XV
The Senate adjourned a few moments after Betty left the gallery. There was little conversation in the cloak-room. The Senators were very tired, and it surely was a brain of bubbles that could indulge in comment upon the climax of the great finished chapter of the old Republic.
North put on his hat and overcoat at once and left the Capitol. After the close confinement in heated and vitiated air for sixteen hours, the thought of a cab was intolerable: he shook his head at the old darky who owned him and whom he never had been able to dodge during his twenty years' service in Washington, plunged his hands into his overcoat pockets, and strode off with an air of aggressive determination which amused him as a fitting anti-climax. The darky grinned and drove home without looking for another fare. His Senator not only had paid him by the month for several years, but had supported his family for the last ten.
North inhaled the pure cool air, the delicious perfume of violet and magnolia, as Betty had done. Once he paused and looked up at the wooded heights surrounding the city, then down at the Potomac and the great expanse of roofs and leaves. The Washington Monument, the purest, coldest, most impersonal monument on earth, looked as gray as the sky, but its outlines were as sharp as at noonday. North often watched it from the window of his Committee Room; he had seen it rosy with the mists of sunset, as dark as granite under stormy skies, as waxen as death. Normally, it was white and pure and inspiring, never companionable, but helpful in its cold and lofty beauty.
"It is a monument," he thought, to-night, "and to more than
Washington."
He turned into Massachusetts Avenue and strolled along, in no hurry to find himself between walls again. He was not conscious of physical fatigue, and experienced no longing for bed, but his brain was tired and he enjoyed the absence of enforced companionship and continued alertness, the cool air, the quiet morning in her last sleep.
Betty, like all brilliant women who love passionately, had over-imagined, in her solitude and excitement. It is true that North had felt the bitterness of defeat, that his mind had dwelt upon the miserable and blasting thought that after years of unquestioned statesmanship and leadership, of hard work and unremitting devotion, his will had had no weight against hysteria and delirium. But both bitterness and the sense of failure had been dismissed in the moment when he had, once for all, accepted the situation; and that had been several days before. Since then, he had shoved aside the past, and had given his undivided thought to the present and the future. He had uttered his "aye" almost indifferently; it had been given to the President days since.
Nevertheless, his brain, tired as it was, did not wander from the great climax in his country's history. To that country at large this climax meant simply a brief and arrogant chastisement of a cruel little nation; the generals would have been quite justified in sending their dress clothes and golf sticks on to Havana; but North knew that this officious "police duty" was the noisy prologue to a new United States, possibly to the birth of a new Constitution.
"Is this the grand finale of the people's rule?" he thought. "They have screamed for the moon as they never screamed before, and this time they have got it fairly between their teeth. Well, it is a dead old planet; will its decay vitiate their own blood and leave them the half-willing prey of a Circumstance they do not dream of now? Dewey will take the Philippines, of course. He would be an inefficient fool if he did not, and he is the reverse. The Spanish in Cuba will crumble almost before the world realizes that the war has begun. The United States will find itself sitting open-mouthed with two huge prizes in its lap. It may, in a fit of virtue which would convulse history, give them back, present them, with much good advice and more rhetoric, to their rightful owners. And it may not. These prizes are crusted with gold; and the stars and stripes will look so well in the breeze above that the pride of patriotism may decide they must remain there. And if it does—if it does… The extremists in the Senate will grow twenty years in one… With the bit between their teeth and the arrogance of triumph in their blood—"
He found himself in front of his own house. He turned slowly and looked intently for a moment toward I Street. His face softened, then he jerked out his latchkey, let himself in and went directly to the library. He still had no desire for bed, and threw himself into an easy-chair before the andirons. But it was the first time in several days that he had sat in a luxurious chair, and the room was full of soft warmth. He fell asleep, and although he seemed to awaken immediately, he could only conclude, when the experience which followed was over, that he had been dreaming.