AURICULAS
“Grave grandees from pageant olden,
Purple, crimson, primrose, golden,
Yellow-hearted, tawny-tuckered,
Velvet-robed, and flounced and puckered,
Golden-eyed and garnet-breasted,
Cherry-rimmed and velvet-vested,
Silver-powdered, golden-dusted,
Damson-dyed or orange-rusted,
Pencilled, painted, grained and graded,
Frilled and broidered and brocaded,
Ye should move in gilded coaches,
While some gorgeous Prince approaches;
Let the Polyanthi then,
Run as dapper liverymen!
Till your dames on polished floors,
Sail like splendid Pompadours.”
Our dining-room faced this pleasant outlook, and it was a favorite family gathering place; for Mary had her sewing machine at one of its windows, and there she sat sewing and singing nearly every morning. The parlor looked on to Lexington Avenue, and was exactly opposite the Dominican Church entrance, and on Sunday mornings I found at its windows never-ceasing food for thought and observation. Early as six o’clock, there was a reverent praying congregation there, and soon after nine the congregation had overflowed its capacity, and men and women were kneeling on its steps, and broad sidewalk. They were indifferent to passers-by, and with their rosaries in their hands, made publicly their confession of sin, and their prayer for pardon. I never wearied of this Sabbath spectacle, and I never dreamed of smiling at it. I could not imagine myself praying on the sidewalk, or even on the church steps, but sincere religion always commands respect. It is never ridiculous or contemptible.
The parlor, like the rest of the house, was plainly furnished. There were white curtains at the windows, and white matting on the floor, and a very good cottage piano, which we rented when we were in the Amity Street rooms, and had to deny ourselves in other matters, in order to pay the eight dollars a month it called for. But Mary had acquired a certain proficiency in music that must not be lost, and at this time she was taking singing lessons from Errani, and they needed steady, regular practice, which was given while I was at the Astor Library.
Through my reviewing for the Christian Union and other papers, we had collected a number of good books, but we had no pictures excepting two fine crayon portraits of my eldest daughters, which had been presented to me by a young artist, 337 who came frequently to our house. And there was always plenty of flowers, for New Yorkers then, as now, delighted in them; and our visitors brought them freely. I suppose, excluding the piano and the two portraits, the whole house was furnished at the cost of three or four hundred dollars; but for all that, it made a cheerful pleasant impression on all who entered it; its atmosphere was so homelike, so comfortable, and happy.
Undoubtedly we were very happy there, though I worked ten hours or more, daily, including the unpleasant ride to the Astor Library, and often as far as Park Row or its vicinity; for I had to be a worker, as well as a dreamer, and my thoughts needed hands and feet, as well as wings in order to turn them into money. Generally I was far too busy, or too tired, to join the pleasant company usually brightening the parlor in the evenings; but everyone came into the dining-room, where I did my daily overflow of copying, for there was no blessed typewriter then, and had a few kind words with me—and I heard Mary singing or playing, or the murmur of joyous conversation, or the echo of light laughter, and I was as happy as the rest:
“For this it was that made me move
As light as carrier birds in air;
I loved the weight I had to bear,
Because it needed help of Love.”
And also, I was often conscious of a strength, not physical, lying under the tired sinews and muscles.
These evening meetings were of the most informal character. There never was any special invitation to them, and the visitors wore their ordinary street costumes, and were mostly literary men and women; though not altogether so. Mr. Isaac Bloom of Galveston, who had been my husband’s friend, often came to New York, and when he did so, always came to visit us; bringing with him, some young Jewish gentleman of his acquaintance. Socially, I never met finer gentlemen. They were well educated, and their reverence for religion, for their parents and family, and for all that is lovely and of good report, made their friendship most pleasant and desirable. This may not be 338 a popular opinion, but it is the truth concerning all the Jews I have known socially, and their number is neither small nor unimportant. My Galveston friend is dead, and I have gradually lost sight of the Franks, and the two Blumenthals, the cultured Noemagen, Julius Sterne and others; but I have not forgotten their good nature, and exquisite courtesy, and I am sure if I met them at this day, they would give my age an even deeper respect, than they gave me forty years ago. Then also, Mary had made many friends while with Mrs. Sykes, and they drifted now and then into our circle; while not infrequently S. S. Conant, the editor of Harper’s Weekly, passed an hour in it before going to his club; or Mr. Mengins called to talk to Lilly about her mission work, readily falling into conversation, and changing opinions with all present; or telling them Scotch stories, with all the rich emphatic idioms, of the Land o’ Cakes.
Always I was well content to sit copying my day’s work in the dining-room, within sound of the happiness, that I could share at any moment; but I grew restless at once, if I heard the voice of a young man called Cochran. He was one of the librarians of the Astor Library when I first met him, but very soon went to where he naturally belonged—the daily press. A man so vivid, so clever, so brimful of intellect, I had never before met. He was like a flash of flame.
The first thing he always did, was to walk through the dining-room, and ask me if he was welcome. Being assured of our pleasure in his company he would answer, “Then I shall make my tea”; and immediately proceeded to make himself a cup of tea. Having drank it, he poured out a second cup, and with this in his hand went back to the parlor, taking if possible his seat on the piano stool. Then he saluted the company, and as he sipped his tea, began a conversation that no one could describe. It was gay and grotesque, thoughtful, and often serious, constantly witty and idiomatic. Oh, it was a dish of all kinds! but all good. Thus he would sit drinking one cup of tea after another, and clinching every discussion with a few trenchant words, driven home as a nail is driven into a sure place, with a few strong blows. It is impossible for words to give any adequate example of this man’s conversation; because 339 it was so vividly illuminated by his personality, the inflections of his voice, his expressive gestures, and the large gray eyes, that beamed or flashed in sympathy with all he said.
On one occasion a minister and his wife from Glasgow and a close friend of my mother-in-law and of all my Scotch connections was present. They had sent me a note from the Metropolitan Hotel saying they would like to call, if it was convenient; and had been invited to take tea, and spend the following evening with us. I confess that I was pleased to have such credible witnesses assure my mother-in-law that I had not done badly for the grandchildren she had neglected; and moreover I did arrange everything as American as possible, and I did pretend to have forgotten all about Glasgow, whereas there was not a street of the murky city, or a day of my life in it, which was not clear and fresh in my memory. And I did dress myself in the finest gown of white mull and lace, with which Southern extravagance in that direction before the war had provided me, and I did go to unnecessary expense in cut flowers and jellies and confectionery, not from the best of motives, not out of respect to the minister and his wife, but just because I suspected them of coming as spies, and I did not wish them to take back an evil report. Before they left New York I was ashamed of my suspicions, but that night I enjoyed myself in them.
And all went exactly as I desired. My visitors were astonished and much pleased with their reception, my daughters had never looked better. Mary sang very well, and Lilly interested the minister with her stories of the Five Points Mission so much, that he wished to go there, and she agreed to go with him on the following day. About eight o’clock Mr. Cochran and Albert Webster came in, and we had an intellectual feast of good things until midnight.
During this evening there was a conversation concerning women which may indicate how much their character has changed during the last thirty years. Mr. Webster related a social anecdote about Mrs. Astor, and her unanswerable way of snubbing rivals aspiring to social prominence; and I asked Mr. Cochran what he thought of Mrs. Astor’s behavior.
“I think the things women bear from each other are amazing,” he answered. “Men would not stand them. Men would not attempt them.”
“Then why do women attempt them?”
“First, because they don’t respect each other; second, because they have no fear of consequences.”
“Consequences!” I exclaimed.
“Yes. They cannot knock each other down, and it is not ladylike to call names.”
“Well then, if a woman is insulted by a woman, what can she do?”
“Repay in kind, and to give women justice, they generally do so.”
“How?”
“A stare, a shrug, a toss of the head, conveys their infinite disdain; and answers the end perfectly.”
Conversation then drifted to Susan B. Anthony, and Mr. Cochran said, “I respect her, but she will not succeed.”
“Why not?” asked Albert Webster.
“Because, though women are gregarious in fashions and follies, they cannot combine. They will not support their weak sisters, and they shrink from their strong ones. Generally speaking, they have a radical contempt for each other’s intellects, and have no class solidarity. Because of the latter want, men have always had the upper hand, and will always keep it.”[7]
The minister approved these opinions, and also kindly looked over, or forgave, any lapses from the strict formalities of a Glasgow evening, by a kindly allowance for our grievous want of a Scotch education. Twelve years afterwards, I paid my mother-in-law a visit at her summer residence in the Isle of Arran. She had forgotten nothing the minister and his wife had told her concerning their visit, but they had told only the things I wished her to hear. Even Mr. Cochran making his own tea, and drinking eight cups or more, had not been reported. I am sensible that I have been smiling as I wrote the last two pages, and I shall not try to justify myself. Sometimes we act naturally, and sometimes we have a grace beyond nature, and that night I dispensed with “the grace beyond,” but I enjoyed the dispensation, and I hope it was not very wrong, because I am not yet sorry for it.
The Albert Webster named here was a fiction writer of a very high order. His work was done principally for Appleton’s Magazine. He was a grave, thoughtful young man, with a charming presence, a high opinion of women, and a passionate love for one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughters; but he was perilously delicate and unfit for the struggle of life. In about two years the work, and the struggle was over. They whom the gods love, die young. The brilliant Cochran followed Webster in a short time, and the rest of the clever, kindly group whom we called friends are scattered far and wide. Max Freelander went to the African diamond mines. S. S. Conant’s sudden disappearance is still a mystery. The Reverend Mr. Mengins is dead. My Jewish friends are immersed in business. They doubtless remember me, as I do them, but I am on Storm King Mountain, and they are in New York’s busiest thoroughfare, sixty-five miles away. Death and distance make barren our lives.
About this time the brilliant scholar Moses Coit Tyler was 342 editor of the Christian Union. He was a great man in every respect. If he only entered a room, it appeared to become lighter; and in no other man have I ever noticed the radiation of the body so pronounced. He made me believe in the aureoles of the saints. Reverent to sacred things, he was still very much of an every day man. He fearlessly spoke his mind, fearlessly opposed what he disapproved; and was not, I suspected, an admirer of Mr. Beecher. I remember thinking that if the two men came to an active dispute, I should like to be present. Professor Tyler soon left the newspaper world, and went to his place in Michigan University. Many years afterwards he wrote me some hearty letters, praising the work I had done, and telling me, he knew I would do still better.
