Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [35]
That proved to be the case, although there was a chilly moment when Alfonso XIII said, “I have admired your career, and I have also admired your military career, though I am sorry that your honors should have been won at the expense of my countrymen.” Evidently, memories of the Spanish-American War still rankled south of the Pyrenees. The King went on to express gratification over the Vatican incident, saying that Catholicism in Spain had begun to encroach intolerably upon civilian life, and was causing an anarchist backlash, not unlike that in the Balkans. “I assure you that much though I object to the anarchists, I do not regard them as more dangerous to my country than are the ultraclericals. Of the two, I mind the extreme right even more than I mind the extreme left.”
Roosevelt had been saying the same thing, in almost identical words, for at least ten years, and was proportionately impressed.
His solemnity was further strained when Stéphen Pichon, the French minister of foreign affairs, approached him for a republican tête-à-tête.
He is a queer looking creature at best, but on this particular evening anger made him look like a gargoyle. His clothes were stiff with gold lace and he wore sashes and orders.… He got me aside and asked me in French, as he did not speak English, what colored coat my coachman had worn that evening. I told him that I did not know; whereupon he answered that his coachman had a black coat. I nodded and said Yes, I thought mine had a black coat also. He responded with much violence that this was an outrage, a slight upon the two great republics, as all the Royalties’ coachmen wore red coats, and that he would at once make a protest on behalf of us both. I told him to hold on, that he must not make any protests on my behalf, that I did not care what kind of coat my coachman wore, and would be perfectly willing to see him wear a green coat with yellow splashes—“un paletot vert avec des tauches jaunes” being my effort at idiomatic rendering of the idea, for I speak French, I am sorry to say, as if it were a non-Aryan tongue, without tense or gender, although with agglutinative vividness and fluency. My incautious incursion into levity in a foreign tongue met appropriate punishment, for I spent the next fifteen minutes in eradicating from Pichon’s mind the belief that I was demanding these colors as my livery.
The Kaiser swooped again when he saw Roosevelt being accosted by the henpecked Prince Consort of Holland. The King of Denmark introduced the King of Greece, whom he already knew. Monarch vied with monarch in getting him to tell stories of Africa, Cuba, and “the Wild West.”
As the all-male evening dragged on through dinner and cordials and cigars, Roosevelt was treated to royal confidences of embarrassing intimacy. Prince Ernest of Cumberland complained that “if it were not for him”—glowering across the table at Wilhelm II—“he would be the King of Hanover.” The King of Greece begged him to lend his voice to Greek claims on Crete, just as George V wanted him to do on behalf of British rule in Egypt. Even after he had said goodnight, three more kings pursued him to the palace door.
They knew that I was not coming back to Europe, that I would never see them again, or try in any way to keep up relations with them; and so they felt free to treat [me] with an intimacy, and on a footing of equality, which would have been impossible with a European.… In a way, although the comparison sounds odd, these sovereigns, in their relations among themselves and with others, reminded me of the officers and wives in one of our western army posts in the old days, when they were shut up together and away from the rest of the world, were sundered by an impassable gulf from the enlisted men and the few scouts, hunters and settlers round about, and were knit together into one social whole, and nevertheless