The Judges of the Secret Court Page 6

  The thought of that firmed Booth’s purpose. “When I leave the stage, I will be the most famous man in America,” he said.

  “Hell, for all you act on it, I thought you left it months ago,” said the drunk. “Croak something for us.”

  Taltavul knew how to handle a drunk. He handled this one fast. But it was funny, come to think of it, but it was true, Booth had not acted for months. And what was all that blarney about leaving the stage, anyhow?

  To his relief, Booth said nothing more, drained his glass, and left the bar.

  In the theatre it was hot. The house was almost full, and the audience had been sweating there for over two hours. Booth watched for a moment, and then slipped into the corridor leading to the boxes, closing and bracing the door after him with a length of wood he had stowed there earlier in the day.

  In the State Box, Mr. Lincoln took his wife’s hand. He was feeling romantic and contrite for having been irritated with her earlier in the day. She might now be merely a pretty pudding, but in the half light she looked as young as she liked to pretend she was; they had been together a long time; and she was his wife, after all.

  Booth was watching through the eyehole he had drilled in the door that afternoon, but did not see the gesture. He had not been able to get the stage carpenter, Spangler, to hold his horse, but since Spangler was a drunk, that was perhaps just as well. A boy was holding it.

  It had impressed him, walking down the stage box corridor, that the walk to the scaffold is much the same as the criminal’s march to the crime. It has the same inevitable pace. Yet the corridor was empty and he was no criminal. He was the hero, girding himself for an heroic act. He could only deplore that the setting was so shoddy. Still, he could see the damnable villain’s back.

  Opening the door, he slipped inside, took out his deringer, cocked it, and shot the President. The time was 10:15.

  VI

  Payne dismounted in Madison Place and handed the reins to Herold. There was a fog, which increased the darkness of the night. Two gas lamps were no more than a misleading glow. He might have been anywhere or nowhere.

  The pretence was that he was delivering a prescription from Dr. Verdi. Secretary of State Seward was a sick man. The idea had come from Herold, who had once been a chemist’s clerk. The sick were always receiving medicines. No one would question such an errand. The bottle was filled up with flour.

  Before Payne loomed the Old Clubhouse, Seward’s home, where Key had once been killed. Now it would have another death. From the outside it was an ordinary enough house of the gentry. He clomped heavily up the stoop and rang the bell. Like the bell at Mass, the doorbell was pitched too high. It was still Good Friday, after all.

  A nigger boy opened the door. Payne did not notice him. He was thinking chiefly of Cap. If their schedules were to synchronize, there was no point in wasting time. He pushed his way inside.

  For a moment the hall confused him. This was the largest house he had ever been in, almost the largest building, except for a hotel. He had no idea where Seward’s room would be. In the half darkness the banisters gleamed, and the hall seemed enormous. Above him somewhere were the bedrooms. Seward would be up there.

  He explained his errand, but without bothering much to make it plausible, for he felt something well up in him which was the reason why he had fled the army. He did not really want to kill, but as in the sexual act, there was a moment when the impulse took over and could not be downed, even while you watched yourself giving way to it. He was no longer worried. Everything would be all right. He knew that in this mood he could not be stopped.

  Still, the sensation always surprised him. It was a thrill he felt no part in. He could only watch with a sort of gentle dismay while his body did these quick, appalling, and efficient things.

  He brushed by the idiotic boy and lumbered heavily up the stairs. They were carpeted, but made for pumps and congress gaiters, not the great clodhoppers he wore. The sound of his footsteps was like a muffled drum.

  At the top of the stairs he ran into somebody standing there angrily in a dressing gown. He stopped and whispered his errand. Young Frederick Seward held out his hand. Panting a little, Payne shook his head. Dr. Verdi had told him to deliver his package in person.

  Frederick Seward said his father was sleeping, and then went through a pantomime at his father’s door, to prove the statement.

