Father Struck It Rich

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

EVALYN WALSH McLEAN
Wearing the Hope Diamond 'and the Star of the East

Fath

er

It Rich

EVALYN WALSH McLEAN

WITH BOYDEN SPARKES

ILLUSTRATED
BOSTON 1936

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

Copyright, 1935, 1936,

BY EVALYN WALSH McLEAN

All rights reserved
Published March, 1936

IN THE UHITED STATES OF AMERICA

To my father, who was the fairest and
squarest man I ever knew, and to my mother
a gallant lady, shy, lovable and brave.

Foreword

As I read over the proofs of this book of mine, which has come
into print only through collaboration with Mr. Boyden Sparkes,
whose untiring efforts I most fully realize, I have come to feel
that, in telling what has happened to me, the whole emphasis
has been on events rather than on my impression of what life
actually is and what I have attempted to get out of it.

Now for a few honest, plain facts about myself: Why should
I at forty-one suddenly break up my home, walk out of three
beautiful places, give back the private Pullman car to my hus-
band, and, knowing it would be bitterly hard, start life over
again? I have noticed that most women do not get a divorce
unless they are ready to marry again or want large alimony. In
my case, it was neither of these reasons. It was to try to save
my three lovely children. Home life was growing so difficult;
and I knew they would be affected, perhaps ruined by it; so I
packed up one morning and moved quickly.

Little did I dream at the time how hard it would be, because
I was getting soft with too much money, too many automobiles.
I know now the best thing I ever did for myself and the chil-
dren was to begin life over again like any average person.

The one outstanding lesson I have learned and the one Father
always taught me was, "Think of the other fellow first." Hu-
man nature is such a wonderful thing; people are so fine and
real when you least expect them to be. You see, I really love
people, all people and every class of people. Another thing I
was taught is, "Give part of yourself."

Anyone with a little money can write out a check, sit back,
and tell someone how to spend it; but the real joy in life is the
personal touch the warm, helping hand held out and the
feeling, "She really cares for me and it is not only charity."

vii

FOREWORD

Many examples of this come to mind. For instance, if, in a
movie house, I see a man or woman who seems worried, or if
one of the patient ushers or doormen who are so kind and con-
siderate seems sick or discouraged, I always manage to get into
conversation with them and often I am able to help in some
little way. I have followed a poor mother out of a movie when
her baby was yelling, and sat with the child and sent the mother
back to finish the show, knowing full well she had had to bring
the child, or not get the simple fun and rest for the afternoon
if she did not bring it, because she had no one at home to leave
it with.

I have my own little secret about the blue Hope diamond,
of which so much has been written. It is not the lovely blue
stone I wonder about; but I have great respect for and a great
deal of curiosity about the thought concentrated on it. Perhaps
when people do think about it, their first thought is, "It is evil";
and with a stone so well known, and with so many people keep-
ing that thought in their minds, that might be the reason for
its power and the cause of so much unhappiness always fol-
lowing the stone. I had it blessed myself and I am sitting back
on the side lines letting the curse and the blessing fight it out
together. Personally, I have so much faith in goodness and
right working out in the end that it never worries me.

I have never done anything in my life without putting hard,
personal work into the little I have accomplished. With my
babies, I walked the floor night after night when often I was
so weak and sick I could hardly stand; and there was always
a trained nurse in the house. I have tried never to pass a wor-
ried or sick person anywhere at a time when there was the
smallest chance of helping them.

Money is lovely to have and I have loved having it, but It
does not really bring the big things of life friends, health,
respect and it is so apt to make one soft and selfish. If I had
only had the courage to lead my own life years ago I might by
now have helped so many poor souls, and might have done infi-
nitely more good.

vm

FOREWORD

The real things, I have found out, are quiet and peace in
your own soul, love and thought for the people around you,
and, above all, the care and devotion you give to your children.

It does not matter how other people treat you. That is their
lookout. The only real thing is how you treat them. Give love
out, but do not worry and expect any in return, and you will
be happy and contented.

In returning these proofs to my publishers, I feel that I must
add a word of appreciation and gratitude for the many hearten-
ing letters which I have received as a result of the serial pub-
lication in the Saturday Evening Post, and for the true friends
which I am making through my story.

It is a great happiness to me to think that the book may
serve a useful purpose.

EVALYN WALSH MCLEAN

Friendship
January, 1936

CONTENTS

i / Tell My Right Age 3

II An Immigrant Lad from Ireland and a Church

Organist 13

in "Daughter, I've Struck It Rich!" 25

iv The Camp Bird Mine 39

v The Walshes Meet the McLeans 49

vi The Walsh Gold Engine 60

vii We Meet a King 69

vin Don't Sell the Camp Bird Mine! 84

ix It Is No Fun to Be a Lady . 95

x More About Gold Seekers 110

xi A Toll Gate On Our Road 121

xii Romance in Washington 134

xin A Fantastic Honeymoon 146

xiv The Hundred Million Dollar Baby 158

xv Drink and Drugs and the Hope Diamond 169

xvi My Relatives-in-Law 185

xvn Newport and Palm Beach 200

xvin Washington Scandals 217

xix Tragedy 229

xx The McLeans, the Hardings and Calvin Coolidge 239

xxi The Distaff Side 259

xxii Oil and the First-Page McLeans 278

xxni Private Problems and Public 292

xxiv Depression Days 301

Index 311

ILLUSTRATIONS

Evalyn Walsh McLean, Wearing the Hope Diamond

and the Star oj the East FRONTISPIECE

Mrs. Lee (Aunt Lucy) 20

Mrs. Thomas F. Walsh, Mother of Mrs. McLean 20

Evalyn Walsh at Four 26

The Walsh Home in Ouray 26

The Walsh Family in 1897 34

Thomas F. Walsh as a Young Man 42

Mr. Walsh in Later Years 42
Mrs, John R. McLean , Mother of Edward Beale McLean 50

Mrs. Washington McLean 50

Camp Bird Mine 66

The Mill at Camp Bird Mine 66

Mountain Road Leading to the Camp Bird Mine 82

2020 Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, D. C. 98

Edward Beale McLean, about 1908 138

On the Honeymoon 154

Tallyho with Vice-President Fairbanks 160
President Tajt Rechristening the Walsh Colorado Estate 160

The Hope Diamond 178

A Banquet at the I Street House 186

Vinson Walsh McLean 202

President Harding and Mrs, McLean 218

Friendship 234

President Harding and Mr. McLean 266

The 1920 Houseboat Party 266

Christmas Tree Party at the I Street House 282

Evalyn B. McLean, Daughter of Mrs. McLean 288

Edward B. McLean, Jr., and John R. McLean, Sons of

Mrs. McLean 304

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

CHAPTER I

/ Tell My Right Age

WHEN I had my hair dyed because streaks of white were show-
ing in the blackness of it, I went right to the telephone and one
after another called my friends and so-called friends espe-
cially those I knew would spread the news fast.

"Darling," I began with each one, "I have become a
blonde "

My habit is to tell things first in preference to letting the
gossips make exciting discoveries. I have been doing this for
years. Long ago, as a Washington hostess and as the wife of
a newspaper proprietor, I learned it is next to impossible to
cover up anything, no matter how much you might like to
keep a few secrets. In this book I am going to tell all my re-
maining ones, and some others. That is why I begin by telling
my right age, adding three years to what heretofore it has been
the polite thing to believe. I uttered my first cry at half -past
four in the afternoon of August 1, 1886, in Denver, Colorado.
It was a Sunday. That, I can tell you right now, is a fact en-
tirely without significance in my life Sunday, I mean.

A nurse was hired to attend Mother and me during the
hours Father had to be away from the house. When the nurse
was there I slept quietly enough, but each day soon after her
departure I would begin to fret and then to cry as one be-
witched. The crying would continue until the nurse returned
the next day. She could soothe me. Mother had lost her first
baby, born five or six years before, and she and Father were
terror-stricken by the thought that I was going to follow my
little sister into oblivion. Mother was so ill that she sent for
her mother, my Grandmother Reed.

3

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

How beautiful is the word "Grandmother." Mine was truly
a grand old woman 1 Virile and self-willed, she took charge
at once, and within a day discovered that the monster of a
nurse had been feeding me morphine in a soothing syrup. My
appetite had been destroyed by the drug, and even when I did
take milk it would not stay down. Father drove the nurse out
of the house and tried to have her prosecuted. Grandmother
Reed, for weeks thereafter, carried me around on a pillow
a puny, bluish little creature that almost no one expected to
live. AH that did keep life in me was the tenderness, the care,
and the mother-shrewdness of Grandmother Reed. To the
last minute of her life there was a strong bond of sympathy
and understanding between us.

We lived in so many, many places when I was a little girl
that I cannot possibly fix upon the exact succession of our
homes, but it does not matter; except when we visited else-
where we were always in the mountains of Colorado. The first
memory of my life that I can bring into focus is of the half-
dark interior of a two-room log cabin. It was comfortable and
warm. Snow was thick against the outside of our small window
except for a frosted corner through which, when the sun was
shining, came a tinsel glitter.

I was crying bitterly. My small brother Vinson, one year
and eight months younger than I, was crying and sniffling. This
was our protest against being taken into the knife-edged cold
of the outdoors. Hands, my mother's hands, were pushing my
arms and legs into thick garments. A scratchy woolen fascinator
was draped firmly over my head to cover my ears and then
crossed below my chin, the ends being tucked far back under
my arms. Mittened and mummified, I was stood to one side
while Vinson's wrappings were completed; that meant I was
ready, so I began to yell with ferocity, stamping my feet for
additional emphasis. Then Vinson was ready, and as Mother
rose with him on her arm his yells were intensified. Then
Mother opened the door and plucked me, with a thickly gloved
hand, after her into the cold.

It is my understating that we were then wintering high up

4

I TELL MY RIGHT AGE

in a mining camp near Leadville, and the cold I am talking
about was an arctic cold. As the latch of the heavy door clicked
behind us I walked, clutching my mother's glove, up a flight
of treacherous and glassy steps that had been chopped (prob-
ably by my father) in the ice on the slope of the hill into which
the cabin was imbedded. When our feet had crunched to the
top step we turned into a pathway of black and icy footprints
in the snow at the level of our cabin's roof.

Several cabin-roofs along that pathway was another and
bigger cabin, that stood higher on the slope. This one sheltered
the mining-camp boardinghouse where we took our meals.
There is a fault in the vein of my memory after that. I must
have been about four years old.

The next thing I remember is an occurrence in Denver.
There were streetcar tracks in front of the small and ugly
house. One side of our backyard was bordered by a weather-
blackened fence that enclo}ed the yard of our next-door
neighbors. They kept a dog th|re. Vin and I often heard him,
and we had been told we must not climb the fence because the
dog would bite us. Whenever we hit the fence with a stick he
would bark and his chain would rattle. One day Mother put
us into the back yard and told us not to go out of it; she was
going downtown. In a little while Vin and I were bored. What
was it we were forbidden to do? Climb the fence. Climb the
fence just that quickly it became an impulse on which I
acted. Poor little Vin, who so many times was led into trouble
by his Sis, climbed with me. It could not have been a very
high fence; it only seems so in my memory. We dropped into
the neighbor's yard. Everything there looked inviting. There
was grass, and in one far corner a doghouse. But the dog was
not chained in his house. I heard the animal growling before
I saw him, heard his claws clicking on a brick pavement, and
then he scampered around a corner of the house and came for
us at a dead run a white bull terrier.

Ourselves two frightened little animals, Vin and I scuttled
to the fence and began to climb. I felt as if I were half -petrified,
but I got over and dropped into our yard. Poor brother ! Slower

5

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

and smaller, he was astride the fence as the dog ended his
charge with a leap. Vin screamed piercingly.

What I remember next is the vibrations of heavy footsteps
that told me of the arrival of the doctor. From my hiding place
under the bed in the front room, I could hear water running
in the kitchen, could see a long black satchel on the floor and
now and then a hairy hand that reached down into it. There
was dust in my nostrils and grief and regret in all my fibers.
At intervals there were more screams from Vinson, The doctor
was working some fresh kind of torture on the dreadful scarlet
rags of flesh on my brother's leg. They did not find me until
after the doctor had gone.

The shock had caused Mother to have one of her headaches;
a wet towel was bandaged at her forehead and her swollen
eyelids were red and tearstained. Father had come home. He
was getting his gun. Afterward I became well acquainted with
that old forty-one caliber revolver that had been with Father
through all his years in the Black Hills and around Leadville,
But this time it was just another awful item in the list of things
my wrongdoing had brought to the surface of our lives.

"Where you going, Tom?" Mother's voice was shrill with
fresh alarm.

"To kill that damned dog." I saw him go out the door, vest
unbuttoned, his head cocked a little to one side, three fingers
of his right hand held as delicately away from the butt of the
erect revolver as if they were the fingers of a too-elegant lady
balancing a fork. My father was ready to "throw down" on
that beast that had torn the leg of his precious boy; Vin was
his idol. I felt that there were ultimate horrors ahead for all
of us, and dived back under the bed. I have no recollection of
any shot, nor do I remember anything else about that affair*
Vinson thereafter had deep and shiny scars on the calf of his
leg, scars that I saw with feelings of guilt.

We moved away from the ugly little house, but where we
went is not clear to me. Sometimes we lived in deep bowl-like
valleys where I would have to tilt my head way back to see
the sky roof above the mountain walls. With the swiftness of

6

I TELL MY RIGHT AGE

a stage effect, day would change to night and then come again
in the same way. Sometimes we would be living in an unpainted
board house so far up on a mountain that, almost any time I
wished, on a wet day I could suck a wisp of cloud fleece right
into my mouth or swing my arms to and fro and make a piece
of cloud flow and eddy along the ground as if it were smoke
from my father's cigar. Generally we were in the mountains
in summer, and Father would come and go on the back of a
horse. These animals were changed even more frequently than
our houses, because they were hired animals. When cold
weather came we usually retreated to Denver; mining-camp
winters were deemed too severe for Vinson and Mother and me.
There was one time, though, that we certainly were living in
a mining town in the winter. The place was Leadville. One
man was distinguished from all others in Leadville by a black
patch over an empty eye-socket. He was John Campion, owner
of the Little Johnny, and a shrewd and hearty friend of my
father.

I always pleaded with Father to let me go with him on his
trips, and one day at Leadville when he was going on farther
up into the mountains on a sled he consented to take me. He
frequently did when it was possible. This time he was going
to see a man about a mine. That is about as much as I re-
member of his errand; probably it is as much as I knew.

The sled seat was close to the ground. When Father had
tucked the grizzly-bear robe tightly around my legs to shut
out the cold, and when I had nestled myself close beside him,
I was lower than the horse's body. I could look between its
hind legs and see its thickly coated brown hide as if it were a
bloated ceiling. I kept my eyes there, because the bright sun-
light on the snow brought tears. Oh, it was a thrilling day!
The sled runners sang on the ice of the road, and my papa and
I smiled, feeling ourselves sliding so smoothly. Here the roads
were wider than in most of the mountain regions I knew. The
trot, trot, trot and clinking of steel on ice lulled me. I slept
part of the way. When I woke up, we were riding in a gray
inist Flakes of snow were catching on my eyelashes, and the

7

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

sun was hidden. I no longer had to keep my eyes fixed on the
dark body of the horse. The road was steep, and now and
again the horse was permitted to stop.

Then we came to a cabin and Father called out, "Hello."
As we got off the sled, the horse's nostrils were flaring so as to
reveal the red lining. Its exhalations were smoky as a dragon's
breath. Father covered the tired beast with the bearskin and
then we hustled into the cabin, the door of which was opened
for us. A prospector lived there.

We ate lunch and then, when Father had finished his busi-
ness with this man and several gunny sacks lumpy with rock
specimens had been thrown with a clatter into a corner, I was
helped into my coat. The prospector, a man with a drooping
mustache like Father's, urged us to stay. He called my father
"Tommy."

Father's eyes left the man's to rest significantly on me.

"My wife would be worried," he said. "I can get back all
right."

It was snowing very hard as Father covered me to the neck.
The bearskin now was moistly warm, and smelled strongly of
horse and of something else that may well have been the odor
of itself, of bear.

The prospector was regretful, because of the lonesomeness
that would descend on him when we vanished; but, little as I
was, I could realize also that there was genuine concern in his
eyes looking at me under his shantied brows that had gone
thicKly white with the falling snow.

He spoke again "Better stay."

There was a slap of the stiffened lines against the brown
rump that swelled above me. We began to move as Father
said, "We'll get home all right."

Then the house was gone from sight, and the sled was slith-
ering to the lower side of the road so that Father had to drive
very slowly until we got down the steep onto a more level
stretch. In a little while I was aware that there was no longer
any sound from the sled runners; nor did the horse's shoes
clink against stones. The animal was laboring in deeper snow,

8

I TELL MY RIGHT AGE

lifting each foot with exaggerated strides, but its efforts made
no sound that I could hear. I put my mittened hands beneath
the bearskin and tried with all my might to hear something
anything. The cold was hurting my face and I no longer could
pluck my clothing closer, with fingers that had become numb
and stiff. The white streaks of the falling snow just beyond
the horse's bobbing head became solid white through which I
could not force my vision, strive as I might. Neither seeing
nor hearing, I became frightened and started to cry.

Father began speaking to me with affected cheerfulness.

I interrupted him to ask if we were lost.

"No," he said, but made no effort to prove that we were not.
We lapsed again into a feathered silence that was terrifying.
I whimpered, and Father said I was a big girl. I said I was
cold. Then he spoke to the horse, stopping it. To dislodge a clot
of snow between its ears the animal shook its head, causing
the rings of its bit to rattle, and I was glad of the sound.

Father stood up in the sled and I saw that the cold had made
his face blue. Mine hurt. He took the bearskin that in the
morning had kept us so snugly warm and wrapped me in it.
Then he placed me at his feet in the bottom of the sled. I still
was cold; he bit the ends of his mustache when he saw me
shiver. In the bottom of the sled I ceased to feel or think.

The next thing I knew we were in the kitchen of a farm-
house and a woman and a man were rubbing snow on my hands,
which felt as if they were on fire. I cried out protests and
squirmed to evade them. My father had me on his lap, and in
his hand he held a cup from which he wanted me to drink. He
was insistent. My hands hurt as if they were being pierced
over and over with hundreds of needles. The flat tongue of
yellow flame in a coal-oil lamp on the brown oilcloth of the
kitchen table was a comfort to me. I began to like the endear-
ments of the woman, even though the snow she applied to my
hands continued to burn. She was telling me why it would be
necessary to keep me from getting closer to the glow of the
stove on the other side of the room.

My hands had been frozen, and for weeks were the chief

9

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

objects -of concern in the lives of my mother and father. There
was some dreadful possibility that made them keep question-
ing me, with the utmost tenderness, as to how my hands felt.
For a while they were not sure (I learned this when I was
older) that amputation could be avoided. During that time
Father could not walk and frequently he swore to ease his
pain. I heard him tell Mother that in the blizzard, when we
were lost, he no longer had any power in his clublike arms to
hold the reins and guide the horse; that he had been in every
way exhausted and hopeless when he saw the faint gleam of
yellow light from the farmhouse window.

One day when I was skipping in bright sunlight on a path
behind some houses, thinking about my black pigtails bounc-
ing on my neck, I was overwhelmed by a drenching of warm,
greasy water. A young woman cried out an unfamiliar exclama-
tion of vexation and engulfed me in tender arms. Then she all
but smothered me as she strove to towel from me the worst
evidence of her carelessness, all the time berating herself in
what I afterward learned was a Scotch brogue. What she had
thrown from a back door, without looking, was the gray fluid
of a clothes boiler. That was my first meeting with blue-eyed
Annie McDonald, who soon thereafter became our first hired
girl and the protector and companion of Vinson and me.

Annie was there to comfort me when I broke Aunt Lucy,
my doll. Aunt Lucy was a lady doll with long dresses humped
over a bustle, and with brown curls arranged in a cluster at
the back of her bisque head. I had named her for my mother's
sister, the prettiest woman I had ever seen. One day Mother
took us all into a store, and there I tripped and fell, crushing
Aunt Lucy's head. I cried until they had to put me to bed.
Mother had the doll's head cemented together, and though she
was no longer beautiful I kept her for years. Always the net-
work of cracks in her face had the power to make me see
visions of places in Denver.

Somehow we had become better off. We had Annie and we
moved into a little frame house in Vine Street that seemed
lovely to us. It was in a much 'nicer part of Denver than I pre-
10

MRS. LEE (AUNT LUCY)

Sister of Evalyn McLean's Mother
and Mother of Monroe Lee

I TELL MY .RIGHT AGE

vlously had known, and I had a room of my own with a bay
window where I kept my dolls and played house. Across the
street lived a little girl about my own age, and we became
chums. Sometimes Grandfather Reed came to sit there with
me and try to join in my pretense that I was the mother of
a lot of children and had many servants. Over the top of his
gold-headed cane he would clasp hands with ridged fingernails.
(I still have the cane as my only memento of him.) His cheeks
were bearded, there was a tuft of white beard on his chin; his
hair was white. He was gentle and dignified.

That was the year, 1892, that my school life began. When
Mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I said I
wanted the biggest slate she could find. I watched her walk
down to the car tracks. When she came back, she gave me a
double slate that opened like a book. It had four black sur-
faces fixed in creamy wooden frames bordered with red felt.
Black cord was laced around and around that red felt. Some
time after I began carrying that possession under my arm as
I walked to school, I was required to memorize a verse about
a lily. My starched white dress stuck out in front, because I
was shaped like a small keg. I was given a calla lily as I started
for the platform. Grown-ups sat there, among them my father.
I made a bow and that very action erased from my mind
every word of the verse. Suddenly I burst out crying and ran
to my father. He hugged me tightly and I was mad at everyone
else because they all laughed.

Every spring and fall a spinster, Miss Ewing, came to the
Vine Street house to make dresses. The living room became
the sewing room and Vinson and I had fun teasing Miss Ewing.
Cautioned to leave her alone, we turned stealthy. She dis-
covered that her sewing machine would not operate. I had put
chewing gum in the works.

My mother said, "To-morrow, Evalyn Walsh, at twelve
o'clock I am going to give you a good spanking."

There was blackness on the face of the earth. I had never
been whipped. I tried to play. I went across the street and
sought forgetfulness with my chum. I had no appetite for

11

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

supper, and when Annie put me to bed T remained for a long
time miserably wide-awake. The next morning Mother went
about the house as usual and I began to have hope that she had
forgotten, but when twelve o'clock struck she sent me into
the basement and then appeared with a black buggy whip. She
ordered me to take off my flannel petticoat. I howled for mercy,
but I was appealing to a cold, aloof stranger. I think that was
the only punishment of the sort ever administered to me.
Thereafter Miss Ewing was left in peace. She made me a
canary-colored silk guimpe dress that was the glory of my life.
It was something to be worn only on Sundays, when 1 went to
a church where I sang "Onward, Christian Soldiers" at the top
of my voice. This must have been galling to the kinsfolk of my
father. Tom Walsh had got so far away from the Roman
Catholic faith that he had become a Mason. Grandfather Reed
was a Mason. I can't say now where I heard it, whether in the
rarely visited house of Uncle Mike Walsh or in the seldom seen
home of Aunt Maria Lafferty, but someone once spoke in my
hearing against the sin of it: a Walsh child a Protestant!

Well, if I was not a Catholic, at least, Aunt Maria, I was
.never a very good Protestant,

12

CHAPTER II
An Immigrant Lad from Ireland and a Church Organist

SOME months before I began this book, at a time when I was
wretched in my mind, I went to the enormous, million-dollar
house that my father had built at 2020 Massachusetts Avenue
in Washington. There are many other great houses in the Capi-
tal which by sad changes have been resolved into dust-stained
mysteries. I have been in all of them: when they were alive,
i gay with music, laughter, champagne when they were bright
with jewels, fine fabrics, and lustrous eyes. As I rolled under
^the porte-cochere in my green Dusenberg a few passers-by
fathered on the sidewalk. One of the great plates of glass in
^ the outer wall of that carriage shelter had been broken, possibly
C^by a thrown rock. My instructions had been obeyed: the doors
were open; an electrician had thrown the electric switches,
breaking the current of the burglar alarm wires that made the
^place into a great trap. As I mounted the stone steps I shivered.
A stream of air was pouring out of all the reaches of the house.
3lt was so cold, so much colder than the outdoors winter that
^it was almost visible, and it flowed swiftly. The house was
as a cavern, a subterranean place in my past, and its deep-
oiest chill was lodged in my heart. This place had been my
<Phome.

From a basement room that had served as his office I resur-
rected all my father's old papers, cardboard letter files, canvas-
covered account books, and other memorabilia of his existence
in those years when I took everything for granted. In upstairs
rooms I dislodged from closets and desks old scrapbooks, pho-
tograph albums, boxes of letters. I found some souvenirs of
my honeymoon, of my darling baby Vinson, but I shed never

13

PATHER STRUCK IT RICH

a tear that anyone could see. It had become my intention to
weave into the strand of my memories all that this material
might reveal. By doing this, I had become convinced that
where my own recollections were faulty or dim I could bring
my reveries into focus with reality. On each floor, shrouded
into whalelike shapes by paper wrappings, were great quanti-
ties of furniture. In a fine cabinet containing mineral specimens
I saw actual lumps of gold; but the richer values that I wanted
were more likely to be found in the receipted bills of a multi-
millionaire. The values I wanted were emotional ones. I wished,
intensely, to rediscover in my own heart how devotedly we
Walshes loved one another.

Father was a comparatively rich man when he met and
married my mother in Leadville during the boom. He was rich
and poor by turns several times, but it was not of such things
that he talked when we sat close to the stove as a mountain
wind howled around our house at Silverton or Ouray. Often I
would be on his lap, one arm thrust behind him in what was
half a caress and half an impulse to play with the little metal
buckle that dangled on the back of his vest; my other hand
played with the points of his pencils where these protruded
from his pocket, and where my ear was pressed I could feel
the beating of his heart. When he told about blizzards or In-
dians or bad men my own heart thumped. Of course, those
things were not the beginning of his story.

Tom Walsh was a farmer's boy, born at Clonmel in Tip-
perary on April 2, 1850. I know little of his life as a boy ex-
cept that his father, my grandfather, was a favorite In the
community because he had a violin and could play on it. As a
lad of twelve my father was apprenticed to a millwright, and
when he had served his apprenticeship and could do anything
that a carpenter could, and a great deal besides, he came to
America. His brother Michael had come here in 1865, had
enlisted in the army, and had been sent West to fight Indians.
With his father and his sister Maria, Tom Walsh came over
in 1869. For a while he worked at his trade in Worcester,

14

AN IMMIGRANT LAD FROM IRELAND

Massachusetts. Then, when he was nearing twenty-one, he
and his sister went West. Golden was the town where he went
to work, building bridges for the Colorado Central Railroad.
Two years of that; then, naturally enough, the mining fever
got hold of him. That was what he called it: "the mining
fever." Never to the end of his life did he get it out of his
blood, and he never wanted to; it was grand fun for him
always, although sometimes heartbreaking.

By the time I was ten, old enough really to understand
what he was looking for, he had been possessed by that fever
for twenty years. He was then forty-six. His health had been
undermined by worry, disappointing business affairs, the
stresses of rude climate, mining-camp food, and other hard-
ships. In 1896 a doctor warned him that if he wanted to live
he would have to take the utmost care of himself. When you
think what he had been through in the preceding quarter of a
century, that was a comical thing to tell Tom Walsh! To "take
the utmost care of himself"!

Why, for years he had been inured to sleeping on the ground,
often under canvas in winter blizzards, exposed to all manner
of hazards.

In 1873 Father had been caught by the excitement of fresh
gold strikes far southwest of Denver, near the border of Ari-
zona. He joined the rush, but spent most of the winter working
in Del Norte; since he was still green as to mining I suppose
he worked at his trade around the mines. In the spring of 1874,
he went back to Denver and then went a few miles westward
to Central City; he was there when all the men were made
frantic by news that there had been rich gold discoveries
to the north, in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Father went
as a member of a wagon-train party that included some of the
most experienced mine operators of Gilpin County. The coun-
try they passed through was Indian territory. The unwary
were apt to be scalped, and some were unwary. Father was in
and around Custer for nearly a year and then, in 1876, he
went over to Deadwood.

Deadwood! Probably a good deal of the frail illusion that

15

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

its muddy thoroughfare was lined by two-story buildings was
actually the handiwork of Tom Walsh: all the stores, barrooms
and gambling houses had false facades that rose above the
actual roofs. Somewhere along that street of deep, ungraded
mud he had a shop. Right in the street near his door was a
placer mine with a wooden trough. Literally, there was gold in
the street. Thousands of booted and seldom washed, rarely
shaved gold-seekers were clustered in and around Deadwood.
Many were men who short years before had been fighting each
other in uniforms of blue or gray. There were gentlemen in
Deadwood, and thieves; there were heroes and homicidal
maniacs; there were nice women and prostitutes; there were
many Chinese, and some Indians. Calamity Jane sometimes
strode along the street in the buckskin clothing and black
slouch hat of a plainsman. Her rifle had a skeleton stock, her
eyes a hard glitter. She called my father by his first name.
Swill Barrel Jimmy and Antelope Frank were among those
who came rushing into sight when loud shrill yipping and the
sounds of galloping horses in harness announced the approach
of the stagecoach. So many times have I heard my father
describe that exciting moment of a Deadwood day that it
seems as if my own eyes actually had seen it: the wheels
throwing mud clots as the coach rolled up the gulch, the octag-
onal barrels of buffalo guns resting on the forearms of the
guards on top, the dirty canvas window curtains flapping and
the coach careening each time a wheel found a deep place in
the soft mud. Of course, I never did see that stage; but as a
girl I heard my father talk with lean and gray-eyed Seth Bul-
lock, the sheriff.

In Washington I was in a hotel corridor one time when
Father came together with long-haired Captain Jack Crawford,
the poet scout.

"Say, are you the Tom Walsh who struck it?"

"They say I did strike it."

They peered at each other closely, grins beginning to crease
deep wrinkles in their weathered faces.

"Why, ain't you the Walsh that rode with the Black Hill

16

AN IMMIGRANT LAD FROM IRELAND

volunteers who went after those redskin murderers of Preacher
Smith in seventy-six?"

"That's who I am: that same Walsh."

They grasped each other by the hands and then they talked
of the Custer "massacree", of the Homestake mine and Smoky
Jones.

One day in the spring of 1876 there had come into Father's
little shop in Deadwood a stranger, ragged and filthy from a
long stay in the hills. Something lovable and charming shone
in the eyes that peered out from a frazzled, uncombed mat of
hair and long beard. Exposure to the sooty breath of his camp-
fire had given to this prospector the dubious complexion of
a slab of bacon, and with merciless accuracy Deadwood had
fixed upon him the name "Smoky" Jones.

Smoky had asked Father to do some trifling job for him.
It was about lunchtime, and Father had asked him to come
and eat with him. The obviously hungry man declined shyly,
but it was wholly characteristic of Tom Walsh that he should
insist. As they ate they became friends and when they parted
Father told Smoky Jones never to come into Deadwood with-
out visiting him. After that, Smoky came often and Father
always saw to it that the prospector had a good meal inside
him before he hit the trail back into the hills. Somewhere out
there, Smoky Jones had a prospect in which he had great
faith. He showed specimens of rock to Father and talked
with enthusiasm about his strike. Then, one day, he pro-
posed that Father become his partner and help him develop
his mine.

Father protested that he knew nothing of mining: he was a
builder, a millwright. Smoky urged, and Father decided to
consult some of his Colorado mining friends men with whom
he had come from Gilpin County into the Black Hills. They
were mining men with "learning." So Tom Walsh told these
oracles of Smoky's offer.

"Have nothing to do with it," they said dogmatically. "It's
a slate formation and even if there is a little gold there it is
only a freak. No mine can be worth fooling with that is not a

17

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

true fissure vein in granite." (I have this in Father's hand-
writing.)

Father was keenly disappointed, but he was convinced. He
told Smoky Jones that he was going to abide by the advice of
his Colorado friends, and declined the offer of a partnership.
Precisely what he declined, in his ignorance, was a half-interest
in the Homestake, one of the world's greatest gold mines.
From it came the vast fortunes of United States Senator George
Hearst, the father of William Randolph Hearst; and in nearly
sixty years the Homestake mine, still a producer, has given
up more than $266,000,000.

When my father talked of the incident in after years, it
was always with a rare kind of Irish pride at the size of his
blunder.

But where another man might have gone on being foolish,
my father buckled down to learn all he could of mining of
Nature's customs, of her whims, in depositing precious miner-
als in the earth. He learned from experience, out of the minds
of other men and even out of books. To the last year of his
life he was ready to point out with grim satisfaction that, while
those dogmatic Colorado mining friends had been among the
first in the Black Hills rush, not one of them had acquired any
of the great properties of that region. What had cheated them,
he used to say, was not a matter of luck but their own technical
prejudices. As for Tom Walsh, ten thousand times in his suc-
ceeding years he stooped to pick a bit of float or to chip a
specimen from an outcrop that another mining man would have
passed by without pause. If it had not been for that habit he
might have died poor. Indeed, but for that habit there might
have been little out of the ordinary for me to tell.

Some time in 1877 Father left Deadwood and returned to
Colorado. To show for his hardships, hazards and labor in the
Black Hills he had between $75,000 and $100,000. Whether
he made any part of it trading in claims or mines I do not
know; it is reasonable to suppose he made most of the
money as a builder, since Ms sort of skill would have been
at a premium when Deadwood was becoming a town. At any

18

AN IMMIGRANT LAD FROM IRELAND

rate in 1878 he was attracted to another boom camp, Leadville.

Nearly eighteen years before my father arrived swarms of
placer miners had cleaned up about $5,000,000 in gold dust
by washing the sand and gravel of the stream bed in California
Gulch. All that remained of that activity in the succeeding
years was a village of about five hundred persons. It was
called Oroville. Then some man, more observant, more curious,
more thorough than all the others who had passed that way,
made an exciting discovery about the black and water-worn
boulders of the stream bed. The earlier fortune-seekers had
levered some of these out of the pathways of their sluices.
This man found that the boulders were masses of silver-lead
carbonates. The place was renamed Leadville and for a few
years thereafter to all America and beyond stood as the
one spot where a man or a woman might hope to win a fortune
overnight. Tom Walsh arrived in 1878, soon enough to see the
arrival of most of the thirty thousand who came. In that half-
mad maelstrom of humanity my father and my mother were to
find each other.

For a single night my father owned a third-interest in a
saloon in Leadville. "The next morning," he said, "I took my
. share of the whiskey and poured it into the gutter."

I am inclined to believe that must have been an incident in
the history of the Grand Hotel. Tom Walsh, aged twenty-five,
had the status of a capitalist when he reached Leadville, and,
soon after, he bought with Jerry Daly and Felix Leavick
the old City Hotel, which they enlarged and renamed. It stood
near the west end of Chestnut Street, a three-story building
with a half-dozen dormer windows along the front of its man-
sard roof and several more on either side. The second-floor
windows on the front opened onto a balustraded gallery that
formed a shelter over the wooden sidewalk.

The Grand Hotel really was grand! The sheets were not
always clean, but the guests were not particular; they were
glad of a chance to sleep turn-about in three eight-hour shifts,
at a time when most of Leadville's inhabitants were living in
tents or even less adequate shelters. Soon all those thousands

19

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

were trapped there in the mountains by severe winter condi-
tions. An appalling number died from exposure and pneu-
monia. Then the surrounding forests were cut down. Bricks
were made. Leadville had little order, but increasing comfort.
In 1879 Tom Walsh became the sole owner of the hotel.

The other large hotel there was the Clarendon, In his book,
"Here They Dug the Gold", George Findlay Willison wrote:

The Grand, built over and around the old City Hotel on Chestnut,
attracts the more sober and respectable. It is kept by Thomas F.
Walsh and his wife, a rather refined lady who claps the name of St.
Keven's upon well-known Sowbelly Gulch when her husband Bap-
pens to make a small strike there. Although the Walshes do well
enough from roomers and boarders they do not attain bonanza rank
during this boom,

I am grateful to Mr. Willison for his research, but as an
authority on Mrs. Thomas F. Walsh I can assure him that he
was excessively cautious when he wrote "rather refined." Why,
Mother was the most refined woman I ever knew; and she was
not an isolated case even in the wildest days of Leadville. My
grandmother, Mrs. Anna Reed, had taken her there in response
to camp publicity about the need for schoolteachers. It is
lodged in my memory that the family, a short while before,
had left the home village of Darlington, Wisconsin, and stayed
a while in Birmingham, Alabama, where Grandfather's brother
was a florist and Mother played the organ in church. Then,
because of Grandfather Reed's lungs, they went on to Denver.
There was a second daughter, Lucy, and a hell-raising, ne'er-
do-well son, Steve. My grandfather, Stephen Reed, was a sweet
old dear who probably hovered around while Grandmother
made plans and carried them out. It was Grandmother who
determined to place her eldest, Carrie Bell, in a schoolteacher's
post in Leadville.

Carrie Bell, my mother, had a figure that men turned to stare
at; she was nearly as pretty as Grandmother and she sang
beautifully. While she was growing she had been required to
walk around the house for hours balancing a glass of water on

20

, Buck

MRS. THOMAS F. WALSH
Mother of Mrs. McLean

AN IMMIGRANT LAD FROM IRELAND

her head. Because of these exercises, with her feet even her
toes concealed under a wealth of petticoats she could, with
the utmost elegance, glide so as to appear to be rolling on cast-
ers. And it was this tempting creature that reckless, determined
Grandmother Reed took to Leadville. They made the journey
in a stagecoach over a terror-inspiring trail that followed the
edge of a succession of precipices. On that highway there was
an unforgettable cavalcade; mule teams dragging canvas-
covered wagons with screeching axles, men and women afoot,
with packs on their backs, bull teams, horsemen, laden burros.

On that road to Leadville there were other unseen chasms
besides those that created such giddiness in any who let their
eyes stray outside the windows of the stagecoach. Indeed, a
young and handsome girl did well to keep her eyes cast down
when there were so many on the road who were quick to read
a challenge in an honest glance. There were professional
gamblers, gunmen, crooks, riding on to Leadville. There were
veterans of other camps, hard-featured women whose entire
baggage consisted of their evil intentions. There were traders
in all manner of things that a mining camp's population might
require. .

There were criminals there soon after the rush began.
Father used to tell me that Jesse James was working in a
near-by gulch, partner in a claim with two men named Ford.
(Bob Ford later shot Jesse James in the back.) But at Lead-
ville, as anywhere, there were more decent men than crooks:
swarms of hard-working fellows, pick and shovel laborers,
teamsters, carpenters and miners and they all wanted for-
tunes quickly, just as my father did.

There were numerous churches in Leadville, and Mrs. Reed
and Miss Reed promptly associated themselves with one of
these. I cannot identify it further than to say that it was one
of the Protestant churches. What really puzzles me is how Tom
Walsh, an apostate Catholic, ever happened to stray inside.
He did though, and heard my mother singing; he was en-
tranced. I have his word for it that then and there he said,
"That is the girl I am going to marry."

21

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

They were happy! They were married on July 11, 1879,
and on the first anniversary of their wedding, Father handed
to her the sweetest gift he could have devised four verses at
the top of which he had written: u To my devoted, true and
loving wife Carrie B. Walsh, these humble lines are dedicated."
If they were better verses I might think some out-of-luck poet
had written them to work out a board bill at the Grand Hotel;
being what they are, I dare to submit a sample and ask if such
words possibly could come from other than the one who felt

Ah, well I know what priceless luck was mine,

That brought the day, the hour, when you became my bride.

Heaven, indeed, could give no choicer, rarer gift

Than you have been to me, my dear and precious pride,

My more than life, my darling Carrie Bell.

The eructative name of Sowbelly Gulch tempts me to believe
that it was the scene of my mother's first housekeeping experi-
ence in the mountains. I know that about a year after their
marriage they left the hotel and went out to live at a mine
Father was preparing to operate. I can well believe she renamed
it "St. Eleven's", because she did many things to transform the
place. There was no suitable cabin, so Father had a boxcar (one
of the first to arrive on the new railroad) taken from its trucks
and placed on a foundation of logs. For steps there was a short
flight of half-logs imbedded in a ramp of earth. There was a
stove inside, a table, and a bed. Father fashioned some win-
dows; Mother made curtains of checked gingham, and in the
window boxes she planted flowers less hardy than the native,
wild ones. She had great trouble saving them from the sharp
frosts. Whenever she told me about that first little home her
face showed a little quirk of smile. She was better off than most
women who followed gold- and silver-seeking husbands into
the mountains. What the average camp cabin was like I know
from my father's story of one of his adventures in gold-seeking.

It was in 1880, and he had gone for a few days' stay at a
mine in which he was interested, in the Frying Pan district
west of Leadville. It was a prospecting trip, and he started out

22

AN IMMIGRANT LAD FROM IRELAND

one morning burdened with a gun and a prospector's pick, to
look over a near-by MIL After several hours of tramping and
sampling he decided to have a smoke. Close by, against the
hillside, was an abandoned log cabin. Obviously it had been
the shelter of some miners who had lost faith in the prospect.
The roof was formed of poles covered with earth and rocks.
Father put the butt of his gun on the ground and tilted the
barrel into a slot formed by uneven ends of the poles support-
ing the low roof. Then he lit his cigar, and as he did so his eyes
were caught by the gleam of quartz particles in the stuff piled
thickly on the roof. It was likely vein matter. He tried to find
the vein, but saw no trace of it. Not far off he discovered the
shaft which the vanished miners had sunk in the hill. The hole
was in decomposed granite, absolutely barren. He investigated
a rubbish pit beside the cabin, clearly the place from which
had been taken most of the earth piled on the roof: beneath
its debris there was no quartz or other indications of minerals.
Finally he went inside. There he noticed that the earthen floor
was made uneven by chunks of partially exposed rock. With
his short-handled pick he broke off corners of the rock. It
proved to be nice-looking quartz. In a flash he saw what had
happened. The men who made the location unwittingly had
built their cabin squarely on the apex of a vein, covered the
roof with dirt and rock from that vein, and then had gone fifty
feet away to sink their shaft into barren granite. He sampled
the roof and when the samples had been assayed the returns
indicated a hundred ounces of silver to the ton.

Father hunted up the owners and paid them their price,
which was not much. Then he put two men to work and within
several weeks a fine vein was uncovered. In two months the
claim netted him over $75,000, and years after he had sold it
indeed, more than a quarter of a century after his discov-
ery it was still a large producer.

A little girl was born to my parents, and died. The price of
silver was declining from year to year. One or the other of these
things caused them to leave LeadvUle and go to Denver where
Father invested in real estate. They were "comfortable", ex-

23

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

cept for the fact that Father was not well. I was bom in 1886,
and on April 9, 1888, my brother Vinson was born. Mother's
younger sister, my beautiful Aunt Lucy, was living in Denver
with her husband, Samuel N. Lee. Uncle Sam and Father went
into business with a Chicago man named David S. Wegg, who
It seems owned the rights to exploit in Colorado what was
known as the "Austin smelting process/' a means of extracting
values from low-grade ores. An old account book of Father's
reveals that by a series of assessments during 1892 the newly
formed Summit Mining & Smelting Company received from
Mr. Wegg, $25,172.22; from Uncle Sam and Father, each,
$12,586.11. Uncle Sam was president, Father was treasurer
and the secretary was a fourth participant, Amos Henderson,
who put in $4,195.37. That enterprise explains for me some
of the moving we did: to Kokomo where a smelter was built;
then to Silverton where another was established. Some English
capital was invested in the Silverton smelter. Uncle Sam and
Aunt Lucy had moved to Kansas City.

Grandmother Reed "Nannie" to all of us was still liv-
ing in Denver. One visit to her was made unforgettable by
what happened to a white fox terrier. Her son, Uncle Steve,
was there and this is my only recollection of my mother's
brother. He was drunk and cursing terribly because Nannie
would not concede something he wanted, probably money.
Suddenly he bent down, grabbed the squalling fox terrier by
its hind legs and threw the poor little animal at Nannie.

I learned afterward that even as a boy Uncle Steve had
been a dark-eyed fiend. He was frequently in trouble and his
sister had lived in terror of him. Yet the family blamed, always,
not Steve but "the drink," In a letter Mother wrote to Father
while I was quite small and he was trying to mend his health
in the East, she reminded him that he had said he would be
willing to pay Steve's keep in some liquor cure. Then she
added that Nannie now knew where her son Steve, was.

However, just to balance the matter I want to state that at
Pueblo, Colorado, Nannie's brother was a prominent citizen,
State Senator Elton T. Beckwith.

24

CHAPTER III

"Daughter, I've Struck It Rich!"

I WAS nine when Father came home to our Vine Street house
one day and announced, "We are going to live in Ouray."

Ouray was wonderful A child first glimpsing that valley
from the mountain trail scratched in the rocks high above it
could look down upon a toy town the few streets of which were
cross-hatched as if a giant had chalked on the basin's floor the
patterns for a couple of games of ticktacktoe. Most of the
mountains roundabout were crested and streaked with snow
and were lavender where rocks showed through the white.
Half a mountain had collapsed into one end of the valley, after
ages to become a pleasant island hill of green, part pasture,
part woodland. From our house we could look across the valley
at the mountain from which that enticing debris apparently
had fallen in the geologic past. There was a perpendicular red
rock-wound so stratified that to my fancy it seemed a rich and
tempting many-layered devil's food cake that is, until my
father made it even more tempting. From our front porch one
day he directed my gaze to that red-brown escarpment and
explained that there I saw plainly what his eyes tried to divine
when he went prospecting: the very heart of a mountain.

Little Annie was with us as our hired girl at Ouray. She
cooked and scrubbed and did her best to keep Vinson and me
out of trouble. Each morning she stood beside me as a monitor
until I had put on the red flannel union suit I so loathed. Each
Saturday night she put me into a tub and gave me a bath with
so much soapsuds and vigor that I went through the entire
process with my eyes screwed tight and my nose wrinkled in
the most hateful expression my imagination could devise. We
had a "front" room at Ouray, an extra chamber in which a guest

25

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

might be sheltered for the night. Sometimes we had as a guest
an old prospector who was doing some work for my father.
When he came to see us his hair was slicked down with water
and he wore a coat that was green at the seams. Red underwear
showed below his cuffs. There were great calluses on his hands
and a thick tuft of hair sprouted from the depths of each ear.
He was Andy Richardson. Father called him "Andy"; he
called Father "Mr. Walsh."

One time Annie, Andy (he was in love with Annie), Vinson,
and I went for a walk in the woods. We sat down to rest on a
log. Some chipmunks that had scampered from sight would
come back, Andy told us, if we were real still. Vinson and I
sat breathless until we saw one of the little ground squirrels
running along a near-by log. It sat up, bright-eyed, to watch us.
Suddenly Andy threw a stick and stunned it. He put the little
creature into his pocket. When we got back to the house it was
as lively as ever. We fed it and gentled it until it became so
tame I had it with me all the time.

When cold weather set in Mother's neuralgic headaches were
so bad Father sent us all to Kansas City to stay with Aunt
Lucy, Uncle Sam, and their little boy Monroe. There was a
golden oak folding bed there for me. It had a mirror in the
top that was supposed to make a secret of its character when
it was folded against a wall. There were heavy springs to help
draw it up past what Uncle Sam called its "dead center."

My little squirrel slept with me and by day rode around on
my shoulder or cuddled against my neck. I had grown to love
it as I never loved any of my dolls. One morning I could not
find my little pet. I looked and called all that day. Some of
the family said it was like all wild creatures, it could not
really be tamed and probably had got out of doors. I did not
believe them. At last it was time to go to bed. As Mother lifted
the pillow I saw something that made me scream with horror.
My squirrel had been there all the. time under the pillow; now
it was stretched flat on its back, Its mouth open, dead.

We went back to Ouray in June of 1896, and Mother and
Father had a new brass bed that I thought the most elegant

26

KVALYN WALSH
AT FOUR

THE WALSH HOME IN OURAY

e /Ae discovery of gold at the Camp Bird Mine

"DAUGHTER, I'VE STRUCK IT RICH!"

piece of furniture any family could possess. I had a collie dog
named Prince. There was a fat little pony in the yard. By that
time I was a tomboy. I had always wanted to be an actress, to
wear a lot of lacy things, smell of perfume, and paint my
cheeks and lips; but I was made to wear red flannel union
suits, so I became tough. I wore boy's pants, flannel shirt and
sweater. Vinson and I had a gang of boys.

An exciting pastime was to visit the main street and stand
in front of the window of the Chinaman. He was a buck-
toothed fellow with an extraordinarily saffron complexion. The
fore part of his skull was shiny with bluish skin that he kept
shaved but on the rear was his astonishing queue. We felt
utterly superior to him as we chanted an accusation that he
ate rats and engaged in other unpleasant actions. He would
take a mouthful of water and spray it on the clothes he was to
iron. Often he was so annoyed that he stamped his feet as if
he were starting to chase us. We would squeal and run. One
day one of us lighted a firecracker the size of a banana and
tossed it in. With a cry like the whinny of a horse the Chinaman
went berserk. He snatched up a large kitchen knife and rushed
after us, gibbering. We were panic-stricken. Fleeing as in a
nightmare, with the Chinaman close behind and coming closer
if the sound of his felt slippers meant anything, I saw the
president of the bank straighten from his lounging position
before the Beaumont Hotel, as our little pack of hellions came
along. He saw we had goaded the laundryman too far. He stuck
out his foot and our pursuer sprawled on the sidewalk. Some-
one told my parents, and for a while I was forbidden to go to
the town.

My father had piercing blue eyes that could be gentle as
forget-me-nots or cold as a blizzard wind. I was really scared
of his wrath, but his work took him away from home so much
I tended to get out of hand. Especially was this true while
Mother was away seeking relief from her headaches, at Kansas
City or Excelsior Springs, in the company of Aunt Lucy Lee.
At such times I was more than a handful for Annie. But there
were certain rules I was expected to obey.

27

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

Father was going away for four or five days In the company
of John Thompson, who was better informed about mining
stock than about mines. Mrs. Thompson, a yellow-haired
woman of the Lillian Russell type, was a friend of Mother's.
They had met four or five years before when the Thompsons
and the Walshes were living at the Princeton Hotel in Denver.
Little Faith Thompson and I were chums.

When Faith came up to our house she was full of chatter
about a dance to be given that night in the hotel dining room.
We had no thought of actually attending the dance, but we
wanted to observe it and get ideas.

"We can peek through the side windows, 77 said Faith.

In front of our house Andy Richardson was just then
engaged in what was, for me, a fascinating activity: he was
loading a pack horse and preparing to show off his supreme
accomplishment (in my eyes) by "throwing a diamond hitch.' 7
Never had I watched his movements so closely. The pack-
saddle with its double cinch had been adjusted and then Andy
proceeded adroitly to weave his pack rope so that a diamond-
shaped loop took taut form on either side of the load where
the bulge was widest. Andy was flattered at my interest; but
what I was really thinking about was the dance.

If Father and Mr. Thompson were going away, I wouldn't
have to be home for supper. Soon afterward Faith and I
skipped down the slope into the town, and for the rest of the
day played at Faith's house. I ate my supper there, wishing all
the while I was not forbidden to spend the night away from
home. I was not allowed to do this, even with people we knew
as intimately as the Thompsons. By the time Faith and I
reached a side window of the hotel, the dance was in full swing.
There was not an evening dress on the floor; but we were
impressed by the formality with which rather ordinary men
jerked themselves forward into a bow when they asked a lady
for a dance. We saw with sympathetic dread the forced anima-
tion of the wallflowers. An hour passed and then another before
I permitted myself to think how late it had become.

"I think Til stay with you, Faith." I knew that if I went

28

"DAUGHTER, I'VE STRUCK IT RICH!"

home I'd be lectured and scolded but if I stayed all night little
Annie would be too scared to tell Father. I wasn't being very
logical, but I went to sleep soon after Faith and I got into bed.

Next thing I knew there was a terrific pounding on the door
of the bedroom and I recognized, with terror, my father's
voice.

"Get up and dress yourself this instant," he commanded me.

I began shivering, and the hands with which I buttoned and
hooked and gartered myself into my clothing were wet with
perspiration. I knew Fate had played me a dirty trick: Father
was supposed to be twelve or fifteen miles away sleeping beside
Mr. Thompson under a tent. I dressed with a haste I hoped
would gain a little mercy, and soon appeared. Father's red
mustache was bristling like the hackles on my collie's back.
The nostrils of his finely chiseled nose flared with each breath,
but he spoke no word until we were out of the Thompsons'
house.

"Now!" he said fiercely. "You have disobeyed me: you
know it's against the rules to spend the night with anyone.
Anyone 1"

I reached for his hand as was our custom when we walked
together. He pulled away and directed me to walk behind him.
I followed as if I were a dog and each of his quick strides
seemed to hit my heart. I was entirely miserable. When we
reached home all he said was, "Go to bed. At once!"

Poor Father! He had enough troubles without having to
fret over my misbehavior. The year had begun badly for us.
We had a dull Christmas and New Year's owing to Mother's
illness. Father himself was far from well, and spent much of
his energy in sleepless nights. A whole series of ventures had
gone wrong through no fault of his. A drop in the price of silver
had turned a profitable smelter at Kokomo into a liability.
Real estate that he had bought in Birmingham, Alabama, had
become unmarketable. A corner he owned in Denver at Champa
and 22 d streets had ceased to bring him any revenue; possibly
it had been mortgaged. He had another piece on Arapahoe
Street, near the post office, between Sixteenth and Seventeenth.

29

PATHER STRUCK IT RICH

These and other investments had become unprofitable or else
had been mortgaged or sold to provide him with funds to en-
gage in some further mining enterprises. The depression of 1893
had contributed to his worries, of course. For one thing it had
deprived him of the support of his partner in Chicago; they
were separating after some years of association. Night after
night when the rest of us had gone to bed Father was sitting
up writing to David Wegg.

The struggle my father was having in 1895 and 1896 to
keep our little family from want is revealed poignantly in those
letters.

Now, Dave, [he wrote] don't think that I have my Irish up or
that I have any grievance against you. Heaven will bear me wit-
ness that I have no feelings but those of a brother towards you
or ever will have. I am utterly unable to go on with the leases I
have on hand. I was disappointed on Black Hawk [at Rico,
Colorado] and Mt. Queen, Since my last I have been a week on the
Black Hawk, We worked a chute of ore 200 feet wide down to a
point where the value gave out; but the vein continued. We shall try
to sink on this chute in hopes that the values will come in again.
At present 5 men are employed, mostly all working in upper work-
ings on small stringers trying to make expenses and if possible get
a little ahead so as to prospect the bottom of the main chute. It is
difficult to hazard an opinion as to the result. The giving out of the
values was like a thunder-clap in a clear sky.

The Mountain Queen pay streak does not hold its value going
down. For 600 feet on the surface it averages 100 ozs. Four feet
down it falls to 30. On account of snow I have been unable to work
the Vermillion yet. The Black Girl ran behind $200 last month but
we are doing a good deal of dead work. The Hawkeye paid $150
more than expenses. The Neodeshaw was a dead loss and I quit it.
I have made no tests on the Mt. Queen as a concentrating proposi-
tion as I have had no means. I paid in the early Spring an assessment
of $250 on [Ben] Butler. We are getting some good ore from this
mine but expect it to play out any day. You can form your own
opinion of a country that will play out in 20 feet with such surface
showings as you saw on Butler. , . .

I will give up about the 10th. I have no money, myself nor fam-

30

"DAUGHTER, I'VE STRUCK IT RICH!"

ily beyond our support. I will quit clean-handed anyway. What I
shall do I have not decided. Some friends may and may not help
me. I exhausted the little reserve I had in paying incidentals like
taxes, Ben Butler, &c. Hence when I needed it I did not have any
strength. Within myself I feel even though no one else agrees with
me that I recovered victory from defeat at Silverton [smelter],
made what was a lost investment worth something. Kokomo was
ruined by a drop in silver. Under the circumstances I don't know
how we struggled along so well but now I am disheartened and sad,
tired of making rosy promises and giving blue results. I have no
money, nor no bank credit [the bank was pressing him to reduce
a $5,000 note] so there seems to be nothing left for me to do only
to shut down. I wish you would advise me for I am in need of calm
advice now if I ever was. To add to my troubles my wife had to go
to her sister's three weeks ago because of continual headaches here.
I am very poor, I have nothing to look forward to. In regard to
Black Hawk and San Bernardo I gave checks amounting to $675,
dated March the 31st on the 1st National [of Denver]. When my
other checks out come in there will be only $50 balance to meet
this $675. I am trying to get some parties here interested in the
leases. My position is desperate and I must do something to protect
my name. I had to send those checks.

I seem to see him again as he was at that time. He would
suddenly put down his knife and fork at table and begin to
figure with a pencil on the back of an envelope. Probably it
was from some of those calculations that he gained the courage
revealed in his postscript:

P.S. Of course if there is any way for me to keep on and hold
on to our leases I will do it. I do not know just how I will carry
Black Hawk & San Bernardo. I may get the men to wait [for their
wages]. From hints you dropped I gathered that you would like
to get completely out of mining interests.

Father did hold on somehow. His imagination was bewitched.
He felt there were richer deposits of minerals in the earth than
ever had been found. I am sure if he were alive he would say
as much right now about what is in the earth. He was constantly

31

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

exercising perceptions that transcended ordinary human sight
in his efforts to discover what was within the mass of each of
those steep mountains over which he rode and walked and
climbed and crawled, always sampling. I was with him on some
of his trips that summer. I was ten and my legs were long
enough to straddle a mountain horse named Dewdrop. Father's
horse was Nig.

In the Imogene Basin, nine miles from Ouray, was an area
that particularly held his interest. The mountains there con-
tained known veins that my father was trying to get possession
of as part of a plan to develop a profitable smelting plant.
Along in the eighties, millions of dollars had been expended
there in the development of silver-lead veins and in the erection
of mills. On our rides we often visited one or another of those
abandoned and dismantled sights and camps. Small animals
sometimes scuttled from view when we came among the low-
roofed log buildings, giving me the feeling that I was being
watched by eyes that should not be there. A silent movement
in a tree usually would reveal itself as the action of something
having the small and friendly form of a camp bird whose first
chirp would be like a greeting.

"What do you see over there across the gulch, Daughter? 7 '
Father once asked me.

"You mean that black hole, Papa?"

"Yes."

"Well, that's what I do see; just an old mine. Maybe a bear
uses it for a cave now."

"Maybe," he said. "But look with your intelligence, too,
Daughter. Look below surfaces. Feel with your mind as well
as your fingers. Think of all the holes like that one which we
have seen around here. There are miles of drift tunnels and
many mine shafts hidden from your eyes: see them with your
mind."

There were crow feet wrinkles printed at the outer, corners
of Father's blue eyes. We were eating our sandwiches. I could
hear the incessant sound of little roots tearing as the horses
cropped grass behind the rock where we sat. Father told me

32

"DAUGHTER, I'VE STRUCK IT RICH!"

that veins of silver-lead ore reached up inside the walls of the
basin where he was spending most of his time that summer.
But he wanted copper. There were only a half-dozen known
bodies of copper in the region. If he could find a copper mine
or an iron mine or both, he could bring success to the pyritic
smelter he was trying to develop at Ouray. He told me that
the Una and the Gertrude claims had been staked here years
before I was born 'way back about the time he was getting
ready to leave the Black Hills.

"It was the time of the big Leadville excitement. After
three-four years of hard work and spending there was fail-
ure. The camps around here were dismantled and everybody
left."

As he talked I could almost hear the racket of hoisting ma-
chinery, the grinding pulsations of big concentrating plants;
yes, even the clink of shovels and picks of the men who once
had dug inside the hills that threw their cool shadows over us
as we rested. I knew Father's plan because he had discussed
it a hundred times. He felt that if he could get possession of the
abandoned properties and make a large output the Austin
smelting process could make the low-grade mines pay.

I knew that already he had acquired a large number of
abandoned mines, mill sites, and undeveloped claims. In most
cases the scattered owners were eager to close at any figure.
The earlier failure had put a blight of human disapproval on
the section. Only one man had kept his faith alive in the
Imogene Basin Andy Richardson. When not in Ouray he
lived in a tent on a claim he called the Ptarmigan. Once, holding
tightly to Andy's dry and horny hand, I walked into a drift
tunnel, each of us keeping a candle high to light the way. When
we were a hundred feet in the hillside, so that when we blew
out the candles, the entrance was merely a disk of light, Andy
asked me with his deep, deep voice how I "would like to work
here with a pick and shovel."

I shook my head and then, realizing Andy could not see
me, I released a "no" that came forth a booming, echoing
sound in that subterranean place. There were a few other men

33

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

working individually on claims in the surrounding Mis, but
Andy had been there from the beginning. He told me that he
was the first white man to cross the range from Red Mountain
to prospect the Imogene Basin. There was pride in his voice,
and his hand slapping against the wall of the tunnel had in it
something of the feeling with which one pats a beloved horse.
Andy loved the place, and because Father believed in it Andy
loved Father.

All our journeys were to prospects or mines with fascinating
names. As we rode, single file, along the narrow, rocky moun-
tain trails Father would toss over his shoulder an identifying
word or two. "Yonder," he'd say with a lift of his hand, "is the
Ivanhoe." Then I, too, would see in the rocky mass he indi-
cated the faint suggestion of a crenelated castle wall that had
inspired the vanished fortune-seeker who had named the place.
Ah, but there were more exciting names!

While my father delved and sampled rocks, sometimes for
whole half-days I dwelt in reveries. Some subtle feelings that
perhaps for years had hovered in the deepest mountain glens
now touched my mind. I had wanted to be an actress, and
there in the hills I was an actress. Not alone sunburn touched
my cheeks, but the paint of my fancy; my hateful red flannel
union suit ceased to itch and became all lace and soft linen.
By perceptions less than clairvoyant I knew the past. All about
me were droppings to tell that the close-cropped grass had
nourished wild mountain sheep and goats, but there was more.
To some of the broken land lonely men had given names that
were as echoes of the purposes that had brought them from
far-off places high up into those hills. An escarpment of rock
that was iris-blue in the sun surely told me it had been named
in memory of haunting eyes, the Norma, The white and
never-melting snow on a rock that cut off half my sky? It was
for someone's white-haired mother; that one had been called
the Emily. In that richly colored world of rocks there were
positive clues to explain that Gertrude had red hair and that
Una, too, was blonde. Men who once had staked their claims
and hopes in this basin had shaped themselves, for me, in such

34

THE WALSH FAMILY IN 1897

"DAUGHTER, I'VE STRUCK IT RICH!"

fine names as Canuck and Yellow Dorg and White Swede. I
thrilled when I heard my elders speak of Hidden Treasure,
Talisman, Oro Cache and Argosy. But it would be Father him-
self who would reveal what secret loyalties to past experiences
had fixed upon his newly staked claims such names as Tip-
perary, Old Ireland, and Deadwood. The Boxer was for Vinson,
arid Tarn o' Shanter why, that was the kind of hat I wore
when I rode beside him.

Mother was often invited, but rarely went. Father said she
brought him luck; he would remind her of a time when they
had been riding in a buggy. He had stopped the horse, stepped
down into the road and picked up a piece of rock. When this
sample, which had a matrix in the near-by earth, was assayed
it showed rich values as easily as that he had discovered a
mine that he afterward developed and then sold for a nice profit.

In June, 1896, father was lobster-red from sunburn when he
returned from five or six days of riding across the mountains
to Silverton and back. "There is lots of snow yet," he said to
explain his burn, and gave the tired pack mare a kindly slap
that sent her trotting into our yard.

It seems to me it was only a few days later that the telegram
came telling of the death of Grandfather Reed in Denver.
When we returned from the funeral Father resumed his pros-
pecting trips, but Mother, blue and troubled incessantly with
neuralgia, spent much of her time in a dark room. Once that
summer, though, they did canter out toward the toll road.
With them rode Mr. Thompson, floridly handsome, and Mrs.
Thompson, her big soft hips spreading wide above the cantle,
so that Father, as they started forth, had half his red mustache
lifted in a grin the others could not see. That time I cried with
vexation because I had been denied permission to go along.
But I was along on the most important day of all.

Father had been offered another claim that was 'way up
near the summit of the range. He had been over the ground with
Andy Richardson and for some reason was eager to get back
a second time. So we rode forth one morning, following the
familiar, dizzy road that was cut into the canyon wall so high

35

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

above the feathery waters at the bottom of the gorge. Father
was tired before we started; his skin was touched with an un-
healthy yellow. Never before, though, had he taken me quite
so high. On the steeps the horses bobbed their heads and
breathed noisily. The wind was cold, for at that altitude there
were never-melting glacial snows lodged in deep fissures in the
crags. Bare black rocks were underfoot. Similar reddish rocks
reared themselves steeply above us, cutting a jagged line into
the turquoise of the sky. On foot we climbed higher and higher,
Father carrying his canvas saddlebags and his prospecting pick.
He would talk to me as if I were grown-up, and a man to boot.

"I like the looks of this ground, Evalyn."

"But wouldn't all the other prospectors that have been up
here the thousands who have passed along the trail "

"They were looking for silver," he said, and squatted on top
of a rock slide. "Besides, there are lots of poor prospectors who
might have been rich if "

That was a favorite theme of his: the careless prospectors
who ceased to be careful and methodical in their search; who
were always ready to assume that the first prospectors to look
at any piece of ground had been thorough.

"In the mining game gold is just where you happen to find
it. And you never know what's under your feet."

Each time the shining, bluish white point of his pick broke
off a sample Father would wet the bit of rock with his tongue
to make its metal shine. Near the ground he sampled that day
was another claim that he owned. Buried under a snow slide
was a tunnel and other workings we could not see. Father
pointed out to me the outline of the dump. About the middle of
the afternoon we mounted the horses and started back; that
high road was not pleasant traveling after dark.

Father had to go to bed soon after that trip. He had de-
veloped a case of jaundice; his skin and the whites of his eyes
became the yellow of gold. As soon as he was permitted out of
bed, he was ordered by the doctor to go to Excelsior Springs.
Before he would consent to go, he insisted on seeing Andy
Richardson. There in our house he gave him instructions to go

36

"DAUGHTER, I'VE STRUCK IT RICH!"

up on the Gertrude and drive a tunnel through the snow until
he could get into the workings.

"Sample the tunnel." Father spoke with such intensity as to
seem almost irritable, which ordinarily he was not. Of course,
he had been quite ill. "Have 'em for me when I get back."

In a few weeks he came home from the Springs and, in his
own phrase, he was still as "green as leaves." He had come
back to Ouray against the orders of the doctor. He was mysteri-
ous with Mother with all of us. There was something he had
to " 'tend to." He was obviously weak, and so thin the bones
of his shoulders made pathetic ridges on the back of his coat.
Nevertheless, he saddled Nig in the morning and set out to see
Andy Richardson at the cabin over in the basin.

Mother had bad news that day from Denver; Grandmother
Reed was ill and needed her there. She would not make the de-
cision to go until Father returned, and when darkness had
filled our valley he still had not come. It was unusually late
when Prince began to whine and scratch at the front door.
Somehow he could distinguish the beat of Nig's hoofs among
those of all the horses that moved around Ouray. Vinson let
the dog out and stood waiting on the porch. Then Father came,
almost exhausted, and grunting a little from the weight of his
saddlebags. He never left those in the barn when he had been
out sampling; he always put them under his bed. That night hils
eyes were so bright that Mother was convinced he had a
temperature.

Next morning he had vanished with his saddlebags before I
was dressed. Then he had to go back to bed; the doctor insisted,
or else he would not be responsible. However, Grandmother
Reed's condition made it necessary for Mother to set out for
Denver, and once more Vin and I were in the care of Annie. A
few days later Annie told me Father wanted me in the bedroom.

"Daughter, dose the door."

I did and then rested my chjn on the cold, shining foot-
board of the big brass bed.

"You must keep a secret I am going to tell you. Promise?"

"Yes ? Papa."

37

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

"Remember the trip we made up near the Gertrude? I found
some gold in those samples I made that day. It ran about two
dollars a ton. Now I have had reports on samples I took this
last trip."

