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Title: The Promised Land
Author: Antin, Mary, 1881-1949
Language: English
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THE PROMISED LAND
[Illustration: MASHKE AND FETCHKE]
THE
PROMISED LAND
BY MARY ANTIN
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1912
COPYRIGHT, 1911 AND 1912, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
_Published April 1912_
To the Memory of
JOSEPHINE LAZARUS
Who lives in the fulfilment
of her prophecies
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION xi
I. WITHIN THE PALE 1
II. CHILDREN OF THE LAW 29
III. BOTH THEIR HOUSES 42
IV. DAILY BREAD 60
V. I REMEMBER 79
VI. THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE 111
VII. THE BOUNDARIES STRETCH 137
VIII. THE EXODUS 163
IX. THE PROMISED LAND 180
X. INITIATION 206
XI. "MY COUNTRY" 222
XII. MIRACLES 241
XIII. A CHILD'S PARADISE 252
XIV. MANNA 264
XV. TARNISHED LAURELS 276
XVI. DOVER STREET 286
XVII. THE LANDLADY 301
XVIII. THE BURNING BUSH 321
XIX. A KINGDOM IN THE SLUMS 337
XX. THE HERITAGE 359
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 365
GLOSSARY 367
ILLUSTRATIONS
MASHKE AND FETCHKE _Frontispiece_
THE GRAVE-DIGGER OF POLOTZK 24
HEDER (HEBREW SCHOOL) FOR BOYS IN POLOTZK 34
THE WOOD MARKET, POLOTZK 52
MY FATHER'S PORTRAIT 70
MY GRANDFATHER'S HOUSE, WHERE I WAS BORN 80
THE MEAT MARKET, POLOTZK 98
SABBATH LOAVES FOR SALE (BREAD MARKET, POLOTZK) 124
WINTER SCENE ON THE DVINA 144
UNION PLACE (BOSTON) WHERE MY NEW HOME WAITED FOR ME 184
TWOSCORE OF MY FELLOW-CITIZENS--PUBLIC SCHOOL, CHELSEA 230
WHEELER STREET, IN THE LOWER SOUTH END OF BOSTON 264
HARRISON AVENUE IS THE HEART OF THE SOUTH END GHETTO 288
I LIKED TO STAND AND LOOK DOWN ON THE DIM TANGLE OF
RAILROAD TRACKS BELOW 298
THE NATURAL HISTORY CLUB HAD FREQUENT FIELD EXCURSIONS 328
BATES HALL, WHERE I SPENT MY LONGEST HOURS IN THE
LIBRARY 342
THE FAMOUS STUDY, THAT WAS FIT TO HAVE BEEN PRESERVED AS A
SHRINE 346
THE TIDE HAD RUSHED IN, STEALING AWAY OUR SEAWEED
CUSHIONS 362
INTRODUCTION
I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over. Is it not time to
write my life's story? I am just as much out of the way as if I were
dead, for I am absolutely other than the person whose story I have to
tell. Physical continuity with my earlier self is no disadvantage. I
could speak in the third person and not feel that I was masquerading.
I can analyze my subject, I can reveal everything; for _she_, and not
_I_, is my real heroine. My life I have still to live; her life ended
when mine began.
A generation is sometimes a more satisfactory unit for the study of
humanity than a lifetime; and spiritual generations are as easy to
demark as physical ones. Now I am the spiritual offspring of the
marriage within my conscious experience of the Past and the Present.
My second birth was no less a birth because there was no distinct
incarnation. Surely it has happened before that one body served more
than one spiritual organization. Nor am I disowning my father and
mother of the flesh, for they were also partners in the generation of
my second self; copartners with my entire line of ancestors. They gave
me body, so that I have eyes like my father's and hair like my
mother's. The spirit also they gave me, so that I reason like my
father and endure like my mother. But did they set me down in a
sheltered garden, where the sun should warm me, and no winter should
hurt, while they fed me from their hands? No; they early let me run in
the fields--perhaps because I would not be held--and eat of the wild
fruits and drink of the dew. Did they teach me from books, and tell me
what to believe? I soon chose my own books, and built me a world of my
own.
In these discriminations _I_ emerged, a new being, something that had
not been before. And when I discovered my own friends, and ran home
with them to convert my parents to a belief in their excellence, did I
not begin to make my father and mother, as truly as they had ever made
me? Did I not become the parent and they the children, in those
relations of teacher and learner? And so I can say that there has been
more than one birth of myself, and I can regard my earlier self as a
separate being, and make it a subject of study.
A proper autobiography is a death-bed confession. A true man finds so
much work to do that he has no time to contemplate his yesterdays; for
to-day and to-morrow are here, with their impatient tasks. The world
is so busy, too, that it cannot afford to study any man's unfinished
work; for the end may prove it a failure, and the world needs
masterpieces. Still there are circumstances by which a man is
justified in pausing in the middle of his life to contemplate the
years already passed. One who has completed early in life a distinct
task may stop to give an account of it. One who has encountered
unusual adventures under vanishing conditions may pause to describe
them before passing into the stable world. And perhaps he also might
be given an early hearing, who, without having ventured out of the
familiar paths, without having achieved any signal triumph, has lived
his simple life so intensely, so thoughtfully, as to have discovered
in his own experience an interpretation of the universal life.
I am not yet thirty, counting in years, and I am writing my life
history. Under which of the above categories do I find my
justification? I have not accomplished anything, I have not discovered
anything, not even by accident, as Columbus discovered America. My
life has been unusual, but by no means unique. And this is the very
core of the matter. It is because I understand my history, in its
larger outlines, to be typical of many, that I consider it worth
recording. My life is a concrete illustration of a multitude of
statistical facts. Although I have written a genuine personal memoir,
I believe that its chief interest lies in the fact that it is
illustrative of scores of unwritten lives. I am only one of many whose
fate it has been to live a page of modern history. We are the strands
of the cable that binds the Old World to the New. As the ships that
brought us link the shores of Europe and America, so our lives span
the bitter sea of racial differences and misunderstandings. Before we
came, the New World knew not the Old; but since we have begun to come,
the Young World has taken the Old by the hand, and the two are
learning to march side by side, seeking a common destiny.
Perhaps I have taken needless trouble to furnish an excuse for my
autobiography. My age alone, my true age, would be reason enough for
my writing. I began life in the Middle Ages, as I shall prove, and
here am I still, your contemporary in the twentieth century, thrilling
with your latest thought.
Had I no better excuse for writing, I still might be driven to it by
my private needs. It is in one sense a matter of my personal
salvation. I was at a most impressionable age when I was transplanted
to the new soil. I was in that period when even normal children,
undisturbed in their customary environment, begin to explore their own
hearts, and endeavor to account for themselves and their world. And my
zest for self-exploration seems not to have been distracted by the
necessity of exploring a new outer universe. I embarked on a double
voyage of discovery, and an exciting life it was! I took note of
everything. I could no more keep my mind from the shifting, changing
landscape than an infant can keep his eyes from the shining candle
moved across his field of vision. Thus everything impressed itself on
my memory, and with double associations; for I was constantly
referring my new world to the old for comparison, and the old to the
new for elucidation. I became a student and philosopher by force of
circumstances.
Had I been brought to America a few years earlier, I might have
written that in such and such a year my father emigrated, just as I
would state what he did for a living, as a matter of family history.
Happening when it did, the emigration became of the most vital
importance to me personally. All the processes of uprooting,
transportation, replanting, acclimatization, and development took
place in my own soul. I felt the pang, the fear, the wonder, and the
joy of it. I can never forget, for I bear the scars. But I want to
forget--sometimes I long to forget. I think I have thoroughly
assimilated my past--I have done its bidding--I want now to be of
to-day. It is painful to be consciously of two worlds. The Wandering
Jew in me seeks forgetfulness. I am not afraid to live on and on, if
only I do not have to remember too much. A long past vividly
remembered is like a heavy garment that clings to your limbs when you
would run. And I have thought of a charm that should release me from
the folds of my clinging past. I take the hint from the Ancient
Mariner, who told his tale in order to be rid of it. I, too, will tell
my tale, for once, and never hark back any more. I will write a bold
"Finis" at the end, and shut the book with a bang!
THE PROMISED LAND
CHAPTER I
WITHIN THE PALE
When I was a little girl, the world was divided into two parts;
namely, Polotzk, the place where I lived, and a strange land called
Russia. All the little girls I knew lived in Polotzk, with their
fathers and mothers and friends. Russia was the place where one's
father went on business. It was so far off, and so many bad things
happened there, that one's mother and grandmother and grown-up aunts
cried at the railroad station, and one was expected to be sad and
quiet for the rest of the day, when the father departed for Russia.
After a while there came to my knowledge the existence of another
division, a region intermediate between Polotzk and Russia. It seemed
there was a place called Vitebsk, and one called Vilna, and Riga, and
some others. From those places came photographs of uncles and cousins
one had never seen, and letters, and sometimes the uncles themselves.
These uncles were just like people in Polotzk; the people in Russia,
one understood, were very different. In answer to one's questions, the
visiting uncles said all sorts of silly things, to make everybody
laugh; and so one never found out why Vitebsk and Vilna, since they
were not Polotzk, were not as sad as Russia. Mother hardly cried at
all when the uncles went away.
One time, when I was about eight years old, one of my grown-up
cousins went to Vitebsk. Everybody went to see her off, but I didn't.
I went with her. I was put on the train, with my best dress tied up in
a bandana, and I stayed on the train for hours and hours, and came to
Vitebsk. I could not tell, as we rushed along, where the end of
Polotzk was. There were a great many places on the way, with strange
names, but it was very plain when we got to Vitebsk.
The railroad station was a big place, much bigger than the one in
Polotzk. Several trains came in at once, instead of only one. There
was an immense buffet, with fruits and confections, and a place where
books were sold. My cousin never let go my hand, on account of the
crowd. Then we rode in a cab for ever so long, and I saw the most
beautiful streets and shops and houses, much bigger and finer than any
in Polotzk.
We remained in Vitebsk several days, and I saw many wonderful things,
but what gave me my one great surprise was something that wasn't new
at all. It was the river--the river Dvina. Now the Dvina is in
Polotzk. All my life I had seen the Dvina. How, then, could the Dvina
be in Vitebsk? My cousin and I had come on the train, but everybody
knew that a train could go everywhere, even to Russia. It became clear
to me that the Dvina went on and on, like a railroad track, whereas I
had always supposed that it stopped where Polotzk stopped. I had never
seen the end of Polotzk; I meant to, when I was bigger. But how could
there be an end to Polotzk now? Polotzk was everything on both sides
of the Dvina, as all my life I had known; and the Dvina, it now turned
out, never broke off at all. It was very curious that the Dvina should
remain the same, while Polotzk changed into Vitebsk!
The mystery of this transmutation led to much fruitful thinking. The
boundary between Polotzk and the rest of the world was not, as I had
supposed, a physical barrier, like the fence which divided our garden
from the street. The world went like this now: Polotzk--more
Polotzk--more Polotzk--Vitebsk! And Vitebsk was not so different, only
bigger and brighter and more crowded. And Vitebsk was not the end. The
Dvina, and the railroad, went on beyond Vitebsk,--went on to Russia.
Then was Russia more Polotzk? Was here also no dividing fence? How I
wanted to see Russia! But very few people went there. When people went
to Russia it was a sign of trouble; either they could not make a
living at home, or they were drafted for the army, or they had a
lawsuit. No, nobody went to Russia for pleasure. Why, in Russia lived
the Czar, and a great many cruel people; and in Russia were the
dreadful prisons from which people never came back.
Polotzk and Vitebsk were now bound together by the continuity of the
earth, but between them and Russia a formidable barrier still
interposed. I learned, as I grew older, that much as Polotzk disliked
to go to Russia, even more did Russia object to letting Polotzk come.
People from Polotzk were sometimes turned back before they had
finished their business, and often they were cruelly treated on the
way. It seemed there were certain places in Russia--St. Petersburg,
and Moscow, and Kiev--where my father or my uncle or my neighbor must
never come at all, no matter what important things invited them. The
police would seize them and send them back to Polotzk, like wicked
criminals, although they had never done any wrong.
It was strange enough that my relatives should be treated like this,
but at least there was this excuse for sending them back to Polotzk,
that they belonged there. For what reason were people driven out of
St. Petersburg and Moscow who had their homes in those cities, and had
no other place to go to? Ever so many people, men and women and even
children, came to Polotzk, where they had no friends, with stories of
cruel treatment in Russia; and although they were nobody's relatives,
they were taken in, and helped, and set up in business, like
unfortunates after a fire.
It was very strange that the Czar and the police should want all
Russia for themselves. It was a very big country; it took many days
for a letter to reach one's father in Russia. Why might not everybody
be there who wanted to?
I do not know when I became old enough to understand. The truth was
borne in on me a dozen times a day, from the time I began to
distinguish words from empty noises. My grandmother told me about it,
when she put me to bed at night. My parents told me about it, when
they gave me presents on holidays. My playmates told me, when they
drew me back into a corner of the gateway, to let a policeman pass.
Vanka, the little white-haired boy, told me all about it, when he ran
out of his mother's laundry on purpose to throw mud after me when I
happened to pass. I heard about it during prayers, and when women
quarrelled in the market place; and sometimes, waking in the night, I
heard my parents whisper it in the dark. There was no time in my life
when I did not hear and see and feel the truth--the reason why Polotzk
was cut off from the rest of Russia. It was the first lesson a little
girl in Polotzk had to learn. But for a long while I did not
understand. Then there came a time when I knew that Polotzk and
Vitebsk and Vilna and some other places were grouped together as the
"Pale of Settlement," and within this area the Czar commanded me to
stay, with my father and mother and friends, and all other people like
us. We must not be found outside the Pale, because we were Jews.
So there was a fence around Polotzk, after all. The world was divided
into Jews and Gentiles. This knowledge came so gradually that it could
not shock me. It trickled into my consciousness drop by drop. By the
time I fully understood that I was a prisoner, the shackles had grown
familiar to my flesh.
The first time Vanka threw mud at me, I ran home and complained to my
mother, who brushed off my dress and said, quite resignedly, "How can
I help you, my poor child? Vanka is a Gentile. The Gentiles do as they
like with us Jews." The next time Vanka abused me, I did not cry, but
ran for shelter, saying to myself, "Vanka is a Gentile." The third
time, when Vanka spat on me, I wiped my face and thought nothing at
all. I accepted ill-usage from the Gentiles as one accepts the
weather. The world was made in a certain way, and I had to live in it.
Not quite all the Gentiles were like Vanka. Next door to us lived a
Gentile family which was very friendly. There was a girl as big as I,
who never called me names, and gave me flowers from her father's
garden. And there were the Parphens, of whom my grandfather rented his
store. They treated us as if we were not Jews at all. On our festival
days they visited our house and brought us presents, carefully
choosing such things as Jewish children might accept; and they liked
to have everything explained to them, about the wine and the fruit and
the candles, and they even tried to say the appropriate greetings and
blessings in Hebrew. My father used to say that if all the Russians
were like the Parphens, there would be no trouble between Gentiles and
Jews; and Fedora Pavlovna, the landlady, would reply that the Russian
_people_ were not to blame. It was the priests, she said, who taught
the people to hate the Jews. Of course she knew best, as she was a
very pious Christian. She never passed a church without crossing
herself.
The Gentiles were always crossing themselves; when they went into a
church, and when they came out, when they met a priest, or passed an
image in the street. The dirty beggars on the church steps never
stopped crossing themselves; and even when they stood on the corner of
a Jewish street, and received alms from Jewish people, they crossed
themselves and mumbled Christian prayers. In every Gentile house there
was what they called an "icon," which was an image or picture of the
Christian god, hung up in a corner, with a light always burning before
it. In front of the icon the Gentiles said their prayers, on their
knees, crossing themselves all the time.
I tried not to look in the corner where the icon was, when I came into
a Gentile house. I was afraid of the cross. Everybody was, in
Polotzk--all the Jews, I mean. For it was the cross that made the
priests, and the priests made our troubles, as even some Christians
admitted. The Gentiles said that we had killed their God, which was
absurd, as they never had a God--nothing but images. Besides, what
they accused us of had happened so long ago; the Gentiles themselves
said it was long ago. Everybody had been dead for ages who could have
had anything to do with it. Yet they put up crosses everywhere, and
wore them on their necks, on purpose to remind themselves of these
false things; and they considered it pious to hate and abuse us,
insisting that we had killed their God. To worship the cross and to
torment a Jew was the same thing to them. That is why we feared the
cross.
Another thing the Gentiles said about us was that we used the blood of
murdered Christian children at the Passover festival. Of course that
was a wicked lie. It made me sick to think of such a thing. I knew
everything that was done for Passover, from the time I was a very
little girl. The house was made clean and shining and holy, even in
the corners where nobody ever looked. Vessels and dishes that were
used all the year round were put away in the garret, and special
vessels were brought out for the Passover week. I used to help unpack
the new dishes, and find my own blue mug. When the fresh curtains were
put up, and the white floors were uncovered, and everybody in the
house put on new clothes, and I sat down to the feast in my new dress,
I felt clean inside and out. And when I asked the Four Questions,
about the unleavened bread and the bitter herbs and the other things,
and the family, reading from their books, answered me, did I not know
all about Passover, and what was on the table, and why? It was wicked
of the Gentiles to tell lies about us. The youngest child in the house
knew how Passover was kept.
The Passover season, when we celebrated our deliverance from the land
of Egypt, and felt so glad and thankful, as if it had only just
happened, was the time our Gentile neighbors chose to remind us that
Russia was another Egypt. That is what I heard people say, and it was
true. It was not so bad in Polotzk, within the Pale; but in Russian
cities, and even more in the country districts, where Jewish families
lived scattered, by special permission of the police, who were always
changing their minds about letting them stay, the Gentiles made the
Passover a time of horror for the Jews. Somebody would start up that
lie about murdering Christian children, and the stupid peasants would
get mad about it, and fill themselves with vodka, and set out to kill
the Jews. They attacked them with knives and clubs and scythes and
axes, killed them or tortured them, and burned their houses. This was
called a "pogrom." Jews who escaped the pogroms came to Polotzk with
wounds on them, and horrible, horrible stories, of little babies torn
limb from limb before their mothers' eyes. Only to hear these things
made one sob and sob and choke with pain. People who saw such things
never smiled any more, no matter how long they lived; and sometimes
their hair turned white in a day, and some people became insane on the
spot.
Often we heard that the pogrom was led by a priest carrying a cross
before the mob. Our enemies always held up the cross as the excuse of
their cruelty to us. I never was in an actual pogrom, but there were
times when it threatened us, even in Polotzk; and in all my fearful
imaginings, as I hid in dark corners, thinking of the horrible things
the Gentiles were going to do to me, I saw the cross, the cruel cross.
I remember a time when I thought a pogrom had broken out in our
street, and I wonder that I did not die of fear. It was some Christian
holiday, and we had been warned by the police to keep indoors. Gates
were locked; shutters were barred. If a child cried, the nurse
threatened to give it to the priest, who would soon be passing by.
Fearful and yet curious, we looked through the cracks in the
shutters. We saw a procession of peasants and townspeople, led by a
number of priests, carrying crosses and banners and images. In the
place of honor was carried a casket, containing a relic from the
monastery in the outskirts of Polotzk. Once a year the Gentiles
paraded with this relic, and on that occasion the streets were
considered too holy for Jews to be about; and we lived in fear till
the end of the day, knowing that the least disturbance might start a
riot, and a riot lead to a pogrom.
On the day when I saw the procession through a crack in the shutter,
there were soldiers and police in the street. This was as usual, but I
did not know it. I asked the nurse, who was pressing to the crack over
my head, what the soldiers were for. Thoughtlessly she answered me,
"In case of a pogrom." Yes, there were the crosses and the priests and
the mob. The church bells were pealing their loudest. Everything was
ready. The Gentiles were going to tear me in pieces, with axes and
knives and ropes. They were going to burn me alive. The cross--the
cross! What would they do to me first?
There was one thing the Gentiles might do to me worse than burning or
rending. It was what was done to unprotected Jewish children who fell
into the hands of priests or nuns. They might baptize me. That would
be worse than death by torture. Rather would I drown in the Dvina than
a drop of the baptismal water should touch my forehead. To be forced
to kneel before the hideous images, to kiss the cross,--sooner would I
rush out to the mob that was passing, and let them tear my vitals out.
To forswear the One God, to bow before idols,--rather would I be
seized with the plague, and be eaten up by vermin. I was only a little
girl, and not very brave; little pains made me ill, and I cried. But
there was no pain that I would not bear--no, none--rather than submit
to baptism.
Every Jewish child had that feeling. There were stories by the dozen
of Jewish boys who were kidnapped by the Czar's agents and brought up
in Gentile families, till they were old enough to enter the army,
where they served till forty years of age; and all those years the
priests tried, by bribes and daily tortures, to force them to accept
baptism, but in vain. This was in the time of Nicholas I, but men who
had been through this service were no older than my grandfather, when
I was a little girl; and they told their experiences with their own
lips, and one knew it was true, and it broke one's heart with pain and
pride.
Some of these soldiers of Nicholas, as they were called, were taken as
little boys of seven or eight--snatched from their mothers' laps. They
were carried to distant villages, where their friends could never
trace them, and turned over to some dirty, brutal peasant, who used
them like slaves and kept them with the pigs. No two were ever left
together; and they were given false names, so that they were entirely
cut off from their own world. And then the lonely child was turned
over to the priests, and he was flogged and starved and terrified--a
little helpless boy who cried for his mother; but still he refused to
be baptized. The priests promised him good things to eat, and fine
clothes, and freedom from labor; but the boy turned away, and said his
prayers secretly--the Hebrew prayers.
As he grew older, severer tortures were invented for him; still he
refused baptism. By this time he had forgotten his mother's face, and
of his prayers perhaps only the "Shema" remained in his memory; but
he was a Jew, and nothing would make him change. After he entered the
army, he was bribed with promises of promotions and honors. He
remained a private, and endured the cruellest discipline. When he was
discharged, at the age of forty, he was a broken man, without a home,
without a clue to his origin, and he spent the rest of his life
wandering among Jewish settlements, searching for his family; hiding
the scars of torture under his rags, begging his way from door to
door. If he were one who had broken down under the cruel torments, and
allowed himself to be baptized, for the sake of a respite, the Church
never let him go again, no matter how loudly he protested that he was
still a Jew. If he was caught practicing Jewish rites, he was
subjected to the severest punishment.
My father knew of one who was taken as a small boy, who never yielded
to the priests under the most hideous tortures. As he was a very
bright boy, the priests were particularly eager to convert him. They
tried him with bribes that would appeal to his ambition. They promised
to make a great man of him--a general, a noble. The boy turned away
and said his prayers. Then they tortured him, and threw him into a
cell; and when he lay asleep from exhaustion, the priest came and
baptized him. When he awoke, they told him he was a Christian, and
brought him the crucifix to kiss. He protested, threw the crucifix
from him, but they held him to it that he was a baptized Jew, and
belonged to the Church; and the rest of his life he spent between the
prison and the hospital, always clinging to his faith, saying the
Hebrew prayers in defiance of his tormentors, and paying for it with
his flesh.
There were men in Polotzk whose faces made you old in a minute. They
had served Nicholas I, and come back unbaptized. The white church in
the square--how did it look to them? I knew. I cursed the church in my
heart every time I had to pass it; and I was afraid--afraid.
On market days, when the peasants came to church, and the bells kept
ringing by the hour, my heart was heavy in me, and I could find no
rest. Even in my father's house I did not feel safe. The church bell
boomed over the roofs of the houses, calling, calling, calling. I
closed my eyes, and saw the people passing into the church: peasant
women with bright embroidered aprons and glass beads; barefoot little
girls with colored kerchiefs on their heads; boys with caps pulled too
far down over their flaxen hair; rough men with plaited bast sandals,
and a rope around the waist,--crowds of them, moving slowly up the
steps, crossing themselves again and again, till they were swallowed
by the black doorway, and only the beggars were left squatting on the
steps. _Boom, boom!_ What are the people doing in the dark, with the
waxen images and the horrid crucifixes? _Boom, boom, boom!_ They are
ringing the bell for me. Is it in the church they will torture me,
when I refuse to kiss the cross?
They ought not to have told me those dreadful stories. They were long
past; we were living under the blessed "New Régime." Alexander III was
no friend of the Jews; still he did not order little boys to be taken
from their mothers, to be made into soldiers and Christians. Every man
had to serve in the army for four years, and a Jewish recruit was
likely to be treated with severity, no matter if his behavior were
perfect; but that was little compared to the dreadful conditions of
the old régime.
The thing that really mattered was the necessity of breaking the
Jewish laws of daily life while in the service. A soldier often had to
eat trefah and work on Sabbath. He had to shave his beard and do
reverence to Christian things. He could not attend daily services at
the synagogue; his private devotions were disturbed by the jeers and
insults of his coarse Gentile comrades. He might resort to all sorts
of tricks and shams, still he was obliged to violate Jewish law. When
he returned home, at the end of his term of service, he could not rid
himself of the stigma of those enforced sins. For four years he had
led the life of a Gentile.
Piety alone was enough to make the Jews dread military service, but
there were other things that made it a serious burden. Most men of
twenty-one--the age of conscription--were already married and had
children. During their absence their families suffered, their business
often was ruined. At the end of their term they were beggars. As
beggars, too, they were sent home from their military post. If they
happened to have a good uniform at the time of their dismissal, it was
stripped from them, and replaced by a shabby one. They received a free
ticket for the return journey, and a few kopecks a day for expenses.
In this fashion they were hurried back into the Pale, like escaped
prisoners. The Czar was done with them. If within a limited time they
were found outside the Pale, they would be seized and sent home in
chains.
There were certain exceptions to the rule of compulsory service. The
only son of a family was exempt, and certain others. In the physical
examination preceding conscription, many were rejected on account of
various faults. This gave the people the idea of inflicting injuries
on themselves, so as to produce temporary deformities on account of
which they might be rejected at the examination. Men would submit to
operations on their eyes, ears, or limbs, which caused them horrible
sufferings, in the hope of escaping the service. If the operation was
successful, the patient was rejected by the examining officers, and in
a short time he was well, and a free man. Often, however, the
deformity intended to be temporary proved incurable, so that there
were many men in Polotzk blind of one eye, or hard of hearing, or
lame, as a result of these secret practices; but these things were
easier to bear than the memory of four years in the Czar's service.
Sons of rich fathers could escape service without leaving any marks on
their persons. It was always possible to bribe conscription officers.
This was a dangerous practice,--it was not the officers who suffered
most in case the negotiations leaked out,--but no respectable family
would let a son be taken as a recruit till it had made every effort to
save him. My grandfather nearly ruined himself to buy his sons out of
service; and my mother tells thrilling anecdotes of her younger
brother's life, who for years lived in hiding, under assumed names and
in various disguises, till he had passed the age of liability for
service.
If it were cowardice that made the Jews shrink from military service
they would not inflict on themselves physical tortures greater than
any that threatened them in the army, and which often left them maimed
for life. If it were avarice--the fear of losing the gains from their
business for four years--they would not empty their pockets and sell
their houses and sink into debt, on the chance of successfully bribing
the Czar's agents. The Jewish recruit dreaded, indeed, brutality and
injustice at the hands of officers and comrades; he feared for his
family, which he left, often enough, as dependents on the charity of
relatives; but the fear of an unholy life was greater than all other
fears. I know, for I remember my cousin who was taken as a soldier.
Everything had been done to save him. Money had been spent freely--my
uncle did not stop at his unmarried daughter's portion, when
everything else was gone. My cousin had also submitted to some secret
treatment,--some devastating drug administered for months before the
examination,--but the effects were not pronounced enough, and he was
passed. For the first few weeks his company was stationed in Polotzk.
I saw my cousin drill on the square, carrying a gun, _on a Sabbath_. I
felt unholy, as if I had sinned the sin in my own person. It was easy
to understand why mothers of conscript sons fasted and wept and prayed
and worried themselves to their graves.
There was a man in our town called David the Substitute, because he
had gone as a soldier in another's stead, he himself being exempt. He
did it for a sum of money. I suppose his family was starving, and he
saw a chance to provide for them for a few years. But it was a sinful
thing to do, to go as a soldier and be obliged to live like a Gentile,
of his own free will. And David knew how wicked it was, for he was a
pious man at heart. When he returned from service, he was aged and
broken, bowed down with the sense of his sins. And he set himself a
penance, which was to go through the streets every Sabbath morning,
calling the people to prayer. Now this was a hard thing to do,
because David labored bitterly all the week, exposed to the weather,
summer or winter; and on Sabbath morning there was nobody so tired and
lame and sore as David. Yet he forced himself to leave his bed before
it was yet daylight, and go from street to street, all over Polotzk,
calling on the people to wake and go to prayer. Many a Sabbath morning
I awoke when David called, and lay listening to his voice as it passed
and died out; and it was so sad that it hurt, as beautiful music
hurts. I was glad to feel my sister lying beside me, for it was lonely
in the gray dawn, with only David and me awake, and God waiting for
the people's prayers.
The Gentiles used to wonder at us because we cared so much about
religious things,--about food, and Sabbath, and teaching the children
Hebrew. They were angry with us for our obstinacy, as they called it,
and mocked us and ridiculed the most sacred things. There were wise
Gentiles who understood. These were educated people, like Fedora
Pavlovna, who made friends with their Jewish neighbors. They were
always respectful, and openly admired some of our ways. But most of
the Gentiles were ignorant and distrustful and spiteful. They would
not believe that there was any good in our religion, and of course we
dared not teach them, because we should be accused of trying to
convert them, and that would be the end of us.
Oh, if they could only understand! Vanka caught me on the street one
day, and pulled my hair, and called me names; and all of a sudden I
asked myself _why_--_why?_--a thing I had stopped asking years before.
I was so angry that I could have punished him; for one moment I was
not afraid to hit back. But this _why_--_why?_ broke out in my heart,
and I forgot to revenge myself. It was so wonderful--Well, there were
no words in my head to say it, but it meant that Vanka abused me only
because _he did not understand_. If he could feel with my heart, if he
could be a little Jewish boy for one day, I thought, he would know--he
would know. If he could understand about David the Substitute, now,
without being told, as I understood. If he could wake in my place on
Sabbath morning, and feel his heart break in him with a strange pain,
because a Jew had dishonored the law of Moses, and God was bending
down to pardon him. Oh, why could I not make Vanka understand? I was
so sorry that my heart hurt me, worse than Vanka's blows. My anger and
my courage were gone. Vanka was throwing stones at me now from his
mother's doorway, and I continued on my errand, but I did not hurry.
The thing that hurt me most I could not run away from.
There was one thing the Gentiles always understood, and that was
money. They would take any kind of bribe at any time. Peace cost so
much a year in Polotzk. If you did not keep on good terms with your
Gentile neighbors, they had a hundred ways of molesting you. If you
chased their pigs when they came rooting up your garden, or objected
to their children maltreating your children, they might complain
against you to the police, stuffing their case with false accusations
and false witnesses. If you had not made friends with the police, the
case might go to court; and there you lost before the trial was
called, unless the judge had reason to befriend you. The cheapest way
to live in Polotzk was to pay as you went along. Even a little girl
understood that, in Polotzk.
Perhaps your parents were in business,--usually they were, as almost
everybody kept store,--and you heard a great deal about the chief of
police, and excise officers, and other agents of the Czar. Between the
Czar whom you had never seen, and the policeman whom you knew too
well, you pictured to yourself a long row of officials of all sorts,
all with their palms stretched out to receive your father's money. You
knew your father hated them all, but you saw him smile and bend as he
filled those greedy palms. You did the same, in your petty way, when
you saw Vanka coming toward you on a lonely street, and you held out
to him the core of the apple you had been chewing, and forced your
unwilling lips into a smile. It hurt, that false smile; it made you
feel black inside.
In your father's parlor hung a large colored portrait of Alexander
III. The Czar was a cruel tyrant,--oh, it was whispered when doors
were locked and shutters tightly barred, at night,--he was a Titus, a
Haman, a sworn foe of all Jews,--and yet his portrait was seen in a
place of honor in your father's house. You knew why. It looked well
when police or government officers came on business.
You went out to play one morning, and saw a little knot of people
gathered around a lamp-post. There was a notice on it--a new order
from the chief of police. You pushed into the crowd, and stared at the
placard, but you could not read. A woman with a ragged shawl looked
down upon you, and said, with a bitter kind of smile, "Rejoice,
rejoice, little girl! The chief of police bids you rejoice. There
shall be a pretty flag flying from every housetop to-day, because it
is the Czar's birthday, and we must celebrate. Come and watch the poor
people pawn their samovars and candlesticks, to raise money for a
pretty flag. It is a holiday, little girl. Rejoice!"
You know the woman is mocking,--you are familiar with the quality of
that smile,--but you accept the hint and go and watch the people buy
their flags. Your cousin keeps a dry-goods store, where you have a
fine view of the proceedings. There is a crowd around the counter, and
your cousin and the assistant are busily measuring off lengths of
cloth, red, and blue, and white.
"How much does it take?" somebody asks. "May I know no more of sin
than I know of flags," another replies. "How is it put together?" "Do
you have to have all three colors?" One customer puts down a few
kopecks on the counter, saying, "Give me a piece of flag. This is all
the money I have. Give me the red and the blue; I'll tear up my shirt
for the white."
You know it is no joke. The flag must show from every house, or the
owner will be dragged to the police station, to pay a fine of
twenty-five rubles. What happened to the old woman who lives in that
tumble-down shanty over the way? It was that other time when flags
were ordered up, because the Grand Duke was to visit Polotzk. The old
woman had no flag, and no money. She hoped the policeman would not
notice her miserable hut. But he did, the vigilant one, and he went up
and kicked the door open with his great boot, and he took the last
pillow from the bed, and sold it, and hoisted a flag above the rotten
roof. I knew the old woman well, with her one watery eye and her
crumpled hands. I often took a plate of soup to her from our kitchen.
There was nothing but rags left on her bed, when the policeman had
taken the pillow.
The Czar always got his dues, no matter if it ruined a family. There
was a poor locksmith who owed the Czar three hundred rubles, because
his brother had escaped from Russia before serving his term in the
army. There was no such fine for Gentiles, only for Jews; and the
whole family was liable. Now, the locksmith never could have so much
money, and he had no valuables to pawn. The police came and attached
his household goods, everything he had, including his young bride's
trousseau; and the sale of the goods brought thirty-five rubles. After
a year's time the police came again, looking for the balance of the
Czar's dues. They put their seal on everything they found. The bride
was in bed with her first baby, a boy. The circumcision was to be next
day. The police did not leave a sheet to wrap the child in when he is
handed up for the operation.
Many bitter sayings came to your ears if you were a Jewish little girl
in Polotzk. "It is a false world," you heard, and you knew it was so,
looking at the Czar's portrait, and at the flags. "Never tell a police
officer the truth," was another saying, and you knew it was good
advice. That fine of three hundred rubles was a sentence of lifelong
slavery for the poor locksmith, unless he freed himself by some trick.
As fast as he could collect a few rags and sticks, the police would be
after them. He might hide under a false name, if he could get away
from Polotzk on a false passport; or he might bribe the proper
officials to issue a false certificate of the missing brother's death.
Only by false means could he secure peace for himself and his family,
as long as the Czar was after his dues.
It was bewildering to hear how many kinds of duties and taxes we owed
the Czar. We paid taxes on our houses, and taxes on the rents from the
houses, taxes on our business, taxes on our profits. I am not sure
whether there were taxes on our losses. The town collected taxes, and
the county, and the central government; and the chief of police we had
always with us. There were taxes for public works, but rotten
pavements went on rotting year after year; and when a bridge was to be
built, special taxes were levied. A bridge, by the way, was not always
a public highway. A railroad bridge across the Dvina, while open to
the military, could be used by the people only by individual
permission.
My uncle explained to me all about the excise duties on tobacco.
Tobacco being a source of government revenue, there was a heavy tax on
it. Cigarettes were taxed at every step of their process. The tobacco
was taxed separately, and the paper, and the mouthpiece, and on the
finished product an additional tax was put. There was no tax on the
smoke. The Czar must have overlooked it.
Business really did not pay when the price of goods was so swollen by
taxes that the people could not buy. The only way to make business pay
was to cheat--cheat the Government of part of the duties. But playing
tricks on the Czar was dangerous, with so many spies watching his
interests. People who sold cigarettes without the government seal got
more gray hairs than bank notes out of their business. The constant
risk, the worry, the dread of a police raid in the night, and the
ruinous fines, in case of detection, left very little margin of profit
or comfort to the dealer in contraband goods. "But what can one do?"
the people said, with the shrug of the shoulders that expresses the
helplessness of the Pale. "What can one do? One must live."
It was not easy to live, with such bitter competition as the
congestion of population made inevitable. There were ten times as many
stores as there should have been, ten times as many tailors, cobblers,
barbers, tinsmiths. A Gentile, if he failed in Polotzk, could go
elsewhere, where there was less competition. A Jew could make the
circle of the Pale, only to find the same conditions as at home.
Outside the Pale he could only go to certain designated localities, on
payment of prohibitive fees, augmented by a constant stream of bribes;
and even then he lived at the mercy of the local chief of police.
Artisans had the right to reside outside the Pale, on fulfilment of
certain conditions. This sounded easy to me, when I was a little girl,
till I realized how it worked. There was a capmaker who had duly
qualified, by passing an examination and paying for his trade papers,
to live in a certain city. The chief of police suddenly took it into
his head to impeach the genuineness of his papers. The capmaker was
obliged to travel to St. Petersburg, where he had qualified in the
first place, to repeat the examination. He spent the savings of years
in petty bribes, trying to hasten the process, but was detained ten
months by bureaucratic red tape. When at length he returned to his
home town, he found a new chief of police, installed during his
absence, who discovered a new flaw in the papers he had just obtained,
and expelled him from the city. If he came to Polotzk, there were then
eleven capmakers where only one could make a living.
Merchants fared like the artisans. They, too, could buy the right of
residence outside the Pale, permanent or temporary, on conditions that
gave them no real security. I was proud to have an uncle who was a
merchant of the First Guild, but it was very expensive for my uncle.
He had to pay so much a year for the title, and a certain percentage
on the profits from his business. This gave him the right to travel on
business outside the Pale, twice a year, for not more than six months
in all. If he were found outside the Pale after his permit expired, he
had to pay a fine that exceeded all he had gained by his journey,
perhaps. I used to picture my uncle on his Russian travels, hurrying,
hurrying to finish his business in the limited time; while a policeman
marched behind him, ticking off the days and counting up the hours.
That was a foolish fancy, but some of the things that were done in
Russia really were very funny.
There were things in Polotzk that made you laugh with one eye and weep
with the other, like a clown. During an epidemic of cholera, the city
officials, suddenly becoming energetic, opened stations for the
distribution of disinfectants to the people. A quarter of the
population was dead when they began, and most of the dead were buried,
while some lay decaying in deserted houses. The survivors, some of
them crazy from horror, stole through the empty streets, avoiding one
another, till they came to the appointed stations, where they pushed
and crowded to get their little bottles of carbolic acid. Many died
from fear in those horrible days, but some must have died from
laughter. For only the Gentiles were allowed to receive the
disinfectant. Poor Jews who had nothing but their new-made graves were
driven away from the stations.
Perhaps it was wrong of us to think of our Gentile neighbors as a
different species of beings from ourselves, but such madness as that
did not help to make them more human in our eyes. It was easier to be
friends with the beasts in the barn than with some of the Gentiles.
The cow and the goat and the cat responded to kindness, and
remembered which of the housemaids was generous and which was cross.
The Gentiles made no distinctions. A Jew was a Jew, to be hated and
spat upon and used spitefully.
The only Gentiles, besides the few of the intelligent kind, who did
not habitually look upon us with hate and contempt, were the stupid
peasants from the country, who were hardly human themselves. They
lived in filthy huts together with their swine, and all they cared for
was how to get something to eat. It was not their fault. The land laws
made them so poor that they had to sell themselves to fill their
bellies. What help was there for us in the good will of such wretched
slaves? For a cask of vodka you could buy up a whole village of them.
They trembled before the meanest townsman, and at a sign from a
long-haired priest they would sharpen their axes against us.
The Gentiles had their excuse for their malice. They said our
merchants and money-lenders preyed upon them, and our shopkeepers gave
false measure. People who want to defend the Jews ought never to deny
this. Yes, I say, we cheated the Gentiles whenever we dared, because
it was the only thing to do. Remember how the Czar was always sending
us commands,--you shall not do this and you shall not do that, until
there was little left that we might honestly do, except pay tribute
and die. There he had us cooped up, thousands of us where only
hundreds could live, and every means of living taxed to the utmost.
When there are too many wolves in the prairie, they begin to prey upon
each other. We starving captives of the Pale--we did as do the hungry
brutes. But our humanity showed in our discrimination between our
victims. Whenever we could, we spared our own kind, directing against
our racial foes the cunning wiles which our bitter need invented. Is
not that the code of war? Encamped in the midst of the enemy, we could
practice no other. A Jew could hardly exist in business unless he
developed a dual conscience, which allowed him to do to the Gentile
what he would call a sin against a fellow Jew. Such spiritual
deformities are self-explained in the step-children of the Czar. A
glance over the statutes of the Pale leaves you wondering that the
Russian Jews have not lost all semblance to humanity.
[Illustration: THE GRAVE DIGGER OF POLOTZK]
A favorite complaint against us was that we were greedy for gold. Why
could not the Gentiles see the whole truth where they saw half? Greedy
for profits we were, eager for bargains, for savings, intent on
squeezing the utmost out of every business transaction. But why? Did
not the Gentiles know the reason? Did they not know what price we had
to pay for the air we breathed? If a Jew and a Gentile kept store side
by side, the Gentile could content himself with smaller profits. He
did not have to buy permission to travel in the interests of his
business. He did not have to pay three hundred rubles fine if his son
evaded military service. He was saved the expense of hushing inciters
of pogroms. Police favor was retailed at a lower price to him than to
the Jew. His nature did not compel him to support schools and
charities. It cost nothing to be a Christian; on the contrary, it
brought rewards and immunities. To be a Jew was a costly luxury, the
price of which was either money or blood. Is it any wonder that we
hoarded our pennies? What his shield is to the soldier in battle, that
was the ruble to the Jew in the Pale.
The knowledge of such things as I am telling leaves marks upon the
flesh and spirit. I remember little children in Polotzk with old, old
faces and eyes glazed with secrets. I knew how to dodge and cringe and
dissemble before I knew the names of the seasons. And I had plenty of
time to ponder on these things, because I was so idle. If they had let
me go to school, now--But of course they didn't.
There was no free school for girls, and even if your parents were rich
enough to send you to a private school, you could not go very far. At
the high school, which was under government control, Jewish children
were admitted in limited numbers,--only ten to every hundred,--and
even if you were among the lucky ones, you had your troubles. The
tutor who prepared you talked all the time about the examinations you
would have to pass, till you were scared. You heard on all sides that
the brightest Jewish children were turned down if the examining
officers did not like the turn of their noses. You went up to be
examined with the other Jewish children, your heart heavy about that
matter of your nose. There was a special examination for the Jewish
candidates, of course; a nine-year-old Jewish child had to answer
questions that a thirteen-year-old Gentile was hardly expected to
understand. But that did not matter so much. You had been prepared for
the thirteen-year-old test; you found the questions quite easy. You
wrote your answers triumphantly--and you received a low rating, and
there was no appeal.
I used to stand in the doorway of my father's store, munching an apple
that did not taste good any more, and watch the pupils going home from
school in twos and threes; the girls in neat brown dresses and black
aprons and little stiff hats, the boys in trim uniforms with many
buttons. They had ever so many books in the satchels on their backs.
They would take them out at home, and read and write, and learn all
sorts of interesting things. They looked to me like beings from
another world than mine. But those whom I envied had their own
troubles, as I often heard. Their school life was one struggle against
injustice from instructors, spiteful treatment from fellow students,
and insults from everybody. Those who, by heroic efforts and
transcendent good luck, successfully finished the course, found
themselves against a new wall, if they wished to go on. They were
turned down at the universities, which admitted them in the ratio of
three Jews to a hundred Gentiles, under the same debarring entrance
conditions as at the high school,--especially rigorous examinations,
dishonest marking, or arbitrary rulings without disguise. No, the Czar
did not want us in the schools.
I heard from my mother of a different state of affairs, at the time
when her brothers were little boys. The Czar of those days had a
bright idea. He said to his ministers: "Let us educate the people. Let
us win over those Jews through the public schools, instead of allowing
them to persist in their narrow Hebrew learning, which teaches them no
love for their monarch. Force has failed with them; the unwilling
converts return to their old ways whenever they dare. Let us try
education."
Perhaps peaceable conversion of the Jews was not the Czar's only
motive when he opened public schools everywhere and compelled parents
to send their boys for instruction. Perhaps he just wanted to be good,
and really hoped to benefit the country. But to the Jews the public
schools appeared as a trap door to the abyss of apostasy. The
instructors were always Christians, the teaching was Christian, and
the regulations of the schoolroom, as to hours, costume, and manners,
were often in opposition to Jewish practices. The public school
interrupted the boy's sacred studies in the Hebrew school. Where would
you look for pious Jews, after a few generations of boys brought up by
Christian teachers? Plainly the Czar was after the souls of the Jewish
children. The church door gaped for them at the end of the school
course. And all good Jews rose up against the schools, and by every
means, fair or foul, kept their boys away. The official appointed to
keep the register of boys for school purposes waxed rich on the bribes
paid him by anxious parents who kept their sons in hiding.
After a while the wise Czar changed his mind, or he died,--probably he
did both,--and the schools were closed, and the Jewish boys perused
their Hebrew books in peace, wearing the sacred fringes[1] in plain
sight, and never polluting their mouths with a word of Russian.
And then it was the Jews who changed their minds--some of them. They
wanted to send their children to school, to learn histories and
sciences, because they had discovered that there was good in such
things as well as in the Sacred Law. These people were called
progressive, but they had no chance to progress. All the czars that
came along persisted in the old idea, that for the Jew no door should
be opened,--no door out of the Pale, no door out of their mediævalism.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] A four-cornered cloth with specially prepared fringes is worn by
pious males under the outer garments, but with, the fringes showing.
The latter play a part in the daily ritual.
CHAPTER II
CHILDREN OF THE LAW
As I look back to-day I see, within the wall raised around my
birthplace by the vigilance of the police, another wall, higher,
thicker, more impenetrable. This is the wall which the Czar with all
his minions could not shake, the priests with their instruments of
torture could not pierce, the mob with their firebrands could not
destroy. This wall within the wall is the religious integrity of the
Jews, a fortress erected by the prisoners of the Pale, in defiance of
their jailers; a stronghold built of the ruins of their pillaged
homes, cemented with the blood of their murdered children.
Harassed on every side, thwarted in every normal effort, pent up
within narrow limits, all but dehumanized, the Russian Jew fell back
upon the only thing that never failed him,--his hereditary faith in
God. In the study of the Torah he found the balm for all his wounds;
the minute observance of traditional rites became the expression of
his spiritual cravings; and in the dream of a restoration to Palestine
he forgot the world.
What did it matter to us, on a Sabbath or festival, when our life was
centred in the synagogue, what czar sat on the throne, what evil
counsellors whispered in his ear? They were concerned with revenues
and policies and ephemeral trifles of all sorts, while we were intent
on renewing our ancient covenant with God, to the end that His promise
to the world should be fulfilled, and His justice overwhelm the
nations.
On a Friday afternoon the stores and markets closed early. The clatter
of business ceased, the dust of worry was laid, and the Sabbath peace
flooded the quiet streets. No hovel so mean but what its casement sent
out its consecrated ray, so that a wayfarer passing in the twilight
saw the spirit of God brooding over the lowly roof.
Care and fear and shrewishness dropped like a mask from every face.
Eyes dimmed with weeping kindled with inmost joy. Wherever a head bent
over a sacred page, there rested the halo of God's presence.
Not on festivals alone, but also on the common days of the week, we
lived by the Law that had been given us through our teacher Moses. How
to eat, how to bathe, how to work--everything had been written down
for us, and we strove to fulfil the Law. The study of the Torah was
the most honored of all occupations, and they who engaged in it the
most revered of all men.
My memory does not go back to a time when I was too young to know that
God had made the world, and had appointed teachers to tell the people
how to live in it. First came Moses, and after him the great rabbis,
and finally the Rav of Polotzk, who read all day in the sacred books,
so that he could tell me and my parents and my friends what to do
whenever we were in doubt. If my mother cut up a chicken and found
something wrong in it,--some hurt or mark that should not be,--she
sent the housemaid with it to the rav, and I ran along, and saw the
rav look in his big books; and whatever he decided was right. If he
called the chicken "trefah" I must not eat of it; no, not if I had to
starve. And the rav knew about everything: about going on a journey,
about business, about marrying, about purifying vessels for Passover.
Another great teacher was the dayyan, who heard people's quarrels and
settled them according to the Law, so that they should not have to go
to the Gentile courts. The Gentiles were false, judges and witnesses
and all. They favored the rich man against the poor, the Christian
against the Jew. The dayyan always gave true judgments. Nohem
Rabinovitch, the richest man in Polotzk, could not win a case against
a servant maid, unless he were in the right.
Besides the rav and the dayyan there were other men whose callings
were holy,--the shohat, who knew how cattle and fowls should be
killed; the hazzan and the other officers of the synagogue; the
teachers of Hebrew, and their pupils. It did not matter how poor a man
was, he was to be respected and set above other men, if he were
learned in the Law.
In the synagogue scores of men sat all day long over the Hebrew books,
studying and disputing from early dawn till candles were brought in at
night, and then as long as the candles lasted. They could not take
time for anything else, if they meant to become great scholars. Most
of them were strangers in Polotzk, and had no home except the
synagogue. They slept on benches, on tables, on the floor; they picked
up their meals wherever they could. They had come from distant cities,
so as to be under good teachers in Polotzk; and the townspeople were
proud to support them by giving them food and clothing and sometimes
money to visit their homes on holidays. But the poor students came in
such numbers that there were not enough rich families to provide for
all, so that some of them suffered privation. You could pick out a
poor student in a crowd, by his pale face and shrunken form.
There was almost always a poor student taking meals at our house. He
was assigned a certain day, and on that day my grandmother took care
to have something especially good for dinner. It was a very shabby
guest who sat down with us at table, but we children watched him with
respectful eyes. Grandmother had told us that he was a lamden
(scholar), and we saw something holy in the way he ate his cabbage.
Not every man could hope to be a rav, but no Jewish boy was allowed to
grow up without at least a rudimentary knowledge of Hebrew. The
scantiest income had to be divided so as to provide for the boys'
tuition. To leave a boy without a teacher was a disgrace upon the
whole family, to the remotest relative. For the children of the
destitute there was a free school, supported by the charity of the
pious. And so every boy was sent to heder (Hebrew school) almost as
soon as he could speak; and usually he continued to study until his
confirmation, at thirteen years of age, or as much longer as his
talent and ambition carried him. My brother was five years old when he
entered on his studies. He was carried to the heder, on the first day,
covered over with a praying-shawl, so that nothing unholy should look
on him; and he was presented with a bun, on which were traced, in
honey, these words: "The Torah left by Moses is the heritage of the
children of Jacob."
After a boy entered heder, he was the hero of the family. He was
served before the other children at table, and nothing was too good
for him. If the family were very poor, all the girls might go
barefoot, but the heder boy must have shoes; he must have a plate of
hot soup, though the others ate dry bread. When the rebbe (teacher)
came on Sabbath afternoon, to examine the boy in the hearing of the
family, everybody sat around the table and nodded with satisfaction,
if he read his portion well; and he was given a great saucerful of
preserves, and was praised, and blessed, and made much of. No wonder
he said, in his morning prayer, "I thank Thee, Lord, for not having
created me a female." It was not much to be a girl, you see. Girls
could not be scholars and rabbonim.
I went to my brother's heder, sometimes, to bring him his dinner, and
saw how the boys studied. They sat on benches around the table, with
their hats on, of course, and the sacred fringes hanging beneath their
jackets. The rebbe sat at an end of the table, rehearsing two or three
of the boys who were studying the same part, pointing out the words
with his wooden pointer, so as not to lose the place. Everybody read
aloud, the smallest boys repeating the alphabet in a sing-song, while
the advanced boys read their portions in a different sing-song; and
everybody raised his voice to its loudest so as to drown the other
voices. The good boys never took their eyes off their page, except to
ask the rebbe a question; but the naughty boys stared around the room,
and kicked each other under the table, till the rebbe caught them at
it. He had a ruler for striking the bad boys on the knuckles, and in a
corner of the room leaned a long birch wand for pupils who would not
learn their lessons.
The boys came to heder before nine in the morning, and remained until
eight or nine in the evening. Stupid pupils, who could not remember
the lesson, sometimes had to stay till ten. There was an hour for
dinner and play at noon. Good little boys played quietly in their
places, but most of the boys ran out of the house and jumped and
yelled and quarrelled.
There was nothing in what the boys did in heder that I could not have
done--if I had not been a girl. For a girl it was enough if she could
read her prayers in Hebrew, and follow the meaning by the Yiddish
translation at the bottom of the page. It did not take long to learn
this much,--a couple of terms with a rebbetzin (female teacher),--and
after that she was done with books.
A girl's real schoolroom was her mother's kitchen. There she learned
to bake and cook and manage, to knit, sew, and embroider; also to spin
and weave, in country places. And while her hands were busy, her
mother instructed her in the laws regulating a pious Jewish household
and in the conduct proper for a Jewish wife; for, of course, every
girl hoped to be a wife. A girl was born for no other purpose.
How soon it came, the pious burden of wifehood! One day the girl is
playing forfeits with her laughing friends, the next day she is missed
from the circle. She has been summoned to a conference with the
shadchan (marriage broker), who has been for months past advertising
her housewifely talents, her piety, her good looks, and her marriage
portion, among families with marriageable sons. Her parents are
pleased with the son-in-law proposed by the shadchan, and now, at the
last, the girl is brought in, to be examined and appraised by the
prospective parents-in-law. If the negotiations go off smoothly, the
marriage contract is written, presents are exchanged between the
engaged couple, through their respective parents, and all that is left
the girl of her maidenhood is a period of busy preparation for the
wedding.
[Illustration: HEDER (HEBREW SCHOOL) FOR BOYS IN POLOTZK]
If the girl is well-to-do, it is a happy interval, spent in visits to
the drapers and tailors, in collecting linens and featherbeds and
vessels of copper and brass. The former playmates come to inspect the
trousseau, enviously fingering the silks and velvets of the
bride-elect. The happy heroine tries on frocks and mantles before her
glass, blushing at references to the wedding day; and to the question,
"How do you like the bridegroom?" she replies, "How should I know?
There was such a crowd at the betrothal that I didn't see him."
Marriage was a sacrament with us Jews in the Pale. To rear a family of
children was to serve God. Every Jewish man and woman had a part in
the fulfilment of the ancient promise given to Jacob that his seed
should be abundantly scattered over the earth. Parenthood, therefore,
was the great career. But while men, in addition to begetting, might
busy themselves with the study of the Law, woman's only work was
motherhood. To be left an old maid became, accordingly, the greatest
misfortune that could threaten a girl; and to ward off that calamity
the girl and her family, to the most distant relatives, would strain
every nerve, whether by contributing to her dowry, or hiding her
defects from the marriage broker, or praying and fasting that God
might send her a husband.
Not only must all the children of a family be mated, but they must
marry in the order of their ages. A younger daughter must on no
account marry before an elder. A houseful of daughters might be held
up because the eldest failed to find favor in the eyes of prospective
mothers-in-law; not one of the others could marry till the eldest was
disposed of.
A cousin of mine was guilty of the disloyalty of wishing to marry
before her elder sister, who was unfortunate enough to be rejected by
one mother-in-law after another. My uncle feared that the younger
daughter, who was of a firm and masterful nature, might carry out her
plans, thereby disgracing her unhappy sister. Accordingly he hastened
to conclude an alliance with a family far beneath him, and the girl
was hastily married to a boy of whom little was known beyond the fact
that he was inclined to consumption.
The consumptive tendency was no such horror, in an age when
superstition was more in vogue than science. For one patient that went
to a physician in Polotzk, there were ten who called in unlicensed
practitioners and miracle workers. If my mother had an obstinate
toothache that honored household remedies failed to relieve, she went
to Dvoshe, the pious woman, who cured by means of a flint and steel,
and a secret prayer pronounced as the sparks flew up. During an
epidemic of scarlet fever, we protected ourselves by wearing a piece
of red woolen tape around the neck. Pepper and salt tied in a corner
of the pocket was effective in warding off the evil eye. There were
lucky signs, lucky dreams, spirits, and hobgoblins, a grisly
collection, gathered by our wandering ancestors from the demonologies
of Asia and Europe.
Antiquated as our popular follies was the organization of our small
society. It was a caste system with social levels sharply marked off,
and families united by clannish ties. The rich looked down on the
poor, the merchants looked down on the artisans, and within the ranks
of the artisans higher and lower grades were distinguished. A
shoemaker's daughter could not hope to marry the son of a shopkeeper,
unless she brought an extra large dowry; and she had to make up her
mind to be snubbed by the sisters-in-law and cousins-in-law all her
life.
One qualification only could raise a man above his social level, and
that was scholarship. A boy born in the gutter need not despair of
entering the houses of the rich, if he had a good mind and a great
appetite for sacred learning. A poor scholar would be preferred in the
marriage market to a rich ignoramus. In the phrase of our
grandmothers, a boy stuffed with learning was worth more than a girl
stuffed with bank notes.
Simple piety unsupported by learning had a parallel value in the eyes
of good families. This was especially true among the Hasidim, the sect
of enthusiasts who set religious exaltation above rabbinical lore.
Ecstasy in prayer and fantastic merriment on days of religious
rejoicing, raised a Hasid to a hero among his kind. My father's
grandfather, who knew of Hebrew only enough to teach beginners, was
famous through a good part of the Pale for his holy life. Israel
Kimanyer he was called, from the village of Kimanye where he lived;
and people were proud to establish even the most distant relationship
with him. Israel was poor to the verge of beggary, but he prayed more
than other people, never failed in the slightest observance enjoined
on Jews, shared his last crust with every chance beggar, and sat up
nights to commune with God. His family connections included country
peddlers, starving artisans, and ne'er-do-wells; but Israel was a
zaddik--a man of piety--and the fame of his good life redeemed the
whole wretched clan. When his grandson, my father, came to marry, he
boasted his direct descent from Israel Kimanyer, and picked his bride
from the best families.
The little house may still be standing which the pious Jews of Kimanye
and the neighboring villages built for my great-grandfather, close on
a century ago. He was too poor to build his own house, so the good
people who loved him, and who were almost as poor as he, collected a
few rubles among themselves, and bought a site, and built the house.
Built, let it be known, with their own hands; for they were too poor
to hire workmen. They carried the beams and boards on their shoulders,
singing and dancing on the way, as they sang and danced at the
presentation of a scroll to the synagogue. They hauled and sawed and
hammered, till the last nail was driven home; and when they conducted
the holy man to his new abode, the rejoicing was greater than at the
crowning of a czar.
That little cabin was fit to be preserved as the monument to a
species of idealism that has rarely been known outside the Pale. What
was the ultimate source of the pious enthusiasm that built my
great-grandfather's house? What was the substance behind the show of
the Judaism of the Pale? Stripped of its grotesque mask of forms,
rites, and mediæval superstitions, the religion of these fanatics was
simply the belief that God was, had been, and ever would be, and that
they, the children of Jacob, were His chosen messengers to carry His
Law to all the nations. Beneath the mountainous volumes of the
Talmudists and commentators, the Mosaic tablets remained intact. Out
of the mazes of the Cabala the pure doctrine of ancient Judaism found
its way to the hearts of the faithful. Sects and schools might rise
and fall, deafening the ears of the simple with the clamor of their
disputes, still the Jew, retiring within his own soul, heard the
voice of the God of Abraham. Prophets, messiahs, miracle workers
might have their day, still the Jew was conscious that between
himself and God no go-between was needed; that he, as well as every
one of his million brothers, had his portion of God's work to do. And
this close relation to God was the source of the strength that
sustained the Jew through all the trials of his life in the Pale.
Consciously or unconsciously, the Jew identified himself with the
cause of righteousness on earth; and hence the heroism with which he
met the battalions of tyrants.
No empty forms could have impressed the unborn children of the Pale so
deeply that they were prepared for willing martyrdom almost as soon as
they were weaned from their mother's breast. The flame of the burning
bush that had dazzled Moses still lighted the gloomy prison of the
Pale. Behind the mummeries, ceremonials, and symbolic accessories, the
object of the Jew's adoration was the face of God.
This has been many times proved by those who escaped from the Pale,
and, excited by sudden freedom, thought to rid themselves, by one
impatient effort, of every strand of their ancient bonds. Eager to be
merged in the better world in which they found themselves, the escaped
prisoners determined on a change of mind, a change of heart, a change
of manner. They rejoiced in their transformation, thinking that every
mark of their former slavery was obliterated. And then, one day,
caught in the vise of some crucial test, the Jew fixed his alarmed
gaze on his inmost soul, and found there the image of his father's
God.
* * * * *
Merrily played the fiddlers at the wedding of my father, who was the
grandson of Israel Kimanyer of sainted memory. The most pious men in
Polotzk danced the night through, their earlocks dangling, the tails
of their long coats flying in a pious ecstasy. Beggars swarmed among
the bidden guests, sure of an easy harvest where so many hearts were
melted by piety. The wedding jester excelled himself in apt allusions
to the friends and relatives who brought up their wedding presents at
his merry invitation. The sixteen-year-old bride, suffocated beneath
her heavy veil, blushed unseen at the numerous healths drunk to her
future sons and daughters. The whole town was a-flutter with joy,
because the pious scion of a godly race had found a pious wife, and a
young branch of the tree of Judah was about to bear fruit.
When I came to lie on my mother's breast, she sang me lullabies on
lofty themes. I heard the names of Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah as early
as the names of father, mother, and nurse. My baby soul was enthralled
by sad and noble cadences, as my mother sang of my ancient home in
Palestine, or mourned over the desolation of Zion. With the first
rattle that was placed in my hand a prayer was pronounced over me, a
petition that a pious man might take me to wife, and a messiah be
among my sons.
I was fed on dreams, instructed by means of prophecies, trained to
hear and see mystical things that callous senses could not perceive. I
was taught to call myself a princess, in memory of my forefathers who
had ruled a nation. Though I went in the disguise of an outcast, I
felt a halo resting on my brow. Sat upon by brutal enemies, unjustly
hated, annihilated a hundred times, I yet arose and held my head high,
sure that I should find my kingdom in the end, although I had lost my
way in exile; for He who had brought my ancestors safe through a
thousand perils was guiding my feet as well. God needed me and I
needed Him, for we two together had a work to do, according to an
ancient covenant between Him and my forefathers.
This is the dream to which I was heir, in common with every sad-eyed
child of the Pale. This is the living seed which I found among my
heirlooms, when I learned how to strip from them the prickly husk in
which they were passed down to me. And what is the fruit of such seed
as that, and whither lead such dreams? If it is mine to give the
answer, let my words be true and brave.
CHAPTER III
BOTH THEIR HOUSES
Among the mediæval customs which were preserved in the Pale when the
rest of the world had long forgotten them was the use of popular
sobriquets in place of surnames proper. Family names existed only in
official documents, such as passports. For the most part people were
known by nicknames, prosaic or picturesque, derived from their
occupations, their physical peculiarities, or distinctive
achievements. Among my neighbors in Polotzk were Yankel the Wig-maker,
Mulye the Blind, Moshe the Six-fingered; and members of their
respective families were referred to by these nicknames: as, for
example, "Mirele, niece of Moshe the Six-fingered."
Let me spread out my family tree, raise aloft my coat-of-arms, and see
what heroes have left a mark by which I may be distinguished. Let me
hunt for my name in the chronicles of the Pale.
