The Judges of the Secret Court (30 page)

Someone held her umbrella over her head. General Hartranft read the death warrant. A door opened at the bottom of the yard, and General Hancock appeared. He had give up all hope of reprieve. It was one thirty. He ordered the executioner to proceed.

“Her too?” asked Rath.

Hancock frowned and said she could not be saved.

Rath looked at the tie beam. She was not a heavy woman. Five knots should hold her.

His assistants began to bind her dress around her, so it would not billow immodestly as she dropped, and so she would not struggle. She asked Father Walter if she might not once more state her innocence. Father Walter said no. The world and all that was in it had now receded forever. It would do no good to protest, and it might disturb her serenity. She did not ask what serenity, but what else could he say? The white cloth covering was put over her head. Her chair was drawn back. Her umbrella was clicked down. The soldiers beneath the scaffold knocked out the beams supporting the trap.

The bodies dropped. The ropes gave an ugly twang. Payne, being the heaviest, died first. His own strength snapped his neck. For the others, death took a moment longer. One can think of a great deal in a moment.

At sixteen minutes before two the prison doctor pronounced them dead. Ten minutes later they were cut down, put in packing boxes, and buried a few feet south of the scaffold, near the prison wall. The earth over them made a fresh, wet wound. The spectators drifted away.

For Mrs. Surratt it was over.

For Edwin it was not. On 3rd January 1866, he returned to the stage.

It was too soon. He still wanted to hide. But he had no choice, he needed money, and only by acting could he provide for Edwina, Mary Ann, and Rosalie. So he faced up to it. That took courage, for not even his friends had foreseen the assaults levelled against him by the gutter press. “Is the Assassination of Caesar to be Performed?” raved the
New York World
, needlessly, since the bill was to be
Hamlet
. “Will Edwin Booth appear as the Assassin of Caesar? That would be, perhaps, the most suitable character.” Other newspapers took up his defence. “The Winter Garden will be thronged tonight as it has rarely been,” they promised.

And so it was.

He tried not to think of the crowd out there. He thought of his performance instead. There were more police in the audience than usual. A riot was expected, for the audience was less an assembly than a mob. And yet Edwin did not feel nervous. Once on a stage, and he knew what to do. It was only off it that he felt at a loss.

Hamlet
was his play. In it he was dark, mysterious, afflicted, melancholy, or so the critics said. Perhaps. He had played it in the Gold Fields of California, as a promise to his father. He had played it for a hundred nights in New York, closing less than a month before the death of the President. As Wilkes had said, he was Hamlet, melancholy and all.

Wilkes's boast had been,
I am myself alone
, and the whole world now knew what that had led to. But Edwin had not wanted to be himself alone. He had wanted some part in the world. He had wanted company in this busy loneliness of life. His efforts had come to nothing. His family existed only on a stage. Turn where he would, eventually he had to climb back into that gaslit parable. It was true. He
was
Hamlet. And whatever we may think of Hamlet, he is not a clubbable man. He is not someone we would ask to dinner. So Edwin was the first to establish that Hamlet should always wear black. In a suit of sables, having lost spontaneous laughter, like Hamlet himself, he could at least be jesting gay.

Yet now he shrank from his customary staging of the piece. He would not be himself alone. He wanted to be sheltered in some family, since he could no longer take shelter in his own, even if it be only the stage family of Elsinore.

The curtain went up on the first scene. Marcellus, Bernardo, Horatio, and the Ghost. “
Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.” “It started like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons
.” “
Let us impart what we have seen tonight unto young Hamlet
.” And, “
I this morning know where we shall find him most conveniently
.”

The curtain dropped. The audience was restless. Perhaps it was as nervous as Edwin, for it too had its part to play to-tonight, and perhaps had not yet decided upon the interpretation.

