the roby street car where we get off that car at blue island ave. we
will meet some fellows sitting at that street where they drink some beer
from pail, they keep look in cars all time and they will wait and see if
we will come sometimes we will have to work, but they will wait so long
they are tired and they don't care they get rest so long but a girl what
works in twine mill saw them talk with us we know her good and she say
what youse talk with old drunk man for we shall come to thier dance when
it will be they will tell us and we should know all about where to see
them that girl she say oh if you will go with them you will get devils
baby like some other girls did who we knows, she say Jane Addams she
will show one like that in Hull House if you will go down there we shall
come sometime and we will see if that is trouth we do not believe her
for she is friendly with them old men herself when she go out from her
work they will wink to her and say something else to. We will go down
and see you and make a lie from what she say.'
IV
The story evidently held some special comfort for hundreds of forlorn
women, representatives of that vast horde of the denied and proscribed,
who had long found themselves confronted by those mysterious and
impersonal wrongs which are apparently nobody's fault but seem to be
inherent in the very nature of things.
Because the Devil Baby embodied an undeserved wrong to a poor mother,
whose tender child had been claimed by the forces of evil, his merely
reputed presence had power to attract to Hull-House hundreds of women
who had been humbled and disgraced by their children; mothers of the
feeble-minded, of the vicious, of the criminal, of the prostitute. In
their talk it was as if their long role of maternal apology and
protective reticence had at last broken down; as if they could speak out
freely because for once a man responsible for an ill-begotten child had
been 'met up with' and had received his deserts. Their sinister version
of the story was that the father of the Devil Baby had married without
confessing a hideous crime committed years before, thus basely deceiving
both his innocent young bride and the good priest who performed the
solemn ceremony; that the sin had become incarnate in his child, which,
to the horror of the young and trusting mother, had been born with all
the outward aspects of the devil himself.
As if drawn by a magnet, week after week, a procession of forlorn women
in search of the Devil Baby came to Hull-House from every part of the
city, issuing forth from the many homes in which dwelt 'the two
unprofitable goddesses, Poverty and Impossibility.' With an
understanding that was quickened perhaps by my own acquaintance with the
mysterious child, I listened to many tragic tales from the visiting
women: of premature births, 'because he kicked me in the side'; of
children maimed and burned, because 'I had no one to leave them with
when I went to work.' These women had seen the tender flesh of growing
little bodies given over to death because 'he wouldn't let me send for
the doctor,' or because 'there was no money to pay for the medicine.'
But even these mothers, rendered childless through insensate brutality,
were less pitiful than some of the others, who might well have cried
aloud of their children as did a distracted mother of her child
centuries ago,--
That God should send this one thing more
Of hunger and of dread, a door
Set wide to every wind of pain!
Such was the mother of a feeble-minded boy who said, 'I didn't have a
devil baby myself, but I bore a poor "innocent," who made me fight
devils for twenty-three years.' She told of her son's experiences, from
the time the other little boys had put him up to stealing that they
might hide in safety and leave him to be found with 'the goods' on him,
until, grown into a huge man, he fell into the hands of professional
burglars; he was evidently the dupe and stool-pigeon of the vicious and
criminal until the very day he was locked into the State Penitentiary.
'If people played with him a little, he went right off and did anything
they told him to, and now he's been sent up for life. We call such
innocents "God's Fools" in the old country, but over here the Devil
himself gets them. I've fought off bad men and boys from the poor lamb
with my very fists; nobody ever came near the house except such like and
the police officers who were always arresting him.'
There were a goodly number of visitors, of the type of those to be found
in every large city, who are on the verge of nervous collapse or who
exhibit many symptoms of mental aberration and yet are sufficiently
normal to be at large most of the time and to support themselves by
drudgery which requires little mental effort, although the exhaustion
resulting from the work they are able to do is the one thing from which
they should be most carefully protected. One such woman, evidently
obtaining inscrutable comfort from the story of the Devil Baby even
after she had become convinced that we harbored no such creature, came
many times to tell of her longing for her son who had joined the army
some eighteen months before and was stationed in Alaska. She always
began with the same words. 'When spring comes and the snow melts so that
I know he could get out, I can hardly stand it. You know I was once in
the Insane Asylum for three years at a stretch, and since then I
haven't had much use of my mind except to worry with. Of course I know
that it is dangerous for me, but what can I do? I think something like
this: "The snow is melting, now he could get out, but his officers won't
let him off, and if he runs away he'll be shot for a deserter--either
way I'll never see him again; I'll die without seeing him"--and then I
begin all over again with the snow.' After a pause, she said, 'The
recruiting officer ought not to have taken him; he's my only son and I'm
a widow; it's against the rules, but he was so crazy to go that I guess
he lied a little. At any rate, the government has him now and I can't
get him back. Without this worry about him, my mind would be all right;
if he was here he would be earning money and keeping me and we would be
happy all day long.'
