Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

MARGARET SANGER

Margaret Sanger

MARGARET
SANGER
An Autobiography

new york W·W·NORTON & COMPANY publishers

Copyright, 1938, by

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

70 Fifth Avenue, New York

First Edition

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

FOR THE PUBLISHERS BY THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS

TO ALL THE PIONEERS

OF NEW AND BETTER WORLDS TO COME

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks are due especially to Rackham Holt for her discerning aid in organizing material and for her untiring and inspired advice during the preparation of this book; as well as to Walter S. Hayward whose able assistance has helped to make the task lighter.

In the course of preparing this narrative many books have been consulted. I trust their authors will agree with me that a bibliography in a personal history is cumbersome and accept a general but none the less grateful acknowledgment.

My admiration has always gone out to the person who can put himself in print and set down for historical purposes an exact record of his honest feelings and thoughts, even though they may seem to reflect upon many of his friends and helpers. I have not in this story hurt any one by intent. Because its thread has, of necessity, followed dramatic highlights, many people who played prominent parts have not been mentioned. These I have not forgotten, nor those numerous others who made smaller offerings. Some have pioneered in their special fields and localities; some have given generously and unfailingly of their financial help; some have volunteered in full measure their time and efforts as officers and Committee members; some have fought and labored by my side throughout the years; some have stepped in for only a brief but significant role. Although on the outskirts of the army, it is to these last as well as to those in the vanguard that the advance has been made. And particularly do I wish to thank those co-workers and members of the various staffs whose contributions can in no way be measured by their duties, and whose indefatigable, loyal devotion has been a bulwark of strength to me at all times.

It has been impossible to carry out my sincere desire to give personal and individual recognition and expression of gratitude to all. Neither a history of the birth control movement nor the part I have taken in it could be complete, however, did I not pay tribute to the integrity, valiance, courage, and clarity of vision of the men and women who, year after year, maintained their principles, and never swerved from them in a cause which belongs to all of us.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

MARGARET SANGER

Chapter One
FROM WHICH I SPRING

“‘Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?’ he asked. ‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said, very gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’”

LEWIS CARROLL

The streets of Corning, New York, where I was born, climb right up from the Chemung River, which cuts the town in two; the people who live there have floppy knees from going up and down. When I was a little girl the oaks and the pines met the stone walks at the top of the hill, and there in the woods my father built his house, hoping mother’s “congestion of the lungs” would be helped if she could breathe the pure, balsam-laden air.

My mother, Anne Purcell, always had a cough, and when she braced herself against the wall the conversation, which was forever echoing from room to room, had to stop until she recovered. She was slender and straight as an arrow, with head well set on sloping shoulders, black, wavy hair, skin white and spotless, and with wide-apart eyes, gray-green, flecked with amber. Her family had been Irish as far back as she could trace; the strain of the Norman conquerors had run true throughout the generations, and may have accounted for her unfaltering courage.

Mother’s sensitivity to beauty found some of its expression in flowers. We had no money with which to buy them, and she had no time to grow them, but the woods and fields were our garden. I can never remember sitting at a table not brightened with blossoms; from the first spring arbutus to the last goldenrod of autumn we had an abundance.

Although this was the Victorian Age, our home was almost free from Victorianism. Father himself had made our furniture. He had even cut and polished the slab of the big “marble-topped table,” as it was always called. Only in the spare room stood a piece bought at a store—a varnished washstand. The things you made yourself were not considered quite good enough for guests. Sometimes father’s visitors were doctors, teachers, or perhaps the village priest, but mostly they were the artisans of the community—cabinet makers, masons, carpenters who admired his ideas as well as shared his passion for hunting. In between tramping the woods and talking they had helped to frame and roof the house, working after hours to do this.

Father, Michael Hennessy Higgins, born in Ireland, was a nonconformist through and through. All other men had beards or mustaches—not he. His bright red mane, worn much too long according to the family, swept back from his massive brow; he would not clip it short as most fathers did. Actually it suited his finely-modeled head. He was nearly six feet tall and hard-muscled; his keen blue eyes were set off by pinkish, freckled skin. Homily and humor rippled unceasingly from his generous mouth in a brogue which he never lost. The jokes with which he punctuated every story were picked up, retold, and scattered about. When I was little they were beyond me, but I could hear my elders laughing.

The scar on father’s forehead was his badge of war service. When Lincoln had called for volunteers against the rebellious South, he had taken his only possessions, a gold watch inherited from his grandfather and his own father’s legacy of three hundred dollars, and had run away from his home in Canada to enlist. But he had been told he was not old enough, and was obliged to wait impatiently a year and a half until, on his fifteenth birthday, he had joined the Twelfth New York Volunteer Cavalry as a drummer boy.

One of father’s adventures had been the capture of a Confederate captain on a fine mule, the latter being counted the more valuable acquisition to the regiment. We were brought up in the tradition that he had been one of three men selected by Sherman for bravery. That made us very proud of him. Better not start anything with father; he could beat anybody! But he himself had been appalled by the brutalities of war; never thereafter was he interested in fighting, unless perhaps his Irish sportsmanship cropped out when two well-matched dogs were set against each other.

Immediately upon leaving the Army father had studied anatomy, medicine, and phrenology, but these had been merely for perfecting his skill in modeling. He made his living by chiseling angels and saints out of huge blocks of white marble or gray granite for tombstones in cemeteries. He was a philosopher, a rebel, and an artist, none of which was calculated to produce wealth. Our existence was like that of any artist’s family—chickens today and feathers tomorrow.

Christmases were on the poverty line. If any of us needed a new winter overcoat or pair of overshoes, these constituted our presents. I was the youngest of six, but after me others kept coming until we were eleven. Our dolls were babies—living, wriggling bodies to bathe and dress instead of lifeless faces that never cried or slept. A pine beside the door was our Christmas tree. Father liked us to use natural things and we had to rely upon ingenuity rather than the village stores, so we decorated it with white popcorn and red cranberries which we strung ourselves. Our most valuable gift was that of imagination.

We had little time for recreation. School was five miles away and we had to walk back and forth twice a day as well as perform household duties. The boys milked the cow, tended the chickens, and took care of Tom, the old white horse which pulled our sleigh up and down the hill. The girls helped put the younger children to bed, mended clothes, set the table, cleaned the vegetables, and washed the dishes. We accepted all this with no sense of deprivation or aggrievement, being, if anything, proud of sharing responsibility.

And we made the most of our vacations. There were so many of us that we did not have to depend upon outsiders, and Saturday afternoons used to put on plays by ourselves in the barn. Ordinarily we were shy about displaying emotions; we looked upon tears and temper in other homes with shocked amazement as signs of ill-breeding. Play-acting, however, was something else again. Here we could find outlet for histrionic talent and win admiration instead of lifted eyebrows. I rather fancied myself as an actress, and often mimicked some of the local characters, to the apparent pleasure of my limited audience of family and neighbors. It was not long before I slipped into declaiming. The Lady of Lyons was one of my specialties:

This is thy palace, where the perfumed light

Steals through the mist of alabaster lamps,

And every air is heavy with the sighs

Of orange groves, and music from the sweet lutes

And murmurs of low fountains, that gush forth

I’ the midst of roses!

All outdoors was our playground, but I was not conscious at the time of my love for the country. Things in childhood change perspective. What was taken for granted then assumes great significance in later life. I knew how the oak tree grew and where the white and yellow violets could be found, and with a slight feeling of superiority I showed and expounded these mysteries to town children. Not until pavements were my paths did I realize how much a part of me the country was, and how I missed it.

We were all, brothers and sisters alike, healthy and strong, vigorous and active; our appetites were curtailed only through necessity. We played the same games together and shared the same sports—baseball, skating, swimming, hunting. Nevertheless, except that we all had red hair, shading from carrot to bronze, we were sharply distinct physically. The girls were small and feminine, the boys husky and brawny. When I went out into the world and observed men, otherwise admirable, who could not pound a nail or use a saw, pick, shovel, or ax, I was dumfounded. I had always taken for granted that any man could make things with his hands.

I expected this even of women. My oldest sister, Mary, possessed, more than the rest of us, an innate charm and gentleness. She could do anything along domestic lines—embroidery, dress making, tailoring, cooking; she could concoct the most delicious and unusual foods, and mix delicate pastries. But she was also an expert at upholstering, carpentry, painting, roofing with shingles or with thatch. When Mary was in the house, we never had to send for a plumber. She rode gracefully and handled the reins from the carriage seat with equal dexterity; she could milk a cow and deliver a baby; neighbors called her to tend their sick cattle, or, when death came, to lay out the body; she tutored in mathematics and Latin, and was well-read in the classics, yet she liked most the theater, and was a dramatic critic whose judgment was often sought. In all that she did her sweetness and dearness were apparent, though she performed her many kindnesses in secret. She left the home roof while I was still a child, but she never failed to send Christmas boxes in which every member of the family shared, each gift beautifully wrapped and decorated with ribbons and cards.

My brothers were ardent sportsmen, although they might not have been outstanding scholars. They could use their fists and were as good shots as their father. For that matter, we all knew how to shoot; any normal person could manage a gun. Father was a great hunter. Our best times were when friends of his came to spend the night, talking late, starting early the next morning for the heavy woods which were full of foxes, rabbits, partridge, quail, and pheasant.

Someone was always cleaning and oiling a gun in the kitchen or carrying food to the kennels. The boys were devoted to their fox and rabbit hounds, but father lavished his affection on bird dogs. Our favorite came to us unsought, unbought, and I had a prideful part in his joining the family. One afternoon I was sitting alone by the nameless brook which ran by our house, clear and cool, deep enough in some places to take little swims on hot summer days. I was engaged in pinning together with thorns a wreath of leaves to adorn my head when a large, white dog ambled up, sniffed, wagged his tail, and seemed to want to belong. This was no ordinary cur, but a well-bred English setter which had evidently been lost. How father would love him!

Even though the dog had no collar, I was slightly uneasy as to my right of ownership. One conspicuous brown-red spot on the back of his neck simplified my problem. Unobtrusively I slipped him into the barn, tied him up, selected a brush, dipped it in one of the cans of paint always on hand, and multiplied the one spot by ten. For a day, waiting for them to dry, I fed him well with food filched from the rations of the other kennel occupants, then led him forth, his hairy dots stiffened with paint, and offered him to father as a special present.

Accepting the gift in the spirit in which it was intended, father admired the dog’s points, and, with an unmistakable twinkle, lent himself to a deception which, of course, could deceive nobody. When Saturday night came, the neighborhood looked the animal over; none knew him so we named him Toss and admitted him to the house. Later he bred with an Irish setter of no importance, and one of the resultant puppies, Beauty, shared his privileges.

Toss, as well as everybody else, subscribed to the idea that the “artist” in father must be catered to. With the first sound of his clearing his throat in the morning Toss picked up the shoes which had been left out to be cleaned, and carried them one at a time to the bedroom door, then stood wagging his tail, waiting to be patted. Father’s shoes were always polished, his trousers always creased. Every day, even when going to work, he put on spotless white shirts with starched collars and attachable cuffs; these were something of a luxury, because they had to be laundered at home, but they got done somehow.

Father took little or no responsibility for the minute details of the daily tasks. I can see him when he had nothing on hand, laughing and joking or reading poetry. Mother, however, was everlastingly busy sewing, cooking, doing this and that. For so ardent and courageous a woman he must have been trying, and I still wonder at her patience. She loved her children deeply, but no one ever doubted that she idolized her husband, and through the years of her wedded life to her early death never wavered in her constancy. Father’s devotion to mother, though equally profound, never evidenced itself in practical ways.

The relation existing between our parents was unusual for its day; they had the idea of comradeship and not merely loved but liked and respected each other. There was no quarreling or bickering; none of us had to take sides, saying, “Father is right,” or, “Mother is right.” We knew that if we pleased one we pleased the other, and such an atmosphere leaves its mark; we felt secure from emotional uncertainty, and were ourselves guided towards certainty in our future. We were all friends together, though not in the modern sense of familiarity. A little dignity and formality were always maintained and we were invariably addressed by our full names. The century of the child had not yet been ushered in.

In those days young people, unless invited to speak, were seen and not heard. But as soon as father considered us old enough to have ideas or opinions, we were given full scope to express them, no matter how adolescent. He hated the slavery of pattern and following of examples and believed in the equality of the sexes; not only did he come out strongly for woman suffrage in the wake of Susan B. Anthony, but he advocated Mrs. Bloomer’s bloomers as attire for women, though his wife and daughters never wore them. He fought for free libraries, free education, free books in the public schools, and freedom of the mind from dogma and cant. Sitting comfortably with his feet on the table he used to say, “You should give something back to your country because you as a child were rocked in the cradle of liberty and nursed at the breast of the goddess of truth.” Father always talked like that.

Although the first Socialist in the community, father also took single tax in his stride and became the champion and friend of Henry George. Progress and Poverty was one of the latest additions to our meager bookshelf. He laughed and rejoiced when he came upon what to him were meaty sentences, reading them aloud to mother, who accepted them as fine because he said they were fine. The rest of us all had to plow through the book in order, as he said, to “elevate the mind.” To me it still remains one of the dullest ever written.

Mother’s loyalty to father was tested repeatedly. Hers were the responsibilities of feeding and clothing and managing on his income, combined with the earnings of the oldest children. But father’s generosity took no cognizance of fact. Once he was asked to buy a dozen bananas for supper. Instead, he purchased a stalk of fifteen dozen, and on his way home gave every single one to schoolboys and girls playing at recess. On another occasion he showed up with eight of a neighbor’s children; the ninth had been quarantined for diphtheria. They lived with us for two months, crowded into our beds, tucked in between us at the table. Mother welcomed them as she did his other guests. The house was always open. She was not so much social-minded as inherently hospitable. But with her frail body and slim pocketbook, it took courage to smile.

Once only that I can remember did mother’s patience give way. That was when father invaded her realm too drastically and invited Henry George to lecture at the leading hotel—with banquet thrown in. From the money saved for the winter coal he had taken enough to entertain fifty men whose children were well-fed and well-clothed. This was the sole time I ever knew my parents to be at odds, though even then I heard no quarreling words. Whatever happened between them I was not sure, but father spent several days wooing back the smile and light to her eyes.

After Henry George’s visit we had to go without coal most of the winter.

With more pleasure than Progress and Poverty I recall a History of the World, Lalla Rookh, Gulliver’s Travels, and Aesop’s Fables. The last-named touched a sympathetic, philosophical chord in father. “Wolf! Wolf!” and “Sour Grapes” were often used to exemplify the trifling imperfections to which all human beings were subject. For his parables he drew also on the Bible, the most enormous volume you ever laid eyes on, brass bound, with heavy clasps, which was the repository of the family statistics; every birth, marriage, death was entered there. The handbooks to father’s work were the physiologies, one of which was combined with a materia medica. These were especially attractive to me, perhaps because they were illustrated with vivid plates, mostly red and blue, and described the fascinating, unknown interior of the human body.

Neighbors were constantly coming to father for help. “What do you think is the matter with this child?” Even without a thermometer he could tell by feeling the skin whether you were feverish. He prescribed bismuth if the diagnosis were “summer complaint,” castor oil if you had eaten something which had disagreed with you, and always sulphur and molasses in the spring “to clean the blood.”

Father’s cure-all was whiskey—“good whiskey,” which “liberated the spirit.” There was nothing from a deranged system to a depressed mind that it could not fix up. He never drank alone, but no masculine guest ever entered the door or sat down to pass the time of day without his producing the bottle. “Have a little shtimulant?”

The chief value of whiskey to father, however, was medicinal. If mumps turned into a large, ugly abscess, he put the blade of his jackknife in the fire, lanced the gland, and cleaned the wound with whiskey—good whiskey. When my face was swollen with erysipelas, he painted it morning, afternoon, and evening with tincture of iodine; the doctor had so ordered. I was held firmly in place each time this torture was inflicted, and, as soon as released, jumped and ran screaming and howling into the cellar, where I plunged my burning face into a pan of cool buttermilk until the pain subsided. This went on for several days, and I was growing exhausted from the dreaded iodine. Finally father decided to abandon the treatment and substitute good whiskey. Then I recovered.

As necessary to father as the physiologies was a book by the famous phrenologist, Orson Fuller, under whom he had studied. Father believed implicitly that the head was the sculptured expression of the soul. Straight or slanting eyes, a ridge between them, a turned-up nose, full lips, bulges in front of or behind the ears—all these traits had definite meaning for him. A research worker had to be inquisitive, a seeker with more than normal curiosity-bumps; a musician had to have order and time over the eyebrows; a pugilist could not be made but had to have the proper protuberances around the ears.

One of father’s phrases was, “Nature is the perfect sculptor; she is never wrong. If you seem to have made a mistake in reading, it is because you have not read correctly.” He himself seldom made a mistake, and his reputation spread far and wide. Young men in confusion of mind and the customary puzzled, pre-graduation state came from Cornell and other colleges to consult him about their careers. He examined heads and faces, told them where he thought their true vocations lay, and supplemented this advice later with voluminous interested correspondence. I could not help picking up his principles and some of his ardor, though I have never been able to analyze character so well. No amount of front or salesmanship could divert him, whereas I have often been taken in by a person’s self-confidence and estimation of himself.

In the predominantly Roman Catholic community of Corning, set crosses in the cemeteries were the rule for the poor and, before they went out of style, angels in various poses for the rich. I used to watch father at work. The rough, penciled sketch indicated little; even less did the first unshaped block of stone. He played with the hard, unyielding marble as though it were clay, making a tiny chip for a mouth, which grew rounder and rounder. A face then emerged, a shoulder, a sweep of drapery, praying hands, until finally the whole stood complete with wings and halo.

Although Catholics were father’s best patrons, by nature and upbringing he deplored their dogma. He joined the Knights of Labor, who were agitating against the influx of unskilled immigrants from Catholic countries, and this did not endear him to his clientele. Still less did his espousal of Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, a man after his own heart, whose works he had eagerly studied and used as texts. Once when the challenger was sounding a ringing defiance in near-by towns, father extended an invitation to speak in Corning and enlighten it. He collected subscriptions to pay for the only hall in town, owned by Father Coghlan. A notice was inserted in the paper that the meeting would be held the following Sunday, but chiefly the news spread by word of mouth. “Better come. Tell all your friends.”

Sunday afternoon arrived, and father escorted “Colonel Bob” from the hotel to the hall, I trotting by his side. We pushed through the waiting crowd, but shut doors stared silently and reprovingly—word had also reached Father Coghlan.

Some were there to hear and learn, others to denounce. Antipathies between the two suddenly exploded in action. Tomatoes, apples, and cabbage stumps began to fly. This was my first experience of rage directed against those holding views which were contrary to accepted ones. It was my first, but by no means my last. I was to encounter it many times, and always with the same bewilderment and disdain. My father apparently felt only the disdain. Resolutely he announced the meeting would take place in the woods near our home an hour later, then led Ingersoll and the “flock” through the streets. I trudged along again, my small hand clasped in his, my head held just as high.

Who cared for the dreary, dark, little hall! In the woodland was room for all. Those who had come for discussion sat spellbound on the ground in a ring around the standing orator. For them the booing had been incidental and was ignored. I cannot remember a word of what Colonel Ingersoll said, but the scene remains. It was late in the afternoon, and the tall pines shot up against the fiery radiance of the setting sun, which lit the sky with the brilliance peculiar to the afterglows of the Chemung Valley.

Florid, gray-haired Father Coghlan, probably tall in his prime, came to call on mother. He was a kindly old gentleman, not really intolerant. Shutting the hall had been a matter of principle; he could not have an atheist within those sacred walls. But he was willing to talk about it afterwards. In fact, he rather enjoyed arguing with rebels. He was full of persuasion which he used on mother, begging her to exercise her influence with father to make him refrain from his evil ways. She had been reared in the faith, although since her marriage to a freethinker which had so distressed her parents, she had never attended church to my knowledge. The priest was troubled to see her soul damned when she might have been a good Catholic, and implored her to send her children to church and to the parochial school, to stand firm against the intrusion of godlessness. Mother must have suffered from the conflict.

None of us realized how the Ingersoll episode was to affect our well-being. Thereafter we were known as children of the devil. On our way to school names were shouted, tongues stuck out, grimaces made; the juvenile stamp of disapproval had been set upon us. But we had been so steeped in “heretic” notions that we were not particularly bothered by this and could not see ahead into the dark future when a hard childhood was to be made harder. No more marble angels were to be carved for local Catholic cemeteries, and, while father’s income was diminishing, the family was increasing.

Occasionally big commissions were offered him in adjacent towns where his reputation was still high, and he was then away for days at a time, coming back with a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars in his pocket; we all had new clothes, and the house was full of plenty. Food was bought for the winter—turnips, apples, flour, potatoes. But then again a year might pass before he had another one, and meanwhile we had sunk deeply into debt.

Towards orthodox religion father’s own attitude remained one of tolerance. He looked upon the New Testament as the noble story of a human being which, because of ignorance and the lack of printing presses, had become exaggerated. He maintained that religions served their purpose; some people depended on them all their lives for discipline—to keep them straight, to make them honest. Others did not need to be so held in line. But subjection to any church was a reflection on strength and character. You should be able to get from yourself what you had to go to church for.

When we asked which Sunday School we should attend, he suggested, “Try them all, but be chained to none.” For a year or two I made the rounds, especially at Christmas and Easter, when you received oranges and little bags of candy. It was always cold at the Catholic church and the wooden benches were very bare and hard; some seats were upholstered in soft, red cloth but these were for the rich, who rented the pews and put dollars into the plate at collection. I never liked to see the figure of Jesus on the cross; we could not help Him because He had been crucified long ago. I much preferred the Virgin Mary; she was beautiful, smiling—the way I should like to look when I had a baby.

Saying my prayers for mother’s benefit was spasmodic. Ethel, the sister nearest my own age, was more given than I to religious phases and I could get her in bed faster if I said them with her. One evening when we had finished this dutiful ritual I climbed on father’s chair to kiss him good night. He asked quizzically, “What was that you were saying about bread?”

“Why, that was in the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’”

“Who were you talking to?”

“To God.”

“Is God a baker?”

I was shocked. Nevertheless, I rallied to the attack and replied as best I could, doubtless influenced by conversations I had heard. “No, of course not. It means the rain, the sunshine, and all the things to make the wheat, which makes the bread.”

“Well, well,” he replied, “so that’s the idea. Then why don’t you say so? Always say what you mean, my daughter; it is much better.”

Thereafter I began to question what I had previously taken for granted and to reason for myself. It was not pleasant, but father had taught me to think. He gave none of us much peace. When we put on stout shoes he said, “Very nice. Very comfortable. Do you know who made them?”

“Why, yes, the shoemaker.”

We then had to listen to graphic descriptions of factory conditions in the shoe industry, so that we might learn something of the misery and poverty the workers suffered in order to keep our feet warm and dry.

Father never talked about religion without bringing in the ballot box. In fact, he took up Socialism because he believed it Christian philosophy put into practice, and to me its ideals still come nearest to carrying out what Christianity was supposed to do. Unceasingly he tried to inculcate in us the idea that our duty lay not in considering what might happen to us after death, but in doing something here and now to make the lives of other human beings more decent. “You have no right to material comforts without giving back to society the benefit of your honest experience,” was one of his maxims, and his parting words to each of his sons and daughters who had grown old enough to fend for themselves were, “Leave the world better because you, my child, have dwelt in it.”

This was something to live up to.

Chapter Two
BLIND GERM OF DAYS TO BE

“I think, dearest Uncle, that you cannot really wish me to be the ‘mamma d’une nombreuse famille,’ for I think you will see the great inconvenience a large family would be to us all, and particularly to the country, independent of the hardship and inconvenience to myself; men never think, at least seldom think, what a hard task it is for us women to go through this very often.”

QUEEN VICTORIA to KING LEOPOLD

Often when my brothers and sisters and I meet we remind each other of funny or exciting adventures we used to have, but I never desire to live that early part of my life again. Childhood is supposed to be a happy time. Mine was difficult, though I did not then think of it as a disadvantage nor do I now.

It never occurred to me to ask my parents for pocket money, but the day came during my eighth year when I was desperately in want of ten cents. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was coming to town. On Saturday afternoon I started out with one of my playmates, she with her dime, I with nothing but faith. We reached the Corning Opera House half an hour early. The throng at the entrance grew thicker and thicker. Curtain time had almost come, and still no miracle. Nevertheless, I simply had to get into that theater. All about me had tickets or money or both. Suddenly I felt something touch my arm—the purse of a woman who was pressed close beside me. It was open, and I could see the coveted coins within. One quick move and I could have my heart’s desire. The longing was so deep and hard that it blotted out everything except my imperative need. I had to get into that theater.

I was about to put out my hand towards the bag when the doors were thrown wide and the crowd precipitately surged forward. Being small, I was shoved headlong under the ropes and into the safety of the nearest seat. But I could take no joy in the play.

As I lay sleepless that night, after a prayer of thanks for my many blessings, the crack of Simon Legree’s whip and the off-stage hounds baying after Eliza were not occupying my mind. Their places were taken by pictures of the devil which had tempted me and the hand of God which had been stretched out to save me from theft.

Following this experience, which might have been called a spiritual awakening, I began to connect my desires with reasoning about consequences. This was difficult, because my feelings were strong and urgent. I realized I was made up of two Me’s—one the thinking Me, the other, willful and emotional, which sometimes exercised too great a power; there was danger in her leadership and I set myself the task of uniting the two by putting myself through ordeals of various sorts to strengthen the head Me.

To gain greater fortitude, I began to make myself do what I feared most—go upstairs alone to bed without a light, go down cellar without singing, get up on the rafters in the barn and jump on the haystack thirty feet below. When I was able to accomplish these without flinching I felt more secure and more strong within myself.

But ahead of me still lay the hardest task of all.

Across the Chemung some friends of ours had a farm. Their orchard, heavy with delectable apples, seemed to me a veritable Eden. But to reach it by the wooden wagon bridge was three miles around; my brothers preferred the shorter route over the high, narrow, iron span of the Erie Railroad, under which the river raced deep and fast. The spaced ties held no terrors for their long legs, and they often swung them over the edge while they fished the stream beneath. When I made the trip father and brother each gave a hand to which I clung fiercely, and they half lifted me over the gaps which my shorter legs could hardly compass unaided. Held tight as I was, I became dizzy from the height, and a panic of terror seized me. In fact, the mere thought of the journey, even so well supported, made me feel queer.

The younger children were forbidden to cross the bridge unaccompanied. But I had to conquer my fear; I had to take that walk alone. I trembled as I drew near. The more I feared it, the more determined I was to make myself do it. I can recall now how stoically I put one foot on the first tie and began the venturesome and precarious passage stretching endlessly ahead of me. I dared not look down at the water; I wanted terribly to see that my feet were firmly placed, but could not trust my head.

About halfway over I heard the hum of the steel rails. My second dread had come upon me—the always possible train. I could not see it because of the curve at the end of the bridge. The singing grew louder as it came closer. I knew I could not get across in time, and turned towards the nearest girder to which I might cling. But it was six feet away. The engine with a whistling shriek burst into view—snorting, huge, menacing, rushing. I stumbled and fell.

In those days I was plump, and this plumpness saved me. Instinctively my arms went out and curled around the ties as I dropped between them. There I dangled over space. The bridge shook; the thunder swelled; the long, swift passenger cars swooped down. I was less than three feet from the outer rail, and a new terror gripped me. I had seen the sharp, sizzling steam jet out as locomotives drew near the station. I screwed my eyes shut and prayed the engineer not to turn on the steam.

After the blur of wheels had crashed by I could feel nothing. I hung there, I do not know how long, until a friend of my father, who had been fishing below, came to my rescue. He pulled up the fat, aching little body, stood me on my feet again, asked me severely whether my father knew where I was, gave me two brisk thwacks on the bottom, turned my face towards home, and went back to his rod and line.

After waiting a few moments to think matters over I realized that it would be impossible for me to retrace my course. Common sense aided me. The journey forward was no further than the journey back. I stepped ahead far more bravely, knowing if I could reach the end of the bridge I would never be so terrified again. Though bruised and sore I continued my cautious march and had as good a time at the farm as usual.

However, I returned home by the wooden bridge, the long way round, but the practical one.

When Ethel asked me that night why I was putting vaseline under my arms I merely said I had scratched myself. Foolhardiness was never highly esteemed by anyone in the family. Though resourcefulness was taken for granted, running into unnecessary danger was just nonsense, and I wanted no censure for my disobedience.

We were seldom scolded, never spanked. If an unpleasant conversation were needed, no other brother or sister was witness; neither parent ever humiliated one child in front of another. This was part of the sensitiveness of both. Mother in particular had a horror of personal vehemence or acrimonious arguments; in trying to prevent or stop them she would display amazing intrepidity—separating fighting dogs, fighting boys, even fighting men.

Peacemaker as she was, on occasion she battled valiantly for her loved ones, resenting bitterly the corporal punishment then customary in schools. Once my brother Joe came home with his hands so swollen and blistered that he could not do his evening chore of bringing in the wood. Mother looked carefully at them and asked him what had happened. He explained that the teacher had fallen asleep and several boys had started throwing spitballs. When one had hit her on the nose she had awakened with a little scream.

Most children had the trick of burying their faces behind their big geographies and appearing to be studying the page with the most innocent air in the world. But Joe had no such technique. He was doubled up with laughter. The teacher first accused him of throwing the spitball, and, when he denied it, insisted that he name the culprit. She had been embarrassed by her ridiculous situation, and had turned her emotion into what she considered righteous indignation. Joe had paid the penalty of being beaten for his unwillingness to violate the schoolboy code of honor.

This was injustice and the surest road to mother’s wrath. She started at once the long trip to the school. When she found no one there, she walked more miles to the teacher’s home. Reproof was called for and she administered it. But that was not enough. She then demanded that father go to the Board of Education and take Joe with him. There would have been no sleeping in the house with her had he not done so. An investigation was promised, which soon afterwards resulted in the teacher’s dismissal.

The teachers at the Corning School were no worse than others of their day; many of them were much better. The brick building was quite modern for the time, with a playground around it and good principals to guide it. Its superiority was due in part to the influence of the Houghtons, the big industrialists of the town. For three generations they had been making glassware unsurpassed for texture and beauty of design, and hardly a family of means in the country did not have at least one cut-glass centerpiece from Corning. The factories had prospered during the kerosene lamp era, and now, with electricity coming into its own, they were working overtime blowing light bulbs.

Corning was not on the whole a pleasant town. Along the river flats lived the factory workers, chiefly Irish; on the heights above the rolling clouds of smoke that belched from the chimneys lived the owners and executives. The tiny yards of the former were a-sprawl with children; in the gardens on the hills only two or three played. This contrast made a track in my mind. Large families were associated with poverty, toil, unemployment, drunkenness, cruelty, fighting, jails; the small ones with cleanliness, leisure, freedom, light, space, sunshine.

The fathers of the small families owned their homes; the young-looking mothers had time to play croquet with their husbands in the evenings on the smooth lawns. Their clothes had style and charm, and the fragrance of perfume clung about them. They walked hand in hand on shopping expeditions with their children, who seemed positive in their right to live. To me the distinction between happiness and unhappiness in childhood was one of small families and of large families rather than of wealth and poverty.

In our home, too, we felt the economic pressure directly ascribable to size. I was always apprehensive that we might some day be like the families on the flats, because we always had another baby coming, another baby coming. A new litter of puppies was interesting but not out of the ordinary; so, likewise, the cry of a new infant never seemed unexpected. Neither excited any more curiosity than breakfast or dinner. No one ever told me how they were born. I just knew.

I was little more than eight when I first helped wash the fourteen-and-a-half-pound baby after one of mother’s deliveries. She had had a “terrible hard time,” but father had pulled her through, and, in a few weeks, tired and coughing, she was going about her work, believing as usual that her latest was the prize of perfect babies. Mother’s eleven children were all ten-pounders or more, and both she and father had a eugenic pride of race. I used to hear her say that not one of hers had a mark or blemish, although she had the utmost compassion for those who might have cleft palates, crossed eyes, or be “born sick.”

Late one night a woman rushed into our house, seeking protection, clutching in her shawl a scrawny, naked baby, raw with eczema. When her hysteria was calmed sufficiently we learned that her husband had reeled home drunk and had thrown the wailing infant out into the snow. Father was all for summoning the police, but mother was too wise for that. She dispatched him to talk to the man while she gave the weeping woman a warm supper and comforted her. Father returned shortly to say it was safe for her to go back to the multitude of other children because her husband had fallen asleep. Ugly and taciturn though he was I could picture him coming home after a hard day’s work to a household racked with the shrieks of the suffering little thing. I could see that he too was pathetic and a victim; I had sympathy for his rage.

But mother did lose one of her beautiful babies. Henry George McGlynn Higgins had been named for two of the rebel figures father most admired. The four-year-old was playing happily in the afternoon; a few hours later he was gasping for breath. Father heated his home-made croup kettle on the stove until it boiled, and then carried it steaming to be put under the blanket which rose like a covered wagon above the bed. As soon as he realized that home remedies were failing he sent for the doctor. But events moved too swiftly for him. We had gone to bed with no suspicion that by morning we should be one less. I was shocked and surprised that something could come along and pick one of us out of the world in so few hours.

I had no time, however, to consider the bewildering verity of death. We all had to turn to consoling mother. Perhaps unconsciously she had subscribed to father’s theory that the face was the mirror to the soul. She complained she had no picture of her lovely boy, and kept reminding herself of the fine shape of his head, the wide, well-set eyes, the familiar contours which had been wiped forever from her sight, and might soon be sponged from her memory as well.

Mother’s grief over her lost child increased father’s. Because in part he blamed himself, he was desperate to assuage her sorrow. The day after the burial he was constantly occupied in his studio, and when evening fell he took me affectionately by the hand asking me to stay up and help him on a piece of work he was about to do. I agreed willingly.

About eleven o’clock we went forth together into the pitch-black night, father pushing ahead of him a wheelbarrow full of tools and a bag of plaster of Paris. We walked on and on through the stillness for fully two miles to the cemetery where the little brother had been buried. Father knew every step, but it was scary and I clung to his hand.

Just beyond the gateway father hid the lighted lantern in the near-by bushes over a grave and told me to wait there unless I heard somebody coming. He expected me to be grown up at the age of ten. Nerves meant sickness; if any child cried out in the night it was merely considered “delicate.” Consequently I obeyed and watched, shivering with cold and excitement, darting quick glances at the ghostly forms of some of father’s monuments which loomed out of the darkness around me. I could hear the steady chunk, chunk, chunk of his pick and shovel, and the sharper sound when suddenly he struck the coffin.

Father had taken it as a matter of course that I should understand and had not explained what he was about to do. But I never questioned his actions. I did not know there was a law against a man’s digging up his own dead child but, even had I known, I would have believed that the law was wrong.

We traveled back the long, weary way, arriving home in the early hours of the morning. Nothing was said to mother or to the others about that amazing night’s adventure; I was not told to keep silent, but I knew there was mystery in the air and it was no time to talk.

For two evenings I worked with father, helping him break the death mask, mold and shape the cast. I remember the queer feeling I had when I discovered some of the hair which had stuck in the plaster. On the third day, just after supper, father said to us all, “Will you come into the studio?” With tender eyes on mother he uncovered and presented to her the bust of the dead little boy.

