VOTES AND UMBRELLAS
WALKING IN THE GARDEN OF MR. GATES’ CHARMING HOUSE I SAW A TRELLIS-work with rose-trees on it all up his wall; and I pointed out to him that this would be rather easy for a burglar to climb, and my polite host agreed with me. Then I looked closer and hastily apologised for having thought the American business man so simple, for every few inches the trellis was cut to within a sixteenth of an inch of the surface.
Every other day while I was there I had what was called a conference at the University; that is to say I took a class of young men interested in writing plays. I particularly remember one who told me of a play that he wanted to write on an incident in one of Poe’s tales, a grim and haunting incident that might have made a thrilling play. I wonder if it was written and what became of it.
I lunched with Owen Wister in his house at Bryn Mawr. He and his daughter had come to see us in Kent, and it was very pleasant to meet them again. A fine head of an elk on his wall set us talking of the wilds and planning to return to them, which I did the following year, but in the other direction, eastwards. A day or two later I lectured at Bryn Mawr College, and afterwards at tea the subjects on which I had lectured standing up, and others, were discussed for some while in a comfortable chair. Soon after this I left the kindly hospitality of Mr. Gates, and of the University of Pennsylvania, and returned to New York.
Somewhere on this trip, I heard afterwards, a reception was being given me, and one lady asked another if she was going to it; but the other lady could not possibly meet me, because she had heard it repeated that I had said that some day there might possibly be another war. Her blindness was by no means indigenous to America, for a little while after that, two years I think, I was asked to speak at a luncheon of schoolteachers in the City of London, mostly from the British Empire, though there were a few from Scandinavian countries, and I said, I remember my exact words, “Do not teach your children that there is a reasonable probability that there will never be another war.” And a man wrote to one of the papers next day, unconsciously quoting Southey’s little Wilhelmine, and saying, “Lord Dunsany has said a very wicked thing.” The motive inspiring letters to the papers is nearly always crystal-clear, and malice is never able to conceal itself, and there was none of it in this letter and the writer was evidently burning with sincerity. Therefore, I said to myself, the world for the moment is safe; while people feel like that there can be no war. And that feeling was pretty general then. Whatever was most savage in Nature had been recently well satisfied, and the League of Nations ably expressed all the world’s desire for peace. But they thought the world agreed with them, when they only agreed with the world. Would the world listen to them for a moment when it should want something that they did not want? Peace was soon to be like crinolines and poke-bonnets, and the poor old gentlemen at Geneva were out of fashion. They had only their umbrellas, which were not of very much use, and their votes, which were of none; while Mars was very quietly sharpening his sword. And if anyone thought that he heard the sound of the whet-stone, that was not a thing to speak of in decent society.
Writing one’s memoirs can be a mournful thing. For the rest of the time that I was in New York I was put up by Mr and Mrs. Percy Rockefeller in their flat, and for all their kindness I can now never thank them any more. Major and Mrs. Putnam are also long dead.
Mr and Mrs. Rockefeller were not at home all the time; but, whether they were there or not, I always had a bedroom and a sitting-room in their flat overlooking the Hudson. In the sitting-room that they gave me there were three pictures: one was a small old picture with a background of those steep blue mountains that only the Old Masters saw, and another was a large picture by Titian, showing a cardinal about to draw aside a red curtain, and looking at you over his shoulder, and there were red curtains in the room designed to match the picture, or rather to extend the idea of it, so that you almost seemed to be in the room with the cardinal. The picture suggested a poem to me, and I print it here in memory of two very kind people.
On A Picture
(In Memory of Mr and Mrs. Percy Rockefeller)
Before the curtains’ ruddy gloom
With hand to draw them back he stands
To show — who knows what hidden room?
Or open on who knows what lands?
A moment and he will have thrown
The curtain’s heavy fold aside,
And yet five centuries have flown
And fifteen generations died,
Since Titian caught that hand in air.
And, like a rock by which is cleft
Some torrent, it is shining there,
And time roars by to right and left.
A letter I wrote to my wife on 6th April gives a glimpse of my life in New York. Part of it tells: “I dined alone here and went for a walk and looked in on the Roulands. This is a marvellous city: there is a vast building at the end of this avenue with a curving road running through it, and Mrs. Rockefeller tells me that trains run through this building, in the basement where other people keep rats. And the shops are like Paris, and the hospitality is like that of romantic fiction. —
“7th April.
“Mrs. Rockefeller rang up this morning to ask if I would go for the week-end to Greenwich, in the country 30 miles away. I have to be back to broadcast here at 8 pm on Sunday, but I’m to motor down after lunch with Avery Rockefeller.”
From the Rockefellers’ beautiful house at Greenwich we walked in the woods with their two wolf-hounds, whose job by night was to guard the house. We passed a house in the wood, which was being guarded by a collie against the wolf-hounds; but, as we went on, the attraction of hunting in the wood seemed more to the collie even than guarding the house, so he joined the wolf-hounds, and between them, in spite of Mrs. Rockefeller’s efforts to save it, they soon killed a woodchuck. By a little lake in the wood we saw Seton Thompson’s house, but it was then empty. Woods like these are very welcome when they come near to great cities. They give mankind the generous feeling of having spared a conquered foe. Or is it by chance the other way about? Is it the wild that must be victorious in the end? And is a wood or a forest or a jungle, close up against a city, like an army that Nature has halted, waiting to rush in as soon as man is too idle or ill to resist, or too self-satisfied to be on his guard, or too much occupied with some other enemy. Meanwhile in India and in America, and in many another land, these two great powers often stand facing each other, forest and city. We do not know how it will end. One way or the other; for those two will hardly face each other idly for ever; they are both too active for that. Already the scouts are out from the jungle and forest. Thistledown and innumerable seeds float into the cities, and find no foothold for a while. And then one day the great machines that hold Nature in scorn feel a touch of fear, not of Nature, but of other machines, and the sirens begin to wail, and they and the other machines go down together; and where factories had stood the scouts of the forest find foothold, and the forests get to know, and Nature comes back to the streets that had thought not to see her again.