II.
“You know the President,” said Irving, while we were travelling from Boston to Washington.
“Yes; I met him once or twice during the contest when he was ultimately returned as Vice-President with General Garfield. His likeness had become very familiar to me before I saw him. Candidates for the high offices of state are not only photographed, but their pictures are painted in heroic proportions. You see them everywhere,—on flags and banners, in shop-windows, in the newspapers. But you will be in the thick of it next autumn, since you have really decided to return this year.”
“Oh, yes!—but tell me about your meeting with the President,—what is he like?”
“Tall and handsome; frank and genial in manner; an excellent conversationalist; well read,—a gentleman. I became acquainted with him on the eve of his election to the vice-presidential chair. At his installation hundreds of his personal friends and admirers from eastern and western cities made ‘high festival,’ in his honor at Washington. Two years later I saw him, with sorrowful face and head bowed down, start for the capital, to stand by the bedside of the dying President, with whom he had been elected. Soon afterwards the friends, who had metaphorically flung up their caps for him on the merry day of his installation with Garfield, went, ‘with solemn tread and slow,’ to assist at his inauguration into the chair which, for a second time, the hand of the assassin had rendered vacant. My recollection of Mr. Arthur pictured a stout, ruddy-complexioned man, with dark hair and whiskers, and a certain elasticity in his gait that betokened strong physical health. I remember that we sat together by the taffrail of a Sound steamer, and talked of the vicissitudes of life and its uncertainties, and that I was deeply moved with sympathy for him in regard to the death of his most accomplished and amiable wife, of whom he spoke (apropos of some remark that led up to his bereavement) with a quivering lip and a moistened eye. The day had been a very pleasant one; the bay of New York was sleeping in the sun; the air was balmy; the time gracious in all respects; but, while doing his best to enliven the passing hour, Arthur’s thoughts had wandered to the grave of his wife. She was a very accomplished woman, I am told; musical, a sweet disposition, refined and cultivated in her tastes. Friends of mine who knew her say that she, above all others, would have rejoiced in her husband’s victory; and, while inspiring him with fortitude under the calamity that lay beyond, would have lent a grace to his reign at the White House that alone was necessary to complete the simple dignity of his administration, social and otherwise, which will always be remembered at Washington in connection with the presidentship of Chester A. Arthur.”
“I have letters to the President, which I shall certainly take the first opportunity to deliver,” said Irving.
When I met Mr. Arthur again in his own room, at the Executive Mansion, I was struck with the change which the anxieties and responsibilities of office, entered upon under circumstances of the most painful character, had wrought upon him. His face was careworn; his hair white; his manner subdued. He stooped in his gait; the old brightness had gone out of his eyes, and there was what seemed to be a permanently saddened expression about the corners of his mouth. He did not look sick; there was nothing in his face or figure denoting ill-health or physical weakness; but in the course of four years he appeared to me to have aged twenty. I had not been in Washington a day before he sent for me and my family, with a pleasant reference to the time when last we met. Looking back over these four years, and considering its record of trouble and anxiety, I could well have forgiven him if he had forgotten my very existence. That he recalled the occasion of our meeting, and was still touched with the spirit of it, I mention to do him honor, not myself; though, had it pleased Providence not to have afflicted me with a never-ending sorrow, I could have felt a high sense of personal pride in the homelike reception which the President of the United States gave to me and my family, in his own room at the Executive Mansion, sitting down with us and chatting in a pleasant, unconstrained, familiar way, that is characteristic of American manners, and eminently becomes the chief of a great republic.
Were this book only intended for English readers I would hesitate (even with the friendly approval of my collaborator) about publishing these few sentences, so personal to myself, lest it should be thought I might be “airing my connections”; but a President per se is not held in such profound estimation or reverence in America as in England, where we rank him with the most powerful of reigning monarchs, and give him a royal personality. Moreover, I should be ungrateful did I not take the best possible opportunity to acknowledge a conspicuous act of kindliness and grace on the part of one who, since I last met him, had stepped from the private station of mere citizenship to the chief office of state over fifty millions of people, wielding an individual power in their government that belongs to no constitutional sovereign, nor to any prince or minister in the most despotic courts or cabinets of Europe.