One: Terrible Terry’s Book
1
In the great pearl-gray slab of a room that is the North Delegates’ Lounge of the United Nations in New York the late-September sun slanted down through the massive east windows and fell across the green carpets, the crowded chairs and sofas, the little knots of delegates standing or sitting or milling about in the midmorning hours before the General Assembly’s seven committees began. Riding over their noisy hubbub came the heavy voices of the young ladies at the telephone desk, relaying via the public-address system their bored yet insistent summonses to the myriad sons of man:
“Mr. Sadu-Nalim of the delegation of Iran, please call the Delegates’ Lounge! … Senator Fry of the United States, please! … Ambassador Labaiya-Sofra of the delegation of Panama, please call the Delegates’ Lounge! … His Royal Highness the M’Bulu of Mbuele, please … Secretary Knox of the United States …”
Surveying the immense and noisy chamber from his vantage point near the door, Senator Harold Fry of West Virginia, one of the two Senate members and acting head of the United States delegation, wondered with some impatience where Orrin Knox was now. The Secretary of State had been in town two days and Hal Fry had hardly seen him for ten minutes at a time, so busy had the Secretary been with conferences, diplomatic receptions, U.S. delegation business, and what Senator Fry termed with some disparagement “giving beads to the natives.” Not that he was above giving a few himself, he thought wryly as he waved with vigorous cordiality to a passing Nigerian and bestowed a glowing smile upon the delegate from Gabon; but at least he could take it or leave it. Secretary Knox seemed to be going about it with a determination that bordered on the grim; Orrin acted at moments as though the fate of the world depended upon it. Which, of course, Senator Fry conceded abruptly with a loud “Hello!” to the delegate of Nepal, it quite possibly did.
A momentary look of concentration and unease touched his face at the thought, an expression of sudden melancholy that went almost as soon as it appeared. The Ambassador of India materialized at his elbow and seized upon it with unfailing accuracy.
“My dear Hal,” Krishna Khaleel said with his air of half-jocular concern, “first you are being so jolly with everybody and then suddenly you look so sad. What is the matter with the Great Republic of the West this morning? Or is it only the distinguished delegate who feels something unsettling in his tummy, perhaps?”
“My tummy’s all right, K.K.,” Senator Fry said. “In fact, I was at the Guinean reception last night and ate like a horse. I’m just wondering where Orrin is.”
“Ah, yes,” said Krishna Khaleel with a little agreeing hiss. “Orrin is so busy since he arrived here. Does he think the United States depends on him alone?”
“He has been known to feel that way,” Senator Fry said with a little smile that the Indian Ambassador answered at once.
“Even now, he feels that way? With Harley in the White House and—”
“Even now,” Hal Fry agreed. “And perhaps with some reason. After all, it isn’t as though Harley were the greatest President who ever—”
“No, indeed,” the Indian Ambassador said quickly. “But we like him, Hal. We all like him. The world thinks highly of your President. He lacks the dramatics of his predecessor, but there is something very—solid about him. And of course Geneva was dramatic enough.”
“Oh, yes,” Senator Fry said, thinking of that fantastic event which had astounded the earth and flabbergasted the universe. “Geneva was dramatic enough, all right … Isn’t that Terrible Terry over there?”
“Where?” Krishna Khaleel demanded, peering toward the bar. “I assume if it is he will be accompanied by the British Ambassador. The United Kingdom can’t seem to leave him alone these days.”
“I should hope not,” Hal Fry said dryly. “I hear Terry’s going to make quite a speech in the plenary session of the General Assembly Friday morning.”
“He can be counted upon,” the Indian Ambassador said with equal dryness.
“Why do you people give him such a play, anyway?” the Senator from West Virginia inquired. “Just to embarrass the rest of us?”
“All the Asian-African states think he has a very good case, you know, Hal. He is one of the last gasps of colonialism. Or his situation is, anyway.”
“‘All the Asian-African states,’” Senator Fry mimicked. “As if you all agreed on anything for more than five minutes at a time.”
“On some things,” the Indian Ambassador said. “On some things. We do agree on Terence Wolowo Ajkaje the M’Bulu of Mbuele.”
“Terence Woe-loe-woe Ahdge-kah-gee the Mmmbooloo of Mmmbweelee,” the Senator from West Virginia said, rolling it out with considerable sarcasm. “Quite a title for a Harvard graduate.”
“And the London School of Economics,” Krishna Khaleel said with a smile. “And Oxford … Now,” he said abruptly, “What is the S.-G. doing, talking to Felix Labaiya?”
Far down the room, under the great wooden slab above the bar that bears the carved map of the world, the Senator from West Virginia saw the tall figure of the Secretary-General bending down to the dark, clever face and short, animated body of the Ambassador of Panama.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Shall we go ask?”
“I’m tempted,” the Indian Ambassador said, as two sheiks from Mauretania went billowing whitely by. “I wonder if it’s the draft resolution Guinea put in yesterday in the Fifth Committee? Guinea, you know, wants to send a UN observer force to Gorotoland to see what the real situation is.”
“Guinea always wants to meddle in everything,” Senator Fry said. Krishna Khaleel smiled broadly.
“So do we,” he said. “And Ghana. And Mali. And Nigeria. And Indonesia. And Ceylon. And—”
“And the Soviet Union,” Hal Fry said. “And, lately, Panama. What’s the matter with Felix Labaiya, anyway?”
“The Ambassador of Belgium, please,” said the young lady at the phone desk. “L’Ambassadeur de Belgique, s’il vous plait.”
“He is leaning more and more in that direction,” Krishna Khaleel said in the thoughtful tone of UN delegates who know very well which direction they mean. “But why don’t you ask his wife? After all, he’s married to an American. North American, I should say.”
Hal Fry shrugged. “No one gets anything out of Patsy Labaiya. She’s as much of a closemouthed crackpot as all the rest of her family.”
“I hear,” the Indian Ambassador said, “that her brother has plans to run for a very important office next year and that Bob Leffingwell may resign from the Administration to help him.”
“Governors of California have run for it before,” Senator Fry said, “but don’t believe all the gossip you hear. Here come Her Majesty’s distinguished Ambassador and Terry, so we’ll get a chance to explore all your most delicious suspicions in that sector.”
“Hal, old boy,” Lord Claude Maudulayne said, peering at him in an amiable way, “of course you know His Royal Highness the M’Bulu of Mbuele.”
“I haven’t had the pleasure,” Senator Fry said, shaking hands cordially. “Shall we go sit by the window? There seem to be some seats empty over there, if we move fast.”
“Right,” the British Ambassador said, grasping his tall companion by the arm and steering him toward the glass wall just in time to forestall three rosy Swedes and a small brown man from Madagascar who were heading for the only available chairs. “I can’t stay too long, though. Have to go to the First Committee and help Orrin hold off the Soviets on the Panamanian resolution.”
“Typical British understatement!” the Indian Ambassador cried with a laugh. “Of course the Panamanian resolution is directed at the U.K., not the U.S.; Orrin will be helping you.”
“K.K.,” Lord Maudulayne said, “you always see through me. Always. But of course,” he added more seriously, “the resolution is slightly directed at the United States, too, you know. I think you can take the reference to ‘unfair treatment of minority peoples’ as being—er—pointed. I’m quite sure it is intended that way.”
“I’m quite sure it is,” Senator Fry said. “What do you make of all this, Your Highness?”
“I think you should call me Terry,” the M’Bulu said in the guttural voice of his people and the clipped accent of his educators; and he conferred a dazzling smile upon Hal Fry, who returned it vigorously. “I think everyone should be friends,” he added with a gesture that was soon to become familiar to them—holding his hands out palms upward with a graceful, charming little shrug. “That is why I am here with His Lordship—even though the United Kingdom and I are engaged in a rather—delicate—discussion at the moment.”
“I expect him to give us jolly old what-for in plenary Friday morning,” Lord Maudulayne said with a chuckle, and the M’Bulu of Mbuele chuckled right back.
“I expect I will. Gorotoland is quite important to me. It has been in my family since roughly the time William of Normandy acquired your island. Or so,” he said with a wry little smile that removed some of the sting, “tradition says. It isn’t written down anywhere. They tell it on the drums.”
“We haven’t any desire to take it away from your family, you know,” Lord Maudulayne said mildly. “In fact, you can have your freedom. The Whittle-Hornsby Report promises that, and far be it from Her Majesty’s Govern—”
“Now,” Terrible Terry said with utter finality.
“If you were only ready,” the British Ambassador said.
“Now,” the M’Bulu said, and with a bland, faraway look he concentrated his gaze upon a heavily laden barge struggling slowly up the East River in the hazy autumn sun and for the moment said no more. When he spoke again it was in a tone of restrained but quite ferocious indignation.
“The only place in the whole of Black Africa which is still unable to break free. Dahomey is free. Chad is free. Gabon is free. And what are Dahomey and Chad and Gabon? Nothing but bare places in the sun!”
“Angola and Mozambique—” Lord Maudulayne ventured to mention the Portuguese colonies, but the M’Bulu brushed them aside with an angry wave.
“Their time will come,” he promised with great certainty, “and not far off. But our time is now.”
“Two hundred high-school graduates in two million people,” Lord Maudulayne said in a bleak tone. “One hundred and two college-educated men and women. Thirty-three doctors. Twenty engineers. Forty-one trained administrators.”
“Not a very good record for you, is it?” Terrible Terry asked pleasantly, and the Indian Ambassador gave an appreciative little chuckle. His British colleague sighed.
“We could have integrated you so well with the Rhodesias, if only you had been willing. We had all the plans ready, but you wouldn’t accept.”
“No!” the M’Bulu said with all the fierce vigor of his twenty-nine years, and for just a second Senator Fry had a vivid and uncomfortable vision of human sacrifice around a ritual fire in the thorn-tree country. “No!”
“Secretary Knox of the United States,” the young lady at the microphone said earnestly. “Secretary Knox of the United States, please call the Delegates’ Lounge!”
“Yes, Secretary Knox,” Hal Fry said in a humorous way that broke the tension, “please do, because I want to see you before I go to Fifth Committee. I want to know what to say to Guinea when they bring up that resolution.”
“And the U.S.S.R.,” the M’Bulu said in a tone that dismissed other matters and came back to good nature. “Mr. Tashikov tells me they plan something very vigorous. We had an interesting talk yesterday on many things.”
“And he promised you complete Soviet support on immediate independence,” Senator Fry said.
“Of course.”
“Of course,” Lord Maudulayne agreed. “Beware.”
“Yes,” said Krishna Khaleel quite unexpectedly, “do beware, Your Highness. Accept support where you can find it, when you need it—but without strings. They have no claim on you now. Don’t give them any. These people. They are not playing simple little games in this world or in this UN. They do not come to this house to offer generosities they do not expect to exact tribute for. They are in this house for what they can get. Do not be fooled by them.”
“K.K.,” Senator Fry said, “how consistent can you be? Every time it comes to an issue here you line up with them as dutifully as though—”
“I resent that, Hal!” the Indian Ambassador said with real anger. “I resent that. India does what she does because she believes it to be best. It has nothing to do with the Soviet Union. It does not even always coincide with the Soviet Union. Often it is different from them. We take our own positions. We are not fools about them, Hal! I resent that!”
“Well, it’s sometimes very hard to see,” Senator Fry remarked. “And very confusing for the rest of us. Anyway, here’s Orrin at last, and I guess maybe we should talk of other things.”
“Your Secretary looks more friendly than I had expected,” the M’Bulu observed, “and not so formidable for one who engineered Geneva.”
“He has a tart tongue and a tart reputation,” Hal Fry said, “but the latter is somewhat exaggerated. And I think the President had quite a lot to do with Geneva. Where are you off to, Claude?”
“First Committee for me, old boy,” Lord Maudulayne said. “I’ll wait and go in with Orrin. Possibly His Highness would like to go with us. If you see Raoul Barre before I do, tell him I shall meet him for lunch at 1:15 in the Delegates’ Dining Room. Why don’t you join us? Possibly the M’Bulu will do the same.”
“I see,” Terrible Terry, said with amusement, “that I am not to be let out of sight.”
“Oh, now!” Lord Maudulayne said, and his youthful companion gave again his hands-out, palms-upward gesture.
“I have a wicked sense of humor,” he confessed merrily. “That is where I got the nickname Terrible Terry. My sense of humor used to distress everyone in England so.”
“Still does, old boy,” the British Ambassador said, and they all joined in his rueful laughter as the American Secretary of State, working his way slowly through the outstretched hands and dutifully smiling faces of a dozen different nationalities, approached them at last.
“I’m sorry to be late, Hal,” he said without preliminaries, “but I got tied up talking to LeGage Shelby at U.S. headquarters across the street. And you know how it is across the street. I should have come straight here, as you recommended.”
“You’ll learn if you stay awhile,” Senator Fry said. “Do you know Terrible—His Royal Highness the M’Bulu of Mbuele?”
“My pleasure,” Orrin Knox said. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you for some time, Your Highness.”
“Call him Terry,” Hal Fry said. “Everybody does. Orrin, do you have any instructions for me for Fifth Committee?”
“No different than you’ve had right along,” the Secretary said, “but come over here. Excuse us, gentlemen.”
Staring out the great window at the gleaming river, outwardly placid, actually swift-racing in the autumn light, he asked abruptly: “How are you feeling?”
“I’m all right,” Hal Fry said with some surprise. “I’m feeling fine. Why?”
“You looked quite odd for a minute last night at the Guinean reception,” Orrin said. “A very strange expression. I didn’t know whether you were going to faint or what.”
“Was it that obvious?” Senator Fry asked in some annoyance.
“I don’t think anybody saw it but me. What was it?”
“Just my eyes,” Hal Fry said. “A little reddish tinge for a minute. It went right away. Just overtired, I think. It startled me, though, which is why I showed it, I guess.”
“Well, take it easy,” Orrin Knox said. “That’s orders.”
“You’re very thoughtful. I will, as much as one can around this place.”
“I don’t want the acting chief delegate dropping by the wayside now that the permanent Ambassador is incapacitated too.”
“How’s he doing?”
“So-so. I was by Harkness Pavilion this morning. Still oxygen tent.”
“Hearts are occupational in the public business, I guess,” Senator Fry said with a sigh. “How’s yours?”
“I’m too ornery to die,” Orrin Knox said, turning back to the others. “Everybody knows that. Well, gentlemen, I expect the committees are beginning, and we should probably all run along. Take care of the interests of the United States in Fifth Committee, K.K. I know we can count on you.”
“M. Raoul Barre, s’il vous plait,” the young lady said politely to the enormous room, now emptying slowly as the delegates headed for committees. “M. l’Ambassadeur de France, s’il vous plait.”
“Always joking, Orrin,” the Indian Ambassador said. “It is a side that has developed in you since your new responsibilities.”
“Since Geneva, I’d say,” Lord Maudulayne remarked. “Nothing like tasting the joys of defiance, eh, old chap?”
“Defiance, nothing,” Secretary Knox said. “We had no choice.”
“Does it ever seem like a dream?” the M’Bulu asked, and for a long moment the Secretary appraised him with a steady glance. Then he tossed off, “A bad one,” tersely, and started to turn away.
“But I wanted to talk to you for a moment,” Terrible Terry said, holding out a restraining hand.
“Very well,” Orrin Knox said, dropping onto a sofa. “I’ll talk. See you later, Hal. Claude, do you want to stay—or is that forbidden, Your Highness?”
“Why,” the M’Bulu said with a charming smile, “nothing would please me more.” He too sat on the sofa and arranged his brilliant robes. “Mr. Secretary, I want to visit your country and be entertained at the White House. I think it would enhance my cause.”
“Well!” Orrin Knox said. “There’s nothing bashful about that. I should think it would, indeed.”
“And diminish ours,” Lord Maudulayne said, too surprised and annoyed to be polite about it.
“Possibly,” Terrible Terry agreed placidly. “But I think it would be nice.”
“Is this a formal request?” the Secretary inquired in a thoughtful tone that showed he was giving it serious consideration.
“It is,” the M’Bulu said with equal gravity.
“Oh, I say,” Claude Maudulayne said. “Now, really—”
“You could always give a reception for me at the Embassy,” Terry said blandly, “prior to the White House dinner.”
“Oh, dinner?” Orrin Knox said. “Is that all you want? Isn’t there anything more we can do for you?”
“I think that will be sufficient,” the M’Bulu said with a jolly laugh.
“What an extraordinary thing,” the Secretary said. “If I were still in the Senate, I’d tell you that it was nonsense and forget it. Now I’m at State, I have to be more diplomatic. Do you mind if I consult with the President? He might have different ideas, you know. It’s just possible he won’t want to rearrange everything for a—a rather minor African prince.”
“Now,” Terry said with a sudden anger in his enormous eyes, “you go too far, Mr. Secretary. Really too far.”
“That was just as though I were still in the Senate,” Orrin Knox said nonchalantly, waving to the Secretary-General, who had paused across the room to talk to two members of the Soviet delegation. “I don’t mean it, really. But really, now—”
“You entertain distinguished foreign visitors all the time,” the M’Bulu pointed out in a reasonable tone. “Surely I’m no different.”
“Well, except as you’re still fighting your case in the UN and it would put us in a position of opposing our allies—”
“A position of post-Geneva,” the M’Bulu said softly. “Perhaps it is more necessary now than it might once have been.”
“You’re a very clever young man,” Orrin Knox said without guile. “I wonder what you really want on these shores?”
“I want only the freedom which is due my country,” Terrible Terry said. “I don’t think that’s so extraordinary.”
“I wonder … I wonder. Where do you want to go in the United States?”
“I heard so much about South Carolina when I was at Harvard, but I never got a chance to go down there. I should like to go there now.”
“I am not at all sure you would be welcome in South Carolina,” the Secretary remarked. Terrible Terry smiled.
“I am prepared to chance it.”
“I am afraid we could not permit it,” Orrin Knox said. The gorgeous figure exploded in a happy, sarcastic laugh.
“How can you prevent it? I’m no Communist diplomat you can keep chained to New York or Washington.”
“Possibly the British can restrain you.”
“They wouldn’t dare!” the M’Bulu said scornfully, and Lord Maudulayne sighed.
“Right you are,” he said. “We wouldn’t dare. Nor, my old friend from the Senate, would you.”
“So, you see?” Terrible Terry demanded in happy triumph, “It is all so simple, and we might as well all co-operate.”
“When would you like to go?” Orrin Knox asked.
“The invitation is for tomorrow noon,” the M’Bulu said, and at his listeners’ looks of surprise he laughed again—in innocent merriment, as the Secretary remarked in the privacy of his own mind, in inno-cent merri-ment.
“And what invitation is this?” he asked.
“The Jason Foundation is giving a luncheon for me in Charleston,” Terry said proudly. “Señora Labaiya’s brother, the Governor of California, will introduce me.”
“Patsy Jason Labaiya’s family fortune is behind that,” the Secretary informed Lord Maudulayne. “It does much good and causes some trouble, like all foundations. So Ted Jason will be there too? I thought the California legislature was in special session. Why don’t you go out there instead? Maybe you could address them.”
“I have several invitations to be on television here that I have to keep,” the M’Bulu said proudly. “It all helps.”
“I’m sure it does. Well, I’ll talk to the President. How about letting him designate a member of Congress to go with you as his representative?”
“And my guard?” Terry suggested with a smile. “Who—Senator Cooley? I’m sure that would guarantee me safe-conduct in South Carolina!”
“He might just surprise you and do it,” the Secretary said. “There are a few tricks left in old Seab yet. No, I was thinking of Cullee Hamilton, as a matter of fact. He’s one of our young Representatives, from California. A very fine one. And a Negro.”
“I know him,” the M’Bulu said, and for just a second a contemplative and not too pleasant expression came into his eyes. “He visited my capital of Molobangwe last year for the House Foreign Affairs Committee.”
“Did you like him?” the Secretary asked. Terrible Terry’s expression changed to something indefinable. He shrugged.
“He has a pretty wife.” He stood up briskly, his robes showering down about him in glittering cascade. “Very well, I’ll take old Cullee, then, if that’s what you want. And you will talk to the President. Maybe Thursday night, if he’s free. Then I can have the day Thursday for seeing people in Washington.”
“It takes time to arrange a White House dinner,” Orrin Knox said.
“He can do it,” Terry said complacently, and the Secretary thought: Go down through layer after layer after layer and you still find something tenaciously and terribly childlike underneath.
The M’Bulu smiled happily. “That way, I can still be back here in plenty of time for my speech Friday morning.”
“Full of praise for the United States, no doubt,” Orrin Knox suggested. The M’Bulu gave his charming palms-out gesture.
“I am sure of it! Your Excellency—” he shook hands with the British Ambassador. “Mr. Secretary—” he repeated with Orrin Knox. “I just want to say good morning to the S.-G. before I drop in on the First Committee. I shall see you there, no doubt, discussing my important little country.”
“See you there, Your Highness,” Orrin Knox agreed, and caught himself even as the M’Bulu did, “—Terry.”
“Good cheer,” the glamorous visitor said. “Good cheer, both!”
“Mr. Fibay-Toku of Upper Volta, please,” said the young lady at the microphone. “Mr. Fibay-Toku of Upper Volta, please call the Delegates’ Lounge.”
A moment later the Secretary and the Ambassador could see the M’Bulu on the other side of the enormous room, now almost deserted as the hour neared eleven and the UN’s committees prepared to convene. He had hailed the Secretary-General with an easy familiarity, and they were standing near the entrance where the races of mankind passed in and out: both tall, both stately, both handsome, both alert, the one clad in the glittering robes of his homeland, the other in a dark-blue business suit, subtly different, yet subtly alike.
“What an extraordinary young man,” Orrin Knox remarked.
“Trouble,” Claude Maudulayne remarked. “Trouble for us both.”
“Why don’t you give him his little seat in the UN and his God-given right to make boring speeches to the General Assembly and get headlines in the New York Times? That’s all they want, most of these petty little politicians who come out of the bush. It’s the great bauble of the century.”
“We have given a definite promise, at a definite time, under definite conditions,” the British Ambassador said doggedly. “It is only a year away, and even then they will be so poorly prepared it may mean chaos. Her Majesty’s Government will simply not turn loose an undisciplined mob if we can help it, until there is some chance of orderly transition.”
“Here comes Terry, ready or no,” the Secretary said in a mocking tone.
“For you, too,” Lord Maudulayne said. Then he added with a rare show of bitterness, “After all, it is post-Geneva. And we all know what that means.”
“Yes,” Orrin Knox conceded, “we all do.”
“Miss Mahdrahani of India, please,” the young lady said. “Miss Mahdrahani of the delegation of India, please call the Delegates’ Lounge.”
2
Now it was autumn, the time of blowing leaves and warm, regretful weather; and yet it did not take any great feat of imagination or effort of will for the Secretary of State to return himself instantly to the terrible tensions of the bright spring days six months ago when he and his colleagues from the Senate had taken off for Geneva from Washington’s National Airport. As he matched the loping stride of Lord Maudulayne along the low, swooping corridors past the constantly recurring glassy vistas of the United Nations building to Conference Room 4 and the inevitable wrangle that awaited them there in First Committee, he could remember very well each detail of that strange, unlikely episode. It had brought a new emphasis to the world, produced a major and not yet clearly understood shift in the East-West confrontation, given to the United States at once new stature and a new need for friends. Partly it had been the President’s doing, partly his. Neither they nor anyone else was quite sure, even now, exactly what had been wrought in those two fantastic, terror-haunted days when it seemed that it would take but a breath—a whisper—and catastrophe beyond imagining would be visited at once upon the human race.
Well: it hadn’t been, and for that, Orrin Knox thought grimly, the good Lord Himself was probably responsible, since His children were so unclear about how it happened. The good Lord and the instincts of nearly two centuries of freedom, which had stood them in good stead when the final chips, or what seemed to be the final chips, were down.
There had been little conversation in the plane, he recalled, as it had hissed out across the empty wastes of the Atlantic. The President, much heartened by the enormous crowd that had come out to see them off with such loving fervor at the airport, had soon dropped off to sleep—“One time when it can really be called the sleep of the just,” the Senate Majority Leader, Bob Munson of Michigan, had remarked to Orrin with an affectionate glance at the dozing Chief Executive—and the rest had occupied themselves with magazines, or brief, murmured conversations, or their own occasional naps. Senator Tom August of Minnesota, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had looked about nervously for a while, staring with deep intensity at the water until Senator Warren Strickland, the Senate Minority Leader, had finally asked, “Well, Tom, and what are the wild waves saying?” At this inquiry, which seemed to disrupt some obscure train of thought that probably only he could follow, the senior Senator from Minnesota had peered up in his startled, owl-like way, mumbled something unintelligible, and finally buried his nose in an old copy of Life. (ROBERT A. LEFFINGWELL, the caption on the cover portrait said; WILL THE SENATE SAY YES? The recent nominee for Secretary of State, photographed at a moment before he knew that the Senate would say NO, looked out upon the world with a confident and self-satisfied air.) Shortly before the chief petty officers came in to start arranging things for lunch, Bob Munson had come over and sat down beside Orrin Knox, and for a time their conversation, first cautiously and then with increasing candor and trust, had ranged over events that neither of them in the rush of recent days had found time to discuss with one another: the long, bitter Senate battle over the Leffingwell nomination; the devious yet ultimately goodhearted machinations of Senator Seab Cooley of South Carolina; the contest between Orrin, then senior Senator from Illinois, and the late President; the President’s death; the sudden yet curiously reassuring ascension of Vice President Harley M. Hudson of Michigan to the Presidential chair; and the dark tragedy, which had cost them so much in pain and sorrow and yet curiously given them much, too, in renewed strength and dedication, of Brigham Anderson of Utah, beginning to recede already into an endurable memory, the dark things forgotten and the kindly, decent, generous, and straightforward personality beginning to come into its own as they wanted to remember it and as he would have wanted them to remember it.
Recalling that conversation, and recalling Brig, the Secretary of State was aware for a second that the bright autumn day beyond the glass which at almost every turning commingled the United Nations with all outdoors had become shadowed over. With an effort he shook off the profound depression that sometimes came over him when he thought of that shocking suicide, so necessary in some ways yet so unnecessary in others, and told himself that he must not think of things that would weaken or distract him now that he was about to enter First Committee and try to walk the delicate tightrope between loyalty to the British ally beside him and the savage onslaught he knew was coming from the Soviet Ambassador as he heaped ridicule and scorn upon the plan for gradual emancipation of Terrible Terry’s Gorotoland. The M’Bulu—that clever, willful, deviously determined young man. What game was he playing, and where did it fit on the chessboard of Soviet-American relations? There was a place for it, he was quite sure, but whether it would be on his side of the board or Vasily Tashikov’s, he did not know.
But he was sure the M’Bulu knew, and he contemplated for a rueful moment the perils that can sometimes arise from an education at Oxford, the London School of Economics, and Harvard University, fused into one shrewd brain and fired with a fierce ambition.
After their luncheon on the plane, he remembered as he paused in the long, red-carpeted corridor to greet the delegate from Cameroun, two ladies from Nicaragua, and the Ceylonese who was executive director of the Economic and Social Council, a certain practical animation had come upon the Geneva-bound party. With the meal they had put past things away and begun to think seriously about what lay ahead. Harley—even now, six months after his accession, Orrin still referred to the President by his given name in his thoughts and sometimes, embarrassingly, in face-to-face conversation—had moved, with the same surprising sure-footedness that had characterized all his actions in the first hectic week of his Administration, to put the problem in the perspective he deemed best for the country.
“Orrin will probably tell me I’m all wet,” he had begun with a little smile at the Secretary, “but I think the best thing for us to do is keep calm and follow my lead.” He looked at the glistening waters far below, beginning to turn silvery in the flat rays of the afternoon sun as the day declined and night raced toward them out of Europe. “I do have one, you know,” he added in a tone that chided them with a little humorous mildness for thinking he might not. “Even though I think maybe I’ll just keep it to myself for a while.”
“But, Mr. President—” Orrin had begun with some impatience.
“Even though we too have now landed an expedition successfully on the moon,” the President continued calmly, “in the eyes of the world we go to Geneva, to some degree, under Soviet threat. They demanded that we go, and the Presi—my predecessor—had already accepted before our own expedition landed. So when I followed through on his acceptance, it appeared that we were yielding to threat and were afraid to stay away. You understand, of course,” he added quietly, so that if they did not understand it, there would be no doubt, “that we were not. I was not. I thought it best to go letting them think that. I think it is still best to let them think that.”
“I don’t quite see—” Bob Munson began in a puzzled tone.
“Surprise has its advantages,” the President said. “One lesson I learned from him,” he commented with a sudden chuckle, and for a moment they could see the predecessor he referred to, so strong, so dominant, so determined, so devoted to the country, and so full of tricks. “Would he ever be surprised to see me now!”
“He’s not the only one,” Tom August blurted out, and then corrected himself hastily. “That is, Mr. President—I mean—” But the President led their laughter, and after a moment the Senator from Minnesota stopped blushing and joined in, timidly at first, but with a growing assurance.
“We don’t sound at all like a group of men on their way to surrender their country,” Senator Strickland observed with satisfaction, and the President smiled.
“No more are we; though, as I say, I think it’s just as well they continue to think there’s at least an outside chance. They’re awfully cocky after that broadcast from the moon and that big stout ultimatum to get to Geneva. And here we are, of course, getting to Geneva. So let them dream. I have an idea or two about it.”
“My only worry, Mr. President,” Bob Munson said, “is whether we should have let them think, even for a minute, that we were giving in. I rather wondered, in fact, why you didn’t tell them to go to hell the minute you took over.”
“I believe in giving his head to an opponent who’s riding for a fall,” the President said. “It makes the tumble that much more emphatic. Don’t worry, Bob. We’ll work it out.”
“I certainly hope so,” Orrin Knox said; and after a moment, explosively, “by God, we’d better!”
And thinking now of the reactions all around the world to that lonely flight across to Geneva, scene of so many blasted hopes and dead ideals, he was aware that he had not been the only one so desperately concerned. Not since Munich had the world waited in quite such fearful expectancy for an international event, and on the short-wave radio as they rode along they could hear the tongues of the nations raised in varying degrees of near-hysteria to chronicle their journey. When they touched down briefly at Shannon, a silent throng had crowded to the gates and along the edges of the field, never stirring, never speaking, as they stepped out to take the air and look about them. Then as they lifted off a great cheer had arisen, touching them deeply. Back in their seats they found that newspapers had been put aboard, and the crisis was made even more emphatic and insistent for them. “WORLD ON BRINK OF DISASTER,” the London Daily Mail exclaimed. “WILL U.S. CAPITULATE?” the News-Chronicle wanted to know. “GRAVE CONCERN,” the London Times admitted; “P.M. TO ADDRESS HOUSE.” “WAR?” demanded the Express. And from their own country, flown up from Paris in the day’s overseas editions, the New York Times carried an eight-column, three-line banner which began “WORLD AWAITS FATEFUL CONFERENCE,” while the New York Herald Tribune warned that “HUMANITY MAY FACE EXTINCTION IF PARLEY FAILS.”
But here was humanity six months later still alive and kicking, and as he and the British Ambassador emerged from the elevator on the lower level and started over the tan and orange Ecuadorian carpets toward the group of delegates, guards, and press standing about the entrance to Conference Room 4, the Secretary of State thought with an ironic conviction that it would probably be a while yet before that condition changed. Whether Geneva had made it less likely or more so that ultimate catastrophe would overtake the world, no one could say with certainty at the moment; but that it had been absolutely imperative for the United States that the conference conclude as it did, there was not now, nor had there been then, the slightest doubt of this, as they became airborne again and turned south for the Continent, they were instinctively aware, although they did not know at the moment just how the President intended to achieve it. He remained bafflingly exclusive about his thoughts, so much so that there were moments when his Senate colleagues came close to dressing him down as though he were still the kindly, rather bumbling, rather timorous, and uncertain Vice President they had known for the past seven years. Senator Munson, indeed, had at one moment started to exclaim, “For God’s sake, Harley!” but had thought better of it and ended in a muffled expletive which did not, however, conceal his definite opinions on the subject. This amused the President.
“Now, Bob,” he said, “and all of you: take it easy. I’m worried about this—” his eyes darkened and a sudden look of disturbing sadness touched his face for a moment—“but suppose I were to show any outward signs of it, or even let myself really feel it inside? Why, you’d be scared to death. I remember how it is, it’s only been a week since I was on the other side of it. There comes a moment sooner or later in any real crisis when the most important thing in the world is to help the man in the White House stay on an even keel, because if he starts to crack, then everything starts to crack. You don’t want me to show concern, really; the most absolutely necessary thing in the world for the United States right now is that I not show concern. So don’t push me into showing it, because if you force me to show it I may begin to feel it and then nobody could tell what might happen.” He looked at them one by one, an expression of absolute trust and candor that they found very touching. “Now, isn’t that right?”
“Yes, Harley,” Bob Munson said after a moment, “that’s right … okay, I won’t press. But I do think we should have a little more coordinated planning for what we’re going to do. Don’t you, Orrin?” An amused glint came into his eyes. “After all, you’re always so busy about things, and you are Secretary of State. I’m surprised you’re not raising hell on the subject.”
“Well,” Orrin said with an answering smile, “I do assume that at some point along the way the President is going to take the Secretary of State into his confidence—and all of us, in fact. But you know Harley. He has a fearful ego underneath it all.”
“Oh, sure,” the President said. “Oh, sure, sure. I really think you boys ought to give Orrin a medal. He’s really showing great restraint for a man who thinks he ought to be where I am. And may well be, one of these days.”
At this reference to his long-standing ambitions for the White House, which had been more customary from the late Chief Executive than Orrin expected them to be from his successor, the Secretary of State gave a rather rueful smile and shook his head.
“No, I’ve learned my lesson. I tried—and tried—and it didn’t work out—and then suddenly you appointed me and said you wouldn’t run to succeed yourself next year—and now it does seem a possibility again—but I’ve stopped worrying about it. You can only take so much of this he’s down, he’s up, he’s down, he’s up business, you know. If it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, well, I can always go back to law, I suppose.”
“You’ve turned Knox into a philosopher,” Senator Munson said. “None of us thought it could be done.”
“If I know Orrin,” the President said, “this reformation will last until the next time he gets up a head of steam about something. Then watch out!”
“Right now,” the Secretary said, “I’m generating a head of steam about the Russians. You may have to hold me down in Geneva, Harl—Mr. President. I suppose it would be quite possible to say something there that would blow up the world.”
“Oh, dear,” Tom August said. “I hope not.”
“It would,” the President said quietly. “And of course you’re just joking now, Orrin. You wouldn’t say anything irresponsible.”
“No. But it is hard to avoid a little irritation now and then.”
“There’s the understatement of the week,” Warren Strickland remarked.
“We’re on the moon, too,” the President pointed out. “Our cards are just as good as theirs, when all is said and done, even though they’ve succeeded in stampeding a lot of the rest of the world into thinking they’re miraculously ten thousand miles ahead.”
“The crowd at Shannon didn’t seem to think so,” Senator Strickland said, and the President nodded.
“An enormous goodwill goes with us. Apparently they feel we mean well.”
“Oh, yes,” Orrin Knox said, “they always feel we mean well. They can kick us around six and nine-tenths days of the week, but now and again, on the remaining one-tenth of the seventh day, they will sometimes reluctantly admit that we mean well.”
The President shrugged.
“Well. That in itself is something.…” He looked below, where the darkness held England, and suddenly leaned forward. “Now, what’s that?”
“It looks to me,” Bob Munson said as they all peered out, “like bonfires. You don’t suppose,” he said half humorously, “they’re for us, do you?”
“I’ll have the radioman check,” the President said, reached for the intercom, and gave the order. In a moment the copilot appeared in the doorway.
“It is for us, sir! We just checked the Air Ministry and the government has suggested that all along the route the people light fires for us. The Ministry says they’re doing it in France, too. We’re going to be lighted all the way in.”
“Well, what do you know,” the President said softly. “So we come to Geneva on a path of light … Tell the pilot to turn on the landing lights and keep sweeping them down to the ground and up again at one-minute intervals from now on. That way they’ll know that we know and that we appreciate it.”
And so they had proceeded, the little beacons flaring out of the darkness far below, the lights of the plane gravely responding as it sped on south over England, the Channel, and France: an exchange of messages, profoundly moving, which emphasized the fearful loneliness of their journey yet gave them much heartening for it.
It would be a long time if ever, he realized as he and Claude Maudulayne entered First Committee and began to move toward their neighboring seats at the left of the inner horseshoe of blue-leather chairs, before any of them would forget the highway of light they had traveled down in the closing moments of their flight. At last the President had broken the silence. “I am always impressed with the enormous kindness of ordinary people. If I have that to support me, I can take my chances with the rest.”
The feeling had been heightened when they landed at Cointrin Airport and, transferring to limousines provided by UN headquarters in Geneva, rode into the city along Route de Meyrin and Rue de la Servette. The citizenry was out in force. American flags showed everywhere, people stood eight and ten deep along the way, and the cheers that began for them at the airport swelled steadily as they drove along. Here, too, was the emphasis on light, springing from some atavistic instinct in the human race, going back so far into ancient night that the mind could not follow even if the mind dared. Torches and flares danced everywhere, and as they turned into Rue de Lausanne and proceeded slowly past the League of Nations building along Lake Geneva to the villa hastily procured for them by the UN, a solid wall of flame kept them company on the left and threw the giant shadows of their progress out across the night-dark water.
At the villa they were informed that the Russians would be expecting them at 10 a.m. the next morning at the Palais des Nations. The President sent word back that they would be there at 3 p.m., and after a little desultory small talk and a nightcap with several very nervous officials of UN/Geneva, they bade one another good night and went off to bed.
Off to bed and, in his own case, Orrin remembered, right off to sleep. He had been interested to find next morning that the others had done the same. Bob Munson explained it simply enough: “I don’t know whether it was the bonfires, or what, but suddenly last night I got the conviction that this is going to work out all right. If so many nice people think so highly of us, how can we fail?”
They had all agreed; but of course, the Secretary thought as he watched the delegate of Ghana coming into First Committee with Vasily Tashikov, the gorgeous M’Bulu, and a pallid little man from Hungary, the world did not run on such simple lines. It took more than the good wishes of nice people to carry on the affairs of humanity: it took guts and character and tenacity, and now and again a flair for the dramatic, which the President, again to their surprised relief, presently proved that he had.
Ranging back now over their two meetings with the Soviets in Geneva, while First Committee filled up and gradually began to get under way, in true UN fashion, half an hour late, Orrin Knox could see that Harley’s strategy from the first had been exactly right for the situation that confronted him. His offhand dismissal of the Russian demand that the Americans appear at 10 a.m. had of course given him the world’s headlines immediately, and he had never once let them slip away from him thereafter. He had held a press conference at 11 and another at 2 p.m. At each, with calm good nature, he had proceeded to reduce the Soviet position to one, essentially, of bad manners, and rather ridiculous bad manners at that. He had been confident but not boastful about the progress of the American moon landing, respectful but not overawed by the Russians’ parallel endeavor. The whole confrontation here in Geneva, he had implied, was rather unnecessary and not a little stupid. Simply by his manner, tone, and general deportment, he had managed to convey to the world a picture of a man not in the slightest hurried, harried, intimidated, or upset.
It was no wonder that when they arrived in the gorgeous spring afternoon at the Palais des Nations amid the screaming sirens and sputtering exhausts of their motorcycle escort, the Soviets should have been awaiting them with obvious impatience and a steadily mounting anger. But when the Chairman of the Council of Ministers came down the steps to meet the car, advancing slowly in his dour, slab-sided, and characteristically suspicious way, the President shook hands with an almost absent-minded cordiality and then commented on the weather.
“What a beautiful spring day, Mr. Chairman!” he exclaimed. “I am so glad you offered me the opportunity to see Geneva for the first time, and in such a lovely season of the year. I am quite glad now that I decided to come.”
At this Tashikov, with whom Orrin supposed he would have to deal with very shortly, as the delegate from Yugoslavia, rapped the gavel for First Committee to come to order, had leaned forward and muttered something harshly in the Chairman’s ear. The Chairman had nodded in the grimly thoughtful fashion familiar from a million photographs and television glimpses and snapped out, “Da, it is beautiful!” and turning on his heel had trudged doggedly up the steps. The President waved to the cameras with a broad smile and wink that amused all but the Soviet photographers, shrugged elaborately, beckoned to his companions, and started, in a deliberately leisurely fashion, to follow.
His host, if that was the proper designation, had disappeared down the hallway when the American party entered the building. With another shrug and a humorous look about, the President continued past the long line of guards standing at attention and the massed flags of the two nations intermingled with exact mathematical equality by the UN/Geneva protocol office, until he came to the heavily-guarded bronze doors of the Assembly Hall and there found some three hundred reporters clamoring without success to get in. He then precipitated the crisis of the day.
“I don’t know where the Chairman has gone to,” he said to Tashikov, who was waiting at the door, “But you can tell him that my predecessor accepted this invitation on the sole understanding that this meeting would be open to the press, radio, and television of the world. I agreed to honor his acceptance on the same understanding. Is the meeting to be open?”
“Mr. President,” the Soviet Ambassador began coldly, “my government felt it would save you embarrassment in the eyes of the world if—”
“Is it!” the President snapped, and Tashikov snapped back, “It is not!”
“Very well,” the President said without a moment’s hesitation. “Come along, gentlemen.”
And he had swung about and led them, startled but having the sense to conceal it, back to the entrance, back to the steps, back to the waiting limousines, and so, with a roar and a flourish and the inevitable scream of sirens, back along the dazzling blue lake in the gleaming bright sun and the warm whipping wind to the villa.
There he collapsed into an enormous overstuffed chair with a little grunt of satisfaction and a happy smile.
“Now,” he said with what was for him a surprising use of profanity, “let’s see what the bastards make of that.”
“My God, Mr. President,” Bob Munson had said, and not entirely joking either, “hadn’t you better check and see if Washington is still there?”
“Washington is still there,” the President had responded in the same vigorous vein. “Washington will be there a damned sight longer than these sons of bitches. Have a drink, everybody. I’m perfectly happy, but you all look as though you might need it.”
“Yes,” Orrin Knox agreed, “I think we do.”
Now, as he put on his earphone for the simultaneous translation in First Committee and switched the dial over the six channels to English on Channel 2, he could remember with satisfaction Tashikov’s appearance when he came to the villa at 6 p.m. The Soviet Ambassador had been white-faced and quivering, both at the situation and at the Secretary’s insistence on meeting him in front of the press in the villa’s ballroom. Under the anger, Orrin could sense an uneasy and growing uncertainty. It had not been alleviated, he knew, when he informed the Ambassador tersely that the President had given orders that he was not to be disturbed for the rest of the night.
“I thought he was entertaining the Chairman at a state dinner at 9 p.m.,” Tashikov had said angrily. “And the Chairman will entertain him tomorrow night. That was the agreement.”
“Agreements can be broken,” the Secretary had taken some satisfaction in pointing out, “as you have already proved this day. Anyway, I think it’s just as well to get away from this standard nonsense about how much everybody loves everybody at these international conferences. You didn’t ask us here to be friendly. You thought you would bring us here to destroy us. Well: you haven’t; nor will you. Now, state your business, and if it’s worthwhile, I’ll tell the President. That’s my function.”
“We cannot possibly agree to open the conference to the press!” the Ambassador said.
“We can’t possibly agree to attend unless it is open,” the Secretary replied. “Tell the Chairman. Good night.”
And taking a leaf from the President’s book, he turned on his heel and went back to the private quarters where the White House communications center had set up an enormous bank of transmitters and receivers, over which he could hear the frantic commentators of his own country telling the world how horribly dangerous the American delegation’s behavior was and how irresponsibly it jeopardized the world’s hopes for peace.
Watching Tashikov now as he launched into another of his high-pitched tirades against the United States, translated word for word and smug inflection for smug inflection by the UN translator, Orrin Knox recalled with a grim amusement the Ambassador’s three subsequent visits to the villa that night: at 8 p.m., at 11, and, finally, at 1 a.m. Each time their conversation had been roughly the same, and each time it seemed to be briefer; and yet the Secretary of State had the growing conviction that all he had to do was stand firm and presently he would win out. At the last he had gestured to all the cameras, the reporters, and the television gear before which they were standing. “Do you know what you’re doing, Mr. Ambassador? You’re making yourself utterly and completely absurd.”
“Very well,” Tashikov had said with a black anger that sounded, at last, completely genuine, “if that is your attitude, your blood be on your own heads, Americans!”
But at 3 a.m., after they had all gone to bed, a courier had come and awakened the Secretary: the Russians would meet them at the Palais des Nations at 3 p.m., and the conference would be open.
“Imperialist colonializers … oppressing the just aspirations of the peoples for freedom … destroyers of human rights … enemies of justice …” The idealistic phrases of the liberty-loving friends of Hungary, Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, East Germany, and the Baltic states came to him in violent precision over the earphone as he watched the Soviet Ambassador pounding and gesticulating across the curved horseshoe of seats in First Committee. He had heard it all so many times before—so infinitely many times. But never, he was sure, with quite the ominous and portentous contempt with which it had been hurled at the President and his companions by the Chairman of the Council of Ministers as he delivered his three-hour denunciation in Geneva.
After one or two futile attempts to interrupt, the President had sat back with an expression both amused and bored while the torrent of invective flooded in upon them through the same UN earphones and apparatus of translation. In fact, it could have been the same translator: there was the same precise rendering of emphasis and inflection, a mimicry so perfect as to border, unconsciously or perhaps not, on parody. The gist of the first two and a half hours of it differed little from what had been coming out of Moscow ever since the Soviets began their calculated campaign of world imperialism at the end of the Second World War. “I don’t think they like us,” Bob Munson had confided at one point, leaning across to Orrin behind the President’s chair. “I’m saddened,” the Secretary had replied with a cheerful amusement that caused an uneasy little ripple through the ranks of the Soviet delegation.
In the final half hour, however, the Chairman, looking about with his angry scowl and customary hostile expression, had gotten down to business. It was not a pleasant prospect that he laid out before the world; although it was, as Warren Strickland remarked later, no different from the prospect presented so often in the past by his late predecessor before that worthy’s abrupt and unexpected demise. It just sounded uglier, reduced to bald essentials and stripped of the grins, the proverbs, and the bouncy banging-about.
“Gospodin!” he had begun, giving to that word, as versatile as the French alors!, a fateful and somber inflection: “Gentlemen, attend me well. You have come here at the direction of the Government of the U.S.S.R., after great and overpowering gains by the U.S.S.R., to hear what the U.S.S.R. requires of your country in the interests of world peace. It is this:
“You will at once abandon the imperialist military alliance known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and will assist with all possible speed in the liquidation of the NATO armed forces. This to be accomplished not later than one month from today.
“You will abandon all military and naval bases of whatever nature on the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, South and North America, exclusive of the United States, retaining only those bases not more than ten miles from the shores of the continental United States. This to be accomplished not later than one month from today.
“You will terminate at once all missile and space exploration projects of the United States, transferring immediately to the U.S.S.R. control of all such projects and their personnel.
“You will terminate at once the experimental programs of the United States in the field of nuclear, thermonuclear, chemical, germ, and other super-weapons, transferring immediately to the U.S.S.R. control of all such projects and their personnel.
“You will reduce the Army of the United States to one hundred thousand officers and men, effective two months from today.
“You will reduce the Navy of the United States to ten battleships, five destroyers, and thirty supporting vessels, with suitable complements. You will discharge all other naval personnel and transfer to the United Nations Security Council tide and control of all other vessels presently in the United States Navy.
“You will immediately destroy, under supervision of the United Nations Security Council, all nuclear-powered submarines in the United States Navy and immediately discharge their personnel.
“You will immediately disband and destroy, under supervision of the United Nations Security Council, the Air Force of the United States and most particularly the Strategic Air Command.
“You will abrogate at once all treaties of alliance, mutual assistance or defense, between the government of the United States and other governments.
“You will take immediate steps to make certain that persons friendly to the U.S.S.R. are brought into the Cabinet of the President and other high offices of your government, and you will take steps also immediately to assure a friendly attitude toward the government of the U.S.S.R. on the part of the press, radio, television, and motion picture industries of the United States.
“You will prepare to receive in Washington not later than one week from today commissioners of the U.S.S.R., who will advise you on carrying out this agreement.
“You will appoint immediately two representatives to sit with the representatives of the U.S.S.R., the Afro-Asian States, the People’s Republics of Europe, the People’s Republics of the Caribbean and Latin America, and a representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, to supervise the carrying-out of all the terms of this agreement.”
He paused and looked up and down the long table, and only the whirring of the television cameras and the sounds of pencils racing over paper in the press areas along the walls broke the silence. His gaze came back to that of the President, who looked at him with impassive curiosity from directly across the table. He gave a sudden cough and an impatient, angry shake of his head.
“Now, gentlemen,” he said, “these terms may at first glance seem harsh and difficult for you to accept. Be assured it is not the intention of the U.S.S.R. to be harsh but only to do what is obviously necessary to guarantee the peace of the world. Our sole interest lies in removing the causes of friction and of war. We have tried for many years without success to persuade the United States to abandon policies, which could lead only to war. The United States has persisted in these policies even though it has been obvious to the world that they could have only one conclusion, a conclusion which would be disastrous for all mankind.
“Now the time has come to change these false and wrongheaded policies. Soviet science has placed in our hands the means to do so. We would be betraying our responsibility to the human race if we did not exercise this new power to make the United States abandon its mad drive toward war and adopt policies desired by all the peace-loving peoples of the earth. That is our sole interest, gentlemen. We are here in the cause of peace. Do not, I beg of you, stand in the way of the world’s yearning for peace.”
He paused, and this time it was the President who coughed, a perfunctory and rather disinterested little sound which he emphasized by smiling politely and saying, “Excuse me,” in a friendly voice. The Chairman frowned but went on.
“You are asking yourselves, as the watching world may no doubt be asking, why should you yield to these Soviet cries for peace? Why should the great United States abandon its drive toward war and rejoin the community of the world’s peace-loving peoples? Are there not profits to be gained by continuing to pursue a policy of war? Is there not power to be gained by continuing to pursue a policy of war? Gentlemen, do not believe it! No, gentlemen, that day is vanished forever. To continue on such a course is to follow an empty dream, to get holes in your shoes chasing a swamp fog.
“Why, gentlemen, do you think”—and here a heavy sarcasm came into his voice—“do you think there are only radio transmitters in the Soviet expedition to the moon? Do you think that is all we sent up there? Do you think it is just a contest in radio broadcasts that exists between our two countries? No, gentlemen, we—(the translator hesitated and then produced)—tucked in—we tucked in a little something else along with the bread and cheese to keep us healthy when we reached the moon. We did not want to rob you of this contest in radio broadcasts, but we wanted to be sure that we had some other argument available when we asked you to come here and accept guarantees for peace.
“That argument is up there too, gentlemen. It needs only a signal from us and it will suddenly be down here on earth again, falling on Washington and New York and Chicago and St. Louis and Denver and San Francisco and all your other fine cities. That is our argument, gentlemen, and you must not stand in the way of it. And, gentlemen! We cannot necessarily be sure that these are the only cities it will hit if you force us to use it. It may also hit London and Paris and Rome and many other capitals in the former imperialist alliance ring of the United States. We should not like this to happen, but if you force us to use our argument, gentlemen, we might not be able to control it entirely. This would be a heavy responsibility for the United States to assume, gentlemen. The results would be very sad for the world.” He glanced at the watching cameras. “The world is right there now, gentlemen. What do you have to say to it, yes or no?”
And with a gesture that did indeed bring suddenly into the room the watching presence of humanity around the globe—Americans in their pleasant homes, Russians in their dark cities and mud-daubed huts, English in their clubs, Malays in Singapore, a white-robed Nigerian in Lagos, some Indians in New Delhi, little excited groups in the sunny alleys of Rome, a sheepherder in New Zealand, businessmen in Rio, tribal chieftains huddled around a squeaky receiver in Jebel-el-Druz, vividly dressed Malagasys in Tananarive, a frightened group of tourists in Tahiti, and many and many a million more on that bright spring day—he folded his arms abruptly and sat back with an intent and listening scowl. A silence again fell on the room, broken as before only by the busy whirring of cameras and a little stir here and there among the press, as history quieted down and prepared to attend the President of the United States.
“Mr. Chairman,” he began slowly, leaning forward to rest his elbows on the arms of his chair and look with a candid appraisal at his opponent, “I would like to think that I am in the presence of a sane man instead of a maniac, for if I am in the presence of a maniac, then this world, so beautiful in the spring, does not have much longer to live.”
He paused, and there was an audible intake of breath around the room and, no doubt, around the earth. But he appeared not to notice and after a moment resumed in a curiously detached voice, as though he were addressing, not the Russians, but the world, as indeed he was.
“I came here with my delegation, composed of old friends of mine from the Senate of the United States, thinking we would find serious and sober proposals for easing the tensions that afflict our poor common humanity.” He stopped and his glance went slowly up and down the Russian side. “Instead,” he said, and a new vigor came into his voice, “we are confronted with utter frivolity. Yes, gentlemen, with utter and complete frivolity. With the most irresponsible playing with the destinies of mankind. With something so monstrous it would under other conditions be considered a joke, though an evil and despicable one.”
“Gospodin—” the Chairman began angrily, but the President went on.
“Evil and despicable!” he said, with all the intensity of one coming from a small town in Michigan confronted suddenly with something dirty and unexpected in the middle of the living-room rug. “Evil and despicable! How dare you, Mr. Chairman?”
“Gospodin—” the Chairman said softly, but again the President brushed him aside.
“We have heard here every dream of every Soviet leader since the end of World War II, boiled down to essence and presented with a straight face. Get out of this! Get out of that! Scrap your defenses! Abandon your friends! Give the world to Communism! Forget your responsibilities to humankind and surrender to us! All the dearest fantasies of the Kremlin have been rolled up in one and presented to us here complete with threats. Gospodin,” he said, giving the word an angry and sarcastic emphasis, “you attend me well, and I will give you the answer of the United States.
“We will never accept your ridiculous proposals. We will never abandon our duty to the world. We will never betray our friends. We will never shirk our destiny or our responsibility.” And he concluded slowly, with a softness to match the Chairman’s own, “Never. Never. Never.…
“And so what will you do now? Blow up the United States? Destroy the globe? Use upon humanity all those rockets, which, as your predecessor was so fond of telling us before you disposed of him, you ‘produce like sausage?’ Gentlemen, there are two sausage factories in this world. There are two bomb factories in this world. There are nuclear submarines with nuclear weapons beneath the seas of this world. There is everything in this world to destroy not only us but you as well. Gospodin, do you really think we will not use it? And do you think you will gain anything thereby?
“Mr. Chairman,” he said, and at last he spoke directly to the man who scowled upon him from across the table, “do you not see what you have done by this threat of terror, not only this threat but all the others you have flung upon the world over the years? You have made terror ridiculous. We have so much terror at our fingertips, you and I, that there is no more terror. It no longer makes sense. It is absurd.
“Blow us up, then! And we will blow you up, then! And let us together blow up the world, then! And that will be the end of humanity, then! And what will that accomplish, can you tell me?
“You are childish and unworthy to be trusted with your great responsibilities. And I and my delegation,” he concluded quietly, “have nothing more to say or do here. If you wish to meet us in the United Nations to conduct negotiations with a decent respect for our mutual needs and the needs of humanity, we shall be there as always. Right now,” he said in four words that were so simple they dignified the moment better than oratory could, “we are going home.”
