Chapter II: Part 2

Mr. Rogers had left the Creek in 1867 and become a partner in the Pratt firm of refiners and exporters of Brooklyn, New York. He and his associates saw as clearly as his old friends in the Oil Region that—let the South Improvement Company succeed in its plan for a monopoly—everybody not in the ring would be forced to go out of business. The New York men seem to have been convinced that the plans for saving themselves which the organized producers and refiners were laying stood a good chance of success, for back in New York Mr. Rogers gave a long interview to the _Herald_. He did not mince words. Cleveland and Pittsburgh were “straining every nerve to create a monopoly.” They would succeed if their control of the railroads continued. He and his fellows felt as the men in the Oil Region did, that the breaking up of the South Improvement Company was a “necessity for self-existence.” They were as bold in action as in words, for when a little later the president of the Standard Oil Company of Cleveland, John D. Rockefeller (to date, the only beneficiary of the South Improvement Company), sought an interview in New York with Mr. Rogers and his committee he was treated cavalierly and according to the newspapers retreated after a brief reception “looking badly crestfallen.”

Thus was the Henry H. Rogers of 1872.

Out of the long struggle begun as a scrimmage came finally a well developed cooperative movement guaranteeing fair play all around. It was signed by the Standard Oil Company’s representative and all the oil-carrying railroads. The railroads indeed were the first to succumb, knowing as they did that what they were doing was contrary to the common law of the land, and being thundered at as they were by the press and politicians of all the country. “I told Willie not to go into that scheme,” said old Commodore Vanderbilt; and Jay Gould whined, “I didn’t sign until everybody else had.”

Out of the alarm and bitterness and confusion, I gathered from my father’s talk a conviction to which I still hold—that what had been undertaken was _wrong_. My father told me it was as if somebody had tried to crowd me off the road. Now I knew very well that, on this road where our little white horse trotted up and down, we had our side, there were rules, you couldn’t use the road unless you obeyed those rules, it was not only bad manners but dangerous to attempt to disobey them. The railroads—so said my father—ran through the valley by the consent of the people; they had given them a right of way. The road on which I trotted was a right of way. One man had the same right as another, but the railroads had given to one something they would not give to another. It was wrong. I sometimes hear learned people arguing that in the days of this historic quarrel everybody took rebates, it was the accepted way. If they had lived in the Oil Region through those days in 1872, they would have realized that, far from being accepted, it was fought tooth and nail. Everybody did not do it. In the nature of the offense everybody could not do it. The strong wrested from the railroads the privilege of preying upon the weak, and the railroads never dared give the privilege save under promise of secrecy.

In walking through the world there is a choice for a man to make. He can choose the fair and open path, the path which sound ethics, sound democracy, and the common law prescribe, or choose the secret way by which he can get the better of his fellow man. It was that choice made by powerful men that suddenly confronted the Oil Region. The sly, secret, greedy way won in the end, and bitterness and unhappiness and incalculable ethical deterioration for the country at large came out of that struggle and others like it which were going on all over the country—an old struggle with old defeats but never without men willing to make stiff fights for their rights, even if it cost them all they ever hoped to possess.

At all events, uncomprehending as I was in that fine fight, there was born in me a hatred of privilege—privilege of any sort. It was all pretty hazy to be sure, but still it was well, at fifteen, to have one definite plank based on things seen and heard, ready for a future platform of social and economic justice if I should ever awake to my need of one. At the moment, however, my reflection did not carry me beyond the wrongness of the privilege which had so upset our world, contradicting as it did the principle of consideration for others which had always been basic in our family and religious teaching. I could not think further in this direction, for now my whole mind was absorbed by the overwhelming discovery that the world was not made in six days of twenty-four hours each.

My interest in science, which meant for me simply larger familiarity with plants and animals and rocks, had set me looking over my father’s books. Among them I found Hugh Miller’s “Testimony of the Rocks,” and sat down to read it. Gradually I grasped with a combination of horror and amazement that, instead of a creation, the earth was a growth—that the creative days I had so clearly visualized were periods, eons long, not to be visualized. It was all too clear to deny, backed as it was by a wealth of geological facts. If this were true, why did the Bible describe so particularly the work of each day, describe it and declare, “And the evening and the morning were the first day,” etc., and end, “and he rested on the seventh day”? Hugh Miller labored to prove that there was no necessary contradiction between Genesis and Geology. But I was too startled to accept what he said. A Bible that needed reconciling, that did not mean what it said, was not the rock I had supposed my feet were on; that words could have other meaning than that I had always given them, I had not yet grasped.

