EARLIEST IMPRESSIONS
On the theory that our genuine impulses may be connected with our
childish experiences, that one's bent may be tracked back to that
"No-Man's Land" where character is formless but nevertheless
settling into definite lines of future development, I begin this
record with some impressions of my childhood.
All of these are directly connected with my father, although of
course I recall many experiences apart from him. I was one of
the younger members of a large family and an eager participant in
the village life, but because my father was so distinctly the
dominant influence and because it is quite impossible to set
forth all of one's early impressions, it has seemed simpler to
string these first memories on that single cord. Moreover, it
was this cord which not only held fast my supreme affections, but
also first drew me into the moral concerns of life, and later
afforded a clew there to which I somewhat wistfully clung in the
intricacy of its mazes.
It must have been from a very early period that I recall "horrid
nights" when I tossed about in my bed because I had told a lie. I
was held in the grip of a miserable dread of death, a double
fear, first, that I myself should die in my sins and go straight
to that fiery Hell which was never mentioned at home, but which I
had heard all about from other children, and, second, that my
father--representing the entire adult world which I had basely
deceived--should himself die before I had time to tell him. My
only method of obtaining relief was to go downstairs to my
father's room and make full confession. The high resolve to do
this would push me out of bed and carry me down the stairs
without a touch of fear. But at the foot of the stairs I would
be faced by the awful necessity of passing the front door--which
my father, because of his Quaker tendencies, did not lock--and of
crossing the wide and black expanse of the living room in order
to reach his door. I would invariably cling to the newel post
while I contemplated the perils of the situation, complicated by
the fact that the literal first step meant putting my bare foot
upon a piece of oilcloth in front of the door, only a few inches
wide, but lying straight in my path. I would finally reach my
father's bedside perfectly breathless and having panted out the
history of my sin, invariable received the same assurance that if
he "had a little girl who told lies," he was very glad that she
"felt too bad to go to sleep afterward." No absolution was asked
for or received, but apparently the sense that the knowledge of
my wickedness was shared, or an obscure understanding of the
affection which underlay the grave statement, was sufficient, for
I always went back to bed as bold as a lion, and slept, if not
the sleep of the just, at least that of the comforted.
I recall an incident which must have occurred before I was seven
years old, for the mill in which my father transacted his business
that day was closed in 1867. The mill stood in the neighboring
town adjacent to its poorest quarter. Before then I had always
seen the little city of ten thousand people with the admiring eyes
of a country child, and it had never occurred to me that all its
streets were not as bewilderingly attractive as the one which
contained the glittering toyshop and the confectioner. On that day
I had my first sight of the poverty which implies squalor, and
felt the curious distinction between the ruddy poverty of the
country and that which even a small city presents in its shabbiest
streets. I remember launching at my father the pertinent inquiry
why people lived in such horrid little houses so close together,
and that after receiving his explanation I declared with much
firmness when I grew up I should, of course, have a large house,
but it would not be built among the other large houses, but right
in the midst of horrid little houses like those.
That curious sense of responsibility for carrying on the world's
affairs which little children often exhibit because "the old man
clogs our earliest years," I remember in myself in a very absurd
manifestation. I dreamed night after night that every one in the
world was dead excepting myself, and that upon me rested the
responsibility of making a wagon wheel. The village street
remained as usual, the village blacksmith shop was "all there,"
even a glowing fire upon the forge and the anvil in its customary
place near the door, but no human being was within sight. They
had all gone around the edge of the hill to the village cemetery,
and I alone remained alive in the deserted world. I always stood
in the same spot in the blacksmith shop, darkly pondering as to
how to begin, and never once did I know how, although I fully
realized that the affairs of the world could not be resumed until
at least one wheel should be made and something started. Every
victim of nightmare is, I imagine, overwhelmed by an excessive
sense of responsibility and the consciousness of a fearful
handicap in the effort to perform what is required; but perhaps
never were the odds more heavily against "a warder of the world"
than in these reiterated dreams of mine, doubtless compounded in
equal parts of a childish version of Robinson Crusoe and of the
end-of-the-world predictions of the Second Adventists, a few of
whom were found in the village. The next morning would often
find me, a delicate little girl of six, with the further
disability of a curved spine, standing in the doorway of the
village blacksmith shop, anxiously watching the burly,
red-shirted figure at work. I would store my mind with such
details of the process of making wheels as I could observe, and
sometimes I plucked up courage to ask for more. "Do you always
have to sizzle the iron in water?" I would ask, thinking how
horrid it would be to do. "Sure!" the good-natured blacksmith
would reply, "that makes the iron hard." I would sigh heavily and
walk away, bearing my responsibility as best I could, and this of
course I confided to no one, for there is something too
mysterious in the burden of "the winds that come from the fields
of sleep" to be communicated, although it is at the same time too
heavy a burden to be borne alone.
