Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [211]
Wilhelm neither confirmed nor denied this declaration of intent. But he suggested that the archduke would be wise to “do something” about the Serbs soon. If not, Russia, currently preoccupied with modernizing her army and navy, might feel impelled to step in and defend her fellow Slavs.
WHILE ROOSEVELT MANAGED to give an impression of “abounding vitality” to the unobservant Lees, the fragility of his health was apparent when he returned to London to address the Royal Geographical Society. Fever had left his voice so weak that he had to ask for the lecture to be relocated to a small hall, in spite of a tremendous demand for tickets. Over a thousand ladies and gentlemen in evening dress showed up to hear him, and most had to be turned away. No less a dignitary than Earl Grey, the former governor-general of Canada, was seen climbing a wall to get into the auditorium.
Roosevelt more or less repeated the blackboard-tapping presentation he had given in Washington. He was listened to with respect, since British geographers initially skeptical of his expedition had by now accepted the truth of all his claims. He was beguilingly modest, hailing the Royal Society as “the foremost geographical body in the world,” again never mentioning that the Dúvida was now named after him, and emphasizing that he had not discovered it. That honor, he said, belonged to Colonel Rondon, one of the Brazilian pioneers who heroically, and without sufficient plaudits from the Anglo-American world, were putting their great wilderness on the map.
The nearest he got to tweaking the nose of the Society was to brandish a 1911 British map of the territory he had explored and prove it to be almost completely inaccurate. His manner was so mild that this merely provoked laughter. Officials sitting on the platform with him chuckled when he went into falsetto on punch lines, not realizing that he was using humor to disguise the attrition of his voice.
Next morning, the same Harley Street laryngologist who had treated him in 1910 examined his throat again and ordered him not to make any open-air speeches for several months. Roosevelt jumped at the chance to refute a fresh batch of stateside rumors that he intended to run for governor of New York. “This is my answer to those who wanted me to go into a campaign,” he told an American reporter. “If anyone expected me to do so, I cannot now.”
He used virtually every minute of his remaining time in London to renew and augment his prodigious range of British acquaintance. He lunched with a trio of humanists—Arthur Balfour, the Oxford classicist Gilbert Murray, and John Bury, regius professor of modern history at Cambridge—and reduced them to silence with a monologue on the interconnection of religion and philosophy. He called on Prime Minister Asquith and found him shaken after having been physically attacked by a suffragette. It was difficult for Roosevelt not to feel, as he paid his respects to other members of the government and Parliament, the collective sense among British policymakers that a dies irae was looming. Sir Edward Grey was furrow-eyed with overwork, haunted by a complex of seemingly insoluble international problems: the Balkan situation, the German-British naval arms race, sedition in Egypt and India, and the prospect of a bloodbath in Ireland, where soldiers of the King had mutinied rather than enforce Home Rule. Sir Cecil Spring Rice, back on leave from Washington, was as loud on the subject of rearmament as his predecessor James (now Viscount) Bryce was on pacifism. The Bishop of London and Sir Robert Cecil wanted the suffragettes to be placated, and the Kaiser intimidated. Prince Louis of Battenberg, First Sea Lord, one of the