The Judges of the Secret Court (19 page)

Booth would have turned away. But before he could do so, Herold had him out of the saddle and on to his crutches. Herold was hungry. They went into the house.

The sight of that large and comfortable parlour made Booth blink. A woman, obviously the doctor's wife, sat with his elaborately dressed daughters. The girls were weedy, but the mother had plump, complacent arms decked out with gold bracelets. He would have said something courtly, in his customary, half-forgotten style, had not one of the daughters raised her hand to her mouth and gasped.

That reminded him. He looked a tramp, so that was what they thought him. Young girls like their soldiers to be officers, and smart with boot polish at that. He was stubbly and filthy, probably wide eyed with fever, and the bandage on his foot must look like a piece of marbleized paper soaking in a gutter. In the expression of their faces he could see that he was something they did not want to remember, the exact image of what civilians hate most in a war, though they cheer loudly enough when the troops go off.

He did not try to speak. He allowed Stewart to lead him to the study. It was a heavy, red rep room. Stewart glanced at the bandage, poked his fingers in it, and realized that the sooner he washed his hands the better. And yet he couldn't turn them away, nor would he accept money from a Confederate soldier for so slight a service. At the same time, he most decidedly would not put them up. He did not like the look of them. But he did say he would see that the servants got them something to eat. He led them to the kitchens and left them there.

Herold saw nothing demeaning in that. The closest he had ever gotten to the gentry was their kitchen offices. The room was warm and the food plentiful. He had no objection to sitting down at the plain plank table, said the doctor was very kind, and began to stuff himself. Opposite him some copper pans and dessert moulds hung on the wall. They gleamed. Dr. Stewart must be well fixed. Why didn't Booth eat? The food was good.

Booth didn't bother to answer. He raged. He felt the humiliation of sitting here all the more deeply, for being so feeble. The one thing he had always insisted upon was entering life by the front door. It was his due. It was a demand he had always bought with his appearance, and not even Bessie Hale's father would have dared to send him to the kitchens. Now Lincoln had reduced him to this filthy discarded scarecrow whom nobody would have dreamed of asking to sit anywhere else. He felt for the first time some of the terror, but none of the resignation, of the middle-aged character actor, who earns his living by pretending to be less than he is, and so becomes what he is forced to impersonate. He would not be degraded so. He got up and hobbled off in search of Dr. Stewart. The man could at least tell him of some place where he might stay. He had never before realized how much of a man's position in this world comes from a razor and a good suit of clothes, how little from his character.

Stewart met him in the front hall, barring entrance to the living room. Booth missed none of that. The nearest place to sleep was a Negro shanty down the road, owned by a freed man called William Lucas. Stewart said he would not ordinarily send a white man to a nigger, he apologized for that, but there was no other nearby house. Booth fetched Herold, got back on Bryant's horse, and rode off into the woods. He had put all the sarcasm he could manage into thanking Stewart for his hospitality, but he had not been able to say enough.

In the first clearing they came to he drew rein, got out the diary, and scribbled away by the light of a candle stump. He did not realize that all he achieved was a written whine.

“It is not the substance, but the manner in which kindness is extended, that makes one happy in the acceptance thereof. ‘The sauce to meat is ceremony; meeting were bare without it.' Be kind enough to accept the enclosed five dollars (though hard to spare) for what we have received,” he wrote. The trouble was he could not afford even five dollars. He rewrote the letter and cut the price to two and a half. That humiliated him still further, for the one way a gentleman has of showing his contempt for scoundrels, is to pay them more than their services are worth. But he could no longer afford to be a gentleman. Two fifty would have to do.

He signed the note, “A Stranger”, and sent the note back by Bryant. He hoped it would give Stewart a bad moment or two. Instead, it was to save the man's life. Then he took a swig of whisky and rode on.

The Lucas shanty was nothing but a clapboard ruin badly chinked. At first, Lucas would not come out when summoned. When he did come out, he was a shivering darky of the kind that makes you want to kick them as soon as they open their mouths. He wouldn't let them in. He said his wife was ill, and besides, he only had one room. Booth would have to go away.