He hesitated; after all, I was only ten. If Mother had been
there I am sure he would have told her instead. Feeling as
badly as he did, he had to tell someone, someone he could trust.
He motioned to me to come around to the side of his bed and
showed me a piece of grayish quartz; it was not very im-
pressive. He wet it with his tongue and held it near my eyes.
Like thread-ends in its texture were glistening circles and
specks of black.

"That's gold."

I was ready to whoop with joy, but he sharply interrupted:
"Whoa ! Remember this is a secret. If you should tell a single
person before I say you can, you might ruin our whole future."
I have forgotten most of his words, of course, but I remember
their import: the report he had received on his samples was
better than his wildest dreams.

In the intervening years I have thought often about that
action of my father. Why did he tell me, a ten-year-old child?
He dared not tell a soul outside the family until he had com-
pleted all his pending deals for the claims and prospects and
mines in that long deserted region. He had no partners; it was
all his own. Yet he was a sick man who knew his clutch on
life was none too firm. If he died his secret would die with him,
and we who were so deeply loved by him, for whom he had
scaled mountains and dug and worried we should be left in
want. He had to tell. Mother was in Denver, Vin was a little
too young, but I was ten and I knew where the gold was. So
he told me and the secret was kept as securely as if we had
been a family of mountaineer Corsicans. Almost the whole of
his message was imparted with a single spoken sentence. He
did not have to write anything that a prying eye might see.
Even if he died he knew that some day I would grow up and
sensibly interpret what he meant when he whispered,

"Daughter, I've struck it rich."

38

CHAPTER IV

The Camp Bird Mine

WITHIN a few weeks there was no secret to keep because It
no longer was important to maintain secrecy. Around Ouray
everybody knew that Tom Walsh had made a gold strike, and
in a silver region that was news. As bigger and bigger orders for
mining machinery began to go out by telegraph the news spread,
first throughout Colorado and then in the big city newspapers.
I have no recollection of any immediate change in our way of
living; indeed, I am pretty sure that for a while there was no
change. What I remember best is the thrill the family all had
each late afternoon when the jack train came down from the
mine into Ouray: each jack was bestridden by an enormous
pair of saddlebags and on each of those bulging canvas recep-
tacles was lettered in black paint "CAMP BIRD MINE."

A few friends were close enough, trusted enough, to learn
the whole story from Father; and often the tale was told at our
fireside in Ouray how he had found gold nine miles from
where we lived:

When Father returned from Excelsior Springs against the
doctor's advice, it was because of his eagerness to see the
samples from that mine tunnel that was covered with snow.
But when Andy Richardson handed him the sacks full of
samples some voice in Father's deep self prompted him to go
and take his own samples. After all, Andy had been in the basin
for eighteen years and never had found gold. So Father threw
aside those sacks and despite the kindly remonstrances of the
old prospector he insisted on making the long, hard trip up the
mountain. He reached the mine after an exhausting effort and
found there a dump of very showy ore having zinc, lead, and

39

FATHER STRUCK IT RICE!

some copper pyrites. He went into the tunnel, and found an
eighteen-inch streak of the same kind of ore that was on the
dump. Then he saw something that made his heart pound.

Between that streak of obvious ore and the hanging wall was
a three-foot vein of quartz. There was no shining mineral in
it, and most miners accustomed to silver-lead carbonates would
have regarded it as worthless; but Father, with a richer ex-
perience, knew it for what it was gold in a tellurium form.
His illness was completely forgotten. For twenty years he had
been searching for what he saw there; and it already belonged
to him when he found it. He took so long to sample that grayish
quartz that Andy became uneasy and entered the mine,

"There's the pay streak, Mr. Walsh." With a finger Andy
traced the narrow vein of less important galena zinc ore.

"Never mind. I see it; but I always assay everything,"

Out on the dump Father found tons of "waste" that when
assayed showed values of $3,000 a ton. Indeed, it was from
the dump of that abandoned mine that he got some of the first
of the extraordinary riches of the Camp Bird. Why (he once
said), with no better tool than an ice pick a man could have
knocked off a comfortable living for a family.

Meanwhile I was still a tomboy and nothing could be done
about it, although Mother tried hard enough. Brother and I
were the chieftains of a pretty rough gang for which our yard
was a rallying place.

I'll never forget the day we all decided to play firemen.
Among the cluster of typical outhouses in our back yard was a
shed with a gable roof above its cramped second story. It was
agreed that Vinson and I were to rescue the others from a burn-
ing building. So we herded them up a ladderlike staircase into
the top chamber of the shed, closed its trap door, and set fire
to the place as calmly as you please, in our enthusiasm using
entirely too much old paper. Before we quite knew what had
happened the structure was a roaring furnace, but making
considerably less noise than our slowly roasting friends. Vin
and I were so frightened we could not move; we had planned
a gentle little fire that we would put out with the garden hose

40

THE CAMP BIRD MINE

as soon as we had made use of the ladder on which the whole
scheme was based. Luckily, Father was at home. He went into
action with the hose, rescued the other youngsters, and cussed
Vin and me all, as it were, with one breath.

As fast as we got out of one scrape we got into another. Vin
had been given one of the Camp Bird burros for a pet a
strong-willed, hard-mouthed little beast. Right after he mounted
it in the yard one day it trotted under a clothesline that was
tight against Vin's throat before he could say "whoa." He was
jerked from the donkey's back, landing on his head. He lay
unconscious; he had a nasty concussion that made the doctor
stick out his lower lip in silent concern. Mother was away and
Father was at the mine. Annie and I were scared as we could
be that Brother would die. However, he recovered and we soon
got ourselves into other difficulties.

The Camp Bird had become a place of the most fascinating
activities. I do not think any mine of like magnitude had ever
been developed so swiftly.

During the first year Father worked as hard as ever he had
worked in his life. He took charge of the development work;
no one was so well fitted by experience to make that develop-
ment work pay for itself. There was no selling of stock, no
borrowing. Some Ouray men with picks, shovels, drills and
dynamite extended the original tunnel farther and farther into
the mountain, almost directly under the jutting cliffs that form
the side of the Basin. That which had been the core of the
tunnel became, almost overnight, the pay of the miners; and
a growing excess was steadily transformed into modern mining
machinery. Happily for Father's peace of mind, fingers of the
veins were found close to the surface.

"Sugar quartz" was what they called the stuff packed down
from the mine on the backs of the burros. The ore was practi-
cally free milling gold. That was the grand phrase we heard
often at our supper table in those days: "free gold"! No
wonder Father was too excited at times to sit through a meal.
The West always had been exciting to him; that one of its
potentials which now had become real had kept a spell on him

41

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

through all the years that he had been prospecting In the
mountains. Yet even while his bonanza was igniting the im-
aginations of those who mined in basins and valleys adjacent
to Ouray, on some of the other crazily tilted surfaces of
Colorado's gorgeous scenery, Father himself was fretting.
Doctors had told him he must, he absolutely must, stop sub-
jecting his body, his heart, and his mind to the strains of
mountain climbing, exposure and worry; but he no longer had
time to talk with doctors. That was because he was a mining
man to the core. If he had inherited that red mustache of his
from ancient Britons, then why not also some of that Brit-
ish instinct for finding metals that long years ago brought
Phoenicians coasting up from Tyre to trade their purple
fabrics?

It was that same instinct, ripened by his years of experience,
that kept him fretting. Too many times for ease of mind he
had been compelled to face the heartbreaking consequences of
having a rich vein pinch out, leaving him confronting debts and
sterile rock. Up there on his mountaintop, so high that some-
times the nearest clouds were a half-mile down, he could see
on near-by slopes, as grim reminders of the wreckage of other
miners' hopes, black holes that were deserted tunnels, low
log structures that were dismantled mills, neglected graves of
the forgotten. There was in the mine itself a cure for the fore-
bodings of such dismal things; touching the ore of his mine with
his hands was a healing action as soothing to his mind as a
dose of some narcotic. This was why he was reluctant to desert
the mine.

No man can dwell in those majestic mountains without
reverence for the creative force that shaped them so magnifi-
cently. During the year my father was unlocking the treasures
of his mine there was fixed in him a firm belief that a Supreme
Intelligence had guided him to the bonanza that other men had
blindly failed to see. He believed there was a nice balance in
the world by which men's acts automatically measured out to
them all that they received of justice or misfortune. Because of
that belief he was unfailingly kind and generous; and then,

42

THE CAMP BIRD MINE

just at the end of his year of development work, he had in his
nostrils the ugly smell of death.

It seems to me now that things were always happening to
the Walshes; but this particular experience happened after a
late summer outing in Denver. Why we had gone there, I do
not now remember. The Thompsons, with their little girl, Faith,
were along; also Father, Mother, Brother, little Annie and I.
Annie and I were in one lower berth together. Outside our
car window the night was by turns dark from the narrowness
of the gorge through which we traveled and acrid with the
breath of the railroad tunnels. The curving pathway of our
green-curtained bed had made us dizzy and glad to sleep.

I think I had been asleep for hours when I was pitched with
terrifying violence into a chasm I could not measure. The
blindness of my plight caused me to shriek, but the sound
echoed only in my mind because the world had become a
place of grinding, splintering clamor, smelling of stale dust,
and I could not breathe, I knew I was choking even as I heard
the moment of silence that succeeded the final smash and rain
of breaking windows. I was head downward as in a strait
jacket of harsh Pullman cushions and bedclothes. I heard
dear, faithful Annie half -scream an injunction for me not to
be frightened. I kicked and writhed until my mouth was free,
but before I could yell there came the voice of my father

"Evalyn?"

There was entreaty in that cry, addressed to something
higher in the scheme than me. He was calling frantically to
each of us in turn to Mother, to Vinson and to me. I managed
a whimper, and in a few seconds felt his strong hands clutch one
of my kicking legs. He plucked me upward as from a barrel,
and when my arms were locked in terror about his neck he
kissed me. I could feel him thrusting upward into the darkness
so that his chest expanded jokingly against my cheek. Glass
showered on us and he crouched over me. He was in frantic
haste to get me through one of those car windows that had
become our tilted ceiling. Up through the opening he had made

43

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

he pushed me, and bade me scramble to the ground. Because
my nightgown was up around my armpits as I slid over the
rough surface of the car roof I scratched and cut myself a
little. For a time on the ground I was too close-fenced by dark-
ness to move. Under my bare feet I could feel cold, sharp
stones and cinders. Probably I was worse confused because of
the bumping I had received, but slowly I acquired a shaping
vision until in the darkness ahead and behind the chaos had
outlines. On the blackness I saw amber arabesques being
written by swinging lanterns.

There was a bigger patch of light some car-lengths away;
a flame that jetted furiously from beneath a coach. While I
watched it the flame began to grow long tongues. There were
awful sounds: cries of pain, moaning, screams, and the bellow-
ing of cattle. I must have walked a short distance, because
soon I saw near me a man who, as I watched, gave up in des-
pair his futile effort to drag himself along the ground. His head
with rather long hair dropped a few inches to the dirt and then
the advancing fire drove the shadows from his face and body.
His legs in torn trousers were drenched with dark fluid and he
reached a hand toward me.

I sat beside him. He was speaking far back in his throat, and
trying to lift his head. In mining camps even the children are
aware of the obligation to succor injured persons. In a situa-
tion in which a city child might have determined that the case
was one for a policeman or an ambulance surgeon, I, as a matter
of course, pulled that poor man's head into my lap and patted
his cheek. He was speaking over and over the same two words :
"Wife, babies."

I have no recollection of a reunion with my mother. The
events of that dreadful night are a jumble. But I know that as
I held the man's head Mother was close enough for me to see
hair braids hanging against the whiteness of her torn gown.

Brass buttons glinted on the open vest of a bareheaded man
who trotted toward us. He was wheezing for lack of breath
when Mother stepped into his path. When he stopped, his
lantern was close beside my head. There was a faint hiss as a

44

THE CAMP BIRD MINE

dark bubble formed on the hot globe in its protection of wires.
I saw that blood was streaming down the hairy back of the
railroad man's hand from some dreadful source hidden by his
darkened sleeve. I saw my mother grab with her hands this
man's other arm, and I heard her imploring and then command-
ing him to go back to flag any other train that otherwise might
swoop unwarned around the curve into our part of the gorge.

By then the fire seemed to fill the cut in which most of
the cars were piled. The man whose head I held stopped moan-
ing. My legs had become numb and gone to sleep. Something
had happened to the man. Perhaps he had fainted. As I stood
up on legs that were wobbly and without feeling, I saw Annie
appear through the side of the Pullman. Then a hand thrust
her away from the opening and the head of bulky-bosomed
Mrs. Thompson rose into view. Father was doing that. I saw
his head once and his eyeballs reflected the near-by flames.
One end of the car was blazing before he himself finally crawled
out, still in his nightgown with its red featherstitching at the
neckband. Blood dripped from cuts on his hands and arms.
Ever thereafter they bore white scars.

There was a nauseating stench in the air. We knew that not
everyone had got out of the blazing cars. Suddenly something
about that figure on the ground, the relaxed mouth below a wet
mustache, frightened me. I lost my head completely and began
to run down an embankment. I cut my feet on a barbed-wire
fence. For weeks afterward I could not walk, so badly had I
torn my feet.

We learned that our train, westbound, had crashed head on
into an eastbound cattle train.

Thirteen bodies were recovered before the train was con-
sumed by fire but it never was determined how many persons
actually were lost in that wreck. For a while thereafter I was
afraid to fall asleep in the dark. Once I woke up screaming
because of my latent fright that was renewed by the sound of
breaking glass. Annie came rushing to comfort me. With tender
ridicule she showed me a smoke-blackened lamp chimney. It
had been left too near a mirror on the dresser. From my bed

45

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

I could see the fragments of broken mirror but even with
Annie's arms around me I could see, also, that horrible scene
that still shapes itself out of a speck of memory through the
simple exercise of trying to index some almost forgotten con-
tents of my mind.

The railroad wreck was all the excuse the Walshes should
have required, I think, to decide to leave the mountains, to
enjoy Father's find by translating the gold into happiness. In
Mother's opinion, the decision could be made none too soon. It
would be bitter tragedy, she felt, to labor all those years walled
off from the world and then through some rude trick of fate
to miss the well-earned fun. But there were, Father objected,
so many things to be done.

Up at the mine Father's right-hand man was John Benson;
lie wore a fierce mustache that spread beyond his cheeks and
Bad the form of the downward-curving horns of a range bull.
When he came to our house at Ouray his hair would be water-
slicked so as to become, along the rim of his forehead, a stiffly
fixed wave. Mr. Benson had a voice that indoors could be safely
employed only as a whisper; nature had designed him to be a
full-throated mine boss. He was one of the kindest of men,
and had helped Father operate the Deer Horn mine at Cripple
Creek and the Black Hawk group at Rico. They had profound
faith in each other. They had been together at the scenes of
fresh strikes of gold and silver. They had seen bloody labor
wars where men fought each other with heavy caliber revolvers,
with repeating rifles and dynamite bombs. They wanted no
labor troubles at the Camp Bird. That payroll which, inside
of a year, had grown to more than one hundred names was
expected to increase eight or nine fold. Tom Walsh planned to
make those men more comfortable than any other group of
miners in the West.

Aunt Lucy had come to Ouray to visit us, to visit the mine
and make us all less impatient for the outside world. She
brought her son Monroe, then a lad of six or seven, and he
became the very shadow of Vinson. Every night there were
talks by the sisters, designed to woo Father from his cherished

46

THE CAMP BIRD MINE

mine. Not all they said was said to him; but most of it he was
supposed to hear. His blue eyes were kindly, sympathetic; but
the thrust of his jaw showed that he was not softly made. He
did not want to go before the mill was built; everything seemed
to turn on the mill.

We were taken to see the parts of the mill machinery when
the first big pieces arrived on flat cars, but Aunt Lucy roguishly
kept talking about Eastern fashions, fine horses, parties. Then,
one day, little Monroe became ill. He had such a severe diarrhea
that Mother in great fear sent a messenger up to the mine for
Father. Several hours later, as it was turning dark, we heard
Nig's hoofs in the familiar canter that always made Prince
bark joyfully.

Monroe was lying in Aunt Lucy's lap, too weak to open his
eyes, and his long lashes were as dark smudges. He was shud-
dering in a violent chill. Father took one long look at him and
vanished into his bedroom, excitedly saying, "Bring the child
to me." He stripped off his own clothing, got into bed, and
took the little boy into his arms; in the meantime, Annie,
Mother, Aunt Lucy were carrying out his orders for hot-water
bottles, for hot flatirons, and other utensils. I saw Annie fill a
pie pan with brandy, and touch a match to it. When the blue
flames were rising from a boiling fluid, she smothered them with
another pan. Soaking a strip of red flannel in the bubbling,
aromatic liquor, she wrapped it about Monroe's stomach to
ease his cramps.

When the child ceased to shiver and quake Father told us
of a dreadful experience he had had while riding fast down the
trail from the mi$e. It happened where the river chasm was
deepest.

Nig, ordinarily a sedate horse, shied violently as they came
around a bend in the canyon wall. Speaking reassuringly to the
animal, Father caught one glimpse of a flapping, grotesque
object, and then felt his horse's hind legs slipping over the
edge. He threw himself forward on the animal's neck to keep
his own balance, and dared not turn around. Looking down
along his thigh he could see that Nig's hind hoof was engaged

47

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

with a revetment of logs that supported the road on the curve.
Saying "Whoa Nig, whoa Nig, whoa Nig," over and over,
Father managed to keep the creature from struggling farther
while he climbed toward the beast's head until he could step to
earth; then he encouraged the horse to climb back on the trail.
Father was horribly shaken by the experience.

"What a slight thing!" he kept saying as he marveled. Some
workman who had been repairing the road at that point had
left a spade stuck in the earth and hung his coat on it. The
wind, setting the sleeves of the garment in motion, gave Nig his
fright; but Father thought too much of Nig to blame him.
"He thought it was a bear," he said.

Nevertheless, that incident, coming so soon after the dread-
ful wreck, determined the next step in our life. The Walshes,
Father announced, were going East to live in Washington,
D. C.

48

CHAPTER V

The Walshes Meet the McLeans

I NEVER have forgotten the excitement of our first winter in
Washington. Every single thing we did was an adventure that
gave us some fresh revelation of the meaning of the Camp Bird
Mine.

We were living in a pretty suite of rooms at the old Cochran
Hotel. There, one night, Mother timidly tried on her first
evening gown. She shuddered at the mirrored reflection of the
creamy nakedness of her own shoulders. With cheeks flushed
rosy from her embarrassment, she vowed she'd never step out-
side her room in such a state.

One of the beauties of Washington was our guest that night:
Marian Cockrell, the daughter of Senator Cockrell of Missouri.
This charming girl whom we called "Mary" was our first friend
in Washington. Her manners had been polished in a Paris
convent, and our faith in her counsels was complete and de-
served.

"Why," she exclaimed, to overcome Mother's timidity, "see
how large and lustrous your dark eyes appear. Your slenderness
is so shapely. Come on!"

She seized Mother by the hands and led her into the cor-
ridor and downstairs. For Mother, it was an experience almost
as overwhelming as if she had been taken direct from that
cabin of my first remembrance into a glittering ballroom in
Washington.

Mother really was timid, and never made advances; Father
was as friendly as could be and everybody liked him. The
Walshes made many friends that winter, and learned a lot.

We children had been entered in good schools. Vinson, a

49

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

skinny little fellow who read "Beautiful Joe", "Black Beauty",
and other animal narratives, wanted to be a great athlete. He
was attending the Friends Select School for Boys. I wanted to
be an actress and was under orders to become a lady. I was
attending Miss Somers' school, the Mount Vernon Seminary.
I was taken there every morning by little Annie; we either
walked or rode on a streetcar. Some of the other girls came
In rather smart turnouts. My chum there was Elizabeth Eddy
who wore a big bow of ribbon on her taffy-colored hair. She
was Miss Somers 7 niece.

Among the important persons Father and Mother had met
in Washington were Mr. and Mrs. John R. McLean. Mrs.
McLean was sponsoring a dancing class for children; the in-
struction was to be given in the drawing-room of her house
in I Street. I think it was as a preliminary to my attendance
there that I was invited to dinner at the McLeans'. My hair
was in two braids down my back with a ribbon bow behind
each ear, my dress stopped at my knees; as I walked into a
room filled with chattering people I felt as if I had been
impaled on a pin and held under a bright light. I had a be-
wildering impression of older young people, especially of girls
somewhat older than I haughty girls who did not speak
to me.

Mrs. McLean introduced me to some and then she brought
her son to me. She called him "Neddie." We were both eleven
but he was a gawky creature so extraordinarily tall he seemed
more like fourteen. He bent his neck and stole sulky looks at
anything that won his interest. His mother enjoined Mm to take
me in to dinner, and to my surprise he obeyed her. I really was
in terror, because I had been cautioned against a myriad
blunders I might make. There was a confusing array of silver
on each side of my plate. Somebody spoke to me in raillery and
I burst into tears.

Next to me sat a man who, just as if my behavior was the
usual thing at dinner, said, "Now, now, you'll get used to this,
This is your first dinner; wait till you've been to as many as L"

Edward Beale McLean, that gawky youth, never opened his

50

Harris 6" Ewing

MRS. JOHN R. MCLEAN
Mother of Edward Beak McLean

Clinedinst Photo

MRS. WASHINGTON McLEAN

THE WALSHES MEET THE MCLEANS

mouth to me that I remember; he had plenty of shyness of his
own to deal with. His mother and father, however, were as
sweet to me as they could be. It was at dancing school that I
first found out how frightfully they were spoiling their son.

Mrs. McLean, a marvelous hostess, was trying to instill
self-confidence into Ned. Some of the boys at dancing school
used to boast that when they played parchesi or crokinole or
even baseball she would bribe them to let her son win. For
ten cents, or fifteen, most of them were delighted to be bought
and maybe were not greatly harmed; but Ned was being
utterly spoiled.

My parents were honestly concerned to keep Vinson and
me from being spoiled. Mother was determined that I should
become a lady but then, practically all mothers in the
nineties had similar expectations for their daughters. I do not
now recall just when the thought began to churn in my mind
that we were rich, because there never was much talk of money.
I do know that we returned to Colorado in the summer of 1897,
and that there was a noisy Fourth of July celebration, in-
cluding a parade. My pony cart sprouted plumes of red,
white, and blue tissue-paper under Father's hand, and I drove
this vehicle just behind Vinson, who wore a plumed hat and, a
grand marshaPs sash, and bestrode his new pet, D ( aisy. She
was full of the devil, and when a string of firecrackers exploded
on one side of the street Daisy backed to the other and put her
haunches through the plate-glass window of the drugstore.
Vinson was not hurt but Mother shrieked and for the rest of
the day was all a-tremble.

The point is, we really were not rich. Thirty, forty, or fifty
thousand dollars was recovered from the Camp Bird cleanups
every month, but most of the money was put right back into
the mine. More than a million dollars was scheduled to be spent
in that way, and at home we continued to think in terms of
"Can we afford it?" Just a week or so after the Fourth of July
parade, I wrote to "My Darling Papa" at Ouray to ask him to
be sure to bring the Kodak, because "at Glenwood Springs
there is a dark room and you can develope your pictures for

SI

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

nothing. The instruments and stuff goes with the room so you
can develope for nothing."

Nevertheless, we soon began to pass out of that stage where
the cost of things ruled decisions.

By the time we were back in Washington, I had become
aware that if Mother so much as breathed a wish for anything,
even a set of $1,800 furs from Gunther's, she got it,
overnight at the latest. Probably that is how I got my idea that
walking to school was a little trying for my dignity. At any rate,
I went to Father's room and found him standing before a small
round mirror, his face covered with lather. I was forbidden to
touch the razor or to talk with him when it was actually in con-
tact with his face. So it was while he turned with the utmost
care and concentration to slide it back and forth over the
glossy surface of his strop that I put him to a test like the one
to which Aladdin subjected the slave of his lamp.

"Papa, do you think you could afford to hire a horse and
carriage for me to ride to school in sometimes?"

"Rent a horse and carriage, hey?"

I saw creases forming in the mask of white soap under his
nose and around his mouth, and he began to laugh heartily.
He laughed so much I was chagrined; then he sobered and
began stropping his razor once more.

"Darling, I guess I can manage to rent you a horse and
carriage."

One afternoon soon afterward he called me to the street,
and there at the curb in front of the hotel was a blue victoria
with the top down. Harnessed to it was a pair of sorrels so
sleek that their hides were iridescent in the sunlight. Their
silver bits were frothy, and both animals pranced as if to prove
their fine ancestry, but they quieted when addressed by a deep
bass voice that came from the throat of a colored coachman
who sat on the box. His name was Terrill; he wore a silk hat
and gloves. For a moment I was speechless, then jumped into
Father's arms and hugged him.

The next day I deliberately made myself almost late for
school so that all the girls were clustered in the yard ready to

52

THE WALSHES MEET THE MCLEANS

enter when I was driven up. That was my first full realization
of what had happened to us, and I should be a liar if I tried
to say I did not enjoy right down to the bottom of my soul the
"ohs" and "ahs" that came from the other girls.

Drink has been an evil influence in my life drink and
drugs. There was a liquor closet in the fine house Father had
bought for us, but nothing that closet contained was half so
intoxicating as the sheer delight of being a part of that house-
hold. On the street corner stood a lamppost, a fluted iron column
that supported a U. S. Mail box at the level of my head and,
on its top, above a short crossbar, an easy climb, an in-
verted pyramid of glass through which the gas jet was visible.
Just above the line of glass appeared the names of the streets
of this intersection, LeRoy Place and Phelps Place. We called
the house, always, "the LeRoy and Phelps Place", picking out
of the confusion of Washington an identity for ourselves. In
Ouray I would have hung by my knees, first thing, from the
crossbar on the lamppost, but in Washington the magnificence
of the carriage neighborhood was strong enough to keep me
on the ground. The house was a three-story yellow brick with
a tile roof, and there was no ugliness either outside of it or in
it. It had been the home of Mr. and Mrs. Conrad Jenness
Miller; Conrad was a minor celebrity in Washington, a widely
traveled lecturer. Father bought the place "complete"; so that
we emerged from our hotel chrysalis to become full-winged
Washington householders as we stepped over the threshold. We
were now possessors of all manner of "things": books, orna-
ments, rugs, curtains, towels, and other intimate appurtenances
of the cultured. It was like magic. (An old account book of
Thomas Walsh reveals that in 1899 such magic could be worked
for $58,129.91, cash.)

A canopy of blue satin over my bed filled me each time
I awakened with the realization that life had changed for
Evalyn Walsh. The figured blue satin that covered the walls
did not lull me; it was as a signal for me to get up quickly, to
put on one of my new frocks, to live. I went through the house

53

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

as a squirrel goes through a forest. One of its most fascinating
recesses was the liquor closet.

With the attitude of a chemist striving empirically to find an
effective catalyst, I went from bottle to bottle. That way I came
upon the creme de menthe. In it I found complete satisfaction.
Of course, we children had been forbidden so much as to open
the door of that closet; but I was crafty, as children usually
are when there are forbidden things around. I would wait my
chance. When mother had gone out and the servants were rat-
tling dishes and chattering over their food, I would step into
the closet, fill a glass with fluid emerald and scamper up to my
room. A piano that had been thrust upon me made a first-rate
hiding place until I was ready for my drink. That would be
at the minute before I was ready to go downstairs to be driven
in the blue victoria to the dancing class at the McLean house.
Then I would toss off my drink and leave home feeling ele-
gant.

Father began to complain about the rapidity with which his
creme de menthe evaporated; finally, he said flatly that some-
body was stealing it. I think he suspected one or another of the
servant girls. I kept my eyes focused on my plate during his
complaints ; but I kept my habit of drinking. One day a maid
observed some sticky circles on top of my piano and mentioned
them to little Annie. Smart as the dickens was Annie McDonald.
She loved me as a sister, and knew me better than she knew
herself. She knew she'd have to catch me dead to rights, so she
hid in my clothes closet. I had my head tilted as she bounced
out and with a leveled forefinger indicted me as a thief of cr&ne
de menthe.

"I'll tell your father," said Annie, and wilted me completely.
"You've got a taste for the stuff. Think of what drink did to
your Uncle Steve!"

"If you tell Papa "I was outraged.

"All right. I won't tell him if you stop your drinking."

I cut down a bit, for I didn't want to hurt Father. There was
usually some around even when we traveled, although Mother
never drank and Father less than he would have liked

54

THE WALSHES MEET THE MCLEANS

whiskey upset his stomach. Nevertheless, he kept it around
because he wanted his friends merry.

There were constant excuses for merrymaking in the be-
ginning of 1899. Some of Father's Colorado friends were urging
him to run for Congress, but he refused the nomination. His
friend Charles Spaulding Thomas had been elected governor of
Colorado. We were all Republicans. We were "for" McKinley
in 1896; and in 1899 Vin and I were permitted, after washing
our hands, to hold and examine something the postman de-
livered, a rectangle of cardboard, stiff, gold-edged, and bearing
a gold shield. It was from the Executive Mansion an in-
vitation to Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Walsh to attend a reception
at the White House. It had come from the President and Mrs.
McKinley. But that event became as nothing when other
things began to happen.

On February 20, 1899, Vin and I flopped down on the floor
to enjoy to the full the sensation of reading that President
McKinley had appointed Thomas Walsh of Colorado and
Washington a Commissioner to the Paris Exposition. We were
going to Europe!

A month or so later, Father unrolled before our fascinated
eyes a parchment scroll that had come from Denver. With
that document Governor Thomas had made my papa a colonel
and an aide-de-camp in the service of the State of Colorado.

Late in May, Washington celebrated the National Peace
Jubilee which had, I suppose, something to do with the end
of the War with Spain. There was a parade in which were many
floats: stages mounted on horse-drawn wagons, set with such
tableaux as the Landing of Columbus, the Birth of Our Flag,
Washington Crossing the Delaware, and soon, and there was an
enthroned white-robed female figure representing Peace, with
white doves supported not by their outspread wings but by
quite visible wires. We had good seats for the parade, as we
did for most affairs in that time. Father had a gilt badge which
identified him as a member of the Finance Committee. I sup-
pose he had made a contribution. It was pretty generally known
by that time that Tom Walsh was a man with money. A short

55

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

while before he had bought the Oxford Hotel, paying $125,000;
there was an $85,000 mortgage on it. He was rather constantly
going about looking at real estate, and most of his callers were
men who wanted to sell him something or, as they would say,
"interest Mm" in some project. In the course of a few months
he bought four hundred $1,000 registered United States Gov-
ernment threes, paying $433,850, and one hundred registered
United States twos at a cost of $102,937.50. Tom Walsh was
nobody's fool, even if he did have, in the phrase current in
Washington, money to burn.

A few days after the close of the Jubilee we sailed on the
White Star liner Majestic. In the party were Father, Mother,
Vinson, Aunt Lucy, her son Monroe, and I. Oh, yes and
Annie McDonald. It was something less than a vacation for
Annie, because she had her hands full with me.

This is not going to be a travel story if I can help it, but
that trip was important to me because during it something
occurred that lodged, I think, in the depths of my mind, to re-
main there as a troubling, foreboding thing, subtly influencing
my behavior.

We toured England, France, Switzerland, Austria, and
Bavaria, and it was all fun; but for Father the great, heart-
swelling days were those we spent in Ireland. For him, the
whole of our journey was simply part of a pilgrimage to Tip-
perary. Some others had joined us by the time we reached
Ireland, a fascinating Irishman whose identity has eluded me
and a woman I shall not identify. She was beautiful, and sweet,
too normally. In her jewels and furs she was as understand-
ing as anyone when we all stood in the courtyard of the white-
washed, thatch-roofed farmhouse at Clonmel. The chickens
pecking in the mud were not merely chickens to my father;
they were creatures in a chain of life that had touched his long
before. He picked up the threads of many old friendships, and
his hand was in and out of his pockets throughout the days;
he made no show of his giving, not ever. He went to see the
grave of his mother, who had died while he was a baby. There

56

THE WALSHES MEET THE MCLEANS

was a stone cross that he had paid for with Black Hills gold.

We were on our way to Queenstown when what I speak of
happened. In the twilight of our train compartment I became
aware that this lovely woman was drunk. There was something
else wrong, but I did not know quite how to define the trouble.
Father, I could see plainly, was provoked. Then we reached
our station. I remember that in the darkness I felt with my foot
for the platform and started into the station where we were
to get something to eat. Just then I whirled around. Father,
swearing, was bending over. The woman had fallen flat. A misty
or a foggy night will evoke that scene in my mind as long as
I live. They got some black coffee for her in the station and she
began talking. Father had made her wrathful by a rebuke and
by this time she was not in the least beautiful: disordered hair
made her haglike.

"Tom Walsh! " She spoke his name with sober fury. "I want
to tell you something. " Her eyes roved from one face to an-
other until she fixed her gaze on me, clinging tightly to my
father's hand. "Tom Walsh, I curse Evalyn. I want you be-
fore you're dead to see her in the gutter, to see her worse
from drink than I am." It was all said quietly, and no other
person spoke.

An Irish curse on mel My mother had her hand clasped to
her mouth. Father, keeping hold of my hand, walked out to the
platform; its boards were soft under our feet from the damp-
ness. He said nothing, but just kept walking back and forth.
I looked up at him as we passed into the yellow glow of the
station lamp. His face was wet with tears. The night was full
of evil. Heavy fog that billowed visibly wherever there was a
bit of light seemed charged with menace. Of course I was just a
child, and this should have touched me no more than a bad
dream; perhaps it did no more and yet I wish, because of
the Irish in me, that curse had never been spoken.

Probably I did something on the ship, and Vinson, too; I
have forgotten what but I remember that when we landed in
New York Mother's mind was fixed on one thing: she was
going to hire a French governess. I was fat, thick-waisted,

57

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

graceless and harsh-voiced as a peafowl. It had been agreed in
a family council that the work of transforming me into a
decorous lady should proceed with a hurry like that which so
quickly brought the Camp Bird into big production. They were
going to work on me in two shifts: school all day, and a gov-
erness morning, noon, and night. Against this scheme I was an
outspoken rebel; but I was taken along to the agency when
Mother went to interview candidates for the position of making
my life miserable.

Mam'selle was French, of course; she had snapping black
eyes, a suggestion of gelatin at the hips as she walked on her
high heels, a strong "zese" and "zose" accent. I hated her
at sight, but Mother hired her, although I never could under-
stand why. (Certainly that French flirt was not a sensible bit
of baggage to take to a mining camp.) Mother asked where we
could drop her and after a flustered protest Mam'selle gave
an address that proved to be a fine brownstone home just off
Fifth Avenue. She was slowly mounting the steps as we drove
off, but when I took a peek through the glass at the rear of our
hired carriage she was hustling down the steps again. I saw her
turn toward the river. (God knows where the woman really
lived.) I told Mother, but she said it did not matter. She never
had a trace of suspicion about anybody; indeed, she was in-
terested in New Thought and deliberately sought to keep out
of her mind all but generous, kindly emotions.

Father and Mother were bent on enjoying their money to
the fullest extent, but both of them had discovered rich satis-
faction in doing for others. They seemed to be agreed that if
they could translate most of the gold of the Camp Bird into
kindnesses great good would result. I remember one incident on
our way back to Colorado.

As we pulled out of some station I was rocking on my
elbows in the open, unscreened window of the Pullman. Beside
our car in semidarkness a man, bent low, was trotting on the
black cinders. I looked down upon the X of his suspenders
against his rain-faded blue turtleneck sweater. Once he turned
his head for a stealthy look behind, and I saw that his face

58

THE WALSHES MEET THE MCLEANS

was as black with soot as the mask of a minstrel. Then, as our
train picked up speed, I saw with shrill horror that the man
had vanished right beneath me. I was sure the wheels were
grinding him up and I let out a shriek for "Papa."

Father came running to hear my bleat that there was a man
under the wheels of the train. He, in turn, roared for the con-
ductor, and the train was stopped. Trainmen with lanterns ran
along the right-of-way, and each pause they made filled me
with something like nausea. They started back and, sur-
prisingly, halted in an angry cluster just under the place I had
regained in the car window. The man in the blue sweater was
dragged out from his perch on the rods. The station agent
came running up and as he was trying to catch a full breath
the conductor was giving him orders to take the young tramp
off to jail.

"Not a bit of it," said Father in a tone that made everybody
listen. "This boy's got a ticket. I'm buying it."

On the train, Father helped the young man get cleaned up. I
saw how thin his sweater was and that he shivered, possibly
from excitement. He went with Father to eat in the diner, and
then I saw his face, wistful and half -dazed, vanish behind the
green curtains of the lower berth' Father had bought for him.
There was money in his pocket, too. I could almost feel his
gratitude as I began to doze. Ten years later, that boy wrote to
Father to express gratitude and to say that he was settled in
a big Western city, making good,

I'm sure a thousand tales like that could be told of Tom
Walsh.

59

CHAPTER VI

The Walsh Gold Engine

THE great gold engine my father had brought into existence
high up in the mountains was making its loudest, grinding
clamor as we returned to it. It was still twilight when I began
to hear the voice of the mill. Sometimes as the road passed
around a slope the voice died away only to return abruptly as
an overtone to the constant sound of the heavy stage wheels and
the clopping of twenty-four hoofs on the road metal. I could
tell when Father's ears caught the sound, because then I no
longer heard the twanging burr of his pleasant voice. He be-
came quite silent which was not strange, since the sounds
were the echoes of instruments that had been shaped first in
his mind and only after that conception had received a
synthesis in what is called reality.

Each time our six-horse stage rounded another curve notched
into a precipice, I had a breath-taking instant. The vehicle be-
came a top-heavy thing of which I was the quivering apex.
It was better, I found, to keep my eyes fixed on the horses'
backs, watching the patterns of their jouncing harness worked
out in sweat marks on their hides. They were blacks and bays
except the off leader; he was a dappled gray. Without fear I
had ridden this road on a horse's back, and would again, but the
seat of the stage was a dizzy perch from which to go tumbling
in my fancy to the bottom of the chasm. That terror was
blotted out as the canyon filled with darkness. The mill noise
had become incessant. The horses began picking up their legs
faster and faster until the driver, uncomfortably aware of his
lady passengers, spoke to his animals crossly, "Haw, you; haw,
haw!" The leaders' ears I could no longer see, but the wheelers

60

THE WALSH GOLD ENGINE

held theirs cocked stiffly forward. Whatever the Camp Bird mill
might mean to the half-score of us in the stage, to the horses
it meant oats, stable warmth, and the deep crisp straw of their
stalls. Then the driver pulled them to a walk as his hand became
dramatically whiter and the metal of the harness shone in a
strange brillance that we had entered.

We had reached the Potosi Basin, and our end of it was
bright with the bluish effulgence of a monstrous electric arc-
light; its globe was suspended more than a hundred and fifty
feet above the ground. Papa identified the masses of shadow-
making structures for me. A big one was the mill itself, doubled
in our absence to contain forty of the thumping, big, eight-
hundred-and-fifty-pound stamps. Even the buildings he saw
for the first time had a matrix in his mind: the General
Manager's headquarters, the cottages of the officials, the store-
room, retort chamber, and assay office. The big light, he showed
me, made a ring of brightness beyond all the buildings, to give
the watchmen the jump on robbers. His eyes went back to the
harsh brilliance in the arc-lamp. It was the pivot of his world.
Our French governess tried to take charge of us at the new
cottage and, with the aid of Vin, I made a scene. Why, I had
been up here when there was no mill or mine; just a snow-
clogged tunnel that only my papa and I knew was rich with
gold. In the morning I dressed early, in a sweater and a pair
of pants, and walked to breakfast with my thumbs hooked be-
hind my suspenders, defiant of Mam'selle.

Higher up in the adjacent Basin was the mine itself, and
there they had built the boarding house. I heard my papa say
it was the finest money could buy. Now I saw it: a great
barracks three stories high and more than two hundred feet
long, designed to keep its numerous, restless tenants comfort-
able in all the extremes of mountain cold and heat. Its walls
and ceiling were tongued and grooved woodwork, glossy with
varnish. The floors were of hardwood, kept waxed and polished.
In the wide corridors that were furnished with chairs, tables,
books, magazines, and pictures, there was marble wainscoting
higher than my head. There was marble in the lavatories, and

61

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

the bathtubs were of porcelain, as fine as any I had ever seen.
At a touch the taps provided hot and cold water. Against the
walls were platoons of brackets supporting the shining reflectors
of oil lamps, but over every table there dangled an electric-
light bulb ugly, but impressive in 1899.

From a staunch timber platform high up on the mill wall, Vin
and I were helped by John Benson into the iron howdah of an
elephantine mechanism called a "tram." Its cable sinews were
stretched on skeletal towers to become threadlike and then
vanish before they crossed nearly two miles of valley bowl
and reached up the mountain to the rim; up there was the
mine. Our car was suspended by a heavy steel arm from tandem
trolley wheels slotted, one set above a second, to a pair of the
heavy cables. We swung out on a fantastic journey, our course
following the rough contours of the terrain and only our heads
above the thick steel side of the car. Ahead I saw a chasm and
then, too swiftly for comfort, the earth dropped away, taking
to the rocky bottom of a canyon all my daring. I fixed the
fingers of one hand tightly to the big shoe of John Benson
and tried to trace with my eyes the least detail of blemish in-
side the car; to look out and down was to fall through the limit-
less space of my imagination. Yet I had to look, and Vin did
too. Trolleying downward from the mine on the cables strung
on the opposite side of the towers that supported our flight
came a tram loaded with the gray-white heart of the mountain
that was the essence of our new life. Vin and I rode repeatedly
in tramcars until the belly-chilling power of the adventure
was gone.

Vin wanted to be a fighter, he wanted to be able to knock
down anybody, to run faster and jump farther. I think I some-
times got my ambitions mixed with his. Most of the time I
wanted to be an actress and have all the men clamoring after
me. I wanted to excel somehow even, I may say, anyhow.
Maybe that's why Vin and I induced a foolish, easily cajoled
foreman to let us go to the bottom of the shaft in the cage the
miners used and then start upward on the vertical ladders kept
there for emergencies.

62

THE WALSH GOLD ENGINE

No one dreamed in that time of such giant structures as rise
from our cities now and yet in every extensive mine the sub-
terranean excavations commonly were of such proportions as
to dwarf the biggest skyscrapers men have dared to build.
From the spire of the Woolworth Building to the ground is not
so far as from the top of the Camp Bird to its bottom level.
I know we did not climb so far, but in my dreams sometimes,
when I am very tired, I am back again in the blackness of that
shaft. My legs and arms are weary. My brother's thin legs are
above my head, the foreman's head below my feet. The ladder
rungs are wet and slippery. My hands ache and threaten not
to keep fast hold. The flickering carbide lamp on the front of
my hat touches with yellow light the failing fingers in my dream,
and I know I am approaching the crisis of that foolish ad-
venture. Somehow Vinson stepped free and up just as the rung
from which he reared gave way. I thought I'd fall just from
fright, and I could not cross the interval. How long I balked
I cannot say; but the miner would not let me retreat. It was
nearer to the top, he said, and with a mighty hand boosted me
from below until I grasped a higher rung. Water dripped on me;
I was saturated. I began to slip more often, and Vin was going
slower and slower. I must have whimpered, because the foreman
was half beside himself and tried to keep one hand locked
about my ankle. When we did get to the top, my hands were
raw with broken blisters.

John Benson growled into his red mustache that the foreman
would die when he got his hands on him. Father said the man
would have to leave the mine. Vin and I were scolded and made
ashamed, but we shed real tears and roared loud protests to
save our friend. We made such a fuss we got him off; but we
ourselves were thereafter kept closely under the thumb of the
governess. We had become just a pair of nuisances to her.

There was an assistant manager of the mill or mine who
would have taken any lady's eye. I was jealous as the devil,
and when I saw she was interested in this man I writhed
inside. When we were supposed to be asleep our Mam'selle
would slip out of the cottage and stealthily enter the tiny house

63

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

of this official. I said nothing about that to anyone, but I
scowled whenever she proceeded with our lessons or In other
ways exercised her authority.

Uncle Sam Lee had arrived to see the Camp Bird. He and
Father yarned with John Benson night after night. Their talk
always was exciting and if Vin and I kept out of sight until
they had taken a drink or two they would rehearse old times
without regard for our young ears.

Often I heard Father tell about the time his partner, with
whom he lodged In a cabin shelter at Deadwood, went mad
whether from loneliness, or drink, or what, I can't remember.
This man was going to kill Father. Snarling oaths, he plunged
into the cabin to emerge a second later with a big revolver,
held, barrel up, at the level of his ear. In the West, bullets were
started on their killing pathways as if they were stones thrown
from the fists of those who fired them. Father had a narrow
choice: he jumped barehanded at his berserk friend and caught
his wrist. This incident was the basis of his oft-repeated motto,
the sense of which was to meet trouble face to face.

Uncle Sam had a bullet hole right through his thigh from
side to side, just below the hip. Monroe and Vin had been
allowed to see that old wound, even to explore it with their
fingers; I heard its history often and always with my spine
prickly with sympathetic fear. After he abandoned mining
Uncle Sam became a railroad contractor. He built sections of
the Sante Fe, recruiting his workmen in the lodging houses of
South State Street in Chicago. Armed guards held as prisoners
all who had accepted passage; otherwise the train would have
arrived at the construction camp empty. This human freight
was difficult to handle. Gamblers, prostitutes, every kind of
fiend and harpy showed up at the camps for payday. With one
of these men there was trouble. Uncle Sam took up a whiffletree
and clubbed his opponent until the man's face was a mask of
blood. Only this saved my uncle from being shot by this man's
big six-shooter. Then Uncle Sam set out to run and hide, and the
staggering victim pursued. Darting around a corner, Uncle

64

THE WALSH GOLD ENGINE

Sam slipped into an open doorway and took refuge in the dark
beneath a bed. For a moment he thought he had eluded his
pursuer. Then he heard boots on the doorsill. From his hiding
place he could see the man wipe his eyes free of blood and
take a quick look; then another wipe. Then their eyes met.

"Now you " Uncle Sam never left out a word of what had
been said to him as he lay under the bed expecting to die. He
took us half-instant by half-instant through his moments of
dread. He watched the man stoop and extend a left arm so that
its wrist became a rest for the long pistol barrel. He saw him
squint, and himself writhed closer to the wall. Then the gun
roared and the whole world seemed to explode into fire. The
killer strode off after a minute of satisfied cursing, believing
the limp form beneath the bed was simply the body of a dead
man. However, and this was the happy ending, the bullet
had only torn a hole through the right leg and cut a deep notch
into the rear of its mate. So Uncle Sam lived to tell us.

There were other stories of the days when the Leadville
Camp was full of hell and my Aunt Maria's husband, Arthur
Lafferty, was a two-gun police sergeant. The most grisly yarn
of all concerned a man who was respected by my kin. In one
of those Western towns where law was beginning to interfere
with natural practices, he had been forced to kill a man. He
had reason to fear the man's associates. His pressing problem
was the body on the floor of his kitchen. Afar off he heard
sounds; wild hog invaders were grunting and quarreling for a
share of the swill of his tame ones lodged in a pasture pen.
He shouldered the body and went out toward the pasture,
dropping his burden into the darkness on the other side of a rail
fence. In the morning when he went to the pasture there was
nothing there to cause him embarrassment. The domestic
hogs were stretched out enjoying the sun and took no interest
in the pail of swill he emptied into their trough. The wild hogs
had gone.

The strongbox of the Camp Bird was sheltered in a frame
building called the retort room. Twice a day at the mill a greasy
accumulation of amalgam was cleaned from the rectangular

65

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

plates where it had collected as a repulsive slime. This was
carried to the retort room and there, after careful washings,
was poured into a crucible that from its shape alone could be
known as the monstrous heart of our engine. When this retort
was closed Mr. Coates, the mill boss, would turn a valve wheel
that released into it an unseen fury in the shape of a steam of
quicksilver. Twice a day I would be on hand to see the crucible
opened and to watch the yellow stuff 900 fine, now cooled and
strangely heavy, lifted out and packed for shipment to the
Denver mint.

Rarely was there less than eighty pounds of amalgam; often
there was much, much more. In addition, there came out of the
mill each day a carload of riches in a less dramatic form, called
"concentrates." This was worth $150 a ton, but to Vin and me
the impressive return was the fresh pot-shaped ingot that twice
a day was laid before our bulging eyes. We had been told the
worth of those rare solids. The Camp Bird was producing
$5,000 a day. Each morning we Walshes arose richer than we
had gone to bed. Mine and mill ran night and day.

An iron chest was lifted to the oak flooring of the stage, and
into that the gold was locked for the guarded trip to Ouray.
A wrinkled boot of grease-black leather would be lifted from
the brake as the driver gathered his six horses. Then two guards
with rifles held like precious toys across their breasts would
climb up with him. Whiffletrees would lift from hocks to mid-
level of the straining haunches and another load of our treasure
was started off to become distantly, mysteriously, somehow
more definitely, ours.

There were persons in the mountains covetous of the gold;
we knew that. A man was dismissed from the mill because he
was constantly smoothing his thick hair with fingers greasy with
the amalgam slime. Others were sent away because high grade
ore had been found in their clothing. Oh, a hundred tricks, I
think, were penetrated before most of the leaks were stopped;
even then the tempting power of the stuff continued to itch too
many minds.

One day when Vin and I, after the departure of the stage,

66

CAMP BIRD MINE

THE MILL AT CAMP BIRD MINE

THE WALSH GOLD ENGINE

had started for the cottage we heard a shot, which was not
unusual. Then there were six or eight in quick succession, fol-
lowed by as many as if someone had fired off a pack of giant
crackers. In response to some further alarm the mill men came
running into the open. All carried rifles. The stage had been
held up. The driver and guards had been killed and the chest
of gold carried off into the mountains. The robbers were never
caught.

After that there were four guards with the stage and they
rode horseback. The treasure chest was bolted solidly to the
floor of the heavy vehicle.

Everything that happened, each fresh excitement, seemed
to make me less tolerant of the supervision of the governess. On
top of this, I found myself growing furious with jealousy every
time I looked at her. Vinson and I agreed to get rid of her if
we could.

One of the places where visitors to Ouray always were taken
was Box Canyon. Rocky cliffs were so close together that I
think a goat could have jumped from wall to wall. At the bot-
tom of the gorge a mountain stream cascaded white as milk
down a succession of falls. A footbridge spanned the walls of
this canyon at the dizzy top; on lower ledges where no sunlight
ever fell there were railed wooden walks. Far down in the
chasm an electric arc light had been suspended so that the
beauties of the place could be observed by night. The lowest
walk of all was at the level of the light and this cavernous,
damp perch, always echoing the roaring of the waterfalls,
could be reached only by descending a ladder. Vinson and I
had it all planned out. We persuaded the governess to go with
us to the lowest level. She was last as we started up again.
Then, by design, I dropped my pocketbook and squealed so
much she backed down the ladder to pick it up. As she stooped
over Vin and I, already at the ledge above, hauled up the ladder.
She was trapped at the bottom of the canyon.

At the house we were asked about Mam'selle. We shrugged
an Appropriately French form of lying. She had gone shop-

67

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

ping, we said. That was true as far as it went. It grew dark and
we had supper. Father returned from somewhere and his in-
quiries about the French girl were more stern. We confessed.
A group of men set off with lanterns to find her. When they
came back the governess was moaning hysterically. In her
fright she had torn her clothing, her waist was in ribbons and
mudstained; she had tried to climb out in high-heeled shoes.
A doctor was called. She did not get pneumonia, happily, and
the next day she was driven to the train. She had a ticket to
New York and a gift from Father that made her eyes sparkle.
We were punished, but I am afraid not severely enough.

By that time both Vin and I had decided that nobody
should be allowed to teach us anything. Vin, I think, was not
so sure we were acting right; I was. I was not going to be a
lady, not if I could help it.

68

CHAPTER VII

We Meet a King

MY father's charm was strong enough to win the lasting friend-
ship of a king. You can bet that made me proud when I was
just a girl. But there was more to it, more that makes me stop
to wonder how many, many of the things that I'd call chance
could be unraveled from my life and traced back, through end-
less patterns, to those days when we were learning how kings
spend money, and what for.

What I remember best, of course, are trival things; an ad-
venture on the Ferris wheel; walking up and down the Eiffel
Tower, thereby having stiff legs for nearly a week; my greedy
interest in the naughtiness of the streets of Paris I was not
allowed to see; the convent where I was for a while immured.
But for my boldness there, I guess I should not have met
Leopold, King of the Belgians, on that trip.

You see, my father's power to grant my wishes had grown
as great as if he had become a magician; but sometimes when a
wish had been granted there were quick and mischievous com-
plications. This was so the time I said I wished I could learn
French. That wish just happened to coincide with the fact that
I had been making a fourteen-year-old nuisance of myself.

While Father was officially representing his Government in
Paris we occupied nearly the whole second floor of the filysee
Palace Hotel. The banquets my father was giving there and at
the Ritz had made him the talk of Paris. In our party we had
Marian Cockrell, Alice Rochester, and the daughter of the
Secretary of Agriculture, Florence Wilson, whom we called
Flora. With Father, Mother, Vin and me, and little Annie, that

69

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

made eight. It was Annie who took me around at first, and what
I thought I ought to see in Paris made her blush.

When I wanted to be in the streets of Paris, seeing for my-
self the Coney Island stuff that made my elders whisper and
giggle, Annie homesick, probably would have me stand-
ing, tired and bored, in the Exposition building on the Champ-
de-Mars called "the Palace of Mines and Metallurgy." John
F. Campion's Leadville mine had an exhibit there of leaf and
crystallized native gold, and right beside it was the exhibit of
the Camp Bird mine which was producing, so the gilded
legend told, $5,000 a day.

On the boulevards I saw the streetwalkers, whole platoons
of them, and if I said they shocked me I should lie; to a child
they did not seem to lead so bad a life. My mind was not
equipped to think of all they had to do to live, nor could I
wrestle with the reasons why: they were human beings, girls,
engaged in a strangely exciting occupation. If I lacked under-
standing, at least my mind was powered with curiosity stronger
than the actuating current of our mountain mill

Annie burst out at me as the sunlight beat upon us when we
left our hotel one day.

"Why, Evalyn," she whispered in shocked fright, "you've
got a face as red as Bordeaux claret."

I minced my steps to a half-stride and said, "I licked the
covers of a hotel book and got the paint off on my tongue."

"You little hussy 1 If your father sees you now "

She only made me mad with that old threat, which she so
rarely carried out. We walked a bit while Annie pondered, and
then she spoke with downright rage.

"You did ... You did! I saw you!"

Well, I had. With fine mimicry I had looked a challenge at
a man who passed, and had rolled my greenish eyes. He turned
his head and, with a smirk, lifted in a mock salute of gallantry
his glossy black taper-crowned silk hat. I was fairly snatched
back to the hotel for that imprudence; and at one in the morn-
ing, when we had been long abed, Annie still was fishing deep
in her Scotch vocabulary for words to berate the thing I had

70

WE MEET A KING

done. "Malapert" and "brazen" were not strong enough, but
dear Annie could not say to me the awful word that was hot
upon her tongue. It was not until the morning that she whis-
pered to my mother how I had acted on the boulevard. "Just

like a French " Annie pursed her lips and substituted

"bad woman." Mother sent for Father, who was still in
bed.

"It's proof," he said at once, "of the poor child's innocence";
but more than that I was not supposed to hear, and so the door
was closed upon their conference,

In a witless moment later in that probationary day I said,
aloud, "I think I should learn to speak in French."

"So you shall," my papa said. "We'll begin at once."

I suppose it all had been arranged. They sent me in Annie's
charge to a convent at 35, rue de Picpus the Convent du
Sacre Cceur. We were admitted through a gate in its high wall
by a porter so feebly old he must have been alive when the
ancient place was built. No man, except in priestly robes, ever
got inside. It was lovely there, I know; old nuns and young had
dedicated their lives unselfishly to God and fixed their minds on
prayer and future glory. For me, accustomed to the wild, free
mountain air of Colorado, it was full of stench compounded half
from lack of plumbing and half from fetid airs that seemed to
come from somewhere underground, Moldering in the convent
cemetery under richly nourished grass were the severed heads
and bodies of a thousand aristocrats. Through a little grated
door I saw that green graveyard, and clutched Annie more
tightly as an old nun spoke of the blood that ran from the
guillotine.

Both Annie and I wore white dresses by command. In
chapel a white veil was scratchy against my neck and ears and
my hands looked thick in white cotton gloves. We did have a
nice room, but its high door could not be locked, and it opened
into a black corridor that was drafty as a cave. In the night-
time, while I lay close beside unhappy, Protestant Annie, the
soft footfalls I occasionally heard outside seemed to be not
those of nuns. My fancy was alive with ghosts, come, I thought,

71

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

from the mysterious crypts below to make me take the veil for
life.

I knew the names of some I had read them on their tombs:
De Boiseliu, De Rochefort and La Rochefoucauld. That made
them so real my convent nights were loud with horrors. A
romance of mice squeaking just beneath my bed became rack-
torture cries from specter lungs. My common sense to-day
tells me that nuns, like all old women, have need to leave their
beds at intervals, but in that black-dark place the softest
shuffling steps could only come, I knew with shudders, from
the movements of things that never should have moved.

In the convent a bath was something a girl could not take at
will it must be arranged for, and not too often; but I got
one that was not scheduled. After a few days of boredom I
frizzed my hair until I had a mass of curls and then I licked
another book that had red covers, putting bold disks of holly-
berry shade upon my cheeks and a deeper tint like a mon-
signor's bib upon my lips. I was playing actress to relieve my
boredom and sulky Annie said no word to keep me from this sin.
Then, before class, I went with Annie into the green freshness
of the garden. There were cypress trees growing high above
the walls, and the morning air was fragrant with shrubs. I
was in a mood to like the place for the first time since my
arrival.

I saw Annie's mouth turn down at the corners and looked
where she did to see a tremendous human figure rolling
toward us in a wheel chair. A nun with lowered head was push-
ing an enormous female. We started off, but this vast woman
called out sternly, "Stop, child! Stop!" I swear she weighed
four hundred pounds at least and much of it was uncorseted
belly tightly swollen against black bombazine.

"What are you doing with your features painted? And
your hair . . , 1 " Deep disgust had shaped each word, but she
spoke in the best English I had heard inside the walls.

I was scared, but I did not have the least notion who she
was. I asked her to tell me and she said, "I am the Mother
Superior." You can bet I listened then, with downcast head. I

72

WE MEET A KING

was really afraid of her mighty powers over all who came inside
the convent.

"You are very wicked. God will not protect you when you
offend him!"

I was petrified.

"Sister!" She spoke then with the voice of a general, and
a somber creature who had been walking a few paces behind her
came up to stand beside me. The Mother Superior, in a cascade
of French, gave further commands; and soon I found myself
being held by the hand as I was walked into the dormitory. A
drenching pitcher of water took the friz out of my hair. Strong
brown soap cleansed my cheeks and lips of all their paint, and
there was a final indignity; a soapy rag was rubbed inside my
mouth.

When I was dressed again I was told that I must put on
my white gloves and veil, and go to the gallery 'of the chapel
and pray for two hours. Annie was forbidden to accompany me.

But I did not pray. I spent the whole of my two angry hours
scheming how I might get out and back to the arms of my
darling father.

When I rejoined Annie I told her my plan and she was half-
ready to endorse it. I wrote a letter and put it in an envelope
that I addressed to Mother. That was the gimmick, if you
know what I mean, of my trick. They had supper there quite
early, so it was early evening when Annie and I, without our
hats or coats, approached the door. I held my letter con-
spicuously in my hand. There was only a young girl there, a lay
sister. I put the letter before her face and in English said I
wanted to go out to mail it. She shook her forefinger from side
to side in a gesture to forbid our passage while she went to
ask about the matter.

The instant she disappeared I seized the heavy latch and
lifted it. Annie and I ran as hard as we could go. We turned
corners to the left, ran another block, then right again. We were
breathless and had no money. I had not the faintest idea where
we were and Annie was, already, full of regret and wanting to
return. Then I saw a heaven-sent voiture.

73

FATHER STRUCK. IT RICH

The horse was white, and its drooping lip hung almost at the
level of its broken knees. The vehicle was an old victoria,
cracked of leather and odorous of stable and the cheap perfumes
of curbstone blondes; but the driver was as friendly as Santa
Claus, He was very fat and laughing all over. He had a high hat
that was fashioned out of some kind of white oilcloth and on
his green old coat, lying in echelon, were three capes, the
shortest at the level of his shoulders, the longest reaching to his
elbows.

a lysee Palace Hotel," I said to him as we climbed in and
sat close to one another on the musty cushions. I had to repeat
the address two or three times before he caught my meaning,
uttered a loud "Bon" and with a high gesture of his arms
slapped the reins against the drooping horse.

At the hotel I rushed upstairs so fast that for a minute I
was breathless and could not tell my mother what was in my
mind. She had turned from her dresser in her white under-
things, her dark eyes showing white circles of astonishment.

"They have been cruel to me," I gasped and believed what
I said.

Mother called out, "Tom!"

Father appeared in stiff white shirt and vest, his hands work-
ing as he struggled to form a string of tie into a white butterfly
against his throat.

I spoke of cruelty again and told about the bath. Father
burst out laughing and I knew I was all right. (Mother just
once, in my whole life, that I remember, lost her temper, and
then she only slammed a door.)

"We've missed you so," Father said, "I'm glad to have you
back. Now we'll get you a governess one that you will like."

So, next day, I was in the custody of a Frenchwoman who
was sweet as she could be, but stern when I needed stern treat-
ment. Her name was, in our household, Miss Haye. With her
to keep me straight I saw a lot of the Exposition,

Mrs. Potter Palmer was one of the twenty American com-
missioners, and she had become a family friend. She came to

74

WE MEET A KING

our hotel early one evening when Father and Mother were
giving a banquet for three or four hundred people. She came,
she told me, just so I could see her emeralds that I had asked
about.

I thought she was old because her hair, in a pompadour ar-
rangement, was snowy white; but she was only fifty-one and
with such a flawless complexion that she was completely lovely.
She let me finger to my heart's content her necklace of emeralds
and diamonds, and seemed to understand the passion in my
eyes as I looked at them. She loved jewels. Strand upon strand
of pearls had been fashioned into a dog collar for her throat,
to cover up the wrinkles that come there first of all. I was
allowed to touch her stomacher and exclaimed aloud when I
saw into the green of the emerald drop that was suspended
there as a kind of jewel climax to all she wore.

"You know, Evalyn," she told me, "I'm devoted to your
father."

Then I walked downstairs with her, holding her hand, feel-
ing her large diamonds set in rings sharp against my fingers,
catching the glitter of her bracelets in my eyes. There were a
hundred small tables in the dining room, and at each lady's
place the waiters were putting an orchid corsage. A man more
grandly uniformed than ever I had seen was helping with the
place cards. A thick jourraghe of gold was knotted at his
shoulder, made ponderous by the golden fringe of his epaulette.
A helmet with a golden chin-strap chain and a white horsehair
plume dressed straight back so as not to hide the golden U. S.
eagle shield in front all that was carried on his arm. This
man, then a colonel, was the military aide of our ambassador to
France, General Porter. He bowed as low to me as to Mrs.
Potter Palmer and so, throughout my adult life, there has been
always in my heart a glow of friendship for General T. Bentley

Mott.

The three of us walked along by the windows opening on
the Champs filysees, and set in each was a full-sized cake of
ice with candlelight to make it glitter as it shed cool air into the
banquet room. That was an extravagance, Mrs. Palmer said,

75

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

quite new to Paris. Bentley Mott lifted from Mrs. Palmer's
creamy shoulders her cape of sables and then my part of the
night was over and I had to scamper upstairs to bed. But I got
up and sneaked back to a gallery where French musicians with
their fiddles and brass horns were tuning up. That was the way
I generally got to our parties in those days.

That, I think, was the night Mary Garden sang for the
Walshes' guests and moved in a cloud of perfume as alluring
as a garden of camellias. I wished and wished I had her looks
and voice.

In the morning Father was beside himself: Mrs. Potter
Palmer's emerald drop was gonel

He was simply wretched with embarrassment over the
missing jewel, and wanted Mrs. Palmer to permit him to replace
it; this she would not listen to, and hushed him up when he kept
saying he felt responsible. They searched the hotel inside and
out, but never found a trace of the big emerald.

Our friendship with Mrs. Potter Palmer lasted. She was a
fixed star in society, and deserved her place. She told us once
that Potter Palmer was more than twice her age when they
were married in 1871; she was twenty-two. Four years before
that time, possessing a fortune, he had retired from a lucrative
partnership in Chicago with Marshall Field and Levi Leiter.
After rest and travel he had gone back to Chicago, putting
his money into real estate until there were thirty-two big
buildings returning rents to him besides the income from the
Palmer House, then new. This was his position when she
married him. In that same year the Chicago fire made him
almost poor. That was when her mettle helped. She was a
partner as wise as Field or Leiter. They built another Palmer
House on the warm ashes of the first and when that was losing
money she knew what to do. She told me this: she walked into
the hotel dining room, and with a pencil marked new prices
on the menu, an extra nickel here, a quarter there until once
more the place returned a profit. I thought she was grand then,
and I still do. I sometimes wonder if from my strong admiration
for the sure social grace and beauty of that great lady I did not

76

WE MEET A KING

catch an infection that has made me, like her, the slave of
jewels.

With me to instruct and to handle, poor dear Miss Haye
earned her money. I made an aeronaut of her within a week.
At the Exposition there was a captive balloon, a monstrous
spherical gas bag jerking at its fastenings, that fascinated me.
The passengers were helped up a small ladder into a wicker
basket; four already were aboard when by a miracle of per-
suasion I convinced my governess that this was, positively, the
most instructive experience a girl could have. The wicker
basket squeaked and metal rings clinked together musically as
the attendants cast off the lines. At first it was no more stomach-
fretting than a swift rise in an elevator, but then the free wind
above Paris began to play with our strange vehicle up there in
the sky. The captive's cable tether made things worse, of
course, and all the others were sick as if the roughness had been
caused by visible sea waves. I never have been seasick in my
life, and was less timid than on my first ride in the Camp
Bird's tram. I saw the curving leaden pathway of the Seine
and was completely thrilled to have all of Paris swelling under
me as a living map. We got down safe, to Miss Haye's surprise,
but next day all her dire feelings were justified. The rope broke,
the balloon sailed off, to come to earth, as I recall it, in Switzer-
land. I regretted that we had not waited a day; but Father
gave Miss Haye strict instructions to avoid rides that were
dangerous. In spite of that precaution she and I vanished.

I had convinced her the Ferris wheel was sedate and en-
tirely safe, and she followed me aboard one of its first-class
cars swung from an axle on its outside rim. We traveled upward
and had creaked half around the orbit of its many cars when
there we stopped, precisely at the top. The thing was broken.

The wind shook and swung our private car of boards in an
arc so wide that poor Miss Haye turned green again; she
retched and moaned and prayed. Far down on the ground I
could see a crescent of upturned faces of people marveling at
our plight.

I had a gorgeous time; but Miss Haye, when she saw the sun

77

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

go down and purple hazes at the horizon turning into darkness,
quit sending prayers aloft and directed a scream or two at
earth. A workman who wore a sloppy cap of tweed began to
clamber up the framework; when he was close enough to touch
our car I saw that his baggy corduroys were belted with a beet-
colored sash. Miss Haye heard only a little of his explanation
of the causes of our fix, before she broke in to say, "Vite, vite,
<vite!" But they were not quick, and another workman clam-
bered up to bring us food. I ate it all; Miss Haye still was sick.
Then, when it was quite black up there above the golden powder
that was made of Paris lights, we swung noisily backward to
earth. At the hotel my father had been so full of fears for me
that he had brought police officials there, had telephoned
hospitals, and had sent messengers wherever any helpful friend
suggested I might be but not one had thought to send to the
top of the Ferris wheel.

My father had become the friend of M. Georges Nagel-
mackers, president of the Compagnie Wagon-Lits, and together
they decided on a trip to Belgium. It was in a special train,
made up as if for royalty with what were truly palace cars,
as wide as rooms in houses, with costly paintings, fine Oriental
rugs, and a swarm of liveried servants who seemed to spend
two thirds of their time serving foods and wines.

