The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 35
I have gotten away from my main story, but these things occur to me and I wish to set them down. Little things that happened, or that dropped, unconsciously perhaps, from Mr. Harding's lips, often gave me clues as to how he felt about important matters concerning which we had no actual discussion.
In this connection, I remember well a dinner at the Manhattan Hotel early in 1918. Woodrow Wilson, then President, was making spectacular efforts which occupied front-page space. However, the newspaper headlines that night carried the latest news from the battle-front, and Mr. Harding's eyes were heavy when he looked up at me. He was quiet for several seconds and his eyes went wet.
"The world's in a bad way, Nan," he said, shaking his head.
I myself had had no intimate contact with the war except through my friends, having had no relatives—at least no near relatives—who had gone over, and its grim horrors were not felt by me as deeply as those who had sent their dear ones to the front. In fact, the two years the United States was in the war were the two years I shall ever look back upon as the happiest of my life, as one cherishes the memory of precious hours with one's sweetheart. And if I ever during that time voiced a desire to be of more active help in war-work, I was reminded by both Mr. Harding and my employer in the United States Steel Corporation that an employee of that Corporation, in view of the vast part steel played in the war, was doing his or her bit effectively.
Perhaps something of this was going through my mind as I watched Mr. Harding over the dinner-table. So far as I knew, he had no near relative "over there" either, but I was sure he was very close to the war situation as a United States Senator. His tone changed into one of severe criticism with his next remark.
"Wilson's a plain damned fool!" he muttered, as to himself, still perusing the front-page headlines.
I meekly acquiesced in Mr. Harding's view that the world was "in a bad way" and that Wilson was "a plain damned fool." "But, sweetheart," I reminded him, "wait until the next election, when you will be President!" He smiled indulgently and leaned over the table, head bent to one side in the appealing pose he sometimes affected when he made love to me.
"If I'm President, Nan, I'll make you White House stenographer!" were his exact words. "A President can do just about as he pleases, you know!" he added, smiling.
I recalled vividly that statement three years later when I visited him at the White House and heard from his very lips, lips that were set in grim determination to bear up at any cost, that "the White House was a veritable prison," and that he could not even retire to the privacy of his toilet without being guarded—"shadowed" as he termed it.
"I'm in jail, Nan!" he would say in a broken voice, shaking his head sadly, "and I can't get out; I've got to stay," and he would lift his hands in a gesture of futility. No, Warren Harding did not like being President of the United States, as I am sure no man with real American blood and a love of life and fair play and freedom would or could like it. What a pity the highest honor a great republic can bestow upon a loyal citizen should be one which saps that citizen's vitality, and makes impossible the achievement of certain ideals through breaking him down physically! And, in my humble opinion, the "system" of American politics is wholly responsible for these hellish conditions. No, Warren Harding did not like being President. Six months after he went into the White House he was a broken man. The seven million majority of votes cast for him by the American people was his death sentence. And I, too, cast my vote for him!
Even in gayer mood, I seemed to see in Mr. Harding a certain pathos. People have observed it in Elizabeth Ann, our daughter, not knowing of course whose child she is. "There is something pathetic about watching her at play," a girl friend of mine said to me last winter. And so it was with her father. There was something pathetic about watching him at play. But he had a keen sense of humor.
I think it secretly amused him to realize, as he did and I did, that the scandal that came up in the presidential campaign of 1920 in which Mrs. Arnold's name and his were linked very frequently, was for us the source of greatest protection, for while the Democrats who were "slinging mud" played with Mrs. Arnold's name they were not looking for mine or any other.
One time, when we were dining, Mrs. Arnold's name came up naturally. Of course Angela, her daughter, had been my childhood playmate, and when I went to Marion I usually saw her either at a party or dance or on the street, and likely this had been the case and I was relating to him how lovely she looked. She was a stunning girl. I had never mentioned Mrs. Arnold's name to him in connection with the oldtime gossip I used to hear, but something I asked him brought forth this spontaneous ejaculation, "Mrs. Arnold is a damned fool—a brilliant conversationalist but a damned fool—if she had half the sense of her daughter. . . ."
I do not know a thing about the truth of things that were said concerning Mr. Harding's one-time relations with Mrs. Arnold. I never pressed him to tell me anything, nor did I care what he had done before we became sweethearts. I only know that during our six and a half years I remained true to him in those essentials that are demanded and expected by one's sweetheart, and I most certainly know that Mr. Harding was most loyal and true to me. There were times when I made frantic endeavors to break away from him, feeling that I was becoming so growingly dependent upon his love and support in every way as to make it inconceivable for me to do without him, but he was constantly in the background of my thoughts—why, I have thought about him every hour of the nine years now since we first met at the Manhattan Hotel in 1917, and not a day has passed since I first saw him in Marion when I was a child that I have not thought lovingly of Warren Gamaliel Harding.