APPRECIATIONS
Gouverneur Morris
Booth Tarkington
Charles Dana Gibson
E. L. Burlingame
Augustus Thomas
Theodore Roosevelt
Irvin S. Cobb
John Fox, Jr
Finley Peter Dunne
Winston Churchill
Leonard Wood
John T. McCutcheon
R. H. D.
BY GOUVERNEUR MORRIS
"And they rise to their feet as He passes by, gentlemen unafraid."
He was almost too good to be true. In addition, the
gods loved him, and so he had to die young. Some people think
that a man of fifty-two is middle-aged. But if R. H. D. had
lived to be a hundred, he would never have grown old. It is
not generally known that the name of his other brother was Peter Pan.
Within the year we have played at pirates together, at the
taking of sperm whales; and we have ransacked the Westchester
Hills for gunsites against the Mexican invasion. And we have
made lists of guns, and medicines, and tinned things, in case
we should ever happen to go elephant-shooting in Africa. But
we weren't going to hurt the elephants. Once R. H. D. shot a
hippopotamus and he was always ashamed and sorry. I think he
never killed anything else. He wasn't that kind of a
sportsman. Of hunting, as of many other things, he has said
the last word. Do you remember the Happy Hunting Ground in
"The Bar Sinister"?--"where nobody hunts us, and there is
nothing to hunt."
Experienced persons tell us that a manhunt is the most
exciting of all sports. R. H. D. hunted men in Cuba. He
hunted for wounded men who were out in front of the trenches
and still under fire, and found some of them and brought them
in. The Rough Riders didn't make him an honorary member of
their regiment just because he was charming and a faithful
friend, but largely because they were a lot of daredevils and
he was another.
To hear him talk you wouldn't have thought that he had ever
done a brave thing in his life. He talked a great deal, and
he talked even better than he wrote (at his best he wrote like
an angel), but I have dusted every corner of my memory and
cannot recall any story of his in which he played a heroic or
successful part. Always he was running at top speed, or
hiding behind a tree, or lying face down in a foot of water
(for hours!) so as not to be seen. Always he was getting the
worst of it. But about the other fellows he told the whole
truth with lightning flashes of wit and character building and
admiration or contempt. Until the invention of moving
pictures the world had nothing in the least like his talk.
His eye had photographed, his mind had developed and prepared
the slides, his words sent the light through them, and lo and
behold, they were reproduced on the screen of your own mind,
exact in drawing and color. With the written word or the
spoken word he was the greatest recorder and reporter of
things that he had seen of any man, perhaps, that ever lived.
The history of the last thirty years, its manners and customs
and its leading events and inventions, cannot be written
truthfully without reference to the records which he has left,
to his special articles and to his letters. Read over again
the Queen's Jubilee, the Czar's Coronation, the March of the
Germans through Brussels, and see for yourself if I speak too
zealously, even for a friend, to whom, now that R. H. D. is
dead, the world can never be the same again.
But I did not set out to estimate his genius. That matter
will come in due time before the unerring tribunal of
posterity.
One secret of Mr. Roosevelt's hold upon those who come into
contact with him is his energy. Retaining enough for his own
use (he uses a good deal, because every day he does the work
of five or six men), he distributes the inexhaustible
remainder among those who most need it. Men go to him tired
and discouraged, he sends them away glad to be alive, still
gladder that he is alive, and ready to fight the devil himself
in a good cause. Upon his friends R. H. D. had the same
effect. And it was not only in proximity that he could
distribute energy, but from afar, by letter and cable. He had
some intuitive way of knowing just when you were slipping into
a slough of laziness and discouragement. And at such times he
either appeared suddenly upon the scene, or there came a boy
on a bicycle, with a yellow envelope and a book to sign, or
the postman in his buggy, or the telephone rang and from the
receiver there poured into you affection and encouragement.
But the great times, of course, were when be came in person,
and the temperature of the house, which a moment before had
been too hot or too cold, became just right, and a sense of
cheerfulness and well-being invaded the hearts of the master
and the mistress and of the servants in the house and in the
yard. And the older daughter ran to him, and the baby, who
had been fretting because nobody would give her a doublebarrelled shotgun, climbed upon his knee and forgot all about
the disappointments of this uncompromising world.
He was touchingly sweet with children. I think he was a
little afraid of them. He was afraid perhaps that they
wouldn't find out how much be loved them. But when they
showed him that they trusted him, and, unsolicited, climbed
upon him and laid their cheeks against his, then the loveliest
expression came over his face, and you knew that the great
heart, which the other day ceased to beat, throbbed with an
exquisite bliss, akin to anguish.
One of the happiest days I remember was when I and mine
received a telegram saying that he had a baby of his own. And
I thank God that little Miss Hope is too young to know what an
appalling loss she has suffered. . . .
Perhaps he stayed to dine. Then perhaps the older daughter
was allowed to sit up an extra half-hour so that she could
wait on the table (and though I say it, that shouldn't, she
could do this beautifully, with dignity and without giggling),
and perhaps the dinner was good, or R. H. D. thought it was,
and in that event he must abandon his place and storm the
kitchen to tell the cook all about it. Perhaps the gardener
was taking life easy on the kitchen porch. He, too, came in
for praise. R. H. D. had never seen our Japanese iris so
beautiful; as for his, they wouldn't grow at all. It wasn't
the iris, it was the man behind the iris. And then back he
would come to us, with a wonderful story of his adventures in
the pantry on his way to the kitchen, and leaving behind him a
cook to whom there had been issued a new lease of life, and a
gardener who blushed and smiled in the darkness under the
Actinidia vines.
It was in our little house at Aiken, in South Carolina, that
he was with us most and we learned to know him best, and that
he and I became dependent upon each other in many ways.
Events, into which I shall not go, had made his life very
difficult and complicated. And he who had given so much
friendship to so many people needed a little friendship in
return, and perhaps, too, he needed for a time to live in a
house whose master and mistress loved each other, and where
there were children. Before he came that first year our house
had no name. Now it is called "Let's Pretend."
Now the chimney in the living-room draws, but in those first
days of the built-over house it didn't. At least, it didn't
draw all the time, but we pretended that it did, and with much
pretense came faith. From the fireplace that smoked to the
serious things of life we extended our pretendings, until real
troubles went down before them--down and out.
It was one of Aiken's very best winters, and the earliest
spring I ever lived anywhere. R. H. D. came shortly after
Christmas. The spiraeas were in bloom, and the monthly roses;
you could always find a sweet violet or two somewhere in the
yard; here and there splotches of deep pink against gray cabin
walls proved that precocious peach-trees were in bloom. It
never rained. At night it was cold enough for fires. In the
middle of the day it was hot. The wind never blew, and every
morning we had a four for tennis and every afternoon we rode
in the woods. And every night we sat in front of the fire
(...
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