All the Days of My Life: An Autobiography

Lilly was very proud of this sale, because, as I have related, the book was written at her request. I had not been so far as fortunate with my publishers, as with my editors. Mr. B – of Appleton’s, with whom I transacted the business relating to my volume on the “Children of Shakespeare’s Dramas,” was an unhappy, unpleasant man to deal with; but he is dead, and I think the Scotch reluctance to speak ill of the dead is at least a wise observance. The publisher of “Cluny MacPherson,” and a volume of “Scottish Tales” was hard and dry as a brush. He had some selfish ideas about the society he represented, but he had no feelings. He had ceased to live with his heart. Mr. Jack Howard was just unfortunate. He was the publisher of the Christian Union and my book, “Romances and Realities,” came out just before the house failed, so that I never received a dollar for it. But that was not Mr. Howard’s fault. He was always courteous and generous about any work I did for him.

Lilly was very proud and happy because, as I have related, the book was written by her advice. “And what do you think of Mr. Dodd, Mamma?” she asked, as we eat drinking tea together. “Is he pleasant? Will you like to write for him?”

“Yes,” I answered. “He is pliant, yet resistant. I dare say he keeps his heart within his head, and so makes an even balance between business keenness and moral emotions.”

“I do not see that, Mamma.”

“It is plain enough, Lilly. The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions. So is the heart. We may often trust the latter most safely. I do. Mr. Dodd would consult both.”

“Is he a religious man?”

“How can I tell? I think so, but I am quite sure he is a straight, clean-living man.”

“Is he nice looking?”

“Quite as nice as there is any necessity to be. The spirit of his face is attractive – that is enough.”

“Is he anything like A – ?”

“Walking majestically, and radiating awe and temper. No, Lilly, not in the least.”

“Or like B – ?”

“Self-conscious to the finger tips. No, not in the least.”

“Then like F – ?”

“A Philistine, proud of his class, and cheerfully living in Ascalon. No, you are far wrong yet.”

“Then like Dr. D – ?”

“When his conscience is taking its usual six days’ sleep. No, you have not guessed at any resemblance. Publishers are as distinct a type of manhood as schoolmasters. They are even different from press men and editors. The latter are often compelled by their duties to waste their moral strength in politics, and their intellect in party journalism. Publishers can mind their own business, and are in no way injured by doing so.”

Thus we talked, as we eat and drank, but without any ill-nature. With the kindly race of editors I had, and have, the strongest sympathies. All that I have known have been kind and helpful to me, and if at times they showed a trifle of the petty unreasonableness of men dressed in a little brief authority, it did not hurt me. I said to myself – how true and striking that phrase is – I said to myself, “It is not you that offends, Amelia. It is something at his home, or down in the office – an unpleasant breakfast, or a disagreeable letter.” So I bore no rancor, and at the next interview all was right. God was very kind and thoughtful for me, when he set me my work among such a kindly, clever, gentlemanly class of workers as editors.

And I confess that I like people with tidal fluctuations of mood and temper. They are full of surprises; you always feel an interest in them. You think about them, and talk of them, and feel that they are as human as yourself. They are far more pleasant than men always cold, businesslike, reticent, polite. These latter are the men you desire to see in bronze, or marble, or even in encyclopedias, rather than in editorial chairs. Even if they are religiously perfect, they are unpleasant in a newspaper sanctum. For it is a trial to our faith in creeds, to find that in business matters, the justified are as selfish and unlovely as the reprobate. So though it is quite correct, that two and two make four, I have a liking for the man with whom the sum of two and two is variable. It is often five and six with me, and it may be ten or twenty, but when it is so, I trust humanity and love God best of all.

If I now copy the closing entry in my diary for the year 1884, it most truly describes my condition at that time.

Dec. 31st. A day of great suffering. I am still very far from well. I have been seven months ill. How my heart would have quailed at the prospect but God has been sufficient. My throat is very bad, my foot, also, and I am generally weary and worn out – and very feeble. Only, thank God, my mind never fails, nor my heart – often. I know in Whom I have trusted for fifty-three years, and I can trust Him for all the rest. I have been copying the “Preacher’s Daughter,” but twenty-four pages wearied me. Mary is in Florida. All the rest as usual. God of my Fathers, accept my gratitude for all Thy great mercies to me.

