When the Cheering Stopped Read Free Page A

where her father had been pastor and held a very simple service. There were two hymns and then the mourners formed up to go to the Myrtle Hill Cemetery.Schoolgirls in white, all holding myrtle branches, lined the way. Although the President had wanted as quiet a funeral as possible, almost the entire population of his wife’s home town turned out and stood by as her casket was lowered into the ground. When the casket rested in place, it was suggested to the President that now he leave the cemetery, but he said that he wanted to wait until the work was completely done. The crowds moved back to leave him quite alone with the girls near a large oak, and a breeze came up and moved some of the flowers. The workmen began to pile earth on Ellen’s casket where she lay with two rings on her hand, the first her wedding ring, the other a diamond one. His head bared, he stood by the men with their shovels, and a distance off the people of the town, the relatives and the Washington people shortly saw that once again the President was weeping because Ellen was gone.
    * It was later declared unconstitutional. Many of the slums are still as they were when Ellen Wilson last saw them.

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    The President sat by himself hour after hour on the observation platform of the train heading for Washington and the now unbearably lonely White House. “I feel so utterly alone,” he said, and begged some of Ellen’s relatives to stay with him for a while. They did so, and for long hours he talked to them, saying it was his ambition and his career that killed her. Her brother said to him that it was not so, but that even if it were Ellen would not have wanted it otherwise.
    Ellen was dead, Jessie and Nellie were married, and Margaret was often away. There was no woman to take charge of the White House. He asked his cousin, Helen Woodrow Bones, who had been brought up by his mother and father, if she would step into the breach. She took up permanent residence with him, hoping also that her two pets, Sandy the Airedale and Hamish the sheep dog, would amuse him. But of course nothing was the same, and often he sat alone reading Ellen’s favorite poemsor went walking the corridors of the Corcoran art gallery to look again at paintings she had loved.
    Ellen was dead. “I do not care a fig for anything that affects me,” he wrote a friend, and to another indicated that it would come as a blessing if someone would assassinate him. “If I hadn’t gone into politics she would probably be alive now,” he told her sister, and took a great interest in hearing from the British Ambassador details of how British Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey, when he lost his own wife, worked to submerge his grief in his love of the outdoors, of flowers and fishing. Even as Great Britain went to the war, Sir Edward took time to write the President a sympathetic note. The lonely man in the White House read it out loud to the people around him.
    Cary Grayson saw his patient declining before his eyes and worked harder than ever to keep up the golfing and auto rides. The doctor also stayed many nights in the White House to be on hand if the President wanted someone to chat with. And often the gentle Helen Bones would sit by her cousin in silence, simply wanting him to know that she was there to help. In her eyes he was something like a Bengal tiger she had once seen in a cage; she thought him trapped by his own cage of high position that prevented him from seeking out friendships wherever he could find them. As summer turned to fall and spring of 1915 came, Helen Bones herself sickened in the depressing atmosphere of the White House, and Grayson began to worry about her. She was a shy person and quiet, and had hardly any friends at all in Washington. Grayson decided that what she needed was a woman friend to talk with, someone who could take her out of the White House now and then.
    Grayson looked around for the proper person and decided to