USA > New York > Onondaga County > Syracuse > Sixty-odd, a personal history > Part 23
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33
He brought to us some of his friends who strengthened the link we already had with the world of labor. One of them was a young German in whom he had become interested. It was a year of de- pression. The man was a painter by trade, and had been for some time out of work. He came to tell us, at my brother's request, his experience of his search for a job. I shall give it as nearly as possible in his own words, written out at that time to be used in a meeting of "privileged" women.
"You don't think at first that it means so much to lose your place. You think you could get bigger wages, or better hours, somewhere else. And the fellows who are in the unions believe they'll be taken care of anyway. You go out to look for a new one, and first you go to the regular big places to see if they've lost a man. You know maybe that there are streets where a lot of shops of one trade are near each other; wholesale ones maybe. So you get a good many at once, and you go from one to another, and they tell you there's nothing for you. The first day you cover quite a lot, but the next day you have to try a little further off; you
291
CHRISTIANITY AND ANARCHY
take one awful long street, or one of the avenues. You can't spend money on cars, so you leg it. You have the same bad luck, and feel pretty used up at the end of the day. But still you don't get discouraged, there are hundreds more places to try. And you have a little bit ahead to give in at home. Some fellows don't let their families know; they just go off in the morning and come home on time at night. But then they find it out. Well, it just goes on like that for days and weeks. Maybe there's a strike in the trade; that don't help any. By and by the women folks ask ques- tions; they say why don't you get work, if you're doing all you say you are. They don't believe you're trying very hard. You get pretty hungry because you don't like to take a lunch when you aren't earning anything, so you go all day without, and you get home starved and find they ate up all the solid stuff at noon because of the children. Pretty soon the home gets to be a kind of a small hell, everybody blaming everybody else. Then, when you've tramped round all day, you don't dare go home any more with bad news. Maybe you sit down in the park and just stare ahead of you. Sometimes you sit there till a policeman shakes you up and tells you to get a move on. You can't shave, and I guess that makes you more likely to be turned back. You get a drink offered you some- times, and it isn't surprising if you take it; I just happen to hate the stuff, but I don't grudge it to the other fellow. So it goes on, and on. And when you do get a job, at last, maybe it's at something you hate, and you haven't any backbone by that time anyway. You may get on at it, but after all your home is pretty well spoiled; it takes years to get it back to where it was."
I have been reminded of that story hundreds of times, and of the insight it gave us. It lent strength to a conviction which I hold yet, that in order to understand the labor question one must have known, and cared for, some working man or woman who has suf- fered under wrong conditions; only affection or loyal friendship can make us see clearly and feel intensely, when it comes to taking the side of an oppressed people. Pity alone is moving, disturbing, but we can help only when our hearts are actually in the cause of justice.
My brother discovered that this lad was full of artistic instinct and talent. He had been in the habit of sketching, on any surface he could find, faces, animals, trees, spires, on his way to work, starting early enough to give a moment to making an outline and finishing
.
الصر
三
1
292
SIXTY-ODD
it later. It was possible to get him instruction, and an eventnal situation in a church-furnishing business in which he worked for years. Every human being with whom James Huntington came in contact, no matter when and where they met, was instantly an ob. ject of vivid interest to him.
I remember once his answer to a woman who had been arguing that young people should not be allowed to go to the theatre, be- cause of the bad plays which were produced. "Yes," he said, "Theatres are misused. But churches are misused too. And crimes are committed out of doors; yet boys and girls cannot be kept shut up in churches or honses. The point is that the drama rises to great heights of beauty; we must look to that, and try to prevent its de- basement, not abolish it. And we must be sure that our own personal moral standards are a matter of living rather than criticizing."
