When the Cheering Stopped (32 page)

After that there was pain for him from the crippled body and from the tortured nerves, but above that pain was exaltation.
He had not failed.
God would make it right. George Creel came to see him and saw religious serenity in the eyes where there had been despair and fear. There was peace in the lines around the mouth which once, when the two drove past the staring crowds outside the White House, had said to George Creel that only menace and curiosity lived in those crowds. “It will come, yes, it will come,” he said to George Creel now in S Street. Creel wrote, “I saw glory shining from his face. ‘It will come.'”

*
Now a part of George Washington University.

14

Nineteen twenty-three. His eyes, always weak, became so impaired that he could read only through a magnifying glass held in the good hand. Soon even that was too difficult, and all he could do was look at the pictures in the
National Geographic
and the motion picture magazines,
Film Fun, Screenland, Photoplay.
She read aloud to him—
Stevenson, Dickens, O. Henry, Scott, the
Home Book of Verse,
and the mysteries:
Malcolm Sage, Detective; Find the Woman; Twenty-Six Clues.

He thought about the past. Nellie came in and read to him and when it seemed he had drifted into sleep she put away her book. He opened his eyes. By the bed was a little dwarf pine tree someone had sent him. A light shone upon it. He had dozed off looking at it and now, awake, he smiled. “I was back on the island at Muskoka,” he said to Nellie softly. “Do you remember our picnics there, and your mother reading poetry under the pines? I wish I could hear her voice.”

He was cold all over now, always cold as his night came on. More and more he spent his time in bed before the fire, but when people came to see him he said to them over and over that he was glad he had broken down in the West in 1919's hot September after the cheering and the speeches and the little boy in Billings handing up the dime and saying, “Give it to him!” It had all been God's will, he said. It was God's way of bringing America to the League. “As it is coming now,” he said, “the American people are thinking their way through, and reaching their own free decision, and that is the better way for it to come.” He said, “The thing is right; it is true; it cannot fail. It is right; and right will prevail.”

In that spring he decided to try to write something. He began to work on an essay, dictating a sentence at a time to Edith. In the small hours of three, four, five o'clock in the morning, he awoke and, not realizing it was night, rang for Scott and asked that Mrs. Wilson come in. Scott went for her and she took down the few words and went back to her room. Two hours later he might ring again. For weeks they worked on it, and when it was finished it was just more than a thousand words in length, a dozen paragraphs. They sent it to George Creel, who was well connected in the publishing world, and asked Creel's opinion on where the essay might be placed. “The Road Away from Revolution,” they titled it.

Creel read it with a horror and a sadness that made difficult the task of offering an opinion. For to Creel the piece was thin, vague, unworthy of the Woodrow Wilson that had been, completely unlike earlier writings and
speeches. Creel wrote to Mrs. Wilson that in other circumstances he would advise “instantly and with all my power against its publication.” To do that, however, might crush the ex-President, who had for years done no intellectual work save this. But to publish it might bring a depressing critical reaction. “What, then, are we to do?” Creel wrote Mrs. Wilson, and answered his own question by suggesting that perhaps it would, be best to get it published with as little fanfare as possible. Perhaps then the public, not expecting too much, would understand. And understanding, perhaps no one would be too unkind. Creel ended: “Surely you can understand how painful it is for me to have to write this letter. It leaves me sick at heart.… This letter is for your own eyes, to be torn up instantly, and I enclose herewith another letter for you to show Mr. Wilson.” In the second letter Creel told a merciful lie and said the article was fine, first-rate, but that to submit it to a major commercial magazine or to a newspaper syndicate would bring cheap “huckstering” and therefore perhaps it would be wisest to publish the essay in a modest, quiet way.

