Part 7

In my own heart I think the small nationalities are the causes of war, but having insisted and proclaimed their rights we certainly _must_ be consistent. The only objection I have heard yet to the Irish Republic is the notion that she would be a base for an enemy fleet in the next war. To which the reply is obvious. She is further away from us than France. Besides, she was a base for the enemy fleet in the last war. Our problems would on the whole have been lessened if Ireland as an independent nation had openly sided with the enemy. We could have declared war on her, instead of being hand tied in the face of her enmity, by pretending that she belonged to our cause. Other theories are, that Ireland would not be our enemy if we gave her independence. Of course Ireland should have her Republic. I say it not as an Irish patriot, or even as an Irish sympathizer, but just as an onlooker, it seems to me the only logical possibility. I suppose the British Empire would lose some revenue over it, money is always at the bottom of all these problems.

When LaFollette had finished, Senator Reed, who had once or twice interrupted (to ask for information, not to criticize) crossed the house and shook hands with Senator LaFollette. Senator Reed has a handsome, regular, rugged face; he is an oldish man, gray haired, but his individuality is full of fight and aggression. He surely must be of Irish origin. Senator Borah was pointed out to me. He has a curious, wide, crumpled-up, forceful face, and long hair. He has been held out to me as one of the heads that would be interesting to do. Henry Cabot Lodge was talking in a back row with the Mormon Senator Smoot. I remember the latter when I was here ten years ago. I met him one evening at a party, and papa introduced us. On that occasion the conversation drifted upon forms of government, and I believe I said (papa has often reminded me of the story) that I believed in feudalism, my idea being a castle surrounded by small huts, which at sight of the enemy eject their inhabitants into the castle for protection. Senator Smoot said in answer to this: “And I gather from this that you, Miss Frewen, would be living in the castle.” I have progressed since then! I feel as if it were not I who had advocated feudalism ten years ago, but some other person within me who is a stranger to me, who is neither mother nor child to me.

Senator Lodge joined us at lunch in one of the private offices. I sat next to Senator Curtis, who is one-eighth Indian, so he told me. The only trace of it was in his fine hawk nose. I told him of my hope about returning from Mexico through the National Parks and he told me a lot about it, and much that was interesting about the Indians and promised to help me in my scheme, if I will write and let him know, where and when I want to go. We discussed the psychology of mixed races, and I wondered whether the faint drop of Indian blood in my own veins could possibly account for my dislike of civilization, and my longing to get away into the wilds alone. He thought that even such a remote strain might account for this.

After lunch we went downstairs to Senator Medill McCormick’s office. I had not yet met him as he has been away. I dined at the McCormick’s again in the evening. I liked the Senator. They are both wondrously hospitable. I am overwhelmed by Washington and want to remain here or come back. Every day I put forth a deeper root. New York has been hospitable, but whereas in New York I feel I am asked because I am a curiosity, here there is real warmth in the hospitality. I like all the people I have met, and the women are intelligent and interested in politics, not like the society women in New York, who seem to affect the blasé aloofness about Washington and all concerned. As for Alice Longworth, she is magnificent--“one of us,” as an Englishman said to me, meaning it as the highest compliment he could pay! She is not “someone” merely because she is her father’s daughter. She has her own very forceful personality. I feel she is the woman who should have gotten into the precincts of Lenin and Trotzky, not me! And they would have appreciated her! She is the Madame Kolontai type.

MAY 7, 1921. _New York._

I have had a good week, quite one of the best since I arrived here. I had an order from Mr. C. to do a bust of Miss Spence for the school. Mrs. C., when she came to talk to me about it, told me that Miss Spence had to be treated as Royalty. Royalty do not alarm me, and I expected Miss Spence would! But she was far more interesting than that.

