THE LONG ROAD OF WOMAN’S MEMORY
[Illustration]
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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TORONTO
THE LONG ROAD OF
WOMAN’S MEMORY
BY
JANE ADDAMS
AUTHOR OF “TWENTY YEARS AT HULL HOUSE”
“THE SPIRIT OF YOUTH AND THE
CITY STREETS,” ETC.
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1916
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1916,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1916.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
TO MY DEAR FRIEND
MARY H. WILMARTH
WHOSE MEMORY STORED WITH THE BEST IN LITERATURE
AND WHOSE FINE PUBLIC SPIRIT ARE DAILY PLACED
AT THE SERVICE OF HER FRIENDS AND OF
HER CITY, WITH A GALLANT AND
GENTLE COURTESY
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION ix
I. WOMEN’S MEMORIES--TRANSMUTING THE PAST, AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE
STORY OF THE DEVIL BABY 1
II. WOMEN’S MEMORIES--REACTING ON LIFE, AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE
STORY OF THE DEVIL BABY 25
III. WOMEN’S MEMORIES--DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 53
IV. WOMEN’S MEMORIES--INTEGRATING INDUSTRY 84
V. WOMEN’S MEMORIES--CHALLENGING WAR 115
VI. A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE IN INTERPRETATIVE MEMORY 141
INTRODUCTION
For many years at Hull-House I have at intervals detected in certain
old people, when they spoke of their past experiences, a tendency to an
idealization, almost to a romanticism suggestive of the ardent dreams
and groundless ambitions we have all observed in the young when they
recklessly lay their plans for the future.
I have, moreover, been frequently impressed by the fact that
these romantic revelations were made by old people who had really
suffered much hardship and sorrow, and that the transmutation of
their experiences was not the result of ignoring actuality, but was
apparently due to a power inherent in memory itself.
It was therefore a great pleasure when I found this aspect of memory
delightfully portrayed by Sir Gilbert Murray in his life of Euripides.
He writes that the aged poet, when he was officially made one of
the old men of Athens, declared that he could transmute into song
traditional tales of sorrow and wrong-doing because, being long past,
they had already become part mystery and part music: “Memory, that
Memory who is the Mother of the Muses, having done her work upon them.”
Here was an explanation which I might have anticipated; it was the
Muses again at their old tricks,--the very mother of them this
time,--thrusting their ghostly fingers into the delicate fabric of
human experience to the extreme end of life. I had known before that
the Muses foregathered with the Spirit of Youth and I had even made a
feeble attempt to portray that companionship, but I was stupid indeed
not to see that they are equally at home with the aged whose prosaic
lives sadly need such interference.
Even with this clue in my hands, so preoccupied are we all with our own
practical affairs, I probably should never have followed it, had it not
been for the visit of a mythical Devil Baby who so completely filled
Hull-House with old women coming to see him, that for a period of six
weeks I could perforce do little but give them my attention.
When this excitement had subsided and I had written down the
corroboration afforded by their eager recitals in the first two
chapters of this book, I might have supposed myself to be rid of the
matter, incidentally having been taught once more that, while I may
receive valuable suggestions from classic literature, when I really
want to learn about life, I must depend upon my neighbors, for, as
William James insists, the most instructive human documents lie along
the beaten pathway.
The subject, however, was not so easily disposed of, for certain
elderly women among these selfsame neighbors disconcertingly took quite
another line from that indicated by Euripides. To my amazement, their
reminiscences revealed an additional function of memory, so aggressive
and withal so modern, that it was quite impossible, living as I was in
a Settlement with sociological tendencies, to ignore it.
It was gradually forced upon my attention that these reminiscences
of the aged, even while softening the harsh realities of the past,
exercise a vital power of selection which often necessitates an onset
against the very traditions and conventions commonly believed to find
their stronghold in the minds of elderly people. Such reminiscences
suggested an analogy to the dreams of youth which, while covering the
future with a shifting rose-colored mist, contain within themselves the
inchoate substance from which the tough-fibred forces of coming social
struggles are composed.