My great veneration and pride in my father manifested itself in
curious ways. On several Sundays, doubtless occurring in two or
three different years, the Union Sunday School of the village was
visited by strangers, some of those "strange people" who live
outside a child's realm, yet constantly thrill it by their close
approach. My father taught the large Bible class in the lefthand
corner of the church next to the pulpit, and to my eyes at least,
was a most imposing figure in his Sunday frock coat, his fine
head rising high above all the others. I imagined that the
strangers were filled with admiration for this dignified person,
and I prayed with all my heart that the ugly, pigeon-toed little
girl, whose crooked back obliged her to walk with her head held
very much upon one side, would never be pointed out to these
visitors as the daughter of this fine man. In order to lessen
the possibility of a connection being made, on these particular
Sundays I did not walk beside my father, although this walk was
the great event of the week, but attached myself firmly to the
side of my Uncle James Addams, in the hope that I should be
mistaken for his child, or at least that I should not remain so
conspicuously unattached that troublesome questions might
identify an Ugly Duckling with her imposing parent. My uncle,
who had many children of his own, must have been mildly surprised
at this unwonted attention, but he would look down kindly at me,
and say, "So you are going to walk with me to-day?" "Yes,
please, Uncle James," would be my meek reply. He fortunately
never explored my motives, nor do I remember that my father ever
did, so that in all probability my machinations have been safe
from public knowledge until this hour.
It is hard to account for the manifestations of a child's adoring
affection, so emotional, so irrational, so tangled with the
affairs of the imagination. I simply could not endure the
thought that "strange people" should know that my handsome father
owned this homely little girl. But even in my chivalric desire
to protect him from his fate, I was not quite easy in the
sacrifice of my uncle, although I quieted my scruples with the
reflection that the contrast was less marked and that, anyway,
his own little girl "was not so very pretty." I do not know that
I commonly dwelt much upon my personal appearance, save as it
thrust itself as an incongruity into my father's life, and in
spite of unending evidence to the contrary, there were even black
moments when I allowed myself to speculate as to whether he might
not share the feeling. Happily, however, this specter was laid
before it had time to grow into a morbid familiar by a very
trifling incident. One day I met my father coming out of his
bank on the main street of the neighboring city which seemed to
me a veritable whirlpool of society and commerce. With a playful
touch of exaggeration, he lifted his high and shining silk hat
and made me an imposing bow. This distinguished public
recognition, this totally unnecessary identification among a mass
of "strange people" who couldn't possibly know unless he himself
made the sign, suddenly filled me with a sense of the absurdity
of the entire feeling. It may not even then have seemed as
absurd as it really was, but at least it seemed enough so to
collapse or to pass into the limbo of forgotten specters.
I made still other almost equally grotesque attempts to express
this doglike affection. The house at the end of the village in
which I was born, and which was my home until I moved to
Hull-House, in my earliest childhood had opposite to it--only
across the road and then across a little stretch of
greensward--two mills belonging to my father; one flour mill, to
which the various grains were brought by the neighboring farmers,
and one sawmill, in which the logs of the native timber were
sawed into lumber. The latter offered the great excitement of
sitting on a log while it slowly approached the buzzing saw which
was cutting it into slabs, and of getting off just in time to
escape a sudden and gory death. But the flouring mill was much
more beloved. It was full of dusky, floury places which we
adored, of empty bins in which we might play house; it had a
basement, with piles of bran and shorts which were almost as good
as sand to play in, whenever the miller let us wet the edges of
the pile with water brought in his sprinkling pot from the
mill-race.
In addition to these fascinations was the association of the mill
with my father's activities, for doubtless at that time I
centered upon him all that careful imitation which a little girl
ordinarily gives to her mother's ways and habits. My mother had
died when I was a baby and my father's second marriage did not
occur until my eighth year.