Every morning except one Miss Spence had sat to me from 10:15 until 1 o’clock--and we have hardly stopped talking the entire time. I have enjoyed every moment of the sittings, and subconsciously our talks have helped to mature certain plans in my mind, plans as to the future, and the education of my children. Miss Spence is among the largest minded people I have met over here. I like her points of view. I like her big heart, her adoration of immature youth, her understanding, and her quick grasp of situations. Moreover her head is extremely interesting, although very difficult to do. Her mouth has a kindly sense of humor without being weak. Her eyes, when she talks, light up with inward vision and enthusiasm.

We have talked a great deal about America, and I find myself talking to the Scotchwoman in her, not to the American born. It becomes a very impartial discussion. The position of woman here as compared with England is an unworn-out subject. The attitude of Englishmen toward the marriage state, their sense of possession, their domination, the laws of divorce, the laws of custody of children, we have reviewed it and deplored it.

To-day there is an account in the NEW YORK HERALD of Lady Astor in the House pleading for mothers, that they may have at least an equal right to their children, and as Miss Spence pointed out, how strange that a woman from _this_ country should have to do it for the English women!

We discussed “Main Street,” which we are both in process of reading. I have already said that its author is the Thackeray of the United States, but Miss Spence said even more. She said: “It is Balsac-ian.”

MONDAY, MAY 16, 1921. _Philadelphia._

In New York they told me Philadelphia was “slow.” I came to Philadelphia on Saturday. It has not been “slow.” It has been breathless. I am staying with friends outside Philadelphia, in an area which seems to be known as the “Chilten Hills.” Perhaps the Chilten Hills are more energetic than Philadelphia, and that may explain the breathless haste. I do not know. I have not been given time to analyze it.

I came to Philadelphia because the “Arts Alliance” club offered me an exhibition and asked me to open it (to-night) with a lecture.

Sunday was one uninterrupted twelve-hour rush in which one met over and over again (at places miles apart!) the same friendly faces that I had learned to know on Saturday night. This is the way the overworked American rests on Sunday:

At 10 o’clock I was taken out riding. Only once before in my life--and that a year ago--had I ever ridden astride. I was mounted on a thoroughbred hunter, but mercifully it was as quiet as a lamb. We rode in the sun for two hours. Going through peoples’ private grounds seems to be no offense in this country. Some time ago--at Bernardsville, New Jersey, I walked for miles unmolested through peoples’ woods and gardens, enjoyed their fountains and their flowers and their lawns. Yesterday was much the same. We rode peacefully, not “across country,” but across property. Honorably sticking to the paths, of course.

People don’t surround their grounds with walls and hedges and ditches here as in England. There appear to be no lodges and gates, and furious people. A gateless entrance is a great temptation, it looks to me like an invitation. No Communist could war against these conditions. It really gives one a sense of fraternity. I need no garden of my own, if I may walk in my neighbor’s. His azaleas look just the same as mine would look, and his fountain sings the same song.

Returning from our ride late, we jumped into a 12-cylinder two-seater, in our riding clothes, and drove at a speed of fifty to the house of friends who had invited us for cocktails at midday! I felt rather as if we were film playing! At the friend’s house I also got an order to do a bust. Thus stimulated, we returned at a speed of sixty. Got home barely in time to bathe and change and start off again for a luncheon party.

After luncheon the entire party motored over to Mr. Stotesbury’s house. This incident deserves comment. Mr. Stotesbury’s house is just completed. It is a sort of Versailles. In reply to comment I heard someone say: “It was not really built so very quickly. It was begun five years ago.” Five years in which to begin and complete an American Versailles! Complete and perfect inside as well as the shell. Five years ago the site on which it stands was a wild countryside which harbored the fox. To-day it is levelled, terraced, planted and planned. Fountains tumble and splash arrogantly. Neatly trimmed box hedging pursues its Italian design, big trees brought from a distance thrive. It seems that you can bribe quite aged trees to survive transplantation that otherwise would die, and altogether one realizes that money can remove mountains or create them. Only--I discovered one rebel. My friend the orange tree, recognizing no King but the sun, had refused to grow oranges to order, and had to submit to having these wired on, but had produced no blossom!

