Near Beer

The bucket was galvanised iron, two gallons, new, with the price still chalked on its side, and La Guardia set it down on the grass of the State House lawn at twenty past six with the care of a man setting down a bomb.

Pershing saw it from his window.

He had come back from Dahlgren Hall at a quarter past five and gone straight up to the room on the garden and taken off the Full Dress, every piece of it, and given it to the Lieutenant-Governor’s valet, who had received it in both arms like a drowned man and carried it away to be hung in the attic in the dark, where it might, with luck, dry by Monday. He had bathed. He had put on a dark suit, the lightest he had, and had sat for twenty minutes at the open window with his eyes shut, and had not slept, and had thought, against his will, about orders that could be kept. Then Bramwell had knocked and said, “Sir, I think you will want to look at the State House lawn,” and he had gone along the corridor to the room at the front and looked out, past Warren, who was lying on the bed with a wet towel round his neck and his face the colour of a brick, reading about birds.

There were perhaps two hundred people on the lawn. They had gathered on the grass on the near side of the State House, the side that faced Government House across the circle, in a loose half-ring, and they were all looking at a short man in a black suit with his sleeves rolled up and a new galvanised bucket at his feet, and at a long trestle table somebody had brought out from somewhere and set up on the grass beside him, and at what was on the table.

On the table, in two neat rows, stood ten bottles.

“What are they?” said Pershing.

“Six are near beer, sir,” said Bramwell, at his shoulder. “Brown bottles. The kind the grocer sells. Bought this afternoon at Hopkins’s on Main Street, eleven pence the bottle, and the receipt is in Mr La Guardia’s hand. He showed it to me. The other four are a malt tonic. Green bottles. A patent preparation for invalids. Sold at any grocer’s. Also lawful. Also bought at Hopkins’s.” Bramwell paused. “He bought the bucket at the ironmonger’s.”

“Why is he doing it in front of this house?”

“Because the State House lawn is within sight, sir. You ruled it so last night. On the step. It was the first thing the class asked about.”

“I know I ruled it.”

“Yes, sir.” Bramwell looked out of the window. “Also the Sun has sent a photographer.”

There was a photographer. He was standing on a box on the grass with a big camera on a tripod and a black cloth over his head and a tray of flash powder held up in one hand, and Aldridge was beside him with his notebook, talking to La Guardia. Voss was at the back of the crowd, writing. Spratt was not there.

“Warren,” said Pershing. “Stay here.”

“I’m not going anywhere, sir,” said Warren from the bed, with feeling. “It hurts to turn my head.”

---

The crowd let him through. It did not part for him this time the way the dock had parted; it opened, quietly, from the front, and made a lane for him to the edge of the grass, and closed behind him, and he understood that it had been waiting for him, and that La Guardia had not begun until he came.

“General,” said La Guardia. “Good. Now we can start.”

“Governor-General.”

“Governor-General. You were wonderful this afternoon. I cried. Abramowitz’s mother cried. Abramowitz didn’t cry, he’s going to be an admiral, admirals don’t cry.” He spread his hands over the table. “Clause two. You’ll want to see the goods.”

Pershing looked at the goods.

“These,” said La Guardia, laying his hand on the brown bottles, “are near beer. Cereal beverage. Brewed in Baltimore by a firm that used to make real beer and now makes this and is ashamed of it. Under the Act they’re lawful because they’re less than half of one per cent. They taste like a wet dog. You can buy them at any grocer’s in the Realm and give them to your grandmother. And these,” he laid his other hand on the green ones, “are a malt extract tonic. For the weak and the convalescent. Sold under the patent medicines schedule as unfit for use as a beverage, which is true, they taste like a dead wet dog. They’re three and a half per cent. Also lawful. Also at any grocer’s.” He looked round at the crowd and raised his voice, not that it needed raising. “Two lawful things! Bought lawfully! With a receipt! And I’m going to put them in a bucket, the two lawful things, on the State House lawn, in front of everybody, and stir them with a lawful spoon. And what comes out of the bucket will be beer. Real beer. About two and three-quarters per cent. Which is unlawful.” He turned to Pershing. “And then somebody’s going to hand me a glass of it. And I’m going to drink it. Within sight of Government House.” He pointed across the circle at the porch, where the flag hung, and Tull’s footman stood with his mouth open, and, at an upstairs window, Mrs Tull. “And then the Governor-General will tell me if I’ve won.”

