The Judges of the Secret Court

by David Stacton

  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 His sigh may be a little sad, his smile a little withdrawn, but he does not really want anything.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.

  X

  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.

  At the station the actor Matthews was boarding a train. In his hotel room he had opened the letter Booth had left with him for the National Intelligencer. Matthews read it once and then burned it. He now hoped to be able to reach the Canadian border.

  Stanton’s net caught him anyway.

  In New York, the New York World had its editorial in place. It contained much praise, since the paper would be quoted abroad, but the praise was grudging.

  “The conspicuous weakness of Mr. Lincoln’s mind on the side of imagination, taste, and refined sensibility,” its editorial writer said, “has rather helped him in the estimation of the multitude.… Among the sources of Mr. Lincoln’s influence we must not omit to mention the quaint and peculiar character of his written and spoken eloquence. Formed on no model, and aiming only at the most convincing statement of what he wished to say, it was terse, shrewd, clear, with a particular twist in the phraseology which more than made up in point what it sometimes lost by its uncouthness.”

  The editorial writer thought that rather handsome of him, for it was more than he would have said had the occasion been otherwise. New York was perhaps still a little out of touch with the new national grief.

  In the White House, Tad Lincoln, who was only a young sprat, heard the carriage drive up and stood, wide awake, on the stairs to the second floor.

  “Mr. Welles,” he said. “Who killed my father?”

  It was nine in the morning. Mr. Welles had brought the body back, in a rain splattered hearse. He had always trusted Mr. Welles.

  Mary Lincoln appeared above him on the stairs and peered down hopelessly. It was Mr. Lincoln, always, who had known how to console Tad. She turned and went back to her room, the one that connected with the other one, the empty one. The door between was shut.

  There were so many things about Lincoln people could not see, that they saw now, and would forget soon enough, now that his body lay downstairs in state.

  It was Stanton’s turn to run the country. There was no one else to run it, for Johnson had yet to collect his wits. What Stanton wanted was revenge. Let Stanton have his way.

  Part Two

  XI

  Dr. Mudd could not sleep. He had not slept for hours. His passion was to own land. He had no other. And now he was afraid.

  He had qualified as a doctor only in order to qualify for the gentry, an important matter in Maryland. His practice was as small as he could keep it. In youth one believes in these things. Time, marriage, and his father had taught him better. Love and the professions demand responsibility. Business does not. So to business one carries off the pride, frustration, and terror of one’s soul. It was revenge on the world and pleasure to one’s self, to see the land one owned. He never looked at any other. And little by little, as his marriage decayed and he found himself puzzled by the silences at his own table, Dr. Mudd had extended his holdings. And now, because of this absurd humane profession of his, which prevented him, when appealed to, from turning any poor stray away from his door, he felt obscurely in danger. It took him most of the morning to puzzle out why. And when he had done so, characteristically, he mentioned the matter to no one, but dealt with it in his own way, by doing nothing.

  The trouble had begun a little after four in the morning, when he had been roused by a knocking and halloing downstairs. As he lay in bed listening, he heard the hound dogs barking both in his own yard and across the fields.

  He did not want to answer the door. On the other hand, neither did he want it beaten in, and there were Federals in the neighbourhood. He went downstairs in his nightshirt and found himself facing a country bumpkin with a moon face and a nervous, excited manner. That made him feel better at once. He knew how to handle bumpkins.

  “My friend here hurt his leg,” said Herold. “His horse threw him. He’s afraid it’s broke.”

  Mudd peered into the drizzly half light beyond the door. One horse, a cheap rocker by the look of her, stood grazing the lawn. On the other sat an erect, heavily wrapped figure whose features he could not see.

  The nature of the call reassured him. He ventured on the lawn. He was wearing scuffs, but the wet grass tickled his feet all the same. He and the yokel carried the man inside and dumped him on the parlour sofa. Mudd went to get a candle.

  The man on the sofa turned his face away.

