The Judges of the Secret Court (22 page)

He led the way towards the barn.

Booth stood in the middle of darkness. There had to be some way of preventing capture, but he could think of none. Even in the woods, he had not felt so afraid.

He could see nothing but dim chinks of light between the slats of the walls, and yet he was aware of men moving out there. They no longer bothered to keep silent. They must be sure of themselves. Someone had lit a torch. Its flickering light spread long streaks across the floor. He heard the padlock unhasped, but the door did not open. Herold neither moved nor spoke. There was nothing to be done with him. His jaw was wobbling. Booth reached for his carbine.

The barn shook as someone kicked against it. “Wake up in there. We have come to arrest you,” shouted a man's voice. “We have the place surrounded. Open the door.”

There was no answer.

Baker put his candle on the ground and confronted Bill Garrett. “I'm going to send you inside. Tell them to surrender.”

Bill didn't want to go in there. He was afraid of getting shot.

“You go in there, or we'll shoot you right now.” Baker swung the door open, shoved him in, and slammed it behind him.

It was dark inside, but the bars of light cast by the torches flickered over Bill Garrett's legs as he stumbled forward.

“Damn you. Get out of here. You have betrayed us,” shouted Booth.

Bill Garrett stood stock still and began to plead. His voice was a whisper. As far as anybody outside could tell, nothing happened. In a minute he was at the door, begging to get out. Conger said to let him out.

He came out trembling. “They don't want to surrender.”

“Did you tell them who we are?”

“They didn't ask.”

“No, they wouldn't ask,” said Conger. He was a professional soldier. That gave him both a decency and an understanding that Baker, a ferret in uniform and nothing more, lacked. Baker was one of Stanton's men. Baker doused the lights, put his mouth to one of the slits of the siding, and told the men inside they had just five minutes to surrender their arms and come out, otherwise the barn would be fired.

Booth had been grateful for that abrupt dark. It was like a last blanket, pulled over his face by a man who wants to go on sleeping, even though he is at last awake. But he was afraid of fire. Herold was crying.

Booth spoke up, making his voice as rich and as assured as he could. “Who are you?” he asked. “Whom do you want? We are guilty of no crime.” He could not help but plead for time.

Neither could he get it.

“It doesn't matter who we are,” said Baker. “We know who you are, and we have fifty men around this place. You can't possibly get away. Come out peacefully and you won't be harmed.”

“Give us a few minutes to think it over.” If this drivelling, snivelling fool had been Payne, rather than Herold, he would not be in such a fix. But there was nothing to be done with Herold. “I am a cripple,” he shouted. “I have only one good leg. Give me a chance for my life. Withdraw your men a hundred yards from the door, and I'll come out and fight you.”

It was a proposal so ridiculous it made Conger spit. “Tell him to go to hell,” he said.

“We can't do anything like that.” Baker tried to sound patient. “We came here to take you prisoner, not to lose men fighting with you.”

There was a pause.

“Fifty yards,” the voice begged.

Conger cursed. The soldiers standing behind him grinned. The man was mad.

“Surrender and come out, or we fire the barn and shoot,” said Baker.

There was another pause.

“Very well, then, my brave boys, prepare a stretcher for me,” shouted Booth.

“What the hell does he mean by that?” Conger asked. “We've had enough of play acting.”

Booth would never have enough of it.

Conger told the Garrett boy to get some brush and pile it against the building, so they could fire the barn. The man in there had shot the President. He saw no reason why he should be allowed to shoot innocent soldiers as well.

Bill remembered that his father had a neighbour's furniture stashed in that barn for safe keeping. He hesitated. Conger told him to do as he was told.

“We'll give that idiot in there just two more minutes. Then I fire the barn.”

They could hear two men arguing inside. One of them sounded on the verge of tears. That was Herold. Herold was whining not so much for his life, as for just five minutes more of it.

Booth felt rather Roman. If it must be this way, then it must, but he would grant Herold his life. The manumission of a slave is the last act of a Seneca.

