LITMIR.BIZ

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“fairy child” Annabel was now nineteen years old, and about to take her place in society as Mrs. Dabney Bayard.

      “Ah, Lieutenant Bayard!—I think I’ve glimpsed the young man once or twice,” Woodrow said, without the slightest edge of reproach in that, perhaps, his wife and he had been excluded from recent social occasions at Crosswicks Manse, “and he seems to me an upstanding Christian youth, and a patriot as well: the grandson, isn’t he, of John Wilmington Bayard?—hearty Presbyterian stock, and most reliable.”

      “We shall see. I mean—yes of course. You are quite right.”

      More than once, Winslow Slade had caught an unwanted glimpse of his dear granddaughter walking in the garden behind the Manse, with Lieutenant Bayard; a handsome boy, but impetuous, whose hands too frequently made their way onto Annabel’s petite body, at her waist, or lower, at her slender hips . . . It was not a vision the seventy-four-year-old wished to summon, at this awkward time.

      Woodrow said, yet still gravely, “Our Margaret, you know, was born in Georgia—not in the North. My dear Ellen took it into her head, near the very end of her pregnancy, that she could not bear for our firstborn to be delivered north of the Mason-Dixon line, and so I—I humored her of course . . . And I think that, in a way, it has made a difference—Margaret is our most gracious daughter, not nearly so—emphatic—headstrong—as the younger girls, born here in the North.”

      Winslow Slade, whose ancestors did not hail from the American South, but rather from the Puritan north of New England, tactfully made no reply to this peculiar remark, in its way both apologetic and boastful.

      “Would you like a cigar, Tommy? I know that you don’t ‘smoke’—at home, certainly. But I have here some very fine Cuban cigars, given to me by a friend.”

      “Thank you, Winslow—but no! I think that I have told you, how my dear mother cured me forever of a wish to smoke?”

      Winslow Slade inclined his head politely, that Woodrow might again tell this favorite story. For Woodrow was quite practiced at the recitation of certain family tales, as if they were old tales of Aesop.

      “I was seven years old when Mother called me, to enlist her in killing the aphids on her roses. It might have been that I had been watching my father and other male relatives smoking cigars, and may have appeared admiring; Mother was quick to take note of such details, and I have inherited her skill. ‘Tommy, come here: I will light one of Father’s cigars, and you will blow smoke on the nasty aphids.’ And so—that is exactly what I did, or tried to do.” Woodrow was laughing, a wheezing sort of laugh, without evident mirth; tears shone in his eyes, of a frantic merriment. “Ah, I was so ill! Violently ill to my stomach, not only repelled by the horrific tobacco smoke, but vomiting for much of a day. And yet, Mother’s wisdom was such: I have never smoked since, nor have I had the slightest inclination. Observing the trustees lighting up their ill-smelling cigars, when we are meant to have a serious meeting, leaves me quite disgusted, though I would never betray my feelings of course.”

      “A most thoughtful mother!” Winslow returned the cigars to their brass humidor.

      In a corner of Dr. Slade’s library an eighteenth-century German grandfather’s clock chimed a quiet but unmistakable quarter-hour: Winslow Slade was hoping that his young friend would depart soon, for Woodrow was clearly in one of his “nerve” states, and the effect upon Winslow himself was beginning to be felt; of all psychic conditions, anxiety verging upon paranoia/hysteria is perhaps the most contagious, even among men. Yet, Woodrow could not resist reverting to his subject, in an indirect way, to lament that the United States was burdened with “an insufferable buffoon” in the White House: “A self-appointed bully who fancies himself a savior, mucking about now shockingly in Panama, and swaying the jingoists to his side. The presidency of the United States is not an office to be besmirched but to be elevated—it is a sacred trust, for our nation is exceptional in the history of the world. And I, here at home, in ‘idyllic’ Princeton, must contend with Teddy Roosevelt’s twin, as it were—who pretends only to have the interest of the university at heart, while wresting my power from me.”

      Winslow sighed, and could not think how to reply. He seemed to know beforehand what his young friend had come to ask of him; and did not want to encourage him; yet, inevitably, Woodrow made his plea, with the blinking simplicity of a small child, his moist eyes gleaming behind his polished eyeglasses: “Dr. Slade, if you might indicate your support of me, or rather, your preference: Woodrow Wilson or Andrew West . . . It would be such a relief to me, as to my family.”

      Pained, Winslow explained that he thought it a wiser course, for one like himself in retirement from all politics, to remain neutral.

      “I am sure that, in the end, wise heads and wisdom will prevail. You will have a vote of the trustees, and that will decide it—soon, I would think?”

      “Winslow, that is—that is not—this is not quite the answer I had hoped for, in coming here . . .”

      Winslow persisted: “I prescribe for you, my dear friend, the simplest and most fundamental of all Christian remedies—prayer. By which I mean, Woodrow, a deep examination of your soul, your motives, and your ideals. Prayer.”

      The younger man blinked at Winslow, as a tic in his left cheek seemed to mock his enfeebled smile. “Yes, you are right—of course. You are invariably right, Dr. Slade. But, I’m afraid, you are uninformed—for I have already spent countless hours on my knees, in prayer, since this hellish situation first manifested itself, months ago. Of course, it has been a gathering storm. I have enlisted prayer from the start, yet the results have been disappointing: for West continues his sorties against me, even laughing behind my back, and God has not seen fit to intervene.”

      So astounded was Winslow Slade by these words, he could think of no adequate reply; and silence uneasily fell between them, as smoldering logs in the fireplace shifted, and darkened; and Woodrow reached out, in a nervous sort of curiosity, to take up a small jade snuffbox on a table, to examine closely. It was an engaging object, though hardly beautiful, covered in a patina of decades, its lid engraved with a miniature yet meticulously wrought serpent that, coiled, looked as if it were about to leap out at the observer. Strikingly, the cobra’s eyes were two inset rubies of the size of pumpkin seeds.

      Fascinating to Woodrow, in his somewhat dazed state, how these rubies glittered, with the fantastical potency of an actual serpent’s eyes . . .

      Now daringly Woodrow said, as he had been preparing to say, perhaps, this past half hour: “He seeks power in a very different way, you know.”

      “He?”

      “West.”

      “Ah yes—West is still our subject?”

      “It is not mere rumor, Dr. Slade, it has been whispered everywhere in town, and Ellen was reluctant to upset me by repeating it—but Andrew West has consorted with clairvoyants and mesmerists; in a pretense of ‘scientific inquiry,’ like his Harvard psychologist-friend William James, he has delved into what we must call occult practices—that fly in the face of Christian teaching.”

      “ ‘Occult practices’—? Andrew West?”

      Winslow Slade laughed, for Andrew West had the solid, burly build of a wrestler; certainly an intelligent man, with degrees from Cambridge (England) as well as Harvard, yet not in any way a sensitive or inwardly-brooding person, of the kind who might take the occult seriously.

      “Yes, Dr. Slade, though you may smile at the prospect—‘occult practices.’ By which he hopes to influence ‘powers’—thereby, to influence the more impressionable minds in our community, and among the trustees. I told you, it is a battle—in an undeclared war.”

      “You are saying that our colleague and neighbor Andrew West, dean of the graduate school, is an—occultist?”

      “Well, I am saying that it is said—it is said by many—that West dabbles in the occult, in a pretense of scientific inquiry; one of his allies is Abraham Sparhawk, in philosophy; but a newfangled sort of philosophy in which up is proved to be down, and time and

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