The exhausting events of November 5 and 6 should have provided quite enough excitement and tension for any two days in a man’s life. But they were only one part of the affairs that occupied him during those forty-eight hours. November 6, remember, was election day!
Woodrow Wilson had gone to Shadow Lawn, his summer house on the New Jersey shore, to wait for the election returns in comparative peace. It was a trying day for him, following a hard, bitter campaign. It was a day on which he chose his visitors with care. One of them was Paderewski.
In the quiet study at Shadow Lawn the two men talked for nearly an hour. Wilson spoke of his idealist’s dreams of world peace and mutual trust between nations. He listened attentively while Paderewski, in turn, described his hopes for his own country. The President asked searching, practical questions. How could Poland survive without an outlet to the sea? Paderewski and House had often discussed this point over a map of Europe. He explained their ideas to the President. When the interview was over, Wilson said solemnly, “My dear Paderewski, I can tell you that Poland will be resurrected and will exist again!”
Paderewski went home exhausted but intensely happy. It had been quite a pair of days! He longed to go to bed, but the election returns were coming in faster and faster now and he could not settle down for the night until he knew for certain that everything was going as expected. He heard the then familiar—and now extinct—cry for which all America had once waited. “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” But the rest of the newsboy’s cry was a catastrophe. “Wilson defeated! Hughes elected!”
Wilson defeated? Wilson who had just promised him his country’s freedom? For two years he had worked inch by inch in the direction of the words he had heard only a few hours before. And now it meant nothing.
It was a cruel night, unnecessarily cruel as it turned out. By five the next morning the newspapers were out with a somewhat different story. Wilson had not been defeated. The Extra-hungry papers had simply neglected to wait for the California votes to be counted!
“I can tell you that Poland will be resurrected and will exist again,” Wilson had said. And the promise was still good.
CHAPTER 8
THE THIRTEENTH POINT
Paderewski was playing a war relief benefit the next afternoon. He had played so little except his Chopin since his return to the United States that he was preparing for the much-heralded Carnegie Hall recital with even greater care than usual. It was Monday, January 8, 1917.