“He was lucky to escape the death penalty. How long has he been in prison?”
“Since October it was,” said the mother. “We a’ready been to the governor—him that was governor before you got elected, sir, but he said he couldn’t do nothin’. So I told Clint we’d wait till a new governor got elected and soon as the corn was in we got somebody to tend the place and we come here.”
“I fear you had a long, expensive and fruitless trip,” said Roosevelt dubiously, escorting them to the door. “Do you plan to go home tonight?”
“Train leaves at midnight and it’s a fur piece from here,” Clint answered. “Come on, Ma, we got to hurry. I told you he wasn’t going to do nothin’, that we was just wastin’ time and money. And a cow home fixing to come fresh any day.”
Theodore Roosevelt went back up the stairs feeling heavy and depressed. Edith looked up from the bed as he came into the room with a lighted candle.
“You look unhappy,” she said. “More office seekers? But I thought I heard a woman’s voice.”
“You did. A poor woman whose husband is in Sing Sing and her son has just been sent there, both for murder. The son killed another man, shot him in the back, but she thought I could do something about it, because she has other children and needs him on the farm. She had a boy with her about fifteen years old, she said he was not right in the head but he seemed shrewd enough, talked as intelligently as his mother and had a clearer idea of the difficulties of doing anything in a case like this than she did.”
“Mothers have too tender hearts always to have good sober judgment,” said Edith quietly. “They have a way of letting their emotions obscure their common sense, especially where their children are concerned. Aren’t you coming to bed? You have a hard day tomorrow with Heaven knows how many interruptions to frustrate you in getting things done.”
“I think I’ll walk outside a little. I don’t feel like sleeping yet. A bit of exercise will steady my nerves.”
“I didn’t know you had that sort of nerves, Theodore.”
“Now and then they take possession of me. Do you know, Edie,” he sat on the edge of the bed, “there are times when I shrink a little from this job I have set myself? After all New York is a big state, the most important state in the Union.”
“And you are a big man,” she consoled him. “And since San Juan Hill you have been about the biggest man in the Union.”
“Hero worship. Public hysteria. It can die as quickly as it flames and it leaves some mighty cold and bitter ashes. There are vast numbers of forgotten heroes in this country, men who rode the crest of a popular wave and deluded themselves into thinking it would last forever. You can be an old story overnight, and forgotten in a month if another object of exciting interest appears. And there’s nothing so forlorn and pitiable as an out-of-date and out-of-fashion hero. Well, I’ll try the open air for a little. Usually it helps my thinking to use my legs and from now on through the rest of the winter I’ll have little time or opportunity to do it.”
He went downstairs and let himself quietly out the front door, first remembering his wife’s admonition to put on a heavy jacket. Buttoning an old army coat up to his chin, he pulled on a battered old campaign hat, rain- and sun-stained and faded, with the insigne of the Rough Riders still pinned upon it, but now slightly tarnished.
A thin spit of snow was still drifting and the air was damp with the feel of the sea in it, but not bitterly freezing. He strode down the hill from the house and took a path that led through the wooded land where he had so often worked off his surplus energies by chopping down trees and carefully cutting them into firewood. There was a pile of cordwood on the edge of the timber and he stopped there and hefted a log, lifting it off the top of the pile, balancing it on his shoulder as woodsmen learn to do.
The rough bark, held close to his face, smelled sharply of acid, so he knew it was a branch from the wild cherry tree that had rotted at the heart. It had been hard and tough to cut, requiring all his muscles to shape it for sawing into logs for the fireplaces, but he had exulted in the job of conquering this old tree just as he had gloried in every strenuous task he had ever set himself.
He laid the log back on the stack, sending down a shower of dry bark, wondering when he would be free to chop wood again or wander these hills followed by his adoring children, or swim in the Bay or teach Quentin to dive off the diving board. He had instructed all the youngsters there, tossing them into deep water relentlessly, ready to fish them out if they foundered, but confident that they would conquer their fears and learn to paddle about, being his own children.
At any rate, he told himself, he was a lucky man, and if there were times when public life irked him a little, bringing a faint regret that outside affairs kept him from the quiet life he loved, he had to balance all the rewards against the slight feeling of frustration, count the honors as recompense.
Destiny had somehow set his feet upon a road and he felt at times a deep secret apprehension of where the road might lead. So far he had found himself adequate to any task that confronted him, and standing still in the quiet night air he felt the muscles of his spirit tense and a glow pervade his body.
He was not blind or deaf to certain portents in the air and, though he never spoke of them or let his mind dwell upon them, they still lingered, buried deep in his consciousness. There was always the echo of casual words spoken, of gay songs being sung.
We’ll send you to the White House for the gallant deeds you’ve done.
All doggerel, all wishful thinking, he told himself, yet the idea lingered, and now he let it float uppermost in his mind till there came over him a sense of exhilaration, a promise of yet greater things ahead. Impatiently he put the thought down, but it kept creeping up again till his nerves tightened and he itched to do something tangible, attack something conquerable. On an impulse he strode back to the house and in a tool room found his ax, by the light of a single match.
Back at the log pile he laid a huge branch across two others and hacked away at it with the ax in the faint snow light, planting vigorous strokes and telling blows, though it was difficult to aim a tool in the thin light from the winter sky and more chips flew through the air than bespoke an expert woodsman.
When the branch was all reduced to proper lengths for burning he piled the sticks carefully, wiping the sticky sap from his hands on the sleeves of the old jacket. Then, shouldering the ax, he tramped back to the house, feeling suddenly relaxed and weary in nerve and bone. The sky, he noted, was slowly clearing and now and then a pale wisp of a moon shone fleetingly against the scud of the wind-driven clouds. Over the water a pale whiteness lighted the clouds as the moonlight increased.
Theodore Roosevelt was no mystic or fatuous dreamer, indeed the factual and actual had always been paramount in his mind. He had never had the weakness of nursing hopeful visions trying to bring them to reality. Instead he had always gone out to fight for what he believed in and let dreamers have their dreams.
But why now was that faint glow in the eastern sky slowly taking on the semblance of a great white dome towering against the horizon? In only one place in the land was reared a majestic dome like that.
Very humbly Theodore Roosevelt went back to his bed.
Transcriber’s Notes
- Silently corrected a few typos.
- Retained publication information from the printed edition: this eBook is public-domain in the country of publication.
- In the text versions only, text in italics is delimited by _underscores_.