“It is most unwelcome to me,” she wrote, “this dispute over a public cause—especially when I see or dream what could be done by co-operation. What I wish is that you would join the Evening Play Centres Committee, and see for yourself what it means. There is nothing in our movement which is necessarily antagonistic to yours, but I think we may claim that ours is more in sympathy with the general ideas on the subject that are stirring people’s minds than yours.”
The affair ended in the acceptance by the Government of an amendment to Mrs. Ward’s clause, authorizing the Local Education Authorities to “encourage and assist the continuance or establishment of Voluntary Agencies” in any exercise of powers under the new Act. The two associations—the Happy Evenings and the Play Centres—continued to exist side by side until the inevitable march of events led, under the stress of war, to the issue of Mr. Fisher’s authoritative Memorandum (January, 1917), admitting the obligation of the State in the matter of the children’s recreation, and announcing that in future the Board would undertake half the “approved expenditure” of Evening Play Centre committees. The Children’s Happy Evenings’ committee thereupon decided, in dignified fashion, that their work was ended, and dissolved their Association. Peace be to its ashes! It had given joy, much joy, to many thousands of London children, as Mrs. Ward always most fully recognized, and if in the end it stood in the way of the new and younger power which was capable of giving an almost indefinite extension to the children’s pleasure, could it but have a free field, the reluctance of the Association to cede any ground was only, after all, a very natural affair.
But once the new Act was passed, Mrs. Ward was to be disappointed in her hopes that the London Education Authority would take advantage of the powers conferred upon it in order to assist the movement financially. Certain members of the Council elected in 1907 (in which the majority was overwhelmingly Moderate) urged her to present an appeal to the Education Committee, asking that the cost of the Handwork, Drill and Gymnastic classes held at the Play Centres might be defrayed by the Council; this she did in a statement which she drew up and presented in October, 1907, weaving into it with all the practised skill that she knew so well how to throw into such documents firstly a picture of the child-life of such districts as Hoxton, Walworth and Notting Dale in the winter evenings, when the children were too often “turned out after tea into the streets and told not to come home till bedtime”; then a brief account of the small beginnings and immense growth of the Children’s Recreation School at the Passmore Edwards Settlement, with its offshoots, the ten Play Centres held in the London schools, and finally a striking list of individual cases, showing how the Centres had already attracted to themselves scores of boys and girls whose conditions of life were leading them into idling and vagabondage of all sorts, through the mere lack of anything to do in the dark hours.
“Perhaps the most striking revelation of the whole work,” wrote Mrs. Ward, “has been the positive hunger for hand-occupation which exists among the older children. The attendances at the handwork classes drop off a little when June begins, and from June to October they are better discontinued in favour of cricket, swimming and outdoor games in general. But from October onwards through the whole winter and up to the end of May, the demand for handwork never slackens. Two or three times the number of children who are now being taught would eagerly come to classes if they were opened. Basket-work, wood-work and cobbling are unfailing delights, and it is here that we ask most earnestly for the help of the County Council. Rough boys, who would soon, if left to themselves, become on leaving school a nuisance to the community and to the police, can be got hold of through handwork, and in no other way. And when once the taste has been acquired, there remains the strong probability that after school is over they will be drawn into the net of Evening Classes and Polytechnics, and so rescued for an honest life.”
But the Education Committee, burdened as it was in that year with the first arrangements for medical inspection and treatment, as well as with the demand for the feeding of necessitous children, did not feel able to undertake this further responsibility, although its reception of Mrs. Ward’s memorandum was extremely sympathetic. All that the Council would do at this stage was to remit the charges previously made for cleaning and caretaking of the schools during Play Centre hours, a concession which amounted to a grant of about £20 a year per Centre.
Mrs. Ward was therefore thrown back upon her own resources for the financing of her great experiment. No thought of reduction or even of standing still could be admitted, for with the growing fame of the Centres, appeals began to come in from Care Committees, from School Managers, from Clergy, and from hard-worked Magistrates, begging that Centres might be opened in their districts, while the owner of a jam factory in South London offered to pay part of the cost of a Centre if it could be opened near his works, because the children used to come down to the factory gates in the evenings and cry till their mothers came out. Mr. Samuel’s Children’s Act of 1908 created the post of Probation Officer for the supervision of “first offenders”; the first two or three of these were appointed, on Mrs. Ward’s recommendation, from among her Play Centre Superintendents, since the intimate knowledge they possessed of the children’s lives gave them special qualifications for their task. It soon became the practice of all Probation Officers to refer their lawless little charges (often aged only nine or ten!) to the nearest Play Centre as “every-night children,” there to forget their wild or thieving ways in the fascinations of cobbling, or wood-work, or games, or military drill. But in order to respond to these growing appeals Mrs. Ward had to undertake an ever-increasing burden of financial responsibility, as well as of organization. In 1905 the first eight Centres had cost a little over £900; in 1908, with twelve Centres and total attendances of 620,000, the bill had risen to £3,000; in 1911, with seventeen Centres and attendances of 1,170,000, it was £4,500; in 1913, with twenty Centres and attendances of 1,500,000, it was £5,700. How she succeeded in raising these large sums in addition to her efforts for the Settlement; how she found time, on the top of her literary work and her many semi-political interests, for the close attention that she gave, week in, week out, to the progress of each individual Centre and the peculiarities of every Superintendent, will always remain a mystery. Her unconquerable optimism, which became a more and more marked trait of her character as the years went on, helped her through every crisis, while her joy in the children’s happiness acted both as a tonic and a spur. Every winter she would issue her eloquent Report, sending it out with irresistible personal letters to a large number of subscribers; many a London landlord was made to stand and deliver for the children of meaner streets than those which paid him rent; many a factory owner was persuaded to follow the example of the jam-manufacturer above-mentioned. Yet when all was done there would usually remain a deficit of several hundred pounds, which must be wiped out in order to avert a bankers’ strike; then Mrs. Ward would gather up all the outstanding facts of the year’s work and present them in one of those remarkable letters to The Times of which she possessed the secret, charming the cheques for very shame out of the pockets of the kind-hearted. And thus, with incredible toil and with many moments of despair, the organization was kept going and the indispensable funds supplied; but it was a labour of Hercules, and her letters throughout these years bear witness to the exhausting nature of the task.
