All the Days of My Life: An Autobiography

On March, the first, I went back to Cornwall, and on the fifteenth I began a novel called “The Hands of Compulsion,” which I finished on June, the twenty-seventh. It is one of the best of my Scotch stories. All July I was reading for “The House on Cherry Street,” which I began on August, the second. I was busy on it all summer, for it was a very difficult period to make interesting, the fight for freedom of the press. The winter came on early, and I went to the city on the first of November, as I needed the Historical Library for my work. On November, the eighteenth, I took dinner at Mr. Dodd’s and among the guests were Mr. George McCutcheon, and Mr. Maurice of the Bookman, a handsome, interesting young man, whom I should like to know better.

On November twenty-seventh, I went to Dr. Klopsch’s to dine with the Honorable Lyman Gage, one of the most widely cultivated men I ever met. I supposed he would not talk of anything but finance or politics. These subjects were never named. During dinner we were talking of evolution and Orlando Smith’s great book on eternalism; after dinner Mr. Gage read aloud some passages from Plato with wonderful beauty and expression; notably the death of Socrates. This began a conversation lasting until midnight concerning death and reincarnation. I shall never forget this evening, which was duplicated on December fourth, with the addition to our company of the Reverend Dr. Chamberlin.

On December, the sixth, I dined with my friend and physician, Dr. Charles Nammack, and his family. Mrs. Nammack and I had long been friends, for they occupied the cottage next to my place on Storm King for two summers. On December, the fifteenth, I went with Dr. and Mrs. Klopsch to the theatre to see “The Servant in the House.” After these compliances for the sake of friendship, I went out no more, for I was busy writing “The House on Cherry Street” until my return home on the eleventh of February.

On the twentieth of February, A.D. 1909, the house was in most comfortable order, and Lilly had gone home the previous day. I was writing well all morning, and was called to dinner as the clock struck twelve. I went into Alice’s rooms to summon her, and we left them hand-in-hand, happily telling each other, how glad we were to be home again. We took one step of the long stairway together, and then in some inscrutable way, I lost my footing, and fell headlong to the bottom. I remember one thought as I fell, “So this is the end of all!” I was insensible, when I reached the lower floor, and knew nothing until I found myself in bed. Alice had run to our nearest neighbor and brought help, and they had telephoned to Lilly to come at once.

Dr. Winter, my own physician, did not arrive for three hours, but I was quite conscious by that time. I had not broken a bone, nor received any internal injury, and he looked at me incredulously. It appeared miraculous, but it was the truth. My right side, however, was severely bruised, and my right shoulder, arm and hand, so much so, as to be practically useless for many months. For neuritis took possession of the bruised member, and I suffered with it, and the nervous consequences of the shock, more than I can express.

And there was my work! How was I to finish it? And it must be finished. I needed the money it would bring. As soon as the pain subsided a little, I began to practice writing with my left hand – tracing letters on the bedspread, and by the time I was able to sit up a little, I was ready to take a pencil and pad. The result was, that I finally wrote very plainly with the left hand, and through sleepless, painful nights and days, I finished the manuscript of “The House on Cherry Street,” on July the twenty-fifth. And by that time, I was able to superintend the typewriter, and to see that it was copied faithfully.

On my seventy-ninth birthday I wrote, “I do not sleep two hours any night. I am racked with pain in my right shoulder, arm and hand. Weak and trembling and unfit to work, but trying to do as well as I can. My left hand stands faithfully by me.”

It was a hard summer in every way. Mr. Munro was in the hospital for a dangerous operation, and Lilly broke down with care and nursing. But through it all, Dr. Winter stood by me, full of hope and encouragement, and promises of final recovery. Mrs. Klopsch sent me constantly pretty hampers of fresh fruits, my friends in Cornwall did all they could to evince their sympathy, and I had almost a wicked joy in my success in training my left hand. Some malign influence had found a moment in which to injure me, but I was hourly getting the better of it. Every page I wrote was a triumph, and Dr. Winter reminded me, also, that the enforced idleness was resting my eyesight, which it sorely needed, and that as I would mind neither physician nor oculist, there was nothing for it, but a fall down stairs, to make me give my eyes a chance. He thought upon the whole it had been a very merciful and necessary fall. So I made the best of it.