Not long after he left the Christian Union Mary and I took a passage on an Anchor Line steamer for Glasgow. I had various reasons for this journey, partly relating to the family, and partly to business. Also, I was exceedingly weary both physically and mentally, and my physician is ever the sea and the air of my native land, if by any means I can secure their help. Having fainted three times within a month, it was not considered prudent for me to go alone, and we hoped Mary might please her relatives better than Lilly had been able to do. So Mary went with me.
In one or two respects the voyage was a success. Ten days on the Atlantic perfectly restored me to health, and I landed at Glasgow fit for anything I ought to do. We went to a private hotel, and I sent my mother-in-law word of our arrival. Towards evening Mrs. Colville and her daughter Jessy came to visit us, bringing me a letter from Mother, desiring us to leave the hotel, and stay with them. So we went to their residence in Bath Street, and were entertained there with great kindness. And I was glad of it. I could not forget that I was with Robert’s mother, sister, and kindred, and I tried for his sake to offend in nothing.
The morning after I arrived I was sitting in a parlor by myself, writing letters, when a gentleman entered. I looked up and as I did not recognize him rose. Then he came eagerly forward crying softly, “Amelia! O Amelia!” The sound of 343 my baptismal name went poignantly to my consciousness; no man since Robert’s death had ever called me by it. As the speaker came closer to me, I saw that it was Alick Sage, my old lover. He had just returned from Australia, a widower with one daughter. I did not know whether I was pleased to see him, or not. He had grown as far away from me, as I from him, and there was not one plank of tenderness in my heart to bridge the chasm. I wanted no lovers; my affections were well satisfied with my daughters, and my work.
He was persistent, and his persistency annoyed me, and I left Mary with her aunt, and went down to Yorkshire to see my sisters, who were then living in Leeds. After spending two days with them, I went on to London, where I collected money enough to pay the expenses of our trip, and also made arrangements for three American stories. Returning to Glasgow I sailed two days afterwards for New York, but Mary remained in Scotland until near Christmas.
In the gloaming of the day before leaving I made two memorable visits, the first was to the house in which I had lived and loved with such passionate earnestness, as I could never know again. It looked as if I had never left it, and a constable walking the broad pavement in front of it, told me that “a real bein, nice couple” lived there, that the wife was “gey bonnie,” and her man had “a fine job in the custom house.” I asked if they had any children. “Aye,” he answered, “a braw lad o’ five, or thereabouts, and a genty wee lassie, just toddling around.” I looked up at the windows, silently blessed the home, and all within it, and giving the man a shilling took leave of it forever. Another inquiry might not have been so happily answered. When a thing is well enough, let it alone.
The other visit was to my husband’s warehouse in Virginia Street. It had been closed for the day, and being entirely a business street was absolutely empty. I stood upon the stone door steps, worn away in the center to a mere flag, and I looked at the row of windows covered with dust and cobwebs, just as Robert and his predecessors had kept them, as emblematical of a large, steady business, not requiring blazoning of any kind. And though my heart was full, I could not help a faint smile 344 at the superstition—which still prevailed—and I made a promise to myself to go down to the big offices in lower New York to see whether New York merchants cleaned their windows, or let them accumulate the dust in which the lucky cobwebs dwell. This promise to myself, I have not yet fulfilled.
When I went to the steamer the next morning I found Mr. Sage there. It troubled me, and made my last talk with Mary conventional, instead of confidential; and yet when he turned away saying, “Farewell, Milly!” I felt unhappy. Indeed for some days I was angry at myself. I had denied and passed by a loving soul without caring. Alas! the pain of reunion is often greater than the pain of parting. Some secret disappointment enters into all meetings after long separation. We feel that it is easier to accept the loss, than to adapt ourselves to this person not expected.
Soon after my return home, I was engaged by Fords, Howard and Hulbert to write a history of the condition and treatment of women in all civilized and semi-civilized countries. Grace Greenwood was to assist me in this work, but I never saw her but once, and that only for about an hour. I have the impression that she lived near Boston, but she took little interest in the book, and when she saw the list of volumes laid out at the Astor Library for reference and information, she shook her head in a kind of laughing despair, and said,
“Your plan is excellent, go on and complete it. The firm do not expect me to do any writing. I am to advise with you.” Then she laughed pleasantly again, and our interview was practically over.
She was a pretty woman, bright and agreeable, and doubtless was paid only for the use of her name on the title page, and having satisfied herself that it was safe in my care and ability, she passed out of my life with a pleasant smile and a compliment. Yet I could not help thinking of what Mr. Cochran said, “Women have a radical contempt for each other’s intellects, and they can not combine.” But she was kind to me in one important respect; she advised me in a peculiarly marked manner to “insist on some weekly payment” for my work.
I followed her advice, and was glad I did so, for Mr. 345 Beecher’s church officials after a lengthy examination, found no wrong in their pastor; and then Mr. Tilton took his quarrel to the civil courts. It was a ruinous step to Fords, Howard and Hulbert, the publishers of the Christian Union; but I did not dream of it affecting their publishing business. So I had a shock one Saturday afternoon, when I entered Mr. Ford’s office with my week’s Mss for the book about women. The usually busy place was still and empty. I glanced at Mr. Jack Howard’s desk, and he was not in his place. The elder Ford had always been a conspicuous figure but he, too, was absent. I saw no one I knew but the cashier. He called me kindly to his office, and gave me my check.
“It is the last I shall pay here,” he said. “I was waiting for you. Mr. Howard told me to do so.”
He spoke so sympathetically, that I felt my eyes fill with tears. “Thank Mr. Howard for me,” I said, “and you?” He shook his head at my question. I knew he was feeling the closing up, as much as I did, for he had a clever, handsome wife and several little children. We shook hands and parted silently. He was full of anxiety, so was I, for in any worker’s life, the loss of steady employment is often a greater tragedy than any Sophocles or Shakespeare ever wrote.
I did not hurry home. I walked slowly for some distance full of thought. But it was not long ere invincible hope began to say words of reason and consolation. Then I made haste and told my children what had happened, and we talked cheerfully over what we must do in order to make our reduced income meet our output, until good days came again.
“Everybody has ups and downs, Mamma,” said Mary, “and I think a thorough change would do us all good. Lilly has not quite recovered from her illness. Alice is quieter than usual, and you look fagged out, Mamma. Let us go to the country. We could at once save half the rent. Let us go to Rutherford Park. When I was there with Mrs. Sykes, I saw such pretty cottages for twenty dollars a month.”
“O Mamma!” cried Lilly, “think of a cottage all to ourselves! Perhaps a garden—and there might be a chicken house. I could raise chickens and turkeys. I raised hundreds and 346 hundreds in Austin, and we might hire a cow—if we could not at first buy one. I could milk her. Old Mammy Green taught me to milk, and I can make butter, too. What a good time we should have! Say yes, Mamma. Do say yes.”
Of course an hour’s conversation in this mood, decided the question. The next day Mary went to Rutherford Park and took a cottage, and Lilly in high spirits spent the day in packing. “You see, Mamma,” she said, as she triumphantly turned the key in an overflowing trunk, “you see, we ought to have made a change before this. When things begin to go wrong, that is the time to make a change. Sam Houston said that, and I reckon he knew all about things going wrong and changes.” Then after another tug with the straps she looked up, her face aglow and asked,
“Things don’t stay wrong, do they? It is good and bad with them, always good and bad, and good again. You know that, don’t you, Mamma?”
I smiled and answered promptly as she wished, for indeed no one knew better than I did, that
“The Sea of Fortune doth not ever flow,
She draws her favors to the lowest ebb,
Her tides have equal times to come and go,
Her loom doth weave the finest and the coarsest web.
No joy so great, but runneth to an end,
No hap so hard, but will in time amend.”
The ready acceptance of a simpler life by Mary and Lilly greatly relieved me for the fear that it would be a trial to them to leave New York had been the pinch of the trouble. Alice was happy anywhere if we were with her, for her life and conversation was not of this world. Born in the stress and terror of the war time, when I lived and moved only in the mercy and care of God, she came into this world more psychically than physically developed. She has never yet comprehended the meaning of care or want. God is her Father, therefore she can “lack nothing.” Her wants are few and simple, and she asks God for them, and I would sell the wedding 347 ring from my finger, rather than she should fear God had failed her. If she notices that I am anxious, and I say, “I am a little troubled,” she asks if I have “told God about the trouble?” and when I answer, “Yes, darling, I have told Him all about it,” she adds with a confident air, “Then it is all right. God will make it so.”
Her mentality in some points is superior to my own, thus she is naturally far more shrewd. I am deceived so easily; she is never deceived. She is exquisitely neat and orderly, and as careful and economical as any of her Scotch ancestry. The servants all obey her cheerfully, and I wish they obeyed me half as well, and as cheerfully. She dislikes extravagance in every shape, and yet money is useless to her, for the sense of numbers is wanting. She cannot learn to count, and though she may know the denomination of coins, she has no idea of their relative worth. Nor can she understand space or distance. She knows she must go a long way to reach England, for she has been there several times, but if the distance is told her in miles, it would give her no idea of it. Of course these wants totally unfit her for a world in which numbers and space and distance are constantly present factors. She speaks little, but she sees and knows more than she can tell. Outward things are an hindrance to her.
Yet she is perfectly happy. Her days pass in sweet and innocent regularity. Of her own accord she has assumed certain small household duties, which would otherwise be mine; she spends her first hours of the day in “talking with God,” which is her definition of prayer; then she embroiders or reads, or improvises on her organ, which at times is done with a wonderful touch and sense of purest harmony. Her voice in accompaniment is very sweet but quite childlike. At four o’clock every day, we have a short service of psalms or collects, the Lord’s Prayer, and a hymn, and she is the innocent God-loving priest, who offers our thanksgiving.
Oh, she is the most blessed child that ever a mother nursed! She has never given me one moment’s sorrow, except for her condition, and for this she is in no way responsible. Indeed I feel it to be a great honor to call such a lovely soul “my child.” 348 Yet her perfectly helpless condition shadows all my days and nights for I know that until the end she will remain one of those sweet souls who,
“... ’mid the trampling throng,
With their first beauty bloom at evensong;
Hearts for whom God has judged it best to know
Only by hearsay, sin and want and woe,
Bright to come hither, and to travel hence,
Bright as they came, and wise in innocence.”
And the one prayer I make for her constantly, especially at midnight—for the midnight prayer God loves best of all—is, that she may “travel hence” before I do, or that He mercifully grant “we may travel hence together.” For it is her hand, that will open to me the gate of the celestial city.
In a week we were settled in the Rutherford Park cottage. I had been only half-hearted about the movement, for it appeared to put the Astor Library too far from me. But the children were delighted with the change, and the human heart is a loving thing, and has reasons that reason does not understand. And I had not then learned that a little misgiving in the beginning of things, means much regret in the end of them.
