destroy the optical images evolved by the moon-shadows and to seek the
small reality which we knew lived and breathed somewhere on that long
branch. Then a sharp crack like a rifle lost whatever it was to us
forever, and we half leaped to our feet as something swept downward
through the air and crashed length after length among the plants and
fallen logs. The branches overhead rocked to and fro, and for many
minutes, like the aftermath of a volcanic eruption, came a shower, first
of twigs and swirling leaves, then of finer particles, and lastly of
motes which gleamed like silver dust as they sifted down to the trail.
When the air cleared I saw that the monkey-ladder had vanished and I
knew that its yards upon yards of length lay coiled and crushed among
the ferns and sprouting palms of the jungle floor. It seemed most
fitting that the vegetable kingdom, whose silence and majesty gave to
the jungle night its magic qualities, should have contributed this
memorable climax.
Long before the first Spaniard sailed up the neighboring river, the
monkey-ladder had thrown its spirals aloft, and through all the
centuries, all the years, it had seen no change wrought beneath it. The
animal trail was trod now and then by Indian hunters, and lately we had
passed several times. The sound of our guns was less than the crashing
fall of an occasional forest tree. Now, with not a leaf moved by the
air, with only the two of us squatting in the moonlight for audience,
the last cell had given way. The sap could no longer fight the decay
which had entered its heart; and at the appointed moment, the moment set
by the culmination of a greater nexus of forces than our human mind
could ever hope to grasp, the last fibre parted and the massive growth
fell.
In the last few minutes, as it hung suspended, gracefully spiraled in
the moonlight, it had seemed as perfect as the new-sprouted _moras_ at
my feet. As I slowly walked out of the jungle I saw in this the
explanation of the simile of artificial scenery, of all the strange
magic which had come to me as I entered. The alchemy of moonlight turned
all the jungle to perfect growth, growth at rest. In the silvery light
was no trace of gnawing worm, of ravening ant, or corroding fungus. The
jungle was rejuvenated and made a place more wonderful than any
fairyland of which I have read or which I have conceived. The jungle by
day, as I have said--that, too, is wonderful. We may have two friends,
quite unlike in character, whom we love each for his own personality,
and yet it would be a hideous, an unthinkable thing to see one
transformed into the other.
So, with the mist settling down and tarnishing the great plaque of
silver, I left the jungle, glad that I could be far away before the
first hint of dawn came to mar the magic. Thus in memory I can keep the
dawn away until I return.
And sometime in the future, when the lure of the full moon comes, and I
answer, I shall be certain of finding the same silence, the same
wonderful light, and the waiting trees and the magic. But Nupee may not
be there. He will perhaps have slipped into memory, with Drojak and
Aladdin. And if I find no one as silently friendly as Nupee, I shall
have to watch alone through my jungle night.
[Illustration]
The Devil Baby at Hull-House
By Jane Addams
I
The knowledge of the existence of the Devil Baby burst upon the
residents of Hull-House one day when three Italian women, with an
excited rush through the door, demanded that he be shown them. No amount
of denial convinced them that he was not there, for they knew exactly
what he was like, with his cloven hoofs, his pointed ears and diminutive
tail; moreover, the Devil Baby had been able to speak as soon as he was
born and was most shockingly profane.
The three women were but the forerunners of a veritable multitude; for
six weeks the streams of visitors from every part of the city and
suburbs to this mythical baby poured in all day long, and so far into
the night that the regular activities of the settlement were almost
swamped.
The Italian version, with a hundred variations, dealt with a pious
Italian girl married to an atheist. Her husband vehemently tore a holy
picture from the bedroom wall, saying that he would quite as soon have a
devil in the house as that; whereupon the devil incarnated himself in
her coming child. As soon as the Devil Baby was born, he ran about the
table shaking his finger in deep reproach at his father, who finally
caught him and in fear and trembling brought him to Hull-House. When the
residents there, in spite of the baby's shocking appearance, wishing to
save his soul, took him to church for baptism, they found that the shawl
was empty, and the Devil Baby, fleeing from the holy water, ran lightly
over the backs of the pews.