And he rose slowly, and with a friendly nod to his countrymen, who also rose as in a daze and followed him, he walked with his sturdy, plodding gait down the long table past the cameras, past the guards, down the steps, into the limousine, and once again in screaming procession beside the blue lake in the warm wind along the Rue de Lausanne to the villa in the bright spring sun.
And the world did not collapse or the skies fall, Secretary Knox thought as he watched Tashikov come to the end of his indignant peroration and prepare to make way for a few words from Ghana prior to First Committee’s vote on the Panamanian resolution to have the General Assembly take up immediate independence for Terrible Terry’s Gorotoland. Yet for a little while it had seemed that they might and the globe had awaited with fearful trepidation what would happen next.
“My God, Harley!” Bob Munson had said when they were alone in the villa. “My God!”
“What else could I do?” the President asked simply. “Really, what else could I do?”
And that was it, of course: there was nothing else. But as they rode back to Cointrin Airport that evening they were not, despite the outward appearance of calm they managed to muster, at all sure what lay in wait for them or for the world. No further word of any kind had come from the Russians, and anything from kidnapping to an immediate nuclear holocaust could have greeted them. This time the crowds were small. No one cheered. There were little gestures and waves now and again, and it was not difficult to tell that they were again being wished well. But a terrible terror lay on the world. No one at all felt like demonstrations now.
Presently the plane was airborne and the lovely city faded in the night. Fog and clouds came on soon after they lifted off, and Europe, the Channel, and England were hidden from them. It was just as well, for they did not really think that any bonfires were burning for them now. What they were going home to they did not know, either: whether there would be cities or a country left, although the President had received no word of anything unusual from Washington, and so it seemed likely things were all right, at least for the moment.
Somewhere out from Ireland they broke above the clouds into a clear moonlit night. It was then that Tom August, peering up at earth’s companion floating serenely above, said suddenly, “Great God, what’s that?”
For a moment, somewhere far out between moon and earth, a tiny red rose blossomed in the endless depths of night—blossomed and grew infinitely brighter for a lovely, horrible minute filled with death and beauty and insane fear, and then began slowly to fade and fade, until at last it disappeared altogether. It was not repeated, and no one had ever been able to discover since whether it had been a shot that failed or simply a Soviet gesture for whatever propaganda value might accrue. It caused great headlines next day, but nobody knew. It was not repeated.
And now here they were in First Committee, Soviet pressure unrelenting but the direct ultimatum, at least for the time being, laid aside. The world had gulped, shifted, adjusted, changed: nobody could say quite how much, or quite in what direction, whether toward or away from the men of Moscow, toward or away from those of Washington. The event, however, had brought an even greater tension to affairs, given many lesser powers a bargaining position they had never known before. The middle nations, the so-called neutrals, the youthful governments of Africa and the uncommitted states, had become even more important now. The contest had reverted to diplomacy and the battle had become even more vicious, using every means at hand. Including, Orrin Knox thought uneasily as he watched Senator Lafe Smith of Iowa come in across the room with a wave and a cheerful grin, the M’Bulu of Mbuele, that glittering young man who now moved gracefully to the podium and prepared, with a respectful yet confident air, to address the chair.
Terrible Terry no doubt had some surprises up his sleeve for the West: all that education hadn’t been wasted on this particular product of the bush.
Nor was it entirely clear why he should suddenly wish to visit South Carolina.
“Trouble for both of us,” the British Ambassador had said. It might well prove true, though perhaps it could be kept within bounds if Washington would co-operate. If the President would make a gesture, if Cullee Hamilton would perform a possibly distasteful task, if Seab Cooley would not be too obstreperous and unmanageable, if— Ten thousand ifs: such was the unrelenting nature of his new life as Secretary of State.
He thought wistfully of the Senate, some two hundred miles to the south, and now at three minutes to noon preparing to convene, as the M’Bulu said politely, “Mr. Chairman,” and began.
3
A month later, after Terrible Terry has cut his swath through the United Nations, the United States, and the affairs of mankind; after Felix Labaiya and his wife and her family have advanced their various ambitions in their various ways; and after Cullee Hamilton and Harold Fry have, each in his own fashion, come to terms with the imperatives of personal need and the obligations of national integrity, the Majority Leader of the United States Senate will look back and wonder why he ever went along with Orrin’s idea in the first place.
He will be able to understand it as an intellectual proposition, but he still will not be entirely convinced of its wisdom: a tribute, he will suspect, to that universal state of confusion in which men everywhere, confronted by the necessity for making great decisions on great events, proceed along paths they cannot anticipate toward conclusions they cannot foresee. He will wonder then if the Secretary of State, impressed with the need for charting a careful diplomatic course in the wake of Geneva, may not have gone too far in his willingness to adapt himself to both the supposed attitudes of certain foreign states and the known prejudices of certain domestic critics, some of the latter more noted for their ability to raise hell than for their capacity to understand issues.
Contemplating the results of it all, Senator Robert Munson of Michigan will be inclined to think that the first reactions in Washington were the right ones; although, being aware with what imperfect knowledge and imperfect understanding the human race moves toward its mysterious and shrouded destiny, he will conclude honestly that, after all, the decisions taken may have been the right ones, or, at any rate, no worse than any others that might have been adopted.
Right now, however, as he takes his position at the first desk, center aisle, of the Senate and prepares to bow his head to another of the Senate Chaplain’s maundering prayers, the senior Senator from Michigan is not concerned with such philosophic musings as this. Right now the M’Bulu of Mbuele and all the events and people about to be involved with him are among the least important items in the world of Bob Munson. He is aware that the United Nations is engaged in one more controversy about one more would-be African state, and he has followed its general outlines in the press. But he is much more concerned at the moment with the practical problems involved in bringing to conclusion the Senate’s debate on the foreign aid bill, and in pushing his balky and cantankerous colleagues toward an adjournment that is already, in late September, several weeks overdue.
It has not been his idea, Senator Munson reflects with some impatience as the clock reaches noon, the President Pro Tempore bangs his gavel, and the Rev. Carney Birch, Chaplain of the Senate, snuffles into another of his admonitory open letters to the Senate and the Lord, to let the Congressional session run on so long. Certainly he and the Speaker of the House would have liked to wind it up a month ago; only the President has seemed to want it prolonged. Since his return from Geneva and the growing public praise and acclaim which have mounted steadily as the world has begun to realize that it will not be blown up because of his actions, Harley has been displaying what Senator Arly Richardson of Arkansas has referred to with his customary sarcasm as “a great urge to play President.”
Leaving aside the fact that Harley of course is the President and definitely not playing at it, Arly’s casual cloakroom crack nonetheless does express a certain wry attitude on the part of the President’s former colleagues on Capitol Hill. The Executive whom Time magazine now hails respectfully as “the man the Soviets couldn’t scare,” and whom the editorial cartoonist of the Washington Post now pictures with a certain homespun strength that was hardly noticeable in his drawings when Harley first took office, is obviously enjoying his job. Not only that, he is using it to attempt to push through certain reforms which, like most other reforms of the human, haphazard, peculiar, and peculiarly successful American system, are long overdue. Possibly spurred on by Robert A. Leffingwell, who is receiving great press commendation as director of the President’s Commission on Administrative Reform, the President has already proposed a sweeping overhaul of the Defense Department and its allied missile and space programs, a streamlining of the Foreign Service and the overseas information activities of the government, and even, God save the mark, a new farm program. This last has already caused some revision in the Congressional estimates of what he will do next year when his party holds its national nominating convention, “I really believed he meant it when he said he wouldn’t run again,” Senator Stanley Danta of Connecticut has just been quoted by Newsweek, “but when I saw that new farm bill I knew he’d changed his mind.”
Whether he has or not (and, queried at his press conference a week ago, the President would only chuckle and say, “My, my, you boys must be hard up for news if you can’t think of a better question than that”), and whether his burst of executive activity since returning from Geneva has been his idea or Bob Leffingwell’s, the fact remains that he has given Bob Munson a busy summer. The Majority Leader has been held to his duties as rigorously as he ever was during the tenure of the President’s predecessor. He has not complained about this, for, after all, it is his job, and it has also given his wife Dolly a chance to hold at least four extra garden parties at “Vagaries,” that great white house in Rock Creek Park, that she wouldn’t have held if they had returned to Michigan earlier in the summer. But the instinct of twenty-three years in the Senate, the last twelve of them as Majority Leader, tells him that the time has come to get the Congress out of Washington and give its members a chance to rest up from one another.
There comes a point, as Bob Munson is well aware, when Senators and Representatives have been together long enough and it is much better for the country if they can just go away, return home or travel or whatever, and forget the problems of legislating for a while. In a system resting so subtly but inescapably upon the delicate balances of human likes and dislikes, familiarity does not necessarily breed contempt but it does breed an eventual irascibility which, toward session’s end, makes the functionings of American democracy rather more subject to personal pitfalls that they should ideally be.
A fast windup to the aid debate—about two more days, Bob Munson estimates—an opportunity for a few last-minute speeches and dramatics by those Senators and Representatives who always have to have the last word for the sake of the political record and whatever headlines it may bring them, and then—home.
So thinks Robert M. Munson as Senator Tom August of Minnesota rises in the Senate to make his concluding speech on the aid bill and at the United Nations the M’Bulu of Mbuele begins to set in train the series of events that will add another ten days to the session and bring to the UN and to both houses of Congress one of the most violent and embittered controversies of recent years.
Unaware of these thoughts of adjournment passing through the mind of the Majority Leader, but fully in accord with their general import, the President Pro Tempore of the Senate is also anxious to get away. Seabright B. Cooley of South Carolina is just turned seventy-six—his colleagues spent all day yesterday trying to outdo one another in paying him tribute, except for Fred Van Ackerman of Wyoming, who deliberately stayed away with the sour comment to the press that he “wasn’t interested in soft-soaping senility”—and he fully apprehends that he had best get on home to South Carolina and do some visiting around the state if he wishes to retain his gradually slipping hold upon it. The basic sources of his political power are as ancient as himself, and many of them, indeed, are gone. A great name and a great reputation, great battles in the cause of Carolina and the South, have carried him through election after election; but he is conscious now that new generations, new interests, new industries, and new money in the state are threatening his position as never before.
“Seab won’t leave the Senate until they carry him out on a stretcher,” Senator John DeWilton of Vermont remarked the other day. The old man knows with a lively awareness that he can be carried out just as effectively on a ballot box. New leaders walk the streets of Barnwell and new voices exchange the softly accented passwords of power in the moss-hung gardens of Charleston. Seab Cooley still commands great respect in his native state, but his instinct is not playing him false: there are whispers everywhere, an urge for someone new, a feeling, sometimes vague but increasingly articulate, that South Carolina should have a younger and more vigorous spokesman in the Senate.
“Younger and more vigorous, my God!” his junior colleague, H. Harper Graham, comments to his fellow Senator. “Could anybody be more vigorous than Seab?” But Harper Graham knows the talk, too, and Seab Cooley has good reason to believe that among those who would not be at all averse to seeing him defeated is Harper Graham himself, melancholy, dark-visaged, filled with ambition and temper almost as great as his own, burning like a dark flame in the Senate. He would not put it past Harper at all to actively seek his political downfall, Seab concludes, and the thought brings an ominous scowl to his face for a moment as he sees his colleague entering at the back of the big brown chamber. Then the look passes almost as it comes and is replaced by the sleepy, self-satisfied expression his fellow Senators know all too well. “What’s that old scallywag cooking up now?” Powell Hanson of North Dakota murmurs to Blair Sykes of Texas as they enter the Senate together, and they speculate for an idle and amused moment that he is probably dreaming up some way to get Harper Graham: so well-known to the Senate is the nature of the bond that unites the senior and junior Senators from South Carolina.
Actually, as is so often the case with Seab, the somnolent look conceals a mind at work on much more far-ranging matters than merely how to remove the threat of a bothersome colleague. “Getting Harper” is part of it, but his entire political problem is what engages him now, and the self-satisfied expression is really due to one of those flashes of intuition—or inspiration—“or hashish, or whatever it is,” as Senator John Winthrop of Massachusetts once put it—which occasionally show the senior Senator from South Carolina how to work his way out of difficult situations.
It is not even, in this case, anything particularly specific, nor is it associated with the man on whom his eye happens to fall just now; it is just that Seab is reminded that on one issue, at least, neither Harper Graham nor any other successful politician in South Carolina can afford to take a position different from his. The man he sees is Cullee Hamilton, the young colored Congressman from California, but the thought Cullee immediately inspires in the mind of Seab Cooley is not one that directly concerns him; it is simply a generalized reaction, prompted by his presence, going back into the bitter past of a troubled region, stirred by emotions as new as tomorrow’s headlines, as old as the tears of time. It is not an especially original thought, but in a political sense it works; and contrary to much violently expressed northern opinion, which conveniently forgets such areas as Chicago, Detroit, and Harlem, it does not work simply because politicians both white and black make use of it for their own selfish purposes. It works because the overwhelming majority of his fellow southerners, like Seab himself, are absolutely convinced of it by birth, by tradition, and by belief. This poses many deeply tragic problems, but the Senator and his fellow citizens can no more change on that particular subject than they could fly, unassisted, to the stars.
By the same token, neither can Cullee Hamilton, as he stands at the center door of the Senate chamber looking about for California’s junior Senator, the dashing and slightly over dapper Raymond Robert Smith. There is a bill involving a proposed water viaduct in the San Fernando Valley which is on the Senate calendar awaiting action, and Cullee, aware that this is important to a number of constituents in his sprawling district just north of Los Angeles, wants Ray Smith’s help in persuading Bob Munson to pass it through the Senate by unanimous consent in what everybody believes to be these closing hours of the Congressional session.
Cullee already has the Speaker’s promise to pass it through the House tomorrow—the Speaker has always been fond of him, personally as well as politically, and Cullee has been well-favored by that powerful gentleman ever since the start of his first term five years ago—but the Senate Majority Leader is another matter. He has rather more on his mind than the Speaker does at the moment, the Senate being customarily more cluttered up with last-minute odds and ends than the House each year when adjournment approaches, and it will take a little extra assistance to get Cullee’s bill approved.
Not that he anticipates any great difficulty, but it is a matter of timing and that takes care. In this Ray Smith, for all that he is something of a laughingstock to his colleagues in their cloakroom conversations, can be of real assistance; particularly since those San Fernando Valley constituents are vitally important to him, too. Ray is up for re-election next year, and he is as sharply conscious of his constituency as Seab Cooley is of his. The fact that he too is in rather shaky condition may provide the extra spur to successful action on Cullee Hamilton’s bill. An extra spur to Cullee, too, Cullee thinks wryly, if only he were as ambitious as Sue-Dan and as full of git-up-and-go as she constantly tells him he ought to be.
The thought of his wife, though it appears to be a circuitous and indirect way to approach it, and though they would both be surprised at the parallel and for the moment unable to see it, brings him to the very point that is just passing through the clever old mind of the President Pro Tempore of the Senate as their eyes meet for a brief moment across the crowded chamber. He and Seab Cooley do not really know one another, having had only one brief and uncomfortable talk on carefully innocuous matters when Cullee testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing three years ago, but there is a certain instinctive understanding between them; “perhaps,” as Cullee told himself dryly at the time, “because we’re both Southerners.” Possibly for this reason it occurs to each of them in this fleeting instant now that the other may be thinking of the subject of race. Both are right, though there is a shade of difference in their thoughts. Seab is thinking of it in terms of his problem in South Carolina, Cullee, much more basically, in terms of his wife.
“Why don’t you run against fancy-nancy Smith for the Senate next year?” she keeps asking in her taunting way. “Because you’re afraid a nigger can’t make it, even in California?” And when he winces at the expression she laughs and says it again three times. “I know you don’t like that word, my poor little Cullee,” she tells him in mock-soothing tones. “That’s a bad word us enlightened people don’t use. But it’s true, isn’t it, nigger, nigger, nigger?”
It is all he can do at such moments, Cullee admits to himself, to keep from slapping her straight across the face; except that it is, as the M’Bulu of Mbuele has already indicated to the Secretary of State, a beautiful face, and it happens to belong to a girl with whom the young Congressman from California is in love in a way so fundamental he can’t help himself. So his only response is a tired sigh and the comment, “Why do you say things like that, Sue-Dan? You know it only bothers me, and what does it gain for you? Do you like to bother me? Haven’t you got better games to play than that?” But her response, as so often, is an apparently instant loss of interest. “You sigh an awful lot, lately,” she says, and with another little laugh she picks up the cat and a magazine, sinks into a chair, and seemingly becomes lost to the world as she studies the printed page and croons soft endearments to the cat.
Thinking of such scenes, which are becoming increasingly frequent of late, the Congressman sighs again and gives an unconscious, instinctive jerk of his right shoulder, as though someone were trying to hit him and he were ducking the blow. His eyes are troubled behind their gold-rimmed glasses, and across his handsome scholarly face, with its high cheekbones, classic brow, and full lips, an expression of trouble, both innocent and obvious, passes briefly. Ray Smith, approaching him unnoticed from the left, does poke him with a friendly fist and asks, “What’s the matter, Cullee? Somebody walking over your grave?” The Congressman shakes his head and looks down at the shorter Senator with a quickly concealing smile.
“I’m worried about water. Are we going to help those folks in the San Fernando Valley? Looks to me like we’ve got to if we’re to be elected next year.” Ray Smith grins back and says with a playfulness just a trifle too exaggerated, “Elected to what, Cullee?” And abruptly the Congressman realizes that Ray Smith and his wife agree. He’s actually afraid of me, he thinks, and it is impossible to deny a thrill of ego at that. He thinks maybe I could beat him, if I wanted to; or at any rate, he isn’t sure he could beat me. And he asks himself again, as he has on many more occasions than he has ever let on to Sue-Dan: why not? Why shouldn’t I? California’s different; they’re more progressive out there. Somebody has to break the ice, and why shouldn’t I? Out there, maybe a man could.
Thus his thoughts again parallel Seab Cooley’s, and now almost identically. There is the same commingling of passionate belief, personal ambition, and practical politics; the only added ingredient being that Cullee, a much younger man reared in a much different age, is able to stand back for a second and think to himself with an ironic and troubled amazement how fantastic this America is, which lets one man seek office on one basis in one state and another man seek office on almost the diametrically opposite basis in another state. How broad this umbrella, which covers so many children, he thinks; and underneath the joshing, uncomfortable conversation he is attempting to carry on with Senator Smith a deeper melancholy comes as he adds to himself: and will they ever rest together in harmony and peace, or will they always betray the ultimate reality of brotherhood and love that is the great final promise of the American dream?
But now, he chides himself, you’re talking like an editorial writer, and the whole thing is a lot more basic than that. The whole thing at the moment, in fact, is as basic as Sue-Dan Hamilton and what she thinks when she goes to bed with Cullee Hamilton; because while this still happens very often it is beginning to become obvious to one participant, at least, that the other doesn’t think too much of it. Certainly not as much as she used to in the first wild months of a union that seemed at the time so inevitable it couldn’t be stopped. Now he is beginning to find it possible to think that under certain conditions it could be stopped; and the thought terrifies him, for what would life be like without little old Sue-Dan? But even here a basic, ironic honesty still intrudes. You’d get along, boy, his mind tells him; you’d get along. But his body adds instantly, it wouldn’t be the same. Oh, no, indeedy. It wouldn’t be the same.
At once there leaps into his mind—by now Ray Smith is really quite worried that the Congressman does intend to run against him, because he seems so absent-minded and unresponsive to all of Ray’s sallies and there surely can be only one explanation for that: Cullee’s so busy thinking how to beat him that he isn’t able to concentrate on small talk—a picture of hot, dusty Molobangwe, capital of Gorotoland, lying in the blazing sun of distant Africa. He recalls the mud-and-wattle huts, the cattle and chickens in the streets, the guttural, rapid, curiously clicking sound of Terrible Terry’s native tongue, and in the rambling, ramshackle European structure, left over from an early ill-fated Christian mission, which now serves as the royal palace, a peculiar conversation with his elusive and half-naked host. The talk appeared to center around politics and the M’Bulu’s impatient and uneasy relationship with the British, but underneath it all Cullee had the impression that it concerned Sue-Dan.
They had been in Molobangwe for a week at the request of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the visit had proved, so far, quite disappointing. “Why don’t you run along over there and see what’s up with that boy?” Representative J. B. (“Jawbone”) Swarthman of South Carolina, chairman of the committee, had suggested in his lazy drawl. “Mebbe he’ll let you in on things he wouldn’t tell the rest of us.” It was indicative of the working relationships in the Congress that neither Cullee nor Jawbone made any point of this practical reference to his color.
Jawbone’s assumption, however, had been false, and this had been very disturbing. In Africa he soon began to feel that he was being received, not as a fellow Negro, but as a prying and probably hostile American. Despite his preliminary reading, he had been a little too goodhearted to expect this, and so his first visit to Africa was proving something of a shock. The conversation with Terry had served to increase this unhappy realization that in a continent of tribes he was regarded as the representative of just another one, and that probably inimical. The whole thing was so foreign to his idealism about his own background, both racial and national, and his exhilaration at the great African surge to independence that was contemporaneous with his college years and start in public life, that he was having considerable difficulty accepting it. Consequently he did not pay too much attention to the M’Bulu’s rambling, if charming, discourse. Except that, at the end of it, he had gathered enough to be able to report later to the committee in Washington that there was probably real trouble coming with the British; and to carry away in the back of his mind the feeling that Terence Ajkaje, given half a chance, would love to appropriate his wife.
Whether Sue-Dan fully understood this he never knew directly, except as he was male enough to know when his female was desired by another male. He did realize that she was conscious of it to some extent, and perhaps bothered by it a little. He preferred to think that she had not encouraged it, and indeed there was little opportunity during their long, jolting rides through the back country in Terry’s old American jeep that had come down to Gorotoland through the mysterious channels of jungle and desert trade from some unknown long-ago battleground far to the north. His wife had been circumspect and noncommittal in the presence of the M’Bulu, who alternated between showing off his gorgeous robes and appearing stripped to a breechclout with his magnificent torso rippling like molten ebony in the sun. Sue-Dan had professed to be unimpressed by all this, and had even remarked sardonically at one point, “For a man with as many pretty clothes as you’ve got, Terry, you sure do like to undress.” Terry had given her his charming smile and exploded into delighted laughter. After that, save for his final talk alone with the Congressman when they had both sat around half-naked drinking native wine in the steaming hot room that had once resounded to “Rock of Ages” thumped out on a pump organ, the M’Bulu had been ceremoniously and fully clothed.
And now, Cullee thinks uneasily, Terry is at the United Nations and his argument with the British is front-page news, and sooner or later their paths will probably cross again. In fact, he is almost sure they will, for although he has turned down Jawbone’s suggestion that he “trot along down to that Jason party for the Emmbooloo in Charleston,” he is sure Terry won’t miss the chance to come through Washington on his way back to New York and create as many headlines as possible for himself in the process. And he, as the most popular, well liked, and respected Negro in Congress, will indubitably be expected to be on hand at some point along the line.
He decides, as he stands there by the Senate door responding with a tenth of his mind and attention to the nervous chatter of Senator Smith, that both he and Sue-Dan will stay out of it as much as possible. Patsy Labaiya and her family can whoop it up for old Terry as much as they like, but he, Cullee Hamilton, will do only the minimum that he absolutely has to; and Terry can be a white man’s pet nigger if he is willing to lend himself to the Jasons’ patronizing ways, but he, Cullee Hamilton, having been down that road and back on several occasions, will be damned if he will do the same. And he is also not disposed, given the present uncertain state of his marital situation, to encourage any stray sparks in igniting any stray dynamite that may be lying around.
He frowns, driving Ray Smith almost frantic, and after an absent-minded expression of thanks for Ray’s help on the San Fernando Valley viaduct, meets Seab Cooley’s eyes once more, gives a polite nod which is politely returned, goes out the swinging doors of the Senate, and starts back down the long, dim marble corridor, crowded with tourists who think he is probably a clerk, to the House.
At this final exchange of glances, five charming ladies whose presence in the Family Gallery is unnoted by the two participants exchange glances of their own and, with them, amused smiles and a significant nod or two. Beth Knox, wife of the Secretary of State, has come to the Hill to have lunch with Dolly Munson, wife of the Majority Leader. In the corridors on the street level two floors down they have, just a few moments before, run into Kitty Maudulayne, wife of the British Ambassador; Celestine Barre, wife of the French Ambassador; and Patsy Labaiya, wife of the Ambassador of Panama, dressed as always in one of her bright, garish dresses and bright, garish hats. Since no one of any prominence can be seen in Washington with anyone else of any prominence without half a dozen people immediately speculating on the significance of it all, Beth and Dolly have both been instantly struck by this odd conjunction of Britain, France, and Panama. Both have perceived some of its possible implications in view of recent developments at the UN, and it has taken only the slightest and most elusive of feminine communications to produce a unanimous and hearty invitation to join the luncheon party. This has been promptly accepted by Kitty, who loves politics and gossip; by Celestine, who has approved with her gravely silent smile; and by Patsy, who interrupts her own rush of conversation long enough to cry, “My dears, we’d be simply DELIGHTED,” and then goes on talking about her own opinion that the recent and surprising marriage of that perennial prowler about town, Senator Lafe Smith of Iowa, may already be on the verge of breaking up. It has been her DISTINCT impression, Patsy informs her companions, two passing newspapermen, a Capitol cop, and a group of tourists from Nebraska, that ALL IS NOT WELL in that household. Why, do THEY know that at Dolly’s last garden party at “Vagaries,” Lafe and little Irene were seen by Justice Tommy Davis of the Supreme Court VIOLENTLY arguing behind one of the rhododendrons, and now that Lafe is up there at the United Nations, Patsy’s husband, HER husband, Felix, says it’s common talk that Lafe is— But here the Senators’ private elevator arrives and swallows them up, leaving behind two disappointed newspapermen, one grinning cop, and six puzzled but thoroughly intrigued tourists from Nebraska.
Now in the Family Gallery, where, as Dolly murmurs to Beth, even Patsy Labaiya has to shut up, they have dutifully stood for Carney Birch’s prayer and then settled down to watch the Senate for a little while before going back down for their 12:30 luncheon reservation in the Senators’ Dining Room. Beth says she can’t stay away from the Senate even though Orrin is at State, now—“it’s always been home to us, and I guess it will always be”—and now that Dolly has finally landed Bob Munson after long and diligent effort, she is finding that she, too, is drawn constantly to the best show in town. The best, and, with the House, the most important, in the opinion of the Congressional wives. The ambassadorial, knowing that here in these chambers United States foreign policies are implemented and American money is approved for distribution abroad, are inclined to agree.
While Tom August drones on about the aid bill, interrupted occasionally by heckling questions from Paul Hendershot of Indiana and Victor Ennis of California, five busy minds of five busy ladies click away like efficient little machines. Beth Knox, thinking over the telephone call that comes faithfully from Orrin every day that he is away from her, recalls that last night he expressed a genuine worry about the latest developments at the UN. The M’Bulu of Mbuele is vividly present in Beth’s mind, for Orrin has told her without embroidery exactly the problems posed by that shrewd young figure: the possibility that the United States, though it will do its best to seek a compromise, may yet have to break with Britain on the issue; the possibility that France, still courting the favor of the young African states she released to independence, may also find herself forced to certain imperatives of national interest; the possibility, not yet supported by real proof but always present, that the Soviets may seek and in Gorotoland possibly find one more African foothold; and the Secretary’s additional uneasy feeling that “this boy is a hell-raiser and I don’t know where he will jump next.”
Added to that, Beth’s own feeling of incompleteness when Orrin is away, and she has a good deal to contemplate as Tom August rambles along; added also the fact that just before she left the big comfortable house in Spring Valley for the Hill she received another phone call, this one from Springfield, Illinois. Her son Hal and her daughter-in-law, Senator Stanley Danta’s daughter Crystal, had burbled over with the news that the Knoxes would presently be grandparents. This too, understandably, gives her much to think about.
For Dolly Munson, reflecting her husband’s concern with getting the Senate session concluded, the problems are also of a domestic, though somewhat less emotional, nature: whether she should have one last quick cocktail party and buffet at “Vagaries” on Saturday night, or whether Congress will have left town by then so that everyone of any importance will be gone—whether she should tell the advance crew of servants to leave for Michigan to open the house in Grosse Pointe next Monday or whether she and Bob should stay over a week and just enjoy Washington and the Valley of Virginia in the beautiful fall weather without having to worry about the Senate, Congress, government, social obligations, or anything else—whether it might not even be best for Bob to take him away altogether, arrange a quick reservation on Cunard to Europe, and do their relaxing in London and Rome. Being married to the Majority Leader has brought with it many subtle responsibilities Dolly never really found out about in her first unhappy marriage. The basic problem of how to take care of a man, which Beth knew instinctively on the day she first met Orrin in college, is only now being fully understood by Dolly.
Kitty Maudulayne, who, like Beth, never doubted from the moment she first saw Claude come riding over the green meadows and stone fences of Crale that this was what life had planned for her, is also concerned to some extent with domestic matters and the possibility of a brief vacation. But being Kitty, loving politics, and very thoroughly aware of the problems implicit in representing a steadily withdrawing power in a world of aggressively advancing forces, she is also vitally concerned with matters at the UN. They come sharply into focus as she watches the handsome young Congressman from California nod briefly to Senator Cooley and leave the chamber. “My dear,” Patsy Labaiya whispers loudly behind her hand, “some of them look like BLACK GREEK GODS!” Kitty responds with a brightly absent-minded smile and, as she does so, catches the thoughtful eye of Celestine Barre. She knows at once that the wife of the French Ambassador is also reminded of color, and so of Africa, and so of Gorotoland, and of Terry, and of the UN, where events may soon take a turning that could conceivably bring to an end an association possessed of a warmth notably pleasant and notably close in the annals of the Washington diplomatic corps.
This, Kitty thinks with a real regret, will be too bad if it happens; but if it must, she knows there is nothing for it but to smile and say the usual cordially empty things and make the best of it. These necessary estrangements occur in international politics as in domestic—indeed, it has been quite unusual that the Ambassadors of the two major West European powers and their wives should have been good friends at all, so many are the points of friction between their countries—but Kitty is one of the world’s nicest people and quite capable of not liking what her husband’s profession requires them to do. She knows that he doesn’t like it, either, for he told her before going up to New York a couple of days ago that “things may get a little sticky with Raoul and Celestine, but let’s keep on with it as long as we can.” So they are both hoping that what is known at the United Nations as “The Problem of Gorotoland” may be settled without too intense a strain upon either their personal or national relationships with the Barres. But they are aware that the chances of so pleasant a solution are slim, especially since the Russians, with their grim determination to inflame every friction and destroy every hope for peace, will be busily working on an Anglo-French split along with all their other little projects.
She looks again at Celestine with a smile that holds both worry and affection, and Celestine smiles back in much the same way. Patsy Labaiya, sitting between them, suddenly asks, “Why doesn’t that OLD FUDDY-DUDDY sit down?” in a whisper so loud that Tom August actually looks up at the gallery with a startled and annoyed expression. The Problem of Gorotoland is temporarily forgotten as all the ladies again exchange amused smiles.
Actually on this occasion, as on so many others, the wife of the Ambassador of Panama is proceeding, with methods that have often proved effective before, in pursuit of purposes that most people usually do not suspect. All of her present companions are aware that there is a lot more to Patsy Jason Labaiya than appears on the ostensibly rattlebrained surface, but this knowledge is not shared by the general public or even by many people in Washington.
“Patsy Labaiya is a very clever woman,” Beth Knox remarked to her husband when they came home from the diplomatic reception where they had met her for the first time, but Orrin only snorted. “She is? She conceals it well.” “Beautifully,” Beth agreed, and suggested that he file the fact away somewhere in his mind for future use.
But Orrin had apparently dismissed it, even though he made no attempt to hide from his wife the fact that he considered Patsy’s brother to be someone worthy of the greatest respect and wariness in the political arena. Nobody had ever called Edward Jason, Governor of California, a stupid man, and Beth could not understand why it was so difficult for Orrin to imagine that some of the family brains might have been conferred upon his sister. Possibly it was because the Governor could conceivably pose some threat to Orrin’s ultimate ambitions that Orrin was willing to concede his abilities and not do the same for Patsy; or possibly it was just that men in politics, even more than men in other lines of endeavor, tend to be unwilling to accord full equality of intelligence to women. Nonetheless, of the five ladies sitting so cordially together in the Family Gallery, not one is under any illusions about the wife of Felix Labaiya-Sofra.
As for Patsy herself, she too at this moment is thinking with the deep concentration of which she is capable about the M’Bulu of Mbuele and the place where he fits in with the family plans to win the White House for her brother. The Jasons are no different from the Adames, the Harrisons, the Roosevelts, the Tafts, the Kennedys. No more numerous than the first, no less ambitious than the last, they too see no reason why one or more of their number should not occupy the fearful seat of power at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Her brother is willing, her cousins are eager to help, her aunts and uncles are prepared to spend as many millions as may be required to win the primaries and add the White House to the other family possessions, and in Patsy’s clever mind the whole thing boils down to the question, “What are we waiting for?” That the principal thing they are waiting for is Orrin Knox lends an extra little ironic fillip to this chance meeting with the Secretary’s wife; and the game is lent an extra zip by the fact that Patsy assumes that Beth must be as aware of its ironies as she. Beth is, but it says much about the two of them that Beth can sometimes relax and stop thinking about the next election, whereas Patsy Labaiya, like the rest of her family, never does.
Into this situation the visit of the M’Bulu of Mbuele to the United Nations has come as an unexpected bonus, a fortuitous circumstance that must, like everything else, be examined for its value to the cause of Ted Jason and used for whatever it may be worth therein. The luncheon in Charleston tomorrow was originally the half-amused, not quite serious idea of Bob Leffingwell, passed along to her at the last garden party at “Vagaries”; but the idea of bringing it under the aegis of the Jason Foundation and making of the guest list as powerful a cross section of influential opinion-makers as the nation affords, was Patsy’s own. California, despite its fantastic growth, has had relatively few racial explosions of late, and the Governor has consequently had few opportunities to associate himself with the politically suitable side of this politically useful question. Felix had called her from the UN a month ago to suggest that the M’Bulu could be very useful to the family plans if handled right, and her brother, apprised of this, had promised to make himself available for whatever she could arrange. The gain among the Negro vote, they hope, may be very substantial.
Therefore the luncheon has its values, both immediate and long-range; and it is lent an extra piquancy and excitement by the inspiration, also hers, of holding it in Seab Cooley’s Charleston. Thank God, Patsy Labaiya tells herself with a scornful glance down at the white-haired figure of the President Pro Tempore, slumped in the Vice President’s chair on the dais, her brother isn’t an insincere racist demagogue like THAT.
As for Bob Leffingwell, it may well be that a direct approach should be made to him about joining the Jason forces. In six months’ time, aided by the President’s generosity in salvaging his career by appointing him director of the Commission on Administrative Reform, he has managed to recoup a good deal of the ground he lost when the Senate defeated his nomination for Secretary of State. There is a disposition in the country to be fair to a man who has, after all, been defeated and humiliated by a Senate rejection and who has now, in the wake of that defeat, gone to work diligently and faithfully for the President who rescued him from what could have been a disastrous end to his public usefulness. The attitude of most of his fellow citizens has been: if the President is willing to give him another chance, the country should, too. In general, the country has.
The only thing that might interfere with Patsy’s plans to bring him into her brother’s camp, in fact, is the possibility that he might feel so much gratitude and loyalty to Harley Hudson that he would not wish to take a position that could bring him into conflict with Harley’s plans for next year. But this would only be true, she suspects, were the President to reverse his announced decision and decide to run again. If he were, as all indications now suggest, to step aside in favor of Orrin Knox, then Bob Leffingwell might feel perfectly free to join those who wish to defeat Orrin. Particularly since everyone knows how he feels about the Secretary of State, even though he has been careful to keep his rare public references suitably decorous.
In some ways, Patsy concludes with some annoyance, it is really that old character in the White House who is her brother’s principal obstacle even more than Orrin Knox. Like so many, she never thought much of him as Vice President and she doesn’t think much of him now, in spite of all his Geneva triumphs and recent executive energetics.
“My dear,” she had told the Speaker not a week ago at Senator Winthrop’s cocktail party at the Mayflower, “after all, what did he do at Geneva? He just said No. ANYBODY can say NO.” The Speaker had looked at her quizzically from his wise old eyes. “All depends on who you say No to, seems to me,” he had said. “Sometimes it’s not so easy.” ‘Poof!” she said. “I knew they wouldn’t do anything.” “Oh?” said the Speaker. “Well, maybe you knew that, Patsy, but, to tell you the truth I was scared as hell.” “Well,” she had gone on, “supposing it WAS a real threat? What else could he have done?” The Speaker had given her that same long, quizzical look. “Some men might have run, and thrown us all down the drain doing it. Harley didn’t. When guts were needed, Harley had ’em. Maybe you don’t value that. I do.” “Why, here’s Stanley Danta,” she had cried, turning away and bestowing a kiss on the Senator from Connecticut. “Stanley, the Speaker’s putting me in my place about the President, and do you know? I MAY DESERVE IT!”
But she didn’t think she did, and it is with a continuing impatience now that she considers the way most of the press and the country are continuing to fawn upon the President. Possibly he deserves some credit for doing what he had to do with a real show of courage, and she is willing to concede him that; but, really, this adulation is approaching the ridiculous. It is also making it quite difficult to challenge him politically, or to make any really solid plans about next year until he makes clear what he intends to do. Like everyone in Washington, Patsy never takes a denial of Presidential ambition to mean what it says, and neither she nor anyone else can believe that a man sitting in the White House will willingly vacate the premises until the Constitution says he absolutely must. Harley, having acceded to office with only twenty-one months of his predecessor’s term remaining, faces no bar whatsoever to two full terms for himself if he so desires and can persuade the voters to approve. Right now his stock is so high that there seems little doubt that the voters, if requested, will do just that.
Whether he will ask them, however, remains his secret; and now, as Patsy Labaiya decides she has been silent long enough and must make some whispered comment to try to persuade the other ladies, unsuccessfully, that she has not really been thinking like a little engine every minute, he is contemplating it quite seriously as he sits a mile away in the study on the second floor of the White House waiting for his lunch. It is a room that holds many memories of many Presidents, but the one he associates it with most often and most poignantly is the midnight conference last spring when his predecessor attempted to dissuade Brigham Anderson from his plans to reveal the truth about Bob Leffingwell. The President has thought many times of that talk, with all its implications and difficulties and terrible national imperatives, which, in the final rendering of judgment, required from his predecessor duplicity and from Brigham Anderson his life.
“Suppose you were sitting here—” his predecessor had said. Well, now he was, and he could see things now that he couldn’t see then, even though he would never, he honestly believes, have permitted events to carry him to the point of no return to which they had carried the late President.
To even contemplate for a second running again is, he tells himself, sheer insanity. It is a terrible job, one of the most terrible ever devised by human ingenuity to meet the need of men to have an organized society; why should anyone subject himself willingly to its fierce demands? Yet, he concedes, it exerts a powerful hold, conferring great rewards in return for the human toll it exacts upon those who occupy it.
So far he has conducted it with honor, he believes, and with a courage that cannot help pleasing him as he thinks back on the rather scornful and patronizing attitudes of Washington in his Vice Presidential days. Events have given him the opportunity to achieve the basic ambition of most men, which is to make the world accept them at their own evaluation. He thanks God every day that he possessed the character to do it when the time came. There are still moments, however, when he wonders with awe how it ever came about, in the mysterious movements of human destiny, and his emotion deepens as he recalls the searing moment of revelation he had as he approached the great bronze doors of the Assembly Hall in Geneva that first fateful afternoon.
Now, my boy, he had admonished himself with a deep breath, you’ve really got to act like the President. Quite suddenly, like a flash of light that almost stopped him where he stood, came the thought: I don’t have to ‘act like’ the President. I am the President.
After that, he had proceeded as though under some other guidance than his own. He had preferred to consider it divine, for that had been his family upbringing, and while he knew Harley Hudson had character that few people suspected, he also knew it wasn’t quite as good as all that. Accordingly on his return from Geneva he had declared a day of national prayer and thanksgiving and had led it himself by attending a solemn convocation at the Washington Cathedral. He was gratified to note that it had been joined by all denominations and, so far as press estimates could tell, by well over a hundred million of his countrymen. From that moment, too, he noted with an inner irony, had begun the steady change in press estimation and public attitude, which had now resulted, six months later, in making him the most popular Chief Executive in recent years.
At first, he would admit, this had been a highly uncertain and chancy proposition. With very few exceptions, the major elements of the American news community had greeted with an alarm approaching hysteria his treatment of the Russians in Geneva. So violent and vitriolic had been the attacks upon him from his own country, he remembers now, that it had seemed for forty-eight hours as though the United States, at least as represented by its major communications media, had turned into one gigantic yawp of bellowing agony at the thought of the possible consequences of maintaining national integrity in the face of the Soviet threat. He would not blame anybody for being afraid, he remembered telling Bob Munson in his only show of real anger at the time. God knew he was afraid himself. But at least he wasn’t acting like a sniveling baby about it.
Twenty-four hours later, of course, after the Soviets had made their monstrously preposterous demands, press, radio, and TV had swung completely about, given him the most absolute support, and poured out upon the Russians a scorn at least as vitriolic as that they had so recently flung at him. But he could never forget that first headlong rush to condemn him, without hesitation, without judgment, without waiting to ascertain the facts, without waiting to see—the automatic assumption that their own country must per se be wrong and stubborn and pigheaded and without justification, and that the enemy by the same token must have reason and justice on his side.
Of his own inner turmoil and the terrible weakening effect upon him of these attacks by his own countrymen at a moment of absolute decision for the United States, he said nothing publicly then, and it was only after he had been back a few weeks that he made his feelings clear. He had given a stag dinner for some of the nation’s top publishers and unburdened himself a little.
“Do you have any idea what it is like to try to face the world and protect the United States with a lot of you boys yapping at my heels all the time?” he had asked with a mildness that had removed some, but not too much, of the sting. “To do your best to defeat the people whose major consistent aim is quite literally to destroy the United States of America and then pick up the papers or listen to radio or television and find yourself called a traitor and a fool and a—‘an aging child playing with the fires of world destruction,’ as my good friend from the Post, here, put it? I’d expect to read that kind of stuff in Pravda, but I must confess I was a little surprised to turn around from facing the Soviets and find my back full of American knives.”
They had taken it with a rueful laugh and a round of applause, but they hadn’t liked it at all. Well, he hadn’t liked what they had done, either, and he had gone on to tell them quietly, “There were a couple of moments there when you almost had me convinced that I was wrong and ought to give in. You just stop and think where we would all be tonight if I had, and then ask yourselves how well you have served your country lately.”
The next day the inevitable inside reports from “informed sources” had carried his off-the-record comments to the public. “A face-to-face dressing-down of the American press,” the AP described it. “Veteran observers have rarely heard the President so angry,” the UPI agreed. “H.H. DOES AN H.S.T.,” the Washington Daily News reported cheerfully; “GIVES US HELL.” But he had announced with a friendly smile at the start of his next press conference that he had “decided I’m not going to answer any questions on White House stag dinners,” the correspondents had laughed, and the flurry had died down. When he noted a couple of weeks later that it had really died down, and that the press had apparently decided that his popularity was such as to make a real attack upon him unwise, he had known with a feeling of genuine triumph that he had won a major victory.
“They have a right to criticize,” he told Orrin next day, “and I don’t think one in ten does it with any but the best of motives. But damn it, they’ve got to realize this isn’t a tea party we’re in with these people. They’ve got to do it responsibly.”
“They will,” the Secretary replied, “as long as you’re as popular as you are. My advice is to make the most of it while it lasts.”
And so he has, the President thinks as he looks out the window at the Washington Monument surging whitely upward into the soft autumn sky and waits a trifle impatiently for his lunch. Six months is a short time in which to judge a Presidential stewardship, or any other kind for that matter; but starring with Geneva, which he regards now as being in all likelihood one of the supreme turning points in history, he feels that he has served his people well so far. The immediate and more easily tackled aspects of the world situation have yielded to a firm hand and a forceful approach. The problem and the atmosphere summed up in what the press has come to refer to tersely as “P.G.”—post-Geneva—is another matter. And on that, the President thinks with a sigh and a sudden unhappy expression that destroys the normal amicability of his pleasantly plain face, the vision is dim and the way is not yet clear.
Whether it ever will be—whether, in truth, it ever has been, for any Administration at any time, in the delicate and uncertain area of relations with other powers—he does not know. Here too he is trying to do his best: to transform the psychological shock and advantage of his actions in Geneva into a lasting and long-range policy that will gradually restore a balanced sanity to world affairs and, indeed, place the United States once again in the lead. This last aim he does not mention, save to his Secretary of State, for he knows that it too would draw down upon him the scorn of elements in the country which are either afraid of Soviet reaction or still in the grip of the strange philosophy of the Forties and Fifties that the United States should be satisfied to seek no more than a timid and uneasy equality with its most deadly enemy. Like all who understand the ultimate implications of the American Revolution, the President is something of a revolutionist himself. He is prepared to advance the cause of genuine freedom wherever and whenever and however he can, now that he has succeeded in putting at least a temporary halt to the headlong Russian campaign of imperialism, subversion, hypocrisy, and hate.
But the ways in which these purposes can be achieved remain, P.G., obscure. For the task the President feels he has a diplomatic team as good as any and probably better than most. The Secretary of State is proving to be considerably more diplomatic in his diplomacy than his past performance as a Senator might have indicated, and at the UN the United States has a delegation, able and hard-working, upon most of whose members the President feels he can rely with implicit confidence and trust.
Thinking for a moment of Harold Fry, acting head of the delegation during the lingering and probably fatal heart illness of the Permanent Ambassador, the President smiles in an affectionate way. The senior Senator from West Virginia, with his easygoing nature, steady humor, and stubborn dedication in the cause of the United States, may not be as subtle in his methods as might sometimes seem advisable. Yet he inspires, at the UN as in the Senate, a warm regard and a deep and abiding trust in his integrity and good faith. Lafe Smith of Iowa, replacing Clarence Wannamaker of Montana, who asked to be relieved to return to his Senate duties, is—well, Lafe Smith, liking everybody, liked by everybody, hard-working and able, with the extra ingredient of an attitude toward sex which, the President suspects, makes him more understandable and endearing to a good many delegations than some more strait-laced Americans who have served at the UN in the past. Possibly Lafe’s recent marriage has curtailed his energies and activities, but the President rather doubts it. Unless Lafe has changed mightily, he has probably already strengthened relations with half the young ladies in the Secretariat. Around the world in eighty days, the President thinks with a mild chuckle at his mild joke, and decides he will have to josh Lafe about it when the Senator is next in Washington.
The remainder of the delegation, composed in the usual pattern, consists of the customary State Department advisers and staff and, with an exact attention to the nation’s minorities, a Catholic, a Negro, and a Jew. Of these last, the Negro is the only one who arouses some uneasiness in the mind of the President, who has been wary of changing the delegation left him by his predecessor. LeGage Shelby is something of a problem, and the President, at something of a loss how to solve it, frowns as he considers the rather fiercely clever young man who heads Defenders of Equality For You (DEFY) and has been in the vanguard of the increasingly vigorous drive to overturn the hard-dying racial patterns of the South.
It is not that ’Gage Shelby has been openly opposed to United States policy, but he has managed to convey to both his own government and the United Nations as a whole that he is not entirely happy with such attitudes as those concerning Red China, now awaiting admission in two years’ time under the compromise finally worked out by Yugoslavia and Ceylon; the patient tolerance toward France and her still-uneasy relations with the Algerians; the continuing insistence of the President on adequate disarmament safeguards in the face of the steady and terrifying growth in the “atomic club,” now numbering eleven nations, including Communist China; and the situation in the Caribbean, where the Republic of Panama seems of late to be working with elements not overly friendly to the United States.
’Gage has done a great deal of what he calls, with a sardonic grin, “black missionary work” among the African states; but neither Hal Fry nor the President has been entirely satisfied that all of it was in line with what Washington desired. “It isn’t that I’m out of step with you, Mr. President,” LeGage had told him recently with a disarming smile; “I’m just an inch or two ahead.” Such candor had momentarily stopped the President, as he was sure LeGage had known it would, and he had only said mildly, “Well, you understand of course that it is advisable for all of us to proceed along the same general line if we are to present a united front to the world.” “Absolutely,” LeGage had said, again with the disarming grin. “You and I couldn’t see more eye to eye on anything, Mr. President.”
But, the President thinks now, of this he is not so sure; and how to handle LeGage within the context in which he must be handled is among the more annoying, if not major, problems that now concern the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. DEFY, a youthful and turbulent offshoot of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, formed out of the impatience of the younger generation with the cautious older, commands the loyalties of many of the nation’s Negroes in the college and young-married levels. It was for this reason that the President’s predecessor appointed LeGage to the delegation a year ago and, shortly before his death, announced his intention of appointing him again. The President has gone along with it for reasons that are as practical as his predecessor’s: the simple fact that LeGage is well on his way to becoming one of the nation’s major colored politicians, plus the fact that the increasing prominence of the new African states seems to make him a natural for the UN assignment. Now the President wishes he had chosen someone like Cullee Hamilton, even though under the custom, which governs appointment of the United States delegation, the Senate and House alternate in providing two delegates each year, and this is a Senate year.
Somewhere, the President recalls, he has heard that Cullee and LeGage roomed together at Howard University right here in Washington, and it is quite possible that the young Congressman from California may have some useful insights into the chairman of DEFY that would prove helpful to the White House. He makes a mental note to talk to him about it if the opportunity arises and thinks with genuine pleasure of his few brief contacts with Cullee in the past. He has always found him eminently sensible, he thinks approvingly—and then assures himself hastily that he doesn’t mean that as patronizingly as it might sound if said aloud. Cullee has not been sensible in the negative sense that Seab Cooley might use the word in describing a Negro; rather, he has seemed sensible to the President in the sense of his understanding of the needs of all parties involved in what the President considers the major domestic problem, human, economic, emotional, and moral, of twentieth-century America.
“I don’t think we should move too fast,” Cullee had said three years ago when the then Vice President had asked him to drop by his Senate office for a private chat after the Congressman had testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, “but we should move. That’s the important thing. We’ve got to keep moving. History won’t let us stop now.”
There was, the President was pleased to find, an absence of the customary cant, true but fatuous in its false emphasis, about “the eyes of the world are on you, America.” There was just a firm insistence on America being true to what America ought to be, irrespective of what anybody else might think. Just because there were certain things that America, being America, must necessarily do and certain high standards that she must eventually live up to if she were to be ultimately whole.
Compared with LeGage, who is always giving lengthy interviews about “America’s solemn obligation in the eyes of humanity,” and “America’s duty to see that she does not disappoint humanity’s hopes,” this is a very sensible position on Cullee’s part. It is not demogogic—indeed, the Congressman is so calm-spoken and mild in outward bearing that political Washington sometimes wonders how he ever got elected in the first place—and it is not the sort of thing to win big headlines in the papers. But it is, the President suspects, an attitude that, matched by a similar attitude on the part of responsible whites both North and South, will ultimately provide a solution if solution is to be found.
If solution is found!
He snorts, startling the butler bringing in his lunch.
It has to be found.
He sighs at the unending complexity of the problems that beset the President, and instantly a hundred pressing urgencies rush into his mind. Trouble in Asia—trouble in Africa—trouble in the Middle East—trouble in Latin America—disarmament talks—a slight sag in business—unemployment rising—missile program still lagging behind the Russians—new integration crisis possible any moment in South Carolina—the space program—maintaining the moon expedition, readying another—Governor Edward Jason of California and his ambitions—Orrin’s ambitions—his own ambitions and/or lack of them—criticism by America’s enemies—criticism by America’s friends—the United Nations—anti-American riots in Lima, West Germany, Manila, Capetown, Panama City—bills he must sign—people he must see—things he must worry about … it never ends. And always, overriding all else, the constant evil pressures from the Communist world, inflaming every problem, increasing every difficulty, negating every hope for peace in a blind, insensate drive toward world destruction so automatic by now that he doubts if the Kremlin could reverse itself and rejoin the decent purposes of a decent humanity even if it wanted to.
He finds it difficult not to feel that this is, as Bob Munson remarked to him the other day with a surprising melancholy, a haunted autumn; indeed, a haunted era. “The weather’s too beautiful,” the Majority Leader had said; “I don’t trust it.” Whether there are valid grounds for this premonitory sadness, the President does not know; probably no more than at any time in the past decade or, if the world is so fortunate as to have one, the next decade. But he, too, cannot escape the frequently recurring feeling that things everywhere are moving toward some sort of climax, one that may come a month from now, a year, two years, a day, a minute: who knows? Ever since the last war the Russians have engaged in a relentless and unceasing campaign to push tensions everywhere to their absolute peak; and the human animal does not live forever under such conditions without an explosive release into violence—it is simply beyond human nature.
War may come, the President feels, for no other reason than that the Soviets have deliberately created so many tensions in so many places that there is nothing else that can logically happen except war; and he sighs again as he contemplates the possibilities of such a holocaust and wonders what, if anything, a man even in his position can do to stop it.
Sometimes he considers the struggling masses of the earth and it seems to him that their leaders are no more than chips on a tide, flung this way and that by the necessities of national security and self-interest and the pressures of the inarticulate yet insistent millions below. No sane man aware of the facts wants to destroy the world; but who, nowadays, is sane, and who has all the facts? Even he, on whom so many heavy responsibilities and desperate hopes devolve, often thinks that he possesses no greater light to see by than anyone else in the fitful darkness that rests upon the twentieth century.
Lost in such thoughts he does not realize for a moment that he has stopped with his sandwich halfway to his mouth and is staring blankly out at the Washington Monument, the river, and autumn-tawny Virginia beyond. Then he starts, gives his head a rueful shake, and bites firmly into the ham and lettuce sandwich sent up from the White House kitchen. He had asked for chicken, he recalls with an ironic smile: even here, the President is powerless to set the course. Like the rest of the world, he will take what the kitchen sends him and make the best of it.
He wonders if anyone else undergoes such prolonged and self-scarifying appraisals as he has found himself called upon to undertake since he entered the White House; and concludes that probably many do, though possibly none with quite the direct and agonizing personal involvement of the President.
“The buck stops here,” Harry Truman had put it, in a sign he kept on his desk. “I am all alone,” Harley’s own predecessor had remarked in a tone of absolute desolation, in a secret telephone call Harley had never told anyone about, on the morning after Brigham Anderson’s death. In a world of problems that range from men on the moon to the relatively minor yet important matter of a difficult member of the United States delegation at the UN, the President now realizes to the full the import of both these comments, at once curiously pathetic and deeply terrifying, on the office he now occupies.
As for the United Nations, which he has thus returned to in the course of his absent-minded and preoccupied lunching, he wonders how the session is going today and what Orrin will have to report when he calls in later. The Problem of Gorotoland is not a simple one either, filled as it is with implications of an argument with allies, and the President contemplates it with real misgivings. Trouble anywhere is sooner or later trouble for the United States in these times, and in the person of the M’Bulu of Mbuele he can sense all sorts of potentials for trouble. He thinks for a moment of putting in a call to the Secretary-General, just to get another point of view on the situation, but then abandons it for the time being. The S.-G. he considers a friend of his, they had enjoyed a warm and cordial talk when he addressed the opening session of the General Assembly—but the thought occurs to him that perhaps he should hold in reserve against a time of real need any further direct contact. It might be interpreted now as going behind Orrin’s back, and that would be most unfortunate. Nonetheless he wonders whether the Secretary-General, agent of an organization with such great potential capabilities but so little real power, is ever moved by such philosophizings as those which come to him who has so much real power as head of a state whose capabilities are felt wherever men live.