In the village of Yuchovitch, about sixty versts above Polotzk, the
oldest inhabitant still remembered my father's great-grandfather when
my father was a boy. Lebe the Innkeeper he was called, and no reproach
was coupled with the name. His son Hayyim succeeded to the business,
but later he took up the glazier's trade, and developed a knack for
all sorts of tinkering, whereby he was able to increase his too scanty
earnings.
Hayyim the Glazier is reputed to have been a man of fine countenance,
wise in homely counsel, honest in all his dealings. Rachel Leah, his
wife, had a reputation for practical wisdom even greater than his. She
was the advice giver of the village in every perplexity of life. My
father remembers his grandmother as a tall, trim, handsome old woman,
active and independent. Satin headbands and lace-trimmed bonnets not
having been invented in her day, Rachel Leah wore the stately knupf or
turban on her shaven head. On Sabbaths and holidays she went to the
synagogue with a long, straight mantle hanging from neck to ankle; and
she wore it with an air, on one sleeve only, the other dangling empty
from her shoulder.
Hayyim begat Joseph, and Joseph begat Pinchus, my father. It behooves
me to consider the stuff I sprang from.
Joseph inherited the trade, good name, and meagre portion of his
father, and maintained the family tradition of honesty and poverty
unbroken to the day of his death. For that matter, Yuchovitch never
heard of any connection of the family, not even a doubtful cousin, who
was not steeped to the earlocks in poverty. But that was no
distinction in Yuchovitch; the whole village was poor almost to
beggary.
Joseph was an indifferent workman, an indifferent scholar, and an
indifferent hasid. At one thing only he was strikingly good, and that
was at grumbling. Although not unkind, he had a temper that boiled
over at small provocation, and even in his most placid mood he took
very little satisfaction in the world. He reversed the proverb,
looking for the sable lining of every silver cloud. In the conditions
of his life he found plenty of food for his pessimism, and merry
hearts were very rare among his neighbors. Still a certain amount of
gloom appears to have been inherent in the man. And as he distrusted
the whole world, so Joseph distrusted himself, which made him shy and
awkward in company. My mother tells how, at the wedding of his only
son, my father, Joseph sat the whole night through in a corner, never
as much as cracking a smile, while the wedding guests danced, laughed,
and rejoiced.
It may have been through distrust of the marital state that Joseph
remained single till the advanced age of twenty-five. Then he took
unto himself an orphan girl as poor as he, namely, Rachel, the
daughter of Israel Kimanyer of pious memory.
My grandmother was such a gentle, cheerful soul, when I knew her, that
I imagine she must have been a merry bride. I should think my
grandfather would have taken great satisfaction in her society, as her
attempts to show him the world through rose-hued spectacles would have
given him frequent opportunity to parade his grievances and recite his
wrongs. But from all reports it appears that he was never satisfied,
and if he did not make his wife unhappy it was because he was away
from home so much. He was absent the greater part of the time; for a
glazier, even if he were a better workman than my grandfather, could
not make a living in Yuchovitch. He became a country peddler, trading
between Polotzk and Yuchovitch, and taking in all the desolate little
hamlets scattered along that route. Fifteen rubles' worth of goods was
a big bill to carry out of Polotzk. The stock consisted of cheap
pottery, tobacco, matches, boot grease, and axle grease. These he
bartered for country produce, including grains in small quantity,
bristles, rags, and bones. Money was seldom handled in these
transactions.
A rough enough life my grandfather led, on the road at all seasons, in
all weathers, knocking about at smoky little inns, glad sometimes of
the hospitality of some peasant's hut, where the pigs slept with the
family. He was doing well if he got home for the holidays with a
little white flour for a cake, and money enough to take his best coat
out of pawn. The best coat, and the candlesticks, too, would be
repawned promptly on the first workday; for it was not for the like of
Joseph of Yuchovitch to live with idle riches around him.
For the credit of Yuchovitch it must be recorded that my grandfather
never had to stay away from the synagogue for want of his one decent
coat to wear. His neighbor Isaac, the village money lender, never
refused to give up the pledged articles on a Sabbath eve, even if the
money due was not forthcoming. Many Sabbath coats besides my
grandfather's, and many candlesticks besides my grandmother's, passed
most of their existence under Isaac's roof, waiting to be redeemed.
But on the eve of Sabbath or holiday Isaac delivered them to their
respective owners, came they empty-handed or otherwise; and at the
expiration of the festival the grateful owners brought them promptly
back, for another season of retirement.
While my grandfather was on the road, my grandmother conducted her
humble household in a capable, housewifely way. Of her six children,
three died young, leaving two daughters and an only son, my father. My
grandmother fed and dressed her children the best she could, and
taught them to thank God for what they had not as well as for what
they had. Piety was about the only positive doctrine she attempted to
drill them in, leaving the rest of their education to life and the
rebbe.
Promptly when custom prescribed, Pinchus, the petted only son, was
sent to heder. My grandfather being on the road at the time, my
grandmother herself carried the boy in her arms, as was usual on the
first day. My father distinctly remembers that she wept on the way to
the heder; partly, I suppose, from joy at starting her son on a holy
life, and partly from sadness at being too poor to set forth the wine
and honey-cake proper to the occasion. For Grandma Rachel, schooled
though she was to pious contentment, probably had her moments of human
pettiness like the rest of us.
My father distinguished himself for scholarship from the first. Five
years old when he entered heder, at eleven he was already a _yeshibah
bahur_--a student in the seminary. The rebbe never had occasion to use
the birch on him. On the contrary, he held him up as an example to the
dull or lazy pupils, praised him in the village, and carried his fame
to Polotzk.
My grandmother's cup of pious joy was overfilled. Everything her boy
did was pleasant in her sight, for Pinchus was going to be a scholar,
a godly man, a credit to the memory of his renowned grandfather,
Israel Kimanyer. She let nothing interfere with his schooling. When
times were bad, and her husband came home with his goods unsold, she
borrowed and begged, till the rebbe's fee was produced. If bad luck
continued, she pleaded with the rebbe for time. She pawned not only
the candlesticks, but her shawl and Sabbath cap as well, to secure the
scant rations that gave the young scholar strength to study. More than
once in the bitter winter, as my father remembers, she carried him to
heder on her back, because he had no shoes; she herself walking
almost barefoot in the cruel snow. No sacrifice was too great for her
in the pious cause of her boy's education. And when there was no rebbe
in Yuchovitch learned enough to guide him in the advanced studies, my
father was sent to Polotzk, where he lived with his poor relations,
who were not too poor to help support a future rebbe or rav. In
Polotzk he continued to distinguish himself for scholarship, till
people began to prophesy that he would live to be famous; and
everybody who remembered Israel Kimanyer regarded the promising
grandson with double respect.
At the age of fifteen my father was qualified to teach beginners in
Hebrew, and he was engaged as instructor in two families living six
versts apart in the country. The boy tutor had to make himself useful,
after lesson hours, by caring for the horse, hauling water from the
frozen pond, and lending a hand at everything. When the little sister
of one of his pupils died, in the middle of the winter, it fell to my
father's lot to take the body to the nearest Jewish cemetery, through
miles of desolate country, no living soul accompanying him.
After one term of this, he tried to go on with his own studies,
sometimes in Yuchovitch, sometimes in Polotzk, as opportunity
dictated. He made the journey to Polotzk beside his father, jogging
along in the springless wagon on the rutty roads. He took a boy's
pleasure in the gypsy life, the green wood, and the summer storm;
while his father sat moody beside him, seeing nothing but the spavins
on the horse's hocks, and the mud in the road ahead.
There is little else to tell of my father's boyhood, as most of his
time was spent in the schoolroom. Outside the schoolroom he was
conspicuous for high spirits in play, daring in mischief, and
independence in everything. But a boy's playtime was so short in
Yuchovitch, and his resources so limited, that even a lad of spirit
came to the edge of his premature manhood without a regret for his
nipped youth. So my father, at the age of sixteen and a half, lent a
willing ear to the cooing voice of the marriage broker.
Indeed, it was high time for him to marry. His parents had kept him so
far, but they had two daughters to marry off, and not a groschen laid
by for their dowries. The cost of my father's schooling, as he
advanced, had mounted to seventeen rubles a term, and the poor rebbe
was seldom paid in full. Of course my father's scholarship was his
fortune--in time it would be his support; but in the meanwhile the
burden of feeding and clothing him lay heavy on his parents'
shoulders. The time had come to find him a well-to-do father-in-law,
who should support him and his wife and children, while he continued
to study in the seminary.
After the usual conferences between parents and marriage brokers, my
father was betrothed to an undertaker's daughter in Polotzk. The girl
was too old,--every day of twenty years,--but three hundred rubles in
dowry, with board after marriage, not to mention handsome presents to
the bridegroom, easily offset the bride's age. My father's family, to
the humblest cousin, felt themselves set up by the match he had made;
and the boy was happy enough, displaying a watch and chain for the
first time in his life, and a good coat on week days. As for his
fiancée, he could have no objection to her, as he had seen her only at
a distance, and had never spoken to her.
When it was time for the wedding preparations to begin, news came to
Yuchovitch of the death of the bride-elect, and my father's prospects
seemed fallen to the ground. But the undertaker had another daughter,
girl of thirteen, and he pressed my father to take her in her sister's
place. At the same time the marriage broker proposed another match;
and my father's poor cousins bristled with importance once more.
Somehow or other my father succeeded in getting in a word at the
family councils that ensued; he even had the temerity to express a
strong preference. He did not want any more of the undertaker's
daughters; he wanted to consider the rival match. There were no
serious objections from the cousins, and my father became engaged to
my mother.
This second choice was Hannah Hayye, only daughter of Raphael, called
the Russian. She had had a very different bringing-up from Pinchus,
the grandson of Israel Kimanyer. She had never known a day of want;
had never gone barefoot from necessity. The family had a solid
position in Polotzk, her father being the owner of a comfortable home
and a good business.
Prosperity is prosaic, so I shall skip briefly over the history of my
mother's house.
My grandfather Raphael, early left an orphan, was brought up by an
elder brother, in a village at no great distance from Polotzk. The
brother dutifully sent him to heder, and at an early age betrothed him
to Deborah, daughter of one Solomon, a dealer in grain and cattle.
Deborah was not yet in her teens at the time of the betrothal, and so
foolish was she that she was afraid of her affianced husband. One day,
when she was coming from the store with a bottle of liquid yeast, she
suddenly came face to face with her betrothed, which gave her such a
fright that she dropped the bottle, spilling the yeast on her pretty
dress; and she ran home crying all the way. At thirteen she was
married, which had a good effect on her deportment. I hear no more of
her running away from her husband.
Among the interesting things belonging to my grandmother, besides her
dowry, at the time of the marriage, was her family. Her father was so
original that he kept a tutor for his daughters--sons he had none--and
allowed them to be instructed in the rudiments of three or four
languages and the elements of arithmetic. Even more unconventional was
her sister Hode. She had married a fiddler, who travelled constantly,
playing at hotels and inns, all through "far Russia." Having no
children, she ought to have spent her days in fasting and praying and
lamenting. Instead of this, she accompanied her husband on his
travels, and even had a heart to enjoy the excitement and variety of
their restless life. I should be the last to blame my great-aunt, for
the irregularity of her conduct afforded my grandfather the opening
for his career, the fruits of which made my childhood so pleasant. For
several years my grandfather travelled in Hode's train, in the
capacity of shohat providing kosher meat for the little troup in the
unholy wilds of "far Russia"; and the grateful couple rewarded him so
generously that he soon had a fortune of eighty rubles laid by.
My grandfather thought the time had now come to settle down, but he
did not know how to invest his wealth. To resolve his perplexity, he
made a pilgrimage to the Rebbe of Kopistch, who advised him to open a
store in Polotzk, and gave him a blessed groschen to keep in the money
drawer for good luck.
The blessing of the "good Jew" proved fruitful. My grandfather's
business prospered, and my grandmother bore him children, several sons
and one daughter. The sons were sent to heder, like all respectable
boys; and they were taught, in addition, writing and arithmetic,
enough for conducting a business. With this my grandfather was
content; more than this he considered incompatible with piety. He was
one of those who strenuously opposed the influence of the public
school, and bribed the government officials to keep their children's
names off the register of schoolboys, as we have already seen. When he
sent his sons to a private tutor, where they could study Russian with
their hats on, he felt, no doubt, that he was giving them all the
education necessary to a successful business career, without violating
piety too grossly.
If reading and writing were enough for the sons, even less would
suffice the daughter. A female teacher was engaged for my mother, at
three kopecks a week, to teach her the Hebrew prayers; and my
grandmother, herself a better scholar than the teacher, taught her
writing in addition. My mother was quick to learn, and expressed an
ambition to study Russian. She teased and coaxed, and her mother
pleaded for her, till my grandfather was persuaded to send her to a
tutor. But the fates were opposed to my mother's education. On the
first day at school, a sudden inflammation of the eyes blinded my
mother temporarily, and although the distemper vanished as suddenly as
it had appeared, it was taken as an omen, and my mother was not
allowed to return to her lessons.
Still she did not give up. She saved up every groschen that was given
her to buy sweets, and bribed her brother Solomon, who was proud of
his scholarship, to give her lessons in secret. The two strove
earnestly with book and quill, in their hiding-place under the
rafters, till my mother could read and write Russian, and translate a
simple passage of Hebrew.
My grandmother, although herself a good housewife, took no pains to
teach her only daughter the domestic arts. She only petted and coddled
her and sent her out to play. But my mother was as ambitious about
housework as about books. She coaxed the housemaid to let her mix the
bread. She learned knitting from watching her playmates. She was
healthy and active, quick at everything, and restless with unspent
energy. Therefore she was quite willing, at the age of ten, to go into
her father's business as his chief assistant.
As the years went by she developed a decided talent for business, so
that her father could safely leave all his affairs in her hands if he
had to go out of town. Her devotion, ability, and tireless energy made
her, in time, indispensable. My grandfather was obliged to admit that
the little learning she had stolen was turned to good account, when he
saw how well she could keep his books, and how smoothly she got along
with Russian and Polish customers. Perhaps that was the argument that
induced him, after obstinate years, to remove his veto from my
mother's petitions and let her take up lessons again. For while piety
was my grandfather's chief concern on the godly side, on the worldly
side he set success in business above everything.
My mother was fifteen years old when she entered on a career of higher
education. For two hours daily she was released from the store, and in
that interval she strove with might and main to conquer the world
of knowledge. Katrina Petrovna, her teacher, praised and encouraged
her; and there was no reason why the promising pupil should not have
developed into a young lady of culture, with Madame teaching Russian,
German, crocheting, and singing--yes, out of a book, to the
accompaniment of a clavier--all for a fee of seventy-five kopecks a
week.
[Illustration: THE WOOD MARKET, POLOTZK]
Did I say there was no reason? And what about the marriage broker?
Hannah Hayye, the only daughter of Raphael the Russian, going on
sixteen, buxom, bright, capable, and well educated, could not escape
the eye of the shadchan. A fine thing it would be to let such a likely
girl grow old over a book! To the canopy with her, while she could
fetch the highest price in the marriage market!
My mother was very unwilling to think of marriage at this time. She
had nothing to gain by marriage, for already she had everything that
she desired, especially since she was permitted to study. While her
father was rather stern, her mother spoiled and petted her; and she
was the idol of her aunt Hode, the fiddler's wife.
Hode had bought a fine estate in Polotzk, after my grandfather settled
there, and made it her home whenever she became tired of travelling.
She lived in state, with many servants and dependents, wearing silk
dresses on week days, and setting silver plate before the meanest
guest. The women of Polotzk were breathless over her wardrobe,
counting up how many pairs of embroidered boots she had, at fifteen
rubles a pair. And Hode's manners were as much a subject of gossip as
her clothes, for she had picked up strange ways in her travels
Although she was so pious that she was never tempted to eat trefah, no
matter if she had to go hungry, her conduct in other respects was not
strictly orthodox. For one thing, she was in the habit of shaking
hands with men, looking them straight in the face. She spoke Russian
like a Gentile, she kept a poodle, and she had no children.
Nobody meant to blame the rich woman for being childless, because it
was well known in Polotzk that Hode the Russian, as she was called,
would have given all her wealth for one scrawny baby. But she was to
blame for voluntarily exiling herself from Jewish society for years at
a time, to live among pork-eaters, and copy the bold ways of Gentile
women. And so while they pitied her childlessness, the women of
Polotzk regarded her misfortune as perhaps no more than a due
punishment.
Hode, poor woman, felt a hungry heart beneath her satin robes. She
wanted to adopt one of my grandmother's children, but my grandmother
would not hear of it. Hode was particularly taken with my mother, and
my grandmother, in compassion, loaned her the child for days at a
time; and those were happy days for both aunt and niece. Hode would
treat my mother to every delicacy in her sumptuous pantry, tell her
wonderful tales of life in distant parts, show her all her beautiful
dresses and jewels, and load her with presents.
As my mother developed into girlhood, her aunt grew more and more
covetous of her. Following a secret plan, she adopted a boy from the
poorhouse, and brought him up with every advantage that money could
buy. My mother, on her visits, was thrown a great deal into this boy's
society, but she liked him less than the poodle. This grieved her
aunt, who cherished in her heart the hope that my mother would marry
her adopted son, and so become her daughter after all. And in order
to accustom her to think well of the match, Hode dinned the boy's name
in my mother's ears day and night, praising him and showing him off.
She would open her jewel boxes and take out the flashing diamonds,
heavy chains, and tinkling bracelets, dress my mother in them in front
of the mirror, telling her that they would all be hers--all her
own--when she became the bride of Mulke.
My mother still describes the necklace of pearls and diamonds which
her aunt used to clasp around her plump throat, with a light in her
eyes that is reminiscent of girlish pleasure. But to all her aunt's
teasing references to the future, my mother answered with a giggle and
a shake of her black curls, and went on enjoying herself, thinking
that the day of judgment was very, very far away. But it swooped down
on her sooner than she expected--the momentous hour when she must
choose between the pearl necklace with Mulke and a penniless stranger
from Yuchovitch who was reputed to be a fine scholar.
Mulke she would not have even if all the pearls in the ocean came with
him. The boy was stupid and unteachable, and of unspeakable origin.
Picked up from the dirty floor of the poorhouse, his father was
identified as the lazy porter who sometimes chopped a cord of wood for
my grandmother; and his sisters were slovenly housemaids scattered
through Polotzk. No, Mulke was not to be considered. But why consider
anybody? Why think of a _hossen_ at all, when she was so content? My
mother ran away every time the shadchan came, and she begged to be
left as she was, and cried, and invoked her mother's support. But her
mother, for the first time in her history, refused to take the
daughter's part. She joined the enemy--the family and the
shadchan--and my mother saw that she was doomed.
Of course she submitted. What else could a dutiful daughter do, in
Polotzk? She submitted to being weighed, measured, and appraised
before her face, and resigned herself to what was to come.
When that which was to come did come, she did not recognize it. She
was all alone in the store one day, when a beardless young man, in top
boots that wanted grease, and a coat too thin for the weather, came in
for a package of cigarettes. My mother climbed up on the counter, with
one foot on a shelf, to reach down the cigarettes. The customer gave
her the right change, and went out. And my mother never suspected that
that was the proposed hossen, who came to look her over and see if she
was likely to last. For my father considered himself a man of
experience now, this being his second match, and he was determined to
have a hand in this affair himself.
No sooner was the hossen out of the store than his mother, also
unknown to the innocent storekeeper, came in for a pound of tallow
candles. She offered a torn bill in payment, and my mother accepted it
and gave change; showing that she was wise enough in money matters to
know that a torn bill was good currency.
After the woman there shuffled in a poor man evidently from the
country, who, in a shy and yet challenging manner, asked for a package
of cheap tobacco. My mother produced the goods with her usual
dispatch, gave the correct change, and stood at attention for more
trade.
Parents and son held a council around the corner, the object of their
espionage never dreaming that she had been put to a triple test and
not found wanting. But in the evening of the same day she was
enlightened. She was summoned to her elder brother's house, for a
conference on the subject of the proposed match, and there she found
the young man who had bought the cigarettes. For my mother's family,
if they forced her to marry, were willing to make her path easier by
letting her meet the hossen, convinced that she must be won over by
his good looks and learned conversation.
It does not really matter how my mother felt, as she sat, with a
protecting niece in her lap, at one end of a long table, with the
hossen fidgeting at the other end. The marriage contract would be
written anyway, no matter what she thought of the hossen. And the
contract was duly written, in the presence of the assembled families
of both parties, after plenty of open discussion, in which everybody
except the prospective bride and groom had a voice.
One voice in particular broke repeatedly into the consultations of the
parents and the shadchan, and that was the voice of Henne Rösel, one
of my father's numerous poor cousins. Henne Rösel was not unknown to
my mother. She often came to the store, to beg, under pretence of
borrowing, a little flour or sugar or a stick of cinnamon. On the
occasion of the betrothal she had arrived late, dressed in
indescribable odds and ends, with an artificial red flower stuck into
her frowzy wig. She pushed and elbowed her way to the middle of the
table, where the shadchan sat ready with paper and ink to take down
the articles of the contract. On every point she had some comment to
make, till a dispute arose over a note which my grandfather offered as
part of the dowry, the hossen's people insisting on cash. No one
insisted so loudly as the cousin with the red flower in her wig; and
when the other cousins seemed about to weaken and accept the note,
Red-Flower stood up and exhorted them to be firm, lest their flesh and
blood be cheated under their noses. The meddlesome cousin was silenced
at last, the contract was signed, the happiness of the engaged couple
was pledged in wine, the guests dispersed. And all this while my
mother had not opened her mouth, and my father had scarcely been
heard.
That is the way my fate was sealed. It gives me a shudder of wonder to
think what a narrow escape I had; I came so near not being born at
all. If the beggarly cousin with the frowzy wig had prevailed upon her
family and broken off the match, then my mother would not have married
my father, and I should at this moment be an unborn possibility in a
philosopher's brain. It is right that I should pick my words most
carefully, and meditate over every comma, because I am describing
miracles too great for careless utterance. If I had died after my
first breath, my history would still be worth recording. For before I
could lie on my mother's breast, the earth had to be prepared, and the
stars had to take their places; a million races had to die, testing
the laws of life; and a boy and girl had to be bound for life to watch
together for my coming. I was millions of years on the way, and I came
through the seas of chance, over the fiery mountain of law, by the
zigzag path of human possibility. Multitudes were pushed back into the
abyss of non-existence, that I should have way to creep into being.
And at the last, when I stood at the gate of life, a weazen-faced
fishwife, who had not wit enough to support herself, came near
shutting me out.
Such creatures of accident are we, liable to a thousand deaths before
we are born. But once we are here, we may create our own world, if we
choose. Since I have stood on my own feet, I have never met my master.
For every time I choose a friend I determine my fate anew. I can think
of no cataclysm that could have the force to move me from my path.
Fire or flood or the envy of men may tear the roof off my house, but
my soul would still be at home under the lofty mountain pines that dip
their heads in star dust. Even life, that was so difficult to attain,
may serve me merely as a wayside inn, if I choose to go on eternally.
However I came here, it is mine to be.
CHAPTER IV
DAILY BREAD
My mother ought to have been happy in her engagement. Everybody
congratulated her on securing such a scholar, her parents loaded her
with presents, and her friends envied her. It is true that the
hossen's family consisted entirely of poor relations; there was not
one solid householder among them. From the worldly point of view my
mother made a mésalliance. But as one of my aunts put it, when my
mother objected to the association with the undesirable cousins, she
could take out the cow and set fire to the barn; meaning that she
could rejoice in the hossen and disregard his family.
The hossen, on his part, had reason to rejoice, without any
reservations. He was going into a highly respectable family, with a
name supported by property and business standing. The promised dowry
was considerable, the presents were generous, the trousseau would be
liberal, and the bride was fair and capable. The bridegroom would have
years before him in which he need do nothing but eat free board, wear
his new clothes, and study Torah; and his poor relations could hold up
their heads at the market stalls, and in the rear pews in the
synagogue.
My mother's trousseau was all that a mother-in-law could wish. The
best tailor in Polotzk was engaged to make the cloaks and gowns, and
his shop was filled to bursting with ample lengths of velvet and satin
and silk. The wedding gown alone cost every kopeck of fifty rubles,
as the tailor's wife reported all over Polotzk. The lingerie was of
the best, and the seamstress was engaged on it for many weeks.
Featherbeds, linen, household goods of every sort--everything was
provided in abundance. My mother crocheted many yards of lace to trim
the best sheets, and fine silk coverlets adorned the plump beds. Many
a marriageable maiden who came to view the trousseau went home to
prink and blush and watch for the shadchan.
The wedding was memorable for gayety and splendor. The guests included
some of the finest people in Polotzk; for while my grandfather was not
quite at the top of the social scale, he had business connections with
those that were, and they all turned out for the wedding of his only
daughter, the men in silk frock coats, the women in all their jewelry.
The bridegroom's aunts and cousins came in full force. Wedding
messengers had been sent to every person who could possibly claim
relationship with the hossen. My mother's parents were too generous to
slight the lowliest. Instead of burning the barn, they did all they
could to garnish it. One or two of the more important of the poor
relations came to the wedding in gowns paid for by my rich
grandfather. The rest came decked out in borrowed finery, or in
undisguised shabbiness. But nobody thought of staying away--except the
obstructive cousin who had nearly prevented the match.
When it was time to conduct the bride to the wedding canopy, the
bridegroom's mother missed Henne Rösel. The house was searched for
her, but in vain. Nobody had seen her. But my grandmother could not
bear to have the marriage solemnized in the absence of a first
cousin. Such a wedding as this was not likely to be repeated in her
family; it would be a great pity if any of the relatives missed it. So
she petitioned the principals to delay the ceremony, while she herself
went in search of the missing cousin.
Clear over to the farthest end of the town she walked, lifting her
gala dress well above her ankles. She found Henne Rösel in her untidy
kitchen, sound in every limb but sulky in spirit. My grandmother
exclaimed at her conduct, and bade her hurry with her toilet, and
accompany her; the wedding guests were waiting; the bride was faint
from prolonging her fast. But Henne Rösel flatly refused to go; the
bride might remain an old maid, for all she, Henne Rösel, cared about
the wedding. My troubled grandmother expostulated, questioned her,
till she drew out the root of the cousin's sulkiness. Henne Rösel
complained that she had not been properly invited. The wedding
messenger had come,--oh, yes!--but she had not addressed her as
flatteringly, as respectfully as she had been heard to address the
wife of Yohem, the money-lender. And Henne Rösel wasn't going to any
weddings where she was not wanted. My grandmother had a struggle of
it, but she succeeded in soothing the sensitive cousin, who consented
at length to don her best dress and go to the wedding.
While my grandmother labored with Henne Rösel, the bride sat in state
in her father's house under the hill, the maidens danced, and the
matrons fanned themselves, while the fiddlers and _zimblers_ scraped
and tinkled. But as the hours went by, the matrons became restless and
the dancers wearied. The poor relations grew impatient for the feast,
and the babies in their laps began to fidget and cry; while the bride
grew faint, and the bridegroom's party began to send frequent
messengers from the house next door, demanding to know the cause of
the delay. Some of the guests at last lost all patience, and begged
leave to go home. But before they went they deposited the wedding
presents in the bride's satin lap, till she resembled a heathen image
hung about with offerings.
My mother, after thirty years of bustling life, retains a lively
memory of the embarrassment she suffered while waiting for the arrival
of the troublesome cousin. When that important dame at last appeared,
with her chin in the air, the artificial flower still stuck
belligerently into her dusty wig, and my grandmother beaming behind
her, the bride's heart fairly jumped with anger, and the red blood of
indignation set her cheeks afire. No wonder that she speaks the name
of the Red-Flower with an unloving accent to this day, although she
has forgiven the enemies who did her greater wrong. The bride is a
princess on her wedding day. To put upon her an indignity is an
unpardonable offense.
After the feasting and dancing, which lasted a whole week, the wedding
presents were locked up, the bride, with her hair discreetly covered,
returned to her father's store, and the groom, with his new
praying-shawl, repaired to the synagogue. This was all according to
the marriage bargain, which implied that my father was to study and
pray and fill the house with the spirit of piety, in return for board
and lodging and the devotion of his wife and her entire family.
All the parties concerned had entered into this bargain in good faith,
so far as they knew their own minds. But the eighteen-year-old
bridegroom, before many months had passed, began to realize that he
felt no such hunger for the word of the Law as he was supposed to
feel. He felt, rather, a hunger for life that all his studying did not
satisfy. He was not trained enough to analyze his own thoughts to any
purpose; he was not experienced enough to understand where his
thoughts were leading him. He only knew that he felt no call to pray
and fast that the Torah did not inspire him, and his days were blank.
The life he was expected to lead grew distasteful to him, and yet he
knew no other way to live. He became lax in his attendance at the
synagogue, incurring the reproach of the family. It began to be
rumored among the studious that the son-in-law of Raphael the Russian
was not devoting himself to the sacred books with any degree of
enthusiasm. It was well known that he had a good mind, but evidently
the spirit was lacking. My grandparents went from surprise to
indignation, from exhortation they passed to recrimination. Before my
parents had been married half a year, my grandfather's house was
divided against itself and my mother was torn between the two
factions. For while she sympathized with her parents, and felt
personally cheated by my father's lack of piety, she thought it was
her duty to take her husband's part, even against her parents, in
their own house. My mother was one of those women who always obey the
highest law they know, even though it leads them to their doom.
How did it happen that my father, who from his early boyhood had been
pointed out as a scholar in embryo, failed to live up to the
expectations of his world? It happened as it happened that his hair
curled over his high forehead: he was made that way. If people were
disappointed, it was because they had based their expectations on a
misconception of his character, for my father had never had any
aspirations for extreme piety. Piety was imputed to him by his mother,
by his rebbe, by his neighbors, when they saw that he rendered the
sacred word more intelligently than his fellow students. It was not
his fault that his people confused scholarship with religious ardor.
Having a good mind, he was glad to exercise it; and being given only
one subject to study he was bound to make rapid progress in that. If
he had ever been offered a choice between a religious and a secular
education, his friends would have found out early that he was not born
to be a rav. But as he had no mental opening except through the
hedder, he went on from year to year winning new distinction in Hebrew
scholarship; with the result that witnesses with preconceived ideas
began to see the halo of piety playing around his head, and a
well-to-do family was misled into making a match with him for the sake
of the glory that he was to attain.
When it became evident that the son-in-law was not going to develop
into a rav, my grandfather notified him that he would have to assume
the support of his own family without delay. My father therefore
entered on a series of experiments with paying occupations, for none
of which he was qualified, and in none of which he succeeded
permanently.
My mother was with my father, as equal partner and laborer, in
everything he attempted in Polotzk. They tried keeping a wayside inn,
but had to give it up because the life was too rough for my mother,
who was expecting her first baby. Returning to Polotzk they went to
storekeeping on their own account, but failed in this also, because my
father was inexperienced, and my mother, now with the baby to nurse,
was not able to give her best attention to business. Over two years
passed in this experiment, and in the interval the second child was
born, increasing my parents' need of a home and a reliable income.
It was then decided that my father should seek his fortune elsewhere.
He travelled as far east as Tchistopol, on the Volga, and south as far
as Odessa, on the Black Sea, trying his luck at various occupations
within the usual Jewish restrictions. Finally he reached the position
of assistant superintendent in a distillery, with a salary of thirty
rubles a month. That was a fair income for those days, and he was
planning to have his family join him when my Grandfather Raphael died,
leaving my mother heir to a good business. My father thereupon
returned to Polotzk, after nearly three years' absence from home.
As my mother had been trained to her business from childhood, while my
father had had only a little irregular experience, she naturally
remained the leader. She was as successful as her father before her.
The people continued to call her Raphael's Hannah Hayye, and under
that name she was greatly respected in the business world. Her eldest
brother was now a merchant of importance, and my mother's
establishment was gradually enlarged; so that, altogether, our family
had a solid position in Polotzk, and there were plenty to envy us.
We were almost rich, as Polotzk counted riches in those days;
certainly we were considered well-to-do. We moved into a larger house,
where there was room for out-of-town customers to stay overnight, with
stabling for their horses. We lived as well as any people of our
class, and perhaps better, because my father had brought home with
him from his travels a taste for a more genial life than Polotzk
usually asked for. My mother kept a cook and a nursemaid, and a
dvornik, or outdoor man, to take care of the horses, the cow, and the
woodpile. All the year round we kept open house, as I remember.
Cousins and aunts were always about, and on holidays friends of all
degrees gathered in numbers. And coming and going in the wing set
apart for business guests were merchants, traders, country peddlers,
peasants, soldiers, and minor government officials. It was a full
house at all times, and especially so during fairs, and at the season
of the military draft.
In the family wing there was also enough going on. There were four of
us children, besides father and mother and grandmother, and the
parasitic cousins. Fetchke was the eldest; I was the second; the third
was my only brother, named Joseph, for my father's father; and the
fourth was Deborah, named for my mother's mother.
I suppose I ought to explain my own name also, especially because I am
going to emerge as the heroine by and by. Be it therefore known that I
was named Maryashe, for a bygone aunt. I was never called by my full
name, however. "Maryashe" was too dignified for me. I was always
"Mashinke," or else "Mashke," by way of diminutive. A variety of
nicknames, mostly suggested by my physical peculiarities, were
bestowed on me from time to time by my fond or foolish relatives. My
uncle Berl, for example, gave me the name of "Zukrochene Flum," which
I am not going to translate, because it is uncomplimentary.
My sister Fetchke was always the good little girl, and when our
troubles began she was an important member of the family. What sort of
little girl I was will be written by and by. Joseph was the best
Jewish boy that ever was born, but he hated to go to heder, so he had
to be whipped, of course. Deborah was just a baby, and her principal
characteristic was single-mindedness. If she had teething to attend
to, she thought of nothing else day or night, and communicated with
the family on no other subject. If it was whooping-cough, she whooped
most heartily; if it was measles, she had them thick.
It was the normal thing in Polotzk, where the mothers worked as well
as the fathers, for the children to be left in the hands of
grandmothers and nursemaids. I suffer reminiscent terrors when I
recall Deborah's nurse, who never opened her lips except to frighten
us children--or else to lie. That girl never told the truth if she
could help it. I know it is so because I heard her tell eleven or
twelve unnecessary lies every day. In the beginning of her residence
with us, I exposed her indignantly every time I caught her lying; but
the tenor of her private conversations with me was conducive to a
cessation of my activity along the line of volunteer testimony. In
shorter words, the nurse terrified me with horrid threats until I did
not dare to contradict her even if she lied her head off. The things
she promised me in this life and in the life to come could not be
executed by a person without imagination. The nurse gave almost her
entire attention to us older children, disposing easily of the baby's
claims. Deborah, unless she was teething or whoop-coughing, was a
quiet baby, and would lie for hours on the nurse's lap, sucking at a
"pacifier" made of bread and sugar tied up in a muslin rag, and
previously chewed to a pulp by the nurse. And while the baby sucked
the nurse told us things--things that we must remember when we went to
bed at night.
A favorite subject of her discourse was the Evil One, who lived, so
she told us, in our attic, with his wife and brood. A pet amusement of
our invisible tenant was the translating of human babies into his
lair, leaving one of his own brats in the cradle; the moral of which
was that if nurse wanted to loaf in the yard and watch who went out
and who came in, we children must mind the baby. The girl was so sly
that she carried on all this tyranny without being detected, and we
lived in terror till she was discharged for stealing.
In our grandmothers we were very fortunate: They spoiled us to our
hearts' content. Grandma Deborah's methods I know only from hearsay,
for I was very little when she died. Grandma Rachel I remember
distinctly, spare and trim and always busy. I recall her coming in
midwinter from the frozen village where she lived. I remember, as if
it were but last winter, the immense shawls and wraps which we unwound
from about her person, her voluminous brown sack coat in which there
was room for three of us at a time, and at last the tight clasp of her
long arms, and her fresh, cold cheeks on ours. And when the hugging
and kissing were over, Grandma had a treat for us. It was _talakno_,
or oat flour, which we mixed with cold water and ate raw, using wooden
spoons, just like the peasants, and smacking our lips over it in
imaginary enjoyment.
But Grandma Rachel did not come to play. She applied herself
energetically to the housekeeping. She kept her bright eye on
everything, as if she were in her own trifling establishment in
Yuchovitch. Watchful was she as any cat--and harmless as a tame
rabbit. If she caught the maids at fault, she found an excuse for
them at the same time. If she was quite exasperated with the stupidity
of Yakub, the dvornik, she pretended to curse him in a phrase of her
own invention, a mixture of Hebrew and Russian, which, translated,
said, "Mayst thou have gold and silver in thy bosom"; but to the
choreman, who was not a linguist, the mongrel phrase conveyed a sense
of his delinquency.
Grandma Rachel meant to be very strict with us children, and
accordingly was prompt to discipline us; but we discovered early in
our acquaintance with her that the child who got a spanking was sure
to get a hot cookie or the jam pot to lick, so we did not stand in
great awe of her punishments. Even if it came to a spanking it was
only a farce. Grandma generally interposed a pillow between the palm
of her hand and the area of moral stimulation.
The real disciplinarian in our family was my father. Present or
absent, it was fear of his displeasure that kept us in the straight
and narrow path. In the minds of us children he was as much
represented, when away from home, by the strap hanging on the wall as
by his portrait which stood on a parlor table, in a gorgeous frame
adorned with little shells. Almost everybody's father had a strap, but
our father's strap was more formidable than the ordinary. For one
thing, it was more painful to encounter personally, because it was not
a simple strap, but a bunch of fine long strips, clinging as rubber.
My father called it noodles; and while his facetiousness was lost on
us children, the superior sting of his instrument was entirely
effective.
In his leisure, my father found means of instructing us other than by
the strap. He took us walking and driving, answered our questions, and
taught us many little things that our playmates were not taught.
From distant parts of the country he had imported little tricks of
speech and conduct, which we learned readily enough; for we were
always a teachable lot. Our pretty manners were very much admired, so
that we became used to being held up as models to children less
polite. Guests at our table praised our deportment, when, at the end
of a meal, we kissed the hands of father and mother and thanked them
for food. Envious mothers of rowdy children used to sneer, "Those
grandchildren of Raphael the Russian are quite the aristocrats."
[Illustration: MY FATHER'S PORTRAIT]
And yet, off the stage, we had our little quarrels and tempests,
especially I. I really and truly cannot remember a time when Fetchke
was naughty, but I was oftener in trouble than out of it. I need not
go into details. I only need to recall how often, on going to bed, I
used to lie silently rehearsing the day's misdeeds, my sister
refraining from talk out of sympathy. As I always came to the
conclusion that I wanted to reform, I emerged from my reflections with
this solemn formula: "Fetchke, let us be good." And my generosity in
including my sister in my plans for salvation was equalled by her
magnanimity in assuming part of my degradation. She always replied, in
aspiration as eager as mine, "Yes, Mashke, let us be good."
My mother had less to do than any one with our early training, because
she was confined to the store. When she came home at night, with her
pockets full of goodies for us, she was too hungry for our love to
listen to tales against us, too tired from work to discipline us. It
was only on Sabbaths and holidays that she had a chance to get
acquainted with us, and we all looked forward to these days of
enjoined rest.
On Friday afternoons my parents came home early, to wash and dress and
remove from their persons every sign of labor. The great keys of the
store were put away out of sight; the money bag was hidden in the
featherbeds. My father put on his best coat and silk skull-cap; my
mother replaced the cotton kerchief by the well-brushed wig. We
children bustled around our parents, asking favors in the name of the
Sabbath--"Mama, let Fetchke and me wear our new shoes, in honor of
Sabbath"; or "Papa, will you take us to-morrow across the bridge? You
said you would, on Sabbath." And while we adorned ourselves in our
best, my grandmother superintended the sealing of the oven, the maids
washed the sweat from their faces, and the dvornik scraped his feet at
the door.
My father and brother went to the synagogue, while we women and girls
assembled in the living-room for candle prayer. The table gleamed with
spotless linen and china. At my father's place lay the Sabbath loaf,
covered over with a crocheted doily; and beside it stood the wine
flask and _kiddush_ cup of gold or silver. At the opposite end of the
table was a long row of brass candlesticks, polished to perfection,
with the heavy silver candlesticks in a shorter row in front; for my
mother and grandmother were very pious, and each used a number of
candles; while Fetchke and I and the maids had one apiece.
After the candle prayer the women generally read in some book of
devotion, while we children amused ourselves in the quietest manner,
till the men returned from synagogue. "Good Sabbath!" my father
called, as he entered; and "Good Sabbath! Good Sabbath!" we wished him
in return. If he brought with him a Sabbath guest from the synagogue,
some poor man without a home, the stranger was welcomed and invited
in, and placed in the seat of honor, next to my father.
We all stood around the table while _kiddush_, or the blessing over
the wine, was said, and if a child whispered or nudged another my
father reproved him with a stern look, and began again from the
beginning. But as soon as he had cut the consecrated loaf, and
distributed the slices, we were at liberty to talk and ask questions,
unless a guest was present, when we maintained a polite silence.
Of one Sabbath guest we were always sure, even if no destitute Jew
accompanied my father from the synagogue. Yakub the choreman partook
of the festival with us. He slept on a bunk built over the entrance
door, and reached by means of a rude flight of steps. There he liked
to roll on his straw and rags, whenever he was not busy, or felt
especially lazy. On Friday evenings he climbed to his roost very
early, before the family assembled for supper, and waited for his cue,
which was the breaking-out of table talk after the blessing of the
bread. Then Yakub began to clear his throat and kept on working at it
until my father called to him to come down and have a glass of vodka.
Sometimes my father pretended not to hear him, and we smiled at one
another around the table, while Yakub's throat grew worse and worse,
and he began to cough and mutter and rustle in his straw. Then my
father let him come down, and he shuffled in, and stood clutching his
cap with both hands, while my father poured him a brimming glass of
whiskey. This Yakub dedicated to all our healths, and tossed off to
his own comfort. If he got a slice of boiled fish after his glassful,
he gulped it down as a chicken gulps worms, smacked his lips
explosively, and wiped his fingers on his unkempt locks. Then,
thanking his master and mistress, and scraping and bowing, he backed
out of the room and ascended to his roost once more; and in less time
than it takes to write his name, the simple fellow was asleep, and
snoring the snore of the just.
On Sabbath morning almost everybody went to synagogue, and those who
did not, read their prayers and devotions at home. Dinner, at midday,
was a pleasant and leisurely meal in our house. Between courses my
father led us in singing our favorite songs, sometimes Hebrew,
sometimes Yiddish, sometimes Russian, or some of the songs without
words for which the Hasidim were famous. In the afternoon we went
visiting, or else we took long walks out of town, where the fields
sprouted and the orchards waited to bloom. If we stayed at home, we
were not without company. Neighbors dropped in for a glass of tea.
Uncles and cousins came, and perhaps my brother's rebbe, to examine
his pupil in the hearing of the family. And wherever we spent the day,
the talk was pleasant, the faces were cheerful, and the joy of Sabbath
pervaded everything.
The festivals were observed with all due pomp and circumstance in our
house. Passover was beautiful with shining new things all through the
house; _Purim_ was gay with feasting and presents and the jolly
mummers; _Succoth_ was a poem lived in a green arbor; New-Year
thrilled our hearts with its symbols and promises; and the Day of
Atonement moved even the laughing children to a longing for
consecration. The year, in our pious house, was an endless song in
many cantos of joy, lamentation, aspiration, and rhapsody.
We children, while we regretted the passing of a festival, found
plenty to content us in the common days of the week. We had
everything we needed, and almost everything we wanted. We were
welcomed everywhere, petted and praised, abroad as well as at home. I
suppose no little girls with whom we played had a more comfortable
sense of being well-off than Fetchke and I. "Raphael the Russian's
grandchildren" people called us, as if referring to the quarterings in
our shield. It was very pleasant to wear fine clothes, to have kopecks
to spend at the fruit stalls, and to be pointed at admiringly. Some of
the little girls we went with were richer than we, but after all one's
mother can wear only one pair of earrings at a time, and our mother
had beautiful gold ones that hung down on her neck.
As we grew older, my parents gave us more than physical comfort and
social standing to rejoice in. They gave us, or set out to give us,
education, which was less common than gold earrings in Polotzk. For
the ideal of a modern education was the priceless ware that my father
brought back with him from his travels in distant parts. His travels,
indeed, had been the making of my father. He had gone away from
Polotzk, in the first place, as a man unfit for the life he led, out
of harmony with his surroundings, at odds with his neighbors. Never
heartily devoted to the religious ideals of the Hebrew scholar, he was
more and more a dissenter as he matured, but he hardly knew what he
wanted to embrace in place of the ideals he rejected. The rigid scheme
of orthodox Jewish life in the Pale offered no opening to any other
mode of life. But in the large cities in the east and south he
discovered a new world, and found himself at home in it. The Jews
among whom he lived in those parts were faithful to the essence of the
religion, but they allowed themselves more latitude in practice and
observance than the people in Polotzk. Instead of bribing government
officials to relax the law of compulsory education for boys, these
people pushed in numbers at every open door of culture and
enlightenment. Even the girls were given books in Odessa and Kherson,
as the rock to build their lives on, and not as an ornament for
idleness. My father's mind was ready for the reception of such ideas,
and he was inspired by the new view of the world which they afforded
him.
When he returned to Polotzk he knew what had been wrong with his life
before, and he proceeded to remedy it. He resolved to live, as far as
the conditions of existence in Polotzk permitted, the life of a modern
man. And he saw no better place to begin than with the education of
the children. Outwardly he must conform to the ways of his neighbors,
just as he must pay tribute to the policeman on the beat; for standing
room is necessary to all operations, and social ostracism could ruin
him as easily as police persecution. His children, if he started them
right, would not have to bow to the yoke as low as he; his children's
children might even be free men. And education was the one means to
redemption.
Fetchke and I were started with a rebbe, in the orthodox way, but we
were taught to translate as well as read Hebrew, and we had a secular
teacher besides. My sister and I were very diligent pupils, and my
father took great satisfaction in our progress and built great plans
for our higher education.
My brother, who was five years old when he entered heder, hated to be
shut up all day over a printed page that meant nothing to him. He
cried and protested, but my father was determined that he should not
grow up ignorant, so he used the strap freely to hasten the truant's
steps to school. The heder was the only beginning allowable for a boy
in Polotzk, and to heder Joseph must go. So the poor boy's life was
made a nightmare, and the horror was not lifted until he was ten years
old, when he went to a modern school where intelligible things were
taught, and it proved that it was not the book he hated, but the
blindness of the heder.
For a number of peaceful years after my father's return from "far
Russia," we led a wholesome life of comfort, contentment, and faith in
to-morrow. Everything prospered, and we children grew in the sun. My
mother was one with my father in all his plans for us. Although she
had spent her young years in the pursuit of the ruble, it was more to
her that our teacher praised us than that she had made a good bargain
with a tea merchant. Fetchke and Joseph and I, and Deborah, when she
grew up, had some prospects even in Polotzk, with our parents' hearts
set on the highest things; but we were destined to seek our fortunes
in a world which even my father did not dream of when he settled down
to business in Polotzk.
Just when he felt himself safe and strong, a long series of troubles
set in to harass us, and in a few years' time we were reduced to a
state of helpless poverty, in which there was no room to think of
anything but bread. My father became seriously ill, and spent large
sums on cures that did not cure him. While he was still an invalid, my
mother also became ill and kept her bed for the better part of two
years. When she got up, it was only to lapse again. Some of us
children also fell ill, so that at one period the house was a
hospital. And while my parents were incapacitated, the business was
ruined through bad management, until a day came when there was not
enough money in the cash drawer to pay the doctor's bills.
For some years after they got upon their feet again, my parents
struggled to regain their place in the business world, but failed to
do so. My father had another period of experimenting with this or that
business, like his earlier experience. But everything went wrong, till
at last he made a great resolve to begin life all over again. And the
way to do that was to start on a new soil. My father determined to
emigrate to America.
I have now told who I am, what my people were, how I began life, and
why I was brought to a new home. Up to this point I have borrowed the
recollections of my parents, to piece out my own fragmentary
reminiscences. But from now on I propose to be my own pilot across the
seas of memory; and if I lose myself in the mists of uncertainty, or
run aground on the reefs of speculation, I still hope to make port at
last, and I shall look for welcoming faces on the shore. For the ship
I sail in is history, and facts will kindle my beacon fires.
CHAPTER V
I REMEMBER
My father and mother could tell me much more that I have forgotten, or
that I never was aware of; but I want to reconstruct my childhood from
those broken recollections only which, recurring to me in after years,
filled me with the pain and wonder of remembrance. I want to string
together those glimpses of my earliest days that dangle in my mind,
like little lanterns in the crooked alleys of the past, and show me an
elusive little figure that is myself, and yet so much a stranger to
me, that I often ask, Can this be I?
I have not much faith in the reality of my first recollection, but as
I can never go back over the past without bringing up at last at this
sombre little scene, as at a door beyond which I cannot pass, I must
put it down for what it is worth in the scheme of my memories. I see,
then, an empty, darkened room. In the middle, on the floor, lies a
long Shape, covered with some black stuff. There are candles at the
head of the Shape. Dim figures are seated low, against the walls,
swaying to and fro. No sound is in the room, except a moan or a sigh
from the shadowy figures; but a child is walking softly around and
around the Shape on the floor, in quiet curiosity.
The Shape is the body of my grandfather laid out for burial. The child
is myself--myself asking questions of Death.
I was four years old when my mother's father died. Do I really
remember the little scene? Perhaps I heard it described by some fond
relative, as I heard other anecdotes of my infancy, and unconsciously
incorporated it with my genuine recollections. It is so suitable a
scene for a beginning: the darkness, the mystery, the impenetrability.
My share in it, too, is characteristic enough, if I really studied
that Shape by the lighted candles, as I have always pretended to
myself. So often afterwards I find myself forgetting the conventional
meanings of things, in some search for a meaning of my own. It is more
likely, however, that I took no intellectual interest in my
grandfather's remains at the time, but later on, when I sought for a
First Recollection, perhaps, elaborated the scene, and my part in it,
to something that satisfied my sense of dramatic fitness. If I really
committed such a fraud, I am now well punished, by being obliged, at
the very start, to discredit the authenticity of my memoirs.
The abode of our childhood, if not revisited in later years, is apt to
loom in our imagination as a vast edifice with immense chambers in
which our little self seems lost. Somehow I have failed of this
illusion. My grandfather's house, where I was born, stands, in my
memory, a small, one-story wooden building, whose chimneys touch the
sky at the same level as its neighbors' chimneys. Such as it was, the
house stood even with the sidewalk, but the yard was screened from the
street by a board fence, outside which I am sure there was a bench.
The gate into the yard swung so high from the ground that four-footed
visitors did not have to wait till it was opened. Pigs found their way
in, and were shown the way out, under the gate; grunting on their
arrival, but squealing on their departure.
[Illustration: MY GRANDFATHER'S HOUSE, WHERE I WAS BORN]
Of the interior of the house I remember only one room, and not so much
the room as the window, which had a blue sash curtain, and beyond the
curtain a view of a narrow, walled garden, where deep-red dahlias
grew. The garden belonged to the house adjoining my grandfather's,
where lived the Gentile girl who was kind to me.
Concerning my dahlias I have been told that they were not dahlias at
all, but poppies. As a conscientious historian I am bound to record
every rumor, but I retain the right to cling to my own impression.
Indeed, I must insist on my dahlias, if I am to preserve the garden at
all. I have so long believed in them, that if I try to see _poppies_
in those red masses over the wall, the whole garden crumbles away, and
leaves me a gray blank. I have nothing against poppies. It is only
that my illusion is more real to me than reality. And so do we often
build our world on an error, and cry out that the universe is falling
to pieces, if any one but lift a finger to replace the error by truth.
Ours was a quiet neighborhood. Across the narrow street was the
orderly front of the Korpus, or military academy, with straight rows
of unshuttered windows. It was an imposing edifice in the eyes of us
all, because it was built of brick, and was several stories high. At
one of the windows I pretend I remember seeing a tailor mending the
uniforms of the cadets. I knew the uniforms, and I knew, in later
years, the man who had been the tailor; but I am not sure that he did
not emigrate to America, there to seek his fortune in a candy shop,
and his happiness in a family of triplets, twins, and even odds, long
before I was old enough to toddle as far as the gate.
Behind my grandfather's house was a low hill, which I do _not_
remember as a mountain. Perhaps it was only a hump in the ground. This
eminence, of whatever stature, was a part of the Vall, a longer and
higher ridge on the top of which was a promenade, and which was said
to be the burying-ground of Napoleonic soldiers. This historic rumor
meant very little to me, for I never knew what Napoleon was.
It was not my way to accept unchallenged every superstition that came
to my ears. Among the wild flowers that grew on the grassy slopes of
the Vall, there was a small daisy, popularly called "blind flower,"
because it was supposed to cause blindness in rash children who picked
it. I was rash, if I was awake; and I picked "blind flowers" behind
the house, handfuls of them, and enjoyed my eyesight unimpaired. If my
faith in nursery lore was shaken by this experience, I kept my
discovery to myself, and did not undertake to enlighten my playmates.
I find other instances, later on, of the curious fact that I was
content with _finding out_ for myself. It is curious to me because I
am not so reticent now. When I discover anything, if only a new tint
in the red sunset, I must publish the fact to all my friends. Is it
possible that in my childish reflections I recognized the fact that
ours was a secretive atmosphere, where knowledge was for the few, and
wisdom was sometimes a capital offence?
In the summer-time I lived outdoors considerably. I found many
occasions to visit my mother in the store, which gave me a long walk.
If my errand was not pressing--or perhaps even if it was--I made a
long stop on the Platz, especially if I had a companion with me. The
Platz was a rectangular space in the centre of a roomy square, with a
shady promenade around its level lawn. The Korpus faced on the Platz,
which was its drill ground. Around the square were grouped the fine
residences of the officers of the Korpus, with a great white church
occupying one side. These buildings had a fearful interest for me,
especially the church, as the dwellings and sanctuary of the enemy;
but on the Platz I was not afraid to play and seek adventures. I loved
to watch the cadets drill and play ball, or pass them close as they
promenaded, two and two, looking so perfect in white trousers and
jackets and visored caps. I loved to run with my playmates and lay out
all sorts of geometric figures on the four straight sides of the
promenade; patterns of infinite variety, traceable only by a pair of
tireless feet. If one got so wild with play as to forget all fear, one
could swing, until chased away by the guard, on the heavy chain
festoons that encircled the monument at one side of the square. This
was the only monument in Polotzk, dedicated I never knew to whom or
what. It was the monument, as the sky was the sky, and the earth,
earth: the only phenomenon of its kind, mysterious, unquestionable.
It was not far from the limits of Polotzk to the fields and woods. My
father was fond of taking us children for a long walk on a Sabbath
afternoon. I have little pictures in my mind of places where we went,
though I doubt if they could be found from my descriptions. I try in
vain to conjure up a panoramic view of the neighborhood. Even when I
stood on the apex of the Vall, and saw the level country spread in all
directions, my inexperienced eyes failed to give me the picture of the
whole. I saw the houses in the streets below, all going to market. The
highroads wandered out into the country, and disappeared in the sunny
distance, where the edge of the earth and the edge of the sky fitted
together, like a jewel box with the lid ajar. In these things I saw
what a child always sees: the unrelated fragments of a vast,
mysterious world. But although my geography may be vague, and the
scenes I remember as the pieces of a paper puzzle, still my breath
catches as I replace this bit or that, and coax the edges to fit
together. I am obstinately positive of some points, and for the rest,
you may amend the puzzle if you can. You may make a survey of Polotzk
ever so accurate, and show me where I was wrong; still I am the better
guide. You may show that my adventureful road led nowhere, but I can
prove, by the quickening of my pulse and the throbbing of my rapid
recollections, that _things happened to me_ there or here; and I shall
be believed, not you. And so over the vague canvas of scenes half
remembered, half imagined, I draw the brush of recollection, and pick
out here a landmark, there a figure, and set my own feet back in the
old ways, and live over the old events. It is real enough, as by my
beating heart you might know.
Sometimes my father took us out by the Long Road. There is no road in
the neighborhood of Polotzk by that name, but I know very well that
the way was long to my little feet; and long are the backward thoughts
that creep along it, like a sunbeam travelling with the day.
The first landmark on the sunny, dusty road is the house of a peasant
acquaintance where we stopped for rest and a drink. I remember a cool
gray interior, a woman with her bosom uncovered pattering barefoot to
hand us the hospitable dipper, and a baby smothered in a deep cradle
which hung by ropes from the ceiling. Farther on, the empty road gave
us shadows of trees and rustlings of long grass. This, at least, is
what I imagine over the spaces where no certain object is. Then, I
know, we ran and played, and it was father himself who hid in the
corn, and we made havoc following after. Laughing, we ramble on, till
we hear the long, far whistle of a locomotive. The railroad track is
just visible over the field on the _left_ of the road; the cornfield,
I say, is on the _right_. We stand on tiptoe and wave our hands and
shout as the long train rushes by at a terrific speed, leaving its
pennon of smoke behind.
The passing of the train thrilled me wonderfully. Where did it come
from, and whither did it fly, and how did it feel to be one of the
faces at the windows? If ever I dreamed of a world beyond Polotzk, it
must have been at those times, though I do not honestly remember.
Somewhere out on that same Long Road is the place where we once
attended a wedding. I do not know who were married, or whether they
lived happily ever after; but I remember that when the dancers were
wearied, and we were all sated with goodies, day was dawning, and
several of the young people went out for a stroll in a grove near by.
They took me with them--who were they?--and they lost me. At any rate,
when they saw me again, I was a stranger. For I had sojourned, for an
immeasurable moment, in a world apart from theirs. I had witnessed my
first sunrise; I had watched the rosy morning tiptoe in among the
silver birches. And that grove stands on the _left_ side of the road.
We had another stopping-place out in that direction. It was the place
where my mother sent her hundred and more house plants to be cared for
one season, because for some reason they could not fare well at home.
We children went to visit them once; and the memory of that is red and
white and purple.
The Long Road went ever on and on; I remember no turns. But we turned
at last, when the sun was set and the breeze of evening blew; and
sometimes the first star came in and the Sabbath went out before we
reached home and supper.
Another way out of town was by the bridge across the Polota. I recall
more than one excursion in that direction. Sometimes we made a large
party, annexing a few cousins and aunts for the day. At this moment I
feel a movement of affection for these relations who shared our
country adventures. I had forgotten what virtue there was in our
family; I do like people who can walk. In those days, it is likely
enough, I did not always walk on my own legs, for I was very little,
and not strong. I do not remember being carried, but if any of my big
uncles gave me a lift, I am sure I like them all the more for it.
The Dvina River swallowed the Polota many times a day, yet the lesser
stream flooded the universe on one occasion. On the hither bank of
that stream, as you go from Polotzk, I should plant a flowering bush,
a lilac or a rose, in memory of the life that bloomed in me one day
that I was there.
Leisurely we had strolled out of the peaceful town. It was early
spring, and the sky and the earth were two warm palms in which all
live things nestled. Little green leaves trembled on the trees, and
the green, green grass sparkled. We sat us down to rest a little above
the bridge; and life flowed in and out of us fully, freely, as the
river flowed and parted about the bridge piles.
A market garden lay on the opposite slope, yellow-green with first
growth. In the long black furrows yet unsown a peasant pushed his
plow. I watched him go up and down, leaving a new black line on the
bank for every turn. Suddenly he began to sing, a rude plowman's song.
Only the melody reached me, but the meaning sprang up in my heart to
fit it--a song of the earth and the hopes of the earth. I sat a long
time listening, looking, tense with attention. I felt myself
discovering things. Something in me gasped for life, and lay still. I
was but a little body, and Life Universal had suddenly burst upon me.
For a moment I had my little hand on the Great Pulse, but my fingers
slipped, empty. For the space of a wild heartbeat I _knew_, and then I
was again a simple child, looking to my earthly senses for life. But
the sky had stretched for me, the earth had expanded; a greater life
had dawned in me.
We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first and the
spirit later; and the birth and growth of the spirit, in those who are
attentive to their own inner life, are slow and exceedingly painful.
Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we
ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth. Our souls
are scarred with the struggles of successive births, and the process
is recorded also by the wrinkles in our brains, by the lines in our
faces. Look at me and you will see that I have been born many times.
And my first self-birth happened, as I have told, that spring day of
my early springs. Therefore would I plant a rose on the green bank of
the Polota, there to bloom in token of eternal life.
Eternal, divine life. This is a tale of immortal life. Should I be
sitting here, chattering of my infantile adventures, if I did not know
that I was speaking for thousands? Should you be sitting there,
attending to my chatter, while the world's work waits, if you did not
know that I spoke also for you? I might say "you" or "he" instead of
"I." Or I might be silent, while you spoke for me and the rest, but
for the accident that I was born with a pen in my hand, and you
without. We love to read the lives of the great, yet what a broken
history of mankind they give, unless supplemented by the lives of the
humble. But while the great can speak for themselves, or by the
tongues of their admirers, the humble are apt to live inarticulate and
die unheard. It is well that now and then one is born among the simple
with a taste for self-revelation. The man or woman thus endowed must
speak, will speak, though there are only the grasses in the field to
hear, and none but the wind to carry the tale.
* * * * *
It is fun to run over the bridge, with a clatter of stout little shoes
on resounding timbers. We pass a walled orchard on the right, and
remind each other of the fruit we enjoyed here last summer. Our next
stopping-place is farther on, beyond the wayside inn where lives the
idiot boy who gave me such a scare last time. It is a poor enough
place, where we stop, but there is an ice house, the only one I know.
We are allowed to go in and see the greenish masses of ice gleaming in
the half-light, and bring out jars of sweet, black "lager beer," which
we drink in the sunny doorway. I shall always remember the flavor of
the stuff, and the smell, and the wonder and chill of the ice house.
I vaguely remember something about a convent out in that direction,
but I was tired and sleepy after my long walk, and glad to be
returning home. I hope they carried me a bit of the way, for I was
very tired. There were stars out before we reached home, and the men
stopped in the middle of the street to bless the new moon.
It is pleasant to recall how we went bathing in the Polota. On Friday
afternoons in summer, when the week's work was done, and the houses of
the good housewives stood shining with cleanliness, ready for the
Sabbath, parties of women and girls went chattering and laughing down
to the river bank. There was a particular spot which belonged to the
women. I do not know where the men bathed, but our part of the river
was just above Bonderoff's gristmill. I can see the green bank sloping
to the water, and the still water sliding down to the sudden swirl and
spray of the mill race.
The woods on the bank screened the bathers. Bathing costumes were
simply absent, which caused the mermaids no embarrassment, for they
were accustomed to see each other naked in the public hot baths. They
had little fear of intrusion, for the spot was sacred to them. They
splashed about and laughed and played tricks, with streaming hair and
free gestures. I do not know when I saw the girls play as they did in
the water. It was a pretty picture, but the bathers would have been
shocked beyond your understanding if you had suggested that naked
women might be put into a picture. If it ever happened, as it happened
at least once for me to remember, that their privacy was outraged, the
bathers were thrown into a panic as if their very lives were
threatened. Screaming, they huddled together, low in the water, some
hiding their eyes in their hands, with the instinct of the ostrich.
Some ran for their clothes on the bank, and stood shrinking behind
some inadequate rag. The more spirited of the naiads threw pebbles at
the cowardly intruders, who, safe behind the leafy cover that was
meant to shield modesty, threw jeers and mockery in return. But the
Gentile boys ran away soon, or ran away punished. A chemise and a
petticoat turn a frightened woman into an Amazon in such
circumstances; and woe to the impudent wretch who lingered after the
avengers plunged into the thicket. Slaps and cuffs at close range were
his portion, and curses pursued him in retreat.