She was extraordinarily comforted. Though to me the model, perfect as it was, seemed lifeless, every once in a while she entered the studio, took off the cloth which protected it from the dust, wept and was relieved, recovered it and went on.

Not one of us dared to utter a word of criticism about mother’s adored and adoring husband; nevertheless her soul was harassed at times by his philosophy of live and let live, by his principles against locked doors and private property. She was merely selfless. Often when one of her children was feverish she went to the kitchen pump for water so that it might be cooler and fresher for parched lips. Once, groping her way on such an errand, she stumbled over a tramp who had taken advantage of the unlatched door and lay sprawled on the floor. She rushed back to arouse father, telling him he must put the man out. But he only turned over on his side and muttered, “Oh, let him alone. The poor divil needs sleep like the rest of us.”

Another night mother was awakened by noises outside. “Father,” she called, “there’s somebody at the hencoop!”

“What makes you think so?” he answered sleepily.

“I hear the chickens. They wouldn’t make a noise unless somebody was in there. Get up!”

Obediently father put on his trousers and coat; not even before thieves would he appear in his nightshirt out of his bedroom. He proceeded to the kitchen door, and, holding a lamp on high, addressed the two men, one of whom was handing out chickens to the other, “Hey, you, there! What do you mean by coming to a man’s house in the middle of the night and shtealing his chickens? What kind of citizens are you?”

This seemed to mother no time for a moral lecture. “Why don’t you go out?” she prodded.

“It’s raining.”

“Give me the lamp!” she demanded, exasperated.

She started towards our nearest neighbor, splashing through the little brook, getting her feet wet, calling, “Some one’s in our chicken house!”

Our neighbor armed himself and came running. A man with a gun sent the marauders scurrying up the hill. That was mother’s philosophy. I think father fell in her estimation for a few days after this. She expected him to be the guardian of the home, but he was never that. His liberal views were so well known that our house was marked with the tramp’s patrin of the first degree. “Always get something here. Never be turned away.” If it happened to be pay day they could count on a quarter as well as a meal.

One particular evening we were expecting father home, his pockets bulging with the money from his latest commission, but by nightfall he had not yet returned. When mother heard a rap at the door she went eagerly to open it. Two ragged strangers were standing there.

“Is the boss in?”

“No, but I’m looking for him any minute.”

“We want something to eat.”

With no more ceremony than was customary among the knights of the open road they pushed through the door and made for the kitchen, plainly knowing their way about.

“How dare you come into this house!” exclaimed mother indignantly. “Toss! Beauty!” she cried sharply. The fear in her voice brought the dogs lunging downstairs with fangs bared and hackles bristling. They leaped at the backs of the uninvited guests.

Father came in a few hours later. The door was swinging wide, the snow was blowing in. Torn scraps of clothing, spots of blood were about, and mother was unconscious on the floor. He poured whiskey down her throat. “It was only good whiskey that brought you to,” he often said afterwards, recalling his alarm. He used the same remedy to pull her through the ensuing six weeks of pneumonia. But he had been so thoroughly worried that his generosity towards tramps lessened and his largesse was curtailed.

After this illness mother coughed more than ever and it was evident the pines were not helping her. Father decided to move; the house was so obviously marked and he had to be gone so much he thought it unsafe for us to live alone so far away.

Chapter Three
BOOKS ARE THE COMPASSES

So we moved into town, still on the western hills. It marked the beginning of my adolescence, and such breaks are always disturbing. In the house in the woods we had all been children together, but now some of us were growing up.

Nevertheless, there were always smaller ones to be put to bed, to be rocked to sleep; there were feet and knees to be scrubbed and hands to be washed. Although we had more space, home study sometimes seemed to me impossible. The living room was usually occupied by the older members of the family, and the bedrooms were cold. I kept up in my lessons, but it was simply because I enjoyed them.

In most schools teachers and pupils then were natural enemies, and the one I had in the eighth grade was particularly adept at arousing antagonism. She apparently disliked her job and the youngsters under her care as much as we hated her. Sarcasm was both her defense and weapon of attack. One day in mid-June I was delayed in getting off for school. Well aware that being tardy was a heinous crime, I hurried, pulling and tugging at my first pair of kid gloves, which Mary had just given me. But the bell had rung two minutes before I walked into the room, flushed and out of breath.

The teacher had already begun the class. She looked up at the interruption. “Well, well, Miss Higgins, so your ladyship has arrived at last! Ah, a new pair of gloves! I wonder that she even deigns to come to school at all.”

Giggles rippled around me as I went into the cloakroom and laid down my hat and gloves. I came back, praying the teacher would pay no more attention to me, but as I walked painfully to my seat she continued repeating with variations her mean comments. Even when I sat down she did not stop. I tried to think of something else, tried not to listen, tried to smile with the others. I endured it as long as I could, then took out my books, pyramiding arithmetic, grammar, and speller, strapped them up, rose, and left.

Mother was amazed when I burst in on her. “I will never go back to that school again!” I exclaimed dramatically. “I have finished forever! I’ll go to jail, I’ll work, I’ll starve, I’ll die! But back to that school and teacher I will never go!”

As older brothers and sisters drifted home in the evening, they were as horrified as mother. “But you have only two weeks more,” they expostulated.

“I don’t care if it’s only an hour. I will not go back!”

When it became obvious that I would stick to my point, mother seemed glad to have me to help her. I was thorough and strong and could get through a surprising amount of work in no time. But the rest of the family was seriously alarmed. The next few months were filled with questions I could not answer. “What can you ever be without an education?” “Are you equipped to earn a living?” “Is factory life a pleasant prospect? If you don’t go back to school, you’ll surely end there.”

“All right. I’ll go to work!” I announced defiantly. Work, even in the factory, meant money, and money meant independence. I had no rebuttal to their arguments; I was acting on an impulse that transcended reason, and must have recognized that any explanation as to my momentous decision would sound foolish.

Then suddenly father, mother, my second older sister Nan, and Mary, who had been summoned to a family council, tried other tactics. I was sent for two weeks to Chautauqua, there to take courses, hear lectures from prominent speakers, listen to music. This was designed to stimulate my interest in education and dispel any idea I might have of getting a job.

My impulse had been misconstrued. I was not rebelling against education as such, but only against that particular school and that particular teacher. When fall drew near and the next session was at hand I was still reiterating that I would not go back, although I still had no answer to Nan’s repeated, “What are you going to do?”

Nan was perhaps the most inspiring of all my brothers and sisters. The exact contrary to father, she wanted us all to conform and was in tears if we did not. To her, failure in this respect showed a lack of breeding. Yet even more important than conformity was knowledge, which was the basis for all true culture. She herself wanted to write, and had received prizes for stories from St. Nicholas and the Youth’s Companion. But the family was too dependent upon the earnings of the older girls, and she was obliged to postpone college and her equally ardent desire to study sculpture. She became a translator of French and German until these aspirations could be fulfilled.

At the time of my mutiny Nan was especially disturbed. “You won’t be able to get anywhere without an education,” she stated firmly. She and Mary, joining forces, together looked for a school, reasonable enough for their purses, but good enough academically to prepare me for Cornell. Private education was not so expensive as today, and families of moderate means could afford it. My sisters selected Claverack College and Hudson River Institute, about three miles from the town of Hudson in the Catskill Mountains. Here, in one of the oldest coeducational institutions in the country, the Methodist farmers of the Dutch valley enrolled their sons and daughters; unfortunately it is now gone and with it the healthy spirit it typified. One sister paid my tuition and the other bought my books and clothes; for my board and room I was to work.

Going away to school was epochal in my life. The self-contained family group was suddenly multiplied to five hundred strangers, all living and studying under one roof. The girls’ dormitory was at one end, the boys’ at the other, but we shared the same dining room and sat together in classes; occasionally a boy could call on a girl in the reception hall if a teacher were present. I liked best the attitude of the teachers; they were not so much policemen as companions and friends, and their instruction was more individual and stimulating than at Corning.

I did not have money to do things the other girls did—go off for week-ends or house-parties—but waiting on table or washing dishes did not set me apart. The work was far easier than at home, and a girl was pretty well praised for doing her share. At first the students all appeared to me uninteresting and lacking in initiative. I never found the same imaginative quality I was used to in my family, but as certain ones began to stand out I discovered they had personalities of their own.

I had been at Claverack only a few days and was still feeling homesick when in the hall one morning I encountered the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. Long hair flying from her shoulders, she was so slender and wraithlike that she seemed unreal. I have never since been so moved by human loveliness as I was by Esther’s. I cried at night because I sensed it was something I could not reach. Even her clothes were unlike all others. Many girls envied their taste and quality, but I knew they belonged to her of right. Of every book I had read she was the heroine come alive.

Worlds apart though we were in tradition, looks, behavior, experience, Esther and I had the same romantic outlook. Having aspirations for the theater, she remained only one year and then left to attend Charles Frohman’s dramatic school. I had been too overpowered by my admiration for her to be happy in it, and it kept me from caring particularly about anyone else. Nevertheless, I am convinced that in any interchange of affection the balance is unequal; one must give and the other be able to receive. My second year I was the recipient of devotion from a younger girl similar to that I had showered upon Esther. The loyalty and praise of Amelia Stuart, my laughing friend, fed all the empty spaces in my heart. She was gay and clever, a Methodist by upbringing but not by conviction. Each Sunday afternoon, given over to the reading of the Bible, we received permission to study together in my room, and there occupied ourselves dutifully, I in mending and darning, and she reading aloud, but interspersing solemn passages with ridiculous exaggerations. What was intended to be a serious exercise of the spirit was turned into merriment.

My friendship with these two girls has been interrupted, but never broken.

Very shortly after my arrival at Claverack I had been infected by that indefinable, nebulous quality called school spirit, and before long was happily in the thick of activities. Assembly was held in the chapel every morning, during which we all in turn had to render small speeches and essays, or recite selections of poetry. I had a vivid feeling of how things should be said, putting more dramatic fervor into certain lines than my limited experience of the theater would seem to explain, and on this account the elocution teacher encouraged me to have faith in my talents.

Every girl, I suppose, at some time or other wants to be an actress. Mary had taken me to the theater now and then, once when Maude Adams was playing Juliet to John Drew’s Romeo, and had gone to some pains to explain to me the difference between artistes like Mary Anderson or Julia Marlowe and mere beauty as such. She would not have been pleased at my seeing Lillian Russell, which I did during a Christmas holiday in New York; Lillian Russell was too glamorous and, furthermore, she was said to have accepted jewelry from men.

One vacation I announced to my family that I was thinking of a stage career. Disapproval was evident on all sides. Father pooh-poohed; Mary alone held out hope. She said I had ability and should go to dramatic school in New York as soon as I had finished Claverack. She would apply immediately to Charles Frohman to have me understudy Maude Adams, whom I at least was said to resemble physically—small and with the same abundant red-brown hair. Lacking good features I took pride only in my thick, long braids. I used to decorate them with ribbons and admire the effect in the mirror.

The application was made; I was photographed in various poses with and without hats. A return letter from the school management came, enclosing a form to be filled in with name, address, age, height, weight, color of hair, eyes, and skin.

But additional data were required as to the exact length of the legs, both right and left, as well as measurements of ankle, calf, knee, and thigh. I knew my proportions in a general way. Those were the days when every pack of cigarettes carried a bonus in the shape of a pictured actress, plump and well-formed. In the gymnasium the girls had compared sizes with these beauties. But to see such personal information go coldly down on paper to be sent off to strange men was unthinkable. I had expected to have to account for the quality of my voice, for my ability to sing, to play, for grace, agility, character, and morals. Since I could not see what legs had to do with being a second Maude Adams, I did not fill in the printed form nor send the photographs, but just put them all away, and turned to other fields where something beside legs was to count.

Chapel never bored me. I had come to dislike ritual in many of the churches I had visited—kneeling for prayer, sitting for instruction, standing for praise. But in a Methodist chapel anyone could get up and express a conviction. Young sprouts here were thinking and discussing the Bible, religion, and politics. Should the individual be submerged in the state? If you had a right to free thought as an individual, should you give it up to the church?

We scribbled during study periods, debated in the evenings. Without always digesting them but with great positiveness I carried over many of the opinions I had heard expounded at home. To most of the boys and girls those Saturday mornings when the more ambitious efforts were offered represented genuine torture. They stuttered and stammered painfully. I was just as nervous—more so probably. Nevertheless, I was so ardent for suffrage, for anything which would “emancipate” women and humanity, that I was eager to proclaim theories of my own.

Father was still the spring from which I drank, and I sent long letters home, getting in reply still longer ones, filled with ammunition about the historical background of the importance of women—Helen of Troy, Ruth, Cleopatra, Poppaea, famous queens, women authors and poets.

When news spread that I was to present my essay, “Women’s Rights,” the boys, following the male attitude which most people have forgotten but which every suffragette well remembers, jeered and drew cartoons of women wearing trousers, stiff collars, and smoking huge cigars. Undeterred, I was spurred on to think up new arguments. I studied and wrote as never before, stealing away to the cemetery and standing on the monuments over the graves. Each day in the quiet of the dead I repeated and repeated that speech out loud. What an essay it was!

“Votes for Women” banners were not yet flying, and this early faint bleating of mine aroused little enthusiasm. I turned then to an equally stern subject. The other students had automatically accepted the cause of solid money. I espoused free silver. At Chautauqua I had heard echoes of those first notes sounded by Bryan for the working classes. The spirit of humanitarianism in industry had been growing and swelling, but it was still deep buried. I believe any great concept must be present in the mass consciousness before any one figure can tap it and set it free on its irresistible way.

I had not seen the “Boy Orator of the Platte,” but the country was ringing with his words, “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” These rich and sonorous phrases made me realize the importance of clothing ideas in fine language. Far more, however, they struck a solemn chord within me. I, also, in an obscure and unformed way, wanted to help grasp Utopia from the skies and plant it on earth. But what to do and where to start I did not know.

Due to my “advanced ideas,” for a time, at least, I am sorry to say, it was chiefly the grinds with whom I “walked in Lovers’ Lane,” nodding wisely and answering their earnest aspirations with profound advice. But this did not last. Soon I was going through the usual boy and girl romances; each season brought a new one. I took none of them very seriously, but adroitly combined flirtatiousness with the conviction that marriage was something towards which I must develop. Therefore I turned the vague and tentative suggestions of my juvenile beaus by saying, “I would never think of jumping into marriage without definite preparation and study of its responsibilities.” Practically no women then went into professions; matrimony was the only way out. It seems ages ago.

Various pranks occurred at Claverack, such as taking walks with boys out of bounds and going to forbidden places for tea. Towards the end of my last year I thought up the idea that several of us should slip out through the window and down to the village dance hall where our special admirers would meet us. About eleven-thirty, in the midst of the gayety, in walked our principal, Mr. Flack, together with the preceptress who had come for the “ladies.” We were all marched back to school, uneasy but silent.

The next morning I received a special invitation to call at The Office. I entered. Mr. Flack, a small, slight, serious, student type of man, with a large head and high brow, was standing with his back to me. I sat down. He gave me no greeting but kept on at his books. To all appearances he did not know I was there. Then, without looking around, he said, “Miss Higgins, don’t you feel rather ashamed of yourself for getting those girls into trouble last night, by taking them out and making them break the rules? They may even have to be sent home.”

Although surprised that he should have known I was the one responsible, I could not deny it, but it flashed across my mind at first that someone must have told him. He went on with rapid flow, almost as though talking to himself, “I’ve watched you ever since you came and I don’t need to be told that you must have been the ringleader. Again and again I’ve noticed your influence over others. I want to call your attention to this, because I know you’re going to use it in the future. You must make your choice—whether to get yourself and others into difficulty, or else guide yourself and others into constructive activities which will do you and them credit.”

I do not quite recall what else he said, but I have never forgotten going out of his room that day. This could not exactly be called a turning point in my life, but from then on I realized more strongly than before that there was a something within myself which could and should be kept under my control and direction.

Long afterwards I wrote to thank Mr. Flack for his wisdom in offering guidance instead of harsh discipline. He died a few years later, and I was glad I had been able to place a rose in his hand rather than on his grave.

I spent three happy years at Claverack. The following season I decided to try my hand at teaching, then a lady-like thing to do. A position was open to me in the first grade of a new public school in southern New Jersey. The majority of the pupils—Poles, Hungarians, Swedes—could not speak English. In they came regularly. I was beside myself to know what to do with eighty-four children who could not understand a word I said. I loved those small, black-haired and tow-headed urchins who became bored with sitting and, on their own, began stunts to entertain themselves. But I was so tired at the end of the day that I often lay down before dressing for dinner and awakened the next morning barely in time to start the routine. In very short order I became aware of the fact that teaching was not merely a job, it was a profession, and training was necessary if you were to do it well. I was not suited by temperament, and therefore had no right to this vocation. I had been struggling for only a brief while when father summoned me home to nurse mother.

She was weak and pale and the high red spots on her cheek bones stood out startlingly against her white face. Although she was now spitting blood when she coughed we still expected her to live on forever. She had been ill so long; this was just another attack among many. Father carried her from room to room, and tried desperately to devise little comforts. We shut the doors and windows to keep out any breath of the raw March air, and in the stuffy atmosphere we toiled over her bed.

In an effort to be more efficient in caring for mother I tried to find out something about consumption by borrowing medical books from the library of the local doctor, who was a friend of the family, and in doing this became so interested in medicine that I decided definitely I would study to be an M.D. When I went back for more volumes and announced my decision the doctor gave them to me, but smiled tolerantly, “You’ll probably get over it.”

I had been closely confined for a long time when I was invited to Buffalo for the Easter holidays to meet again one of the boys by whom I had been beaued at Claverack. Mother insisted that I needed a vacation. Mary and Nan were both there; I could stay with them, and we planned a pleasant trip to Niagara Falls for the day.

With me out of the way mother sent off the little children one by one on some pretext or another. She had more difficulty with father. The fire bricks in the stove had split and she told him he must go to town and get new ones. Much against his will, because he was vaguely unquiet, he started for the foundry. He had left only because mother seemed to want it so much, but when he had walked a few blocks, he found he could not go on. For some Celtic mystic reason of his own he turned abruptly around and came back to the house. Mother was gasping in death. All the family hated scenes, she most of all. She had known she was to die and wanted to be alone.

It was a folk superstition that a consumptive who survived through the month of March would live until November. Mother died on the thirty-first of the month, leaving father desolate and inconsolable. I came flying home. The house was silent and he hardly spoke. Suddenly the stillness of the night was broken by a wailing and Toss was found with his paws on the coffin, mourning and howling—the most poignant and agonizing sound I had ever heard.

I had to take mother’s place—manage the finances, order the meals, pay the debts. There was nothing left for my clothing nor for any outside diversions. All that could be squeezed out by making this or that do had to go for shoes or necessities for the younger brothers. Mend, patch, sew as you would, there was a limit to the endurance of trousers, and new ones had to be purchased.

To add to my woes, father seemed to me, who was sensitive to criticism, suddenly metamorphosed from a loving, gentle, benevolent parent into a most aggravating, irritating tyrant; nobody in any fairy tale I had ever read was quite so cruel. He who had given us the world in which to roam now apparently wanted to put us behind prison bars. His unreasonableness was not directed towards the boys, who were in bed as soon as lessons were done, but towards his daughters, Ethel and me. Whatever we did was wrong. He objected particularly to young men.

Ethel was receiving the concentrated attention of Jack Byrne. Father in scolding her said she should mix more. My beaus were a little older than the ones I had had at school, and more earnest in their intentions. Though not one really interested me—their conversation seemed flat, consisting of foolish questions and smart, silly replies—father scolded me also about them, “Why aren’t you serious like your sister? Can’t you settle yourself to one? Do you have to have somebody different every evening?”

Messages were coming to me from a young man going West, postmarked Chicago or San Francisco. These daily letters and sometimes telegrams as well, were not father’s idea of wooing. What could anyone have to say every day? To his way of thinking, a decent man came to the house and did his talking straight; he sat around with the family and got acquainted. Father said, “That fellow’s a scoundrel. He’s too worldly. He’s not even known in town.”

We had to ask permission whether Tom or Jack or Henry could call. Without reason or explanation father said, “No,” and that was an end to it. If we went out, we had to be back at ten and give an account of ourselves.

Then came the climax. Ethel and I had gone to an open-air concert. On the stroke of ten we were a full block away from home running with all our might. When we arrived, three minutes late, the house was in utter darkness—not a sight nor sound of a living creature anywhere. We banged and knocked. We tried the front door, the back, and the side, then again the front. It opened part way; father looked out, reached forth a hand and caught Ethel’s arm, saying, “This outrageous behavior is not your fault. Come in.” With that he pulled her inside, and the door slammed, leaving me in the dark, stunned and bewildered. I did not know this monster.

Hurt beyond words, I sat down on the steps, worrying not only about this night but about the next day and the next, concerned over the children left at home with this new kind of father. I was sure if I waited long enough he would come out for me, but it was a chilly evening in October. I had no wrap, and began to grow very cold.

I walked away from the house, trying to decide where I should go and what I should do. I could not linger on the streets indefinitely, with the possibility of encountering some tipsy factory hand or drummer passing through. At first there seemed no one to turn to. Finally, exhausted by stress of emotion, I went to the home of the girl who had been with us at the concert. She had not yet gone to bed, and her mother welcomed me so hospitably that I shall be eternally grateful. The next morning she lent me carfare to go to Elmira, where I had friends with whom I could stay.

Meantime father had found me gone. He had dressed and tramped up and down First Street, searching every byway, inquiring whether I had been seen. When he had returned at daybreak to find me still missing he had sent word to Mary, who received his message at almost the same time as one from me, telling her not to worry; I was all right. Both of them urged me to come back to Corning, and in a few days I did so, taking up again my responsibilities. Father and I tried to talk it over, but we could not meet on the old ground; between us a deep silence had fallen.

Father had almost stopped expounding; instead, he was reading more. Debs had come on his horizon, and the Socialist papers cropping up all over the country were appearing in the house. From the Free Library, which he had helped to establish years earlier, he was borrowing Spencer, who was modern for that time, and other books on sociology.

I had given up encouraging young men to see me, but I, too, was patronizing the library. My books were fiction. “All nonsense,” father snorted at the mention of such titles as Graustark, Prisoners of Hope, or Three Musketeers. The word “novel” was still shocking to many people, and he classed them all as “love stories.” “Read to cultivate and uplift your mind. Read what will benefit you in the battle of life,” he admonished. But I continued my escape from the daily humdrum to revel in romances, devouring them in the evenings and hiding them under the mattress during the day.

One noon when I was waiting for the children to come in to lunch I was buried in David Harum, finding it very funny, and did not hear father enter. He stood ominously in the doorway. I should have felt trapped, but, instead, without warning and without reason, the old love flamed up again. I laughed and laughed. I was no longer afraid nor did I care for his scowls or his silly old notions. The long silence was broken.

“Do listen to this.” And I started reading. The frown began to melt away and soon father too was chuckling. This was the first laughter that had been heard in that dreary household since mother’s death. The book disappeared into his room, and soon thereafter he was caught seeking more of “that nonsense.”

At last I realized why father had been so different. He had been lonely for mother, lonely for her love, and doubtless missed her ready appreciation of his own longings and misgivings. Then, too, he had always before depended on her to understand and direct us. He was probably a trifle jealous, though not consciously, because he considered jealousy an animal trait far beneath him, and refused to recognize it in himself. Nevertheless, beaus had been sidetracking the affections of his little girls. So oppressed had he been by his sense of responsibility that he had slipped in judgment and in so doing slid into the small-town rut of propriety. His belated discipline, caused by worry and anxiety, was merely an attempt to guide his children.

I, however, considered the time had passed for such guidance. I had to step forth by myself along the experimental path of adulthood. Though the immediate occasion for reading medical books had ceased with mother’s death, I had never, during these months, lost my deep conviction that perhaps she might have been saved had I had sufficient knowledge of medicine. This was linked up with my latent desire to be of service in the world. The career of a physician seemed to fulfill all my requirements. I could not at the moment see how the gap in education from Claverack to medical school was to be bridged. Nevertheless, I could at least make a start with nursing.

But father, though he proclaimed his belief in perfect independence of thought and mind, could not approve nursing as a profession, even when I told him that some of the nicest girls were going into it. “Well, they won’t be nice long,” he growled. “It’s no sort of work for girls to be doing.” My argument that he himself had taught us to help other people had no effect.

Father’s notions, however, were not going to divert me from my intention; no matter how peaceful the home atmosphere had become, still I had to get out and try my wings. For six months more we jogged along, then, just a year after mother had died, Esther asked me to visit her in New York. I really wanted to train in the city, but her mother knew someone on the board of the White Plains Hospital, which was just initiating a school. There I was accepted as a probationer.

Chapter Four
DARKNESS THERE AND NOTHING MORE

The old White Plains Hospital, not at all like a modern institution, had been a three-storied manor house, long deserted because two people had once been found mysteriously dead in it and thereafter nobody would rent or buy. The hospital board, scoffing at superstition, had gladly purchased it at the low price to which it had been reduced. However, in spite of rearrangements and redecorating, many people in White Plains went all the way to the Tarrytown Hospital rather than enter the haunted portals.

Once set in spacious grounds the building was still far back from the road; a high wall immediately behind it shut off the view of the next street and nothing could be seen beyond except the roof of what had been the stable. The surrounding tall trees made it shadowy even in the daytime. To reach the office you had to cross a broad pillared veranda. Parlor and sitting room had been thrown together for the male ward, and an operating room had been tacked on to the rear. The great wide stairway of fumed oak, lighted at night by low-turned gas jets, swept up through the lofty ceiling. On the second floor were the female ward and a few private rooms. The dozen or so nurses slept in the made-over servants’ quarters under the gambrel roof.

Student nurses in large modern hospitals have little idea what our life was like in a small one thirty-five years ago. The single bathroom on each floor was way at the back. We did not have a resident interne, and, consequently, had to depend mainly upon our own judgment. Since we had no electricity, we could not ring a bell and have our needs supplied, and had to use our legs for elevators. A probationer had to learn to make dressings, bandages, mix solutions, and toil over sterilizing. She put two inches of water in the wash-boiler, laid a board across the bricks placed in the bottom, and balanced the laundered linen and gauze on top. Then, clapping on the lid, she set the water to boiling briskly, watched the clock, and when the prescribed number of minutes had elapsed the sterilizing was over.

The great self-confidence with which I entered upon my duties soon received a slight shock. One of our cases was an old man from the County Home. He complained chiefly of pains in his leg and, since his condition was not very serious, the superintendent of nurses left him one afternoon in my care. This was my first patient. When I heard the clapper of his little nickeled bell, I hurried with a professional air to his bedside.

“Missy, will you please bandage up my sore leg? It does me so much good.”

Having just had my initial lesson in bandaging, I was elated at this opportunity to try my skill. I set to work with great precision, and, when I had finished, congratulated myself on a neat job, admiring the smooth white leg. My first entry went on his record sheet.

A little later the superintendent, in making her rounds, regarded the old man perplexedly.

“Why have you got your leg bandaged?”

“I asked the nurse to do it for me.”

“Why that leg? It’s the other one that hurts.”

“Oh, she was so kind I didn’t want to stop her.”

I bowed my head in embarrassment, but I was young and eager, and it did not stay bowed long.

Within a short period I considered myself thoroughly inured to what many look upon as the unpleasant aspects of nursing; the sight of blood never made me squeamish and I had watched operations, even on the brain, with none of the usual sick giddiness. Then one day the driver of a Macy delivery wagon, who had fallen off the seat, was brought in with a split nose. I was holding the basin for the young doctor who was stitching it up, when one of the other nurses said something to tease him. He dropped his work, leaving the needle and cat-gut thread sticking across the patient’s nose, and chased her out of the room and down the hall. The patient, painless under a local anesthetic, gazed mildly after them; but the idea that doctor and nurse could be so callous as to play jokes horrified me.

When pursuer and pursued returned they found me in a heap on the floor, the basin tipped over beside me, instruments and sponges scattered everywhere. The patient was still sitting quietly waiting for all the foolishness to stop. I am glad to say this was the one and only time I ever fainted on duty.

The training, rigid though it was, would have been far less difficult had it not been for the truly diabolical head nurse. In the morning she was all smiles, so saintly that you could almost glimpse the halo around her head. But as the day wore on the demon in her appeared. She could always think up extra things for you to do to keep you from your regular afternoon two hours off. This was particularly hard on me because I had developed tubercular glands and was running a temperature. In my second year I was operated on, and two weeks later assigned to night duty, where I stayed for three awful months.

My worst tribulation came during this period. People then seldom went to hospitals with minor ailments; our patients were commonly the very sick, requiring a maximum of attention. There was no orderly and I could use only my left hand because my right shoulder was still bandaged. I took care of admissions, entered case histories, and, when sharp bells punctuated the waiting stillness, sometimes one coming before I had time to answer the first, I pattered hurriedly up and down the three flights, through the shadows relieved only by the faint red glow from the gas jets. I suppose adventures were inevitable.

One night an Italian was picked up on the street in a state of almost complete exhaustion, and brought to the hospital. He was so ill with suspected typhoid that he should have had a “special,” but instead he was placed in the ward. An old leather couch stood across the windows, and whenever a pause came in my duties I lay down. From there I could keep an eye on my new patient. Sick as he was he insisted on making the long trip through the ward to the bathroom. I could not explain how unwise this was, because he could not understand a word of English. He must have reeled out of his bed between thirty and forty times.

Just as the early spring dawn came creeping in the window behind me I grew drowsy. I was on the point of dozing off when some premonition warned me and I opened my eyelids enough to see the man reach under his pillow, take something out cautiously, glide from his bed. Spellbound I watched him slithering soft-footedly as he edged his way towards me. I seemed to be hypnotized with sleep and could not stir. He came nearer and nearer with eyes fixed, hands behind him. Suddenly I snapped into duty, arose quickly, ordered him back to bed, and ran ahead to straighten his sheets and pillows, not realizing my danger until he loomed over me, his knife in his hand. Before he could thrust I grabbed his arm and held it. Though I was small-boned I had good muscles, and he was very ill.

Meanwhile, another patient snatched up his bell and rang, and rang and rang. Nobody answered. The nurses were too far away to hear; the other patients in the ward were unable to help me. But the man quickly used up what little energy he had, and I was able to get the knife from him, push him back in bed, and take his temperature. I assumed he had suddenly become delirious.

About seven o’clock I answered a summons to the front door and found three policemen who wanted to know whether we had an Italian patient. “Indeed we have,” I answered feelingly and called the superintendent.

When the red tape was unwound, I learned that my Italian belonged to a gang which had been hiding in a cave between Tarrytown and White Plains, holding up passers-by. Amongst them they had committed five murders. The others had all been hunted down, but this man’s collapse had temporarily covered his whereabouts. The attack on me had apparently been merely incidental to his attempt at escape through the open window behind me. He was carried off to the County Hospital Jail, and I was not sorry to see him go.

After this incident an orderly was employed and, though he was allowed to sleep at night, it was reassuring to know he could be called in an emergency. The emergency soon arose. A young man of about twenty-five, of well-to-do parents, was admitted as an alcoholic. I remember that I was impressed by the softness of his handshake when I greeted him. He had the first symptoms of delirium tremens but he was now perfectly conscious and needed no more than routine attention.

Sometime in the night the new arrival asked me to get him a drink of water. When I came back into the room and offered it to him he knocked me into the corner ten feet away. As my head banged against the wall, he leaped out of bed after me and reached down for my throat. Though half-stunned and off my feet, I yet had more strength than the man whose flabby muscles refused to obey his will. The patient in the adjoining bed rang and in a few moments the orderly came to my assistance. Between us we got the poor crazed youth into a strait jacket. The doctor who was summoned could do nothing and in the morning the young man mercifully died.

To differentiate between things real and things imaginary was not always easy at nighttime. One morning about two o’clock I was writing my case histories in the reception office on the ground floor just off the veranda. Both window and curtain behind my back were up about ten inches to let in the cool, moist air. Abruptly I had a feeling that eyes were staring at me. I could not have explained why; I had heard no sound, but I was certain some human being was somewhere about. Anybody who had come on legitimate business would have spoken. Perhaps it was another patient with a knife. Should I sit still? Should I look behind me?

I turned my head to the window, and there an ugly, grinning face with a spreading, black mustache was peering in at me. It might have been disembodied; all I could see was this extraordinary face, white against the inky background. It was not a patient, not anyone in my charge. Relief was immediate and action automatic. I seized the long window pole, twice as tall as I, dashed to the outer door, and shooed him off the veranda. He ran for the outer gate while I brandished my weapon after him.

Such instantaneous responses must have been the result of having in childhood sent fears about their business before they could gather momentum. Now I could usually act without having to think very much about them or be troubled in retrospect. They were all in the day’s work of the night nurse.

Probably the fact that I was low in vitality made me more susceptible to mental than physical influences. Realistic doctors and stern head nurses tried to keep tales of the old house from the probationers, but not very successfully. When the colored patients could not sleep they used to tell us weird stories, and with rolling eyes solemnly affirmed they were true. One old darky woman, hearing the hoot owls begin their mournful “too-whoo, too-whoo,” would sit straight up in her bed and whisper, “Suppose dat callin’ me? Hit’s callin’ someone in dis hospital.”

Again and again after the owls’ hooting either somebody in the hospital died, or was brought in to die from an accident. Reason told me this was pure coincidence, but it began to get on my nerves.

And then stranger events, for which I could find no explanation, followed. Once when I was making my rounds a little after midnight, I turned into the room occupied by the tubercular valet of a member of the Iselin family. I had expected him to be sleeping quietly because he was merely there to rest up before being sent back home to England, but he was awake and asked for ice. I started for the refrigerator, which was two flights down in the cellar. But at the top of the stairs I suddenly stopped short—“One—Two—Three!” I heard dull, distinct knocks directly under the stairway.

Not one, single, tangible thing near by could have made those sounds. In the space of a few seconds I took an inventory of the importance of my life as compared to the proper care of my patient. I had to walk deliberately down those steps, not knowing what might be lying in wait for me below. As I stepped on the first tread the same knocks came again—“One—Two—Three!”

I tried to hurry but it seemed to me that each foot had tons of iron attached to it. The little red devils of night lights blinked at me and seemed to make the shadows thicker in the corners. But nothing clutched me from the dim and ghostly hall. I got down those steps somehow and passed through the dining room into the kitchen. There I paused again. Should I take a butcher knife with me? “No, I won’t do that,” I answered myself resolutely, and started for the cellar stairs.

For the third time came the knocking. Glancing to right and left, my back against the dark, I crept down, reached the refrigerator, broke off some chunks of ice with trembling hands, put them in a bowl, steeled myself while I chopped them into still finer pieces, and set out on the return, my feet much lighter going up than down.

I had been away only a brief while altogether, but the patient, for no apparent cause, had had a hemorrhage, and died in a few minutes.

Many times after that I heard these nocturnal sounds, usually overhead. They began to seem more like footsteps—“tap, tap, tap, tap,”—very quick and a bit muffled. Soon I was not sleeping well in the daytime.

One morning I asked at breakfast table, “Who was walking around last night?”

“I wasn’t.” “Not I.” “Certainly not me,” came a chorus. “What makes you think someone was up?”

“I distinctly heard footsteps the full length of the third floor.”

