The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (13 page)

T
HE FIRST DAY ON THE
N
ILE
was a momentous one for Teedie. He coordinated the lenses of his crooked spectacles, and the sights of his battered rifle, well enough to bag a small warbler. It was “the first bird I ever shot and I was proportionately delighted.” Throughout the twelve-hundred-mile trip to Aswân and back, Teedie ecstatically watched and listened to birds on the wing, and then as ecstatically killed them—a total, according to his own vague estimate, of “between one and two hundred.”
²⁴

On Christmas Day his father presented him with a double-barreled breech-loading shotgun, and the boy’s delight knew no bounds. “He is a most enthusiastic sportsman,” wrote Theodore Senior, “and has infused some of his spirit into me. Yesterday I walked the bogs with him at the risk of sinking hopelessly and helplessly, for hours … but I felt that I must keep up with Teedie.”
²⁵

No matter how sluggish the pace of the
dahabeah
, he managed to keep busy all day long. After breakfast he joined his younger brother and sister for two hours of lessons with Bamie. She discovered that Teedie knew a great deal more than she did on most subjects. Later, “he would put on a large pair of spectacles and swing his gun over his shoulder and start on whatever small donkey was provided at the place we had stopped, and ruthlessly lope after whatever object he had in view, the donkey almost invariably crowding between any other two who might be riding together.” His habit, during these lopes, of allowing the loaded gun to bump and bounce about freely aroused considerable nervousness among his fellow hunters.
Throughout the broiling afternoons, Corinne recalled, he would sit under the canopy on deck “surrounded by the brown-faced and curious sailors … and skin and stuff the products of his sport.”
²⁶
At sunset, when breezes cooled the desert, he would join the family in tours of the stupendous ruins that regularly drifted into view.

One such expedition, early in the New Year of 1873, shattered him.

With adolescent determination not to waste good purple prose, he repeated this entire passage, complete with ineffables and unutterables, in a letter to Aunt Annie two weeks later. Rather more characteristic of his mature humor is a postscript on Egyptian rural fashions: “I may as well mention that the dress of the inhabitants up to ten years of age is—nothing. After that they put on a shirt descended from some remote ancestor and never take it off until the day of their death.”
²⁸

The Roosevelts enjoyed their southward cruise so much that they were tempted, upon reaching the First Aswân Cataract, to continue on into the heartland of North Africa.
²⁹
But time was running out for Commissioner Roosevelt: he still had to escort his family through Palestine, Syria, Turkey, and Greece, before reporting for duty on 1 May at the Vienna Exposition. Reluctantly, he gave the order to turn downstream.

S
IX DAYS LATER
, after one of those sudden changes of pace and scene in which Theodore Senior delighted, the Roosevelts found themselves cantering on hired horses across the green fields of Palestine. They were accompanied on this leg of their Grand Tour by Nathaniel Thayer and August Jay, two of the young Harvard men
they had met on the Nile. A pleased sense of adventure hung over the little party. Ahead of them lay a month’s exploration of the Levant, most of it on horseback. Tonight would be spent in a monastery, and most of the next few days in a Jerusalem hotel; but after that they planned to live like nomads, camping out in the wilderness.
³⁰

Toward sunset the party arrived at its destination, the Convent of Ramle, about fifteen miles inland from Jaffa. Theodore Senior had made reservations here, but the monks took one look at his women and curtly announced there was “no room.” This was not the sort of Biblical parallel he was looking for in the Holy Land, and he reacted with his usual aggressiveness. “A long talk ensued,” Teedie reported. “At last the monks said that they had rooms for the gentlemen but that ladies could not go inside the inner walls … this difficulty was also overcome in time.”
³¹

A minor incident, perhaps, yet it haunts the imagination. Six tired women and children, two bewildered students; a gate, a darkening landscape, scowling bearded faces, and—dominating the whole scene—one determined man. Time and again Teedie was convinced, by experiences like this, that his father was all-powerful and irresistible; that forceful talk, combined with personal charm, would vanquish any opposition.

