My Brother, Theodore Roosevelt

by Corinne Roosevelt Robinson

I can still feel the somewhat uncanny thrill with which I received the suggestion that a large reddish stain on a rock in the woods near by was the blood of a white girl, lately killed by the chief of the Indian tribe, to which through many mysterious rites we were supposed to belong. I remember enticing there in the twilight our very Hibernian kitchen-maid, and taking delight in her shrieks of terror at the sight of the so-called blood.

My brother always felt in later years, and carried the feeling into practice with his own children, that liberty in the summer-time, for a certain period at least, stimulated greatly the imagination of a child. To rove unhampered, to people the surroundings with one’s own creations, to watch the habits of the feathered or furry creatures, and insensibly to react to the beauty of wood and wind and water—all this leaves an indelible impression on the malleable nature of a young child, and we five happy cousins, in spite of Theodore’s constant delicacy, were allowed this wonderful freedom to assimilate what nature had to give.

I never once remember that we came to the “grown people” with that often-heard question “What shall we do next?” The days never seemed long enough, the hours flew on golden wings. Often there would be days of suffering for my brother, even in the soft summer weather, but not as acute as in the winter-time, and though my father or my aunt frequently had to take Theodore for change of air to one place or another, and rarely, even at his best, could he sleep without being propped up in bed or in a big chair, still his spirit was so strong and so recuperative that when I think of my earliest country memories, he seems always there, leading, suggesting, explaining, as all through my life when the nursery was a thing of the past and the New Jersey woodlands a faint though fair green memory, he was always beside me, leading, suggesting, explaining still.

It was in those very woodlands that his more accurate interest in natural history began. We others—normal and not particularly intelligent little children—joyed in the delights of the country, in our games and our liberty, but he was not only a leader for us in everything, but he also led a life apart from us, seriously studying the birds, their habits and their notes, so that years afterward the result of those long hours of childish concentration took form in his expert knowledge of bird life and lore—so expert a knowledge that even Mr. John Burroughs, the great nature specialist, conceded him equality of information with himself along those lines.

It was at Lowantaka, at the breakfast-table one day, after my father had taken the train to New York—this was the second year of our domicile there, and the sad war was over—that my mother received a peculiar-looking letter. I remember her face of puzzled interest as she opened it and the flush that came to her cheek as she turned to my aunt and said: “Oh, Anna, this must be from Irvine!” and read aloud what would now seem like a “personal” on a page of the New York Herald. It was as follows:

“If Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and Miss Anna Bulloch will walk in Central Park up the Mall, at 3 o’clock on Thursday afternoon of this week [it was then Tuesday] and notice a young man standing under the third tree on the left with a red handkerchief tied around his throat, it will be of interest to them.”

As my mother finished reading the letter she burst into tears, for it was long since the younger brother had been heard from, as the amnesty granted to all those taking part in the Rebellion had not been extended to those who had gone to England, as had my two uncles, to assist in the building and the sailing of the Alabama, and letters from them were considered too dangerous to be received.

This “Irvine” had been saved when the Alabama sank, after her brief career, and the two brothers had settled in Liverpool, and my mother knowing the great sorrow that his mother’s death had meant to this younger brother, had always longed during the intervening months to see him and tell him of that mother’s undying devotion, though she herself had passed away the year before.

It seemed now to the active imaginations of the Southern sisters that somehow or other Irvine had braved the authorities, and would be able to see them and hear from their lips the story of the past five years.

One can well imagine the excitement of the children around the breakfast-table at the romantic meeting suggested by the anonymous letter. And so, on the following Thursday, the two sisters went in to New York and walked up the Mall in Central Park, and there, standing under the third tree to the left, was the young man—a thin, haggard-looking young man compared to the round-faced boy with whom they had parted so long ago, but eagerly waiting to get from them the last news of the mother who had hoped she would die before any harm could befall him. He had worked his way over in the steerage of a sailing-vessel under an assumed name, for he was afraid of bringing some trouble on my father, and had taken the method of the anonymous letter to bring to him the sisters he had loved and missed so sorely.