Colonel Roosevelt (80 page)

Roosevelt and Alfonso XIII already knew each other, as fellow mourners at the funeral of Edward VII four years before.
Their initial meetings had been awkward. Alfonso found it hard to forget, and forgive, the defeats his soldiers had suffered in the Spanish-American War, at the hands of adversaries prominently including the Colonel of the Rough Riders. Now it was necessary for him to be cordial, if only because of the diplomatic importance of tomorrow’s ceremony, linking the administrations of two American presidents.
Roosevelt treated Alfonso with his usual affability, unbending him to the extent that they ended up laughing about the “wake” George V had held in Buckingham Palace.

Royal favor notwithstanding, the Spanish government found it necessary to surround the Colonel with heavy security during his four-day stay.
Plainclothes detectives followed him everywhere, and a detachment of police
guarded his quarters at the American Embassy. He did what he could to improve his local image, holding a press conference to express love for the country of Velázquez and the Conquistadors, and saying that after what he had seen of the spread of Latin civilization in South America, he would not be surprised to see Spanish becoming the world’s universal language. Socialist and republican editors were unpersuaded that he had changed since the Battle of San Juan. “We know his attitude toward Spain,”
El País
remarked. “We cannot welcome him.”

To Roosevelt’s mild irritation, he was pestered by cable requests from American newspapers for a statement regarding his future as leader of the Progressive Party. “This trip is just a spree,” he replied to
The New York Times
, “and I am not interested in politics now. I want to meet the litterateurs and geographers and see the museums.”

A guest list drawn almost exclusively from the diplomatic corps, plus Edith’s inscrutable absence, infused the wedding on 11 June with a sense of impersonality and dislocation. Belle was rich, brittle, snobbish, and flighty, a toothy little blonde with the sinuous neck of someone adept at casing cocktail parties. Kermit was a moth drawn to her brightness. His intent, after they had spent a brief honeymoon in Europe, was to return to Brazil and manage a market in Curytiba. He thought they might stay there for nine or ten years, if not longer. Neither the Willard nor the Roosevelt families were sure how Belle would take to social life in the Antipodes.

“
I believe she will be his sweetheart almost, but not entirely, as you are mine,” Roosevelt wrote Edith on the eve of his departure for London.

HE STOPPED IN PARIS
to change trains, seeing nobody but the American ambassador, Myron T. Herrick. En route south the week before, he had spent two full days in the city, breakfasting with Edith Wharton, lecturing Henri Bergson and a bored Auguste Rodin on the physical characteristics of European races, and paying his respects to President Raymond Poincaré.
Paris that June was, more noticeably to visiting Americans than to herself, voluptuous, shabby, chaotic, tinged with the melancholy that had settled on her like mold after the conclusion of
l’affaire Dreyfus
.
Georges Clemenceau’s passionate call upon his countrymen to
vouloir ou mourir
, to will or to die in response to Prussian militarism, had been answered to the extent that the French army was now as big as Germany’s. But the will, palpably, was still weak. As Claude Debussy wrote an artist friend, “For forty-four years we’ve been playing at self-effacement.”

When Roosevelt saw London again, early on Saturday, 13 June, it too had lost much of the imperial self-certainty he remembered from the spring of 1910. Now the mood was more fearful than passive, after four years of worsening
social and political unrest. He had no sooner moved into Arthur Lee’s Mayfair townhouse than a “
suffrage bomb” went off nearby in St. George’s, Hanover Square.
The old church was dear to him because he had married Edith there. Sylvia Pankhurst and her followers were unlikely to know or care about that. They were merely following up on their much more shocking detonation, two days before, of a bomb right beneath the coronation chair in Westminster Abbey.

Walter Hines Page, the American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, gave the Colonel a welcoming luncheon. It was attended by Henry James, John Singer Sargent, Lord Curzon, the Spanish diplomat Alfonso Merry del Val, the agricultural reformer Sir Horace Plunkett, and other luminaries.
Obscurely basking in their combined glow was Woodrow Wilson’s friend Colonel Edward M. House of Texas. One of the busy little gray men who make themselves indispensable to potentates as fund-raisers, gossips, and go-betweens, House was in the midst of a private tour of European capitals. He stood close to the reception line and marveled at the sharpness of the Colonel’s focus on every incoming guest.

Afterward the Lees drove him out to Chequers. They told him they were thinking of bequeathing the house to the nation as a country retreat for prime ministers. Roosevelt praised the idea in words not entirely flattering to his host, saying that an “ordinary man” could make “a definite difference in the world” by being so generous.

