Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [313]
TR (panting heavily) Too late! Too late, by George! Quentin!—I mean Georgie Washington—come here with your i-n-c-r-i-m-i-n-a-t-i-n-g hatchet! In the heat of battle, many acts, which would not be c-o-u-n-t-e-n-a-n-c-e-d at other times, may be excusable—or at least, subject to sym-pa-thet-ic in-ter-pre-ta-tion; of course you understand that, boys?
Q Sure. You mean that’s the reason why I did it? I did it, because something had to be done, immejit-ly—
TR That’s e-x-a-c-t-l-y it! The point is always to do something quickly, because if you don’t, the other fellow will.
Charles Evans Hughes, whose candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination had never recovered from Roosevelt’s surprise attack in January, could vouch for this advice, along with Senator Foraker, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and President Marroquín of Colombia. But the President was not finished with his son:
TR You may be wrong—you were here—but you have, at least, i-n-i-t-i-a-t-e-d action. When the action is wrong, you must admit it, and correct it by some further action—
Q (looking at the severed hose) I don’t see how this can be corrected.
TR Only by an entirely new garden-hose. It was Government property, still is, but also, is no longer. You cannot imagine the difficulties involved, and the things required to be done, in order to replace it. It will even cost money, part of that which I am earning—or was earning, when interrupted by a despatch regarding the progress of this war, and left hurriedly for the field—
Q Well, of course you’re right; but we’ve learned our lesson, you know—
TR We? Don’t you mean yourself? And what have you learned?
Q Not to cut up garden-hoses.
TR And not to use fire-axes on anything but a fire—
Q (with a touch of wistfulness) We’re not so likely to have a fire.
TR Not with all this water around! You escape, Quentin, only because of the extenuating circumstances arising out of the heat of battle.
With that, he turned on his heel and marched back to the Executive Office.
To adults, as well as Gang members, Q was a freakish duplication of his father, right down to the juvenile asthma and queer, prudish chivalry. (When classmates giggled at a girl’s up-folded dress, he yanked it down, trembling with anger.) He had the same physical courage, clarity of perception, and ability to concentrate totally on any task at hand. Yet, more than any of the other Roosevelt children except Alice—who in any case had a different mother—he had a large personality of his own. Henry Adams found him fascinating, as had Mark Hanna.
Q was imaginative enough to withdraw, periodically, into daydreams that seemed to elevate him in an almost physical sense. He loved heights, and the eagle’s-eye perception that height endows. The famous MacMillan Commission models of Washington thrilled him. “Look down on the White House, as if you were a god! How small it looks.… You could drop a pebble on it and crush it, together with the p-i-g-m-y President and the State-War-Navy Department, too, by mistake!”
The last two words were an indication of Quentin Roosevelt’s essentially kindly nature. Like his father, he had an aggressive urge to hurl bolts from above. Unlike his father, he thought about the consequences.
TO THE RATHER less aggressive Kermit Roosevelt, the President wrote, “I have two first-rate maps of the part of Africa we are to go to.”
For some time he had been thinking of taking Kermit, who had just graduated from Groton, on a hunting trip after William Howard Taft (or William Jennings Bryan?) succeeded to the Presidency. He knew himself well enough to know that he would want to reassume control of the government (if necessary, at the head of a company of cavalry), within weeks of either man’s inauguration.