I had a consuming ambition to posses a miller's thumb, and would
sit contentedly for a long time rubbing between my thumb and
fingers the ground wheat as it fell from between the millstones,
before it was taken up on an endless chain of mysterious little
buckets to be bolted into flour. I believe I have never since
wanted anything more desperately than I wanted my right thumb to
be flattened, as my father's had become, during his earlier years
of a miller's life. Somewhat discouraged by the slow process of
structural modification, I also took measures to secure on the
backs of my hands the tiny purple and red spots which are always
found on the hands of the miller who dresses millstones. The
marks on my father's hands had grown faint, but were quite
visible when looked for, and seemed to me so desirable that they
must be procured at all costs. Even when playing in our house or
yard, I could always tell when the millstones were being dressed,
because the rumbling of the mill then stopped, and there were few
pleasures I would not instantly forego, rushing at once to the
mill, that I might spread out my hands near the mill-stones in
the hope that the little hard flints flying form the miller's
chisel would light upon their backs and make the longed-for
marks. I used hotly to accuse the German miller, my dear friend
Ferdinand, "of trying not to hit my hands," but he scornfully
replied that he could not hit them if he did try, and that they
were too little to be of use in a mill anyway. Although I hated
his teasing, I never had the courage to confess my real purpose.
This sincere tribute of imitation, which affection offers to its
adored object, had later, I hope, subtler manifestations, but
certainly these first ones were altogether genuine. In this
case, too, I doubtless contributed my share to that stream of
admiration which our generation so generously poured forth for
the self-made man. I was consumed by a wistful desire to
apprehend the hardships of my father's earlier life in that
faraway time when he had been a miller's apprentice. I knew that
he still woke up punctually at three o'clock because for so many
years he had taken his turn at the mill in the early morning, and
if by chance I awoke at the same hour, as curiously enough I
often did, I imagined him in the early dawn in my uncle's old
mill reading through the entire village library, book after book,
beginning with the lives of the signers of the Declaration of
Independence. Copies of the same books, mostly bound in
calfskin, were to be found in the library below, and I
courageously resolved that I too would read them all and try to
understand life as he did. I did in fact later begin a course of
reading in the early morning hours, but I was caught by some
fantastic notion of chronological order and early legendary form.
Pope's translation of the "Iliad," even followed by Dryden's
"Virgil," did not leave behind the residuum of wisdom for which I
longed, and I finally gave them up for a thick book entitled "The
History of the World" as affording a shorter and an easier path.
Although I constantly confided my sins and perplexities to my
father, there are only a few occasions on which I remember having
received direct advice or admonition; it may easily be true,
however, that I have forgotten the latter, in the manner of many
seekers after advice who enjoyably set forth their situation but
do not really listen to the advice itself. I can remember an
admonition on one occasion, however, when, as a little girl of
eight years, arrayed in a new cloak, gorgeous beyond anything I
had ever worn before, I stood before my father for his approval.
I was much chagrined by his remark that it was a very pretty
cloak--in fact so much prettier than any cloak the other little
girls in the Sunday School had, that he would advise me to wear
my old cloak, which would keep me quite as warm, with the added
advantage of not making the other little girls feel badly. I
complied with the request but I fear without inner consent, and I
certainly was quite without the joy of self-sacrifice as I walked
soberly through the village street by the side of my counselor.
My mind was busy, however, with the old question eternally
suggested by the inequalities of the human lot. Only as we
neared the church door did I venture to ask what could be done
about it, receiving the reply that it might never be righted so
far as clothes went, but that people might be equal in things
that mattered much more than clothes, the affairs of education
and religion, for instance, which we attended to when we went to
school and church, and that it was very stupid to wear the sort
of clothes that made it harder to have equality even there.
It must have been a little later when I held a conversation with
my father upon the doctrine of foreordination, which at one time
very much perplexed my childish mind. After setting the
difficulty before him and complaining that I could not make it
out, although my best friend "understood it perfectly," I settled
down to hear his argument, having no doubt that he could make it
quite clear. To my delighted surprise, for any intimation that
our minds were on an equality lifted me high indeed, he said that
he feared that he and I did not have the kind of mind that would
ever understand fore-ordination very well and advised me not to
give too much time to it; but he then proceeded to say other
things of which the final impression left upon my mind was, that
it did not matter much whether one understood foreordination or
not, but that it was very important not to pretend to understand
what you didn't understand and that you must always be honest
with yourself inside, whatever happened. Perhaps on the whole as
valuable a lesson as the shorter catechism itself contains.
My memory merges this early conversation on religious doctrine
into one which took place years later when I put before my father
the situation in which I found myself at boarding school when
under great evangelical pressure, and once again I heard his
testimony in favor of "mental integrity above everything else."
At the time we were driving through a piece of timber in which
the wood choppers had been at work during the winter, and so
earnestly were we talking that he suddenly drew up the horses to
find that he did not know where he was. We were both entertained
by the incident, I that my father had been "lost in his own
timber" so that various cords of wood must have escaped his
practiced eye, and he on his side that he should have become so
absorbed in this maze of youthful speculation. We were in high
spirits as we emerged from the tender green of the spring woods
into the clear light of day, and as we came back into the main
road I categorically asked him:-
"What are you? What do you say when people ask you?"
His eyes twinkled a little as he soberly replied:
"I am a Quaker."
"But that isn't enough to say," I urged.
"Very well," he added, "to people who insist upon details, as some
one is doing now, I add that I am a Hicksite Quaker"; and not
another word on the weighty subject could I induce him to utter.
These early recollections are set in a scene of rural beauty,
unusual at least for Illinois. The prairie around the village
was broken into hills, one of them crowned by pine woods, grown
up from a bag full of Norway pine seeds sown by my father in
1844, the very year he came to Illinois, a testimony perhaps that
the most vigorous pioneers gave at least an occasional thought to
beauty. The banks of the mill stream rose into high bluffs too
perpendicular to be climbed without skill, and containing caves
of which one at least was so black that it could not be explored
without the aid of a candle; and there was a deserted limekiln
which became associated in my mind with the unpardonable sin of
Hawthorne's "Lime-Burner." My stepbrother and I carried on games
and crusades which lasted week after week, and even summer after
summer, as only free-ranging country children can do. It may be
in contrast to this that one of the most piteous aspects in the
life of city children, as I have seen it in the neighborhood of
Hull-House, is the constant interruption to their play which is
inevitable on the streets, so that it can never have any
continuity--the most elaborate "plan or chart" or "fragment from
their dream of human life" is sure to be rudely destroyed by the
passing traffic. Although they start over and over again, even
the most vivacious become worn out at last and take to that
passive "standing 'round" varied by rude horseplay, which in time
becomes so characteristic of city children.
We had of course our favorite places and trees and birds and
flowers. It is hard to reproduce the companionship which
children establish with nature, but certainly it is much too
unconscious and intimate to come under the head of aesthetic
appreciation or anything of the sort. When we said that the
purple wind-flowers--the anemone patens--"looked as if the winds
had made them," we thought much more of the fact that they were
wind-born than that they were beautiful: we clapped our hands in
sudden joy over the soft radiance of the rainbow, but its
enchantment lay in our half belief that a pot of gold was to be
found at its farther end; we yielded to a soft melancholy when we
heard the whippoorwill in the early twilight, but while he
aroused in us vague longings of which we spoke solemnly, we felt
no beauty in his call.
We erected an altar beside the stream, to which for several years
we brought all the snakes we killed during our excursions, no
matter how long the toil--some journey which we had to make with
a limp snake dangling between two sticks. I remember rather
vaguely the ceremonial performed upon this altar one autumn day,
when we brought as further tribute one out of every hundred of
the black walnuts which we had gathered, and then poured over the
whole a pitcher full of cider, fresh from the cider mill on the
barn floor. I think we had also burned a favorite book or two
upon this pyre of stones. The entire affair carried on with such
solemnity was probably the result of one of those imperative
impulses under whose compulsion children seek a ceremonial which
shall express their sense of identification with man's primitive
life and their familiar kinship with the remotest past.
Long before we had begun the study of Latin at the village
school, my brother and I had learned the Lord's Prayer in Latin
out of an old copy of the Vulgate, and gravely repeated it every
night in an execrable pronunciation because it seemed to us more
religious than "plain English."
