I could not help being amused by such an attitude, accompanied as it was by a total imperviousness to any criticism of her own person. At times she reminded me of Lady Astor in the ruthless and castigating way she dealt with her adversaries, but I never ventured to tell either of them so, knowing how deeply each would resent the comparison. Margot had a disarming manner of imparting what we women call a "dig." I once heard her say to a perfectly harmless female whose affectations were nevertheless boring us all, "Darling, must you always be so self-consciously refined?" It was so funny we all had to laugh, but it had a cruel sting.
Margot found it difficult to listen. She would shoot forth exclamations that soared like rockets, and loved to throw in pointed criticism or to scold satirically. She had a mania for pigeonholing people and kept a list of possible house guests with letters beside their names to describe their qualifications. Against my own I discovered B. T. & G. and later found that these mysterious initials stood for Bridge, Tennis and Golf. She and her daughter Elisabeth both loved bridge, but when one played with them, their perpetual flow of talk proved very distracting.
On her return from an American lecture tour she complained bitterly to me that Americans took no interest in sport. "Perhaps not the sporting episodes of amateurs like yourself," I answered, for she had lectured endlessly about a gray hunter she had once owned.
At her first appearance at Carnegie Hall in New York Mr. Henry White, a former Ambassador to France, took the chair. The suave eloquence of this practiced diplomat invariably succeeded in creating the friendly atmosphere a chairman attempts to establish between his audience and the speakers. Mrs. Asquith had been well advertised, and the hall was packed. After being introduced she remained seated and read her lecture in low tones which did not carry. When cries from the gallery "louder please" interrupted her, she calmly answered, "I have no intention of raising my voice; I am talking quite loud enough if you will listen." Alas, very few stayed to listen. After this unhappy event Mr. White drove her back to her hotel.
When Margot came to Crowhurst, I invited to act as foils Lord Hugh Cecil and Lytton Strachey. The latter had just published Eminent Victorians, the first of his books, in which he set a precedent for ironic and detached biography. As I remember him, Strachey then was an overgrown young man with a red beard. Thin and of an aesthetic appearance, he gave the impression of delicacy and asceticism. Watching him and Lord Hugh playing tennis was like seeing figures in an Italian primitive come to life. Their racquets might have been instruments for self-flagellation and the ball always seemed to elude the rushes and passes they made for it. But their conversation was brilliant and under far greater control than the game of tennis. What a pity there were no dictaphones to record such talks—the flow of eloquence—the quick thrust—the tone of voice—the subtle blend, persuasive or perverse—the laugh of glee or scorn—the dialogue of two minds attuned, each qualified to expound the wisdom and follies of the ages.
After such week ends of talk and bridge, I was glad to have Mr. Asquith come to stay, for there was no need to search for bridge players who were also brilliant conversationalists. Besides Mr. Asquith I had invited a few friends, among whom were the Grand Duke Dmitri, lovely Pamela Lytton and Jacques Balsan. During dinner Mr. Asquith criticized the German Emperor with the pungent acumen he at times indulged in, and it was agreed that he should be hanged. Dmitri remained silent, but on leaving the room he turned to Balsan, and with an air of indescribable hauteur said, "De quel droit ces gens-la se fermettent-ils de nous critiquer?"—"What right have such people to criticize us?" I thought of Lord Randolph Churchill's remark to the Marquis de Breteuil on seeing in the Breteuil dining room a portrait of Louis XVI in which a placid stupidity of countenance was allied to an arrogant pose, "Now, at last, I understand the French Revolution!"
The various elements of this house party, which took place during the war, an English ex-Prime Minister, a Russian Grand Duke, a French Colonel, had mingled more successfully than might have been expected. The simple charm of Crowhurst, the fact that one lived as if in a garden, the roses and honeysuckle climbing into one's windows, the flowers at one's feet as one opened the door, awakened in everyone a gentleness sometimes wholly unexpected. I have heard my guests say of each other, "I have never known so and so could be so nice!" Crowhurst had that atmosphere only to be found in a happy house, as if kindness had always lived there. Thus Mr. Asquith had brilliantly displayed his versatility without extinguishing our own small sparks of conversation, and, as a hostess, I felt grateful to him that he should have made us all appear at our best.
8: A New Life Unfolds
DURING the long years that followed my separation I became gradually more and more immersed in philanthropic and political work. What had begun as an answer to a need for a new interest in my life became eventually my main way of life and gave it a meaning it had hitherto lacked.
I have already mentioned some of the activities in which I engaged, but one that fairly early absorbed a large part of my time and interest was an attempt to do something about the shameful conditions under which women worked in the sweated industries. In response to an appeal by Miss Margaret Laurence and Miss Gertrude Tuckwell, who were influential trade union officials, I helped them organize a meeting at Sunderland House in November, 1913, to call public attention to that social evil. It was an all-day conference at which I took the chair at the morning session, with the Bishop of Oxford as chairman in the afternoon. A contemporary paper gives the following description of the conference:
The sweated women's conference which was organised recently by the Duchess of Marlborough has probably done more to advance the cause of female suffrage in Britain than the violent combined efforts of the militant suffragettes. It is evident that the Duchess of Marlborough understands the British pub-he. She is in closer touch with the thrifty spirit of the nation, which abhors the house-burning and window-breaking methods of illuminating grievances, than any of her radical co-workers. Quite lately she convened a conference of sweated women at Sunderland House, and secured the presence there of the Press and of representative leaders of every section of society. We must take leave to doubt that a soul would have attended had the British public suspected the noble lady's little game.
