INTRODUCTION (continued 2)

He asked me who I’d studied with. I forgot to ask him. He abused Epstein and showed Mrs. Junius all the worst things in the Epstein book. Mrs. Junius, who is an amateur, and conventional, was not able to appreciate the best of Epstein. B. asked me fiercely if I had come to this country to live; I don’t know if I have or not, I told him, I thought not!

As we were preparing to go, he pulled himself together. Either he wanted to atone or the vision of our departure put new life into him. He turned to me suddenly and said, “What do you think of Lenin?”

He then held forth to us on the three men of contemporary history, Kaiser Wilhelm, President Wilson, and Lenin. The former who had inherited his power, the second who had it offered to him, the third who took it. We agreed that the greatest of the three is the one who takes it. What had the other two done with their invested power? Let us see what Lenin is still to do.

I dined with Mrs. Willard Straight, almost the nicest woman I’ve met since I arrived here. She gives one a feeling of sincerity and absence of pose. She is real. It was a delightful party, the Walter Lipmanns and Bullitts and B. Berenson, all people I like, were there. Her house has the right atmosphere.

March 23, 1921.

I spent the afternoon at Knoedlers, who have very generously taken on my exhibition from the Numesmatic Society for two weeks. My things look well in their big room, and it is comic to see the Soviet leaders daring to show their faces in Fifth Avenue! No one looks at Winston or Asquith, they go straight to the Russians, as though fascinated with horror!

Crystal Eastman and her husband took me to dinner at the Hill Club, where I had to speak. I sat between Mr. Boardman Robinson and Dr. Parker. Boardman Robinson is the author of the cartoon in the Liberator, “Capitalism Looks Itself Over,” a horrible and terrible and wonderful conception. Mr. Robinson has red hair and beard. He looks like the pictures of Judas Iscariot or maybe it’s St. Peter he reminds me of. In which case small chance of Heaven for the rich! He’d unlock the gates to all the radicals.

Dr. Parker is a psycho-analycist, bearded and bespectacled. Alarming at first—one is inevitably ill at ease with a psycho-analycist. It is not vanity to say that one instantly becomes self-conscious, as if the deep-eyed man were already analysing one, and looking down into a heart that perhaps does not bear looking into! Finally I discussed the thing with him openly. I told him that I knew nothing of psycho-analysis and didn’t want to—that I thought it encouraged people to become even more concentrated upon themselves than they were already! Then, the ice being broken, we talked openly and simply about anything and everything. He took his glasses off and became quite unserious. It was due partly to him that when I stood up to speak I was in a flippant mood. Either the party took its mood from me, or I from it. I rather incline to the latter. At all events, I said all I wanted to say, uncompromisingly, about Russia. I put forth all the best that I had seen. I risked the label of Bolshevik and propagandist. Indeed, as I pointed out to them—Bolshevism is over ... the New York papers have it in headlines—! England has signed the trade agreement, Lenin has ceased to be Red and Bolshevism is over! Therefore I am free at last to say what I like. And the people who listen have no longer the cause for panic! I went on lightly and humorously and they laughed, laughed even when I didn’t expect them to.

Thursday, March 24, 1921.

At my exhibition at Knoedlers’, continue to meet new people and make new friends. This afternoon I was introduced to Morris Korbel, the Czecho-Slovak sculptor. He asked to know me and was complimentary about my work which is much from a fellow sculptor. He is good looking in a foreign way—wild haired, deep eyed, deep voiced, rather intense and dramatic in his personality. He told me he was going to Europe in a week as his wife was there. He said he was intellectually starved, and must get back for a while to the old world. He said that I should find I could only live here about nine months on end without going away. He was, nevertheless appreciative of the generosity and hospitality of America. “They take their pound of flesh,” he said, “but they are generous and appreciative in turn. But one must go, and come back, and go again ...” he said.

He admitted that he went to Europe this time with some reluctance, as he had planned to go to Mexico where he had a portrait order to do President Obregon. I suddenly had a vision ... “Are you definitely not going to do that order?” I asked him. He said he thought not. “Then will you hand it on to me...?” I saw my new road mapped out before me. Korbel did not say a great deal, he probably thought I was not serious or that it was not practicable. “The Mexicans are not like the Bolsheviks—” he said warningly. (One up for my friends the Bolsheviks!! Even reliability is only a matter of comparison—!)

He asked me to lunch with him tomorrow at the Ritz and then I will pursue this thing further.

Friday, March 25, 1921.

Lunched with Morris Korbel at the Ritz, and had an orgy of discussion. He is full of thoughts. He sees the world from the point of view of a looker-on. His analysis of the United States and its inhabitants was very illuminating. I am still watching, and undecided. He has his views. He thinks it is a great country and (with the exception of New York) more appreciative of Art and more encouraging than any other country. Moreover, it has developed its own Art. We compiled together a goodly list of American artists. He talked about the extraordinary advance of America in architecture, for instance—over any other country in the world today, and its efficiency in Science, and Hygiene. He described to me “the west,” the agricultural districts, the orchards—how they are planted, and drained. How the sluice gates open once a day and acres are watered systematically. How these people just “rape Nature,” as he expressed it, and get all there is to be had out of it. We reviewed the miracle of the race. How all the foreign peoples come into the melting pot and turn out an American type. He said, and truly, that with the exception of England, no country breeds women with such long legs and thin ankles and wrists. They are beautiful. And as for the men—where else do they rise from working men and become Kings? (“In Soviet Russia!” I murmured.)

Kenneth Durant fetched me at six-thirty and we took the over-head-railway and went to East Side. Where, making our way through a maze of playing children, we dined in the Roumanian restaurant. It was as though in a few minutes one had suddenly gone abroad to a foreign country. I have never had the sensation in New York that I was a foreigner, perhaps that is because I am half American, or because we all speak English.

In the East Side people talked Italian or else that other strange language that newspapers are printed in, and which looks like a mixture of Russian and Arabic! A newspaper boy brought in the evening papers to the Roumanian restaurant while we were there, and when I asked him if he couldn’t bring in something I could read, the other people laughed. We ordered some steak for our dinner, and when the waiter brought enough for a school treat I exclaimed, and he said, “In Broadway they serve the dishes—here we serve the food!” They did indeed; even sharing it with a starving cat I couldn’t get through with it. The restaurant was rather a good one and very clean. I reproached Kenneth for not having taken me somewhere with more local color. I hate being treated as a Bourgeoise.