We stayed a few days at the Chateau d'Ardennes and ex-
plored its forest. Long years after, I found among my things a
picture postcard of the place, which Flora Wilson had written
on and then forgot to mail. On the picture side there was a
message for "Dear Father" but on the address side it simply
said: The Secretary of Agriculture, 1022 Vermont Avenue,
Washington, D. C., U. S. A. Almost everybody called her
father "Uncle Jimmy." We were practicing formality then, I
guess, for we were soon to meet King Leopold.

Leopold was living in the Chalet du Roi, at Ostend, That
was where my father met him. Except that he wore an enormous
beard, was very tall, and limped, I saw at first nothing to set
him apart from other men; but that very fact, I suppose, was

78

WE MEET A KING

what could turn a person's head. He took a quick fancy to
my father, because he himself was a first-rate business man and
had heard about the Camp Bird mine. After we returned to
Paris, Father went a second time to Belgium just to visit with
the King; and when Leopold came to Paris to see the Exposi-
tion he lived at the filysee Palace Hotel in what we considered
a modest apartment.

The climax of our trip, I imagine, was not the night Tom
Walsh gave the grandest of his banquets; rather, it was the day
he had as his dinner guest King Leopold. It makes me happy to
remember now that, after years and years of hard knocks and
worry, my daddy was so quickly recognized, when he had riches,
as more than just a man with gold.

Throughout the King's stay in Paris, Father saw him often.
They stood together, once, before the gold exhibit from America
in the Palace of Mines and Metallurgy. A piece of Camp Bird
ore was hefted by the King and when they walked on, my father
said, the King had one hand on his arm. Oh, they were friends,
there is no doubt of that. The King, my father told us, wanted
him to go into the Congo and be his partner in the mines to be
developed there.

I know that Mary Garden sang at the party Father and
Mother gave on the day before we sailed for home. She was
then singing regularly at the Opera Comique. Frederick Town-
send Martin had become our friend, as had the Countess Spotts-
wood Mackin and a host of others. The papers said the whole
American colony had attended the reception. On a platform
under palms that touched the ceiling an orchestra of Hawaiians
played guitars held flat on their thighs. Mother was receiving
in a gown of Irish lace over silk and mull with insertions of fine
black French lace.

Sailing homeward on the steamship St. Paul I sometimes saw
that Father, pondering, had his lower lip stuck out beyond his
thick mustache. The house at LeRoy and Phelps Place in
Washington, he had decided, was too small. He planned a bigger
place to cost, maybe, a million dollars. Not much was said to

79

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

Vin or me about the price of things, and that was startling. It
was an exciting thought and in our stateroom Brother and I
talked it over. There was to be, Vin said, a suite of rooms in
it just for the King. We argued late over that, but Vin was
right.

It was so rough that night we could not sleep and from his
upper berth Vin chattered on. All of a sudden there was an
awful crash. The boat shook, then quivered, and my feet were
jammed against the end of the bed. In my fright I took fast hold
and squealed, "What was that?" Brother, who was brave as
anything said, "Oh, it's nothing. I guess a whale just got caught
in our propellers.'' That seemed all right to me, so I went to
sleep; but in the morning the St. Paul's decks were slanting
alarmingly. Some thick rod of steel in the engine had broken
and been driven through the vessel's hull and we were shipping
water. We were four days late getting in to New York; since
there was no wireless, it had been feared that we were lost.

The day we landed I left the Waldorf to go shopping with
my mother. She got new furs at Gunther's, a pair of monster
vases at Tiffany's. We left nearly a thousand dollars owing
when we walked out of Altaian's, and half as much at Stern
Brothers' and Wanamaker's. Father grinned and said he was
glad to see that she no longer suffered and then he grinned
again from mal de mer.

I should have been Aunt Lucy's daughter, for she was the
complete opposite of my quiet, even-tempered, book-reading
mother. It was Lucy who had extravagant enthusiasms for
clothes, jewelry, and fine show horses, whose ears were attuned
for compliments. She was vividly colored and alluringly shaped,
and had almost liquid brown eyes. When I heard people say
she ought to be on the stage, why, then I knew again just why
I wanted to be an actress: I'd be like my Aunt Lucy.

I tried to fix my hair so people could see how much I looked
the actress. Edna May caught my fancy about that time; my
hair was frizzed and parted in the middle, then dressed low to
hide my ears completely a hairdresser fixed it so* Knowing I
never could restore the mold, I left it that way day on day, my

80

WE MEET A KING

ears unwashed and turning yellow for want of sunlight. Written
complaints from Miss Somers' school were supplemented by
my mother's bleats until at last my father spoke to me.

"Listen, the thing you want more than all else in the world,
I think, is a diamond ring. I'm right?"

"You surely are, my daddy!" I was flip when I was going
on fifteen.

"Well then, if you will wear your hair back off your ears as
other nice girls do, I'll give you such a diamond ring as will
make you quite the envy of all your friends."

I thought he had the ring in his pocket then, but he shook his
head and said, "First fix your hair."

It was an awful pull for me to give up what I truly thought
was my personality, but I did it and that was how I got the
first of all iny jewels.

My first proposal came soon after that brought on, I
now suspect, because I kept that ring in sight and quite a
mystery. My papa's gift? How quite absurd I made those
dancing school companions seem who suggested such a thing.
I sneaked out of the class to ride with gawky Ned McLean in
his back-firing motorcar. Not many boys had automobiles then,
nor old folks either, but his parents gave him anything he
wanted. We rolled along, and crossed a bridge and came at last
to a farmhouse where Ned thought we might get strawberries
and cream. We did, too. A baby with an old tin spoon was
digging in the dirt right near the porch where we sat eating.

I saw Ned watching me and I observed the black down on
his upper lip that could soon become a mustache. Just then he
pulled my dish of strawberries out of my greedy reach and
blurted out, "I think you ought to marry me."

Well, I didn't know just what to say, I felt a swelling in
my mind that was a sense of triumph. After this, I knew, I
could not fail; without half-trying I had caught a man. So
naturally I did not say no to him, but neither did I say yes; and
if my daughter were to ask me now I think I'd tell her that was
just the thing to do in such a situation. Hell! The cards are
stacked against us women in any other field we tackle.

81

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

That must have been about the time my brother Vinson
ran away. In my room I found his note that read:

Dear Sis:

I have decided to become a man and seek adventure. I don't know
when if ever you will see me again. All my love,

BROTHER

My screams could have been heard a block away from
LeRoy and Phelps Place that night. I really made a racket as
I took the news to my parents. Mother took fire from my ex-
citement, but Father had spent too many nights with just a
blanket between him and the outer edges of the universe to
worry over Vin's exposure. He took it calmly; but when two
days later Vin came home, and entered by the kitchen door,
my father met him; he was grimly angry because the boy had
carried, on that escapade, one of Tom Walsh's six-shooters
the type called a "hog leg", loaded. He took my brother down
from man size to a proper twelve-year-old with a leather slipper
used effectively for just about five minutes. The licking was
administered, of all places, in our drawing-room bay window.
For two days Vin stayed in his room. I think that was his only
licking, and I cried more than he did.

That spring I had my first deep heart affair. Elizabeth Eddy
and I went to the theater and saw, as Sherlock Holmes, the
grandest actor I had ever seen William Gillette. We both
fell madly in love with his exaggerated profile, but whether
we called a truce or meant to share him half-and-half I can't
remember. We pooled our money and bought some letter paper
that was stiff and grand. Each day we handed a half-dozen
notes to Annie, who had access to the stamp supply. I used to
lie awake at night and wonder what I should do if he answered.
But he never did, and when my sanity returned Annie gave me
a proper scolding; then she saved my pride by telling me she
had burned the notes.

We went West that summer because we wanted to see the
Camp Bird, and Father was wishing he could find another mine.

82

MOUNTAIN ROAD LEADING TO THE CAMP BIRD MINE

WE MEET A KING

It was not money that made him feel that way. It was a kind
of game he had been playing all those years before he made his
richest strike, and so he really yearned for the inner thrill of
finding hidden treasure. He knew quite well he had much more
than he could ever spend even with all of us to help him. What
he wanted all the time was more and more excitement. I loved
it, too.

We used to love to jump aboard a train just when it was
pulling out. On that very trip we did that several times and
once, at some station, I got back aboard but Father had not
come when the train began to move. I was frantic! My darling
father had been left. The train was racing when I made up my
mind: I reached up and yanked the cord that only the con-
ductor was supposed to touch. The train stopped so quickly I
nearly turned a cartwheel in the aisle. The conductor rushed
up to me, raving.

"You go back and get my father," I said, half-crying.

He swore. "I don't care," I said, "you let me off or back the
train."

He glared for six or seven seconds.

"You know what this is going to cost your father?"

"I don't care," I said.

Back we started, and then to my great relief I saw my father
running down the track. I think he settled the case for three or
five hundred dollars, but when we were alone together he
grinned at me and tweaked my hair.

83

CHAPTER VIII

"Don't Sell the Camp Bird Mine!"

THAT was a summer to remember. My mother's dear sister
Lucy came to Colorado and brought Monroe, then ten or eleven
years old. Aunt Lucy wore the things my mother had brought
to her from Paris and she chattered of the handsome show ring
saddle horse she had, a gift from my father. Another visitor
who had exciting tales to tell was John Hays Hammond. He
had brought along his boy, Jack, then thirteen, which was
Vinson's age. They made a pair for mischief; and with Monroe
and me to aid them, got into plenty.

Mr. Hammond was trying to persuade my father to sell the
Camp Bird mine to a London syndicate which he represented,
but Father only laughed whenever he brought the subject up
and Mother, too, would sniff at such a foolish notion. Only a
few years before in the Transvaal, after the Jameson Raid,
Mr. Hammond had been sentenced to death for that attempted
coup d'etat which was not at all, he said, his fault. Then he
had been told his sentence was changed to fifteen years, and
that was almost worse than death. He told us how he felt the
day he was taken out of jail and given freedom upon payment
of a fine of $125,000.

Up at the mine we gave him a scare. He was supposed to be
in charge of us that day, but Jack and Vin and I climbed on our
horses and galloped off onto the canyon wall, at breakneck
speed. He heard the hoofbeats, saw our cloud of dust, and
yelled at us to stop. But he never caught us, because I knew the
road and I was riding poor Dewdrop, who, after two years,
remembered to push my shoulder with his nose when he wanted
sugar.

84

"DON'T SELL THE CAMP BIRD MINE!"

Mr. Hammond was far behind when we pulled up just out
of Ouray. Dewdrop's head was low, his mouth wide open. I had
not realized the poor thing was old. I saw his knees bend until
his muzzle pushed into the dust of the road. I was no tomboy
then, when Dewdrop rolled over on his side and died. My
thoughtlessness had killed him. I cried and cried, and when
Father came and looked at me with scorn I cried some more.
For years Tom Walsh had not hunted game, and continually
he preached to us a creed of being kind to animals. That spoiled,
of course, the fun I had thought would come from scaring
Mr. Hammond. He said and he was angry that at every
bend he had expected to see our mangled bodies far below him
on the canyon floor.

In July we went to Glenwood Springs to celebrate the Fourth.
Mr. Hammond had gone East and left young Jack in our care.
In Washington, Vin had taken lessons from a stage magician
and whenever he received a trifle of encouragement he would
give a show. This Fourth, however, it was Jack who gave the
show. Our shooting crackers had been shipped from China
pimento-colored cylinders that, Mother warned us, were full
of death. Each one had two uncertain fuses. We would light
them both from a piece of punk and then just before the fuses
sputtered out of sight we would hurl them in the air. Jack
Hammond held one too long. It went off in his hand. His thumb
hung loose and blood poured out. Though he tried to keep his
lips tight, he was pretty shrill before the doctor sewed that
limp thumb back to the hand where it belonged. (I have often
thought of that when I have read of some astonishing new in-
vention fashioned by that same hand: a thing to explode
torpedoes far out at sea, and many other war machines that
I can't understand.)

The White House debutante that winter was my mother's
guest sometimes. The first occasion I remember was the night
Madame Lillian Nordica sang at a Walsh musicale. I still wore
a pigtail down my back, a thing that seemed to pull my ego out
of shape as I looked at other girls whose hair was Up. That
night, what I wanted most of all to see was Alice. I tried hiding

85

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

under Mother's bed but there was not enough concealment, so
I got inside her closet and peeped out from behind an ambush
of velvet frocks, furs, and satin. Hearing Nordica was not
half so exciting as seeing Miss Roosevelt put powder on her
face and offer (actually) a cigarette to that brunette of mystery,
Countess Cassini, the Russian Ambassador's daughter. That
night the talked-about countess wore against her lovely throat
a gigantic bow of chiffon. What people said behind her back
about her birth was not too nice, and it was gossiped later
that the President had told his daughter (with a show of teeth)
that she was forbidden to accept the Russians' invitations.
When the musicale was over I went into our guest's bedroom to
see Nordica helped out of her clothes and eyed her as she
rubbed the red corrugations left on her hips by corsets. She
rarely wore them, so she said.

"Why, Evalyn," she said to me in answering some one of
my thousand questions, "I have not had a bath in thirty years."

I envied her and asked another question.

"My maid," she said, "always sponges me. I don't believe
that bathing in a tub is healthy. Those sort of baths take
strength a singer needs."

I do not agree with that and yet I really mean it when I say
I learned most of what has been helpful from such conversa-
tions from peeking or from bolder observations, rather than
from any of the schools to which I was sent. After the Mount
Vernon Seminary, I was enrolled at the Holton Arms very
small, very select. That's where I met Katherine Elkins.

Out at Ouray, my father had some plan afoot to deal with
the Belgians' king. Yet what now conies to light, by turning
over yellow papers and other souvenirs, was for long years
simply a mystery to my mother. The Camp Bird mine, she
would insist, should not be sold. She said she had a premonition.
I suppose I heard a thousand mild arguments about the
presence at our mine of John Hays Hammond, a wily fellow
representing London clients.

"Don't sell it, Tom. What can you buy that's half so safe
as a six-mile vein of gold right through your own land?" .

86

"DON'T SELL THE CAMP BIRD MINE!"

"But, Carrie Bell," my father would reply, "how could you
keep it going if I were gone? A regiment of mining men are not
so easily handled. Who is to make decisions when I am not
around? Whom can you trust?"

"Don't sell it, Tom," was her whole argument. This is a
kind of force that women have to help them get their way. Men
call it "nagging", even when it's partnership. In Father's case
there was a need of freedom; he lived, more than we realized,
by struggle. He wanted something more than ease, something
that his womenfolk knew not how to measure. King Leopold
had given him the vision of a partnership. In the Congo forest
there were copper, gold, and God knows what else to tempt a
miner. My father had engineers' reports to show those jungle
mines could be made into quick producers that would dwarf
what we were getting from the Camp Bird, provided he
applied to them the same hustling effort he had used in Colo-
rado.

"Why, Tom," my mother asked him once, "how do you
know this whole mad scheme is not a trick of that old king to
buy the Camp Bird cheap?"

My father laughed and went ahead with Hammond. They
made a deal for cash, plus ore, plus stock. It was fair enough,
no doubt; but my mother continued, always, to believe it
quite, quite foolish. As for me, I sometimes entertained another
notion; I halfway felt we had angered fate or God or something
not to be expressed in words.

Why, as I recall it, almost in the hour that the deal became
a verbal promise we got the telegram about Aunt Lucy. In her
shiny black victoria she and Monroe had been driving in
Kansas City. The top was down so that she could see and be
seen. The coachman had to get down to fasten a strap. She
stood, to hold the reins he tried to pass to her, when suddenly
the horses were frightened beyond control. Standing up, she
thought first of the little boy behind her; she pitched him out
so shrewdly that he landed on a patch of grass unhurt but dazed
from the suddenness of their plight. Then she jumped, her
long skirts tangling about her feet, and fell backward to the

87

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

street. Aunt Lucy was wearing a jeweled comb which was driven
deep into her skull. The message told us she was dead.

In that same year my father gave a library to the people of
Ouray. To David Wegg, his former partner, he had passed
along about a hundred thousand dollars for some project; but
just to show it was no money-making enterprise, for him, he
wrote it down as "profit & loss." In' other days Mr. Wegg had
done as much for him. Old scores were being settled.

To the day she died my mother insisted that Father had
been hypnotized by John Hays Hammond. Of course, that was
just her way of expressing something she could not fathom with
her mind. I know the price paid to my father and I know the
buyers got back eightfold what they paid. The price was
$3,100,000 and it was paid at noon, May 1, 1902, in the offices
of Guggenheimer, Untermyer and Marshall, at 30 Broad Street,
New York City. Beyond that sum he got a paper obligating the
Camp Bird Mining Company, Limited, to give him one-fourth
of all the net proceeds of its ore until he had, in cash, $2,000,000
more. Another sentence in the printed bargain that now lies
before me gave him $100,000 worth of stock. He got it all
$5,200,000 to add to the two or three or four other millions
he already had gouged out of his fantastic mountain. He had
that other money salted down, to use his phrase, in real estate
and bonds. But that was not all he had: right near the Camp
Bird vein there were other claims, old mines and prospects, that
he called the Hidden Treasure Group. The London crowd that
that had its offices in 43 Threadneedle Street took option on
that stuff, too, but that part of the deal fell through. For years
and years I've paid the taxes and had assessment work per-
formed. What I have out there in Colorado, so I think, really
is a hidden treasure that my sons can go and find some day just
as their grandfather did.

Charlie Thomas, my father's dear friend, was named in the
agreement, to represent him in any disputes, and John Hays
Hammond had a similar obligation for his foreign clients. There
were no disputes. Indeed, when it was discovered that the deed

88

"DON'T SELL THE CAMP BIRD MINE!"

did not include twenty miles of water pipe line and other water
power rights, my father simply told them all to fix it up, for
he had meant to sell the stuff. Tom Walsh was never one to
play smart tricks with ink. His word was his bond. I have no
notion here of "fixing blame" on anyone. I wish he had not sold,
and so did Mother, but the deal was made and it was legal.

When the ex-owner of the Camp Bird mine had planted his
too fluid capital in more real estate and bonds, he took us all
to Europe. There was something on his mind. He had plans he
never did confide to us; but in September we knew that he
was considering a business proposition made by King Leopold.
I only know what happened in my presence.

The King was staying at a place called Bagneres-de-Luchon,
in the Pyrenees.

"Would you like to go to see the King?"

Anybody knowing me knows what I said.

We traveled all night, and late the next day we came into
a place all rocky, purple steeps like the Colorado mountains that
were home to us. The King himself met us at the train. He was
incognito when he lived there. We dined that night with
Leopold in an apartment that was not so grand. What caught
my eye was the way he ate, pushing food into the red mouth
that gaped under an enormous nose in his vast white fabric of
beard.

Some birds were served. I think that in my memory they have
changed their mold. I remember them as quail, and I know I
could not eat mine with half a dozen bites; possibly they were
only larks. Anyway I saw the King impale one on his fork. He
caught my eyes and there is no doubt that I was rudely
staring. His monocle was tucked against his eye behind the
projection of his cheek and skull and through its convex glass
one half his gaze was magnified and while I watched he
popped a whole bird into his mouth. I could not take my eyes
away. He never chewed; he just swallowed once and passed a
napkin before his face. Then he chuckled and spoke again to
Father, whom he called "Tommy." (Father called him "Sir.")

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

There was a young aide-de-camp around, Lieutenant Binje,
who tried to be polite to me. There was not much I could do,
except to giggle.

I studied Leopold covertly. His big nose seemed to have a
mulberry tinge from drinking, I suppose. But there was
something else that kept me watching: the stiffness of his pose.
I had a notion the King wore corsets.

My father and he talked throughout the evening while I was
left to look at some old book of scenic pictures. Leopold was
urging Father to do something, and since they were talking of
business I hardly listened. The next day we went for a drive
and I sat beside the King in an open carriage while Father
faced us. I was puzzled about the King's fixed shape, and so
when we trotted toward a curve I leaned out a little as if to see
ahead. Then I let the turning seem to throw me off my balance.
I fell against the King so that my elbow poked him. I did not
touch his ribs! He was encased in something hard as iron. It
was no ordinary corset that he wore, but probably a special
bullet-proof garment.

The King gave Father his entire attention for three days.
Once when we were alone my father was in a rage.

"The way they handle things down there in the Congo "
he said. "I wouldn't touch it I"

Another day we drove over a historic road up the Valle de la
Pique, with the King acting as guide. He told how Romans,
then Moors, had used this same road to carry out their schemes
of conquest. Once he pointed to some projecting rocks far over-
head where no carriage could hope to go and said that he had
gone up there on foot clear from Luchon just a week or so be-
fore. Father whistled his astonishment "I hope when I am
sixty-seven I can do as good!"

When we got back from that trip Luchon was clothed with
flags and bunting red, black, and yellow in honor of the
King. French military bands were there, and I was excited
because then the King would have to rig himself in all his
glory; but, worse luck, we had to hustle to catch the boat for
home. Those two shook hands as cronies, but I knew some-

90

"DON'T SELL THE CAMP BIRD MINE!"

thing the King did not suspect: my father's mind was firmly set
against the Congo; and yet he liked the King and in his mind
there lingered a hope that they would get together, some way,
In a deal or two. More important, though, was the promise made
by Leopold to come to see us in America.

"Nineteen-three, sir?" father said, and Leopold answered,
"Right."

Officially the King was to come to see the St. Louis Ex-
position; but actually he wanted with his own eyes to see
Americans making money. I think, too, he had a notion that
by being nice and friendly he could start a stream of capital
flowing into his domain in Africa. My papa was not putting any
in; he told me that on the train by saying, "I'll keep my money
home where I can see it. Of course, I don't mind little flyers."

Nevertheless, he spent plenty building "2020." We've always
called it simply that, as if to compensate for its regal size and
splendor; and yet some of the neighbors 7 houses in Massachu-
setts Avenue and some in other streets in Washington were
just as big and cost, I suppose, as much. Indeed, a few had what
ours did not porticoes with great stone columns supporting
pediments as heavy as the one that overhangs the front porch
of the White House.

Sixty rooms are chambered in our Massachusetts Avenue
house between the roof and ground, and on the third floor (my
father spent $5,075 for elevators) there really was, and is, an
apartment for a king. The architect was Henry Anderson, well
known in 1902, and he was told by Father just what was
wanted. They selected curly birch for the trimming, and it was
done in Empire style. But, hell, I can't see anything more
elegant there than in the balance of the house. I won't deny
it: I love the place; for me, it really is a palace that expresses
dreams my father and mother had when they were poor in
Colorado. This should not give rise to any notion they were
sadly "nouveau", as that term is used to label people outside
of society trying to get in. We were in; make no mistake about
it. Everywhere, thanks to Father's charm and Mother's
modesty, they passed the tests; at Palm Beach and up at

91

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

Newport, in New York and Washington, there were no barriers
to make them fret. We found people really sweet and kind. I
think the reason is that the Walshes never tried to hide their
simple start. No matter how many, many years I live I'm not
the kind ever to forget that as a child I was kept warm in red
flannel underdrawers. But that's no reason for wearing them
now. Why, the sheets I sleep on are pink satin soft as some-
thing for a fairy princess and the lace around their edges is
woven out of (I fancy) spider frowns. I paid four thousand
dollars for them and got a bargain because, as any woman
knows, forgetful, restful sleep will take out wrinkles.

Green veins show in the smooth, round marble columns that
define the doorways of 2020. Inside, the great reception hall
has no roof until you lift your eyes four full stories to a richly
colored surface of stained glass. Why, that alone was grand
enough for me to feel, at sixteen, a prideful swelling in my
throat. A wide staircase, which led to a landing holding two
marble statues in dancing poses, divided as a Y so that two
staircases rose to the first of a series of promenade galleries.
The first-floor library was so rich with books that my book-
loving mother was appalled, knowing she never would be able
to read a tenth of them even if she did nothing else. The furni-
ture was dazzling, but it was appropriate. The point is that
Tom Walsh and Carrie Bell were smart enough to know their
limitations, which is something people long possessed of wealth
sometimes forget. My father had hired Mrs. Anna Jenness
Miller to scout around and help my mother buy just what was
needed for that house; it was a job that lasted several years.
She worked with mother and was so often in New York to deal
with decorators, art dealers, rug merchants and furniture
makers that she had an artist's studio as an office there. She
even went abroad to get some choicer paintings and the bric-a-
brac we needed. Rugs from Persia, pictures and aquarelles
from dealers in the Boulevard Poissonniere in Paris, from the
Avenue Louise in Brussels; sometimes her shipments came from
Montreux, Switzerland. How the money wentl

Ah, but you should have seen my suite of rooms the day I

92

"DON'T SELL THE CAMP BIRD MINE!"

first walked in and saw the perfectly beautiful, pink satin walls;
a huge sitting room, a bedroom, and a bathroom that I still
think enormous. And yet, the things we had been doing, our
travels, the houses of our friends, the rich hotels and other
contacts had done something. My perceptions of luxury were
no longer, at the start of 1903, the same quick avenues to my
emotions. Why, at the first sight of the canopy above my bed
in LeRoy and Phelps Place I had fairly screamed with ecstasy;
but when I saw my suite at 2020, I was sure it was nice but
I was not excited. I had everything I wanted almost as I wanted
It, so that getting new things was less and less exciting. Still,
I really loved the feel of fitting myself into the house. There
was my dresser, and on it a set of toilet things mirror, brush
and comb, glass jars, buttonhook, scissors, file; all heavy with
gold tops or gold handles. There was also a jewel box. In those
rooms against the walls, on my big Steinway, and on any
other furniture that would hold them were photographs
of Father, Mother, Vinson and some others we all loved.

Vinson was the center of things. Almost anything he wanted
he could have, and this is what he had in his room:

1 red rug, 2 small ones. 1 sterling silver ship,

1 heavy, carved bed couch, 5 red 1 alligator, stuffed.

pillows. 1 anchor clock.

1 cabinet with mirror. 1 Hindu bust.

1 book and gun case combined. 1 Indian head.

1 large center table with Navajo 1 Madonna and child.

blanket cover. 2 sets of armor.

1 Turkish cozy corner, 8 pillows. 1 shield.

1 bookcase full of books (I re- 7 pieces of old armor on the wall.

member "Harry Castleman", 1 silver man-on-horseback.

"Henty" and, what was surely 1 carved bellows.

excess baggage in that room, 1 bronze horse.

the works of Horatio Alger). 1 ivory elephant.

However, lots of Vinson's most treasured things were in the
top of the house. Of course, the very top was a roof garden;
but ou the fourth floor, besides the ballroom, there was a theater

93

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

where Brother could have his shows. By this time he could do
all kinds of tricks to fool an audience. With Monroe Lee (who
lived with us) to serve as his stooge and helper, Vinson would
escape, just like Houdini, from a chained-up sack; and then,
when the screen was pulled aside, some chosen spectators would
be permitted to open a padlocked trunk and inside, snug
but almost breathless from his hurry, would be my brother.
Dear Vinson had bought that trick, and others, complete with
all the gadgets from some queer dealer in such things. You
should have heard the loud clapping of Tom Walsh's hands
whenever Vinson did a card trick or lifted a live and squirming
rabbit from a hat. He loved that boy beyond my powers of
expression.

A note on stiff White House stationery, through the un-
importance of its message, brings alive now some of the feeling
with which my father was regarded in Washington. A hansom
cab driver, guiding tourists along Massachusetts Avenue, when
opposite the scaffolded house at 2020 is said to have lifted
the trap door in the cab roof to say (first shifting his brown
quid from tongue to cheek), "five million dollar home of the
Colorado Monte Cristo; the fellow that's a friend of kings."
Well, cab drivers are not the only ones who exaggerate five-
fold when money is referred to; actually that house, complete,
cost $835,000. But the legend of Father's wealth and power
grew.

What President Theodore Roosevelt wrote on October 28,
1902, was this: "When I was riding yesterday in the Park I
waved to you."

That letter came within a week of the death of Mother's
scapegrace brother, Stephen Reed, in Chicago. (I had forgotten,
until I found among my father's papers a receipted bill for
ninety dollars, plus fifteen dollars for a grave in Oakwood
from some West Madison Street undertaker.)

94

CHAPTER IX

It Is No Fun to Be a Lady

IT was about that time that I was shipped away, in Annie's
care, to the Misses Masters' School at Dobbs Ferry. The
record seems to indicate that I was there until just before the
last big party that the Walshes had at LeRoy and Phelps
Place.

Lovely Marion Cockrell was the guest of honor. She was to
be married a few days later, February 14, 1903, to Edson F.
Gallaudet, who just before this time had coached a winning
crew at Yale. The house at 2020 was not completed, and so after
the dinner party there was a musicale at the New Willard Hotel.

But first I ought to tell how I got there, from the Dobbs
Ferry School.

I knew what was expected of me there. By some school
magic, I was to become a lady; and a lady could do, so I was
told, just about nothing that she might want to do except attend
all parties. But there was more to make me sad. I really was
homesick. We four Father, Mother, Vin and I grew faint
with something like hunger when we were kept apart.

I cried so much in classes that one or two of the girls usually
carried, on my behalf, an extra handkerchief. It may sound
silly now, but it was not then. From the day Annie checked me
in I was completely wretched. I wrote and wrote, and finally
Father came to give me a Saturday of fun in New York. He
asked me what I wanted and I said "Jewels."

I suppose he figured I would feel better if I had some-
thing finer than the other girls at school. At any rate he took
me into a jewelry store and bought for me a turquoise-and-

95

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

where Brother could have his shows. By this time he could do
all kinds of tricks to fool an audience. With Monroe Lee (who
lived with us) to serve as his stooge and helper, Vinson would
escape, just like Houdini, from a chained-up sack; and then,
when the screen was pulled aside, some chosen spectators would
be permitted to open a padlocked trunk and inside, snug
but almost breathless from his hurry, would be my brother.
Dear Vinson had bought that trick, and others, complete with
all the gadgets from some queer dealer in such things. You
should have heard the loud clapping of Tom Walsh's hands
whenever Vinson did a card trick or lifted a live and squirming
rabbit from a hat. He loved that boy beyond my powers of
expression.

A note on stiff White House stationery, through the un-
importance of its message, brings alive now some of the feeling
with which my father was regarded in Washington. A hansom
cab driver, guiding tourists along Massachusetts Avenue, when
opposite the scaffolded house at 2020 is said to have lifted
the trap door in the cab roof to say (first shifting his brown
quid from tongue to cheek), "five million dollar home of the
Colorado Monte Cristo; the fellow that's a friend of kings."
Well, cab drivers are not the only ones who exaggerate five-
fold when money is referred to; actually that house, complete,
cost $835,000. But the legend of Father's wealth and power
grew.

What President Theodore Roosevelt wrote on October 28,
1902, was this: "When I was riding yesterday in the Park I
waved to you."

That letter came within a week of the death of Mother's
scapegrace brother, Stephen Reed, in Chicago. (I had forgotten,
until I found among my father's papers a receipted bill for
ninety dollars, plus fifteen dollars for a grave in Oakwood
from some West Madison Street undertaker.)

94

CHAPTER IX
It Is No Fun to Be a Lady

IT was about that time that I was shipped away, in Annie's
care, to the Misses Masters' School at Dobbs Ferry. The
record seems to indicate that I was there until just before the
last big party that the Walshes had at LeRoy and Phelps
Place.

Lovely Marion Cockrell was the guest of honor. She was to
be married a few days later, February 14, 1903, to Edson F.
Gallaudet, who just before this time had coached a winning
crew at Yale. The house at 2020 was not completed, and so after
the dinner party there was a musicale at the New Willard Hotel.

But first I ought to tell how I got there, from the Dobbs
Ferry School.

I knew what was expected of me there. By some school
magic, I was to become a lady; and a lady could do, so I was
told, just about nothing that she might want to do except attend
all parties. But there was more to make me sad. I really was
homesick. We four Father, Mother, Vin and I grew faint
with something like hunger when we were kept apart.

I cried so much in classes that one or two of the girls usually
carried, on my behalf, an extra handkerchief. It may sound
silly now, but it was not then. From the day Annie checked me
in I was completely wretched. I wrote and wrote, and finally
Father came to give me a Saturday of fun in New York. He
asked me what I wanted and I said " Jewels."

I suppose he figured I would feel better if I had some-
thing finer than the other girls at school. At any rate he took
me into a jewelry store and bought for me a turquoise-and-

95

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

seed-pearl dog collar. I had it on when I got back to school,
and two kinds of paint that I had succeeded in buying on the
sly were thick upon my cheeks and lips.

Miss Masters saw me from the porch as I returned late that
Saturday. She was stiff with rage as she beckoned me to stand
before her. What a talking-to she gave me! I was vulgar, I was
common. She ranted on, and I was quite subdued until she made
a disparaging remark about the turquoise-and-seed-pearl dog
collar that there and then became tight about my swelling
neck. My Irish was boiling over.

"My father gave me this," I said; and even now I think that
if she had possessed a speck of wit she would have been, just
then, a whole lot nicer.

But what she said was, "You disgrace this school."

I called my brother Vinson on the phone and we talked hog
Latin. (I never learned the other kind.) We two always spoke
in code. I asked him to fix it up with Father to send me per-
mission to see a New York dentist and for Vin to meet me on
the following Saturday at the Waldorf.

We met there, and when I got home to Washington I asked
little Annie to go to Dobbs Ferry and get my clothes. I broke
the news to Father in such a manner as to make him burst out
laughing, and so postponed the reckoning. Of course they did
not like my leaving school that way, but I never did go back to
an American school.

" At any rate, I was present at the musicale for Miss Cockrell.
That night there was an Army and Navy reception at the
White House, from nine to ten-thirty, and Mother's invitations,
shrewdly, read "10:30." Consequently her entertainment was
thronged with uniforms.

Marian's wedding at the Church of the Covenant was the
most brilliant of the winter season. The bridesmaids wore
white crepe de Chine tucked and trimmed with medallions of
lace over vaguely seen silk slips of green. Their picture hats of
white chiffon were shaped to their heads by half -wreaths of
green leaves; they carried, quite demurely, shower bouquets

96

IT IS NO FUN TO BE A LADY

of bride roses, leaning forward as they walked because of the
corset lacings that had shaped them like creatures of another
species. I heard the ohs and ahs at the passage down the aisle
of little Anna Ewing Cockrell, 2d, the flower girl, aged three
or four.

How unimportant to recall? Not so. The yearnings to be
seen and heard, which I felt in my adolescence, were ten times
more bedeviling than anything else that gave me irk.

My purpose is to show what made me tick, what made me
act so harum-scarum.

Once, in Denver at Elitch's Gardens, I got myself arrested
along with Vin and some of the children of Governor Thomas.
I have forgotten when, but I was pretty big. We broke some
lights and pulled down signs while riding on the roller coaster
(I still ride the things, in summers, hour after hour), and I
suppose a licking would have been in order. However, an
enormous policeman came and grabbed the Thomas boys and
Vin. Edith, who had shown no trace of fault, was ashamed
and frightened; but I told the policeman who we were.

"You'll be a treat/' he said, "for our old lockup."

A crowd had gathered and I begged permission to call up
Governor Thomas. (I cannot remember whether he was still
in office, but he was certainly an influential citizen.)

"I am sorry," I tactfully began, as Edith whimpered, "but
we are all arrested."

What he said was so harsh it made the earpiece vibrate! "I
should have known better," he roared, "than to let my children
go romping with you two wild ones." Then he spoke to the
policeman, and we were held in a shamefaced cluster until the
Governor appeared and took us home.

My next scrape was not my fault, but rather that of chance
unless it might be blamed upon my fatal addiction to roller
coaster rides and other artificial thrills. The French Ambas-
sador and Madame Jusserand, who was by then attached to
Mother, had taken a house that summer (1903) at Man-
chester, Massachusetts. So Father leased the G. H. Hood
estate. . , .

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

I had forgotten. What brings it back so clearly now is a let-
ter on blue notepaper, written later by a man who worked for
us an Edward Burke. He wrote politely, giving information
about some disgruntled servant to Miss Annie Lee McDonald,
who had inquired about the matter. He wrote:

. . . and also I see Eddie get his month's wages at two different
times. Once when Mr. Walsh was away Miss Evelyn [sic] paid the
three of us she brought the money down just at tea time. Ameal
[Indeed, he means Emile] and myself were standing in the dining
room and gave Eddie the three envelopes and when Ameal and
my-self came out he gave us our envelopes. I think Mr. Walsh was
in New York that time . . .

Oh, I know it is quite, quite unimportant, and yet that
letter written as a kindness is now a potent charm evoking
from a pinpoint of my memory whole scenes a house, an
ocean, parts of a summer of my past. I never saw that letter
until I began to rummage; but, with a mind-magic I wish I
understood, through a forgotten servant's eyes I am enabled to
feel, again, myself: Miss Evalyn Walsh, a girl who really had
no sorrows, just half-mad yearnings to know the world and
all that's in it.

Why, after thirty years and more that dining room is freshly
printed in my mind. There was a fourfold Japanese screen
with bamboo panels decorated with some Oriental whimsy.
There was an oblong, white enamel table with turned and
ornamental legs; a bronze gong and hammer; a lantern with
assorted colored glasses; eight leather-seated chairs with
mahogany and birch frames, and a Smyrna carpet on the
floor.

A fine Bokhara made the front hall a soft purple and the
parlor floor was covered with a Persian Feraghan. There was
a Japanese bronze cylinder vase with a raised design con-
trived from the writhing struggle of a snake held in the knife-
like beak of a big bird. We had a billiard room upstairs. All
that household was in the charge of dear Annie, who had be-

98

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IT IS NO FUN TO BE A LADY

come our housekeeper and much more: she dealt with all our
household problems. Hers was a post of dignity; she had be-
come "Miss Annie", who traced lost trunks, rebuked the
butler, from habit scanned my ears, and daily warned Vin to
take it slower in his Winton.

There was a launch that Vinson ran, here my memory
slips a trifle, and once we started out in the evening to cross
some bay to a small amusement park. Nanine Mitchell was
with us, and other youngsters. The launch broke down and
we were stranded. Our several families, half-crazed by cat-
astrophic visions more vivid than opium nightmares, were
gathered on the porch when we came home. As usual, they
blamed me.

In the fall we moved into 2020. During the December holi-
days, the Walshes gave a small ball there in honor of Miss
Alice Roosevelt. For many years we have been about together,
but on that night I was just another Carmen quite willing to
pull her hair or fight with other weapons. I was furious because
I was not allowed to go to the party. Why? I was too young
seventeen.

Most of the company that night saw for the first time the
large, Louis XIV salon on the first floor. The dancing began at
eleven in the top-floor ballroom, with its walls all yellow with
brocade, with yellow hangings and yellow fabrics covering all
the benches and chairs around the room. It was one o'clock
when the cotillon began, led by Major Charles McCawley, of
the Marine Corps, and Alice. Sixty couples passed the tables
where favors had been piled: gold pencils for the men, lace
and tortoiseshell fans for the ladies.

I got a fan, anyway.

I had forgotten why my family let me go abroad without
them until I rummaged in my father's files. (All of us forget
much more than we remember, and that's a blessing.) The
fact is that we had all expected to go abroad in June, 1904,
and then our arrangements were canceled at the last moment

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

because President Theodore Roosevelt made a request of
Father almost a command, it was to remain and use his
influence to settle the disturbed condition of Colorado. (This
was the year Roosevelt ran for election to the office he was
holding by virtue of McKinley's assassination,)

Thanks to that, we had a summer in a place in Colorado
that I described to Dad as "the littlest hole I ever got into in
my life; there are a few cows with bells around their necks 7 a
very few old people, and all the rest is mountains." (There
is nothing I would add to that now; the description was com-
plete.)

Tom Walsh himself soon hustled out of Colorado. The ex-
owner of the Camp Bird mine responded to another gold
alarm. With blanket rolls, prospectors' short-handled picks,
canvas saddlebags and other apparatus of his early days, he
and John Benson joined the rush. The place they went to was
Goldfield and Father almost lost his life.

"I guess I've turned into a tenderfoot," he said when finally
he came back to us. The rough camp grub had made him ill,
and one ear had lost the power of hearing. An ear specialist
stretched him on his side, looked in his ear, then fished
around and brought forth a small beetle that had used his ear
for a mausoleum. (He had been sleeping on the ground while
hunting claims to stake in Nevada.)

"I found worse than beetles," he told us. "While others
searched the valleys and stream beds, John Benson and I, re-
membering the Camp Bird's altitude, went higher and higher.
One day we found a tunnel some abandoned pit mouth of
another fellow's hopes. It had been driven into bare rock face
above a place all overgrown with mountain laurel, or something
very like it, just coming into bloom with little pink-striped
flowers. After what I found in an old abandoned tunnel here
in Colorado, I couldn't resist what seemed to be another invi-
tation to find a vein of gold. On hands and knees I crept into
that hole, which had by fallen rock and rubble been narrowed
to little more than twice my size. I pushed ahead of me a stub

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IT IS NO FUN TO BE A LADY

of lighted candle, kneeling on a slab of rock. I had just room
enough In there to swing my little pick, and I was swinging it
when I heard a buzz. Under that rock on which I rested was
a rattlesnake. I froze, as I have done before when warned by
that crisp, scaly flutter. Right then and there, on a level with
my ear, I swear a hundred other snakes began to buzz. They
were massed in writhing hydra form upon a ledge made by the
last blast of giant powder fired in that tunnel long years before.
Their roost was not the length of my arm from me. They have
a stench, those snakes. I smelled it then, and backed out faster
than I usually go forward, and I was sweating as I yelled for
John to take care because we were prospecting a den of rat-
tlers. That place into which I'd crawled had become the
breeding ground where the young are born and to which the
snakes come back year after year, from the valleys where
they hunt all summer, to lie dormant through the cold months.

"What did I do? Well, since then IVe been having trouble"
he grinned and slapped his stomach "here."

He grinned, but he was solemn as he promised us, and cer-
tain saints, that he would not again go prospecting for gold
or any other ore. Throughout the balance of that summer he
spent much time in Colorado, taking old friends by their lapels
as he talked to them of his friend T.R.

My education was still a pressing problem. Something of the
talk and the pressure that was exerted to make me settle down
to study comes back to me as I hold a sheet of paper made
electric with a charge of love by one for whom I have been
lonesome now for thirty years my brother Vinson. While
we were in Colorado he had spent part of the summer in New
York getting treatments for some puzzling malady that broke
out on his skin. To keep him less homesick Dad fixed it up
for him to take some boxing lessons from Tom Sharkey. He
had bought some clothes, that sixteen-year-old, from Wetzel's,
and then Mother and I had gone with him to Pottstown, where
he entered The Hill School. He wrote from there:

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

Dear old Sis,

You can't know how fierce it was to let you and Sweetness [that
was Mother] go the other day but I suppose it's right that I should be
here although it does seem awful hard. I have been feeling too bad
to write cheerful news so I haven't written before.

Now, old girl, you are going to have lots of temptations in Paris
but you are old enough now [I was eighteen] to know what's right
so don't give way to them. Remember, this is your last chance so
take it and work like ". . . ." and when I come over we will make
the "fur fly." If you are ever in doubt remember that you can always
write to me. I don't want you to become a great literary scholar but
I do want you to know as much as the people you will have to go
with. Well, darling sis, I will say good-night.

Your chum

VlN

My "chance" that Vin wrote about was an agreement
reached in our family for me to go to Paris to study music,
French and other parlor tricks of ladies. Flora Wilson, want-
ing further training for her voice, was enchanted by the offer
of my father to send the two of us abroad. Motherless, she had
for eight years held the rank of cabinet lady; and, as she was
older, self-governed, and restrained, the family felt she was
just the one to be my companion. But that was not the only
precaution by any means. We two were to be chaperoned and
counseled by Miss Fanny Reed, a notable of Paris. She was
the sister of Mrs. Paran Stevens of New York, and she was
also the aunt of Lady Paget, King Edward's friend.

What brings that back is a fading London letter to my father
from "35 Belgrave Square, S.W.", signed "N. Torlks" the
secretary of Minnie Paget. Something terrible had befallen
her; her right kneecap was smashed, her thigh doubly frac-
tured, her ankle broken, besides many cuts and bruises. She
had to lie flat on her back, it seems, for three months, in
plaster casts; but she had told her secretary to write my father
that she had heard there was a chance his daughter would be
coming over to stay with Aunt Fanny to learn French; how
nice it would be, she much hoped it was true.

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IT IS NO FUN TO BE A LADY

But now I've lost track of stating what it was I did that
winter, in my concern over that accident to Minnie Paget The
answer is given in another letter, sent by Aunt Fanny Reed
from 187, rue de la Pompe, Paris, to my father:

Your letter of July 20 was received just as I was leaving for Paris
as I had been to Carlsbad for a cure it almost took my breath away
to think your dear Evalyn & Miss Wilson were to be here for the
winter. I will look about at once for an apartment & if I cannot find
something as satisfactory as they wish, perhaps they would come to
me. I have in my wing two very good bedrooms, dressing rooms,
bath, etc., & I could perhaps find a room for Annie in the house. Of
course you have heard of Mrs. Paget's terrible accident, falling down
her lift to the basement. I am so sorry for her. Will you please send
me by the ladies a box of pecan nuts such as Huyler's prepares
not too salt I shall be very grateful.

Affec.

FANNY REED

Oh, I did love my father and mother, and never meant to
give them the slightest pang of worry on my account. The note
I wrote that September night of 1904 as the 5.5. Deutschland
got out to sea Is proof of what I say:

Darling beloved pets,

Here we are safe and sound in our little bed and very comfortable.
I have the big lower berth and Flora has the one opposite it. The
state rooms are so nice and how can I ever thank you enough for
those beautiful flowers! ! !

The steward says the fruit is aboard but I haven't seen it yet.
Now my own darling pets don't you worry about me at all. I am not
going to meet a soul [as I wrote I meant it, positively] and we are
going to stay in bed half the day and go to bed early at nights.
You were perfect bricks tonight and if you hadn't been so perfect
I never could have gone. I know now what it means to see two people
absolutely unselfish. You dear things, if I don't just work hard and
repay you both for the brave fight you are making. But don't for-
get your promise to send for me if you are lonesome at the end of
the month. I haven't cried once. Now my darlings goodnight Flora

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

looks so tired and I must put the light out. I won't forget the prom-
ise I gave you and Oh! please don't miss me too much. I will send you
a telegram Friday with billions of love and kisses from your very own
loving little girl,

EVALYN

P.S. I can't tell you how much I love you both, but you know! ! 1
P.S. Give my love to Nannie and Brother and remember me to

dear old Maggie. [That was Maggie Buggy, a servant. At least I have

hung on to her.]

My life has been just like that letter; my love something to
be freely spent, my feelings sounding off with exclamation
points and underscorings.

The 5.5. Deutschland created in my mind a quite uncomplex
notion of the freedom of the seas. For just about the first time
in my life I was free to act grown-up. There wasn't anyone
around to say "Please don't" or nag me with a plea to "be a
lady." Of course, Annie was aboard, but she was such a rotten
sailor she stayed in her berth right through to Cherbourg. I
had a $10,000 letter of credit, a present from my father, and
for the control of my expenditures I had about ten cents'
worth of judgment. Flora and I soon knew all the men on
the boat and spent most of our time in the smoking room. Two
I met that trip were William Gibbs McAdoo and his brother,
who was a fascinating devil. That was the year McAdoo had
completed the first tunnel under the Hudson River.

At Paris I went straight to Fanny Reed's apartment. Any-
one could see that once she had been distractingly beautiful.
Then she had become a grande dame with snow-white hair,
finely sculptured features, and purple eyes.

"Now, Aunt Fanny," I began, "I don't think these two
rooms will be enough. If I'm to study I must have space to pace
the floor."

Aunt Fanny nodded, and compromised by letting me take
an apartment two floors higher in that dwelling at 187 rue
de la Pompe.

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IT IS NO FUN TO BE A LADY

"I'm going to have the McAdoo brothers for dinner Satur-
day night, Aunt Fanny," I told her when I was settled.

She blinked, and then she said, "They can come, but 111 be
here too."

The next thing I did was to hire an electric brougham, the
prettiest I could get; and when I told Aunt Fanny I was
taking Mr. McAdoo, the tunnel builder, for a ride In the Bois
she smiled and said, "That's right: Mr. McAdoo and Annie."

Well, it was time for me to take my first singing lesson.
Aunt Fanny dressed herself beautifully and we set out for
the atelier of some Frenchman who, she carefully warned me,
was most particular to teach only students with aptitude. He
proved to be porcinely fat, and the dome of his skull shone
pinkly as if it had been buffed by an ardent manicurist. He
wore a morning coat, striped trousers, and fawn spats. He
bowed himself in half, and then took his seat before a piano
as he gave me instructions to run a scale or two. I know I
have a horrid voice, and singing lessons were not on my secret
schedule. I sang the most stridulous do, re, mi, fa sol, la that
Frenchman ever hesfrd. I know I must have hurt him as a dog
is hurt when high notes make it howl. He jumped right off
the floor, clicked his heels, and clapped his brow.

"My God," he cried. "My God! Stop!" When I was quiet
he addressed himself to Fanny Reed, beginning with restraint
but becoming louder and louder, at the same time gesturing me
away.

"Precisely what," I asked Aunt Fanny, "does he say?"

She laughed. "He says he would not try to teach you singing
for all the gold in America."

"You see, Aunt Fanny, I've got no voice so that leaves
me free to-day to do a little shopping."

I went to Georges, a hairdresser, but the man, extending his *
fingers placatively refused to carry out my order.

"Mam'selle," he said, "I can't do theese without a border
from ze papa."

What I wanted him to do was to change my hair from

105

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

black to red. When he refused I bought, elsewhere, a bottle
of hair dye; and that night in my own room I made myself a
blonde probably the most grotesque that was ever seen in
Paris. I used too much of the chemical. When I woke up, my
hair was red in places. But it was likewise green and yellow.
I went back to Georges, and when I was unswathed from the
veils in which Flora and Annie had wrapped me, I said, "Now
will you fix me up?" He clucked and smote his hands and
summoned, one after another, all his assistants.

When I left the place that afternoon I was a coppery red-
head. Aunt Fanny howled in despair when she saw me.

The next day I went to Worth's and bought the prettiest
clothes that I could buy. I stocked up with black lace under-
wear, listening stonily while Aunt Fanny Reed tried to explain
that the things I wore were much much too Then she would
run out of words and finish up by saying she thought I ought
to wear costumes more appropriate for one of my age. Dear
Flora was completely horrified at the extravagance of my be-
havior.

However, one Western girl gone maverick was not too much
for Fanny Reed. She understood just why I did the things that
were upsetting and tried to guide my taste and keep me in the
company of some who might stimulate my ambitions. One of
these was Mary Garden. Aunt Fanny had her come one night
for dinner; she was there when word was brought that the
star who was to sing "Louise" was ill. Mary was the under-
study. All of us went to the opera immediately, and I thrilled
in sympathy when I saw the whole house rise to its feet to
acclaim as a new star artist the American Mary Garden.

I was supposed to spend my days in Paris right under the
cultured thumb of Fanny Reed, and so was Flora. Flora took
her singing seriously and chattered faithfully in French with
those who could improve her accent, but where I improved the
most was in my skill at getting Aunt Fanny to go places. (I
used to tell her I was getting too much sleep for my own good.)
Gradually she began to like the things I liked. Then Flora
proved to be the real chaperone. She was not getting sleep

106

IT IS NO PUN TO BE A LADY

enough, trying to keep a faithful eye on me, and what with
this and that she and Fanny sassed each other quite frequently.

T. Bentley Mott came to call, and Annie would not let him
past the door. "No men allowed" was her creed where I was
concerned. However, I did get out; and naturally I went to
places where I encountered plenty of Americans. One I saw was
Frank Munsey. He was so anxious to hear whether I was en-
joying Paris that I told him just how grand a time I was
having. I don't remember when he sailed, but just before
Christmas I got a cablegram from Father telling me to come
home at once. I cabled back that I was learning so much I did
not want to leave until spring. But I had a hunch, and hustled
around from shop to shop buying things I thought I'd need:
a sable coat, muff, and scarf, some stunning dresses, and other
things, until there was very little money left. Father's second
cable came just then: "STOPPED YOUR LETTER OF CREDIT SEND-
ING MRS. WICKERSHAM." She was the wife of Father's secre-
tary and she, I knew, was coming for me just like a sheriff.

"Do you," I asked dear Aunt Fanny, "think my family will
find me much improved?"

"My dear," she temporized, "I think they'll find you vastly
changed. I trust your father is partial to red hair."

I had completely forgotten that, and whistled. However, I
cheered myself up by trying on one of my gowns, of yellow
velvet, with real lace down the front and diamond stars ; it was
one of the nicest ones I'd bought. It matched something else
I'd bought before Dad clamped down on my credit. That was
a yellow Fiat.

Mrs. Wickersham, when she arrived and took me into cus-
tody, had arranged that my punishment should begin on the
voyage. My good time, she said, was over. Instead of giving
me a de luxe cabin, my father had engaged for me a tiny state-
room down below. However, it was passage on the S.S. Deutsch-
land. I felt powerless, because I had no money and Mrs.
Wickersham was as fixed as concrete in her idea that I should
travel modestly. She had orders, so she said. Well, who should
appear but a smart-looking ship's officer; he said Captain

107

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

Kemp wished to see me. You should have seen me racing to
his quarters.

"Go right to your old room on deck," he said with twinkles
in his eyes. "If your father wants to punish you he ought to use
a switch and not make all aboard my ship suffer for your sins.
Anyway, it's all O.K., because there'll be no extra charge."

Poor Mrs. Wickersham was sick within the hour and did
not have the stomach to insist upon the bargain she had made
with Father; instead, she went right into Flora's old bed and
I proceeded out on deck to show off some of my clothes. A
fellow passenger was an old friend, Susan Preston Draper,
whose husband, the General, had been Ambassador to Italy.
A December passage of the North Atlantic is not the smooth-
est voyage one can take. Poor Mrs. Wickersham looked like
Gorgonzola, and would not even notice when I started out on
deck, a redhead in a yellow coat. I was the only woman who
was well and I had, be sure of it, the grandest time I'd ever had.

Two men who had been sent by Father came aboard the
boat at Quarantine, and one of them handed me a note in
which he warned me to declare anything I'd bought abroad.
I only had about eight trunks by then. I wrote down some of
the things on that confusing declaration, but there were so
many good-byes to say, so many addresses to record, that I
was not too careful. We were not supposed to dock until
morning, but the ship was sheathed in ice and the trip had
been so rough that it was decided to let us off at night. There
was no one there to meet me. I just left my trunks and went
straight off to the Waldorf, and there all of my family who
had come to meet me were in bed Father, Monroe Lee, and
Uncle Sam. I woke them up but tried to keep from getting
into the light. They kissed me in semidarkness, but Father
wanted hungrily to see his daughter. Suddenly he whooped
at me: "What's happened to your hair? Great God! It's red!"

I explained just how it happened that I had come home a
blonde, and Father scolded and then he laughed, and then
he scolded more. But Uncle Sam, in striped pink pajamas,
dropped down on the hotel room floor and shrieked and yelled

108

IT IS NO FUN TO BE A LADY

and laughed just as if he'd been in some old railroad construc-
tion camp. I must say I was relieved.

Next day the phone rang. Mr, Thomas Walsh was wanted
at the Customhouse.

"Are you sure, Evalyn," he said, "that you declared every-
thing?"

"I declared a lot," I said, "considering how little I brought
in."

When he had gone I began to feel a foggy scare creeping
up from the pit of my stomach, and I told Annie that she and
I were going for a long, long drive. We had lunch out in a park
somewhere, but in the late afternoon I knew I simply had to go
back and face the music. I walked into a room of silent men;
not even Uncle Sam was laughing then. Finally Father
spoke:

"I understood you to say you had declared everything. You
must have overlooked a few things. I've just had to pay one
thousand, four hundred and seventy-four dollars duty for you,
young lady. If it had been anybody else I think they would
have sent you off to a cell."

"What did you tell 'em, Tom?" asked Uncle Sam.

"I said," replied my father, "that my eldest child, my
daughter Evalyn, did not have good sense; that she was just
a little " and then he tapped his head.

Uncle Sam and Monroe had come East to spend Christmas
with us. But Mother almost ruined it for me by confiscating all
my Paris dresses. They were too old for me, she said, and was
not moved by any of my arguments. I cried a lot. Then sud-
denly I remembered something.

"Papa," I inquired, "why did you cable me when you did,
that first time?"

"Ill tell you," he said. "I met Frank Munsey, and he said,
4 I see your daughter Evalyn is having a grand time in Paris. 5
Then I said, ( Oh, no, she's not. She is studying French, music
a lot of things. 7 And he said, Whenever I saw her she was
riding in a yellow Fiat that only touched the high spots or
else I'd meet her roaming around at night with Fanny Reed.' "

109

CHAPTER X
More about Gold-Seekers

THE Walshes were not entertaining that winter. Our big new
house at 2020, staffed with twenty-three servants, could not be
used as had been intended, because my father's brother had
died in Denver, from dropsy of the liver.

Just see: I had not thought of Uncle Mike in years yet,
if Uncle Mike had not gone West to be an Indian fighter, my
father might have stayed in Worcester, or even Ireland, and
so might never have met my mother. And now, by dying,
Michael was to change further the current of our life.

Just before New Year's, 1905, my father wrote to John
Benson:

We are going back with Evalyn, leaving on the Deutschland
January 7, via the Mediterranean route. We feel it would cause
unfavorable comment if we should entertain this winter and that we
cannot be better engaged than looking after Evalyn's education.

That's how it happened that I met the Pope; likewise those
two Vinson always called "the Dago princes."

There was (and I should say it here) another reason why
my parents wanted me in Europe: they were afraid Fd marry
Ned McLean. His mother had been sweet and kind to my
mother, and his father was always full of hearty greetings for
my dad; but Ned, my family felt, was too completely spoiled
to make a husband for their darling. Anything or anyone, that
is, was better for me, so my parents thought, than young
McLean.

In Rome, that January, T. Bentley Mott showed up; and

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so did other friends we had made in Paris during the Exposi-
tion. And then I met this prince, Altieri. In Rome, indeed all
over Europe, I was spoken of habitually as "the Walsh
heiress", and on the Continent that is a kind of sugar bound
to attract some flies. My father's money was a legend that
grew fabulous in repeated telling. He was a liberal spender,
and tipped so freely that the frantic service (and servility) of
maitre d'hotels was furthering, each day, the opinion that the
Walsh millions were unnumbered. However, what Altieri liked
about me, so he always told me, was my eyes, my hair, my
charm, my verve, my Oh, you should have heard him, and
I admit I liked it.

I remember well the night I met him. We were living in
the Palace Hotel, and there was a dance downstairs in the
ballroom. I put on a gown of pale blue tulle and then, forbidden
to use rouge by Mother, got red for my cheeks and lips by
licking the cover of a Baedeker. Foolish? Not a bit! That little
trick put armor on my soul, and let me go out to conquer.

I was seated in the lobby, undated, when my father came
along bringing with him a small man with patent-leather-black
for hair and skin as pale as if he'd been laid out in death. My
father introduced us. This gentleman, who spoke beautiful
English, was Prince Colonna, grandson of Mrs. John W.
Mackay. The Prince's father, Ferdinand, had married the
Mackay daughter after she, too, had gone to Europe to spend
gold that came from her father's mine. Of course that was a
romantic start for an evening but it was just a start.

I began waltzing with this black-haired prince whose
smoldering eyes were barely on a level with my own. A dozen
violins, a harp, and cellos were playing "The Beautiful Blue
Danube", and as they stopped and we did too a slender, blond
man, very tall, approached and spoke a burst of Italian words
to Prince Colonna. Scowling just a little, Colonna introduced
us. This stranger with the figure and the features of a matinee
idol was Prince Altieri, and he quickly asked me for a dance.
That was how it all began.

I told him he ought to learn to speak some English. He spoke

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

enough, it turned out, to ask my father if he might call. He
called twice before he said he would like to have us meet his
mother. She came for luncheon, simply dressed in black with
real lace cuffs and collar.

At that time I began each day by opening up an enormous
box of fragrant flowers that came from Altieri.

His mother invited us to dinner at their palace. Suite after
suite was closed and dusty and other parts of the great struc-
ture were rented out; but what the Prince and his mother still
inhabited was something to make you gasp with pleasure.
There was one intoxicating room with double walls of marble.
The whole place was made to glow by hidden lights as soft as
if their power plant was made of fireflies. The translucence of
that room was as deeply stirring as a moonlight night; its
furnishings were old. Right in there, with my parents and his
mother looking on, Prince Altieri revealed to me the eight or
ten new words of crippled English that he had captured that
day.

There were more flowers, and entertainments in my honor
until there was not a Roman unaware of Altieri's plan to
make me a princess.

One day Prince Altieri led me up to the gates of the
Vatican gardens. There could not be many who had keys to
open up those gates, but he had one. I was impressed all
right, and then as he bowed me in he said, quite prettily, that
Eve had now come back to Eden.

But really, Altieri had me miscast; not Eve was with him
there in Rome but little Eva, hunting heaven high and low. . . .

And that recalls to me just how I felt the day I met the
Pope. Yet what I felt was nothing to compare with the way
my apostate father felt. Mother had, by then, moved from
New Thought into Christian Science. My father, so I under-
stand, had gone as far as one may go in Freemasonry. I, of
course, am just a heathen.

I had been told to dress in black and not show flesh from
toe to chin. I wore black gloves, and over my head was thrown
a black lace veil. That all was fine, because I loved black.

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I much admired the Swiss guards whose sentry posts we
crossed as we walked into the Vatican; but they shrank
to nothing when we stood before a certain man who ranked
high in the Roman Catholic Church. My recollection is a blend
of the man himself and a portrait I once saw of Edwin Booth
dressed up in scarlet and ermine as Richelieu; but I am quite
certain he was beautiful glossy black hair and liquid brown
eyes. The man was Cardinal Merry del Val. Around his neck
was hung a chain of heavy gold, helped by precious stones to
support the cross of gold upon his breast. I was absolutely
breathless. The voice with which he traded kindly words with
Father was richly cultured. I looked at him, and thought to
myself it was high time I turned Catholic.

An usher in a sombre suit of plain black satin led us down
a long corridor, and presently we were in an ordinary room,
where stood a man quite thin and wraithlike. ... He was as
simple as the Cardinal was grand. This was Pope Pius. His
robe and cape were white, and his gold cross was rather small,
as if he might have had it throughout his priesthood. I knelt as
I had been told to do, and tried to kiss the big ring on his
finger but found that it was being made to evade my lips.
It was the same with Mother. My father though, was allowed'
to kiss the ring. Through an interpreter we conversed of our
stay in Rome. When we were leaving, the Pope gave his hand
to Father, who swiftly dropped to his knees and received a
blessing. But Mother and I were not so lucky. The Pope just
shook our hands and withheld the gesture that had been such
a comfort to my father. (He talked about it afterward, for
days. He was tethered to the Church by bonds fixed on him in
his childhood.)

I won't pretend I did not like the talk about my supposed
romance. There was a fancy dress affair one night at some old
palace. Mrs. Craig Biddle of Philadelphia was there, and I
found her raillery about the Prince quite satisfying to my ego.
She wore her hair back in a great big knot and for all her
plumpness she was pretty. Craig Biddle was a man to make

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

one see that all the foreign glitter of an Altieri would surely
leave one lonesome and unhappy in the end. Biddle was hand-
some, and he was American. Two or three things brought me
to my senses, but in Rome the case of Altieri and Miss Walsh
continued to be meat for gossip.

Waldo Story gave some marvelous parties in a fascinating
studio, and pushed against the walls were the stone and
plaster heads and bodies that he had sculptured there. He him-
self was rated "fast" in Rome, but what he said to me was:
"Evalyn, don't you be rushed off your feet by titled glamour.
You are too damned nice. Think about it twice."

That day a letter had arrived from Brother Vin, addressed to
Mother. She read this aloud.

Don't let Sis have anything to do with the prince. I am afraid
from your letters that you have been blinded by the thought of a
title and are thinking about the high position it would give you
rather than of sister's happiness and if you have not yet influenced
her one way or the other start right in and get the idea of marrying
that dago right out of tier head. I am so glad darling papa is getting
better and tell him that I am trying every way to build myself into a
strong man so I can help Mm later on.

I told old Waldo Story about Vin's letter and some of my
other thoughts upon the subject of international marriage.

"Not for me,' 7 I said. "I've seen too many half-frightened
women over here who used to be Americans."

"You are right/' said Story.

"However," I went on, "I've got a plan to get from Father
an automobile that I want right now a lot more than I want
any man to be my husband. Actually, I am dying for a
Mercedes."

A few nights later Father was giving a great big dinner
and everybody supposed this was to be the occasion of an
announcement. The Prince's mother was there, seated at the
right of Father. She wore an Altieri heirloom. It was a neck-
lace of diamonds as large as hickory nuts, but those were
merely satellites of the orb that hung below the cleft of her

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bosom. That stone was as large as a golf ball. The jewels
needed scrubbing, and thinking how I'd like to wear them,
cleaned, I almost wavered. However, I just winked at Father
for we had had a talk.

It had taken place that afternoon, while he was standing
at a window of our suite looking into the street through
which flowed the old, old river of Roman life. There were, as
usual, swarms of loathsome, ragged beggars; plumed and
booted officers were strutting in that throng, and now and
then he saw a pimpled conscript; there were women with
baskets balanced on their heads, their figures showing them to
be enceinte; there were priests.

When Father spoke he said: "See how cruelly these people
load their donkeys."

A minute later he asked the question that was in his mind,
putting it to me point blank: "Daughter, are you going to
marry this prince?"

I knew he did not want me to, and just to tease I asked,
"How much money does he want?"

Father said, "He hasn't asked for any yet."

(Mother was not in on this at all. I never did confide in
Mother.)

"Look here," said Father, as if suddenly determined to wind
the matter up. "There is going to be a lot of pressure put upon
me! Didn't Fanny Reed take money for helping on the wed-
ding of Anna Gould with Count Boni de Castellane? I'd spend
a million twice a day to buy happiness, but I just can't be-
lieve you'd get it. What do you say?"

Poor Father! He was weighing in his mind the relative dis-
advantages of an Italian prince in search of dowry and Ned
McLean.

"I'll tell you what, my papa," I said. "I'd rather have a
red Mercedes any day than Altieri. If you will telegraph to
Livy Beeckman up in Paris he'll buy and ship the car for

us."

R. Livingston Beeckman had become one of our friends.
Afterward he was Governor of Rhode Island; then, he was a

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

charming companion who made all acts of living part of his
fine art.

"Sure you don't want this prince?" persisted Father.

"Cross my heart! I'd far rather have the car. And we can
start right off for Venice."

"It's a go," said Father.

We left, as I recall it, a few days after the dinner, and I
avoided any farewell with Altieri. I had no intention of keep-
ing that affair aboiling as Katherine Elkins later did with the
King of Italy's cousin, the Duke of the AbruzzL As a matter
of fact I was sick and tired of a certain prince.

We reached Venice about noon and Maggie Buggy un-
packed everything. Father and Mother went out. Our sitting
room overlooked the Grand Canal, and I was looking down
upon its unclean water when among the sharp-prowed boats
I spotted a gondola in which the single passenger was, of all
people, Prince Altieri. He stepped ashore at a place which
was practically in our hotel.

I let out a roar at Maggie to declare that I was out. Then
I jumped into bed.

I absolutely refused to speak with him for two days. He
saw Father first, and introduced to him a red-haired lady
who promptly started in to flatter that old miner, Thomas
Walsh. Well, he had dug gold long years before she began;
but she was, in her way, more expert. In no time Mother had
her hands full, and Altieri's flowers were delivered to me
every morning in even bigger boxes than he had sent in
Rome.

"Now you look here," I said to Father late one night,
"you'll get yourself in trouble if you don't watch out."

"Why, what do you mean?" He looked completely guilty.

"I mean that red-haired hussy; that's what I mean."

Well, we both agreed it was time we ducked away from
Venice. I was entirely cured of all romantic notions about a
titled marriage.

And now Mrs. John W. Mackay was in Paris with her grand-

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son, that pale dark Prince Colonna who first had introduced
me to AJtieri back in Rome. The old lady was then a great
figure in society, especially in London. She had known my
parents for several years.