Women were somewhat of a mystery to him in the carlier days of his ministry. He did not know how to handle sentimental peni- tents who came to him with personal tangles to be smoothed out. Now and then he remanded them to his sister in Brooklyn with the message; "I'm sending you a girl who really needs the advice of a sensible woman much more than the prescriptions of a priest; you reason with her and I'll pray for her." The specimens he sent were for the most part impenetrable to common sense or any kind of practical recommendations; but I recollect one very charming girl whose conscience had reproached her for leading a dual life: she was trying to keep up a connection with aristocratic relatives who had helped her and her mother financially, and were anxious to promote her social status, and bring about a good match for her, while she concealed the fact that she was working in a downtown office, and using all sorts of means to avoid meeting by day any of the society men with whom she danced at night. Her adventures were amusing, if somewhat pathetic, and I found it hard to blame her, for she had a very healthy conscience and a real honesty be- neath her somewhat unworthy (as they seemed to me) ambitions. I could only urge that friends to whom one dare not admit that one was earning one's living were not worth the sacrifices she had made; but I think she found it hard to agree with me, and would
293
CHRISTIANITY AND ANARCHY
rather have consoled herself with spiritual abstractions and the practice of penitential ritual. She had that kind of a mind, as I told my brother, and I thought it likely that in time her social aspira- tions would be sublimated through the making of altar-cloths under the tutelage of a good Sister, the occupation which she pursued on her afternoons out. He was not shocked at these sentiments of mine, and accepted her back from me with a kindly spirit; I never saw her again, but a few years later learned that she had left New York, and had met and married a young fellow with money and a finer attitude than that of the society set in which she had been ambitiously moving.
There were compensations, during that gray foggy season: we made the acquaintance of new and interesting people. One of them was Dr. Eliza Mosher, a physician to whom my footsteps seemed to have been guided one winter night when the influenza plague first broke out in America. My husband and baby were both ill; I was desperate, and rushed out into the fog, hardly knowing where I went. A brightly lighted window made me halt before her door, and though it was long after office hours I found there a remark- able woman whose sympathy and poise brought instant confidence that she could help us. After she had accompanied me home, had put a glycerine jacket-poultice over little Hannah's lungs, and given Archie a dose of phenacetine, then one of the prevalent reme- dies for grippe, all with a bright reassuring diagnosis which braced him for quick recovery, we felt her not only a ministering angel, but a strong friend. She became for me, as for thousands of other women, a counselor and teacher and backer.
ا سلوم
1
LOSS AND HOPE
But the dreary boarding-house life came suddenly to an end. In the summer of 1891 we had a season of prosperity; it came after anxious months, since a wave of malaria along the Connecticut River had given Nan chills and fever. They cropped out every now and then, finally forcing us to go to Ashfield to escape the Valley mists and mosquitoes, dangerous at Forty Acres. Rather suddenly Archie wrote from Brooklyn that he had leased a small apartment uptown. He was going to bring our furniture down from Engle- wood, and have it ready for my home-coming in the month of Sep- tember. It was good news. A home of our own again, on a broad airy street, where our child could develop and the new baby ex- pected at Christmas-time could have its own nursery. We made a very happy journey, the three of us, and climbed easy stairs to find a charmingly arranged suite of rooms absolutely ready for occupa- tion. In the dining-room stood a tall, capable English girl, to whom small Hannah ran instinctively.
"You're going to be my friend, aren't you?" she said, and was gathered into the friend's embrace at once. Edith never forgot that greeting, and never swerved from the friendship. She bore it out as a matter of fact, through the changes and chances of forty years; the embodiment of loyalty, unselfish service, and above all, good sense and abundant humor. Our basis for comfortable fam- ily living was complete, we two felt; and the next three months were completely happy ones.
Our second daughter came in December, a Christmas baby. We named her Mary, after my sister. She was unusually lovely, for a new-born infant, with eyes that were soft like her father's, blue
-
.
295
LOSS AND HOPE
eyes with a tinge of coming brown. Her arrival was so quick and easy that it hardly interrupted the natural order of events; she seemed perfectly healthy except for a little darkness of the skin, over which the doctor did not seem to worry, although she spoke of it. Our much-loved Dr. Mosher had been called away for a few days, but had hoped to return for the birth. The substitute physi- cian was also a woman, but had not had so large an experience.