  A doctor, even one who practises as little as Mudd, pays more attention to bodies than faces, and remembers them better. But he had never examined Booth before, and so did not recognize him. He saw at once the man would have to be moved upstairs. He went to fetch his wife to light the way. Mrs. Mudd delighted in an interesting invalid, for her life was dull. Yet hold the candle how she would, the patient always twisted away. She could not see his features.

  Upstairs in the bedroom, Mudd slit the boot and threw it under the bed, stripped off the stocking, which was sweaty and distasteful to him, and took a look at the leg. A look was all he needed. It was a simple case of Pott’s fracture, nothing serious, but the man would not be able to walk for weeks. He could stay where he was overnight, rest, and fetch a carriage tomorrow.

  Booth was so consternated he was driven to speech. Mudd turned to look at him. Perhaps the crêpe beard had slipped. Booth disguised his voice.

  Mudd frowned and went out to get splints. He took his wife with him. She, too, was anxious now.

  Mudd told her not to worry. Queer things happened these days. Perhaps the man was an escaped Reb. Perhaps he was a deserting Northerner, for though the war was over, one could still be punished for that. It was better not to ask questions. A doctor had certain legal privileges. It was his duty to treat the patient who came to his door, not to ask his name. But Mudd did not like it, all the same. When he went up with the splints, he refused either to look at his patient or to talk to him. He gave his wife the same advice. The less they knew about the man the better.

  Then he went down to breakfast, taking the younger man with him. The younger man was if anything too talkative. He said his name was Henston, and that the injured man was a Mr. Tyser. They were ridiculous names. Clearly Mr. Henston was lying, but the doctor was grateful just then for a lie. Henston asked for a razor. Mudd did not want to know any more. Henston had no facial hair, and the man upstairs had a grey beard, even though his moustache was black. Why should a man in a feverish condition suddenly decide to shave? Mudd got out of there and went to supervise his field workers. He did not want that man in the house. He was a southerner. These days it was dangerous to harbour a southerner. Yet he could not very well turn the two strangers over to the authorities, either. Surely not even a war can make human loyalty and love of your birthplace a crime.

  And yet Mudd knew that was exactly what the war had done. It had changed the world. Loyalty and love were now a crime. He did not know what to
do. For though his life was directed by prudence, he was not yet so modern as to be beyond loyalty. He might detest that restraint, but all the same, it bound him in.

  Upstairs Booth fell asleep. Like Richard, his best part, he could add colours to the chameleon. He was loyal only to himself. He gave no thought to the repercussions of what he had done. And besides, his bed was so soft. He had never before realized, since he had slept in them all his life, the utter luxury of a well-made bed. He had lived so high on the hog these last years, for that matter, that he had never before realized the sheer luxury of being alive at all. It was pain that made him aware of that. He had never felt pain before, either.

  XII

  As always in that family, Edwin was the first to suffer. He was only thirty-two, but his career had been an insane and jumbled confusion of extremes. He had played low comedy, and he had played Hamlet for a hundred nights. Yet the triumph meant nothing. In America, he had said once, not bitterly, but sadly, art degenerates even below the standard of a trade. Yet at the same time he knew that art is a trade. Like jewellers whom the public can no longer afford, artists still spend their little increment upon the adornment of the world, for that is all they know how to do, even though the world be too spiritually impoverished to afford any longer their luxuries. The artist cannot afford them either. So he who would become master of the revels winds up a victim of his own abilities. Despite himself, life had made Edwin a tragedian, yet alone of that family, he had had a sense of humour. No doubt that is what makes one a tragedian. As a child, when they had all play-acted for pennies in a Baltimore cellar, it was he who had wanted to be the clown. But comedy turns to irony, and irony to divine comedy, which, as in Dante, ends happily only in heaven. Hamlet is only the Pagliacci of the self. Circuses are no more than a parable. Last night he had played Sir Giles Overreach, who is all the world’s jape, which no doubt is why the world loves to see the part performed. And who should he be today, as he woke up in Boston?