"Tom," she said to Father, "you want to give this girl an
education, and Monte Carlo is a proper place for her to begin.
I'm going down. Let me take her along. I'll take my grandson
and be their chaperon."

As we motored south through France Colonna seemed to
think his place in life was just to make me forget all about
Altieri. He was half -American, he would remind me; but I
could see that the other half was pretty much like Altieri.

Mrs. Mackay stayed in bed all morning. She was made of
rolls of fat, but when she stepped forth to begin her day she
was beautifully made up. With that dark red wig she wore, and
with a veil, she kept herself looking pretty smart. Right after
luncheon she would go to the Casino and play until she had
lost a certain sum; if she was winning, of course, she hated
stopping. In the evening after dinner she would waddle back
and lose or win some more.

Once I chided her: "You always lose."

"Oh, no," she said, "I spend money for certain wares you
do not see. I am buying excitement with my money when I
gamble. That makes my blood course faster, and that itself
is better for me than if I constantly gave doctors great big fees
to tell me what was wrong with me."

My own excitement was feverish. Father and Mother had
come to Monte Carlo and as he, too, came to gamble, I was
free to ride around in my red Mercedes, escorted by Colonna
and chaperoned by Maggie. That was fun; but I had twice the
fun when Altieri appeared on the scene. Almost at once those
two princes began to squawl and bicker over me. I am not
vain enough to think it was entirely me they quarreled about.
There were stunning beauties on the Riviera, lovely creatures
who tempted by design. But even so, I can see even more
clearly now than then that in pursuing me those two were
doing, in their Continental way, what Tom Walsh had done

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when he went prospecting for gold. Indeed, Altieri said one
day that Colonna had, in effect, jumped his claim. Those were
not his words, but that was his meaning. The three of us were
having lunch at Cannes, and suddenly Colonna's pale face
turned purple at something Altieri said in Italian. He half-
rose from his chair, and snatching up a wineglass threw its
contents in the other man's face. Altieri was no coward and I,
who thought this all quite comic, do not know how they ironed
it out.

> A few nights later Colonna was sitting in our suite. Generally
the half of him that was American was uppermost in what he
said and did. Maggie had gone to bed and in the adjoining
room my mother was in hers, reading. I have forgotten where
we had been, but I do remember that in those days it was
considered hardly proper to leave two young people by them-
selves. In Europe the rules were strict, and a girl was
constantly being warned by her elders to give no cause for
talk.

All of a sudden there came a knock on the door and I heard
Altieri say, just like the Wolf, "Can I come in?"

I don't know what evil spirit prompted me, but I whispered
to Colonna, "Get in there, quick" and pushed him into the
worst of all hiding places, my bedroom.

"What are you doing here all alone?" asked Altieri.

"Just thinking," I said.

Well, then he acted as if we were engaged or married. He
was raging as he pointed a trembling finger at a hall bench and
said, "You are thinking in the company of someone who wears
a hat and coat."

"What of that?" I told Colonna to come on out, and then
I crossed the floor with the stride of Duse and opened Mother's
door and spoke to her.

She answered, "Yes, darling girl?"

I looked at those two young men and knew, inside, that I
was wishing I was home in America.

"Get out!"

And they went.

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The truth is, I suppose, it was my own fault; but I will not
take the blame for a mediaeval kind of thinking that justifies
the men of European nations in supposing that a girl is the
reverse of good if she's not watched from hour to hour.

We Walshes went to Biarritz and Prince Colonna came
tagging along. (I don't know where Altieri went.) Then
Colonna began to get excited telegrams from his grandmother.
She said his mother was ill and needed him. Mrs. Mackay
wired my father please to send the young man home, and
Father told me to start Colonna going. I had lost all interest
in princes of whatever kind. Everything they did and said
made me know that I would be awfully lonesome with any one
of them.

We had a farewell luncheon at the Casino. Maggie sat
near by to keep our little party regular. I told Colonna to be
on his way before his grandmamma sent gendarmes after him.
He grew perfervid then, and once or twice Maggie Buggy
snickered. (When we were by ourselves we used to mock the
manners of the Princes.) Then he said good-bye, and started
off.

It was raining, and I decided to send Maggie after some
money, as I wanted to play roulette.

She went into the adjoining chamber and there was the
little Prince, still hanging around. Maggie laughed at him.
Well, the American part of him disappeared and his rage was
all Italian. He rushed at Maggie and jumped with both his feet,
hard, on her corns. She shrieked so loud that I came out to see
who was being murdered. Next day my father escorted the
young man to a train and put him on it.

When we got back to Paris, at the Ritz, he came to call
but I was entirely out of patience by then. Father talked with
me from time to time, and although he rarely interfered I
could see that he was relieved that I had decided I did not
want a title.

"The way I see it, 3 ' he once said to me, "these foreign mar-
riages do not work because the man and woman have such
different points of view. But don't you forget this: the greatest

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luxury that I can buy myself is the knowledge that I have
secured for you and Vincent corridors of security extending
far into the future beyond the time when I can be here as
your shield."

120

CHAPTER XI

A Tollgate on Our Road

WASHINGTON, D. C, was a little town, comparatively, in 1905.
My brother Vin and Ned McLean were far from liking one
another. If they saw each other, driving, that was excuse for
a hard, fast race with motorcars. Vin had become a first-rate
driver, and he had lots of nerve. Quite frequently he was pur-
sued by some policeman on a bicycle. It seems to me his
favorite car that year was a Pope Toledo; he had one that
could be changed in something shorter than a jiffy from a
roadster with bucket seats into a sedate family car with a
large tonneau.

One day he and Monroe were gasping in the garage yard
at 2020 after making such a change, when a cop rode up and
coyly fluttered his fingers at a kitchen maid, who beckoned
him to enter. He was streaming perspiration, and pleaded
for a drink of something cold. (He had been there before.)
Suddenly he looked into the yard and saw Vin and Monroe
beside the car, half-overcome from their exertions in dis-
guising it.

He gaped, then stammered, as he perked his finger toward
a bent fender: "I'd swear this was the car that I been chasing
two miles or more, except that one I chased had some other
kind of hind end." He scratched his head, replaced his helmet,
and with his hand squeezed from his thick mustache whatever
fluid it was our maid had given him to drink. When he had de-
parted on his large-sprocketed bicycle, Vin and Monroe
hugged and punched each other just like two maniacs. It was
more fun, they said, then they had ever had. Vin was seventeen
then.

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The year before, in Colorado, he had shot a bear. Its skin
became a rug of which Father was mighty proud, although
ordinarily he was opposed to killing animals or birds. Anything
that Vinson did, or I, was apt to seem all right to our indulgent
father.

Father was proud, too, when Vin, after playing hookey
about half the time at the Washington School, had settled
down at Pottstown to make a fair record at Hill. Up there
his ambition was to become a member of the staff of the Dial,
the school paper. To win he had to get some paid advertise-
ments, and Father wrote a lot of letters to New York tailors,
to George Boldt of the Waldorf, and to others who had enjoyed
his patronage. He invited them to come across, each one, with
$30 for a page in the Dial Not one refused, and Father was
delighted.

My red Mercedes was something that made Vin whistle
with astonishment and joy. With goggles on, just like a racing
driver, he was bound he would make that car deliver all the
speed there was in it. While we had been in Rome, I now
gather, he had done some speeding in his own car,

I found a letter in Dad's papers dated January 28, 1905,
and sent from Sligo, Maryland, by the keeper of the tollgate
there. In a scrawly hand the man had written Vinson demand-
ing sixty cents for toll fees. That ancient letter now reads like
a threat;

You went North through Toll Gate No. 1 at Sligo at half past
three o'clock A.M. at not less than thirty miles an hour. The Mary-
land law says you must not go more than six through any village
and I taken your number as you passed me when I haled you to stop
and pay toll.

There were other unheard voices hailing us to stop and pay
our toll just then.

We worried about the ones we loved more than we did about
ourselves. Father used to say to Vin, "Now, son, don't go so
fast you can't see where you're going." He took pride, though,
in the fact that his son was such a skillful automobilist. As

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for me, I was astonished, every time I looked at him, to see
how little Vin was growing into a tall, good-looking youth who
was sure to have a welcome in society. Yet it had been no
more than the year before that the two of us at 2020 had slit
a small hole in a painted canvas screen that covered a gap
above the dining room wall. (The actual wall itself was not
carried to the ceiling, so that the musicians could be heard
from their platform on the other side. This was a part of the
landing of the staircase in the reception hall. That night
Secretary William Howard Taft, Archie Butt, the White
House military aide, and nearly forty other friends of Father's
were dining. We watched them drink champagne awhile, and
then took turns poking a bean shooter through the slit. I my-
self blew the bean that made Archie Butt get up from the
table and start on a search for the culprits.) However, we
were much more circumspect by the summer of 1905, when
we went to Newport.

Newport society was kind to us that summer. Mother had
talked with Father about a party they were to give at 2020
in the winter season, to present me formally to all their friends.
I was not pleased; indeed, I was fearful of such an ordeal as
a debut. But at Newport I lived through, and to some extent
enjoyed, a tea that was given in my honor by Mrs. James L.
Kernochan. Born Eloise Stevenson, she had become a cele-
brated cross-country rider, a woman who knew dogs and
horses as well as she knew all angles of society. Three years
before while following hounds she had fallen so hard that she
was forced to give up riding. The next year her husband died.
This charming young widow was our great friend and counselor
at Newport. She was living there as the guest of her mother-
in-law, Mrs. James P. Kernochan.

Father decided we needed a big place in order to entertain.
Just south of Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont's marble home on Belle-
vue Avenue is "Beaulieu", of brick and brownstone. The
house was built in 1862 by a Peruvian named Frederic Bar-
reda, reputed to have made his money out of guano. When he
lost it his niece, Maria de Barril, went to New York and

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

for years thereafter made a living acting as a social guide.
Eventually that house became the property of William Waldorf
Astor. The place was spoken of as "hoodooed." Before she
became our friend, Mrs. Potter Palmer had lived there for two
brilliant seasons. It was in that house, in 1899, that her niece,
Julia Grant, was married to the Russian Prince, Mickel
Cantacuzene. Next, it had been leased for a term of years by
Cornelius Vanderbilt (not the young fellow his father) and
Father rented it from him. I never had more fun that I did
those months at Newport.

On a day in August, the nineteenth, Vinson and I went
to the Clambate Club to a luncheon given by Mrs. Clement
Moore. We had gone in my Mercedes, driven by Emile
Devoust, our imported chauffeur; but when we were leaving,
about four in the afternoon, Vinson wanted to drive.

Mrs. Kernochan, Herbert Pell Jr., and Harry Oelrichs
rode with us. Devoust sat on the step in front. Vinson drove
us swiftly past the other automobiles and turnouts getting
away from Mrs. Moore's. We climbed the grade behind the
beach, then started down Honeyman's Hill. We were going
fast when I heard something like a pistol shot and the Mer-
cedes began to sway and pitch. A rear tire had blown out.
One of us screamed, and in that second we struck the flooring
of a bridge that carries the road over a creek. I heard the
chilling sound of splintering wood, and then our car bounced
through the rail and threw me into a dreadful darkness. My
face was pressed into mud and water; I could, with tremendous
effort, bend my neck. I tried to think, but each thought was
engulfed by waves of pain. I spent many, many years in that
position with something like a painter's torch cooking all my
nerves. I remember hearing my own groans and those of others,
then a voice of some man saying, "Godl She's under the
car."

I know the car was levered up with fence rails and that I
was pulled out; that was agony. A doctor gave me something
from a glass and said, "Lie still; your leg is broken." I strug-

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A TOLLGATE ON OUR ROAD

gled against his hand and over and over cried out, "Where is
Brother?" Some gentlehearted liar said, "He's all right." I
was ghastly cold from pain and creek water, but my brain
kept turning out a relentless logic: if my brother were all right,
he would be with his sister. I tried again to rise. Everything
seemed to happen with an incomprehensible slowness. I saw
Alfred G. Vanderbilt bending over the creek bank. I called
for Vinson and someone said he was hurt a little. Actually,
right then his mind was blank and he was dying. Eloise
Kernochan, one hand to disordered hair and with her summer
frock all torn and stained with mud and blood, was being
helped into a trap. I saw the docked tail of a horse switching
nervously and the lines that held the animal were clenched
in the hands of young Pauline French. I promised someone
not to scream if they would show me Vinson. His hurts, I
heard, were being dressed.

That was a time when an automobile driver occasionally
was impaled on a steering post. As two policemen put me on
a stretcher, I demanded that I be carried past the broken
Mercedes to a place where I could see the steering wheel. It
was not broken, but slanting through that car from end to
end, just like a monstrous spear, was a heavy, wooden timber,
the railing of the bridge. It seems to me that Blanche Oelrichs,
Harry's sister, and their mother, had come upon the scene.
Then Fifi Potter Stillman leaned down, and I breathed her
fragrance as she touched me softly on the face. I shivered, and
she took off a lovely coat of Irish lace and placed it over me. I
have loved her for that action ever since. As the police ambu-
lance started rolling behind its trotting horses, I begged the
policemen to squeeze my wrists for the sake of that same
mercy we give a horse by putting a twitch upon its lip to
distract it from some other pain.

I kept conscious until I saw my .mother. I tried to tell her
Vinson was in better condition than I was but had been taken
to the hospital. I did not know it then, of course, but he died
about the time I was placed in the ambulance. The fact of his
death was kept from me. On the day of the funeral my father

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

and mother came into my room in ordinary clothes, forcing
themselves to be sweetly cheerful, and then, out of my sight,
put on their black. I finally learned that Vin was dead through
a letter of condolence sent to me. Mother had read aloud from
it just a line or two, that expressed hope for my complete re-
covery. She was called away and put the letter on the table. I
asked a nurse to hand it to me. She did, and I read a phrase
that spoke of our great affliction in the loss of one so young.
Well, after that my mind was vague for weeks and weeks. They
gave me morphine whenever I had need of it.

The house we had leased from the Vanderbilts was closed
and we left Newport, going to the Garden City Hotel, on Long
Island. I was in a cast and made the trip in a long deep basket.
Katherine Elkins came and was a comfort to us then.

I suffered the tortures of the damned before that injury
was healed. Even now that wretched part of me, my crippled
leg, knows how to give its owner fits.

Because the great big house at 2020 Massachusetts Avenue
was filled with souvenirs of Vinson that, it was feared, would
keep us weeping, Father took a floor in the old Shoreham
Hotel when we returned to Washington. I was in such agony
there that I could not sleep. I had a graphophone beside my
bed, and it was kept playing, generally, all night long, and much
of the day. Every pulsation of my heart gave me fresh aches
as blood was forced through clogged-up channels. They gave
me more and more morphine until I was receiving ten grains
a day, and even then my pain would prowl about my system
until it found a nerve not quite dead to gnaw on.

Two months later my right leg, as I stood upon my leg,
swung inches from the floor. It was limp. When I tried to rest
my weight upon it, I screamed so loud I think I could have been
heard a half-mile away. There is no use now to blame the doc-
tors who had bungled. I had no need of X-rays to tell me that
two broken ends of bone were unmatched in my thigh.

I had one friend just then who was especially sweet. That
was Ned McLean. The gawky youth had become a mustached

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A TOLLGATE ON OUR ROAD

man. He found that new records for the graphophone gave me
just about my only pleasure. He would bring up all the new
ones he could buy.

One day there was a great argument between my parents*
Mother said, "Which would you rather have her do: lose her
life or lose her leg?"

Father said, "The girl herself should make this decision."

I told Ned about that dilemma and he dashed off, half-
frenzied, to get his father.

Old John R. McLean was the oddest hybrid of gentle
friend and fierce monster that I have ever known. In Washing-
ton he exercised a power almost like that of a political boss.
Owning two newspapers, his most effective trick in life was to
discover something compromising about a highly placed indi-
vidual and then not print what he had learned. He kept
such secrets as loaded guns. In secret caches he had all sorts
of facts. This strange man came to call on us, and out of his
assorted knowledge produced a fact that saved my life.

"There is," he said, "a marvelous doctor at Johns Hopkins.
He saved Ned's life when he had appendicitis. My brother-in-
law, Admiral Dewey," swears by him. Hell make this right."

Confidence, to my way of thinking, generally is all the
magic needed to work miracles. John R.'s faith decided us. So
Dr. Finney came. John Miller Turpin Finney was about forty-
two, and he had a skill that only now and then is given to a
surgeon. He did not try to fool me for a second.

"You have an even chance of living if I operate."

"It is up to you, daughter," said Father, and caught his
graying mustache in his teeth.

That was on a Tuesday. I said: "Friday is a lucky day for
me. Let's make it Friday; but I want it done in Twenty-
twenty." (I could not tell them that I simply did not want to
die where I might become a young ghost doomed to haunt the
old Shoreham's corridors.)

We moved back home on Thursday. I never shall forget
that night. Little Annie slept with me during that period, and
believing I was going to die in the morning I chattered on and

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

on until the pink damask on my wall was taking on a glint
from the rising sun.

Dr. Finney and Ms associates had decided to use my white
tile bathroom as the operating chamber. It is about six times
as large as any ordinary bathroom. I had refused, the night
before, to see Ned or any of my callers. I was afraid my nerve
might break.

Quite early, one of the doctors entered my bedroom and
announced that they were ready.

"First," I said, "I am going in to see the knives and saws
Dr. Finney's going to use." I walked in on my crutches and
my excited chattering made white-smocked Dr. Finney so
nervous he had to go outside.

Soon after that, they gave me an anesthetic and then Finney
worked four solid hours. He cut out necrotic bone and riveted
the semihealthy broken ends together with a fif teen-inch splint
of silver plate. My thigh, of course, was opened wide as one
might split a mackerel to give the doctor room to do his
cabinetmaking and silversmithing job.

When I woke up I was back in bed. The crippled leg, fixed
in a cast, was held up on a scaffolding by ropes, counterweights
and pulleys, so that it pointed at the ceiling. I remained that
way for five months; and while they had me flat on my back
the new doctors set to work to cure me of my worst affliction:
I had become a morphine addict.

"Dope fiend." I was shocked -to realize it, but even that
could not keep me quiet when I wanted to be drugged. I was
pretty well spoiled anyway (I make no secret of it), and those
doctors had a time with me. One day, regardless of that cast
and harness and the delicate structure of silver and half -made
bone, I tried in madness to fling myself out of the bed. (I
never read about those poor devils who get in trouble through
robberies or other violences designed to gain for them the drug
they crave without a throb of pity. I know that aching hun-
ger. I know how cunningly it magnifies the slightest twitching
of a nerve into a pounding, crushing, all-pervading sense of
pain.)

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A TOLLGATE ON OUR ROAD

There was one night when Dr. Jim Mitchell and Dr. Briggs
stayed in my room until four o'clock in the morning.

I have forgotten what I said or did; but I remember hear-
ing Jim Mitchell, his jaw stuck out, say to me:

"Yell your head off if you like; but you won't get it."

I hated him so much I could have killed him if I had held
a gun in my twitching hands.

Once when Father sat beside my bed in 2020 and held my
hand I said, "What a price I'm paying just because I find
myself alive."

"I cannot bear to see you suffer," he said, "and I'd do any-
thing to spare you. Why, do you know that if I could have our
boy alive again and you well and whole I'd undertake to
spend eternity restoring to that Colorado mountain every bit
of gold and rock. I'd wad the tunnels of the Camp Bird mine
until the place was just as we found it that day that you and
I ..."

He stopped talking then, and tried with a smoothing gesture
of his hands to straighten out a grief-contorted, ageing face.
That made me ashamed, I suppose, of the way I had carried on.
Until then he had hardly mentioned in my presence the load
of sorrow that he bore.

I buckled down from that day on. I listened carefully to the
advice the doctors gave me. As best I could, I co-operated; and
finally, except for a haunted place deep in my mind, I had
smothered my fantastic craving.

A letter I found stored away among old papers recalls the
date I was released from the thralldom of the cast. It was
March 20, 1906. Vinson had been dead for seven months.

This letter was one that Father wrote to Grandma Reed:

Dear Nannie:

Well, our darling had the cast removed for good two days ago
and everything was found in fine shape; a positive union of the
break. She is able to move the limb from the hip in all directions.
To make assurance doubly sure she will rest for 8 days more so as
to give the bone time to harden. Then we look for the dear child

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

to get around very quickly. The limbs are practically the same
length. We are accordingly happy or as happy as we can ever be
again.

Then he spoke of what we had been through as the "long,
dark night."

One late spring afternoon when birds were chirping in the
grass beside the house Dr. Finney came. I had been rolled
into a sitting room, and sat there talking with my mother and
little Annie.

"I want to see you take a step/' he said.

I had become completely invalid from months of lying
down, and so they had to lift me as they would a flabby baby
until I was erect and found myself looking down from what
seemed a terrific height at a threatening floor that reeled and
pitched like a ship's deck in a storm. With an effort I stiffened
rny good leg until I was balanced on it. Then I put my other
foot a stride forward on the rug, free from pain, felt it bear
my weight. Dr. Finney has had one of the finest surgical
careers, but I'll wager that never has any patient felt more
gratitude than I felt at that moment, when I knew for sure
that he had given back to me my life and my leg. It surely
would be ungracious of me to mutter, now, that I had lost an
inch and a half from that leg and that, ever since, I have had
to have a support built in my shoes to compensate for the
shortness. Wearing such a device, unless I'm tired I walk
without betraying lameness. I marvel at Finney's skill. What
he performed on me was very like a miracle.

My seven months of invalidism had left the back of my
head as smooth and yellow as a duck's egg. My appearance
has always been a matter of supreme importance to my ego.
I love to nest my body in soft and frilly things. I like (and who
does not?) to be admired when I am seen. So it was most dis-
turbing after seasons spent in fashionable company in
Washington, Paris, Rome, and Newport to be going back
to Colorado to see the home folks, looking, from the rear, a
fright.

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A TOLLGATE ON OUR ROAD

We went back to Colorado that summer because of a real
ache in us to breathe mountain air, hear Western intona-
tions, and mingle with old friends. As a flavoring among our
reasons was the fact that certain Republicans had suggested
to my father that he might appropriately consider himself as a
possible United States Senator from Colorado. They thought
he ought to run, they said; while they spoke as friends, I am
inclined to think they were not unmindful of what was called
his "barrel." My mother was disposed to agree, I think, be-
cause she knew that politics, or something like it, was saner
filling for his mind than what was there incessantly dreary
thoughts of his dead boy and of the feebleness of money in
any contest with Fate.

Once, in a family council, someone said that by going home
to Colorado we might change our luck.

We moved to Wolhurst, an estate near Denver that my
father had leased. Later in that year records seem to indicate
he bought it for $150,000. The place had been a part of the
estate of Senator Edward O. Wolcott. There were five hundred
acres, numerous buildings, stables, a fine house, well-made
roads and extensive gardens. I was less in love with Wolhurst
than Mother was. I have always liked the excitements of city
streets, of throngs, as Father did. At Wolhurst my great prob-
lem was my half-bald skull, especially when soon after we
arrived I was invited to be one of the guests of honor at a
Denver Country Club dinner dance.

The other ladies wore elaborate evening gowns, cut low,
and there were lots of jewels flashing. When I entered they all
looked at me and in their shock revealed surprise. Not know-
ing I was nearly hairless, they did not understand what strange
new fashion notion made me wear a simple, high-necked gown
and a close-fitting lingerie hat.

They talked so much gossiped, really that the fact was
commented on in the Denver Post, which said:

Miss Walsh's costume though simple was striking, and the fact
that she has been welcomed to Westchester, Burlingame, Renlay and
Nieuller clubs was quite convincing that she was about correct; at

131

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

least the number of wash dresses and lingerie hats which have since
been worn to the club indicate that the "thirty' 7 have since arrived
at that conclusion.

Such things were exciting, but right on top of that we had
another scare.

Almost the day we arrived in Colorado, Father had started
out from Colorado Springs aboard a special train to Hartsel,
a new mining camp where dry placer gold mining fields had
been discovered. The craze for finding gold or silver in the
earth was still a part of him. John W. Benson went with him,
and they spent half a day trying to guess how much gold was
hidden in old river gravels there. The special had traveled a
mile on the homeward journey when it collided with a freight
train. My father, seated in about the middle of a railroad
coach, was flung into the aisle by the crashing stop. His face
was deeply cut below his eye; a jaw was badly bruised, and he
was terribly shaken up. John Benson, thrown backward with
great force, lost consciousness but was not badly hurt. The
freight's fireman was killed; the engineer was terribly injured.
For many days Father was unstrung, although he protested
he had not been hurt.

I am superstitious. I had a notion he was courting trouble
every time he went afield for gold; yet he kept on going, as if
he were bewitched. The least little rumor of some fresh strike
could always catch his close attention.

"I never expect to find another Camp Bird mine," he said.
Nevertheless, he had put some money then into a syndicate
that was hopeful of finding gold in Siberia. William Randolph
Hearst was likewise in that syndicate. Father had other gold
properties in British Columbia, and was buying machinery for
them that summer in Denver* He was also full of plans, which
he talked over with John Benson, about a careful exploration
of his other claims in and around Ouray. Much of his cor-
respondence dealt with mines, claims, exploration syndicates
until one might have supposed that all he thought about
was cashing in on vaster riches than those he already had. But

132

A TOLLGATE ON OUR ROAD

that would not have been fair to him. Mother and I knew that
what he wanted was some anodyne to ease his pain of mind.
That is why we entertained so much that year.

One of the first affairs we gave at Wolhurst was a luncheon
to the leading Republicans of Arapahoe County, It was
only one of the signs that if the Legislature and the people of
the State should insist upon it Father would not refuse to go
to the Senate. There were a half-dozen candidates, but Simon
Guggenheim, who was called "the smelter king" in Colorado,
was out in front. As I look back now it seems to me that Father
was trying to make the Guggenheim campaign something less
of a sure thing. I don't pretend to know the inside of that strug-
gle, but I do know that Father let it be known he was not trying.
Nevertheless, he talked like a candidate. Some months later
Colorado's Junior Senator was elected by the Legislature.
They chose Simon Guggenheim. However, Tom Walsh had
almost stopped the smelter king by speaking out in such a
way that what he advocated for the masses was headlined by
the Denver Post as "modified socialism."

Mind you, what Tom Walsh said was said in 1906; and yet
to me it sounds much like the prophetic words I hear almost
any time I turn on a radio.

We find men with such accumulated wealth that they are puz-
zled to know to what use to put it. We find men so rich that they are
unable to give anything like an approximate estimate of their wealth.
Accumulated and concentrated wealth, both corporate and indi-
vidual, is crushing from the masses the life of individual ownership,
individual independence and, almost, individual existence. A simple
and practical example is the department store, where is concentrated
under a single roof every human product. They stand as terrible
monuments to the thousands of commercial lives that they have
crushed out.

A continuance of these monopolistic conditions means that all the
commercial wealth of our country will be concentrated in a few
hands, and the masses of the people left without an atom of owner-
ship.

We should establish a new basis for compensating the masses.

133

CHAPTER XII

Romance in Washington

I WAS the only living human who ever exercised control over
Ned McLean. Certainly he never ruled himself. His father
was limp and spineless where his only son was concerned. He
loved Ned as much as he was capable of loving anything other
than John R. McLean, His mother, Emily Beale McLean,
was the leader of Washington society, but she never was able
to give her son any of that courage with which the Beales were
so richly endowed; all Ned received of that part of his heri-
tage was recklessness in dissipation.

In a measure I seemed able to strengthen Ned. From my
childhood I was greatly attached to his mother and liked to
please her. Whenever she saw me she would embrace me and
say, warmly, "Here is my girl." I think that sympathy be-
tween us, between an older woman and a young girl, influenced
me to try to make Ned behave himself. However, during my
illness after the automobile accident he drank so much that he
was on the verge of seeing things. We had broken our engage-
ment over and over, but when he was in such a state of nerves
from drinking that he had to make a handkerchief sling to
steady the hand with which he lifted his glass I had sense
enough for a little while to stop even associating with
him. I broke with him absolutely in 1907, and did not speak to
him for many months. During the following year I was re-
peatedly half -engaged to several men. There was Bradish John-
son; I thought he was too old, but liked him enormously. I gave
a picnic once on Pike's Peak for Viscount de Chambrun and
was, Jor a little, quite wild about him. Just to be a French
countess? Oh, no, indeed; because I liked Charley. We broke

134

ROMANCE IN WASHINGTON

off in London in a cab. Then there was another man I thought
I might marry.

First, however, I ought to tell about the ruptured romance
of Katherine Elkins and the Duke of the AbruzzL As I recall
it, they met in 1907, when Prince Luigi Amedeo of Savoy-
Aosta, Duke of the Abruzzi, arrived in America in command
of a squadron of Italian warships. He was the sort of man to
make any woman lose her reason and become a creature ruled
entirely by emotion. It was not simply titled glamour that
made Kitty Elkins look at him, and look again, and listen
when he talked. Here was no ordinary, swarthy, foppish
Italian nobleman; this was a man who seemed to be the es-
sence of nobility. He was tall. The brown of his eyes was set
in rings that were as white as marble. His skin was richly
olive from the tanning of mountain sunlight as well as from the
open sea. His nose was a proper feature for a man born to
speak commands. His full lips were just the kind that in-
vited women to be fools and they were modeled on a line as
straight as a needle. He was every inch a man. Besides all
this, there were his uniforms of blue cloth glinting with gold
stars.

When Katherine met him he was thirty-four and she was,
my guess is, twenty-one. She was long of limb, erect, the very
model of that American fineness Charles Dana Gibson tried
to capture in his drawings. She had great pride, and warmth
equally great for those she liked. The faintest glow of inter-
est in her eyes would have been quite enough, it seems to me,
to make the wandering Prince her slave, even if old Senator
Stephen B. Elkins had not owned railroads and coal mines in
West Virginia.

Wrapped up inside the two of them there was a concert
of the voices of all their ancestors shouting. That is the thing
we call instinct. It seems to me that even the least of the hu-
man race is touched with genius when mad with love. Kath-
erine was my close friend. I saw her eyes and said straight
out, "If I were you I'd take him on any terms, with royal
marriage or without."

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

I saw them almost day by day, watching what flickered in
their eyes while the families were bartering. His royal rela-
tives were divided; this man stood in line for the throne of Italy
and his life was much less his own than, for example, mine
was. Yet, if it comes to that, we have at best but precious little
weight in controlling circumstances that mold and shape our
lives.

The Duke might have renounced his royal privileges, or, if
Katherine had said "yes", he might have married her with, so
to speak, his left hand. She thumbed her nose at that. John R.
McLean told me that old Senator Elkins could have fixed it all
on a regular basis if he had been willing to pay $2,000,000. The
newspapers were at that time more excited about the romance
of Katherine and the Duke than about almost anything else.
Why, I remember that one night, when I was going to a small
dinner party Katherine was giving for the Duke just before
he was to return to Italy early in 1908, Mrs. John R. McLean
called me on the telephone.

"Evalyn," she said, "everyone thinks Katherine is going to
announce her engagement at this dinner party. Don't forget
we own the Washington Post and the Cincinnati Enquirer.
Such a scoop, my husband tells me, would be worth an extra.
I want you to slip out as soon as you learn and telephone me."

I had been engaged so often to her Ned that I called her
"Mummie", and I agreed to telephone. The dinner was beauti-
fully arranged. Mathilde Townsend was there, and Martha
Hitchburn. I wore a plain black velvet princesse dress. Abruzzi
was completely charming that night, but there was no an-
nouncement and finally when I was sure there would be none
I slipped upstairs and used the telephone.

When I told her, Mummie McLean said, "She's a f ool."

The Duke sailed for home and Billy Hitt was sometimes
seen out riding with Miss Katherine Elkins in her smart trap.
Something of great importance in that affair for me started on
a day at the Chevy Chase Country Club. Katherine Elkins was
there with Marjorie Gould, who was her house guest; and I

136

ROMANCE IN WASHINGTON

was there. Ned McLean was in our party; we were not speak-
ing, but from time to time I caught him looking my way, wist-
fully, and when I so caught him I was looking wistful too, I
suppose. Billy Hitt and Katherine had been spatting, with the
result that Joe Leiter had taken this chance to give her a rush.

Joe was a great big fellow who quite perfectly matched in
spirit the pretentiousness of Leiter Castle, his widowed mother's
home at 1500 New Hampshire Avenue, on DuPont Circle. Levi
Leiter left a lot of millions, made in partership with Marshall
Field. One of his daughters became Lady Curzon, wife of Lord
Curzon of Kedleston, later Viceroy of India. (She had died two
years before this day I speak of.) The Leiter girls were all
Anglophiles: one was Countess of Suffolk and the third be-
came Mrs. Colin Campbell. But Joe was a delightful compan-
ion. In 1898 he had tried to corner wheat, and with so many
millions at his beck and call might have succeeded but for the
stubborn fight of P. D. Armour, who turned ships around at
Liverpool and broke the winter ice on the Great Lakes so he
could deliver more wheat at Chicago than there were Leiter
millions to pay for.

By the time of our party, Mrs. Leiter had become a horti-
culturist. She mixed some pollen and named the resulting blue
verbena after Alice Roosevelt. Later on she brought about a
yellow verbena that she called "Ethel Roosevelt." Still later,
she produced a pink one that she named for Helen Taft. Be-
sides these marriages fixed up among the flowers, Mrs. Leiter
had a passion for society romances. (It was she who brought
the Due de Chaulnes and Marguerite Shonts together, so we
all believed.) In the late spring of 1908 she was trying to help
Billy Hitt win Katherine Elkins from the glamorous Duke of
the Abruzzi. Mrs. Leiter's plan, no doubt, was highly patriotic,
but her son Joe himself liked Katherine.

Suddenly, that day at Chevy Chase, I heard Katherine
Elkins say to Leiter, "Joe, I'll never speak to you again until
you apologize."

Joe and I left then, and went to "Cabin John's Bridge", a
roadhouse.

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

"EvaJyn," said Joe, and twirled the thin stem between fingers
that were fat and somewhat hairy, "I'll bet you a thousand you
can't split up Katherine Elkins and Billy Hitt."

My glass was tilted and in my nose constellations of cham-
pagne bubbles were exploding. I quickly swallowed.

"I'll take you, Joe. That's a bet." We shook hands, and
then began to plan just how to start the ball rolling.

That same evening Katherine was giving a dinner party for
Marjorie Gould. I suggested to Joe that he give a midnight
party that would be our bait for Billy Hitt. I knew Billy only
slightly, but I called up Fritzi Scheff , who was playing in Wash-
ington, and made a date for after midnight. Then I went home
to dress for the Elkins dinner.

Joe Leiter, of course, did not attend Katharine's dinner,
because of their row; but after midnight he was in rare form as
a host at the Willard. Fritzi sang the best of her songs but
when she sang Victor Herbert's "Kiss Me, Kiss Me Again", I
felt somebody take my hand. That was Billy Hitt, who had
been placed next to me by Joe Leiter who wanted very much to
lose Ms bet.

I feel older now by about a thousand years, and I have quite
forgotten what tactics I employed to keep young Mr. Hitt
attentive. At any rate, he came to lunch and came again. We
had a lot of talks together concerning many things. We went for
drives, and out to the races. I warned him: "Now, Billy, you
must not talk to Katherine. I could not bear it." Then, when
he said he would not, I collected my bet from Joe Leiter. By
that time, though, I thought Mr. Hitt was what I really wanted.
We were going West to spend the summer at Wolhurst, and
Billy agreed to come too. (However, I am quite sure now that
all the time he was mooning over Katherine.)

Then Ned McLean called up:

"I hear you're going out to Colorado, and that Hitt is going
too."

"We are leaving in two days, Saturday afternoon," I told
him.

138

EDWARD BEALE McLEAN
About 1908

ROMANCE IN WASHINGTON

"Well, I want my letters back/' he said in a sulky tone.
"You send them."

"Like hell I will; you come and get your letters."

"Damned if I will!"

We were like that always; fighting when our hearts were
half-sick with loneliness and love.

Mother and Daddy were having a big dinner that Thursday
night for Mabel Boardman of the Red Cross. Our house was
filled with guests and flowers and the music of a group of
Italians perched in their place above the dining room, with
their violins, their flutes, and a harp.

I was wearing a Worth gown of emerald green. Billy Hitt
had gone to New York to see his mother off for Europe; I knew
I was not wearing that costume for him. Ned was coming; Ned
McLean. It is not thinking that goes on in a girl's mind when
she keeps her attention fixed upon some young man. I answered
vacantly when either of the two men who sat beside me at table
spoke polite phrases against my ears. The musicians played
some songs that made a wild mood of mine much more intense.

I ached with a strong wish that Ned McLean were more
than rich and handsome, that he were noble in his manners
and courageous in his soul.

We were moving from the table into our Louis XIV salon
when a butler whispered to me that Mr. McLean was in the
reception hall. Then I spoke pleasantly to Ned, just as though
for months we had not been pretending we could not see each
other. We went to the second floor in an elevator, and to my
sitting room. When the door was closed Ned put aside his half-
frozen manner.

"It's no use pretending, Evalyn. Won't you marry me? Sure,
I'll give up drinking. Please! We've always loved each other.
You can't marry Hitt! When are you going to stop this?"

"When you stop drinking," I replied. I felt a thrill just then
that was beyond all reason. I made myself believe I had the
power to mold him into everything I wanted from the race of
men. For the twentieth time, I made up my mind right there

139

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

and then; but what I said to Ned that night was, "You will
have to ask my father."

In half an hour he had gone home and I was left alone to
think that he was only bluffing. He was so shy and he was so
sure my parents would not stand for him that I was more
than half-inclined to think he would never meet that simple
test.

In the morning I told my father.

"There must be some good in the boy," said Father, "or you
would be able to forget about him. This time, though, let's have
no shilly-shallying about it. I don't want you like you were be-
fore ready to marry him one day and vowing on the next
that you would like to have him shot. Are you decided?"

It was about a quarter to two when Ned showed up at 2020.

I kissed him and said, "Now you are in for it, because Papa's
waiting for you."

My sweetheart said, "My knees are knocking. You know
I love you, Evalyn, because I'd rather swallow poison than
appear before your father. Well, maybe he won't shoot me."

Then Ned went in. They stayed and stayed. I saw the butler
responding to my father's ring. Then the servant went upstairs
and soon returned, preceding by a pace or two my mother, who
was white-faced after a morning of trying to accept a situa-
tion that was hateful to her. Soon Mother left their conference
and followed me to my sitting room. She was really broken-
hearted, but she never said a word to show her state of mind.
Then Father came out just ahead of Ned, who was smiling with
a hangdog air.

"The boy and I," said Father, "have fixed it up. You will
have an announcement of your engagement later, and after that
be married. But just now he is going to follow us to Chicago
and then go on to Colorado with us."

Ned then went out to see his family at Friendship and re-
port what he had done. In a little while his mother called
me and expressed complete satisfaction "You and Tom and
Carrie all come on out here."

The families drank a toast to us, and then there was a lot

140

ROMANCE IN WASHINGTON

of speculation about our future. Ned and I left them together,
and as we had done so many times as kids strolled down be-
yond the cabin, his playhouse, where afterward my children
played, and stood beside the spring. We had not taken any
champagne. We rather solemnly drank water. For at least an
hour or two Ned had stopped drinking anything but water.

Ned McLean's enormous basket of orchids on the seat be-
side me as the train left Washington for the trip to Chicago
reminded me of something Billy Hitt! I sent him a telegram
to let him know as tactfully as possible that he had best forget
my invitation to come out to Wolhurst. I explained that I was
engaged again I am sure it must have been the fiftieth time
to Ned.

Father was a delegate-at-large from Colorado to the Repub-
lican National Convention in Chicago, and he was enthusiasti-
cally committed to the candidacy of William Howard Taft.
Ned was acting in the role of cub reporter, but he would not
have recognized a piece of news not even if the man who bit
the dog likewise bit Ned McLean. He showed me some copy
paper and some pencils in his pocket, but I guess he was less
of a pest to the other reporters of the Cincinnati Enquirer and
the Washington Post, because he was so much more concerned
with me than with news.

It seems to me that Ned was staying at Joe Leiter's apart-
ment in Chicago. We went to many parties, and there was one
to which he was asked on my behalf by Alice Longworth.

Politics in those days meant less than nothing to me. It was
something you played, as any other game, for excitement.
(Perhaps that still is true.) Ned's work was justification for
his trip to Colorado. He wore his pencil in his vest when we
went on to Denver. The papers laughed at him in type that
pointed out that he had arrived many days in advance of any
other reporters to cover the Democratic Convention. Those
days we spent delightfully. He dressed up in a cowboy suit
high-heeled boots, curly black-haired chaps, a wide, brass-
studded belt, a holster with a forty-four, a red bandanna at
his throat and on his slicked hair a large tan hat. I posed him

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

on a keg and took his picture. I still was lame, and about half
of each day I helped myself along on crutches.

An appropriate time was picked to announce my engage-
ment to Ned: July Fourth. We celebrated with champagne and
firecrackers, to the dismay of all the birds that Father's gentle-
ness and no-shooting rules had induced to come there to roost.
(One time at Wolhurst, I have discovered from his papers,
Dad spent $700 just for birdseed. I know I am extravagant too
but that seems to me to be a lot of birdseed.)

Louise and Crawford Hill were there that Fourth, and the
news of our engagement was announced in Crawford's paper,
the Denver Republican, under headlines which referred to
Ned as "a Washington editor." The boy surely had a rise if
this was true! In Chicago, he had modestly admitted in an
Interview that if he could hang on a while he might get to be a
cub. Crawford, being fond of us, promoted Ned to be the
Washington Post's managing editor. (After all, I suppose that
sort of thing occurs right often.)

This fiance of mine was not an editor nor was he a cub re-
porter. He was a rich man's son, twenty-two years old. He
never had been other than rich or else he might have been
an editor. I have a photograph of Ned when he was eight or
perhaps no more than seven. It shows him mounted on the tin
seat of his goat buckboard. His team of goats had halted on
the gravel of the Park across from the McLeans' I Street house.
The button shoes he wore extended halfway to his knees.
There were brass buttons on his coat, befitting a grandson of
General Beale who helped to win California for the United
States. A tiny, round cap is perched above a frowning little
face. Three small girls in garments trimmed with fur were
photographed with him- that day, and I can imagine that the
little boy they played with was a friendly little cuss. This
picture has the power to give me an ache deep inside my heart.
The gentle lad out driving his team of black-and-white goats
was still peering out at me above the brown mustache my Ned
wore on July 4, 1908.

A telegram from Ned's mother urged us to plan for a large

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ROMANCE IN WASHINGTON

wedding in the East; she proposed that we have the ceremony
performed at Bar Harbor. Ned seemed to shrivel in his clothes
at that suggestion. My own preference, generally, is for show.
I should have been quite willing, if anyone had proposed it,
to be married while hanging by my knees from the crosspiece
of the spire of any well-known church. If I had a dog, I wanted
him to be a dog people turned to stare at; it was the same with
any of my possessions, and with many of my acts. From that
standpoint my engagement was a success. Messages of con-
gratulation began to pour in on us. I heard from the three girls
with whom I had been closely associated in Washington so-
ciety: from Mathilde Townsend, Katherine Elkins, and Isobel
May. Mathilde, just then, was planning to entertain the Duke
of Alba at her mother's home in Bar Harbor. (She afterward
married Peter Gerry, and is now Mrs. Sumner Welles.)

In their convention the Democrats nominated William Jen-
nings Bryan. Alice and Nick Longworth had arrived for that
affair and came to Wolhurst for luncheon. Before Alice had
gone out to the Orient in a party headed by Secretary of War
Taft, and on the trip fallen in love with Nick, one of her
favorite beaux had been Ned McLean. She was sweet to us
that day, but Ned was always grumpy where Alice was con-
cerned.

"She is our loyal friend," he would say, "because we have two
newspapers and one of them is in Cincinnati. If Cincinnati turns
Nick down in some election she'll be exiled from Washington.
With Nick it's different. You can count on Nick." Ned always
was suspicious.

One afternoon in late July it was the twenty-second
while we were driving miles from Denver in my car, attended
by a chauffeur and Maggie Buggy, Ned said a reckless thing
"Let's get married." Precisely because it was a daring thought,
I liked it. I agreed. Ned went into some store that had a tele-
phone, to call up Crawford HilL After just a little coaxing
Crawford said he would fix everything and meet us, with a
ring and a license, with Louise, his wife, and with Colonel Billy
Stapleton, at St. Mark's Episcopal Church. So far as I was

143

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

concerned it would have been all right if we had gone down
the aisle to the altar of some Hindu temple. That day I was
wearing a dress of white broadcloth and a high straw hat thickly
feathered with snowy ostrich plumes. Ned was wearing a light
gray serge suit and a cloth cap.

I remember kneeling in front of St. Mark's altar, with my
eyes fixed on a golden cross made luminous by candlelight. I
saw the scuffed shoes of the rector, Henry Foster, peering at me
from the bottom of his hastily tossed-on cassock. I heard the
words about as clearly as one detects the separate words uttered
by a droning bee that hovers noisily above a flower. Yet, if any-
body should believe that my harum-scarum qualities implied
that I would be a harum-scarum wife, they are mistaken. The
part of me that draws through Thomas Walsh the whole genius
of the Irish race is fixed by instinct when a marriage vow is
said. The scent of just about a peck of violets that Ned had
bought for me escorted into my nostrils, into my brain and
being, a strong desire to have this bond of marriage last for-
ever. Kneeling there, I recognized with gratitude that Ned
loved me and cared but little for my father's money. Another
girl in such a fix upon her knees would, I supposed, have
prayed, but I was thinking that a few feet down beneath the
church floor was Colorado earth, the generous earth that had
opened to my father his great store of gold, and now, close to
that earth, I was coming into something richer.

Crawford Hill gave me away in place of my father.

I remember kissing Ned, Louise, Crawford, and Billy Staple-
ton, and then a strong embrace from loving Maggie Buggy.

The next thing was our return to Wolhurst; as our car
turned into the tree-bordered, gravel driveway I was aware
of being grateful that Father was away in Kansas City. I
could not bear to see his eyes when I must leave with Ned.

Mother was not pleased but she was pleasant. A society
wedding would have been excuse for musicales, receptions,
dinners, dances. However, she ordered a wedding feast and
we sat down with several house guests. Ned and I drank
water while the others gulped down champagne. Right after

144

ROMANCE IN WASHINGTON

that we two excited people, Ned and I, were driven to the
station and took a train for Colorado Springs. At the Antlers
Hotel, where we had taken a suite, we found the restaurant
closed; so we went out and in an all-night restaurant that
advertised coffee and doughnuts for five cents we ate our
real wedding supper: lamb chops and salad and ginger ale.
We were not drinking stronger things. We stayed at the
Springs about a weeL

145

CHAPTER XIII
A Fantastic Honeymoon

A QUEER, queer fellow was this Ned McLean that I had mar-
ried. The simplest way to make him comprehensible is to show
that he was just about a dozen men packaged as one jealous
husband. He was so changeable that at times I felt quite polyan-
drous. We spent some weeks at Bar Harbor with all four of our
parents beaming on us. Then, so we could be alone, we went
back to Washington and stayed at Friendship. Joe Leiter and
his bride, the former Juliette Williams, were with us for a while.
Finally, however, Ned and I decided that we would not have a
honeymoon unless we went roaming over Europe. Our fathers
matched each other in extravagance and gave us each $100,000.

"Now, children/' Mother said, "be careful." My father
grinned a bit and said, "Get yourself a wedding present if you
see anything you like."

On that fantastic honeymoon I was attended by dear old
Maggie Buggy, and we also had a chauffeur, Platt. On the way
across Platt told us he thought we ought to have something be-
sides our Packard down in the ship's hold. That car was yellow
with red striping. It was a roadster, and in the rear there was
a rumble. Its tires were about twice the size of garden hose.
Platt, in a chauffeur's visored cap and fur-lined coat, seemed
to suggest that the Packard would be about right for him and
Maggie.

"I think we ought to have a Mercedes," I said to Ned.

The one we ordered sent from Paris on the day we landed
in Holland was waiting for us on the dock at Amsterdam
a few days later. It cost us 15,500 guilders, but I have for-

146

A FANTASTIC HONEYMOON

gotten how much money that was in those days. I had never
seen a bigger car. It had two seats and all the rest was hooded
engine. I swear it looks as big to-day a kind of domestic
locomotive. I have it still, in a barn at Friendship; I keep it as
a souvenir of our honeymoon madness, just as another woman
might keep a champagne cork or faded violets.

That pale yellow automobile on the dock at Amsterdam
certainly looked like a wild contraption.

"Can you run that monster, Ned?"

For answer he just helped me to my seat, tucked me in,
climbed in himself, and signaled Platt to crank it. Platt and
Maggie were to follow in the Packard with most of our small
luggage. Ned pressed the clutch and yanked a lever.

"Now," he said, "you're going to Berlin."

We started with such a mighty lunge that we were off the
wharf before I had time to stiffen my neck and brace my legs.
In 1908 good roads were not so common as they are now, but
when we headed into Germany we bowled along on smooth gray
crushed rock roads that would have seemed sinister, if we had
been gifted with the wit to understand. Those roads were as
gun barrels pointing towards England, Holland, Belgium,
France.

Near our journey's end we decided late one night that we
would leave the small town inn where I was having trouble
sleeping and push on to Berlin right away.

We swiftly pulled away from Platt and Maggie. We drove
and drove and lost our way repeatedly. At last a policeman
stopped us with a yell. Happily he spoke some English
otherwise even then we should not have known that we really
had reached Berlin.

"You are McLean?" The policeman asked the question so
deeply in his throat it sounded like the growling of some huge
dog. "Ja? Your other car passed three hours ago!"

Berlin, I thought, might be the place to get my wedding
present; but I could not find quite what I wanted. I did buy a
chinchilla coat a fur so soft that I cannot imagine any more
delicate sensation than the feel of it against my cheek. Its

147

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

gray was most becoming, and usually I wore it decked with
fifty marks' worth of violets.

Ned bought me a present that now reposes high on a closet
shelf in 2020; a traveling case of gold, the twin of one made
for the Crown Princess of Germany. It contained just about
every utensil for the toilet that could be invented, all massed
in green plush drawers that lifted out on slender extensible
metal arms so that its ordinarily compact two cubic feet or
less may become a wide expanse of green plush utility. Maggie
found it just another nuisance among her many chores, but for
a while I liked it.

Dresden, Leipzig, Cologne, Diisseldorf each one to me
stands for a shopping spree.

One day, in Leipzig, we lost patience with the fact that we
had only one Mercedes and went overnight to Paris and bought
an extra one for 24,000 francs.

We had meant to go to St. Petersburg to visit Ned's Aunt
Mamie and Uncle George Bakhmeteff. Bakhmeteff, a Russian
diplomat, was an entertaining gentleman. Aunt Mamie had
been Marie Beale, Ned's mother's sister. These two girls and
their brother, Uncle Truxton Beale, were the children of old
General Beale. For years he had been American minister at
Vienna; later he became American envoy to Greece, where
Aunt Mamie had been a great favorite in Athens. Her close
friend there was Queen Olga, formerly a Russian princes^

InyBerlin Ned told me of a scheme that had been hatching
in his head. The family was hoping to bring about the appoint-
ment of George Bakhmeteff as Russian Ambassador to the
United States. That, of course, would be perfectly wonderful
for all of us, but most of all for the social dictatorship of Emily
Beale McLean. (As I look back on it I feel inclined to think
that Ned, with all his diplomatic fixing, was trying hard to im-
press me, his bride with his importance. I do not remember
now, but I have a suspicion that I urged him on.)

He began his negotiations with a telegram to Bakhmeteff
at the Czar's capital. That telegram was so discreet and cloudy

148

A FANTASTIC HONEYMOON

in its phrasing that it could not be understood even by Uncle
George.

So Ned dictated to the public stenographer of our hotel in
Dresden a letter, less discreet. (I came across all the corre-
spondence tucked away with other souvenirs of our wild
honeymoon.) He wrote Bakhmeteff :

The matter which I telegraphed you about and which by your
telegram you say you fail to understand, is this:

I was told from America to find out if anything could be done
through money, if so how much and would there be any surety of it
being accomplished if conditions were complied with.

Very much disappointed that you both could not come to Vienna
as would have loved to have seen you personally and then it would
have been so much better to have talked it over together.

America wants definite information if it is possible to arrange for
you to come to Washington.

I have a list of people, that was given me, to see about the matter
and who could exert great influence in the proper quarters, influence
which is very powerful and which you do not know of.

As soon as you get this letter telegraph me to the address which
I shall wire you in Vienna. Then if you think that I personally could
put any weight to help you in Petersburg, just frankly say so and
we will both come at once.

You know how anxious America is to have this accomplished.

The impudence of it becomes a laughing matter now, and
yet when I read George Bakhmeteff' s frantic telegram of reply
I can see how close to ruin Ned's letter must have seemed to
bring Bakhmeteff ? s long diplomatic career. (I have forgotten
many of the details, but I remember well that it was supposed
by certain of our relatives in the United States that money
could buy the place Bakhmeteff wanted.) What Uncle George
wired from St. Petersburg was:

LETTER RECEIVED STOP I MOST POSITIVELY INSIST ON YOUR
NOT TAKING ANY STEPS WHATEVER IN A MATTER WHICH CON-
CERNS ME ALONE AND I MOST CATEGORICALLY REFUSE MY CON-
SENT TO YOUR INTERFERENCE WHICH CAN HAVE THE MOST
FATAL CONSEQUENCES STOP BAKHMETEFF.

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

Ned went into a rage at that, of course. This was, to him, the
Koh-i-noor of all ingratitude. He wired back:

HAVE NO ANXIETY OVER ME EVER TAKING ANY STEPS CON-
CERNING YOU.

But even after that, Ned got a wire from his father saying,
"STAY OUT OF RUSSIA."

In later years, when the Bakhmeteffs were in Washington
(he was there for the last five years of the Czar's reign), we
had great fun together; but on my honeymoon I had small hope
that we should ever become reconciled, so deeply was Ned
wounded. Neither of us, then, had the slightest conception of
the risk to which Ned's blundering, well-meant efforts had
exposed that couple. Poor Aunt Mamie! She was more ob-
servant of court etiquette than any Russian. She had joined
the Greek Catholic Church when she married and became, to
the best of her ability, a Russian. When I came to know her
well I loved her.

Ned and I went on to Vienna and saw the Legation building
where the Beales had lived so long. Near by was a little park
enclosed by a tall iron fence, and Ned told me how when
Bakhmeteff was a young Russian attache courting Marie
Beale the two had once strolled inside the gates of that park.
When they decided to leave it they found the gates locked.
Poor Aunt Mamie supposed, so strictly were such things re-
garded, that she was hopelessly ruined. I have forgotten just
how they escaped. At any rate it was there at the Viennese
court that my mother-in-law acquired the poise, the tact, and
the other qualities that enabled her to become the boss of
Washington society. One factor was, of course, her husband's
money and his great power; but she was an extraordinarily
gifted hostess, with a flair for pomp.

Our next stop was Constantinople; we went there so we
wrote home in pursuit of culture. We arrived in a period
when the Young Turks were trying to work reforms that
could only be accomplished by unseating and unhareming the

150

A FANTASTIC HONEYMOON

old Sultan, Abdul-HamidL Our Ambassador at that time was
John G. A. Leishmann, whose next post was Berlin. He was
more than kind to us.

I told him that I had grown tight in my skin from the pres-
sure of two wishes that he might grant. He was the friend of
both John R. McLean and my father, and as wishful as an
enslaved and grateful djinn to do my bidding.

"I want to meet the Sultan, since he is, I'm told, the Caliph
of all Mohammedan faithful."

Mr. Leishmann's eyes began to gleam with merriment. He
looked me up and down, a girl of twenty-two, and then said,
"He may tap you for his harem."

"The way they tap a boy for some society at Yale? Is that
the way he gets ? em?"

He grinned and pretended it was so. Then he arranged, with
what effort I do not know, for Ned and me to go to Yfldiz
Palace. In the streets that we drove through on that very day
there had been shooting, the Sultan's loyal troops against
throngs incited by the Young Turks.

The Sultan had pouchy, bilious eyes, an ugly nose and lots
of trimmed bristles, red with henna, for a beard. He was stoop-
shouldered and kept on his head a fez ornamented with an
emerald for which my fingers itched. The coffee we had with
him was served in tiny eggshell porcelain cups, each one in a
golden filigree holder set with diamonds. Those diamonds
caught my eye at once. There were so many cups I was half-
inclined to slip one in my muff and, in my mind, went through
the motions many times until I thought I saw a eunuch watch-
ing me from behind the Sultan's chair. Of course, I have no
way of knowing positively that he was a eunuch, but he was
there and watching. There were thousands of those mutilated
creatures in Turkey, and such extreme care to guard the Turk-
ish ladies made me feel that they must be ten times more lovely
than ordinary creatures that make men jealous.

"The other thing I'm set on doing if it can be arranged," I
said to Mr. Leishmann, "is to see a harem. The Sultan's
harem."

151

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

The Ambassador frowned at that and said it was impossible,
or at least very difficult.

"You know this is not precisely like going through Coney
Island or any other play resort. These people are highly civi-
lized, even though you may not perceive it."

"My dear Mr. Ambassador," I pleaded, "I have a jealous
husband and I want to know the worst that is in store for me."

Lord knows, I was jesting, but anyway Mr. Leishmann fixed
It. I was received within the imperial harem; but what I saw
was disappointing.

Our next stop was Egypt. We went ashore at Port Said, saw
all its filthiness, and .then went on to Alexandria. The consul
there was D. R. Birch who endeared himself to us by acting as
a friend. He simply made us go and see the things that were
important, the gigantic artifacts of ancient times that used to
make my father ponder but which generally made me im-
patient to go out before it was too late and buy something I
might want. In Egypt I bought a lot of junk I sometimes wish
I had left there things inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and not-
so-good rugs. These were offered with such excitement that
at the time I seemed to think each was precisely what I
wanted.

We had a frightful trip by boat to Jaffa. For nearly three
days, it seems to me, our boat was tossed around. Two sick
passengers died aboard, and one woman was flung from her
berth and badly injured. They said her back was broken.

Ships did not land at Jaffa; they anchored, and by means of
small rowboats passengers were sent ashore or brought aboard.
From Jaffa we went by train to Jerusalem.

As soon as we were established in a hotel there, I went right
out and bought some Arab costumes. For Ned there was a
cream-white burnous that fell to the ground unless he held it
as a woman holds her skirt. I got an appropriate silk and
woolen swathing, rainbow-striped, to wrap about his head
and shoulders, and for his head a small green hat that we were
told should not be worn by anyone except such pilgrims as
had been to Mecca.

152

A FANTASTIC HONEYMOON

"My favorite saloon In Cincinnati/' said Ned, "is a marble
barroom called The Mecca. That makes me eligible. You are
now looking at Hadji McLean." With that he covered his
unreligious head with the green lid.

For myself I had bought a red velvet, richly embroidered.
Such things are done nowhere as finely as in Asia Minor. The
jacket was studded with turquoises. I had a pillbox hat which
was fixed upon my head by a netting fashioned out of thin gold
coins with other coins worked into a strap that passed beneath
my chin. Thus clad we rode as much as possible on camels.

"What shall we do next?" asked Ned one day.

"How about the River Jordan?"

We set out with two victorias; ours was drawn by four
horses, and we had an escort of nine Arab horsemen
armed with rifles, swords, and I don't know what else to
defend us. They wore cartridge bandoleers across their chests.
We had with us also a courier, a very funny German named
William somebody. We were passed from tribe to tribe with
ceremony and the payment of small bribes. On our second
day we saw a number of small clouds of dust approaching. A
score of horsemen were coming at a gallop.

"Let's throw the women to 'em," said William to my hus-
band. "We can save our more precious necks."

We were sure they were bandits; but they proved to be quite
friendly show-offs who scampered up and down the treeless
stony hills on their small Arab horses. Those creatures were
keenly interesting to Ned, who had an eye for horseflesh. The
chief of the band, a reckless brown-skinned fellow with a thick
mustache and beard, was thrown. The other riders seemed to
think this was a matter between the chief and Allah; they
made no move to help him.

I insisted on his drinking from a bottle of whisky that Ned
produced. We had a case or two for just such an emergency.

The Arab, forbidden by his creed to drink alcohol, put his
hands before his eyes, palms outward, and waved me off. I
urged him just a little more, and then he took a stiff drink.

153

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

When it hit his stomach lie let out a yell that was far less
Arablike than Indian.

"Just be quiet now," I said. I had Maggie bring me two
soft pink satin pillows, smelling enticingly of sachet powder.
I lifted up the man's head. I really thought he was dying. He
was suddenly alert, and watched me closely like a captive hawk.
When he saw the pillows he began to yell and curse and
struggle. He seemed to think I was trying to put some kind of
spell on him. So, with a wide gesture designed to foil whatever
sorcery I might be working, he climbed back, bleeding as he
was, into his saddle.

Late that evening we reached a small inn, a barren place
where for years Christian pilgrims had been coming just to
touch their hands in Jordan water. The river seemed a sickly
stream; we had expected at the least a Mississippi. But we were
impressed when told that we stood where Christ had preached.

I felt the force of that, and so did Ned. So, when we were
told that bathing in the Jordan was a permanent cure for colds
we decided to go swimming. We drove out to the river, and
had the tops of the victorias raised to serve as dressing-rooms.
As soon as we were in our bathing suits I stepped to the
ground and walked into the river.

I could not swim for a nickel prize but, of course, I had to
show an Arab audience what a great swimmer I was. The
current proved to be terrific, and before I could muster up a
grain of sense the thing had me. I felt my feet go out from
under me and swallowed enough holy water to last an ordinary
sinner a lifetime. I shrieked, but the sound I emitted was just
a snort. Happily Ned saw me and grabbed for my long hair.
With that for a rope, he towed me to the muddy shore. (I
have not thought about it much before, but I really wonder
that I am alive after so much feckless living.)

We suddenly decided we had better hurry out of Palestine.
It was not suited to our mood. We hired a special train to get
us back to Jaffa to catch a ship that otherwise we might have
missed.

About ten days later we turned up in Paris, with not enough

154

ON THE HONEYMOON

In their Packard
On Camels in Jerusalem

A FANTASTIC HONEYMOON

money to pay our next hotel bill. Ned cabled his father and I
cabled mine. My father sent me a fresh credit and his love.
Ned got a message that said:

BETTER HURRY HOME JANUARY FIRST FOR WASHINGTON
POST MEETING.

Then I remembered that I had not bought my wedding
present. So I went to Carrier's at 13, rue de la Paix (I need no
guide to find that place) and told them my predicament. They
were lovely and, of course, they knew me and my Dad.

"We have just the thing for you," said one of the firm. Then
he hypnotized me by showing me an ornament that made bright
spots before my eyes. (Anyway that's what I told my father
later.)

A line of diamond fire in square links of platinum where it
would touch my throat became a triple loop and from the bot-
tom circle was depended an entrancing pearl. It was the size
of my little finger-end and weighed 32 J4 grains. The pearl was
but the supporting slave of another thing I craved at sight
an emerald. Some lapidary had shaped it with six sides so as
to amplify, or to find at least, every trace of color. It weighed
34J4 carats. This green jewel, in turn, was just the object
supporting the Star of the East. This stone, a pear-shaped
brilliant, was one of the most famous in the world 92^2
carats. All lapidaries know it.

With fingers that fumbled from excitement I put that gor-
geous piece around my throat.

"Ned," I said, in mock despair, "it's got me! I'll never
get away from the spell of this."

"A shock might break the spell," said Ned. "Suppose you
ask the price of this magnificence."

"Well," I said to the man at Carrier's, as I put my index
fingers in my ears, "how much?"

He whispered, "Six hundred thousand francs, madame."

"You mean a hundred and twenty thousand dollars?"

He cocked his head to one side so that his nod was made
obliquely.

155

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

"After all," I said to Ned, "this Is really an investment.
Besides, this is December fifteenth and I can tell my father it's
a double gift, to cover both my wedding and Christmas."

So we signed a receipt, and Cartier allowed us children to
walk out with the Star of the East.

It made me half -drunk with excitement every time I put it
on in Paris. I wore it everywhere into all the fantastic
places one goes when seeing Continental night life.

"How can we pay duty on that bauble when we reach the
Customs?" Ned had just a trace more caution then than I.
He never had been allowed so much as I. Indeed, that $100,000
of his that we had blown along with my own $100,000 had been
intended by John R. to set us up in life. He was, according to
Walsh standards, tight.

"Never mind about the duty, Ned; I'm going to sneak it in."

The day we saited I walked into a cabin that Ned had had
lined, walls and ceiling, with orchids. He was a dear when he
was sober.

"Did you buy a wedding present, Daughter?" Father asked
when we were home. I told him to hide his eyes until I put it
on. When he had looked he blinked a time or two, and said,
"That's fine. Did you pay the duty?"
"No, I smuggled it."

"You take the cake," he said, and laughed until he almost
cried.

We went to dinner that night at the McLeans', in the famous
I Street house. (John Russell Pope was the architect who
transformed what had been a comparatively small, old-fash-
ioned house into a place for giving regal entertainments. We
were in the dining room. Its ceiling is covered with the work of
some great painter. The table is always guarded by four
massive columns that rear themselves like pagan altars, each
decorated with sculptured vines and grapes and bearing a
basket piled with fruits. Each column and its basket is a
cunning contrivance to diffuse the light that touches the faces
of those who banquet there.)

156

A FANTASTIC HONEYMOON

We were served by Grafoni, a butler who was himself a
jewel. While Grafoni was handling the lesser servants with
something of the silent zest of a concert master, my father
spoke to old John R.

"I have a surprise for you: see what Daughter bought her-
self as a wedding present."

I bent my head and, by then much practised, quickly
fastened it about my neck. The champagne glasses out of
which we had been toasting one another were a foot tall, crys-
tal vessels with golden bands where one's lips touch. This
luxury of Ned's home was quite as fine, I'm sure, as could
be produced if all the wrecked civilizations of the past were
brought to life. So what I showed upon my throat and bosom
seemed to us Walshes quite appropriate. Yet Mrs. McLean,
who had no really fine jewelry herself, looked at it almost
sourly, and said no word until she was pressed to speak.
Then she burst out with an opinion much too frank for that
occasion.

"Hideous thing for a child to wear! That's what I think.
I must say it looks Jewish, and since you ask my advice, I say:
send it back."

I am generally most concerned to spare the feelings of those
about me. I cannot bear to wound anyone in so sensitive a
spot as the naked ego. If I were less considerate, be sure my
household servants would not be with me year after year.
I am careful of others' feelings because I myself am most
sensitive to such things.

"How much duty did you pay on that thing?" said old
John R.

"Didn't pay any, I sneaked it in."

"Great God! Don't you see my Ned becomes involved be-
cause he is your husband? This thing would be ruinous to me.
Think of the hostile headlines in rival papers!"

"Don't worry," said my father. "I'll send my lawyer down
to-morrow and let him declare the trinket. Hell, I am glad to
buy it for my Evalyn. There won't be a bit of trouble. Ill
send word to the customs men that she is not all there."

157

CHAPTER XIV
The Hundred-Million-Dollar Baby

MY pointless, pampered life of spending began to have a point
in April, 1909. That was when I discovered I was going to
have a child. My partner in this enterprise of being sorcerer
was gentle with me then. He tapered down his drinking. He
gave Platt, the chauffeur, strict orders to drive with exaggerated
care. My Ned, I knew by then, was the most plausible of liars;
but I had no wish to contradict him now when he was telling me
how lovely he was finding me.

That was a happy summer. Ned kept me breathing the
fragrance of the most costly blooms he could find. I am not
a gardening variety of lady. I want my flowers cut and gath-
ered for me, but I wanted very much to be the gardener of my
child. The channel of my care of it was my own throat. I
stopped all drinking. I ate precisely what the doctors ordered.
Likewise, I rested regularly. Yet underneath my conscious
mind, in realms where there is stored in any woman all the
pasts of all ancestors, I was most active. I knew this every
time I tried to sleep.

