Living Dead Man*

SEMI-FICTION

One December evening through which the 19th Century was creeping at last to its grave, a silver-haired gentleman of broken but distinguished appearance made his way from the Grand Avenue Hotel of Enid, Okla., to the corner drugstore. He purchased lilac perfume and headache powders, enough to keep his head steady on "a long trip." Next day the hotel porter thought he heard a groan through the locked door of the old gentleman's chamber. The door was burst in time for a doctor and two others to hear a stertorous voice say: "I am--am--John Wilkes-- Booth. I killed--killed--Abraham --Lincoln--the--best--best--"

After a paroxysm the dying man went on: "Two--two others know It--Mrs.--Harper--Bates--they-- know--" And there was, they say, one last whisper: "Mother." Bottled lilacs scented the room.

Mrs. Harper, a minister's wife, was brought. "Poor Mr. George," she said. Yes, he had told her he was Booth, one night when he was at death's door in El Reno, Okla. He had wished lilacs near his coffin. He had mentioned a Texan named Bates. Yes, the addressee of the letter they had found in George's pockets was that Texan, Finis L. Bates.

When Finis Bates arrived he took incognito to gave his friend's body from mob violence. For it was the body of his friend, John St. Helen, beyond peradventure?a hooplike scar over the eye, a neck cicatrice, an old leg fracture, a crooked thumb. And years before, near death in Texas, St. Helen had given Bates proof that only a friend, a lawyer never, could refuse to accept, proof that he was Lincoln's assassin.

After he left Enid, Bates spent $50,000 collecting evidence and affidavits to substantiate this proof. He published The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth, This is that book enlarged; romanticized by the keen, sympathetic author of The Soul of Ann Rutledge and The Soul of Abe Lincoln.

The story is briefly this: Frustrated by Lee's surrender in a design to kidnap President Lincoln and hold him hostage to end the war, quixotic Booth saw removal of "the cause of the war" as his ultimate duty. He entered the President's box in Ford's Theatre, Good Friday night, 1865, fired coolly, leapt to the stage (fracturing his leg), spurred out of Washington on a dark, wet road. Smuggled in straw on a Negro's wagon piled with household goods, he lost from his pockets some letters, a photograph. The confederate, "Jimmie," who went back for these, had not returned when Booth, hiding at the Garrett home across the Rappahannock, stole off alone, unseen, though a wood where later his field-glasses were picked up. When Lieutenant Colonel Conger and Lieutenant Baker surrounded and fired the Garrett barn that night, it was "Jimmie," not Booth, whose head was shot half off by a disobedient sergeant and upon whose person were found Booth's papers. The identification and disposal of this body were clouded with uncertainty, ambiguity. Prize money on Booth by then totaled $200,000. If the officers, neither of whom had ever seen Booth, had admitted a mistake they would have been disgraced and out of pocket. One of their soldiers swore, in 1922, that he and another had seen a mistake at once. They knew Booth well; were ordered silent.

Mrs. Babcock reconstructs Booth's thoughts, dreams, visions and world-wide wanderings with deep power and clever deduction. He hunts buffalo, drives mules, sees his mother in San Francisco, plays Richard III in Hong Kong, listens to a Yoghi in Singapore, tries to write his life in the Pelew Islands, confesses in Mexico, hides in Cuba, runs a saloon in Texas. He feels a corpse twinned to his living body, flees an empty noose over nightmarish seas and mountains. He has recurrent sight of a gaunt, forgiving spectre whom he comes to love. He hears a Voice, repeating words of his own, his mother's, Bessie Hale's, Lincoln's. "With malice toward none," the Voice says; "with charity for all."

The author of this semi-fictional romance, Mrs. Bernie Smade Babcock, aged 57, able journalist, lives in Little Rock, Ark., a city "posthumously" visited by Booth.

There lives today (last week he called at the White House) a man to whom passages in this book will read strangely indeed.

The story tells of Bessie Hale, whom Booth, brilliant actor and darling of the gods, loved insanely, and who in turn loved Booth, under spring lilacs, "forever and forever." Bessie Hale married years later, but after Booth's departure she lived "a dead woman's life."

There was a ball one night in Washington whither Booth came late. Bessie Hale had dressed especially for him. She was watching, wondering. Meantime she waltzed to dreamy strains with a nice-looking young officer who was also, as many knew, an abject slave to her divinity. This was a tall lad, handsome, courtly. He had begged her hand time and again, receiving her refusals with cheery fortitude. Her parents preferred him to "the player." He used to send her stunning bouquets from the White House conservatory. He was President Lincoln's oldest son, Robert.

This particular evening, matrons saw Booth halt abruptly when he entered the ballroom. He blenched, bit his lips, stood taut.