The crowd made a sound. It was not quite a cheer. It was the sound a crowd makes when it has been told exactly what is going to happen and is delighted to find that it is going to be allowed to watch.

“Who is to hand it to you?” said Pershing.

“I’ll find somebody.”

“I’ll do it,” said Ritchie.

He had come up through the crowd behind Pershing without either of them noticing, still in his morning coat from the commissions, with his top hat in his hand and his grey hair shining in the evening light and his handsome face entirely serious. He stepped out on to the grass beside the table.

“Mr Premier,” said Pershing.

“Your Excellency.” Ritchie bowed. “I’m a party. I’ve said so. I’d like to see Wesley lose. I’ll do it, Fiorello. If you’ll have a Premier.”

“I’d have a Premier,” said La Guardia, delighted, “over a Methodist any day.”

“Mr Premier,” said Pershing, “you are the head of the King’s government in this Province.”

“I am.”

“You will be handing a glass of unlawful liquor to a Member of Parliament in front of the State House, the King’s representative in the Province, the Baltimore Sun and two hundred of your electors.”

“Three hundred, now,” said Ritchie, looking round. “And I’ll tell you what, Your Excellency, I’ll get every one of their votes for it. Every one. Maryland is the Free State.” He turned and lifted his top hat to the crowd, and the crowd, which had not been entirely sure what it was there for until that moment, cheered him. Then he turned back, and dropped his voice, and said, in quite a different tone, so that only Pershing could hear, “I’ve got twenty-two men in the state penitentiary for selling beer, Your Excellency. Dockers. Watermen. Cannery hands off the Eastern Shore. I’ve got four thousand bottles of claret in my own cellar in Baltimore, laid down by my father before 1920, and the Act doesn’t touch them. I’d like to hand a glass of beer to somebody in public just once. I think I’ve earned it.”

Pershing did not answer at once.

Then he looked across the circle at Government House, and at the window where Mrs Tull was, and at the window beside it where a boy with a wet towel round his neck had, after all, turned his head.

“The referee does not rule on who may hand a glass to whom,” he said. “Proceed.”

---

La Guardia proceeded.

He did it with tremendous ceremony. He took off his hat and put it on the table, crown down. He took a bottle opener out of his waistcoat pocket and held it up to the crowd, and the photographer under his black cloth said, “Hold it,” and the flash went off with a white bang and a puff of smoke, and three hundred people jumped, and a dog barked, and somebody in the crowd laughed out loud. Then he opened the first brown bottle, and held it up, and poured it slowly into the bucket, and it went in with a thin flat sound, like rain into a drain, and smelled exactly as he had said it would.

“One,” said La Guardia.

“One!” said the crowd.

He poured the second. The third. The crowd counted with him, louder each time, and the photographer’s flash went off again, and somebody at the back began to clap in time, and by the sixth brown bottle the whole of the State House lawn was counting and clapping, and Pershing stood at the edge of the grass with his hands behind his back and his face giving nothing away, and felt, very far down, somewhere he did not look at often, the beginnings of something he did not have a name for.

La Guardia picked up the first green bottle.

“And now,” he said, “the medicine.”

“Stop,” said a voice. “Federal officer. Stop that.”

---

Spratt came through the crowd from the far side of the State House at a pace just short of a run, with his brown hat in one hand and his leather case in the other, and he was out of breath, and his long pale face had two spots of colour in it, high on the cheekbones, that Pershing had not seen there before.

“Mr La Guardia,” he said. “Put the bottle down.”

