When the Cheering Stopped

by Smith, Gene;

  Riding down in the nearly empty special train, the President rarely left his wife but sat by the casket, only occasionally napping on a lounge in the car’s compartment. By Tuesday morning they were deep in the South, and although only the tolling of the engine bell signaled their approach, at the railroad platforms of the small towns and even at the way stations silent people stood with their hats off. Going through the hills and valleys of north Georgia, they saw old men standing at attention on the porches of the remote rural cabins. At noon in Rome the stores closed and the trolleys stopped running and the factories shut down; when in the early afternoon the train pulled into the station, bells began to toll all over the city. They got out of the train into the hot Georgia sun and a group of her relatives took the casket and put it in the hearse while the President looked at it with a strong fixed stare. They drove directly to the church where her father had been pastor and held a very simple service. There were two hymns and then the mourners formed up to go to the Myrtle Hill Cemetery. Schoolgirls in white, all holding myrtle branches, lined the way. Although the President had wanted as quiet a funeral as possible, almost the entire population of his wife’s home town turned out and stood by as her casket was lowered into the ground. When the casket rested in place, it was suggested to the President that now he leave the cemetery, but he said that he wanted to wait until the work was completely done. The crowds moved back to leave him quite alone with the girls near a large oak, and a breeze came up and moved some of the flowers. The workmen began to pile earth on Ellen’s casket where she lay with two rings on her hand, the first her wedding ring, the other a diamond one. His head bared, he stood by the men with their shovels, and a distance off the people of the town, the relatives and the Washington people shortly saw that once again the President was weeping because Ellen was gone.

  * It was later declared unconstitutional. Many of the slums are still as they were when Ellen Wilson last saw them.

  2

  The President sat by himself hour after hour on the observation platform of the train heading for Washington and the now unbearably lonely White House. “I feel so utterly alone,” he said, and begged some of Ellen’s relatives to stay with him for a while. They did so, and for long hours he talked to them, saying it was his ambition and his career that killed her. Her brother said to him that it was not so, but that even if it were Ellen would not have wanted it otherwise.

  Ellen was dead, Jessie and Nellie were married, and Margaret was often away. There was no woman to take charge of the White House. He asked his cousin, Helen Woodrow Bones, who had been brought up by his mother and father, if she would step into the breach. She took up permanent residence with him, hoping also that her two pets, Sandy the Airedale and Hamish the sheep dog, would amuse him. But of course nothing was the same, and often he sat alone reading Ellen’s favorite poems or went walking the corridors of the Corcoran art gallery to look again at paintings she had loved.

  Ellen was dead. “I do not care a fig for anything that affects me,” he wrote a friend, and to another indicated that it would come as a blessing if someone would assassinate him. “If I hadn’t gone into politics she would probably be alive now,” he told her sister, and took a great interest in hearing from the British Ambassador details of how British Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey, when he lost his own wife, worked to submerge his grief in his love of the outdoors, of flowers and fishing. Even as Great Britain went to the war, Sir Edward took time to write the President a sympathetic note. The lonely man in the White House read it out loud to the people around him.

  Cary Grayson saw his patient declining before his eyes and worked harder than ever to keep up the golfing and auto rides. The doctor also stayed many nights in the White House to be on hand if the President wanted someone to chat with. And often the gentle Helen Bones would sit by her cousin in silence, simply wanting him to know that she was there to help. In her eyes he was something like a Bengal tiger she had once seen in a cage; she thought him trapped by his own cage of high position that prevented him from seeking out friendships wherever he could find them. As summer turned to fall and spring of 1915 came, Helen Bones herself sickened in the depressing atmosphere of the White House, and Grayson began to worry about her. She was a shy person and quiet, and had hardly any friends at all in Washington. Grayson decided that what she needed was a woman friend to talk with, someone who could take her out of the White House now and then.

