Citizen Tom Paine (19 page)

“I'm tougher than that.”

“Are you? I don't think so. There are those who love you, Paine, but how many hate you?”

“Enough, I suppose.”

“All right. You have to fight, and you're in no condition to fight. You have to live, and you haven't a penny to your name. Now listen to me, the Committee of Secret Correspondence is going to be reorganized as a permanent Office of Foreign Affairs. There's a post open for an official secretary, and I'm going to have Adams put you up for it.”

“Through Congress?” Paine smiled.

“Through Congress.”

“To hell with them,” Paine muttered. “I'm a revolutionist, not a dirty, sneaking politician.”

But Roberdeau said quietly, “Stay here with Irene. I'm going to see Adams.”

He was gone a long while. Paine sat in a deep wingchair and listened to the girl play on the clavichord. He must have dozed a bit, because when he opened his eyes, she had stopped playing and was watching him.

“Tired?”

He said, no, he wasn't tired, and asked her what she had been playing.

“Bach.”

“Please play again,” he asked her.

The little instrument rustled like a harp; Paine watched the girl's back, the motion of her head, the strong muscles that played her fingers.

She was less beautiful than strong and handsome; there was a tawny color in her hair that spoke of a Norman strain somewhere in the family, yet in every motion and gesture she was French. Through playing, she turned to Paine and she was startled by something in his eyes. For some reason Paine thought she would go. He asked her to stay.

“Yes, of course.” She sat down near him and said, “Tell me about yourself.”

He began to tell her, speaking in a soft voice, his eyes half closed. In a little while Roberdeau would return, and there might be a good chance that he had succeeded. Politics was a career, and Paine was very tired.

“I think you're the strangest man I have ever known,” she said. “I think—”

“What?”

She walked over and kissed him, and then Paine was smiling strangely. “Of course, it's no good,” she admitted. “You're damned, aren't you?”

Paine said nothing, and then they just sat and waited for Roberdeau.

To his amazement, Paine got the office, in spite of a fervent objection by a small clique, headed by Witherspoon, a Scotch pastor and one-time supporter of the bonnie Prince Charlie. Witherspoon hated Paine, not only because he was a fearless writer, but because he was both a Quaker and English. The clique accused him of everything from murdering children and being a secret agent for the British, to being an apostate and a devil without horns. But Adams and Jefferson and others stood up for him, and at the time there were reasons for the two parties to make a deal. Tom Paine became secretary to the committee of the new Department of Foreign Affairs, with a salary of seventy dollars a month.

It was a new feeling, respectability. Seventy dollars a month was not a fortune; indeed in the recently issued continental currency, it threatened to become nothing at all very soon; yet it was more than enough for Paine's simple needs, enough to pay the few debts he had, to buy him a decent suit of clothes, clean if not spacious quarters, pen and paper to write with, and no danger of starving.

And the respectability, of course; Paine the revolutionary was nothing; Paine the writer, whose book had been read and reread by almost every literate person in the thirteen colonies, and spoken aloud to most of those who were not literate, whose book had caused the British ministry to curse the day when the written word had been made available to commoners, was a mere scribbler; Paine the pamphleteer, who had done as much as any man in America to hold the army together in its worst hour, was a rabble rouser and no more: but Paine the secretary to the Committee of Foreign Affairs was a person of some consequence, on the inside among the circle of the gods that be, able to do a person a favor and say the right word in the right place. Or so they thought, and more hats were tipped to him, more hellos said, more waists bent than ever before.

And Paine came to live in the world within, where the ivory tower protected even the most sensitive. Soon enough he discovered that where the quaint inner circle of colonial politics began, reality stopped. That war was being fought by a haggard, desperate little army led by a quiet and stubborn man called Washington, mattered so little to the Continental Congress of the United Thirteen Colonies that it was only by deliberate resolution that they could recall the nature of the situation.