The first change necessary in our lives was that Mary or Lilly should do the office work. One of them went to the city with me nearly every morning. On reaching New York I took the street cars direct to the library, arriving there about nine o’clock and working until four. If there was writing to be done, or writing to be altered, it was brought to the library, and we usually made our arrangements to so fit each other, that we returned home together. Then there was the happy supper table, and the exchange of city and village news.
This was the year 1876—the great celebration of the Independence of the Colonies at Philadelphia—and we had many visitors from the South. Among them was a very interesting gentleman from Tennessee called Thomas Barr. He stayed some weeks in Rutherford Park, and was very popular; for he had a handsome person, a fine manner, and was possessed of considerable 349 wealth. There was an engagement between him and my daughter Mary, but it died a very easy, natural death; and as they were unsuited to each other, I congratulated both of them, for correcting a mistake, before it was made. The last four words are a contradiction, but they state the case plainly enough.
Rutherford Park was then a charming suburb of New York. There were a great many New Yorkers living there, and the society of the place was delightful. But society in Rutherford Park, meant exactly what it meant in New York. There were the same extravagances of dressing and entertaining and we soon found out that economy is an inherent virtue, and not dependent on environment—a charmed word, however, at that time; ethical and social teachers being quite confident, that every one physically or morally sick, could be made healthy and good, by giving them the proper environment. I myself had been advised by the Reverend Mr. Ruston, as true a friend as we ever had, to go to the country and to learn among simple villagers the happiness of a simple life. There were not many simple villagers in Rutherford Park, and they appeared to absolutely separate themselves from what they called “the Yorkers.” So we did not learn anything from our environment. We spent as much living in a cottage, whose rent was twenty dollars a month, as we spent in a New York apartment at fifty dollars a month, for the small cottage did not alter our ideas about the superfluities, that have become the necessities.
But blue glass and environment, which were at that time the great cures for personal and moral ailments, did not in the least affect us. We saw every one bringing home a square of blue glass to sit under and be cured of their bodily sickness, and we heard everywhere the great word “environment” as the true specific for original sin. Even yet, “good environments and good associations,” are the shibboleth of philanthropists. I want to remind them, that Nature prevails enormously over nurture; for instance the cuckoo has been laying her eggs in the respectable nests of the dove and the titlark ever since the creation, but never a cuckoo yet imbibed, or even imitated the 350 virtues of their foster parents. I know that poets sing beautifully of the cuckoo bird,
“Breaking the silence of the seas,
Among the furthest Hebrides.”
But Moses forbade the Jews to incorporate their vices by eating them, and Milton centuries later classed them with “owls, apes and dogs.” Three centuries have passed since Milton, and the cuckoo is just as bad as he was at the beginning. He has had, say six thousand years of the respectable environment and excellent moral associations of doves and titlarks, and he has not been cured of a single fault. So much for environment and good associations! I find I have written a little lecture but if it teaches one philanthropist, that all moral improvement must be from the inside outward, it will not be in vain. If the heart of even a bad child is not changed, all outside moralities will be useless; he will become a bad man.
Our real life in Rutherford Park was just what it had been in New York. I wrote constantly, but not as comfortably as in the city. The train wearied me, and also there were always people in it, who talked to me all the time. If they were women and going up town to shop, they talked until I left them at Astor Place. Coming to my work from Seventy-seventh Street in the horse cars was different. There I was among strangers. I could sit still and think, and possess myself in reflection. Socially things were different enough. We had been very kindly received, and soon had numerous acquaintances and callers, and we had found it quite possible to go to church, which had been a serious query in New York.
This may seem a peculiar statement. I will explain it. One Sunday I went to hear a minister whom I had read a good deal about. I liked his sermon, and I liked the music, and I felt that I would be happy to join its congregation. I wrote a few lines to this minister, telling him with what churches I had been connected, referring him to Mr. Beecher and Dr. Tyng, and asking what preliminaries were necessary.
Some time passed and then one day an officer of this church 351 called on me. I happened to be at home very busy copying. Mary was sewing beside me; Alice was coloring a picture; Lilly opened the door for him, and as he wished “to see Mrs. Barr” she brought him into the dining-room, where I was at work. She thought he was a very respectable editor. I thought the same, and I rose to greet him. I have no doubt he was a millionaire, but he was courteous and gentlemanly, and after a few minutes quite kindly. He said, he had come in response to my letter, sent to Dr. C.
I smiled and he continued, “Dr. C—— would like to know the name of your banker.”
“My banker!” I replied in amazement. “I have no banker.”
“You see,” he continued, “ours is a very extravagant church—I mean in good works—and our members must be looked to for large subscriptions. Dr. C—— is acquainted with your name—and thinks highly of you—but he is afraid you would not be able to give as—as liberally—as liberally as our church expenses—demanded.”
He spoke with difficulty, and as I continued to look at him, and remained silent, he was confused and said hastily, “I am afraid you do not understand the situation.”
I said I did not, and he tried to explain, but he was much embarrassed and I shook my head and said, “You had better make no more explanations, sir. I understand that only the rich can be members of Dr. C——’s church. The Lord Christ, also, is therefore ineligible. I will remain outside with Him. I had an old-fashioned idea, that every Church was a House of God, I have no desire to intrude on premises belonging to Dr. C——.”
The official sat a while, talked of other things, and went away I think not very happy. If he is still in life, and this relation should meet his eyes, he will remember. He did his best to make the refusal as inoffensive as possible but he had to present a case utterly destitute of every gracious element.
But even when we were living in the rooms in Amity Street, we found out that the church in New York had a social side, that could not be intruded upon. We went then regularly to a Methodist church in our neighborhood, a large well-appointed 352 building, with a very excellent preacher. His manner even in his service was so really “brotherly” and “sisterly,” that I was in no way astonished when he made us a pastoral call. We found him socially a delightful man, responding gladly to intellectual and spiritual conversation. He remained talking with me over my life, and especially over my work on the religious press for at least two hours. When he rose to go he said, he would like to bring Mrs. D—— to see us, and would surely do so, as soon as we moved “into a more fashionable street.”
He meant nothing unkind by this proviso, and in future years I did a great deal of work for him, and he visited me at Cherry Croft. But the remark made us think, and then laugh a little—perhaps, not a happy laugh. Hitherto I had not troubled myself as to whether the street was fashionable or not. Mr. Sykes had approved the locality, and it suited my library wants perfectly, but now I asked Mary, if she thought we ought to see about a change? “Not for the honor of Mrs. D——’s call,” she answered. Then I looked at Lilly and she laughed and said, “You ought to have told Mr. D——, Mamma, that we were not lonely nor likely to be so. We are not fashionable people; why should we go to a fashionable street?”
In direct opposition to this exclusiveness Dr. Tyng offered me a pew for myself and family in the new church he had just built on Madison Avenue and Forty-second Street, without money and without price. But at that time I had worked a great deal with, and for ministers of more than one denomination, and I confess my ideas of the sacred office were turned topsy-turvey. The clergy I knew in England and Scotland were so exclusively “Ministers of The Word.” Their church and pastoral work completely absorbed them. They were really “reverend” and entitled to that respect mingled with fear and affection which they received. I have gone out of my way many and many a time, so that I might meet a minister, and have him smile at me, and say “God bless you, child!” Much of this sentiment remained with me when I came to New York, but it was soon killed—for a minister in the market place, bargaining for stories and editorials, is not as “reverend” as the man who 353 goes up to the Holy Place and opens with prayer and praise a solemn service to the Eternal One.
In Rutherford we had an excellent minister—a Mr. Walcott, a good man full of the Evangel he loved to proclaim. He and Mrs. Walcott welcomed us gladly, and the church welcomed us, and we had in Rutherford all the spiritual privileges hungry souls could wish. I was conscious, however, of a great change. I had acquired, I knew not how, a self-sufficiency in spiritual things that needed nothing from human sympathy or numbers. There are experiences in life, after which we cannot go on in the old way; can never be what we were before. I had gone through several such experiences.
I had lost many of the convictions and illusions of my youth. I had gained much knowledge of men and of things, that I had not yet either accepted or refused. But I clung with passionate fervor to my trust in God’s love and care, and in spite of the frequent dropping of cold words of doubt in my presence, I still had an almost awful prepossession in favor of the Bible. I read it alone with my daughters, and we talked of its promises, and as we four knelt together in earnest prayer, or holy silence, there was some times the blessed consciousness of Another with us. Christ had promised to be with such worshippers. Christ will keep His promise even to the end of the world. So we passed out of the splendid church, into the little upper chamber, but we did not pass out of God’s love and presence.
CHAPTER XXI
THUS RUNS THE WORLD AWAY
“I must tell all. I cannot be unfaithful to my past. If I cut it away, I am but half myself. I wish also faith in the years to come, and those lofty delights which defy the tomb.”
In the meantime my work went steadily on, and I wrote a good deal for a Mr. Marks, who very soon removed to London. But in the interval he supplied the place of the Christian Union which in the years 1876 to 1877 was at such a low ebb, that no one but Dr. Lyman Abbott, who then took it in charge, could have guided it over the sea of its difficulties, into the safe harbor of its present influence and success.
In looking over my diaries for these years, I am astonished at the amount of money I made from short stories, poems, and articles. We lived comfortably on it, and wanted no good things. And I think my readers must be so familiar now with my regular life, that I will only specify the incidents which varied and changed it somewhat, until I reach the period when I gave up newspaper and magazine work for the purpose of writing books.
The first event of moment was our leaving Rutherford, and going to Denver, Colorado. To this day, I wonder at the circumstance. I was certainly ill, no, not ill, but completely tired out body and mind, so that even my ever upspringing soul was inert and indifferent. A change was imperative, but the sea, and a week or two of my native air, would have put me all right. Let no one smile at my prescription. In cases of lost vitality and extreme weariness, one’s native air is the finest tonic and builder up that can be taken. Drugs have nothing to compare with it. I am very weary now, but I know that if I could sit on Ulverston fells, and breathe the potent mixture of her sea and land ozone, I would be in a week ten years younger. I do 355 not say this on my own experience or authority. English specialists insist on its virtue, and I know one of the greatest surgeons of New York, who takes this tonic every summer, if possible, and comes home a new man.
