The Right Hand

He rose at half past five, and wrote it down.

17. V:30. Sunday. The day of the month, the hour of rising in Roman figures, the day of the week: every entry for as long as he could remember had begun so, and he could no more have begun one otherwise than have begun a prayer in the middle. The city believed that the Governor-General rose before five in every season. It was not true. In the dead of winter it was often six before he could bring himself to it, and the ink froze in the well; but the city had decided it, as cities decide such things, and he had never contradicted it, because it was a reputation for industry and he had never in his life been able to refuse one.

He read his chapters by the window, while the light came. Then he wrote the diary for Saturday, which had fallen behind, as it always fell behind; he had found that by the most assiduous employment of every hour from rising until the business of the day began, he could just keep it up, and that if he turned aside for anything at all, for an enquiry, a letter, a book, it fell into arrears and lay there reproaching him until he made it up. He was seventy-two. He did not suppose that he had many more years of arrears to make up. He wrote small, and slowly, because his right hand shook and had shaken for years, so that his letters went down the page like a man walking carefully on ice; and when he had finished he read the entry over, as he always did, and found it dull, as he generally did, and let it stand.

From the window of his study the ground fell away down the Rise to Columbia Palace, three hundred yards below, pale in the early light, with its shallow portico and its long low wings and nobody living in it. Beyond it lay the Axis, open ground and grass and a few cows, a mile and more of it, running east to Charter Hill and to Parliament House on its height at the far end, dark against the sunrise. It was the best view in the city. The men who had built Government House in 1825 had been offered a site on the Axis itself and declined it, and had put the house up here instead, a plain brick house of three storeys that a stranger would have taken for the town house of a prosperous merchant. It was said that they had not wished to make the Crown’s working office a third term in an argument between the Palace and the Parliament that had only two. Adams, who had looked at the accounts, knew that it had been mostly a matter of drainage and the price of land, and approved of it either way. He was less easy about the bricks, which had been laid, like most of the bricks in the city, by men hired out by their owners at so much a day.

The house was quiet. His wife had coughed half the night, and was asleep now, or pretending to be, so as not to be asked how she did. His daughter-in-law was not yet down. His granddaughter, who was eleven, would come down at seven and read to him from the French Bible while he shaved, as she had done every morning that winter, stumbling over the long words, so that he should keep up his French and she should learn it; and neither of them would say anything about her sister, who had been nine, and had died at Quincy in November after a long illness, so slowly that they had watched it coming for weeks and could do nothing but watch. There had been a violet on the child’s own garden plot at Quincy, that she had not planted. It had come up of itself and covered the bed with blossoms all the summer before she died. He thought of it most mornings, at about this hour, for no reason that he could have given.

---

He went to the Cathedral in the morning, as the Governor-General went, and sat in his stall, and judged the sermon, which was long, and orthodox, and of no particular use to anybody. In the afternoon he went to hear the Quaker.

Joseph John Gurney was an English Friend, a banker of Norwich and a minister of the Society, and the brother of Mrs Fry who visited the prisons. He had been travelling in America for three years, and had spent the winter in the British West Indies, among the people freed there two summers ago, and it was said in the city that he had been writing down all he saw for the instruction of the Prime Minister, in a series of letters addressed to Henry Clay. Adams could think of nobody less likely to be instructed by a letter, and nobody more likely to answer it charmingly. Gurney was to hold a meeting at the Friends’ meeting house in the old port town, and half the city meant to go, out of curiosity, since he was a celebrated man and a Quaker sermon was a thing many of them had never seen.

The meeting house was plain, and hot, and full, chiefly of women. The day was intensely warm, the first real heat of the year, and the women fanned themselves with whatever they had, so that the whole room moved gently, like a field. Adams sat on a bench near the door with his hat on his knee, and nobody made any fuss about it, which he liked.

Friend Gurney spoke for an hour. He took for his text, without naming the book, What think ye of Christ? whose son is he?, and discoursed upon the perfect union of the divine and the human in a single person: a hackneyed theme, Adams thought, and an incomprehensible one, which had divided Christendom for fifteen hundred years and was not likely to be settled in an afternoon in the port town. But the man commanded attention. That was the first of all the qualifications of an orator, and with it a man could dispense with all the others, and Gurney dispensed with most of them. His face was as immovable as a marble statue. He spoke in one unvarying tone, slowly, with a clear distinct articulation and a Quaker drawl that turned his o’s into broad u’s, so that he spoke of the glurrious gospel, and Adams, who had heard every great speaker in two hemispheres and judged them all, sat and listened to him and could not have said why. He was grave, and earnest, and plainly sincere, and kind, and thought himself, Adams suspected, not a whit behind the chiefest of the Apostles. He did not mention the West Indies at all.

