The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [77]
At six o’clock in the evening we reached the small hut, half a cavern, where we spent the night; it was on the face of a cliff, up which we climbed by a rope forty feet long, and the floor was covered with ice a foot deep … We left the hut at three-forty [A.M.] and, after seeing a most glorious sunrise, which crowned the countless snow peaks and billowy, white clouds with a strange, crimson irradescence, reached the summit at seven, and were down at the foot of the Matterhorn proper by one. It was like going up and down enormous stairs on your hands and knees for nine hours … during the journey I was nearer giving out than on the Jungfrau, but I was not nearly so tired afterwards.63
HAVING HAD HIS FILL of exercise for a while, Theodore turned now to mental activity. The manuscript of “that favorite chateau-en-espagne of mine,” The Naval War of 1812 formed a bulky part of the Roosevelt luggage, and he worked at it doggedly during his last month in Europe. “You would be amused,” he told Bamie from the Hague, “to see me writing it here. I have plenty of information now, but I can’t get it into words; I am afraid it is too big a task for me. I wonder if I won’t find everything in life too big for my abilities. Well, time will tell.”64
On 10 September the travelers reached Liverpool,65 laden with Parisian fashions and presents from the best London shops. Here Theodore’s “blessed old sea-captain” uncle, Irvine Bulloch, helped untangle some of the nautical knots in his manuscript.66 The young author’s confidence returned, and he found himself looking forward to the resumption of his legal, literary, and political work in New York.
Summarizing his third trip abroad in twelve years, Theodore wrote Bill Sewall: “I have enjoyed it greatly, yet the more I see the better satisfied I am that I am an American; free born and free bred, where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit.”67
IN THIS HEALTHY FRAME of mind, and feeling superbly healthy in body, the conqueror of the Matterhorn arrived back in New York on 2 October 1881. He lost no time in resuming his tripartite life, although a diary entry for 17 October indicates that his priorities had changed. “Am working fairly hard at my law, hard at politics, and hardest of all at my book.” Indeed, Theodore’s interest in the first of these activities was steadily waning. He would continue to attend Columbia Law School lectures, on and off, for at least another year, and acquire, almost against his will, a semiprofessional mastery of civil and criminal procedure, corporate and constitutional law, labor contracts, and cross-examination techniques—all highly useful to him in later life. But he found his current ambitions better served (and his soul more soothed) by the contrasted pleasures of politicking and writing.68
From 6 October to 8 November it was the former activity that prevailed, since the Twenty-first District was going through its annual throes of returning an Assemblyman to Albany. Theodore did not want to miss a moment of the “rough and tumble.” He plunged aggressively into primary work, resolved “to kill our last year’s legislator,” who was up for renomination.69 The legislator’s name was William Trimble. Like all of Jake Hess’s hand-picked Assemblymen, he was a loyal servant of the machine, and a Stalwart through and through. This alone would have been enough to prejudice Theodore against him. The fact that Trimble had voted to oppose his pet cause, the Street Cleaning Bill, added a personal zest to the fight. Accordingly Theodore worked energetically on behalf of independent delegates, and on 24 October, at the preconvention meeting in Morton Hall, he stood up to make a formal protest against Trimble’s renomination.70 Hess listened from behind his pitcher of iced water with the bland patience of a leader who is sure of his delegates. Neither he nor the speaker was