He had. It had been forced upon him willynilly. One learns from what one does. A parable shows one what one is. It is inevitable, but each time we experience it, the times have changed, we have changed, and so also changes the meaning of the parable itself. Such is the malice of events. The whole world is a parable. To act it out, is only to play it for one's self. Old age releases one from parts of which one is tired. From Romeo one progresses to Richelieu. But
Hamlet
has no age. One has to play it forever. One has to play it to the grave,
a little little grave, an obscure grave
. When one has played it enough, no doubt that is all one any longer wants.

And yet he was excited. What would the audience do to him?

He walked from his dressing-room. The actors made way for him with a curiously disconcerted silence, as though he were not a fellow actor, but some priest on his way to the altar, to offer up the rites. That was not their usual behaviour. Usually they jabbered until it was time for them to play their parts.

He took his seat. For an instant they looked at the heavy back of the curtain, as though not knowing what was on the other side of it. It was a world that was about to be unveiled for them, out there, and perhaps they did not want to see its expression. The audience was ominously quiet.

The guy ropes tugged and grew taut. So did the actors. The King turned to mime a conversation with the Queen, the others fell into their familiar supporting attitudes, and the curtain rose.

There was no applause. Out of the corners of their eyes, they could see that shapeless heaving mass of black and blobs of coloured dresses, beyond the footlights, waiting. There was nothing to do but go on.

Usually in this scene they walked on after the curtain was up, or at least while it was rising. They did not like the new stage business of being imprisoned in their chairs. And they missed, too, that usual flourish of trumpets which broke the silence and sent them on their way.

The King began:

he said to that void out there, and could not help but stumble. He might as well have been speaking of Lincoln. Why was it so quiet out there? What was the audience doing?

The audience had been taken by surprise. They were used to a Hamlet who posed decoratively upstage, in front of the rest of the company. At first they could not find him. The players were brilliantly dressed. Then they saw Edwin, black amid all that dazzle, sitting in a heavily carved curule chair, his small figure and wasted calves huddled there, waiting. In the utter silence of that face only the eyes burned.

Again the King faltered. The players had seen that figure, too.

The audience did not move. And then something happened. The players could feel it in the instant before it came, and glanced quickly at each other. The audience rose, almost in unison, and began to cheer. From gallery to pit the house was white with waving handkerchiefs.

“Three groans for
The New York World
,” somebody shouted. Three hollow boos went echoing through the house, but even while they booed, they went on clapping. That tidal noise swept over the stage in waves.

Edwin began to tremble. His head dropped on to his breast. He could not help it. The tears welled down his cheeks. Slowly he rose and walked upstage, towards the audience, until he was alone. And then, looking out over that sea of hands, he made his bow.

The audience sat down. The play went on. Ophelia died. Laertes died. The Queen and King died. And then it was Hamlet's turn to die.

There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all
.

They were Edwin's favourite lines. They were his philosophy and his Hamlet too. Hamlet died. The empty world was left to Fortinbras, who though he went through the proper forms, was not loath to claim it. Do what we will, in the end it is all the same. The world belongs to Fortinbras.

But the audience would not soon forget the expression in those anguished eyes.

He was back. He was the glory of their stage. They told him so. Yet somehow it was not the same Edwin who was back. In '57, in the Gold Fields, he had been vivacious. And now, it was hard to define, but as one of his fellow actors said, what a change. Somehow he had become uncomfortably moving.

On 22nd January 1867, a year after his return, the stage scenery was sent up to the flies, a dining-room table was moved in, the stage became a drawing-room, and a committee presented him with a Tiffany Gold Medal for the hundred nights of his first great
Hamlet
. They had meant to do that before, but the assassination had intervened. However, that was over with now, and they were proud of him, those businessmen who gave him the medal. He was the palladium of the American arts, those arts they had no time for, and regarded with suspicion. But Edwin was an exception. Not only was he admired by the best critics, he made forty or fifty thousand dollars a year. The arts might degenerate below the level of a trade, as he said, but no tradesman makes that much money. Therefore what he did must be art. Besides, he moved them. There was something gentle in Edwin, and at the same time something enormously strong, which made him acceptable. Perhaps it was dignity. Or perhaps it was that he was a sort of talisman, that he had to live with something that they knew they should remember, and yet, being human and every day, quite sensibly forgot. He was a tragedian. He did their suffering for them. And since he kept quiet about it while he did so, they loved him none the less for that.

