Government House

The Honourable Wesley Tull, Lieutenant-Governor of Maryland, shook hands like a man working a pump that he expected, any moment now, to give water.

“Your Excellency,” he said. “Your Excellency. Welcome to Annapolis. Welcome to Maryland. Welcome to June Week.” He pumped on each sentence. “We are honoured. We are deeply honoured. The Province is honoured. Mrs Tull is honoured. She is in the motor. She is very honoured. She would have come to the platform, but the heat, you know, and her hat.”

“Your Honour,” said Pershing, and recovered his hand.

He had met Tull once before, at the New Year levee in the capital, where Tull had stood in the line of Lieutenant-Governors with his hat held exactly like everybody else’s and had said, when his turn came, “Maryland keeps the law, Your Excellency,” as if that were the form of greeting, which it was not. Pershing had remembered it because nobody else had said anything at all. Tull was perhaps fifty-five. He was round in the face and round in the body and his grey suit had been made for him by a good tailor who had been told to make him look taller and had done his best. He had a soft Eastern Shore voice that lengthened every vowel it could reach and a pink scrubbed look, as though he had been washed that morning by somebody who loved him. He smelled of bay rum and starch.

“And this is the young gentleman,” Tull said, turning to Warren with real warmth. “Master Warren. How do you do, sir. You have grown. I have a nephew at the Academy who is not so tall as you, and they measure them.”

“How do you do, sir,” said Warren.

“And Mr Bramwell.” Tull shook Bramwell’s hand too, without the smallest hesitation, which Pershing noted, because there were Lieutenant-Governors in the Realm who would have hesitated and two who would have not shaken it at all. “Mr Bramwell and I have had a great deal of correspondence about the seating.”

“We have, Your Honour,” said Bramwell.

“It is all settled now. It is a very good plan. Mr Bramwell has a great talent for seating.” Tull beamed at all of them. “Shall we? The motor is just there. The band will play us off. I asked them to. I hope that was proper.”

“Entirely proper,” said Pershing, who would have preferred no band at all.

The band played them off. It played the anthem first, at the proper speed, and the midshipmen on the platform came to attention in a long white line, and the people on the platform behind them took off their hats, and a good many of the people on the street outside took off their hats too, and a small dog barked through the whole thing and was not stopped. Pershing stood with his hat against his chest and his eyes on the middle distance, the way he had stood for it ten thousand times, and was aware, at the edge of that distance, of a short wide figure in a black hat walking away up West Street with a suitcase, not stopping, not taking his hat off, swinging the suitcase and whistling something that was not the anthem.

He did not turn his head.

---

Mrs Tull was in the motor. She was a tall thin woman in grey silk and a wide grey hat, sitting very straight in the back of a long black Packard with a fan in her lap that she was not using, and she was a good ten years younger than her husband and a good deal cleverer, and Pershing knew both these things before she had said a word, because of the way she watched her husband come down the platform. She watched him the way a pilot watches a ship come into a lock: affectionately, without anxiety, ready.

“Your Excellency,” she said, and gave him a hand that was cool in spite of the heat. “Welcome. You will be tired of hearing it.”

“Not at all, Mrs Tull.”

“You will be by Sunday.” She moved along the seat to make room for him and looked past him at Warren, climbing into the front beside the driver with his knees up round his ears. “And you will be the son. Are you comfortable?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Warren, who was not.

“You are not. Hiram, put the seat back.” The driver, who was an old man with a white moustache and a peaked cap, put the seat back without a word, and Warren’s knees came down. “There. We have the room at the top for you, on the circle. It is the best room in the house. It looks at everything. My husband wanted to give it to the Governor-General.”

“I wished the Governor-General to have the best room,” said Tull, climbing in on the other side. “It is only proper.”

“The Governor-General has the room on the garden, which is quieter,” said Mrs Tull. “Mr Bramwell told me that the Governor-General sleeps badly and rises at five.” She looked at Pershing. “Was he right?”