We had a radiantly happy Christmas, on a Friday that year; but two days after, the baby wakened very early, and did not seem quite right, the young nurse thought. She could not eat, was breath- ing too rapidly, and lay back on my arm with eyes wide open, gaz- ing into mine with a strange depth of expression, quite unlike the look of so young a child. Dr. Mosher had returned the night be- fore, and had sent word that she was coming up the first thing to see us. We waited in suspense, longing to have her get there, for every moment increased our anxiety. Finally she came in with her breczy greeting, and I heard her in the hall saying to Archie, "I couldn't wait a minute to see that baby." I found myself unable to speak; I could only point to the child with a smile which trem- bling lips belied. She gathered it eagerly into her arms, and I saw her face change instantly.
"Has she been as dark as this from the first?" she asked, "So blue?"
"Not quite," the nurse answered. "But a little. And we had an accident yesterday; some people built a fire in a flat below us, and there was a leak in the chimney somewhere; a lot of soft-coal smoke came into these rooms, and we had to open the windows to let it out; it was a fearfully cold night. I took the baby back into the kitchen and kept her there, but I think there was still smoke, and cold air, when I brought her back. I was afraid-" but the doctor did not stop to hear more.
"We'll take her back by the kitchen stove," she said. And to me, "Don't worry, child; I shall take off my things and stay right on here; we'll fight for her life."
She came back in a half hour. "It's an affection of the bronchial tubes," she said. "And her heart isn't quite right, I think. But
t
.
-
200
SIXTY-ODD
we have had her in a hot bath, and she's improved; we may pull her through. She's lying in the lap of a big chair, close to the open oven."
I don't know just what we did, all that day. Edith was sent down with Nan to Grandmother's, but my husband would not leave me. I remember saying over a short prayer that ended, "Save us and help us, O Lord God." I had never prayed like that before. But when, in the middle of the afternoon, the doctor came in saying that at last the little thing was breathing naturally, and there was really hope for her, she did not see the nurse, who had run in to call her back. Just as she had left the baby, its breath had stopped. She came back holding it in her arms.
"You must have her now to hold," she said, "warm and pink from her bath and like a little rose. But think of the brightness that 'eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither hath entered into the heart of man.' "
I could not have borne to hear anyone else quote Scripture at that moment; I know of no one who could have done it as she did. But it lifted us up in that moment of supreme anguish. We realized the flight of an immortal soul from the tiny body; no narrow doc- trine could ever have taken that conviction from us. It took all the strength we had, but our mourning drew us still closer to one an- other. Neither of us felt for an instant that the littleness of our baby, her short stay with us, or the suddenness of her passing would minimize that sorrow; it was destined to last for many years, and to remind us at each birthday anniversary of what she might have been if she had lived and grown. And for us both it was the first im- mediate experience of death. We felt that it had come to us with a heavenly vision.
Another trouble followed six weeks after the baby's death. Nan came down suddenly with scarlet fever, and we were quarantined in our apartment at the top of the house. The young nurse who had been with us at baby Mary's birth came back; she had made me promise to send for her in case of need; she felt that perhaps her lack of experience might have caused the disaster. We were kept very busy for the following month; Edith, our good young helper,
297
LOSS AND HOPE
caught the fever, and was quite ill. When the spring came, she moved with her family to Connecticut, and for a time I managed the housekeeping myself; I was very strong and ready in those days, and glad to be busy. But we had a warm May, and in June extreme weather; both Nan and I began to wilt. It was terribly close in the little apartment, and through open windows the nearness of the elevated railway, a crash and rush every ten minutes, was frightfully disturbing.
Weariness and another slump in finances brought a discourage- ment which we would not own even to one another, but we were losing sleep and hope. We were trying to plan in the stifling atmos- phere of our tiny rooms for a visit to Forty Acres, but it did not look hopeful.
One morning Archie was solicitous about the mail; a letter ar- rived just before he left for the office. It was from my father, as follows:
"I have a piece of news for you; I have leased the old Phelps house from the Bulfinches, who are not going there this summer, and have had it put in complete order. The furniture is all there, so you can take pos- session of it at any time. I want you to leave Brooklyn on Thursday pre- pared to spend the whole summer. You will take the forenoon train and reach the Hadley station in the middle of the afternoon; you will find my man there with a carriage and a boy with a wagon for the trunks. They will give you the key to the house-door, and you can open it and enter in. Archie knows all about it, and promises to send you off; he will join you later, and we shall be there in about three weeks."