Deep inside me, quite beyond the foolish surface touched by
bungling teachers, indulgent parents, lavish friends and my
own behavior, there was going on a chemistry I wish I fully
understood. How ultra-wise I should be then! Yet I insist
that every time I have been pregnant I have been presciently
aware that I was engaged in the greatest of all magic. I? Per-
haps I mean that God was doing this. At any rate I knew that
incomprehensible forces within my being were building up a
human entity. What best of Ned, what best of me had been

158

THE HUNDRED-MILLION-DOLLAR BABY

imparted to my child? I used to lie awake and ponder even
as I felt the baby growing.

My Tipperary father had qualities I hoped were fixed in
me, and these I knew I wanted for my baby; warmheartedness
and a genius for persistence in any endeavor. My mother had
a gift for music. I wanted that. Ned's charm I often thought
of; it would be a better world, I used to think, if a woman in
my state could control the formula of her child's being. What
had been taken from Ned and passed along to this one who was
our son? (Of course I never had a moment's doubt but that I
would have a son.) Ned's father's sister, Mildred, had possessed
charm enough to capture at the peak of his glory the hero of
Manila, George Dewey. Ned's father was a potent, crafty man
a newspaper proprietor who had a trick of getting his own
way with men or women. I wanted my son to possess charm
and sweeping power; but I wanted more for him than had
shown itself in Ned. Through Emily, his mother, the great
traditions of the Beales were funneled into Ned and there,
somehow, smothered. I hoped to bring to life again in my own
son those great ones. There was Ned's grandfather, who as a
navy ensign helped to wrest California from the Mexicans and
grabbed for himself a big ranch; there was a line of soldier
and sailor leaders printed in his blood.

Whatever was done about it inside my body has been done
before some billions of times. Still for me this was a unique
process, my personal miracle.

September, 1909, was a glorious month for my father. Con-
sequently I remained in the East and got my information about
the Western trip of President Taft from family letters and
from the newspapers.

As a former national committeeman from Colorado, and also
a friend, my father had strong claims on William Howard Taft.
Father wished to rename Wolhurst: he had selected as a name
for it "Clonmel", that Tipperary village where he was born.
Mr. Taft had agreed to come for a visit (he had been there
a time or two before) and rebaptize the place.

That was one time when I wished human gestation was a

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

swifter process. I wanted very much to be out home for that
affair.

President Taft and his party came the eighteen miles from
Denver on a special train. I have forgotten what sort of re-
naming hocus-pocus they went through, but my father sent
me a copy of Mr. Taft's speech. It contained a story that I
like. He said it had been told him by a Lord Justice of the
Court of Appeals of Ireland:

While holding the Assizes in County Tipperary, a man was
brought before the Lord Justice under indictment of man-
slaughter. The evidence showed that the deceased had come to
his death through a blow from a blackthorn stick in the hands
of the defendant. Medical testimony disclosed that the victim
had what is called a "paper skull." When found guilty and
brought before the Lord Justice for sentence, the defendant
was asked if he knew of any reason why the sentence of the
Court should not be pronounced on him.

"No, your lordship; but I would like to ask one question."

"What is that, my man?"

"I would like to ask what the divil a man with a head like
that was doing in Tipperary?"

Father wrote me that when the President told this story his
vast paunch shook from something like an earthquake of
merriment. Mr. Taft always laughed with fresh enjoyment
each time he told a funny story.

The bulk of William Howard Taft was well nourished at
the breakfast served by the Walshes in his honor at Clonmel:
his meal included mountain trout, bacon, eggs, broiled chicken,
chops, peas, corn, biscuits, and waffles. I have, besides that
menu, some photographs that show my father smiling with
his friend Taft. My mother was the heroine of each picture,
plumed as a Hottentot and tightly laced. Archie Butt was
there, in blue with gold braid and black riding boots, and so
was Jimmy Sloan, the secret service bodyguard, closely watch-
ing all who came. (How blind they seem to me, because not
one of them could see what is now so dear: my father as he
smiled was dying.)

160

TALLYHO WITH VICE PRESIDENT FAIRBANKS
THOMAS F. WALSH AND OTHERS

PRESIDENT TAFT RE-CHRISTENING THE WALSH
COLORADO ESTATE

THE HUNDRED-MILLION-DOLLAR BABY

At Bar Harbor Ned and I had taken a fancy to a summer
place known as the Sears Estate. My father bought it for us.
He had furnished Ned's office and given him whatever money
"the boy" seemed to need. Ned's own father gave him a strict
allowance, a salary of $1,000 a month. Yet Ned was not living
on such a basis, and never had. In August, 1909, he got from
Father $10,000. In October he got $7,000. It was like that,
month by month. Father had more than plenty. The Camp Bird
mine that very year produced for him, on the sale agreement
and in dividends on his stock, $554,136.13. One day in Janu-
ary Father gave my mother $100,000 for whatever she might
be needing, and on the same day advanced to the father of his
grandson another $50,000.

My child was bom December 18, 1909, in 2020 Massa-
chusetts Avenue; and the two of us were close to death. Those
months of being fixed immobile in a plaster cast had taken tone
from muscles that I needed to expel my child into the world.
Dr. Whitridge Williams, dean of Johns Hopkins, saw that he
would have to use great forceps. Hour by hour Ned implored
other specialists to come. Dr. Williams was with me four days.
He sent for Dr. Harvey Gushing, the brain surgeon, to reshape
my precious baby's head. There had been a heavy snowstorm
and Gushing rode from Baltimore on a special engine. Ned's
mother, thinking the baby could not live, baptized the infant
and named him, for my brother, Vinson Walsh McLean.

He was called in newspaper headlines "the hundred-million-
dollar baby", and if that was an exaggeration as to his pros-
pects as an heir it seemed to me gross understatement of his
value. He had a golden crib, and in it he was sheltered from
all drafts by a lacy, quilted canopy depending from an ar-
rangement like a crown. This crib was a gift from King
Leopold.

The strain of having him had exhausted me. I had no bit of
strength, and very little poise. Much of my vitality had gone
into this little son. I worried unnaturally about his safety. This
was made worse because they would not let me more than
touch him.

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

At this time my father vanished out of Washington. As I
grew better I was told that he and Mother were down in Palm
Beach. Perhaps it is life that is cruel, but I have always felt
that there was needless cruelty on the part of the doctor who
harshly, or at leastly bluntly, transformed my gentle, sweet-
tempered father into a condemned man. I knew nothing of
his situation until one day Wayne MacVeagh came to see me.
His daughter was one of my best friends.

He gave me the facts: my father had a cancer that was
devouring his lungs. In Florida he had suffered a severe
haemorrhage.

I telegraphed my mother to ask what she was going to do,
and heard that she had started West with him for San Antonio,
Texas. A doctor had gone South with them, but now had been
left behind; and on the Western trip decisions were being
made by a woman Christian Scientist who had my mother's
complete confidence.

The morning Ned and I reached San Antonio I went straight
to the little cottage where my parents were sheltered. I was
weak and ill myself. I wanted more than anything to see
Father, but Mother and this woman talked to me. Everything
was lovely, beautiful; they were made up as if for a dance,
and would not speak a word concerning sickness. Nor would
they let me see my father.

I was too weak to argue, and went back to the hotel; but as
soon as I had eaten breakfast I stormed back and demanded to
see him.

He asked for something as I entered, and I saw a sullen
nurse, instead of handing it to him, throw what he had asked
for on his bed.

"Get out," I said to her, my eyes blazing, and that is when
my father knew I had arrived. Tears rolled down Ms cheeks
as we reached for each other.

"I knew you'd come," he said.

That Spartan boy who let a fox gnaw at his vitals had been
no more silent under hideous pain than had my father. Those
two, my mother and the practitioner, were honestly persuaded

162

THE HUNDRED-MILLION-DOLLAR BABY

that by mumbo-jumbo his frightful sufferings could be nulli-
fied.

I took charge. I arranged for a squad of nurses, and with
Ned's help found the best doctor in San Antonio. Then I turned
on my mother's friend: "I understand that it is against the
laws of Texas to practise as you have been doing here. I give
you just one hour to get out with your bags and books. Leave
Texas!"

In an hour she was gone. My mother, weeping, abandoned
everything to me. My nostrils were still flaring from my rage,
but I felt more nearly like myself than I had for days. My
father was asleep, his limp wrist held by a physician who kept
his eyes fixed on his watch. I am not religious, I almost never
pray; but with my emaciated fingers clutching the bed rail I
thanked God, with all my heart, for morphine that could give
my father ease from pain.

I do not think he suffered so very much after that.

Ned and I had taken the house next door to Father. Arthur
Buckman was in charge for us in Washington. Many times
each day I had telegrams from little Vinson's bodyguards and
nurses. Will Duckstein, Ned's secretary, was on hand; also
there was a nightwatchman and one other man. Besides these,
there were the nurses, and a doctor who was constantly in
attendance.

I could not sleep soundly, because I worried. I feared some
of the threatening letters that had come to us were more than
mere threats from cranks. A wire would come saying "TWO-
THIRTY A.M. STOP BABY is NOW ASLEEP." Then I would sleep.
Later, another message would arrive and soothe my fears a little
by reporting "BABY REALLY LAUGHED THIS MORNING", or I
would try to nap after reading a telegram that said "BABY

ONLY CRIED TEN MINUTES TO-DAY STOP HE IS FINE." Even

though I had a message every hour I did not have enough,
because I was tortured by a fear that almost drove me mad.

All my nightmares for twenty-six years have had to do with
my plight as the mother of a kidnaped baby.

163

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

My baby Vinson was just two months old when I saw the
first of those loathsome threats a scrawled message on soiled
paper; of course, it was anonymous. Then others came; there
were telegrams sometimes, and messages by telephone as well
as the notes that came by mail. Sometimes these contained
directions as to where to deposit money. Sometimes there was
just a cold-blooded statement that at such an hour, such a day,
my baby would be slaughtered. These threats were most hide-
ous to me when the writers did not ask for money. They were
expressions of an envy I could not be expected to understand
or share. The others, the blackmail threats and those that de-
manded, in advance, a ransom, began to lose some of their
frightfulness in time and seem to me to be the bugaboo per-
formances of futile people trying to frighten me. Ned took
that view even while he hired more detectives. He would try
to blast away my fears with just a word or two: "Crackpots,
that's all they are."

I think Ned was right; and yet I realized that a crackpot
with no more than half a mind might take my baby. In Texas
I tossed off orders every day by telegraph, trying to tighten
our defenses against the mental misfits, the criminally envious,
the scheming ones who threatened us.

Right here I want to say most earnestly that it never pays
to give a nickel to a blackmailer. The way to deal with them
is fight! Quite obviously they are cowards, or they would
take some bolder way of criminality. I say quite flatly that if
ever I have one of these creatures within my reach I hope to
shoot Mm. I have told all those I love: "If you start paying
blackmail you will never stop. Fools pay to hush things up.
No matter what wrong thing you may have done let it come
out and pay no heed, but focus all your feelings on the black-
mailer. Fight. Don't pay." That is what I have told my chil-
dren.

In Texas all the days of early March were bleak for me no
matter how brightly the sun was shining. My father was dying,
literally by half -inches. I wanted to pour out all his fortune into

164

THE HUNDRED-MILLION-DOLLAR BABY

one great effort to restore him. Somewhere, I felt, there might
be a doctor who could perform a miracle of science.

My poor mother's argument was that Christ had raised men
from the dead. She cited Lazarus and repeated other stories
from the Bible. I told her with all possible gentleness that we
ought to try both systems, I told her to pray and not to feel
that God would be so unjust to her and to Father as to deny re-
lief merely because I was having faith in doctors as the direct
instrument of His power. She went into a darkened room and
closed the door. I had Ned send more telegrams. By those
wires we fixed upon the doctor who was regarded as foremost
among those who dealt with cancers. This was Dr. Lewellys
F. Barker of Baltimore.

"He must come down here," I said to Ned.

Dr. Barker's fee was fixed at $1,000 for each day away
from Baltimore. He left Baltimore on March 14th and de-
voted ten days (including travel) to my father. I say it earn-
estly: he might have had everything that had come from the
Camp Bird mine if only he could have cured my father. We
knew he could not do that, but wanted him to exercise his
skill with morphine. Dr. Barker decided that a certain solution
he knew how to mix Would have more potency than the injec-
tions Father had been receiving. My conscience was soothed
of its least pang at having taken charge and deposing Mother
when I saw my father's pain-racked face relax and show its
gentleness once more as Barker gave him treatments. There
were others: all first-class men. There was no excuse for hope.
We knew that even while we hoped.

We decided at the first of spring to take Father North to
2020 so that he could see my baby and then die at home. John
W. Gates's private car was hooked to the "Ohio", the McLean
private car, and these two formed part of a special that carried
baggage cars for weight. I never left my father's side through-
out the ride from Texas to the Capital. I could not sleep. The
train, so we were told, was breaking every record, and looking
out from time to time I could believe this. The landscape
rushing past to shrivel into a distorted background was not

165

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

more crazy in its seeming behavior than the actuality of the
world.

I have not led a contemplative life; and yet there has been
time for pondering. The thing I wonder most about is why the
universe is geared to cruelty?

My father found in the earth a treasure of which all men
wanted pieces; so my father, in turn, could trade his treasure
for what he wanted. Thereafter he was as he had been before:
gentle, generous, and fair to all. It pleased him to be accepted
as the friend of presidents and of a king, and of their friends.
Although an errant Catholic, it was a thrill for him to bend
his knee before the Pope. Surely such recognitions, such ac-
ceptances would be pleasing to any immigrant lad who had
crossed in the steerage in search of fortune. He bought all
manner of costly things, and by his buying scattered much
wealth. His spending gave employment to unnumbered people.
His wants created activity, and thereby more wealth for others.

I cannot see the justice of it. Why should he have been so
frightfully afflicted?

Beyond that, I am puzzled at the envy of others, who seem
to suppose that wealth is the perfect anodyne for human
misery. Perhaps I'll find the answers in some world to come,
if there is any.

Each day at 2020 my father gazed at my baby, named for
his dead son, and as he looked found relief and satisfaction
quite as potent as the treatments of Dr. Barker. It used to seem
to me still sleepless that our plight, his pain, my worried
state, and my mother's wretchedness on his account had been
going on for years and years.

On the night of April 8th, when I went to his room to kiss
him, he roused himself and gripped my hand. I looked deep
into his eyes and listened.

"Take care of Mother, darling." That was all he said.

I waited in my own room for several hours. Then someone
came to beckon me to return to him. I sat beside his bed and
held his hand. I could feel his pulse and knew Ms heart was

166

THE HUNDRED-MILLION-DOLLAR BABY

pumping. I could hear his breathing. Presently he ceased to
breathe. The flutter of his pulse against my fingers was the
only signal that he was living; when that stopped there were
no other signals.

There is a magic in old papers that can evoke visions of the
past. A letter from a Washington store, a thing I read once
and put aside, can now do this thing for me.

Enclosed please find samples of the very best dot muslin suitable
for nursery curtains that we can obtain.

The date it bears is the date of my father's death. Turned
over, that letter reveals a note I penciled there to be sent as a
telegram to Mathilde Townsend.

Dearest Mathilde:

Mother, Ned and I are so delighted to hear of your happiness. We
send you hearty congratulations and best love.

Affectionately,

EVALYN MCLEAN

That "happiness" was the announcement of her engagement
to Peter Goelet Gerry whom she later was separated from
and then divorced. But did I send a telegram from 2020 to
2121 Massachusetts Avenue? The answer is supplied so swiftly
I can believe that all experiences, however trivial, are kept on
record in each mind. After the funeral Ned, mother and I went
to Atlantic City.

Mother and I were so broken up by my father's death, after
the strain of his long illness, that we did not attend the funeral.
Instead, as our friends began to gather at 2020, three doctors
of that group, Finney, Guthrie, and Jim Mitchell, took us to the
garden on the roof. Mother was in a state of trance. I remember
that one of the doctors invited me to see how blue the sky was,
but looking up was just an excuse for me to try not to hear
the clatter at the porte-cochere and the noises of automobiles
moving slowly.

167

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

Afterward Ned tried to tell us how he had handled every-
thing for us. (He reached one of his peaks of fineness on that
day.) From Ned we learned that President Taft had been
among the mourners, and that Speaker Cannon had been seen
to stoop behind Supreme Court Justice McKenna so that none
would see him bite off a piece of dry stogie to chew in a situa-
tion that forbade smoking.

I heard Ned speak of these and other pallbearers: Admiral
Dewey, John R. McLean, Myron Herrick, whom we loved,
Senator Charles J. Hughes of Colorado, and David Wegg, who
for years had been his partner.

Mother hardly nodded even when asked a question.

168

CHAPTER XV

Drink and Drugs and the Hope Diamond

WE went from Atlantic City, after about a month, to our
place at Bar Harbor; but even there my mother kept to her
room, the blinds drawn tightly against all light. She said, quite
without dramatics, that she wished to follow Father. I tried to
talk with her of business matters. Father had left his fortune
in trust for us for ten years, half to Mother, half to me, with a
joint survivorship arrangement. Even the details of this did not
rouse her. She was so weak she had to be carried to her bath.
She ate sparingly or not at all. However, there was one by whom
her interest was aroused for a little: my baby had that power
she adored him.

I talked about her case with several doctors, and we hit
upon a scheme for making her custodian, for a little while, of
Vinson.

"It is up to you, Mother/' I said to her one day. "I am put-
ting full responsibility for my baby in your hands. Ned and I
are going to France."

She got right up, and in a few days she was out and In the
garden. She was almost like herself by the time we sailed.

One night we drove down to Vichy in our yellow racing
Fiat. I felt an urge to gamble. Unless I gamble more than I
should, there is no flavor for me at the tables. Well, at the
Casino I bought the bank. For me the best of all gambling
patterns is Russian bank.

Sitting next to me that night was a dear old man, who helped
me run the bank. I had begun to play at about ten-thirty in
the evening. When I stopped, at four in the morning, I had
won about seventy thousand dollars.

169

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

Ned had gone to get a drink, and I followed Mm,

"Where's that money?" Ned asked.

"That old man is looking after it," I said.

"Who is he?"

"I don't know."

We started back to the tables without our drink. The old
man had vanished, and with him all my winnings.

For about three minutes Ned and I were wondering just
how loud to pitch our voices as we shouted that we had been
robbed. Then I saw the old man again. He was approaching,
smiling broadly, and had all my winnings, changed into bills
of large denomination and neatly packaged. As he handed
this to me he introduced himself as the owner of Angostura
Bitters. But for all I knew before he might have been a
crook.

I talked of going back to the Casino to make another kill-
ing, but Ned demurred.

"I'll tell you what we're going to do," he said, "we're packing
now and driving back to Paris. If you stay here you'll lose all
you've won and more/'

We had a consultation about the chauffeur, who was feeling
ill. We put my maid on the fast express to Paris, and then Ned
told the chauffeur to get in the back of the car.

Ned was most skillful at the wheel and drove with elan, with
daring. That day the roads were thick with summer dust and
the driver of a car ahead of us was reluctant to let us pass. So
Ned opened up the Fiat. Dosed with laudanum and whisky, I
did not care about the risk so long as we were not riding in the
other fellow's dust. Ned blew three or four times and then
went by, our fenders scraping the other man's with a screech-
ing clatter.

When we pulled up in front of the Hotel Bristol in Paris
Ned looked at his watch. We had beaten the fast express by
ten minutes. For a minute we exulted and then noticed that
the chauffeur had not jumped out to help us. I looked around
and there, lying behind us, half on the seat, half on the floor,
wide-eyed and slobbering, was the chauffeur. The hotel porter

170

DRINK AND DRUGS AND THE HOPE DIAMOND

at my cry reached in and touched him. "My God/' he said in
French, "this one has broken his pipe."

He meant that the chauffeur was dead; and he was right.
The man had suffered a heart attack. We had not known be-
fore, but apparently he had been suffering from heart trouble
for a long time. If he had driven us that day, and died while
driving, we should have had a pretty smashup.

Pierre Cartier came to call on us at the Hotel Bristol in
Paris. He carried, tenderly, a package tightly closed with
wax seals. His manner was exquisitely mysterious. I suppose a
Parisian jewel merchant who seeks to trade among the ultra-
rich has to be more or less a stage manager and an actor.
Certainly he must be one great salesman. Of course, M. Cartier
was dressed as carefully as any woman going to her first big
ball. His silk hat, which he swept outward in a flourish, had
such a sheen that almost made me believe it had been handed
to him, new, as he crossed our threshold. His oyster-colored
spats, his knife-edged trousers, his morning coat, the pinkness
of his fingernails, all these and other things about him were
made by him to seem to be for me for Madame McLean
one French compliment.

Ned was still abristle with a day-old beard, and from the
folds of a peacock-colored lounging robe was blinking at me
across the breakfast coffee cups. He had ordered ham and eggs,
but he could not bear the sight of them, or of me, or of Pierre
Cartier.

"You know about the Turkish Revolution?" said Cartier,
and tapped his polished fingernails upon his package in the
manner of a Kellar or Mulholland about to do a trick.

"Why," I told him, "we were in Constantinople when there
was shooting in the streets. We went there on our honeymoon.
I was admitted, thanks to Mr. Leishmann, to the Sultan's
harem just a lot of fatties, except for two or three who wore
Worth gowns."

"Ah, I do not forget such things. You told me when you
bought from me your wedding present, the Star of the East.

171

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

I remember very well. It seems to me you told me then that
you had seen a jewel in the harem, a great blue stone that rested
against the throat of the Sultan's favorite. A lovely throat, eh?"

"I guess I did." It was too early to argue and, after all, I
had seen jewels on Turkish ladies that made my fingers itch.

"Of course you did," said Cartier. "Such things impress one
and, besides, not many Western women have been inside such
a place."

"It seems to me I did see that stone."

"Naturally. We hear the woman who had that jewel from
the Sultan's hand was stabbed to death."

All my boredom vanished as he went on.

"The beginning of this stone's history, as we believe it, was
its appearance in Europe when Louis the Fourteenth was King
of France. A man named Jean Tavernier had brought it from
India at a time when maharajahs and rajahs kept their wealth
in jewels. In that day the world's greatest jewel markets were
in the Orient. This stone when it was sold to Louis the Four-
teenth was called the Tavernier blue diamond. Marie Antoinette
wore it, so we understand; we know positively that there was
just this one big blue diamond among the French crown jewels.
Marie Antoinette was guillotined and the Revolutionists seized
all the wealth. The crown jewels were inventoried, and the
Tavernier blue was listed there. Then, along with other im-
portant items of the royal regalia, this big blue diamond
vanished stolen, so we think."

By this time Cartier had me on fire with eagerness to see
what treasure was sealed up in his package. But, shrewd sales-
man that he was, he did not open it. He just went on talking,
tracing out the jewel's history (or what he freely acknowledged
were his beliefs concerning that history). He said he under-
stood that Tavernier had stolen the gem from a Hindu, perhaps
a Hindu god. My recollection is that he said Tavernier after-
ward was torn and eaten by wild dogs. I might have been ex-
cused, that morning, for believing that all the violences of the
French Revolution were just the repercussions of that Hindu
idol's wrath. M. Cartier was most entertaining.

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DRINK AND DRUGS AND THE HOPE DIAMOND

In after years Sir Caspar Purdon-Clarke, who had been
Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City,
confirmed some of the diamond's history. In 1830, he said, a
diamond dealer named Daniel Eliason offered for sale in
London a big blue gem that weighed 44 % carats. The
Tavernier blue diamond had weighed 67 2/16 carats; but
obviously that stone could not be sold in its old form anywhere
in the world with a clear title. It was property stolen from the
French Government, and as such would have been attached
and made the object of legal struggles that would have de-
voured any pseudo-owner's equity. In 1874 another stone, the
Brunswick blue, came on the market, and that stone was said
to be the lesser part of the Tavernier. The larger stone Eliason
had sold to Henry Thomas Hope, a London banker. Hope's
wife was a Parisienne named Bichat, who kept the big blue
gem until her death in 1887. Her daughter had become the
Duchess of Newcastle, but when the banker's widow died she
left her wealth not to her daughter, then a dowager duchess,
but to her daughter's younger son, Lord Francis Pelham
Clinton. On one condition, she left to him her country-seats,
Deepdene, near Dorking, and Blayney Castle in County
Monaghan, her other wealth, and her collection of jewels, the
prize of which was the blue Hope diamond. The condition
was that he should thereafter call himself, "Lord Francis
Pelham Clinton Hope." This he agreed to do. Lord Francis
squandered his fortune and got deeply into debt. In 1894 he
married May Yohe, an American actress. She used to wear
her husband's jewels on the stages of music halls where she was
singing. They could not sell or pawn the jewels without risking
jail, because Lord and Lady Francis Hope had only a life
interest in- them. However, when Lord Francis Hope was de-
clared bankrupt the jewels had disappeared.

Some time after that Sir Caspar Purdon-Clarke received a
visit from an old man who made a business of trading bits of
jewelry that he picked up at secondhand stores and pawn-
brokers' shops. Out of his bag onto a cloth-covered table he
dumped an astonishing collection of jewels, so dirty as to be

173

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

without lustre. The old trader accounted for his possession of
these by saying he had bought them at a sheriff's sale in
Brighton. They had been among the effects of a music-hall
actress who had vanished from her lodgings, with her husband,
without paying her landlady or any of the other creditors who
had been keeping the couple practically in a state of siege.
None but the old jewel trader had supposed the ornaments in
the actress 7 abandoned trunk were other than shoddy imita-
tions, stage jewelry. The cheap lodgings bore out that idea.

When he realized the enormous value of his bargain, the
trader went for advice to his old customer, Sir Casper Purdon-
Clarke. The antiquarian at once recognized several items as be-
longing to the Hope collection, but he most easily recognized the
Hope blue diamond; he knew there was not another like it in
the world. He advised the trader to get in touch with the
trustees of the Hope estate. The old man did so, and for sur-
rendering the collection received a fair reward.

After that the Hope diamond was sold to an American
syndicate. "Selim Habib" was the name of the customer who
took it off their hands. Did the Turkish Sultan, Abdul-Hamid,
ever own it? I do not know for sure. Cartier told me his firm
acquired it from a man named Rosenau in Paris.

But I could wait no longer. "Let me see the thing, 35 I said
impatiently to Cartier. He breathed quietly without movement
for at least a minute, as a concert pianist may do before striking
trained fingers to the keys of his instrument. That pause was
eloquent, and made me feel as he wished me to that I
was being privileged beyond most persons in being shown this
gem.

No word had been said of price; this was just a visit from a
jewel merchant to a friend whom he admired.

Finally, he stripped away the wrappings and then held be-
fore my eyes the Hope diamond. No other gem I know of is
so rare as a real blue diamond; I have never seen another the
precise blue of the Hope diamond. The blue of it is something
I am puzzled to name. Peking blue would be too dark, West
Point blue too gray. A Hussar's coat? Delft? A harbor blue?

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DRINK AND DRUGS AND THE HOPE DIAMOND

Sometimes wlien I have looked at it, I have felt that Nature,
when making it, was half -inclined to form a sapphire, but its
diamond hardness dispels that thought, and, really, it has no
more than a quarter of the blue of soft sapphires. That very
rareness of color is the thing that convinced me the Hope and
Brunswick were once a single treasure of the French crown.

The stone was set in diamonds, and, as I looked at it,
M. Cartier told me things he did not vouch for: that it was
supposed to be ill-favored, and would bring bad luck to any-
one who wore or even touched it. Selim Habib is supposed to
have been drowned when his ship sank after he had disposed of
the gem. We all know about the knife blade that sliced through
Marie Antoinette's throat. Lord Hope had plenty of troubles
that, to a superstitious soul, might seem to trace back to a
heathen idol's wrath. May Yohe, Hope's wife, eloped with
handsome, feckless Captain Putnam Bradlee Strong; maybe
that was not bad luck, but it was embarrassing. There were
others, too.

You should have heard how solemnly we considered all
those possibilities that day in the Hotel Bristol.

"Bad luck objects," I said to Cartier, "for me are lucky."

"Ah, yes," he said. "Madame told me that before, and I
remembered. I think, myself, that superstitions of the kind we
speak about are baseless. Yet, one must admit, they are
amusing."

Ned held the jewel in his hands long after I had put it down.

"How much?" he asked, although I do not know why, since
he almost never paid for things until forced by threats of suit.

Before Cartier could answer I declared myself. "Ned
I don't want the thing. I don't like the setting."

We sailed for the United States aboard the Rotterdam in
October, and the jewel I was thinking of was no blue diamond
but my precious little son.

A tide goes out, a tide comes in; so I would describe my
leaving him and my coming back. I take no credit for the wild,
uncontrolled love I had for little Vinson. I am, myself, the

175

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

merest speck of life, but I think its fullest force exerts itself
whenever life breeds life. I cannot remember when I did not
hunger after thrills. That is the key to all my recklessness, I
fancy. For some thrills I have paid terrific prices and, properly,
I almost paid the biggest one of all for Vinson.

In the McLean private Pullman car we hastened from New
York to Bar Harbor. We found the baby strong and smiling,
a nine-inonths-old man, gurgling, laughing, showing just the
suggestion of a tooth. What exquisite joy it was to feel his rose-
like ear printing itself against my neck, to test the vigor of his
kick against my stomach 1

But Pierre Cartier had not forgotten me. Mother, Ned, the
baby and I were back at 2020 in November when we had a
letter from the Cartier establishment at 712 Fifth Avenue. It
was addressed to Ned.

Dear Sir:

We have the pleasure to inform you that Mr. Pierre Cartier has
arrived from Europe this morning on the "Lusitania." He has brought
with him the documents concerning the Hope diamond. He has a
book written by Tavernier himself, who, if you remember, sold the
stone to King Louis XIV.

Besides, he lias a book written by the great French expert of all
jewels of the crown of France and you will have there all details
you require.

Mr, Pierre Cartier will be glad to be honoured with an appoint-
ment, so as to be able to give you all further details you may re-
quire.

Awaiting your kind answer,

We beg to remain, dear sir,

Yours respectfully,

CARTIER.

Ned talked with Pierre Cartier and reported that the jewel
merchant simply wanted me to keep the Hope diamond in
my custody from Saturday until Monday. I agreed, of course,
telling Ned to put the gem on my dresser.

For hours that jewel stared at me. The setting had been
changed completely to a frame of diamonds, and there was a

176

DRINK AND DRUGS AND THE HOPE DIAMOND

splendid chain of diamonds to go about my neck. At some time
during that night I began to want the thing.

Do I believe a lot of silly superstitions, legends of the
diamond? I must confess I know better and yet, knowing
better, I believe. By that I mean I never let my friends or
children touch it. Call it a foolish woman's fetish if you like;
after you have said so without contradiction, let me say that
I have come to feel not think that I have developed a
sort of immunity to its evil. What tragedies have befallen me
might have occurred had I never seen or touched the diamond.
I have sense enough to know that fortunetellers gain fame as
prophets by habitually predicting probabilities. My observa-
tions have persuaded me that tragedies, for anyone who lives,
are not escapable.

Pierre Cartier came to call on Monday morning, but the
deal hung fire for several months. The price was fixed at
$154,000. 1 agreed to pay $40,000 before long and then, in the
space of three years, $114,000. I had an emerald and pearl
pendant with a diamond necklace that pleased me less, and
Cartier accepted that as part of the price. Then I signed a note
and Ned signed too. I put the chain around my neck and
thereby seemed to hook my life to its destiny of good or evil.

I knew Ned's mother would try to stop me. That was why
I hurried to make the purchase irrevocable. When Cartier
had put our note inside his pocket, I called Mrs. McLean on
the telephone.

"Mummie, I have bought the Hope diamond."

With her at the time was Mrs. Robert Goelet, who told me
afterward that my mother-in-law almost fainted.

What I heard her say was, "It is a cursed stone and you
must send it back. Worse than its being freighted with bad luck
is your buying of it a piece of recklessness. Money is a trust
for better things than jewel-buying."

She lectured on and on and only now and then did I break
in to say, "But, Mummie "

She did not let me say much more, because she had a thou-
sand objections bursting forth.

177

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

Finally I said firmly, "But, Mummie, everybody has bad
luck. You never know.' 7

She reported then that Mrs, Goelet was joining in her en-
treaty to save me from a piece of madcap folly. Mrs. Goelet
actually spoke to me over the telephone. Then they drove
around to see me, continuing to urge a change of mind even
while they handled and admired the gem. So, at last, knowing
I was obliged to be a nice daughter-in-law, I sent back the
stone to Cartier.

And Cartier quite promptly sent it back to me.

Bad luck? Within a narrow space, just about a year or so,
both women died: Mrs. Goelet was stricken on her yacht;
Mummie died of pneumonia at Bar Harbor. They had to die
sometime, as we all do. Nevertheless, lacking other philosophy
to meet such events, I made mine up when needed out of odds
and ends of superstition and common sense as do most
people, I suppose. In me were half-sprouted faiths in saints
concerning whom I had no teachings. Perhaps I simply scared
myself for fun; at any rate, I did believe that blue diamond
was a talisman of evil.

Every day I received letters from persons near and far who
had read that I had become the owner of this stone. A man
wrote to me about how he had nearly drowned when the
S.S. Seine went down. He implied the Hope diamond was
aboard, but did not explain who saved it when he asked me to
compensate him for some of his later troubles, which he blamed
on his former proximity to the thing that was hanging on my
neck. I had letter after letter from May Yohe, now trying to
recoup some bit of happiness from the ruin of her life. She
blamed the diamond; as one woman to another, she begged me
to throw it away and break its spell. Every time I got a dozen
letters I got fresh thrills, but in spite of myself I began to have
about my life some of that feeling with which we await the
rising of a curtain at a play.

One day I said to Maggie Buggy, "Can't we get some priest
you know to lay the curse?"

178

Photo Sessler 6* Henderson

THE HOPE DIAMOND

DRINK AND DRUGS AND THE HOPE DIAMOND

"A priest will bless the stone/' said Maggie, "and be sure
that will foil the devil in it."

We set out in my electric victoria for the church of Mon-
signor Russell.

"Look, Father," I said to him, "this thing has got me nervous.
Would you bless it for me?"

We were in a small side room of the church, and Monsignor
Russell donned his robes and put my bauble on a velvet cushion.

As he continued his preparations, a storm broke. Lightning
flashed. Thunder shook the church. I don't mind saying various
things were scared right out of me. There was no wind or rain;
just darkness and these lurid lightning thrusts. Across the
street a tree was struck and splintered. Maggie was half-frantic
with her fear; beads were clicking through her fingers. I wished
I could have such faith; Maggie was calling on Personages
with whom I rarely reckon in my thoughts.

Monsignor Russell's Latin words gave me strange comfort.
Ever since that day, I've worn my diamond as a charm. I kid
myself, of course but I like to pretend the thing brings good
luck. As a matter of fact, the luckiest thing about It is that, if
I ever had to, I could hock it.

Grief over the loss of my father brought me back, tempo-
rarily, to morphine.

I was becoming more cunning than an animal in hiding my
supply of morphine. A squirrel saving nuts is limited by its
undevelo; *d imagination when it buries such winter treasure
in earth holes or hollow trees; but I was not so handicapped.
A squirrel, for example, is debarred from sending money to
some greedy doctor or druggist and making arrangement^ to
have a bit of powder sent each day by mail. (That was a trick
of mine that worked until Ned had all our mail deliveries
switched from 2020 to the Washington Post.)

Thin packages, were cached beneath my bedroom carpet.
With a pair of scissors I ^ould make skillful cuts in obscure
places in the furniture and then, as far in as I could poke my
thinning arm into the stuffing of chairs, couches, sofas, I would

179

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

put a small brown bottle, hoping thus to impregnate my future
with the drug I craved. I seem to recall that I had one big
bottle stored away inside the pipe organ,

I was always popping into drugstores, although on most shop-
ping trips I would simply flick a finger at some servant as a
signal to begone upon my errand. In those days a woman,
diamond laden, could buy laudanum by the quart if she would
simply pay the druggist what he asked. I always went provided
with some sort of prescription.

Months went by, and what with dope and drink I had no
trace of appetite. I could not keep a thing on my stomach so
I would fill myself with narcotics and go, completely dazed, for
two or three hours of driving.

There was one advantage for me in the habit. Ordinarily I
worried incessantly about the money about all the things
that formerly my father had dealt with; but when I took
morphine there were no worries, no cares. Of course I paled
until I looked like a ghost.

If by some bad chance I could not get the stuff the instant I
required it, I would take a dose of chloral, or anything narcotic
that I could buy in the drugstores.

Then one day I confessed to Ned.

He was shocked, but sweet. "Can't you stop?" he asked me.
"Suppose you try real hard. You know, we've got the baby; we
must think of him."

"I'll stop," But I was quite unable to keep my word with-
out help, so one day I called up Dr. Hardin. I told him I had
been taking morphine again, that it was beyond my control,
and I wanted him to cure me of the habit.

He came, asked some questions, and left beside my bed a
big green bottle from which I was supposed to take a small and
measured dose whenever I could not control my nerves. Well,
during that night I drank everything in the bottle.

It must have been about ten days later that I came to what
we may call my senses. When I could focus my eyes, I saw two
women sitting in the room; they wore white starched uniforms.
Dr. Barker was in charge of my case then.

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DRINK AND DRUGS AND THE HOPE DIAMOND

I also learned that, during those days when I was blithering
and dazed, Dr. Barker had wanted me locked up in some
sanitarium. That was when Ned McLean did something fine for
me.

"We'll have a sanitarium right upstairs," he said, "on the top
floor of this house. If she were to come out of this locked up
somewhere, she never would recover from the shock. She stays
her el"

I was meant to "taper off." At times I felt such pains as
must afflict a creature while a bigger beast eats and claws at its
middle. God-awful things were hiding underneath my bed,
and it was no use telling me they were not there I knew they
were, and felt their dreadful ever-changing shapes.

One day I telephoned for Barker.

"I am ready now to fight this thing myself. I will do as you
say that is, I will try, and certainly I will submit myself to
any rule you make. Just to prove me, put a vial of morphine
tablets on the table here beside my bed. I won't touch them, and
I won't drink or smoke a cigarette."

I do not know whether it really was morphine that Dr.
Barker left with me, but I believed it was. Wrestling with my-
self to keep resisting, I would become drenched with perspira-
tion. I did not win the fight for hours.

I know there was a month when during any night I did not
pass more than a half-hour in bed. We used to walk around
that mammoth house throughout the night, the nurses and I.
We would circle every gallery as, so many times, I've paced the
decks of liners. We would go from the top floor to the ground,
each nurse holding tightly to an arm; and when we would
round a corner or go into another room I would start and
tremble.

"What's that crawling on the wall?"

"Now, now, that's just a shadow, darling."

"If that's a shadow it has legs with substance and a slimy,
writhing tail."

Don't ask me to account for it: I really saw the things the
nurses said I fancied out of shadows. I have had lots of time

181

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

to think about the matter. It is my belief that out of mental
records of my past the impression of some lizard or garden
snake no bigger than a pencil came crawling into memory, and
that in my delirium these old impressions were enlarged and
projected against the wall and ceilings of my home.

Eventually I seemed to find myself with a lessened craving
but whenever Barker came he warned me: no drinks, no
smoking.

I had the help of all who loved me, including Ned. We used
to talk of my affliction without a trace of passion. He wanted
me to discipline myself for the sake of our baby; but he was
unwilling to discipline himself.

One night, about the time Barker was becoming proud of his
cure of me, Ned did not come home. I sent his secretary to the
Post to get him. When the secretary failed to produce his boss,
I called up Ned and ordered him to come right straight to 2020.

"I'm not coming home to-night."

"Unless you come I'm going to pour myself a nice big drink."
There were terrific implications there. Need I confess again
that I was warped and spoiled?

"Go on. Take your drink. I'm not coming home."

I was in the fix of a man who draws a gun and lacks the nerve
to shoot. I called up Barker over in Baltimore, and told him
Ned and I were fighting and that I was about to take a drink.
The two nurses, Miss Shearn and Miss O'Brien, were still
staying with me, although I was supposed to be quite cured.

"Listen," said Dr. Barker: "don't you dare touch a thing.
Get your hat and coat and come straight to me as fast as you
can come. I'll be waiting. Mind, now."

I ordered the car and told the two nurses to get ready.
Mother had learned of this commotion. She pleaded with me
to calm myself and stay at home. I would not listen, flouncing
out the door to where the car was waiting under the glass-roofed
porte-cochere.

"You open it up," I said to the chauffeur, "and if you fail
to pass each car ahead you can be sure someone else will drive
for me to-morrow."

182

DRINK AND DRUGS AND THE HOPE DIAMOND

I guess I made him mad, or hurt his pride; at any rate, he
broke some records for the run from Washington to Baltimore
and lost a fender.

Those two calm nurses were anything but calm when we
arrived. The Irish saints they called on for protection were
pretty nearly a Catholic education for me.

A suite had been engaged at one of the hotels.

Dr. Barker was waiting in my sitting room. He is an ad-
mirable man handsome, effective, self-contained, and force-
ful. I owe him much.

"I'm through." I said to Dr. Barker. "Ned's acting up, ter-
ribly. He would not come home to-night and I am through."

Barker raised his eyebrows a little and looked at me.

"Now," went on the dramatist in me, "I'm going to order
three cocktails, and cigarettes. I'm pulling wide the throttle
on the road to hell."

Barker seated himself in a comfortable chair and merely
looked at me.

Presently a hotel servant came and placed the tray of cock-
tails and the cigarettes on the mantelpiece. The door closed
and we two again were alone. I rubbed my hands. Then I
walked up to the cocktails three Manhattans.

I could not reach out for a glass. I told myself that Barker
had me hypnotized. Probably the truth is I could not bear to
see a man so fine gaze at me with contempt. It was then about
half-past nine.

We were there until three-thirty in the morning, and if
Barker spoke two words I do not remember them. He simply
watched me. Repeatedly I went to the mantelpiece and stopped,
just as if I were a clock that had been wound tod tightly.
Whether Barker really hypnotized me or whether he simply
aroused my self : respect I do not know. At some time before
dawn the nurses put me to bed, and Barker gave me something
he said would make me sleep. It did.

That was the last struggle I had with morphine. I think the
credit goes half to Barker, half to little Vinson Walsh McLean.

183

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

When I returned home I discovered that Ned was still off
somewhere on a drinking spree. My nurses remained with me
for some time after that, and even when they left I continued
to be careful. My bout with morphine was over forever.

184

CHAPTER XVI

My Relatives-in-Law

THERE never has been another cast in the mold of Ned's uncle,
Truxtun Beale of San Francisco. Born rich, he never had to
lift a finger. In 1891, at the age of thirty-five, this brother-in-
law of influential John R. McLean was sent as Minister to
Persia; thereafter he was, simultaneously, Minister to Greece,
Roumania, and Serbia; and after that he traveled in Siberia,
Central Asia, and Chinese Turkestan. As one of the family, I
can testify that he really was an envoy extraordinary. I suspect
he is, or has been, worth about four millions. All his life he has
been a sort of lightning rod attracting trouble.

Uncle Trux is now almost eighty and still a fascinating man;
but he has the darnedest habits the old firebrand. Some-
times he leaves his cluttered house at 28 Jackson Place (it is
packed with objects of art and other treasures) in such a hurry
that his clothes are pulled on over his pajamas. He has been
known to stay that way for weeks with a cravat "dressing up"
the collar of his pajamas. God knows where he often sleeps 1
Possibly in a moldy chair at the Metropolitan Club. His first
wife I adore her and she is often my house guest now
is Aunt Harriet, the daughter of James G. Elaine. This marriage
ended in divorce, and, in 1903, he married Marie Oge of San
Rafael, a grandniece of Salmon P. Chase.

Long ago, in New York, Uncle Trux went out for an evening
in the company of a young beauty and her husband, a Pitts-
burgh playboy. They were eating and drinking on the roof of
Madison Square Garden when the husband left abruptly.

Suddenly Uncle Trux heard something pop; people jumped
to their feet, women screamed. Just then the young husband
came back and said, "Here, Truxtun, you take Evelyn home.

185

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

I've just shot Stanford White." In his hand was a pistol that
still exhaled a burned-powder odor.

Uncle Trux was petrified. He was still, he hoped, a person
eligible for diplomatic honors, and there he found himself
smack in the middle of a page-one scandal.

Uncle Trux was not feeling gallant then; he hustled the
former Evelyn Nesbit down to the street, boosted her into a
taxi cab, and himself raced off to catch a train for California.
It was he who sent, in place of flowers, the California lawyer,
Delmas, to defend his friend. Uncle Trux never came back
across the Rockies until the trial was over, and Harry Thaw
was safe in an asylum.

I do not know for sure what Uncle Trux was mad about
the time he had his trouble with Taft's Secretary of the Navy,
George Von Lengerke Meyer. Of course, the old man always has
been jealous, but he was apt to take fire just as much at a
harsh word. (Once, on Marie's behalf, he shot a California
editor.)

This particular day at 2020, after luncheon a servant in-
formed Ned that the Metropolitan Club was calling him; it
was urgent. Ned bounced back from the telephone and grabbed
his hat. His excited eyes showed circles white as egg-on-spinach.

"Come quick," he said, "so we can see the fun."

"What is it?"

By that time Ned was at the porte-cochere, leaping at the
Fiat.

"Uncle Trux," he roared, "and Secretary Meyer are fighting
in front of the Metropolitan Club. They began by pulling each
other's noses on the club steps, and now they are locked to-
gether rolling in the gutter. The House Committee thinks I
ought to come and separate ? em."

They had been pulled apart before Ned arrived, but he was
there in time to hear his Uncle Trux say: "Now, you this-and-
that, come on across the street to the hotel. We'll get a room
and finish."

Ned phoned me later: "Uncle Trux was the winner." Ned,
naturally, was partisan. Since I do not know the inside of the

186

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story I am willing to call it a draw. Marie Oge Beale is very
handsome, as vivid as a poppy.

John R. McLean was always "Pop" to Ned. To me he was
and will remain a mystery. I know he had an acid stomach,
but I can't see why he had to have an acid heart. His father,
Washington McLean, built up the Cincinnati Enquirer and
accustomed his children to a life of riches. (John R, used to
tell how he eventually got the paper for himself and then made
his father pay to subscribe.)

Mrs. Washington McLean was just about as fussy as she
would have been allowed to be as Empress of Russia. Four
horses were harnessed to her victoria. With two men on the
box and two outriders, she demurely rode alone in the seat and
probably pretended to herself that in her veins was nothing
less than royal blood.

John R. went to Harvard, then to Heidelberg. He loved
power and nothing was too much trouble when he saw a chance
to extend his reach and his control of other men. When I came
into the family he was at his peak. He would be sweet and
gentle with some callers and when they had departed he would
say, "Now, what do they want out of me?"

The McLeans had the big house in I Street where afterward
I was hostess. It covered half the block. John Russell Pope, the
architect, had nobly fashioned it for entertaining nothing
else; actually the modern part is like a palace, but this pre-
tentious front is hooked onto a small, old-fashioned home of
crumbling brick. (That was the old McLean place where I
used to go when I was little.) Around the corner in Fifteenth
Street was the original Shoreham Hotel. I Street is paralleled
by H Street, and there John R. had another house in which he
had his office. This was the place that later on, in the Harding
Administration, was called "the love nest" by Harry Daugherty.

One day when my boy Vinson was a baby, Mummie McLean
herself took me to see that place. Elsie De Wolfe had super-
vised the decorations; it was one of the first things she ever
did. Below the street level were the kitchen and the pantry. At

187

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

the rear on the first floor was the dining room with stone serving
tables and a small fountain. In front of that there really was an
office, a room with panels of buff satin. John R., the head spider,
could sit behind the curtains in a big bay window and observe
all who passed along H Street, knowing that none in the street
could see him. Upstairs were two bedrooms. The rear one was
in lovely chintz; the front one was a gorgeous place, everything
covered with pale pink taffeta. The gilt bed was sheltered by
pink taffeta draperies and pale pink taffeta curtains hung at
the window. It was alluring.

The other day I thumbed through a book of tissue copies of
letters and came across one to Brewster and Company, the
carriage people, in New York. John R. was arranging the details
of a gift, an automobile for his wife. Her name, Emily, was to
be put in silver letters somewhere on the inside of the car. He
had sent to Brewster's more than a dozen objects to be in-
stalled: a bottle for salts, address book, pin-cushion, mirror,
hairbrush, hatbrush, and memorandum pad. All those things
were silver, and John R. was meticulous in his specifications :
"Remember, Mr, Brewster, I want this to be very nice, and I
look to you to make it so for me." Another time, in 1909, that
book reveals him writing to Tiffany and Company.

Gentlemen:

I have just received by U. S. Express Company this morning the
emerald and diamond pendant, which I ordered from your company
in Paris. But the combination collar and bracelet which I ordered
there for Mrs. McLean has not reached me yet, and as my time for
giving it to her is growing short, won't you kindly cable over there
and find out when it will reach this country, and when I will get it
here, Washington Gas Light Company, D. C.
Sincerely yours,

JOHN R. MCLEAN.

He wrote to Peter Schwab at Hamilton, Ohio:
Dear Peter:

What you must have heard was that I wanted to sell Enquirers.
As for selling the Enquirer, why, I would as soon think of cutting

188

MY RELATIVES-IN-LAW

off my right hand. My father made that paper, as you know, and
I never will sell it as long as I have a drop of blood in me. The
Cincinnati Enquirer is for my son. No money could buy it. So glad
to hear from you.

Just about everything John R. had he seemed to hold for
his son. In those days, though, I thought he was a skinflint.
Ned received $1,000 a month. I fully realize that to many this
amount would seem magnificent, but it never lasted Ned more
than a few days. I paid all our living costs and bought my
own clothes (in 1911 I had a sable coat that cost $60,000);
on top of that, I made up Ned's deficit when he got into jams
and needed money. A letter from Pop McLean to Ms boy Ned
simply complicates my efforts to understand John R.:

Dear Ned:

All well here. Tell Pop the truth, how are you? Are you over your
cold or not? Everything is going here all right at the Post. All you
have got to do in this world is to keep well. Pop will take all the re-
sponsibility. I am only holding the Post for you. I just sent you a
telegram. Hope I will get a good answer.

He would write like that and mean it, but when Ned went
deeply into debt, and was threatened with bankruptcy, this
man who had encouraged him in idleness let me be the rescuer.
I got every dollar I could get from the Trust Company. Once
I pawned a ruby bracelet and other jewelry. Another time I
paid $300,000 cash to release my husband from the clutches
of his creditors. To me old John R. had few redeeming
qualities; Ned's wastrel characteristics were blandly tolerated
by him.

And yet, poor devil, how horribly he died!

Mummie was a creature of entirely different stuff. She
was a gentlewoman in every fiber; she was foolish on only one
subject: her son. I felt her fineness on the day the torpedo boat
destroyer Beale was launched into the Delaware River, at the
yard of William Cramp and Sons Ship and Engine Building

189

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

Company. That day soft brown fur of her coat collar was about
her throat. She had changed a hat that was white with ostrich
feathers for a smaller one of dark straw and ribbon much less
apt to catch the wind. A bottle of champagne in a gold wire net
was held by the neck as a kind of wand in her white-gloved
hand. Her cheek was deeply dimpled, and her smile was a
young girl's smile.

"I name thee Beale!" she cried, and with an arm that knew
a tennis racket and how to swing it in a circle she swung the
bottle hard against the prow. A giant figure 5 was painted where
that champagne made a christening foam on the thick paint
of the new hull.

The Beale for whom the ship was named was Mummie's
father, who had been Lieutenant Edward Fitzgerald Eeale of
the United States Navy, then had resigned to become a
brigadier general of the Army. Somehow as a boy, an, ensign,
while helping to win California for the U. S. A. he also won for
himself a million-acre ranch.

After the Civil War, as a friend of President Grant, he had
his third career as a diplomat at Vienna. He was born in 1822
and died in 1893. My, but Mummie was proud of him, and so
was his other daughter whose eyes that day were full of tears:
Aunt Mamie was present with her husband George Bakhmeteff,
who late in 1911 arrived in Washington as the Czar's am-
bassador, little dreaming that he would be the last to repre-
sent his emperor in America.

The Bakhrneteffs were temporarily at the Shoreham when I
first went to call on them.

I found a fat and dumpy little woman whose dyed red hair
was pink in spots, as mine is now. Her nose was sharp. Each
move she made was accompanied by the clink and clatter of a
pound or two of barbaric jewelry. Her hat was thickly
feathered; Aunt Mamie adored feathers. I liked her right away.
She was, beyond dispute, an ugly woman. Uncle George's face
was deeply pitted with the scars of smallpox. He always wore
a monocle. They loved each other more than any couple I

190

MY RELATIVES-IN-LAW

have ever known. They were completely devoted, two beings in
a perfect union, unhappy every minute they were apart. He
had a caustic wit; to illustrate it offhand I have to skip ahead
to 1917.

When the Russian Revolution was under way, while the
Czar was a prisoner and Kerensky had become the head of the
government, President Wilson asked Uncle George a ques-
tion.

"This Bakhmeteff who is being sent over here to represent
the Russian people in your place; he is a relative?"

"He is related to me," said Uncle George, "in just about the
way that Booker T. Washington was related to George Wash-
ington."

Mr. Wilson roared at that.

The Bakhmeteffs were the guests of honor at a dinner I
gave at 2020; that was February 2, 1912 the same day we
settled a lawsuit with Cartier and paid a part of the $154,000
for the Hope diamond. I wore the stone that night but would
not let any of my friends touch it on the ground that they
might not be immune to its curse.

That was a party! There were forty-eight for dinner, and
the cost of the whole entertainment was $40,000; much of that
was for orchids and 'for four thousand two-dollar yellow lilies,
brought from London. I wore the Star of the East in my hair.
Among the guests were Admiral Dewey and his wife, Ned's
aunt.

I can't think when I first met Millie Dewey. She had great
blue eyes, and was as dainty and as scratchy as a cat. A doll!
That is the only word I can think of to apply to her. She was
completely feminine and saved each thing the Admiral gave her
in the manner of a girl who hoards her emotional souvenirs
dance programs, faded flowers, and similar objects; I remember
being puzzled over her concern for the safety of a china orna-
ment, a yellow cat on a purple pillow.

I loved Admiral Dewey. He used to take me for drives, and
driving was the old man's hobby. One day we went to Arlington

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

and rode through all those twisting avenues between the curving
rows of graves of soldiers and sailors, mostly officers. Admiral
Dewey showed me precisely where he wanted to be buried.

With both hands he preened his snowy mustache. "I'm going
to have a tomb in here that will make that ugly mausoleum of
Admiral Porter look like hell."

Aunt Millie used to say to me: "You go with George. He
wants to hold the reins himself and does not enjoy being driven.
I am content in a victoria or a brougham, but I am nervous
when I ride close to the horses."

She would tell me how she dreamed and thought of her
mother constantly after old Mrs. Washington McLean had
died. She grumbled all the years I knew her about her mother's
w ill "that unjust will." Sometimes her grumbling had a
quality that suggested she was talking less to me than to her
dead mother. Such a conversation would run on like this:
"Cutting me out with only a life interest! Humph! And I
should have had one third of Mamma's estate It all came
from Papa and I have been juggled out of it. I do not blame
poor little Mamma. It must have given her many unhappy
hours. After all, I was the last person on earth she spoke to,
and I was the only child she kissed and blessed."

Mrs. Dewey and her sister, Mrs. Mamie Ludlow (her son,
Frederick Bugher, was Police Commissioner of New York for
a while when Hylan was mayor), squabbled endlessly; they
fought like sparrows, with chirps and pecks and screams.
Mamie was the widow of Rear Admiral Ludlow. The constant
umpire was John R.

Aunt Millie used to tell me how she quivered when she and
the Admiral, soon after their marriage, were being criticized In
the newspapers. Two months after their marriage, in November,
1899, they had moved into a place called Beauvoir, in Woodley
Lane. The man who destroyed the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay
took pride in a little sitting room decorated in Delft blue and
white. His admiral's flag hung against the wall, with pictures
of Cavite and also photographs of two Spanish ships that his
guns had sunk.

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MY RELATIVES-IN-LAW

Aunt Millie was really dwelling in the past for all of her last
years. She had been a beautiful widow in 1899 when Dewey
came home from the Orient a hero. He was acclaimed almost
as a god. But Mrs. Washington McLean and her widowed
daughter, Millie, came to the conclusion that he was not a god,
but quite a man. The night he proposed the old lady was
poised upstairs awaiting her daughter's call. She hustled down,
kissed the Admiral, kissed her daughter, almost before she
had heard a signal. Then the nation gave the Admiral a
house in Washington, D. C., at 1747 Rhode Island Avenue,
N.W. and he, dear man, gave the house to his new wife.
What a clamor that caused! I barely remembered any of
it, of course; but after I was married and often with the
Deweys, they continued to speak of this period of disfavor
as something much more dreadful than the war that made him
a hero.

"The New York Journal had a whole page of lies," she told
me once. "All about my disputing for precedence with Mrs.
Nelson Miles, how I rose from table before my hostess to
show I was a 'hero's wife', how I fought for my rank at
luncheon and dinners. There was not a word of truth in those
silly charges. Miles was just a lieutenant general, while George
was Admiral of the Navy. There was no question of his rank.
Yet all that abuse distressed me horribly, because I was, and
am, so sensitive. It almost killed me!"

Poor Aunt Millie! She had little force with which to meet
calumny. She was easily wounded, even by a fancied slight.
Later on Ned did something that she thought was outrageous
and Admiral Dewey, through me, sent word that he never
wanted to look on Ned's face again.

I found a letter in our files that I had not seen in twenty-
three years. Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge, the wife of the Senator,
wrote it to John R. McLean in 1912, when Taft, Roosevelt,
and Wilson and their supporters were in a mad, triangular
campaign. It seems to me that Mrs. Lodge wrote beautifully
of my husband's mother:

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

No one had, or ever will have, her grace and charm of figure and
movement. To see her cross her own ball room or sit at the head
of her table; to have her come as she so kindly did sometimes to my
house, when I could no longer go to her, and enter the room with
that beautiful gliding motion was always an enchantment to me.

And then her lovely hands with those flashing diamonds which
made her fingers even more fine and slim, those eyes of hers and
hair! I have to say these things to you because I know that you
appreciate all Mrs. McLean's kindness and the warmth of her human
sympathy; but I want you also to know how I admired and re-
joiced in the outward and visible signs of her many inward gifts
and graces.

This reminds me of a time at Newport when I was full of
eagerness for the marrow I was to l^elp Aunt Mamie
Bakhmeteff with her garden party at the Russian summer
embassy- Between times, when I rode in a car or drove in a
smart cart to Bailey's Beach, I had beside me on the seat my
big French poodle, Sarto; he was white, woolly as a sheep, and
devoted to me. That caniche could almost talk. So sensitive was
he, I swear Ms tail and spirits drooped as I read a telegram
from Bar Harbor that told me Mummie McLean was confined
to her bed with a bad cold. I hated that summer home that
John R. owned in Bar Harbor it had uneven floors and other
antique discomforts; but as I expected Aunt Mamie forthwith
canceled all arrangements for her Russian party at Newport
and we set out for Maine.

When Mummie was not on parade she was accustomed to
move around the house in a little, old flannel gown, with her
hair pulled straight back into a braid held fast with a string
of ribbon. She was thin, dark of skin, and in her brilliancy as
hard as any diamond in my jewel casket. When young she had
been better than good-looking; that could be realized by any-
one who saw her eyes and dimples. But when I made her into
a grandmother she was old, but of unrevealed age. Her age was
guarded by her as a bitter secret. In September, 1912, I feel
sure that there were years that she despised and hated among
her probable sixty-five. Perhaps it was bitterness that flavored

194

MY RELATIVES-IN-LAW

the witty remarks with which she could keep a table roaring
with laughter. I have heard her do so a hundred times, especially
at her regular Sunday luncheons out at Friendship where, at one
time or another, everybody came who helped, through politics
or business, to run the nation. She was ghastly-looking when
Ned, Aunt Mamie, and I reached her, but what she had was
still "a cold/' John R. was already there.

I stayed beside her several days, and once or twice we
thought she was getting better. Then abruptly she began to
breathe much harder. An oxygen tank was brought and we be-
gan to put in calls to Baltimore for Dr. Barker. He was away
somewhere in the mountains. I do not recall all the details of the
search for him, but at last he was found at a point on Lake
Toxaway in North Carolina, more than thirteen hundred miles
from where Mummie was trying with frightful wheezings to
get air into her lungs.

John R. said, "Get him." The man who spoke was one long
accustomed to authority. The messages went forth by telephone
and telegraph. Three special trains would be needed to get
Barker to Maine: one from North Carolina to Washington;
one from Washington to New York; then a third train that
would travel over several lines to Bar Harbor. The McLean
payroll was a long one. All kinds of talents were detached from
other employment just to weave for this one occasion a swifter
path for Barker. At the beginning he had to come for hours
down the mountains in a wagon, and while he was being jolted
along Mummie McLean was dying.

"Send off a wire," said John R. to me as he halted in
his pacing, "to Tiffany or Cartier whichever you think best.
I want a string of pearls. I have been after them some time to
locate a string."

In the next room my Sarto, grotesquely barbered (I paid
five dollars for his haircuts), lifted up his long snout and
howled. I shivered.

I find some letters: in one John R. asks one of his editors to
get two hundred decks of playing cards with unglazed surfaces.
He wrote: "Mrs. McLean's eyes cannot stand the shiny cards."

195

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

In another, written much more than a year before this time, he
was asking one of my favorite jewelers to be on the lookout
in Paris for a string of pearls in case he wished to buy one when
he came over. Why did he not go through with that?

I hated my father-in-law and yet I want to be fair. The
old man with his soft blue eyes, his cropped mustache, was
always a businessman. A string of pearls? A hundred thousand
dollars? Why, that would buy the presses for the weekly paper
he was now conceiving, now aborting in his mind. He knew
much better than I could ever know the force of money, what
true wealth was and how to store it. The business manager of
the Enquirer received from him a note expressing genuine de-
light: "Do you really mean you have on hand $22,000 worth
of white paper and that it is all paid for?" Another one to
W. F. Wiley, his Cincinnati editor, reveals a business mind
turning over just about as fast as big Hoe presses.

How would it do to use more white paper on the week days and
give me all the chance possible on Sunday? Last year we printed
more Sunday papers than this, and yet this year we used over
18,000 pounds more of white paper than last year. The increase
for the weekly amounts to maybe 4500 pounds. Now I would do
more with the daily than what we have been doing, but turn less
white paper in on Sunday. It's the terriffic use of white paper on
Sunday that is my great expense. The additional page on Sunday,
as you know, far outranks the additional page on a week day. I have
no competition to speak of on Sunday, but competition on the other
six days. Just for a trial let us turn it around save on Sunday,
and spend a little more on week days. Kindest regards.

Such a mind would envisage a string of pearls and right be-
side them 600-pound rolls of white newsprint in a mound big
enough to run his papers for a longer while than I can calcu-
late. He would be concerned because, with Congress in session,
less gas was being consumed in Washington than his engineers
had estimated. He would send word to Mamie Ludlow:

The man who now runs the Arlington will give us $15,000 per
year for the rent of the Normandie, provided we put on $25,000

196

MY RELATXVES-IN-LAW

worth of repairs for work that he thinks necessary to make the hotel
all right. You see he has a full equipment of cooks, maids, men and
etc. and can move right in. Now the question is, are you willing to
put in l /z of the $25,000. I am if you are. Milly says she Is. Please
let me hear from you at once? There seems to be no danger about
the mines.

Aff.-

JOHN R. MCLEAN.

God knows what happened to him on the route to fortune.
He left Harvard early after being injured, so I always
understood, while playing baseball. Then, after some years
abroad, where he became infected with the harsh, ruthless
philosophy of Kant and Nietzsche, he returned to take over his
father's paper. He made it boom. He made it into what I con-
sider one of the greatest papers west of the Hudson River, and
he made it sensitive to news by free spending on telegraph
tolls.

I imagine that in his youth he was more gentle and that he
put on a harder shell as he grew older.

Dr. Barker reached the other side of the bay just before
eight o'clock on September 8th, Will Duckstein met him there
with a fast motor boat, and brought him across through a
streak of spray. When he entered Mummie brightened just a
trifle; her faith, as mine, was high in Barker. I hated my Hope
diamond when he turned away from the bed. If anybody could
have saved her Barker could; but Barker shrugged his
shoulders. I did not know what to blame. We needed her, each
one of us, for she was sane and good.

Outside the wind shrieked against the house that had with-
stood so much harsh weather. A shutter banged. Sarto lifted
Ms head as he would do when someone played a violin offkey or
sang soprano. Then he began to howl. Another superstition?
Hell, I am not saying. All I know is that while Mummie lay
dying Sarto howled.

Ned threw himself upon his mother's body, and although he
had grown to be over six feet tall and weighed more than two
hundred pounds, I could detect in Ms heartbroken wails the

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

grief of the sweet-faced, wholly charming little fellow whose
photograph, aged eight, can help me orient my mind when I am
inclined to think, sometimes, that the McLean I married was
always a half-lost soul. I often wonder what he would have
been, what he might be, if he had never had much money.

But we had the money, or rather it had us. We were held
fast In Its clutches, captives to it as I had been to morphine.
Indeed, I think that is the way to say it: we were the slaves of
an infernal habit. This habit stole our will, subtly metamor-
phosed our point of view, thwarted our creative powers, and
quite constantly made us the victims of such awful shapes of
greed as would defy the fancy of such persons as we Walshes
were until after I was ten. I will prove my case with something
that I ordinarily forget; this was the experience that to remem-
ber even for an instant chills my blood with horror.

Among the letters that poured in on us, extending sympathy
and love from all our friends and Mummie's, there were sev-
eral that were vile. I shall not dwell upon this grisly subject.
The point is that John R. found he had to hire two men to
guard his wife's tomb by day and night. The armed watchman
who came on duty as darkness settled was escorted to the
mausoleum by the superintendent of the cemetery. This offi-
cial unlocked the tomb, and when the watchmen entered locked
it again. The man was a prisoner there all night. For several
years this was continued; and all this unnatural seeping out of
fear was caused by letters asking money to placate the threat
of some greedy fiend who signed his letters with one word:
GHOUL.

With Mummie buried, a half-dozen women began that win-
ter, 1912-1913, to struggle to achieve the leadership of Wash-
ington society. The newspapers always speak of the wife of
the current president as "the First Lady of the Land"; my
experience is that she has little chance of being First in Wash-
ington. No matter what her skill, her grace, or her family
background, when she moves into the White House she moves

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MY RELATIVES-IN-LAW

into a social strait jacket. She never enjoys anything like
freedom in making up her lists. Her husband's problems must
come first. His politics keep interfering and, moreover, the
manner of their entertaining must never cause dismay among
the churchgoing small-town voters. That winter our friend
Mrs. Taft was preparing to depart, and the new mistress of
the White House was to be the first Mrs. Woodrow Wilson
gentle, cultured, almost an invalid, far outside my reckless
orbit.

The ones who struggled for the ruling social place in Wash-
ington, a place linked up* with Palm Beach, Bar Harbor, and
Newport, were very rich women: Mrs. Levi Leiter, Mrs. Wil-
liam F. Draper (I have her photograph taken with a coronet,
each point blunted with a pearl approximately half as big as
my thumb), Mrs. Edson Bradley, and some others. Marshall
Field's widow was in Washington that year, and she was in an
entrenched position.

Because of our mourning, Ned and I were completely out
of things.

199

CHAPTER XVII

Newport and Palm Beach

WE had our customary pre-Christmas party for Vinson on
his birthday. His parties as my own were everything that
White House parties cannot be. Champ Clark was devoted to
my little boy; so was Admiral Dewey, who gave him, one year,
a birthday cake that was a pastrycook's idea of the battleship
Olympic. The Deweys also had given him his first team of goats.
He had one toy I had selected, a life-sized burro made of the
skin of one of those creatures of the Colorado mountains. There
was nothing I could think of that our son lacked. His Christmas
parties were a treat for others. Each little boy would get an
electric railroad train or something like it; each little girl, the
most expensive doll. I think I never spent less than $15,000
for one of his parties.