In all probability the great array of bishops, politicians, butterflies of fashion, industrial captains and big-wigs that assembled went to Sunderland House in the expectation of passing a pleasant hour or two exchanging trite moral reflections over tea and strawberries and gratuitous champagne. We can picture their discomfiture, their horror, on discovering that the Duchess had successfully arranged a trap for the capture and destruction of the national complacency. There was no opportunity provided them of platitudinous discussion. When the conference was opened they found they were to listen, not to talk. Twelve old women occupied the stage. Twelve poor but respectable old women, who had each spent from 20 to 50 years of a long life bearing the yoke of industrial slavery in its crudest form. They did all the talking. One after another they came forward and related the stories of their miserably cramped and sweated lives. One was a shirt maker. She showed her gilded audience a shirt she had made. "A dozen of these right out before earning 9d. Last week me and my husband sat from 5:30 till 11 at night and made fourteen dozen shirts, which came to ten shilling, and ten pence for cotton." And such had been her daily grind for more than twenty years. A widow in the confectionery trade had worked for twenty years in a factory for eight shilling a week, out of which she had had to provide for the support and education of her child. For twenty years she had never eaten a dinner costing more than a penny. And thus ran all the tales the silent and confounded conference was forced to hear.
Little is the wonder that all England is muttering today of the Sunderland House Conference.
In consequence of this conference, trade boards were opened to about eight more sweated industries.
I loved my work, but it was tiring. Returning to London from Liverpool where I had a
ddressed two big meetings, and where as the principal speaker I had made an impassioned plea for a Municipal Lodging House for Women, I experienced the repercussion of weariness and deflation such efforts produced. In the cold of my reserved compartment, a hot water comforter to my feet, a gas jet burning overhead, I viewed the lonely future which seemed to stretch endlessly before me. My thoughts went to my mother who, seeking distraction from the sorrows of widowhood—for her husband had died in 1908—had found comfort in the all-engrossing interest the suffrage movement was to her. To this end she sacrificed her time, her wealth, even her personal feelings. There is a photograph in which I see her valiantly leading a parade up Fifth Avenue. I did not realize what such a conspicuous public act must have cost her until she later confessed, "To a woman brought up as I was, it was a terrible ordeal!"
It was through her that I met many noted leaders of the movement, of whom I chiefly recall Emmeline Pankhurst. I sometimes saw her during her visits to Paris, which were secret and surreptitious for she was wanted by the police and at that time spent many days hunger-striking in prison. A fine undaunted woman, her delicate body held the flame that animates crusaders, the spirit that willingly endures suffering and pain for an ideal. Forcible feeding even for the doctor who administers it is a grueling experience; for a sensitive woman it meant torture and long periods of ill health.
Her daughter Christabel often stayed with my mother. Once suffrage had been secured, she turned her active mind to an exhaustive study of the Book of the Revelations, from which she emerged with the prophecy that Armageddon would soon be upon us, leaving me to contemplate that if so women should don armor rather than exercise a futile vote. With my mother she shared a common hatred for the genus man although they both delighted in men's company. An extract from a letter written by my mother to a friend explains her reasons for this prejudice:
My first experiences in life gave birth to my belief in militant woman suffrage. I found even at the age of seven that boys looked down upon girls. I can almost feel my childish hot blood rise as it did then in rebellion at some such taunting remarks as: "You can't run." "You can't climb trees." "You can't fight." "You are only a girl." But no young would-be masculine bravado ever expressed twice such slurring belittlements of me.
As a specimen of my mother's method of attack, I quote the following extract from a letter written in April, 1913, to the secretary of the Committee on Criminal Courts in New York:
I am in receipt of your circular letter of April 11th containing the question: "What Shall We Do With the Young Prostitute?"
That the victims of man's recognized and accepted vices need protection none can deny; but why call upon the general public to furnish the necessary funds? Why collect money for the benefit of State and City and then divert it into channels for succoring human beings whose viciousness and undesirability were forced upon them by a class of self-indulgent criminals of the male population who have the power to vote against every decent measure brought before the electorate?
No, gentlemen, do not ask the Governor to use his influence in securing a bill such as you refer to, but simply look the situation squarely in the face and ask his help in the interest of another bill which should be sent to the Legislature that shall place the burden of this monstrous sin on the shoulders of those who have created the necessity for such institutions. Arrest every man, rich or poor, young or old, who traffics in human bodies; fine him heavily according to his means, and the $700,000 necessary to provide an enlarged refuge for his victims will soon be raised.
