Alice Bailey - Autobiography - Chapter VI







To Netnews Homepage    
Previous     Next 
    Index      Table of Contents





Autobiography of Alice A. Bailey - Chapter VI





One thing I did find was that the girls were quite able to
hold their own in any set or situation though they were only the product of the public
schools of America. Given ability, a home where interesting things are valued and where
human values are emphasized I know no better training-ground for the youth of the world
than a public school education along the lines of the United States.In the spring of
1931 we made our plans to accept Olga Fröbe's suggestion and go to her house on the
Italian lakes for a few months. You can imagine the excitement of the planning, the buying
of suitcases, the arranging of clothes and the speculations on the part of the girls about
everything. They had never been anywhere in their lives outside of the United States, with
the exception of my eldest girl, Dorothy, who had been in Hawaii. Alice Ortiz stepped in
with her usual generosity and saw that we all had the right clothes, besides paying all
travelling expenses.
We chose
one of the smaller boats which went direct from New York to Antwerp, Belgium, and I will
admit that I found life on board with three girls full of life and energy slightly
exhausting. Keeping track of them was no joke. Rounding them up every evening at bedtime
was also no joke. It is no fun for a girl when she is dancing most happily with some
officer to see a parent standing on the sidelines and to know quite well it was bedtime.
They were exceedingly good but exceedingly excited. They knew everyone on board, who they
were, where they came from and what their names were, and they were most popular. [221]
Only a few
years ago I came across a big bundle of material which when I unrolled it proved to be
three fancy ball dresses I had made for the girls on board the boat. The idea was most
unoriginal, for the dresses were the stars and stripes, dark blue skirts striped with
white and white bodices trimmed with red five-pointed stars. I refused to put forty-eight
stars on each bodice as it imposed too much sewing but the general effect was most
patriotic and gay.
I shall never forget the day when we wound our way up the Scheldt river and docked at
Antwerp. The girls, of course, had never seen a foreign city. Everything looked new and
strange to them, from the fiacre in which we went to the hotel to the duvets on all beds.
We went to the Hotel Des Flandes and had a good time the few days we were in Antwerp. The
checked tablecloths in the Van Viordinaire, the foreign cooking and the cafe au lait, all
were most exciting to them and full of memories to me.
A friend had crossed with us in order to be with us at Ascona but was leaving us after
a few days in Antwerp as she wanted to go down the Rhine with her daughter. She had a very
different conception as to how to enjoy a foreign land to that which Foster and I had.
Down she would come in the morning with a daughter on one arm and a Baedeker on the other.
"Alice," she would say to me, "what are you going to see this morning?
There is a statue with three stars to it in the guide book, there are the Reubens to be
seen in the cathedral and all kinds of other things. Which do you plan to do first?"
To her great astonishment I would tell her that we were not going to do anything like that
as we were not interested in statues of long dead military men or to visit every church
that could be visited.
I told her that my main idea was that the girls should imbibe some of the atmosphere of
the country they were in and see some of the people and watch how they live and what [222]
they do at different hours of the day. So we were going to stroll about and sit in little
cafes under the awnings and drink coffee and just sit and watch the people and listen and
talk. So that is what we did whilst she went off in different directions. I never took the
girls to see galleries to gaze at statues, talk about churches or do the everyday things
which the average tourist does. We drifted about the streets. We looked into gardens. We
would take a walk to the suburbs. At the end of a few days the girls had absorbed an
enormous amount of knowledge of the town and its surroundings, its occupants and its
history. We never bought souvenirs, but we took photographs, bought picture postcards and
found out that foreign people were very like ourselves.
From
Antwerp we went to Locarno, Switzerland, which was as far as we could go by train and
there Olga met us and took us to her lovely villa where we stayed for a number of weeks.
This train trip was a marvelous thing to the girls but an exhausting journey for me. We
went on the "Blue train" through the Simplon and across the Cento valley.
It is quite hopeless to attempt to describe the beauty of the Italian lakes. To my mind
Lake Maggiore on the shores of which Olga's villa is found, is one of the most beautiful
and it is one of the largest in Italy. Part of the lake is in Swiss territory in the
canton of Ticino but most of it is in Italy. The lake is so blue, the little villages are
so picturesque, perched as they are on the sides of the hills reaching down into the
water. I know nothing more beautiful to look at than the view from Ronco looking up and
down the lake. It is useless for me to write about it for I have not got the words, but
the beauty of it none of us will ever forget. Such are the things one pictures to oneself
in moments of fatigue and disillusionment, and yet behind all this beauty were corruption
and very ancient evil. [223]





To Netnews Homepage    
Previous     Next 
    Index      Table of Contents





Last updated Monday, July 6, 1998
          © 1998 Netnews Association. All
rights reserved.