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.