Angel Dorothy

by Jane Brown

  The rest of the summer at Woods Hole became stressful. She was trying to be the ‘Samaritan of all’ but it became more and more difficult. Louise and Herbert Croly arrived directly from Venice, Herbert being nervous and touchy about his long manuscript and Dorothy still absorbed in proof correcting. As August progressed she felt sicker and sicker, she noted that her heart was racing all the time, she was short of breath and had constant indigestion – hardly right for a slim and active woman in her mid-thirties. She made such a good job of disguising her distress, as usual, that no one apparently noticed. She grew hysterical with exhaustion, she said she felt ‘poisoned’. She hung on for Michael’s birthday on 1st September and her wedding anniversary on the 7th, which she realised four days later, ‘I rejoiced and was glad in it.’ In New York in mid-October she finally collapsed. Her doctors ordered complete bed rest for an unspecified period with no contact at all with the outside world. She was moved to Old Westbury, where Mrs James, Louisa Weinstein and George Bennett – with Miss Bogue managing everything – constituted a guard no one would pass.

  As the year darkened and winter closed in so her life was reduced to her own room where only the crackle of logs on the fire or the lift of the curtain in a breath of fresh air broke the quiet. Her committees and causes, 1130 Fifth Avenue, Henry Street, The New Republic, her Book Class, the Colony Club, Grace Church and her friends all had to do without her. Miss Bogue fielded all requests and messages, she kept the households running, but almost everyone was kept away. Dorothy’s breakdown laid her low through Christmas and into the spring of 1924. It is impossible to know what nightmares roamed the drug-induced haziness of her mind, but when she was recalled to life, she was changed. Her closest friends visited, and it seems that Ruth Morgan, who became her spiritual confidante, restored her religious optimism. It is also to be hoped that someone she loved released her into a cathartic outburst of anger at Willard for dying. His death seemed so implausible, so unnecessary. If he and Colonel House had caught the Spanish flu at the same time, why did the hypochondriac desk-bound Texan more than twenty years older than Willard survive, and Willard succumb?131 The influenza killed younger men in their thousands but in battlefield conditions – Willard was in the luxurious Hôtel Crillon with the best army doctors and nurses.132 Or, terrible to contemplate, had he given up ‘like a tired child’, as Daisy Harriman had written? Had Theodore Roosevelt’s failure to return as president in 1916 ended his political hopes, followed by his humiliation at President Wilson’s cancellation of the Chinese loans, leaving him only the role of war hero to merit Dorothy’s love, and even that was denied him? He had so often joked about being her expensive luxury, or was it always a joke? He had written so pointedly to the young Whitney, ‘If you ever amount to anything it will be because of your Mother.’ Had poor Willard died of shame?

  He is dead and gone, lady,

  He is dead and gone;

  At his head a grass-green turf,

  At his heels a stone.133

  She had done her very best for him, to the point of endangering her own life. On 15th June 1924 there was ‘an affecting little ceremony’ at Cornell when the cornerstone of Willard Straight Hall was laid. A copper casket was buried beneath it containing a copy of Herbert Croly’s Willard Straight, just published, the letters of offer and acceptance for the building, views of the campus, newspaper cuttings, a copy of the 1901 class book, Willard’s registration card, a photo of him, and his sketch of his admired Professor Morse Stephens.134 Those present included several of Willard’s former friends and colleagues and Dorothy was represented by her secretary, Miss Anna Bogue.

  Six: ‘All Things Change’135

  In the last week of July 1924 Dorothy was released by her doctors to go to Woods Hole for her holiday with her children. Those who knew her respected her frailty, all except for one, an Englishman named Leonard Elmhirst, who had journeyed from India and overland from San Francisco to see her – how could she refuse? She managed a wan note: ‘I’m glad you’ve come.’136