“What time?”

“Around four o’clock.”

But nobody admitted to having been up. “Then one of you must have been walking in your sleep,” I insisted.

The nurse who had preceded me on night duty timidly contributed, “I always heard somebody. I didn’t want to say anything about it for fear you’d think I was queer.”

Towards morning of the very next night when I was in the second floor ward, I heard the patter again above my head. I ran upstairs to the nurses’ quarters as fast as I could and looked down the corridor. Every door was tight shut. I tore down two flights to the first floor. The noise came once more above me. Back to the second floor. All patients were in their beds. I asked the only wakeful one, “Did you get up just now?”

“No.”

“Did anybody else get up?”

“No.”

Some nights went by quietly. But I heard the noises often enough to become truly concerned for fear I might be imagining things. I said to one of the older nurses, “I’m going to wake you up and see whether you hear them too.”

“I’ll sit up with you,” she offered.

“No, I’ll call you. They never come until almost morning.”

The next time, at the first tap, I hurried to her room, shook her awake, led her to the floor below, “There, do you hear it?”

Her expression was confirmation enough.

Leaving her I raced down another flight, and waited. In a moment the “Tap, tap, tap, tap” came again from overhead. Up I went. She said she had heard it all right but it had come from over her head. At least my senses were not playing me tricks. My accounts were given greater credence, and other nurses sometimes interrupted their slumbers to listen.

One of my companions told a young and intelligent doctor on the staff that I had better be taken off night duty before I had a nervous breakdown. Though he thought this was girlish nonsense, he could see I was being seriously affected, and anyhow the strain of three continuous months at such a hard task was far too much. Another nurse relieved me.

After my second glandular operation I was placed in one of the private rooms on the upper floor. I had not come through very well, and this same doctor remained in the hospital all night to be on call. Being restless, I woke up, only to hear the identical noises which had haunted me for so long. I called him and exclaimed, “There it is. Don’t you hear it?”

He did, but confidently he strode upstairs to the nurses’ floor. I knew he would find nothing. When he came back, I asked, “Did you see anyone?”

“No. Apparently everybody was asleep. I looked in all the rooms.”

Immediately the raps came again. He moved a little faster to get downstairs. In a few minutes he put his head back in the door. “You’re in bed? You haven’t been up?” I assured him I had not moved, knowing well he must have heard them as always I had, from above.

Though still believing somebody was walking around the place, the doctor by this time was determined to get to the bottom of the mystery, and returned every night for a week. But the sound was a will-o’-the-wisp. He never could catch up with it. He was so eager to exhaust every possibility that he even brought the matter before the board. One of them patronizingly explained that it was probably the echo from some rat in the walls; they were in the habit of dismissing thus lightly the superstitions which clung about the old house.

The doctor continued his detective work until one day he appeared in great good humor. From the rear windows he pointed to the roof which rose beyond the high back wall. “I’ve found it. That stable is built on the same timbers as this house. When some horse grows restless towards morning he stamps and the vibration is carried through them underground to this building. Now do you believe in ghosts?”

Life was by no means so serious as all this sounds. Amelia had followed me into the hospital and we continued our gay times together. For that matter nursing itself often presented amusing aspects. The supply of registered nurses was very small, and in our last year of training we were sent out on private cases, thus seeing both the highlights and lowlights of life, which prepared us well in experience.

One which had romantic overtones took place immediately after Howard Willett had transferred his house-party from Aiken, South Carolina, to Gedney Farms Manor in White Plains. The indisposition of young Eugene Sugney Reynal was pronounced scarlet fever. The contagion began spreading among the guests and servants, and Dr. Julius Schmid, old and honored, a noteworthy figure in the community and also our chief of staff, detailed three of us nurses for service there, practically turning the place into a hospital for five weeks.

My special charge was Adelaide Fitzgerald, Reynal’s fiancée, but as necessity arose we shifted around. Reynal’s condition grew steadily worse. One morning at daybreak when the patient was almost in a coma Dr. Schmid sent for the priest to administer extreme unction, and said to me, “You’d better get Miss Fitzgerald and tell her there’s very little hope.”

She knelt by his bed, “Gene,” she called to him, “Gene, we’re going to be married—right now.”

Reynal was as near death as a man could be, but her voice reached into his subconscious and summoned him back. Another nurse and I, hastily called upon to act as bridesmaids, stood in starched and rustling white beside the bed. It was extraordinary to watch; Reynal seemed to shake himself alive until he was conscious enough to respond “I do” to the priest who had arrived to perform quite a different office.

As an anti-climax to all the excitement, and to my intense disgust, I myself came down with a mild attack of scarlet fever. I was so embarrassed that I went right on working and did not take to my bed until I actually began to peel.

My usual cases offered drama of another sort. Often I was called in the middle of the night on a maternity case, perhaps ten miles away from the hospital, where I had to sterilize the water and boil the forceps over a wood fire in the kitchen stove while the doctor scrubbed up as best he could. Many times labor terminated before he could arrive and I had to perform the delivery by myself.

To see a baby born is one of the greatest experiences that a human being can have. Birth to me has always been more awe-inspiring than death. As often as I have witnessed the miracle, held the perfect creature with its tiny hands and tiny feet, each time I have felt as though I were entering a cathedral with prayer in my heart.

There is so little knowledge in the world compared with what there is to know. Always I was deeply affected by the trust patients, rich or poor, male or female, old or young, placed in their nurses. When we appeared they seemed to say, “Ah, here is someone who can tell us.” Mothers asked me pathetically, plaintively, hopefully, “Miss Higgins, what should I do not to have another baby right away?” I was at a loss to answer their intimate questions, and passed them along to the doctor, who more often than not snorted, “She ought to be ashamed of herself to talk to a young girl about things like that.”

All such problems were thus summarily shoved aside. We had one woman in our hospital who had had several miscarriages and six babies, each by a different father. Doctors and nurses knew every time she went out that she would soon be back again, but it was not their business or anybody’s business; it was just “natural.”

To be polished off neatly, the nurses in training were assigned to one of the larger city hospitals in which to work during the last three or six months of our course. Mine was the Manhattan Eye and Ear at Forty-first Street and Park Avenue, across the street from the Murray Hill Hotel, and I welcomed the chance to see up-to-date equipment and clockwork discipline. My new environment was considerably less harsh and intense, more comfortable and leisurely.

At one of the frequent informal dances held there my doctor partner received a message—not a call, but a caller. His architect wanted to go over blueprints with him. “Come along,” he invited. “See whether you think my new house is going to be as fine as I do.”

The architect was introduced. “This is William Sanger.”

The three of us bent over the plans. The doctor was the only one unaware of the sudden electric quality of the atmosphere.

At seven-thirty the next morning when I went out for my usual “constitutional,” Bill Sanger was on the doorstep. He had that type of romantic nature which appealed to me, and had been waiting there all night. We took our walk together that day and regularly for many days thereafter, learning about each other, exploring each other’s minds, and discovering a community of ideas and ideals. His fineness fitted in with my whole destiny, if I can call it such, just as definitely as my hospital training.

I found Bill’s mother a lovely person—artistic, musical, and highly cultured. His father had been a wealthy sheep rancher in Australia. When you travel anywhere from there, you practically have to go round the world, and on his way to San Francisco he had passed through Central Europe. In a German town he had fallen in love with the Mayor’s youngest daughter, then only fourteen. When she was of marriageable age he had returned for her, and it was from this talented mother that Bill had derived his fondness for music and desire to paint.

Bill was an architect only by profession; he was pure artist by temperament. Although his heart was not in mechanical drawing, he did it well. Stanford White once told me he was one of the six best draftsmen in New York. He confided to me his dream of eventually being able to leave architecture behind and devote himself to painting, particularly murals. I had had instilled in me a feeling for the natural relationship between color and symmetry of line, and sympathized not merely with his aspirations but was intensely proud of his work. Some day we were going to be married, and as soon as we had saved enough we would go to Paris, whither the inspiration of the great French painters was summoning artists from all over the world.

These plans were nebulous and had nothing to do with my abrupt departure from New York. One afternoon, about four o’clock, I was standing under a skylight putting drops in the eyes of a convalescent patient. Unexpectedly, inexplicably, the glass began to fall apart. Almost by instinct I pulled my patient under the lintel of the door. A great blast followed and pandemonium was let loose; the ruined skylight went crashing down the stairs, plaster and radiators tumbled from the walls, doors fell out, windows cracked.

I rushed to the bed of the man who needed my first attention. He had been operated on for a cataract only a few hours previously and my orders had been not to let him move too soon lest the fluid in his eye run out and damage his sight permanently. But he with the other terrified patients was already on his feet.

Rounding up all those under my care and checking their names took several minutes, and while I was still trying to quiet them, ambulances from other hospitals came clanging up. By the time I had ushered my charges down to the ground floor, a way had been cleared through the debris of fallen brick and wood. Since mine were not stretcher cases I was able to crowd ten of them into one ambulance, and we were taken to the New York Hospital. Not until I had them all safely installed did I learn what had happened to our building. A tremendous explosion in the new Park Avenue subway had practically demolished it, and it had to be evacuated.

I returned to White Plains, where Bill came up frequently to see me. On one of our rambles he idly pulled at some vines on a stone wall, and then, with his hands, tilted my face for a kiss. The next morning, to my mortification, four telltale finger marks were outlined on my cheek by poison ivy blisters. The day after that, my face was swollen so that my eyes were tight shut, and I was sick for two months; since my training was finished, I was sent home to convalesce.

Chapter Five
CORALS TO CUT LIFE UPON

For a while I stayed at Corning, and then went back to New York to start nursing in earnest. On one of my free afternoons in August, Bill and I went for a drive, and he suggested we stop in at the house of a friend of his who was a minister. All had been prepared. License and rice were waiting. And so we were married.

The first year is half taken up with love and half with planning a future together which is to endure forever. These dreams feed youthful ambitions, but they seldom can come true in their entirety. In our case the obstacles arose with undue speed.

I was not well. I was paying the cost of long hours in mother’s closely confined room and of continuous overwork in the hospital. Medical advice was to go West to live, but I would not go without Bill, and he had a commission which kept him in New York. Accordingly, I was packed off to a small semi-sanitarium near Saranac where the great Dr. Trudeau, specialist in pulmonary tuberculosis, was consulted.

Existence there was depressing. A man might be talking to me one day, full of life and spirit and hope, and the next morning not appear. The dead were ordinarily removed in the quiet of the night, and the doctors made no comment. In this gloomy environment I rested, preparing myself for motherhood. The flood of treatises on child psychology had not yet started, and even the books on the care and feeding of infants were few. But I read whatever I could.

Just before it was time for the baby to be born I returned to the little apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue at 149th Street, then practically suburban. Taking every precaution, we had engaged four doctors in a row. Dr. Schmid had said he would perform the ceremony unless it came at night, in which case his assistant would have to take charge. The assistant had provided that, if he were not available, his assistant would be on call, and this assistant had another assistant to assist him.

When towards three o’clock one morning I felt the first thin, fine pains of warning, Bill tried one after the other of our obstetricians—not one could be located. He had to run around the corner to the nearest general practitioner. Due almost as much to this young doctor’s inexperience as to my physical state, the ordeal was unusually hard, but the baby Stuart, given Amelia’s family name, was perfectly healthy, strong, and sturdy. I looked upon this as a victory, although it was only partial, because I had to go right back to the mountains. It was a wrench to leave again so soon and at such a time, but I could not believe it would be for long.

With Stuart and a nurse I took rooms in a friendly farmhouse near a small Adirondack village; I did not want the baby in the midst of sick people, and, moreover, I was not welcome at Saranac itself, since Dr. Trudeau did not like to have in residence patients whose illness had progressed beyond a certain stage. One of the most important parts of the treatment was stuffing with food. I was being filled with the then recognized remedy, creosote, and gulped capsule after capsule, which broke my appetite utterly. Still I had to pour down milk and swallow eggs, and always I had to rest and rest and rest.

At the end of eight months I was worse instead of better, and had no interest in living. Nan and Bill’s mother were summoned, and two of Dr. Trudeau’s associates came to see me. They advised that I should go nearer Saranac and be separated from all personal responsibilities.

“What would you yourself like to do?” they asked.

“Nothing.”

“Where would you like to go?”

“Nowhere.”

“Would you like to have the baby sent to your brother, or would you rather have your mother-in-law take it?”

“I don’t care.”

To every suggestion I was negative. I was not even interested in my baby.

The two doctors left. The younger, however, apparently not satisfied with the professional attitude, returned almost immediately, not so much in a medical capacity as one of anxious friendliness. I was still sitting in the same state of listlessness. He laid his hand on my shoulder quietly, but I had all the feeling of being violently shaken. “Don’t be like this!” he exclaimed. “Don’t let yourself get into such a mental condition. Do something! Want something! You’ll never get well if you keep on this way.”

I could not sleep that night. I had been rudely jolted from my stupor by the understanding doctor. Obviously preparations were being made for a lingering illness which would terminate in death. But if I had to die I would rather be with those I loved than disappear in the night as a part of the cold routine.

As the first glimmer of dawn appeared through the curtains I got up and stared at the steadily ticking clock. It was not yet five. I dressed quickly, then tiptoed into the bedroom where the nurse and baby were slumbering soundly. I roused her and told her to pack up; we were going back to New York. She looked up in drowsy dismay, but obeyed meekly. The farmer hitched up his horse and we jogged along all the way to the station in the early summer morning, bright with sunshine and cheery with birds.

Bill was waiting at the Grand Central Terminal, quite naturally perplexed. He had that morning received two telegrams, one saying I was to be removed to Saranac at once, pending his approval as to the care of the baby by relatives, and the other from me asking him to meet me because I was coming home. I told him as best I could the reasons for my sudden decision. Though I probably sounded incoherent he understood and, instead of scolding, soothed me tenderly and exclaimed, “You did just the right thing. I won’t let you die.”

“And don’t make me eat! Don’t even mention food to me!” He promised to let me have my own way.

At the small family hotel in Yonkers in which we settled, I lived pretty much by myself, keeping the baby and everyone else away from me; I had by now learned the dangers of contact in spreading tuberculosis. Once free from the horrors of invalidism and comforted by love and devotion I began to regain a normal interest in life, and by the end of three weeks had recovered from my hysterical rejection of food.

As soon as I was strong enough we started to explore Westchester County for a home site. We wanted something more than a mere house. We wanted space, we wanted a view, we wanted a garden. At Hastings-on-Hudson we found what we sought. There on fifty acres of hillside overlooking the river about ten families—doctors, teachers, college professors, scientists—had combined to construct the sort of dwellings they liked in the environment they considered best suited for their children. We too had in mind a family and a comfortable, serene, suburban existence, and we joined this Columbia Colony, as it was called, renting a small cottage until we could build our own.

The other wives and I spent our afternoons conferring over the momentous problems of servants, gardens, and schools. If we went to town, we took the children with us, fitting them with special shoes at Coward’s, introducing them to museums, libraries, or art galleries. Life centered around them. When Stuart and his little friends began to ask questions, “Where do babies come from?” I collected them and tried to answer, using the simple phenomena of nature as illustrations—flowers, frogs, fish, and animals. I still consider this approach has its place with many children, although modern sex educationists may smile at this method, thinking it old-fashioned.

None of the colony played cards. Instead, the women formed a literary club where we read papers on George Eliot, Browning, and Shakespeare, as well as on some current authors, and we had occasional political discussions. Out of this grew the Women’s Club of Hastings.

It was all very pleasant, and at first I was busy and contented. The endless details of housekeeping did not seem to me drudgery; conquering minor crises was exciting. Though I was never slavishly domestic, I was inclined to be slavishly maternal. Bill was a devoted husband. He took care of me in the little ways—starting for the train and coming back to put his head in the door and call, “It’s awfully cold. Don’t go out without your wrap,” or, if it were hot, he offered, “Give me your list and I’ll send up the groceries.”

I was again leading the life of an artist’s family. Bill was a hard worker; I can rarely remember one evening of just reading together. I did the reading and he drew or painted. But I was never quite sure whether we were rich or poor. He possessed the finest qualities of creative genius, and with them some of its limitations and liabilities. When he was paid for a big commission he brought me orchids and embroidered Japanese robes which I had no occasion to wear, and filled the house with luxuries. This did not go with my practical sense. If the grocery account were long unpaid, I protested, “They’re beautiful. Thank you, but can we afford them?”

“Certainly,” and out of his pocket came tickets for the opera or theater, his chief pleasures.

“But we shouldn’t,” I remonstrated as I ruffled a sheaf of bills before him.

Nevertheless, we used the tickets.

Every architect wants to embody his ideas at least once in his own home. Ours was “modern” in its square simplicity and unadorned surfaces of stuccoed hollow tile, even being called a show house; people came from afar to study it. It was designed to have a large nursery opening on a veranda overlooking the Hudson, a studio, a bath with each bedroom, fireplaces everywhere, and one especially capacious in the big library. From this room the open stairway, forking at the lower landing with a few steps leading down into the kitchen, reached up the wall to the second story.

The house took long to complete, but it was fun. The moment Bill finished his work in New York he was back at it. Theoretically he supervised at night and the builder built by day. But when an arch did not turn out to be a perfect arch, seizing an ax, he chopped out part of it, usually pounding his fingers in the process. The neighbors, careful of their pennies, held their ears at the clatter and clamor and exclaimed, “There goes another partition.” When the contractor returned in the morning he found his previous day’s work demolished. Some portions were entirely done over two or three times.

The color on the woodwork we applied ourselves by artificial light, plumped on our knees or stretching high overhead. If the effect were wrong, we had to match it all up again. Evening after evening we labored on the rose window which was to crown with radiance the head of the staircase. Far into the night we leaded and welded together every glowing petal. Our fingers were cut, our nerves were irritated, our eyes fatigued. But tireless love went into the composition of this rose window which symbolized the stability of our future. We were aiming at permanence and security, and our efforts seemed to be fused into indestructible unity. It was our keystone of beauty.

After the tedious worrying over details we suddenly became too impatient to wait any more, and, in spite of the raw condition of the house, late one February afternoon of half-sleet, half-rain, a moving van pulled up to our front door. Through the semi-twilight boxes, crates, and barrels were carted in.

The four-year-old Stuart was not well. We put him early to bed, and Bill stirred up a roaring fire in the furnace against the increasing cold. Then with hammer and claw we turned to our treasures, which we had not seen for such a time. It was like opening packages on Christmas morning. We had almost forgotten the tapestry Mary had sent from Persia, the rug from Egypt, Bill’s paintings. “What’s in this box? Oh, look here! See what I’ve found!” A flood of color inundated us. We tried out their warmth against our immaculate walls and floors. I was carrying my second baby and was tired hours before I wanted to stop. As I climbed up to bed I gazed down happily on the litter below.

Some time later I heard dimly through my sleep a pounding, and woke to realize it was the German maid at the door, crying, “Madam. Come! Fire in the big stove!”

We jumped out of bed. Acrid smoke was in our nostrils, and we were swept by the horror of fire by night. Bill shouted to me, “Get right out! I’ve got to give the alarm.”

Away he rushed in his pajamas; there was no telephone within half a mile. I seized Stuart from his crib, bedclothes and all. This took only a few seconds, but the kitchen was already ablaze and flames were leaping up the staircase. I pulled the blanket over his head and started cautiously down, hugging the outer side. The blistering treads crunched as they gave under my feet, but did not collapse until I had reached the smoke-filled library.

The family across the street welcomed us in. When I had tucked Stuart into an impromptu bed I went to watch. Not merely was the fire engine trying to get up the icy hill, two steps forward and one back, but the whole village was accompanying it to help organize a bucket brigade.

The clouds had cleared and the bright moon was shining on the strange scene. The weather had turned much colder, and the rain had frozen into crystals which glittered on the branches of trees and shrubbery. It was unbelievably fantastic, and in that unreal setting the flames, as though directed by devilish intent, spurted only through our prized rose window. I stood silently regarding the result of months of work and love slowly disintegrate. Petal by petal it succumbed to the licking tongues of fire; one by one they fell into the gray-white snow. Fitting them together had taken so long; now relentlessly they were being pulled apart. A thing of beauty had perished in a few moments.

It was as though a chapter of my life had been brought to a close, and I was neither disappointed nor regretful. On the contrary, I was conscious of a certain relief, of a burden lifted. In that instant I learned the lesson of the futility of material substances. Of what great importance were they spiritually if they could go so quickly? Pains, thirsts, heartaches could be put into the creation of something external which in one sweep could be taken from you. With the destruction of the window, my scale of suburban values was consumed. I could never again pin my faith on concrete things; I must build on myself alone. I hoped I should continue to have lovely objects around me, but I could also be happy without them.

The next day was filled with neighbors coming to condole and offer help, and with insurance adjusters peering about and questioning. They found the too-heavy fire in the furnace had overheated the pipes around which the asbestos had not yet been wrapped. We lost a good deal because, although the house was covered, the insurance on the furniture had not been shifted to its new location, and, moreover, many of our possessions were irreplaceable, their worth having lain in the sentiment attached to them.

A personal catastrophe may in the end prove to be a public benefit. People in the community are brought together in sympathy, and learn by the experience of others how to protect themselves. After our mischance every householder in Columbia Colony began to look to his furnace and insure his home.

Our walls were fireproof, and much of the house could be saved, but it was really more disheartening than complete demolition would have been, for in the latter case we could have started to rebuild from the beginning. I admired Bill greatly for the resolute way he set about the painful business again. He went over every inch, here saying, “This board is all right,” and there tearing out black pieces of charred wood. It was a dirty job, but he stuck to it. Nevertheless, paint and stain as we would, we could not quite get rid of the unmistakable and ineradicable odor which clings around a burned building, almost like the smell of death.

Next summer we moved in once more. But the house was never the same. Never could I recapture that first flush of joy.

Grant, my second son, was born almost immediately. I loved having a baby to tend again, and wanted at least four more as quickly as my health would permit. I could not wait another five years. I yearned especially for a daughter, and twenty months later my wish came true. After Peggy’s birth, the doctor went downstairs and saw Bill sitting in the library with Grant in his arms and tears welling from his eyes.

“Why, what’s the matter? There’s a nice little girl upstairs.”

“I’m thinking of this poor little boy. Margaret has wanted a girl so long—now she’ll have no room in her heart for him.”

Bill’s fears were groundless. Grant was not supplanted, but Peggy was so satisfactory a baby that I was not particularly disappointed when my illness cropped up again and the doctor said my family must end at this point. I was quite content with things as they were.

Even as a little fellow, the sandy-haired, square-built Stuart was practical, loved sports, and had a reasoning, logical mind, always experimenting with life as well as with mechanical things. A thorough Higgins, he had to find out for himself and prove it. He used to stamp and scold when presented with a chore, such as mowing the lawn or bringing in wood for the fireplaces, but his rebellions were brief, and, when he realized the inevitable, he turned it into a game. “Come on over,” he hailed his friends. “We’ve lots to do. Let’s get to it! We’re going to have great fun.”

The other boys, taken in by his enthusiastic invitations, also believed that mowing the lawn or bringing in wood were among the best games invented.

Grant was more self-conscious than Stuart, and more inarticulate, but more affectionate. He followed the baby Peggy slavishly. They were usually hand in hand, and Grant’s darkness contrasted with her bright, blond hair. From the time she could talk they referred to themselves as “we.” Peggy was the most independent child I have ever seen. At three she knew what she wanted and where she was going. She was vivacious, mischievous, laughing—the embodiment of all my hopes in a daughter.

Stuart typified the scientist, Grant the artist, Peggy the doer. It was maternally gratifying to wonder whether they would carry out these propensities in their later lives.

I enjoyed my literary activities along with my children, and Bill encouraged me. “You go ahead and finish your writing. I’ll get the dinner and wash the dishes.” And what is more he did it, drawing the shades, however, so that nobody could see him. He thought I should make a career of it instead of limiting myself to small-town interests.

Both Bill and I were feeling what amounted to a world hunger, the pull and haul towards wider horizons. For him Paris was still over the next hill. I was not able to express my discontent with the futility of my present course, but after my experience as a nurse with fundamentals this quiet withdrawal into the tame domesticity of the pretty riverside settlement seemed to be bordering on stagnation. I felt as though we had drifted into a swamp, but we would not wait for the tide to set us free.

It was hopeless to emphasize the importance of practical necessities to an artist, and consequently I decided to resume nursing in order to earn my share. We had spent years building our home and used it only for a brief while. I was glad to leave when, in one of our financial doldrums, we plunged back into the rushing stream of New York life.

Chapter Six
FANATICS OF THEIR PURE IDEALS

We took an apartment way uptown. It was the old-fashioned railroad type—big, high-ceilinged, with plenty of room, air, and light. The children’s grandmother came to live with us and her presence gave me ease of mind when I was called on a case; my children were utterly safe in her care.

Headlong we dived into one of the most interesting phases of life the United States has ever seen. Radicalism in manners, art, industry, morals, politics was effervescing, and the lid was about to blow off in the Great War. John Spargo, an authority on Karl Marx, had translated Das Kapital into English, thus giving impetus to Socialism. Lincoln Steffens had published The Shame of the Cities, George Fitzpatrick had produced War, What For?, a strange and wonderful arraignment of capitalism, which sold thousands of copies.

The names of Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso first became familiar sounds on this side of the Atlantic at the time of the notable Armory Exhibition, when outstanding examples of impressionist and cubist painting were imported from Europe. But there was so much of eccentricity—a leg on top of a head, a hat on a foot, the Nude Descending a Staircase, all in the name of art—that you had to close one eye to look at it. The Armory vibrated; it shook New York.

Although Bill had studied according to the old school, he could see the point of view of the radical in art, and in politics as well. His attitude towards the underdog was much like father’s. He had always been a Socialist, although not active, and held his friend Eugene V. Debs in high esteem.

A religion without a name was spreading over the country. The converts were liberals, Socialists, anarchists, revolutionists of all shades. They were as fixed in their faith in the coming revolution as ever any Primitive Christian in the immediate establishment of the Kingdom of God. Some could even predict the exact date of its advent.

At one end of the scale of rebels and scoffers were the “pink” parliamentarian socialists and theorists at whom anarchists hurled the insult “bourgeois.” At the other were the Industrial Workers of the World, the “Wobblies,” advocating unionization of the whole industry rather than the craft or trade. This was to be brought about, if need be, by direct action.

Almost without knowing it you became a “comrade.” You could either belong to a group that believed civilization was to be saved by the vote and by protective legislation, or go further to the left and believe with the anarchists in the integrity of the individual, and that it was possible to develop human character to the point where laws and police were unnecessary.

The mental stirring was such as to make a near Renaissance. Everybody was writing on the nebulous “new liberties.” Practically always people could be found to support leaders or magazines, although many of the latter lived for hardly more than a single issue.

Upton Sinclair was utilizing his gift for vivid expression and righteous wrath in trying to correct social abuses by the indirect but highly effective method of story-telling. The Jungle was a powerful exposé of the capitalist meat industry responsible for the “embalmed beef” which had poisoned American soldiers in ’98. Courageous as he was, he was yet mistrusted by the Socialist Old Guard as being a Silk Hat Radical who retained his bourgeois philosophy. Furthermore, he had been divorced, and divorce at that time was something of a scandal. Though anarchists minded such details not a whit, Socialists were imbued with all the respectabilities; to most of these home-loving Germans, only the form of government needed change.

In the United States the party was trying to separate itself from this German influence, and the standard bearer of the American concept was the magnetic and beloved Debs. Not himself an intellectual, he did not need to be; he was intelligent. Risen as he had from the ranks of the railroad workers, he knew their hardships from experience. Though I am not sure he actually was tall, he gave the illusion of height because of his thinness and stooping shoulders. He was all flame, like a fire spirit. That was probably why the members of his coterie followed him so gladly.

Our living room became a gathering place where liberals, anarchists, Socialists, and I.W.W.’s could meet. These vehement individualists had to have an audience, preferably a small, intimate one. They really came to see Bill; I made the cocoa. I used to listen in, not at all sure my opinions would be accepted by this very superior group. When I did meekly venture something, I was quite likely to find myself on the opposite side—right in a left crowd and vice versa.

Any evening you might find visitors from the Middle West being aroused by Jack Reed, bullied by Bill Haywood, led softly towards anarchist thought by Alexander Berkman. When throats grew dry and the flood of oratory waned, someone went out for hamburger sandwiches, hot dogs, and beer, paid for by all. The luxuriousness of the midnight repast depended upon the collection of coins tossed into the middle of the table, which consisted of about what everybody had in his pocket. These considerate friends never imposed a burden either of extra work or extra expense. In the kitchen everyone sliced, buttered, opened cans. As soon as all were replenished, the conversation was resumed practically where it had left off.

Both right-wingers and left-wingers who ordinarily objected to those in between loved Jack Reed, the master reporter just out of Harvard. He refused to conform to the rule and rote of either, though his natural inclination appeared to be more in harmony with direct action.

Behind this most highly intellectual young man loomed an uncouth, stumbling, one-eyed giant with an enormous head which he tended to hold on one side. Big Bill Haywood looked like a bull about to plunge into an arena. He seemed always glancing warily this way and that with his one eye, head slightly turned as though to get the view of you. His great voice boomed; his speech was crude and so were his manners; his philosophy was that of the mining camps, where he had spent his life. But I soon found out that for gentleness and sympathy he had not his equal. He was blunt because he was simple and direct. Though he was not tailor-made, he was custom-made.

Because Big Bill’s well-wishers saw so much that was fine in him, they wanted to smooth off the jagged edges. When they tried to polish his speeches, Jack Reed objected, saying, “Give him a free hand. He expresses what you and I think much more dramatically than we can. Don’t try to stop him! We should encourage him.”

One of Big Bill’s best friends, Jessie Ashley, was, without meaning to be, a taming influence. These two were the oddest combination in the world—old Bill with his one eye, stubby, roughened fingernails, uncreased trousers, and shoddy clothes for which he refused to pay more than the minimum; Jessie with Boston accent and horn-rimmed glasses, a compromise between spectacles and lorgnette, from which dangled a black ribbon, the ultimate word in eccentric decoration.

Jessie was one of the most conspicuous of the many men and women of long pedigree who were revolting against family tradition. She was the daughter of the President of the New York School of Law, and sister of its dean. When her brother had organized the first women’s law class, she had been his pupil and later had become the first woman lawyer in New York City. Her peculiarly honest mind was tolerant towards others, but uncompromising towards herself. It was said of her truly that she was always in the forefront when it took courage to be there; always in the background when there was credit to be gained. A Socialist in practice as well as theory, she spent large portions of her income in getting radicals out of jail, and her own legal experience she gave freely in their behalf. Nevertheless, her appearances at strike meetings were slightly uncomfortable; class tension rose up in waves.

Many others were trying to pull themselves out of the rut of tradition. Alexander Berkman, the gentle anarchist, understood them all. He had just been freed after fourteen years’ imprisonment for his attempt to assassinate Henry Clay Frick during the Homestead Steel strike of 1892. His emergence had stirred anarchism up again, and particularly its credo of pure individualism—to stand on your own and be yourself, never to have one person dictate to another, even parent to child.

Berkman’s appearance belied his reputation—blond, blue-eyed, slightly built, with thinnish hair, and sensitive, mobile face and hands. He was a thoughtful ascetic, believing sincerely that the quickest way to focus attention on social outrages was to commit some dramatic act, however violent or antipathetic it might be to his nature—and then suffer the consequences. He was not at all embittered by his sojourn in jail, and had a great sense of humor, coupled with his most extraordinary understanding of the strange congeries of people who were about to be melted down into his glowing crucible of truth.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn had made the transition from Catholicism, Jack Reed from being a “Harvard man,” Mabel Dodge from being a society matron. They all had had to get over being class conscious, and acquire instead the consciousness of the class struggle. Berkman made friends with all, and when they were faced by problems apparently insurmountable, he advised them on their spiritual journey, and supported and backed them. For this reason he was beloved by all who encountered his most gracious charm.

This was not the way of Emma Goldman, whose habit was to berate and lash with the language of scorn. She was never satisfied until people had arrived at her own doorstep and accepted the dogma she had woven for herself. Short, stocky, even stout, a true Russian peasant type, her figure indicated strength of body and strength of character, and this impression was enhanced by her firm step and reliant walk. Though I disliked both her ideas and her methods I admired her; she was really like a spring house-cleaning to the sloppy thinking of the average American. Our Government suffered in the estimation of the liberal world when she and Berkman were expelled from the country.

Of all the strange places for these diverse personalities to meet, none more strange could have been found than in Mabel Dodge’s salon, which burst upon New York like a rocket. Mabel belonged to one of the old families of Buffalo, but neither in thought nor action was she orthodox. Only in the luxurious appointments of her home did she conform.

Among the sights and memories I shall never forget were her famous soirées at Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue. A certain one typical of all the others comes to mind; the whole gamut of liberalism had collected in her spacious drawing-room before an open fire. Cross-legged on the floor, in the best Bohemian tradition, were Wobblies with uncut hair, unshaven faces, leaning against valuable draperies. Their clothes may have been unkempt, but their eyes were ablaze with interest and intelligence. Each knew his own side of the subject as well as any scholar. You had to inform yourself to be in the liberal movement. Ideas were respected, but you had to back them up with facts. Expressions of mere emotion, unleashed from reason, could not be let loose to wander about.

Listener more than talker, Mabel sat near the hearth, brown bangs outlining a white face, simply gowned in velvet, beautifully arched foot beating the air. For two hours I watched fascinatedly that silken ankle never ceasing its violent agitation.

The topic of conversation turned out to be direct action. Big Bill was the figure of the evening, but everybody was looking for an opportunity to talk. Each believed he had a key to the gates of Heaven; each was trying to convert the others. It could not exactly have been called a debate, because a single person held the floor as long as he could. Then, at one of his most effective periods, somebody else half rose and interposed a “But—” The speaker hurried on; at his next telling sentence came other “But—s,” until finally he was downed by the weight of interruptions. In the end, conversions were nil; all were convinced beforehand either for or against, and I never knew them to shift ground.

It is not hard to laugh about it now, but nobody could have been more serious and determined than we were in those days.

Just before the argument reached the stage of fist fights, the big doors were thrown open and the butler announced, “Madam, supper is served.” Many of the boys had never heard those words, but one and all jumped up with alacrity from the floor and discussion was, for the moment at least, postponed. The wide, generous table in the dining room was burdened with beef, cold turkey, hot ham—hearty meat for hungry souls. On a side table were pitchers of lemonade, siphons, bottles of rye and Scotch.

Mabel never stirred while the banquet raged, but continued to sit, her foot still beating the air, and talked with the few who did not choose to eat.

The class contrasts encountered in a gathering there were not unique. They were to be found elsewhere, even in matrimony. When the wealthy J. G. Phelps Stokes married Rose Pastor, the Russian-Jewish cigar maker, both families felt equally outraged; he was practically sent to Coventry by his former associates and the Jews regarded her as a renegade because she wore a silver cross about her neck. William English Walling, the last word in Newport, married Anna Strunsky, the last word in the Jewish intelligentsia, and himself became a leading literary critic on the radical side.

Harvard had been turning out liberals by the dozen, and all of them were playing hob with accepted conventions in thought. One of these was Walter Lippmann, others were Norman Hapgood and his brother, Hutchins. “Hutch” was then working on the Globe, a paper which because of its broad editorial policy was preferred by many radicals to the Call. He stood by Bill Haywood and Emma Goldman, although he had much more to lose economically and socially than the out-and-out reds.

