Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [80]
TAFT REMARKED THAT on occasion Theodore Roosevelt was possessed of “the spirit of the old berserkers.” If so, the Colonel’s savage beast was as often soothed by the bird music he heard at Oyster Bay, spring after warming spring:
There is nothing that quite corresponds to the chorus that during May and June moves northward from the Gulf States and southern California to Maine, Minnesota, and Oregon, to Ontario and Saskatchewan; when there comes the great vernal burst of bloom and song; when the mayflower, bloodroot, wake-robin, anemone, adder’s tongue, lover-wort, shadblow, dogwood, redbud, gladden the woods … when from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific, wood-thrushes, veeries, rufous-backed thrushes, robins, bluebirds, orioles, thrashers, catbirds, house-finches, song-sparrows … and many, many other singers thrill the gardens at sunrise; until the long days begin to shorten, and tawny lilies burn by the roadside, and the indigo-buntings trill from the tops of little trees throughout the hot afternoons.
CHAPTER 7
Showing the White Feather
Time passed, and filled along with his
The place of many more;
Time came, and hardly one of us
Had credence to restore
From what appeared one day, the man
Whom we had known before.
QUENTIN ROOSEVELT BROUGHT a diminished rush and noise of boyhood back to Sagamore Hill that summer. At nearly thirteen, he had little innocence left, and seemed to have exchanged his genius for mayhem for serious study. He had flabbergasted his parents—and made the front page of The New York Times—by winning a scholarship at Groton.
Always precocious, he read adult books to widen an already impressive vocabulary. Since attending an air show with his mother at Reims, France, in 1909, he had loved anything that turned over, vibrated, clattered, or flew. “You don’t know how pretty it was to see all the aeroplanes sailing at a time … the prettiest thing I ever saw.” Big of brow and burly bodied, forever baring his teeth in fits of laughter, he was no longer a miniature version of his father, but stood half an inch taller.
Archie, Quentin’s former knockabout buddy, was now a loping, long-limbed youth of seventeen, not unlike an Apache with his hawk features and Arizona tan. The slowest of the six Roosevelt siblings, he could spare little time for tennis matches with “Q,” having to study for his Harvard entrance exams. Whether accepted or not—he was characteristically pessimistic about his chances—Archie had another year at the Evans School in Mesa to face. One of the family’s secrets was that he had been expelled from Groton in 1910 for insubordination.
For Theodore and Edith, there was a temporary feel to the lingering presence of Kermit and Ethel under their roof. It was likely to be Kermit’s last summer at home. After graduation next year, he would be looking for a career in business. And judging from the “motor” excursions he and his sister kept taking to visit with Hitchcocks and Bacons and Rumseys and Whitneys—the Meadowbrook set—it might be the last summer Ethel remained “a young girl entitled to think primarily of her amusements,” as Roosevelt, trying to sound like a tolerant father, put it. She was about to turn twenty, and must address herself to the serious business of choosing a husband.
There were no nurses and governesses upstairs anymore. Edith had pensioned off the last of the old family servants during Theodore’s absence in Africa. The Roosevelt retinue was now reduced to five white women—a cook, a waitress, and three housemaids—and five black men, including a butler and a “chauffeur” for the Haynes-Apperson. The hay and corn fields were farmed by freelance laborers, among whom could often be seen the former President of the United States, husky and sweating in white blouse and knickerbockers.
“I am really thinking more about natural history than about politics,” he wrote to Arthur Lee on 27 June, boasting that he had finished “a masterly article on ‘Revealing and Concealing Coloration in Birds and Mammals.’ ” He