Among the liveliest of my memories are those of eating and drinking;
and I would sooner give up some of my delightful remembered walks,
green trees, cool skies, and all, than to lose my images of suppers
eaten on Sabbath evenings at the end of those walks. I make no apology
to the spiritually minded, to whom this statement must be a revelation
of grossness. I am content to tell the truth as well as I am able. I
do not even need to console myself with the reflection that what is
dross to the dreamy ascetic may be gold to the psychologist. The fact
is that I ate, even as a delicate child, with considerable relish; and
I remember eating with a relish still keener. Why, I can dream away a
half-hour on the immortal flavor of those thick cheese cakes we used
to have on Saturday night. I am no cook, so I cannot tell you how to
make such cake. I might borrow the recipe from my mother, but I would
rather you should take my word for the excellence of Polotzk cheese
cakes. If you should attempt that pastry, I am certain, be you ever so
clever a cook, you would be disappointed by the result; and hence you
might be led to mistrust my reflections and conclusions. You have
nothing in your kitchen cupboard to give the pastry its notable
flavor. It takes history to make such a cake. First, you must eat it
as a ravenous child, in memorable twilights, before the lighting of
the week-day lamp. Then you must have yourself removed from the house
of your simple feast, across the oceans, to a land where your
cherished pastry is unknown even by name; and where daylight and
twilight, work day and fête day, for years rush by you in the unbroken
tide of a strange, new, overfull life. You must abstain from the
inimitable morsel for a period of years,--I think fifteen is the magic
number,--and then suddenly, one day, rub the Aladdin's lamp of memory,
and have the renowned tidbit whisked upon your platter, garnished with
a hundred sweet herbs of past association.
Do you think all your imported spices, all your scientific blending
and manipulating, could produce so fragrant a morsel as that which I
have on my tongue as I write? Glad am I that my mother, in her
assiduous imitation of everything American, has forgotten the secrets
of Polotzk cookery. At any rate, she does not practise it, and I am
the richer in memories for her omissions. Polotzk cheese cake, as I
now know it, has in it the flavor of daisies and clover picked on the
Vall; the sweetness of Dvina water; the richness of newly turned earth
which I moulded with bare feet and hands; the ripeness of red cherries
bought by the dipperful in the market place; the fragrance of all my
childhood's summers.
Abstinence, as I have mentioned, is one of the essential ingredients
in the phantom dish. I discovered this through a recent experience. It
was cherry time in the country, and the sight of the scarlet fruit
suddenly reminded me of a cherry season in Polotzk, I could not say
how many years ago. On that earlier occasion my Cousin Shimke, who,
like everybody else, was a storekeeper, had set a boy to watch her
store, and me to watch the boy, while she went home to make cherry
preserves. She gave us a basket of cherries for our trouble, and the
boy offered to eat them with the stones if I would give him my share.
But I was equal to that feat myself, so we sat down to a cherry-stone
contest. Who ate the most stones I could not remember as I stood under
the laden trees not long ago, but the transcendent flavor of the
historical cherries came back to me, and I needs must enjoy it once
more.
I climbed into the lowest boughs and hung there, eating cherries with
the stones, my whole mind concentrated on the sense of taste. Alas!
the fruit had no such flavor to yield as I sought. Excellent American
cherries were these, but not so fragrantly sweet as my cousin's
cherries. And if I should return to Polotzk, and buy me a measure of
cherries at a market stall, and pay for it with a Russian groschen,
would the market woman be generous enough to throw in that haunting
flavor? I fear I should find that the old species of cherry is extinct
in Polotzk.
Sometimes, when I am not trying to remember at all, I am more
fortunate in extracting the flavors of past feasts from my plain
American viands. I was eating strawberries the other day, ripe, red
American strawberries. Suddenly I experienced the very flavor and
aroma of some strawberries I ate perhaps twenty years ago. I started
as from a shock, and then sat still for I do not know how long,
breathless with amazement. In the brief interval of a gustatory
perception I became a child again, and I positively ached with the
pain of being so suddenly compressed to that small being. I wandered
about Polotzk once more, with large, questioning eyes; I rode the
Atlantic in an emigrant ship; I took possession of the New World, my
ears growing accustomed to a new language; I sat at the feet of
renowned professors, till my eyes contracted in dreaming over what
they taught; and there I was again, an American among Americans,
suddenly made aware of all that I had been, all that I had
become--suddenly illuminated, inspired by a complete vision of myself,
a daughter of Israel and a child of the universe, that taught me more
of the history of my race than ever my learned teachers could
understand.
All this came to me in that instant of tasting, all from the flavor of
ripe strawberries on my tongue. Why, then, should I not treasure my
memories of childhood feasts? This experience gives me a great respect
for my bread and meat. I want to taste of as many viands as possible;
for when I sit down to a dish of porridge I am certain of rising again
a better animal, and I may rise a wiser man. I want to eat and drink
and be instructed. Some day I expect to extract from my pudding the
flavor of manna which I ate in the desert, and then I shall write you
a contemporaneous commentary on the Exodus. Nor do I despair of
remembering yet, over a dish of corn, the time when I fed on worms;
and then I may be able to recall how it felt to be made at last into a
man. Give me to eat and drink, for I crave wisdom.
* * * * *
My winters, while I was a very little girl, were passed in comparative
confinement. On account of my delicate health, my grandmother and
aunts deemed it wise to keep me indoors; or if I went out, I was so
heavily coated and mittened and shawled that the frost scarcely got a
chance at the tip of my nose. I never skated or coasted or built snow
houses. If I had any experience of snowballs, it was with those
thrown at me by the Gentile boys. The way I dodge a snowball to this
day makes me certain that I learned the act in my fearful childhood
days, when I learned so many cowardly tricks of bending to a blow. I
know that I was proud of myself when, not many years ago, I found I
was not afraid to stand up and catch a flying baseball; but the fear
of the snowball I have not conquered. When I turn a corner in snowball
days, the boys with bulging pockets see a head held high and a step
unquickened, but I know that I cringe inwardly; and this private
mortification I set down against old Polotzk, in my long score of
grievances and shames. Fear is a devil hard to cast out.
Let me make the most of the winter adventures that I recall. First,
there was sleighing. We never kept horses of our own, but the horses
of our customer-guests were always at our disposal, and many a jolly
ride they gave us, with the dvornik at the reins, while their owners
haggled with my mother in the store about the price of soap. We had no
luxurious sleigh, with cushions and fur robes, no silver bells on our
harness. Ours was a bare sledge used for hauling wood, with a padding
of straw and burlap, and the reins, as likely as not, were a knotted
rope. But the horses did fly, over the river and up the opposite bank
if we chose; and whether we had bells or not, the merry, foolish heart
of Yakub would sing, and the whip would crack, and we children would
laugh; and the sport was as good as when, occasionally, we did ride in
a more splendid sleigh, loaned us by one of our prouder guests. We
were wholesome as apples to look at when we returned for bread and tea
in the dusk; at least I remember my sister, with cheeks as red as a
painted doll's under her close-clipped curls; and my little brother,
rosy, too, and aristocratic-looking enough, in his little greatcoat
tied with a red sash, and little fur cap with earlaps. For myself, I
suppose my nose was purple and my cheeks pinched, just as they are now
in the cold weather; but I had a good time.
At certain--I mean uncertain--intervals we were bundled up and marched
to the public baths. This was so great an undertaking, consuming half
a day or so, and involving, in winter, such risk of catching cold,
that it is no wonder the ceremony was not practised oftener.
The public baths were situated on the river bank. I always stopped
awhile outside, to visit the poor patient horse in the treadmill, by
means of which the water was pumped into the baths. I was not
sentimental about animals then. I had not read of "Black Beauty" or
any other personified monsters; I had not heard of any societies for
the prevention of cruelty to anything. But my pity stirred of its own
accord at the sight of that miserable brute in the treadmill. I was
used to seeing horses hard-worked and abused. This horse had no load
to make him sweat, and I never saw him whipped. Yet I pitied this
creature. Round and round his little circle he trod, with head hanging
and eyes void of expectation; round and round all day, unthrilled by
any touch of rein or bridle, interpreters of a living will; round and
round, all solitary, never driven, never checked, never addressed;
round and round and round, a walking machine, with eyes that did not
flash, with teeth that did not threaten, with hoofs that did not
strike; round and round the dull day long. I knew what a horse's life
should be, entangled with the life of a master: adventurous, troubled,
thrilled; petted and opposed, loved and abused; to-day the ringing
city pavement underfoot, and the buzz of beasts and men in the market
place; to-morrow the yielding turf under tickled flanks, and the lone
whinny of scattered mates. How empty the existence of the treadmill
horse beside this! As empty and endless and dull as the life of almost
any woman in Polotzk, had I had eyes to see the likeness.
But to my ablutions!
We undress in a room leading directly from the entry, and furnished
only with benches around the walls. There is no screen or other
protection against the drafts rushing in every time the door is
opened. When we enter the bathing-room we are confused by a babel of
sounds--shrill voices of women, hoarse voices of attendants, wailing
and yelping of children, and rushing of water. At the same time we are
smitten by the heat of the room and nearly suffocated by clouds of
steam. We find at last an empty bench, and surround ourselves with a
semicircle of wooden pails, collected from all around the room.
Sometimes two women in search of pails lay hold of the same pail at
the same moment, and a wrangle ensues, in the course of which each
disputant reminds the other of all her failings, nicknames, and
undesirable connections, living, dead, and unborn; until an attendant
interferes, with more muscle than argument, punctuating the sentence
of justice with newly coined expletives suggested by the occasion. The
centre of the room, where the bathers fill their pails at the faucets,
is a field of endless battle, especially on a crowded day. The
peaceful women seated within earshot stop their violent scrubbing, to
the relief of unwilling children, while they attend to the liveliest
of the quarrels.
I like to watch the _poll_, that place of torture and heroic
endurance. It is a series of steps rising to the ceiling, affording a
gradually mounting temperature. The bather who wants to enjoy a
violent sweating rests full length for a few minutes on each step,
while an attendant administers several hearty strokes of a stinging
besom. Sometimes a woman climbs too far, and is brought down in a
faint. On the poll, also, the cupping is done. The back of the
patient, with the cups in even rows, looks to me like a muffin pan. Of
course I never go on the poll: I am not robust enough. My spankings I
take at home.
Another centre of interest is the _mikweh_, the name of which it is
indelicate to mention in the hearing of men. It is a large pool of
standing water, its depth graded by means of a flight of steps. Every
married woman must perform here certain ceremonious ablutions at
regular intervals. Cleanliness is as strictly enjoined as godliness,
and the manner of attaining it is carefully prescribed. The women are
prepared by the attendants for entering the pool, the curious children
looking on. In the pool they are ducked over their heads the correct
number of times. The water in the pool has been standing for days; it
does not look nor smell fresh. But we had no germs in Polotzk, so no
harm came of it, any more than of the pails used promiscuously by
feminine Polotzk. If any were so dainty as to have second thoughts
about the use of the common bath, they could enjoy, for a fee of
twenty-five kopecks, a private bathtub in another part of the
building. For the rich there were luxuries even in Polotzk.
Cleansed, red-skinned, and steaming, we return at last to the
dressing-room, to shiver, as we dress, in the cold drafts from the
entry door; and then, muffled up to the eyes, we plunge into the
refreshing outer air, and hurry home, looking like so many big bundles
running away with smaller bundles. If we meet acquaintances on the way
we are greeted with "_zu refueh_" ("to your good health"). If the
first man we meet is a Gentile, the women who have been to the mikweh
have to return and repeat the ceremony of purification. To prevent
such a calamity, the kerchief is worn hooded over the eyes, so as to
exclude unholy sights. At home we are indulged with extra pieces of
cake for tea, and otherwise treated like heroes returned from victory.
We narrate anecdotes of our expedition, and my mother complains that
my little brother is getting too old to be taken to the women's bath.
He will go hereafter with the men.
[Illustration: THE MEAT MARKET, POLOTZK]
My winter confinement was not shared by my older sister, who otherwise
was my constant companion. She went out more than I, not being so
afraid of the cold. She used to fret so when my mother was away in the
store that it became a custom for her to accompany my mother from the
time she was a mere baby. Muffled and rosy and frost-bitten, the tears
of cold rolling unnoticed down her plump cheeks, she ran after my busy
mother all day long, or tumbled about behind the counter, or nestled
for a nap among the bulging sacks of oats and barley. She warmed her
little hands over my mother's pot of glowing charcoal--there was no
stove in the store--and even learned to stand astride of it, for
further comfort, without setting her clothes on fire.
Fetchke was like a young colt inseparable from the mare. I make this
comparison not in disrespectful jest, but in deepest pity. Fetchke
kept close to my mother at first for love and protection, but the
petting she got became a blind for discipline. She learned early, from
my mother's example, that hands and feet and brains were made for
labor. She learned to bow to the yoke, to lift burdens, to do more for
others than she could ever hope to have done for her in turn. She
learned to see sugar plums lie around without asking for her share.
When she was only fit to nurse her dolls, she learned how to comfort a
weary heart.
And all this while I sat warm and watched over at home, untouched by
any discipline save such as I directly incurred by my own sins. I
differed from Fetchke a little in age, considerably in health, and
enormously in luck. It was my good luck, in the first place, to be
born after her, instead of before; in the second place, to inherit,
from the family stock, that particular assortment of gifts which was
sure to mark me for special attentions, exemptions, and privileges;
and as fortune always smiles on good fortune, it has ever been my
luck, in the third place, to find something good in my idle
hand--whether a sunbeam, or a loving heart, or a congenial
task--whenever, on turning a corner, I put out my hand to see what my
new world was like; while my sister, dear, devoted creature, had her
hands so full of work that the sunbeam slipped, and the loving comrade
passed out of hearing before she could straighten from her task, and
all she had of the better world was a scented zephyr fanned in her
face by the irresistible closing of a door.
Perhaps Esau has been too severely blamed for selling his birthright
for a mess of pottage. The lot of the firstborn is not necessarily to
be envied. The firstborn of a well-to-do patriarch, like Isaac, or of
a Rothschild of to-day, inherits, with his father's flocks and slaves
and coffers, a troop of cares and responsibilities; unless he be a
man without a sense of duty, in which case we are not supposed to envy
him. The firstborn of an indigent father inherits a double measure of
the disadvantages of poverty,--a joyless childhood, a guideless youth,
and perhaps a mateless manhood, his own life being drained to feed the
young of his father's begetting. If we cannot do away with poverty
entirely, we ought at least to abolish the institution of
primogeniture. Nature invented the individual, and promised him, as a
reward for lusty being, comfort and immortality. Comes man with his
patented brains and copyrighted notions, and levies a tax on the
individual, in the form of enforced coöperation, for the maintenance
of his pet institution, the family. Our comfort, in the grip of this
tyranny, must lie in the hope that man, who is no bastard child of
Mother Nature, may be approaching a more perfect resemblance to her
majestic features; that his fitful development will culminate in a
spiritual constitution capable of absolute justice.
* * * * *
I think I was telling how I stayed at home in the winter, while my
sister helped or hindered my mother in her store-keeping. The days
drew themselves out too long sometimes, so that I sat at the window
thinking what should happen next. No dolls, no books, no games, and at
times no companions. My grandmother taught me knitting, but I never
got to the heel of my stocking, because if I discovered a dropped
stitch I insisted on unravelling all my work till I picked it up; and
grandmother, instead of encouraging me in my love for perfection, lost
patience and took away my knitting needles. I still maintain that she
was in the wrong, but I have forgiven her, since I have worn many
pairs of stockings with dropped stitches, and been grateful for them.
And speaking of such everyday things reminds me of my friends, among
whom also I find an impressive number with a stitch dropped somewhere
in the pattern of their souls. I love these friends so dearly that I
begin to think I am at last shedding my intolerance; for I remember
the day when I could not love less than perfection. I and my imperfect
friends together aspire to cast our blemishes, and I am happier so.
There was not much to see from my window, yet adventures beckoned to
me from the empty street. Sometimes the adventure was real, and I went
out to act in it, instead of dreaming on my stool. Once, I remember,
it was early spring, and the winter's ice, just chopped up by the
street cleaners, lay muddy and ragged and high in the streets from
curb to curb. So it must lie till there was time to cart it to the
Dvina, which had all it could do at this season to carry tons, and
heavy tons, of ice and snow and every sort of city rubbish,
accumulated during the long closed months. Polotzk had no underground
communication with the sea, save such as water naturally makes for
itself. The poor old Dvina was hard-worked, serving both as
drinking-fountain and sewer, as a bridge in winter, a highway in
summer, and a playground at all times. So it served us right if we had
to wait weeks and weeks in thawing time for our streets to be cleared;
and we deserved all the sprains and bruises we suffered from
clambering over the broken ice in the streets while going about our
business.
Leah the Short, little and straight and neat, with a basket on one arm
and a bundle under the other, stood hesitating on the edge of the curb
opposite my window. Her poor old face, framed in its calico kerchief,
had a wrinkle of anxiety in it. The tumbled ice heap in the street
looked to her like an impassable barrier. Tiny as she was, and loaded,
she had reason to hesitate. Perhaps she had eggs in her basket,--I
thought of that as I looked at her across the street; and I thought of
my old ambition to measure myself, shoulder to shoulder, with Leah,
reputedly short. I was small myself, and was constantly reminded of it
by a variety of nicknames, lovingly or vengefully invented by my
friends and enemies. I was called Mouse and Crumb and Poppy Seed.
Should I live to be called, in my old age, Mashke the Short? I longed
to measure my stature by Leah's, and here was my chance.
I ran out into the street, my grandmother scolding me for going
without a shawl, and I calling back to her to be sure and watch me. I
skipped over the ice blocks like a goat, and offered my assistance to
Leah the Short. With admirable skill and solicitude I guided her timid
steps across the street, at the same time winking to my grandmother at
the window, and pointing to my shoulder close to Leah's. Once on the
safe sidewalk, the tiny woman thanked me and blessed me and praised me
for a thoughtful child; and I watched her toddle away without the
least stir of shame at my hypocrisy. She had convinced me that I was a
good little girl, and I had convinced myself that I was not so very
short. My chin was almost on a level with Leah's shoulder, and I had
years ahead in which to elevate it. Grandma at the window was witness,
and I was entirely happy. If I caught cold from going bareheaded, so
much the better; mother would give me rock candy for my cough.
For the long winter evenings there was plenty of quiet occupation. I
liked to sit with the women at the long bare table picking feathers
for new featherbeds. It was pleasant to poke my hand into the
soft-heaped mass and set it all in motion. I pretended that I could
pick out the feathers of particular hens, formerly my pets. I
reflected that they had fed me with eggs and broth, and now were going
to make my bed so soft; while I had done nothing for them but throw
them a handful of oats now and then, or chase them about, or spoil
their nests. I was not ashamed of my part; I knew that if I were a hen
I should do as a hen does. I just liked to think about things in my
idle way.
Itke, the housemaid, was always the one to break in upon my
reflections. She was sure to have a fit of sneezing just when the heap
on the table was highest, sending clouds of feathers into the air,
like a homemade snowstorm. After that the evening was finished by our
picking the feathers from each other's hair.
Sometimes we played cards or checkers, munching frost-bitten apples
between moves. Sometimes the women sewed, and we children wound yarn
or worsted for grandmother's knitting. If somebody had a story to tell
while the rest worked, the evening passed with a pleasant sense of
semi-idleness for all.
On a Saturday night, the Sabbath being just departed, ghost stories
were particularly in favor. After two or three of the creepy legends
we began to move closer together under the lamp. At the end of an hour
or so we started and screamed if a spool fell, or a window rattled. At
bedtime nobody was willing to make the round of doors and windows, and
we were afraid to bring a candle into a dark room.
I was just as much afraid as anybody. I am afraid now to be alone in
the house at night. I certainly was afraid that Saturday night when
somebody, in bravado, suggested fresh-baked buns, as a charm to dispel
the ghosts. The baker who lived next door always baked on Saturday
night. Who would go and fetch the buns? Nobody dared to venture
outdoors. It had snowed all evening; the frosted windows prevented a
preliminary survey of the silent night. _Brr-rr!_ Nobody would take
the dare.
Nobody but me. Oh, how the creeps ran up and down my back! and oh! how
I loved to distinguish myself! I let them bundle me up till I was
nearly smothered. I paused with my mittened hand on the latch. I
shivered, though I could have sat the night out with a Polar bear
without another shawl. I opened the door, and then turned back, to
make a speech.
"I am not afraid," I said, in the noble accents of courage. "I am not
afraid to go. God goes with me."
Pride goeth before a fall. On the step outside I slid down into a
drift, just on the eve of triumph. They picked me up; they brought me
in. They found all of me inside my wrappings. They gave me a piece of
sugar and sent me to bed. And I was very glad. I did hate to go all
the way next door and all the way back, through the white snow, under
the white stars, invisible company keeping step with me.
* * * * *
And I remember my playmates.
There was always a crowd of us girls. We were a mixed set,--rich
little girls, well-to-do little girls, and poor little girls,--but not
because we were so democratic. Rather it came about, if my sister and
I are considered the centre of the ring, because we had suffered the
several grades of fortune. In our best days no little girls had to
stoop to us; in our humbler days we were not so proud that we had to
condescend to our chance neighbors. The granddaughters of Raphael the
Russian, in retaining their breeding and manners, retained a few of
their more exalted friends, and became a link between them and those
whom they later adopted through force of propinquity.
We were human little girls, so our amusements mimicked the life about
us. We played house, we played soldiers, we played Gentiles, we
celebrated weddings and funerals. We copied the life about us
literally. We had not been to a Froebel kindergarten, and learned to
impersonate butterflies and stones. Our elders would have laughed at
us for such nonsense. I remember once standing on the river bank with
a little boy, when a quantity of lumber was floating down on its way
to the distant sawmill. A log and a board crowded each other near
where we stood. The board slipped by first, but presently it swerved
and swung partly around. Then it righted itself with the stream and
kept straight on, the lazy log following behind. Said Zalmen to me,
interpreting: "The board looks back and says, 'Log, log, you will not
go with me? Then I will go on by myself.'" That boy was called simple,
on account of such speeches as this. I wonder in what language he is
writing poetry now.
We had very few toys. Neither Fetchke nor I cared much for dolls. A
rag baby apiece contented us, and if we had a set of jackstones we
were perfectly happy. Our jackstones, by the way, were not stones but
bones. We used the knuckle bones of sheep, dried and scraped; every
little girl cherished a set in her pocket.
I did not care much for playing house. I liked soldiers better, but it
was not much fun without boys. Boys and girls always played apart.
I was very fond of playing Gentiles. I am afraid I liked everything
that was a little risky. I particularly enjoyed being the corpse in a
Gentile funeral. I was laid across two chairs, and my playmates, in
borrowed shawls and long calicoes, with their hair loose and with
candlesticks in their hands, marched around me, singing unearthly
songs, and groaning till they scared themselves. As I lay there,
covered over with a black cloth, I felt as dead as dead could be; and
my playmates were the unholy priests in gorgeous robes of velvet and
silk and gold. Their candlesticks were the crosiers that were carried
in Christian funeral processions, and their chantings were hideous
incantations to the arch enemy, the Christian God of horrible images.
As I imagined the bareheaded crowds making way for my funeral to pass,
my flesh crept, not because I was about to be buried, but because the
people _crossed themselves_. But our procession stopped outside the
church, because we did not dare to carry even our make-believe across
that accursed threshold. Besides, none of us had ever been
inside,--God forbid!--so we did not know what did happen next.
When I arose from my funeral I was indeed a ghost. I felt unreal and
lost and hateful. I don't think we girls liked each other much after
playing funeral. Anyway, we never played any more on the same day; or
if we did, we soon quarrelled. Such was the hold which our hereditary
terrors and hatreds had upon our childish minds that if we only mocked
a Christian procession in our play, we suffered a mutual revulsion of
feeling, as if we had led each other into sin.
We gathered oftener at our house than anywhere else. On Sabbath days
we refrained, of course, from soldiering and the like, but we had just
as good a time, going off to promenade, two and two, in our very best
dresses; whispering secrets and telling stories. We had a few stories
in the circle--I do not know how they came to us--and these were told
over and over. Gutke knew the best story of all. She told the story of
Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, and she told it well. It was her
story, and nobody else ever attempted it, though I, for one, soon had
it by heart. Gutke's version of the famous tale was unlike any I have
since read, but it was essentially the story of Aladdin, so that I was
able to identify it later when I found it in a book. Names, incidents,
and "local color" were slightly Hebraized, but the supernatural
wonders of treasure caves, jewelled gardens, genii, princesses, and
all, were not in the least marred or diminished. Gutke would spin the
story out for a long afternoon, and we all listened entranced, even at
the hundredth rehearsal. We had a few other fairy stories,--I later
identified them with stories of Grimm's or of Andersen's,--but for the
most part the tales we told were sombre and unimaginative; tales our
nurses used to tell to frighten us into good behavior.
Sometimes we spent a whole afternoon in dancing. We made our own
music, singing as we danced, or somebody blew on a comb with a bit of
paper over its teeth; and comb music is not to be despised when there
is no other sort. We knew the polka and the waltz, the mazurka, the
quadrille, and the lancers, and several fancy dances. We did not
hesitate to invent new steps or figures, and we never stopped till we
were out of breath. I was one of the most enthusiastic dancers. I
danced till I felt as if I could fly.
Sometimes we sat in a ring and sang all the songs we knew. None of us
were trained,--we had never seen a sheet of music--but some of us
could sing any tune that was ever heard in Polotzk, and the others
followed half a bar behind. I enjoyed these singing-bees. We had
Hebrew songs and Jewish and Russian; solemn songs, and jolly songs,
and songs unfit for children, but harmless enough on our innocent
lips. I enjoyed the play of moods in these songs--I liked to be
harrowed one minute and tickled the next. I threw all my heart into
the singing, which was only fair, as I had very little voice to throw
in.
Although I always joined the crowd when any fun was on foot, I think I
had the best times by myself. My sister was fond of housework, but
I--I was fond of idleness. While Fetchke pottered in the kitchen
beside the maid or trotted all about the house after my grandmother, I
wasted time in some window corner, or studied the habits of the cow
and the chickens in the yard. I always found something to do that was
of no use to anybody. I had no particular fondness for animals; I
liked to see what they did, merely because they were curious. The red
cow would go to meet my grandmother as she came out of the kitchen
with a bucket of bran for her. She drank it up in no time, the greedy
creature, in great loud gulps; and then she stood with dripping
nostrils over the empty bucket, staring at me on the other side. I
teased grandmother to give the cow more, because I enjoyed her
enjoyment of it. I wondered, if I ate from a bucket instead of a
plate, should I take so much more pleasure in my dinner? That red cow
liked everything. She liked going to pasture, and she liked coming
back, and she stood still to be milked, as if she liked that too.
The chickens were not all alike. Some of them would not let me catch
them, while others stood still till I took them up. There were two
that were particularly tame, a white hen and a speckled one. In
winter, when they were kept in the house, my sister and I had these
two for our pets. They let us handle them by the hour, and stayed just
where we put them. The white hen laid her eggs in a linen chest made
of bark. We would take the warm egg to grandmother, who rolled it on
our eyes, repeating this charm: "As this egg is fresh, so may your
eyes be fresh. As this egg is sound, so may your eyes be sound." I
still like to touch my eyelids with a fresh-laid egg, whenever I am so
happy as to possess one.
On the horses in the barn I bestowed the same calm attention as on the
cow, speculative rather than affectionate. I was not a very
tender-hearted infant. If I have been a true witness of my own growth,
I was slower to love than I was to think. I do not know when the
change was wrought, but to-day, if you ask my friends, they will tell
you that I know how to love them better than to solve their problems.
And if you will call one more witness, and ask me, I shall say that if
you set me down before a noble landscape, I feel it long before I
begin to see it.
Idle child though I was, the day was not long enough sometimes for my
idleness. More than once in the pleasant summer I stole out of bed
when even the cow was still drowsing, and went barefoot through the
dripping grass and stood at the gate, awaiting the morning. I found a
sense of adventure in being conscious when all other people were
asleep. There was not much of a prospect from the gateway, but in
that early hour everything looked new and large to me, even the little
houses that yesterday had been so familiar. The houses, when creatures
went in and out of them, were merely conventional objects; in the soft
gray morning they were themselves creatures. Some stood up straight,
and some leaned, and some looked as if they saw me. And then over the
dewy gardens rose the sun, and the light spread and grew over
everything, till it shone on my bare feet. And in my heart grew a
great wonder, and I was ready to cry, my world was so strange and
sweet about me. In those moments, I think, I could have loved somebody
as well as I loved later--somebody who cared to get up secretly, and
stand and see the sun come up.
Was there not somebody who got up before the sun? Was there not Mishka
the shepherd? Aye, that was an early riser; but I knew he was no
sun-worshipper. Before the chickens stirred, before the lazy maid let
the cow out of the barn, I heard his rousing horn, its distant notes
harmonious with the morning. Barn doors creaked in response to
Mishka's call, and soft-eyed cattle went willingly out to meet him,
and stood in groups in the empty square, licking and nosing each
other; till Mishka's little drove was all assembled, and he tramped
out of town behind them, in a cloud of dust.
CHAPTER VI
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE
History shows that in all countries where Jews have equal rights with
the rest of the people, they lose their fear of secular science, and
learn how to take their ancient religion with them from century to
awakening century, dropping nothing by the way but what their growing
spirit has outgrown. In countries where progress is to be bought only
at the price of apostasy, they shut themselves up in their synagogues,
and raise the wall of extreme separateness between themselves and
their Gentile neighbors. There is never a Jewish community without its
scholars, but where Jews may not be both intellectuals and Jews, they
prefer to remain Jews.
The survival in Russia of mediæval injustice to Jews was responsible
for the narrowness of educational standards in the Polotzk of my time.
Jewish scholarship, as we have seen, was confined to a knowledge of
the Hebrew language and literature, and even these limited stores of
learning were not equally divided between men and women. In the
mediæval position of the women of Polotzk education really had no
place. A girl was "finished" when she could read her prayers in
Hebrew, following the meaning by the aid of the Yiddish translation
especially prepared for women. If she could sign her name in Russian,
do a little figuring, and write a letter in Yiddish to the parents of
her betrothed, she was called _wohl gelehrent_--well educated.
Fortunately for me, my parents' ideals soared beyond all this. My
mother, although she had not stirred out of Polotzk, readily adopted
the notion of a liberal education imported by my father from cities
beyond the Pale. She heartily supported him in all his plans for us
girls. Fetchke and I were to learn to translate as well as pronounce
Hebrew, the same as our brother. We were to study Russian and German
and arithmetic. We were to go to the best _pension_ and receive a
thorough secular education. My father's ambition, after several years'
sojourn in enlightened circles, reached even beyond the _pension_; but
that was flying farther than Polotzk could follow him with the naked
eye.
I do not remember our first teacher. When our second teacher came we
were already able to read continuous passages. Reb' Lebe was no great
scholar. Great scholars would not waste their learning on mere girls.
Reb' Lebe knew enough to teach girls Hebrew. Tall and lean was the
rebbe, with a lean, pointed face and a thin, pointed beard. The beard
became pointed from much stroking and pulling downwards. The hands of
Reb' Lebe were large, and his beard was not half a handful. The
fingers of the rebbe were long, and the nails, I am afraid, were not
very clean. The coat of Reb' Lebe was rusty, and so was his skull-cap.
Remember, Reb' Lebe was only a girls' teacher, and nobody would pay
much for teaching girls. But lean and rusty as he was, the rebbe's
pupils regarded him with entire respect, and followed his pointer with
earnest eyes across the limp page of the alphabet, or the thumbed page
of the prayer-book.
For a short time my sister and I went for our lessons to Reb' Lebe's
heder, in the bare room off the women's gallery, up one flight of
stairs, in a synagogue. The place was as noisy as a reckless
expenditure of lung power could make it. The pupils on the bench
shouted their way from _aleph_ to _tav_, cheered and prompted by the
growl of the rebbe; while the children in the corridor waiting their
turn played "puss in the corner" and other noisy games.
Fetchke and I, however, soon began to have our lessons in private, at
our own home. We sat one on each side of the rebbe, reading the Hebrew
sentences turn and turn about.
When we left off reading by rote and Reb' Lebe began to reveal the
mysteries to us, I was so eager to know all that was in my book that
the lesson was always too short. I continued reading by the hour,
after the rebbe was gone, though I understood about one word in ten.
My favorite Hebrew reading was the Psalms. Verse after verse I chanted
to the monotonous tune taught by Reb' Lebe, rocking to the rhythm of
the chant, just like the rebbe. And so ran the song of David, and so
ran the hours by, while I sat by the low window, the world erased from
my consciousness.
What I thought I do not remember; I only know that I loved the sound
of the words, the full, dense, solid sound of them, to the meditative
chant of Reb' Lebe. I pronounced Hebrew very well, and I caught some
mechanical trick of accent and emphasis, which was sufficiently like
Reb' Lebe's to make my reading sound intelligent. I had a clue to the
general mood of the subject from the few Psalms I had actually
translated, and drawing on my imagination for details, I was able to
read with so much spirit that ignorant listeners were carried away by
my performance. My mother tells me, indeed, that people used to stop
outside my window to hear me read. Of this I have not the slightest
recollection, so I suppose I was an unconscious impostor. Certain I am
that I thought no ignoble thoughts as I chanted the sacred words; and
who can say that my visions were not as inspiring as David's? He was a
shepherd before he became a king. I was an ignorant child in the
Ghetto, but I was admitted at last to the society of the best; I was
given the freedom of all America. Perhaps the "stuff that dreams are
made of" is the same for all dreamers.
When we came to read Genesis I had the great advantage of a complete
translation in Yiddish. I faithfully studied the portion assigned in
Hebrew, but I need no longer wait for the next lesson to know how the
story ends. I could read while daylight lasted, if I chose, in the
Yiddish. Well I remember that Pentateuch, a middling thick octavo
volume, in a crumbly sort of leather cover; and how the book opened of
itself at certain places, where there were pictures. My father tells
me that when I was just learning to translate single words, he found
me one evening poring over the _humesh_ and made fun of me for
pretending to read; whereupon I gave him an eager account, he says, of
the stories of Jacob, Benjamin, Moses, and others, which I had puzzled
out from the pictures, by the help of a word here and there that I was
able to translate.
It was inevitable, as we came to Genesis, that I should ask questions.
Rebbe, translating: "In the beginning God created the earth."
Pupil, repeating: "In the beginning--Rebbe, when was the beginning?"
Rebbe, losing the place in amazement: "'S _gehert a kasse_? (Ever
hear such a question?) The beginning was--the beginning--the beginning
was in the beginning, of course! _Nu! nu!_ Go on."
Pupil, resuming: "In the beginning God made the earth.--Rebbe, what
did He make it out of?"
Rebbe, dropping his pointer in astonishment: "What did--? What sort of
a girl is this, that asks questions? Go on, go on!"
The lesson continues to the end. The book is closed, the pointer put
away. The rebbe exchanges his skull-cap for his street cap, is about
to go.
Pupil, timidly, but determinedly, detaining him: "Reb' Lebe, _who made
God_?"
The rebbe regards the pupil in amazement mixed with anxiety. His
emotion is beyond speech. He turns and leaves the room. In his
perturbation he even forgets to kiss the _mezuzah_[2] on the doorpost.
The pupil feels reproved and yet somehow in the right. Who _did_ make
God? But if the rebbe will not tell--will not tell? Or, perhaps, he
does not know? The rebbe--?
It was some time after this conflict between my curiosity and his
obtuseness that I saw my teacher act a ridiculous part in a trifling
comedy, and then I remember no more of him.
Reb' Lebe lingered one day after the lesson. A guest who was about to
depart, wishing to fortify himself for his journey, took a roll of
hard sausage from his satchel and laid it, with his clasp knife, on
the table. He cut himself a slice and ate it standing; and then,
noticing the thin, lean rebbe, he invited him, by a gesture, to help
himself to the sausage. The rebbe put his hands behind his coat tails,
declining the traveller's hospitality. The traveller forgot the other,
and walked up and down, ready in his fur coat and cap, till his
carriage should arrive. The sausage remained on the table, thick and
spicy and brown. No such sausage was known in Polotzk. Reb' Lebe
looked at it. Reb' Lebe continued to look. The stranger stopped to cut
another slice, and repeated his gesture of invitation. Reb' Lebe moved
a step towards the table, but his hands stuck behind his coat tails.
The traveller resumed his walk. Reb' Lebe moved another step. The
stranger was not looking. The rebbe's courage rose, he advanced
towards the table; he stretched out his hand for the knife. At that
instant the door opened, the carriage was announced. The eager
traveller, without noticing Reb' Lebe, swept up sausage and knife,
just at the moment when the timid rebbe was about to cut himself a
delicious slice. I saw his discomfiture from my corner, and I am
obliged to confess that I enjoyed it. His face always looked foolish
to me after that; but, fortunately for us both, we did not study
together much longer.
* * * * *
Two little girls dressed in their best, shining from their curls to
their shoes. One little girl has rosy cheeks, the other has staring
eyes. Rosy-Cheeks carries a carpet bag; Big-Eyes carries a new slate.
Hand in hand they go into the summer morning, so happy and pretty a
pair that it is no wonder people look after them, from window and
door; and that other little girls, not dressed in their best and
carrying no carpet bags, stand in the street gaping after them.
Let the folks stare; no harm can come to the little sisters. Did not
grandmother tie pepper and salt into the corners of their pockets, to
ward off the evil eye? The little maids see nothing but the road
ahead, so eager are they upon their errand. Carpet bag and slate
proclaim that errand: Rosy-Cheeks and Big-Eyes are going to school.
I have no words to describe the pride with which my sister and I
crossed the threshold of Isaiah the Scribe. Hitherto we had been to
heder, to a rebbe; now we were to study with a _lehrer_, a secular
teacher. There was all the difference in the world between the two.
The one taught you Hebrew only, which every girl learned; the other
could teach Yiddish and Russian and, some said, even German; and how
to write a letter, and how to do sums without a counting-frame, just
on a piece of paper; accomplishments which were extremely rare among
girls in Polotzk. But nothing was too high for the grandchildren of
Raphael the Russian; they had "good heads," everybody knew. So we were
sent to Reb' Isaiah.
My first school, where I was so proud to be received, was a hovel on
the edge of a swamp. The schoolroom was gray within and without. The
door was so low that Reb' Isaiah had to stoop in passing. The little
windows were murky. The walls were bare, but the low ceiling was
decorated with bundles of goose quills stuck in under the rafters. A
rough table stood in the middle of the room, with a long bench on
either side. That was the schoolroom complete. In my eyes, on that
first morning, it shone with a wonderful light, a strange glory that
penetrated every corner, and made the stained logs fair as tinted
marble; and the windows were not too small to afford me a view of a
large new world.
Room was made for the new pupils on the bench, beside the teacher. We
found our inkwells, which were simply hollows scooped out in the thick
table top. Reb' Isaiah made us very serviceable pens by tying the pen
points securely to little twigs; though some of the pupils used
quills. The teacher also ruled our paper for us, into little squares,
like a surveyor's notebook. Then he set us a copy, and we copied, one
letter in each square, all the way down the page. All the little girls
and the middle-sized girls and the pretty big girls copied letters in
little squares, just so. There were so few of us that Reb' Isaiah
could see everybody's page by just leaning over. And if some of our
cramped fingers were clumsy, and did not form the loops and curves
accurately, all he had to do was to stretch out his hand and rap with
his ruler on our respective knuckles. It was all very cosey, with the
inkwells that could not be upset, and the pens that grew in the woods
or strutted in the dooryard, and the teacher in the closest touch with
his pupils, as I have just told. And as he labored with us, and the
hours drew themselves out, he was comforted by the smell of his dinner
cooking in some little hole adjoining the schoolroom, and by the sound
of his good Leah or Rachel or Deborah (I don't remember her name)
keeping order among his little ones. She kept very good order, too, so
that most of the time you could hear the scratching of the laborious
pens accompanied by the croaking of the frogs in the swamp.
Although my sister and I began our studies at the same time, and
progressed together, my parents did not want me to take up new
subjects as fast as Fetchke did. They thought my health too delicate
for much study. So when Fetchke had her Russian lesson I was told to
go and play. I am sorry to say that I was disobedient on these
occasions, as on many others. I did not go and play; I looked on, I
listened, when Fetchke rehearsed her lesson at home. And one evening I
stole the Russian primer and repaired to a secret place I knew of. It
was a storeroom for broken chairs and rusty utensils and dried apples.
Nobody would look for me in that dusty hole. Nobody did look there,
but they looked everywhere else, in the house, and in the yard, and in
the barn, and down the street, and at our neighbors'; and while
everybody was searching and calling for me, and telling each other
when I was last seen, and what I was then doing, I, Mashke, was
bending over the stolen book, rehearsing A, B, C, by the names my
sister had given them; and before anybody hit upon my retreat, I could
spell B-O-G, _Bog_ (God) and K-A-Z-A, _Kaza_ (goat). I did not mind in
the least being caught, for I had my new accomplishment to show off.
I remember the littered place, and the high chest that served as my
table, and the blue glass lamp that lighted my secret efforts. I
remember being brought from there into the firelit room where the
family was assembled, and confusing them all by my recital of the
simple words, B-O-G, _Bog_, and K-A-Z-A, _Kaza_. I was not reproached
for going into hiding at bedtime, and the next day I was allowed to
take part in the Russian lesson.
Alas! there were not many lessons more. Long before we had exhausted
Reb' Isaiah's learning, my sister and I had to give up our teacher,
because the family fortunes began to decline, and luxuries, such as
schooling, had to be cut off. Isaiah the Scribe taught us, in all,
perhaps two terms, in which time we learned Yiddish and Russian, and a
little arithmetic. But little good we had from our ability to read,
for there were no books in our house except prayer-books and other
religious writings, mostly in Hebrew. For our skill in writing we had
as little use, as letter-writing was not an everyday exercise, and
idle writing was not thought of. Our good teacher, however, who had
taken pride in our progress, would not let us lose all that we had
learned from him. Books he could not lend us, because he had none
himself; but he could, and he did, write us out a beautiful "copy"
apiece, which we could repeat over and over, from time to time, and so
keep our hands in.
I wonder that I have forgotten the graceful sentences of my "copy";
for I wrote them out just about countless times. It was in the form of
a letter, written on lovely pink paper (my sister's was blue), the
lines taking the shape of semicircles across the page; and that
without any guide lines showing. The script, of course, was
perfect--in the best manner of Isaiah the Scribe--and the sentiments
therein expressed were entirely noble. I was supposed to be a
high-school pupil away on my vacation; and I was writing to my
"Respected Parents," to assure them of my welfare, and to tell them
how, in the midst of my pleasures, I still longed for my friends, and
looked forward with eagerness to the renewal of my studies. All this,
in phrases half Yiddish, half German, and altogether foreign to the
ears of Polotzk. At least, I never heard such talk in the market, when
I went to buy a kopeck's worth of sunflower seeds.
This was all the schooling I had in Russia. My father's plans fell to
the ground, on account of the protracted illness of both my parents.
All his hopes of leading his children beyond the intellectual limits
of Polotzk were trampled down by the monster poverty who showed his
evil visage just as my sister and I were fairly started on a broader
path.
One chance we had, and that was quickly snatched away, of continuing
our education in spite of family difficulties. Lozhe the Rav, hearing
from various sources that Pinchus, son-in-law of Raphael the Russian,
had two bright little girls, whose talents were going to waste for
want of training, became much interested, and sent for the children,
to see for himself what the gossip was worth. By a strange trick of
memory I recall nothing of this important interview, nor indeed of the
whole matter, although a thousand trifles of that period recur to me
on the instant; so I report this anecdote on the authority of my
parents.
They tell me how the rav lifted me up on a table in front of him, and
asked me many questions, and encouraged me to ask questions in my
turn. Reb' Lozhe came to the conclusion, as a result of this
interview, that I ought by all means to be put to school. There was no
public school for girls, as we know, but a few pupils were maintained
in a certain private school by irregular contributions from city
funds. Reb' Lozhe enlisted in my cause the influence of his son, who,
by virtue of some municipal office which he held, had a vote in fixing
this appropriation. But although he pleaded eloquently for my
admission as a city pupil, the rav's son failed to win the consent of
his colleagues, and my one little crack of opportunity was tightly
stopped.
My father does not remember on what technicality my application was
dismissed. My mother is under the impression that it was plainly
refused on account of my religion, the authorities being unwilling to
appropriate money for the tuition of a Jewish child. But little it
matters now what the reason was; the result is what affected me. I was
left without teacher or book just when my mind was most active. I was
left without food just when the hunger of growth was creeping up. I
was left to think and think, without direction; without the means of
grappling with the contents of my own thought.
* * * * *
In a community which was isolated from the mass of the people on
account of its religion; which was governed by special civil laws in
recognition of that fact; in whose calendar there were twoscore days
of religious observance; whose going and coming, giving and taking,
living and dying, to the minutest details of social conduct, to the
most intimate particulars of private life, were regulated by sacred
laws, there could be no question of personal convictions in religion.
One was a Jew, leading a righteous life; or one was a Gentile,
existing to harass the Jews, while making a living off Jewish
enterprise. In the vocabulary of the more intelligent part of Polotzk,
it is true, there were such words as freethinker and apostate; but
these were the names of men who had forsaken the Law in distant times
or in distant parts, and whose evil fame had reached Polotzk by the
circuitous route of tradition. Nobody looked for such monsters in his
neighborhood. Polotzk was safely divided into Jews and Gentiles.
If any one in Polotzk had been idle and curious enough to inquire into
the state of mind of a little child, I wonder if his findings would
not have disturbed this simple classification.
There used to be a little girl in Polotzk who recited the long Hebrew
prayers, morning and evening, before and after meals, and never
skipped a word; who kissed the _mezuzah_ when going or coming; who
abstained from food and drink on fast days when she was no bigger than
a sacrificial hen; who spent Sabbath mornings over the lengthy ritual
for the day, and read the Psalms till daylight failed.
This pious child could give as good an account of the Creation as any
boy of her age. She knew how God made the world. Undeterred by the
fate of Eve, she wanted to know more. She asked her wise rebbe how God
came to be in His place, and where He found the stuff to make the
world of, and what was doing in the universe before God undertook His
task. Finding from his unsatisfying replies that the rebbe was but a
barren branch on the tree of knowledge, the good little girl never
betrayed to the world, by look or word, her discovery of his
limitations, but continued to accord him, outwardly, all the courtesy
due to his calling.
Her teacher having failed her, the young student, with admirable
persistence, carried her questions from one to another of her
acquaintances, putting their answers to the test whenever it was
possible. She established by this means two facts: first, that she
knew as much as any of those who undertook to instruct her; second,
that her oracles sometimes gave false answers. Did the little
inquisitor charge her betrayers with the lie? Magnanimous creature,
she kept their falseness a secret, and ceased to probe their shallow
depths.
What you would know, find out for yourself: this became our student's
motto; and she passed from the question to the experiment. Her
grandmother told her that if she handled "blind flowers" she would be
stricken blind. She found by test that the pretty flowers were
harmless. She tested everything that could be tested, till she hit at
last on an impious plan to put God Himself to the proof.
The pious little girl arose one Sabbath afternoon from her religious
meditations, when all the house was taking its after-dinner nap, and
went out in the yard, and stopped at the gate. She took out her pocket
handkerchief. She looked at it. Yes, that would do for the experiment.
She put it back into her pocket. She did not have to rehearse mentally
the sacred admonition not to carry anything beyond the house-limits on
the Sabbath day. She knew it as she knew that she was alive. And with
her handkerchief in her pocket the audacious child stepped into the
street!
She stood a moment, her heart beating so that it pained. Nothing
happened! She walked quite across the street. The Sabbath peace still
lay on everything. She felt again of the burden in her pocket. Yes,
she certainly was committing a sin. With an access of impious
boldness, the sinner walked--she ran as far as the corner, and stood
still, fearfully expectant. What form would the punishment take? She
stood breathing painfully for an eternity. How still everything
was--how close and still the air! Would it be a storm? Would a sudden
bolt strike her? She stood and waited. She could not bring her hand to
her pocket again, but she felt that it bulged monstrously. She stood
with no thought of moving again. Where were the thunders of Jehovah?
No sacred word of all her long prayers came to her tongue--not even
"Hear, O Israel." She felt that she was in direct communication with
God--awful thought!--and He would read her mind and would send His
answer.
[Illustration: SABBATH LOAVES FOR SALE (BREAD MARKET, POLOTZK)]
An age passed in blank expectancy. Nothing happened! Where was the
wrath of God? _Where was God?_
When she turned to go home, the little philosopher had her
handkerchief tied around her wrist in the proper way. The experiment
was over, though the result was not clear. God had not punished her,
but nothing was proved by His indifference. Either the act was no sin,
and her preceptors were all deceivers; or it was indeed a sin in the
eyes of God, but He refrained from stern justice for high reasons of
His own. It was not a searching experiment she had made. She was
bitterly disappointed, and perhaps that was meant as her punishment:
God refused to give her a reply. She intended no sin for the sake of
sin; so, being still in doubt, she tied her handkerchief around her
wrist. Her eyes stared more than ever,--this was the child with the
staring eyes,--but that was the only sign she gave of a consciousness
suddenly expanded, of a self-consciousness intensified.
When she went back into the house, she gazed with a new curiosity at
her mother, at her grandmother, dozing in their chairs. They looked
_different_. When they awoke and stretched themselves and adjusted wig
and cap, they looked _very_ strange. As she went to get her
grandmother her Bible, and dropped it accidentally, she kissed it by
way of atonement just as a proper child should.
How, I wonder, would this Psalm-singing child have be enlabelled by
the investigator of her mind? Would he have called her a Jew? She was
too young to be called an apostate. Perhaps she would have been
dismissed as a little fraud; and I should be content with that
classification, if slightly modified. I should say the child was a
piteously puzzled little fraud.
To return to the honest first person, I _was_ something of a fraud.
The days when I believed everything I was told did not run much beyond
my teething time. I soon began to question if fire was really hot, if
the cat would really scratch. Presently, as we have seen, I questioned
God. And in those days my religion depended on my mood. I could
believe anything I wanted to believe. I did believe, in all my moods,
that there was a God who had made the world, in some fashion
unexplained, and who knew about me and my doings; for there was the
world all about me, and somebody must have made it. And it was
conceivable that a being powerful enough to do such work could be
aware of my actions at all times, and yet continue to me invisible.
The question remained, what did He think of my conduct? Was He really
angry when I broke the Sabbath, or pleased when I fasted on the Day of
Atonement? My belief as to these matters wavered. When I swung the
sacrifice around my head on Atonement Eve, repeating, "Be thou my
sacrifice," etc., I certainly believed that I was bargaining with the
Almighty for pardon, and that He was interested in the matter. But
next day, when the fast was over, and I enjoyed all of my chicken that
I could eat, I believed as certainly that God could not be party to
such a foolish transaction, in which He got nothing but words, while I
got both the feast and the pardon. The sacrifice of money, to be spent
for the poor, seemed to me a more reliable insurance against
damnation. The well-to-do pious offered up both living sacrifice and
money for the poor-box, but it was a sign of poverty to offer only
money. Even a lean rooster, to be killed, roasted, and garnished for
the devotee's own table at the breaking of the fast, seemed to be
considered a more respectable sacrifice than a groschen to increase
the charity fund. All this was so illogical that it unsettled my faith
in minor points of doctrine, and on these points I was quite happy to
believe to-day one thing, to-morrow another.
As unwaveringly as I believed that we Jews had a God who was powerful
and wise, I believed that the God of my Christian neighbors was
impotent, cruel, and foolish. I understood that the god of the
Gentiles was no better than a toy, to be dressed up in gaudy stuffs
and carried in processions. I saw it often enough, and turned away in
contempt. While the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--my God--enjoined
on me honesty and kindness, the god of Vanka bade him beat me and spit
on me whenever he caught me alone. And what a foolish god was that who
taught the stupid Gentiles that we drank the blood of a murdered child
at our Passover feast! Why, I, who was only a child, knew better. And
so I hated and feared and avoided the great white church in the Platz,
and hated every sign and symbol of that monstrous god who was kept
there and hated my own person, when, in our play of a Christian
funeral, I imagined my body to be the corpse, over which was carried
the hideous cross.
Perhaps I have established that I was more Jew than Gentile, though I
can still prove that I was none the less a fraud. For instance, I
remember how once, on the eve of the Ninth of Ab--the anniversary of
the fall of the Temple--I was looking on at the lamentations of the
women. A large circle had gathered around my mother, who was the only
good reader among them, to listen to the story of the cruel
destruction. Sitting on humble stools, in stocking feet, shabby
clothes, and dishevelled hair, weeping in chorus, and wringing their
hands, as if it was but yesterday that the sacred edifice fell and
they were in the very dust and ashes of the ruin, the women looked to
me enviously wretched and pious. I joined the circle in the
candlelight. I wrung my hands, I moaned; but I was always slow of
tears--I could not weep. But I wanted to look like the others. So I
streaked my cheeks with the only moisture at hand.
Alas for my pious ambition! alas for the noble lament of the women!
Somebody looked up and caught me in the act of manufacturing tears. I
grinned, and she giggled. Another woman looked up. I grinned, and they
giggled. Demoralization swept around the circle. Honest laughter
snuffed out artificial grief. My mother at last looked up, with red
and astonished eyes, and I was banished from the feast of tears.
I returned promptly to my playmates in the street, who were amusing
themselves, according to the custom on that sad anniversary, by
pelting each other with burrs. Here I was distinguished, more than I
had been among my elders. My hair being curly, it caught a generous
number of burrs, so that I fairly bristled with these emblems of
mortification and woe.
Not long after that sinful experiment with the handkerchief I
discovered by accident that I was not the only doubter in Polotzk. One
Friday night I lay wakeful in my little bed, staring from the dark
into the lighted room adjoining mine. I saw the Sabbath candles
sputter and go out, one by one,--it was late,--but the lamp hanging
from the ceiling still burned high. Everybody had gone to bed. The
lamp would go out before morning if there was little oil; or else it
would burn till Natasha, the Gentile chorewoman, came in the morning
to put it out, and remove the candlesticks from the table, and unseal
the oven, and do the dozen little tasks which no Jew could perform on
the Sabbath. The simple prohibition to labor on the Sabbath day had
been construed by zealous commentators to mean much more. One must not
even touch any instrument of labor or commerce, as an axe or a coin.
It was forbidden to light a fire, or to touch anything that contained
a fire, or had contained fire, were it only a cold candlestick or a
burned match. Therefore the lamp at which I was staring must burn till
the Gentile woman came to put it out.
The light did not annoy me in the least; I was not thinking about it.
But apparently it troubled somebody else. I saw my father come from
his room, which also adjoined the living-room. What was he going to
do? What was this he was doing? Could I believe my eyes? My father
touched the lighted lamp!--yes, he shook it, as if to see how much oil
there was left.
I was petrified in my place. I could neither move nor make a sound. It
seemed to me he must feel my eyes bulging at him out of the dark. But
he did not know that I was looking; he thought everybody was asleep.
He turned down the light a very little, and waited. I did not take my
eyes from him. He lowered the flame a little more, and waited again. I
watched. By the slightest degrees he turned the light down. I
understood. In case any one were awake, it would appear as if the lamp
was going out of itself. I was the only one who lay so as to be able
to see him, and I had gone to bed so early that he could not suppose I
was awake. The light annoyed him, he wanted to put it out, but he
would not risk having it known.
I heard my father find his bed in the dark before I dared to draw a
full breath. The thing he had done was a monstrous sin. If his mother
had seen him do it, it would have broken her heart--his mother who
fasted half the days of the year, when he was a boy, to save his
teacher's fee; his mother who walked almost barefoot in the cruel snow
to carry him on her shoulders to school when she had no shoes for him;
his mother who made it her pious pride to raise up a learned son, that
most precious offering in the eyes of the great God, from the hand of
a poor struggling woman. If my mother had seen it, it would have
grieved her no less--my mother who was given to him, with her youth
and good name and her dowry, in exchange for his learning and piety;
my mother who was taken from her play to bear him children and feed
them and keep them, while he sat on the benches of the scholars and
repaid her labors with the fame of his learning. I did not put it to
myself just so, but I understood that learning and piety were the
things most valued in our family, that my father was a scholar, and
that piety, of course, was the fruit of sacred learning. And yet my
father had deliberately violated the Sabbath.
His act was not to be compared with my carrying the handkerchief. The
two sins were of the same kind, but the sinners and their motives were
different. I was a child, a girl at that, not yet of the age of moral
responsibility. He was a man full grown, passing for one of God's
elect, and accepting the reverence of the world as due tribute to his
scholarly merits. I had by no means satisfied myself, by my secret
experiment, that it was not sinful to carry a burden on the Sabbath
day. If God did not punish me on the spot, perhaps it was because of
my youth or perhaps it was because of my motive.
According to my elders, my father, by turning out the lamp, committed
the sin of Sabbath-breaking. What did my father intend? I could not
suppose that his purpose was similar to mine. Surely he, who had lived
so long and studied so deeply, had by this time resolved all his
doubts. Surely God had instructed _him_. I could not believe that he
did wrong knowingly, so I came to the conclusion that he did not hold
it a sin to touch a lighted lamp on Sabbath. Then why was he so secret
in his action? That, too, became clear to me. I myself had
instinctively adopted secret methods in all my little investigations,
and had kept the results to myself. The way in which my questions were
received had taught me much. I had a dim, inarticulate understanding
of the horror and indignation which my father would excite if he,
supposedly a man of piety, should publish the heretical opinion that
it was not wrong to handle fire on the Sabbath. To see what remorse my
mother suffered, or my father's mother, if by some accident she failed
in any point of religious observance, was to know that she could never
be brought to doubt the sacred importance of the thousand minutiæ of
ancient Jewish practice. That which had been taught them as the truth
by their fathers and mothers was the whole truth to my good friends
and neighbors--that and nothing else. If there were any people in
Polotzk who had strange private opinions, such as I concluded my
father must hold, it was possible that he had a secret acquaintance
with them. But it would never do, it was plain to me, to make public
confession of his convictions. Such an act would not only break the
hearts of his family, but it would also take the bread from the mouths
of his children, and ruin them forever. My sister and my brother and
I would come to be called the children of Israel the Apostate, just as
Gutke, my playmate, was called the granddaughter of Yankel the
Informer. The most innocent of us would be cursed and shunned for the
sin of our father.
All this I came to understand, not all at once, but by degrees, as I
put this and that together, and brought my childish thoughts to order.
I was by no means absorbed in this problem. I played and danced with
the other children as heartily as ever, but I brooded in my window
corner when there was nothing else to do. I had not the slightest
impulse to go to my father, charge him with his unorthodox conduct,
and demand an explanation of him. I was quite satisfied that I
understood him, and I had not the habit of confidences. I was still in
the days when I was content to _find out_ things, and did not long to
communicate my discoveries. Moreover, I was used to living in two
worlds, a real world and a make-believe one, without ever knowing
which was which. In one world I had much company--father and mother
and sister and friends--and did as others did, and took everything for
granted. In the other world I was all alone, and I had to discover
ways for myself; and I was so uncertain that I did not attempt to
bring a companion along. And did I find my own father treading in the
unknown ways? Then perhaps some day he would come across me, and take
me farther than I had yet been; but I would not be the first to
whisper that I was there. It seems strange enough to me now that I
should have been so uncommunicative; but I remind myself that I have
been thoroughly made over, at least once, since those early days.
I recall with sorrow that I was sometimes as weak in morals as I was
in religion. I remember stealing a piece of sugar. It was long
ago--almost as long ago as anything that I remember. We were still
living in my grandfather's house when this dreadful thing happened and
I was only four or five years old when we moved from there. Before my
mother figured this out for me I scarcely had the courage to confess
my sin.
And it was thus: In a corner of a front room, by a window, stood a
high chest of drawers. On top of the chest stood a tin box, decorated
with figures of queer people with queer flat parasols; a Chinese
tea-box, in a word. The box had a lid. The lid was shut tight. But I
knew what was in that gorgeous box and I coveted it. I was very
little--I never could reach anything. There stood a chair suggestively
near the chest. I pushed the chair a little and mounted it. By
standing on tiptoe I could now reach the box. I opened it and took out
an irregular lump of sparkling sugar. I stood on the chair admiring
it. I stood too long. My grandmother came in--or was it Itke, the
housemaid?--and found me with the stolen morsel.
I saw that I was fairly caught. How could I hope to escape my captor,
when I was obliged to turn on my stomach in order to descend safely,
thus presenting my jailer with the most tempting opportunity for
immediate chastisement? I took in the situation before my grandmother
had found her voice for horror. Did I rub my eyes with my knuckles and
whimper? I wish I could report that I was thus instantly struck with a
sense of my guilt. I was impressed only with the absolute certainty of
my impending doom, and I promptly seized on a measure of compensation.
While my captor--I really think it was a grandmother--rehearsed her
entire vocabulary of reproach, from a distance sufficient to enable
her to hurl her voice at me with the best effect, I stuffed the lump
of sugar into my mouth and munched it as fast as I could. And I had
eaten it all, and had licked my sticky lips, before the avenging rod
came down.
I remember no similar lapses from righteousness, but I sinned in
lesser ways more times than there are years in my life. I sinned, and
more than once I escaped punishment by some trick or sly speech. I do
not mean that I lied outright, though that also I did, sometimes; but
I would twist my naughty speech, if forced to repeat it, in such an
artful manner, or give such ludicrous explanation of my naughty act,
that justice was overcome by laughter and threw me, as often as not, a
handful of raisins instead of a knotted strap. If by such successes I
was encouraged to cultivate my natural slyness and duplicity, I throw
the blame on my unwise preceptors, and am glad to be rid of the burden
for once.
I have said that I used to lie. I recall no particular occasion when a
lie was the cause of my disgrace; but I know that it was always my
habit, when I had some trifling adventure to report, to garnish it up
with so much detail and circumstance that nobody who had witnessed my
small affair could have recognized it as the same, had I not insisted
on my version with such fervid conviction. The truth is that
everything that happened to me really loomed great and shone splendid
in my eyes, and I could not, except by conscious effort, reduce my
visions to their actual shapes and colors. If I saw a pair of geese
leading about a lazy goose girl, they went through all sorts of antics
before my eyes that fat geese are not known to indulge in. If I met
poor Blind Munye with a frown on his face, I thought that a cloud of
wrath overspread his countenance; and I ran home to relate, panting,
how narrowly I had escaped his fury. I will not pretend that I was
absolutely unconscious of my exaggerations; but if you insist, I will
say that things as I reported them might have been so, and would have
been much more interesting had they been so.
The noble reader who never told a lie, or never confessed one, will be
shocked at these revelations of my childish depravity. What proof has
he, he will cry, that I am not lying on every page of this chronicle,
if, by my own confession, my childhood was spent in a maze of lies and
dreams? I shall say to the saint, when I am challenged, that the proof
of my conversion to veracity is engraven in his own soul. Do you not
remember, you spotless one, how you used to steal and lie and cheat
and rob? Oh, not with your own hand, of course! It was your remote
ancestor who lived by plunder, and was honored for the blood upon his
hairy hands. By and by he discovered that cunning was more effective
than violence, and less troublesome. Still later he became convinced
that the greatest cunning was virtue, and made him a moral code, and
subdued the world. Then, when you came along, stumbling through the
wilderness of cast-off errors, your wise ancestor gave you a thrust
that landed you in the clearing of modernity, at the same time
bellowing in your ear, "Now be good! It pays!"
This is the whole history of your saintliness. But all people do not
take up life at the same point of human development. Some are backward
at birth, and have to make up, in the brief space of their individual
history, the stages they missed on their way out of the black past.
With me, for example, it actually comes to this: that I have to
recapitulate in my own experience all the slow steps of the progress
of the race. I seem to learn nothing except by the prick of life on my
own skin. I am saved from living in ignorance and dying in darkness
only by the sensitiveness of my skin. Some men learn through borrowed
experience. Shut them up in a glass tower, with an unobstructed view
of the world, and they will go through every adventure of life by
proxy, and be able to furnish you with a complete philosophy of life;
and you may safely bring up your children by it. But I am not of that
godlike organization. I am a thinking animal. Things are as important
to me as ideas. I imbibe wisdom through every pore of my body. There
are times, indeed, when the doctor in his study is less intelligible
to me than a cricket far off in the field. The earth was my mother,
the earth is my teacher. I am a dutiful pupil: I listen ever with my
ear close to her lips. It seems to me I do not know a single thing
that I did not learn, more or less directly, through the corporal
senses. As long as I have my body, I need not despair of salvation.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] A piece of parchment inscribed with a passage of Scripture, rolled
in a case and tacked to the doorpost. The pious touch or kiss this
when leaving or entering a house.