In the light of this later knowledge, I was impelled to write the
next two chapters of this book, basing them upon conversations held
with various women of my acquaintance whose experience in family
relationships or in the labor market had so forced their conduct to a
variation from the accepted type that there emerged an indication of a
selective groping toward another standard. They inevitably suggested
that a sufficient number of similar variations might even, in Memory’s
leisurely fashion of upbuilding tradition, in the end establish a new
norm.
Some of these women, under the domination of that mysterious
autobiographical impulse which makes it more difficult to conceal
the truth than to avow it, purged their souls in all sincerity and
unconsciously made plain the part borne in their hard lives by
monstrous social injustices.
These conversations proved to be so illustrative of my second thesis
that it seemed scarcely necessary to do more than record them. The
deduction was obvious that mutual reminiscences perform a valuable
function in determining analogous conduct for large bodies of people
who have no other basis for like-mindedness.
So gradual is this process, so unconsciously are these converts under
Memory’s gentle coercion brought into a spiritual fellowship, that the
social changes thus inaugurated, at least until the reformers begin
to formulate them and to accelerate the process through propaganda,
take on the aspect of beneficent natural phenomena. And yet, curiously
enough, I found that the two functions of Memory--first, its important
rôle in interpreting and appeasing life for the individual, and second
its activity as a selective agency in social reorganization--were
not mutually exclusive, and at moments seemed to support each other.
Certain conversations even suggested that the selective process itself
might be held responsible for the softened outlines of the past to
one looking back, by the natural blurring of nonessentials and the
consequent throwing into high relief of common human experiences.
The insistence of Memory upon the great essentials, even to the
complete sacrifice of its inherent power to appease, was most
poignantly brought to my attention during two months I spent in Europe
in the summer of 1915. Desolated women, stripped by war of all their
warm domestic interests and of children long cherished in affectionate
solicitude, sat shelterless in the devastating glare of Memory. Because
by its pitiless light they were forced to look into the black depths of
primitive human nature, occasionally one of these heart-broken women
would ignore the strident claims of the present and would insist that
the war was cutting at the very taproots of the basic human relations
so vitally necessary to the survival of civilization. I cannot hope
to have adequately reproduced in Chapter V those conversations which
themselves partook of the grim aspect of war.
It was during this cataclysmic summer in Europe that I sometimes sought
for a solace, or at least for a source of sanity, by resting my mind
on the immemorial monuments of ancient Egypt, from which I had once
received an almost mystic assurance of the essential unity of man’s
age-long spiritual effort. But because such guarding of continuity as
Egypt had afforded me had been associated with an unexpected revival
of childish recollections, I found that Memory was a chief factor
also in this situation. Therefore, in spite of the fact that these
reminiscences of my childhood were vividly resuscitated in Egypt by
a process which postulates a reversal of the one described in the
first two chapters of this book, I venture to incorporate my personal
experience in the last chapter. It may suggest one more of our
obligations to Memory, that Protean Mother, who first differentiated
primitive man from the brute; who makes possible our complicated modern
life so daily dependent on the experiences of the past; and upon whom
at the present moment is thrust the sole responsibility of guarding,
for future generations, our common heritage of mutual good-will.
THE LONG ROAD OF WOMAN’S MEMORY
CHAPTER I
WOMEN’S MEMORIES--TRANSMUTING THE PAST, AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE STORY OF
THE DEVIL BABY
Quite as it would be hard for any one of us to select the summer in
which he ceased to live that life, so ardent in childhood and early
youth, when all the real happenings are in the future, so it must be
difficult for old people to tell at what period they began to regard
the present chiefly as a prolongation of the past. There is no doubt,
however, that such instinctive shiftings and reversals have taken place
for many old people who, under the control of Memory, are actually
living much more in the past than in the ephemeral present.