Twice in the course of the hour he stopped, and asked the meeting to sit for a few minutes in silence, after the manner of the Society of Friends; and the room was silent.

Adams had not sat in such a silence for a long time. It was not the silence of a House waiting for a division, or of a court waiting for a verdict, or of a chamber waiting for the Crown’s representative to speak, which were the silences of his trade. It was a silence in which nobody was waiting for anything; and into it, unasked, came the thing he had been not thinking about since March.

He had read the division in the Votes on the morning the Speaker brought the address up the Rise. A hundred and forty-one to thirty-eight. The House of Commons of the United Kingdom of America had been invited to congratulate its Queen upon the freedom of her subjects in the West Indies, and had declined, by a majority of more than a hundred, with the Prime Minister in the lobby and the Prime Minister’s arguments in every mouth: that it was not the day, and not the occasion, and not the form. Adams had taken the address from the Speaker’s hands with perfect courtesy, and transmitted it to the Queen by the next steamer with a covering letter of four lines, and said nothing whatever about the division to anybody. He had written two pages about it in his diary that night, and gone to bed late, and had not felt any better for either.

He could not have said anything. That was the office. The Governor-General might warn; he had warned, in public, as plainly as the office allowed, in every address he had given since he came up the Rise five years ago, and the warnings were printed and praised and filed and changed nothing, which was what warnings were for. He might not take a side in a division of the House. He might not tell the Prime Minister what to do, or the Speaker, or the member from the Western Reserve, who had done the only honest thing that was done that afternoon and had been beaten for it by a hundred and three votes. He sat in the Quaker’s silence, with the women’s fans moving around him, and found that he was angry, and that he had been angry for two months, and that there was not a soul in the Union to whom he was permitted to say so.

Then Friend Gurney spoke again, and said that he hoped the interval had been employed by every person present in fervent prayer; and Adams, who had employed it in nothing of the kind, bowed his head with the rest.

---

The mail came up from New York that evening.

The British Queen had come in on Saturday, thirteen days and a half from Portsmouth, a fine fast passage, with the London papers to the first of May; and among the letters in the Governor-General’s bag, in a stiff square envelope sealed in red with the royal arms, was the Queen’s answer to the address of the Commons.

He opened it at his desk, by the lamp. It was in her own hand, round and upright and very young, in the third person, as such answers were:

The Queen has received with sincere pleasure the loyal and dutiful Address of the Commons of the United Kingdom of America on the occasion of her marriage. The Queen thanks the Commons for their congratulations, and for their prayers for her happiness and that of the Prince; and she assures them of her earnest wish for the welfare and happiness of all her faithful subjects in America.

He read it twice. Then he sat back in his chair with his hands on the arms of it, and considered it.

It said nothing about the division. He had not expected it to. A Queen who answered an address from her American Commons was answering in American affairs, and in American affairs she might be advised by her American ministers and by nobody else, which meant, at a distance of three thousand miles, that she might be advised by nobody at all; and a girl of twenty with nobody to advise her had said, very properly, nothing. The Crown had assented to the freedom of the slaves in one of its realms and said nothing about them in this one. It had been saying nothing in this one since 1783. He had heard men in the Commons point to it as a proof that the thing was tolerable, and men in the pulpits point to it as a proof that the Crown stood under judgement, and he had never been able to decide which of them he disliked more.

And yet there was the last line. The welfare and happiness of all her faithful subjects in America. He looked at the word for a long time. It was a small word, and it was the kind of word that a young woman writing a gracious answer would put in without thinking, because it made the sentence warmer, and because she had been brought up to say all when she meant everybody. Or it was not. He could not tell. It was a word that a man reading the answer in the House of Commons would pass over without noticing, and that a man who had read the division in March would notice at once, and he did not know which of those two men the Queen had been writing for, or whether she had been writing for either. He knew that it would be read aloud in the Commons, in the Speaker’s voice, to a House that had voted down thirty-eight members two months before; and that some of them would hear it and some would not; and that nobody, in either case, could say that she had said anything.

He thought that it was very well done. He did not know by whom.

