My Impressions of America Part 3

We travelled that night to Columbus in the same sort of horrible train--shaky, hot, and stopping outside before jerking into the stations. Upon our arrival, a stranger came up to us on the platform and said he hoped we would let him take us and our luggage to any place we liked; that he had loved my book and was going to hear my lecture. We were delighted to accept his invitation and were whizzed off to the hotel. Mr. Jeffries, the owner of the motor, was more than kind and enthusiastic. I tried to distinguish his handsome face in a ballroom where I spoke in the evening, but he was in the gallery, and I was too nervous to look much about me.

Ex-Governor Campbell made a witty introductory speech and encouraged my listeners to ask me questions. When it was all over, I was surrounded by various ladies and gentlemen of the audience who introduced themselves and each other to me and asked if I would not eat ices and drink punch, but I was dropping with fatigue and even my handsome friend who was full of congratulations, could not prevent me from staggering off to bed.

I had received a wire from my manager begging me to go by the 7 a.m.

train next morning to Chicago in time to see the reporters in the evening. The prospect of this gave me a sleepless night, especially as I was disturbed, first at midnight by a messenger boy with an alb.u.m which he wished me to sign, and again at two in the morning by the night watchman who said I had neglected to lock my door. I used un-parliamentary language, telling him that nothing would induce me to lock my door, and after an unsuccessful attempt to settle down, I turned on the light and read "If Winter Comes."

The originality and pathos of this wonderful study reduced me to tears and, more dead than alive, at 5.30 a.m. I told my maid I would have my bath.

The reporters at Chicago were very civil and, interspersed with flash-lights, I got through the interviews as well as I could. One of the young ladies, following me to the lift, said:

"I wish you hadn't been so charming and polite. I would like you to have just rushed at me and pulled my hair out so that I could have got the story."

I looked at her in surprise and disgust as Mr. Horton elbowed me into the lift.

I dined that night with a very old friend of mine, Count Minotto, and met the first woman of real beauty that I have seen since I came here.

Mrs. Minotto walked into the room with long white arms and a transparently pale face; her dark hair brushed in waves off her forehead was knotted loosely at the back of her neck, and her beautiful eyes glowed with welcome. We talked _a trois_ for three hours and before going away she took me into her night nursery. The nurse woke up, but her lady told her not to move, and after looking at a handsome little boy, she glided to the side of a white cradle. Very tall, in a clinging black crepe dress, I was struck by the beauty of her att.i.tude, and the tenderness of her expression as, leaning across the cot, she removed the coverlet for me to see her little sleeping baby.

I lectured the next night to the biggest and most intelligent audience I had faced since Boston, and when it was over people came on to the stage to congratulate me and ask for my autograph.

On the morning of the 22nd, having asked to see the big Military Hospital, a friend of Mr. Horton's--who had been his secretary during his Foreign Office work in Paris--took us out to see the Speedway Hospital.

We had a long and adventurous drive, skidding in circles on the ice, although we went at an almost funereal pace. Puffs of steam came up from my feet which seemed to emerge from a furnace. Mr. Horton insisted on stopping at a garage for fear the car would catch fire, and our chauffeur in a rough-and-ready manner poured cans of water down the window s.p.a.ces to do what he could to cool the car.

On arriving at the hospital we were greeted by interviewers and doctors (the latter in khaki),--we had taken with us Miss Allard, a lady reporter of first rate intelligence and fine manners,--and we started to walk round. The military doctor wanted naturally enough to show me the hospital, which I should imagine to be the largest and most perfectly equipped in the world. This solid building extends for over half a mile, and is several storeys high; but I wanted to see the patients, and I loathe long pa.s.sages and operating paraphernalia. With difficulty I was finally permitted to see the wounded.

It is difficult to make conversation with tired men acclimatized to pain and bed, but I was glad to meet and talk to them.

I have a feeling, which may be wrong, that they are not getting the attention they deserve in this country of money and movies, but the hospital was magnificent, and there at any rate, they are treated with efficiency and understanding.