What right did a nigger, freed man or not, have to tell a white man what he could or couldn't do? Booth hit him with one of his crutches. It was the first time he had struck a nigger, but he had had enough. He barged inside and told Lucas to get his wife out of there. Lucas decided he could do that. Herold sniggered. Booth had the bed stripped, because you never knew what bugs a nigger might have, lay down and went to sleep.

He had had enough. He had had enough.

Edwin had not yet left the house on 19th Street. It was night, and he found the nights worse than the days. During the day he hid from the world. But at night the world was sleeping, he could not, and so it was himself then he had to hide from.

He thought he should have done something to prevent this. He had known Wilkes was crazy on the subject of Lincoln. He had even heard Wilkes say that awful sentence, that there was a great way for a man to immortalize himself, by shooting the President. But he had thought that only Wilkes's posturing, and had believed that Wilkes was too concerned to posture ever to take part in real events.

Now he had. That one shot had shattered the whole family. How could any of them face the world again?

His only consolation was that he himself had once saved Robert Lincoln's life. It had happened on a train. Robert Lincoln had missed his footing and started to fall under the wheels. Edwin had hauled him safely up. He told everybody about that, the way an old pensioner shows his certificate of service to strangers who do not even remember the campaign he served in, let alone the man himself. The Booth family madness had come out at last. Against that, nothing weighed on the balanced side.

Junius had been arrested. Nothing could be done with that optimist. He wrote confident, bubbly letters from prison, telling Edwin that it would be over soon enough and that the world would soon forget. Edwin knew better. It would never be over and the world would never forget. Sleeper Clarke was in the next cell, raging against them all. June did not say that, but Edwin knew it. Sleepy would never forgive Asia for getting him into this, and Asia was under house arrest. It could not be easy for her, though she made it no easier for anyone else, in refusing to condemn Johnny. She spoke out too much. Edwina was still with her, and if Asia's correspondence was being opened, Edwin shuddered for the safety of his daughter.

Few of his friends wrote to console him. That did not surprise him. He was only surprised that a few did, which touched him deeply, and he answered as best he could. It was the other mail that disturbed him, the anonymous letters, the signed threats, and the charitable communications from acquaintances who wrote to say they had known how terrible the Booth family was, right from the beginning. John Wilkes was not dead yet, so far as was known, and yet he had received three letters from hysterical women claiming to be his widow, who wrote to ask about the estate. If it had not been for Aldrich, he would have gone mad.

Sometimes late at night the two men slipped out of the shuttered house, to take a constitutional in the streets. As far as Edwin was concerned, those streets could never now be empty enough. He shrank from everyone. As Asia had written, “Those who have passed through such an ordeal, if there are any such, may be quick to forgive, slow to resent; they never relearn to trust in human nature, they never resume their old place in the world, and they forget only in death.”

Yet he could not shrink from meeting everyone. As his father had once told him, everybody knows Tom Fool. In this life we knot our own noose. He had always known that. But at least one might be allowed to kick away the box one's self.

“ 'Tis a mere matter of time. I feel sure Time will bring all things right,” wrote June. How could June be such a fool?

On Monday, the 24th of April, Lincoln's body arrived in New York, escorted across the water from Newark on the train ferry. To New York it was a procession, and New York loves processions. The window sashes were removed from the windows, so that people might have a better look. But a look was all they wanted.

Edwin had determined to stay indoors. And yet, though he told nobody, he knew he had to look. He found a place in the crowds which lined the streets.

As the catafalque entered the street, it seemed to sway down upon him like the cart of juggernaut. Its wobbling motion, behind its horses, was something he would never be able to forget. The crowds seemed unmoved. He did not understand. Perhaps fright had sobered them into their best behaviour, but our best behaviour is often our worst. This did not seem to mean anything to them at all. And yet he had only to open a newspaper to see how they cried for vengeance. Was grief, then, only the pretext for vengeance? Somehow he did not himself find it so. Grief should make one gentle, not venomous.

