“Have you thought of how you are going to finance it?”
“Certainly I have.” I was certain that the interest of many of our contributors extended beyond the magazine, and that they would see we now had a broader field of activity. They had given before and would give again. I knew money would come in.
Any five of the outside women present could have underwritten the Conference, but they objected that funds were needed for other work. One by one they left in a hurry; the inevitable appointments were waiting for them. Their advice to the Board was, no Conference—and the wealthy members of the Board concurred.
Nevertheless, I went ahead with the details of securing backers. Even the letterhead on our stationery was significant. You could tell such a lot about an organization—quality, standards, tone—from the names, often more informative than the body of the letter. My intention was to make people stand in public for what they believed in private, and at least our list of sponsors was impressive enough—a brilliant and distinguished array.
The success of any conference was determined in great measure by the caliber of the men who took part in it. Results depended first upon the concept animating it, and second, as had been proved before, on the presence of an eminent figure to ornament the assemblage. I decided to see whether I could induce Lord Dawson to be our main speaker, and, hoping that personal persuasion might be more efficacious than written, sailed for England in September.
Havelock came up from Margate to greet me, as usual far removed from the hurly-burly of the world, aloof from the conflict of ideas which meant so much to me. Yet to talk with him again was to return to the mêlée with renewed inspiration. I managed to crowd in a motor trip to Oxford, lunch at the Mitre, a walk through Brazenose and King’s, and a drive back through Buckinghamshire, where the beeches were changing to bronze and russet. I felt a regretful pang that so little of my life could be lived in England.
Unfortunately for my purposes Lord Dawson was away shooting in the North. With some temerity I dwelt upon the possibility of Lord Buckmaster, the former Stanley Owen, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Asquith Coalition of 1915, who had become one of the most finished orators in the House of Lords. He had just returned from Scotland and telephoned me to suggest we exchange views. He was about to present a resolution that, under the auspices of the Ministry of Health, restrictions on birth control instruction be removed for married women who attended welfare centers. He was gathering practical information from people who had had practical experience, and wanted to know how methods in the United States differed from those in England and, particularly, verification of their harmlessness.
When he came to my hotel one afternoon, I did not take time to mention the Conference, because H.G., knowing the value of proper introductions, had arranged one of his most brilliant dinners for that very evening, or rather he had proposed it and Jane had arranged it. For H.G. to entertain in behalf of a cause set the seal of approval on it. Jane had invited literary luminaries and their wives: George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, Sir Arbuthnot Lane, Professor E. W. MacBride of the Eugenics Education Society, Walter Salter of the League of Nations, and Lord Buckmaster.
It had been my experience that personages gave little of themselves on formal occasions. So many people expected these lions to roar bravely, forgetting that they preferred to save their sparkling sallies for the pages of their books. Moreover, when the English came together for an evening they liked to have it light and amusing. I had received much from the books of Shaw, who had advanced civilization by breaking down barriers of all sorts, now almost nothing from him personally, although he was very diverting, with funny quips upon life and America and birth control.
I had by design been seated next to Lord Buckmaster, and after the meal had been in progress for perhaps half an hour, H.G. leaned over and whispered to me, “Have you got him?”