  Up until now Dorothy had lived her life on her own terms, that famed independence of mind that her father knew so well, and those she wanted to share her companionship had been her chosen ones. It was not so with Leonard Elmhirst. Leonard, hearing of her name and her riches from the campus gossip at Cornell, had confidently, brazenly, stormed the feminine bastion of the Colony Club and persisted until they were face to face – ‘There was Mrs Straight, tall and slim, all in black except for a little sable fur around her neck and a very fetching hat,’ he later recalled. Leonard’s English male and matron-dominated upbringing had in no way equipped him for such an embodiment of the former colonial race: ‘She was not only charming to look at, but there was a graciousness and style about her bearing [and] when I mentioned the business shortcomings of professors, her face lit up and the laugh she gave will not easily be forgotten.’137

  He was a twenty-seven-year-old postgraduate studying agriculture at Cornell, and he hoped she would support the university’s Cosmopolitan Club for foreign students, in danger of closing for lack of funds. With a disarming chivalry he had escorted her from the station to the Cornell campus on her first nerve-wracking visit to Ithaca in October 1920, lightening her dealings with the professors with his insights into student opinions. She had promised to make the ‘Cosmo’ her concern for she realised ‘there was an absence of any real intellectual curiosity on the part of the average American student’, which was a ‘discouraging aspect’ of college life. In her own way she cheered him on: ‘I am glad that you are at Cornell and that you are making yourself a force for liberal thinking. Keep your courage high for it all counts tremendously.’ That was enough for Leonard to keep writing to her, confessional letters full of crimes against his childhood with the whiff of the boys’ changing room, full of earthy Yorkshire tales, which Dorothy had not really the time nor the inclination to read.138

  She felt sorry that he was lonely at Cornell, and guilty that she could not keep up with his flow of letters, and so she invited him to Old Westbury in June 1921 where he proved good at adventure games with Whitney. He had met the Indian poet and mystic Rabindranath Tagore, who had asked him to manage his community farm and school in Bengal, but Leonard insisted he had no means of getting there. The polished – if rather theatrical – Guards officer-type with a wide smile and bristling moustache who appeared at the Colony Club had been replaced by an impoverished-looking student reduced to one battered suit and his last dollar. Leonard brought out the Samaritan in Dorothy, and she cheerfully turned out her purse for his train fare; ‘I do need your guidance in regard to the Union,’ she smilingly said, as an excuse for suggesting ways of making him money. He could write ‘Letters from India’ for Asia magazine (she would clear this with the editor Louis Froelick) and being so enamoured with her own new Corona portable typewriter she ordered one for Leonard as a ‘serious necessity’. ‘Why don’t you sell the Corona typewriter when it finally arrives then I can send you another – and we can go on doing that indefinitely! Brilliant idea!’ Finally she ‘realised’: ‘When Tagore was here I saw him two or three times but through inadvertence on my part, I let him get away without really doing anything for him – and it has worried me ever since.’ Should she give Leonard, say, $5,000 or $10,000 a year for five years for the benefit of India?139

  Leonard accepted the challenge of India and he was to leave in the August, so Dorothy invited him to Woods Hole, partly because Whitney asked if he could come, and partly because she knew he had nowhere else to go. Leonard, brought up in chilly Yorkshire, revelled in the unbelievable Cape paradise of sun, sands and sea, sailing, picnics, crab suppers, exploring Kennebunkport, all the glories of New England summering. Dorothy was the queen of the glories, to whom he addressed his slavish affections: ‘Your every look makes me feel like a veritable worm of a man and want to grovel at your feet,’ adding that he had ‘adopted’ her as his ‘mother and sister and everything else’. After he had left, she supposed for five years in
India, she replied philosophically:

  Love and understanding are the great gifts we humans can bring to each other and we all need them so dreadfully, in spite of our fine self-sufficiencies. For some reason or other the harmony of spirit between man and woman seems greater than any other and so I am going to count on you always and be grateful to you always for all that you have added to my life.140

  She wrote in her usual hurry, and her sermon-like phrasing seems caught – as she was apt to do – from the marriage service for her brother-in-law Almeric Paget and his new wife Edith Starr Miller, which she had dashed into Manhattan to attend. She meant a farewell. Most people, friends or radicals, knew her signals – ‘always be grateful’ signifying the end of a spell of meetings or companionship. It was her only armour against the myriad of people who could make her life impossible. But less than six months later, in January 1922, Leonard surprised her with an agonising proposal of marriage sent from India: ‘The cry of a floundering kind of helpless, homeless, comfortless pilgrim – my soul calls across the chasm – would she meet him in Bombay?’ No, she would not, marriage ‘was out of the question’. Leonard had the grace to confess that in his heart he ‘knew nothing of marriage – and I know still less about the real nature of woman’.141

  He continued to write, and she managed perhaps one letter to his six or seven. Isolated in the backwoods of Bengal, Leonard’s fantasy of Dorothy possessed his mind; this lovely American woman with a fortune, to win her would astound his family, all his high-achieving brothers, and justify his position as now the eldest son and heir.142 He grew stronger in his determination, while she grew weaker, sinking under strains and exhaustion. The nadir was that summer of 1923 when, after her flight to Venice, they were all at Woods Hole. The children, Whitney now ten and a half, Beatrice, nine, and Michael, seven, were his secret weapons; he introduced Whitney to boyhood skills with a pen-knife and fishing rod and spent hours watching birds with Michael. They called him ‘Jerry’ and sometimes Dorothy joined in, coyly thanking him, ‘what a gift you have for reaching children’.

  Her inner child had always made her good at children’s games but of late her energies had sunk so low. She was well and truly trapped between Willard’s importunate ghost and Leonard’s vigorous presence; she was still living through every word of Willard’s life in the proofs of his biography. Leonard was wiry but strong, the thick downstrokes of his writing told her that, his presence was very physical; if Willard’s character had been porcelain then Leonard’s was of sawn English oak, with a thin veneer of spirituality assumed from his time spent in the company of the mystical genius Tagore. Everyone with them assumed he was the holiday tutor, and in a friendly gesture Herbert Croly suggested he might like to read the proofs of his Willard Straight. Herbert was deeply upset; he told Dorothy he feared ‘Leonard had not liked the book at all’. It was not the book’s fault it had aroused, perhaps confirmed, Leonard’s jealousy of Willard’s sainthood, and Dorothy had to apply balm to Herbert’s hurt feelings. To Leonard she wrote of having ‘hurled myself back into the life of the world’ at the end of her holiday, signing herself ‘Yours and Willard’s Dorothy’.143 No one seemed to notice that she was on the verge of her complete breakdown.

  So, there they were, back at Woods Hole again, at the beginning of August a year later in 1924. Leonard had continued writing from India, oblivious of her illness, and Miss Bogue had filed his letters under ‘Financial’ as he had lectured Dorothy on her money, that her resources would be better spent on a single project than on her many causes. Now they had much to talk about, or Leonard had; he proposed again, and her reply emerged as ‘an understanding’ that ‘we are to try and be content to be married in spirit and in absence’. Did that mean on opposite sides of the world? Their second decision was more sensible: their aim, their great project, would be a school ‘such as has not happened yet’, drawing on Indian, American and Chinese ideas of education, involving a few men of ideals and spirit (no politics and no ‘isms’) and nurturing children for service and fellowship – ‘a Jerusalem’ to set their faces towards. Leonard intended Jerusalem to be in India, but he had identified Dorothy’s deep interest which survived from her discovery of Dewey’s Laboratory School in Chicago in 1908 (and conveniently pre-dated Willard). He left Woods Hole for the city, writing from Dorothy’s 1130 Fifth Avenue, ‘This is to say good-bye and never good-bye for we are bound for eternity,’ and Dorothy replied, her bruised brain unearthing impressions from Peking:

  I’m glad I have lived in heaven, Jerry! The afternoon at our rock was that – the yellow tufted hills, the sea and the birds and the broken stone wall. And through it all a sense of understanding as deep as life itself. Never was there such a communication of soul between two people.