The Jewish version, again with variations, was to the effect that the
father of six daughters had said before the birth of a seventh child
that he would rather have a devil in the house than another girl,
whereupon the Devil Baby promptly appeared.
Save for a red automobile which occasionally figured in the story, and a
stray cigar which, in some versions, the newborn child snatched from his
father's lips, the tale might have been fashioned a thousand years ago.
Although the visitors to the Devil Baby included people of every degree
of prosperity and education,--even physicians and trained nurses who
assured us of their scientific interest,--the story constantly
demonstrated the power of an old wives' tale among thousands of people
in modern society who are living in a corner of their own, their vision
fixed, their intelligence held by some iron chain of silent habit. To
such primitive people the metaphor apparently is still the very 'stuff
of life'; or, rather, no other form of statement reaches them, and the
tremendous tonnage of current writing for them has no existence. It was
in keeping with their simple habits that the reputed presence of the
Devil Baby at Hull-House did not reach the newspapers until the fifth
week of his sojourn--after thousands of people had already been informed
of his whereabouts by the old method of passing news from mouth to
mouth.
During the weeks of excitement it was the old women who really seemed to
have come into their own, and perhaps the most significant result of the
incident was the reaction of the story upon them. It stirred their minds
and memories as with a magic touch; it loosened their tongues and
revealed the inner life and thoughts of those who are so often
inarticulate. These old women enjoyed a moment of triumph, as if they
had made good at last and had come into a region of sanctions and
punishments which they understood.
Throughout six weeks, as I went about Hull-House, I would hear a voice
at the telephone repeating for the hundredth time that day, 'No, there
is no such baby'; 'No, we never had it here'; 'No, he couldn't have seen
it for fifty cents'; 'We didn't send it anywhere because we never had
it'; 'I don't mean to say that your sister-in-law lied, but there must
be some mistake'; 'There is no use getting up an excursion from
Milwaukee, for there isn't any Devil Baby at Hull-House'; 'We can't
give reduced rates because we are not exhibiting anything'; and so on
and on. As I came near the front door, I would catch snatches of
arguments that were often acrimonious: 'Why do you let so many people
believe it, if it isn't here?' 'We have taken three lines of cars to
come, and we have as much right to see it as anybody else'; 'This is a
pretty big place, of course you could hide it easy enough'; 'What you
saying that for--are you going to raise the price of admission?' We had
doubtless struck a case of what the psychologists call the 'contagion of
emotion,' added to that 'aesthetic sociability' which impels any one of
us to drag the entire household to the window when a procession comes
into the street or a rainbow appears in the sky.
But the Devil Baby of course was worth many processions and rainbows,
and I will confess that, as the empty show went on day after day, I
quite revolted against such a vapid manifestation of an admirable human
trait. There was always one exception, however: whenever I heard the
high eager voices of old women, I was irresistibly interested, and left
anything I might be doing in order to listen to them.
II
Perhaps my many talks with these aged visitors crystallized thoughts and
impressions that I had been receiving through years; or the tale itself
may have ignited a fire, as it were, whose light illumined some of my
darkest memories of neglected and uncomfortable old age, of old peasant
women who had ruthlessly probed into the ugly depths of human nature in
themselves and others. Many of them who came to see the Devil Baby had
been forced to face tragic human experiences; the powers of brutality
and horror had had full scope in their lives, and for years they had had
acquaintance with disaster and death. Such old women do not shirk life's
misery by feeble idealism, for they are long past the stage of
make-believe. They relate without flinching the most hideous
experiences. 'My face has had this queer twist for now nearly sixty
years; I was ten when it got that way, the night after I saw my father
do my mother to death with his knife.' 'Yes, I had fourteen children;
only two grew to be men and both of them were killed in the same
explosion. I was never sure they brought home the right bodies.' But
even the most hideous sorrows which the old women related had apparently
subsided into the paler emotion of ineffectual regret, after Memory had
long done her work upon them; the old people seemed, in some
unaccountable way, to lose all bitterness and resentment against life,
or rather they were so completely without it that they must have lost it
long since.