Pershing looked at Bramwell, who had got into a second motor behind them with the bags and could not be looked at.

“He was right,” he said.

“Then you have the garden,” said Mrs Tull, “and the boy has the circle, and everybody has what they need,” and the Packard pulled out into West Street, and the band behind them struck up a march, too fast.

---

The town climbed. It was a small town, old and red and close, and it had been built, as far as Pershing could see, by people who had not expected anyone to drive a motor through it, and who had been right. The streets were narrow and they were full. June Week had filled them: with midshipmen in white walking in threes, with families in the doorways of boarding houses, with girls on the brick pavements, with a man selling soft crabs out of a barrow, with an ice cart, with the brass band of a Black church practising on its own steps, with flags. There were flags on everything. There were flags on the houses and flags on the lamp-posts and flags on the barrow of the man who sold soft crabs, the Realm’s and the King’s and the Province’s black and gold, and Pershing looked at them all and could not see a single one that was hung upside down, which was more than he could have said for the capital.

The Packard went up Church Street at the pace of a walking man, behind the ice cart, and came out on to a circle.

“Church Circle,” said Tull, pointing as though it might otherwise be missed. “St Anne’s.”

The church stood in the middle of the circle with the street going round it on every side, a red brick church with a white spire and a clock, in its own small yard of grass and old graves under trees. Its doors were open. There was a man on a ladder at the west door doing something to the hinge.

“The established church,” said Tull. “Very old parish. Very fine. The Rector is a very fine man. You will be attending on Sunday, of course, Your Excellency. It is in the programme.”

“I know it is in the programme.”

“We ourselves attend the chapel,” said Tull. “The Methodist chapel. On the other circle. We are Methodists. My father was a Methodist and my grandfather was a class leader at Taylor’s Island and walked to meeting barefoot with his shoes round his neck to save them.” He said it with simple pride, the way another man might have mentioned a grandfather at Yorktown. “But we shall come and see you go in. It is only proper.”

“That is very kind.”

“Wesley,” said Mrs Tull, “the Governor-General does not need to be seen going into church.”

“I should like him to know that the Province sees him.”

“The Province will see him. The Province will be on the pavement with its mouth open. It will not need you to point.” She opened her fan, at last, and moved it twice, and shut it. “School Street.”

The Packard went round three-quarters of Church Circle, which took some time, because of the ice cart, and turned up a short narrow street between two old houses, a street not more than a hundred and fifty yards long and gently uphill, and at the top of it Pershing saw the State House.

He had seen it before. He had not seen it from here. It stood in its own circle, larger than the other, on a green rise, a big red brick building with a white porch, and above it, much too big for it and absolutely right, a wooden dome, white and octagonal and tiered like a wedding cake, with a lantern on the top and a lightning rod on the lantern and a flag on the rod. It had been there since before the Charter. Congresses had sat under it. Pershing, who did not care for buildings, found that he cared for that dome.

“State Circle,” said Tull. “And there, Your Excellency. Government House.”

It was on the far side of the circle, set back from the street behind a low brick wall and an iron railing and a strip of lawn: a big square house of red brick with white trim and a slate roof and tall chimneys and a porch with white columns, newer than the State House by a hundred years and trying not to show it, and on the porch a flag, and on the flag the Province’s arms, and on the steps of the porch, as the Packard came round the circle, a line of servants in black and white standing in order of height. It was a fine house. It was not a beautiful one. Pershing preferred it that way.

He looked back over his shoulder, down School Street, the way they had come. Through the gap between the two old houses at the bottom he could see the white spire of St Anne’s and a piece of its red wall and a corner of its open door.

He noted it. He did not know why he noted it. He had been noting the ground he stood on for forty-five years and he did it the way other men breathed, a church spire here, a ridge there, a stand of trees that would hide a battery, a gap between houses through which a man could see a door. It meant nothing.

The Packard stopped. The line on the steps bowed.