Somehow, Ned got the idea that Vinson would be spoiled by
too much attention from his elders. As a matter of fact, the
child did talk in the manner of grown-ups.

"Say," Ned exclaimed to me one day in a rebellious voice.
"I had a Negro boy to play with when I was little. Vinson
needs a change from this association with detectives, nurses,
and others. He does not see enough of children. He'll be a snob
if you're not careful."

I argued. Ned retorted: "Last year we provided him with
a private showing of the circus. My plan is to change things
a lot. Let's find him a Negro boy to play with. When he grows
up the Negro boy can be his valet." I had a notion, for a while,
that the scheme would be amusing.

We could not buy a colored boy, of course, although it was
our habit to buy anything we wanted. But Ned made arrange-

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NEWPORT AND PALM BEACH

ments with the parents of a little five-year-old named Julian
Winbush to let him come and live with us. They relinquished
all control of him for ten years, and signed some papers to
make it legal.

The Winbush boy was shiny black with teeth that anyone
would envy. I dressed him up to match Vinson, and then we
headed South in the private car. The colored Pullman porters
all the way to Palm Beach were just about hysterical at the
astonishing prospects of Julian Winbush. Aladdin, Sindbad,
Ali Baba rolled into one would not have been as interesting
to them as the little colored boy who, they thought, was being
reared as a brother of the so-called "hundred-million-dollar
baby. 35

In winter and in summer most of Vinson's little things came
from Paris, from Worth's like his little carriage robe, his
hat, his coat, all made of ermine. I liked that little colored
boy, at first; but I could not bring myself to a point where
there was pleasure for me in dressing him in clothes from
Paris. Yet, since Vinson played with him, he must be clean
and sweetly scented. He was playful, friendly, roguish. His
big eyes that rolled like agates in his little head gleamed with
amusement when I placed him and Vinson in a wicker rolling
chair at Palm Beach and pushed them, seated side by side.

As far as I can recall the experience, Vinson was none too
well pleased. So far as he was concerned, I would have done
as well to have borrowed a playmate for him from the zoo.
My Vinson was remarkable for something I have not detected
in my other children. He was puzzled, almost as soon as he
could talk, at being alive and by the queerness of that situa-
tion. If God made us, he asked me once, then who made God?
I could not answer, so he posed the question to his dancing
teacher, Miss Hawks but she was no better informed than I.

By the time we were ready to come North from Palm Beach
our experiment with the little colored boy was nearly finished.
We canceled ourselves out of the deal with money. I have
wondered, once or twice, what black-skinned Julian Winbush
thought about it all, or thinks about it now. Some day, perhaps

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

(God help me!), he will write Ms own memoirs and speak his
mind concerning rich white folks.

Vinson had one little chum whose visits made him rapturous
Shirley Carter, a sweet and lovely boy on whose counte-
nance was printed all the fineness of the great old family of
his father, Dr. Carter, that reached in an aristocratic line far
back into the history of Virginia, Those two little boys, to-
gether, were wholly charming, in microcosm what the race of
grown-up men should be; at least, that was the way I felt. Most
of the time, of course, my Vinson's companions were the
heavy-shouldered guards who were his outdoor nurses and to
whom he was attached. The way he talked with them and
their manner with him was the reason, I suppose, for his
young intelligence having such a strong appeal for some of his
distinguished friends. Between my little boy and Speaker
Champ Clark there was a real friendship. The old Missouri
politician would walk, sometimes for an hour on end, about
the grounds at Friendship with Vinson's tiny hand clutching
his lowered index finger; linked in that way, they exchanged
thoughts the old man and the little boy.

Among the papers I have looked over in my effort to awake
the past is a typewritten list, part of an expense account of
a guard named Murphy as turned in by Arthur Buckman, who
was then our steward. The list relates to a couple of days when
Vinson was sometimes with me in my box at the Laurel race
track. In my fancy now I can follow him into the paddock,
under the stand, everywhere a little boy's keen curiosity might
take him. When he saw anything he wanted (provided it was
not forbidden as injurious) it was promptly bought. Apparently
he purchased apples and chewing gum on sixteen separate
occasions in those two days; he also admired, somewhere, a
pumpkin, and that was bought The price was a quarter. An-
other quarter was given to an organ man. Heigh ho! it is a
long time since that day, but I find rising inside me a tiny hope
that the organ man was the escort of a dressed-up monkey
that once made my Vinson laugh. He met the organ man a
second time, I now discover for the expense account lists

202

fc

CO

NEWPORT AND PALM BEACH

another quarter. There were quarters handed out four other
times by Vinson, through his almoner, to someone called
Billy. He also handed out a quarter at Friendship to someone
he liked whose name was Joe. I cannot remember, now, just
who the "Margaret" was for whom he bought (aged not quite
five), on two occasions, apples, gum, and candy.

I remember that in 1913 we went back to Newport and in
Black Point Farm found a place that took our fancy. It was
the property of Mr. and Mrs. Reginald Norman, and our near
neighbors were Alfred and Reginald Vanderbilt. I much pre-
ferred Newport to Bar Harbor; besides, with the Bakhmeteffs
living there, I was holding trump cards in what always is a
tricky game society. Ned, of course, wanted nothing to do
with society; he hated it for himself and hated worse, I think,
to have me concerned with it. At heart he was an outdoor man.
Jokes and drinking from a flask in a duck blind pleased him
much better than jesting and drinking in dressed-up company.
Besides, he could not bear to see me dance with other men.
He was by inherited instinct a jealous person, but even while
it irked me I realized that his jealousy was a warped expres-
sion of his love. He never trusted me a minute; I trusted him
too long. That is the precious thing we lost by being too
damned rich: a trustful love.

I never lost the thrill of hoping we were going to have
smooth sailing in our marriage. I used to listen eagerly for
his shout at homecoming "Hey! Evalyn!" If a child was
sick Ned could be as tender as a woman; but he could also be,
when his mean qualities were brought up by drink, a complete
beast. I went to our ducking camp time after time to be with
him. I learned to drive horses in a show ring to be with him.
I stayed away from big parties to be with him to lull his
half-mad jealousy. That first summer at Black Point Farm
I left a lot of social engagements to go off to Quebec to fish
and shoot. We caught salmon until I was worn out and then
proceeded deep into the woods where I shot two caribou and
dropped a moose, an enormous bull whose weight was cal-
culated to be eighteen hundred pounds.

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

That winter, Lady Duff-Gordon designed and made for me
a superb coat of tailless ermine with a deep-shaded flounce
of broadtail. This was draped from my shoulders to a point
below my ankles. The collar was a strip of fur finished with a
heavy tassel, and was twisted once about the throat in the
manner of a hunting stock. The hat I liked to wear with that
coat was black velvet made smart with black aigrettes.

I used to send telegrams to her New York shop, where she
was doing business as "Lucile." A wire from me would read:
"PLEASE HAVE LADY DUFF-GORDON MAKE THE LOVELIEST DRESS
SHE CAN FOR ME STOP HAVE 200 IMPORTANT PEOPLE COMING
TO DINNER DECEMBER 31ST J ' Or "PLEASE MAKE ME AN ORANGE
THEATER GOWN AM DESPERATE." It seems to me, as I finger old
bills and excite my memory, that during some months there
was hardly a day when I was not receiving additions to my
wardrobe. An enormous room on the top floor of 2020, much
bigger than some shops, contained rack upon rack in something
like a wilderness my clothes. I used to give commands to
those I dealt with to send my things by something swifter than
express or parcel post. I ordered Madame Tappe: "PUT A MAN

OR GIRL ON TRAIN AND SEND MY DRESSES AND HATS TO ME RIGHT

AWAY." I paid and never haggled, so I usually got the haste I
asked for. Years and years ago my father said to me: "Daugh-
ter, women who complain of service have only themselves to
blame. They don't know how to tip. Be sure to tip beyond the
amount to be expected. Those people make their living out of
tips. Be generous in such matters. You can afford to do so.
Pinch down in anything but tips."

In 1914, as all the world was plunging into war, we three
Ned, Vinson and I went back to Black Point Farm. We had
a staff of thirty people most of the time. I will try to make
them real again by writing down their names: William
Schindele, Arthur Buckman, Simeon Blake, Leo Costello,
Ernest Heil, Henry Verdelman, Herbert Wright, Hedwig Tack,
Alice Buggy (that was dear Maggie's sister), Laura Jenkins,
Rosie Jenkins, Thomas Murphy, Angus Mclnnis, V. Bracaloni,

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NEWPORT AND PALM BEACH

William Rideout, Rosie Meugel, Helen Wright, G. M. Terrell,
Harry Kohler, Gurley Weynzer, William Holmes, Adrian
Icart, D. H. McVicker, Fanny Grandy, Alfred Schiffner,
Bernice Jackson, Anna Berthold (the second cook), Henri-
etta Jenkins, Maggie Harkum, and some soul called simply
Tony.

Some months our household payroll, with expense accounts,
reached $2,700; by rearranging jobs Buckman got it down to
$1,800, and once or twice the total was only $1,600. Of course,
this does not take account of those who worked on the farm
as laborers. To cooks, maids, laundresses, and cleaning women
we had to add an extra three or four just to do work for the
other servants. The staff would grow in spite of attempted cur-
tailment but, even so, we liked to be surrounded by those
people. The men, to us, were men-at-arms. I almost always have
had devotion from the people who have worked for me.

Those were wild- times we had, during the two summers
we lived at Black Point Farm and went to Newport parties.
Ned was the wild one then, not I. But do not misunderstand
me: I was never just a quiet matron.

I remember a curious experience on a Fourth of July. In
the afternoon Reginald Vanderbilt came over to the farm to
continue his day's drinking in Ned's company. He said to Ned,
"Let's go over to Narragansett Pier and celebrate our Inde-
pendence, hey?"

"I wish I'd thought of that," said Ned. "Why, boy, you're
absolutely brilliant." *

"Now, now," I said, "you'd better not go. Anyway the last
ferry has gone. It's past four o'clock."

"Does that matter?" Reggie challenged. "We'll hire a ferry."

Our motor that year was ultrafast, an Isotta-Fraschmi. In
next to no time, we were on our way; I had about a pound of
diamonds and some evening clothes in a bag.. The two men
had evening clothes. We hired a ferry, and when it came into
its slip we went ashore in the whizzing manner of a skyrocket.
We went to the hotel (since then it has become a boarding
house), cleaned up, and went to the Casino for dinner. Uncle

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

Truxtun Beale joined us there; also Preston Gibson, who was
two or three wives younger then and spent some of his time
writing plays, John R. McLean was living in Narragansett
that summer, to escape a ghost that might have bothered him
In Maine; but I was careful not to tell my father-in-law that
we were there under the same sky.

Ned, Preston, and Reggie kept on drinking, and were feel-
ing pretty good. I kept my promise to myself; black coffee
was the strongest thing I took. Therefore, I was cold sober
when I heard them say we ought to gamble. I loved gambling;
I love it still.

"Come on," I said, "I'll stick with you."

"Not me," said Uncle Trux. "I almost know when I've had
enough."

So just we four headed down a side street of the town and
entered what looked like an entirely innocent little cottage.
Then, inside, we were ushered through a sort of tunnel into a
chamber where, as I remember, there were three tables. Ned
and Preston settled down at roulette; I headed for one of the
other tables, and Reggie went with me.

Reggie played heavily; I played just a little. Then, in
about an hour I got up and walked over to Ned's table. He
presented a strange appearance; his lower lip hung slack, his
eyes were glassy. Ned was a tank, and I knew he did not easily
pass into such a complete daze. I looked at the table and saw
a vast mound of chips just thrown around his elbows where
they might seem to belong to anybody. That was not regu-
lar.

"Here," I said sharply to the croupier, a thin-lipped fellow
wearing a green eyeshade. "What are you doing? What has
been done to my husband? How much has he lost?"

There was silence for a few seconds all over that room.
Everybody stopped to listen. The bouncers moved quietly into
sight, just like an opera chorus getting ready to perform some-
thing that has often been rehearsed. Finally the croupier lifted
his eyeshade an inch and spoke.

"This man has got into the house for fifty-five thousand

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NEWPORT AND PALM BEACH

dollars. And now you ask what we done to him? Lady, that
ain't nice."

"You had no right," I shrilly stated, "to let him play in this
condition. Any child could see he does not know what he's
doing."

While this went on, Ned was pawing his chips around as if
they were sand; he drooled a little and his eyes were half-
shut, vacant of any expression. I hurried back to the table
where I had played.

"Reggie," I said, "come over here. There is something queer
going on." Reggie got up promptly and went directly to the
proprietor, an elderly wolf.

"You should not let him play," he said, as if to shame the
man.

"He owes me money," growled the keeper of the den.

I spoke up to Ned then, as I shook him by the shoulder,
saying, "You are going to stop right now; come on, Ned." He
half -rose to obey me, but the head man came up with paper,
ink, and a pen.

"I'll tell you something, lady. He's going to sign these notes
before he goes out of here. I'm not going to let you out until
these notes are signed."

In the pit of my stomach there was a feeling of chill that
was merely, I knew, the bottom of my rage. I was not scared
a bit.

"You know this is Mr. Ned McLean. You probably know Ms
father. Maybe you think you know how to fix things, but if
you do, you don't know old John R. Now listen: If you try to
make my husband sign a single paper I begin to scream.
You've never heard me scream? When I scream the whole
police department of Narragansett will come a-running. Any-
way, you know damn well such notes won't be legal."

Somehow I had got Ned's stiff straw hat into my hands. I
banged it down on his head as if it had been a tambourine, and
with a shove started him toward the door. I gave Preston
several shoves and got him going. Reggie gave me a pair of
approving pats on the shoulder.

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

"I should not have had the nerve," he said. He was a sweet
fellow.

The other hats and coats were left behind and we started
out. I pushed Ned step by step; Reggie handled Preston,, who
was growing limp. That passageway that was so much like a
tunnel seemed to me to be the cover of a long, long journey.
I did not know what minute that gang would come after us
with guns or something. Reggie and I shoved Ned and Preston
into our machine and took them back to the hotel. We found
that both of them had been doped.

Afterward, the gamblers tried their best to make Ned settle
for his losses but they could not make him pay a penny.

But if I had not been with Ned that night he would have
signed anything.

When I went rummaging in my house in 2020 Massachusetts
Avenue I looked through my clothes room upstairs and fingered
silks, satins, furs, all kinds of fabrics that in the past had been
a part of me. I saw a score and more of long-forgotten trunks,
and each held its store of garments. There was one trunk that
I had opened by my maid, Inga. To my surprise it was filled
right to the lid with sable collars, other trimmings, and a gross
or more of ermine tails. Each item on that floor excited a
fresh flood of memories. I had not thought of it before; but I
believe I might take that store of things and garment by gar-
ment use them deliberately to revive experiences that likewise
hang forgotten in my mind.

One object I found up there in the closed-up house my father
built caused me to blush and feel afresh the chagrin that I
first felt in Newport back in 1914.

That was a terrible affair: Ned got us into a regular
feud with the Vincent Astors. The thing I found was a wig of
Chinese hair, the black and glossy strands elaborately coifed
and ornamented across the top by a half -moon shield of em-
broidered silk that dangled, just beside each ear, four strings
of green jade beads. The embroidered Chinese shoes were
there on a table beside that wig, and in a near-by box was the

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NEWPORT AND PALM BEACH

Chinese gown, and with it was my ivory and peacock feather
fan, a priceless object when I bought it. That was the costume
that I wore to Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont's big Chinese ball in her
playhouse, an enormous and faithfully copied Chinese pagoda
with real sun-dogs guarding its entrance.

However, all the trouble occurred not there but at the dinner
party which preceded the ball, at the home of Mrs. Stuyvesant
Fish. She was a social queen at Newport then. If she became
angry with anyone, that person's life in Newport would not,
thereafter, amount to much. Mrs. Fish had her dining room
all hung with red brocade satin, decorated with stunning gold
dragons. She herself was lovely, but was watching everything
just like a lady hawk. I suppose she had at least a hundred
and fifty guests for dinner, and all the tableware was gold;
that was, it seems to me, the last of her big parties.

Mrs. Belmont's ball was keyed to this dinner party, or vice
versa. At any rate, Mrs. Belmont's son, Harold Vanderbilt,
bridge expert and yachtsman, took me in to dinner. It seems
to me he was dressed as a mandarin, but, mandarin or yachts-
man, Harold Vanderbilt is Mike to his friends. My own face
was yellow with a Mongol tint of grease paint; my black
brows slanted upward from just above my nose. On my fore-
head I wore my biggest emerald; it is just a trifle bigger than
either of my eyes. I have forgotten who the Russian grand duke
was who sat with us that night; he was visiting the Bakhmet-
effs. Mike's sister Consuelo, then Duchess of Marlborough,
was on hand. In fact, everybody who counted in society was
there that night, or wished to be. That was where it happened;
I saw nothing of it but only heard when it was too late.

The Vincent As tors that summer were newly married; their
wedding, I think, had been in April. Anyway, she sent word,
so I was told, to Mrs. Fish that unless Ned McLean was made
to leave the house she would leave. I knew nothing of this, as I
say, until later when I heard that Mrs. Fish had sent word
back that she would have no guest of hers removed, and if
Mrs. Astor did not like it she could go herself. However, when
I got into the motor after dinner to drive to Mrs. Belmont's I

209

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

plainly saw that Ned McLean was much too drunk to be at a
party. I tried to persuade him to go home; he would not; he
was sullen and suspicious. So I took him to the dance, and
about two o'clock in the morning I left him there and went on
home.

The next day I went to see Aunt Mamie Bakhmeteff. I
rushed into her presence and said, "This is frightful. What
will'we do?"

Aunt Mamie clucked a time or two, and caught a pair of
tears on her cambric handkerchief before they could streak
her make-up. She shrugged, as if to say it was beyond her.

"I'll tell you what," I said. "I am going straight to Mrs.
Fish and let her know how dreadfully all this makes me feel."

Mrs. Fish was a very quick, high-strung woman. If she
liked you she liked you, and nothing mattered.

"Mrs. Fish," I began, "I feel heartbroken about this thing.
I feel that Mr. McLean and I ought to get away from New-
port."

"My dear child," she said to me, "you let him go, but you
stay here. Stick it out. It is not your fault."

John R. McLean was full of wrath and thumbed Ned out of
town just like a traffic cop. Ned never said a word, but for
him from that time on Newport was not on the map.

I went to Mrs. Belmont too. She was a comfort to me.

"It's not your fault. You just sit tight. We are all back of
you. Now listen: I am giving a select dinner for the Duchess
of Marlborough, and I want you to come."

I went: this dinner took place a few days after the Chinese
ball. Of course, it made me feel much better. There were only
twenty or twenty-two at the small Marlborough party. Soon
after that, I gave a party for the Duchess of Marlborough. I
had it under a big tent on a green bluff overlooking the ocean.
After that I was ready to leave, and I told Arthur Buckman
to close up the farm. Just recently I found a memorandum
dealing with that move; it brings back sharply some of my
distaste of that moment for Black Point Farm and all that was
connected with it.

The carriage house was filled with rigs on which we had

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NEWPORT AND PALM BEACH

spent a lot of money; vehicles designed to make us feel like
country folks. Buckman asked me how to ship them.

"Ship them, hell!" I said. "Sell them."

A list tells me what I never gave a thought to then: a little
straw wagon brought $75; a yellow station wagon brought
$100, as did one other wagon; Vinson's pony cart went for
$35, and a gig for $50.

At Palm Beach that winter, for good and sufficient reasons
I scolded Ned, and so he left the place. My playmate then was
Mrs. Quincy Shaw, 2nd; Nanine was the close friend of Mrs.
Harry Payne Whitney. Quinney Shaw, as I recall it, left
Palm Beach when Ned did. So, the first thing we two wives
did was to go to Miami Beach and hire ourselves a yacht.

I remember that the first person we met down there was
Harry Black and we told him we were going to charter a
handsome little vessel called the Bluebird.

"Girls," he said, "don't you hire a yacht. I have chartered
a perfect beauty, and am all ready to sail to Nassau. Come
on with me and save your money."

We told him good-bye right there and that same day we
went aboard the Bluebird, telling the skipper to take us back
to Palm Beach. We came inside by what is called the canal
route. I remember we tied up somewhere against a marshy
bank just under a revolving beam from a lighthouse. Of course
I had to climb up the tower and inspect the lighting mechanism.
Nanine was furious with me. Then we went to sleep.

I woke up in a fright; Nanine was yelling from a corner
where she had fallen from her berth; and the ceiling, I could
see, was slanting. We were convinced the boat was sinking
and rushed on deck. What had happened was that the tide
had gone out leaving us aground, on tidal mud. For the rest
of that night we sat in the stern on cushions, playing a
graphophone.

One of our acquaintances at Palm Beach was old Mrs.
William Rhinelander Stewart, who by this time was the widow
of James Henry Smith, who was known as "Silent" Smith.
She was past sixty, and all her life she had been accumulating

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

jewelry. Tiffany might have started a branch with what she
wore even when she was going swimming. Because we both
were constantly encrusted I was perfectly terrified at times
that, with a drink or two, she might lose some in the beach
sand and then say that my jewels were really hers. (At night
when she retired it was her habit to grope in darkness on the
floor until her jewelry was cached beneath the carpet.)

One day there appeared, on the most exclusive section of the
beach, a young fellow in a pale pink bathing suit, a pretty
good imitation of flesh color. He was strolling with a white-
and-gray Russian wolfhound. Quite boldly he was making eyes
at this old woman, and his eyes were big and fringed with
long lashes. He got a quick response from the elderly widow.

Under her breath she spoke intensely: "Meet this fellow.
Then invite us both aboard the Bluebird! 9

My motto is ? "Oblige a friend at any price." Consequently,
when I met this chap I invited him to come to dinner on the
yacht; then I invited old Mrs. Smith. The affair, I thought,
would be amusing.

As I recall it, Colonel Edward Bradley introduced me to
St. Cyr one night when I was playing hazard at one of Brad-
ley's tables. As it happened that was an occasion when I lost
about everything I had.

Bradley had taken off the $50 limit and we were playing on
the cuff at $500 a throw. I went in the hole fast, and went in
deep. However, I was superstitious and I concluded the
croupier was giving me bad luck. Bradley changed the man
for me, and I began to win. I won a lot, and kept on until I
had played off my loss. Word of what I had been doing there
must have reached Ned through some detective spy. I got a
telegram from him:

HOPE YOU AND MRS SHAW WERE NOT ARRESTED IN BRADLEYS
DO YOU WANT US TO GO BAIL AM SENDING IMPORTANT PAPER SIGN
AND RETURN AT ONCE TO MY FATHER DEAREST LOVE TO YOU BOTH

In the space of just about two weeks I had from Ned
a total of sixty telegrams, all of them designed to accom-

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NEWPORT AND PALM BEACH

plish just one thing: to get me back with everything forgiven.

I have a magpie habit of saving things: bright objects, all
photographs, old letters, programs. I suppose the habit has
been encouraged by the multitude of servants always around
to file away what I want saved, and likewise by the storage
space in a half-dozen houses. At any rate, among other things,
all those written mementoes of that fight I had with Ned in
1915 have been preserved; his telegrams to me, my tele-
grams to him, and the telegraphed reports from his man
Arthur Buckman. Ned always used a code of some kind be-
cause he was invariably suspicious.

One telegram I got from Ned asked me to come to him at
once without the servants. He said my signature was needed
on some papers. There is in the file another message, one I
never saw before, from Buckman back to Ned: "SHE RECEIVED
IT MADE NO COMMENT." Then there was another from Buckman
concerning me: "GONE TO SLEEP WONT SEE ME THINK CAN FIX
IT IN THE MORNING." A sample of the code remains: "BYWOI

HY CRUD NYWH CU KI HTWEM E SU VEX EH EW KYLWEWB."

Decoding that to-day would be beyond my powers, and yet
what I am trying here to do is to decode emotions that long
ago were printed in cipher on my mind. I can recall how
hungrily I waited for Ned's morning message. I was angry,
but I loved him and could be happy then, at least only
when I was sure that he loved me. His frantic pleas by tele-
gram were far more satisfying at that time than anything I
could buy with all my money.

To his request to come and leave the servants, I replied:
"CANT GET ACCOMMODATIONS WHY COME ALONE EVALYN."

I had another telegram from him: "HAVE SEEN WIRE YOU

SENT MY FATHER AM TRYING TO STICK TO MY PROMISE AND

.

HAVE DONE SO WIRE ME AT ONCE WHEN YOU ARE COMING."

Why did I not reply at once to that? Let Buckman's mes-
sage speak: "HAVE STATEROOM SHE is OUT FISHING."

At six I sent my answer: "LEAVING TONIGHTS TRAIN BEST
LOVE EVALYN." But at nine there was another wire from him
that made me rage: "DELIGHTED YOU ARE COMING BUT HAVE

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

ARRANGED YOUR SIGNATURE NOT NECESSARY SO THERE IS NO
NEED OF YOUR COMING ON BUSINESS UNLESS YOU WANT TO
COME NED."

At 11:17 that night Buckman wired Mm: "NOT BEEN ABLE
TO SEE PARTY YET"; and then, four minutes before midnight,
Buckman wired again: "is NOT COMING."

Naturally I was not coming. I had too much spirit to sur-
render to Mm so completely. How characteristic of Ned to lead
me on, to pretend that important business required us to come
together, and then, when I was wild with eagerness for a com-
plete reconciliation, to let me see that all his pleas by wire
were just part of a spoiled man's trick to make me show I was
the one who cared the most.

I think it must have been the next day that I gave my din-
ner aboard the yacht Bluebird and had as guests, among some
others, this strange young man, St. Cyr, and Mrs. Smith. He
was so much younger than her son Willie that her interest in
St. Cyr's hats might have seemed at first glance to be maternal.
I saw her rearrange the yachting cap he wore upon his dark
curly hair. I saw the black veins on her aged hand as she let
a jeweled finger scrape Ms ear. That very minute I was sorry
I had introduced them. Contrite, I sent a wire to Willie Stew-
art. He came, and we did all we could to break it up; but we
had no chance what glittered in Willie's mother's eye was
sometMng that thirty-five years before could have been in-
dexed as girlish love. The old woman became Mrs. St. Cyr,
and when she died she left St. Cyr, as I recall it, practically
all of her money.

A few days after the yachting party I had another flood of
telegrams from Ned, in code, and the first one I unraveled
said, "DARLING GIRL YOU KNOW HOW CRAZY i AH TO HAVE
YOU COME BACK." There was another, saying "i THINK YOU

WOULD BE FOOLISH TO GO TO THE COAST AS THAT PER-
SON HAS CALLED ON MY FATHER ABOUT YOUR LOSSES AT

BRADLEYS." I replied, "DONT WORRY IT is NOT TRUE ABOUT

214

NEWPORT AND PALM BEACH

BRADLEYS WHEN YOU WIRE AGAIN DONT USE CODE AS THEY
GET IT AWFULLY MIXED UP LOVE EVALYN." One of Ms wires

that day said, "IF THE WEATHER is NICE DARLING GIRL STAY

UNTIL THE TWENTY NINTH. 1 '

At this time I had an entire first floor wing of The Breakers.
All night long two men stood guard outside of Vinson's door;
by day my little son was in the company of Arthur Buckman.
It was not difficult for him to keep Ned posted on what I
did, or said that I intended to do. That was a part of Buck-
man's job just then. He was working earnestly to keep us to-
gether.

Ned had word that I was starting North to Hot Springs,
Virginia, where I had a cottage. My intention was to make
our separation final. One minute I would be sure that was the
thing to do, the next minute I would be uncertain.

Ned climbed aboard the train at Jacksonville; and when I
heard the shrillness of my little Vinson's joy and saw his keen
delight my own emotion declared itself for what it was: com-
plete satisfaction in our reunion.

We went to Belmont Farm. That was the place Ned had
bought at Leesburg, Virginia, with some of the money in-
herited from his mother. He paid $90,000 for the place, and
then kept pouring money into the establishment until he was
hip-deep in debts. Guns, dogs, and horses were the sort of
things with which Ned would want to equip his part of
heaven. Down there we had some show horses that were su-
perb, and we were breeding others: but we had switched our
devotion to the sport of racing. I had my own string, and with
a natural appetite for gambling found the racing atmosphere
agreeable. It was fun to plan with Ned how we might make
the farm produce a Derby winner, even a horse that could
show its heels to any owned in England. The finest stables,
the most costly horses entered into Ned's plans. He issued
commands, and whole battalions of laborers appeared to change
the landscape of the farm, to create new structures to house

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

our scheme; and all the while I was careful. I was going to
have, I knew, another child.

My son Jock was bora at 2020 on January 31, 1916. His
father, grandfather, and great-grandfather in the McLean line
held power chiefly through the widespread ability of Americans
to read print; for this, along with the common appetite for
news, is the earth and water that generate that still strangely
modern force, a newspaper. My children's father, Ned McLean,
as he was an only son, was born face-to-face with opportunity
for greatness In the world; that is, the instrument of power
was there if he could learn, as Jason did, to wield It. The un-
predicted thing that robbed Ned of his chance was lack of
discipline: a spoiling mother from his babyhood saw no wrong
in anything he did, a doting but a selfish father would not take
the time to study, as he studied any problem of business or
politics, the problem of his son.

There is tragedy in all this, if only I can show it. All of my
life, from the time we Walshes left the Camp Bird mine to
spend its riches for whatever we might want, I have been in
contact with the chiefs and captains of the world. Beyond dis-
pute, throughout the years my son Jock has been engaged in
growing up my world has been restricted to the places where
such people play and work. Why, I have nursed that child of
mine and then gone, gowned and jeweled, to preside as hostess
over tables where all those of consequence in Washington were
sitting. How natural, then, that I should feel a hunger for my
sons to have their share of greatness.

I think I still believed, in 1916, that given his father's au-
thority, Ned could make the Enquirer and the Washington
Post pedestals for real power of his own. I wanted him to have
the admiration and acclaim that go to greatness. I wanted him
to rule his father's fortune when the time should come, and
above all else I wanted our sons to be fit to play and work
with the leaders of the nation. They do not teach as plainly
as they should, in any school I ever went to, that these things
cannot be bought as swift horses, jewels, furs, and lawyers'
services are bought.

216

CHAPTER XVIII

Washington Scandals

JOHN R. had power apart from money a kind of power I
should like to see my sons acquire for better usage. In 1884,
he was a delegate from Ohio to the Convention that nomi-
nated Grover Cleveland for the presidency. In that situation,
John R. incurred the enmity of Allen G. Thurman; and so in
1896, when John R. was eager for the Democratic nomina-
tion for himself, a son of Thurman showed that the feud still
lived by depriving him of the essential support of the Ohio
delegation. Bryan was nominated. In politics my father-in-
law had the ethics of a masked raider.

John R. purchased the Washington Post about 1905, and in
it had a lever with which to pry himself into stronger power.
The Old Dominion Railroad was one of the things in which he
was heavily interested. He was also one of the largest stock-
holders in the American Security Trust and the Riggs National
Bank. When he issued a request politicians of both parties
usually tried to oblige him. When a new Republican Senator
came to Washington from Ohio in 1916, and John R. sent word
he would like to see him, Senator Warren G. Harding was
rather prompt to go and call at the H Street office of the owBer
of the Cincinnati Enquirer.

I met the Hardings for the first time one night at Alice
Longworth's house. We had gone there for a poker game.
That evening I decided that the new Junior Senator from
Ohio (he had beaten old Joseph B. Foraker in the Republican
primaries) was a stunning man. He chewed tobacco, biting
from a plug that he would lend, or borrow, and he did not care

217

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

If the whole world knew he wore suspenders. However, what-
ever Alice cares to say, I say he was not a slob.

That night his white-haired wife, whose chin was lifted
haughtily each time she scented challenge, served all our
drinks and did not play. Warren Harding at fifty-one was full
of life and eagerness to enjoy the world of riches that had been
opened to him by success in politics; but Florence Kling Hard-
ing had been born in I860, the year Lincoln was elected
President why, in her mind were printed memories of
soldiers in blue uniforms coming back to Ohio from the Civil
War.

By the calendar she was five years older than her husband;
but ill-health and a tendency to worry over what might hap-
pen, plus her nagging temperament, had helped to wear her
body. With Harding to-morrow was, at that time, just an-
other day. Hers was the ambition; what he had was charm,
an ability to get along with assorted persons, friendliness, and
a love of jovial companions.

He was the publisher of just a little newspaper or so the
Marion Star seemed to Ned and me, who felt we were to rule
the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Washington Post. If it comes
to that, I suppose our Ohio paper explains why we had been
invited by our friends the Longworths to come and meet the
new Senator from Ohio. I was amused to discover that
Harding always addressed his wife as "Duchess." That
haughty look of hers, a certain spitfire tendency that had not
been curbed with age, had made the nickname seem appropri-
ate. He told me, later on, that some years before he had en-
joyed a book about a character called "Chimmie Fadden"
whose sweetheart was a lady's maid, a French maid; she was
called "the Duchess."

Charlie Curtis, who afterward became Vice President with
Calvin Coolidge, was at that Longworth party. I remember
that he won all our money. Charlie almost always won, and we
used to say it was his Indian blood that kept his face a stoic's
mask; it fooled us so that we could not rightly guess by his
blank face whether he was nursing treys and deuces or had

218

PRESIDENT HARDING AND MRS. McLEAN

WASHINGTON SCANDALS

filled a flush. Why, once in later days when Harding was Presi-
dent and they were traveling in the South, they stopped the
special train at some wayside station to send a telegram in-
forming us that Charlie Curtis had been taken into camp
aboard the train; he had been cleaned at poker. When he lost
at cards, that was news.

In a week or two, we had a poker game designed to repeat
the enjoyment of that splendid evening at the Longworths 7 ;
but, to my disappointment, the Hardings did not come. I asked
Alice where they were.

"She is desperately sick," said Alice, "and it is a question
whether she will live."

I was shocked, and said that I would go to call on her the
next day.

I did. I got into my car and went up to Wyoming Avenue to
the house they had rented. As I recall it, their next-door
neighbors were the yellow-skinned people of the Siamese
legation. A Negro maid opened the door and looked at me
in silence.

"Tell Mrs. Harding I want to see her if I can. I hear she is
ill."

Word was sent down for me to come right up. Mrs. Harding
was lying flat in bed, and her complexion was blue. My roving
eyes saw and appraised many things while we sat and chatted.
Hanging on a chandelier near the bureau was a rack of neck-
ties.

"I am very sick," Mrs. Harding told me. "I have sent to
Marion for my physician, Dr. Sawyer." She explained: it was
her kidney; she had but one or else the least effective, float-
ing one was wired in place. It was pathetic, what I saw and
heard that day. Her father had been a banker, rich by small-
town standards. Then she eloped with the boy next door, a
ne'er-do-well, who drank and had no luck whatever. He be-
came a railroad freight brakeman, and one day fell beneath
the wheels. He lost his arm. They had a son. The sequence of
those things she told me I have forgotten; but I remember
that her father had sent her West, to Reno, where she was

219

FATHER STBUCK IT RICH

divorced. Her father thought she was making a worse mistake
the second time she wished to marry. She lifted her chin and
married anyway.

She and the young editor (he was twenty-six) rented a
house that frame house in Mt. Vernon Avenue with a front
porch that afterward became so celebrated. In the parlor of
that house they were married. Thereafter, for some years, her
father would not speak to her and was so bitter that he pre-
vented Warren Harding from being accepted into the lodge
of Masons when he first was a candidate. (The lodge afterward
was proud to take him into membership.) It seems that old
man Kling would go from place to place in Marion repeating
some unjust piece of gossip about his daughter's second hus-
band. She told me how hard she had worked to keep the
Marion Star a solvent enterprise when, about 1906, Harding
had what she spoke of as "a nervous breakdown." There was
the pattern of a fixed idea in what she said to me that day. I
was not the only one she told how she had scrubbed the office,
herded delivery boys out on their routes, and performed a lot
of chores.

I used to send flowers to Mrs. Harding during her recurring
spells of illness. She had been lovely in her youth; anyone
could tell that. Her eyes were blue, her profile firmly chiseled,
but her mouth was a revelation of her discontent. She was
ambitious for herself and for Warren.

"What did they say about me?" she would ask unfailingly
each time she met me after we had been together in a group of
people of the smarter set.

That was some months after the time when what we had to
gossip about in Washington was the hot romance of President
Wilson and the widowed Mrs. Gait, whose deceased husband
had been the proprietor of a jewelry store. Few of my friends
knew Mrs. Gait, but all were frantic to know more about her.
They used to chide me because I did not know, right off, the
inside story of the White House love affair.

"Please, Evalyn," they would say, "what is the use of having

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WASHINGTON SCANDALS

newspapers in your family if you cannot find out all about such
matters?"

We knew that Mrs. Gait was good-looking and, in Ned's
horsy phrase, well-fleshed. Admiral Gary Grayson probably was
never more sought-after in his life by hostesses than during
the period when a president was going courting. When anyone
was giving a dinner party her best friend was apt to say, "Get
someone who knows this Mrs. Gait to come. Fm wild for in-
formation."

Woodrow Wilson and Edith Boiling Gait were married De-
cember 18, 1915. And how the gossips buzzed! Ned brought
home from the office of the Washington Post a hint that a cer-
tain Mrs. Peck was offering to sell to newspapers her cor-
respondence with the President. It covered a period of years,
extending into his past to the time when he was President of
Princeton University.

"Editorial dynamite is what it is," Ned told me. That was
the opinion of able newspapermen with years of training. The
letters did exist I have in my possession copies of them all;
but they were never published. As a matter of fact, I have no
way of knowing that Mrs. Peck offered them for sale while
Mr. Wilson lived. I do know that everywhere in Washington
her then mysterious friendship with the President was just
about the most exciting topic we had ever had. Who is Mrs.
Peck? Reporters scampered here and there to propound that
question in a whisper.

The truth about those letters is that by 1917 various news-
paper executives had read them all. Mrs. Peck still retained
her copies. There was not in a single letter one statement that
was damaging, in any way compromising, to the character of
Mr. Wilson or Mrs. Peck. I have no skill with which to
measure the literary value of his letters, but I know the friend-
ship he expressed was something any woman might be proud
to inspire in any man. He wrote, for example, that he supposed
it was a recognized principle of friendship that one might show
one's weaker, even one's weakest side to the friend who will

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

best understand and most deeply sympathize. Few people re-
alize that Woodrow Wilson had such a side he seemed so
cold; and yet he was not cold at all By a court decision after
he was dead, the second Mrs. Wilson was upheld in her con-
tention that her husband's* letters, to whomever written, were
still his own and, after him, belonged to his heirs.

However, I must admit I got an extra dividend out of the
Washington Post the year I read immune to the Widow
Wilson's wrath those letters. The injunction did not stop, of
course, the distribution of the sample copies to the newspapers
planning to print the letters.

In 1916, though, when Washington still gossiped about the
White House romance, Ned and I were much more exercised
about another marriage we feared was pending. Old John R.
was in a state of mind that gave us great concern. His wealth
had filled all our world with conspirators; or so it seemed to
us.

In the spring of 1916, the old man developed jaundice and
a case of hiccoughs that could not be ended, seemingly. He
told us he was going down to Atlantic City; but as soon as he
had gone we began to wonder whether we should not have
sent along some person to watch out for him (of course, he had
his servants). His valet was a man named Meggett, and he also
was attended by a nurse. The suggestion was made to us at
that time that a certain woman might take advantage of his
feeble state and jump herself into the queen row by way of
marriage. That was a most unpleasant fear to haunt Ned and
me at 2020. A lawyer, retained by Ned, went to Atlantic City,
and checked the records of the Marriage License Bureau there;
happily there was nothing. Yet when he returned we still
feared something was amiss, because John R. was acting quite
unlike himself. And his hiccoughs had not abated much. At
the I Street house, except for servants, he lived alone in
princely magnificence.

Then, one day, he took a notion that he would not talk to
Ned.

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WASHINGTON SCANDALS

I'll say this for my husband: he was grief -stricken, and
took to heart the harsh things John R. had said to him. Gener-
ally, the old man whom Ned called "Pop" had been tender
with his unwise son. Yet Ned, as did most persons who counted
on the favor of John R., lived in fear of his father. Neverthe-
less, something had to be done if the old man was to be saved
from some wild rashness. We knew he had to be restrained, and
even though Ned was his son this was not easy.

In April, 1916, at our request, there came from Baltimore
Dr. Lewellys F. Barker, who made what seemed to be a social
call on old John R. The doctor talked of various matters for
the purpose of discovering what was the mental status of the
patient. Suddenly, to something Barker said, the old man took
exception and was fired into a rage. He seized from somewhere
a big parchment pile a million dollars' worth of bonds.

"Money?" screamed my husband's father. "I'll show you
what I think of money!" He raised his flabby arms and flung
the bonds so that they showered Barker's head. The doctor
then returned to Baltimore and made an affidavit: "This is to
certify that the behavior of Mr. John R. McLean on April 24,
1916, convinced me that legal measures should promptly be
taken to prevent him from endangering himself or his prop-
erty."

When Dr. Finney and Dr. Henry Parker had made similar
reports, and when these had been supported by Adolph Meyer,
professor of psychiatry in Johns Hopkins University and
psychiatrist in chief to the Johns Hopkins Hospital, we dared
to undertake the first steps to exercise control over the person
and the derelict estate of John R. His morbid delusions and
fantastic suspicions were the basis for our moves in which we
had the backing of Dr. John Blair Spencer and of lawyers.
The big trouble was that Ned's father was in no mood to ad-
mit that his mind was unsound; consequently, we had to move
with caution. His valet and his nurse contrived to obey all
his orders as if his mind were normal. We deemed it necessary
to replace those two attendants. This job the Pinkertons under-
took to do when guaranteed indemnity by Ned.

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

When Meggett left the I Street house to get a breath of air
one day in early May, some men joined him; and from that
minute John R.'s one-man army was, in effect, a prisoner. Dr.
Adolph Meyer, with a squad of hospital orderlies, proceeded
into the I Street house along with Dr. Finney, Dr. Barker,
and some others. These men were John R.'s friends, and Ned
was his son; but the old man had determined that this was all
a plot against his life and fortune. Even in his delirium, he was
persuasive and domineering.

All these men walked into John R.'s bedroom. Every half-
minute he would hiccough. That had been going on for weeks.

"What is it?" he demanded sharply as he saw the cluster of
faces near his bed. Then he began to roar, "Meggett! Where's
Meggett?"

"Now, Mr. McLean, you must stay quietly in bed. Every-
thing will be

"Meggett!"

Literally, the only thing intended was to restrain Ned's
father in the I Street house; but he thought worse was planned,
I am sure, because he sprang from bed and yelled such pro-
fane threats that no man dared to put a hand upon him. He
threw the window open up with a force that made the sash-
weights clatter. There was a cab stand just across the street
from the I Street house.

"Cab!" he roared, "I want a cab." He turned from the win-
dow when a driver raised a finger to his visored cap. The old
man, trembling with fright and rage, pulled on his trousers,
a coat, his shoes, and then started out of that house where
afterward I was hostess. He spoke to Dr. Meyer with no trace
of respect, saying, "Get the hell out of my house, you." An
essence of all the power he had wielded in his day was shining
in his half -mad eyes and so, completely daunted, they permitted
him to go,

John R. took refuge in the little H Street house and from
there sent forth a call by telephone to the editor of the Wash-
ington Post and for his woman secretary. They were unin-
formed as to our intentions, and obeyed their boss quite faith-

224

WASHINGTON SCANDALS

fully. They accompanied Mm to Friendship where I now
live. There are almost eighty acres inside the wall; it is a regal
holding with lovely gardens, a private golf course, greenhouses,
stables, and other instruments of country living. Yet all of this
is a piece of Washington.

In the house at Friendship, John R. prepared for siege; he
summoned private detectives, a platoon or more. To Ned he
sent a painful message that because his son was trying to
poison him he was going to shoot him.

Our own detectives remained on watch, reporting who went
in or out of Friendship. In that way we learned there was a
plan afoot to operate on the old man. The doctors were not
men we knew.

I remember that Dr. Finney came and said: "Evalyn, he is
dying. There should not be any operation. If any surgeon tries
to operate he is just after a fee. The case is hopeless. John R.
is full of cancer."

The next day Ned and I had those doctors come to 2020.
There was a stenographer posted behind a screen while we
talked. When we said what was on our minds the doctors
shrugged and abandoned what they called "the case."

After that I told Ned we simply had to break the siege
and, if necessary, to shoot it out with John R.'s guards. He
got six Pinkertons and went to the big gates at Friendship,
near the clock tower. The gates were closed and just be-
hind the bars some men, with pistols showing, glowered at
him.

"See here/' said Ned, "I am the son of John R. McLean.
He's sick out of his head. His own physicians say that he
should be protected from himself. Now, you get out. I'm
coming in. If there is the least resistance I start shooting."

"O.K., big boy," said one of those hulking fellows, "we just
work for a living. So we get paid, we don't give a hoot." They
opened the gates and Ned drove down the graveled drive and
made the loop that brought him to the door. Ned fairly ran up-
stairs to reach his father.

I always say that God was gracious to us then; old John R.'s

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

mind was clear, and he was contrite. He threw his arms around
Ned and said to him, "I want Evalyn."

In half 'an hour I was entering the house hearing, as I
climbed the stairs, the dreadful sound of a man dying, hiccough
by hiccough. Ned and I stayed on at Friendship then, and
never was there a minute when we failed to hear at least two
hiccoughs. He died on the eighth of June.

We held the funeral at Friendship. John R.'s sister, Mildred
Dewey, and the Admiral were out of town. A week before, ac-
companied by John R.'s woman secretary, Mrs. Dewey had
appeared at the gates, intending to take her brother back to
his home in town. By Ned's orders, this was not allowed.

The sister and the son had not agreed about what was best
for the dying man. So, when it was suggested that the funeral
ought to wait upon the Deweys ? return, Ned said, "Hell, we'll
just go ahead without 'em." However, they arrived before the
service ended, and Ned's Aunt Millie was in a grief-stained
fury. She had really loved her brother. Beside her the Admiral
preened his white mustache. His cheeks were red with rage
at Ned's affront.

Next day I telephoned Admiral Dewey.

"May I come down?"

"Of course, dear child. You always can come here."

I went, and for an hour I pleaded with him to appreciate
our strain, to excuse Ned.

"Evalyn," he said, "I am not angry with you, but I never
want to see Ned McLean again, as long as I live. The way he
has treated my darling wife!" The old Admiral clasped his
blue-veined hands behind his back and paced the floor. He
stopped in front of me: "I never have liked him, and now I
know I never want to have anything to do with him. Why
couldn't he have had the decency to wait for my poor wife
to get here? You know she did adore her brother Johnnie."

Well, that was the end of Admiral Dewey being Ned's uncle.
He never spoke to Ned again.

What had me wrought up, when John R.'s will was read

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WASHINGTON SCANDALS

and understood, was the stunning discovery that the Washing-
ton Post and the Cincinnati Enquirer had been taken from
us. You can bet that made me fume. That was when I had
the secret exit of the little house in H Street sealed up. I dis-
mantled it of all its furnishings. What I left there was just an
office, and it was simply that until 1921 when Jess Smith and
Harry Daugherty moved in, at Ned's enthusiastic invita-
tion. . . . But that comes later.

The will provided that the net income of the estate should
be paid to Ned, and at his death to the children, the principal
not to be distributed until twenty years after the death of that
child of Ned's who was the youngest at the time of John R.'s
death. The youngest was our second son, Jock, who had been
named John Roll McLean, Of course, the income of itself was
sufficient to supply the needs and whims of any ordinary
spendthrift; but I never knew until a few years ago that Ned's
income had thus increased and ranged between $500,000 and
$880,000 annually.

It would be difficult to estimate the exact value of the
John R. McLean estate. According to newspaper guesses when
the old man died, the wealth he left would total $100,000,000.
The appraiser was more conservative, and figured it at just
about $7,000,000; fixing $3,000,000 (an understatement in
my opinion) as the value of the Enquirer, and pricing the rest
as follows: stocks, $2,701,597.82; bonds, $886,607.50; house-
hold effects, $173,555; jewelry, $128,759.75; and books, $471.
That item which relates to stocks included, of course, some
rich, going concerns for which only book value was put down
without regard to earnings. There were a half-dozen modest
annuities provided for a couple of distant relatives and a few
old servants. Except for these and insignificant deductions,
everything went to the American Security and Trust Com-
pany. It was a sort of document that lawyers speak of as a
"book trust", one that young students of law are apt to find
themselves obliged to read. By extending its provisions into

227

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

the future, twenty years beyond the span of a well-protected
baby's life, it neatly skipped the fortune's real power over
Ned's life, and mine.

While we were in the midst of a struggle to establish Ned
as cotrustee, Admiral Dewey died. That was January 16, 1917 ;
and, day by day, America was getting nearer to a state of war
with Germany. At any time, I suppose, Uncle George would
have rated an elaborate funeral, but in the country's situation,
with the whole world panoplied, it was deemed fitting to have
his obsequies conducted in the rotunda of the Capitol.

The following incident is out of order here, but this is the
place to tell it: Aunt Millie grew dissatisfied with Arling-
ton. The tomb that sheltered the Admiral's remains was fine
enough, we all thought, till the Episcopal National Cathedral's
Bishop Freeman, whom I love, went to call on Aunt Millie.

Later in March, 1925, she had Admiral Dewey reinterred in
Washington Cathedral. As a former Cathedral trustee he was
entitled to ?uch a sepulchre.

228

CHAPTER XIX

Tragedy

THE war and Ned's preoccupation with it as a journalist kept
me in Washington throughout the summer of 1917. I remem-
ber that for a year or more I had been in terror of infantile
paralysis on account of my children. Some of that old fear re-
turns as I read a letter sent by me to Dr. John Lovett Morse
of Boston. After explaining that I had sent my year-and-a-
half-old son Jock to Bar Harbor, I wrote:

Margaret Connelly, one of the nurses you know, is with him. If
she should call you on the phone please do not spare any expense to
get to the baby as quickly as possible. If necessary get a special train.
I will have to spend the summer here and my address is Friendship,
Washington, B.C. If you are called to see the babf, be sure to
take up some of the infantile paralysis serum, as that is the thing
I most dread.

Herbert Hoover and I met in that year; likewise Mr. Hoover
met my finest pet, my enormous white caniche, Sartor. We
called that prize French poodle "Sarto", and everywhere I
went, there also would go Sarto, Of course, just about every-
thing we did at that time was related in some way to the
war.

Mr. Hoover, fresh from his relief work in Belgium, was
practically a hero, and President Wilson needed one to serve
as Food Administrator. Our great hobby then was to get behind
the slogan of the diet dictator, which was "Food will win the
war." So I gave a dinner for about sixty people, in Mr. Hoov-
er's honor. I used our finest plate, but there were only three
simple courses. It was practically no meal at all. We had fin-

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

ished this skimpy win-the-war meal and I was leading the way
out of the dining room, holding onto Mr. Hoover's arm, when
we met Sarto and the butler. The butler was feeding the dog
about five pounds of raw beef. I looked at Food Dictator
Hoover and he looked at me; then we burst out laughing.

My mother was the busy one with war relief work; under
her direction 2020 had been transformed into what was prac-
tically a clothing factory. Old clothing was made over into
decent garments for the destitute women and children of
France and Belgium. Mother was helped by a host of her
women friends but they were constantly complaining because
they could not accomplish more.

Mrs. Julian James had turned her house over to war work;
I went there almost every day. One night as I was leaving
there I saw a funny little old woman who had arrived with a
strange-looking contraption, and when I showed interest she
fastened the small machine to a table, threaded into it a string
of wool, and began to turn the handle at a furious pace. In
practically no time at all she had produced a wool sock that
seemed to me to be a much better sock than the lumpy things
we women, with our jeweled fingers, had been slowly knitting
by hand. The old woman told me there was a larger machine
that would knit a man-size sweater in about fifteen minutes.
I told Mother about these machines, and she promptly bought
four and had them set up in the reception room at 2020. She
bought a number of the sock machines, and thereafter our
old home produced a lot of well-made woolen garments. I did
what I could, but I must admit that when it comes to that
sort of thing I much prefer to work where my sympathies
have been involved directly.

I remember at this time I was trying to buy sight for a little
blind boy. (Oh, there is no doubt that money is a splendid
thing when rightly used.) One day, as I was visiting a hospital
in Washington, I saw this thin little boy of five or so. He was
crying on a bench beside his sad-faced mother. He was lame
and blind. The sight was gone entirely from one eye, and a

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TRAGEDY

total of thirteen operations had been performed on the other.
Between day and night, for that poor child, there was just the
difference of a feeble glimmer.

I got in touch at once with Dr. W. H. Wilmer, who is the
best of all eye doctors. A little later, when the child's strength
had been built up with proper food and care, Wilmer operated
on him and, by his own miracle, restored sight to that afflicted
child. I knew that I had never bought a finer thing with any
money when, on a certain day, I took the child into our I
Street house and in a shaded room, when his bandages had
been removed, showed him a bowl of goldfish. That was some-
thing to make one weep, that child's delight in seeing moving
shapes and natural beauty.

There were times in the succeeding years when that child's
sight would have failed had it not been for Wilmer's skill.
There were periods when the boy's mother wished to send him
back to a school for the blind. I was stubborn about that, and
insisted that he should go to a school where he would use what
sight he had. To-day he is a man, a great big fellow who has
married. At times his eyes are not as good as I should like to
have them.

"It would be so terrible if you were to go blind again,"
I said to him one time. "You would hate me for my inter-
ference."

"Why/' he chided me, "I won't mind if I have to go back into
the blackness again. Just think of what I have already seen
with these eyes of mine. I won't forget; and, if I lose my sight
again, I shall remember shapes and colors and live in a world
of blackness that is at least a bit rational."

One afternoon in late October, 1918, when I had just come
home and was undressing, the telephone rang in my bedroom.
I picked it up. It was an officer at the War Department, He
repeated (thanks to Secretary Baker) a cablegram from Gen-
eral Pershing. This stated that Lieutenant Walker Blaine
Beale, Company I, 310th Infantry, died on September 18th
from wounds received in action on the same day. He had been

231

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

buried on the same date in Commune Euvezin, Departement
Meurthe-et-Moselle.

Mine was a ghastly job. I had to break the news to Uncle
Truxtun and Aunt Harriet. He was their only child, the finest
thing in both their lives. I called up the Metropolitan Club
and told Uncle Trux to come over.

I poured a tumbler half -full of whisky, and when he came
I beckoned Mm to come beside the sofa where I stood.

"Now, Truxtun, drink this down/' I said.

He looked at me sharply and then drank. I think he knew
almost by instinct what this was all about. Then I told him,
and his knees gave way. Just as soon as he was stronger we
went together to his former wife's apartment to tell her.

I have forgotten how many years they had been divorced,
but when Aunt Harriet's grief burst forth Uncle Truxtun was
about as fine as anyone could be. She went completely mad in
her anguish. She tried to jump from the window. To see those
two look at each other then and in a glance trace back the
years to the time when they were sweethearts, married, with
a baby son why, that was war enough for me.

One afternoon Lord Reading telephoned and asked if he
could come to the house. He was a great friend; I gave a
dinner for him when he came to America and another when he
left. Distress was deeply printed on his face when he arrived
on this 1918 summer day. He was pale and greatly shaken. I
asked him what was wrong.

"We have just had an inkling," he said, "of a sickening
tragedy."

Tears were rolling down his face and for a moment he could
not speak. Then he added: "Through our Intelligence Bureau
we have just had a curt message that the whole Russian royal
family had been wiped out."

I gasped at that. I knew how hideously that crime would
wound the Bakhmeteffs. The Lord knows, it did. Uncle George
just seemed to wither when he learned the dreadful facts.

Then and afterward our house in I Street was the strangest

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TRAGEDY

meeting ground in all of Washington. Once when William
Randolph Hearst was attacking everything British in all his
publications, I gave a dinner at I Street for about three hun-
dred. Mr. Hearst and Millicent, his wife, came down from New
York. She was looking lovely in a white satin dress and her
emeralds. Among the Cabinet officers and diplomats who came
that night was Sir Auckland Geddes, then the new British
Ambassador. He and Hearst were soon together in a corner.
They talked for what seemed to be about two solid hours, while
most of my other guests stood off and eyed them.

Thereafter Mr. Hearst kept right on attacking England in
his papers.

The persons closest to me say that I am fey. I am aware of
some peculiar sensitivity in myself that I cannot define; it
simply happens to me from time to time that, without being
able to say how, I feel I know that death impends for some
life that touches mine.

It so happened that I watched the running of the Kentucky
Derby at Churchill Downs on a Saturday in May, 1919, with-
out a trace of thrilling interest in the outcome. That spectacle,
which should have made me thrill, was reflected in my eyes as
part of a pageant without meaning. I heard the pounding hoofs,
the burst of yells from fifty or sixty thousand throats, and
still persisted in my fixed melancholia.

I had not wanted to leave home for that Kentucky trip. If
I say Something told me I should stay at home, I do not believe
there is exaggeration in the statement. But it seemed to be of
more importance to my children that I go with Ned and do my
best to keep their father out of trouble. On April 1st, that year,
the convalescent soldiers who had been in possession of the
place all winter were moved out of Friendship, and then, on
the heels of decorators, we planned to move in; and never, so
I thought, could I feel so safe in any place.

Long ago Friendship was a monastery, and the gardens then
laid out and cultivated by brown-robed, cinctured monks were

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

designed, in turn, to produce a finer cultivation of the human
mind. Each of a hundred sylvan places, long vistas, greenish
nooks, was intended to produce a fruit of holy meditation.
There was a duck pond; and Ned, the sportsman, brought
some captive mallards there and had a wing of each clipped
so that they would not fly away in search of other waters. We
kept donkeys, goats, and fat, waddling geese as well as ponies,
horses, cows and other creatures whose only obligation was to
make our children laugh once in a while. There was a green-
house, and in this place $50,000 had been spent just for rose-
bushes. Maybe we were overcharged, but when the roses
bloomed only a trust company president would phrase that
thought in the rose-perfumed air. There was a fountain, and
not far off a stretch of water where water lilies bloomed.

A private golf course was one of the features of the place
that would reveal to a stranger that Friendship had ceased to
be the habitat of men in holy orders. Otherwise, the country air
was as it had been for years past. The proof of that was fixed
beyond the need of affidavits, by the presence, in each corner
of the wide porch, of a tiny woven nest where hummingbirds,
year after year, reared iridescent, honey-suckling families.

My quiet-voiced, sweet-tempered mother at my plea had left
her books and privacy to come to Friendship, and only when
she came was I content to go aboard our private car for the
Kentucky trip. The children meant as much to her as I had
meant. My son Ned, born July 28, 1918, was then less than
ten months old. Jock, who had been named John R. McLean,
was three years plus three months a precious imp who never
moved out of the sight of a heavy-shouldered man below whose
armpit there was kept each minute of the day an automatic
pistol; by Ned's order that was a forty-five. ("Even a crack-
pot," Ned would say, "would be knocked down and made limp
if struck anywhere by such a ball.") Vinson was guarded by a
man who had become a sort of older chum. We sent the chil-
dren, with their guards, their nurses, and a big proportion of
the staff of servants, out to Friendship, to stay under the pro-

234

Underwood & Underwood

Harris d* Ewing

FRIENDSHIP

TRAGEDY

tection of my mother during the few days Ned and I were to
be away.

I want to say a word right here about Ned McLean: Our
children had developed what was beyond a doubt his sweetest
side. I never heard him speak harshly to a dog, a horse, or a
child. With servants he was soft-voiced, too, by habit. When
he was not drinking he had charm, or else he would not have
had the years I gave him. The children, though, were what
we shared as well as we could share anything. Why, I remem-
ber one Sunday morning when Vinson had a touch of fever, and
how Ned took off his little garments and then proceeded with
exquisite tenderness to give his oldest son an alcohol rub.
When he was not spree-drinking he often led a most exemplary
life; he loved to play with horses and dogs, and concerning
golf he became, eventually, so keen that he hired a leading
professional, Freddie McLeod, to devote himself to teaching
him at a salary, as I recall it, of $10,000 a year. Of course,
there was a Harding twist to that, because a better golf game
seemed to be the path, for Ned, to greater intimacy with all
who stood well with his friend the President.

I could not understand what made me so blue on those days
before we left for Louisville, Kentucky. My depression was
complete, and as I interpreted my feelings I was being warned
that I was going to die. Something dreadful, of that I was sure,
was going to happen to me. I went for the first time in my
life, I think and made a will. My health was better than it
had been during many years, and yet I was feeling worse than
at any time I could remember.

I kissed the children and then, just as any other foolish
mother, went back to them on some pretended errand when
the truth was all I wanted was to kiss them more.

Almost my final word was to complete an order for two extra
guards to keep a vigil out at Friendship. It is not normal for
me to be so deeply shadowed by forebodings; but when I am
afflicted with a prescient feeling of the kind my woe increases
because repeatedly these warnings (or so I call them) have
been justified.

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

Two nights, or maybe it was the night after we left Wash-
ington, I sat propped up in bed for hours past midnight as I
wrote page after page of a letter to Vinson. In him, I felt, lived
all that I had ever wanted to exist in the grandson of Thomas
Walsh. He was sweet and preternaturally wise. I told him in
my letter what I knew of wealth, and what I felt he ought to
do to make himself a worthy man. He was, I told him, the big
man of our family. I thought that some day my written mes-
sage would speak to him, for me, when I was in my grave.
We were so closely bound by mutual love that I knew he
would obey my letter; and still I grieved. I did not want to leave
him, I did not want him to become the motherless prey of
sycophants nor to know the other things that are as grasping,
taloned fingers attached to excessive wealth. Vinson had been
nine in the previous December.

There was the usual post-race celebration in Louisville, but
through it all I moved as in a daze. I felt that, in spite of any-
thing I might do, whatever threatened me would have to hap-
pen.

It was early on Sunday morning when Ned answered the
telephone. Washington was calling the McLeans at Louisville.
Ned came from the telephone to my bed to say that Dr. Mitch-
ell had called him up. It was not important, but Dr. Mitchell
wanted to keep faith with me by reporting that Vinson had
a mild case of influenza. (They lied to me in gentleness, of
course.)

"Probably," said Ned, and held my hand with one of his,
"you will want to go straight home. It isn't necessary, but we
will go right away."

"Now?"

"Right away; we'll take the next train out."

As we entered the train shed that day the sun shone brightly,
and I had no sensible cause to be afraid until I saw the short-
ened shadow of the train. Walking toward the rear vestibule of
our private car, which was by custom hooked to the last regu-
lar car, I noticed on the station platform the shadow of our
car and that of just one other. Beyond those two shadows was
the silhouette of the steam-snorting engine. There were friends

236

TRAGEDY

with us then and some perhaps were tenderly conspiring with
Ned to make me think this was a needless hurry we were in.
But just the instant I saw that the train was short I knew we
were traveling out of Louisville as a special. It was not through
occult knowledge that I realized from that moment that an
awful thing had happened. All my forebodings now were add-
ing up into a fearful worry which had as its sane pedestal one
significant fact: a long-distance telephone call from Dr. Mitch-
ell concerning Vinson.

I was alone when a colored servant of the private car staff
brought me some coffee. Craftily I sought from him a bit of
information.

"This is a special train/ 7 1 said, and by inflection made that
statement into a question.

"Oh, yes, madam/' he said, and softly closed the door. That
dark-skinned man never knew, I fancy, that his simple answer
to my question was to me bad news.

I knew; that is all I can say about the matter. The noises
of the train, the sharply curving roadbed on which we were
riding through green Kentucky hills, were just a nightmare
after that. The day wore on until the train was speeding east-
ward through a landscape stained with shadows, and then I tried
to find comfort in my recollections of my father. I need no
photograph to see his features plainly, not ever; on that occa-
sion I even seemed to hear his voice, but rather than court
disbelief I simply want to state that when I was told in Wash-
ington on Monday morning I already knew my son was dead.

Old John R.'s valet, Meggett, who had become Ned's man,
had been looking after Vinson on that Sunday morning. They
were walking in the grounds under the big trees.

"Let's go outside the gate/' said Vinson, and there seemed to
Meggett to be no reason why, on such a lovely Sunday morn-
ing, they should not. Across the street they saw an old friend
driving a wagon loaded with ferns. The driver was a gardener
who had worked for us, a man named Goebel.

"Hello, Goebel/' cried Vinson, and hastened across the
road "how are you?"

237

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

They chatted merrily and then Vinson, playfully, snatched
a few ferns and ran, in fun, back across the road while Goebel
yelled, "Hey, you can't have those."

Vinson had turned to run in another direction, hoping by
his dodges to lure his friend Goebel into pursuit. He did not
see what was approaching at a slow pace, a Ford of that spe-
cies which Americans commonly spoke of as "Tin Lizzies."
This automobile struck Vinson, but not hard. Meggett said
afterward, and this was confirmed by other witnesses, that the
machine did little more than push the child so that he fell down.
From what I know I should even hesitate to say that the auto-
mobile knocked him down. So slowly was it going that the
driver braked it to a halt, and it did not even pass over the
fallen child.

Vinson seemed to be not badly hurt. They picked him up and
brushed from his clothes all traces of dust. Then, holding
Meggett by the hand, he walked back to the house. Miss Geor-
giana Todd, whom we always call "Baby", was with him then;
and soon he was being fondled by his Grandmother Walsh.

He shrewdly interpreted her deep concern as he heard her
order the immediate presence of the doctor.

"Will you tell Mother?" I know he asked the question hoping
he would learn that I was not going to be made to worry over
his mishap.

"No," Mother assured him, "you are all right."

All the doctors whom I might have brought to Friendship
had I been there came swiftly to the house. There was not a
thing left undone. The doctors said there was nothing to be
done. If the skull was not fractured, they seemed to feel, he
would be none the worse for his experience; however, they quite
fairly pointed out that there were possibilities in such an
accident of serious harm. A bleeding might have started in-
ternally.

Later in the day my boy became paralyzed. Once he pro-
pounded a question to his grandmother: "Is it wicked for me
to love Mother more than God?"

At six o'clock that Sunday night he died.

238

CHAPTER XX

The McLeans, the Hardings, and Calvin Coolidge

THE one time in our life when I thought that Ned McLean
was going to be saved from a disastrous end in dissipation was
when he was going around with Warren Gamaliel Harding.
Good heavens! I had cause enough for hope, because that
friend of my husband, and of mine, became the President and
thus possessed not only the power but the will to confer on us
some great distinction that would fully gratify the most ambi-
tious appetite for dignity. I have the President's written word
that he was alert to recognize becomingly "our valued and
devoted friendship."

Yet what happened to us all was just about as tragic as if
each one, instead of only I, had worn a talisman of evil. Some
died, one probably was killed, one is blind, some went to jail;
I suffered humiliation, and Ned lives on, a fancied fugitive, in
an asylum where he pretends, with characteristic slyness, that
he is someone else who does not know McLean.

In that stage of the 1920 campaign when the Republican
candidate was leaving his front porch from time to time to
make speeches from the rear platform of his train, and in
auditoriums before vast gatherings of cheering people whom
he addressed as his "fellow countrymen", Ned and I were with
the Hardings for a while and found out that the Hardings we
had known as poker-playing friends were quite unchanged.
However, out of doors, or any place where others might observe
us, Mrs. Harding was clutched by a set of the strangest fears
that I ever encountered; and so, to a less degree, was her hus-
band.

I stood beside her one day as photographers prepared to take

239

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

our picture in a group with several others. I was engaged, at
the time, in what for thirty years or more has been one of the
least compromising of my habits I was smoking a cigarette.
Suddenly, aware of its smoke, she whirled on me and snatched
the cigarette from my lips. She was as much concerned as if its
tip had been hovering over a powder barrel.

"Evalyn," she chided me a little later, "you've got to help
us by being circumspect. The Lord knows / don't mind your
cigarettes, or jewels. You know how much I think of you; but
you must give a thought to what we now are doing."

"But the Senator smokes cigarettes," I said.

"Not when he is having his picture taken," said Mrs. Hard-
ing grimly. "Just let me catch him light a cigarette where any
hostile eye might see him! He can't play cards until the cam-
paign is over, either."

"But he does smoke tobacco?"