On August, the twenty-third, I began “The Reconstructed Marriage,” which I finished on the sixteenth of December. It was a very cold winter, and Alice and I went to the Garden City Hotel, and I felt its healthy influence at once, but I could not escape company, which in my weakened condition was very fatiguing. So I bought a larger furnace, and then my home was warm enough to return to. I only received one thousand dollars for “The Reconstructed Marriage,” but Mr. Dodd had many reasons for cutting my price – the advance in wages, and the price of paper, et cetera, all just reasons, no doubt, but they pressed hard on me, for my long sickness asked for more, instead of less.

On March first, 1910, I heard of Dr. Klopsch’s death. I put away all work that day. He was my best friend! My truest friend! The friend on whom I relied for advice or help in every emergency. I think there were few that knew Dr. Klopsch. He was a man of the widest charity, if you take that word in its noblest sense. And my heart ached for Mrs. Klopsch, whom I love with a strong and true affection, for I knew the lonely suffering she was passing through.

On March, the twelfth, I began “Sheila Vedder.” It was really a continuation of “Jan Vedder’s Wife.” I wrote it at the request of Mrs. Frank Dodd, who said she wanted “to know something more about the Vedders.” The writing of this book was a great pleasure to me, therefore I know that it has given pleasure to others; for if the writer is not interested, the public will not be interested, that is sure.

On April, the sixteenth, I make the short pitiful note, and it brings tears to my eyes yet, “My sweet Alice’s birthday. I could not afford to give her any gift. I asked God to give it for me.”

I finished “Sheila Vedder” on August twenty-fourth, and began making notes for my Stuyvesant novel on August, the twenty-eighth. I was three months in getting the material I wanted, and in fixing it clearly in my mind, but I began this book on the fifteenth of December.

This year, A.D. 1910, I was too poor to keep Christmas. I was not without money, but taxes, insurance, servants’ wages, and a ton of coal every six days, with food, clothing, doctors and medicines, took all the money I could make. And Christmas was not a necessity, though I had always thought it one, and had never missed keeping it for seventy-nine years.

While writing this Stuyvesant novel – which Dodd Mead called “A Maid of Old New York” – a name I do not like, my own choice being “Peter Stuyvesant’s Ward,” I became persistently aware of a familiarity, that would not be dismissed; in fact I recognized in Theodore Roosevelt, a reincarnation of Peter Stuyvesant, Roosevelt having all the fiery radiations of Peter’s character, modified in some cases by the spirit of a more refined age, and intensified in others, by its wider knowledge.

I sent this book to Colonel Roosevelt myself and received the following reply to my letter:

    November 8, 1911.

My dear Mrs. Barr:

Any book of yours I am sure to read. I look forward to reading the volume just sent me, which of course has a peculiar interest to me, as a descendant of some of old Peter Stuyvesant’s contemporaries. It would be a pleasure if I could see you some time.

With warm regards, and all good wishes and thanks, I am

    Sincerely yours,
    Theodore Roosevelt.

The thing that delights me in this pleasant note, is that all the kind words, good wishes and thanks, are written by his own hand, interpolated as it were. I prize it very highly. I would not part with it for anything.

This March twenty-ninth was my eightieth birthday, and I had one hundred and thirty letters and cards full of good wishes, from men and women whom I have never seen, and who were scattered in many states and far distant places.

I finished the Stuyvesant novel on August, the first, 1911, and on September, the eighth, 1911, I began to write this story of my life, which is now drawing rapidly to its conclusion on October twenty-eighth, A.D. 1912.

It has been a grand lesson to me. I have recalled all God’s goodness, remembered all His mercies, lived over again the years in which I have seen so much sorrow and labor, and I say gratefully, yes, joyfully, they were all good days, for always God has been what He promised me – “Sufficient!”

CHAPTER XXVI

THE VERDICT OF LIFE

“Lord, mend, or make us – one creation
Will not suffice our turn;
Except Thou make us daily, we shall spurn
Our own salvation.”

