raging within her that her brain ached as if a wedge had been driven through it. She whispered hurriedly to Mary Montgomery, who was leaning breathlessly over the rail and did not hear her, then made her way up to the door as rapidly as she could; even the steps were set thick with people.
As she was pa.s.sed out of the gallery by the doorkeeper, and found herself precipitated upon that pale trembling hollow-eyed crowd wedged together like atoms in a rock, her knees trembled and her courage almost failed her. Several caught her by the arms, and asked her how the vote was going; but she only shrugged her shoulders with the instinct of self-defence and pushed her way toward a big policeman. He knew her and put out his hand, thrusting one or two people aside.
”This has been too much for you, miss, I reckon,” he said. ”I'll get you downstairs. Keep close behind me.”
He forced a way through the crowd to the elevator. To attempt to part the compact ma.s.s on the staircase would invite disaster. The elevator boy had deserted his post that he might hear the news the sooner, but the policeman pushed Betty into the car, and manipulated the ropes himself. On the lower floor was another dense crowd; but he got her to the East door after rescuing her twice, called her carriage and returned to his post, well pleased with his bill.
For many moments Betty, bruised from elbows, breathless from her pa.s.sage through that crush in the stagnant air, could not think connectedly. She vaguely recalled Mrs. Mudd's large face and black silk dress in the Diplomats' Gallery, which even a Cabinet minister might not enter without a permit from a member of the Corps. Doubtless the doorkeepers had been flung to and fro more than once to-night, like little skiffs in an angry sea. She wondered how she had had sufficient presence of mind to fee the policeman, and hoped she had not given him silver instead of the large bill which had seemed to spring to her fingers at the end of that frightful journey.
She leaned out of the open window, wis.h.i.+ng it were winter, that the blood might be driven from her head; but there was only the slight chill of a delicious April morning in the air, and the young leaves fluttered gently in the trees. In the afternoon hundreds of boys had sold violets in the streets, and the perfume lingered, floating above the heavier scent of the magnolias in the parks. Betty's weary mind pictured Was.h.i.+ngton as it would be a few weeks hence, a great forest of brilliant living green amidst which one had almost to look for the houses and the heroes in the squares. Every street was an avenue whose tall trees seemed to cut the sky into blue banners--the word started the rearrangement of her scattered senses; in a few weeks the dust would be flying up to the green from thousands of marching feet.
She burst into tears, and they gave her some relief. The carriage stopped at the house a moment later, and she went directly to her boudoir. She took off her hat and pulled down her hair, rubbing her fingers against her burning head. Senator North took possession of her mind at once. The Senate was no longer a unit to her excited imagination; it seemed to dissolve away and leave one figure standing there beaten and alone.