The avowal of confidence by Paderewski, even more than his offer of the commission, was something that Gutzon appreciated. His answer was eager and quick:
MRS. MASON GAVE ME YOUR MESSAGE. SEND PADEREWSKI AT ONCE BY CABLE QUOTE AM DELIGHTED TO ACCEPT DOUBLE HONOR FOR YOURSELF AND WOODROW WILSON. TIME AMPLE IF WE ACT SOON. MEANS ALSO AMPLE FOR BEAUTIFUL MEMORIAL UNQUOTE. LOVE TO YOU ALL.
Paderewski’s response, grateful and sympathetic, settled the matter of the Wilson statue in a few days. Because of the early date set for the unveiling, the sculptor should first have gone to Europe to confer with the committee and to study the proposed location of the memorial. But the work on Mount Rushmore was getting critical and it was impossible for him to leave. He decided to send his son Lincoln to Europe to arrange for the casting of the bronze in Paris, Florence or Naples, and then to confer with Paderewski at his home in Morges, Switzerland.
Lincoln, accompanied by his mother, went immediately.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
TRIBUTE TO WILSON
The travelers never forgot Paderewski as he met them at the Morges station. He was standing on the runway, a little derby hat perched on the top of his head, with his wave of hair floating out from it like a cloud. He seemed serene and happy.
“Where are your trunks?” he asked in honest puzzlement.
And they told him that they carried no trunks, that they were staying with him only between trains. His surprise was genuine and his disappointment obvious.
“I expected you to stay a month,” he said. “So now you must stay for at least a week.” He picked up the bags, though his butler factotum hovered around anxious to help, and led the way to his old-fashioned touring car. And they stayed at his chalet, with its wide-spreading trees, its huge garden and its vineyard sloping down to the lake shore—they stayed a week.
Gutzon had little trouble making sketches of his new subject. He had known Wilson fairly well; they had traveled the Atlantic in the same ship. Wilson had given him a degree at Princeton. They had seen much of each other when Gutzon was working on the decorations for the dormitory built by the class of 1879. And they had been close, though hardly harmonious, during the Borglum investigation of the aircraft scandal. However, to amplify his own impressions of Wilson’s characteristics, the sculptor wrote to several men who had known the President: Professor John Grier Hibben, the new president of Princeton University; William Allen White; President Coolidge; and several senators. He asked them to say frankly what characteristics he should portray.