On their side, it might be said that they were as impotent as any governing body could conceivably be; able to make treaties, they could not force observation of them; they had the right to coin money, but no power to buy gold or silver, and with the power to wage war, they could not raise a single soldier. In the one worst moment of crisis, when Washington's shivering and defeated troops had finally crossed to the southwest bank of the Delaware, they had abdicated voluntarily, fled in panic from Philadelphia to Baltimore, and given to Washington the full power of a dictator.

Their knowledge of warfare was confined to the continental military tracts they read so feverishly; each had his own personal military theory and fought for it, and the only military fact they agreed in was that it would be ridiculous to fight the war in the one style Americans knew, the silent, terrible bushwacking tactics that had torn a British army to ribbons between Concord and Lexington.

They were split into parties, the pro- and anti-confederation, the northern party, the southern, the pro-reconciliation and anti-reconciliation, the pro-Washington and anti-Washington. There were the isolationists who believed revolution was a property peculiar to Americans of pure British descent and of the eastern coast of North America and that all other persons and places should be excluded; and there were the internationalists, those who would rally the insular Dutch, Irish, Scotch, Swedes, Jews, Poles, French, and Germans, and add to them whatever liberal and anti-British feeling existed on the continent of Europe. Not the Sons of the American Revolution but the non-fighting ancestors were already working feverishly to make the roster exclusive.

And to add on the coals, they had discovered the good American device of lobbying.

They lobbied for everything: to have their local towns, counties, cities protected by troops; the Southerners to have tobacco adopted as a necessity for the troops; the down-easters to convince all that no one could fight without a liberal ration of rum; the wool-runners to sell woolen blankets at four times the price they had ever sold them; the midlanders to sell their grain; the New Englanders to have the troops fight on curds; the New Yorkers to have them fight on beef.

And they could agree on nothing, not on the style of the confederation, not on post-war aims, not on a constitution. The honest, sincere men among them fought and broke their hearts, and somehow things were done and somehow the war blundered along.

And into this Paine came, a revolutionist whom all regarded with suspicion. He did his work, he wrote another
Crisis;
he sat in a cubicle and pushed his pen as a clerk, and sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he would see men in rags with a rattlesnake banner. And he saw Irene Roberdeau and said, “Look at me. Do you like it?”

“I think you look better than you ever looked.”

“Do I? And I tell you, something is dying inside of me.” She noticed then what a flair he had for the dramatic.

“I can't stand much more of this,” he decided.

“I hear you're greatly appreciated.”

“You do? They're waiting for a chance to be rid of me, and the sooner it comes, the better. This is a people's war, and some day the people may awake to that.”

“And can't you forget the war even for a while?”

“You told me I was damned,” Paine smiled.

“But not beyond redemption,” she said.

The carts came into Philadelphia with half a hundred badly wounded men, and Paine worked with others, feeding them, making them comfortable in the old Quaker meeting house to which they were taken. Some he knew; he was Common Sense to them. He found his
Crisis
papers among their belongings; a paper read a dozen times would end as dressing for wounds or wadding for a gun.

“A stout heart,” he would say.

He sat all one night holding the hand of a boy who was dying, and the next day he washed the body and laid it out himself. It was before the time when women would go near a dying or a wounded man; the male nurses were tobacco-stained, filthy old devils. Paine told Irene Roberdeau soon after, “I'm going away, I must.”

“Where?”

“To the army—I'm no good for this sort of thing.”

She pleaded with him, asked him whether it was not enough to throw herself at his feet.

“I'm no good for you,” he said. “I'm no good for anything except this stew I've brewed.” Yet he lingered on in Philadelphia.

