She took such a feverish interest in the Devil Baby that, when I was obliged to disillusion her, I found it hard to take away her comfort in the belief that the Powers that Be are on the side of the woman when her husband resents too many daughters. But, after all, the birth of daughters was but an incident in her tale of unmitigated woe, for the scoldings of a disappointed husband were as nothing to the curse of a strange enemy, although she doubtless had a confused impression that if there were retribution for one in the general scheme of things, there might be for the other. When the weeping woman finally put the events of her disordered life in some sort of sequence, it became clear that about fifteen years ago she had reported to the police a vicious house whose back door opened into her own yard. Her husband had forbidden her to do anything about it and had said that it would only get them into trouble, but she had been made desperate one day when she saw her little girl, then twelve years old, come out of the door, gleefully showing her younger sister a present of money. Because the poor woman had tried for ten years without success to induce her husband to move from the vicinity of such houses, she was certain that she could save her child only by forcing out “the bad people” from her own door yard. She therefore made her one frantic effort, found her way to the city hall and there reported the house to the chief himself. Of course, “the bad people stood in with the police” and nothing happened to them save, perhaps, a fresh levy of blackmail, but the keeper of the house, beside himself with rage, made the dire threat and laid the curse upon her. In less than a year from that time he had enticed her daughter into a disreputable house in another part of the district. The poor woman, ringing one doorbell after another, had never been able to find her, but her sisters, who in time came to know where she was, had been dazzled by her mode of life. The weeping mother was quite sure that two of her daughters, while still outwardly respectable and “working downtown,” earned money in the devious ways which they had learned all about when they were little children, although for the past five years the now prosperous husband had allowed the family to live in a suburb, where the two younger daughters were “growing up respectable.”
Certain of the visitors, although confronted by those mysterious and impersonal wrongs which are apparently inherent in the very nature of things, gave us glimpses of another sort of wisdom than that expressed in the assumptions that the decrees of Fate are immutable.
Such a glimpse came to me through a conversation with a woman whose fine mind and indomitable spirit I had long admired; I had known her for years, and yet the recital of her sufferings, added to those the Devil Baby had already induced other women to tell me, pierced me afresh. The story of the Devil Baby may have incited these women to put their experiences more vividly than they had hitherto been able to do. It may have been because they were unconsciously spurred by the hope that a supernatural retribution might intervene even for them, or because they were merely comforted by the knowledge that it had once done so for some one else that they spoke with more confidence than they had ever done before.
“I had eleven children, some born in Hungary and some born here, nine of them boys; all of the children died when they were little but my dear Liboucha. You know all about her. She died last winter in the Insane Asylum. She was only twelve years old when her father, in a fit of delirium tremens, killed himself after he had chased us around the room, trying to kill us first. She saw it all, the blood splashed on the wall stayed in her mind the worst; she shivered and shook all that night through, and the next morning she had lost her voice, couldn’t speak out loud for terror. After a while she went to school again and her voice came back, although it was never very natural. She seemed to do as well as ever and was awful pleased when she got into High School. All the money we had I earned scrubbing in a public dispensary, although sometimes I got a little more by interpreting for the patients, for I know three languages, one as well as the other. But I was determined that whatever happened to me, Liboucha was to be educated. My husband’s father was a doctor in the old country, and Liboucha was always a clever child. I wouldn’t have her live the kind of life I had, with no use for my mind except to make me restless and bitter. I was pretty old and worn out for such hard work, but when I used to see Liboucha on a Sunday morning ready for church in her white dress, with her long yellow hair braided round her beautiful pale face, lying there in bed as I was, being brought up a free-thinker, and needing to rest my aching bones for the next week’s work, I’d feel almost happy, in spite of everything. But of course no such peace could last in my life; the second year at High School Liboucha began to seem different and to do strange things. You know the time she wandered away for three days and we were all wild with fright, although a kind woman had taken her in and no harm came to her. I could never be easy after that; she was always gentle, but she was awful sly about running away and at last I had to send her to the asylum. She stayed there off and on for five years, but I saw her every week of my life and she was always company for me, what with sewing for her, washing and ironing her clothes, cooking little things to take out to her, and saving a bit of money to buy fruit for her. At any rate, I had stopped feeling so bitter, and got some comfort out of seeing the one thing that belonged to me on this side of the water, when all of a sudden she died of heart failure and they never took the trouble to send for me until the next day.”