If he were to make the phone call, instead of abandoning it for a later day, he would find that the Secretary-General, sitting in his office on the thirty-eighth floor of the Secretariat building, is indeed filled with a comparable concern. He has changed the chaste decor left him by his predecessor—there is more color in the room and a livelier atmosphere in which to conduct negotiations—yet far below in the General Assembly Hall, the Security Council, the noisy lounges, and the bustling corridors, the rulers of earth remain as obdurate and contentious and far apart as ever.
For this, the S.-G. thinks moodily, he is not to blame, yet he cannot avoid feeling, as other idealistic men in his position have felt before him, that he bears a major responsibility. Like them, he has come into office to find his powers ill-defined, his duties circumscribed by the conflicting national interests of more than a hundred nations, and his office the focus for a constant tug of war between the Communist and non-Communist worlds. Indeed, he would not be here were it not for this constant conflict; and the fact that he is here, in and of itself automatically makes him almost impotent.
Remembering his election, outcome of two months of bitter struggle between East and West, the S.-G. sometimes wishes one of the other candidates had received sufficient votes: then at least the issue would be clear. But the East would not accept the West’s candidates, the West rejected those of the East. Finally his name had been mentioned, almost as an afterthought, by the British. Within two days sentiment in the lounges, the corridors, and the delegation headquarters scattered through midtown Manhattan had coalesced in his favor and he had been elected. “Il n’est pas un Pape de Rome,” Raoul Barre had commented to the prime minister of the Secretary-General’s country. “Il est un Pape d’Avignon.” And in truth, for ineffectualness and inability to do the things the salvation of the world so clearly demanded, he was.
For this state of affairs, he reflects, the Communists are largely responsible, for their constant attacks upon the office of the Secretary-General and their steady hammering at the morale of the Secretariat have inevitably, in time, begun to produce some of the results they desire. The attack begun by the late Chairman of the Council of Ministers during his raucous attendance at the Fifteenth General Assembly has borne its evil fruit and been continued by his successors. Now both the office of the Secretary-General and the Secretariat are closer to real impotence than they have ever been.
Even during the high point reached in the early stages of the crisis in the Congo, their powers and influence at best had not been very great; now they have declined to a sort of innocuous and ineffective housekeeping that not all the earnest editorials at the time of his election have been able to redress.
“It is with renewed hope,” the New York Times had commented then, “that the world hails the election of a new Secretary-General. Now, if ever, the United Nations has a chance to halt the decline of recent years and climb back to the high plateau of goodwill and sound endeavor that men everywhere still hope to find in the world organization.”
Well, the hope had not been justified, because men everywhere did not hope to find the goodwill and sound endeavor so dutifully invoked by the Times. A great many of them just hoped to find one more mechanism for their own unchanging plans for world conquest. And their campaign to reduce the United Nations to just such a mechanism has made ominous and steady strides ever since. Endless debates, endless arguments, endless demands for impossible concessions, disorderly sessions of the General Assembly, frivolous demands for special sessions of the Security Council—there is no limit to the vicious ingenuity with which they frustrate the decent hopes of mankind.
Now, he thinks as he goes into his private apartment off the office to see whether his heavy beard needs a quick shave before he goes down to lunch with Terence Ajkaje and the Soviet Ambassador in the Delegates’ Dining Room on the fourth floor, all is tenuous and uncertain and the future is dimmer than it has ever seemed, even in the great slab-sided glass monolith that houses the United Nations. “We fly on a wing and a prayer,” his American deputy had told a luncheon meeting of the United Nations Correspondents Association a week ago, “if we fly at all.”
Yet there is, he tells himself with a sort of angry hopelessness, such great potential for good in the flimsy shield, riddled with national self-interest and competing sovereign claims, which men erected in San Francisco in 1945 in one more desperately hopeful attempt to protect themselves against the dismal winds that howl down the reaches of history. Only yesterday he had stopped by the offices of the Technical Assistance Fund on the twenty-ninth floor and been shown proudly by its director an enormous map of the world with little colored pins scattered over the surface, each representing a UN mission. Sometimes the mission consisted of eight or ten people; sometimes, in the vast expanse of some desert nation or the steaming jungles of another’s almost impenetrable heartland, the pin would represent just one man—just one, for so many hundreds of thousands of square miles, so many millions of people. But it was a start—it was a start. Here and there in the darkness the UN was lighting little lights.
“Maybe a hundred years from now it will all add up to something,” he had remarked somewhat bitterly to the director, a doughty little Welshman grown gray in the service of the world organization.
“It is the hope in which we live,” the director had replied; and had added gravely, “In which we have to live.”
Technical assistance—the United Nations Children’s Fund—the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees—the United Nations Korean Reconstruction Agency—the United Nations High Commission for Refugees—the United Nations Emergency Force—the United Nations Special Fund—the Economic and Social Council—the Trusteeship Council—the Economic Commissions for Europe, Asia, and the Far East, Latin America and Africa—the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine—the United Nations Advisory Commission on the Congo—the United Nations Refugee Assistance for South Africa—the United Nations this, the United Nations that—
It is a proud roll call, even if it does represent a defiance pathetically tiny of the forces that conspire to threaten humankind everywhere. At least, the Secretary-General thinks with an ironic grimness, you can get East-West agreement on stamping out malaria in the jungles, and on inoculating natives against yaws, and on teaching a peasant how to plow a straight furrow, and on building a dam here and there to protect the crops and generate power. Maybe that, in the long run, is a work of the United Nations far more hopeful and far more lasting than all the bitter political wrangles that go on in the Assembly and the Security Council. Here in Turtle Bay on the East River, in the sheer marble-and-green-glass shaft of the Secretariat, he is aware that dedicated people from all the races of man are working in the light of a fragile promise and a desperate hope. They are people as human, as imperfect, as subject to red tape and petty ambition and simple error as people everywhere, yet for the most part he has found them to be earnest and idealistic and devoted to the world organization and the good of humanity. He sometimes wishes that those who freely criticize the UN could know, as he knows, the patient, persistent, day-by-day work of the organization as it attempts, so doggedly and under such great handicaps, to push back the night that threatens to engulf the world. The night is so black and the light is so feeble. But it shines. That is the important thing: it shines.
And so, he thinks with an abrupt bitterness as he pauses for a moment to stare out his apartment’s glass wall at the steel and concrete crags of Manhattan that balance his office’s East River view over Brooklyn on the other side, one manages to convince oneself that it all adds up to something and really does encourage hope, and that the vicious political conflicts of the UN are really less important than its small, snail-like progressions in the area of social, economic, and human relations. One can almost persuade oneself that a Communist pounding on his desk to stop free debate, or an African sneering at a white man, or a white man bitterly denouncing another white man, can all be wiped out by sweetness and light in the Economic and Social Council or a tentative glow of compassion in the Children’s Fund. It would be nice to think so, but he knows the thought is not tenable for long. It is the fearful bitternesses that really matter; it is the terrifying divisions that really control man’s fate, not the temporary and tiny co-operations.
And here he knows, as any honest man must know, that the outlook is not promising and the future is not bright. Ever since Geneva the neutral states have been beating a path to his door. The burden of each has been essentially the same: Protect us.
“Protect you!” he had finally blown up at the smugly self-righteous representative of Ghana. “Protect you, when you did everything you could to subvert the Congo, and always try to play your own imperialist game in Africa! Why should I protect you, even if the Charter and the big powers gave me the authority to do it?”
The Ghanaian had been angrily resentful and accused him of being a lackey of the British; but the S.-G.’s barb had sunk home, and it had been fully justified. They all wanted to follow their own cheap, self-serving little ends, and then when the going got rough they wanted a man whose powers they had blandly connived to diminish to come running and help them out. When they get scared, he thinks, they turn tail fast enough; but it is almost too late for them to do so, because bit by bit they have helped to whittle away the always flimsy powers of his office until now it is an almost empty shell.
In the aftermath of the dramatic confrontation between the American President and the Soviet Chairman at Geneva, this fact annoys and frustrates him increasingly as the tensions heighten. He does what he can to ameliorate differences; tries his best to serve as a bridge between East and West; is respected by the United States, treated with contempt by the Soviet Empire and its colonies, beseeched by the Africans and Asians, ignored by the Latin Americans, patronized by the French, criticized by the British, advised by the Indians, given hearty admonitions by the Canadians, and made much of by the American press. This last gives him some little wry amusement at times. He may be a figurehead to some, but he does rate well with the New York Times, the Post, and the Herald Tribune. This is not such insignificant support, either, since most delegates to the UN are sensitive to the writings of the metropolitan press and eager to find themselves mentioned in its pages.
Today they should all be quite happy, for The Problem of Gorotoland is receiving its full share of attention, and discussions concerning it are being followed most attentively by all channels of communication. He is not surprised that this should be so, for he has followed the career of Terence Ajkaje ever since he met him in London ten years ago. It is not unexpected that the M’Bulu should have been able to take a matter so dear to the hearts of the press and raise it with skilled showmanship to a major international issue. It would be surprising, in fact, if he did not do so, adept as he is at parlaying his flair for the dramatic into big news. Combine big news with a moral issue, however clouded by events in Molobangwe and elsewhere, and headlines, radio reports, and television commentaries are bound to follow, in America. It is no wonder that the UN, which in its standard legal parlance is “seized of” issues when it assumes jurisdiction over them, should be seized indeed of Terrible Terry.
The thought of this brings a smile to the Secretary-General’s face for a second as he drops world problems to concentrate on his beard. “I don’t have five-o’clock shadow,” he remembers telling Senator Fry of the United States the other day; “with me, it is more like 9 a.m.” “It isn’t noticeable,” Hal Fry assured him, “but if it bothers you, why don’t you give in and let it grow?” The Secretary-General had shaken his head with a smile. “That’s only for northerners like the Ethiopians. I wouldn’t want to get people confused.”
He decides now that he can probably get by without a shave until time to get ready for the Turkish reception at the Waldorf tonight, especially since he doesn’t want to run the risk of cutting his chin again. He frowns as he notes the tiny clot of dried blood from the morning’s accident, but against the black skin it shows hardly at all, and after a moment he forgets it and turns away. Then he leaves the beautiful apartment with its sensational view of New York, walks past the pleasant office with its sensational view of Brooklyn and the river, quickly paces off the long corridor to the elevator, pushes the bell, and, after a moment, steps in. The Javanese girl who operates the elevator greets him respectfully; he responds, and then stands with hands clasped behind him and head thoughtfully bowed as they glide swiftly downward to the halls and corridors far below where the bickering heirs of Adam conduct their talkative and tendentious business.
4
It was at moments like this, the M’Bulu told himself with a happy satisfaction, when everything seemed to conspire to give his talents and abilities their greatest possible scope, that the world could not possibly avoid admitting that he was as dashing and effective a figure as he knew himself to be. Here he was, child of Gorotoland, heir to a threadbare kingdom, “a minor princeling,” as the London Times had dared to call him recently, and here was all the world, in solemn assembly arrayed, attentive to his every word. At least, most of them were attentive. The British Ambassador was, you could be sure of that, for all his outward bland imperviousness; and the American Secretary of State, and the Soviet Ambassador, and indeed nearly everyone else around the globe, for today almost every seat in the big pale mahogany-and-blue bowl of First Committee was filled. Only Cameroun and Congo Brazzaville were absent, and he knew what he thought of them, particularly Cameroun. He made a mental reference to Cameroun’s ancestors which was not complimentary, rearranged his gorgeous green and gold robes with a spiteful flourish, drew himself to his full six-feet-seven, and turned to the Yugoslav delegate in the Chair with a suitable dignity as all those on the floor and in the press and public galleries who did not speak English adjusted their earphones and prepared to listen attentively.
“Mr. Chairman,” he said soberly in his chopped, guttural accent, “I must thank you on behalf of my people in Gorotoland for permitting me to appear here before this august committee of the United Nations on this matter so dear to their hearts. A long period of desperate suffering under a ruthless colonialism”—he was aware of the slightest hint of motion from Lord Maudulayne and found it difficult to refrain from a broad grin—“has made their hearts desperate for freedom, Mr. Chairman. They look to you, the United Nations, to release them from their bondage. Now.” A sudden fierce look flared on his face and he banged his massive fist on the rostrum with an explosive force. “Now!”
There was a burst of applause from many delegates and some desk-pounding by the Communist bloc. He acknowledged it all with a bow and went gravely on.
“I shall not delay you with a further recounting of the terrible struggles of my people to achieve independence. The distinguished Soviet delegate has already given you that sorry story this morning. It is one that does no credit to the colonial power which has been responsible.” He looked squarely at Lord Maudulayne, who returned the look with the slightest of ironic winks that clearly conveyed the comment: Why, you hypocritical little pip-squeak. Terry broke into a sunny smile and marveled at how effectively he could make his tone change altogether.
“But, Mr. Chairman,” he cried, “at last there is hope! Hope from the United Nations! Hope from the United States and the Soviet Union! Hope, not least, from the United Kingdom itself, which, remembering at last its traditional regard for the rights and liberties of men, now moves forward boldly to assist in the solution of this problem. Yes, Mr. Chairman, we look to the United Kingdom for the decision humanity and justice dictate! Give us your votes and support and we know the U.K. will join happily in immediate independence for Gorotoland! Now!”
Again there was the burst of applause, the pounding by the Communists. In the midst of it the British Ambassador raised his hand for recognition.
“Mr. Chairman,” he said from his seat in a flatly impassive tone that instantly silenced the chamber, “exercising briefly the right of reply, I simply wish to reiterate again that Her Majesty’s Government have entered into a solemn obligation to establish the independence of Gorotoland in one year’s time. There has been, to my knowledge, no change in this position to warrant the assumption just made by His Royal Highness. Nor can there be, until the territory achieves adequate preparation for self-government. Surely His Highness is aware of that.”
And he pushed aside his microphone with an air of tired distaste, amid renewed desk-pounding by the Soviets and considerable stirring and muttering throughout the room. At the rostrum the M’Bulu permitted an expression of sadness to disturb his primordially handsome face, but when he replied it was in a tone of patient tolerance.
“Mr. Chairman, the distinguished delegate of the United Kingdom—whom I like to consider,” he added, with a wistful smile, “my good personal friend, however these differences of policy may divide us—is, as usual succinct and to the point. Naturally I am aware of the commitments undertaken by Her Majesty’s Government. I am also aware that history does not always wait upon formal commitments. I am also aware”—and his voice began to rise again—“that freedom is impatient! Justice is impatient! Gorotoland is impatient! What is the right thing to do is impatient! Her Majesty’s Government should remember that, too!
“But, Mr. Chairman,” he said, and he permitted his voice to modulate gently, “I am hopeful. I am always hopeful. There are signs of friendship and assistance from many quarters.
“Tomorrow I shall visit a famous city in the southern United States, and there I shall find friends and support. I shall visit Washington, D.C., and there, I understand, the President of the United States, that great man whom we all admire”—there was a thump from Vasily Tashikov, answering laughter from others, and with a sudden grin Terry amended his statement—“whom some of us admire, will entertain me at a dinner in the White House. And also, though we have our differences here, I understand that the distinguished delegate of the U.K. and his delightful wife, who is known to many of you, will entertain for me at a reception at Her Majesty’s Embassy. So, you see, though we argue here and have our differences in this great house of the nations, we are still all friends. I think we should all,” he added with a commanding gesture that started and encouraged the responding applause, “be very pleased by these indications of humanity and friendliness which mean that no real bitterness can linger here.”
“That’s what you say,” Orrin Knox murmured to Lord Maudulayne, who replied with an ironic snort. “I defy you to get up now and say all this isn’t so,” he whispered back. “You see how simple it is. Seek and ye shall find. Demand and ye shall get. The powers of the West are but as sheep, and a little child is leading them.”
“Little child, my hat,” said Orrin Knox. “Some child!”
But in this, as the M’Bulu bowed low and prepared to move on to the peroration of his brief address, the Secretary of State might possibly have been mistaken; for behind the broad-planed face and towering body before them at the rostrum there were many complex things, and one of them might well have been a little child. Certainly Terrible Terry was filled with a happiness so tense and excited that it might, in other surroundings, have been expressed with a child’s exuberance—a certain kind of child. The kind who might, in a moment of exhilaration, kill a lion with a spear, or catch a running wildebeest on foot, or, perhaps, castrate an enemy tribesman over a slow-burning fire and then roast the results for dinner.
For there was much to the M’Bulu of Mbuele that of course could not be known to great sections of the rest of the world, though it was clearly understood by many of his compatriots from the vast upsurging continent who, like himself, now appeared amid the trappings of Western civilization in the gleaming glass citadel of the UN. Many an echo from the savage depths of mankind was present, though not all white men were sensitive enough to perceive it in the bustling lounges, the long, murmurous corridors, and the contentious conference rooms on the East River. No tribal drums sounded in Turtle Bay, but their faint, insistent beat was never far from many ears; and in few did they beat with quite the commanding note that they sounded for Terence Wolowo Ajkaje.
It would have been important for many men to find out why, had there been time and not ten thousand other things to think about, for an understanding of his background and purposes might have permitted some more reasoned attempt to be forewarned and thus forearmed. But possibly even that would not have been enough. Intelligent anticipation can only go so far, even under the best of circumstances; and the M’Bulu was one of history’s sports in an age that encouraged them: extremely smart, extremely clever, deceptive, misleading, erratic, but, as many were now to find out to their sorrow, erratic with a plan.
That the plan was not his own, but that he should have been able to lend himself to it so willingly and improve upon it so brilliantly in his own right, was a tribute to a mind that had traveled a long way since it first became sentient in Gorotoland. Now as he stood in First Committee gathering his thoughts for his final comments before the vote on Panama’s resolution to have the General Assembly take up The Problem of Gorotoland, he was thinking with an approving awe of that predestined forward progress which had brought him to the point where he could sway the nations of the world. It had not appeared at first that he would even live to maturity, let alone achieve so high a dignity in the councils of the earth.
He had been born, twenty-nine years before, to the seventh wife of the 136th chief in direct descent from the legendary first M’Bulu, the great warrior Molobangwe. Many were the tales of this great one, and numerous the rival chieftains he was said to have killed to consolidate his power. One by one he had subjugated seven warring tribes, carefully marrying all the widows he created with each new conquest. (“You call George Washington the father of your country,” Terry was fond of remarking during his year at Harvard. “You should have seen the man I’m descended from.”) By the time he died peacefully on his pallet at the reputed age of eighty-one—the last M’Bulu for some years to expire so uneventfully—Molobangwe had carved for himself a sizable kingdom and done more than any other one man to populate it with the dominant Goroto people.
The kingdom, consisting of a small area of mountain highlands, some dusty plains and sparse grasslands, a few elusive streams, and two fair-sized, sedgy lakes, was favored by nature just sufficiently to permit its people a bare subsistence if they worked from sunup to sundown from the day of birth to the day of death. The populace, filled with the innumerable progeny of the late warrior king, was almost fatally diverted from this necessary diligence for the better part of half a century, for it was immediately torn apart by rival claimants to the vacant throne. (When he was at Oxford, Terry liked to refer to this as “our Wars of the Roses,” which sometimes made his listeners wince.) Out of the constant raiding, fighting, and general bloodshed there rapidly appeared and violently disappeared the first thirty-one of the 137 M’Bulus. With the thirty-eighth, a great-nephew in the female line of the great Molobangwe (although which female, tribal elders were never entirely clear), there finally arose a youth firm enough and strong enough to once again impose upon his warring people much the same pax virilis as that imposed by his fertile forebear.
By a brisk policy of beheading his enemies and impregnating their wives, he managed in ten years, time to pacify Gorotoland and turn its people once again to the problem of eking out a living in the highlands, where some of them hunted, and on the plains, where the remainder grazed their cattle. He must in his way, as his descendant the 137th M’Bulu sometimes thought with real respect, have been something of a statesman, for he was able to work out a trading relationship between the hunters and the grazers that permitted them to live together in peace instead of existing forever at each other’s throats, as was so often the case elsewhere in Africa. He also chose for his seat of government the town of Mbuele in the highlands, thus adding to his title for all time the name of its first capital. It was only several hundred years later that the capital came down to Molobangwe on the plains as the result of a marriage between the two leading families in the nation; a choice that Terrible Terry deplored but which he could not change even in the mid-twentieth century, so rigid were the iron rules of tribal custom that still bound the ruler of Gorotoland to this day.
The centuries passed and other M’Bulus succeeded the pacifier of mountain and plain; in Europe and Asia civilization advanced across the hemispheres, great states rose and fell, wars and revolutions and dynastic enterprises swept the earth, men drew maps and navigated the globe, developed science and theology and medicine, began to think, first in idle dreams and then with mounting excitement, beyond the planet to the stars. In Gorotoland, as in the rest of Black Africa, life never changed from one century to the next. Men were born, lived, and died in accordance with ancient ritual. Tradition, superstition, terror, and ignorance ruled the life of the people. Around succeeding M’Bulus and the elder priests who presently came to form their council of state there encrusted an inflexible way of doing things that raised men barely above the beasts they hunted and the beasts they grazed and kept them there, apparently forever.
So ages passed to the middle of what was known, in distant regions out of sight and out of mind, as the nineteenth century.
And then suddenly the white man was everywhere in Africa, adventuring after gold, after diamonds, sometimes, encouraged by willing rulers such as the present M’Bulu’s grandfather, after slaves; pushing up river valleys, landing along the endless coasts, trading, colonizing, bringing an impatient, pushing, ambitious, violent, explosive, restless, never-fulfilled and never-satisfied civilization to all but the most inaccessible parts of the black continent. Some sentimentalists found it fashionable now to bemoan this invasion, alternating between ruthlessness and paternalism, and to deplore the passing of the noble savagery which had prevailed before. Terrible Terry was not among them. If it hadn’t happened, he wouldn’t be here now addressing the First Committee of this wobbly parliament of man; nor would he be able to command the attention of NBC, ABC, CBS, Time, Life, or the New York Times. Savage innocence? They could have it! He would take “Meet the Press” any day.
For Gorotoland, the transition to British rule was sanguine and abrupt. A small exploratory expedition sent out by the Royal Geographic Society came innocently one day to Molobangwe in the sun. Fifteen savage minutes later its members were mercifully beyond sensation as a surprised and indignant reception committee readied them for lunch. The response of the Crown was inevitable and immediate. Two weeks later a full-scale military expedition appeared on the horizon, and by sundown a thousand of the M’Bulu’s finest warriors were dead, seven members of his Council of Elders were hanging from nearby thorn trees, and he and twenty-nine of his wives were in abject and ignominious captivity. Life was simpler in those days when there was no First Committee to appeal to, and the whole thing was decided with a dispatch no longer permitted in seeking solutions to the world’s more irritating problems. Disraeli turned up one morning at Windsor with good news for the Queen and, graciously if a trifle vaguely, she accepted one more jewel in her diadem and Gorotoland joined that long list of rather inadvertent and absent-minded conquests which turned the map crimson and, for a time now gone forever, gave the sun something to shine upon wherever it went.
There ensued a period of uneasy dominion which inculcated deep in the Goroto people and their ruler those traits of dissembling, deviousness, and deceit which were, though few who watched him at the rostrum now were aware of it, so much a part of the 137th M’Bulu. It went against the grain to give up slavery, ritual sacrifices, and the privilege of devouring one’s opponents; and back in the highlands, none of these pleasant customs ever died, despite the earnest efforts of the sweating, sandy-haired, red-faced, mustachioed, exasperated but terribly, terribly self-controlled young men who came out from London to do their best for the Empire and, quite sincerely, for the natives. The natives never really did desire all this well-meant attention, having been much happier in a state of self-ruled slaughter and their own precarious trade balance between hill and plain.
Toward the end something approaching a grudging tolerance for the colonizers finally became general in Gorotoland—they tried so hard, and were so inexplicably just, and it was so easy to pull the wool over their eyes and go right on doing what one had always done—but there was never at any time any real affection or loyalty. Not even when, with the country’s population pushing toward two million, thanks to white man’s administration, white man’s medicine, and white man’s peace, the British instituted a modest but definite program of sending a few of the brighter youths away to be educated in the white man’s world. This was regarded as one more example of an innate and baffling foolishness on their part, but it did not take long for the ruling family and the Council of Elders to perceive that this was a good thing and they had better allow a certain number to get in on it. This number, a fact known to Terry but unknown to Lord Maudulayne when they had argued the matter earlier that morning, was decided by the natives themselves. Education was restricted to those selected by the then M’Bulu and his immediate advisers and it was, they thought then, in their best interest to extend it to no more than a handful. Later, when independence swept Africa and the M’Bulu’s grandson was hurtled on the tide of it into his demand for immediate freedom, the grandson could have wished it had been more broadly based to provide him with a greater corps of potential administrators. But by then, of course, it was too late.
For himself, however, Terence (a tribute to the Resident, who professed to be pleased) Wolowo Ajkaje could not complain, once he had surmounted the apparently insurmountable obstacle of being born to the seventh wife of his late father. Ahead of him in the succession were four half brothers, and for thirteen of his years in the dusty royal compounds of Molobangwe it seemed likely that he would never be anything more than a very secondary brother of whoever succeeded to the throne, providing that worthy allowed him and the other brothers to live at all once he came to power. Indeed, there was considerable danger that some such sudden termination of his career might occur even before his father passed from the picture, so violent were the interfamily feuds that surrounded the succession. But the genius of his more notable ancestors, having skipped his father and several preceding M’Bulus, seemed to have lodged in Terry, and with a shrewdness beyond his years he dissembled his brains, hid his clever and overactive intelligence, and went about with an air of stumbling stupidity that provoked loud cries of indignation, but nothing worse, from his father’s other wives.
To his mother, whom he only wished he could have brought along to see him at the United Nations, and would have had she not been Regent and also badly crippled with arthritis, the M’Bulu felt that he owed most of his native abilities. He had never forgotten a wild night in his sixth year when a thunderstorm had seemed to come up from all of Africa below them to the south. Without a word his mother had taken him firmly by the hand and slipped away from the compound to a great bare baobab tree that stood on a little rise looking toward the mountains. There, with a sort of wild crooning chant whose echoes in memory could still make him shiver, she had implored the assistance of their ancestors and all the tribal gods for one, single, all-consuming purpose: “Make my son M’Bulu! Make my son M’Bulu! Make—my—son—M’Bulu!” At the height of the storm the ancestors and gods had reached down and, in a blinding flash of light, hurled them both insensate to the ground. “Damn-fool woman is lucky the lightning didn’t kill them both,” the Resident had grumbled hopelessly the next morning when they were still resting from the shock in the little makeshift hospital in Molobangwe; but neither he nor his mother ever doubted that they had been given a pledge of divine assistance for her ambitions, which thereafter became his own.
It took six years for the gods and ancestors to contrive the means to do it in the crowded compounds, but suddenly one day after his mother had passed silently outside a window overlooking a fireplace where a broth was being prepared for his two oldest half brothers, the gods and ancestors began to make good on their pledge. Within two hours his half brothers were rolling in agony in the dust, and a couple of hours after that his father had two less heirs. Inevitably this stirred sharp suspicions in Gorotoland, but the gods and ancestors had been as good as their bond: his mother had not been seen, and her protestations of innocence were so loud and aggrieved that everyone soon believed her and turned instead upon one of the Council of Elders, who presently vanished somewhere in the highlands and was heard from no more, despite the Resident’s earnest attempts for six months to find him.
A short time after that, the gods and ancestors intervened again, apparently on this occasion entirely on their own volition. The younger of his two remaining half brothers contracted a genuine case of pneumonia in the midst of the rainy season and was carried off in three days. That left one, a boy of fourteen, one year older than himself, son of his father’s fifth wife; and now, it seemed to Terry, it was time for the gods and ancestors to again take an active hand in his destiny.
It took him several months to decide how to help them go about it, but the approach of the annual puberty rites, held in a great cave in the highlands near the ancient capital of Mbuele, gave him the idea. The year before, in preparation for their own participation later, he and his brother had been permitted to watch in wide-eyed excitement from the outer reaches of the cave as the ceremony, in which the older men of the tribe were mingled with the novitiate youths, reached its peak. There came a moment when, elders and young stark naked and inflamed with fermented banana beer, standing in a great circle in the dimly lit cave, the ceremony reached a climax and everyone became so busy that no normal male could concentrate on anything but the sensations of his own body. Terry was normal enough in that, but he was abnormal in his powers of concentration and will. That moment, it seemed to him, would be the ideal moment for the gods and ancestors to insert a knife between the ribs of his half-conscious, half-blind, all-animal brother.
And so, as events went forward, it came about. With great presence of mind he concealed the knife beforehand; pretended to drink but refrained from it; and when the final moment came, did what the gods and ancestors intended him to do and then eased his dying brother gently down upon a nearby rock, unnoticed in the general grunting frenzy all around. Instead of fleeing the cave, he simply moved to another part of it, until he was on the other side of the fiercely quaking circle. And when, some hours later, the first spent novitiate staggered awake and tripped across the cold body of his brother, it was by then much too late for anyone to discover how the gods and ancestors had performed so foul a deed. (Far away in America, Tune magazine took its first notice of Terrible Terry in an account of the strange series of royal fatalities in Gorotoland, entitled “A Little Fresh Heir.” But of course no one in Gorotoland ever saw it, and it was soon forgotten by the rest of the world, for although it was an example of shrewd speculation, the facts to support it could not be proved.)
Thus at thirteen Terence Ajkaje became the heir apparent to Gorotoland, and a fortunate absence of any but female children in the huts of his father’s remaining five wives made it unnecessary for him and his mother to seek any more divine assistance. They could now proceed to prepare him, with the rather dazed concurrence of his father, who could not understand why the gods and ancestors had bereft him of so many heirs, for the throne. In the boy and his mother the British found both the material and the appreciation for what they were trying to do in education. There was no doubt, the Resident reported to London, that the heir to Gorotoland was as bright as a whip, or possibly three or four whips. He recommended every encouragement, and that was what the Colonial Office, in its ponderous but eventually efficient fashion, set out to provide.
Recalling now the stages of his education as he stared blandly down upon Lord Maudulayne and the rest in First Committee, the M’Bulu of Mbuele could not escape a small ironic bow in the confines of his mind to those who had opened the doors of the world for him. You did it well, you British, he said in a silent conversation that Claude Maudulayne could not hear but would not have been surprised about if he had; oh, yes, you did it well. More fools you, but—you did it well.
First had come shoes and European clothing, and an awkward period of practicing with them that lasted until time to leave for the trip to Mombasa and the slow steamer up the east coast, through Suez into the Mediterranean, and so past the soft green shores of fertile France to the misty little island that now, in the aftermath of her second great war, was saying good-by with increasing speed to all the lands on so many continents and across so many seas over which she had for so long held dominion. The British were a revelation to Terry, as they are to most who visit them at home; and in some strange way he both resented and admired, could not understand and yet could not ever entirely escape, they had left their mark upon him forever, no matter who the savage that lurked beneath.
In fact, he told himself now with irony that was not quite irony and sarcasm not entirely sarcastic as he readied his concluding words of appeal to the nations sitting silently before him, there would always be in Gorotoland some little piece of blackness that would be forever England; and whether he or the English would ever understand the curious love-hate of it, either in Gorotoland or in so many other places in Asia and Africa where their stuffy, proud, and strangely gallant cavalcade had passed, he very much doubted.
This, however, was a mature thought now, long after that first unforgettable passage up the Solent into Southampton Water; the ride into London on the tootling train through the tidy little fields, green with a greenness even the highlands of Gorotoland could not match; and his first excited introduction to the strange ways and strange world of the white man. The junior clerk from the Colonial Office who shepherded him from dockside to the capital was one who took his duties seriously and was also gifted with the ability to address children as adults without being patronizing about it. Long before the train pulled into Waterloo Station he had broken through the awed reserve of his royal charge and Terry was asking questions so fast his mentor found it difficult to keep up. (To this day the M’Bulu still received an occasional letter, increasingly wistful and concerned, from his old friend. Recently he had stopped replying.) By the time he was taken off to Eton a week later, he had been given a quick but thorough introduction to the major relics of the English past and in some subtle, understated way been given to feel that he was fortunate indeed to have the opportunity to add its heritage to his own. He was not, at first, prepared to accept this without a struggle, until somewhere early in his public-school career, when he suddenly perceived the basic element in the heritage: a willingness to accord to one’s opponent a decency and fairness as great as one’s own. Then he began to see how vulnerable this made his hosts, and after that he had the key to his future and that of Gorotoland firmly in his grasp. A boy who had the purposeful determination to murder his brother at the age of thirteen did not need a great deal of assistance from outsiders in getting where he wanted to go; but the English, just by being English, gave him all they could.
Academically, his record was brilliant from the first, and by the time he was ready to enter Oxford the judgment of the Resident had been more than justified. At Magdalen the story continued, and, accompanying it, with a sort of offhand air that greatly impressed his schoolmates, the steady development of that reputation that soon earned him the sobriquet “Terrible Terry.” There was not much that Terence Ajkaje, heir of Gorotoland and veteran of puberty rites, did not know about sex, in all the infinite varieties that fascinated the students of Oxford as they fascinate students everywhere. Being big, handsome, and black gave him an added advantage, and in very short order he was welcomed in many circles, some rather peculiar and all quite influential, both at the University and in London. A secret contempt, which did not need much encouragement to get started, began to fill his mind for the self-righteous, tightly controlled whites who preached such lofty morals and, at least in his experience, did such avid and hungry things when you took off your clothes for them.
Inevitably he soon became the darling of the sensational press. “African Prince Cited,” the London Times would murmur discreetly; “TERRIBLE TERRY BOPS COPS, JUGGED AGAIN,” the Express would roar. A series of escapades and a growing string of well-publicized dates with titled young ladies made him the pet of the columnists and the darling of the gossips. The final accolade came just before he left England, in a valedictory personality sketch in the Daily Mail: “TERRY JOINS ‘SET’: PRINCESS FINDS HIM AMUSING.”
Behind the window dressing, most of it both socially enjoyable and physically refreshing, a mind like a razor busily stowed away all the information it received, both textual and human, at Oxford and during a year’s postgraduate study at the London School of Economics. It also, on a few quieter, unpublicized trips upcountry with his old mentor from the Colonial Office, gave him as much insight as a foreigner could ever achieve into the enigma of Britain: a tiny country, filled with a thousand surprises, each a thousand years old, that never quite divulged its innermost realities to anyone who wasn’t native. As a tribalist, he eventually concluded with some ironic amusement that he was in the presence of another tribe, and one he would never completely understand: very ancient, going back very far into the past, surrounded by haunted scenes and haunted memories and heroes and heroines and deep-dyed villains who had never really died. “But all these people are still alive!” he had finally exclaimed in amused amazement to his mentor as they studied some ruined haunt of Hotspur in the west; and so it seemed, in this lovely little land where, eating lunch in some ancient inn set in an emerald valley in the hills, one might almost expect to hear in the courtyard a rattle and a clatter and a whicker and a whinny and, looking out, see Great Elizabeth, all silks and jewels and spangled things, descending from her coach; and, being startled but not at all surprised, say politely, “Why, yes, ma’am. But I had thought you were in London.”
So England left her mark, for all that he had sampled some of her most superficial as well as most impressive aspects, and for all that he headed home to Gorotoland determined to put to use all his British-conferred knowledge to break his ties with Britain just as rapidly as he could. In Molobangwe he found his father, now in his early seventies, failing badly; but although he and his mother had one more talk concerning the possibilities of again seeking the aid of the gods and ancestors to hasten his accession to the throne, they decided that it would be neither necessary nor wise. Independence was sweeping Africa now, and the world was suddenly acutely conscious of everything that went on there; it would not suit his purposes to have “Fresh Heir” taken out of the files and brought up to date. He decided instead, after securing by blood-oath the acquiescence of the Council of Elders in the unheard-of proposition that his mother should serve as Regent during his father’s decline, to go off to the United States and take another postgraduate year, this time at Harvard. Before he left, he married three wives and spent an intensive two weeks alternating among them night and day in the firm determination to leave behind as many heirs as possible. He was pleased to learn a month after he left that all were pregnant.
In the United States he went about as determined to absorb impressions and knowledge as he had been in Britain. He arrived with his reputation fairly well established, and while he had decided that it would be best to play down the “Terrible Terry” side of it, at least in public (in private, he found himself as eagerly pursued in Harvard Yard and along the gaudier reaches of the eastern seaboard as he had ever been in Oxford and London), he put the rest of it to good use.
Great racial ferment was under way in America, too, which was one reason he had wanted to go there, and he promptly found himself in great demand from many groups in both races as a speaker and adviser on African affairs.
“While his own country is still struggling to achieve the full forms of democracy,” The Reporter announced in an admiring article, “the basic freedoms and liberties of its citizens are being daily strengthened with new guarantees.”
This was news to Terry, but he said, “Oh, yes, oh, yes,” with complacent quickness and a brisk confirming nod when he was asked about it on Face the Nation. Self-delusion, he rapidly found, was the principal characteristic of mid-century America, and this made the country willing sucker bait for anyone who could offer a reasonable facsimile of idealism and goodwill. The word was enough, provided it was applied to humanitarian causes, and nobody bothered to check behind the word for either facts or ultimate intentions. It never occurred to him to appreciate the genuine goodwill toward man from which this sometimes terrifying naïveté arose, since in his country, as in so many others, disinterested goodwill toward man was a concept that simply did not exist. He concluded soon that many Americans were fools in this regard, and one night when he had been invited to be one of the principal speakers at a Brotherhood Week banquet in New York he decided to put it to the test.
“It has been wonderful to have this fine roast beef,” he began, looking out upon the glittering audience agleam with diamonds and humanitarian impulse. “In my country, you know, we eat people. This is quite a change.”
They had roared with happy laughter and considered him the most charming spoofer. After that he adopted a sort of sardonic double-talk with his American hosts, which they always took with absolute seriousness. The British, he decided, always believed that you were going to tell them the truth, and eventually caught up with you if you lied; the Americans always believed that you were telling them the truth, and never caught up with you if you lied. He still found this puzzling, at times, but it did not stop him from using the fact with the most calculating ruthlessness to advance his personal and national ambitions.
In contrast to what he found in America, the harsh dynamism of Soviet Russia and the steady hammering advance of Communism upon the citadels of the West had deeply impressed him. He had deliberately refrained from giving himself the experience of studying in Moscow, even though the Soviet Government had secretly invited him on several occasions; his business was with the West and he did not wish to alienate it unduly. Possibly if he had gone there he would have been less impressed and less willing to be gullible about it. But to him, as an African watching the world convulsion go forward after the Second World War, seeing the confused and ineffectual way the West attempted to withstand it, perceiving in it all the opportunities it held for the clever little mice to play while the great cats were at one another’s throats, he inevitably came to admire and respect the Soviet approach. It was as cruel, as brutal, as heartless, and as cold-blooded as his own. The words were roseate, the principles were noble, the slogans were as ringing as any to be found in the West; but, underneath, the un-deviating purpose and aim was as deceitful, as deceptive, as devious and unprincipled and greedy for power as anything to be found in Africa. The Communists talked as volubly as the West of shining goals; but the Communists acted, too, and the talk turned out to be a lie: and the lie worked. No one with a background such as Terry’s could fail to be impressed by that.
It was no wonder that since his father’s deep senility he had permitted the secret entry of Soviet and Chinese Communist advisers and technicians into Gorotoland, that Communist arms were being secretly assembled in the highlands, and that in the past two years he had come increasingly to rely upon his younger cousin (making sure, of course, that the cousin was always attended by tribesmen absolutely loyal to himself), who had accepted Moscow’s invitation and had spent three years in Russia.
At Harvard, where he audited a number of classes and participated in a number of forums and other intellectual exercises concerning emergent Africa, he found himself looked to as an authority both on what should be done there and in the United States as well. There were several incidents involving colored students (one was a star trackman named Cullee Hamilton), and during each he was interviewed, questioned, and quoted. He made his statements suitably fervent and solemn, and was given much attention as a youthful symbol of the wave of independence and dawning justice that was racing across Africa and finding many echoes at the lunch counters and campuses of America.
And this reputation, he thought contemptuously now, he still retained as he launched upon his final comments to the First Committee, despite the fact that Gorotoland had a tribal caste system as terrible as India’s, despite the fact that his government still connived at secret slavery, despite the hushed-up massacre of the United Opposition Party two years ago and the ritual sacrifices that still went on in the cave at Mbuele. The British were beginning to catch onto him, but in the United States he still remained the shining knight jousting with the forces of colonialist evil. Occasionally some disturbing question would be raised by someone, some embarrassing disclosure would creep into the pages of the papers; he could always count upon a dozen influential defenders to spring to his side, pooh-pooh it all away, write indignant editorials denouncing the suspicious, or offer the world some other equally impressive example of hardheaded realism on the subject. There were a great many people in academic, literary, and journalistic circles of the United States, he had been happily surprised to learn, who simply did not want to admit the seamy side of their chosen idols: too much of their own reputations was involved. Having committed themselves to certain people and causes, they could not abandon the commitment without admitting that they had been fools. And none of them, if it could possibly be avoided by sufficiently loud, sarcastic, indignant, and self-defensive noise, would do that.
So, while he knew Claude Maudulayne and Orrin Knox and Vasily Tashikov and a good deal of the rest of the world assessed him for exactly what he was, he was calmly confident—as he rolled out his concluding sentences about “help us achieve true liberty for Gorotoland—help us join the nations of mankind, upright and unafraid”—that he could count on much friendly support in America. It gave an extra power to his peroration as it resounded now in First Committee just prior to the vote on the resolution offered by Felix Labaiya-Sofra in the name of Panama:
“Oh, Mr. Chairman”—he told himself, with a sudden reversion to the happy excitement that made his heart feel like bursting, how beautifully he was performing, here at the UN—“we cry out in Gorotoland! The world cries with us! Freedom for my poor oppressed people. Freedom—now!” And once again he crashed his enormous fist down on the rostrum while the Communist bloc banged and pounded and applause rippled over floor and public galleries. And once more he found Lord Maudulayne raising his hand and, with an ironic little bow, started to step aside. But the British Ambassador halted him with a gesture.
“Mr. Chairman, I would just like to put one question to His Royal Highness before the vote. Is he aware that Soviet and Chinese technicians are in his country illegally and that arms from Communist sources are being smuggled into the highlands to a secret point there?”
An exaggerated expression of surprise came over the M’Bulu’s face, followed by a broad smile.
“Well, Mr. Chairman, if Her Majesty’s Government really think outworn charges about Communism will delay this vote on freedom for Gorotoland, I think they are mistaken. Why is it, Mr. Chairman, that everyone—everyone in the West who wishes to stop the forward march of peoples always—always—tries to scare the world with Communism? Do they not understand that this is old stuff now? Do they not know that the peoples of the world can no longer be frightened with it? Do they not know the world simply does not believe it any longer? Mr. Chairman,” he said gravely, “I again ask your help for my poor enslaved country. I have no more to say, distinguished delegates. It is in your hands.”
And with a flourish of his gleaming robes he stalked from the rostrum without another glance at the British Ambassador, who seemed for a second, but only a second, at a loss.
“Very well, Mr. Chairman,” he said matter-of-factly, “I wonder if the Ambassador of Panama would read his resolution to us, so that we may all hear it again before we vote, bearing in mind the question I have just put to His Highness, which is based on very well-authenticated information reaching Her Majesty’s Government from very reliable sources within Gorotoland.”
There was a stir, and into it Patsy Labaiya’s husband spoke from the floor.
“It is irregular, Mr. Chairman,” he said, a frown on his shrewd dark face and a characteristic sharpness in his tone. “I see no reason why I should read the resolution. Let the distinguished delegate of the U.K. resume his seat and let the rapporteur read it, if that is the desire of the committee.”
“I will read it,” said the Yugoslav delegate in the chair, and preceded to do so as Lord Maudulayne resumed his seat and the Secretary of State passed him a note that said, “We have intended to vote with you all along at this stage, but watch what the press will make of it.” Claude Maudulayne nodded rather grimly and tore up the note.
“Whereas,” the Yugoslav delegate said in his thick but recognizable English, “it is the legitimate desire of all colonial peoples to achieve independence, and,
“Whereas, it is the purpose of the United Nations to encourage and support all such legitimate aspirations of all colonial peoples everywhere, and,
“Whereas, it is the intention of the United Nations, furthermore, that all states should speed the easing of racial tensions, whether springing from the colonialist past or any other cause—”
“Damn it,” Claude Maudulayne whispered, “I still don’t like that language. And neither should you.”
“He wanted ‘imperialist past’ and it’s taken us six days of negotiating to get agreement on ‘colonialist,’” Orrin Knox whispered back. “The Asians and Africans wouldn’t permit any further change. Be thankful for small favors.”
“And, whereas the Territory of Gorotoland is the outstanding area at the moment where these purposes may be achieved most speedily,
“Now, therefore, it is the recommendation of the General Assembly that the United Nations do all in its power to persuade the United Kingdom to grant immediate independence to the Territory of Gorotoland.”
“Roll call!” the Soviet Ambassador shouted. “Roll call!”
“If the distinguished Soviet delegate will wait until I put the question,” the Yugoslav delegate said with some asperity. “The question is, does the First Committee approve this resolution and recommend its referral to, and adoption by, the General Assembly?”
“Does the First Committee approve immediate independence for Gorotoland!” Vasily Tashikov said loudly.
“That is not the question,” the Yugoslav delegate said with a pout. “I have stated the question. A roll call has been requested.” He reached into a small box before him and, in the UN custom, drew the name of the first nation to be called, the others to follow in their alphabetical order in English. “We will start with the Malagasy Republic.”
“Oui,” said Malagasy.
“Mali.”
“Oui.”
“Mauritania.”
“Oui.”
“Mexico.”
“Sí.”
“Mongolia.”
“Yes.”
“Morocco.”
“Oui.”
“Nepal.”
“Abstention.”
“Netherlands.”
“No.”
“New Zealand.”
“No.”
“Nicaragua.”
“Abstención.”
“Niger.”
“Oui.”
“Nigeria.”
“Yes.”
“Seems to be a landslide,” NBC/UN whispered to the London Daily Mail in the press gallery. “Serves us jolly well right,” the Daily Mail responded dourly. “Imagine trying to stop genuine independence in this day and age.” “Nothing to the reports of Communism, then?” NBC inquired. The Express snorted. “You Yanks are hipped on the subject just like Terry said. Why don’t you come off it?” “Okay,” NBC said with a shrug. “I just wanted the official word.” “You got it from Maudulayne, right enough,” the Daily Mail said, “but that doesn’t mean it’s true. Listen to South Africa! What could you expect?”
“No,” said South Africa.
“Spain.”
“No.”
“It appears you have a very handsome victory,” the Secretary-General murmured to the M’Bulu. “I cannot complain,” said Terrible Terry.
“Turkey,” said the rapporteur.
“No.”
“Uganda.”
“Yes.”
“Ukrainian S.S.R.”
“Da.”
“U.S.S.R.”
“Da.”
“United Arab Republic.”
“Yes.”
“United Kingdom.”
“No,” Claude Maudulayne said firmly.
“Here we go,” said NBC, leaning forward.
“United States.”
“No,” said Orrin Knox with equal firmness, and there was a sound of released tension through the room.
“Afghanistan,” the rapporteur went on, going back to the head of the alphabet after running through the U’s, V’s, W’s, and Y’s. “Albania … Algeria … Argentina … Australia …”
“The vote on the draft resolution submitted by Panama,” the Yugoslav delegate said presently, “is 51 Yes, 23 No, 36 abstentions, others absent. The resolution is adopted and referred to the General Assembly.
“If there is no other business, this meeting of First Committee is adjourned until tomorrow at 10 a.m., when we will consider General Assembly draft resolution 6 stroke 98, proposals for suspension of nuclear testing by the eleven nuclear powers.”
At the door, as the delegates crowded out, the M’Bulu of Mbuele, halted by many congratulatory handshakes, awaited with a happy smile the approach of the British Ambassador and the American Secretary of State.
“There,” he said comfortably. “It was not so bad, was it, Your Lordship?” Claude Maudulayne shrugged.
“It was an interesting advisory. And that, of course, is all it was.”
“But with the weight of world opinion behind it,” the M’Bulu said, somewhat less sunnily.
“If it passes the General Assembly, possibly.”
“Surely you don’t think you can stop it!” Terry said with an anger he made noticeably louder as the press began to approach.
“Who knows?” the British Ambassador said. “We want some answers on those reports I mentioned before H. M.’s Government would be willing to relax their very determined opposition.”
“Reports!” Terry demanded. “Who told you about ‘reports’?”
“I’m not going to tell you,” Lord Maudulayne said with a cheerful smile at the press. “I don’t want the poor beggars eaten. There’s the matter of the slave trade, too.”
“Come now,” said the London Daily Express in a peremptory tone. “Surely H. M.’s Government aren’t going to bring out those old chestnuts!”
“Aren’t you interested in whether they might be true?” Claude Maudulayne inquired mildly.
“I know they’re not,” the Express said flatly. “I’ve been to Gorotoland and seen for myself, haven’t I, Your Highness?” He turned to the Secretary of State with an impatient air. “Mr. Secretary, why did the U.S. vote with the U.K.?”
“We feel the program of independence for Gorotoland is well timed and well phased, on the whole,” Orrin said, “and in any event, if it is not, we aren’t so sure this kind of pressure is the way to help the situation. We haven’t decided what to do when it comes before the Assembly.”
“Then we may be for it there,” the New York Times said quickly. Orrin shrugged.
“Wait until it gets there and see.”
“Is it because you’re afraid of the blacks?” the Express inquired. The Secretary’s expression hardened, and it was Terry who came to the rescue.
“Enough, enough!” he cried with an infectious gaiety. “Enough of such solemn talk! Ahead of me lies my delightful visit to the southern United States, my dinner at the White House, my reception at Her Majesty’s Embassy, the chance to renew old acquaintances and make new friends for Gorotoland. Enough, enough!” And he burst into a roar of delighted laughter that quite startled his listeners.
“Enough, indeed,” the Secretary of State agreed dryly. “How about some lunch?”
“Alas, I have contracted to meet the distinguished Ambassador of the Soviet Union and the Secretary-General for lunch,” Terrible Terry said. “Possibly next week, if I may be so bold as to request a rain check.”
“Fine with me,” Orrin said. “Claude? A quick one, because I have a lot of telephoning to do to Washington.”
“All caused by me?” the M’Bulu asked coyly. The Secretary smiled at the attentive press.
“You do love to be the center of things, don’t you? No, not entirely by you. There are other things that concern the government of the United States.”
“Ah,” said Terry. “But none more important, surely.”
And in this, as the Secretary of State was to reflect in glum retrospect two days later, the M’Bulu was to be proven entirely correct.
5
The crowded elevator arrived at the fourth floor and two Indians, three Sudanese, a Cypriote, two French correspondents, three American correspondents, a graying secretary from the Economic and Social Council, and the junior United States Senator from Iowa stepped off. The others rapidly found their luncheon companions and dispersed from the humming little entryway to the Delegates’ Dining Room, but the Senator paused a moment to watch the hubbub of arrivals, greetings, handshakes, and exclamations in half a hundred tongues before wandering to the reservations desk to get his table number.
“Senator Smith of the United States,” he said with the intimately boyish grin that always fluttered feminine hearts, and the large Brunhilde behind the desk, true to her sex, gave a pleased titter and obediently skimmed through her reservation book with a swiftly ingratiating pencil.
“Table 47, Senator Smits,” she informed him with a dazzling display of teeth, and Lafe Smith reached over and patted her on the cheek.
“I can always count on you, can’t I?”
“Oh, yess, Senator Smits!” she assured him with a hearty giggle. “For annnysssing!”
“Ah, ah!” he said. “You’ll be giving me ideas.”
“Oh, Senator Smits!” she exclaimed, turning away with a wink and a blush to the grave Pakistani who was pretending not to hear this intimate exchange. Senator Fry, approaching his colleague from the rear, poked him in the small of the back.
“That was a disgusting exhibition,” he observed. Lafe grunted and swung about with an amiable grin.
“Hi, buddy. I just have to keep in practice.”
“I thought you were a sedate old married man now,” Hal Fry remarked. For a moment his companion lost his cheerful expression.
“Yes,” he said. “Who are you waiting for?”
“Nobody in particular. I thought I might run into you. And you?”
“Well, I took a table for two,” Lafe said, “and—actually—”
Senator Fry shook his head.
“All right. I’ll run along. I won’t even ask who she is.”
“But I don’t know who she is.” Lafe grinned. “Yet.”
“Oh, come on, now. I don’t believe even you are that good. Particularly right here in front of God and the UN.”
“As a matter of fact, there’s a little nurse in the Medical Service, and—I don’t know, you understand, she may be married with ten kids, but when I was in there the other day to get some cold pills she seemed—uh—friendly, as it were.”
“I’ll bet, ‘as it were,’” Hal Fry said. “What does Irene think of this?” Again a shadow filmed his colleague’s eyes.
“If she doesn’t like it,” he said shortly, “it’s her own damned fault. If, of course,” he added pleasantly, “it’s any of your business.”
“Sorry,” Hal said. “Your love life is so much a part of Washington, you know, that even up here one expects to be kept informed. But forgive me if I’m intruding.”
“You are and I do,” Senator Smith said, good nature restored. “There’s that little lady now.” He stared intently at a group of girls getting off the elevator, but none responded.
“There goes that little lady now,” Senator Fry remarked after they had passed. Lafe smiled.
“Very significant. Don’t have to tell an old campaigner like me what it means to be deliberately ignored. I may even have to have some more cold pills this afternoon.”
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” his colleague told him, not entirely in jest.
“Oh, I may be pure as the driven snow these days, for all you know,” the Senator from Iowa said. He frowned. “About as pure as my wife. But that’s another story. How was Fifth Committee? Are the administrative and budget vultures still after poor old Uncle Sam?”
“Always. Why don’t we wait for a minute and see if Orrin comes up?”
“Okay. I’ll ask Miss Fluoristan of 1896 to give us a table for four.”
“I’ll ask her. You’ve titillated the poor girl enough for one day.”
“Titillated!” Lafe Smith repeated dreamily. “What an obscene, delightful word. Can’t you just see me with my naked hands around her naked—and my naked—and her naked—and—”
“All right,” Hal Fry said hastily. “Save that for the next time Tashikov makes a speech in the Assembly and I need something to keep me awake. Not here. I’ll be back in a second.”
“There’s that little guy from Gabon,” Lafe said with a shift to seriousness. “I want to ask him something, anyway. See you in a minute.”
Their errands completed, they met again by the entrance to the blue-and-white dining room just as the Secretary of State and the British Ambassador came out of the elevator and moved to the reservation desk. Hal hailed them, and in a moment they were on their way in together. By doing a little quick reshuffling that would a few minutes later badly upset four lady members of the Friends of the United Nations of Pipestone, Minnesota, Miss Fluoristan had managed to give them the prize table that sits in the northeast corner of the great glass-walled room looking straight up the East River to the Queensborough Bridge and beyond. The gentle autumn haze had lifted a little; the sun was bright and almost hot upon the river, ruffled by a freshening breeze. Oil barges and sightseeing boats trudged busily up and down, and over the bridge beyond the apartment buildings of Beekman Place and Sutton Place they could see a stream of tiny cars constantly coming and going.