"This," said one who marked how Booth's blazing eyes fastened upon the broad blue shoulder of Captain Bob Lincoln and the delicious confiding form of Bessie Hale, "this is the fire of passion whipped high."

The book records no conversations between Booth and Captain Bob Lincoln. We are only told that, as the couple waltzed near him, Booth spun on his heel in fury and strode away. Pausing before his friend and confidante, Mrs. Temple, he blazed: "I am done! Tell her so; tell her to take her blue-coated son of a nigger-loving President!"

"But John?John?"

"Let me go or I will kill him!"

It is not suggested that Bob Lincoln's attentions to Bessie Hale heaped fuel upon Booth's feeling against Lincoln Sr. Rather the reverse: that the son of Lincoln was the rival Booth could least brook. Such a suggestion might not be far-fetched in view of Booth's capacity for insensate passion, but it would be cruel now, and futile, to dig sorrow afresh from its burial under the years.

After Booth was "dead," Bessie Hale did not take Bob Lincoln. He himself took some one else, long before Bessie married. He chose Mary, daughter of Senator Harlan of Iowa. They were married in 1868. And as the years went on, the inadequacy of a remark attributed to a guest at the ball described, became increasingly apparent. The guest had referred to Bob Lincoln as "a young man who will be known as the son of a president, if posterity remembers him at all."

Robert Todd Lincoln was born in Springfield, Ill., in 1843, in the little white house with green blinds where his ex-Congressman father had settled down to practice law. He was named for his Kentucky-banker grandfather, Robert Todd. He took after his impetuous, affectionate fault-finding mother. He attended the Illinois Industrial School at Urbana (later the University of Illinois) and was sent east to Phillips Exeter Academy. He entered Harvard Law School but left to become a captain on General Grant's staff. He was present at the fall of Petersburg and at Appomattox, whence he returned the day before his father's assassination. He was in the Ford Theatre box that night.

Two years later he was admitted to the Illinois bar, returning to Washington in 1881 at the request of President Garfield who asked him to be Secretary of War. Waiting one day at a railway station, he witnessed a second presidential assassination as Garfield left the train. President Arthur retained him alone of Garfield's secretaries.

After four years, he returned to Illinois and became special counsel to the Pullman Co. In 1889 another request, this time from President Harrison, took him to London as Ambassador to the Court of St. James's. Returning again to his native state, he refused to run for the U. S. Senate. George A. Pullman died and Mr. Lincoln became executor of his estate, enjoying a $400,000 fee and the presidency of the sleeping car company. He visited the Buffalo Exposition and witnessed a third presidential assassination, McKinley shot by Anarchist Czolgosz.

In 1911 he retired to the Pullman board chairmanship and has since avoided the public eye. From his summer home at Manchester, Vt., or his big brick mansion in Washington, he issues into the limelight only on very pressing occasions, such as the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial by President Harding on May 30, 1922, or the hanging of his mother's portrait in the White House a fortnight ago, (TIME, Mar. 1, THE PRESIDENCY) .

FICTION

Bags of Beauty

SPANISH BAYONET?Stephen Vincent Benet?Doran ($2). It is characteristic of Author Benet that the pre-Revolutionary Floridian of his tale is an indigo-planter and breeder of cochineal bugs, not a farmer of yams or tobacco; that his name is Gentian, not Brown or Black; that he is not so much a retired army surgeon with impeccable manners and exquisite vintages, as a mage of the sinister arts, whose oval study is done in blue-and-gold leather with a star-powdered dome and a secret moonwindow. It is characteristic that Dr. Gentian's wife is a burned-out Greek beauty and that their daughter Sparta has a dazzling net of golden hair, grey eyes changing as a winter cloud, and a voice like "skeins of rock-crystal flecked through and through with tiny flakes of softest gold."

For Mr. Benet is a poet, hotly amorous of all words, ideas and images that appeal to the senses with clarity and elegance. He writes a rich historical tale in prose of the same genre as that which his austere sister-in-law, Elinor Wylie, put into her finespun web of intellectual silicon, The Venetian Glass Nephew.

As to plot, Dr. Gentian nurses a nice insanity to be King of the Floridas, while the passion of his daughter is to be a queen, preferably piratical, with the misbegotten brute who appeals to her inherited taste for coarse-grained erotics. When the hero, young Andrew Beard of New York, arrives on business for his rich father, he is snaffled between plan and counterplan of father and daughter, escaping not without scars on heart and body. In the distances are heard the splashing of tea-chests in Boston harbor, the rattle of musketry at Lexington.

No fiction of hip-flask Florida could be more faithfully supplied with the spirit and flesh of the period than is this romance of the joyous peninsula in its rum and bombo days. It is thorough work, racy reading, a story packed with bags of beauty and of darkness.

