My nervousness ahead of lectures continued to be akin to illness. All through the years it has been like a nightmare even to think of a pending speech. I promised enthusiastically to go here or there, and then tried to forget it. The morning it was to be delivered I awakened with a panicky feeling which grew into a sort of terror if I allowed myself to dwell on it. It was fatal to eat before a meeting.
Some people can keep an audience rocking with laughter and yet get over a message. But I cannot. Seldom do my hearers have anything merry from me. Advisers often say, “Lighten up your subject.” I have always resented this; I am the protagonist of women who have nothing to laugh at.
Heywood Broun once remarked that I had no sense of humor. I was surprised at him, but I could understand his statement in a way; he had been at only a few meetings as chairman and I had been serious to the point of deadliness, purposely bringing forth laborious facts and dramatic statistics. I was grasping at an opportunity to reach his audience because, whenever he was moved by anything deeply, he wrote a story in his column which by reason of its effective irony and smooth prose swayed others to the same extent.
I have had much fun, although it may have penetrated only to the intimate circle of friends. Once after giving what I thought was a very up-to-date, spirited talk at the Waldorf-Astoria, a dear old lady, at least in her middle eighties, tottered towards me with the aid of a cane and in trembling voice quavered, “I have traveled across the country to hear you speak, Miss Sangster. My mother used to read your poems to me when I was a little girl, and I feel this is a great day for me to be able to clasp your hand.” She had confused me with the poetess, Margaret E. Sangster, who in the mid-Nineteenth Century had been a regular contributor to religious magazines.
Inevitably I have been constantly torn between my compulsion to do this work and a haunting feeling that I was robbing my children of time to which they were entitled. Back in 1913 I had had some vague notion of being able to spend all my summers with them at Provincetown. That visionary hope had been immediately dissipated because too many painters began to discover it and the place became littered with easels and smocks. Gene O’Neill’s plays were being produced on the wharf opposite Mary Heaton Vorse’s house, and these brought many more people. I wanted to get away even further, and so did Jack Reed, who had also sought sanctuary there. A real estate agent took him to near-by Truro where the feet of New Yorkers had not yet trod, and I was invited to come along. We saw a little house on a little hill, one of the most ancient in the village. Below it the Pamet River wound like a silver ribbon to the ocean. An old sea captain had squared and smoothed and fitted the timbers, brought them up from the Carolinas in a sailing vessel, and fastened them tightly together with wooden pegs. The kitchen was bright and warm, and seemed as though many cookies and pies had been baked in it.