She stopped as if wondering afresh that the Fates could have been so casual, but with a sudden illumination, as if she had been awakened out of the burden and intensity of her restricted personal interests into a consciousness of those larger relations that are, for the most part, so strangely invisible. It was as if the young mother of the grotesque Devil Baby, that victim of wrong doing on the part of others, had revealed to this tragic woman much more clearly than soft words had ever done, that the return of a deed of violence upon the head of the innocent is inevitable; as if she had realized that, although she was destined to walk all the days of her life with the piteous multitude who bear the undeserved wrongs of the world, she would walk henceforth with a sense of companionship.
At moments it seemed possible that these simple women, representing an earlier development, eagerly seized upon the story because it was primitive in form and substance. Certainly, one evening, a long-forgotten ballad made an unceasing effort to come to the surface of my mind as I talked to a feeble woman who, in the last stages of an incurable disease from which she soon afterwards died, had been helped off the street car in front of Hull-House. The ballad tells how the lover of a proud and jealous mistress, who demanded as a final test of devotion that he bring her the heart of his mother, had quickly cut the heart from his mother’s breast and impetuously returned to his lady, bearing it upon a salver; and how, when stumbling in his gallant haste, he stooped to replace upon the silver plate his mother’s heart, which had rolled to the ground, the heart, still beating with tender solicitude, whispered the hope that her child was not hurt. The ballad itself was scarcely more exaggerated than the story of our visitor that evening, who had made the desperate effort of a journey from home in order to see the Devil Baby. I was familiar with her vicissitudes; the shiftless, drinking husband and the large family of children, all of whom had brought her sorrow and disgrace, and I knew that her heart’s desire was to see again, before she died, her youngest son, who was a life prisoner in the penitentiary. She was confident that the last piteous stage of her disease would secure him a week’s parole, founding this forlorn hope upon the fact that “they sometimes let them out to attend a mother’s funeral, and perhaps they’d let Joe come a few days ahead; he could pay his fare afterwards from the insurance money. It wouldn’t take much to bury me.” Again we went over the hideous story: Joe had violently quarrelled with a woman, the proprietor of the house in which his disreputable wife was living, because she had withheld from him a part of his wife’s “earnings,” and in the altercation had killed her—a situation, one would say, which it would be difficult for even a mother to condone. But not at all, her thin gray face worked with emotion, her trembling hands restlessly pulled at her shabby skirt as the hands of the dying pluck at their sheets, but she put all the vitality she could muster into his defence. She told us he had legally married the girl, who supported him, “although Lily had been so long in that life that few men would have done it. Of course, such a girl must have a protector or everybody would fleece her. Poor Lily said to the day of her death that he was the kindest man she ever knew, and treated her the whitest; that she herself was to blame for the murder because she told on the old miser, and Joe was so hot-headed she might have known that he would draw a gun for her.” The gasping mother concluded: “He was always that handsome and had such a way. One winter, when I was scrubbing in an office building, I’d never get home much before twelve o’clock, but Joe would open the door for me just as pleasant as if he hadn’t been waked out of a sound sleep.” She was so triumphantly unconscious of the incongruity of a sturdy son in bed while his mother earned his food, that her auditors said never a word, and in silence we saw a hero evolved before our eyes, a defender of the oppressed, the best beloved of his mother, who was losing his high spirits and eating his heart out behind prison bars. He could well defy the world even there, surrounded as he was by that invincible affection which assures both the fortunate and unfortunate alike that we are loved, not according to our deserts, but in response to some profounder law.
This imposing revelation of maternal solicitude was an instance of what continually happened in connection with the Devil Baby. In the midst of the most tragic reminiscences, there remained that something in the memories of these mothers which has been called the great revelation of tragedy, or sometimes the great illusion of tragedy; that which has power in its own right to make life palatable and at rare moments even beautiful.
CHAPTER III
WOMEN’S MEMORIES—DISTURBING CONVENTIONS
In sharp contrast to the function of woman’s long memory as a reconciler to life, revealed by the visitors to the Devil Baby, are those individual reminiscences which, because they force the possessor to challenge existing conventions, act as a reproach, even as a social disturber. When these reminiscences, based upon the diverse experiences of many people unknown to each other, point to one inevitable conclusion, they accumulate into a social protest, although not necessarily an effective one, against existing conventions, even against those which are most valuable and those securely founded upon cumulative human wisdom. But because no conventionalized tradition is perfect, however good its intent, most of them become challenged in course of time, unwittingly illustrating the contention that great social changes are often brought about less by the thinkers than by “a certain native and independent rationalism operating in great masses of men and women.”
The statement is well founded that a convention is at its best, not when it is universally accepted, but just when it is being so challenged and broken that the conformists are obliged to defend it and to fight for it against those who would destroy it. Both the defenders of an old custom and its opponents are then driven to a searching of their own hearts.