“Well,” Orrin said as they settled down and ordered drinks before turning to the menu, “and how was Trusteeship Committee?”
“You know Fourth Committee,” Lafe said. “Flick, flick, flick from our little friends in Moscow, as always. Guess what we talked about this morning: just the same thing you did in First Committee—Gorotoland. I must say that boy has his groundwork well laid.”
“He’s a shrewd fellow,” Hal Fry agreed. “We even had to spend an hour on it in Fifth Committee, too. Did you vote in First?”
“We did,” the Secretary said. “And he won, substantially.”
“And we lost,” Senator Fry said. “Substantially.”
“We did.”
“I’m not so sure, with all respects to you, Claude, that this is a wise position for us to take,” Hal Fry observed. “I have a good many qualms on this one.”
The British Ambassador looked argumentative, but the Secretary shrugged.
“The press asked. I told them. I said we regarded the commitment made by Britain on independence as well phased and well timed. And in any event, I said, we didn’t feel that the situation would be helped by this kind of pressure. I said I didn’t know what we’d do in the General Assembly.”
“Once in a while,” Lafe observed, “I’d like to see us be consistent all the way through, you know? If we’re against it, let’s be against it. If we’re for it, let’s be for it. All the way.”
“Well,” Orrin said. “We may be.”
“We would appreciate that,” Claude Maudulayne said. The Secretary smiled.
“Or, again, we may not be,” he said cheerfully, and then sobered at once. “No. I don’t mean to be frivolous about it, but there is much to be said on Terry’s side of it, even admitting Communist infiltration, hidden slave trade, ritual sacrifices, and all. After all, most of the rest of Africa is free now, and—”
“Yes,” the British Ambassador said, “and look at it! Just look at it! Sinking back into tribalism in a dozen areas, abandoning all the protections of liberty, all the safeguards of the human being that some of us tried to give them over so many hard years—”
“Maybe they never really wanted them,” Hal Fry suggested. “Maybe they just wanted to be left alone to slaughter one another down the ages.”
“Well,” Claude Maudulayne said. “I must be fair, too. Of course there are some who have tried. Julius Nyerere has tried. Nigeria has tried. Some others have tried. But look at those who haven’t, starting with Ghana. But you’d never know it,” he said bitterly, “to read some of the press.”
“There are certain major elements of the press that occupy a curious position relative to the United Nations,” the Secretary of State said thoughtfully. “They decide arbitrarily that it is best for their readers to believe certain things about certain areas of the globe. It rather confuses things … Speaking of our troubles,” he said as they finished giving the pretty Japanese waitress their orders, “wouldn’t you like to eavesdrop on that conversation down there by the window?”
“I must say Tashikov and Terry look happy,” Senator Fry observed. “The Secretary-General doesn’t seem so cheerful.”
“What a hell of a spot he’s on, really,” Lafe said. “Those damned bastards chipping away at him every minute of every day; the organization slipping, really, ever since the Congo, nothing in sight to indicate the trend is going to change—Orrin,” he concluded abruptly, “why don’t we have the S.-G. to lunch someday? I think we ought to make more of a fuss over him. The poor guy needs help.”
“We do as much as we can, don’t we?” the Secretary asked. “Without making it too obvious. We can’t afford to court the charge that he’s an American stooge.”
“There isn’t a charge in the world that we try to avoid,” Senator Fry remarked, “that the Communists don’t make anyway. So why should we worry what they say? I think we ought to work with him more closely, too.”
“I don’t think he’ll do it,” Orrin Knox said. “Oh, he’ll lunch with us, I’m sure. But look at him now. He wouldn’t be any more relaxed or communicative than he’s being with them.”
And indeed it did appear to many eyes around the room that the Secretary-General was not entirely at ease in his present company. This was correct, for he was not. He found himself, in fact, wondering with some asperity how it was that his host the Soviet Ambassador could always succeed in placing him at a disadvantage, and concluded that it was by exactly the same means that the Communists used to put everyone at a disadvantage: simply by taking the forms of polite and civilized custom and twisting them around with complete selfishness and ruthless inconsideration to serve their own ends. A luncheon invitation from the head of a delegation was something one in his position did not normally turn down without a valid excuse if he were in New York: so all Tashikov had to do was ask. And then all he had to do was extend the invitation to the heir to Gorotoland, and there were the three of them in the eye of the world, obviously in cahoots and crowing about the vote in First Committee.
Such, at any rate, was the exact impression he knew the Soviet Ambassador wanted to give when he had ordered champagne and started the luncheon with a toast. The toast had been only the standard “To peace!” but when he forced them to clink glasses with a big, obvious gesture and then grinned triumphantly around the dining room, it was obvious to everyone that they were saluting Terry’s triumph. Particularly when that exuberant young man had gulped down his drink, refilled his glass, and gulped that down, too, with a sunny smile upon the world. For him, at least, there was no subterfuge; he was celebrating his triumph.
“Mr. Secretary-General,” he said, “this is a wonderful day for my people. And indeed for all people like us, don’t you think?”
The Secretary-General stiffened slightly at this reference to their mutual color and responded with a circumspect courtesy.
“I can understand Your Highness’ satisfaction.”
“Aren’t you satisfied too?” the M’Bulu demanded in some surprise. Their Soviet host chortled.
“The Secretary-General can’t afford to be satisfied or dissatisfied, can you, Mr. Secretary-General? It is beyond the scope of the Charter.”
The S.-G. smiled, a trifle bleakly. “And on the letter of the Charter, Your Highness,” he said, “you will find that the distinguished Soviet delegate is a very fine and meticulous expert. The spirit of the Charter is sometimes something else again.”
“We do not understand spirits in my country,” Vasily Tashikov said blandly. “We are practical people. We consider spirits the same as ghosts. The ghost of the West,” he remarked with a sudden ironic chuckle in which the M’Bulu joined with spontaneous delight.
“I love the UN,” he said simply. “Everyone is so witty and amusing here. You are fortunate to be in your position, Mr. Secretary-General. It is a great honor as well as responsibility.”
“Yes,” the Secretary-General said in a polite tone that warned off further comment along that line. Terrible Terry got the message but plunged right on.
“You can do so much for Africa now. So much more than you could when you were delegate from Nigeria. We all look to you.”
“The Secretary-General,” Vasily Tashikov said, spearing a large bite of steak, “tries to remember, occasionally, that he comes from Africa. Most of the time he is more anxious to be liked by everyone everywhere. Is that not true, Mr. Secretary-General?”
“I conceive it my duty,” the S.-G. said stiffly, “to be as impartial as possible. However difficult the distinguished Soviet delegate and his associates may try to make it for me to be so.”
“We try to understand you,” the Soviet Ambassador said with a mock wistfulness. “We attempt to exercise every charity in seeing your point of view. It is only when you consistently play the imperialist game of the West that we find ourselves baffled and saddened that one we thought a good friend should so betray the cause of human freedom. It is sad.”
“You attempt to destroy my office and the United Nations every day in the world,” the Secretary-General said bluntly. “That is what is sad. If you people devoted one-tenth of the energy to building up the world that you do to tearing it down, what a wonderful world it would be.”
“You see, Your Highness?” Vasily Tashikov said with a show of frustration. “He persists in these historical fallacies.”
“I do not know about this,” the M’Bulu said in a placating tone. “All I know is that we regard him as a great defender of our liberties in Africa, and we in Gorotoland, particularly, are counting upon him to aid us in our struggle to be free.”
“The point is,” the Secretary-General said sharply, “that I can’t help anybody much. This man and his country have virtually destroyed my office and the UN itself.”
“But without the Secretary-General,” Terry objected with a sunny disbelief, “where would any of us be?”
“That is exactly it,” the S.-G. said grimly. “It is the question you should ask yourselves before it is too late altogether.”
“You are turning a delightful luncheon into a debate,” the Soviet Ambassador said regretfully. “And everyone is watching. It is sad, on such a happy day for our young friend’s country.”
“Yes, really,” the M’Bulu said. “You are much too gloomy, Mr. Secretary-General. We should all be friends! That is what the UN is for, is it not?”
“Who knows?” the S.-G. said, giving him a sharp, appraising glance. “What do you intend to use it for?”
“‘Use it for’?” the M’Bulu echoed. “For the independence of my country. And, after that, for the benefit of mankind. If Gorotoland can contribute to it.”
“Mmm-hmm,” the Secretary-General said. “Anyone who has sufficient goodwill and integrity can contribute to it. Some do not.”
“We would like to expel them,” the Soviet Ambassador agreed, “but it is so difficult, with the veto.”
“Accccchhhh!” the Secretary-General said, an indescribable combination of disgust, distaste, and dislike. “What a mockery you make of it.”
A look of amusement and, the S.-G. thought, understanding of some secret nature he could not interpret passed between his companions. Again the M’Bulu gave his hearty laugh and held out his hands in his palms-up gesture.
“Mr. Secretary-General, I think you are much too gloomy. Be of good faith, Mr. Secretary-General! Be of good cheer! It is a great day and all will come right for humanity!”
“Let me tell you something, Your Highness,” the Secretary-General said. “I served some considerable time as delegate before being elected to this office, and I will tell you something you should know. And that is that nothing good comes of the kind of game you are playing here.”
“What game?” Terry demanded in blank bewilderment.
“I tell you that as one African to another,” the Secretary-General added quietly, and for a long moment they stared at one another until the M’Bulu’s eyes dropped. But he covered it, again, with an infectious laugh.
“You speak in riddles, Mr. Secretary-General. Riddles, riddles. All I want is for us to be happy and enjoy the happy day for my country. Will you not drink to that? I think our friends the Secretary of State and the distinguished British Ambassador will think you are not comfortable being with me unless we have a little show of happiness.”
“The Secretary-General does not dare to appear happy in my presence,” Vasily Tashikov said with a laugh. “The world would think he was forgiving me for pointing out the historical facts about his position as agent for the colonialist powers. The world would think he was finally agreeing to the facts. Nobody in the West wants to agree to facts. That causes all our troubles here.”
“Very well,” the Secretary-General said, lifting his glass. “To the fact of human decency, which survives everything, even you.”
“To the human decency of the freedom-loving peoples,” the Soviet Ambassador said amicably. “I will stop there.”
“To everybody!” the M’Bulu said with a flashing smile. “Let us make it unanimous.”
“Now, what was that all about?” Hal Fry inquired. “The S.-G. looked as though he were drinking vinegar.”
“Drinking the blood of the West,” Claude Maudulayne said, “if Tashikov had anything to do with preparing the tipple. But Terry looked happy.”
“Terry always looks happy,” Lafe Smith said. “Terry is having a ball. I understand Harley’s going to entertain him in Washington, and you folks are going to give him a reception at the Embassy, and the Jasons are going to roll out the red carpet in Charleston, and everything’s really going to be great. It’s the talk of the Lounge. Does Harley know all about this?”
“No, I doubt if he does, yet,” Orrin said. “I’ve got to call him before his press conference so he’ll be prepared for it if they ask him. Actually I think we can get out of it at the White House with just a little buffet or something; maybe Foreign Relations Committee, Foreign Affairs Committee, a few correspondents to give him the publicity he wants, and that ought to do it. And as for you, Claude, it’s none of my business, but the smaller that reception the better, it seems to me.”
“Oh, yes. We’ll keep it down. They’ll hardly know he’s been in town. We hope.”
“Good,” Orrin said as he signed the check for the delegates’ discount, “we’ll hope so, too. Hal, why don’t you go take a nap?”
“Do I look that tired?” Senator Fry asked with a smile. “I’m really not.”
“Keep an eye on this man for me, Lafe,” the Secretary said. “He worries me, suddenly.”
“It isn’t anything,” Hal Fry said with some annoyance.
“What?” Lafe asked in concern. The Senator from West Virginia looked even more annoyed.
“Now here’s Orrin making a federal case of it. I’m just having a little blurring of vision, a little reddish thing. Very temporary. Nothing serious. It’s only happened twice—”
“In twenty-four hours,” the Secretary of State said. “I saw you blink just now.”
“—and it’s just a little tiredness. Maybe I will lie down, but only for a little while.”
“Let me take you to the doctor’s office,” Lafe suggested. “That would be an even better excuse than cold pills.”
“Excuse for what?” Orrin asked. “No, don’t tell me. It can only be one of the nurses.”
“Raoul was telling me yesterday that the delegate from Senegal describes you as ‘le chasseur formidable,’” Lord Maudulayne said. ‘“You’re the envy of the entire UN.”
“I don’t really deserve it, you know,” Lafe said. “No, really I don’t,” he repeated when they all laughed. “But I suppose it gives people something to gossip about in the Lounge … Well, let’s be off. Fourth Committee’s going back at three and I want to run across the street to delegation headquarters and check my Washington mail before the meeting starts.”
“I’ll come with you,” Hal said.
“Rest,” Orrin told him.
“Call Harley,” Hal replied. “You worry about the cares of the world and I’ll worry about me.”
‘It’s no care, really,” the Secretary said as they walked out of the dining room to the smiles and nods and little bows of many delegates who stopped their eating to watch them go. “You know that fatherly manner Harley’s developed lately. Terry will be charmed to pieces and all will be well.”
And as he turned at the door to give a cheerful farewell wave to the glittering M’Bulu, who waved cheerfully back, he actually believed it.
6
“What I can’t understand,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch remarked rather sourly as the Washington press corps drifted into the New State Department auditorium, “is why this press conference was called three hours early.”
“I suspect the President’s going to take off for the Upper Peninsula of Michigan tonight,” the Houston Post said. “The word isn’t out officially yet, but I understand he wants to spend a few days up there in the back woods.”
“Oh, God,” the Washington Star said with a groan. “More roughing it around the campfire for America’s Finest.”
“Just because you don’t like to fish,” said the Baltimore Sun. “Anyway, let the great man have his fun. He has a tough job. It says here.”
“Oh, it is,” the Arkansas Gazette agreed. “Nobody said it wasn’t.”
“I still think Governor Jason could do it better,” the Herald, Tribune said.
“What’s this thing the Jason Foundation’s throwing for that African gook?” the Memphis Commercial Appeal inquired. “I understand they’re going to serve white man Bordelaise. You boys better stay away from there.”
“Only bureau chiefs and columnists got invited,” the Philadelphia Inquirer said. “You don’t suppose they’ll be eaten, do you?”
“You’re living in a dream world,” the Post-Dispatch said. “No such luck. Ooops! Everybody up!”
“Please be seated,” the President said, taking his customary stand at the high rostrum with the microphones, his press staff beside him in a row, the White House stenographer at one side transcribing busily. Before him in the auditorium he saw some two hundred members of the press corps in various stages of alertness, in back of them and on the sides the waiting television cameras. What he had begun by referring to as “my weekly ordeal” and had now come to regard as “my weekly picnic” was about to begin. He hadn’t much for them this time, but if he knew the press corps they’d develop something before the senior wire-service man put an end to it by crying, “Thank you, Mr. President!” and they risked life and limb racing for the telephones.
“I really haven’t much today,” he said. “The Ambassador of the Ivory Coast presented his credentials this morning. I had a short talk with the Ambassador of Rumania on a possible food grant there. The head of the World Bank and I had a short talk on the world economic situation, and the Secretary of Labor reported that unemployment has risen slightly—the Labor Department is releasing those figures later this afternoon. I have some new postmaster appointments and some new Generals in the Air Force, which I shall send down to the Senate tomorrow in the hope they’ll advise and consent to them. I shall take off tonight for my fishing camp on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for a five-day visit, and if any of you want to go along for a taste of life in the great outdoors, you’ll be welcome. Now I’ll answer any questions you have.”
Fifteen were on their feet at once. He picked a familiar face and nodded.
“Mr. President,” the AP said, “is it true that the government of India has invited you to make a formal visit in the spring?”
“That is under consideration.”
“Mr. President,” said the Chicago Daily News, “since your Administration is deliberately withholding so much news from the public about current missile developments, do you think the country would be justified in becoming alarmed by the situation?”
The President started to look indignant but then thought better of it.
“No, I stopped beating my wife yesterday. You can ask her.”
“Well, Mr. President,” the Daily News said as his colleagues laughed, “that is all very well, but—”
“I don’t believe we are withholding information. If we are, write me a letter through the press office with specific examples and I’ll see what I can do about it. Next question?”
“Mr. President,” UPI said, “are you satisfied with the progress of the nuclear control talks at the UN?”
“They are never satisfactory,” the President said with a frank unhappiness. “They are always too slow and they never really come to grips with the problem.”
“Is that the Communists’ fault or ours, Mr. President?” the Washington Post asked quickly.
“I prefer to think it’s theirs,” the President said. “Do you have some information to the contrary?”
“No, sir,” the Post said. “I just wondered if you were satisfied that we were doing all we can.”
“I am doing all I can.”
“Yes, sir,” said the Post.
“Mr. President,” the New York Times said, “we have a question from our bureau at the United Nations. They understand up there that you are going to give a formal White House dinner for Terrible Terry—the M’Bulu of Mbuele, that is—that African prince from Gorotoland—”
“I know who he is. Who tells them that?”
“Apparently he did,” the Times said.
“I haven’t heard about it.”
“Mr. President,” the Los Angeles Times said, “you mean that he is inviting himself to dinner without your knowledge?”
“Apparently so,” the President said with a chuckle. Ebony magazine was on his feet at once, looking indignant.
“Mr. President,” he demanded, “do you mean to say, sir, that you are against entertaining visiting African dignitaries?”
“Now, I don’t recall saying that,” the President replied mildly. “Of course I am not against entertaining the official representatives of other countries. I do it all the time.”
“Who makes them official, Mr. President?” Ebony demanded in the same tone. The President looked surprised.
“I don’t quite understand your question.”
“I mean,” Ebony said, “are they officials because somebody says they are, or because they are?”
The correspondents laughed, but the President only smiled patiently.
“I still don’t quite see it, but I suppose you mean would I receive Prince Terry if the British Government said they didn’t want me to?”
“Do you feel he has to have British permission, or do you feel he is a dignitary in his own right?” Ebony persisted, as the other correspondents began to fidget.
“Knock it off, Uncle Tom,” the Philadelphia Bulletin murmured to the Providence Journal, “knock it off.”
“It is my understanding that Gorotoland is not an independent nation,” the President said. “If I am wrong, you can correct me.”
“Then will you receive him, sir?” the New York Times asked. The President smiled.
“I receive everyone who wishes to see me.”
“The question is, sir,” the Times persisted, “will you give him a formal White House dinner, as he says you will?”
“Well,” the President said, beginning to show a little irritation at last, “I can’t do it this weekend because I’m going away to Michigan. I can’t stay around and entertain for every little character that comes to town.”
“Oh, oh,” the Christian Science Monitor whispered to CBS. “That does it.”
“Mr. President,” the Air Force Journal said, leaping up a fraction of a second before twelve colleagues, “is it planned to launch another moon expedition before the end of the year?”
“I have no comment on that.”
“The families of the men who are there seem to be getting a little concerned, Mr. Presi—” the Air Force Journal said.
“The men will be maintained. That’s all.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ten reporters were on their feet. He chose the El Paso Times.
“Mr. President, sir,” she said, “why are you going fishing right at this time when world problems are so pressing?”
“Come along with me,” he said as they all laughed, “and you’ll find it will give you a much healthier outlook on all those pressing world problems. Seriously, I haven’t had a vacation since Geneva and I think it’s time I had one. Any objections?”
“No, Mr. President,” she said. “I don’t object. Some people do, though.”
“Let ’em,” he said cheerfully.
“My, my,” the Denver Post remarked sotto voce to the Chicago Tribune. “Aren’t we getting big and important.”
“Just to go back for a minute to Terrible Terry, Mr. President,” the Louisville Courier-Journal said, “we are to understand, then, that you know of no official dinner for him, you don’t expect to stay here to see him, and there wouldn’t be a dinner for him even if you did?”
“That’s about it,” the President said. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not unfriendly to him, but of course he won’t be here in a status in which I can entertain him formally.”
“Thank you, Mr. President!” the AP cried, and they tumbled headlong up the plushly carpeted steps out of the big orange-and-blue auditorium to the waiting telephones as the President watched them go with an amused shake of the head.
“Felix,” said the New York Times/UN in the Delegates’ Lounge, “what do you think of this? The President says he won’t stay around to entertain Terry and wouldn’t entertain him even if he did stay around. He says he’s going fishing and he thinks Terry’s a little character. How about that?”
“I don’t think,” said the Ambassador of Panama, “that our African friends will like it one little bit.”
“Does it make your resolution on Gorotoland even more important?” the Times suggested.
Felix Labaiya-Sofra gave his characteristic thin-lipped smile and his dark eyes snapped.
“Its wisdom becomes more obvious every day.”
“Do you think the President should stay and entertain Terry?” the Times persisted.
“I think any President who wished to make friends for the United States would do so,” the Panamanian Ambassador said. “The United States,” he added coldly, “does not have so many friends she can afford to waste them.”
“Can I quote you?”
“Please do,” said Felix Labaiya.
“Of course,” said the delegate of Guinea to NBC with an air of deepest injury, “the President knows what he wishes to do. But it is a distinct shock to us. We are indignant and horrified.”
“If the President had deliberately set out to insult the entire Afro-Asian world,” the delegate of the United Arab Republic said sternly to Paris Match, “I do not see how he could have done a better job. I am surprised and disappointed.”
“We are disappointed,” said the delegate of Ghana. “We are not surprised.”
“I should hardly think it would be well received in Africa,” the French Ambassador said, “but that is the President’s problem.”
“It might perhaps have been better to do as His Highness desired,” said the Ambassador of the Argentine, “but we would not wish to enter into a matter that is between the United States and the African states.”
“It is typical Yankee imperialism!” said the delegate of Cuba.
“I am puzzled by his decision,” the Indian Ambassador observed cautiously to CBS, “but I would wish to study it further before saying anything about it.”
“A bit thick, under the circumstances, wasn’t it?” asked the Canadian delegate cheerfully.
“As Africans,” said the delegate of Mali to the Daily Mail, who nodded vigorous agreement, “we are personally affronted. I think we can promise you there will be the gravest consequences.”
“Oh, no,” said the British Ambassador with a bland expression that didn’t quite come off, “I wouldn’t want to make any comment at all.”
“Oh, no!” said the M’Bulu of Mbuele with a sunny smile. “I wouldn’t want to make any comment at all!”
“It’s my fault,” the Secretary of State said. “I should have tried to reach you earlier, but I just assumed you were having your press conference at the usual time.”
“And of course I just assumed that everything was in order up there,” the President said with a trace of annoyance in his tone. The Secretary glanced across First Avenue at the green and silver shaft of the Secretariat Building, caught now by the slanting golden rays of the late-afternoon sun, and laughed rather grimly.
“Nothing is ever in order up here. Particularly with everybody in Africa big as life and twice as self-important. I don’t think that reference to ‘little character’ was especially fortunate.”
“It wasn’t. But I knew how I meant it, and the press knew how I meant it.”
“—but the world didn’t,” Orrin said. “Or, anyway, a good portion of the world is pretending it didn’t to suit its own devious purposes.”
“Why are they such chintzy souls all the time?” the President asked in mild wonderment. “They know perfectly well—”
“It’s like Alice in Wonderland. They do it ’cause it teases. For no other reason at all, except to embarrass us. That’s the great game in the world, you see. We’re out front, so we’re fair target. That’s for the jealous and spiteful ones. For those who really want to tear us down, of course, the game is less frivolous and lighthearted.”
“Do you know where the line is that separates the two?” the President inquired dryly. The Secretary snorted.
“It’s a little difficult to find, in some areas. I do think it would be wise to modify your plans somewhat. I ran into Raoul Barre just before I came across the street and he said he has already found great consternation and excitement among the former French colonies. Apparently they still come running to him with their troubles up here, and he thinks you would be well advised to think of some graceful excuse and change your plans.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” the President said in a tone of disgust. “How can I? Do you mean I have to be at the beck and call of every little two-bit international scalawag who wants to hold a gun at my head? It’s blackmail.”
“Sure,” Orrin Knox said cheerfully, “that’s exactly what it is. And everybody knows it. The most delightfully cynical double life goes on up here all the time about almost everything. Of a political nature, anyway.”
“Now, Orrin,” the President said. “God knows I don’t have much side to me, but I do have some concept of the dignity of my office, and I can’t let it appear that Terence Ajkaje is leading it around on a string. It’s beneath the office. It’s beneath the United States.”
“That,” said the Secretary of State, “is exactly the point Raoul was making, in an indirect way. He’s not so sure it is.”
“Have we fallen that low?” the President demanded. “I don’t believe it. And neither do you.”
“No. But—”
“And, furthermore, I must say all this hardly sounds like you. What’s become of the fearless fighting Senator from Illinois? I thought I was appointing a Secretary of State with some starch in his soul.”
“Now, Harley,” the Secretary said sharply, “you know that isn’t fair.”
“Well,” the President conceded, “you’re right; it isn’t. I apologize. But it does seem to me—”
“God knows I’d like to tell the little worm to go to hell,” Orrin said, “but, you see, he isn’t a little worm in the eyes of his fellow Africans, the press, and the New York cocktail circuit. Or if he is, they’re doing an awfully good job of keeping it quiet. He floats around this place on a wave of favorable publicity that hasn’t been matched since Castro spoke to the newspaper editors. He’s the world symbol of freedom and liberty at the moment. It doesn’t make any difference that he’s really the exact opposite. It’s the public image that counts, and I must say the public image is crowned with laurel and ten feet high.”
“Even so,” the President said with a stubborn note that his Cabinet had come to recognize, “I am afraid I can’t possibly change my plans for him.”
“Raoul suggested that perhaps you could say that last-minute legislation needed your attention, so you had decided to put off the fishing trip until next week—”
“There isn’t anything that can’t wait to be signed until I get back.”
“—and then you could arrange to have possibly just a small buffet at the White House,” Orrin went on calmly, “with perhaps the members of Foreign Relations and Foreign Affairs committees and a few of the top correspondents so he can get the publicity he wants—”
“I said I’m not changing my plans. Now, what else is on your mind?”
“I feel as Raoul does,” the Secretary said earnestly, “that perhaps under the circumstances it would be best to find a good excuse and do it. The world doesn’t deal in realities any more, you know; it deals in public fictions.”
“I know. And I am determined that the public fiction about the United States will be that it does not yield to every little passing wind of hysteria that blows. Haven’t I made that clear already, at Geneva and elsewhere?”
“You have done beautifully,” the Secretary of State said soberly, “and, like you, I think the public fiction will coincide most closely with reality if that is the picture of us you can educate the world to accept. But there is a genuine feeling up here that we must take into account. And in that context—”
“I know what it is,” the President said. “It’s a feeling of blown-up ego that has the whole world out of balance. Sometimes I think the end result of the United Nations has been to give unimportant little states nobody would ever have heard of a chance to inflate themselves out of all proportion to their actual weight in things. It’s ridiculous that we let the tail swing the cat the way we do.”
“But you understand why it is,” Orrin Knox suggested. The President sighed.
“Yes, I understand why it is. The more real power you have, the less you can afford to exercise it, and the less real power you have, the more you can throw it around. It’s a sign of how topsy-turvy our world is.”
“So you do think perhaps, then, that you can—” the Secretary began, and was conscious at once of a change of atmosphere at the other end of the line.
“No, indeed,” the President said crisply. “This is one of those times I feel it won’t do to give in.”
“I’d rather do it gracefully now than find we had to later,” Orrin observed.
“I can’t conceive of any situation in which we’d ‘have to later.’ Anyway, Ted Jason and his little luncheon in Charleston ought to give him all the headlines he wants.”
“LeGage Shelby won’t be happy, either,” the Secretary told him with an ironic amusement.
“LeGage Shelby is the least of my worries. Are you coming back down tonight?”
“Yes, I think so. I don’t feel I can be away from the department more than a couple of days without a lot of things getting out from under me. Not that they don’t when I’m there, of course; but I feel better about it when I’m on the spot. At least I can prevent some of it.”
“Now, surely,” the President said with a mocking irony that exactly mimicked some other voices of the past, “you don’t think that some obscure little clerk in some obscure little bureau lost China, do you?”
“Obscure little clerks in obscure little bureaus can do a hell of a lot of damage in a government like this, and it’s either naive or disingenuous to say they can’t. However, it’s more a matter of good administration that I’m concerned with. So, I’ll be back in town late tonight if you want to reach me before you go to Michigan.”
“I’m going to Michigan at six. Do you and Beth like trout?”
“Love ’em.”
“I’ll bring you a dozen. And, of course, you can always reach me through the White House switchboard if you need me.”
“Sure thing,” Orrin Knox said. “Have a good rest. You deserve it.”
“Thanks,” said the President. “I will.”
And that, the Secretary thought as he returned the direct phone to the White House to its receiver and swung back to the pile of papers that confronted him on his desk, was what could still happen with Harley. For the most part he had settled into the Presidency with a sure skill that had, in the case of Geneva, risen to an instinctive brilliance. But there was still a stubborn streak, certainly not decreased by the adulation that had followed his actions in the Swiss city, and a certain willful blindness about things, on occasion.
Of course Orrin could see his position that the United States must not be “on a string to Terence Ajkaje,” but, by the same token, the President’s press conference remark and his decision not to entertain the M’Bulu was already an issue and rapidly becoming more so at the UN. The episode was exactly the sort of thing that the neutralist states, encouraged by the Communists, loved to fret about and worry away at until it had grown to a size out of all proportion to its real worth. And in this recurring and oft-repeated process, of course, the lure of a good story and a major controversy always brought the eager co-operation of the news corps. It was already top news in the New York Post and the New York World-Telegram and Sun, whose late-afternoon editions were on the desk before him. “PRESIDENT SNUBS AFRICANS,” said the former. “HASSLE DEVELOPS ON WHITE HOUSE BID TO TERRY,” said the latter.
As far as he was concerned, the Secretary thought with some annoyance, he would love to kick the bucket over the moon along with Harley and not worry about it anymore. He smiled as he recalled the President’s remark about his own newly found diplomacy: he certainly had become a diplomat since leaving the Senate. But in the democratic system each job had its own imperatives, as each had its own prerogatives and privileges, and you inevitably found yourself adapting to the style of new responsibilities when you took them on. It was all very well to rise and denounce something in the Senate—and he thought for a wistful moment of what fun it would be to do it, just once more—but in the delicate area of international relationships it was not so easy or advisable to do so. Of course the Communists could, that was their stock in trade—but the United States could not. It would, ironically enough, shock all those powers that watched the Soviet performances with a secret envy and approval. They would never accept it from America. It would be much too uncomfortable to have two great powers acting like great powers. As long as the United States confined itself to acid rejoinders and refused to take the offensive, everybody could pretend it wasn’t so.
He swung again to the window and stared thoughtfully across at the UN buildings against the backdrop of the darkening river and Brooklyn, now becoming dotted with early evening lights as the day swiftly faded. On a sudden impulse he picked up a phone, had his secretary verify an appointment, clapped on his hat and coat, and hurried over.
“You know, Seab,” the Majority Leader murmured as they sat side-by-side in the Senate and listened with half an ear to the foreign aid debate droning on, “you ought to take yourself a cruise when this is over. Get away from it all. Relax. Rejuvenate. Regain your youth.”
His seatmate gave a chuckle and peered at him through half-closed eyes.
“Now, Bob, you know exactly where I’m going to be doing my cruising this fall. You know exactly where, Bob. In the great state of South Carolina, Bob. That’s where.”
“Things getting a little rough for you, are they?” Bob Munson asked. “I didn’t know that could ever happen to you, Seab.”
The senior Senator from South Carolina chuckled.
“Oh, yes, sir. Oh—yes—sir. Even to poor old beleaguered Seabright B. Cooley, servant of the people these fifty years, Bob. The little mice are nibblin’, Bob. They’re nibblin’ at me. But,” he said with a sudden emphasis, “I still know a thing or two, Bob. I’m not through yet. Or even near it.”
“What are you going to do?” the Majority Leader asked with the impersonal curiosity of one political technician to another. “Get involved in the race issue?”
“I’d rather not,” Seab Cooley said soberly, “if I can avoid it, Bob. It’s bad enough at best, and I don’t want to be stirring it around. Unless they push us too hard, Bob. If they push us too hard, Bob, then you’ll hear from me. Yes, sir, you’ll surely—hear—from—me.”
“Mmm-hmm. I expect we will. Well, we’ll try to get you out of here tomorrow night, Seab. The Speaker and I wouldn’t want Harper Graham and those other boys to have a free hand against you one minute longer than we can help it.”
“Where is he?” Senator Cooley said, hunching himself around and peering dourly over the Senate. “Where is that devious fellow, Bob?”
“I don’t see your distinguished colleague,” the Majority Leader said. “Probably on the phone to South Carolina right this minute lining up votes against you, Seab.”
“It won’t do him any good, Bob,” Senator Cooley said calmly. “It won’t do him any good at all.”
“Well, I hope not,” Senator Munson said truthfully, “but you never know. Mr. President!” he said, jumping to his feet as Paul Hendershot of Indiana concluded a lengthy attack on the bill. Powell Hanson of North Dakota, in the chair, gave him recognition. “Mr. President, I should like to advise Senators that it is the leadership’s intention to hold the Senate in session late tonight, possibly until ten o’clock or midnight, in the hope that we can conclude action on the pending measure.”
“Mr. President,” said Raymond Robert Smith of California, “I think we should have a quorum call so that a majority of the Senate can hear that important announcement by the Majority Leader. I so move a quorum call, Mr. President.”
“Now, what is that all about?” Senator Munson muttered in some annoyance to Senator Cooley as he resumed his chair and looked about the Senate at the handful of Senators present. “We don’t need a quorum until at least eight o’clock. We won’t begin voting on anything until then.”
“Maybe he has a delegation in town from California and wants the Senate to look busy for them,” the Senator from South Carolina suggested dryly. “Or maybe he wants to read us something for the Congressional Record. The old Record gets mighty important when you come to run for re-election, Bob. Maybe you noticed I’ve been using it a little myself recently.”
“I had, Seab,” the Majority Leader said, “but I just thought you had come across something of unusual merit that should be recorded for posterity—and sent out under your frank to the voters, of course. Well, if Ray Smith has something, it probably concerns movies, agriculture, or irrigation. I expect we’ll have to listen.”
What the junior Senator from California had, however, concerned neither movies, nor agriculture, nor irrigation, and in very short order it became apparent to his colleagues that it might behoove them to listen. He arose with a serious expression as Powell Hanson announced that, fifty-four Senators having answered to their names, a quorum was present. Arly Richardson of Arkansas leaned over to Elizabeth Ames Adams of Kansas. “Oh-oh,” he said. “Ray’s The-Gravity-of-This-Cannot-Be-Minimized attitude. I wonder what up.” “Undue Japanese competition for Southern California industries,” Bessie Adams whispered wickedly back. “They’ve found a new process for mass-producing crackpots.”
“Mr. President,” the Senator from California said earnestly, “I wish to call the Senate’s attention to a surprising and, I think, most disturbing development today in our relations with the great continent of Africa. I am informed, Mr. President, that the President of the United States has withdrawn plans to entertain one of the most distinguished representatives of the African continent, and, indeed, is leaving for Michigan to go fishing for five days and won’t even see him while he is in Washington. I refer, of course, to His Royal Highness the M’Bulu of Mbuele, certainly one of the most outstanding and noteworthy members of the great Negro race—”
“I knew he was afraid of Cullee Hamilton running against him,” Cecil Hathaway of Delaware whispered to Murfee Andrews of Kentucky, “but I didn’t know he was that afraid.”
“—and one who deserves, if anyone does, the recognition that should by rights be conferred upon him by the President.”
“Mr. President,” Bob Munson said, “will the Senator yield? Is it not the fact that His Highness’ country is still under British rule and he is not yet the head of an independent state? Might this not explain the President’s action?”
“I do not know what explains it, Mr. President,” said Ray Smith severely, “unless it is shortsightedness of the most flagrant kind. Certainly a representative of the great Negro race—”
“He’s practically terrified,” Murfee Andrews whispered to Cecil Hathaway.
“—deserves better treatment than this from the President of the United States. How are we to hold up our heads at the United Nations, Mr. President? How are we to convince the African states that we are truly their friend? How are we to convince the world that we mean it when we talk of equal rights, equal justice, and life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all men?”
“Mr. President,” said the senior Senator from South Carolina with an ominous gentleness, “will the distinguished Senator from California yield?”
“Mr. President,” Senator Smith said hastily, “I do not wish to get into an argument with the disting—”
“Oh, Mr. President,” Senator Cooley said. “Now, I do not entertain at all the idea of getting into an argument with the distinguished Senator from California in this matter. But is it not true that in Gorotoland where this Emboohoo of Embewley—”
“M’Bulu of Mbuele,” Ray Smith corrected nervously.
“Emboohoo of Embewley,” Seab Cooley repeated firmly, “lives, there is reason to believe that slavery still exists? Is it not rumored that human sacrifices and even cannibalism can still be found there? Are there not even signs of Russian and Chinese Communist infiltration?”
“Oh, well, Mr. President,” Senator Smith said with a relieved scornfulness, “don’t tell me the Senator from South Carolina is going to trot out old charges of Communist infiltration! Now, that is ridiculous, Mr. President.”
“Is it?” Seab Cooley asked mildly. “Well, sir, I wouldn’t know about that. The Senator from California is much more of an expert on Communism than I am, that’s true, Mr. President. He knows much more about it than I do.”
“What does the Senator mean by that?” Ray Smith demanded with a nervous anger. “I resent that, Mr. President!”
“Now, Mr. President,” Senator Cooley said with a sad patience, “I don’t know what the Senator from California is talking about. I do think there is reason to believe that this African fellow that the President won’t entertain—and, in my opinion, wisely won’t entertain—is not all the Senator from California says he is. Representative of the great Negro race! Mr. President, I know representatives of the great Negro race. I know them in my own state, Mr. President, and, yes, I know them in the state of the Senator from California. The distinguished Representative from that state, Mr. Cullee Hamilton, Mr. President. There is a great representative of the great Negro race.” He fixed the junior Senator from California with a steady glance and his voice dropped to a siren’s whisper. “Does he deny it, Mr. President? Does he deny that Representative Hamilton is a great representative of the great Negro race?”
“Why, no,” Senator Smith said nervously. “Why, no. Why, of course not. I don’t deny that Representative Hamilton is a great representative of his race.”
“Worthy even to be a United States Senator, Mr. President,” Seab Cooley said softly.
“Why, er—er—why, yes, I suppose so,” said Ray Smith helplessly.
‘This is murder,” Sam Eastwood of Colorado murmured to Alexander Chabot of Louisiana. “Somebody ought to stop it.” Alec Chabot smiled and shrugged in his dapper way.
“Now, Mr. President!” Seab Cooley said, raising his voice suddenly, bringing his fist high over his head and crashing it down on his desk in his characteristic gesture, “I think the Senator from California should apologize to his fellow Californian, that great Negro Congressman who is even worthy to be a United States Senator, for mentioning him in the same breath with this—this—adventurer from Africa whom our President has wisely refused to entertain. He should apologize to him, Mr. President! He—should—apologize—to—him!”
“This ‘adventurer,’ as you call him,” Ray Smith said, his tone rising slightly in pitch, “is going to be entertained in your own state tomorrow, Senator! Of course you know that!”
“Oh, yes,” Seab Cooley said, “I know that. A pack of adventurers will entertain him, Mr. President. An ambitious family with its eye on the White House. The ragtag and bobtail of the American press, Mr. President. Oh, yes, they will all be there in my state of South Carolina making a Roman holiday for this adventurer. They will all be there!”
“And among them, Mr. President,” Senator Smith said in the same high-pitched, icy way, “the governor of my own state of California, the Honorable Edward Jason. I think the Senator from South Carolina owes him an apology, Mr. President for using such language about him. To say nothing of the distinguished audience that will honor His Highness the M’Bulu.”
“They may do honor to him, Mr. President,” Seab Cooley roared, “but they do dishonor to the white race! And they do dishonor to the great state of South Carolina! When you dishonor the white race, Mr. President, you dishonor South Carolina. When you dishonor South Carolina, you dishonor the white race! Dishonor, Mr. President! Dishonor! That is what this kinky-haired kinkajou brings to America!”
“Mr. President,” the Majority Leader said calmly, “if the Senator will yield—if whichever Senator has the floor will yield; I’ve lost track—I think we have had enough of this discussion of the M’Bulu and might now get back to the foreign aid bill, if we could. I think the Senator from California has made the point to his constituents that he wished to make, and I think the Senator from South Carolina has made the point to his constituents that he wished to make. At any rate, Mr. President, I think we should at least try to get back to the pending business. Is that agreeable to the two Senators?”
“I still think the President is making a shocking mistake that will seriously damage the United States,” Ray Smith said doggedly.
“I still think the Senator owes an apology to his great Negro colleague who is worthy to be Senator, to my state of South Carolina, and to the white race, Mr. President,” Senator Cooley said. “But,” he added sadly, “if he is going to remain obdurate in his contumacy, I can only watch him go with a sorrowing eye, a mourning heart, and a ‘Farewell, brother!’”
“That was a great performance,” Bob Munson whispered sarcastically as they resumed their seats. “That was worthy of Booth in his best days.”
“I said I still know a thing or two, Bob,” his seatmate said. He gave a satisfied chuckle. “I still do.”
7
“Mr. Shelby of the United States, please,” said the young lady at the telephone desk in heavy accents. “Mr. Shelby of the United States, please call the Delegates’ Lounge … Señora Del Rio of Peru, please call the Delegates’ Lounge … Signor Vitelli of Italy, please …”
“Don’t go away, Felix,” LeGage Shelby said. “I’ll be back in a minute, I want to talk to you about this.”
The Panamanian Ambassador nodded.
“Surely,” he said. “I shall call Patsy while you’re gone if I can find a phone.”
“Tell her I’ll certainly be in Charleston for the luncheon,” ’Gage Shelby said.
“I think she knows,” said Felix Labaiya, and watched his companion swing away to the telephone desk in his pantherlike, self-important way. A peculiar expression gleamed for a moment in the eyes of the Ambassador of Panama: the expression reserved by the users for the used. Then he spied an Indian concluding a conversation on one of the instruments at one of the small tables along the wall and, with a quick step, moved toward it just in time to take it from under the nose of a Norwegian with the same idea. The Norwegian gave a sour smile, shrugged, and walked away. Felix dropped into the leather armchair alongside the table, dialed 9 for outside, and then dialed his home. From Dumbarton Avenue in Georgetown his wife answered immediately. The housekeeper, he deduced, was busy with dinner and Patsy was upstairs in the bedroom taking her usual rest before the meal. His voice took on the direct, impersonal note it usually held when he addressed his wife on the telephone. He had once explained to her that he did not believe in using the instrument for romance. Someone might be listening.
“This is Felix,” he said. “I am in the Delegates’ Lounge, as you can hear”—he put a hand over his right ear to shut out the booming loudspeaker, now calling for Mr. Hirosaki of Japan, please—“and everyone up here is quite excited about the President’s comments on Terry. It is ideally timed for us.”
“Everyone here is terribly excited, too,” she said in a pleased tone of voice. “In fact, everyone is FURIOUS. Wouldn’t you know that old fool would put his foot in his mouth? Leave it to him! But, more fun for us. They’ve already had a big row about it in the Senate.”
“Oh? Were you there?”
“I was earlier, but then I had to go and have lunch with Beth Knox and Dolly Munson and Kitty Maudulayne and Celestine Barre—”
“An interesting group,” her husband observed with a smile that sent some warmth over the wire. Patsy chuckled.
“Yes, wasn’t that a combination? But VERY interesting. Beth isn’t worried at all,” she added less cheerily.
“She will be,” the Panamanian Ambassador promised, again with a smile. His wife laughed.
“Yes. Well, I started the row, anyway, because the minute the news came over the wire—” Felix winced as he always did at the thought of the wire-service teletypes tapping away in the Dumbarton Avenue study; but it was Patsy’s money, and who was he to quibble? Just Patsy’s husband. “I got right on the phone and called Ray Smith, and do you know—he went right on the floor and made the most magnificent speech about it … At least,” she said more thoughtfully, “I THINK it was magnificent. The reports aren’t too clear yet, because Seab Cooley got into it somehow and you know how he can confuse the issue when he wants to. I don’t see why that old mountebank DOESN’T DROP DEAD. I really don’t. Anyway, it’s now a big issue down here, too. Which is all to the good for the luncheon. Now we’ll really get attention.”
“I never doubted it,” Felix said with an irony he knew she didn’t miss. “When the Jasons go to work on something, I’ve found they rarely fail. Why don’t you buy us the Canal and give it to us for a birthday present?”
“Wait until Ted’s elected,” she said cheerfully. “We may be able to work something out. What’s happening up there?”
“Much discussion, much excitement, much annoyance. The Africans are very exercised, the Asians are upset. The Europeans are baffled and the Communists are happy. All in all, one grand mess.”
“Will it help your resolution?”
“Certainly. I don’t see any possibility of its failing now. Even if it gets blocked in the Assembly, I think it may be possible to get it to the Security Council as a threat to world peace. Particularly with this assist from the President.”
“Felix,” his wife said, “I may be dense, but exactly how does the problem of Gorotoland affect peace? I mean, I can see that as a moral matter, possibly, as a nice thing to do, an idealistic gesture, it makes sense. But I don’t quite see how it rates as a threat to peace if Terry doesn’t get his independence until the date the British have promised him. After all, a year isn’t so long to wait. Just how does it come under UN procedure in the form you’ve presented it?”
“UN procedure,” Felix Labaiya said dryly, “never was very exact, and it’s becoming less so every day. It’s already been attacked on just the grounds you say. The British tried to keep it out of First Committee, where it really doesn’t belong, with just that argument. But we’ve all learned things from the Russians. You can get the UN to do whatever you want it to if you just present it with something loudly enough and insist that it act. Maybe ten years ago sentiment for precedent could have been mustered to block the whole thing at the outset. Now you can get the Afro-Asians to go along with anything, provided certain of the big powers are against it. Once upon a time Britain could have got enough votes to have the whole thing thrown out. She doesn’t dare try it today. Not even with U.S. help.”
“Yes, but what I mean is, why? Why is it so vital that Gorotoland be freed at once? Why is it such an issue? Why is everybody suddenly so wild on the subject?”
“Specifically, why am I? Well, to me it’s simply a matter of common justice. Nearly all of Africa is free, just as the M’Bulu says, and it’s about time the rest of it was, too. And with Soviet help I felt it could be done most directly in the form in which I’ve presented it.”
“Why did the Soviets choose you?” Patsy Labaiya asked. The Ambassador made a small, disgusted “Tchk!” sound and his tone sharpened noticeably.
“No one chose me. No one chose anybody. It was my idea all along. I happened to mention the matter to Tashikov one day at lunch and he said they would be glad to help if they could. I’ve told you all that.”
“Yes, I know. But it still puzzles me.”
“Puzzling or not, it seems to be working perfectly all right. And of course the whole thing builds up beautifully for the luncheon and Ted. Would he like to come back up here with me and watch the final voting, or does he have to go right back to California?”
“I expect he’ll have to go back,” Patsy said, “but you can talk it over in Charleston. He does want to come back through here and see the President; I know that.”
“Oh? That’s intriguing.”
“Yes, very. It’s a courtesy call, of course, but—”
“One of those where you put your pistols on the table when you sit down,” her husband suggested with a smile. She laughed.
“Probably. Well, I’m delighted everything’s going so well. Things are all set for the luncheon, too. It’s going to be wonderful.”
“LeGage Shelby wanted me to be sure and tell you he would be there.”
“I’m so surprised,” Patsy said ironically. “If there was anyone I thought would stay away, it was ’Gage Shelby. He hates headlines so … The one who says he is going to stay away, of course, is Cullee Hamilton, and he’s the one we really should have.”
“Can’t your brother do anything with him? If he wants to run for Senator, I should think he’d need Ted’s support. Surely that provides some leverage.”
“California’s a funny state,” Patsy said. “Just when you think you’ve got political leverage on someone, you find the leverage isn’t there and you fall flat on your face. The voters are too independent to co-operate. So is Cullee. Ted can offer his support, and it may be of some assistance, but his opposition wouldn’t hurt much. Everybody runs on his own out there. I certainly wish he would come, though. He’s so respectable. You know what ’Gage is.”
“Yes,” said Felix Labaiya. “And here he comes now, so I’d better conclude.”
“I wish you were here,” his wife said in a voice that suddenly changed completely. “Right here.”
“Yes,” he said, thinking dryly. Well, that’s dutiful; I must be dutiful, too. He put a little fervor in his voice. “We must discuss all that in Charleston.”
“Is that a promise?”
“A promise.”
“I’ll hold you to it,” she said, “Tell ’Gage I’m absolutely thrilled to death that he will be with us.”
“He will be thrilled that you are thrilled,” Felix said. “Good-by, now.”
“How is she?” LeGage asked, dropping into the armchair on the other side of the table. “Well, I hope.”
“So excited about the luncheon she cannot see straight,” Felix said, and they both laughed pleasantly over the fiction, which neither believed, that Patsy was ever so excited about anything that she couldn’t see straight.
“Ah, yes,” ’Gage said dreamily. “That will be quite an affair, particularly with Justice Davis about to hand down a decision on that appeal for injunction on the school integration case. Quite an affair. Is Cullee coming?”
Felix frowned.
“Apparently he is not.” ’Gage frowned, too.
“What’s the matter with that boy?” he asked in an exasperated voice. “Doesn’t he know this is a chance to stand together and really strike a blow for something constructive? I ought to talk to that boy.”
“I thought you had,” the Panamanian Ambassador said in some surprise. “And if you haven’t, why haven’t you? And if you haven’t, why don’t you?”
LeGage gave an embarrassed little laugh.
“Well, you don’t exactly understand the relationship between old Cullee and me. We were roommates at Howard, you know; we understand each other pretty well; and—well, he doesn’t take much from me without getting mad. I can’t push him; he gets stubborn. He’s already mad at me about something else down there, a bill that DEFY wanted to have passed, and—I just don’t know whether it would do any good for me to talk to him about the luncheon or not. That’s why I haven’t because I haven’t been sure. I thought it might just make it worse.”
Felix Labaiya gave him a skeptical and appraising smile.
“Don’t tell me there’s someone who has the great LeGage Shelby intimidated. I do not believe it. What does this Cullee have that I don’t know about? I shall have to cultivate him when I am in Washington.”
“He’s worth it,” LeGage said. “He’s really quite a boy.”
“You sound as though you genuinely admire him. This, too, is rare.”
’Gage Shelby smiled, somewhat uncomfortably.
“Let’s just say he can—do things I can’t do.” A rarely honest expression crossed his face for a moment, and his companion realized that only a very genuine emotion could produce such a result in one who normally lived behind several brassy and self-protective layers. “He’s got guts about some things I haven’t,” LeGage said simply. “Let’s put it that way.”
“And by the same token,” the Ambassador said firmly, “you can do things he can’t do. And you have the guts to do them, too. Such as lead DEFY to new victories and deal so splendidly with our friends of the Afro-Asian bloc here.”
“That was one of the Nigerians on the phone just now,” ’Gage said with a pleased smile, distracted to more comfortable matters. “They’re having a conference in half an hour about your resolution and they want me to be there.”
“Have you cleared it with the Secretary?” Felix asked with a certain mocking note that did not escape his companion. LeGage smiled.
“Nope. But he needn’t worry. I’m just supposed to explain the fine points to them if they ask me.”
“They regard you still as an outsider,” the Panamanian Ambassador said. LeGage gave him a scornful look.
“Shucks, man. They don’t really take me in. I’m not a Negro. I’m an American. We Americans, we got it made, you see. They’re jealous of us … Got it made!” he said with a sudden deep bitterness. “Oh, brother. Have we got it made.”
“Well,” said Felix Labaiya-Sofra with a quiet conviction. “You will have. One of these days.”
“Yes!” his companion said with a sudden naked fierceness in his voice, though his face retained its usual sardonic mask. “Yes, man. You just bet we will.”
“Have you seen Terry?” Felix asked with a deliberate change of tone. LeGage laughed.
“Terry’s in the recording studios being interviewed by the networks. In another hour he’ll be the most from coast to coast. That boy never had it so good. He’s really riding high.”
“Well,” Felix said, “I can’t be at your Afro-Asian conference, because they would never ask me, but you take them a message from me. You tell them,” he said, his eyes narrowing as he looked down the lounge to the bar, where delegates and press now clustered, drinking and gossiping beneath the wooden map of the world, “that I, of course, deeply deplore the unfortunate and insulting attitude of the President of the United States toward His Highness and, indeed, toward all African states generally. You tell them that I intend to push my resolution with unrelenting vigor until it is adopted by the United Nations. You tell them I shall never flag or fail in the cause of freedom and opposition to colonialist domination of which, as a Panamanian, I know something.”
“Say, now!” ’Gage Shelby said with a laugh. “That’s quite a speech, Felix, boy.”
“You tell them,” the Panamanian Ambassador repeated in a completely humorless tone.
“I’ll tell them … Can I fly down to Charleston with you tomorrow?”
“Gladly. And, look. Why don’t you call Cullee? We really do need him, and I’m sure this is something sufficiently important to overcome your strange and uncharacteristic reluctance.”
“We-ell,” LeGage said, looking doubtful. “I’ll think about it.”
“He really does have you scared, doesn’t he?” the Panamanian Ambassador said. LeGage grinned.
“Not exactly scared. You just don’t understand about Cullee and me. That boy’s got character.”
“And you haven’t?”
“Sometimes when I’m around him,” LeGage admitted, not altogether humorously, “I’m not so sure.”
They stood for a moment silent in the glass-walled living room on the thirty-eighth floor, looking out over First Avenue to the fantastic spectacle of New York flung upward to the sky, a last shred of sunset dying behind the city’s silhouette, the lights coming on in a hundred skyscrapers, an impression of overwhelming life, cruel, challenging, ruthless, beautiful. The Secretary-General shook his head.
“Fabulous city. Fabulous. Words can never do it justice. It has to be lived to be believed. You are lucky to have it in your country.”
The Secretary of State smiled.
“Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But you’re right; there is nothing like it. In some ways it is hardly America, but there’s no denying it’s the twentieth century.”
“Would you like a drink?” the Secretary-General asked. “I have some sherry, or something stronger.”
“Sherry will be fine,” the Secretary said. “I’ve got to cut down on this UN high life. I don’t see how you regulars stand it.”
“It took me a while to arrive at a happy compromise,” the S.-G. admitted with a smile. “The British left us a drinking tradition in Lagos, but it’s nothing like this.”
“Of course I suppose it has its purpose, as much as in Washington. A good deal of your business gets done at receptions, cocktail parties, and dinners, I’ve observed.”
“Even more than yours,” the Secretary-General said, “because of course in Washington you deal in the substance of power. You can really make things happen. Here we deal only in power’s shadow. We can only talk. We can’t make much of anything happen.”
“Sometimes the talk can be very important,” the Secretary said, staring into the amber depths of his glass. “World public opinion can be a powerful thing.”
“It can be as powerful as you let it be,” the Secretary-General said quietly. “That is something you in the United States sometimes forget. The decision on how powerful always rests with you, because if you desire you can always ignore it. Possibly you would prefer not to remember this, for it is perhaps easier not to accept the obligations remembering would impose upon you.”