It is most fortunate, therefore, that in some subtle fashion these
old people, reviewing the long road they have travelled, are able to
transmute their own untoward experiences into that which seems to make
even the most wretched life acceptable. This may possibly be due to an
instinct of self-preservation, which checks the devastating bitterness
that would result did they recall over and over again the sordid detail
of events long past; it is even possible that those people who were not
able thus to inhibit their bitterness have died earlier, for as one old
man recently reminded me, “It is a true word that worry can kill a cat.”
This permanent and elemental function of Memory was graphically
demonstrated at Hull-House during a period of several weeks when we
were reported to be harboring within its walls a so-called “Devil Baby.”
The knowledge of his existence 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 to 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; the Devil Baby
had, moreover, 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 from every part of the city and suburbs the streams of
visitors 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 in a rage had torn
a holy picture from the bedroom wall saying that he would quite as
soon have a devil in the house as such a thing, 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, was running 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 family 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 new-born child had snatched
from his father’s lips, the tale might have been fashioned a thousand
years ago.
Although the visitors to the Devil Baby included persons 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 men
and women 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; 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 should not reach the newspapers until the
fifth week of his sojourn at Hull-House--after thousands of people had
already been informed of his whereabouts by the old method of passing
news from mouth to mouth.
For six weeks as I went about the 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 are
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 “æsthetic 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.
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 even 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. As I came down
the stairs, long before I could hear what they were saying, implicit in
their solemn and portentous old voices came the admonition:--
“Wilt thou reject the past
Big with deep warnings?”
It was a very serious and genuine matter with the old women, this
story so ancient and yet so contemporaneous, and they flocked to
Hull-House from every direction; those I had known for many years,
others I had never known and some whom I had supposed to be long dead.
But they were all alive and eager; something in the story or in its
mysterious sequences had aroused one of those active forces in human
nature which does not take orders, but insists only upon giving them.
We had abruptly come in contact with a living and self-assertive human
quality!
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. They are accustomed to sit at home and to hear the
younger members of the family speak of affairs quite outside their
own experiences, sometimes in a language they do not understand, and
at best in quick glancing phrases which they cannot follow; “More
than half the time I can’t tell what they are talking about,” is an
oft-repeated complaint. The story of the Devil Baby evidently put into
their hands the sort of material with which they were accustomed to
deal. They had long used such tales in their unremitting efforts at
family discipline, ever since they had frightened their first children
into awed silence by tales of bugaboo men who prowled in the darkness.
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. Years of living had taught them that recrimination
with grown-up children and grandchildren is worse than useless, that
punishments are impossible, that domestic instruction is best given
through tales and metaphors.
As the old women talked with the new volubility which the story of the
Devil Baby had released in them, going back into their long memories
and urging its credibility upon me, the story seemed to condense
that mystical wisdom which becomes deposited in the heart of man by
unnoticed innumerable experiences.
Perhaps my many conversations with these aged visitors crystallized
thoughts and impressions 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 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 to be so completely without it that they must have lost it
long since.
None of them had a word of blame for undutiful children or heedless
grandchildren, because apparently the petty and transitory had fallen
away from their austere old age, the fires were burnt out, resentments,
hatreds, and even cherished sorrows had become actually unintelligible.
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 offered a fleeting glimpse of the translucent
wisdom, so often embodied in the old, but so difficult to portray. It
is doubtless what Michael Angelo had in mind when he made the Sybils
old, what Dante meant by the phrase “those who had learned of life,”
and the age-worn minstrel who turned into song a Memory which was more
that of history and tradition than his own.
In contrast to the visitors to the Devil Baby who spoke only such words
of groping wisdom as they were able, were other 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 up-stairs.”
Some of these old women had struggled for weary years with poverty and
much childbearing, had known what it was to be bullied and beaten by
their husbands, neglected and ignored by their prosperous children, and
burdened by the support of the imbecile and the shiftless ones. They
had literally gone “Deep written all their days with care.”
