The Judges of the Secret Court (11 page)

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.

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.

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?

He found out soon enough. The news was everywhere. Wilkes had shot Lincoln.

That overwhelmed him. That was the madness of the family, showing at last. But it did not surprise him. Not, at any rate, now that it had happened. In an insane family, it is only the sane one who worries about his sanity. “You look like Hamlet,” his father had said in California. “Why do you not do it for your benefit?” But Hamlet was a role to no one's benefit. It had too much melancholy in it. Now Wilkes had put them on a larger stage, and they would all die in Act Five. For no one gains from Hamlet, no one at all, except Fortinbras. That normal creature, that only member of the audience upon the stage, is moved, unmoved, and yet survives it all, to his own benefit.
That devil Wilkes
, in Wilkes' case, was no devil, but only a poor devil. If we are trained to do so, how easily we rant on; but that would not save the family.

Edwin stayed in his room. Yet he could not stay in his room. He would have to take some action. His mother, that simple hearted creature, alone in New York with his idiot sister Rosalie, would need his help. And so would Junius and his sister Asia, with her husband, Sleeper Clarke, who would be furious now. At least his own daughter was safe with Asia.

“
If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all
.” Those lines summed up his life. They were his favourite lines. He had spoken them much more than a hundred times. He thought of them often. And yet he was not ready.

There was a note from the manager of the theatre, not so much to ask, as to point out to him, that it would be better if he did not appear that night. Edwin sat down and answered it. He wrote from the heart, for he had a heart, and he had always admired Lincoln. He would co-operate in every way. And he agreed. It would be better if he never acted again. How could he? He had tried to rise above his family, but his inheritance had once more pulled him down. Madness was all. An actor is limited. He has no right to make the world his stage, for then he reminds us of what we do not want to know, that we are merely players.

“I am oppressed,” he wrote Jarrett, the manager who had decided to close the theatre, “by a private woe not to be expressed in words.” And neither was it. He could only stare. Even Edwina's name would be besmirched by this thing Wilkes had done. It was all very well to say not so, but he knew how the world went.

In Cincinnati, Junius Brutus Booth had yet to find out.

In that family it was Junius Brutus who was the businessman. His nerves were as thick and as sensible as his legs. The eldest, he saw himself as the uncle of them all. He was also the sanest. But he did not know what had happened. He came downstairs after breakfast and told the desk clerk he was going for a walk. The clerk winced and told him there was a mob out in the streets, waiting to tear him to pieces.

Junius did not understand and looked bewildered. He knew about mobs, of course, and what they could do, for he had been a charter member of the Vigilantes in California. But that had been a small mob, acting only because there was no other justice to call upon. Here life was orderly and settled, as it was supposed to be. What had a mob to do with him?

The clerk told him.

Junius could hear the mob now. It was a sound he had never heard before, for in California he had been at the head of it. It was his first and only glimpse of what lies underneath the surface of life, and from what lies that surface is accreted. The clerk told him to take refuge in his room upstairs, and he went at once.

But he could hear them down there, and for the first time in his life he was afraid. He was afraid of what life was. Unlike Edwin, he was not a thinking man. He was merely clever. He had never before glimpsed the reality of the theatrical pretence.

It made him unwilling ever to enact tragedy again. The sound downstairs was inhuman. He could almost hear that mob knot a greasy rope. It did not even care that he was the wrong man. It merely wanted someone to play with.

Finally the hotel staff managed to smuggle him away.

For their mother, in New York, it was perhaps worst of all.

Mary Ann had felt lost for years. Without her husband, and uprooted from Maryland, she no more than existed in New York. A country girl snatched up from London flower selling, she had been whisked here, by a man who could not even marry her, and buried on a farm in Maryland. In forty years she had not yet caught her breath. She at least had the children. Their father's death had been almost a relief; illegitimate they might be, but now at least there would be grandchildren to play with.

It had not worked out that way. She did not understand the brood she had reared. They puzzled her as much as their father had done, and she loved them far less. They were so seldom home, and their children they kept away from her. Even Edwin, who meant to be kind, sent his daughter to Philadelphia and not to her. Asia was a witty, caustic stranger, ashamed of her own birth. Junius Brutus evaded her, Edwin, who had been so lively a child, had unaccountably darkened. He was kind to her, of course, but only because he wished to be. She was not taken in by that, even though she was grateful to him for being so. Rosalie was weak minded, though, since she stayed home, she was better than no company at all.