Part 11
In my own neighborhood the small families are the best educated or at least have the best opportunities to educate the children. I know of two families within a day’s travel of my home that have fifteen children each. Thirty children in two poor families! And not a single child obtained a common school education. They were obliged to go out to service before they were fifteen years old, and many at even a younger age. They are good citizens for the single reason that they were raised in the country, where few temptations are found. Had they been born in the city slums, what could have saved them from a life of crime? As it is, not a single child will stand any chance to make the world better for their having lived in it; for they belong to parents who came from prolific families, and where education was only a luxury to be handed over to the wealthy.
If Nature intended men and women to be as helpless in the reproduction of their kind as the fruit tree or the wild animals, the knowledge of reducing the crop would have been withheld from them. And until men gained this knowledge Nature was obliged to step in and reduce the population by famine, disease or earthquake and flood. It was an object lesson against over-population, and to show men that there was no hurry about God’s work. If God is love, he certainly does not desire the job of removing an over-population through the means of some awful calamity or a visitation of disease.
Don’t you suppose the God of nature loves to see men live in comfort and plenty? The Meat Trust and the Kaiser want large families, but the Meat Trust and the Kaiser have motives far removed from bringing happiness into the world. The one wants children to consume more benzoated meat, and the other wants to turn children into soldiers and human butchers.
The man who cries for overgrown families of children, to be brought up in rags and ignorance and slavery, has not the happiness of the race in his heart. He wants them for a selfish, barbarous purpose—for profit and for plunder.
FOR A STAGE CAREER
She was a beautiful woman and her costumes were magnificent, but there seemed to be a lack of soul in her acting. There was applause from the house every time she came on the stage, and seldom she escaped after singing a song in her entrancing voice without returning and singing to an encore. There was the sweetness of despair in her voice, but made a trifle harsh by a spirit of defiance. A trained ear could distinguish the lack of harmony in her soul. The man at my side turned to me as she left the stage and said:
“That poor girl has a history, and a sad one. It is one thing to have a sorrow or an adventure that is absolutely located in the past, but still another thing to have a sorrow and a regret that follows one through life like a shadow.”
I looked at him in wonderment and he continued: “I have met her and she told me of her mistaken life. She was so full of her sorrow and regret that she simply had to talk of it to some one, and I am always a willing listener when a troubled soul opens the secret door and invites me to walk in and sit in the shadow.
“She told me that from the time she first took a leading part in a school entertainment she had a desire for a stage career. She grew up with this desire burning in her soul, at which fire she toasted her mental shins every night before going to sleep. She never missed an opportunity to take part in any entertainment given by the local talent of her village. At seventeen she fell deeply in love with a young carpenter and they became engaged to marry. Of course, the wedding was not to take place for several years, since her young man was poor and must first set aside a few hundred dollars to start with.
“After this engagement she went to attend school in the city, where she met the son of a very wealthy business man. He fell desperately in love with her, though many years older. One evening while out riding he proposed to her, and she told him of her ambition. ‘Promise me a stage career, and I will marry you,’ she told him. He readily agreed to this, and the engagement and contract was entered into at that hour. He sent her to a training school immediately, from where she wrote to her village lover that their engagement must be declared a thing of the past, since she had resolved to go on the stage, and give up the old life and the old friends.
“The year following her debut on the professional stage she married the man who made a stage career possible, but the face of the young carpenter looked out of the shadows and reproached her as the train that took her on her wedding tour went flying through the night. Only then it dawned on her that she did not love the man who was to give her a stage career—did not love him enough to become his bride, because her heart was still back in the village with the broken-hearted carpenter to whom she gave her most sincere and innocent love.
“And ever since this ambitious marriage there is the ghost of a wrong follows her and looks with reproachful eyes from the dark corners of every opera house. Her husband is kind to her, and follows her wherever she goes, and is proud of her success; but always this truth is before her—she sold her body to secure a stage career, but her heart was never a partner in the deal. How much happier she could be in the humble home of the poor carpenter, had not ambition so blinded her unsophisticated soul.