The anarchists seldom initiated anything, because they did not have the personnel or the equipment, but when something else was started which appeared to have any good in it, they came right in. This they did with the Ferrer School on Twelfth Street near Fourth Avenue, in the founding of which Hutch, with the liberal journalist, Leonard Abbott, and the author, Manuel Komroff, were moving spirits. The object was to provide a form of education more progressive than that offered by the public schools, and its name was intended to perpetuate the memory of the recently martyred Spanish libertarian, Francisco Ferrer, who had established modern free schools in Spain in which science and evolution had been taught.

Lola Ridge, intense rebel from Australia, was the organizing secretary, Robert Henri and George Bellows gave lessons in art, and a young man named Will Durant was chosen to direct the younger children, combining in his teaching Froebel, Montessori, and other new methods. Under him we enrolled Stuart.

Will Durant was of French-Canadian ancestry. His mother had worked hard to put him through a Jesuit seminary, but just before taking the vows he had abandoned the priesthood. While he had been studying he had read Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis and was prepared to acquaint New York with the facts of sex psychology. Sitting nonchalantly to deliver his lectures, which evidenced scholarly background and research, he advanced to his small but serious audience practically the first public expression of this intimate subject.

The young instructor created rather a problem for the directors by unexpectedly marrying a pupil, Ida Kaufman, commonly called Puck. I remember one Saturday when she was romping with Stuart, and my laundress said to her, “Why, you’re so young to be married. Do you like it?”

Puck replied, “Oh, I don’t care, but I’d much rather play marbles.”

Intellectuals were then flocking to enlist under the flag of humanitarianism, and as soon as anybody evinced human sympathies he was deemed a Socialist. My own personal feelings drew me towards the individualist, anarchist philosophy, and I read Kropotkin, Bakunin, and Fourier, but it seemed to me necessary to approach the ideal by way of Socialism; as long as the earning of food, clothing, and shelter was on a competitive basis, man could never develop any true independence.

Therefore, I joined the Socialist Party, Local Number Five, itself something of a rebel in the ranks, which, against the wishes of the central authority, had been responsible for bringing Bill Haywood East after his release from prison. The members—Italian, Jewish, Russian, German, Spanish, a pretty good mixture—used the rooms over a neighborhood shop as a meeting place and there they were to be found every evening reading and discussing politics.

Somebody had donated a sum of money to be spent to interest women in Socialism. As proof that we were not necessarily like the masculine, aggressive, bulldog, window-smashing suffragettes in England, I, an American and a mother of children, was selected to recruit new members among the clubs of working women. The Scandinavians, who had a housemaids’ union, were the most satisfactory; they already leaned towards liberalism.

Grant, who was as yet too young to go to school, wholeheartedly disapproved of my political activities. Once when I was about to depart for the evening he climbed up on my lap and said, “Are you going to a meeting?”

“Yes.”

“A soshist meeting?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, I hate soshism!”

Everybody else was amused when the Sangers went to a Socialist meeting. If I had an idea, I leaned over and whispered it to Bill, who waved his hand and called for attention. “Margaret has something to say on that. Have you heard Margaret?” Many men might have labeled my opinions silly, and, indeed, I was not at all sure of them myself, but Bill thought if I had one, it was worth hearing.

John Block and his wife, Anita, were ardent workers for the cause. She was a grand person, a Barnard graduate and editor of the woman’s page of the Call. She telephoned me one evening, “Will you help me out? We have a lecture scheduled for tonight and our speaker is unable to come. Won’t you take her place?”

“But I can’t speak. I’ve never made a speech in my life.”

“You’ll simply have to do it. There isn’t anybody I can get, and I’m depending on you.”

“How many will be there?” I asked.

“Only about ten. You’ve nothing to be frightened of.”

But I was frightened—thoroughly so. I could not eat my supper. Shaking and quaking I faced the little handful of women who had come after their long working hours for enlightenment. Since I did not consider myself qualified to speak on labor, I switched the subject to health, with which I was more familiar. This, it appeared, was something new. They were pleased and said to Anita, “Let’s have more health talks.” The second time we met the audience had swelled to seventy-five and arrangements were made to continue the lectures, if such they could be called, which I prepared while my patients slept.

The young mothers in the group asked so many questions about their intimate family life that I mentioned it to Anita. “Just the thing,” she said. “Write up your answers and we’ll try them out in the Call.” The result was the first composition I had ever done for publication, a series under the general title, What Every Mother Should Know. I attempted, as I had with the Hastings children, to introduce the impersonality of nature in order to break through the rigid consciousness of sex on the part of parents, who were inclined to be too intensely personal about it.

Then Anita requested a second series to be called What Every Girl Should Know. The motif was, “If the mother can impress the child with the beauty and wonder and sacredness of the sex function, she has taught it the first lesson.”

These articles ran along for three or four weeks until one Sunday morning I turned to the Call to see my precious little effort, and, instead, encountered a newspaper box two columns wide in which was printed in black letters,

WHAT EVERY GIRL SHOULD KNOW

N
O
T
H
I
N
G
!

BY ORDER OF

THE POST-OFFICE DEPARTMENT

The words gonorrhea and syphilis had occurred in that article and Anthony Comstock, head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, did not like them. By the so-called Comstock Law of 1873, which had been adroitly pushed through a busy Congress on the eve of adjournment, the Post Office had been given authority to decide what might be called lewd, lascivious, indecent, or obscene, and this extraordinary man had been granted the extraordinary power, alone of all citizens of the United States, to open any letter or package or pamphlet or book passing through the mails and, if he wished, lay his complaint before the Post Office. So powerful had his society become that anything to which he objected in its name was almost automatically barred; he had turned out to be sole censor for ninety million people. During some forty years Comstock had been damming the rising tide of new thought, thereby causing much harm, and only now was his hopeless contest against September Morn making him absurd and an object of ridicule.

But at this same time also John D. Rockefeller, Jr. was organizing the Bureau of Social Hygiene, in part to educate the working public regarding what were politely termed “social evils.” A fine start was being made although no surveys had been completed. Lacking data, lecturers had to speak in generalities. Nevertheless, to me, who had sat through hours of highly academic exposition expressed in cultivated tones, their approach seemed timorous and their words disguised with verbiage. I saw no reason why these facts could not be given in a few minutes in language simple enough for anyone to understand.

When my series was finished it was printed in pamphlet form. I sent a copy to Dr. Prince Morrow of the Bureau, asking for his opinion and any corrections he might suggest for the next edition; to my delight he replied he would like to see it spread by the million. The Bureau had names and backing but was not proceeding very fast towards educating working people regarding venereal disease; the articles in the Call, on the other hand, were reaching this same class by the thousand—yet the one which mentioned syphilis was suppressed.

I continued assiduously to write pieces for the Call. One of these reported the laundry strike in New York City in the winter of 1912, unauthorized by Samuel Gompers and his American Federation of Labor, which claimed it alone had the right to declare strikes. To get the details I went into the houses of the Irish Amazons, who with their husbands had walked out without being called out, simply because they could not stand it any longer. They were the hardest worked, the poorest paid, had the most protracted and irregular hours of any union members. One man described his typical day: he rose at five, had ten minutes for lunch, less for supper, and dragged himself home at eleven at night. I was glad they had the courage to rebel, and it took courage to be a picket—getting up so early on bitterly cold mornings and waiting and waiting to waylay the strikebreakers and argue with them. The police were ready to pounce when the boss pointed out the ringleaders.

This was the only time I came in contact with men and women on strike together. I could see the men had two things in their minds: one economic—the two-dollar extra wage and the shorter hours they might win; the other political—the coming of the social revolution. The women really cared for neither of these. Dominating each was the relationship between her husband, her children, and herself. She might complain of being tired and not having enough money, but always she connected both with too many offspring.

Some of the strikers thought I might help them out, but I was not at all sure I believed either in direct action or legislation as a remedy for their difficulties. This lack of conviction prevented me from having the necessary force to aid them organize themselves, and in such an emergency a forceful leader was called for. The night of their rally I was amazed at the complete confusion. Anybody could speak—and was doing so.

I felt helpless in the midst of this chaos, and distressed at their helplessness. But I knew the person who could manage the situation effectively, and so I sent for Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a direct actionist identified with the I.W.W. Her father, Tom Flynn, a labor organizer, was the same type of philosophical rebel as my father, long on conversation but short on work. Elizabeth had been out in the logging camps of the West, where she had won the complete adoration of the lumberjacks. At her tongue’s end were the words and phrases they understood, and she knew exactly the right note to stir them.

Elizabeth stood on the platform, dramatically beautiful with her black hair and deep blue eyes, her cream-white complexion set off by the flaming scarf she always wore about her throat. Nothing if not outspoken, she started by saying it was folly for the strikers to give up their bread and butter by walking out. They could achieve their ends more quickly if they threw hypothetical sabots into the machinery. “If a shirt comes in from a man who wears size fifteen, send him back an eighteen. Replace a dress shirt with a blue denim. That’s what the laundry workers of France did, and brought the employers to their knees.”

The audience was being held spellbound by this instruction in the fine art of sabotage when some of Gompers’ strong-arm men appeared, and the battle was on. They tramped up on the stage, moved furniture and chairs about, made so much noise Elizabeth’s voice could not be heard, and finally ejected some of her sympathizers.

It was probably better in the end that the American Federation of Labor eventually took the laundry workers under its wing, because the I.W.W. was not an organized body, but merely an agitational force which scarcely had the necessary strength to lead a successful strike in New York City. Its influence in Lawrence, Massachusetts, was far more potent. Joe Ettor, once bootblack in California, with Arturo Giovanitti, scholar, idealist, poet, and editor of Il Proletario, had been stirring up the unorganized textile strikers with impassioned eloquence. So compelling were the words of these two that workers of seven nationalities, chiefly Italian, had walked out spontaneously.

The accidental shooting of a girl picket provided an excuse, farfetched as it may seem, to jail the firebrands, Ettor and Giovanitti, who were charged with being “accessories before the fact,” which meant they were accused of having known beforehand she was going to be shot by the police and were, therefore, responsible. Now, the strikers had martyrs, and the I.W.W. heroes of the West poured in to help. Bill Haywood, William E. Trautman of the United Brewery Workers, Carlo Tresca, editor and owner of an Italian paper in New York, contributed to put on the biggest show the East had ever seen—parades, banners, songs, speeches.

The entire Italian population of America was aroused. These were then a people unto themselves. For much longer than the two generations customary among other immigrant races they retained their habits, traditions, and language, ate their own type of food and read their own newspapers.

Italians in New York who were in accord with the strikers decided on a step, novel in this country although it had been tried in Italy and Belgium. The primary reason for the failure of all labor rebellions was the hunger cries of the babies; if they were only fed the strikers could usually last out. It was determined to bring the children of the textile workers to New York, where they could be taken care of until the issue was settled. This resolution was made without knowing how many there might be; provision would be forthcoming somehow.

Again because I was an American, a nurse, and reputed to be sympathetic to their cause and the cause of children, the committee asked me with John Di Gregorio and Carrie Giovanitti to fetch the youngsters. As soon as I agreed, telephone calls were put through to Lawrence, and a delegate took the midnight train to make the preliminary arrangements.

We found the boys and girls gathered in a Lawrence public hall and, before we started, I insisted on physical examinations for contagious diseases. One, though ill with diphtheria, had been working up to the time of the strike. Almost all had adenoids and enlarged tonsils. Each, without exception, was incredibly emaciated.

Our hundred and nineteen charges were of every age, from babies of two or three to older ones of twelve to thirteen. Although the latter had been employed in the textile mills, their garments were simply worn to shreds. Not a child had on any woolen clothing whatsoever, and only four wore overcoats. Never in all my nursing in the slums had I seen children in so ragged and deplorable a condition. The February weather was bitter, and we had to run them to the station. There the parents, with tears in their eyes and gratitude in their hearts, relinquished their shivering offspring.

The wind was even icier when we reached Boston, and money was scarce. I had only enough for railroad fares and none for chartering buses or hiring taxis. Consequently, again we had to scurry on foot from the North to the South Station. But, once more on the train, great was the enthusiasm of the boys and girls, who entertained themselves by singing the Marseillaise and the Internationale. All knew the words as well as the tunes, though the former might be in Polish, Hungarian, French, German, Italian, and even English. The children who sang those songs are now grown up. I wonder how they regard the present state of the world.

As we neared New York I began to worry about our arrival. We were all weary. Would preparations have been made to feed this hungry mob and house it for the night? But I should have trusted the deep feeling and the dramatic instinct of the Italians. Thousands of men and women were waiting. As my assistants and I left the train, looking like three Pied Pipers followed by our ragged cohorts, the crowd pushed through the police lines, leaped the ropes, caught up the children as they came, and hoisted them to their shoulders. I was seized by both arms and I, too, had the illusion of being swept from the ground.

The committee had secured permission to parade to Webster Hall near Union Square. Our tired feet fell into the rhythm of the band. As we swung along singing, laughing, crying, big banners bellying and torches flaring, sidewalk throngs shouted and whistled and applauded.

At Webster Hall supper was ready in plentiful quantity. Many of our small guests were so unused to sitting at table that they did not know how to behave. Like shy animals they tried to take cover, carrying their plates to a chair, a box, anything handy. Almost all snatched at their food with both fists and stuffed it down, they were so hungry.

Socialists had not initiated this fight but they were in it. Many had come to offer shelter for the duration of the strike—perhaps six weeks, perhaps six months, perhaps a year—with visions in their minds of beautiful, starry-eyed, helpless little ones. Instead they were presented with bedraggled urchins, many of whom had never seen a toothbrush. But they rallied round magnificently; I cannot speak too highly of them.

It was a responsibility to apportion the children properly, but I had willing and intelligent help. The Poles had sent a Polish delegate, the French had sent a French delegate, and so on, in order that all might be placed in homes where they could be understood. Luckily several families were willing to take more than one child so that we were usually able to keep brother and sister together. Each, before it was handed over, was given a medical examination. The temporary foster-parents had to promise to write the real parents, and also to send a weekly report to the committee of how their charges were getting on. The tabulation was thorough, and not until four in the morning did the last of us go to bed.

The next week, ninety-two more children were brought down, but I had no part in this, because I was on a case. Hysteria had now risen to such a height that some of the parents at the Lawrence Station were beaten and arrested by the police. Victor Berger of Wisconsin, the only Socialist member of Congress, asked for an investigation of circumstances leading up to the walkout. Although I had not been identified with it, he requested me to be present at the hearings.

When Gompers testified, he literally shook with rage, and it seemed to me he was about to have apoplexy. The mill owners charged that the whole affair had been staged solely for notoriety and that the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children should step in.

Unfortunately, the witnesses for the strikers were not well-documented. When it was obvious that the Congressional Committee was not receiving the correct impression, Berger asked me to take the stand and describe the condition of the children as I had seen them. Writing up statistics on hospital reports had given me the habit of classification. I was able from my brief notes to answer every question as to their nationalities, their ages, their weights, the number of those without underclothes and without overcoats. Senator Warren Gamaliel Harding led the inquiry, and I could see he was in sympathy with my vehement replies.

The publicity had been so well managed by the Italians and their leaders that popular opinion turned in favor of the strikers, and they eventually won. At the end of March the little refugees, who had endeared themselves to their foster-parents, went back to the mill district. It was hard to recognize the same children of six weeks before, plumped up and dressed in new clothes. In November Ettor and Giovanitti were acquitted.

The Paterson silk strike of the next year, in which the workers were again predominantly Italian, may have been as important as the one at Lawrence, but it was by no means so obviously dramatic. Paterson was a gloomy city, and, as a river, the Passaic was sadder than the Merrimac. Though the leadership was far more cohesive, caution was evidenced on every hand. Its chief interest to me lay in Bill Haywood’s participation. At Lawrence he had only been one of the committee, whereas at Paterson he was in charge for the first time in the East. Always before he had advised strikers to “take it on the chin” and not be too gentle in hitting back. But here, before ten thousand crowding up to the rostrum, I heard him warn, “Keep your hands in your pockets, men, and nobody can say you are shooting.”

An American was apt to be at a disadvantage in handling foreigners, particularly when they felt aggrieved. They objected to his manner of going about things, so different from their own, and he, on the other hand, could not fully understand their psychology, and had the added obstacle of being compelled to work through an intermediary in language.

At Paterson the Italian groups were not behind Bill. As soon as he began to temper his language and sound a more wary note of advice, his once-faithful adherents repudiated him. His clarion call of “Hands in the Pockets,” which was intended to create favorable popular opinion by proving them “good boys,” had actually tied their hands, and detectives beat and bullied them just the same. The public was not impressed and they were resentful. They claimed he did not have the old fighting spirit he had shown when directing the miners of the West, he was getting soft, he was a sick man. Although he had actually progressed tactically and left them where they were, from that time on he lost his power of leadership.

Following the method which had been so successful at Lawrence, Jack Reed endeavored to dramatize direct action in an enormous pageant at Madison Square Garden. He even had pallbearers carry an actual coffin into the hall to pictorialize the funeral of a worker who had been shot at Paterson. I could feel a tremor go through the audience, but, on the whole, conviction was lacking.

The pageant was a fitting conclusion to one period of my life. I believe that we all had our parts to play. Some had important ones; some were there to lend support to a scene; some were merely voices off stage. Each, whatever his role, was essential. I only walked on, but it had its influence in my future.

No matter to what degree I might participate in strikes, I always came back to the idea which was beginning to obsess me—that something more was needed to assuage the condition of the very poor. It was both absurd and futile to struggle over pennies when fast-coming babies required dollars to feed them.

I was thoroughly despondent after the Paterson debacle, and had a sickening feeling that there was to be no end; it seemed to me the whole question of strikes for higher wages was based on man’s economic need of supporting his family, and that this was a shallow principle upon which to found a new civilization. Furthermore, I was enough of a Feminist to resent the fact that woman and her requirements were not being taken into account in reconstructing this new world about which all were talking. They were failing to consider the quality of life itself.

Chapter Seven
THE TURBID EBB AND FLOW OF MISERY

“Every night and every morn

Some to misery are born.

Every morn and every night

Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,

Some are born to endless night.”

WILLIAM BLAKE

During these years in New York trained nurses were in great demand. Few people wanted to enter hospitals; they were afraid they might be “practiced” upon, and consented to go only in desperate emergencies. Sentiment was especially vehement in the matter of having babies. A woman’s own bedroom, no matter how inconveniently arranged, was the usual place for her lying-in. I was not sufficiently free from domestic duties to be a general nurse, but I could ordinarily manage obstetrical cases because I was notified far enough ahead to plan my schedule. And after serving my two weeks I could get home again.

Sometimes I was summoned to small apartments occupied by young clerks, insurance salesmen, or lawyers, just starting out, most of them under thirty and whose wives were having their first or second baby. They were always eager to know the best and latest method in infant care and feeding. In particular, Jewish patients, whose lives centered around the family, welcomed advice and followed it implicitly.

But more and more my calls began to come from the Lower East Side, as though I were being magnetically drawn there by some force outside my control. I hated the wretchedness and hopelessness of the poor, and never experienced that satisfaction in working among them that so many noble women have found. My concern for my patients was now quite different from my earlier hospital attitude. I could see that much was wrong with them which did not appear in the physiological or medical diagnosis. A woman in childbirth was not merely a woman in childbirth. My expanded outlook included a view of her background, her potentialities as a human being, the kind of children she was bearing, and what was going to happen to them.

The wives of small shopkeepers were my most frequent cases, but I had carpenters, truck drivers, dishwashers, and pushcart vendors. I admired intensely the consideration most of these people had for their own. Money to pay doctor and nurse had been carefully saved months in advance—parents-in-law, grandfathers, grandmothers, all contributing.

As soon as the neighbors learned that a nurse was in the building they came in a friendly way to visit, often carrying fruit, jellies, or gefüllter fish made after a cherished recipe. It was infinitely pathetic to me that they, so poor themselves, should bring me food. Later they drifted in again with the excuse of getting the plate, and sat down for a nice talk; there was no hurry. Always back of the little gift was the question, “I am pregnant (or my daughter, or my sister is). Tell me something to keep from having another baby. We cannot afford another yet.”

I tried to explain the only two methods I had ever heard of among the middle classes, both of which were invariably brushed aside as unacceptable. They were of no certain avail to the wife because they placed the burden of responsibility solely upon the husband—a burden which he seldom assumed. What she was seeking was self-protection she could herself use, and there was none.

Below this stratum of society was one in truly desperate circumstances. The men were sullen and unskilled, picking up odd jobs now and then, but more often unemployed, lounging in and out of the house at all hours of the day and night. The women seemed to slink on their way to market and were without neighborliness.

These submerged, untouched classes were beyond the scope of organized charity or religion. No labor union, no church, not even the Salvation Army reached them. They were apprehensive of everyone and rejected help of any kind, ordering all intruders to keep out; both birth and death they considered their own business. Social agents, who were just beginning to appear, were profoundly mistrusted because they pried into homes and lives, asking questions about wages, how many were in the family, had any of them ever been in jail. Often two or three had been there or were now under suspicion of prostitution, shoplifting, purse snatching, petty thievery, and, in consequence, passed furtively by the big blue uniforms on the corner.

The utmost depression came over me as I approached this surreptitious region. Below Fourteenth Street I seemed to be breathing a different air, to be in another world and country where the people had habits and customs alien to anything I had ever heard about.

There were then approximately ten thousand apartments in New York into which no sun ray penetrated directly; such windows as they had opened only on a narrow court from which rose fetid odors. It was seldom cleaned, though garbage and refuse often went down into it. All these dwellings were pervaded by the foul breath of poverty, that moldy, indefinable, indescribable smell which cannot be fumigated out, sickening to me but apparently unnoticed by those who lived there. When I set to work with antiseptics, their pungent sting, at least temporarily, obscured the stench.

I remember one confinement case to which I was called by the doctor of an insurance company. I climbed up the five flights and entered the airless rooms, but the baby had come with too great speed. A boy of ten had been the only assistant. Five flights was a long way; he had wrapped the placenta in a piece of newspaper and dropped it out the window into the court.

Many families took in “boarders,” as they were termed, whose small contributions paid the rent. These derelicts, wanderers, alternately working and drinking, were crowded in with the children; a single room sometimes held as many as six sleepers. Little girls were accustomed to dressing and undressing in front of the men, and were often violated, occasionally by their own fathers or brothers, before they reached the age of puberty.

Pregnancy was a chronic condition among the women of this class. Suggestions as to what to do for a girl who was “in trouble” or a married woman who was “caught” passed from mouth to mouth—herb teas, turpentine, steaming, rolling downstairs, inserting slippery elm, knitting needles, shoe-hooks. When they had word of a new remedy they hurried to the drugstore, and if the clerk were inclined to be friendly he might say, “Oh, that won’t help you, but here’s something that may.” The younger druggists usually refused to give advice because, if it were to be known, they would come under the law; midwives were even more fearful. The doomed women implored me to reveal the “secret” rich people had, offering to pay me extra to tell them; many really believed I was holding back information for money. They asked everybody and tried anything, but nothing did them any good. On Saturday nights I have seen groups of from fifty to one hundred with their shawls over their heads waiting outside the office of a five-dollar abortionist.

Each time I returned to this district, which was becoming a recurrent nightmare, I used to hear that Mrs. Cohen “had been carried to a hospital, but had never come back,” or that Mrs. Kelly “had sent the children to a neighbor and had put her head into the gas oven.” Day after day such tales were poured into my ears—a baby born dead, great relief—the death of an older child, sorrow but again relief of a sort—the story told a thousand times of death from abortion and children going into institutions. I shuddered with horror as I listened to the details and studied the reasons back of them—destitution linked with excessive childbearing. The waste of life seemed utterly senseless. One by one worried, sad, pensive, and aging faces marshaled themselves before me in my dreams, sometimes appealingly, sometimes accusingly.

These were not merely “unfortunate conditions among the poor” such as we read about. I knew the women personally. They were living, breathing, human beings, with hopes, fears, and aspirations like my own, yet their weary, misshapen bodies, “always ailing, never failing,” were destined to be thrown on the scrap heap before they were thirty-five. I could not escape from the facts of their wretchedness; neither was I able to see any way out. My own cozy and comfortable family existence was becoming a reproach to me.

Then one stifling mid-July day of 1912 I was summoned to a Grand Street tenement. My patient was a small, slight Russian Jewess, about twenty-eight years old, of the special cast of feature to which suffering lends a madonna-like expression. The cramped three-room apartment was in a sorry state of turmoil. Jake Sachs, a truck driver scarcely older than his wife, had come home to find the three children crying and her unconscious from the effects of a self-induced abortion. He had called the nearest doctor, who in turn had sent for me. Jake’s earnings were trifling, and most of them had gone to keep the none-too-strong children clean and properly fed. But his wife’s ingenuity had helped them to save a little, and this he was glad to spend on a nurse rather than have her go to a hospital.

The doctor and I settled ourselves to the task of fighting the septicemia. Never had I worked so fast, never so concentratedly. The sultry days and nights were melted into a torpid inferno. It did not seem possible there could be such heat, and every bit of food, ice, and drugs had to be carried up three flights of stairs.

Jake was more kind and thoughtful than many of the husbands I had encountered. He loved his children, and had always helped his wife wash and dress them. He had brought water up and carried garbage down before he left in the morning, and did as much as he could for me while he anxiously watched her progress.

After a fortnight Mrs. Sachs’ recovery was in sight. Neighbors, ordinarily fatalistic as to the results of abortion, were genuinely pleased that she had survived. She smiled wanly at all who came to see her and thanked them gently, but she could not respond to their hearty congratulations. She appeared to be more despondent and anxious than she should have been, and spent too much time in meditation.

At the end of three weeks, as I was preparing to leave the fragile patient to take up her difficult life once more, she finally voiced her fears, “Another baby will finish me, I suppose?”

“It’s too early to talk about that,” I temporized.

But when the doctor came to make his last call, I drew him aside. “Mrs. Sachs is terribly worried about having another baby.”

“She well may be,” replied the doctor, and then he stood before her and said, “Any more such capers, young woman, and there’ll be no need to send for me.”

“I know, doctor,” she replied timidly, “but,” and she hesitated as though it took all her courage to say it, “what can I do to prevent it?”

The doctor was a kindly man, and he had worked hard to save her, but such incidents had become so familiar to him that he had long since lost whatever delicacy he might once have had. He laughed good-naturedly. “You want to have your cake and eat it too, do you? Well, it can’t be done.”

Then picking up his hat and bag to depart he said, “Tell Jake to sleep on the roof.”

I glanced quickly at Mrs. Sachs. Even through my sudden tears I could see stamped on her face an expression of absolute despair. We simply looked at each other, saying no word until the door had closed behind the doctor. Then she lifted her thin, blue-veined hands and clasped them beseechingly. “He can’t understand. He’s only a man. But you do, don’t you? Please tell me the secret, and I’ll never breathe it to a soul. Please!”

What was I to do? I could not speak the conventionally comforting phrases which would be of no comfort. Instead, I made her as physically easy as I could and promised to come back in a few days to talk with her again. A little later, when she slept, I tiptoed away.

Night after night the wistful image of Mrs. Sachs appeared before me. I made all sorts of excuses to myself for not going back. I was busy on other cases; I really did not know what to say to her or how to convince her of my own ignorance; I was helpless to avert such monstrous atrocities. Time rolled by and I did nothing.

The telephone rang one evening three months later, and Jake Sachs’ agitated voice begged me to come at once; his wife was sick again and from the same cause. For a wild moment I thought of sending someone else, but actually, of course, I hurried into my uniform, caught up my bag, and started out. All the way I longed for a subway wreck, an explosion, anything to keep me from having to enter that home again. But nothing happened, even to delay me. I turned into the dingy doorway and climbed the familiar stairs once more. The children were there, young little things.

Mrs. Sachs was in a coma and died within ten minutes. I folded her still hands across her breast, remembering how they had pleaded with me, begging so humbly for the knowledge which was her right. I drew a sheet over her pallid face. Jake was sobbing, running his hands through his hair and pulling it out like an insane person. Over and over again he wailed, “My God! My God! My God!”

I left him pacing desperately back and forth, and for hours I myself walked and walked and walked through the hushed streets. When I finally arrived home and let myself quietly in, all the household was sleeping. I looked out my window and down upon the dimly lighted city. Its pains and griefs crowded in upon me, a moving picture rolled before my eyes with photographic clearness: women writhing in travail to bring forth little babies; the babies themselves naked and hungry, wrapped in newspapers to keep them from the cold; six-year-old children with pinched, pale, wrinkled faces, old in concentrated wretchedness, pushed into gray and fetid cellars, crouching on stone floors, their small scrawny hands scuttling through rags, making lamp shades, artificial flowers; white coffins, black coffins, coffins, coffins interminably passing in never-ending succession. The scenes piled one upon another on another. I could bear it no longer.

As I stood there the darkness faded. The sun came up and threw its reflection over the house tops. It was the dawn of a new day in my life also. The doubt and questioning, the experimenting and trying, were now to be put behind me. I knew I could not go back merely to keeping people alive.

I went to bed, knowing that no matter what it might cost, I was finished with palliatives and superficial cures; I was resolved to seek out the root of evil, to do something to change the destiny of mothers whose miseries were vast as the sky.

Chapter Eight
I HAVE PROMISES TO KEEP

How were mothers to be saved? I went through many revolving doors, looked around, and, not finding what I was seeking, came out again. I talked incessantly to everybody who seemed to have social welfare at heart. Progressive women whom I consulted were thoroughly discouraging. “Wait until we get the vote. Then we’ll take care of that,” they assured me. I tried the Socialists. Here, there, and everywhere the reply came, “Wait until women have more education. Wait until we secure equal distribution of wealth.” Wait for this and wait for that. Wait! Wait! Wait!

Having no idea how powerful were the laws which laid a blanket of ignorance over the medical profession as well as the laity, I asked various doctors of my acquaintance, “Why aren’t physicians doing something?”

“The people you’re worrying about wouldn’t use contraception if they had it; they breed like rabbits. And, besides, there’s a law against it.”

“Information does exist, doesn’t it?”

“Perhaps, but I doubt whether you can find it. Even if you do, you can’t pass it on. Comstock’ll get you if you don’t watch out.”

In order to ascertain something about this subject which was so mysterious and so unaccountably forbidden, I spent almost a year in the libraries—the Astor, the Lenox, the Academy of Medicine, the Library of Congress, and dozens of others. Hoping that psychological treatises might inform me, I read Auguste Forel and Iwan Block. At one gulp I swallowed Havelock Ellis’ Psychology of Sex, and had psychic indigestion for months thereafter. I was not shocked, but this mountainous array of abnormalities made me spiritually ill. So many volumes were devoted to the exceptional, and so few to the maladjustments of normal married people, which were infinitely more numerous and urgent.

I read translations from the German in which women were advised to have more children because it could be proved statistically that their condition was improved by childbearing. The only article on the question I could discover in American literature was in the Atlantic Monthly by Edward Alsworth Ross of the University of Wisconsin, who brought to the attention of his readers the decline of the birth rate among the upper and educated classes and the increase among the unfit, the consequences of which were sure to be race suicide.

The Englishman, Thomas Robert Malthus, remained little more than a name to me, something like Plato or Henry George. Father had talked about him, but he meant mostly agriculture—wheat and food supplies in the national sense. Possibly he had a philosophy but not, to me, a live one. He had been put away on a shelf and, in my mind, had nothing to do with the everyday human problem. I was not looking for theories. What I desired was merely a simple method of contraception for the poor.

The pursuit of my quest took me away from home a good deal. The children used to come in after school and at once hunt for me. “Where’s mother?” was the usual question. If they found me at my mending basket they all leaped about for joy, took hands and danced, shouting, “Mother’s home, mother’s home, mother’s sewing.” Sewing seemed to imply a measure of permanence.

I, too, wanted to drive away the foreboding barrier of separation by closer contact with them. I wanted to have them solely to myself, to feed, to bathe, to clothe them myself. I had heard of the clean, wind-swept Cape Cod dunes, which appeared to be as far from the ugliness of civilization as I could get. Socialism, anarchism, syndicalism, progressivism—I was tired of them all. At the end of the spring, thoroughly depressed and dissatisfied, I tucked the children under my arms, boarded a Fall River boat, and sailed off, a pioneer to Provincetown.

In 1913 the tip of the Cape was nothing but a fishing village with one planked walk which, I was told, had been paid for by Congress. Up and down its length the bellman, the last of the town criers, walked, proclaiming the news.

At first we lived in the upper story of a fisherman’s house right on the water. After he went out in the morning, his wife and her children, and I and mine, were left alone. Then the old women recalled scenes from their early days on the whaling vessels. Their mothers had brought them forth unaided, and their own sons, in turn, had been born on the ships and apprenticed to their husbands. They fitted into life simply, but the younger Portuguese, who were taking over the fishing industry, were asking what they should do about limiting their families.

The village was rather messy and smelled of fish. I was still too close to humanity and wanted to be more alone, so we moved to the extreme end of town. Our veranda faced the Bay, and when the tide was high the water came up and lapped at the piles on which the cottage was built. Stuart, Grant, and Peggy used to sit on the steps and dabble their toes. At low tide they had two miles of beach on which to skip and run; it was a wonderful place to play, and all summer we had sunrise breakfasts, sunset picnics.

Ethel, who had married Jack Byrne, was now widowed and had also gone into nursing. She had considerable free time and stayed with me. Consequently, I was able to leave the children in her care when I made my expeditions to Boston’s far-famed public library, taking the Dorothy Bradford at noon, and coming back the next day. Even there I found no information more reliable than that exchanged by back-fence gossips in any small town.

I spent the entire season at Provincetown, groping for knowledge, classifying all my past activities in their proper categories, weighing the pros and cons of what good there was in them and also what they lacked. It was a period of gestation. Just as you give birth to a child, so you can give birth to an idea.

Between interims of brooding and playing with the children I took part in the diversions of the minute colony of congenial people. Charles Hawthorne had a school of painting, and Mary Heaton Vorse with her husband, Joseph O’Brien, were there; so also were Hutch Hapgood and Neith Boyce. Jessie Ashley had lifted Big Bill Haywood out of the slough of the Paterson strike and brought him down to rest and recuperate.

Big Bill was one of the few who saw what I was aiming at, although fearful that my future might involve the happiness of my children. Even he did not feel that the small-family question was significant enough to be injected into the labor platform. Nevertheless, as we rambled up and down the beach he came to my aid with that cheering encouragement of which I was so sorely in need. He never wasted words in advising me to “wait.” Instead, he suggested that I go to France and see for myself the conditions resulting from generations of family limitation in that country. This struck me as a splendid idea, because it would also give Bill Sanger a chance to paint instead of continuing to build suburban houses.

The trip to Europe seemed so urgent that no matter what sacrifices had to be made, we decided to make them when we came to them. In the fall we sold the house at Hastings, gave away some of our furniture and put the rest in storage. Although we did not realize it at the time, our gestures indicated a clean sweep of the past.