---

There was a man on the porch who did not bow.

He stood a little apart from the servants, by the end column, in a brown suit that was too heavy for the day and a brown hat he had not taken off, and he held himself the way men hold themselves who have been told to stand somewhere and are going to stand there until they are told to stop. He was about forty. He was thin, with a long jaw and pale eyes and a pale moustache trimmed so close to the lip that it might have been drawn on, and he had a leather case under one arm, the kind lawyers carry, and he was looking at the Governor-General’s motor with an expression of complete attention and no feeling whatever.

Tull went to him at once, after Pershing was out and the bows had been received and Mrs Tull had gone ahead into the hall.

“Your Excellency, may I present Agent Spratt. Of the federal service. The enforcement service.” Tull said it the way he had said St Anne’s, pleased to be able to point it out. “Mr Spratt has the Baltimore district.”

“Your Excellency,” said Spratt. He did not offer his hand. He inclined his head about an inch.

“Mr Spratt.”

“I have asked Mr Spratt to be at the dinner,” said Tull. “Not as a guest, you understand, though of course he is very welcome, very welcome. In his capacity. I wished it to be seen that the Act is kept at the Lieutenant-Governor’s table.” He beamed. “Maryland keeps the law, Your Excellency. I like to show it.”

Pershing looked at Spratt. Spratt looked back.

“Mr Spratt,” Pershing said, “is the Act not kept at every table?”

“It is the law at every table, Your Excellency,” said Spratt. His voice was flat and careful and slightly nasal, the voice of a man reading aloud from a document he had read many times before. “Section three. No person shall manufacture, sell, barter, transport, import, export, deliver, furnish or possess any intoxicating liquor except as authorised by this Act. Whether it is kept at every table is a different question. It is the question I am paid to answer.”

“And what is the answer?”

“In the Baltimore district, Your Excellency? No.”

Tull’s beam faltered for a fraction of a second and came back stronger.

“Mr Spratt is very thorough,” he said. “Very thorough. He has read the whole of the Act. He is the only man in the district who has. He told me so.”

“I have read it four times, Your Honour,” said Spratt. “Including the schedules.”

“There,” said Tull. “The schedules.”

“How many agents have you in the district, Mr Spratt?” said Pershing.

“Six, Your Excellency. For Baltimore, the Bay and the counties of the Western Shore. Four, at present. One is in hospital and one is under investigation.”

“For what?”

“For having a motor car, Your Excellency, and a house at Gibson Island, on a salary of forty-two pounds a quarter.”

There was a silence on the porch. A sparrow went in and out of the ivy.

“Well,” said Tull. “Well. These things are being looked into. Coolidge is looking into them. Mr Spratt is very thorough.” He touched Pershing’s elbow, as if guiding him away from something hot. “Shall we go in? Mrs Tull will have lemonade.”

---

Mrs Tull had lemonade. She had it on a tray in the hall, which was high and cool and smelled of beeswax and cut flowers, with a black and white marble floor and a staircase going up in a long curve and a portrait of a Calvert at the turn of it, looking down with the expression of a man who had owned the Province and would have liked it back. The lemonade was very cold and very sour and Pershing drank all of it and was given another.

The servants took the bags. Bramwell came in behind them with the dispatch box, and Mrs Tull took him away at once to show him the room that had been made into an office, because she had been told he would want one, and he went with her looking, for the first time since New Westminster, very slightly surprised.

Warren was taken up to the room on the circle by a housemaid of about his own age who giggled on the stairs.

Pershing was taken through to the dining room by Tull, to see the table.

“I like to see the table,” Tull said. “Before. I like to see it as it will be.”

It was a long table in a long room, laid for twenty-four, under a chandelier that someone had cleaned that morning one drop at a time. There were silver candlesticks and silver bowls of roses and at each place a card in a careful copperplate, and at each place, in front of the plates, three glasses: a tumbler, a small stemmed glass, and a tall one. In the middle of the table, between the roses, stood four crystal decanters with silver collars, very fine, very old, cut in a pattern of vines. They were full of something dark red.

