Colonel Roosevelt (6 page)

It is plain to him that the pagan tribes of British East Africa are in a state of development far behind that of the Pawnee and other aboriginal peoples. It would be useless to offer them any kind of independence: “The ‘just consent of the governed,’ in their case, if taken literally, would mean idleness, famine, and endless internecine warfare.” He declines, however, to treat them as irredeemable,
in the manner that comes so naturally to their colonial masters. They have as much civilized potential as his own ancestors did, back in the days when bison roamed the forests of Europe. He shocks the complacency of a dinner in his honor, at the Railway Institute in Nairobi, by saying, “In making this a white man’s country, remember that not only the laws of righteousness, but your own real and ultimate self-interest demand that the black man be treated with justice, that he be safeguarded in his rights and not pressed downward. Brutality and injustice are especially hateful when exercised on the helpless.”

AS HIS FIFTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY
approaches on 27 October, he begins to pine for Edith. A mighty hunter, with much killing yet to do, should not give way to “homesickness” (the word he applies to all private desires), but he finds himself counting the months and days until they meet in Khartoum. A chance reference to
the Song of Solomon, in the midst of a letter he addresses to an editorial friend, makes him segue into a rhapsody on domestic bliss: “I think that the love of the really happy husband and wife
—not
purged of passion, but with passion heated to a white heat of intensity and purity and tenderness and consideration, and with many another feeling added thereto—is the loftiest and most ennobling influence that comes into the life of any man or woman, even loftier and more ennobling than the wise and tender love for children.”

In November, on the seventeenth, another anniversary looms: that of his engagement to Edith. He writes to her from his camp beside the River ’Nzoi:

He signs it “Your own lover.”

Moving on to Londiani on the last day of the month, he disbands the main body of his safari. He has already spent almost all of the $75,000 Andrew Carnegie and a few other American sponsors have lavished upon the expedition. It has collected all it needs in British East Africa—indeed, more than it is officially entitled to: almost 4,000 mammals large and small, plus 3,379 birds, 1,500 reptiles,
frogs, and toads, and 250 fish. In addition there are uncounted numbers of crabs, beetles, millipedes, and other invertebrates, and several thousand plants.

From now on, he and Kermit will hunt in Uganda Protectorate and the Sudan with a much smaller retinue of porters and horse boys. Heller, Loring, and Dr. Mearns insist on staying with him. They are insatiable for more specimens, and airily confident that the safari will stay in business for another three very expensive months. This worries him.
He is generous by nature, but also improvident, with little understanding of the real value of money. He has insisted on paying his and Kermit’s own way so far, not dipping into sponsor funds. Edith is bound to remind him, if the funds run out, that he has two more sons to put through Harvard—with Quentin unlikely to graduate until the spring of 1919. He is by no means financially secure. His entire presidential salary went toward entertaining, and his Nobel Peace Prize award,
totaling almost $40,000, has been placed at the disposal of Congress, as something he feels he has no right to keep. Nor is he likely ever again to negotiate a publishing contract as big as his current one.

“ ‘O
H, SWEETEST OF ALL SWEET GIRLS
.’ ”
Edith Kermit Roosevelt in 1909
.
(photo credit p.5)

He is therefore relieved to hear that Carnegie will be sending him a check
for $20,000 for the naturalists, along with a promise of further cash if needed. “I am now entirely easy as to the expense of the scientific Smithsonian part of the trip,” he writes, emphasizing that he and Kermit will continue to finance themselves. He does not want to become personally indebted to anyone. His experience as a professional politician has been that donors always look for repayment in the coin of their choice. What Carnegie craves is influence over affairs of state. Already there have been indications that the steelmaker, an ardent pacifist, wants to draft him into the international arms control movement—a cause he has never much cared for.

Revisiting Nairobi in mid-December, he sends off another plump envelope to his publisher. He is pleased to hear from Robert Bridges, the editor of
Scribner’s Magazine
, that the first installment of his safari story has been a runaway publishing success. “
The very large edition of the October number (much the largest we have ever printed) is completely exhausted.” Subsequent print runs are to be even larger. With eleven installments already mailed, he has only two more to write, and can look forward to publication of his complete African book in less than a year.

In Nairobi’s little bookstore, he amplifies the Pigskin Library with Darwin’s
Voyage of the Beagle
, nine volumes of Julian Huxley’s
Essays in Popular Science
, and every classic he can lay his hands on: Cervantes, Goethe, Molière, Pascal, Montaigne, Saint-Simon. Then, on 18 December, he takes the Uganda Railway to Lake Victoria, and sails in a small steamer for Entebbe. As he does so, he crosses the equator and reenters his home hemisphere.

CHRISTMAS DAY FINDS
him marching northwest toward Lake Albert, parallel with the Victoria Nile.
It is elephant country, and he cannot resist downing another leviathan—his eighth—and guzzling the “excellent soup” made from its trunk.
He is in superb health, having (perhaps with the aid of Cuban fever) deflected all local diseases. If the rheumatism he began to complain of in his last years as President still troubles him, he has stopped mentioning it.
His stride is tireless, unusually long for a small-boned man five feet nine inches tall. He can run, carrying a heavy gun, for one and a half miles in 102°F heat. He eats enormously, but his constant activity burns up fat.
He looks better than at any time in his adult life: tanned, hard-muscled, sun bleach gilding the slight gray in his hair. Even his monocular eyesight seems improved. He is the first in his party to spot a distant herd of buffalo, “their dark forms picked out by highlights on the curve of their horns.” His hearing remains phenomenal, and he is intrigued to find that his sense of smell has become animal-like, alerting him to the nearness of invisible prey.

He has, in short, reached his peak as a hunter, exuberantly altered from the pale, overweight statesman of ten months ago. Africa’s way of reducing
every problem of existence to dire alternatives—shoot or starve, kill or be killed, shelter or suffer, procreate or count for nothing—has clarified his thinking, purged him of politics and its constant search for compromise.
Yet on the seventh day of the new year, as he enters the valley of the White Nile at Butiaba, he begins to accept that his retreat into the Pleistocene is over. A reverse journey is under way: he feels himself “passing through stratum after stratum of savagery and semicivilization … each stage representing some thousands of years of advance upon the preceding.”

The advance is as slow as he can make it. It proceeds amphibiously, with most of his porters trekking inland from Kobe to Nimule, while the white command meanders downriver in a flotilla of five small boats. He orders
a three-week halt just south of the third parallel, and in a hunting orgy with Kermit, kills nine white rhinos.

A MONTH LATER
, he reaches Gondokoro in the southern Sudan. By now, after a final chase after giant eland,
he feels that he has advanced at least as far as the seventh century.
A letter from Henry Cabot Lodge jerks him further forward. It warns that a phalanx of foreign correspondents will waylay him at Khartoum, 750 miles north. “There is a constantly growing thought of you and your return to the Presidency.… They will all try to get you to say things. I think it is of the first importance that you should say absolutely nothing about American politics before you get home.”

He insists in reply that all he wants to do is finish his book, tour Europe with Edith, Kermit, and Ethel, and then come home as a private citizen. “
At present it does not seem to me that it would be wise, from any side, for me to be a candidate. But that can wait.”

THREE MEMBERS OF THE KHARTOUM
press contingent, however, cannot. On 11 March they emerge from the Nile’s dawn mist in a commandeered steamboat, waving sun helmets and the Stars and Stripes. Encouraged by his return of salute, they introduce themselves as representatives of the
Chicago Tribune
, New York
World
, and United Press. He invites them to dinner aboard his new ship, the
Dal
, a luxury sternwheeler made available by the Governor-General of the Sudan. But when they row over that evening, they find the table laid on its forward barge, full of malodorous hides. The message is clear: he still considers himself a traveling hunter.