It Is My Duty

It was broad daylight when he woke, which had not happened to him in a twelvemonth.

He lay for some time looking at it: a hard white light on the ceiling, coming up off the snow, so bright that the room seemed lit from below. The sky had cleared in the night. He knew that without going to the window, from the silence; there was no sound of the wind at the corner of the house, where it had been for three days, and no hiss of snow on the glass, and no sound of anything else either, no carts, no bells, no voices in the road, only a great white quiet over the whole city, like the quiet of a room where somebody is ill. And it was cold. He lay in the bed and shrank from it, from the thought of the floor, and the water in the jug, and the fire that had gone out in the night and must be made again; and he lay there for a full quarter of an hour, an old man of seventy-three under four blankets, arguing with himself about it as if it were a point of law, before he was ashamed, and got up, and did it.

He made the fire himself. He always had. There were servants in the house who would have done it, and Louisa told him every winter that he would kill himself on his knees at the grate at his age, and he had answered every winter that a man who could not make his own fire had no business governing anybody; and since May he had made it with his left hand, slowly, badly, with the kindling falling over and the tinder failing, while the right arm hung in its sling against his side and was no use to anybody. It took him twenty minutes. He broke the ice in the jug with the back of the brush, and washed, and dressed, and went to the window.

The city was gone. In its place there was a white country, very still, under a sky the colour of a blue china plate, with smoke going straight up from the chimneys into it; and he could not tell, for a moment, where anything was. The Axis was a white field a mile long with no road on it. The Palace at the foot of the Rise was a white shape with a portico, half buried, its steps gone, its windows looking out over the drifts like the windows of a house in Russia. Beyond it the Cathedral stood on its ridge with snow to the sills, and the doors, he knew, still drifted shut, as they had been yesterday, when for the first time since it was consecrated there had been no service in it on a Sunday; and at the far end of everything, on its hill, Parliament House, very white against the blue, with the sun on its east front and a thread of smoke from every chimney, because they had been lighting the fires there since Saturday, to warm the chambers for today.

Eighteen inches on the level, by his measure. He had put his stick into it on the step on Sunday afternoon. He had no recollection of a storm of three days in his life before, in this city or any other, and he had been keeping the weather in his diary for sixty years.

He went down to his study, and Mary brought him his coffee, and he sat at his desk with the speech in front of him and read his chapters first, because he always did.

---

The speech was in the right-hand drawer, in a fair copy in the Clerk’s hand, with the ministers’ minute pinned to it. It had come up the Rise on the Thursday before the snow, the twenty-sixth, for his observations, and he had read it through twice and made none, and sent it back; and it had come up again, engrossed, on the Saturday, in the middle of the storm, in the pocket of a messenger from Parliament House who had walked the whole way along the Axis on foot, in snow to his knees, rather than trust a horse to it, and arrived at the door at dusk looking like a snowman, very proud.

The King’s speech was in the left-hand drawer, with the King’s other letter, and the paper with one word on it from the window frame, and the note from Cambridge. He did not take it out. He did not need to. He had read it on the night of the twenty-third, by the candle, after the British minister had gone down the hill; and again in the morning, with Clay in the chair across the desk; and he found that he knew it, as he knew the Psalms, without having tried to learn it.

I have commanded My Governor-General to declare to you My Pleasure in these My own Words.

He opened the ministers’ speech instead, and read it again from the beginning, as he would read it at two o’clock: slowly, aloud, under his breath, to have the sound of it.

It was a good speech. He had thought so on the Thursday and he thought so still. It was not the King’s. It was longer, and said less, which was its merit; it mourned the Queen in a paragraph that he was fairly sure Clay had written himself, because nobody else in the ministry could have made a paragraph do that, and it recorded the King’s accession in the words of the proclamation, and then it went on to the revenue, and the bank, and the war in Florida, and the western rivers, as every speech had gone on to every one of them in the five years he had been reading them. And at the top of it, where every speech he had ever read in that chamber had begun with the same words, the old words, the words that every Governor-General had read from the dais since the Parliament first met, there were other words.

My Lords and Gentlemen, It is my duty to acquaint you.

He had seen the alteration on the Thursday. It was in the draft that came up for his observations: the old words struck out with a single stroke of the pen, I have it in command from His Majesty, and the new ones written in over them in Clay’s quick slanting hand, and Clay’s initials in the margin, and under the initials a small note in the Clerk’s red ink, which he had had to hold to the window to read: Altered by Mr Clay, 26 Nov. The command not to be read.