"A pipe, cigars, yes; but a cigarette is something that seems
to infuriate swarms of voters who have a prejudice against
cigarettes. He can chew tobacco, though." When she added that
bit of information Mrs. Harding grimaced with a twinkle in her
cornflower -blue eyes.

I learned that golf was something else that seemed to upset
the stomachs of great masses of the voters; of factory laborers,
of farmers, and of others who dwelt by myriads in those states
where the campaign would be won or lost. Altogether the can-
didate had to shape himself, or seem to, just to fit the convolu-
tions of the voters' minds.

What caused them constant worry was a fear that crafty
James M. Cox, the Governor of Ohio who was the Democratic
candidate, would plant some spy to watch them in their relaxed
hours. Mrs. Harding used to shake her head from side to side
and cluck just like a hen as she sought to convince me that
Jimmy Cox was apt to do almost anything to win. (What
seems strangest to me now is that we never saw that the
simplest recipe to foil a rival politician is to live free of all
hypocrisy.)

I began to understand how sincere Warren Harding had

240

THE MCLEANS, HARDINGS, AND CALVIN COOLIDGE

been when he told us one time when we played poker that he
really did not want to run for President.

"I'm satisfied with being Senator/ 7 he said. "I'd like to go
on living here in Washington and continue to be a member of
the world's most exclusive club. I'm sure I can have six years
more; I may have twelve or eighteen. If I have to go on and
live in the White House I won't be able to call my soul my own.
I don't want to be spied on every minute of the day and night.
I don't want secret-service men trailing after me." He meant
it, and it is my conviction that his wife meant it, too, when she
said she preferred that they should be to the end of their days
Senator and Mrs. Harding. The one who nagged and coaxed
them to change their course was Harry M. Daugherty.

I remembered that Mr. Cox, who owned a newspaper in
Dayton, Ohio, and one or two other small city newspapers,
came to see us in Washington almost before the campaign was
under way. He wanted to make sure that Ned would put the
Cincinnati Enquirer wholeheartedly on the side of the Demo-
cratic party and Cox. The Enquirer always had been Demo-
cratic.

"We've got to make up our minds," said Ned. "We're for
Harding, you and me, but the readers of the Enquirer and the
Post may be less ready for a shift than we should like to have
them."

The fact is, I suppose, that old John R. would have walked
the earth as Hamlet's father did, if he had known how lightly
Ned was flipping back and forth with the idea of altering,
overnight, the political complexion of two big, money-making
papers. The question was especially vital with the Enquirer.
Under Washington McLean, as I recall it, that paper during
the Civil War had been referred to by its enemies as a Copper-
head sheet. Always under John R.'s direction it had been de-
voted to the Democratic party, which was natural since he him-
self was a party'boss out in Ohio.

Just what to do came to me clearly in the night! Harding
was going to win hands down, and everybody loves a winner.
I put it plainly up to Ned, and he to me; we convinced each

241

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

other (and I think so still) that as between Harding and Cox
for President my choice to the end of time would be Warren
G. Harding. There was no open break with the party, but Ned
made it clear that he wanted nothing printed that would inter-
fere even a little with the success of the Harding campaign.

There came a time when the Hardings expressed fear that
Cox's adherents might manage to get some detrimental story
into the Enquirer. Mrs. Harding used to say, "You don't know
that man Cox; there isn't any trick of politics he doesn't know."
We remembered that in his early days Governor Cox had
worked on the Enquirer as a reporter. Ned took steps to make
doubly sure that his instructions would not be violated by
stealth late some night when the editor was taking a night off.

What awful hatreds boiled just below the surface of political
ambitions in Ohio were beyond my comprehension then. On
Cox's side, in secret, were some Republicans who hated Harry
Daugherty so much that they would have been quite willing
to defeat Harding by any instrument, for the sake of being
revenged on Harding's Warwick; that sort of treachery was
really hard to comprehend. Nevertheless, I had the convincing
behavior of Mrs. Harding to persuade me that she really was
afraid of some vile act, a threat that was real and not a
phantom.

One day we got word in Washington of an astounding story.
Some slanderer out in Ohio was offering to give to newspapers
facts about the ancestry of Senator Harding. The charge was
being made that in his veins there coursed a strain of Negro
blood. We knew then, and I know now, the story could not be
true; yet we were frightened by the possible consequences to
his campaign. Mrs. Harding, so we learned, was red-eyed from
weeping.

Ned, in the first flare of indignation, jumped to the conclu-
sion that the Democratic party was responsible for the circula-
tion of this false statement. At first he wanted to use that
situation as an excuse to change the newspapers to open
Republicanism; but hp was dissuaded from this course. How-
ever, he arranged with an employee of the Washington Post

242

THE MCLEANS, HARDINGS, AND CALVIN COOLIDGE

to go to the White House and discuss this dreadful business
with President Wilson's secretary, Joseph P. Tumulty.

Mr. Tumulty told his caller, who reported back to Ned, that
certain "proofs" about Senator Harding's history had been sub-
mitted to him. He said he had reported this to Mr. Wilson,
and that Woodrow Wilson had directed him to act toward
Senator Harding in the very same way that he would want
Harding to act if the situation were reversed. That was a noble
application of the golden rule.

We learned directly from Harry Daugherty that the last
thing Warren Harding wanted was to have anything printed
with reference to the Negro blood story. A denial would reveal
to millions, so it was explained to us, that such a charge had
been made, and taint their minds; consequently, Mr. Harding's
friend would ignore the slander. We knew that some unidenti-
fied conspirators had paid thousands of dollars to print and
mail copies of the fiction. Thanks to President Wilson's quick-
acting decency, those abominations were taken from the mails
and burned. Even so, the report spread swiftly but not so
swiftly as such things are spread by print.

Judge then what must have been our concern when we
learned that white-haired Mrs. Heber Votaw, Senator Hard-
ing's youngest sister, was scheduled to address a meeting of
colored people in Washington. She was then a policewoman in
Washington and had for eight years been a missionary in
Burma.

I made sure of her intention to attend this meeting, and
then called Mrs. Harding at Marion by long-distance tele-
phone. When I told her, and she had grasped the meaning of
my words, I heard a harsh and grating sound; Mrs. Harding
was gritting her teeth. Then she spoke peremptorily.

"Get that sister of Warren Harding to come out to Friend-
ship if you love us. Keep her there! Do not let her make
that speech if you have to lock her in your cellar."

I promised, and soon after that the Marion long-distance
operator was calling Ned. Senator Harding wanted to speak
with Mr. McLean. He was quite as exercised as his wife had

243

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

been. He implored Ned to prevent his sister from making the
speech and gave him complete authority in the matter. At a
half -hour after midnight a man in Ned's employ started out to
find the candidate's sister. He found her, and let her read (but
not keep) this letter:

Dear Mrs. Votaw:

Senator Harding has just gotten through talking to me on the
telephone and wishes you to receive a message of imperative im-
portance from Mrs. McLean before you go to your office this (Satur-
day) morning.

My wife had a slight automobile accident yesterday or she would
come to see you. We are living at Friendship and will send a machine
for you any time you wish or will send one to show you where the
place is.

With very best regards, I remain

Yours very truly,

EDWARD MCLEAN.

P.S. For reasons which Mr. Brown will explain to you I am ask-
ing him to return this letter to me.

Well, Mrs. Votaw came and we persuaded her to remain with
us for dinner. We kept her with us until we learned, through
one of the Post reporters, that the meeting had been held and
that the audience had dispersed. After that, Mrs. Votaw was
put aboard a train and shipped to Marion to stay for the re-
mainder of the campaign.

One time in the White House, when he was President, War-
ren Harding grew expansive about that slander. It had been
used against him in every campaign; when he ran for Lieu-
tenant Governor and won, when he ran for Governor and
lost, and when he defeated old Joe Foraker in the Republi-
can primaries for the senatorial nomination. The thing grew
out of a village quarrel that occurred long before he was
born. .

The Hardings were Abolitionists and their farmhouse at
Blooming Grove, Ohio, was a station on the Underground
Railroad by means of which runaway slaves were helped on

244

THE MCLEANS, HARDINGS, AND CALVIN COOLIDGE

their way northward from Kentucky and Virginia into Canada.
Some of the Hoardings' neighbors resented this and called them
"nigger-lovers." One day at the country school the Appleman
children, neighbors, appeared with faces scabby from what
was known as "buckwheat rash." The Harding children jeered
at them and called them "lousy." The Appleman children re-
torted, "We may be lousy, but that comes from having to as-
sociate with you Harding niggers."

The school board had to settle the schoolboys' feud that
grew out of that exchange of words; and then, sometime later,
a blacksmith in another county married a Miss Harding. He,
too, quarreled one day with a customer and, when this man
evened up their score by saying the blacksmith had married
"one of them Harding niggers", he picked up from his anvil a
heavy sharp-edged tool and flung it with a deadly aim; the
steel clove through the victim's skull. He died, and what he
had said was repeated as evidence at the blacksmith's trial.
In that way the slander lived.

In the sweet way of politicians out in Ohio (and perhaps
in other states), when this old slander was repeated against
Warren Harding a fake ancestral tree was charted to make
the story more convincing. This supposed "proof" fixed the
paternity of a half -black child on Harding's great-great-grand-
father, Amos Harding. The chart was easily shown to be a fake.
What should have been the most convincing thing of all was
the blue-eyed faces of the Hardings who dotted the country
towns and villages in Ohio.

Just about a week before election Ned had a letter from
Mrs. Harding and all her fears had shriveled. She wrote:

The trip was wonderfully satisfactory; we faced immense throngs
everywhere. It does not seem there can be a Democrat left any-
where, and yet I want to pitch in harder than ever. We must win
Big.

Give my dearest love to Evalyn.

The overwhelming victory of the Republicans in November,
1920, meant first of all to Ned and me that we were going with

245

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

them on a vacation celebration down in Texas at what we
thought of as a God-forsaken place called Point Isabel.

"But why do we have to go way off to Point Isabel?" I asked
Ned.

As he explained it, the newspaper correspondents who had
been with Senator Harding throughout the campaign had been
told by him that in the event of his election they could choose
the place for the vacation that was sure to follow. Then Ed
Scobey came up from San Antonio as the escort of R. B.
Creager, a sharp-thinking man of business who was the Repub-
lican National Committeeman from Texas, sometimes called
"the Red Fox of the Rio Grande Valley." This red-haired Mr.
Creager and his wife owned a summer home at the most
southerly spot in the United States a fishing village called
Point Isabel, near the mouth of the Rio Grande. It was in-
habited by about a hundred and fifty Mexicans and, possibly,
by one hundred who were white. The nearest town, some
twenty miles away, was Brownsville, Texas. Mr. Harding
had told Scobey and Creager of his promise, and they had
gone into the back-yard bungalow where the newspaper cor-
respondents had a headquarters, to make them think that
Point Isabel was a Paradise where even apples could be freely
eaten*

The tarpon fishing was described; deer, ducks, quail, wild
turkeys were mentioned. Each man was assured of at least one
tarpon, and furthermore there were references to the nearness
of Matamoros in Mexico, with its supply of gambling houses.
Consequently, so Ned told me, when Senator Harding called
for a vote the newspaper correspondents, as one man, exer-
cised their suffrage on behalf of Creager's place at Point
Isabel.

The Scobeys and the Hardings were real old friends; to each
other they invariably were "Ed" and "Warren" and "Flor-
ence." Years before, Scobey had been the sheriff of Marion
County; and when Harding had presided over the Ohio Senate
while Lieutenant Governor, Scobey had been the clerk of that
body. Then he had developed tuberculosis and, to save his life,

246

THE MCLEANS, HARDINGS, AND CALVIN COOLIDGE

had moved to San Antonio. There he had recovered his health
and prospered in the storage warehouse business. Besides a
rumbling voice, he had a double chin, bushy gray eyebrows,
and an inner compulsion to be the life of any party of which
he was a member.

Well, as a persistent hostess I could understand the eager-
ness of the Creagers to capture, as their guests in Texas,
President-elect and Mrs. Harding; but I could not comprehend
why they had failed to appreciate the size of their hospitable
undertaking. Probably they had their minds fixed on their
Texas neighbors. Mr. and Mrs. Harding were no longer just
one couple. There were other guests, of course: Mr. and Mrs.
Malcolm Jennings years before had been partners of the Hard-
ings in the Marion Star; Dr. and Mrs. Charles E. Sawyer
were there as friends, but also because it was not ever safe for
Mrs. Harding to go far away from Sawyer. Others in the party
included Senator Harding's three playmates of the Senate:
Davis Elkins (brother of my friend Katherine) of West Vir-
ginia, Fred Hale of Maine, and red-faced Joseph Freyling-
huysen of New Jersey. Those four senators were bound
together not as an oligarchy but simply because they were a
-constant golfing foursome with a complete nineteenth-hole
understanding of each other. But necessarily there were many,
many others in the party. All told, there were three railroad
carloads.

At Brownsville we had to leave our private cars. The only
railroad line to Point Isabel was a narrow-gauge equipped
with rolling stock that in Europe would be rated as fourth-
class. We went in automobiles. The Creager cottage was a
comfortable summer dwelling, but there was not sufficient
room in it nor in the adjoining house to take care of all the
party. The overflow had to be accommodated in a hotel that,
until our coming, seemingly had been abandoned. It was un-
screened against mosquitoes.

There was no dining room, nor any service whatever. George
Christian, the young women stenographers, the Secret-Service
men, all the reporters and cameramen, and some of the Hard-

247

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

Ings 3 closest friends had to find shelter in that dismantled old
red brick structure. Most were sleeping on army cots. Ned
and I were in a cottage and Ned, because he was so tall and
heavy, rated the bed that had been assigned to us. I slept on
a cot, and once when I tried to roll over in the night I landed,
plop, right on the floor I hope on some mosquitoes.

For food, all but a chosen few who ate with the Creagers
depended on the ham and eggs of the lunchroom counter,
which was the only open restaurant in the community.

Ned had supposed there would be plenty of hunting as well
as tarpon fishing. There were no bird dogs, that he could dis-
cover, for miles around. The tarpon fishing was first-class, but
tackle of the kind used in that sort of fishing had been made
available only for the Hardings and about two others. Loud
squawks were heard in private; and the newspapermen's were
not so private their peevish outbursts resulted finally in
the appearance of Mr. Scobey and Mr. Creager at the ex-
hotel.

The kickers were almost speechless when they tried without
profanity to set forth their complaints that they had been
grossly misled when they chose to come to Point Isabel. The
final straw upon the load of their indignation was that they
could not even hire a boat in which to cross the Bay to see the
President-elect at play; both launches there had been char-
tered by Mr. Creager. Ned listened at this meeting and he
heard Scobey exclaim, in the tone of one who has seen a vision,
"Why, Red, I know what these fellows want: they want a
boat."

Senator Harding caught a few big tarpon; it was thrilling to
watch such a creature, all silver, leap clear of its element to
shake its head and try to throw the hook from its mouth. I
caught one or two, aided by Davis Elkins, and Mrs. Harding
hooked a prize and then alternately coaxed and scolded Fred
Hale as he played it for her.

A howling norther what I would call a blizzard swept
down upon us in our unprotected state. How we shivered!
Several members of our party got tight through their efforts

248

THE MCLEANS, HARDINGS, AND CALVIN COOLIDGE

to get warm. We were marooned for several days and spent
all our time playing poker. Well, of course, the bitter weather
compelled us to abandon Point Isabel and retreat to Browns-
ville. The roads were too deep in mud (remember, that was
1920) for any automobile to get through; so, wrapped in
blankets, we all went aboard the train, which was made up
of roller-coaster cars or something very like them.

The point of this is that I find excuse for any President
who chooses to accept the hospitality only of those who own
big yachts or who are in other ways equipped for the special
sort of entertaining that presidents require. The Creagers, the
Scobeys, indeed, none of us, quite realized in December, 1920,
just what had happened to our friend Warren.

The constant adulation of people was beginning to have an
effect on Senator Harding. He was, more and more, inclined
to believe in himself. He cherished an idea that when a man
was elevated to the presidency his wits, by some automatic
mental chemistry, were increased to fit the stature of his office.
We, his friends, could see him, during that vacation, as a young
Aladdin testing experimentally the terrific power of the mighty
engine called the presidency.

"Hey, Ed," we would hear him call in a loud tone, as a king
in olden times called for a jester. He really loved Ed Scobey;
and it was fun for Harding to be able to announce to him that
he should become the Director of the Mint, and to know that
what he promised would, by reason of his great power, come
to pass.

It was the same with Dr. Sawyer. C. E. Sawyer was a frail
hundred pounds of whiskered country doctor. He was a wiz-
ened little man, soft-voiced, with thick glasses to enable his
kindly eyes to make sound diagnoses. In Mrs. Harding's judg-
ment he was the one and only doctor who could keep her alive
despite the defects of her kidneys. He watched her diet and
kept her nearly well. Several times in previous years he had
performed major operations on her. Just outside of Marion,
he had a paying sanitarium that had all the attributes of a
rich man's country estate: wide shady lawns; a herd of blooded

249

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

cows. He was by no means easily persuaded to leave that well-
organized establishment to follow a single patient to Washing-
ton. The patient, positively, was not Harding, but Mrs.
Harding. How could Dr. Sawyer be made to change?

I sometimes wish I might have heard Warren Harding break
the news to Dr. Sawyer that he was going to give him the rank
of brigadier general. I should have known that he was jesting
In a small-town way, but that also he was doing something finer.
He wanted Sawyer in Washington for Mrs. Harding's sake, and
I honor him for the lengths to which he went to keep her, "in
sickness and in health."

Ned, before long, was to learn that he had been made
Chairman of the Inaugural Committee, which would have
full charge of all arrangements for the celebration in connec-
tion with the ceremony whereby Woodrow Wilson would re-
linquish power and Warren Harding take it. A few other acts
of powered graciousness were revealed to us on that trip, or
just a few weeks later, as, one by one, all of Harding's well-
liked friends received some kind of title. Dick Crissinger, for
example, had been Harding's playmate when they were bare-
foot country boys. He grew up to be a Democrat of conse-
quence in Marion, but it was his old pal Harding who made
him Governor of the Federal Reserve Board. These were not
bad appointments; as good, no doubt, as needed for the jobs;
but it seems significant to me, now, that they were made as
they were because Warren Harding had received the presi-
dency by chance, without having expected until late in life
that he had even, as he might have said, a Chinaman's chance
to win the office. The office of president was hardly a subject
that he had studied. I think it was a thing he had merely
dreamed about, as we all dream when we wish we had power
to fix everything. It is my opinion that Warren Harding, if he
could have looked ahead when he was young and seen a vision
of the time when he would be selected to go and live in the
White House, would have lived quite differently. As it hap-
pened, he was a loyal friend who was, unhappily, loyal some-
times to the wrong people.

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THE MCLEANS, HARDINGS, AND CALVIN COOLIDGE

Those old folktales that harp upon the theme of tragic
complications coming in the wake of wishes too easily granted
are merely patterns of my husband's story and my own. There
are those who would believe that somehow a curse is housed
deep in the blue of the Hope diamond. I scoff at that in the
privacy of my mind, for I do comprehend the source of what
is evil in our lives; but I can see no way to filter out the black-
ness from the magic that oppresses us. I am helpless in my
plight as a Chinese woman who contemplates fashion-bound
feet and yearns to run with fleetness. The hamperings I wish
to overcome are, I think, the natural consequences of unearned
wealth in undisciplined hands. But even so, I have had my fun.
The kind of life that Alice lived in Wonderland is what I expect
and want; indeed, it should be obvious by now that I like to
be fantastic. It is only when the thing I buy creates a show for
those around me that I get my money's worth. We live but
once, and of all things in this world I hate boredom most.
Wealth is the key to this cipher I am trying to decode. What-
ever change in our lives my husband or I ever wanted either
one of us could bring about; we were as two wizards in one
family and that made the greatest complication. I say that
because if a whim occurred to either one of us that whim was
gratified. From Ned's angle, I suppose, some of mine were fool-
ish; his were more than foolish to me.

One day, to cite a case at random, I started out with my
little girl to buy her a small white poodle. We went to place
after place, but there seemed to be not a single poodle for
sale. We were riding in the Rolls-Royce, just a little one with
two seats at the back. The chauffeur sat up front; he spoke
to me over his shoulder to say that he knew where there was
a dog, the champion of all champion St. Bernards. We went
at once to see the dog. Gosh! My Great Dane, Mike, who
nowadays sleeps beside my bed, would seem as a puppy be-
side that monster of a dog. The price was $5,000, and I scrib-
bled a check. We put the dog beside Evalyn and I rode home
beside the chauffeur. I simply can't tell how big that dog was
unless I say his lolling tongue was like a whole boiled ham.

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Ned rolled his eyes to heaven when we came up to the door at
I Street.

Because of our wealth, the rich scenes in which my husband
and I moved were peopled with the great, and the powerful, of
our generation. When any one of these might wish to meet his
kind at play around Washington, a likely place to make the
contact was our country estate my home, which we call
Friendship, and which has been a piece of the Capital.

A mad place, truly! with a monkey in my bathroom, a
llama on the lawn, and our corridors shrill with the curses of
our parrot (learned from a diplomat). In the stables when my
children wished to play at being grownups they could find
there midget horses and the coach, brightly painted, that had
once belonged to General Tom Thumb. The cellar was as
richly stocked with wines and spirits as if the sale of these
were the first concern of the owners. The kitchen was a place
as artful in its cuisine as any hostelry.

Some of our acres had been remolded into a golf course
where the grass was far more costly than any kind of Oriental
rugs; and, partially, this is why our country home became the
playground of President Harding and all those who wished to
win from him some inch or two of official stature.

Guns, dogs and horses were the instruments with which my
husband had much of his fun; a duck blind on a raw and
foggy morning was for him a place rich with excitement, and
I think he liked nothing better than to see some horse he owned,
such as the Porter, racing out in front. However, when
Senator Harding was elected Ned took up golf. He was well
equipped to play at poker, but not so well equipped as the
President-elect at bridge. Upon deciding to become a better
golfer Ned did not merely buy a book; as I have said before
he hired the full-time services of a first-rate professional,
Freddie McLeod. When that was done we had at Friendship
all the appurtenances of a splendid country club; but this
was a club where none paid dues, nor any other fees except
we two McLeans. We had our money's worth in providing

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THE MCLEANS, HARDINGS, AND CALVIN COOLIDGE

entertainment for those who came. As for me, there was an
added value in the chance I seemed to sense that Ned McLean
would stir with fine ambitions as he watched our friend, Presi-
dent-elect Harding, wield power and change the destinies of
other men.

Certainly, when Harding started in to pick his Cabinet some
of his selections were of a kind to make other men envy him
his power. Charles Evans Hughes, Herbert Hoover, John W.
Weeks were names that aroused my enthusiasm when I heard
they were slated for the Harding Cabinet. There was a special
thrill for me in those choices, because one afternoon during his
post-election vacation at Brownsville, Texas, Senator Harding
talked to me about that first big job he had to do.

"I want to have a really great Cabinet," he said. Saying
this, he was looking out the window of our private car. His
shaggy brows were knit, and under them his blue-gray eyes
were tender as he let them peer beyond the flatness of the
Texas landscape until he took into his mind some concept of
the whole of that country of which he had become the leader.
Even there and then, however, one might have seen that
troubles were in store for a man so easygoing with his friends.
He was, himself, a loyal friend, and could not think that
treachery could mask itself behind the eyes of those he
looked upon as friends of his. Unhappily, for many persons
he had become something other than a friend; he was to all
of these no less a thing than Opportunity. In consequence,
if he talked alone with one man for five or ten minutes some
others became uncomfortable, fearful of losing an expected
favor.

Among those who came to Brownsville on that post-election
vacation trip and who joined us in poker games in our private
car was Senator Albert Fall of New Mexico. I liked Albert
Fall and so did Ned. He showed me his six-shooter one after-
noon; he carried it always, a habit of frontier days. He wore a
black slouch hat, and the cigar that stuck forward from his
angular jaw was about the size of a lead pencil and as poison-
ous as a cobra. At that time, so we understood, Senator Fall,

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

who had been Senator Hardlng's seatmate in the Senate
chamber, was not among those under consideration for the
Cabinet. However, what was most interesting to Ned and me
as the party left Brownsville and rolled along the Gulf toward
New Orleans was the fact that Ned was expected to become the
chairman of the committee in charge of the inaugural celebra-
tion. The Hardings and the bulk of their party went on to
Panama, but we came back to Washington and with us was the
journalist, Mark Sullivan.

Ned went to considerable personal expense in connection
with the inaugural plans. What he wished to have was an affair
about ten times as lively as a Fourth of July celebration com-
bined with the ending of a victorious war. There were to have
been fireworks displays, bands by the score, and all manner
of excitement to mark the passage of the executive power from
Wilson's hands to those of Harding. Then Senator Borah and
some others began to squawk about the cost of all this to the
Government. Some man sent off to Harding a telegram of
several thousand words of protest concerning Ned's authority,
and signed himself "CHAIRMAN EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE HARD-
ING AND COOLIDGE REPUBLICAN LEAGUE NO. 1."

The President-elect had Harry Daugherty try to straighten
out the mess. His instructions were to "see this party and pour
oil on the troubled waters if possible." Because of this bickering,
and complaints in Congress about extravagance, it was de-
cided finally that there would be no celebration.

Poor Ned! I think he never had worked so hard to develop
any project. Not long ago I found among some papers at my
house a copy of a message sent to Marion, Ohio, by telephone.
It had been, I think, what Ned intended as his resignation
from the Inaugural Ball Committee. It was simply a statement
to be relayed by an employee of the Washington Post, giving
Ned's opinion of everybody at the Harding headquarters in
Marion. They were, he wished to have them told, a lot of
sapheads.

When the plans for an Inaugural Ball were abandoned, we

254

THE MCLEANS, HARDINGS, AND CALVIN COOLIDGE

determined that the McLeans would provide a celebration
anyhow, and pay the bills without regard to penny-pinching
Senators; that was our attitude. Moreover, we felt like cele-
brating; our home town was going to be a gayer place because
two friends of ours had skyrocketed to power. What I pro-
ceeded to arrange was an enormous dinner at the I Street
house. I invited the new Cabinet members, the Justices of the
Supreme Court, the diplomatic corps, the Senators and, as
guest of honor, the new Vice-President, Calvin Coolidge. That
was our first meeting with the Coolidges, who became our
good friends.

When it was time to go in to dinner that Fourth of March
night and I took the arm of Mr. Coolidge, I was astonished
to discover that he was shaking. I forgot his trembling for
a little while as my mind filled with all my problems as a host-
ess. In the ballroom I had provided three tables, each about
a hundred feet long. There was a gold service on each of the
two outside tables; on the center table there was a silver
service. With the Barberini tapestries on the walls, with the
great wood carvings that John R. had prized, and with the
masses of flowers, I had contrived a scene that I found im-
mensely satisfying. That is, it was satisfying until I observed
that my guest of honor, Mr. Coolidge, was eating none of his
dinner. Several courses had been placed before him and taken
away untouched. I saw that now and then he was looking out
of the corners of his eyes at the glitter on my hands and
arms, but I could not believe that he was disturbed by jewels.
What could be troubling him? At last my feelings overcame
me.

"Mr. Vice-President/' I whispered, "y u have not eaten
anything. What is the matter? Is anything wrong?"

"Yass," said Mr. Coolidge. "I have the most terrible
stomach-ache."

That was something I could fix. I sent at once for bicarbon-
ate, of soda and stirred half a teaspoonful into a glass of water
until it was dissolved, and then I made him drink it. Through-
out that gay evening he was a side-line guest who drank glass

255

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

after glass of soda. Mrs. Coolidge was perfectly delightful then,
as always. From that night on, I was devoted to them; and I
know they counted me among their friends.

As it turned out, it was I who transformed Mr. Coolidge
into a golfer.

President Harding and his foursome friends of the Senate
Fred Hale of Maine, Davis Elkins of West Virginia,
Joseph Freylinghuysen of New Jersey came often to
play golf at Friendship. They were a jovial group and florid.
Their mood at Friendship was always one of mirth, and I
was told by the President that he dared unbend at Friendship
as he might not do elsewhere. By that he meant that he could
simply be himself at our country place; he could laugh aloud,
behave generally as a free and independent person. It was a
kind of sanctuary. Elsewhere, his life had in it some of the
elements of the pampered year accorded by the Aztecs to the
victim selected for sacrifice. Outside our walls I often saw
President Harding overwhelmed by those who reached for his
hand as if there were some potent charta in such a touch. He
was unfailingly gentle, warm, and unhurried with the swarms,
yet each day's end found him more tired and packed just a
little tighter with a sense of care.

Once r just before a snowy Christmas, a stream of threaten-
ing letters poured into the White House. A sort of final warn-
ing was delivered in which some mysterious enemy boasted
that on Christmas Day the thing would happen. Mrs. Harding
said to me, "Evalyn, we want to spend that day somewhere
else." She was wearing at her throat a diamond buckle orna-
ment that I had selected as her Christmas present the year
before; It was excuse for a black velvet band that neatly hid
her aging neck.

"You come and stay with us," I said. (We were living in
the I Street house.)

They went to church and then drove to our house. We had
lunch, then sat around and talked until dinnertime. After din-
ner we put the President upstairs in a sitting room connected

256

THE MCLEANS, HARDINGS, AND CALVIN COOLIDGE

with my bedroom. Up there, we all decided, would be the saf-
est place.

Weeks, Harry Daugherty, Ned, and Charlie Curtis kept him
company at bridge or poker. Downstairs, Mrs. Harding and
I had a private picture show Mary Pick! ord in "Little Lord
Fauntleroy." I know that Harding's mind was quite at ease.
I heard him laugh a time or two, and threaten what would
happen to his friends when he held better cards; but Mrs.
Harding twitched and jumped about. She was convinced that
at any instant something of first-page moment would happen
to them. Outside our house secret-service men were watching,
inside the house were others. I always felt a good deal safer
when those men were around.

Suddenly, somewhere in the house there was a loud crash-
ing. Mrs. Harding half-screamed and almost slid from her
chair. There was no comedy about her fears; they were too
real. A servant came in response to my loud calls and apol-
ogized because a door had slammed.

About two in the morning the Hardings left, and drove
home to the White House. Mr. Harding, shaking hands with
me, amusement in his eyes, said, "I'm very grateful to my as-
sassins for a very pleasant Christmas Day." Of course, he had
not worried for a minute.

Amusement was the sort of precious stuff we tried to mine
from all our hours at Friendship. So, when it was revealed
that on a certain afternoon that Calvin Coolidge was coming
out expressly to learn the game of golf, some other golfers
decided they, too, would play that day and have an extra bit
of fun.

My recollection is that Mrs. Oscar Underwood played with
me. I recall that Mrs. Coolidge took her knitting from a bag
and smilingly announced that she was going to spend the af-
ternoon in the shade, on our veranda. The fourth person in
the foursome I had arranged was McLeod, the professional.
We waited, and then Vice-President Coolidge arrived, having
come directly from the Senate over which he then presided.

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

I was astonished when I saw him. All our other golfers, such
as President Harding and Senators Elkins, Freylinghuysen and
Hale, were mighty dressy on the golf course. So were Ned,
George Christian, and William Gibbs McAdoo (who at that
time was being paid $3,000 every quarter by Ned for legal
services. I have forgotten just why be had been retained).
Well, as I say, those golfers and most of the others were usu-
ally attired as if they were about to pose for some fashion
plate to demonstrate what should be worn on the golf course.
Plus fours that year were flaring much wider than women's
skirts; the men golfers wore hose woven in designs of chess-
board checks or dizzy alternating circles; and their caps were
so generously made that I used to ask them please not to let
the breeze waft them up into the trees.

Calvin Coolidge was a different sort of golfer. He had a bag
of clubs when he arrived; he had played before, of course, but
not enough to justify his playing with the Harding foursome.
That day of which I speak he fixed himself for playing by
simply taking off his coat. At that moment, in long pants and
suspenders, he was almost ready to take a stance on the first
tee. His other act of preparation was to take from his golf
bag a white cotton hat, lined with green. Its brim was turned
tip closely, saucer fashion. He was quite solemn, and both
remembered and applied the morsels of advice tossed to him
by the pro. I think he himself did not speak one word, how-
ever, until we reached the seventh hole. It was there he ad-
dressed himself to me.

"Your dress is wet in the back," he said. "Thought you
ought to know it" I thanked him.

As we approached the last hole I heard a lot of noisy chat-
ter, and then I saw President Harding and a half-dozen of his
companions lined up as a gallery. I heard them commenting
gaily on Mr. Coolidge ? s suspenders, as if to tease him. They
had no luck at that; and finally I heard the President confess
that he, too, wore suspenders.

258

CHAPTER XXI

The Distaff Side

EVENTUALLY, through his practice out at Friendship, Mr.
Coolidge became a quite fair golfer. Mrs. Coolidge would al-
ways bring her knitting and sit on the front porch. When we
could induce them to remain for dinner we were delighted.

When our lawns were turning brown with fallen leaves that
autumn I had to give up golf myself because, in the early
winter, I was going to have another child.

My fourth child, and only daughter, was born a little more
than four months later, on November 16, 1921. When she was
about six weeks old I had her christened; she had a little
bonnet with a pink plume, and a very long pink chiffon dress
made by Hickson, a perfectly lovely thing. The ceremony of
baptism was held in the ballroom of the I Street house; I had
an altar built in there, and the child was baptized by the
Bishop of Washington, the Right Reverend Alfred Harding,
right on the scene of so many of our splendid parties; how-
ever, this affair was a party, too. President and Mrs. Harding
were the baby's godparents, and there were a score or more
of others present, including Secretary of State and Mrs.
Charles Evans Hughes, Secretary of War and Mrs. John W.
Weeks, and Mr. and Mrs. James B. Duke.

That was a feat to get the society-dodging Mr. Duke to
pay us a visit. However, Nannie Lee Duke and I had been
such good friends that I persisted until she succeeded in per-
suading her husband to come. It was cold and snowing when
I went to the station to meet the train to which their private
car was attached; and when Mr. Duke stepped down I dis-
covered he was in a tough humor. As I extended my hand to

259

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

greet him his first words were, "I was a fool to come, and I'm
going straight back home.' 7

Mrs. Duke is beautiful beyond comparison I think. Her
hair is black and her features perfect. It was a lovely eye she
winked at me there on the station platform. She wished to
stay, of course.

"Now, Mr. Duke," I coaxed, "you just come on out to
dinner "

"I hate this society game," said Mr. Duke, "and I am not
going to begin now." I began to suspect that I had stepped
into the middle of an argument. He kept on talking, saying,
"I'm going to have the car hitched to the next train going
North,"

"That will be all right, Mr. Duke," I conceded; "but just
come on out to dinner, see the people, and then, if you don't
like it, you can go back."

In my automobile he made a sort of explanation of his
grumpiness by saying, "My feet are hurting." He was Nannie
Lee's second husband, and far from young. I put them in the
little H Street house. (It had been refurnished by Ned to make
a temporary home for Harry Daugherty and Jess Smith when
they came to Washington, and when they moved elsewhere I
began using it as a guest house. Among others whom I sheltered
there were Millicent and William Randolph Hearst.) The
H Street house was beyond the zone of any noisemaking by
my children, and so Mr. Duke found it soothing.

As it turned out, he loved the party.

Right after dinner I began a picture show and when that
was over the first to come to speak to me was Mr. Duke. He
wanted to know all about my projection machine. I could tell
him, because for a long time it had been my hobby to make
motion pictures of all my friends. David Wark Griffith had
helped me transform a part of the basement of, the I Street
house into a movie workshop. Down there are developing
rooms, containing vast reels upon which I supervised the dry
ing of just about eighty miles of film that I exposed before
I wore the newness off the hobby. I was really good at picture-

260

THE DISTAFF SIDE

making. Experts taught me, experts sent by Griffith. I learned
how to set up the tripod in the tonneau of an open car and
then, with tires half flat, to crank at a measured pace while
riding past some scene I wished to take. I bought the finest
cameras and all the other instruments of that craft. Some of
my enthusiasm about the movies boiled out of me that night
when I discovered that Mr. Duke was happy as a child at
having discovered that the movie way of telling a story was
so enchanting.

"I am going to get a couple of those machines for each
house," he said and added, "That will be eight. This solves
my problem. Hereafter, when we have a dinner party I'll know
how to fix it so we won't have to sit around and talk."

Because of his delight with the picture show I arranged an-
other for the midday following, to precede the christening.
That was primarily for the children, and as a result of it I
think we worked a further change in the Duke establishment.

My old maid and friend, Maggie Buggy, had married Ernest
Bauer, formerly my father's secretary. Alice and Ernest, their
two children, were playmates of my sons. This arrangement
was explained to Mr. Duke as these children arrived for the
show, and he then and there declared: "By George, that is
what we are going to do for Doris. I am sick and tired of
seeing that child by herself. I know who could play with her.
The gardener has a lovely child. She ought to make, for Doris,
a real playmate." I have forgotten whether he did fix upon
the gardener's child, but I know he carried out the plan with
some child. Nannie Lee was furious with me; when she went
to Europe that summer with Doris she had to take that play-
mate child along. Moreover, from the time of that visit to our
house, Mr. Duke was a constant movie fan. He could hardly
bear to wait for the guests to finish dinner, so eager was he
to drag them into his private picture shows.

Right after the Bishop left that afternoon we started playing
bridge. President Harding, Mrs. Duke, Secretary Weeks, and
I played. Mrs. Harding felt, and said, that her husband had a

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

job to do over in Pennsylvania Avenue. She spoke of this to me
and then she spoke to him a time or two.

"Warren," she said, "you should be getting back to work."
He played an ace with table-banging force, but said no word.
Presently she spoke again, "Warren, you really ought to be
going back to work." I watched the faces of my guests, the
calm, the lovely, unperturbed features of Mrs. Duke, the
twitching of Mrs. Harding's lips, and the President's black
brows that were becoming tightly knit.

"Five spades," said Secretary Weeks.

"Warren!" Mrs. Harding spoke with undisguised sharp-
ness.

I passed, and then the President turned his head and de-
clared himself. "I am going," he said, "to play all afternoon.
Five spades doubled."

The baby's great-aunt, Mildred Dewey, had urged me to
name the child for her. I had refused, saying that she should be
named for Mummie McLean. Aunt Millie tried to have her
way by saying she would leave all her money to the child, but
I still refused. When my daughter was twelve or thirteen, she
turned against her name and declared she must have another.
She kept after me to change it until at last I gave consent;
and so she is no longer called Emily Beale McLean. Her name,
by law, is recognized as Evalyn.

With diplomats and admirals of all the nations gathered in
Washington for the Arms Conference, I turned some of my
attention from my infant daughter to a scheme I had for giving
a great big party. President Harding and Secretary Hughes had
just astonished everybody by proposing to destroy battleships
and limit future naval building in the interests of peace. It
seemed to me that was sufficient excuse for an entertainment.

Pale gold sateen with an overcloth of yellow lace was what
I ordered for two of my three long dinner tables; each of them
was seventy-five feet long. The third table, placed in the
middle, was covered with a silver cloth and lace; that one bore

262

THE DISTAFF SIDE

the silver service with its great candelabra given me for a wed-
ding present. On the tables with the cloths of gold I placed,
on one, the golden service left to us by John R., and on the
other the golden service of the Walshes. My father had had
that one made to his order, and in the center of each gilt-en-
crusted plate there is a camp bird fashioned out of gold. When
those tables were set, and the Barberini tapestries covered the
I Street ballroom walls, the scene was much more lovely than
can be imagined.

Ned was proud of the great dinner I had planned, but he
was not a bit of help. Baby Todd, my social secretary, was my
right hand; Grafoni, the butler I inherited from Mummie and
John R., was a worker of miracles. That man could be a
maitre d'hotel anywhere he might choose to go. But Ned
laughed at Miss Todd and me, saying, "You make so much
work out of this; let me put these place cards around." I
was delighted to have him take an interest, so I vanished to
attend to some other chore, leaving Miss Todd to supervise
his help. Afterward, I learned that Ned actually placed cards
on one whole table before he wearied and called out, "Totten!"
Totten was a member of the household staff, a carpenter. He
came in answer to Ned's call, leaving some decorations hang-
ing from a ladder.

"Totten," Ned inquired, "are your hands clean? O. K. ? You
take the rest of these cards and put them around on these
other tables." At this social sacrilege, Baby Todd almost
screamed; she took back the cards.

At most parties people hardly knew whether Ned was pres-
ent. He had good manners for such occasions; at least he had
surface manners, but he did not enjoy big dinners. To me he
would whisper, "Who am I to take out to-night? Who is my
dinner partner?" I would tell him; then he would grumble,
"What, that old bag of bones?"

This Arms Conference dinner was the one at which I showed
Griffith's movie of the Gish sisters in "Orphans of the Storm/*
That was the night Alice Longworth sat on a gilt sofa between
Senator Borah and Balfour. Hidden in his pocket, Balfour

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

had a souvenir that I had given him. Just before we left the
dinner tables so that they could be cleared away, he and Lord
Lee of Fareham came and subtly flattered me. They asked
what cloth it was that shone with such a yellow luster; it
seemed to be, with all the lights turned on, something woven
out of Camp Bird ore.

"It's just ordinary sateen," I gladly told them.

Balfour let his scholarly blue eyes review the cluster massed
at the doors; most of the men that night wore handsome uni-
forms, not olive drab but richly ornamented fabrics, their
breasts bright with jeweled decorations.

Lord Lee fingered the yellow cloth and murmured that he
would try to remember that the word was "sateen."

"You shan't have to think about the word," I said, "because
I'll let you have a sample."

A servant brought a pair of scissors and those two British
gentlemen stood popeyed as I whacked off for each of them a
square of yellow cloth. When I explained how inexpensive
sateen really is, Lord Lee said that he would have something
to tell his womenfolk when he got home.

In the story of her life Alice Longworth commented on the
contrasting reactions of Balfour and Senator Borah to this
moving picture "Orphans of the Storm." The scenes of the
French Revolution were lurid, as Alice says, and the cruelties of
the French nobles portrayed something that I know does not
exist in the United States. With Alice for my reporter, I know
that as the picture story was unreeled Balfour murmured near
her ear from time to time, "Very moving; very moving." Borah,
on the other hand, she says, behaved as though the scenes had
been taken on the spot. She describes him as blazing with in-
dignation at the cruelties.

Well, something else came from Mr. Borah that night, some-
thing that I want to have in my book. The Senator from Idaho
stood there in the ballroom in his somber evening clothes,
surveyed our guests, our servants, and the rich furnishings
of the I Street house. Then he spoke aloud, and according to

264

THE DISTAFF SIDE

my friends what he said was, "This sort of thing is what brings
on a revolution."

I made up my mind that, for a while at least, I would not
subject Senator Borah to such a hazard. The next time I had
a party I wrote a note to Mrs. Borah saying I knew her hus-
band did not like dinner parties and evening clothes but that
I should be delighted to have her come.

In the first days of our acquaintance Mrs. Borah had come
to one of my parties and was standing right near me, unaware
of my presence. I heard her say my name and then add, "She
is right sweet-looking, and I suppose she would be all right if
it wasn't for that awful voice of hers." Just then she saw me
and turned another color. I walked over.

"Mrs. Borah," I began as sweetly as I could, "you know
I come from the West, a mining camp; so what can you
expect of me? I ain't a lady."

Poor Mrs. Borah! I was only teasing her. The truth is, I
do not care what people say about me, if only they tell the
truth; and, after all, that voice of mine is kind of rusty.

Later in that winter of the Washington Arms Conference my
husband and I were at The Breakers in Palm Beach, awaiting
word to proceed with another sort of entertainment we were
planning for the President. We had the Nahmeoka under
charter. She was the property of H. N. Baruch (a brother of
Bernie); she was a houseboat with four double staterooms.
In Washington, President Harding was no less eager than we
to be off on a coastal canal and river cruise in Florida. We had
tempted him with comments on the golf courses and the free-
dom from the constant pressure at the White House.

On February 10, 1922, Ned read aloud to me this letter:

My dear Ned:

I have just been having an interview with our mutual friend, the
new Ambassador to Belgium [Henry Fletcher]. We are clinging to
the hope that it will be possible to come South for the house-boat
trip for a week. It does not seem possible, however, to make this trip
before the end of the first week in March. The Secretary of State

265

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

[Charles Evans Hughes] is leaving on the 15th for Bermuda and will
be absent for at least two weeks. There is no possibility of the
Under Secretary [Henry Fletcher] getting away during his absence.
It would be rather difficult, certainly disappointing, to make up a
party without him. Of course, there is the chance that the whole
thing will go by the board, but I wanted to tell you we are still
hoping, and I felt that if I told you I was sure we would not come
before March 6th you could probably be making other plans for the
house-boat trip meanwhile. I hope you are having a very delightful
time of it.

Please give my very best regards to Evalyn.
Very truly,

WARREN G. HARDING.

On March 8, 1922, President and Mrs. Harding with a
small party of friends left Washington and when they ar-
rived in Florida joined us aboard the houseboat, tied up at
St. Augustine. The others in the party were Attorney General
Harry Daugherty, Undersecretary of State Henry Fletcher,
General Sawyer, Speaker of the House Frederick Gillett, and
George Christian. To my notion it was not highly successful
as a party, but I think the men enjoyed themselves. Mrs.
Harding was not really in good health at any time I knew
her. We two spent most of our time aboard the boat cruising
ahead while the men, after their golf, would follow in auto-
mobiles, coming aboard the boat in time, usually, for dinner.
Mrs. Harding's meals were supervised by Dr. Sawyer; he kept
her on a strict diet. Generally in the evenings we all played
poker.

After Palm Beach, Ned and I returned to Washington for
just a little while, and then went to Bar Harbor. Consequently
we saw but little of the Hardings till fall.

On an evening in September, 1922, as I hastened along a
White House corridor, I remember seeing a wall clock with
its black hands showing half-past nine. As I paused outside
a wide door, some impulse of the clock mechanism made its
long Iiand jump a trifle so that I was startled. The movement

266

PRESIDENT HARDING AND MR. McLEAN

Photos Underu'ood & Underwood

1920 HOUSEBOAT PARTY, INCLUDING THE HARDINGS,
MCLEANS, HARRY DAUGHERTY AND JESS SMITH

THE DISTAFF SIDE

gave me a melancholy feeling that there was not much time
left for me or Mrs. Harding.

She was ill. The news had come to me at Bar Harbor and,
after an exchange of wires with Sawyer and a long-distance
talk with Harding, I had started for the Capitol on a special
train. We broke all records into Baltimore, and at Washington
I was met by Doris Christian in a White House car. I was taken
directly to the office of the President. Secretary Weeks was
seated with him there. Mr. Harding had his arms stretched
out before him on a big desk blotter.

"I am afraid Florence is going/' he said.

"Surely," I protested, "there is something we can do. We
can muster all the doctors "

President Harding shook his head. "Finney and Mayo are
here. They say her only chance to live is in an operation.
Sawyer won't have it. Suppose you talk to him."

"Let me talk first with Finney."

I found Finney and Dr. Mayo, for both of whom I have
profound respect, shaking their heads over the state of af-
fairs.

"She won't live," said Finney. "Dying now, I think." There
is no surgeon in the world whom I rate higher than Finney.

"Are you certain?" I asked, and he nodded.

Mayo was downright mad because the little whipper-snap-
per, Sawyer, was standing pat. He said he was so disgusted
he was ready to go home.

"Let me go to work on Sawyer," I said.

So I saw Sawyer. I found him pacing up and down the
floor just outside the bedroom where Florence Harding was
lying, quite out of her senses from the effects of self -generated
poisons. He was wearing russet-colored puttees on his thin
calves; his uniform tunic was buttoned across his hollow chest.
It seemed to me that he was trying to take power through the
silver stars on his shoulders, to make them testify afresh each
minute that he was, after all, a General. He was so pitiably
small of body that there was something ridiculously birdlike
in his striding.

267

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

"Now look here, General," I began, "do you realize the
load of responsibility you have taken on yourself? You are
standing out against Finney and Mayo. Good heavens! Think
who they are."

"Evalyn," he said, and paused to emphasize his words. He
was squinting behind his thick glasses. "I realize much more
sharply than you can just how the country will think of rne if
Florence if anything happens to her." It almost seemed as
if he had the reluctance of a savage to name the thing he
feared. Then he went on: "Finney and Mayo are great men;
but let me tell you this: they are not going to operate on her
unless they do it over my dead* body!"

His voice was a trifle shrill. He pressed my arm with his
fingers. There were tears in his eyes.

"I have pulled this woman through many and many a time.
I know her constitution. I know what she can stand, and I
know she cannot stand another operation. She lived just
through luck or God the last time she went under ether. I was
the surgeon then; I know. I am gambling my reputation I
am facing ruin, almost just because I am convinced that if
her heart holds out the kidney stoppage will open up. I tell
you, I'm their family doctor."

He brushed his palms across his eyes, that small-town doc-
tor from Ohio, and all of a sudden I wanted very much to hug
him. He took me on tiptoe to the side of Mrs. Harding's bed.
As I looked I thought, "She must be dead." But she was not,
and in the morning she showed a trace of improvement. Slowly
she eliminated poisons and slowly she began to mend. In the
space of weeks she was being pushed around on a wheel chair.
She lived because of Dr. Sawyer's skill and courage.

Mrs. Harding used to rely on me to select her clothes. While
she was getting well I took her a boudoir cap of lace shaped
like a crown. She was deeply concerned just then because
Warren had lost so much sleep during her illness. Time after
time each night the nurses had to attend to her; and every
time they did, of course, the President was disturbed. That

268

THE DISTAFF SIDE

went on for weeks; and by day he worked at one of the hardest
jobs in the world. No wonder he grew tired.

Our last long time with the Har dings was in March, 1923.
It was another vacation party on a houseboat we had chartered,
the Pioneer, with seven staterooms, one with two beds and
four with double berths. Our preparations were under way at
Palm Beach in February when a letter came from the White
House. It was dated February 15th.

My dear Ned:

Christian has shown me your letter, presumably written on the
13th, which arrived this morning. Our present plans are to leave here
on the forenoon of the 5th and go directly to Ormond in accordance
with the plans which we discussed when I last saw you. We ought to
arrive at Ormond on the forenoon of the 6th and after proper saluta-
tions we ought to be able to look forward to a game of golf over the
Ormond Beach course. When that is out of the way we can proceed
on a leisurely journey southward. No change has been made in any
way concerning the personnel of the party. General Dawes will meet
us at Ormond. You understand that Lasker and Speaker Gillett are
to be in the party. You talked to me about General Daugherty and
Mr. Smith. I think the General is making such progress toward re-
covery that he will be able to come, and I have no doubt he very
much desires to have the Southern vacation, and I think it is a fine
thing for him to have it if lie is able to make the trip. I saw him
briefly yesterday but did not discuss the matter with him. I under-
stand from General Sawyer that he is figuring on being a member
of the party and, of course, this is highly agreeable to us as I under-
stand it will be to you. Of course, you are counting on General
Sawyer and Mr. Christian and I assume that Mrs. Harding must
have her maid, and I will be glad to have Brooks come along if it is
possible to take care of him. He can adjust himself to any arrange-
ment either on or off the boat which is necessary. I think I ought
to tell you about one party whom I think would like an invitation.
At one time Ms inclusion in the party was discussed. I refer to
Secretary Weeks. Nothing has been said to him, however, and the
extension of an invitation will be wholly left to your wishes in the
matter.

Mrs. Harding wanted me to write about a matter that she is

269

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

deeply interested in. She wants the privilege of sending my horse
and the one you placed at her disposal out to your Virginia farm for
an early Spring recuperation. She would like to send an attendant
along so that the horses might be properly housed at night and be
given the out-of-door life during the day. Of course I will be very
glad to cover all expenses if your situation at the farm is such that
the addition of two animals will not embarrass the management.
Please let me know frankly concerning the matter.

We are looking forward to the trip with the most delightful an-
ticipation. Mrs. Harding is getting herself in form so that she may
fully enjoy it and counts upon making a great improvement. She
has been out of doors in the South grounds of the White 1 House
every day that weather permits and we are confident she is going to
find great satisfaction in the trip.

Please give my very best to Mrs. McLean, and be assured of my
continued high regard,

Very sincerely yours,

WAEREN G. HARDING.

I have a pencil-written scrap of paper that Warren Harding
apparently tucked inside the envelope that carried the letter.
This reads,

The Weeks matter is wholly up to you and Mrs. McLean. Of
course I am referring to Mm alone, since I understand the party is
stag outside of Evelyn [sic] to look after you and the boss to
keep me right.

That trip was much more pleasant than the one we had had
the preceding winter. Harding, Dawes, Lasker, and McLean
were generally the foursome, as I recall it; but sometimes
George Christian played with them and once or twice they
took along some professional.

What happened in the next few months to change our friend
Warren Harding into a weary, heartsick man? I am sorry to
report that an illness of my own here compels me to drop a
stitch or two of yarn.

One day at Friendship, Ned watched me sharply as I moved
about my room. Then he called to Miss Todd and asked her

270

THE DISTAFF SIDE

if she had noticed a swelling of my throat. She had not, but
when I stood before a mirror and Ned pulled back my hair
I could see a faintly bulging line just above the place where
my blue diamond touches me. Soon after that I went to Balti-
more to see Dr. Finney.

"Yes/' he said, after feeling with his fingers and making
other tests, "it's goiter."

I took that calmly. For a while I thought I should prefer
to have it taken out by Dr. Crile of Cleveland, but he refused
to operate in my bedroom. Finney did not want to, but when
I coaxed he consented.

"How are you going to do it?' 3 I inquired on the appointed
day.

"Give you gas/' he said, "and you won't know a thing about
it."

"You don't know me," I said.

He clucked when he took my pulse and remarked that it was
thumping; then he added that I had an even chance.

"Of course it thumps," I complained, "when you tell me I'm
about to die."

I was chewing gum and trying hard to keep myself calmed
down. My bedroom was as crowded as a theater lobby with
nurses and doctors all in white, with rubber-coated hands held
carefully aloof from everything I treasure there in my bou-
doir.

"We're going to give you gas right on this table," someone
said. I walked over, thinking that soon the world would be over
as a play is over when the curtain falls. Then I asked myself
a question: "How shall I know if I am dead?" As I reclined,
with help, upon the table, I saw the bluish globe of a chande-
lier above me, and decided to remember that as a kind of land-
mark. Then I stuck my chewing gum on the underside of the
so gosh-darned-sanitary table and announced a rule. I said to
Dr. Hardin, "Now if I press your hand three times, you will
know I'm conscious and you must not begin to cut."

He held my hand; in a minute I heard somebody say "all
ready," and I nearly squeezed his fingers off. So they waited

271

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

and then, in blackness, I felt a feeble thought rise up through
my mind as bubbles in thick fluid. None of my normal con-
tacts with the universe seemed to be working, but at last I
managed to command myself a little and one eye must have
opened, for there above me was the bluish light; then, and only
then, I knew I was alive.

In the same spring that I was operated on, Harry Daugherty
was verging on a nervous breakdown. I suppose I missed a lot
by being in seclusion. On May 19, 1923, Ned showed me a
letter from Jess Smith, who was staying in Ohio. Smith re-
ported:

I came to Columbus to-day to see Harry [Daugherty] and do a
little shopping. I have not seen him yet but will later in the day.
He is making steady improvement and is less nervous, I think, and
looks much better. He is dieting and holding his weight down. He
has had a lot of callers but evades most of them tho they try to run
Mm to death. He is taking things comparatively easy.

There is another paragraph I want to quote, because Jess
W. Smith really was a kindly fellow whatever else he may have
been. He wrote:

I miss seeing you [Ned] very much. You have always been so
nice to me and I have such a deep affection for you that I really get
homesick for you. I hope you are all right and still reducing your
weight and going along good. I sincerely trust Mrs. McLean is also
continuing to improve and will soon be able to be about. Kindly
give her my regards, and also my regards to the children. I want you
to know how much I appreciate your kindness to me in every way.
I probably will never be able to repay you but I am always willing
and ready to do anything I can for you at any time.

Ten days after we had read Jess Smith's letter from Colum-
bus, our telephone rang one evening; we were down at Lees-
burg on our 2,600-acre farm. Ned answered.

"It's Jess Smith," he told me. "He wants to know if he can
come down here for three or four days."

"Oh, damn," I said, "I don't feel good; but tell him all

272

THE DISTAFF SIDE

right. I will have my meals up in my room; I should anyway,
the way I feel/ 7

A while later, about ten in the evening I should say, the
phone rang once more. It was Jess Smith again, calling from
his apartment in the Wardman Park. He told Ned a big storm
was drenching Washington. He would be at the farm in the
morning.

At midnight, or thereabouts, the phone rang again. Ned was
asleep. I answered it. Jess Smith was on the wire again.

"Hello," I said. "How are you?"

"I am fine but rather nervous."

"Now, now," I said, "what's wrong with you?"

"Oh, I'm just a little upset. Ned's asleep, you say?"

"Isn't Mr. Daugherty with you?"

"No; the Chief sent for him to come to the White House."

"Well, you get a little sleep now and you'll feel better."

"I'll be at the farm at seven," he said.

"You can stay as long as you like," I told him.

"I am so glad I can come," he said.

I went to sleep right after that, and woke up about noon.
My son Jock, who then was twelve, was standing wide-eyed
beside my bed, "Jess Smith is dead," he said. "He shot him-
self, the paper says."

There was no post-mortem examination of the body. I have
often wondered why.

Once when I talked with President Harding that year I
chided him about new traces of tenderness that he was show-
ing for the League of Nations. My tutor in high politics was
our friend, the Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, Colo-
nel George Harvey.

"If you're not careful," I said, "you will swing us into the
League, and then you won't get four more years in the White
House." I had spoken almost playfully, but his face tightened
swiftly.

"Evalyn," he said, "I wish to God I could walk out and
slam the door and never go into it again."

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

Few of our old crowd were going West with the Hardings
on the Alaskan trip. General and Mrs. Sawyer were going;
also George Christian and Ms wife, Speaker Gillett, and
Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Jennings. Most of the others were
rather less well known to us, such as Albert Fall's successor
as Secretary of the Interior, Dr. Work and Ms wife, Secre-
tary of Agriculture Henry C. Wallace, and Secretary of
Commerce and Mrs. Herbert Hoover. They were a Western
crowd.

My physical condition was such that summer of 1923 that,
although the Hardings urged us to go with them to Alaska,
Dr. Finney told me he must forbid my making such a trip.
We were at Bar Harbor when we got the first news that Mr.
Harding was ill. Then we heard that all he required was rest;
as we were in receipt of frequent bulletins, relayed from the
Washington Post, we were not worried, and really supposed
he was soon to be himself again. Consequently the news that
he was dead came as a clap of thunder. We hurried back to
Washington and I was with Mrs. Harding at the White House
during those first oppressive hours in what had ceased to be her
home.

Right in the middle of the August night, at one-thirty, Mrs.
Harding decided that she was lonesome for want of her hus-
band's companionship. He was downstairs in the East Room
of the WMte House, in Ms coffin. I held her arm, soft and
dropsical, as we descended the curving white marble staircase.
She was being game with all her might. Through all that time
I never saw her shed a tear.

George Christian, with a grief almost as deep as hers,
alertly watched for any sign of weakness, of collapse; there was
no such sign.

"Put back the casket lid," she said to him, and he obeyed
at once.

In the nighttime what was no longer the President appeared
quite alive; rouge and lipstick touches, that in daylight were
ghastly, with a softer illumination made him seem almost him-

274

THE DISTAFF SIDE

self. Then I began to shiver, because I heard Mrs. Harding
talking to her husband. The heavy scent of flowers cloyed my
nostrils as we stayed on and on and Mrs. Harding talked. A
chair was placed for her and she sat down.

"Warren/ 3 she said, her face held close to his, "the trip
has not hurt you one bit."

That poor thing kept right on talking, as if she could not
bear to hear the silence that would so poignantly remind her
that he could not speak to her in turn.

"No one can hurt you now, Warren," she said another
time. That one remark helped me to understand how she was
weaving strands of comforting philosophy out of grief. I
know how she had feared that some crank might do him
harm; I too sometimes am conscious of a feeling of warmth
when I think that my own dead are now beyond the reach
of harm.

Before we left she looked about at all the flowers, the costly
sheaves of roses, the wreaths and the usual collection over-
size of course of those stupid fabrications that the florists
make, and then buy back, withered, from cemeteries for further
use. Somewhere in those mounds she saw something that she
wanted, and she stooped down as if she were in a growing garden
to pick it up a small bouquet of country flowers, of daisies
and nasturtiums. These she placed directly on the coffin after
she had told George Christian to close the lid. It was three
o'clock in the morning when we started back upstairs.

Ned went out to Marion on the train with Mrs. Harding and
the body of her husband. The doctor would not let me go.
That same night the Coolidges came out to Friendship and
brought the Stearnses along. We five had dinner; that was
arranged by Mr. Coolidge because, I fancy, he was being too
much hectored at the Hotel Willard. I looked at Mm that
night and wondered at the swift change that had been wrought.
How had it all happened?

I asked Brooks. He was Harding's valet, a colored man with
the dignity of an Othello. He was a major in the National
Guard.

275

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

"Brooks, please tell me what you can. How did it happen?
You should know a lot."

"Mrs. McLean," said Brooks, "if he had turned back when
he was first told to . . ."

"How about that awful sunburn in Kansas City when he
rode around under a broiling sun on a reaper in a wheat-
field; when his lips were so swollen?"

"That wasn't due to sunburn," said Brooks. "That was
caused by his heart."

Then he said some more: "We were on that transport and
had a slight collision. Remember? They called out, 'All hands
on deck.'

" 'Brooks/ the President said, 'what's happened?' He was
lying down with his face hidden in his hands. I told him it
was not serious, but that everybody was ordered on deck.
Then he spoke again.

"*I hope the boat sinks.' That's what he said. And two
hours later they had him dressed up once more, reviewing a
parade."

When Mrs. Harding had supervised the packing of all their
personal belongings, when she had burned a mound of souve-
nirs and papers, given his dog away, and performed a lot of
other chores of widowhood, she lifted up her chin in a charac-
teristic gesture. Then she walked out of the White House and
came to Friendship. I myself was preparing to return to my
children, at Bar Harbor. Cicadas were singing with their
wings as we walked beneath the trees that shade the lawn.

"Now that it is all over," she said, "I am beginning to feel
it is for the best. I could not, could not wish him back to all
that strain."

The next time I saw her was in Marion. She was staying
at Dr. Sawyer's sanitarium. Many of the patients were mental
cases. Sawyer was the one who had been keeping her alive;
but Sawyer by that time was dead. I persuaded her to come
down to the private car in the railroad yard and have dinner
with us. When she was leaving in the middle of the evening,

276

THE DISTAFF SIDE

to drive back to the sanitarium farm, she spoke with finality.

"I will never see you again. Good-bye."

"Now, now," I chided her. "You are going to get better and
visit me see all your friends in Washington."

"Evalyn, this is the end."

It was, indeed. With General Sawyer dead, her shield was
down. She died November 21st, 1924.

277

CHAPTER XXII

Oil and the First-Page McLeans

MY husband, and our way of living, became first-page news in
1924. Hot on the trail of bribery and graft in connection with
the leases upon the Naval Oil Reserves in a wilderness called
Teapot Dome, the United States Senate's Committee on Public
Lands and Surveys ran Ned to earth as a minor accessory after
the fact.

In this tricky matter of the Teapot Dome and the Elk Hills
Oil Reserves, designed to fuel the Navy, Ned's only part was
that he lied to help a friend. That friend was Albert FalL

After Fall's resignation as Secretary of the Interior had
taken effect on March 4, 1923, he went abroad, and into
Russia on an oil development mission for Harry Sinclair (who
by intimates is always called "Sinco"). Fall was, we always
understood, an expert oil man. He traveled overseas with Colo-
nel Zeverly, another one of Sinclair's men. Then President
Harding died, on August 2d. In the autumn there were stories
published of some impending scandal. My recollection is not
clear as to when we learned that Albert Fall was being accused
of having taken a large bribe in return for leasing the Naval
Oil Lands on a basis that excluded competition. In October,
Fall had testified before the Senate Committee of which Sen-
ator Walsh was such an able member. I remember that, in a
little more than three months after President Harding died,
all of our friends in Washington wdre wondering where Al-
bert Fall was; it was no secret that he had been drinking
heavily. Then, early in December, when Ned and I were pre-
paring to start for Palm Beach, there came a telegram from
Fall. He was in Chicago and asked if he and Mrs. Fall might

278

OIL AND THE FIRST-PAGE MCLEANS

come to Friendship for a couple of days. Ned wired for them
to come, but we heard nothing more for a week or so and
then I was called on long distance by Mrs. Fall. She was talk-
ing from Atlantic City. (Her name is Emma.)

"So glad to hear from you," I said. "Where is Al?"

"He's here," she said, "very sick; and he wants Ned to
come over."

"We are ready to start for Palm Beach. Is it very impor-
tant?"

"A matter of life or death/ 7 she said, and something in her
tone caused me to believe her.

The next morning Ned left Washington in the private car
"Enquirer" for Atlantic City, and returned late the same day.

"I found Al in a terrible condition," Ned told me. "He's been
in such a state for days and days." Ned told rne that Fall had
asked him to do him a favor, to say that he had loaned him the
$100,000 which the Senate Committee somehow had heard
about. He told me that Fall had assured him that the Com-
mittee was "barking up the wrong tree", adding further that
the money in question had nothing to do with Harry Sinclair
or Teapot Dome. That Sinclair was the one with whom Fall
was involved had been inferred theretofore, because Fall had
resigned from the Cabinet to take what we all had understood
was a fine job in Sinclair's employ.

We started for Florida on December 20th. As we traveled,
Ned was exchanging telegrams with his personal employees,
John Major and William Duckstein. What Ned became con-
cerned with chiefly on that journey to Palm Beach was a scheme
to set up a private telegraph wire to link our cottage down
there with the Washington Post. The one who advised us to
spend about $1,500 every month for that wire and a couple of
operators was Francis Homer, a Baltimore lawyer who, had
been the dose friend and last adviser of John R. McLean.

There was so much spying, back and forth, that this seems
to be as good a place as any to reveal that at that very time
a man who had access to all our things, Ned's papers and my

279

FATHER STRUCK' IT RICH

own, was being paid money by a man named Gaston B. Means.
I still keep as a souvenir of that mad time an affidavit later
made by this man, in which he confesses that he worked for
Means that winter at the same time we were paying him.
Means, maverick detective, had fallen out with Harry Daugh-
erty, and was preparing to do his best to compromise the At-
torney General. That was his reason for making, as he would
say, a "contact" with one of our most trusted household em-
ployees.

Bascom Slemp, a former Virginia member of Congress who
in September, 1923, became secretary to President Coolidge,
was a friend of Ned's. Three days before Christmas he left
Washington for Palm Beach, where we saw right much of
him.

On Christmas Day in Palm Beach, Ned wired John Major
in Washington that he had a tip saying he was going to be
subpoenaed before the Senate Committee; he referred to the
same committee that was investigating the leases of the Naval
Oil Reserves. Ned instructed Major to get A. Mitchell Palmer
to represent him if he should be subpoenaed. (Palmer had been
Woodrow Wilson's Attorney General.) On that same Christmas
Day, Ned sent a wire to Albert Fall:

PLEASE WIRE ME WHERE YOU WILL BE SATURDAY STOP WANT
MY SECRETARY TO SEE YOU FOR IMPORTANT BUSINESS MATTER
THAT DAY STOP MRS MCLEAN JOINS ME IN WISHING YOU AND
MRS FALL A MERRY CHRISTMAS STOP WIRE ANSWER.

The day after Christmas Ned began his foolish actions
whereby he tried to lure old Senator Walsh of Montana off the
scent of graft. Ned sent a wire to his man Major, instructing
him to see A. Mitchell Palmer and tell him (so that he could
tell the Senate Committee) that the only thing that might re-
motely connect him with the investigation before the Commit-
tee would be that in 1921 he had loaned Fall $100,000 on Ms
personal note. Of course, Ned never had loaned any such sum
to Albert Fall; in saying that he had, Ned was doing what

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OIL AND THE FIRST-PAGE MCLEANS

a field lark does when she pretends to have a crippled wing,
and thus leads those who pursue away from her nest of eggs.
It was the day after Ned arranged for Mitchell Palmer to tell
that fabricated story to the committee that Fall himself in-
formed the Committee that he had received $100,000 from
Edward B. McLean. (I almost think that Ned was having fun
right then.)

