Peggy O'Neal

by Alfred Henry Lewis

Before this, I have written somewhere, have I not?—for old age can not hold a memory, nor tell a lucid story step by step, but forever must wander to the garrulous this-side-or-that, with topics alien to the task in hand—how I caught some flash of the General's uncertainty of Van Buren and the pose that gentleman would take on? It fell in this kind. I had asked then a question about Van Buren, and how he compared with his fellow captain, Marcy. The General shook uncertain head.

“Van Buren may surprise us,” said he, “and show me wrong besides; but this is what I think. You are to bear in mind, also, that his selection to be at my cabinet right hand was not personal but political. Here is how I hold him.” Now the General spoke with a thoughtful, measured flow of speech, as though his eye were turned to introspection, and he read, as one reads a page of print, his estimate of him whom he sought to weigh. “Van Buren is essentially furtive, lurking, cat-like. He delights in moonlight politics and follows the byways. He avoids the eye, is seldom in the show ring, and, in making his excursions, sticks to the lanes and keeps off the highways. Few men see, and fewer know, Van Buren. He is sly rather than bold; chicanes rather than assails; and when attacked he does not fight in that strifish sense of hard knocks. He poisons the springs and streams and standing water; and then he falls back into the hills. Van Buren does with snares what others do by blows; traps while others hunt. And yet, in a feline way, he likes trouble. Set out a bowl of milk and a bowl of blood, and turn your back. If sure of unobservation, he will lap the blood. But if you stare at him, he dissembles with the milk, purring with fervor sedulous. Ever secret, Van Buren knows of no harder fate than mere discovery. His points of power are his egotism, his skill for sly effort, his talent as a trader of politics. Marcy is of another sort. Marcy is vigorous where Van Buren is fine. If a band of music were to go by, Marcy would regard the bass drum as the great instrument. Van Buren would prefer the piccolo. Marcy does his war work with an axe. When any homicide of politics enforces itself upon Van Buren he moves with sack and bowstring. He waits until midnight, and then, with victim gagged and bagged and bound, drowns him in the Bosphorus of party.”

Even as the General spoke, Van Buren was trudging up the street; for it would appear that he had come into town the hour before, and now made speed to pay his respects to the General.

While Van Buren was in talk with the General, our first greetings being done, I strove to come by some true account of one who was like to make for much weight in the scales. He was round, short, and by no means superb or imposing. Standing between the General and myself, and both of us above six feet, he seemed something stunted. There was a quiet twinkle in his gray, intelligent eye that he drew from his tavern-keeping sire of Kinderhook; the latter being of shrewd Dutch stock, born to count pennies and to save them, and whose profits with his inn found partial coinage in an education above bottles and taprooms for his son. There hovered an oily peace about Van Buren; it showed on him like painted color. I was not tremendously impressed of him, I grant you; albeit, before all was done, I came to better learn him. The man, for a best simile, was like so much quicksilver. Bright and of surprising weight, he rolled away from a touch and never failed to fit himself scrupulously and plausibly into every inequality which the surface he rested on presented. He came to be, as you may think, precisely the man for the General; since, while the one was as apt for heat as Sahara, and as much the home of hurricanes, the other under no stress was ever known to give or take offence. He would be without quills, this Van Buren, and yet no porcupine in his rattling armor went about more perfect to his own defence or so equal for the problem of his own security.

Van Buren made no lengthy stay with us; there was a hand-shake, a talk of a moment, a bow, and he was back to his quarters in the Indian Queen.

“And what do you say of him?” asked the General, when now his new secretary was gone.

“Why, sir,” I replied, “I should call your story of the man a good one. But he does not look so strong as you would make him.”

“Why, then,” returned the General, “neither does any other thing of silk.” Then, after a pause: “Just as an insinuation is stronger than a direct charge, so is Van Buren stronger than other men. I warrant you, as we stand here with all our wisdom, he holds our measures more nearly than we hold his.”

The General, you are to observe, and whether early or late, never said a word to Van Buren of Peg and the villain forays against her fame; the General was too proud for that. The defence of Peg seemed a thing personal to his heart; with him it owned no place in politics or the business of the state. Therefore, he would ask no man's aid, and folk on that quarrel might be neutral or pick their sides and go what ways they would.

The General, I say, beheld nothing of politics in the question of his defence of Peg; it was wholly the thing personal. He never realized, what is clear to you and me, that everything was the thing personal with him, and politics a thing most personal of all. Even now, since he had found the Palmetto coterie to be among his enemies, and within short weeks of the birth of his first rancor against Calhoun as one who had sought to do him hidden harm while apeing friendship and aiming at his betrayal with a kiss, he had commenced to nourish a steady wrath against that statesman's policies of Secession and States Rights. This latter he was cultivating and feeding in all possible fashion.