  “Very well,” Payne said. “I will go.” He smiled, but now that he knew where the elder Seward was, he did not intend to go. He pulled out his pistol and fired it. It made no sound. It had misfired. Reversing it, he smashed the butt down on Frederick Seward’s head, over and over again.

  It was the first blow that was always difficult. After that, violence was exultantly easy. He got caught up into it and became a different person. Only afterwards did an act like that become meaningless, so that he would puzzle over it for days, whereas at the time it had seemed quite real.

  The nigger boy fled down the stairs, screaming, “Murder”.

  It was not murder at all. Payne was more methodical than that. He was merely clearing a way to what he had to do.

  He ran for the sick room, found his pistol was broken, and threw it away. A knife would do. From childhood he had known all about knives. Someone blocked the door from inside. He smashed it in and tumbled into darkness. He saw only dimly moving figures, but when he slashed them they yelled and fled. He went for the bed, jumped on it, and struck where he could, repeatedly. It was like finally getting into one’s own nightmares to punish one’s dreams.

  Two men pulled him off. Nobody said anything. Payne hacked at their arms. There was a lady there, in a nightdress. He would not have wanted to hurt a lady. Another man approached, this one fully dressed. When the knife went into his chest, he went down at once.

  “I’m mad,” shouted Payne, as he ran out into the hall. “I’m mad,” and only wished he had been. That would have made things so much easier. But he was not mad. He was only dreaming.

  He clattered down the stairs and out of the door. Somewhere in the fog, the nigger boy was still yelling murder. One always wakes up, even from one’s own dreams. The clammy air revived him. Herold, he saw, had fled.

  Well, one did not expect much of people like Herold.

  He unhitched his horse, walked it away, mounted, and spurred it on. The nigger boy was close behind him. Then the nigger boy turned back and he was alone. He rode on and on. He had no idea where he was. After some time he came to an open field. An open field was better than a building, that was for sure, so he dismounted, turned off the horse, and plunged through the grass.

  He felt curiously sleepy, the world seemed far away; he knew he should get to Cap, but he didn’t know how. He was sure, for he had done as he was told, hadn’t he? Cap would find him and take care of him. So choosing a good tree, he clambered up into it, found a comfortable notch, and curled up in it to sleep, like the tousled bear he was, with his hands across his chest, as though surfeited with honey.

  Violence always made him tired, but he was not frightened.

  In Boston, Edwin Booth was winding up a performance of A New Way to Pay Old Debts. It was a part so familiar to him that he did not bother to think about it any more. Acting soothed him. On a stage he always knew what to do, and tonight, to judge by the applause, he must be doing it better than usual.

  As Sir Giles Overreach (how often had he had to play that part, who did not believe a word of it), he raised his arm and declaimed: “Where is my honour now?”

  That was one of the high spots of the play. The audience, as usual, loved it. He was delighted to see them so happy. If he had any worries, it was only the small ones, about Mother in New York, and his daughter Edwina and what she might be doing at this hour, with her Aunt Asia, in Philadelphia.

  Everyone is ambivalent about his profession, if he has practised it long enough, but there were still moments when he loved the stage and all those unseen people out there, who might cheer you or boo you, but that
was largely, though not entirely, up to you.

  They made the world seem friendly somehow, though he knew it was not.

  VII

  Wilkes was quite right about one thing. Laura Keene had been in the green room. The commotion had brought her into the wings. Since she could not act, one part suited her as well as any other, and so she was the first person to offer Mr. Lincoln a glass of water, holding it up to the box, high above her head, to Miss Harris, who had asked for it.

  She had been one of the first to collect her wits.

  It was not so much that the shot had stunned the audience, as that they had been stunned already. Most of them had seen Our American Cousin before, and unless Miss Keene was on stage, there was not much to it. The theatre was hot and they were drugged with boredom.

  The stage had been empty, except for Harry Hawk, doing his star monologue. The audience was fond of Harry Hawk, he was a dear, in or out of character, but he was not particularly funny. At the end of the monologue the audience would applaud. Meanwhile it looked at the scenery.