There is no difficulty in arresting the woman of the streets or the inmate of the house of ill repute; therefore the task of detecting men of the same caliber should not be among the impossibilities, and according to statistics, they outnumber women probably twenty to one. Find a means of haling these men into court, see that man-ruled courts and man-made laws can bring them to justice. Can you not realize the effectiveness of such a proceeding?
In the same year, 1913, she went to Budapest as a delegate to the Biennial Convention of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance and I accompanied her. The Hungarian government gave the delegates an outstanding reception. My most vivid remembrance is of a service in a great church where Dr. Anna Shaw of the American delegation had the honor of preaching a sermon from the pulpit. She was a Doctor of Divinity and of Medicine and gave us a remarkably fine discourse.
The following summer I went to America on a visit to my mother at Marble House. She had by then become a leader of the suffrage movement and under the auspices of the Political Equality Association organized an open-air meeting at which the speakers were Miss Rose Schneiderman, vice-president of the Women's Trade Union League; Miss Mary M. Bartelme, assistant judge of the Chicago Juvenile Court; Mrs. Maud Ballington Booth, of the Volunteers of America; Miss Katherine B. Davis, Commissioner of Correction of New York; Miss Julia C. Lathrop, Chief of the Federal Children's Bureau, in Washington, D.C., Mrs. Florence Kelly, secretary of the National Consumers League; Mrs. Helen Ring Robinson, a Colorado State Senator, and Miss Kate M. Gordon, of New Orleans, La., president of the Southern States Women's Suffrage Conference. I was impressed by their speeches and by the fine type of American womanhood they represented. My mother opened the meeting in an excellent introductory address and like a good showman presented one "great woman" after another—until with a horrible thrill of apprehension I trembled lest by error my humble person should be so identified. When in the company of suffragettes a perverse desire to condone all men's errors possessed me, for I found female self-sufficiency somewhat ridiculous. To hear Christabel Pankhurst orate against the male sex, as if their presence in this world were altogether superfluous, made one wonder how far prejudice could contaminate a brilliant intellect.
During this visit, with the threat of a European war imminent, I found it difficult to focus my thoughts on women's suffrage. A return passage to England on the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, one of Germany's super luxury liners, had been booked for me. She was to sail on August 3rd but on the 2nd news reached me that because of the English destroyers in her path her departure had been delayed. Unable to get in touch with the Lusitania, which at the dead of night put out like a phantom ship for an "unknown destination," I left on an American steamer three days after the declaration of war. Brilliantly lighted with the American flag well to the fore, we sailed through submarine-infested seas, passing ships that like dark and silent ghosts showed neither lights nor colors.
My imagination had pictured an England grim and tense in the throes of a general mobilization. I was surprised to find how little people had reacted with my foreboding of a long and terrible war. To me the future loomed frighteningly, for my sons were at Eton and Blandford was nearly seventeen. Already I sensed the tragic lot of that doomed generation. Most of them went straight from public school to the Army; the fortunate returned to take a course at Oxford or Cambridge.
Blandford went from Eton to Sandhurst, the Military College, at eighteen, for the short course of training which was all they could afford to give officers in those hard-pressed days, and then straight into the Regiment of the First Life Guards as a second lieutenant. It seemed to me as I went down to spend a day with them that a shadow already obscured the happiness of our times together, for one had to hide one's apprehensions in that young world of high expectancies.
On the very evening of my return to England I had been rung up by the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador, who in a sad voice and speaking French asked, "May I come to say good-by? I am leaving tomorrow." "English, please," interrupted the operator. Poor Count Mensdorff—how unhappy he was to leave England where all his sympathies lay. He had tried against impossible odds to preserve peace, even after the assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and if it had not been for the German war lords he would have succeeded. His Embassy in Belgrave Square had been the gayest in London and as a bachelor he managed to avoid the pomp that like a pall enveloped the German Embassy. His dinner parties were charmi
ng and chosen with care among the prettiest women and most entertaining men; and his chef contributed in equal measure to a perfect evening. He usually had an Austrian band and we danced those entrancing Viennese waltzes until early morning. Sometimes he asked me to act as his hostess, and I did so when he entertained the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and also the young Archduke Charles, who would be Emperor now were he alive and Austria still a monarchy. He was very young then and talked with the greatest enthusiasm of the lovely Princess he was engaged to marry. "She is one of a very large family," he told me, "which is good, for I want ever so many children." He had them, but the Empress Zita lives, widowed and poor, in exile—and the children are scattered throughout the world.
Count Mensdorff came to say good-by and I realized that he still hoped that the status quo might be restored after the war and that he might return as Ambassador. I, however, felt convinced that the war would prove the end of an era. The next day a British man-of-war took him to France where a special train carried him to his country. It was very different treatment from that accorded Monsieur Jules Cambon, the French Ambassador to Germany; there women spat on the windows of his compartment as he traveled through in an ordinary train, and every courtesy—even a glass of water—was refused him. French has been well chosen as the language of diplomacy, but the Hun will never learn its meaning.
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