Quietly

The car left West Street at seven, and at the last moment, as the guard’s whistle went, Bramwell got up from his seat across the aisle and went to the end door and unlocked it.

Pershing watched him do it.

“Mr Bramwell.”

“Sir.” Bramwell came back and sat down. “There is a family in the third car back with six children and a parrot.”

“The same family?”

“The same parrot, sir. I asked.”

And the end door opened, inward, and La Guardia came through it backwards with his suitcase in one hand and his hat in the other, talking over his shoulder to the conductor, “No, he unlocked it, ask him, it was unlocked, the Governor-General’s own secretary unlocked it, you can write to the company,” and turned round, and saw them, and stopped.

He looked at Bramwell. Bramwell looked at page ten of a programme for an event that had finished.

“Well,” said La Guardia. “Well, well.”

“Sit down, Mr La Guardia,” said Pershing.

La Guardia sat down. He sat where he had sat on Friday, facing backwards, beside Warren, opposite the Governor-General, so that their knees nearly touched. He put his hat on his knee. Warren, who had been looking out of the window at the town going by in the evening light, did not turn his head, but moved his long legs to give him room.

The car pulled out. The town went past, the red brick and the white doors and the window boxes, and the people of Annapolis on their steps in the Sunday evening, fanning; and the car came out on to the bridge, and the river was there, wide and gold and very still, full of boats coming home, and on the far side of the bridge, at the end of the City Dock, a long white skipjack with a raked mast was going out on the last of the ebb under her one great sail, and an old man at her tiller in a black coat lifted one hand, not quite a wave, as the car went over.

Warren lifted his hand back.

Then the trees closed in, and the river was gone.

---

La Guardia talked until the junction.

He talked about Abramowitz, who was to join the fleet at Hampton Roads on the fifteenth and had promised to write to his mother every week and to his Member once a month, and about Abramowitz’s mother, who had asked La Guardia whether the Governor-General was always so quiet, and been told that he was, and had said that she liked a quiet man, her husband had been a quiet man. He talked about the Admiral, whom he had sat next to at lunch and found to be a socialist on the subject of naval pensions, though the Admiral did not know it. He talked about the Rector, whom he had gone to see at four o’clock that afternoon, after the drawing room, and with whom he had drunk a cup of very bad coffee in the vestry, and to whom he had made, he said, a sort of confession, though not the sort with a curtain, and the Rector had listened to all of it and then said that there was always room at the table and that he was sorry Mr La Guardia had not got to it, and that he would be very welcome on the first Sunday in July, without an escort.

He did not talk about the Act. He did not talk about the wager. He did not talk about anything that had not happened. He talked about everything else, for forty minutes, in the hot car, in his high loud voice, with his hands going, and Pershing sat opposite him and said perhaps eleven words, and found, as he had found on Friday, that it was neither unpleasant nor what he had expected.

At the junction the car stopped for water. The platform was empty now; June Week had come down on Friday and would go back up on Monday, and on Sunday night there was nobody on it but a porter and the man with the tin bath of lemonade, who had sold out, and was sitting on the empty bath in the dusk, smoking.

La Guardia looked out at him.

“I could do with a lemonade,” he said.

Nobody answered.

“General,” said La Guardia, still looking out of the window. “Can I ask you one thing? Not about anything. About nothing.”

“You may ask.”

“Did you know? When you went up?”

Pershing did not answer at once. The car began to move again, slowly, out of the junction, and swung east, and the platform went past, and the man on the tin bath, and the water tower, and the sign.

“No,” he said.

La Guardia turned his head from the window and looked at him.

“I knew when I got there,” said Pershing. “Not before.”

“And then?”

Pershing looked at him across the car, the round dark face with its wide mouth that had, for once, nothing to say; and he thought of the curate coming down the step with the plain silver cup, and of lifting his hand from the rail, palm down, very slightly, which he had not done.

“And then it was not mine to decline,” he said.

La Guardia looked at him for a long time. Then he nodded, once, slowly, the way Captain Tyler had nodded on the dock, all the way up and all the way down; and he turned back to the window, and put his hat over his face, and in about three minutes, with the car swaying on the long straight run through the pines toward the capital, he was asleep.

He slept the rest of the way. He slept with his mouth a little open and his hat over his eyes and his short legs out across the floor of the car, so that Bramwell had to step over them twice, and once, outside Bladensburg, he said something in his sleep in Italian that Pershing did not understand and Warren, it turned out, did, and would not translate.

Warren did not sleep. He sat by the window in Mrs Tull’s white silk scarf, which she had told him to keep, with his face turned to the dark glass and the lights of the capital beginning to come up out of the country in it, and said nothing all the way home. He had guessed everything. Pershing knew that he had. He had known it since the sundial, and he had known it in the drawing room, when his son turned his wet face from the garden and said I’m good at it now. And he said nothing about any of it, then or afterwards, not that night and not in the years that followed, not to his father and not, so far as his father ever knew, to anybody; and his father, who had spent his life among men who could keep a thing, thought that he had never known one who kept it better, or at so little cost to the person he was keeping it for.

