Part 6

Mother, when bidding your child farewell, With heartaches more than tongue can tell, When laying him low in the cold, cold ground, And tenderly heaping the little mound— There’s a land of hope just over the hill, Where your baby will be your baby still. No news of him will ever pain Your aching, loving heart again. Silent he sleeps in the earth’s cool breast, And when life’s sun has set, in the west, And you lie down at his side, he will Be your darling baby still.

Only a little while ahead— A little nap for the silent dead— A little trouble, and sorrow, and pain, And you will be with your child again. Safer with you is the child you find Than the full-grown man you leave behind. And tho’ the promised future is dim, ’Tis enough to know—you shall sleep with him, And all through eternity your baby will Be your darling baby still.

WISH I WERE A JEW

I wish I were a Jew. The more I study the situation, the more I wish to be a Jew. I have found fault with the Jews, from the Christian point of view, and I would like to turn around and fire a few broadsides into my delinquent Christian friends from the Hebrew standpoint. Not that I would condemn Jesusism, but to show the Christian world how far they are off the track of the meek and lowly Jesus, when he commanded his followers with a new commandment. Did Jesus mean anything when he said: “A new commandment I give unto you; that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.”

If I were a Jew I would ask my fellow Christians whether they believe that Christ only loves them after the style and fashion of their love for one another? I would ask them if these great navies and mighty armies of armed men, trained to kill each other in new and improved style, are imitations of Christ’s great love for men? Are England and Germany and France and Russia and the United States and Spain and Italy and all the South American republics loving each other as Christ loved the world? If these are truly Christian nations, then the Jews must take it for granted that they are imitating the love of Jesus, as ordered in the “New Commandment.” If these so-called Christian nations are not obeying the “New Commandment,” then they are not Christian nations, and their pretense is sheer hypocrisy.

Loving your neighbor as you love yourself is poorly displayed in taxing him to build navies for the purpose of killing a lot of other people Christ loved and died for. Christ died to establish universal peace, but to judge him through the work of those who pretend to be his followers, he died for the purpose of ordaining priests and preachers to bless the armies and navies of civilization.

As a boy I was taught to look upon the Jews as the rejecters, betrayers and crucifiers of Christ, the man sent of God to establish peace and good will. I was taught to look upon Judas Iscariot as the meanest of all men—the man who pretended to love Jesus, but who betrayed him for thirty pieces of silver. If I were a Jew, I would point to the Christian churches, pretending to love the people as Christ loved them, but openly turning the blessings of Christ from their natural channels of peace, to blessing the armies and navies that go out to do violence. Judas only betrayed Christ once, and was sorry for it, while the Christians betray him every day in the year, and boast of it. They boast of their armies and navies and sing their praises, feeling more secure in the ability of their armed forces than they do in the love of their Christ.

Did the Jews do worse in rejecting Christ, then the Christians do in accepting him, and then disobey the newest commandment that came from his lips? They preach his gospel of peace and then organize for the purpose of destroying peace. If the Christian church turned against militarism, and abandoned the war departments in their efforts to enforce commercialism and the extension of trade, the war-loving people would not contribute their thirty pieces of silver.

If I were a Jew I would set up the character of Judas against the work of the Christians in the betrayal of business.

Judas was part of the original plan—to establish a living example of the perfidy attached to the work of treachery. Have the Christians profited by the example? Have they not deceitfully handed the gospel of Christ over to the enemies of peace? Have they loved one another similar to the love Christ died for? Are the slums of our large cities examples of Christ’s love for the lowly and the oppressed? Is the treatment of the Jews in Christian Russia an example of “Love your neighbor as yourself?” The more I think over the situation, the more I regret that I am not a Jew.

MEMORIES

The old people had been living in their village home long before I went there to become their neighbor. They had reared their family of five children in the old house, and they had all married and gone elsewhere to live. The old people were now past 65, and rather old for transplanting in a new home, but the death of a relative brought to their door a small fortune, and the children insisted that they must remove to the city and live in better style, as becomes people in affluent circumstances.

