[_Mrs. Laidlaw is chairman of Manhattan Borough of the Woman
Suffrage Party. Her special interest in the subject of this
review is due, among other things, to her friendship with Rose
Livingston, the rescue worker in Chinatown whose unique
experience gives her understanding sympathy with unfortunate
girls, and who has suffered persecution, unchecked by the
police, on account of her revelations in regard to the white
slave trade._—Ed.]
In My Little Sister[10] Elizabeth Robins has let us hear a great
cry out of the depths—an actual human cry.
True, many snug, comfortable people, shaken for a moment out of
their apathy, dismiss it all carelessly, even contemptuously. Many
who are gripped to the heart as they read brush away the tears
with a sign of relief and say, “Well, it’s only a story.” But what
a “story!”
It is told in a tense, staccato style which hurries the reader
on—on even through the idealistic descriptions of the English
country and the stretching moor, across which, in its little
garden planted by loving hands, stands the “dear home” of the
officer’s gentle widow and her two daughters, the Elder Sister in
whose words the story is told and whose name is never mentioned,
and the Little Sister, Bettina, all golden and bright, a creature
so touchingly exquisite, so like a flower.
Through the sweet, lightly sketched scenes of the childhood,
girlhood and dawning womanhood of these two fair young creatures
there is woven a dark thread of fear, dread, tragedy. Some
experience of brutality this dainty, tenderly devoted mother has
had, an experience which is never more than darkly hinted at. She
forgets the terror of it only in those happy memories that cluster
about her lover-husband. His body was brought home to her from a
fatal tiger hunt. Her only consolation in his loss, she tells the
Elder Sister, was that she knew that there are worse dangers than
those of the jungle! She had the joy of knowing that he died while
all was “bright and untarnished.”
The narrative hastens on, always with a hovering sense of doom.
The innocent, tender love stories of the sisters develop. They are
but seventeen and nineteen, but they are women. It is impossible
to do justice to the telling of this story, so we will pass to the
main event, the invitation of the London aunt, the failing health
and fortune of the mother, which nerves her to accept an offer
that will separate her from her children, and the almost happy
bustle of preparation for the first visit from home, and for that
wonder of wonders—a London season! The sinister part played by
Madame Aurore, the little London dressmaker who, while working for
them in their country home lays the plans that are to decoy them
to their ruin in London, is worked out with sure, rapid touch.
Then comes the arrival in London, the meeting of the girls by the
pseudo “aunt,” who has been dressed for the part by the aid of a
photograph sent on to the procurers by Madame Aurore. Then follows
the terrible scene in the house with the barred windows and the
strange overwhelming scent, the escape of the Elder Sister, the
heart-breaking search for the younger—the madness, the despair!
One of the most pathetic things in the book is the heart-broken
young lover who traces Bettina from London to “their house in
Paris”—thence from one place to another “always too late.” The
merciful death of the mother, and the fixed conviction, the
subliminal inspiration, that comes toward the end to the tortured
brain of the elder sister that Bettina has found her release in
death, alleviate and spiritualize the misery of it all.
Now as to the truth of this tremendous story. I suppose that
having put the very soul of truth and reality into the narrative
itself, having written it from the very depths of her own pitying
heart, the author has not reckoned with the callous incredulity
which the book often meets, or she might well have added an
introductory note in regard to the actual facts in this case from
real life. The story, she told me subsequent to its publication,
was absolutely true, but much softened at many points. In the true
story, for instance, the mother is not dead, but is in a state of
dementia on the continent, whither the family have moved, being
unable to endure England and its memories.
Moreover, although Miss Robins’ experience in working for women
and the woman’s cause in England had brought to her knowledge many
life histories more unspeakable than this, after she had finished
this book she said to herself, “Now here is a story that I know to
be absolutely true, but how valuable is it to give to the world an
individual instance of this kind; how far can it be generalized?”
To test this she went, with that sincerity of spirit that
characterizes all she does, to a noted police justice in London
and laid the story before him, asking him what he would do if a
person came to him with such a story. He answered sadly, with no
show of being at all roused by anything unusual, that he would
begin to take evidence immediately and see what he could do about
it. He added that the story was really a commonplace.