Well, I went to Denver. It was the most foolish thing I ever did, and I can not tell why I did it. There was a vague idea in my mind, that if I could not write any more, I might open in this new, growing town, such a school, as I had had in Chicago; and then my children had been talked into an enthusiasm about the West, and youth is always sure that change must be for the better. I gave way with a supineness that astonishes me to remember. A letter to Mr. Abbott, the passenger agent of the Erie line, settled the matter. He offered me a compartment for four at half-price if I would write an article for a pamphlet they would publish, and speak otherwise favorably of the line as I had opportunity. The girls were delighted, and I tried to feel some of their enthusiasm. The great trouble to me, was the breaking up of the home and the sale of the furniture I had worked so hard to obtain. But there was no alternative. If there were storage houses then, we knew nothing about them, and Lilly, who always looked at the bright side, said,
“It would be well to be rid of it. We didn’t know how, or where to buy furniture, Mamma, when we bought this heavy stuff. I know now where far prettier and cheaper can be had. Just let this go, Mamma. We can’t drag it to Denver, and if we do come back, we will buy things far more suitable.”
I made no further dissent. I only reflected how many of my homes I had seen torn to pieces, and scattered wide, and I wondered why this experience seemed obligatory. Then it struck me, that there might be a psychic side to the circumstance—that to break up my dwelling place, and send me on some far off journey was perhaps the best, the only thing my angel could do, in order to save me and my children from “Him that followeth after.” For I know well, that the breaking up of existing conditions, is often the only salvation; that we are sent long, unexpected, and often unpleasant journeys because it is the best way to defeat disaster; that we are often 356 prevented from taking journeys we have planned and prepared for, because they would be fatal; yea, that we are often stripped as Job was stripped, in order to make possible the two-fold blessing of Job.
I felt the long, dirty, monotonous journey to Denver very much. But the children were happy. They made friends with an United States General and his charming wife and daughter, and were half sorry not to accept their invitation to go on with them to the frontier station which was their home.
We arrived in Denver on the twenty-first of July, 1878, after five days’ travel; and the next day we rented a small furnished house belonging to Miss Sargent, a writer of that day whose stories were much liked both in England and America. We made the place pretty and comfortable, and then took time to consider what we had done. I felt painfully the extreme rarity of the atmosphere. It affected my ears, and gave me a peculiar headache; but it is not fair to describe the Denver of that date, for it was the point to which all consumptives past hope were then sent. It was full of the sick and the dying, yet withal a busy town; but I saw at once that we should never like it, and my heart turned to New York with a home-sickness impossible to describe.
However, the great total eclipse of the sun was to be noted there in perfection on the twenty-ninth of the month, and we were glad to have an opportunity to witness what we should never see again in this incarnation. The day was clear, unnaturally still, and tenuous; and there was a sense of something supernatural about to occur. As the sun was gradually darkened, and the earth lay passive in that unearthly gloom, a dead silence prevailed, but the moment of totality, or the moment after it, was saluted with the shouts and huzzas of the crowd watching the marvelous event. It was no doubt the most sincere way in which the unlearned thousands could express their feelings, but it was not the awful wonder and worship that seemed fitting.
My old pupil, Mr. William Libbey, called afterwards. He with many other young men and students from the different universities had come purposely to observe the eclipse, and Mrs. Jackson, the beloved H. H. of the literary world, quickly found 357 us out. But no kindness could reconcile us to a life full of strange conditions. Mary went back to New York with some returning friends in a month; I, as soon as I could bear the journey, and Lilly and Alice as quickly as the bitter cold of winter was over, and it was safe for Alice to cross the plains.
Thankfully I close this chapter with our happy reunion in some pleasant rooms in the St. Stephens, a very quiet respectable hotel on Eleventh Street and University Place. Many of my Rutherford friends stayed there when in town for a few days, and it was also the resort of at least three ministers whom I knew well. We lived there a long time, for among its many advantages was its proximity to the Astor and the Mercantile Libraries.
The day after my return to New York I went back to my sunny quiet alcove in the Astor, and found the paper and pencils I had left on its table untouched. I lifted them with affection, and tears sprang to my eyes as I looked around the hall, and from far and near received a smile and a nod of welcome. For I was the familiar of most of the alcove students, and always ready to give them the help of my own index in finding the material they wanted. All day long, I had little visits and pleasant words, and at the lunch hour Dr. Strasneky, the superintendent, came and chatted with me about my journey. He said he was glad to see me in my place again. “Every one missed you,” he continued, “we all liked to look up and see you sitting here, as happy and busy as if writing was the most blessed work in the world.”
“So it is, Doctor,” I answered. “If we write good words, and write them well, it is the work God gives to His beloved.”
“You talk mystically,” he said, “but you write plain enough. Don’t go away again.”
As he left me, a tall, pale young man brought his lunch in his hand, and sat down to eat it beside me. It was Wolcott Balestier, the brother of the young lady whom Rudyard Kipling married, and no mean writer of fiction. He was employed in the Patent Department, and he never told me he was writing. He liked to eat his lunch beside me, and discuss the people around, and what they were doing. Sometimes he gave me some 358 of his marshmallows, and I gave him half of my apple. We always had a happy moment over these exchanges, and he used to banter me for being so extravagant as to buy apples, when they were five cents each. Well, when I first came to New York, I had sometimes hesitated between the apple and the ride home. If I got my apple, I had to walk up to Eighteenth Street, if I could do without my apple I could afford the cars home. Always the apple won, for I told myself, “I ought to walk home after sitting so long. It is really a question of health, and not of apples.” I wonder how it would have affected me, if I had been then made sure, that the day was coming when I would have apple trees of many kinds, that were all my own, and apples without stint to eat, and to sell, and to give away. Would it have been good for me to know this? No. It would not. Every one’s experience will teach them that much.
Above all other visitors in my alcove, I liked Frank Norton. He also was in the Patent Department, but I never saw a man so far out of his place. It was hard enough for young Balestier to be working over some old mechanical patent, when he was dreaming of love and ladies and great adventures; but the darkly handsome Professor N—— dwelt constantly among the stars, and believed himself to be spiritually related to them. He came into my alcove one day, and began talking about our earth having once been part of the sun, and he declared that her day and night, her tides and seasons, and simplest phenomena, would be unintelligible without taking into account her heavenly companions. He then attempted to prove to me how these extra-telluric influences, have also dominion over the phenomena of mind, because man, being a product not only of the earth but of the universe, is influenced by the stars as well as the earth. I confess that his wisdom was mostly beyond me, but I was greatly delighted with the word “telluric” and when he talked of “extra-telluric influences” I was eager and anxious to know what the word might mean. As soon therefore as he left me, I went to a dictionary and found out. I might have asked him, and saved some stair-climbing and research, but I knew if I compelled myself to look for the meaning, I would never forget it. Ever since the word has had a charm for my ear, 359 and I have wanted to use it in the books I have written; but this is the first opportunity I have found. Professor N—— was then a young, handsome man, enthusiastically full of dreams, and of an extra-telluric nature; yet apparently under very good telluric influences, for he was always happy, always well dressed, and always had the air of a man well supplied with money. I wonder where he is today, and I hope sincerely that the stars and all other extra-telluric powers, have been very kind and generous to him.
And on the evening of the day on which this conversation with Professor N—— occurred, after thinking it over, I said to myself, “This earth, with its days and nights, its change of seasons, its tides and earthquakes, and magnetic storms, may be under extra-telluric influences; but the phenomena of the soul, is beyond all such control. By some mysterious exercise of its own powers, it moves on from phase to phase, from gloom to sunshine, from doubt to faith, from repose to activity, and natural laws are of no importance to it. What telluric, or extra-telluric influence, can govern thought?”
Lilly had always been the manager of our home affairs, and now that this employment was taken away, her mind reverted to mission work; and she went on a journey for the American Missionary Society that promised her a great deal of the kind of adventure she liked. She was to go to the southern states where schools and home missions had been established to report on the work they were doing, and the success or failure that had attended it. I do not remember how long she was thus occupied, but it was not long, for she was soon busy in her own way “among southern cabins;” for in Charleston she met Mr. Tourgee, and he advised her to go to John’s Island, which lay some miles off the coast of South Carolina and was famous for its long staple cotton. Here, he told her, she would find negroes far different from the usual type, and natural surroundings of great beauty and interest.
On this island there was a fine old manor house called “Headquarters,” then owned by a Mr. and Mrs. Peck, and she went there to see it. Every brick in this house had been 360 brought from England by Lord Fenwick its builder, and its noble entrance hall, leaded library windows, and magnificent cypress paneling were still in beautiful preservation. It received its name from having been headquarters during the war of the Revolution, the war of A.D. 1812, and twice during the war of A.D. 1860. A very sincere friendship grew up between its owners and Lilly, and she stayed at “Headquarters” more than a year, writing charming papers about its woods and lagoons, its birds and reptiles, and its picturesque and exceedingly interesting negro life and character. These papers were all bought by the Independent and Harper’s Weekly.
Immediately after her settlement at “Headquarters,” she began to dream of, or to see in a kind of vision, an old lady and gentleman who appeared to be much interested in her. Their dress was that prevalent among the nobles and gentry during the reign of Queen Anne, or the early Georges, and they impressed her with a strong persuasion of their constant care and guardianship. She was sure that it was not only interest, but love that prompted them. Phantoms, of course! Yes, but phantoms of remarkable clearness and evidence, and all the time she was at “Headquarters” she saw, or she dreamed of them.
Now the singular point in this experience, was not known until this summer, when I received officially from the county clerk a list of all the references to my family, the Huddlestons of Millom, to be found in the county histories of the shires of Cumberland and Westmoreland. It will be remembered that I have just stated, that this fine old mansion was built by Lord Fenwick, and in the historical list just referred to, I find the following record:
“John Huddleston, son of the above-named Richard, who succeeded his father in 1337, married a daughter of Henry Fenwick, Lord of Fenwick, county of Northumberland.”
These few lines gave me food for some very pleasant thoughts, which I followed further than I can do here, but it was evident that these early Fenwicks who built “Headquarters,” still remembered that their family and the Huddlestons were kindred. 361 After more than five hundred years had elapsed, as we count them, they remembered it, and knew that the alliance still influenced the Huddleston strain. Well, then the dead do not forget in the next life what happened in this life. Also, the affections of the dead remain in the same channel as when they were on earth. Far off from the original strain as Lilly was, they knew her, and they felt an interest in her welfare and safety. My readers can of themselves follow out these trains of thoughts; they may find comfort and explanations in so doing. And I think those of our families who are in another world like us to remember them.