Amelia E. Barr.1507 Park Avenue, N.Y.

I open 1885 with the following lines:

Commit Thy ways unto the Lord.Thy Bread shall be given, and thy water sure.Let thy widows trust in me.

The first and the last of these directions, were given to me in answer to prayer; the center one was my father’s promise to me, when I bid him farewell forever in this life. I notice, nevertheless, that I am anxious about money matters, that I have six hundred dollars owing me, and cannot collect a dollar, and that I fear the Ledger is not in good circumstances; nothing has been said, I write, and all appears the same, but I feel a change of some kind. I was copying the “Preacher’s Daughter,” but was weak, and it was hard work.

On the fifth of January I note that Dodd, Mead and Company paid me three hundred dollars for “Jan Vedder’s Wife,” and that I had a letter from London promising me money for my work soon, and that I also received a small check from The Advance. So once more I found out how good it is to commit my way unto the Lord, and that He brings things to pass, I cannot move. On the eleventh I see that Lilly was out all day among the shanties with Father B – , a Catholic priest “in the world,” a man of great mercy and piety, with an intellect keen and well cultivated. There were many shanties on the rocks in our vicinity, and Lilly’s missionary spirit had led her to make friends in all of them. She found them Roman Catholics in theory, but altogether negligent in practice. So she took Father B – to stir up their faith, which he did with an authority they feared and obeyed.

I was ill and nervous at the time, and it did not please me. I asked her what her Grandmother Barr would say, and I assured her she would never leave her a shilling.

“I don’t care either for her shillings or her pounds,” Lilly answered. “I don’t want them. If I have helped one soul back to its faith in God, or even to its faith in good angels to help it to God, that is better than all the gold in Scotland.”

“Angels!” I said. “Do you call Father B – an angel? and what kind of a way will he lead them?”

“A good way. The way of prayer. And also he will see that they take it. Now that he has found these few sheep in the wilderness, they will have to go back to the fold. That will be good for them everyway.”

“Well, Lilly, I hope you will not take his way.”

“Mamma, dear, we are all going to God, and some like the Roman Catholic way. My own forefathers for eight hundred years did so. They could not all be wrong – abbotts and priors and priests and nuns, all of them. They could not all be wrong.”

“Nor right.”

“Well none of us can deny that while the Huddlestons were of the old profession, they were famous and prosperous. They turned Protestant when that little German body that couldn’t speak a word of English, came to govern us. The idea!”

“Are you going to turn Catholic after all?”

“I am going to be just what my Bible makes me.”

For I may as well state here that Lilly, though born in the very citadel of Calvinism, was a natural Catholic. She loved its ritual, and frequently went to confession. At one time it took all my pleading and influence, and all Dr. Tyng’s eloquence to keep her out of a convent, and I had a year or two of constant fear and watchfulness. This was the year we lived on Lexington Avenue opposite the Dominican Church. There was at that time a priest there called Father McKenna, a holy man entirely separate from the world, night and day either before the altar, or among the most miserable of the living and the dying; and I think he was her inspiration.

For long centuries Lilly’s ancestors had been priests in the old profession, and Furness Abbey is full of their memorial stones as Abbotts of that rich and powerful brotherhood. Catholicism was in her heart and her blood, and she was animated by all the passionate missionary spirit of the old faith. I had much suffering and long months of miserable anxiety on this subject, and doubtless Lilly was just as unhappy, but this is one of those domestic tragedies not for the public ear, and I do not know how I came to write so much about it.

I will, however, let it stand, for I would not be astonished if she yet went back to the Roman Church. Her soul has evidently belonged to it in all its incarnations, and I know that whenever she is in trouble or perplexity she goes to a Catholic priest for advice. One day I asked her, “Why?”

“Because,” she answered, “they never snub or ask me ‘whose daughter art thou.’ They know immediately that I am a Protestant, but they never turn me away. Kindly, and without prejudice they give me the best advice. It never comes out wrong.”

“But why not go to God for advice?”

“Mamma, there are things, like love letters, for instance. Would you go to God with them?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Love letters may be very important things. At any rate, your mother might be better than a priest.”

“Mamma, dear, you know that you have a fixed conviction that love affairs should only occur in books. Now Frank is not a ‘character,’ he is a real, living, very delightful man.”

Then I said no more, for Frank Morgan was then a very sore subject of conversation, and I really was not sure in my own mind what I had against the young man. His parents were wealthy, and he was their only son. He was the captain of his company, handsome, gentlemanly, and particularly respectful and attentive to myself. It was hard to think wrong of him, and yet I did; and it was no use my deciding not to do so, for I invariably went back to my first impressions. This feeling made me patient, and perhaps less watchful and inquisitive than I should have been.

But during the first half of 1885 I was very weak, and seldom out of pain, and on the eighteenth of January I went to see Dr. Fleuhrer, who made me very anxious. He said work and company were killing me, and I must go to the mountains and live more in solitude. When I went home I found Mrs. Van Duzen there, and after dinner Nat Urner and his wife came to spend the evening. The next morning I went to the Methodist Book Concern and wrote a preface for “The Hallam Succession,” a novel written at Dr. Vincent’s request on purely Methodist lines. I wanted to do my very best on this book; for I liked Dr. Vincent, and I liked to write of Methodism, but I did not please myself at all. I was really too sick to write well, and I ought not to have attempted it.

On the twenty-sixth Lilly was at Harper’s and found Miss Van Dyne removed from her place as editress of Young People, and Mr. Conant’s office empty. She said there was general silence and distress; no one would talk, and she came away full of a sense of great trouble. Two days afterwards I went to the Illustrated Christian Weekly, and was shocked to see on the bulletin boards of all the newspapers “S. S. Conant Still Missing.”

I did not stop to read what followed. I was sick at heart, trembling, and glad to get safely into an empty Third Avenue horse-car, and lean for support against its upper-end corner. All the way uptown I was like a woman in a dream, for I was indeed living over a dream I had had a few days previously. This dream had troubled me much at the time, and when I related it to Lilly she listened silently, and made no remark but the following:

“It was an evil dream, and I hope S. S. C. is not going to be ill.”

We seldom called Mr. Conant by his full name. When speaking of him we used his initials, as indeed he generally did himself. S. S. C. stood in every writer’s mind for S. S. Conant. Well, I had dreamed three nights previously of standing in Park Row and looking up to an angry cloud-tossed sky. On this sky I saw the initials S. S. C. blazoned in immense black letters, and, as I watched, great masses of vengeful storm clouds came swiftly toward them, and drove them with a wild passion over the firmament, and out of sight. The dream made a profound impression on me, and when Lilly told me S. S. C. was lost, I answered, “He will not be found.”

“O Mamma, do not say that,” she cried. “When he left the office, he said he was going to the Grand Central Railway Station. How can a man be lost between Harper’s building and the Grand Central – unless he killed himself.”

“He did not do that,” I answered, and then we were silent. Indeed, to me the great wonder of the mysterious disappearance was the dislike of any one to speak of it. The man passed away like a dream that is told.

But I was anxious and unhappy. For years Mr. Conant had bought a large part of my work, and I looked upon him as a sure reliance. Who would take his place? I knew not, but I felt there had been one door closed forever. Then, I bid myself remember, “that as one door shuts, another opens; and that all the keys of the country did not hang from the Harper’s belt.” Still the little poem I wrote for Bonner that night shows the loneliness and longing I had for the love and protection once mine, which I had taken as I had taken hitherto my wonderful health and strength, and the daily bread that had never failed me:

LOVED TOO LATEYear after year with glad contentIn and out of our home he went,In and out;Ever for us the skies were clear,His heart carried the care and fear,The care and doubt.Our hands held with a careless hold,All that he won of honor and gold,In toil and pain;O dear hands, that our burdens bore!Hands that shall toil for us no more,Never again!Oh, it was hard to learn our loss,Bearing daily the heavy cross,The cross he bore;To say with an aching heart and head,Would to God that the Love now deadWere here once more!For when the Love we held too light,Was gone away from our speech and sight,No bitter tears,No passionate words of fond regret,No yearning grief could pay the debt,Of thankless years.Oh, now while the sweet Love lingers near,Grudge not the tender words of cheer,Leave none unsaid;For the heart can have no sadder fate,Than some day to awake – too late —And find Love dead.

Mr. Conant’s disappearance precipitated events. I felt it so much that I could not but understand how far below my usual health I had fallen. I was sitting thinking of various places to which I might retire, and yet keep in touch with my business, when Mrs. Orr of Cornwall-on-Hudson called. When we were together on the Devonia she had often spoken of Cornwall, and the mountains and river which made it such a beautiful and healthful resort; and when I told her of my desire to come to the country, she offered me a house called Overlook, near their own. The next day Lilly went to see the place, found it roomy and comfortable, and standing on the top of a hill, and she rented it for the following six months. It seemed on the road to nowhere, but it would give me solitude and fine mountain air, and these things, with less work, were all that was required to restore my usual splendid health and spirits. Dr. Fleuhrer stipulated with me to stay six months in Cornwall, and I intended to do so; but I did not intend to stay the twenty-seven years which I have done.

The clear, pure air and the quiet began its restorative work at once, and it was at this time I commenced a custom which I have observed ever since – that is, I went to my room at nine o’clock, no matter who, or how many were present, and I am sure I owe much of my good health and “staying power” to this custom. I do not sleep from nine to six, but I lie at rest in loose garments, and in the rebuilding darkness. Most of my mental work is prepared in this seclusion, my plots are laid, my characters conceived, and my background and motif determined.

We removed to Cornwall on the second of March, 1885, and on the twenty-sixth I received my first copy of “Jan Vedder’s Wife.” It had been on the market more than a week, but in my seclusion I had not heard of it. It was Dr. Lyman Abbott who gave me the first news that the book had brought me instant favor and recognition. Lilly was on the train going to the Ledger office one Friday, which was the only day Mr. Bonner received contributions, and Dr. Abbott came to her and said, “Tell your mother ‘Jan Vedder’ has made her famous. Everyone is reading it, and everyone is praising it.” Then Lilly had to pass Dodd, Mead and Company’s store, then on Broadway and Ninth Street, and she saw their windows full of large placards bearing the words “Jan Vedder’s Wife” in large letters; at the Ledger’s office she met Mr. Munkitterick, who gave her one of his delightful exaggerations about the beauty of the tale, and its great success. I often wonder where Munkitterick has gone to. No one could write such poems as he could. Mr. Bonner bought all he could get, and they were the gems of the Ledger. So clever, so witty, so good-hearted, what has become of such a rare man? I hope that he has all his desires, wherever he may be.

The record of March is a very happy one in regard to my work, and on the twenty-ninth, my fifty-fourth birthday, I wrote, “All is white and deep with snow, but I feel so much better. I thank God for the mercies of the past year. Over and over He has saved my life, and He has abundantly supplied my wants. My dear God, go forward with me, for I cannot direct my own steps, but with Thee, I am always safe and happy.”

During April I was steadily and rapidly improving, and very content and peaceful, so much so, that eight lines chronicles this month, and these lines refer mainly to the letters from Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Habberton, who was then on the staff of the New York Herald, both of them in praise of “Jan.” I said once, happiness is not written down. That is the truth. It is the unhappy, anxious months whose records cover pages; this happy April needed only eight lines.

Much the same conditions with regard to my work continued, and in health and strength I gained steadily. On the sixteenth of May I had a letter from Mr. Libbey, which I prized very highly. He told me that he had watched with great pleasure my steady progress, that he had never lost sight of my brave struggle, and was glad that he had been given the opportunity of helping me when I needed help. If Queen Victoria had written me the words of praise he did, I should not have been half so proud and pleased. I had to put aside my work that day; I was too happy to sit still and write. Mr. Libbey was my first friend in New York. He took me at my own word, and I thank God I had been able to more than make it good. I was purely and sincerely delighted. All the world seemed beautiful that day, and I went to my room and, kneeling down, not only thanked God, but told Robert all about the joy in my heart. I thought God would permit him to share it, and I believe He did.

