On my return to the hotel I found a note from an American friend asking me to dine and saying she would call for me at eight. This was cheering. How it is known so quickly that one is in a place passes my comprehension! Punctually at eight she burst into my room, looking as radiant as the May, although she is nearly forty.
“Tell me,” I asked. “How do you keep yourself so young, you amazing woman?”
“Simple enough,” she retorted. “Massage and a blameless life, my dear.”
We dined with several members of the Hungarian Red Cross, gone crazy with hate of Bolshevism, who talked themselves hoarse about the iniquities of the Jews and ate so many oysters that I began to be nervous for their constitutions. And so ended the last of my days in Berne.
I was too late for the Geneva Conference. The delegates had had their last sitting, and only a social function to say farewell remained. There I met a number of dear friends full of good works. I have written of Mrs. Buxton and her sister. These and their like compensate the world for the idle and mischievous butterflies waiting for their Paris visa and frocks and jewels.
At the theatre that evening a curious little international group talked of their many adventures of travel, with the difficulties of getting passports as a conspicuous item of conversation. One spoke of the amount he had had to pay in bribes in Rumania, another of having lost his passport. “But I had a receipted tailor’s bill in my pocket. The Austrian Royal Arms were at the head. It was an old bill. And they accepted it as my passport without a question. It looked important and the fellow who looked at it couldn’t read a word, so there was no trouble!” A little picture of Balkan Europe which tells a story one can read only too well.
Baron Ofenheim is reputed to be one of the wealthiest men in Austria. I only know him as the kindest of friends and the most tender-hearted of men. He has a connexion of many years’ standing with England and is a man of great business capacity, which he has devoted to helping his unfortunate country out of her terribly trying situation. He was one of the most helpful delegates to the Fight the Famine Conference in London. He attended the Geneva Conference urging a better organization than he believed the Save the Children Fund had then achieved. He favoured activity on a larger scale by a more representative body of people than he considered the organizers of the Fund to be at that time. Doubtless the much superior organization that the Fund has achieved under the able secretaryship of Mr. Golden would satisfy the most severe critic, including the Herr Baron. With him was Sir Cyril Butler, at one time a British official in Vienna. With the opinion of these two distinguished men that Vienna would be a far more useful centre for the League of Nations than Geneva, I heartily agree.