At any rate, he told himself, he was a lucky man, and if there were times when public life irked him a little, bringing a faint regret that outside affairs kept him from the quiet life he loved, he had to balance all the rewards against the slight feeling of frustration, count the honors as recompense.
Destiny had somehow set his feet upon a road and he felt at times a deep secret apprehension of where the road might lead. So far he had found himself adequate to any task that confronted him, and standing still in the quiet night air he felt the muscles of his spirit tense and a glow pervade his body.
He was not blind or deaf to certain portents in the air and, though he never spoke of them or let his mind dwell upon them, they still lingered, buried deep in his consciousness. There was always the echo of casual words spoken, of gay songs being sung.
We’ll send you to the White House for the gallant deeds you’ve done.
All doggerel, all wishful thinking, he told himself, yet the idea lingered, and now he let it float uppermost in his mind till there came over him a sense of exhilaration, a promise of yet greater things ahead. Impatiently he put the thought down, but it kept creeping up again till his nerves tightened and he itched to do something tangible, attack something conquerable. On an impulse he strode back to the house and in a tool room found his ax, by the light of a single match.
Back at the log pile he laid a huge branch across two others and hacked away at it with the ax in the faint snow light, planting vigorous strokes and telling blows, though it was difficult to aim a tool in the thin light from the winter sky and more chips flew through the air than bespoke an expert woodsman.
When the branch was all reduced to proper lengths for burning he piled the sticks carefully, wiping the sticky sap from his hands on the sleeves of the old jacket. Then, shouldering the ax, he tramped back to the house, feeling suddenly relaxed and weary in nerve and bone. The sky, he noted, was slowly clearing and now and then a pale wisp of a moon shone fleetingly against the scud of the wind-driven clouds. Over the water a pale whiteness lighted the clouds as the moonlight increased.
Theodore Roosevelt was no mystic or fatuous dreamer, indeed the factual and actual had always been paramount in his mind. He had never had the weakness of nursing hopeful visions trying to bring them to reality. Instead he had always gone out to fight for what he believed in and let dreamers have their dreams.
But why now was that faint glow in the eastern sky slowly taking on the semblance of a great white dome towering against the horizon? In only one place in the land was reared a majestic dome like that.
Very humbly Theodore Roosevelt went back to his bed.