Riding on eastward the next day, Teedie began to get the feel of his horse. “He has some Arab blood in him, and is very swift, pretty, and spirited.” After so many summers spent on the placid back of an American pony, it was thrilling to crouch over this lean body as it drummed tirelessly across the plain. Mr. Jay was challenged to a race and beaten. In great good humor, Teedie galloped up to a ridge of hills, and was suddenly confronted with Jerusalem. “Just what I expected it to be,” he decided, “except that it was remarkably small.”
³²

Apart from a single expression of “awe” on Calvary, Teedie’s account of his travels through Palestine and Syria is free of conventional piety. He bathed irreverently in the Jordan (“what we should call a small creek in America”), noted that bribery alone gained access to the birthplace of Christ, and “killed two very pretty little finches” in the vicinity of Abraham’s Oak. His pantheistic soul
seems to have been stirred more by the bird-haunted glades around Jericho, the desolate grandeur of the Moab escarpment, and the ruins of Baalbek. “They gave me the same feeling as to contemplate the mighty temples of Thebes.” Other, more primitive emotions surged when he came across a pair of jackals outside Damascus:

Apart from a cat he had shot near Jaffa “in mistake for a rabbit,” this was his first attempt to hunt animals for sport, rather than science.

Toward the end of the Roosevelts’ Levantine wanderings, Teedie recorded his first “bad attack of Asthma and Cholera Morbus” since leaving America five months previously. It was brought on by a freezing night in the mountains of Lebanon, and no doubt served to remind him that his battle for health was still not won. The clear dry air of the desert, and a diet of yogurt and salads, had given him a period of easy breathing and untroubled digestion; but now, as the prospect of “returning to civilization” loomed nearer, he knew he would have to take up the fight again.

He was “very seasick” during a short cruise to Greece (whose ruins did not impress him), “very sick” with colic in Constantinople, “very seasick” in the Black Sea, and “had the asthma” again while sailing up the Danube. By the time the Roosevelts arrived in Vienna on 19 April 1873, he was plainly depressed. Boredom weighed down heavily as his father plunged into preparations for
the opening of the exposition, and his mother fussed over Bamie’s European debut. “I bought a black cock and used up all my arsenic on him,” wrote Teedie on 28 April, and on 11 May: “the last few weeks have been spent in the most dreary monotony. If I stayed here much longer I should spend all my money on books and birds
pour passer le temps
.”

But his parents had arranged a better way for him to pass his time. “At 10
P.M
. on the 14th we two boys (with Father) left for Dresden, where we are to stay in a German Family for the summer.”

It was Theodore Senior’s typically bold intention to scatter the Roosevelts across Europe while he himself completed his duties in Vienna and returned to America ahead of them. Perhaps he sensed that a period of mutual independence was necessary. Years of close-knit domesticity, and the enforced claustrophobia of travel, had brought them rather too much under his wing. The boys in particular would benefit. A certain coziness, verging on effeminacy, was discernible in their relations with their sisters and “little Motherling,” and it was high time they were off on their own. He had accordingly arranged, through the American consul in Dresden, that they would study German and French there privately for five months. Mittie and Bamie would take the cures at Carlsbad and Frankensbad, and shop in London and Paris. Eleven-year-old Corinne was told that she, too, was going to Dresden, but would live apart from Teedie and Elliott, “so that the brothers and sister would not speak too much English together.” Theodore Senior soon came to regret this unconsciously cruel decision, and allowed the heart-stricken little girl to move in with the boys.
³⁴

D
RESDEN WAS
, in that peaceful heyday of the German Empire, one of the loveliest cities in the world. Its domes and spires and bridges, tremblingly reflected in the River Elbe, gave way on the one hand to mellow clusters of medieval housing, and on the other to the spacious estates of the rich. Beyond lay hills striped with vines and crowned with lush forests. The city’s museums and libraries were full of masterpieces by Michelangelo, Raphael, Dante, and Goethe; its Court Opera had known the batons of Weber and Wagner; its
zoological and mineralogical collections were unsurpassed in Europe. A general atmosphere of elegance and culture justly earned it the title of “Florence on the Elbe.”
³⁵

Here, “in the finer part” of town (Mittie was pleased to note), lived a genteel family named Minkwitz, who agreed to accommodate and instruct the young Roosevelts through the summer. Theodore Senior could not have found a more typically Teutonic household.
Herr Hofsrath
Minkwitz was a member of the German Reichstag, imperious and stiffly formal. His wife was pink, plump, and hearty, a fount of cream teas and cakes. Their three daughters were “gay, well-educated, and very temperamental,” and their two sons were fierce-looking university students, much slashed about the face. Teedie was predictably fascinated by this macabre pair. “One, a famous swordsman, was called
Der Rothe Herzog
(the Red Duke), and the other was nicknamed
Herr Nasehorn
(Sir Rhinoceros) because the tip of his nose had been cut off in a duel and sewn on again.”
³⁶