---

On Monday he rose at half past five again, his wife having been ill in the night again, and wrote the Quaker into the diary. Dr Thomas came at eight to see her, and stayed half an hour, and came down looking grave, and said that she was in very infirm health and must keep her bed, which she had no intention of doing.

Then Adams took down his letter-book and copied the Queen’s answer into it in his own hand, every word, as he copied everything, because a man who held an office of record ought to keep a record, and because he did not trust copyists with anything that mattered. It took him a long time. His hand shook over the capitals. When it was done he wrote a short message to the House of Commons, that His Excellency the Governor-General had received Her Majesty’s answer to the Address of the House and had the honour to lay it before them, and signed it, J. Q. Adams, in the small careful letters that went down the page like a man on ice; and sent it down the Axis to the Speaker by his secretary at noon, with the original enclosed.

He went down himself at five, in the carriage, for the assent.

---

There was a room off the Lords’ lobby in Parliament House where the Governor-General waited to be called: a small panelled room with a chair, a table, a looking-glass, and two tall windows, kept for him and used by nobody else, so that it had the musty, unvisited air of a chapel in a great house. He had stood at its windows a great many times in five years. He stood at them now while the Ebony Rod went to fetch the Commons.

From the windows of Parliament House you could see the market. Everybody knew it, and almost nobody said so. It lay below the hill, to the south, a long low building of whitewashed brick with a yard behind it and a fence of boards too high to see over from the street, though not from here: the yard where people were kept, and walked, and looked at, before they were sold down the river or across it. It had stood there for nearly forty years, in sight of the windows of the Parliament of the Union, and in all that time the Parliament had made laws about almost everything in the world except that yard. He had once asked a member of the Lords, a Virginian, a kind man and a good husband, what he thought when he looked out of these windows. The Virginian had said that he generally drew the curtain.

There were people in the yard now. He could see them quite plainly in the long evening light: thirty or forty of them, men and women, and two or three children, standing about or sitting on the ground against the fence, in the shade where there was any. Some of the men were chained together in pairs at the wrist. A white man with a whip under his arm walked up and down in front of them, not using it, eating something out of a paper. Nobody in the yard was making any sound that carried up the hill. It was very quiet. Somewhere below and to the left a bell was ringing for evening service.

He was the Crown’s representative in America. He had sworn fidelity to the Charter, and to lawful government under it, and to the Crown; and the Charter, which said so much, did not say one word about the yard, and had been written so as not to, by men he had known, one of them his father. In a quarter of an hour he would go into the Lords’ chamber and sit on the dais by the empty throne, and the Commons would come to the bar, and the Clerk would read the titles of eleven bills, and at each title the Crown’s assent would be pronounced in the old words, and they would become the law of a kingdom that permitted the yard. None of the eleven had anything to do with it. That was not the point. No Governor-General had ever refused assent to a bill that had passed both Houses, and none ever would, because a Crown that assented only to the laws it liked would not be a Crown but a government, and the Union already had one of those. He had completed instruments he found repugnant. He would complete more. He had thought it all through, long ago, at greater length than anyone else in the Union, and had concluded that he was right, and had found that being right did not help in the least when he stood at this window.

A woman in the yard looked up the hill, straight at the windows of Parliament House, the way one looks at weather. Then she looked away.

The Ebony Rod knocked, and said that the Commons were at the bar.

---

It was done in twenty minutes.

He sat on the dais in the Lords’ chamber beside the empty throne, in his plain black coat, with the Lord Chancellor on the woolsack below him and the peers on their benches in the hot evening light: the bishops in their lawn, northern and southern, who agreed about nothing; the old proprietors from the Tidewater and the new ones from the West; a dozen sleepy men who had come because there was a division later on a turnpike. At the bar the Commons stood crowded together, with the Speaker in front of them in his black gown, holding the supply bill; and behind the Speaker, a head taller than the men around him, taking snuff, the Prime Minister.

Clay caught his eye across the chamber and bowed, very slightly, with great grace, and Adams inclined his head. They had known each other for thirty years, and agreed about the bank and the tariff and the roads, and about almost nothing else that mattered, and Adams had sent for him in 1836 because there had been nobody else, and had never pretended otherwise, and Clay had never once held it against him. That was the trouble with Clay. He never held anything against anybody, and so nothing could ever be settled with him.