NON-FICTION

Infanta Terrible

COURTS AND COUNTRIES AFTER THE WAR?H. R. H. The Infanta Eulalia of Spain [aunt of the present King, Alfonso XIII, sister of Alfonso XII]?Dodd, Mead ($3.50). The Infanta Eulalia has been called "the tomboy of royalty"?a significant nickname only when understood. Her tomboyishness is never rowdy, like that of "Margot" Asquith. It is her faculty for saying calmly and directly what more timid souls express by circumlocution that caused her to be regarded once as an enfant terrible, and now as a dowager to whom the same adjective may be applied. Her "indiscretions of the pen" however are deceptive. She has an uncanny flair for making superficially sensational statements which on closer examination are seen to be nearly always discreet and frequently both rational and discerning:

Spain. "In Spain you are noble or nothing; we do not recognize any middle class. . . . We never feel the loneliness of those who acquire social position. . . . We are born in it. ...

"The King, my nephew, provides me with an inexhaustible source of interest. ... To live with him is like living with 20 different persons at once! ... I have often heard my nephew described as unstable, but this conception of him arises from his extreme versatility; and although he indulges in many and varied pursuits he does them all thoroughly. . . . [Most kings] are frankly tired?they inherit too late! ... It must be remembered that Alfonso XIII was' never the heir to the throne but was born a king. . ." (six months after the death of his father, Alfonso XII, who had no other male issue).

"Queen Victoria Eugenie of Spain is one of the most decorative queens in Europe. . . . My nephew lost no time in molding his wife's pliant disposition. . . . She is now in many respects more of a Spaniard than many Spaniards" (although a Battenberg and a granddaughter of Queen Victoria).

England. "I was the first person to see the Prince of Wales after he was born! ... I am amused to notice that the old-fashioned idea of the 'impurity' of the English bedroom has not vanished in post-War conditions

On the Continent the bedroom is regarded as quite an ordinary room. ... I wonder whether we are immodest. . . . [Existence at Queen Victoria's Court was] akin to a perpetual sojourn in a cemetery."

Germany. "German scientists are determined that in the next war every necessity of life shall have its artificial substitute; the nation shall not again be starved into subjection. . . . Perhaps the most wonderful [German] medical triumph is its maiden substitute for the unwedded or the wedded foster-mother, with which I came into contact when I was staying near Coburg, where the clinic and the foster-mother farm exist.

"This farm clinic purports to be able to supply wet-nurses who have never been mothers but whose maternal capacity for suckling has been arrived at by diverting another natural function from its accepted duties. However I am not sufficiently clever to describe the medical details."

Belgium. Elizabeth Queen of the Belgians "is one of the most interesting of European Royalties ... a daughter of the Duke Karl Theodor of Bavaria, the famous philanthropist and eye doctor. . . . The Queen like all the Wittelsbachs is many-sided in her accomplishments: she is a clever violinist, a great reader, an admirable horsewoman, a good shot. . . . She is the only 'flying' Queen, and she thinks as little of flight as most people do of a ride in an omnibus. . . .

"Belgium ... is perhaps the only country in Europe which is not unduly affected by the present craze for dancing."

Herself. "I have endeavored to discuss courts and countries after the War in a more or less womanly way. ... I think I can claim to be the first Royalty to inaugurate the habit of going about without a lady in waiting. . . . But I have always been in advance of my time."

Neurography

THE DOCTOR LOOKS AT BIOGRAPHY?Psychological Studies of Life and Letters?Joseph Collins, M.D.?Doran. ($3). Dr. Collins, who looked at literature through a neurologist's spectacles, has played the same trick on biography and autobiography. Those who find the lives of distinguished or notorious persons the best reading in the world will be stimulated. Occasionally his vocabulary is too technical for the average reader, but most of the time the doctor uses the language of a broader culture, relieved by sudden reversions to modern slang.

The choice of interpretations is sufficiently catholic. Sherwood Anderson leads the American writers treated; Henry James comes last. Of foreign writers the names of Anatole France, Joseph Conrad and John Donne suggest a diversity of patients. Among the poets in the doctor's waiting-room are Blake, Keats and Poe. Weber and Fields are not too low nor is Eleanora Duse too exalted for attention. Among the best studies are those of Brigham Young, Theodore Roosevelt, Sir William Osier, James J. Corbett and George Cohan. Only a hint of the complete list may be gathered from these names.

The book sparkles with quotable lines. Apropos of the statement that Irving Berlin can neither read nor write music, Dr. Collins observes: "Some who have heard his compositions will say 'I knew it!'" And then he adds: "Homer could neither read nor write and his poetry has stirred the hearts of thousands of generations."*

*BOOTH AND THE SPIRIT OF LINCOLN?Bernie Babcock?Lippincott ($2). *Dr. Collins' error. One thousand generations equals 33,000 years. Homer lived about 850 B. C.