“Surely you are not suggesting that we ignore world opinion! You don’t want us to have Hungaries, now, do you? Surely not as an African you don’t. Even less as Secretary-General.”
The Secretary-General stared across at the vast glowing peaks and canyons of Manhattan, the enormous buildings afire now with a million lights, and his eyes looked as far away as Lagos.
“No, of course not. But sometimes I wonder—I wonder if perhaps your reluctance to be tough doesn’t play directly into the hands of the Soviets who would destroy you—destroy me—destroy the UN.” He smiled ruefully. “Why did you seek me out?”
“Partly to get acquainted. Partly to assess whatever damage the President may have done in his press conference.”
“Ah, yes, the President. A great man, in his unpretentious way. But I know little about the reaction. My African colleagues for the most part no longer talk to me. I am relatively isolated in this position, which is exactly the way the Soviets want it.”
“But surely some of your friends talk to you still,” the Secretary objected. “Or, if not, your own appraisal is sufficient and well informed, I’m sure.”
The Secretary-General shrugged.
“Obviously the President’s remark was ill-advised and thoughtless, even though anyone with an ounce of sense and an iota of goodwill can perceive exactly what he meant. You understand, of course, that there are plenty of people in this house who possess a great deal of sense and not one speck of goodwill. His refusal to see the M’Bulu, while also understandable, was perhaps even more unfortunate. There I think possibly he was ill-advised.”
“He wasn’t advised at all,” the Secretary said bluntly. “I failed him, because I didn’t know that he had advanced the hour of his press conference. It was an understandable human error.”
“The world turns these days on understandable human errors to which understanding is refused,” the Secretary-General said. “It is the business of many here not to understand. No amount of explanation could erase now either the general impression left by the remarks or the decision not to see Terry. I am afraid the United States cannot ignore entirely the situation thus created.”
“But it’s such a stupid tempest in a teapot!” the Secretary exploded “Such utter silly nonsense. Particularly when you take into account that—that little—adventurer.”
The Secretary-General smiled, a sudden gleam of white teeth against black skin, and his eyes filled with a quizzical amusement.
“He is that. He is all of that. He is not a nice young man, the heir to Gorotoland. But marvelously popular in your country. Let us see—it is just past six.” And, crossing to an outsize television set, he turned it on and switched rapidly over the channels. On two of them Terrible Terry was already appearing, talking with slow earnestness on one, grinning and waving happily on the other. The Secretary-General snapped off the machine with a sardonic expression and returned to his chair. "It is a wonderful medium for the dissemination of information. I am sure Orrin Knox, or anyone else giving a true picture of the M’Bulu, would receive equal attention.”
The Secretary smiled.
“You just don’t understand our free society … You think, then, that we should now undertake the hopeless task of appeasing the unappeasable. That was the idea with which I came here, but I wanted confirmation.”
“Some gestures should be made, I think. They will not appease Terry, and he may not accept them, but at least you will have made them. It is important to give the Afro-Asian states the idea that you are humbling yourselves. They love that.”
“I take it you tell me that as an African,” the Secretary said dryly. The Secretary-General smiled.
“Sometimes I can understand the point of view. However, I tell you basically as Secretary-General, who wishes to do what he can to remove unnecessary frictions from the path of co-operation here. God knows there are enough necessary ones.”
“Yes. Well: the President is on his way to Michigan right now, so that part of it can’t be helped. But maybe we can fix up something else for his royal importance.”
“The Jasons are apparently going to do what they can to help in Charleston,” the Secretary-General observed. The Secretary of State snorted.
“That’s a great crew. I mean, something in Washington.”
“Good luck,” the Secretary-General said. “Will I be seeing you at the Turkish reception this evening?”
“No, I think I’m going back to Washington around eight. I’ll probably be back next week for the Assembly debate. I’ll see you then.”
“Call on me any time. I like to think I can be of some use to someone.”
“Oh, come now,” the Secretary said. “It isn’t that bad.”
“Almost,” the Secretary-General said. “Almost my friend.”
And that was symptomatic of the UN at this stage of its existence, the Secretary thought as he walked down the long corridor to the elevator, descended thirty-eight floors, and emerged from the Delegates’ Entrance to cross the furious homebound rush on First Avenue just before it funneled into F.D.R. Drive up the East River. A pervasive questioning filled the gleaming glass structure of the nations, “this house,” as so many of them called it. If only the performance equaled the potential—if only: that bitter, annoying, frustrating phrase. If only—the world’s troubles would be over.
Well, he thought as he entered U.S. delegation headquarters and returned to his office, not in his lifetime, probably, and probably not in the lifetime of anyone now living. Attack, struggle, and fall back; attack, struggle, and fall back. Maybe a little less back each time; that was the most one could hope for. He marveled at his own patience and thought again of the President’s comment on his changing attitude of late. He smiled. This was not like impatient Orrin Knox. Impatient Orrin Knox was learning, in the crucible of world events. Impatient Orrin Knox might really be a statesman, someday, if he kept at it long enough.
He paused for a moment to stare out his office window, his eyes traveling up the lighted Secretariat Building to the top floor, where he had just been. The private apartment was still illuminated and a tiny figure was still standing in the window staring out at fabulous Manhattan. Moved by some sentimental impulse, the Secretary raised his arm and waved, but there was no response, and indeed it was ridiculous to suppose that out of all that fantastic jumble of buildings the S.-G. should be looking at Orrin’s window. But he felt better for the gesture as he turned back to his desk, put through a call to Washington, and prepared to take the next step in his plans for easing the situation.
It was a lonely office the S.-G. had, he thought with a shiver. All the offices that bore men’s hopes were lonely—his own, he realized too, not least among them.
I shall see that gorgeous figure stalking down endless corridors in my dreams, Hal Fry thought as he emerged from the restricted delegates’ area into the Main Concourse of the UN, and there it was again. His first instinct was to let it go, but this was superseded instantly by duty, and he hurried forward, calling “Terry!” As the M’Bulu swung about with a pleased smile, the Senator became conscious of hurrying feet behind him, and he and the Indian Ambassador arrived together at their objective in the center of the echoing expanse of lobby, emptied now of its usual thronging tourists and occupied only by a small trickle of secretaries, clerks, and delegates going home.
“My two good friends!” the M’Bulu exclaimed. “Always together, a really genuine international friendship.”
“It wasn’t my intention,” Hal Fry said amicably, “but I heard the patter of little feet and there he was.”
“Oh, if I am not welcome, Hal—” Krishna Khaleel began, but the Senator from West Virginia waved him silent.
“Nonsense, I haven’t any secrets to hide. I just want to know what our young friend here is going to do to us as a result of the President’s rather undiplomatic—frankness.”
Terrible Terry smiled and made his hands-out, palms-up gesture with a graceful shrug.
“I am not doing anything to anyone. I am the one who is having things done to me. I am simply awaiting with interest to see—what next!”
“Mmm,” Hal Fry said. “Well, we hope there won’t be any ‘what next,’ at least of that kind. And, of course, he didn’t mean any personal disrespect to you. You know that.”
Again the M’Bulu shrugged and smiled.
“Who can say what is in the mind of another?”
The Senator from West Virginia snorted.
“Half the world, apparently, or so I hear around the corridors. The things they read into the President’s mind are quite something.”
“I regret he gave them the opportunity,” Terry said, and this time he did not smile. Hal Fry looked at him for a second, debating several tactics, and then chose, characteristically, the most direct.
“Who gave who the opportunity? I don’t recall that you were invited. As I remember it, you demanded to be asked. A self-invited guest need not necessarily expect the same cordial reception as one who is invited. Isn’t that right?”
“Oh, now, Hal,” the Indian Ambassador said, “I do not think we should get into a public argument right here in the lobby of the UN—”
“I’m not getting into an argument,” Senator Fry said reasonably, “and, anyway, it’s late. There’s hardly anybody around. Let him answer if he will. Or am I,” he said with a sudden amiable grin, “being entirely too Western and direct?”
The M’Bulu gave a merry laugh and shook his head.
“You are being very American—let us put it that way. And I, perhaps, was being too—civilized when I thought I could depend on the famed hospitality of your country. Apparently it is very selective. It does not extend to those whose skins are black.”
“That’s a lie, and you know it. From Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Toure right on up, African leaders have been entertained at the White House.”
“Then I do not see why I am unworthy,” Terry said harshly. “Am I any different than they are? How, tell me. How?”
“You do not represent an independent state,” Senator Fry said patiently. “That is how.”
“It seems to us a very precious distinction,” Krishna Khaleel said in a superior tone. “I must confess, Hal, it does seem splitting hairs.”
“I suppose,” the Senator said. “Or, at any rate, you’re all going to act as though you thought so if you think you can make a little propaganda from it.”
“Who is this ‘all’ who is going to do this?” the M’Bulu asked in bewilderment. “Who is conducting this sinister conspiracy against the great United States? Is she really so alone in the world? I am sorry for you, America!”
The Senator from West Virginia smiled.
“I know. I know. I am talking of shadows, and here at the UN everyone is calm and well-intentioned and kindly toward one another, nobody uses empty pretexts to attack anyone else, love and harmony fill the air, and we are all friends and companions in the great adventure of world peace. I salute you as you join our ranks, o noble son of Africa. May your days be long and your efforts fruitful. We shall look to you to lead us from the darkness into light.”
“Hal, Hal,” K.K. protested. “Now you are not being serious again. How is it possible to keep you to the serious point?”
“How fortunate,” the M’Bulu said with a quick irony, “that I do keep to it. What would you advise me, then, Senator? What should one who is—in the words of your President—‘a little character,’ do now? Should I cancel my visit to South Carolina? Should I give up my plans to visit Washington? Should I steal away silently, as suggested in effect by the United States, with no doubt the close concurrence of the United Kingdom, and be seen and heard no more? Do you think that would make the Afro-Asian states feel more kindly toward your country?”
“That is right, Hal,” Krishna Khaleel said solemnly. “You must think of the Asian-African states.”
“I think if I were you,” Hal Fry said as the M’Bulu disposed himself on one of the long, low benches where the tourists gather and looked out across the dark, swift-racing river to the giant neon Pepsi-Cola sign over Brooklyn, “that I would go to South Carolina as planned and go to Washington as planned. I’m sure you haven’t the slightest intention of abandoning either idea, and I suspect that in Washington it will be possible for you to see many people important to your cause. I haven’t talked to the Secretary since noon, but I think probably you will find that he is arranging opportunities for you to see members of the Congress, perhaps, and others with whom you might wish to confer. Possibly,” he said, hoping to goodness it was true, “he is arranging some suitable social event for you. I am quite sure that you will be made welcome in Washington.”
Terrible Terry gave him a long, thoughtful look and then smiled.
“By everyone save the one man who counts most. No,” he said, all amiability suddenly gone, “I do not think my colleagues from Africa are so mistaken in their reactions. I think their instincts tell them truly when, through me, they are being insulted. I think it will take some substantial amends in Washington to make up to them for this.”
“I believe you will have them,” Hal Fry said with a calculated indifference. “K.K., are you going back to the Waldorf?”
“No, thank you, Hal,” the Indian Ambassador said importantly. “Not yet. I wish to discuss some matters with His Highness, if you will excuse us now.”
The Senator from West Virginia shrugged.
“Surely. Will I see you at the Turkish reception?”
“I shall be there!” Terrible Terry said with a sudden happy eagerness. “I would not miss anything of this wonderful UN.”
“Keep smiling, K.K.,” Hal Fry said. And, recalling another conversation at the height of the Leffingwell controversy some months ago, he added dryly, “It won’t matter in a hundred years.”
But the Indian Ambassador preferred not to be amused. Instead, he looked offended.
“Possibly not, Hal. But it matters now. Most assuredly.”
And so, because of this damnable twentieth-century habit of inflaming everything out of all proportion, it did. The Senator from West Virginia was very conscious of the two of them talking behind him as he put on his coat and hat and walked along the great empty lobby toward the Public Entrance. This was typical of his days since becoming acting head of the delegation: a series of little talks and arguments, an endless attempt to do justice to the United States position and still be fair to others, the grinding burden of truth denied and falsehood enthroned that weighted down the UN. There were moments when this left him deeply depressed. If men knew the truth and yet persisted in denying it with a straight face, how were the nations ever to arrive at a stable world?
And yet one had to keep trying. The favorite cliché here in Turtle Bay was to say quickly, “Why, of course the UN will continue. It’s got to. There isn’t anything else.” Along with the cliché went the most candid cataloguing of all the handicaps that made its success most problematical. Oh, yes, they would say cheerfully, this is wrong and that is wrong, and this won’t work and that won’t work, the Russians hate the Americans and the Americans distrust the Russians, and the Jews won’t accept that and you know very well the Arabs won’t accept that, and the Africans are angry about that and the Asians about that and the Latin Americans think so-and-so and the Europeans think thus-and-such, and you know nothing can possibly be achieved there and nothing can be done there—but, It’s Got To. There Isn’t Anything Else.
He sighed, feeling suddenly extraordinarily tired and sapped of energy with an abruptness that startled him for a moment; perhaps he hadn’t rested long enough, though at Orrin’s insistence he had gone back to delegation headquarters and slept for half an hour or so. It was true that in the last couple of weeks something had seemed to be a little wrong with his health: nothing he could quite put his finger on, a fleeting moment of complete tiredness, such as he was experiencing now, gone almost as soon as it came; the little odd reddish flickering of vision, a sudden flash of white, that he had noticed a couple of times in the past few days; an odd little rash on one arm. Maybe he was working too hard, but if so he wasn’t about to admit it to anyone yet. The General Assembly was really just getting under way, and there was a great deal to be done to serve the American cause: his country, to use another cliché which was also valid, needed him. He had never shirked a public duty yet, and now in mid-fifties he wasn’t about to shirk this one, if he could get by with a little more rest and care for the abrupt, puzzling, but really quite slight deterioration in his physical condition. And besides, he told himself wryly, he was one of the cliché-repeaters, too. He too had acquired a deep devotion to the strange, troubled, gloomy-hopeful organization. Like everyone else, he too believed that. It’s Got To. There Isn’t Anything Else.
In the open space before the bronze doors given by Canada, he paused for a moment to glance at the incongruous but somehow fitting trio that guarded the gates: to his far right, off near the wall, the statue of naked Zeus, gift of Greece, with his old man’s head and his young man’s body with its half-erection; the model of the first Sputnik hanging insolently above the entryway; and high on the left the two-hundred-pound, gold-plated pendulum of the Netherlands on its seventy-five-foot stainless-steel wire, swinging slowly and inexorably back and forth as it crossed a metal ring below, endlessly demonstrating the rotation of the earth.
Zeus and Sputnik and the sure, impersonal turning of the globe: a fitting galaxy of Fates to preside over mankind’s latest joint endeavor.
“It is a privilege to live this day and tomorrow,” Queen Juliana had said in donating the pendulum; the words were inscribed on the steel pillar supporting the ring. Everyone who labored in the organization could certainly agree with that, Hal Fry reflected. Today and tomorrow—and stop there. Take them as they came—and stop there. No one cared, or dared, to look beyond.
He sighed as he emerged onto the plaza and the cool nip of the autumn night air hit him in the face. He must hurry over to the delegation and tell Orrin to get busy on the task of rolling out a substitute red carpet for an angry and vindictive M’Bulu who had no intention of being mollified by anything less than abject amends on the part of the United States. There had not been much attempt to conceal the injured spitefulness beneath the spurious outward amicability. He walked toward the roar of First Avenue and the glittering mass of Manhattan, hoping that the Secretary of State would already be at work doing those things that would have to be done to appease an injured ego, which, unappeased, could cause much damage.
And so, of course, Orrin was, being at that moment on the phone to Senator Munson in Washington, getting the Majority Leader’s acquiescence to a temporary delay in Senate adjournment and securing from him Dolly’s aid in giving a small private dinner party that might, hopefully, give the M’Bulu’s hurt feelings the comforting they wanted in Washington.
8
There appeared shortly thereafter on the little screen the visage, alert and intelligently terrierlike, of one of the nation’s top commentators. Smoothly and ably, as he did every night at this time except Saturdays and Sundays, he proceeded to put the whole thing in perspective for his faithful audience:
“It is already apparent tonight that the President of the United States has pulled something of an international boo-boo in his cavalier treatment of the young African leader known by the unusual title of the M’Bulu of Mbuele. Terence Wolowo Ajkaje, hereditary crown prince of British-held Gorotoland, perhaps expected a little too much when he confidently predicted here at the United Nations earlier today that he would receive the red-carpet welcome usually reserved for heads of states and major royalty in Washington. But he perhaps had the right to expect at least a modest version of it, and even this much the President seems determined to deny him. The President, in fact, has left the capital for a five-day fishing trip on the eve of the M’Bulu’s visit. Behind him he has left a United Nations abuzz with what many delegates, particularly those from Africa and Asia, seem determined to regard as a deliberate insult to the whole African continent.
“The rights and wrongs of this dispute are already buried beneath automatic layers of prejudice, East and West, that make it virtually impossible to get at the basic justice of it. Let it suffice to say that what the United Nations sees most clearly is that a symbol of emergent Africa, a Western-educated leader who might be expected to bring his people into the democratic camp, has been publicly, and it would seem deliberately, snubbed by the President of the West’s greatest democracy. This cannot help but have serious consequences here in several areas not directly connected with the immediate event.
“There is, for instance, the resolution introduced by the Ambassador of Panama, Felix Labaiya-Sofra, which would bring strong United Nations recommendation that independence be granted to Gorotoland immediately instead of at the end of the one-year period now promised by Britain. Señor Labaiya and the M’Bulu won the first stage of that battle in the United Nations First, or Political, Committee this afternoon by a vote of 51 to 23. Now the argument moves to the Assembly. The United States voted with Britain in First Committee today, but there were strong indications that this unity of Western viewpoint may not hold in the Assembly. The Soviet Union, of course, voted for the Panamanian resolution and thereby again gave dramatic proof to the African-Asian states that she favors their cause and desires a speedy and complete break with all vestiges of the colonial past. If the United States should vote against Britain in later stages of the debate on Ambassador Labaiya’s resolution, it would indicate that this country, too, has decided to step up its attempts to compete more directly in the sweepstakes for Africa’s friendship.
“Against this background, the President’s snub to the M’Bulu seems doubly puzzling to observers here at the United Nations. For those observers interested in domestic politics, there is an added factor that intrigues them. One thing the M’Bulu will definitely do is attend a private luncheon in his honor to be held tomorrow in Charleston, South Carolina, under the auspices of the Jason Foundation. The Jason Foundation, of course, is one of the family foundations of Edward Jason, Governor of California, who may well seek the Presidential nomination of the President’s party next year if the President follows through on his announced intention not to seek re-election. And another director of the Foundation, of course, is the Governor’s sister Patsy, who is the wife of Ambassador Labaiya, author of the Gorotoland resolution. Thus are domestic and international politics dramatically linked in this argument at the United Nations, to which the President has now, by his snub to one of the most intelligent, most worthwhile, and most hopeful young figures out of Africa, added the fuel of personal controversy.”
And now, Patsy Labaiya told herself with a pleased anticipation as she snapped off a further comment on Japan’s latest atomic tests, I shall see if I can’t add a little more to that personal controversy. The phone rang twice at a handsome home just off Sixteenth Street near the Woodner and a soft and slightly sulky voice answered, “This is the Hamilton’s’ residence.”
“Is this Sue-Dan—Mrs. Hamilton?” Patsy asked, adding hurriedly, “This is Patsy Labaiya, Sue-Dan. I believe we met at the Pakistan Embassy last month, didn’t we?”
“Yes, we did,” the voice said, somewhat less sulky and more cordial. “How are you, Mrs. Labaiya?”
“Patsy. Why, I’m fine, thank you, just fine. And how are you and the Congressman these days?”
“Oh, we’re fine, too.”
“Well, that’s good.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t ma’am me,” Patsy said in an annoyed tone. “I hate that. Particularly from someone in your—your position.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Sue-Dan evenly. There was a silence and then, impersonally, “How is everything with you and the Ambassador?”
“Oh, we’re fine, too, thank you,” Patsy said, beginning to feel a little on edge about this and rather sorry she had called in the first place. After all, she didn’t have to take this kind of insolence. Jasons usually didn’t. But she filled her voice with a cordiality that fooled her listener not at all and pursued her objective.
“I was wondering, Sue-Dan, if you could help me persuade that distinguished husband of yours—distinguished and handsome, I might say—”
“Lots of ladies seem to think so,” Sue-Dan observed politely. Patsy flushed and, in spite of her best intentions, found it impossible not to retaliate.
“I’m sure you’re pleased,” she said smoothly. “Well, as I was saying, I wonder if you could help me persuade him that he really should come down to Charleston tomorrow and be one of our head-table guests at the luncheon in honor of Terence Ajkaje—you know, from Gorotoland. The M’Bulu of Mbuele.”
“I know Terry.”
“Oh? Then why don’t you come, too? I think it would be very nice to have you there with him.”
“I usually leave most of that official business to Cullee. Anyway, I doubt if he would like me to come along to see Terry. He doesn’t approve of Terry.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Patsy said, and she genuinely was, for it complicated several plans. “I hope, though, that this wouldn’t prevent him from doing honor to a fellow—er—a fellow—”
“Nigger?” Sue-Dan said blandly, and was pleased to hear a gasp at the other end. “I really wouldn’t know. I expect Cullee just doesn’t like him.”
“But, surely,” Patsy said, trying not to sound flustered, “in his capacity as a distinguished visitor to this country—”
“I wouldn’t know about that, really. Cullee doesn’t pay much attention to frills when he likes somebody or doesn’t. And I do know he doesn’t think too much of Terry. So I couldn’t say.”
“Well, will you tell him I called?”
“Oh, sure, I’ll tell him.”
“Will you tell him what I wanted, and that I may call again later, when he’s home? I suppose you do expect him home from the Hill soon?”
“Yes, ma’am. He’ll be here, and I’ll tell him.”
“And look, Sue-Dan,” Patsy said rather desperately, “why don’t you and I have lunch together some day soon? I feel I should know you better. I think we would have a lot to talk about.”
“Where?”
“Why—er—why, I don’t know. How about the City Tavern?”
“Would they take me?”
“I should think they would if I said so.”
“Mmm-hmm. Well, no, thank you, ma’am. Unless you’d like to join me at something like some Hot Shoppe somewhere.”
Damn her, anyway, Patsy thought furiously; she knows perfectly well we’ve got to have Cullee’s support in California.
“Look, Sue-Dan,” she said pleasantly, “I don’t really think either one of us is going to gain anything by playing games with the other, now, are we? It’s important to me to know you better. It is not entirely unimportant, I might point out, for you and your husband to know me better, considering his plans and my brother’s plans for next year. I would like to take you to lunch. Next Tuesday. At twelve-thirty. I shall pick you up at your house. All right?”
“Why, yes,” Sue-Dan said agreeably. “I expect that would be all right.”
“Thank you, Sue-Dan.”
“Thank you … Patsy.”
And, with a wicked little laugh that came clearly over the wire, she hung up. Patsy turned away in genuine irritation. They were all alike, all alike. She told herself sternly, however, that she must get over that thought and calm herself down to call Cullee back later, because Cullee wasn’t one of those who was “all alike.” Cullee was quality and a very important man to the Jason family. But she pitied him his wife. How on earth did he stand it?
In this thought, she would have been interested to know, she was not alone; for now as he ran hastily through the accumulation of letters to be signed that his secretary had put before him, affixing his flowing signature carefully to each, the young Congressman from California was unhappily thinking much the same thing. His mind, temporarily diverted from the subject by his visit to the Senate and his uncomfortable chat with Ray Smith, had returned to it again as soon as he started back down the long corridor to the House.
Nothing he had found in that chamber had done much to divert him again. The House, operating as usual under the five-minute rule, was hearing a long parade of short speeches on a bill to tighten minor provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act. The bill was not going to pass—everybody knew it—and so both proponents and opponents were just going through the motions while they waited for the customarily laggard Senate to wind up its business so that both houses could adjourn for the year and go home. Cullee dutifully presented his five minutes of opposition and then for a while sat toward the back of the room; the House at work on a dull bill, he had found, was the best place in the world in which to concentrate free from distraction. Late in the afternoon the Speaker came by, took the seat beside him, and chatted for a few minutes about life in general and next year in particular.
“You going to run against Ray Smith?” he asked, and Cullee, who felt obligated in many ways to the powerful old man who had befriended him and encouraged his career from the first, answered with complete honesty, “I don’t know at the moment, Mr. Speaker, but I’m leaning.”
“Toward or away from?” the Speaker asked, and Cullee smiled.
“Depends on which wind happens to be blowing. Mostly toward, I guess.”
“You’ve got powerful support in ‘the other body,’” the Speaker said, using the term with which House members are accustomed to refer formally to the Senate. “Bet you’d be surprised to know who it is.”
“Victor Ennis?” Cullee asked, thinking possibly California’s senior Senator had abandoned his increasingly uneasy neutrality to take the plunge, but prepared to be surprised if it were for him.
“Guess again,” the Speaker said with a chuckle. “No, sir, you’ve got powerful support from the South, my boy. A certain very distinguished southern Senator.”
The memory of his polite exchange of nods with the President Pro Tempore of the Senate flashed across Cullee’s mind. He began to laugh.
“Don’t tell me Seab Cooley—” he said, and the Speaker chuckled again.
“Yes, sir, you should have heard him. They tell me he had poor old Ray Smith backed right against the wall and admitting in public that you were fully equipped to be United States Senator. Practically had him urging the people of California to vote for you, way I heard tell.”
“That I should like to have heard. Poor Ray! He does have his troubles, and I guess I’m no help to them.”
“Why should you be?” the Speaker asked in some surprise. “This isn’t any charity ward. It’s politics.”
“I know, but—” the Congressman began. The Speaker stopped him with a fatherly squeeze of his knee.
“You run. You owe it to the country and to California. Don’t like to get maudlin about these things, but you also owe it to your people. Think it over,” he admonished as he rose to go back to the Chair for the vote on the Taft-Hartley amendments. “Think it over, hear?”
And while the few remaining five-minute speeches were delivered, and then through the lopsided roll call, Cullee found that he was thinking it over, for this was a diversion important enough to take him away from the thought of Sue-Dan—though, of course, it inevitably led back to her, for she was gaining support all the time, and he was losing, in their running argument about what he should do. About all he needed now was for LeGage to call and put the pressure on him, and he would really be in a mood to blow up and tell them all to go to hell. He was not at all amused ten minutes later when this turned out to be mental telepathy and a page boy came up to tell him he was wanted on the phone in the cloakroom. “A Mr. Shelby,” the boy said, and was quite startled by the Congressman’s expression and the tone in which he said, “Oh, for—all right, I’ll take it!”
“Cullee, boy!” ’Gage’s voice came cheerily over the line in one of the private booths. “How’s the great statesman in our next-to-most-deliberative body?”
“I’m fine,” Cullee said, without giving much. “How’s our greatest civil rightser?”
“Always busy,” LeGage said, not so cheerily. “Think you’ve got ’em stopped coming in the doors and they come in the windows. Looks now as though something’s going to pop in South Carolina.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Justice Tommy Davis has just handed down an order upholding our appeal in the Charleston case. They’re ordered to integrate immediately.”
“Well, you’ll be down there tomorrow,” Cullee said in a mocking tone. “You can wrap all that up in no time.”
“I don’t know about that,” LeGage said thoughtfully. “DEFY’ll have some pickets out, but South Carolina’s a tough one. They’re really mean down there.”
“Check with Seab Cooley. He’s a friend of mine.”
“What?”
“Sorry. Confidential Congress business. Look, ’Gage. I’ve got to get back to the floor in a minute. We’ve got an important vote coming up—”
“Oh, damn it, you always use that ‘got to get back to the floor’ routine on me. Why don’t you ever be nice to me, Cullee? I’m a friend of yours.”
“Yes, boy, I know. We slept together all through college. In the same room, that is.”
“Well, damn it, you always hold me off, when we know each other a lot better than anybody else knows us. We need each other, Cullee. We’re both fighting for the same thing.”
“Different ways.”
“All right, Mr. High and Mighty. So you’re a Congressman and I’m head of DEFY. Who’s bigger?”
“Want to test it out against me in California next year? Maybe you can lick me.”
“Oh, damn it, I don’t want to lick you. I want you where you are, doing the job you’re doing. Or even a better one.”
“Sure. Now you tell me to run for the Senate. That’ll really kill it.”
“Cullee,” LeGage said patiently, and the Congressman could tell he was close to that point of emotionally frayed nerves to which he could so easily drive him, “please lay off me? I didn’t call to get in a fight. I called because Felix Labaiya asked me to. He thinks you ought to be down there in Charleston tomorrow at that luncheon for Terry.”
“You agree with him?”
“I suppose I’d better say no, so you’ll do it.”
“Well, I don’t care whether you do or not, really. But I’m not going.”
“Why not?”
“Because I just don’t like to be patronized by the Jasons, for one thing. Ted just sees one thing when he looks at me, and you too, and that’s the Colored Vote. Furthermore, Terry doesn’t mean any good for this country, and I don’t want to be part of whatever he may have in mind, even if you do. Also, I’ve seen him on his home grounds and he isn’t much. Why, hell! All this white sentimentalizing over that little two-bit belly bumper from the bush. He isn’t worth that.”
“He isn’t little,” LeGage objected mildly. “He’s six-foot-seven.”
“I’m talking about inside, not outside,” the Congressman snapped. “Why, hell! I’ll bet he’s all over television right this minute. Yes, Your Highness. No, Your Highness. Tell us poor ignorant white folks about all you noble black fighters for freedom in Africa, Your Highness. Crap all over the United States, Your Highness. We love it, Your Highness. It’s how we prove we’re a great-enlightened nation, Your Highness. Acchhkk. They make me sick!”
“What’s the matter, boy?” LeGage asked with a sarcasm he knew would infuriate but could never resist when Cullee got in this mood. “He try to run off with your wife?”
“And leave my wife out of it,” the Congressman said ominously. “Good-by.”
“Cullee. Please, Cullee, don’t hang up ye—oh, God damn it.”
And that’s the way it always was with ’Gage, Cullee thought bitterly as he went back into the chamber; why in the hell doesn’t he leave me alone? They had been on each other’s nerves from the day they met, they had never stopped being on each other’s nerves one minute since, and they would always have this tension between them if they lived to be a hundred. “I think you and I are too much alike,” he had told his clever, driving roommate after one of the earliest of their many furious arguments in the room at Howard; “maybe I’d best move out.” But ’Gage, instantly contrite, had begged him not to—“We’ve got to stick together, boy. Who else is there for us to talk to?”—and some combination of like, dislike, affection, annoyance, love, hate, whatever, had kept them together, bickering through their school years and bickering still. It was true that they did know each other better than anyone else did, and that included ’Gage’s placidly limited wife and the hellcat he himself happened to have drawn in the Lord’s sardonic lottery. When things got unhappiest for him, he could always think—and it was genuinely comforting, he would admit— Well, I’ll bet ’Gage knows how I feel; and he was sure ’Gage did, and that ’Gage often thought the same about him, although they rarely came even as close to touching on it as ’Gage had done just now. It was a curious and apparently unbreakable relationship, whose possible implications they had finally faced one time in senior year in a completely candid discussion that certainly didn’t change matters any. “Well, it’s obvious neither of us is a woman,” Cullee had said, “but I guess we can’t live with each other or without each other.” “You make me awful mad sometimes,” ’Gage had agreed, “but I expect if I was ever really—really—in trouble, I’d come to you.” “Me, too,” Cullee said, and they had shaken hands very solemnly, at twenty-one. Then divergent paths to the same objectives had brought increasing criticism, increasing nagging, growing uneasiness and sharpness between them, inflamed and embittered the tensions of their youth, made their friendship ever harder to live with, or without. Damn it all, why did he have to be such an annoying bastard?
On the House floor he found only a handful of members remaining for the final speeches of the day, the “special orders” without time limitation after regular House business is done, in which those who desire can present their arguments about this, their exhortations about that, rarely listened to by their colleagues but, once in the Record, available to be sent out under frank to presumably interested constituents. He left the floor; dropped by the Speaker’s office for fifteen minutes of what that gentleman referred to as “the usual libation,” a little late-afternoon ceremony that he reserved for the more powerful chairmen and his special favorites among the younger members; and then went on to his own office in the Old House Office Building, cleaned up the mail, and dismissed his staff. He called home to say he was coming; got the maid, Maudie, who informed him when he asked for Sue-Dan that “she’s resting and can’t be disturbed”; and closed the huge mahogany door to his office with a crash so vigorous that a policeman at the guard desk far down the corridor looked up startled from his copy of the Evening Star. He waved, the cop waved back, and then he took the elevator to the basement, got his Lincoln Continental out of the garage, and drove off through the heavy traffic of homebound Washington, negotiating automatically and hardly conscious of the crush of cars around him all the way through town and up Sixteenth Street.
Arrived home, he went on into the house, again punctuating his mood with the door from the carport. The sound brought Maudie immediately to the living room. She was a woman of sixty who reminded him a good deal of his mother, and she always treated him as though she were.
“A mighty big noise from a big man,” she said, pausing to plump the pillows on the sofa. “Suppose the world’s ending, maybe, or something?”
“It may be,” he said darkly. “Could just be, old Maudie.”
“Not likely tonight,” she said. “Not likely tonight. Let me take that hat and coat and get you a drink.”
“Thanks,” he said, tossing the garments to her. “The usual.”
“Martinis made by the devil,” she observed disapprovingly, “but if you want one, I expect I have to make it.”
“Expect so, Maudie,” he said, more cheerfully, “seeing as how you’re a devil.”
“You get along, now. Don’t see you growing any angel wings, Mr. Congressman.” Her voice underwent the subtle change it always did when she referred to the lady of the house. “Shall I mix one for her, too?”
He shrugged.
“I don’t know. Is she up? Ask her.”
“Oh, she’s not up,” Maudie said. “You wouldn’t think she’d be up and waiting for her husband after his day at the office, would you? That not the girl you married.”
“Okay, if you know so much about it, old woman, maybe she just likes to wait for me in bed. How about that?”
“You needn’t be flaunting it,” Maudie said tartly. “Even suppose it’s true. Which,” she added, “I don’t.”
“All right,” he said, suddenly sterner, “get along out, now, and mix those drinks. I’ll take it up to her. Then,” he added wickedly, “maybe you can put off dinner an hour, Maudie, and think about it, down here in the kitchen.”
“Hmph,” she said. “Little boy like to talk about getting the moon, but once he got it, what he got? Just plain old cheese. Not gold and silver at all, just plain old cheese.”
“All right, get along, I said!” he repeated sharply. “And hurry it up!”
“I’m gettin’,” she said grumpily. “Don’t rush me.”
So much for that, he thought angrily as he went to the television set and snapped it on. So much for God damn that. Little boy will get the moon and see what it’s made of. But even as the screen began to light up and there appeared upon it exactly the bland and happy face he expected to see, he knew the answer. Maudie’s answer. Just plain old cheese.
“Of course,” the M’Bulu was remarking in a film clip taken out on the concrete expanse of the plaza with the Secretariat Building looming most impressively behind him, “I am sure the United States does not wish to be in the position of being discourteous or inconsiderate to Africa. But—” he shrugged and gave his charming gesture and smile. “But—”
“Then you think, Your Highness,” the network correspondent asked eagerly, “that the President definitely should have canceled his trip to Michigan to remain in Washington and entertain you?”
“Oh, I would not want to disturb the President’s plans,” Terrible Terry said politely. “He knows what is best for his own health. And, I assume, for his country. But—” And again the charming shrug and smile.
“Then you do think he should have stayed?”
The M’Bulu laughed.
“Now you are attempting to get me to be critical of the President.”
“Oh, no,” the network correspondent objected, but Terry went on.
“I think the President is a great man. I am sure that if he decided to insult Africa, he had reasons for it. And I am sure they make sense to him. Even if,” he added wistfully, “they leave all of us in Africa somewhat puzzled.”
“You would say that the United States, then, has definitely lost ground in Africa as a result of the President’s snub?”
Again the M’Bulu shrugged and smiled.
“I would not want to pass judgment, but—well, yes, I think the United States definitely will have to regain some lost ground. If, of course, the United States cares what we in Africa think. Sometimes we are not so sure.”
Cullee made a disgusted sound and snapped off the set as Maudie returned with the drinks.
“A great man, Maudie. He’s going to tell the United States what to do. I think maybe he’s also going to lead us poor black folks out of slavery, if he has the time.”
“Pfoof,” she said. “’T’s all I can say. Pfoof! Here’s your drinks.”
“Thank you,” he said, starting up the stairs. As he did so, she laughed suddenly. “Bet she’s still listening to him. What do you bet?”
“You know I’d lose, Maudie. Don’t hurry dinner.”
“You going to be mighty embarrassed when you find you have forty-five minutes to kill,” she called, but he didn’t deign an answer.
Nor, he thought as he kicked open the bedroom door and went in carrying the tray, was there any particular answer to make. Most of the older women of his race had an instinct for going straight to the jugular, particularly in matters involving life, death, love, and other fundamentals. Maudie had sensed it out, all right, though she had never before voiced it so frankly. By the same token, maybe she had made him face it more honestly than he had up to now. The thought did not give him a pleasant expression as he came into the room, and the shrewd little fox-face that greeted him from among the pillows and lacy things of the bed threw it back to him without an instant’s hesitation. Of course the bedroom television set was blaring too, and of course Terry was still on it, though on another channel. He put the drinks on the night table, went over to the machine, and snapped it off with a vicious twist of his fingers. Sue-Dan promptly switched it back on again with the remote-control mechanism beside the bed.
“Leave it off!” he demanded, and after a long look and a moment sufficiently prolonged to tease him she complied with a little chuckle.
“What’s the matter? You don’t want to hear your old friend Terry?”
“No.”
“Big man. Real famous now. Better look him up, Cullee. It might help your career.”
“How’s that?” he demanded, going to the closet and taking off his coat and tie, tossing his shirt on a chair, putting his glasses carefully on the bureau, coming back to sit on the edge of the bed as he unlaced his shoes. “What’s he got to do with my career?”
“Patsy Labaiya called a while ago. She thinks you ought to go to Charleston for that luncheon.”
“LeGage Shelby called a while ago,” he said in a voice that mimicked her own sarcastic tones. “He thinks I ought to go to Charleston for that luncheon.”
She laughed.
“Cullee’s other wife. You can say no to Patsy, but sure enough you aren’t going to say no to ’Gage. Now, are you?”
“Yes,” he said levelly, “I did say no to him.”
“And had another fight.”
“And had another fight.”
“Could be the Jasons could help you when you run for Senator next year,” she observed dreamily, nestling down in the pillows with a luxuriant air.
“If I run for Senator,” he corrected, slipping out of his trousers and draping them over the chair with his shirt.
“Oh,” she said, as he sat again on the edge of the bed. “I expect you will.”
‘The Speaker thinks I should,” he admitted, and for the first time since he had entered the room Sue-Dan looked genuinely pleased.
“Good for him. He’s got some sense, that old man.”
“He’s got plenty of sense,” Cullee said, starting to strip off his undershirt. He was conscious of an immediate tensing alongside.
“What you got in mind, Cullee?” she asked sharply. He gave a sarcastic laugh.
“I just like to get undressed and run around naked. Isn’t that what you been thinking right along? Surely, now, you haven’t been thinking anything else, little Sue-Dan.”
Her eyes looked enormous, though not, he thought bitterly, from any fear or anticipation of him. She played this game all the time.
“I’m tired.”
“I’m tired,” he mimicked. “So am I tired. But I’m not tired right here. See that, Sue-Dan? Terry isn’t the only big man. You got a big man, too.”
“Why can’t you ever leave me alone?” she demanded angrily, starting to roll out the other side of the bed; but he reached an arm across and pinned her down with one enormous hand as he reached down with the other, ripped off his shorts, and dropped them on the floor.
“I’ve got to show you who Cullee’s wife really is,” he said huskily, stripping back the blankets and clambering over her. “I think maybe you forgot since the last time.”
“I haven’t forgotten anything,” she said through her teeth, struggling fiercely under him.
“Then stop it,” he said angrily, his face an inch from hers, his powerfully muscled athlete’s body slowly and inexorably crushing down upon her. “Just stop it. God damn it, do you mean I have to rape my own wife?”
Suddenly her struggles ceased as quickly as they had begun, her arms went around him, the world became a place of wild confusion, until at last they cried out together in hoarse, incoherent exclamation and a quietness descended.
“Now get off me,” she whispered abruptly with a harshness that broke the mood at once. “Just get off me, big man. You’ve proved it, whatever it was you wanted to prove. Get off me.”
“You just can’t help but be good, even when you hate me, can you, Sue-Dan?” he said with an equally harsh sarcasm as he started to comply. “You’re just a natural-born lay, Mrs. Congressman Hamilton.”
“Better not let anybody else find it out,” she said shrewishly, and he swung back one huge hand, caught her wrist, and again pinned her down helpless on the bed, leaning over so close his face was again an inch from hers.
“Better not you ever let anybody else find it out,” he whispered with a menace that he was pleased to note made her look genuinely terrified. “Or I not promise what I do to you, little Sue-Dan.”
And as abruptly as he had pinned her down he released her, stood up, stretched, and went into the bathroom. She remained motionless where she was, not stirring until the phone rang as he came out, toweling vigorously and starting toward his drink. She lifted the receiver and, in a tone as casual as though she had been mending socks, asked who it was. Then with an expression of surprise she said respectfully, “Yes, Mr. Secretary, just a minute. Here he is.”
The car radio was on as they swung out of Forty-eighth Street onto Massachusetts Avenue in Spring Valley and started the run across town to the Sheraton-Park on Sixteenth Street, and once again much was being said about the troubles of the M’Bulu. By this time, the Secretary of State noted, the public was being given the general impression that the President had told the Savior He couldn’t walk on the water. Apparently the Secretary’s companion had the same reaction to the broadcast, for he gave a slow chuckle and shifted a little in his seat.
“Orrin,” he said, “what in the world—what—in—the—world—did Harley do to that young man? Must have been something terrible, Orrin. I can’t remember things getting so stirred up since you and I did all those awful things to Mr. Robert—A.—Leffingwell. Can you, Orrin?”
“Well, it’s all very unfortunate,” the Secretary said as he drove briskly down nearly deserted Mass. Avenue. “I missed giving Harley the pitch by half an hour, and consequently the sky has fallen in. Or, at any rate, all our eager friends, allies, and enemies would like to have us think so. It’s amazing how unanimous they can get when it’s a case of embarrassing the United States.”
Senator Cooley chuckled.
“Seems to me like you’re getting a mite prickly in your new job, Orrin. Think of what a gray world it would be for them if we weren’t around to embarrass.”
“It’s so damned childish, that’s what gets me. Grown men and grown nations—because many of them are grown that do it; it isn’t always the babies who might possibly be excused on the ground they don’t know any better—yapping at our heels on the slightest pretext they can find. Listen to that: ‘British reaction tonight is harshly critical of the President—’”
“Maybe there comes a time in the life of a nation,” Seab Cooley said, “when you haven’t got much more to do but react. Maybe you get hypersensitive and waspish just because you’re sick and sad inside that nobody any more cares enough to react to you like that. Could be a lesson for us someday, too, you know, Orrin.”
“‘Far-called our navies melt away,’” the Secretary quoted with an ironic note. ‘“On dune and headland sinks the fire …’ Yes, I suppose so, Seab. But not yet awhile. Not yet awhile, God willing and God grant us strength. We have an awful lot to do before we reach that point, I do believe. And so do they believe, all of them, when you come right down to it. Just suppose there were no United States to bulwark the world? Where would all the yappers be then?”
“Ground up and sold for hamburger at Moscow Meat Factory No. 1,” Senator Cooley said with a dry chuckle. “Yes, sir, ground up and sold for hamburger at Moscow Meat Factory No. 1.”
“Exactly,” the Secretary of State agreed as they swung around Ward Circle past American University and continued the long plunge down Massachusetts Avenue toward the center of town. “That’s why I sometimes find it a little hard to be as dutifully polite as I’m suppose to be in this job.”
“Kind of hard for Orrin Knox to hold it in, isn’t it?” The pugnacious old face looked solemn, but there was a puckish gleam in the eyes. “Good, for you, Orrin! Good for you!”
“So Beth tells me. She tells me I may be a great man someday if I can just stand the discipline of it.”
“Very kind woman, Beth,” the Senator from South Carolina said. “Very kind of you both to invite me to dinner tonight.”
“Oh, I had a motive,” Orrin said cheerfully. “Aside from always being glad to see you, of course, which we both are. I want your help in dealing with the M’Bulu, Seab. I’m really taking him rather seriously. I have to, now.”
“What do you think would happen, Orrin, if sometime the United States just refused to take some over-inflated episode seriously? If the United States just said, ‘Now, you all just run along and stop bothering us. We just never heard about it, so you all just run along.’ Would the world really come to an end, Orrin? Or would they respect us the more for being strong enough to do it?”
“Yes, that’s all very fine, Seab,” the Secretary said as he turned left on Idaho Avenue to Woodley Road and then turned right toward Connecticut Avenue, “but it isn’t very practical in the nervous situation the world has got itself into. You’ve no idea the way they go twittering around that UN aviary up there like a flock of sparrows in a high wind. And if you happen to believe in it then you have to take it into account. You can’t just dismiss it cavalierly. We’re committed to it, and that automatically means that everybody from the biggest power to the littlest can put his oar into what we do. So—we have the M’Bulu. And the M’Bulu, as you gather, is making the most of it.”
“Mmmm. That’s why you’re going to see young Cullee.”
“Yes. I think he can help. You could, too, Seab, if you would.”
“How’s that?”
“Just by keeping quiet. Just by not inflaming the situation any more than necessary.”
“If you mean be kind to Ray Smith—” Seab began with a humorous air. Orrin snorted.
“Ray’s a fool. I hope Cullee runs and beats him. No, have your fun with Ray, if you want to. But tomorrow, for instance—do what you can to keep this luncheon from boiling over into something unpleasant in Charleston.”
“I haven’t been invited. You know that, Orrin. Wouldn’t invite the Senators from South Carolina. Might put the curse of respectability on it. The Jasons can’t have that.”
“Respectability in South Carolina, you must remember, Seab. Other places your presence might not be considered respectable.”
“I might just go, you know, Orrin,” Senator Cooley said gently. “I just might, now.”
“That’s exactly what I mean, Seab. That’s exactly the sort of thing. Please don’t. It’s too important to play games with.”
“I’m not playing games, Orrin. I’m protecting my state.”
“And the political future of Seab Cooley,” the Secretary said. His companion chuckled.
“Looks to me like the political future of Orrin Knox is involved, too. Ted Jason’s going to get a mighty lot of mileage out of this with the colored folks, Orrin.”
“Well,” the Secretary said bluntly, “that may be. But we’ve got to hope it will be as orderly as possible and that they’ll get out of there without some sort of incident or other. That’s where you can be of assistance, Seab. Just help keep the noise down to a minimum, okay?”
“Least I can do, if I don’t go, is issue a statement, Orrin. You know I’ve got to do at least that much, now.”
“All right, issue your statement. But tell your friends not to start any funny business.”
“It isn’t always my friends who start the funny business, Orrin. We have elements that aren’t so well mannered about these things. Can’t say they’re my friends, though. Necessarily.”
“They vote for you. They’ll listen to you. I’m asking your help, Seab. Please.”
“What are you going to do for him when he gets to Washington, Orrin?”
“I said please, Seab.”
The senior Senator from South Carolina smiled.
“Now, Orrin, you know perfectly well I’m not going to give you any answer to that. I’m just going to keep you guessing. I’m a vicious, evil old man, Orrin. Everybody knows that. But I’ll say this: Within the necessary limits of what I have to do to protect myself politically, Orrin, I won’t stir things up for you. I’ll help you with your kinky-haired kinkajou.”
The Secretary laughed as they turned right off Cathedral Avenue onto Connecticut and headed down toward the rambling, comfortable old Sheraton-Park Hotel, where Seab had his apartment.
“The first thing you can do is stop repeating that phrase. You had your fun with it this afternoon, and that annoyed the Africans enough. Don’t use it again. What do you think of Cullee?” he asked abruptly. His companion shrugged.
“For an educated colored man, I think he does very well. He seems to be a well-mannered fellow. I haven’t any argument with him.”
“Lucky Cullee,” Orrin Knox remarked. Seab chuckled as they swung under the portico.
“Lucky Seab, maybe. Don’t ever quote me, though, Orrin. I’d deny it, Orrin, so don’t ever quote me. Seriously,” he said as the Secretary eased the car to a stop, “I think he’s a good boy, Orrin. Got more sense in him than they usually have. I wish him well, Orrin. You can tell him I said so, Orrin. Just say: ‘Seab Cooley said to say he wishes you well.’” He chuckled. “That’ll puzzle him, Orrin. That’ll give him something to think about.” He held out his hand and shook Orrin’s firmly as the doorman leaped to open the door. “Thank you again for the pleasant dinner. Getting to an age where I appreciate small kindnesses, Orrin. Seventy-six.” For a second the Secretary thought he was about to be party to a rare moment of pathos with the senior Senator from South Carolina. But he might have known. “And not dead yet,” Seab Cooley said with pugnacious satisfaction. “Not dead yet and not about to be, Orrin! Not about to be! Good night, now. And good luck with your kinky-haired kinkajou.”
“Thank you, Seab,” the Secretary said. “I’m counting on you. Take care of yourself.”
But whether he could count on a Seab hard pressed and “running scared,” he thought as he swung the car down the curving drive and back to Connecticut for the Klingle Road-Piney Branch connection through Rock Creek Park to Sixteenth Street, he was not at all sure. The drive from Silver Spring had taken nearly twenty minutes, and he wondered if it had accomplished so much after all. Now more news was on the radio, reiterating his problem. He switched swiftly to music and sighed as he heard a time-check. Almost 10 p.m. Quite an hour to come calling on Cullee, but he hadn’t landed from New York until almost eight, and then it had taken some time to get home and have dinner, and he hadn’t wanted to rush Seab. Like everyone in Washington, he still had great respect for Seab’s abilities to cause trouble, seventy-six or no.
Curious, though, he reflected as he passed the Woodner on Sixteenth and prepared to swing off a block to the street where the Hamiltons lived, that little message to the Congressman. Curious the whole white-black relationship in the South, that compound of love, hate, tolerance, and intolerance, understanding and misunderstanding, laughter and anger, that he as a Northerner could never fully comprehend. Black-white did not mix so well in his native Illinois, particularly in Chicago, where the proud pretensions of the North went down the drain in the ugly frictions that never eased and often flared. And as for Harlem, that black ghetto existing side by side with all the airy, patronizing pretenses of the white New York cultural world—the South, he thought, need not bow its head too low. The city of its chief critics was no sweet-smelling rose on the face of the earth, that was sure, “fabulous” though it might appear to the Secretary-General and anyone else with an ounce of romance in his soul. A great crawling abyss lay just below the surface of the romance, and it would be a long time, if ever, before New York could say truthfully that its own reality was such as to justify the superior, arrogant intolerance so many of its more publicized residents unfailingly displayed toward other people’s shortcomings.
He parked his car in the neat neighborhood—what did the houses run here, he wondered, $25,000, $35,000, $40,000? He estimated that the one before him with its broad lawn and neatly kept shrubs and gardens must be well over $30,000. The door was opened as he started up the walk. Cullee greeted him dressed in razor-pressed navy-blue slacks, white tie and shirt, a loose gray cashmere sweater—a combination of neat informality exactly right for the occasion, Orrin thought as he extended his hand.
“Cullee,” he said cordially, “you are very kind to see me at this hour, and I appreciate it.”
“Not at all, Senator,” the Congressman said, using the old title Orrin had borne so long and still liked to hear. “I’m honored that you would come here to me … I’ll have to apologize for my wife,” he said as he led his guest into the warmly furnished living room and gestured to a chair. “She had a headache and went to bed early.”
“Just as well I didn’t bring Beth, then. I was going to, and she said no woman wanted to entertain another at 10 p.m. while their men talked business. I guess she was right.” He smiled and looked approvingly around the room. “I see you’re like we are. You like comfortable things. We’ll have to have you out soon.”
“Thank you,” Cullee said. “We’d like to come. Yes, I’m a comfort boy, myself, and I’ve managed to persuade Sue-Dan to go along with me. Her taste rather runs to the frilly, you know, but I hardly thought that would suit a man my size.”
“What was it? Football?”
“Track.”
“That’s right, of course. The Olympics, and so on—”
The Congressman smiled, a reminiscent look in his eye.
“That was fun. I really enjoyed beating those puffed-up boys from the Communist bloc. I think they thought because I was a Negro I’d betray the United States. They had,” he remarked with satisfaction, “another think coming. Cigarette?”
“No, thanks; I don’t.”
“Me, either, but one has to make the gesture.”
They smiled at one another with great amiability, and the Secretary remarked thoughtfully, “You know, it’s nice to see you again. We never did get to know each other very well on the Hill, but now that I’m at State maybe we can get together more often. Frankly, I’d like your help with the Africans. They’re my biggest headache at the moment.”
Cullee laughed.
“Got lots of big ideas, haven’t they? Terry, for instance.”
“Terry is why I’m here, as a matter of fact,” Orrin said. His host nodded.
“I thought so. He’s a bad boy.”
“You bet he is,” the Secretary agreed with feeling. “You were out in Gorotoland last year, weren’t you?”
“Yes; Jawbone Swarthman asked me to go out for the Foreign Affairs Committee, so we did. Terry showed us around for about a week.” He smiled. “Didn’t give us any human flesh to eat or show us any sacrifices, but we got a pretty good picture of the civilized side. It isn’t much. Personally, I don’t blame Britain.”
“We start pretty much in agreement, then. I don’t, either.”
“But we may not be able to support her in the General Assembly,” the Congressman suggested. The Secretary’s face clouded.
“I wouldn’t want it officially confirmed, but we may not. We just aren’t sure yet, so please don’t say anything.”
“It stops here. What can I do to help with Terry?”
“First of all, I hope you’ll go to that luncheon in Charleston tomorrow,” Orrin said and then, as a stubborn look came instantly to his host’s face, went firmly on, “and when he returns here to Washington, I hope you’ll pretty well stay right with him all the time he’s here. I want somebody I can trust to keep an eye on him.”
Cullee smiled and for a moment his face lost the stubborn look.
“I’m flattered by that, right enough, but I’m afraid I can’t do it.”
“I wish you would. It would be a great help to me. It would be a great help to the country, I think.”
“You don’t understand,” the Congressman said. “I—I don’t like him, for one thing. He’s kind of—unclean, inside, I think. We didn’t get along too well when Sue-Dan and I were out there—”
“He told me this morning he thought you had a pretty wife,” the Secretary said, and his tone brought an answering smile from Cullee.
“He’s got half a dozen of his own; why pick on mine? But—aside from not liking him personally—it’s difficult to explain to you, Senator, but—I just resent the way you—you people—are fawning all over him here. He isn’t worth it.”
“By ‘you people,’ I take it, you mean you white people,’ is that right?” Cullee nodded. “It isn’t my doing,” Orrin Knox said shortly. “The only fawning I’m doing is a strictly political necessity—internationally political, that is. Harley got us rather in a mess, I’m afraid, by not being too tactful this afternoon at his press conference. Now it’s up to me to bail us out. Everybody at the UN who wants to embarrass the U.S., and that’s just about everybody, has seized upon it to make a big rumpus, as you know. You’ve seen television and heard the news.”