At the terminal in New Westminster, under the arc lamps, La Guardia woke up, and put on his hat, and picked up his suitcase, and shook hands with Bramwell, and with Warren, and then with the Governor-General, hard.

“General,” he said.

“Governor-General.”

“I’ll see you at the levee,” said La Guardia, and went off down the platform into the crowd, short and wide and black-suited, swinging his suitcase, whistling something that was not the anthem, and did not look back.

---

The Sun came up from Baltimore on the early train, and was on the breakfast table at Government House in New Westminster on Monday morning beside the Courier, folded, at half past seven.

Pershing read the Courier first, as he always did. He read the leading article, which was about the price of wheat, and the parliamentary report, which was empty, because the House had risen on Thursday, and the Court Circular, which recorded that the Governor-General had returned to New Westminster on Sunday evening from Annapolis, where he had presented commissions to the Class of 1926 of the Royal American Naval Academy and attended Divine Service at the church of St Anne. He folded it so that the Court Circular was on the outside, and left it on the table, and did not notice that he had done it until his son came in and picked it up and looked at it and looked at him.

Then he opened the Sun.

It was on page eleven. It was at the bottom of the page, under an advertisement for a seaside hotel at Ocean City and above a report of a horse show at Timonium, and it was four inches long, and it was headed JUNE WEEK PASSES QUIETLY, and it was by Mr Gus Aldridge.

He read it twice.

ANNAPOLIS, June 6. It said. June Week at the Royal American Naval Academy closed on Sunday after four days of fine weather. Commissions were presented on Saturday to the four hundred and sixty-one members of the Class of 1926 by His Excellency the Governor-General, who spoke briefly on the subject of service and on the giving of orders. The June Ball was held in Dahlgren Hall on Saturday evening. The Lieutenant-Governor and Mrs Tull entertained at Government House on Friday evening. Among the guests was Mr Fiorello La Guardia, the Member for East Harlem, who attended at the invitation of the Premier. On Sunday the Governor-General attended Divine Service at St Anne’s. Nothing else of note occurred.

That was all.

Pershing put the Sun down on the table, and looked at it, at the four inches at the bottom of page eleven, and thought that Mr Gus Aldridge of the Baltimore Sun had kept his word in the letter, every syllable of it, and in the spirit not at all; and that every man and woman in Maryland who had been on the State House lawn on Saturday evening or the City Dock on Saturday night or Church Circle on Sunday morning would read the last sentence of it, at their own breakfast tables, that morning, and laugh until they cried.

He folded the Sun so that page eleven was on the outside, and left it beside the Courier.

---

The Minister of Justice came at ten, as the telegram had asked, for a quarter of an hour, on a matter arising from the annual report of the federal enforcement service.

He was a tall grey man with a tall grey voice who had been at the Bar for thirty years and in the Commons for twelve and in the Ministry for two, and he had come to Government House on a great many Monday mornings for a great many quarters of an hour, and he came into the study with the face of a man who knows that he is going to be asked three questions, in a certain order, and has spent the weekend finding the answers.

He laid the annual report on the desk. It was a fat buff document of two hundred pages with the Treasury’s crest on it. He sat down.

“Your Excellency.”

“Minister.”

“The report, Your Excellency, in brief. The service has made eleven thousand four hundred arrests in the year to March. Convictions are up. Seizures are up. Expenditure is within the estimates. There is a paragraph on the Bureau’s growing role in the inter-polity cases, which the Treasury welcomes, though it will want to discuss the division of responsibility.” He paused. “I am advised that it is a satisfactory report.”

Pershing looked at the buff document on his desk. He did not open it.

“Corruption,” he said.

The Minister had the answer. It was on a sheet of paper inside the front cover. It said that three officers of the service had been dismissed in the year and four were under investigation, which was a smaller proportion than the year before, and that the service’s own inspectors were satisfied that the problem was contained.

“In the Baltimore district?” said Pershing.

The Minister looked at his sheet of paper. “I don’t have the figures by district, Your Excellency.”

“There are six agents in the Baltimore district. One is under investigation, for a house at Gibson Island and a Hupmobile, on forty-two pounds a quarter.”

The Minister looked up.

“Selective enforcement,” said Pershing.

The Minister had an answer to that too. It was on a second sheet. It said that the service enforced the Act without fear or favour against all persons in the Realm, and that the figures did not support the contention that any class of person was disproportionately prosecuted, though the figures were not broken down in a manner that would permit the contention to be tested.

“In the Province of Maryland, in the last twelve months,” said Pershing, “there were four hundred and eleven arrests under the Act. Two hundred and ninety were dockers, labourers, watermen, cannery hands or domestic servants. One hundred and eighty were Black. Seventy were foreign-born. Eleven were women. None was a man with a cellar.” He paused. “Nine were cannery hands at Cambridge, in Dorchester County, taken for a still the size of a coffee pot. They were fined fifty pounds each. Three could not pay and served ninety days at Jessup.”