He had made no observation on it. He had sat with it at the window for a long time, on the Thursday, with the draft on his knee, and then he had sent it back without a word; because there was no observation to be made on it that would not have been a decision, and because it was, when he came to think about it, the most exact sentence in the speech.

He had no command from His Majesty that he was going to read. He had one command, in the left-hand drawer, and he was not going to read it, and he did not propose to stand on the dais beside the empty throne and tell the two Houses of the Parliament of the Union, in the old words, that he had it in command from His Majesty to acquaint them of anything. He had it in duty. That was the truth, and it was the whole of the office, and he had held the office for five years without ever having had to say so in so many words. Clay had said it for him, in four words, in the margin of a draft, and initialled it, so that it should be Clay’s and not his.

He put the speech in his pocket and rang for his coat.

---

They took him down in a sleigh.

There was no carriage in the city that could have gone a hundred yards; the livery stables had sent up a great old sleigh from Baltimore that had not been out since the winter of ‘thirty-one, with a pair of horses and a coachman in a fur cap and a string of bells on the harness, and the Governor-General went down the Rise to open the Parliament of the Union sitting in it in his greatcoat, with a buffalo robe over his knees and his right arm under the robe, and the bells going like a wedding. Mary had wanted to come with him, because of the arm, and he had not let her. Louisa stood on the step in her shawl to see him go, and laughed at the bells, which was the first time he had heard her laugh since the summer.

The Axis was a white desert, and the road along it was two ruts that the morning’s sleighs had cut, and the sun on the snow was so bright that he had to shut his eyes against it. Boys were out on the drifts with sleds, shouting, in hundreds, it seemed; they had had no school for three days, and would have none today, and the Governor-General’s bells went by them and they stopped and stared and then cheered him, out of sheer good spirits, without knowing who he was, and he lifted his left hand to them from under the robe. At the Palace the guard of honour was drawn up in the snow at the foot of the buried steps, twenty men of the garrison with their muskets and their breath smoking, stamping their feet; they presented arms as he went by, and the snow fell off their shakos in little showers. And then the long white mile, and the slow climb of Charter Hill, with the horses steaming and labouring and the coachman talking to them in Irish; and the guns on the hill began to fire as he came up it, for the Governor-General opening the Parliament, and he counted them, as he counted everything, and they were right.

He had heard on the way down that the House would be thin. A train from Philadelphia had been stuck in the drifts since Saturday night, three-and-twenty miles short of Baltimore, with eighty passengers in it, a dozen members among them, who had kept up their fires with the cars’ own wood and foraged for bread and bacon round the farms; they were being dug out that morning, and would be in by the evening, God willing. Two members from Massachusetts had been since Friday afternoon on the road from Philadelphia and had come in at four in the morning, half frozen, and gone straight to bed. He thought it was very likely that this would be the first Parliament of the Union ever opened in the presence of less than half its members; and he thought, too, that he would not at all have minded being one of the ones in the snow.

---

He waited in the small room off the Lords’ lobby, as he always waited, while the Ebony Rod went to fetch the Commons.

It was very cold in there. They had lit the fire, but the fire had not yet understood what was required of it, and he stood with his back to it in his greatcoat, which he had not taken off, and looked out of the two tall windows to the south, because he always did.

The market was under the snow. It lay below the hill as it always lay, the long low building of whitewashed brick and the yard behind it and the fence of boards too high to see over from the street; but the snow had filled the yard to the top of the fence and drifted over the roof, so that the whole place had gone soft and white and shapeless, like everything else in the city, and looked from up here like nothing at all, like a shed in a field. There was smoke from one chimney. There was nobody in the yard; nobody could have been in it. He supposed that they were all inside, wherever inside was, in the cold, waiting, as they waited at all seasons, and that the snow was no more to them than the summer had been, except colder. He looked at it for a long time. The snow had made it beautiful, which he thought was the worst thing he had yet seen the snow do.

The Ebony Rod came back, and bowed, and said that the Commons were at the bar.

He went in.

The Lords’ chamber was full of a hard white light from its high windows, reflected off the snow outside, so that every face in it looked a little ill, and the gilt on the throne and on the canopy over it shone as if it were wet. It was fuller than he had expected. The peers who lived in the District had come, of course, the old Tidewater men who had nowhere else to be in December; and the bishops, most of them, in their lawn, who seemed to have a way of getting through snow that ordinary men had not; and a good many of the western peers who had come in early for the session, before the storm, and had been snowed up for three days in the hotels and were glad to be anywhere. The galleries were full of ladies in furs. They had come through eighteen inches of snow to hear the Governor-General read a speech that would be in every newspaper in the city by the evening, and he did not pretend to understand why, and was obscurely touched by it.