  Grayson looked around for the proper person and decided to introduce Helen to the older friend of the girl he would shortly marry. Grayson’s future wife was Alice Gertrude Gordon, who was called Altrude by her friends, and Altrude’s friend was a forty-two-year-old widow who owned a Washington jewelry shop left her by her late husband. The shop was a profitable one and ran itself with little aid from its owner, who was able to travel widely, take a great interest in clothes, particularly Paris frocks, and drive around in an electric automobile which, she said, was the first ever owned and operated by a Washington woman. She lived alone save for two maids in a house on 20th Street, N.W., at New Hampshire Avenue. She was tall and imposing and had a beautiful smile and appealing dimples. Her family was one of the oldest in Virginia and her father had been a plantation owner, Confederate officer, lawyer and judge, but she had been brought up in the impoverished post-Civil War South and had but two years of formal education. She was a non-political person, not active in Society or charitable circles, and in almost twenty years of Washington residence had never been inside the White House. Her name was Edith Bolling Galt.

  Miss Bones and Mrs. Galt soon became friends, going for outings in Mrs. Galt’s electric (which she drove like an absolute madwoman) and for long afternoon walks along the paths in Rock Creek Park. The Galt home was only a few blocks from the park, and after their walks they would make for its library, where a fire would be lit and tea served. One day in March, after a long hike over muddy paths, Helen Bones invited her friend to come for tea in the White House instead of in the 20th Street library. “Oh, I couldn’t do that; my shoes are a sight, and I should be taken for a tramp,” Mrs. Galt said.

  “Yes, you can,” said Miss Bones. “There is not a soul there. Cousin Woodrow is playing golf with Dr. Grayson and we will go right upstairs in the elevator and you shall see no one.” They went to the White House and to the second floor. As they stepped out of the elevator, they saw coming around the corner, attired in golfing clothes and muddy boots, the President of the United States and his physician. Mrs. Galt had time to note that the golf suits were tatty and not smart at all, and time to think to herself that if her own shoes were not clean at least she was wearing a Worth gown and a nice tricot hat. Then she was being introduced and Helen Bones was explaining that they had been for a walk and were going to have tea. “I think you might ask us,” Grayson said, and it was agreed that the men would change while the women had their shoes cleaned up. They would then all meet in the Oval Room.

  They sat down to tea and when they finished the President took Mrs. Galt to see a desk made from the timbers of the British ship Resolute which, icebound and abandoned in the Arctic, was found by an American ship and returned to England, where Queen Victoria had the desk made for President Rutherford B. Hayes. Then Edith Galt went home. In the short time she was with the President, her cheerful manner made him laugh twice, making Helen Bones wonder if she was hearing right. He had laughed. “I can’t say that I foresaw in the first minute what was going to happen,” Helen Bones said later. “It may have taken ten minutes.”

  A few days later Mrs. Galt came to dinner at the White House, and a few days after that went riding with the two cousins, she and Helen sitting in the back of the car while the President sat by the driver. He seemed very tired and hardly said a word while his cousin and her friend chattered away. Around five-thirty they drove back to the White House and he asked the guest if she would not join them for dinner. There was something plaintive in the way he told her he and Cousin Helen were entirely alone. After
they ate he seemed far more lively and the three of them sat around a fire talking about books and their pasts in the South. He read aloud, as he always loved to do, and spoke feelingly of his father, who had drilled him in English and composition when he was a boy. He talked a good deal of that boyhood, of the time he saw Jefferson Davis, the prisoner of Union soldiers, being led past his home in Georgia. She spoke also of her family; she was a direct descendant of Pocahontas, who after saving Captain John Smith from execution married John Rolfe and was Mrs. Galt’s grandmother seven times removed. They talked about the scrimping the parents of both had to do after the Civil War, and of Negro ex-slaves their families knew. She saw, she thought, boyishness and simplicity in him, and something crying out for human companionship.

