Free When the Cheering Stopped by Gene; Smith

cheeks. At night when Baker would come he found the President utterly exhausted and worn out and growing grayer and grayer and grimmer and grimmer, with the lines in his face deepening beneath his eyes. He looked tired all the time; he said he felt as if he could go to sleep standing up. “I get so I cannot understand why he does not crumble up,” Hoover wrote home. “I wonder if the Doctor notices it as I do.” Grayson did notice, of course, and he begged the President to slow down. “Give me time,” the President answered. “We are running a race with Bolshevism and the world is on fire. Let us wind up this work here and then we will go home and find time for a little rest and play and take up our health routine again.” The killing work went on. His voice grew hoarse, he suffered from indigestion and heartburn, and he developed headaches; one blinding one he attributed to “bottled-up wrath at Lloyd George” and the Prime Minister’s demands for impossible reparations from the Germans.
    He could not go on in this way. On April 3 a fit of coughing seized him. All day his voice had been huskyand by evening he could hardly talk. Grayson took his temperature: it was 103. The doctor was terrified, thinking to himself that the President had been poisoned. Such was the rumor that flew over Paris: he had been poisoned by germs slipped into the ice in his drinking water. He took to his bed. The coughing was frighteningly violent and so severe that he could not get his breath for long moments at a time. Grayson sat with him all night and the First Lady acted as nurse, but he could not keep food down and suffered violent diarrhea. To Dr. Grayson the situation seemed very serious; it was influenza, he decided. The fever kept up and the President could not sleep, he who had always been able to sleep—to “pull down the curtains of my mind”—no matter what aggravations were his. When he dozed off for a few minutes he came awake to racking coughs that Grayson could not stop. His entire digestive system was completely out of control and his face grew alarmingly thin, its gauntness emphasizing the luminous eyes.
    He insisted on getting back to work and sent word to the Premiers of France, England and Italy that unless they were afraid of catching his disease he wanted them to come to his room for more conferences and more arguments. They came and he sat up in bed to go over with them yet once again the questions of who got what. Grayson and the First Lady were outside the door, telling each other he should never have gone back to work so soon, and Grayson cabled Joe Tumulty in Washington that the President was working too hard in spite of the illness: “This is a matter that worries me.” Tumulty cabled the President a plea that he not strain his constitution and the President sent back a grim joke in reply: “Constitution? Why man, I’m already living on my by-laws.”
    There came a night of burning fever and Grayson, backed by the First Lady, absolutely forbade any more work. The patient had no strength with which to fight. For three days he slept—a fitful slumber.
    When he awoke, he sent for his reports and his papers, he held his conferences. And he ruled that it was over, the fight was lost. The Italians were too wild in their demands, the French greedy, the British unreasonable. Hetold Grayson to order the captain of the George Washington to prepare for an immediate return to the United States. “I will retire in good order; we will go home.” At once the Europeans came flying to promise moderation and compromise. Clemenceau might privately say the President was like a cook who keeps her trunk ready in the hall, and the French papers might say he was like a spoiled child threatening to run home to Mama, but the demands were scaled down and conciliatory gestures made.
    He stayed. But in the American delegation they could no longer understand