The evening was very warm, and the restaurant door was open. East Side has its background of sound like any other place. In Pittsburgh it is the sound of the mills, like the roar of the sea. In New York it is the trams and the traffic and the overhead trains. In East Side (at night) it is the voices of laughing playing children. What heaps of children! The streets were full of them. One tumbled over them, one bumped into them, one dodged them, as in the side streets of Naples. Some of the smaller children, smaller than Dick, sat crumpled up in a doorway or leaning against a lamp-post, weary and sleepy. It was nearly ten o’clock at night, and they were not in bed. The streets were strewn with papers as after a picnic. I said to Kenneth, “Why aren’t the streets cleaned?” and he said because people were so busy cleaning the streets where I live. I said, “Why don’t the children go to bed?” and he said because there were twenty people to a room, and it was easier to leave the children out in the street as long as possible.

We walked and walked, a long way, through ill-lit side streets where women sat out on their door-steps, watching sleeping babies in perambulators, or suckling them at the breast. The main streets were brightly lit, and the stalls by the sidewalk were doing a busy trade in tawdry goods as in the Zucharefski Market of Moscow. We bought roast chestnuts and ate them as we walked along. I bought a pot of red tulips growing—for Dick. They were cheaper here, but they were heavy and Kenneth had to carry them, but he didn’t complain.

Saturday, March 26, 1921.

We have been here nearly two months, and in those two months we have learnt that American ideas are on the whole, good ideas. There is usually reason in most things that Americans do, and good reasons, as for instance, in prohibition. But there is another prohibition quite different from the one that most people talk about, and it’s unexplained. It concerns Dick. When I say that it concerns him I do not mean that it affects him alone. He is merely voicing the great “why?” of a million children, who may not walk on the grass in Central Park. “Keep Off”—“Keep Off” is written everywhere. It takes a great many men in, uniform to enforce this prohibition. Strong men, vigilant men, diligent men, too. Just as the policemen seem to be picked for Fifth Avenue traffic, policemen who seem to be entirely friendly towards children, whose one idea is to help them across the street and to laugh and joke with them as he does so (Dick has several friends on the Avenue) just so the parkmen seem to be picked for their job. They are hard men, cold men, they smile not neither do they joke. They are like people who have been too long with children. I learnt my lesson a few days ago when for a great treat Dick took me for a walk in Central Park. With the perfect courage of an ignorant person, I tossed my head, drank in deep breaths of fresh spring air, and strode out across the open. It was the first day of spring, and how good it seemed. Suddenly Dick seized my arm and pointing to a distant blot in the landscape said to me, “That is for you—don’t you hear the whistle?” I confessed I heard a whistle, but I thought someone was calling a dog. “That is for you to get off the grass—.” But I was a long way on the grass. I seemed to be in the middle of a sea of green. True, no one was on it but myself, but that had not seemed to me peculiar. If I thought about it at all I just thought Americans were too busy to loaf like me, in the sun.

“Are you sure we mayn’t walk on the grass?” I asked Dick. He was quite sure, and made some signal to the whistleman to the effect that we would remove ourselves to the far distant path.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked him. And then I learnt what prohibition means; that you do the thing that is prohibited just as often as you can, until you are found out. What a game for one’s early days—to dodge the law, and deliberately break it on every possible occasion.

I asked a park-keeper whom I met later on what the regulations were and learnt that towards May there are certain places in the park that may be walked on, in turn. This will be indicated by a flag flying high or a flag lying low, I couldn’t quite make out. The children had been unlucky this year, the keeper said, because there had been so little snow, which enables them to go anywhere.

Dick is unlucky, because he arrived in New York in February, and will leave before May, so he has missed and will miss any chance of walking on the grass!

This afternoon we were lent a car, so I drove him, with Louise, to a part of Central Park that he has talked of for days. It was not the grassy part (the view of that green space was enjoyed very much. It was most gratifying and pleasing to the eye as we sped by luxuriously in our limousine!). I dropped him at the wooded hillside which is like the country. You can see no houses, just wooded slopes and streams and waterfalls and ponds. He took his submarine and his steamer with him, and I left him there. When he came home in the evening I asked him if he had enjoyed it. He said, “The park men wouldn’t let me sail my ships—but I did!” He went on to explain that whenever he put his ships in the water a whistle was blown. Finally he and Louise got under a bridge, and under cover succeeded in breaking the prohibition rule for some time.

“Some day—,” and there was a gleam in Dick’s eye that was something more than just the naughty look of a mischievous boy—“someday when I am a man, I shall have a gun, and I shall shoot every man with a whistle.” “Oh, Dick,” I protested. “Yes I shall—I shall be a Revolutioner!”

And that is surely the effect on the young of a prohibition that cannot be explained. Dick knows of no reason why he should not walk on the grass, nor sail his ships in the streams; what is grass for? Why is there a park at all? There is one pond in Central Park for children’s ships, and there is a playground for children’s balls. But one small pond and one dusty playground, what is that among so many children? In such a big park?

On St. Patrick’s Day, Dick and I came back through the Park from the Metropolitan Museum, and the procession was still passing by. People might not even stand on a rocky eminence to look over the wall. A parkman stood there, whistle in mouth, proudly, defiantly, king of all he surveyed. Over the wall came the sound of the bands, and the marching feet, but only the park-keeper could see the procession. Big-eyed children stood there, open-mouthed, at the sound of the “Wearing of the Green.” Truly he was not an Irishman, that park-keeper. And now I feel sad, and rather anxious, as spring is coming. I have work that keeps me a while longer in the city. Should I send Dick to a boarding-school in the country, so that he may enjoy the spring? So that he should not have daily to endure the sight of green grass viewed from a narrow gravel path, a path in which he may not even dig, or build sand castles. Must I send him away so that he shall not grow into a law-breaker and a “Revolutioner”?

What we really want to know, is: Who does the green grass grow for, in Central Park?

Monday March 28, 1921.

Have spent the Easter week-end in bed. I slept almost on end for sixty-eight hours, mentally and physically perfectly exhausted. It was heaven being in bed, and I didn’t attempt to read nor write, or even think.

Today I arose, slightly rested, and lunched with Emil Fuchs. Louis Wiley was the only other presence. I like seeing him, I always discover which way the wind is blowing. We talked about England’s trade agreement with Russia, and I said—rather provokingly perhaps, “I suppose America is waiting to see if Russia really has anything to trade with. It would be a great joke if she has, and if England gets it all.” Mr. Wiley answered rather maliciously, “England can have it—she needs it, and it may help her to pay us back—.”

So! That’s the undercurrent, is it?

Tuesday, March 29, 1921.

