Colonel Roosevelt (18 page)

AFTER A FAREWELL
dinner at Dorchester House,
attended by the heads of the government, judiciary, and Anglican Church, Roosevelt left London for Southampton early on Thursday, 9 June. His ship was not due to sail until the following day, but he had an unusual assignation in Hampshire, en route to the port.

For years he had dreamed of roaming the English countryside “
at the time of the singing of the birds.” Bird-listening was his primary delight as an ornithologist—almost his only delight in childhood, when he had been so myopic he had difficulty tracing the source of any song. Now, with his left eye blinded, he again wanted to hear, if not see, some of the British species he had studied as a boy.

Sir Edward Grey was happy to act as his guide through some melodious plot of beechen green. The foreign secretary was a passionate outdoorsman, extremely knowledgeable about avian life. He had suggested they tour the meadowlands around Highland Water, deep in the New Forest. There was a country inn nearby at Brockenhurst, where they could spend the night. Southampton lay only eight miles away. Roosevelt’s wife and children could travel there separately the following morning, and meet him at the docks.

With one of the longest days of the year to spare,
the two men took a preliminary hike down the valley of the Itchen. Then they drove to Stoney Cross and fortified themselves with tea. At 4:30
P
.
M
. they disappeared into the New Forest, and were not seen again until nine o’clock that evening.

The weather was overcast and the season late for a full chorale, but Grey was able to identify twenty-three different songs of forty-one observed species.
Roosevelt listened and watched with a sense of literary familiarity. He had read Marryat’s
Children of the New Forest
as a boy, and many of the names his guide whispered to him—the nightingale, the skylark, the thrush, the blackbird—evoked poems he had by heart. But the beauty of their live music thrilled him. The cuckoo wrought its traditional spell, and the “ventriloqual lay” of the sedge warbler mocked him among the river reeds. If the “singing and soaring” of a skylark reminded him of Wordsworth, rather than Shelley, and its melody degenerated sometimes into chatter, he felt it deserved its place in the quotation books.

He heard nothing that quite equaled, to his ear, the chimes of the American wood thrush, the high, brilliant tessitura of the northern winter wren, or
the unstoppable mockingbird that had once kept him awake one moonlit night in Tennessee. Nevertheless, “
the woods and fields were still vocal with beautiful bird-music, the country was very lovely, the inn as comfortable as possible, and the bath and supper very enjoyable after our tramp; and altogether I passed no pleasanter twenty-four hours during my entire European trip.”

ROOSEVELT SAILED FROM
Southampton the following afternoon on the
Kaiserin Auguste Victoria
. “
Take care of him,” Rudyard Kipling wrote to a friend in New York. “He is scarce and valuable.”

The ship was crowded with a record number of American passengers, many of whom had shortened their vacations in order to accompany the Colonel home. Stateside, his voyage was already being called “the Return from Elba.”
Similar imagery was employed in France. “Never since Napoleon dawned on Europe,”
Le Temps
remarked, “has such an impression been produced there as has been made by Theodore Roosevelt.” Some British commentators, still smarting over the Guildhall speech, would not have been sorry
to see him head for St. Helena. “He is an amiable barbarian with a veneer of European civilization,” wrote S. Verdad, foreign correspondent for
The New Age
. “To give him credit for any diplomatic talent is a huge joke.” But the
Westminster Review
spoke for the majority in declaring, “Mr. Roosevelt is becoming more and more the commanding figure of the English-speaking world.”

All this attention—not to mention
eight thousand letters received to date by his overworked secretaries—testified to a fact obvious to many, if denied by himself: that he was perceived as the once and future President of the United States. Those jokes at Oxford about him running for another term had been diplomatic. So, looking further back, had the state receptions, the military reviews, the royal confidences lavished on him since he stepped ashore in Khartoum. He would not have been
mein Freund
to the Kaiser, or George V’s chosen oracle of Empire, nor even Sir Edward Grey’s bird-watching buddy, if specialists in the Wilhelmstrasse and Whitehall really believed that he was headed for retirement. And the vehemence with which Muslims attacked him (
a spokesman for the Young Egypt Party regretted that he not been shot dead in Cairo) bespoke a new neurosis in international relations: fear that the United States, which he had personally shaped into the great Western power, would expand its influence eastward under a third Roosevelt administration. Maybe even a fourth: he was still only fifty-one.