Truly Lilly needed some protection, for she was surrounded by many dangers; the climate was dangerous, the reptile life was dangerous, and the negro element was tremendously in the ascendant; there being only forty white families on the whole island, while the negroes probably numbered four thousand, more or less. And Lilly knew not the word fear; she stood an hour in the hot swamp one day, and watched the long battle between a very large rattlesnake and an equally large black snake, watched them at close quarters until the black snake tore the skin off his antagonist, and left him flayed from head to tail in the burning sun. It never struck her that there was any danger to herself. “The snakes,” she said, “paid no attention to me. They were too busy with themselves. I was in no danger whatever.”
And at that time, in that lonely island, the white man and woman had no fear of the black man; nor did Lilly see while she was there any ill will of the black man to the whites. They still regarded with liking and respect the white families to which they had belonged, as the following incident will exemplify. One woman had worked four years after her freedom for her master, and he had never paid her any wage. Lilly asked “Why do you not sue him, Mary? The law would give you your wage, for he is able to pay it.”
“O Miss Lill,” was the answer, with a positive shake of the head, “we couldn’t hab a suit in the fambly.”
So much trust was there then in the old servants, that Lilly accompanied by Mrs. Peck, often went to Charleston in the 362 long boat, rowed by four black men. Their leader was a gigantic negro called Binyard, and to his impromptu songs and recitatives the oars kept time all the sixteen miles. Thus when Binyard saw a steamer approaching, his stentorian voice hailed it thus:
“Git out ob de way, you steamboat!
Binyard’s on de ribber!
Binyard’s on de ribber, steamboat,
Git out ob Binyard’s way!”
Then when the steamer swept across their bow and left them rocking in its wash he continued,
“Go on dis time, little steamer,
I let you pass dis time,
Dere’s white ladies on Binyard’s boat,
So he let you pass dis time—
“But keep out ob de way, steamboat,
When no white ladies wid him;
He sink you sure, little steamboat;
He sink you wid his oar!”
As soon as they cleared Ashley River, and got fairly around the bend and into Stono River, they met many boats coming from John, James, and Edisto Islands, and then invariably the singing began, the leading boat flinging out the challenge,
“Gwine to hang up de sword in Zion?”
and the rest answering,
“Yes, Lord! ’Tis a great camp meeting
In de Promised Land!”
And this spiritual was followed by others, until they went singing into “Headquarters” landing. It is all changed now. The negro has been to the university and got “eddicated” and 363 the white man no longer trusts him, and the white woman fears him.
In the evening hours while Mary was out at various houses, or entertainments I wrote a novel, one of the very best I ever wrote. It was called “The Last of the McAllisters.” I sent it to Henry Holt, being moved to do so by a feeling I could not resist, and cannot explain. He returned it with a letter saying, “If you will write me an American novel as clever and interesting, I will gladly publish it.” This letter, so kind and wise, set me thinking of the possibilities of American history for fiction, and was in fact the seed thought of “The Bow of Orange Ribbon,” and consequently of the series of American historical tales which followed it. The origin of novels is often very interesting, and far to seek.
Early in November, 1880, I had an almost fatal attack of inflammation of the brain, followed before I recovered consciousness, by double pneumonia. At the crisis of the sickness, I was for five days neither here nor there. Where was I? I was in a land where all was of fine shifting sand, a land of such awful silence, that I could feel the deadly stillness. And I wanted to pray, and could not pray. I was conscious of no pain, and no desire, but this terrible, urgent longing to pray, and yet not being able to cry to God for help. To want God, and to have no power to call Him, or to go to Him, was an agony there are no words to express. At last, as I stood helpless and hopeless among mountains of sand, there was a whisper, and the pang of unpermitted prayer was taken away. Then I cried out, “Spare me, Lord, that I may recover strength, before I go hence and be no more forever.” Instantly I was conscious. I knew that I was on earth, in my own room, and I spoke one word, “Mary!”
Mary was kneeling beside me, kissing my almost clay hands and face, and moistening my lips with drops of water. And I knew that I was saved. I knew that God had really given me a new life—a new physical and mental power. Physicians had said, I would never be mentally well again. I was dictating poems and other work to Mary, before I was permitted to have any light in my room—when I lay in my bed, while Mary stood 364 at the open door, writing down my words. My convalescence was rapid and sure. I was in the Astor Library on the twenty-first of March, making notes for an article on “Nollekins, the Sculptor,” for Harper’s Monthly. The next week I went again for notes on “Beating the Bounds” for Mr. Munroe, the editor of Harper’s Young People.
I had been four months in my room. I felt now an urgent necessity to be at work again. I have a list beside me of the work I did in this month of March, and of the work done in the nine months following. It may interest some of my friends to read the list for March, because I was then scarcely out of the shadow of the grave. It includes twelve poems, four for Harper’s Weekly and eight for the Ledger, as follows:
“An old Man’s Valentine.”
“’Tis God’s World After All.”
“Blue and Gray Together.”
“John’s Wife.”
“The Fortune Teller.”
“The Best I Can.”
“The Lover that Comes in the Morning.”
“No Room for Me.”
“When To Drop the Bridle.”
“We’ve Always Been Provided For.”
“When Mother and I Were Married.”
Beside these twelve poems, I went to the library and procured the material for the Nollekins article, a lengthy one which depicted the Georgian life and celebrities; wrote two articles for Lippincott’s, and the school paper called “Beating the Bounds,” for the editor of Harper’s Young People. For the year following, I have a list which shows one hundred and thirty-one poems, eight stories, two of which were long enough to be called novelettes, and twenty-five articles referring mostly to remarkable people, places or events.
Mrs. Barr
November, 1880
But when the home is broken up the family scatters. I felt this painfully, for I missed Lilly constantly, and Mary was a great deal with friends, or away, so that Alice and I were really 365 much alone. I had most of the office work to do, and was obliged to leave her when about it, though I took her with me to the library, if the weather was favorable.
Under these conditions it was as easy for me to go to England as to remain in New York during the summer, and in May, 1882, having just finished and sold to Appleton, my book on the “Children of Shakespeare’s Dramas,” I took Alice and went first to Glasgow and afterwards to Yorkshire; remaining away until Christmas was approaching. During that summer vacation, so-called, I sent back to New York eighty-one poems, stories, and descriptive articles, and this number does not include poems and stories written for English papers and magazines during the same period, but of which I have kept no list. These eighty-one poems and stories were sent to Mary, who managed their sale so well, that all were placed and mostly paid for, when I returned home.
This voyage is memorable to me because of a great salvation. On May the third, 1882, I dreamed that a Presence whose enmity I felt, stood by my bedside and said, “You are going to be lost! You are going to be lost! You are going to be ship-wrecked!” And I answered, even as I slept, “I do not believe you. God is able and willing to keep me in all my ways, and my soul trusteth in Him forever.” Then I awoke, and I said consciously over and over, the words I had said in my dream, and so fell asleep again, fighting the fear in my heart with trust and faith. And again I dreamed a Presence stood by my side, a holy loving Presence, and it said confidently “Go, and the Lord be with thee” (1st Samuel, 17:37). And I opened my eyes full of happiness, and there was no shadow of fear in my heart, and three days afterwards Alice and I sailed in the Devonia for Glasgow. We were, as before said, in Scotland and Yorkshire all summer; but took passage for New York again on the eleventh of November. I held fast to the promise given me, and in pleading it for our return voyage, I was suddenly affected in a remarkable way, by the wording of the promise. For the first time I noticed the word “be” in it. It seemed to stand out more plainly than any other word. Then I understood. God had promised not only to go with me, but to be 366 with me. That was sufficient. There were very few saloon passengers. I remember only two ladies beside Alice and myself, an actress, and a Mrs. Orr of Cornwall-on-Hudson. No one comes into your life for nothing, and the next year being advised to go to the mountains for a month or two, I remembered what this lady had said about Cornwall, and I wrote and asked her if she knew of a house I could rent. She advised me to come and see Cornwall. I did so, took a house for six months, and have been here twenty-eight years.
Our first three days at sea were fine, and the wind favorable; the next day the sea was rough, and I was thrown against the brass pipe of the saloon stove, and my right hand painfully burned. On the eighteenth of November, at eleven o’clock at night, we broke our machinery, and in the morning, when I went on deck, I was appalled by the sight of the deck covered with pieces of iron, and wreckage of every kind; and my heart for a moment failed me. For nine days we drifted helplessly about the Atlantic, but all the time, day and night, men were working steadily to repair our engine. Captain Young, a devout man and a fine sailor, was speechlessly anxious, but he clung to Alice whenever he saw her, for she had told him the ship would reach New York safely; and he believed her.
On the night of the twenty-seventh, after dinner, he asked Alice and me to pray for the ship. “At eight bells,” he said, “listen and pray! We are then going to try the engine. If she works, we may, if God wills, reach our harbor in safety——”
“And if not, Captain?”
“We shall still be in God’s hands.”
With these words he turned away, and Alice and I watched faithfully with the anxious man. At eight bells we were on our knees, and as the bells began to strike, the thud of the engine began with them.
“I told you all would be right,” said Alice, and I kissed her, and both our cheeks were wet.
A few days later in the afternoon, Alice sitting quite alone in the saloon saw smoke coming from a place where smoke had no business. She instantly found an officer, and he ran for the captain. For a few hours there was an unusual commotion, but 367 the subject was not named, and I understood from the captain’s reticence, that danger was over, and that silence was wise, and even imperative. For our long detention at sea, had made both water and provisions very scarce, and there was actual mutiny among the emigrant passengers, whose number was unusually large. It happened, however, that there was a big consignment of nuts on board, and they were given to the angry crowd, who were thus pacified. Two days afterwards we reached our pier in New York harbor, so grateful and happy, that we hardly felt the blustering wind, and snow and cold. We had been threatened with fire, and shipwreck, and mutiny, but all had failed to really injure. Nothing of us had suffered; for He had given His angels charge concerning us.
My readers, I hope, remember what I wrote about charms. They were not my words, but I endorsed them from my experience. Well I confess that this wonderful verse, 1st Samuel, 17:37, has assumed something of the character of a sacred amulet. When I first read it, I wrote the words of the covenant God had given me on a piece of paper, folded the paper with a prayer, and put it into a little pocket of my purse. It remained there for many, many years. Other documents placed beside it became invalid, useless, or outworn, and were destroyed. But the golden promise of God’s constant care remained. On certain occasions, I took it out and reminded God, that it read He would be with me. Finally the writing became so nearly illegible, and the paper so frail I solemnly renewed both, putting this renewal in the same purse pocket, where it remains unto this moment. It will go to the grave with me, for I will never give up that promise. God made it. God will keep it. Whether I deserve it, or not, He will keep it. Yea, if I did not deserve one letter of it, all the more I would plead,
“Because I seek Thee not, Oh, seek Thou me,
Because my lips are dumb, oh, hear the cry
I do not utter as Thou passest by!