The matting was down again. It had been taken up after May, and put down again for the session with brass rods along every seam, so that there was not a seam in it that a man’s foot could find; somebody had seen to that, without being asked, and without mentioning it to him, and he knew who, and he crossed it slowly with his eyes on it, the whole width of the chamber, and went up the three steps to the dais without help, and sat down in the chair beside the empty throne.

At the bar the Commons stood packed together, what there was of them, with the Speaker in front in his gown and wig, very large and solemn, with the snow still on his shoes; and beside the Speaker, a little behind him, as was his place, the Prime Minister, very tall and thin and upright in his black, with his hands folded in front of him, looking at the floor.

Adams took the speech out of his pocket with his left hand, and unfolded it on his knee, and stood up, and read.

My Lords and Gentlemen,

It is my duty to acquaint you, that since you were last assembled it has pleased Almighty God to take from us our late Sovereign Lady Queen Victoria, in the twenty-second year of her age, by an act of wickedness which the people of this Union heard of with horror, and have lamented as with one heart. She had not reigned over us long enough to be known to us as her people in England knew her. She had reigned long enough to be loved; and there is no part of her dominions in which she has been more sincerely mourned than this.

He had meant to read it in his ordinary voice, the dry flat high voice that he had read every speech in, and every message, and every bill, for five years; and he found that he could not quite, and that the House was very still. He went on.

By her death the Crown of the United Kingdom of America has come, according to the Charter, to His Majesty King Ernest the First, whose accession was made known throughout the Union by proclamation of His Majesty’s Privy Council on the fifteenth day of August last.

He did not pause there. He had decided in the study that morning that he would not pause anywhere, for anything, and he did not; he read the King’s name as he had read the Queen’s, and went on to the revenue. He read the revenue, and the bank, and the war in Florida, which had lasted five years and was costing more than the Treasury could bear; and the navigation of the western rivers, and the estimates, which would be laid before the House of Commons; and at the end, the old words, which nobody had altered because they were true of every Parliament in every year:

I commend these, and all other matters which may come before you, to your wisdom; and I pray that the blessing of Almighty God may attend your deliberations.

He sat down.

He had stood on that dais, he supposed, beside that empty chair, some thirty times in five years, and read some thirty speeches, and given the assent to some hundreds of bills, in the name of a King and then of a Queen, neither of whom had ever seen the chamber or would ever see it; and he had never before today felt the chair beside him as a thing that was there. He felt it now. It stood at his left hand, gilt and crimson, with its canopy over it and the arms of the Union carved on its back, empty, as it had always been empty; and five weeks ago, three thousand miles away, a man had sat at a table in a house in London and written, in his own hand, in large black letters, that the man in the chair beside it was to declare His Pleasure in His own Words. And the man in the chair beside it had declared his ministers’ pleasure, in a Kentucky lawyer’s words, with a Kentucky lawyer’s alteration at the top of the page; and the throne had stood there through the whole of it, and had said nothing, as thrones do.

The Commons bowed, and went out, the Speaker first, and Clay behind him, who did not once look up at the dais; and the Lords rose; and the Governor-General went back across the matting, slowly, with his eyes on it, and out to his sleigh, and home through the snow with the bells going, and the boys cheering him again on the Axis, without knowing who he was.

---

Clay came at nine that night.

He came on foot, which no man in his senses would have done, the whole length of the Axis in the dark and the frost, with Charles in front of him carrying a lantern and breaking the way; and Adams, who had been sitting in his study with the candles and the newspapers, heard them on the step, and the bell, and knew who it was before the servant came up, because nobody else in New Westminster would have come.

He came in with his cheeks red and his boots white to the knee, and his breath still short from the Rise, and stood at the fire to warm his hands, as he had stood in this room in July, and in August, and in November, every time that something had been done; and Adams looked at his face and saw that it had been done again, whatever it was, and that Clay was very tired, and very pleased, and a little afraid of being told what he was.

“Sit down, Mr Clay.”

“I’ll stand a moment, sir, if you’ll allow me. I’ve been sitting since noon.” He held his hands to the blaze. “I’ve come to tell you what the House did this afternoon, after you left it. I thought you had better hear it from me. You will hear it from everybody else by the morning, under the seal of the most solemn secrecy.”

