CROSS COUNTRY
D. C.
-1938
T
HIS IS
the imperial accent, the Roman rhetoric. Columns in rows,
pediments loaded with ponderous allegories in stone, massive blocks of
masonry-dykes against the foaming tides of the popular life. The star-
lings fling themselves against the stolid fac;ades, life spurts among the
pediments, the graven seals and the pompous republican insignia are
perching places for starlings, a rush of birds bursting like a grenade
against the masonry, cascading over the tile roofs into the sky, distant
rustle of bird voices and the silent stone.
These birds are considered a civic pest. The police have tried shoot-
ing them, they have tried to poison them. They have posted men to shout
at them, to wave things at them, to scare them away. But the starlings
persist. They specially haunt the interminable fac;ades built by Hoover
and Mellon.
D. C. is the city of spittoons. Big brassbellied monsters squat on the
carpeted floors of the Capitol. In the newer buildings, they are small,
neatly enamelled in dark green and white, discreet.
The Room is nightmare tall. The light is utterly dead, too dead even
to be harsh, a corpse pallor shed from bowls high overhead, a light as
cold and sterile as the atmosphere of an extinct planet. One sits softly
on red plush pew benches. A spoken word, if anyone dared, would
reverberate as in a tomb, or a bank vault. One feels one's flesh puffing
out in corpse-dropsy. In this Room, smelling faintly of marble, window-
less, pillar@, breathing is a slight indiscretion. The nine old men slip
from behind the velvet draperies and settle into their appointed seats.
Justice Cardozo is said to have said: "We ought to ride in on elephants."
The Senators sit at grammar-school desks, with lids that lift up.
(But this is a schoolboy's paradise, where no one "pays attention" and
where special messengers are provided to facilitate note-passing.) A few
wear cutaways. But a Senator is unmistakeable even in a business suit.
An opulent air of authority, an expansiveness of gesture, a well fed
satiated look. Above all, the Senatorial handclasp.
An elderly man appears at the back of the centre aisle, in his hand
a large envelope with red seals, a burlesque monster of an envelope like
41
