Perpetual Light | Page 4

to make her life count. She wasted no time on what did not at once attract her spirit, except of necessity. And yet she genuinely delighted in the small events of a day such as please and awe children. And the reason they loved her so was because they knew she brought the same guileless point of view to solve their bewilderment from larger experience. And yet she would write:
"I _wish_ I knew where I stood. I was much happier when I was a rigid Catholic. I wish I could fit back into that measure. Can I ever-- any more than I can fit into the mental measure of a nun?"
And again her typewriting would exclaim to me:
"I don't like to write letters to you. I like to talk to you. I like still better to be silent with you!"
When she thought me in need of it she could be very self-forgetful:
"But I want to see the future big with Romance for you and I would rather feel you came home from voyages two weeks or two months long, with a trunkful of manuscripts; and that, three years from today, you had secured us special rates on a tramp steamer to Plymouth, than that you were going to dodge into subways the rest of your life."
"I would infinitely rather you shipped before the mast--to Bermuda, Borneo, or Buenos Aires. Don't think from this I don't want your face across the table from mine every night the rest of my life!"
Reading to the children, she would retail to me such incidents as:
"Then I read them the Gospel stories, ... and they were too funny--R-- trying to show me how Herod looked, and J-- suggesting charitably that perhaps his wife was good. 'No,' said R--,'the whole family was bad!'"
"In the spring I am going to take an old farmhouse, give the children one brown garment apiece, and plan a scheme of living that will leave something over for other children."
And this appealed to her:
"Well, if it is not in the Fall of 1918, it will be in 'one of those houses Our Lord is building' as J-- remarks casually. Did I tell you of the little village in the North Carolina hills where H-- and S. L-- spent the summer, where the women raised enough sheep to cut the wool, card, and spin and weave the clothes the family wore?"
In the winter of 1914 she first visited Augusta, Georgia, where my father was stationed, and there the campaign against Child Labor, in which she was always vitally interested, became doubly real in necessity to her as she went through the cotton mills and saw conditions at close range. She always gave what sums she could to this cause. In 1915, perhaps the most famous year of the woman suffrage battle, she was campaigning, speaking, watching all day at the polls in her village of Port Washington, Long Island. I remember her speaking from the stage of the Republican Club against a clever antisuffragist from New York. Her voice reached out for something in the?hearts of her audience hid deeper than the appeal of a mere legislative reform. She knew her intellectual ground, but it was something deeper than intellectuality that went home.
In 1918 the Baby Welfare Movement was at its height. She became chairman of the Augusta committee and established clinics at the different schools and social centres.
So I grasp at her life, giving only a slight indication of how full it was. Her friends were of every type and kind, of every religious belief or lack of belief, of many different political opinions.
She hated war with her whole soul. It was directly opposed to the words of Christ. But she wrote me in a dark time:
"Italy is bad, Russia is bad, Cambrai is bad. But those things are only phases in the eternal struggle of right against wrong. And the only thing that matters is to personally throw your whole life into the balance for the things you believe to be right."
How far I failed her! It is given to every man to fight somehow through the bewilderment of life with the best intentions he can realize. And life seems to me like a fierce current on which we are borne rather than anything we can really master--except by forgetting it. She has left me with the feeling that I must know infinitely more and try to understand better, and that we are governed most truly only by the inexplicable. "Meanwhile, there is our life here--Well?"
The verse in this book is put as nearly as possible in the order of its writing. If there is any merit in any line of it, the merit is of her making. If there is none, the effort was, at least, to reach higher than