MORNING SERIAL
HUBBARD’S interest was, as it transpired, closer still. He whirled me around by the elbow into the path of his wife and introduced us by shouting aloud “Alice! Here’s a young fellow who knows Fred Welsh.” Into the Verandah cafe, decorative with palm trees and trellis screens and wicker-work chairs, and to sit down for coffee and for Hubbard’s genial amusement at the coincidences in life which he treated as fate. One such, I discovered later, was his essay musing on the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 and, with friends lost amongst the drowned, he had wondered how he would have accepted that as his own destiny. Coincidence certainly spun for him into fate a few days later. The happier intertwining of the champion, himself and now me, was the spark for him and the conversation which took me, too briefly, out of my doldrums of spirit. Why!, he had exclaimed and slapped the table so hard that the coffee jumped out of the cups, did I know that Freddie Welsh had been slated to be on board the Lusitania for this very voyage and, what’s more!, to be travelling in the company of the Hubbards? I did not. And did I know that Freddie was a frequent guest, and active participant, at the extensive farm and settlement they had created in East Aurora? Had I heard of it? I had not. Well, he said, changing groups of people from all walks of life came to lodge with them for varying time durations, and there they communed with each other, body and soul I was to understand, and listened to Elbert Hubbard express his views on an alternative way of being together as humans and his considered opinions on how to realise a new, alternative and better world. The secret was to find inner strength through meditation, physical perfection through yoga, intellectual mastery of the best in all religions and none, the discarding of the conventional and spurning of orthodoxy. So, pantheism, engagement with arts and crafts as William Morris had taught us about style, form and function, a strict vegetarian regime as carried out by Tolstoy, and, of course, the Motherhood of God in a feminising world.
> The Crossing by Dai Smith is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com
CONTINUES TOMORROW