“Yes, and I’d like to help if I could, but—I’m not sure I could do much, anyway. Also, I resent playing tail on Ted Jason’s kite. He just wants me around because I’m colored. It’s all part of his schemes for next year. You know that, Senator.”
“Maybe that’s the only reason I’m here,” Orrin Knox said with a calculated bluntness on which several things were riding; but he thought it best to meet it head on. “Maybe I’m just trying to line you up on my side. After all, you know, the colored vote’s the colored vote.”
His host looked at him without expression for a long moment before smiling and shaking his head.
“No, I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I have a lot of respect for Orrin Knox, I may say, and I don’t think so. Oh, of course you’d like my support, and you need the colored vote, there’s no doubt of that. But I really think you’re working on the problem you’ve got right now. I really do.”
“One problem at a time,” Orrin said with a rueful smile, and Cullee smiled, too.
“That’s a good motto.”
“Well, let me ask you— Do you think you can run for Senator out there if you antagonize the Governor and don’t help him with his plans?”
His host shrugged, but the Secretary could see the gesture covered a more troubled mind than the Congressman wanted to admit.
“Who knows? I don’t know that I’ll even run, yet. And if I do, I expect I’ll get along, with Ted or without him. In California, you know, we’re all pretty independent of one another.”
The Secretary looked at his watch.
“Well,” he said with a deliberate matter-of-factness, “I expect I’d better run. It’s getting late. I’m sorry you won’t help me, but—” Cullee held up an admonitory hand.
“Sit down, Senator. Wait a minute. Let me think … I hate to—well, to be frank with you, it doesn’t sound very modest, but I just hate to lend my name and prestige to that overdressed piece of nothing. I do represent something, to my people and—”
“And to mine.”
“Yes, maybe to yours, too. At least, I hope so. I try to be a good Congressman and a good representative of my race.”
“The best,” Orrin Knox said without flattery.
“That’s why I hesitate, you see?” Cullee Hamilton said. “It means something, if I do a thing. It’s a responsibility.”
“It is indeed. A very great one, which you carry supremely well. Of course you know I wouldn’t ask your help if that weren’t the case.”
Cullee laughed, rather helplessly.
“You meet me coming around the barn the other side … All right. I’ll do it.”
“Good,” said Orrin Knox, rising briskly and shaking hands. “I’m very pleased and very grateful. I know the President will be, too”—he gave a wry smile—“after he realizes that we’re gradually getting this thing worked out for him.”
Cullee smiled.
“He’s a great guy, but I guess this time he just didn’t stop to think.”
“I’d be out of a job,” Orrin Knox said, “if all the people in this world who ought to stop and think stopped and thought. Well, then. You’ll be at the luncheon and then squire him around town afterwards.”
“Okay,” Cullee said without enthusiasm. “You understand I’m not cutting any rugs for joy about it, but I’ll do my best to put a good face on it for you.”
“Good man. I really meant it about getting together, too. You come have lunch with me at the Department sometime in the next week or two—I’ll have my secretary call and make a date. And Beth and I would like to have you two out. I meant that, too.”
“I’d be pleased,” Cullee said with a genuinely flattered smile.
“We’ll work it out,” the Secretary said. He stopped on the doorstep. “Oh, one thing. I almost forgot. I have a message for you from our dinner guest this evening. I’ll quote him exactly. He said, ‘I wish him well. You can tell him I said so. Just say: “Seab Cooley said to say he wishes you well.”’ There, I think I’ve made it about as repetitious as he does.”
Again the Congressman looked genuinely pleased.
“That was very kind of him. You know,” he added thoughtfully, leaning against the doorjamb, “it’s a funny thing, and I expect you northerners wouldn’t understand it, but in a curious way I think that old man and I really quite like each other. We’ll never agree on my race, and no doubt he’s been guilty of a lot of bad things toward it, but—you tell him I said I wish him well, too. He’s one of the last of his kind, and, on its own terms, I expect it wasn’t such a bad kind, in lots of ways. You tell him what I said.”
“Maybe you should tell him yourself,” the Secretary suggested. His host dismissed it with a laugh.
“No. To quote my mother, God rest her soul, that wouldn’t be fittin’. It just wouldn’t be fittin’. I could do it, but he wouldn’t know how to take it. So you be our messenger, Mr. Secretary. We both trust you.”
Orrin Knox laughed.
“Good. And good night, Cullee. It’s a great relief to have your help.”
“Any time I can. Give my regards to Mrs. Knox.”
And so, the Secretary told himself with some satisfaction as he began the long drive back to Spring Valley, he had done about as much as he could do to appease little Mr. Self-importance from Gorotoland. He would call Hal or Lafe as soon as he got back to the house—both would be at the Turkish party at the Waldorf, and he could reach one or the other there—and get the word to the M’Bulu that he would have a formal luncheon with the Foreign Relations and Foreign Affairs Committees on Friday and then on Friday night be entertained at “Vagaries” by the Knoxes, the Munsons, and a lot of other highfalutin folk. These honors, together with the reception at the British Embassy, should be enough to calm him down. In fact, considering all the handicaps that had surrounded the matter, the Secretary congratulated himself as he swung up Massachusetts Avenue again that he had done about as good a job as anyone could do on such short notice of handling the problem presented to the United States by the M’Bulu of Mbuele. What he could not know, of course, was that the M’Bulu, dancing gaily with a lady delegate from Malaya at the Waldorf, wasn’t really anywhere near as concerned about this particular problem as he had chosen to sound all day long. Terrible Terry, although no one knew it but himself, had kept an eye on the news and now had another problem altogether in store for the United States.
9
For the better part of two hundred years, “Harmony” had stood on the Battery in Charleston with an air of calm and stately dignity that often belied the activities that went on inside. Behind the great white pillars in the great high-ceilinged rooms, some of war’s beginnings had been plotted and many of war’s bitter consequences had been felt. Proud men who debated conquering the North over brandy and cigars in the mansion’s oak-paneled living room had come home to that same room minus legs or arms or eyes and carrying in their hearts the bitter foreknowledge of the North’s cold unforgiveness. The passions and tempers of four proud families had swept in and out of the broad hallways and across the broad lawns, velvet-soft in the years of plenty, scraggly and weed-grown in the years of adversity, velvet again as prosperity slowly returned to a beaten but still unhumbled people. Original Ashtons had given way to Boyds; Boyds eventually yielding, after the war, to Middletons; Middletons, dwindled down at last to two ancient spinsters, giving over, after a later and yet more monstrous war that began in 1939, to Jasons. Yet even with these last, regarded as rich, intruding Yankees, fawned over to their faces and despised behind their backs by their soft-talking, professionally cordial Southern neighbors, “Harmony” had always managed, under all conditions, to maintain its dignity, its air of solid magnificence, its outward aspect of stately and serene gentility.
Until today.
Today, things were happening to “Harmony.”
The process had begun around 9 a.m. when three trucks filled with cameras and electronic equipment, each emblazoned with the name of a national network, had roared down the quietly gracious thoroughfare to turn abruptly into “Harmony’s” winding drive. Loud-spoken men had leaped to earth, their voices raucous in the golden morning, and for an hour or more there had been great noise and disturbance in the neighborhood.
When it finally subsided, long black cables snaked from the trucks up “Harmony’s” stately steps and into “Harmony’s” stately halls, and at every vantage point in the mansion—in the living room, the parlor, the ballroom, and the banquet hall; on the verandas and here and there at strategic intervals about the lawn, television cameras now stood poised and ready to capture famous people and witness historic events. Operators and technicians lounged about, exchanging loud and irreverent conversations on the affairs of nations and of men as they drank coffee furnished by the crew of servants busily at work in “Harmony’s” kitchens, and it was obvious to everyone for blocks around that something of vast import was soon to take place.
Shortly after 11 a.m. this knowledge was strengthened by the arrival of two chartered buses labeled “JASON FOUNDATION—PRESS,” just in from Municipal Airport, where their occupants—reporters, correspondents, columnists, editors, and photographers—had been met by Jason—furnished transportation after their Jason-financed flights from New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver, and other centers of publicity and communication. Again the soft morning air was troubled with the cries of old hands at the game greeting one another, the ribald comments of professionals surveying the sort of spectacle they had all seen so often before, the cynical, half-resentful jesting of men and women who knew they were being used but knew also that their profession made it impossible for them to escape being used. Another coffee line soon formed under the great oaks and the air was filled with gossip and speculation about the luncheon to come, its principal guest, its principal organizers, and the pertinence of it all to political events both foreign and domestic. So quietly that hardly anyone at “Harmony” noticed, shades were drawn on the windows of the two houses overlooking the old mansion and a deliberate hush descended on the Battery. Against it the noise and bustle in that one place, emphasized by the surrounding silence, appeared to take on the volume of a small but crowded midway at a circus. This was undoubtedly the intention of those who had drawn the shades, but the gesture was lost upon the people at “Harmony.” None of them paid any attention, and the rising tide of sound kept right on rising.
Promptly at noon the first of what soon became a steady procession of sleek black chauffeured Cadillacs came along the Battery, turned into the winding approach to the mansion, and discharged its passengers under the gleaming portico. From this car there emerged four people, Edward Jason, Governor of California; his sister, Señora Labaiya-Sofra; his brother-in-law, the Ambassador of Panama; and the guest of honor. Cameras whirred, flashbulbs popped, newsmen pressed forward.
“Governor, do you have any comment to make on the President’s treatment of His Royal Highness? Governor, would you care to comment on the United States attitude toward Africa? Governor, are you ready to announce your candidacy for President?”
To all of these, particularly the last, which brought general laughter in which he joined, the Governor of California gave his pleasant, statesmanlike smile and a friendly, “No comment, ladies and gentlemen. This is the M’Bulu’s day. Talk to him.”
“But, Governor,” the San Francisco Chronicle said, “surely you have some comment to make on what has been happening in the last couple of days?”
“I’m going to make a little speech,” Edward Jason said, patting his breast pocket. His dark eyes sobered for a second, his deep tan looking beautifully impressive contrasted with his silver eyebrows and silver hair. His fine head came up in the challenging gesture he had adopted from another Governor of California who not so long ago had followed to its successful conclusion the road upon which he himself was now embarked. “Listen to the speech. I think it will make my position clear.”
“Your Highness, then. Has Your Highness received any communication from the United States Government since yesterday?”
Terrible Terry, his green and gold robes crowned today by a cap and tassel of brilliant purple that raised his total height to seven feet, gave his shrug and happy smile.
“Oh, I received something last night. Not a formal communication, you understand; but the distinguished delegate of the United States to the United Nations transmitted invitations to me from the Secretary of State. There will be a luncheon, I believe, on Friday. And a party Friday night after the British Embassy reception. A private party.”
“Will this satisfy you as a substitute for being entertained by the President, Your Royal Highness?”
Again the shrug and smile.
“Is a little stone a substitute for bread?” he asked, as they all laughed. “I think not. But, like the Governor—I too have a speech. Will you listen?”
“Oh, yes,” someone assured him. “We’ll listen.” “We wouldn’t miss it for anything,” said someone else.
Amid more laughter, the official party turned and went in.
There followed in quick procession other distinguished guests, faithfully recorded by television and still cameras, evoking appropriate comments from the press as its members busily jotted down names and noted the degree of fame.
Herbert Jason, cousin of the Governor and Señora Labaiya, Nobel Prize-winning scientist and genius in the field of electronics, arrived with two elderly Jason aunts and the director of the Jason Foundation. Four members of the Senate and five from the House, all from northern or western states, followed in succeeding cars. Several editors from the smaller and more agitated journals came next, looking suitably self-important. Various members of the upper echelons of the metropolitan press: editors, editorialists, special writers, columnists; three or four book publishers of the desperately concerned variety—they too passed within the portals.
Following came some of the more famous leaders of a certain highly vocal sector of American intellectual thought, the headline-lovers who sign petitions and get up memorials, the profound thinkers who are to be found one week seeking “FAIR PLAY FOR DICTATOR X,” who has just shot ten thousand innocent victims, and the next urging “JUSTICE FOR MOE GINSBERG,” now waxing pale in Dannemora after having given atomic secrets to Russia and done his best to destroy his own country.
It was, in fact, a sort of Walpurgis Noon of all the professional phonies and intellectual flotsam of America, washed up on “Harmony’s” broad lawns, and given an extra twitter this day because the word was out that next week there would be a full-page “FAIR PLAY FOR GOROTOLAND” ad in the New York Times and everybody but everybody would have his name on it.
Finally, quite late in the flow of arrivals, not appearing until almost a hundred guests had entered “Harmony,” came a trio that again brought press and cameras surging forward. In rather surprising conjunction the director of the President’s Commission on Administrative Reform, the chairman of DEFY, and the young colored Congressman from California arrived together to be faced with the usual onslaught of questions.
“Mr. Leffingwell, sir, do you have any comment to make on the President’s refusal to entertain the M’Bulu? Mr. Shelby, what do you think the United States can do to regain the ground we have lost at the UN? Congressman, do you think His Highness’ reception here will please the Negroes of America?”
“I have no comment,” Bob Leffingwell said easily. “I work for the President, you know.” They laughed appreciatively; he posed for pictures and vanished within. LeGage was a little more elaborate.
“Yes, I think the United States has lost ground,” he said slowly, “with the Africans and also with the Asian states. Through this thing with the M’Bulu and also, as always, because of domestic conditions here in this country. Speaking as a member of the United States delegation, I am happy to be here with His Highness. Speaking as chairman of DEFY, I would hope that the United States would continue to press forward vigorously to end segregation wherever and whenever it exists. Including,” he said after a significant pause that they leaped upon at once, “this city.”
“Does that mean DEFY is going to get into the school situation here, ’Gage?” the Chicago Defender asked quickly. LeGage got the solemn self-important look that always made his ex-roommate want to kick him.
“I wouldn’t want to say anything at all on that,” he said with great emphasis. “Anything at all.”
“How about you, Congressman?” the Defender said. “How do you think the Negroes of America feel about the M’Bulu’s visit here to this city which is about to become the scene of another battle for human rights?”
“Quite a question,” Cullee observed. “I’ll ask you one. You’re a Negro: How do you feel?”
“It’s my business to ask the questions, Congressman,” the Defender said sharply. “It’s yours to answer.”
“I can’t speak for the Negroes of America.”
“Some of us would like to think you could, Congressman,” Ebony magazine told him, while the white press crowded closer, intrigued by this developing intramural argument.
“Well,” the Congressman said shortly, “I don’t. I don’t know how all the Negroes in America feel about it, any more than you know how all the Negroes of America feel about it. Speaking as a member of the Congress of the United States—one member—I hope the M’Bulu will have a pleasant and enjoyable visit and go home thinking well of us.”
“What do you think about the integration crisis here?” the Afro-American asked. Cullee gave him a long look and started to turn away.
“When a crisis develops, then maybe I’ll comment on it.”
“You doubt it will?” Ebony demanded. Cullee’s eyes flashed at the tone.
“If you have anything to do with it, yes,” he snapped, knowing that he shouldn’t give way to anger but unable to refrain from it. There was something so smug about the way certain of his fellows always approached the question. “Come on, ’Gage,” he said, taking him by the arm and swinging him around and into the mansion.
“That boy’s been associating with whites so long he’s practically white himself,” he heard the Defender murmur behind him.
“Get to be a great man when you get to Congress,” Ebony agreed. “Apt to forget where you came from.”
“Now, what did you want to do that for?” LeGage demanded in a fierce whisper, yanking his arm free and pulling Cullee aside once they got inside the door. “Why do you have to make your own people mad at you? They can do you a lot of damage if you keep on acting uppity. And they will, too.”
“Ah, I get so sick of them,” Cullee said with an equal fierceness. “Integration, integration, integration, as though that were the answer to everything.
“We’ve got a hell of a long way to go and a hell of a lot more to do, boy, and don’t tell me we haven’t. Maybe we better stop being so worried over what we demand and ask ourselves whether we deserve it when we get it.”
“You get awful sick about a lot of things, seems to me,” ’Gage told him softly as Felix and Patsy Labaiya began to converge upon them from different corners of the room. His eyes suddenly flashed with anger and a drained, tense expression that Cullee hadn’t seen for a long time came over his face.
“You say Terry’s a white man’s nigger,” he whispered. “How about the Congressman who has ten times more whites than Negroes in his district? Maybe he’s become a white man’s nigger, too, because he has to be to get elected. Now you listen to me, white pet. The time’s coming and soon when you’re going to be for us or against us. You remember that, Cullee. You just remember it.”
The Congressman gave him a contemptuous stare as Patsy advanced burbling, with hand outstretched, and Felix came smoothly forward.
“I’ll remember it,” he said “Don’t you get too big for your britches, either. And, ’Gage. Do me a favor and just leave me alone, will you? I think that would be best.”
For a second before the Labaiyas were upon them and talk was no longer possible, hurt, protest, anger, and an agonized mixture of dislike and regret passed across LeGage’s face. Then without a word he flung away, past the Labaiyas, whom he was apparently too blinded by emotion to see, and on into the crowded living room, where a noisy throng was gathered worshipfully around the M’Bulu, holding court.
“Nobody quarrels with the intensity of old friends,” Felix said with a bland smile that apparently dismissed it. “Cullee, we are happy to have you with us.”
After five minutes of innocuous chitchat, however, Cullee noticed, the Ambassador glided quietly away and was presently to be seen off in a corner engaged in earnest conversation with the still-agitated chairman of DEFY.
What this meant, the Congressman did not have much time to speculate, for very shortly gongs began to toll through the halls of “Harmony,” and presently the guests of the Jason Foundation were crowding in to take their places at the two enormous tables that had been prepared for them. The doors giving onto the central hall had been flung open in both living room and banquet room so that the two had in effect been connected into one huge dining area. At one end in a seat of honor Terrible Terry, flanked by LeGage and Robert A. Leffingwell, took his place amid much loud applause and eager cries of greeting; opposite him at the other end the Governor of California gracefully acknowledged a similar ovation as he took his seat flanked by his sister and brother-in-law. Television cameras around the walls peered up and down the tables to catch this distinguished guest with a piece of shrimp halfway into an open mouth, that distinguished guest mopping surreptitiously at a spot of spilled soup on the tablecloth before him. Those distinguished members of the press who were guests could be seen here and there down the table, eating busily with the rest; those other newsmen who were actually working stood against the walls among the cameras jotting notes on the appearance and behavior of the notables thus glamorously displayed before them. In hushed voices the network commentators identified the major guests for the audiences that would see them that evening in taped reports on half a dozen national news shows.
There came presently the time of surfeit and speeches, and with a flourish the director of the Jason Foundation presented the Governor of California. Ted Jason rose and everyone agreed he had never looked so handsome and distinguished as he did making a graceful little speech of welcome to introduce the honored guest.
It was a shame, he pointed out, that under the laws of South Carolina Negroes and whites could not associate at a public gathering, and therefore it had been impossible to hire a suitable hall for their distinguished guest this day. By the same token, however, it was fortunate for the Jason Foundation that this was so, for it had given the Foundation and, he might add, himself and his family, a chance to do particular honor to this great fighter for Negro freedom who had come to them from Africa. (Loud applause.)
It was a shame also that the Government of the United States had seen fit to treat in so cavalier a fashion so fine and worthy a visitor to these shores. (Hisses and boos.) But here, too, the President’s failure was his, and his family’s good fortune, because it permitted them to extend on behalf of the people of the United States—who, he knew, did not agree with their President on this particular matter—a fond and cordial welcome to break bread with many of the greatest leaders of American thought. (Further warm applause.)
It was also especially pleasing this day to have with them the great young Negro Congressman from California and the dynamic, fighting young chairman of DEFY, both of whom had done so much in the unceasing struggle to bring true liberty and justice to this great land of ours. (Renewed applause, shouts and whistles.)
He was pleased to say that as a Californian, and as Governor of California, he was particularly proud of Cullee Hamilton, who fully lived up to the finest traditions of his race and of a state where he, the Governor, would say without undue modesty that great advances had been made under his Administration, and would continue to be made, for the great Negro race. (Wild applause, some standing.)
This gathering today, he hoped, would prove both an apology and a recompense for the slur and slap at the peoples of Africa implicit in the President’s mistaken treatment of the M’Bulu. And it was particularly fitting that it should be held here in this city, which was about to become the newest battleground in the struggle of America’s own Negro people to achieve full equality under law. (Significant laughter, cheers, and applause.) He hoped this word would be carried back to the residents of the city, even though their newspapers and radio stations had seen fit to boycott the luncheon. (Sarcastic amusement; cries of “Shame! Shame!”) And even though their senior Senator, the Honorable Seabright B. Cooley, had seen fit to issue a statement in Washington denouncing the gathering as “an insult to South Carolina.” If he, Ted Jason, weren’t Governor of California and a proud resident of that state, he would be tempted to run for Senator right here next year and see if he couldn’t remove what was really an insult to South Carolina. Anyway, he fully intended to help whoever should do so. (Great applause and cheers; shouts of “Sink Seab!”)
And so, without further ado, he would present the guest of honor they all wanted to hear, that brilliant, dedicated, fearless fighter for the freedom of his people and all peoples, His Royal Highness the M’Bulu of Mbuele. (Wild and prolonged applause, audience standing and shouting.)
There followed one of Terrible Terry’s most effective speeches, filled with an impression of intelligence, idealism, and fierce internal anger which, taken together with his towering physical presence and his gorgeous robes, made fair ladies sigh and strong men be thankful they weren’t meeting him alone in a dark alley. As he railed at the United States, poured sarcasm on the United Kingdom, and repeatedly claimed for himself the role of symbol of all Africa, the television cameras had a field day around the tables, recording the Governor of California, dignified and approving; Robert A. Leffingwell, gravely attentive; the Panamanian Ambassador, breaking his customary impassivity with sudden sharp bursts of applause; his wife, eager and ecstatic; the chairman of DEFY, his eyes gleaming and an expression of fervent approval approaching hero worship in them; and the M’Bulu himself, gigantic and magnificent in his scathing denunciation of the enemies of Africa and the Negro race, whom he professed to have found at work in the United Nations and the city of Washington. Only the Congressman from California sat quietly and without noticeable response, on his face a peculiar combination of amusement, skepticism, patient boredom, and something that some perceptive viewers might characterize as contempt. The commentators couldn’t make much of his attitude, and after a couple of desultory glimpses the cameras left him and concentrated on the others.
After half an hour of this there came one more slashing attack on the United States, one more magnificent defiance of “those too blind to see the road of history that lies before them,” and the speaker was done. Amid frantic applause and another standing ovation, the newspaper reporters fled to the telephones, which had been thoughtfully provided in “Harmony’s” library upstairs and began to file their stories. “TERRY RAPS U.S., U.K., AND U.N. ‘SABOTEURS’” the New York Post reported in the streets of Megalopolis an hour later. “COLORED RULER HITS LOCAL SEGREGATION,” said the Charleston News and Courier, which had decided to cover the story, after all.
And once more, as the happy throng broke up into chatting, excited groups for coffee on the lawn prior to being taken away again in Cadillacs and buses to the various transportation terminals, the Panamanian Ambassador drew the chairman of DEFY aside for five minutes’ earnest conversation, in which they were presently joined, briefly but apparently for some concrete purpose, by the guest of honor.
A few moments later the Congressman from California was on the phone to the Secretary of State in Washington to report, “So far, so good, aside from words, and I guess we can stand them.” The Secretary thanked him, wished him well, and invited him to lunch at the Department next day. He accepted with pleasure but had to call back ten minutes later and cancel because the M’Bulu had informed him of a new development. The Jasons had invited him to stay over, he said, and use the house—the family had to leave right away, its members explained regretfully in the hearing of the press, but he might stay on and make use of all “Harmony’s” facilities if he wished to see the historic old city and its surrounding area. “Does that invitation include me, too?” Cullee had asked Patsy Labaiya, and with only a moment’s hesitation she had cried, “But of COURSE it does, Cullee! Do be our guest!” So he had changed his plans, he told Orrin Knox—or had them changed for him, rather.
“Well, old Cullee,” Terry said an hour later, stretching out to his full length on one of the outsize double beds in “Harmony’s” master bedroom, “imagine seeing you here in Charleston. I feel very flattered you decided to come and hear me.”
“I want to do all proper honors to a famous symbol of my race,” the Congressman said calmly from where he half sat, half stretched on the other bed. Terry laughed aloud.
“I know how sincerely you mean that. I know very well how sincerely you mean it, old Cullee, my friend from Congress. Where’s that pretty little wife of yours?”
“She’s in Washington,” Cullee said evenly. “Where are yours?”
“Molobangwe,” Terry said, and chuckled. “I was afraid I’d shock my strait-laced admirers in the United States if I brought them along.” He stretched again, like the jungle cat he was. “I wish I had one of them here right now. I could use her.”
“I’m sure,” the Congressman said. “Did you think of asking Patsy Labaiya?”
The M’Bulu gave a shout of laughter, sat up, and then dropped back full-length upon the bed.
“I doubt if the notable tolerance of the Jason family would go that far. I’m sure the Governor didn’t raise his sister to sleep with a Negro. Tell me about this Charleston, though. We ought to be able to find something interesting here tonight.”
“Is that why you decided to stay over?”
“Oh,” the M’Bulu said airily, “many reasons, many reasons, Cullee, friend. Tell me: are you staying to spy on me for the distinguished Secretary of State?”
“Yes,” Cullee said, “I am. Are you going to give me trouble?”
Again Terry gave the shout of laughter.
“Keep close and see.”
“I shall. What did you think of the luncheon?”
The M’Bulu gave him a sardonic wink.
“Why, I think it was a great success. I got publicity for my cause. Ted Jason got publicity for his cause. And all those nice, wide-eyed, twittering fools who attended as guests were able to tell each other how enlightened and progressive and full of love for humanity they are. And they also got a chance to hear a big black man tell their country to go to hell, which seems to be what they like best … Cullee?” He frowned. “Why do so many Americans like to hear their own country attacked? Gorotoland isn’t much, as you know, but you don’t catch me or any of my people failing to defend it in the face of strangers. Why are so many Americans the other way?”
The Congressman winced and shook his head.
“I don’t know; I can’t explain it. I never have known how to explain it. I just don’t happen to be one of their kind, you might remember. This country has been good to me and I don’t knock it.”
“Even when it does what it does to your people?” Terry asked.
“Even when it does what it does to your people?” he said, returning to it as they started out three hours later, after a sumptuous candlelit dinner proffered by servants who tended them in impassive and expressionless silence, for a walk in the soft autumn twilight. The walk was Terry’s idea, and at first he had been disposed to make it in full regalia, or at least had teased his companion into thinking he would. It was not until Cullee became really angry in his protests that the M’Bulu had admitted blandly that he had intended to change into a conservative Western business suit right along.
“But I had you worried, didn’t I, old Cullee?” he asked mischievously as they left “Harmony” and started along the Battery toward East Bay Street, one of the Jason Foundation Cadillacs following at a discreet distance a block behind. “You thought I was going to start out and create an incident right tonight, didn’t you?”
He uttered his charming laugh and gave Cullee’s shoulders a fraternal squeeze with one long arm.
“Relax. I wouldn’t do a thing like that to you, my friend. Think of the headlines it would make: ‘CONGRESSMAN AND TERRY INVOLVED IN RIOT.’ I couldn’t do that to you, Cullee.”
“I think I could handle it if you did,” the Congressman said, “but it would be simpler if you didn’t.”
“You wish to refrain from disturbances and protect the country,” the M’Bulu said, “even when it does what it does to your people?”
The question hung in the gentle air as they walked along. The Congressman started twice to answer, then stopped. Finally he said with a frown, “You’d never understand, so forget it.”
“But I might. A former graduate student at Harvard? Surely I know something about the United States!”
“Only how to make trouble. I think you know that pretty well.”
“Come,” the M’Bulu said as they reached Tradd Street, taking him by the arm and waving up the Cadillac, which put on a spurt of speed and drew sleekly alongside. “Let us go and see them in their native habitat, your people and mine. I would like to walk there rather than in front of all these fine white houses. I feel more at home. Perhaps it will suggest some thoughts to us. Take us somewhere near the Old Railroad Depot,” he told the chauffeur, who, like all “Harmony’s” servants, received his order without visible reaction. Cullee had no choice but to clamber in, and the Cadillac rolled off.
“Now,” the M’Bulu said, after he had stopped the car and they had alighted and left it, again following discreetly a block behind, “here they are, the happy American Negroes.” A group of youngsters was playing ball down a side street, gossiping neighbors were talking over fences or rocking on porches; a drowsy peace rested on the colored sections of the city. Indeed, the M’Bulu and the Congressman furnished the only excitement of the moment: two such tall and stately men did not often walk with such a lordly air together down those humble streets. A little eddy of comment and discussion followed them as they moved slowly along. Terrible Terry was not disposed to let the mood of the moment rest. “What do you think of this?”
“They look happy enough to me,” Cullee said. “They are happy, as a matter of fact.”
“Right now. Oh, yes, surely, right now. As long as they don’t try to stir off their porches or play in some other street. But suppose,” he said dreamily, “suppose someone were to say to them suddenly”—and he half raised his voice as his companion caught his arm—“‘Come with me, my friends, and we will go have a fish fry on the Battery. Come with me to “Harmony,” where they like Negroes, and we will make “Harmony’s” neighbors like them, too.’” His voice dropped and he shrugged off Cullee’s hand. “What then, my friend? Would they be happy then?”
“Keep your voice down,” the Congressman said quietly. “I don’t want to have to slug you.”
Terrible Terry threw back his head and gave a shout of delighted laughter that caused heads up and down the block to turn and a little wave of answering, appreciative laughter to eddy in the wake of his.
“It would be a fair match, Cullee. Six-feet—what, four?—against six-feet-seven, and I guess about equal in weight, give or take a few pounds. Yes, it would be quite a match. But again,” he said with a mischievous chuckle, “that incident. ‘CONGRESSMAN AND TERRY BRAWL IN STREET.’ No, no, we cannot have that, my upright and self-righteous friend … So they are all very happy, are they?”
“No. But they can’t get happier by your methods in this country.”
“And what have they achieved by your methods?” the M’Bulu asked as they strolled along, avoiding a jacks game, detouring around two games of hopscotch, narrowly averting head-on collisions by fast footwork as a flying wedge of boys and girls from eight to twelve came shrieking and laughing down the street. “Well, let us see. One thing, of course, they have,” he said elaborately, “is a Congressman from California. And one from Michigan. And one from New York. And one from Chicago. And also, of course, some of them do drive big cars and many of them have television sets, for all of which they will be paying their own usurers 50 per cent interest for a hundred years to come. And their brave leaders like yourself, aided by some of those desperately enlightened whites, have managed to get Brer Rabbit removed from some schools, and nowadays when the white folks sing about Basin Street it isn’t ‘where the dark and the light folks meet’ any more; it’s where the people meet. And when somebody beats his feet on the Mississippi mud, it isn’t the darkies who do it; it’s the people who do it. And a well-picked handful here in the South do attend a few schools now that they didn’t once upon a time, and there’s public transportation they can use now, and some lunch counters where they can eat … Oh, yes, there’s been great progress, Congressman. But does a single one of them respect you or want you around?” he demanded with a sudden fierce challenge that made passers-by hesitate and glance at him with a quick curiosity. “Tell me that. Tell me that!”
“Orrin Knox likes me,” Cullee said with a deliberate sarcasm, “and Ted Jason likes you. There’s two.”
“And both for the same reason,” Terry said spitefully. “For their own political advantage. At least that old fool of a President of yours is honest. He doesn’t think much of me and he won’t pretend he does, no matter what the consequences.” His eyes darkened and he spat out the words: “I hate this pious, pretending country!”
“I know you do,” Cullee Hamilton said in a tired fashion that suddenly made him seem much older than he was, “and I think it is too bad that you have to suffer us and we have to suffer you. I happen to love this country—I was born here; at least with all its faults it’s mine; and even if I didn’t love it, your saying you hate it would make me do so. Now, I’d suggest we get on back. I’m tired and I’m going to read awhile and then turn in. I’m not leaving you loose in Charleston tonight. So come along, Your Royal Highness. Whistle up your Cadillac and let’s us poor oppressed colored folk ride back to the Battery where we belong.”
The M’Bulu looked at him appraisingly, and for a moment Cullee wasn’t sure but what he would have to make good on his threat and persuade him to come by physical means. But Terry once again threw back his head and laughed, turning to wave up the Cadillac as he did so.
“You’re so persuasive, Cullee, friend, and so logical. I just couldn’t refuse Sue-Dan’s husband anything.”
“Fine,” Cullee said, exercising great restraint and managing to make a joke of it, which he knew disappointed his companion; “if I can count on that, we’ll get along.”
“Oh, we’ll get along,” Terry said as they got in the car and started the short ride back to “Harmony.” “No doubt of that …”
“Two numbers in New York for you to call,” the butler said as they reentered the stately house.
“No other calls?” Terry asked sharply.
“No,” the butler said.
“I’ll take them in the library.”
Fifteen minutes later he rejoined Cullee, by now comfortable in pajamas and slippers and starting to read, in the bedroom.
“Well,” he said with an amused air. “Imagine that. My friends in the United Kingdom have just issued a White Paper on Gorotoland. It seems we conduct human sacrifices, we eat people, we deal in slavery, and, worst of all, we’re accepting help from the Communists.”
“It’s all true, isn’t it?” Cullee asked. Terrible Terry didn’t answer directly, but gave him instead a cheerful grin.
“You know very well that not one of those fools who attended the luncheon today will believe it. Nor will most of your press and television. That was the New York Post asking me if I considered it a pack of lies. I said I did. You see, they make it easy for you. They put the words in your mouth and all you have to do is agree.”
“I think you’re not much,” the Congressman observed, without looking up from his book. The M’Bulu’s grin increased.
“But in this country they make it so easy for you to get away with it.”
And as he went whistling and humming about the room getting undressed and ready for bed, his companion reflected that, for all those unscrupulous enough to take advantage of the fact, this was unfortunately all too true. There was a sort of perverse and self-defeating innocence about America, which made her easy game for the phonies, the self-serving criticizers, the sly and subtle enemies of freedom and decency in the world. The eternal baby-faced innocent, waiting wide-eyed for the pie in the face from the villains in the cheap comedy of international errors put on by the Communists and their stooges—that was his country. With a sudden fierce anguish he thought: I will help you. And instantly deflated himself with the thought: What can you do, one little colored Congressman? One little white man’s pet, as LeGage put it? One little nigger, as his wife put it?
“Better call the Secretary and tell him I’ve been a good boy,” Terry suggested cheerfully as he got into bed. “Well!” he added as the phone rang on the nightstand between them. “There he is now.”
But it was not the Secretary, and he was not calling Cullee. The call again was for Terry, and when, in great glee, he told Cullee all about it a moment later the Congressman tried in great alarm and anger to persuade him to abandon what was apparently a carefully conceived plan by the M’Bulu and certain of his friends. Terry, however, would have none of it. All he would do was suggest mockingly that Cullee might like to come along.
“We need our great Negro Congressman at a time like this,” he kept saying. “Your people need you, Cullee.”
The Congressman, terribly disturbed, lay awake long after the M’Bulu had dropped off to sleep and started to snore heavily; for he was torn between what he knew he should do for his country and what he knew he could not do because of his race, and he was aware now that there was no longer anything at all amusing about the visit of Terrible Terry to the United States.
10
In much the same fashion as “Harmony,” the Henry Middleton School had also grown old and dignified with the years, and like “Harmony” it too was experiencing strange things on this fine fall morning following the M’Bulu’s luncheon. Again the soft autumnal haze lay upon the city, lending an atmosphere of somnolent peace drastically challenged by events now proceeding at the stately institution just below Broad Street.
Here, too, the television crews, the reporters, and the press photographers were gathered, indeed had begun to gather as early as 6 a.m. Here too were the gossiping knots of newsmen, the impromptu coffee lines at nearby stores, the peering eyes of television, the atmosphere of expectancy and excitement. But here there was a difference, for there was in the air around Henry Middleton School an ugly unease, a tense and explosive sense of violence that filled the bland morning air with a definite and inescapable menace.
Partly this came from the city policemen who stood about, sullen and nervous, in the streets, on the steps, and on the grounds of the school. More insistently, perhaps, it came from the steadily growing group of white women who clustered near the approaches to the grounds, talking together in hurried, raucous fashion, broken now and again by squeals of excitement and loud, nervous shrieks of laughter. Studied objectively, with an eye to their sloppy clothing, their half-combed hair, and the ostentatious vulgarity of their outcries, it could be seen that these ladies were not the cream of Charleston society. It did not matter; nor was it necessary that gentler ladies should do the task that was being done by these cordial dames. Those who were there were white, and that was quite sufficient to make the point they wished to make to the little gathering of Negroes that stood about, silent, sullen, and equally nervous, at a corner some one hundred yards down the street.
To this little group, which carried one rather shamefaced DEFY banner and could not have numbered more than ten or twelve, the ladies of the schoolyard gave frequent and noisy greeting.
“Go on home, you God-damned niggers!” they would scream, making sure the television cameras were turned upon them. “We don’t want no niggers messing with our kids!” Banners, too, waved gallantly in the breeze: “THIS IS A WHITE SCHOOL: NO NIGERS NEED APPLY” and “KEEP YOUR BLACK BASTIDS IN YOUR OWN BACK YARD.”
Now as the hour neared eight-thirty the excitement increased and the tension mounted. CBS and ABC had by this time interviewed some ten of these Christian souls and were about to extend equal privilege to the Negroes, already tapped by NBC. These operations, too, had provoked a certain attention from the chorus of Graces clustered near the steps. “Why don’t you northern nigger-lovers go home?” one disheveled charmer yelled, while a companion, for no pertinent reason that the cameramen could see, but which they dutifully photographed, made obscene motions with her belly. “Why don’t you take these burrheads back to New York with you? We don’t want ’em!
For these kindly suggestions there did not seem, at the moment, any rational rejoinder that the newsmen and television crews could make, even though a few were provoked to mutter angry comments to one another. One such comment was overheard by a policeman, and the cameraman responsible was promptly arrested for disturbing the peace. This made for a diversionary scuffle as other cameramen sought to take pictures of the police throwing a cordon around their colleague. The outcry of the ladies grew even louder, more excited, and more obscene.
Ten minutes went by in these pursuits, and it was almost time for the school bell to ring. A sudden hush descended upon the raucous crowd as they looked down the street toward the little group of Negroes. The police hurriedly formed parallel lines along the walk that led to the entrance to the school. The Negroes seemed to gather more tightly together. A silence, infinitely tense, infinitely menacing, fell upon the street. The world of reason, the world in which decent people tried to understand and help one another, the universe where kindly folk tried to make sense of humanity’s eternal contradictions, the places where Christians tried to live like Christians, even the many areas where whites and blacks existed tolerantly together, were suddenly far away. Abruptly there was no more world, no more anything but a silent street, filled with anger, blindness, hurt, and hate. Slowly the school bell began to toll and, as if commanded by some great director, there came from everyone, white and black alike, a sudden expulsion of pent-up breath.
At the doorway there appeared the figure of the school superintendent, his voice quavering and cracking with strain as he raised it against the clamor of the bell and shouted, “This school has no choice but to obey the law and we intend to do it!” So great was the tension that no one shouted back. Nor did anyone need to. The silence was more ominous than any spoken word.
For perhaps five minutes, while the bell completed its call and ceased, the silence held, the tension stretching and twisting and turning like a living thing, whipping hearts to a furious pace, straining eyes, catching breath short, making muscles ache with the frozen postures of bodies that did not know in exactly what fashion they would be called upon to perform, but knowing that in a split second’s time the demand would probably come.
Perhaps five minutes—and then, quite suddenly from a side street, unexpected and stunning in its abrupt appearance, there turned into Melton Avenue and drove to the school entrance, with a slow but inexorable pace that forced the silent women to fall back before it, a long black Cadillac.
From it, while the crowd watched with the same tense silence, now heightened by bafflement and curiosity, there descended two persons. One was a little colored girl of six, wide-eyed and frightened and hanging desperately to the enormous hand that gently held her own. The other was a figure seven feet tall, dressed in gorgeous robes of gold and green, wearing a purple-tasseled cap and walking with a calm and lordly disdain straight for the center of the group of women who blocked the entrance to the school.
So astounded were the ladies that for perhaps another two minutes, while the new arrivals bore down upon them, there seemed to be no reaction at all. Only the press photographers, dancing frantically in front of the advancing figures as they sought effective angles from which to snap them, only the short, excited expletives of the television cameramen trying to picture everyone at once, only the sharply-drawn breaths of newsmen scribbling frantically on their note pads, broke the silence. Not until the stately progression of the two disparate figures, the little girl terrified to the point of tears, her stately companion looking straight ahead with a composed fierceness that struck genuine terror into his viewers, reached the gates and started in, did the tension break. Then it was the belly-manipulator who suddenly screamed in a high, frantic voice, “Don’t let the black bastards in,” and ran forward, hesitant but determined, to try to block the way.
At once the silence dissolved into a wild outcry of shouts and screams and catcalls as a handful of her sisters surged forward behind her. Seven strong, they stood shouting before the M’Bulu, and for just a moment, while the little girl started to cry and hid behind his robes, he surveyed them with a withering distaste. Then he bent down and with one gentle, scooping movement lifted the little girl to his arms. And then he resumed his progress, step by step with a blind fury on his face that, even more than his physical presence, made them fall back before him. The last to give way was the belly-shaker herself, still screaming obscenities, but now with a high, terrified note of mounting frenzy and fear in her voice. Contemptuously the M’Bulu trod on her foot and she gave a sudden yelp of pain and hobbled away to the side. The police surged forward, but they too hesitated before the giant figure, awesome in its controlled fury. The pause was long enough for the M’Bulu and his tiny terrified burden to pass within the gates and begin to mount, step by step while the photographers scrambled frantically to record each foot of progress, up the stairs to the waiting superintendent.
At the top, the M’Bulu paused beside the superintendent, who looked terrified himself, and, turning with the little girl in his arms, looked back upon the once-more silent crowd. It made a magnificent picture (the AP photographer who took it would subsequently win first prize in the annual White House News Photographers’ Contest), and he held it for a long moment. Then he turned, gave the little girl a gentle kiss, gently put her down, gently disengaged her hand from his and transferred it to the shaking hand of the superintendent, and, turning once more, resumed his stately progress back down the steps toward the waiting limousine.
As he passed out the gates the fury of the ladies broke again through their fear, and although this time they kept a careful distance, they did offer him tokens of their esteem. From all sides eggs, rotten tomatoes, bricks, sticks, and rocks, thrown in wild excitement and without very good aim, began to rain upon him. Only one of the more solid objects struck home, a small stone that landed solidly on his right temple. He stopped as blood spurted suddenly down his face and raised a hand to it with an expression of surprise, faithfully recorded by the jostling photographers. Then he moved slowly on while the barrage resumed. By the time he reached the car, his gorgeous robes were stained and draggled from head to foot with broken eggs and splattered tomatoes; and these too he displayed for the photographers as he turned once more and looked at the screaming crowd with an utter contempt before slowly entering the car.
Then he was driven away, while behind him the last shreds of the soft peace of morning vanished altogether as the gentle ladies of the schoolyard, bitter with a wild frustrated fury, yelled and spat and caterwauled.
So acted His Royal Highness Terence Wolowo Ajkaje the M’Bulu of Mbuele, heir to Gorotoland, son of Africa, between 8:35 and 8:49 of a fall morning in the city of Charleston, South Carolina. The consequences were immediate and, as he and his friends had known they would be, worldwide.
By 9:30 a.m. extras were on the streets of New York, radio and television commentators were busily relaying the news, and across the nation and the world in a mounting babel of voices in a thousand tongues and dialects the word was being carried to the farthest corners of the globe.
By 10 a.m. business at the United Nations had virtually come to a standstill as delegates gathered in buzzing groups in the corridors, in the lounges, in conference rooms, in every available corner and cranny of the vast glass building, to exchange excited comments. The British Ambassador was observed to be, for once, openly concerned. The Soviet Ambassador and the Ambassador of Panama were observed to smile, not blatantly, but with a solid satisfaction. Senator Fry of the American delegation was seen to look tired and worried, Senator Smith to lose his customary affability. LeGage Shelby was not to be seen, though many from Asia and Africa wished to seek him out.
By 10:37 Edward Jason, Governor of California, had issued a statement in Washington, where he was visiting his sister, expressing on behalf of himself and his family “the greatest sorrow, dismay, and condemnation for this lawless episode in our adopted state of South Carolina.”
By 10:38 the switchboard of the New York Times was besieged by excited callers wishing to add their names to next week’s “FAIR PLAY FOR GOROTOLAND” advertisement.
By 10:46 a.m. (4:46 Greenwich) a question was being asked by the Opposition in Parliament, and two minutes later the Prime Minister was launched upon one of his gracefully obfuscatory replies which managed to chide the M’Bulu, uphold the M’Bulu, chide the United States, uphold the United States, comfort the white race and encourage the black, and all in the most charming, amicable, pragmatic, and fatherly language.
By 11 a.m. the State Department had gathered itself together sufficiently to issue a statement on behalf of the Secretary expressing deepest regret, and hard on its heels at 11:15 the White House issued one from the President conveying his personal apologies to the M’Bulu and announcing that he was canceling his vacation stay in Michigan in order to return to the capital at once and both confer with, and entertain, the nation’s distinguished visitor. (“I think we’ve got things in fairly good shape,” Orrin Knox had begun when the call came through from the Upper Peninsula. “Dolly’s going to give a dinner party for him—” “Dolly, hell!” the President snapped back with a rare profanity. “I’m going to come back and entertain the little bastard myself. He’s got his White House party.”) In his statement the President also expressed the hope, in language fair but firm, that South Carolina would see fit speedily to comply with the rulings of the courts.
By 11:45 the President had been hanged in effigy at Henry Middleton School.
By 12 noon Eastern Time, or 2 a.m. Japanese Time, the first of what the Secretary of State was later to label in his own mind as “Anti-American Riots, M’Bulu Series” was under way in Tokyo, where several hundred well-paid youths were serpentining angrily in front of the American Embassy and threatening to knock down its gates.
By 12:30 p.m. similar demonstrations were under way in Moscow, Jakarta, Cairo, Stanleyville, Mombasa, Lagos, and Accra.
By 1:15 they had also begun in Casablanca, Rome, Paris, London, Caracas, Havana, Port-au-Prince, Rio, and Panama City.
By 1:22, having disposed of routine business, both houses of the Congress of the United States were engaged in angry debate, with the senior Senator from South Carolina making a furious denunciation of the M’Bulu in the upper chamber and his colleague, Representative J. B. Swarthman of South Carolina, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, doing likewise in the House. Both were being constantly heckled by Senators from North and West, in the one case, and Congressmen from Chicago, Detroit, and New York, in the other.
By 1:35 three famous television programs had announced that the M’Bulu had accepted their invitations to appear, and in New York both the Overseas Press Club and the United Nations Correspondents Association were able to announce the same.
By 2:36 Life magazine disclosed that it had signed an exclusive contract with the M’Bulu for a first-person account of his experiences in South Carolina.
At 3 p.m. the British Embassy in Washington announced that the M’Bulu would arrive shortly at National Airport and would be entertained at a reception tomorrow night prior to the White House dinner.
At 3:31 p.m. the plane carrying the M’Bulu touched down at National Airport, and to the waiting reporters he gave only a graceful greeting and the news that instead of spending the night at the Embassy, as the Ambassador had invited him to do, he would instead stay with his old and dear friend the Congressman from California, here at his side. To the insistent demands of the reporters the old and dear friend refused comment. He did manage to keep a calm outward aspect and a pleasant if firm attitude, but as they finally gave up and started to turn away he seemed to let down and for a moment looked terribly unhappy, as though he were being harried and haunted by many things. Fortunately none of the press perceived this. Only Terry perceived it, with an ironic smile. “Cheer up, old Cullee,” he said. “Everything’s going our way.”
In newspapers all over the world the news of the M’Bulu’s courageous gesture and its worldwide repercussions rated banner headlines. The news about the British White Paper on Gorotoland merited only passing mention in many papers and none at all in some. It was freely predicted everywhere that the Panamanian resolution on immediate freedom for Gorotoland would now be passed at once by the United Nations.
11
And so it always was, the M’Bulu told himself, at each stage of his forward progress when he acted truly and forcefully as his instincts and his destiny told him he should: his brothers died, the way to the throne opened for him, the citadels of white society fell, the U.K. retreated before the claims of Gorotoland, the UN rallied to his cause, and the proud Americans were humbled in their own front yard. The gods had answered on that wild night in the storm when his mother had cried out, and they were with him still. Who else could have been so noble? Who else could have been so brave?
“No one,” he said fiercely aloud. “No one.” Beside him in the British Embassy limousine bringing them from the house off Sixteenth Street to the reception in the stately Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue his hostess stirred and turned to look at him in some surprise.
“No one what, Terry?” Sue-Dan said.
“No one can do what I can,” the M’Bulu replied, with so crystalline a certainty that her initial impulse to be sarcastic died halfway. “They all go down before me, don’t they, Cullee, friend?”
The Congressman, staring out the window, deep in his own thoughts, at first did not reply. Then he gave his guest a sidelong glance in which tiredness, distaste, disapproval, and a lingering trace of reluctant envy fought with one another.
“You’re a great man, all right, Terry,” he said finally. “There’s no doubt about it now. You’re the greatest thing that ever hit these United States.”
The M’Bulu gave his merry laugh and his graceful palms-out shrug.
“Anyone could have done what I did. Anyone who loved his own people. And was brave enough.”
“Cullee’s smart,” his wife said with a sudden sharp sarcasm. “He thinks that’s better than being brave.”
“I invited him to go with me,” Terry said with a wistful regret. “I gave him every chance. He preferred to be—objective.”
“I don’t know what I married,” Sue-Dan said viciously, and was pleased to see her husband’s hands knot furiously in his lap. “I swear I don’t.”
“You’re not the only one who wonders that,” he said, and deliberately turned his back to stare again out the window. He felt her fingers claw into his arm with ferocious strength.
“Don’t you turn your back on me, Cullee Hamilton!” she said shrilly, and up front the British chauffeur, completely expressionless, pressed a button. A glass wall slid neatly up into place to close him off from their discussion. “Don’t you treat me like dirt. You’re the dirt! Where were you when your own people needed you? You let Terry do it! You let a foreigner do it! Someone had to come from Africa and do the job you should have done! And you call yourself a Negro!”
“I thought you called it nigger, Sue-Dan,” he said evenly. “Now, I’m not going to argue with you—”
“How can you?” she demanded, still in the same shrill way. “How can you, when I’ve got a jellyfish for a husband? Terry’s the only man in this car!”
“Well, now,” the M’Bulu said soothingly, “I’m sure I didn’t mean to start a family argument—”
“You stay out of this!” she snapped, so sharply that he gave a startled laugh and sank back against the seat.
“You can have her, Cullee! She’s too much for me. I’ve got half a dozen at home, but this little girl’s got more spirit than all of them together. Mercy!” he said with a delicate precision incongruous with his bulk. “Has this little girl got spirit!”
“It’s a good thing I have,” Sue-Dan said scornfully, “because Cullee hasn’t. Won’t help his own people. Won’t run for Senator. Won’t anything.”
“I swear to God,” the Congressman said, “someday I’m going to—”
“Going to, nothing! You couldn’t. It might upset the white folks, and then you wouldn’t be elected any more. You’d have to go back to being a ditch-digger or whatever job the white folks’d let you have. Or maybe,” she added with a shrewish instinct for hurtfulness, “’Gage would let you sweep up his office.”
“That LeGage,” the M’Bulu said dreamily. “There’s a great leader of his people who knows how to lead. I like LeGage.”
“I suppose he put you up to this,” Cullee said.
“We discussed it,” Terry admitted, “but it really was my idea. DEFY is going to help, now I’ve done it but I thought of it. After all, it was so obvious. It ties in so well with so many things. I’m just surprised no one ever thought of it before. Kwame could have done it. Sekou had the chance. It would have been a natural for poor Patrice. But no one thought of it but me. No one!” An expression of fierce pride came to his face. “No one but Terry!”
“It was a great and noble action,” the Congressman said, spitting out the words with a genuine distaste. The M’Bulu shrugged and, in one of his abrupt transitions, gave his sunny smile.
“So your press is telling the world. And so the world believes. Who am I to deny it?”
“At least it showed the white man,” Sue-Dan said with a satisfaction that sounded quite ferocious. “At least, my poor Cullee, it showed the white man.”
“That isn’t all, either,” Terrible Terry said happily. “Let me tell you,” he said as the limousine neared the Embassy and they saw ahead a crush of traffic, cops, and arriving vehicles, “what else is going to happen.”
And as they approached the stately iron-scrolled gates and the police, alerted by the standards of Gorotoland and the United Kingdom flapping together from the fenders, moved to clear the way for their arrival, he proceeded to do so with an arrogant pleasure that seemed to delight the Congressman’s wife but made the Congressman’s blood run cold. And again, of course, he struggled with the agonizing feeling that there was nothing—or, at any rate, very little—that he could do. He determined to do that little, however, such as it was, though he was careful to keep his face impassive and his intention secret.
“Now zip me,” Lady Maudulayne said, “and tell me how I look.”
“I am always delighted when you take these intimate little chores away from Southgate and let me do them,” Claude Maudulayne said. “It makes for a fragrant memory of youthful domesticity, even if she does resent it. There, you’re zipped. Carry on.”
“And tell me how I look, I said.”
“Ravishing,” the British Ambassador replied. “How else?”
“I want to,” Kitty said. “For all our relatives of palm and pine, black, white, yellow, green, blue, red—”
“Wrong color,” Lord Maudulayne said cheerfully. “Anything else, but not red. Is Tashikov coming?”
“Oh, yes. Madame called, personally, and we exchanged heavy pleasantries. I try not to let my mind work too fast for those people, but sometimes I can’t help it.”
“Well,” her husband said, “you let it work as fast as you like on your level, because I can assure you theirs are going like lightning on their level. I rather thought he’d come, since he didn’t get asked to the White House.”
“I must say I do admire the President,” Kitty said, adjusting two enormous jade earrings and giving her face a final pat with an enormous powder puff. “He does have spunk, you know?”
“The old boy puts his foot in it sometimes, but most of the time he does very well, in my estimation. He’s still feeling his way, in many respects.”
“Do you suppose it was just because he insulted Terry that Terry went to South Carolina and did what he did?”
Claude Maudulayne shrugged.
“Who knows why Terry does anything? Except that his motives are never as noble as one would gather if one believed all one heard and read about him at this particular moment.”
“But it was rather brave, you know. You must admit that. He might have been killed.”
“Cowards don’t often kill, and most of these mobs seem to be composed of cowards. Still, he was taking a chance, I’ll grant you. It’s certainly got the wind up all the Africans and Asians at the UN.”
“Which takes some of the pressure off us,” his wife said with some satisfaction; and then added with a characteristic fairness, “How heartless politics is, really, particularly international politics. Somebody’s misfortune is always somebody’s good news, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I must admit that I look forward with some interest to Orrin’s expression when they get here. I told him in New York that this clever young man meant trouble for both of us, and I think he was inclined to think it was just typical British worry about the colonials, don’t you know. I’m afraid they take a somewhat patronizing attitude toward our little problems at times. Which,” he added with a wry honesty, “we reciprocate in full.”
