I
MISS ADGATE accepted the Bolingbrokes' invitation. She spent six weeks of gaiety in Washington. Indeed it was refreshing to live in the world again, to mix with people of the world; to have cogent reasons for dressing exquisitely every night for dinner, to be taken in to dinner by a facetious attaché, by, even, a complacent, redundant railway magnate; or, happy compromise, by a Member of the Cabinet, for it is well known that a Cabinet Minister may be amusing. Through the interchange of frivolities and banter one could rise, not to more important matters,—is anything much more important to the world than the light touch and a witty conversation? But Miss Adgate found refreshment in living again among people whose thoughts were sometimes occupied by questions impersonal, of more or less consequence to the world's history.
Someone possessed of a grain of humour has assured us that the “World is a good old Chum.”
Miss Adgate found the world at Washington a very good old chum during those six weeks. “In all but the aesthetic sense,” she reflected, “America is an interesting land to live in.” Plentiful wherever she went, tittle-tattle, supplemented by her own observations, helped her to form an idea of how this unwieldy bulk of a nation calling itself The United States of America was being rescued from fatuous chaos, a mass of political corruption and a superfluity of wealth, and lifted into an arrogant, resolute Power. But a Power whose outlook was as far removed from the simple hardy traditions of Puritan America as Earth is from Heaven.
An oligarchy of able men,—a handful,—chosen, directed, inspired by a man yet abler, more audacious than they,—these were moulding, had already changed the destiny, the policy of the United States.
Miss Adgate recognised the efforts of the Man at the Helm. He had followed a fixed idea, and the idea was the Greater Glory of his Country; he had secured with his henchmen indisputable prestige to the Nation, and, thanks to his star, his tenacity, his temerity, America,—feared to-day if not honoured, was powerful. But not alas approved of! “Damn approval!” (the worm will turn,—the watchword passed through the land). “We are ourselves.”
The “ourselves” went very far. This at least was the modest, unexpressed opinion of Miss Adgate,—it was shared, apparently, by the Man at the Helm. He lectured the Nation like a father. The Nation knowing itself to be unwholesome, inchoate, something ruthless, listened meekly.
“But,” Ruth reflected from the vantage of a calm and sympathetic observation: “So many religions, no Faith! Where every man, in disobedience to Christ, chooses to be his own Pope. Yet the Holy Father has dedicated America to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception.... But the very elements in America, so violent and so ferocious,—the burning Summers, the cruel Winters, the appalling cataclysms of Nature, if these are reproduced in the violent characters of the people, inclined to rape and rapine on a big or a little scale—at what end, left to its own devices, will the American character issue? Will it,” she wondered, “become, inflated with power, the great Master Robber of the World? Or will it perish utterly, hoist by its own petard?”
“Jerusalem! Jerusalem! Convertere ad Dominum Deum.”... Mournful and tender, in the melodious, yearning, touching accents of Tenebrae, the phrase filled her ears.
“No man at the Helm,” she sorrowfully said to herself, “shall save us for more than his few years of tenure. The race cries for direction, a sane outlet to its emotions. The sole influence which holds anarchy at bay is Holy Mother Church, wise men tell us. Yes, the Divine Authority!.. The sweet miracle of the Catholic Faith may save our people from ending as a nation of brutes; may open to us the gates of Humility and show to us the road to the 'Greater Glory of God.'”
And then, Miss Adgate woke with a start from her musings. She shook her pretty head. She returned to the practice of light banter and witty causerie, the only efficacious methods within reach, she reflected, of furthering the millennium her fancy painted for her native land.