I felt he was trying to prepare me for something having gone wrong, though I could not imagine what it was. From then on I was aware of an unpleasant subterranean mystery insidiously disturbing the previous harmony. But nobody talked openly.
During my absence in the United States, Sir Bernard had been collecting his European friends. Not only was Italy intent on increasing her population, but the reactionary element of France also had formed a society to combat birth control. We had invited the Italians, Guglielmo Ferrero and Gaetano Salvemini, but Sir Bernard had been induced to accept as a substitute Corrado Gini, who, dark, swarthy, highly egotistical, speaking English painfully, was the perfect mirror of Mussolini’s sentiments, and turned out to be a most tiresome speaker and a general nuisance.
The delegates, Gini among the first, began to gather late in August. The storm broke the Friday before our scheduled opening Tuesday, August 31st. Proofs of the official program had just come to me for my approval. Sir Bernard came into my office and looked at them. “Well, we’ll just cross these off,” he said, drawing his pencil through my name and those of my assistants.
“Why are you doing that?”
“The names of the workers should not be included on scientific programs.”
“These people are different,” I objected. “In their particular lines they are as much experts as the scientists.”
“It doesn’t matter. They can’t go on. Out of the question. It’s not done.”
A long cry of dismay went up from the staff. They considered the action reprehensible and petty. The young woman who was to deliver the program to the printers would not do so. Saturday morning, secretaries and typists—twenty-one altogether—struck in a body, and without them the Conference could not proceed successfully.
While Dr. Little was trying his powers of persuasion on them, I reported the situation to Sir Bernard, saying that in justice to the women who had given so generously of their time and effort, who had raised the money, issued the invitations, paid the delegates’ expenses, they should be given proper credit. All the latter had had to do was walk in at the last moment, present their papers, and take part in the social life planned for them.
Having registered my sentiments, I spent most of Sunday convincing the members of the staff that the Conference was bigger than their own hurt feelings and making them promise to return; Edith How-Martyn, however, who had joined me some time before, refused to continue because the hard labor of the workers was not to be acknowledged.