It was spring again, and the armies were moving in the field. Plowing over, farmers picked up their muskets, cleaned off the rust, and drifted down the country lanes toward Washington's encampment. Last summer was forgotten; the shop clerks forgot and left their shelves, and the mechanics laid away their tools. A lark and a campaign, and the war would be over. Spring does that, coming suddenly with the sky bluer than ever it was during the winter. The few thousand regulars, lean and hard, mocked the way Yankees mock at the summer soldiers, the militia who took their fighting as they would bird shooting, in between the planting and the harvest. “Where were you at Christmas Day?” became the taunt, harking back to the time they turned like wolves at bay and crossed the Delaware. This was the year for ending the war; they could prove that by the almanacs, by the stars, by gypsy fortune tellers. Ho and away; there were rations in plenty, and up from New Orleans by the bosom of broad mother Mississippi had come a thousand fat hogsheads of gunpowder, lead weight to cast a million of shot and three thousand shining Spanish bayonets. There was no treaty with Spain yet, but rustic farmers, suddenly turned astute politicians, winked and nodded their long heads as they ran a hard forefinger over the Toledo steel; one knew about those things.

It was in Washington's mind to make a campaign in the north against Burgoyne, but the middle country was screaming to be protected. Howe had packed his British and Hessians into their great ships and sailed away with them, and who knew where they would land? They were sighted off Delaware, and then word came that they were sailing into Chesapeake Bay. The American army, swelled to a considerable size now by the influx of militia, began to march south.

Paine watched them strut through Philadelphia. It was summer and hot, and stripped to the waist, their muskets slung over their backs, barefooted most of them, they appeared fine and ready and trim.

Paine was neither seen nor minded; he stood in the packed crowd that cheered and hooted and waved at the sunburned marchers, bright and gay with sprigs of green tucked under their caps and behind their ears. Washington rode by in his buff and blue, looking healthier and younger than he had this midwinter past; alongside of him was the boy Paine had heard of but not seen before, young Lafayette in white twill and satin, beribboned all over with gold braid. Hamilton was there and fat Harry Knox, nursing along their lumbering guns, and Nathanael Greene to whom Paine waved—but a man is not to be seen in a crowd.

Paine went to Roberdeau's home, but Irene was not there. She left a note for him that she had gone to watch the parade.

And then they were defeated at Brandywine Creek, slashed to pieces, cut and routed, the old story of men who were willing to die but didn't know how: the old story of mistakes, a listing of blunders, each one worse than the last.

With a dead, white face, Paine heard the news, walked to the office of the Committee with dragging steps. “Of course, Congress most leave the city again,” everyone said. No one had the truth of what had happened; they were running around like chickens freshly slaughtered; they were frightened.

The whole city was catching the virus of panic, the Tories with fear that the rebels would take their revenge before they left, the rebels with fear that the Tories would not allow them to leave. Neither party quite knew the strength of the other. But the British would march on Philadelphia; that, at least, was obvious.

Paine found Irene, and she said to him what she hadn't dared to say before,

“Come with me—out of all this. Haven't you done enough and suffered enough? It's over now, and if they go on, how long will it be, ten years? or twenty? Paine, I've never loved anyone else—and if you leave me now—”

“And if I stay with you? What kind of happiness would you have with me! I have nothing, Irene, except an old shirt and a pen to write with. I'm a camp-follower of revolution, a scribbler, and a pamphleteer.”

“I won't ask you again, Tom.”

He nodded and went without kissing her, without saying anything else, and the next day he heard that she and her uncle had left the city. They were not alone in leaving. The Tories made a show of strength, brawls and gunshots and now and then a woman's scream—the city was dying and not gently. As during that last time when the city had been threatened, Paine tried to plead with the leaders of the Associators. Congress had gone, but there were one or two left, friends of his, with a little influence, and between them they managed to call a meeting in Carpenter's Hall. Less than two hundred persons appeared, and when Paine addressed them, they listened in silent apathy.

“A city,” he cried, “is the best fortress in the world, the forest of the citizen soldier! Every street can become a fortress, every house a death trap! The army lost a battle, but this is a people's war, and the British army can break its back on the stout heart of Philadelphia—”

There was no stout heart in the city. Paine sat in his room and wrote a
Crisis
paper, and below him the streets were deserted. One by one, the pro-continental citizens went. At night, a pistol bullet whistled past his ear. There was a parade of Tories, with a great banner reading, “Death to every damned traitor!”