Recalling the vagabondish lad who had never earned much money and had
certainly never 'kept' his hard-working mother, I ventured to suggest
that, even if he were at home, he might not have worked these hard
times, that he might get into trouble and be arrested,--I did not need
to remind her that he had already been arrested twice,--that he was now
fed and sheltered and under discipline, and I added hopefully something
about seeing the world. She looked at me out of her withdrawn harried
eyes, as if I were speaking a foreign tongue. 'That wouldn't make any
real difference to me--the work, the money, his behaving well and all
that, if I could cook and wash for him; I don't need all the money I
earn scrubbing that factory; I only take bread and tea for supper, and I
choke over that, thinking of him.'
V
A sorrowful woman clad in heavy black, who came one day, exhibited such
a capacity for prolonged weeping that it was evidence in itself of the
truth of at least half her statement, that she had cried herself to
sleep every night of her life for fourteen years in fulfillment of a
'curse' laid upon her by an angry man that 'her pillow would be wet with
tears as long as she lived.' Her respectable husband had kept a shop in
the Red Light district, because he found it profitable to sell to the
men and women who lived there. She had kept house in the rooms 'over the
store,' from the time she was a bride newly come from Russia, and her
five daughters had been born there, but never a son to gladden her
husband's heart.
She took such a feverish interest in the Devil Baby that when I was
obliged to disillusion her, I found it hard to take away her comfort in
the belief that the Powers that Be are on the side of the woman, when
her husband resents too many daughters. But, after all, the birth of
daughters was but an incident in her tale of unmitigated woe, for the
scoldings of a disappointed husband were as nothing to the curse of a
strange enemy, although she doubtless had a confused impression that if
there was retribution for one in the general scheme of things, there
might be for the other.
When the weeping woman finally put the events of her disordered life in
some sort of sequence, it was clear that about fifteen years ago she had
reported to the police a vicious house whose back door opened into her
own yard. Her husband had forbidden her to do anything about it and had
said that it would only get them into trouble; but she had been made
desperate one day when she saw her little girl, then twelve years old,
come out of the door, gleefully showing her younger sister a present of
money. Because the poor woman had tried for ten years, without success,
to induce her husband to move from the vicinity of such houses, she was
certain that she could save her child only by forcing out 'the bad
people' from her own door-yard. She therefore made her one frantic
effort, found her way to the city hall, and there reported the house to
the chief himself. Of course, 'the bad people' 'stood in with the
police,' and nothing happened to them except, perhaps, a fresh levy of
blackmail; but the keeper of the house, beside himself with rage, made
the dire threat and laid the curse upon her. In less than a year from
that time he had enticed her daughter into a disreputable house in
another part of the district. The poor woman, ringing one doorbell after
another, had never been able to find her; but the girl's sisters, who in
time came to know where she was, had been dazzled by her mode of life.
The weeping mother was quite sure that two of her daughters, while still
outwardly respectable and 'working downtown,' earned money in the
devious ways which they had learned all about when they were little
children, although for the past five years the now prosperous husband
had allowed the family to live in a suburb where the two younger
daughters were 'growing up respectable.'
At moments it seemed possible that these simple women, representing an
earlier development, eagerly seized upon the story simply because it was
primitive in form and substance. Certainly one evening a long-forgotten
ballad made an unceasing effort to come to the surface of my mind, as I
talked to a feeble woman who, in the last stages of an incurable disease
from which she soon afterwards died, had been helped off the street-car
in front of Hull-House.
The ballad tells that the lover of a proud and jealous mistress, who
demanded as a final test of devotion that he bring her the heart of his
mother, had quickly cut the heart from his mother's breast and
impetuously returned to his lady bearing it upon a salver; but that,
when stumbling in his gallant haste, he stooped to replace upon the
silver plate his mother's heart which had rolled upon the ground, the
heart, still beating with tender solicitude, whispered the hope that her
child was not hurt.
The ballad itself was scarcely more exaggerated than the story of our
visitor that evening, who had made the desperate effort of a journey
from home in order to see the Devil Baby. I was familiar with her
vicissitudes: the shiftless drinking husband and the large family of
children, all of whom had brought her sorrow and disgrace; and I knew
that her heart's desire was to see again before she died her youngest
son, who was a life prisoner in the penitentiary. She was confident that
the last piteous stage of her disease would secure him a week's parole,
founding this forlorn hope upon the fact that 'they sometimes let them
out to attend a mother's funeral, and perhaps they'd let Joe come a few
days ahead; he could pay his fare afterwards from the insurance money.
It wouldn't take much to bury me.'
