was the quiet little woman in glasses who sat among them. Then at the last minute, when she was introduced, Miss Lohse recalled, voices would whisper, '"Who is she?" "That is Lidia." And then this wonderful talk.'
'She was simple,' Doris Lohse remembered, 'and still you saw at first glance that she was an intelligent, fine girl. She was very mature. She wouldn't begin to talk; she would first wait until somebody spoke to her. She was so unassuming. . . and so satisfied with little. She was very selfless. Just a great light.'
Her talk that evening in Washington impressed the audience as 'very earnest and effective'. She had prepared the speech with care and seemed to have it nearly all memorized. Although she had brought the text with her, she laid the manuscript down on the table and scarcely glanced at it.
Now that Lidia had been in America for several months, she was finally getting used to the New World. She no longer felt the home- sickness she had suffered in her earlier years of traveling, although she still couldn't say she especially liked to traveclass="underline" 'not at all,' she said. She loved her work, but, she admitted, if it hadn't been for the friends she had made in America, Baha'fs and Esperantists, she would have felt 'somewhat strange at the beginning among the skyscrapers'. Her work in America had proved much more difficult than in France. 'One must sow a lot to reap but little,' she wrote a correspondent in Europe.
The diet in America also took some getting used to — she thought Americans used too much pepper on their food. The family she was staying with in Philadelphia were vegetarians, 'so also I have had to become somewhat of a vegetarian,' she wrote. 'Although I am used to eating meat, still it isn't very difficult for me.'
Even after Lidia left New York, the two men who had caused problems before continued to stir up trouble. The gossip spread to Washington, DC, poisoning people against her and dampening the enthusiasm of the Washington Esperantists, one of whom had returned from a visit to New York with 'quite a tale of woe about Lidia'. The Esperantists in the capital, wrote Josephine Kruka, were 'not enthusiastic' about inviting Lidia to give a course in their city. Some had been hesitant from the first, doubting that even a course given by the daughter of Zamenhof would be a success. Now they were even more discouraged, and were glad to let other cities go ahead of them in Lidia's itinerary. In the end, Lidia never did give a course in the capital city of the United States.
To make matters worse, the antipathy against Lidia had taken a new direction. 'Merry hell has broken loose again,' Della wroteJosephine. It was being said that a number of people had complained about Lidia, saying that outside her classes she was unapproachable and even rude.
They even accused her of acting superior because she was Zamenhofs daughter. Emest Dodge, in Washington, to whom these stories had been reported, was much shaken by the accusations and suggested she might be suffering from ill health, overwork, or anxiety about her family in Poland. But, he wrote Della, if Lidia (whom he had not yet met personally) was really such a difficult personality, he questioned whether her visit to America was worthwhile after all. 'I think you will realize', he added, 'how these reports cannot help affecting the thoughts of some of us.'
Della retorted that the episode had been 'prearranged' by the antagonists. She believed that any misunderstandings that had come up were due to the fact that European and American manners were very different. Lidia didn't understand American ways, which often seemed rude and insulting to her. Some of her students were unhappy that she would not allow the open discussion of various points of grammar in her classes, but the Cseh method - according to which the entire class had to be in Esperanto - did not allow it.
At last the nature of the accusations that had been made against Lidia behind her back was revealed. The man in whose home Lidia had stayed, Della had been told, had called her a 'liar' and a 'thief. These could be easily dismissed as irrational ravings, but there was something else which, while equally false, could have been seriously damaging to Lidia ifit were spread around. In the presence ofothers he had claimed Lidia had come to America to spread 'communistic doctrines'. The extent ofhis confused mental state was clear, at least to Della, when she learned that 'in almost the next breath he proposed to them that they start a fund for her to travel throughout America'. When his listeners protested that they thought it unwise to contribute to a fund for someone teaching communism, 'he became badly mixed up in his endeavors to reconcile this proposal with his accusations'.
Knowing that the man was not responsible for his remarks, Della did not take his outbursts seriously. But others who did not know him well began repeating the stories and hurried to Della in alarm. 'Although these accusations are completely absurd,' she told Emest Dodge, 'they do reflect quite accurately the depth of the malice that is felt toward her in a certain quarter.' What damage could be done to Lidia, Della worried, 'by judicious letters written here and there throughout the country?'
Josephine thought that Della tended to get 'a little too emotional' and advised her to iet the whole matter rest'. She wamed her: 'We cannot let a split come between the Baha'fs and the Esperantists. It would be tragic.' Josephine felt that it was the Baha'i's' fault for allowing the original confusion and misunderstanding to occur at the beginning of Lidia's visit.
Lidia gave no sign she knew about the goings-on in New York, and still showed friendly concem for her former hosts. She was puzzled as to why Della was getting so upset and had begged Lidia not to write to them.
Emest Dodge's wary attitude changed when he finally met Lidia at her talk in Washington, DC. He told Della that his conversation with Lidia that evening left 'a very pleasant impression', and he felt that prospects for 'her future labors' were 'favorable'.
Although Lidia was teaching only one course in Philadelphia, correspondence took up all ofher freetime, as she made arrangements for her future courses and lectures - laboriously typing out copies of letters for Della - and wrote to friends and acquaintances. But somehow she found time to write articles for World Order and for La Praktiko.
Even while in the United States, she was teaching the Baha'i Faith to correspondents in Poland and France. 'Esperanto correspondence about the Baha'i Faith takes a lot of time,' she wrote, 'for which I am very happy.' After one of her correspondents wrote to her about his experiments with psychic phenomena, Lidia cautioned him about trying to make contact with other-worldly forces and revealed that on occasion she also had had psychic experiences. 'I must confess', she told him, 'that your relations with the other world rather disturb me. I also at one time used to feel some kind of influences, but I never was sure whether they were friendly or unfriendly. Here, on earth, we still do not have enough knowledge about the forces and ways of the other world. In submitting to the influences it is as if we blindly expose ourselves to the actions of forces unknown to us, and those forces may not always be favorable. The dark forces which are at present pushing the world into chaos can also act on the psychic plane. On the earth, enemies sometimes come to us as wolves in sheep's clothing, to outwit us. It can be the same also on the psychic plane.'
Lidia had begun to write to Harold Foulds, an Esperantist in Cleveland, encouraging him in his study of the Baha'i Faith. 'It is more than a Faith,' she told him eagerly, 'because laying foundations and solving the perplexing world problems which now torment humanity so deeply, it is not merely a religion, but it is a new Order in the world. It is also like an abundantly laid table, upon which each can find something according to his pleasure: the believer - a high and noble faith; the philosopher - lofty philosophical thought; the soriologist - a solution to world problems; and everyone — new joy and courage.'