I was enchanted with Miss Barnett’s log cabin, with its spacious rooms and screened-in porches, its picturesque furnishings, its hardwood floors in bedrooms, where nothing had been forgotten to make the guests perfectly comfortable, the grounds, the deep green coolness of the forest which rose majestically around it. And most of all did it amaze me to see served to us a luncheon as delicately appointed as one might get at the Plaza or Ritz-Carlton.
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When we arrived in Washington that night about eleven o’clock, we found Mr. Votaw waiting up for us, having received word from Mrs. Votaw as to when we would arrive. Daisy Harding had told me that her brother-in-law, Heber Herbert Votaw, had been very ill, and one needed only to glance at him to know it. I had seen Mr. Votaw only a few times, and these occasions dated back to my high school days, when he and his wife had returned from Burma on a furlough, and it occurred to me as I looked at him closely for the first time that night, that he might be described as being handsome in much the same way that George Christian was considered handsome. He had very dark hair and eyes that laughed, and teeth of flashing whiteness, and he was of pleasing height and bearing. On meeting him again after these years I liked Mr. Votaw immediately, with one reservation. It seemed to me his voice was unpleasantly loud. I decided it had been abnormally developed because of his wife’s difficulty in hearing, and was not at all his own natural voice. And further, I concluded that even if he were inclined to be irritable, his late illness and resultant weakness were sufficient grounds. I remember when I was passing through the most trying months of my nervous breakdown following Elizabeth Ann’s birth, I used to manifest a disposition of irritability both in my voice and actions which I may, in justice to my true self, disclaim as a part of my nature when I am physically sound.
Yet somehow, despite these explanations to myself, I could not reconcile the irritancy of Mr. Votaw’s voice, no matter to what it might be attributable, with the meekness and patience which should mark a missionary of religion.
The Votaws lived in a very comfortable house which Carrie Votaw told me they rented partially furnished, having brought some of their own things to complete the outfitting. They kept one maid, a young girl Mrs. Votaw had befriended in a motherly way, and Mrs. Votaw herself went into the kitchen and superintended the getting of the meals. Mrs. Votaw liked young people about and very early introduced me to a young man and several young people, all nearer my own age. She was a charming hostess and did many things I was sure were done just to please me. When she said to me she wished I would come down there and live with them and help her in a secretarial way to write up her many experiences in Burma, I was quite thrilled. I thought it might work out that I could bring her brother’s child with me and in that way introduce her into the household along with myself. Then we could all share her.
Mrs. Votaw talked a great deal about “wanting a baby,” and I could not help reflecting how tragic it is that into some homes come so many children, oftentimes unwanted, while into other homes where they would find welcome and love awaiting them, for some reason they do not come. I felt genuinely sorry for her and thought to myself, “How she will adore Elizabeth Ann!” even as her sister Daisy had prophesied. And her longing for a child only served to strengthen my hope of being asked very soon to bring Elizabeth Ann, their beloved brother’s own child, into their homes and into their hearts as the child of their flesh and blood. And, although I would never, never part with her, to have them know the blessing of her smile and the happiness I knew she would radiate for them all, would, I thought, be a great joy to them, even as it was for me my life joy.
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One evening Mr. and Mrs. Votaw and I sat talking before bedtime, and our conversation drifted into religion. We had talked pro and con about this phase and that for perhaps an hour or more when Mrs. Votaw excused herself and went on upstairs to bed. Mr. Votaw and I talked on until one o’clock. His fervency struck me as being that of a man genuinely convinced that he had found the truth, and I expressed the wish that I, too, some day would find a religion that would fill me as satisfyingly. Mine up to this time had become merely a philosophy of my own, from conning religious books, and influenced predominately by the bitter-sweet experiences I had met up with in life. I must always have been innately religious, else I would not always have longed to know that something which satisfies the soul. But I had witnessed on all sides the hypocrisy which makes people live lives they despise and practise religions insincerely for the mere sake of upholding conventional standards. I had therefore turned into my own mental paths.
Phoebe Carolyn (“Carrie”) Harding
(Mrs. Heber Herbert Votaw)
the President’s sister