“Let me out quick. I don't know anything about this man. He's a desperate character, and is going to shoot me,” yelled Herold. Fear had stimulated him to a certain worthless cunning.

Booth did not even hear him.

He was himself again. The curtain was about to go up. A noble Roman was about to open his veins, rather than be executed by the Emperor Nero (it was Nero, wasn't it, who asked Seneca to despatch himself?). But stoicism is a private affair. We do not demand that our servants be slain with us. We are not so primitive as that. Besides, he could not stop Herold.

“All right, Colonel,” he called. “There's a man here who wants to surrender.”

“Let him come out, then, but he must bring his arms with him.”

“He has no arms. He swears to you he is guilty of no crime.”

That was exactly the way Herold felt about it. He was guilty of no crime.

“For Chrissake, let the poor bastard out,” Conger told Baker. “I'd hate to be in there with that lunatic. He seems to think he's still on a stage.”

Baker opened the door. In the dark opening he saw a pair of extended hands. Then Herold came capering out.

“I always liked Mr. Lincoln's jokes,” he simpered. “I thought he was a fine man. I always liked his jokes.”

Baker yanked him aside by the wrists and turned him over to the soldiers. Herold began to cry.

A faint glow appeared at the side of the barn. With a snap, it blossomed out of its pod and spread up the building. The wood was old. The slats began to blaze at once. Through the slats Baker caught sight of Booth. The man was standing motionless in the middle of the barn. In that lurid half light he resembled his brother Edwin, and the flickering shadows made him seem taller. There was no expression in his eyes.

He was looking at the fire. It had caught at the straw which hid the furniture, and flamed up from the varnish on it. The smoke was getting heavy. At first he was blinded by so much light. He stared at it almost idly, and remembered the name of the man that poem was about, the man who fired the Ephesian dome. The man was Herostratus, a white skinned young fanatic. He looked at his own hands. They were spotted and dingy.

The smoke made his eyes smart. He looked at the gun in his hand. The flames cast deep shadows and lurid lights on the roof beams. The barn, which was big enough to begin with, now seemed immense. The carbine was too clumsy. He dropped it and took out his revolver. No doubt he was being watched from outside. He had an audience. He took three or four steps forward. But what was forward, here? Whatever happened, he would not be led through the streets of Washington like some king of Armenia. He saw the scene, the crowds, the top hats, the togas, the crinolines, and the chains. And then reality struck him.

He was going to die. This was not a performance. It was real. It was something for which there would be no applause and no demand for a benefit. This was what reality was: to die.

He could not believe it. He wanted to cry out. Did they not realize it had all been a game? If this was reality, why should he not be allowed to live? The other had not been real, the assassination. It was only a pretence they would burn or hang him for. He had died on the stage quite often. That did not hurt. But this would. These villains meant to kill him here.

He tried to face the audience he could not even see, but the effort was too much for him. It was reality that was the pretence. The pretence was horrible.

“I am in this body,” he thought. “Oh, my God. They are going to take it away from me. I won't be able to act through it any more. I won't even be any more.”

Couldn't they take something else? Why couldn't they? Couldn't they let him go on acting? For any body would do for him to act in. He didn't care what it looked like or what was wrong with it, just so they let him have one. Couldn't they torture him instead?

But when one says Oh, my God, it isn't because one believes in Him. There isn't any God to intervene except on the winning side. It's because there isn't one that one calls out for Him. One realizes that at last, and the realization is horrible. God is as indifferent to our affairs, as Manitou or Brahman.

He remembered himself. He saw a hundred cartes-devisite, of Booth gallant, triumphant, white skinned, leaping on his horse, muscular, popular, sleeping in a warm bed, the idol of everyone.

It was the performance that was real, not the reality. For where else but on a stage could a man be himself? What else was the world, and society?

Raising his pistol, for he could not bear the sight of it, to a position out of his line of sight, he cocked it. A bullet whizzed by his ear. No. Only the performance was real. He shot himself behind the same ear. It was where he had shot Lincoln. It was where one administered the
coup de grâce
to a dying animal. But he did not think of that.

