Charter Day

4. IV:45. Saturday. Charter Day. 57.

He had Mary put the number in, as he had put it in every year of his life since he was old enough to count: fifty-seven years since the Fourth of July in 1783, when the Charter was signed at Boston, in the Old State House, in the room where the peace had been made, with his father among the commissioners who had brought it there from Philadelphia. He had been fifteen, and abroad, and had heard of it weeks afterwards from a newspaper. He remembered his father’s letter about it better than he remembered most of the things he had seen with his own eyes.

It was ninety degrees by nine o’clock.

He took the review at ten, on the Axis, from the stand they had put up below Columbia Palace with an awning over it that kept off the sun and nothing else. The regulars from the barracks marched past him, and the marines from the navy yard, and the militia of the District in their own uniforms, which were of every colour that the militia of the District could afford, and then the volunteer companies from the city, who had been drinking since dawn; and the Marine band played at the head of them, and the dust went up off the parade ground into the white sky, and the crowd on the grass along the edges of the Axis cheered everything that passed, and him. He stood for an hour and a half in a black coat, with his hat in his right hand, and his right arm held up to his hat at every colour that went by, because the Governor-General saluted the colours and did not sit down while they passed, and he did not propose to be the first Governor-General who did. The arm ached from the third company onwards. By the end it had stopped aching and gone numb, which he took to be an improvement.

At noon there was the service at the Cathedral.

The Cathedral stood on the ridge above the city, and the road up to it was a mile of white dust; and inside it was hotter than outside, with every seat full and the doors shut against the noise of the crowd, and the whole congregation fanning itself at once, so that the nave seemed to move like a field of wheat. He sat in his stall in the choir, below the Archbishop’s throne, in a sweat, and listened to the Primate give thanks for the Charter, for the fifty-seventh time since it was signed, in the same words that had been used every year since he could remember, and which he knew by heart. Then the prayers. They prayed for the Union, and for the Parliament of the Union, and for the Governor-General, which he never knew how to sit through; and for the Queen’s Majesty.

Most heartily we beseech thee with thy favour to behold our most gracious Sovereign Lady, Queen Victoria.

The whole Cathedral said it. Two thousand people, in the heat, with their fans stopped for a moment, said the Queen’s name together and asked God to grant her in health and wealth long to live; and the Primate, after the prayer for the royal family, added a sentence of his own, which he had evidently written out that morning and was pleased with, asking God to be with Her Majesty in the hour that was to come and to give her a safe and joyful deliverance; and two thousand people said Amen to that too, warmly, as if it had been their own sister.

Adams said it with them. He thought of Louisa at prayers three weeks ago, saying and the child from her chair by the window; and of the letter about the Imaum’s pearls, which he had signed with such labour and sent off by the Great Western, and which would be a few days out of New York by now, with the whole ocean still in front of it; and he found that he was pleased, in a way that he would not have admitted to the Primate or to anybody, to think of her opening it.

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The afternoon was given to the parties.

They had both of them hired a hotel, as they did every year: the American Whigs at one end of the Avenue and the Popular Democrats at the other, each with its long dinner and its seventeen toasts and its band, so that by four o’clock the whole length of the Avenue was music and smoke and men in black coats going in and out of doors, and by six it was speeches. He had been asked to neither, since the Governor-General belonged to no party, and he was glad of it. He had made speeches at such dinners in his time, and been cheered at some and hissed at others, and could not remember now which had been which. They were all party celebrations. There was not one of them, in the whole city, with which he could sympathise. The Charter was fifty-seven years old today, and every man in New Westminster who could afford a dinner was drinking its health in one hotel or the other, and not one of them, he suspected, had read it through since he left school.

He walked home from the Cathedral, slowly, because Louisa had taken the carriage; and spent the rest of the day quietly at Government House, with the shutters closed, dictating to Mary, who wrote down everything he said and corrected nothing, though he could tell from the back of her neck when she thought he was wrong.

In the evening Miss Cutts came, who was the niece of an old friend and very kind to children, and took Mary Louisa off to see the fireworks on the Axis, and brought her back at eleven, asleep on her feet and with gunpowder on her gloves, and full of rockets. He heard her on the stairs telling her mother that there had been a set piece at the end, with the Charter in letters of fire, and the eagle, and the Queen’s cypher, and that the Queen’s cypher had gone out first, before the others, pop, and everybody had laughed.

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On the Sunday he went with Louisa and Mary Louisa and Mrs Thornton to the service in the House of Commons.

The chamber was used for worship on Sundays when the House was sitting, and the chaplain preached there, and anybody might come; and it was generally full, of members and their wives and boarding-house keepers and clerks and strangers, and of people who came to see the chamber and stayed for the sermon because it was cooler than the street. This morning it was full and not cooler. The chaplain was a Methodist, a big earnest man with a voice like a bell, whom the House had chosen because nobody could think of a reason against him; and he took for his text half a verse from the Ephesians, the commonwealth of Israel, and preached for an hour on the government of the Hebrews.