Because content I perish far from Thee,
Oh, seize and snatch me from my fate; draw nigh,
And let me blinded, Thy Salvation see.
“If I were pouring at thy feet my tears,
If I were clamoring to see Thy face,
I should not need Thee, Lord, as now I need,
Because my dumb, dead soul knows neither hopes nor fears,
Nor dreads the outer darkness of this place,
Because I seek not, pray not, give Thou heed!”
For, alas! there have been times in the years gone by when I was even in such case, when I went wandering after strange Gods, and New Thought, and my dear, closed Bible reproached me. But of this interlude I will write in its proper place. I name it here, only that I may have the opportunity of thanking God as frequently as I possibly can, for the blessed, eternal possibility of repentance. For well I know, that God is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy, and that
“... our place is kept, and it will wait
Ready for us to fill, soon or late;
No star is ever lost we once have seen,
We always may be, what we might have been.”
In March and April of 1883 I wrote one of the most interesting of all my Scotch novels. I began it on March twenty-fifth, and finished it on the thirtieth of April. I worked on it nine hours every day excepting four days when I only wrote eight hours. During this same time I wrote the following for Robert Bonner and Harper’s:
Mar. 25th. Finished my long paper on famous Irish women and began my novel, “Cluny MacPherson.”
Mar. 26th. At home all day writing on “Cluny MacPherson.”
Mar. 27th. Ditto.
Mar. 28th. Writing on “Cluny” all morning. Went down to several offices in afternoon. Did nothing in the evening. Had a bad headache.
Mar. 29th. Very sick headache, but wrote “Cato’s Song.”
Mar. 30th. At the last hour wrote “Two Workers” for Bonner, and he praised it very much, a great thing for him to do.
Mar. 31st. Very sick. Went to the dentist’s but could not have anything done.
April 1st. Wrote an “April Wedding” and worked on “Cluny.”
April 2nd. Still sick but on “Cluny,” and wrote “The Reconciliation.”
April 3rd. All day on “Cluny;” in the evening wrote “Lending a Hand.”
April 4th. All day on “Cluny.”
April 5th. All day on “Cluny.”
April 6th. All day on “Cluny,” but am feeling tired.
April 7th. On “Cluny,” very tired. A wet day and Peter Cooper’s funeral.
April 8th. On “Cluny,” and wrote a poem called “O Mollie, How I Love You!”
April 9th. On my novel nine hours.
April 10th. On my novel eight hours.
April 11th. On my novel eight hours.
April 12th. On my novel eight hours, and wrote “Two Ships.”
April 13th. On my novel nine hours.
April 14th. On my novel eight hours.
April 15th, 16th, 17th. Nine hours each.
April 18th. Very sick.
April 19th. Wrote “My Pretty Canary” and “The Little Evangel.”
April 20th. Wrote nine hours on “Cluny.”
April 21st to 28th. I wrote all day long on “Cluny,” but managed to write for Harper’s a poem called, “A Tap at the Door.”
April 29th. On “Cluny,” and wrote for Bonner a poem called, “Take Care.”
April 30th. Wrote “A Birthday,” finished “Cluny” and took it to Mr. Rand, of the Tract House.
Eleven days afterwards I saw Mr. Rand, and he told me they were reading proof, and much pleased with the book, and on February seventeenth, A.D. 1884, I received a letter from the Cluny MacPherson, chief of the clan MacPherson, thanking me 370 for such a good picture of the clan life. The letter was dated from Castle Cluny, but the chief himself filled some important office in the Queen’s Household.
Just about the time that I finished “Cluny MacPherson,” Lilly returned home at my urgent request, and we went to housekeeping in some furnished rooms at 128 East Tenth Street. Then I made a short visit to England, leaving Alice at home with her sisters, as she was very averse to taking another ocean voyage.
My visit to Glasgow this year contained one scene, which made a great impression on me, and the recent death of General Booth brings it back so vividly, that I think my readers will be interested in the picture of this early salvation service.
At that time I had thought little of the movement. What I had seen of its noisy, moblike parades, with their deafening clang of cymbals and drums, and their shouting, jumping excitement, was not calculated to enlist the sympathy of intelligent persons. But then it was not such persons Mr. Booth wished to reach. “I have been sent into the world, to do the Lord’s gutter work,” was his own definition of his mission; and certainly at that day, his methods could only appeal to those on the lowest plane of humanity.
Well, one Saturday night in June, I had been dining with an old friend living beyond Rutherglen Bridge on the east side of the city, and in returning to my hotel, I had to pass through that portion of the old town, where Hamilton Street, High Street, the Saltmarket, and the Trongate pour their night crowd into the open place around the old Cross. The rain was falling in a black, steady downpour. The ragged crowd was swaying to and fro to the sounds of drums and cornets, and above all, I heard the shrill continuous scream of a woman’s voice.
I put down the window of the carriage, and saw the woman. She was marching, with an open Bible in her hands, at the head of a noisy crowd, and reading, or rather reciting, verses from the Gospels. Her face showed deathly white from under her black hood, her voice cut the yellow dismal fog in sharp screaming octaves, her whole appearance was that of one inspired or insane, and the rain poured down on the barefooted women, 371 with ragged kilted petticoats, and wretched little babies hanging over their shoulders, who followed her. I shut the window, and shut my eyes in a kind of horror. I had a feeling, that somewhere, centuries ago, I had seen such a nightmare of black houses, and black rain, and such a heaving and tossing flood of miserable humanity, and somehow it comforted me to hope, that through the tumult, the fierce sorrowful laughter, and drunken jibes, some poor breaking heart must have heard, and understood, that woman’s shrill intensity as she called out, “Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
I had another experience of the Salvation Army, so perfectly Scotch and so characteristic, that I think my friends will be pleased to hear it. I was coming down the old Shorehead of Arbroath, and I met a band of men and women carrying flags and singing hymns. In Glasgow I had become familiar with these parades, and had been astonished at the toleration with which they were regarded. But the men and women of Arbroath, were of a different spirit and the tumult, and abusive storm of language became so great, that I stepped inside a little shop for shelter. The proprietor, a very dry rusk of a Scotchman, in a green duffle apron, and a red Kilmarnock night cap, was standing at the open door.
“The Salvation Army?” I said inquiringly.
“Ye arena far wrang.”
“What do you think of them?”
“I’m thinking it is better for men to meddle wi’ the things o’ God, which they canna change, than wi’ those o’ the government wi’ which they can wark a’ kinds o’ mischief and mischance. Thae Irish kirns now!” Then his face flushed, angrily, and fixing his eyes on a lad who was in the procession he cried,
“If there isna my Jock wi’ thae loons! Certie, the words arena to seek, that I’ll gie him, when he wins home again!”
“Then you don’t approve of the movement?” I asked.
“What way would I do that?”
“Have you read or heard anything of Mr. Booth?”
“Ow, ay, he is just a parfect Goliath o’ conceit, but he isna the man to hold the deil, for a’ his talk.”
“Is there a deil to hold? You know some ministers have given up the idea of personal devil,” I said; and I quite anticipated the look I got in reply,
“Have they? Ay weel, getting rid o’ the Wicked One, hasna got us rid o’ the wicked. Good day to you, ma’am. I’ll be requiring to go ben.”
These scenes were in the early days of the Salvation Army. A short time afterward, I saw Glasgow ministers of the strictest sect of the Calvinistic Pharisees, with their congregations at their heels, following the music of the Moody and Sankey evangelical movement, and I met their leaders as guests in the most exclusive religious families. After my return home Dr. Talmage, then editor of the Christian At Work, asked me to tell him frankly, which side the paper ought to take.
“The popular side,” I answered.
“Is that for, or against them?”
“For them, decidedly. Sankey’s voice draws the crowd, and then they listen to Moody’s speaking, and so the singing may lead to prayer.”
“You think it will be a success?”
“It is a success,” I answered, “and is going to a very great one.”
Then Dr. Talmage turning to Mr. B—— the active editor said, “The Christian At Work, will stand with Moody and Sankey, Mr. B——. It is the proper thing to do, I suppose?”
“Yes,” I answered, and he then asked if I had “seen anything of General Booth.”
“I have seen him several times,” I replied.
“What kind of a man is Booth?” Dr. Talmage asked.
“A big man, every way. He is the Cromwell of Dissent.” I heard that he was a passionate little Chartist when he was thirteen years old. I will tell you something, a good name is a good fortune, and the name of the Salvation Army was a kind of inspiration. One day a secretary drawing up a paper wrote, “We are a Volunteer Army,” and Mr. Booth took the pen from his hand, crossed out the word “Volunteer” and wrote in its place “Salvation.” He saw in a moment the splendid capabilities of the word, it fitted itself to the work, as promptly 373 as the stuttering out of the word “tee-to-tal” inaugurated the grand successes of the temperance cause.
They are burying William Booth today, and no one can deny that he has fought a good fight; for he, and only he and his army, reach down to that strata of humanity which has fallen below the churches; and which are emphatically “ready to perish.” And if the Salvation Army only succeeds in facing a man around, or in making him take one step upward, instead of downward, there is hope for his next reincarnation.
CHAPTER XXII
THE LATEST GOSPEL: KNOW THY WORK AND DO IT
“What is our Life? A strange mixture of good and evil; of ill-assorted fates and pathetic acquiescences; and of the overpowering certainty of daily needs, against the world of thoughts, and Shadows.”
. . . . . . . . . .
“The object of Life is to gain wisdom through experience, even one life forces us to this conclusion.”
In this year, 1883, I went to England alone, staying most of the time with Mr. Sam Wilson, who had been my friend and playmate when I was six years old. He was then a very tall fine-looking man of fifty-two years of age, with a beautiful and clever wife, and a son studying medicine in Edinburgh University. His handsome residence, with its wealth of flowers, was in the suburbs of Bradford, Yorkshire, and I remained there for many happy weeks; paying a short visit to London in the interval, and loitering some time around Glasgow, from which port I sailed to New York.
But I had a heartache all the time I was away about Mary, who I feared was going to marry, and I did not wish her to do so. I could not find one objection to the young man she intended to espouse. They had been friends for three years, and were truly attached to each other. He was a clever writer, especially for boys, and the first editor of Harper’s Young People. He was fine-looking, gentlemanly, and quite sufficiently good-hearted for the world he was living in, fond of outdoor sports of all kinds, both on land and water, and a traveler who loved ways unknown and adventurous. I believe he was the first white man who penetrated the recesses of the Everglades. Incidentally it may be noticed, that he was a great friend of the Seminole Indians, who lived in the Everglades, and that to this day, he is regarded by them as their true comrade.
