U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [223]
Every time a lion or an elephant went crashing
down into the jungle underbrush, under the impact of a wel placed mushroom bul et the papers lit up with headlines;
when he talked with the Kaiser on horseback
the world was not ignorant of what he said, or
when he lectured the Nationalists at Cairo tel ing them that this was a white man's world. He went to Brazil where he travel ed through the
Matto Grosso in a dugout over waters infested with the tiny maneating fish, the piranha, shot tapirs,
jaguars,
-146-specimens of the whitelipped peccary.
He ran the rapids of the River of Doubt
down to the Amazon frontiers where he arrived
sick, an infected abscess in his leg, stretched out under an awning in a dugout with a tame trumpeterbird beside him.
Back in the States he fought his last fight when
he came out for the republican nomination in 1912 a progressive, champion of the Square Deal, crusader for the Plain People; the Bul Moose bolted out from under the Taft steamrol er and formed the Progressive Party for righteousness' sake at the Chicago Colosseum while the delegates who were going to restore demo-cratic government rocked with tears in their eyes as they sang
On ward Christian so old gers
Marching as to war
Perhaps the River of Doubt had been too much for
a man of his age; perhaps things weren't so bul y any more; T.R. lost his voice during the triangular cam-paign. In Duluth a maniac shot him in the chest, his life was saved only by the thick bundle of manuscript of the speech he was going to deliver. T.R. delivered the speech with the bul et stil in him, heard the scared applause, felt the plain people praying for his recov-ery but the spel was broken somehow. The Democrats swept in, the world war drowned
out the righteous voice of the Happy Warrior in the roar of exploding lyddite. this was. Wilson wouldn't let T.R. lead a division, this was
no amateur's war (perhaps the regulars remembered
the round robin at Santiago). Al he could do was
write magazine articles against the Huns, send his sons; Quentin was kil ed.
-147-It wasn't the bul y amateur's world any more.
Nobody knew that on armistice day, Theodore Roose-velt, happy amateur warrior with the grinning teeth, the shaking forefinger, naturalist, explorer, magazine-writer, Sundayschool teacher, cowpuncher, moralist, politician, righteous orator with a short memory, fond of denouncing liars (the Ananias Club) and having
pil owfights with his children, was taken to the Roose-velt hospital gravely il with inflammatory rheumatism. Things weren't bul y any more;
T.R. had grit;
he bore the pain, the obscurity, the sense of being forgotten as he had borne the gril ing portages when he was exploring the River of Doubt, the heat, the fetid jungle mud, the infected abscess in his leg,
and died quietly in his sleep
at Sagamore Hil
on January 6, 1919
and left on the shoulders of his sons
the white man's burden.
THE CAMERA EYE (33)
11,000 registered harlots said the Red Cross Pub-licity Man infest the streets of Marseil es the Ford stal ed three times in the Rue de Rivoli
in Fontainebleau we had our café au lait in bed the For-est was so achingly red yel ow novemberbrown under the tiny lavender rain beyond the road climbed through dovecolored hil s the air smelt of apples
Nevers (Dumas nom de dieu) Athos Pcrthos and
-148-d'Artagnan had ordered a bisque at the inn we wound down slowly into red Macon that smelt of winelees and the vintage fais ce que voudras saute Bourgignon. in the Rhone val ey the first strawcolored sunlight streaked the white road with shadows of skeleton poplars at
every stop we drank wine strong as beefsteaks rich as the palace of François Premier bouquet of the last sleet-lashed roses we didn't cross the river to Lyon where JeanJacques suffered from greensickness as a young-ster the landscapes of Provence were al out of the Gal-lic Wars the towns were dictionaries of latin roots Orange Tarascon Arles where Van Gogh cut off his ears the
convoy became less of a conducted tour we stopped to play craps in the estaminets boys we're going south to drink the red wine the popes loved best to eat fat meals in oliveoil. and garlic bound south c