I was soon to find that the biblical day was disturbing a great part of the Christian world, was a chief point of controversy in the church. I had hardly made my discovery when Genesis and Geology appeared in the pulpit of the Methodist Church of Titusville, Pennsylvania. Filling this pulpit at that time was a remarkable and brilliant man, Amos Norton Craft. Dr. Craft was an indefatigable student. It was told of him to the wonder of the church that he laid aside yearly $200 of his meager salary to buy books. Like all the ministers of those days, he was obliged to face the challenges of science. Many of his fellows—most of them, so far as my knowledge went—took refuge in heated declarations that the conclusions that science was making were profane, godless, an affront to divinity. Not so Dr. Craft. He accepted them, strove to fit them into the Christian system. He startled his congregation and interested the town profoundly by announcing an evening course of lectures on the reconciliation of Genesis and Geology. The first of the series dealt with the universe. I had never known there was one. The stars, yes. I could name planets and constellations and liked nothing better than to lie on my back and watch them; but a universe with figures of its size was staggering. I went away from those Sunday night lectures fascinated, horror-stricken, confused—a most miserable child, for not only was my idea of the world shattered, not only was I left dizzily gyrating in a space to which there was no end, but the whole Christian system I had been taught was falling in a general ruin. I began to feel that I ought to leave the church. I did not believe what I was supposed to believe. I did not have the consolation of pride in emancipation which I find youth frequently has when it finds itself obliged to desert the views it has been taught. Indeed, I doubted greatly whether it was an emancipation. What troubled me most was that if I gave up the church I had nothing to put in place of something it had given me which seemed to me of supreme importance; summed up, that something was in the commandment, “Do as you would be done by.” Certainly nothing which Hugh Miller or Herbert Spencer, whom I began to read in 1872 in the _Popular Science Monthly_, helped me here. They gave me nothing to take the place of what had always been the unwritten law of the Tarbell household, based as I knew upon the teachings of the Bible. The gist of the Bible, as it had come to me, was what I later came to call the brotherhood of man. Practically it was that we should do nothing, say nothing, that injured another. That was a catastrophe, and when it happened in our household—an inarticulate household on the whole, though one extraordinarily conscious of the minds and hearts of one another—when it happened the whole household was shadowed for hours and it was not until by sensitive unspoken efforts the injured one had been consoled, that we went on about our usual ways.

This was something too precious to give up, and something for which I did not find a substitute in the scientific thinking and arguing in which I was floundering. The scientists offered me nothing to guide me in human relations, and they did not satisfy a craving from which I could not escape; that was the need of direction, the need of that which I called God and which I still call God. Perhaps I was a calculating person, a cautious one. At all events I made up my mind to wait and find out something which better took the place of those things which I so valued. It cost me curious little compromises, compromises that I had to argue myself into. The chief came in repeating the creed.

I could repeat, “conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary,” because for many years I did not know what that meant. It was the resurrection that disturbed me. I could not accept it, nor could I accept the promise of personal immortality. That had become a grave doubt with me when I first grew dizzy with the consciousness of the vastness of the universe. Why should I expect to exist forever as a conscious mind in that vast emptiness? What would become of me? I did not want to think about it, and I came then to a conviction that has never left me: that as far as I am concerned immortality is not my business, that there is too much for me to attend to in this mortal life without overspeculation on the immortal, that it is not necessary to my peace of mind or to my effort to be a decent and useful person, to have a definite assurance about the affairs of the next world. I say this with humility, for I believe that some such assurance is necessary to the peace and usefulness of many persons, and I am the last to scoff at the revelations they claim.

And yet it was hard to give up heaven. Among the books on our shelves—many of them orthodox religious books—was one that had a frontispiece which I had accepted as a definite picture of the heaven to which I was to go. Jehovah sat on a throne, cherubim and seraphim around him, rank upon rank of angels filling the great amphitheater below. I always wondered where my place would be, and whether there would be any chance to work up in heaven as there seemed to be on earth, to become a cherub.

But giving up this heaven was by no means the greatest tragedy in my discovery that the world was not made in six days of twenty-four hours each. The real tragedy was the birth in me of doubt and uncertainty. Nothing was ever again to be final. Always I was to ask myself when confronted with a problem, a system, a scheme, a code, a leader, “How can I accept without knowing more?” The quest of the truth had been born in me—the most tragic and incomplete, as well as the most essential, of man’s quests.

It was while groping my way, frightened like a lost child, I found a word to hold to—evolution. Things grew. What did they grow from? They all started somewhere. I was soon applying the idea. Nothing seemed to matter now, except to find the starting point of things and, having that, see why and how they grew into something else. How were you to go to work to find the start of life? With a microscope. And I soon was in the heat of my first intellectual passion, my first and greatest—that for the microscope. With a microscope I could perhaps get an answer to my mystification about the beginning of life, where it started; and then, I believed, I should find God again.

I was a practical person apparently, for I at once began to save my money and soon had enough to put into a small instrument. The house in Titusville, like many of its period, had a tower room, a steep staircase running up to it. This room was surrounded on three sides with big double windows. I begged to have it for my own. Here I was allowed to set up shop; here I had my desk, my papers, and my microscope; here I was alone with my problems. That little microscope had a good deal to do with my determination to go to college. If I was to become a microscopist—I had already adopted that word—I must study, get an education.

