But it is impossible to convey what her ways were with the children
and in the several homes that she made so full of dreaming light. She
had a keen appreciation of the humorousness and quaintness of
children. She was always quoting to me their adventures, their
sayings. She had countless plans and schemes for work in the world,
and carried out many of them in relation to woman suffrage, baby
clinics, camp-fire organization for the girls of our village, and,
during the war, work with all the local organizations among women that
it called into being where she was living at the time. She wanted to
start a home in America for French widows and orphans, though this
plan was not possible,--she was deeply interested in the work for the
protection of young girls under Miss Katharine Bement Davis, and only
circumstances prevented her taking this up during the fall of 1918.
She had several interviews with Miss Davis and showed herself to be
the very person who could have helped greatly. Self-denial, sacrifice,
poverty, effort were the watchwords ever recurring to her. Her instant
concentration upon any book or paper that came under her eyes became a
family joke. She would be lost immediately, oblivious of all
surroundings. She read and thought with a lively appreciation of the
many futilities in life and a desire to make her life count. She
wasted no time on what did not at once attract her spirit, except of
necessity. And yet she genuinely delighted in the small events of a
day such as please and awe children. And the reason they loved her so
was because they knew she brought the same guileless point of view to
solve their bewilderment from larger experience. And yet she would
write:
"I _wish_ I knew where I stood. I was much happier when I was a
rigid Catholic. I wish I could fit back into that measure. Can I ever--
any more than I can fit into the mental measure of a nun?"
And again her typewriting would exclaim to me:
"I don't like to write letters to you. I like to talk to you. I like
still better to be silent with you!"
When she thought me in need of it she could be very self-forgetful:
"But I want to see the future big with Romance for you and I would
rather feel you came home from voyages two weeks or two months long,
with a trunkful of manuscripts; and that, three years from today, you
had secured us special rates on a tramp steamer to Plymouth, than that
you were going to dodge into subways the rest of your life."
"I would infinitely rather you shipped before the mast--to Bermuda,
Borneo, or Buenos Aires. Don't think from this I don't want your face
across the table from mine every night the rest of my life!"
Reading to the children, she would retail to me such incidents as:
"Then I read them the Gospel stories, ... and they were too funny--R--
trying to show me how Herod looked, and J-- suggesting charitably that
perhaps his wife was good. 'No,' said R--,'the whole family was bad!'"
"In the spring I am going to take an old farmhouse, give the children
one brown garment apiece, and plan a scheme of living that will leave
something over for other children."
And this appealed to her:
"Well, if it is not in the Fall of 1918, it will be in 'one of those
houses Our Lord is building' as J-- remarks casually. Did I tell you
of the little village in the North Carolina hills where H-- and S. L--
spent the summer, where the women raised enough sheep to cut the wool,
card, and spin and weave the clothes the family wore?"
In the winter of 1914 she first visited Augusta, Georgia, where my
father was stationed, and there the campaign against Child Labor, in
which she was always vitally interested, became doubly real in
necessity to her as she went through the cotton mills and saw
conditions at close range. She always gave what sums she could to this
cause. In 1915, perhaps the most famous year of the woman suffrage
battle, she was campaigning, speaking, watching all day at the polls
in her village of Port Washington, Long Island. I remember her
speaking from the stage of the Republican Club against a clever anti-
suffragist from New York. Her voice reached out for something in the
hearts of her audience hid deeper than the appeal of a mere
legislative reform. She knew her intellectual ground, but it was
something deeper than intellectuality that went home.
In 1918 the Baby Welfare Movement was at its height. She became
chairman of the Augusta committee and established clinics at the
different schools and social centres.
So I grasp at her life, giving only a slight indication of how full it
was. Her friends were of every type and kind, of every religious
belief or lack of belief, of many different political opinions.
She hated war with her whole soul. It was directly opposed to the
words of Christ. But she wrote me in a dark time:
"Italy is bad, Russia is bad, Cambrai is bad. But those things are
only phases in the eternal struggle of right against wrong. And the
only thing that matters is to personally throw your whole life into
the balance for the things you believe to be right."
How far I failed her! It is given to every man to fight somehow
through the bewilderment of life with the best intentions he can
realize. And life seems to me like a fierce current on which we are
borne rather than anything we can really master--except by forgetting
it. She has left me with the feeling that I must know infinitely more
and try to understand better, and that we are governed most truly only
by the inexplicable. "Meanwhile, there is our life here--Well?"
The verse in this book is put as nearly as possible in the order of
its writing. If there is any merit in any line of it, the merit is of
her making. If there is none, the effort was, at least, to reach
higher than my grasp--because of her. A writer is--and it is the
ancient curse!--an egotist. But it is not my grief that I wish to
display here. The human heart can fortunately never be put on paper.
Only--reality assures of reality.
Poetry is unconscionable because it follows true conscience. I knew,
in her, that conscience,--and know it in these fantastic shadows cast
by her light. If you do also, be assured that the light still shines--
forever.
New York City,
March 25, 1919.