CHAPTER VII
THE BOUNDARIES STRETCH
The long chapter of troubles which led to my father's emigration to
America began with his own illness. The doctors sent him to Courland
to consult expensive specialists, who prescribed tedious courses of
treatment. He was far from cured when my mother also fell ill, and my
father had to return to Polotzk to look after the business.
Trouble begets trouble. After my mother took to her bed everything
continued to go wrong. The business gradually declined, as too much
money was withdrawn to pay the doctors' and apothecaries' bills; and
my father, himself in poor health, and worried about my mother, was
not successful in coping with the growing difficulties. At home, the
servants were dismissed, for the sake of economy, and all the
housework and the nursing fell on my grandmother and my sister.
Fetchke, as a result, was overworked, and fell ill of a fever. The
baby, suffering from unavoidable neglect, developed the fractious
temper of semi-illness. And by way of a climax, the old cow took it
into her head to kick my grandmother, who was laid up for a week with
a bruised leg.
Neighbors and cousins pulled us through till grandma got up, and after
her, Fetchke. But my mother remained on her bed. Weeks, months, a year
she lay there, and half of another year. All the doctors in Polotzk
attended her in turn, and one doctor came all the way from Vitebsk.
Every country practitioner for miles around was consulted, every
quack, every old wife who knew a charm. The apothecaries ransacked
their shops for drugs the names of which they had forgotten, and kind
neighbors brought in their favorite remedies. There were midnight
prayers in the synagogue for my mother, and petitions at the graves of
her parents; and one awful night when she was near death, three pious
mothers who had never lost a child came to my mother's bedside and
bought her, for a few kopecks, for their own, so that she might gain
the protection of their luck, and so be saved.
Still my poor mother lay on her bed, suffering and wasting. The house
assumed a look of desolation. Everybody went on tiptoe; we talked in
whispers; for weeks at a time there was no laughter in our home. The
ominous night lamp was never extinguished. We slept in our clothes
night after night, so as to wake the more easily in case of sudden
need. We watched, we waited, but we scarcely hoped.
Once in a while I was allowed to take a short turn in the sick-room.
It was awful to sit beside my mother's bed in the still night and see
her helplessness. She had been so strong, so active. She used to lift
sacks and barrels that were heavy for a man, and now she could not
raise a spoon to her mouth. Sometimes she did not know me when I gave
her the medicine, and when she knew me, she did not care. Would she
ever care any more? She looked strange and small in the shadows of the
bed. Her hair had been cut off after the first few months; her short
curls were almost covered by the ice bag. Her cheeks were red, red,
but her hands were so white as they had never been before. In the
still night I wondered if she cared to live.
The night lamp burned on. My father grew old. He was always figuring
on a piece of paper. We children knew the till was empty when the
silver candlesticks were taken away to be pawned. Next, superfluous
featherbeds were sold for what they would bring, and then there came a
day when grandma, with eyes blinded by tears, groped in the big
wardrobe for my mother's satin dress and velvet mantle; and after that
it did not matter any more what was taken out of the house.
Then everything took a sudden turn. My mother began to improve, and at
the same time my father was offered a good position as superintendent
of a gristmill.
As soon as my mother could be moved, he took us all out to the mill,
about three versts out of town, on the Polota. We had a pleasant
cottage there, with the miller's red-headed, freckled family for our
only neighbors. If our rooms were barer than they used to be, the sun
shone in at all the windows; and as the leaves on the trees grew
denser and darker, my mother grew stronger on her feet, and laughter
returned to our house as the song bird to the grove.
We children had a very happy summer. We had never lived in the country
before, and we liked the change. It was endless fun to explore the
mill; to squeeze into forbidden places, and be pulled out by the angry
miller; to tyrannize over the mill hands, and be worshipped by them in
return; to go boating on the river, and discover unvisited nooks, and
search the woods and fields for kitchen herbs, and get lost, and be
found, a hundred times a week. And what an adventure it was to walk
the three versts into town, leaving a trail of perfume from the
wild-flower posies we carried to our city friends!
But these things did not last. The mill changed hands, and the new
owner put a protégé of his own in my father's place. So, after a short
breathing spell, we were driven back into the swamp of growing poverty
and trouble.
The next year or so my father spent in a restless and fruitless search
for a permanent position. My mother had another serious illness, and
his own health remained precarious. What he earned did not more than
half pay the bills in the end, though we were living very humbly now.
Polotzk seemed to reject him, and no other place invited him.
Just at this time occurred one of the periodic anti-Semitic movements
whereby government officials were wont to clear the forbidden cities
of Jews, whom, in the intervals of slack administration of the law,
they allowed to maintain an illegal residence in places outside the
Pale, on payment of enormous bribes and at the cost of nameless risks
and indignities.
It was a little before Passover that the cry of the hunted thrilled
the Jewish world with the familiar fear. The wholesale expulsion of
Jews from Moscow and its surrounding district at cruelly short notice
was the name of this latest disaster. Where would the doom strike
next? The Jews who lived illegally without the Pale turned their
possessions into cash and slept in their clothes, ready for immediate
flight. Those who lived in the comparative security of the Pale
trembled for their brothers and sisters without, and opened wide their
doors to afford the fugitives refuge. And hundreds of fugitives,
preceded by a wail of distress, flocked into the open district,
bringing their trouble where trouble was never absent, mingling their
tears with the tears that never dried.
The open cities becoming thus suddenly crowded, every man's chance of
making a living was diminished in proportion to the number of
additional competitors. Hardship, acute distress, ruin for many: thus
spread the disaster, ring beyond ring, from the stone thrown by a
despotic official into the ever-full river of Jewish persecution.
Passover was celebrated in tears that year. In the story of the Exodus
we would have read a chapter of current history, only for us there was
no deliverer and no promised land.
But what said some of us at the end of the long service? Not "May we
be next year in Jerusalem," but "Next year--in America!" So there was
our promised land, and many faces were turned towards the West. And if
the waters of the Atlantic did not part for them, the wanderers rode
its bitter flood by a miracle as great as any the rod of Moses ever
wrought.
My father was carried away by the westward movement, glad of his own
deliverance, but sore at heart for us whom he left behind. It was the
last chance for all of us. We were so far reduced in circumstances
that he had to travel with borrowed money to a German port, whence he
was forwarded to Boston, with a host of others, at the expense of an
emigrant aid society.
I was about ten years old when my father emigrated. I was used to his
going away from home, and "America" did not mean much more to me than
"Kherson," or "Odessa," or any other names of distant places. I
understood vaguely, from the gravity with which his plans were
discussed, and from references to ships, societies, and other
unfamiliar things, that this enterprise was different from previous
ones; but my excitement and emotion on the morning of my father's
departure were mainly vicarious.
I know the day when "America" as a world entirely unlike Polotzk
lodged in my brain, to become the centre of all my dreams and
speculations. Well I know the day. I was in bed, sharing the measles
with some of the other children. Mother brought us a thick letter from
father, written just before boarding the ship. The letter was full of
excitement. There was something in it besides the description of
travel, something besides the pictures of crowds of people, of foreign
cities, of a ship ready to put out to sea. My father was travelling at
the expense of a charitable organization, without means of his own,
without plans, to a strange world where he had no friends; and yet he
wrote with the confidence of a well-equipped soldier going into
battle. The rhetoric is mine. Father simply wrote that the emigration
committee was taking good care of everybody, that the weather was
fine, and the ship comfortable. But I heard something, as we read the
letter together in the darkened room, that was more than the words
seemed to say. There was an elation, a hint of triumph, such as had
never been in my father's letters before. I cannot tell how I knew it.
I felt a stirring, a straining in my father's letter. It was there,
even though my mother stumbled over strange words, even though she
cried, as women will when somebody is going away. My father was
inspired by a vision. He saw something--he promised us something. It
was this "America." And "America" became my dream.
While it was nothing new for my father to go far from home in search
of his fortune, the circumstances in which he left us were unlike
anything we had experienced before. We had absolutely no reliable
source of income, no settled home, no immediate prospects. We hardly
knew where we belonged in the simple scheme of our society. My mother,
as a bread-winner, had nothing like her former success. Her health was
permanently impaired, her place in the business world had long been
filled by others, and there was no capital to start her anew. Her
brothers did what they could for her. They were well-to-do, but they
all had large families, with marriageable daughters and sons to be
bought out of military service. The allowance they made her was
generous compared to their means,--affection and duty could do no
more,--but there were four of us growing children, and my mother was
obliged to make every effort within her power to piece out her income.
How quickly we came down from a large establishment, with servants and
retainers, and a place among the best in Polotzk, to a single room
hired by the week, and the humblest associations, and the averted
heads of former friends! But oftenest it was my mother who turned away
her head. She took to using the side streets to avoid the pitiful eyes
of the kind, and the scornful eyes of the haughty. Both were turned on
her as she trudged from store to store, and from house to house,
peddling tea or other ware; and both were hard to bear. Many a winter
morning she arose in the dark, to tramp three or four miles in the
gripping cold, through the dragging snow, with a pound of tea for a
distant customer; and her profit was perhaps twenty kopecks. Many a
time she fell on the ice, as she climbed the steep bank on the far
side of the Dvina, a heavy basket on each arm. More than once she
fainted at the doors of her customers, ashamed to knock as suppliant
where she had used to be received as an honored guest. I hope the
angels did not have to count the tears that fell on her frost-bitten,
aching hands as she counted her bitter earnings at night.
And who took care of us children while my mother tramped the streets
with her basket? Why, who but Fetchke? Who but the little housewife of
twelve? Sure of our safety was my mother with Fetchke to watch; sure
of our comfort with Fetchke to cook the soup and divide the scrap of
meat and remember the next meal. Joseph was in heder all day; the baby
was a quiet little thing; Mashke was no worse than usual. But still
there was plenty to do, with order to keep in a crowded room, and the
washing, and the mending. And Fetchke did it all. She went to the
river with the women to wash the clothes, and tucked up her dress and
stood bare-legged in the water, like the rest of them, and beat and
rubbed with all her might, till our miserable rags gleamed white
again.
And I? I usually had a cold, or a cough, or something to disable me;
and I never had any talent for housework. If I swept and sanded the
floor, polished the samovar, and ran errands, I was doing much. I
minded the baby, who did not need much minding. I was willing enough,
I suppose, but the hard things were done without my help.
Not that I mean to belittle the part that I played in our reduced
domestic economy. Indeed, I am very particular to get all the credit
due me. I always remind my sister Deborah, who was the baby of those
humble days, that it was I who pierced her ears. Earrings were a
requisite part of a girl's toilet. Even a beggar girl must have
earrings, were they only loops of thread with glass beads. I heard my
mother bemoan the baby because she had not time to pierce her ears.
Promptly I armed myself with a coarse needle and a spool of thread,
and towed Deborah out into the woodshed. The operation was entirely
successful, though the baby was entirely ungrateful. And I am proud to
this day of the unflinching manner in which I did what I conceived to
be my duty. If Deborah chooses to go with ungarnished ears, it is her
affair; my conscience is free of all reproach.
[Illustration: WINTER SCENE ON THE DVINA]
I had a direct way in everything. I rushed right in--I spoke right
out. My mother sent me sometimes to deliver a package of tea, and I
was proud to help in business. One day I went across the Dvina and far
up "the other side." It was a good-sized expedition for me to make
alone, and I was not a little pleased with myself when I delivered my
package, safe and intact, into the hands of my customer. But the
storekeeper was not pleased at all. She sniffed and sniffed, she
pinched the tea, she shook it all out on the counter.
"_Na_, take it back," she said in disgust; "this is not the tea I
always buy. It's a poorer quality."
I knew the woman was mistaken. I was acquainted with my mother's
several grades of tea. So I spoke up manfully.
"Oh, no," I said; "this is the tea my mother always sends you. There
is no worse tea."
Nothing in my life ever hurt me more than that woman's answer to my
argument. She laughed--she simply laughed. But I understood, even
before she controlled herself sufficiently to make verbal remarks,
that I had spoken like a fool, had lost my mother a customer. I had
only spoken the truth, but I had not expressed it diplomatically.
That was no way to make business.
I felt very sore to be returning home with the tea still in my hand,
but I forgot my trouble in watching a summer storm gather up the
river. The few passengers who took the boat with me looked scared as
the sky darkened, and the boatman grasped his oars very soberly. It
took my breath away to see the signs, but I liked it; and I was much
disappointed to get home dry.
When my mother heard of my misadventure she laughed, too; but that was
different, and I was able to laugh with her.
This is the way I helped in the housekeeping and in business. I hope
it does not appear as if I did not take our situation to heart, for I
did--in my own fashion. It was plain, even to an idle dreamer like me,
that we were living on the charity of our friends, and barely living
at that. It was plain, from my father's letters, that he was scarcely
able to support himself in America, and that there was no immediate
prospect of our joining him. I realized it all, but I considered it
temporary, and I found plenty of comfort in writing long letters to my
father--real, original letters this time, not copies of Reb' Isaiah's
model--letters which my father treasured for years.
As an instance of what I mean by my own fashion of taking trouble to
heart, I recall the day when our household effects were attached for a
debt. We had plenty of debts, but the stern creditor who set the law
on us this time was none of ours. The claim was against a family to
whom my mother sublet two of our three rooms, furnished with her own
things. The police officers, who swooped down upon us without warning,
as was their habit, asked no questions and paid no heed to
explanations. They affixed a seal to every lame chair and cracked
pitcher in the place; aye, to every faded petticoat found hanging in
the wardrobe. These goods, comprising all our possessions and all our
tenant's, would presently be removed, to be sold at auction, for the
benefit of the creditor.
Lame chairs and faded petticoats, when they are the last one has, have
a vital value in the owner's eyes. My mother moved about, weeping
distractedly, all the while the officers were in the house. The
frightened children cried. Our neighbors gathered to bemoan our
misfortune. And over everything was the peculiar dread which only Jews
in Russia feel when agents of the Government invade their homes.
The fear of the moment was in my heart, as in every other heart there.
It was a horrid, oppressive fear. I retired to a quiet corner to
grapple with it. I was not given to weeping, but I must think things
out in words. I repeated to myself that the trouble was all about
money. Somebody wanted money from our tenant, who had none to give.
Our furniture was going to be sold to make this money. It was a
mistake, but then the officers would not believe my mother. Still, it
was only about money. Nobody was dead, nobody was ill. It was all
about _money_. Why, there was plenty of money in Polotzk! My own uncle
had many times as much as the creditor claimed. He could buy all our
things back, or somebody else could. What did it matter? It was only
_money_, and money was got by working, and we were all willing to
work. There was nothing gone, nothing lost, as when somebody died.
This furniture could be moved from place to place, and so could money
be moved, and nothing was lost out of the world by the transfer.
_That_ was all. If anybody--
Why, what do I see at the window? Breine Malke, our next-door
neighbor, is--yes, she is smuggling something out of the window! If
she is caught--! Oh, I must help! Breine Malke beckons. She wants me
to do something. I see--I understand. I must stand in the doorway, to
obstruct the view of the officers, who are all engaged in the next
room just now. I move readily to my post, but I cannot resist my
curiosity. I must look over my shoulder a last time, to see what it is
Breine Malke wants to smuggle out.
I can scarcely stifle my laughter. Of all our earthly goods, our
neighbor has chosen for salvation a dented bandbox containing a
moth-eaten bonnet from my mother's happier days! And I laugh not only
from amusement but also from lightness of heart. For I have succeeded
in reducing our catastrophe to its simplest terms, and I find that it
is only a trifle, and no matter of life and death.
I could not help it. That was the way it looked to me.
I am sure I made as serious efforts as anybody to prepare myself for
life in America on the lines indicated in my father's letters. In
America, he wrote, it was no disgrace to work at a trade. Workmen and
capitalists were equal. The employer addressed the employee as _you_,
not, familiarly, as _thou_. The cobbler and the teacher had the same
title, "Mister." And all the children, boys and girls, Jews and
Gentiles, went to school! Education would be ours for the asking, and
economic independence also, as soon as we were prepared. He wanted
Fetchke and me to be taught some trade; so my sister was apprenticed
to a dressmaker and I to a milliner.
Fetchke, of course, was successful, and I, of course, was not. My
sister managed to learn her trade, although most of the time at the
dressmaker's she had to spend in sweeping, running errands, and
minding the babies; the usual occupations of the apprentice in any
trade.
But I--I had to be taken away from the milliner's after a couple of
months. I did try, honestly. With all my eyes I watched my mistress
build up a chimney pot of straw and things. I ripped up old bonnets
with enthusiasm. I picked up everybody's spools and thimbles, and
other far-rolling objects. I did just as I was told, for I was
determined to become a famous milliner, since America honored the
workman so. But most of the time I was sent away on errands--to the
market to buy soup greens, to the corner store to get change, and all
over town with bandboxes half as round again as I. It was winter, and
I was not very well dressed. I froze; I coughed; my mistress said I
was not of much use to her. So my mother kept me at home, and my
career as a milliner was blighted.
This was during our last year in Russia, when I was between twelve and
thirteen years of age. I was old enough to be ashamed of my failures,
but I did not have much time to think about them, because my Uncle
Solomon took me with him to Vitebsk.
It was not my first visit to that city. A few years before I had spent
some days there, in the care of my father's cousin Rachel, who
journeyed periodically to the capital of the province to replenish her
stock of spools and combs and like small wares, by the sale of which
she was slowly earning her dowry.
On that first occasion, Cousin Rachel, who had developed in business
that dual conscience, one for her Jewish neighbors and one for the
Gentiles, decided to carry me without a ticket. I was so small, though
of an age to pay half-fare, that it was not difficult. I remember her
simple stratagem from beginning to end. When we approached the ticket
office she whispered to me to stoop a little, and I stooped. The
ticket agent passed me. In the car she bade me curl up in the seat,
and I curled up. She threw a shawl over me and bade me pretend to
sleep, and I pretended to sleep. I heard the conductor collect the
tickets. I knew when he was looking at me. I heard him ask my age and
I heard Cousin Rachel lie about it. I was allowed to sit up when the
conductor was gone, and I sat up and looked out of the window and saw
everything, and was perfectly, perfectly happy. I was fond of my
cousin, and I smiled at her in perfect understanding and admiration of
her cleverness in beating the railroad company.
I knew then, as I know now, beyond a doubt, that my Uncle David's
daughter was an honorable woman. With the righteous she dealt
squarely; with the unjust, as best she could. She was in duty bound to
make all the money she could, for money was her only protection in the
midst of the enemy. Every kopeck she earned or saved was a scale in
her coat of armor. We learned this code early in life, in Polotzk; so
I was pleased with the success of our ruse on this occasion, though I
should have been horrified if I had seen Cousin Rachel cheat a Jew.
We made our headquarters in that part of Vitebsk where my father's
numerous cousins and aunts lived, in more or less poverty, or at most
in the humblest comfort; but I was taken to my Uncle Solomon's to
spend the Sabbath. I remember a long walk, through magnificent
avenues and past splendid shops and houses and gardens. Vitebsk was a
metropolis beside provincial Polotzk; and I was very small, even
without stooping.
Uncle Solomon lived in the better part of the city, and I found his
place very attractive. Still, after a night's sleep, I was ready for
further travel and adventures, and I set out, without a word to
anybody, to retrace my steps clear across the city.
The way was twice as long as on the preceding day, perhaps because
such small feet set the pace, perhaps because I lingered as long as I
pleased at the shop windows. At some corners, too, I had to stop and
study my route. I do not think I was frightened at all, though I
imagine my back was very straight and my head very high all the way;
for I was well aware that I was out on an adventure.
I did not speak to any one till I reached my Aunt Leah's; and then I
hardly had a chance to speak, I was so much hugged and laughed over
and cried over, and questioned and cross-questioned, without anybody
waiting to hear my answers. I had meant to surprise Cousin Rachel, and
I had frightened her. When she had come to Uncle Solomon's to take me
back, she found the house in an uproar, everybody frightened at my
disappearance. The neighborhood was searched, and at last messengers
were sent to Aunt Leah's. The messengers in their haste quite
overlooked me. It was their fault if they took a short cut unknown to
me. I was all the time faithfully steering by the sign of the tobacco
shop, and the shop with the jumping-jack in the window, and the garden
with the iron fence, and the sentry box opposite a drug store, and all
the rest of my landmarks, as carefully entered on my mental chart the
day before.
All this I told my scared relatives as soon as they let me, till they
were convinced that I was not lost, nor stolen by the gypsies, nor
otherwise done away with. Cousin Rachel was so glad that she would not
have to return to Polotzk empty-handed that she would not let anybody
scold me. She made me tell over and over what I had seen on the way,
till they all laughed and praised my acuteness for seeing so much more
than they had supposed there was to see. Indeed, I was made a heroine,
which was just what I intended to be when I set out on my adventure.
And thus ended most of my unlawful escapades; I was more petted than
scolded for my insubordination.
My second journey to Vitebsk, in the company of Uncle Solomon, I
remember as well as the first. I had been up all night, dancing at a
wedding, and had gone home only to pick up my small bundle and be
picked up, in turn, by my uncle. I was a little taller now, and had my
own ticket, like a real traveller.
It was still early in the morning when the train pulled out of the
station, or else it was a misty day. I know the fields looked soft and
gray when we got out into the country, and the trees were blurred. I
did not want to sleep. A new day had begun--a new adventure. I would
not miss any of it.
But the last day, so unnaturally prolonged, was entangled in the
skirts of the new. When did yesterday end? Why was not this new day
the same day continued? I looked up at my uncle, but he was smiling at
me in that amused way of his--he always seemed to be amused at me, and
he would make me talk and then laugh at me--so I did not ask my
question. Indeed, I could not formulate it, so I kept staring out on
the dim country, and thinking, and thinking; and all the while the
engine throbbed and lurched, and the wheels ground along, and I was
astonished to hear that they were keeping perfectly the time of the
last waltz I had danced at the wedding. I sang it through in my head.
Yes, that was the rhythm. The engine knew it, the whole machine
repeated it, and sent vibrations through my body that were just like
the movements of the waltz. I was so much interested in this discovery
that I forgot the problem of the Continuity of Time; and from that day
to this, whenever I have heard that waltz,--one of the sweet Danube
waltzes,--I have lived through that entire experience; the festive
night, the misty morning, the abnormal consciousness of time, as if I
had existed forever, without a break; the journey, the dim landscape,
and the tune singing itself in my head. Never can I hear that waltz
without the accompaniment of engine wheels grinding rhythmically along
speeding tracks.
I remained in Vitebsk about six months. I do not believe I was ever
homesick during all that time. I was too happy to be homesick. The
life suited me extremely well. My life in Polotzk had grown meaner and
duller, as the family fortunes declined. For years there had been no
lessons, no pleasant excursions, no jolly gatherings with uncles and
aunts. Poverty, shadowed by pride, trampled down our simple ambitions
and simpler joys. I cannot honestly say that I was very sensitive to
our losses. I do not remember suffering because there was no jam on my
bread, and no new dress for the holidays. I do not know whether I was
hurt when some of our playmates abandoned us. I remember myself
oftener in the attitude of an onlooker, as on the occasion of the
attachment of our furniture, when I went off into a corner to think
about it. Perhaps I was not able to cling to negations. The possession
of the bread was a more absorbing fact than the loss of the jam. If I
were to read my character backwards, I ought to believe that I did
miss what I lacked in our days of privation; for I know, to my shame,
that in more recent years I have cried for jam. But I am trying not to
reason, only to remember; and from many scattered and shadowy
memories, that glimmer and fade away so fast that I cannot fix them on
this page, I form an idea, almost a conviction, that it was with me as
I say.
However indifferent I may have been to what I had not, I was fully
alive to what I had. So when I came to Vitebsk I eagerly seized on the
many new things that I found around me; and these new impressions and
experiences affected me so much that I count that visit as an epoch in
my Russian life.
I was very much at home in my uncle's household. I was a little afraid
of my aunt, who had a quick temper, but on the whole I liked her. She
was fair and thin and had a pretty smile in the wake of her tempers.
Uncle Solomon was an old friend. I was fond of him and he made much of
me. His fine brown eyes were full of smiles, and there always was a
pleasant smile for me, or a teasing one.
Uncle Solomon was comparatively prosperous, so I soon forgot whatever
I had known at home of sordid cares. I do not remember that I was ever
haunted by the thought of my mother, who slaved to keep us in bread;
or of my sister, so little older than myself, who bent her little back
to a woman's work. I took up the life around me as if there were no
other life. I did not play all the time, but I enjoyed whatever work I
found because I was so happy. I helped my Cousin Dinke help her
mother with the housework. I put it this way because I think my aunt
never set me any tasks; but Dinke was glad to have me help wash dishes
and sweep and make beds. My cousin was a gentle, sweet girl, blue-eyed
and fair, and altogether attractive. She talked to me about grown-up
things, and I liked it. When her friends came to visit her she did not
mind having me about, although my skirts were so short.
My helping hand was extended also to my smaller cousins, Mendele and
Perele. I played lotto with Mendele and let him beat me; I found him
when he was lost, and I helped him play tricks on our elders. Perele,
the baby, was at times my special charge, and I think she did not
suffer in my hands. I was a good nurse, though my methods were
somewhat original.
Uncle Solomon was often away on business, and in his absence Cousin
Hirshel was my hero. Hirshel was only a little older than I, but he
was a pupil in the high school, and wore the student's uniform, and
knew nearly as much as my uncle, I thought. When he buckled on his
satchel of books in the morning, and strode away straight as a
soldier,--no heder boy ever walked like that,--I stood in the doorway
and worshipped his retreating steps. I met him on his return in the
late afternoon, and hung over him when he laid out his books for his
lessons. Sometimes he had long Russian pieces to commit to memory. He
would walk up and down repeating the lines out loud, and I learned as
fast as he. He would let me hold the book while he recited, and a
proud girl was I if I could correct him.
My interest in his lessons amused him; he did not take me seriously.
He looked much like his father, and twinkled his eyes at me in the
same way and made fun of me, too. But sometimes he condescended to set
me a lesson in spelling or arithmetic,--in reading I was as good as
he,--and if I did well, he praised me and went and told the family
about it; but lest I grow too proud of my achievements, he would sit
down and do mysterious sums--I now believe it was algebra--to which I
had no clue whatever, and which duly impressed me with a sense of my
ignorance.
There were other books in the house than school-books. The Hebrew
books, of course, were there, as in other Jewish homes; but I was no
longer devoted to the Psalms. There were a few books about in Russian
and in Yiddish, that were neither works of devotion nor of
instruction. These were story-books and poems. They were a great
surprise to me and a greater delight. I read them hungrily, all there
were--a mere handful, but to me an overwhelming treasure. Of all those
books I remember by name only "Robinson Crusoe." I think I preferred
the stories to the poems, though poetry was good to recite, walking up
and down, like Cousin Hirshel. That was my introduction to secular
literature, but I did not understand it at the time.
When I had exhausted the books, I began on the old volumes of a
Russian periodical which I found on a shelf in my room. There was a
high stack of these paper volumes, and I was so hungry for books that
I went at them greedily, fearing that I might not get through before I
had to return to Polotzk.
I read every spare minute of the day, and most of the night. I
scarcely ever stopped at night until my lamp burned out. Then I would
creep into bed beside Dinke, but often my head burned so from
excitement that I did not sleep at once. And no wonder. The violent
romances which rushed through the pages of that periodical were fit to
inflame an older, more sophisticated brain than mine. I must believe
that it was a thoroughly respectable magazine, because I found it in
my Uncle Solomon's house; but the novels it printed were certainly
sensational, if I dare judge from my lurid recollections. These
romances, indeed, may have had their literary qualities, which I was
too untrained to appreciate. I remember nothing but startling
adventures of strange heroes and heroines, violent catastrophes in
every chapter, beautiful maidens abducted by cruel Cossacks, inhuman
mothers who poisoned their daughters for jealousy of their lovers; and
all these unheard-of things happening in a strange world, the very
language of which was unnatural to me. I was quick enough to fix
meanings to new words, however, so keen was my interest in what I
read. Indeed, when I recall the zest with which I devoured those
fearful pages, the thrill with which I followed the heartless mother
or the abused maiden in her adventures, my heart beating in my throat
when my little lamp began to flicker; and then, myself, big-eyed and
shivery in the dark, stealing to bed like a guilty ghost,--when I
remember all this, I have an unpleasant feeling, as of one hearing of
another's debauch; and I would be glad to shake the little bony
culprit that I was then.
My uncle was away so much of the time that I doubt if he knew how I
spent my nights. My aunt, poor hard-worked housewife, knew too little
of books to direct my reading. My cousins were not enough older than
myself to play mentors to me. Besides all this, I think it was tacitly
agreed, at my uncle's as at home, that Mashke was best let alone in
such matters. So I burnt my midnight lamp, and filled my mind with a
conglomeration of images entirely unsuited to my mental digestion; and
no one can say what they would have bred in me, besides headache and
nervousness, had they not been so soon dispelled and superseded by a
host of strong new impressions. For these readings ended with my
visit, which was closely followed by the preparations for our
emigration.
On the whole, then, I do not feel that I was seriously harmed by my
wild reading. I have not been told that my taste was corrupted, and my
morals, I believe, have also escaped serious stricture. I would even
say that I have never been hurt by any revelation, however distorted
or untimely, that I found in books, good or poor; that I have never
read an idle book that was entirely useless; and that I have never
quite lost whatever was significant to my spirit in any book, good or
bad, even though my conscious memory can give no account of it.
One lived, at Uncle Solomon's, not only one's own life, but the life
of all around. My uncle, when he returned after a short absence, had
stories to tell and adventures to describe; and I learned that one
might travel considerably and see things unknown even in Vitebsk,
without going as far as America. My cousins sometimes went to the
theatre, and I listened with rapture to their account of what they had
seen, and I learned the songs they had heard. Once Cousin Hirshel went
to see a giant, who exhibited himself for three kopecks, and came home
with such marvellous accounts of his astonishing proportions, and his
amazing feats of strength, that little Mendele cried for envy, and I
had to play lotto with him and let him beat me oh, so easily! till he
felt himself a man again.
And sometimes I had adventures of my own. I explored the city to some
extent by myself, or else my cousins took me with them on their
errands. There were so many fine people to see, such wonderful shops,
such great distances to go. Once they took me to a bookstore. I saw
shelves and shelves of books, and people buying them, and taking them
away to keep. I was told that some people had in their own houses more
books than were in the store. Was not that wonderful? It was a great
city, Vitebsk; I never could exhaust its delights.
Although I did not often think of my people at home, struggling
desperately to live while I revelled in abundance and pleasure and
excitement, I did do my little to help the family by giving lessons in
lacemaking. As this was the only time in my life that I earned money
by the work of my hands, I take care not to forget it and I like to
give an account of it.
I was always, as I have elsewhere admitted, very clumsy with my hands,
counting five thumbs to the hand. Knitting and embroidery, at which my
sister was so clever, I could never do with any degree of skill. The
blue peacock with the red tail that I achieved in cross-stitch was not
a performance of any grace. Neither was I very much downcast at my
failures in this field; I was not an ambitious needlewoman. But when
the fad for "Russian lace" was introduced into Polotzk by a family of
sisters who had been expelled from St. Petersburg, and all feminine
Polotzk, on both sides of the Dvina, dropped knitting and crochet
needles and embroidery frames to take up pillow and bobbins, I, too,
was carried away by the novelty, and applied myself heartily to learn
the intricate art, with the result that I did master it. The Russian
sisters charged enormous fees for lessons, and made a fortune out of
the sale of patterns while they held the monopoly. Their pupils passed
on the art at reduced fees, and their pupils' pupils charged still
less; until even the humblest cottage rang with the pretty click of
the bobbins, and my Cousin Rachel sold steel pins by the ounce,
instead of by the dozen, and the women exchanged cardboard patterns
from one end of town to the other.
My teacher, who taught me without fee, being a friend of our
prosperous days, lived "on the other side." It was winter, and many a
time I crossed the frozen river, carrying a lace pillow as big as
myself, till my hands were numb with cold. But I persisted, afraid as
I was of cold; and when I came to Vitebsk I was glad of my one
accomplishment. For Vitebsk had not yet seen "Russian lace," and I was
an acceptable teacher of the new art, though I was such a mite,
because there was no other. I taught my Cousin Dinke, of course, and I
had a number of paying pupils. I gave lessons at my pupils' homes, and
was very proud, going thus about town and being received as a person
of importance. If my feet did not reach the floor when I sat in a
chair, my hands knew their business for once; and I was such a
conscientious and enthusiastic teacher that I had the satisfaction of
seeing all my pupils execute difficult pieces before I left Vitebsk.
I never have seen money that was half so bright to look at, half so
pretty to clink, as the money I earned by these lessons. And it was
easy to decide what to do with my wealth. I bought presents for
everybody I knew. I remember to this day the pattern of the shawl I
bought for my mother. When I came home and unpacked my treasures, I
was the proudest girl in Polotzk.
The proudest, but not the happiest. I found my family in such a
pitiful state that all my joy was stifled by care, if only for a
while.
Unwilling to spoil my holiday, my mother had not written me how things
had gone from bad to worse during my absence, and I was not prepared.
Fetchke met me at the station, and conducted me to a more wretched
hole than I had ever called home before.
I went into the room alone, having been greeted outside by my mother
and brother. It was evening, and the shabbiness of the apartment was
all the gloomier for the light of a small kerosene lamp standing on
the bare deal table. At one end of the table--is this Deborah? My
little sister, dressed in an ugly gray jacket, sat motionless in the
lamplight, her fair head drooping, her little hands folded on the edge
of the table. At sight of her I grew suddenly old. It was merely that
she was a shy little girl, unbecomingly dressed, and perhaps a little
pale from underfeeding. But to me, at that moment, she was the
personification of dejection, the living symbol of the fallen family
state.
Of course my sober mood did not last long. Even "fallen family state"
could be interpreted in terms of money--absent money--and that, as
once established, was a trifling matter. Hadn't I earned money myself?
Heaps of it! Only look at this, and this, and this that I brought from
Vitebsk, bought with my own money! No, I did not remain old. For many
years more I was a very childish child.
Perhaps I had spent my time in Vitebsk to better advantage than at the
milliner's, from any point of view. When I returned to my native town
I _saw_ things. I saw the narrowness, the stifling narrowness, of life
in Polotzk. My books, my walks, my visits, as teacher, to many homes,
had been so many doors opening on a wider world; so many horizons, one
beyond the other. The boundaries of life had stretched, and I had
filled my lungs with the thrilling air from a great Beyond. Child
though I was, Polotzk, when I came back, was too small for me.
And even Vitebsk, for all its peepholes into a Beyond, presently began
to shrink in my imagination, as America loomed near. My father's
letters warned us to prepare for the summons, and we lived in a quiver
of expectation.
Not that my father had grown suddenly rich. He was so far from rich
that he was going to borrow every cent of the money for our
third-class passage; but he had a business in view which he could
carry on all the better for having the family with him; and, besides,
we were borrowing right and left anyway, and to no definite purpose.
With the children, he argued, every year in Russia was a year lost.
They should be spending the precious years in school, in learning
English, in becoming Americans. United in America, there were ten
chances of our getting to our feet again to one chance in our
scattered, aimless state.
So at last I was going to America! Really, really going, at last! The
boundaries burst. The arch of heaven soared. A million suns shone out
for every star. The winds rushed in from outer space, roaring in my
ears, "America! America!"
CHAPTER VIII
THE EXODUS
On the day when our steamer ticket arrived, my mother did not go out
with her basket, my brother stayed out of heder, and my sister salted
the soup three times. I do not know what I did to celebrate the
occasion. Very likely I played tricks on Deborah, and wrote a long
letter to my father.
Before sunset the news was all over Polotzk that Hannah Hayye had
received a steamer ticket for America. Then they began to come. Friends
and foes, distant relatives and new acquaintances, young and old, wise
and foolish, debtors and creditors, and mere neighbors,--from every
quarter of the city, from both sides of the Dvina, from over the
Polota, from nowhere,--a steady stream of them poured into our street,
both day and night, till the hour of our departure. And my mother gave
audience. Her faded kerchief halfway off her head, her black ringlets
straying, her apron often at her eyes, she received her guests in a
rainbow of smiles and tears. She was the heroine of Polotzk, and she
conducted herself appropriately. She gave her heart's thanks for the
congratulations and blessings that poured in on her; ready tears for
condolences; patient answers to monotonous questions; and handshakes
and kisses and hugs she gave gratis.
What did they not ask, the eager, foolish, friendly people? They
wanted to handle the ticket, and mother must read them what is written
on it. How much did it cost? Was it all paid for? Were we going to
have a foreign passport or did we intend to steal across the border?
Were we not all going to have new dresses to travel in? Was it sure
that we could get koscher food on the ship? And with the questions
poured in suggestions, and solid chunks of advice were rammed in by
nimble prophecies. Mother ought to make a pilgrimage to a "Good
Jew"--say, the Rebbe of Lubavitch--to get his blessing on our journey.
She must be sure and pack her prayer books and Bible, and twenty
pounds of zwieback at the least. If they did serve trefah on the ship,
she and the four children would have to starve, unless she carried
provisions from home.--Oh, she must take all the featherbeds!
Featherbeds are scarce in America. In America they sleep on hard
mattresses, even in winter. Haveh Mirel, Yachne the dressmaker's
daughter, who emigrated to New York two years ago, wrote her mother
that she got up from childbed with sore sides, because she had no
featherbed.--Mother mustn't carry her money in a pocketbook. She must
sew it into the lining of her jacket. The policemen in Castle Garden
take all their money from the passengers as they land, unless the
travellers deny having any.
And so on, and so on, till my poor mother was completely bewildered.
And as the day set for our departure approached, the people came
oftener and stayed longer, and rehearsed my mother in long messages
for their friends in America, praying that she deliver them promptly
on her arrival, and without fail, and might God bless her for her
kindness, and she must be sure and write them how she found their
friends.
Hayye Dvoshe, the wig-maker, for the eleventh time repeating herself,
to my mother, still patiently attentive, thus:--
"Promise me, I beg you. I don't sleep nights for thinking of him.
Emigrated to America eighteen months ago, fresh and well and strong,
with twenty-five ruble in his pocket, besides his steamer ticket, with
new phylacteries, and a silk skull-cap, and a suit as good as
new,--made it only three years before,--everything respectable, there
could be nothing better;--sent one letter, how he arrived in Castle
Garden, how well he was received by his uncle's son-in-law, how he was
conducted to the baths, how they bought him an American suit,
everything good, fine, pleasant;--wrote how his relative promised him
a position in his business--a clothing merchant is he--makes
gold,--and since then not a postal card, not a word, just as if he had
vanished, as if the earth had swallowed him. _Oi, weh!_ what haven't I
imagined, what haven't I dreamed, what haven't I lamented! Already
three letters have I sent--the last one, you know, you yourself wrote
for me, Hannah Hayye, dear--and no answer. Lost, as if in the sea!"
And after the application of a corner of her shawl to eyes and nose,
Hayye Dvoshe, continuing:--
"So you will go into the newspaper, and ask them what has become of my
Möshele, and if he isn't in Castle Garden, maybe he went up to
Balti-moreh,--it's in the neighborhood, you know,--and you can tell
them, for a mark, that he has a silk handkerchief with his monogram in
Russian, that his betrothed embroidered for him before the engagement
was broken. And may God grant you an easy journey, and may you arrive
in a propitious hour, and may you find your husband well, and strong,
and rich, and may you both live to lead your children to the wedding
canopy, and may America shower gold on you. Amen."
The weeks skipped, the days took wing, an hour was a flash of thought;
so brimful of events was the interval before our departure. And no one
was more alive than I to the multiple significance of the daily drama.
My mother, full of grief at the parting from home and family and all
things dear, anxious about the journey, uncertain about the future,
but ready, as ever, to take up what new burdens awaited her; my
sister, one with our mother in every hope and apprehension; my
brother, rejoicing in his sudden release from heder; and the little
sister, vaguely excited by mysteries afoot; the uncles and aunts and
devoted neighbors, sad and solemn over their coming loss; and my
father away over in Boston, eager and anxious about us in Polotzk,--an
American citizen impatient to start his children on American
careers,--I knew the minds of every one of these, and I lived their
days and nights with them after an apish fashion of my own.
But at bottom I was aloof from them all. What made me silent and
big-eyed was the sense of being in the midst of a tremendous
adventure. From morning till night I was all attention. I must credit
myself with some pang of parting; I certainly felt the thrill of
expectation; but keener than these was my delight in the progress of
the great adventure. It was delightful just to be myself. I rejoiced,
with the younger children, during the weeks of packing and
preparation, in the relaxation of discipline and the general
demoralization of our daily life. It was pleasant to be petted and
spoiled by favorite cousins and stuffed with belated sweets by
unfavorite ones. It was distinctly interesting to catch my mother
weeping in corner cupboards over precious rubbish that could by no
means be carried to America. It was agreeable to have my Uncle Moses
stroke my hair and regard me with affectionate eyes, while he told me
that I would soon forget him, and asked me, so coaxingly, to write him
an account of our journey. It was delicious to be notorious through
the length and breadth of Polotzk; to be stopped and questioned at
every shop-door, when I ran out to buy two kopecks' worth of butter;
to be treated with respect by my former playmates, if ever I found
time to mingle with them; to be pointed at by my enemies, as I passed
them importantly on the street. And all my delight and pride and
interest were steeped in a super-feeling, the sense that it was I,
Mashke, _I myself_, that was moving and acting in the midst of unusual
events. Now that I was sure of America, I was in no hurry to depart,
and not impatient to arrive. I was willing to linger over every detail
of our progress, and so cherish the flavor of the adventure.
The last night in Polotzk we slept at my uncle's house, having
disposed of all our belongings, to the last three-legged stool, except
such as we were taking with us. I could go straight to the room where
I slept with my aunt that night, if I were suddenly set down in
Polotzk. But I did not really sleep. Excitement kept me awake, and my
aunt snored hideously. In the morning I was going away from Polotzk,
forever and ever. I was going on a wonderful journey. I was going to
America. How could I sleep?
My uncle gave out a false bulletin, with the last batch that the
gossips carried away in the evening. He told them that we were not
going to start till the second day. This he did in the hope of
smuggling us quietly out, and so saving us the wear and tear of a
public farewell. But his ruse failed of success. Half of Polotzk was
at my uncle's gate in the morning, to conduct us to the railway
station, and the other half was already there before we arrived.
The procession resembled both a funeral and a triumph. The women wept
over us, reminding us eloquently of the perils of the sea, of the
bewilderment of a foreign land, of the torments of homesickness that
awaited us. They bewailed my mother's lot, who had to tear herself
away from blood relations to go among strangers; who had to face
gendarmes, ticket agents, and sailors, unprotected by a masculine
escort; who had to care for four young children in the confusion of
travel, and very likely feed them trefah or see them starve on the
way. Or they praised her for a brave pilgrim, and expressed confidence
in her ability to cope with gendarmes and ticket agents, and blessed
her with every other word, and all but carried her in their arms.
At the station the procession disbanded and became a mob. My uncle and
my tall cousins did their best to protect us, but we wanderers were
almost torn to pieces. They did get us into a car at last, but the
riot on the station platform continued unquelled. When the warning
bell rang out, it was drowned in a confounding babel of
voices,--fragments of the oft-repeated messages, admonitions,
lamentations, blessings, farewells. "Don't forget!"--"Take care of--"
"Keep your tickets--" "Möshele--newspapers!" "Garlick is best!" "Happy
journey!" "God help you!" "Good-bye! Good-bye!" "Remember--"
The last I saw of Polotzk was an agitated mass of people, waving
colored handkerchiefs and other frantic bits of calico, madly
gesticulating, falling on each other's necks, gone wild altogether.
Then the station became invisible, and the shining tracks spun out
from sky to sky. I was in the middle of the great, great world, and
the longest road was mine.
* * * * *
Memory may take a rest while I copy from a contemporaneous document
the story of the great voyage. In accordance with my promise to my
uncle, I wrote, during my first months in America, a detailed account
of our adventures between Polotzk and Boston. Ink was cheap, and the
epistle, in Yiddish, occupied me for many hot summer hours. It was a
great disaster, therefore, to have a lamp upset on my writing-table,
when I was near the end, soaking the thick pile of letter sheets in
kerosene. I was obliged to make a fair copy for my uncle, and my
father kept the oily, smelly original. After a couple of years'
teasing, he induced me to translate the letter into English, for the
benefit of a friend who did not know Yiddish; for the benefit of the
present narrative, which was not thought of thirteen years ago. I can
hardly refrain from moralizing as I turn to the leaves of my childish
manuscript, grateful at last for the calamity of the overturned lamp.
Our route lay over the German border, with Hamburg for our port. On
the way to the frontier we stopped for a farewell visit in Vilna,
where my mother had a brother. Vilna is slighted in my description. I
find special mention of only two things, the horse-cars and the
bookstores.
On a gray wet morning in early April we set out for the frontier. This
was the real beginning of our journey, and all my faculties of
observation were alert. I took note of everything,--the weather, the
trains, the bustle of railroad stations, our fellow passengers, and
the family mood at every stage of our progress.
The bags and bundles which composed our travelling outfit were much
more bulky than valuable. A trifling sum of money, the steamer ticket,
and the foreign passport were the magic agents by means of which we
hoped to span the five thousand miles of earth and water between us
and my father. The passport was supposed to pass us over the frontier
without any trouble, but on account of the prevalence of cholera in
some parts of the country, the poorer sort of travellers, such as
emigrants, were subjected, at this time, to more than ordinary
supervision and regulation.
At Versbolovo, the last station on the Russian side, we met the first
of our troubles. A German physician and several gendarmes boarded the
train and put us through a searching examination as to our health,
destination, and financial resources. As a result of the inquisition
we were informed that we would not be allowed to cross the frontier
unless we exchanged our third-class steamer ticket for second-class,
which would require two hundred rubles more than we possessed. Our
passport was taken from us, and we were to be turned back on our
journey.
My letter describes the situation:--
We were homeless, houseless, and friendless in a strange place.
We had hardly money enough to last us through the voyage for
which we had hoped and waited for three long years. We had
suffered much that the reunion we longed for might come about;
we had prepared ourselves to suffer more in order to bring it
about, and had parted with those we loved, with places that were
dear to us in spite of what we passed through in them, never
again to see them, as we were convinced--all for the same dear
end. With strong hopes and high spirits that hid the sad
parting, we had started on our long journey. And now we were
checked so unexpectedly but surely, the blow coming from where
we little expected it, being, as we believed, safe in that
quarter. When my mother had recovered enough to speak, she began
to argue with the gendarme, telling him our story and begging
him to be kind. The children were frightened and all but I
cried. I was only wondering what would happen.
Moved by our distress, the German officers gave us the best advice
they could. We were to get out at the station of Kibart on the Russian
side, and apply to one Herr Schidorsky, who might help us on our way.
The letter goes on:--
We are in Kibart, at the depot. The least important particular,
even, of that place, I noticed and remembered. How the
porter--he was an ugly, grinning man--carried in our things and
put them away in the southern corner of the big room, on the
floor; how we sat down on a settee near them, a yellow settee;
how the glass roof let in so much light that we had to shade our
eyes because the car had been dark and we had been crying; how
there were only a few people besides ourselves there, and how I
began to count them and stopped when I noticed a sign over the
head of the fifth person--a little woman with a red nose and a
pimple on it--and tried to read the German, with the aid of the
Russian translation below. I noticed all this and remembered it,
as if there were nothing else in the world for me to think of.
The letter dwells gratefully on the kindness of Herr Schidorsky, who
became the agent of our salvation. He procured my mother a pass to
Eidtkuhnen, the German frontier station, where his older brother, as
chairman of a well-known emigrant aid association, arranged for our
admission into Germany. During the negotiations, which took several
days, the good man of Kibart entertained us in his own house, shabby
emigrants though we were. The Schidorsky brothers were Jews, but it is
not on that account that their name has been lovingly remembered for
fifteen years in my family.
On the German side our course joined that of many other emigrant
groups, on their way to Hamburg and other ports. We were a clumsy
enough crowd, with wide, unsophisticated eyes, with awkward bundles
hugged in our arms, and our hearts set on America.
The letter to my uncle faithfully describes every stage of our
bustling progress. Here is a sample scene of many that I recorded:--
There was a terrible confusion in the baggage-room where we were
directed to go. Boxes, baskets, bags, valises, and great,
shapeless things belonging to no particular class, were thrown
about by porters and other men, who sorted them and put tickets
on all but those containing provisions, while others were opened
and examined in haste. At last our turn came, and our things,
along with those of all other American-bound travellers, were
taken away to be steamed and smoked and other such processes
gone through. We were told to wait till notice should be given
us of something else to be done.
The phrases "we were told to do this" and "told to do that" occur
again and again in my narrative, and the most effective handling of
the facts could give no more vivid picture of the proceedings. We
emigrants were herded at the stations, packed in the cars, and driven
from place to place like cattle.
At the expected hour we all tried to find room in a car
indicated by the conductor. We tried, but could only find enough
space on the floor for our baggage, on which we made-believe
sitting comfortably. For now we were obliged to exchange the
comparative comforts of a third-class passenger train for the
certain discomforts of a fourth-class one. There were only four
narrow benches in the whole car, and about twice as many people
were already seated on these as they were probably supposed to
accommodate. All other space, to the last inch, was crowded by
passengers or their luggage. It was very hot and close and
altogether uncomfortable, and still at every new station fresh
passengers came crowding in, and actually made room, spare as it
was, for themselves. It became so terrible that all glared madly
at the conductor as he allowed more people to come into that
prison, and trembled at the announcement of every station. I
cannot see even now how the officers could allow such a thing;
it was really dangerous.
The following is my attempt to describe a flying glimpse of a
metropolis:--
Towards evening we came into Berlin. I grow dizzy even now when
I think of our whirling through that city. It seemed we were
going faster and faster all the time, but it was only the whirl
of trains passing in opposite directions and close to us that
made it seem so. The sight of crowds of people such as we had
never seen before, hurrying to and fro, in and out of great
depots that danced past us, helped to make it more so. Strange
sights, splendid buildings, shops, people, and animals, all
mingled in one great, confused mass of a disposition to
continually move in a great hurry, wildly, with no other aim but
to make one's head go round and round, in following its dreadful
motions. Round and round went my head. It was nothing but
trains, depots, crowds,--crowds, depots, trains,--again and
again, with no beginning, no end, only a mad dance! Faster and
faster we go, faster still, and the noise increases with the
speed. Bells, whistles, hammers, locomotives shrieking madly,
men's voices, peddlers' cries, horses' hoofs, dogs'
barkings--all united in doing their best to drown every other
sound but their own, and made such a deafening uproar in the
attempt that nothing could keep it out.
The plight of the bewildered emigrant on the way to foreign parts is
always pitiful enough, but for us who came from plague-ridden Russia
the terrors of the way were doubled.
In a great lonely field, opposite a solitary house within a
large yard, our train pulled up at last, and a conductor
commanded the passengers to make haste and get out. He need not
have told us to hurry; we were glad enough to be free again
after such a long imprisonment in the uncomfortable car. All
rushed to the door. We breathed more freely in the open field,
but the conductor did not wait for us to enjoy our freedom. He
hurried us into the one large room which made up the house, and
then into the yard. Here a great many men and women, dressed in
white, received us, the women attending to the women and girls
of the passengers, and the men to the others.
This was another scene of bewildering confusion, parents losing
their children, and little ones crying; baggage being thrown
together in one corner of the yard, heedless of contents, which
suffered in consequence; those white-clad Germans shouting
commands, always accompanied with "Quick! Quick!"--the confused
passengers obeying all orders like meek children, only
questioning now and then what was going to be done with them.
And no wonder if in some minds stories arose of people being
captured by robbers, murderers, and the like. Here we had been
taken to a lonely place where only that house was to be seen;
our things were taken away, our friends separated from us; a man
came to inspect us, as if to ascertain our full value;
strange-looking people driving us about like dumb animals,
helpless and unresisting; children we could not see crying in a
way that suggested terrible things; ourselves driven into a
little room where a great kettle was boiling on a little stove;
our clothes taken off, our bodies rubbed with a slippery
substance that might be any bad thing; a shower of warm water
let down on us without warning; again driven to another little
room where we sit, wrapped in woollen blankets till large,
coarse bags are brought in, their contents turned out, and we
see only a cloud of steam, and hear the women's orders to dress
ourselves,--"Quick! Quick!"--or else we'll miss--something we
cannot hear. We are forced to pick out our clothes from among
all the others, with the steam blinding us; we choke, cough,
entreat the women to give us time; they persist, "Quick!
Quick!--or you'll miss the train!"--Oh, so we really won't be
murdered! They are only making us ready for the continuing of
our journey, cleaning us of all suspicions of dangerous
sickness. Thank God!
In Polotzk, if the cholera broke out, as it did once or twice in every
generation, we made no such fuss as did these Germans. Those who died
of the sickness were buried, and those who lived ran to the synagogues
to pray. We travellers felt hurt at the way the Germans treated us. My
mother nearly died of cholera once, but she was given a new name, a
lucky one, which saved her; and that was when she was a small girl.
None of us were sick now, yet hear how we were treated! Those
gendarmes and nurses always shouted their commands at us from a
distance, as fearful of our touch as if we had been lepers.
We arrived in Hamburg early one morning, after a long night in the
crowded cars. We were marched up to a strange vehicle, long and
narrow and high, drawn by two horses and commanded by a mute driver.
We were piled up on this wagon, our baggage was thrown after us, and
we started on a sight-seeing tour across the city of Hamburg. The
sights I faithfully enumerate for the benefit of my uncle include
little carts drawn by dogs, and big cars that run of themselves, later
identified as electric cars.
The humorous side of our adventures did not escape me. Again and again
I come across a laugh in the long pages of the historic epistle. The
description of the ride through Hamburg ends with this:--
The sight-seeing was not all on our side. I noticed many people
stopping to look at us as if amused, though most passed by us as
though used to such sights. We did make a queer appearance all
in a long row, up above people's heads. In fact, we looked like
a flock of giant fowls roosting, only wide awake.
The smiles and shivers fairly crowded each other in some parts of our
career.
Suddenly, when everything interesting seemed at an end, we all
recollected how long it was since we had started on our funny
ride. Hours, we thought, and still the horses ran. Now we rode
through quieter streets where there were fewer shops and more
wooden houses. Still the horses seemed to have but just started.
I looked over our perch again. Something made me think of a
description I had read of criminals being carried on long
journeys in uncomfortable things--like this? Well, it was
strange--this long, long drive, the conveyance, no word of
explanation; and all, though going different ways, being packed
off together. We were strangers; the driver knew it. He might
take us anywhere--how could we tell? I was frightened again as
in Berlin. The faces around me confessed the same.
Yes, we are frightened. We are very still. Some Polish women
over there have fallen asleep, and the rest of us look such a
picture of woe, and yet so funny, it is a sight to see and
remember.
Our mysterious ride came to an end on the outskirts of the city, where
we were once more lined up, cross-questioned, disinfected, labelled,
and pigeonholed. This was one of the occasions when we suspected that
we were the victims of a conspiracy to extort money from us; for here,
as at every repetition of the purifying operations we had undergone, a
fee was levied on us, so much per head. My mother, indeed, seeing her
tiny hoard melting away, had long since sold some articles from our
baggage to a fellow passenger richer than she, but even so she did not
have enough money to pay the fee demanded of her in Hamburg. Her
statement was not accepted, and we all suffered the last indignity of
having our persons searched.
This last place of detention turned out to be a prison. "Quarantine"
they called it, and there was a great deal of it--two weeks of it. Two
weeks within high brick walls, several hundred of us herded in half a
dozen compartments,--numbered compartments,--sleeping in rows, like
sick people in a hospital; with roll-call morning and night, and short
rations three times a day; with never a sign of the free world beyond
our barred windows; with anxiety and longing and homesickness in our
hearts, and in our ears the unfamiliar voice of the invisible ocean,
which drew and repelled us at the same time. The fortnight in
quarantine was not an episode; it was an epoch, divisible into eras,
periods, events.
The greatest event was the arrival of some ship to take some of
the waiting passengers. When the gates were opened and the lucky
ones said good-bye, those left behind felt hopeless of ever
seeing the gates open for them. It was both pleasant and
painful, for the strangers grew to be fast friends in a day, and
really rejoiced in each other's fortune; but the regretful envy
could not be helped either.
Our turn came at last. We were conducted through the gate of
departure, and after some hours of bewildering manœuvres, described
in great detail in the report to my uncle, we found ourselves--we five
frightened pilgrims from Polotzk--on the deck of a great big steamship
afloat on the strange big waters of the ocean.
For sixteen days the ship was our world. My letter dwells solemnly on
the details of the life at sea, as if afraid to cheat my uncle of the
smallest circumstance. It does not shrink from describing the torments
of seasickness; it notes every change in the weather. A rough night is
described, when the ship pitched and rolled so that people were thrown
from their berths; days and nights when we crawled through dense fogs,
our foghorn drawing answering warnings from invisible ships. The
perils of the sea were not minimized in the imaginations of us
inexperienced voyagers. The captain and his officers ate their
dinners, smoked their pipes and slept soundly in their turns, while we
frightened emigrants turned our faces to the wall and awaited our
watery graves.
All this while the seasickness lasted. Then came happy hours on deck,
with fugitive sunshine, birds atop the crested waves, band music and
dancing and fun. I explored the ship, made friends with officers and
crew, or pursued my thoughts in quiet nooks. It was my first
experience of the ocean, and I was profoundly moved.
Oh, what solemn thoughts I had! How deeply I felt the greatness,
the power of the scene! The immeasurable distance from horizon
to horizon; the huge billows forever changing their shapes--now
only a wavy and rolling plain, now a chain of great mountains,
coming and going farther away; then a town in the distance,
perhaps, with spires and towers and buildings of gigantic
dimensions; and mostly a vast mass of uncertain shapes, knocking
against each other in fury, and seething and foaming in their
anger; the gray sky, with its mountains of gloomy clouds,
flying, moving with the waves, as it seemed, very near them; the
absence of any object besides the one ship; and the deep, solemn
groans of the sea, sounding as if all the voices of the world
had been turned into sighs and then gathered into that one
mournful sound--so deeply did I feel the presence of these
things, that the feeling became one of awe, both painful and
sweet, and stirring and warming, and deep and calm and grand.
I would imagine myself all alone on the ocean, and Robinson
Crusoe was very real to me. I was alone sometimes. I was aware
of no human presence; I was conscious only of sea and sky and
something I did not understand. And as I listened to its solemn
voice, I felt as if I had found a friend, and knew that I loved
the ocean. It seemed as if it were within as well as without,
part of myself; and I wondered how I had lived without it, and
if I could ever part with it.
And so suffering, fearing, brooding, rejoicing we crept nearer and
nearer to the coveted shore, until, on a glorious May morning, six
weeks after our departure from Polotzk, our eyes beheld the Promised
Land, and my father received us in his arms.
CHAPTER IX
THE PROMISED LAND
Having made such good time across the ocean, I ought to be able to
proceed no less rapidly on _terra firma_, where, after all, I am more
at home. And yet here is where I falter. Not that I hesitated, even
for the space of a breath, in my first steps in America. There was no
time to hesitate. The most ignorant immigrant, on landing proceeds to
give and receive greetings, to eat, sleep and rise, after the manner
of his own country; wherein he is corrected, admonished, and laughed
at, whether by interested friends or the most indifferent strangers;
and his American experience is thus begun. The process is spontaneous
on all sides, like the education of the child by the family circle.
But while the most stupid nursery maid is able to contribute her part
toward the result, we do not expect an analysis of the process to be
furnished by any member of the family, least of all by the engaging
infant. The philosophical maiden aunt alone, or some other witness
equally psychological and aloof, is able to trace the myriad efforts
by which the little Johnnie or Nellie acquires a secure hold on the
disjointed parts of the huge plaything, life.
Now I was not exactly an infant when I was set down, on a May day some
fifteen years ago, in this pleasant nursery of America. I had long
since acquired the use of my faculties, and had collected some bits of
experience practical and emotional, and had even learned to give an
account of them. Still, I had very little perspective, and my
observations and comparisons were superficial. I was too much carried
away to analyze the forces that were moving me. My Polotzk I knew well
before I began to judge it and experiment with it. America was
bewilderingly strange, unimaginably complex, delightfully unexplored.
I rushed impetuously out of the cage of my provincialism and looked
eagerly about the brilliant universe. My question was, What have we
here?--not, What does this mean? That query came much later. When I
now become retrospectively introspective, I fall into the predicament
of the centipede in the rhyme, who got along very smoothly until he
was asked which leg came after which, whereupon he became so rattled
that he couldn't take a step. I know I have come on a thousand feet,
on wings, winds and American machines,--I have leaped and run and
climbed and crawled,--but to tell which step came after which I find a
puzzling matter. Plenty of maiden aunts were present during my second
infancy, in the guise of immigrant officials, school-teachers,
settlement workers, and sundry other unprejudiced and critical
observers. Their statistics I might properly borrow to fill the gaps
in my recollections, but I am prevented by my sense of harmony. The
individual, we know, is a creature unknown to the statistician,
whereas I undertook to give the personal view of everything. So I am
bound to unravel, as well as I can, the tangle of events, outer and
inner, which made up the first breathless years of my American life.
During his three years of probation, my father had made a number of
false starts in business. His history for that period is the history
of thousands who come to America, like him, with pockets empty, hands
untrained to the use of tools, minds cramped by centuries of
repression in their native land. Dozens of these men pass under your
eyes every day, my American friend, too absorbed in their honest
affairs to notice the looks of suspicion which you cast at them, the
repugnance with which you shrink from their touch. You see them
shuffle from door to door with a basket of spools and buttons, or
bending over the sizzling irons in a basement tailor shop, or
rummaging in your ash can, or moving a pushcart from curb to curb, at
the command of the burly policeman. "The Jew peddler!" you say, and
dismiss him from your premises and from your thoughts, never dreaming
that the sordid drama of his days may have a moral that concerns you.
What if the creature with the untidy beard carries in his bosom his
citizenship papers? What if the cross-legged tailor is supporting a
boy in college who is one day going to mend your state constitution
for you? What if the ragpicker's daughters are hastening over the
ocean to teach your children in the public schools? Think, every time
you pass the greasy alien on the street, that he was born thousands of
years before the oldest native American; and he may have something to
communicate to you, when you two shall have learned a common language.
Remember that his very physiognomy is a cipher the key to which it
behooves you to search for most diligently.
* * * * *
By the time we joined my father, he had surveyed many avenues of
approach toward the coveted citadel of fortune. One of these,
heretofore untried, he now proposed to essay, armed with new courage,
and cheered on by the presence of his family. In partnership with an
energetic little man who had an English chapter in his history, he
prepared to set up a refreshment booth on Crescent Beach. But while he
was completing arrangements at the beach we remained in town, where we
enjoyed the educational advantages of a thickly populated
neighborhood; namely, Wall Street, in the West End of Boston.
Anybody who knows Boston knows that the West and North Ends are the
wrong ends of that city. They form the tenement district, or, in the
newer phrase, the slums of Boston. Anybody who is acquainted with the
slums of any American metropolis knows that that is the quarter where
poor immigrants foregather, to live, for the most part, as unkempt,
half-washed, toiling, unaspiring foreigners; pitiful in the eyes of
social missionaries, the despair of boards of health, the hope of ward
politicians, the touchstone of American democracy. The well-versed
metropolitan knows the slums as a sort of house of detention for poor
aliens, where they live on probation till they can show a certificate
of good citizenship.
He may know all this and yet not guess how Wall Street, in the West
End, appears in the eyes of a little immigrant from Polotzk. What
would the sophisticated sight-seer say about Union Place, off Wall
Street, where my new home waited for me? He would say that it is no
place at all, but a short box of an alley. Two rows of three-story
tenements are its sides, a stingy strip of sky is its lid, a littered
pavement is the floor, and a narrow mouth its exit.
