Part 15

I slept little the night I got that letter and could not wait for the morrow when I could phone my darling. During those days I very often called Mr. Harding long distance. I usually called him at noon during my luncheon hour, and I went across the street to the Equitable Building. There was one particular girl who always got the call for me, and she grew so accustomed to getting it that as soon as I appeared above her at the switchboard, she inquired with a smile, “W. G. Harding--Senate Chamber?” Sometimes she was smiling broadly when I came out of the booth and I would not be surprised if she heard many interesting conversations.

But when I nodded to the telephone operator upon this particular occasion I just could not smile. I think she understood something was wrong. She put the call through quickly. I reached him, as usual, in the Senate Chamber. He was cool as could be over the phone and I apologized and apologized, though in truth I hardly knew what for! It grieved me to have him take such an unfair attitude. I was most disconsolate.

But the following day came his letter of forgiveness, yes, of humble apology, and his confession that it had been only his jealousy that had prompted him to write as he had and to speak to me over the phone in that way. He would never do so again, he was a “damned fool,” and so on, but he loved me so much. “And after all, dearie,” he wrote, “there is bound to be jealousy where there is love.” And I knew well he loved me greatly.

Curious that the only man who ever really caused Mr. Harding a moment of jealousy, on my account at least, should have been his opponent in the Presidential election of 1920!

_65_

This brings to my mind the little personal catechism I underwent upon that first visit to the White House. He had often in the early days questioned me concerning other, younger, men. Of these younger fellows he seemed not so much jealous as curious. But sometimes he pretended jealousy. He often said to me, “Nan, darling, I don’t want you to be a hermit maid.” And so I went occasionally to dinner or to the theatre with fellows nearer my own age. But I told Mr. Harding about them.

Now, upon this first visit in the White House I thought his interest in my social movements seemed almost pathetically curious. “Don’t go off and marry any of the fellows you meet, dearie!” he pleaded with me there on the dilapidated couch in the ante-room. As he spoke he blushed faintly. “I love you so much. Nan--and I don’t like to have you be with anybody else--that’s the real truth!” he finished lamely. I could have screamed my delight at his concern. If he could only have realized that the liveliness exhibited there with him was for me only reaction to the stimulation I felt always when around him. Why, back in Chicago I felt weak, and ill. I hugged him and whispered soothing negations in his ear, denying emphatically that I should ever marry at all since I could not marry him. Free or not free, I told him, I preferred Warren Harding to all the other men in the world put together.

There would be opportunities for intimate companionship, he promised. I told him _I_ was in no danger of being a hermit maid in that event. I was free to be with him just as in the old days. And I hoped he was going to be equally free. Yet somehow I inwardly lamented the personal restrictions I felt the presidency would impose. I think it took Warren Harding a few months to discover these restrictions.

After I returned to Chicago from my initial trip to Washington and the White House, I prepared to go to New York. Scott, Elizabeth and Elizabeth Ann were going down on a farm in Illinois, which is the home of Scott’s people, and I left Chicago for New York about the same time. That was in August. Scott’s mother and father adored the baby; she seemed to make everyone love her, and people outside of the family spoke about her “adorable smile,” which is the smile of her father.

On July 30th, 1921, I took Elizabeth Ann and went away for two days. I wanted to be alone with her for a little space, away from everybody. We took a lake boat and went across to St. Joseph, Michigan. Going over it was a lot of fun for me to speak to strangers openly as “her mother,” for Elizabeth Ann was too small to know things, and her affection for me was always the very natural affection of a daughter for her mother. We stopped at a hotel in St. Joseph, the name of which I have forgotten, and the next day some time I held Elizabeth Ann in my arms while one of those “tin-type” photographers snapped our picture, which eventually found its way to Washington. She was so small that we could not do much except walk about a bit and take a long ride in a touring car which I hired by the hour. I remember Elizabeth Ann slept most of the rather uninteresting ride we took about the country, but we were at least together--mother and darling baby--and for two whole days!

When we crossed the gang-plank to board the steamer on our return, a gentleman asked if he might assist me with my bag. I carried the baby. I turned later to thank him and said, “Thank you very much, sir.” Elizabeth Ann, with characteristic mimicry, looked up at him and echoed, her Harding smile very evident, “Ver’ much, ver’ much,” which delighted the whole crowd.

_66_

I stopped at the White House enroute East in August. I went to see President Harding as soon as Tim Slade could make an appointment for me. It seems to me that appointment was in the late afternoon, though it is difficult to remember these details.

Leaving Elizabeth Ann had again thrown me into a state of mental depression I could not shake off, and I was far from normally strong and well in spite of the enormous good Dr. Barbour had done me. As he said, I had been “pretty far gone nervously.”

I told Mr. Harding I contemplated plans for combining work with a course at Columbia University that fall and winter. He heartily approved of this. I told him I had understood that secretarial positions were scarce in New York, but that if I _could_ get a good all-day position I would take it and attend Columbia at night, unless the strain proved too great. He did not encourage me to take an all-day position, but he did make some suggestions with regard to obtaining work, and offered to give me a card of introduction, and to write a letter in my behalf, to the Collector of the Port of New York, Mr. George Aldridge, whose office was of course in the Customs Building, Battery Place. He told me Mr. Aldridge had been one of his appointees and that he did not hesitate to ask such a favor of him. The card Mr. Harding gave me to present to Mr. Aldridge merely bore his name, Warren G. Harding, and, in his handwriting, “Introducing Miss Britton.”

Remembering Mr. Harding’s remark about making me White House stenographer, a remark made to me one night in the earlier days when we had dined at the Manhattan and I had lovingly prophesied the position he now held, I said to him, “Sweetheart, couldn’t you let me come down here and work?” I told him it would help to make me happier, inasmuch as it didn’t seem possible for me to remain in Chicago and be only a third parent to Elizabeth Ann. It was during that visit, I remember, that his woman stenographer came in. I was sitting in a chair near Mr. Harding’s desk and Mr. Harding was seated in his chair at the desk. The stenographer came across the room and Mr. Harding looked up and smiled and said, “Can’t read it?” She pointed to the words she couldn’t make out (in his handwriting so familiar to me!) and he read them for her. After she had gone out and closed the door, I said wistfully, “Oh, I wish _I_ could work for you, darling!” Mr. Harding smiled--the old smile of indulgence and love I liked to think he smiled best at _me_--but shook his head. “It would never do, dearie,” he said. Then he went on to picture in the face of his refusal how he would _love to have me_, and how, if I _were_ his stenographer he would give me _all_ his dictation just to have me with him, and he feared the nation’s business would suffer! Thus it was that he would picture for me the things he would love to do, making their impossibility a thing of unspeakable disappointment to me, and causing me to exclaim more than once, “Oh, I _wish_ you weren’t in this position!”

We talked over the situation with regard to Elizabeth Ann and I explained to Mr. Harding how difficult it had become to really work out the three-cornered parentage. He said, “Well, just wait, dearie. Some of these days I’ll take her myself,” but that prospect was at least four years off, which to me seemed an eternity.

I showed him snapshots of Elizabeth Ann we had taken, and particularly one which to me is the image of her father. He was delighted with everything. We had to talk so fast, too, in order to say everything to each other; and even then I never failed to leave without realizing I had forgotten dozens of things I meant to say to him. It wasn’t at all as it had been in the days when he was Senator. And his statement to me, repeated substantially every time I went to the White House, only added to my sorrow after I had left him--“I find myself longing to take baby girls in my arms, dearie--I never used to feel so deeply moved,” he would say, and the lights in his eyes were divine.

Mr. Harding gave me several hundred dollars and admonished me to be careful in spending it so that people wouldn’t talk about me. Then I left him. I do not really know the usual length of my visits with Mr. Harding in the White House, but I do know that it is not possible for sweethearts to spend three-fourths of their time in making up for lost kisses and have much time left to discuss serious affairs. These visits were never satisfying in length of time.

_67_

I went down to the Custom House to see Mr. Aldridge almost as soon as I reached New York, armed with Mr. Harding’s card of introduction. The deputy, Mr. Stewart, took me in to Mr. Aldridge’s office. With Mr. Aldridge was another man whom he introduced to me, “Colonel William Hayward, another friend of the President.”

The letter which Mr. Harding had told me he would write to Mr. Aldridge had not as yet reached the latter’s hands, and so I was obliged to explain my errand. Mr. Aldridge assured me he would do all in his power to assist me, and Col. Hayward volunteered to do the same. I thanked them both and tried to make it clear to Mr. Aldridge, after Col. Hayward had gone out, that I needed the position from the standpoint of salary, thinking by so doing I would entirely disarm him of any suspicion as to why President Harding had taken the pains to intercede for me.

I have often wished I had asked him frankly in the days that followed to see the letter which Mr. Harding actually wrote to him. I imagine the President wrote that I was the “daughter of an old friend,” etc. But evidently what he did write was sufficiently strong. For two weeks there were a good many people down there working directly or indirectly to find a suitable position for the President’s friend! I am afraid they all thought I wanted something much finer than I actually desired. Mr. Aldridge early turned the onus of the job upon his assistant, Mr. Stewart. Col. Hayward interviewed me with (what he said was) a view to creating a position in his own office for me in case I found nothing that pleased me.

As a matter of fact, I did not obtain work at all as a result of the efforts exerted in my behalf by the Custom House officials. I took the civil service examination at that time, but, having used my shorthand only spasmodically since I left the Steel Corporation, my speed was cut in half and I fell down on the stenographic examination, though I passed creditably in typing.

The position I finally obtained came entirely through my own personal contacts with employment bureaus, and was with an advertising man who employed me mornings and certain afternoons during the week. The rest of the time I spent getting out work for my journalistic course at Columbia.

I located at 314 West 72nd Street, in a room on the top floor of a studio apartment building. This structure has since been torn down and one of the newer type of tall apartment buildings substituted.

Mr. Harding had always encouraged me to write as much as possible, praising me for my letters which I wrote to him and which he said were the most graphic letters he had ever read. He used to tell me how he kept them under lock and key until he had absorbed every line of them, often taking them to the Senate Chamber, where he so often wrote to me, sitting apart from the other senators. “I am writing to you within hearing of epoch-making speeches,” or “I am writing near the scene of important legislative events,” he often said in his letters to me. And the knowledge that he had so often expressed what seemed to me was genuine pride in my writing encouraged me more than anything to strive for a certain goal that year at Columbia--that goal being a fair mark of excellence, of course.

_68_

In October of that year, 1921, I went again to Washington. I do not remember at which hotel I stopped on each occasion, but on my various visits to Washington I have stopped at the Raleigh, New Ebbitt, Harrington, New Willard, Capitol Park, and, I think, at the Washington.

It seems to me it was upon this visit that Mr. Ferguson, another secret service man, met me at the station with his Ford coupe. I do not remember very distinctly whether it was after or before my conference with the President that Mr. Ferguson asked if I would like to occupy some of my time by driving. I thanked him and he took me for a drive out along the Potomac. He seemed curious about me and endeavored to “draw me out.” It gave me the keenest pleasure to pretend to misunderstand his questions and to be naively ignorant of the motive behind them. I am sure he must have despaired of being enlightened as to my identity, even though the President had given him my correct name.

I told Mr. Harding at that time that I felt he was very foolish to allow anyone but Tim Slade to meet me. I voiced my own faith in Tim’s trustworthiness and put it up to him direct.

“Don’t you _trust_ Tim Slade, sweetheart?” I inquired.

I remember right where Mr. Harding stood, beside his desk, when I asked him this. He shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyebrows as he answered, “Oh, measurably!” He told me he had tried to get Tim on that occasion, but he was either busy or out of the city--probably out of the city, for it always seemed to me Tim was at my beck and call, and I am sure he must have been more so at the President’s. But I managed to convince Mr. Harding that every new man he sent to me was just “one more,” and he agreed we might better stick to Tim. “I like Slade all right,” he conceded when I pressed him for an opinion. In fact, as time went on, I was sure an element of affection in Mr. Harding’s attitude toward the man who was our confidential intermediary. In any event, that was the one and only time that Mr. Ferguson met me in Washington, although he did come on one occasion to Chicago with some money when the President was unable to secure Tim Slade’s services. Tim himself reminded me of this in one of the many talks we have had during the past two years.

The President listened eagerly to the latest news I had received from my sister Elizabeth concerning our child, and upon these visits to Washington I would invariably take with me pencilled scratches from Elizabeth Ann, these constituting the “letters” she would occasionally send to me. Naturally the enthusiasm with which I began these recitals ended in tears for me, for I could not talk long with her father about her without crying. And Mr. Harding’s eyes would grow heavy with sadness as he turned the conversation into other channels and pulled out a ready handkerchief to dry my eyes. He would try so hard to bring a smile to my face!

“What did you say to Woodrow Wilson that made him laugh when he rode with you the day of your inauguration?” I inquired of him upon one such occasion of weeping.

“Why, dearie, I don’t know! Did I make him laugh?” he asked, himself deeply amused at my query. I told him he must have done so because it was in the papers. He smiled whimsically, seeming to get quite a kick out of my credulity as to the accuracy of newspaper accounts.

Mr. Harding wanted to know whether I liked my work, and intimated that he either had already spoken to another steel man who was a friend of his or he intended to speak to him--J. Leonard Replogle. I know Mr. Harding played golf with Mr. Replogle and two other men some time that fall on Long Island. But I did not encourage him to use his influence in getting me into another permanent position, for my movements were too uncertain those days.

During that visit I asked Mr. Harding if I might be taken through the rooms in the White House. We discussed the possibility of my running into Mrs. Harding, and Mr. Harding said it was possible, though not probable. It didn’t seem to worry him, and I was confident I could handle such a situation, anyway. The only time I had met Mrs. Harding, since the time back in 1915, when I went to their home on Mt. Vernon Avenue in Marion to congratulate Mr. Harding upon his election to the United States Senate, was one day in Chicago shortly after Mr. Harding’s nomination for the Presidency. I had a friend with me who was interested to meet Mrs. Harding and we waited in the Florentine Room of the Congress Hotel, where we knew Mrs. Harding intended coming to hold a brief reception. I was entirely at ease with her when she finally made her appearance. And, if I may be permitted to so assume without seeming presumptuous, there was in her manner toward me almost an affection as I took her arm and led her over to where my friend stood who wished to meet her. And so, there in the White House, I felt entirely free from any apprehensions regarding Mrs. Harding’s attitude toward me should we meet there.

“Sure, go along, Nan, and see the place!” said Mr. Harding when I was ready to leave, or rather when he told me it was time for me to go. As I look back upon that visit now, it is as though he might have said to me, “Sure, visitors are allowed to go through the prison! Go along!” for as a prison he soon regarded the White House.

That was the first time Mr. Harding had seen my squirrel coat and he remarked that it was very beautiful. “But, Nan, darling, do be careful! How in the world do you explain these expensive-looking things?” I assured him I had not been approached for any explanations and I was sure I could handle the situation if I were. As a matter of fact, later on, when I went to school at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, I did feel obliged to make certain explanations, and I simply named my sister as the donor of all things beyond reasonable possibility of my own acquirement.

And so this particular visit ended with Mr. Ferguson, of the secret service, taking me through the White House reception rooms, the private dining-room, and many others which I was told were usually barred from public view. We made our exit by the entrance which is on the left of the portico as one enters the White House.

_69_

I was growingly introspective those days and especially after a trip to the White House. I would ponder morbidly a future, four years of which (Mr. Harding’s presidential years) seemed unalterably mapped out beyond hope of change, wherein I seemed to be shut out from the happiness I so longed to share with the two people I loved more than all else. I was selfish to the point of forgetting that the man down in Washington whom I loved and who loved me, as he kept writing me, “more than the world,” was also bearing a burden of loneliness such as he never dreamed would be his lot. So far he had not complained to me, though I felt the presence of much unrest and unhappiness even as early as the visits I made to him that fall. His was an attitude of constant hopefulness; mine of constant regret for the conditions of our entire situation.

Already I could not measure the regret I was experiencing as a result of the steps I had permitted to be taken in order to protect Elizabeth Ann “legally,” that she might have a name and home. After all, would I not have to undo all this when I revealed to her her real identity, which I certainly expected to do? What, then, would be the good of having provided her with a protection which was utterly false fundamentally, notwithstanding the fact that I could not doubt the kindly intentions of my sister and her husband? Where was the justice of a law which would deprive a mother, worthy to be a mother, of her child simply because that child was born a “love-child”? Should not all children be love-children? But were they? I remember once a girl friend of mine said to me when I charged her with insincerity in her marriage, “Well, you _know_, Nan, a woman _has_ to marry if she wants to have children!” She herself was no more in love with her husband than with the telephone pole outside her very beautiful home, and was in truth later on divorced. But she had “protected” her child! Mr. Harding was not free to offer me such protection, though he loved me, avowedly before God, far more than he had ever loved any other woman.

I have often wondered whether I would have been tempted to act in defiance of social conventions in taking my child openly myself, had her father been a man of lesser rank. I only know that during the period of which I am speaking, within the early months of Mr. Harding’s presidency, I was rebelling with all my heart at the situation as it existed, blame for which seemed to rest upon “the law.” Only my daily work and conscientious efforts to make good in my journalistic course at Columbia kept me from being unfair to everyone and upsetting a legalized regime.

And my rebellion was as fiercely directed against the law as it affected Mr. Harding as it was against the law as it affected myself. His attention to and love for little children during his tenure of office as President was marked sufficiently to prove, even to one who preferred to doubt, the sincerity in his heart when he voiced to me his longing just “to hold little girls.” Bless him! By all the laws of God and man certainly Warren G. Harding was entitled to nurture this spring of hidden father-love! Other little girls he could fondle openly, but his own dear child he dared not acknowledge, nor bestow upon her the love he felt, before a narrow-minded and censorious public.