Anita Block proposed that we go via Scotland; she wanted me to write three or four articles on what twenty-five years of municipal ownership in Glasgow had done for women and children. Socialists were talking about how everything there belonged to the people themselves and had earned their own way—banks, schools, homes, parks, markets, art galleries, museums, laundries, bath houses, hospitals, and tramways. The city was about to pay off the last debt on the transportation system, and this was being hailed as a great victory, a perfect example of what Socialism could do. It sounded big and fine, and I, too, was impressed. Certainly in Glasgow, I thought, I should find women walking hand in hand with men, and children free and happy.

In October the Sangers sailed from Boston on a cabin boat, little and crowded, and one black night two weeks later steamed up the Clyde. The naval program of 1913 was causing every shipyard to run double shifts, and the flare and glare against the somber dark was like fairyland—giant, sparkling starlights reaching from the horizon into the sky, a beautiful introduction to Utopia.

The very next day I started out upon my investigations. To mind the children, aged nine, five, and three, I availed myself of a sort of employment bureau run by the Municipal Corporation. I had been told that anyone could call here for any imaginable type of service. In response to my summons, there promptly arrived at my door, standing straight and machine-like, a small boy in a buttons uniform, with chin strap holding his cap on the side of his head. Willie MacGuire’s stipend was to be twelve cents an hour, or fifty cents for the half day. His function was to take the three out, entertain them, and return them faithfully at any time designated. Though he was no bigger than Stuart, his efficient manner reassured me, and I soon learned that he performed his duties diligently.

Religiously I made the rounds of all the social institutions, and at first everything appeared as I had been led to expect—except the weather. It had always just rained, and, when the sun did show itself, it was seldom for long enough to dry up the walks. Though the streets were clean, they were invariably wet and damp, and nobody wore rubbers. Everywhere could be seen little girls down on their knees, scrubbing the door-steps in front of the houses, or, again, carrying huge bundles or baskets of groceries to be delivered at the homes of the buyers. The people themselves seemed cold and rigid, as dismal as their climate. Only the policemen had a sense of humor.

As I proceeded, flaws in the vaunted civic enterprises began to display themselves. Glasgow had its show beauty spots, but even the model tenements were not so good as our simplest, lower-middle-class apartment buildings. One had been constructed for the accommodation of “deserving and respectable widows and widowers belonging to the working class” having one or more children with no one to care for them while the parents were away. But the building had been turned over to the exclusive use of widowers. Widows and their children had to shift for themselves.

All tenements were planned scientifically on the basis of so many cubic feet of air and so much light per so many human beings, ranging from quarters for two to those for five. No overcrowding was allowed.

“Well,” I asked, “what happens when there are five or six children?”

“Oh, they can’t live here,” replied the superintendent. “They must go elsewhere.”

“But where?”

Conversation ceased.

With particular attention I traced the adventures of one family which had expanded beyond the three-child limit. The parents had first moved over to the fringes of the city, and thereafter as more children were born had traveled from place to place, progressively more dingy, more decrepit. They now had nine and were inhabiting a hovel in the shipbuilding slums, unimaginably filthy and too far from the splendid utilities ever to enjoy them.

The further I looked, the greater grew the inconsistency. The model markets carried chiefly wholesale produce, and the really poor, who were obliged to huddle on the far side of the city, contented themselves with bread and tea and were thankful to have it. Another disappointment was the washhouses, dating from 1878 when they had been deemed a public necessity because men had protested they were being driven from their homes by washing which, on account of the incessant rain, seemed to hang there forever. A stall cost only twopence an hour, less expensive than heating water at home, and there were always women waiting in line. But the tram system, which was on the point of being liquidated in spite of its low fares, forbade laundry baskets, and, consequently, those who were not within walking distance—and they were the ones who needed it most—were deprived of its use.

Throughout the slum section I saw drunken, sodden women whose remaining, snag-like teeth stuck down like fangs and protruded from their sunken mouths. When I asked one of the executive officers of the corporation why they were so much more degraded than the men, he replied, “Oh, the women of Glasgow are all dirty and low. They’re hopeless.”

“But why should this be?” I persisted.

His only answer was, “It’s their own fault.”

Bill and I walked about late at night, overwhelmed by the unspeakable poverty. The streets were filled with fighting, shiftless beggars. Hundreds of women were abroad, the big shawls over their heads serving two purposes: one, to keep their shoulders warm; the other, to wrap around the baby which each one carried. It was apparent that their clothing consisted only of a shawl, a petticoat, a wrapper, and shoes. Older children were begging, “A ha’penny for bread, Missus, a ha’penny for bread.”

It was infinitely cold, dreary, and disappointing—so much talk about more wages and better subsistence, and here the workers had it and what were they getting?—a little more light, perhaps, a few more pennies a day, the opportunity to buy food a little more cheaply, a few parks in which they could wander, a bank where their money earned a fraction more interest. But as soon as they passed beyond the border of another baby, they were in exactly the same condition as the people beyond the realm of municipal control.

Municipal ownership was one more thing to throw in the discard.

One dull, rainy day, glad to leave behind the shrill, crying voices of the beggars of Glasgow, we boarded a horrid cattle boat bound for Antwerp. The children were all seasick as we bounced and tossed over the North Sea. It was something of a job to handle the three of them with no nurse, especially when the storm threw them out of their beds on to the cabin floor. Fortunately they suffered no fractures, although twenty-six horses in the hold had to be shot because their legs had been broken.

We arrived at the Gare du Nord in Paris at the end of another dismal, bewildering day—toot-toot! steam, luggage, brusque snatching by blue-smocked, black-capped porters, all looking like villains, jam at the ticket gate, rackety taxi to a hotel on the Left Bank.

Paris seemed another Glasgow, more like a provincial village than a great metropolis. The atmosphere of petty penury destroyed my dreams of Parisian gaiety and elegance; even the French children were dressed in drab, gloomy, black aprons. Within a few days we had sub-let an apartment on the Boulevard St. Michel across from the Luxembourg Gardens where Grant and Peggy could play. It was four flights up, and the cold penetrated to the marrow of our bones. We could put tons of briquets into the little fireplaces and never get any heat. All the family went into flannel underwear, the first since my early childhood.

I presented Stuart to the superintendent of the district lycée. He demanded a birth certificate, and I had none.

“But without it how can I tell where he was born or how old he is?” The official seemed to imply that Stuart did not exist.

“But,” I protested, “here he is. He’s alive.”

“No, no, Madame! The law says you must have a birth certificate.”

I had to send him to a private school, which was something of a drain on the budget.

Bill found a studio on Montparnasse, just back of the Station. Again and again he came home aglow with news of meeting the great Matisse and other revolutionary painters barely emerging from obscurity. I trailed around to studios and exhibits occasionally, but I was trying to become articulate on my own subject, and paid scant attention to those who loomed up later as giants in the artistic world. The companionship of Jessie Ashley and Bill Haywood, who had just come to Paris, was more familiar to me.

I was also eager to encounter French people and discover their points of view. One of the first was Victor Dave, the last surviving leader of the French Commune of 1871. Thanksgiving Day we had a little dinner party and invited American friends to greet him. He was then over eighty, but still keen and active. As the evening wore on we started him talking about his past experiences and he held us enthralled until way into the morning, when we all had breakfast in the apartment.

The old Communard spoke English far better than any of us spoke French. He was now making three dollars a week by his linguistic abilities, because he was the sole person the Government could call upon not only for the language but the dialects of the Balkans. Just the day before he had been translating a new series of treaties which France was making with the Balkan States in a desperate attempt to tie them to the Triple Entente. Though he was a philosophical person who could be gay over his own hardships, his confidences to us were serious and sad. From the agreements then being drawn up, particularly those with Rumania, he could see nothing but war ahead, predicting definitely that within five years all nations would be at each other’s throats. We newcomers to Europe could not grasp the meaning of his words, and the residents shrugged their shoulders and said, “He is getting old. He cannot see that we are now beyond war, that people are too intelligent ever to resort to it again.”

As I look back it is apparent that we heard in France the whole rumblings of the World War. Unrest was in the air as it had been in the United States, but with a difference. Theaters were showing anti-German plays, revanche placards decorated Napoleon’s tomb in the Invalides, and the rusty black draperies around the shrouded statue of Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde pointed a macabre note. These were remembered afterwards; at the time they were merely part of the Paris scene.

I realized the disadvantage of not being better acquainted with the French language, and started in to practice what I knew and learn more. Good fortune brought me in touch with an Englishwoman, the wife of the editor of L’Humanité, the organ of the Confédération Générale de Travail, the famous C.G.T. To her I clung and at her home I met the Socialist leader, Jean Jaurès. His English was bad and my French worse; we had to have an interpreter. Doubtless we missed a lot, but even so we found we understood each other. I believe that his assassination on the eve of the war which he had done so much to prevent proved an irreparable loss to the cause of peace.

In my language difficulties Jessie Ashley’s fluency was an ever-present help. Together we used to eat in the restaurants frequented by laborers, who came in groups, keeping their caps on, enjoying the cheap and good food accompanied by wine. Often we were the only women in the place, always excepting the inevitable cashier.

Though women were rarely seen at a C.G.T. meeting, Victor Dave took Jessie and me to a particularly impressive one which Bill Haywood was to address. His reputation as a firebrand had preceded him, and the police were making certain that no riot should ensue; they were stopping each person who crossed the bridge and demanding an account of his destination. Our passport was the venerable appearance of our escort, whose long white hair hung low about his head. His top hat, that universal badge of respectability, let us through.

The vast auditorium was filled with some three thousand French syndicalists, similar to the American I.W.W.’s, all standing, all wearing the uniform of the proletariat—black-visored caps and loose corduroys. They were being urged not to take up arms against the workers of other nations. I began to wonder whether perhaps the various tokens of disquiet which had impalpably surrounded me since coming to France had some more desperate meaning than we in America had realized. The War, What For? discussions in New York had seemed only a part of the evening conversations. Here again I was listening to protests against government efforts to arouse national hatred by calling it patriotism. I had heard the words so often, “Workers of the World, Unite,” yet at last I was vaguely uneasy because of the difference in spirit.

As we emerged into the narrow, alley-like street we found the exits into the boulevard guarded by hundreds of gendarmes, both mounted and afoot. Had any outbreak occurred, the assembled syndicalists would literally have been trapped.

My uneasiness was increased as a result of a visit to the Hindu nationalist, Shyamaji Krishnavarma. In England he had been an agitator for Indian Home Rule and, when the London residence of the Viceroy of India had been bombed, with other Indians who might have been implicated, he had fled to France, so long the sanctuary for anyone who, because of political beliefs, got into trouble elsewhere. Krishnavarma was now editing the Indian Sociologist, which was being secretly spirited across the Channel.

Krishnavarma had asked whether he might be permitted to give a reception in my honor. No Hindu had ever given a reception in my honor. Trying to appear, however, as though this were a frequent occurrence, I set a time and bravely entered his salon, supported, as usual, by Jessie.

About twenty-five men were there, Indian students all, and only one other woman, Mrs. Krishnavarma, barely out of purdah and still in native dress. As a great concession she had been allowed to come in, despite the presence of men. It was evident she could listen but not speak, because, when I asked her something about her children, Krishnavarma answered for her quickly. A little later I was disputing a point with him and, to bolster up his argument, he gave her a curt command in Hindustani. She rose swiftly and soon returned with a well-thumbed and pencil-marked copy of Spencer. I had come to consider Spencer’s philosophy old-fogyish. His teachings were so mild that I wondered what in the world he could ever have been hounded for. Though Krishnavarma was working towards the freedom of India he had gone no further than this pink tea which was not even pale China, let alone sturdy, black Ceylon.

I had been home scarcely more than half an hour and was dressing for dinner when Peggy ran in animatedly. “Mother, there are three soldiers at the door!” The bright uniforms of the gendarmes had taken her fancy, and she was pleased and excited. When I went out to meet them they demanded to know where we had come from, the object of our visit to France, how long we intended to stay, in what manner we had located the apartment, from whom we had rented it, where I had been that afternoon, the length of time I had known Krishnavarma, and the reason for my being at his home. Finally, they explained their presence by saying the concierge had not sent in the required information to the prefecture.

When I described the strange visitation to someone familiar with French customs, I was told that concierges were all ex officio agents of the police and were compelled to make regular reports of the activities, no matter how petty, of their tenants. These were incorporated into the dossiers of all foreigners. Actually, the police, working with the British Secret Service, were checking up on Krishnavarma’s callers. Thereafter gendarmes lingered in doorways outside our apartment, and wherever I went I was conscious they were in the vicinity.

Because of the predilection of the French for quality rather than quantity, they had not only adopted the sociological definition of proletariat, “the prolific ones,” a term originally applied by the Romans to the lowest class of society, but had interpreted it literally. The syndicalists in particular had made what they called conscious generation a part of their policy and principles, and had affiliated themselves with the Neo-Malthusian movement, which had its headquarters in London.

The parents of France, almost on the same wage scale as those I had seen in Glasgow, had settled the matter to their own satisfaction. Their one or two children were given all the care and advantages of French culture. I was struck with the motherly attention bestowed by our femme de chambre upon her only child. She came promptly to work, but nothing could persuade her to arrive before Jean had been taken to his school, and nothing could prevent her leaving promptly at noon to fetch him for his luncheon.

When Bill Haywood began taking me into the homes of the syndicalists, I found perfect acceptance of family limitation and its relation to labor. “Have you just discovered this?” I asked each woman I met.

“Oh, no, Maman told me.”

“Well, who told her?”

“Grandmère, I suppose.”

The Code Napoléon had provided that daughters should inherit equally with sons and this, to the thrifty peasant mind, had indicated the desirability of fewer offspring. Nobody would marry a girl unless she had been instructed how to regulate the numbers of her household as well as the home itself.

Some of the contraceptive formulas which had been handed down were almost as good as those of today. Although they had to make simple things, mothers prided themselves on their special recipes for suppositories as much as on those for pot au feu or wine.

All individual Frenchwomen considered this knowledge their individual right, and, if it failed, abortion, which was still common. I talked about the problems of my own people, but they could give me no help, merely shrugging their shoulders, apparently glad they were living in France and not in the United States. This independence of thought and action seemed wholly admirable to me at the time, and I sang the praises of the system.

Bill was happy in his studio, but I could find no peace. Each day I stayed, each person I met, made it worse. A whole year had been given over to this inactive, incoherent brooding. Family and friends had been generous in patience. I had added to my personal experience statistics from Glasgow and the little formulas I had gathered from the French peasants. With this background I had practically reached the exploding point. I could not contain my ideas, I wanted to get on with what I had to do in the world.

The last day of the year, December 31, 1913, Bill and I said good-by, unaware the parting was to be final. With the children I embarked at Cherbourg for home.

Chapter Nine
THE WOMAN REBEL

“Oh you daughters of the West!

O you young and elder daughters! O you maidens and you women!

Never must you be divided, in our ranks you move united,

Pioneers! O pioneers!”

WALT WHITMAN

The New York was a nice ship and it was not too wintry to walk about on deck. After the children were safely in bed I paced round and round and absorbed into my being that quiet which comes to you at sea. That it was New Year’s Eve added to the poignancy of my emotions but did not obscure the faith within.

I knew something must be done to rescue those women who were voiceless; someone had to express with white hot intensity the conviction that they must be empowered to decide for themselves when they should fulfill the supreme function of motherhood. They had to be made aware of how they were being shackled, and roused to mutiny. To this end I conceived the idea of a magazine to be called the Woman Rebel, dedicated to the interests of working women.

Often I had thought of Vashti as the first woman rebel in history. Once when her husband, King Ahasuerus, had been showing off to his people his fine linens, his pillars of marble, his beds of gold and silver, and all his riches, he had commanded that his beautiful Queen Vashti also be put on view. But she had declined to be exhibited as a possession or chattel. Because of her disobedience, which might set a very bad example to other wives, she had been cast aside and Ahasuerus had chosen a new bride, the meek and gentle Esther.

I wanted each woman to be a rebellious Vashti, not an Esther; was she to be merely a washboard with only one song, one song? Surely, she should be allowed to develop all her potentialities. Feminists were trying to free her from the new economic ideology but were doing nothing to free her from her biological subservience to man, which was the true cause of her enslavement.

Before gathering friends around me for that help which I must have in stirring women to sedition, before asking them to believe, I had to chart my own course. Should I bring the cause to the attention of the people by headlines and front pages? Should I follow my own compulsion regardless of extreme consequences?

I fully recognized I must refrain from acts which I could not carry through. So many movements had been issuing defiances without any ultimate goal, shooting off a popgun here, a popgun there, and finally shooting themselves to death. They had been too greatly resembling froth—too noisy with the screech of tin horns and other cheap instruments instead of the deeper sounds of an outraged, angry, serious people.

With as crystal a view as that which had come to me after the death of Mrs. Sachs when I had renounced nursing forever, I saw the path ahead in its civic, national, and even international direction—a panorama of things to be. Fired with this vision, I went into the lounge and wrote and wrote page after page until the hours of daylight.

Having settled the principles, I left the details to work themselves out. I realized that a price must be paid for honest thinking—a price for everything. Though I did not know exactly how I was to prepare myself, what turn events might take, or what I might be called upon to do, the future in its larger aspects has actually developed as I saw it that night.

The same thoughts kept repeating themselves over and over during the remainder of the otherwise uneventful voyage. As soon as possible after reaching New York, I rented an inexpensive little flat on Post Avenue near Dyckman Street, so far out on the upper end of Manhattan that even the Broadway subway trains managed to burrow their way into sunlight and fresh air. My dining room was my office, the table my desk.

A new movement was starting, and the baby had to have a name. It did not belong to Socialism nor was it in the labor field, and it had much more to it than just the prevention of conception. As a few companions were sitting with me one evening we debated in turn voluntary parenthood, voluntary motherhood, the new motherhood, constructive generation, and new generation. The terms already in use—Neo-Malthusianism, Family Limitation, and Conscious Generation seemed stuffy and lacked popular appeal.

The word control was good, but I did not like limitation—that was too limiting. I was not advocating a one-child or two-child system as in France, nor did I wholeheartedly agree with the English Neo-Malthusians whose concern was almost entirely with limitation for economic reasons. My idea of control was bigger and freer. I wanted family in it, yet family control did not sound right. We tried population control, race control, and birth rate control. Then someone suggested, “Drop the rate.” Birth control was the answer; we knew we had it. Our work for that day was done and everybody picked up his hat and went home. The baby was named.

When I first announced that I was going to publish a magazine, “Where are you going to get the money?” was volleyed at me from all sides. I did not know, but I was certain of its coming somehow. Equally important was moral support. Those same young friends and I founded a little society, grandly titled the National Birth Control League, sought aid from enthusiasts for other causes, turning first to the Feminists because they seemed our natural allies. Armed with leaflets we went to Cooper Union to tell them that in the Woman Rebel they would have an opportunity to express their sentiments.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the Feminist leader, was trying to inspire women in this country to have a deeper meaning in their lives, which to her signified more than getting the vote. Nevertheless, at that time I struck no responsive chord from her or from such intelligent co-workers as Crystal Eastman, Marie Howe, or Henrietta Rodman. It seemed unbelievable they could be serious in occupying themselves with what I regarded as trivialities when mothers within a stone’s throw of their meetings were dying shocking deaths.

Who cared whether a woman kept her Christian name—Mary Smith instead of Mrs. John Jones? Who cared whether she wore her wedding ring? Who cared about her demand for the right to work? Hundreds of thousands of laundresses, cloak-makers, scrub women, servants, telephone girls, shop workers would gladly have changed places with the Feminists in return for the right to have leisure, to be lazy a little now and then. When I suggested that the basis of Feminism might be the right to be a mother regardless of church or state, their inherited prejudices were instantly aroused. They were still subject to the age-old, masculine atmosphere compounded of protection and dominance.

Disappointed in that quarter I turned to the Socialists and trade unionists, trusting they would appreciate the importance of family limitation in the kind of civilization towards which they were stumbling. Notices were sent to The Masses, Mother Earth, The Call, The Arm and Hammer, The Liberator, all names echoing the spirit which had quickened them.

Shortly I had several hundred subscriptions to the Woman Rebel, paid up in advance at the rate of a dollar a year, the period for which I had made my plans. Proceeds were to go into a separate revolving account, scrupulously kept. Unlike so many ephemeral periodicals, mine was not to flare up and spark out before it had functioned, leaving its subscribers with only a few issues when they were entitled to more. Eventually we had a mailing list of about two thousand, but five, ten, even fifty copies often went in a bundle to be distributed without charge to some labor organization.

I was solely responsible for the magazine financially, legally, and morally; I was editor, manager, circulation department, bookkeeper, and I paid the printer’s bill. But any cause that has not helpers is losing out. So many men and women secretaries, stenographers, clerks, used to come in of an evening that I could not find room for all. Some typed, some addressed envelopes, some went to libraries and looked up things for us to use, some wrote articles, though seldom signing their own names. Not one penny ever had to go for salaries, because service was given freely.

In March, 1914, appeared the first issue of the Woman Rebel, eight pages on cheap paper, copied from the French style, mailed first class in the city and expressed outside. My initial declaration of the right of the individual was the slogan “No Gods, No Masters.” Gods, not God. I wanted that word to go beyond religion and also stop turning idols, heroes, leaders into gods.

I defined a woman’s duty, “To look the world in the face with a go-to-hell look in the eyes; to have an idea; to speak and act in defiance of convention.” It was a marvelous time to say what we wished. All America was a Hyde Park corner as far as criticism and challenging thought were concerned. We advocated direct action and took up the burning questions of the day. With a fine sense of irony we put anti-capitalist soapbox oratory in print. I do not know whether the financiers we denounced would have been tolerant or resentful of our onslaughts had they read them, or as full of passion for their cause as we for ours. Perhaps they too will have forgotten that emotion now.

My daily routine always started with looking over the pile of mail, and one morning my attention was caught by an unstamped official envelope from the New York Post Office. I tore it open.

Dear Madam, You are hereby notified that the Solicitor of the Post Office Department has decided that the Woman Rebel for March, 1914, is unmailable under Section 489, Postal Laws and Regulations.

E. M. Morgan, Postmaster.

I reread the letter. It was so unexpected that at first the significance did not sink in. I had given no contraceptive information; I had merely announced that I intended to do so. Then I began to realize that no mention was made of any special article or articles. I wrote Mr. Morgan and asked him to state what specifically had offended, thereby assisting me in my future course. His reply simply repeated that the March issue was unmailable.

I had anticipated objections from religious bodies, but believed with father, “Anything you want can be accomplished by putting a little piece of paper into the ballot box.” Therefore, to have our insignificant magazine stopped by the big, strong United States Government seemed so ludicrous as almost to make us feel important.

To the newspaper world this was news, but not one of the dailies picked it out as an infringement of a free press. The Sun carried a headline, “‘WOMAN REBEL’ BARRED FROM MAILS.” And underneath the comment, “Too bad. The case should be reversed. They should be barred from her and spelled differently.”

Many times I studied Section 211 of the Federal Statutes, under which the Post Office was acting. This penal clause of the Comstock Law had been left hanging in Washington like the dried shell of a tortoise. Its grip had even been tightened on the moral side; in case the word obscene should prove too vague, its definition had been enlarged to include the prevention of conception and the causing of abortion under one and the same heading. To me it was outrageous that information regarding motherhood, which was so generally called sacred, should be classed with pornography.

Nevertheless, I had not broken the law, because it did not prohibit discussion of contraception—merely giving advice. I harbored a burning desire to undermine that law. But if I continued publication I was making myself liable to a Federal indictment and a possible prison term of five years plus a fine of five thousand dollars. I had to choose between abandoning the Woman Rebel, changing its tone, or continuing as I had begun. Though I had no wish to become a martyr, with no hesitation I followed the last-named course.

I gathered our little group together. At first we assumed Comstock had stopped the entire issue before delivery, but apparently he had not, because only the A to M’s which had been mailed in the local post office had been confiscated. We took a fresh lot downtown, slipped three into one chute, four in another, walked miles around the city so that no single box contained more than a few copies.

The same procedure had to be pursued in succeeding months. Sometimes daylight caught me, with one or more assistants, still tramping from the printer’s and dropping the copies, piece by piece, into various boxes and chutes. I felt the Government was absurd and tyrannical to make us do this for no good purpose. I could not get used to its methods then. I have not yet, and probably never shall.

The Woman Rebel produced extraordinary results, striking vibrations that brought contacts, messages, inquiries, pamphlets, books, even some money. I corresponded with the leading Feminists of Europe—Ellen Key, then at the height of her fame, Olive Schreiner, Mrs. Pankhurst, Rosa Luxemburg, Adele Schreiber, Clara Zetkin, Roszika Schwimmer, Frau Maria Stritt. But I also heard from sources and groups I had hardly known existed—Theosophist, New Thought, Rosicrucian, Spiritualist, Mental Scientist. It was not alone from New York, but from the highways and by ways of north, south, east, and west that inspiration came.

After the second number the focus had been birth control. Within six months we had received over ten thousand letters, arriving in accelerating volume. Most of them read, “Will your magazine give accurate and reliable information to prevent conception?” This I could not print. Realizing by now it was going to be a fairly big fight, I was careful not to break the law on such a trivial point. It would have been ridiculous to have a single letter reach the wrong destination; therefore, I sent no contraceptive facts through the mails.

However, I had no intention of giving up this primary purpose. I began sorting and arranging the material I had brought back from France, complete with formulas and drawings, to be issued in a pamphlet where I could treat the subject with more delicacy than in a magazine, writing it for women of extremely circumscribed vocabularies. A few hundred dollars were needed to finance publication of Family Limitation, as I named it, and I approached Theodore Schroeder, a lawyer of standing and an ardent advocate of free speech. He had been left a fund by a certain Dr. Foote who had produced a book on Borning Better Babies, and I thought my pamphlet might qualify as a beneficiary.

Dr. Abraham Brill was just then bringing out a translation of Freud, in whom Schroeder was much interested. He asked whether I had been psychoanalyzed.

“What is psychoanalysis?”

He looked at me critically as from a great height. “You ought to be analyzed as to your motives. If, after six weeks, you still wish to publish this pamphlet, I’ll pay for ten thousand copies.”

“Well, do you think I won’t want to go on?”

“I don’t only think so. I’m quite sure of it.”

“Then I won’t be analyzed.”

I took the manuscript to a printer well known for his liberal tendencies and courage. He read the contents page by page and said, “You’ll never get this set up in any shop in New York. It’s a Sing Sing job.”

Every one of the twenty printers whom I tried to persuade was afraid to touch it. It was impossible ever, it seemed, to get into print the contents of that pamphlet.

Meanwhile, following the March issue the May and July numbers of the Woman Rebel had also been banned. In reply to each of the formal notices I inquired which particular article or articles had incurred disapproval, but could obtain no answer.

At that time I visualized the birth control movement as part of the fight for freedom of speech. How much would the postal authorities suppress? What were they really after? I was determined to prod and goad until some definite knowledge was obtained as to what was “obscene, lewd, and lascivious.”

Theodore Schroeder and I used to meet once in a while at the Liberal Club, and he gave much sound advice—I could not go on with the Woman Rebel forever. Eventually the Post Office would wear me down by stopping the issues as fast as I printed them. He warned, “They won’t do so and so unless you do thus and thus. If you do such and such, then you’ll have to take the consequences.” He was a good lawyer and an authority on the Constitution.

When my family learned that I might be getting in deep water a council was called just as when I had been a child. A verdict of nervous breakdown was openly decreed, but back in the minds of all was the unspoken dread that I must have become mentally unbalanced. They insisted father come to New York, where he had not been for forty years, to persuade me to go to a sanitarium.

For several days father and I talked over the contents of the Woman Rebel. In his fine, flowing language he expressed his hatred of it. He despised talk about revolution, and despaired of anyone who could discuss sex, blaming this on my nursing training, which, he intimated, had put me in possession of all the known secrets of the human body. He was not quite sure what birth control was, and my reasoning, which retraced the pattern of our old arguments, made no impression upon him.

Father would have nothing to do with the “queer people” who came to the house—people of whom no one had ever heard—turning up with articles on every possible subject and defying me to publish them in the name of free speech. I printed everything. For the August issue I accepted a philosophical essay on the theory of assassination, largely derived from Richard Carlile. It was vague, inane, and innocuous, and had no bearing on my policy except to taunt the Government to take action, because assassination also was included under Section 211.

Only a few weeks earlier, the war which Victor Dave had predicted had started its headlong progress. The very moment when most people were busy with geographies and atlases, trying to find out just where Sarajevo might be, the United States chose to sever diplomatic relations with me.

One morning I was startled by the peremptory, imperious, and incessant ringing of my bell. When I opened the door, I was confronted by two gentlemen.

“Will you come in?”

They followed me into my living room, scrutinized with amazement the velocipede and wagon, the woolly animals and toys stacked in the corner. One of them asked, “Are you the editor and publisher of a magazine entitled the Woman Rebel?”

When I confessed to it, he thrust a legal document into my hands. I tried to read it, threading my way slowly through the jungle of legal terminology. Perhaps the words became a bit blurred because of the slight trembling of my hands, but I managed to disentangle the crucial point of the message. I had been indicted—indicted on no less than nine counts—for alleged violation of the Federal Statutes. If found guilty on all, I might be liable to forty-five years in the penitentiary.

I looked at the two agents of the Department of Justice. They seemed nice and sensible. I invited them to sit down and started in to explain birth control. For three hours I presented to their imaginations some of the tragic stories of conscript motherhood. I forget now what I said, but at the end they agreed that such a law should not be on the statute books. Yet it was, and there was nothing to do about it but bring my case to court.

When the officers had gone, father came through the door of the adjoining room where he had been reading the paper. He put both arms around me and said, “Your mother would have been alive today if we had known all this then.” He had applied my recital directly to his own life. “You will win this case. Everything is with you—logic, common sense, and progress. I never saw the truth until this instant.”

Old-fashioned phraseology, but father was at last convinced. He went home quite proud, thinking I was not so crazy after all, and began sending me clippings to help prove the case for birth control—women who had drowned themselves or their children and the brutalities of parents, because even mother love might turn cruel if too hard pressed.

My faith was still childlike. I trusted that, like father, a judge representing our Government would be convinced. All I had to do was explain to those in power what I was doing and everything would come right.

August twenty-fifth I was arraigned in the old Post Office way downtown. Judge Hazel, himself a father of eight or nine children, was kindly, and I suspected the two Federal agents who had summoned me had spoken a good word on my behalf. But Assistant District Attorney Harold A. Content seemed a ferocious young fellow. When the Judge asked, “What sort of things is Mrs. Sanger doing to violate the law?” he answered, “She’s printing articles advocating bomb throwing and assassination.”

“Mrs. Sanger doesn’t look like a bomb thrower or an assassin.”

Mr. Content murmured something about not all being gold that glittered; I was doing a great deal of harm. He intimated he knew of my attempts to get Family Limitation in print when he said, “She is not satisfied merely to violate the law, but is planning to do it on a very large scale.”

Judge Hazel, apparently believing the charges much exaggerated, put the case over until the fall term, which gave me six weeks to prepare my answer, and Mr. Content concurred, saying that if this were not enough time, I could have more.

The press also was inclined to be friendly. Reporters came up to Post Avenue, looked over the various articles. They agreed, “We think the Government absolutely wrong. We don’t see how it has any case.” Unfortunately, while we were talking, Peggy, who had never seen a derby before, took possession of their hats and sticks, and in the hall a little parade of children formed, marching up and down in front of the door. One of the gentlemen was so furious that I hid Peggy in the kitchen away from his wrath. As he went out he remarked, “You should have birth controlled them before they were born. Why don’t you stay home and spend some thought on disciplining your own family?”

I had many things to do which could not be postponed, the most important among them being to provide for the children’s future. This occupied much of my time for the next few weeks. Temporarily, I sent the younger two to the Catskills and Stuart to a camp in Maine, arranging for school in the fall on Long Island.

Defense funds were always being raised when radicals got into trouble to pay pseudo-radical lawyers to fight the cases on technicalities. I was not going to have any lawyer get me out of this. Since my indictment had not stopped my publishing the Woman Rebel, through the columns of the September issue I told my subscribers I did not want pennies or dollars, but appealed to them to combine forces and protest on their own behalf against government invasion of their rights. That issue and the October one were both suppressed.

During what might be called my sleepwalking stage it was as though I were heading towards a precipice and nothing could awaken me. I had no ear for the objections of family or the criticism of friends. People were around me, I knew, but I could not see them clearly; I was deaf to their warnings and blind to their signs.

When I review the situation through the eyes of those who gave me circumspect advice, I can understand their attitude. I was considered a conservative, even a bourgeoise by the radicals. I was digging into an illegal subject, was not a trained writer or speaker or experienced in the arts of the propagandist, had no money with which to start a rousing campaign, and possessed neither social position nor influence.

In the opinion of nearly all my acquaintances I would have to spend at least a year in jail, and they began to condole with me. None offered to do anything about it, just suggested how I could get through. One kind woman whom I had never seen before called late one evening and volunteered to give me dancing lessons. In a small six-by-four cabin she had developed a system which she claimed was equally applicable to a prison cell and would keep me in good health. She even wrote out careful directions for combining proper exercises with the rhythm of the dance.

But I myself had no intention of going to jail; it was not in my program.

One other thing I had to do before my trial. Family Limitation simply must be published. I had at last found the right person—Bill Shatoff, Russian-born, big and burly, at that time a linotype operator on a foreign paper. So that nobody would see him he did the job after hours when his shop was supposed to be closed.

At first I had thought only of an edition of ten thousand. However, when I learned that union leaders in the silk, woolen, and copper industries were eager to have many more copies to distribute, I enlarged my plan. I would have liked to print a million but, owing to lack of funds, could not manage more than a hundred thousand.

Addressing the envelopes took a lot of work. Night after night the faithful band labored in a storage room, wrapping, weighing, stamping. Bundles went to the mills in the East, to the mines of the West—to Chicago, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh, to Butte, Lawrence, and Paterson. All who had requested copies were to receive them simultaneously; I did not want any to be circulated until I was ready, and refused to have one in my own house. I was a tyrant about this, as firm as a general about leaving no rough edges.

In October my case came up. I had had no notice and, without a lawyer to keep me posted, did not even know it had been called until the District Attorney’s office telephoned. Since Mr. Content had promised me plenty of time, I thought this was merely a formality and all I had to do was put in an appearance.

The next morning I presented myself at court. As I sat in the crowded room I felt crushed and oppressed by an intuitive sense of the tremendous, impersonal power of my opponents. Popular interest was now focused on Europe; my little defiance was no longer important. When I was brought out of my reverie by the voice of the clerk trumpeting forth in the harshly mechanical tones of a train announcer something about The People v. Margaret Sanger, there flashed into my mind a huge map of the United States, coming to life as a massive, vari-colored animal, against which I, so insignificant and small, must in some way defend myself. It was a terrific feeling.

But courage did not entirely desert me. Elsie Clapp, whose ample Grecian figure made her seem a tower of strength, marched up the aisle with me as though she, too, were to be tried. I said to Judge Hazel that I was not prepared, and asked for a month’s adjournment. Mr. Content astonished me by objecting. “Mrs. Sanger’s had plenty of time and I see no reason, Your Honor, why we should have a further postponement. Every day’s delay means that her violations are increased. I ask that the case continue this afternoon.”

A change in Judge Hazel’s attitude had taken place since August. Instead of listening to my request, he advised me to get an attorney at once—my trial would go on after the noon recess.