  “Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, you sockdologizing old mantrap!” said Trenchard, otherwise Hawk. There was always a pause here, before the next line.

  That was when the gun went off. Yet even that explosion did not mean much. Guns were going off all over Washington City these days, because of the celebrations, and the theatre was not soundproof.

  Then the audience saw a small, dim figure appear at the edge of the Presidential box. “Sic semper tyrannis,” it said mildly. Booth had delivered his line. Behind him billowed a small pungent cloud of smoke.

  They strained forward. They had not heard what had been said. They had been sitting too long to be able to stand up easily. The figure leapt from the box, almost lost its balance, the flag draped there tore in the air, the figure landed on its left leg, fell on its hands, and pressed itself up.

  Harry Hawk still had his arm raised towards the wings. His speech faltered. He did not lower his arm.

  The figure was so theatrically dressed, that it was as though a character from some other play had blundered into this one. The play for Saturday night was to be a benefit performance of The Octoroon. This figure looked like the slave dealer from that. But it also looked like a toad, hopping away from the light. There was something maimed and crazy about its motion that disturbed them.

  Then it disappeared into the wings.

  Harry Hawk had not shifted position, but he at last lowered his arm.

  Mrs. Lincoln screamed. There was no mistaking that scream. It was what anyone who had ever seen her had always expected her to do. Yet this scream had a different note in it. That absence of an urgent self-indulgence dashed them awake like a pail of water.

  Clara Harris, one of the guests in the box, stood up and demanded water. Her action was involuntary. When something unexpected happened, one always asked for water if one were a woman, brandy if one were a man.

  Mrs. Lincoln screamed again.

  In the Presidential box someone leaned over the balustrade and yelled: “He has shot the President!”

  That got everybody up. On the stage, Harry Hawk began to weep. Laura Keene brushed by him with the glass of water. The crowd began to move. In Washington City everyone lived in a bubble of plots, and one death might attract another. It was not exactly panic they gave way to, but they could not just sit there. The beehive voices, for no one could bear silence, drowned out the sound of Mrs. Lincoln’s weeping.

  At the rear of the auditorium, upstairs, some men tried to push open the door to the box corridor. It would not give.

  A Dr. Charles Taft clambered up on the stage and got the actors to hoist him up to the box. In the audience a man named Ferguson lost his head and tried to rescue a little girl from the mob, on the same principle which had led Miss Harris to demand water.

  Someone opened the corridor door from the inside, and called for a doctor. Somehow Dr. Charles Leale was forced through the mob and squeezed out into the dingy corridor. He went straight to the Presidential box.

  As usual, Mrs. Lincoln had lost her head, but nobody blamed her for doing so now. There was a little blood on the hem of her dress, for the assassin had slashed Miss Harris’s companion, Major Rathbone, with a knife. Rathbone said he was bleeding to death. By the look of him he wasn’t that far gone. Leale pushed him aside. To get rid of Mrs. Lincoln was harder. He finally got her deposited on the sofa at the other end of the double box, where she and Miss Harris sat waiting, a muffled, sobbing, double white blur. Miss Keene, who had come up the back stairs, joined them there.

  Lincoln still sat in his rocker, but his head had slumped forward and his legs looked lifeless. There was no light in the box. It was necessary to strike matches in order to see him. Leale sent for a lamp, got the body on the floor, and while men stood in a circle around him striking innumerable matches, he searched, by that dim flicker, for the wound. The lucifers of that day burned down quickly. In a few minutes the floor was littered with charred sticks. The sound of scratching, as new ones were lit, was the sound of a nail drawn down a blackboard.

  Leale had to feel with his fingers, which came away stained with blood. The wound was at the back of the neck. A clot had already formed. Leale removed it, and the body breathed shallowly. He lifted up one eyelid. The eye glistened in the match light, but it was out of focus and the evidence of brain injury was plain enough. The matches smelled abominably of sulphur.