But I saw a very different picture on my introduction to Union Place.
I saw two imposing rows of brick buildings, loftier than any dwelling
I had ever lived in. Brick was even on the ground for me to tread on,
instead of common earth or boards. Many friendly windows stood open,
filled with uncovered heads of women and children. I thought the
people were interested in us, which was very neighborly. I looked up
to the topmost row of windows, and my eyes were filled with the May
blue of an American sky!
In our days of affluence in Russia we had been accustomed to
upholstered parlors, embroidered linen, silver spoons and
candlesticks, goblets of gold, kitchen shelves shining with copper and
brass. We had featherbeds heaped halfway to the ceiling; we had
clothes presses dusky with velvet and silk and fine woollen. The three
small rooms into which my father now ushered us, up one flight of
stairs, contained only the necessary beds, with lean mattresses; a few
wooden chairs; a table or two; a mysterious iron structure, which
later turned out to be a stove; a couple of unornamental kerosene
lamps; and a scanty array of cooking-utensils and crockery. And yet we
were all impressed with our new home and its furniture. It was not
only because we had just passed through our seven lean years, cooking
in earthen vessels, eating black bread on holidays and wearing cotton;
it was chiefly because these wooden chairs and tin pans were American
chairs and pans that they shone glorious in our eyes. And if there was
anything lacking for comfort or decoration we expected it to be
presently supplied--at least, we children did. Perhaps my mother
alone, of us newcomers, appreciated the shabbiness of the little
apartment, and realized that for her there was as yet no laying down
of the burden of poverty.
Our initiation into American ways began with the first step on the new
soil. My father found occasion to instruct or correct us even on
the way from the pier to Wall Street, which journey we made crowded
together in a rickety cab. He told us not to lean out of the windows,
not to point, and explained the word "greenhorn." We did not want to
be "greenhorns," and gave the strictest attention to my father's
instructions. I do not know when my parents found opportunity to
review together the history of Polotzk in the three years past, for we
children had no patience with the subject; my mother's narrative was
constantly interrupted by irrelevant questions, interjections, and
explanations.
[Illustration: UNION PLACE (BOSTON) WHERE MY NEW HOME WAITED
FOR ME]
The first meal was an object lesson of much variety. My father
produced several kinds of food, ready to eat, without any cooking,
from little tin cans that had printing all over them. He attempted to
introduce us to a queer, slippery kind of fruit, which he called
"banana," but had to give it up for the time being. After the meal, he
had better luck with a curious piece of furniture on runners, which he
called "rocking-chair." There were five of us newcomers, and we found
five different ways of getting into the American machine of perpetual
motion, and as many ways of getting out of it. One born and bred to
the use of a rocking-chair cannot imagine how ludicrous people can
make themselves when attempting to use it for the first time. We
laughed immoderately over our various experiments with the novelty,
which was a wholesome way of letting off steam after the unusual
excitement of the day.
In our flat we did not think of such a thing as storing the coal in
the bathtub. There was no bathtub. So in the evening of the first day
my father conducted us to the public baths. As we moved along in a
little procession, I was delighted with the illumination of the
streets. So many lamps, and they burned until morning, my father
said, and so people did not need to carry lanterns. In America, then,
everything was free, as we had heard in Russia. Light was free; the
streets were as bright as a synagogue on a holy day. Music was free;
we had been serenaded, to our gaping delight, by a brass band of many
pieces, soon after our installation on Union Place.
Education was free. That subject my father had written about
repeatedly, as comprising his chief hope for us children, the essence
of American opportunity, the treasure that no thief could touch, not
even misfortune or poverty. It was the one thing that he was able to
promise us when he sent for us; surer, safer than bread or shelter. On
our second day I was thrilled with the realization of what this
freedom of education meant. A little girl from across the alley came
and offered to conduct us to school. My father was out, but we five
between us had a few words of English by this time. We knew the word
school. We understood. This child, who had never seen us till
yesterday, who could not pronounce our names, who was not much better
dressed than we, was able to offer us the freedom of the schools of
Boston! No application made, no questions asked, no examinations,
rulings, exclusions; no machinations, no fees. The doors stood open
for every one of us. The smallest child could show us the way.
This incident impressed me more than anything I had heard in advance
of the freedom of education in America. It was a concrete
proof--almost the thing itself. One had to experience it to understand
it.
It was a great disappointment to be told by my father that we were not
to enter upon our school career at once. It was too near the end of
the term, he said, and we were going to move to Crescent Beach in a
week or so. We had to wait until the opening of the schools in
September. What a loss of precious time--from May till September!
Not that the time was really lost. Even the interval on Union Place
was crowded with lessons and experiences. We had to visit the stores
and be dressed from head to foot in American clothing; we had to learn
the mysteries of the iron stove, the washboard, and the speaking-tube;
we had to learn to trade with the fruit peddler through the window,
and not to be afraid of the policeman; and, above all, we had to learn
English.
The kind people who assisted us in these important matters form a
group by themselves in the gallery of my friends. If I had never seen
them from those early days till now, I should still have remembered
them with gratitude. When I enumerate the long list of my American
teachers, I must begin with those who came to us on Wall Street and
taught us our first steps. To my mother, in her perplexity over the
cookstove, the woman who showed her how to make the fire was an angel
of deliverance. A fairy godmother to us children was she who led us to
a wonderful country called "uptown," where, in a dazzlingly beautiful
palace called a "department store," we exchanged our hateful homemade
European costumes, which pointed us out as "greenhorns" to the
children on the street, for real American machine-made garments, and
issued forth glorified in each other's eyes.
With our despised immigrant clothing we shed also our impossible
Hebrew names. A committee of our friends, several years ahead of us in
American experience, put their heads together and concocted American
names for us all. Those of our real names that had no pleasing
American equivalents they ruthlessly discarded, content if they
retained the initials. My mother, possessing a name that was not
easily translatable, was punished with the undignified nickname of
Annie. Fetchke, Joseph, and Deborah issued as Frieda, Joseph, and
Dora, respectively. As for poor me, I was simply cheated. The name
they gave me was hardly new. My Hebrew name being Maryashe in full,
Mashke for short, Russianized into Marya (_Mar-ya_), my friends said
that it would hold good in English as _Mary_; which was very
disappointing, as I longed to possess a strange-sounding American name
like the others.
I am forgetting the consolation I had, in this matter of names, from
the use of my surname, which I have had no occasion to mention until
now. I found on my arrival that my father was "Mr. Antin" on the
slightest provocation, and not, as in Polotzk, on state occasions
alone. And so I was "Mary Antin," and I felt very important to answer
to such a dignified title. It was just like America that even plain
people should wear their surnames on week days.
As a family we were so diligent under instruction, so adaptable, and
so clever in hiding our deficiencies, that when we made the journey to
Crescent Beach, in the wake of our small wagon-load of household
goods, my father had very little occasion to admonish us on the way,
and I am sure he was not ashamed of us. So much we had achieved toward
our Americanization during the two weeks since our landing.
Crescent Beach is a name that is printed in very small type on the
maps of the environs of Boston, but a life-size strip of sand curves
from Winthrop to Lynn; and that is historic ground in the annals of my
family. The place is now a popular resort for holiday crowds, and is
famous under the name of Revere Beach. When the reunited Antins made
their stand there, however, there were no boulevards, no stately
bath-houses, no hotels, no gaudy amusement places, no illuminations,
no showmen, no tawdry rabble. There was only the bright clean sweep of
sand, the summer sea, and the summer sky. At high tide the whole
Atlantic rushed in, tossing the seaweeds in his mane; at low tide he
rushed out, growling and gnashing his granite teeth. Between tides a
baby might play on the beach, digging with pebbles and shells, till it
lay asleep on the sand. The whole sun shone by day, troops of stars by
night, and the great moon in its season.
Into this grand cycle of the seaside day I came to live and learn and
play. A few people came with me, as I have already intimated; but the
main thing was that _I_ came to live on the edge of the sea--I, who
had spent my life inland, believing that the great waters of the world
were spread out before me in the Dvina. My idea of the human world had
grown enormously during the long journey; my idea of the earth had
expanded with every day at sea; my idea of the world outside the earth
now budded and swelled during my prolonged experience of the wide and
unobstructed heavens.
Not that I got any inkling of the conception of a multiple world. I
had had no lessons in cosmogony, and I had no spontaneous revelation
of the true position of the earth in the universe. For me, as for my
fathers, the sun set and rose, and I did not feel the earth rushing
through space. But I lay stretched out in the sun, my eyes level with
the sea, till I seemed to be absorbed bodily by the very materials of
the world around me; till I could not feel my hand as separate from
the warm sand in which it was buried. Or I crouched on the beach at
full moon, wondering, wondering, between the two splendors of the sky
and the sea. Or I ran out to meet the incoming storm, my face full in
the wind, my being a-tingle with an awesome delight to the tips of my
fog-matted locks flying behind; and stood clinging to some stake or
upturned boat, shaken by the roar and rumble of the waves. So
clinging, I pretended that I was in danger, and was deliciously
frightened; I held on with both hands, and shook my head, exulting in
the tumult around me, equally ready to laugh or sob. Or else I sat, on
the stillest days, with my back to the sea, not looking at all, but
just listening to the rustle of the waves on the sand; not thinking at
all, but just breathing with the sea.
Thus courting the influence of sea and sky and variable weather, I was
bound to have dreams, hints, imaginings. It was no more than this,
perhaps: that the world as I knew it was not large enough to contain
all that I saw and felt; that the thoughts that flashed through my
mind, not half understood, unrelated to my utterable thoughts,
concerned something for which I had as yet no name. Every imaginative
growing child has these flashes of intuition, especially one that
becomes intimate with some one aspect of nature. With me it was the
growing time, that idle summer by the sea, and I grew all the faster
because I had been so cramped before. My mind, too, had so recently
been worked upon by the impressive experience of a change of country
that I was more than commonly alive to impressions, which are the
seeds of ideas.
Let no one suppose that I spent my time entirely, or even chiefly, in
inspired solitude. By far the best part of my day was spent in
play--frank, hearty, boisterous play, such as comes natural to
American children. In Polotzk I had already begun to be considered too
old for play, excepting set games or organized frolics. Here I found
myself included with children who still played, and I willingly
returned to childhood. There were plenty of playfellows. My father's
energetic little partner had a little wife and a large family. He kept
them in the little cottage next to ours; and that the shanty survived
the tumultuous presence of that brood is a wonder to me to-day. The
young Wilners included an assortment of boys, girls, and twins, of
every possible variety of age, size, disposition, and sex. They
swarmed in and out of the cottage all day long, wearing the door-sill
hollow, and trampling the ground to powder. They swung out of windows
like monkeys, slid up the roof like flies, and shot out of trees like
fowls. Even a small person like me couldn't go anywhere without being
run over by a Wilner; and I could never tell which Wilner it was
because none of them ever stood still long enough to be identified;
and also because I suspected that they were in the habit of
interchanging conspicuous articles of clothing, which was very
confusing.
You would suppose that the little mother must have been utterly lost,
bewildered, trodden down in this horde of urchins; but you are
mistaken. Mrs. Wilner was a positively majestic little person. She
ruled her brood with the utmost coolness and strictness. She had even
the biggest boy under her thumb, frequently under her palm. If they
enjoyed the wildest freedom outdoors, indoors the young Wilners lived
by the clock. And so at five o'clock in the evening, on seven days in
the week, my father's partner's children could be seen in two long
rows around the supper table. You could tell them apart on this
occasion, because they all had their faces washed. And this is the
time to count them: there are twelve little Wilners at table.
I managed to retain my identity in this multitude somehow, and while I
was very much impressed with their numbers, I even dared to pick and
choose my friends among the Wilners. One or two of the smaller boys I
liked best of all, for a game of hide-and-seek or a frolic on the
beach. We played in the water like ducks, never taking the trouble to
get dry. One day I waded out with one of the boys, to see which of us
dared go farthest. The tide was extremely low, and we had not wet our
knees when we began to look back to see if familiar objects were still
in sight. I thought we had been wading for hours, and still the water
was so shallow and quiet. My companion was marching straight ahead, so
I did the same. Suddenly a swell lifted us almost off our feet, and we
clutched at each other simultaneously. There was a lesser swell, and
little waves began to run, and a sigh went up from the sea. The tide
was turning--perhaps a storm was on the way--and we were miles,
dreadful miles from dry land.
Boy and girl turned without a word, four determined bare legs
ploughing through the water, four scared eyes straining toward the
land. Through an eternity of toil and fear they kept dumbly on, death
at their heels, pride still in their hearts. At last they reach
high-water mark--six hours before full tide.
Each has seen the other afraid, and each rejoices in the knowledge.
But only the boy is sure of his tongue.
"You was scared, warn't you?" he taunts.
The girl understands so much, and is able to reply:--
"You can schwimmen, I not."
"Betcher life I can schwimmen," the other mocks.
And the girl walks off, angry and hurt.
"An' I can walk on my hands," the tormentor calls after her. "Say, you
greenhorn, why don'tcher look?"
The girl keeps straight on, vowing that she would never walk with that
rude boy again, neither by land nor sea, not even though the waters
should part at his bidding.
I am forgetting the more serious business which had brought us to
Crescent Beach. While we children disported ourselves like mermaids
and mermen in the surf, our respective fathers dispensed cold
lemonade, hot peanuts, and pink popcorn, and piled up our respective
fortunes, nickel by nickel, penny by penny. I was very proud of my
connection with the public life of the beach. I admired greatly our
shining soda fountain, the rows of sparkling glasses, the pyramids of
oranges, the sausage chains, the neat white counter, and the bright
array of tin spoons. It seemed to me that none of the other
refreshment stands on the beach--there were a few--were half so
attractive as ours. I thought my father looked very well in a long
white apron and shirt sleeves. He dished out ice cream with
enthusiasm, so I supposed he was getting rich. It never occurred to me
to compare his present occupation with the position for which he had
been originally destined; or if I thought about it, I was just as well
content, for by this time I had by heart my father's saying, "America
is not Polotzk." All occupations were respectable, all men were equal,
in America.
If I admired the soda fountain and the sausage chains, I almost
worshipped the partner, Mr. Wilner. I was content to stand for an hour
at a time watching him make potato chips. In his cook's cap and apron,
with a ladle in his hand and a smile on his face, he moved about with
the greatest agility, whisking his raw materials out of nowhere,
dipping into his bubbling kettle with a flourish, and bringing forth
the finished product with a caper. Such potato chips were not to be had
anywhere else on Crescent Beach. Thin as tissue paper, crisp as dry
snow, and salt as the sea--such thirst-producing, lemonade-selling,
nickel-bringing potato chips only Mr. Wilner could make. On holidays,
when dozens of family parties came out by every train from town, he
could hardly keep up with the demand for his potato chips. And with a
waiting crowd around him our partner was at his best. He was as voluble
as he was skilful, and as witty as he was voluble; at least so I
guessed from the laughter that frequently drowned his voice. I could
not understand his jokes, but if I could get near enough to watch his
lips and his smile and his merry eyes, I was happy. That any one could
talk so fast, and in English, was marvel enough, but that this prodigy
should belong to _our_ establishment was a fact to thrill me. I had
never seen anything like Mr. Wilner, except a wedding jester; but then
he spoke common Yiddish. So proud was I of the talent and good taste
displayed at our stand that if my father beckoned to me in the crowd
and sent me on an errand, I hoped the people noticed that I, too, was
connected with the establishment.
And all this splendor and glory and distinction came to a sudden end.
There was some trouble about a license--some fee or fine--there was a
storm in the night that damaged the soda fountain and other
fixtures--there was talk and consultation between the houses of Antin
and Wilner--and the promising partnership was dissolved. No more would
the merry partner gather the crowd on the beach; no more would the
twelve young Wilners gambol like mermen and mermaids in the surf. And
the less numerous tribe of Antin must also say farewell to the jolly
seaside life; for men in such humble business as my father's carry
their families, along with their other earthly goods, wherever they
go, after the manner of the gypsies. We had driven a feeble stake into
the sand. The jealous Atlantic, in conspiracy with the Sunday law, had
torn it out. We must seek our luck elsewhere.
In Polotzk we had supposed that "America" was practically synonymous
with "Boston." When we landed in Boston, the horizon was pushed back,
and we annexed Crescent Beach. And now, espying other lands of
promise, we took possession of the province of Chelsea, in the name of
our necessity.
In Chelsea, as in Boston, we made our stand in the wrong end of the
town. Arlington Street was inhabited by poor Jews, poor Negroes, and a
sprinkling of poor Irish. The side streets leading from it were
occupied by more poor Jews and Negroes. It was a proper locality for a
man without capital to do business. My father rented a tenement with a
store in the basement. He put in a few barrels of flour and of sugar,
a few boxes of crackers, a few gallons of kerosene, an assortment of
soap of the "save the coupon" brands; in the cellar, a few barrels of
potatoes, and a pyramid of kindling-wood; in the showcase, an alluring
display of penny candy. He put out his sign, with a gilt-lettered
warning of "Strictly Cash," and proceeded to give credit
indiscriminately. That was the regular way to do business on Arlington
Street. My father, in his three years' apprenticeship, had learned the
tricks of many trades. He knew when and how to "bluff." The legend of
"Strictly Cash" was a protection against notoriously irresponsible
customers; while none of the "good" customers, who had a record for
paying regularly on Saturday, hesitated to enter the store with empty
purses.
If my father knew the tricks of the trade, my mother could be counted
on to throw all her talent and tact into the business. Of course she
had no English yet, but as she could perform the acts of weighing,
measuring, and mental computation of fractions mechanically, she was
able to give her whole attention to the dark mysteries of the
language, as intercourse with her customers gave her opportunity. In
this she made such rapid progress that she soon lost all sense of
disadvantage, and conducted herself behind the counter very much as if
she were back in her old store in Polotzk. It was far more cosey than
Polotzk--at least, so it seemed to me; for behind the store was the
kitchen, where, in the intervals of slack trade, she did her cooking
and washing. Arlington Street customers were used to waiting while the
storekeeper salted the soup or rescued a loaf from the oven.
Once more Fortune favored my family with a thin little smile, and my
father, in reply to a friendly inquiry, would say, "One makes a
living," with a shrug of the shoulders that added "but nothing to boast
of." It was characteristic of my attitude toward bread-and-butter
matters that this contented me, and I felt free to devote myself to the
conquest of my new world. Looking back to those critical first years,
I see myself always behaving like a child let loose in a garden to play
and dig and chase the butterflies. Occasionally, indeed, I was stung by
the wasp of family trouble; but I knew a healing ointment--my faith in
America. My father had come to America to make a living. America, which
was free and fair and kind, must presently yield him what he sought. I
had come to America to see a new world, and I followed my own ends with
the utmost assiduity; only, as I ran out to explore, I would look back
to see if my house were in order behind me--if my family still kept its
head above water.
In after years, when I passed as an American among Americans, if I was
suddenly made aware of the past that lay forgotten,--if a letter from
Russia, or a paragraph in the newspaper, or a conversation overheard
in the street-car, suddenly reminded me of what I might have been,--I
thought it miracle enough that I, Mashke, the granddaughter of Raphael
the Russian, born to a humble destiny, should be at home in an
American metropolis, be free to fashion my own life, and should dream
my dreams in English phrases. But in the beginning my admiration was
spent on more concrete embodiments of the splendors of America; such
as fine houses, gay shops, electric engines and apparatus, public
buildings, illuminations, and parades. My early letters to my Russian
friends were filled with boastful descriptions of these glories of my
new country. No native citizen of Chelsea took such pride and delight
in its institutions as I did. It required no fife and drum corps, no
Fourth of July procession, to set me tingling with patriotism. Even
the common agents and instruments of municipal life, such as the
letter carrier and the fire engine, I regarded with a measure of
respect. I know what I thought of people who said that Chelsea was a
very small, dull, unaspiring town, with no discernible excuse for a
separate name or existence.
The apex of my civic pride and personal contentment was reached on the
bright September morning when I entered the public school. That day I
must always remember, even if I live to be so old that I cannot tell
my name. To most people their first day at school is a memorable
occasion. In my case the importance of the day was a hundred times
magnified, on account of the years I had waited, the road I had come,
and the conscious ambitions I entertained.
I am wearily aware that I am speaking in extreme figures, in
superlatives. I wish I knew some other way to render the mental life
of the immigrant child of reasoning age. I may have been ever so much
an exception in acuteness of observation, powers of comparison, and
abnormal self-consciousness; none the less were my thoughts and
conduct typical of the attitude of the intelligent immigrant child
toward American institutions. And what the child thinks and feels is a
reflection of the hopes, desires, and purposes of the parents who
brought him overseas, no matter how precocious and independent the
child may be. Your immigrant inspectors will tell you what poverty the
foreigner brings in his baggage, what want in his pockets. Let the
overgrown boy of twelve, reverently drawing his letters in the baby
class, testify to the noble dreams and high ideals that may be hidden
beneath the greasy caftan of the immigrant. Speaking for the Jews, at
least, I know I am safe in inviting such an investigation.
Who were my companions on my first day at school? Whose hand was in
mine, as I stood, overcome with awe, by the teacher's desk, and
whispered my name as my father prompted? Was it Frieda's steady,
capable hand? Was it her loyal heart that throbbed, beat for beat with
mine, as it had done through all our childish adventures? Frieda's
heart did throb that day, but not with my emotions. My heart pulsed
with joy and pride and ambition; in her heart longing fought with
abnegation. For I was led to the schoolroom, with its sunshine and its
singing and the teacher's cheery smile; while she was led to the
workshop, with its foul air, care-lined faces, and the foreman's stern
command. Our going to school was the fulfilment of my father's best
promises to us, and Frieda's share in it was to fashion and fit the
calico frocks in which the baby sister and I made our first appearance
in a public schoolroom.
I remember to this day the gray pattern of the calico, so
affectionately did I regard it as it hung upon the wall--my
consecration robe awaiting the beatific day. And Frieda, I am sure,
remembers it, too, so longingly did she regard it as the crisp,
starchy breadths of it slid between her fingers. But whatever were her
longings, she said nothing of them; she bent over the sewing-machine
humming an Old-World melody. In every straight, smooth seam, perhaps,
she tucked away some lingering impulse of childhood; but she matched
the scrolls and flowers with the utmost care. If a sudden shock of
rebellion made her straighten up for an instant, the next instant she
was bending to adjust a ruffle to the best advantage. And when the
momentous day arrived, and the little sister and I stood up to be
arrayed, it was Frieda herself who patted and smoothed my stiff new
calico; who made me turn round and round, to see that I was perfect;
who stooped to pull out a disfiguring basting-thread. If there was
anything in her heart besides sisterly love and pride and good-will,
as we parted that morning, it was a sense of loss and a woman's
acquiescence in her fate; for we had been close friends, and now our
ways would lie apart. Longing she felt, but no envy. She did not
grudge me what she was denied. Until that morning we had been children
together, but now, at the fiat of her destiny, she became a woman,
with all a woman's cares; whilst I, so little younger than she, was
bidden to dance at the May festival of untroubled childhood.
I wish, for my comfort, that I could say that I had some notion of the
difference in our lots, some sense of the injustice to her, of the
indulgence to me. I wish I could even say that I gave serious thought
to the matter. There had always been a distinction between us rather
out of proportion to the difference in our years. Her good health and
domestic instincts had made it natural for her to become my mother's
right hand, in the years preceding the emigration, when there were no
more servants or dependents. Then there was the family tradition that
Mary was the quicker, the brighter of the two, and that hers could be
no common lot. Frieda was relied upon for help, and her sister for
glory. And when I failed as a milliner's apprentice, while Frieda made
excellent progress at the dressmaker's, our fates, indeed, were
sealed. It was understood, even before we reached Boston, that she
would go to work and I to school. In view of the family prejudices, it
was the inevitable course. No injustice was intended. My father sent
us hand in hand to school, before he had ever thought of America. If,
in America, he had been able to support his family unaided, it would
have been the culmination of his best hopes to see all his children at
school, with equal advantages at home. But when he had done his best,
and was still unable to provide even bread and shelter for us all, he
was compelled to make us children self-supporting as fast as it was
practicable. There was no choosing possible; Frieda was the oldest,
the strongest, the best prepared, and the only one who was of legal
age to be put to work.
My father has nothing to answer for. He divided the world between his
children in accordance with the laws of the country and the compulsion
of his circumstances. I have no need of defending him. It is myself
that I would like to defend, and I cannot. I remember that I accepted
the arrangements made for my sister and me without much reflection,
and everything that was planned for my advantage I took as a matter of
course. I was no heartless monster, but a decidedly self-centred
child. If my sister had seemed unhappy it would have troubled me; but
I am ashamed to recall that I did not consider how little it was that
contented her. I was so preoccupied with my own happiness that I did
not half perceive the splendid devotion of her attitude towards me,
the sweetness of her joy in my good luck. She not only stood by
approvingly when I was helped to everything; she cheerfully waited on
me herself. And I took everything from her hand as if it were my due.
The two of us stood a moment in the doorway of the tenement house on
Arlington Street, that wonderful September morning when I first went
to school. It was I that ran away, on winged feet of joy and
expectation; it was she whose feet were bound in the treadmill of
daily toil. And I was so blind that I did not see that the glory lay
on her, and not on me.
* * * * *
Father himself conducted us to school. He would not have delegated
that mission to the President of the United States. He had awaited the
day with impatience equal to mine, and the visions he saw as he
hurried us over the sun-flecked pavements transcended all my dreams.
Almost his first act on landing on American soil, three years before,
had been his application for naturalization. He had taken the
remaining steps in the process with eager promptness, and at the
earliest moment allowed by the law, he became a citizen of the United
States. It is true that he had left home in search of bread for his
hungry family, but he went blessing the necessity that drove him to
America. The boasted freedom of the New World meant to him far more
than the right to reside, travel, and work wherever he pleased; it
meant the freedom to speak his thoughts, to throw off the shackles of
superstition, to test his own fate, unhindered by political or
religious tyranny. He was only a young man when he landed--thirty-two;
and most of his life he had been held in leading-strings. He was
hungry for his untasted manhood.
Three years passed in sordid struggle and disappointment. He was not
prepared to make a living even in America, where the day laborer eats
wheat instead of rye. Apparently the American flag could not protect
him against the pursuing Nemesis of his limitations; he must expiate
the sins of his fathers who slept across the seas. He had been endowed
at birth with a poor constitution, a nervous, restless temperament,
and an abundance of hindering prejudices. In his boyhood his body was
starved, that his mind might be stuffed with useless learning. In his
youth this dearly gotten learning was sold, and the price was the
bread and salt which he had not been trained to earn for himself.
Under the wedding canopy he was bound for life to a girl whose
features were still strange to him; and he was bidden to multiply
himself, that sacred learning might be perpetuated in his sons, to the
glory of the God of his fathers. All this while he had been led about
as a creature without a will, a chattel, an instrument. In his
maturity he awoke, and found himself poor in health, poor in purse,
poor in useful knowledge, and hampered on all sides. At the first nod
of opportunity he broke away from his prison, and strove to atone for
his wasted youth by a life of useful labor; while at the same time he
sought to lighten the gloom of his narrow scholarship by freely
partaking of modern ideas. But his utmost endeavor still left him far
from his goal. In business, nothing prospered with him. Some fault of
hand or mind or temperament led him to failure where other men found
success. Wherever the blame for his disabilities be placed, he reaped
their bitter fruit. "Give me bread!" he cried to America. "What will
you do to earn it?" the challenge came back. And he found that he was
master of no art, of no trade; that even his precious learning was of
no avail, because he had only the most antiquated methods of
communicating it.
So in his primary quest he had failed. There was left him the
compensation of intellectual freedom. That he sought to realize in
every possible way. He had very little opportunity to prosecute his
education, which, in truth, had never been begun. His struggle for a
bare living left him no time to take advantage of the public evening
school; but he lost nothing of what was to be learned through reading,
through attendance at public meetings, through exercising the rights
of citizenship. Even here he was hindered by a natural inability to
acquire the English language. In time, indeed, he learned to read, to
follow a conversation or lecture; but he never learned to write
correctly, and his pronunciation remains extremely foreign to this
day.
If education, culture, the higher life were shining things to be
worshipped from afar, he had still a means left whereby he could draw
one step nearer to them. He could send his children to school, to
learn all those things that he knew by fame to be desirable. The
common school, at least, perhaps high school; for one or two, perhaps
even college! His children should be students, should fill his house
with books and intellectual company; and thus he would walk by proxy
in the Elysian Fields of liberal learning. As for the children
themselves, he knew no surer way to their advancement and happiness.
So it was with a heart full of longing and hope that my father led us
to school on that first day. He took long strides in his eagerness,
the rest of us running and hopping to keep up.
At last the four of us stood around the teacher's desk; and my father,
in his impossible English, gave us over in her charge, with some
broken word of his hopes for us that his swelling heart could no
longer contain. I venture to say that Miss Nixon was struck by
something uncommon in the group we made, something outside of Semitic
features and the abashed manner of the alien. My little sister was as
pretty as a doll, with her clear pink-and-white face, short golden
curls, and eyes like blue violets when you caught them looking up. My
brother might have been a girl, too, with his cherubic contours of
face, rich red color, glossy black hair, and fine eyebrows. Whatever
secret fears were in his heart, remembering his former teachers, who
had taught with the rod, he stood up straight and uncringing before
the American teacher, his cap respectfully doffed. Next to him stood a
starved-looking girl with eyes ready to pop out, and short dark curls
that would not have made much of a wig for a Jewish bride.
All three children carried themselves rather better than the common
run of "green" pupils that were brought to Miss Nixon. But the figure
that challenged attention to the group was the tall, straight father,
with his earnest face and fine forehead, nervous hands eloquent in
gesture, and a voice full of feeling. This foreigner, who brought his
children to school as if it were an act of consecration, who regarded
the teacher of the primer class with reverence, who spoke of visions,
like a man inspired, in a common schoolroom, was not like other
aliens, who brought their children in dull obedience to the law; was
not like the native fathers, who brought their unmanageable boys, glad
to be relieved of their care. I think Miss Nixon guessed what my
father's best English could not convey. I think she divined that by
the simple act of delivering our school certificates to her he took
possession of America.
CHAPTER X
INITIATION
It is not worth while to refer to voluminous school statistics to see
just how many "green" pupils entered school last September, not
knowing the days of the week in English, who next February will be
declaiming patriotic verses in honor of George Washington and Abraham
Lincoln, with a foreign accent, indeed, but with plenty of enthusiasm.
It is enough to know that this hundred-fold miracle is common to the
schools in every part of the United States where immigrants are
received. And if I was one of Chelsea's hundred in 1894, it was only
to be expected, since I was one of the older of the "green" children,
and had had a start in my irregular schooling in Russia, and was
carried along by a tremendous desire to learn, and had my family to
cheer me on.
I was not a bit too large for my little chair and desk in the baby
class, but my mind, of course, was too mature by six or seven years
for the work. So as soon as I could understand what the teacher said
in class, I was advanced to the second grade. This was within a week
after Miss Nixon took me in hand. But I do not mean to give my dear
teacher all the credit for my rapid progress, nor even half the
credit. I shall divide it with her on behalf of my race and my family.
I was Jew enough to have an aptitude for language in general, and to
bend my mind earnestly to my task; I was Antin enough to read each
lesson with my heart, which gave me an inkling of what was coming
next, and so carried me along by leaps and bounds. As for the teacher,
she could best explain what theory she followed in teaching us
foreigners to read. I can only describe the method, which was so
simple that I wish holiness could be taught in the same way.
There were about half a dozen of us beginners in English, in age from
six to fifteen. Miss Nixon made a special class of us, and aided us so
skilfully and earnestly in our endeavors to "see-a-cat," and
"hear-a-dog-bark," and "look-at-the-hen," that we turned over page
after page of the ravishing history, eager to find out how the common
world looked, smelled, and tasted in the strange speech. The teacher
knew just when to let us help each other out with a word in our own
tongue,--it happened that we were all Jews,--and so, working all
together, we actually covered more ground in a lesson than the native
classes, composed entirely of the little tots.
But we stuck--stuck fast--at the definite article; and sometimes the
lesson resolved itself into a species of lingual gymnastics, in which
we all looked as if we meant to bite our tongues off. Miss Nixon was
pretty, and she must have looked well with her white teeth showing in
the act; but at the time I was too solemnly occupied to admire her
looks. I did take great pleasure in her smile of approval, whenever I
pronounced well; and her patience and perseverance in struggling with
us over that thick little word are becoming to her even now, after
fifteen years. It is not her fault if any of us to-day give a buzzing
sound to the dreadful English _th_.
I shall never have a better opportunity to make public declaration of
my love for the English language. I am glad that American history
runs, chapter for chapter, the way it does; for thus America came to
be the country I love so dearly. I am glad, most of all, that the
Americans began by being Englishmen, for thus did I come to inherit
this beautiful language in which I think. It seems to me that in any
other language happiness is not so sweet, logic is not so clear. I am
not sure that I could believe in my neighbors as I do if I thought
about them in un-English words. I could almost say that my conviction
of immortality is bound up with the English of its promise. And as I
am attached to my prejudices, I must love the English language!
Whenever the teachers did anything special to help me over my private
difficulties, my gratitude went out to them, silently. It meant so
much to me that they halted the lesson to give me a lift, that I needs
must love them for it. Dear Miss Carrol, of the second grade, would be
amazed to hear what small things I remember, all because I was so
impressed at the time with her readiness and sweetness in taking
notice of my difficulties.
Says Miss Carrol, looking straight at me:--
"If Johnnie has three marbles, and Charlie has twice as many, how many
marbles has Charlie?"
I raise my hand for permission to speak.
"Teacher, I don't know vhat is tvice."
Teacher beckons me to her, and whispers to me the meaning of the
strange word, and I am able to write the sum correctly. It's all in
the day's work with her; with me, it is a special act of kindness and
efficiency.
She whom I found in the next grade became so dear a friend that I can
hardly name her with the rest, though I mention none of them lightly.
Her approval was always dear to me, first because she was "Teacher,"
and afterwards, as long as she lived, because she was my Miss
Dillingham. Great was my grief, therefore, when, shortly after my
admission to her class, I incurred discipline, the first, and next to
the last, time in my school career.
The class was repeating in chorus the Lord's Prayer, heads bowed on
desks. I was doing my best to keep up by the sound; my mind could not
go beyond the word "hallowed," for which I had not found the meaning.
In the middle of the prayer a Jewish boy across the aisle trod on my
foot to get my attention. "You must not say that," he admonished in a
solemn whisper; "it's Christian." I whispered back that it wasn't, and
went on to the "Amen." I did not know but what he was right, but the
name of Christ was not in the prayer, and I was bound to do everything
that the class did. If I had any Jewish scruples, they were lagging
away behind my interest in school affairs. How American this was: two
pupils side by side in the schoolroom, each holding to his own
opinion, but both submitting to the common law; for the boy at least
bowed his head as the teacher ordered.
But all Miss Dillingham knew of it was that two of her pupils
whispered during morning prayer, and she must discipline them. So I
was degraded from the honor row to the lowest row, and it was many a
day before I forgave that young missionary; it was not enough for my
vengeance that he suffered punishment with me. Teacher, of course,
heard us both defend ourselves, but there was a time and a place for
religious arguments, and she meant to help us remember that point.
I remember to this day what a struggle we had over the word "water,"
Miss Dillingham and I. It seemed as if I could not give the sound of
_w_; I said "vater" every time. Patiently my teacher worked with me,
inventing mouth exercises for me, to get my stubborn lips to produce
that _w_; and when at last I could say "village" and "water" in rapid
alternation, without misplacing the two initials, that memorable word
was sweet on my lips. For we had conquered, and Teacher was pleased.
Getting a language in this way, word by word, has a charm that may be
set against the disadvantages. It is like gathering a posy blossom by
blossom. Bring the bouquet into your chamber, and these nasturtiums
stand for the whole flaming carnival of them tumbling over the fence
out there; these yellow pansies recall the velvet crescent of color
glowing under the bay window; this spray of honeysuckle smells like
the wind-tossed masses of it on the porch, ripe and bee-laden; the
whole garden in a glass tumbler. So it is with one who gathers words,
loving them. Particular words remain associated with important
occasions in the learner's mind. I could thus write a history of my
English vocabulary that should be at the same time an account of my
comings and goings, my mistakes and my triumphs, during the years of
my initiation.
If I was eager and diligent, my teachers did not sleep. As fast as my
knowledge of English allowed, they advanced me from grade to grade,
without reference to the usual schedule of promotions. My father was
right, when he often said, in discussing my prospects, that ability
would be promptly recognized in the public schools. Rapid as was my
progress, on account of the advantages with which I started, some of
the other "green" pupils were not far behind me; within a grade or
two, by the end of the year. My brother, whose childhood had been one
hideous nightmare, what with the stupid rebbe, the cruel whip, and the
general repression of life in the Pale, surprised my father by the
progress he made under intelligent, sympathetic guidance. Indeed, he
soon had a reputation in the school that the American boys envied; and
all through the school course he more than held his own with pupils of
his age. So much for the right and wrong way of doing things.
There is a record of my early progress in English much better than my
recollections, however accurate and definite these may be. I have
several reasons for introducing it here. First, it shows what the
Russian Jew can do with an adopted language; next, it proves that
vigilance of our public-school teachers of which I spoke; and last, I
am proud of it! That is an unnecessary confession, but I could not be
satisfied to insert the record here, with my vanity unavowed.
This is the document, copied from an educational journal, a tattered
copy of which lies in my lap as I write--treasured for fifteen years,
you see, by my vanity.
EDITOR "PRIMARY EDUCATION":--
This is the uncorrected paper of a Russian child twelve years
old, who had studied English only four months. She had never,
until September, been to school even in her own country and has
heard English spoken _only_ at school. I shall be glad if the
paper of my pupil and the above explanation may appear in your
paper.
M.S. DILLINGHAM.
CHELSEA, MASS.
SNOW
Snow is frozen moisture which comes from the clouds. Now the
snow is coming down in feather-flakes, which makes nice
snow-balls. But there is still one kind of snow more. This kind
of snow is called snow-crystals, for it comes down in little
curly balls. These snow-crystals aren't quiet as good for
snow-balls as feather-flakes, for they (the snow-crystals) are
dry: so they can't keep together as feather-flakes do.
The snow is dear to some children for they like sleighing.
As I said at the top--the snow comes from the clouds.
Now the trees are bare, and no flowers are to see in the fields
and gardens, (we all know why) and the whole world seems like
asleep without the happy birds songs which left us till spring.
But the snow which drove away all these pretty and happy things,
try, (as I think) not to make us at all unhappy; they covered up
the branches of the trees, the fields, the gardens and houses,
and the whole world looks like dressed in a beautiful
white--instead of green--dress, with the sky looking down on it
with a pale face.
And so the people can find some joy in it, too, without the
happy summer.
MARY ANTIN.
And now that it stands there, with _her_ name over it, I am ashamed of
my flippant talk about vanity. More to me than all the praise I could
hope to win by the conquest of fifty languages is the association of
this dear friend with my earliest efforts at writing; and it pleases
me to remember that to her I owe my very first appearance in print.
Vanity is the least part of it, when I remember how she called me to
her desk, one day after school was out, and showed me my
composition--my own words, that I had written out of my own
head--printed out, clear black and white, with my name at the end!
Nothing so wonderful had ever happened to me before. My whole
consciousness was suddenly transformed. I suppose that was the moment
when I became a writer. I always loved to write,--I wrote letters
whenever I had an excuse,--yet it had never occurred to me to sit down
and write my thoughts for no person in particular, merely to put the
word on paper. But now, as I read my own words, in a delicious
confusion, the idea was born. I stared at my name: MARY ANTIN. Was
that really I? The printed characters composing it seemed strange to
me all of a sudden. If that was my name, and those were the words out
of my own head, what relation did it all have to _me_, who was alone
there with Miss Dillingham, and the printed page between us? Why, it
meant that I could write again, and see my writing printed for people
to read! I could write many, many, many things: I could write a book!
The idea was so huge, so bewildering, that my mind scarcely could
accommodate it.
I do not know what my teacher said to me; probably very little. It was
her way to say only a little, and look at me, and trust me to
understand. Once she had occasion to lecture me about living a shut-up
life; she wanted me to go outdoors. I had been repeatedly scolded and
reproved on that score by other people, but I had only laughed, saying
that I was too happy to change my ways. But when Miss Dillingham spoke
to me, I saw that it was a serious matter; and yet she only said a few
words, and looked at me with that smile of hers that was only half a
smile, and the rest a meaning. Another time she had a great question
to ask me, touching my life to the quick. She merely put her question,
and was silent; but I knew what answer she expected, and not being
able to give it then, I went away sad and reproved. Years later I had
my triumphant answer, but she was no longer there to receive it; and
so her eyes look at me, from the picture on the mantel there, with a
reproach I no longer merit.
I ought to go back and strike out all that talk about vanity. What
reason have I to be vain, when I reflect how at every step I was
petted, nursed, and encouraged? I did not even discover my own talent.
It was discovered first by my father in Russia, and next by my friend
in America. What did I ever do but write when they told me to write? I
suppose my grandfather who drove a spavined horse through lonely
country lanes sat in the shade of crisp-leaved oaks to refresh himself
with a bit of black bread; and an acorn falling beside him, in the
immense stillness, shook his heart with the echo, and left him
wondering. I suppose my father stole away from the synagogue one long
festival day, and stretched himself out in the sun-warmed grass, and
lost himself in dreams that made the world of men unreal when he
returned to them. And so what is there left for me to do, who do not
have to drive a horse nor interpret ancient lore, but put my
grandfather's question into words and set to music my father's dream?
The tongue am I of those who lived before me, as those that are to
come will be the voice of my unspoken thoughts. And so who shall be
applauded if the song be sweet, if the prophecy be true?
I never heard of any one who was so watched and coaxed, so passed
along from hand to helping hand, as was I. I always had friends. They
sprang up everywhere, as if they had stood waiting for me to come. So
here was my teacher, the moment she saw that I could give a good
paraphrase of her talk on "Snow," bent on finding out what more I
could do. One day she asked me if I had ever written poetry. I had
not, but I went home and tried. I believe it was more snow, and I
know it was wretched. I wish I could produce a copy of that early
effusion; it would prove that my judgment is not severe. Wretched it
was,--worse, a great deal, than reams of poetry that is written by
children about whom there is no fuss made. But Miss Dillingham was not
discouraged. She saw that I had no idea of metre, so she proceeded to
teach me. We repeated miles of poetry together, smooth lines that sang
themselves, mostly out of Longfellow. Then I would go home and
write--oh, about the snow in our back yard!--but when Miss Dillingham
came to read my verses, they limped and they lagged and they dragged,
and there was no tune that would fit them.
At last came the moment of illumination: I saw where my trouble lay. I
had supposed that my lines matched when they had an equal number of
syllables, taking no account of accent. Now I knew better; now I could
write poetry! The everlasting snow melted at last, and the mud puddles
dried in the spring sun, and the grass on the common was green, and
still I wrote poetry! Again I wish I had some example of my springtime
rhapsodies, the veriest rubbish of the sort that ever a child
perpetrated. Lizzie McDee, who had red hair and freckles, and a
Sunday-school manner on weekdays, and was below me in the class, did a
great deal better. We used to compare verses; and while I do not
remember that I ever had the grace to own that she was the better
poet, I do know that I secretly wondered why the teachers did not
invite her to stay after school and study poetry, while they took so
much pains with me. But so it was always with me: somebody did
something for me all the time.
Making fair allowance for my youth, retarded education, and
strangeness to the language, it must still be admitted that I never
wrote good verse. But I loved to read it. My half-hours with Miss
Dillingham were full of delight for me, quite apart from my new-born
ambition to become a writer. What, then, was my joy, when Miss
Dillingham, just before locking up her desk one evening, presented me
with a volume of Longfellow's poems! It was a thin volume of
selections, but to me it was a bottomless treasure. I had never owned
a book before. The sense of possession alone was a source of bliss,
and this book I already knew and loved. And so Miss Dillingham, who
was my first American friend, and who first put my name in print, was
also the one to start my library. Deep is my regret when I consider
that she was gone before I had given much of an account of all her
gifts of love and service to me.
About the middle of the year I was promoted to the grammar school.
Then it was that I walked on air. For I said to myself that I was a
_student_ now, in earnest, not merely a school-girl learning to spell
and cipher. I was going to learn out-of-the-way things, things that
had nothing to do with ordinary life--things to _know_. When I walked
home afternoons, with the great big geography book under my arm, it
seemed to me that the earth was conscious of my step. Sometimes I
carried home half the books in my desk, not because I should need
them, but because I loved to hold them; and also because I loved to be
seen carrying books. It was a badge of scholarship, and I was proud of
it. I remembered the days in Vitebsk when I used to watch my cousin
Hirshel start for school in the morning, every thread of his student's
uniform, every worn copybook in his satchel, glorified in my envious
eyes. And now I was myself as he: aye, greater than he; for I knew
English, and I could write poetry.
If my head was not turned at this time it was because I was so busy
from morning till night. My father did his best to make me vain and
silly. He made much of me to every chance caller, boasting of my
progress at school, and of my exalted friends, the teachers. For a
school-teacher was no ordinary mortal in his eyes; she was a superior
being, set above the common run of men by her erudition and devotion
to higher things. That a school-teacher could be shallow or petty, or
greedy for pay, was a thing that he could not have been brought to
believe, at this time. And he was right, if he could only have stuck
to it in later years, when a new-born pessimism, fathered by his
perception that in America, too, some things needed mending, threw him
to the opposite extreme of opinion, crying that nothing in the
American scheme of society or government was worth tinkering.
He surely was right in his first appraisal of the teacher. The mean
sort of teachers are not teachers at all; they are self-seekers who
take up teaching as a business, to support themselves and keep their
hands white. These same persons, did they keep store or drive a milk
wagon or wash babies for a living, would be respectable. As
trespassers on a noble profession, they are worth no more than the
books and slates and desks over which they preside; so much furniture,
to be had by the gross. They do not love their work. They contribute
nothing to the higher development of their pupils. They busy
themselves, not with research into the science of teaching, but with
organizing political demonstrations to advance the cause of selfish
candidates for public office, who promise them rewards. The true
teachers are of another strain. Apostles all of an ideal, they go to
their work in a spirit of love and inquiry, seeking not comfort, not
position, not old-age pensions, but truth that is the soul of wisdom,
the joy of big-eyed children, the food of hungry youth.
They were true teachers who used to come to me on Arlington Street, so
my father had reason to boast of the distinction brought upon his
house. For the school-teacher in her trim, unostentatious dress was an
uncommon visitor in our neighborhood; and the talk that passed in the
bare little "parlor" over the grocery store would not have been
entirely comprehensible to our next-door neighbor.
In the grammar school I had as good teaching as I had had in the
primary. It seems to me in retrospect that it was as good, on the
whole, as the public school ideals of the time made possible. When I
recall how I was taught geography, I see, indeed, that there was room
for improvement occasionally both in the substance and in the method
of instruction. But I know of at least one teacher of Chelsea who
realized this; for I met her, eight years later, at a great
metropolitan university that holds a summer session for the benefit of
school-teachers who want to keep up with the advance in their science.
Very likely they no longer teach geography entirely within doors, and
by rote, as I was taught. Fifteen years is plenty of time for
progress.
When I joined the first grammar grade, the class had had a half-year's
start of me, but it was not long before I found my place near the
head. In all branches except geography it was genuine progress. I
overtook the youngsters in their study of numbers, spelling, reading,
and composition. In geography I merely made a bluff, but I did not
know it. Neither did my teacher. I came up to such tests as she put
me.
The lesson was on Chelsea, which was right: geography, like charity,
should begin at home. Our text ran on for a paragraph or so on the
location, boundaries, natural features, and industries of the town,
with a bit of local history thrown in. We were to learn all these
interesting facts, and be prepared to write them out from memory the
next day. I went home and learned--learned every word of the text,
every comma, every footnote. When the teacher had read my paper she
marked it "EE." "E" was for "excellent," but my paper was absolutely
perfect, and must be put in a class by itself. The teacher exhibited
my paper before the class, with some remarks about the diligence that
could overtake in a week pupils who had had half a year's start. I
took it all as modestly as I could, never doubting that I was indeed a
very bright little girl, and getting to be very learned to boot. I was
"perfect" in geography, a most erudite subject.
But what was the truth? The words that I repeated so accurately on my
paper had about as much meaning to me as the words of the Psalms I
used to chant in Hebrew. I got an idea that the city of Chelsea, and
the world in general, was laid out flat, like the common, and shaved
off at the ends, to allow the north, south, east, and west to snuggle
up close, like the frame around a picture. If I looked at the map, I
was utterly bewildered; I could find no correspondence between the
picture and the verbal explanations. With words I was safe; I could
learn any number of words by heart, and sometime or other they would
pop out of the medley, clothed with meaning. Chelsea, I read, was
bounded on all sides--"bounded" appealed to my imagination--by various
things that I had never identified, much as I had roamed about the
town. I immediately pictured these remote boundaries as a six-foot
fence in a good state of preservation, with the Mystic River, the
towns of Everett and Revere, and East Boston Creek, rejoicing, on the
south, west, north, and east of it, respectively, that they had got
inside; while the rest of the world peeped in enviously through a knot
hole. In the middle of this cherished area piano factories--or was it
shoe factories?--proudly reared their chimneys, while the population
promenaded on a _rope walk_, saluted at every turn by the benevolent
inmates of the Soldiers' Home on the top of Powderhorn Hill.
Perhaps the fault was partly mine, because I always would reduce
everything to a picture. Partly it may have been because I had not had
time to digest the general definitions and explanations at the
beginning of the book. Still, I can take but little of the blame, when
I consider how I fared through my geography, right to the end of the
grammar-school course. I did in time disentangle the symbolism of the
orange revolving on a knitting-needle from the astronomical facts in
the case, but it took years of training under a master of the subject
to rid me of my distrust of the map as a representation of the earth.
To this day I sometimes blunder back to my early impression that any
given portion of the earth's surface is constructed upon a skeleton
consisting of two crossed bars, terminating in arrowheads which pin
the cardinal points into place; and if I want to find any desired
point of the compass, I am inclined to throw myself flat on my nose,
my head due north, and my outstretched arms seeking the east and west
respectively.
For in the schoolroom, as far as the study of the map went, we began
with the symbol and stuck to the symbol. No teacher of geography I
ever had, except the master I referred to, took the pains to ascertain
whether I had any sense of the facts for which the symbols stood.
Outside the study of maps, geography consisted of statistics: tables
of population, imports and exports, manufactures, and degrees of
temperature; dimensions of rivers, mountains, and political states;
with lists of minerals, plants, and plagues native to any given part
of the globe. The only part of the whole subject that meant anything
to me was the description of the aspect of foreign lands, and the
manners and customs of their peoples. The relation of physiography to
human history--what might be called the moral of geography--was not
taught at all, or was touched upon in an unimpressive manner. The
prevalence of this defect in the teaching of school geography is borne
out by the surprise of the college freshman, who remarked to the
professor of geology that it was curious to note how all the big
rivers and harbors on the Atlantic coastal plain occurred in the
neighborhood of large cities! A little instruction in the elements of
chartography--a little practice in the use of the compass and the
spirit level, a topographical map of the town common, an excursion
with a road map--would have given me a fat round earth in place of my
paper ghost; would have illumined the one dark alley in my school
life.
CHAPTER XI
"MY COUNTRY"
The public school has done its best for us foreigners, and for the
country, when it has made us into good Americans. I am glad it is mine
to tell how the miracle was wrought in one case. You should be glad to
hear of it, you born Americans; for it is the story of the growth of
your country; of the flocking of your brothers and sisters from the
far ends of the earth to the flag you love; of the recruiting of your
armies of workers, thinkers, and leaders. And you will be glad to hear
of it, my comrades in adoption; for it is a rehearsal of your own
experience, the thrill and wonder of which your own hearts have felt.
How long would you say, wise reader, it takes to make an American? By
the middle of my second year in school I had reached the sixth grade.
When, after the Christmas holidays, we began to study the life of
Washington, running through a summary of the Revolution, and the early
days of the Republic, it seemed to me that all my reading and study
had been idle until then. The reader, the arithmetic, the song book,
that had so fascinated me until now, became suddenly sober exercise
books, tools wherewith to hew a way to the source of inspiration. When
the teacher read to us out of a big book with many bookmarks in it, I
sat rigid with attention in my little chair, my hands tightly clasped
on the edge of my desk; and I painfully held my breath, to prevent
sighs of disappointment escaping, as I saw the teacher skip the parts
between bookmarks. When the class read, and it came my turn, my voice
shook and the book trembled in my hands. I could not pronounce the
name of George Washington without a pause. Never had I prayed, never
had I chanted the songs of David, never had I called upon the Most
Holy, in such utter reverence and worship as I repeated the simple
sentences of my child's story of the patriot. I gazed with adoration
at the portraits of George and Martha Washington, till I could see
them with my eyes shut. And whereas formerly my self-consciousness had
bordered on conceit, and I thought myself an uncommon person, parading
my schoolbooks through the streets, and swelling with pride when a
teacher detained me in conversation, now I grew humble all at once,
seeing how insignificant I was beside the Great.
As I read about the noble boy who would not tell a lie to save himself
from punishment, I was for the first time truly repentant of my sins.
Formerly I had fasted and prayed and made sacrifice on the Day of
Atonement, but it was more than half play, in mimicry of my elders. I
had no real horror of sin, and I knew so many ways of escaping
punishment. I am sure my family, my neighbors, my teachers in
Polotzk--all my world, in fact--strove together, by example and
precept, to teach me goodness. Saintliness had a new incarnation in
about every third person I knew. I did respect the saints, but I could
not help seeing that most of them were a little bit stupid, and that
mischief was much more fun than piety. Goodness, as I had known it,
was respectable, but not necessarily admirable. The people I really
admired, like my Uncle Solomon, and Cousin Rachel, were those who
preached the least and laughed the most. My sister Frieda was
perfectly good, but she did not think the less of me because I played
tricks. What I loved in my friends was not inimitable. One could be
downright good if one really wanted to. One could be learned if one
had books and teachers. One could sing funny songs and tell anecdotes
if one travelled about and picked up such things, like one's uncles
and cousins. But a human being strictly good, perfectly wise, and
unfailingly valiant, all at the same time, I had never heard or
dreamed of. This wonderful George Washington was as inimitable as he
was irreproachable. Even if I had never, never told a lie, I could not
compare myself to George Washington; for I was not brave--I was afraid
to go out when snowballs whizzed--and I could never be the First
President of the United States.
So I was forced to revise my own estimate of myself. But the twin of
my new-born humility, paradoxical as it may seem, was a sense of
dignity I had never known before. For if I found that I was a person
of small consequence, I discovered at the same time that I was more
nobly related than I had ever supposed. I had relatives and friends
who were notable people by the old standards,--I had never been
ashamed of my family,--but this George Washington, who died long
before I was born, was like a king in greatness, and he and I were
Fellow Citizens. There was a great deal about Fellow Citizens in the
patriotic literature we read at this time; and I knew from my father
how he was a Citizen, through the process of naturalization, and how I
also was a citizen, by virtue of my relation to him. Undoubtedly I was
a Fellow Citizen, and George Washington was another. It thrilled me to
realize what sudden greatness had fallen on me; and at the same time
it sobered me, as with a sense of responsibility. I strove to conduct
myself as befitted a Fellow Citizen.
Before books came into my life, I was given to stargazing and
daydreaming. When books were given me, I fell upon them as a glutton
pounces on his meat after a period of enforced starvation. I lived
with my nose in a book, and took no notice of the alternations of the
sun and stars. But now, after the advent of George Washington and the
American Revolution, I began to dream again. I strayed on the common
after school instead of hurrying home to read. I hung on fence rails,
my pet book forgotten under my arm, and gazed off to the
yellow-streaked February sunset, and beyond, and beyond. I was no
longer the central figure of my dreams; the dry weeds in the lane
crackled beneath the tread of Heroes.
What more could America give a child? Ah, much more! As I read how the
patriots planned the Revolution, and the women gave their sons to die
in battle, and the heroes led to victory, and the rejoicing people set
up the Republic, it dawned on me gradually what was meant by _my
country_. The people all desiring noble things, and striving for them
together, defying their oppressors, giving their lives for each
other--all this it was that made _my country_. It was not a thing that
I _understood_; I could not go home and tell Frieda about it, as I
told her other things I learned at school. But I knew one could say
"my country" and _feel_ it, as one felt "God" or "myself." My teacher,
my schoolmates, Miss Dillingham, George Washington himself could not
mean more than I when they said "my country," after I had once felt
it. For the Country was for all the Citizens, and _I was a Citizen_.
And when we stood up to sing "America," I shouted the words with all
my might. I was in very earnest proclaiming to the world my love for
my new-found country.
"I love thy rocks and rills.
Thy woods and templed hills."
Boston Harbor, Crescent Beach, Chelsea Square--all was hallowed ground
to me. As the day approached when the school was to hold exercises in
honor of Washington's Birthday, the halls resounded at all hours with
the strains of patriotic songs; and I, who was a model of the
attentive pupil, more than once lost my place in the lesson as I
strained to hear, through closed doors, some neighboring class
rehearsing "The Star-Spangled Banner." If the doors happened to open,
and the chorus broke out unveiled--
"O! say, does that Star-Spangled Banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?"--
delicious tremors ran up and down my spine, and I was faint with
suppressed enthusiasm.
Where had been my country until now? What flag had I loved? What
heroes had I worshipped? The very names of these things had been
unknown to me. Well I knew that Polotzk was not my country. It was
_goluth_--exile. On many occasions in the year we prayed to God to
lead us out of exile. The beautiful Passover service closed with the
words, "Next year, may we be in Jerusalem." On childish lips, indeed,
those words were no conscious aspiration; we repeated the Hebrew
syllables after our elders, but without their hope and longing. Still
not a child among us was too young to feel in his own flesh the lash
of the oppressor. We knew what it was to be Jews in exile, from the
spiteful treatment we suffered at the hands of the smallest urchin
who crossed himself; and thence we knew that Israel had good reason to
pray for deliverance. But the story of the Exodus was not history to
me in the sense that the story of the American Revolution was. It was
more like a glorious myth, a belief in which had the effect of cutting
me off from the actual world, by linking me with a world of phantoms.
Those moments of exaltation which the contemplation of the Biblical
past afforded us, allowing us to call ourselves the children of
princes, served but to tinge with a more poignant sense of
disinheritance the long humdrum stretches of our life. In very truth
we were a people without a country. Surrounded by mocking foes and
detractors, it was difficult for me to realize the persons of my
people's heroes or the events in which they moved. Except in moments
of abstraction from the world around me, I scarcely understood that
Jerusalem was an actual spot on the earth, where once the Kings of the
Bible, real people, like my neighbors in Polotzk, ruled in puissant
majesty. For the conditions of our civil life did not permit us to
cultivate a spirit of nationalism. The freedom of worship that was
grudgingly granted within the narrow limits of the Pale by no means
included the right to set up openly any ideal of a Hebrew State, any
hero other than the Czar. What we children picked up of our ancient
political history was confused with the miraculous story of the
Creation, with the supernatural legends and hazy associations of Bible
lore. As to our future, we Jews in Polotzk had no national
expectations; only a life-worn dreamer here and there hoped to die in
Palestine. If Fetchke and I sang, with my father, first making sure of
our audience, "Zion, Zion, Holy Zion, not forever is it lost," we did
not really picture to ourselves Judæa restored.
So it came to pass that we did not know what _my country_ could mean
to a man. And as we had no country, so we had no flag to love. It was
by no far-fetched symbolism that the banner of the House of Romanoff
became the emblem of our latter-day bondage in our eyes. Even a child
would know how to hate the flag that we were forced, on pain of severe
penalties, to hoist above our housetops, in celebration of the advent
of one of our oppressors. And as it was with country and flag, so it
was with heroes of war. We hated the uniform of the soldier, to the
last brass button. On the person of a Gentile, it was the symbol of
tyranny; on the person of a Jew, it was the emblem of shame.
So a little Jewish girl in Polotzk was apt to grow up hungry-minded
and empty-hearted; and if, still in her outreaching youth, she was set
down in a land of outspoken patriotism, she was likely to love her new
country with a great love, and to embrace its heroes in a great
worship. Naturalization, with us Russian Jews, may mean more than the
adoption of the immigrant by America. It may mean the adoption of
America by the immigrant.
On the day of the Washington celebration I recited a poem that I had
composed in my enthusiasm. But "composed" is not the word. The process
of putting on paper the sentiments that seethed in my soul was really
very discomposing. I dug the words out of my heart, squeezed the
rhymes out of my brain, forced the missing syllables out of their
hiding-places in the dictionary. May I never again know such travail
of the spirit as I endured during the fevered days when I was engaged
on the poem. It was not as if I wanted to say that snow was white or
grass was green. I could do that without a dictionary. It was a
question now of the loftiest sentiments, of the most abstract truths,
the names of which were very new in my vocabulary. It was necessary to
use polysyllables, and plenty of them; and where to find rhymes for
such words as "tyranny," "freedom," and "justice," when you had less
than two years' acquaintance with English! The name I wished to
celebrate was the most difficult of all. Nothing but "Washington"
rhymed with "Washington." It was a most ambitious undertaking, but my
heart could find no rest till it had proclaimed itself to the world;
so I wrestled with my difficulties, and spared not ink, till
inspiration perched on my penpoint, and my soul gave up its best.
When I had done, I was myself impressed with the length, gravity, and
nobility of my poem. My father was overcome with emotion as he read
it. His hands trembled as he held the paper to the light, and the mist
gathered in his eyes. My teacher, Miss Dwight, was plainly astonished
at my performance, and said many kind things, and asked many
questions; all of which I took very solemnly, like one who had been in
the clouds and returned to earth with a sign upon him. When Miss
Dwight asked me to read my poem to the class on the day of
celebration, I readily consented. It was not in me to refuse a chance
to tell my schoolmates what I thought of George Washington.
I was not a heroic figure when I stood up in front of the class to
pronounce the praises of the Father of his Country. Thin, pale, and
hollow, with a shadow of short black curls on my brow, and the staring
look of prominent eyes, I must have looked more frightened than
imposing. My dress added no grace to my appearance. "Plaids" were in
fashion, and my frock was of a red-and-green "plaid" that had a
ghastly effect on my complexion. I hated it when I thought of it, but
on the great day I did not know I had any dress on. Heels clapped
together, and hands glued to my sides, I lifted up my voice in praise
of George Washington. It was not much of a voice; like my hollow
cheeks, it suggested consumption. My pronunciation was faulty, my
declamation flat. But I had the courage of my convictions. I was face
to face with twoscore Fellow Citizens, in clean blouses and extra
frills. I must tell them what George Washington had done for their
country--for _our_ country--for me.
I can laugh now at the impossible metres, the grandiose phrases, the
verbose repetitions of my poem. Years ago I must have laughed at it,
when I threw my only copy into the wastebasket. The copy I am now
turning over was loaned me by Miss Dwight, who faithfully preserved it
all these years, for the sake, no doubt, of what I strove to express
when I laboriously hitched together those dozen and more ungraceful
stanzas. But to the forty Fellow Citizens sitting in rows in front of
me it was no laughing matter. Even the bad boys sat in attitudes of
attention, hypnotized by the solemnity of my demeanor. If they got any
inkling of what the hail of big words was about, it must have been
through occult suggestion. I fixed their eighty eyes with my single
stare, and gave it to them, stanza after stanza, with such emphasis as
the lameness of the lines permitted.
He whose courage, will, amazing bravery,
Did free his land from a despot's rule,
From man's greatest evil, almost slavery,
And all that's taught in tyranny's school.
Who gave his land its liberty,
Who was he?
'T was he who e'er will be our pride.
Immortal Washington,
Who always did in truth confide.
We hail our Washington!
[Illustration: TWOSCORE OF MY FELLOW-CITIZENS--PUBLIC SCHOOL,
CHELSEA]
The best of the verses were no better than these, but the children
listened. They had to. Presently I gave them news, declaring that
Washington
Wrote the famous Constitution; sacred's the hand
That this blessed guide to man had given, which says, "One
And all of mankind are alike, excepting none."