Perhaps those women, because they had come to expect nothing more from
life and had perforce ceased from grasping and striving, had obtained,
if not renunciation, at least that quiet endurance which allows the
wounds of the spirit to heal. Through their stored-up habit of
acquiescence, they vouchsafed a fleeting glimpse of that translucent
wisdom so often embodied in old women, but so difficult to portray. I
recall a conversation with one of them, a woman whose fine mind and
indomitable spirit I had long admired; I had known her for years, and
yet the recital of her sufferings, added to those which the Devil Baby
had already induced other women to tell me, pierced me afresh.
'I had eleven children, some born in Bohemia and some born here; nine of
them boys; all of the children died when they were little, but my dear
Liboucha, you know all about her. She died last winter in the insane
asylum. She was only twelve years old when her father, in a fit of
delirium tremens, killed himself after he had chased us around the room
trying to kill us first. She saw it all; the blood splashed on the wall
stayed in her mind the worst; she shivered and shook all that night
through, and the next morning she had lost her voice, couldn't speak out
loud for terror. After a while her voice came back, although it was
never very natural, and she went to school again. She seemed to do as
well as ever and was awful pleased when she got into High School. All
the money we had, I earned scrubbing in a public dispensary, although
sometimes I got a little more by interpreting for the patients, for I
know three languages, one as well as the other. But I was determined
that, whatever happened to me, Liboucha was to be educated. My husband's
father was a doctor in the old country, and Liboucha was always a clever
child. I wouldn't have her live the kind of life I had, with no use for
my mind except to make me restless and bitter. I was pretty old and worn
out for such hard work, but when I used to see Liboucha on a Sunday
morning, ready for church, in her white dress with her long yellow hair
braided round her beautiful pale face, lying there in bed as I
was,--being brought up a freethinker and needing to rest my aching bones
for the next week's work,--I'd feel almost happy, in spite of
everything.
'But of course no such peace could last in my life; the second year at
High School, Liboucha began to seem different and do strange things. You
know the time she wandered away for three days and we were all wild with
fright, although a kind woman had taken her in and no harm came to her.
I could never be easy after that; she was always gentle, but she was
awful sly about running away, and at last I had to send her to the
asylum. She stayed there off and on for five years, but I saw her every
week of my life and she was always company for me, what with sewing for
her, washing and ironing her clothes, cooking little things to take out
to her and saving a bit of money to buy fruit for her. At any rate, I
had stopped feeling so bitter, and got some comfort out of seeing the
one thing that belonged to me on this side of the water, when all of a
sudden she died of heart-failure, and they never took the trouble to
send for me until the next day.'
She stopped, as if wondering afresh that the Fates could have been so
casual, but with a sudden illumination, as if she had been awakened out
of the burden and intensity of her restricted personal interests into a
consciousness of those larger relations which are, for the most part, so
strangely invisible. It was as if the young mother of the grotesque
Devil Baby, that victim of wrongdoing on the part of others, had
revealed to this tragic woman, much more clearly than soft words had
ever done, that the return of a deed of violence upon the head of the
innocent is inevitable; as if she had realized that, although she was
destined to walk all the days of her life with that piteous multitude
who bear the undeserved wrongs of the world, she would walk henceforth
with a sense of companionship.
Among the visitors were pitiful old women who, although they had already
reconciled themselves to much misery, were still enduring more. 'You
might say it's a disgrace to have your son beat you up for the sake of a
bit of money you've earned by scrubbing,--your own man is
different,--but I haven't the heart to blame the boy for doing what he's
seen all his life; his father forever went wild when the drink was in
him and struck me to the very day of his death. The ugliness was born
in the boy as the marks of the devil was born in the poor child
upstairs.'