So what chance had I against a lover of such manifold 375 attractions? I knew I must lose, and I thought I could bear it better at a distance. In the middle of the Atlantic one night, I dreamed that Robert came to me and said, “This morning, Mary was married to Kirk Munroe.” He said other things, but they were entirely personal, and may not be repeated; but when I awoke I was consoled and reconciled. And it has always been my way to accept the inevitable as cheerfully as possible, so I told myself “I will now forget.” If Mary was happier with a stranger, than with the mother who had cherished and loved her, and worked for her for thirty-three years, well I must be content to shave my own pleasure to increase hers. Had I not done it all the years of her life? It was no new sacrifice. But I said all such things with a swelling heart, and eyes full of unshed tears. Yet the marriage has been a singularly happy and sympathetic one, and though her home is in southern Florida, she comes every year to spend a month with me. And I am now content in her happiness.
With the main events of my business life, Mary’s marriage made no difference. I wrote constantly, and spent my days mostly in the Astor Library and Lilly or I attended to the office work, as was most convenient. The year 1884 found me writing a story called “Sandiland’s Siller” which I finished on the sixteenth of January, noting in my diary, that I was tired, having composed the last six pages, and copied the last thirty-five pages that day. On the following day I took “Sandiland’s” to Dr. Stevenson of the Illustrated Christian Weekly. I mailed a poem called “He That Is Washed” to Mr. Mabie of the Christian Union, “Three Wishes” to The Advance, two little verses to Puck, and wrote “The Household Thrush” for Mr. Bonner. The first three poems had been written at intervals, while I was working on “Sandiland’s Siller;” “The Household Thrush,” only, was written on the seventeenth. About this latter poem the following incident occurred. It contained five verses, the length Mr. Bonner preferred, and the first three verses referred to the thrush. Mr. Bonner read it, and then turning to Lilly said,
“Too much bird, before you come to the girl.”
“Take some of the bird away, Mr. Bonner,” answered Lilly; 376 and he smiled, cut out one verse, and handed her ten dollars. There were things about Mr. Bonner writers did not like, but all appreciated his clever criticisms, and his prompt payment. When Lilly came home and laughingly told me this story I was much amused. We had a merry little lunch together, and then I made three pencil drawings to illustrate an article called “The Fishers of Fife” which I intended to begin the following day.
The list of work done by me from this time to the twenty-sixth of May is hardly credible. On that day I fell from the library steps while sitting on them reading, and hurt my foot and my neck very much. The next day I had a high fever, and was suffering severely from nervous shock. For nine days I was unable to do anything, and by that time the swollen condition of my throat was alarming, and I sent for Dr. Fleuhrer, a very clever surgeon. For fourteen more days I was under his care, then I began to improve, so that on
June 24th. I began an article on the Scotch Highlands for Mr. Mabie.
June 25th. I was writing on the same. Still in bed but mending slowly.
June 26th. Finished and copied the Highland article.
June 27th. I began “Jan Vedder’s Wife,” and on this day also received fifty-five pounds from London for work done for The Leisure Hour and the Sunday Magazine. Lilly was down at Bonner’s when the checks came, but as soon as I showed them to her, she said,
“Mamma, we have now plenty of money to furnish comfortably. Don’t you want your own home, Mamma?”
“O Lilly!” I cried, “there is nothing on earth I want so much. Dear, dear child, go and look for what will suit us. Go tomorrow! Go this afternoon!”
So that afternoon Lilly went home hunting, and I wrote happily on “Jan Vedder’s Wife” and Alice sat sewing beside me, touching my hand every now and then and smiling. On the twenty-eighth the flat suitable was found, and on the thirtieth I managed to get into a cab and go home. All was in confusion, but such happy confusion, that we did not think of sleeping until midnight.
In a week the new home was in perfect order, and I was able to be on the sofa, and to write “Jan Vedder’s Wife” more swiftly and comfortably. So sweet was home! So good was home, that I now felt all things possible, and really I had not been as happy, since Robert and I went into the wood cottage with its domestic ceilings, in Austin, and turned it into the prettiest and happiest of dwellings. Lilly and Alice furnished the rooms as they desired, and I was quite pleased and full of content.
And it was a great joy when the eleventh of July came round to find that my wedding anniversary was not now to be forgotten. In hotels it had seemed out of place to keep it. I do not know why, but it had always slipped past with a kiss and a word or two. But on this happy day, Lilly set a fine dinner, and Mary sent a wedding cake; we had a bottle of sparkling Moselle, and drank silently but lovingly to the memory of those of our household dwelling in the City Celestial; and our tears of love and hope made the wine sacramental—a pledge and token of our remembrance and our thanksgiving.
There does not seem much to write about in the life of a woman lame and sick, and confined to a flat in an upper Park Avenue. But our existence is always a story, for the fruit of life is experience, not happiness. And every experience that helps us in our ultimate aim of becoming a Spiritual Being, though it be as trite as suffering, is worthy of being considered. Chesterton calls Christ’s counsel to “take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?” an amazing command. To the majority it is an amazing command, but writers who love their work understand it. I was busy on “Jan Vedder’s Wife,” and so interested in the story that I forgot I was sick, and the processes of convalescence went right on without my regarding them. When the story was finished I read it to Lilly. It was then complete in four chapters, and she listened to them with critical interest, and when I laid down the manuscript said,
“It is too good for a short story, Mamma; make it into a novel. You have sufficient material and characters, and if 378 the latter are more fully drawn out, the material will be better.”
“But,” I asked, “can we afford it? I shall get one hundred and fifty for it from the Christian Union just as it is, and we need the money.”
“No, we do not,” she replied, “and if we did, I would still say, write it over, Mamma. It is a shame not to write it fully, just because we might want five dollars;” and she pushed my paper and pencils towards me with an encouraging smile. Then I began it all over, and added nearly two hundred pages. When all were corrected and copied I sent it by Lilly to Mr. Bonner. For once this reticent man broke his usual custom, and commented on the work in “the straight-flung words and few,” which reflected him.
“It is a good story, a fine story,” he said. “Take it to Dodd, Mead and Company. It will suit them. It is too good for the Ledger.”
And when Lilly came home, and told me what Mr. Bonner had said, there flashed across my mind a dream I had had a week previously, in which Robert had given me the same advice. Christ said, that if one rose from the dead to inform, or direct us, we would not believe their message, and evidently I had not believed the dead, until they spoke through a mortal whose business capacities I trusted. I have often reproached myself on this score, but—Oh, there is no “but.” I have no excuse for my want of faith.
Miss Mary Barr
(Mrs. Kirk Munroe)
I had finished the novel of “Jan Vedder’s Wife” on the sixteenth of September, 1884, the seventeenth anniversary of Robert’s death, and on October, the twelfth, I gave up the regular use of crutches, though my foot was extremely weak and painful, and I had nearly constant headaches. But on this date, I began a story called “Janet McFarlane,” which I finished on the twenty-first and sent to the Advance. On the twenty-sixth I began a story called “Paul and Christina,” which was published in the Christian Union and afterwards enlarged to book size and published by Dodd, Mead and Company. On the twenty-eighth, I note that “Mary and Kirk Munroe took tea with us,” so I had by that time conquered my dislike to her 379 marriage; for I do not ask people to eat with me, if I have any ill will toward them. Those who do not understand me, will perhaps live to do so, for
“... soon or late the fact grows plain,
To all through sorrow’s test,
The only folks who give us pain,
Are those we love the best.”
On the first of November I was at the Astor Library again, but did not dare to go upstairs to my alcove. On the second of November I was finishing “Paul and Christina” began on the twenty-sixth of October. On the second, third and fourth of November I was at the library, and on the fifth so ill, I had to summon Dr. Fleuhrer’s help again. I was sick for a week then reviewed and corrected “Paul and Christina” and took it in the afternoon to the Christian Union. On the same day the Sisters from a Religious Order, living near us, began to teach Alice. I say “Sisters” because they were not allowed to go anywhere alone, so one came to teach, and the other came, for what purpose I know not. On the nineteenth I wrote “Going to Church Together,” a poem for Bonner, and a New Year’s article for the Illustrated Christian Weekly; Kirk came to tea. Mary was in Boston with his father and mother. The following day I was at the library and wrote “Lacordaire Dying.” On the twenty-third I wrote “Mary,” a Christmas poem, and Kirk came to tea; we had a pleasant evening, and I wrote in my diary, “He is a nice fellow, after all.” On the twenty-fifth I arranged with the Christian Union for the first study of “Paul and Christina.” They gave me one hundred and twenty dollars, and on the twenty-seventh of November, A.D. 1884, I received a letter from Dodd, Mead and Company accepting “Jan Vedder’s Wife.” It happened to be Thanksgiving Day, and this letter made it a memorable one, for it altered the whole course of my life. I had this letter framed, and it hangs now before me in my study as I write. Time has faded the four lines it contained, but they are graven on memory’s tablet, and the yellow paper and nearly colorless ink cannot hide from me the words 380 of Promise it contained. On the twenty-eighth I saw Mr. Frank Dodd, and arranged with him for the publication of “Jan Vedder’s Wife.” He gave me three hundred dollars for the book, promising to add to this sum if it sold well, and I may mention here, that he subsequently sent me five hundred dollars more. He sent it of his own free will. I made neither claim nor request for it.
Lilly was very proud of this sale, because, as I have related, the book was written at her request. I had not been so far as fortunate with my publishers, as with my editors. Mr. B—— of Appleton’s, with whom I transacted the business relating to my volume on the “Children of Shakespeare’s Dramas,” was an unhappy, unpleasant man to deal with; but he is dead, and I think the Scotch reluctance to speak ill of the dead is at least a wise observance. The publisher of “Cluny MacPherson,” and a volume of “Scottish Tales” was hard and dry as a brush. He had some selfish ideas about the society he represented, but he had no feelings. He had ceased to live with his heart. Mr. Jack Howard was just unfortunate. He was the publisher of the Christian Union and my book, “Romances and Realities,” came out just before the house failed, so that I never received a dollar for it. But that was not Mr. Howard’s fault. He was always courteous and generous about any work I did for him.
Lilly was very proud and happy because, as I have related, the book was written by her advice. “And what do you think of Mr. Dodd, Mamma?” she asked, as we eat drinking tea together. “Is he pleasant? Will you like to write for him?”