It was altogether a political discourse, and it was very well suited to the place and to the day after Charter Day, and Adams had not heard anything like it in that chamber in thirty years. The chaplain argued that the government of Israel under Moses and Joshua and the Judges had been a commonwealth, a government of the people under the law, with no king in it but God; and that the Bible was a book containing the supreme law of liberty. He described the twelve tribes, and the tribe of Levi set apart from all the rest, without land, scattered through the cities of the others; and the Judges, and the prophets, divinely inspired and all laymen, who rose up out of the people to rebuke the powers of the day. And then he came to the kings: how the people of Israel had demanded a king, that they might be like all the nations; and how Samuel had disapproved of it, and God had disapproved of it, and had warned them by the mouth of Samuel of everything a king would do to them, how he would take their sons for his chariots and their daughters for his kitchens and a tenth of everything they had; and had then given them a king nevertheless, because they would have one.

There was a perfect silence in the chamber when he said that. Adams, sitting in the second row of the members’ benches with his hat on his knee and Mrs Thornton’s fan going at his elbow, kept his face very still. He was perfectly aware that every person in the chamber who knew who he was had turned to look at the back of his head.

The chaplain did not seem to notice. He went on to the Gospel, and to the answer that Christ sent to the messengers of John the Baptist, ending, after all the miracles, with the one that John was left to draw his own conclusion from: that the poor had the Gospel preached to them. He said that the preaching of Christ had been to the multitude; and that Christianity, of all religions, was the one whose first principle was that all mankind were of one family, descended from one father; and he sat down, very hot, and they sang a hymn.

“That was radical,” said Mrs Thornton, on the steps outside, putting up her parasol. She was a widow, and had lived in New Westminster since there was nothing in it but the plans, and said what she thought.

“So it was,” Adams said. “And so is the Christian religion.”

He thought about it all the way home, in the carriage, in the glare; and in the afternoon he thought about it at St John’s, where a curate read the evening service for the third Sunday after Trinity and preached on Malachi, and Adams did not listen to a word of it. All mankind of one family: that was the root of it. That was where the natural equality of men came from, if it came from anywhere, and the principle that the natural state of men among themselves was peace and not war; and he thought that there were the heads of a lecture in it, or a dissertation, moral and political and religious, if he ever had the time, which he would not. He thought, too, about Samuel, and the kings, and the people who would have one; and about a set piece of fireworks on the Axis, and the Queen’s cypher going out first; and he went to bed early, and lay awake, in the dark, in his chamber, which was the hottest room in the house, and solitary.

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The week was the House’s, and the heat’s.

It was ninety degrees every afternoon, and eighty at midnight. The members sat from ten in the morning until eight and nine at night, with the windows open and the flies in, on the army bill and the navy bill and the deficit and the Florida war, and a great many other things that had waited since December and could not wait any longer; and every evening somebody came up the Rise to tell him what they had done, since he could not go down to see. He did not go down. The Governor-General did not sit in the gallery of the House of Commons; it was one of the things that the office did not do, and he had kept the rule for five years, though there were days when he would have given a year of his life to be back on the benches with his hand up, and this week was full of them.

On the Tuesday the committee reported the resolution about the Imaum’s presents.

Clay had wanted it kept back until the House rose. Adams knew that, because Clay had told him so, very civilly, in a note of three lines, a fortnight ago: Her Majesty’s ministers would give the point their most careful consideration. It was the most Clay-like note that Clay had ever written, and Adams had kept it, to put in a drawer with some others. But committees in the last fortnight of a session did as they pleased, and this one had been worked upon by somebody who wanted the pearls sold; and it brought the resolution in on the Tuesday morning with an amendment, and the House took it up, and there was a debate.

He heard about it from a Massachusetts member who called on him that evening, hot and indignant, and sat in his study with a glass of lemonade, telling it. Half the House had thought the presents belonged to the Queen, the member said, and could not be sold without her leave. A quarter had thought they belonged to the Union and should go to the Exchequer. The rest had thought that it was too hot to think about anything, and wanted the vote taken so that they could get on with the army bill. Nobody had been able to say for certain whose they were. One member had produced the precedent of the Morocco lion, and another had answered him that a lion was not a pearl; and the Chairman had ruled that this was not a point of order, and the House had adjourned the debate.

On the Thursday it was taken up again, and decided by the yeas and nays: the amendment lost, sixty-nine to eighty-nine, and the resolution to sell lost, seventy-five to eighty-six. The pearls were to stay where they were.

The Massachusetts member came up the Rise again that evening to tell him so, delighted, and shook his left hand, and called it a triumph of pure principle; and Adams thanked him, and said that they would reverse it by a reconsideration before tomorrow night, and the member laughed.

They reversed it by noon.

He had the whole of it on Friday evening from two members, separately, each very angry with the other. The rejected resolution, which ought by the rules of the House to have been carried to the Lords by the Clerk before noon on Thursday, as a resolution rejected, had not been carried anywhere. It had been handed privately, by the Clerk, to a member: nobody knew which member, and the Clerk would not say. And on Friday morning, as soon as the Journal had been read, that member had stood up with the resolution in his hand and moved to reconsider the vote by which it was rejected. There had been a long debate about the Clerk. There had been appeals to the chair, and motions to lay on the table, and the previous question, and all the machinery of a party that has made up its mind and does not mean to hear argument; and at the end of it the vote was reconsidered, a hundred and eight to fifty-four, and the resolution was amended to sell the presents and pay the proceeds into the Exchequer, and passed, eighty-two to seventy.

