22
Earlier that fall, on August 17, 1918, to be exact, Mr. Harding had an engagement in Plattsburg, New York, to address an audience. He wrote inviting me to come up there for the day, enclosing ample funds, and told me with his usual explicitness the exact train to take out of New York at night which would land me in Plattsburg in the morning. He stopped at a hotel which I recognized recently in a post card picture as the New Witherell. I arrived about 8.00 o’clock in the morning and went to the same hotel, registering, I believe, under the usual fictitious name of Christian.
I shall never forget how the sun was streaming in at the windows of that room in the hotel when Mr. Harding opened the door in his pajamas in answer to my rather timid knock. His face was all smiles as he closed the door and took me in his arms.
“Gee, Nan, I’m s’ glad t’ see you!” he exclaimed. I just loved the way he lapsed into the vernacular when we were alone together. My room was not far from his and I had deposited my bag before going to him. He asked all about these things—when I arrived, how I had registered, and where my room was located.
Then we planned our day. He was to speak that afternoon and gave me the direction and location of the training-ground where his address would be delivered, and explained that he would not be able to see me after the luncheon hour for the people in charge would take possession of him. But we could, he said with adorable enthusiasm, have the whole blessed morning together.
Oh, how happy that made me! There were really so few times when we could be together with a feeling of utter safety, and the sunshine, the occasion and the beauty of the place itself all pointed propitiously to a red letter day in our calendar of happiness.
I met him about half an hour later, by arrangement, in a grove near the hotel, and together we strolled toward the main street of Plattsburg and out into the country. But first Mr. Harding stopped at a corner store and bought some smokes. I was proud of the new dress I was wearing and thought Mr. Harding’s smile betrayed approval as he joined me outside the store, cigarettes in hand, and surveyed me with beaming countenance.
I accused him affectionately of having made a reconnaissance of the outskirts of the village prior to my arrival, for certainly it seemed to me he could have chosen no lovelier spot than the sunny meadow where we spent the morning. It sloped gently down to a winding stream, and on one side there was a thick wood. The ground was soft and the grass high. It was sweet to hold his head on my lap and have him just lie there looking up at the blue sky.
We were both full of loving reminiscences and future plans, and Mr. Harding included in his musings certain things bearing upon his position as senator. I realize the paucity of political allusions in this manuscript, but the reader is to remember that while he was moving in the most active governmental circles at that stressful period in the history of our country, when I was with Mr. Harding alone our conversation was not principally political but warmly personal. However, when he chose to confide his problems and little worries to me it made me very proud and I took them very seriously. Right then he was up against a problem which was causing him considerable anxiety: the folks back home had scheduled him for a speech in December, I think he said, and he was supposed to call upon some fellow senator to accompany him to Marion and make an address also.
“La Follette would be fine,” he mused with emphasis as he chewed thoughtfully on a stalk of timothy, “but he doesn’t want to do it.”