Again we went over the hideous story. Joe had violently quarreled with a
woman, the proprietor of the house in which his disreputable wife lived,
because she withheld from him a part of his wife's 'earnings,' and in
the altercation had killed her--a situation, one would say, which it
would be difficult for even a mother to condone. But not at all: her
thin gray face worked with emotion, her trembling hands restlessly
pulled at her shabby skirt as the hands of the dying pluck at the
sheets, but she put all the vitality she could muster into his defense.
She told us he had legally married the girl who supported him, 'although
Lily had been so long in that life that few men would have done it. Of
course such a girl must have a protector or everybody would fleece her;
poor Lily said to the day of her death that he was the kindest man she
ever knew, and treated her the whitest; that she herself was to blame
for the murder because she told on the old miser, and Joe was so
hot-headed she might have known that he would draw a gun for her.' The
gasping mother concluded, 'He was always that handsome and had such a
way. One winter when I was scrubbing in an office-building, I'd never
get home much before twelve o'clock; but Joe would open the door for me
just as pleasant as if he hadn't been waked out of a sound sleep.'
She was so triumphantly unconscious of the incongruity of a sturdy son
in bed while his mother earned his food, that her auditors said never a
word, and in silence we saw a hero evolved before our eyes: a defender
of the oppressed, the best beloved of his mother, who was losing his
high spirits and eating his heart out behind prison bars. He could well
defy the world even there, surrounded as he was by that invincible
affection which assures both the fortunate and unfortunate alike that we
are loved, not according to our deserts, but in response to some
profounder law.
This imposing revelation of maternal solicitude was an instance of what
continually happened in connection with the Devil Baby. In the midst of
the most tragic recitals there remained that something in the souls of
these mothers which has been called the great revelation of tragedy, or
sometimes the great illusion of tragedy--that which has power in its own
right to make life acceptable and at rare moments even beautiful.
At least, during the weeks when the Devil Baby seemed to occupy every
room in Hull-House, one was conscious that all human vicissitudes are in
the end melted down into reminiscence, and that a metaphorical statement
of those profound experiences which are implicit in human nature itself,
however crude in form the story may be, has a singular power of healing
the distracted spirit.
If it has always been the mission of literature to translate the
particular act into something of the universal, to reduce the element of
crude pain in the isolated experience by bringing to the sufferer a
realization that his is but the common lot, this mission may have been
performed by such stories as this for simple hard-working women, who,
after all, at any given moment compose the bulk of the women in the
world.
[Illustration]
Every Man's Natural Desire to be Somebody Else
By Samuel McChord Crothers
I
Several years ago a young man came to my study with a manuscript which
he wished me to criticize.
'It is only a little bit of my work,' he said modestly, 'and it will not
take you long to look it over. In fact it is only the first chapter, in
which I explain the Universe.'
I suppose that we have all had moments of sudden illumination when it
occurred to us that we had explained the Universe, and it was so easy
for us that we wondered why we had not done it before. Some thought
drifted into our mind and filled us with vague forebodings of
omniscience. It was not an ordinary thought, that explained only a
fragment of existence. It explained everything. It proved one thing and
it proved the opposite just as well. It explained why things are as they
are, and if it should turn out that they are not that way at all, it
would prove that fact also. In the light of our great thought chaos
seemed rational.
Such thoughts usually occur about four o'clock in the morning. Having
explained the Universe, we relapse into satisfied slumber. When, a few
hours later, we rise, we wonder what the explanation was.
Now and then, however, one of these highly explanatory ideas remains to
comfort us in our waking hours. Such a thought is that which I here
throw out, and which has doubtless at some early hour occurred to most
of my readers. It is that every man has a natural desire to be somebody
else.
This does not explain the Universe, but it explains that perplexing part
of it which we call Human Nature. It explains why so many intelligent
people, who deal skillfully with matters of fact, make such a mess of it
when they deal with their fellow creatures. It explains why we get on as
well as we do with strangers, and why we do not get on better with our
friends. It explains why people are so often offended when we say nice
things about them, and why it is that, when we say harsh things about
them, they take it as a compliment. It explains why people marry their
opposites and why they live happily ever afterwards. It also explains
why some people don't. It explains the meaning of tact and its opposite.
The tactless person treats a person according to a scientific method as
if he were a thing. Now, in dealing with a thing, you must first find
out what it is, and then act accordingly. But with a person, you must
first find out what he is and then carefully conceal from him the fact
that you have made the discovery.
The tactless person can never be made to understand this. He prides
himself on taking people as they are without being aware that that is
not the way they want to be taken.
He has a keen eye for the obvious, and calls attention to it. Age, sex,
color, nationality, previous condition of servitude, and all the facts
that are interesting to the census-taker, are apparent to him and are
made the basis of his conversation. When he meets one who is older than
he, he is conscious of the fact, and emphasizes by every polite
attention the disparity in years. He has an idea that at a certain
period in life the highest tribute of respect is to be urged to rise out
of one chair and take another that is presumably more comfortable. It
does not occur to him that there may remain any tastes that are not
sedentary. On the other hand, he sees a callow youth and addresses
himself to the obvious callowness, and thereby makes himself thoroughly
disliked. For, strange to say, the youth prefers to be addressed as a
person of precocious maturity.
