Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,100

what else it could be. “In the absence of any other apparent cause for the phenomenon I was forced to agree in the conclusion that it was due to the presence of the bullet,” he would later write. “I was by no means satisfied, however, with the results.”

After returning to his laboratory, Bell felt none of the triumph he had felt the night before. As he turned the memory of the test over and over in his mind, trying to understand what had been different this time, he began to wonder if the problem had been some sort of outside interference. The next day, he returned to the White House and asked urgently to speak to Garfield’s surgeons. Were they “perfectly sure,” he asked, “that all metal had been removed from the neighborhood of the bed.” “It was then recollected,” Bell would later write, “that underneath the horse-hair mattress on which the President lay was another mattress composed of steel wires.”

The revelation stunned Bell, who had had no way to anticipate such an unusual and potentially disastrous factor in his work. Box springs would not become common in the United States for another twenty years. As Bell knew, however, it would be difficult to find a better way to interfere with an induction balance than a mattress made of metal. Still, Bell was not convinced that it was the entire source of the problem. It seemed to him that, since Garfield had been lying on the mattress, he would have heard the pulsating sound everywhere he tested, rather than in just a small area near the wound. He asked the White House to send him an exact duplicate of the president’s mattress for testing.

Acutely aware that time was running out, Bell returned to his lab and threw himself into meeting this new challenge. He had just begun, however, when he received an urgent message from Boston. Mabel, who was in the third trimester of her pregnancy, had fallen ill. She had been pleading with him to visit her and their children for more than a month. Now the situation had taken an ominous turn. Determined to find a way to keep working, Bell left Tainter with detailed instructions and then rushed aboard a train, already planning to ask Charles Williams for his old work space in the machine shop.

Waiting for Bell in Boston, however, was a tragedy that was far more personal than the one he was leaving behind, and which would leave him powerless to help Garfield, or indeed himself.

• CHAPTER 20 •

TERROR, HOPE, AND DESPAIR

I have sometimes thought that we cannot know any man thoroughly

well while he is in perfect health. As the ebb-tide discloses the real

lines of the shore and the bed of the sea, so feebleness, sickness, and pain

bring out the real character of a man.

JAMES A. GARFIELD

In his sickroom in the White House, Garfield was exhausted and weakened by the suffering he endured, but he was not surprised. He had been poor, and he had been a soldier, and like any man who had known want or war, he understood that the cruelest enemy was disease. “This fighting with disease,” he had written to Lucretia nearly ten years earlier, after watching twenty-two of his men die from typhoid fever during the Civil War, “is infinitely more horrible than battle.”

Now, his body, which had miraculously survived the initial trauma of the bullet wound, was so riddled with infection that he was literally rotting to death. Although Bliss closely tracked the spikes in the president’s temperature, the chills, restlessness, vomiting, pounding heart, and profuse sweating, he either did not know, or refused to acknowledge, that they were symptoms of severe septicemia. He also insisted that he was not worried about the small, pus-filled lumps that dotted Garfield’s back and arms. Known as “septic acne,” they were yet another indication of blood infection. When a reporter, who had seen them mentioned in the bulletins, asked Bliss about them, the doctor dismissed them as being fairly common. “They will not be allowed to get large,” he said, “but will be opened as they may form.”

On August 8, a few days after Bell left for Boston, Bliss directed Agnew to again operate on the president, to “facilitate the escape of pus.” When Bliss told Garfield that he would need to undergo another operation, Garfield, with “unfailing cheerfulness,” replied, “Very well; whatever you say is necessary must be done.” Using a long surgical knife with an ivory handle, Agnew made a