Once more, in 1913, Mrs. Ward hoped that the recognition of her long effort was not far off, for both Government and County Council expressed themselves, through the mouths of two distinguished leaders, as very warmly in sympathy with it. She had organized an exhibition of Play Centre hand-work at the Settlement—toy models of all sorts, baskets, dolls, needlework, cobbled boots and shoes—and invited her old friend Lord Haldane, then Lord Chancellor, and Mr. Cyril Cobb, Chairman of the Education Committee, L.C.C., to speak at the opening ceremony. Both speakers emphasized the fact that Mrs. Ward had now proved her case, and that, as Lord Haldane said, the Play Centre movement had “reached a stage in which it must be recognized as one, at least, of the elements in a national system of education, as one of the things that must come within the scope and observance of the Board of Education. Such a movement must begin by voluntary effort. It has already reached a stage in which I hope it is going to attract a great deal of official attention.” Such words could not but encourage Mrs. Ward to hope that help was near, for by that time the Board of Education had already inaugurated the system of giving aid to voluntary societies, if their aims and methods were approved, by a proportional grant on their expenditure. Yet 1913 passed away and nothing came of it. One may perhaps shrewdly suspect, in looking back, that the authorities knew well enough when a thing was a “going concern” and needed no effort of theirs to help it up the hill. Mrs. Ward was their willing horse; they continued, with the instinct of laissez-faire which has so often preserved the British Constitution, to let her pull her own load. But a time was at hand when laissez-faire and all other comfortable doctrines were to be swept away in the shock that set the whole fabric of our society reeling. The outbreak of war, which seemed at first to threaten the very existence of such things as Play Centres, was in fact to reveal and establish their necessity. After two more years of heroic effort to keep them going amid the flood of war appeals, Mrs. Ward had her reward at last in Mr. Fisher’s Memorandum of January, 1917. The State had recognized the principle that in the children lay the best hope of England, and Mrs. Ward had her way. Thence-forward the Board of Education undertook to pay half the “approved expenditure” of the Evening Play Centres committee.
But the establishment and growth of the London Play Centres, heavy and exacting as was the toil that it involved, did not by any means exhaust Mrs. Ward’s efforts to improve the lot of London’s children during these years. In 1908 she opened two additional Vacation Schools in the East End; one in a school with a “roof-playground” in Bow, the other in an ordinary school in Hoxton.
“On Friday I had a field-day at the Bow Vacation School,” she wrote to J.P.T. in August, 1908. “The air on the roof-playground was like Margate, and the children’s happiness and good-temper delightful to see. There were flowers all about, and sunny views over East London to distant country, and round games, and little ones happy with toys, and all sorts of nice things. Downstairs a splendid game of hand-ball in the playground, and a cool hall full of boys playing games and reading. As for the Settlement, it has never been so enchanting. There are 1,150 children daily, and all the teachers say it is better than ever. The Duke’s sand-heap and the new drinking-fountain are great additions. Hoxton goes to my heart! It is too crowded, and there is nothing but asphalt playgrounds, with no shade till late. Yet the children swarm, and when you see them sitting listlessly, doing absolutely nothing, in the broiling dirty streets outside you can’t wonder. I am having the playground shelter scrubbed out with carbolic daily, lined with some flowers in pots, and filled with small tables and chairs for the little ones. They have 800 children, and we have been obliged to give extra help.”
