We had accepted an invitation from Hope Mirlees' mother to visit her at Cambridge. We also received an invitation to stay with Logan Pearsall Smith, but mobilization prevented us from taking a train. The trains were being requisitioned for the movement of troops.
( . . )
At the Mirlees' one nght we met Dr. Alfred North Whitehead and Mrs. Whitehead. After dinner he asked me if he could take me to the garden where we would have coffee. I did not know who he was at the time, and only when I saw his face under a lamp did I recognize him. He had a most benign sweet smile and a simplicity that comes only in geniuses. He was my third genius for whom the bell rang. The first two had been Gertrude Stein and Picasso.
We dined with the Whiteheads again in London, and Mrs. Whitehead then asked us to visit them at their country home in Lockbridge the following weekedn. Little did we know that the weekend would extend well into the next month. Louise Hayden later said, You were asked for a weekend and you stayed six weeks.
When war was declared, Dr. Whitehead read aloud the frightening news from the newspapers. But he kept his quiet serenity.
Bertrand Russell came to visit the Whiteheads and held forth on pacifism. Mrs. Whitehead as hostess could say nothing, but
Gertrude — who had known Russell on a visit to England with Leo — spoke very harshly to him.
The Whiteheads had a very young son and an older one, who was in the country recuperating from an illness, and a young daughter. Mrs. Whitehead was worried about North, the older son. She was worried lest he try to enlist, so she telegraphed him to come home at once. He had, in fact, tried to enlist. She felt that he shold bave a commission and go off at oncea s an officer, so she went immediately to London where she saw Kitchener. Kitchener had once been an intimate friend of her husband's brother, a bishop of the Church of England in India. Mrs. Whitehead came back with a commission for North.
We proposed going to London to retrieve our trunsk and to draw money on our letters of credit, and Mrs. whitehead came with us. She wished to see if she could do anything to help the Belgians. At the junction we were surprised to see Lady Astley, whom we had met through Mira Edgerly in Paris. She had come to say good-bye to her son, who was in the Guards. They had been ordered to France. That was the first we knew that England was sending troops to France.
In London the station was crowded with young men who wee leaving school to go off to the war.