I dined in Brooklyn and spoke afterwards at the Twentieth Century Club. This had been arranged for me by Mr. Keedick. I asked what sort of audience I should have to talk to, (meaning would it be radical, reactionary, artistic, or semitic—) and was told they were “ladies and gentlemen!” Thus illuminated I trimmed my sails accordingly. I dined with some charming people first, and to my astonishment, there was a most beautiful Sir Joshua in the drawing-room. It was a lovely nude bacchante, and at her feet a little faun playing the flute. I asked incredulously, “Is that a real Sir Joshua?” My hostess answered, “Yes, and I confess I am very fond of it, though I never should have thought I could have a nude in my drawing-room, especially with a daughter growing up.”

Friday, April 1, 1921.

I have had rather a wonderful morning. I was taken to the apartment of a man who collects Italian primitives. He is young, as yet only about twenty-seven, and one of the amazing products of this country. His mother, they say, was a washer-woman, (why not?) and he determined to go through college. At Harvard he paid his own way by buying up the trouser press industry and syndicating it, and putting himself at the head. He made a fortune by pressing the undergraduates’ trousers. This is the “on-dit,” probably it is quite inaccurate, and he would tell a very different story. Anyway it’s a good story, and the fundamental thing is that he arose, from nowhere, out of the blue, so to speak. What his work is now I didn’t hear, but he is collecting Italian primitives. We saw them all before he came in. There were Botticelli’s, Fra Angelico’s, Filippo Lippi, Bellini, and countless others. Each one was lovely, and one felt much loved. The rooms were simply but beautifully furnished with Italian pieces. In the dining-room the table was laid, and next to the owner’s place was a book from which he reads out a little prayer, for grace, before each meal. It sounded affected, but I was assured it came from a deeply fervent spirit. I marvelled much over this young man before I saw him. His bedroom was chaste and hung with Madonnas, he had tall candles and things that suggested holiness! There was only one personal note in the whole place, the photograph of a very modern lovely girl.

Later, the owner arrived, a perfectly simple, unaffected, enthusiastic boy, who knew all about his treasures and could tell about them. He had the face of a Mantegna picture, and the stiff white modern collar made him of today. Otherwise he was quite in keeping. There certainly was no pose about him, and no suggestion of nouveau-riche.

Every day that I am in this country I am more amazed. What has produced this curious type, that earns millions and prefers to spend on pre-Raphaelites rather than on race horses?

I lunched with Emil Fuchs, who had a nice party, among whom Frank Munsey, a curious personality. Intellectual but so, so cold. I managed once to make him half smile. He came afterwards to Knoedler’s, he looked at everything, silently, and left hurriedly without any expression of opinion.

I dined with the Rosens, and Benjy Guiness and McEvoy and Purcell Jones were of the party. While they went on to the box that Laurette Taylor had given me for “Peg of My Heart” I went to the Town Hall and made a Pacifist speech at a Disarmament meeting.

Sunday, April 3, 1921.

Dined with the Swopes, it being Mrs. Swope’s birthday party.

I had a long talk with Barney Baruch who came in afterwards. I had not seen him since that bewildering night when I first arrived, and thought he was Mr. Brooke! I’ve never forgotten him, he has a dominating personality, and a nose and a brow that I keep modelling in my mind while I am talking to him. But he is “the king with two faces,” he can look hard and Satanic one minute, kind and gentle the next. He has a great love of Winston, and a loyalty to Wilson. His ideas about life and the world in general are fine. He has the dynamic force of a Revolutionary, but his idealism is to get the world straight sanely, calmly and constructively, not violently, bitterly and destructively. He believes in an ideal League of Nations, and in reasoning rather than arming. The answer to all that is, that nothing gets done at all except by force, bitterness and violence, and so Russia is the only one among us who has gotten something done! Perhaps if there were more Barney Baruchs in the world something might evolve, who knows. I don’t really know enough about him and his life, and to what purpose he puts his activities.

He talked to me a good deal about his father and mother, especially his mother. He has that Jewish love of family. I always like to hear a man eulogise his mother, it makes me realize my own responsibility towards Dick. If a man can remember the things his mother said to him in early life, then my talking to Dick is not as vain as it would seem.

Jews are wonderful parents, and wonderful children. Moreover they are the cultured people in the world. They chiefly are our Art patrons. It always amuses me in this country when people ask me if Russia is entirely run by Jews. I didn’t meet half as many there as I have met here!

Tuesday, April 5, 1921.

Dined with Mr. Otto Kahn at his house, a small party, and went on afterwards to Carnegie Hall to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra which was heavenly.

At dinner we discussed the psychology of men and women here. He has a fine analytical mind. We talked of the American woman being starved emotionally. He said about the position of women in different countries, “Here they are an ornament, in England they are an object, in France they are a passion.” It is a good summing up.

We talked about Bolshevism. He had an amusing point of view, so different from the usual “foaming-at-the-mouth” reactionary. He said that the Russians are naturally an anarchistic and rebellious people incapable of self-government. That Bolshevism was a form of self-expression that would pass, as everything would pass—but why, he said, take it so tragically? It was none of our business! The world had lost its sense of humor. Our attitude towards the Russian experiment should be that of interested spectators. But the idea of getting cross about it, of exchanging furious notes, of sending soldiers to “walk up the hill and down again.” It was ridiculous! He talked of Bolshevism as a great play, and the Bolsheviks as being living actors, fulfilling their part dramatically, but that play acted in French, or English, or Italian, was another thing. What would succeed in Russia would fail in translation....

Wednesday, April 6, 1921.

A Heaven-sent day. As warm as the best summer day in England. I went out without a coat. They tell me it is a cold day in comparison to what we will get. Never yet have I found anything warm enough. Rome in June was just satisfying. If I might only go down into Hell and sculp the Devil, how happy I would be.

Ever since March 21st, I have spent almost every afternoon at Knoedlers, but today, I jibbed, it was too good a day to stay in. Besides, I feel as if I can’t bear compliments and praise another moment. It was wonderful at first, one felt flattered, pleased, amused. The various remarks were entertaining, but they are almost without variety, and in the end one longs not to have to smile the smile of appreciation that will not come off, there seems so little to say in reply to “How wonderful! How clever you are, how living they are, how brave you were, what brutes they look— — —” I just stand first on one leg and then on the other and look silly and feel worse. If anyone bought anything, or wanted to be done, it would be different, but I feel that Knoedlers have generously taken a great deal of trouble and been awfully kind, and gained nothing. People treat my exhibition as a sort of free “Madame Tussaud’s,” and there the thing ends.