One old woman actually came from the poorhouse, having heard of the
Devil Baby “through a lady from Polk Street visiting an old friend who
has a bed in our ward.” It was no slight achievement for the penniless
and crippled old inmate to make her escape. She had asked “a young
bar-keep in a saloon across the road” to lend her ten cents, offering
as security the fact that she was an old acquaintance at Hull-House who
could not be refused so slight a loan. She marvelled at some length
over the goodness of the young man, for she had not had a dime to
spend for a drink for the last six months, and he and the conductor
had been obliged to lift her into the street car by main strength. She
was naturally much elated over the achievement of her escape. To be
sure, from the men’s side, they were always walking off in the summer
and taking to the road, living like tramps they did, in a way no one
from the woman’s side would demean herself to do; but to have left in
a street car like a lady, with money to pay her own fare, was quite
a different matter, although she was indeed “clean wore out” by the
effort. However, it was clear that she would consider herself well
repaid by a sight of the Devil Baby and that not only the inmates of
her own ward, but those in every other ward in the house would be made
to “sit up” when she got back; it would liven them all up a bit, and
she hazarded the guess that she would have to tell them about that baby
at least a dozen times a day.
As she cheerfully rambled on, we weakly postponed telling her there was
no Devil Baby, first that she might have a cup of tea and rest, and
then through a sheer desire to withhold a blow from a poor old body who
had received so many throughout a long, hard life.
As I recall those unreal weeks, it was in her presence that I found
myself for the first time vaguely wishing that I could administer
comfort by the simple device of not asserting too dogmatically that the
Devil Baby had never been at Hull-House.
Our guest recalled with great pride that her grandmother had possessed
second sight; that her mother had heard the Banshee three times and
that she, herself, had heard it once. All this gave her a certain
proprietary interest in the Devil Baby and I suspected she cherished a
secret hope that when she should lay her eyes upon him, her inherited
gifts might be able to reveal the meaning of the strange portent. At
the least, he would afford a proof that her family-long faith in such
matters was justified. Her misshapen hands lying on her lap fairly
trembled with eagerness.
It may have been because I was still smarting under the recollection
of the disappointment we had so wantonly inflicted upon our visitor
from the poorhouse that the very next day I found myself almost
agreeing with her whole-hearted acceptance of the past as of much more
importance than the mere present; at least for half an hour the past
seemed endowed also for me with a profounder and more ardent life.
This impression was received in connection with an old woman, sturdy
in her convictions, although long since bedridden, who had doggedly
refused to believe that there was no Devil Baby at Hull-House, unless
“herself” told her so. Because of her mounting irritation with the
envoys who one and all came back to her to report “they say it ain’t
there,” it seemed well that I should go promptly before “she fashed
herself into the grave.” As I walked along the street and even as I
went up the ramshackle outside stairway of the rear cottage and through
the dark corridor to the “second floor back” where she lay in her
untidy bed, I was assailed by a veritable temptation to give her a full
description of the Devil Baby, which by this time I knew so accurately
(for with a hundred variations to select from I could have made a
monstrous infant almost worthy of his name), and also to refrain from
putting too much stress on the fact that he had never been really and
truly at Hull-House.
I found my mind hastily marshalling arguments for not disturbing
her belief in the story which had so evidently brought her a vivid
interest long denied her. She lived alone with her young grandson, who
went to work every morning at seven o’clock and save for the short
visits made by the visiting nurse and by kind neighbors, her long day
was monotonous and undisturbed. But the story of a Devil Baby, with
his existence officially corroborated as it were, would give her a
lodestone which would attract the neighbors far and wide and exalt her
once more into the social importance she had had twenty-four years
before when I had first known her. She was then the proprietor of
the most prosperous second-hand store on a street full of them, her
shiftless, drinking husband and her jolly, good-natured sons doing
exactly what she told them to do. This, however, was long past, for
“owing to the drink,” in her own graphic phrase, “the old man, the
boys, and the business, too, were clean gone” and there was “nobody
left but little Tom and me and nothing for us to live on.”