This was received in respectful silence, possibly because the other
Fellow Citizens were as hazy about historical facts as I at this
point. "Hurrah for Washington!" they understood, and "Three cheers for
the Red, White, and Blue!" was only to be expected on that occasion.
But there ran a special note through my poem--a thought that only
Israel Rubinstein or Beckie Aronovitch could have fully understood,
besides myself. For I made myself the spokesman of the "luckless sons
of Abraham," saying--
Then we weary Hebrew children at last found rest
In the land where reigned Freedom, and like a nest
To homeless birds your land proved to us, and therefore
Will we gratefully sing your praise evermore.
The boys and girls who had never been turned away from any door
because of their father's religion sat as if fascinated in their
places. But they woke up and applauded heartily when I was done,
following the example of Miss Dwight, who wore the happy face which
meant that one of her pupils had done well.
The recitation was repeated, by request, before several other classes,
and the applause was equally prolonged at each repetition. After the
exercises I was surrounded, praised, questioned, and made much of, by
teachers as well as pupils. Plainly I had not poured my praise of
George Washington into deaf ears. The teachers asked me if anybody had
helped me with the poem. The girls invariably asked, "Mary Antin, how
could you think of all those words?" None of them thought of the
dictionary!
If I had been satisfied with my poem in the first place, the applause
with which it was received by my teachers and schoolmates convinced me
that I had produced a very fine thing indeed. So the person, whoever
it was,--perhaps my father--who suggested that my tribute to
Washington ought to be printed, did not find me difficult to persuade.
When I had achieved an absolutely perfect copy of my verses, at the
expense of a dozen sheets of blue-ruled note paper, I crossed the
Mystic River to Boston and boldly invaded Newspaper Row.
It never occurred to me to send my manuscript by mail. In fact, it has
never been my way to send a delegate where I could go myself.
Consciously or unconsciously, I have always acted on the motto of a
wise man who was one of the dearest friends that Boston kept for me
until I came. "Personal presence moves the world," said the great Dr.
Hale; and I went in person to beard the editor in his armchair.
From the ferry slip to the offices of the "Boston Transcript" the way
was long, strange, and full of perils; but I kept resolutely on up
Hanover Street, being familiar with that part of my route, till I came
to a puzzling corner. There I stopped, utterly bewildered by the
tangle of streets, the roar of traffic, the giddy swarm of
pedestrians. With the precious manuscript tightly clasped, I balanced
myself on the curbstone, afraid to plunge into the boiling vortex of
the crossing. Every time I made a start, a clanging street car
snatched up the way. I could not even pick out my street; the
unobtrusive street signs were lost to my unpractised sight, in the
glaring confusion of store signs and advertisements. If I accosted a
pedestrian to ask the way, I had to speak several times before I was
heard. Jews, hurrying by with bearded chins on their bosoms and eyes
intent, shrugged their shoulders at the name "Transcript," and
shrugged till they were out of sight. Italians sauntering behind their
fruit carts answered my inquiry with a lift of the head that made
their earrings gleam, and a wave of the hand that referred me to all
four points of the compass at once. I was trying to catch the eye of
the tall policeman who stood grandly in the middle of the crossing, a
stout pillar around which the waves of traffic broke, when deliverance
bellowed in my ear.
"Herald, Globe, Record, _Tra-avel-er_! Eh? Whatcher want, sis?" The
tall newsboy had to stoop to me. "Transcript? Sure!" And in half a
twinkling he had picked me out a paper from his bundle. When I
explained to him, he good-naturedly tucked the paper in again, piloted
me across, unravelled the end of Washington Street for me, and with
much pointing out of landmarks, headed me for my destination, my nose
seeking the spire of the Old South Church.
I found the "Transcript" building a waste of corridors tunnelled by a
maze of staircases. On the glazed-glass doors were many signs with the
names or nicknames of many persons: "City Editor"; "Beggars and
Peddlers not Allowed." The nameless world not included in these
categories was warned off, forbidden to be or do: "Private--No
Admittance"; "Don't Knock." And the various inhospitable legends on
the doors and walls were punctuated by frequent cuspidors on the
floor. There was no sign anywhere of the welcome which I, as an
author, expected to find in the home of a newspaper.
I was descending from the top story to the street for the seventh
time, trying to decide what kind of editor a patriotic poem belonged
to, when an untidy boy carrying broad paper streamers and whistling
shrilly, in defiance of an express prohibition on the wall, bustled
through the corridor and left a door ajar. I slipped in behind him,
and found myself in a room full of editors.
I was a little surprised at the appearance of the editors. I had
imagined my editor would look like Mr. Jones, the principal of my
school, whose coat was always buttoned, and whose finger nails were
beautiful. These people were in shirt sleeves, and they smoked, and
they didn't politely turn in their revolving chairs when I came in,
and ask, "What can I do for you?"
The room was noisy with typewriters, and nobody heard my "Please, can
you tell me." At last one of the machines stopped, and the operator
thought he heard something in the pause. He looked up through his own
smoke. I guess he thought he saw something, for he stared. It troubled
me a little to have him stare so. I realized suddenly that the hand in
which I carried my manuscript was moist, and I was afraid it would
make marks on the paper. I held out the manuscript to the editor,
explaining that it was a poem about George Washington, and would he
please print it in the "Transcript."
There was something queer about that particular editor. The way he
stared and smiled made me feel about eleven inches high, and my voice
kept growing smaller and smaller as I neared the end of my speech.
At last he spoke, laying down his pipe, and sitting back at his ease.
"So you have brought us a poem, my child?"
"It's about George Washington," I repeated impressively. "Don't you
want to read it?"
"I should be delighted, my dear, but the fact is--"
He did not take my paper. He stood up and called across the room.
"Say, Jack! here is a young lady who has brought us a poem--about
George Washington.--Wrote it yourself, my dear?--Wrote it all herself.
What shall we do with her?"
Mr. Jack came over, and another man. My editor made me repeat my
business, and they all looked interested, but nobody took my paper
from me. They put their hands into their pockets, and my hand kept
growing clammier all the time. The three seemed to be consulting, but
I could not understand what they said, or why Mr. Jack laughed.
A fourth man, who had been writing busily at a desk near by, broke in
on the consultation.
"That's enough, boys," he said, "that's enough. Take the young lady to
Mr. Hurd."
Mr. Hurd, it was found, was away on a vacation, and of several other
editors in several offices, to whom I was referred, none proved to be
the proper editor to take charge of a poem about George Washington. At
last an elderly editor suggested that as Mr. Hurd would be away for
some time, I would do well to give up the "Transcript" and try the
"Herald," across the way.
A little tired by my wanderings, and bewildered by the complexity of
the editorial system, but still confident about my mission, I picked
my way across Washington Street and found the "Herald" offices. Here I
had instant good luck. The first editor I addressed took my paper and
invited me to a seat. He read my poem much more quickly than I could
myself, and said it was very nice, and asked me some questions, and
made notes on a slip of paper which he pinned to my manuscript. He
said he would have my piece printed very soon, and would send me a
copy of the issue in which it appeared. As I was going, I could not
help giving the editor my hand, although I had not experienced any
handshaking in Newspaper Row. I felt that as author and editor we were
on a very pleasant footing, and I gave him my hand in token of
comradeship.
I had regained my full stature and something over, during this cordial
interview, and when I stepped out into the street and saw the crowd
intently studying the bulletin board I swelled out of all proportion.
For I told myself that I, Mary Antin, was one of the inspired
brotherhood who made newspapers so interesting. I did not know whether
my poem would be put upon the bulletin board; but at any rate, it
would be in the paper, with my name at the bottom, like my story about
"Snow" in Miss Dillingham's school journal. And all these people in
the streets, and more, thousands of people--all Boston!--would read my
poem, and learn my name, and wonder who I was. I smiled to myself in
delicious amusement when a man deliberately put me out of his path, as
I dreamed my way through the jostling crowd; if he only _knew_ whom
he was treating so unceremoniously!
When the paper with my poem in it arrived, the whole house pounced
upon it at once. I was surprised to find that my verses were not all
over the front page. The poem was a little hard to find, if anything,
being tucked away in the middle of the voluminous sheet. But when we
found it, it looked wonderful, just like real poetry, not at all as if
somebody we knew had written it. It occupied a gratifying amount of
space, and was introduced by a flattering biographical sketch of the
author--the _author_!--the material for which the friendly editor had
artfully drawn from me during that happy interview. And my name, as I
had prophesied, was at the bottom!
When the excitement in the house had subsided, my father took all the
change out of the cash drawer and went to buy up the "Herald." He did
not count the pennies. He just bought "Heralds," all he could lay his
hands on, and distributed them gratis to all our friends, relatives,
and acquaintances; to all who could read, and to some who could not.
For weeks he carried a clipping from the "Herald" in his breast
pocket, and few were the occasions when he did not manage to introduce
it into the conversation. He treasured that clipping as for years he
had treasured the letters I wrote him from Polotzk.
Although my father bought up most of the issue containing my poem, a
few hundred copies were left to circulate among the general public,
enough to spread the flame of my patriotic ardor and to enkindle a
thousand sluggish hearts. Really, there was something more solemn than
vanity in my satisfaction. Pleased as I was with my notoriety--and
nobody but I knew how exceedingly pleased--I had a sober feeling about
it all. I enjoyed being praised and admired and envied; but what gave
a divine flavor to my happiness was the idea that I had publicly borne
testimony to the goodness of my exalted hero, to the greatness of my
adopted country. I did not discount the homage of Arlington Street,
because I did not properly rate the intelligence of its population. I
took the admiration of my schoolmates without a grain of salt; it was
just so much honey to me. I could not know that what made me great in
the eyes of my neighbors was that "there was a piece about me in the
paper"; it mattered very little to them what the "piece" was about. I
thought they really admired my sentiments. On the street, in the
schoolyard, I was pointed out. The people said, "That's Mary Antin.
She had her name in the paper." _I_ thought they said, "This is she
who loves her country and worships George Washington."
To repeat, I was well aware that I was something of a celebrity, and
took all possible satisfaction in the fact; yet I gave my schoolmates
no occasion to call me "stuck-up." My vanity did not express itself in
strutting or wagging the head. I played tag and puss-in-the-corner in
the schoolyard, and did everything that was comrade-like. But in the
schoolroom I conducted myself gravely, as befitted one who was
preparing for the noble career of a poet.
I am forgetting Lizzie McDee. I am trying to give the impression that
I behaved with at least outward modesty during my schoolgirl triumphs,
whereas Lizzie could testify that she knew Mary Antin as a vain
boastful, curly-headed little Jew. For I had a special style of
deportment for Lizzie. If there was any girl in the school besides me
who could keep near the top of the class all the year through, and
give bright answers when the principal or the school committee popped
sudden questions, and write rhymes that almost always rhymed, _I_ was
determined that that ambitious person should not soar unduly in her
own estimation. So I took care to show Lizzie all my poetry, and when
she showed me hers I did not admire it too warmly. Lizzie, as I have
already said, was in a Sunday-school mood even on week days; her
verses all had morals. My poems were about the crystal snow, and the
ocean blue, and sweet spring, and fleecy clouds; when I tried to drag
in a moral it kicked so that the music of my lines went out in a
groan. So I had a sweet revenge when Lizzie, one day, volunteered to
bolster up the eloquence of Mr. Jones, the principal, who was
lecturing the class for bad behavior, by comparing the bad boy in the
schoolroom to the rotten apple that spoils the barrelful. The groans,
coughs, a-hem's, feet shufflings, and paper pellets that filled the
room as Saint Elizabeth sat down, even in the principal's presence,
were sweet balm to my smart of envy; I didn't care if I didn't know
how to moralize.
When my teacher had visitors I was aware that I was the show pupil of
the class. I was always made to recite, my compositions were passed
around, and often I was called up on the platform--oh, climax of
exaltation!--to be interviewed by the distinguished strangers; while
the class took advantage of the teacher's distraction, to hold
forbidden intercourse on matters not prescribed in the curriculum.
When I returned to my seat, after such public audience with the great,
I looked to see if Lizzie McDee was taking notice; and Lizzie, who was
a generous soul, her Sunday-school airs notwithstanding, generally
smiled, and I forgave her her rhymes.
Not but what I paid a price for my honors. With all my self-possession
I had a certain capacity for shyness. Even when I arose to recite
before the customary audience of my class I suffered from incipient
stage fright, and my voice trembled over the first few words. When
visitors were in the room I was even more troubled; and when I was
made the special object of their attention my triumph was marred by
acute distress. If I was called up to speak to the visitors, forty
pairs of eyes pricked me in the back as I went. I stumbled in the
aisle, and knocked down things that were not at all in my way; and my
awkwardness increasing my embarrassment I would gladly have changed
places with Lizzie or the bad boy in the back row; anything, only to
be less conspicuous. When I found myself shaking hands with an august
School-Committeeman, or a teacher from New York, the remnants of my
self-possession vanished in awe; and it was in a very husky voice that
I repeated, as I was asked, my name, lineage, and personal history. On
the whole, I do not think that the School-Committeeman found a very
forward creature in the solemn-faced little girl with the tight curls
and the terrible red-and-green "plaid."
These awful audiences did not always end with the handshaking.
Sometimes the great personages asked me to write to them, and
exchanged addresses with me. Some of these correspondences continued
through years, and were the source of much pleasure, on one side at
least. And Arlington Street took notice when I received letters with
important-looking or aristocratic-looking letterheads. Lizzie McDee
also took notice. _I_ saw to that.
CHAPTER XII
MIRACLES
It was not always in admiration that the finger was pointed at me. One
day I found myself the centre of an excited group in the middle of the
schoolyard, with a dozen girls interrupting each other to express
their disapproval of me. For I had coolly told them, in answer to a
question, that I did not believe in God.
How had I arrived at such a conviction? How had I come, from praying
and fasting and Psalm-singing, to extreme impiety? Alas! my
backsliding had cost me no travail of spirit. Always weak in my faith,
playing at sanctity as I played at soldiers, just as I was in the mood
or not, I had neglected my books of devotion and given myself up to
profane literature at the first opportunity, in Vitebsk; and I never
took up my prayer book again. On my return to Polotzk, America loomed
so near that my imagination was fully occupied, and I did not revive
the secret experiments with which I used to test the nature and
intention of Deity. It was more to me that I was going to America than
that I might not be going to Heaven. And when we joined my father, and
I saw that he did not wear the sacred fringes, and did not put on the
phylacteries and pray, I was neither surprised nor shocked,
remembering the Sabbath night when he had with his own hand turned out
the lamp. When I saw him go out to work on Sabbath exactly as on a
week day, I understood why God had not annihilated me with his
lightnings that time when I purposely carried something in my pocket
on Sabbath: there was no God, and there was no sin. And I ran out to
play, pleased to find that I was free, like other little girls in the
street, instead of being hemmed about with prohibitions and
obligations at every step. And yet if the golden truth of Judaism had
not been handed me in the motley rags of formalism, I might not have
been so ready to put away my religion.
It was Rachel Goldstein who provoked my avowal of atheism. She asked
if I wasn't going to stay out of school during Passover, and I said
no. Wasn't I a Jew? she wanted to know. No, I wasn't; I was a
Freethinker. What was that? I didn't believe in God. Rachel was
horrified. Why, Kitty Maloney believed in God, and Kitty was only a
Catholic! She appealed to Kitty.
"Kitty Maloney! Come over here. Don't you believe in God?--There, now,
Mary Antin!--Mary Antin says she doesn't believe in God!"
Rachel Goldstein's horror is duplicated. Kitty Maloney, who used to
mock Rachel's Jewish accent, instantly becomes her voluble ally, and
proceeds to annihilate me by plying me with crucial questions.
"You don't believe in God? Then who made you, Mary Antin?"
"Nature made me."
"_Nature_ made you! What's that?"
"It's--everything. It's the trees--no, it's what makes the trees grow.
_That's_ what it is."
"But _God_ made the trees, Mary Antin," from Rachel and Kitty in
chorus. "Maggie O'Reilly! Listen to Mary Antin. She says there isn't
any God. She says the trees made her!"
Rachel and Kitty and Maggie, Sadie and Annie and Beckie, made a circle
around me, and pressed me with questions, and mocked me, and
threatened me with hell flames and utter extinction. I held my ground
against them all obstinately enough, though my argument was
exceedingly lame. I glibly repeated phrases I had heard my father use,
but I had no real understanding of his atheistic doctrines. I had been
surprised into this dispute. I had no spontaneous interest in the
subject; my mind was occupied with other things. But as the number of
my opponents grew, and I saw how unanimously they condemned me, my
indifference turned into a heat of indignation. The actual point at
issue was as little as ever to me, but I perceived that a crowd of
Free Americans were disputing the right of a Fellow Citizen to have
any kind of God she chose. I knew, from my father's teaching, that
this persecution was contrary to the Constitution of the United
States, and I held my ground as befitted the defender of a cause.
George Washington would not have treated me as Rachel Goldstein and
Kitty Maloney were doing! "This is a free country," I reminded them in
the middle of the argument.
The excitement in the yard amounted to a toy riot. When the school
bell rang and the children began to file in, I stood out there as long
as any of my enemies remained, although it was my habit to go to my
room very promptly. And as the foes of American Liberty crowded and
pushed in the line, whispering to those who had not heard that a
heretic had been discovered in their midst, the teacher who kept the
line in the corridor was obliged to scold and pull the noisy ones into
order; and Sadie Cohen told her, in tones of awe, what the commotion
was about.
Miss Bland waited till the children had filed in before she asked me,
in a tone encouraging confidence, to give my version of the story.
This I did, huskily but fearlessly; and the teacher, who was a woman
of tact, did not smile or commit herself in any way. She was sorry
that the children had been rude to me, but she thought they would not
trouble me any more if I let the subject drop. She made me understand,
somewhat as Miss Dillingham had done on the occasion of my whispering
during prayer, that it was proper American conduct to avoid religious
arguments on school territory. I felt honored by this private
initiation into the doctrine of the separation of Church and State,
and I went to my seat with a good deal of dignity, my alarm about the
safety of the Constitution allayed by the teacher's calmness.
This is not so strictly the story of the second generation that I may
not properly give a brief account of how it fared with my mother when
my father undertook to purge his house of superstition. The process of
her emancipation, it is true, was not obvious to me at the time, but
what I observed of her outward conduct has been interpreted by my
subsequent experience; so that to-day I understand how it happens that
all the year round my mother keeps the same day of rest as her Gentile
neighbors; but when the ram's horn blows on the Day of Atonement,
calling upon Israel to cleanse its heart from sin and draw nearer to
the God of its fathers, her soul is stirred as of old, and she needs
must join in the ancient service. It means, I have come to know, that
she has dropped the husk and retained the kernel of Judaism; but years
were required for this process of instinctive selection.
My father, in his ambition to make Americans of us, was rather
headlong and strenuous in his methods. To my mother, on the eve of
departure for the New World, he wrote boldly that progressive Jews in
America did not spend their days in praying; and he urged her to leave
her wig in Polotzk, as a first step of progress. My mother, like the
majority of women in the Pale, had all her life taken her religion on
authority; so she was only fulfilling her duty to her husband when she
took his hint, and set out upon her journey in her own hair. Not that
it was done without reluctance; the Jewish faith in her was deeply
rooted, as in the best of Jews it always is. The law of the Fathers
was binding to her, and the outward symbols of obedience inseparable
from the spirit. But the breath of revolt against orthodox externals
was at this time beginning to reach us in Polotzk from the greater
world, notably from America. Sons whose parents had impoverished
themselves by paying the fine for non-appearance for military duty, in
order to save their darlings from the inevitable sins of violated
Judaism while in the service, sent home portraits of themselves with
their faces shaved; and the grieved old fathers and mothers, after
offering up special prayers for the renegades, and giving charity in
their name, exhibited the significant portraits on their parlor
tables. My mother's own nephew went no farther than Vilna, ten hours'
journey from Polotzk, to learn to cut his beard; and even within our
town limits young women of education were beginning to reject the wig
after marriage. A notorious example was the beautiful daughter of
Lozhe the Rav, who was not restrained by her father's conspicuous
relation to Judaism from exhibiting her lovely black curls like a
maiden; and it was a further sign of the times that the rav did not
disown his daughter. What wonder, then, that my poor mother, shaken
by these foreshadowings of revolution in our midst, and by the express
authority of her husband, gave up the emblem of matrimonial chastity
with but a passing struggle? Considering how the heavy burdens which
she had borne from childhood had never allowed her time to think for
herself at all, but had obliged her always to tread blindly in the
beaten paths, I think it greatly to her credit that in her puzzling
situation she did not lose her poise entirely. Bred to submission,
submit she must; and when she perceived a conflict of authorities, she
prepared to accept the new order of things under which her children's
future was to be formed; wherein she showed her native adaptability,
the readiness to fall into line, which is one of the most charming
traits of her gentle, self-effacing nature.
My father gave my mother very little time to adjust herself. He was
only three years from the Old World with its settled prejudices.
Considering his education, he had thought out a good deal for himself,
but his line of thinking had not as yet brought him to include woman
in the intellectual emancipation for which he himself had been so
eager even in Russia. This was still in the day when he was astonished
to learn that women had written books--had used their minds, their
imaginations, unaided. He still rated the mental capacity of the
average woman as only a little above that of the cattle she tended. He
held it to be a wife's duty to follow her husband in all things. He
could do all the thinking for the family, he believed; and being
convinced that to hold to the outward forms of orthodox Judaism was to
be hampered in the race for Americanization, he did not hesitate to
order our family life on unorthodox lines. There was no conscious
despotism in this; it was only making manly haste to realize an ideal
the nobility of which there was no one to dispute.
My mother, as we know, had not the initial impulse to depart from
ancient usage that my father had in his habitual scepticism. He had
always been a nonconformist in his heart; she bore lovingly the yoke
of prescribed conduct. Individual freedom, to him, was the only
tolerable condition of life; to her it was confusion. My mother,
therefore, gradually divested herself, at my father's bidding, of the
mantle of orthodox observance; but the process cost her many a pang,
because the fabric of that venerable garment was interwoven with the
fabric of her soul.
My father did not attempt to touch the fundamentals of her faith. He
certainly did not forbid her to honor God by loving her neighbor,
which is perhaps not far from being the whole of Judaism. If his loud
denials of the existence of God influenced her to reconsider her
creed, it was merely an incidental result of the freedom of expression
he was so eager to practise, after his life of enforced hypocrisy. As
the opinions of a mere woman on matters so abstract as religion did
not interest him in the least, he counted it no particular triumph if
he observed that my mother weakened in her faith as the years went by.
He allowed her to keep a Jewish kitchen as long as she pleased, but he
did not want us children to refuse invitations to the table of our
Gentile neighbors. He would have no bar to our social intercourse with
the world around us, for only by freely sharing the life of our
neighbors could we come into our full inheritance of American freedom
and opportunity. On the holy days he bought my mother a ticket for the
synagogue, but the children he sent to school. On Sabbath eve my
mother might light the consecrated candles, but he kept the store open
until Sunday morning. My mother might believe and worship as she
pleased, up to the point where her orthodoxy began to interfere with
the American progress of the family.
The price that all of us paid for this disorganization of our family
life has been levied on every immigrant Jewish household where the
first generation clings to the traditions of the Old World, while the
second generation leads the life of the New. Nothing more pitiful
could be written in the annals of the Jews; nothing more inevitable;
nothing more hopeful. Hopeful, yes; alike for the Jew and for the
country that has given him shelter. For Israel is not the only party
that has put up a forfeit in this contest. The nations may well sit by
and watch the struggle, for humanity has a stake in it. I say this,
whose life has borne witness, whose heart is heavy with revelations it
has not made. And I speak for thousands; oh, for thousands!
My gray hairs are too few for me to let these pages trespass the limit
I have set myself. That part of my life which contains the climax of
my personal drama I must leave to my grandchildren to record. My
father might speak and tell how, in time, he discovered that in his
first violent rejection of everything old and established he cast from
him much that he afterwards missed. He might tell to what extent he
later retraced his steps, seeking to recover what he had learned to
value anew; how it fared with his avowed irreligion when put to the
extreme test; to what, in short, his emancipation amounted. And he,
like myself, would speak for thousands. My grandchildren, for all I
know, may have a graver task than I have set them. Perhaps they may
have to testify that the faith of Israel is a heritage that no heir in
the direct line has the power to alienate from his successors. Even I,
with my limited perspective, think it doubtful if the conversion of
the Jew to any alien belief or disbelief is ever thoroughly
accomplished. What positive affirmation of the persistence of Judaism
in the blood my descendants may have to make, I may not be present to
hear.
It would be superfluous to state that none of these hints and
prophecies troubled me at the time when I horrified the schoolyard by
denying the existence of God, on the authority of my father; and
defended my right to my atheism, on the authority of the Constitution.
I considered myself absolutely, eternally, delightfully emancipated
from the yoke of indefensible superstitions. I was wild with
indignation and pity when I remembered how my poor brother had been
cruelly tormented because he did not want to sit in heder and learn
what was after all false or useless. I knew now why poor Reb' Lebe had
been unable to answer my questions; it was because the truth was not
whispered outside America. I was very much in love with my
enlightenment, and eager for opportunities to give proof of it.
It was Miss Dillingham, she who helped me in so many ways, who
unconsciously put me to an early test, the result of which gave me a
shock that I did not get over for many a day. She invited me to tea
one day, and I came in much trepidation. It was my first entrance into
a genuine American household; my first meal at a Gentile--yes, a
Christian--board. Would I know how to behave properly? I do not know
whether I betrayed my anxiety; I am certain only that I was all eyes
and ears, that nothing should escape me which might serve to guide
me. This, after all, was a normal state for me to be in, so I suppose
I looked natural, no matter how much I stared. I had been accustomed
to consider my table manners irreproachable, but America was not
Polotzk, as my father was ever saying; so I proceeded very cautiously
with my spoons and forks. I was cunning enough to try to conceal my
uncertainty; by being just a little bit slow, I did not get to any
given spoon until the others at table had shown me which it was.
All went well, until a platter was passed with a kind of meat that was
strange to me. Some mischievous instinct told me that it was
ham--forbidden food; and I, the liberal, the free, was afraid to touch
it! I had a terrible moment of surprise, mortification, self-contempt;
but I helped myself to a slice of ham, nevertheless, and hung my head
over my plate to hide my confusion. I was furious with myself for my
weakness. I to be afraid of a pink piece of pig's flesh, who had
defied at least two religions in defence of free thought! And I began
to reduce my ham to indivisible atoms, determined to eat more of it
than anybody at the table.
Alas! I learned that to eat in defence of principles was not so easy
as to talk. I ate, but only a newly abnegated Jew can understand with
what squirming, what protesting of the inner man, what exquisite
abhorrence of myself. That Spartan boy who allowed the stolen fox
hidden in his bosom to consume his vitals rather than be detected in
the theft, showed no such miracle of self-control as did I, sitting
there at my friend's tea-table, eating unjewish meat.
And to think that so ridiculous a thing as a scrap of meat should be
the symbol and test of things so august! To think that in the mental
life of a half-grown child should be reflected the struggles and
triumphs of ages! Over and over and over again I discover that I am a
wonderful thing, being human; that I am the image of the universe,
being myself; that I am the repository of all the wisdom in the world,
being alive and sane at the beginning of this twentieth century. The
heir of the ages am I, and all that has been is in me, and shall
continue to be in my immortal self.
CHAPTER XIII
A CHILD'S PARADISE
All this while that I was studying and exploring in the borderland
between the old life and the new; leaping at conclusions, and
sometimes slipping; finding inspiration in common things, and
interpretations in dumb things; eagerly scaling the ladder of
learning, my eyes on star-diademmed peaks of ambition; building up
friendships that should support my youth and enrich my womanhood;
learning to think much of myself, and much more of my world,--while I
was steadily gathering in my heritage, sowed in the dim past, and
ripened in the sun of my own day, what was my sister doing?
Why, what she had always done: keeping close to my mother's side on
the dreary marches of a humdrum life; sensing sweet gardens of
forbidden joy, but never turning from the path of duty. I cannot
believe but that her sacrifices tasted as dust and ashes to her at
times; for Frieda was a mere girl, whose childhood, on the whole, had
been gray, while her appetite for happy things was as great as any
normal girl's. She had a fine sense for what was best in the life
about her, though she could not articulate her appreciation. She
longed to possess the good things, but her position in the family
forbidding possession, she developed a talent for vicarious enjoyment
which I never in this life hope to imitate. And her simple mind did
not busy itself with self-analysis. She did not even know why she was
happy; she thought life was good to her. Still, there must have been
moments when she perceived that the finer things were not in
themselves unattainable, but were kept from her by a social tyranny.
This I can only surmise, as in our daily intercourse she never gave a
sign of discontent.
We continued to have part of our life in common for some time after
she went to work. We formed ourselves into an evening school, she and
I and the two youngsters, for the study of English and arithmetic. As
soon as the supper dishes were put away, we gathered around the
kitchen table, with books borrowed from school, and pencils supplied
by my father with eager willingness. I was the teacher, the others the
diligent pupils; and the earnestness with which we labored was worthy
of the great things we meant to achieve. Whether the results were
commensurate with our efforts I cannot say. I only know that Frieda's
cheeks flamed with the excitement of reading English monosyllables;
and her eyes shone like stars on a moonless night when I explained to
her how she and I and George Washington were Fellow Citizens together.
Inspired by our studious evenings, what Frieda Antin would not be glad
to sit all day bent over the needle, that the family should keep on
its feet, and Mary continue at school? The morning ride on the
ferryboat, when spring winds dimpled the river, may have stirred her
heart with nameless longings, but when she took her place at the
machine her lot was glorified to her, and she wanted to sing; for the
girls, the foreman, the boss, all talked about Mary Antin, whose poems
were printed in an American newspaper. Wherever she went on her humble
business, she was sure to hear her sister's name. For, with
characteristic loyalty, the whole Jewish community claimed kinship
with me, simply because I was a Jew; and they made much of my small
triumphs, and pointed to me with pride, just as they always do when a
Jew distinguishes himself in any worthy way. Frieda, going home from
work at sunset, when rosy buds beaded the shining stems, may have felt
the weariness of those who toil for bread; but when we opened our
books after supper, her spirit revived afresh, and it was only when
the lamp began to smoke that she thought of taking rest.
At bedtime she and I chatted as we used to do when we were little
girls in Polotzk; only now, instead of closing our eyes to see
imaginary wonders, according to a bedtime game of ours, we exchanged
anecdotes about the marvellous adventures of our American life. My
contributions on these occasions were boastful accounts, I have no
doubt, of what I did at school, and in the company of school-committee
men, editors, and other notables; and Frieda's delight in my
achievements was the very flower of her fine sympathy. As formerly,
when I had been naughty and I invited her to share in my repentance,
she used to join me in spiritual humility and solemnly dedicate
herself to a better life; so now, when I was full of pride and
ambition, she, too, felt the crown on her brows, and heard the
applause of future generations murmuring in her ear. And so partaking
of her sister's glory, what Frieda Antin would not say that her
portion was sufficient reward for a youth of toil?
I did not, like my sister, earn my bread in those days; but let us say
that I earned my salt, by sweeping, scrubbing, and scouring, on
Saturdays, when there was no school. My mother's housekeeping was
necessarily irregular, as she was pretty constantly occupied in the
store; so there was enough for us children to do to keep the bare
rooms shining. Even here Frieda did the lion's share; it used to take
me all Saturday to accomplish what Frieda would do with half a dozen
turns of her capable hands. I did not like housework, but I loved
order; so I polished windows with a will, and even got some fun out of
scrubbing, by laying out the floor in patterns and tracing them all
around the room in a lively flurry of soapsuds.
There is a joy that comes from doing common things well, especially if
they seem hard to us. When I faced a day's housework I was half
paralyzed with a sense of inability, and I wasted precious minutes
walking around it, to see what a very hard task I had. But having
pitched in and conquered, it gave me an exquisite pleasure to survey
my work. My hair tousled and my dress tucked up, streaked arms bare to
the elbow, I would step on my heels over the damp, clean boards, and
pass my hand over chair rounds and table legs, to prove that no dust
was left. I could not wait to put my dress in order before running out
into the street to see how my windows shone. Every workman who carries
a dinner pail has these moments of keen delight in the product of his
drudgery. Men of genius, likewise, in their hours of relaxation from
their loftier tasks, prove this universal rule. I know a man who fills
a chair at a great university. I have seen him hold a roomful of
otherwise restless youths spellbound for an hour, while he discoursed
about the respective inhabitants of the earth and sea at a time when
nothing walked on fewer than four legs. And I have seen this scholar,
his ponderous tomes shelved for a space, turning over and over with
cherishing hands a letter-box that he had made out of card-board and
paste, and exhibiting it proudly to his friends. For the hand was the
first instrument of labor, that distinctive accomplishment by which
man finally raised himself above his cousins, the lower animals; and a
respect for the work of the hand survives as an instinct in all of us.
The stretch of weeks from June to September, when the schools were
closed, would have been hard to fill in had it not been for the public
library. At first I made myself a calendar of the vacation months, and
every morning I tore off a day, and comforted myself with the
decreasing number of vacation days. But after I discovered the public
library I was not impatient for the reopening of school. The library
did not open till one o'clock in the afternoon, and each reader was
allowed to take out only one book at a time. Long before one o'clock I
was to be seen on the library steps, waiting for the door of paradise
to open. I spent hours in the reading-room, pleased with the
atmosphere of books, with the order and quiet of the place, so unlike
anything on Arlington Street. The sense of these things permeated my
consciousness even when I was absorbed in a book, just as the rustle
of pages turned and the tiptoe tread of the librarian reached my ear,
without distracting my attention. Anything so wonderful as a library
had never been in my life. It was even better than school in some
ways. One could read and read, and learn and learn, as fast as one
knew how, without being obliged to stop for stupid little girls and
inattentive little boys to catch up with the lesson. When I went home
from the library I had a book under my arm; and I would finish it
before the library opened next day, no matter till what hours of the
night I burned my little lamp.
What books did I read so diligently? Pretty nearly everything that
came to my hand. I dare say the librarian helped me select my books,
but, curiously enough, I do not remember. Something must have directed
me, for I read a great many of the books that are written for
children. Of these I remember with the greatest delight Louisa
Alcott's stories. A less attractive series of books was of the Sunday
School type. In volume after volume a very naughty little girl by the
name of Lulu was always going into tempers, that her father might have
opportunity to lecture her and point to her angelic little sister,
Gracie, as an example of what she should be; after which they all felt
better and prayed. Next to Louisa Alcott's books in my esteem were
boys' books of adventure, many of them by Horatio Alger; and I read
all, I suppose, of the Rollo books, by Jacob Abbott.
But that was not all. I read every kind of printed rubbish that came
into the house, by design or accident. A weekly story paper of a worse
than worthless character, that circulated widely in our neighborhood
because subscribers were rewarded with a premium of a diamond ring,
warranted I don't know how many karats, occupied me for hours. The
stories in this paper resembled, in breathlessness of plot, abundance
of horrors, and improbability of characters, the things I used to read
in Vitebsk. The text was illustrated by frequent pictures, in which
the villain generally had his hands on the heroine's throat, while the
hero was bursting in through a graceful drapery to the rescue of his
beloved. If a bundle came into the house wrapped in a stained old
newspaper, I laboriously smoothed out the paper and read it through. I
enjoyed it all, and found fault with nothing that I read. And, as in
the case of the Vitebsk readings, I cannot find that I suffered any
harm. Of course, reading so many better books, there came a time when
the diamond-ring story paper disgusted me; but in the beginning my
appetite for print was so enormous that I could let nothing pass
through my hands unread, while my taste was so crude that nothing
printed could offend me.
Good reading matter came into the house from one other source besides
the library. The Yiddish newspapers of the day were excellent, and my
father subscribed to the best of them. Since that time Yiddish
journalism has sadly degenerated, through imitation of the vicious
"yellow journals" of the American press.
There was one book in the library over which I pored very often, and
that was the encyclopædia. I turned usually to the names of famous
people, beginning, of course, with George Washington. Oftenest of all
I read the biographical sketches of my favorite authors, and felt that
the worthies must have been glad to die just to have their names and
histories printed out in the book of fame. It seemed to me the
apotheosis of glory to be even briefly mentioned in an encyclopædia.
And there grew in me an enormous ambition that devoured all my other
ambitions, which was no less than this: that I should live to know
that after my death my name would surely be printed in the
encyclopædia. It was such a prodigious thing to expect that I kept the
idea a secret even from myself, just letting it lie where it sprouted,
in an unexplored corner of my busy brain. But it grew on me in spite
of myself, till finally I could not resist the temptation to study out
the exact place in the encyclopædia where my name would belong. I saw
that it would come not far from "Alcott, Louisa M."; and I covered my
face with my hands, to hide the silly, baseless joy in it. I practised
saying my name in the encyclopædic form, "Antin, Mary"; and I realized
that it sounded chopped off, and wondered if I might not annex a
middle initial. I wanted to ask my teacher about it, but I was afraid
I might betray my reasons. For, infatuated though I was with the idea
of the greatness I might live to attain, I knew very well that thus
far my claims to posthumous fame were ridiculously unfounded, and I
did not want to be laughed at for my vanity.
Spirit of all childhood! Forgive me, forgive me, for so lightly
betraying a child's dream-secrets. I that smile so scoffingly to-day
at the unsophisticated child that was myself, have I found any nobler
thing in life than my own longing to be noble? Would I not rather be
consumed by ambitions that can never be realized than live in stupid
acceptance of my neighbor's opinion of me? The statue in the public
square is less a portrait of a mortal individual than a symbol of the
immortal aspiration of humanity. So do not laugh at the little boy
playing at soldiers, if he tells you he is going to hew the world into
good behavior when he gets to be a man. And do, by all means, write my
name in the book of fame, saying, She was one who aspired. For that,
in condensed form, is the story of the lives of the great.
* * * * *
Summer days are long, and the evenings, we know, are as long as the
lamp-wick. So, with all my reading, I had time to play; and, with all
my studiousness, I had the will to play. My favorite playmates were
boys. It was but mild fun to play theatre in Bessie Finklestein's
back yard, even if I had leading parts, which I made impressive by
recitations in Russian, no word of which was intelligible to my
audience. It was far better sport to play hide-and-seek with the boys,
for I enjoyed the use of my limbs--what there was of them. I was so
often reproached and teased for being little, that it gave me great
satisfaction to beat a five-foot boy to the goal.
Once a great, hulky colored boy, who was the torment of the
neighborhood, treated me roughly while I was playing on the street. My
father, determined to teach the rascal a lesson for once, had him
arrested and brought to court. The boy was locked up overnight, and he
emerged from his brief imprisonment with a respect for the rights and
persons of his neighbors. But the moral of this incident lies not
herein. What interested me more than my revenge on a bully was what I
saw of the way in which justice was actually administered in the
United States. Here we were gathered in the little courtroom, bearded
Arlington Street against wool-headed Arlington Street; accused and
accuser, witnesses, sympathizers, sight-seers, and all. Nobody
cringed, nobody was bullied, nobody lied who didn't want to. We were
all free, and all treated equally, just as it said in the
Constitution! The evil-doer was actually punished, and not the victim,
as might very easily happen in a similar case in Russia. "Liberty and
justice for all." Three cheers for the Red, White, and Blue!
There was one occasion in the week when I was ever willing to put away
my book, no matter how entrancing were its pages. That was on Saturday
night, when Bessie Finklestein called for me; and Bessie and I, with
arms entwined, called for Sadie Rabinowitch; and Bessie and Sadie and
I, still further entwined, called for Annie Reilly; and Bessie, etc.,
etc., inextricably wound up, marched up Broadway, and took possession
of all we saw, heard, guessed, or desired, from end to end of that
main thoroughfare of Chelsea.
Parading all abreast, as many as we were, only breaking ranks to let
people pass; leaving the imprints of our noses and fingers on
plate-glass windows ablaze with electric lights and alluring with
display; inspecting tons of cheap candy, to find a few pennies' worth
of the most enduring kind, the same to be sucked and chewed by the
company, turn and turn about, as we continued our promenade; loitering
wherever a crowd gathered, or running for a block or so to cheer on
the fire-engine or police ambulance; getting into everybody's way, and
just keeping clear of serious mischief,--we were only girls,--we
enjoyed ourselves as only children can whose fathers keep a basement
grocery store, whose mothers do their own washing, and whose sisters
operate a machine for five dollars a week. Had we been boys, I suppose
Bessie and Sadie and the rest of us would have been a "gang," and
would have popped into the Chinese laundry to tease "Chinky Chinaman,"
and been chased by the "cops" from comfortable doorsteps, and had a
"bully" time of it. Being what we were, we called ourselves a "set,"
and we had a "lovely" time, as people who passed us on Broadway could
not fail to see. And hear. For we were at the giggling age, and
Broadway on Saturday night was full of giggles for us. We stayed out
till all hours, too; for Arlington Street had no strict domestic
programme, not even in the nursery, the inmates of which were as
likely to be found in the gutter as in their cots, at any time this
side of one o'clock in the morning.
There was an element in my enjoyment that was yielded neither by the
sights, the adventures, nor the chewing-candy. I had a keen feeling
for the sociability of the crowd. All plebeian Chelsea was abroad, and
a bourgeois population is nowhere unneighborly. Women shapeless with
bundles, their hats awry over thin, eager faces, gathered in knots on
the edge of the curb, boasting of their bargains. Little girls in
curlpapers and little boys in brimless hats clung to their skirts,
whining for pennies, only to be silenced by absent-minded cuffs. A few
disconsolate fathers strayed behind these family groups, the rest
being distributed between the barber shops and the corner lamp-posts.
I understood these people, being one of them, and I liked them, and I
found it all delightfully sociable.
Saturday night is the workman's wife's night, but that does not
entirely prevent my lady from going abroad, if only to leave an order
at the florist's. So it happened that Bellingham Hill and Washington
Avenue, the aristocratic sections of Chelsea, mingled with Arlington
Street on Broadway, to the further enhancement of my enjoyment of the
occasion. For I always loved a mixed crowd. I loved the contrasts, the
high lights and deep shadows, and the gradations that connect the two,
and make all life one. I saw many, many things that I was not aware of
seeing at the time. I only found out afterwards what treasures my
brain had stored up, when, coming to the puzzling places in life,
light and meaning would suddenly burst on me, the hidden fruit of some
experience that had not impressed me at the time.
How many times, I wonder, did I brush past my destiny on Broadway,
foolishly staring after it, instead of going home to pray? I wonder
did a stranger collide with me, and put me patiently out of his way,
wondering why such a mite was not at home and abed at ten o'clock in
the evening, and never dreaming that one day he might have to reckon
with me? Did some one smile down on my childish glee, I wonder,
unwarned of a day when we should weep together? I wonder--I wonder. A
million threads of life and love and sorrow was the common street; and
whether we would or not, we entangled ourselves in a common maze,
without paying the homage of a second glance to those who would some
day master us; too dull to pick that face from out the crowd which one
day would bend over us in love or pity or remorse. What company of
skipping, laughing little girls is to be reproached for careless
hours, when men and women on every side stepped heedlessly into the
traps of fate? Small sin it was to annoy my neighbor by getting in his
way, as I stared over my shoulder, if a grown man knew no better than
to drop a word in passing that might turn the course of another's
life, as a boulder rolled down from the mountain-side deflects the
current of a brook.
CHAPTER XIV
MANNA
So went the life in Chelsea for the space of a year or so. Then my
father, finding a discrepancy between his assets and liabilities on
the wrong side of the ledger, once more struck tent, collected his
flock, and set out in search of richer pastures.
There was a charming simplicity about these proceedings. Here to-day,
apparently rooted; there to-morrow, and just as much at home. Another
basement grocery, with a freshly painted sign over the door; the broom
in the corner, the loaf on the table--these things made home for us.
There were rather more Negroes on Wheeler Street, in the lower South
End of Boston, than there had been on Arlington Street, which promised
more numerous outstanding accounts; but they were a neighborly folk,
and they took us strangers in--sometimes very badly. Then there was
the school three blocks away, where "America" was sung to the same
tune as in Chelsea, and geography was made as dark a mystery. It was
impossible not to feel at home.
And presently, lest anything be lacking to our domestic bliss, there
was a new baby in a borrowed crib; and little Dora had only a few more
turns to take with her battered doll carriage before a life-size
vehicle with a more animated dolly was turned over to her constant
care.
The Wheeler Street neighborhood is not a place where a refined young
lady would care to find herself alone, even in the cheery daylight. If
she came at all, she would be attended by a trusty escort. She
would not get too close to people on the doorsteps, and she would
shrink away in disgust and fear from a blear-eyed creature careering
down the sidewalk on many-jointed legs. The delicate damsel would
hasten home to wash and purify and perfume herself till the foul
contact of Wheeler Street was utterly eradicated, and her wonted
purity restored. And I do not blame her. I only wish that she would
bring a little soap and water and perfumery into Wheeler Street next
time she comes; for some people there may be smothering in the filth
which they abhor as much as she, but from which they cannot, like her,
run away.
[Illustration: WHEELER STREET, IN THE LOWER SOUTH END OF BOSTON]
Many years after my escape from Wheeler Street I returned to see if
the place was as bad as I remembered it. I found the narrow street
grown even narrower, the sidewalk not broad enough for two to walk
abreast, the gutter choked with dust and refuse, the dingy row of
tenements on either side unspeakably gloomy. I discovered, what I had
not realized before, that Wheeler Street was a crooked lane connecting
a corner saloon on Shawmut Avenue with a block of houses of ill repute
on Corning Street. It had been the same in my day, but I had not
understood much, and I lived unharmed.
On this later visit I walked slowly up one side of the street, and
down the other, remembering many things. It was eleven o'clock in the
evening, and sounds of squabbling coming through doors and windows
informed my experienced ear that a part of Wheeler Street was going to
bed. The grocery store in the basement of Number 11--my father's old
store--was still open for business; and in the gutter in front of the
store, to be sure, was a happy baby, just as there used to be.
I was not alone on this tour of inspection. I was attended by a trusty
escort. But I brought soap and water with me. I am applying them now.
I found no fault with Wheeler Street when I was fourteen years old. On
the contrary, I pronounced it good. We had never lived so near the car
tracks before, and I delighted in the moonlike splendor of the arc
lamp just in front of the saloon. The space illumined by this lamp and
enlivened by the passage of many thirsty souls was the favorite
playground for Wheeler Street youth. On our street there was not room
to turn around; here the sidewalk spread out wider as it swung around
to Shawmut Avenue.
I played with the boys by preference, as in Chelsea. I learned to cut
across the tracks in front of an oncoming car, and it was great fun to
see the motorman's angry face turn scared, when he thought I was going
to be shaved this time sure. It was amusing, too, to watch the side
door of the saloon, which opened right opposite the grocery store, and
see a drunken man put out by the bartender. The fellow would whine so
comically, and cling to the doorpost so like a damp leaf to a twig,
and blubber so like a red-faced baby, that it was really funny to see
him.
And there was Morgan Chapel. It was worth coming to Wheeler Street
just for that. All the children of the neighborhood, except the most
rowdyish, flocked to Morgan Chapel at least once a week. This was on
Saturday evening, when a free entertainment was given, consisting of
music, recitations, and other parlor accomplishments. The performances
were exceedingly artistic, according to the impartial judgment of
juvenile Wheeler Street. I can speak with authority for the crowd of
us from Number 11. We hung upon the lips of the beautiful ladies who
read or sang to us; and they in turn did their best, recognizing the
quality of our approval. We admired the miraculously clean gentlemen
who sang or played, as heartily as we applauded their performance.
Sometimes the beautiful ladies were accompanied by ravishing little
girls who stood up in a glory of golden curls, frilled petticoats, and
silk stockings, to recite pathetic or comic pieces, with trained
expression and practised gestures that seemed to us the perfection of
the elocutionary art. We were all a little bit stage-struck after
these entertainments; but what was more, we were genuinely moved by
the glimpses of a fairer world than ours which we caught through the
music and poetry; the world in which the beautiful ladies dwelt with
the fairy children and the clean gentlemen.
Brother Hotchkins, who managed these entertainments, knew what he was
there for. His programmes were masterly. Classics of the lighter sort
were judiciously interspersed with the favorite street songs of the
day. Nothing that savored of the chapel was there: the hour was
honestly devoted to entertainment. The total effect was an exquisitely
balanced compound of pleasure, wonder, and longing. Knock-kneed men
with purple noses, bristling chins, and no collars, who slouched in
sceptically and sat tentatively on the edge of the rear settees at the
beginning of the concert, moved nearer the front as the programme went
on, and openly joined in the applause at the end. Scowling fellows who
came in with defiant faces occasionally slunk out shamefaced; and both
the knock-kneed and the defiant sometimes remained to hear Brother
Tompkins pray and preach. And it was all due to Brother Hotchkins's
masterly programme. The children behaved very well, for the most part;
the few "toughs" who came in on purpose to make trouble were promptly
expelled by Brother Hotchkins and his lieutenants.
I could not help admiring Brother Hotchkins, he was so eminently
efficient in every part of the hall, at every stage of the
proceedings. I always believed that he was the author of the alluring
notices that occupied the bulletin board every Saturday, though I
never knew it for a fact. The way he handled the bad boys was
masterly. The way he introduced the performers was inimitable. The way
he did everything was the best way. And yet I did not like Brother
Hotchkins. I could not. He was too slim, too pale, too fair. His voice
was too encouraging, his smile was too restrained. The man was a
missionary, and it stuck out all over him. I could not abide a
missionary. That was the Jew in me, the European Jew, trained by the
cruel centuries of his outcast existence to distrust any one who spoke
of God by any other name than _Adonai_. But I should have resented the
suggestion that inherited distrust was the cause of my dislike for
good Brother Hotchkins; for I considered myself freed from racial
prejudices, by the same triumph of my infallible judgment which had
lifted from me the yoke of credulity. An uncompromising atheist, such
as I was at the age of fourteen, was bound to scorn all those who
sought to implant religion in their fellow men, and thereby prolong
the reign of superstition. Of course that was the explanation.
Brother Hotchkins, happily unconscious of my disapproval of his
complexion, arose at intervals behind the railing, to announce, from a
slip of paper, that "the next number on our programme will be a
musical selection by," etc., etc.; until he arrived at "I am sure you
will all join me in thanking the ladies and gentlemen who have
entertained us this evening." And as I moved towards the door with my
companions, I would hear his voice raised for the inevitable "You are
all invited to remain to a short prayer service, after which--" a
little louder--"refreshments will be served in the vestry. I will ask
Brother Tompkins to--" The rest was lost in the shuffle of feet about
the door and the roar of electric cars glancing past each other on
opposite tracks. I always got out of the chapel before Brother
Tompkins could do me any harm. As if there was anything he could steal
from me, now that there was no God in my heart!
If I were to go back to Morgan Chapel now, I should stay to hear
Brother Tompkins, and as many other brethren as might have anything to
say. I would sit very still in my corner seat and listen to the
prayer, and silently join in the Amen. For I know now what Wheeler
Street is, and I know what Morgan Chapel is there for, in the midst of
those crooked alleys, those saloons, those pawnshops, those gloomy
tenements. It is there to apply soap and water, and it is doing that
all the time. I have learned, since my deliverance from Wheeler
Street, that there is more than one road to any given goal. I should
look with respect at Brother Hotchkins applying soap and water in his
own way, convinced at last that my way is not the only way. Men must
work with those tools to the use of which they are best fitted by
nature. Brother Hotchkins must pray, and I must bear witness, and
another must nurse a feeble infant. We are all honest workmen, and
deserve standing-room in the workshop of sweating humanity. It is
only the idle scoffers who stand by and jeer at our efforts to cleanse
our house that should be kicked out of the door, as Brother Hotchkins
turned out the rowdies.
It was characteristic of the looseness of our family discipline at
this time that nobody was seriously interested in our visits to Morgan
Chapel. Our time was our own, after school duties and household tasks
were done. Joseph sold newspapers after school; I swept and washed
dishes; Dora minded the baby. For the rest, we amused ourselves as
best we could. Father and mother were preoccupied with the store day
and night; and not so much with weighing and measuring and making
change as with figuring out how long it would take the outstanding
accounts to ruin the business entirely. If my mother had scruples
against her children resorting to a building with a cross on it, she
did not have time to formulate them. If my father heard us talking
about Morgan Chapel, he dismissed the subject with a sarcastic
characterization, and wanted to know if we were going to join the
Salvation Army next; but he did not seriously care, and he was willing
that the children should have a good time. And if my parents had
objected to Morgan Chapel, was the sidewalk in front of the saloon a
better place for us children to spend the evening? They could not have
argued with us very long, so they hardly argued at all.
In Polotzk we had been trained and watched, our days had been
regulated, our conduct prescribed. In America, suddenly, we were let
loose on the street. Why? Because my father having renounced his
faith, and my mother being uncertain of hers, they had no particular
creed to hold us to. The conception of a system of ethics independent
of religion could not at once enter as an active principle in their
life; so that they could give a child no reason why to be truthful or
kind. And as with religion, so it fared with other branches of our
domestic education. Chaos took the place of system; uncertainty,
inconsistency undermined discipline. My parents knew only that they
desired us to be like American children; and seeing how their
neighbors gave their children boundless liberty, they turned us also
loose, never doubting but that the American way was the best way. In
public deportment, in etiquette, in all matters of social intercourse,
they had no standards to go by, seeing that America was not Polotzk.
In their bewilderment and uncertainty they needs must trust us
children to learn from such models as the tenements afforded. More
than this, they must step down from their throne of parental
authority, and take the law from their children's mouths; for they had
no other means of finding out what was good American form. The result
was that laxity of domestic organization, that inversion of normal
relations which makes for friction, and which sometimes ends in
breaking up a family that was formerly united and happy.
This sad process of disintegration of home life may be observed in
almost any immigrant family of our class and with our traditions and
aspirations. It is part of the process of Americanization; an upheaval
preceding the state of repose. It is the cross that the first and
second generations must bear, an involuntary sacrifice for the sake of
the future generations. These are the pains of adjustment, as racking
as the pains of birth. And as the mother forgets her agonies in the
bliss of clasping her babe to her breast, so the bent and heart-sore
immigrant forgets exile and homesickness and ridicule and loss and
estrangement, when he beholds his sons and daughters moving as
Americans among Americans.
On Wheeler Street there were no real homes. There were miserable flats
of three or four rooms, or fewer, in which families that did not
practise race suicide cooked, washed, and ate; slept from two to four
in a bed, in windowless bedrooms; quarrelled in the gray morning, and
made up in the smoky evening; tormented each other, supported each
other, saved each other, drove each other out of the house. But there
was no common life in any form that means life. There was no room for
it, for one thing. Beds and cribs took up most of the floor space,
disorder packed the interspaces. The centre table in the "parlor" was
not loaded with books. It held, invariably, a photograph album and an
ornamental lamp with a paper shade; and the lamp was usually out of
order. So there was as little motive for a common life as there was
room. The yard was only big enough for the perennial rubbish heap. The
narrow sidewalk was crowded. What were the people to do with
themselves? There were the saloons, the missions, the libraries, the
cheap amusement places, and the neighborhood houses. People selected
their resorts according to their tastes. The children, let it be
thankfully recorded, flocked mostly to the clubs; the little girls to
sew, cook, dance, and play games; the little boys to hammer and paste,
mend chairs, debate, and govern a toy republic. All these, of course,
are forms of baptism by soap and water.
Our neighborhood went in search of salvation to Morgan Memorial Hall,
Barnard Memorial, Morgan Chapel aforementioned, and some other clean
places that lighted a candle in their window. My brother, my sister
Dora, and I were introduced to some of the clubs by our young
neighbors, and we were glad to go. For our home also gave us little
besides meals in the kitchen and beds in the dark. What with the six
of us, and the store, and the baby, and sometimes a "greener" or two
from Polotzk, whom we lodged as a matter of course till they found a
permanent home--what with such a company and the size of our tenement,
we needed to get out almost as much as our neighbors' children. I say
almost; for our parlor we managed to keep pretty clear, and the lamp
on our centre table was always in order, and its light fell often on
an open book. Still, it was part of the life of Wheeler Street to
belong to clubs, so we belonged.
I didn't care for sewing or cooking, so I joined a dancing-club; and
even here I was a failure. I had been a very good dancer in Russia,
but here I found all the steps different, and I did not have the
courage to go out in the middle of the slippery floor and mince it and
toe it in front of the teacher. When I retired to a corner and tried
to play dominoes, I became suddenly shy of my partner; and I never
could win a game of checkers, although formerly I used to beat my
father at it. I tried to be friends with a little girl I had known in
Chelsea, but she met my advances coldly. She lived on Appleton Street,
which was too aristocratic to mix with Wheeler Street. Geraldine was
studying elocution, and she wore a scarlet cape and hood, and she was
going on the stage by and by. I acknowledged that her sense of
superiority was well-founded, and retired farther into my corner, for
the first time conscious of my shabbiness and lowliness.
I looked on at the dancing until I could endure it no longer. Overcome
by a sense of isolation and unfitness, I slipped out of the room,
avoiding the teacher's eye, and went home to write melancholy poetry.
What had come over me? Why was I, the confident, the ambitious,
suddenly grown so shy and meek? Why was the candidate for encyclopædic
immortality overawed by a scarlet hood? Why did I, a very tomboy
yesterday, suddenly find my playmates stupid, and hide-and-seek a
bore? I did not know why. I only knew that I was lonely and troubled
and sore; and I went home to write sad poetry.
I shall never forget the pattern of the red carpet in our parlor,--we
had achieved a carpet since Chelsea days,--because I lay for hours
face down on the floor, writing poetry on a screechy slate. When I had
perfected my verses, and copied them fair on the famous blue-lined
note paper, and saw that I had made a very pathetic poem indeed, I
felt better. And this happened over and over again. I gave up the
dancing-club, I ceased to know the rowdy little boys, and I wrote
melancholy poetry oftener, and felt better. The centre table became my
study. I read much, and mooned between chapters, and wrote long
letters to Miss Dillingham.
For some time I wrote to her almost daily. That was when I found in my
heart such depths of woe as I could not pack into rhyme. And finally
there came a day when I could utter my trouble in neither verse nor
prose, and I implored Miss Dillingham to come to me and hear my
sorrowful revelations. But I did not want her to come to the house. In
the house there was no privacy; I could not talk. Would she meet me on
Boston Common at such and such a time?
Would she? She was a devoted friend, and a wise woman. She met me on
Boston Common. It was a gray autumn day--was it not actually
drizzling?--and I was cold sitting on the bench; but I was thrilled
through and through with the sense of the magnitude of my troubles,
and of the romantic nature of the rendezvous. Who that was even half
awake when he was growing up does not know what all these symptoms
betokened? Miss Dillingham understood, and she wisely gave me no
inkling of her diagnosis. She let me talk and kept a grave face. She
did not belittle my troubles--I made specific charges against my home,
members of my family, and life in general; she did not say that I
would get over them, that every growing girl suffers from the blues;
that I was, in brief, a little goose stretching my wings for flight.
She told me rather that it would be noble to bear my sorrows bravely,
to soothe those who irritated me, to live each day with all my might.
She reminded me of great men and women who have suffered, and who
overcame their troubles by living and working. And she sent me home
amazingly comforted, my pettiness and self-consciousness routed by the
quiet influence of her gray eyes searching mine. This, or something
like this, had to be repeated many times, as anybody will know who was
present at the slow birth of his manhood. From now on, for some years,
of course, I must weep and laugh out of season, stand on tiptoe to
pluck the stars in heaven, love and hate immoderately, propound
theories of the destiny of man, and not know what is going on in my
own heart.
CHAPTER XV
TARNISHED LAURELS
In the intervals of harkening to my growing-pains I was, of course,
still a little girl. As a little girl, in many ways immature for my
age, I finished my course in the grammar school, and was graduated
with honors, four years after my landing in Boston.
Wheeler Street recognizes five great events in a girl's life: namely,
christening, confirmation, graduation, marriage, and burial. These
occasions all require full dress for the heroine, and full dress is
forthcoming, no matter if the family goes into debt for it. There was
not a girl who came to school in rags all the year round that did not
burst forth in sudden glory on Graduation Day. Fine muslin frocks,
lace-trimmed petticoats, patent-leather shoes, perishable hats,
gloves, parasols, fans--every girl had them. A mother who had scrubbed
floors for years to keep her girl in school was not going to have her
shamed in the end for want of a pretty dress. So she cut off the
children's supply of butter and worked nights and borrowed and fell
into arrears with the rent; and on Graduation Day she felt
magnificently rewarded, seeing her Mamie as fine as any girl in the
school. And in order to preserve for posterity this triumphant
spectacle, she took Mamie, after the exercises, to be photographed,
with her diploma in one hand, a bouquet in the other, and the gloves,
fan, parasol, and patent-leather shoes in full sight around a fancy
table. Truly, the follies of the poor are worth studying.
It did not strike me as folly, but as the fulfilment of the portent of
my natal star, when I saw myself, on Graduation Day, arrayed like unto
a princess. Frills, lace, patent-leather shoes--I had everything. I
even had a sash with silk fringes.
Did I speak of folly? Listen, and I will tell you quite another tale.
Perhaps when you have heard it you will not be too hasty to run and
teach The Poor. Perhaps you will admit that The Poor may have
something to teach you.
Before we had been two years in America, my sister Frieda was engaged
to be married. This was under the old dispensation: Frieda came to
America too late to avail herself of the gifts of an American
girlhood. Had she been two years younger she might have dodged her
circumstances, evaded her Old-World fate. She would have gone to
school and imbibed American ideas. She might have clung to her
girlhood longer instead of marrying at seventeen. I am so fond of the
American way that it has always seemed to me a pitiful accident that
my sister should have come so near and missed by so little the
fulfilment of my country's promise to women. A long girlhood, a free
choice in marriage, and a brimful womanhood are the precious rights of
an American woman.
My father was too recently from the Old World to be entirely free from
the influence of its social traditions. He had put Frieda to work out
of necessity. The necessity was hardly lifted when she had an offer of
marriage, but my father would not stand in the way of what he
considered her welfare. Let her escape from the workshop, if she had a
chance, while the roses were still in her cheeks. If she remained for
ten years more bent over the needle, what would she gain? Not even
her personal comfort; for Frieda never called her earnings her own,
but spent everything on the family, denying herself all but
necessities. The young man who sued for her was a good workman,
earning fair wages, of irreproachable character, and refined manners.
My father had known him for years.
So Frieda was to be released from the workshop. The act was really in
the nature of a sacrifice on my father's part, for he was still in the
woods financially, and would sorely miss Frieda's wages. The greater
the pity, therefore, that there was no one to counsel him to give
America more time with my sister. She attended the night school; she
was fond of reading. In books, in a slowly ripening experience, she
might have found a better answer to the riddle of a girl's life than a
premature marriage.
My sister's engagement pleased me very well. Our confidences were not
interrupted, and I understood that she was happy. I was very fond of
Moses Rifkin myself. He was the nicest young man of my acquaintance,
not at all like other workmen. He was very kind to us children,
bringing us presents and taking us out for excursions. He had a sense
of humor, and he was going to marry our Frieda. How could I help being
pleased?
The marriage was not to take place for some time, and in the interval
Frieda remained in the shop. She continued to bring home all her
wages. If she was going to desert the family, she would not let them
feel it sooner than she must.
Then all of a sudden she turned spendthrift. She appropriated I do not
know what fabulous sums, to spend just as she pleased, for once. She
attended bargain sales, and brought away such finery as had never
graced our flat before. Home from work in the evening, after a hurried
supper, she shut herself up in the parlor, and cut and snipped and
measured and basted and stitched as if there were nothing else in the
world to do. It was early summer, and the air had a wooing touch, even
on Wheeler Street. Moses Rifkin came, and I suppose he also had a
wooing touch. But Frieda only smiled and shook her head; and as her
mouth was full of pins, it was physically impossible for Moses to
argue. She remained all evening in a white disorder of tucked
breadths, curled ruffles, dismembered sleeves, and swirls of fresh
lace; her needle glancing in the lamplight, and poor Moses picking up
her spools.