Perhaps I am not competent to judge, but from what I have observed, the men who fought in the war--many of whom have been either permanently disabled or financially handicapped--are in danger of being forgotten, not by the Government either in the States or any other part of the world, but by the private individual.

The bonus over here, even if it pa.s.ses, can never be an excuse for the rich and leisured not to go among the wounded either at their homes or in the hospitals. Ga.s.sed, crippled and sh.e.l.l-shocked, their outlook at the best can but be forlorn, and I am haunted by a fear that in the hustle of life and what is erroneously called the "return to normality," the crippled and wounded are neglected. It is understandable that men in business should want to make money, but business principles should not be mainly the reflection of personal interests and you may pay too high a price for making your fortune.

Excepting for myself I saw no stranger in the crowded wards of this immense hospital, and from answers to my questions, I do not think it is the practice among women over here to visit them.

VII: PITTSBURGH AND ROCHESTER

PITTSBURGH AND ROCHESTER

MEETS AN INTERESTING REPORTER--COMPLIMENTS FROM DR.

HOLLAND--PULLMAN CAR INCONVENIENCES--MARGOT SEES HER FIRST FLAPPER

After travelling all night in a train that would not be tolerated for a day in England, we jolted into Pittsburgh at 6.30 a.m. on the morning of the 23rd. Reporters and photographers waited in the sitting room to see me after breakfast and, giddy from the journey, I put my feet upon a sofa and awaited their intelligent questions.

I spoke to three women and one man. The women asked me if I did not think they were advancing rapidly as a nation; I answered that no doubt interest in international politics was making them less provincial, and with their vitality, intelligence, and resources, their country was bound to exercise enormous political influence in the future, if it was not already doing so. I observed the male reporter demurred to this; he said that the men of ideas and captains of industry were fighting each other all the time, and that the American press pandered to the public taste by keeping them in ignorance of the truth. The ladies challenged this and, addressing him as "Bruce," asked if he thought they did not revere their great men and all that was worth while; adding that they were a young and free nation and, if anything, going far too fast.

Appealing to me, I felt obliged to say I thought they were the most genuine and hospitable of people, but that in spite of being always in a hurry I had found them slow; nor could I honestly say I thought them a free nation. I was heartily supported by the solitary man, who asked the ladies where they had observed either the great men, or the reverence; he said that materialism was sapping the soul of America, that their men of intellect were choked out, and in an aside to me in French, while the photographers were taking flash-lights, begged me to let him stay on after the ladies had departed. I a.s.sented, and when the oft repeated enquiry as to what I thought of "flappers" came up, I listened with absent mind and without committing myself to a subject that, while disturbing to the morals of the female questioners, bores me to such an extent that I almost scream when it is mentioned.

After the ladies had gone Mr. Horton returned with "Bruce." He was the most interesting reporter that I have met up till now.

He said he did not know what had happened to the spirit of his fellow-countrymen. Whether it was from temporary restlessness--following the chaos of present conditions--or from a native and ingrained lack of reflection, but that jazz, hustle and headlines were killing the soul of the American people.

"There is a perpetual antagonism between the machine, the press, the money makers, and those who are groping in the darkness to be free.

When they see the Light, and know the Truth, it will be as bad over here as it is in Russia to-day, and, Mrs. Asquith," he added, "why should this be? We have men of ideas, and are young and keen; why must what is fine be inarticulate? You won't believe me, but in this very hotel I heard one man say to another:

"'I never read a line that is not going to profit me in commerce.'

"Imagine, after these five years of anguish all over the world, that such a thing could be said! I'm a poor man, never likely to arrive, but I would rather starve than say a thing like that."

"Have you read 'If Winter Comes'?" I asked.

He answered that he had, and told me he had been deeply moved over it; but did I believe that such a man as Mark Sabre could ever exist; did I not think he had emanated from a sensitive and creative power, but was not quite a real being. I replied that it was just because Mark Sabre was so human, and made by G.o.d as well as Hutchinson, that the book was great.

