A Shade of Difference (78 page)

He considered the idea of talking to Cullee about it himself, but abandoned it quickly. Any approach from him would only be regarded with the deepest suspicion, to say nothing of the fact that it might well be interpreted as a sign of weakness that would only encourage the Congressman in his stubbornness. He just couldn’t bring himself to the point of putting himself even indirectly in the position of being supplicant to a colored boy, even as fine and steady a one as this. Where Seab came from, you just didn’t consider anything like that.

Where he came from! There rushed flooding into his mind, with a pang so sharp it seemed to ravage his heart, the thought of his native state lying somnolent in the late-autumn sun, the low hills and valleys, the slow-moving rivers, the swamplands russet and dusty in the gentle haze. With it, as always, there came too the thought of “Roselands,” of the Cashtons, Amy and Cornelia and their father the Colonel, of the long-ago loves and long-ago dreams that had taken a poor boy from Barnwell to the high and mighty eminence of member and major force in the Senate of the United States over so long a span of vigorous, violent, and controversy-ridden years.

How long a time it had been, the public life of Senator Seabright B. Cooley, and how diligently and at what great cost in energy and determination had he seen it through. How melancholy it was now to have to look back upon it and be forced to wonder, as all men sooner or later must, what it had added up to, what its ultimate meanings had been, how well it had been lived when placed against the background of its origin and its era. The era might be ending, new thoughts and new purposes might be moving beneath the surface of the South, but it was not in his mind or being to look back and say that he had failed his people, his country, or himself. I have served you well, he told Carolina and the Cashtons and the land he loved with all the fierce affection of a heart that did not have too many things to love; I have served you well. And it seemed to him that from all down the years there came back the approving answer, yes, you have.

Why, then, must he face at seventy-six the strong possibility of repudiation at the polls, and, perhaps even more bitter, the thought of repudiation here in this Senate that was so much a part of him, on an issue upon which he knew a majority of his colleagues had serious reservations?

His mood did not brighten when he overtook Arly Richardson of Arkansas and John DeWilton of Vermont, as they boarded the subway car to the Capitol, and learned from those two politically sensitive gentlemen that much of the initial Senate annoyance with the Hamilton Resolution was beginning to mellow under the persuasive arguments of the President and the Secretary of State, both of whom apparently had been very busy on the telephone in the last few hours.

“After all,” Johnny DeWilton said with characteristic dryness, “what does a little resolution matter, among friends? If it will make the Hottentots happy, I can probably go along with it. I can’t see it will make such difference one way or the other.”

Arly Richardon was less inclined to be complacent, facing as he did in Arkansas much the same problem Seab faced in South Carolina, but even he indicated that it was so late in the session that he wouldn’t want to do more than make a protest for the record and then vote against it.

“No filibuster for me this time,” he said with a yawn. “If you want to, Seab, fire away. We’ll all watch.”

This was cold comfort, and no better was the indication a couple of minutes later from Alexander Chabot of Louisiana, dapper and elusive as always, that he, too, could not be counted upon for a filibuster.

“It’s too late in the session, I’m too tired, and I want to go home. It isn’t really that important, Seab.”

“It is to me,” Seab said bluntly, and Alec gave him his ironic sidelong glance and nodded.

“Maybe it would be for me, too, if I were up for re-election next year, but I’ve got four more years to go. By then Louisiana will have other things to worry about.… Oh, I’ll speak against it,” he said in response to the look of dismay—could the old man really be that scared, Alec wondered unbelievingly—that showed for an instant on Senator Cooley’s face. “But not a filibuster, Seab. Not this time.”

The whole atmosphere had shifted subtly since the House completed action last night. The narrowness of the vote had not had at all the effect Seab had assumed it would have upon his colleagues. If anything, it had seemed to increase the feeling of many of them that they must give an even more emphatic endorsement to Cullee’s resolution.

He found this particularly dismaying since the House vote represented a personal triumph that had satisfied him very well. He had not expected to beat the combination of Administration pressures arrayed against him, but to come within five votes of doing so had exceeded his most optimistic calculations. He had shown them he was a force to reckon with still, and while he had not beaten their precious resolution, at least he had come close enough to slow it down considerably. Or so, until he began to sense the mood of the Senate this morning, he had supposed.

His uncertainty gave a subtle but definite droop to his shoulders as he trudged along the corridors on his way to the Majority Leader’s private office for lunch. It was with a startled disbelief as sudden as Alec Chabot’s that the Secretary of State, coming along a few feet behind as Seab turned into the Senate Document Room on the gallery floor and started to walk through into the winding passageways beyond, realized that he was seeing a man who was old and tired as he had never, up to now, seen him old and tired before.

For himself, the Secretary of State also felt tired, if not so old. He wondered if it might not be true that all the leaders in all the countries felt tired in these savage days. He had a sudden vision of a little band of exhausted men, perched high in the superstructures of government above the vast uneasy mass of their fellow men below, all tired, all desperate, all uncertain, shouting wearily to one another across steadily widening chasms, gesturing halfheartedly through the rising mists with the terrible lassitude of those who have tried too much and failed too often, staggering together toward some ultimate and final disaster, dragging the helpless, bemused, and unhappy human race with them.

He sighed, a sudden, unexpected sound that startled a page boy darting past with a fistful of printed bills and resolutions, so that the youth said, “Hello, Mr. Secretary?” with a startled, questioning inflection. Don’t ask me to make sense of it, Orrin Knox responded silently in his mind.

“How are you, Billy?” he asked cordially. “I hope school is going well.”

“Just fine, thank you, sir.” The boy flashed a smile and hurried off.

Would that I could say the same for the world you are about to grow up in, the Secretary said silently after him. Would that I could.

What had caused this sudden and, on the whole, uncharacteristic gloominess, he was not entirely sure unless it might be just the general burden of the world, insistent as it was in so many events, so many dark, unhappy things. His morning paper had contained the news of three murders, two rapes, a teenage dope ring in Ohio, the figures to date on the year’s traffic fatalities, a police scandal in Kansas City, a price-fixing conspiracy in one of the nation’s major industries, a strike to secure an additional five minutes of coffee break at Cape Canaveral, the divorce of another of Hollywood’s ideal couples, a revolutionary outbreak in Chile, another adamant statement from the Soviet Union, the attempted assassination of the Duke of Edinburgh on an official visit to Guiana, another attack on the United States at a “neutralist” meeting in Kuala Lumpur, a sudden and peculiar little riot in the M’Bulu’s dusty capital of Molobangwe, another famine in Communist China, another crisis, another evil, another gray day on the downward slope of the twentieth century.

Perhaps humanity did not deserve to survive, he thought, so ravaged was it with hatred, so sadly bereft of love.

Well: that was no way to get done the jobs he had to do. He told himself that there might be time someday for such dank philosophizing, but it certainly was not now when he had so much on his mind and so many things that demanded his alert and unhesitating decision. To think too much about the evils of the world was to be hobbled by them, and this was not a luxury the Secretary of State could afford at the best of times, let alone in times as universally unrelieved as these.

In what some of his bright young underlings in the Department were wont to refer to as “the immediate sector,” he thought he could feel reasonably well pleased with the course of events. Cullee’s resolution had passed the House, and Cullee was apparently standing firm under the various pressures to which he was being subjected as a result of it. It was true, of course, that this morning’s editorial cartoon had featured a docile Cullee on a chain held by the Secretary, the caption reading, “Ah wuhks for Massuh Knox,” but Orrin’s impression of the Congressman was that he would not be deflected by attacks as crude as that. Nor, he suspected, could he be swayed by the similar clamor out of New York, much of it directed along the same lines.

But now, having asked Cullee to take the gaff in this fashion, and Cullee having done so, the Secretary found himself faced with the possibility of having to ask him to accept a modification of his resolution that he would in all likelihood regard as a betrayal by a white man whom he really trusted. Cullee had decided to offer his resolution only because Orrin had convinced him of its merit and promised to stand by him. Now because of the stubborn old figure just turning the corner there ahead of him, Orrin might have to renege a little—not very much, but enough, given the hair-trigger sensitivity of black persuaded by white to take a position unpopular with many of his own people, to seriously embitter Cullee.

Seriously, and perhaps permanently; and the consequences of that the Secretary could not contemplate with any equanimity. He felt it to be vitally important to the welfare of the country that Cullee Hamilton should remain a moderate; he did not like to imagine the consequences if the Congressman became a fanatic on the race question. There were few enough with the vision to forgive the white man his many trespasses and perceive that in a joint devotion to the ultimate good of the whole nation lay the salvation of its uneasy parts. Not to forget, possibly—it would take many generations, if ever, for that—but at least to forgive, and to go on from there together to work things out on a moderate middle ground free from the shrill yammerings of radicals both right and left, both black and white.

Of equal importance with preserving Seab’s dignity was preserving the dignity of Cullee Hamilton, and this he knew to be at the moment a much-battered though still powerful thing. The impression Orrin had of Cullee was of a very harassed and isolated individual who might, if he were not blessed with a strong character, give in. Such was only one of the many areas of havoc wrought by that high-riding, high-living, highbinding young character out of Africa, His Royal Highness the M’Bulu of Mbuele.

The thought of Terrible Terry, all six-feet-seven of him laughing away in his gorgeous robes, brought an expression of distaste to the Secretary’s face as he made the final turn in the winding corridor and saw Senator Cooley entering the Majority Leader’s hideaway down the hall ahead. He was quite a boy, was H.R.H. Terry, and Orrin Knox had a great respect for both his shrewdness and his inventive desire to do damage to the United States. Right now he was probably holding forth at the UN to some adoring circle of admirers, lambasting America for all he was worth. Was he, the Secretary wondered, aware of the strange little riot yesterday in Molobangwe and the thinly veiled hint in the early reports that it might in some way have been inspired by the left-leaning cousin he had appointed to run the country under his mother’s regency while he was away? Possibly he was not laughing quite so happily after all; possibly the news would call him home. Or possibly it meant nothing. But to one accustomed now to listen with all senses alert to all the subtle noises that occurred around the globe, it seemed to the Secretary that there might be an indication of trouble ahead in Gorotoland, just as the recent British White Paper had predicted. He decided to ask for an immediate report from the African desk at the Department the moment he returned from lunch.

The thought of the UN, drifting in its rudderless and gossipy way through the endless shoals of international disaster, missing by some miracle this fatal Scylla, escaping by some marvel that terminal Charybdis, caused him annoyance, too. He could agree with the Secretary-General that the social services of the organization were infinitely valuable and hopeful for humanity, and he could also agree on the marvelous potential—heartbreaking because so remote of realization—of the organization’s political mechanism. But until its individual members arrived at some concept of law and reason and decent dealing with one another, the former would remain infinitesimal and the latter would remain beyond reach. And not all the pious, idealistic, eyes-closed exhortations of its earnest friends in the United States and elsewhere would change these somber facts.

Fine words could not make the UN better. Only the UN could make the UN better.

He was especially disturbed about it at the moment, because of his concern for the acting head of the delegation and the problems that a need for replacement would create at this particular time when so much depended upon continuity and vigor of leadership there. Whatever his analysis of its effectiveness as a political agency might be, the Secretary of State was well aware of the UN’s character as a place where world opinion was free to run amuck. Some of its newer members had not liked the substitution of Cullee for LeGage—LeGage was more their type—and there had been much criticism in the Lounge and through the corridors and committee rooms and delegation headquarters. Some of this had been dutifully echoed by certain elements in the United States—LeGage had been invited to appear on a late-hours television show whose fey proprietor had wept copious verbal tears over his removal from the delegation—and all in all it had caused rather more of a fuss than seemed necessary.