“Concord,” said Tull. “From the Finger Lakes. The very best. The Welch’s people send it to me by the case. I have it in the decanters, you see. For the look.” He picked one up and held it to the window, and the light came through it the colour of a stained-glass window in a Methodist chapel. “Nobody can say the Lieutenant-Governor’s table is not handsome. Nobody can say it is not festive. And nobody can say it is not lawful.” He set it down very gently. “I give the toast in it. At every dinner. I have given it in this room for six years. Maryland keeps the law. And everybody drinks.”

“Everybody?”

“Everybody stands,” said Tull, “and everybody raises the glass.” He paused. “Mr La Guardia, I believe, does not drink it. He holds it up and then he puts it down. He says he is allergic to grapes.”

“Is he?”

“He eats them,” said Tull. “I have seen him.” He gazed down the table with great tenderness. “He is coming tonight. Ritchie asked him. Ritchie always asks him. I think it is to annoy me.” He smiled, without any malice at all. “He does not annoy me. He is a very clever man, Mr La Guardia, and a very kind one, to his constituents. He has a wrong idea about Maryland, that is all. Everybody in the capital has a wrong idea about Maryland. They think because we are next to them we must be like them. But we are not. We are an old province. We keep the law.”

Pershing looked at the decanters.

“Your Honour,” he said, “may I ask you something?”

“Anything, Your Excellency.”

“Has anyone ever offered you a drink? In Maryland. Since 1920.”

Tull looked at him with complete and untroubled surprise.

“Of course not,” he said. “Who would offer the Lieutenant-Governor a drink?”

---

Pershing went up to his room at four.

It was on the garden, as promised, at the back of the house: a big square room with a high bed and a washstand and a writing table and two windows, with green blinds half drawn against the sun, and below the windows a long garden going down in terraces to a brick wall, with box hedges and roses and a magnolia and a sundial and, at the bottom, beyond the wall, the roofs of the town going down toward the water, and the water. He stood at the window for some time.

Then, because he could not help it, he went along the corridor to the front of the house, to the room at the top of the stairs where his son had been put.

Warren was lying on the bed with his shoes on, which Pershing noted and did not mention, reading a book of Mrs Tull’s about birds. The room was full of light. It had three tall windows on the circle and they were all open, and the noise of June Week came in through them, the motors and the voices and a band somewhere and the clock on the State House striking the quarter.

Pershing went to the middle window and looked out.

He could see the whole of State Circle: the green rise, the State House, the white porch, the dome against the sky. He could see the other houses round the circle, brick and white, and the treasury building, and on the far side a plain brick chapel with a short square tower, which would be Tull’s. He could see three streets going down from the circle into the town. And down one of them, the short one, School Street, a hundred and fifty yards of it with the trees meeting overhead, he could see, framed at the bottom between two old roofs, the white spire of St Anne’s and its clock, and below the clock a piece of red wall, and in the wall a door, open, with a man on a ladder.

“You can see everything from here,” said Warren from the bed, without looking up from the birds. “Mrs Tull said you could. She said that’s why it’s the best room.”

“Yes,” said Pershing.

“You can see the chapel and the church and the State House and three streets. And the dome. And a bit of the river, if you lean out.”

“Do not lean out.”

“I already did.”

Pershing stood at the window a moment longer. The man on the ladder at the church door came down and moved the ladder and went up again. The clock on the spire said ten past four. The clock on the State House said a quarter past. Pershing set his watch by the State House, because it was the State House, and because he had a feeling, which he did not examine, that somebody this weekend was going to ask him which clock was the right one.

“Warren.”

“Sir?”

“Your shoes.”

Warren took his shoes off and dropped them on the floor, one and then the other, and went on reading about birds, and Pershing went back down the corridor to his own room on the garden, where it was quiet, to lie down for an hour before dinner and not sleep.