Rex Stout by The President Vanishes

Stanley? He’s not expecting it. Hatred of war? Maybe you think I love it. Reid does and Wilcox does. Let them. I hate it. During these twenty years in Washington I guess you and I have learned to choke down hate. What is it? Do you think you can stop the tide? Not a chance. What is it?”
    “It’s just a belly-ache, Jim.” Tilney reached up and patted the other’s shoulder. “I’ve got the belly-ache, that’s all.” He turned and got his eyes around to the other three, Wilcox to Allen to Reid. “Gentlemen. I shall not decide what to say about your war until I have heard the President tomorrow. That’s final. I should have made it final two hours ago. At present no one knows what the President will say. If after he has spoken my conscience will permit it, you will find me as ready to swallow bitterness as you are to feast on gall.”
    Wilcox snapped, “Good. That’s that.”
    Reid said, cold but friendly, “Don’t try to fight us, Tilney.”
    Allen was sarcastic and not friendly at all. “Leave your conscience at home. It’s less trouble that way.”
    Tilney, disregarding them, was muttering something to Corcoran, and the latter was shaking his head. “No,” he saidwhen Tilney had finished, “we can’t do it. It has to be before adjournment tomorrow. Today. We’re committed. Come with us, Bronnie. Take your time. I’ll wait here all night for you.”
    Tilney, not bothering with another no, moved away. “Goodnight, Jim.” He nodded vaguely in the general direction of the others, walked slowly and not very steadily across to the door, and went through it, leaving it open behind him.
    Wilcox said, “He’s dead on his feet.”
    “He won’t be at noon,” Reid observed, pushing back his chair and getting up. “Going my way, Jim?”
    Corcoran had moved around the table and stopped in front of Allen, looking down wearily at his slickness. There was venom in his tired voice. “If you find yourself smothering some day, buried under Bronson Tilney’s conscience, don’t yell for me.”
    Reid said, “Forget it. We’re all sitting on the same keg of powder. Let’s get some sleep.”

TUESDAY—ANTICLIMAX

1
    On a day when the President is to appear in person before a joint session of the Congress, Washington on the lazy Potomac assumes outwardly, not without a touch of self-consciousness, a little of the air of a world-capital. This, the least self-made of cities, built by the most violently self-made men in the world, is ordinarily and obviously content with its rôle of celestial rooming-house for the hordes whose heaven is a public office and whose salvation is the national pay-roll; but now and then it arouses itself reluctantly to a half-hearted realization of its position as the nucleus of the most potent and dynamic among the world’s half-dozen imperial atoms. The quadrennial Inaugural Day is such an occasion; New Year’s Day, for obscure and indefinable reasons, is one; another, in much smaller degree, is a day when the President talks to the Congress. The visible evidences of the difference from any other day are next to imperceptible: more police on Pennsylvania Avenue, more people on the sidewalks, and more costly limousines headed for the Capitol; but the difference is somewhat greater where it really exists, in the psychological tone of the inhabitants. The air is by no means as electric as it is in Cleveland or St. Louis on the opening day of a baseball World Series, but there are sparks and currents which commonly are absent.
    This particular Tuesday, though, this day of a President’s visit, began early to show promise of more than something a little different—possibly, even, something unique. At ten o’clock in the morning Major General Francis Cunningham stood looking out of a window in the office of the Secretary of War and growled, without turning around, to that official:
    “What the hell does this town think it is, Paris changing cabinets?”
    The Secretary, reaching for a