Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [172]
… Church’s Beowulf; Morris’ translation of the Heimskringla, and Dasent’s translation of the sagas of Gisli and Burnt Njal; Lady Gregory’s and Miss Hull’s Cuchulain Saga together with The Children of Lir, The Children of Turin, The Tale of Deirdre, etc.; Les Précieuses Ridicules, Le Barbier de Séville; most of Jusserand’s books, of which I was most interested in his studies of the Kingis Quhair; Holmes’ Over the Teacups; Lounsbury’s Shakespeare and Voltaire; various numbers of the Edinburgh Review from 1803 to 1850; Tolstoi’s Sebastopol and The Cossacks; Sienkiewicz’s Fire and Sword, and parts of his other volumes; Guy Mannering; The Antiquary; Rob Roy; Waverley; Quentin Durward; parts of Marmion and the Lay of the Last Minstrel; Cooper’s Pilot; some of the earlier stories and poems of Bret Harte; Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer; Pickwick Papers; Nicholas Nickelby; Vanity Fair; Pendennis; The Newcomes; Adventures of Philip; Conan Doyle’s White Company.…
WHEN ELISEO TORRES, the young colonel whom General Tovar had left in command of the tiradores, asked Colonel Shaler when his men might expect to cross the Isthmus, he received a variety of answers. At first Shaler repeated Obaldía’s promise of delivery by five, but when that hour drew near, the railroad suddenly demanded advance payment of all fares. Torres, who had no money, was quick-thinking enough to insist on the government of Colombia’s right to transport troops on credit. Consul Malmros, overhearing, confirmed that such a right was written into the railroad’s concession. Shaler did not contest this, but noted that the concession also called for the Governor of Panama’s signature on all military travel requisitions. Also there was still the question of a shortage of available cars, most of the railroad’s rolling stock unfortunately being on the other side of the Isthmus.
Torres waxed more and more angry. Shaler had to admit, quietly to Chief Meléndez, that the railroad could not stall much longer without jeopardizing its treaty privileges. Torres could probably be held off until sunset, when trains stopped running anyway. But some cars were going to have to be laid on in the morning, unless Shaler received “written orders of the United States Government to refuse the transportation.”
ROOSEVELT RECALLED PLOWING through Charles Lever’s Charles O’Malley and some Brockden Brown novels with little real enjoyment, during the period when he was confined by his leg injury. Keats, Browning, Poe, Tennyson, Longfellow, Kipling, Bliss Carmen, Lowell, Stevenson, Allingham, and Leopold Wagner were more to his taste, and he had spent many enjoyable hours in their literary company. He had read aloud to his children (“and often finished afterwards to myself”) the stories of Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, and Howard Pyle. As for Joel Chandler Harris, “I would be willing to rest all I have done in the South as regards the negro in his story ‘Free Joe.’ ”
FIVE O’CLOCK CAME and went in Colón without any word of a disturbance in Panama City. The cable and railroad offices prepared to shut down for the night. Commander Hubbard came ashore again from the Nashville, and heard with concern that Shaler was resigned to transporting the government battalion in the morning. But before he could object, at 5:49 P.M., a call came through from Herbert G. Prescott, Shaler’s deputy at the Pacific terminus. Strangely, Prescott wanted to speak to Chief Meléndez. His message was a coded one—indicating that Prescott, too, was an agent of the junta, and saying that the revolution was “about to begin.”
Subsequent calls made clear that General Tovar and his senior staff had already been arrested at the order of General Huertas. Governor Obaldía was next (surrendering with the utmost equanimity), and by 6:00 P.M. the junta had started reorganizing itself as a “Provisional Government.” Its official documents and proclamations