I was so amazed that I could only believe his refusal was due to my lack of technical knowledge, and supposed that at this point I really had to have a lawyer. I knew Simon H. Pollock, who had represented labor during the Paterson strike, and I went to see him. He agreed with me that a lawyer’s plea would not be rejected and that afternoon confidently asked for a month’s stay. It was denied. He reduced it to two weeks. Again it was denied. At ten the following morning the case was to be tried without fail.

From the Post Office Department I received roundabout word that my conviction had already been decided upon. When I told this to Mr. Pollock he said, “There isn’t a thing I can do. You’d better plead guilty and let us get you out as fast as we can. We might even be able to make some deal with the D.A. so you’d only have to pay a fine.”

I indignantly refused to plead guilty under any circumstances. What was the sense of bringing about my indictment in order to test the law, and then admit that I had done wrong? I was trying to prove the law was wrong, not I. Giving Mr. Pollock no directions how to act, I merely said I would call him up.

It was now four o’clock and I sought refuge at home to think through my mental turmoil and distress. But home was crowded with too many associations and emotions pulling me this way and that. When my thoughts would not come clear and straight I packed a suitcase, went back downtown, and took a room in a hotel, the most impersonal place in the world.

There was no doubt in my mind that if I faced the hostile court the next morning, unprepared as I was, I would be convicted of publishing an obscene paper. Such a verdict would be an injustice. If I were to convince a court of the rightness of my cause, I must have my facts well marshaled, and that could not be done in eighteen hours.

Then there was the question of the children’s welfare. Had I the right to leave them the heritage of a mother who had been imprisoned for some offensive literature of which no one knew the details?

What was I to do? Should I get another lawyer, one with personal influence who could secure a postponement, and should we then go into court together and fight it out? I had no money for such a luxury. Should I follow the inevitable suggestion of the “I-told-you-so’s” and take my medicine? Yes, but what medicine? I would not swallow a dosage for the wrong disease.

I was not afraid of the penitentiary; I was not afraid of anything except being misunderstood. Nevertheless, in the circumstances, my going there could help nobody. I had seen so many people do foolish things valiantly, such as wave a red flag, shout inflammatory words, lead a parade, just for the excitement of doing what the crowd expected of them. Then they went to jail for six months, a year perhaps, and what happened? Something had been killed in them; they were never heard of again. I had seen braver and hardier souls than I vanquished in spirit and body by prison terms, and I was not going to be lost and broken for an issue which was not the real one, such as the entirely unimportant Woman Rebel articles. Had I been able to print Family Limitation earlier, and to swing the indictment around that, going to jail might have had some significance.

Going away was much more difficult than remaining. But if I were to sail for Europe I could prepare my case adequately and return then to win or lose in the courts. There was a train for Canada within a few hours. Could I take it? Should I take it? Could I ever make those who had advised me against this work and these activities understand? Could I ever make anyone understand? How could I separate myself from the children without seeing them once more? Peggy’s leg was swollen from vaccination. This kept worrying me, made me hesitate, anxious. It was so hard to decide what to do.

Perfectly still, my watch on the table, I marked the minutes fly. There could be no retreat once I boarded that train. The torture of uncertainty, the agony of making a decision only to reverse it! The hour grew later and later. This was like both birth and death—you had to meet them alone.

About thirty minutes before train time I knew that I must go. I wrote two letters, one to Judge Hazel, one to Mr. Content, to be received at the desk the next day, informing them of my action. I had asked for a month and it had been refused. This denial of right and freedom compelled me to leave my home and my three children until I made ready my case, which dealt with society rather than an individual. I would notify them when I came back. Whether this were in a month or a year depended on what I found it necessary to do. Finally, as though to say, “Make the most of it,” I enclosed to each a copy of Family Limitation.

Parting from all that I held dear in life, I left New York at midnight, without a passport, not knowing whether I could ever return.

Chapter Ten
WE SPEAK THE SAME GOOD TONGUE

At Montreal I found comfort and refuge. In fact, on any road I took men and women who knew about the Woman Rebel came to my aid. I shall never forget the generosity of the Baineses who met me at the train and welcomed me to their home. They had been friends of Walt Whitman and still honored “his” memory. I sat at the table where “he” had sat, and in “his” chair. Among their many kindnesses they gave me an introduction to Edward Carpenter, also mentioned in awed tones, leader of the Whitman group in England and author of Love’s Coming of Age, which was then on every modern bookshelf.

Since I was charged with felony I could be extradited. I was obliged, therefore, in buying my passage, to choose a new name. No sooner had I selected the atrociously ugly “Bertha Watson,” which seemed to rob me of femininity, than I wanted to be rid of it. But once having adopted it I could not escape.

I boarded the RMS Virginian, laden with munitions, food, Englishmen returning home for war duty, and Canadians going over. Even before the printing of Family Limitation had begun in August, I had arranged a key message which would release all the pamphlets simultaneously whenever it should be received by any of four trusted lieutenants. In case one should be arrested, another ill, or a third die, still everything would go forward as provided for. Three days out of Montreal I sent a cable and shortly had one in reply that the program was being executed as planned. My soul was sick and my heart empty for those I loved; the one gleam in this dreadful night of despair was the faint hope that my efforts might, perhaps, make Peggy’s future easier.

The government official examining credentials at Liverpool said sternly, “England is at war, Madam. You can’t expect us to let you through. We’re sending back people without passports every day, and I can’t make an exception in your case.”

But I had Good Luck as an ally; she comes so often to help in emergencies. A shipboard acquaintance telephoned and pulled wires, a procedure not so common in England as in the United States. On his guarantee that I would get a passport from the American Embassy immediately on reaching London I was allowed to enter.

I wound through dirty streets in a cab to the Adelphi Palace. It rained all day, the wind blew, its howling came through the windows and crept down the chimney. Homesickness swept over me worse than ever before or since. I knew it would not do to “set and think” as the Quakers say, so I wandered about in the business district, trying to adjust my mind to the prices marked in the store windows in order to have some idea of what they were in dollars and cents. I viewed church architecture and the Cathedral, which was not expected to be finished for fifty years. It did not look so splendid, but since everything about it was closed I really could not tell.

Liverpool was a quaint city. I liked its weathered brick houses, and the evenness and settled feeling, as though the people in them planned to remain where they were for time everlasting. The women of the poor were unconcernedly wearing on the streets dresses originally made for bustles, hats with feathers, caricatures which should have been stuffed away in attics forty years before.

Bertha Watson had a letter to the local Fabian Society, and at six I went to the Clarion Café, where it foregathered each Friday. I presented her letter, was welcomed heartily, and invited to the discussion. I found the English then and later polite in speech and action, tolerant in listening. One of the members helped me to locate temporary rooms while I waited for the arrival of letters and messages from the United States. These lodgings were in the home of gentle, middle-class people to whom I paid thirty shillings a week, including breakfast and dinner.

I shall always be glad I went to that meeting, because there I met Lorenzo Portet, once companion of Francisco Ferrer and now heir to his educational work, which both believed was the key to Spanish emancipation.

After the attempted assassination of Alfonso XIII and Victoria of England, the Government had arrested twenty-five hundred Spaniards having republican ideas, among them Ferrer. His school had been closed and he had been jailed. When he had been eventually released, he had still been determined to educate for universal peace by means of economic justice. Accordingly, as Portet stated it, he had reopened a school for all Spain by publishing labor texts at Barcelona. This again had earned him no reward from a grateful Government. In 1909 he had been arrested in a purge of republicans, stood up against a wall and shot, and his body thrown into a ditch.

Ferrer had left his money to Portet, who was now fulfilling his trust by feeding the country with modern scientific translations from Italy, France, and England. He was a man of middle height and weight whose alert glance summed you up with an accuracy occasionally disturbing. After our initial encounter he called on me with punctiliousness and formality, and produced an article from a New York magazine which carried the story of the indictment of Margaret Sanger. “This is you?” he questioned with the jumping of all fact which is termed intuition.

Portet, a born teacher, was then instructing youth at the University of Liverpool in Spanish. No human being I ever knew could explain with such infinite pains the details of a subject. He placed your own opposition before you, marshaled it in all its strength, and then annihilated every point, one by one. His humorous cynicism was most baffling to those who were merely emotional converts to better worlds. “Civilization?” he might say, “Mainly a question of good roads.”

Sometimes in the midst of those long, drab, November weeks I escaped to Wales, where there were endless lanes, winding and hard, with very few carts, and all very quiet. Even here were Carnegie libraries, one of them turned into a restaurant. I went into the houses of the smelting workers at Green Brombo, Wexham, all lovely, minute, stone cottages of two or three rooms, huddled closely together, charming with their walks and walls and flower gardens. The folk were slow, deliberate, simple.

Liverpool was only a junction; London was my terminus. There I could study at the British Museum, and meet the Neo-Malthusians. Towards the end of the month I rolled up to London through miles of chimney-potted suburbs; it continued rainy and foggy, but still there was a friendly atmosphere in the air. I seemed to be coming to a second home.

My first quarters were on the top floor of a “bed and breakfast” on Torrington Square, just back of the British Museum. I looked out on little rows of trees, iron fences, steps going up to all the houses. There was but one bathroom and to use it cost extra. Every morning about seven came a knock, and when I opened the door I discovered a midget jug of hot water outside. I was supposed to break the ice on my large pitcher, mix the two, and pour all into my tin tub, the back of which rose behind me like a throne. After this winter I realized how the British had acquired their well-known moral courage.

I had no fireplace, but two floors below was an empty room with a grate. Occasionally I indulged myself in the luxury of renting it for the evening, and of buying wood to keep myself warm while I worked. I made up for it by not having the slatternly Cockney maid bring up tea, and also went each morning to the basement dining room for my breakfast, thereby saving a shilling a week. It was not long before I was stricken by the first digestive upset I had ever had, and was obliged to call in an American doctor. He looked me over casually and then, without further examination, asked, “Have you been drinking English coffee?”

“Why, yes.”

“Well, give it up. The English can’t make coffee; they only know how to make tea. Take up English tea.”

I followed his advice and from that time on, instead of carrying my own eating habits with me, have tried to adjust myself to the food of the country where I happened to be. In this way I get along much better.

Sundays I attended concerts or visited art galleries, though since it was war time disappointingly few pictures were being shown. Each week day, however, found me at the British Museum, going in with the opening of the gates in the morning. In order to secure permission to work, you had to have a card, but once you obtained it, you could take a special seat and books were reserved for you. My aim was to present my case from all angles, to make the trial soundly historical so that birth control would be seriously discussed in America. Therefore, I read avidly and voluminously many weighty tomes, and turned carefully the yellowed, brittle pages of pamphlets and broadsides, finding much that was dull, much that was irrelevant, but also much that was amusing, if only for the ponderous manner of its expression. In the end I had a picture of what had gone before.

The father of family limitation was Thomas Robert Malthus, born in 1766 at the Rookery, near Dorking, Surrey. In 1798 this curate of Albury published his Principle of Population and in the initial chapter laid down his famous postulates: “first, that food is necessary to the existence of man; second, that the passion between the sexes is necessary, and will remain nearly in its present state....” Consequently the unrestrained fertility of the human race was certain to outstrip the available fruits of the earth, and, although the natural checks of war, disease, and privation had controlled population for centuries, they had brought misery, disaster, and death in their train. His solution was voluntary and intelligent control of the birth rate by means of late marriage, which left few years for childbearing. However, human nature is such that Malthus might preach forever without anyone’s heeding his advice. Not until the profound economic depression which followed the Napoleonic Wars were people worried into concern over surplus population.

To John Stuart Mill the production of large families was to be regarded in the same light as drunkenness or any other physical excess. In the very first edition of his Political Economy he spoke of “prudence, by which either marriages are sparingly contracted, or care is taken that children beyond a certain number shall not be the fruit,” and concluded that “the grand practical problem is to find the means of limiting the number of births.” But he left it merely as a grand, practical problem.

Francis Place, the master tailor of Charing Cross, was born in a private debtors’ prison kept by his father in Vinegar Yard. He was the first to suggest the idea of contraception as a remedy for poverty, but was more practical in his preaching than in his performance, fathering as he did fifteen children. In 1822 he published Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle of Population:

If, above all, it were once clearly understood, that it was not disreputable for married persons to avail themselves of such precautionary means as would, without being injurious to health, or destructive of female delicacy, prevent conception, a sufficient check might at once be given to the increase of population beyond the means of subsistence; vice and misery, to a prodigious extent, might be removed from society, and the object of Mr. Malthus, Mr. Godwin, and of every philanthropic person, be promoted.

Place had educated himself on Adam Smith, Locke, Hume, Thomas Paine, and Burke. To his remarkable library came many notable thinkers and men of letters. Among them was Robert Owen, the textile industrialist, who, in his Moral Physiology, offered openly a method of contraception:

I sit down to write a little treatise, which will subject me to abuse from the self-righteous, to misrepresentation from the hypocritical, and to reproach even from the honestly prejudiced.

He spoke to young men and women who still believed in virtue and happiness. “A human being is a puppet, a slave, if his ignorance is to be the safeguard of his virtue.” In reply to the accusation that coitus interruptus was unnatural, he pointed out that the thwarting of any human wish or impulse might be so termed. “If this trifling restraint is to be called unnatural, what shall be said of celibacy?”

Owen in his youth had been impressed by the sufferings of the working classes, and, in a first effort to lighten the burden of his employees, had instituted many reforms in the New Lanark Mills, himself prospering materially in so doing; he was less successful when he emigrated to the United States and at New Harmony, Indiana, established a short-lived communal colony. However, his coming to America had at least one important result. His book influenced Doctor Charles Knowlton of Boston to write a tract entitled Fruits of Philosophy in which he recommended a chemical formula and other methods to prevent conception. I had not found a trace of this in my previous research, even in Boston where it had been published.

Knowlton’s reaffirmation of the desirability both from a political and social point of view for mankind to be able to limit at will the number of offspring without sacrificing the attendant gratification of the reproductive instinct, would have been little noticed had it not been for the repercussion in England forty years later.

During the early Victorian uprush of industrialism a man’s children had been breadwinners, and family limitation had naturally lapsed. But when humanitarian legislation had begun to rescue children from factories, the population specter had shown itself once more.

In 1861 was formed the Malthusian League, designed to influence public opinion and overcome the prevailing misconception of Malthusianism, and in 1876 a Bristol bookseller brought out an English edition of Fruits of Philosophy. He was promptly arrested on the charge of publishing an obscene book, and sentence was suspended on his plea of guilty.

The brilliant rationalist and freethinker, Charles Bradlaugh, a redoubtable personality, together with Annie Besant, later the renowned Theosophist but then a young rebel, started a printing partnership and sold the pamphlet. Although not approving it in all its details they determined to contest the right to publish it and to prove that prevention of conception was not obscene.

Extraordinary interest was aroused in their trial before Lord Chief Justice Cockburn and a special jury. The Solicitor General himself appeared as chief counsel for the prosecution. Taking a copy of Fruits of Philosophy in his hands he opened it solemnly and said, “It is really extremely painful to me,” then hesitating, “very painful to me to have to read this.” But he did so.

Bradlaugh and Besant conducted their own defense. The latter with eloquence and astonishing poise held the admiring attention of the court for two days. Nevertheless, both were convicted of defaming the morals of the public, sentenced to six months in jail and a thousand-dollar fine, and required to put up guarantees of twenty-five hundred dollars for good behavior during the next two years. The case was immediately appealed. Fortunately the upper court dismissed it on a technicality, because specific evidence of obscenity was not included; if the words were polluting they had to appear in the record.

This decision settled for all time in England that contraception was not to be classed among the obscenities. As a result, new life was injected into the Malthusian League and its name was changed to the Neo-Malthusian Society. In the first issue of its monthly journal it set forth a modest claim: “We have the ONLY REMEDY that the disease of society can be cured by.” Instead of the impractical advice of Malthus to marry late, the Neo-Malthusians advised early marriage, the use of contraceptive methods, and children born according to the earning capacity of the father; a man’s station in life should determine the number of his children. Furthermore, they intended one by one to “prick the flimsy bubbles of emigration, lessened production, and home colonization, which are from time to time put forward.” The emphasis was still placed on the social and economic aspects rather than the personal tragedies of women.

That was in 1876; now in 1914 the Drysdales, Dr. C. V. and his wife, Bessie, were the guiding spirits of the Society. They had a long heritage of Malthusianism behind them; the uncle of the former, Dr. George Drysdale, fresh from Edinburgh in 1854, had anonymously published his Elements of Social Science, which had gone into fifteen languages. He had even himself studied Chinese to ensure a reasonably accurate translation in that tongue. In the darkest days of Victorianism, this young physician had included the New Woman in his interpretation of Malthus. Both he and his brother Charles, also a physician, had been in love with Alice Vickery, who had chosen the latter and borne him a son, the present C.V.

Alice Vickery was as great in her day as Mary Wollstonecraft in hers. After a tremendous struggle, which included getting her degree in Dublin and her training in Paris, she had proved her right to enter the medical profession, and had become the first woman doctor in England.

My keenest desire was to get in touch with the Drysdales. They invited me to tea at their offices—offices in the English sense, not ours. I squelched through the inevitable rain to Queen Anne’s Chambers and was astonished to find nothing on the door except Dr. C. V. Drysdale’s name. The term Malthusian was not considered proper according to the landlord’s ideas of propriety. In fact, throughout England the word brought up antagonism. People crossed the street to avoid it.

I entered a sitting room, gay with chintz-covered chairs and a sofa, pillows at the back, quite fitted to Queen Anne’s own day. A fire was burning cheerily, yet even this was not so welcome as the open arms and excitement with which I was greeted, not only by the Drysdales but also by Dr. Binnie Dunlop, dark, Scotch, thin, and dapper, intellectually enthusiastic although not emotionally so; by Olive Johnston, the faithful secretary who had worked for many years with the Drysdales; and by F. W. Stella Browne, an ardent Feminist whose faintly florid face, hair never quite white, and indefatigable vivacity are the same a quarter of a century later. Many women in causes are like that; something in their spirit keeps them forever young.

Dr. Drysdale was then in his early forties, slender, fair, inclined to be bald. In his ebullience he was not at all British, but his pleasing, warm, and courteous personality was British at its best. Bessie Drysdale, about her husband’s age, was the practical member, dispensing charming hospitality. The others were like an army meeting me, but she brought up the rear with tea and cakes and comforting things.

It seemed to me I had seen them and known them all before. I was immediately certain I had come to the right place. In the United States I had been alone, pulling against all whose broad, general principles were the same as mine but who disapproved of my actions. But these new friends saw eye to eye with me. Instead of heaping criticism and fears upon me, they offered all the force of an international organization as well as their encyclopedic minds to back me up.

The policy of the Neo-Malthusians had been to educate the educators. They believed that once the practice of family limitation had been established among the well-to-do and socially prominent, it would be taken up by the lower strata. They were not discouraged, although after almost forty years success seemed as far away as ever; the working classes not only evinced no desire for the benefits of family limitation, but did not even know such a thing existed.

Everybody in the room appreciated my rebellion and extended congratulations on a name having been coined which was so simple and easy to understand as birth control. When I told them how I had managed the distribution of the Family Limitation pamphlets Dr. Drysdale stood up impetuously and said, “Oh, would to God we had a Comstock law! There’s nothing can so stir the British people as a bad law. Then they will do something to change it!”

That afternoon was one of the most encouraging and delightful of my life. The warmth of my reception strengthened me to face the future. It lessened my dreadful homesickness and curbed the ever-growing impulse to escape from war-sick London and hurry back to the children. During my stay I saw much of the Drysdales and their group, and between us all grew up a close kinship which has lasted through the stormy years.

I like to think of London at this time chiefly because of all my new friends and the laughter they brought me. Of late there had been little of it in my life, but with every friend I had in England—more than with any other people I have ever known—I laughed, and this laughter knit and welded the bonds of comradeship.

One day in the British Museum I was standing by the catalogs, which were in the form of books, waiting until a man near me finished the volume I wanted to consult. I glanced at him idly, then more closely, thinking I identified the profile from pictures I had seen. When he had put the book down I ventured tentatively, “Aren’t you Edward Carpenter?”

Almost without looking at me he replied, “Yes, and aren’t you Margaret Sanger?”

It was a shock for Bertha Watson to hear this name repeated out loud in a public place. However, Mr. Carpenter’s recognition was readily explainable. He had been more or less prepared to see me because he had already received my letter and had that morning at my rooming house been told I never returned from the British Museum until evening. Since we could not talk in this hall of silence, we adjourned to the Egyptian Room, and then to lunch. He was human, full of wit, fun, and humor—a live person who exuded magnetism.

Edward Carpenter reassured me that what I was doing was not merely of the present but belonged even more to the future. From this fine spirit I drew confirmation of the purity of my endeavor, something essential for me to take back to America if others there were to experience the same sense of justification. We beyond the Atlantic were still uncertain of our ethics, and even of our morals. We needed the sanction of British public opinion and the approval of their great philosophers, so that we could be strong in our beliefs.

During the first weeks in England I did not feel vehemently about the War, especially as signs were displayed everywhere, “Business as usual.” I supposed it would be a little flurry, soon over. War talk, of course, was universal. The German espionage system was much discussed. I wondered whether it were not the general characteristic of the German always to observe and be accurate in detail which made his information valuable. He did the same thing in the United States, where nobody thought of calling him a spy. Everywhere women were knitting socks and mitts, but I was more impressed by the fact they were smoking in hotel lobbies—a new indication of emancipation to me—and even rolling their own cigarettes. If a woman came in for tea, without a word being said, a bell hop produced her own box of tobacco. When she left, it was returned to its proper place.

As the months went on, however, to be an American became almost as unlucky as to be a German. Whoever wished to remain safely in England must agree with England, give over every vestige of independent thinking or free expression. Wherever I went I heard mention of “Traitorous America.” At one dining-car table a gray-haired Englishman, unaware of my nationality, asserted, “Americans will do anything for money.”

“Yes,” agreed his companion. “They do not care whom their bullets kill. They get paid for them.” He was a young Dutchman, apparently just returned from the East Indies, and the conversation between the two developed briskly. Americans were a “mixed breed without souls; they had none of the qualities which make a nation great—no traditions, history, art, music, absolutely nothing but their money; they had to come to Europe for everything—to England for laws, customs, and morals, to France for fashions and arts; they were human leeches fastened on Europe without incentive, originality, or creative ability; they—”

I interrupted, “What do you want America to do? Why should she get into this? Does she owe loyalty to England or France or Russia?”

“Oh, no, but for Belgium. America signed the Hague Treaty with the rest of us, and she has not stood by it.”

To this I advanced the argument, “We Americans are not like Europeans. We are a heterogeneous mixture of all the fighting forces and nations of the world. We include the Irish who hate England, and Jews who hardly can be said to love Russia. A large part of our population—industrious, civil, reliable, and prosperous—are Germans, with whom our Scandinavians are sympathetic. Who then have we to ally against Germany? And why?—a very small far-back mention of gratitude to France for her help in our Revolution against British rule—and the Statue of Liberty.”

On the whole I came more nearly being a nationalist when I left England than when I went there. I had to do such battle to explain the United States that, almost involuntarily, I felt myself becoming less of an internationalist. It was a strange feeling, as though somebody you knew and loved were being criticized, and you took up the cudgels in defense.

Chapter Eleven
HAVELOCK ELLIS

“He who ascends to mountain-tops shall find

Their loftiest peaks most wrapt in clouds and snow;

Round him are icy rocks, and loudly blow

Contending tempests on his naked head.”

LORD BYRON

As Christmas approached, my loneliness for the children increased. This was their particular time. I had messages from and about them, but these could not give the small, intimate details; the Atlantic was a broad span, seeming more vast to letter writers. I missed their voices, their caresses, even their little quarrels. I almost wondered whether solitary confinement in prison were not preferable to my present isolation.

In the midst of this stark yearning to be with them and share their tree I received a cordial note from Havelock Ellis asking me to come to tea. With kindly foresight he had given me explicit directions how to reach Fourteen Dover Mansions in Brixton across the Thames. I boarded a crowded bus at Oxford Circus. Though it was a miserable day near the dark end of 1914, the spirit of Christmas was in the air and everyone was laden with beribboned bundles and bright packages.

Looking askance at the police station which occupied the lower floor I climbed up the stairs, and, with the shyness of an adolescent, full of fears and uncertainties, lifted the huge brass knocker. The figure of Ellis himself appeared in the door. He seemed a giant in stature, a lovely, simple man in loose-fitting clothes, with powerful head and wonderful smile. He was fifty-five then, but that head will never change—the shock of white hair, the venerable beard, shaggy though well-kept, the wide, expressive mouth and deep-set eyes, sad even in spite of the humorous twinkle always latent.

I was conscious immediately that I was in the presence of a great man, yet I was startled at first by his voice as he welcomed me in. It was typically English, high and thin. I once talked to a prisoner at Sing Sing who had been in the death house for three years and could speak only in whispers thereafter. Ellis had been a hermit for twenty-five. He had lived in the Bush in Australia, and later secluded himself in his study. Nevertheless, the importance of what he had to say much more than made up for the instrument which conveyed it.

He led me to the living room through which the cheerless twilight of a winter afternoon in London barely penetrated, and seated me before a little gas fire. Some rooms impress you as ghastly cold even when hot. This one, though lacking central heating, had the warmth of many books. He lit two candles on the mantel, which flickered softly over his features, giving him the aspect of a seer.

We sat down and quiet fell. I tried a few aimless remarks but I stuttered with embarrassment. Ellis was still. Small talk was not possible with him; you had to utter only the deepest truths within you. No other human being could be so silent and remain so poised and calm in silence.

While Ellis was preparing tea in the kitchen he left me to look over his library and the most recent news from America. He had laid out and marked certain pertinent items which he thought might not have come to my attention. This, I later found, was one of his most endearing characteristics. He always entered into the life of the other person in little details, never forgetting even the kind of bread or olives, fruits or wines, you preferred. His detachment was not incompatible with sympathy.

Soon appeared a large tray, laden with tea, cakes, and bread and butter, and we sat down before the humming flame and talked and talked; and as we talked we wove into our lives an intangible web of mutual interests. I began to realize then that the men who are truly great are the easiest to meet and understand. After those first few moments I was at peace, and content as I had never been before. Entirely unaware of the reverence he aroused, Ellis pasted no labels on himself, had no poses, made no effort to impress. He was simply, quite un-self-consciously, what he was.

When he asked me to describe the details of how I had locked horns with the law, I spoke glowingly of the heartening approval which the Drysdales had just given me. He did not show the same enthusiasm; in fact he was rather concerned, and not so ready with praise for my lack of respect for the established order, believing so strongly in my case that he wanted me to avoid mistakes. I think his influence was always more or less subduing and moderating; he tried to get me, too, to take the middle road. Though he occasionally alluded to some of the more amusing phases of the trial of his own work, he had pushed it into the back of his mind.

This monumental study intended for doctors and psychologists had been projected when Ellis was a medical student of nineteen. But his short practice of medicine, his editing of the Mermaid Series of Old British Dramatists, and the preparation of several sociological treatises, had intervened before, in 1898, Sexual Inversion, the first volume, had appeared. George Bedborough, printer, had been arrested for selling a copy, and charged with “publishing an obscene libel with the intention of corrupting the laws of Her Majesty’s subjects.” Ellis, the scholar, preferred to ignore controversy; the martyr’s crown would not have coincided favorably with calm and dispassionate research. Judging it merely stupid of the British Government to have pushed the case to trial, he suspended the sale of the volume immediately, so disappointed that his own countrymen did not understand his motives that he stated then and there he would not have his other volumes published in England, and he never has.

He, beyond any other person, has been able to clarify the question of sex, and free it from the smudginess connected with it from the beginning of Christianity, raise it from the dark cellar, set it on a higher plane. That has been his great contribution. Like an alchemist, he transmuted the psychic disturbance which had followed my reading of his books into a spiritual essence.

We had many things to discuss, but suddenly it dawned upon me that I must have outstayed my time. Seven o’clock struck before I realized how late it was. It had seemed so short to me.

I was not excited as I went back through the heavy fog to my own dull little room. My emotion was too deep for that. I felt as though I had been exalted into a hitherto undreamed-of world.

Some of my new friends, Guy Aldred, Henry Sara, and Rose Witcop, invited me to tea with them Christmas Eve. Rose was deliberate in her movements, tall and dark, with straight black hair falling low over her forehead and caught at the nape of the neck. She and Guy were both ardent pacifists. A few days earlier I had overheard them reproving their son, aged six, for suggesting that Santa Claus bring him some lead soldiers. He had seen uniforms in every street and toy replicas in every shop window; all little boys were having them. I had not been able to send many presents to my children, and before leaving the house slipped into his room. He was sound asleep and his clothes were stretched out neatly at the foot of his bed. Outraging my own principles I tucked a box of soldiers under the blanket so that he might see this martial array the first thing in the morning.

Rose and Guy were thoroughly disgusted with me.

Much that evening combined to stir me. Carol singers paraded Torrington Square, group after group lifting plaintive voices in Good King Wenceslas and We Three Kings of Orient Are. I was headachy but I went out and strolled about the streets to see Merrie England at Yuletide. I had on so much clothing that I could scarcely walk, and still I was icy cold. It was just about a year since I had left France with the children, never to be reunited with Bill.

Since I am slow in my decisions and cannot separate myself from past emotions quickly, all breaches must come gradually. A measure of frustration is an inevitable accompaniment to endeavor. My marriage had not been unhappy; I had not let it be. It had not failed because of lack of love, romance, wealth, respect, or any of those qualities which were supposed to cause marital rifts, but because the interests of each had widened beyond those of the other. Development had proceeded so fast that our lives had diverged, due to that very growth which we had sought for each other. I could not live with a human being conscious that my necessities were thwarting or dwarfing his progress.

It had been a crowded year, encompassing the heights and depths of feeling. Christmas Eve was too much for me. I went back again and sat, wondering whether the children were well and contented. The next morning came a cable from them, flowers from Bill, and a nice note from Havelock Ellis.

Thereafter Havelock aided me immensely in my studies by guiding my reading. Tuesdays and Fridays were his days at the British Museum, and he often left little messages at my seat, listing helpful articles or offering suggestions as to books which might assist me in the particular aspect I was then engaged upon.

If when traveling about with him on the tram, going to a concert, shopping for coffee and cigarettes outside the Museum, a thought came to him, he would pull out a bit of paper and jot down notes. That was how he compiled his material for books, gathering it piecemeal and storing it away in envelopes. Anything on the dance went into the dance envelope, music into music, and so on. As soon as any one became full enough to attract his attention, he took it out and started to make something of it.

Sometimes we dined together at a Soho restaurant; occasionally I had tea at his flat. In his combined kitchen and dining room, warmed by a coal stove, he did his work, and there also he cooked meals for which he marketed himself. He was proud of being able to lay a fire with fewer sticks and less paper than an expert charwoman, and once said he would rather win praise for the creation of a salad than of an essay.

One of the four rooms was set aside for the use of his wife, Edith. She preferred the country and lived on her farm in Cornwall, whereas Havelock loved to be in the city; though he was not a part of it, he liked to hear it going on about him. Whenever she came to town she found all her books and possessions inviolate; whenever he went to Cornwall he found everything ready for him. Either of them could, on impulse, board a train without baggage and in a few hours be at home.

Edith was short and stocky, high-colored, curly-haired, with mystical blue eyes but accompanying them a strain of practicality. She could run the farm, look after the livestock, and dispose of her products. Her vitality was so great that it sought other outlets in writing fiction.

Bernard Shaw was once trying to find his way to the Ellis farm and stopped at a cottage to inquire whether he was on the right road. The goodwife could not tell him.

“But I know Mr. and Mrs. Ellis live near here.”

She kept protesting nobody of that name was in the neighborhood until Shaw pointed to a house which appeared as though it might be the one. “Who lives there?”

“Two strangers.”

“What do they do?”

“Oh, the man he writes out of other folks’ books, but she writes out of her head.”

The person who saw most of Havelock was Olive Schreiner, a long-standing friend of his and of Edith. I was delighted at the chance of meeting the author of Woman and Labor and of another favorite, The Story of an African Farm. She had just come to England for the first time in twenty-five years and been caught in the War.

Knowing Havelock to be a philosopher, I had expected him to be an elderly man, but, despite his white hair, had found him young, physically and mentally. Olive Schreiner’s writings were so alive that I had visualized a young woman. Instead, although her hair was black, her square and stout Dutch body was old and spread. She had, perhaps, been partly aged by the frightful asthma from which she had suffered for so many years. The effect was enhanced by the dark surroundings of the shabby hotel in which I first saw her.

Certainly another contributing factor was her despondence over the War. Although her mother was English, her father Dutch, and she a British subject, her Germanic name was causing her the most harrowing complications. Fellow hotel guests of her own sex, when they spied her name on the register or heard her paged, insisted to the manager that either she should be removed or they were going to seek quarters elsewhere. She was literally being hounded from place to place.

Possibly Olive felt the tragedy of the War more than any other person I met in London at this time. She had never believed that “the boys would be out of the trenches by Christmas,” or that business as usual could continue much longer. Already she had seen the horrors of armed conflict in South Africa; it seemed to begin lightly, but it did not end that way. She feared the whole world might be trapped in this one, that internationalism and the peace movement were practically finished, and that a whole new generation had to be born before we could recover what we had lost. She appeared to me then unduly disheartened; it was only later when her words came true that I comprehended how accurate were her prophecies.

Better than any living being Olive understood Havelock. I realized this during a conversation between herself and Edith. The latter had been in the United States lecturing on three writers: her husband, James Hinton, whom he admired tremendously, and Edward Carpenter. Her reception had convinced her the name of Ellis had gone beyond the borders of England, and she wanted him to return with her the following year to reap some of the reward of the respect thousands of Americans had for him.

Havelock was terror-stricken, first at the idea of coming to a new country, and second at the mere mention of speaking in public. He could imagine no tortures worse than these. But in order to please Edith, whom he loved dearly, and also because her persistency and determination were so great that he found it hard to oppose her, he agreed to leave it to the three of us.

Edith and I had called on Olive to talk it over. She, as usual, had just recently moved. This time she was more cheerful, and after tea we took up the momentous question of the destiny of another individual. Edith, with her customary fire and fervor, started in to persuade Olive, Havelock’s lifelong friend, and me, his new friend, that going to America would be a crowning glory for him. She entreated our aid in making him decide to do so.

Olive characteristically listened with rapt attention until Edith had finished. Then she turned to me. “What do you think Havelock should do?”

I, knowing how much Americans expected of a speaker in the way of voice, personality, and gift of oratory, and also how easily they could be disappointed unless gestures and external appearance fulfilled their anticipations, concluded he would not find this crown of glory or this universal acclaim, and that he would probably return disillusioned after the first fanfare of publicity. I said, without giving my reasons, “I don’t think he should go.”

“Have either of you asked Havelock what he wants to do?” Olive questioned.

“I have,” said Edith, “and he doesn’t want to.”

“Then that settles the matter entirely,” replied Olive. “Nobody has the authority to make another do what he doesn’t want to, no matter how good you or I or any of us think it might be for him. I myself will never take a step that my instinct or intuition tells me not to. I am guided wholly by that instinct, and if I should awaken tomorrow morning and my inner voice told me to go to the top of the Himalayas, I would pack up and go.”