"If we cared enough, we all have it in us to develop some of Sabre's qualities, but we must be equally independent of public opinion, equally tolerant and, above all, equally selfless and loving," I said.

"You may be right, but what good, after all, did it do him?"

"Of course," I replied, "if every time we do or say the right thing we expect to succeed, matters would be very simple. It is because we are always meeting with rebuffs that life is so complicated. We must peg away doing what we can; fundamentally humble and despising popular opinion. Believe me, you are not the only country exposed to the temptations you speak of. We can only overcome these eternal inequalities by pity and self-sacrifice, and of this we have been given an immortal example."

He got up, and, shaking me firmly by the hand, said:

"It was just as well that Christ was crucified when He was, for He would not long have survived the hate and antagonism that His ideas provoked among the conventional, the successful, and the governing cla.s.ses."

In the afternoon I was taken over the Carnegie Buildings. By the kindness of Mr. Church I was rolled about in a chair, and enjoyed the most wonderful inst.i.tution of its sort that exists. Dr. Holland, who informed me that he was not only acquainted with all my literary friends in England, but with most of the crowned heads of Europe, accompanied us. Stuffed animals in huge gla.s.s cases do not usually attract me, but at the Carnegie Inst.i.tute they are presented with such life-like skill that I begged to be introduced to the man who had arranged them. He was brought down in a lift from his work, and after shaking him warmly by the hand, I told him how proud I was to meet so great an artist.

Dr. Holland, my chairman of that night, was kind enough to give me the rough copy of his introductory speech:

"Ladies and Gentlemen, neighbours, and friends," he said.

"Written history has been called a 'tissue of lies.' Most historians, like portrait painters, feel it to be their duty to impart to the characters whom they are describing a glamour, which in many cases is more or less superhuman or super-diabolical as the case may be, and to represent circ.u.mstances as they happened in the light of the preternatural. Now and then there arises a writer who is gifted with the quality to see things as they really are, and who, to use a current phrase, 'calls a spade a spade.' In an age of pretence, it is to many more or less shocking to have such persons take up the pen and, with frankness born of native honesty, tell the truth as he or she may distinctly perceive it. Society is so used to 'diplomatic courtesies'

that when the truth-teller arrives, society 'takes a fit,' seeing its illusions vanish. Its would-be idols which have been proclaimed as made of pure gold, are found to be gilded clay, its devils not so devilish after all, and the daring act of the truth-teller is vigorously denounced by an age which calls for nothing but compliments.

"We have all read, at least I have, with great appreciation, coupled with no small degree of amus.e.m.e.nt, Mrs. Margot Asquith's 'Autobiography.' I particularly enjoyed it because it gave her impressions of many people whom I have met and known.

"Mrs. Asquith is the wife of the great man who was the prime minister of England at the outbreak of the World War. She is here to-day in a city which bears the name of that prime minister of England who held the helm of state during the Napoleonic wars.

"I have the honour of presenting Mrs. Margot Asquith, wife of the Right Honourable Herbert Henry Asquith. She is one of the most famous women of England."

Hampered by the knowledge that we were to catch the night train to Rochester, and inexperienced in timing what I have to say, I found when I sat down that I had cut my lecture short by half an hour. To make up for this, and encouraged by people in the front row reaching up to shake my hand, I invited them to come on to the platform. They trooped up in large numbers and I held an informal reception which met with unexpected success.

We drove in silence to the station. I had a conviction which my secretary did not attempt to contradict that I had been a failure. Mr.

Horton said he feared the news of my curtailed lecture might reach the influential press and prejudice those who might want to hear me in the towns in which I was booked to speak. Knowing in my heart that I had on every occasion received more praise than I deserved, and being of a temperament that is not knocked out by failure, I tried to cheer him up while the n.i.g.g.e.r was arranging my bed, but without the smallest success.