He told it. He told it standing at the fire, in the low part of his voice, without any of his ornaments, as a man gives evidence. When the Commons had come back from the Lords, he said, and the Speaker had reported His Excellency’s speech, and before any member could rise to move the Address, he had got up in his place; and Stanly, at the end of the second bench, had taken notice of strangers. The Speaker had ordered them to withdraw. The galleries had been cleared, the ladies and the reporters and all, protesting, and the doors shut and locked, and the Serjeant set at them. And then, with nothing whatever before the House, by its leave, he had told the House that His Majesty had been graciously pleased to send to His Excellency the Governor-General, by the hand of His Majesty’s minister at this place, a Speech in His Majesty’s own hand, with a letter commanding that it be read to the Parliament of the Union at its meeting in those words; that His Excellency had laid it before His Majesty’s American ministers, as he was bound to do; that His Excellency had this day read to the two Houses, by the advice of those ministers, the Speech which they had submitted to him, as every Governor-General had done since the Parliament first met; and that His Majesty’s ministers thought it right that the House should hear His Majesty’s own words, every one of them, from the mouth of one of His Majesty’s servants, before it proceeded to any business.

“And then I read it to them,” Clay said. “The letter and the Speech. All four paragraphs. I read it as well as I know how, sir, which is tolerably well, and I said nothing about it whatever, before or after; and then I sat down.”

“And?”

“And nobody rose.” Clay turned from the fire at last. “There was nothing before the House, so there was nothing to rise to. I had seen to that. I had seen the Speaker on Saturday, and he knew what he was to do if anybody tried, and he sat there in the chair looking like a bull in a field, waiting for somebody to try. Nobody tried. There were a hundred and nine of them in the House, sir, the rest being in the snow; and they sat in that shut room with the lamps lit, the hundred and nine, and looked at me, and at one another, and at the floor; and I could hear the fire in the grate at the end of the chamber, and a man coughing in the lobby outside the locked door, and nothing else at all. It went on for a long time. Longer than the Council, in August. I thought it would never stop. And then somebody at the back, on the opposition benches, I could not see who, said, not loud, God save the King.”

He stopped.

“And they all said it,” said Clay. “The hundred and nine. The whole House. Not loud. As if they were in church. God save the King. The Popular Democrats and the ministry, the low country and the Western Reserve, all of them together, in a shut room, with nobody to hear them do it but themselves.” He was silent a moment. “I have sat in that House for thirty years, sir. I have never heard it do anything all together, not once, not on the Queen’s wedding. And I could not tell you, if you were to hang me for it, whether they meant it as loyalty or as the other thing. I believe they meant it as both. I believe that most of them did not know which they meant. I am quite sure that none of them will ever have to say.”

Adams said nothing.

“Then the Speaker ordered the strangers readmitted,” said Clay, “and the ladies came back in, very cross, and the reporters, crosser, and a young member from New York moved the Address, and a member from Georgia seconded it, and it was agreed to without a division, and the House adjourned at a quarter past four. And there is nothing in the Journal, sir, except that His Excellency’s speech was reported and the Address agreed to. Nothing at all.”

He sat down then, all at once, in the chair across the desk, like a man whose legs have decided it for him; and they looked at each other across the desk, in the candlelight, the two old men, with the snow on Clay’s boots melting into the carpet.

“You did not ask me,” said Adams.

“No, sir.”

“It was my letter. It was addressed to me. The King’s words were sent into my hand, by his command, and you read them to the House of Commons without a word to me before or since. You did not ask me.”

“No, sir,” said Clay. “If I had asked you, you would have had to answer.”

There was a long silence. The fire settled. Somewhere below in the house a door shut, and Charles’s voice said something in the hall, and a servant’s answered it.

Then Adams did a thing that he had not done, so far as he could remember, since the spring, and that he saw astonished Clay a good deal more than anything that had been said in the House of Commons that afternoon. He laughed. It was not much of a laugh; it was a short, high, cracked sound, like a dry stick breaking, and it hurt his shoulder; but it was a laugh, and it went on for a little while, and Clay sat and looked at him with his mouth open.