I’m told it has been a great success. If success is measured by the quantities of people who visit it, then “Yes”—the critics have certainly been splendid to me. For the rest, if I have any complaint to make, it is due, I suppose, to the “slump” that I am told prevails. A slump is prosperity compared to Europe, and I have not been here in normal times, so can make no comparison.

I feel rather with the policeman in the Avenue, Dick’s friend, who said to Louise, “Look at them! Look at them!” pointing at the motors, “all day long they pass back and forth. Gee! How rich people must be, no wonder the world comes and asks us for relief funds—!”

I dined with Kenneth Durant and Ernestine Evans, Crystal Eastman and a young Art critic from Boston. We went afterwards to see “Emperor Jones.” This is practically a one man play, and its success is due to the genius of Gilpin, the colored actor. It is a grim and powerful representation, that the “grand Guignol” might well produce. The only thing is that it deals so entirely with the psychology of the colored race that no European would quite understand it. I would have lost a lot of it if Kenneth hadn’t explained here and there. I see the negro in a new light. He used to be rather repulsive to me, but obviously he is human, has been very badly treated, and suffers probably a good deal from the terrific race prejudice that prevails here. It must be humiliating to an educated colored man, that he may not walk down the street with a white woman, nor dine in a restaurant with her. I wonder about the psychology of the colored man, like the poet, Mackaye, who came to see me a few days ago and who is as delightful to talk to as any man one could meet. In this play the civilized negro adventurer, who has established himself Emperor of an island, has to fly to the woods in the face of a rebellion. He grows weak from hunger, and finally, overcome by superstitious fears, goes slowly mad, and scene after scene in which he is practically alone on the stage, shows the man going back further and further towards his origin. It is terribly interesting, and at the end I felt the colored actor had scored a triumph, and that the white audience could not be feeling very proud.

Friday, April 8, 1921.

Mr. Villard asked me to lunch down town with the staff of The Nation. We were nine people and conversation was general. I heard a good deal of American politics which it interests me to absorb and not have to take part in. They also discussed the English Labor Party, and the strike that is going on at this moment. England is threatened with a “Triple Alliance” strike, (miners, railwaymen and transport workers). It has never happened yet though it has been attempted. We all agreed in believing it will not be accomplished this time either. Some day, perhaps—yes, and then look out! But the time has not come. Meanwhile, as Mr. Villard prophesied, if the worst comes to the worst, Lloyd George will call a general election and will be re-elected with flying colors.

I heard a certain amount about the treatment by the United States of the native Indians on the settlements. Apparently there is not a country anywhere that has not its skeletons in its cupboards.

In the afternoon I went for the last time to Knoedlers. The exhibition closes tomorrow. Mr. Purcell Jones, who has an exhibition of decorative water-colors upstairs, was very amusing, relating to me some of the remarks of people who came in yesterday when I was away.

Apparently two or three women came on after a lecture about Russia. One of them, looking at Lenin, announced in a loud voice, “It’s not the murdering that I resent, but it’s the destruction of the finest collection of butterflies in the world.” Another, looking at the bust of Krassin (whose pure Siberian features, so full, as I think, of dignity and character) said that he reminded her of a Chinese Jew—it was the first time I had heard of there being any in existence—as one lives one learns.

Concerning the marble baby on a very low pedestal in the middle of the room, he said, “All the women who come here just stand over it and shower it with hairpins.” I laughed, and to prove his assertion he went and looked on the carpet at the base of the pedestal. Sure, he picked up several straight away!

Thursday, April 14, 1921.

Lunched with Emil Fuchs, and walked home by Fifth Avenue. In front of the Public Library a meeting was going on. A woman was speaking, and it seemed to be an appeal for funds for “suffering Ireland.” I mingled with the crowd in hopes of hearing something startling. But I only heard a jumbled mix-up about Women’s Suffrage, and then Belgium, and about the Queen of Belgium being a full-blooded German, “but that didn’t stop you going to help Belgium,” the speaker said. I couldn’t wait long enough to see the connection with Ireland. As I walked away I revolved in my mind the letter I had from papa this morning in which he told me that Stenning, our Scotch game-keeper, who had lived on our Irish estate ever since I was a small child, has just been murdered in his house.

My thoughts were suddenly broken into by the unusual action of a man who skipped backwards in front of me, and before I realized it a huge kodak was aimed at me. A few paces further on a man of rather humble appearance addressed me as “Miss Sheridan.” He took his hat off and held it in his hand while he told me that he had heard me lecture, and had read everything I had written. “I am a Russian” he said—“and I felt that you had the good of Russia at heart ... I just wanted to thank you.” I thanked him, shook hands, and walked on. Queer place, Fifth Avenue!

Saturday, April 16, 1921.

Colonel William Boyce Thompson sent his car for me at twelve, and I drove out to his place in Yonkers on the Hudson. There I found a Russian gathering! Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Robbins, Colonel Thatcher and the Wardwells. The house is beautiful, full of pictures. I wonder if Botticelli could have had any premonition that he was painting to decorate the stately homes of America. I keep wondering why there are enough Botticelli’s to go round.

We lunched in a room that had six French Windows facing the garden that slopes down to the Hudson River. At least, so I discovered afterwards, but the windows were thickly and tightly and most carefully curtained so that one could not at all see out. All during lunch I longed to pierce the veil. Immediately afterwards we went out into the sun on the terrace, and I begged that we might sit out, and not in. Conversation on Russia was very stimulating, but as I was none too sure of my host’s exact sentiments, I talked rather guardedly. He may be labelled “the Bolshevik millionaire,” but it does not mean that he is Bolshevik. Almost any unprejudiced person is labelled Bolshevik in this country! Colonel Thompson told us that when he got back from Russia, the papers published his photograph between Lenin’s and Trotzky’s! When Thatcher got back, Col. Thompson told him there was might little difference between hero and zero, as it is understood here; and having experienced certain things, they went to meet Raymond Robbins on his arrival to prepare him.

Never had I heard three more hearty laughters, than these three men reminiscing over their reception in this country on their return from Russia. I said to them, “It’s all very well to laugh, but knowing what you do, mightn’t you go to the rescue of the floundering stranger, landing in equal plight on your shores?” They laughed the more, “We like to see it ... we like to watch, and then gather the sufferer to our fold!”

Later they talked about Wilson, to which I listened in silence with awe. It interested me to hear that Wilson is the author of a work entitled “The New Freedom” which was discovered at the headquarters of the I. W. W. and declared to be seditious literature! Lansing’s book did not pass unmentioned—there seems to be but one opinion about it. Someone in Washington described it as the “vituperations of an enraged white mouse.” Raymond Robbins gave an imitation of Lansing leaning forward in his chair, wiping his glasses, and with sly glances at the clock, whilst he, Robbins described in fifteen minutes what happened in Russia in one year. Col. Thatcher boasted that he had been given an audience of twenty-five minutes! But in either case the result was the same!