We called on them in the evening of their last day in the old home and found them sitting on the front porch, resting and dreaming after a day of packing up goods for the removal. The old lady had been silently weeping, and her heart was so full of going away that she broke down and tearfully assured us that going away was breaking ties that affect her heart for all time to come.

“Jim and me are too old to be torn up by the roots and transplanted to a town lot. We’ve lived here so long that we can’t ever make ourselves believe that a grander house and a stylish lot of neighbors is to become our home for all time.

“Why, every nook and corner of this old place is peopled with loving memories. The house seems to be a store-house filled with the echoes of our children’s happy voices and their merry laughter. I sometimes even imagine that I hear the prattling echo of little Ruth’s baby voice, the child who died when four years old.

“It may be foolish, Mr. Haiden, but no other house can ever produce the same pleasant illusions. I hear them all, when I listen, just as I heard their real voices in the long ago. But it won’t be so in the new home. They ain’t going to let me take any of the old furniture along—the chairs and the sideboard and the bureau that are all scratched with the hands of the children. And the old pictures of George Washington crossing the Delaware, and the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, and the Soldier’s Dream, and the Soldier’s Farewell—they say they’re out of date, and must be packed away on the garret.

“If these old things are out of date, what’s to be said of Jim and me? We love those old pictures and scratched pieces of furniture better than anything that’s new and has no history connected with it. We don’t want to be separated from the past so ruthlessly and violently. It’s bad enough to be torn away from our old friends and acquaintances, and taken so far away and stored away in such a grand house that none of the old neighbors will ever come to see us, and will finally grow indifferent toward us, and blame us for being stuck up and proud, and declare we were glad and willing to move away and sever the ties of love and friendship between us and our rustic neighbors.

“And if our money leaves us as suddenly as it came, and we are obliged to come back here, it will be like a spirit forced to come back to its dead and deserted body. For all these old memories and childish echoes must surely die after we are no longer here to hear them, and the house will become as dead to us as the memories that died of loneliness after we went away.

“For memories live on our love, Jim, On the heartstrings tied to them; They’ll die when we once remove, Jim, And break them off love’s stem; For they lie on my breast, Like children at rest, And nurse at love’s fountain brim.

And all have a beautiful head, Jim, With faces upturned for a kiss; I feel in my heart they’re not dead, Jim, But living in innocent bliss; But when we depart; They’ll die in my heart— And, oh, their presence I’ll miss!

They are echoes of voices so dear, Jim, They are whispering now in my heart. Come closer, and put your ear, Jim, Just over the place—don’t start! Ah, you hear the song, That is all the day long Singing the mournful part.”

SWEETENED WITH SORROW

People who suffer in the slow fire of sorrow are purified from many of the weaknesses and faults of humanity. Perfection comes only after we have paid the price. Men are always better and kinder to their second wife than they were to their first, for in the loss of the first wife sorrow opened the door to a wider vision and a broader view. Sorrow is part of our education. The giddy young have not yet been purified in sorrow’s flames, and they are blind to many things that must be learned before they win the hearts of the people.

The kindest man I ever knew was the saddest looking when his face was in repose. He had a good word for everybody. He seemed to know why men and women go wrong and could find an excuse for all their short-comings and evil doings. He came into our village life as though by accident, setting up housekeeping with his white-haired mother and two hired servants on the little farm just west of the town. They farmed only a little bit, keeping but one horse and two cows. The postmistress said he sent some large packages of first-class mail matter to a certain publishing house in the city, and we guessed that the man was an author or journalist.

I met him afterwards when we sat together at the old stone bridge fishing in the deep pool at the mouth of the little creek. It was a good place to catch the fish when gathering there previous to their migrating up the creek for the season. Bit by bit, I learned his story, for he was hungry for sympathy. A woman had broken his heart. She had married him for his money. He had been a business man in the big city—a banker, but occasionally writing for a newspaper in which he held some stock.

A family moved into the neighborhood where the bank was located, and he met the daughter at the house of a friend. A mutual admiration began from the first. She was of a literary turn, and was in sympathy with his ambition and hopes, and showed in many ways that she admired him. She was pretty and intelligent, and he was recovering from a love disappointment and was hungry for love and sympathy. He proposed, was accepted, and in a few months after the first meeting they were married. He was only twenty-five then, frivolous and happy and without a care.