Such is the reticence of the English press, and such is the stern
family pride concerning the “blot on the scutcheon,” and all those
traditions which grow out of the double moral standard whereby the
escapade of the son of the house can even be repeated lightly
while the slightest shadow on the name of the daughter is an
unspeakable disgrace, that no one knows how many tragedies of this
kind are hidden from sight in the records of numerous respectable
families.
To satisfy herself more completely that the story was susceptible
of extensive application, Miss Robins took it to several London
police inspectors. No one for a moment stopped to doubt or
question the facts. The most horrible stories that the human mind
can conceive are old stories to them. When the Home Secretary was
asked a question on this subject in the House of Commons only a
few weeks ago, he answered that in London city alone, to his
knowledge, there had been reported fifty-three girls lost and
never heard of within a few months. Such facts as this explain the
tragic intensity with which the book is written.
Danger! Danger! Danger! That is the dominant note that sounds
throughout the narrative. How pathetically the mother’s poignant
fears contrast with her ineffectiveness. Ever this haunting
danger, whether mother and daughters are walking in the sunset, or
planting in the garden, or sitting by the hearth. What a wonderful
picture Miss Robins gives of the mother’s desperate dependence on
the four walls of her home—“Soon home, now, little girl, soon safe
in our dear home.” The danger signal of the night-bird’s note is
introduced with inimitable art—a subtle suggestion, even in those
early days, of the gray hawk whose shadow hovers over bright young
lives.
The unutterable sadness of it all and the stern warning to mothers
that children’s homes are not just in four walls, but are in towns
and cities and nations! How utterly ineffectual seem an individual
mother’s effort for the safety of her child. How evident is it
that a mother’s care must have back of it power—power in council
and legislative hall. How strongly the lack of social sympathy is
brought out; the mother’s indifference to the great crying needs
of the world. This mother’s “place was the home,” and to what did
all her negative efforts avail in shutting the danger away from
her cherished daughters in a nation, in a world, which holds a
traffic system of such Machiavellian adroitness, a system which
can afford, so great are its profits, to reach into the inner
recesses of a home, to work with endless patience and
resourcefulness and which can enlist on its side such power that
even the London police, perhaps the least corrupt in the world,
can answer evasively to the frantic cry, “Do you know such a
house?”—“We have a great many on the list, but not many such as
you describe;” and follow this statement with the maddening
inactivity which Miss Robins describes with vivid accuracy.
Her book is a terrific arraignment of the conditions which make
such a tragedy possible. Respectability and indifference are
personified scathingly in the monumental aunt, deaf to the world
voices of agony. All society is arraigned as the Elder Sister
storms at her aunt, “sitting massive, calm, with a power of inert
resistance.” Her bewildered answer to the mad cry for help,—“It
isn’t possible, this is England,”—sounds strangely natural to us.
It is the burden of so many recent New York editorials, “such
things don’t happen”!—and that in our land where the record of the
Chicago Immigration League tells of 1,700 girls between the
railroad terminals of New York and Chicago alone, reported lost in
one year. Thus wails the Elder Sister,—“So old and unbelieving, I
felt she had looked on unmoved at evil since the world began....
She rose, O! but slowly;—slow, stiff and ponderous. I felt in her
all the heaviness of acquiescence since time began.”
Thus is the unbelievable apathy of society pictured! Thus Miss
Robins touches lightly, pitifully on the problem of a girl’s
handicap in the lack of preparation for life. What a picture she
gives of the sheltered girl—“Such a little thing, my not knowing
how to telephone, yet it might cost my mother her life.” Again
this motive is sounded when the daughter is begging her mother for
knowledge about her experiences, and the great gray danger—“It is
not the kind of thing you need ever know,” answers the mother with
fatuous finality.
Nor does she make our heart bleed for girlhood alone, but for
manhood, as that blood-curdling conversation, unparalleled in
literature, is gasped out between the Man and the Elder Sister as
they crouch in the shadow in that ghastly room in what he himself
tells her is “one of the most terrible houses in Europe.” Here we
see manhood disfigured, draggled beyond recognition, sitting in
the dust and ashes of a charnel house. How sodden the words fall
from his lips as depraved and perverted manhood defends itself.
“This is a commonplace in the world, in every capital of every
nation on earth. Bishops, old ladies, imagine you could alter
these things.” “Human nature—human nature,” muses the Elder
Sister, “like the tolling of a muffled bell.” Thus are the
wickedest, most deadly of the world’s platitudes on this subject
uttered in this glaring scene of abnormality, so that
automatically they are given the lie.