  In the days that followed, the President and Mrs. Galt went for frequent rides with his cousin as chaperone (along with the ever-present Secret Service men), and she came often to dine in the White House. He sent her a book, and read aloud to her in the Oval Room. She met Margaret and Nellie, and he asked Dr. Grayson to come for dinner with Altrude. On April 30 in that spring of 1915 the four dined together, with Grayson performing the duty of picking up the ladies at their homes. The President earlier sent each a corsage of roses, golden ones for Mrs. Galt and pink for Altrude. Grayson came by at seven forty-five to pick up the older woman, she in a Worth black charmeuse gown with golden slippers, and the two drove together to get Altrude. Altrude, only twenty-one, was found in an unready state: she had decided the pink roses did not go with the dress she planned to wear and was changing into another one. Grayson, on edge and anxious that his friend make a good impression on the President, went into a panic at the idea that they would be late. “Make her come on,” he begged Mrs. Galt, and urged that the finishing touches be done in the auto—he would turn his head. They went to the car and Altrude and Mrs. Galt spent the time of the trip in deciding whether the pink roses should be worn at the side of the shoulder or the waistline. (Finally they chose the shoulder.) The dinner went off splendidly and on May 4 Mrs. Galt (in white satin and green slippers) was back to dine with the President, Aunt Annie and her daughter, Helen, Margaret and Grayson. It was a warm night and the party adjourned to the South Portico for their coffee. Soon everyone else drifted away, Grayson leaving and the other women taking a stroll on the south lawn. Mrs. Galt was alone with the President. He moved his chair closer to hers and said, “I have asked Margaret and Helen to give me an opportunity to tell you something tonight that I have already told them.” And he said he loved her.

  She was astonished. They had known each other two months; they were still “Mr. President” and “Mrs. Galt” to each other. “Oh, you can’t love me,” she said. “You don’t really know me. And it is less than a year since your wife died.”

  “I know you feel that,” he said. “But, little girl, in this place time is not measured by weeks, or months, or years, but by deep human experience; and since her death I have lived a lifetime of loneliness and heartache. I was afraid, knowing you, I would shock you; but I would be less than a gentleman if I continued to make opportunities to see you without telling you what I have told my daughters and Helen: that I want you to be my wife.” He went on, saying any relationship between them would provoke gossip but that they would have to bear it and that it would be best for her to come to the White House rather than for him to call on her, but that if she cared for him as he cared for her she would accept these things. And the girls and Helen would act as chaperones.

  They talked for more than an hour, and at the end she said that if she must that night say yes or no she would have to say no, that she needed time to decide what to do. He and Helen drove her home.

  The next day Helen came for a walk in the park. No mention was made of the previous night, but when they sat down on some stones for a rest Helen observed that Cousin Woodrow looked really ill that morning. “Just as I thought some happiness was coming into his life!” Helen snapped. “You are breaking his heart!” Mrs. Galt explained she thought she was being fair to both parties in saying they ought to move slowly, and was certain she was right in trying to stand off from the situation and thus see it more clearly. This would have to be accepted as her attitude.

  The next meeting between the couple was upon the occasion of a Presidential review of the Atlantic Fleet in New York. The outing had been planned before his proposal of marriage, and she decided to go ahead with it even if the circumstances were difficult. They sailed down on the Presidential yacht Mayflower with Aunt Annie and her daughter, Margaret, Helen, Joe Tumulty, Grayson and Altrude. From Chesapeake Bay to New York a violent storm raged. Helen hid in her cabin, telling everyone to leave her alone in her agony, and Altrude simply lay down on the deck while the pale Grayson, naval rank notwithstanding, reeled and gagged. The President’s valet tried to bring brandy and ice for Altrude but could not raise his head and collapsed in the dining saloon. Mrs. Galt went below and took the liquor from him. She carried it part way to the deck but ran out of good health in the hatch and lay on her back with her eyes closed, clutching the brandy bottle to her chest. The President found her so and could not help laughing at the sight; that made her laugh too, and she felt better. At lunch only she and the President and Joe Tumulty appeared. When lamb with peas was served Tumulty turned a color Mrs. Galt thought similar to that of the peas and disappeared. When the yacht was finally docked in the Hudson, Tumulty and Margaret quickly announced that urgent matters made it imperative that they return to Washington at once by train. The others on the way back found the water calm and the spring weather very fine, and they anchored in the Potomac and went ashore to see Robert E. Lee’s birthplace. By that time the President was talking about his work and problems to Mrs. Galt, and she was torn by the desire to help him and the fear that really she was unqualified to do so.