Then the Falls joined us at Palm Beach. They came at
Ned's telegraphed suggestion, arriving on the last day of the
year. For the first time in my life, I saw a man crumble right
before my eyes. Albert Fall used to sit on the hotel porch
gazing out to sea, and his face was a mask of tragedy. We
really loved the Falls; and I used to beg Albert to tell the
truth and get his life straightened out.

"I can't tell without bringing ruin to some others/' he would
say; "but I tell you I have done nothing wrong."

Drinking had changed him from a virile, sharp-witted man
into a trembling wreck. Night aftqr night, I tried to get Albert
Fall to make a clean breast of what he knew. He was sick and
weak, but his lean jaw would tighten at the thought of talking
to his former colleagues of the Senate.

I was provoked with Ned for getting deeper into the mess.
I told him it was time to call a halt.

Ned said, "I won't go back on Al Fall."

"You've gone far enough," I said. "This Committee will root
back through all your papers until they prove you're lying.
Who believes that story, anyway? Somebody gave Fall the
money; let him say who it was."

For hours every night there would be a steady exchange
of telegrams, most of them in weird codes. Ned had, besides
the badge that identified him as an agent of the Department
of Justice, a copy of its secret code. Some of his messages were
in that code; some were in hastily devised new ones. Many of
the communications were unimportant. However, there was
confusion in our cottage on the day we got a wire saying that
Senator Walsh was requesting Ned to appear before the Com-
mittee in Washington on January 7th.

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

Poor Ned! Short months had worked a change in his posi-
tion; he was no longer one to whom men appealed when some-
thing was to be fixed up. There, in that rich playground at
Palm Beach, he was being ordered as an ordinary culprit to
come North prepared to tell the truth. We were scared.

Ned got his doctor, who was also treating Bascom Slemp,
to say his sinuses were in such a state that he could not travel
safely. To our dismay, we next heard that Senator Walsh was
coming down to Palm Beach to take Ned's statement, under
oath.

When I heard that news I was taking care of my little girl,
then two years old. I was breaking her in to a new nurse.
Well, I just threw her to the nurse and went, flaming mad, to
see Albert Fall.

"Now look," I said: "If Ned McLean gets up before Senator
Walsh and perjures himself, nobody can save him. I'm not
going to have the father of my children sent to jail on your
account."

I was so wrought up and frightened that poor Albert tried
to comfort me. He showed me a telegram he was sending to
Edward L. Doheny. This was my first inkling that Doheny
was the one who had loaned him the $100,000. We talked some
more; I argued and I pleaded. Finally I said, "If you don't
release Ned from his promise, I'm going to tell Senator Walsh
just what I know."

We settled it there and then: he would tell the truth. But
that afternoon Ned appeared before Senator Walsh and told
a lame story about having given Albert Fall his checks for
$100,000, adding that these were never cashed. Senator Walsh
thereafter established that Ned did not have sufficient money
to cover checks for that amount in the banks on which he said
the checks were drawn.

Subsequently Albert and Emma Fall, two broken people,
went to New Orleans and there met Doheny, who agreed to
reveal that he had given Fall the money. Doheny did; he told
the Committee how his son (since murdered by a maniac) had

282

CHRISTMAS TREE PARTY
At the I Street House

OIL AND THE FIRST-PAGE MCLEANS

carried a black satchel, containing $100,000 in bills, to Wash-
ington and there delivered it to Secretary of the Interior Al-
bert B. Fall, I did not understand it then; I do not now. It
seems to me that Fall, who had been so greatly loved when
he was in the Senate, must have lost, if not his mind, at least
his point of view when he accepted that money.

In March, Ned went North and appeared before the Com-
mittee; thanks to a childlike manner when responding to ques-
tions, to a squad of high-priced lawyers, and to some other
factors, he succeeded in avoiding punishment and finally heard
Senator Walsh say, "That is all."

A few months after the unhappy oil mess had ceased to get
so much attention in the newspapers, Ned hired a new editor
for the Washington Post. He did it in the kind of mood that
would send me forth to buy a jewel. The one he hired at a
salary of $75,000 a year was George Harvey, who was giving
up his post as Ambassador in London. I wrote the agreement
that they both signed one night at Friendship, on a sheet of
my monogramed letter paper. Harvey was a fascinating char-
acter; to have him at work for one was something like having
a tiger as a pet a most flattering arrangement as long as the
tiger likes his keeper. Once the hating mechanism of George
Harvey got in motion, it never seemed to stop; but he was to
the McLeans the warmest kind of friend.

"I miss you both like the very devil," he wrote to us in that
summer of 1924. We were at Bar Harbor and he was staying
in the White House with the Coolidges, who were then in
mourning for their son Calvin, Jr. That had been a tragedy
that shadowed Ned and me, because it made us feel again the
pangs of little Vinson's death. Both Calvin and John Coolidge
had been accustomed to come often to Friendship when they
were out of school. They sometimes used our swimming pool.
Calvin, Jr., was the sweetest kind of lad, who would have
been, I always felt, a splendid man. What President Coolidge
was going through that summer, George Harvey helped me
realize. On White House stationery he wrote:

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

As the days pass I realize more fully the change in him he is
still very tired. Though quite brisk as a rule, every once in a while
his face suddenly goes gray and pitiably sad and it is with distinct
effort that he fetches it back. ... He feels lonely naturally and
seems to hanker for somebody or something to lean up against once
in a while.

I think it was shortly after we received that letter that
George Harvey joined us at Bar Harbor, his brow wrinkled
over the problem of producing an acceptable 1924 campaign
slogan for the Republican Party. One night on our porch he
burst out, "Evalyn, IVe got it."

" You've got what?"

"The campaign slogan. Listen!"

*Tm listening."

"Coolidge or Chaos."

Well, it sounded pretty flat to me quite disappointing as
the product of a week of cerebration by Harvey, who so often
said smarter things on the spur of the moment. Some imes in
the intervening years as, in the role of client, I have sat across
an office table and watched the calm, strong face of John W.
Davis I have wondered at the impudence of suggesting to the
nation that his name could be a synonym for "Chaos." How-
ever, in 1924 I was for Coolidge; and if he were alive to-day
I think I'd be a partisan of Coolidge still.

Before we left for Palm Beach I had a sweet note from
Grace Coolidge, written on Christmas Day, thanking me for
a fan that I had sent her. They were to have four years more
in the White House, but I could tell how the time would be
flavored for her as I read,

I hope you will all have a merry, merry Christmas and in your
family circle I know you count, as we do, the boy who is singing his
carols in Heaven.

With my love,

GRACE COOLIDGE.

The only favor I ever asked of President Coolidge was to
have Mrs. Edward Hutton presented at Court, in London.

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OIL AND THE FIRST-PAGE MCLEANS

I had not seen Mrs. Button in a great many years until we
encountered each other at Palm Beach, and she reminded me
that she was a boarder at the Mount Vernon Seminary when
I was a day pupil. That had been when she was Miss Post of
Battle Creek. She had been married, divorced, and married
a second time. (Since then she has been divorced from Hutton.)
We became very friendly in Florida. One day she came up and
said, "Evalyn, I want so much to be presented at court on
account of my daughter."

The next time I saw President Coolidge I asked him, and
he agreed to fix it. Then it developed that Mrs. Hutton and
her daughter wished to be presented at the same time. A bit
later Everett Sanders wrote a letter to Ned saying:

I am quoting from a letter I have just received from Ambassador
Houghton at London:

"In regard to the presentation of Mrs. Hutton and Miss Hutton
next yea?[ I am bound to tell you that we have been compelled to
establish^ definite rule that only one member of a family can be
presented. There are, as you know, scores of applications embracing
requests from mother and daughter. The number, however, that we
are permitted to present is so limited, that we have found it neces-
sary to establish the rule just mentioned. The rule, of course, can b^
broken, and if the matter is of enough importance, it will be broken.
But in view of our practice, I wish you would let me know when I
am in Washington whether so marked an exception should in the
case of the Huttons be made. My only fear is that if we make one
exception, the pressure next year for many more will be pretty
severe, which would result in practically cutting the presentation
list in half."

In view of what the Ambassador says I wonder if it win not be
satisfactory if we advise him to arrange the presentation of the
daughter alone. Please let me know.

Nannie Lee Duke was offering me a hundred to one that the
thing could not be done, but I was determined. I wheedled
and pulled strings until at last Ned got an angry message
from President Coolidge, the essence of which was, "I wish she
[meaning me] would not annoy me. We are doing everything

285

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

we can." However, in 1928 Mrs. Hutton and Miss Button
were presented.

One night at the I Street house Mr. Coolidge spoke to me in
an undertone, saying, "There's a lady here who is going to
lose five dollars."

"Whom do you mean?" I asked. "And how?"

He told me and then he said: "I heard her bet some friend
five dollars that she could get me to talk. Well, I'm not going
to open my lips all evening."

I watched and had a lot of fun. The lady would chatter at
him archly, then fire a question, then retreat before his grunt.
Sometimes he nodded, sometimes he shook his head, but he did
not talk. Contrary to legend, however, usually Mr. Coolidge
really liked to talk.

I never have figured out why he did not stand for re-election.
When he came back from his trip to the Black Hills in 1927 I
went to the White House for dinner and chided him at my
first opportunity for having said, "I do not choose to run."

After my usual habit of saying what is in my mind, I went
on: "It was a foolish statement because we need you here in
Washington. I hear people saying it's because you're sick."

I saw the muscles of his face grow taut, which was his com-
mon reaction to annoyance, and he fairly snapped at me,
"That's absurd. I am not sick at all. I never felt better in
my life."

Time goes by so fast! It seems as yesterday that I was
being introduced to Andrew Mellon at the White House
soon after he came into the Harding Cabinet; and then I see
myself with him again during a Sunday morning gathering
at Friendship, as we strolled toward the swimming pool, talk-
ing of things we had seen and heard in Washington under
Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. It seems to me we laughed
again that day as we recalled the time that Babe, our long-
tailed monkey, snatched from a table on the porch a tall glass
of lemonade or something and scampered up the side of the
house by clutching vines and projections; and then, how every-

286

OIL AND THE FIRST-PAGE MCLEANS

body had forgotten about the little beast until it dribbled the
contents of the glass down on the striped flannels of President
Harding. That same little brute stowed away one day In the
automobile of Mr. Mellon and rode from Friendship clear to
the Treasury Department before it was discovered.

The monkey was an almost human creature. At first, when it
was young, I kept it in my bathroom and every morning, due
to its nightlong researches, the place was inches deep in broken
glass, pink bath salts, powder, perfume, and cold creams.
So, in spite of all its drolleries, it had to be banished out of
doors. Thereafter it had the run of the place and scampered
up and down our trees and callers indiscriminately. When I
would place my daughter on the lawn it would rush at her
and snatch away her orange juice. If workmen on the place
brought luncheons in a box, they would have to watch, or the
mpnkey would make off with all their food. It had one trick
that 'astonished everybody: it would swim underwater the
length of our garden pool.

All the puppies and other young pets got their adolescent
training in my bathroom, so that sometimes the second floor at
Friendship was like a zoo. I remember once when I was sick
I heard a clatter and a clicking as of small hoofs on hardwood
floors. I thought: "That can't be that white llama Ringling
sent Us ! " But it was, as I discovered when my boudoir door
swung wide and my little daughter, in the saddle, rode the
woolly animal to my bedside. A horse kicks, a dog bites, a cow
hooks, but a llama spits. One of those things will spit you
right over on your back. I was nearly petrified, because already
I was in a nervous state that had the doctors worried. Little
Evalyn made the llama put its head down on my pillow. I
stroked its chinchilla-soft ears and told myself I had better
make no sudden move else I'd be blown right out the win-
dow.

"Now," I said to little Evalyn when I felt stronger, "will you
kindly ride this thing into some other room?" Her bodyguard
was with her. He led it out as gently as you please. After that
we sent the llama to the zoo; it is there to-day, but I don't

287

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

believe the Sunday visitors who stare through the fence that
pens it in ever suspect that once it was our house pet.

The one continuing problem in my life has always had the
shape of just one question: What amusing thing can I do next?
It is not only me it bothers, so I notice; it afflicts all my friends
except those who have their noses deep in work. Nick and
Alice Longworth used to help us solve that problem with their
musicales. Nick really loved music, and played on his violin
with entrancing skill. Moreover, his music was always rich
with fun; he would write amusing parodies on popular songs,
and sometimes Gypsy, the wife of Senator James Hamilton
Lewis, would sing to Nick's accompaniment. Sometimes the
star performer at one of Nick's evenings would be the Hunga-
rian Minister, Count Szechenyi, who used a felt-covered mallet
to play upon a saw. The Count could play divinely, too, on the
theremin, an electrical gadget which gave off tones of high-
pressure oscillations which the player would shape into melo-
dies with gestures of his hands.

In thirty-eight years swarms whom I have known in Wash-
ington have died, so that, for me, it is more thickly populated
by ghosts than by living friends. One I shall never cease to
miss is Nick. When he was being taken back to Cincinnati
a blanket of roses placed on his casket, in the station, was
from me.

In our married life together I gave Ned some queer sur-
prises. One was when I let him go without me to Cincinnati,
when the Porter was racing at Latonia, and then just as soon as
he had gone began to make my plans to fly out there and join
him. That was 1926, when such occurrences were far less com-
monplace than now. I called up New York and told them to
send me the biggest plane they had, and with it their best pilot
and best mechanic. The plane they sent was a three-motored
Fokker. I asked the pilot to come out to the house. I wished
to discover if he was sober, and in other ways all right; he
proved to be very nice and quiet. His name was Wilmer Stultz.
Alice Longworth wouldn't go; she said it would not be fair
to her Paulina.

288

EVALYN B. MCLEAN

Daughter of Mrs. McLean

OIL AND THE FIRST-PAGE MCLEANS

"Well, Alice," I said, "I'm going to leave my three and fly.
God will take care of me."

My maid, Inga, went along. We were in the air six hours,
and at Cincinnati Ned had discovered what I was up to just
about the time our communication with the ground was inter-
rupted. He was in the office of the Cincinnati Enquirer when
I walked in. I heard him swearing at all who had a hand in
my adventure. Then he saw me, safe, and was so mad that he
walked right past me without speaking.

Another time when I was in a humor for amusement I
rounded up some of the oldest men I knew in Washington: old
Justices and others of distinction who had long beards and
walked with canes. I had them out for dinner to meet my
friend Fanny Ward, the rejuvenated actress. She shows no
wrinkles, not a line.

That night she displayed creamy round arms and shoulders
in a low-cut, baby-blue taffeta dress. She wore a wig of yellow
curls held close by a bandeau of blue ribbon. It seemed to me
her face had been lifted so effectively that I promptly knew
that when the time came I would have mine lifted too. It was
a treat to watch those feeble guests of mine when they saw
Fanny and were told that she was more than seventy. I hear
that Fanny sits up all night, and rarely goes to sleep. She does
not, so she says, take any exercise. I've never been a Girl
Scout, but I knew that I had done my good deed for weeks
and weeks when I saw those old fellows, clustered around
Fanny, perk up and glow with the realization that, after all,
they were not so old.

Another act of mine that ought to be on record concerns
the time I returned home with the forlorn mother of an injured
girl-acrobat of the circus. That time Ned met me at the door.
When he saw the sniffling woman, he spoke as if to one I could
not see, asking, "God, please tell me what she is going to bring
into our house next?"

A few days previous at the circus I had talked with John
Ringling, of whom I am very fond. He had told me about a
distressing accident that had happened the night before. A girl,

289

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

standing on her head at the top of a tall and limber pole sup-
ported on the shoulder of a strong man, had lost her balance
and fallen to the sawdust far below. When I asked if she would
live John Ringling shrugged. So, after that I went to the hos-
pital, had the girl moved into a private room, arranged for a
nurse, and had Dr. Jim Mitchell X-ray her skull and spine.
About the time the girl was recovering consciousness her
mother arrived from Vermont, and to me she appeared as if
she had never been away from Vermont before. A minister had
given her the money for her fare. She was the one I brought
out to Friendship.

I am not a social case worker, but I began to think that my
handling of that woman's case was going to be better than first-
class. In her youth she, too, had been an acrobat but after
years she began to look as though she had spent most of her
time in kitchens. I brought the convalescing daughter out to
Friendship and she wore, anchored with some string, a gaudy
bracelet I had given her. It was the only imitation thing I
owned, but she prized it so much that she was getting well,
she said, just so she could show it off around the circus. At
last I spoke my mind to the mother.

"Look," I said, "I've been studying you, and you could be
made over. You've had hard luck and lost your husband but
that does not prevent another try. You come along." I took
her downtown then; first to fimil, who is the best hairdresser
on my list. Her hair was gray-black and long when he began.
When he finished it was smartly bobbed, permanently waved,
and red,

"Now," I told my protegee when I had her dressed in lacy
underwear and a smart dress, "I'm going to get you married."

I took her back to Friendship; and when she walked, trans-
formed, into the room where Ned was sitting, he asked, be-
hind Ms hand, "Who's that?"

In a week the daughter was going to rejoin the circus, but
it had been a week of sniffles from the mother. I supposed her
tears flowed from her gratitude, untfl at last she told me that
she simply had to confess.

290

OIL AND THE FIRST-PAGE MCLEANS

"You ought to know it," she began. "The fact is, I've been
married several times, since I lost the husband I spoke about.
Right now I'm happily married. I hope he'll like me the way
you've fixed me up, and I hope you'll forgive me for what I
made you think."

That poor thing had been worried for fear I had another
husband all picked out for her and waiting with a ring. When
I forgave her she set out for Vermont, delighted with her new
finery.

291

CHAPTER XXIII
Private Problems and Public

How strange it is that I could spend a few dollars on a woman's
hair and clothing, and patch her life up neatly, although with
all my money and all of Ned's we could not fix our own. I
think our lives were spoiled for us when we were little. His
mother, and his father too, believed that the way to make him
happy was to give him what he wanted. They never gave
him any taste of discipline, because they could not bear to
see his tears or hear him wail. We went apart for keeps in
1928. I went back to him one time when he was ill, but just
to nurse him.

There is a lesson in all this, I rather fancy, for those per-
sons who suppose that life would be entirely smooth if only
they had money. Well, we had money! And yet, what did we
buy except the stresses that broke up our home? Lest anyone
should think that he, or I, with money, can evade the conse-
quences of that rupture, I want to set down here a poignant
line Ned wrote, from some place far away, to our young
daughter: "I hope my darling girl is happy and that you never
in your life be lonesome" Unhappily, a broken family always
goes on being lonesome.

There is a question in my mind as to how much I ought to
say about our private troubles. I ought to show that Ned Mc-
Lean's wild behavior was at last revealed to be a progressive
madness capsed by dissipation. I say I should tell this, because
from day to day I have to teach my sons and daughter how,
with money, their father bought all his trouble.

My own story has not ended, but there is little more to tell

292

PRIVATE PROBLEMS AND PUBLIC

about my husband. At intervals I get reports from a Maryland
hospital concerning a patient there who has morbid preoccupa-
tions and lives in a state of mental exile, shut off even from
himself. If he is addressed by his right name he grows excited
and swears he is not McLean.

Outside of 2020 Massachusetts Avenue a blizzard wind was
howling and the noise of it seemed to take the shape of words
I'd heard about people starving and freezing in the parks.
Alice Longworth was staying with me. As neither of us could
sleep, we were in my sitting room before a fire. It was after
midnight.

"Alice," I said, "I simply can't stand this. I am so worried
about those people suffering. I am going out to investigate,
to see just who is sleeping in the park with newspapers wrapped
around them."

"Evalyn, you can't do that," said Alice,

"I can and I am; I am going to take my little pistol and
sally forth."

"As I'm your guest I'll come," said Alice; "but none too
happily."

We first stopped at Franklin Square. Alice got out of the
taxicab and walked around with me. We saw no one there.
Then we went to the Pension Office Park. This time she would
not get out of the cab. I did and saw two figures huddled on a
bench and started toward them. They seemed to duck their
heads as I came closer, and I suspect they thought from my
determined manner that I was a policewoman. The girl was
wrapped, not in newspapers, but in a fur coat.

"What are you children doing out here in this^ blizzard?"

"Lady," said the boy, "we've got no other place where we
can find privacy." The girl spoke up to say that it was crowded
at her home.

"Here's three dollars," I said. "Go to a nice restaurant and
enjoy yourselves."

Leaving them agape, I entered the women's restroom. I had
been told such places were crowded with female victims of

293

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

the depression. There was a three-hundred-pound chocolate-
colored woman In that one, and no others.

"What are you doing?" I asked her and saw her eyes roll
white with fright.

"Oh, lady, I ain't doing any harm. I just stopped in here
on my way home."

"You're sure you've got a home?"

"I have a nice home with lots of children, and a husband
waiting for me."

That was all I could find of starving people in a park, so
I went back to Alice and said that I was going to the Salva-
tion Army place. I crawled up a steep staircase there, and
asked if they had empty beds. They said they had some in
case I wanted to send any poor to use them. We saw some
other empty parks and then I went to Precinct One. Alice
did not leave me, but she continued to sit in the cab. The
police that night had rounded up a lot of poor men who were
shooting craps, so that I had half a mind to stay at Precinct
One. It was after two when Alice and I went into Childs' for
something warm.

About that time my own system of living was undergoing
change. I was not poor, of course; but I was no longer spend-
ing at the rate I like to spend. Only a few months before,
there had expired the second ten-year period of trust in which,
voluntarily, I had left my half of my father's fortune. I had
grown dissatisfied with the arrangement and so, escorted by
Judge A. A. Hoehling, I had gone to the American Security
Trust Company and demanded everything of mine they had.
When it had been accounted for, bond by bond, it was wrapped
into a bundle, and with this I had started across the street
toward the National Metropolitan, Judge Hoehling's bank.
He was greatly agitated, and protested: "You can't do this.
We'll be held up. You've got more than a million dollars in
your hand."

"Don't be timid," I counseled him. "Nobody knows why
we came here."

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PRIVATE PROBLEMS AND PUBLIC

Most of those bonds that I then carried across the street
had to be turned Into money to pay off debts; I owed about
$800,000, and five-eighths of that was for Ned's debts. How-
ever, none of my real estate was mortgaged for a dollar. In
that, I had the bulk of what my father left me. Another
asset, not so good, was an order of a District of Columbia
court instructing the trustees of the estate of old John R. to
pay me $7,500 a month. Already, though, they were shrugging
their shoulders and trying to maintain as fact their notion
that they could not pay out money even though the estate
included two big newspapers, the Rosiclair mine, bonds, stocks,
Friendship, and the I Street house.

One day when I was blue from all the trouble of making
million-dollar ends meet, I remembered my old prescription
for that state of mind, went to New York, and asked Cartier
to show me something fine. He then dazzled me with a ruby
and diamond bracelet one that owed its existence to the
Depression.

"That principal diamond," said Cartier, "was placed in
our hands by a well-known family that owned it, but on the
condition that their name would not be revealed. The stone
was always known as the Star of the South. It is almost sixteen
carats. There are sixteen rubies and sixteen other diamonds,"
Cartier held it up before my eyes, and I could only utter just
one question "How much?" He told me $135,000.

I thought it over carefully for about a day; and then I sent
him an offer of $50,000 cash and the balance to be paid in
monthly sums spread over two years. Cartier telegraphed me

"YES."

That is the way I always get into trouble when I have some
money in my hands. I seem not to be able to do otherwise
than spend it. However, it is no use for anyone to chide me for
loving jewels. I cannot help it if I have a passion for them.
They make me feel comfortable, and even happy. The truth
is, when I neglect to wear jewels astute members of my family
call in doctors because it is a sign I'm becoming ill

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FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

My mother died on February 25, 1932. She had sent for me
when she was in great pain. I promptly brought in doctors,
who discovered she had cancer of the lungs. However, my
mother would not accept treatment from the doctors and in-
sisted on having a religious healer, one she had known for
years. I brought the woman from Chicago to Washington and
let her do precisely as she wished for a while.

One morning Mother whispered a request for me to close
the door. Then she said, "Please give me something for this
pain and don't let her come near me any more." From that
time my mother had morphine whenever she required it; I made
sure of that until the day she died.

My mother left all her property to me, in trust; at my death
to go outright to my children. So 2020 Massachusetts Avenue
became mine, likewise other real estate, more bonds, and varied
possessions, along with that fresh sorrow.

It was while my grief was sharpest that the Lindbergh
baby was kidnapped from its crib in its parents' isolated house
in New Jersey.

Why should I have tried to get the Lindbergh baby back to
its mother? Well, for one thing I had lived more than a score
of years haunted daily by the fear of just what had happened
to the Lindberghs. So many people were then wishing they
might save the baby and revenge the crime that I wonder why
so many persons now ask me what prompted me to involve
myself in the hunt. It should be obvious, I think, that I tried
to do what millions wished they might try to do. In my case the
wish was harnessed, just as a carriage, to my money. I wished
and, presto! things began to happen.

On Friday, the fourth of March, 1932, 1 sent for Gaston B.
Means. I found out how to reach him through Mrs. May Dixon
Thacker, who sometime before had repudiated the book that
she had written based on his fanciful and wicked story of the
death of President Harding. I telephoned to him asking,
"Means, can you come to see me?"

296

PRIVATE PROBLEMS AND PUBLIC

he said, "this evening."

He came at half -past eight. He stood before me in my draw-
ing room a fat and deeply dimpled scoundrel, who was, I
thought, precisely what I needed as an instrument to get in
touch with the kidnapers. William J. Burns had said this man
was the best investigator he had ever known, A New York
County prosecutor had said he was the cold-blooded murderer
of a rich widow, but a small-town North Carolina jury had
held him innocent. Means had served, in the Federal prison
in Atlanta, a sentence imposed on him for being a grafter.
I had no illusions about Means except that I supposed the
chance to act as go-between in the ransoming of the Lindbergh
baby would seem a bigger prize to him than any other chance
he might discern in his dealings with me.

I wanted Means for precisely what he was for the lack
of straightness in his smartness. (I still think that Means was
just the sort of man I wanted, even though he failed me.)
Before very long the Lindberghs themselves had adopted a
similar notion that the way to make a contact with the
underworld is through someone linked with it. Means told me,
plausibly enough to convince me, that he wanted nothing more
than to re-establish himself, for the sake of his own son and
Mrs. Means. He hoped by such a coup as finding the Lind-
bergh baby to restore himself to favor. With just one deed, he
could remake his world.

"Means," I asked him, "do you know where the Lindbergh
baby is?"

"I do," he said, and then proceeded to tell me a highly
colored yarn that was easy to believe. Means had been sent to
Atlanta by the Federal Government for taking bribes from
men engaged in the illicit liquor traffic, and for weeks after the
Lindbergh baby was stolen the theory common to most police
officials, and held by the Lindberghs and the Morrow family,
was that bootleg criminals were the kidnapers.

Means told me the kidnapers wanted $100,000 ransom. By
placing a short-term mortgage on the Oxford block, I raised
the money and then gave the $100,000 to Gaston Means. A

297

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

foolish thing to do? I was as wild to get back the child as if it
were mine; and twice Colonel Lindbergh acted on a hope no
less vain than my own, and paid out cash on such a trust. And
on doing this I was acting with the full consent and co-operation
of Colonel Lindbergh.

Night after night I waited out at Fairview, outside of
Washington. That had been my mother's home. At the time I
tell about, the house was tightly shuttered, the graveled drive
neglected, and in the gardens weeds were showing. This estate
that was now among my possessions had been chosen by Means,
from a list of suggested places, as the ideal rendezvous where
we should meet the kidnapers and get the Lindbergh baby back.
Each night I waited there, and through the darkness tried
to see along the paths my mother's feet had made. Each dawn
was just another disappointment; but with sunrise hope would
grow again.

I would think how fine it was that I should be engaged in
something really useful in the world. In my Irish blood, which
Tom Walsh gave me before he had a bit of gold, there was a
compulsion pumped from my heart making me undertake that
quest. I may spring from peasant stock, but that was a stir-
ring, after years of luxury, of noblesse oblige. This is why I feel
no chagrin whatever for having failed in an impossible under-
taking. I did my best, paid out good money, and wanted no
reward except a glow of satisfaction that I hoped to experience
In my heart.

Well, Means had the cash, but there was no baby; yet my
disappointments were no more difficult to account for than
those that had to be explained away each of those days in the
Lindbergh household. This fellow Means was kept informed,
of course, by reading all the newspapers; but thanks to his
understanding of the half-world of crime he could interpret
what he read in such a manner as to make it seem to me that
he had predicted some of the happenings. When March was
two-thirds gone, I gave him another $4,000 for expenses and
agreed to go to the house at Aiken, South Carolina, that I had

298

PRIVATE PROBLEMS AND PUBLIC

leased for the season while my son Edward, Jr. was down there
in school. Means said that would be a first-rate place for the
meeting with the crooks.

At Aiken, a doctor friend loaded for me a special fountain
pen. Its barrel was filled with a deadly poison, disguised as ink.
From that time on, if anybody had tried to make me write
under duress, I should have been prepared with a mild-looking
device about as harmful as a cobra's fang.

Once I clutched that fountain pen in the middle of the night
when I awoke in a bed that shook and trembled. I heard the
melancholy screaming of a railroad engine's whistle, and
realized with a sharply focused mind that again I had dug
myself deeper into a desperate situation by acting on im-
pulse. Means had persuaded me that the criminals were
ready to play fair with me at Ei Paso, Texas. So I had
consented to go, taking with me my trained nurse and my
maid, Inga.

In El Paso I registered in the hotel as "Mrs. Lane", and
each instant I kept in sight of the nurse and Inga. I was grow-
ing more and more suspicious about everything Means told me;
and yet, the baby still was missing. Means swore the criminals
were close at hand, ready to deliver the child to me now that
they could so easily cross the international line and be fairly
safe from capture. Then, a few hours later, Means came to
explain to me that the kidnapers were already across the line,
but would not give up the baby except in Mexico. Then I knew
as plainly as though a rattlesnake had buzzed its tail that I
was in mortal danger; right now I feel sure that had I crossed
into Mexico I should have been destroyed. However, I in-
structed the nurse to stay behind to get the child if possible
and then I started back to Washington.

It was after these adventures that Colonel Lindbergh in
New Jersey identified the remains of a child's body as that
of Ms little son.

I sent Father Hurney, a Roman Catholic priest, to Means to
demand my $100,000. Father Hurney had been selected earlier

299

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

as an appropriate person to receive the baby, and had helped
me all he could.

The record of all Means's yarns and explanations would
fill endless pages. His final statement was that he had per-
mitted some associates to take the $100,000 to be used in
a whisky deal in which they expected to double the amount
within the space of a few days. Well, after that I had Means
and his confederate, a man named Whitaker, arrested. I testi-
fied against them, and Mr. Means was given twenty years; at
his age, I think that means life. I am sorry that I failed, that
I was tricked; but I shall always be glad that in my heart
there was something that compelled me to try my best to take
part in the effort to ransom the Lindbergh baby.

300

CHAPTER XXIV

Depression Days

THE bank was going to foreclose the mortgage on the Oxford
corner. I tried to make them hold off, but the only con-
cession they would make was an agreement to "wait until
Friday." None of my pleading had counted for a darn. I
went on home and said, "To the devil with them; I've got to
have a hundred thousand dollars."

I paced the floor a bit. Then I went behind a big heavily up-
holstered chair. I ripped out the back and pushed my arm
deeply into a sort of squirrel's nest until my groping fingers
found a cache of jewels there. With those stones I set out for
New York, accompanied by a woman friend and my young
daughter. One pawnbroker let me have $50,000 on the stones
taken from the chair; another, Simpson's, 91 Park Row, gave
me $37,500 on the Hope diamond.

Sometime later, when I had the money to redeem them, I
went back with my same escort of one woman friend and one
little girl. I pushed my cash across the counter, and when the
stones were brought I stuffed them into my dress. When I went
back to Simpson's after the Hope diamond it was in their
original shop, downtown in the shadow of Brooklyn Bridge.
Down there, the pawnshop men exclaimed as I started into the
noisy street; they thought I ought to have detectives along.

We went uptown for luncheon, but lingered too long. We
jumped into a taxi, and then ran through the station so fast I
thought I would be shaking the stones out of my bosom at
every step. We just managed to step into a baggage car as the
train began to roll. I was in a lather; but I was happy to be
going back with all my jewels.

301

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

On a day in June, 1932, I saw a dusty automobile truck
roll slowly past my house. I saw the unshaven, tired faces of
the men who were riding in it standing up. A few were seated at
the rear with their legs dangling over the lowered tailboard. On
the side of the truck was an expanse of white cloth on which,
crudely lettered in black, was a legend, "BONUS ARMY."

Other trucks followed in a straggling succession, and on the
sidewalks of Massachusetts Avenue where stroll most of the
diplomats and the other fashionables of Washington were
some ragged hikers, wearing scraps of old uniforms. The sticks
with which they strode along seemed less canes than cudgels.
They were not a friendly-looking lot, and I learned they were
hiking and riding into the Capital along each of its radial
avenues; that they had come from every part of the continent.
It was not lost on me that those men, passing any one of my
big houses, would see in such rich shelters a kind of challenge
2020 was a mockery of their want.

I was burning, because I felt that crowd of men, women,
and children never should have been permitted to swarm across
the continent. But I could remember when those same men,
with others, had been cheered as they marched down Pennsyl-
vania Avenue. While I recalled those wartime parades, I was
reading in the newspapers that the Bonus Army men were go-
ing hungry in Washington.

That night I woke up before I had been asleep an hour.
I got to thinking about those poor devils, marching around the
Capital. Then I decided that it should be a part of my son
Jock's education to see and try to comprehend that marching.
It was one o'clock, and the Capitol was beautifully lighted.
I wished then for the power to turn off the lights and use the
money thereby saved to feed the hungry.

When Jock and I rode among the bivouacked men I was
horrified to see plain evidence of hunger in their faces; I heard
them trying to cadge cigarettes from one another. Some were
lying on the sidewalks, unkempt heads pillowed on their arms,
A few clusters were shuffling around. I went up to one of them,
a fellow with eyes deeply sunken in his head.

302

DEPRESSION DAYS

"Have you eaten?"

He shook Ms head.

Just then I saw General Glassford, superintendent of the
Washington police. He said, "I'm going to get some coffee
for them."

"All right/ 7 I said, "I am going to Quids'."

It was two o'clock when I walked into that white restaurant.
A man came up to take my order. "Do you serve sandwiches?
I want a thousand," I said. "And a thousand packages of
cigarettes."

"But, lady "

"I want them right away. I haven't got a nickel with me,
but you can trust me. I am Mrs. McLean."

Well, he called the manager into the conference and before
long they were slicing bread with a machine; and what with
Glassford's coffee also (he was spending his own money) we
two fed all the hungry ones who were in sight.

Next day I went to see Judge John Barton Payne, head of
the Red Cross, but I could not persuade him that the Bonus
Army men were part of a national crisis that the Red Cross
was bound to deal with. He did promise a little flour, and I was
glad to accept It.

Then I tried the Salvation Army and found that their girls
were doing all they could. I asked the officer in charge, a
worried little man, if he would undertake to find out how I
could help the men. With enthusiasm he said he would, and
the next day he came to my house to tell me that what the
Bonus Army leaders said they most needed was a big tent to
serve as a headquarters, in which fresh arrivals could be
registered. At once I ordered a tent sent over from Baltimore.
After that I succeeded in getting Walter Waters to come to
my house. He was trying to keep command of that big crowd
of men. I talked to him and before long we were friends. I
sent books and radios to the men. I went to the house in
Pennsylvania that Glassford had provided for the women and
children. There was not a thing in it. Scores of women and
children were sleeping on its floors. So I went out and bought

303

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

them army cots. Another day I took over some of my sons'
clothing, likewise some of my own, and dresses of my
daughter. One of the women held up one of little Evalyn's
dresses and examined it on both sides. Then she said, "I
guess my child can starve in a fifty-dollar dress as well as in
her rags."

One day Waters, the so-called commander, came to my
house and said: "I'm desperate. Unless these men are fed,
I can't say what won't happen to this town." With him was
his wife, a little ninety-three-pounder, dressed as a man, her
legs and feet in shiny boots. Her yellow hair was freshly mar-
celed.

"She's been on the road for days," said Waters, "and has
just arrived by bus."

I thought a bath would be a welcome change; so I took her
upstairs to that guest bedroom my father had designed for
King Leopold. I sent for my maid to draw a bath, and told
the young woman to lie down.

"You get undressed," I said, "and while you sleep I'll have
all your things cleaned and pressed."

"Oh, no," she said, "not me. I'm not giving these clothes up.
I might never see them again."

Her lip was out, and so I did not argue. She threw herself
down on the bed, boots and all, and I tiptoed out.

That night I telephoned to Vice-President Charlie Curtis.
I told him I was speaking for Waters, who was standing by
my chair. I said: "These men are in a desperate situation,
and unless something is done for them, unless they are fed,
there is bound to be a lot of trouble. They have no money, nor
any food."

Charlie Curtis told me that he was calling a secret meeting
of Senators, and would send a delegation of them to the House
to urge immediate action on the Howell bill, providing money
to send the Bonus Army members back to their homes.

Those were times when I often wished for the days of Warren
Harding. Harding would have gone among those men and
talked in such a manner as to make them cheer him and cheer

304

Farm 6* Ewing

EDWARD B. MCLEAN, JR. AND JOHN R. MCLEAN

Sons of Mrs. McLean

DEPRESSION DAYS

their flag. If Hoover had done that, I think, not even trouble-
makers in the swarm could have caused any harm.

Nothing I had seen before in my whole life touched me as
deeply as what I had seen in the faces of those men of the
Bonus Army. Their way of righting things was wrong oh,
yes; but it is not the only wrong. I had talked with them and
their women. Even when the million-dollar home my father
built was serving as a sort of headquarters for their leader,
I could feel and almost understand their discontent and their
hatred of some of the things I have represented.

I was cut in California when the United States army was
used to drive them out of Washington. In a moving-picture
show I saw, in a news reel, the tanks, the cavalry, and the gas-
bomb throwers running those wretched Americans out of our
Capital. I was so raging mad I could have torn the theater
down. They could not be allowed to stay, of course; but even
so I felt myself one of them.

After that, I concluded it was high time the family of Tom
Walsh went back to work.

How shall a woman in my fix train her youngsters to be-
come useful members of society rather than leisured play-
mates of society? Well, I turned on discipline as one turns
on a faucet. My friend Mary Roberts Rinehart, the mother
,of three sons, says now that I am too strict with mine. When
one son was arrested for speeding, I took away his car no
fooling. When the other, while in prep school, stayed out too
late, I induced a detective to scare him with a gun. In showing
my two sons just what a man's lot is, I have had a great deal
,of help from Admiral Mark Bristol who is now retired from the
United States Navy. He is a fine man and by court appoint-
ment acts for my husband in all business matters. That makes
It simple for me to seek sound conclusions when I plan for my
sons and daughter.

Jock, my elder son, at the age of eighteen went to work in
Cincinnati in the counting room of the Enquirer, the news-
paper his great-grandfather founded. Jock started at the bot-

305

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

torn. He was paid $15 a week, on which he lived, in a boarding-
house, until he had earned a promotion. A bit later there will
be a job for Ned. I have every reason to believe my sons and
daughter will inherit wealth. The point is, I have learned that
with riches one inherits obligations.

I would not undertake to say how great a change has been
worked in me. However, in the spring of 1935 I went to
dinner at the home of Senator and Mrs. Hiram Johnson. (In
Washington we always call her "Boss.") Senator and Mrs.
Key Pittman were there; just a few others. As I came in
Attorney General Cummings leaned toward Hiram Johnson's
ear to ask, "Who's that?" At dinner I sat next to Mr. Cum-
mings and expressed surprise that he had failed to recognize
me.

"But there is something different about you, Mrs, McLean/'
he said. "Something I can't quite define. 55

"Well, Mr. Attorney General," I replied, "as your depart-
ment contains all the G-men, you are supposed to be the na-
tion's greatest sleuth. And you tell me you can't figure out the
change in me?"

"I really can't," he said, "and I'm amazed."

"Mr. Attorney General, the last time you saw me my hair
was jet black, and now it's pink."

Even so, I dare to tell myself sometimes that there really
has been a change and that it goes far deeper than hair dye.

I suppose that many have read this with envy, some with
amazement, others with anger, that money, so powerful in this
world, so desperately necessitous in their own households at
times, should be given beyond all need into such hands.

Well, money is power power for good, power for evil, ac-
cordingly as it is used. Power is a test the test of char-
acter. I want pity from no one, do not want to seem preachy
or sorry for myself, but, as any woman, I should like to be
understood a little. Unless you have been put to the test, don't
be too sure that you would have made a better mark than I
have. He jests at scars who never felt a wound*

306

DEPRESSION DAYS

If Ned McLean and I had been born into average-income
families and normal environments, given just what we were
born with, we probably should have been average citizens
to-day, leading normal lives, with normal faults and virtues,
reading this story with the same emotions you have felt. Char-
acter or environment? The world never has settled that argu-
ment. I think we each had enough character to have met the
negative tests of such an environment. The very circumstances
of normal life encourage self -discipline, punish self-indulgence.

Not all the moral tests of life are tied up with money or the
lack of it, but only the rich may be reckless, foolish, ignorant,
and snap their fingers at the consequences. If you are not
rich, the piper is at the door with his bill in the morning. The
rich can defer their payments; they may easily delude them-
selves that they are not paying at all.

I said that money is power. You may believe that you know
this quite as well as I. That I doubt. It is not something you
can know by hearsay. Money and electricity are much alike.
Both are stored energy. Living amidst electricity, using it
constantly, you take its presence and its utility for granted.
Treated with respect, it is constructive, tireless. Treated with
disrespect, it is destructive, vicious. It will light your way, pull
a twelve-car train from Washington to New York in a bit more
than four hours, kill you or burn your house alike. Electricity
is insulated, though, and children are not permitted to play
with it.

Those who make money rarely are reckless with it. They
know its values from having made it. They know that it takes
at least as much gumption to keep it, to use it wisely, as it does
to create it in the first place. If they misuse it badly now and
then, it is in the full knowledge of their folly and with a reserva-
tion not to make a habit of it. Yet they assume often that to
their children this will be sense as plain as that a hot stove
burns and pins stick.

They bring their children up surrounded by wires charged
with the high voltages of wealth, thinly insulated with
"Naiighty! Naughty!" commands. If they are generous of

307

FATHER STRUCK IT RICH

heart, they will want to share the bounties of wealth with their
own. If it is easier for any parent to say "yes" than "no", how
much easier for those whose yes involves no sacrifice, or in-
convenience even? If they have known hardship and denial,
they will wish to spare their own.

In this eagerness to give their children the things^ they
themselves did not have as children, to save these children
from what they themselves did have, they innocently deny
their sons and daughters the very incentives, the aids to char-
acter and ambition which impelled their own successes. This is
instinct in most parents, rich, poor, or in between. You may
see the impulse operating under nearly any roof, but those
who do not have money are in little danger of softening their
children with money.

There is nothing noble or virtuous, as such, about poverty
and discomfort. If a man in his own youth broke the ice in the
water pitcher of a winter morning, it isn't necessary to deny
his son a radiator. If a woman walked barefoot to a dance,
carrying her shoes, it won't corrupt her daughter to ride in a
car or to own five pairs of shoes. But if it was good for the
man to earn his own spending money as a boy, it will be good
for his son. Twenty-five cents a week may have been enough
for the father; five dollars may not be enough for the son.
Times change, and the value of money, but boys and girls and
first principles don't.

Or if parents are mean-spirited, I have seen them dangle
riches tantalMngly before adolescents, not to discipline them
to moderation, but teasing them with the scraps of wealth.
If they have pride in their own achievements, they may easily
communicate the pride, without the achievements, to their sons
and daughters. Surely the greatest responsibility of all that
money brings is the responsibility to keep it from distorting
your children's lives.

Yes, money was our devil, but it was not money's fault.

I can hear my father talking now of "clean money." His came
directly from the earth, not from other men, whether fairly or
unfairly. He took pride in that. A generous man and one who

308

DEPRESSION DAYS

liked people, he taught me that there was no true generosity
in giving money if the giver has much money; that unless I
gave something of myself as well, it cost me nothing; therefore
meant nothing. This I have tried to practice, hope to practice
more. That he did not teach me more, I cannot find it in my
heart to reproach his memory. He had not, after all, ex-
perienced the evil side of money. He knew little of weakness.
A strong character himself, it would have been natural for him
to take for granted the strength of his children, to fail to realize
the different circumstances of money earned and money in-
herited. It is myself I reproach; most of all, because he would
be disappointed in me.

I best can make amends by teaching my children what I had
to learn the hard way, and late. I am teaching them; be sure of
that. As for myself, I am pretty nearly broke now. I hope my
acquaintances I won't say friends are satisfied. The
Hope diamond, and every other jewel that I have, have been in
and out of New York pawnshops in recent years. There is a
spot three feet square where the plaster has fallen from the
ceiling of my bedroom at Friendship. Its repair is indefinite
and I think of hanging pink ruffles around it.

With care, if times improve, there will be enough salvage
from the two estates to provide what still will be a fortune
for each child. I think they will give a better account of their
stewardships than their father and mother have. It won't be
for lack of a bad example or for ignorance of that example, if
they do not.

Index

ABDTJL-HAMID, 151, 174

Abruzzi, Duke of the, 116; and Kath-

erine Elkins, 135, 136
Altieri, Prince, and Evalyn Walsh, 110-

119
Amedeo, Prince Luigi. See Abruzzi,

Duke of the
Anderson, Henry, architect of "2020",

91

Antelope, Frank, 16
Armour, P. .D., 137
Astor, Vincent, 208, 209
Astor, Mrs. Vincent, 208, 209
Astor, William Waldorf, 124

BAKER, NEWTON D., 231
Bakhmeteff, George, 148-150, 190, 191
Bakhmeteff, Madame George, 148-150,

190, 191, 194, 210
Balfour, Lord, 263, 264
Bareda, Frederic, 123
Barker, Dr. Lewellys F., 165, 166,

180-183, 195, 197, 223, 224
Barril, Maria de, 123, 124
Baruch, Bernard, 265
Baruch, H. N., 265
Beale, Lieut. Edward F., 190
Beale, Gen., 142

Beale, Truxtun, 185, 186, 206, 232
Beale, Mrs. Truxtun, 185, 232
Beale, Lieut. Walker Blame, death of,

231, 232

Beckwith, Elton T., 24
Beeckman, R. Livingston, 115
Belmont, Mrs. 0. H. P., 123, 209, 210
Benson, John, at Camp Bird, 46, 62-

64; at Goldfield, 100, 101; further

prospecting, 132, 133
Biddle, Craig, 113, 114
Biddle, Mrs. Craig, 113
Birch, D. R>, 152
Blaine, James G., 185

Boardman, Mabel, 139

Boldt, George, of the Waldorf, 122

Booth, Edwin, portrait of, 113

Borah, William E., 254, 263-265

Borah, Mrs. William E., 265

Bradley, Mrs. Edson, 199

Bradley, Col. Edward, 212

Briggs, Dr., 129

Bristol, Admiral Mark, 305

Bryan, William Jennings, 143, 217

Buckman, Arthur, 163, 202, 204, 205,

211-215
Buggy, Maggie, 116-119, 143, 144,

146, 147, 178, 179, 261
Bugher, Frederick, 192
Bullock, Seth, the sheriff of Deadwood,

16

Burke, Edward, 98
Burns, William J., 297
Butt, Archie, 123

CALAMITY JAKE, 16

Campbell, Mrs. Colin, 137

Camp Bird mine, discovery of wealth

ii^ 39-41, 46; return of Walshes to,

60-68; its sale, 84-89
Campion, John F., 7, 70
Cannon, Speaker Joe, 168
Cantacuzene, Prince Mickel, 124
Carter, Shirley, 202
Cartier, Pierre, and the Hope diamond,

171, 172, 174-178, 191, 295
Cassini, Countess, 86
Castellane, Count Boni de, 115
Chambrun, Viscount de, 134
Chase, Salmon P., 185
Chaulnes, Due de, 137
Christian, George, 247, 258, 266, 270,

271, 274, 275
Clark, Champ, 200, 202
Cleveland, Grover, 217
Clinton, Lord Francis Pelham, 173
Cockrell, Anna Ewing, 2d, 97

311

INDEX

Cockrell, Marion, 49, 69; the Walshes'
reception for, 95, 96; her wedding,
96, 97

Cockrell, Senator, 49

Colonna, Prince, and Evalyn Walsh,
111, 117-119

Coolidge, Calvin, 218; as Vice-Presi-
dent, 255-259, 275; death of his son,
283, 284; as President, 284-2S6

Coolidge, Mrs. Calvin, 255-259, 275,
284

Coolidge, Calvin, Jr., 283

Coolidge, John, 283

Cox, James M., 240-242

Crawford, Capt. Jack, 16, 17

Creager, R. B., 246-249

Crile, Dr. George, 271

Crissinger, Dick, 250

CummingSj Homer, 306

Curtis, Charles, 218, 219, 257, 304

Curzon, Lady, 137

Curzon, Lord, 137

Cushing, Dr. Harvey, 161

DALY, JERRY, 19

Daugherty, Harry M., 187, 241-243,

254, 256, 260, 266, 272, 273, 280
Davis, John W., 284
Dawes, Charles G., 270
Deadwood, 15-18
Devoust, Emile, 124
Dewey, Adm. George, 159, 168, 191,

192, 200, 226-228
Dewey, Mrs. George, 191, 192, 226-

228

De Wolfe, Elsie, 187
Doheny, Edward L., 282
Draper, Gen., 108
Draper, Susan Preston, 108
Draper, Mrs. William F., 199
Duckstein, Will, 163, 197, 279
Duff-Gordon, Lady, 204
Duke, Doris, 261
Duke, James B., 259-262
Duke, Mrs. James B., 259-262, 285

EDDY, ELIZABETH, 50, 82

Edward VII, King, 102

Eliason, Daniel, 173

Elkins, Davis, 247, 248, 256, 258

EHdns, Katherine, at Holton Arms, 86,

116; and Abruzzi, 135, 136; further

romances, 136, 137, 143

Elkins, Stephen B., 135, 136
Ewing, Miss, 11, 12

FALL, ALBERT, 253, 254, 274, 278-283

Fall, Mrs. Albert, 278, 279, 282, 283

Field, Marshall, 76, 137

Field, Mrs. Marshall, 199

Finney, Dr. John Miller Turpin, 127,

128, 130, 167, 223-225, 267, 271,

274

Fish, Mrs. Stuyvesant, 209, 210
Fletcher, Henry, 266
Foraker, Joseph B., 217, 244
Ford, Bob, 21
Foster, Rev. Henry, 144
Freylinghuysen, Joseph, 247, 256, 258

GALLAUDET, EDSOK F., 95

Gait, Mrs., her romance with Wilson,
220, 221. See also Wilson, Mrs.
Woodrow (second)

Garden, Mary, 76, 79; her Paris tri-
umph, 106

Gates, John W., 165

Geddes, Sir Auckland, 233

Gerry, Peter, 143, 167

Gibson, Charles Dana, 135

Gibson, Preston, 206-208

Gillett, Frederick, 266, 274

Gillette, William, 82

Glassford, Gen., 303

Goelet, Mrs. Robert, 177, 178

Goldfield, 100, 101

Gould, Anna, 115

Gould, Marjorie, 136, 138

Grant, Julia, 124

Grant, Pres. U. S., 190

Griffith, David Wark, 260, 261

Guggenheim, Simon, 133

Guthrie, Dr., 167

HALE, FRED, 246, 256, 258
Hammond, Jack, at Camp Bird, 84, 85
Hammond, John Hays, at Camp Bird,

84, 85; negotiates sale of Camp

Bird, 86-89
Hardin, Dr., 180, 271
Harding, Rt. Rev. Alfred, 259
Harding, Amos, 245
Harding, Warren G., 187; as editor

and Senator, 217-220; the campaign

for, 239-250; his cabinet, 253, 254;

guest of the McLeans, 256, 257, 259,

312

INDEX

Harding, Warren G. (continued}
261, 262, 265, 266; his last journey,
274, 275

Harding, Mrs. Warren G., 218-220;
and the presidential campaign, 239-
250; her illness, 266-268; her hus-
band's death, 274-276; her death,
277. See also Harding, Warren G.

Harvey, Col. George, 273, 283, 284

Hawks, Miss, 201

Haye, Miss, 74, 77, 78

Hearst, Senator George, and the Home-
stake mine, 18

Hearst, William Randolph, 18, 132,
233, 260

Hearst, Mrs. William Randolph, 233,
260

Henderson, Amos, partner of Tom
Walsh, 24

Herrick, Myron, 168

HiU, Crawford, 142-144

Hill, Mrs. Crawford, 142-144

Hitchburn, Martha, 136

Hitt, William, 136-141

Hoehling, Judge A. A., 294

Homer, Francis, 279

Homestake mine, 17, 18

Hoover, Herbert, 229, 230; in Harding
cabinet, 253, 274; and the Bonus
Army, 305

Hoover, Mrs. Herbert, 274

Hope diamond, purchase of, 171-179,
191; curse of, 251; pawned, 301,
309

Hope, Henry Thomas, 173

Hughes, Charles Evans, 253, 259, 262

Hughes, Mrs. Charles Evans, 259

Hughes, Charles J., 168

Hurney, Father, 299

Button, Mrs, Edward, 284-286

Hylan, Mayor, 192

IMOGENE BASIN, Tom Walsh's interest
in, 32-34

JAMES, JESSE, 21
James, Mrs. Julian, 230
Jenness, Conrad, 53
Jennings, Malcolm, 247, 274
Jennings, Mrs. Malcolm, 247, 274
Johnson, Bradish, 134
Johnson, Hiram, 306
Johnson, Mrs, Hiram, 306

Jones, Smoky, and the Homestake

mine, 17, 18
Jusserand, Ambassador, 97

KEMP, CAPT., of the Deutschland, 107,

108

Kerensky, Alexander, 191
Kernochan, Mrs. James L., 123-125

LAFFERTY, ARTHUR, 65

Lafferty, Aunt Maria, 12, 14

LeadviUe, 7, 14, 19-23

Leavick, Felix, 19

Lee, Lord, of Fareham, 264

Lee, Monroe, 26, 46, 47, 56, 84, 87,

94, 121

Lee, Samuel N., husband of Lucy
Reed, 24, 26, 108; at Camp Bird, 64
Lee, Mrs. Samuel N. See Reed, Lucy
Leishmann, John G. A., 151, 152, 171
Leiter, Joseph, 137, 138, 146
Leiter, Levi, 76, 137
Leiter, Mrs. Levi, 199
Leopold II, King of the Belgians, 69,
161; his friendship for Tom Walsh,
78, 79; his influence on Walsh, 86,
87, 89-91

Lewis, Mrs. James Hamilton, 288
Lindbergh, Col. Charles A., 296-299
Lodge, Mrs. Henry Cabot, 193, 194
Longworth, Nicholas, 143, 288
Longworth, Mrs. Nicholas. See Roose-
velt, Alice

Longworth, Paulina, 288
Louis XIV, of France, 172
Ludlow, Mrs. Mamie, 192, 194-196

McADOO, WILLIAM GIBBS, 104, 105, 258
McCawley, Major Charles, 99
McDonald, Annie, 10, 25-27, 37, 43-
46, 54, 95, 96; a trip abroad, 56;
in Paris, 69-73; in a post of dig-
nity, 98, 99, 104

Mackay, Mrs. John W., Ill, 116-119
McKenna, Justice, 168
McKinley, President William, 55, 100
McKinley, Mrs. William, 55
McLean, Edward Beale, 121; meets
Evalyn Walsh, 50, 51; first pro-
posal, 81; a spoiled child, 110;
during Evalyn's illness, 126! en-
gagement and marriage, 134, 138
145; honeymoon, 146-157; his rel-

313

INDEX

McLean, Edward Beale (continued)
atives, 185-199 ; his mother's death,
197, 198; his jealousy, 203; wild
times, 205-215; Ms father's death,
222-228; becomes front-page news,
278-283; mental troubles, 292, 293.
See also Walsh, Evalyn

McLean, Edward Jr. (born 1918), 234,
299, 306

McLean, Evalyn (born 1921), 259-
261, 287

McLean, John R., 50, 127, 134, 136,
168, 185-189, 192-195, 198, 210;
and the Washington Post, 217, 218;
Ms death, 222-226; his estate, 227,
228

McLean, Mrs. John R. } 50, 51, 134,
142, 148, 177, 178, 188-190, 194;
death of, 197, 198

McLean, John Roll, 216, 227, 229,
234, 273, 302, 305, 306

McLean, Mildred, 159

McLean, Vinson Walsh, birth of, 161;
kidnap threats, 163, 164; his child-
hood, 200-202, 234, 235; his death,
236-238

McLean, Washington, 187, 241

McLean, Mrs. Washington, 187, 192,
193

McLeod, Freddie, 235, 252

MacVeagh, Wayne, 162

Major, John, 279, 280

Marie Antoinette, and the Tavernier
diamond, 172, 175

Marlborough, Duchess of, 209, 210

Martin, Frederick Townsend, 79

Masters, Miss, of Dobbs Ferry, 96

May, Isobel, 143

Mayo, Dr., 267, 268

Means, Gaston B., 280, 296-300

Mellon, Andrew, 286, 287

Merry del Val, Cardinal, 113

Meyer, Dr. Adolph, 223, 224

Meyer, George Von Lengerke, 186

Miller, Mrs. Anna Jenness, and dec-
orating of "2020", 92

Mitchell, Dr. James, 129, 167, 290

Mitchell, Nanine, 99

Moore, Mrs. Clement, 124

Morse, Dr. John Lovett, 229

JVfott, Gen. T. Bentley, 75, 76, 107,

110
Munsey, Frank, 107, 109

NAGELMACKERS, GEORGES, 78
National Peace Jubilee, in Washing-
ton, 55, 56

Nesbit, Evelyn, 185, 186
Newcastle, Duchess of, 173
Nordica, Mme. Lillian, 85, 86
Norman, Reginald, 203
Norman, Mrs. Reginald, 203

OELRICHS, BLANCHE, 125
Oelrichs, Harry, 124, 125
Oge, Marie (Mrs. Beale), 185, 187
Olga, Queen, 148

Ouray, the Walshes' early life in, 25-
38; a library for, 88

PAGET, LADY, 102, 103

Palmer, A. Mitchell, 280, 281

Palmer, Potter, 76

Palmer, Mrs, Potter, in Paris with the

Walshes, 74-76; her life in Chicago,

76; in Newport, 124
Parker, Dr. Henry, 223
Payne, John Barton, 303
Peck, Mrs., and Wilson, 221
Pell, Herbert Jr., 124
Pershing, Gen. John, 231
Pittman, Key, 306
Pittman, Mrs. Key, 306
Pius, Pope, receives Walsh family, 113
Pope, John Russell, 156, 157, 187
Porter, Gen., 75
Purdon-Clarke, Sir Caspar, 173, 174

READING, LORD, 232

Reed, Carrie Bell, See Walsh, Mrs.

Thomas F.
Reed, Fanny, chaperones Evalyn in

Paris, 102-107
Reed, Lucy, 20; marries Samuel N.

Lee, 24; in Kansas City, 26; at

Camp Bird, 46, 47, 84; a trip abroad,

56; death of, 87, 8S
Reed, Stephen (Grandfather), 11, 12,

20; death of, 35
Reed, Mrs. Stephen (Grandmother),

3, 4, 20, 21, 24, 36, 129, 130
Reed, Steve, 20, 24; death of, 94
Richardson, Andy, 26-28, 39, 40; his

faith in Imogene Basin, 33-35; and

the Gertrude, 36, 37
Rinehart, Mary Roberts, 305
Ringing, John, 289, 290

314

INDEX

Rochester, Alice, 69

Roosevelt, Alice, 137, 141, 143, 217-
219, 292-294; a White House debu-
tante, 85, 86; the Walsh ball for,
99; at the Arms Conference dinner,
263, 264; her musicales, 288

Roosevelt, Ethel, 137

Roosevelt, Pres. Theodore, 94, 100,
101, 193

Russell, Monsignor, 179

ST. CYR, 212-214

Sanders, Everett, 285

Sawyer, Dr. Charles E., 219, 247, 249,

250, 266-268, 274, 276
Sawyer, Mrs. Charles E., 247, 274
Scheff, Fritzi, 138
Schwab, Peter, 188
Scobey, Ed, 246, 247, 249
Sharkey, Tom, 101
Shaw, Quincy, 211
Shaw, Mrs. Quincy, 2nd, 211
Shouts, Marguerite, 137
Sinclair, Harry, 278, 279
Slemp, Bascom, 280, 282
Sloan, Jimmy, 160
Smith, James Henry, 211
Smith, Jess W., 260, 272, 273
Somers, Miss, 50
Spencer, Dr. John Blair, 223
Spottswood Mackin, Countess, 79
Stapleton, Col. Billy, 143, 144
Star of the East, diamond, 155-157,

171, 191

Star of the South, 295
Stearns, Frank, 275
Stearns, Mrs. Frank, 275
Stevens, Mrs. Paran, 102
Stewart, Mrs. William Rhmelander

(later Mrs. Smith), 211, 212, 214
Stillman, Fifi Potter, 125
Story, Waldo, 114
Strong, Capt. Putnam Bradlee, 175
Stultz, WUmer, 288
Suffolk, Countess of, 137
Swill Barrel Jimmy, 16
Szeche"nyi, Count, 288

TAPT, HELEN, 137

Taft, William Howard, 123, 141, 159,

160, 168, 186, 193
Taft, Mrs. William H., 199
Tappe, Mme., 204

Tavernier, Jean, 172

Thacker, Mrs. May Dixon, 296

Thaw, Harry, 185, 186

Thomas, Charles Spaulding, governor

of Colorado, 55, 88, 97
Thomas, Edith, 97
Thompson, Faith, 28, 29, 43
Thompson, John, 28, 35, 43
Thompson, Mrs. John, 28, 35, 43, 45
Thumb, Gen. Tom, 252
Thurman, Allen G., 217
Todd, Georgiana, 238, 263, 270
Townsend, Mathilde, 136, 143, 167
Tumulty, Joseph P., 243

UNDERWOOD, MRS. OSCAR, 257

VANDERBILT, ALFRED G., 125, 203
Vanderbilt, Consuelo. See Marlbor-

ough, Duchess of
Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 124
Vanderbilt, Harold, 209
Vanderbilt, Reginald, 203, 205-208
Votaw, Mrs. Heber, 243, 244

WALLACE, HENRY C., 274

Walsh, Evalyn, birth of (1886), 3, 24;
and Grandmother Reed, 3, 4; early
days in Colorado, 4-12; school life
begins, 11; her religion, 12; lean
days in Ouray, 25-38; shares her
father's secret, 38 ; childhood scrapes
at Camp Bird, 40, 41; in a train
wreck, 43-46; the excitement of
Washington, 49, 50; meets Edward
McLean, 50, 51; influence of drink,
53, 54; and the National Peace
Jubilee, 55, 56; her first trip abroad,
56, 57; an Irish curse, 57; and
"Mam'selle", 58, 61, 67, 68; the re-
turn to Camp Bird, 60-68; life in
Paris, 69-71, 74-78; at the Convent
du Sacre Coeur, 71-73; the escape,
73, 74; meets Leopold of Belgium,
78, 79; her first proposal, 81; stops
a tram, 83 ; a summer at Camp Bird,
84, 85; at Holton Arms, 86; a visit
to Leopold, 89-91; her quarters at
"2020", 92; at Dobbs Ferry, 95, 96;
more escapades, 97, 98; to Paris
with Fanny Reed, 102-109; adven-
tures in Rome and Biarritz, 110-120;
in Newport, 123, 124; a fatal ride,

315

INDEX

Walsh, Evalyn (continued)

124-126; an invalid for months,
126-130; at Wolhurst, 131-133; her
engagement and marriage, 134, 138-
145; her honeymoon, 146-157; birth
of her first son, 158, 159, 161 ; death
of her father, 162-167; and pur-
chase of Hope diamond, 171-179; a
bout with morphine, 179-184; her
relatives-in-law, 185-199; wild
times, 205-215; birth of second son,
216; in Washington again, 217-228;
war days, 229-233 ; death of her son
Vinson, 236-238; and the Hardings,
239-258; meets the Coolidges, 255,
256; birth of daughter, 259-261; the
Arms Conference dinner, 262-265;
Florida days, 265, 266, 269, 270; an
operation, 271, 272; and the de-
pression, 293-295; her mother's
death, 296; and the Lindbergh case,
296-300; and the Bonus Army, 302-
304; the education of her children,
305-309

Walsh, Uncle Mike, 12, 14; death of,
110

Walsh, Senator, of Montana, 280-283

Walsh, Thomas F., early days in Col-
orado, 3-12; a Mason, 12; his early
life, 14, 15; his "mining fever", 15;
in Deadwood, 15-18; at LeadviUe,
19-23; his marriage, 22; strikes rich
vein, 23; moves to Denver, 23, 24;
his smelting business, 24 ; hard times
in Ouray, 25-31; prospecting, 32-
38; strikes it rich, 38-41 ; in a tram
wreck, 43-46; moves to Washing-
ton, 49, 50; prosperity in Washing-
ton, 52-56; appointed Commissioner
to Paris Exposition, 55-57, 69-77;
his kindness, 59; back to Camp
Bird, 61-68; and Leopold of Bel-
gium, 78, 79; sells the Camp Bird,
84-88; Leopold's influence on, 86,
87, 89-91; building of "2020", 91-
94; joins Goldfield rush, 100, 101;
and Guggenheim, 133; supports
Taft, 141, 159, 160; his fatal illness,
162-167

Walsh, Mrs. Thomas F., early days in
Colorado, 3-12; described, 20, 21;
her marriage, 22; her ill health, 26-
29, 35; with her mother in Den-

ver, 38, 39; in a train wreck, 43-
46; first winter in Washington, 49,
50; abroad, 56-58, 69-80; protests
sale of Camp Bird, 86-89; accepted
by society, 91, 92; and husband's
death, 162-169; her war work, 230;
her death, 296. See also Walsh,
Thomas F.

Walsh, Vinson, childhood escapades,
4-7, 10, 40, 41 ; born in Denver, 24 ;
in Ouray, 25-27, 37; in a train
wreck, 43-46 ; in school in Washing-
ton, 50, 51; a trip abroad, 56, 57,
69-80; at Camp Bird, 61-68, 84,
85; runs away, 82; his quarters at
"2020", 93, 94; at The Hill School,
101, 102; his love of driving, 121-
124; his death, 124-126

Ward, Fanny, 289

Washington, the Walshes' first winter
in, 49, 50; the Walshes' home in,
91-94

Waters, Walter, 303, 304 l

Weeks, John W,, 253, 257, 259, 261,
262

Weeks, Mrs. John W., 259

Wegg, David S., 168; and the "Austin
smelting process", 24; a letter from
Tom Walsh, 30, 31; Walsh settles
old score with, 88

Welles, Sumner, 143

White, Stanford, 186

Whitney, Mrs. Harry Payne, 211

Wickersham, Mrs., 107, 108

Wiley, W. F., 196

Williams, Juliette, 146

Williams, Dr. Whitridge, 161

Willison, George Findlay, describes
the Walshes, 20

Wilmer, Dr. W, H., 231

Wilson, Florence, 69, 78, 102-108

Wilson, Pres. Woodrow, 191, 193,
229; marries Mrs. Gait, 220, 221

Wilson, Mrs. Woodrow (first), 199

Wilson, Mrs. Woodrow (second), 221

Winbush, Julian, 201, 202

Wolcott, Edward O., 131

Wolhurst, the Walshes at, 131-133

Work, Dr. Hubert, 274

Work, Mrs. Hubert, 274

YOHE, MAY, 173, 174, 178
ZEVERLY, COL., 278

316

114349