The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [58]
BY RISING EARLY and working before breakfast, Theodore was able to pack six to eight hours of study into the first half of the day, leaving his afternoons and evenings free for romance. Although he defined this as “a life of most luxurious ease,” poor Lightfoot cannot have agreed. The animal was not only thundering constantly along the hard road to Chestnut Hill, but had to help Theodore work off his exuberance afterward with marathon gallops through the countryside. When, on 13 May, Theodore was invited to dinner at the Lees’, he whipped Lightfoot up to such a pace that he nearly killed both horse and himself. “I rode like Jehu, both coming and going, and as it was pitch dark when I returned (about 10:15) we fell, while galloping downhill—a misadventure which I thoroughly deserve for being a fool.” For weeks it seemed that the crippled horse might not recover, and Theodore was obliged to visit his beloved on foot—a twelve-mile tramp every time.40
By early June, however, he was once again in the saddle. Pausing only to register a preoccupied 87 percent in his annual examinations,41 Theodore braced himself for the final phase of his courtship of Alice Lee. It was now or never. Only two weeks remained until Harvard shut its doors for the summer. Then, for almost three months, he would be hundreds of miles away from her—while other suitors, perhaps, strolled the lawns of Chestnut Hill. Alice had already given disturbing hints that she liked to flirt. If he did not secure her by Class Day, she might be wooed away.
It comes as a surprise to flick through Theodore’s diary for these momentous final weeks of his junior year and find no hint of crisis in its bland pages. Since ripping out his written vow to marry Alice, he had begun what was to become a lifelong habit, that of simply not recording what was ominous, unresolved, or disgraceful. Triumph was worth the ink; tragedy was not. Until Alice was his, he would continue merely to list the trivial details of their relationship, so that if he failed, posterity would not know it, and even he, in time, might forget his aching desire for her.
His letters home are just as guarded, although one cannot help but admire how subtly, since the New Year, Theodore has made the Roosevelts aware of Alice Lee, and prepared them, subconsciously as it were, for his possible engagement. Casually he suggests the entire family might like to come up to Harvard for Class Day, 20 June. “I want you particularly to know some of my girlfriends now.”42 How convenient to have both them and the Lees at hand, should he wish to make an announcement—at the conclusion of his junior year, at the blossoming climax of spring!
Although it is not certain that Theodore asked Alice to marry him on Class Day, he afterward confirmed that he proposed to her sometime in June, and his unerring sense of place and time would seem to make the evening of the twentieth inevitable.43 He had been tense as a wire the night before, at the D.K.E. Strawberry festivities: “I got into a row with a mucker and knocked him down, cutting my knuckles pretty badly against his teeth.”44 But now his mood was tranquil. Never had he spent such a pleasant day; never had Alice looked “sweeter or prettier.” He had ushered at Saunders Hall in the morning, lunched at the Porc, ushered again at the Flower Rush, then escorted Alice to two tea-parties in succession. No doubt much of the student body had admired