Page:Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, Walter de la Mare, 1919.djvu/41

Rh awarded Brooke the first Howland Memorial Prize—"in recognition of an achievement of marked distinction in the field of literature"—passed, comparatively speaking, unnoticed in England. But that award was not merely an academic compliment. The value of a gift is in the spirit of the giver, and this gift of love and admiration was from the heart. The friend—because none worthier to be sent was free—the friend of Brooke's whose privilege it was to go to New Haven formally to receive that prize on Mrs Brooke's behalf, was absolutely unknown there. His name—my name, as a matter of fact—was, alas, no Sesame. In New York I went, I remember, to call one day on a very charming friend of Brooke's, to whom he wrote some of his gayest letters. A graceful coloured lift-girl inquired who the caller was. I told her. Whereupon she exclaimed, with a smile all radiant gold and ivory, "Gee whiz! what a name!" This trifling and immodest digression is only to show just how Mrs Brooke's ambassador stood in the great eye of America. Now, in Brooke's own words, "American hospitality means that with the nice ones you can be at once on happy and intimate terms." I wish I had words to express how true that is—that heedful, self-sacrificing, unbounded kindness. The nice