Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [44]
With one of the longest days of the year to spare, the two men took a preliminary hike down the valley of the Itchen. Then they drove to Stoney Cross and fortified themselves with tea. At 4:30 P.M. they disappeared into the New Forest, and were not seen again until nine o’clock that evening.
The weather was overcast and the season late for a full chorale, but Grey was able to identify twenty-three different songs of forty-one observed species. Roosevelt listened and watched with a sense of literary familiarity. He had read Marryat’s Children of the New Forest as a boy, and many of the names his guide whispered to him—the nightingale, the skylark, the thrush, the blackbird—evoked poems he had by heart. But the beauty of their live music thrilled him. The cuckoo wrought its traditional spell, and the “ventriloqual lay” of the sedge warbler mocked him among the river reeds. If the “singing and soaring” of a skylark reminded him of Wordsworth, rather than Shelley, and its melody degenerated sometimes into chatter, he felt it deserved its place in the quotation books.
He heard nothing that quite equaled, to his ear, the chimes of the American wood thrush, the high, brilliant tessitura of the northern winter wren, or the unstoppable mockingbird that had once kept him awake one moonlit night in Tennessee. Nevertheless, “the woods and fields were still vocal with beautiful bird-music, the country was very lovely, the inn as comfortable as possible, and the bath and supper very enjoyable after our tramp; and altogether I passed no pleasanter twenty-four hours during my entire European trip.”
ROOSEVELT SAILED FROM Southampton the following afternoon on the Kaiserin Auguste Victoria. “Take care of him,” Rudyard Kipling wrote to a friend in New York. “He is scarce and valuable.”
The ship was crowded with a record number of American passengers, many of whom had shortened their vacations in order to accompany the Colonel home. Stateside, his voyage was already being called “the Return from Elba.” Similar imagery was employed in France. “Never since Napoleon dawned on Europe,” Le Temps remarked, “has such an impression been produced there as has been made by Theodore Roosevelt.” Some British commentators, still smarting over the Guildhall speech, would not have been sorry to see him head for St. Helena. “He is an amiable barbarian with a veneer of European civilization,” wrote S. Verdad, foreign correspondent for The New Age. “To give him credit for any diplomatic talent is a huge joke.” But the Westminster Review spoke for the majority in declaring, “Mr. Roosevelt is becoming more and more the commanding figure of the English-speaking world.”
All this attention—not to mention eight thousand letters received to date by his overworked secretaries—testified to a fact obvious to many, if denied by himself: that he was perceived as the once and future President of the United States. Those jokes at Oxford about him running for another term had been diplomatic. So, looking further back, had the state receptions, the military reviews, the royal confidences lavished on him since he stepped ashore in Khartoum. He would not have been mein Freund to the Kaiser, or George V’s chosen oracle of Empire, nor even Sir Edward Grey’s bird-watching buddy, if specialists in the Wilhelmstrasse and Whitehall really believed that he was headed for retirement. And the vehemence with which Muslims attacked him (a spokesman for the Young Egypt Party regretted that he not been shot dead in Cairo) bespoke a new neurosis in international relations: fear that the United States, which he had personally shaped into the great Western power, would expand its influence eastward under a third Roosevelt administration. Maybe even a