Her trousseau, was it not? No, not her trousseau. It was my graduation
dress on which she was so intent. And when it was finished, and was
pronounced a most beautiful dress, and she ought to have been
satisfied, Frieda went to the shops once more and bought the sash with
the silk fringes.
The improvidence of the poor is a most distressing spectacle to all
right-minded students of sociology. But please spare me your homily
this time. It does not apply. The poor are the poor in spirit. Those
who are rich in spiritual endowment will never be found bankrupt.
Graduation Day was nothing less than a triumph for me. It was not only
that I had two pieces to speak, one of them an original composition;
it was more because I was known in my school district as the
"smartest" girl in the class, and all eyes were turned on the prodigy,
and I was aware of it. I was aware of everything. That is why I am
able to tell you everything now.
The assembly hall was crowded to bursting, but my friends had no
trouble in finding seats. They were ushered up to the platform, which
was reserved for guests of honor. I was very proud to see my friends
treated with such distinction. My parents were there, and Frieda, of
course; Miss Dillingham, and some others of my Chelsea teachers. A
dozen or so of my humbler friends and acquaintances were scattered
among the crowd on the floor.
When I stepped up on the stage to read my composition I was seized
with stage fright. The floor under my feet and the air around me were
oppressively present to my senses, while my own hand I could not have
located. I did not know where my body began or ended, I was so
conscious of my gloves, my shoes, my flowing sash. My wonderful dress,
in which I had taken so much satisfaction, gave me the most trouble. I
was suddenly paralyzed by a conviction that it was too short, and it
seemed to me I stood on absurdly long legs. And ten thousand people
were looking up at me. It was horrible!
I suppose I no more than cleared my throat before I began to read, but
to me it seemed that I stood petrified for an age, an awful silence
booming in my ears. My voice, when at last I began, sounded far away.
I thought that nobody could hear me. But I kept on, mechanically; for
I had rehearsed many times. And as I read I gradually forgot myself,
forgot the place and the occasion. The people looking up at me heard
the story of a beautiful little boy, my cousin, whom I had loved very
dearly, and who died in far-distant Russia some years after I came to
America. My composition was not a masterpiece; it was merely good for
a girl of fifteen. But I had written that I still loved the little
cousin, and I made a thousand strangers feel it. And before the
applause there was a moment of stillness in the great hall.
After the singing and reading by the class, there were the customary
addresses by distinguished guests. We girls were reminded that we were
going to be women, and happiness was promised to those of us who would
aim to be noble women. A great many trite and obvious things, a great
deal of the rhetoric appropriate to the occasion, compliments,
applause, general satisfaction; so went the programme. Much of the
rhetoric, many of the fine sentiments did not penetrate to the
thoughts of us for whom they were intended, because we were in such a
flutter about our ruffles and ribbons, and could hardly refrain from
openly prinking. But we applauded very heartily every speaker and
every would-be speaker, understanding that by a consensus of opinion
on the platform we were very fine young ladies, and much was to be
expected of us.
One of the last speakers was introduced as a member of the School
Board. He began like all the rest of them, but he ended differently.
Abandoning generalities, he went on to tell the story of a particular
schoolgirl, a pupil in a Boston school, whose phenomenal career might
serve as an illustration of what the American system of free education
and the European immigrant could make of each other. He had not got
very far when I realized, to my great surprise and no small delight,
that he was telling my story. I saw my friends on the platform beaming
behind the speaker, and I heard my name whispered in the audience. I
had been so much of a celebrity, in a small local way, that
identification of the speaker's heroine was inevitable. My classmates,
of course, guessed the name, and they turned to look at me, and
nudged me, and all but pointed at me; their new muslins rustling and
silk ribbons hissing.
One or two nearest me forgot etiquette so far as to whisper to me.
"Mary Antin," they said, as the speaker sat down, amid a burst of the
most enthusiastic applause,--"Mary Antin, why don't you get up and
thank him?"
I was dazed with all that had happened. Bursting with pride I was, but
I was moved, too, by nobler feelings. I realized, in a vague, far-off
way, what it meant to my father and mother to be sitting there and
seeing me held up as a paragon, my history made the theme of an
eloquent discourse; what it meant to my father to see his ambitious
hopes thus gloriously fulfilled, his judgment of me verified; what it
meant to Frieda to hear me all but named with such honor. With all
these things choking my heart to overflowing, my wits forsook me, if I
had had any at all that day. The audience was stirring and whispering
so that I could hear: "Who is it?" "Is that so?" And again they
prompted me:--
"Mary Antin, get up. Get up and thank him, Mary."
And I rose where I sat, and in a voice that sounded thin as a fly's
after the oratorical bass of the last speaker, I began:--
"I want to thank you--"
That is as far as I got. Mr. Swan, the principal, waved his hand to
silence me; and then, and only then, did I realize the enormity of
what I had done.
My eulogist had had the good taste not to mention names, and I had
been brazenly forward, deliberately calling attention to myself when
there was no need. Oh, it was sickening! I hated myself, I hated with
all my heart the girls who had prompted me to such immodest conduct. I
wished the ground would yawn and snap me up. I was ashamed to look up
at my friends on the platform. What was Miss Dillingham thinking of
me? Oh, what a fool I had been! I had ruined my own triumph. I had
disgraced myself, and my friends, and poor Mr. Swan, and the Winthrop
School. The monster vanity had sucked out my wits, and left me a
staring idiot.
It is easy to say that I was making a mountain out of a mole hill, a
catastrophe out of a mere breach of good manners. It is easy to say
that. But I know that I suffered agonies of shame. After the
exercises, when the crowd pressed in all directions in search of
friends, I tried in vain to get out of the hall. I was mobbed, I was
lionized. Everybody wanted to shake hands with the prodigy of the day,
and they knew who it was. I had made sure of that; I had exhibited
myself. The people smiled on me, flattered me, passed me on from one
to another. I smirked back, but I did not know what I said. I was wild
to be clear of the building. I thought everybody mocked me. All my
roses had turned to ashes, and all through my own brazen conduct.
I would have given my diploma to have Miss Dillingham know how the
thing had happened, but I could not bring myself to speak first. If
she would ask me--But nobody asked. Nobody looked away from me.
Everybody congratulated me, and my father and mother and my remotest
relations. But the sting of shame smarted just the same; I could not
be consoled. I had made a fool of myself: Mr. Swan had publicly put me
down.
Ah, so that was it! Vanity was the vital spot again. It was wounded
vanity that writhed and squirmed. It was not because I had been bold,
but because I had been pronounced bold, that I suffered so
monstrously. If Mr. Swan, with an eloquent gesture, had not silenced
me, I might have made my little speech--good heavens! what _did_ I
mean to say?--and probably called it another feather in my bonnet. But
he had stopped me promptly, disgusted with my forwardness, and he had
shown before all those hundreds what he thought of me. Therein lay the
sting.
With all my talent for self-analysis, it took me a long time to
realize the essential pettiness of my trouble. For years--actually for
years--after that eventful day of mingled triumph and disgrace, I
could not think of the unhappy incident without inward squirming. I
remember distinctly how the little scene would suddenly flash upon me
at night, as I lay awake in bed, and I would turn over impatiently, as
if to shake off a nightmare; and this so long after the occurrence
that I was myself amazed at the persistence of the nightmare. I had
never been reproached by any one for my conduct on Graduation Day. Why
could I not forgive myself? I studied the matter deeply--it wearies me
to remember how deeply--till at last I understood that it was wounded
vanity that hurt so, and no nobler remorse. Then, and only then, was
the ghost laid. If it ever tried to get up again, after that, I only
had to call it names to see it scurry back to its grave and pull the
sod down after it.
Before I had laid my ghost, a friend told me of a similar experience
of his boyhood. He was present at a small private entertainment, and a
violinist who should have played being absent, the host asked for a
volunteer to take his place. My friend, then a boy in his teens,
offered himself, and actually stood up with the violin in his hands,
as if to play. But he could not even hold the instrument properly--he
had never been taught the violin. He told me he never knew what
possessed him to get up and make a fool of himself before a roomful of
people; but he was certain that ten thousand imps possessed him and
tormented him for years and years after if only he remembered the
incident.
My friend's confession was such a consolation to me that I could not
help thinking I might do some other poor wretch a world of good by
offering him my company and that of my friend in his misery. For if it
took me a long time to find out that I was a vain fool, the corollary
did not escape me: there must be other vain fools.
CHAPTER XVI
DOVER STREET
What happened next was Dover Street.
And what was Dover Street?
Ask rather, What was it not? Dover Street was my fairest garden of
girlhood, a gate of paradise, a window facing on a broad avenue of
life. Dover Street was a prison, a school of discipline, a battlefield
of sordid strife. The air in Dover Street was heavy with evil odors of
degradation, but a breath from the uppermost heavens rippled through,
whispering of infinite things. In Dover Street the dragon poverty
gripped me for a last fight, but I overthrew the hideous creature, and
sat on his neck as on a throne. In Dover Street I was shackled with a
hundred chains of disadvantage, but with one free hand I planted
little seeds, right there in the mud of shame, that blossomed into the
honeyed rose of widest freedom. In Dover Street there was often no
loaf on the table, but the hand of some noble friend was ever in mine.
The night in Dover Street was rent with the cries of wrong, but the
thunders of truth crashed through the pitiful clamor and died out in
prophetic silences.
Outwardly, Dover Street is a noisy thoroughfare cut through a South
End slum, in every essential the same as Wheeler Street. Turn down any
street in the slums, at random, and call it by whatever name you
please, you will observe there the same fashions of life, death, and
endurance. Every one of those streets is a rubbish heap of damaged
humanity, and it will take a powerful broom and an ocean of soapsuds
to clean it out.
Dover Street is intersected, near its eastern end, where we lived, by
Harrison Avenue. That street is to the South End what Salem Street is
to the North End. It is the heart of the South End ghetto, for the
greater part of its length; although its northern end belongs to the
realm of Chinatown. Its multifarious business bursts through the
narrow shop doors, and overruns the basements, the sidewalk, the
street itself, in pushcarts and open-air stands. Its multitudinous
population bursts through the greasy tenement doors, and floods the
corridors, the doorsteps, the gutters, the side streets, pushing in
and out among the pushcarts, all day long and half the night besides.
Rarely as Harrison Avenue is caught asleep, even more rarely is it
found clean. Nothing less than a fire or flood would cleanse this
street. Even Passover cannot quite accomplish this feat. For although
the tenements may be scrubbed to their remotest corners, on this one
occasion, the cleansing stops at the curbstone. A great deal of the
filthy rubbish accumulated in a year is pitched into the street, often
through the windows; and what the ashman on his daily round does not
remove is left to be trampled to powder, in which form it steals back
into the houses from which it was so lately removed.
The City Fathers provide soap and water for the slums, in the form of
excellent schools, kindergartens, and branch libraries. And there they
stop: at the curbstone of the people's life. They cleanse and
discipline the children's minds, but their bodies they pitch into the
gutter. For there are no parks and almost no playgrounds in the
Harrison Avenue district,--in my day there were none,--and such as
there are have been wrenched from the city by public-spirited citizens
who have no offices in City Hall. No wonder the ashman is not more
thorough: he learns from his masters.
It is a pity to have it so, in a queen of enlightened cities like
Boston. If we of the twentieth century do not believe in baseball as
much as in philosophy, we have not learned the lesson of modern
science, which teaches, among other things, that the body is the
nursery of the soul; the instrument of our moral development; the
secret chart of our devious progress from worm to man. The great
achievement of recent science, of which we are so proud, has been the
deciphering of the hieroglyphic of organic nature. To worship the
facts and neglect the implications of the message of science is to
applaud the drama without taking the moral to heart. And we certainly
are not taking the moral to heart when we try to make a hero out of
the boy by such foreign appliances as grammar and algebra, while
utterly despising the fittest instrument for his uplifting--the boy's
own body.
We had no particular reason for coming to Dover Street. It might just
as well have been Applepie Alley. For my father had sold, with the
goods, fixtures, and good-will of the Wheeler Street store, all his
hopes of ever making a living in the grocery trade; and I doubt if he
got a silver dollar the more for them. We had to live somewhere, even
if we were not making a living, so we came to Dover Street, where
tenements were cheap; by which I mean that rent was low. The ultimate
cost of life in those tenements, in terms of human happiness, is high
enough.
Our new home consisted of five small rooms up two flights of
stairs, with the right of way through the dark corridors. In the
"parlor" the dingy paper hung in rags and the plaster fell in chunks.
One of the bedrooms was absolutely dark and air-tight. The kitchen
windows looked out on a dirty court, at the back of which was the rear
tenement of the estate. To us belonged, along with the five rooms and
the right of way aforesaid, a block of upper space the length of a
pulley line across this court, and the width of an arc described by a
windy Monday's wash in its remotest wanderings.
[Illustration: HARRISON AVENUE IS THE HEART OF THE SOUTH END
GHETTO]
The little front bedroom was assigned to me, with only one partner, my
sister Dora. A mouse could not have led a cat much of a chase across
this room; still we found space for a narrow bed, a crazy bureau, and
a small table. From the window there was an unobstructed view of a
lumberyard, beyond which frowned the blackened walls of a factory. The
fence of the lumberyard was gay with theatre posters and illustrated
advertisements of tobacco, whiskey, and patent baby foods. When the
window was open, there was a constant clang and whirr of electric
cars, varied by the screech of machinery, the clatter of empty wagons,
or the rumble of heavy trucks.
There was nothing worse in all this than we had had before since our
exile from Crescent Beach; but I did not take the same delight in the
propinquity of electric cars and arc lights that I had till now. I
suppose the tenement began to pall on me.
It must not be supposed that I enjoyed any degree of privacy, because
I had half a room to myself. We were six in the five rooms; we were
bound to be always in each other's way. And as it was within our flat,
so it was in the house as a whole. All doors, beginning with the
street door, stood open most of the time; or if they were closed, the
tenants did not wear out their knuckles knocking for admittance. I
could stand at any time in the unswept entrance hall and tell, from an
analysis of the medley of sounds and smells that issued from doors
ajar, what was going on in the several flats from below up. That
guttural, scolding voice, unremittent as the hissing of a steam pipe,
is Mrs. Rasnosky. I make a guess that she is chastising the infant
Isaac for taking a second lump of sugar in his tea. _Spam! Bam!_ Yes,
and she is rubbing in her objections with the flat of her hand. That
blubbering and moaning, accompanying an elephantine tread, is fat Mrs.
Casey, second floor, home drunk from an afternoon out, in fear of the
vengeance of Mr. Casey; to propitiate whom she is burning a pan of
bacon, as the choking fumes and outrageous sizzling testify. I hear a
feeble whining, interrupted by long silences. It is that scabby baby
on the third floor, fallen out of bed again, with nobody home to pick
him up.
To escape from these various horrors I ascend to the roof, where bacon
and babies and child-beating are not. But there I find two figures in
calico wrappers, with bare red arms akimbo, a basket of wet clothes in
front of each, and only one empty clothes-line between them. I do not
want to be dragged in as a witness in a case of assault and battery,
so I descend to the street again, grateful to note, as I pass, that
the third-floor baby is still.
In front of the door I squeeze through a group of children. They are
going to play tag, and are counting to see who should be "it":--
"My-mother-and-your-mother-went-out-to-hang-clothes;
My-mother-gave-your-mother-a-punch-in-the-nose."
If the children's couplet does not give a vivid picture of the life,
manners, and customs of Dover Street, no description of mine can ever
do so.
Frieda was married before we came to Dover Street, and went to live in
East Boston. This left me the eldest of the children at home. Whether
on this account, or because I was outgrowing my childish carelessness,
or because I began to believe, on the cumulative evidence of the
Crescent Beach, Chelsea, and Wheeler Street adventures, that America,
after all, was not going to provide for my father's family,--whether
for any or all of these reasons, I began at this time to take
bread-and-butter matters more to heart, and to ponder ways and means
of getting rich. My father sought employment wherever work was going
on. His health was poor; he aged very fast. Nevertheless he offered
himself for every kind of labor; he offered himself for a boy's wages.
Here he was found too weak, here too old; here his imperfect English
was in the way, here his Jewish appearance. He had a few short terms
of work at this or that; I do not know the name of the form of
drudgery that my father did not practise. But all told, he did not
earn enough to pay the rent in full and buy a bone for the soup. The
only steady source of income, for I do not know what years, was my
brother's earnings from his newspapers.
Surely this was the time for me to take my sister's place in the
workshop. I had had every fair chance until now: school, my time to
myself, liberty to run and play and make friends. I had graduated from
grammar school; I was of legal age to go to work. What was I doing,
sitting at home and dreaming?
I was minding my business, of course; with all my might I was minding
my business. As I understood it, my business was to go to school, to
learn everything there was to know, to write poetry, become famous,
and make the family rich. Surely it was not shirking to lay out such a
programme for myself. I had boundless faith in my future. I was
certainly going to be a great poet; I was certainly going to take care
of the family.
Thus mused I, in my arrogance. And my family? They were as bad as I.
My father had not lost a whit of his ambition for me. Since Graduation
Day, and the school-committeeman's speech, and half a column about me
in the paper, his ambition had soared even higher. He was going to
keep me at school till I was prepared for college. By that time, he
was sure, I would more than take care of myself. It never for a moment
entered his head to doubt the wisdom or justice of this course. And my
mother was just as loyal to my cause, and my brother, and my sister.
It is no wonder if I got along rapidly: I was helped, encouraged, and
upheld by every one. Even the baby cheered me on. When I asked her
whether she believed in higher education, she answered, without a
moment's hesitation, "Ducka-ducka-da!" Against her I remember only
that one day, when I read her a verse out of a most pathetic piece I
was composing, she laughed right out, a most disrespectful laugh; for
which I revenged myself by washing her face at the faucet, and rubbing
it red on the roller towel.
It was just like me, when it was debated whether I would be best
fitted for college at the High or the Latin School, to go in person to
Mr. Tetlow, who was principal of both schools, and so get the most
expert opinion on the subject. I never send a messenger, you may
remember, where I can go myself. It was vacation time, and I had to
find Mr. Tetlow at his home. Away out to the wilds of Roxbury I found
my way--perhaps half an hour's ride on the electric car from Dover
Street. I grew an inch taller and broader between the corner of Cedar
Street and Mr. Tetlow's house, such was the charm of the clean, green
suburb on a cramped waif from the slums. My faded calico dress, my
rusty straw sailor hat, the color of my skin and all bespoke the waif.
But never a bit daunted was I. I went up the steps to the porch, rang
the bell, and asked for the great man with as much assurance as if I
were a daily visitor on Cedar Street. I calmly awaited the appearance
of Mr. Tetlow in the reception room, and stated my errand without
trepidation.
And why not? I was a solemn little person for the moment, earnestly
seeking advice on a matter of great importance. That is what Mr.
Tetlow saw, to judge by the gravity with which he discussed my
business with me, and the courtesy with which he showed me to the
door. He saw, too, I fancy, that I was not the least bit conscious of
my shabby dress; and I am sure he did not smile at my appearance, even
when my back was turned.
A new life began for me when I entered the Latin School in September.
Until then I had gone to school with my equals, and as a matter of
course. Now it was distinctly a feat for me to keep in school, and my
schoolmates were socially so far superior to me that my poverty became
conspicuous. The pupils of the Latin School, from the nature of the
institution, are an aristocratic set. They come from refined homes,
dress well, and spend the recess hour talking about parties, beaux,
and the matinée. As students they are either very quick or very
hard-working; for the course of study, in the lingo of the school
world, is considered "stiff." The girl with half her brain asleep, or
with too many beaux, drops out by the end of the first year; or a one
and only beau may be the fatal element. At the end of the course the
weeding process has reduced the once numerous tribe of academic
candidates to a cosey little family.
By all these tokens I should have had serious business on my hands as
a pupil in the Latin School, but I did not find it hard. To make
myself letter-perfect in my lessons required long hours of study, but
that was my delight. To make myself at home in an alien world was also
within my talents; I had been practising it day and night for the past
four years. To remain unconscious of my shabby and ill-fitting clothes
when the rustle of silk petticoats in the schoolroom protested against
them was a matter still within my moral reach. Half a dress a year had
been my allowance for many seasons; even less, for as I did not grow
much I could wear my dresses as long as they lasted. And I had stood
before editors, and exchanged polite calls with school-teachers,
untroubled by the detestable colors and archaic design of my garments.
To stand up and recite Latin declensions without trembling from hunger
was something more of a feat, because I sometimes went to school with
little or no breakfast; but even that required no special heroism,--at
most it was a matter of self-control. I had the advantage of a poor
appetite, too; I really did not need much breakfast. Or if I was
hungry it would hardly show; I coughed so much that my unsteadiness
was self-explained.
Everything helped, you see. My schoolmates helped. Aristocrats though
they were, they did not hold themselves aloof from me. Some of the
girls who came to school in carriages were especially cordial. They
rated me by my scholarship, and not by my father's occupation. They
teased and admired me by turns for learning the footnotes in the Latin
grammar by heart; they never reproached me for my ignorance of the
latest comic opera. And it was more than good breeding that made them
seem unaware of the incongruity of my presence. It was a generous
appreciation of what it meant for a girl from the slums to be in the
Latin School, on the way to college. If our intimacy ended on the
steps of the school-house, it was more my fault than theirs. Most of
the girls were democratic enough to have invited me to their homes,
although to some, of course, I was "impossible." But I had no time for
visiting; school work and reading and family affairs occupied all the
daytime, and much of the night time. I did not "go with" any of the
girls, in the school-girl sense of the phrase. I admired some of them,
either for good looks, or beautiful manners, or more subtle
attributes; but always at a distance. I discovered something
inimitable in the way the Back Bay girls carried themselves; and I
should have been the first to perceive the incongruity of Commonwealth
Avenue entwining arms with Dover Street. Some day, perhaps, when I
should be famous and rich; but not just then. So my companions and I
parted on the steps of the school-house, in mutual respect; they
guiltless of snobbishness, I innocent of envy. It was a graciously
American relation, and I am happy to this day to recall it.
The one exception to this rule of friendly distance was my chum,
Florence Connolly. But I should hardly have said "chum." Florence and
I occupied adjacent seats for three years, but we did not walk arm in
arm, nor call each other nicknames, nor share our lunch, nor
correspond in vacation time. Florence was quiet as a mouse, and I was
reserved as an oyster; and perhaps we two had no more in common
fundamentally than those two creatures in their natural state. Still,
as we were both very studious, and never strayed far from our desks at
recess, we practised a sort of intimacy of propinquity. Although
Florence was of my social order, her father presiding over a cheap
lunch room, I did not on that account feel especially drawn to her. I
spent more time studying Florence than loving her, I suppose. And yet
I ought to have loved her; she was such a good girl. Always perfect in
her lessons, she was so modest that she recited in a noticeable
tremor, and had to be told frequently to raise her voice. Florence
wore her light brown hair brushed flatly back and braided in a single
plait, at a time when pompadours were six inches high and braids hung
in pairs. Florence had a pocket in her dress for her handkerchief, in
a day when pockets were repugnant to fashion. All these things ought
to have made me feel the kinship of humble circumstances, the
comradeship of intellectual earnestness; but they did not.
The truth is that my relation to persons and things depended neither
on social distinctions nor on intellectual or moral affinities. My
attitude, at this time, was determined by my consciousness of the
unique elements in my character and history. It seemed to me that I
had been pursuing a single adventure since the beginning of the world.
Through highways and byways, underground, overground, by land, by sea,
ever the same star had guided me, I thought, ever the same purpose
had divided my affairs from other men's. What that purpose was, where
was the fixed horizon beyond which my star would not recede, was an
absorbing mystery to me. But the current moment never puzzled me. What
I chose instinctively to do I knew to be right and in accordance with
my destiny. I never hesitated over great things, but answered promptly
to the call of my genius. So what was it to me whether my neighbors
spurned or embraced me, if my way was no man's way? Nor should any one
ever reject me whom I chose to be my friend, because I would make sure
of a kindred spirit by the coincidence of our guiding stars.
When, where in the harum-scarum life of Dover Street was there time or
place for such self-communing? In the night, when everybody slept; on
a solitary walk, as far from home as I dared to go.
I was not unhappy on Dover Street; quite the contrary. Everything of
consequence was well with me. Poverty was a superficial, temporary
matter; it vanished at the touch of money. Money in America was
plentiful; it was only a matter of getting some of it, and I was on my
way to the mint. If Dover Street was not a pleasant place to abide in,
it was only a wayside house. And I was really happy, actively happy,
in the exercise of my mind in Latin, mathematics, history, and the
rest; the things that suffice a studious girl in the middle teens.
Still I had moments of depression, when my whole being protested
against the life of the slum. I resented the familiarity of my vulgar
neighbors. I felt myself defiled by the indecencies I was compelled to
witness. Then it was I took to running away from home. I went out in
the twilight and walked for hours, my blind feet leading me. I did
not care where I went. If I lost my way, so much the better; I never
wanted to see Dover Street again.
But behold, as I left the crowds behind, and the broader avenues were
spanned by the open sky, my grievances melted away, and I fell to
dreaming of things that neither hurt nor pleased. A fringe of trees
against the sunset became suddenly the symbol of the whole world, and
I stood and gazed and asked questions of it. The sunset faded; the
trees withdrew. The wind went by, but dropped no hint in my ear. The
evening star leaped out between the clouds, and sealed the secret with
a seal of splendor.
A favorite resort of mine, after dark, was the South Boston Bridge,
across South Bay and the Old Colony Railroad. This was so near home
that I could go there at any time when the confusion in the house
drove me out, or I felt the need of fresh air. I liked to stand
leaning on the bridge railing, and look down on the dim tangle of
railroad tracks below. I could barely see them branching out,
elbowing, winding, and sliding out into the night in pairs. I was
fascinated by the dotted lights, the significant red and green of
signal lamps. These simple things stood for a complexity that it made
me dizzy to think of. Then the blackness below me was split by the
fiery eye of a monster engine, his breath enveloped me in blinding
clouds, his long body shot by, rattling a hundred claws of steel; and
he was gone, with an imperative shriek that shook me where I stood.
So would I be, swift on my rightful business, picking out my proper
track from the million that cross it, pausing for no obstacles, sure
of my goal.
[Illustration: I LIKED TO STAND AND LOOK DOWN ON THE DIM TANGLE
OF RAILROAD TRACKS BELOW]
After my watches on the bridge I often stayed up to write or study. It
is late before Dover Street begins to go to bed. It is past midnight
before I feel that I am alone. Seated in my stiff little chair before
my narrow table, I gather in the night sounds through the open window,
curious to assort and define them. As, little by little, the city
settles down to sleep, the volume of sound diminishes, and the
qualities of particular sounds stand out. The electric car lurches by
with silent gong, taking the empty track by leaps, humming to itself
in the invisible distance. A benighted team swings recklessly around
the corner, sharp under my rattling window panes, the staccato pelting
of hoofs on the cobblestones changed suddenly to an even pounding on
the bridge. A few pedestrians hurry by, their heavy boots all out of
step. The distant thoroughfares have long ago ceased their murmur, and
I know that a million lamps shine idly in the idle streets.
My sister sleeps quietly in the little bed. The rhythmic dripping of a
faucet is audible through the flat. It is so still that I can hear the
paper crackling on the wall. Silence upon silence is added to the
night; only the kitchen clock is the voice of my brooding
thoughts,--ticking, ticking, ticking.
Suddenly the distant whistle of a locomotive breaks the stillness with
a long-drawn wail. Like a threatened trouble, the sound comes nearer,
piercingly near; then it dies out in a mangled silence, complaining to
the last.
The sleepers stir in their beds. Somebody sighs, and the burden of all
his trouble falls upon my heart. A homeless cat cries in the alley, in
the voice of a human child. And the ticking of the kitchen clock is
the voice of my troubled thoughts.
Many things are revealed to me as I sit and watch the world asleep.
But the silence asks me many questions that I cannot answer; and I am
glad when the tide of sound begins to return, by little and little,
and I welcome the clatter of tin cans that announces the milkman. I
cannot see him in the dusk, but I know his wholesome face has no
problem in it.
It is one flight up to the roof; it is a leap of the soul to the
sunrise. The morning mist rests lightly on chimneys and roofs and
walls, wreathes the lamp-posts, and floats in gauzy streamers down the
streets. Distant buildings are massed like palace walls, with turrets
and spires lost in the rosy clouds. I love my beautiful city spreading
all about me. I love the world. I love my place in the world.
CHAPTER XVII
THE LANDLADY
From sunrise to sunset the day was long enough for many things besides
school, which occupied five hours. There was time for me to try to
earn my living; or at least the rent of our tenement. Rent was a
standing trouble. We were always behind, and the landlady was very
angry; so I was particularly ambitious to earn the rent. I had had one
or two poems published since the celebrated eulogy of George
Washington, but nobody had paid for my poems--yet. I was coming to
that, of course, but in the mean time I could not pay the rent with my
writing. To be sure, my acquaintance with men of letters gave me an
opening. A friend of mine introduced me to a slightly literary lady
who introduced me to the editor of the "Boston Searchlight," who
offered me a generous commission for subscriptions to his paper.
If our rent was three and one-half dollars per week, payable on strong
demand, and the annual subscription to the "Searchlight" was one
dollar, and my commission was fifty per cent, how many subscribers did
I need? How easy! Seven subscribers a week--one a day! Anybody could
do that. Mr. James, the editor, said so. He said I could get two or
three any afternoon between the end of school and supper. If I worked
all Saturday--my head went dizzy computing the amount of my
commissions. It would be rent and shoes and bonnets and everything for
everybody.
Bright and early one Saturday morning in the fall I started out
canvassing, in my hand a neatly folded copy of the "Searchlight," in
my heart, faith in my lucky star and good-will towards all the world.
I began with one of the great office buildings on Tremont Street, as
Mr. James had advised. The first half-hour I lost, wandering through
the corridors, reading the names on the doors. There were so many
people in the same office, how should I know, when I entered, which
was Wilson & Reed, Solicitors, and which C. Jenkins Smith, Mortgages
and Bonds? I decided that it did not matter: I would call them all
"Sir."
I selected a door and knocked. After waiting some time, I knocked a
little louder. The building buzzed with noise,--swift footsteps echoed
on the stone floors, snappy talk broke out with the opening of every
door, bells tinkled, elevators hummed,--no wonder they did not hear me
knock. But I noticed that other people went in without knocking, so
after a while I did the same.
There were several men and two women in the small, brightly lighted
room. They were all busy. It was very confusing. Should I say "Sir" to
the roomful?
"Excuse me, sir," I began. That was a very good beginning, I felt
sure, but I must speak louder. Lately my voice had been poor in
school--gave out, sometimes, in the middle of a recitation. I cleared
my throat, but I did not repeat myself. The back of the bald head that
I had addressed revolved and presented its complement, a bald front.
"Will you--would you like--I'd like--"
I stared in dismay at the bald gentleman, unable to recall a word of
what I meant to say; and he stared in impatience at me.
"Well, well!" he snapped, "What is it? What is it?"
That reminded me.
"It's the 'Boston Searchlight,' sir. I take sub--"
"Take it away--take it away. We're busy here." He waved me away over
his shoulder, the back of his head once more presented to me.
I stole out of the room in great confusion. Was that the way I was
going to be received? Why, Mr. James had said nobody would hesitate to
subscribe. It was the best paper in Boston, the "Searchlight," and no
business man could afford to be without it. I must have made some
blunder. _Was_ "Mortgages and Bonds" a business? I'd never heard of
it, and very likely I had spoken to C. Jenkins Smith. I must try
again--of course I must try again.
I selected a real estate office next. A real estate broker, I knew for
certain, was a business man. Mr. George A. Hooker must be just waiting
for the "Boston Searchlight."
Mr. Hooker was indeed waiting, and he was telling "Central" about it.
"Yes, Central; waiting, waiting--What?--Yes, yes; ring _four_--What's
that?--Since when?--Why didn't you say so at first, then, instead of
keeping me on the line--What?--Oh, is that so? Well, never mind this
time, Central.--I see, I see.--All right."
I had become so absorbed in this monologue that when Mr. Hooker swung
around on me in his revolving chair I was startled, feeling that I had
been caught eavesdropping. I thought he was going to rebuke me, but he
only said, "What can I do for you, Miss?"
Encouraged by his forbearance, I said:--
"Would you like to subscribe to the 'Boston Searchlight,' sir?"--"Sir"
was safer, after all.--"It's a dollar a year."
I was supposed to say that it was the best paper in Boston, etc., but
Mr. Hooker did not look interested, though he was not cross.
"No, thank you, Miss; no new papers for me. Excuse me, I am very
busy." And he began to dictate to a stenographer.
Well, that was not so bad. Mr. Hooker was at least polite. I must try
to make a better speech next time. I stuck to real estate now. O'Lair
& Kennedy were both in, in my next office, and both apparently
enjoying a minute of relaxation, tilted back in their chairs behind a
low railing. Said I, determined to be businesslike at last, and
addressing myself to the whole firm:--
"Would you like to subscribe to the 'Boston Searchlight?' It's a very
good paper. No business man can afford it--afford to be without it, I
mean. It's only a dollar a year."
Both men smiled at my break, and I smiled, too. I wondered would they
subscribe separately, or would they take one copy for the firm.
"The 'Boston Searchlight,'" repeated one of the partners. "Never heard
of it. Is that the paper you have there?"
He unfolded the paper I gave him, looked over it, and handed it to his
partner.
"Ever heard of the 'Searchlight,' O'Lair? What do you think--can we
afford to be without it?"
"I guess we'll make out somehow," replied Mr. O'Lair, handing me back
my paper. "But I'll buy this copy of you, Miss," he added, from second
thoughts.
"And I'll go partner on the bargain," said Mr. Kennedy.
But I objected.
"This is a sample," I said; "I don't sell single papers. I take
subscriptions for the year. It's one dollar."
"And no business man can afford it, you know." Mr. Kennedy winked as
he said it, and we all smiled again. It would have been stupid not to
see the joke.
"I'm sorry I can't sell my sample," I said, with my hand on the
doorknob.
"That's all right, my dear," said Mr. Kennedy, with a gracious wave of
the hand. And his partner called after me, "Better luck next door!"
Well, I was getting on! The people grew friendlier all the time. But I
skipped "next door"; it was "Mortgages and Bonds." I tried
"Insurance."
"The best paper in Boston, is it?" remarked Mr. Thomas F. Dix, turning
over my sample. "And who told you that, young lady?"
"Mr. James," was my prompt reply.
"Who is Mr. James?--The _editor_! Oh, I see. And do you also think the
'Searchlight' the best paper in Boston?"
"I don't know, sir. I like the 'Herald' much better, and the
'Transcript.'"
At that Mr. Dix laughed. "That's right," he said. "Business is
business, but you tell the truth. One dollar, is it? Here you are. My
name is on the door. Good-day."
I think I spent twenty minutes copying the name and room number from
the door. I did not trust myself to read plain English. What if I made
a mistake, and the "Searchlight" went astray, and good Mr. Dix
remained unilluminated? He had paid for the year--it would be
dreadful to make a mistake.
Emboldened by my one success, I went into the next office without
considering the kind of business announced on the door. I tried
brokers, lawyers, contractors, and all, just as they came around the
corridor; but I copied no more addresses. Most of the people were
polite. Some men waved me away, like C. Jenkins Smith. Some looked
impatient at first, but excused themselves politely in the end. Almost
everybody said, "We're busy here," as if they suspected I wanted them
to read a whole year's issue of the "Searchlight" at once. At last one
man told me he did not think it was a nice business for a girl, going
through the offices like that.
This took me aback. I had not thought anything about the nature of the
business. I only wanted the money to pay the rent. I wandered through
miles of stone corridors, unable to see why it was not a nice
business, and yet reluctant to go on with it, with the doubt in my
mind. Intent on my new problem, I walked into a messenger boy; and
looking back to apologize to him, I collided softly with a
cushion-shaped gentleman getting out of an elevator. I was making up
my mind to leave the building forever, when I saw an office door
standing open. It was the first open door I had come across since
morning--it was past noon now--and it was a sign to me to keep on. I
must not give up so easily.
Mr. Frederick A. Strong was alone in the office, surreptitiously
picking his teeth. He had been to lunch. He heard me out
good-naturedly.
"How much is your commission, if I may ask?" It was the first thing he
had said.
"Fifty cents, sir."
"Well, I'll tell you what I will do. I don't care to subscribe, but
here's a quarter for you."
If I did not blush, it was because it is not my habit, but all of a
sudden I choked. A lump jumped into my throat; almost the tears were
in my eyes. That man was right who said it was not nice to go through
the offices. I was taken for a beggar: a stranger offered me money for
nothing.
I could not say a word. I started to go out. But Mr. Strong jumped up
and prevented me.
"Oh, don't go like that!" he cried. "I didn't mean to offend you; upon
my word, I didn't. I beg your pardon. I didn't know--you see--Won't
you sit down a minute to rest? That's kind of you."
Mr. Strong was so genuinely repentant that I could not refuse him.
Besides, I felt a little weak. I had been on my feet since morning,
and had had no lunch. I sat down, and Mr. Strong talked. He showed me
a picture of his wife and little girl, and said I must go and see them
some time. Pretty soon I was chatting, too, and I told Mr. Strong
about the Latin School; and of course he asked me if I was French, the
way people always did when they wanted to say that I had a foreign
accent. So we got started on Russia, and had such an interesting time
that we both jumped up, surprised, when a fine young lady in a
beautiful hat came in to take possession of the idle typewriter.
Mr. Strong introduced me very formally, thanked me for an interesting
hour, and shook hands with me at the door. I did not add his name to
my short subscription list, but I counted it a greater triumph that I
had made a friend.
It would have been seeking an anticlimax to solicit any more in the
building. I went out, into the roar of Tremont Street, and across the
Common, still green and leafy. I rested a while on a bench, debating
where to go next. It was past two by the clock on Park Street Church.
I had had a long day already, but it was too early to quit work, with
only one half dollar of my own in my pocket. It was Saturday--in the
evening the landlady would come. I must try a little longer.
I went out along Columbus Avenue, a popular route for bicyclists at
that time. The bicycle stores all along the way looked promising to
me. The people did not look so busy as in the office building: they
would at least be polite.
They were not particularly rude, but they did not subscribe. Nobody
wanted the "Searchlight." They had never heard of it--they made jokes
about it--they did not want it at any price.
I began to lose faith in the paper myself. I got tired of its name. I
began to feel dizzy. I stopped going into the stores. I walked
straight along, looking at nothing. I wanted to go back, go home, but
I wouldn't. I felt like doing myself spite. I walked right along,
straight as the avenue ran. I did not know where it would lead me. I
did not care. Everything was horrid. I would go right on until night.
I would get lost. I would fall in a faint on a strange doorstep, and
be found dead in the morning, and be pitied.
Wouldn't that be interesting! The adventure might even end happily. I
might faint at the door of a rich old man's house, who would take me
in, and order his housekeeper to nurse me, just like in the story
books. In my delirium--of course I would have a fever--I would talk
about the landlady, and how I had tried to earn the rent; and the old
gentleman would wipe his spectacles for pity. Then I would wake up,
and ask plaintively, "Where am I?" And when I got strong, after a
delightfully long convalescence, the old gentleman would take me to
Dover Street--in a carriage!--and we would all be reunited, and laugh
and cry together. The old gentleman, of course, would engage my father
as his steward, on the spot, and we would all go to live in one of his
houses, with a garden around it.
I walked on and on, gleefully aware that I had not eaten since
morning. Wasn't I beginning to feel shaky? Yes; I should certainly
faint before long. But I didn't like the houses I passed. They did not
look fit for my adventure. I must keep up till I reached a better
neighborhood.
Anybody who knows Boston knows how cheaply my adventure ended.
Columbus Avenue leads out to Roxbury Crossing. When I saw that the
houses were getting shabbier, instead of finer, my heart sank. When I
came out on the noisy, thrice-commonplace street-car centre, my spirit
collapsed utterly.
I did not swoon. I woke up from my foolish, childish dream with a
shock. I was disgusted with myself, and frightened besides. It was
evening now, and I was faint and sick in good earnest, and I did not
know where I was. I asked a starter at the transfer station the way to
Dover Street, and he told me to get on a car that was just coming in.
"I'll walk," I said, "if you will please tell me the shortest way."
How could I spend five cents out of the little I had made?
But the starter discouraged me.
"You can't walk it before midnight--the way you look, my girl. Better
hop on that car before it goes."
I could not resist the temptation. I rode home in the car, and felt
like a thief when I paid the fare. Five cents gone to pay for my
folly!
I was grateful for a cold supper; thrice grateful to hear that Mrs.
Hutch, the landlady, had been and gone, content with two dollars that
my father had brought home.
Mrs. Hutch seldom succeeded in collecting the full amount of the rents
from her tenants. I suppose that made the bookkeeping complicated,
which must have been wearing on her nerves; and hence her temper. We
lived, on Dover Street, in fear of her temper. Saturday had a distinct
quality about it, derived from the imminence of Mrs. Hutch's visit. Of
course I awoke on Saturday morning with the no-school feeling; but the
grim thing that leaped to its feet and glowered down on me, while the
rest of my consciousness was still yawning on its back, was the
Mrs.-Hutch-is-coming-and-there's-no-rent feeling.
It is hard, if you are a young girl, full of life and inclined to be
glad, to go to sleep in anxiety and awake in fear. It is apt to
interfere with the circulation of the vital ether of happiness in the
young, which is damaging to the complexion of the soul. It is bitter,
when you are middle-aged and unsuccessful, to go to sleep in
self-reproach and awake unexonerated. It is likely to cause
fermentation in the sweetest nature; it is certain to breed gray hairs
and a premature longing for death. It is pitiful, if you are the
home-keeping mother of an impoverished family, to drop in your traces
helpless at night, and awake unstrengthened in the early morning. The
haunting consciousness of rooted poverty is an improper bedfellow for
a woman who still bears. It has been known to induce physical and
spiritual malformations in the babies she nurses.
It did require strength to lift the burden of life, in the gray
morning, on Dover Street; especially on Saturday morning. Perhaps my
mother's pack was the heaviest to lift. To the man of the house,
poverty is a bulky dragon with gripping talons and a poisonous breath;
but he bellows in the open, and it is possible to give him knightly
battle, with the full swing of the angry arm that cuts to the enemy's
vitals. To the housewife, want is an insidious myriapod creature that
crawls in the dark, mates with its own offspring, breeds all the year
round, persists like leprosy. The woman has an endless, inglorious
struggle with the pest; her triumphs are too petty for applause, her
failures too mean for notice. Care, to the man, is a hound to be kept
in leash and mastered. To the woman, care is a secret parasite that
infects the blood.
Mrs. Hutch, of course, was only one symptom of the disease of poverty,
but there were times when she seemed to me the sharpest tooth of the
gnawing canker. Surely as sorrow trails behind sin, Saturday evening
brought Mrs. Hutch. The landlady did not trail. Her movements were
anything but impassive. She climbed the stairs with determination and
landed at the top with emphasis. Her knock on the door was clear
sharp, unfaltering; it was impossible to pretend not to hear it. Her
"Good-evening" announced business; her manner of taking a chair
suggested the throwing-down of the gauntlet. Invariably she asked for
my father, calling him Mr. Anton, and refusing to be corrected; almost
invariably he was not at home--was out looking for work. Had he left
her the rent? My mother's gentle "No, ma'am" was the signal for the
storm. I do not want to repeat what Mrs. Hutch said. It would be hard
on her, and hard on me. She grew red in the face; her voice grew
shriller with every word. My poor mother hung her head where she
stood; the children stared from their corners; the frightened baby
cried. The angry landlady rehearsed our sins like a prophet
foretelling doom. We owed so many weeks' rent; we were too lazy to
work; we never intended to pay; we lived on others; we deserved to be
put out without warning. She reproached my mother for having too many
children; she blamed us all for coming to America. She enumerated her
losses through nonpayment of her rents; told us that she did not
collect the amount of her taxes; showed us how our irregularities were
driving a poor widow to ruin.
My mother did not attempt to excuse herself, but when Mrs. Hutch began
to rail against my absent father, she tried to put in a word in his
defence. The landlady grew all the shriller at that, and silenced my
mother impatiently. Sometimes she addressed herself to me. I always
stood by, if I was at home, to give my mother the moral support of my
dumb sympathy. I understood that Mrs. Hutch had a special grudge
against me, because I did not go to work as a cash girl and earn three
dollars a week. I wanted to explain to her how I was preparing myself
for a great career, and I was ready to promise her the payment of the
arrears as soon as I began to get rich. But the landlady would not let
me put in a word. And I was sorry for her, because she seemed to be
having such a bad time.
At last Mrs. Hutch got up to leave, marching out as determinedly as
she had marched in. At the door she turned, in undiminished wrath, to
shoot her parting dart:--
"And if Mr. Anton does not bring me the rent on Monday, I will serve
notice of eviction on Tuesday, without fail."
We breathed when she was gone. My mother wiped away a few tears, and
went to the baby, crying in the windowless, air-tight room.
I was the first to speak.
"Isn't she queer, mamma!" I said. "She never remembers how to say our
name. She insists on saying _Anton--Anton_. Celia, say _Anton_." And I
made the baby laugh by imitating the landlady, who had made her cry.
But when I went to my little room I did not mock Mrs. Hutch. I thought
about her, thought long and hard, and to a purpose. I decided that she
must hear me out once. She must understand about my plans, my future,
my good intentions. It was too irrational to go on like this, we
living in fear of her, she in distrust of us. If Mrs. Hutch would only
trust me, and the tax collectors would trust her, we could all live
happily forever.
I was the more certain that my argument would prevail with the
landlady, if only I could make her listen, because I understood her
point of view. I even sympathized with her. What she said about the
babies, for instance, was not all unreasonable to me. There was this
last baby, my mother's sixth, born on Mrs. Hutch's premises--yes, in
the windowless, air-tight bedroom. Was there any need of this baby?
When May was born, two years earlier, on Wheeler Street, I had
accepted her; after a while I even welcomed her. She was born an
American, and it was something to me to have one genuine American
relative. I had to sit up with her the whole of her first night on
earth, and I questioned her about the place she came from, and so we
got acquainted. As my mother was so ill that my sister Frieda, who was
nurse, and the doctor from the dispensary had all they could do to
take care of her, the baby remained in my charge a good deal, and so I
got used to her. But when Celia came I was two years older, and my
outlook was broader; I could see around a baby's charms, and discern
the disadvantages of possessing the baby. I was supplied with all
kinds of relatives now--I had a brother-in-law, and an American-born
nephew, who might become a President. Moreover, I knew there was not
enough to eat before the baby's advent, and she did not bring any
supplies with her that I could see. The baby was one too many. There
was no need of her. I resented her existence. I recorded my resentment
in my journal.
I was pleased with my broad-mindedness, that enabled me to see all
sides of the baby question. I could regard even the rent question
disinterestedly, like a philosopher reviewing natural phenomena. It
seemed not unreasonable that Mrs. Hutch should have a craving for the
rent as such. A school-girl dotes on her books, a baby cries for its
rattle, and a landlady yearns for her rents. I could easily believe
that it was doing Mrs. Hutch spiritual violence to withhold the rent
from her; and hence the vehemence with which she pursued the arrears.
Yes, I could analyze the landlady very nicely. I was certainly
qualified to act as peacemaker between her and my family. But I must
go to her own house, and _not_ on a rent day. Saturday evening, when
she was embittered by many disappointments, was no time to approach
her with diplomatic negotiations. I must go to her house on a day of
good omen.
And I went, as soon as my father could give me a week's rent to take
along. I found Mrs. Hutch in the gloom of a long, faded parlor.
Divested of the ample black coat and widow's bonnet in which I had
always seen her, her presence would have been less formidable had I
not been conscious that I was a mere rumpled sparrow fallen into the
lion's den. When I had delivered the money, I should have begun my
speech; but I did not know what came first of all there was to say.
While I hesitated, Mrs. Hutch observed me. She noticed my books, and
asked about them. I thought this was my opening, and I showed her
eagerly my Latin grammar, my geometry, my Virgil. I began to tell her
how I was to go to college, to fit myself to write poetry, and get
rich, and pay the arrears. But Mrs. Hutch cut me short at the mention
of college. She broke out with her old reproaches, and worked herself
into a worse fury than I had ever witnessed before. I was all alone in
the tempest, and a very old lady was sitting on a sofa, drinking tea;
and the tidy on the back of the sofa was sliding down.
I was so bewildered by the suddenness of the onslaught, I felt so
helpless to defend myself, that I could only stand and stare at Mrs.
Hutch. She kept on railing without stopping for breath, repeating
herself over and over. At last I ceased to hear what she said; I
became hypnotized by the rapid motions of her mouth. Then the moving
tidy caught my eye and the spell was broken. I went over to the sofa
with a decided step and carefully replaced the tidy.
It was now the landlady's turn to stare, and I stared back, surprised
at my own action. The old lady also stared, her teacup suspended under
her nose. The whole thing was so ridiculous! I had come on such a
grand mission, ready to dictate the terms of a noble peace. I was met
with anger and contumely; the dignity of the ambassador of peace
rubbed off at a touch, like the golden dust from the butterfly's wing.
I took my scolding like a meek child; and then, when she was in the
middle of a trenchant phrase, her eye fixed daggerlike on mine, I
calmly went to put the enemy's house in order! It was ridiculous, and
I laughed.
Immediately I was sorry. I wanted to apologize, but Mrs. Hutch didn't
give me a chance. If she had been harsh before, she was terrific now.
Did I come there to insult her?--she wanted to know. Wasn't it enough
that I and my family lived on her, that I must come to her on purpose
to rile her with my talk about college--_college!_ these beggars!--and
laugh in her face? "What did you come for? Who sent you? Why do you
stand there staring? Say something! _College!_ these beggars! And do
you think I'll keep you till you go to college? _You_, learning
geometry! Did you ever figure out how much rent your father owes me?
You are all too lazy--Don't say a word! Don't speak to me! Coming here
to laugh in my face! I don't believe you can say one sensible word.
_Latin_--and _French_! Oh, these beggars! You ought to go to work, if
you know enough to do one sensible thing. _College!_ Go home and tell
your father never to send you again. Laughing in my face--and staring!
Why don't you say something? How old are you?"
Mrs. Hutch actually stopped, and I jumped into the pause.
"I'm seventeen," I said quickly, "and I feel like seventy."
This was too much, even for me who had spoken. I had not meant to say
the last. It broke out, like my wicked laugh. I was afraid, if I
stayed any longer, Mrs. Hutch would have the apoplexy; and I felt that
I was going to cry. I moved towards the door, but the landlady got in
another speech before I had escaped.
"Seventeen--seventy! And looks like twelve! The child is silly. Can't
even tell her own age. No wonder, with her Latin, and French, and--"
I did cry when I got outside, and I didn't care if I was noticed. What
was the use of anything? Everything I did was wrong. Everything I
tried to do for Mrs. Hutch turned out bad. I tried to sell papers, for
the sake of the rent, and nobody wanted the "Searchlight," and I was
told it was not a nice business. I wanted to take her into my
confidence, and she wouldn't hear a word, but scolded and called me
names. She was an unreasonable, ungrateful landlady. I wished she
_would_ put us out, then we should be rid of her.--But wasn't it funny
about that tidy? What made me do that? I never meant to. Curious, the
way we sometimes do things we don't want to at all.--The old lady must
be deaf; she didn't say anything all that time.--Oh, I have a whole
book of the "Æneid" to review, and it's getting late. I must hurry
home.
It was impossible to remain despondent long. The landlady came only
once a week, I reflected, as I walked, and the rest of the time I was
surrounded by friends. Everybody was good to me, at home, of course,
and at school; and there was Miss Dillingham, and her friend who took
me out in the country to see the autumn leaves, and her friend's
friend who lent me books, and Mr. Hurd, who put my poems in the
"Transcript," and gave me books almost every time I came, and a dozen
others who did something good for me all the time, besides the several
dozen who wrote me such nice letters. Friends? If I named one for
every block I passed I should not get through before I reached home.
There was Mr. Strong, too, and he wanted me to meet his wife and
little girl. And Mr. Pastor! I had almost forgotten Mr. Pastor. I
arrived at the corner of Washington and Dover Streets, on my way home,
and looked into Mr. Pastor's showy drug store as I passed, and that
reminded me of the history of my latest friendship.
My cough had been pretty bad--kept me awake nights. My voice gave out
frequently. The teachers had spoken to me several times, suggesting
that I ought to see a doctor. Of course the teachers did not know that
I could not afford a doctor, but I could go to the free dispensary,
and I did. They told me to come again, and again, and I lost precious
hours sitting in the waiting-room, watching for my turn. I was
examined, thumped, studied, and sent out with prescriptions and
innumerable directions. All that was said about food, fresh air, sunny
rooms, etc., was, of course, impossible; but I would try the medicine.
A bottle of medicine was a definite thing with a fixed price. You
either could or could not afford it, on a given day. Once you began
with milk and eggs and such things, there was no end of it. You were
always going around the corner for more, till the grocer said he could
give no more credit. No; the medicine bottle was the only safe thing.
I had taken several bottles, and was told that I was looking better,
when I went, one day, to have my prescription renewed. It was just
after a hard rain, and the pools on the broken pavements were full of
blue sky. I was delighted with the beautiful reflections; there were
even the white clouds moving across the blue, there, at my feet, on
the pavement! I walked with my head down all the way to the drug
store, which was all right; but I should not have done it going back,
with the new bottle of medicine in my hand.
In front of a cigar store, halfway between Washington Street and
Harrison Avenue, stood a wooden Indian with a package of wooden cigars
in his hand. My eyes on the shining rain pools, I walked plump into
the Indian, and the bottle was knocked out of my hand and broke with a
crash.
I was horrified at the catastrophe. The medicine cost fifty cents. My
mother had given me the last money in the house. I must not be without
my medicine; the dispensary doctor was very emphatic about that. It
would be dreadful to get sick and have to stay out of school. What was
to be done?
I made up my mind in less than five minutes. I went back to the drug
store and asked for Mr. Pastor himself. He knew me; he often sold me
postage stamps, and joked about my large correspondence, and heard a
good deal about my friends. He came out, on this occasion, from his
little office in the back of the store; and I told him of my accident,
and that there was no more money at home, and asked him to give me
another bottle, to be paid for as soon as possible. My father had a
job as night watchman in a store. I should be able to pay very soon.
"Certainly, my dear, certainly," said Mr. Pastor; "very glad to oblige
you. It's doing you good, isn't it?--That's right. You're such a
studious young lady, with all those books, and so many letters to
write--you need something to build you up. There you are.--Oh, don't
mention it! Any time at all. And lookout for wild Indians!"
Of course we were great friends after that, and this is the way my
troubles often ended on Dover Street. To bump into a wooden Indian was
to bump into good luck, a hundred times a week. No wonder I was happy
most of the time.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE BURNING BUSH
Just when Mrs. Hutch was most worried about the error of my ways, I
entered on a new chapter of adventures, even more remote from the cash
girl's career than Latin and geometry. But I ought not to name such
harsh things as landladies at the opening of the fairy story of my
girlhood. I have reached what was the second transformation of my
life, as truly as my coming to America was the first great
transformation.
Robert Louis Stevenson, in one of his delightful essays, credits the
lover with a feeling of remorse and shame at the contemplation of that
part of his life which he lived without his beloved, content with his
barren existence. It is with just such a feeling of remorse that I
look back to my bookworm days, before I began the study of natural
history outdoors; and with a feeling of shame akin to the lover's I
confess how late in my life nature took the first place in my
affections.
The subject of nature study is better developed in the public schools
to-day than it was in my time. I remember my teacher in the Chelsea
grammar school who encouraged us to look for different kinds of
grasses in the empty lots near home, and to bring to school samples of
the cereals we found in our mothers' pantries. I brought the grasses
and cereals, as I did everything the teacher ordered, but I was
content when nature study was over and the arithmetic lesson began. I
was not interested, and the teacher did not make it interesting.
In the boys' books I was fond of reading I came across all sorts of
heroes, and I sympathized with them all. The boy who ran away to sea;
the boy who delighted in the society of ranchmen and cowboys; the
stage-struck boy, whose ambition was to drive a pasteboard chariot in
a circus; the boy who gave up his holidays in order to earn money for
books; the bad boy who played tricks on people; the clever boy who
invented amusing toys for his blind little sister--all these boys I
admired. I could put myself in the place of any one of these heroes,
and delight in their delights. But there was one sort of hero I never
could understand, and that was the boy whose favorite reading was
natural history, who kept an aquarium, collected beetles, and knew all
about a man by the name of Agassiz. This style of boy always had a
seafaring uncle, or a missionary aunt, who sent him all sorts of queer
things from China and the South Sea Islands; and the conversation
between this boy and the seafaring uncle home on a visit, I was
perfectly willing to skip. The impossible hero usually kept snakes in
a box in the barn, where his little sister was fond of playing with
her little friends. The snakes escaped at least once before the end of
the story; and the things the boy said to the frightened little girls,
about the harmless and fascinating qualities of snakes, was something
I had no patience to read.
No, I did not care for natural history. I would read about travels,
about deserts, and nameless islands, and strange peoples; but snakes
and birds and minerals and butterflies did not interest me in the
least. I visited the Natural History Museum once or twice, because it
was my way to enter every open door, so as to miss nothing that was
free to the public; but the curious monsters that filled the glass
cases and adorned the walls and ceilings failed to stir my
imagination, and the slimy things that floated in glass vessels were
too horrid for a second glance.
Of all the horrid things that ever passed under my eyes when I lifted
my nose from my book, spiders were the worst. Mice were bad enough,
and so were flies and worms and June bugs; but spiders were absolutely
the most loathsome creatures I knew. And yet it was the spider that
opened my eyes to the wonders of nature, and touched my girlish
happiness with the hues of the infinite.
And it happened at Hale House.
It was not Dr. Hale, though it might have been, who showed me the way
to the settlement house on Garland Street which bears his name. Hale
House is situated in the midst of the labyrinth of narrow streets and
alleys that constitutes the slum of which Harrison Avenue is the
backbone, and of which Dover Street is a member.
Bearing in mind the fact that there are almost no playgrounds in all
this congested district, you will understand that Hale House has
plenty of work on its hands to carry a little sunshine into the grimy
tenement homes. The beautiful story of how that is done cannot be told
here, but what Hale House did for me I may not omit to mention.
It was my brother Joseph who discovered Hale House. He started a
debating club, and invited his chums to help him settle the problems
of the Republic on Sunday afternoon. The club held its first session
in our empty parlor on Dover Street, and the United States Government
was in a fair way to be put on a sound basis at last, when the
numerous babies belonging to our establishment broke up the meeting,
leaving the Administration in suspense as to its future course.
The next meeting was held in Isaac Maslinsky's parlor, and the orators
were beginning to jump to their feet and shake their fists at each
other, in excellent parliamentary form, when Mrs. Maslinsky sallied
in, to smile at the boys' excitement. But at the sight of seven pairs
of boys' boots scuffling on her cherished parlor carpet, the fringed
cover of the centre table hanging by one corner, and the plush
photograph album unceremoniously laid aside, indignation took the
place of good humor in Mrs. Maslinsky's ample bosom, and she ordered
the boys to clear out, threatening "Ike" with dire vengeance if ever
again he ventured to enter the parlor with ungentle purpose.
On the following Sunday Harry Rubinstein offered the club the
hospitality of _his_ parlor, and the meeting began satisfactorily. The
subject on the table was the Tariff, and the pros and antis were about
evenly divided. Congress might safely have taken a nap, with the Hub
Debating Club to handle its affairs, if Harry Rubinstein's big brother
Jake had not interfered. He came out of the kitchen, where he had been
stuffing the baby with peanuts, and stood in the doorway of the parlor
and winked at the dignified chairman. The chairman turned his back on
him, whereupon Jake pelted him with peanut shells. He mocked the
speakers, and called them "kids," and wanted to know how they could
tell the Tariff from a sunstroke, anyhow. "We've got to have free
trade," he mocked. "Pa, listen to the kids! 'In the interests of the
American laborer.' Hoo-ray! Listen to the kids, pa!"
Flesh and blood could not bear this. The political reformers
adjourned indefinitely, and the club was in danger of extinction for
want of a sheltering roof, when one of the members discovered that
Hale House, on Garland Street, was waiting to welcome the club.
How the debating-club prospered in the genial atmosphere of the
settlement house; how from a little club it grew to be a big club, as
the little boys became young men; how Joseph and Isaac and Harry and
the rest won prizes in public debates; how they came to be a part of
the multiple influence for good that issues from Garland Street--all
this is a piece of the history of Hale House, whose business in the
slums is to mould the restless children on the street corners into
noble men and women. I brought the debating-club into my story just to
show how naturally the children of the slums drift toward their
salvation, if only some island of safety lies in the course of their
innocent activities. Not a child in the slums is born to be lost. They
are all born to be saved, and the raft that carries them unharmed
through the perilous torrent of tenement life is the child's
unconscious aspiration for the best. But there must be lighthouses to
guide him midstream.
Dora followed Joseph to Hale House, joining a club for little girls
which has since become famous in the Hale House district. The leader
of this club, under pretence of teaching the little girls the proper
way to sweep and make beds, artfully teaches them how to beautify a
tenement home by means of noble living.
Joseph and Dora were so enthusiastic about Hale House that I had to go
over and see what it was all about. And I found the Natural History
Club.
I do not know how Mrs. Black, who was then the resident, persuaded me
to try the Natural History Club, in spite of my aversion for bugs. I
suppose she tried me in various girls' clubs, and found that I did not
fit, any more than I fitted in the dancing-club that I attempted years
before. I dare say she decided that I was an old maid, and urged me to
come to the meetings of the Natural History Club, which was composed
of adults. The members of this club were not people from the
neighborhood, I understood, but workers at Hale House and their
friends; and they often had eminent naturalists, travellers, and other
notables lecture before them. My curiosity to see a real live
naturalist probably induced me to accept Mrs. Black's invitation in
the end; for up to that time I had never met any one who enjoyed the
creepy society of snakes and worms, except in books.
The Natural History Club sat in a ring around the reception room,
facing the broad doorway of the adjoining room. Mrs. Black introduced
me, and I said "Glad to meet you" all around the circle, and sat down
in a kindergarten chair beside the piano. It was Friday evening, and I
had the sense of leisure which pervades the school-girl's
consciousness when there is to be no school on the morrow. I liked the
pleasant room, pleasanter than any at home. I liked the faces of the
company I was in. I was prepared to have an agreeable evening, even if
I was a little bored.
The tall, lean gentleman with the frank blue eyes got up to read the
minutes of the last meeting. I did not understand what he read, but I
noticed that it gave him great satisfaction. This man had greeted me
as if he had been waiting for my coming all his life. What did Mrs.
Black call him? He looked and spoke as if he was happy to be alive. I
liked him. Oh, yes! this was Mr. Winthrop.
I let my thoughts wander, with my eyes, all around the circle, trying
to read the characters of my new friends in their faces. But suddenly
my attention was arrested by a word. Mr. Winthrop had finished reading
the minutes, and was introducing the speaker of the evening. "We are
very fortunate in having with us Mr. Emerson, whom we all know as an
authority on spiders."
_Spiders!_ What hard luck! Mr. Winthrop pronounced the word "spiders"
with unmistakable relish, as if he doted on the horrid creatures; but
I--My nerves contracted into a tight knot. I gripped the arms of my
little chair, determined _not_ to run, with all those strangers
looking on. I watched Mr. Emerson, to see when he would open a box of
spiders. I recalled a hideous experience of long ago, when, putting on
a dress that had hung on the wall for weeks, I felt a thing with a
hundred legs crawling down my bare arm, and shook a spider out of my
sleeve. I watched the lecturer, but I was _not_ going to run. It was
too bad that Mrs. Black had not warned me.
After a while I realized that the lecturer had no menagerie in his
pockets. He talked, in a familiar way, about different kinds of
spiders and their ways; and as he talked, he wove across the doorway,
where he stood, a gigantic spider's web, unwinding a ball of twine in
his hand, and looping various lengths on invisible tacks he had ready
in the door frame.