The Minister of Justice sat very still in his chair.

“Your Excellency,” he said slowly, “may I ask where you obtained those figures?”

“No,” said Pershing. “The burden on the courts.”

The Minister did not have a sheet of paper for that. He sat in the chair in the study at Government House with the fat buff report on the desk between them and looked at the Governor-General of the Realm, who had asked him three questions every Monday for five years in the same order and had never once, in all that time, had the answers to them himself; and Pershing watched him understand, slowly, that something had happened somewhere, and that he was not going to be told what, and that he was going to have to find out.

“Two thousand six hundred and forty cases waiting in the federal court at Baltimore,” said Pershing. “Two judges. One is seventy-eight.”

“Your Excellency,” said the Minister. “Are you advising me?”

“I am asking you what the law is costing, Minister,” said Pershing. “That is all I may do. It is all I have done.” He put his hand flat on the buff report and pushed it, very slightly, back across the desk. “I should be grateful for the answers by district. When you have them.”

The Minister of Justice took the report, and stood, and bowed, and went out with it under his arm; and Pershing heard him in the hall, a moment later, saying to Bramwell, in a low and urgent voice, “Who has he been talking to?”, and heard Bramwell say, in his, “I couldn’t say, Minister. I have no record of anything.”

---

It did not stay quiet. He had not expected it to.

Mrs Tull wrote on the Tuesday. It was a short letter in a small upright hand on the Lieutenant-Governor’s paper, and it thanked His Excellency for the honour of his visit, and hoped that Master Warren’s neck was mending, and said that Wesley was well, and quieter than usual, and had asked her on Monday evening whether there was anything in the Province he ought to know about that nobody had told him, and she had told him about the cannery at Cambridge, and he had gone there on the Tuesday morning on the first boat, alone, and she did not yet know what he would do, but she knew that he would do it in public, and that it would be honest, and that it would very likely cost him his office, and that she had never been prouder of him in her life. It said that she had told the choir at the chapel that nothing had happened at Annapolis that weekend, and that the choir had taken this very well and was now singing it, to the tune of a hymn that Mr Asbury Cooper always chose wrongly. It said that the cellar was as it had been, and the coal was where it was, and the bucket was on top of it. It was signed Hester Tull, and under the signature, in the same small upright hand, she had written: You were served. Good.

Ritchie did not write. He sent, in July, a single bottle of very old Madeira, unlabelled, in a plain wooden box, by hand, with a card that said For medicinal purposes. A.C.R. Pershing had it taken down to the cellar at Government House in New Westminster, where it stood, unopened, on a shelf by itself, for the rest of his term.

The class of 1926 set it to music. He heard it first in August, from the street beyond the garden wall of Government House on a summer evening, sung by a dozen young voices going home late from somewhere, to the tune of a sea shanty, very badly; and it was not about anything at all, as far as the words went, it was about a man who went to church; and the chorus went Within sight, within sight, the referee was served, and the voices went on up the street and round the corner, and Pershing stood in the garden in the dusk with his hands behind his back and did not move until they had quite gone.

Captain Tyler of Smith Island built a new skipjack that winter, his son told a reporter some years later, and named her. Nobody on Smith Island could ever be got to say what he named her, and her registration papers were lost in a fire at Crisfield in 1931.

And Abramowitz wrote to his Member, once a month, from the fleet, as he had promised, and La Guardia wrote back to every one. In the third letter, Abramowitz said that he had been told a story in the wardroom about something that had happened in Annapolis in June Week that he had not seen, because he had been at the Ball with his mother, and asked whether it was true. La Guardia’s reply, which Abramowitz kept all his life and which is now in a drawer in a house in Brooklyn, said: Nothing happened, kid. Nothing ever happens in Maryland. Ask the Governor-General.

Nobody ever did.

---

On the evening of Monday the seventh of June, after the Minister had gone, and the boxes had come and gone, and his son had gone up to bed with his neck in Mrs Tull’s white silk scarf, Pershing sat alone at the writing table in his study at Government House in New Westminster with the window open on the garden and the lamp lit.

He took out of his breast pocket, where they had been since Friday, four pieces of paper, and laid them on the blotter in a row.

A programme for June Week at the Royal American Naval Academy, eleven pages, with a hyphen put in on page nine in pencil.

A prescription for one pint of spiritus frumenti, for external application, for Warren Pershing, aged sixteen, sunburn, signed A. Kemp, M.D., permit number 4471, unfilled.

A page torn from a private secretary’s notebook, folded in four, with a note in copperplate and, under it, in a large round hand sloping hard to the right: General. Is it a drink? F. LaG.

And a place card, in copperplate, His Excellency the Governor-General, with the hyphen.

He put the programme in the drawer. He put the prescription in the drawer. He held the note a long time, and then put it in the drawer too, under the others.

Then he turned the place card over, and read the back of it, in his own hand, in Bramwell’s ink, all five clauses, one after another, slowly, the way he read everything, for the mistakes; and found none.

He read clause five once more.

Then he put the card back in his breast pocket, where it stayed.