“I don’t really see how this can affect them directly, though, do you? After all, the resolution is still directed against us, and this hasn’t helped it any.”
“No,” Lord Maudulayne said ruefully, “from our standpoint, it has not. But they may get hurt by the backlash. Anything like this does them fearful damage all over the world. And this is such a particularly vicious way to turn the screw. I’m surprised none of our black friends thought of it before.”
“You have to hand it to our honored guest,” Lady Maudulayne said as she gave him a silver pump and extended her right foot, balancing herself with a finger on his shoulder. “He has a certain ingenuity about him.”
“Oh, in his own twisted way, he’s a genius,” Lord Maudulayne said, putting on the shoe and reaching for the other. “His school record indicates that. But I wonder a little, on this. It’s such a pat weapon that can be used so many ways. I wonder if he had help.”
“Tashikov?”
“Felix.”
“It’s the same thing, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t want to say that about a distinguished colleague. Anyway, I’m not sure.”
“Who’s ever sure, until they turn up in Moscow being interviewed for television?”
“That’s the last place Patsy Jason’s husband will ever turn up, of that you can be sure.… No, I think we’re off base, and we mustn’t ever say it. It’s only a hunch.”
“I have learned over the years, my dear,” Lady Maudulayne said, “that when you and I arrive independently at the same hunch, it is more often than not the right one.” Lord Maudulayne smiled.
“How true. But we must just bury this thought, I think, and not even bring it to the surface of our minds, where it might show to some perceptive eye.”
“But we mustn’t throw it away altogether,” Kitty said. “Please, let’s not throw it away altogether.”
Her husband grinned.
“How could we? … When do we fade gracefully away to the White House like Arabs in the night and leave our guests to drink themselves into a stupor on Her Majesty’s liquor?”
“I think we’ll stick it to seven. I really think most of them will be gone by then. I’m closing the bar at six-thirty.”
“Very forethoughted.”
“Thank you. Now, once more,” she said, pausing at the door to turn gracefully and face him. “How do I look?”
“No lovelier than when I saw you that first day at Crale,” her husband said gravely. She blushed with pleasure.
“What would I have ever done without you?” she asked softly.
“Fortunately,” the British Ambassador said, “that is a question whose answer the Lord did not require either of us to find out.”
In the public rooms, beneath the portraits of Sovereign current, Sovereigns past, assorted Hanovers, Windsors, Tudors, and Stuarts, they greeted their guest with suitable ceremony as he entered with his host and hostess of the night. The M’Bulu, gorgeous in fresh robes, bowed graciously to Kitty, shook hands with a pleased smile with the Ambassador, and took his position in the receiving line with a graceful dignity. The Hamiltons, seeming a little tense to the Maudulaynes, chatted briefly and then went on in to refreshments. The crush followed fast upon them and steadily increased for an hour as the Ambassador and his lady and the heir to Gorotoland fell automatically into the accustomed routine of “So nice to see you, Miss Mumble—Mrs. Mumble, sorry—Lady Maudulayne, Mrs. Mumble—So nice to see you, Mr. Mumble—Sorry, Mr. Murmur—Mr. Murmur, Your Royal Highness.” In time this slacked off, the last dazzling smile had been exchanged, the last bone-crushing handshake endured, the last vigorously vague politeness expressed with suitable cordiality. The line was over and “The guests, thank God, are on their own,” as the Ambassador remarked.
“You can’t help being friends after going through an experience like that together,” Lady Maudulayne said. “Why don’t you come into the study for a moment and have a private drink, Your Highness? Then we can Circulate. I trust you hear my capital C.”
“I do,” Terrible Terry said with a friendly laugh. “Indeed I do. But you must call me Terry. Everyone does.”
“I’m flattered,” Kitty said, slipping her arm through his. “Heavens! How far up there are you?”
“Far enough,” the M’Bulu said. “Possibly,” he added with a teasing little smile as they entered the study and closed the door behind them, “His Lordship thinks I am too far up, right now.”
“Not at all, old chap,” the Ambassador said briskly. “You got there by your own efforts. Who am I to cavil? After all, one doesn’t criticize Mount Everest for being where it is. Why criticize the M’Bulu for being where he is? I assume you’re taking Scotch.”
“As a good Britisher,” Terry said with a smile, “how could I take anything else? I do like ice, though. Americanized to that extent.”
“Quite Americanized, I’d say,” Kitty told him. “Goodness, how exciting it all is! I think you were fearfully brave.”
“I felt it was the least I could do,” the M’Bulu said modestly.
“It was so clever of you to think of it. I don’t see how ever you did.”
“Oh, it was my idea,” Terry said quickly. “It was my idea, right enough.”
“Did you think I was implying it wasn’t?” Kitty asked with a merry laugh. “Goodness, I’m not that stupid. I hope I know shrewdness when I see it, by this time.”
“If so,” Terry said with a little bow, “it must be because like recognizes like.”
“Now I know why you were such a smash in London,” she said. “Not only clever, but flattering as well. The only reason I mentioned it,” she added, looking him straight in the eye with a candid smile, “is because there has been some talk going ’round that Felix Labaiya put you up to it.”
“Now, why,” the M’Bulu demanded slowly, a trifle too slowly she felt, “would Felix Labaiya want to do a thing like that?”
“I don’t know. But you know how rumors start in this town.”
“Felix had nothing to do with it,” he said firmly. “It was quite my own idea.” A dark scowl banished his customary smile for a second. “I think these are the great hypocrites, here. I think it is time someone showed them up.”
“And how neatly it all fits in with your resolution at the UN,” Lord Maudulayne said politely. “It couldn’t have been better if someone had planned it that way.”
“I planned it that way,” Terry said, again with the dark scowl. Then his expression changed to one of growing amusement. “That Felix, though, I will tell you. He is an imaginative fellow, that one. I think it will be some time before the world discovers all the surprises of which he is capable.” And, as though overcome by some vast secret joke, he threw back his head and gave his shout of delighted laughter.
“He came up with one surprise sufficient for us in your Gorotoland resolution,” Lord Maudulayne remarked. The M’Bulu shrugged.
“It was inevitable.”
“And now you are sure it will pass,” Kitty said. He shrugged again.
“With the vote in First Committee, and now this? Inevitable.”
“You are very sure of yourself, too. Another reason for popularity, I suppose.”
“Oh, well,” he said, and he said it with a deliberately patronizing tone that he hoped would get through the armor of these two self-possessed and charming people before him, “why should you worry if you lose us? You have so much real estate.”
But they disappointed him, for Kitty laughed and the Ambassador chuckled.
“How simple and wonderful life is when you look at it simply and wonderfully,” Kitty observed. “And now I think we really must go and circulate. Everyone will be wondering and waiting. It is always fatal in Washington to let people wonder and wait. Their imaginations are prompted to supply so many explanations that don’t exist. Will you escort me, please?”
“Gladly,” Terry said. “I have enjoyed our talk.”
“We, too,” Lord Maudulayne said. “We must do it again one of these days.”
“When I return as head of independent Gorotoland.”
“A year from now, then,” his host said cheerfully.
“Oh, much sooner,” Terry said. Kitty laughed and linked her arm through his.
“So determined, too,” she said. “Heads up, backs straight, eyes forward, and here we go!”
And with a style that was recognizable wherever one came upon it around the world, the Ambassador and his lady went forth to meet their guests as pleasant and imperturbable as the day was long. For just a moment, struck and a little awed by their self-control, and remembering the misty isle of his education and adolescence, their guest had a sudden poignant vision of a thousand gallant banners going by, passing into history, never to return. But only for a moment: because for him, as for all the other M’Bulus of this world, black, brown, yellow, and white, it was really a matter of the greatest inconsequence whether the homeland of his hosts was successful or unsuccessful, hurt or not hurt, whether it retreated graciously or scrambled home in awkward disarray, whether history treated it fairly or unfairly. He couldn’t really, Terrible Terry told himself as he dismissed his memories and strode forward to Circulate with a capital C, care less.
And there they came, the Secretary of State thought as the oaken doors swung open and the colorful trio advanced upon them, Mother Britain and her little changeling child—except that it was not quite certain, given the M’Bulu’s pleased expression and the tiniest line of tension around Kitty’s lips, who was shepherding whom. It was a tough problem for them, he thought sympathetically, forgetting for a second that it was a tough problem for his own country as well. As if to prevent any such illusory lapses, the Indian Ambassador approached and reminded him.
“Mr. Secretary,” he said with a polite hiss, “and everyone’s beloved, Mrs. Knox. How delightful to see you here at this delightful reception for our young friend.”
“It’s nice to see you too, Mr. Ambassador,” Beth said. “We were hoping you would be able to come down from the UN for the festivities.”
“I was able to get away,” Krishna Khaleel said importantly, “but only just. We had a meeting of the Asian-African states this afternoon, you know, concerning the—the unfortunate episode in South Carolina yesterday, and it lasted for some time.”
“Oh?” Orrin said. “And how does that concern the Afro-Asian states?”
“The Asian-African states are concerned by everything that touches upon the question of color. It is one of the major things that divide the world, of course. Sometimes it makes for a shade of difference in the way various states approach various matters. Our shade,” he said, and laughed merrily. “What a pun!”
“You slay me as always, K.K.,” the Secretary told him. “And what was the final purport of your conference?”
The Indian Ambassador looked grave.
“We were very disturbed, of course. It was even proposed by some of our hotheads, like Mali and Ghana, that we should adopt an informal resolution condemning you. But the wiser heads prevailed.”
“I know yours was one of them,” Beth said with a comfortable assurance that brought a flattered smile from the Indian Ambassador. “You lend such stability to the proceedings up there.”
“I will admit,” Krishna Khaleel said, “that it was basically my suggestion that was adopted. This was: to let it pass, in view of the quick amends, as it were, being made by the President, and by you, Orrin. I said you were obviously embarrassed by what had happened, and that, given sufficient goodwill and tolerance on all sides, everything could be straightened out to the satisfaction of all those who, appreciating honest efforts to correct wrong, as it were, would be willing to give the benefit of the doubt, as it were, to those who made the efforts. And, of course, applaud the corrections once made, as it were.”
“I appreciate that, as it were,” Orrin Knox said. “Of course, really, I don’t see where anybody at the UN has any right to be concerned about it at all. It seems to me it’s a matter between us and Terry.”
“Oh, at the UN we concern ourselves about everything!” K.K. said with a laugh. “You know that, Orrin.”
“I do indeed. Well, thank you, K.K., I appreciate it very much. I hope he’s happy with what we’re doing for him, even if it does make us look slightly ridiculous now, after Harley’s initial adamant stand at his press conference.”
“But that is the great charm of it, my dear friend! For many of us, it is delightful to see you slightly ridiculous. And, of course, it does you no harm, really. We admire you for having the courage to reverse an untenable position, even if under pressure, and pay proper attention to one of the world’s great young leaders.”
“One of the world’s great young leaders shouldn’t be complaining now,” the Secretary said. “I had him and the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate and the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House to lunch at the Department this noon. And now this. And then the White House dinner. Almost everybody came to the luncheon, including Congressman Jawbone Swarthman of South Carolina, and I’m glad he did, because that kept everything extremely polite and absolutely noncontroversial. But I think it flattered Terry’s ego, which I suspect is monumental.”
“Monumental,” Krishna Khaleel agreed. “But perhaps necessary to rise to power in Africa. Things are so chaotic there.”
“What will you do when he becomes independent and drives all the Indians out of Gorotoland, K.K.?” the Secretary asked with some relish. “Give him a state dinner in New Delhi?”
“I should hope,” the Indian Ambassador said stiffly, “that he would not desire to pursue so unfriendly a course. If he does, then”—he shook his head—“who knows? I would hope we should be able to understand his motivations.”
“I’m sure that will make everything all right with your people. As long as they understand his motivations. And of course you can probably always get a loan from us to help you resettle them in India.”
“We will simply continue to hope,” Krishna Khaleel said firmly, “that he does no such things. Excuse me, now; there is the Ambassador of Panama and I must say hello to him. I shall see you at the White House later, and then at the UN next week, Orrin?”
“I think I’ll stay down here for a few days, unless there’s something quite urgent to be attended to up there.”
“Oh,” the Indian Ambassador said, and a veiled expression came and went swiftly in his eyes. “Oh, I see.”
“You did say there would be nothing from the Asian-African bloc, didn’t you, Mr. Ambassador?” Beth asked. K.K. nodded.
“I did say that. And now excuse me. The Ambassador of Panama, as I said.” And with a smile and a bow he was off across the room to a little group that included Felix and Patsy Labaiya, Bob Leffingwell, LeGage Shelby, and a couple of attaches from the Embassy of Sierra Leone.
“You know what I think?” Beth said, and her husband nodded.
“You think K.K. was telling me that Felix is cooking up something and I’d better get back up there. But what can Felix possibly cook up? He’s busy with his Gorotoland resolution, and this thing will blow over shortly. Anyway, Hal’s there, and there’s nothing the UN can do. They have no jurisdiction.”
“Does that matter? I think something else, too. I think we’d better follow K.K. right over.”
“I’d rather talk to Claude and Kitty,” the Secretary said, “but I expect you’re right … Well, Felix,” he said as they arrived on the other side of the room and the group, a little self-consciously and awkwardly, opened out to include them, “I hear you’re cooking up a little surprise for us.” He was rewarded by a startled glance from the Panamanian Ambassador, but it was instantly obliterated by his usual smooth and self-contained smile.
“Washington!” he said. “How the town talks! I can’t possibly imagine what it could be.”
“Neither can I,” Orrin said with a cheerful smile, “so I thought I’d ask.” He looked candidly about the group, K.K., Patsy, Bob Leffingwell, LeGage, each presenting his own version of innocence. “Nothing?” he asked, looking from eye to eye as they all shook their heads with expressions of puzzled amusement. “Well, this new job must be making me both suspicious and gullible. I could have sworn there was something to it. But since you all reassure me, I’ll put my suspicions to bed. Bob, how have you been?”
“Very well, thank you, Orrin,” Bob Leffingwell said with just the right degree of noncommittal courtesy. Their meetings had been few since the Senate battle over his appointment as Secretary of State, and he and the man who had beaten him had not gone out of their way to make contact. Many eyes in the room were upon them, and there was no point in more than the most casual cordiality. But Orrin could not resist a dig at Patsy, who looked slightly nonplussed, for once.
“Have you signed him up to manage Ted’s campaign yet? I hear that’s in the wind, too.”
“Why,” she began hurriedly, “I don’t know what—” and then in mid-sentence decided to change course. “Why, yes,” she said with a candid smile, “we’d certainly love to have him if he’d come, but you know HOW HE IS. There are times when he’s ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE.”
“Yes, I know,” the Secretary said, and was pleased to note that this prompt agreement with its overtones of past controversy flustered her too, though Bob Leffingwell didn’t turn a hair. “Where is Ted? Did he go right back to California?”
“He’s flying out at seven-thirty,” Patsy said, and added with a satisfaction of her own, “He has a special appointment with the President at six-thirty, you know. The President asked him to stop by and discuss matters of interest to the party before he went back.”
“That’s nice,” Orrin said. “I’m glad he’s keeping in touch with us.”
“Yes,” she said, “isn’t it nice that the President feels he can rely upon HIM for advice in these difficult days.”
He laughed.
“Patsy, you’re priceless. Good luck if you decide to go with them, Bob. I intend to do everything I can to make it difficult for Ted to get the nomination, of course. Life won’t be dull.”
“I’m sure he intends to reciprocate,” Bob Leffingwell said. “It should be a lively few months.”
“I’m not worried,” Orrin said with a calm he did not entirely feel, but which he knew would irritate them and which was also politically necessary. “Felix, I’ll see you at the UN soon, I suppose. Your resolution comes up for a vote on—”
“Tuesday, isn’t it?” the Ambassador of Panama said, looking at K.K. for confirmation. “Barring,” he added with a pleasant smile, “unforeseen developments.”
“Will you be coming up for it, Mr. Secretary?” LeGage asked. “I’m going back myself after the President’s dinner tonight, if there’s anything you want me to tell Hal Fry—”
“I don’t know yet whether I’ll be there or not. Nothing for Hal at the moment, but I’ll let you know if anything develops. You’ve been busy, I see—all these pickets out front. Will you picket the White House, too? That will be nice.”
“It wasn’t my doing,” LeGage said earnestly. “That was the local office’s idea.”
“Someday,” the Secretary said, “you will have to decide where your loyalties really lie, ’Gage. If you aren’t happy with U.S. policies, maybe you’d better get off the delegation.”
LeGage looked both abashed and defiant.
“Only one man can remove me,” he said sullenly, “and he hasn’t.”
“Of course not,” Patsy Labaiya said indignantly. “OF COURSE NOT. After all, isn’t this a FREE COUNTRY? Whatever do you mean, Orrin, trying to intimidate a perfectly honest expression of support for the bravest man we’ve had visit us in YEARS. You ought to be ashamed not to be speaking out for Terry yourself. My brother did.”
“Sometimes I think,” the Secretary snapped, “that your brother doesn’t do anything else but speak out for people. But I suppose it all makes for votes, and that’s all that matters, isn’t it?”
“There are times,” Patsy said angrily, “when that IS all that matters. Such as next year at the polls. YOU’LL find out.”
For a startled moment they all stood suspended, amazed by their own emotions, paralyzed by the abrupt personal turn of the conversation. Orrin and Patsy stared at one another blankly, K.K. looked terribly anxious and upset, LeGage appeared startled and alarmed. Felix had a secret little smile that did not quite conceal the wary speculation in his eyes as he looked at the Secretary, Bob Leffingwell was impassive, Beth Knox concerned. Into their tense little circle came their hostess with a no-nonsense air.
“I’ve been watching all you indignant people for several minutes,” she said cheerfully, “as has everyone else, of course, and I think it’s quite time that you broke it up and got drunk, or something. The bar’s going to close in ten minutes, and that’s fair warning to all. Felix, come talk to me about the UN, and Patsy, go and rescue Terry from the Norwegian Ambassadress. I’m sure he doesn’t want to hear any more about fishing rights in the North Sea.”
“Good for you, Kitty,” Beth said with a humorous relief as the moment broke and they scattered quickly and a little sheepishly in obedience to their hostess’ command. “I was wondering how to rescue this bull in a china shop from his indiscretions. The way to do it, obviously, was just to be a bull in a china shop oneself. Or cow, rather. But that doesn’t sound very charming, does it?” She chuckled as Kitty gave her arm an affectionate squeeze and moved off to other guests. “Come along, Mr. Secretary. You’ve spread enough diplomatic sweetness and light for one reception.”
For a moment her husband continued to look stubborn; then he grinned suddenly.
“Alas,” he said, “where is that ‘New Orrin Knox’ I’ve been reading about? Patsy sounds off and, right away, there’s the old one, snarling away. How can you stand being married to such an incorrigible?”
“It’s never bothered me in the least, except that now and again I still manage to be surprised at the inadvertent moments you choose to let it go.” She smiled. “However, I think it’s about time Patsy got told off on that subject, and who more fitting to do it?”
“That’s what I thought. It’ll be all over Washington by the time we reach the White House tonight, but who gives a damn?”
“Not you, obviously. And I don’t think it was such a bad idea to remind Felix that you can be hard to handle if pushed too far.”
“You don’t like Felix very well, do you?”
“No,” she said, looking across the room, where their hostess was now engaged in lively conversation with the Panamanian Ambassador. “And I don’t think Kitty does, either.”
Her husband grunted.
“That’s good enough for me. If you two are suspicious, there must be something wrong.”
“I can’t get it out of my head that what happened in Charleston wasn’t all coincidence. Why don’t you ask Cullee? Terry’s staying with him, and he might have an inkling.”
He nodded.
“I will, when we get to 1600.”
But later at the White House, in the most hurried of murmured conversations as the guests went into the East Room for the concert after dinner, the Congressman proved both evasive and uneasy. This was not like Cullee, and the Secretary puzzled over it for some time—until he heard from him much later that night in a call at home, in fact.
And now, Terry told himself with a mounting excitement, he was coming to the climax of his visit to the great United States. He had shown them up in the eyes of all the world, and here they were honoring him with a state dinner at the White House, just as he had demanded. Their bumbling President had insulted him, and he had taken his vengeance in a way from which they would not soon recover in the minds and hearts of all the earth’s colored peoples. Now they were humbling themselves before him, the M’Bulu of Mbuele, the heir to Gorotoland, because they had no choice. Ah, you are proud, he told them fiercely inside his mind as the Embassy limousine with its standards fluttering slowed for the West Gate, carefully found its way through several hundred DEFY picketers with placards waving, and turned into the long curving drive to the White House portico: but I am prouder. And I have made you do as I said; I, Terry.
“This is such a lovely house,” said Kitty beside him. “I always so enjoy coming here.”
“Yes,” he said, looking with an exaggerated approval at the Marines in dress uniform who lined the drive, rigid at attention at regular intervals. He gave a patronizing little laugh. “They do things well on their formal occasions. But, of course, not as well as you. No one does them as well as you.”
“Thanks, old boy,” Lord Maudulayne said. “It’s always nice to have your commendation, no matter how minor the point. It’s so rare that it’s doubly appreciated. We must bring you up the Mall with the Queen behind the Horse Guards and the Household Cavalry, next time you’re in London.”
“You may, at that,” the M’Bulu said cheerfully. “You just may, at that.”
“Everything’s going very well for you, isn’t it,” the British Ambassador said. “Good show all around. U.K. on the run, U.S. in wild confusion, UN bowing and scraping—the world’s going well for Terry. Right?”
“I cannot complain about it. But should it not go well for one, when one has justice on one’s side?”
“It should,” Lord Maudulayne agreed with a dryness that was not lost upon his companion. “It should.”
“Possibly there are varying degrees of justice,” the M’Bulu said quickly. “Possibly there is more on one side than on the other.”
“There’s hardly time to get into a philosophic discussion of that right now, old fellow,” the Ambassador said as the car rolled to a gentle halt and one of the President’s military aides stepped smartly down the steps to open the door. “Even if we could possibly compose our differing points of view, which I doubt. Here we are. Enjoy your glory.”
“I shall,” Terrible Terry said with a rather savage smile. “You may be sure I shall.”
“You know,” the President said in a puzzled tone as he finished knotting his white tie in the master bedroom on the third floor, “that Ted Jason’s an odd fellow. I don’t know why he wanted to come and see me. I couldn’t very well refuse when he asked, but it was a very peculiar conversation.”
“What’s that, dear?” Lucille said politely from the bathroom, and he raised his voice and repeated, “A very odd conversation!”
“Yes, it is,” she said pleasantly. “You seem to be talking to yourself. I can’t get the drift of it.”
“Well, come out here,” he said, rather more loudly than he intended, “and perhaps you will. I said it was an odd conversation I had with Ted Jason. Governor Jason. Governor—”
“I know,” she said, bustling into the room as she always did, plump and pink and soft and cuddlesome. (“I do love Mrs. H.,” one society reporter had recently cooed to another just before they proceeded to rip Mrs. H. to tatters. “She always looks like a marshmallow dipped in peppermint sauce. So sweet.” There had been a knowing laugh and they had plunged at once into a savage dissection of the First Lady.) “I know exactly who Governor Jason is, dear, so don’t shout. He has an odd family, too.”
“He may be the next President of the United States, so perhaps you should be more respectful.”
“I know who the next President of the United States is going to be,” she said comfortably. “Here, do let me straighten that tie; you can never seem to get it quite at the right angle.”
“And who’s that?” he demanded, submitting patiently.
“You,” she said, pushing and tugging and patting and whisking with little clucking noises of dismay and finally of approval. “I’ve never had the slightest doubt of it.”
“Ha!” he said with a scornful snort. “You haven’t?”
“No, dear. Now, do try to be nice to this funny young man who’s coming—”
“I’m on record in ten dozen places,” the President pointed out reasonably, “as saying I won’t run. And I’ll be nice to this funny young man.”
“Oh, I know what you say,” she agreed, handing him a pin and an enormous lavender orchid corsage, “but that doesn’t make any difference. Who else could it be?”
“I can think of two, out of two hundred and fifty million,” he said, obediently pinning the corsage for her. She gave a deprecating little smile and dismissed the idea.
“Neither Ted nor Orrin,” she said placidly, “could possibly do it half as well as you do. And the country likes you so. Why should it want anyone else? And how could anyone else get it unless you withdrew? And you aren’t going to withdraw.”
“But I have withdrawn,” he said with a helpless laugh.
“Yes, dear, but of course nobody believes you for one minute.”
“Now, look,” he said, “you and I have been married for forty-one years. Do I lie, or do I tell the truth?”
She looked quite shocked.
“Oh, you tell the truth. At least, you think it’s the truth at the time.”
“It is the truth!”
“Yes, dear. Now tell me how I look?”
“I am not going to run for President of the United States!”
“Fifteen months from now, on January twentieth, Harley M. Hudson of Michigan will be sworn in for his first elected term as President. I don’t know why you make such a fuss about it.” She dimpled suddenly and, stretching on tiptoes, kissed the end of his nose. “After all, I wouldn’t feel safe with anyone else. That’s why I married you.”
He chuckled and relaxed.
“It was mutual. But you must learn to have more faith in the public statements of your elected officials.”
“You’ll see. How do I look?”
“Oh, no, I won’t. You’ll see. You look just like the girl I married. How do I look? I have to impress that young whippersnapper with the majesty of the office.”
“Don’t try,” she advised. “You’re always so much more impressive when you don’t try. He’ll be impressed enough.”
“I don’t know,” he said grimy. “I think after Charleston the only thing he’s impressed with is Terence Ajkaje.”
“Do you think Ted Jason put him up to it?”
“Either Ted or Felix Labaiya. Ted was very smooth on the subject, of course. He gave me that statesman’s glance with the silver hair gleaming and told me in several thousand well-rounded evasive words how much he regretted the episode but also, of course, how much he regretted that we were vulnerable to such a thing. And how much he regretted, too, that I had given Terry the original snub that might have made him feel so vindictive. He wasn’t saying it had, he gave me to understand; it just might have.”
“Don’t you think he would have done it anyway?” she asked with a shrewdness the society reporters would not have given her credit for. “Don’t you think he planned to do it when he went down there?”
“I don’t doubt it for a minute. But of course you couldn’t convince the world of that now. I’d like to know for sure who put him up to it, though. It would illuminate some things.”
“It was really very brave of him, all things considered.”
“Oh, it was,” he agreed. “I don’t deny that for a minute. Bravery springs from many causes, though—not always as noble as the world likes to think.”
“Will it die down, do you think?”
“Oh, yes. All this fuss over him here ought to smooth his ruffled feathers. And Tommy Davis’ injunction concerning the school itself will stand until the full Court can get to it, so that situation will move along. With more un-happiness on both sides, no doubt; but at least it will move, which is the important thing.”
“Then it’s up to us to give him a very pleasant evening and send him back to the UN happy.”
“That’s right. Maybe it will show the Africans and Asians we aren’t so bad, after all.”
“It’s going to take a lot more than that,” she said. He sighed, and nodded.
“I’m afraid so.”
There was a knock on the door and the naval aide put his head inside.
“His Royal Highness is here, Mr. President.”
“Very well,” the President said. “Take him to the Blue Room and we’ll be right down.”
And now they were all caught up in the stylized formality of a state dinner at the White House, as the long line of arriving limousines began to turn off Pennsylvania Avenue in steady procession, rolling at regular intervals of a minute or two under the portico to discharge their passengers. The Hamiltons were among the first arrivals; Bob and Dolly Munson followed soon after with the Secretary of State and Mrs. Knox; other Cabinet members and their wives came after; the French Ambassador and Celestine Barre and other members of the diplomatic corps, with a heavy emphasis on Africa and Asia: Krishna Khaleel, the Pakistani Ambassador and his wife, the Ambassadors and Ambassadresses of Guinea, Ghana, Sudan, Libya, Congo Brazzaville, Congo Leopoldville, the United Arab Republic, Morocco, Tanganyika, Kenya, Nigeria, Mali, Uganda, Liberia, Ethiopia, many in their colorful native costumes. Justice Davis of the Supreme Court arrived with the editorial director of the Washington Post; Senator Cooley, looking grumpy and as though it were much against his better judgment, in the company of his South Carolina colleague, Chairman J. B. Swarthman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; other members of the Foreign Relations and Foreign Affairs committees. The Chief Justice and three other members of the Supreme Court, and their wives, came next; the editor of the Washington Daily News; several owners of the Washington Evening Star; assorted society editors; columnists and correspondents; several of television’s most noted commentators. A State Department protocol officer, standing unobtrusively just inside the door, was pleased to find that he could place a check mark after every name on the list of expected guests. He was not surprised. The President’s sudden decision to entertain the M’Bulu had blasted twenty-three scheduled dinner parties, including Dolly Munson’s, which it replaced, but nobody minded. When the White House beckoned, one came if one were alive, inside the country, and outside an institution.
Thus it was that there had arrived by special messenger at noon the day before, at exactly 52 homes housing 38 couples and 14 single persons, the chaste white card, 4½ by 5½ inches, bearing top center the chaste, small Presidential seal in gold and beneath it in flowing script the information that the President and Mrs. Hudson requested the pleasure of the company of Mr. and Mrs. Mumble (or Mr. Murmur, as the case might be), at dinner on Saturday at eight o’clock. Attached to each card was a smaller white card, bearing in the same calligraphy the advisory, “White tie”; a name-pass to be surrendered at the West Gate; and a slip of paper, this also in script but obviously mimeographed, reading, “On the occasion of the visit of His Royal Highness the M’Bulu of Mbuele.”
Armed with these bona fides, the guests arrived; were greeted by uniformed aides who waited in the entrance hall where the red-coated Marine Band, nestled in a sea of potted palms, played welcoming light-opera airs; and were escorted to a small table down the hall, where each received an envelope with the name of his or her dinner partner. Then they were shown a large, detailed outline of the M-shaped table, with appropriate indications of the seats they would occupy, and were then led to the massive gold, white, and blue expanse of the East Room; deposited in a chatting, steadily-growing line; and told politely but firmly to stay put until further notice.
At eight twenty-nine, all guests having arrived, the Air Force Band, stationed in a corner of the East Room, struck up “Hail to the Chief” and the President, the First Lady, and their guest of honor, having passed the time in the Blue Room in innocuous chatter which touched on nothing any of them was thinking about, appeared at the door. “Hail to the Chief’ concluded, there was a long roll on the drums, and with a flourish the band plunged into something else that brought a start of recognition and then much humor down the line. For a moment the M’Bulu looked puzzled; but the tune sounded familiar, and with a sudden start the former graduate student of Harvard realized what it was. He glanced quickly at his host and was startled to find that for just a second the President gave him the slightest of winks. With a sudden broad grin, he returned it; and so, to the strains of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” played with solid relish by the band, the glittering assemblage passed through the receiving line (“Miss Mumble, Mr. President—sorry, Mrs. Mumble—Mr. Murmur, Your Royal Highness”) through the Green Room, the Blue Room, the Red Room, and so to the State Dining Room, where the hungry throng fell at last upon the lavish repast.
There, seated at the table covered with gleaming damask and decorated with masses of chrysanthemums and autumn leaves, dining off the White House gold service in a setting of fabulous beauty, it was not too easy for the guests to exchange the thoughts that many of them had concerning the intriguing series of events that had brought the kindly if sometimes awkward President to this implicit and gorgeous apology to the dashing young giant who sat beside him like a piece of midnight swathed in gold and green. Yet there was evident in the glances of the Africans and Asians a subtle but deep-seated satisfaction, a lively sense of the humiliation of their host and his country which thrilled them all, no matter what their other differences and antagonisms might be. On this they were all agreed, and it gave them a certain powerful unity of attitude, made even stronger because it was not matched in the remainder of the company. Senator Cooley might feel angry and resentful (he had carefully been placed between Celestine Barre and Dolly Munson, who did their best to soothe him), and some others might also have no doubts of where they stood, but in the more complex and conscientious minds of many at that pleasant board, not including LeGage Shelby but certainly including Cullee Hamilton, there were doubts and worries, shame for what had happened in Charleston, shame for what it symbolized, angry and conflicting emotions about it, and also, in the hearts and minds of many, a desperate attempt to try to find some fair ground on which all disputing claims and all opposing prejudices could be composed and led to work together toward constructive solution. None of this, however—the smug, superior, supercilious hatred or the troubled, uncertain attempt to be fair—broke through the surface of that distinguished assemblage, whose members talked merrily of this and that as they ate their way steadily through Sea Food Marguery, Broiled Filet Mignon, and assorted side dishes, in an atmosphere inwardly electric with racial tensions and outwardly bland with the necessary suppression of true emotion that so often characterizes the formal occasions of Washington officialdom.
Down upon them from the marble mantel over the fireplace looked the graven words of the second President, John Adams, to his wife Abigail:
“I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessings on This House and on all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but wise and honest men ever rule under this roof.”
In a world John Adams never knew and perhaps could not have understood, the man who ruled there now, doing his best to be wise and honest, chatted pleasantly with his difficult guest; but the blessings upon This House that night were troubled and unclear, and there was no certainty anywhere in such savage times that wisdom and honesty would be enough to protect John Adams’ successor and the hopeful people who looked to him to lead them safely through the wilderness of envy and deceit in which they found themselves confused and wandering.
In an hour’s time, after the last wine had been downed, the last Baked Alaska gulped away, the President rose and toasted his guest in a brief and formalized statement, graciously noncommittal. His guest responded in the same terms and the company lifted glasses to them both. Then the guests separated, the ladies to the Blue Room for coffee, liqueur, and gossip, the men to the Red Room for gossip, liqueur, and coffee. Half an hour passed in this customary ritual, and then the gathering regrouped to return to the East Room, there to sit in gold-leafed chairs and listen to forty-five minutes of piano-playing by one of the nation’s mop-haired virtuosos, flown down from New York especially for the occasion.
During the somewhat informal procession to the East Room, the Secretary of State was observed to murmur hastily to the Congressman from California, who shook his head and seemed embarrassed; the junior Senator from California, Raymond Robert Smith, was observed to hover nervously around Governor Jason’s sister, Patsy Labaiya, and the Ambassador of Panama; LeGage Shelby could be observed in happily animated conversation with the Ambassador of Guinea; Mr. Justice Davis and the senior Senator from South Carolina were observed to be pointedly not speaking to one another; and the French Ambassador was observed to stroll arm-in-arm toward the concert with the Ambassador of Ghana while his wife offered a wide-eyed and respectful audience to the evidently profound comments of the Ambassador of Cameroun.
And so presently, after the virtuoso had performed, and with a winsome smile and a toss of his rambling locks had vouchsafed one brief encore, the President once more arose and with a smile indicated to his guests that their evening at 1600 Pennsylvania was over. He murmured something to his guest of honor, who smiled and apparently agreed, and nodded to the Secretary of State, who shortly thereafter sent his wife home with the Munsons and lingered behind casually. Fifteen minutes later, so skilled and practiced were the White House staff and the military aides at this routine, the last guest had been coated, carred, and carried away. The bands departed, the cleaning crews went busily to work dismantling the table in the state dining room and waxing the East Room, the First Lady said good night and disappeared to the family quarters on the third floor, and in his study on the second the President faced his two remaining guests with a relaxed and comfortable air.
“Sit down for a moment, Your Highness,” he said, doing the same in a deep leather armchair that he drew up facing the M’Bulu, while Orrin perched on a corner of the Presidential desk. “I won’t keep you for a minute, but I wanted to know if you were satisfied with the evening here.”
The M’Bulu smiled and spread his palms with his charming shrug.
“I cannot complain of a single thing. The company was magnificent, the food was superb, the hospitality was all that one associates with America.” He could not resist a little laugh that somehow sounded more spiteful than amused. “Some parts of America, that is.”
“Yes,” the President said. “Well. We hope that unhappy memory will soon be banished from your mind.”
“The kindness shown me in Washington will surely do much to achieve that objective,” Terry agreed.
“I want you to know also,” the President said, so easily and matter-of-factly that it hardly appeared he was apologizing at all, “that I am sorry they misinterpreted me at my press conference. I probably should have made a formal apology at once, but you know how it is. One assumes certain obviously understandable errors can be forgiven by men of reasonable goodwill.”
“Yes,” Terry said politely, his amicable expression changing a little. A silence fell, during which the Secretary was on the point of shooting out an explosive, “Well?” But he restrained himself, and after a moment the President resumed.
“We can assume, then,” he said gently, “that you don’t hold a grudge against the United States?”
The M’Bulu gave his merriest laugh.
“Oh, heavens! Mr. President, I could not be happier!”
“And this is the end of it, as far as you’re concerned?” Orrin asked. Again there was the rollicking amusement.
“Mr. Secretary, this is the end! … Of course,” he added, more soberly, “I do think that—well, there are some things in your country that are not perfect. I could wish they were better.”
“Yes,” the President said gravely. “You have helped to emphasize them to the whole world, possibly at real risk to your own life, and you have a right to criticize us for them. But we work at it, my impatient young friend. We work at it all the time, and it gets better all the time.”
“Not very fast,” Terry remarked.
“About as fast as a democratic society can move.”
“Then perhaps a democratic society is not the answer to the world’s problems,” the M’Bulu said quickly.
The President nodded.
“Yes, that’s the obvious comment. So narrow it overlooks a great many things having to do with the freedom and dignity of the individual—but obvious.”
“Are rotten eggs and tomatoes part of freedom and dignity?” Terrible Terry inquired, and now he was not smiling at all. “Is trying to win a great victory over little children part of freedom and dignity?”
“Not dignity, no,” the President said. “Surely not. But freedom, yes. Now,” he went on, as the M’Bulu made as if to interrupt, “I may condemn certain practices in your country—we, for instance, abolished slavery here well over a hundred years ago, and it has been a great many years, and then only under the greatest of desperation, that one of us ate another—but that does not stop the United States from supporting independence for Gorotoland, as we expect to do this coming week at the United Nations. We believe you can correct these evils, which some might say were signs of a barbarous and savage and unworthy country, if you are given sufficient tolerance and help and the freedom to solve your problems within their own context. Would you say that was a tolerant, fair-minded attitude, or would you not?”
For a long moment they stared at one another, until the M’Bulu’s eyes finally dropped and he shrugged.
“I would say it is typical of the United States.”
“Is it fair?” the President persisted. His guest gave a sudden laugh and, as always when pressed, an evasive answer.
“Fair, fair! Freedom! Dignity! Such words! All I know is that I have had a delightful evening with charming hosts, and now I must go back to the Hamiltons and get my rest before returning to New York tomorrow.”
“And there are no shenanigans planned for the UN?” Orrin Knox inquired. Again the M’Bulu gave a laugh, startled this time.
“She-nan-i-gans?” he repeated carefully, sounding not at all like a former graduate student at Harvard. “A wonderful word, whose meaning I can guess. No, Mr. Secretary,” he said with a flourish, “I do not think any she-nan-i-gans.”
“Is that a promise?” Orrin asked, and Terrible Terry looked at him with a playful blankness.
“I have nothing in mind but to go back to New York, make my speech to the Assembly, and hope for the best when the vote is taken.”
For a long moment in his turn, the Secretary stared at him, and this time with a bland innocence he stared back and his eyes did not drop.
“Good,” the President said comfortably. “Then we part friends. Let me see you down. Staying with the Hamiltons, you said?” For a second his eyes met Orrin’s and looked away again, but not before the Secretary had responded with the slightest of nods. “Cullee’s a fine Congressman, a fine American. Orrin, wait just a minute and I’ll be right back. I want to talk to you about an invitation I got from Peru today to visit down there.”
But when he had seen his guest safely off in a White House limousine and returned to the comfortable study, minus his predecessor’s coin collection but otherwise the same masculine leather-filled room it had been as long as he could remember it, the Secretary had nothing to report on Cullee.
“He won’t tell me anything. His wife didn’t even want to tell him I was calling, and then he was very guarded, possibly because she was there. Something’s going on.”
“You mean you didn’t believe our distinguished visitor?” the President asked dryly.
The Secretary snorted. “Not a word. No more did you.”
“That’s right,” the President said thoughtfully. “Not a one.”
But that was not the way they heard it at the other end of Sixteenth Street. “Oh, you should have seen them, the two stupid fools,” said Terrible Terry, sprawled in the Hamiltons’ biggest armchair. “They believed it all. No shenanigans at the UN, said the great Orrin Knox, that fool! You don’t hold a grudge against the United States, said the great President. How much of an idiot can a man be! I fooled them! I fooled them!”
“Did you?” Cullee said. “I’m sure you should be very proud of that.”
“Why shouldn’t he be?” Sue-Dan demanded in a tone so sharp that Maudie, bringing in coffee on a tray, stopped short and gave her an exaggerated stare. “And stop staring at me, old woman! Bring that coffee in here, and get out!”
“You’ve no call to speak to Maudie like that,” the Congressman said with an angry sharpness of his own.
“I’ll speak to Maudie any way I—” she began, but he interrupted.
“You’ll speak to Maudie like a lady. She is a lady, even if you’re not. A fine Senator’s wife you’ll be!”
“Senator’s wife!” she said scornfully, as Maudie set down the tray, gave her an insolent look, and flounced out. “That’s a chicken that’ll be a long time coming out of the egg. Go on, Terry; I want to hear about it even if this brave boy doesn’t. His friend Mr. Knox has already been on the phone trying to spy on you.”
“Oh?” said the M’Bulu, all trace of amicability suddenly gone from his face, a dangerous quietness replacing it. “How was that?”
“He called from the White House,” the Congressman said with a patient calm he did not feel, “to tell me you were on your way, that’s all.”
“That’s what he says,” Sue-Dan observed with a sardonic little smile. “That’s what you say, Cullee.”
“All right, suppose he did want to know what was being planned. And suppose I told him. What could you do about it, big boy? Or you either, little gal?”
“Did you tell him—” Terry began, leaning forward tensely in his chair, but Cullee held up a hand.
“Oh, no,” he said in a tone of tired disgust. “I didn’t tell any of your precious secrets. I don’t think it’ll matter much to us, anyway.”
“Who’s us, Cullee?” his wife asked softly. “Who’s ‘us’?”
“‘Us’ is the United States. That’s the country I belong to. Who do you belong to, Sue-Dan?”
“I belong to you, Cullee,” she said sarcastically. Then her tone hardened. “I also belong to the colored race. Terry and me, we belong to the colored race. We wouldn’t expect you to understand that, Cullee.”
“Are ’Gage’s boys and girls still outside?” he asked, ignoring her thrust, though a deep rage at its unfairness welled in his heart; and, going to the window, he drew the draperies and looked out.
The street was quiet at last; the group of DEFY picketers that had been in front of the house all day with big banners proclaiming “TERRY THE COLORED HERO” and “AFRICA WILL FREE AMERICA” was gone. He let the draperies fall back.
“I guess he’s called them off.”
“They’ll be back,” she said with satisfaction. “They’ll be back everywhere they’re needed, until the job is done.”
“I don’t think Cullee cares about the job,” Terry said tauntingly. “He just cares about standing in well with the white man. He doesn’t want to get involved in anything messy.”
“When are you going back to your own country?” the Congressman asked levelly. His guest laughed.
“Are you tired of me already, old Cullee? Well, I guess they are, too. When I get my vote, I’ll go. You can tell your friend the Secretary, if he’s interested.”
‘Tell him yourself. You fool him so well.”
“Well,” the M’Bulu said, “let me put it to you this way: Who do they think they are? All they’ve done to the colored people all these years, and then they think if they issue a pretty invitation and put on a pretty party and the President pats you on the head and says, My boy, be nice, you’ll be nice. Why, hell and damnation!” he exclaimed with his guttural British precision. “Who do they think they are? Who do they think we are?”
“Go to bed, Terry,” Sue-Dan said, finishing her coffee, getting up, and starting for the stairs. “He doesn’t care. You’re talking to a stone wall when you talk to Cullee.”
“Stone walls get broken down,” the M’Bulu observed harshly. His host with a great effort controlled his impulse to shout back in anger.
“Yes, Terry,” he said softly. “Go on to bed. You’re tired and you tire me. We’ll have breakfast at eight and I’ll take you to the plane.”
“Don’t bother,” the M’Bulu said with a grin. “I’ll whistle to Claude Maudulayne and he’ll send an Embassy car ’round.”
“Good night, then,” the Congressman said quietly, and after a moment’s hesitation his guest arose, picked up his robes from the sofa where he had flung them when he got in from the White House, and started slowly after Sue-Dan.
“You coming, Cullee?” she asked from the top of the stairs.
“Why?”
She laughed.
“Suit yourself. Good night, Terry. Be sure you stay in your own bed.”
The M’Bulu threw back his head with a shout of amusement.
“I would love not to, but I am afraid old Cullee would not permit it.”
“You’re right,” the Congressman said with a last halfhearted attempt to be more amiable. “Hospitality doesn’t extend to offering wives in this country. It’s against the rules. Not that Sue-Dan,” he added under his breath with a twist of agony in his heart, “wouldn’t enjoy it.”
He picked up a magazine and dropped aimlessly into the armchair, one leg over its arm, as Maudie came back in to get the coffee tray.
“Don’t like him,” she said grumpily, lowering her voice just enough so that it was inaudible beyond the living room. “Don’t like her. Think I’d best go—”
“Oh, Maudie,” he said in genuine alarm, “don’t do that. I have to have somebody around here I can talk to.”
“Who he think he is, coming to this country and messing things up?” she demanded indignantly. “We gettin’ along down that road without ’no-’count African trash showin’ us what to do. We don’t need African trash.”
“You go to bed, too, Maudie,” he said. “Maybe we’ll all feel better in the morning.”
“He’s trouble,” she said as she started for the kitchen. “He’s Mr. T. for Trouble. T for Terry and Terry for Trouble.” She repeated it like a litany as she went out and left him alone in the softly lighted, luxurious room. “T for Terry and Terry for Trouble. Yes, sir.”
And so at last, he thought, as he looked about the empty room of this house, which used to hold such happiness for him and recently was holding so little, he was alone to think about things for the first time in three days. He had been presented quite an issue by this dashing visitor; this hero of the front pages, the airwaves, and the television cameras; this bright, self-appointed symbol of the colored man’s hopes and the UN’s problems. T for Terry and Terry for Trouble: it was certainly true enough for him.
And doubly so, of course, because, in a sense that he had been vividly aware of ever since he won election to the House, he was indeed trapped between the two races. His every instinct as a Negro had cried out to accept Terry’s taunting challenge to go with him to Henry Middleton School; after the limousine had driven away from “Harmony,” he had stood in the bedroom with hands clenched and said to himself over and over in an agonized whisper, “I should be there. I should be there.” Yet at the same time he had known with an equally agonized certainty that he could not be.
There was herein a conflict so fundamental and yet so subtle that he knew very well that it could never be understood by the great majority of his people. It was a conflict on the practical political level, and, since he was a decent and steady man who felt a great responsibility to his country and a great concern for her welfare, it was on yet another, much higher, much more racking level. The practical aspects of it were easy enough to grasp; Sue-Dan, much as she wanted to be a Senator’s wife, was still capable of accusing him of being afraid to participate so dramatically in the desegregation struggle because it might antagonize his white electorate in California. And this was true. He didn’t like to admit it to himself, but he had to: it was true. He was to some degree bound by the knowledge that even in California he could arouse antagonisms that would be fatal to his public career if he went ahead as fast and as blatantly in that area as LeGage, for instance, was always wanting him to do.
’Gage and Sue-Dan, he thought with a sigh; there was a pair for a man to contend with. Both wanted him to be what he was, his race’s finest representative in the national government; both wanted him to advance to the Senate; and yet neither could resist constantly needling him to take actions so violent in the area of race that they would inevitably destroy his public career, topple him from the House, and make of the Senate a blasted dream.
Well: he wasn’t the only man in public life who was torn many ways by many things, and he probably shouldn’t let it bother him too much. And perhaps it wouldn’t, were it not compounded by the other factor: an ability not given to many of his people to place their problem in perspective, to stand back and judge their needs against the overall necessities of the United States, hard pressed and under fire everywhere, in this most disorderly and irresponsible of centuries.
Never before, he imagined, had humanity been so completely frivolous about its own survival. In a sort of gargantuan joke on everybody, the fabric of a stable world society was ripped and torn on every hand, reason and restraint were tossed to the wind, decency and truth were hurled in history’s waste can, things that were declared to be things that were not, things that were not solemnly hailed as things that were. “Freedom!” they cried, and destroyed freedom in its name. “Progress!” they shouted, and scurried back as fast as they could scramble to the dark night of dictatorship and the death of the mind. And here was one little colored boy, trying to make sense of it all; one little colored boy, he thought grimly, who had been more than well-treated by his white countrymen and therefore felt himself under obligation to be responsible when he approached the matter of the beloved country they shared together.
Did this make him, then, a “white man’s pet,” as LeGage would have it? Because he wouldn’t walk with Terry through obscene women to take a little girl to school, because he wouldn’t engage in the easy slurs of the white man that were such a staple of daily conversation among so many of his people, because he tried to be objective—a desperately difficult thing to do, in this age of organized intolerance of the other fellow’s point of view?
Well, maybe. But he could not honestly believe it. He had some concept of himself better and higher than that. He remembered what his mother had said, shortly before her death, when he was first elected to the House.
“You goin’ there to be a servant to the country,” she had said with the intensity of the dying, staring at him out of the enormous dark eyes in the wasting face. “You be a good one.”
Be a good one. It was an injunction he had always done his best to follow, even now when his wife, his friend, everything, and everyone were conspiring to make it as difficult as possible.
Be a good one.
He got up with a sudden air of decision, crossed the room to the telephone, dialed a number, and said softly to the voice that answered—drowsily, for it was past midnight—“Mr. Secretary?”
From another telephone high in the Waldorf-Astoria in New York there came a muffled, questioning sound fifteen minutes later. The acting head of the United States delegation to the UN was also struggling awake.
“I’m sorry, Hal,” Orrin Knox said. “I didn’t want to wake you, but it seemed best. Cullee Hamilton just called to tell me what Felix has in mind. Are you awake?”
“Yes,” Senator Fry said, obviously making an effort to be instantly bright and receptive and apparently achieving it. “Go right ahead. I’m listening.”
Two minutes later he objected, “But we can stand that, can’t we? It may be a little embarrassing, but—”
“Any other time,” the Secretary agreed, “it would be embarrassing, but we could probably get it quietly killed in committee, or beaten if it had to go to a vote. But with this business of Terry to compound it, it could really do us great damage—very great damage—all over the world. Particularly in the way it’s going to be offered, which ties it in with the other matter. We really may not be able to beat it, with the Afro-Asians as excited as they are … I just called Patsy and woke her up, which I must say I enjoyed doing because of a little argument earlier in the evening that I’ll tell you about when I see you, and she said Felix was on the Pennsylvania Railroad sleeper to New York. She was a little vague, I suspect deliberately, as to where and when you could reach him tomorrow, but I’d like you to see him if you possibly can. Tell him that if he will hold off on this, I’ll begin serious talks with him at once on that Panama matter he’s been after. He’ll know the one.”
“Is it important enough to head him off on this?” Hal Fry asked in some surprise. “What is it, cession of the Canal?”
“No, but in that area. So will you see him, please?”
There was a momentary hesitation and the Secretary caught it up at once.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, now, what?”
“Well, it’s just that—it’s my day to go up the Hudson, you know? I haven’t been able to get there in a couple of weeks, and I felt I should. Not that it makes any difference,” Hal Fry said with a sadness so deep it made the Secretary want to cry, “but I think I should. However, under the circumstances—”
“No,” Orrin said, “you go. What time will you be back?”
“Oh, about three, I suppose.”
“Well, all right. But do see Felix then for sure, okay? Because it could be quite vital. The stakes are suddenly much higher all around than they have been. I’m counting on you.”
“Sure thing. When will you be coming up?”
“I guess Monday morning, now. I hadn’t planned to, but there it is. The world doesn’t stand still for plans, nowadays. Now go back to sleep and get some more rest. You need it.”
“I took it easy today; I feel much better. And Orrin—thanks about tomorrow.”
“Certainly. You know you’re very welcome. Just be sure and see Felix when you get back.”
“Right.”
12
The day was glorious as he turned off West Seventy-second Street onto Riverside Drive and drove north toward the George Washington Bridge. The sky was bright with the exaggerated blue of autumn, a very few clearly defined clouds drifted white above the New Jersey Palisades, a lone river steamer plowed slowly up the wind-whipped channel of the Hudson, and close to the churning gray water the sea gulls dipped and swung. Not many cars were on the Drive at ten o’clock on this beautiful Sunday morning, and he drove with the feeling, sometimes unexpectedly granted even in the city of New York, that he was master of the universe. It was a feeling he would have enjoyed any other time, but today, as always on these visits that now extended back over so many years, he felt only a sadness so deep he wondered if he would ever recover from the burden. Each time, of course, he did, or thought he did, but each new time the pain returned as crushing as before.
This, however, was something he must try not to think about too much, even though the years did not lessen it as years were supposed to do. One could adjust to certain things, but one could never really accept them; the aching protest remained, no matter how dutifully one made obeisance to the Lord’s unfathomable will. It was so unjust, so unnecessary, so unfair—but he must stop that. It never solved anything, helped anything, or got him anywhere in his endless argument with a destiny that had turned out to be much darker than he had ever dreamed it would be when he first embarked upon it.
Not, of course, that the world was aware, save in the most casual way, of the void that lay beneath his outwardly successful career. “If, now and again, the senior Senator from West Virginia seems gripped by a melancholy beyond that normally brought by the endless contentions of men at the United Nations,” Time had said in its cover story on him three months ago, “he perhaps has reason.” There had been the briefest of comments, a genuinely kind reference, as though it were something the magazine had to include but did not relish, to his personal tragedy. Back home, it was rarely mentioned, seldom thought of, hardly known. His constituents, and many of his friends, had only a vague notion that there was something unhappy there. Fortunately his fundamental good nature and likable character were such that few really remembered and understood and felt the kind of sympathy that was, in itself, a pain.
For this, in all honesty, he was grateful, for he did not know for sure whether he could bear what he had to bear if it were the object of a constantly expressed general commiseration. There were things it was best that society not notice too much; some doors it was best, by mutual agreement, to keep closed. This was one of them. Nothing could be done about it, and endless expressions of sorrow could only make more difficult a burden that at no time was easy. He was grateful to society for forgetting. It did not help him forget, of course, but it made his remembering a little easier.
And so as usual, he told himself with a bitter self-sarcasm as he swung over the massive bridge to the Palisades Parkway and started the scenic run above the river toward West Point and Newburgh and his destination not far beyond, he had once again worked himself into the perfect frame of mind for it. Why did he always do this? Why could he not achieve the serenity of acceptance that he had sought in vain to achieve over the empty years? Why, why, why? … Well: he knew the answer to that, right enough. Because it was the sort of thing no man could accept serenely, unless he was a saint or until he was dead.
Best think about the UN, he decided hastily; that was certainly problem enough to fill any man’s mind for the remainder of the ride. He had watched it feeding on its own tensions in the past three days, the endless self-cannibalizing of ideas, intentions, motivations, hopes, fears, objectives, ambitions, speculation, gossip, that went on all the time but always stepped up to an exaggerated pace whenever some new, unusual event occurred in the world to provoke it. What had begun as an unfortunate but probably harmless comedy of errors in the President’s inadvertent press conference remark and his first reaction to the M’Bulu’s visit had been transformed abruptly by the latter’s dramatic gesture in South Carolina into something far more dangerous and troublesome. And now Felix Labaiya was stepping in to make it even worse. And behind Felix, he supposed, either as a direct party in interest or just for the hell of it, was the Soviet Union.