Old age is the verdict of life. I am now an old woman. Many people tell me so, and there is the indisputable evidence of my eighty-second birthday, the twenty-ninth of next March. But truly I am unconscious of being old. My life here is so simple, that I have never as yet met either business or social demands I was not able to fulfil without any sense of effort. My day’s work is as long as it was twenty years ago, and I have quite as much pleasure in it now, as I had then. I have rarely a headache now. I was rarely without one then. I enjoy my food, especially my breakfast, and the eminent physician Brudenel of London told me that an enjoyment of breakfast was an excellent sign of general well being. I sleep seven hours every night, neither more nor less, except under some unusual circumstances; but I never fail to be ten hours in the restful and recuperative freedom of the night’s silence and darkness. I have made my living for forty-two years in a stooping posture, but I am yet perfectly erect, and I ascend the stairs as rapidly as I ever did. I am more free from pain than I have been for many years. A touch now and then of rheumatism reminds me that I am a subject to mortality, and a gray hair here and there foretells the hand that shall finally prevail. But life is still sweet and busy, and my children talk of what I am going to do in the future, as if I was immortal. Also my long true friends on the daily press do the same thing. They tell of what I am writing or planning to write, far more than of what I have done in the past. And I hope and pray, when the Master comes, He will find me at my desk, writing such words as it will please Him to see. For to literature, humanly speaking, I am indebted not only for my living, but also for every blessing I enjoy – health of body, activity of mind, cheerfulness, contentment, and continual employment, therefore continual happiness.

Happiness? Yes, I will certainly let the word stand. My old age is very like this fine October day; calm, restful and fair in its own beauty. Indeed both in body and mind,

“I have put on an Autumn glow,
A richer red after the rainy weather,
I mourn not for the Spring, for the lost long ago,
But clothe my cliffs with purple-honeyed heather.”

I feel strongly that these last years of life must not be a time of repose, but rather a time of beginning again; of learning afresh how best to make ready for the new world before me. I wish to master the fine art of dying well, as great a lesson as the fine art of living, about which every one is so busy; for I want to take into the Great Unknown before me, a supple, joyous spirit ready for it.

Eighty-two years ago I was not. Then I was. I have had my day. I have warmed both hands at the fire of life. I have drank every cup, joyful or sorrowful, life could give me; but neither my soul nor my heart is old. Time has laid his hand gently on me, just as a harper lays his open palm upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations – that is all. The sunrise has never yet melted for me into the light of common day. The air, far from being emptied of wonder, is thrilled with its new travelers for peace and war. Still I can listen to Greene and Putnam, and Sam Houston, shouting in the trenches of freedom, and hear the palaces of tyrants crumbling, and see the dungeons of cruelty flame to heaven. Nobody has watched the daily papers of the last few months with more eager and passionate interest than I have done. I have followed the great colonel with all my youthful enthusiasms, and listened at the street corners to the noble band of women pleading for their just rights. Such a pitiful sight! How can the noble American male bear to see it? Why does he not stand up in her place, and speak for her. Any decent Christian will speak for a dumb man, and women have been dumb for unknown centuries. They are only learning now to talk, only learning to ask for what they want.

“Then I am for Women’s Suffrage?” I am for the enfranchisement of every slave. I am for justice, even to women. Any one who lived in England during the early half of the nineteenth century would be a suffragist; for then the most highly cultured wife was constantly treated by her husband, as Tennyson says, “Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.”

Men ought to remember that they have had a mother, as well as a father, and that in most cases she has been, in every way, the better parent of the two. All my life long I have been sensible of the injustice constantly done to women. Since I have had to fight the world single-handed, there has not been one day I have not smarted under the wrongs I have had to bear, because I was not only a woman, but a woman doing a man’s work, without any man, husband, son, brother or friend, to stand at my side, and to see some semblance of justice done me. I cannot forget, for injustice is a sixth sense, and rouses all the others. If it was not for the constant inflowing of God into human affairs, the condition of women would today have been almost as insufferable, as was the condition of the negro in 1860. However, the movement for the enfranchisement of women will go forward, and not backward, and I have not one fear as to the consequences it will bring about.

I have lived, I have loved, I have worked, and at eighty-two I only ask that the love and the work continue while I live. What I must do, I will love to do. It is a noble chemistry, that turns necessity into pleasure. About my daily life I have been as frank and truthful as it was possible to be; but I have not found the opportunity of saying anything about my dream life. Yet how poor my daily life would have been without it. All day long we are in the world, and occupied with its material things, but the night celebrates the resurrection of the soul. Then, while the body lies dormant and incapable of motion, the soul is free to wander far off, and to meddle with events that the body is unconscious of. What is the lesson we learn night after night from this condition? It proves to us the separate existence of the soul. We are asleep one-third of our life. Is the soul as inert and dead as the body appears to be?

No! No! Who has not suffered and rejoiced in dreams, with an intensity impossible to their waking hours? Who has not then striven with things impossible and accomplished them without any feeling of surprise? Ah, dreams reveal to us powers of the soul, which we shall never realize until this mortal puts on immortality!