The unbelieving will say, “But how is it possible that we do not
hear oftener of such cases?” Two elements especially conspire to
suppress such knowledge, both based on a false attitude towards
women. First the double standard of morals which holds men’s
purity so much lower than woman’s; second, the unjust attitude
towards women reflected in the press which is more likely to seize
upon a disappearance story in such a way as to make it reflect
upon the girls’ character rather than to acknowledge it a possible
case of abduction or white slavery.
As I write, Miss Robins sends me letters which she has recently
received from people interested in her book. One speaking of the
“awful traffic that is going on” tells how two girls, daughters of
a clergyman, have disappeared on their journey home from school
and have never been heard of since.
A letter from Miss Robins herself adds the following to her
remarks on her book. “Of all the official people I consulted, not
one of these experts doubted my story, _and all had known similar
cases_. We do not need to be told that the people to whom these
things happen, if they are refined and sensitive, are not eager to
make known their ruin. The natural impulse is to cover the horror
from every eye, even to deny it.”
“If you will consult the findings of your own commissions you will
see that in America ‘no girl of any class is safe.’”
I myself know at first hand an appalling number of cases—wives,
women of standing, college girls on journeys, young girls on their
way to boarding school, and working girls trapped and sold. In
Rose Livingston’s mail in the last few weeks have come
heartrending letters from parents for help in finding their lost
daughters. A letter I read yesterday from a doctor’s wife in
Indiana was so terrible in the lingering pathos with which the
mother dwelt on the beauty and sweetness of this lost daughter
that I handed it back without reading to the end.
In connection with Miss Robins’ letter, I offer the following
quotation from a paper by Stanley Finch of the Federal Department
of Justice where he speaks of the operation of the Federal White
Slave Traffic Act. “The number of complaints and prosecutions is
rapidly increasing.... Such crimes are more numerous than was
first believed possible.... It has become evident that thousands
of people[11] in practically all parts of the country were
violating the law.... [We found] girls were being transported in
such interstate and foreign commerce solely for the purpose of
prostitution and were being treated as mere articles of
merchandise for the profit of those who handled them and who were
willing for the profit involved to sacrifice both the bodies and
the souls of their victims.... As we extend this work [of federal
prosecution] throughout the country the awful interstate trade in
women and girls for immoral purposes which for years has been
going on almost without let or hindrance, has now become a very
dangerous occupation.... The practices of people engaged in the
white slave traffic involves in a considerable number of cases the
actual physical detention of women and girls against their will in
this vilest form of involuntary servitude.”
Would that there were space to reinforce these remarks by New York
newspaper headlines dealing with such cases for the month of March
15 to April 15.
How many fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, friends and
lovers throughout this country, have lived through the agony
endured by the Elder Sister and the lover in Miss Robins’ book?
That which had been their greatest care and burden, the frail
health of Bettina, becomes the Elder Sister’s one comfort and
hope. How many a bereft father and mother today not only cling in
anguish to that hope, but desperately refuse to believe but that
their girl is dead! And with reliable students estimating the life
of the white slave in this country at five years, we know that
many a flower-like highly organized Little Sister has met
mercifully her release in a few weeks—a few months.
To those who know how considerable a factor in the whole problem
of the white slave traffic is the girl who is taken, not the girl
who goes, the girl who is under compulsion, not the girl who
stays, this book is a great contribution. THE SURVEY printed some
time since a poster that has been used in this country from ocean
to ocean: “Danger! Mothers, beware! 60,000 innocent girls wanted
to take the place of 60,000 white slaves who will die this year in
the United States.” If My Little Sister will only make the truth
of this warning more real, more individual more poignant, then, in
the pain-soothing words that close this book, “She will not have
suffered in vain, and others will thank her too.”
Such a book is not merely a literary production, an exquisite work
of art: it is a high, sincere human service. Front a literary
point of view it is a great book. One is reminded of the
Aeschylean definition of tragedy: “That which purifies the heart
through pity and terror.” But this book not only reaches great
tragic and dramatic heights, but its subtle art is such that it
blends with the tragedy in an almost eerie way a lyric chord which
echoes throughout, an unbroken strain of hope and pity, of the
essential dignity and sanity and rightness of life.