We obeyed these orders to the letter. Archie was never troubled by city heat and noise, although he loved to get away into the country for visits. He could not leave an important case to go with us, but agreed to go to his parents, who were delighted to have him at home. And little Hannah and I were breathing the freshness of a north- west breeze from the hills by the time our train crossed the Con- necticut River. We found the man at the station, were given a great hand-wrought iron key, and drove in at the gate of the old Phelps house to find heaps of fragrant hay under the pines, and a gleam
-
0
298
SIXTY-ODD
of yellow June lilies in the garden beyond. Branches of an ancient trumpet-vine had become twisted in the long closed blinds.
As we opened the door and entered in, it was like being sud- denly touched with the spirit of the old Phelps ancestors, and find- ing unseen personalities waiting for us with a welcome. The house was swept and garnished, every piece of furniture left where the departing inmates had placed it three years before. The long north parlor had its stiff chairs and sofa; against the wall stood the two rounding table-ends of the grand old square inlaid Chippendale dining-table; the tall ugly blue glass vases stood on the mantel- piece beside the curious lamps, the original student-lamps in which former generations had burned sperm oil. With that room we associated our summer-evening visits to Cousin Sarah and Cousin Caroline and Cousin Ellen; Archie and I would always hold it in sacred memory. Had it not a pair of hearts cut into each shutter? There was the little room at the foot of the stairs, which was once Uncle Phelps' office, where he and Oliver Smith drew up the fa- mous Smith Will, contested by Rufus Choate and defended success- fully by Daniel Webster. We passed on up the stairs, at the head of which I found Cousin Sarah's bedroom, with the high bed in which she was lying when she received Archie and me and gave our engagement her blessing, not long before her death. I knew that was destined to be my own room, and that the southwest chamber where stood a great four-poster bed and chintz hangings with giant flowers, would remain a guest-room. And that the east bedroom adjoining mine, which was papered in a close-covered design of shaded green maple leaves, would be the place for Nan's small bed. Then there were other bedrooms, giving on a small side- hall, and the back stairs descended steeply into a winter dining- room, with a huge fireplace and Dutch oven and crane, and hooks in the ceiling for hams to hang from. There was a fine kitchen in the ell, into which one stepped down; we remembered the old wooden pump in the center of the room, and its long trough under- neath, in which ancient householders were said to have washed dishes, apparently on their knees-a tradition which we could not believe. But a towering clothes-bar structure folded against the
£
100-1-00 15
299
LOSS AND HOPE
wall gave a hint of the enormous washings which 'Liza West, the little old woman who lived to be ninety in the service of the family and had called all the eleven grown sons and daughters of two wives by their first names, must have put through.
I could not sleep that first night; it was too exciting. After mid- night, when the moon was shining on Nan's counterpane, lighting up the meadows and reflected in pools left by recent rain, I escaped into the garden, and walked about among the lilies in a sort of trance. One could catch the sounds of tiny feet; three years of soli- tude had made the old place a home for all kinds of animals.
I sat a while on the doorstep, then flung myself on a pile of fresh hay beneath the pines. After a time, the laugh of a fox sounded from the woods, to which a little lane ascended gently; I strolled across the farm-yard, and let down the bars into the lane. By and by the moon vanished; then came the unearthly rose of dawn. My eyes must have closed. The next conscious moment found me with my head against a porch pillar, and a bright sun coming up over the edge of the hill, between two broad-branched elms, with rosy clouds in attendance-the beginning of another perfect June day. I ran upstairs, to make sure that I should hear Nan's waking cry of "Mother!"
It was a summer that stands out in memory. There was time, to begin with, to lay aside worries. Archie came often for week-ends, and it was good to see him rest; at the end he spent ten days with us. My father saw to it that there were no expenses beyond what we should have spent in town; delicious fruits and vegetables came from his garden, as well as milk and cream, and butter of Mother's churning. Our friend Edith, who had been with her family in Con- necticut for some months after the scarlet fever, returned to us accompanied by her younger sister Tessie. We repacked chestsful of old linen, creamy homespun blankets, marvelous quilts and damask tablecloths, all in perfect condition. We might have writ- ten a history of eighteen- and nineteenth-century fancy-work, on the basis of further discoveries in crewels, crocheted tidies, pine- cone frames, spatterwork (which consisted in running a brush saturated with ink through a small screen, over a sheet of drawing-
1
ليس أنتر ية بيل
300
SIXTY-ODD
paper to which pressed ferns had been applied in designs, leaving white impressions of their shapes when these were removed). A great part of these treasures had to be discarded because of decay; others we packed in empty trunks which we found under the eaves, and there they still remain.