Six weeks after the wedding he discovered by sheer accident that the woman had a living husband from whom she was not divorced, and whom she met clandestinely and gave him money with which to gamble. She wasn’t his wife at all, but an unscrupulous adventuress who associated with criminals.

He sold out his interest in the bank and came out into the country with his widowed mother to live a quiet life and try to forget.

That same summer a strange woman came to the village to spend a few months in this quiet retreat, and one night I sat with my melancholy friend in church when the strange lady sang a solo. She had the sweetest voice I ever heard—mournfully sweet, with a peculiar cadence that filled one’s eyes with moisture and sent thrills of unknown feelings tingling through every nerve. And oh, how beautiful was her face when she sang. I turned to my companion at the conclusion of the song and remarked: “God only bestows a voice like that upon a very few women.”

“Yes,” he replied sadly, “upon the few women who involuntarily pay the great price.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“No woman can sing so sweetly who has not suffered. Somebody has broken that frail woman’s heart. She has suffered in the slow fire of deep sorrow. A man is driven into great philanthropy; music, or literary work that touches the heart, through deep sorrow, but the woman who has a voice for singing pours all her sorrow out through the channel of sweetened song.”

I glanced at him and knew he had learned the story that can only come to a man whose heart has been broken; and I knew that he had guessed whence came the sweet cadence in the singer’s voice. Somehow it struck me forcibly that these two people who had been made sweet and lovable in the fire of sorrow would make life companions, if they could be brought together. I told my wife all I had on my mind and she fell in with my views at once. She is a chronic matchmaker.

She courted the woman’s society and learned her story. Her husband had been a defaulter, embezzler, bigamist and scoundrel. He had since been killed by a woman. She was making her living singing on the stage. I told her, when better acquainted, of how my friend had guessed of her sorrow, and she became greatly interested in my sad friend’s history. We finally brought the two strangers together. She sang for us and he read his latest poem. The sweetness of sorrow touched us all. She sang again and we all cried together. The charm of sorrow was over us all—over the entire house.

That was two years ago. They are now happily married. The sweetness of sorrow is in their love for each other, and life is filled with love’s sweet song.

IN HER DREAMS

In the lonesomest road I travelled while homeward bound from Reading, I stopped at a little faded cottage to inquire the way and the distance to the nearest town. An old white haired woman came to the door and gave as much information as she possessed, but she confessed she hadn’t been to town for more than sixteen years.

“And do you live all alone in this dreary place the year ’round?” I inquired. “No, not always alone,” she replied, with a peculiar smile. “Once a month the groceryman sends the boy out with my store goods and flour, and a neighbor living just over the hill comes over every week to see if I have any wood chopped, and to fix the pasture field fence so that my cow can’t get away. Besides this one or two neighbor women call sometimes and do their sewing while telling me the news from the outside world.”

“But at night you are alone, and that is the dreariest time of all,” I suggested.

“No, I’m not alone even during the night, stranger. I have very realistic dreams while I sleep. During the year I am visited by all of my old friends and schoolmates. Not all at one time, to be sure, but every night one or the other of them will call on me, and we’ll all be young again and play the dear old games we loved so well when we were boys and girls. And the boy who was killed in the mines away back in ’78 comes back once a week and in my dreams I mend his clothes and wash his shirts, the same as I used to do in the long ago.”

“Sort of a sad dream,” I remarked.

“No, not at all! Why should it make one sad to dream of those we loved, and who loved us long ago? Last night my husband came back to see me, and he was killed in the mines away back in ’67. He was just like he appeared to me the morning he went to the mine and to his death.”

“Were you glad to see him?” I asked, for she stopped short and was looking out toward the wooded hills with a glad smile on her face.

“Glad to see him? Why, I was just as glad as I was when he used to come courting me down in Lebanon a half century ago! He always puts his arms around me and gives me a gentle embrace, and kisses me on the lips, just as he did when he was my lover and I was his girl sweetheart. And then he sits at the chimney and lights his pipe and smokes in silence, and I mend his clothes. By and by I fill his dinner pail, and before he starts away he asks me to the door, where he embraces me once more, and I hold up my lips for his farewell kiss; and then I stand there in the early morning light and watch him pass down the road and around the bend and disappear behind the bunch of laurels, just as I used to watch him long ago.”