Raymond Robbins is a very ill man. He looked desperately tired, and he was, as I understood, going off to a rest cure somewhere. I like him and I liked very much Mrs. Robbins, she has a keen, searching, restless face, almost hawk’s eyes. She is head of a Women’s Labor Organization. She was awfully nice to me (everybody was), about my book, and about my adventure. It is overwhelming, and I feel undeserved. The book is so humble and unpretentious, the adventure so obviously worth doing.

I got home at six o’clock and an hour later dined with a compatriot, Frank McDermott, and having nothing planned we drove to Broadway. This is a marvelous place at night. The whole locality is illuminated with electric advertisements. They baffle description. The American advertiser, not content with lighting up his advertisement, must needs have movement in those lights. All of them dance, twinkle, rain, run, sparkle, circulate. It is metaphorically a shrieking competition. There are even a pair of dogs pulling a sleigh, the man in the sleigh flicks his electric whip in the air, and the dogs just gallop! Far fewer lights on a Coronation or a Peace night in London, bring forth crowds into the streets, walking arm in arm “to see the illuminations.” In Broadway it seems to be a perpetual Coronation Night!

We went into the “Capitol” film palace. The first time I had been to one. It is gigantic, and the house was packed. An opera sized orchestra started off by playing Wagner to us. The house listened intently. The American public is very musical, even if it has gone expecting to see a film, it will listen to Wagner without whispering. I believe the American people are as appreciative of music as the Russian people.

After that, the orchestra accompanied a choir that sang southern songs. There is great character and a good deal of romance in these songs, one never fails to be stirred. When “Dixie” was sung a large proportion of the audience burst forth into spontaneous applause. I have never heard “Dixie” played in this country without its arousing applause. Finally we sat through a rather dull film play—they can be dull sometimes!

Thursday, April 21, 1921. Washington, D. C.

I arrived in Washington at six this morning. I don’t know what I’ve come for, I didn’t really plan it. Soukine4 it was who suggested my coming, and clinched it by writing to Countess Gizycka to tell her so. This elicited a telegram from Countess Gizycka asking me to dine on Friday. Furthermore my letter to Sir Auckland Geddes produced a telegram asking me to lunch at the British Embassy on Thursday. Therefore, I came when I did. I have lunched and I have tea’d at the Embassy, I have walked round the town instead of dining. It is very warm and very lovely. The trees are in full leaf, there is a wind but it is a warm wind—Washington is a pleasant contrast to New York, it is large and airy and leisurely and dignified. It looks like a new town that is incomplete. As one drives outside, one does not get into slums and suburbs as with any other town, but suddenly one is in green pastures, it is like the boundaries of a village.

I feel very lonely, Dick is in New Jersey.

Friday April 22, 1921.

Paul Hanna, a friend of Kenneth Durant’s, asked me to lunch, he and Mrs Hanna (everyone is married in America—however young) came to fetch me. We went to a restaurant near by where we found our party, among whom, with his wife, was Sinclair Lewis, the author of the much-discussed “Main Street.” The restaurant we lunched in was rather cleverly decorated, so that one had the impression of having a tent awning overhead, and being surrounded by Italian stone walls with vases, and a peacock was silhouetted against a sapphire blue sky. The proportions of the room, and the height of the roof lent themselves to this treatment. I was informed that it had been recently converted from a Baptist Chapel! How strange we Christians are! No oriental would thus desecrate his temple. The party amused themselves at my expense, telling American humor stories, which I couldn’t laugh at. I said I didn’t think the American paper Life was funny, they admitted they didn’t think so either, but that twenty out of a hundred jokes in Punch compensated for the other eighty. It was a funny party—I knew what train of thought Paul Hanna represented, but I wonder if the others did.

After lunch most of us went off to the bookshop and I exchanged “Mayfair to Moscow” for “Main Street,” duly autographed.

I went to tea with Mrs. William Hard where a great many people drifted in and out. Among them Alice Longworth, with whom I made a date, and Mrs. Brandeis and her daughter, who invited me to go to tea on the morrow to meet Mr. Justice Brandeis. I have a great curiosity to see him, I have heard his name over and over again. Everyone says to me, “You should do a head of Brandeis.” I am told he looks like Lincoln. Innumerable people tell me also that I should do a head of Mr. Baruch. “The replete eagle with a kindly eye” as someone here described him to me. If he were only poor, and nobody, he would probably consent to sit to me, and be quite happy doing so. This lack of vanity in man is new to me. I have never met it before, I do not understand it. There are types in this country not only fine physically, and interesting, but there is the brain, the force and the power of achievement behind it.

Soukine fetched me for dinner at Countess Gizycka’s. Senator Edge took me in to dinner—I was sent in first as the guest of honor. On my other side was Mr. Lowry, whom I had met at tea at Mrs. Hard’s. We stumbled in the course of conversation on a mutual friendship with Henry James. It happened by chance, but it was a happy chance. He loved Henry as all Henry’s friends did. He nursed him through his last illness. Mr. Lowry had not guessed that I was the Sheridan to whom the best of Henry James’ letters are written in the last volume. That tag of Soviet Russia which is tied tightly round my neck had obliterated any idea of my being anyone else! We talked of Rye, and of my own home, and the mention of Brede Place recalled to my vision spring in England, the peace and the remoteness of Sussex; “so far away,” as Mr. Lowry said. So far away, indeed, that it seems like another world, and sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever get back there.

I met “Mr. Baker of the Mint” as he was described to me when I asked who he was. A man with a very fine, characteristically American face, and a charming personality. Later, when everyone else went on to a ball, Mr. Baker took me for a drive in his car before dropping me at the Shoreham. I asked him what Mr. Baker he was, whether he was the Mr. Baker of the Wilson Administration. He obviously was laughing at my ignorance and explained that he was just plain Mr. Baker, although he had been in the Wilson Administration, but that he had always been simply Mr. Baker, and still was the same, and not a very important person—not important enough, for instance, to have his head done! By which, I suppose, he means that he is not Secretary for War Baker—? Whoever he is, (and I suppose I shall learn in time about people in Washington, just as I have in time learnt about people in New York!) I like him, I like his face, and I like his talk, although he is “the man of the mint” who refuses to buy Soviet gold. I asked him why, “Is it because you are a very high principled man and you feel the gold belongs to someone else?”

“I am a high principled man but it is not for any principle that I will not buy Soviet gold—.”

