IT was in meeting again the hotel proprietor, when I went back to pay him my debt, that I first realized what a summer in the land of promise had done for me. He did not know me at all. Thinking it quite natural he should not remember one among the thousands he saw yearly, I tried to recall myself to his memory.
“You don’t mean to say,” he cried, “that you are the child who was here a few months ago! Have you been ill?”
“No.”
“Then what have you done to yourself?”
I had not done anything to myself, but the work and the heat had robbed me of all my colour, of half my hair, and of pounds of weight.
At the French home my fellow-inmates were mostly of the servant class. They were very kind to me: they made my bed, swept my room, washed my hair, did my little mending, and even brought me sweets. They expressed the hope that I should meet some nice American who would offer me marriage, yet they confessedthat American people were singularly devoid of sentiment.
Several months after I was on the staff of the newspaper, an American scholar, who was writing a book on the Greek language, came to the office to see if he could find some one to work with him, and the proprietor recommended me. At his house I met his wife, who at once took an interest in me. Since she spoke very little French and I no more English, our progress was slow; but both of them were very kind to me. The husband became my regular pupil, paying me for one hour’s Greek lesson every day more than I was receiving from the newspaper for all my time. So I decided to give up my position with the latter, where there was really no chance for advancement, and devote myself to teaching and studying.
It was necessary for me at this time to change quarters. I could not keep on living in a place where I had no companionship; so my Greek pupil put an advertisement in the newspaper for me, saying that I was an educated young Greek girl, who would exchange French or Greek lessons for a home.
From the replies to my advertisement he chose a school, and I went to see the principal. She, too, had blue eyes, which had become the symbol of kindness to me. She knew French, and we were able to speak together. She wished me tocoach a girl in Greek, to pass her entrance examinations, and for this she was willing not only to give me my room and board but my laundry. I at once moved to the school, and here ended the first chapter of my American life.
I was now living in an American school, surrounded by Americans. I was to see them live their American lives. One may imagine how interested I was. The school had about a hundred day scholars, ranging from four to twenty years of age; and twenty boarders, representing almost as many States, and who—even to my untrained ears—spoke in almost as many different ways.
As a teacher of Greek I failed utterly. My pupil read a Greek I could not follow, even with the text-book in my hand. My beautiful, musical mother-tongue was massacred in the mouth of that girl, and she understood me not at all. A living, thrilling language, with a literature to-day on a par with the best of Europe’s, and spoken by over ten million people, had to be considered as dead, and pronounced in a barbaric and ridiculous manner. The girl was very angry at me when I told her she did not pronounce it correctly. She informed me that the ancient Greeks pronounced Greek as she did, and that I, the lineal descendent of this people whose language had been handed downwithout a break from father to son, and who used the very words of Plato every day, did not know how to pronounce it. With what delight I should have boxed her ears, only I had to remember that I was no longer I, but a teacher, exchanging lessons for my living.
After several lessons together she went to the principal and told her that I was quite unfitted to teach her, and that she was only wasting her time.
The principal and I had a conference. “I can’t teach her,” I admitted, “unless I learn to pronounce my own language in the execrable way she does.”
So far then as the school was concerned I had failed. I was a Greek—but could not teach Greek! The thought of leaving the school hurt me, because I had become very fond of the principal, who even used to come to my room sometimes and kiss me good night.
She offered me an alternative. “Wouldn’t you like to teach the little girls French, talk French with the boarders, take them to church and out for their walks?”
I was delighted to accept this proposal. Not being permitted to speak any English with the pupils materially impeded my own progress; but there was a girl in the school who lived there without being a pupil, and who, although she spoke French fluently, often talked English withme, to give me practice. We became very good friends: she said I was to be her daughter, and she would be my mother. To her I owe a great deal of the pleasure I had during my first few years in America.
The principal of the school also took the greatest pains with my English. It is true, she did not permit me to speak it with the girls, but she herself spoke it constantly with me. I could have had no better person to take as a pattern, for she had a lovely accent, the best to be found among Anglo-Saxons anywhere. She chose the books I was to read, and told me the phrases to use, as if I were her most expensive pupil.
My general impression of America now was kindness. It was given to me with the lavishness which is one of the chief characteristics of the Americans. Yet because they were so different from the people I was accustomed to, I could not understand them at all, and misunderstanding them I could not exactly love them. In spite of their kindness they had a certain crudity of manner, which constantly hurt me. Besides, they seemed to me to live their lives in blazing lights. I missed the twilights and starlights, the poetry and charm of our life at home—just as I missed the spring in their calendar.
It will perhaps surprise Americans to hear that, in spite of the excellent table at the school,I was almost starved before I could learn to eat American food. It seemed to me painfully tasteless: the beef and mutton were so tough, compared to the meat in Turkey, and all the vegetables were cooked in water—while as for the potatoes I had never seen such quantities in my life. We had them for breakfast, for luncheon, and for dinner, in some form or other. Just before we sat down to table the principal said grace, in which were the words, “Bless that of which we are about to partake.” To my untrained ear “partake” and “potatoes” sounded exactly alike, and I wrote home that the Americans not only ate potatoes morning, noon, and night, but that they even prayed to the Lord to keep them supplied with potatoes, instead of daily bread.