The house was immense; faultless in architecture, and full of beautiful pictures and furniture. Nothing seemed to have been omitted in the planning. There was nothing to criticise. But like those people one meets occasionally, whose souls are still very young, the house lacked everything that time alone could bring. But Versailles was new once.

I suppose it gave lots of employment, and I wonder who earned the most, the designer, the contractor or the worker.

To-night I did the really brave thing. I stood up to an audience in Rittenhouse Square and talked about Lenin and Trotzky!

Everyone listened most politely, but of course I could not expect them to be really sympathetic. They were cold, though attentive. I don’t believe they were really interested about Russia at all. However, they knew it was about Russia I was going to talk, and the room was crowded to overflowing. In the dim remoteness I caught sight of Kenneth’s keen archaic face. I met it while I was in the middle of my lecture. It rather paralyzed me. I was not talking my best, I cannot, to an unresponsive audience, and I felt ashamed that Kenneth should hear me for the first time, and in such a way. He told me afterwards that I had done all that was possible, but asked if I understood his reaction. He was bred in Rittenhouse Square!

Later someone in the crowd asked me rather excitedly if I had heard the news, that “the Soviet Representative was here among us this evening....” My informant said it half incredulously, not knowing in the least who the Soviet Representative could be, and wondering if I would not be rather frightened at the idea of having been listened to by an official!

Someone else said to me: “I know what your political views are, you’ve entirely given yourself away....” “Explain,” I said. “Why of course you are a Bolshevist, because at the end of your lecture when you offered to answer questions you said they must not be economic questions, because at the mere thought of economics your mind becomes a perfect blank. That is exactly the case with all Bolshevists!”

TUESDAY, MAY 17, 1921. _New York._

I dined with the G.‘s to meet Mr. Hearst. I have heard almost more about him than anyone in America, and I was curious to see him. Great was my disappointment when I was told that Hearst was not there. He had been called away suddenly to Boston.

Mrs. Hearst came, and I sat next to Mr. Brisbane. I did not feel he was amiably disposed towards me at first, but I was careful not to discuss Anglo-American relations or the Irish question, and when I told him I was contemplating educating my children over here Mr. Brisbane melted a little. We talked about the absent Hearst, whom I realize is a great storm centre in this country. I must meet him before my curiosity can be allayed. I want to get my own impression of him. Russia has taught me that individuals are not as the world says they are. Mrs. Hearst, who is very pretty, was treated like a queen. Men sat on the floor at her feet, admiringly, and social reformers sat at her elbow beseechingly, and she smiled and assented, and listened and promised, and did all that a perfectly good queen should do, and like a perfectly real queen, jewel crowned, she arose and left before anyone else. But not without my telephone number and address. Mr. Brisbane eventually dropped me home in his car, he too promised, in the name of the queen, that I should meet Hearst, and maybe--who knows? Meanwhile the mystery of Hearst is still unsolved for me, but I see that I shall now have to add to my daily’s the NEW YORK AMERICAN because of Brisbane. Already I read the HERALD on account of Frank Munsey, THE WORLD because of Herbert Swope, and the TIMES because of--well, because it originally god-fathered me! As well as the NATION, THE NEW REPUBLIC, the FREEMAN, LIBERATOR, and SOVIET RUSSIA, most of whom have given me “Luncheons”; also ARTS AND DECORATIONS, whose co-editor once told me in unmeasured terms exactly what he thought of me for attaching undue importance to the Soviet leaders by having the effrontery to go and portray them!

Thus, as my knowledge increases, my working time decreases!

SATURDAY, MAY 21, 1921.

Dick and I and Louise started off for the week-end, not knowing in the least where we were going to. Someone fetched us, our tickets were taken and we were put on a train for Philadelphia. At Philadelphia we were removed to a private car. The day was steaming hot, and Dick enjoyed standing out on the balcony at the end of the car. It reminded me of my journey to Moscow, the private car that met Kameneff was just like it, perhaps it was made in the U. S. At Harrisburg we had an hour to wait and went motoring in the town. First we visited the Capitol to see George Barnard’s sculpture groups. These are attached to the building on either side of the entrance, and they do not seem rightly to belong to the place. Perhaps Barnard is too individualistic to be architectural. We then drove along the riverside to the Country Club, which was opening that day. I must say, that if Harrisburg happened to be one’s “home-town,” or if by accident of fate one’s father or husband’s work attached one there, I can imagine living very happily in one of those riverside residences, bathed in sunshine, and prefaced with a lawn and trees--overlooking the great wide river with its islands and rapids, and the mountains beyond. It was truly grandiose.

Having in one hour “done” Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, we then continued our journey until we fetched up in a place called Chambersburg. This seemed to me remote, and detached from the world.

That evening a dance made of me a total wreck, but the next day was heavenly, spent in sleeping on the grass in the shadow of a bush. Dick tossed hay and said it smelt of home, and there was a rivulet which engulfed his boat, but he did not cry, he climbed onto the sluice gate and made believe the wheel was steering a real ship, and that comforted him. It was real, wild, ragged country, and we were happy. But it was a long way to go for one night and one day. On Sunday night we travelled back on the private car, sleeping fitfully. Since then Dick’s toy trains are all private cars, and I had hoped to make a good Socialist of him. All my work and plans are ruined. He seems to have become so very exclusive!

FRIDAY, MAY 27, 1921. _Philadelphia._

Having deposited Dick in New York, and having had a second inoculation for typhoid (preparatory for Mexico) and feeling quite ill, I returned to Philadelphia on Tuesday. The place is becoming almost familiar to me. It is not unlike an English old-world town, there are parts of it that recall Winchester, or even remote bits of London. I have come to work. When I was here last someone commissioned me to do her husband. “If you can get him to sit for you,” she said. I have got him. It is true he made every effort to evade me, to escape me, to postpone me. But I was determined not to be beat, and I gave him no loophole. Dr. Tait McKenzie has lent me his studio, and my victim comes there every morning from 11 to 1. He says he hates it, and he arrives protesting and resentful. But I like him, and we talk quite pleasantly all the time without stopping. I think he resents it less than he imagines. He has a good head, typically American.

When I get back in the afternoon to my friends in the Chilten Hills, where I am staying, I work in the loggia, on the portrait of their little daughter. She is the same age as my Margaret, and makes me feel rather homesick. To-morrow I return to New York, my work completed.

SUNDAY, MAY 29, 1921. _New York._

Dick and I with Kenneth, caught an 11:30 train for Croton. We lunched with Crystal Eastman and her husband, Walter Fuller, in a roadside cottage surrounded by roses. It was real country and, luxuriantly green, with the fresh immaturity of impending summer. In the orchard on the steep grassy hill behind the house the children climbed a cherry tree, and Dick brought me greenleafed branches hanging with ripe sweet cherries. After lunch we walked up the road to see the view from the top of the hill. There is a sort of Colony at Croton, and every other house is inhabited by someone one knows, or who knows the other. All work-worn journalists, artists and Bohemians generally, who come there with their children for a rest. The houses have no gardens, the grass grows long and the rose bushes are weed tangled. Now and then a bunch of peonies survives. The cottages have almost an abandoned look, for the town toilers are too weary to work in their gardens when they get there. Towards the hill summit I noticed a wooden veranda’d cottage, looking rather neglected and lonely, the ground sloped down to a stream where some yellow and some purple iris bloomed amid the waste. On the post box at the gate were inscribed the two names: Reed, Bryant, and sure enough it was the summer cottage of Jack Reed and his wife. My thoughts shot straight across to Moscow, and to the grave under the Kremlin wall. At the top of the hill we lay down in the long grass under the shadow of a giant tree, and felt like insects, with the butter-cups so much higher than ourselves, and the tall seed grasses like slender trees above our heads. Dick, who was unrestful, and looking for work, built a wall of loose stones between us, “to separate us,” he said, and that accomplished he proceeded to pull down a post and chain and dig up another. In my half somnolent state I was aware of much hammering and cracking and splitting but took no notice. After awhile Dick came running to me, and in some trepidation asked anxiously if he were likely to be put in prison.

“What on earth for?” I asked.

“Because I’ve been destroying the man’s property,” he said.

“What man?” I asked.

“The man whom this place belongs to.”

“Be happy,” I advised him; “be happy and enjoy whatever the work is you have undertaken even if it’s the destruction of the other fellow’s property.” And so Dick went back, and the sounds of hammering were mingled with a love song he’d learned from the gramaphone and no man disturbed our peace.

Returning whence we came, after a time, we sauntered into the garden of Mr. and Mrs. Boardman Robinson, there on a slope, overlooking the tennis court and the wonderful distant view of the Hudson; a large party eventually foregathered. Quite apart from the fact that it was pleasant, conditions made it extremely attractive. It was as though Greenwich Village in summer array had been dumped down with almost deliberate pageantry upon the grass. There were men in open-necked shirts, and there was one in a green sweater, another in a butcher blouse shirt and corduroy trousers like a French _ouvrier_. Women in yellow, and orange, children in royal blue, or bare-armed and bare-legged in bathing suits; lovely splotches of color grouped among the tree stems. Boardman Robinson, looking like a primitive man, with his red unkempt beard, bushy eyebrows and hair standing on end, lay on his stomach in the grass listening intently to Walter Fuller’s little sister, who sang old English folk songs to us, and sang them gracefully without any self-consciousness. Floyd Dell, the author of “Moon-Calf,” was there, and a great many people I didn’t know. And all the children were good (by a strange coincidence there was not a girl-child among them...!) and all the people were happy. One or two mothers asked me (and I looked at them twice to see if they were serious) when in my opinion conditions in Russian would be sufficiently adjusted to enable them to take their children there for education.

That evening, about 8:15, the train disgorged us in New York, and Dick, looking truly proletarian, went triumphantly two hours late to bed.

MONDAY, MAY 30, 1921.

I spent all the afternoon sitting to Emil Fuchs. He painted me last 15 years ago. Since then much water has flowed under the bridge. He did me then in a big Gainsborough hat and a fashionable black dress. I had just emerged from the school-room and my ambition was to look like a widow. To-day he did me in my yellow working smock.

I have known him since I was twelve years old, in the days when he worked in London and Edward VII was his patron. Success leaves no imprint on Fuchs. He is one of those modest ever-dissatisfied-with-himself, over-sensitive beings. He has never grown the extra skin which is one’s armor in dealing with the world. Fuchs is almost too sensitive, too deep feeling to be able to live at all. All his thoughts are beautiful thoughts, and if the world is not as beautiful as he demands it should be he feels almost suicidal with depression. He is the most generous-souled, pure-visioned person I have ever known. He likes very few people, and makes few friends, but those he does make are more devoted to him than other people’s friends are to them!

The picture began awfully well, I have great hopes and he was wildly enthusiastic. It was one of the few occasions on which I have seen him happy.

JUNE 2, 1921. _New York._

Yesterday I went downtown to the Mexican Consulate. As soon as I walked in, Tata-Nacho saw me, and this strange looking descendant of Montezuma, in a musty office, showed me every possible attention. It was not his fault that the acting consul sent me word that he was not sure if he could give me a visé, or not, as Bolsheviks are not wanted in Mexico! Think of Mexico becoming so respectable! I was asked to return the next day for my answer. This morning, feeling disinclined for a downtown journey on chance, I telephoned, demanding my visé by post or my refusal by phone. “There are other places to go to for the summer,” I explained, “and I don’t _have_ to go to Mexico!” The answer was that everything was in order.

I dined on the Astor roof in Broadway with M., who sails for Europe in the morning en route for Moscow. It is a delightfully planned place such as I have never seen before, and mixed with our talk of Russia, making a fitting background, “Macy’s” Scarlet Star, the communist emblem, stood defiantly illuminated against the sky.

MONDAY, JUNE 13, 1921. _New York._