A Writer's Recollections Volume II Part 11

Let me recall a few more personal landmarks in the eighteen years that have pa.s.sed since _Eleanor_ appeared, before I close.

Midway in the course of them, 1908 was marked out for me, for whom a yearly visit to Italy or France, and occasionally to Germany, made the limits of possible travel, by the great event of a spring spent in the United States and Canada. We saw nothing more in the States than every tourist sees--New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and a few other towns; but the interest of every hour seemed to renew in me a nervous energy and a capacity for enjoyment that had been flagging before. Our week at Washington at the British Emba.s.sy with Mr. and Mrs.

Bryce, as they then were, our first acquaintance with Mr. Roosevelt, then at the White House, and with American men of politics and affairs, like Mr. Root, Mr. Garfield, and Mr. Bacon--set all of it in spring sunshine, amid a sheen of white magnolias and May leaf--will always stay with me as a time of pleasure, unmixed and unspoiled, such as one's fairy G.o.dmother seldom provides without some medicinal drawback! And to find the Jusserands there so entirely in their right place--he so unchanged from the old British Museum days when we knew him first--was one of the chief items in the delightful whole. So, too, was the discussion of the President, first with one Amba.s.sador and then with another. For who could help discussing him! And what true and admiring friends he had in both these able men who knew him through and through, and were daily in contact with him, both as diplomats and in social life.

Then Philadelphia, where I lectured on behalf of the London Play Centers; Boston, with Mrs. Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett--a pair of friends, gentle, eager, distinguished, whom none who loved them will forget; Cambridge, and our last sight of Charles Eliot Norton, standing to bid us farewell on the steps of Shady Hill; Hawthorne's house at Concord; and the lovely sh.o.r.e of Newport. The wonderful new scenes unrolled themselves day by day; kind faces and welcoming voices were always round us, and it was indeed hard to tear ourselves away.

But at the end of April we went north to Canada for yet another chapter of quickened life. A week at Montreal, first with Sir William van Horne, then Ottawa, and a week with Lord and Lady Grey; and finally the never-to-be-forgotten experience of three weeks in the "Saskatchewan,"

Sir William's car on the Canadian Pacific Railway, which took us first from Toronto to Vancouver, and then from Vancouver to Quebec. So in a swallow's flight from sea to sea I saw the marvelous land wherein, perhaps, in a far hidden future, lies the destiny of our race.

Of all this--of the historic figures of Sir William van Home, of beloved Lord Grey, of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and Sir Robert Borden, as they were ten years ago, there would be much to say. But my present task is done.

Nor is there any room here for those experiences of the war, and of the actual fighting front, to which I have already given utterance in _England's Effort_ and _Towards the Goal._ Some day, perhaps, if these _Recollections_ find an audience, and when peace has loosened our tongues and abolished that very necessary person, the Censor, there will be something more to be written. But now, at any rate, I lay down my pen. For a while these _Recollections_, during the hours I have been at work on them, have swept me out of the shadow of the vast and tragic struggle in which we live, into days long past on which there is still sunlight--though it be a ghostly sunlight; and above them the sky of normal life. But the dream and the illusion are done. The shadow descends again, and the evening paper comes in, bringing yet another mad speech of a guilty Emperor to desecrate yet another Christmas Eve.

The heart of the world is set on peace. But for us, the Allies, in whose hands lies the infant hope of the future, it must be a peace worthy of our dead and of their sacrifice. "Let us gird up the loins of our minds.

In due time we shall reap, if we faint not."

And meanwhile across the western ocean America, through these winter days, sends incessantly the long procession of her men and ships to the help of the Old World and an undying cause. Silently they come, for there are powers of evil lying in wait for them. But "still they come."

The air thickens, as it were with the sense of an ever-gathering host.

On this side, and on that, it is the Army of Freedom, and of Judgment.

_Christmas Eve, 1917._

THE END OF VOLUME II