My Greek pupil and his wife, and also my first American friend of the Normal College found me pupils, so that I now earned considerable money. My outside pupils, mostly married women, were very nice to me; but I felt that they did not quite know how to take me. I had a terribly direct way of speaking; and, being still under the impression that as a nation they were my inferiors, my attitude must have displayed something of that feeling.
I began to be asked out to luncheons and dinners—partly as a freak, I am afraid—and at one of these dinners I became the victim ofAmerican humour. Happening to mention that I was surprised at not seeing any real Americans in New York, I was asked what I meant. I explained that I meant pure-blooded Indians. Thereupon my host very soberly told me that I could see them any day at five o’clock, on Broadway, at the corner where now stands the beautiful Flatiron building. He cautioned me to be there at five exactly.
The very first day I was free I went to the designated corner. I arrived at half-past four, and waited there till almost six, without seeing one Indian. Fearing that I had made a mistake in the corner, I went into a shop and, in my broken English, made inquiries. Two or three clerks gathered together and discussed the problem, and then one of them, repressing a smile, said to me: “I am afraid some one has played a joke on you. There are no Indians to be seen anywhere in New York, except in shows.”
That evening at school I told the whole story at table, feeling highly indignant, and believing that my hearers would share my indignation. To my amazement every one burst out laughing, and declared it to be the best joke they had heard for a long time. Some of the girls even said they should write home and tell it, because it was so “terribly funny.”
Their attitude was a revelation to me. My host had deceived me, and had wasted two hoursof my time and my strength, by giving me a piece of information that he knew to be false; yet every one thought it delightfully humorous. The only excuse I could find for this conduct was that they were a nation of half-breeds, and did not know any better. Indeed, as time went on, American humour was to me the most disagreeable part of Americans. It lacked finesse: it was not funny to me—only undeveloped and childish. Daily I was told that I had no sense of humour, and that, like an Englishman, I needed a surgical operation to appreciate what was so highly appreciable.
Finally, I got very tired of being told I had no humour and could not understand an American joke; so I determined to prove to them that I not only understood their silly jokes but could play them myself, if I chose. Now to me the essence of an American joke was a lie, told with a sober face, and in an earnest voice. I played one on a girl boarder. To my surprise, the girl, instead of laughing, began to cry and sob, and almost went into hysterics. It made a great rumpus in the school, and the principal sent for me.
“My dear, is what you said true?” she asked, with the greatest concern.
“No, not a word of it,” I replied.
“Then why did you say it to the poor girl?”
“To deceive her, and play an American joke on her.”
The principal stared at me an instant, and then burst into immoderate laughter. She called the victim and the other older girls to her and explained my joke, and they all went into peels of laughter. In spite of its inauspicious beginning my American joke was a huge success; and I could not understand why both the principal and my “mother” united—after their amusement had subsided—in cautioning me to make no more American jokes.
For one year I stayed at the school; then, having saved some money from my private lessons, and having enough pupils assured me for the coming year, I decided to leave the school and go into a private family, for the sake of my English, and also in order to see American home life. I still felt very ignorant about the American people: in their own way they were so complex, and they could not be judged by European standards.
Almost with stupefaction do I read the interviews reported by the newspapers with distinguished and undistinguished foreigners, who, after a few days’ sojourn in the United States, and a bird’s-eye view of the country, give out their comprehensive and eulogistic opinions. They fill me with amazement, and I wonder whether these other foreigners are so much cleverer than I, or whether they are playing an American joke on the American people.
The family with whom I went to live turned out to be a Danish husband with a German wife. Their children, however, were born and brought up in America, so that I did mingle with Americans of the first generation. That year away from school enabled me to poke around a lot, in all sorts of corners and by-corners of New York. I took my luncheon daily in a different place, and spoke to all sorts of people, and heard what they had to say. The papers I read faithfully, and every free evening I would attend some public meeting, from a spiritualistic séance to any sort of a lecture. I also spent one entire night in the streets of New York. All the afternoon I slept. At seven o’clock I dressed and went to dinner alone in one of the so-called best restaurants of Broadway, and then to the play. The time between half-past eleven and five in the morning I spent in walking in Broadway and in Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Avenues. I took the elevated train to the Battery, then up to Harlem, and down again by another line. New York at night is very different from New York in the daytime. It seemed to me that even the types which inhabited it were different, and I saw a great deal which was not pleasant to see; but no one bothered me, either by word or look.
Before this year I used to think that to be absolutely free, to go and come as I pleased,would be the acme of happiness; to have no one to question my actions, to be responsible only to myself would be thekorypheof freedom. Yet this year, when I was free to go and come as I pleased, and had no one to whom I had to give any account of my actions, I found to be the most desolate of my life, and my freedom weighed on me far more than ever restraint had at home. I came to realize that though an individual I was part of a whole, and must remain a part of that whole in order to enjoy life.
