With an understanding quickened, perhaps, through my own acquaintance with the mysterious child, I listened to many tragic reminiscences from the visiting women; of premature births, “because he kicked me in the side”; of children maimed and burnt because “I had no one to leave them with when I went to work”; women had seen the tender flesh of growing little bodies given over to death because “he wouldn’t let me send for the doctor,” or because “there was no money to pay for the medicine.” But even these mothers, rendered childless through insensate brutality, were less pitiful than some of the others, who might well have cried aloud of their children as did a distracted mother of her child centuries ago:
“That God should send this one thing more
Of hunger and of dread, a door
Set wide to every wind of pain!”
Such was the mother of a feeble-minded boy who said: “I didn’t have a devil baby myself, but I bore a poor ‘innocent’ who made me fight devils for twenty-three years.” She told of her son’s experiences from the time the other little boys had put him up to stealing that they might hide in safety and leave him to be found with “the goods on him,” until grown into a huge man he fell into the hands of professional burglars; he was evidently the dupe and stool-pigeon of the vicious and criminal until the very day he was locked into the State Penitentiary. “If people played with him a little, he went right off and did anything they told him to, and now he’s been sent up for life. We call such innocents ‘God’s Fools’ in the old country, but over here the Devil himself gets them. I’ve fought off bad men and boys from the poor lamb with my very fists; nobody ever came near the house except such-like and the police officers, who were always arresting him.”
There were a goodly number of visitors to the Devil Baby of the type of those to be found in every large city, who are on the verge of nervous collapse, or who exhibit many symptoms of mental aberration, and yet are sufficiently normal to be at large most of the time, and to support themselves by drudgery which requires little mental effort, although the exhaustion resulting from the work they are able to do is the one thing from which they should be most carefully protected. One such woman, evidently obtaining inscrutable comfort from the story of the Devil Baby even after she had become convinced that we harbored no such creature, came many times to tell of her longing for her son, who had joined the army eighteen months before and was now stationed in Alaska. She always began with the same words.
“When Spring comes and the snow melts so that I know he could get out, I can hardly stand it. You know I was once in the Insane Asylum for three years at a stretch, and since then I haven’t had much use of my mind except to worry with. Of course I know that it is dangerous for me, but what can I do? I think something like this: ‘The snow is melting, now he could get out, but his officers won’t let him off and if he runs away he’ll be shot for a deserter—either way I’ll never see him again; I’ll die without seeing him’—and then I begin all over again with the snow.” After a pause, she said: “The recruiting officer ought not to have taken him, he’s my only son and I’m a widow. It’s against the rules, but he was so crazy to go that I guess he lied a little—at any rate, the government has him now and I can’t get him back. Without this worry about him my mind would be all right; if he were here he would be earning money and keeping me and we would be happy all day long.”
Recalling the vagabondish lad, who had never earned much money and had certainly never “kept” his hard-working mother, I ventured to suggest that, even if he were at home, he might not have work these hard times, that he might get into trouble and be arrested—I did not need to remind her that he had already been arrested twice—that he was now fed and sheltered and under discipline, and I added hopefully something about his seeing the world. She looked at me out of her withdrawn, harried eyes, as if I were speaking a foreign tongue. “That wouldn’t make any real difference to me—the work, the money, his behaving well and all that, if I could cook and wash for him. I don’t need all the money I earn scrubbing that factory. I only take bread and tea for supper and I choke over that, thinking of him.”
She ceased to speak, overcome by a thousand obscure emotions which could find no outlet in words. She dimly realized that the facts in the case, to one who had known her boy from childhood, were far from creditable, and that no one could understand the eternally unappeased idealism which, for her, surrounded her son’s return. She was even afraid to say much about it, lest she should be overmastered by her subject and be considered so irrational as to suggest a return to the Hospital for the Insane.
Those mothers who have never resisted fate nor buffeted against the black waters, but have allowed the waves to close over them, worn and bent as they are by hard labor, subdued and misshapen by the brutality of men, are at least unaffrighted by the melodramatic coarseness of life, which Stevenson more gently describes as “the uncouth and outlandish strain in the web of the world.” The story of the Devil Baby may have made its appeal through its frank presentation of this very demoniac quality, to those who live under the iron tyranny of that poverty which threatens starvation, and under the dread of a brutality which may any dark night bring them or their children to extinction; to those who have seen both virtue and vice go unrewarded and who have long since ceased to explain.
This more primitive type embodies the eternal patience of those humble, toiling women who through the generations have been held of little value, save as their drudgery ministered to their men. One of them related her habit of going through the pockets of her drunken son every pay day, and complained that she had never found so little as the night before, only twenty-five cents out of fifteen dollars he had promised for the rent, long overdue. “I had to get that as he lay in the alley before the door; I couldn’t pull him in, and the copper who helped him home, left as soon as he heard me coming and pretended he didn’t see me. I have no food in the house, nor coffee to sober him up with. I know perfectly well that you will ask me to eat something here, but, if I can’t carry it home, I won’t take a bite nor a sup. I have never told you so much before. Since one of the nurses said he could be arrested for my non-support, I have been awful close-mouthed. It’s the foolish way all the women in our street are talking about the Devil Baby that’s loosened my tongue, more shame to me.”
A sorrowful woman clad in heavy black, who came one day, exhibited such a capacity for prolonged weeping that it was evidence in itself of the truth of at least half her statement, that she had cried herself to sleep every night of her life for fourteen years in fulfilment of a “curse” laid upon her by an angry man, that “her pillow would be wet with tears as long as she lived.” Her respectable husband had a shop in the Red Light district because he found it profitable to sell to the men and women who lived there. She had kept house in the room over the “store” from the time she was a bride newly come from Russia, and her five daughters had been born there, but never a son to gladden her husband’s heart.