Then in the next year, besides maintaining the roof-playground, she opened another experimental Holiday-school near by for a small number of delicate and ailing children whose names were on the “necessitous” list, and who were therefore eligible for free dinners. Mrs. Ward delighted in continuing and improving the free dinners for these little waifs during the holidays, as well as in providing suitable occupations for their fingers, and it was with real pride that she returned them to their regular school at the end of the holidays, thriving, and with a record of increased weight in almost every case. But the very success of these attempts, together with the ever-increasing size and attractiveness of the Settlement Vacation School, filled her with distress at the wasted opportunities presented by the empty playgrounds of the ordinary London schools during the August holiday, for she well knew from her own experience and from that of New York, which she had closely studied,[27] that it only needed the presence of two or three active kindergarten teachers and a supply of toys and materials to attract to these open spaces all the hot and weary children from the neighbouring streets and there to make them happy. Her fingers itched to do it, tired though they were with so many other labours. It was not, however, till the spring of 1911 that she was able to take this work in hand, but then she addressed herself to it with all her usual energy, presenting a scheme to the L.C.C. for the “organization” of both the boys’ and the girls’ playgrounds at twenty-six London schools during the summer holiday. The Council met her once more with complete confidence, lending all the larger equipment required; Mrs. Ward raised a special fund of nearly £1,000, and devoted much attention to the engagement of the Superintendents for the girls’ grounds and the Games Masters for the boys’. Then, just before the end of term, notices were distributed in the neighbouring schools announcing that such and such a playground would be opened for games and quiet occupations during the holidays, and the result was awaited with some quaking. Would there be a crowd or a desert? and if the former, would the Superintendents be able to keep order? The answer was not long in coming. “I let in 400 boys,” wrote one of the Games Masters after his first session, “and the street outside was still black with them.” But in spite of the eager crowds which everywhere made their appearance, order was kept most successfully. Mrs. Ward herself visited the playgrounds constantly, and at the end of the month wrote her joyous report to The Times:
‘Inside one came always upon a cheerful scene. In the girls’ playgrounds, during those hottest August days, one saw crowds of girls and babies playing in the shade of the school buildings, or forming happy groups for reading or sewing, or filling the trestle tables under the shelters, where were picture-books to be looked at, beads to thread, paints and paper to draw with, or wool for knitting, or portable swings where the elder girls could swing the little ones in turn. Then, if you asked the schoolkeeper to pass you through a locked door, you were in the boys’ playground, where balls were whizzing, and the space was divided up by a clever Superintendent between the cricket of the bigger boys—very near, often, to the real thing—and the first efforts, not a whit less energetic, of the younger ones. In one corner, also, there would be mats and jumping-stands; in another a group playing tennis with a chalked line instead of a net, while the shelters were full, as in the girl’s ground, of all kinds of quiet occupations. Management was everything. It was wonderful what a Superintendent with a real turn for the thing could make of his ground, what a hold he got upon his boys, and how well, in such cases, the boys behaved. There was a real loyalty and esprit de corps in these grounds; and when, in the last week, ‘sports’ and displays were organized for the benefit of the parents, it was really astonishing to see with what ease a competent man or woman could handle a crowded playground, how eagerly the children obeyed, how courteous and happy they were.”
The number of attendances had been prodigious—424,000 for the whole month, or 106,000 per week—and the gratitude of the parents who had pressed in to see the final displays was touching to hear. In the next year Mrs. Ward persuaded the L.C.C. to share the experiment with her, the Council opening “organized playgrounds” in twenty schools and she herself in twenty more; this time the organization was in many points improved, and the results still more satisfactory. But although the Council gave her to understand that they would undertake to carry on the experiment in future, being convinced of its necessity, no further action was taken, and the playgrounds of London, in spite of Mrs. Ward’s object-lesson, have been suffered to relapse into that condition of uselessness and sometimes of positive danger to the children’s morals from which her efforts in 1911 and 1912 had sought to rescue them.
The story of Mrs. Ward’s activities for the welfare of London’s children has taken us far beyond the period of her life at which we had otherwise arrived. To return briefly to her literary work, it may be said, I think, that those two novels of London life, Lady Rose’s Daughter and William Ashe, had marked its highest point in sheer brilliance and success; after these the long autumn of her novel-writing began, which, like all mellow autumns, had its moments of more true and delicate beauty than the full summer had possessed. The first of these autumn novels, if I may use the term, was Fenwick’s Career, which appeared in May, 1906; it was not a great popular success, like the previous two, but to those who read it in these after-times its sober excellence of workmanship, as shown especially in the scenes at Versailles and at the Westmorland cottage where husband and wife meet again after their long separation, are perhaps more attractive than all the brilliance of poor Kitty Bristol or of the shifting groups in Lady Henry’s house in Bruton Street. Mrs. Ward had been criticized in the case of these three novels for having made use of the persons and incidents of the past without any definite acknowledgment, but she defended herself vigorously, in a short Preface to Fenwick’s Career, in words that I cannot do better than reproduce:
“The artist, as I hold, may gather from any field, so long as he sacredly respects what other artists have already made their own by the transmuting processes of the mind. To draw on the conceptions or the phrases that have once passed through the warm minting of another’s brain, is for us moderns at any rate, the literary crime of crimes. But to the teller of stories, all that is recorded of the real life of men, as well as all that his own eyes can see, is offered for the enrichment of his tale. This is a clear and simple principle; yet it has been often denied. To insist upon it is, in my belief, to uphold the true flag of Imagination, and to defend the wide borders of Romance.”
The cottage on the “shelf of fell” in Langdale, whence poor Phœbe Fenwick set forth on her mad journey to London, had also a solid existence of its own, though no “acknowledgment” is made to it in Foreword or text. “Robin Ghyll” stands high above the road on the fell-side, between a giant sycamore and an ancient yew, close by the ghyll of “druid oaks” whence it takes its name—resisting with all the force of the mountain stone of which it is built the hurricanes that sweep down upon it from the central knot of those grim northern hills. The view from its little lawn of Pikes, Crinkle Crags and Bow Fell has perhaps no equal in the Lake District. Sunshine and storm have passed over it for 200 years or more, since the valley folk first built it as a small statesman’s farm or shepherd’s cottage. At the time of which I write the little place was occupied by a poetically minded resident who had added two pleasant rooms.
Mrs. Ward and her daughter Dorothy noticed Robin Ghyll as they drove up Langdale with “Aunt Fan” one summer day in 1902, and fell in love with it. Two years later it actually fell vacant, so that Mrs. Ward could take it in the name of her daughter and share with her the joy of furnishing and then inhabiting its seven rooms. But though Mrs. Ward loved Robin Ghyll and fled to it occasionally for complete retirement, it belonged in a more particular sense to her daughter, and derived from her its charm. Thither she would go at Whitsuntide or in September, refreshing body and mind by contact with its solitudes. Not often indeed could she be spared from the absorbing life of Stocks, or Italy, or Grosvenor Place, where so much depended upon her. But though life limped at Stocks during Dorothy’s brief absences, she always returned from Robin Ghyll with strength redoubled for the arduous service of love which she rendered to her mother all her life long, and from which both giver and receiver derived a sacred happiness.
MRS. WARD had often been assured by her friends and admirers in the United States that if she would but visit them she would find such a welcome as would stagger all her previous ideas of hospitality. She could not doubt it; it was, in fact, this thought, combined with the frailness of her health, that had deterred her during the twenty years that followed the publication of Robert Elsmere from going to claim the honours that awaited her. Her husband and daughter had already paid two visits to the States, and had experienced in the kindness and warmth of their reception an earnest of what would fall to Mrs. Ward’s lot should she venture across the Atlantic; nor had they merely whirled with the passing show, but had made many lifelong friends. Mrs. Ward had, however, resisted the pressure of these friends for many years, until at length, in the spring of 1908, so strong a combination of circumstances arose to tempt her that her resolution gave way. Her own health, which had suffered a grievous and prolonged breakdown in 1906, had gradually re-established itself, so that by the time of which we are speaking she was perhaps in better case for such an adventure than she had been for some years. Mr. and Mrs. Whitridge would hear of nothing but that she should make their house her home during her stay in New York; Mr. Bryce made the same demand for Washington; Earl Grey for Ottawa (where he was at that time Governor-General), while Mr. Ward’s acquaintance with Sir William van Horne, Chairman of the Canadian Pacific Railway—based on a common enthusiasm for Old Masters—led to the irresistible offer of a private car on the Line for Mrs. Ward and her party, at the Company’s expense, from Montreal to Vancouver and back. Such lures were hardly to be withstood, but I doubt whether Mrs. Ward would have succumbed even to them had it not been for her growing desire to see, with her own eyes, the work which was being done in New York for the play-time of the children. She knew that New York was far in advance of London in the provision of Vacation Schools for the long summer holiday, and of evening Recreation Centres for the children who had left school; but Play Centres for the school-children themselves were as yet unknown there, so that she felt much might be gained by an exchange of experiences between herself and the “Playground Association of America.”
And so, on March 11, 1908, they sailed in the Adriatic—she and Mr. Ward, and her daughter Dorothy, with the faithful Lizzie in attendance. The great ship set her thinking of the only other long voyage that she had ever made, over far other seas. “When I look at this ship,” she wrote, “and think of the cockleshell we came home in round the Horn in ’56, and the discomforts my mother must have suffered with three children, one a young baby! Happiness, as we all know, and as the copy-books tell us, does not depend on luxuries—but how she would have responded to a little comfort, a little petting, if she had ever had it! My heart often aches when I think of it.” The comforts of the Adriatic were indeed colossal, and since the ocean was kindness itself, Mrs. Ward took no ill from the voyage, but arrived in good spirits, and ready to face the New World with that zest which was her cradle-gift.
Mr. Whitridge’s pleasant house in East Eleventh Street received Mr. and Mrs. Ward, while Dorothy stayed with equally hospitable friends—Mrs. Cadwalader Jones and her daughter—over the way. Avalanches of reporters had to be faced and dealt with, all craving for five minutes’ talk with Mrs. Ward, but they were usually intercepted in the hall by Mr. Whitridge, whose method of dealing with his country’s newspapers was somewhat drastic. If they passed this outer line of defence they were received by Mr. or Miss Ward, who found them persistent indeed, but always marvellously civil; and on the very few occasions when Mrs. Ward did consent to be interviewed, she insisted on seeing the proof and entirely re-writing what had been put into her mouth. The newspapers, indeed, had reckoned without a mentality which intensely disliked this kind of thing; it was unfortunate, perhaps, but inevitable!
In all other respects, however, it was impossible for Mrs. Ward not to be deeply moved by the kindness that was heaped upon her. “Life has been a tremendous rush,” wrote D. M. W. from New York, “but really a very delightful one, and we are accumulating many happy and amusing memories. The chief thing that stands out, of course, is the love and admiration for M. and her books. When all’s said and done, it really is pretty stirring, the way they feel about her. And the things the quiet, unknown people say to one about her books go to one’s heart.” (“We dined at a house last night,” wrote Mrs. Ward herself, “where everybody had a card containing a quotation from my wretched works. Humphry bears up as well as can be expected!”) But on one occasion, at least, she came in for a puff of unearned incense. At an afternoon tea, given in her honour by Mrs. Whitridge, an elderly lady was overheard saying in awe-struck tones to her neighbour, “To think that I should have lived to shake hands with the authoress of Little Lord Fauntleroy!”
Dinners, lunches, receptions, operas and theatres succeeded one another in a dazzling rush, but New York knew quite well what was the main purpose of Mrs. Ward’s visit, and it was fitting that the principal function arranged in her honour should have been a dinner given her at the Waldorf-Astoria by the Playground Association of America. There were 900 persons present, and when Mrs. Ward stood up to address them every man and woman in the room spontaneously rose to their feet to greet her. It was a moment that would have touched a far harder heart than hers.
“It was very moving—it really was,” she wrote to J. P. T.—“because of the evident kindness and sincerity of it. I got through fairly well, though I don’t feel that I have yet arrived at the right speech for a public dinner.... I was most interested by the speech of the City Superintendent of Education, Dr. Maxwell, an admirable man, who declared hotly in my favour as to Play Centres, and has, since the dinner, given directions for the first afternoon Play Centre for school children in New York. Isn’t that jolly!
‘Well, and since, we have been lunching, dining and seeing sights with the same vigour. I have been to schools and manual training centres with Dr. Maxwell, and we went through the Natural History Museum with its Director,[28] who gave us a thrilling time.... One afternoon I went down to a College Settlement and spoke to a large gathering of workers about English ways. The day before yesterday I spoke to about 900 boys and girls and their teachers, in one of their magnificent public schools. Dr. Maxwell took me, and asked me to speak of Grandpapa. A great many of the elder boys had read Tom Brown and knew all about the ‘Doctor’! I enjoyed it greatly, and as to their saluting of the flag—these masses of alien children—one may say what one will, but it is one of the most thrilling things in the world, and we, as a nation, are the poorer for not having it.”
Mrs. Ward had accepted four or five engagements to lecture while she was in America, in aid of her London Play Centres, and accumulated, to her intense satisfaction, the handsome sum of £250 from this source during her tour. She gave her audiences of her best—the paper already mentioned, on “The Peasant in Literature,” which revealed her literary craft in its most finished form, and although she was so much the rage at the time that her admirers were not disposed to be critical, she was yet genuinely gratified by the pleasure which this paper gave, especially in so cultivated a centre as Philadelphia. Here Mrs. Ward and her daughter were the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Earle Coates, and then of the Bertram Lippincotts, in their charming house outside the town. Independence Hall gave them the proper thrill of sympathy with a “nation struggling to be free,” while Mrs. Ward was delighted by the general old-world look of many of the streets, no less than by the stately river, on which, as she found to her astonishment, “the boat-crews practise for Henley.” During their short stay with Mrs. Coates, Mrs. Ward made friends with Dr. Weir Mitchell, novelist and physician, and with Miss Agnes Repplier, for whom she felt an instant attraction, while Dorothy sat next to a Mr. Walter Smith, and talked to him innocently about certain Modernist lectures that had been given at the Settlement in London, discovering afterwards, to her dismay, that he was a strong Catholic, and freely called in Philadelphia “Helbeck of Bannisdale.” “I noticed it fell a little flat!”
From Philadelphia they moved on to Washington, to stay with their old friends the Bryces, at the hospitable British Embassy. An invitation from the President (Mr. Roosevelt) to dine with him at the White House, had already reached them. Mrs. Ward described her impressions in a long letter to her son:
“WASHINGTON,
”April 13, 1908.
‘Everybody here has been kindness itself, and we feel that we ought to spend the rest of our days in trying to be nice to Americans in London! First, as you know, we went to the Bryces. They asked a great many people to meet us, but what I remember best is a quiet hour with Mr. and Mrs. Root, who were smuggled into an inner drawing-room away from the crowd, where one could listen to him in peace, and above all, look at him! He is, I think, the most attractive of all the Americans we have seen. He has been Secretary of State now for some years, and is evidently, like Edward Grey, absorbed in his own special work and not much concerned with current politics. His subordinates speak of him with enthusiasm, and he has a detached, humane, meditative face, with a slight flicker of humour perpetually playing over it—as different as possible from the hawk-like concentration of the New Yorkers. We have seen most of the Cabinet and high officials, and I have particularly liked Mr. Garfield, Secretary of the Interior, Mr. Metcalf, Secretary for the Navy, and Mr. Bacon, Assistant Secretary of State. Saturday’s dinner at the White House was delightful, only surpassed by the little round-table dinner of eight last night at Mr. Henry Adams’s, where the President took me in and talk was fast and free—altogether a memorable evening. At the White House I did not sit near the President, everything being regulated by a comparatively strict etiquette and precedence—but after dinner he sent word that I was to sit by him in the ballroom, at the little concert which followed, and when the music was over, he and I plunged into all sorts of things, ending up with religion and theology! Last night he talked politics, socialism, divorce, large and small families, the Kaiser, Randolph Churchill, the future of wealth in this country (he wants to lop all the biggest fortunes by some form of taxation—pollard them like trees)—the future of marriage and a few other trifles of the same kind. He is, of course, an egotist, but an extraordinarily well-meaning and able one, with all the virtues and failings of his natural character and original bringing-up, exaggerated now and produced on what one might almost call a colossal scale, which strikes the American imagination. He honestly doesn’t want a third term, and has set his mind on Taft for his successor, but it must be hard for such a man to step down from such a post into the ordinary opportunities of life. However, as he says, and apparently sincerely, ‘we mustn’t break the Washington tradition.’
“To-day we are going out to Mount Vernon, and to-night there is another dinner-party. Washington is a most beautiful place—the Capitol a really glorious building that any nation might be proud of, and the shining White House, with its graceful pillared front, among its flowering trees and shrubs, makes me think with shame of that black abortion, Buckingham Palace!”
It was a special pleasure to them also to see something of M. Jusserand, the French Ambassador, and his charming wife, and to renew a friendship which had endured since their early days in London. But above all it was the leaders of American politics that impressed Mrs. Ward.
“Root, Garfield, Taft,” she wrote to Miss Arnold, of Fox How, “these and several others of the leading men attracted and impressed me greatly—beyond what I had expected. Indeed, I think one of the main impressions of this visit has been the inaccuracy of our common idea in England that American women of the upper class are as a rule superior to the men. It may be true among a certain section of the rich business class, but amongst the professional, educated and political people it is not true at all.”
Boston, of course, claimed Mrs. Ward on her way to Canada, and adopted her in whole-hearted fashion. She was by this time a little tired of “receptions” of five and six hundred persons, all passing before her as in a dream and shaking a hand which was never free from writer’s cramp. “But the touching thing is the distance people come—one lame lady came 300 miles!—it made me feel badly—and all the Unitarian ministers for thirty miles round have been asked and are said to be coming on Tuesday next!” When they came, Mrs. Ward enjoyed the occasion particularly, and wrote home that she had “had to make a speech, but got through better than usual by dint of talking of T. H. Green.” An elderly bookseller among them, who had written to her regularly about each of her books for the last twenty years, now met her and spoke with her at last; he went away contented. But the real delights of her stay at Boston were her visits to Harvard and Radcliffe, and her intercourse with the Nortons at Shady Hill, and with Mrs. Fields and Miss Jewett at the former’s house. Here she met the fine old veteran, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, author of the “Battle-Hymn of the Republic,” who had lately brought out her memoirs. Mrs. Ward had been somewhat wickedly amused by certain passages in the latter: “Imagine Mrs. Ward Howe declaring in public that a poem of hers, which a critic had declared to be ‘in pitiable hexameters’ (English, of course), was not ‘in hexameters at all—it was in pentameters of my own make—I never followed any special school or rule!’ I have been gurgling over that in bed this morning.” But when they met, Mrs. Ward capitulated. “By the way, I retract about Mrs. Howe. Her book is rather foolish, but she herself is an old dear—full of fun at ninety, and adored here. She lunched with Mrs. Fields to-day en petit comité, and was most amusing.”
The New England country, which she saw on a motor-trip to Concord and Lexington, and again on a visit which she paid to Mr. and Mrs. Henry Holt at their beautiful house overlooking Lake Champlain, fascinated her, “with its miles and miles of young woods sprung up on the soil of the slain forests of the past—its pools and lakes, its hills and dales, its glorious Connecticut river, and its myriads of white, small wooden houses, all on a nice Georgian pattern, with shady verandahs, scattered fenceless over the open fields. There were no flowers to be seen—only the scarlet blossom of the maples in the woods.”
Nor could she get away, in such an atmosphere, from the old, old problem of the separation.
“I have been reading Bancroft this morning, and shall read G. O. T. to-night. We were fools!—but really, I rather agree with H. G. Wells that they make too much fuss about it! and with Mr. Bryce that it was a great pity, for them and us, that the link was broken. So they needn’t be so tremendously dithyrambic!”
It was, however, with a heart full of gratitude for the unnumbered kindnesses of her hosts that Mrs. Ward quitted American soil at the end of April and crossed over into Canada. Here her peregrinations were to be mainly under the auspices of Lord Grey, then Governor-General, and of Sir William van Horne, lord of the Canadian Pacific Railway, at whose house in Montreal she planned the details of her great journey to the West. These two revealed themselves to Mrs. Ward in characteristic fashion while she was still the guest of Sir William, at Montreal, for the Governor-General, coming over from Ottawa for the great Horse Show, stopped during his progress round the arena at the Van Horne’s box, spoke to Mrs. Ward with the greatest cordiality, and there and then insisted that she must go to see the great new Agricultural College at St. Anne’s, near Montreal, on their way to Ottawa the next day.
“He declared that M. could not possibly leave Canada without having seen it,” wrote D. M. W., “and then said, with a laugh and a wave of his hand to Sir William, ‘Ask him—he’ll arrange it all for you!’—and passed on, leaving M. and me somewhat scared, for we had not wanted to bother Sir William about this journey at any rate! I could see that even he, who is never perturbed, was a little taken aback, but he said, in his quiet way, ‘It can certainly be arranged,’ and it has been!” Then, en revanche, the Governor-General, “being on the loose, so to speak, in Montreal, with only one and the least vigilant of his A.D.C.’s,” came unexpectedly to the big evening party that the Van Hornes were giving that night—“because, as he said, ‘I like Van Horne, and I wanted to see Mrs. Ward!’” But, once back in Ottawa, “his family and all his other A.D.C.’s, are scolding him and wringing their hands, because he never ought to have done it! It creates a precedent and offends 500 people, while it pleases one. Such are the joys of his position.”
When the “command” journey to the Agricultural College had been safely preformed, the students duly presented Mrs. Ward with a bouquet and sang “For she’s a jolly good fellow.” “The G.G. was delighted,” wrote Dorothy, “and led her out to smile her thanks, but there was fortunately no time for her to be called upon for five minutes of uplift, as His Excellency was, the last time he went there! That has now become a household word in Government House.” Mrs. Ward must, I think, almost have been in at the birth of that hard-worked phrase.
Mr. Ward had been obliged to return to England for his work on The Times, so that his wife’s Canadian experiences are recorded in letters to him:
“GOVERNMENT HOUSE, OTTAWA,
“May 14, 1908.
...“Well, we have had a very pleasant time. Lord Grey is never tired of doing kind things, and she also is charming. He has asked everybody to meet us who he thought would be interesting—Government and Opposition—Civil servants, journalists, clergy—but no priests! The fact is that there is a certain amount of anxiety about these plotting Catholics, and always will be. They accept the status quo because they must, and because it would not help them as Catholics to fall into the hands of either the United States or of France. But there is plenty of almost seditious feeling about. And the ingratitude of it! I sat last night at the Lauriers’ between Sir Wilfrid and M. Lemieux, Minister of Labour—both Catholics. Sir Wilfrid said to me, ‘I am a Roman Catholic, but all my life I have fought the priests—le cléricalisme, voilà l’ennemi. Their power in Quebec is unbounded, but Modernism will come some day—with a rush—in a violent reaction.‘ On my left M. Lemieux described his meeting last week in Quebec with fourteen bishops, one of whom said to him—’Le Canada, c’est le Paradis terrestre du Catholicisme!’ But as for the educated Catholics, M. Lemieux went on, ‘We are all Modernists!’ Both of them denounced the Pope and spoke with longing of Leo XIII.”
“TORONTO,
”May 18.
‘Such nice people at Ottawa, and such interesting people. Also the guiding ideas and influences are English, the first time I have felt it. The position of the Parliament buildings is splendid, and some day it will be a great city. The Archives represent the birth and future of Canadian history, and a Canadian patriotism—four years’ work, and already it is influencing ideas and politics, among a young people who did not know they had a history.[29]
“Toronto is less exciting, though pleasant. We lunched yesterday with Colonel George Denison, a great Loyalist and Preferentialist, much in with Chamberlain. He cut Goldwin Smith twenty years ago!—so it was piquant to go on from him to the Grange. The Grange is an English eighteenth-century house, or early nineteenth—as one might find in the suburbs of Manchester in a large English garden—the remains of 1,000 acres—with beautiful trees. An old man got up to meet me, old, but unmistakably Goldwin Smith, though the black hair is grizzled—not white—and the face emaciated. But he holds himself erect, and his mind is as clear, and his eye as living, as ever—at 85. He still harps on his favourite theme—that Canada must ultimately drop into the mouth of the United States and should do so—and poured scorn on English Tariff Reformers and English Home Rulers together. Naturally he is not very popular here!”
From Toronto Mrs. Ward made a flying trip to Buffalo and Niagara, where she was shown the glories of the Falls by General Greene—a descendant of the gallant Nathaniel Greene, hero of the S. Carolina campaign of 1781. Then, returning to Toronto, she found Sir William van Horne and the promised private car awaiting her—not to mention the “Royal Suite” at the Queen’s Hotel, offered her by the management “free, gratis, for nothing! Oh dear, how soon will the mighty fall!—after the 12th of June next” (the date of her departure for home). But, for the present, “The car is yours,” said Sir William, “the railway is yours—do exactly as you like and give your orders.”