This brief speech determined the question for Havelock, his right to stay snugly in London, and to give up all the adventure Edith had planned for him.

Olive, in her commonly dark mood, was encouraged more by the work being done for women in birth control than by anything else. She herself, who had had but one child, which had died, realized its significance. The last time I saw her she put both arms around me and said, “We may never meet again, but your endeavor is the bright star shining through the black clouds of war.”

She was not able to go back to South Africa until the War was over. One morning, not long afterwards, she was found dead in her bed. According to her instructions, her little child and beloved dog were removed from their old resting places and Kaffirs carried the three of them to the peak of a mountain outside Queenstown, where they have since reposed on their high eminence.

Ellis has been called the greatest living English gentleman. But England alone cannot claim him; he belongs to all mankind. I define him as one who radiates truth, energy, and beauty. I see him in a realm above and beyond the shouting and the tumult. Captains and kings come and go. Lilliputian warriors strut their hour, and boundary lines between nations are made and unmade. Although he takes no active share in this external trafficking, he does not dwell apart in an ivory tower of his own construction.

This Olympian seems to be aloof from the pain of the world, yet he has penetrated profoundly into the persistent problems of the race. Nothing human is alien to his sympathy. His knowledge is broad and deep; his wisdom even deeper. He makes no strident, blatant effort to cry aloud his message, but gradually and in ever-increasing numbers, men and women pause to listen to his serene voice.

Here is a phenomenon more amazing than the achievements of radio-activity. Despite all the obstacles and obstructions that have hindered his expression, his truth has filtered through to minds ready to receive it. His philosophy, if it can be reduced to an essence, is that of life more abundant—attained through a more complete understanding of ourselves and an unruffled charity to all.

To Havelock Ellis we owe our concept of that Kingdom of God within us, that inner world which hides all our inherent potentialities for joy as well as suffering. Thanks to him we realize that happiness must be the fruit of an attitude towards life, that it is in no way dependent upon the rewards or the gifts of fortune. Like St. Francis of Assisi, he teaches the beauty of nature, of his brother the sun and his sister the moon, of birds and fish and animals, and all the pageantry of the passing seasons.

I have never felt about any other person as I do about Havelock Ellis. To know him has been a bounteous privilege; to claim him friend my greatest honor.

Chapter Twelve
STORK OVER HOLLAND

Day after day the attendants at the British Museum piled books and pamphlets on the table before my seat. As I pored over the vital statistics of Europe it seemed to me that chiefly in the Netherlands was there a force operating towards constructive race building. The Dutch had long since adopted a common-sense attitude on the subject, looking upon having a baby as an economic luxury—something like a piano or an automobile that had to be taken care of afterwards.

The Drysdales often mentioned the great work done by Dr. Aletta Jacobs of Amsterdam and Dr. Johannes Rutgers of the Hague. The story of Dr. Jacobs’ conquest of nearly insuperable obstacles to a medical career was particularly appealing. Born in 1854 in the Province of Groningen, she was the eighth child of a physician who, on eight hundred dollars a year, had to support his wife and eleven children. Even before adolescence she had asked defiantly, “What’s the use of brains if you’re born a girl?” She was determined to become a doctor like her father, though no woman had ever been admitted to Groningen University. Her spirit was so indomitable that when at seventeen she had passed the examinations and demanded entrance, she had been permitted to listen for a year, and then allowed to register as a permanent student.

In 1878 Dr. Jacobs had finished her studies in medicine at Amsterdam University and gone to London, where she had attended the Besant and Bradlaugh trial, met the Fabians, met the Malthusians, become an ardent suffragist. This first woman physician in the Netherlands had returned to Amsterdam and there had braved the disapproval of her father’s friends by practicing her profession and by opening a free clinic for poor women and children, where she gave contraceptive advice and information, the first time this had ever been done in the world.

Within a few years and within a radius of five miles the proportion of stillbirths and abortions as well as venereal disease had started to decline, children were filling the schools, people were leaving their canal boats to go into agriculture.

The Netherlands being such a small country, where one person’s business was everybody’s business, such changes could not escape notice. Just about this time Dr. Charles R. Drysdale, then President of the English League, had been invited to address an International Medical Congress held in Amsterdam. The results of Dr. Jacobs’ clinic were so apparent that immediately thereafter the Dutch Neo-Malthusian League had been formed and thirty-four physicians had joined it. When other centers were established, purely for consultation, the word clinic was applied to them also. In 1883 Dr. Mensinga, a gynecologist of Flensburg, Germany, had published a description of a contraceptive device called a diaphragm pessary, which he and Dr. Jacobs had perfected. Dr. and Madame Hoitsema Rutgers had taken charge of the League in 1899 with such success that the work had spread through that well-ordered kingdom. In recognition of its extensive and valuable accomplishment, Queen Wilhelmina had presented it with a medal of honor and a charter, and counted it one of the great public utilities.

In my statistical investigations I paid special attention to the birth and mortality rates of the Netherlands to see how they had been affected over this period of thirty-five years. They showed the lowest maternal mortality, whereas the United States was at the top of the list; three times more mothers’ lives were being saved in the little dike country than in my native land. Furthermore, the infant death rate of Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and the Hague, the three cities in which the League was most active, were the lowest of all those in the world.

During the same period the death rate had been cut in half, but, surprisingly, I found that the birth rate had been reduced only a third. In other words, the death rate had fallen faster than the birth rate, which meant that the population of the Netherlands was increasing more rapidly than that of any other country in Europe.

I had much difficulty in reconciling these figures with my preconceived idea that birth control would automatically bring about a decrease in population. Since it was increasing, then perhaps birth control was not, after all, the answer to the economic international problem. If this were true all my calculations were going to be upset.

Impatient to go to the Netherlands and dig out the real facts, not only from Dutch records but from personal observation, I decided quietly—most of my decisions in those days were quiet ones—to cross the Channel. This implied possible unwelcome encounters with inquisitive officials, floating bombs, submarines, and every type of inconvenience and delay, but my eagerness made me discount the hindrances.

I applied, to the Dutch Consul for a visa to Bertha Watson’s passport.

“Eighty cents, please,” and no questions asked.

So that I should not have to return to London before going on to Paris I presented myself at the French Consulate also. I waited two hours. “Two dollars, please,” and still no queries.

I attached myself to the end of the long line waiting at Victoria Station to have passports inspected, and was soon safely on the train for Folkestone. We were late when we reached the Channel. Again we lined up for inspection. Many Belgian women with four or five children were going back to their people; the sleepy little ones and the tired women settled on the platform to rest until some had gone through. Two detectives glanced casually at my passport, and then allowed me to enter the official chamber. Inspections had been growing steadily more strict; this was the ultimate test. There sat in a row three officers in mufti, well-fed and brusque with authority. I handed my passport to the first, who looked me up and down as though I were a treacherous enemy, then pushed it over to the next. This man too viewed me with suspicion and mistrust, and pulled out a notebook, scanning the names to see whether mine were on the proscribed list. The last of the three, who was to make the final decision—crisp, trim, and hard as nails in voice and manner—demanded, “What are you going to the Continent for, Madam? Another joy ride? You Americans must think that’s all this War amounts to. Can you produce any good reason for letting you through?”

Fortunately I was prepared for such a contingency. I took out of my purse a letter from Bernarr MacFadden asking me to answer certain questions in the form of articles for Physical Culture such as the relation between the unfit and population growth. I offered this document while those in line behind me waited restively. He read it meticulously, taking longer than necessary as it seemed to me in my nervousness. At last he folded it neatly and said, “A good work, this. Too bad someone hasn’t done it before.”

Then he put his last official stamp on my various papers and I passed through for the gangplank.

No complications presented themselves at the Hague, and early on a January morning in 1915 I registered at an inexpensive hotel. It was comforting to hear a radiator sizzling once more. I joined the other guests who were cheerfully breakfasting together en famille at a single table, and, since I spoke neither Dutch nor German, silently munched my black bread and cheese, downed the excellent coffee, and watched interestedly. Though stolid in appearance like all the Dutch, they were friendly.

I did not try to telephone Dr. Rutgers. Instead, though it was not yet nine o’clock, I hailed a taxi and held out to the driver a slip of paper on which I had written the street and number. In response to my ring at the door to which I was delivered, a tiny square window in the upper part opened mysteriously and a face—wizened, aged, and inquisitive—was framed in the aperture. It remained while I explained my mission. Apparently trust was inspired because, my story finished, the door swung wide and the face, materialized into Dr. Rutgers, ushered me into the library, where I waited until he came back in his street clothing. Then we went out to a second breakfast in a near-by café.

The doctor turned out to be a kindly little man, whose wife was now an invalid. It was hard for him to talk English. Most of the Dutch had four languages, but only those who had lived in England spoke English well. The difficulties, however, lessened as we nibbled brioches and sipped coffee after coffee until noon. Warming to my narrative of the battle in the United States, he shook his head when he thought of what I might have to face in the future, and expressed more concern over my predicament and more heartfelt sympathy with my having had to leave the children behind than anybody I had yet met. He was the first person to whom I had been able to overflow about my personal sadness.

On his part Dr. Rutgers described his hardships in keeping the clinics open and, through the League, preventing adverse legislation. Neo-Malthusianism had never been popular anywhere, no matter what the proof in the lessening of human misery and suffering. Dr. Rutgers had borne alone the brunt of all the criticism directed at his society.

The Rutgers method for establishing new clinics had resulted in a sound system for dealing with the birth rate. The men and women who acted as his councilors understood that a rising birth rate, no matter where in the country, would soon be followed by a high infant mortality rate. Accordingly, they reported this quickly to the society, which sent a midwife or practical nurse, trained in the technique standardized by Dr. Rutgers, into the congested sector to set up a demonstration clinic. She usually took an apartment with two extra rooms, one for waiting, the other a modestly equipped office like that of any country midwife.

Her duty was to go into the home where a child had died, inquire into the cause, and give friendly advice regarding the mother’s own health. She also encouraged her not to have another baby until the condition of ignorance, poverty, or disease, whichever it might be, had either been bettered or eliminated. Whenever four had been born into such a family this advice was made more emphatic.

As soon as Dr. Rutgers had explained his policy to me I had that most important answer to the puzzling and bothersome problem of the increasing population in the Netherlands brought about by birth control. It was proper spacing. The numbers in a family or the numbers in a nation might be increased just as long as the arrival of children was not too rapid to permit those already born to be assured of livelihood and to become assimilated in the community.

Dr. Rutgers suggested I come to his clinic the next day and learn his technique. He was at the moment training two midwives preparatory to starting a new center in the outskirts of the Hague. Under his tutelage I began to realize the necessity for individual instruction to patients if the method of contraception prescribed was to fulfill its function. I wondered at the ease with which this could be done. Very soon even I myself, unable to talk to these women in their own tongue, instructed seventy-five.

I used to bombard the little man with questions concerning each case. I took issue with him over his autocratic system of dictating without explanation. Merely saying, “This is what you do. Do this always,” had to my mind no educational value.

“Don’t you think it would be a good idea to tell your patients what you’re aiming at and why?” I asked.

“No, can’t take time. They must do what they’re told.”

His was the doctor’s point of view with which I was familiar, but with which I could not agree.

It also seemed to me a mistake to regard the women merely as units in a sociological scheme for bettering the human race. On the file cards were inscribed only names and addresses; no case histories. I wanted to know so much more about them. How many children had they already had? How many had they lost? What were their husbands’ wages? What was the spacing in each family, and what were the effects? How successful had been the method of contraception?

If this information had then been recorded, the birth control movement could later have cited chapter and verse in its own support.

After my morning’s work with Dr. Rutgers I usually repaired to the Central Bureau of Statistics with my three-in-one translator, interpreter, and guide. My findings were that in all cities and districts where clinics had been established the figures showed improvement—labor conditions were better and children were going to schools, which had raised their educational standards. Professional prostitutes were few, and even these were German, French, Belgian, or English, because Dutch women were encouraged to marry early. It made a difference. From the eugenic standpoint there had been a rapid increase in the stature of the Dutch conscript as shown by army records. The data proved conclusively that a controlled birth rate was as beneficial as I had imagined it might be, growing out of the first clinic initiated by the enterprise of Dr. Aletta Jacobs.

I was, of course, looking forward to meeting Dr. Jacobs, and sent her a note asking for the privilege of an interview. A reply came, curt and blunt; she would not see me. She was not concerned with my studies or with me, because it was a doctor’s subject and one in which laymen should not interfere. Already I had come to the same conclusion in principle, but was dismayed at this first rebuff I had encountered. I was also hurt as much as I could be hurt during that period when I seemed to be one mass of aches, physically and mentally. Not until much later did I learn that to be a nurse was no recommendation in Europe, where she was more like an upper servant, a household drudge who took care of the sick instead of the kitchen.

For two months I wandered about the Netherlands, visiting clinics and independent nurses in the Hague, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam. In spite of the League propaganda against commercialization I found many shops in which a woman, if she so desired, could purchase contraceptive supplies as casually as you might buy a toothbrush. Unfortunately in some of them she could be examined and fitted by saleswomen who had but little training in technique and scant knowledge of anatomy. Although the Dutch League had several thousand members—each one active, writing to papers, talking to friends, attending meetings—and although fifty-four clinics were in operation, many well-informed people did not know anything about them. More surprising still, the medical profession as a whole appeared to be utterly ignorant of the directed birth control work that was going on. It did not, therefore, seem extraordinary that no inkling of all this—either clinics or contraceptive methods—had ever reached the United States, and practically no attempt to copy it been made in England.

Even in this neutral country signs of war were everywhere. Along the way were soldiers in uniform, armed and keeping guard, and at the stations Red Cross wagons were in readiness. Feeling among the Dutch was greatly mixed: Queen Wilhelmina’s husband was a German; the army and the aristocracy were for the Triple Alliance; the poorer classes were more influenced by the sufferings of the thousands and thousands of Belgians who had flocked to Dutch firesides for food and shelter.

Nowhere else was I so impressed with the tragedies of war. Often about four o’clock I had kaffee klatch at the home of some Dutch lady who sat, very proper, while the maid served coffee, the best in Europe, from the big, white, porcelain pot. I suspected most of the morning had been spent in supervising preparations for the delicious food.

At one of these afternoons I was introduced to five German delegates who had come to attend the Women’s Peace Conference. They found it difficult to forgive the stories of German atrocities which England had allowed to circulate. I ventured to inquire how they could disprove them, especially in view of the report of the Bryce Commission. “Was not war cruel and savage, and might not these things have happened?”

“Yes, yes,” one said, “but hundreds of our German boys are brought back to us, dead and alive, whose noses and ears have been cut off, put in packages, and taken to headquarters for reward. However, we would not dream of accusing the French or the English soldiers of such barbarisms. We know that because their code forbids them to do these things themselves they have called in the Moors and the Gurkhas and the savages from Africa.”

Unable to comprehend how those towards whom they felt such friendliness could return this sentiment with hatred, the women said to me in bewilderment, “Tell us really why people who do not know us hate us as they do.” The dignity of their sorrow, the heavy burden of grief under which they labored, the very calmness and fairness with which they bore it, had a quieting effect.

The Netherlands was the place to regain a certain sense of balance, especially if you had passed through England, where feeling was so embittered. I overheard in Amsterdam a most illuminating conversation between two Englishmen and a German. After going over the pros and cons, they shook hands all around, agreeing that six months after the War was settled German and English trade would be hand in glove, trials and grievances forgotten.

To go directly to France from the Netherlands was next to impossible; nor did I find it easy to travel roundabout by way of England, owing to the recently instituted German submarine blockade. Then at last I heard that a freighter was to be sent to London to test it. Day after day I went to the docks for news, and employed the interval with pleasant social contacts.

Rather than have a cocktail before lunch or dinner the Dutch assembled at their favorite restaurants for apéritifs. The glass, with winged rim spreading out about half an inch from the top, was filled to overflowing with Bols. You were not supposed to touch it at first; instead you leaned over and sort of scooped a little with your mouth before picking it up and enjoying it. The French apéritifs were pleasant and mild, but Holland gin was so strong and raw that I marveled at the way they could take it with a smile. I was definitely unequal to the art.

One evening I was invited to play billiards with a Dutchman, an Englishman, and a German. I accepted as naturally as for a game of whist. Afterwards the Dutchman said that, though no respectable Dutch wife could have played billiards in that room without later being approached or insulted, an American woman could do anything and still not lose caste. She minded her own affairs, paid her own bills, and even if she were seen on the streets late at night without an escort everyone knew she must be on legitimate business.

Then the Englishman spoke to the same effect. He said you found the American woman in all sorts of out-of-the-way and often questionable places, but you needed only to look into her candid face to find an answer to what she was doing there. European women owed her a great deal for her pioneering on the Continent. In England it was a common sight to see the most estimable women smoking cigarettes in all fashionable restaurants and hotels just as in America.

“Just as in America!” I gasped, remembering my astonishment at having seen women smoke publicly in London. “I’m sure there must be some mistake. Ladies are not supposed to smoke in America. As an example to Europe they’re a failure, because they haven’t even won that liberty for themselves.”

This was a surprise to them all. But the Dutchman rallied to the defense, shifting the subject. “Nevertheless, she is the best-dressed woman in the world.”

“What about the Parisian?” I exclaimed.

“I except none. I have been over half the globe. I have paid particular attention to foreigners, their customs, their education, their tastes, and I have been convinced that today the Parisian woman has had to yield to the American in respect to clothes and fashion. Paris designs are intended for the United States, not for France or England. The Frenchwoman may be trim and neat and jaunty, but it takes a woman of wealth in France to be in the fashion, while in New York, every shopgirl wears cheap editions of the latest styles.”

The German was deep in thought during these speeches, resting his chin in his hand. Aroused by the striking of the clock he suddenly interpolated, “Why, you can always tell an American couple in Europe. The woman is too bossy, she leads the way, she does all the talking and ordering, while the man trails on behind her and silently pays the bills.”

“Well, you must have seen him when he was on his good behavior,” I suggested, “for at home he is not so silent about paying the bills.”

Unabashed, the German continued, “My brother who has long lived in America says the woman there is the head of the house, that she manages all; her word is law. Is this true?”

He seemed greatly disturbed, and I was about to reply, but the Briton rose to speak. “Of course she is, because she’s far superior. Why, American men have nothing in common with the women. They are coarse, blunt, crude, while the women are finely sensitive, exquisite, and courteous. The man has nothing to give his wife but money; he comes home at night and talks business, introduces into his home only friends who will help him out financially, and when his wife discusses music, art, or literature, he falls asleep and snores. That’s why she brings her fortune into Europe for a husband. She finds her equal in the Frenchman, the Italian, the Spaniard, but particularly in the Englishman. For every Englishman is a gentleman, and every American woman is a lady!”

The German added a final convulsive note to the settlement of the woman problem by adding, “Is it true the American husband not only washes the dishes but pushes the perambulator?”

“Why, yes, he often does that.”

“That is terr-r-r-rrible,” he answered, the r’s rolling out, and his hands clasped tight to his temples.

And at that we all departed for our rest. But a few days later one or another of the quartet was demonstrated right. News came that my boat was about to leave at once, and I sought out the Captain. At the first intimation of my errand, he waved his hands and said, “No! No! No women!”

I kept on talking until I made him admit he was interested in America, in diet, and in population. When I found he was a reader of Physical Culture I produced my open sesame letter and again it was more potent than a passport. I stood reasoning with him on the pier, until finally he said, “There’s a rule to take no women. But you Americans are not like others. I think I can put you in.” I was allowed to embark.

During the voyage we were most careful, anchoring at dusk, and when it was light keeping sharp watch for floating mines which might have broken loose from their moorings. It took us two nights and a day to make a crossing that ordinarily occupied only nine or ten hours.

I had plenty of time to sort out my impressions and conclusions regarding the birth control movement. They had been revolutionized. I could no longer look upon it as a struggle for free speech, because I now realized that it involved much more than talks, books, or pamphlets. These were not enough.

Personal instruction had been proved to be the best method, and I concluded clinics were the proper places from which to disseminate information but also, admirable as they were in the Netherlands, they ought not to be placed in the hands of unskilled midwives, social workers, or even nurses. These could, of course, instruct after a fashion, but only doctors had the requisite knowledge of anatomy and physiology and training in gynecology to examine properly and prescribe accurately.

I had a new goal, but how difficult and how distant its attainment was to be I never dreamed.

Chapter Thirteen
THE PEASANTS ARE KINGS

I stayed but a few days in London and then went on to Paris, a gloomy, gloomy city because so many people were garbed in black. Jaurès had been shot. The capital had already been moved to Bordeaux and suspicion and hysteria were in the air. When I went within easy driving distance of Paris for lunch or dinner, I could see the barbed-wire entanglements and gaps where the trees had been taken down for better visibility.

I renewed what contacts I could. But everybody was too busy now with the War to think of such a subject as family limitation, which to the French had never been anything to get excited about because they were too used to it. Furthermore, the other side of the question was now presenting itself. They were beginning to ask, “If we had a larger population, could we not have held the Germans back?”

Again I saw Victor Dave. He was literally starving to death, supported only by friendly gifts of a few francs here or there which he always accepted with laughter; what difference did it make to him whether he lived a few days longer? I never saw greater gallantry than was manifested by his smile and the shrug of his shoulders as he sauntered to work with two pieces of dry bread in his pocket.

The libraries were shut. Paris was no place for me, but I could see something of Spain, and Portet was waiting for me there. After the customary passport argument and some surprise at the cost of the sleeping-car arrangements I left for the South. It was four o’clock in the morning as the express pulled into Cerbère, the station on the border, where the French viewed all passengers with caution and mistrust.

“Cerbère!” shouted the guard, and, “Passports!” shouted an inspector following on his heels. Mine was not quite right. The train moved out leaving me and my baggage desolate on the platform. In the course of several interviews with various officials I made out that my passport lacked a particular signature, and Perpignan was the nearest town where it could be secured.

I paced up and down the tiny station watching for the train back. As usual, peasants were asleep in the waiting room, some on the floor, others sitting on bags and parcels. We were so close under the shadow of the Pyrenees that they almost seemed to be toppling over us.

From the train window I looked out on the beauty of dawn and the rising sun, a scene of such magnificence that it repaid me in pleasure for all the trouble. To one side was the far stretch of the Mediterranean, as magic a blue as I had ever imagined it. To the other were the majestic, rugged mountains with snow-capped peaks and bases covered with pink, flowering apricots. Little villages of white houses and red-tile roofs nestled in the valleys and serpentine roads coiled up the hillsides, where thousands of acres of grape vines, trim and well cared-for, bespoke the wine country.

From Perpignan I telegraphed Portet, “Live or die, sink or swim, survive or perish, I’ll be in Barcelona tomorrow,” and boarded the train once more with a light heart and my papers, three of them.

Already in the minute second-class compartment were a large, middle-aged woman whose sweet face was framed in a black mantilla, a small gray-haired man, evidently her husband, and a younger one of about twenty-five. It would have been crowded enough as it was, but they had brought with them packages and bundles that filled the space to the roof. However, they squeezed out enough room for me to curl myself up and go to sleep.

I awakened with a start, hearing again the fateful word, “Passports!” and found the agent examining those of my fellow passengers. I opened the bag where I had always carried my credentials, but they were not there. The officer stood waiting. “I have my papers all signed,” I said, “but I cannot find them. Go on to the others and when you come back I’ll have them.”

Since he could not understand English my speech had little effect; he continued to wait. I began turning things out—letters, books, pamphlets of all kinds and descriptions, groping through every bag, in and out of every package. My traveling companions gazed on the commotion sympathetically and drew their legs aside so I could look under the seat.

At this point another uniform approached and the two consulted together. Then one of them blew a whistle and at its loud and shrill summons five men came running. The biggest of them threw wide the compartment door, to indicate I must get off. They were jabbering at me in French and Spanish; I was talking English. All of us were going as fast as we could. First I jumped up and expostulated, then sat down and waved my hands saying, “Go away.”

Finally there appeared a young Spanish student who could speak English. He conveyed to me that the train was already late on my account; I must get off so the other passengers could catch the Barcelona Express.

I would not be bothered any more. “So do I want to catch it,” I exclaimed. “Why don’t they move on? I have a passport and I’ll find it in a few minutes. I’ve paid for my ticket to Port Bou and I’m not going back. You can stop the train here for a week if you want to—I shan’t budge!”

The gendarmes were standing expectantly on the platform below. The interpreter shrugged his shoulders, “She’ll do as she says. She’s an American woman and she’ll never come down. You might as well move on.”

Nevertheless, the big fellow with the long black cape resolutely seized one bag after another and handed them out. Underneath the last one were disclosed the missing papers. Straightway everybody was wreathed in smiles. The bags were restored and the agents apologized, thanked me profusely, and departed.

The passengers shook hands with me all around.

Just before we reached Port Bou one of them peered out the window, rippled off some words to the others in Catalan. The whole compartment was as though electrified. In a few seconds parcels were being torn apart and boxes ripped open. The Señora removed her mantilla and placed a smart new hat on her head, then crowned that with another, and another, and another, until finally she was wearing four. Yards of beautiful and exquisite lace went inside her bodice. She took off her outer skirt and swathed her hips in lengths of cloth. The men stuffed their pockets and the lining of their coats. At last there were only a few rolls of braid left. The younger one lifted his trousers, wound them round and round his legs and tucked the ends in his garters. Then through the window went crumpled paper, boxes, string. Finally, as the train was slowing up they put on light-buff, linen dusters. My eyes popped out of my head to see these simple people suddenly transformed into stylish stouts returning from Paris.

The two men nonchalantly smoked cigars as though nothing out of the way were going on while the customs officials went through their bags. Everybody concerned knew they were merchants smuggling goods, but even the authorities regarded it as legitimate for them to bring in as much as they could carry on their persons. As they left the shed where my belongings were still being scrambled over, they glanced commiseratingly at me and glowered indignation at the officials that a lady should be so served.

I had expected to find in Barcelona street-corner Carmens with hibiscus blossoms in their hair, wandering guitarists and singers. But the only music that passed my window oozed out mechanically from two-wheeled, highly-ornamented hurdy-gurdies. Nevertheless, the city was full of color. Strange little wagons with canvas covers, looking as though they were part of a caravan, rattled over the cobbles. There was something gorgeously elegant about the members of the Guardia Civil, grandly mounted on Arabian horses, their mustachios fiercely bristling, their uniforms ablaze with scarlet and yellow topped off with black patent leather hats. The red Phrygian caps of the porters seemed almost too realistic a reminder of revolution. The workers still wore their crimson-fringed sashes, their blue French blouses, and white rope-soled shoes. The men, as a rule, were of slight frame, but conveyed an impression of strength like steel rods; the women, invariably black-clad except for the very young, were fat and waddling.

Numberless bells were constantly ringing in numberless churches. Everywhere, like crows, were priests in long swinging robes, shovel hats, and dirty bare toes sticking through their sandals. On the corners of the central streets I saw them occupying the booths of the professional correspondents who for ten cents read and answered letters for the illiterate.

Although Barcelona, capital of the separatist province of Catalonia, was the progressive, industrial center of Spain, it was not darkened by a mêlée of belching chimneys. The hundreds of factories were kept out of sight, each one isolated in the fields, leaving the city free from traffic, smoke, and the whir of machinery. The palms in the squares and parks were lovely, but set side by side with the new was the startling antiquity of the old town, congested and melancholy.

Overlooking the sea at the end of the Rambla, decorated along its length with flower stalls and trees, loud with birds, stood a tall column bearing the statue of Columbus. Around the base were scenes portraying various incidents of the voyage to America, each represented by small images cast in bronze, all beautiful to the last detail. But the effect was greatly spoiled because nearly every one remaining had a leg, arm, foot, or even head gone. After looking at this for some time and pondering over the wherefore, I concluded that figures so strongly made and set had not easily been removed, and decided it must have something to do with the Spanish-American War. When I asked my Spanish friends whether I had guessed correctly, their only explanation was that ruffians had doubtless done it for sport.

However, after I had left the country I received verification of my supposition. The monument had been stoned in ’98, but no Spaniard would ever have admitted this fact to any American; it might hurt the feelings of the visitor even to mention the unpleasantness.

I began to study Spanish with a teacher, but I was not nearly far enough advanced to be able to get anywhere in my investigations. Unfortunately also, although men thronged the cafés in droves, they kept their wives in semi-Oriental seclusion and even mentally imposed their deep-rooted ideas of the isolation of women on foreigners. I could not violate this custom by going about alone, because I was a guest. As a result Portet, who was a busy man himself, provided me with a succession of male escorts.

Towards the end of a certain afternoon, tired and footsore, I was sitting with one of these accommodating gentlemen at a sidewalk table sipping an apéritif—a delicious French vermouth supplemented by olives stuffed with anchovies. Bootblacks were making their customary rounds of the patrons, and the men were having their shoes cleaned. Since I had been walking about a great deal, mine were appearing rather scuffed, and I stretched my feet out.

My companion looked at me appealingly. “I beg of you, Señora, not here.”

“Why not?”

But the boy had already brought his little shoe rest, begun spitting on my oxford and rubbing with energy and enthusiasm. Embarrassed, my escort rose and moved away, but, interested in the boy’s novel methods, I kept my eyes on my shoes and was unaware of anything out of the ordinary.

As soon as he had finished I glanced up. There must have been twenty-five men gathered in front of the café, all looking fixedly and intently at this unusual spectacle. When I opened my purse to pay the boy, he doffed his cap with the most gracious gesture. “Señora, this is my pleasure.”

The crowd outside applauded loudly and I felt my face growing hot. Not until they had drifted off did my protector return, wan and pale and extremely agitated. “You see what you’ve done, you see? It will be the joke of Spain! You are the friend of Professor Portet! It is a reflection on him and on his family! You cannot do these things!”

I realized then that I had to be more circumspect.

Portet, who after all was Ferrer’s successor, was watched wherever he went by the secret service, and soon pointed out that I too had a shadow—the man who sat constantly at the little, round, marble-topped table across from my hotel. He said I should always have this individual or one of his mates with me. They were on eight-hour duty, and if I were to go in for any night life I would have three separate ones over the twenty-four hours.

These government agents were to give a regular report of whom I was with and where I went, and, in a sense, they also looked after me, although Portet was never without a revolver in his pocket. In Spain a breath of dampness, and pop—open went the umbrellas all over the place. Once on the way to a benefit for the Belgians Portet and I were waiting for the tram when a spatter of rain came up. His spy rushed to hold an umbrella over him while mine ran after my hat which the wind had saucily blown off my head. Or, if I were taking a train alone, my daytime attendant, having already been in conference with the hotel proprietor, would appear at the ticket office and explain to the clerk where I wanted to go. Had he spoken English I would have doubtless enjoyed his conversation, but Portet warned me it was beneath my dignity even to nod good morning to such a creature.

The frequent friendly attentions of our spies could not draw a word of approval from Portet, though on one occasion they performed a real service. Stopping en route at the American Express Company to get some money, we set out to see a part of the old city new to me. Only a few blocks from the banks and modern shops were center pumps from which women were carrying the water to their homes in tall earthen jugs, in just the same primitive manner as centuries ago. The houses in the red-light district were approached by outside stairways along which were niches enclosing receptacles for holy water, and into these the patrons dipped their fingers religiously, crossed themselves, and entered.

While we were walking through one of the narrow streets, high-walled on either side, suddenly and without reason I felt alarmed, and at the same moment Portet put his hand in his pocket. I glanced behind to find our two familiar guarding shadows gone; I sensed danger ahead, but I, too, tried to act as though everything were all right, as though there were nothing to worry about. We strolled in the same leisurely way to the corner. There in a flash down another street we caught a quick glimpse of struggling figures in the distance. In a moment they disappeared.

We proceeded to our destination—a little café fronting the Mediterranean. As we sat admiring it, I was startled by the sight of our two spies approaching, one of them holding a long, jagged-edged knife. I could not understand his excited words, but his pantomime was so graphically descriptive of a life-and-death struggle that my flesh began to creep and shivers ran up and down my backbone. He paused, bowed, and held out the knife, obviously offering it to me.

Portet, looking very incensed, pulled out his revolver, showed it to the man, and ordered him off. When both had retired, abashed, Portet translated briefly, “He says he has saved your life—that robbers saw you get money at the American Express this morning, and that he knew they were going to attack you. He followed and grabbed the knife away from them. I told him this was unnecessary. The thieves would have got as good as they gave! I can take care of you.”

I thought I ought at least to have given the man a reward, but not Portet, the revolutionary, who was furious at the presumption. He was always angry at them. When he came to lunch with me Palm Sunday, the hotel proprietor leaned over the table confidentially and said, “The government agent wishes to speak to you.”

Portet shouted, “If he comes near, I’ll shoot him! The hound, the worm, the dog! How dare he?”

“Can’t we find out what he wants?” I suggested.

The proprietor returned, “Nothing, Señor, except to ask whether you and the Señora are attending the bullfight this afternoon. His time is up at four o’clock, but if you are going to the plaza de toros, he will be glad to stay on duty another eight hours.”

We went; he came right along and saw the spectacle at government expense.

The cement-like benches of the large amphitheater were crowded to full capacity. The people were gesticulating, chattering volubly as though awaiting something unusual or something good eagerly anticipated. Overhead the monotonous, gray sky seemed like a huge tent, it was so regular and colorless, but every little while a patch of blue appeared. The disposition of the onlookers changed with the same unexpectedness from gladness and joy almost instantaneously into impatience or wrath; at one moment they clapped and praised the matador, at the next they insulted and vilified him.

Most of my Spanish friends hoped I would like a bullfight, although Portet, who thought it barbaric, told me it would probably shock me; every foreigner who saw one simply shut his eyes in horror when some poor old skeleton horse was so gored that its intestines fell out and then were pushed back for its re-entry into the arena. If I were going to be conspicuous by showing my feelings, the populace might turn upon me, and, jokingly, he suggested following the example of Alfonso XIII, who had given his English bride a pair of opera glasses with perfectly black lenses because she was so open and frank at displaying her emotions. She had stood and stared blankly at them all the time, and thus got through her first bullfight.

I promised to be careful, and watched with the naked eye.

The bull came out snorting with passion and vigor, glaring around the arena with a great noble sweep of his head. Suddenly he saw a color he did not like, something inimical. He lunged towards it, and then a medieval-looking figure danced before him with a cape to confuse him. He forgot his original enemy and rushed at the red thing. Another gyrating figure distracted his attention and angered him to wheel towards the new adversary, make another plunge, and again be met by a flash of color.

Over and over and over again this happened. The poor bull’s vitality was finally worn down, not from direct combat, but because of the many bewildering forces that were there to destroy him—the fluttering capes, the kaleidoscopic shapes, the swift-thrown banderillas, and the gleaming lances of the picadors. Then, when he was bleeding and utterly spent, the hero stepped out with a sword to kill him. He was dragged out, sombreros whirled into the arena, shrieks and shouts arose, the band played, a great victory had been achieved.

Within no time, even before another bull appeared, vendors came along with baskets of hot sandwiches made from the barbecued meat of the one just killed.

Not a single word would Portet let me say until we were entirely out of hearing; you could talk freely in Spain against the Church or the priests, but this sacred institution must not be criticized. Passing through my mind was the thought that a bullfight was symbolic of the struggle of the working classes. Strikes, picketing, jails exhausted their energy until they too charged blindly this way and that, always missing the main issue.