The literalist, observing that most people talk shop, takes it for
granted that they like to talk shop. This is a mistake. They do it
because it is the easiest thing to do, but they resent having attention
called to their limitations. A man's profession does not necessarily
coincide with his natural aptitude or with his predominant desire. When
you meet a member of the Supreme Court you may assume that he is gifted
with a judicial mind. But it does not follow that that is the only
quality of mind he has; nor that when, out of court, he gives you a
piece of his mind, it will be a piece of his judicial mind that he
gives.
My acquaintance with royalty is limited to photographs of royal groups,
which exhibit a high degree of domesticity. It would seem that the
business of royalty when pursued as a steady job becomes tiresome, and
that when they have their pictures taken they endeavor to look as much
like ordinary folks as possible--and they usually succeed.
The member of one profession is always flattered by being taken for a
skilled practitioner of another. Try it on your minister. Instead of
saying, 'That was an excellent sermon of yours this morning,' say, 'As I
listened to your cogent argument, I thought what a successful lawyer you
would have made.' Then he will say, 'I did think of taking to the law.'
If you had belonged to the court of Frederick the Great, you would have
proved a poor courtier indeed if you had praised His Majesty's
campaigns. Frederick knew that he was a Prussian general, but he wanted
to be a French literary man. If you wished to gain his favor, you
should have told him that in your opinion he excelled Voltaire.
We do not like to have too much attention drawn to our present
circumstances. They may be well enough in their way, but we can think of
something which would be more fitting for us. We have either seen better
days or we expect them.
Suppose you had visited Napoleon in Elba and had sought to ingratiate
yourself with him.
'Sire,' you would have said, 'this is a beautiful little empire of
yours, so snug and cosy and quiet. It is just such a domain as is suited
to a man in your condition. The climate is excellent. Everything is
peaceful. It must be delightful to rule where everything is arranged for
you and the details are taken care of by others. As I came to your
dominion I saw a line of British frigates guarding your shores. The
evidences of such thoughtfulness are everywhere.'
Your praise of his present condition would not have endeared you to
Napoleon. You were addressing him as the Emperor of Elba. In his own
eyes he was Emperor, though in Elba.
It is such a misapprehension which irritates any mature human being when
his environment is taken as the measure of his personality.
The man with a literal mind moves in a perpetual comedy of errors. It is
not a question of two Dromios. There are half a dozen Dromios under one
hat.
How casually introductions are made, as if it were the easiest thing in
the world to make two human beings acquainted! Your friend says, 'I want
you to know Mr. Stifflekin,' and you say that you are happy to know him.
But does either of you know the enigma that goes under the name of
Stifflekin? You may know what he looks like and where he resides and
what he does for a living. But that is all in the present tense. To
really know him you must not only know what he is but what he used to
be; what he used to think he was; what he used to think he ought to be
and might be if he worked hard enough. You must know what he might have
been if certain things had happened otherwise, and you must know what
might have happened otherwise if he had been otherwise. All these
complexities are a part of his own dim apprehension of himself. They are
what make him so much more interesting to himself than he is to any one
else.
It is this consciousness of the inadequacy of our knowledge which makes
us so embarrassed when we offer any service to another. Will he take it
in the spirit in which it is given?
That was an awkward moment when Stanley, after all his hardships in his
search for Dr. Livingstone, at last found the Doctor by a lake in
Central Africa. Stanley held out his hand and said stiffly, 'Dr.
Livingstone, I presume?' Stanley had heroically plunged through the
equatorial forests to find Livingstone and to bring him back to
civilization. But Livingstone was not particularly anxious to be found,
and had a decided objection to being brought back to civilization. What
he wanted was a new adventure. Stanley did not find the real Livingstone
till he discovered that the old man was as young at heart as himself.
The two men became acquainted only when they began to plan a new
expedition to find the source of the Nile.
II
The natural desire of every man to be somebody else explains many of the
minor irritations of life. It prevents that perfect organization of
society in which every one should know his place and keep it. The desire
to be somebody else leads us to practice on work that does not strictly
belong to us. We all have aptitudes and talents that overflow the narrow
bounds of our trade or profession. Every man feels that he is bigger
than his job, and he is all the time doing what theologians call 'works
of supererogation.'
The serious-minded housemaid is not content to do what she is told to
do. She has an unexpended balance of energy. She wants to be a general
household reformer. So she goes to the desk of the titular master of the
house and gives it a thorough reformation. She arranges the papers
according to her idea of neatness. When the poor gentleman returns and
finds his familiar chaos transformed into a hateful order, he becomes a
reactionary.