“Yes,” I answered. “He is pliant, yet resistant. I dare say he keeps his heart within his head, and so makes an even balance between business keenness and moral emotions.”
“I do not see that, Mamma.”
“It is plain enough, Lilly. The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions. So is the heart. We may often trust the latter most safely. I do. Mr. Dodd would consult both.”
“Is he a religious man?”
“How can I tell? I think so, but I am quite sure he is a straight, clean-living man.”
“Is he nice looking?”
“Quite as nice as there is any necessity to be. The spirit of his face is attractive—that is enough.”
“Is he anything like A——?”
“Walking majestically, and radiating awe and temper. No, Lilly, not in the least.”
“Or like B——?”
“Self-conscious to the finger tips. No, not in the least.”
“Then like F——?”
“A Philistine, proud of his class, and cheerfully living in Ascalon. No, you are far wrong yet.”
“Then like Dr. D——?”
“When his conscience is taking its usual six days’ sleep. No, you have not guessed at any resemblance. Publishers are as distinct a type of manhood as schoolmasters. They are even different from press men and editors. The latter are often compelled by their duties to waste their moral strength in politics, and their intellect in party journalism. Publishers can mind their own business, and are in no way injured by doing so.”
Thus we talked, as we eat and drank, but without any ill-nature. With the kindly race of editors I had, and have, the strongest sympathies. All that I have known have been kind and helpful to me, and if at times they showed a trifle of the petty unreasonableness of men dressed in a little brief authority, it did not hurt me. I said to myself—how true and striking that phrase is—I said to myself, “It is not you that offends, Amelia. It is something at his home, or down in the office—an unpleasant breakfast, or a disagreeable letter.” So I bore no rancor, and at the next interview all was right. God was very kind and thoughtful for me, when he set me my work among such a kindly, clever, gentlemanly class of workers as editors.
And I confess that I like people with tidal fluctuations of mood and temper. They are full of surprises; you always feel an interest in them. You think about them, and talk of them, and feel that they are as human as yourself. They are far more pleasant than men always cold, businesslike, reticent, polite. These latter are the men you desire to see in bronze, or marble, or even in encyclopedias, rather than in editorial 382 chairs. Even if they are religiously perfect, they are unpleasant in a newspaper sanctum. For it is a trial to our faith in creeds, to find that in business matters, the justified are as selfish and unlovely as the reprobate. So though it is quite correct, that two and two make four, I have a liking for the man with whom the sum of two and two is variable. It is often five and six with me, and it may be ten or twenty, but when it is so, I trust humanity and love God best of all.
If I now copy the closing entry in my diary for the year 1884, it most truly describes my condition at that time.
Dec. 31st. A day of great suffering. I am still very far from well. I have been seven months ill. How my heart would have quailed at the prospect but God has been sufficient. My throat is very bad, my foot, also, and I am generally weary and worn out—and very feeble. Only, thank God, my mind never fails, nor my heart—often. I know in Whom I have trusted for fifty-three years, and I can trust Him for all the rest. I have been copying the “Preacher’s Daughter,” but twenty-four pages wearied me. Mary is in Florida. All the rest as usual. God of my Fathers, accept my gratitude for all Thy great mercies to me.
Amelia E. Barr.
1507 Park Avenue, N.Y.
I open 1885 with the following lines:
Commit Thy ways unto the Lord.
Thy Bread shall be given, and thy water sure.
Let thy widows trust in me.
The first and the last of these directions, were given to me in answer to prayer; the center one was my father’s promise to me, when I bid him farewell forever in this life. I notice, nevertheless, that I am anxious about money matters, that I have six hundred dollars owing me, and cannot collect a dollar, and that I fear the Ledger is not in good circumstances; nothing has been said, I write, and all appears the same, but I feel a change of some kind. I was copying the “Preacher’s Daughter,” but was weak, and it was hard work.
On the fifth of January I note that Dodd, Mead and Company paid me three hundred dollars for “Jan Vedder’s Wife,” and that I had a letter from London promising me money for my work soon, and that I also received a small check from The Advance. So once more I found out how good it is to commit my way unto the Lord, and that He brings things to pass, I cannot move. On the eleventh I see that Lilly was out all day among the shanties with Father B——, a Catholic priest “in the world,” a man of great mercy and piety, with an intellect keen and well cultivated. There were many shanties on the rocks in our vicinity, and Lilly’s missionary spirit had led her to make friends in all of them. She found them Roman Catholics in theory, but altogether negligent in practice. So she took Father B—— to stir up their faith, which he did with an authority they feared and obeyed.
I was ill and nervous at the time, and it did not please me. I asked her what her Grandmother Barr would say, and I assured her she would never leave her a shilling.
“I don’t care either for her shillings or her pounds,” Lilly answered. “I don’t want them. If I have helped one soul back to its faith in God, or even to its faith in good angels to help it to God, that is better than all the gold in Scotland.”
“Angels!” I said. “Do you call Father B—— an angel? and what kind of a way will he lead them?”
“A good way. The way of prayer. And also he will see that they take it. Now that he has found these few sheep in the wilderness, they will have to go back to the fold. That will be good for them everyway.”
“Well, Lilly, I hope you will not take his way.”
“Mamma, dear, we are all going to God, and some like the Roman Catholic way. My own forefathers for eight hundred years did so. They could not all be wrong—abbotts and priors and priests and nuns, all of them. They could not all be wrong.”
“Nor right.”
“Well none of us can deny that while the Huddlestons were of the old profession, they were famous and prosperous. They 384 turned Protestant when that little German body that couldn’t speak a word of English, came to govern us. The idea!”
“Are you going to turn Catholic after all?”
“I am going to be just what my Bible makes me.”
For I may as well state here that Lilly, though born in the very citadel of Calvinism, was a natural Catholic. She loved its ritual, and frequently went to confession. At one time it took all my pleading and influence, and all Dr. Tyng’s eloquence to keep her out of a convent, and I had a year or two of constant fear and watchfulness. This was the year we lived on Lexington Avenue opposite the Dominican Church. There was at that time a priest there called Father McKenna, a holy man entirely separate from the world, night and day either before the altar, or among the most miserable of the living and the dying; and I think he was her inspiration.
For long centuries Lilly’s ancestors had been priests in the old profession, and Furness Abbey is full of their memorial stones as Abbotts of that rich and powerful brotherhood. Catholicism was in her heart and her blood, and she was animated by all the passionate missionary spirit of the old faith. I had much suffering and long months of miserable anxiety on this subject, and doubtless Lilly was just as unhappy, but this is one of those domestic tragedies not for the public ear, and I do not know how I came to write so much about it.
I will, however, let it stand, for I would not be astonished if she yet went back to the Roman Church. Her soul has evidently belonged to it in all its incarnations, and I know that whenever she is in trouble or perplexity she goes to a Catholic priest for advice. One day I asked her, “Why?”
“Because,” she answered, “they never snub or ask me ‘whose daughter art thou.’ They know immediately that I am a Protestant, but they never turn me away. Kindly, and without prejudice they give me the best advice. It never comes out wrong.”
“But why not go to God for advice?”
“Mamma, there are things, like love letters, for instance. Would you go to God with them?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Love letters may be very important 385 things. At any rate, your mother might be better than a priest.”
“Mamma, dear, you know that you have a fixed conviction that love affairs should only occur in books. Now Frank is not a ‘character,’ he is a real, living, very delightful man.”
Then I said no more, for Frank Morgan was then a very sore subject of conversation, and I really was not sure in my own mind what I had against the young man. His parents were wealthy, and he was their only son. He was the captain of his company, handsome, gentlemanly, and particularly respectful and attentive to myself. It was hard to think wrong of him, and yet I did; and it was no use my deciding not to do so, for I invariably went back to my first impressions. This feeling made me patient, and perhaps less watchful and inquisitive than I should have been.
But during the first half of 1885 I was very weak, and seldom out of pain, and on the eighteenth of January I went to see Dr. Fleuhrer, who made me very anxious. He said work and company were killing me, and I must go to the mountains and live more in solitude. When I went home I found Mrs. Van Duzen there, and after dinner Nat Urner and his wife came to spend the evening. The next morning I went to the Methodist Book Concern and wrote a preface for “The Hallam Succession,” a novel written at Dr. Vincent’s request on purely Methodist lines. I wanted to do my very best on this book; for I liked Dr. Vincent, and I liked to write of Methodism, but I did not please myself at all. I was really too sick to write well, and I ought not to have attempted it.
On the twenty-sixth Lilly was at Harper’s and found Miss Van Dyne removed from her place as editress of Young People, and Mr. Conant’s office empty. She said there was general silence and distress; no one would talk, and she came away full of a sense of great trouble. Two days afterwards I went to the Illustrated Christian Weekly, and was shocked to see on the bulletin boards of all the newspapers “S. S. Conant Still Missing.”
I did not stop to read what followed. I was sick at heart, trembling, and glad to get safely into an empty Third Avenue 386 horse-car, and lean for support against its upper-end corner. All the way uptown I was like a woman in a dream, for I was indeed living over a dream I had had a few days previously. This dream had troubled me much at the time, and when I related it to Lilly she listened silently, and made no remark but the following:
“It was an evil dream, and I hope S. S. C. is not going to be ill.”
We seldom called Mr. Conant by his full name. When speaking of him we used his initials, as indeed he generally did himself. S. S. C. stood in every writer’s mind for S. S. Conant. Well, I had dreamed three nights previously of standing in Park Row and looking up to an angry cloud-tossed sky. On this sky I saw the initials S. S. C. blazoned in immense black letters, and, as I watched, great masses of vengeful storm clouds came swiftly toward them, and drove them with a wild passion over the firmament, and out of sight. The dream made a profound impression on me, and when Lilly told me S. S. C. was lost, I answered, “He will not be found.”
“O Mamma, do not say that,” she cried. “When he left the office, he said he was going to the Grand Central Railway Station. How can a man be lost between Harper’s building and the Grand Central—unless he killed himself.”
“He did not do that,” I answered, and then we were silent. Indeed, to me the great wonder of the mysterious disappearance was the dislike of any one to speak of it. The man passed away like a dream that is told.
But I was anxious and unhappy. For years Mr. Conant had bought a large part of my work, and I looked upon him as a sure reliance. Who would take his place? I knew not, but I felt there had been one door closed forever. Then, I bid myself remember, “that as one door shuts, another opens; and that all the keys of the country did not hang from the Harper’s belt.” Still the little poem I wrote for Bonner that night shows the loneliness and longing I had for the love and protection once mine, which I had taken as I had taken hitherto my wonderful health and strength, and the daily bread that had never failed me: