Chapter XI: Jane Addams 297 (6)

They lived in a tiny house in an obscure suburb of Paris, giving all that they possessed--the modest income gained from teaching and lecturing, their share of the Nobel prize of $40,000, which, in 1903, was divided between them and Professor Becquerel, together with all their time and all their skill and knowledge, to their work.

For recreation they went for walks in the country with little Irene, often stopping for dinner at quaint inns among the trees. On one such evening, when Dr. Curie had just declined the decoration of the Legion of Honor, because it had "no bearing on his work," his small daughter climbed on his knee and slipped a red geranium into his buttonhole, saying, with comical solemnity: "You are now decorated with the Legion of Honor. Pray, Monsieur, what do you intend to do about it?"

"I like this emblem much better than a glittering star on a bit of red ribbon, and I love the hand that put it there," replied the father, his face lighting up with one of his rare smiles. "In this case I make no objection."

Other honors, which meant increased opportunity for work, were quietly accepted. Pierre Curie was elected to the French Academy--the greatest honor his country can bestow on her men of genius and achievement. Madame Curie received the degree of Doctor of Physical Science, and--a distinction shared with no other woman--the position of special lecturer at the Sorbonne, in Paris.

One day in 1906, when Dr. Curie, his mind intent on an absorbing problem, was absent-mindedly hurrying across a wet street, he slipped and fell under a passing truck and was instantly killed. When they attempted to break the news to Madame Curie by telling her that her husband had been hurt in an accident, she looked past them with a white, set face, and repeated over and over to herself, as if trying to get her bearings in the new existence that stretched blackly before her, "Pierre is dead; Pierre is dead."

Now, as on that night when she was leaving Russia for an unknown world, she saw a gleam in the blackness--there was work to be done! There was something waiting in the shadowy future for her, something that she alone could do. As on that other night, she found her lips shaping the words: "The big world has need of little me. But oh, it will be hard now to work alone!" Then her eyes fell on her two little girls (Irene was now eight years old and baby Eve was three), who were standing quietly near with big, wondering eyes fixed on their mother's strange face.

"Forgive me, darlings!" she cried, gathering her children into her arms. "We must try hard to go on with the work Father loved. _Together_ is a magic word for us still, little daughters!"

Everybody wondered at the courage and quiet power with which Madame Curie went out to meet her new life. She succeeded to her husband's professorship, and carried on his special lines of investigation as well as her own. The value of her work to science and to humanity may be indicated by the fact that in 1911 the Nobel prize was again awarded to her--the only time it has ever been given more than once to the same person.

At home, she tried to be father as well as mother. She took the children for walks in the evening, and while she sewed on their dresses and knitted them mittens and mufflers, she told them stories of the wonderland of science.

"Why do you take time to write down everything you do?" asked Eve one day, as she looked over her mother's shoulder at the neat note-book in which the world-famous scientist was summing up the work of the day.

"Why does a seaman keep a log, dearie?" the mother questioned with a smile. "A laboratory is just like a ship, and I want things shipshape. Every day with me is like a voyage--a voyage of discovery."

"But why do you put question marks everywhere, Mother!" persisted the child.

It was true that the pages fairly bristled with interrogation points. Madame Curie laughed as if she had never noticed this before. "It is good to have an inquiring mind, child," she said. "I am like my children; I love to ask questions. And when one gets an answer,--when you really discover something,--it only leads to more questions; and so we go on from one thing to another."

When Madame Curie was asked on one occasion to what she attributed her success, she replied, without hesitation: "To my excellent training: first, under my father, who taught me to wonder and to test; second, under my husband, who understood and encouraged me; and third, under my children, who question me!"

It is the day of one of Madame Curie's lectures. The dignified halls of the university are a-flutter with many visitors from the world of wealth and fashion. There, too, are distinguished scientists from abroad, among whom are Lord Kelvin, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Sir William Ramsay. The President of France and his wife enter with royal guests, Don Carlos and Queen Amélie of Portugal, and the Shah of Persia. The plodding students and the sober men of learning, ranged about the hall, blink at the brilliant company like owls suddenly brought into the sunlight.

At a given moment the hum of conversation dies away and the assemblage rises to its feet as a little black-robed figure steps in and stands before them on the platform. There is an instant's stillness,--a hush of indrawn breath you can almost hear,--and then the audience gives expression to its enthusiasm in a sudden roar of applause. The little woman lifts up her hand pleadingly. All is still again and she begins to speak.

She is slight, almost pathetically frail, this queen of science. You feel as if all her life had gone into her work. Her face is pale, and her hair is only a shadow above her serious brow. But the deep-set eyes glow, and the quiet voice somehow holds the attention of those least concerned with the problems of advanced physics.

Bank and wealth mean nothing to this little black-robed professor. It is said that when she was requested by the president to give a special demonstration of radium and its marvels before the Shah of Persia, she amazed his Serene Highness by showing much more concern for her tiny tube of white powder than for his distinguished favor. When the royal guest, who had never felt any particular need of exercising self-control, saw the uncanny light that was able to pass through plates of iron, he gave a startled exclamation and made a sudden movement that tipped over the scientist's material. Now it was the Lady Professor's turn to be alarmed. To pacify her, the Shah held out a costly ring from his royal finger, but this extraordinary woman with the pale face paid not the slightest attention; she could not be bribed to forget the peril of her precious radium. It is to be doubted if the eastern potentate had ever before been treated with such scant ceremony.

In 1911, Madame Curie's name was proposed for election to the Academy of Sciences. While it was admitted that her rivals for the vacancy were below her in merit, she failed of being elected by two votes. There was a general protest, since it was felt that service of the first order had gone unrecognized merely because the candidate happened to be a woman. It was stated, however, that Madame Curie was not rejected for this reason, but because it was thought wise to appoint to that vacancy Professor Branly, who had given Marconi valuable aid in his invention of wireless telegraphy, and who, since he was then an old man, would probably not have another chance for the honor. As Madame Curie, on the other hand, was only forty-three, she could well wait for another vacancy.

Since the outbreak of the present war the world has heard nothing new of the work of the Heroine of Radium. We do not doubt, however, that like all the women of France and all her men of science, she is giving her strength and knowledge to the utmost in the service of her adopted country. But we know, also, that just as surely she is seeing the pure light of truth shining through the blackness, and that she is "following the gleam." When the clouds of war shall have cleared away, we may see that her labors now, as in the past, have not only been of service to her country, but also to humanity. For Truth knows no boundaries of nation or race, and he who serves Truth serves all men.

THE HEART OF HULL-HOUSE:

JANE ADDAMS

The Russian peasants have a proverb that says: "Labor is
the house that Love lives in"; by which they mean that no two
people, or group of people, can come into affectionate relation
with each other unless they carry on a mutual task.

JANE ADDAMS.

THE HEART OF HULL-HOUSE

Do you remember what the poet says of Peter Bell?

At noon, when by the forest's edge
He lay beneath the branches high,
The soft blue sky did never melt
Into his heart: he never felt
The witchery of the soft blue sky!

In the same way, when he saw the "primrose by the river's brim," it was not to him a lovely bit of the miracle of upspringing life from the unthinking clod; it was just a common little yellow flower, which one might idly pick and cast aside, but to which one never gave a thought. He saw the sky and woods and fields and human faces with the outward eye, but not with the eye of the heart or the spirit. He had eyes for nothing but the shell and show of things.

This is the story of a girl who early learned to see with the "inward eye"; she "felt the witchery of the soft blue sky" and all the wonder of the changing earth, and something of the life about her melted into her heart and became part of herself. So it was that she came to have a "belonging feeling" for all that she saw--fields, pine woods, mill-stream, birds, trees, and people.

Perhaps little Jane Addams loved trees and people best of all. Trees were so big and true, with roots ever seeking a firmer hold on the good brown earth, and branches growing up and ever up, year by year, turning sunbeams into strength. And people she loved, because they had in them something of all kinds of life.

There was one special tree that had the friendliest nooks where she could nestle and dream and plan plays as long as the summer afternoon. Perhaps one reason that Jane loved this tree was that it reminded her of her tall, splendid father.

"You are so big and beautiful, and yet you always have a place for a little girl--even one who can never be straight and strong," Jane whispered, as she put her arms about her tree friend. And when she crept into the shelter of her father's arms, she forgot her poor back, that made her carry her head weakly on one side when she longed to fling it back and look the world in the face squarely, exultingly, as her father's daughter should.

"There is no one so fine or so noble as my father," Jane would say to herself as she saw him standing before his Bible-class on Sundays. Then her cheek paled, and her big eyes grew wistful. It would be too bad if people discovered that this frail child belonged to him. They would be surprised and pity him, and one must never pity Father. So it came about that, though it was her dearest joy to walk by his side clinging to his hand, she stepped over to her uncle, saying timidly, "May I walk with you, Uncle James?"

This happened again and again, to the mild astonishment of the good uncle. At last a day came that made everything different. Jane, who had gone to town unexpectedly, chanced to meet her father coming out of a bank on the main street. Smiling gaily and raising his shining silk hat, he bowed low, as if he were greeting a princess; and as the shy child smiled back she knew that she had been a very foolish little girl indeed. Why of course! Her father made everything that belonged to him all right just because it _did_ belong. He had strength and power enough for them both. As she walked by his side after that, it seemed as if the big grasp of the hand that held hers enfolded all the little tremblings of her days.

"What are these funny red and purple specks?" Jane asked once as she looked with loving admiration at the hand to which she clung.

"Those marks show that I've dressed millstones in my time, just as this flat right thumb tells any one who happens to notice that I began life as a miller," said her father.

After that Jane spent much time at the mill industriously rubbing the ground wheat between thumb and forefinger; and when the millstones were being dressed, she eagerly held out her little hands in the hope that the bits of flying flint would mark her as they had her father. These marks, she dimly felt, were an outward sign of her father's true greatness. He was a leading citizen of their Illinois community by right of character and hard-won success. Everybody admired and honored him. Did not President Lincoln even, who was, her father said, "the greatest man in the world," write to him as a comrade and brother, calling him "My dear Double D'ed Addams"?

Years afterward, when Jane Addams spoke of her childhood, she said that all her early experiences were directly connected with her father, and that two incidents stood out with the distinctness of vivid pictures.

She stood, one Sunday morning, in proud possession of a beautiful new cloak, waiting for her father's approval. He looked at her a moment quietly, and then patted her on the shoulder.

"Thy cloak is very pretty, Jane," said the Quaker father, gravely; "so much prettier, indeed, than that of the other little girls that I think thee had better wear thy old one." Then he added, as he looked into her puzzled, disappointed eyes, "We can never, perhaps, make such things as clothes quite fair and right in this hill-and-valley world, but it is wrong and stupid to let the differences crop out in things that mean so much more; in school and church, at least, people should be able to feel that they belong to one family."

Another day she had gone with her father on an errand into the poorest quarter of the town. It had always before seemed to her country eyes that the city was a dazzling place of toy- and candy-shops, smooth streets, and contented houses with sleek lawns. Now she caught a glimpse of quite another city, with ugly, dingy houses huddled close together and thin, dirty children standing miserably about without place or spirit to play.

"It is dreadful the way all the comfortable, happy people stay off to themselves," said Jane. "When I grow up, I shall, of course, have a big house, but it is not going to be set apart with all the other big homes; it is going to be right down among the poor horrid little houses like these."

Always after that, when Jane roamed over her prairie playground or sat dreaming under the Norway pines which had grown from seeds that her father had scattered in his early, pioneer days, she seemed to hear something of "the still, sad music of humanity" in the voice of the wind in the tree-tops and in the harmony of her life of varied interests. For she saw with the inward eye of the heart, and felt the throb of all life in each vital experience that was hers. It would be impossible to live apart in pleasant places, enjoying beauty which others might not share. She must live in the midst of the crowded ways, and bring to the poor, stifled little houses an ideal of healthier living. She would study medicine and go as a doctor to the forlorn, dirty children; but first there would be many things to learn.

It was her dream to go to Smith College, but her father believed that a small college near her home better fitted one for the life to which she belonged.

"My daughter is also a daughter of Illinois," he said, "and Rockford College is her proper place. Afterward she may go east and to Europe in order to gain a knowledge of what the world beyond us can give, and so get a fuller appreciation of what life at home is and may be."

Jane Addams went, therefore, to the Illinois college, "The Mt. Holyoke of the West," a college famed for its earnest, missionary spirit. The serious temper of her class was reflected in their motto which was the Anglo-Saxon word for lady--_hláfdige_ (bread-kneader), translated as _bread-giver_; and the poppy was selected for the class flower, "because poppies grow among the wheat, as if Nature knew that wherever there was hunger that needed food there would be pain that needed relief."

The study in which she took the keenest interest was history,--"the human tale of this wide world,"--but even at the time of her greatest enthusiasm she realized that while knowledge comes from the records of the past, wisdom comes from a right understanding of the actual life of the present.

After receiving from her Alma Mater the degree of B. A., she entered the Woman's Medical College in Philadelphia to prepare for real work in a real world, but the old spinal trouble soon brought that chapter to a close. After some months in Doctor Weir Mitchell's hospital, and a longer time of invalidism, she agreed to follow her doctor's pleasant prescription of two years in Europe.

"When I returned I decided to give up my medical course," said Jane Addams, "partly because I had no real aptitude for scientific work, and partly because I discovered that there were other genuine reasons for living among the poor than that of practicing medicine upon them."

While in London Miss Addams saw much of the life of the great city from the top of an omnibus. Once she was taken with a number of tourists to see the spectacle of the Saturday night auction of fruits and vegetables to the poor of the East Side, and the lurid picture blotted out all the picturesque impressions, full of pleasant human interest and historic association, that she had been eagerly enjoying during this first visit to London town. Always afterwards, when she closed her eyes, she could see the scene; it seemed as if it would never leave her. In the flare of the gas-light, which made weird and spectral the motley, jostling crowd and touched the black shadows it created into a grotesque semblance of life, she saw wrinkled women, desperate-looking men, and pale children vying with each other to secure with their farthings and ha'pennies the vegetables held up by a hoarse, red-faced auctioneer.

One haggard youth sat on the curb, hungrily devouring the cabbage that he had succeeded in bidding in. Her sensation-loving companions on the bus stared with mingled pity and disgust; but the girl who saw what she looked on with the inward eye of the heart turned away her face. The poverty that she had before seen had not prepared her for wretchedness like this.

"For the following weeks," she said, "I went about London furtively, afraid to look down narrow streets and alleys lest they disclose this hideous human need and suffering. In time, nothing of the great city seemed real save the misery of its East End."

This first impression of London's poverty was, of course, not only lurid, but quite unfair. She knew nothing of the earnest workers who were devoting their lives to the problem of giving the right kind of help to those who, through weakness, ignorance, or misfortune, were not able to help themselves.

When, five years later, she visited Toynbee Hall, she saw effective work of the kind she had dimly dreamed of ever since, as a little girl, she had wanted to build a beautiful big house among the ugly little ones in the city. Here in the heart of the Whitechapel district, the most evil and unhappy section of London's East End, a group of optimistic, large-hearted young men, who believed that advantages mean responsibilities, had come to live and work. While trying to share what good birth, breeding, and education had given them with those who had been shut away from every chance for wholesome living, they believed that they in turn might learn from their humble neighbors much that universities and books cannot teach.

"I have spent too much time in vague preparation for I knew not what," said Jane Addams. "At last I see a way to begin to live in a really real world, and to learn to do by doing."

And so Hull-House was born. In the heart of the industrial section of Chicago, where workers of thirty-six different nations live closely herded together, Miss Addams found surviving a solidly built house with large halls, open fireplaces, and friendly piazzas. This she secured, repaired, and adapted to the needs of her work, naming it Hull-House from its original owner, one of Chicago's early citizens.

"But we must not forget that the house is only the outward sign," said Miss Addams. "The real thing is the work. 'Labor is the house that love lives in,' and as we work together we shall come to understand each other and learn from each other."

"What are you going to put in your house for your interesting experiment?" Miss Addams was asked.

"Just what I should want in my home anywhere--even in your perfectly correct neighborhood," she replied with a smile.

You can imagine the beautiful, restful place it was, with everything in keeping with the fine old house. On every side were pictures and other interesting things that she had gathered in her travels.

Of course, Miss Addams was not alone in her work. Her friend, Ellen Gates Starr, was with her from the beginning. Miss Julia Lathrop, who is now the head of the Children's Bureau in Washington, was another fellow-worker. Soon many volunteers came eagerly forward, some to teach the kindergarten, others to take charge of classes and clubs of various kinds. They began by teaching different kinds of hand-work, which then had no place in the public schools.

"One little chap, who was brought into the Juvenile Court the other day for breaking a window, confessed to the judge that he had thrown the stone 'a-purpose to get pinched,' so they would send him to a school where 'they learn a fellow to make things,'" Miss Addams was told.

Classes in woodwork, basketry, sewing, weaving, and other handicrafts were eagerly patronized. There were also evening clubs where boys and girls who had early left school to work in factories could learn to make things of practical value or listen to reading and the spirited telling of the great world-stories.

One day Miss Addams met a small newsboy as he hastily left the house, vainly trying to keep back signs of grief. "There is no use of coming here any more," he said gruffly; "Prince Roland is dead!"

The evening classes were also social clubs, where the children who seemed to be growing dull and unfeeling like the turning wheels among which they spent their days could relax their souls and bodies in free, happy companionship and get a taste of natural living.

"Young people need pleasure as truly as they need food and air," said Miss Addams. "When I see the throngs of factory-girls on our streets in the evening, it seems to me that the pitiless city sees in them just two possibilities: first, the chance to use their tender labor-power by day, and then the chance to take from them their little earnings at night by appealing to their need of pleasure."

One of the new buildings that was early added to the original Hull-House was a gymnasium, which provided opportunities for swimming, basket-ball, and dancing.

"We have swell times in our Hull-House club," boasted black-eyed Angelina. "Our floor in the gym puts it all over the old dancehalls for a jolly good hop,--no saloon next door with all that crowd, good classy music, and the right sort of girls and fellows. Then sometimes our club has a real party in the coffeehouse. That's what I call a fine, cozy time; makes a girl glad she's living."

Hull-House also puts within the reach of many the things which their active minds crave, and opens the way to a new life and success in the world.

"Don't you remember me?" a rising young newspaper man once said to Miss Addams. "I used to belong to a Hull-House club."

"Tell me what Hull-House did for you that really helped," she took occasion to ask.

"It was the first house I had ever been in," he replied promptly, "where books and magazines just lay around as if there were plenty of them in the world. Don't you remember how much I used to read at that little round table at the back of the library?"

Some good people who visit the Settlement in a patronizing mood are surprised to discover that many of "these working-girls" have a taste for what is fine. Miss Addams likes to tell them about the intelligent group who followed the reading of George Eliot's "Romola" with unflagging interest.

"The club was held in our dining-room," she said to one incredulous visitor, "and two of the girls came early regularly to help wash the dishes and arrange the photographs of Florence on the table. Do you know," she added, looking her prosperous guest quietly in the eyes, "that the young woman of whom you were inquiring about 'these people' is one of our neighborhood girls? Those who live in these dingy streets because they are poor and must live near their work are not a different order of beings. Don't forget what Lincoln said, 'God must love the common people--He made so many of them.' You have only to live at Hull-House a while to learn how true it is that God loves them."

"Nothing has ever meant more real inspiration to me," said a student of sociology from the university, who had spent a year in the Settlement, "than the way the poor help each other. A woman who supports three children by scrubbing will share her breakfast with the people in the next tenement because she has heard that they are 'hard up'; a man who has been out of work has a month's rent paid by a young chap in the stock-yards who boarded with him last year; a Swedish girl works in the laundry for her German neighbor to let her stay home with her sick baby--and so it goes."

"Our people have, too, many other hardships besides the frequent lack of food and fuel," said Miss Addams. "There are other hungers. Do you know what it means for the Italian peasant, used to an outdoor life in a sunny, easy-going land, to adapt himself to the ways of America? It is a very dark, shut-in Chicago that many of them know. At one of the receptions here an Italian woman who was delighted with our red roses was also surprised that they could be 'brought so fresh all the way from Italy.' She would not believe that roses grew in Chicago, because she had lived here six years and had never seen any. One always saw roses in Italy. Think of it! She had lived for six years within ten blocks of florists' shops, but had never seen one!"

"Yes," said Miss Starr, "they lose the beauties and joys of their old homes before they learn what the new can give. When we had our first art exhibit, an Italian said that he didn't know that Americans cared for anything but dollars--that looking at pictures was something people did only in Italy."

A Greek was overjoyed at seeing a photograph of the Acropolis at Hull-House. He said that before he came to America he had prepared a book of pictures in color of Athens, because he thought that people in the new country would like to see them. At his stand near a big railroad-station he had tried to talk to some of those who stopped to buy about "the glory that was Greece," but he had concluded that Americans cared for nothing but fruit and the correct change!

At Hull-House the Greeks, Italians, Poles, and Germans not only find pictures which quicken early memories and affections, but they can give plays of their own country and people. The "Ajax" and "Electra" of Sophocles have been presented by Greeks, who felt that they were showing ignorant Americans the majesty of the classic drama. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other holidays are celebrated by plays and pageants. Nor are the great days of other lands forgotten. Garibaldi and Mazzini, who fought for liberty in Italy, are honored with Washington and Lincoln.

Old and young alike take part in the dramatic events. A blind patriarch, who appeared in Longfellow's "Golden Legend," which was presented one Christmas, spoke to Miss Addams of his great joy in the work.

"Kind Heart," he said (that was his name for her),--"Kind Heart, it seems to me that I have been waiting all my life to hear some of these things said. I am glad we had so many performances, for I think I can remember them to the end. It is getting very hard for me to listen to reading, but the different voices and all made this very plain."

The music classes and choruses give much joy to the people, and here it seems possible to bring together in a common feeling those widely separated by tradition and custom. Music is the universal language of the heart. Bohemian and Polish women sing their tender and stirring folk-songs. The voices of men and women of many lands mingle in Schubert's lovely melodies and in the mighty choruses of Handel.

As Miss Addams went about among her neighbors she longed to lead them to a perception of the relation between the present and the past. If only the young, who were impatiently breaking away from all the old country traditions, could be made to appreciate what their parents held dear; if the fathers and mothers could at the same time understand the complex new order in which their children were struggling to hold their own. When, one day, she saw an old Italian woman spinning with distaff and spindle, an idea came to her. A Labor Museum, that would show the growth of industries in every country, from the simplest processes to the elaborate machinery of modern times, might serve the purpose.

The working-out of her plan far exceeded her wildest dream. Russians, Germans, and Italians happily foregathered to demonstrate and compare methods of textile work with which they were familiar. Other activities proved equally interesting. The lectures given among the various exhibits met with a warm welcome. Factory workers, who had previously fought shy of everything "improving," came because they said these lectures were "getting next to the stuff you work with all the time."

Hull-House has worked not only _with_ the people but _for_ them, by trying to secure laws that will improve the conditions under which they labor and live. The following incident will speak for the fight that Miss Addams has made against such evils as child labor and sweat-shop work.

The representatives of a group of manufacturers waited upon her and promised that if she would "drop all this nonsense about a sweat-shop bill of which she knew nothing," certain business men would give fifty thousand dollars for her Settlement. The steady look which the lady of Hull-House gave the spokesman made him wish that some one else had come with the offer of the bribe.

"We have no ambition," said Miss Addams, "to make Hull-House the largest institution in Chicago; but we are trying to protect our neighbors from evil conditions; and if to do that, the destruction of our Settlement should be necessary, we would gladly sing a Te Deum on its ruins."

The girl who saw what she looked on with "the eye of the heart," had become a leader in the life and the reforms of her time. "On the whole," one writer has said of her, "the reach of this woman's sympathy and understanding is beyond all comparison wider in its span--comprehending all kinds of people--than that of any other living person."

Jane Addams has won her great influence with people by the simple means of working with them. Her life and the true Hull-House--the work itself, not the buildings which shelter it--give meaning to the saying that "Labor is the house that love lives in."

THE END

Transcriber's Notes:

Simple typographical errors were corrected.

Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.

This book contains double quotation marks within double quotation marks.

End of Project Gutenberg's Heroines of Service, by Mary Rosetta Parkman