I remember how well she used to tell a story when I once tried to
collect some folk-lore for Mr. Yeats to prove that an Irish peasant
does not lose his faith in the little people nor his knowledge of
Gaelic phrases simply because he is living in a city. She had at that
time told me a wonderful tale concerning a red cloak worn by an old
woman to a freshly dug grave. The story of the Devil Baby would give
her material worthy of her powers, but of course she must be able to
believe it with all her heart. She could live only a few months at the
very best, I argued to myself; why not give her this vivid interest and
through it awake those earliest recollections of that long-accumulated
folk-lore with its magic power to transfigure and eclipse the sordid
and unsatisfactory surroundings in which life is actually spent? I
solemnly assured myself that the imagination of old age needs to be fed
and probably has quite as imperious a claim as that of youth, which
levies upon us so remorselessly with its “I want a fairy story, but I
don’t like you to begin by saying that it isn’t true.” Impatiently I
found myself challenging the educators who had given us no pedagogical
instructions for the treatment of old age, although they had fairly
overinformed us as to the use of the fairy tale with children.
The little room was stuffed with a magpie collection, the usual odds
and ends which compose an old woman’s treasures, augmented in this
case by various articles which a second-hand store, even of the most
flourishing sort, could not sell. In the picturesque confusion, if
anywhere in Chicago, an urbanized group of the little people might
dwell; they would certainly find the traditional atmosphere which they
strictly require, marvelling faith and unalloyed reverence. At any
rate, an eager old woman aroused to her utmost capacity of wonder and
credulity was the very soil, prepared to a nicety, for planting the
seed-thought of the Devil Baby. If the object of my errand had been
an hour’s reading to a sick woman, it would have been accounted to me
for philanthropic righteousness, and if the chosen reading had lifted
her mind from her bodily discomforts and harassing thoughts so that
she forgot them all for one fleeting moment, how pleased I should have
been with the success of my effort. But here I was with a story at my
tongue’s end, stupidly hesitating to give it validity, although the
very words were on my lips. I was still arguing the case with myself
when I stood on the threshold of her room and caught the indomitable
gleam of her eye, fairly daring me to deny the existence of the Devil
Baby, her slack dropsical body so responding to her overpowering
excitement that for the moment she looked alert in her defiance and
positively menacing.
But, as in the case of many another weak soul, the decision was taken
out of my hands, my very hesitation was enough, for nothing is more
certain than that the bearer of a magic tale never stands dawdling on
the door-step. Slowly the gleam died out of the expectant old eyes, the
erect shoulders sagged and pulled forward, and I saw only too plainly
that the poor old woman had accepted one more disappointment in a life
already overflowing with them. She was violently thrown back into all
the limitations of her personal experience and surroundings, and that
larger life she had anticipated so eagerly was as suddenly shut away
from her as if a door had been slammed in her face.
I never encountered that particular temptation again, though she was no
more pitiful than many of the aged visitors whom the Devil Baby brought
to Hull-House. But, perhaps as a result of this experience, I gradually
lost the impression that the old people were longing for a second
chance at life, to live it all over again and to live more fully and
wisely, and I became more reconciled to the fact that many of them had
little opportunity for meditation or for bodily rest, but must keep on
working with their toil-worn hands, in spite of weariness or faintness
of heart.
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, 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 was walking in
such strange paths and that no one would listen to them, for one moment
there flickered up the last hope of a disappointed life, that it may
at least serve as a warning, while affording material for an exciting
narrative.
Sometimes in talking to a woman who was “but a hair’s breadth this
side of the darkness,” I realized that old age has its own expression
for the mystic renunciation of the world. Their impatience with all
non-essentials, the craving to be free from hampering bonds and soft
conditions, recalled Tolstoy’s last impetuous journey, and I was once
more grateful to his genius for making clear another unintelligible
impulse of bewildered humanity.
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
fulfilment of an inmost desire, with a sincerity and anticipation 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 so reassuring, that I
found myself perpetually speculating upon how soon the fleeting and
petty emotions which now seem unduly important to us 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, all sense of resentment.