There was, of course, the complicating factor of William Howard Taft. One of the longest letters in the Colonel’s prodigious stash of mail came from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a litany of Taft’s personal and political troubles, beginning with, “
I have had a hard time” and ending with an indirect appeal for help: “It would give me a great deal of pleasure if after you get settled at Oyster Bay, you could come over to Washington and spend a few days in the White House.”

HEADING FOR HOME
, Roosevelt was a different person from the gregarious, Africa-bound adventurer of two springs before. He paced several hours a day on the first-class deck, a black hat shading his eyes. Fellow promenaders sensed his distraction and left him alone. He was willing to pose for the occasional “kodaker,” and made himself available for a general handshaking session. Otherwise,
passengers saw little of him. He spent most of his time with Edith and Alice in their respective staterooms, while Ethel roamed the ship with a little black dog, and Kermit played bridge in the smoking room. Invariably, the family ate together in the ship’s exclusive “Ritz Carlton” restaurant.

They had much to talk about, and more to ponder individually, with changes looming in all their lives. Edith wanted nothing more than to have her husband back at Oyster Bay for good. Her dream was to grow old with him in
Sagamore Hill, their big house overlooking the sea, filling it with more books as it emptied of children.
But she knew him well enough not to bet against some urge for action taking him away from her, sooner or later. She had seen him brood at Omdurman, noticed how he huddled with Pinchot in Porto Maurizio, heard him exalt the Man in the Arena in Paris, registered what he said the night he came back depressed and raspy-voiced from Döberitz. At Windsor, she had watched as he walked with kings, and—in Kipling’s cliché—kept his bearing. At none of these times had Theodore looked like a spent force.

Alice, attuned to every political overtone humming around Washington, saw trouble looming between the President, her father, herself, and her husband. Nick was in a difficult position, since he came from a family long associated with the Tafts. Alice’s dread was that, in the event of a Roosevelt-Taft split, Representative Longworth would resign from Congress and run for governor of Ohio. To ultra-sophisticated Alice, the prospect of life in Columbus was only slightly better than death.

Kermit had two more years of Harvard to brace for, with little enthusiasm. During his
annus mirabilis
with his father, he had discovered himself both as a man and a wanderer. Restless, nervous, intoxicated by danger, he had earned social respect on safari, only to discover, as he trailed Roosevelt through Europe, that people still took no notice of him. He was too grown-up now (and too fond of cards and liquor) to expect any sympathy from his mother. Ethel was his new soul mate.

And
she
—eighteen years old, the shyest, most studious member of the family—had been transformed too. Her first experience of the world outside America had filled her with a vast curiosity, which reading would no longer satisfy. For that reason alone, Ethel hoped that Roosevelt would not get back into politics. She was starved for his company, his warm physicality, and his universal knowledge. “
I love Father so much that it frightens me at times.”

THE COLONEL PRESERVED
his sphinx-like silence about domestic politics all the way across the Atlantic.
He agreed to speak only at a Sunday service for first-class passengers, and preached a lay sermon on “scribes and Pharisees, publicans and sinners.” Afterward he said that he felt uncomfortable that similar worship was not provided for lower-class passengers. “Let’s see if we can’t carry this righteousness down to the steerage people and the stokers.”

Arrangements were made on the bottom deck, to vast excitement. When Roosevelt descended, escorted by the captain, he found more than a thousand Poles crowded around a makeshift altar draped with the German and American flags. The only light in the windowless space came from candles. He asked a Polish priest to say on his behalf “how earnestly he wished the adventure
into the new land would be a turning-point in their lives; wished that they might find there all their dreams had painted for them; and how earnestly he, as a citizen of the great republic, welcomed them to it.” Many in the congregation began to weep as these words were translated. He stayed to hear them sing a litany and receive the priest’s benediction. As he made his way out, a girl seized his hand and kissed it. Others followed by the dozen, catching at the skirts of his coat and pressing it to their lips. He proceeded to another gathering on the third-class deck, where, speaking partly in German, he extended the same good wishes.

Later in the day, musing, Roosevelt said to one of the journalists on board that he would like to see steerage done away with, so that all American immigrants “might, from the beginning of the voyage, feel that they were entering into a new life of self-respect, with privacy and cleanliness.”