And I also was delighted with the girls’ colleges and wrote home:
“At Vassar the girls were playing a football game in sympathy with the Harvard and Yale match going on. They were all dressed as boys, had made up trousers, or knickers, and some were playing on combs to represent a band, and singing the Yale song, though the sham Harvard had beaten the sham Yale by 25 to 5. They are nice, merry girls, I think as nice as at Smith’s, where I promised to suggest my granddaughter should be educated. I had an audience of about six hundred, a very good and pleasant one, nearly all girls and a few men. The President was sitting close to the door, and I asked him to call out to me to speak up if he didn’t hear, as I was young as a lecturer and always afraid my voice might not reach. He said he would not like to do that, but would hold up a handkerchief if I was to speak louder. About the middle of the lecture I saw him very slowly raise a handkerchief to the level of his face, but I could not catch his eye, so I stopped and asked if that was the signal. He was quite confused and said, No, he wanted to blow his nose, and the girls shrieked with delight. He told me afterwards he had held out as long as he could. The girls had acted some of my plays. The Jackdaw is a great favourite there as well as at Smith’s, where they have conjugated a verb ‘to Jackdaw.’ One of the ‘Faculty’ said she doubted if our players could do Gaol Gate as well as Mr. Kennedy, the author of The Servant in the House, reads it....”
These lectures gave me opportunity of seeing many places where our plays did not go, and I have delighted memories of rushing waters in Detroit, and of little girls dancing in cruciform Columbus, and of the roar of Niagara Falls, and the stillness of the power house that sends that great energy to create light and motion a hundred or two hundred miles away, and of many another wide-spreading, kindly city where strangers welcomed me, and I seemed to say good-bye to friends. Dozing in midnight trains, I would remember, as in a dream, “the flight of a bird through a lighted hall,” the old parable of human life.
To return to the meeting at Washington:
“I had to get away early because Mrs. Taft had asked me to the White House to hear the Mormon choir. I arrived there rather late but the music was going on. It was a very pretty sight, the long white room with fine old glass chandeliers, and two hundred Mormons—the men in black, the women in white—and about fifty guests. I heard one chorus, and they sang ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ and everyone stood up. Then we moved about and chatted, and I was presented to the President—pleasant enough, but one doesn’t feel him on the stage like Roosevelt.
“To-day I had a very scattered rehearsal of Spreading the News. The players kept slipping out by a back door, and I found the negroes were dancing and singing out there, it being their dinner hour. It was, of course, irresistible.”
One day when we went to rehearsal, the sun was shining and I offered the players a holiday and picnic to Mount Vernon, and we crossed the river and spent the day there very pleasantly. Donovan said, “No wonder a man should fight for such a home as this.” I told them the holiday was not a precedent, for we might go to a great many countries before finding so great a man to honour. Washington had been a friend of my grandfather’s, who had been in America with his regiment. There was a case of stuffed birds at Roxborough which was said to have been a present from Washington, and there was a field there called Mount Vernon. My grandfather had built a little sea lodge on the Burren coast and had called that also Mount Vernon, so I was specially interested in seeing the house. It is beautifully kept and filled with memorials of its owner and with furniture that belonged to him. The Americans keep their sacred places well. A school at which I lectured wanted to give me a fee; but I did not wish to take one, and I said when they pressed it, that I had seen in a shop window an old jug with portraits of Washington and of Lafayette on it, and had wished for it, but it was nine dollars and I was refraining from luxuries, and that I would accept that if they liked. So it was sent to me, and I brought it safely home to add to my collection of historic delft. It has the date 1824. It was made to commemorate Lafayette’s visit at that time, and the words on it are, “A Republic is not always ungrateful.” It now stands near another jug of about the same date, on which there is the portrait of that other patriot beloved by his people, O’Connell.
On November 18th I arrived at New York. All my work was easier from that time through the help of my friend of some ten years, Mr. John Quinn. I had a pleasant little set of rooms at the Algonquin Hotel. I said to Mr. Flynn, Liebler’s manager, when I arrived there, “Is it near the theatre? Shall I be able to walk there?” “Walk there,” he said, “why you could throw a cricket ball to it.” I did walk there and back many times a day during my stay, and grew fond of the little corner of the city I got to know so well; but I sometimes envied the cricket ball that would have escaped the dangerous excitement of the five crossings, one of them across 6th Avenue, with motors dashing in all directions, and railway trains thundering overhead. The theatre was charming, I wish we could carry it about on all our tours, and I was given a little room off the stage, which had been Maxine Elliott’s own room, and where players and guests often had tea with me.
“Hotel Algonquin, New York, Monday, 20th November. We opened very well last night. A crowded house and very enthusiastic, Rising of the Moon, Birthright, and Spreading the News were given. All got five or more curtains. One man made rather a disturbance at the fight in Birthright, saying it was ‘not Irish,’ but his voice was drowned and he left. I was told that —— one of the enemy who was there, said, ‘Such things do not happen in Ireland; they may happen in Lady Gregory’s own family.’ The Playboy is to be put on next week. J. Q. seems a bit anxious about The Playboy; says they may ‘throw things,’ and that seems what the Gaelic American is inviting them to do when it says The Playboy ‘must be squelched’ and a lesson taught to Mr. Yeats and his fellow-agents of England, and that I have no right to appeal for respect for my sex.
“Last night as I went into the theatre I heard my name spoken, and a girl told me she was the daughter of old Matt Cahel, the blacksmith who had lived at Roxborough, and she had come to see the plays and said her father would have been so proud, if he had lived, to know I was here. I am glad of this, for I hear the plays were preached against by some priests last Sunday. Father Flanagan thinks the attacks all come from Dublin. The players are convinced they are from some of our non-paying guests.... I think we must revise that list. The Playboy is to be put on next Monday. I am glad they are not putting off the fight any longer. It tries the players’ nerves. It will be on for four nights and a matinée. By going behind myself and gathering a party and cheering with what voice I had left, I at last got the shouts for Hughie in Birthright to be less of a mournful wail.”