“That is the most insolent thing that anybody has said to me in this house,” Adams said at last, when he could. “In five years. And it is perfectly true.” He wiped his eyes with his left hand. “You are a very dangerous man, Mr Clay. I have always said so. I begin to think that you are the most dangerous man in America, and that we could not do without you.” He reached for the bell. “Will you take a glass of wine? And then you had better hear me write to the King, since you will not let me decide anything else, and you may as well be present when I do the one thing that is still left to me.”

---

He wrote it that night, with Mary at the desk and Clay in the chair by the fire with his wine, listening, and the snow lying white and silent outside the window all the way down to the Palace and the river.

Sire,

I have had the honour to receive from the hands of Your Majesty’s minister at this place, on the evening of the 23rd ultimo, Your Majesty’s gracious letter of the 1st of November, together with the Speech which Your Majesty was pleased to enclose in it, written in Your Majesty’s own hand.

I have laid both before Your Majesty’s American ministers, as I am bound to do. By their advice I this day opened Your Majesty’s Parliament of the Union with a Speech, in Your Majesty’s name, in the words which they submitted to me, as every Governor-General has opened it since that Parliament first met; and Your Majesty will be pleased to recollect that by the fourth clause of the second Article of the Charter of Union, I could open it in no other.

I have the honour further to acquaint Your Majesty that Your Majesty’s Speech, in Your Majesty’s own words, was this day read to the House of Commons of the Union by Your Majesty’s Prime Minister, every word of it, in a sitting from which strangers were excluded; and that the House heard it in silence, and at the end of it, as I am informed, said with one voice, God save the King.

I have the honour to be, with the most profound respect, Sire, Your Majesty’s most faithful and most obedient servant and subject,

He signed it himself, as he had signed the other, with his left hand, slowly, in letters an inch high across the foot of the sheet. Then he sat back and looked at it.

“He will not like it,” said Clay, from the fire.

“No,” said Adams. “But he will know that it is true. I think that he is a man who would rather be told the truth and not like it than be told anything else and like it. I have been that kind of man myself, all my life. It is the one thing that I have in common with His Majesty, and I mean to make use of it.” He handed the sheet to Mary to be sealed. “The convention is that the King’s letters to his Governor-General weigh nothing, Mr Clay. That he may write as often as he pleases, and as civilly, and that nothing he writes can make the smallest difference to anything the Governor-General does. I have believed it all my life, and I have done my duty by it today, and I believe it still. But I will tell you that I have had that letter in my drawer for a fortnight, and it has not weighed nothing.”

“No, sir,” said Clay. “I don’t suppose it has.”

He went away down the hill at eleven, with Charles and the lantern going in front of him down the Rise, very small, until the light went behind the Palace, and came out again beyond it on the long white Axis, and went on and on towards Charter Hill until Adams could not tell it from the stars; and he stood at the window and watched it, and then went to bed, and lay awake a long time in the cold, listening to the silence.

---

On the Wednesday his sister’s son was set free.

The court discharged him by its own order, in the ordinary course, as Cranch had told him in June that it might after November if nobody moved further; and nobody had moved further, and nobody had asked the Crown for mercy, and nobody had given it. William came up the Rise in the afternoon with his wife, through the slush, after twenty months in the District gaol, a thin grey nervous man past fifty who could not stop thanking everybody in the house for things they had not done; and Louisa cried, and Mary gave them tea, and Adams shook his nephew’s hand with his left hand and said very little, because there was nothing he could say that would not have been either a lie or a lecture, and he had given up both for the day.

He dictated it to Mary that night, in the words that came.

My nephew William S. Smith was this day liberated, and came with his wife to my house.

That was all he said of it. He did not say that he had not lifted a finger. He did not need to; the diary knew.

And on the Sunday, the thirteenth, the thaw came, and the Cathedral was open again, and he walked to it down the Rise with his stick, slowly, in a slush ankle-deep, because no sleigh could go and no carriage could get through; and the Primate preached on the text Render therefore unto Caesar, which Adams thought was either a coincidence or the Primate’s notion of a joke, and could not decide which. And in the evening he dictated the day to Mary at the window, with the light going and the water dripping from the eaves all along the front of the house, and the Axis below them gone from white to grey, and the drifts sinking, and the ruts showing through again, and the whole city coming back, sodden and dirty and familiar, out of the snow.

A bright sky overhead, he said; a mild but snow-chilled atmosphere to breathe, and a slushy carpet in the streets under foot was the circumstantial condition of this day; and emblematical of the social and political condition of the country.

Mary wrote it down, and waited, with the pen lifted.

“That will do,” said the Governor-General. “That is the whole of it.”