Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [307]
On the contrary, Roosevelt was so ill the following morning that newspapermen posted a death watch in the hospital lobby. His fever resurged. He was racked by labyrinthine dizziness, vomited repeatedly, and complained of being deaf in the left ear. His eyes kept oscillating from side to side. Duel and Martin could not hide their pessimism.
A fall in his temperature to 99°F proved only temporarily encouraging. That evening his condition became desperate. He was given morphine to ease the agony that pulsed from all three of his wounds. Shortly before dawn next morning, Friday, 8 February, it was announced that Theodore Roosevelt was fighting for life. At 9 A.M. a rumor hit the wires that he had died.
The hospital denied this, but conceded that his surgeons were on emergency call. Another operation, however, was as likely to kill the Colonel as blood poisoning. His left ear was still suppurating, and now the mastoid process appeared to be involved, threatening the base of the brain. Probing that deep might have terrible consequences. Ethel found her father so mummified in bandages that she could see little of his face, and his voice—whispering something about her fighting brothers—was almost inaudible. The infection advanced to the limit of his tolerance, then stopped and began to subside. By the end of the day he was asking for food.
“He’s a peach,” one of the nurses said.
ROOSEVELT REMAINED HOSPITALIZED for a month. His recovery from sepsis was rapid, but extreme vertigo afflicted him through the middle weeks of February. The slightest movement of his head brought on waves of nausea. That made it doubly difficult for him to reorient himself to his surroundings, because of his blind left eye. He was told that the deafness in his left ear would probably be permanent.
Edith and Ethel alternated in sitting with him. They read him newspaper articles soothing to his blood pressure, and get-well letters from the sackfuls delivered daily by Miss Stricker. The first he answered came from William Howard Taft, who mentioned that he had been through a similar rectal experience. Roosevelt dictated a sympathetic reply, and said of himself, “Am rather rocky, but worth several men.”
The President wrote. Cables came from King George V and Clemenceau. Edwin Arlington Robinson penned a few touching words. There was no message from Cecil Spring Rice: Edith suppressed the news that he had just died of a heart attack, en route home to England.
A letter arrived from Quentin. It had been mailed before he had heard of his father’s illness, and did not explain his mysterious silence earlier that winter. But visits from Flora, looking pretty and more in love than ever, reassured Roosevelt that all was now well. Quentin’s only complaint was that he was still being held back from the Front. His commanding major had “called him down” for demanding to be transferred to the lines, saying that he was needed at Issoudun as an instructor for draftees. Roosevelt advised him to keep trying nevertheless. He should remember for the moment that he had been one of the first volunteers of the war. “You stand as no other men of your generation can stand. You have won the great prize.”
When, at last, Quentin confessed what had been wrong with him for so long, he wrote not to his parents but Ethel. Horrified, she shared the truth with them on 27 February. He had succumbed to pneumonia a few weeks before Christmas, as a result of high-altitude training, and had been sent to the Riviera to recuperate. Archie, in a sharp letter endorsed by Ted, had accused him of