This determination of mine to get an education, go to college, was chiefly due, no doubt, to the active crusade going on in those days for what we called woman’s rights. Ours was a yeasty time, the ferment reaching into every relation of life, attacking and remodeling every tradition, every philosophy. As my father was hard hit by the attack on his conception of individualism in a democracy—freedom with strictest consideration for the rights and needs of others—as I was struggling with all the handicaps of my ignorance, with the nature of life, a search for God, so my mother was facing a little reluctantly a readjustment of her status in the home and in society. She had grown up with the Woman’s Rights movement. Had she never married, I feel sure she would have sought to “vindicate her sex” by seeking a higher education, possibly a profession. The fight would have delighted her. If she had gone to Iowa she surely would have soon joined the agitation led there in the late fifties by Amelia Bloomer, the inventor of the practical and ugly costume which still carries her name, the real founder of dress reform. We owe it to Amelia Bloomer that we can without public ridicule wear short skirts and stout boots, be as sensible as our feminine natures permit—which is not saying much for us when it comes to fashions. But my mother found herself a pioneer in the Oil Region, confronted by the sternest of problems which were to be settled only by immediate individual effort and good will.

The move to Titusville, however, soon put my mother in touch with the crusade for equal political rights which was taking the place of the earlier movement for woman’s rights. The Civil War had slowed up that agitation; indeed, many of its best talking points had been conceded and were slowly going into practice. Most of the militants had thrown themselves into war work and, after the war, into the campaign for negro suffrage; but the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, for the first time introducing the word “male” into the Constitution, aroused a sense of outrage, not only in the advocates of equal rights but in many women who had not approved of previous agitations. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the greatest of the early leaders, failing to keep the humiliating distinction out of the Amendment, began a tremendous national crusade for woman’s suffrage. They marshaled a group of splendid women and undertook an intensive campaign meant to reach every woman in the country. It reached us in Titusville, even reached our home where my father and mother, always hospitable to crusaders, opened their doors to them. I remember best Mary Livermore and Frances Willard—not that either touched me, saw me; of this neglect I was acutely conscious. I noted, too, that the men we entertained did notice me, talked to me as a person—not merely as a possible member of a society they were promoting. There was Neal Dow—father by this time was a prohibitionist—who let me show him our Dante with Gustave Doré’s pictures. Men were nicer than women to me, I mentally noted.

As the struggle for equal rights grew in heat I became aware that it was far from a united struggle, that as a matter of fact leaders and followers were spending almost as much time disapproving of one another’s methods as fighting for their cause. The friction came largely from the propensity of Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony to form alliances shocking to many of their oldest and wisest friends. Before the war they had, rather recklessly from a political point of view, supported easier divorce. As one of their friends wrote them, they had in so doing broken the heart of the portly _Evening Post_ and nearly driven the _Tribune_ to the grave. Time had not cooled their ardor for strange bedfellows. They made an alliance now of which I heard no little talk by my mother and her friends; it was with the two most notorious women in the eye of the public at the moment. “Hussies,” conservative circles in Titusville, Pennsylvania, called them—Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin.

It was not difficult for even a girl of fifteen to pick up some idea of what these women were, so well did they advertise themselves, and so delightedly did the press back them up in their doings. Beginning their careers as clairvoyants, they had developed professionally their undoubted powers until they were in the sixties—the two best known and best paid trance-physicians of their day. Victoria claimed to have raised a child from the dead, and Tennessee, the harder worker of the two, made enough money to keep thirty-five relations in comfort. “If I am a humbug sometimes, look at the dead beats I have to support,” was her answer to those who accused her of abusing her talents. Both women frankly advocated free love, and so it was believed quite as frankly practiced it.

With this equipment they entered Wall Street in the eighteen-sixties as consultants. The “lady brokers,” they were called. They quickly built up a profitable business. Old Commodore Vanderbilt was so tickled by their combination of beauty and effrontery, talents and ambitions, that he is said to have proposed marriage to Victoria. He was more valuable as a friend. She kept his picture on the wall of the salon where she received her clients, and under it the framed motto, “Simply to thy cross I cling.”

In 1870 Victoria Woodhull announced herself as a candidate for President in 1872. So successful was she in attracting and holding big audiences, and so brilliantly did she present the arguments for equal rights, that Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony threw scruples to the wind and took her into their camp—from which promptly there was a considerable exodus of scandalized ladies. Not only did Victoria win the countenance of these two great leaders, but she involved them in the Beecher-Tilton scandal, which for months she worked steadily to force before the public.

The reverberations of the conflict inside the suffrage party, together with what I picked up about the Beecher trial (I read the testimony word by word in our newspapers), did not increase my regard for my sex. They did not seem to substantiate what I heard about the subjection of women, nor did what I observed nearer home convince me. Subjection seemed to me fairly divided. That is all: I saw there were “henpecked men,” as well as “downtrodden women.” The chief unfairness which I recognized was in the handling of household expenses. Women who must do the spending were obliged to ask for money or depend on charging. My mother had not been trained to live on as generous a scale as was now possible, but my father never said, “We have so much and no more to spend.” They worked often at cross purposes. So I gathered as I listened to intimate talks between women, listened to suffrage speakers, read the literature; so did many American husbands and wives. I felt no restraint myself, for I always had at least a little money and I, too, could charge. This foolish practice led me into funny expenditures.

I had no sense of the appropriate in clothes. Often I had an ardent desire for something fitted only for grown-ups, and I always had a keen ambition to fit myself out for occasions. Some time in the early seventies Clara Louise Kellogg came to town. My father and mother were in the West, but they had arranged that I was to hear her. It seemed as if some kind of regalia was necessary, so I charged a wide pink sash and a pair of yellow kid gloves.

Out of the agitation for rights as it came to me, two rights that were worth going after quite definitely segregated themselves: the right to an education, and the right to earn my living—education and economic independence.

The older I grew, the more determined I became to be independent. I saw only one way—teach; but if I was to teach I must fit myself, go to college. My father and mother agreed. I had a clear notion of what I wanted to teach—natural science, particularly the microscope, for I was to be a biologist. I made my choice—Cornell, first opened to women in 1872; but at the moment when the steps to enter Cornell were to be taken, there appeared in the household as an over-Sunday guest the president of a small college in our neighborhood, only thirty miles away, Allegheny. Among the patrons of that college was the Methodist organization known as the Erie Conference, to which the Titusville church belonged. I had heard of it annually when a representative appeared in our pulpit, told its story and asked for support. The president, Dr. Lucius Bugbee, was a delightful and entertaining guest and, learning that I was headed Cornellward, adroitly painted the advantages of Allegheny. It was near home; it was a ward of our church. It had responded to the cry of women for educational opportunity and had opened its doors before the institution I had chosen.

Was not here an opportunity for a serious young woman interested in the advancement of her sex? Had I not a responsibility in the matter? If the few colleges that had opened their doors were to keep them open, if others were to imitate their example, two things were essential: women must prove they wanted a college education by supporting those in their vicinity; and they must prove by their scholarship what many doubted—that they had minds as capable of development as young men. Allegheny had not a large territory to draw from. I must be a pioneer.

As a matter of fact the only responsibility I had felt and assumed in going to college was entirely selfish and personal. But the sense of responsibility was not lacking nor dormant in me. It was one of the few things I had found out about myself in the shanty on the flats when I was six years old and there was a new baby in the family.

The woman looking after my mother had said, “Now you are old enough to make a cup of tea and take it to her.” I think, in all my life since, nothing has seemed more important, more wonderful to me than this being called upon by an elder to do something for mother, be responsible for it. I can feel that cup in my hand as I cautiously took it to the bed, and can see my mother’s touching smile as she thanked me. Perhaps there came to her a realization that this rebelling, experimenting child might one day become a partner in the struggle for life so serious for her at the moment, always to be more or less serious.

But to return to Dr. Bugbee and his argument; before he left the house I had agreed to enter Allegheny in the fall of 1876. And that I did.

What did I take with me? Well, I took what from my earliest years I had been told was necessary to everyone—a Purpose, always spelled with a capital. I had an outline of the route which would lead to its realization. Making outlines of what was in my mind was the one and only fruit that I had gathered so far from long terms of struggle over grammar, rhetoric, composition. Outlines which held together, I had discovered, cleared my mind, gave it something to follow. I outlined all my plans as I had diagramed sentences. It was not a poor beginning for one who eventually, and by accident rather than by intention, was to earn her living by writing—the core of which must be sound structure.

One thing by choice left out of the plan I carried from high school was marriage. I would never marry. It would interfere with my plan; it would fetter my freedom. I didn’t quite know what Freedom meant; certainly I was far from realizing that it exists only in the spirit, never in human relations, never in human activities—that the road to it is as often as not what men call bondage. But above all I must be free; and to be free I must be a spinster. When I was fourteen I was praying God on my knees to keep me from marriage. I suspect that it was only an echo of the strident feminine cry filling the air at that moment, the cry that woman was a slave in a man-made world. By the time I was ready to go to college I had changed my prayer for freedom to a will to freedom. Such was the baggage I carried to college, where I was soon to find several things I had not counted on.

3
A COEDUCATIONAL COLLEGE OF THE EIGHTIES

When I entered Allegheny College in the fall of 1876 I made my first contact with the past. I had been born and reared a pioneer; I knew only the beginning of things, the making of a home in a wilderness, the making of an industry from the ground up. I had seen the hardships of beginnings, the joy of realization, the attacks that success must expect; but of things with a past, things that had made themselves permanent, I knew nothing. It struck me full in the face now, for this was an old college as things west of the Alleghenies were reckoned—an old college in an old town. Here was history, and I had never met it before to recognize it.

The town lay in the valley of a tributary of the Allegheny River—French Creek. Its oldest tradition after the tales of Indians was that George Washington once drank from a spring on the edge of the campus. Certainly he passed that way in 1753 when he came up the river valley from Fort Duquesne (Pittsburgh), following the route which led to Fort Le Bœuf near Lake Erie. He comments in his diary, published the year after his trip, on the extensive rich meadows through which he had passed, one of which “I believe was nearly four miles in length and considerable wider in some places.” To this particular “rich meadow” a few years later came one David Mead and laid out a town and sold land. Here soon after came the representative of the Holland Land Company, colonizers of first quality. Good men came, distinguished names in Pennsylvania’s history, and they wanted a college. The answer to their wish came in 1815 when one of the most scholarly men of that day, Timothy Alden of Massachusetts, heard their call and, picking up all his worldly possessions, made the two months’ trip by coach and boat to the settlement called Meadville.

Timothy Alden, like many of his fellows, was fired by a deep belief that through Christian democracy alone could men arrive at the better world towards which he, scholar that he was, knew they had been groping from their earliest beginnings. But men could only come to an understanding of their individual and collective responsibilities to democracy through education. Therefore, as men spread westward he and others like him must follow them with education.

But once in Meadville how little he found with which to carry out his project—a log courthouse for a schoolhouse, and little or no money, though of what they had men gave freely. Now Timothy Alden knew that throughout the East were men of scholarly traditions convinced as was he that democracy would work only if men were trained to understanding and sacrifice. He believed that they would help his Western venture. In 1816 he went East to find out. He was not wrong in thinking there would be sympathy for the young college. Out of their meager store men gave—this one, fifty cents; that one, five dollars; few, more—and men gave books, one, two, five. The list of donors now in the college archives shows many of the best known names of the day—Lowell, Adams, Tucker, Parkman, Channing in Boston and twenty-nine fine New York names. Friends were made for Allegheny in every town and city where its brave story was told. Timothy Alden came back with $361 in money and with books, more needed than money, estimated to be worth $1,642.26.

From that time he kept the undertaking steadily before the East, promoted it by every method known to the times. A great response to his passionate effort came in 1819 when the college world of the East was shocked by learning that William Bentley of Salem, Massachusetts, had left his famous collection of “classical and theological books, dictionaries, lexicons and Bibles” to a college in the wilderness of northwestern Pennsylvania, a college without a home, still doing its work in a log courthouse. That gift, long a bitter drop in the cup of Harvard, it is said, made a home of its own necessity for Allegheny, and in 1820 the corner stone of Bentley Hall, named for the donor, was laid. It took many years to complete it; but, when done on the lines Timothy Alden had himself laid down, it was one of the most beautiful buildings in the country. Today it easily stands after Independence Hall as the most perfect piece of Colonial architecture in the state of Pennsylvania. For me Bentley Hall was an extraordinary experience. It was the first really beautiful building I had seen, a revelation, something I had never dreamed of.

Fifty-six years had passed since the corner stone of Bentley Hall was laid, and not one of them without disappointments and sacrifices. More than once it had seemed as if the brave attempt must fail. Two buildings only had been added in these years: Culver Hall, a frame boarding house for men; Ruter Hall, a grim uncompromising three-story rectangular brick structure, fifty by ninety feet in size, a perfect reflection of the straitened period to which it belonged. The “Factory” was our slighting name for Ruter Hall, but in this stern structure I was to find a second deep satisfaction—the library; in a room on the top floor, ninety feet long and at least sixteen in height was housed not only the splendid Bentley collection, but one even more valuable, that of Judge James Winthrop of Cambridge, Massachusetts, rare volumes from the great presses of Europe, three tons of books brought overland in wagons by Boston teamsters in 1822. They lined the great unbroken inside wall, as well as every space between openings. From the window seats one looked out on the town in the valley, its roofs and towers half hidden by a wealth of trees, and beyond to a circle of round-breasted hills. Before I left Allegheny I had found a very precious thing in that severe room—the companionship there is in the silent presence of books.

Allegheny did not of course admit women at the start; but the ferment caused by the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment making it clear that only men were to be regarded as citizens stirred the Allegheny constituents mightily. Its chief patron, as I have said, was the Methodist Church. Now the Methodist Church was a militant reformer. The greatest of its bishops, Matthew Simpson, had backed Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony and their colleagues at every step. Leaders among Methodist women had been abolitionists, aggressive temperance advocates, and now they became militant suffragists. Their influence began to tell. In 1870, with misgivings in not a few minds the admission of women was voted. This was the same year that the University of Michigan opened its doors to women, and two years before Cornell. In the six years before I entered ten women had graduated. When I came there were but two seniors, two juniors, no sophomores. I was a lone freshman in a class of forty hostile or indifferent boys. The friendly and facetious professor charged with the care of the “young ladies” put it that I was “Lost in the Wilderness of Boy.”

From the first I was dimly conscious that I was an invader, that there was abroad a spirit of masculinity challenging my right to be there, and there were taboos not to be disregarded. My first experience was that of which Virginia Woolf speaks so bitterly in “A Room of One’s Own”—the closing of the college green to her at Oxbridge. Nearly fifty years before her book was written I was having at Allegheny the same experience.

The sloping green of the campus below Bentley Hall was inviting. Between classes I made my way one day to a seat under a tree only to hear a horrified call from the walk above, “Come back, come back quick.” An imperative summons from an upper-class woman. “You mustn’t go on that side of the walk, only men go there.”

It was not so simple to find a spot where you could go and be comfortable. If Bentley Hall, where all the classes were held, was a beautiful piece of architecture, its interior could hardly have been more severe. The rooms were heated with potbellied cast-iron stoves, seated with the hardest wooden chairs, lighted by kerosene lamps. In winter (and the winters were long) the snow tracked in kept the floors wet and cold. Often one wore a muffler in chapel. But of all that I was unheeding. My pioneer childhood served me well. Moreover, I realized at the start that I had found what I had come to college for, direction in the only field in which I was interested—science. I found it in a way that I doubt if Cornell could have given me at the moment, shy and immature as I was: the warming and contagious enthusiasm of a great natural teacher, one who had an ardent passion for those things which had stirred me and a wide knowledge which he fed by constant study and travel—Jeremiah Tingley, the head of Allegheny’s department of natural science.

Professor Tingley was then a man of fifty, sparkling, alive, informal. Three years before, he had been one of the fifty chosen from many hundred applicants to spend the summer with Louis Agassiz on the island of Penikese in Buzzards Bay. Agassiz had planned with enthusiasm for the Penikese Summer School, and for those privileged to enter who could understand and appreciate it was an unforgettable experience; certainly it was for Jeremiah Tingley. He carried there Agassiz’s faith in observation and classification, as well as his reverence for Nature and all her ways. For both men the material world was but the cover of the spirit. Professor Tingley would quote Agassiz sometimes: “Nature always brings us back to absolute truth whenever we wander.”

This fervent faith had a profound and quieting effect on my religious tumult. I learned a new word: Pantheism. Being still in that early stage of development where there must be a definite word by which to classify oneself, I began to call myself a pantheist—and I had a creed which I repeated more often than the creed I had learned in childhood:

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand
Little flower—but _if_ I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

It reassured me; I was on the right track, for was I not going to find out with the microscope what God and man are?

Professor Tingley’s method for those he found really interested in scientific study was to encourage them to look outside the book. There was where I had already found my joy; but I suspected it was the willful way, that the true way was to know first what was in the books. Here in Professor Tingley’s classes you were ordered to go and see for yourself. He used to tell us a story of his first experience at Penikese. A stone was put before him, a round water-washed stone, on which he was to report. He looked at the stone, turned it over. There was nothing to report. “It is not the outside, it is the inside of things that matters,” said Agassiz. And in the laboratory that became our watchword: Look inside.

Discovering my interest in the microscope, I was not only allowed, I was urged to use the magnificent binocular belonging to the college, was given the free run of the laboratory along with a few as crazy as myself. Here my most exciting adventure apart from what I found under the microscope came from actually having my hands on a “missing link.” Evolution, to which I was clinging determinedly, could only be established, I realized, by discovering the links. There was one peculiar to the waters in our valley, the _Memopomo Alleghaniensis_, a creature twelve to fifteen inches long with gills and one lung, able to live in the water or mud as circumstances required. The mud puppy, as it was appropriately called, was slimy, loathsome, but I worked over it with awe. Was I not being admitted into the very workshop of Nature herself—seeing how she did it?

Professor Tingley took his little group of laboratory devotees into his home circle. He and Mrs. Tingley were housed in a wing of Bentley Hall—big rooms built for classrooms. They had no children, and in the years of their study and travel they had gathered about them things of beauty and interest. The atmosphere of those rooms was something quite new and wonderful to me. It was my first look into the intimate social life possible to people interested above all in ideas, beauty, music, and glad to work hard and live simply to devote themselves to their cultivation.

And such good talks! Much of it was concerned with fresh scientific thought, the inventions and discoveries which were stirring the world. An omnivorous reader of the scientific publications of Europe and America, Professor Tingley kept us excited, not only by what had been done but what it might mean. There was the telephone. I had been in college but a few weeks when my father asked me to go with him and my brother to the Centennial Exposition of 1876. President Bugbee, who had made me his special care for a time—Mrs. Bugbee even taking me into their home until an appropriate boarding place could be found—was heartily in favor of my going. I went, and when I returned Professor Tingley’s first question was, “Did you see the telephone?” I hadn’t even heard of it. Two exhibits only of that exposition made a deep enough impression on me to last until today—my first Corot and the Corliss engine. Professor Tingley was greatly disappointed, and I did not understand why until a few weeks later he called the student body together to explain and illustrate the telephone by a homemade instrument. “You’ll talk to your homes from these rooms one day,” he told us. “New York will talk to Boston.” He didn’t suggest Chicago. “Dreamer,” the boys said. “Dreamer,” my father and his Titusville friends said a little later when an agent of the Bell Associates, the first company to attempt putting the new invention within reach of everybody, came to town selling stock. How often I heard it said later, “If I’d bought that telephone stock!”

Years later I told Alexander Graham Bell of my introduction to the telephone. “Nobody,” he said, “can estimate what the teachers of science in colleges and high schools were doing in those days not only to spread knowledge of the telephone but to stir youth to tackle the possibilities in electricity.”

What I best remember is not the telephone but Professor Tingley’s amazing enthusiasm for the telephone. This revelation of enthusiasm, its power to warm and illuminate was one of the finest and most lasting of my college experiences. The people I had known, teachers, preachers, doctors, business men, all went through their day’s work either with a stubborn, often sullen determination to do their whole duty, or with an undercurrent of uneasiness, if they found pleasure in duty. They seemed to me to feel that they were not really working if they were not demonstrating the Puritan teaching that labor is a curse. It had never seemed so to me, but I did not dare gloat over it. And here was a teacher who did gloat over his job in all its ramifications. Moreover, he did his best to stir you to share his joy.

But while I looked on what I was learning in the laboratory as what I had come to college for, while each term stiffened my ambition to go deeper and deeper into the search for the original atom, science was not all that interested me. The faculty, if small, was made up largely of seasoned men with a perspective on life. There was not only deep seriousness but humor and tolerance, and since we were so small a college the student was close enough to discover them, to find out what each man as an individual had to offer him. As I learned the power of enthusiasm from Jeremiah Tingley, I learned from another man of that faculty the value of contempt. Holding the chair of Latin was one of the few able teachers I have known, George Haskins, father of that sound scholar of international repute, the late Charles Homer Haskins, at the time of his death Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at Harvard University. What deep satisfaction his career gave his father, himself a man of many disappointments!

George Haskins labored, usually in vain, to arouse us to the choiceness of Latinity, the meaning of Rome’s rise and fall, the quality of her men, the relation of that life to ours. Professor Haskins’ contempt for our lack of understanding, for our slack preparation, was something utterly new to me in human intercourse. The people I knew with rare exceptions spared one another’s feelings. I had come to consider that a superior grace; you must be kind if you lied for it. But here was a man who turned on indifference, neglect, carelessness with bitter and caustic contempt, left his victim seared. The sufferers lived to say, some of them at least: “I deserved it. He was never unjust, never inappreciative of effort.”

“Cherish your contempts,” Henry James advised me once when he had drawn from me a confession of the conflict between my natural dislike of saying anything unpleasant about anybody and the necessity of being cruel, even brutal, if the work I had undertaken was to be truthful in fact and logic. “Cherish your contempts,” said Mr. James, “and strength to your elbow.” If it had not been for George Haskins I doubt if I should have known what he meant; nor should I ever have become the steady, rather dogged worker I am. The contempt for shiftlessness which he inspired in me aroused a determination to be a good worker. I began to train my mind to go at its task regularly, keep hours, study whether I liked a thing or not. I forced myself not to waste time, not to loaf, not to give up before I finished. If I failed at any point in this discipline I suffered a certain mental and spiritual malaise, a dissatisfaction with myself hard to live with.

In spite of my painful efforts to make a regular worker out of myself, life at college was lightened by my discovery of the Boy. Incredible as it seems to me now, I had come to college at eighteen without ever having dared to look fully into the face of any boy of my age. To be sure, I had from childhood nourished secret passions for a succession of older individuals whom I never saw except at a distance, and with whom I never exchanged a word. My brother and his friends, my father and his friends—these I had always hobnobbed with; but those who naturally should have been my companions, I shunned. I was unable to take part in those things that brought the young people of the day together. I did not dance—the Methodist discipline forbade it. I was incredibly stupid and uninterested in games—still am. I had no easy companionable ways, was too shy to attempt them. I had my delights; the hills which I ran, the long drives behind our little white horse, the family doings, the reading of French regularly with my splendid friend Annette Grumbine, still living, still as she was then a vitalizing influence in the town and state for all that makes for a higher social life—these things and my precious evening walks, the full length of Titusville’s main street, alone or with some girl friend while we talked of things deepest in our minds.