The catafalque was hauled out of sight, and he went back to his house. Did these crowds not realize that they were watching something much more terrible than even the worst raree-show? Or was a raree-show all they made out of the real meaning of life?

Perhaps.

The body was removed to City Hall, outside of which a chorus of eight hundred chanted the Pilgrims' Chorus from
Tannhäuser
. It was the latest music. New York believes in keeping up to date. A little puzzled by the vast world out there, beyond the Hudson, it only feels secure in novelty. That is its only pre-eminence.

Yet the obsequies, and in particular the decorations, left nothing to be desired. Other cities might place an eagle over the catafalque. New York had a silver eagle whose wings were folded and whose head appropriately drooped. It was a triumph of artistic expression, and yet the mourners, as the papers pointed out, seemed chiefly to be impressionable shop girls. Observers noted that though the respect was beautifully paid, there was less feeling and less sorrow in New York than elsewhere.

To tell the truth, the mourners found the body exposed and dusty. He was only a man, and a dead man at that, and the parade was more impressive than its occasion, they thought. It had, indeed, a magnificent allegorical float. When the body had been seen off on the train, the city took down the black bunting and went about its usual affairs, which were, after all, of some importance.

However, it had been a good procession, the citizens of the Fifth Ward of Brooklyn had been particularly impressive, and of course the Negro population had been deeply moved. Everyone had applauded the devotion of the Negroes. As a cheap labour pool, they would be invaluable.

The Honourable George Bancroft delivered an oration in Union Square. The Rev. Osgood recited an ode, and William Cullen Bryant, who was still alive, though his recovery from tuberculosis had been the death of his muse, had distributed among a few friends a little hymn.

But at Mount Vernon, near Yonkers, the Sisters of Charity, with veiled heads, stood on the lawn before their convent, surrounded by their two hundred pupils, and watched the slow funeral train go by, until it had vanished around a bend, leaving in the air behind it only a low, dissolving tube of black smoke. The countryside was more devout. Bonfires lit the hills, and sometimes the stations. In Ohio, at Richmond, the bells of the city rang out across the dark, to summon the citizens to the station. People came in from the country, through the hot, sticky night, in their farm wagons, and sat on their buckboards, as the train slowly passed by. Guns fired. And at Urbana, the young ladies of the community, stiff in new frocks, entered the funeral car and dropped flowers on the bier.

It was incredible: the farther the train got from the urban centres which had processed the most, the deeper into the real country those politicians in Washington City thought they knew so well and knew they ruled, the more, as the train passed on, the real tribute came down to the trackside and flared on the hills, although the train did not stop.

As the train moved through Ohio into Illinois, the people brought not silver eagles, black velvet, and a gaggle of Bishops; not hymns, odes, and the latest music from Europe, but flowers.

From everywhere, that late spring, they brought flowers, from the fields, wilting already in the hands of those who held them, from the gardens and nurseries, arranged in set pieces and in vases, white roses, immortelles, amaranth, orange blossoms, and the emblematical justicia, for in those days people knew, what we have forgotten, the ancient language of flowers. They brought evergreen boughs and the flowers of the season, which meant more to them than laurel.

The eagle, which in New York had so artfully drooped, in the back country was larger and more triumphant. And at Chicago they did him proud. It surprised everyone. No one had realized that there were so many to care in Chicago. Again, before the coffin departed on its final journey, there were more flowers, that most ancient, prechristian, pagan, and perpetual of Man's offerings, which he offers in his fist, when it is too late, to he knows not what. Most of these people were of British stock. They might not understand each other or themselves. But they understood the meaning of flowers.

At 9:30 the cortège left Chicago for Springfield. Along the way it passed through the hamlet of Lincoln, a place named after him, in whose origins he had taken an interest. There, there was an arch over the railroad bed, and a choir in white, but the train did not stop.