But Edith was not going to lie to her husband. She went riding with him and with Ellen's brother, Stockton Axson, who was a professor of English, and she plainly said that Creel felt the article would not do, that it lacked body. Her husband flared up and said that Creel had been after him for years to do some writing, and now he had done his best and it would have to stand. Edith said, “Now don't get on your high horse. I am just telling you that what the article needs is expansion, reasoning out the case more.” But he sulked with an invalid's impatience and said, “I have done all I can and all I am going to do. I don't want these people bothering me any more.” He had wanted “The Road Away from Revolution” to be a high clarion call, it was his first work in so long, he had put so much into it—and she had had to tell him it was a failure.

When they got back to S Street and he was being helped upstairs, Stockton Axson went into Bolling's office for a moment and as he stood there he heard Edith sobbing in the hall. She was to Axson such a strong woman, so strong, and he had never before known her to cry. He
went out to her at once. “All I want to do,” she said, “is just to help in any way I can. I am not urging him to do things he doesn't want to do. I just want to help and I just don't know how to help. I don't know what to do.”

It was so unlike her to break this way, to falter. Axson begged her not to cry and asked if he might see the article. She gave it to him and after reading it he said that perhaps it could be pruned down a little and presented not as an argument but as a challenge. He went upstairs and said so to the essay's author; the answer was, “Why, you see exactly the point. Fix it.” Axson drew a line through two or three paragraphs and the article was retyped and sent to the
Atlantic Monthly
with an accompanying note: “My dear Mr. Editor, In former years, whenever I happened to have produced an essay, it used to be my preference and pleasure to send it to the
Atlantic
…” The
Atlantic
accepted the piece for $200 and so it came out, a plea for unselfishness in life, a following of the way of Christ. It could be read in a moment.

That summer another President took a train trip west. Haunted and frightened and muttering to himself and asking what should you do when your friends betray you, President Harding went across the country playing cards twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day. Cabinet officers spelled each other at the table. The President said he was off liquor, but he needed it now, and his aides collected bottles from the reporters. Teapot Dome came in on him, Teapot Dome and the money running through the hands of the old friends from Ohio. He was distraught, gray, collapsing, trying to fight off the fear by dealing cards hand after hand. He fell sick and in San Francisco he was sicker. He died in a room of a hotel where his predecessor spoke for the League in 1919. Ever after they whispered that his wife poisoned him to save him from the revelations that were coming. Or perhaps he took the poison himself.

In S Street, Warren Harding was always considered a “fool” and a “lightweight,” but when the newsboys shouting the headlines brought the news, Harding's predecessor was shocked. No one seeing the two men riding to Harding's inauguration could have predicted the new President would die first. Edith went up to the bedroom
and together they got out a condolence telegram to Florence Harding.

In San Francisco the casket was placed level with the window of the funeral car so that mourners by the track, weeping, could see it. Church bells tolled as the train went by on its way to the state funeral in Washington, and when it arrived at Union Station thousands stood by to watch the catafalque going up the Avenue to the White House. Tears were in the eyes of most of those people.

The funeral would be held in the White House on August 8. It would have been very difficult, almost impossible, for Harding's predecessor to alight from his car and go into the building he had left in company with the handsome and vigorous man who now was dead, and so with Cary Grayson and Edith he sat outside while the services went on. It was a very hot day; several of the marines standing in formation fainted from the heat. The old Pierce-Arrow that had spent so many years in government service drove up to the place where it had done that service at a little past nine-thirty in the morning. The chauffeur parked by the west side of the North Portico. White House servants came out to say hello and the troops saluted. Cary Grayson was in white summer uniform and wearing a mourning band on his sleeve and the former First Lady in black crape; her husband wore formal mourning attire with a black cravat. As they sat in the heat a stone's throw from where they had had their greatest moments, both personal and official, and also their most terrible ones, a red-faced and perspiring colonel of cavalry came up. The officer said in an excited voice, “Mr. Wilson, may I ask you a question?” “Certainly, Colonel.” “Mr. Wilson, do you know where I can find Senator Lodge?”