But in all this there was no boy. I was not long in discovering him when I reached Allegheny, for the taboos I encountered at the start soon yielded under the increased number of women, women in college, in special courses, in the Preparatory Department. They swept masculine prohibitions out of the way—took possession, made a different kind of institution of it, less scholastic, gayer, easier-going. The daily association in the classrooms, the contacts and appraisements, the mutual interests and intimacies, the continual procession of college doings which in the nature of things required that you should have a masculine attendant, soon put me at my ease. I was learning, learning fast, but the learning carried its pains. I still had a stiff-necked determination to be free. To avoid entangling alliances of all kinds had become an obsession with me. I was slow in laying it aside when I began to take part in the social life of the college, and because of it I was guilty of one performance which was properly enough a scandal to the young men.

There were several men’s fraternities in the college; most of the boys belonged to one or another. It was an ambition of the fraternities to put their pins on acceptable town and college girls. You were a Delta girl, or a Gamma girl or a Phi Psi girl. I resented this effort to tag me. Why should I not have friends in all the fraternities? And I had; I accumulated four pins and then, one disastrous morning, went into chapel with the four pins on my coat. There were a few months after that when, if it had not been for two or three non-Frat friends, I should have been a social outcast.

I spent four years in Allegheny College. Measured by what I got instead of by what I did not get and was obliged to learn later, I regard them as among the most profitable of my life. I find often that men and women accuse the college of not opening their minds to life as it is in the world. For a mind sufficiently developed to see “life as it is” I cannot conceive a more fruitful field than the classics. If I had been sufficiently mature I could have learned from George Haskins’ teachings of Cicero and Tacitus and Livy more than I know today about the ways of men in their personal and their national relations, more of the causes of war, of the weaknesses of governments. But I was not ready for it. Life is the great teacher, and she leads us step by step. It is not the fault of the human teacher that his pupil must learn to climb by climbing.

It was in the spring of 1880 that I graduated. I still carried the same baggage with which I had entered—a little heavier to be sure, a little better packed, a little better adapted to the “Purpose.” The only difference which threatened disturbance was that I had added an item which I had refused to bring with me in 1876. Then I was not willing to believe I would ever marry—now I thought possibly some day I might; but the item was not heavy, not heavy enough at least to prevent my rejoicing over the fact that I was graduating with a job. I had signed a contract with an institution of which I had never heard until the negotiations leading to it opened. After frequent communications with the faculty a representative of the Poland Union Seminary of Poland, Ohio, with some misgivings had employed me to serve as its Preceptress—$500 a year “and board yourself.” I was jubilant. It meant economic independence—the first plank in my platform. I would use my leisure to work with the microscope; I would save my money; I would one day go abroad and study with some great biologist. I would never abandon my search for the beginning of life, the point where I expected to find God.

It was then with entire confidence in the future that I started out in August of 1880 for the town of Poland on the Western Reserve of Ohio, to begin what women were then talking of in more or less awed tones as a Career.

4
A START AND A RETREAT

If I had been going on my honeymoon I should scarcely have been more expectant or more curious than I was in August of 1880 when I left home to take my first position: “Preceptress of Poland Union Seminary, Poland, Mahoning County, Ohio—$500.00 a year and board yourself”! Poland was not a long journey from my home—four or five hours.

I found the village delightful. It had the air of having been long in existence, as it had. Here there was no noise of railroads, no sign of the coal and steel and iron industries which encircled it but had never passed its boundaries. Here all people seemed to me to live tranquilly in roomy houses with pleasant yards or on near-by farms where there were fine horses and fat blooded sheep, and where planting and harvesting went ahead year in and year out in orderly fashion.

The chief and only industry of Poland was its seminary, now about thirty years old. It was a community enterprise started in 1848 by Mr. B. F. Lee, the financial agent who had hired me. Everybody in the village had subscribed to its endowment, practically every church had at one time or another been its patron. The long depression of the seventies had crippled its finances sadly; but times were better now, and the well-to-do Presbytery of Mahoning County had agreed to take it under its care. But I was soon to learn that Poland Union Seminary in spite of the patronage of the Presbytery lived on a narrow and worn shoestring. Moreover, I at once divined, kind as were those who were responsible for my being there, that I had been injected into a situation of which Mr. Lee had given me no hint strong enough to penetrate my inexperience. It was serious enough, as on the very day the school bell first rang for me the villagers began to let me know. Men and women would stop me on the street to say:

“So it’s you that’s taking Miss Blakeley’s place. You have no idea how badly we feel about her resigning. I went to school to her, my father and mother went to school to her. I had hoped all my children would go to her. She was a wonderful teacher, a beautiful character. You look pretty young; you haven’t had much experience, have you?”