“It’s lawful, Mr Spratt.”

“I know it’s lawful. Put it down.” Spratt arrived at the table and stood across it from La Guardia and looked at the bucket, and at the six empty brown bottles, and at the four full green ones, and at the photographer, and at the Premier, and at the Governor-General, and the two spots of colour got larger. “Section six, Your Excellency. No person shall manufacture any intoxicating liquor. Manufacture includes the mixing, blending or compounding of any two or more substances, whether themselves lawful or not, so as to produce a liquor intoxicating within the meaning of section one.” He took a breath. “Schedule two.”

“I haven’t mixed anything,” said La Guardia. “I’ve poured six bottles of near beer into a bucket. That’s still near beer. Look at it.”

“You’re about to pour in the tonic.”

“I’m about to.”

“About to is not an offence under the Act,” said Ritchie, interested. “Is it, Mr Spratt?”

Spratt looked at the Premier. Then he opened his leather case, and took out a small, thick, much-handled book in a grey paper cover, and opened it at a place marked with a strip of newspaper, and ran his finger down a page, and down another, and stopped.

“Attempt,” he said. “Section thirty-one.”

“I haven’t attempted anything. I’ve opened a bottle.”

“With intent.”

“How do you know my intent?”

“You told three hundred people,” said Spratt. “And the Sun.” He closed the book. “Mr La Guardia, I am seizing the bucket and its contents and the four bottles of tonic as evidence of an attempt to manufacture intoxicating liquor in contravention of section six. You may make representations to the district office on Monday.”

“Seize away,” said La Guardia, with enormous good humour, and stepped back from the table with his hands up, and the crowd laughed, and Spratt reached across the table and took hold of the handle of the bucket.

And another hand took hold of it too.

---

“I’m afraid I can’t allow that,” said Voss.

He was very pale. He was standing on the other side of the bucket from Spratt, at the end of the table, where nobody had seen him arrive, with his grey bag over his shoulder and his grey notebook in his left hand and his right hand on the handle of the bucket beside Spratt’s, and he was holding it very firmly.

“Agent Spratt,” he said, “that bucket is evidence in a Bureau investigation.”

“It’s evidence in a district seizure.”

“It’s material evidence in a conspiracy to transport intoxicating liquor to Government House,” said Voss, “of which the Bureau has been seized since a quarter to ten last night, and I cannot allow the district to remove it from the scene without a receipt. Ministry of Justice regulations, Agent Spratt. Paragraph forty.”

“The enforcement service isn’t under the Ministry of Justice. It’s under the Treasury.”

“Then it isn’t under paragraph forty,” said Voss, “and I am.”

They stood there, the two of them, on the State House lawn, in front of three hundred people and the Baltimore Sun, each holding one side of the handle of a two-gallon galvanised bucket containing six bottles of near beer, and looked at each other with an expression of perfect, mutual, honourable loathing.

“Let go of the bucket, Mr Voss.”

“I can’t do that, Agent Spratt.”

“Then I am placing you under arrest,” said Spratt, “for obstructing a federal officer in the execution of his duty.”

“And I,” said Voss, without a pause, “am placing you under arrest for interfering with material evidence in a federal investigation.”

The photographer’s flash went off.

Three hundred people on the State House lawn were silent for perhaps two seconds, the time it takes for a crowd to understand that it has seen something it will be telling its grandchildren about; and then the noise came, all at once, laughing and cheering and somebody whistling through his fingers, and the dog barking again, and over all of it, from the steps of the State House where he had sat down to watch with his top hat on his knee, the Premier of Maryland laughing so hard that he had to hold on to the railing.

La Guardia was not laughing. He was looking at the bucket, and at the two hands on its handle, and at the Governor-General, and his round face had an expression on it of the purest, most uncomplicated professional admiration.

“Clause two, General,” he said. “Who’s got custody?”

---

The Governor-General took custody.