“And your dreams make you feel happy during the next day, I suppose,” I remarked, for she was again looking dreamily towards the hills.

“Not always,” she sadly replied. “For when my dead baby comes back in the night and begins to feel with his dead hands all over my bosom, and with his dead mouth tries to find my breast, I then recall that many and many the time that same baby groped for my breast when he was starving for the want of proper food; for in those days John was drinking hard; and did not provide for his family, and my half-starved body furnished but poor watery food for my baby boy; and all night long his baby hands reached for the fountain that had run dry. The doctor said he was so nearly starved that he could not stand the pneumonia and recover, so he died.”

“Could you forgive your husband after baby died?” I asked.

“Yes, after a manner. You see he straightened up for a time after baby died, and wasn’t drinking so very hard when he was killed. And he is always young and sober and industrious in my dreams, the same as he was when we were married, but baby is always hungry and groping with his dead mouth for my shriveled breast.”

THE MORTGAGED MOTHER

The home was located in an isolated and lonely spot, with hills on two sides of it and a ragged woodland in the rear, and the front side leading into a deep ravine that grew wider as it neared the valley far below. The road came up the steep ravine, passed the house and wound over the hill in the rear. It was so steep that few people traveled the road unless going to call on the owner of the home, Jack Wier.

Jack was sitting on the porch as we drove up to the house, and looked the picture of despair. Children came running out of the house to see who was coming, and the open doorway was filled with frowsy heads, besides the bolder ones who hung over the rail of the porch and gazed at us like so many startled rabbits. We counted nine, and Jack said the youngest was sleeping in the cradle.

“Ten children, after a marriage of twelve years!” he said, with a melancholy tinge in his voice.

“Surely there is no race suicide here!” I exclaimed.

“No, there is no race suicide, but there has been a mother sacrificed,” he said, and there was a sob in his throat. “Two days after the birth of our last baby girl the poor worn-out mother died. Nature could not sustain her frail body after so many years of torture. Common sense should have taught me that my wife was making a sacrifice of herself, but I was blind. Suddenly I was awakened. I was left with a family of ten children, and the eldest only eleven years old. Of course, I am fond of the children, but the price paid was too much—twelve years of painful sacrifice, and then an eternal rest in the bosom of mother earth.

“And what am I to do with my children? We have been getting along, after a manner, but the children are now showing the effects of neglect. It may require another sacrifice before the children are all pulled through. Bessie, my eldest girl, has never had any childhood. She has been forced into womanhood before she fairly tasted the joys of happy girlhood, and she is growing into that peculiar condition where the overburdened body takes on the appearance of age, and the dream-light no longer shines in the hopeless eyes.”

“You take things too seriously,” I said, by way of cheering him up.

“That may be,” he replied, “but God knows how seriously things are taking me! I love my children and would educate them all, if possible, but it looks now as though I will never be able to educate any of them. This poor hillside farm is all I have in the world, and debts accumulate much faster than crops grow. When a man gets so far in debt that release seems hopeless, the future looks uninviting to that man.

“And it’s all owing to my blind ignorance! So long as my wife lived I was proud to be called the father of ten children. It put me in a class with those patriarchs of old, who gloried in their many offspring. I forgot that these same old patriarchs gloried in their many wives, as well.”

Then pointing down the valley he asked: “Do you see that white house over yonder? That man has two children. They are now attending high school over in the city. He is able to give them both a good education, and no doubt the two will accomplish more good in the world than my ten, who must grow up in ignorance and be fit to only perform menial and poorly paid labor.

“And that’s not all, nor the worst: Growing up without a mother’s care and loving hand to guide them, I often tremble for their safety. The pitfalls and traps set to catch the unsophisticated girls are numerous and temptations lurk in every dark corner. Race suicide may be a sin, but mother sacrifice is a barbarous outrage. Outraged nature is taking revenge out of me. I painted this picture myself, with living pictures, but the face of a martyred mother is in the background.”

THE TOY MAKER