“What is life and success and the applause of the world when love’s first and only idol lies broken at one’s feet? Happiness must be shared with those we love best, and when we are obliged to share everything the heart holds sacred with some one we can never love, the pleasures of life crumble in our hands like an image that has been reduced to ashes. And the ashes are always being blown into our eyes, and into our mouth, and the taste is bitter, bitter; and the unloved lips that touch ours are tainted with the bitterness of all life’s regrets and mistakes, though we are tied to them with pledges and promises that must never, never be broken.”
THE DEAD OF THE LAND AND SEA
Below I publish some verses I wrote thirty years ago, and while I worked as a common laborer in the lumber woods of Tioga County, Pennsylvania. In a religious discussion with a pious comrade he quoted Scripture to prove that the earth and sea shall ultimately give up their dead, and each individual shall be punished, or blest, according to the deeds committed while they lived. The more I thought over this horrible picture, the more I doubted that a God of Love would be so revengeful toward any of his poor creatures, who are born into ignorance and superstition, and must go mentally creeping through a life of hunger and pain.
OH, LET THEM SLEEP!
They tell me that the earth and sea Will some day give up all their dead. Oh, what a strange day that will be To happen thus, as has been said: Clothed in power a God will stand— With outstretched hands this God will be— With one foot on the sea-washed sand, The other buried in the sea, And loudly call: “Come forth, ye dead, No matter where in death you fell; Come with a sentence on your head— You’ll make good fodder for my hell!
Come with the heartaches that died with you, With ashes of hope within your hand: You died as all earth’s creatures do— Foreclosure, at Death’s demand. Come before me for sentence now— Come ev’ry one—I know you all: A few shall wear the glory brow, But many, many must go to hell!” “Oh, stay your hand, revengeful God, And let us all sleep where we lie! You know that man is but a clod— Was born to suffer and to die: And life is but chaotic dreams; With human love our one reward; We drifted down life’s midnight streams To stem the tide we found too hard.
“Oh, let us sleep, revengeful God, Oblivion seems to fit us well; Here, mingled with the friendly clod, Is better far than pagan hell.” But this strange God will pay no heed To all the bitter cries that well— Cold as a rock, with savage greed, He’ll cast them into scorching hell!
* * * * *
A savage giant captured men, And took their wives and children, too, And put them in a dismal pen, And asked himself what he must do. He ne’er had eaten human flesh— His soul revolted at the thought; The clothes they wore were only trash, By their own hands they had been wrought.
“I’ll torture them,” the giant said, “To see them writhe and twist with pain; I’ll watch them in their torture bed, And hear them weep and wail in vain.” And, while he planned, the pris’ners slept. A mother drew close to her breast The babe that had so loudly wept, And soon they both had sunk to rest.
And now the giant loudly called; “Come forth, ye creatures of the damn’d And in this pit, so strangely walled, I’ll torture you, as I have planned, Forever you shall weep and cry— ’Twill be sweet music in my ears— For you shall never, never die While eternity winds up the years!”
* * * * *
I made this giant—who made this God, To do the work my giant schemed? For spirit ne’er this cold world trod With such a heart as brute man dreamed. The God who loves the blooming flower, Who tuned the voice of child and bird, Would never use his God-like power To conjure tortures so absurd.
No! No! and when the earth and sea Give up the dead they’re holding fast, A God of love and life there’ll be Forgiving man his painful past; For, would a God who can forgive, Call back the dead from where they sleep, And take delight to have them live, Where they eternally must weep? If this be true, then keep your dead, Oh, tear-washed earth and troubled sea! And let them sleep within their bed To rest throughout eternity.
WHERE DREAMS COME TRUE
Are dreams but idle things, or is there a land where all our happy dreams come true? Dreams are queer freaks of the intellect. We dream of the dead whom we have not seen for so long, that we can scarcely recall the picture of their face in our wakeful hours, but in our dreams we walk with them and talk with them and see them just as they were while living. The picture printed on our brain cells never fades away, and when the brain is held under the proper light, the old picture comes to view. Do these pictures fade away absolutely at death, or is there a land where all these brain pictures are stored away, to be given to us when we are called back?
