The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 69
I was growingly introspective those days and especially after a trip to the White House. I would ponder morbidly a future, four years of which (Mr. Harding's presidential years) seemed unalterably mapped out beyond hope of change, wherein I seemed to be shut out from the happiness I so longed to share with the two people I loved more than all else. I was selfish to the point of forgetting that the man down in Washington whom I loved and who loved me, as he kept writing me, "more than the world," was also bearing a burden of loneliness such as he never dreamed would be his lot. So far he had not complained to me, though I felt the presence of much unrest and unhappiness even as early as the visits I made to him that fall. His was an attitude of constant hopefulness; mine of constant regret for the conditions of our entire situation.
Already I could not measure the regret I was experiencing as a result of the steps I had permitted to be taken in order to protect Elizabeth Ann "legally," that she might have a name and home. After all, would I not have to undo all this when I revealed to her her real identity, which I certainly expected to do? What, then, would be the good of having provided her with a protection which was utterly false fundamentally, notwithstanding the fact that I could not doubt the kindly intentions of my sister and her husband? Where was the justice of a law which would deprive a mother, worthy to be a mother, of her child simply because that child was born a "love-child"? Should not all children be love-children? But were they? I remember once a girl friend of mine said to me when I charged her with insincerity in her marriage, "Well, you know, Nan, a woman has to marry if she wants to have children!" She herself was no more in love with her husband than with the telephone pole outside her very beautiful home, and was in truth later on divorced. But she had "protected" her child! Mr. Harding was not free to offer me such protection, though he loved me, avowedly before God, far more than he had ever loved any other woman.
I have often wondered whether I would have been tempted to act in defiance of social conventions in taking my child openly myself, had her father been a man of lesser rank. I only know that during the period of which I am speaking, within the early months of Mr. Harding's presidency, I was rebelling with all my heart at the situation as it existed, blame for which seemed to rest upon "the law." Only my daily work and conscientious efforts to make good in my journalistic course at Columbia kept me from being unfair to everyone and upsetting a legalized regime.
And my rebellion was as fiercely directed against the law as it affected Mr. Harding as it was against the law as it affected myself. His attention to and love for little children during his tenure of office as President was marked sufficiently to prove, even to one who preferred to doubt, the sincerity in his heart when he voiced to me his longing just "to hold little girls." Bless him! By all the laws of God and man certainly Warren G. Harding was entitled to nurture this spring of hidden father-love! Other little girls he could fondle openly, but his own dear child he dared not acknowledge, nor bestow upon her the love he felt, before a narrow-minded and censorious public.
In my Harding book of clippings I have a most appealing photograph which was published, I think, in The New York Times. It shows Mr. Harding holding a little girl in one arm and the little girl's dog in the other, and a picture more expressive of his feelings I have never seen; I think this particular child is the daughter of Edward B. McLean—unfortunately, I have cut away the inscription below the picture. Another half-tone is inscribed, "A proud daughter of New England is kissed by the President of the United States, at Crawford Notch, New Hampshire," and shows Mr. Harding holding close a shy little girl, his face buried in what seems to be the fur of the child's coat. Another pictures Mr. Harding with Norma and Levett Sweig of New York, who, according to the words below the picture "were tickled pink" when they asked the President to pose with them at the White House and he agreed. All of these children look to be about three years old. Still another picture shows Mr. Harding leaning far out of his executive office window to buy Christmas seals from a little girl whose name is Sally Le Fevre, and, the paper says, she "was greeted by a real Harding smile." Even up in Alaska this love for children was evidenced, and I have a picture which shows Mr. Harding shaking hands with school children, the two in this picture also being little girls. I have other pictures of Mr. Harding with groups of children, and one where he is shown (The Saturday Evening Post of July 2, 1921) with two boys; but for the most part he chose to show his preferment for girls, and very naturally so, since his own and only child was a little girl.
Enrico Caruso, so another clipping goes, was struck with the likeness Mr. Harding bore to George Washington, and, with his deft artistry, took a picture of Mr. Harding and touched it up so that the resemblance to Washington is marked. But the heading above the picture which reads, "Harding becomes Father of Country," struck a note of deep longing in my heart, for my yearning was not that he be known as the Father of His Country, but that I might proudly say to the world, "He is the father of my child!"
Thus the longing to claim Elizabeth Ann as mine battled with the tortuous plans already existent, and regret for past steps and worry over future ones were my constant mental companions. It is very possible that out of this bitterness was born my prayer for strength to ultimately set right a grossly wrong condition.
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Though at that time little did I know of the pathways of suffering my feet would tread before I could bring myself to claim the child of Warren G. Harding as mine before the world! This I now do in this book, The President's Daughter.