36o My Brother Theodore Roosevelt

told me afterward that that speech in Carnegie Hall was one of the most convincing and thrilling appeals to patriotism ever made by Theodore Roosevelt.

A few days later, always true to his interest in the colored people, he made an address under the auspices of the Negro Circle, and again I was to have been present and was prevented by my condition of health. The following week when I was better I telegraphed to Oyster Bay to ask him, if possible, to lunch with me in New York, and to my distress received an answer that he was not well enough to come to New York, but would I come out and spend the night at Oyster Bay instead? When I arrived at Sagamore Hill, I could not but feel worried to find him in bed, and in much pain, which, however, he entirely disregarded, and we had one of the most delightful evenings that I ever remember spending with him. I had brought, thinking that it might interest him, Professor William Lyon Phelps's book on "Modern Poetry," and during the time that I left his room to take dinner with my sister-in-law, he had read so much and with such avidity that I felt on my return to his bedside that he had assimilated the whole volume. In spite of pain and politics, he threw himself into a discussion of modern American poetry, taking up author after author and giving me rapid criticisms or appreciations. He took much interest in both Edgar Lee Masters and Vachel Lindsay, struck with the masterful

story-telling quality of the one and the curious rhythmic metre

of the other, and the strong Americanism of both.

From poetry we wandered across political fields together,

and he discussed the armistice which had just been signed, and

which he said he could not but regret from the standpoint of

the future. He felt that for all the days to come it would have

been better had Germany's army had to return to the Father

land an insignificant and defeated fraction of its original strength,

and had the Allies entered Berlin as victors. This opinion,

although very strong, was not in any way advanced as a criti

cism of the signing of the armistice, which he appeared to feel

had been inevitable. We talked until twelve o'clock that night

1° The Quiet Quitting "   361

and I have always felt grateful to my sister-in-law for having

arranged for me to have that delightful communion with my

brother.

There was no serious apprehension about his health when I left the next morning, and the news that he had been taken to

the hospital the following week came as a shock and surprise to me. All through those late November and December days, when my brother was an invalid in Roosevelt Hospital (except for a brief thirty-six hours when he was threatened with pneumonia, which trouble he threw off with his usual wonderful vitality), we were not seriously apprehensive of any fatal outcome to his ill health, and, indeed, at times during that detention in the hospital, he gave one the impression of a man fully able to recuperate as he had always done before. Many were the happy hours of quiet interchange of thought and affection passed by me with my brother in the hospital. My sister-inlaw had given the order to the nurses that I should always be admitted, and I came and went in the sick-room daily. Sometimes he was well enough to see visitors, and lines of people of the most varied kinds were always waiting in the corridors in the hope of a few words with him. I remember a long talk on American literature to which I listened between Hamlin Garland and himself, and in the middle of December he asked me to telegraph our dear friend Senator Lodge to ask him to come on and discuss certain political matters with him. The senator spent two days with me, and of those two days two whole mornings in the Colonel's room in the hospital. I was with them during the first morning when they discussed the tentative League of Nations, parts of which in problematical form were already known to the public. The different reservations, insisted upon later by Senator Lodge, when the League in its eventual form was presented to the Senate of the United States, were tentatively formulated at the bedside of the Colonel. I do not mean that definite clauses in the League were definitely discussed, but many contingencies of the document, contingencies which later took the form of definite clauses, were discussed,