  Dr. Taft tumbled over the edge of the box. Everyone was breathing a little too fast. Together the two doctors raised the body, which felt heavy and old. It was alive, but Lincoln seemed not to be in it. They could then see the wound, and observe that it was mortal.

  The two men let the body down again. Leale applied artificial respiration. A Dr. King arrived to offer his services. They did the best they could.

  Some soldiers were trying to clear spectators out of the box. The flat surfaces of their natty forage caps reflected the light of the lamp that someone had at last brought. In that light they looked like the ghost of an army. The box emptied. It now contained only the three doctors, the body, and a circle of dead matches on the floor, which crunched under their boot heels as they moved about. The air was acrid.

  Mrs. Lincoln sat on the sofa. She said nothing. Laura Keene sat beside her, she did not quite know why. Perhaps she had merely followed a humane impulse. She was human, after all, though life had drained most of the real life out of her. But she was no longer spontaneous. Perhaps she had realized, for word had gone round that Wilkes Booth had done this thing, though Spangler, the stage carpenter, denied it, that the safest place for an actor at this moment was close to the President.

  Outside in the street, dimly, you could hear a crowd roaring the name of Booth and threatening to burn the theatre down. Leale asked if Lincoln could not be removed to some nearby place.

  Dr. King answered that soldiers had been sent for the Presidential carriage, which had been turned round to face toward the White House.

  Leale shook his head. “No. The wound is mortal. It is impossible for him to recover.”

  Except for the actors, who were still on stage, in deshabille, the theatre was almost empty. Sound carried all too well. The three women on the sofa heard what he had said, though Mrs. Lincoln seemed not to have heard it. She was in a state of shock.

  Laura Keene, who, being an actress, believed all the funereal sentiments of the day, got up and asked if she might hold the President’s head for a moment. Leale looked at her blankly. But there was something in her taut, snake-like face and the quiet way she stood which made him nod. She sat on the floor, her enormous pale yellow stage skirt crinkling around her, and held the head in her lap. Leale noticed, without really seeing it, that her fingers, long but knobbly at the knuckles, were those of a woman older even than, in this half light, she looked. Arthritis perhaps. What he was really worried about was the trip to the White House.

  “If it is attempted,” he said, “he will be dead
before we reach there.”

  There were houses across the street. Dr. Taft asked an officer, for there were still soldiers waiting in the corridor, to run out and find a lodging nearby.

  Four soldiers formed a human sling. Dr. King held the left shoulder. Dr. Leale held the head cupped in his hands, decided that to walk head first would be better, manœuvred the body around, and with the soldiers, left the box. “Clear a passage,” he shouted.

  Laura Keene sat on the floor, her skirt matted with blood, and watched Dr. Leale’s face, as he backed out the door. Then she got up, and with Mrs. Lincoln between them, she and Miss Harris followed the body. They could hear the crowd roaring in the street.

  At the head of the stairs the women paused, their wide dresses bent to the walls of the corridor. The body had reached the lobby and was heading towards the doors. The women started down.

  “Clear out,” yelled the troopers down below them. “Clear out.”

  Then the crowd saw the body, first the shaggy head in its broken posture, then the chest and feet. Someone began to cry. It was impossible to clear a passage. The doctors had to inch forward, and the street was fifty feet wide.

  The crowd pressed in front and closed in behind. The captain of the troopers had to swing his sword in order to clear a passage. The night air was damp and sweaty, but the sky had cleared and there was a cold wind. In the moonlight, the shadow of Ford’s Theatre covered the street and stretched half-way up the opposite buildings, as though it had been a pall.

  Night would darken it.

  The three ladies stepped out into the shadow. Nothing could be heard over the crowd, pressed tight and baying for someone to lynch. That person they had detested half an hour ago was already dying, but there was no one to tell them whom or what to lynch.