“So much the better,” I said, “there will be more for England and we want it—and it will come to you just the same I suppose in the end, only it will come through us—!”

At that moment we passed by what seemed in the night to be columns of a Greek temple standing out against the night blue. It was the Lincoln Memorial. We drove along the river which looked mysterious and beautiful with its bridges and reflected lights. As we flashed by the lights of the lamps I saw azaleas of every color, banks of them. The night was as warm as any in an English summer.

Saturday, April 23, 1921.

Lunched with Sinclair Lewis at the Shoreham. He is full of imagination. One of the few Americans I have met who is not submerged by domesticity, although he is married.

He tells me he wrote four or five novels before he wrote “Main Street,” but they were not successes. I asked him why that had not discouraged him. He laughed, he said it was no use being discouraged, that writing novels was all he could do, he might starve at it, but he was incapable of any other form of work. (Truly an artist!) He had expected some people would like “Main Street,” but he had not expected it to sell. It was a great joke being famous, though sometimes a great bore. He was extremely funny about it.

I went to tea with Mrs. McCormick, then on to see Mr. Justice Brandeis, who expected me at his chambers. He was very nice, though rather shy. He certainly is extremely like Lincoln, but a Lincoln who has not suffered. Certainly a fine head to do. I am told he is one of the big brains of the United States. He is a friend of F. E.‘s5 and of Lord Reading. He said things about England and the English that made me proud—we talked for quite a while, but one does not talk at ease when both are strangers confronting each other for the purpose of conversation. The best thoughts and talks I elicit from people when I am working on them, and when it is only necessary to speak if the idea comes, and where a gap of silence is possible and restful rather than embarrassing. Under these conditions I get people to give of their best.

I dined with X—— and we talked about the future. But I am like a nun who, when tempted to run away from her vocation, reflected that her lover would no longer love the nun with short hair and no veil. My work is my veil—I must work and keep working, though it entail a sacrifice. I remember years ago a man, (and he was an American) said to me, “Choose your path; either the path of companionship and love, or the path of a career with all it entails of purpose and of loneliness.” And he is right—.

Sunday, April 24, 1921.

Motored with Admiral and Mrs. Grayson to some place outside Washington to see Barney Baruch’s race horses. The stable is by the side of the race course, but the District of Columbia has legislated against racing, so now the track is used for a training ground. Queer form of government this! How strange it would be if the County of Surrey suddenly decided by a local County Council to suppress racing, there would be no more Ascot, or if Liverpool suddenly decided to have no more Grand National. I wonder if the English would stand it or rebel. Americans seem to me to be a strangely well-disciplined community; there will never be a revolution in this country!

I lunched with Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and his daughter-in-law, Mrs. Lodge, and a beautiful girl, his granddaughter. Although I hardly knew the Senator I feel as if he were a relation. He was, until recently, a trustee for the children under my mother-in-law’s6 will. We talked at great length about Mother Mary, whom I loved as he also loved her. We discussed her sorrows, her courage, her sense of duty. Almost she played the role in life of a great tragedienne, but with no appeal to the gallery. Very silent, and very lovely and very reserved she was, and her face was the face of Our Mother of Sorrows.

Few people know about my “Mother Mary.” But Senator Lodge knew and it was like bringing her dear ghost-face back again to life. After lunch Colonel Harvey fetched the Senator for a drive, the future ambassador to Britain is not an imposing individuality. He has the American sense of humor which is seldom lacking, and much there may be inside him that is not evident on the surface. I felt no impression of him at all. It seemed to me a pity that the United States should not be represented by one of the types of America, with a square jaw, and clear bright eyes, and forceful personality, such as I meet over and over again.

They dropped me at the Shoreham and from there I proceeded out into the country in an open car with.... Such a lovely afternoon, hot enough to motor without a coat. We drove for miles but it seemed impossible to get away from other cars and other people however far we went. Finally we stopped in front of a lane, left the car and went rambling through someone’s private woods. There were three kinds of wild flowers I had never seen before, and whole bushes of wild azalea in bloom. We gathered armfuls. It seems too wonderful when I think of our tender care in growing azaleas at home, that they should grow wild here. And there was a big yellow “swallowtailed” butterfly. I have seen it in Italy. In England it does not exist. I remember as a child buying one for my butterfly collection, it cost half a crown. (I wonder if the price has gone up since.) We passed by a pond, and the sound of frogs was like the sound of birds, and quite as loud. In England frogs never say a word. I suppose these are a different kind of frog, or else we haven’t enough heat to rouse a protest from them. It was a very heavenly afternoon, out into the stillness of the country, in the sun, in the spring.

I dined at the Medill McCormick’s. A big party at small tables in several rooms. I sat next to Mr. Richard Washburn Child on one side. He is talked of as a possible United States Ambassador to Japan.7 He looks very young. He asked me why I was “here,” which I took to mean America, not Washington, and I found myself telling him everything that I haven’t told even some of my best friends. He seemed to understand my feeling about the adventure of life. Some people never awaken, others start with their eyes wide open. I began late, I feel as if I had only waked up when I got to Russia. Perhaps I was slowly stirring ever since I began to work five years ago. But those years were too laden with overwork and anxiety as to the future, and the effort of attaining. I was conscious then of belonging to a world, but not to the world. But now I know the world is all mine for the discovering. I belong to every bit of it, and it all belongs to me. What care I where I live, so long as I find work, and sunshine, and from out the crowd one hand extended towards me in friendship?

When I got to Russia, I realized a great big new country that was thinking and working in a way I had never dreamt of. It was a tremendous awakening. And now, what hazard has led me back to my mother’s country? I find it is another great big new world, working and thinking in just as new and different a way, and as differently as Russia. But the size of these countries is what appeals to me. In Russia I could have (but I didn’t) taken a train for days, and travelled to other parts and been still in Russia. Here I have not, but I will—go west, go south, go north. For days and days I shall be able to go. From a commercial provincial town out into the land of endless flowers where there are no seasons, and the land gives out two crops a year.

I have a great desire to see more, and more, and yet more. To see it all, in fact. But I am tired (already) of civilization, of the luxury of baths and telephones, and the overabundance of food. I am tired of people, even of people who are kind, and people who are brilliant. I want to take Dick and get away somewhere into the wilds. Whenever I ask if there is some village in the hills; with an Inn, as for instance, in Cornwall, or in Italy, I am recommended a primitive wood, where there is “a colony.” I want to get away from the colony! Can’t I live for a while, as at Lerici, seeing only peasant people? Even outside Rome, within half an hour by rail, I found myself in Arcadian groves, where it seemed that only Pan had lived. I am told that here it is impossible, however remotely one travel to get away from the telegraph, telephone and motor cars. From England I had visualized this country, as consisting of New York, Washington and Chicago and Boston, and for the rest, that one mounted a horse, and rode out over prairies towards mountains. And I mean to find it is so. The land of the Red Indian must still contain some primitive unreclaimed spots. Anyway, there it all is, and mine if I choose to go and look for it. The world is a great wonder-place with wonder-people in it. I am drunk with love of it, love of the beauty and the capriciousness, and the unexpectedness of it. I want to see it all—Mexico, China, Egypt, Greece and back again to Russia, working all the way, hunting heads, and reading people and never arriving at any understanding, but loving it always as one loves the person who is big, generous, elusive, full of moods, and never to be understood.

Sometimes, though, I wish I could learn something from it all. I wish I could understand some of the problems, and have a few convictions. As I sit here and ruminate in front of my open window I think of many things, in a kaleidoscopic way. It is the first time I have had leisure to think since I landed in America. I have heard so many varied opinions over here, and I just begin to wish I knew for example: whether the Soviet form of government is right, or even partly right, or on the right trail, and whether the majority of the world which condemns it, is wrong, or frightened, or sensible.

I wish I knew if human nature on the whole is very grand and fine, or whether it is chiefly murky and ugly and very selfish.

I wish I knew if there is such a thing as love, apart from maternal love, or whether it is all only passion.

I wish I could make up my mind as to whether civilization is a very valuable evolution, or a very great curse.

I wish I could decide whether I want to live in America, France or Russia, and whether I should like my immediate headquarters to be in New York or Washington.

I wish I knew how much the people who are nice to me really like me, or how much I am a curiosity.

I wish I knew whether I am happier than anyone else or happy at all.

Tuesday, April 26, 1921.

Alice Longworth fetched me a little after twelve (a piping hot day). We drove to the Senate. For about half an hour before lunch we sat in the gallery of the Senate Chamber. By strange chance a Senator called LaFollette was holding forth upon Ireland, and demanding that the government of the U. S. recognize the Irish Republic. It was strange to come to the Senate to hear home politics. I listened to censorious remarks on Great Britain and I felt that everyone was agreeing, both on the floor of the Senate as well as in the galleries. Senator LaFollette, with his gray hair standing on end, and his face pink with passion, left his desk, strode up and down, around and about, the while he shook a formidable finger at the empty seats around him. They were not entirely empty, however, for Senator Reed was listening with attention and approval. I had met Senator Reed at Mrs. McCormick’s party on Sunday night, and the subject of Ireland had arisen between us then. He told me he was contemplating a journey to Detroit to speak at a meeting for “Funds for Ireland.” I said to him that night: “If you are going to ask for funds for Ireland you must needs abuse Great Britain.” He answered that the one did not absolutely necessitate the other. But I surmised he only said it out of politeness to an Englishwoman. I feel I have met the anti-British wave at last. It is here—and it is in the Senate! But what can one say in self-defense about Ireland? Senator LaFollette reiterated all the arguments that were asserted in Moscow, and to which I could not answer a word. Such as the war having been fought to protect the small nations, self-determination by the people, freedom of Poland, of Jugo-Slavia, of Czecho-Slovakia, of God knows what else.

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.

We stayed with our cousins, the Jerome Lawrences, at Rye, for the week end. It is on “the Sound.” We motored to the yacht club and lay on rocks in the sun, getting more and more burned. Dick, after paddling for some time, demanded to bathe. To my amazement, I was told that not only must he put on a bathing suit, but he must undress in the bathing house. Dick asked “why?” He is accustomed every year in England to be sunkissed, either in the sea or in the woods—whenever there is a warm enough sun. I have taken many photographs of him and Margaret naked on the hillside and among the flowers. There is nothing on earth more beautiful than the body of a child.

I recall my horror when a nun at Margaret’s Convent told her that she must never look at herself because the human body is “disgusting” (she used the term), and Margaret asked her, “Who made our bodies? and who made our clothes?” Such an attitude of mind in a nun is perhaps not unexpected, but one is surprised at the lack of simplicity in a great primitive country. But in the United States the Puritan origin has dominated over all other races with which it has eventually become amalgamated; stronger than the Latin is the Puritan—stronger than the German, the Dutch, the Irish, or the Jew. In this amazing country even the mature foreign element is bent, broken, molded, forced into an American! And in a very short space of time—it is this standardization that suppresses individuality. In this particular instance I suppose it is good that the masses should bathe in suits, it is good for the masses that the bathers should undress under cover, and so it goes on from little to larger things, from unimportant details to larger issues. Some day perhaps, when there is time to stop to take a breath a few individualities will be allowed to live among the standardized—at present those few slip off abroad, and live there! But I am not complaining, I am only wondering why with all its restrictions, I like living in it better than I like living in the freest country on earth—England!

On Sunday night I had one of the great surprises of my life. It will be as memorable as any of the big events that have come to me. We were sitting on the piazza at dusk, and I asked, pointing to the bushes: “Am I mad? What is that?” “That is a firefly.” I had heard vaguely of fire-flies, but no one had ever described to me what a June night in America could be like. W. B. Yeats has written of Ireland that “the night was full of the sound of linnets’ wings,” but I have not read the poet who has sung about the fireflies. As the night became darker, the world became full of small, twinkling, winking, dancing lights, from the highest tree-tops down to the grass. I ran upstairs. Dick was asleep. I hoisted him on to my back and carried him, still sleeping, out into the wild orchard across the road. Presently Dick lifted a sleepy head from my shoulder and looked around him. “It’s the Germans shootin’,” he said. “No,” I corrected, “it’s fairies.” He gave a little giggle of delight and exclaimed: “Fairies! To guard us?—” And as I walked towards the dark trees in the distance he clung around my neck. “Don’t let’s get lost in fairyland.” The crickets were making an unholy and flippant noise. It was all very merry and happy. There were darting lights all around us, in the long grass at our feet, in the bushes overhead, against the darkness of the distance, exactly like the scene of the treetops in Peter Pan. On our way home Dick said, “I don’t think they’re fairies, I think it’s the stars have come down to play.”

I looked up at the sky. It was full of stars—stable, serious, solemn stars. What star would not, if it could, drop down to earth and play hide and seek with the moon shadows and mischievously rouse all the crickets on a June night. Yes, I think I agree with Dick, they were young baby stars, making merry. In two minutes from the time his head touched the pillow Dick was fast asleep again. I went in search of Mary Brennan, the Irish maid, who is Dick’s friend. “Mary!” I said, “when you see Dick in the morning, remember he has been playing to-night with stars.” “Not with firebugs?” Mary answered with perfect understanding.

Friday, June 17. New York.

My last night before sailing, and I was taken to dine on a roof in Brooklyn. It was the roof of a hotel, and it was very cleverly made to look like the deck of a ship. From that deck one had a most superb view of one bit of New York—a monumental group of buildings which included the Woolworth Tower and seemed to rise up out of the sea. In the distance was the Statue of Liberty holding up her torch for the ships at sea. We watched the sun set behind the tall buildings, and the lights and shadows seemed to produce a cubistic picture. But I was silenced by so much beauty. Is it my artist eyes, I wonder, that make me so appreciative of the world? How strange that the Earth is always beautiful, and Man’s buildings sometimes are, especially with surroundings and background of color and light and shade. It is only in the human mind and the human body that God seems to have failed sometimes.

Sunday, June 19, 1921.

S. S. Monterey. En route for Vera Cruz.

Dick and I are so happy. It is calm as a lake and gets better every hour.

The first day the color of the sea was a deep Prussian blue. The next day it was pure sapphire. To-day it has been the same color as the sky, so you could not tell where they met on the horizon. and so transparent that one could see the fishes deep down. There were flying fishes too. They rose up at our ship’s prow and skimmed over the sea surface like little silver aeroplanes!

The ship seems so small and the sea so large and we seem to be going so slowly, so leisurely, as if all the time in the world were at our disposal and we simply didn’t care where or when we fetched up.

Last night it was agreed that Dick should stay up late as a great treat. He wanted to see how night comes on the ocean. Almost as if it were for Dick’s appreciation, night played up in the most dramatic fashion. From behind a cloud bank there appeared a tiny speck of orange. It grew in as short a space as could be counted in seconds into a big round moon, a cloud that drooped over it was lit up like a human face by firelight. Dick asked: “Who is the figure in the sky?” It looked like a giant Destiny gazing into an orange crystal. The reflection made a golden rippling pathway straight across the sea to us. Dick, who was sitting on the ship’s bow with his legs dangling over and one arm tightly clinging round my neck, suddenly kissed me, fervently, which was exactly what I felt about it! On the opposite side there was a lightning display for our benefit. It came from one point, always from behind the same cloud bank. It turned the sky into the most perfect Valkyric background. When Dick asked me what the stars were like to touch: “Are they soft, or do they burn?” I had to tell him they were great big worlds like ours. Dick felt very small—we both did.

Whatever Mexico may or may not have in store for us, the journey alone is well worth while. The contrast after four bewildering months in New York is extreme. The peace and the beauty are reviving and one gets back one’s sense of judgment, which one is apt to lose in the crowd.

How unimportant it is, whether anyone thinks I am or am not Bolshevik, how little it matters if someone has turned their back on me at dinner, or unduly praised whatever work I’ve done. How completely nothing matters except to be on speaking terms with oneself, and one cannot be unless one is living one’s own life, and not playing a part. All of which sounds very pedantic. I believe one is apt to get pedantic if one is alone.

No one on board is the least interesting, but one young man has insisted on attaching himself. He is a Mexican architect, who has just graduated from the University at Philadelphia. He will be very useful at Vera Cruz with the luggage. There is a middle-aged American who inspires that unfailing American reliability. When I told him what I had heard of Mexico and Mexicans: “Forget it!” he said; and so I am facing my destination with a blank mind.

My feelings at leaving New York were conflicting. In a sort of way I felt I was leaving home. The compliment (for it should be a compliment) has two sides: Home of course is Home; but one is always rather pleased to get away. The U. S. is so conventional and comfortable, so proper and business-like, so well regulated, so absolutely just what it should be, it is like married life! To leave it, to launch out into the blue unknown is exciting and stimulating. It seems to me I belong to two rather prosaic countries. I, who love color, song, romance! There is no reason why one should have to choose between them, each supplies something the other lacks, and I might as well own them both. But Old World and tradition have become museum preserves. They are no longer working concerns; and the word “Imperialism” gives me a pain in my head. So much for my father’s land. In my mother’s country I find a heap of things that irritate me, but it’s a “live-world,” efficient, and infinitely large. There is space, without Imperialism, a new world, without decadence, and without tradition. Although it is reactionary and conservative on the surface, it is at heart young and progressive and opens wide areas to new ideas.

Thursday, June 23, 1921.

We arrived in Havana and went ashore about 10 A.M. Not having so far made friends with anyone on board, Dick, I and Louise went off alone. From the tugboat that brought us off our ship we stumbled on the quay into the arms of a guide, who stood in wait. Unable to speak a word of Spanish, we allowed him to attach himself to us. We were to have his guideship and the services of a Ford car for three hours, $10 complete. They were suffocating hours. The sun beat down on the canvas hood of the little car which bumped and rattled through the uneven, narrow streets. The guide, true to type (it recalled old days in Italy!) was boring and garrulous. I wanted to get a general impression of Havana, and my contemplation was rudely broken into when the Y. M. C. A.‘s building was insistently pointed out to me, and similarly other buildings of no interest.

The Cathedral where Columbus was buried alone stands out in my memory as a thing of beauty, but we got no further than an inner courtyard—the Cathedral itself was closed for repairs. The town seemed to have innumerable, modern marble monuments, each one more in ill taste than the other and each Cuban patriot thus commemorated had to be described at length by our unshaven guide. As for the living Havanians, they seemed to me to be a people asleep. Everywhere they slept at full length on the ground in the squares; in the avenues or leaning in doorways—even our chauffeur was asleep in the car when we came out from stamping letters at the post office! People who walked in the street looked at us wonderingly and sleepily, open-mouthed and heavy-eyed. It may have been the siesta hour of the town. After lunching at the Hotel Ingleterra we made for the quay, and there chartering a motor boat explored the harbor before returning on board. That was the part Dick liked best. He had been very bored with the town, and was greatly relieved to hear that Havana was not Mexico, as he has great expectations of our ultimate destination.

A few new passengers joined the ship in the evening, a few old ones having left. Those that have been on board from New York, seem to have done the usual ship trick, which is to break up into couples and walk round the ship’s angles at dusk, arm round waist. One looks on almost cynically, the thing is so inevitable. My cynicism and aloofness makes me feel old. Dick, however, knows the whole ship—the youngest and the oldest passengers are his devoted friends; the officers, the stewards and the ship hands are his intimates. The captain, who teases him with great earnestness, is taken very seriously and more respected by Dick than loved. But the little girl passengers he treats with almost silent contempt!