The company that weekend was congenial and nonpolitical, consisting of John St. Loe Strachey, owner of the
Spectator
, Sir Owen Seaman, editor of
Punch
, the literary scholar Sidney Colvin, and their wives. They gasped at his stories of murder and malaria in the jungle (a map of Brazil spread out on the floor of the Great Hall), unaware that in a
country palace near Prague, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was making a much more lurid presentation to Kaiser Wilhelm II.

THE HEIR TO THE DUAL
Monarchy was seeking advice, as often before, on what to do about unrest in the Balkans. Serbia was increasingly resentful of Austrian repression, and was now, Franz Ferdinand believed, fomenting revolution in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He wanted to know if the Kaiser had meant what he had said in Leipzig, at the time of the dedication of the
Volkerschlacht
monument: that Germany would support any Austrian move to discipline Serbia, once and for all.

Wilhelm neither confirmed nor denied this declaration of intent. But he suggested that the archduke would be wise to “do something” about the Serbs soon. If not, Russia, currently preoccupied with modernizing her army and navy, might feel impelled to step in and defend her fellow Slavs.

WHILE ROOSEVELT MANAGED
to give an impression of “abounding vitality” to the unobservant Lees, the fragility of his health was apparent when he returned to London to address the Royal Geographical Society. Fever had left his voice so weak that he had to ask for the lecture to be relocated to a small hall, in spite of a tremendous demand for tickets. Over a thousand ladies and gentlemen in evening dress showed up to hear him, and most had to be turned away. No less a dignitary than Earl Grey, the former governor-general of Canada, was seen climbing a wall to get into the auditorium.

Roosevelt more or less repeated the blackboard-tapping presentation he had given in Washington. He was listened to with respect, since British geographers initially skeptical of his expedition had by now accepted the truth of all his claims. He was beguilingly modest, hailing the Royal Society as “the foremost geographical body in the world,” again never mentioning that the Dúvida was now named after him, and emphasizing that he had not discovered it. That honor, he said, belonged to Colonel Rondon, one of the Brazilian pioneers who heroically, and without sufficient plaudits from the Anglo-American world, were putting their great wilderness on the map.

The nearest he got to tweaking the nose of the Society was to brandish a 1911 British map of the territory he had explored and prove it to be almost completely inaccurate. His manner was so mild that this merely provoked laughter. Officials sitting on the platform with him chuckled when he went into falsetto on punch lines, not realizing that he was using humor to disguise the attrition of his voice.

Next morning, the same Harley Street laryngologist who had treated him in 1910 examined his throat again and ordered him not to make any open-air speeches for several months. Roosevelt jumped at the chance to refute a fresh batch of stateside rumors that he intended to run for governor of New York. “
This is my answer to those who wanted me to go into a campaign,” he told an American reporter. “If anyone expected me to do so, I cannot now.”

He used virtually every minute of his remaining time in London to renew and augment his prodigious range of British acquaintance. He lunched with a trio of humanists—Arthur Balfour, the Oxford classicist Gilbert Murray, and John Bury, regius professor of modern history at Cambridge—and reduced them to silence with a monologue on the interconnection of religion and philosophy.
He called on Prime Minister Asquith and found him shaken after having been physically attacked by a suffragette. It was difficult for Roosevelt not to feel, as he paid his respects to
other members of the government and Parliament, the collective sense among British policymakers that a
dies irae
was looming. Sir Edward Grey was furrow-eyed with overwork, haunted by a complex of seemingly insoluble international problems: the Balkan situation,
the German-British naval arms race, sedition in Egypt and India, and the prospect of a bloodbath in Ireland, where soldiers of the King had mutinied rather than enforce Home Rule. Sir Cecil Spring Rice, back on leave from Washington, was as loud on the subject of rearmament as his predecessor James (now Viscount) Bryce was on pacifism. The Bishop of London and Sir Robert Cecil wanted the suffragettes to be placated, and the Kaiser intimidated. Prince Louis of Battenberg, First Sea Lord, one of the last remnants of Anglo-Germanism in the British royal family, was less troubled by his mixed inheritance than by the pressure put on him by the Admiralty to expend the largest naval budget in British history.

There had been a rumor, before Roosevelt’s arrival in London, that the King and Queen wished to renew their acquaintance with him. But he was no longer a special ambassador, much less a possible revenant to the White House. Nothing was heard from Buckingham Palace. On Thursday, 18 June, he took the boat train to Southampton and boarded his homebound liner, the SS
Imperator
.

He was accompanied by Arthur Lee and by the valet who had looked after him during his visit. After the Colonel had bade them goodbye, Lee was surprised to see the servant in tears. “
Excuse me sir, but in all my thirty years of service I have never met such a great gentleman as ’im.”