Many of my holidays were spent more happily than this. I never tired of the wooded mountains which sheltered Barcelona, most of them having some religious significance. Portet and I went up the funicular to the top of Tibidabo, the exceeding high place where the devil tempted Jesus, showing him in a moment of time the world spread out before him.

Another glorious spring day we twisted up the thirty miles of road to Montserrat, the mountain riven in two at the Crucifixion. It was the quaintest sight to one coming from a land of subways and elevators to watch the donkeys laden with packs on their backs of vegetables, eggs, and butter, and to see their owners straggling beside up and down the hills, masters of at least themselves if not of their donkeys. The breeze blew more chill as we ascended the final slope to the huge monastery at the top. Afterwards night fell, and the moon shone over the huge boulders of towering rocks, and the whispering wind swung from mass to mass and echoed back again whence it came. It was an evening of enchantment.

On making other sorties into the country I perceived an innate intelligence in the most ignorant peasant. The average one could not tell the names of the simplest plants or flowers, but one look from the eye, one tone of the voice, was comprehended in a flash. Even the gypsy children in the outskirts of Barcelona, with their little dirty feet and tattered clothing, who danced weird dances and flattered strangers for pennies, had a natural brightness beyond belief.

But this intelligence was not being directed, and one reason was inherent in the rebellious nature of the Catalan; he would have preferred no system of government at all if that had been possible, for he was restless and tumultuous under restraint.

When I saw children leading the blind about the streets day after day, I asked, “Don’t they have to be in school? Isn’t education made compulsory by the Government?”

I was laughed at. “If the Government sent our children to school, we would know it was the wrong sort of school.”

Parents who could afford it, however, were willing enough to have them go to Ferrer’s schools. Two thirds of the Spanish people had not been able to read or write before his time. The teacher, who worked constantly all the year round, averaged about sixteen dollars a month. “He is hungrier than a schoolmaster” was a household axiom.

Since Ferrer’s first school had opened fourteen years previously, some forty-six had begun to operate, and, in addition, most towns of any size had at least one rationalist school which was maintained by the workers and also used Ferrer’s texts. The groundwork was then being laid for the children of yesterday to become the leaders in today’s fight. The pupils I saw at near-by Sabadella, at Granada, and at Seville, were being taught the processes of life from the cell up, and their instructors were really trying to give them a scientific instead of a theological attitude.

Because of the long mental and physical isolation imposed upon them by the Church, which controlled all education, five thousand towns and villages could be reached only by trails and tracks. The Church had objected to having roads built because, once transportation were made more accessible, women could more easily leave their homes in the country and go to the city where evil awaited them—their morals were being safeguarded by cow-paths.

Most of Spain was a gaunt, denuded, tragic country with vast, desolate steppes and red, impoverished soil which gave the feeling it had been soaked in human blood for centuries. Certainly the spilling of blood had been a matter of indifference in Spanish history. In a sense the whole people were lawless, hostile to rulers. Every child knew the evils of El Caciquismo. Some Spaniard has said, “Democracy, Republicanism, or Socialism have in reality little to do in our country, for we do not willingly accept either king, president, priest, or prophet.”

The worker in Catalonia had small faith in government, no matter what the brand, and kept straight to the one issue—revolution through economic action, chiefly the general strike. He did not look upon the Government as a vague, mysterious something for the deeds or blunders of which no one could be blamed; he demanded that those in authority should give accounting for the results of their authority. He never forgot a wrong, and usually those responsible paid the bill. I sometimes thought his “attempts” were carried out more from a spirit of revenge and individual hatred than as a social protest.

At the head of the Rambla was a great square, the Plaza de la Constitucion, and there each day from five to six the populace took its airing. Thousands of feet had so worn the pavement that it needed replacement. One noon the square was torn up. Nobody could walk there for twenty-four hours, the workmen were busy, ropes were placed across both ends of the promenade, and a huge sign was erected, “No trespassing allowed. By Order of the Government.”

Loiterers gathered to look at the proclamation. They began talking, their gestures growing more and more vehement, until finally they pulled down the ropes and deliberately trod on the fresh concrete. They were not going to be forbidden by the Government! The entire job had to be done over again, and I noticed the next night six mounted police were guarding all four sides. But nobody seemed to give either incident the slightest attention.

Catalans were a race of individualists, each a law unto himself. Their most marked characteristics were independence and personal dignity. Even Pepet, the waiter at my hotel, knew how to use his freedom. Sometimes he calmly left the dining room and went down the street for a shave while we were having our soup. He eventually returned for the following course, happy and clean, his absence unreproved.

Whenever the conversation of the guests interested him, Pepet entered in quite as naturally as though he were sitting and being served instead of serving. In any other country this would have been resented as insolence, but here every courtesy and respect was shown to him just as he showed it to others. If you said you were going to go by a certain tram to a certain place to be there at three in the afternoon, he interrupted, “Pardon me, Señora, you do not need to be there until four-thirty, and it is much better to go by this other route.”

Like the rest I said, “Right, Pepet, we shall take your advice.”

With the expulsion of the Jews from Spain vanished the driving force for commercial initiative, a quality, fortunately or unfortunately, greatly lacking in the country. Pérez Galdós said:

The capital defect of the Spaniards of your time is that you live exclusively the life of words, and the language is so beautiful that the delight in the sweet sound of it woos you to sleep. You speak too much. You lavish without stint a wealth of phrases to conceal the poverty of your actions.

I did not believe this entirely true, but without doubt the Spanish had a maddening habit of procrastination. It was “Sí, Sí, Señora, assuredly, certainly,” all gracious promising—and then nothing happening. To an American this was especially aggravating, because he was always in a constant hurry; he expected to see and know the whole of Spain in a month. But the Spaniard was not to be rushed. When asked what time it was, he might reply, “Perhaps four hours more of the sun.”

This defiance of clocks and the absence of strain and bustle pleased me personally. A story was told of a Spaniard going to seek his fortune in South America. After finding a position to his satisfaction he worked three hours and then suddenly asked for his pay. When his employer requested the cause of his abrupt leave-taking, he exclaimed angrily, “Do you think I’m going to spend all my life working for you?”

Don Quixote truly represented the Spanish temperament. The strong enthusiasm which was shown for a project and the still stronger imagination which not only saw the matter begun but also finished, was Spanish to the last degree. The knight of La Mancha thought nothing of invading cities and fighting giants, but it ended in thinking about it. “I consider all that already done.”

Spanish character, so paradoxical, so attractive, and often so difficult to understand, fascinated me. I could exhaust myself in adjectives—fickle, impetuous, rich-souled, ascetic, passionate, realistic, individualistic. Courtesy and ceremony were second nature to the Catalans of Barcelona, supposed to be the most dangerous and lawless city in Europe, where thousands of anarchists gathered and plotted and where bombs were thrown wrapped up in flowers.

I remember how on the suburban trams going high into the mountains, sellers of hot and cold omelets ran up and down the station platforms. Anybody who bought one, before eating it himself, offered it to all the passengers in the car, even though they might be carrying their own lunches.

To accept, however, was a shocking breach of good form. The offerer protested that you must take it, and you had to think fast for a plausible excuse. “My friends are waiting for me to dine with them,” or “I’ve just had something at the last station.” You must never, never, never accept.

Havelock used to tell of a grave error he had once made when traveling in Spain. When he had admired a piece of jewelry, the lady to whom it belonged had removed it promptly and thrust it upon him, saying, “I am honored to give it to you.” She had been so insistent that, though thoroughly uncomfortable, he had taken it—the very worst thing he could have done. Soon it disappeared from his effects, but what was his surprise on his next encounter with the lady to find her wearing it again with no sign of discomposure. Her servants had been so indignant that one of them had immediately stolen it back.

Spanish men were not only courteous to women but also to each other, having no hesitancy at showing their regard and affection. Even the beggars addressed each other in the most high-flown phrases, “Your Highness,” or “Your Grace.” One might ask, “Where is Your Excellency to sleep tonight?”

“Under the bridge, My Lord.”

They lacked that poverty-in-the-soul look that existed in the same class in other countries. Assuming the condition of one tattered and ragged specimen to be temporary, I questioned him, “What do you do ordinarily?”

“I saunter, I idle, I loaf.”

“But what work do you do?”

He drew himself up with the utmost hauteur, and said proudly, “I do not work. I am a beggar.”

Doing business with the Spaniards required a knowledge of finesse quite foreign to the average American. I, for example, saw a basket in a shop window which I felt I really must have. My escort and I went into the store. Since the proprietor did not speak English, all I could do was gaze longingly, take it in my hand, and ask my companion, “How much do you suppose this is?” He made no answer, but pointed to something else on the wall, and we left without learning the price. I thought he was a terribly stupid person.

The next day I passed the same place with Portet, and I begged, “Oh, do come in and ask how much that basket is. I want to buy it.”

He smiled at me indulgently. “You know in our country we cannot just go into places and find out prices. This man is a craftsman. We will talk to him.”

The proprietor and his wife shook hands with us and brought the best wine from the cellar. Then the former said, “The Señora was here yesterday. Tell us about her.”

“She comes from North America,” answered Portet.

“Tell us about North America.”

After forty minutes of this, during which I kept one eye on the wicker container but was unable to divert the conversation to it, we said, “Hasta la vista,” and bowed our way out.

A week later Portet and I, following the lodestone of my particular basket, sought the shop once more. Relations had now been established, and we were entitled to ask about it. But we still could not demand outright, “How much does it cost?” We must say, “This basket must be worth so and so,” making the figure higher than it should be.

“Oh, no, no, no, no!” the proprietor protested. “It is not worth that. My humble hands fashioned it. It is hardly worth anything.”

He endeavored to make me accept it for nothing. I had to refuse and once more try to make him take more than its value. Never was there such a juggling before we finally arrived at the exact amount of pesetas.

On my departure from the country I had to break through a similar punctilio. I spent about seven weeks in Barcelona and was never presented with a hotel bill—none for lodging, for laundry, for meals, or for extras such as coffee. The day was coming when I must go back to France, and I did not want too much Spanish money with me—just enough to take me to the border. From there I had already purchased my tickets for England.

Each time I mentioned cuenta to the proprietor, bowing and turning up his palms he answered, “Sí, Sí, Señora,” until finally, on my last morning, I marched resolutely up to the desk and said, “I shall miss my train if I have to go to the American Express to get more money. You really must tell me how much I owe.”

He went upstairs. I waited. Finally he descended, his hair standing on end. He threw the reckoning down on the table with a most vindictive look. I glanced at it. The total was very low; it could barely have covered the cost of the food.

“I have been humiliated!” he exclaimed dramatically.

“Whatever is the matter?” I questioned.

“We are living in the most hellish country on earth!”

“Why, what’s happened?”

“A lady comes all the way from North America. She visits us, she stays here, we like her, and I must present her with this sordid bill!”

Some day when the fighting is over I shall return again to Spain.

Chapter Fourteen
O, TO BE IN ENGLAND

When I reached London it was spring, and beautiful as only spring in England can be. I longed to get out into the country and, through the kindness of Dr. Alice Vickery, was soon lodged in a private home in Hampstead Gardens next door to her quaint, ivy-covered, red-brick house. In the large garden in back we often had tea under the blossoming apple trees. There, dressed in gray or purple, with white collar and a wisp of lace not quite a bonnet on her head, she entertained the young and modern women of England who were working for reforms of no matter what kind. Still, at the age of eighty, she was alert upon all questions of the day, busily engaged in writing leaflets or articles pointing out the weak spots in social programs.

Dr. Vickery was so full of the living side of Neo-Malthusianism that I could ill afford to forego one possible hour with her. Often when we found ourselves alone in her drawing room I sat at her feet and heard the story of the pioneer Malthusians, what they had had to undergo, and what they had accomplished. For my benefit she brought out of her attic a veritable treasure of the early days—old circulars, pamphlets, and letters now, I am afraid, destroyed.

Almost every afternoon, taking her walking stick and with Dr. Binnie Dunlop for a companion, Dr. Vickery boarded the tram to attend some gathering. She had been one of the first to welcome the militant suffragettes, and she never missed a suffrage meeting, nor, for that matter, any other significant one on infant or maternal welfare, eugenics, or public health. She always went with the definite purpose of getting the audience down to fundamentals. In time she became a familiar figure. As soon as she entered a hall you could feel those present aligning themselves against her. They knew she was going to bring up a controversial subject that no one wanted discussed, such as birth control. It was like casting a boulder into a nice quiet lake, but, with an unruffled exterior and grim determination, she invariably rose just the same, asked the chairman to recognize her, and said her say on the Feminist side of the question. From the lips of this Victorian old lady it sounded strange to hear frank remarks about the importance of limiting offspring. Dr. Dunlop, with Scotch determination, was also bent on setting people straight; he followed her and expounded the medical aspects of population.

In June Dr. Vickery asked me to tell my story to a group of her friends. Among them was Edith How-Martyn, who had recently graduated from the London School of Economics. But already the zealous ardor of this small and slight person had landed her in jail for suffrage. She had now split from Mrs. Pankhurst, unable to subscribe to the militant policy.

The American woman is apt to say, “Anything I can do for you, let me know,” and then go away, her conscience relieved. The Englishwoman states definitely that she can get up a meeting, bring you in touch with so and so, give you money, or get money for you. Edith How-Martyn in her quiet manner said to me, “I think what you have told us today should have a larger audience. Will you give a lecture if we arrange it for you? We’ll do the donkey work; all you have to do is speak.”

In a few days the time and place were set. I was to appear in Fabian Hall the following month under my own name.

The chairs in the auditorium were wooden and the interior was unheated—not like an American hall. The audience was quite different from the little Socialist gatherings of working women I had addressed at home. The atrocious and hideous English hats gave it an intellectual and highly respectable air. These representatives of nearly every social and civic organization in London, had the rationalist attitude and preferred to listen to principles and theories. I told them what I had been trying to do through the Woman Rebel and explained my private and personal conception of what Feminism should mean; that is, women should first free themselves from biological slavery, which could best be accomplished through birth control. This was, generally speaking, the introduction of the term into England.

Many came up and talked to me afterwards, among them Marie Stopes, a paleontologist who had made a reputation with work on coal. Would I come to her home and discuss the book she was writing?

Over the teacups I found her to have an open, frank manner that quite won me. She took me into her confidence at once, stating her marriage had been unconsummated, and for that reason she was securing an annulment. Her book, Married Love, was based largely on her own experiences and the unhappiness that came to people from ignorance and lack of understanding in wedlock, and she hoped it would help others. She was extremely interested in the correlation of marital success to birth control knowledge, although she admitted she knew nothing about the latter. Could I tell her exactly what methods were used and how? In spite of my belief that the Netherlands clinics could be improved upon, I was fired with fervor for the idea as such, and described them as I had seen them.

Later when I came back to the United States, I brought with me the manuscript of Married Love, and tried every established publisher in New York, receiving a rejection from each. Finally I induced Dr. William J. Robinson to publish it under the auspices of his Critic and Guide, a monthly magazine which took up many subjects the Journal of the American Medical Association would not touch. Unfortunately even here it had to be expurgated. When I cabled Dr. Stopes I had a publisher in New York, her new husband, H. V. Roe, financed an unabridged English edition which appeared simultaneously.

No one can underestimate the work Marie Stopes has done. Though her other books, Radiant Motherhood and Wise Parenthood, were limited in value because they were based on limited personal experience, she has handled sex knowledge with delicacy and wisdom, placing it in a modern, practical category. She started the first birth control clinic in England, but she was not a pioneer in the movement. Annie Besant, Dr. Vickery, the Drysdales, and many others had plowed the ground and sown the seed. It needed only a new voice, articulate and clear as hers, to push her into the front ranks of the movement, where she must have been much surprised to find herself.

Many people went out of their way to be kind to me in those days. I was often asked to the home of E. P. C. Haynes, solicitor, writer on freedom of the press, and a fine adviser. Around his table, one of the grandest set anywhere in England, could usually be found a large group of distinguished people. Among them was the American Civil War veteran, Major G. P. Putnam, a dapper, lively, alert little publisher with a white mustache and cold blue eyes. He was conservative and formal, but at the same time a firebrand in his fashion and an enthusiast for certain issues. Haynes had invited him to hear my views, and himself introduced the subject of birth control. Thus I was enabled to pave the way for having G. P. Putnam’s Sons eventually take over the publication of Married Love in this country, although not until 1931, through the Major’s efforts, was the ban lifted which prohibited the importation of the complete edition into the United States.

Harold Cox, brilliant Member of Parliament and editor of the Edinburgh Review, was another delightful host at Old Kennards in Buckinghamshire. In the Review he was constantly helping to form an enlightened public opinion on birth control, having every argument at his finger tips and never missing a chance to answer questions in the London Times.

Hugh and Janet de Selincourt’s place at Torrington, Sussex, where Shelley was born, always was a haven of refuge. After five days’ work in town I could come, tired and pent-up, for a week-end. I loved the joy and simplicity of the music there, the lighthearted conversation, and tea on the lawn. From there you saw English ivy climbing up to the thatched roof, and a pond, a small one, which had been converted into a swimming pool. The general impression was of shrubbery and old walls with fruit trees trellised against them. Beyond the velvet green grass were red tree roses, beautiful borders of pink lupins, and delphiniums, the tallest and bluest I have ever seep, From the dining-room window the effect was that of a tapestry. I wanted some day to embody the rambling spirit of this home in one of my own.

Here again laughter bound me to these people. We laughed and we laughed and we laughed. Whole days were spent in gaiety over the most absurd things. Hugh could never quite accept me as a crusader; he went into roars of merriment whenever I mentioned the subject of population—it was too much for a woman in a yellow dress to bother about.

But many of my week-ends were spent in “bothering” about it. At Sunday afternoon labor meetings in London someone was always holding forth. “Here’s a chance for you to talk birth control,” Rose Witcop once urged.

It was an opportunity to reach working people and I agreed, but lunch of that day found me trembling. Henry Sara, a young man but old in the ways of the speaker, noticed I was not eating or drinking and could hardly utter a word. “I say, what’s the idea of all this worry? What you must think about is that everybody there comes merely to hear somebody or anybody. They’ve no notion what you’re going to say. Anything is all right with them. Get that in your mind and stop worrying.”

His friendly encouragement gave me a little more fortitude, but on the way to the hall Rose Witcop took me severely to task for the trembling, which I seemed unable to stop. “These are just plain people you’re going to speak to. It’s utter nonsense to be nervous about it.”

When Rose stood up to introduce me, she began, “Comrades—” There was a long pause. For the second time she tried in a less assured tone, “Comrades—” Another interval and a third time, in a voice so weak she herself could hardly hear it, she attempted, “Comrades—” Then, barely whispering, “Excuse me,” she sat down. By comparison my speech was not bad.

Writing at this time was a means of expression much easier than speaking. I had not forgotten my subscribers to the Woman Rebel. I had to fulfill my obligations and supply something to take the place of the three issues which I had been unable to furnish them. Therefore, I wrote three pamphlets on methods of contraception in England, the Netherlands, and France respectively. Printing them cost me a considerable amount of money. My friends in Canada, knowing I was not affluent, now and then when they had a little windfall or unexpected dividend sent me small checks of from five to ten pounds, saying, “To use for your work.” These had come in quite often.

On one occasion I had squeezed my pocketbook dry paying for the last pamphlet; I had not another penny to buy stamps. Ten days had gone by, and I kept wishing something might come in to help me out. That morning a letter arrived. I tore it apart and a money order dropped out. Hurrying as fast as I could to the post office I received the cash, spent it all on stamps, and hastened back in the hope of getting the whole edition off on the Arabic; in wartime sailings had to be considered. One batch of envelopes had already gone into the pillar box, and I was just finishing addressing and stamping the second lot when I heard the knocker on the door below clatter through the house. It had the ring of authority and sounded so ominous that I felt it must have something to do with me.

Sure enough, in a few moments a bobby and a man in plain clothes appeared at my threshold. They asked whether I were the person who had been sending quantities of mail to a foreign address.

“Yes,” I admitted in a small voice, wondering what on earth was going to happen now.

The bobby came closer, showed me an unopened envelope, and demanded sternly, “Did you post this?”

“I think so.”

“Madam, in England we never put His Majesty on upside down. We do not represent our King standing on his head. Will you please, in affixing your stamps, pay attention to the customs of our country?”

The care with which I stuck on the remainder right side up delayed me so that I barely made the Arabic. Only then did I have time to read the letter. I took it out of my bag, thinking how wonderful it was of my friends to send me the money and how much good I had been able to do with it. To my consternation and amazement it was not for my use, but to buy gifts—certain books to be sent back as soon as possible.

The money was gone and the presents could not be purchased.

After all this rush and pother the Arabic was torpedoed and went down with the entire two thousand pamphlets. I made another effort, this time successfully completed, and shaped an article on Emerson, Thoreau, and Humphrey Noyes and the Oneida Community, about whom the English were talking.

Meanwhile I had written to Canada apologizing and saying I expected shortly to be able to fulfill the commissions. I now had an opening ahead of me for a career abroad. Portet’s publishing house in Barcelona was closely allied with others in Paris. Through him I was offered the job of choosing appropriate books in English, which could be published in both French and Spanish, especially works that would be of help to women and labor. The salary was satisfactory, the job itself interesting, and it gave promise of permanency as soon as the War should be over. I had almost decided to take it, even selecting a little house in Versailles with sunny rooms and a garden for the children.

There was only one drawback—the subtle, persistent dread that something was wrong with Peggy. Night after night her voice startled me from deep sleep and left me in a state of agitation until I received the next letter containing news that all was going well. I tried to dismiss this fear and would have it partially submerged, but always the same troubled voice rang in my ears, “Mother, Mother, are you coming back?”

One definite though inexplicable experience kept puzzling me. As I unclosed my eyes in the morning, or even before I was completely awake, I became conscious of the number 6, as though that numeral were repeating itself again and again in my drowsy mind. I often tried to fit it into some event of the day—six o’clock, sixpence, the price of tea, or anything else amusing, and as casual or silly as I could make up. This I did to protect myself against the premonition which seemed at first to come upon me with the recurrence of this number. Later, like a leaf on a wall calendar, NOV. 6 stood out.

When the publisher asked me to commit myself by signing a three-year contract to stay in Paris, I said, “Yes, I will if you’ll guarantee to lock me up or send me to Africa or the North Pole until after November 6th.”

“Why November 6th?”

“I don’t know, but I’m certain that something important is to occur on that day, something different, and something which will affect my entire future.”

He drew up our plans as of January 1st of the following year.

Edith Ellis was lecturing in America, and by letter we arranged for her to bring back Peggy and Grant, because it appeared I might be staying for some time. Then, since only Peggy seemed lonely and in need of her mother and Grant was happy in school, it was determined he should be left there. Edith was to sail with Peggy on the Lusitania.

When word was flashed that the liner had been torpedoed, I stood in the middle of the night in front of the Cunard office, scanning with horror the mounting ranks of missing and dead. Not until two in the morning was the list complete and could I breathe once more; neither Peggy’s nor Edith’s name was on it. Edith had received one of those slips warning prospective passengers that the ship might be blown up, and was one of the few who had heeded the admonition and transferred to another boat. Even so, the thought of being responsible for Peggy had been too alarming and she had decided not to bring her.

The War had sent many Americans back from Europe and Bill had returned to New York. I had had a detailed letter from him describing the stirring events of the previous December. A man introducing himself as A. Heller had called upon him at his studio and requested a copy of Family Limitation, pleading that he was poor, had too large a family, and was a friend of mine. Bill said he was sorry but we had agreed that I was to carry on my work independently of him, and he did not even think he had any of the pamphlets. However, the man’s story was so pathetic that he rummaged around and by chance found one in the library drawer.

A few days later Bill opened the door to a gray-haired, side-whiskered six-footer who lost no time in announcing, “I am Mr. Comstock. I have a warrant for your arrest on the grounds of circulating obscene literature.” Accompanying him was the so-called Heller, who turned out to be Charles J. Bamberger, an agent of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The three departed but Bill soon found himself in a restaurant instead of the police station. When he protested that he wished to consult a lawyer without delay, Comstock, between mouthfuls of lunch, offered advice. “Young man, I want to act as a brother to you. Lawyers are expensive and will only aggravate your case.” Here he patted Bill on the shoulder. “Plead guilty to this charge, and I’ll ask for a suspended sentence.”

Bill’s answer was that, though he had been in Europe when the pamphlet had been written, he believed in the principles embodied in it, and that, therefore, his own principles were at stake. He would not plead guilty. “You know as well as I do, Mr. Comstock, there’s nothing obscene in that pamphlet.”

“Young man, I have been in this work for twenty years, and that leaflet is the worst thing I have ever seen.”

This sort of conversation went on all afternoon; Comstock even tried to bribe Bill to turn states’ evidence by disclosing my whereabouts. It was his custom to arrive at the police station so late that his prisoner could not communicate with a lawyer or bonding office and had to spend the night in jail. He could then make a statement to the papers that his captive had been unable to secure bail.

When Comstock and Bill at last reached the Yorkville Police Court and the clerk had asked the latter how he wished to plead, Comstock spoke for him, “He pleads guilty.”

“I do not,” expostulated Bill. “I plead not guilty.”

He was arraigned and bail fixed at five hundred dollars, but he was obliged to spend thirty-six hours in jail before it could be procured.

In September I had word that, after several postponements, his trial had finally come up before Justices McInerney, Herbert, and Salmon. He started to read his typewritten statement. “I admit that I broke the law, and yet I claim that in every real sense it is the law and not I that is on trial here today.”

Justice McInerney interrupted him. “You admit you are guilty, and all this statement of yours is just opinions. I’m not going to have a lot of rigmarole on the record. We’ve no time to bother. This book is not only indecent but immoral. Its circulation is a menace to society. Too many women are going around advocating woman suffrage. If they would go around advocating bearing children we should be better off.

“The statute gives you the privilege of being fined for this offense, but I do not believe this should be so. A man, guilty as you are, ought to have no alternative from a prison sentence. One hundred and fifty dollars or thirty days in jail.”

“Then I want to say to the court,” shouted Bill, leaning forward and raising his hand for greater emphasis, “that I would rather be in jail with my self-respect than in your place without it!”

Although he was convinced of the justice of my cause, this was the first and only copy of the pamphlet he had ever given out. It was one of life’s sharpest ironies that, despite our separation, he should have been drawn into my battle, and go to prison for it.

When I received Bill’s letter bearing this news, I tore across the lawn to Dr. Vickery’s. Dr. Drysdale happened to be there, and in his indignation his face became red and his hands were clenched. He tramped up and down the floor in a frenzy of rage that such a thing could be done to any human being. I am still touched when I think of this mild, gentle person being moved to depths of anger over an injustice which did not affect him personally.

The question before me was, “Should I go back?” As had gone Bill’s trial so would probably go my own. I did not want to sacrifice myself in a lost cause. I was young, and knew I should be used for something. Temporarily postponing my final answer to the publishing house, I decided to return to the United States, but only long enough to survey the situation, to gather up my children. I intended, if possible, to come back to that little house in Versailles.

Chapter Fifteen
HIGH HANGS THE GAUNTLET

“Let God and man decree

Laws for themselves and not for me;

Their deeds I judge and much condemn

Yet when did I make laws for them?”

A. E. HOUSMAN

The end of September, 1915, I set sail from Bordeaux, I remember how interminable that voyage was across the dangerous, foggy Atlantic. The shadow of the Lusitania hung over us. The ship was absolutely dark, and tension crackled in the very air. My own thoughts were black as the night and the old nervousness, the nervousness that came with a queer gripping at the pit of the stomach, was upon me; a dread presentiment and a foreboding were with me almost incessantly.

When I succeeded in snatching a few hours’ sleep I was startled out of unpleasant dreams. One of them was of attempting to struggle through a crowded street against traffic; I was pushed to the curb and had to make my way cautiously. The mechanical, automaton-like crowds were walking, walking, walking, always in the opposite direction. Then suddenly in my dream the people turned into mice—thousands and thousands of them; they even smelled like mice. I awakened and had to open the porthole to rid the room of that musty smell of mice.

At last the lights of Staten Island, winking like specters in the dim dawn, signaled our safe arrival at quarantine. As the ship sidled along the wharf at West Fourteenth Street on that gray October morning, a new exhilaration, a new hope arose in my heart.

To see American faces again after the unutterable despair of Europe, to sense the rough democracy of the porters and of the good-hearted, hard-boiled taxi-drivers; to breathe in the crisp, electric autumn air of home—all these brought with them an irresistible gladness. Because I wanted the feeling to linger, I refused a taxi, picked up my small bag, and walked away from the pier, looking about.

At the first news stand I passed I caught sight of the words, “What Shall We Do About Birth Control?” on the cover of the Pictorial Review. It seemed strange to be greeted, not by friends or relatives, but by a phrase of your own carried on a magazine. I purchased it and, singing to myself, went on to a hotel where the children were brought to me. I cannot describe the joy of being reunited with them.

That evening I sat down at my desk and wrote several letters. I notified Judge Hazel and Assistant District Attorney Content that I was now back and ready for trial, and inquired whether the indictments of the previous year were still pending; I was politely informed that they were.

A note more difficult to compose went to the National Birth Control League, which had been re-organized in my absence under the leadership of Mary Ware Dennett, Clara Stillman, and Anita Block. To it had been turned over all my files, including the list of subscribers to the Woman Rebel. I asked them what moral support I could expect from the League, saying this would help to determine the length of my stay.

Mrs. Stillman, the secretary, invited me to call a few days later at her home, where an executive meeting was to convene. I went with keen anticipation, totally unprepared for the actual answer. The committee had met. Mrs. Dennett, Mrs. Stillman, and Anita were all there. Mrs. Dennett spoke for the group; the National Birth Control League disagreed with my methods, my tactics, with everything I had done. Such an organization as theirs, the function of which was primarily to change the laws in an orderly and proper manner, could not logically sanction anyone who had broken those laws.

After delivering this ultimatum, Mrs. Dennett walked to the door with me. Would I mind giving her the names and addresses of those socially prominent and distinguished persons I had found on my European trip to be interested? Heartsick as I was over my reception, I was also amused at her shrewdness.

Mrs. Dennett was a good promoter and experienced campaigner, a capable office executive, an indefatigable worker for suffrage and peace, with a background that might have been invaluable. I often regretted that we could not have combined our efforts. Had we been able to do so the movement might have been pushed many years ahead.

My fourth communication was to Dr. William J. Robinson, an émigré from the land of orthodox medicine, who was possessed of a sensitivity to current moods. When he had realized that Will Durant’s lectures had aroused interest in sex psychology, he had stepped in to speak to larger audiences, using a more popular approach, although, as far as I know, he had never publicly discussed the prevention of conception.

Dr. Abraham Jacoby, beloved dean of the profession, in accepting the presidency of the Academy of Medicine, had backed birth control, and through Dr. Robinson’s endeavors a small committee had later been formed to look into it. From the reports that had come to me I could not discover whether any harmonious agreement that the subject lay within the province of medicine had been made. To my inquiry Dr. Robinson replied that the committee had met only once and he considered I could expect no support from them. He enclosed a check for ten dollars towards the expenses of my trial.

Here were two disappointments to face. Both these organizations had seemed so well suited to continue progress: one to change the laws, the other to take proper medical charge. Neither had fulfilled my hopes and therefore I felt I had to enter the fray again. My burning concern for the thousands of women who went unregarded could apparently find no official endorsement; birth control was back again where it had started. I was convinced I had to depend solely upon the compassionate insight of intelligent women, which I was certain was latent and could be aroused.

But these problems were suddenly swept aside by a crisis of a more intimate nature, a tragedy about which I find myself still unable to write, though so many years have passed.

A few days after my arrival Peggy was taken ill with pneumonia. When Mr. Content telephoned to say I had better come down and talk it over, I could not go. He was extremely kind, assuring me there was no hurry and he would postpone the trial until I was free. This allowed me to devote my whole attention and time to her.

Peggy died the morning of November 6, 1915.

The joy in the fullness of life went out of it then and has never quite returned. Deep in the hidden realm of my consciousness my little girl has continued to live, and in that strange, mysterious place where reality and imagination meet, she has grown up to womanhood. There she leads an ideal existence untouched by harsh actuality and disillusion.

Men and women from all classes, from nearly every city in America, poured upon me their sympathy. Money for my trial came beyond my understanding—not large amounts, but large for the senders—from miners of West Virginia and lumbermen of the North Woods. Some had walked five miles to read Family Limitation; others had had it copied for them. Women wrote of children dead a quarter of a century for whom they were still secretly mourning, and sent me pictures and locks of hair of their own dead babies. I had never fully realized until then that the loss of a child remains unforgotten to every mother during her lifetime.

Public opinion had been focused on Comstock’s activities by Bill’s sentence, and the liberals had been aroused. Committees of two and three came to request me to take up the purely legislative task of changing the Federal law. Aid would be forthcoming—special trains to Congress, investigations, commissions, and victory in sight before the year was over! It was tempting. It seemed so feasible on the surface, so much easier than agonizing delays through the courts. Many others advised me just as before that in pleading guilty I was choosing the best field in which to make my fight.

One of those to urge me towards a middle course was Max Eastman, who possessed an unusual evenness of temper and tolerance towards all who opposed him as well as a keen mind and keen imagination which followed hypotheses to logical conclusions. This soft-voiced, lethargic poet, mentally and emotionally controlled, had too great a sense of humor and ability in visualizing events in their proper perspective to advocate direct action.

Max made an appointment for me to see Samuel Untermyer, authority on constitutional law and a person to whom liberals turned because of the fight he had put up against the trusts; he might straighten out the legal aspects. I found him enthroned in his luxurious office amid the most magnificent American Beauty roses—dozens and dozens and dozens. With his piercing eyes and head too large for his frame, he appeared a disembodied brain. Though the appointment had been made with difficulty—writing and telephoning back and forth through secretaries to be verified—time now was nothing to him. He was so smooth, so courteous, so sympathetic, so unhurried; he seemed to understand and to be ready to lift the load of legal worry from my mind.

Picking up the telephone, he said, “Get me Mr. Content.” Then, “Harold, come on over to my office and bring your record on Mrs. Sanger.”

When the District Attorney had arrived, Mr. Untermyer’s whole voice changed. He spoke sternly to the young man. “Why, Harold, what are you trying to do—persecuting this little woman, so frail and so delicate, the mother of a family? You don’t want to put her behind bars, do you? She’s doing a noble work in the world and here you are behaving like this! Are you representing the Government or are you merely prejudiced in your own behalf?”

Mr. Content replied respectfully, “Well, Mr. Untermyer, we don’t want to prosecute Mrs. Sanger, but we want her to promise to obey the law.”

“Has she broken the law?”

“We have positive proof that she has violated it on a very large scale.”

Mr. Untermyer immediately assured him, “Why, of course, she’ll promise not to break any more laws. Is that all it is? You just quash that indictment and forget about it.”

Mr. Content left. Mr. Untermyer turned to me genially and said, “Well, you see? We’ve fixed that up.”

“What’s going to happen? The law will be the same, won’t it?”

“Why, yes.”

“What was that you said about a promise?”

“Oh, yes, write me a letter saying you won’t break the law again.”

“I couldn’t promise that, Mr. Untermyer.”

“What?”