Woodrow Wilson looked at the man. “I am not Senator Lodge's keeper,” he said evenly. The Colonel saluted and spurred his horse and dashed off. Woodrow Wilson said, “What asylum did that Colonel escape from?”

Edith was tired, weary, all but played out. It had been four years since Pueblo and in that period she had not had a rest of any kind. Grayson said to her that she was ready for a breakdown and must get away. Her husband
also worried about her and urged her to take a trip for a few days. So she went to visit her friends Charles Sumner Hamlin
*
and his wife and daughter, Anna, at the Hamlin summer place in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. In late August she went to them and every morning took a walk with Anna and the family dog, Moses, a big black spaniel, along the shores of Buzzards Bay. Reporters asked her if her husband's essay in the
Atlantic
signaled an active writing career in the future—“Is his long silence over?”—but she simply smiled and expressed her admiration for Moses, one of the handsomest dogs she had ever seen, who had a “permanent wave” that all Anna's bobbed-hair girl friends envied. For a week she was gone, Grayson staying at S Street twenty-four hours a day to try to make up for her absence, and then she came back. And when she did she looked with new eyes at her husband and saw what before had not been clear because it was so familiar and she had been too close: he was dying. It could not be long now. She gathered herself.

The Hamlins came for dinner and the ex-President ate with them, Edith getting them out of the dining room on the pretext that they come and look at the garden so they might not see how Scott had to lift their host to his feet. He went to bed and the guests played pool below with his wife, who afterward went to dine several times with them. She also played bridge once a week with the Washington hostess Mrs. J. Borden (Daisy) Harriman, never knowing the invitations stemmed from a visit Mrs. Harriman had paid to S Street. Sitting with the guest, who during the war had headed the Red Cross women's motor corps in France, the ex-President said, “I want you to do something for me. Don't tell Mrs. Wilson I asked.” And he said he would like Edith to go out to play cards; she needed some recreation so much.

In that year, 1923, his last full year, a New Jersey newspaperman, James Kerney, came to call and suggested that he run for the Senate. But he said no, he would not want that, it would just mean getting into rows with “old Lodge,” and anyway the Senate didn't mean “a damn”; they hadn't had a thought there in “fifty years.” No. There was only one place where he could really exert his
influence. When he said that, the newspaperman understood what he meant. Had not Cary Grayson, who knew, said years ago, right before the 1920 convention, that no man who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue ever wants to leave it?

But thinking of a return to what he had been for eight years did not blank out the gentler parts of his nature, and often the lined face seemed placid, content, very loving. Some of the people who wrote him caught his interest, and wrapped in his shawl in the garden sunshine he listened to his wife reading the letters. Two elderly English spinsters, Cicely and Gertrude Ford, became friendly with him through the mails and it pleased him to hear of their interests, of the farmer down the road from their Heather Cottage at Bournemouth, of how they sat up until midnight reading to each other from
Tom Sawyer
and that despite the extreme lateness of the hour they continued because “we simply could not leave him in the midst of his thrilling adventures in the cave!” In their neat old maids' writing they wrote of working to support the League: they were going to hire a band and hold an open-air meeting in support of international co-operation. “We have been ‘hustling about some,' in American phrase,” they wrote; and the meeting was a great success. Several hundred people turned out. They were interested, they wrote, “in all things American, from Congress to Clabber—what ever that dainty may be.” As the months and then the years passed they wrote to S Street of how they founded a branch of the League of Nations Union in Bournemouth; first they themselves
were
the branch, but then they had two and four and five helpers, and where once a half-filled small room was large enough for their meetings, the time came when the spacious pavilion of the Bournemouth Winter Gardens was not large enough. He in return wrote back that “it makes me very impatient of my present inability to travel when I think of the great pleasure I would otherwise have in visiting Bournemouth and paying my respects in person to my highly valued friends, the Misses Ford.” They sent a limerick for him; they had read he loved limericks: