McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908
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Title: McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908
Author: Various
Release date: February 2, 2006 [eBook #17663]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17663
Credits: Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Richard J. Shiffer and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE, VOL. 31, NO. 1, MAY 1908 ***
Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Richard J. Shiffer and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.
[Transcriber's Note: The Table of Contents and the list of illustrations
were added by the transcriber.]
McCLURE'S MAGAZINE
VOL. XXXI MAY, 1908 No. 1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS.
THE MISADVENTURES OF CASSIDY. By Edward S. Moffat.
MARY BAKER G. EDDY. By Georgine Milmine.
IN CHARGE OF TRUSTY. By Lucy Pratt.
FIRST DAYS OF THE RECONSTRUCTION. By Carl Schurz.
Restless Foot-loose Negroes.
The Freedmen's Bureau.
Pickles and Patriotism.
The South's Hopeless Poverty.
Johnson's Haste for Reconstruction.
Arming the Young Men of the South.
The President Defends Southern Militia.
Criticism and Personal Discomfort.
The End of an Aristocracy.
An Ungracious Reception.
Why the President Reversed his Policy.
Congress and General Grant's Report.
THE FLOWER FACTORY. By Florence Wilkinson.
THE SILLY ASS. By James Barnes.
WAR ON THE TIGER. By W. G. Fitz-gerald.
THE RADICAL JUDGE. By Anita Fitch.
POVERTY AND DISCONTENT IN RUSSIA. By George Kennan.
"THE HEART KNOWETH." By Charlotte Wilson.
IN THE DARK HOUR. By Perceval Gibbon.
"OLIVIA" and "FAUST" AT THE LYCEUM. By Ellen Terry.
"Olivia" a Family Play.
Ellen Terry and Eleanora Duse.
"Faust."
George Alexander and the Barmaids.
"Faust" a Paradoxical Success.
Irving on Long Runs.
Irving's Mephistopheles.
"Faust's" Four Hundred Ropes.
THE LIE DIRECT. By Caroline Duer.
THE WAYFARERS. By Mary Stewart Cutting.
XV.
XVI.
XVII.
XVIII.
ILLUSTRATIONS
"FOR FOUR LONG SUMMER MONTHS OF DUST AND HEAT CASSIDY HAD BEEN A
FREIGHTER."
"'I'VE SOLD THEM WHEELERS!'"
"NEAREST TO THE ROUGH PINE BOX STOOD THE WIDOW, WITH LOWERED EYES"
"'I HEREBY PRONOUNCE YUH MAN AND WIFE!'"
GREETING THE PILGRIMS.
GEORGE WASHINGTON GLOVER.
THE MOTHER CHURCH IN BOSTON.
"'I'SE JUS 'BLIGE WHUP 'IM ALL DE WAY TER SCHOOL'"
"I KIN GET 'EM YERE, EF YER WANTS."
"TWO SMALL FIGURES PUSHED THEIR WAY INTO THE ROOM"
"THAT LITTLE BOY, SMILED THE ROSY-CHEEKED GENTLEMAN"
MAJOR-GENERAL O. O. HOWARD.
A PHOTOGRAPH OF GENERAL HOWARD.
MAJOR-GENERAL H. W. SLOCUM FROM A WAR-TIME PHOTOGRAPH.
MAJOR-GENERAL H. W. SLOCUM BEFORE HIS DEATH IN 1894.
MAJOR-GENERAL E. R. S. CANBY.
SENATOR WILLIAM LEWIS SHARKEY.
"HE COULD HEAR THE CRASH, SEE THE GREAT BOW SINKING"
"FIRST A MAGNIFICENT YELLOW HEAD EMERGES, THEN THE LONG, LITHE BODY"
HOWDAH ELEPHANT TRAINING MADE EASY.
LAST WALL OF DEFENSE.
SLAYER OF SEVENTY-SIX NATIVES LAID LOW AT LAST.
TIGRESS ALSO IS SLAIN.
"'WADICAL!'"
"AN UNTIDY MIDGET FOLLOWING CLOSELY AT HIS HEELS"
"HOPE CAROLINA, FROM HER MARVELOUS BED, COULD SEE EVERYTHING."
"FOREVER TURNING BACK TO KISS HIM...."
"IT WAS THE QUAINT CUSTOM ... TO FOLLOW MOURNERS ... FROM THE GRAVE"
PAUL MILYUKOV.
P. A. STOLYPIN.
THE AUDREY ARMS, OXBRIDGE, MIDDLESEX.
ELLEN TERRY AS "OLIVIA."
ELLEN TERRY AS OLIVIA.
HENRY IRVING AS THE VICAR.
H. BEERBOHM TREE.
ELEANORA DUSE WITH LENBACH'S CHILD.
ELLEN TERRY AS ELLALINE IN "THE AMBER HEART."
HENRY IRVING AS MEPHISTOPHELES IN "FAUST."
ELLEN TERRY.
ELLEN TERRY'S FAVOURITE PHOTOGRAPH AS OLIVIA.
ELLEN TERRY AS OLIVIA AND HENRY IRVING AS THE VICAR.
ELLEN TERRY AS MARGUERITE IN "FAUST."
"MRS. LEVERICH BOWED INCIDENTALLY"
"WITH EYES FOR NOBODY ELSE"
"FLOWERS AND CHILDREN--CHILDREN AND FLOWERS!"
"'THE LITTLE SPIDER WON'T HURT YOU'"
"'NEVER LET HIM COME HERE AGAIN--NEVER, NEVER!'"
[Illustration: "FOR FOUR LONG SUMMER MONTHS OF DUST AND HEAT CASSIDY
HAD BEEN A FREIGHTER."]
McCLURE'S MAGAZINE
VOL. XXXI MAY, 1908 No. 1
THE MISADVENTURES OF CASSIDY
BY EDWARD S. MOFFAT
ILLUSTRATIONS BY N.C. WYETH
Cassidy gazed long and blankly across the desert. "Wot a life!" he
muttered grimly. "Say, _wot_ a life this is!" Cassidy made the words
by putting his tongue against his set teeth and forcibly wrenching the
sounds out by the roots. The words had been a long time in the making,
but now, because of the infinite sourness of their birth and because
of the acrid grinding and gritting that had been going on in the dark
recesses of his soul, Cassidy was forced at last to listen. Rudely and
forever they dispelled Cassidy's dull impression that things were well
with Cassidy, and in so doing tore away the veil and revealed Truth
standing before him, naked, yet gloriously unashamed. But the general
outlines of the goddess had not been entirely unfamiliar to him.
Although his previous skull-gropings had brought forth neither a cause
nor a remedy, he had so long felt that things were far from
satisfactory that when at last she fronted him brazenly, eye to eye,
he only sighed heavily, spat twice in sad reflection, and----nodded
for her to pass on; she had been accepted.
"Gosh, wot a thirst I got!" he pondered, and kicked the empty canteen
at his feet. "Wot a simply horrible thirst! Say, pardner, I wonder did
a feller _ever_ have a thirst like this?" Luckily for Cassidy, his
throat was not yet so dry but that he could amuse himself by
fancifully measuring his thirst, first by pints, then by quarts.
"A quart would never do it, though," he meditated whimsically. "It
would be a mean, low trick to make it think so. This yere job rightly
belongs to a water-tank. Oh, gosh! And ten miles yet, across that
darned dry lake, tuh Ochre. Gid-ap, Tawmm!"
In slow response, the four blacks settled into their sweaty collars,
and the big Bain freighter, with its tugging trailer, heaved up the
swale and lurched drunkenly down the other side to the glittering
mesa.
For four long summer months of dust and heat Cassidy had been a
freighter. From sun-up to sun-down he had dragged with snail-like
progress up and down the cañons, through the rocky washes and crooked
draws; and now that the road had dropped into the Southwestern Basin
it was sickening mesa work, with the fine dust running like water
ahead of his wheels or whirling up in fantastic, dancing pillars of
grit that drove spitefully into his slack, parched mouth and sleepy
eyes.
"It's the goll-dinged monotonosity of it I cain't stand!" he whined,
as he drove his boot-heel down on the rasping brake-lever and waited
sullenly for the inevitable bump from the trailer. "Gawd never meant
fer a feller tuh do this work. I don't know Him very good," wailed
Cassidy, "but I bet He wouldn't deal no such a raw hand. It ain't
_human!_"
He frowned heavily at the sky-line of jagged mountains blued with
haze. "They look like a lot of big old alligators--just as if they was
asleep and lyin' with their shoulders half out of water," he murmured
in gentle, subdued reminiscence. "The darned old no-good things!"
Then, as the bitterness of his lonely life rose up and dulled his mind
and soured his tongue, "Why don't yuh get some mineral into yuh?" he
yelled with abrupt ferocity. "Why ain't yuh some good tuh a feller?
_Zing, zing, zing_--I _hate_ your old heat a-singin' in my ears all
the gosh-blamed time! Why don't yuh _do_ something? Huh? Yuh don't
make it so's anything kin live. Yuh don't give no water, yuh don't
give no grass, yuh don't do nothin'! Yuh jest lay there and make
_heat!_"
[Illustration: "'I'VE SOLD THEM WHEELERS!'"]
[Illustration: "NEAREST TO THE ROUGH PINE BOX STOOD THE WIDOW, WITH
LOWERED EYES"]
Across the mesa the shimmering white surface of a dry lake caught his
angry eye. As he looked, it began to rock gently from side to side.
Presently, in a freakish spirit of its own, it curled up at the edges.
Later, it seemed to turn into a dimpling sheet of water, cool, sweet,
and alluring.
Cassidy burst into a howl of derision that startled his blacks into a
jogging trot: "Oh, yuh cain't fool me, yuh darned old fake!" He shook
a huge red fist in defiance of his ancient foe. "I'll beat yuh
yet--darn yuh!"
Late that night, a large man with a red face and a sunburned neck on
which the skin lay in little cobwebs, stumbled in under the lights of
Number One Commissary Tent.
"I want my time and I want my money. I ain't a-goin' tuh work _no
more!_ he announced with a displeased frown.
"Going back home tuh Coloraydo?" asked the youthful clerk.
"Back home?" repeated Cassidy mechanically. "How--how's that, young
feller?"
"I asked yuh if yuh were going tuh hit the grit fer home?" the boy
repeated.
"Aoh!" said Cassidy, and a blank look spread across his countenance.
He spoke as if he did not understand. For a while he stood quite
still, unknowingly twiddling the time-check in his thick,
fat-cushioned fingers into a moist pink ball. His face grew heavy and
dull. It seemed to have been robbed, with a surprising suddenness, of
all the good spirits, all the abounding, virile life, of the moment
before. It grew to look old and lined under the flickering lamplight,
and this was odd, because Cassidy was not by any means an old man.
For a time the only sound he made was a queer little ejaculation of
surprise, the only movement a bewildered stare at the boy. Together
they were the actions of a child who, in the first numbing moments of
a gashed finger, only gazes at the wound in round-eyed wonder. Cassidy
had begun to remember.
He remembered that "back home" a man didn't have to live _all_ the
time on sour bread and canned tomatoes; "back home" you didn't have to
die of thirst, coming in with day-empty water-barrels to find the
spring dried up; "back home" the mountains didn't jiggle up and down
in front of you, through glassy waves of heat that rightfully
belonged in a blast-furnace. Things were different--and better--"back
home."
Cassidy lifted his head and listened. He had heard the sound of water.
Half hidden in the brush, a little brook was running by him down a
dark ravine. Joyously, tumultuously, it churked and gurgled over the
smooth green stones and moss down to the level, and then slipped away,
with low, contented murmurings, among the cottonwoods and willows.
Cassidy found himself following that brook. It took him down through
fields of dark lucerne. It led him through yellow pasturage, deep with
stubble and wild oats. It showed him long-aisled orchards glinting
with fruit in the sunlight. It ushered him into a wide and pleasant
valley. In the distance Cassidy saw a ranch. Near by, with blowsy
forelock and careless mane, a shaggy pony stood knee-deep in the
river-sedge.
"Why, hello, hossy!" whispered Cassidy, with soft surprise. "Why, say!
I know yuh!"
A full, warm wind began to sough through the pines on the hillside. He
could hear it blowing, blowing unendingly, from across the hills. His
ears rang with the whirring sound, as it came singing along with the
vox humana chords of a great 'cello, streaming down from the heights,
gentle-fingered, but wondrously vast-bodied--booming along with half a
world behind it. Fair in the face it smote him with its resinous
breath, and he felt his lips parting to inhale its fiery tonic--felt,
as he used to feel, the magic glow tingling in his veins again and
brightening his eyes with the pure pagan glory of his living.
And then, very sadly indeed for Cassidy, and in much the same way that
whisky and he had let it all slip through their fingers long ago, the
sound of the brook stilled. The valley, the meadows, the ranch, and
the kind, warm wind faded, one by one. In their stead came the creak
and shock of a belated wagon-train pulling into camp. He heard the
panting of laboring horses. He caught the salt reek of sweaty harness.
He heard the drivers curse querulously as they jammed down the
brake-levers, tossed the reins away, and clambered stiffly down.
Cassidy turned a strained, hard face on the boy. "I reckon not," he
said sadly, grimly. "I ain't a-goin' home. Nope; I ain't a-goin' no
place that's good. Yuh kin always be sure of that, kid."
"Oh, now, that's all right. Don't get sore," soothed the boy. "That's
all right, Cassidy."
"No, it ain't!" roared Cassidy, angry with the long, hot days and
stifling nights, angry with the work and the scanty pay, angry most
of all with himself. "No, it _ain't_ all right!"
[Illustration: "'I HEREBY PRONOUNCE YUH MAN AND WIFE!'"]
As a previously concealed resolve crystallized at last somewhere in
his brain, his voice rasped up a whole octave.
"Nothin's all right, pardner!" he yelled. "Yuh hear me? Yuh know what
I'm goin' tuh do?" He waved the time-check defiantly above his head
and let go one last howl of sardonic self-derision:
"I'm goin' down tuh the Bucket of Blood _tuh get drunk_!"
* * * * *
The desert town of Ochre, in its more salient points, was not unlike a
desert flower, although its makers were far from desiring it to blush
unseen. Yesterday it had slept unborn in a nook of the sand-hills, the
abiding-place of cat's-claw, mesquit, and flickering lizards.
To-day it burst, with an almost tropic vigor, into riotous growth.
Flamboyant youth, calculating middle age, doddering senility, all
these were there, all treading on one another's heels, to reap and be
reaped. To-day a scene of marvelous activity, a maelstrom of bustling
commissariat and fretting supply-trains, cut by never-ending
counter-currents of hoboes to and from the front, to-morrow it would
simmer down into the desuetude of a siding. Thus is vanity repaid.
Although Cassidy had begun at the "Bucket," he soon discovered that it
possessed no phonograph, and, possessing a craving for music, he had
removed himself and the remains of the pink check to where an aged
instrument in "Red Eye Mike's" guttered forth a doubtful plea for one
"Bill Bailey" to come home.
Here he had remained for five fateful, forgetting days. What Mike and
Mike's friends did to him in that space of time cannot be dwelt upon.
Suffice it to say that on the morning of the sixth day the bleary
semblance of a man who had slept all night in the sand, alongside of a
saloon, awoke to the daylight and a hell of pain.
By dint of soul-racking exertions it managed to roll to its hands and
knees. Then, by slow stages, it pulled itself together, and after
several unsuccessful attempts, tottering, stood on its feet. Tents,
horses, sky, desert, and sun revolved in a bewildering kaleidoscope
before his eyes. In the vastness of his skull a point of pain darted
agonizingly back and forth. In his mouth was a taste like unto nothing
known on this earth or in either bourn.
"I got money yet," he mumbled dazedly to himself, as was his
conversational wont. "Say! I'm tellin' yuh, I got money yet!"
Fumbling, he searched his pockets, but quite to no avail. Sadder yet,
a repetition of the search, even to turning his clothes inside out and
then looking anxiously on the sand, produced nothing. With a puzzled
look on his haggard face, he stumbled into Mike's saloon.
Not at all disconcerted by the bedraggled form that leaned on his bar
and mouthed disconnectedly, the worthy keeper of the hostel proceeded
to produce a sheet of paper from the till.
"I don't savvy what you're talking about at all," he remarked
ingenuously; "but seein' as you've been spendin' a few bucks amongst
your friends here, I'll tell you how you stand."
"How do I stand?" asked Cassidy thickly.
Mike laughed in his face. "You don't stand, pardner. You're all in."
A moment necessarily had to be allowed Cassidy to fathom this
catastrophe. When the agony had come and passed, he was heard to sigh
heavily and remark: "Well, I reckon it'll be the old job again. I got
the outfit yet."
"Have you, indeed?" mocked Mike, well up to his lay. "I'm glad to have
you mention it. See here, pardner." He slapped the sheet of paper flat
on the bar, under Cassidy's astonished eyes. "Do you figure this is
your name at the bottom, or don't you?" he demanded in peremptory
tones.
Cassidy frowned and regarded the paper. Then, as the words swam and
blurred together in one long, discouraging line, he weakly gave it up.
"Wot's it say, Mike?" he asked feebly.
"This here paper says," responded the other, with the cold, forceful
air of one well within his rights, "that last night you sold me your
teams and your outfit--fer a consideration. Of course, now, I ain't
sayin' just what you done with the consideration I give you. Mebbe you
spent it like a gent fer booze, mebbe you was foolish and went to some
strong-arm shack and got rolled. I dunno; I can't say. All I know is
that you got your money and I got the outfit. Savvy?"
Cassidy's face took on a queer, pasty white. His hands clawed
ineffectively at the bar.
"Sold you my _outfit_?" he quavered, with an awful break in his voice.
"_Sold it_, Mike? Why, how do you figure that?"
"Is that your name?" barked Mike in answer. He thrust the paper out at
arm's length and shook it under Cassidy's nose with astonishing
ferocity. "Just you say one little short word, friend. Is that your
name, or isn't it?"
Cassidy wavered. It was unquestionably his name; whether _he_ had
written it there or not was yet to be decided.
If psychological moments come to the Cassidys, this one felt such a
thing near him. _Now_ was the time for him to leap in the air and
pound wrathfully upon the bar. _Now_ was the instant for him to rush
into the open and call vociferously on his friends. _Now_ was the
fraction of a second left for him to reach out his hard knuckles and
pin Mike to the wall and tear the paper from his hands. But instead,
and with a queer feeling of aloofness from it all, much as if he were
the helpless spectator of activities proceeding in some fantastic
dream, he felt the moment thrilling up to him; felt it stand
obediently waiting; felt himself slowly gathering in response to its
mute query; then felt himself drop helplessly back into a stupid coma
of whisky fumes and sodden inertia.
When he came to, Mike had put the paper back in his till and was
assiduously cleaning up his bar. It was all over.
Cassidy shifted irresolutely from one foot to the other. A sickening
feeling of hollowness within him was crying aloud to be appeased by
either food or drink, and his shaking body begged for a place to rest
itself into tranquillity; but still for a while he stood there,
fighting off these yearnings while he gathered his far-strayed wits.
Now and then he weakly attempted to catch the other's eye, but as Mike
studiously refused to be caught, Cassidy could only blink owlishly and
fumble again with the tangled ends of the skein. Finally, abandoning
it all as useless, he turned toward the door, yet arrested his dazed
shambling to ask one last question.
"How's that?" Mike responded vaguely over his shoulder. "Still harping
on that, are you?"
"Did I really sell you them blacks?" ventured Cassidy quaveringly,
controlling his voice only with a tremendous effort. "Reelly,
truly--did I sell 'em?"
Mike rolled a cigar over in his mouth, with a complacent lick of his
tongue. "That's what," he replied laconically.
Cassidy gulped down something in his throat. He leaned for a moment
against the door-jamb; his gaunt, hollow-cheeked face quivered with
misery.
"I mean them black wheelers, Mike. Just them two--them wheelers," he
pleaded. Hesitating a little, as the other deigned no response, he
ventured weakly on:
"I was figurin', now--of course, I don't mean nothin' by it, Mike,
only yuh see how a feller _c'u'd_ figger it--that mebbe--mebbe you
made some mistake in readin' that paper. Yuh see how it could happen.
A feller _c'u'd_ make a mistake in readin', now, c'u'dn't he?" With
this flimsy appeal Cassidy played his last and poorest card.
In answer the other snapped some ashes from his sleeve, turned his
back, slapped the cash-register shut, and strode masterfully down the
room. "Not this time, pardner."
Cassidy stumbled out.
"I've sold them wheelers!" he sobbed under his breath. "Why, it seems
like I was just this minute thinkin' I'd get tuh go and water 'em, and
rub 'em down a bit. _Now_ it ain't no use thinkin' about it--not any
more. It ain't me that's goin' tuh do that. I cain't water 'em. I
ain't got rights to even lay my hands on 'em! O-h-h!" he shuddered,
and agonizedly pulled taut on every tired, aching muscle. "Yuh oughter
be beat up with a club. Yuh oughter get pounded with a rawk. You're a
rotten, whisky-soaked bum, that's all yuh are now, and yuh oughter be
killed and kicked out in the street!"
Half whining, half crying miserably, he drove himself out of the town,
for a mile or more, on the desert, then plodded painfully back again,
mauling and beating himself with the bludgeon of his awful self-pity.
At the foot of a fast-rising "grade" he halted wearily and watched the
work. It was well on toward noon by this time, and the sun was blazing
down through a choking pall of dust that hung in the lifeless air. Men
were driving horses to and fro. They were men with weak, deeply lined
faces and shambling gaits. They broke into querulous curses and beat
their animals savagely on ridiculously small pretexts. They handled
their reins with a uniformly betraying awkwardness.
Cassidy sized them up and sniffed contemptuously to himself. _He_
knew. "That's wot _you_'ll be doing to-morrow," he muttered. "Durn
your hide, that's all you're good for. That's yuh to-morrow, yuh and
the rest of the 'boes."
Not knowing what to do with himself now, he drifted back to the town
and sat in the scanty shade of a joshua, prepared to commune further
with himself. Looking up after a time, his eyes descried in the
distance the figures of two men who were walking toward him.
"I bet that's Con Maguire," he murmured. "Yep--him and that old
'Arkinsaw.' They've got their time-checks, tuh; I kin tell the way
they walk. I bet I know wot they're sayin'. Con, he's got a little
ranch up tuh Provo, and he's fer makin' right up the line and gettin'
that old no-good Arkinsaw to go along and pass up the booze.
"Poor old Arkinsaw!" mused Cassidy shrewdly. "He's worked three months
steady for Donovans', drivin' scraper, the poor old slob, and their
chuck is rotten. I'll bet he's terrible glad to get back tuh Number
One. He's got forty dollars now. I bet he's near crazy. He allers
looks that way when he's got forty dollars," said Cassidy.
"Sure I'll go with you, Con," Arkinsaw was saying. "I always meant to
go, reelly, truly I did. You ask any of the fellers back to Donovans'.
I was allers savin', 'I'm goin' out home when Con Maguire goes'--and,
sure enough, here I am. I'll be to the train the same time as you.
We'll go home on the same train, Con; sure we will." The old man
laughed nervously. His eyes were bright with some strange
excitement--but half of it was fear.
"Say, Con," he whispered hoarsely, "I'll be all right. You jest ketch
holt of my arm when we go by; I'll be all right then. Say, Con," he
guttered, in an agony of fear and desperation, "you hear me? Only git
me by that first saloon."
But the approaching twain had been seen by other eyes than Cassidy's.
By some odd fortuity, a phonograph broke into wheezy song as the
wayfarers swung down the street. Dice began to roll invitingly across
the bars, and from a distant spot came the hollow sound of the
roulette-ball. Quite by chance, a man appeared in a doorway, holding a
glass of beer. He was seen to drain it, just as they passed. Then he
noticed them for the first time.
"Come in and cool off, boys," he suggested cordially. "It's all on
ice. Good, cold lager, boys!"
Under its mask of dust, Arkinsaw's face worked horribly. He stumbled,
loitered along the way to fix his shoe, zigzagged from one side to the
other, fumbled at his pack, and finally stopped.
"Say, Con," he rasped feebly. "Oh, Con! Say, I gotter see a feller
here. Say!" as his friend looked back at him with disconcerting doubt
written on every feature. "Say, Con!--reelly, truly I have!"
"Well, hurry up, then," replied the other, and went on his dogged way.
The instant his back was turned, the old man obliqued crabwise to the
side of the road. Fumbling nervously at his roll of bedding, he threw
it off and darted for the saloon, running and stumbling in his haste.
But at this point a large, gaunt, red-faced man, bearing a club in one
hand, appeared from nowhere in particular and fronted him.
"G'wan down the road!" said the red-faced man harshly.
"Why--why, _Cass_!" Arkinsaw bleated surprisedly. "How you did startle
me! Why, where did you come from? Yessir!" and he deftly manoeuvered
so as to catch a glimpse of the bar over Cassidy's shoulder. "You
surely startled me bad. Excuse _me_," he murmured absently; "I gotter
see a feller----"
"G'wan down the road!"
"No, no, Cass!" the old man begged, hopping frantically on one foot.
"Just a minute. It'll only take me a minute, I tell you. I gotter see
a feller."
"G'wan down the road!"
"Say, Cass! _don't_ treat a feller that way----"
Arkinsaw retreated. Cassidy and the club advanced. Arkinsaw craftily
side-stepped. So did Cassidy. They paused.
Cassidy leaned on his stick and centered the old man's wavering gaze.
"Don't lie," he said softly. "If yuh lie tuh me, yuh feather-brained
old cockroach, I'll just natch'lly beat your face off! I want yuh tuh
go home; just clamp your mind on that, Sam Meeker! If yuh think you're
goin' tuh throw your money away over that bar, yuh want tuh separate
yourself from the idea mighty quick. I won't stand fer foolishness. Go
over there and git your bed!"
By this time the old man had calmed down. He looked the other over
with a benevolently crafty eye.
"Why, what you been doing lately, Cass?" he inquired, with an adroit
turn of the conversation. "You don't look as if you were real happy."
Cassidy winced. Then he hefted the club suggestively. "I've been doin'
things _yuh_ won't do!" he said savagely. "There's your bed over
there. Pick it up! Hit the breeze! _Hike!_"
"This yere's a friend of mine, Con," chortled Arkinsaw delightedly, as
he scrambled up the steps of the swing train a little later. "He
knowed my folks, back home. He's a real kind feller."
Con nodded and surveyed Cassidy's club with vast appreciation. The
train underwent a preliminary convulsion and began to pull out.
"Good-by!" yelled Cassidy. "Keep sober, yuh brindle-whiskered old
billy-goat!"
Arkinsaw's straggly beard waved in the air as he stuck his head out of
a window. His worn, furtive old face was riotous with joy. He was
going home--_home_! Safe and sober, with forty dollars and a clean
conscience, more than had been his in many a day.
"You bet I kin!" he bellowed back. "You're all right, Cass!"
Cassidy sniffed and turned again toward the town. "I don't reckon I
c'u'd stand these yere chuck-ranches off fer a meal," he soliloquized,
"not lookin' the way I am. To-morrow's all right; I'll be workin'
then. To-day--" He paused and ran his hand over his forehead. "Well,
to-day I reckon it'll be Mike's again--if he'll stand fer it."
And Mike fed him. Cassidy was harmless now. The fact that he asked for
food proved it. Mike knew it; Cassidy knew it.
The rear of the saloon was partitioned off into a "Ladies' Room,"
whose door opened on the alkali flat behind. From thence came the
monotonous drone of a murmured conversation. Cassidy tried
ineffectually to follow it, but the droning of the voices and the
steady hum of the flies around the beer lees on the bar made him
sleepy. Outside it was stiflingly hot. Over on the grade the horses
were choking and snorting in the dust, while the shambling-gaited men
cursed steadily and heaved at the heavy scrapers. The little patch of
blue in the doorway was twinkling with heat. Far out on the yellow
plain, a grotesque-armed joshua lurched from side to side.
Cassidy felt a hand on his shoulder. "Do you want a drink?" asked
Mike. "If you do, go in there and earn it. Talk to her. She's in hard
luck."
Cassidy arose obediently, and with not a little timidity ventured to
open the door and peer within.
"Come in," said a woman's voice, and Cassidy, not knowing why or why
not, went in.
"Put your hat on the coffin and have a chair," said the woman. "I've
looked and looked, and I can't see any table in this room."
Cassidy shuffled to a seat in a moment of surprise, and looked
guardedly about him. There was, in fact, no table. Indubitably there
was a coffin.
"That's my husband," said the woman. "Want to see him?"
"N-n-no, ma'am," Cassidy stammered hastily.
The woman nodded appreciatively. "Few does," she said, "and I guess it
wouldn't do yuh much good. What's the matter with yuh? Yuh don't seem
right well."
"No, ma'am," Cassidy confessed; "I ain't very well to-day."
The woman smiled a little. There was a pause. "How long have yuh been
drinkin'?" she asked in a gentle voice.
"'Bout five days now," said Cassidy, reddening to the tips of his ears
and bashfully looking up for the first time.
She was a short, well-made woman, dressed in black from the hem of her
shiny skirt to the long plush bonnet-strings dangling loosely in her
lap. Her face was a firm, pleasant oval, quite unlined except near the
eyes, where there was a multitude of fine wrinkles such as come from
squinting across a desert under a desert sun. There was nothing
particularly worth noting about her face, except that it had an
exceptionally healthy appearance. But her eyes fascinated Cassidy.
They were an uncompromising, snapping black. They seemed brimming over
with vitality. They were eyes that showed a strength of will behind
them only woefully expressible in her woman's voice. They had a
compelling quality in their straightforward honesty that forced
Cassidy at once to forego the rest of her features. If he ventured to
admire the firm white chin and well-kept teeth, the eyes flashed a
stern rebuke. If his gaze slipped down to the sleazy, badly fashioned
dress, the eyes brought him up with a round turn, slapped him, and
reduced him to obedience. If his own flitted curiously to the smooth
brown hair, drawn simply, plainly away from her forehead, hers towed
him mercilessly back.
"We never drank much down tuh the ranch," she remarked, with the easy
deviance of one who understands another's failings and does not wish
to pain him by intruding their own immunity; "and now I s'pose there
won't be hardly any. I'm Sarah Gentry. Yuh know me? We live down tuh
Willow Springs."
Cassidy nodded. _He_ knew Willow Springs and its well-kept ranch. It
was the only fertile neck of land that ran down to Ochre Desert, an
oasis, a veritable paradise of cottonwoods, willows, dark fields of
alfalfa, a capably fenced corral, long lines of beehives, and
apple-and olive-trees.
Cassidy grinned feebly. "I know. I stoled a mushmelon there last
week."
"I saw yuh," said Sarah Gentry quickly, but without a shadow of
malice. "Your head is tuh red. Yuh better stick tuh grapes at night."
Cassidy collapsed.
"My husband died yesterday, from consumption," she went on, with an
even, steady flow of talk. "And I came in here tuh get a preacher tuh
bury him. I heard the railroad was comin' this way, and I figured
Christianity would come clippin' right along behind. But I guess it
won't pull in for quite a spell. It just beats me how the devil
_always_ gets the head start. _He_ kin always get in somehow, ridin'
the rods, or comin' blind baggage; religion sorter tags behind and
waits for the chair-car. I don't think much of this town, either. It
seems like it was full of nothin' but sand, saloons, beer-bottles, and
bums. Are yuh one of 'em?" she inquired, with a sudden thrust that
startled Cassidy beyond bounds.
"A _bum_, ma'am?" gasped Cassidy.
"No; a preacher."
"I reckon not," said Cassidy definitely.
"I didn't know," said the woman vaguely. "I never saw one. Edgard an'
me was married by the county clerk down tuh Hackberry, and he tried
tuh kiss me, and Edgard shot him. Those would be mighty unfortunate
manners for a preacher, I reckon. And now I'm all tired out and don't
know what tuh do. That man outside let me sit down in here, and made
me bring the coffin right inside,--he carried it in himself,--but he
didn't seem tuh know much about preachers, either. If I was a Mormon I
s'pose I could divide up the buryin' some, but I'm all alone now."
In a moment of unreflecting insanity Cassidy opened his mouth. "I'll
help yuh, ma'am!" he said gallantly.
"All right," responded the widowed woman instantly. "Yuh kin lead."
Cassidy paled perceptibly under his tan.
"Now don't back out," she said, "even if yuh do feel sick. Mebbe some
whisky would hearten yuh up." And she went quickly to the door.
Cassidy sat still in his chair, making up his mind--about the whisky.
"There!" said Sarah Gentry, suddenly appearing with a glass which she
set on the coffin. "Looks real good, don't it?"
Cassidy's forehead was damp with perspiration. Inside of him something
was clamoring frightfully for the stuff in the glass. Something seemed
gnawing at his very heart and soul, threatening and pleading, begging
and insisting, fashioning devilish excuses, promising great things.
Cassidy's hand stretched slowly out for the drink--and came back.
There was a silence. The woman fixed her large, strong eyes on his.
Again he reached out his hand, and his face was strained and
unpleasant to look upon. But again he stopped before he took the
glass. A horse had whinnied outside. Cassidy shook his head grimly.
Putting his toe against the glass, he deftly kicked it into the
corner. "I reckon not," he said.
The woman jumped to her feet.
"Git up!" she said impulsively. "Git up and shake hands. You're a
_man_! And now we'll go out and git tuh buryin'."
A little party of six was assembled in a gulch in the sand-hills. The
coffin, marked only with a card, lay in a slight depression scooped
out by the wind.
Nearest to the rough pine box stood the widow, with lowered eyes, but
without the trace of an expression on her face. Heavy-handed,
red-faced, gaunt and grim, Cassidy loomed up beside her. Behind them,
in attitudes of more or less perfunctory interest, stood a
white-capped cook from the commissary-tent, who had come out to get
away from the flies, two vague-visaged unknowns from the vast
under-world of hobodom, and a greasy, loose-lipped fireman with a
dirty red sweater and a contemptuous eye.
"Go on!" whispered the woman. She threw one of her swift, compelling
glances at Cassidy. "Say something!" And Cassidy obeyed; he could not
have refused if he had tried.
It became at once apparent that he must make no rambling talk. The
history of the past five days, while illuminating and diverting, could
not be calculated to inspire the casual onlooker with religious awe.
If aught was to be said, it must, perforce, be meaty and direct.
Cassidy grasped the irritating fireman firmly by the arm. Fixing him
with a baleful eye, he spoke:
"This yere lady has wanted me to say something tuh yuh about her
husband dyin'. As far as I kin understand, that part is all right.
That's what he done. He's dead, all right; there ain't no mistake
about _that_. Wot I'm askin' _yuh_ is: Was he a _man_? Was he good for
anything? Wot did he do when he wasn't workin'? Was he a low, mean
cuss, always goin' round with bums?"
"How do I know?" asked the fireman, in an aggrieved tone. "Ouch! Say,
leggo my arm!"
Cassidy's grip tightened. The fireman groaned dismally and subsided.
"Judgin' from wot I kin see, I should say he was! I mean he _was_ good
fer something. I should say he was surely a terrible weaver if he
couldn't keep straight, hitched up alongside of the--the lamented
widow. I don't think any feller could be much if he wasn't. Yuh see,
pardner, he had _all the chance in the world_. _He_ didn't need to be
jay-hawkin' round, makin' eyes at every red-cheeked biscuit-shooter
that fed him hot cakes. _He_ had a nice ranch and a good wife. A
feller that couldn't be grateful tuh a woman that's treated him as
good as she has to-day, and hauled him clear from Willow Springs tuh
git a Christian burial, and stood around fer him in a hot sun--well,
he couldn't be no account _at all_!"
Cassidy paused and spat. "That's the way _I_ look at it. And,"
thwarting the restive fireman by a startlingly painful grip on the
fleshy part of his arm, "any feller that ain't got as good a wife--any
feller that ain't got _any_, and lays round drinkin', and foolin' his
money away on the 'double O,' and sittin' in tuh stud games with
permiskus strangers, and gettin' ready tuh be a hobo--all I kin say
is, he'd better brace up and try tuh deserve one. A feller that ain't
got a wife is a no-account loafer and bum, and he ought tuh git
kicked! _This_ man had one, but he went and left her. Even then he
done better than _yuh_ done! That's all."
"Kin I go now?" queried the fireman smartly.
"Yuh kin!" responded Cassidy, malevolently, "but I'll see yuh later,
young feller. I ain't overfond of yuh." And he turned away to cover
the coffin with sand, digging it up laboriously and scattering it here
and there with a piece of board.
"That was a mighty nice talk yuh gave the fireman," remarked the
woman, during an interval in their labors. "I feel a lot better now.
Mebbe the fireman will get married now and brace up. Was he really
doing all those things yuh said?"
"Some feller was," answered Cassidy. "I heard about it."
"And now," announced the widow, "we'll just make him a good head-board
and stop there. Edgard _might_ have been a good husband, but he didn't
try overhard. Have yuh got anything written?"
"I ain't got anything but this yere old location notice," ventured
Cassidy doubtfully. "I guess, though, I'll just stake out Edgard, the
same as a claim. Then it'll be regular, and there won't nobody touch
him. Of course we won't put up any side centers or corner posts; jest
a sort of discovery monument. He'll be safe for three months, all
right."
And so Cassidy, with the nub of a pencil, and using his knee as a
writing-desk, duly, and in the manner set forth in the laws of the
United States, discovered and located Edgard Gentry, age thirty-five,
died of consumption, extending fifteen hundred feet in a northerly and
southerly direction and three hundred feet on either side, together
with all his dips, spurs, and angles.
"Yuh write a nice hand," murmured the widow pensively, sitting down in
the sand beside him and unwittingly breathing on his neck as he wrote.
"Did yuh go tuh school, Mister Cassidy?"
"Yessum," was the confused answer. "Leastways, part of the time."
The widow surveyed him with a dreamy look in her fine eyes and pulled
thoughtfully at her full lower lip.
"You're a big man," she remarked. "How much do you weigh?"
"Over two hundred," answered Cassidy consciously.
"And yuh haven't got any home?"--innocently.
"No, ma'am."
"What were yuh doing tuh that poor old man to-day?"
The sudden irrelevance of the question startled Cassidy immeasurably.
"Wot? That little old Arkinsaw man? Oh--nothin'. Did yuh see me
talkin' tuh him?"
"I did," said the woman; "and I also saw yuh poking him up the street
with a big stick. Do yuh think that was a nice thing for a strong
young man like yuh?"
"I was--I was just advisin' him," explained Cassidy thickly. "I----"
"What were yuh hurtin' that old man for?" was the forceful
interruption. "Did he ever hurt _yuh_ any?"
"Hurt _me_? Old Arkinsaw? No, ma'am; not tuh my knowledge. But----"
"_Never mind that_," said the woman stonily though the big, strong
eyes had a favorable light in their depths. "Yuh tell me why yuh were
sticking him in the back."
"Well--he wanted a drink--that's why," Cassidy mumbled.
"Oh!" remarked the woman, with withering comprehension. "And so,
because he was tired and thirsty and wanted a drink, yuh poked him. I
see."
Cassidy grew desperate. "I'm afraid, ma'am, yuh don't rightly
understand," he undertook to explain.
"Yes, I do," replied the woman hotly, and burned him with her eyes.
Then she turned her back on him, which hurt him a great deal more.
Cassidy groaned aloud.
"I believe you're a bully," goaded the little woman, and showed an
attractive, mutinous profile over her shoulder. "Do yuh bully women,
too?"
Cassidy did not answer at once. When he did, it was in a low, rather
lifeless voice: "No'm; I don't bother the women-folks much."
"There, there, now," soothed the woman, quickly turning to him and
putting her hand on his shoulder with a motherly gesture. "Don't go
tuh feelin' bad. Don't yuh s'pose I knew all the time why yuh did it?
I was glad, too. Just yuh lay down there in the sand and get rested,
and tell me all about it."
And so Cassidy, stretched full length, with his face half hidden in
his arm, mumbled fragmentarily--and told. After it was finished, after
all his misdeeds had been related, and counted over, one by one, he
ventured to look up.
The woman's face was grave, but she was smiling. She laid her hand
gently on his cheek and turned his eyes to hers.
"But you've quit now?" she stated.
"I've quit," answered Cassidy honestly.
"Well, then, it'll be all right. I reckon it's time for me to be going
now. Yuh better drive me home."
* * * * *
The road to Willow Springs lay straight across the mesa. Here and
there, in the yellow expanse of sand, were patches of green mesquit,
where some underground flow came near enough to the surface to slake
their thirsty roots. Elsewhere the sand shifted noiselessly across the
plain, under the touch of the wind, which fashioned innumerable oddly
shaped hummocks, and then gently purred them away again, to heap on
others.
After they had driven silently for some time, the woman spoke:
"There's a man standing in that clump of cat's-claw ahead. Did yuh see
him?"
Cassidy thoughtfully eased up the perspiring team. "I know him," he
answered, although apparently he had not raised his eyes above the
dash-board for a long time. "Name is Tommy."
"Well, what's Tommy hidin' in those bushes for?" demanded the woman.
"A feller broke into Number One Commissary last night."
"Did Tommy do it?"
"No, ma'am--not this time. His partner done it and skipped out."
"Does Jake think Tommy did it?"
"Yes, ma'am. I see Jake hitchin' up tuh go after him when we started
out."
There was little said after that until they came abreast of the
cat's-claw near the road. Cassidy pulled up.
"Say, Tommy! Oh, yuh Tommy!" he called persuasively at the silent
bushes. "Come, git in here. This lady wants yuh."
"I guess Jake's a-comin'," replied Tommy, poking his head into view
from his thorny retreat.
"I guess he is," said Cassidy, and looked over his shoulder at a
rapidly approaching pillar of dust. "It's a good thing the county pays
for his horse-flesh." There was a pause. "I reckon you'd better hurry
some, Tommy," drawled Cassidy.
"Don't stand there imperiling your life, tryin' tuh guess who I am,"
said the widow abruptly. "Get right in here and cover up with alfalfa
and them horse-blankets, and lie quiet. I want yuh."
"What for?" queried Tommy, as he clambered in, being a young man of
devious thought.
"For a witness!" said Sarah Gentry unfathomably--for Tommy.
Cassidy looked puzzled for a moment. Then a slow wave of red crept
over his face and crimsoned his ears. He started his horses again to
cover his confusion.
The woman let him think for a moment; then her eyes drew his own
startled orbs around and enveloped them in a soft light.
"Yuh know what I mean, Mister Cassidy?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Well--shall we?" shyly.
"Yes, ma'am," answered Cassidy, and blushed incontinently.
Behind them a light buggy was being driven over the desert at a
furious pace. As it came nearer, the two in the ranch-wagon, with its
confused huddle of horse-blankets and hay, beneath which lay the
trustful Tommy, could hear the shock of the springs as it bumped from
one chuck-hole to another; but they did not turn their heads.
"Hello, there, Cass!" shouted the sheriff genially, as he pulled down
alongside of them. "How'do, Mis' Gentry! Pretty hot travelin', ain't
it?"
"I s'pose it is--being July," the little woman replied, with the first
trace of confusion that Cassidy had seen. "I--I hadn't been noticing
lately."
"I'm in a terrible hurry," the sheriff continued rapidly. "Some are
sayin' young Tommy Ivison come this way, and I want him. I hate tuh
give yuh my dust. Whoa, Dick! Whoa, Pet!" He pulled in his fretting
team with a heavy hand. "I've got tuh get him before he crosses the
California line, so I got tuh fan right along. Gid-ap, there!"
"Wait a minute, Jake."
"Can't do it, Mis' Gentry. If he's more than a couple of miles ahead,
I can't ketch him. What is it I can do for you?"
"Yuh kin marry us two!" said the little woman, with a gulp.
"_Marry yuh?_" roared the sheriff. "Can't do it, ma'am--not even for a
friend. Awful sorry, Mis' Gentry, but I've just _got_ tuh go." He
jerked the whip from its socket for a merciless slash.
"_Jake!_" said the little woman commandingly.
"Ma'am?" said the sheriff in an uncertain tone.
"Yuh heard what I said?"
"Yes, ma'am; but it ain't regular at _all_. I ain't no justice of the
peace; I ain't got power enough; I ain't got anything--Bible, nor
statutes, nor nothing. I couldn't take no fee, either; it wouldn't be
right. By Golly!" he exclaimed excitedly, "I bet that's him, up ahead,
right now!" and he struck his horses.
"Whip up!" said the woman to Cassidy, and she stood up in the wagon
and held on by the rocking top.
"Jake Bowerman!" she called across the erratic width that separated
the rapidly moving vehicles, "if you've got power enough tuh 'rest
people and keep 'em in jail for the rest of their lives, marryin'
ain't much worse, and yuh kin do it if yuh try!"
"Yuh ain't got any witness, Mis' Gentry!" bellowed the confused Jake,
as a last resort, and touched his horses again. Cassidy let out
another notch, and kept even. The wagons were swaying jerkily from
side to side.
"Yes, I have!" snapped the woman. "Now, yuh hurry up!"
"Better stand up, Mister Cassidy," she whispered; "we've got tuh be
real quick!"
"It don't seem hardly regular!" yelled the discomfited sheriff,
skilfully avoiding a dangerous hummock and crashing through a
mesquit-bush which whipped away his hat. "I'll--I'll do it for yuh,
Mis' Gentry. I'll marry yuh as tight as I kin; but I can't stop
drivin' for that, and I've forgot a whole lot how it goes. Are yuh all
ready?"
The desert had changed from its soft, yielding sand to a brown, flat
floor of small stones and volcanic dust, fairly hard and unrutted.
Pulling in dangerously close, the sheriff shifted his reins to one
hand and faced them. The two wagons were racing neck and neck in a
cloud of dust, Cassidy handling his lines with skill and growing
satisfaction. From the body of the wagon under him, and quite
distinguishable from the clatter of the horses' feet, came a series of
sharp bumps as the unfortunate Tommy ricochetted from side to side.
"Do yuh believe in the Constitution of the United States?" bellowed
Jake.
"_We do!_" pealed the woman.
"Do yuh--whoa, there, Pet! Goll darn your hide!--do yuh solemnly swear
never tuh fight no _duels_?"
"What's that?" screamed the woman.
"He said a 'duel'!" shouted Cassidy in her ear, above the uproar of
the wheels. "Tell him _no_! We won't fight many duels!"
"No! _No_ duels!" sang the woman.
"And no aidin' or abettin'?"
"No! No bettin' at all!"
"Nor have any connection with any _duels_ whatsoever?"
The widow looked puzzled. She didn't understand. What had _duels_ to
do with solemn marriage?
"It's all in the statutes, all right!" roared the sheriff angrily, as
vast portions of the laws of Nevada fled from his agitated mind.
"Mebbe you're both grand jurors now; I dunno. I think that's the oath.
I reckon it's good and bindin', anyhow." He stood up in his buggy and
shook the reins furiously over his horses' backs to escape from
further legal entanglements. Leaning back over the folded top, he
pointed at them magisterially with his whip.
"And now, by the grace of God and me, Jake Bowerman, I hereby
pronounce yuh man and wife!"
With a roar of wheels, bad language, and a cloud of dust, the sheriff
vanished in pursuit of the California line and the fleet-footed Tommy.
Cassidy pulled his horses into a much-needed walk. The little woman
sat down and felt for her bonnet.
"_My!_" gasped Mrs. Cassidy, "_that_ was going some! Do yuh reckon
we're really married?"
The team, unheeded, had swung off from the desert into a road made in
damper, richer soil. Not far ahead, now, the dark foliage of the
Willow Spring ranch rose in cool relief against the grim, sun-reddened
buttes beyond. Their passenger had some time since dropped quietly off
and was walking ahead of the plodding horses.
As Cassidy looked forward at the quiet fields, and the ranch, and the
spring, in the half-circle of willows where the cattle drank, now
gradually dimming in the soft twilight, and then, with an involuntary
turn, at the God-forgotten waste behind him, something melted in his
breast; something cleared up his mind, and wiped it free of his
thoughtless appetites and sins, and made him a strong, clean-hearted
man again. He turned to the now quiet, pensive little woman at his
side. He found her looking up at him with trustful, softly shining,
all-enveloping eyes.
"I hope we're married!" said Cassidy gravely. "I reckon we are. Jake
was always a mighty brave man, and what he does, he does so it sticks.
But even if we ain't married good enough fer some folks, it's good
enough fer me, for all time. I won't run away, ma'am. No, ma'am--not
ever!"
"I know!" said the little woman happily. "_I_ know!"
MARY BAKER G. EDDY
THE STORY OF HER LIFE AND THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
BY GEORGINE MILMINE
XIII
TRAINING THE VINE--A STUDY IN MRS. EDDY'S PREROGATIVES AND POWERS
A Lady with a Lamp shall stand
In the great history of the land
_Motto upon the cover of the "Christian Science Sentinel"_
At the June communion of the Mother Church, 1895, a telegram from Mrs.
Eddy was read aloud to the congregation, in which she invited all
members who desired to do so to call upon her at Pleasant View on the
following day.[1] Accordingly, one hundred and eighty Christian
Scientists boarded the train at Boston and went up to Concord. Mrs.
Eddy threw her house open to them, received them in person, shook
hands with each delegate, and conversed with many. This was the
beginning of the Concord "pilgrimages" which later became so
conspicuous.
After the communion in 1897, twenty-five hundred enthusiastic pilgrims
crowded into the little New Hampshire capital. Although the Scientists
hired every available conveyance in Concord, there were not nearly
enough carriages to accommodate their numbers, so hundreds of the
pilgrims made their joyful progress on foot out Pleasant Street to
Mrs. Eddy's home.
Mrs. Eddy again received her votaries, greeted them cordially, and
made a rather lengthy address. The _Journal_ says that her manner upon
this occasion was peculiar for its "utter freedom from sensationalism
or the Mesmeric effect that so many speakers seem to exert," and adds
that she was "calm and unimpassioned, but strong and convincing." The
_Journal_ also states that upon this occasion Mrs. Eddy wore "a royal
purple silk dress covered with black lace" and a "dainty bonnet." She
wore her diamond cross and the badge of the Daughters of the
Revolution in diamonds and rubies.
In 1901[2] three thousand of the June communicants went from Boston to
Concord on three special trains. They were not admitted to the house,
but Mrs. Eddy appeared upon her balcony for a moment and spoke to
them, saying that they had already heard from her in her message to
the Mother Church, and that she would pause but a moment to look into
their dear faces and then return to her "studio." The _Journal_
comments upon her "erect form and sprightly step," and says that she
wore "what might have been silk or satin, figured, and cut _en
traine_. Upon her white hair rested a bonnet with fluttering blue and
old gold trimmings."
The last of these pilgrimages occurred in 1904, when Mrs. Eddy did not
invite the pilgrims to come to Pleasant View but asked them to
assemble at the new Christian Science church in Concord. Fifteen
hundred of them gathered in front of the church and stood in reverent
silence as Mrs. Eddy's carriage approached. The horses were stopped in
front of the assemblage, and Mrs. Eddy signaled the President of the
Mother Church to approach her carriage. To him, as representing the
church body, she spoke her greeting.
The yearning which these people felt toward Mrs. Eddy, and their
rapture at beholding her, can only be described by one of the
pilgrims. In the _Journal_, June, 1899, Miss Martha Sutton Thompson
writes to describe a visit which she made in January of that year to
the meeting of the Christian Science Board of Education in Boston. She
says:
"When I decided to attend I also hoped to see our Mother....
I saw that if I allowed the thought that I must see her
personally to transcend the desire to obey and grow into the
likeness of her teachings, this mistake would obscure my
understanding of both the Revelator and the Revelation.
After the members of the Board had retired they reappeared
upon the rostrum and my heart beat quickly with the thought
'Perhaps _she_ has come.' But no, it was to read her
message.... She said God was with us and to give her love to
all the class. It was so precious to get it directly from
her.
"The following day five of us made the journey to Concord,
drove out to Pleasant View, and met her face to face on her
daily drive. She seemed watching to greet us, for when she
caught sight of our faces she instantly half rose with
expectant face, bowing, smiling, and waving her hand to each
of us. Then as she went out of our sight, kissed her hand to
all.
"I will not attempt to describe the Leader, nor can I say
what this brief glimpse was and is to me. I can only say I
wept and the tears start every time I think of it. Why do I
weep? I think it is because I want to be like her and they
are tears of repentance. I realize better now what it was
that made Mary Magdalen weep when she came into the presence
of the Nazarene."
_Mrs. Eddy's Last Class_
After the pilgrimages were discouraged, there was no possible way in
which these devoted disciples could ever see Mrs. Eddy. They used,
indeed, like Miss Thompson, to go to Concord and linger about the
highways to catch a glimpse of her as she drove by, until she rebuked
them in a new by-law in the Church Manual: "_Thou Shalt not Steal_.
Sect. 15. Neither a Christian Scientist, his student or his patient,
nor a member of the Mother Church shall daily and continuously haunt
Mrs. Eddy's drive by meeting her once or more every day when she goes
out--on penalty of being disciplined and dealt with justly by her
church," etc.
Mrs. Eddy did her last public teaching in the Christian Science Hall
in Concord, November 21 and 22, 1898. There were sixty-one persons in
this class,--several from Canada, one from England, and one from
Scotland,--and Mrs. Eddy refused to accept any remuneration for her
instruction. The first lesson lasted about two hours, the second
nearly four. "Only two lessons," says the _Journal_, "but such
lessons! Only those who have sat under this wondrous teaching can form
a conjecture of what these classes were." "We mention," the _Journal_
continues, "a sweet incident and one which deeply touched the Mother's
heart. Upon her return from class she found beside her plate at dinner
table a lovely white rose with the card of a young lady student
accompanying on which she chastely referred to the last couplet of the
fourth stanza of that sweet poem from the Mother's pen, 'Love.'
"Thou to whose power our hope we give
Free us from human strife.
Fed by Thy love divine we live
For Love alone is Life," etc.
_Mrs. Eddy and the Press_
Mrs. Eddy now achieved publicity in a good many ways, and to such
publications as afforded her space and appreciation she was able to
grant reciprocal favors. The _Granite Monthly_, a little magazine
published at Concord, New Hampshire, printed Mrs. Eddy's poem "Easter
Morn" and a highly laudatory article upon her. Mrs. Eddy then came out
in the _Christian Science Journal_ with a request that all Christian
Scientists subscribe to the _Granite Monthly_, which they promptly
did. Colonel Oliver C. Sabin, an astute politician in Washington,
D.C., was editor of a purely political publication, the Washington
_News Letter_. A Congressman one day attacked Christian Science in a
speech. Colonel Sabin, whose paper was just then making things
unpleasant for that particular Congressman, wrote an editorial in
defense of Christian Science. Mrs. Eddy inserted a card in the
_Journal_ requesting all Christian Scientists to subscribe to the
_News Letter_. This brought Colonel Sabin such a revenue that he
dropped politics altogether and his political sheet became a
religious periodical. Mr. James T. White, publisher of the _National
Encyclopaedia of American Biography_, gave Mrs. Eddy a generous place
in his encyclopedia and wrote a poem to her. Mrs. Eddy requested,
through the _Journal_, that all Christian Scientists buy Mr. White's
volume of verse for Christmas presents, and the Christian Science
Publication Society marketed Mr. White's verses. Mrs. Eddy made a
point of being on good terms with the Concord papers; she furnished
them with many columns of copy, and the editors realized that her
presence in Concord brought a great deal of money into the town. From
1898 to 1901 the files of the _Journal_ echo increasing material
prosperity, and show that both Mrs. Eddy and her church were much more
taken account of than formerly. Articles by Mrs. Eddy are quoted from
various newspapers whose editors had requested her to express her
views upon the war with Spain, the Puritan Thanksgiving, etc.
In the autumn of 1901 Mrs. Eddy wrote an article on the death of
President McKinley. Commenting upon this article, _Harper's Weekly_
said: "Among others who have spoken [on President McKinley's death]
was Mrs. Eddy, the Mother of Christian Science. She issued two
utterances which were read in her churches.... Both of these
discourses are seemly and kind, but they are materially different from
the writings of any one else. Reciting the praises of the dead
President, Mrs. Eddy says: 'May his history waken a tone of truth that
shall reverberate, renew euphony, emphasize human power and bear its
banner into the vast forever.' No one else said anything like that.
Mother Eddy's style is a personal asset. Her sentences usually have
the considerable literary merit of being unexpected."
Of this editorial the Journal says, with a candor almost incredible:
"We take pleasure in republishing from that old-established and
valuable publication _Harper's Weekly_, the following merited tribute
to Mrs. Eddy's utterances," etc. Then follows the editorial quoted
above.
[Illustration: _Copyrighted, 1903, by R. W. Sears_ GREETING THE
PILGRIMS
MRS. EDDY ON THE BALCONY OF HER CONCORD HOME ADDRESSING THE PILGRIMS IN
1903. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH MADE AT THE TIME BY R. W. SEARS]
In the winter of 1898 Christian Science was given great publicity
through the death, under Christian Science treatment, of the American
journalist and novelist, Harold Frederic, in England. Mr. Frederic's
readers were not, as a rule, people who knew much about Christian
Science, and his taking off brought the new cult to the attention of
thousands of people for the first time.
Mrs. Eddy and the Peerage
In December, 1898, the Earl of Dunmore, a peer of the Scottish Realm,
and his Countess, came to Boston to study Christian Science. They were
received by Mrs. Eddy at Pleasant View, and Lady Dunmore was present
at the June communion, 1899. According to the _Journal_, Lady
Dunmore's son, Lord Fincastle, left his regiment in India and came to
Boston to join his mother in this service, and then returned
immediately to his military duties. Lady Mildred Murray, daughter of
the Countess, also came to America to attend the annual communion. A
pew was reserved upon the first floor of the church for this titled
family, although the _Journal_ explains that "the reservation of a pew
for the Countess of Dunmore and her family was wholly a matter of
international courtesy, and not in any sense a tribute to their rank."
Lord Dunmore, at one of the Wednesday evening meetings, discussed the
possibilities of a "Christianly-Scientific Alliance of the two
Anglo-Saxon peoples." Even after his departure to England, Lord
Dunmore continued to contribute very characteristic Christian Science
poetry to the _Journal_. He paid a visit to Mrs. Eddy only a few
months before his death in the summer of 1907.
In 1904 the Earl was present at the convention of the Christian
Science Teachers' Association in London, and sent Mrs. Eddy the
following cablegram:
"London, Nov. 28, 1904.
"REV. MARY BAKER EDDY,
"Pleasant View, Concord, N. H.
"Members of Teachers' Association, London, send much love,
and are striving, by doing better, to help you.
"DUNMORE."
To this Mrs. Eddy gallantly replied:
"Concord, N. H., November 29, 1904.
"EARL OF DUNMORE, AND TEACHERS' ASSOCIATION, London, G. B.
"Increasing gratitude and love for your lordly help and that
of your Association.
"MARY BAKER EDDY."
In these prosperous years the Reverend Irving C. Tomlinson, in
commenting in the _Journal_ upon Brander Matthews' statement that
English seemed destined to become the world-language, says: "It may be
that Prof. Matthews has written better than he knew. Science and
Health is fast reaching all parts of the world; and as our text book
may never be translated into a foreign tongue, may it not be expected
to fulfill the prophet's hope, 'Then will I turn to the people a pure
language,'" etc.
In January, 1901, Mrs. Eddy called her directors together in solemn
conclave, and charged them to send expressions of sympathy to the
British government and to King Edward upon the death of the Queen.
Truly the days of the Lynn shoemakers and the little Broad Street
tenement were far gone by, and it must have seemed to Mrs. Eddy that
she was living in one of those _New York Ledger_ romances which had so
delighted her in those humbler times. Even a less spirited woman than
she would have expanded under all this notoriety, and Mrs. Eddy, as
always, caught the spirit of the play. A letter written to her son,
George Glover, April 27, 1898, conveys some idea of how Mrs. Eddy
appeared to herself at this time:
Pleasant View,
Concord, N. H., April 27, 1898.
DEAR SON: Yours of latest date came duly. That which you
cannot write I understand, and will say, I am reported as
dying, wholly decriped and useless, etc. Now one of these
reports is just as true as the others are. My life is as
pure as that of the angels. God has lifted me up to my work,
and if it was not pure it would not bring forth good fruits.
The Bible says the tree is known by its fruit.
But I need not say this to a Christian Scientist, who knows
it. I thank you for any interest you may feel in your
mother. I am alone in the world, more lone than a solitary
star. Although it is duly estimated by business characters
and learned scholars that I lead and am obeyed by 300,000
people at this date. The most distinguished newspapers ask
me to write on the most important subjects. Lords and
ladies, earles, princes and marquises and marchionesses from
abroad write to me in the most complimentary manner. Hoke
Smith declares I am the most illustrious woman on the
continent--those are his exact words. Our senators and
members of Congress call on me for counsel. But what of all
this? I am not made the least proud by it or a particle
happier for it. I am working for a higher purpose.
Now what of my circumstances? I name first my home, which of
all places on earth is the one in which to find peace and
enjoyment. But my home is simply a house and a beautiful
landscape. There is not one in it that I love only as I love
everybody. I have no congeniality with my help inside of my
house; they are no companions and scarcely fit to be my
help.
I adopted a son hoping he would take Mr. Frye's place as my
book-keeper and man of all work that belongs to man. But my
trial of him has proved another disappointment. His books
could not be audited they were so incorrect, etc., etc. Mr.
Frye is the most disagreeable man that can be found, but
this he is, namely, (if there is one on earth) an honest
man, as all will tell you who deal with him. At first
mesmerism swayed him, but he learned through my forbearance
to govern himself. He is a man that would not steal, commit
adultery, or fornication, or break one of the Ten
Commandments. I have now done, but I could write a volume on
what I have touched upon.
One thing is the severest wound of all, namely, the want of
education among those nearest to me in kin. I would gladly
give every dollar I possess to have one or two and three
that are nearest to me on earth possess a thorough
education. If you had been educated as I intend to have you,
today you could, would, be made President of the United
States. Mary's letters to me are so misspelled that I blush
to read them.
You pronounce your words so wrongly and then she spells them
accordingly. I am even yet too proud to have you come among
my society and alas! mispronounce your words as you do; but
for this thing I should be honored by your good manners and
I love you. With love to all
MARY BAKER EDDY.
P.S.--My letter is so short I add a postscript. I have tried
about one dozen bookkeepers and had to give them all up,
either for dishonesty or incapacity. I have not had my books
audited for five years, and Mr. Ladd, who is famous for
this, audited them last week, and gives me his certificate
that they are all right except in some places not quite
plain, and he showed Frye how to correct that. Then he, Frye
gave me a check for that amount before I knew about it.
The slight mistake occurred four years ago and he could not
remember about the things. But Mr. Ladd told me that he knew
it was only not set down in a coherent way for in other
parts of the book he could trace where it was put down in
all probability, but not orderly. When I can get a
Christian, as I know he is, and a woman that can fill his
place I shall do it. But I have no time to receive company,
to call on others, or to go out of my house only to drive.
Am always driven with work for others, but nobody to help me
even to get help such as I would choose.
Again, MOTHER.
[Illustration: GEORGE WASHINGTON GLOVER
MRS. EDDY'S ONLY SON]
While Mrs. Eddy was working out her larger policy she never forgot the
little things. The manufacture of Christian Science jewelry was at one
time a thriving business, conducted by the J. C. Derby Company, of
Concord. Christian Science emblems and Mrs. Eddy's "favorite flower"
were made up into cuff-buttons, rings, brooches, watches, and
pendants, varying in price from $325 to $2.50. The sale of the
Christian Science teaspoons was especially profitable. The "Mother
spoon," an ordinary silver spoon, sold for $5.00. Mrs. Eddy's portrait
was embossed upon it, a picture of Pleasant View, Mrs. Eddy's
signature, and the motto, "Not Matter but Mind Satisfieth." Mrs. Eddy
stimulated the sale of this spoon by inserting the following request
in the _Journal_:[3]
"On each of these most beautiful spoons is a motto in bas
relief that every person on earth needs to hold in thought.
Mother requests that Christian Scientists shall not ask to
be informed what this motto is, but each Scientist shall
purchase at least one spoon, and those who can afford it,
one dozen spoons, that their families may read this motto at
every meal, and their guests be made partakers of its simple
truth."
"MARY BAKER G. EDDY.
"The above-named spoons are sold by the Christian Science
Souvenir Company, Concord, N. H., and will soon be on sale
at the Christian Science reading rooms throughout the
country."
Mrs. Eddy's picture was another fruitful source of revenue. The
copyright for this is still owned by the Derby Company. This portrait
is known as the "authorized" photograph of Mrs. Eddy. It was sold for
years as a genuine photograph of Mrs. Eddy, but it is admitted now at
Christian Science sales-rooms that this picture is a "composite." The
cheapest sells for one dollar. When they were ready for sale, in May,
1899, Mrs. Eddy, in the _Journal_ of that date, announced:
"It is with pleasure I certify that after months of
incessant toil and at great expense Mr. Henry P. Moore, and
Mr. J. C. Derby of Concord, N. H., have brought out a
likeness of me far superior to the one they offered for sale
last November. The portrait they have now perfected I
cordially endorse. Also I declare their sole right to the
making and exclusive sale of the duplicates of said
portrait.
"I simply ask that those who love me purchase this portrait.
"MARY BAKER EDDY."
The material prosperity of the Mother Church continued and the
congregation soon outgrew the original building. At the June communion
in 1902 ten thousand Christian Scientists were present. In the
business meeting which followed they pledged themselves, "with
startling grace," as Mrs. Eddy put it, to raise two million dollars,
or any part of that sum which should be needed, to build an annex.
In the late spring of 1906 the enormous addition to the Mother
Church--the "excelsior extension," as Mrs. Eddy calls it--was
completed, and it was dedicated at the annual communion, June 10, of
that year. The original building was in the form of a cross, so Mrs.
Eddy had the new addition built with a dome to represent a crown--a
combination which is happier in its symbolism than in its
architectural results. The auditorium is capable of holding five
thousand people; the walls are decorated with texts signed "Jesus, the
Christ" and "Mary Baker G. Eddy"--these names standing side by side.
According to the belief of Mrs. Eddy's followers, every signal victory
of Christian Science is apt to beget "chemicalization"; that is, it
stirs up "error" and "mortal mind"--which terms include everything
that is hostile to Christian Science--and makes them ugly and
revengeful. The forces of evil--that curious, non-existent evil
which, in spite of its nihility, makes Mrs. Eddy so much trouble--were
naturally aroused by the dedication of the great church building in
1906, and within a year Mrs. Eddy's son brought a suit in equity which
caused her annoyance and anxiety.
_Suit Brought by Mrs. Eddy's Son_
Among the mistakes of Mrs. Eddy's early life must certainly be
accounted her indifference to her only child, George Washington
Glover. Mrs. Eddy's first husband died six months after their
marriage, and the son was not born until three months after his
father's death--a circumstance which, it would seem, might have
peculiarly endeared him to his mother. When he was a baby, living with
Mrs. Glover in his aunt's house, his mother's indifference to him was
such as to cause comment in her family and indignation on the part of
her father, Mark Baker. The symptoms of serious nervous disorder so
conspicuous in Mrs. Eddy's young womanhood--the exaggerated hysteria,
the anaesthesia, the mania for being rocked and swung--are sometimes
accompanied by a lack of maternal feeling, and the absence of it in
Mrs. Eddy must be considered, like her lack of the sense of smell, a
defect of constitution rather than a vice of character.
Mrs. Eddy has stated that she sent her child away because her second
husband, Dr. Patterson, would not permit her to keep George with her.
But although Mrs. Eddy was not married to Dr. Patterson until 1853, in
1851 she sent the child to live with Mrs. Russell Cheney, a woman who
had attended Mrs. Eddy at the boy's birth. George lived with the
Cheneys at North Groton, New Hampshire, from the time he was seven
years old until he was thirteen. During the greater part of this time
his mother, then Mrs. Patterson, was living in the same town. When
George was thirteen the Cheneys moved to Enterprise, Minnesota, and
took him with them. Mrs. Eddy did not see her son again for
twenty-three years. She wrote some verses about him, but certainly
made no effort to go to him, or to have him come to her. On the whole,
her separation from him seems to have caused her no real distress. The
boy received absolutely no education, and he was kept hard at work in
the fields until he ran away and joined the army, in which he served
with an excellent record.
After he went West with the Cheneys in 1857, George Glover did not see
his mother again until 1879. He was then living in Minnesota, a man of
thirty-five, when he received a telegram from Mrs. Eddy, dated from
Lynn, and asking him to meet her immediately in Cincinnati. This was
the time when Mrs. Eddy believed that mesmerism was overwhelming her
in Lynn; that every stranger she met in the streets, and even
inanimate objects, were hostile to her, and that she must "flee" from
the hypnotists (Kennedy and Spofford) to save her cause and her life.
Unable to find any trace of his mother in Cincinnati, George Glover
telegraphed to the Chief of Police in Lynn. Some days later he
received another telegram from his mother, directing him to meet her
in Boston. He went to Boston, and found that Mrs. Eddy and her
husband, Asa G. Eddy, had left Lynn for a time and were staying in
Boston at the house of Mrs. Clara Choate. Glover remained in Boston
for some time and then returned to his home in the West.
[Illustration: THE MOTHER CHURCH IN BOSTON
THE ORIGINAL BUILDING, AT THE RIGHT, IS IN THE FORM OF A CROSS, AND
THE IMMENSE "ANNEX," WITH ITS DOME, IS SUPPOSED TO REPRESENT A CROWN,
THE TWO BUILDINGS THUS FORMING THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE SEAL--THE CROSS
AND CROWN]
George Glover's longest stay in Boston was in 1888, when he brought
his family and spent the winter in Chelsea. His relations with his
mother were then of a friendly but very formal nature. In the autumn,
when he first proposed going to Boston, his plan was to spend a few
months with his mother. Mrs. Eddy, however, wrote him that she had no
room for him in her house and positively forbade him to come. Mrs.
Eddy's letter reads as follows:
Massachusetts Metaphysical College.
Rev. Mary B. G. Eddy, President.
No. 571 Columbus ave.
Boston, Oct. 31, 1887
DEAR GEORGE: Yours received. I am surprised that you think
of coming to visit me when I live in a schoolhouse and have
no room that I can let even a boarder into.
I use the whole of my rooms and am at work in them more or
less all the time.
Besides this I have all I can meet without receiving
company. I must have quiet in my house, and it will not be
pleasant for you in Boston the Choates are doing all they
can by falsehood, and public shames, such as advertising a
college of her own within a few doors of mine when she is a
disgraceful woman and known to be. I am going to give up my
lease when this class is over, and cannot pay your board nor
give you a single dollar now. I am alone, and you never
would come to me when I called for you, and now I cannot
have you come.
I want quiet and Christian life alone with God, when I can
find intervals for a little rest. You are not what I had
hoped to find you, and I am changed. The world, the flesh
and evil I am at war with, and if any one comes to me it
must be to help me and not to hinder me in this warfare. If
you will stay away from me until I get through with my
public labor then I will send for you and hope to then have
a home to take you to.
As it now is, I have none, and you will injure me by coming
to Boston at this time more than I have room to state in a
letter. I asked you to come to me when my husband died and I
so much needed some one to help me. You refused to come then
in my great need, and I then gave up ever thinking of you in
that line. Now I have a clerk[4] who is a pure-minded
Christian, and two girls to assist me in the college. These
are all that I can have under this roof.
If you come after getting this letter I shall feel you have
no regard for my interest or feelings, which I hope not to
be obliged to feel.
Boston is the last place in the world for you or your
family. When I retire from business and into private life,
then I can receive you if you are reformed, but not
otherwise. I say this to you, not to any one else. I would
not injure you any more than myself. As ever sincerely,
M. B. G. EDDY.
After Mrs. Eddy retired to Pleasant View, neither her son nor his
family were permitted to visit her, and, when they came East, they
experienced a good deal of difficulty in seeing her at all. Mr. Glover
believed that his letters to his mother were sometimes answered by Mr.
Frye, and that some of his letters never reached his mother at all.
Mr. Glover states that he finally sent his mother a letter by express,
with instructions to the Concord agent that it was to be delivered to
her in person, and to no one else. He was notified that Mrs. Eddy
could not receive the letter except through her secretary, Calvin
Frye.
[ILLUSTRATION: MRS. EDDY'S NEW HOME AT CHESTNUT HILL
JANUARY 26, 1908. MRS. EDDY LEFT HER OLD HOME AT CONCORD AND CAME TO
HER NEW HOUSE AT NEWTON ON A SPECIAL TRAIN, WITH THREE ENGINES TO
INSURE HER SAFE CONDUCT]
January 2, 1907, Mr. Glover and his daughter, Mary Baker Glover, were
permitted a brief interview with Mrs. Eddy at Pleasant View. Mr.
Glover states that he was shocked at his mother's physical condition
and alarmed by the rambling, incoherent nature of her conversation. In
talking to him she made the old charges and the old complaints:
"people" had been stealing her "things" (as she used to say they did
in Lynn); people wanted to kill her; two carriage horses had been
presented to her which, had she driven behind them, would have run
away and injured her--they had been sent, she thought, for that
especial purpose.
After this interview Mr. Glover and his daughter went to Washington,
D. C., to ask legal advice from Ex-Senator William E. Chandler. While
there Mr. Glover received the following letter from his mother:
Pleasant View,
Concord, N. H., Jan. 11, 1907.
MY DEAR SON: The enemy to Christian Science is by the
wickedest powers of hypnotism trying to do me all the harm
possible by acting on the minds of people to make them lie
about me and my family. In view of all this I herein and
hereby ask this favor of you. I have done for you what I
could, and never to my recollection have I asked but once
before this a favor of my only child. Will you send to me by
express all the letters of mine that I have written to you?
This will be a great comfort to your mother if you do it.
Send all--ALL of them. Be sure of that. If you will do this
for me I will make you and Mary some presents of value, I
assure you. Let no one but Mary and your lawyer, Mr. Wilson,
know what I herein write to Mary and you. With love.
Mother, M. B. G. Eddy.
Mr. Glover refused to give up his letters, and on March 1, 1907, he
began, by himself and others as next friends, an action in Mrs. Eddy's
behalf against some ten prominent Christian Scientists, among whom
were Calvin Frye, Alfred Farlow, and the officers of the Mother Church
in Boston. This action was brought in the Superior Court of New
Hampshire. Mr. Glover asked for an adjudication that Mrs. Eddy was
incompetent, through age and failing faculties, to manage her estate;
that a receiver of her property be appointed; and that the various
defendants named be required to account for alleged misuse of her
property. Six days later Mrs. Eddy met this action by declaring a
trusteeship for the control of her estate. The trustees named were
responsible men, gave bond for $500,000, and their trusteeship was to
last during Mrs. Eddy's lifetime. In August Mr. Glover withdrew his
suit.
This action brought by her son, which undoubtedly caused Mrs. Eddy a
great deal of annoyance, was but another result of those indirect
methods to which she has always clung so stubbornly. When her son
appealed to her for financial aid, she chose, instead of meeting him
with a candid refusal, to tell him that she was not allowed to use her
own money as she wished, that Mr. Frye made her account for every
penny, etc., etc. Mr. Glover made the mistake of taking his mother at
her word. He brought his suit upon the supposition that his mother was
the victim of designing persons who controlled her affairs--without
consulting her, against her wish, and to their own advantage--a
hypothesis which his attorneys entirely failed to establish.
This lawsuit disclosed one interesting fact, namely, that while in
1893 securities of Mrs. Eddy amounting to $100,000 were brought to
Concord, and in January, 1899, she had $236,200, and while in 1907 she
had about a million dollars' worth of taxable property, Mrs. Eddy in
1901 returned a signed statement to the assessors at Concord that the
value of her taxable property amounted to about nineteen thousand
dollars. This statement was sworn to year after year by Mr. Frye.
_Mrs. Eddy's Removal to Newton_
About a month after Mr. Glover's suit was withdrawn, Mrs. Eddy
purchased, through Robert Walker, a Christian Scientist real-estate
agent in Chicago, the old Lawrence mansion in Newton, a suburb of
Boston. The house was remodeled and enlarged in great haste and at a
cost which must almost have equaled the original purchase price,
$100,000. All the arrangements were conducted with the greatest
secrecy and very few Christian Scientists knew that it was Mrs. Eddy's
intention to occupy this house until she was actually there in person.
On Sunday, January 26, 1908, at two o'clock in the afternoon, Mrs.
Eddy, attended by nearly a score of her followers, boarded a special
train at Concord. Extraordinary precautions were taken to prevent
accidents. A pilot-engine preceded the locomotive which drew Mrs.
Eddy's special train, and the train was followed by a third engine to
prevent the possibility of a rear-end collision--a precaution never
before adopted, even by the royal trains abroad. Dr. Alpheus B.
Morrill, a second cousin of Mrs. Eddy and a practising physician of
Concord, was of her party. Mrs. Eddy's face was heavily veiled when
she took the train at Concord and when she alighted at Chestnut Hill
station. Her carriage arrived at the Lawrence house late in the
afternoon, and she was lifted out and carried into the house by one of
her male attendants.
Mrs. Eddy's new residence is a fine old stone mansion which has been
enlarged without injury to its original dignity. The grounds cover an
area of about twelve acres and are well wooded. The house itself now
contains about twenty-five rooms. There is an electric elevator
adjoining Mrs. Eddy's private apartments. Two large vaults have been
built into the house--doubtless designed as repositories for Mrs.
Eddy's manuscripts. Since her arrival at Chestnut Hill, Mrs. Eddy,
upon one of her daily drives, saw for the first time the new building
which completes the Mother Church and which, like the original modest
structure, is a memorial to her.
There are many reasons why Mrs. Eddy may have decided to leave
Concord. But the extravagant haste with which her new residence was
got ready for her--a body of several hundred laborers was kept busy
upon it all day, and another shift, equally large, worked all night by
the aid of arc-lights--would seem to suggest that even if practical
considerations brought about Mrs. Eddy's change of residence, her
extreme impatience may have resulted from a more personal motive. It
is, indeed, very probable that Mrs. Eddy left Concord for the same
reason that she left Boston years ago: because she felt that malicious
animal magnetism was becoming too strong for her there. The action
brought by her son in Concord last summer she attributed entirely to
the work of mesmerists who were supposed to be in control of her son's
mind. Mrs. Eddy always believed that this strange miasma of evil had a
curious tendency to become localized: that certain streets,
mail-boxes, telegraph-offices, vehicles, could be totally suborned by
these invisible currents of hatred and ill-will that had their source
in the minds of her enemies and continually encircled her. She
believed that in this way an entire neighborhood could be made
inimical to her, and it is quite possible that, after the recent
litigation in Concord, she felt that the place had become saturated
with mesmerism and that she would never again find peace there.
_Mrs. Eddy at Eighty_
The years since 1890 Mrs. Eddy has spent in training her church in the
way she desires it to go, in making it more and more her own, and in
issuing by-law after by-law to restrict her followers in their church
privileges and to guide them in their daily walk. Mrs. Eddy, one must
remember, was fifty years of age before she knew what she wanted to
do; sixty when she bethought herself of the most effective way to do
it,--by founding a church,--and seventy when she achieved her greatest
triumph--the reorganization and personal control of the Mother Church.
But she did not stop there. Between her seventieth and eightieth year,
and even up to the present time, she has displayed remarkable
ingenuity in disciplining her church and its leaders, and adroit
resourcefulness and unflagging energy in the prosecution of her
plans.
Mrs. Eddy's system of church government was not devised in a month or
a year, but grew, by-law on by-law, to meet new emergencies and
situations. To attain the end she desired it was necessary to keep
fifty or sixty thousand people working as if the church were the first
object in their lives; to encourage hundreds of these to adopt
church-work as their profession and make it their only chance of
worldly success; and yet to hold all this devotion and energy in
absolute subservience to Mrs. Eddy herself and to prevent any one of
these healers, or preachers, or teachers from attaining any marked
personal prominence and from acquiring a personal following. In other
words, the church was to have all the vigor of spontaneous growth, but
was to grow only as Mrs. Eddy permitted and to confine itself to the
trellis she had built for it.
_Preaching Prohibited_
Naturally, the first danger lay in the pastors of her branch churches.
Mrs. Stetson and Laura Lathrop had built up strong churches in New
York; Mrs. Ewing was pastor of a flourishing church in Chicago, Mrs.
Leonard of another in Brooklyn, Mrs. Williams in Buffalo, Mrs. Steward
in Toronto, Mr. Norcross in Denver. These pastors naturally became
leaders among the Christian Scientists in their respective
communities, and came to be regarded as persons authorized to expound
"Science and Health" and the doctrines of Christian Science. Such a
state of things Mrs. Eddy considered dangerous, not only because of
the personal influence the pastor might acquire over his flock, but
because a pastor might, even without intending to do so, give a
personal color to his interpretation of her words. In his sermon he
might expand her texts and infinitely improvise upon her themes until
gradually his hearers accepted his own opinions for Mrs. Eddy's. The
church in Toronto might come to emphasize doctrines which the church
in Denver did not; here was a possible beginning of differing
denominations.
So, as Mrs. Eddy splendidly puts it, "In 1895 I ordained the Bible and
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, as the Pastor, on this
planet, of all the churches of the Christian Science Denomination."
That is what Mrs. Eddy actually did. In the _Journal_ of April, 1895,
she announced, without any previous warning to them, that her
preachers should never preach again; that there were to be no more
preachers; that each church should have instead a First and a Second
Reader, and that the Sunday sermon was to consist of extracts from
the Bible and from "Science and Health," read aloud to the
congregation. In the beginning the First Reader read from the Bible
and the Second Reader from Mrs. Eddy's book. But this she soon
changed. The First Reader now reads from "Science and Health" and the
Second reads those passages of the Bible which Mrs. Eddy says are
correlative. This service, Mrs. Eddy declares, was "authorized by
Christ."[5]
When Mrs. Eddy issued this injunction, every Christian Science
preacher stepped down from his pulpit and closed his lips. There was
not an island of the sea in which he could lift up his voice and
sermonize; Mrs. Eddy's command covered "this" planet. Not one voice
was raised in protest. Whatever the pastors felt, they obeyed. Many of
them kissed the rod. L. P. Norcross, one of the deposed pastors, wrote
humbly in the August _Journal_:
"Did any one expect such a revelation, such a new departure
would be given? No, not in the way it came.... A former
pastor of the Mother Church once remarked that the day would
dawn when the current methods of preaching and worship would
disappear, but he could not discern how.... Such disclosures
are too high for us to perceive. _To One alone did the
message come._"
_The "Reader" Restricted_
Mrs. Eddy had no grudge against her pastors; she did not intend that
they should starve, and many of them were made Readers and were
permitted to read "Science and Health" aloud in the churches which
they had built and in which they had formerly preached.
The "Reader," it would seem, was a safe experiment, and he was so well
hedged in with by-laws that he could not well go astray. His duties
and limitations are clearly defined:
He is to read parts of "Science and Health" aloud at every service.
He cannot read from a manuscript or from a transcribed copy, but must
read from _the book itself_.
He is, Mrs. Eddy says, to be "well read and well educated," but he
shall at no time make any remarks explanatory of the passages which he
reads.
Before commencing to read from Mrs. Eddy's book "he shall distinctly
announce its full title and give the author's name."
A Reader must not be a leader in the church.
Lest, under all these restrictions, his incorrigible ambition might
still put forth its buds, there is a saving by-law which provides that
Mrs. Eddy can without explanation remove any reader at any time that
she sees fit to do so.[6]
Mrs. Eddy herself seems to have considered this a safe arrangement. In
the same number of the _Journal_ in which she dismissed her pastors
and substituted Readers, she stated, in an open letter, that her
students would find in that issue "the completion, as I now think, of
the Divine directions sent out to the churches." But it was by no
means the completion. By the summer of 1902 Septimus J. Hanna, First
Reader of the Mother Church in Boston, had become, without the liberty
to preach or to "make remarks," by the mere sound of his voice, it
would seem, so influential that Mrs. Eddy felt the necessity to limit
still further the Reader's power. Of course she could have dismissed
Mr. Hanna, but he was far too useful to be dispensed with. So Mrs.
Eddy made a new ruling that the Reader's term of office should be
limited to three years,[7] and, Mr. Hanna's term then being up, he was
put into the lecture field. Now the highest dignity that any Christian
Scientist could hope for was to be chosen to read "Science and Health"
aloud for three years at a comfortable salary.
_Why the Readers Obeyed_
Why, it has often been asked, did the more influential pastors--people
with a large personal following, like Mrs. Stetson--consent to resign
their pulpits in the first place and afterward to be stripped of
privilege after privilege? Some of them, of course, submitted because
they believed that Mrs. Eddy possessed "Divine Wisdom"; others because
they remembered what had happened to dissenters aforetime. Of all
those who had broken away from Mrs. Eddy's authority, not one had
attained to anything like her obvious success or material prosperity,
while many had followed wandering fires and had come to nothing.
Christian Science leaders had staked their fortunes upon the
hypothesis that Mrs. Eddy possessed "divine wisdom"; it was as
expounders of this wisdom that they had obtained their influence and
built up their churches. To rebel against the authority of Mrs. Eddy's
wisdom would be to discredit themselves; to discredit Mrs. Eddy's
wisdom would have been to destroy their whole foundation. To claim an
understanding and an inspiration equal to Mrs. Eddy's, would have been
to cheapen and invalidate everything that gave Christian Science an
advantage over other religions. Had they once denied the Revelation
and the Revelator upon which their church was founded, the whole
structure would have fallen in upon them. If Mrs. Eddy's intelligence
were not divine in one case, who would be able to say that it was in
another? If they could not accept Mrs. Eddy's wisdom when she said
"there shall be no pastors," how could they persuade other people to
accept it when she said "there is no matter"? It was clear, even to
those who writhed under the restrictions imposed upon them, that they
must stand or fall with Mrs. Eddy's Wisdom, and that to disobey it was
to compromise their own career. Even in the matter of getting on in
the world, it was better to be a doorkeeper in the Mother Church than
to dwell in the tents of the "mental healers."
_Mrs. Stetson and Mrs. Eddy_
Probably it was harder for Mrs. Stetson to retire from the pastorship
than for any one else; indeed, it was often whispered that the pastors
were dismissed largely because Mrs. Stetson's growing influence
suggested to Mrs. Eddy the danger of permitting such powers to her
vice-regents. Mrs. Stetson had gone to New York when Christian Science
was practically unknown there, and from poor and small beginnings had
built up a rich and powerful church. But, when the command came, she
stepped out of the pulpit she had built. She is to-day probably the
most influential person, after Mrs. Eddy, in the Christian Science
body. Rumors are ever and again started that Mrs. Stetson is not at
all times loyal to her Leader, and that she controls her faction for
her own ends rather than for Mrs. Eddy's. Whatever Mrs. Stetson's
private conversation may be, her public utterances have always been
humble enough, and she annually declares her loyalty. In 1907 the New
York _World_ published several interviews with persons who asserted
that they believed Mrs. Eddy to be controlled by a clique of Christian
Scientists who were acting for Mrs. Stetson's interests. In June Mrs.
Stetson wrote Mrs. Eddy a letter which was printed in the _Christian
Science Sentinel_ and which read in part:
"Boston, Mass., June 9, 1907.
"MY PRECIOUS LEADER:--I am glad I know that I am in the
hands of God, not of men. These reports are only the revival
of a lie which I have not heard for a long time. It is a
renewed attack upon me and my loyal students, to turn me
from following in the footsteps of Christ by making another
attempt to dishearten me and make me weary of the struggle
to demonstrate my trust in God to deliver me from the
'accuser of our brethren.' It is a diabolical attempt to
separate me from you, as my Leader and Teacher....
"Oh, Dearest, it is such a lie! No one who knows us can
believe this. It is vicarious atonement. Has the enemy no
more argument to use, that it has to go back to this? It is
exhausting its resources and I hope the end is near. You
know my love for you, beloved; and my students love you as
their Leader and Teacher; they follow your teachings and
lean on the 'sustaining infinite.' They who refuse to accept
you as God's messenger, or ignore the message which you
bring, will not get up by some other way, but will come
short of salvation....
"Dearly beloved, we are not ascending out of sense as fast
as we desire, but we are trusting in God to put off the
false and put on the Christ. This lie cannot disturb you nor
me. I love you and my students love you, and we never touch
you with such a thought as is mentioned.
"Lovingly your child,
"AUGUSTA E. STETSON."
_The Teachers Disciplined_
Her pastors having been satisfactorily dealt with, the next danger
Mrs. Eddy saw lay in her teachers and "academies." Mrs. Eddy soon
found, of course, that a great many Christian Scientists wished to
make their living out of their new religion; that possibility, indeed,
was one of the most effective advantages which Christian Science had
to offer over other religions. In the early days of the church, while
Mrs. Eddy herself was still instructing classes in Christian Science
at her "college," teaching was a much more remunerative business than
healing. Mrs. Eddy charged each student $300 for a primary course of
seven lessons, and the various Christian Science "institutes" and
"academies" about the country charged from $100 to $200 per student.
So long as Mrs. Eddy was herself teaching and never took patients, she
could not well forbid other teachers to do likewise. But after she
retired to Concord, she took the teachers in hand. Mrs. Eddy knew well
enough that Christian Science was propagated and that converts were
made, not through doctrine, but through cures. She had found that out
in the very beginning, when Richard Kennedy's cures brought her her
first success. She knew, too, that teaching Christian Science was a
much easier profession than healing by it, and that the teacher
risked no encounter with the law. Since teaching was both easier and
more remunerative, the first thing to be done in discouraging it was
to cut down the teacher's fee, and to limit the number of pupils which
one teacher might instruct in a year. By 1904 Mrs. Eddy had got the
teacher's fee down to fifty dollars per student, and a teacher was not
permitted to teach more than thirty students a year. Mrs. Eddy's
purpose is as clear as it was wise: she desired that no one should be
able to make a living by teaching alone. It was healing that carried
the movement forward, and whoever made a living by Christian Science
must heal. From 1903 to 1906 all teaching was suspended under the
by-law "Healing better than teaching."
In the fall of 1895 Mrs. Eddy issued her instructions to the churches
in the form of a volume entitled the "Church Manual of the First
Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Mass." The by-laws herein
contained, she says, "were impelled by a power not one's own, were
written at different dates, as occasion required." This book is among
Mrs. Eddy's copyrighted works,--a source of revenue, like the
rest,--and has now been through more than forty editions. Some of the
by-laws in the earlier editions are perplexing.
We find that "Careless comparison or irreverent reference to Christ
Jesus, is abnormal in a Christian Scientist and prohibited."[8] It is
probable that no Christian church had ever before found it necessary
to make such a prohibition.
Again, the by-laws state that "Any member of this church who is found
living with a child improperly, or claiming a child not legally
adopted, or claiming or living with a husband or a wife to whom they
have not been legally married, shall immediately be excommunicated,"
etc.[9] This seems a strange subject for especial legislation.
The Manual, however, is chiefly interesting as an exposition of Mrs.
Eddy's method of church government and as an inventory of her personal
prerogatives. Never was a title more misleadingly modest than Mrs.
Eddy's title of "Pastor Emeritus" of the Mother Church.
_How the Mother Church is Organized_
Next to Mrs. Eddy in authority is the Board of Directors, who were
chosen by Mrs. Eddy and who are subject to her in all their official
acts. Any one of these directors can at any time be dismissed _upon
Mrs. Eddy's request_, and the vacancy can be filled only by a
candidate whom she has approved. All the church business is
transacted by these directors,--no other members of the church may be
present at the business meetings,--and if at any time one of them
should refuse to carry out Mrs. Eddy's instructions, or should grumble
about carrying them out, her request would remove him. The members of
this board, in addition to their precarious tenure, are pledged to
secrecy; they "shall neither report the discussions of this Board,
_nor those with Mrs. Eddy_."[10]
These directors are Mrs. Eddy's machine; they are her executive self,
created by her breath, dissolved at a breath, and committed to
silence. Their chief duties are two--to elect to office whomsoever
Mrs. Eddy appoints, and to hold their peace.
The President of the church is annually elected by the directors, the
election being subject to Mrs. Eddy's approval.[11]
The First and Second Readers are elected every third year by the
directors, subject to Mrs. Eddy's approval, but she can remove a
Reader either from the Mother Church or from any of the branch
churches whenever she sees fit and without explanation.[12]
The Clerk and Treasurer of the church are elected once a year by the
directors, subject to Mrs. Eddy's approval.[13]
Executive Members: Prior to 1903 these were known as First Members.
They shall not be less than fifty in number, nor more than one
hundred. They must have certain qualifications (such as residing
within five hundred miles of Boston), and they must hold a meeting
once a year and special meetings at Mrs. Eddy's call, but they have no
powers and no duties.[14] The manner of their election is especially
unusual. The by-laws state that a member can be made an Executive
Member only after a letter is received by the directors from Mrs. Eddy
requesting them to make said persons Executive Members; and then, Mrs.
Eddy adds, "they shall be elected by the _unanimous vote of the Board
of Directors_."[15]
What, one might ask, is the purpose in having an "executive" body
which can do nothing--they are not even allowed to be present at the
business meetings of the church--elected by a Board of Directors who
have to elect "unanimously" whomsoever Mrs. Eddy names? Why go through
the form of "electing" them, when they are simply appointed? Why,
indeed, elect the church officers, since, behind this brave showing
of boards and bodies, Mrs. Eddy, in reality, simply appoints?
One reason is that Mrs. Eddy likes the play of making boards and
committees; she loves titles and loves to distribute them. Another
reason is that her followers are proud to be placed upon these boards,
however limited their sphere of action may be.
_How Mrs. Eddy Controls the Branch Churches_
With the branch churches the case is much the same. Mrs. Eddy starts
out bravely by saying that they are to have "local self-government."
But on reading the Manual we find that they are pretty well provided
for.
A branch church can be organized only by a member of the Mother
Church.[16]
The services of the branch churches are definitely prescribed; they
are to consist of music, Mrs. Eddy's prayer, and oral readings from
"Science and Health" and the Bible.
Mrs. Eddy may appoint or remove--without explanation--the Readers of
the branch churches at any time.[17]
The branch churches may never have comments or remarks made by their
Readers, either upon passages from "Science and Health" or from the
Bible.[18]
The branch churches may have lectures only by lecturers whom Mrs. Eddy
has appointed in the usual way--through the "vote" of her Board of
Directors.[19] And the lecture must have passed censorship.[20]
After listening to such a lecture, the members of the branch churches
are not permitted to give a reception or to meet for social
intercourse. Mrs. Eddy tells them that it will be much better for them
to "depart in quiet thought."[21] (It seems more than probable that
this by-law was devised for the spiritual good of the lecturer. Mrs.
Eddy had no idea that these gentlemen should be fêted or made much of
after their discourse and thus become puffed up with pride of place.)
Since the branch churches, then, have nothing to say about their
services, Readers, or lecturers, there seems to be very little left
for them to do with their powers of local self-government.
Services in the branch churches, as in the Mother Church, are limited
to the Sunday morning and evening readings from the Bible and "Science
and Health," the Wednesday evening experience meetings, and to the
communion service. (In the Mother Church this occurs but once a year,
in the branch churches twice.) There is no baptismal service, no
marriage or burial service, and weddings and funerals are never
conducted in any of the Christian Science churches.
_The Publication Committee_
Included in the Mother Church organization are the Publication
Committee, the Christian Science Publishing Society, the Board of
Lectureship, the Board of Missionaries, and the Board of Education,
all absolutely under Mrs. Eddy's control.
The manager of the Publication Committee, at present Mr. Alfred
Farlow, is "elected" annually by the Board of Directors under Mrs.
Eddy's instructions. His salary is to be not less than $5,000. This
Publication Committee is simply a press bureau, consisting of a
manager with headquarters in Boston and of various branch committees
throughout the field. It is the duty of a member of this committee,
wherever he resides, to reply promptly through the press to any
criticism of Christian Science or of Mrs. Eddy which may be made in
his part of the country, and to insert in the newspapers of his
territory as much matter favorable to Christian Science as they will
print. In replying to criticism this bureau will, if necessary, pay
the regular advertising rate for the publication of their statements.
The members of this committee, after having written and published
their articles in defense of Christian Science, are also responsible,
says the Manual, "for having the papers containing these articles
circulated in large quantities." This press agency has been extremely
effective in pushing the interests of Christian Science, in keeping it
before the public, and in building up a desirable legendry around Mrs.
Eddy.
_The Publishing Society_
The Christian Science Publishing Society is conducted for the purpose
of publishing and marketing Mrs. Eddy's works and the three Christian
Science periodicals, the _Christian Science Journal_, the _Christian
Science Sentinel_, and _Der Christian Science Herold_. It is managed
and controlled by a Board of Trustees, appointed by Mrs. Eddy, and the
net profits of the business are turned over semi-annually to the
treasurer of the Mother Church. The manager and editors are appointed
for but one year, and must be elected or reëlected by a vote of the
directors _and_ "the consent of the Pastor Emeritus, given in her own
handwriting." The Manual also states that a person who is not accepted
by Mrs. Eddy as suitable shall _in no manner_ be connected with
publishing her books or editing her periodicals--not a compositor, not
the copy-boy, not the scrubwoman.
_Christian Science Lectures_
Until 1898 any Christian Scientist could give public talks or lectures
upon the doctrines of his faith, but in January of that year Mrs. Eddy
prudently withdrew this privilege. She appointed a Board of
Lectureship, carefully selecting each member and assigning each to a
certain district. In this work she placed several of her most
influential men, among whom was Septimus J. Hanna. Her idea seems to
have been that as itinerant lecturers these men could not build up a
dangerously strong personal following. These lecturers are elected
annually, subject to Mrs. Eddy's approval. Their representative
lecture must be censored by the clerk of the Mother Church. The Manual
stipulates that these lectures must "bear testimony to the facts
pertaining to the life of the Pastor Emeritus."
_Missionaries_
Seven missionaries are elected annually by the Board of
Directors--Mrs. Eddy's usual way of appointing. Indeed, one finds that
the elections of these various boards are simply confirmations of
appointments made by Mrs. Eddy; not, certainly, because her
appointments need confirmation, but rather because it seems to give
these boards pleasure to vote "unanimously" when they are bidden. To
all intents and purposes the Manual might just as well state that
every committee and officer is appointed by the Pastor Emeritus, and
the phrase "elected by the Board of Directors" seems used merely for
variety of expression.
_Board of Education_
The Board of Education consists of three members, the President,
Vice-President, and a teacher. Mrs. Eddy is the permanent
President--unless, says the Manual, she sees fit to "resign over her
own signature." The Vice-President and teacher are elected from time
to time, "subject to the approval of the Pastor Emeritus."
_Obligations of the Individual Christian Scientist_
It is not easy to become a member of the Mother Church. In the first
place, the applicant for admission must read nothing upon metaphysics
or religion except Mrs. Eddy's books and the Bible. In the second
place, his application must be countersigned by one of Mrs. Eddy's
loyal students, who is made responsible for the candidate's sincerity.
There are so many things for which the new member may be expelled
after he is once admitted into the church, that it would seem as if he
can remain there only by very special grace. He is hedged about by a
number of by-laws which seem to relate chiefly to his personal
attitude toward Mrs. Eddy. He may not haunt the roads upon which Mrs.
Eddy drives. He may not discuss, lecture upon, or debate upon
Christian Science in public without especial permission from one of
her representatives. He must not be a "leader" in the church and must
never be called one. He may read only the Bible and Mrs. Eddy for
religious instruction. He shall not "vilify" the Pastor Emeritus. He
is in duty bound to go to Mrs. Eddy's home and serve her in person for
one year if she requires it of him. He may not permit his children to
believe in Santa Claus--Mrs. Eddy abolished Santa Claus by
proclamation in 1904. She brooks no petty rivals. He may not read or
quote from Mrs. Eddy's books or from her "poems" without first naming
the author. She says, in explanation of this by-law: "To pour into the
ears of listeners the sacred revelations of Christian Science
indiscriminately, or without characterizing their origin and thus
distinguishing them from the writings of authors who think at random
on this subject, is to lose some weight in the scale of right
thinking."[22]
A Christian Scientist "shall neither buy, sell nor circulate Christian
Science literature which is not correct in its statement," etc., Mrs.
Eddy, of course, determining whether or not the statement is correct.
He "shall not patronize a publishing house or bookstore that has for
sale obnoxious books."
A Christian Scientist may not belong to any club or society, Free
Masons excepted, outside the Mother Church. His connection with the
Mother Church must be sufficient for all his social and intellectual
needs, and his interest is not to be diverted from its one proper
channel. Mrs. Eddy says that church organizations are ample for
him.[23]
It is indicative of Mrs. Eddy's influence over her followers that when
this by-law was issued, less than twenty inquiries (so her secretary
announced) were received at Pleasant View. Men resigned from their
political, business, and social clubs, women from their literary and
patriotic organizations, without a murmur and without a question.
No hymns may be sung in the Mother Church unless they have been
approved by Mrs. Eddy, and Mrs. Eddy's own hymns must be sung at
stated intervals. "If a solo singer in the Mother Church shall either
neglect or refuse to sing alone a hymn written by our Leader and
Pastor Emeritus, as often as once each month, and oftener if the
Directors so direct, a meeting shall be called and the salary of this
singer shall be stopped."
_Supreme Authority_
But far above all these lesser by-laws Mrs. Eddy holds one in which
her supreme authority rests. A mesmerist or "mental malpractitioner"
is, of course, to be excommunicated, and "if the author of Science and
Health shall bear witness to the offense of mental malpractice, it
shall be considered sufficient evidence thereof."[24] The accused can
make no defense, has no appeal. If any Christian Scientist offends
Mrs. Eddy, if he writes a letter to the _Journal_ and uses a phrase
which does not please her, if he is too popular in his own community,
if it is rumored that he reads upon philosophy or metaphysics, or
medicine, if he in any way wounds her vanity, Mrs. Eddy can expel him
from the church by a word, without explanation, and he can make no
effort to vindicate himself. In the matter of hypnotism Mrs. Eddy's
mere word is enough. She has, she says, an unerring instinct by which
she can detect hypnotism in any creature:
"I possess a spiritual sense of what the malicious mental practitioner
is mentally arguing which cannot be deceived; I can discern in the
human mind thoughts, motives, and purposes; and neither mental
arguments nor psychic power can affect this spiritual insight."[25]
_Actual Size of Mrs. Eddy's Following_
The result of Mrs. Eddy's planning and training and pruning is that
she has built up the largest and most powerful organization ever
founded by any woman in America. Probably no other woman so
handicapped--so limited in intellect, so uncertain in conduct, so
tortured by hatred and hampered by petty animosities--has ever risen
from a state of helplessness and dependence to a position of such
power and authority. All that Christian Science comprises to-day--the
Mother Church, branch churches, healers, teachers, Readers, boards,
committees, societies--are as completely under Mrs. Eddy's control as
if she were their temporal as well as their spiritual ruler. The
growth of her power has been extensive as well as intensive.
In June, 1907, the membership of the Mother Church, according to the
Secretary's report, was 43,876. The membership of the branch churches
amounted to 42,846. As members of the branch churches are almost
invariably members of the Mother Church as well, there cannot be more
than 60,000 Christian Scientists in the world to-day, and the number
is probably nearer 50,000.
In June, 1907, there were in all 710 branch churches. Fifty-eight of
these are in foreign countries: 25 in the Dominion of Canada, 14 in
Great Britain, 2 in Ireland, 4 in Australia, 1 in South Africa, 8 in
Mexico, 2 in Germany, 1 in Holland, and 1 in France. There are also
295 Christian Science societies not yet incorporated into churches, 30
of which are in foreign countries.[26]
In reading these figures one must bear in mind the fact that
twenty-nine years ago the only Christian Science church in the world
was struggling to pay its rent in Boston.
One very effective element in the growth of the church has been the
fact that a considerable proportion of Christian Scientists--probably
about one tenth--make their living by their faith, and their worldly
fortunes as well as their spiritual comfort are in their church; they
must prosper or decline, rise or fall, with Christian Science, and
they prosecute the cause of their church with all their energies and
with entire singleness of purpose. Again, any religion must experience
a great impetus and stimulus from the living presence of its founder
or prophet, and when that presence is as effective as Mrs. Eddy's, it
is a force to be reckoned with. Furthermore, Christian Science is a
novel and sensational presentation of one of the oldest accepted
truths in human thinking, and converts a few time-worn metaphysical
platitudes into mysterious incantations which are quite as effective
by reason of their incoherence and misapplication as because of the
relative truths which they originally conveyed. Optimism is the cry of
the times, and of all the voices which declare it, this is the most
strident and insistent, proclaiming the shortest of all the short
roads to happiness, declaring the secret of a contentment as
impervious of total anaesthesia.
[Note: The next article will deal with Mrs. Eddy's book,
"Science and Health," and will complete this history.]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This communion was originally observed once each quarter and then
twice a year. Since 1899 it has been observed but once a year, on the
second Sunday in June. No "material" emblems, such as bread and wine,
are offered, and the communion is one of silent thought. On Monday the
directors meet and transact the business of the year, and on Tuesday
the officers' reports are read. As most members of the branch churches
are also members of the Mother Church, thousands of Christian
Scientists from all over the United States visit Boston at this time.
[2] At the 1898 communion there was no invitation from Mrs. Eddy, but
a number of communicants went up to Concord to see her house and to
see her start out upon her daily drive. In June, 1899, Mrs. Eddy came
to Boston and briefly addressed the annual business meeting of the
church. In 1902 and 1903 there were no formal pilgrimages, although
hundreds of Christian Scientists went to Concord to catch a glimpse of
Mrs. Eddy upon her drive.
[3] February, 1899.
[4] Calvin Frye.
[5] In a notice to the churches, 1897, Mrs. Eddy says:
"The Bible and the Christian Science text-book are our only preachers.
We shall now read scriptural texts and their co-relative passages from
our text-book--these comprise our sermon. The canonical writings,
together with the word of our text-book, corroborating and explaining
the Bible texts in their denominational, spiritual import and
application to all ages, past, present and future, constitute a sermon
undivorced from truth, uncontaminated or fettered by human hypotheses
and authorized by Christ."
[6] For the text of these by-laws see Christian Science Manual (1904),
Articles IV and XXIII.
[7] Mrs. Eddy stated in regard to this ruling that it was to have
immediate effect only in the Mother Church, adding: "Doubtless the
churches adopting this by-law will discriminate its adaptability to
their conditions. But if now is not the time the branch churches can
wait for the favored moment to act on this subject."
[8] Church Manual (11th ed.), Article XXXII.
[9] Ibid. (3d ed.), Article VIII, Sec. 5.
[10] Church Manual (43d ed.), Article I, Sec. 5.
[11] Ibid. (43d ed.), Article I, Sec. 2.
[12] Ibid. (43d ed.), Article I, Sec. 4. Ibid. (11th ed.), Article
XXIII, Sec. 2.
[13] Ibid. (43d ed.), Article I, Sec. 3.
[14] Formerly the Executive Members were permitted to fix the salaries
of the Readers, but in the last edition of the Manual this privilege
seems to have been withdrawn.
[15] Church Manual (43d ed.), Article VI.
[16] Church Manual (43d ed.), Article XXVIII.
[17] Ibid. (11th ed.), Article XXIII.
[18] Ibid. (43d ed.), Article IV.
[19] Ibid. (43d ed.), Article XXXIV, Sec. 1.
[20] Ibid. (43d ed.), Article XXXIV, Sec. 2.
[21] Ibid. (43d ed.), Article XXXIV, Sec. 4.
[22] Church Manual (11th ed.). Article XV.
[23] Ibid. (43d ed.), Article XXVI.
[24] Church Manual (43d ed.), Article XXII, Sec. 4.
[25] "Christian Science History," by Mary B. G. Eddy (1st ed.), page
16.
[26] In June, 1907, there were 3,515 authorized Christian Science
"healers" in the world; 3,268 of these are practising in the United
States, 1 in Alaska, 63 in the Dominion of Canada, 5 in Mexico, 1 in
Cuba, 1 in South Africa, 18 in Australia, 1 in China, 105 in England,
5 in Ireland, 9 in Scotland, 7 in France, 15 in Germany, 4 in Holland,
1 in India, 1 in Italy, 1 in the Philippine Islands, 1 in Russia, 1 in
South America, 7 in Switzerland.
[Illustration]
IN CHARGE OF TRUSTY
BY LUCY PRATT
ILLUSTRATIONS BY FREDERIC DORR STEELE
There was a dramatic arrival at the Whittier School one Monday
morning.
The children were gathered in their class-rooms, looking particularly
good and hopeful just after their morning exercises, and Miss Doane
was on the platform in the Assembly Room, when she became aware of a
slight confusion in the outside hall. But, since visitors of
distinction always came in from that particular hall, Miss Doane
merely waited for whatever special form of distinction this might be.
There was a thump on the door, and then, after some slight parleying
and continued confusion on the other side, it opened and two visitors
made their entrance. One was a very large and rather ancient-looking
colored man, the other was a very small colored boy. They both looked
somewhat spent and breathless, and when the man had deposited the boy
before him, with a threatening wave of the stick, he took out a large
bandana and wiped the sweat of honest toil from his brow. Miss Doane,
somewhat uneasy, approached her visitor.
"Yer see, Miss," he explained, with a gesture of triumph toward the
small heap on the floor, "he's ser bad, I'se jes 'blige whup 'im all
de way ter school ter git 'im yere fer sho!"
Miss Doane made some response to the effect that it certainly was an
unusual way of making sure that a child came to school, to which he
joined in:
"Ya-as, Miss, ya-as, _Miss_! Cert'nly is so! Jes 'blige drap all my
wuk 'n' run 'im clean yere. Now, ain't yer 'shame, boy, fer de lady
ter see yer ser bad 'n' hard-haided?"
He was not too ashamed to grumble out an unintelligible answer; but he
looked quite disgusted with life in general, and twisted his head
around in all sorts of directions, and sniffed, and rubbed his
coat-sleeve across his face, and appeared generally ill at ease.
"What is his name?" questioned Miss Doane.
"Trusty--Trusty 'is name," explained the parent. "Trusty Miles. W'y
doan't yer speak up, boy, an' tell de lady yer name?"
Trusty grunted.
"He doesn't seem very glad to be here," suggested Miss Doane mildly.
"No, Miss, dat's de trufe," agreed the parent cordially, "dat's de
trufe! Yer see, he ain't r'ally used ter w'ite folks' school, 'counten
allays gwine ter Miss Pauline Smiff's. Yas'm. He ain't r'ally used ter
w'ite folks, an' he jes seem ter natchelly balk at de idea fum de
fus."
"I see," returned Miss Doane modestly, producing a reader by way of
tactful diversion.
Miss Pauline Smith's ex-pupil looked at it a bit askance, and Miss
Doane proceeded in a somewhat harrowing attempt to discover and lay
bare anything in the least suggestive of knowledge--as such.
"I see," she concluded finally, when there was positively nothing
more left to discover; "I see. Will you follow me, please?"
With unexpected docility, Trusty turned and, with his eyes fixed on a
closed door toward which Miss Doane led the way, followed, he knew not
where.
"Miss North," began Miss Doane, when the door had opened and closed
again, "Miss North, I have a new pupil for you."
Miss North tried to look as if this were the most unexpected bit of
good fortune which could possibly come to her, and glanced around for
an appropriate seat. The children looked pleased at the slight
diversion, and Ezekiel, sitting in a corner seat of the front row,
looked both pleased and intelligent.
"Dat's Trusty," he began smilingly in a low voice to Miss North,
"dat's Trusty Miles, Miss No'th"; and, feeling the cheerful
superiority of former acquaintance, he beamed delightedly on Trusty.
"Yes; and I think you may sit right here," explained Miss North, after
brief consideration.
In lack of anything else to do, Trusty accepted the offered seat.
"And now," continued Miss North, when the children had once more
settled themselves and Miss Doane had gone back to her waiting
visitor, "we will go on with the lesson. Yes, we had just decided that
we all had _bodies_."
Ezekiel glanced at the new pupil, who seemed to be somewhat taken by
surprise at this unexpected development, and was looking curiously
around the room with evident hope of disputing the statement.
"Yes, that is true, is it not, that we all have _bodies?_"
They _all_ looked around rather doubtfully, as if they did not feel
quite so sure on this point; but, as no disembodied spirit spoke up in
denial of the assertion, it was gradually accepted.
"Yes; and these bodies have a great many different _parts_, haven't
they?"
"Yas'm," came, rather faintly.
"Why, yes, indeed," went on Miss North, quite gaily, "a great many
different _parts_. Now, what are some of these parts, children? Who
can think?"
There was a moment of tremendous concentration, and then a dozen hands
went up.
"Well, Alphonso Jones--and make a nice sentence, Alphonso."
"Yer haid is part uv yer body," stated Alphonso, as though he were not
in the habit of being contradicted.
"Yes, very true. Your head is part of your body. And now, as different
parts of the head, we have--" putting her fingers suggestively to her
ears----
"Ears!" shouted a tremendous chorus.
[Illustration: "'I'SE JUS 'BLIGE WHUP 'IM ALL DE WAY TER SCHOOL'"]
"Yes; and--" closing her eyes, and just touching the lids lightly, as
the most delicate hint possible----
"Eyes!" shouted a yet more tremendous chorus.
"Yes; and now, since the eyes are such a very important part of the
head, let us think how we can take very good _care_ of the eyes."
This sounded rather complicated, and there was another moment of awful
concentration. Even Trusty appeared to be thinking warmly on the
subject.
"Well, Ezekiel, what do you say?"
"Not pick no holes in 'em wid no pin," suggested Ezekiel pleasantly.
"Why, Ezekiel, certainly not! Of course we shouldn't want to pick
holes in them with a pin; but--well, what do you say, Tommy?"
"Not pick no holes in 'em wid no needle!" explained Tommy, his face
all aglow with enthusiasm.
"Why, no, indeed! Of course not--why, of course _not_. But that isn't
just what I mean, because of course you would never think of doing
that anyway, would you, Tommy?"
Hands were waving madly in all directions now; but when young Charles
Sumner Scott raised his with its usual effect of poise and precision,
Miss North considered the situation saved. Charles usually saved the
situation.
"How must we treat the eyes if we want to keep them nice and strong,
Charles?"
"Not pick no holes in 'em wid no _hat_-pin!" announced Charles.
"Hands down!" ordered Miss North.
Hands down, indeed!
"Hezzy Cones, did you hear what I said?"
"Yath'm! Not pick no holthe in 'em wid no _hair_-pin!" shouted Hezzy,
not to be walked over so easily, and jubilant at this slight
variation.
The new pupil had waked up, too.
"Not pick no holes in 'em wid no _knittin'-needle_!" he sang loudly,
in a perfect burst of inspiration.
This was a stroke of genius, and they all looked around on the
new-comer admiringly, and looked a little doubtful, for a moment, as
to whether anything more could be said on the subject.
Ezekiel fairly radiated at his friend's success.
[Illustration: "I KIN GET 'EM YERE, EF YER WANTS."]
"Now, wait, children!" said Miss North, with emphasis amounting almost
to severity. "Our answers are getting wild--very wild. And I do not
wish to hear anything more about _pins_ or _needles_ or _hat-pins_ or
_knitting-needles_. I should like to see you all _very straight_ in
your seats."
There was a tremendous effort at straightening up, whereupon Miss
North proceeded to make a few valuable suggestions in regard to the
treatment of the eyes.
"Now," said Miss North, as if she were propounding a theory of rare
and striking originality, "_who_ can tell me another part of the
body?"
The pause was long; they were evidently feeling somewhat sore over
their last setback.
"Well?" encouraged Miss North.
"Yer laigs," mumbled a stuffy voice from the back of the room.
"Yes, your legs, Samuel; that is quite right. And perhaps you can tell
me what your legs are for, Samuel. But wait; we will _think_ before
answering."
"Ter se' down with," answered Samuel comfortably.
"No, Samuel; you evidently did _not_ think; they are for nothing of
the kind," returned Miss North shortly.
Trusty's hand was waving with unmistakable interest. Miss North was
painfully aware that he must be encouraged.
"Well, Trusty," she ventured, "what are your legs for?"
"_Ter hole yer feet on!_" shouted Trusty, in a perfect spasm of joyous
interest.
Miss North essayed to collect her thoughts.
"Well, hardly, hardly for--_that alone_, are they, Trusty? Tell me
what else they are for."
But Trusty failed to find any other use to which he could put the
legs, and Miss North again took the floor; whereupon Trusty's interest
immediately subsided.
Later on, she attempted, somewhat cautiously, to draw him out once
more; but the day went on, and not once again did Trusty deign to come
to the front.
* * * * *
The next morning Miss Doane was at school early. She had been working
for some moments at her desk in the Assembly Room, when she became
aware that again an unusual sort of demonstration was taking place in
the outside hall. To the hall Miss Doane went; and there, once more,
she was met by the large colored man and the small colored boy.
"Jes 'blige ter 'ply de same kine o' coaxin', Miss! Whup 'im all de
way yere! Ain't I, Trusty?"
Poor Trusty appeared almost too spent even to reply; and Miss Doane
looked at him and suggested that he go to his seat and rest.
"M-m-m--ain' gwine no seat 'n' res'!" he growled.
His father intervened: "Yer see, Miss? Yer see? He's de hard-haidedes'
chile I'se got, an' dat's de trufe. Come 'long, now, boy; jes come
'long, now!" And, without ceremony, Trusty was lifted with a firm hand
and transported through the Assembly Room to his seat, where he was
deposited with a thump.
Miss North looked up in mild surprise.
"Why, Trusty! Good morning!"
Trusty's response was a thing of conjecture.
"And so you are back at school again; and aren't you glad, after all,
to come back to this nice school?"
"M-m-m--school nuthin'!" was the unexpectedly prompt response.
"Yer'll fine 'im mighty wearisome, I 'spec', Miss," put in the parent.
"But whup 'im! Dat's all I kin say. Whup 'im _all_ de time; an' me 'n'
'Mandy'll wuk on 'im nights 'n' mawnin's."
Miss North looked at the diminutive object but half filling his seat,
and caught her breath.
Another day of alternate gloom and occasional spasmodic interest on
Trusty's part, another day of doubts and fears in his behalf on the
part of Miss North.
That night, just as he was about to scuffle disconsolately behind the
others from the room, picturing, no doubt, some of the joys which were
awaiting him at home, she called him back. Ezekiel stood by her desk,
wondering why she had called him, too.
"Trusty," she began, "wouldn't you like to come to school to-morrow
morning with Ezekiel?"
Trusty looked up doubtfully, and Ezekiel looked up, not just
comprehending.
"You live near each other, don't you?"
"No'm," Ezekiel's tone wavered anxiously. "No'm, we don't live nare
each udder, Miss No'th; Trusty he live clare way _down_ de road."
He stopped, meditating; then his face seemed to clear somewhat of its
burden of thought. "But I reckon--I kin _git_ 'im yere, ef yer wants,
Miss No'th; yas'm, I--I kin git 'im yere, ef yer wants, 'cuz I kin go
af' 'im an' git 'im. Yas'm, I kin ca'y 'im ter school, Miss No'th!"
Trusty looked a bit doubtful as to whether he should entirely fall in
with the plan, and Miss North made haste to readjust herself.
"No'm, 'tain' no trouble, Miss No'th; no'm. I kin ca'y 'im ter school
ter-morrer, cyan't I, Trusty?"
Trusty still appeared to be doubting heavily; but Ezekiel's assurances
continued to ring warmly, as they moved on toward the door and
disappeared into the hall.
* * * * *
It was still early the next morning when Miss North worked alone in
the school-room. Slowly the door opened. Slowly two small figures
pushed their way awkwardly into the room. Miss North looked up.
"Why, Ezekiel! And Trusty!"
They came in softly, hand in hand, and stood before her desk, Trusty
passive, Ezekiel glowing shyly with pride and pleasure.
"Hyeah's Trusty, Miss No'th," he explained briefly.
"I see. Why, how--how very nice! And so nice and early! Why, Trusty,
aren't you glad you could get here so early?"
Trusty seemed hardly ready to commit himself just yet, but began to
look shyly pleased, too. Ezekiel, still holding him by the hand,
looked down protectingly.
[Illustration: "TWO SMALL FIGURES PUSHED THEIR WAY INTO THE ROOM"]
"Yas'm, he--he likes ter git yere early; doan't yer, Trusty?"
"Yes, I'm sure he does," put in Miss North tactfully. "And now,
perhaps he would like to help by getting some of the dust out of these
erasers; they aren't very clean this morning."
His eyes brightened. "Yas'm!"
The two came back looking as if they had been temporarily detained in
a flour-barrel.
"Why, yes, those are very clean; but you seem to be just a little
dusty yourselves, aren't you?"
"Yas'm," agreed Trusty, while Ezekiel brushed him with doubtful
success. "Kin ole Sam'el Smiff dus' 'em?"
"Samuel Smith? I don't think Samuel ever did dust them----"
"'Cuz me 'n' 'Zekiel kin dus' 'em good's dat 'mos' _any_ time; cyan't
we, 'Zekiel?"
By the time that school was ready to begin that morning, there stood a
stately line of "visitors from the North" across Miss North's room,
ready for enlightenment on the Negro Problem. And as Miss North began:
"We are having a new month to-day, children; who can tell me what the
name of the month is?" the line drew itself up, preparatory to getting
right down to the heart of the matter.
"What month, class?"
"February!"
"Yes; very good. Is February a short month or a long month?"
There was an unfortunate difference of opinion:
"Short!" "Long!" "Short!" "Long!" "_Short!_" "_Long!_"
"Very well," joined in Miss North, ready to agree to anything. "What
do you say about it, Archelus?"
"Li'l' teeny bit uv a short month," explained Archelus. "Ain' no
longer'n----"
As Archelus was about to illustrate the length of February with his
two small hands, Miss North waived any further information on the
subject, and went on:
"Yes, a short month. And who can tell me what holiday we have in this
month?"
There were two or three who promptly arrived at conclusions. The
visitors were smiling wide smiles of appreciation.
"Lemuel?"
"Chris'mas!"
"Oh, no; we have just had Christmas. Samuel?"
"Thanksgivin'!"
"Why, no, indeed, Samuel; you are not thinking. William?"
"Washin'ton's Birthday!"
One of the visitors, a rosy-cheeked gentleman with white hair, gave
such a loud grunt of appreciation at this that Miss North glanced his
way.
"Can he tell us anything _about_ George Washington?" he questioned
smilingly, in response to Miss North's glance.
"Oh, I think so. Who can tell me some one thing about George
Washington, children? Hands, please."
"That little boy," smiled the rosy-cheeked gentleman; "he seems to be
getting so very much interested!"
Heavens! it was Trusty who was getting interested. Miss North glanced
at his face, which radiated with delighted intelligence as he fixed
his eyes on the closed coat-closet, and felt a chilling and definite
foreboding.
"H-m--yes," she went on evasively, "yes. Ezekiel, can you tell
us--something about--" What was the matter? Had _Ezekiel_ forgotten
how to talk? To be sure! His eyes, kindling with interest and pride,
were fixed on his friend.
"No, no! This one," explained the rosy-cheeked gentleman, his eyes
still resting smilingly on Trusty. "Well, what do you know about
George Washington, little fellow?"
"_Miss No'th got 'im shet up in de coat-closet!_"
The rosy-cheeked gentleman stepped back a bit, and there was suddenly
a rather startled expression on the part of the visitors from the
North. Somewhat furtively they glanced at the coat-closet, apparently
expecting to see the immortal George emerge in person at any moment.
Miss North coughed slightly, and looked as if she had known happier
times.
"You may be seated, Trusty."
"She shet 'im in dere fer imperdence!" explained Trusty.
But just then the door creaked softly, and from the unknown depths of
the coat-closet a little figure peered anxiously.
"Mith No'th! Kin I come out now?"
Miss North looked at the small figure, and then at the visitors from
the North, whereupon they all looked at her; and then suddenly the
rosy-cheeked gentleman burst out into such unchecked, joyous laughter
that the others all joined in, and the visitors from the North moved
on.
At the same time, there was a thump on the door which opened from the
back hall, and a large and ancient colored man advanced into the room.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: "THAT LITTLE BOY, SMILED THE ROSY-CHEEKED GENTLEMAN"]
"Mawnin', Miss, mawnin'!" he began in loud, cheerful tones. "'Scusin'
de privilege o' de interruption, I'se 'blige ax yer kin I borry Trusty
fer a li'l' w'ile, 'spesh'ly fer de 'casion?"
Just what the occasion was he did not explain; but Trusty, possibly
receiving suggestive glimmers of inward light on the subject, and
being at this particular moment otherwise interested, began to show
evidence of unexpected combativeness.
"M-m-m--I ain' gwine be 'scuse fer no 'casion," he mumbled
cantankerously.
"Come, now, boy, ya-as, yer is, too!" disagreed the parent, advancing
toward the subject of complication. "Yer see, Miss! Ain't I tole yer
he's de hard-haidedes' chile? Fus I'se 'blige whup 'im school, 'n'
nex' I cyan' git 'im 'way ter bless me! Ain't I jes tole yer!" And
again, with a firm hand, Trusty was lifted and transported across the
room to the open door. Miss North hastily suggested the final
formalities requisite for an excuse, but her voice was quite lost
among the reverberations of a more powerful organ:
"Ain't I jes tole yer so! Ya-as, yer is, too! Ain't I jes tole yer!
Come 'long, now; jes come 'long, now!"
They disappeared through the doorway, and then only the final
reverberations came back to them as Trusty was triumphantly exhorted
on his way.
* * * * *
But the worst of vicissitudes, and the best of them, only wait to give
place to new ones, and the old days change to new ones and the weeks
and the months go on; and, as the oft-repeated act becomes a habit, so
it had finally become an unvarying habit for Ezekiel to arrive at
school with Trusty's hand held loosely in his own, while Trusty
himself plodded unresistingly at his side.
But occasionally there comes a time, too, when the habitual thing
fails to happen.
It was one morning toward the end of May. Miss North had glanced at
the clock, which hovered close to nine, and then she had glanced
around the room at several waiting children, and into the yard, which
was filling rapidly, and wondered, half passively, why Ezekiel and
Trusty had not come. In a quickly changing, drifting undercurrent of
thought, she remembered their first arrival together--just how they
had looked as they stood, hand in hand, before her desk. Again, she
remembered Trusty as he had looked that first day, just after his
arrival, first sullenly rebelling, and then vibrating, as it were,
between a state of absolute indifference and one of suddenly aroused
interest. Strange, how it had grown to be a regular thing for Trusty
to be "interested"! She glanced around the room and out to the yard
again, and wondered why they didn't come; and when one of the children
came in from outside with an excited story of "ole Trusty racin' down
de road, an' 'is father after 'im," she listened.
"Ole man Miles say Trusty he cyan' come school dis yere day, an'
Trusty say he is, an' 'Zekiel say he is, too, an' ole man say he
ain't, an' Trusty 'n' 'Zekiel say he is, an' start off down de road
jes a-runnin'! An' ole man af' 'em clean all de way yere!"
A moment after this enthusiastic announcement, the school-room door
burst open, and Ezekiel came lurching into the room, half carrying,
half dragging Trusty, who was spattered with mud and dirt from head to
foot.
"_Miss No'th! He say he cyan' come!_" cried Ezekiel. "_He--he say--he
cyan' come--no mo'!_" He stumbled against her desk, and Trusty dropped
limply down before him, feebly snatching at Miss North's skirts.
"He--he--say--I cyan'--come--no mo'!" he whispered in a faint, panting
echo.
Ezekiel dropped heavily against the desk, his breath catching
convulsively in his throat. "He--he lock 'im up so he cyan' come
ter--ter school!" he choked. "But--T-Trusty he say he--he is, an' he
keep on tellin' 'im he--is--an' he is! An'--an' he jes say--he cyan'
come--no--mo'!" His head bumped down between his arms, and he waited,
his breath still catching in his throat. "An' I--I tells 'im he--he's
'_blige_ ter come! But--'tain'--no--use; he--he--jes lock de do'!
An'--an' we jumps outen de winder, an'--an' he cotch T-Trusty 'n' lock
'im up 'gin--an'--an' he jumps outen 'gin--'cuz he keeps on tellin'
'im he--he's--'b-blige ter come ter--ter school! He--he tells 'im
he's--jes--'_b-blige ter come!_"
With hushed faces, the children gazed first at Ezekiel and then at
Miss North. With an involuntary movement of the arms, she made a
movement toward him. But a small heap of a boy stirred at her feet,
and she looked down. A possibility, suddenly realized, seemed to seize
him, and he looked up, clinging to her in helpless terror.
"Doan't yer let 'im tek me back!" he whispered hoarsely, "so I cyan'
git 'way! Doan't yer, Miss No'th! Please doan't yer! 'Cuz--ain't I
'blige--ain't I 'blige--s-seem like--some'ow"--Miss North bent down to
hear it--"s-seem like--some'ow--t-ter-day--I'se jes--'_blige ter be
yere!_"
She heard the faint, choked whisper, and she saw the trembling little
figure. She saw the other little figure, and then again the faint,
choked whisper came sounding up to her ears. But dimly, dimly--just
for the moment--she seemed to hear something else--to see another
little boy, whipped to school by a coarse, brutish man, yet all the
while helplessly struggling against it. That other little boy--again
the small hands caught at her skirts.
"Doan't yer let 'im! Will yer, Miss No'th?"
She lifted him from the floor.
"No--I won't let him," and she put him gently into his seat.
Still, with hushed faces, the children gazed wonderingly.... She held
out her arms.
"Come, Ezekiel!" Was Miss North going to cry?
"Sit down--right here, Ezekiel; you are very--tired!"
He still hung over the desk, and she went up to him between the seats.
"Eze-kiel! Come! Come--my dear little boy!"
But there was the sound of an opening door, and she turned.
In the doorway stood a large and ancient-looking colored man, and for
a moment he only stood there, breathing laboriously and murmuring in
strange, half-audible tones. Then, with sudden unexpected perception,
he took in the scene before him. Half mortified, half conciliatory, he
turned to Miss North.
"Jes all completely wrop in dey edjercation!" he explained
ingratiatingly, with resigned indulgence. His eyes rested on Trusty.
"Cert'nly did use ter be de boss o' dat boy! Cert'nly did!" He looked
at Ezekiel and chuckled indulgently. "But look like times is change!
Cert'nly is change! Ya-as, suh, I jes natchelly pass de case over ter
you!"
He turned around and went out again--and Ezekiel looked up at Miss
North through his tears.
[Illustration]
FIRST DAYS OF THE RECONSTRUCTION
BY
CARL SCHURZ
ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
My travels in the interior of the South in the summer and fall of 1865
took me over the track of Sherman's march, which, in South Carolina at
least, looked for many miles like a broad black streak of ruin and
desolation--fences gone, lonesome smoke-stacks, surrounded by dark
heaps of ashes and cinders, marking the spots where human habitations
had stood, the fields along the road wildly overgrown by weeds, with
here and there a sickly-looking patch of cotton or corn cultivated by
negro squatters. In the city of Columbia, the political capital of the
State, I found a thin fringe of houses encircling a confused mass of
charred ruins of dwellings and business buildings which had been
destroyed by a sweeping conflagration.
No part of the South I then visited had, indeed, suffered as much from
the ravages of the war as South Carolina--the State which was looked
upon by the Northern soldier as the principal instigator of the whole
mischief and therefore deserving of special punishment. But even those
regions which had been touched but little or not at all by military
operations were laboring under dire distress. The Confederate money in
the hands of the Southern people, paper money signed by the
Confederate government without any security behind it, had by the
collapse of the Confederacy become entirely worthless. Only a few
individuals of more or less wealth had been fortunate enough to save,
and to keep throughout the war, small hoards of gold and silver, which
in the aggregate amounted to little. Immediately after the close of
the war the people may be said to have been substantially without a
"circulating medium" to serve in the transaction of ordinary business.
United States money came in to fill the vacuum, but it could not be
had for nothing; it could be obtained only by selling something for
it, in the shape of goods or of labor. The Southern people, having
during four years of war devoted their productive activity, aside from
the satisfaction of their current home wants, almost entirely to the
sustenance of their army and of the machinery of their government, and
having suffered great losses by the destruction of property, had, of
course, very little to sell. In fact, they were dreadfully
impoverished and needed all their laboring capacity to provide for the
wants of the next day; and as agriculture was their main resource,
upon which everything else depended, the next day was to them of
supreme importance.
_The First Crop Without Slaves_
But now the men come home from the war found their whole agricultural
labor system turned upside down. Slave labor had been their absolute
reliance. They had been accustomed to it, they had believed in it,
they had religiously regarded it as a necessity in the order of the
universe. During the war a large majority of the negroes had stayed
upon the plantations and attended to the crops in the wonted way in
those regions which were not touched by the Union armies. They had
heard of "Mas'r Lincoln's" Emancipation Proclamation in a more or less
vague way, but did not know exactly what it meant, and preferred to
remain quietly at work and wait for further developments. But when the
war was over, general emancipation became a well-understood reality.
The negro knew that he was a free man, and the Southern white man
found himself face to face with the problem of dealing with the negro
as a free laborer. To most of the Southern whites this problem was
utterly bewildering. Many of them, honest and well-meaning people,
admitted to me, with a sort of helpless stupefaction, that their
imagination was wholly incapable of grasping the fact that their
former slaves were now free. And yet they had to deal with this
perplexing fact, and practically to accommodate themselves to it, at
once and without delay, if they were to have any crops that year.
Many of them would frankly recognize this necessity and begin in good
faith to consider how they might meet it. But then they stumbled
forthwith over a set of old prejudices which in their minds had
acquired the stubborn force of convictions. They were sure the negro
would not work without physical compulsion; they were sure the negro
did not, and never would, understand the nature of a contract; and so
on. Yes, they "accepted the situation." Yes, they recognized that the
negro was henceforth to be a free man. But could not some method of
force be discovered and introduced to compel the negro to work? It
goes without saying that persons of such a way of thinking labored
under a heavy handicap in going at a difficult task with a settled
conviction that it was really "useless to try." But even if they did
try, and found that the negro might, after all, be induced to work
without physical compulsion, they were apt to be seriously troubled by
things which would not at all trouble an employer accustomed to free
labor. I once had an argument with a Georgia planter who vociferously
insisted that one of his negro laborers who had objected to a whipping
had thereby furnished the most conclusive proof of his unfitness for
freedom. And such statements were constantly reinforced by further
assertion that they, the Southern whites, understood the negro and
knew how to treat him, and that we of the North did not and never
would.
This might have been true in one sense, but not true in another. The
Southerner knew better than the Northerner how to treat the negro as a
slave, but it did not follow that he knew best how to treat the negro
as a freeman; and just there was the rub. It was perhaps too much to
expect of the Southern slaveholders, or of Southern society generally,
that a clear judgment of the new order of things should have come to
them at once. The total overturning of the whole labor system of a
country, accomplished suddenly, without preparation or general
transition, is a tremendous revolution, a terrible wrench, well apt to
confuse men's minds. It should not have surprised any fair-minded
person that many Southern people for a time clung to the accustomed
idea that the landowner must also own the black man tilling his land,
and that any assertion of freedom of action on the part of that black
man was insubordination equivalent to criminal revolt, and any dissent
by the black man from the employer's opinion or taste intolerable
insolence. Nor should it be forgotten that the urgent necessity of
negro labor for that summer's crop could hardly fail to sharpen the
nervous tension then disquieting Southern society.
_Restless Foot-loose Negroes_
It is equally natural that the negro population of the South should at
that time have been unusually restless. I have already mentioned the
fact that during the Civil War the bulk of the slave population
remained quietly at work on the plantations, except in districts
touched by the operations of the armies. Had negro slaves not done so,
the Rebellion would not have survived its first year. They presented
the remarkable spectacle of an enslaved race doing slaves' work to
sustain a government and an army fighting for the perpetuation of its
enslavement. Some colored people did, indeed, escape from the
plantations and run into the Union lines where our troops were within
reach, and some of their young men enlisted in the Union army as
soldiers. But there was nowhere any commotion among them that had in
the slightest degree the character of an uprising in force of slaves
against their masters. Nor was there, when, after the downfall of the
Confederacy, general emancipation had become an established fact, a
single instance of an act of vengeance committed by a negro upon a
white man for inhumanity suffered by him or his while in the condition
of bondage. No race or class of men ever passed from slavery to
freedom with a record equally pure of revenge. But many of them,
especially in the neighborhood of towns or of Federal encampments,
very naturally yielded to the temptation of testing and enjoying their
freedom by walking away from the plantations to have a frolic. Many
others left their work because their employers ill-treated them or in
other ways incurred their distrust. Thus it happened that in various
parts of the South the highroads and byways were alive with foot-loose
colored people.
I did not find, so far as I was informed by personal observation or
report, that their conduct could, on the whole, be called lawless.
There was some stealing of pigs and chickens and other petty
pilfering, but rather less than might have been expected. More serious
depredations rarely, if ever, occurred. The vagrants were throughout
very good-natured. They had their carousals with singing and dancing,
and their camp-meetings with their peculiar religious programs. But,
while these things might in themselves have been harmless enough under
different circumstances, they produced deplorable effects in the
situation then existing. Those negroes stayed away from the
plantations just when their labor was most needed to secure the crops
of the season, and those crops were more than ordinarily needed to
save the population from continued want and misery. Violent efforts
were made by white men to drive the straggling negroes back to the
plantations by force, and reports of bloody outrages inflicted upon
colored people came from all quarters. I had occasion to examine
personally into several of those cases, and I saw in odious hospitals
negroes, women as well as men, whose ears had been cut off, or whose
bodies were slashed with knives, or bruised with whips or bludgeons,
or punctured with shot-wounds. Dead negroes were found in considerable
numbers in the country roads or on the fields, shot to death, or
strung on the limbs of trees. In many districts the colored people
were in a panic of fright, and the whites in a state of almost insane
irritation against them. These conditions in their worst form were
only local, but they were liable to spread, for there was plenty of
inflammable spirit of the same kind all over the South. It looked
sometimes as if wholesale massacres were prevented only by the
presence of the Federal garrisons which were dispersed all over the
country.
[Illustration: MAJOR-GENERAL O. O. HOWARD
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN DECEMBER, 1862, JUST AFTER HIS PROMOTION TO
MAJOR-GENERAL OF VOLUNTEERS]
_The Freedmen's Bureau_
Indeed, nothing could have been more necessary at that time than the
active interposition of the Federal power between the whites and the
blacks of the South, not only to prevent or repress violent
collisions, but to start the former masters and the former slaves on
the path of peaceful and profitable coöperation as employers and free
laborers. This was a difficult task. Northern men who had come to the
South to purchase or lease plantations enjoyed the great advantage of
having money, so that they could pay the wages of their negro laborers
in cash, which the negroes preferred. The Southern men, having been
stripped almost naked by the war, had, aside from current sustenance,
only prospective payment to offer, consisting mostly of a part of the
crop. While many planters were just and even liberal in the making of
cash contracts, others would take advantage of the ignorance of the
negroes and try to tie them down to stipulations which left to the
laborer almost nothing, or even obliged him to run in debt to his
employer, and thus drop into the condition of a mere peon, a
debt-slave. It is a very curious fact that some of the forms of
contract drawn up by former slaveholders contained provisions looking
to the probability of a future restoration of slavery. There was, not
unnaturally, much distrust of the planters among the negroes, who, in
concluding contracts, feared to compromise their rights as freemen or
to be otherwise overreached. To allay that distrust and, in many
cases, to secure their just dues, they stood much in need of an
adviser in whom they had confidence and to whom they could look for
protection, while, on the other hand, the employers of negro labor
stood in equal need of some helpful authority to give the colored
people sound instruction as to their duties as freemen and to lead
them back to the path of industry and good order when, with their
loose notions of the binding force of agreements, they broke their
contracts, or indulged themselves otherwise in unruly pranks.
To this end the "Freedmen's Bureau" was instituted, an organization of
civil officials who were, with the necessary staffs, dispersed all
over the South to see that the freedmen had their rights and to act as
intermediaries between them and the whites. The conception was a good
one, and the institution, at the head of which General O. O. Howard
was put, did useful service in many instances.
Thus the strain of the situation was somewhat relieved by the
interposition of the Federal authority between clashing elements, but
by no means as much as was required to produce a feeling of security.
The labor puzzle, aggravated by race antagonism, was indeed the main
distressing influence, but not the only one. To the younger
Southerners who had grown up in the heated atmosphere of the political
feud about slavery, to whom the threat of disunion as a means to save
slavery had been like a household word, and who had always regarded
the bond of Union as a shackle to be cast off, the thought of being
"reunited" to "the enemy," the hated Yankee, was distasteful in the
extreme. Such sentiments of the "unconquered" found excited and
exciting expression in the Southern press, and were largely
entertained by many Southern clergymen of different denominations and
still more ardently by Southern women. General Thomas Kilby Smith,
commanding the southern districts of Alabama, reported to me that when
he suggested to Bishop Wilmer, of the Episcopal diocese of Alabama,
the propriety of restoring to the Litany that prayer which includes
the President of the United States, the whole of which he had ordered
his rectors to expurge, the bishop refused, first, upon the ground
that he could not pray for a continuance of martial law, and,
secondly, because he would, by ordering the restoration of the prayer,
stultify himself in the event of Alabama and the Southern Confederacy
regaining independence.
_Pickles and Patriotism_
The influence exercised by the feelings of the women of the South upon
the condition of mind and the conduct of the men was, of course, very
great. Of those feelings I witnessed a significant manifestation in a
hotel at Savannah. At the public dinner-table I sat opposite a lady in
black, probably mourning. She was middle-aged, but still handsome, and
of an agreeable expression of countenance. She seemed to be a lady of
the higher order of society. A young lieutenant in Federal uniform
took a seat by my side, a youth of fine features and gentlemanly
appearance. The lady, as I happened to notice, darted a glance at him
which, as it impressed me, indicated that the presence of the person
in Federal uniform was highly obnoxious to her. She seemed to grow
restless, as if struggling with an excitement hard to restrain. To
judge from the tone of her orders to the waiter, she was evidently
impatient to finish her dinner. When she reached for a dish of pickles
standing on the table at a little distance from her, the lieutenant
got up and, with a polite bow, took it and offered it to her. She
withdrew her hand as if it had touched something loathsome, her eyes
flashed fire, and in a tone of wrathful scorn and indignation she
said: "So you think a Southern woman will take a dish of pickles from
a hand that is dripping with the blood of her countrymen?" Then she
abruptly left the table, while the poor lieutenant, deeply blushing,
apparently stunned by the unexpected rebuff, stammered some words of
apology, assuring the lady that he had meant no offense.
The mixing of a dish of pickles with so hot an outburst of Southern
patriotism could hardly fail to evoke a smile; but the whole scene
struck me as gravely pathetic, and as auguring ill for the speedy
revival of a common national spirit.
[Illustration: A PHOTOGRAPH OF GENERAL HOWARD, TAKEN AT GOVERNOR'S
ISLAND IN 1893 AT THE CLOSE OF THE WAR GENERAL HOWARD WAS APPOINTED
CHIEF OF THE FREEDMEN'S BUREAU]
_The South's Hopeless Poverty_
Southern women had suffered much by the Civil War, on the whole far
more than their Northern sisters. There was but little exaggeration in
the phrase which was current at the time, that the Confederacy, in
order to fill its armies, had to "draw upon the cradle and the grave."
Almost every white male capable of bearing arms enlisted or was
pressed into service. The loss of men, not in proportion to the number
on the rolls, but in proportion to the whole white population, was far
heavier in the South than in the North. There were not many families
unbereft, not many women who had not the loss of a father, or a
husband, or a brother, or a friend to deplore. In the regions in
which military operations had taken place the destruction of property
had been great, and while most of that destruction seemed necessary in
the opinion of military men, in the eyes of the sufferers it appeared
wanton, cruel, malignant, devilish. The interruption of the industries
of the country, the exclusion by the blockade of the posts of all
importations from abroad, and the necessity of providing for the
sustenance of the armies in the field, subjected all classes to
various distressing privations and self-denials. There were bread
riots in Richmond. Salt became so scarce that the earthen floors of
the smoke-houses were scraped to secure the remnants of the
brine-drippings of former periods. Flour was at all times painfully
scarce. Coffee and tea were almost unattainable. Of the various little
comforts and luxuries which by long common use had almost become
necessaries, many were no longer to be had. Mothers had to ransack old
rag-bags to find material with which to clothe their children. Ladies
accustomed to a life of abundance and fashion had not only to work
their old gowns over and to wear their bonnets of long ago, but also
to flit with their children from one plantation to another in order to
find something palatable to eat in the houses of more fortunate
friends who had in time provided for themselves. And when at last the
war was over, the blockade was raised, and the necessaries and
comforts so long and so painfully missed came within sight again, the
South was made only more sensible of her poverty. It was indeed an
appalling situation, looking in many respects almost hopeless. And for
all this the Southern woman, her heart full of the mournful memories
of the sere past and heavy with the anxieties of the present, held the
"cruel Yankee" responsible.
From time to time, traveling from State to State, I reported to
President Johnson my observations and the conclusions I drew from
them. Not only was I most careful to tell him the exact truth as I saw
it; I also elicited from our military officers and from agents of the
Freedmen's Bureau stationed in the South, as well as from prominent
Southern men, statements of their views and experiences, which formed
a mighty body of authoritative testimony, coming as it did from men of
high character and important public position, some of whom were
Republicans, some Democrats, some old anti-slavery men, some old
pro-slavery men. All these papers, too, I submitted to the President.
The historian of that time will hardly find more trustworthy material.
They all substantially agreed upon certain points of fact. They all
found that the South was at peace in so far as there was no open armed
conflict between the government troops and organized bodies of
insurgents. The South was not at peace inasmuch as the different
social forces did not peaceably coöperate, and violent collisions on a
great scale were prevented or repressed only by the presence of the
Federal authority supported by the government troops on the ground for
immediate action. The "results of the war," recognized in the South in
so far as the restoration of the Union and the Federal Government,
were submitted to by virtue of necessity, and the emancipation of the
slaves and the introduction of free labor were accepted in name; but
the Union was still hateful to a large majority of the white
population of the South, the Southern Unionists were still social
outcasts, the officers of the Union were still regarded as foreign
tyrants ruling by force. And as to the abolition of slavery,
emancipation, although "accepted" in name, was still denounced by a
large majority of the former master class as an "unconstitutional"
stretch of power, to be reversed if possible; and that class, the
ruling class among the whites, was still desiring, hoping, and
striving to reduce the free negro laborer as much as possible to the
condition of a slave. And this tendency was seriously aggravated by
the fact that the South, exhausted and impoverished, stood in the most
pressing need of productive agricultural labor, while the landowners
generally did not yet know how to manage the former slave as a free
laborer, and the emancipated negro was still unused to the rights and
duties of a freeman. In short, Southern society was still in that most
confused, perplexing, and perilous of conditions--the condition of a
defeated insurrection leaving irritated feelings behind it, and of a
great social revolution only half accomplished, leaving antagonistic
forces face to face. The necessity of the presence of a restraining
and guiding higher authority could hardly have been more obvious.
[Illustration: MAJOR-GENERAL H. W. SLOCUM
FROM A WAR-TIME PHOTOGRAPH]
_Johnson's Haste for Reconstruction_
During the first six weeks of my travels in the South I did not
receive a single word from the President or any member of the
administration; but through the newspapers and the talk going on
around me I learned that the President had taken active measures to
put the "States lately in rebellion" into a self-governing
condition--that is to say, he had appointed "provisional governors";
he had directed those provisional governors to call conventions, to be
elected, according to the plan laid down in the North Carolina
proclamation, by the "loyal" white citizens, an overwhelming majority
of whom were persons who had adhered to the Rebellion and had then
taken the prescribed oath of allegiance. On the same basis, the
provisional governors were to set in motion again the whole machinery
of civil government as rapidly as possible. When, early in July, I had
taken leave of the President to set out on my tour of investigation,
he, as I have already mentioned, had assured me that the North
Carolina proclamation was not to be regarded as a plan definitely
resolved upon; that it was merely tentative and experimental; that
before proceeding further he would "wait and see"; and that to aid him
by furnishing him information and advice while he was "waiting and
seeing" was the object of my mission. Had not this been the
understanding, I should not have undertaken the wearisome and
ungrateful journey. But now he did not wait and see; on the contrary,
he rushed forward the political reconstruction of the Southern States
in hot haste--apparently without regard to consequences.
[Illustration: MAJOR-GENERAL H. W. SLOCUM
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN SHORTLY BEFORE HIS DEATH IN 1894]
Every good citizen most cordially desired the earliest practicable
reëstablishment of the constitutional relations of the late "rebel
States" to the national government; but, before restoring those States
to all the functions of self-government within the Union, the national
government was in conscience bound to keep in mind certain debts of
honor. One was due to the Union men of the South who had stood true to
the republic in the days of trial and danger; and the other was due to
the colored people who had furnished 200,000 soldiers to our army at
the time when enlistments were running slack, and to whom we had given
the solemn promise of freedom at a time when that promise gave a
distinct moral character to our war for the Union, fatally
discouraging the inclination of foreign governments to interfere in
our civil conflict. Not only imperative reasons of statesmanship, but
the very honor of the republic seemed to forbid that the fate of the
emancipated slaves be turned over to State governments ruled by the
former master class without the simplest possible guaranty of the
genuineness of their freedom. But, as every fair-minded observer would
admit, nothing could have been more certain than that the political
restoration of the "late rebel States" as self-governing bodies on the
North Carolina plan would, at that time, have put the whole
legislative and executive power of those States into the hands of men
ignorant of the ways of free labor society, who sincerely believed
that the negro would not work without physical compulsion and was
generally unfit for freedom, and who were then pressed by the dire
necessities of their impoverished condition to force out of the
negroes all the agricultural labor they could with the least possible
regard for their new rights. The consequences of all this were
witnessed in the actual experiences of every day.
[Illustration: MAJOR-GENERAL E. R. S. CANBY
COMMANDER OF THE DEPARTMENT OF LOUISIANA]
_Arming the Young Men of the South_
At last I came again into contact with the President. Late in August I
arrived in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and visited the headquarters of
Major-General Slocum, who commanded the Department of the Mississippi.
I found the General in a puzzled state of mind about a proclamation
recently issued by Mr. W. L. Sharkey, whom President Johnson had
appointed provisional governor of that State, calling "upon the
people, and especially upon such as are liable to perform military
duty and are familiar with military discipline," and more especially
"the young men of the State who have so distinguished themselves for
gallantry," to organize as speedily as possible volunteer companies in
every county of the State, at least one company of cavalry and one of
infantry, for the protection of life, property, and good order in the
State. This meant no more nor less than the organization under the
authority of one of the "States lately in rebellion" of a large armed
military force consisting of men who had but recently surrendered
their arms as Confederate soldiers.
Two days before my arrival at Vicksburg, General Slocum had issued a
"general order" in which he directed the district commanders under him
not to permit within their districts the organization of such military
forces as were contemplated by Governor Sharkey's proclamation. The
reasons for such action, given by General Slocum in the order itself,
were conclusive. While the military forces of the United States sent
to the State of Mississippi for the purpose of maintaining order and
of executing the laws of Congress and the orders of the War Department
had performed their duties in a spirit of conciliation and forbearance
and with remarkable success, the provisional governor, on the alleged
ground that this had not been done to his satisfaction, and without
consulting the department commander, had called upon the late
Confederate soldiers, fresh from the war against the national
government, to organize a military force intended to be "independent
of the military authority now present, and superior in strength to the
United States powers on duty in the States." The execution of this
scheme would bring on collisions at once, especially when the United
States forces consisted of colored troops. The crimes and disorder the
occurrence of which the provisional governor adduced as his reason for
organizing his State volunteers had been committed or connived at, as
the record showed, by people of the same class as that to which the
governor's volunteers would belong. The commanding general, as well as
every good citizen, earnestly desired to hasten the day when the
troops of the United States could with safety be withdrawn, but that
day would "not be hastened by arming at this time the young men of the
South."
[Illustration: SENATOR WILLIAM LEWIS SHARKEY
APPOINTED PROVISIONAL GOVERNOR OF MISSISSIPPI BY PRESIDENT JOHNSON]
General Slocum--by the way, be it said, not at all an old anti-slavery
man, but a Democrat in politics--was manifestly right. He showed me
reports from his district commanders which substantially anticipated
his order. But the General was anxious to know whether the President
had authorized or approved Governor Sharkey's action. This he asked me
to ascertain, and I telegraphed to President Johnson the following
despatch:
"General Slocum has issued an order prohibiting the organization of
the militia in this State. The organization of the militia would have
been a false step. All I can see and learn in the State convinces me
that the course followed by General Slocum is the only one by which
public order and security can be maintained. To-day I shall forward by
mail General Slocum's order with a full statement of the case."
_The President Defends Southern Militia_
It is hard to imagine my amazement when, at two o'clock on the morning
of September 1, I was called up from my berth on a Mississippi
steamboat carrying me from Vicksburg to New Orleans, off Baton Rouge,
to receive a telegraphic despatch from President Johnson, to which I
cannot do justice without quoting it in full:
Washington, D. C.,
August 30, 1865.
To Major-General Carl Schurz,
Vicksburg, Mississippi.
I presume General Slocum will issue no order interfering
with Governor Sharkey in restoring functions of the State
Government without first consulting the Government, giving
the reasons for such proposed interference. It is believed
there can be organized in each county a force of citizens or
militia to suppress crime, preserve order, and enforce the
civil authority of the State and of the United States which
would enable the Federal Government to reduce the Army and
withdraw to a great extent the forces from the state,
thereby reducing the enormous expense of the Government. If
there was any danger from an organization of the Citizens
for the purpose indicated, the military are there to detect
and suppress on the first appearance any move
insurrectionary in its character. One great object is to
induce the people to come forward in the defense of the
State and Federal Government. General Washington declared
that the people or the militia was the Army of the
Constitution or the Army of the United States, and as soon
as it is practicable the original design of the Government
must be resumed and the Government administrated upon the
principles of the great chart of freedom handed down to the
people by the founders of the Republic. The people must be
trusted with their Government, and, if trusted, my opinion
is they will act in good faith and restore their former
Constitutional relations with all the States composing the
Union. The main object of Major-General Carl Schurz's
mission to the South was to aid as far as practicable in
carrying out the policy adopted by the Government for
restoring the States to their former relations with the
Federal Government. It is hoped such aid has been given. The
proclamation authorizing restoration of State Governments
requires the military to aid the Provisional Governor in the
performance of his duties as prescribed in the proclamation,
and in no manner to interfere or throw impediments in the
way of consummating the object of his appointment, at least
without advising the Government of the intended
interference.
ANDREW JOHNSON, Prest. U. S.
As soon as I reached New Orleans, I telegraphed my reply. The
President having apparently supposed that I had ordered General Slocum
to issue his order, I thought it due to myself to inform the President
that the order had been out before I saw the General, but that I
decidedly approved of it.
According to the President's own words, I had understood the
President's policy to be merely experimental and my mission to be
merely one of observation and report. I had governed myself strictly
by this understanding, seeking to aid the President by reliable
information, believing that it could not be the President's intention
to withdraw his protecting hand from the Union people and freedom
before their rights and safety were secured. I entreated him not to
disapprove General Slocum's conduct and to give me an indication of
his purposes concerning the Mississippi militia case.
The next day, September 2, after having seen Major-General Canby, the
commander of the Department of Louisiana, an uncommonly cool-headed
and cautious man, I telegraphed again as follows:
"TO THE PRESIDENT: General Canby authorizes me to state that the
organization of local militia companies was tried in his department,
but that he found himself obliged to disband them again because they
indulged in the gratification of private vengeance and worked
generally against the policy of the Government. Sheridan has issued an
order in Texas embracing the identical points contained in General
Slocum's order."
_Criticism and Personal Discomfort_
Thereupon I received on September 6 a telegram simply announcing the
receipt of my "despatch of the 30th ultimo," probably meaning my
letter from Vicksburg; and then nothing more--not a word indicating
the President's policy, or his wishes, or his approval or disapproval
of my conduct. But meanwhile I had found a short paragraph in a New
Orleans paper telegraphed from Washington, only a few lines, stating
that the President was dissatisfied with me, and that I was especially
blamed for having written to the newspapers instead of informing him.
I believed I saw in this news paragraph an inspiration from the White
House. Acting upon that supposition, I at once wrote to the President,
reminding him that I had not sought this mission to the South, but had
accepted it thinking that I might do the country some service. I
pointed out to him that the charge that I had reported to the
newspapers instead of to the President was simply absurd; that I had
written to the President a series of elaborate reports; and, though I
had, indeed, written a few letters to a newspaper, that it was well
understood by the Secretary of War that I would do this when he made
the arrangements for my journey. The compensation set out for me, I
reminded the President, was a mere War Department clerk's salary,
utterly insufficient to cover the expenses incidental to my travels,
aside from transportation and subsistence, among which incidentals was
a considerable extra premium on my life-insurance on account of my
travels so far South during the summer, and consequently, as the
Secretary of War understood and appreciated, I had to earn something
in some way to make my journey financially possible. My newspaper
letters contained nothing that should have been treated as official
secrets, but incidents of travel, anecdotes, picturesque views of
Southern conditions with some reflections thereon, mostly things which
would not find proper elaboration in official reports--and all this
quite anonymous, so as not to have the slightest official character;
and, finally, I wrote, I had a right to feel myself entitled to
protection against such imputations as the newspaper paragraph in
question contained.
My first impulse was to resign my mission at once and return home. But
then I considered that the duty to the public which I had assumed
obliged me to finish my work as well as I could, unless I were
expressly recalled by the President. I would, therefore, at any rate,
go on with my inquiries, in expectation of an answer from him to my
letter. I was outraged at the treatment I was receiving. I had
undertaken the journey in obedience to an urgent request of the
President and at serious sacrifice, for I was on the point of
returning to my Western home when the President called me. My journey
in the South during the hottest part of the year was in the highest
degree laborious and fatiguing, but it was hardly worse than the
sweltering nights in the wretched country taverns of those
days--nights spent in desperate fights with ravenous swarms of
mosquitos. The upshot of it was that, when I arrived at New Orleans,
the limits of my endurance were well-nigh reached, and a few days
later I had a severe attack of the "break-bone fever," an illness
which by the sensations it caused me did full justice to its
ill-boding name. I thought I might fight the distemper by leaving New
Orleans and visiting other parts in pursuit of my inquiries. I went to
Mobile for the purpose of looking into the conditions of southern
Alabama, returned to New Orleans, and then ran up Bayou Teche in a
government tug-boat as far as New Iberia, where I was literally driven
back by clouds of mosquitos of unusual ferocity. At New Orleans I
despatched an additional report to the President, and then,
relentlessly harassed by the break-bone fever, which a physician
advised me I should not get rid of as long as I remained in that
climate, I set my face northward, stopping at Natchez and Vicksburg to
gather some important information.
_The End of an Aristocracy_
At Natchez I witnessed a significant spectacle. I was shown some large
dwelling-houses which before the Civil War had at certain seasons been
occupied by families of the planting aristocracy of that region. Most
of those houses now looked deserted and uncared for, shutters
unhinged, window-panes broken, yards and gardens covered with a rank
growth of grass and weeds. In the front yard of one of the houses I
observed some fresh stumps and stacks of cordwood and an old man busy
cutting down with an ax a magnificent shade-tree. There was something
distinguished in his appearance that arrested my attention--fine
features topped with long white locks; slender, delicate hands;
clothes shabby, but of a cut denoting that they had originally been
made for a person above the ordinary wood-chopper. My companion, a
Federal captain, did not know him. I accosted him with the question to
whom that house belonged. "It belongs to me," he said. I begged his
pardon for asking the further question why he was cutting down that
splendid shade-tree. "I must live," he replied, with a sad smile. "My
sons fell in the war; all my servants have left me. I sell fire-wood
to the steamboats passing by." He swung his ax again to end the
conversation. A warm word of sympathy was on my tongue, but I
repressed it, a look at his dignified mien making me apprehend that he
might resent being pitied, especially by one of the victorious enemy.
At Vicksburg I learned from General Slocum that Governor Sharkey
himself had, upon more mature reflection, given up the organization of
his State militia as too dangerous an experiment.
I left the South troubled by great anxiety. Four millions of negroes,
of a race held in servitude for two centuries, had suddenly been made
free men. That an overwhelming majority of them, grown up in the
traditional darkness of slavery, should at first not have been able to
grasp the duties of their new condition, together with its rights, was
but natural. It was equally natural that the Southern whites, who had
known the negro laborer only as a slave, and who had been trained only
in the habits and ways of thinking of the master class, should have
stubbornly clung to their traditional prejudice that the negro would
not work without physical compulsion. They might have concluded that
their prejudice was unreasonable; but, such is human nature, a
prejudice is often the more tenaciously clung to the more unreasonable
it is. There was, therefore, a strong tendency among the whites to
continue the old practices of the slavery system to force the negro
freedmen to labor for them. Thus the two races, whose well-being
depended upon their peaceable and harmonious coöperation, confronted
each other in a state of fearful irritation, aggravated by the
pressing necessity of producing a crop that season, and embittered by
race antagonism. The Southern whites wished and hoped to be speedily
restored to the control of their States by the reëstablishment of
their State governments. To this end they were willing to recognize
"the results of the war," among them the abolition of slavery, in
point of form. The true purpose was to use the power of the State
governments, legislative and executive, to reduce the freedom of the
negroes to a minimum and to revive as much of the old slave code as
they thought necessary to make the blacks work for the whites.
Now President Johnson stepped in and, by directly encouraging the
expectation that the States would without delay be restored to full
self-control even under present circumstances, distinctly stimulated
the most dangerous reactionary tendencies to more reckless and baneful
activity.
_An Ungracious Reception_
This was my view of Southern conditions when I returned from my
mission of inquiry. Arrived at Washington, I reported myself at once
at the White House. The President's private secretary, who seemed
surprised to see me, announced me to the President, who sent out word
that he was busy. When would it please the President to receive me?
The private secretary could not tell, as the President's time was much
occupied by urgent business. I left the anteroom, but called again the
next morning. The President was still busy. I asked the private
secretary to submit to the President that I had returned from a three
months' journey made at the President's personal request; that I
thought it my duty respectfully to report myself back; and that I
should be obliged to the President if he would let me know whether,
and if so when, he would receive me to that end. The private
secretary went in again, and brought out the answer that the President
would see me in an hour or so. At the appointed time I was admitted.
The President received me without a smile of welcome. His mien was
sullen. I said that I had returned from the journey which I had made
in obedience to his demand, and was ready to give him, in addition to
the communications I had already sent him, such further information as
was in my possession. A moment's silence followed. Then he inquired
about my health. I thanked him for the inquiry and hoped the
President's health was good. He said it was. Another pause, which I
brought to an end by saying that I wished to supplement the letters I
had written to him from the South with an elaborate report giving my
experiences and conclusions in a connected shape. The President looked
up and said that I need not go to the trouble of writing out such a
general report on his account. I replied that it would be no trouble
at all, but that I should consider it a duty. The President did not
answer. The silence became awkward, and I bowed myself out.
President Johnson evidently wished to suppress my testimony as to the
condition of things in the South. I resolved not to let him do so. I
had conscientiously endeavored to see Southern conditions as they
were. I had not permitted any political considerations or any
preconceived opinions on my part to obscure my perception and
discernment in the slightest degree. I had told the truth, as I
learned it and understood it, with the severest accuracy, and I
thought it due to the country that the truth should be known.
_Why the President Reversed his Policy_
Among my friends in Washington there were different opinions as to how
the striking change in President Johnson's attitude had been brought
about. Some told me that during the summer the White House had been
fairly besieged by Southern men and women of high social standing, who
had told the President that the only element of trouble in the South
consisted of a lot of fanatical abolitionists who excited the negroes
with all sorts of dangerous notions, and that all would be well if he
would only restore the Southern State government as quickly as
possible according to his own plan as laid down in the North Carolina
proclamation, and that he was a great man to whom they looked up as
their savior. It was now thought that Mr. Johnson, the plebeian who
before the war had been treated with undisguised contempt by the
slaveholding aristocracy, could not withstand the subtle flattery of
the same aristocracy when they flocked around him as humble
suppliants cajoling his vanity.
I went to work at my general report with the utmost care. My
statements of fact were invariably accompanied by the sources of my
information, my testimony being produced in the language of my
informants. I scrupulously avoided exaggeration and cultivated sober
and moderate forms of expression. It gives me some satisfaction now to
say that none of those statements of fact has ever been effectually
controverted. I cannot speak with the same assurance of my conclusions
and recommendations, for they were matters, not of knowledge, but of
judgment.
In the concluding paragraph of my report I respectfully suggested to
the President that he advise Congress to send one or more
investigating committees into the Southern States to inquire for
themselves into the actual condition of things before taking final and
irreversible action, I sent the completed document to the President on
November 22, asking him at the same time to permit me to publish it,
on my sole responsibility and in such a manner as would preclude the
imputation that the President approved the whole or any part of it. To
this request I never received a reply.
_Congress and General Grant's Report_
Congress met early in December. At once the Republican majority in
both houses rose in opposition to President Johnson's plan of
reconstruction. Even before the President's message was read, the
House of Representatives, upon the motion of Thaddeus Stevens of
Pennsylvania, passed a resolution providing for a joint committee of
both houses to inquire into the condition of the "States lately in
rebellion," which committee should thereupon report, "by bill or
otherwise," whether, in its judgment, those States, or any of them,
were entitled to be represented in either House of Congress. To this
resolution the Senate subsequently assented. Thus Congress took the
matter of the reconstruction of the late rebel States as to its final
consummation into its own hands.
On December 12, upon the motion of Mr. Sumner, the Senate resolved
that the President be directed to furnish to the Senate, among other
things, a copy of my report. A week later the President did so, but he
coupled it with a report from General Grant on the same subject. The
two reports were transmitted with a short message from the President
in which he affirmed that the Rebellion had been suppressed; that,
peace reigned throughout the land; that, "so far as could be done,"
the courts of the United States had been restored, post-offices
reëstablished, and revenues collected; that several of those States
had reorganized their State governments, and that good progress had
been made in doing so; that the constitutional amendment abolishing
slavery had been ratified by nearly all of them; that legislation to
protect the rights of the freedmen was in course of preparation in
most of them; and that, on the whole, the condition of things was
promising and far better than might have been expected. He transmitted
my report without a word of comment, but called special attention to
that of General Grant.
The appearance of General Grant's report was a surprise, which,
however, easily explained itself. On November 22 the President had
received my report. On the 27th General Grant, with the approval of
the President, started on a "tour of inspection through some of the
Southern States" to look after the "disposition of the troops," and
also "to learn, as far as possible, the feelings and intentions of the
citizens of those States toward the general government." On December
12 the Senate asked for the transmission of my report. General Grant's
report was dated the 10th, and on the 17th it was sent to the Senate
together with mine. The inference was easily drawn, and it was
generally believed that this arrangement was devised by President
Johnson to the end of neutralizing the possible effect of my account
of Southern conditions. If so, it was cleverly planned. General Grant
was at that time at the height of his popularity. He was since
Lincoln's death by far the most imposing figure in the popular eye.
Having forced the surrender of the formidable Lee, he was by countless
tongues called "the savior of the Union." His word would go very far
toward carrying conviction. But in this case the discredit which
President Johnson had already incurred proved too heavy for even the
military hero to carry. As to the practical things to be done General
Grant's views were not so very far distinct from mine; but President
Johnson's friends insisted upon representing him as favoring the
immediate restoration of all "the States lately in rebellion" to all
their self-governing functions, and this became the general
impression, probably much against Grant's wish. My report after its
publication as an "executive document" became widely known in the
country. A flood of letters of approval and congratulation poured in
upon me from all parts of the United States.
[Illustration]
THE FLOWER FACTORY
BY FLORENCE WILKINSON
_Lisabetta, Marianina, Fiametta, Teresina,
They are winding stems of roses, one by one, one by one--
Little children who have never learned to play:
Teresina softly crying that her fingers ache to-day,
Tiny Fiametta nodding when the twilight slips in, gray.
High above the clattering street, ambulance and fire-gong beat,
They sit, curling crimson petals, one by one, one by one.
Lisabetta, Marianina, Fiametta, Teresina,
They have never seen a rose-bush nor a dew-drop in the sun.
They will dream of the vendetta, Teresina, Fiametta,
Of a Black Hand and a Face behind a grating;
They will dream of cotton petals, endless, crimson, suffocating,
Never of a wild-rose thicket nor the singing of a cricket,
But the ambulance will bellow through the wanness of their dreams,
And their tired lids will flutter with the street's hysteric screams.
Lisabetta, Marianina, Fiametta, Teresina,
They are winding stems of roses, one by one, one by one.
Let them have a long, long play-time, Lord of Toil, when toil is done!
Fill their baby hands with roses, joyous roses of the sun._
THE SILLY ASS
BY JAMES BARNES
ILLUSTRATION BY ARTHUR COVEY
"Marcia," called the admiral, tapping lightly on the state-room door
with the back of his fingernails, "Marcia, my dear, I hope you're
better. Come out with me; it's--oh, ah--where's Miss Marcia?"
The door had been opened by the courier maid, whose wilted and forlorn
appearance was eloquent of her failure to live up to at least one item
in her letter of recommendation.
"Miss Dorn has gone up to--ze deck, Monsieur."
"Humph! I didn't see her. When did she go?"
"Since early zis morning, Monsieur," rejoined the well-recommended one
rather despondently.
Perhaps she might have gone on to say something more, but the admiral
stamped down the passageway. The maid looked on her features in the
glass much as one might inspect a barometer, drew a weak, despairing
breath, and laid herself down on the sofa again, her relaxed person
responding inertly to the steamer's vibrations.
Now, Admiral Page Paulding was as sweet-tempered an old sea-dog as
ever retired from the employ of an ungrateful country; but foggy
weather always worked a bit on his nerves--and what hands he had held
that morning in the smoke-room! As he thumped up the rubber-carpeted
staircase he knew that he was in a thoroughly bad humor, but made up
his mind to conceal it. And there were reasons. When a man has reached
the age when by all rights he should be a grandfather, and finds
himself only a foolish old-bachelor uncle personally conducting a
young niece of marriageable age and attractive exterior on her first
trip to Europe, it may well be said: "Of each day learneth he
experience." Aside from the avuncular privilege of paying bills, he
had known the jealous promptings of a father, indulged in the
self-communing suspicions of a mother, and supported smilingly the
irritations of a chaperon. The enforced companionship of a courier
maid does not lessen the perplexities of certain situations nor
lighten the burden of responsibility.
If the truth be told, the admiral's retirement, this time, from what
might quite properly be termed active service would be accompanied by
no bitter heartburnings and regrets. Rather--yes, many times
rather--would he con a fleet of battle-ships through the tortuous
turnings of Smith Island Sound than again personally conduct one
attractive and impulsive young female through the hotel-strewn shoals
of Europe. There was that German baron in Switzerland, that dashing
young lieutenant of cavalry in Vienna, and that persistent
Englishman--oh, that _persistent_ Englishman!--who turned up
everywhere, and would not be turned down! There was a good deal back
of the cablegram the old gentleman had sent Mrs. Dorn, his sister,
from Southampton, which had read:
Sailing _Caronia_, unentangled, on Wednesday.
"That means only three days more now," mused the admiral, recalling
these words to himself as he came out on the promenade-deck. He stood
there a moment,
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