They parted from their kind Providence on Saturday, May 23, but within forty-eight hours the railway was providing them with quite an unforeseen sensation. Six hours this side of Winnipeg (where all kinds of engagements awaited her), part of the track that ran across a marsh collapsed, with the result that Mrs. Ward’s and many other trains were held up for nearly twenty hours.
“Vermilion Station, C.P.R.,
“May 25, 1908.
‘Here we are, stranded at a tiny wayside station of the C.P.R., and have been waiting sixteen hours, while eight miles ahead they are repairing a bridge which has collapsed in a marsh owing to heavy rain. Three trains are before us and about five behind. A complete block on the great line. We arrived here at six this morning, and here it is 9.50 p.m.
‘It has been a strange day—mostly very wet, with nothing to look at but some scrubby woods and a bit of cutting. We captured a Manitoba Senator and made him come and talk to us, but it did not help us very far. Snell, our wonderful cook and factotum, being in want of milk, went out and milked a cow!—asking the irate owner, when the deed was done, how much he wanted. And various little incidents happened, but nothing very enlivening.
[Later.]. “Here we are at the spot, a danger signal behind us, and the one in front just lowered. Another stop! our engine is detached and we see it vanishing to the rear. The track won’t bear it. How are we going to get over!—Here comes the engine back, and the brakesman behind our car imagines we are to be pushed over, the engine itself not venturing.
‘10.5. Safely over! The engine pushed us to the brink, and then, as it was taken off, a voice asked for Mrs. Ward. It was the Assistant Manager of the line, Mr. Jameson, who jumped on board in order to cross with us and explain to me everything that had happened. He had been working for hours and looked tired out. But we went out to the observation-platform, he and I and Dorothy, and the trajet began—our train being attached to some light empty cars, and an engine in front that was pulling us over. I thought Mr. Jameson evidently nervous as we went slowly forward—we were the first train over!—but he showed us as well as the darkness allowed, the marshy place, the new bed made for the line (in the morning the rails were hanging in air and an engine and two cars went in!) and the black mud of the sink-hole pushed up into high banks—trees on the top of them—on either side by the pressure of the new filling put in—50,000 cubic yards of sand and gravel. On either side of the line were crowds of dark figures, Galician and Italian workmen, intently watching our progress. Altogether a dramatic and interesting scene! We were all glad, including, clearly, the assistant manager, when he said, ‘Now we are over it’—but there was no real danger, even if the train had partially sunk, for it was only a causeway over a marsh and not a real bridge.
“Well, it is absurd to have only a day for Winnipeg, but this accident makes it inevitable. The journey has been all of it wonderful, and I am more thrilled by Canada than words can describe!”
After a breathless day in Winnipeg, very pleasantly spent, under the care of Mr. and Mrs. Sanford Evans, in endeavouring to overtake the engagements lost in the “sink-hole,” Mrs. Ward and her daughter resumed their journey across the vast prairie, over the Rockies and the Selkirks, and down into Vancouver. On her return she thus summed up her impressions of it in a letter to “Aunt Fan”:
‘Everybody was kindness itself, everywhere, and the wonderful journey across Canada and back was something never to forget. To see how a great railway can make and has made a country, to watch all the stages of the prairie towns, from the first wooden huts upwards to towns like Calgary and Regina, and the booming prosperity of Winnipeg—to be able to linger a little in the glorious Rockies, to rush down the Fraser Cañon, which Papa used to talk to us about and show us pictures of when we were children—I thought of him with tears and longing in the middle of it—and then to find ourselves at the end beside the ‘wide glimmering sea’ of the blue Pacific—all this was wonderful, a real enrichment of mind and imagination. At least it ought to be!”
In Vancouver they were under the chaperonage of Mr. F. C. Wade, now Agent-General for British Columbia, and of Mr. Mackenzie King, the future Prime Minister, whom they had already met at Ottawa, but with whom Mrs. Ward had a far more intimate link than that, since about five years before he had come to live as a Resident at the Passmore Edwards Settlement, and had made great friends with us all. He now acted as guide, not only to the marvellous beauties of Vancouver, but also to the recesses of the Chinese quarter, where he had many friends, owing to the fact that he happened to be engaged in dealing out Government compensation for the anti-Chinese riots of the year before. Mrs. Ward was immensely interested in all the problems of Vancouver—racial, financial and political—being especially impressed by the danger of its “Americanization” through the buying up of its real estate by American capital. She stayed long enough to lecture to the Canadian Club of Vancouver in aid of Lord Grey’s fund for the purchase of the Quebec battlefields as a national memorial to Wolfe, and then set her face definitely homewards. But she could not allow herself to hurry too swiftly through the Rockies, where the snow was beginning to melt and expeditions were becoming possible. From Field she drove to feast her eyes on the Emerald Lake; from Laggan she pushed on to Lake Louise.