I do not know; but it is a pleasant dream to half-believe that this is true; for without these memory pictures being restored to us, how shall we know our loved ones in the beyond when we meet them again? If the grave swallows all our happy visions and dreams, the new life will find us as babes, beginning to learn the very things we forgot at death. Then all our present individuality would be lost, and the immortal part of us would be a stranger to the mortal creature that died. God might as well call new beings into existence, as an unknown and unknowable part of the original creature. Without a memory we would not be able to recognize our own soul, should we meet him in the spirit world.
Hence a recollection of our dreams and our visions must go with us into the spirit world, or we must go as strangers without knowledge or a consciousness of the past. No use to be of immortal material, if the changes squeeze out memory pictures, for they are the tender chords that bind the two conditions together. Heaven must be a land where our dreams come true, or it would have no connection with this earth and this life.
I once wrote a few verses on this subject, that have never yet been published. They fit in here very nicely:
Is there a land where our dreams come true, The dreams that we dream when asleep; A land of love that is always new, Where the joyous never weep? And the dreams that we dream when wide awake, When the silence is on our soul, When we look far out where the shadows break, And the Dead sea billows roll.
Oh, is there a land where we shall awake, From a dream that is full of sighs, In a land where the boughs of the green trees shake In the breezes that sweep the skies; And behold the faces we loved so dear— Who bade us the long adieu— And see them smile without sigh or tear, Oh, will ever our dreams come true?
I dreamed last night my mother came And sang with the old-time charms, And called me “darling” just the same As when I slumbered in her arms. The vision changed; I was a man, A baby’s hand was on my face, Its warm breath on my cheek, and then I felt the baby’s warm embrace.
It was my baby, long since dead, Her dreamy eyes were good to see; Its baby tongue moved, and it said: “Oh, isn’t it sweet to dream of me! Oh, papa dear, your cheeks are wet, Just like the flowers are wet with dew, But soon you’ll wake, and you’ll forget The land where all our dreams come true!”
Oh, is there a land where our dreams come true— The dreams we are dreaming all day long? And do they almost come into our view When our souls are carried away with song? Will all our visions and day-dreams return The same as the seasons and song birds do? Will we meet the dear ones for whom we yearn In the land of immortals, where dreams come true?
IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
“No,” said my companion, as the train dashed on, “it is not true that men love but once. I believe that a man loves more sensibly and truly after he has had two or three infatuations and suffered as many disappointments. I believe, too, it is the same with the sensible woman, only she sometimes does not have the opportunity to love so often as a man.
“The other day I met an old sweetheart on the train in company with her mother. Once I would have married the woman, for I thought she was the only one in the world, but her mother objected to the match. My blood wasn’t blue enough. She was a good, warm-hearted girl, but she lacked courage. Had she been a girl of spirit, she would have married me in spite of all opposition. But she gave me up and broke her own heart over the affair.
“I’ll admit that I was pretty well broken up at first, but my pride came to my rescue. I made up my mind that I needed a wife of more individuality and character, and I soon found her. In a little while I was deeper in love than ever before. She was brighter, deeper and more resolute. Her parents objected at first to her choice, but she told them it was not they who were making the match. She said if a girl had no choice in selecting a husband, the natural selection of sex was ignored, and love was seen only from a financial view.
“Honest and true, I believe now it would have been very unfortunate had the first sweetheart married me, though I believe I could have loved her always, had her mother not broken up the match. Truly, I believe her life has been blighted by that disappointment. She never married. Perhaps she never had another chance. I do not know. They are poor now, and her mother has lost much of her pride. She has confessed lately that she made a mistake when she broke up Mary’s love affair.
“The day I met them on the train they were going to ignore my presence, but I would not have it that way. I respect them too much to drop absolutely out of their world. I simply took a seat behind them and called their attention to my presence. It was the first time in twenty years we had met. The mother was greatly confused at first, and Mary blushed like a school girl; but after the ice was broken, we had a very pleasant two hours’ ride. Mary asked all about my wife and children, and expressed a desire to see them.
“I pitied the woman I once loved, for she looked very unhappy and discontented with life. Her mother is growing quite feeble and she is devoting her life to her parents. I pitied her. This was all there was left of my love. As I looked at the disappointed woman, I thought of how I once held her in my arms and we both swore eternal loyalty to each other. How we had lied to each other. She cast me off as a duty and I forgot her in retaliation. How foolish it would be then to cork ourselves up and never love another.
“Once she was the idol of all my youthful dreams, the queen of my children. Now I love another woman more fondly than I ever loved before, because she is worthy of it. She gave up home and friends for me, and proved her great love for me, and, after all, this is the true test of our love. A man can’t long love a woman who has not the courage to love him in spite of the oppositions of friends. She sinks out of sight and some one else is sure to take her place, if he only waits. There is no occasion to commit suicide if jilted by one woman. She never was worthy of the fellow’s love, or she would not have jilted him. She never loved him. The woman who loves a man truly will give up all the world for him.
“Still, I pity Mary. I would feel just a little more happy if she were married to a good man. A man can’t help but pity any woman he once loved, if he thinks her unhappy. His mind will insist on going back occasionally to the days when that woman was the only woman in the world to him; when it might have ended just as he had dreamed. It might have been otherwise than it has turned out to be. His present love is a flower of a later growth, even though of sweeter odor.”
A MISGUIDED MOTHER
It was no fault of his own that caused a separation between Walter Clark and his young wife. She took a dislike to him after a short matrimonial voyage, simply because she had never sincerely and truly loved him. She was one of those impulsive girls who are determined to have their own way in everything, and when they can’t have things just as they want them, they become unreasonable. They never admit that they are in the wrong. They are always right, and all the world is wrong. Walter Clark’s demonstrations of love and affection became disagreeable to his cold and frivolous wife. She preferred to sit down and pout rather than go with her husband to the theatre, or on an excursion. Perhaps there had been a previous lover whom she lost, and no man could fill his place in her heart.
When Walter discovered that his wife was determined to disagree with him in everything, and to grow more disagreeable every day, he let her pass the time as best she could without his presence, which had become so annoying to her. One day she bundled up her belongings and went home to her mother. Maybe she thought Walter would come after her and plead with her to go back to the old life. But, God knows, Walter had enough of the old life and felt relieved when the change came into his life. Every tender feeling he had once felt toward his wife had been destroyed, and by her own disagreeable conduct. In his heart he had deified the girl he married, but she proved to be an idol of miserable clay. Three years after the separation he went on a visit to the Middle West. He met a beautiful young woman and felt himself drawn toward her by her loveliness and most charming manner. He was hungry for the love of a good and true woman, and in his heart he believed he had found her at last. His attentions were encouraged, and he felt love growing deeper and fonder every day.
He despised traveling under false colors, and frankly went to the girl’s mother and told her that he was a married man, but hoped to be freed from his wife before long. He told of everything that led up to the separation, and confessed that he loved her daughter fondly and truly, and would try to make her a good husband.
The mother was shocked. A married man making love to her daughter! All her orthodox prejudice and provincial suspicion rebelled against Walter, and she turned him out of the house, as though he were a criminal of the lowest type. She could not see that he had played fair—that he sailed under his true colors and could give her references as to his good character from the people of his own home city. No, she didn’t want references—a married man was an outlaw in the realms of love and courtship. In her eyes Walter was forever damned.
The honorable, but heart-broken young man left the town, and the incident was closed. He would not tread on that mother’s rights, even though he realized that she was playing tyrant, and wrecking her daughter’s happiness.
Dazed and unhappy, the young girl could not realize whether she had been wronged by the mother’s decision, or by the presumption of Walter Clark, who won her love while he was married to another. The whole world seemed to be deceptive and false.
She was aroused from this condition of despair a few months later when a young “unmarried” traveling man came to town. He had all the dash and brilliancy of the gay world, and the disappointed girl, and her misguided, ambitious and unsuspecting mother were captivated. He spent many of his evenings at the girl’s home, and the mother was pleased to see her daughter sitting in the parlor with such a promising young man. The daughter had been in disgrace since her love affair with a horrid married man, but now the mother was pleased.