This more primitive type embodies the eternal patience of those humble
toiling women who through the generations have been held of little
value, save as their drudgery ministered to their men. One of them
related her habit of going through the pockets of her drunken son every
pay-day, and complained that she had never got so little as the night
before, only twenty-five cents out of fifteen dollars he had promised
for the rent long overdue. 'I had to get that as he lay in the alley
before the door; I couldn't pull him in, and the copper who helped him
home left as soon as he heard me coming and pretended he didn't see me.
I have no food in the house nor coffee to sober him up with. I know
perfectly well that you will ask me to eat something here, but if I
can't carry it home, I won't take a bite nor a sup. I have never told
you so much before. Since one of the nurses said he could be arrested
for my nonsupport, I've been awfully close-mouthed. It's the foolish way
all the women in our street are talking about the Devil Baby that's
loosened my tongue--more shame to me.'
There are those, if possible more piteous still, who have become
absolutely helpless and can therefore no longer perform the household
services exacted from them. One last wish has been denied them. 'I hoped
to go before I became a burden, but it was not to be'; and the long
days of unwonted idleness are darkened by the haunting fear that 'they'
will come to think the burden too heavy and decide that the poorhouse is
'the best.' Even then there is no word of blame for undutiful children
or heedless grandchildren, for apparently all that is petty and
transitory falls away from austere old age; the fires are burned out,
resentments, hatreds, and even cherished sorrows have become actually
unintelligible. It is as if the horrors through which these old people
had passed had never existed for them; and, facing death as they are,
they seem anxious to speak only such words of groping wisdom as they can
command.
This aspect of memory has never been more clearly stated than by Gilbert
Murray in his _Life of Euripides_. He tells us that the aged poet, when
he was officially declared to be one of 'the old men of Athens,' said,
'Even yet the age-worn minstrel can turn Memory into song'; and the
memory of which he spoke was that of history and tradition, rather than
his own. The aged poet turned into song even the hideous story of Medea,
transmuting it into 'a beautiful remote song about far-off children who
have been slain in legend, children who are now at peace and whose
ancient pain has become part mystery and part music. Memory--that Memory
who is the mother of the Muses--having done her work upon them.'
The vivid interest of so many old women in the story of the Devil Baby
may have been an unconscious, although powerful, testimony that tragic
experiences gradually become dressed in such trappings in order that
their spent agony may prove of some use to a world which learns at the
hardest; and that the strivings and sufferings of men and women long
since dead, their emotions no longer connected with flesh and blood, are
thus transmuted into legendary wisdom. The young are forced to heed the
warning in such a tale, although for the most part it is so easy for
them to disregard the words of the aged. That the old women who came to
visit the Devil Baby believed that the story would secure them a hearing
at home, was evident, and as they prepared themselves with every detail
of it, their old faces shone with a timid satisfaction. Their features,
worn and scarred by harsh living, even as effigies built into the floor
of an old church become dim and defaced by rough-shod feet, grew
poignant and solemn. In the midst of their double bewilderment, both
that the younger generation were walking in such strange paths and that
no one would listen to them, for one moment there flickered up that last
hope of a disappointed life, that it may at least serve as a warning
while affording material for exciting narrations.
Sometimes in talking to one of them, who was 'but a hair's breadth this
side of the darkness,' one realized that old age has its own expression
for the mystic renunciation of the world. The impatience with all
non-essentials, the craving to be free from hampering bonds and soft
conditions, was perhaps typified in our own generation by Tolstoi's last
impetuous journey, the light of his genius for a moment making
comprehensible to us that unintelligible impulse of the aged.
