Mexico -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
All during dinner there were speeches. Admiral Huse discussed
armament, which he is in favor of. Of course, soldiers and sailors
are for armaments, otherwise where would they be? But armaments don’t
interest me much. I can’t see that it matters if the United States
wants to waste money in that way. She’s got plenty to spend. But what
is the armament for? The United States got on without it before, when
there was a strong England and a strong Germany. Now that Europe is “in
extremis” why suddenly is the United States on the defensive? Anyway,
none of the speeches were anti-British to my surprise, as I am looking
for that anti-British wave, and haven’t found it yet.
One speaker surprised me by telling a long submarine war story. We have
so completely finished with war stories in Europe, it was funny to find
it still going on here.
After dinner my neighbor on the left insisted on taking me to dance
at a restaurant called “Montmartre.” He assured me it was quite
respectable and that I should “have the time of my life.” I didn’t care
about the respectability, but it wasn’t amusing. A room thick with
smoke and filled with supper tables, and only the space of a plate to
dance in! A terrible crowd, and dancing a perfect impossibility.
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 1921.
Dick took me out to lunch. He insisted I should go alone with him.
He knew exactly where to take me. We crossed Fifth Avenue and went
along West 55th Street and down some steps to a restaurant called the
“Mayflower,” where he seemed to be known there. Dick ordered the food,
talked familiarly to the waitress and produced two dollars to pay the
bill. He then took me to a toy shop in Fifth Avenue; he knew the way
there, too, and I had to pay five dollars for a submarine----!
I dined with Mr. and Mrs. Barmby, who took me to Carnegie Hall to hear
Sir Philip Gibbs’ lecture on the Irish question. It was a subject that
seemed to demand great courage to tackle, and, of course, it asked
for trouble. Outside on the side walk, women went back and forth with
placards full of insults about England. It roused all my fighting
instincts. I said to one of them aggressively, “I’m proud I’m English!”
and she put her tongue out at me. Why was I proud to be English? I
never feel very English ordinarily, but these people affected me this
way.
The hall was packed. Gibbs prefaced his lecture by hoping it was going
to be a pleasant and a friendly meeting, which made the audience laugh.
It certainly remained friendly longer than I had expected, but when the
interruptions came they were ridiculously feeble and ill-organized. A
bunch of women in the dress circle, screamed in high-pitched voices
and waved the United States and the Sinn Fein flags. One man in the
gallery had to be evicted, amid applause of the house.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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