  She worried about what to do, but she continued to see him for drives and dinners, with Margaret, Nellie or Helen invariably being their companions. She introduced her own family into the situation, bringing her sister Bertha to tea on a day when Helen and Margaret did not appear and the President brewed the tea himself, with the result that the drink, to her taste, was more like lye than tea. Afterward the three of them walked in the garden, which was glorious in the early summer weather. He had rented a summer place in New Hampshire and Margaret and Helen asked her to visit. She did so, driving up with Helen via Princeton, where Helen acted as guide on a tour of his former haunts. They went on for shopping in New York and then to the summer place, where they were joined in a few days by the President and Grayson. Margaret came up also. Jessica, the middle daughter, and her husband, Francis B. Sayre, came over from Massachusetts, where he was teaching at Harvard. The party went for drives and picnics, and Francis Sayre was struck by the ease and informality of the way the President acted in the rural surroundings. They ate out in the open and went for long walks as they had in the Princeton days when Sayre first met the President and Jessica, even though of course in those earlier times there were no Secret Service men always very close at hand.

  Many of the members of the party stayed on after the President and Grayson went back to Washington for a while, and Helen and Mrs. Galt transferred their walking tours to these new surroundings, going out every day. But to the latter the house seemed a dead place when its temporary owner was not there.

  Still she could not make up her mind to marry him while he was in office, although she said she would do so if he was defeated in the 1916 election. In July she left New Hampshire to visit some friends in upstate New York, carrying with her the memory of his figure standing in the open door, dressed in white flannels and looking after her as she drove away. On September 3 she returned to Washington and found flowers awaiting her along with a note of welcome reminding her that she had promised to dine with him at the White House on her first night home. She went to find the President was meeting with Secretary of War Lindley M. Garrison. Helen and Margaret were in the Red Room, however, and had a g
ood deal to say to her about keeping him in a state of suspense about the romance. Finally he came in from the Blue Room and in her eyes he was so distinguished-looking in his evening clothes that when she put her hands in his and met his gaze something changed in her and she knew they would marry. After dinner Margaret went out and Mrs. Galt and the two cousins, Helen and the President, went for a ride through Rock Creek Park. He talked about the problem of keeping the United States out of the war and ended by saying that he had come to understand her reluctance to assume the responsibilities his wife must necessarily have during such difficult times. The car had as passengers a Secret Service man and the chauffeur, and Helen was sitting right beside her, but despite them she put her arms around his neck and said, “Well, if you won’t ask me, I will volunteer.” So it was decided. The next morning they told Margaret and Nellie they were engaged.

  Edward Mandell House was a thin, small, retiring Texan who always talked in almost a whisper. He had inherited a sum of money that made it unnecessary for him to work for a living and he interested himself in politics, becoming adviser to a succession of Texas governors, one of whom made him an honorary colonel—a title by which most people came to address him. When Governor Wilson of New Jersey was named candidate at the Democratic convention of 1912, House struck up a friendship with the nominee, who found him a singularly agreeable man. The candidate was elected President and the relationship grew even warmer, with House suggesting Cabinet members and overseeing political fence-mending. In time it was said that the Colonel’s ear was the one to reach if you had something to say to the President, and it was true: the President relied upon House in many ways.