All the Days of My Life: An Autobiography

“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.”