Often, in the midst of a conversation, one of these touching old women
would quietly express a longing for death, as if it were a natural
fulfillment of an inmost desire. Her sincerity and anticipation were so
genuine that I would feel abashed in her presence, ashamed to 'cling to
this strange thing that shines in the sunlight, and to be sick with love
for it.' Such impressions were in their essence transitory, but one
result from the hypothetical visit of the Devil Baby to Hull-House will,
I think, remain: a realization of the sifting and reconciling power
inherent in Memory, itself. The old women, with much to aggravate and
little to soften the habitual bodily discomforts of old age, exhibited
an emotional serenity so vast and reassuring that I found myself
perpetually speculating as to how soon the fleeting and petty emotions
which seem so unduly important to us now might be thus transmuted; at
what moment we might expect the inconsistencies and perplexities of life
to be brought under this appeasing Memory, with its ultimate power to
increase the elements of Beauty and Significance and to reduce, if not
to eliminate, stupidity and resentment.
III
As our visitors to the Devil Baby came day by day, it was gradually
evident that the simpler women were not moved wholly by curiosity, but
that many of them prized the story as a valuable instrument in the
business of living.
The legend exhibited all the persistence of one of those tales which
have doubtless been preserved through the centuries because of their
taming effects upon recalcitrant husbands and fathers. Shamefaced men
brought by their women-folk to see the baby but ill-concealed their
triumph when there proved to be no such visible sign of retribution for
domestic derelictions. On the other hand, numbers of men came by
themselves. One group from a neighboring factory, on their 'own time,'
offered to pay twenty-five cents, a half-dollar, two dollars apiece to
see the child, insisting that it must be at Hull-House because 'the
women-folks had seen it.' To my query as to whether they supposed we
would exhibit for money a poor little deformed baby, if one had been
born in the neighborhood, they replied, 'Sure, why not?' and, 'It
teaches a good lesson, too,' they added as an afterthought, or perhaps
as a concession to the strange moral standards of a place like
Hull-House. All the members of this group of hardworking men, in spite
of a certain swagger toward one another and a tendency to bully the
derelict showman, wore that hang-dog look betraying the sense of unfair
treatment which a man is so apt to feel when his womankind makes an
appeal to the supernatural. In their determination to see the child, the
men recklessly divulged much more concerning their motives than they had
meant to do, and their talk confirmed my impression that such a story
may still act as a restraining influence in that sphere of marital
conduct, which, next to primitive religion itself, we are told, has
always afforded the most fertile field for irrational tabus and savage
punishments.
What story more than this could be calculated to secure sympathy for the
mother of too many daughters, and contumely for the irritated father?
The touch of mysticism, the supernatural sphere in which it was placed,
would render a man perfectly helpless.
The story of the Devil Baby, evolved to-day as it might have been
centuries before in response to the imperative needs of anxious wives
and mothers, recalled the theory that woman first fashioned the
fairy-story, that combination of wisdom and romance, in an effort to
tame her mate and to make him a better father to her children, until
such stories finally became a rude creed for domestic conduct, softening
the treatment that men accorded to women.
These first pitiful efforts of women, so wide-spread and powerful that
we have not yet escaped their influence, still cast vague shadows upon
the vast spaces of life, shadows that are dim and distorted because of
their distant origin. They remind us that for thousands of years women
had nothing to oppose against unthinkable brutality save 'the charm of
words,' no other implement with which to subdue the fiercenesses of the
world about them.
During the weeks that the Devil Baby drew multitudes of visitors to
Hull-House, my mind was opened to the fact that new knowledge derived
from concrete experience is continually being made available for the
guidance of human life; that humble women are still establishing rules
of conduct as best they may, to counteract the base temptations of a
man's world. Thousands of women, for instance, make it a standard of
domestic virtue that a man must not touch his pay envelope, but bring it
home unopened to his wife. High praise is contained in the phrase, 'We
have been married twenty years and he never once opened his own
envelope'; or covert blame in the statement, 'Of course he got to
gambling; what can you expect from a man who always opens his own pay?'
The women are so fatalistically certain of this relation of punishment
to domestic sin, of reward to domestic virtue, that when they talk about
it, as they so constantly did in connection with the Devil Baby, it
often sounds as if they were using the words of a widely known ritual.
Even the young girls seized upon it as a palpable punishment, to be
held over the heads of reckless friends. That the tale was useful was
evidenced by many letters similar to the anonymous epistle here given.