ABSTRACT
In the summer of 1889, when I was living with my Uncle Rollo at his house on the slopes of Hindhead, he took me one Sunday for a long walk. As we were going down Friday’s Hill, near Fernhurst, he said: ‘Some new people have come to live at this house, and I think we will call upon them.’ Shyness made me dislike the idea, and I implored him, whatever might happen, not to stay to supper. He said he would not, but he did, and I was glad he did. We found that the family were Americans, named Pearsall Smith, consisting of an elderly mother and father, a married daughter and her husband, named Costelloe, a younger daughter at Bryn Mawr home for the holidays, and a son at Balliol. The father and mother had been in their day famous evangelistic preachers, but the father had lost his faith as the result of a scandal which arose from his having been seen to kiss a young woman, and the mother had grown rather too old for such a wearing life. Costelloe, the son-in-law, was a clever man, a Radical, a member of the London County Council. He arrived fresh from London while we were at dinner, bringing the latest news of a great dock strike which was then in progress. This dock strike was of considerable interest and importance because it marked the penetration of Trade Unionism to a lower level than that previously reached. I listened open-mouthed while he related what was being done, and I felt that I was in touch with reality. The son from Balliol conversed in brilliant epigrams, and appeared to know everything with contemptuous ease. But it was the daughter from Bryn Mawr who especially interested me. She was very beautiful, as appears from the following extract from the Bulletin, Glasgow, May 10, 1921: ‘I remember meeting Mrs Bertrand Russell at a civic reception or something of the kind (was it a reception to temperance delegates?) in Edinburgh twenty odd years ago. She was at that time one of the most
beautiful women it is possible to imagine, and gifted with a sort of imperial stateliness, for all her Quaker stock. We who were present admired her so much that in a collected and dignified Edinburgh way we made her the heroine of the evening.’ She was more emancipated than any young woman I had known, since she was at college and crossed the Atlantic alone, and was, as I soon discovered, an intimate friend of Walt Whitman. She asked me whether I had ever read a certain German book called Ekkehard, and it happened that I had finished it that morning. I felt this was a stroke of luck. She was kind, and made me feel not shy. I fell in love with her at first sight. I did not see any of the family again that summer, but in subsequent years, during the three months that I spent annually with my Uncle Rollo, I used to walk the four miles to their house every Sunday, arriving to lunch and staying to supper. After supper they would make a camp fire in the woods, and sit round singing Negro spirituals, which were in those days unknown in England. To me, as to Goethe, America seemed a romantic land of freedom, and I found among them an absence of many prejudices which hampered me at home. Above all, I enjoyed their emancipation from good taste. It was at their house that I first met Sidney Webb, then still unmarried.