Some time ago I had sent the novel called “The Last of the McAllisters,” which Mr. Henry Holt had praised but refused, to a London magazine, and in June they published it. I ought, of course, to have secured its sale in the United States, but I was yet ignorant of my right to sell both in England and America, and when Harper Brothers pirated it, and sent me what they called an honorarium of fifty dollars I thought it was very kind of them. I had no suspicion that I had been politely robbed, though I did notice a singular expression cross Mr. Mead’s face when I told him of the circumstance. Subsequently Dodd, Mead and Company paid me one hundred dollars to make over to them the American rights in the book.

During all this time I kept up my regular contributions to the papers for which I had so long written, for my books did not bring me enough to warrant my giving up my time to novel writing. At the same time I was writing another, and a better, story for the Methodist Book Concern, called “The Lost Silver of Briffault,” which I finished on the nineteenth of July. I was able by this time to take in the manuscript myself, and after leaving it with Dr. Hunt, I went to the Astor Library and worked there, until the twenty-eighth, making notes and reading for the New York story I had been so long contemplating.

The first morning I went to the library I found my alcove, table and chair, had been taken possession of by a man who looked intelligent, but who was common and ill-mannered. He did not speak to me, or even look at me, when I entered with a boy carrying his arms full of books. If he had done either, I know I should have said, “Sit still, sir, you will not incommode me, and I hope I shall not annoy you.” But he just glared, and dropped his eyes, and so, with a slight apology for displacing some paper – my paper, which he was freely using – I sat down at the other end of the table, which was large, even for two writers.

I could have forgotten he was there, if he would have sat still, but he fidgeted and sighed, and showed such signs of annoyance, that I was not a bit sorry when Professor Valentine came in with a joyful “welcome back” to me; and then launched into his usual enthusiasm, concerning Central America and its buried cities. Mr. Saunders followed, and, with his courtly English civilities about my health and my work, easily passed ten minutes. Then a scholarly clergyman connected with the Churchman, had something to ask me, and he was quickly joined by Professor Norton – not my starry friend – but an old editor of one department in the Christian Union; and we three found something to talk about for nearly half an hour. Every now and then some press writer came to ask help from my index, and though I myself was vexed at the interruptions, I was mean enough to be consoled, because the man at the other end of my table was as much disturbed as a man could be.

The next day I was sorry, and I intended to make him welcome, but he had gone as far from me as he could get, and all I could do was to make an apology, which he received in an injured, sulky temper, that astonished me; for I have always found real scholars, the best and easiest tempered men in the world. Afterwards, I asked Mr. Saunders who the man was, and he told me he was a teacher, writing a mathematical text-book. Then I fully excused him. The work was accountable for the temper. For though mathematics may teach a man how to build a bridge, it is what the Scotch Universities call the humanities, that teach him to be civil and sweet-tempered.

In August I wrote to Holland for some directions about the Dutch forms of speech, for one of the Astor librarians who spoke the Dutch language, told me always to remember that the Dutch of the period I wish to write of, thought in Dutch, even if they spoke in English. Thus, he instanced, an Englishman would say, “Spring will soon be here,” but a Dutchman would say, “We come near to the Spring.” So then a knowledge of Dutch forms was necessary, and he told me what books to write for. When I had sent off this letter, I considered that my preparations for writing “The Bow of Orange Ribbon” were complete.

They had extended over nearly two years. An historical novel was a new venture, and as I had leisure I had been making myself familiar with the history of the time, and the ways of colonial dressing and housekeeping. Indeed, I had perhaps an exaggerated idea of the necessity of a truthful background, and I have never got over that impression. I am sure that I may fairly claim, that my historical tales of New York are faithful pictures of whatever epoch I am using.

But, though I had done all I could do until the writing of the book should gradually reveal whatever was yet lacking, I did not begin it. I was waiting for the books from Amsterdam; and I commenced meanwhile, on the first of September, a tale of the fishers of Fife, for that particular humanity and locality was perfectly familiar to me. But by my visit to the library I had brought on a return of the trouble in my foot, and I was writing in bed all September, often twelve hours a day, so that I had finished “A Daughter of Fife” on the third of October. Then I went over it, corrected all errors, and sent it to Dodd, Mead on the ninth. I will insert here an amusing letter from one of Fife’s daughters – one of a great many; for the story was a favorite, especially among the Scotch.