When, however, I really prayed, what I saw before my eyes was a
most outrageous picture which adorned a song-book used in Sunday
School, portraying the Lord upon his throne, surrounded by tiers
and tiers of saints and angels all in a blur of yellow. I am
ashamed to tell how old I was when that picture ceased to appear
before my eyes, especially when moments of terror compelled me to
ask protection from the heavenly powers.
I recall with great distinctness my first direct contact with
death when I was fifteen years old: Polly was an old nurse who
had taken care of my mother and had followed her to frontier
Illinois to help rear a second generation of children. She had
always lived in our house, but made annual visits to her cousins
on a farm a few miles north of the village. During one of those
visits, word came to us one Sunday evening that Polly was dying,
and for a number of reasons I was the only person able to go to
her. I left the lamp-lit, warm house to be driven four miles
through a blinding storm which every minute added more snow to
the already high drifts, with a sense of starting upon a fateful
errand. An hour after my arrival all of the cousin's family went
downstairs to supper, and I was left alone to watch with Polly.
The square, old-fashioned chamber in the lonely farmhouse was
very cold and still, with nothing to be heard but the storm
outside. Suddenly the great change came. I heard a feeble call
of "Sarah," my mother's name, as the dying eyes were turned upon
me, followed by a curious breathing and in place of the face
familiar from my earliest childhood and associated with homely
household cares, there lay upon the pillow strange, august
features, stern and withdrawn from all the small affairs of life.
That sense of solitude, of being unsheltered in a wide world of
relentless and elemental forces which is at the basis of
childhood's timidity and which is far from outgrown at fifteen,
seized me irresistibly before I could reach the narrow stairs and
summon the family from below.
As I was driven home in the winter storm, the wind through the
trees seemed laden with a passing soul and the riddle of life and
death pressed hard; once to be young, to grow old and to die,
everything came to that, and then a mysterious journey out into
the Unknown. Did she mind faring forth alone? Would the journey
perhaps end in something as familiar and natural to the aged and
dying as life is to the young and living? Through all the drive
and indeed throughout the night these thoughts were pierced by
sharp worry, a sense of faithlessness because I had forgotten the
text Polly had confided to me long before as the one from which
she wished her funeral sermon to be preached. My comfort as
usual finally came from my father, who pointed out what was
essential and what was of little avail even in such a moment as
this, and while he was much too wise to grow dogmatic upon the
great theme of death, I felt a new fellowship with him because we
had discussed it together.
Perhaps I may record here my protest against the efforts, so
often made, to shield children and young people from all that has
to do with death and sorrow, to give them a good time at all
hazards on the assumption that the ills of life will come soon
enough. Young people themselves often resent this attitude on
the part of their elders; they feel set aside and belittled as if
they were denied the common human experiences. They too wish to
climb steep stairs and to eat their bread with tears, and they
imagine that the problems of existence which so press upon them
in pensive moments would be less insoluble in the light of these
great happenings.
An incident which stands out clearly in my mind as an exciting
suggestion of the great world of moral enterprise and serious
undertakings must have occurred earlier than this, for in 1872,
when I was not yet twelve years old, I came into my father's room
one morning to find him sitting beside the fire with a newspaper in
his hand, looking very solemn; and upon my eager inquiry what had
happened, he told me that Joseph Mazzini was dead. I had never
even heard Mazzini's name, and after being told about him I was
inclined to grow argumentative, asserting that my father did not
know him, that he was not an American, and that I could not
understand why we should be expected to feel badly about him. It
is impossible to recall the conversation with the complete
breakdown of my cheap arguments, but in the end I obtained that
which I have ever regarded as a valuable possession, a sense of the
genuine relationship which may exist between men who share large
hopes and like desires, even though they differ in nationality,
language, and creed; that those things count for absolutely nothing
between groups of men who are trying to abolish slavery in America
or to throw off Hapsburg oppression in Italy. At any rate, I was
heartily ashamed of my meager notion of patriotism, and I came out
of the room exhilarated with the consciousness that impersonal and
international relations are actual facts and not mere phrases. I
was filled with pride that I knew a man who held converse with
great minds and who really sorrowed and rejoiced over happenings
across the sea. I never recall those early conversations with my
father, nor a score of others like them, but there comes into my
mind a line from Mrs. Browning in which a daughter describes her
relations with her father:--
"He wrapt me in his large
Man's doublet, careless did it fit or no."
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