I was fascinated by the progress of the web. I forgot my terrors; I
began to follow Mr. Emerson's discourse. I was surprised to hear how
much there was to know about a dusty little spider, besides that he
could spin his webs as fast as my broom could sweep them away. The
drama of the spider's daily life became very real to me as the
lecturer went on. His struggle for existence; his wars with his
enemies; his wiles, his traps, his patient labors; the intricate
safeguards of his simple existence; the fitness of his body for his
surroundings, of his instincts for his vital needs--the whole picture
of the spider's pursuit of life under the direction of definite laws
filled me with a great wonder and left no room in my mind for
repugnance or fear. It was the first time the natural history of a
living creature had been presented to me under such circumstances that
I could not avoid hearing and seeing, and I was surprised at my
dulness in the past when I had rejected books on natural history.
I did not become an enthusiastic amateur naturalist at once; I did not
at once begin to collect worms and bugs. But on the next sweeping-day
I stood on a chair, craning my neck, to study the spider webs I
discovered in the corners of the ceiling; and one or two webs of more
than ordinary perfection I suffered to remain undisturbed for weeks,
although it was my duty, as a house-cleaner, to sweep the ceiling
clean. I began to watch for the mice that were wont to scurry across
the floor when the house slept and I alone waked. I even placed a
crust for them on the threshold of my room, and cultivated a
breathless intimacy with them, when the little gray beasts
acknowledged my hospitality by nibbling my crust in full sight. And so
by degrees I came to a better understanding of my animal neighbors on
all sides, and I began to look forward to the meetings of the Natural
History Club.
The club had frequent field excursions, in addition to the regular
meetings. At the seashore, in the woods, in the fields; at high
tide and low tide, in summer and winter, by sunlight and by moonlight,
the marvellous story of orderly nature was revealed to me, in
fragments that allured the imagination and made me beg for more. Some
of the members of the club were school-teachers, accustomed to
answering questions. All of them were patient; some of them took
special pains with me. But nobody took me seriously as a member of the
club. They called me the club mascot, and appointed me curator of the
club museum, which was not in existence, at a salary of ten cents a
year, which was never paid. And I was well pleased with my unique
position in the club, delighted with my new friends, enraptured with
my new study.
[Illustration: THE NATURAL HISTORY CLUB HAD FREQUENT FIELD
EXCURSIONS]
More and more, as the seasons rolled by, and page after page of the
book of nature was turned before my eager eyes, did I feel the wonder
and thrill of the revelations of science, till all my thoughts became
colored with the tints of infinite truths. My days arranged themselves
around the meetings of the club as a centre. The whole structure of my
life was transfigured by my novel experiences outdoors. I realized,
with a shock at first, but afterwards with complacency, that books
were taking a secondary place in my life, my irregular studies in
natural history holding the first place. I began to enjoy the Natural
History rooms; and I was obliged to admit to myself that my heart hung
with a more thrilling suspense over the fate of some beans I had
planted in a window box than over the fortunes of the classic hero
about whom we were reading at school.
But for all my enthusiasm about animals, plants, and rocks,--for all
my devotion to the Natural History Club,--I did not become a thorough
naturalist. My scientific friends were right not to take me
seriously. Mr. Winthrop, in his delightfully frank way, called me a
fraud; and I did not resent it. I dipped into zoölogy, botany,
geology, ornithology, and an infinite number of other ologies, as the
activities of the club or of particular members of it gave me
opportunity, but I made no systematic study of any branch of science;
at least not until I went to college. For what enthralled my
imagination in the whole subject of natural history was not the
orderly array of facts, but the glimpse I caught, through this or that
fragment of science, of the grand principles underlying the facts. By
asking questions, by listening when my wise friends talked, by
reading, by pondering and dreaming, I slowly gathered together the
kaleidoscopic bits of the stupendous panorama which is painted in the
literature of Darwinism. Everything I had ever learned at school was
illumined by this new knowledge; the world lay newly made under my
eyes. Vastly as my mind had stretched to embrace the idea of a great
country, when I exchanged Polotzk for America, it was no such
enlargement as I now experienced, when in place of the measurable
earth, with its paltry tale of historic centuries, I was given the
illimitable universe to contemplate, with the numberless æons of
infinite time.
As the meaning of nature was deepened for me, so was its aspect
beautified. Hitherto I had loved in nature the spectacular,--the
blazing sunset, the whirling tempest, the flush of summer, the
snow-wonder of winter. Now, for the first time, my heart was satisfied
with the microscopic perfection of a solitary blossom. The harmonious
murmur of autumn woods broke up into a hundred separate melodies, as
the pelting acorn, the scurrying squirrel, the infrequent chirp of
the lingering cricket, and the soft speed of ripe pine cones through
dense-grown branches, each struck its discriminate chord in the
scented air. The outdoor world was magnified in every dimension;
inanimate things were vivified; living things were dignified.
No two persons set the same value on any given thing, and so it may
very well be that I am boasting of the enrichment of my life through
the study of natural history to ears that hear not. I need only recall
my own obtuseness to the subject, before the story of the spider
sharpened my senses, to realize that these confessions of a nature
lover may bore every other person who reads them. But I do not pretend
to be concerned about the reader at this point. I never hope to
explain to my neighbor the exact value of a winter sunrise in my
spiritual economy, but I know that my life has grown better since I
learned to distinguish between a butterfly and a moth; that my faith
in man is the greater because I have watched for the coming of the
song sparrow in the spring; and my thoughts of immortality are the
less wavering because I have cherished the winter duckweed on my lawn.
Those who find their greatest intellectual and emotional satisfaction
in the study of nature are apt to refer their spiritual problems also
to science. That is how it went with me. Long before my introduction
to natural history I had realized, with an uneasy sense of the
breaking of peace, that the questions which I thought to have been
settled years before were beginning to tease me anew. In Russia I had
practised a prescribed religion, with little faith in what I
professed, and a restless questioning of the universe. When I came to
America I lightly dropped the religious forms that I had half mocked
before, and contented myself with a few novel phrases employed by my
father in his attempt to explain the riddle of existence. The busy
years flew by, when from morning till night I was preoccupied with the
process of becoming an American; and no question arose in my mind that
my books or my teachers could not fully answer. Then came a time when
the ordinary business of my girl's life discharged itself
automatically, and I had leisure once more to look over and around
things. This period coinciding with my moody adolescence, I rapidly
entangled myself in a net of doubts and questions, after the
well-known manner of a growing girl. I asked once more, How did I come
to be?--and I found that I was no whit wiser than poor Reb' Lebe, whom
I had despised for his ignorance. For all my years of America and
schooling, I could give no better answer to my clamoring questions
than the teacher of my childhood. Whence came the fair world? Was
there a God, after all? And if so, what did He intend when He made me?
It was always my way, if I wanted anything, to turn my daily life into
a pursuit of that thing. "Have you seen the treasure I seek?" I asked
of every man I met. And if it was God that I desired, I made all my
friends search their hearts for evidence of His being. I asked all the
wise people I knew what they were going to do with themselves after
death; and if the wise failed to satisfy me, I questioned the simple,
and listened to the babies talking in their sleep.
Still the imperative clamor of my mind remained unallayed. Was all my
life to be a hunger and a questioning? I complained of my teachers,
who stuffed my head with facts and gave my soul no crumb to feed on.
I blamed the stars for their silence. I sat up nights brooding over
the emptiness of knowledge, and praying for revelations.
Sometimes I lived for days in a chimera of doubts, feeling that it was
hardly worth while living at all if I was never to know why I was born
and why I could not live forever. It was in one of these prolonged
moods that I heard that a friend of mine, a distinguished man of
letters whom I greatly admired, was coming to Boston for a short
visit. A terrific New England blizzard arrived some hours in advance
of my friend's train, but so intent was I on questioning him that I
disregarded the weather, and struggled through towering snowdrifts, in
the teeth of the wild wind, to the railroad station. There I nearly
perished of weariness while waiting for the train, which was delayed
by the storm. But when my friend emerged from one of the snow-crusted
cars I was rewarded; for the blizzard had kept the reporters away, and
the great man could give me his undivided attention.
No doubt he understood the pressing importance of the matter to me,
from the trouble I had taken to secure an early interview with him. He
heard me out very soberly, and answered my questions as honestly as a
thinking man could. Not a word of what he said remains in my mind, but
I remember going away with the impression that it was possible to live
without knowing everything, after all, and that I might even try to be
happy in a world full of riddles.
In such ways as this I sought peace of mind, but I never achieved more
than a brief truce. I was coming to believe that only the stupid could
be happy, and that life was pretty hard on the philosophical, when
the great new interest of science came into my life, and scattered my
blue devils as the sun scatters the night damps.
Some of my friends in the Natural History Club were deeply versed in
the principles of evolutionary science, and were able to guide me in
my impetuous rush to learn everything in a day. I was in a hurry to
deduce, from the conglomeration of isolated facts that I picked up in
the lectures, the final solution of all my problems. It took both
patience and wisdom to check me and at the same time satisfy me, I
have no doubt; but then I was always fortunate in my friends. Wisdom
and patience in plenty were spent on me, and I was instructed and
inspired and comforted. Of course my wisest teacher was not able to
tell me how the original spark of life was kindled, nor to point out,
on the starry map of heaven, my future abode. The bread of absolute
knowledge I do not hope to taste in this life. But all creation was
remodelled on a grander scale by the utterances of my teachers; and my
problems, though they deepened with the expansion of all nameable
phenomena, were carried up to the heights of the impersonal, and
ceased to torment me. Seeing how life and death, beginning and end,
were all parts of the process of being, it mattered less in what
particular ripple of the flux of existence I found myself. If past
time was a trooping of similar yesterdays, back over the unbroken
millenniums, to the first moment, it was simple to think of future
time as a trooping of knowable to-days, on and on, to infinity.
Possibly, also, the spark of life that had persisted through the
geological ages, under a million million disguises, was vital enough
to continue for another earth-age, in some shape as potent as the
first or last. Thinking in æons and in races, instead of in years and
individuals, somehow lightened the burden of intelligence, and filled
me anew with a sense of youth and well-being, that I had almost lost
in the pit of my narrow personal doubts.
No one who understands the nature of youth will be misled, by this
summary of my intellectual history, into thinking that I actually
arranged my newly acquired scientific knowledge into any such orderly
philosophy as, for the sake of clearness, I have outlined above. I had
long passed my teens, and had seen something of life that is not
revealed to poetizing girls, before I could give any logical account
of what I read in the book of cosmogony. But the high peaks of the
promised land of evolution did flash on my vision in the earlier days,
and with these to guide me I rebuilt the world, and found it much
nobler than it had ever been before, and took great comfort in it.
I did not become a finished philosopher from hearing a couple of
hundred lectures on scientific subjects. I did not even become a
finished woman. If anything, I grew rather more girlish. I remember
myself as very merry in the midst of my serious scientific friends,
and I can think of no time when I was more inclined to play the tomboy
than when off for a day in the woods, in quest of botanical and
zoological specimens. The freedom of outdoors, the society of
congenial friends, the delight of my occupation--all acted as a strong
wine on my mood, and sent my spirits soaring to immoderate heights I
am very much afraid I made myself a nuisance, at times, to some of the
more sedate of my grown-up companions. I wish they could know that I
have truly repented. I wish they had known at the time that it was
the exuberance of my happiness that played tricks, and no wicked
desire to annoy kind friends. But I am sure that those who were
offended have long since forgotten or forgiven, and I need remember
nothing of those wonderful days other than that a new sun rose above a
new earth for me, and that my happiness was like unto the iridescent
dews.
CHAPTER XIX
A KINGDOM IN THE SLUMS
I did not always wait for the Natural History Club to guide me to
delectable lands. Some of the happiest days of that happy time I spent
with my sister in East Boston. We had a merry time at supper, Moses
making clever jokes, without cracking a smile himself; and the baby
romping in his high chair, eating what wasn't good for him. But the
best of the evening came later, when father and baby had gone to bed,
and the dishes were put away, and there was not a crumb left on the
red-and-white checked tablecloth. Frieda took out her sewing, and I
took a book; and the lamp was between us, shining on the table, on the
large brown roses on the wall, on the green and brown diamonds of the
oil cloth on the floor, on the baby's rattle on a shelf, and on the
shining stove in the corner. It was such a pleasant kitchen--such a
cosey, friendly room--that when Frieda and I were left alone I was
perfectly happy just to sit there. Frieda had a beautiful parlor, with
plush chairs and a velvet carpet and gilt picture frames; but we
preferred the homely, homelike kitchen.
I read aloud from Longfellow, or Whittier, or Tennyson; and it was as
great a treat to me as it was to Frieda. Her attention alone was
inspiring. Her delight, her eager questions doubled the meaning of the
lines I read. Poor Frieda had little enough time for reading, unless
she stole it from the sewing or the baking or the mending. But she was
hungry for books, and so grateful when I came to read to her that it
made me ashamed to remember all the beautiful things I had and did not
share with her.
It is true I shared what could be shared. I brought my friends to her.
At her wedding were some of the friends of whom I was most proud. Miss
Dillingham came, and Mr. Hurd; and the humbler guests stared in
admiration at our school-teachers and editors. But I had so many
delightful things that I could not bring to Frieda--my walks, my
dreams, my adventures of all sorts. And yet when I told her about
them, I found that she partook of everything. For she had her talent
for vicarious enjoyment, by means of which she entered as an actor
into my adventures, was present as a witness at the frolic of my
younger life. Or if I narrated things that were beyond her, on account
of her narrower experience, she listened with an eager longing to
understand that was better than some people's easy comprehension. My
world ever rang with good tidings, and she was grateful if I brought
her the echo of them, to ring again within the four walls of the
kitchen that bounded her life. And I, who lived on the heights, and
walked with the learned, and bathed in the crystal fountains of youth,
sometimes climbed the sublimest peak in my sister's humble kitchen,
there caught the unfaltering accents of inspiration, and rejoiced in
silver pools of untried happiness.
The way she reached out for everything fine was shown by her interest
in the incomprehensible Latin and French books that I brought. She
liked to hear me read my Cicero, pleased by the movement of the
sonorous periods. I translated Ovid and Virgil for her; and her
pleasure illumined the difficult passages, so that I seldom needed to
have recourse to the dictionary. I shall never forget the evening I
read to her, from the "Æneid," the passage in the fourth book
describing the death of Dido. I read the Latin first, and then my own
version in English hexameters, that I had prepared for a recitation at
school. Frieda forgot her sewing in her lap, and leaned forward in
rapt attention. When I was through, there were tears of delight in her
eyes; and I was surprised myself at the beauty of the words I had just
pronounced.
I do not dare to confess how much of my Latin I have forgotten, lest
any of the devoted teachers who taught me should learn the sad truth;
but I shall always boast of some acquaintance with Virgil, through
that scrap of the "Æneid" made memorable by my sister's enjoyment of
it.
Truly my education was not entirely in the hands of persons who had
licenses to teach. My sister's fat baby taught me things about the
origin and ultimate destiny of dimples that were not in any of my
school-books. Mr. Casey, of the second floor, who was drunk whenever
his wife was sober, gave me an insight into the psychology of the beer
mug that would have added to the mental furniture of my most scholarly
teacher. The bold-faced girls who passed the evening on the corner, in
promiscuous flirtation with the cock-eyed youths of the neighborhood,
unconsciously revealed to me the eternal secrets of adolescence. My
neighbor of the third floor, who sat on the curbstone with the scabby
baby in her bedraggled lap, had things to say about the fine ladies
who came in carriages to inspect the public bathhouse across the
street that ought to be repeated in the lecture halls of every school
of philanthropy. Instruction poured into my brain at such a rate that
I could not digest it all at the time; but in later years, when my
destiny had led me far from Dover Street, the emphatic moral of those
lessons became clear. The memory of my experience on Dover Street
became the strength of my convictions, the illumined index of my
purpose, the aureola of my happiness. And if I paid for those lessons
with days of privation and dread, with nights of tormenting anxiety, I
count the price cheap. Who would not go to a little trouble to find
out what life is made of? Life in the slums spins busily as a
schoolboy's top, and one who has heard its humming never forgets. I
look forward to telling, when I get to be a master of language, what I
read in the crooked cobblestones when I revisited Dover Street the
other day.
Dover Street was never really my residence--at least, not the whole of
it. It happened to be the nook where my bed was made, but I inhabited
the City of Boston. In the pearl-misty morning, in the ruby-red
evening, I was empress of all I surveyed from the roof of the tenement
house. I could point in any direction and name a friend who would
welcome me there. Off towards the northwest, in the direction of
Harvard Bridge, which some day I should cross on my way to Radcliffe
College, was one of my favorite palaces, whither I resorted every day
after school.
A low, wide-spreading building with a dignified granite front it was,
flanked on all sides by noble old churches, museums, and
school-houses, harmoniously disposed around a spacious triangle,
called Copley Square. Two thoroughfares that came straight from the
green suburbs swept by my palace, one on either side, converged at the
apex of the triangle, and pointed off, past the Public Garden, across
the historic Common, to the domed State House sitting on a height.
It was my habit to go very slowly up the low, broad steps to the
palace entrance, pleasing my eyes with the majestic lines of the
building, and lingering to read again the carved inscriptions: _Public
Library_--_Built by the People_--_Free to All_.
Did I not say it was my palace? Mine, because I was a citizen; mine,
though I was born an alien; mine, though I lived on Dover Street. My
palace--_mine_!
I loved to lean against a pillar in the entrance hall, watching the
people go in and out. Groups of children hushed their chatter at the
entrance, and skipped, whispering and giggling in their fists, up the
grand stairway, patting the great stone lions at the top, with an eye
on the aged policemen down below. Spectacled scholars came slowly down
the stairs, loaded with books, heedless of the lofty arches that
echoed their steps. Visitors from out of town lingered long in the
entrance hall, studying the inscriptions and symbols on the marble
floor. And I loved to stand in the midst of all this, and remind
myself that I was there, that I had a right to be there, that I was at
home there. All these eager children, all these fine-browed women, all
these scholars going home to write learned books--I and they had this
glorious thing in common, this noble treasure house of learning. It
was wonderful to say, _This is mine_; it was thrilling to say, _This
is ours_.
I visited every part of the building that was open to the public. I
spent rapt hours studying the Abbey pictures. I repeated to myself
lines from Tennyson's poem before the glowing scenes of the Holy
Grail. Before the "Prophets" in the gallery above I was mute, but
echoes of the Hebrew Psalms I had long forgotten throbbed somewhere in
the depths of my consciousness. The Chavannes series around the main
staircase I did not enjoy for years. I thought the pictures looked
faded, and their symbolism somehow failed to move me at first.
Bates Hall was the place where I spent my longest hours in the
library. I chose a seat far at one end, so that looking up from my
books I would get the full effect of the vast reading-room. I felt the
grand spaces under the soaring arches as a personal attribute of my
being.
The courtyard was my sky-roofed chamber of dreams. Slowly strolling
past the endless pillars of the colonnade, the fountain murmured in my
ear of all the beautiful things in all the beautiful world. I imagined
that I was a Greek of the classic days, treading on sandalled feet
through the glistening marble porticoes of Athens. I expected to see,
if I looked over my shoulder, a bearded philosopher in a drooping
mantle, surrounded by beautiful youths with wreathed locks. Everything
I read in school, in Latin or Greek, everything in my history books,
was real to me here, in this courtyard set about with stately columns.
Here is where I liked to remind myself of Polotzk, the better to bring
out the wonder of my life. That I who was born in the prison of the
Pale should roam at will in the land of freedom was a marvel that it
did me good to realize. That I who was brought up to my teens almost
without a book should be set down in the midst of all the books that
ever were written was a miracle as great as any on record. That an
outcast should become a privileged citizen, that a beggar should dwell
in a palace--this was a romance more thrilling than poet ever sung.
Surely I was rocked in an enchanted cradle.
[Illustration: BATES HALL, WHERE I SPENT MY LONGEST HOURS IN THE
LIBRARY]
From the Public Library to the State House is only a step, and I found
my way there without a guide. The State House was one of the places I
could point to and say that I had a friend there to welcome me. I do
not mean the representative of my district, though I hope he was a
worthy man. My friend was no less a man than the Honorable Senator
Roe, from Worcester, whose letters to me, written under the embossed
letter head of the Senate Chamber, I could not help exhibiting to
Florence Connolly.
How did I come by a Senator? Through being a citizen of Boston, of
course. To be a citizen of the smallest village in the United States
which maintains a free school and a public library is to stand in the
path of the splendid processions of opportunity. And as Boston has
rather better schools and a rather finer library than some other
villages, it comes natural there for children in the slums to summon
gentlemen from the State House to be their personal friends.
It is so simple, in Boston! You are a school-girl, and your teacher
gives you a ticket for the annual historical lecture in the Old South
Church, on Washington's Birthday. You hear a stirring discourse on
some subject in your country's history, and you go home with a heart
bursting with patriotism. You sit down and write a letter to the
speaker who so moved you, telling him how glad you are to be an
American, explaining to him, if you happen to be a recently made
American, why you love your adopted country so much better than your
native land. Perhaps the patriotic lecturer happens to be a Senator,
and he reads your letter under the vast dome of the State House; and
it occurs to him that he and his eminent colleagues and the stately
capitol and the glorious flag that floats above it, all gathered on
the hill above the Common, do his country no greater honor than the
outspoken admiration of an ardent young alien. The Senator replies to
your letter, inviting you to visit him at the State House; and in the
renowned chamber where the august business of the State is conducted,
you, an obscure child from the slums, and he, a chosen leader of the
people, seal a democratic friendship based on the love of a common
flag.
Even simpler than to meet a Senator was it to become acquainted with a
man like Edward Everett Hale. "The Grand Old Man of Boston," the
people called him, from the manner of his life among them. He kept
open house in every public building in the city. Wherever two citizens
met to devise a measure for the public weal, he was a third. Wherever
a worthy cause needed a champion, Dr. Hale lifted his mighty voice. At
some time or another his colossal figure towered above an eager
multitude from every pulpit in the city, from every lecture platform.
And where is the map of Boston that gives the names of the lost alleys
and back ways where the great man went in search of the lame in body,
who could not join the public assembly, in quest of the maimed in
spirit, who feared to show their faces in the open? If all the little
children who have sat on Dr. Hale's knee were started in a procession
on the State House steps, standing four abreast, there would be a lane
of merry faces across the Common, out to the Public Library, over
Harvard Bridge, and away beyond to remoter landmarks.
That I met Dr. Hale is no wonder. It was as inevitable as that I
should be a year older every twelvemonth. He was a part of Boston, as
the salt wave is a part of the sea. I can hardly say whether he came
to me or I came to him. We met, and my adopted country took me closer
to her breast.
A day or two after our first meeting I called on Dr. Hale, at his
invitation. It was only eight o'clock in the morning, you may be sure,
because he had risen early to attend to a hundred great affairs, and I
had risen early so as to talk with a great man before I went to
school. I think we liked each other a little the more for the fact
that when so many people were still asleep, we were already busy in
the interests of citizenship and friendship. We certainly liked each
other.
I am sure I did not stay more than fifteen minutes, and all that I
recall of our conversation was that Dr. Hale asked me a great many
questions about Russia, in a manner that made me feel that I was an
authority on the subject; and with his great hand in good-bye he gave
me a bit of homely advice, namely, that I should never study before
breakfast!
That was all, but for the rest of the day I moved against a background
of grandeur. There was a noble ring to Virgil that day that even my
teacher's firm translation had never brought out before. Obscure
points in the history lesson were clear to me alone, of the thirty
girls in the class. And it happened that the tulips in Copley Square
opened that day, and shone in the sun like lighted lamps.
Any one could be happy a year on Dover Street, after spending half an
hour on Highland Street. I enjoyed so many half-hours in the great
man's house that I do not know how to convey the sense of my
remembered happiness. My friend used to keep me in conversation a few
minutes, in the famous study that was fit to have been preserved as a
shrine; after which he sent me to roam about the house, and explore
his library, and take away what books I pleased. Who would feel
cramped in a tenement, with such royal privileges as these?
Once I brought Dr. Hale a present, a copy of a story of mine that had
been printed in a journal; and from his manner of accepting it you
might have thought that I was a princess dispensing gifts from a
throne. I wish I had asked him, that last time I talked with him, how
it was that he who was so modest made those who walked with him so
great.
Modest as the man was the house in which he lived. A gray old house of
a style that New England no longer builds, with a pillared porch
curtained by vines, set back in the yard behind the old trees.
Whatever cherished flowers glowed in the garden behind the house, the
common daisy was encouraged to bloom in front. And was there sun or
snow on the ground, the most timid hand could open the gate, the most
humble visitor was sure of a welcome. Out of that modest house the
troubled came comforted, the fallen came uplifted, the noble came
inspired.
My explorations of Dr. Hale's house might not have brought me to the
gables, but for my friend's daughter, the artist, who had a studio at
the top of the house. She asked me one day if I would sit for a
portrait, and I consented with the greatest alacrity. It would be an
interesting experience, and interesting experiences were the bread of
life to me. I agreed to come every Saturday morning, and felt that
something was going to happen to Dover Street.
[Illustration: THE FAMOUS STUDY, THAT WAS FIT TO HAVE BEEN
PRESERVED AS A SHRINE]
When I came home from my talk with Miss Hale, I studied myself long in
my blotched looking-glass. I saw just what I expected. My face was too
thin, my nose too large, my complexion too dull. My hair, which was
curly enough, was too short to be described as luxurious tresses; and
the color was neither brown nor black. My hands were neither white nor
velvety; the fingers ended decidedly, instead of tapering off like
rosy dreams. I was disgusted with my wrists; they showed too far below
the tight sleeves of my dress of the year before last, and they looked
consumptive.
No, it was not for my beauty that Miss Hale wanted to paint me. It was
because I was a girl, a person, a piece of creation. I understood
perfectly. If I could write an interesting composition about a broom,
why should not an artist be able to make an interesting picture of me?
I had done it with the broom, and the milk wagon, and the rain spout.
It was not what a thing was that made it interesting, but what I was
able to draw out of it. It was exciting to speculate as to what Miss
Hale was going to draw out of me.
The first sitting was indeed exciting. There was hardly any sitting to
it. We did nothing but move around the studio, and move the easel
around, and try on ever so many backgrounds, and ever so many poses.
In the end, of course, we left everything just as it had been at the
start, because Miss Hale had had the right idea from the beginning;
but I understood that a preliminary tempest in the studio was the
proper way to test that idea.
I was surprised to find that I should not be obliged to hold my
breath, and should be allowed to wink all I wanted. Posing was just
sitting with my hands in my lap, and enjoying the most interesting
conversation with the artist. We hit upon such out-of-the-way
topics--once, I remember, we talked about the marriage laws of
different states! I had a glorious time, and I believe Miss Hale did
too. I watched the progress of the portrait with utter lack of
comprehension, and with perfect faith in the ultimate result. The
morning flew so fast that I could have sat right on into the afternoon
without tiring.
Once or twice I stayed to lunch, and sat opposite the artist's mother
at table. It was like sitting face to face with Martha Washington, I
thought. Everything was wonderful in that wonderful old house.
One thing disturbed my enjoyment of those Saturday mornings. It was a
small thing, hardly as big as a pen-wiper. It was a silver coin which
Miss Hale gave me regularly when I was going. I knew that models were
paid for sitting, but I was not a professional model. When people sat
for their portraits they usually paid the artist, instead of the
artist paying them. Of course I had not ordered this portrait, but I
had such a good time sitting that it did not seem to me I could be
earning money. But what troubled me was not the suspicion that I did
not earn the money, but that I did not know what was in my friend's
mind when she gave it to me. Was it possible that Miss Hale had asked
me to sit on purpose to be able to pay me, so that I could help pay
the rent? Everybody knew about the rent sooner or later, because I was
always asking my friends what a girl could do to make the landlady
happy. Very possibly Miss Hale had my landlady in mind when she asked
me to pose. I might have asked her--I dearly loved explanations, which
cleared up hidden motives--but her answer would not have made any
real difference. I should have accepted the money just the same. Miss
Hale was not a stranger, like Mr. Strong when he offered me a quarter.
She knew me, she believed in my cause, and she wanted to contribute to
it. Thus I, in my hair-splitting analyses of persons and motives;
while the portrait went steadily on.
It was Miss Hale who first found a use for our superfluous baby. She
came to Dover Street several times to study our tiny Celia, in
swaddling clothes improvised by my mother, after the fashion of the
old country. Miss Hale wanted a baby for a picture of the Nativity
which she was doing for her father's church; and of all the babies in
Boston, our Celia, our little Jewish Celia, was posing for the Christ
Child! It does not matter in this connection that the Infant that lies
in the lantern light, brooded over by the Mother's divine sorrow of
love, in the beautiful altar piece in Dr. Hale's church, was not
actually painted from my mother's baby, in the end. The point is that
my mother, in less than half a dozen years of America, had so far
shaken off her ancient superstitions that she feared no evil
consequence from letting her child pose for a Christian picture.
A busy life I led, on Dover Street; a happy, busy life. When I was not
reciting lessons, nor writing midnight poetry, nor selling papers, nor
posing, nor studying sociology, nor pickling bugs, nor interviewing
statesmen, nor running away from home, I made long entries in nay
journal, or wrote forty-page letters to my friends. It was a happy
thing that poor Mrs. Hutch did not know what sums I spent for
stationery and postage stamps. She would have gone into consumption, I
do believe, from inexpressible indignation; and she would have been
in the right--to be indignant, not to go into consumption. I admit it;
she would have been justified--from her point of view. From my point
of view I was also in the right; of course I was. To make friends
among the great was an important part of my education, and was not to
be accomplished without a liberal expenditure of paper and postage
stamps. If Mrs. Hutch had not repulsed my offer of confidences, I
could have shown her long letters written to me by people whose mere
signature was prized by autograph hunters. It is true that I could not
turn those letters directly into rent-money,--or if I could, I would
not,--but indirectly my interesting letters did pay a week's rent now
and then. Through the influence of my friends my father sometimes
found work that he could not have got in any other way. These
practical results of my costly pursuit of friendships might have given
Mrs. Hutch confidence in my ultimate solvency, had she not remained
obstinately deaf to my plea for time, her heart being set on direct,
immediate, convertible cash payment.
That was very narrow-minded, even though I say it who should not. The
grocer on Harrison Avenue who supplied our table could have taught her
to take a more liberal view. We were all anxious to teach her, if she
only would have listened. Here was this poor grocer, conducting his
business on the same perilous credit system which had driven my father
out of Chelsea and Wheeler Street, supplying us with tea and sugar and
strong butter, milk freely splashed from rusty cans, potent yeast, and
bananas done to a turn,--with everything, in short, that keeps a poor
man's family hearty in spite of what they eat,--and all this for the
consideration of part payment, with the faintest prospect of a future
settlement in full. Mr. Rosenblum had an intimate knowledge of the
financial situation of every family that traded with him, from the
gossip of his customers around his herring barrel. He knew without
asking that my father had no regular employment, and that,
consequently, it was risky to give us credit. Nevertheless he gave us
credit by the week, by the month, accepted partial payment with
thanks, and let the balance stand by the year.
We owed him as much as the landlady, I suppose, every time he balanced
our account. But he never complained; nay, he even insisted on my
mother's taking almonds and raisins for a cake for the holidays. He
knew, as well as Mrs. Hutch, that my father kept a daughter at school
who was of age to be put to work; but so far was he from reproaching
him for it that he detained my father by the half-hour, inquiring
about my progress and discussing my future. He knew very well, did the
poor grocer, who it was that burned so much oil in my family; but when
I came in to have my kerosene can filled, he did not fall upon me with
harsh words of blame. Instead, he wanted to hear about my latest
triumph at school, and about the great people who wrote me letters and
even came to see me; and he called his wife from the kitchen behind
the store to come and hear of these grand doings. Mrs. Rosenblum, who
could not sign her name, came out in her faded calico wrapper, and
stood with her hands folded under her apron, shy and respectful before
the embryo scholar; and she nodded her head sideways in approval,
drinking in with envious pleasure her husband's Yiddish version of my
tale. If her black-eyed Goldie happened to be playing jackstones on
the curb, Mrs. Rosenblum pulled her into the store, to hear what
distinction Mr. Antin's daughter had won at school, bidding her take
example from Mary, if she would also go far in education.
"Hear you, Goldie? She has the best marks, in everything, Goldie, all
the time. She is only five years in the country, and she'll be in
college soon. She beats them all in school, Goldie--her father says
she beats them all. She studies all the time--all night--and she
writes, it is a pleasure to hear. She writes in the paper, Goldie. You
ought to hear Mr. Antin read what she writes in the paper. Long
pieces--"
"You don't understand what he reads, ma," Goldie interrupts
mischievously; and I want to laugh, but I refrain. Mr. Rosenblum does
not fill my can; I am forced to stand and hear myself eulogized.
"Not understand? Of course I don't understand. How should I
understand? I was not sent to school to learn. Of course I don't
understand. But _you_ don't understand, Goldie, and that's a shame. If
you would put your mind on it, and study hard, like Mary Antin, you
would also stand high, and you would go to high school, and be
somebody."
"Would you send me to high school, pa?" Goldie asks, to test her
mother's promises. "Would you really?"
"Sure as I am a Jew," Mr. Rosenblum promptly replies, a look of
aspiration in his deep eyes. "Only show yourself worthy, Goldie, and
I'll keep you in school till you get to something. In America
everybody can get to something, if he only wants to. I would even send
you farther than high school--to be a teacher, maybe. Why not? In
America everything is possible. But you have to work hard, Goldie,
like Mary Antin--study hard, put your mind on it."
"Oh, I know it, pa!" Goldie exclaims, her momentary enthusiasm
extinguished at the thought of long lessons indefinitely prolonged.
Goldie was a restless little thing who could not sit long over her
geography book. She wriggled out of her mother's grasp now, and made
for the door, throwing a "back-hand" as she went, without losing a
single jackstone. "I hate long lessons," she said. "When I graduate
grammar school next year I'm going to work in Jordan-Marsh's big
store, and get three dollars a week, and have lots of fun with the
girls. I can't write pieces in the paper, anyhow.--Beckie! Beckie
Hurvich! Where you going? Wait a minute, I'll go along." And she was
off, leaving her ambitious parents to shake their heads over her
flightiness.
Mr. Rosenblum gave me my oil. If he had had postage stamps in stock,
he would have given me all I needed, and felt proud to think that he
was assisting in my important correspondences. And he was a poor man,
and had a large family, and many customers who paid as irregularly as
we. He ran the risk of ruin, of course, but he did not scold--not us,
at any rate. For he _understood_. He was himself an immigrant Jew of
the type that values education, and sets a great price on the higher
development of the child. He would have done in my father's place just
what my father was doing: borrow, beg, go without, run in
debt--anything to secure for a promising child the fulfilment of the
promise. That is what America was for. The land of opportunity it was,
but opportunities must be used, must be grasped, held, squeezed dry.
To keep a child of working age in school was to invest the meagre
present for the sake of the opulent future. If there was but one
child in a family of twelve who promised to achieve an intellectual
career, the other eleven, and father, and mother, and neighbors must
devote themselves to that one child's welfare, and feed and clothe and
cheer it on, and be rewarded in the end by hearing its name mentioned
with the names of the great.
So the poor grocer helped to keep me in school for I do not know how
many years. And this is one of the things that is done on Harrison
Avenue, by the people who pitch rubbish through their windows. Let the
City Fathers strike the balance.
Of course this is wretched economics. If I had a son who wanted to go
into the grocery business, I should take care that he was well
grounded in the principles of sound bookkeeping and prudence. But I
should not fail to tell him the story of the Harrison Avenue grocer,
hoping that he would puzzle out the moral.
Mr. Rosenblum himself would be astonished to hear that any one was
drawing morals from his manner of conducting his little store, and yet
it is from men like him that I learn the true values of things. The
grocer weighed me out a quarter of a pound of butter, and when the
scales were even he threw in another scrap. "_Na!_" he said, smiling
across the counter, "you can carry that much around the corner!"
Plainly he was showing me that if I have not as many houses as my
neighbor, that should not prevent me from cultivating as many graces.
If I made some shame-faced reference to the unpaid balance, Mr.
Rosenblum replied, "I guess you're not thinking of running away from
Boston yet. You haven't finished turning the libraries inside out,
have you?" In this way he reminded me that there were things more
important than conventional respectability. The world belongs to those
who can use it to the best advantage, the grocer seemed to argue; and
I found that I had the courage to test this philosophy.
From my little room on Dover Street I reached out for the world, and
the world came to me. Through books, through the conversation of noble
men and women, through communion with the stars in the depth of night,
I entered into every noble chamber of the palace of life. I employed
no charm to win admittance. The doors opened to me because I had a
right to be within. My patent of nobility was the longing for the
abundance of life with which I was endowed at birth; and from the time
I could toddle unaided I had been gathering into my hand everything
that was fine in the world around me. Given health and standing-room,
I should have worked out my salvation even on a desert island. Being
set down in the garden of America, where opportunity waits on
ambition, I was bound to make my days a triumphal march toward my
goal. The most unfriendly witness of my life will not venture to deny
that I have been successful. For aside from subordinate desires for
greatness or wealth or specific achievement, my chief ambition in life
has been _to live_, and I have lived. A glowing life has been mine,
and the fires that blazed highest in all my days were kindled on Dover
Street.
I have never had a dull hour in my life; I have never had a livelier
time than in the slums. In all my troubles I was thrilled through and
through with a prophetic sense of how they were to end. A halo of
romance floated before every to-morrow; the wings of future
adventures rustled in the dead of night. Nothing could be quite common
that touched my life, because I had a power for attracting uncommon
things. And when my noblest dreams shall have been realized I shall
meet with nothing finer, nothing more remote from the commonplace,
than some of the things that came into my life on Dover Street.
Friends came to me bearing noble gifts of service, inspiration, and
love. There came one, to talk with whom was to double the volume of
life. She left roses on my pillow when I lay ill, and in my heart she
planted a longing for greatness that I have yet to satisfy. Another
came whose soul was steeped in sunshine, whose eyes saw through every
pretence, whose lips mocked nothing holy. And one came who carried the
golden key that unlocked the last secret chamber of life for me.
Friends came trooping from everywhere, and some were poor, and some
were rich, but all were devoted and true; and they left no niche in my
heart unfilled, and no want unsatisfied.
To be alive in America, I found out long ago, is to ride on the
central current of the river of modern life; and to have a conscious
purpose is to hold the rudder that steers the ship of fate. I was
alive to my finger tips, back there on Dover Street, and all my
girlish purposes served one main purpose. It would have been amazing
if I had stuck in the mire of the slum. By every law of my nature I
was bound to soar above it, to attain the fairer places that wait for
every emancipated immigrant.
A characteristic thing about the aspiring immigrant is the fact that
he is not content to progress alone. Solitary success is imperfect
success in his eyes. He must take his family with him as he rises. So
when I refused to be adopted by a rich old man, and clung to my
family in the slums, I was only following the rule; and I can tell it
without boasting, because it is no more to my credit than that I wake
refreshed after a night's sleep.
This suggests to me a summary of my virtues, through the exercise of
which I may be said to have attracted my good fortune. I find that I
have always given nature a chance, I have used my opportunities, and
have practised self-expression. So much my enemies will grant me; more
than this my friends cannot claim for me.
In the Dover Street days I did not philosophize about my private
character, nor about the immigrant and his ways. I lived the life, and
the moral took care of itself. And after Dover Street came Applepie
Alley, Letterbox Lane, and other evil corners of the slums of Boston,
till it must have looked to our neighbors as if we meant to go on
forever exploring the underworld. But we found a short-cut--we found a
short-cut! And the route we took from the tenements of the stifling
alleys to a darling cottage of our own, where the sun shines in at
every window, and the green grass runs up to our very doorstep, was
surveyed by the Pilgrim Fathers, who trans-scribed their field notes
on a very fine parchment and called it the Constitution of the United
States.
It was good to get out of Dover Street--it was better for the growing
children, better for my weary parents, better for all of us, as the
clean grass is better than the dusty pavement. But I must never forget
that I came away from Dover Street with my hands full of riches. I
must not fail to testify that in America a child of the slums owns the
land and all that is good in it. All the beautiful things I saw
belonged to me, if I wanted to use them; all the beautiful things I
desired approached me. I did not need to seek my kingdom. I had only
to be worthy, and it came to me, even on Dover Street. Everything that
was ever to happen to me in the future had its germ or impulse in the
conditions of my life on Dover Street. My friendships, my advantages
and disadvantages, my gifts, my habits, my ambitions--these were the
materials out of which I built my after life, in the open workshop of
America. My days in the slums were pregnant with possibilities; it
only needed the ripeness of events to make them fruit forth in
realities. Steadily as I worked to win America, America advanced to
lie at my feet. I was an heir, on Dover Street, awaiting maturity. I
was a princess waiting to be led to the throne.
CHAPTER XX
THE HERITAGE
One of the inherent disadvantages of premature biography is that it
cannot go to the natural end of the story. This difficulty threatened
me in the beginning, but now I find I do not need to tax my judgment
to fix the proper stopping-place. Sudden qualms of reluctance warn me
where the past and present meet. I have reached a point where my
yesterdays lie in a quick heap, and I cannot bear to prod and turn
them and set them up to be looked at. For that matter, I am not sure
that I should add anything really new, even if I could force myself to
cross the line of discretion. I have already shown what a real thing
is this American freedom that we talk about, and in what manner a
certain class of aliens make use of it. Anything that I might add of
my later adventures would be a repetition, in substance, of what I
have already described. Having traced the way an immigrant child may
take from the ship through the public schools, passed on from hand to
hand by the ready teachers; through free libraries and lecture halls,
inspired by every occasion of civic consciousness; dragging through
the slums the weight of private disadvantage, but heartened for the
effort by public opportunity; welcomed at a hundred open doors of
instruction, initiated with pomp and splendor and flags unfurled
seeking, in American minds, the American way, and finding it in the
thoughts of the noble,--striving against the odds of foreign birth and
poverty, and winning, through the use of abundant opportunity, a
place as enviable as that of any native child,--having traced the
footsteps of the young immigrant almost to the college gate, the rest
of the course may be left to the imagination. Let us say that from the
Latin School on I lived very much as my American schoolmates lived,
having overcome my foreign idiosyncrasies, and the rest of my outward
adventures you may read in any volume of American feminine statistics.
But lest I be reproached for a sudden affectation of reserve, after
having trained my reader to expect the fullest particulars, I am
willing to add a few details. I went to college, as I proposed, though
not to Radcliffe. Receiving an invitation to live in New York that I
did not like to refuse, I went to Barnard College instead. There I
took all the honors that I deserved; and if I did not learn to write
poetry, as I once supposed I should, I learned at least to think in
English without an accent. Did I get rich? you may want to know,
remembering my ambition to provide for the family. I can reply that I
have earned enough to pay Mrs. Hutch the arrears, and satisfy all my
wants. And where have I lived since I left the slums? My favorite
abode is a tent in the wilderness, where I shall be happy to serve you
a cup of tea out of a tin kettle, and answer further questions.
And is this really to be the last word? Yes, though a long chapter of
the romance of Dover Street is left untold. I could fill another book
with anecdotes, telling how I took possession of Beacon Street, and
learned to distinguish the lord of the manor from the butler in full
dress. I might trace my steps from my bare room overlooking the
lumber-yard to the satin drawing-rooms of the Back Bay, where I drank
afternoon tea with gentle ladies whose hands were as delicate as
their porcelain cups. My journal of those days is full of comments on
the contrasts of life, that I copied from my busy thoughts in the
evening, after a visit to my aristocratic friends. Coming straight
from the cushioned refinement of Beacon Street, where the maid who
brought my hostess her slippers spoke in softer accents than the
finest people on Dover Street, I sometimes stumbled over poor Mr.
Casey lying asleep in the corridor; and the shock of the contrast was
like a searchlight turned suddenly on my life, and I pondered over the
revelation, and wrote touching poems, in which I figured as a heroine
of two worlds.
I might quote from my journals and poems, and build up the picture of
that double life. I might rehearse the names of the gracious friends
who admitted me to their tables, although I came direct from the
reeking slums. I might enumerate the priceless gifts they showered on
me; gifts bought not with gold but with love. It would be a pleasant
task to recall the high things that passed in the gilded drawing-rooms
over the afternoon tea. It would add a splendor to my simple narrative
to weave in the portraits of the distinguished men and women who
busied themselves with the humble fortunes of a school-girl. And
finally, it would relieve my heart of a burden of gratitude to
publish, once for all, the amount of my indebtedness to the devoted
friends who took me by the hand when I walked in the paths of
obscurity, and led me, by a pleasanter lane than I could have found by
myself, to the open fields where obstacles thinned and opportunities
crowded to meet me. Outside America I should hardly be believed if I
told how simply, in my experience, Dover Street merged into the Back
Bay. These are matters to which I long to testify, but I must wait
till they recede into the past.
I can conjure up no better symbol of the genuine, practical equality
of all our citizens than the Hale House Natural History Club, which
played an important part in my final emancipation from the slums. For
all I was regarded as a plaything by the serious members of the club,
the attention and kindness they lavished on me had a deep
significance. Every one of those earnest men and women unconsciously
taught me my place in the Commonwealth, as the potential equal of the
best of them. Few of my friends in the club, it is true, could have
rightly defined their benevolence toward me. Perhaps some of them
thought they befriended me for charity's sake, because I was a starved
waif from the slums. Some of them imagined they enjoyed my society,
because I had much to say for myself, and a gay manner of meeting
life. But all these were only secondary motives. I myself, in my
unclouded perception of the true relation of things that concerned me,
could have told them all why they spent their friendship on me. They
made way for me because I was their foster sister. They opened their
homes to me that I might learn how good Americans lived. In the least
of their attentions to me, they cherished the citizen in the making.
* * * * *
The Natural History Club had spent the day at Nahant, studying marine
life in the tide pools, scrambling up and down the cliffs with no
thought for decorum, bent only on securing the starfish, limpets,
sea-urchins, and other trophies of the chase. There had been a merry
luncheon on the rocks, with talk and laughter between sandwiches, and
strange jokes, intelligible only to the practising naturalist. The
tide had rushed in at its proper time, stealing away our seaweed
cushions, drowning our transparent pools, spouting in the crevices,
booming and hissing, and tossing high the snowy foam.
[Illustration: THE TIDE HAD RUSHED IN, STEALING AWAY OUR SEAWEED
CUSHIONS]
From the deck of the jolly excursion steamer which was carrying us
home, we had watched the rosy sun dip down below the sea. The members
of the club, grouped in twos and threes, discussed the day's
successes, compared specimens, exchanged field notes, or watched the
western horizon in sympathetic silence.
It had been a great day for me. I had seen a dozen new forms of life,
had caught a hundred fragments of the song of nature by the sea; and
my mind was seething with meanings that crowded in. I do not remember
to which of my learned friends I addressed my questions on this
occasion, but he surely was one of the most learned. For he took up
all my fragments of dawning knowledge in his discourse, and welded
them into a solid structure of wisdom, with windows looking far down
the past and a tower overlooking the future. I was so absorbed in my
private review of creation that I hardly realized when we landed, or
how we got into the electric cars, till we were a good way into the
city.
At the Public Library I parted from my friends, and stood on the broad
stone steps, my jar of specimens in my hand, watching the car that
carried them glide out of sight. My heart was full of a stirring
wonder. I was hardly conscious of the place where I stood, or of the
day, or the hour. I was in a dream, and the familiar world around me
was transfigured. My hair was damp with sea spray; the roar of the
tide was still in my ears. Mighty thoughts surged through my dreams,
and I trembled with understanding.
I sank down on the granite ledge beside the entrance to the Library,
and for a mere moment I covered my eyes with my hand. In that moment I
had a vision of myself, the human creature, emerging from the dim
places where the torch of history has never been, creeping slowly into
the light of civilized existence, pushing more steadily forward to the
broad plateau of modern life, and leaping, at last, strong and glad,
to the intellectual summit of the latest century.
What an awful stretch of years to contemplate! What a weighty past to
carry in memory! How shall I number the days of my life, except by the
stars of the night, except by the salt drops of the sea?
But hark to the clamor of the city all about! This is my latest home,
and it invites me to a glad new life. The endless ages have indeed
throbbed through my blood, but a new rhythm dances in my veins. My
spirit is not tied to the monumental past, any more than my feet were
bound to my grandfather's house below the hill. The past was only my
cradle, and now it cannot hold me, because I am grown too big; just as
the little house in Polotzk, once my home, has now become a toy of
memory, as I move about at will in the wide spaces of this splendid
palace, whose shadow covers acres. No! it is not I that belong to the
past, but the past that belongs to me. America is the youngest of the
nations, and inherits all that went before in history. And I am the
youngest of America's children, and into my hands is given all her
priceless heritage, to the last white star espied through the
telescope, to the last great thought of the philosopher. Mine is the
whole majestic past, and mine is the shining future.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
_To my mother who bore me; to my father who endowed me; to my
brothers and sisters who believed in me; to my friends who loved
me; to my teachers who inspired me; to my neighbors who
befriended me; to my daughter who enlarged me; to my husband who
opened the door of the greater life for me;--to all these who
helped to make this book, I give my thanks._
GLOSSARY
KEY TO PRONUNCIATION
a as in man
ä as in far
e as in met
ē as in meet
ë as long e in German Leder
i as in pin
ī as in file
o as in not
ō as in note
ö as in German König
u as in circus
ū as in mute
u̇ as in pull
ai as in aisle
oi as in joint
ch as in German ach, Scotch loch
ḥ as in German ach, Scotch loch
l̂ as in failure
ñ as in cañon
zh as z in seizure.
_Explanations_
The abbreviations _Germ._ (= German), _Hebr._ (= Hebrew), _Russ._
(= Russian), and _Yid._ (= Yiddish) indicate the origin of a word.
Most of the names marked _Yiddish_ are such in form only, the roots
being for the most part Hebrew.
Prop. n = proper name.
The endings _ke_ and _le_ of Yiddish proper names (Mashke, Perele)
have a diminutive or endearing value, like the German _chen_
(Helenchen).
Double names are given under the first name.
The religious customs described prevail among the Orthodox Jews of
European countries. In the United States they have been considerably
modified, especially among the Reformed Jews.
=Ab= (äb) _Hebr._ The fifth month of the Hebrew calendar. The
ninth of Ab is a day of fasting and mourning, in commemoration
of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple.
=Adonai= (ä-do-nai´), _Hebr._ An appellation of God.
=Aleph= (ä'-lef), _Hebr._ The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
=Atonement, Day of= (Hebrew, _Yom Kippur_). The most solemn of the
Hebrew festivals, observed by fasting and an elaborate
ceremonial.
=Bahur= (bä´-hur), _Hebr._ A young unmarried man, particularly a
student of the Talmud. (See _Yeshibah bahur_.)
=Berl= (berl). _Yid._ Prop. n.
=Cabala= (käb-ä´-lä), _Hebr._ A system of Hebrew mystic philosophy
which flourished in the Middle Ages.
=Candle Prayer= (Yiddish, _licht bentschen_). Prayer pronounced
over lighted candles by the women and older girls of the
household at the commencement of the Sabbath.
=Canopy, wedding= (Hebrew _huppah_). A portable canopy under which
the marriage ceremony is performed, usually outdoors.
=Cossaks= (kos´-aks), _Russ._ A name given to certain Russian
tribes, formerly distinguished for their freebooting habits, now
best known for their position in the army.
=Dayyan= (dai´-an), _Hebr._ A judge to whom are submitted civil
disputes, as distinguished from purely religious questions,
which are decided by the Rav.
=Dinke= (din´-ke), _Yid._ Prop. n.
=Dvina= (dvē´-nä), _Russ._ Name of a river.
=Dvornik= (dvor´-nik), _Russ._ An outdoor man; a choreman.
=Dvoshe= (dvo´-she), _Yid._ Prop. n.
=Earlocks= (Hebrew _peath_). Two locks of hair allowed to grow long
and hang in front of the ears. Among the fanatical Hasidim, a
mark of piety.
=Eidtkuhnen= (eit-koo´-ñen), _Germ._ Name of a Russo-German
frontier town.
=Fetchke= (fëtch´-ke), _Yid._ Prop. n.
=Fringes, sacred= (Hebrew _zizit_). Specially prepared fringes
fastened to the four corners of the _arba kanfot_ (literally,
"four-corners"), a garment worn by all pious males underneath
the jacket or frock coat, usually with the fringes showing. The
latter play a part in the daily ritual.
=Goluth= (gol´-ut), _Hebr._ Banishment; exile.
=Good Jew= (Yiddish _guter id_). Among the Hasidim, a title
popularly accorded to more or less learned individuals
distinguished for their piety, and credited with supernatural
powers of healing, divination, etc. Pilgrimages to some renowned
"Good Jew" were often undertaken by the very pious, on occasions
of perplexity or trouble, for the purpose of obtaining his
advice or help.
=Groschen= (gro´-shen), _Germ._ A popular name for various coins of
small denomination, especially the half-kopeck.
=Gutke= (gut´-ke), _Yid._ Prop. n.
=Hannah Hayye= (ḥän´-a ḥai´-e), _Hebr._ Prop. n.
=Hasid=, pl. =Hasidim= (ḥäs´-id, ḥas-id´-im), _Hebr._ A
numerous sect of Jews distinguished for their enthusiasm in
religious observance, a fanatical worship of their rabbis and
many superstitious practices.
=Haven Mirel= (ḥa´-ve mirl), _Hebr._ and _Yid._ Prop. n.
=Hayye Dvoshe= (ḥai´-e dvo´-she), _Hebr._ and _Yid._ Prop. n.
=Hayyim= (ḥai´-im), _Hebr._ Prop. n.
=Hazzan= (ḥäz-an), _Hebr._ Cantor in a synagogue.
=Heder= (ḥë´-der), _Hebr._ Elementary Hebrew school, usually
held at the teacher's residence.
=Henne Rösel= (he´-ñe rözl), _Yid._ Prop. n.
=Hirshel= (hir´-shl), _Yid._ Prop. n.
=Hode= (ho´-de), _Yid._ Prop. n.
=Horn, ram's= (Hebrew _shofar_). Ritual horn, used in the synagogue
during the great festivals.
=Hossen= (ḥo´-ssn), _Hebr._ Bridegroom; prospective bridegroom;
betrothed.
=Humesh= (ḥu̇´-mesh), _Hebr._ The Pentateuch.
=Icon= (ī´-kon) _Russ._ A representation of Christ or some
saint, usually in an elaborate frame, found in every orthodox
Russian house.
=Itke= (it´-ke), _Yid._ Prop. n.
=Jew, Good.= See under =Good=.
=Kibart= (ki-bärt´), _Russ._ Name of a town.
=Kiddush= (kid´-ush), _Hebr._ Benediction pronounced over a cup of
wine before the Sabbath evening meal.
=Kimanye= (ki-mä´-ñe), _Russ._ Name of a village.
=Kimanyer= (ki-mä´-ñer), _Yid._ Belonging to or hailing from the
village of Kimanye.
=Knupf= (knupf), _Yid._ A sort of turban.
=Kopeck= (ko´-pek), _Russ._ A copper coin, the 1/100 part of a
ruble, worth about half a cent.
=Kopistch= (ko´-pistch), _Russ._ Name of a town.
=Kosher= (ko´-sher), _Hebr._ Clean, according to Jewish ritual law;
opposed to =tref=, unclean. Applied chiefly to articles of diet
and cooking and eating vessels.
=Lamden= (läm´-den), _Hebr._ Scholar; one versed in Hebrew
learning.
=Law, the= (specifically used). The Mosaic Law; the Torah.
=Lebe= (lë´-be), _Yid._ Prop. n.
=Loaf, Sabbath.= See under Sabbath.
=Lozhe= (lo´-zhe), _Yid._ Prop. n.
=Lubavitch= (lu̇-bäv´-itch), _Russ._ Name of a town.
=Maryashe= (mär-yä´-she), _Yid._ Prop. n.
=Mashinke= (mä´-shin-ke), _Yid._ A diminutive of Mashke.
=Mashke= (mäsh´-ke), _Yid._ Prop. n.
=Mendele= (men´-del-e), _Yid._ Prop. n.
=Mezuzah= (me-zu´-zä), _Hebr._ A piece of parchment inscribed with
a passage of Scripture, rolled in a case and tacked to the
doorpost. The pious touch or kiss this when leaving or entering
a house.
=Mikweh= (mik´-we), _Hebr._ Ritual bath, constructed and used
according to minute directions.
=Mirele= (mir´-e-le), _Yid._ Prop. n.
=Mishka= (mish´-kä), _Russ._ Prop. n.
=Moon, blessing of.= Benediction pronounced at the appearance of
the new moon.
=Moshe= (mo´-she), _Yid._ Prop, n., a form of Moses.
=Möshele= (mo´-she-le), _Yid._ Prop, n., diminutive of Moshe.
=Mulke= (ṁu̇l̂´-ke), _Yid._ Prop, n., diminutive of Mulye.
=Mulye= (mu̇l̂´-e), _Yid._ Prop. n.
=Na!= (nä), _Yid._ Here you are! Take it!
=Nohem= (no´-ḥem), _Hebr._ Prop. n.
=Nu, nu!= (nu̇, nu̇), _Yid._ Well, well.
=Oi, weh!= (oi, vë), _Yid._ Woe is me!
=Oven, sealing of.= As no fire is kindled on the Sabbath, the
Sabbath dinner is cooked on Friday afternoon and left in the
brick oven overnight. The oven is tightly closed with a board or
sheet of metal, wet rags being stuffed into the interstices.
=Passover= (Hebrew, _pesech_). The feast of Unleavened Bread,
commemorating the escape of the Israelites from Egypt.
=Passport, foreign.= A special passport required of any Russian
subject wishing to go to a foreign country. To avoid the
necessity of procuring such a passport, travellers often cross
the border by stealth.
=Perele= (per´-e-le), _Yid._ Prop. n.
=Phylacteries= (fi-lak´-ter-is; Hebrew _tefillin_). Two small
leathern boxes containing parchments inscribed with certain
passages of Scripture, worn during morning prayer, one on the
forehead and one on the left arm, where they are fastened by
means of straps, in a manner carefully prescribed. The wearing
of the _tefillin_ is obligatory on all males over thirteen years
of age (the age of confirmation).
=Pinchus= (pin´-chus), _Hebr._ Prop. n.
=Pogrom= (po-grom´), _Russ._ An organized massacre of Jews.
=Poll= (pol), _Yid._ A series of steps in the bathing-room, where
cupping, etc., is done under a high temperature.
=Polota= (Po-lo-tä´), _Russ._ Name of a river.
=Polotzk= (po´-lotzk), _Russ._, also spelled Polotsk. A town in the
government of Vitebsk, Russia, since early times a stronghold of
Jewish orthodoxy. _N.B._ Polotzk must not be confused with
Plotzk (also spelled Plock), the capital of the government of
Plotzk, in Russian Poland, about 400 miles southwest of Polotzk.
=Praying Shawl= (Hebrew, _tallit_). A fine white woollen shawl with
sacred fringes (_zizit_), in the four corners, worn by males
after marriage, during certain devotional exercises.
=Purim= (pu̇´-rim), _Hebr._ A feast in commemoration of the
deliverance of the Persian Jews, through the intervention of
Esther, from the massacre planned by Haman. Masquerading,
feasting, exchange of presents, and general license make this
celebration the jolliest of the Jewish year.
=Questions, the Four.= At the Passover feast, the youngest son (or,
in the absence of a son of suitable age, a daughter) asks four
questions as to the significance of various symbolic articles
used in the ceremonial, in reply to which the family read the
story of Exodus.
=Rabbi= (rab´-ī), _Hebr._ A title accorded to men distinguished
for learning and authorized to teach the Law. As used in the
present work, _rabbi_ is identical with the official title of
_rav_, which see.
=Rabbonim= (räb-on´-im), _Hebr._ Plural of _rabbi_.
=Rav= (räv), _Hebr._ The spiritual head of a Jewish community,
whose duties include the settlement of ritualistic questions.
=Reb'= (reb), _Yid._ An abbreviation of _rebbe_, used as a title of
respect, equivalent to the old-fashioned English "master."
=Rebbe= (reb´-e), _Yid._ Colloquial form of _rabbi_. A Hebrew
teacher. Applied usually to teachers of lesser rank; also used
as a title for a "Good Jew"; as, the Rebbe of Kopistch.
=Rebbetzin= (reb´-e-tzin), _Yid._ Female Hebrew teacher.
=Riga= (ri´-gä), _Russ._ Name of a city.
=Ruble= (ru̇´-bl), _Russ._ The monetary unit of Russia. A silver
coin (or, more commonly, a paper bill) worth a little over fifty
cents.
=Sabbath Loaf= (Hebrew, _hallah_). A wheaten loaf of peculiar shape
used in the Sabbath ceremonial.
=Sacred Fringes.= See under =Fringes=.
=Shadchan= (shäd´-chan), _Hebr._ Professional match-maker; marriage
broker.
=Shawl, Praying.= See under =Praying=.
=Shema= (shmä), _Hebr._ The verse recited as the Jewish confession
of faith ("Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One");
so called from the initial word. The "Shema" recurs constantly
in the daily ritual, and is informally repeated on every
occasion of distress, or as a charm to ward off evil
influences.
=Shohat= (sho´-ḥat), _Hebr._ Slaughterer of cattle according to
ritual law.
=Succoth= (su̇´-kot), _Hebr._ The feast of Tabernacles,
celebrated with many symbolic rites, among these being the
eating of the festive meals outdoors, in a booth or bower of
lattice work covered with evergreens.
=Talakno= (täl-äk-no´), _Russ._ Meal made of ground oats, often
mixed with other grains or with weeds. An important article of
diet among the peasants, generally moistened with cold water and
eaten raw.
=Talmudists= (tal´-mu̇d-ists; from Hebrew _talmud_). The
compilers of the Talmud (the body of Jewish traditional lore);
scholars versed in the teachings of the Talmud.
=Tav= (täv), _Hebr._ The last letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
=Torah= (tō´-rä), _Hebr._ The Mosaic Law; the book or scroll of
the Law; sacred learning.
=Trefah= (trëf´-a), _Hebr._ Unclean, according to ritual law;
opposed to kosher, clean. Chiefly applied to articles of food
and eating and cooking vessels.
=Versbolovo= (vers-bo-lo´-vä), _Russ._ Name of a town.
=Verst= (vyerst), _Russ._ A measure of length, about two-thirds of
an English mile.
=Vilna= (vil´-nä), _Russ._ Name of a city.
=Vitebsk= (vi´-tebsk), _Russ._ Name of a city.
=Vodka= (vod´-kä), _Russ._ A kind of whiskey distilled from barley
or from potatoes, constantly indulged in by the lower classes in
Russia, especially by the peasants.
=Wedding Canopy.= See under =Canopy=.
=Yachne= (Yäch´-ne), _Yid._ Prop. n.
=Yakub= (yä-ku̇b´), _Russ._ Prop. n.
=Yankel= (yän´-kl), _Yid._ Prop. n.
=Yeshibah= (ye-shib´-ä), _Hebr._ Rabbinical school or seminary.
=Yeshibah Bachur=, a student in a _yeshibah_.
=Yiddish= (yid´-ish), _Yid._ Judeo-German, the language of the Jews
of Eastern Europe. The basis is an archaic form of German, on
which are grafted many words of Hebrew origin, and words from
the vernacular of the country.
=Yochem= (yo´-chem), _Yid._ Prop. n.
=Yuchovitch= (yu̇-chov-itch´), _Russ._ Name of a village.
=Zaddik= (tzä´-dik), _Hebr._ A man of piety; a holy man.
=Zalmen= (zäl´-men), _Yid._ Prop. n.
=Zimbler= (tzim´-bler), _Yid._ A performer on the _zimble_, an
instrument constructed like a wooden tray, with several wires
stretched across lengthwise, and played by means of two short
rods.
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE. MASSACHUSETTS
U.S.A.
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*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Promised Land" ***
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