Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [12]
Possibly the image of another narrow-chested Harvard undergraduate, thirty years ago, amazing the backwoodsmen of Maine with equal feats of courage and endurance hovers in a father’s memory. Nothing dull about that youth! Even then, people seemed to be irradiated in contact with him. His peculiar glow, which he gives off as naturally as a firefly, has not transmitted to any of his children—unless Alice’s fitful sparks of conversational brilliance, and signs that Quentin is developing an exceptional charm, can be regarded as genetic.
He has grown used, over the years, to being surrounded by crowds wearing the strange fixed smile, half-awed, half-predatory, that is celebrity’s reflection. On the rare occasions he visits Nairobi to pick up supplies and mail, the smile greets him as if he were still President, as if he were not a private hunter in one of the remotest colonies in the world. He has to laugh when he returns to the trail, and finds himself surrounded by a “thoroughly African circle of deeply interested spectators.” Wildebeest and kongoni form the perimeter; a rhino peers shortsightedly with small pig’s eyes, less than half a mile away; four topi advance for a closer look; a buck topi and a zebra follow suit; and high overhead, vultures wheel. So long the center of other circles, social, intellectual, and political, he is now, apparently, a focal point of the Sotik plateau.
Quitting the safari entirely for a week, with only Kermit and a few Kikuyu servants for company, he camps in the cold highlands of the Guaso Nyero. Freak rains fall almost every night. Snug in his tent and stoutly clad by Abercrombie & Fitch, he is concerned at the way his half-naked men cower under bushes, instead of building some sort of roof for themselves. He has to drive them to chop and plait leafy boughs.
It is plain to him that the pagan tribes of British East Africa are in a state of development far behind that of the Pawnee and other aboriginal peoples. It would be useless to offer them any kind of independence: “The ‘just consent of the governed,’ in their case, if taken literally, would mean idleness, famine, and endless internecine warfare.” He declines, however, to treat them as irredeemable, in the manner that comes so naturally to their colonial masters. They have as much civilized potential as his own ancestors did, back in the days when bison roamed the forests of Europe. He shocks the complacency of a dinner in his honor, at the Railway Institute in Nairobi, by saying, “In making this a white man’s country, remember that not only the laws of righteousness, but your own real and ultimate self-interest demand that the black man be treated with justice, that he be safeguarded in his rights and not pressed downward. Brutality and injustice are especially hateful when exercised on the helpless.”
AS HIS FIFTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY approaches on 27 October, he begins to pine for Edith. A mighty hunter, with much killing yet to do, should not give way to “homesickness” (the word he applies to all private desires), but he finds himself counting the months and days until they meet in Khartoum. A chance reference to the Song of Solomon, in the midst of a letter he addresses to an editorial friend, makes him segue into a rhapsody on domestic bliss: “I think that the love of the really happy husband and wife—not purged of passion, but with passion heated to a white heat of intensity and purity and tenderness and consideration, and with many another feeling added thereto—is the loftiest and most ennobling influence that comes into the life of any man or woman, even loftier and more ennobling than the wise and tender love for children.”
In November, on the seventeenth, another anniversary looms: that of his engagement to Edith. He writes to her from his camp beside the River ’Nzoi:
Oh, sweetest of all sweet girls, last night I dreamed that I was with you, that our separation was but a dream; and when I waked up it was almost too hard to bear.