Hospitality was one of the joys of that summer. Leonora ()'Reilly came, with her friend Mary Dreier. As a result I resolved to throw myself into reform activities again when we came back to the city. My friend Lucy Watson came, and we lived over again our joys of previous years. Cousin Ellen herself also came, happy in the thought that the old house could be filled with young life again. She sold the whole estate the next year to my father, who wanted to make it our permanent summer home, and left in it most of the furnishings. Forty Acres was by this time alive with children. Little Hannah now had playmates of her own age, be- side the chivalrous boy cousins. The Bishop still read aloud delight- fully, still had daily morning prayers, still tilled the soil with his own hands in vacation-time, and took friends into the woods. His devotion to his little grand-daughter was lovely to see. Yet no more young men listened, stretched on the grass or gathered in the stoop. It was not quite like the life of our earlier days; after all, the world had changed.
F
.
£
8
THE EIGHTEEN NINETIES
We went back to Brooklyn from that experience with fresh zest for the world. The last years of the century were to some de- gree a preparation for stupendous advances in human affairs. The face of metropolitan life had been altered; there were strange ap- paritions in our midst. One day a carriage with wheels but no shafts, no horses, no visible propelling force, came up Fulton Street in Brooklyn, and turned into Washington Avenue under our win- dows. People stopped, gazed, a few boys tried to run after it. I can remember the thrill the later appearance of the first trolley car gave us as it moved, a dark-colored monster, crowds beholding it from the sidewalk. One felt a sudden swelling of the throat; not so much the excitement of the thing itself, but from a sense of the change for which it stood. Before long the horse-cars that had threaded the city streets for the better part of a century began to disappear. The bicycle, which for some time had amused the man on the sidewalk with the spectacle of one high wheel and a man on top of it guiding a tiny one, had come down to lesser propor- tions and more speed, and was offering attraction to women riders. The cinema was becoming a source of amusement. Electric lighting had replaced gas in many houses, and gas stoves too were making their way. The telephone was by that time available to smaller householders.
And now, with these and an infinite number of minor changes, there came beginnings of increased social consciousness, manifest in the body politic and the ranks of labor. Reform movements were gaining influence in legislatures, and in New York City the fight against Tammany and its enormities was renewed with fresh vigor.
2
0
302
SIXTY-ODD
It was astonishing and revealing, however, to realize with what pas- sivity that huge institution, already nearly a hundred years old, had been taken for granted by the public. It had been making itself gradually impregnable, consolidating its defenses, reaping millions of dollars, and reaching into fields where there could be practically no effective opposition, with more or less backing from the Catholic Church, and the support of an ignorant and bribed public. The arch-villain Tweed was gone, but his successor, Richard Croker, had followed the same course, and was now spending his millions on the race-tracks of England and his luxurious country-house there, while henchmen carried on gallantly in America. He held the whip-hand over the Democratic party, and worst of all, the equally iniquitous but perhaps not quite so lavishly. outrageous Republican boss, Tom Platt, was actually his partner whenever that turned out to be for their common advantage.
My husband liad joined the Young Men's Democratic Club of Brooklyn, one of the local reform groups which had furthered the attacks on Tammany rule and the attempt to elect better leaders. It was, like other groups of its kind, sincere and valorous, and out- against corruption in public office. At that time the agitation for Civil Service reform was also becoming strong, and some of our friends were prominent in that movement; both of the Lows, Seth and William, a half-brother, were working with unremitting zeal in its cause. They had married sisters, Annie and Lois Curtis of Boston, who were friends of my older sister and myself. Seth Low had been President of Columbia College and had served a term as Mayor of Greater New York in the early nineties.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.