I went up-stairs, put on my “best bib and tucker,” and proceeded to go around the other way to the front door of the offices. As I rang the bell the dear old man who always opened the door greeted me warmly, and said: “Yes, Mrs. Douglas Robinson, your appointment is at 9. It is just time.” I went into the outer hall, where a number of the appointees of 9.15, 9.30, etc., were already waiting, to be surely on hand for their appointments, and in a moment or two Mr. Loeb opened the door of the private office of the President, and came out into the hall and said in a rather impersonal way, “Mrs. Douglas Robinson’s appointment,” and I was shown into the room. My brother was seated at a large table, and on it was every imaginable paper marked “Porto Rico.” As I entered he was still reading one of these papers. He looked up, and I almost felt a shock as I met what seemed to be a pair of perfectly opaque blue eyes. I could hardly believe they were the eyes of the brother with whom I had so lately parted, the eyes that had glistened as he recited the poems of Kipling and Swinburne, the eyes that had almost closed to see better the tiny breast-fluff of the fox-sparrow. These were rather cold eyes, the eyes of a just judge, eyes that were turned upon his sister as they would have been turned upon any other individual who came to him in connection with a question about which he must give his most careful and deliberate decision. He waved me to a chair, finished the paper he was reading, and then turning to me, his eyes still stern and opaque, he said: “I believe you have come to see me on business connected with Porto Rico. Kindly be as condensed as possible.” I decided to meet him on his own ground, and made my eyes as much like his as possible, and was as condensed as possible. Having listened carefully to my short story, he said: “Have you proof of this?” still rather sternly. Again I decided to answer as he asked, and I replied: “I should not be here, wasting your time and mine, did I not have adequate proof.” With that I handed him the notes made by the governor of Porto Rico, and proceeded to explain them. He became a little less severe after reading them, but no less serious, and turning to me more gently, said: “This is a very serious matter. I have got to be sure of the correctness of these statements. A man’s whole future hangs upon my decision.” For a moment I felt like an executioner, but realizing as I did the shocking and disgraceful behavior of the official in question, I knew that no sentimentality on my part should interfere with the important decision to be made, and I briefly backed up all that the governor had written. I can still hear the sound of the President’s pen as he took out the paper on which the man’s name was inscribed, and with one strong stroke effaced that name from official connection with Porto Rico forever. That was the way that Theodore Roosevelt did business with his sister.
During that same year, 1905, the old Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral sent him his volume called “Mireille,” and the acknowledgment of the book seems to me to express more than almost any other letter ever written by my brother the spirit which permeated his whole life. It shows indisputably that though he had reached the apex of his desires, that though he was a great President of a great country, perhaps the most powerful ruler at the moment of any country, that his ideals for that country, just as his ideals for himself and for his own beloved home life, were what they had always been before the sceptre of power had been clasped by his outstretched hand.
White House, Washington,
December 15, 1905.My dear M. Mistral:
Mrs. Roosevelt and I were equally pleased with the book and the medal, and none the less because for nearly twenty years we have possessed a copy of Mireille. That copy we shall keep for old association’s sake, though this new copy with the personal inscription by you must hereafter occupy the place of honor.
All success to you and your associates! You are teaching the lesson that none need more to learn than we of the West, we of the eager, restless, wealth-seeking nation; the lesson that after a certain not very high level of material well-being has been reached, then the things that really count in life are the things of the spirit. Factories and railways are good up to a certain point, but courage and endurance, love of wife and child, love of home and country, love of lover for sweetheart, love of beauty in man’s work and in nature, love and emulation of daring and of lofty endeavour, the homely work-a-day virtues and the heroic virtues—these are better still, and if they are lacking, no piled-up riches, no roaring, clanging industrialism, no feverish and many-sided activity shall avail either the individual or the nation. I do not undervalue these things of a nation’s body; I only desire that they shall not make us forget that beside the nation’s body there is also the nation’s soul.
Again thanking you on behalf of both of us, believe me,
Faithfully yours,
(Signed) Theodore Roosevelt.To M. Frédéric Mistral.
No wonder that Mistral turned to a friend after reading that letter and said with emotion: “It is he who is the new hope of humanity.”
XII
HOME LIFE IN THE WHITE HOUSE
(CONTINUED)
Men smile through falling tears,
Remembering the courage of his years
That stood each one for God, humanity,
And covenanted world-wide Liberty!
—Edith Daley.
One of the most extraordinary things about my brother was that in the midst of his full political life, a life “pressed down and overflowing,” he still had time for the most loving interest in personal family matters. Just after the great moment of his inauguration, he sent me a number of photographs of my eldest son and his young wife, just married, who had gone around the world and were staying with General Wood in the Philippines, and adds in the letter: “It was such a pleasure to have Douglas and you down here for the inauguration, and to see the boys and Corinne.” In June of that same year, when my two younger boys had each won a boat-race at St. Paul’s School, he takes a moment from his pressing duties to write another letter: “Darling Corinne: Good for Monroe and Stewart! Give them my hearty congratulations; I have only time for this line.” Such unusual thoughtfulness could not fail to keep burning perpetually the steady fire of my love for him.