That year humanized me, so to speak, and made me understand the reason for much that I used to laugh at before—such, for example, as the spinster’s devotion to her rector, to settlement work, or even to a parrot, a cat, or a dog. Whenever now I see a woman in a carriage with a dog on her lap, I may join with those who laugh at her; but at the same time I wonder if it may not be poverty and loneliness of life which make that woman, rich in money, lavish the treasures of her heart on a dumb creature.
At the end of the year I returned to the school, and willingly placed myself again in harness. During this year I made the acquaintance of John Fisk’s books, and discovered the error of my preconceived notions about the American people and their origin. He taught me who the early settlers really were, whence, and why they had come. I read of their privations andstruggles, and of their ultimate success. For the first time I looked upon this continent as peopled by the white race, and the shame I felt for my past ignorance was only mitigated by my desire to atone for it. I mapped out a thorough course of reading, and all the spare time of that year and the next was devoted to systematic study of American history, literature and poetry.
And, as I read American history, it came over me how different the beginning of this race was from the beginning of all the other civilized nations of the world. Whereas the others all started by a strong barbaric race descending upon a weaker people and seizing their cattle and their lands by brute force, America alone started with the great middle classes of all civilized races, who came to the new world, not with brute force as their weapon, but with the desire to carry out in a wild and virgin country the spiritual and social development they craved. What a marvellous, unprecedented beginning! What a heritage for their sons! I am afraid many of them do not appreciate the greatness of that beginning, otherwise why should they try to go beyond those early settlers and seek to establish their descent from William the Conqueror, or some little sprig of nobility, and make themselves ridiculous where they ought to be sublime?
By temperament I am afraid I am something of an extremist. My barely tolerant attitude toward my new country changed into a wholly reverential one. I desired to become an American myself, considering it a great honour, as in the olden days people came from all over the world to Greece, to become that country’s citizens. I started my Americanism by adopting its brusqueness—it is an unfortunate fact that one is as likely to imitate the faults of those one admires as the virtues—but brusqueness which is so characteristic of America is mitigated by its young blood and by its buoyancy, and we of the old bloods can very little afford that trait. It must have made a poor combination in me, and many people must have found it hard to tolerate. The principal of the school told me, during my third year with her, that I had so completely changed in manners as to be hardly recognizable. When I first came to live with her, she said, I had had exquisite and charming manners; now, I had become as brusque as any raw western girl. She little understood that she was attacking my new garb of Americanism.
The school year began in October and ended in May, leaving me four months to my own devices. Two vacations I spent in a fashionable summer resort, not far from New York, where I not only had pupils enough to pay my expenses but ample time to read English and Americanbooks, and also opportunity to study the attitude of rich Americans toward a girl earning her own living—an attitude not very different from ours in the Old World. One summer I spent in a working girl’s vacation home, where all the girls were shop girls, and where I met the proletariat of the New World on an equal footing. And once I spent the entire four months visiting in the mountains of North Carolina, where I learned how much more American money is needed for schools there than in Constantinople, where it goes, not to civilize the Turks but to educate at the least possible expense to themselves the children of well-to-do Bulgarians, Greeks, and Armenians—especially the first. And the recent actions of the Bulgarians have proved eloquently how little American education helps them; for American civilization must be sought—it cannot be imposed from without.
My third year at school, the head French teacher left it, and the principal offered me her place; and so, four years after I landed in the new world I was at the head of the French department of one of the best private schools in New York City. I had many good friends, was making considerable money outside the school, and was studying at the University of New York. To all appearance I had succeeded; yet truth compels me to confess that, so far as my inner self was concerned, I was a total failure.
I had thought that if I were to join the great army of the world’s workers, and lead my life as seemed to me worthy; if I were to cut loose from the conventions and traditions which hampered my development in the old world, happiness would come to me. Far from it! I realized then that I was only one of the victims of that terrible disease, Restlessness, which has taken hold of women the world over. We are dissatisfied with the lines of development and action imposed by our sex, and the causes of our dissatisfaction are so many that I shall not even try to enumerate them. The terrible fact remains that in our discontent we rush from this to that remedy, hoping vainly that each new one will lead to peace. We have even come to believe that political equality is the remedy for our disease. Very soon, let us hope, we shall possess that nostrum, too. When we find ourselves politically equal with men, and on a par with them in the arena of economics, we may discover that these extraneous changes are not what we need. We may then, by looking deep down into our own hearts see whether, as women, we have really done the best we could by ourselves. We may then find out the real cause for our discontent, and deliberately and with our own hands draw the line of demarcation again between men and women, and devote ourselves to developing that greater efficiencyin ourselves along our own lines, which is the only remedy for our present restlessness.
I believe that only then shall we find contentment and a better equality than the one for which to-day some of us are even committing lawlessness.