Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [210]
A guest list drawn almost exclusively from the diplomatic corps, plus Edith’s inscrutable absence, infused the wedding on 11 June with a sense of impersonality and dislocation. Belle was rich, brittle, snobbish, and flighty, a toothy little blonde with the sinuous neck of someone adept at casing cocktail parties. Kermit was a moth drawn to her brightness. His intent, after they had spent a brief honeymoon in Europe, was to return to Brazil and manage a market in Curytiba. He thought they might stay there for nine or ten years, if not longer. Neither the Willard nor the Roosevelt families were sure how Belle would take to social life in the Antipodes.
“I believe she will be his sweetheart almost, but not entirely, as you are mine,” Roosevelt wrote Edith on the eve of his departure for London.
HE STOPPED IN PARIS to change trains, seeing nobody but the American ambassador, Myron T. Herrick. En route south the week before, he had spent two full days in the city, breakfasting with Edith Wharton, lecturing Henri Bergson and a bored Auguste Rodin on the physical characteristics of European races, and paying his respects to President Raymond Poincaré. Paris that June was, more noticeably to visiting Americans than to herself, voluptuous, shabby, chaotic, tinged with the melancholy that had settled on her like mold after the conclusion of l’affaire Dreyfus. Georges Clemenceau’s passionate call upon his countrymen to vouloir ou mourir, to will or to die in response to Prussian militarism, had been answered to the extent that the French army was now as big as Germany’s. But the will, palpably, was still weak. As Claude Debussy wrote an artist friend, “For forty-four years we’ve been playing at self-effacement.”
When Roosevelt saw London again, early on Saturday, 13 June, it too had lost much of the imperial self-certainty he remembered from the spring of 1910. Now the mood was more fearful than passive, after four years of worsening social and political unrest. He had no sooner moved into Arthur Lee’s Mayfair townhouse than a “suffrage bomb” went off nearby in St. George’s, Hanover Square. The old church was dear to him because he had married Edith there. Sylvia Pankhurst and her followers were unlikely to know or care about that. They were merely following up on their much more shocking detonation, two days before, of a bomb right beneath the coronation chair in Westminster Abbey.
Walter Hines Page, the American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, gave the Colonel a welcoming luncheon. It was attended by Henry James, John Singer Sargent, Lord Curzon, the Spanish diplomat Alfonso Merry del Val, the agricultural reformer Sir Horace Plunkett, and other luminaries. Obscurely basking in their combined glow was Woodrow Wilson’s friend Colonel Edward M. House of Texas. One of the busy little gray men who make themselves indispensable to potentates as fund-raisers, gossips, and go-betweens, House was in the midst of a private tour of European capitals. He stood close to the reception line and marveled at the sharpness of the Colonel’s focus on every incoming guest.
Afterward the Lees drove him out to Chequers. They told him they were thinking of bequeathing the house to the nation as a country retreat for prime ministers. Roosevelt praised the idea in words not entirely flattering to his host, saying that an “ordinary man” could make “a definite difference in the world” by being so generous.
The company that weekend was congenial and nonpolitical, consisting of John St. Loe Strachey, owner of the Spectator, Sir Owen Seaman, editor of Punch, the literary scholar Sidney Colvin, and their wives. They gasped at his stories of murder and malaria in the jungle (a map of Brazil spread out on the floor of the Great Hall), unaware that in a country palace near Prague, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was making a much more lurid presentation to Kaiser Wilhelm II.
THE HEIR TO THE DUAL Monarchy was seeking advice, as often before, on what to do about unrest