Sic semper tyrannis
.

But at least he had been one. Ambition had made him one. Every idol becomes one. It is so with everything we applaud, and he could hear that applause. It had a curious rush, like leaves in a gust along a corridor. And then he fell.

Baker went into the barn at once, and had Herold dragged in after him, to identify the body. Conger followed.

“He shot himself,” said Baker.

Conger said, “No.” He could not admit that the man had shot himself. If he did, he would then have failed to carry out his orders.

Herold, his face hot with flames, who did not want to burn and felt his eyebrows singeing already, said yes, it was Booth; and knew he had condemned himself with the admission.

The officers could not be bothered with Herold just then. Some soldiers were detailed to tie him to a tree in front of the house. Conger and Baker dragged Booth out of the flames.

Sergeant Corbett stepped forward to say that he had shot the man. Conger looked up and saw who it was. He knew all about Corbett. The man was a hysteric renegade, with the naked, shaved look of an insane man. He had mad eyes and a cracker's cunning. He was also castrated. That was what an earlier fit of religious fervour had led to.

“I shot him,” he repeated.

Baker told Conger he was crazy enough to have done anything. Conger took the hint, but he had to dress Corbett down.

“Providence directed me to do it, Sir. I heard the voice of God,” said Corbett.

Perhaps he had at that, thought Conger, but there were one or two legalities to be thought of. “He was trying to shoot one of us, I suppose.”

It was Corbett's turn to take the hint.

The barn was now blazing up to the rooftree. The light was both misleading and dazzling. Herold was praying, the tears trickling down his face. And Booth was still alive.

Some soldiers carried the body to the porch. Baker asked for brandy, Miss Holloway brought it, and soaking some on a handkerchief, ran it over Booth's lips. Baker held a candle over his head and moved it to and fro. Yes, the man's eyes were open.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked Booth.

Booth had died so many times on the stage. He knew how to do it. He had killed himself, and yet he had not died.

“Turn me over. The pain,” he said, and when they did, the pain was worse, so he asked to be turned back again.

“Did Jett betray me?”

Nobody answered him. He realized his body was paralyzed. Herold, tied to the tree, could see everything and heartily wished that he could not. He wondered if he would be killed there.

An officer bent over Booth. Booth could see him plainly. He could also see Mary Ann. “Tell Mother I died for my country,” he whispered.

“Is that what you say?” asked Conger. He was aware of himself, was Conger, kneeling there. He felt sorry for the poor fool.

“Yes,” said Booth. It was only play acting, after all. Then he panicked. He felt himself slipping away. He could not bear that inevitable and giddy motion.

“Kill me. Oh, kill me,” he begged. He would rather be killed than go through the terror of dying. He had had enough of reality.

Conger could not do that. He straightened up and looked across the yard. His soldiers stood about, young, ample, and easy in their spick and span and graceful uniforms. As the flames flickered, now one, and now another of them emerged from the darkness. They were oddly silent. There was something terrible about that dying body, something they did not want to hear about.

All men are actors, perhaps, but Conger, who was an older man, did not care for the silence of these. Corbett bothered him. That fanatic had the face of a barbered Medusa.

Booth fainted, but he was not dead yet. There was nothing to do but wait. The man took two and a half hours about dying.

Roped to the tree, even Herold was silent now. He had cried himself out.

Somewhere under consciousness Booth's body made a last effort. It was scarcely audible, because of the creak of leather-clad legs around him.

Conger bent over him to listen. It was only a little murmur, but Conger was not soon to forget it.

“Useless,” said Booth. “Useless.” And then he died.

So it had been, no doubt. Conger straightened up, his legs cramped with kneeling. What was not? Perhaps that was what the men had not wanted to hear. Looking down from the porch, he saw Corbett's greedy eyes.

Miss Holloway stepped forward and asked if she might not have a lock of the dead man's hair.