And yet why, he challenged himself abruptly, should he so quickly assume that the Soviets had anything to do with it? Wasn’t he being quite unjust to Felix, who after all had never given any overt cause for such suspicions? Of course there was gossip about him in the corridors and the Lounge, but, then, there was gossip about everyone on some count or other. No one had ever caught Felix out in anything that could be attributed beyond question to Soviet influence. Why should one assume now, just because something was embarrassing to the United States, that Soviet influence was calling the tune? Might not Felix honestly feel this way? Many delegates did, particularly among the newer states. Why shouldn’t Felix arrive independently at the same judgment?
Furthermore, the assumption of Communist influence was too pat. Like many a United States delegate, Hal’s first impulse on being assigned to the United Nations had been to assume, for a while, that Communist malevolence was behind everything hostile to the United States. It did not take him long to perceive that while the malevolence existed, it did not encompass every antagonism, or inspire every hostility, to his country and the West. If the West weren’t vulnerable on so many points, he was honest enough to admit, it wouldn’t suffer attack on so many points. If his own country weren’t vulnerable, it wouldn’t now be such a sitting duck for the double-barreled assault of the Ambassador of Panama and the heir to Gorotoland.
Thus his thoughts went as the river grew narrower and more lovely above West Point and the sharp outlines of earlier morning gave way to the gentling haze of the day’s growing warmth. And then abruptly he was unable to fill his mind with the subject any longer, for now he was nearing his objective and the time had come to brace himself once more for other things.
He passed through Newburgh, turned off Highway 9-W to the river, came in sight of it rolling magnificently to his right, came to the well-remembered clump of woods, the small neat gates, the small unobtrusive sign: Oak Lawn. He turned in and began the winding approach, his breath beginning to come shorter as it always did despite his angriest efforts to keep it steady, his heart beginning to pound hurtfully. Had it been easier when she—before the day he had come home and found—but that, too, he did not want to think of, though he inevitably did. He supposed her presence used to help somehow, though, looking back, it seemed to him that it had always been the closest thing to hell that he would ever know on earth.
And then he was at the parking lot, carefully placing his car alongside the others—some modest and empty, others, not so modest, with chauffeurs waiting—and was on his way up the familiar walk to the familiar door. He was greeted with the hushed, respectful tones that were standard courtesy here, escorted down the long, waxed corridors, taken through the big sun porch overlooking the river, left to walk out alone upon the lawn. Fifty feet away, sitting by himself on a rattan chair in the brilliant sunlight, he saw a strikingly handsome boy of nineteen, his eyes looking far away, intent on something no other eyes would ever see, beyond the river.
“Jimmy!” Hal Fry called, his voice high and near breaking, as it always was at this moment, however he tried to keep it normal. “Hi, Jimmy!”
The boy turned in his slow way, that to a stranger might appear thoughtful, and gave the gravely beautiful smile that illuminated his face with a kindness beyond comprehension. There came an expression of friendly and all-embracing greeting, though Senator Fry knew that he had not recognized him now for many years, would never recognize him again, did not have the slightest realization of who he was or the slightest memory that he had ever been there before.
With a little half-sob in his throat he tried to keep his smile steady and reassuring as he went forward through the gorgeous morning to greet his son.
Three hours later, after the half-touched luncheon, the agonizing gestures toward coherent, consecutive conversation, the farewell attempt to impart, as if a raised voice and desperate reiteration could do it, some memory of this visit, some anticipation of the next, he was on the road back down to New York, driving slowly in the thickening afternoon traffic. He was trying hard, but without too much success, to control the crying in his heart as he remembered the politely puzzled smile; the kindly, considerate concern, utterly genuine yet terrifyingly impersonal; the regret at his going that was already forgotten by the time he had walked twenty steps. For a moment his eyes blinded with tears and he lost sight of the road. If Jimmy had not been so attractive a boy, if he had been ugly or malformed, if it had not been so easy to see all the wonderful things he would have been if only—if only—
He told himself with a great effort of the will, aided by the angry cries of a group of college kids roaring by, too close, in a convertible with the top down, that he must snap out of it or run the risk of endangering his own life and that of others on the highway with him. His own he did not particularly care about at this moment, but he could not be so irresponsible toward others. It seemed as though half the population was out taking advantage of the last golden days of fall, young couples, old people, solitary drivers, families with children, gay groups of happy folk. No doubt in sheer healthy exuberance twenty or thirty of them would have smashed each other up and be dead by nightfall, but it was not his task to add to the toll if he could help it.
So by concentrating carefully on his driving and steadily, fiercely, determinedly pushing into the back of his mind the contrast between his personal problem and the heartbreaking beauties of the lovely day, he safely negotiated 9-W, got back on the Palisades Parkway, came eventually again to the George Washington Bridge and the crossing to the city. It was five o’clock; the early dusk was beginning to fall; the river glinted like molten brass as it stretched away south on his right. Wrapped in a mixture of sunset, fog, and haze, their mystery and magic increased by the twilight, the towers of Manhattan shot up in jumbled confusion against the sky. Like no other city, he thought: no other city. In many buildings the lights were already beginning to come on; across on the Palisades as he went down Riverside Drive the neon signs of amusement parks and grocery products added their twinkling glitter. Like a ruined caravel, the wreck of the copper sunset sank in low black clouds and night had come.
And now he must find Felix, he told himself with a feeling of guilt. The visit had taken longer than he had intended; he should have cut it short and come back sooner—but how could he? How could he? They had told him long ago there was no hope, but how could one not have hope? Perhaps the next question, the next carefully joking comment, the very next attempt to arouse interest—and suddenly the polite smile would become really perceptive, the eyes turn suddenly from impersonal kindness to genuine understanding, the softly slurred words become suddenly clear and filled with the urgency of the great intelligence that had once been there. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps—dear God, was it not worth hoping for? And how could one hurry, when the chance might be just around the corner?
But there he was again, he told himself as he drew alongside another car at the intersection of Forty-sixth and Fifth, and he must not, he must not. Ahead beyond the canyoned buildings he could see in his mind’s eye the tall bulk of the Secretariat looming, lit here and there where cleaning women worked slowly through, readying it for the new week, or where in some isolated office someone worked for the world, even on Sunday. And so did he, and he must make up for lost time now.
He realized with a mild start of surprise that the car next to him was moving forward, even though the stoplight was still red; the car behind him honked impatiently, so evidently the signal had become stuck. He moved out across Fifth, cautiously at first and then more surely as he realized the cross-traffic had stopped. This struck him as odd until he was almost to Third Avenue. Then he remembered that the signal light he had seen as red had been at the bottom of the signal post, not at the top; and red—real red—of course was at the top. For the first time a strange little prickle of fear ran along his scalp. “There it is again,” he said aloud in a surprised voice; and added, as though it could be brought back to sense by a matter-of-fact tone, “That’s damned peculiar.”
And so it was; but as he drove on across Second and First and into the garage beneath the Secretariat and left his car—he found it simpler and cheaper to leave it there and cab back and forth to the Waldorf—he felt nothing further. His vision was quite all right again; he experienced only the natural tiredness to be expected from the emotional strain of the visit and the physical strain of the drive; he was, on the whole, rested and lively and alert. As he started toward the elevator he noticed a familiar limousine in its place near his and, on an impulse, turned toward the attendant, a pleasant-faced boy from Malaya who was studying law at Columbia.
“Is the S.-G. in the building?” he asked in some surprise. The boy nodded.
“He came in about an hour ago with Ambassador Labaiya of Panama. They went right on up to his office, I believe. Señor Labaiya came back down and got his car about ten minutes ago.”
“Thank you.” He hesitated a moment; it might make it difficult to find Felix later, but he felt he really should talk to the Secretary-General. “Maybe I’ll run up, too, just to say hello.”
“Yes, sir. Do you want me to call and tell him you’re coming?”
“No, thanks. I’ll just go up.”
“All right, sir.”
On the thirty-eighth floor he found two secretaries on duty, an air of unusual bustle. In some alarm he asked for the Secretary-General and was shown in almost immediately.
“Senator Fry,” the Secretary-General said, rising and coming forward with a friendly smile that seemed to Hal to hold considerable concern. “Do sit down. My secretary has been trying to reach you at the Waldorf.”
“Yes, I’ve been out of town. I just got back.” He decided on the direct approach, and the knowledge that Felix had just been here fortified it. “What can you tell me about the Panamanian resolution?”
His host looked startled.
“So you’ve heard about it, then?” Hal Fry, who had learned long ago in West Virginia politics that it was sometimes best to feign a knowledge one did not possess, said nothing. The S.-G. sighed.
“He was just here, you know. Perhaps if you had come ten minutes earlier, it might have been possible to talk the matter over and work out something less damaging. I am sorry.”
“So am I,” Hal said, and he was, as he suddenly began to realize how narrowly he might have missed the chance to save his country the trouble that now would almost certainly plague her here in the UN. “Do you have a copy I can see?”
“It’s being mimeographed for distribution to the delegations,” the Secretary-General said. “I would like to show it to you, but—” he smiled. “You know the delicate technicalities of my position. I can’t play favorites. Everyone should have it by about 8 p.m., I should think.”
“It’s bad, though.” The S.-G. nodded.
“It is, as our critics of the organization often say, just words. But—very hurtful words. And very damaging, in the context of these times and the circumstances that prompted its introduction.”
“Is it a new resolution or an amendment? Because if it’s a new one, then maybe we can stop it before it gets to the floor of the Assembly …” His voice trailed away at the S.-G.’s expression. “Damn it! Somebody very clever has been at work on this thing.”
The Secretary-General looked tired.
“Very clever indeed. Felix is clever. Terry is clever. Their friends are clever. I am the object of their cleverness a dozen times a day. I know they are clever.”
“What do you think the reaction will be?” Hal Fry asked, a growing dismay in his heart as the full import of his missing Felix began to bear in upon him. Probably it wouldn’t have made any difference, probably Felix was determined upon it, probably he was beginning to torture himself unnecessarily—and yet. Yet it could have been just the thing needed to head Felix off, a quiet talk with this patient and thoughtful man here in this office that had seen so many would-be crises smoothly compromised away before they could burst into the open in the hectic atmosphere of notoriety, prejudice, and exacerbated attitudes on the floors below.
“The reaction will be about as you anticipate it in many areas,” the Secretary-General said.
“We may need your help,” Senator Fry said simply, and his host nodded.
“I am always being accused of betraying my own colored race,” he said with a grim humor, “but I don’t mind it, by now. My good offices are always available in the interests of compromising differences. I shall do what I can, of course, within the limitations of the Charter.”
“Well, that’s something,” Hal Fry said with a certain bitter jocularity. His host smiled.
“I would hope so. I like to think I am of some value in this house. Would you like me to call Felix and see if I can get him back right now? It might be we could still—”
But even as he reached for the phone in response to Hal’s nod, it rang under his hand. He lifted it and listened, shook his head at the Senator with an expression of annoyance, and finally said, “Yes, Mr. Ambassador. It will be done … That was Tashikov. He has heard that the Ambassador of Panama has an amendment to his resolution on Gorotoland and he wants it translated into Byelorussian. This will prevent distribution until at least midnight and, of course, foreclose any counter activities until tomorrow. He obviously knows what it says, so there’s no point in recalling it now. Felix couldn’t if he wanted to.”
“Which he does not,” Senator Fry said.
“Again, I am sorry. Ten minutes’ time, and—”
“Well, we’ll just have to see it through. It won’t be easy, but we’ve no choice, apparently.”
“Good luck,” the Secretary-General said.
“We’ll need it,” Hal Fry said. “That’s for sure.”
A few minutes later at the Waldorf he called Orrin in Washington and told him what had happened, apologizing bitterly for his own delay in returning to the city. The Secretary assured him that he was quite certain it wouldn’t have made any difference at all, that Felix was apparently operating on a broader plan than they had either of them imagined him to be, and that even if a meeting had been held in the Secretary-General’s office, the chances of a compromise would have been nil.
“I do believe this,” Orrin said, “so I don’t want you to worry about it for a moment. How was the boy?”
“The same.”
“In good health, though.”
“Oh, yes,” Hal Fry said with a terrible bitterness. “My son will live forever. He won’t have a mind, but he’ll be in good health.” He made a strangled sound. “My God, Orrin, how does the Lord let such things happen?”
“Now, Hal,” the Secretary said firmly, “stop it. That won’t do any good, and you know it. I want you to find Lafe and go to delegation headquarters at once and start making plans for a reply tomorrow. Do you hear me? That’s an order.”
“Yes … Yes, I guess that’s best for me.”
“It’s best for the country. I want us prepared tomorrow. I’ll be flying up at 9 a.m. I want everything ready.”
“All right,” Senator Fry agreed, obviously forcing himself to be businesslike, and succeeding. “I guess it’s the least I can do, after messing it up the way I have.”
“And stop that, too! I’m not kidding when I say it wouldn’t have made any difference. You’re just letting it upset you because you were already upset by your trip up the river. It wouldn’t have made any difference. Now, damn it, get that through your head!”
“Yes, Orrin,” Hal Fry said humbly. “You’re a kind man and I’ll try not to let you down again.”
And although the Secretary once more reassured him, with all the indignant force at his command, and although he presently returned to the conclusion himself that it probably wouldn’t have made any difference even if he had seen Felix, he could not escape the guilty feeling that he had failed Orrin, failed the President, failed the country by staying too long in the golden day with the handsome boy who did not know him. He realized that his state of depression was making him feel this way, but he couldn’t help it. He did feel this way, and that was all that mattered.
13
“Mrs. Vhadu Labba of India, please,” said the heavy voice of the busty blonde at the phone desk. “Mrs. Vhadu Labba of India, please call the Delegates’ Lounge … Dr. Ranashah of Iran, please … Ambassador Labaiya of Panama, please … Lord Maudulayne of the U.K. …”
And now, as always in the hours preceding a crucial meeting of the Assembly or the Security Council—in other words, almost every day—the United Nations hummed with gossip and speculation from top to bottom and one end to the other. Word of the new turn of events—sped by a speculative story from the New York Times’ UN correspondent under the headline “U.S. FEARS U.N. MOVE ON TERRY”—had given the organization its newest sensation. “It looks as though Uncle Sam is in for it,” a member of the Canadian delegation had remarked, not without relish, to a member of the delegation of Pakistan; and, typically, their cheerful agreement was being echoed, to greater or lesser degree, in many other conversations now going on in the lounges, the corridors, the eating places and conference rooms of the world’s mansion. Its inhabitants, disregarding the admonition to those who live in glass houses, rarely let pass a chance to throw stones at one another and now were having a high old time of it.
Thus the North Lounge was even noisier than usual on this morning of Felix Labaiya’s latest démarche in The Problem of Gorotoland, now broadened by the M’Bulu’s dramatic bravery in South Carolina and about to be broadened much further by the Panamanian Ambassador’s decision to seize upon the pattern of events and turn it to his own purposes. The support for his doing this was loud and vigorous in many sections of the room, and it was already apparent as the two senatorial members of the American delegation came in that many of the smaller states were already beginning to make up their minds in the matter, and not in a way favorable to the United States.
“Well, buddy,” Lafe Smith said with an appraising glance up and down the Lounge, “it sounds as though Felix has our work cut out for us, doesn’t it? You can always tell when somebody shakes this beehive. The buzz gets deafening.”
“Yes,” Hal Fry agreed as they walked along toward the snack bar at the other end, greeting fellow delegates on the way, nodding to friends, creating a stir by their passage. “I expect the Times’ story is pretty well correct, too.” He was feeling better and more like himself this morning. A sleep of deep exhaustion had worked its benison during the night.
“Oh, yes, I think so. I had breakfast with my friend from Gabon and he’s apparently seen the amendment, which is being floated about by the Communists to everybody but us, of course. It’s not very complimentary, I’m afraid.”
“One thing I will say for the UN,” Hal Fry remarked. “It has succeeded in raising the power of words to a level never before achieved in human history. We go forth and do battle over phraseology in this place with all the fierce determination of the Greeks at Thermopylae. And behind the words, of course, the greater part of three billion people around the globe who have so little knowledge and education that they’ll believe the first word that reaches them and go into the streets and do battle just on the strength of it. That’s why these resolutions are so important, for all that they’re ‘just words,’ as the critics like to say.”
Senator Smith sighed as they reached the snack bar and ordered coffee.
“Yes. I could wish we weren’t quite so vulnerable to certain acts by certain people in certain areas, but—there it is. We are, I’m just surprised it hasn’t happened before. Where’s the hero of the hour, by the way?”
“Terry? I don’t know. He’s staying at the St. Regis. I tried to reach him there around nine, but he’s already left. Probably leading a pep rally in the Afro-Asian bloc.”
“Secretary Knox of the United States, please,” the young lady at the telephone desk said. “Secretary Knox, please call the Delegates’ Lounge.”
“Speaking of heroes,” Lafe said, “where is he? I thought he was due in this morning.”
“He’s coming. He called me a little while ago. Harley wanted him to stop by the White House before he came up, so he’s delayed a bit. But he’ll be here.”
“Let’s go find a table by the window,” Lafe suggested, “and see who gathers ’round.”
“All right,” Hal said, and they started back out into the main part of the crowded room, carefully balancing their coffee cups as they went. “Oh-oh!” Hal tossed over his shoulder. “Do you see who I see?”
“I do indeed. Suppose we do the gathering.”
“An excellent idea,” Hal agreed as they moved toward a sofa, occupied, and two empty chairs around a coffee table by the enormous wall of windows facing up the East River. “Good morning, gentlemen. Is this summit private, or can anybody join?”
“By all means, Hal,” Raoul Barre said pleasantly, ignoring the increased hum of comment that swept the room as the two Americans sat down. “I’m sure we have no secrets from you.”
“Felix does,” Senator Fry said. “Don’t you, Felix?”
The Ambassador of Panama gave his dry little self-contained smile and looked up from stirring his coffee with a bland expression.
“My dear Hal, only the necessities of having my amendment translated into Byelorussian, of all God-forsaken things, prevents it from being in your hands right now.”
“That was a very thoughtful move, on someone’s part,” Hal observed. “It preserves the element of surprise. At least for us. Apparently everybody else has seen a copy.”
“Oh, I think not,” Felix Labaiya said calmly. “Plenty of rumors, speculation in the Times—the usual stuff. But actual copies, no, I don’t think so. After all,” he said with a sudden pleasant smile, “I don’t mean to be crude about this. I’m only doing what, regretfully, seems necessary to salvage United States honor in the eyes of the world. No one should be more willing to support me than your delegation, Hal, as a matter of fact.”
“I assume your motives are of the most noble,” Hal Fry said, “because I think it would look rather odd if the brother-in-law of the Governor of California led a world crusade against the Governor’s country. The Governor’s country might not like it when it came time to go to the polls.”
“I married into a very understanding family,” the Ambassador of Panama said calmly. “I think my motivations will be quite clear to everyone when I speak this afternoon.”
“I hope so, because they baffle nearly everyone now.”
“Oh, I don’t believe so, Hal,” Raoul Bane said. “Not everyone. I think vast sections of Africa and Asia understand them very well. After all,” he said with a sardonic little smile, “it is as simple as black and white.”
“And what color is France trying to be?” Lafe Smith inquired. “Gray?”
“France believes in an intelligent adaptability,” her Ambassador said with some impatience. “We have many friends, good friends, in Africa. We do not intend to lose them. Surely you can understand that.”
“Yes, I understand. It’s all very practical.”
“I should hope so,” the French Ambassador said. “It is good to have a bridge between the two worlds, is it not? Possibly we can be of great assistance to you. Felix does not object if we try.”
“We are not prepared to compromise on this amendment,” Senator Fry said, “You both understand that, of course.”
Raoul Barre shrugged.
“Sometimes events conspire to make compromise seem more desirable toward the end than it does at the beginning. Surely two Senators do not have to be told that.”
“Two Senators who have the votes,” Hal Fry said with more show of confidence than he felt, “don’t have to be told anything.”
Felix Labaiya smiled.
“When the roll is called, we shall see on votes.”
“Well,” Hal Fry said, finishing his coffee and standing up, “that’s true enough. Are you speaking before Terry or after?”
“Possibly, after. I may permit him to prepare the psychological climate.”
“Trust him for that,” Lafe said. Felix Labaiya laughed.
“I do.”
The day’s plenary session of the General Assembly, scheduled to begin at 10 a.m., was, as usual, gradually pulling itself together in the Assembly Hall shortly before eleven. The Ambassador of the Netherlands, this year’s Assembly President, sat in his seat at the center of the high desk on the podium looking patiently about the enormous blue-and-tan room, a tidy little roly-poly man whose pink cheeks, white hair, and blue twinkling eyes gave him a deceptive appearance of jolly Santa Claus, belied by his brisk gaveling and firm rulings when his colleagues, as often happened, became obstreperous. At his right sat the Secretary-General, his fine head and thoughtful face in repose as he, too, waited patiently for the delegations to take their places. The S.-G.’s principal deputy, a lean, grizzled American who moved about with an air of intense and impatient energy that gave him the aspect of a greyhound on leash, had not yet appeared on the podium to take his seat at the President’s left.
On the floor of the huge concave bowl of a room—a room which, with its insistent pastels, its stark fluorescent lights, its garish fried-egg murals by Léger, its general air of being too bright, too harsh, too demanding, too loudly noisy in its décor, might almost have been designed deliberately to murder thought—increasing numbers of delegates were beginning to move to their seats at the long, gleaming wooden tables, like so many writing shelves in some gigantic schoolroom, that served as desks. In the radio, television, and translation booths, set high in the walls on both sides of the chamber, reporters, technicians, and members of the Secretariat could be observed chatting and gossiping behind the glass. The public and press galleries, banked up in sharply rising rows of seats at the end of the room opposite the podium, were rapidly filling. A constant stream of people passed back and forth through the aisles that divide the sections of seats on the floor, stopping to chat, to say hello, to greet one another with vigorous handshakes, to exchange hasty gossip and comment.
In all this colorful thronging assemblage of the nations, it could be seen that on this day more Africans than usual were wearing their native costumes, apparently by way of emphasizing that they were Africans—something the Ghanaians and Guineans often did but others were not so diligent about. Today bright robes and togas, vivid caps and sashes, could be seen dotted profusely about the room, standing out brilliantly against the sober Western business suits of the other delegations. This did not pass without comment, nor did the entrance of the major figures in the drama of the day: the Ambassador of Panama entering with the Ambassador of France; the British Ambassador and the Indian Ambassador, approaching from opposite ends of the aisle that divides the floor at the back from the first rows of the press gallery, stopping to greet one another with elaborate cordiality; the Soviet Ambassador, hurrying in with the Ambassador of Cuba, nodding brusquely to the head of the American delegation, who nodded as brusquely back. There was much questioning, particularly in the press gallery, where many correspondents were scanning the floor with binoculars, concerning the whereabouts of the M’Bulu. He had not yet appeared, and his absence served to increase the interest in the vast chamber, where many sought his giant figure.
There was an unusual air of drama and excitement about the Assembly this day. High at the back of the public galleries the blue-uniformed guards glanced at one another nervously, for one never knew when some well-organized disturbance might break out.
At three minutes to eleven the President rapped his gavel smartly and announced in his brisk broken English, “The plenary session of the General Assembly is now in session and the delegates will please be in order. The pending business is the draft resolution submitted by Panama on The Problem of Gorotoland. The Chair calls upon the distinguished delegate of Panama, Ambassador Labaiya, to speak to his resolution.”
Far over at the right of the chamber, from his delegation’s place next to Paraguay, Felix Labaiya could be seen, as heads turned and voices hushed, rising and moving down the aisle toward the podium. In a moment he had walked up the steps to the speaker’s stand, bowed to the President, and turned back to face the attentive assemblage, many of whose members were adjusting earphones and settling back to listen.
“Mr. President,” he said, choosing to speak in English rather than Spanish (many delegates took their earphones off again), “I should like to defer my statement in order that the Assembly may first hear a brief statement by a distinguished visitor to the United Nations who, we hope, will soon join us as a member in his own right, His Royal Highness the M’Bulu of Mbuele. I realize that it is somewhat irregular, Mr. President (“When did that ever stop the UN?” Lafe Smith whispered to Claude Maudulayne, over on the left where the U.S. and U.K. delegations sat side by side), but this was announced last week and I believe has the general approval of most of the delegations. I would hope that neither the United Kingdom nor the United States would object.” He paused with pointed politeness for a moment; both the delegations concerned sat impassive, and after a moment he went smoothly on. “Then, Mr. President, I now invite the Assembly’s courtesy and attention for our distinguished visitor, His Royal Highness the M’Bulu.”
There was a burst of applause as he returned to his seat, and for a minute or two the room hummed again with gossip and comment as the podium remained empty. In the pause the Secretary-General’s American deputy, who could be seen by the nearer delegations to be looking angry and disturbed, came from the President’s private room directly behind the wall that backs the podium, took his seat, and whispered across to the President and the S.-G. For a moment their heads were together, and just as they broke away again, the other two men startled and bothered too, there was a mounting commotion over on the left side, where delegates could see the door of the room behind the podium. It was followed in seconds by a sudden gasp from all around the hall.
The M’Bulu appeared and walked with his stately tread to the lectern, clad in the robes he had worn in Charleston, spattered and bedraggled from head to foot with rotten tomatoes, rotten eggs, streaks of mud and dirt.
For a long moment the gasp that had greeted his appearance was succeeded by silence; and then Ghana and Guinea were on their feet applauding, the rest of the African and Asian delegations were beginning to stand, from the Communist bloc came raucous bangings and thumpings on desks, a little group of Negroes in the public galleries suddenly unfurled the red and black banners of DEFY and began screaming unintelligible things, the enormous chamber was suddenly filled with a storm of sound. One by one the smaller nations, the so-called neutrals, the uncommitted states, all the peoples around the world who for one reason or another had cause to applaud anyone who would defy the great powers of the West, stood and applauded too. Very few delegations, in fact, remained seated and silent. All those who did were white, and many of their members looked desperately troubled and upset.
“Oh, brother,” Lafe Smith said softly to his colleague, “this is serious.”
“Yes,” said Hal Fry grimly. “Indeed it is.”
For several moments the television cameras roved about the chamber, catching the United States and United Kingdom delegations looking soured and isolated in a sea of standing, applauding delegates, bringing the impassive face of the M’Bulu, head erect, eyes straight ahead, repeatedly before the viewers, lingering with loving attention on his spattered robes, while the press reporters stood in their gallery and scribbled hasty notes. Then with a sure instinct for timing Terry brought the tableau to a close by raising a long left arm. A quick hush fell, and into it he said one slow and powerful word that renewed pandemonium:
“Free-dom!”
Immediately the roar of sound welled up again as the chant was repeated from all across the floor:
“Free—dom! Free—dom! Free—dom!”
The Africans were in a frenzy, the Asians wildly excited, the Communists, for once, in the presence of a showman better than they were. The President of the Assembly, his rosy cheeks purpling, his blue eyes popping, pounded and pounded and pounded his gavel, his shouts for order drowned out in the rhythmic chant that filled the Hall and drove out thought and sensation with its hypnotic reiteration.
That, too, Terry permitted to run on just long enough. Then he raised both arms and, with a vigorous down-sweeping gesture, steadily repeated, commanded silence. Gradually the noise subsided; an excited, buzzing, rustling quiet began to fall. Experienced diplomats, who a second before had been shouting with the rest, turned to one another amazed that they had done so, shaken by the impact of the most basic emotions set loose. A spent silence descended upon the chamber. Into it the heir to Gorotoland began speaking with a slow and powerful deliberation.
“Mr. President! My friends of the United Kingdom! (Raucous laughter from many delegations.) My friends of the United States! (Cheers, applause, laughter, harsh, ironic, menacing.) My friends of Africa and freedom-loving peoples everywhere. (Great applause and shouts.) Where I have been, you know. What I did, you have heard about. What happened to me, you see.” He paused, stilling a rising murmur of boos, and then spat out his words: “Do you think it worthy of the home of the brave and the land of the free?”
(Wild shouts of “No! No! Free-dom! Death to the Americans! America the slavers!” Communist desk-banging, shrill screams and shouts from the demonstrators of DEFY in the public galleries.) Terrible Terry went gravely on.
“Will you give me freedom?” he demanded, and a great shout of “Yes!” replied.
He nodded with a fierce satisfaction. Then his expression changed back to one of grave and sober contemplation.
“Mr. President,” he said slowly, and a real hush fell at the note of gravely chiding sorrow in his voice. “It seems to me that it is time for this great organization of the world to take official notice of the desperate social conditions within the United States of America. It is time for all people who truly love freedom—who truly seek right and justice for humanity—who cry out when oppression and cruelty occur anywhere in the world—to make it clear to the United States that the world will no longer tolerate such barbaric practices as exist in this country behind the facade of democracy. It is an empty democracy, Mr. President! Look at me! This is the kind of democracy it is!”
And he stepped away from the rostrum and forward to the edge of the platform, so that all could see him full-length, spattered and smeared with the colorful mementos of the ladies of Charleston. An uneasy mixture of applause and murmurs rose from the floor, and many delegates looked nervously toward the United States, for this was suddenly a truly serious thing the M’Bulu was doing and many were not sure how fully they dared support it.
He stepped back to the rostrum and for a long moment looked out upon them in somber contemplation.
“Mr. President, I have no doubt that all of you, my friends of the freedom-loving countries, will overwhelmingly approve independence for Gorotoland. That is fairly easy. That does not take real bravery. That is a matter of simple justice.
“I ask you this, however: Will you also be brave enough to condemn a nation whose ideals and actions are so far apart—who commits such crimes against innocent human beings simply because they are not white?
“Will you also be brave enough to censure the United States and demand that it conform to the high and noble ideals of the United Nations?
“That will be your true test, my friends.
“I urge you to think well upon it!”
And, drawing himself once more to his utmost height, he bowed gravely to the Assembly, turned and bowed gravely to the apoplectic little President on the raised dais above him, stalked slowly back to the private room behind the dais, and disappeared.
For several minutes the Assembly sat dazed, as if drunk from so much powerful emotion, shaken by the enormity of the challenge thus openly flung at last at America. Many of the delegates had felt these things for many years. Many of them had wished to do something about it. None had dared. Now Terry had. The shock of it was so powerful that, it appeared, not even the Americans themselves could think of an answer. It could be seen that angry whispered conversations were going on within the delegation, and many heads now turned to see; it was expected that momentarily either Senator Fry or Senator Smith would exercise the “right of reply” and come forward to respond to the harsh criticism of their country. But the moment passed. (“We’ve got to say something,” Lafe hissed angrily. “I said wait until Felix is through!” Hal Fry hissed back, and for a long moment they openly glared at one another, until Lafe’s eyes dropped and he shrugged and slumped back in his chair.)
Presently in a shaking voice the President said into the uneasy tension:
“The Chair now recognizes the distinguished delegate of Panama to finish explaining his resolution.”
“Mr. President,” Felix Labaiya said with the small, neat, self-contained precision that characterized his person, his attitude, his thinking, and his voice, “I shall not detain the Assembly long, for I know we wish to proceed speedily to debate, and perhaps to vote upon, this resolution. The resolution itself was circulated to all delegations two weeks ago. It has been overwhelmingly approved by First Committee, and it does not need further explanation from me. I hope, and I expect, that it will be approved here, too, so that the United Nations, through the General Assembly, may proceed swiftly to bring Gorotoland into the independent partnership of free nations.
“But, Mr. President,” he said, and something in his voice made many sit forward intently in their seats, those who did not speak English holding their earphones tightly to their ears to receive translation, “the task will not be complete if that is all we do in this resolution. A grave event, a display of great courage and kindness, followed by a vicious insult to both human decency and to the representative of another country, has occurred on the soil of the host nation to the United Nations. True, the insult has been condemned by officials of that country; but the deeper insult, to humanity, to human dignity, to peoples of differing racial backgrounds, to the United Nations, to you—has not been expiated. Nor can it be, the delegation of Panama believes, until the United Nations comes to the assistance of the wayward country and aids its officials, by a great expression of world opinion, to rid their society of its greatest evil, the evil of racial discrimination. Therefore, Mr. President, the delegation of Panama proposes, and herewith formally adds to its resolution on The Problem of Gorotoland, the following amendment:
“Whereas, the distinguished representative of Gorotoland, acting in the greatest traditions of human freedom and decency, has been savagely attacked in a city of the United States of America; and,
“Whereas, this attack grew directly from policies of racial discrimination in the United States of America, which decent men everywhere deplore and condemn; and,
“Whereas, the continued existence of these policies in the United States tends to place the United States in direct violation of the principles of the Charter of the United Nations and therefore casts grave doubts upon the qualifications of the United States to continue as a member of this body”—there were gasps of surprise from many places across the floor, but he went on with unperturbed self-possession—
“Now, therefore, be it resolved that this resolution is hereby amended to direct the Security Council, acting on behalf of the United Nations, to make an immediate investigation of racial practices in the United States, looking toward the ending of such racial practices, and offering the full assistance of the United Nations in this task so that the United States may truly conform to the principles of the Charter and be fully worthy of membership in this great body.”
He paused and the room almost visibly palpitated with the swirling thoughts of all the silent delegates.
“Mr. President, that is the amended language of my resolution. I commend it to your early and favorable consideration. Simple justice and the imperatives of history demand it. Let us meet the demand and thus, in friendly spirit, help the great Republic of the West to show forth to the world, once more unsullied, the banner of freedom she raised in the presence of mankind in 1776.”
And he turned, bowed to the President, descended the steps of the rostrum, and resumed his seat beside Paraguay as the room burst into an explosion of talk and argument, silenced almost as soon as it began by Senator Fry of the United States, rising in his place and waving toward the Chair.
“The Chair recognizes the distinguished delegate of the United States,” the President said in a quivering voice, “to exercise the right to reply—?”
“Point of order, Mr. President,” Hal Fry shouted, and the President amended hastily, “On a point of order,” as Hal came forward down the aisle while galleries and delegates strained to see him and a tense silence fell once more upon the room.
“Now, Mr. President,” he said, “the United States has heard, with a patience far greater than these two performances here this morning have warranted, vicious attacks upon itself. The United States has made, it feels, full apologies and amends for what occurred to His Royal Highness in Charleston. The United States does not feel that—”
But there was a commotion on the floor, and the Soviet Ambassador was on his feet, also crying, “Point of order!”
“The distinguished delegate of the Soviet Union desires recognition on a point of order,” the President said, and Tashikov came forward as Senator Fry stepped down and took a temporary seat at the side.
“Mr. President,” Vasily Tashikov said angrily, and delegates all over the room adjusted their earphones and switched hurriedly to the Russian translation, “the point of order is that under Rule 73 of the General Assembly, points of order are not debatable. The distinguished delegate of the United States is attempting to debate his point of order. Therefore, he himself is out of order.”
And he returned to his chair amid scattered applause as Hal Fry stepped back to the podium and started to speak. The President silenced him with his gavel.
“On the point of order raised by the distinguished delegate of the Soviet Union,” he said, “the Chair feels that the point is well taken and that the distinguished delegate of the United States should state his point of order without debate.”
There was a burst of clapping from many of the Afro-Asian bloc, and the Senator from West Virginia, wishing he did not feel suddenly so tired in this moment of crisis, bowed to the Chair.
“Very well, Mr. President,” he said, and his voice dragged a little for a second in a way that made Lafe Smith down in the delegation look suddenly intent; but then he went on, strongly as usual. “Very well. The point of order of the United States is that this amendment is not germane to the resolution seeking independence for Gorotoland and therefore is out of order at this time.”
“My God,” the London Daily Express whispered with audible savagery in the press gallery, “how phony can you get?” The New York Post nodded and chuckled, but the New York Times looked quite annoyed.
The President, the Secretary-General, and the Deputy consulted together for a moment while the Assembly stirred restlessly below. Then the President spoke.
“It is the opinion of the Chair that the point of order is not well taken under the rules of the Assembly, and therefore the point of order is overruled.”
“We appeal the ruling, Mr. President,” Hal Fry said.
“The United States has appealed the ruling of the Chair,” the President announced. “Under the rules, the appeal must be put immediately to a vote without debate, and accordingly the voting will now begin.” He reached in his little box and drew a name. “A vote Yes will uphold the point of order and defeat the ruling; a vote No will uphold the ruling and defeat the point of order. The voting will begin with Turkey.”
“Yes.”
“Uganda.”
“No.”
“Ukrainian S.S.R.”
“Nyet.”
“U.S.S.R.”
“Nyet.”
“United Arab Republic.”
“No.”
“United Kingdom.”
“Yes.”
“United States.”
“Yes.”
“Upper Volta.”
“Abstention.”
“Uruguay.”
“Abstención.”
Ten minutes later, most of the Afro-Asian bloc having lined up against the United States, Portugal and South Africa having done the same in voices full of spite, much of Latin America and Europe having abstained, the President spoke.
“The vote on the appeal is 38 Yes, 43 No, 32 abstentions, remainder absent, and the appeal is defeated. The distinguished delegate of the United States.”
“Don’t tell me he’s going to try something else!” Paris-Match exclaimed in the press gallery. “Hope springs eternal,” said the Christian Science Monitor with an uncomfortable little laugh.
“Very well, Mr. President,” Hal Fry said, “I move to adjourn debate on the item under Rule 76.”
“The Chair, under Rule 76, will grant five minutes each to two speakers for the motion and two against.” There was a movement on the floor, several messengers went to the podium, the President finally rapped his gavel.
“The Chair will recognize the United Kingdom and Cameroun speaking in favor of the motion, Ghana and Guinea speaking against. The distinguished delegate of the United Kingdom.”
“Mr. President,” Lord Maudulayne said with a measured imperturbability, “it is not the purpose of the United Kingdom to inflame further passions which have already been inflamed enough here this morning. As the target of the original draft resolution proposed by the distinguished delegate of Panama, it might be presumed to be of assistance to the United Kingdom for the issue of Gorotoland to be confused by the introduction of what can only appear to us to be an extraneous matter.
“However, while the United Kingdom makes no brief for anything that may happen in another country—and also is not quite so anxious as some to appoint itself guardian of others’ morals—we nonetheless agree with the distinguished delegate of the United States that this is entirely aside from the central issue of immediate independence for Gorotoland. We do not think this house should confuse the issue by permitting itself to be dragged into debate on a matter which is something for the United States to solve, in her own way, within her own borders. Great progress has been made in the United States toward solution of this problem (“Not very damned much!” a DEFY demonstrator in the gallery shouted, and a guard started hastily toward his seat), and there is every sign that the progress will continue. It is not our purpose here in the United Nations—it is not our right—to presume to interfere in this process through the channels of world public opinion that we can mobilize here. We must be judicious, tolerant, and fair. Otherwise the United Nations descends to mere name-calling and sinks in the sea of its own passions. We support the motion of the United States to end debate on this item.”
“The distinguished delegate of Ghana,” the President said, and the delegate, clad in his gorgeous native robes, strode angrily to the podium and began furiously speaking, so excited that the words tumbled out in a torrent and he forgot to bow to the Chair.
“Mr. President! The distinguished delegate of the United Kingdom says we must be fair to the United States. Was the United States fair to the M’Bulu? Was that fairness, Mr. President—the rotten eggs and rotten tomatoes and dirt we have seen here? I ask you, Mr. President! Does anyone call that fairness?”
He paused and a shout of “No!” rose from many delegations.
“Mr. President! Ghana urges you to vote against ending debate on this matter. Ghana urges you to condemn the United States, just as you would condemn any other power, be it big or little, that so violates human decency. That is what the United Nations is for, Mr. President—that all should be judged equally, on the same basis, whether they be big or little. Let us remember the Charter, Mr. President! Let us be true to the United Nations! Let us continue debate, and vote, on this tragic issue!”
“The distinguished delegate of Cameroun,” the President said patiently, and another Negro in robes walked down the aisle as the Ghanaian came up, brushing past him with an expression of contempt and not speaking.
“Mr. President,” the delegate of Cameroun began in liquid French, and earphones went on all over the room and dials were hastily switched to the French translation, “we are hearing great speeches here today. We are hearing great emotional appeals here today. People are banging desks and displaying dirty clothes”—a startled sound, followed by hisses, responded to this—“and appealing to the Charter of the United Nations.
“Is everything perfect in Ghana, Mr. President, I would ask my distinguished colleague? Do democracy and liberty shine down upon its sons and daughters, Mr. President—or only upon a few of them? Mr. President, sometimes it is well to catch the mouse in one’s own house before sending the cat to catch the neighbor’s.
“I do not make any defense, Mr. President, of certain unhappy things in the United States of America. God knows any man of color who visits New York is aware that they exist. But, Mr. President, I do pay tribute to the sincere attempts of the United States to work out this problem, and to do it peaceably and constructively within her own borders.
“Within her own borders—that is it, Mr. President. Ask yourselves: Where would you like the United Nations to investigate next? In your country? Where does it stop, Mr. President?
“Mr. President, the issue of independence for Gorotoland is clear-cut. On that my delegation stands with our brothers of Africa. But do not confuse it, I beg you, with internal affairs of the United States which are no concern of this honorable Assembly.”
The President rapped his gavel to silence the mixed boos and applause that followed, announced the distinguished delegate of Guinea, and once again two Africans met in mid-aisle and ignored one another as the lithe young delegate from Guinea strode to the podium.
“Mr. President,” he said slowly, also in French, “the distinguished delegate of Cameroun, as usual, is very much of an expert on emotional appeals. He shows us how it is done, Mr. President, and no doubt we are the better instructed for it.
“But, Mr. President my delegation does not feel that these emotional appeals of the delegate of Cameroun are sufficient to meet the grave issue now before this house. A grave insult has been given a great African by the United States of America; and, Mr. President, do not let us hide the sequence of events. The insult was tendered first by the President of the United States. Only then, following his lead, was it tendered by the people of the United States, those miserable people in South Carolina.
“They have insulted all of us of colored blood, Mr. President. That is the issue here. For too long this hypocritical pretense has been allowed to go on, here under the very nose of the United Nations. It is not just what happened in South Carolina. It is a long miserable record of discrimination, cruelty, unfairness, unkindness. I ask you, my fellow delegates: Which of you whose skin is not white is free to go anywhere he pleases in the United States? Which of you who is not white feels himself treated with full equality as a human being in the United States? Not one, Mr. President! Not one! Mr. President, the delegation of Guinea joins Ghana in urging you to vote against adjourning debate on this item. History is watching us, Mr. President! We must act!”
There was loud approval as he strode down from the rostrum and back up the aisle to his seat, and as it began to subside there was a new stirring of interest and turning of heads as a commotion broke out around the American delegation. “There’s Knox,” the London Observer said with some excitement. “Now things ought to start moving.” “Moving where?” the Daily Express asked scornfully. “They’re up against a blank wall. They’re not going anywhere.”
And so, indeed, it seemed to the Secretary at first glance as Senator Fry and Senator Smith and the other delegation members rapidly filled him in on what had occurred prior to his arrival. “Possibly I took the wrong tack, Orrin,” Hal began, “but I thought—” “Absolutely right,” the Secretary said. “The least we could do is try it out. And maybe the vote will go all right this time.”
This hope, however, proved empty. The President, announcing that, Rule 76 having been complied with, it was now in order to vote, reached into his little box, drew a name, and announced that vote on the motion to adjourn debate would begin with Ceylon.
“No.”
“Chad.”
“Oui.”
“Chile.”
“Abstención.”
“China.”
“Yes.”
“Colombia.”
“Abstención.”
“Congo Brazzaville.”
“Oui.”
“Congo Leopoldville.”
“Non.”
“Costa Rica.”
“No.”
“Cuba.”
“No.”
“Cyprus.”
“No.”
“Czechoslovakia.”
“No.”
“Dahomey.”
“Non.”
“Denmark.”
“Yes.”
“On the motion to adjourn debate on this item,” the President announced in due course, “the motion is 47 Yes, 50 No, 17 abstentions, others absent, and the motion is defeated.”
“Mr. President!” Orrin Knox shouted from his chair in the U.S. delegation, and a buzz of excitement spread over the chamber. “Mr. President!”
“The distinguished delegate of the United States, Secretary Knox,” the President said, and the Secretary moved forward purposefully to the rostrum, bowed to the President, and turned to the Assembly.
“Be good, Orrin boy,” Lafe Smith said, half aloud, and Hal Fry said, “He will be.”
In the oratorical manner he had perfected long ago in the Senate, the Secretary of State stared out impassively upon the vast chamber, now silent awaiting his words. Then he began in a level, deliberate tone.
“Mr. President, we are witnessing here today an attempt to make the private business of the United States the public business of the United Nations.”
There was a little resentful stir, but he went on calmly to take them by surprise with his next remark.
“In some respects, this may be justified.
“It is true that an unfortunate incident occurred in South Carolina. It is true that the President of the United States did not leap at once to entertain one who is not the head of an independent state.
“It is also true, Mr. President, that the President was acting entirely within the bounds of standard diplomatic procedure. It is also true that the problems of South Carolina would not have become the problem of the M’Bulu of Mbuele had His Royal Highness not seen fit to involve himself deliberately in them.
“No one asked him to intervene in the internal affairs of the United States or the sovereign state of South Carolina, Mr. President. We have not presumed to interfere with the way he treats his colored people. Why should he interfere with us?”
“He isn’t the United States!” someone shouted from somewhere in the gallery, and the President hastily rapped for order. The guards once more shifted nervously at their stations.
“No, indeed,” the Secretary said sardonically. “No, indeed he is not the United States. And I will grant you,” he said, more solemnly, “there does rest upon the United States an obligation, springing both from our history going back to the American Revolution and from the restraints that world responsibility should place upon those of us who have it, a duty to maintain for herself a standard of conduct worthy of her, irrespective of what others may do.
“I do not pretend, Mr. President, that the United States, in the sequence of events of the past three days, has been entirely blameless or has lived up entirely to that personal standard which the President and the overwhelming majority of Americans desire to maintain. But we try, Mr. President; we are trying to improve the situation, to bring the Negro to full citizenship, to extend to all Americans everywhere regardless of color the blessings conferred by our Revolution.
“Against that background, I must respectfully say to this honorable house that agitating the matter here can only inflame the situation within our borders.” (On the floor the Ambassador of South Africa caught, with a wink, the eye of the Ambassador of Portugal, who smiled without amusement and nodded.)
“Mr. President, none of this means, of course, that I would wish to detract from or decry the personal bravery of His Royal Highness in doing what he did. But there are two kinds of bravery, Mr. President. There is the bravery of the dramatic gesture, isolated in time and carrying with it no responsibility to stay around and help take care of the consequences; and there is the bravery of those who must live with the problem from day to day and somehow, God willing, eventually work it out in a way that will be fair and just to all. His Highness has had his little moment, Mr. President, and I would not try to say that it was not a brave moment, for it was. But the United States of America and her people must, in this area, deal not with moments but with years; and that requires of us, over the long haul, a much greater bravery than that of one who dips in and out of the situation for whatever it may be worth to him in temporary headlines.
“Mr. President, we have made formal apologies to the M’Bulu. He does not seem to be happy with them, but that represents a lack of restraint on his part, Mr. President. It does not represent a lack of grace on ours.
“Mr. President, I move to adjourn the meeting.”
At once there was a surge of exclamation and protest from some delegations, scattered applause from others, a little dutiful desk-banging by the Communists, a flurry in the press and public galleries. The Secretary’s motion, if approved, would have the effect of terminating further consideration of both the amendment and the original resolution on Gorotoland. It was not subject to debate, but it was immediately obvious that, in typical United Nations fashion, the outcome was not going to be the open-and-shut conclusion he proposed.
Indeed he knew, and his Senate colleagues suspected as much, that he did not really intend it to be. With the instinct of an experienced parliamentarian, he had sensed that a change was under way in the assemblage before him. Restraint was not always a United Nations characteristic when one of the great powers of the West was on the run, but the emotional impact of the M’Bulu’s speech was fading, second thoughts were beginning to intrude, self-interest, that great modifier of ideals and passions, was beginning to operate. The United States still provided two-thirds of the UN budget; at least two-thirds of the organization’s members were still dependent, in one way or another, upon United States friendship and financial assistance. The mood might return to vengeance in enough delegations to swing the final vote, but there was a sudden realization that it might be well to delay that vote and think about it for a while. The realization had produced one of those moments that come so often in the Congress in Washington, when opposing forces reach the exact point of meeting head on and then suddenly understand that a crushing victory by either might have very serious consequences. It was a cause for reappraisal, reconsideration, and regrouping. Orrin had recognized it as such and changed tactics accordingly.
Although it was somewhat irregular under the easily flexed rules of the Assembly, it was with a general feeling of relief that its members heard the delegate from Ghana once more seek recognition, and the President grant it, while Orrin stepped temporarily aside.
“Mr. President,” Ghana said, “I am wondering if the distinguished delegate of the United States would be willing to change his motion to a motion to suspend the meeting on this item to a day certain. The distinguished delegate,” he said with the first note of humor in an angry day, “is in a more favored position than most delegations: he can give himself his own instructions. Others may wish to consult with their home governments. Would he consider such a modification?”
“Mr. President,” Orrin said, stepping back to the rostrum, “what does the distinguished delegate of Ghana have in mind?”
“I would leave that to the wisdom of the distinguished Secretary and the judgment of this Assembly,” Ghana said smoothly, and stepped down.
Again there was a silence as Orrin stood at the rostrum, obviously thinking it out, though perhaps not quite at such length as he made them believe. Finally he spoke with a thoughtful slowness.
“Well, Mr. President, this is all rather irregular, and I should, all things considered, prefer a vote at once on my motion to adjourn. However, in view of the suggestion of the distinguished delegate of Ghana, which is typical of his thoughtful approach to this matter—(“Oh, brother,” Lafe murmured to Hal Fry)—I might be willing to modify my suggestion to suspend to next Monday, a week from today.”
There was an immediate commotion from the general direction of the U.S.S.R., and—shouting “Point of order! Point of order!”—Vasily Tashikov could be seen hurrying down the aisle to the platform. The delegate from Ghana went back to his seat, the Secretary of State turned away to a seat at the side without speaking to the Soviet Ambassador, earphones went on, dials were spun to the Russian channel. The President said patiently, “The distinguished delegate of the Soviet Union is recognized for a point of order.”
“The point of order, Mr. President,” Tashikov said angrily, “is that we are here proposing to let the guilty man decide the terms of his own sentencing. We are proposing to let the criminal decide when he shall be hanged. This is not the purpose of the United Nations, Mr. President—”
“Now, Mr. President!” the Secretary of State cried with equal anger, steaming back up the steps in a show of rage that made the Soviet Ambassador step hastily back from the rostrum, “the distinguished Soviet delegate is himself out of order to use such terms about a fellow member of the United Nations. How dare he call the United States a criminal, Mr. President, he whose nation has on its hands the blood of many millions of innocent people, and in whose graveyard rest the carcasses of so many once-free states?”
“Point of order, Mr. President!” Tashikov shouted, while his colleagues in the Communist bloc dutifully pounded their desks and pandemonium again began to sweep across the chamber. Into it the President furiously banged his gavel and, with some instinct of perception that enabled him to catch the slightest of movements in areas from which help might come, cried out with great relief, “The delegate of France seeks recognition. The distinguished delegate of France is recognized!”
“Mr. President,” Raoul Barre said calmly as both the delegate of the U.S.A. and the delegate of the U.S.S.R. resumed their seats, stalking stiffly down separate aisles to rejoin their delegations, “I shall not inflame this discussion further but will only say that I have been in consultation with other members of the French Community and other nations, and it seems to us that a reasonable compromise in this matter would be to amend the last motion of the distinguished delegate of the United States to read suspension until Thursday. It is now Monday, and that will allow for the balance of today, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday until 10 a.m. for members to consult their governments and each other. Surely that should be sufficient to satisfy all parties concerned. I therefore make that formal motion, Mr. President, as a substitute for the last motion of the delegate of the United States.”
“All those in favor of the motion of the delegate of France please signify by raising their hands,” said the President with a relieved promptness that, as Hal murmured to Lafe, would have been at home on Capitol Hill. “All those opposed. Apparently a large majority is in favor of the motion as modified by the distinguished delegate of France, and this plenary session on this item is now suspended until 10 a.m. on Thursday.”
Back in the Delegates’ Lounge after the Assembly Hall had emptied, the world now really abuzz with sensation, the United States for the first time really on the defensive in the United Nations and on her most vulnerable point at that, the Secretary of State awaited with a number of emotions the arrival of the French Ambassador, with whom he had arranged a hasty date for lunch. Presently from the swirling crowd the dapper figure of Raoul Barre appeared and came forward. Orrin shook hands with some warmth.
“I want to thank you. I think that was exactly what had to be done, at that point.”
Raoul nodded.
“Yes, it seemed to me so. As soon as Ghana began to give ground, it was obvious they all wanted a compromise. I don’t know, though, how effectively they can be held off later on.”
“No,” the Secretary said, somewhat gloomily. “Nor do I. But we must do our best. Come along and tell me about the French Community. I gather we may be able to hold them.”
The French Ambassador shook his head soberly.
“I do not know at this point. It will take some shrewd diplomacy and much hard work, but possibly you can beat it.”
“Possibly!” Orrin Knox said. “We’ve got to beat it.”
But whether they could or not he did not at the moment know, a doubt increased by the number of bland and noncommittal greetings he received as they proceeded to the elevator and up to the Delegates’ Dining Room on the fourth floor. Only one greeting was quite unequivocal. As they stepped off the elevator and stopped by the reservations desk to get their table number, a small figure at the Secretary’s elbow stepped back a pace and held out his hand. Orrin turned to find himself greeting the Portuguese Ambassador.
“Congratulations, Mr. Secretary,” he said with an ironic politeness. “Now you know how it feels.”
And to that, the French Ambassador noted with a small inward smile as he took the Secretary’s arm and pulled him away, Orrin for once had no rejoinder.
So the word went out across the seas and to all the nations that the United States of America had this day been publicly attacked and humiliated before the world and might very well find herself, in three days’ time, formally condemned for social practices which to a majority of the world’s inhabitants had long seemed deserving of condemnation. That she had been making earnest attempts for many years to right the wrongs, that Administration after Administration in Washington had done its best to speed the process, that decent folk of both races in South and North alike were working together patiently in a fearfully difficult situation, made no difference now. It was not an age in which men were disposed to stop and think, or be objective or fair, even had they the knowledge and the decency to do so. It was an age to take advantage of every weakness, and there were many now who were ready to move in for the kill, if kill there were to be.
In steadily mounting crescendo the babble of opinion crashed across the world as afternoon wore into night. Lights burned late in many delegations. International cables and telephone lines were jammed. DEFY’s picketers paraded two hundred strong outside the UN. A constant stream of delegates ascended to the thirty-eighth floor to see the Secretary-General. In Washington men pondered how best to defend their country, or take advantage of her, and in New York the Times advertising department got a call to delay the “FAIR PLAY FOR GOROTOLAND” ad, because its sponsors wished to revise it in view of late events. All across the broad reaches of America the citizenry reacted with annoyance or anger or bitterness or shame, according to individual attitude and inclination.
At the St. Regis in New York the delegation of Yugoslavia gave a dinner-dance and the M’Bulu of Mbuele partied long and happily into the night.
***