“The honest decision of yesterday,” said the angrier of the two members, “reversed by a smaller number than it was carried. That is what we have come to.”

Adams said that it was the session, and the heat, and the last fortnight; and that it would now go up to the Lords; and that the Lords had never in his experience done anything whatever in the last fortnight of a session except adjourn, and would not begin with the Imaum of Muscat. The pearls would stay at the Palace until December, and in December everybody would have forgotten them, and in a year the Imaum would send more. He said it to make the member laugh, and the member did. Then he sat for a long time alone in his study, in the dark, with the window open and the fireflies on the Axis, and thought about the Clerk’s hand, and the member’s hand, and a resolution passing from one to the other in a corridor on a Thursday afternoon, with nobody seeing it, and nobody deciding it, and the thing done.

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On the Saturday he was seventy-three.

He rose at a quarter past four, because it was too hot to lie in bed, and Mary put it in the book: 11. IV:15. Saturday. He did not have her put in anything about the birthday. There were letters from Quincy, and from Charles at Boston, and one from a stranger in Ohio who had heard that it was the Governor-General’s birthday and wished to tell him that he had been wrong about the tariff in 1828. He read them all, and answered two.

In the evening he went down the Rise and along the Axis to Parliament House, at sunset, to hear the Marine band, which played on the steps of the east front on summer evenings and drew a crowd; and he stood on the steps among the crowd, a little apart, with his hat off, in the first cool air of the day, and listened to it for nearly an hour, and was happy. The coachman had hurt his hand, and could not drive; so Louisa sent a hack down for him, and he went home in it, and then out again, because he had been promised to the theatre.

The theatre was the event of the season. The celebrated Mademoiselle Fanny Elssler was dancing there, the first great dancer from the Paris Opera that had ever come to New Westminster, and the whole city that could get a seat had gone to see her, and the House of Commons had very nearly adjourned on the Thursday so that the members could go; and a member from Maryland had promised to keep him a seat in the parquet, and kept it. It was stifling. The heat in the parquet was so great that after the farce he gave up the seat, with apologies, and went up to the second row of boxes, where there was a little air from a door, and sat there in a corner by himself.

She danced a ballet called La Tarantule, which was very poor, with a gentleman called Monsieur Sylvain, who was said to be an Irishman called Sullivan; and then, after a song, she danced alone, a Polish dance called La Cracovienne, in a red and white dress with little bells on her boots, and the house went mad.

Adams watched her with his chin on his hand. He had seen every dancer of consequence in Europe in his time, at St Petersburg and Berlin and Paris and London, as a young man and an old one, and he thought, watching her, that the exhibition of attitudes which in his younger days would have been called lascivious was the unrivalled excellence of Mademoiselle Elssler, and that she knew it, and that the house knew it, and that he knew it, and that it was very well done. The house threw roses. They came down out of the boxes all round him in posies, red and white and yellow, and fell on the stage at her feet; and she was called out, again and again, and curtseyed, and gave the people thanks in a little speech in an accent that the whole house adored; and he sat in his box in the heat and applauded her with his left hand against his knee, because the right was no use for it, and went home at midnight under the stars, in a hack, past the dark Palace, seventy-three years old.

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He dictated it the next morning, at dawn, standing at the window of his study, with the light coming up over the Axis and the mocking-bird beginning, and Mary at the desk behind him with the pen.

12. V. Sunday.

I entered yesterday upon the seventy-fourth year of my age; and I have now lived as long since the decease of my mother as she had lived when I was born. I am deeply sensible of the duty of beginning in earnest to wean myself from the interests and affections of this world, and of preparing myself for my departure to that which is to come; and yet the day of yesterday was so absorbed in worldly business and worldly pleasure that not a moment of it was left for self-admonition or for meditation.

He stopped. Mary waited, with the pen lifted. Down the hill the Palace was coming out of the dark, pale and shuttered, with its long low wings, and nobody living in it; and beyond it the Axis, and the stand still up from Charter Day, with its awning flapping, that nobody had yet thought to take down.

The truth is, he said, I adhere to the world, and to all its vanities, from an impulse altogether involuntary; and cannot by any exercise of my will realise that I can have but very few days more to live, and that I have nothing better or more urgent to do than to pack up and make ready for my voyage.

Mary wrote it down. He looked out of the window for a while longer. He thought that it was a strange thing, and a little shameful, to be seventy-three and to cling to the world against one’s will, when there were people in it who had not yet had any of it at all; and he thought of the Queen, for no reason, as he had thought of her at the Cathedral, and of the long reign she had in front of her, and of the child; and that she would be his age, if God spared her, in the year eighteen hundred and ninety-two, which was a date he could not even imagine, and in which the Charter would be a hundred and nine years old, and the Imaum’s pearls would still be at the Palace, very likely, in their box, waiting for somebody to decide whose they were.

“That will do,” he said.