He did not want to. He said so, in a voice that only the four men by the table could hear, and he said it once, and then he did it, because there was nobody else, and because both men were going to stand on the State House lawn holding that bucket until one of them died, and because every minute they stood there was another flash from the Sun and another story for the grandchildren.

“Mr Spratt. Mr Voss. Clause two says intoxicating liquor within the meaning of the Act. The contents of that bucket are not, at present, intoxicating liquor within the meaning of the Act. They are near beer.” He did not look at La Guardia. “They are, however, the subject of a dispute arising under the terms of a demonstration of which I am the referee. Under the terms, if there is a question, I answer it. The question is who has the bucket. I have it.” He held out his hand. “Release it, please. Both of you. At the same time.”

They looked at each other.

“Now,” said Pershing.

They released it at the same time. Pershing took the handle. The bucket was heavier than he had expected and he did not let it show.

“Mr Bramwell.”

“Sir.” Bramwell was at his elbow. Pershing had not seen him come out of the house. He never did.

“A receipt, please. Two copies. One for the district and one for the Bureau. Received into the custody of the referee, one galvanised bucket, two gallons, containing the contents of six bottles of cereal beverage, together with four sealed bottles of malt tonic, unopened.” He paused. “With the time.”

“Six forty-one, sir.” Bramwell had a pad. He was writing already. He wrote both copies on his knee, standing on one leg on the State House lawn, in a copperplate that would not have disgraced the Privy Council, and held them out, and Pershing set the bucket down on the grass and took the fountain pen and signed both, John J. Pershing, Referee, and gave one to Spratt and one to Voss, and each of them read his copy twice and folded it and put it in an inside pocket, and each of them looked, for the first time all weekend, slightly comforted.

“And the arrests, Your Excellency?” said Voss.

“Mr Voss,” said Pershing, “do you wish to proceed with the arrest of Agent Spratt?”

Voss looked at Spratt. Spratt looked at Voss.

“Not at this time, Your Excellency.”

“Mr Spratt?”

“Not at this time, Your Excellency.”

“Then go and have your supper,” said Pershing, and picked up the bucket again.

---

He carried it across State Circle himself.

He could have given it to Bramwell. He could have given it to the footman, who had come running down the steps of Government House with his arms out. He did not. He carried it across the circle and up the steps and in at the door of the Lieutenant-Governor’s house, in front of three hundred people, a sixty-five-year-old man in a dark suit carrying a two-gallon bucket of near beer with four green bottles clinking in it, and the crowd on the State House lawn watched him do it in complete silence, and then, as the door closed, began to applaud.

Mrs Tull was in the hall. She had come down from the window. She looked at the bucket and then at the Governor-General and then at the bucket again.

“Where shall I put it, Mrs Tull?” said Pershing.

“Oh, give it to me,” said Mrs Tull, and took it out of his hand before he could stop her, quite easily, as though it weighed nothing at all. “We’ll put it in the cellar. With the others.”

She was halfway across the hall with it before she heard what she had said.

She stopped. She did not turn round. She stood quite still on the black and white marble with the bucket in her hand and her back to him, for perhaps three seconds, and then she went on, steadily, to the door under the stairs, and opened it, and went down, and he heard her footsteps going down a long way, and a second door, and then nothing.

Pershing stood alone in the hall of Government House for a moment with the receipt pad in his hand.

Then he went upstairs, and along the corridor, to the room at the front. Warren was at the window, with the towel round his neck, looking down at the State House lawn, where the crowd was breaking up and the Premier was signing autographs on the steps and La Guardia was being photographed with his hat on, beside an empty trestle table, holding up the bottle opener.

“Did he win?” said Warren.

“No.”

“Did Mr Tull win?”

“Not yet.”

Warren looked at him over the towel.

“Sir,” he said. “What’s in the cellar?”

“I have no idea,” said Pershing, “and I do not intend to find out,” and he went back along the corridor to his own room on the garden and shut the door and sat down at the writing table and took out the place card and read all five clauses, slowly, one after another, and found that none of them said anything at all about cellars.