  Leonard warmed to his mastery of the situation: ‘I don’t want to see you drift back into the old life and be caught in the old net – the world can’t afford to lose you again and you know it.’ Touching her Achilles heel, for she felt so strongly that Whitney needed a man’s guidance, he added, ‘Life has been too easy for him, he’s too ready to sacrifice truth for his own immediate ends – life has come to mean possession and having, not enough of earning and creating.’144

  In part her rescuer came out of the ether, for in the late August she read E.M. Forster’s newly published A Passage to India, which she found ‘extraordinary’ and ‘oppressive’ except for his ‘flashes of insight’. The India he portrayed, she feared, was of ‘muddle, muddle, muddle’ and it would be impossible to get anything done; ‘suspicion in the oriental is a sort of malignant tumour’ was her verdict.145 She would not go to India. Leonard, now in England, seeing people who knew nothing of Dorothy but heard the magic words ‘American’ and ‘heiress’ and told him that he was a ‘lucky dog’ and what was he waiting for, wrote on 18th September with his third proposal:

  Will you join me in Europe in April and transfer your dreams from the night – to the day, to reality, to marriage, and permit me to give a hand in bringing them to fruition? We’ve played with our dreams long enough.

  She read this fifty times; her answers are enumerated:

  1. Dr Connor says that her thyroid condition has weakened her system and she is not sure she can have any more children.

  2. She has to consult Whitney, Beatrice and Michael, but not yet.

  3. ‘There is my age, in ten years I’ll be an old lady.’ (She would be forty-seven.) She finishes, ‘But how wonderful your letters are – that I can keep my nationality and my name if I want to, angel, angel, that’s what you are.’146

  Leonard was impatient from four years of ‘aching and wanting’ and being unable to convince her that she was ‘his only one right person’. She cabled him, ‘Not Now Please Wait Till I Recover Fully.’ She promised to keep April in mind. Leonard was now on the high seas to Bombay and, accepting that India was not for her, suggested that their school might be in England. Dorothy was overwhelmed: ‘You know I adore England and always have since I stayed with my sister – and Dorset? Shall we really live there?’147 The children’s doctor had advised telling them everything, to keep their confidence – Michael, aged eight, said it would be ‘dandy’ if she married Jerry. Herbert and Louise Croly thought he had ‘in a rare degree that purity of heart and that luminous moving simplicity of mind’ that any man she married ‘ought to have’. They thought that Leonard would simply marry her in New York and everything would remain the same, and that he was more suited to the quietly spiritual Dorothy that had emerged from her illness than any of her American friends and former suitors.

  She spent a quiet autumn; Leonard was now acting as companion and secretary to Tagore who had been invited to visit Peru. They arrived in Buenos Aires in early November where Tagore was taken ill and they were both given refuge by his disciple and muse Victoria Ocampo in her luxurious villa.148 Dorothy was intending to meet Leonard in April but for now he seemed very far away, and she had time to recover her spirits.

  Whitney was enrolled
at Groton School in Massachusetts, her brothers’ old school, and this decided her that Beatrice and Michael too would be educated in America. She saw Shaw’s Saint Joan, which made her think about patriotism – she, who had always been such a devout American patriot – could she ever relinquish her beloved country? Was there nowhere for their school in all America? Her 1925 diary, of gold-embossed mauve leather, marked the return of her joie de vivre. She would take Whitney and Beatrice to California for an adventure and a holiday, and so on the morning of 10th January they all trooped into the Natural History Museum with John Rothschild and Ruth Morgan to look at birds, as a treat for Michael who was being left behind.149 Later Dorothy, Whitney and Beatrice boarded the sleeper train for the long haul, two nights and nearly two days, to Green River in south-west Wyoming, where they changed to the Western Pacific for Salt Lake City, some sightseeing and a recital in the Mormon Tabernacle before another train to San Francisco. There they stayed for over a week, spending a day in Berkeley with friends, seeing the La Honda redwoods, Palo Alto and Stanford; Dorothy celebrated her birthday in the Yosemite National Park. They acquired a driver and ‘in a nice Cadillac’ made their way south through the olive groves of Sausalito to San Raphael, then along the Santa Clara Valley to Monterey. They spent ‘two gorgeous days’ at Pebble Beach before continuing southwards along the Salinas Valley (the coastal highway was not yet built) to El Mirasol and Santa Barbara, and viewed the Ojai valley in the rain. Pasadena and Hollywood were their planned treats for Beatrice, where they visited Douglas Fairbanks’s Studio and watched the filming of Don Quixote – from then on the stage-struck girl had few doubts about her future career. The next day they went to Rockwell Field and the Naval Air Station especially for the speed-struck Whitney.