And yet, he was changed.

So was the country. The Civil War had made it an Imperium. Perhaps even Lincoln could not have checked that monstrous growth, but though the country, which had once seemed so spacious, now merely seemed complex, there was no longer any place in it, as far as Edwin could see, for anything he believed in, and as time went on, others, no doubt, would also find less and less. The movement to Europe had begun. The young, when they had something to do or say, went there. That did not make them any the less American, but somehow it made America the less. He even went himself, twice to England, and once to Germany. He felt lost everywhere. He was no political thinker, but he could not help but notice things. People now said servants, where formerly they had been content to chatter away with the hired help. And it seemed to him that everything had been taken away from him. That was why he was so afraid for Edwina. Because he had nothing else left to lose, he had an irrational terror that she might be taken, too.

Yet alone of that family, he was afflicted with self-control. Nothing of what he felt showed outwardly. It was just that he became very quiet, and that his burning eyes watched everything, for no matter what we become, we still look out at the world from the snug corner of what we once were. He wanted only to be left in peace, and to forget.

Mary Ann would not let him. Life had addled her. She was sixty-five. Wilkes had been her favourite son. If she could not have him, she could at least have his body. The assassination meant nothing to her, Wilkes everything. Edwin was no substitute for Wilkes, but he always saw to things. Would he see if he could get the body back?

He sighed, but he did so. He always did what she asked, if only because they had nothing in common. He wrote to Stanton, got no answer, wrote to Grant, failed again, and at last appealed to President Johnson.

Johnson was going out of office, wished to leave a good record, had never approved of Stanton's tactics, and was pleased, as one of his last official acts, to affront the man. Besides, there had been another trial, of John Surratt this time, who had finally been apprehended. The trial proved Lloyd a liar, Weichmann a complacent perjuror, the Government venal, Surratt an irresponsible fool, Stanton a megalomaniac, Mrs. Surratt falsely hanged, and what was even worse, it brought the suppressed clemency plea to light. Johnson would not be tarred with that brush. He sacked both Holt and Stanton.

Stanton refused to leave. He barricaded himself in the War Department, intrigued with Congress, got his position back, and to keep it, tried to have Johnson impeached. The effort failed. Johnson was not a politician for nothing, and he could outmanœuvre Stanton any day. There was nothing for Stanton to do but leave. He could not see that he had done anything wrong, and if others said so, they lied. He was a good Christian and a good hater. Lincoln, perhaps, he had hated most of all. But he had enjoyed to fight him, for Lincoln had been an opponent worth the tricking, since he was hard to trick. But what did it all matter? He was out of office. There was nothing to do but die.

Johnson pardoned the conspirators. O'Laughlin had died of yellow fever at the Dry Tortugas, but the others went free. And he released Wilkes' body, and his theatrical trunk, which the War Department had taken from the National Hotel and impounded. He made only one condition. The man's grave must go unmarked. He would not have that man commemorated.

Neither would Edwin. Asia had just published a memoir of their father. It was an untruthful little idyll. She concealed the elder Booth's drunkenness, his madness, and his bigamy. Their grandfather she presented as a picturesque old gentleman, tall, slender, dressed in knee breeches, and with snow-white hair braided in a queue. She made no mention of his stalking them at night, with naked feet, his long toenails clacking on the deal floors. Wilkes she referred to as “his well-beloved—his bright boy Absalom”. How could she believe such nonsense? Why did she have to bank these fires? Why couldn't she let them go out? She wrote from England, where Sleeper Clarke had taken her. But he was here.