Free Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris Page B

the mass of marchers began to sway to the tune’s slow rhythm.
    For auld lang syne, my dear
,
For auld lang syne …
    Roosevelt, who had been laughing and brandishing his silk hat, lapsed into quietness. Loeb furtively watched him, afraid he might break down. But by the time they arrived at the station, the band had switched to “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” and Roosevelt was as jovial as ever.
    “Good-bye to you all,” he shouted in his high, cracking voice, and leaped out of the carriage the moment it rolled to a halt. Before the crowd could close around him, he had disappeared.

    EDITH ROOSEVELT RECEIVED him in the new terminal’s magnificent President’s Room, as yet—and still—unused by any Chief Executive of the United States. Quentin was with her, looking triumphant, because he had managed to sneak into the Capitol without a pass. He and “Taffy” had watched the Inauguration together, squeezed into one seat in the Taft family row.
    A special train was waiting, but ice delayed its departure for two wearying hours. Roosevelt was forced to hold an impromptu reception as hundreds of Washington friends and diplomats, including a tearful Jules Jusserand, came to wish him well and—over and over again—“good hunting.” Just as frequently, he assured everyone who would listen that he had had “a bully time” as President, but was happy to lay down the burden of office.
    Shortly after three o’clock, the railway north was cleared, and Roosevelt passed with his wife and son through a crowd that had swelled to several thousand. The vast station hall reverberated with roars as he waved, flashed his teeth and pince-nez, and disappeared down the platform. At 3:26 on the station register, Theodore Roosevelt officially departed Washington, D.C.

    THE STORM HAD abated, but with wires down and only hand signals operating for the next thirty miles, the train took more than two hours to get to Baltimore. By then darkness had fallen, and Rooseveltdid not show himself, as if to emphasize to a small, wistful crowd that he was no longer public property.
    Seven years and a hundred and sixty-nine days before, on another loweringevening, he had come south along this same track, eager to begin work as President of the United States. For all his show of grief for McKinley, and natural nervous tension, he had been happy then, as he was happy now; happy at the large things he had managed to achieve—a canal, a coal-strike settlement, a peace treaty, a national conservation conference—contented with myriad smaller triumphs, proud of his appointees, passionate about his country, in love with his wife and children; many-friended, much-honored, lusty in his physical and intellectual appetites,constantly bubbling with mirth; happy, above all, at having kept his promise not to hold on too long to power. Brownsville had been proof to many, and perhaps even a warning to himself, of the truth of LordActon’s famous dictum.
    Already, in his fifty-first year, epitaphs of him were beginning to appear, distressingly written in the past historic, from H. G. Wells’s claim that he seemed “a very symbol of the creative will in man” to Henry Adams’s “Roosevelt, more than any other man living within the range of notoriety, showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter—the quality that medieval theology assigned to God—he was pure act.”
    In time, no doubt, the inevitable memorial committee would form, and solemn scholars would comb his works for quotations suitable to chisel in stone. Statute books and official histories would celebrate his administrative achievements: the Monroe Doctrine reaffirmed, the Old World banished from the New World, the great Canal being cut; peace established in the Far East; the Open Door swinging freely in Manchuria and Morocco; Cuba liberated (and returned to self-government just in time for his departure); the Philippines pacified; the Navy hugely