The Speaker presented the supply. The Clerk read the titles. At each one the Clerk of the Parliaments turned and bowed to the dais, and Adams inclined his head, and the old words were pronounced, and the thing was law. A bridge over the Monocacy. A turnpike in Maryland. A charter for a fire company in the old port town. The grant of supply for the year, which Clay had carried through the Commons since the winter, a clause at a time, by the charm and patience of a man folding a very large map along its old creases. The Commons bowed, and withdrew, talking, and the peers began to stand and stretch and drift towards the doors, and the light came yellow through the high windows across the floor.

It was between six and seven. Adams came down from the dais and began to cross the floor of the chamber to the far door, where the Lord Chancellor had asked him for a word about a commission.

The matting was new. It had been laid in the spring over the old boards of the chamber, a fine close matting of straw from Canton, brought out at great expense and much admired. Nobody had yet walked enough on it to flatten the seams. His foot went into one of them as he crossed, and caught, and held; and he pitched forward with his hands out, too old and too slow to save himself, and came down on the floor of the House of Lords with his whole weight on his right side, and heard something in his shoulder go, and for a moment saw nothing at all.

---

Afterwards he remembered the faces.

There were a great many of them, all at once, very close, upside down: peers and members who had not yet gone out, and a doorkeeper, and the Lord Chancellor with his wig askew, and somebody’s hand under his head, and somebody saying don’t move him and somebody else saying lift him, and a young member from New Jersey, a doctor’s son, who said that he had seen this done and took hold of his arm and pulled, while two others held him, and could not do it. Adams did not cry out. He remembered being proud of that afterwards, and then ashamed of being proud of it, at his age, on the floor.

They carried him into the Lord Chancellor’s room and laid him on a sofa, and somebody sent for Dr Thomas, and somebody else for Dr May the younger, who lived nearer; and within half an hour the two of them had the coat cut off him and the bone back in its place, which they did between them with a towel and a knee in his armpit and a single long pull, while he looked at the ceiling of the Lord Chancellor’s room and counted the panels in it and found that there were forty-two. Then they bound his arm across his chest, and gave him something to drink, and said that he was very fortunate, at his age, that nothing was broken, and that he must keep the arm quite still for a month and on no account attempt to use the hand.

“On no account,” said Dr Thomas again, because he knew his patient.

---

They took him home up the Axis in the dusk, at a walk, with the carriage lamps lit, and his daughter-in-law met him at the door with her face white, and his wife came down the stairs from the bed she had been told to keep, in her wrapper, coughing, and was very angry with him, and held his left hand, and would not go back up until he was in his chair.

At nine o’clock he sent for Mary, and asked her to bring the diary.

She sat at his desk, where he always sat, with the book open under the lamp, and dipped his pen, and looked at him. He was in his armchair with his arm bound across his chest in a black silk handkerchief and his coat over his shoulders, and the shoulder had begun, now, to tell him properly what had been done to it.

“Write the heading,” he said. “Eighteen. Then the hour I rose, in Roman figures: V, a colon, thirty. Then Monday.”

She wrote it, in her own hand, which was neat and clear and sloped the other way, and which had never yet appeared on any page of the diary.

He dictated the day to her: the doctor’s visit, and the Queen’s answer copied, and the message sent down, and the assent; and then the rest of it, in the words that came, which were not many. Between six and seven, crossing the floor of the chamber after the assent, I was tripped up by the new laid matting, pitched forward, prostrated, and dislocated my right shoulder. Several of the members who remained came immediately to my assistance, and attempted to set the bone without success. I was taken to the Lord Chancellor’s room, where in about half an hour the bone was set by Drs Thomas and May.

She stopped, and waited for more, with the pen lifted.

“That will do,” he said.

On the desk beside her, in the lamplight, lay the papers that had come up from the Executive Quarter that afternoon while he was at Parliament House: three commissions, a warrant, and a letter to the Queen of eleven lines acknowledging her answer, in his secretary’s fair copy, all waiting for the Governor-General’s signature, which was the only part of any of them that he was required to supply. He looked at them for some time. Then he looked at his right hand, lying on the black silk across his chest, the hand that had shaken for years and written the diary for sixty and copied the Queen’s words into the letter-book that very morning, letter by letter, and would not now close.

“Those will keep,” he said.

Mary blotted the page, and closed the book, and put it away in the drawer where it lived. A messenger came at ten from the Prime Minister’s lodgings with a note in Clay’s large, easy hand, asking after him, very warmly; and Mary read it to him, and he dictated an answer of two lines, and she wrote that too.