The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 86
I returned to Chicago on an early train. The following day or so after that President Walter Dill Scott was confined to his home with a severe cold, and sent for me to take some work. It was up in his den that I told him of the change I intended to make—to go to school instead of being his secretary. He expressed himself as glad that I wished to attend the University, but said he would be sorry to lose my services, and suggested that I try to combine studies with secretarial work. But this I knew I could not do, for I was still under Dr. Barbour's care, making two trips to him weekly for iron inoculations. This President Scott knew nothing about and I explained it to him and said I knew I could not undertake to do both things.
My brother-in-law, Scott Willits, returned home from abroad about this time and I changed my residence to one of the girls' dormitories in Evanston. This was on Sherman Avenue, Evanston, and Mr. Harding wrote me at that address during the next six months instead of at my sister's. He kept me well funded, also, during that spring, and I found my studies more absorbing than I had found the secretarial work with the President of the University.
But I was far from happy. I had Elizabeth Ann out at the dormitory with me many times, and frequently stayed in the city all night at my sister's. Elizabeth Ann was the most lovable child imaginable. The girls at school adored her and I never saw a child who could adapt herself more quickly to playmates than Elizabeth Ann, even though those playmates were, like the girls in the dormitory, eighteen and nineteen years old. Of course, I was much older than the others there, being twenty-six years old.
It was, I think, about the middle of March, when I, one day, called up my sister's apartment from Evanston to learn from my brother-in-law that she had taken the baby and gone to Ohio. I had exhibited my growing dissatisfaction with the arrangement as it stood, and to Elizabeth, my sister, I had not hesitated to express, in all the fierceness of my desire, my opinion that matters would have to undergo a change. I might even have intimated that I myself knew of one way which would give me my child, and in moments when the bars were let down entirely I probably told her very bluntly how it hurt me to hear Elizabeth Ann call Scott "daddy." I never had as strong feeling about Elizabeth Ann's calling my sister "mamma," although I objected to her calling her "mother."
Things as they stood were not harmonious. It all affected me like a poison, and I am sure was the direct cause of my so slow return to normal health. And when I visited the baby at my sister's and heard Elizabeth Ann speak of what "daddy" or "mamma" did, even her manifestations of love for me only made me the more unspeakably miserable. I used to want to pick her up and fly away with her. And, oh, how I longed to shout to the world, "She's mine! She's mine!"
The knowledge of this state of affairs and of the equal dissatisfaction on the part of Elizabeth and Scott, experienced as a result of my unrelenting attitude, told me, even as my brother-in-law was informing me of my sister's departure for Ohio, that she had really also gone on to Washington. My high-strung nervous system made my perceptive abilities all the keener, and I had scarcely hung up the receiver when I saw very plainly the whole picture. Either Mr. Harding, his greater fears aroused by my first frank confession to him in January of utter dissatisfaction with the present adoption arrangement, had sent for Elizabeth, or she, tossed about mentally by the hurricane of my own expressed sentiments and then by the more direct tornado of refusals by Scott to longer suffer interference from me where the baby was concerned, had written to him and asked for an appointment. To this day I do not know how it came to be arranged that Elizabeth went down. In any event, I knew intuitively, without being told, where she had gone.
When Elizabeth returned from Washington, she told me she had talked with Mr. Harding, and I learned that she had left the baby at my mother's in Athens, Ohio, while she went on to the White House.
But what passed between Mr. Harding and my sister Elizabeth is to this day almost a closed book to me. I was shaken with fury to think that she would go to see him and not advise me of it beforehand. And I was wroth with him I loved so dearly for inviting or permitting an interview without my knowledge.
I will admit the possibility at that time of actual mental impairment on my part where Elizabeth Ann was concerned, and perhaps it would not be too much to say, that only by offsetting the effect that my too-concentrated thinking wrought in me physically, by vigorous mental application to my studies, was I able to appear the normal, fairly healthy individual I had to be in order to keep going. But I so powerfully discounted the wisdom and right of a mother's having to give up her love-child simply because stupid convention held a Damocletian sword over her head, that I had developed a decided complex on the subject, to apply the modern phrase.
And, instead of pressing Elizabeth to tell me what had been said by Mr. Harding to her and what she had said to Mr. Harding, I sat down and poured out to my sweetheart in a letter, which I fain would have recalled as soon as it was mailed, my angry resentment at what I termed being "double-crossed." I wrote unkindly, I wrote hysterically, I wrote intolerantly, I wrote pleadingly.
And, as always, my answer from him was characteristic. He wrote kindly, he wrote calmly, he wrote tolerantly, and he, too, wrote pleadingly.
And, as always, my subsequent letter to him was one of apology for a hasty temper indulged. I remember back in 1917, when I had shown anger for a moment over something, Mr. Harding wrote to me afterward, "I love you, Nan, darling, as much when you are angry as any other time." Indeed, I have never had anything but love displayed by him toward me.
And even in late years when my sister has intimated to me that "Mr. Harding was not as loyal to you, Nan, as you were to him, believe me!" I have recognized that whatever Mr. Harding said to my sister Elizabeth in that interview, he said not because he didn't love or trust me, but because, as he told me so often, he "couldn't be expected" to trust anybody beyond or outside of me, because he knew that in all the world nobody loved him as devotedly or as passionately as Nan Britton. And when he talked to Elizabeth, even though she was my own sister, he was talking to a comparative outsider.