Back-Trailers from the Middle Border | Page 2

very hard to remain neutral In addition to the sad changes in my household, I was fifty-four years old and suffering some obscure disorder which manifested itself in acute cramping pains in my breast and shoulder. The doctors diagnosed my "misery" as neuritis, but none of them seemed able to give me the slightest relief and I faced the coming winter with vague alarm.
My daughters were now old enough to sense the change in me (Mary Isabel was twelve and Constance eight), but they remained loyal although I must have seemed to them an ailing and irritable old man. They met me at every return from a lecture tour or a visit to the city, with cries of joy and a smother of kisses. The tug of their soft arms about my neck enabled me to put away, for a time, my aches and my despairs. They still found me admirable and tdok unaccountable pleasure in my company, with the angelic tolerance of childhood.
They continued to sleep out on the south porch long after the air became too cold for me to sit beside them and tell them stories. Each night they chanted their evening prayer, the words of which Mary Isabel had composed, and I never heard their sweet small voices without a stirring round my heart The trust and confidence in the world, which this slender chant expressed, brought up by way of contrast the devastating drama in France and Belgium, a tragedy whose horror all the world seemed about to share.
My daughters loved our ugly, old cottage, and had no wish to leave it, and their mother was almost equally content, but I was restless and uneasy. There was much for me to do in New York, and so early in November I took the train for Chicago, to resume the duties and relationships which I had dropped in the spring. My wife and daughters were dear to me but my work called.
As I journeyed eastward the war appeared to approach. At my first luncheon in The Players, I sat with John Lane and Robert Underwood Johnson, finding them both much concerned with the pro-German attitude of the Middle West. Lane confessed that he was in America on that special mission and I did my best to assure him that the West, as a whole, was on the side of France and Belgium.
The Club swarmed with strangers and buzzed with news of war. Many of its young writers had gone to France as correspondents, and others were in government employ. In the midst of the excitement, I was able to forget, in some degree, my personal anxieties. A singular exaltation was in the air. No one was bored. No one was indifferent. Each morning we rose with keen interest, and hour by hour we bought papers, devoured rumors and discussed campaigns. My homestead in West Salem and my children chanting their exquisite evensong, receded swiftly into remote and peaceful distance.
In calling on the editor of the Century Magazine, I learned that this fine old firm was in the midst of change and that it might at any moment suspend. As I walked its familiar corridors walled with original drawings of its choicest illustrations by its most famous artists, I recalled the awed wonder and admiration in which I had made my first progress toward the private office of the Editor-in-Chief nearly thirty years before. I experienced a pang of regret when told that the firm must certainly move. "I hope it may remain," I said to the editor with sincere devotion to its past.
One of the chief reasons for my eastern visit at this time was a call to attend the Annual Meeting of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, of which I was officer. The first function of the session was a reception given to Eugene Brieux as a representative of the French Academy by President Butler of Columbia University at his home on Morningside Drive, a most distinguished assembly.
Brieux made a fine impression on us all He was unlike any Frenchman I had ever met He was blond, smoothshaven and quietly powerful On being introduced to him, I spoke to him in English which he understood very well until I fell into certain idiomatic western expressions These he laughingly admitted were out of his reach. He was very friendly and expressed his deep appreciation of the honor done him by our Institute and Academy.
On the following morning he was presented to a fine audience in Aeolian Hall by William Dean Howells, who made a short but exquisitely phrased address Nearly one hundred of our members were on the platform.
The stimulation of meeting my friends helped me phys- > ically as well as mentally, and when Louis Betts, the Cbiv.! cago painter, seizing the opportunity