“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 And there’s nothing so forlorn and pitiable as an out-of-date and out-of-fashion hero.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.