The shadowy land of dreams rests upon the terra-firma of revelation, for the dream literature of the Bible comprises some of its most delightful and important passages. God did not the less fulfil all his promises to Jacob, because they were made in a dream; nay but in a second dream, he encourages Jacob, by reminding him of this first dream. All through the historical part of the Bible its dream world presses continually on its humanity; and the sublime beauty of the prophecies is nowhere more remarkable than in the dreams of these spiritual sentinels of the people. In all the realm of poetry, where can there be found anything to equal that dream of the millennium peace, which Zachariah saw – the angel standing among the myrtle trees, and the angelic horsemen walking to-and-fro in the happy earth reporting, “Behold all the earth sitteth still, and is at rest.” There is little need to speak of the dream life in the New Testament. Every one is familiar with it.

“God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not; in a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon man in slumberings upon the bed.” This was Job’s testimony. Dare any one declare that God has ceased to speak to man? Every man and woman has exigencies and sorrows of which only God knows, and only God can counsel and comfort. I solemnly declare, that I have known this truth all my life long:

“Whoso has felt the Spirit of the Highest,
Cannot confound, nor doubt Him, nor deny;
Yea, with one voice, O World, though thou deniest,
Stand thou on that side, for on this, am I.”

There has always been a distinction between dreams and visions. Visions imply the agency of an angel. Christ did not dream of an angel comforting him in Gethsemane; “there appeared an angel unto Him from heaven strengthening him.” Visions are much rarer than dreams. I have had divine and prophesying dreams of many kinds, but never have had a vision. My spiritual ear was pre-attuned to heavenly voices, when I came into this reincarnation, but my sight has not yet been opened. Yet I am intensely sensitive to Spiritual Presence, and though I cannot discern it, it is as real to me as my own person. Never in all eternity can I forget the Angel Presence who came to me when I was a child twelve years old. I was praying with all my child heart, that God would love me, and teach me how to please Him, and suddenly, even as I prayed, there was some one there, and I heard a voice, clear and sweet, say to me, “Arise and shine, for thy light has come.” And I was so happy, I thought I was in heaven. If all the events I have written in this book should vanish from memory, this one would remain bright and imperishable, though the waves of centuries washed over it. Yet I did not see. I am not yet ready for vision. But it will come, for we have a natural body, and we have a spiritual body – not we are going to have – we already possess it, and as we develop our spiritual faculties, they will be ours.

No doctrine is taught more authoritatively and constantly in the Bible than that of Angel Ministry. Whenever we read of angels it is as helpers and comforters. They rejoice over our repentance, they minister continually to our sorrows. The broken in heart, the eyes washed and cleared by consecrating tears, the feet that have been to the border land, they know. However there never was in Christendom an age when there were so many creeds and so little faith. People are proud of being practical and material. They forget that our spiritual life is beyond all scientific laws, and rests entirely on one spiritual and miraculous book, and one spiritual and miraculous life.

On the twenty-third of September, that is about a month ago, a most interesting thing happened. I received by mail a newspaper in English, printed and published in the City of Jerusalem, Palestine; a large sheet of four pages, and the lower half of every page was occupied by the article I had written for the American of New York, on the subject of spiritual revelations, and the sublime destiny of man through the means of reincarnations. It delighted me that this article should appear in a paper named The Truth and this especially, because the subject of reincarnation was well known in ancient Jerusalem; was indeed a recognized faith in all Judea in the time of Christ. With the exception of the class called Sadducees, the Jew believed in his own immortality. He knew that whatever had its beginning in time, must end in time; but he looked backward, as well as forward, to an eternity of God’s love. Solomon says for all his race, the indisputable words of faith found in Proverbs, 8:22-31.

What does reincarnation demand of us? Only that we should by a series of human lives, attain to the condition of celestial beings, worthy to be called the sons and daughters of The Most High. Some through love, obedience and self denial – which last is the highest form of soul culture – will reach this end sooner than others, but I believe all will eventually do so; for it is not the will of God that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance, and consequently to an era of effort, which will finally prevail.

Every new existence is paid for by the old age and death of a body worn out, which though it has perished, contained the indestructible seed out of which the new life has arisen. And why should we not come back as often as we are capable of acquiring fresh knowledge and experience? Do we carry away so much from one life, that there is nothing left to repay us for coming back?