Part 44

Shoes and sandals were left outside the _ashram_, and Shastri went ahead to announce my arrival. I bowed in the entrance and took my place on the floor just within, crossed my legs under my skirt, and looked about me to feel and sense the atmosphere. The Maharshi, naked save for a loin cloth, was sitting cross-legged on a silk-covered couch, pillows behind him and a leopard skin thrown over the foot. A small charcoal fire and incense, which attendants kept burning all day, sweetened and made heavy the air. The Maharshi’s luminous eyes were fixed in a trance, although sometimes his fan lifted a bit and his stare widened.

At first it was nicely quiet; then some women began to sing in a high-pitched tone, much through the nose and head, doubtless good for the pineal gland, once supposed to be the seat of the soul. The men chanted aloud and someone played a stringed instrument.

Towards eleven the Maharshi shared his gifts among those who sat in reflection, and shortly afterwards a man from Kashmir, six feet tall and massively built, entered, prostrated himself as hundreds had done already, falling full length, hands outspread above him on the floor, touching his brow three times. As he rose again his whole body shook, tears streamed down his cheeks. To see women cry from excess of emotion did not bother me, but when a man of such a type as this, in no sense a weakling, went into paroxysms of ecstasy, it was beyond my comprehension. With no critical intent, but curious to know why he had been so moved, we asked what had happened to him.

“When I came into the Maharshi’s presence it was as though electricity had passed through my body. I felt when I bowed I would be calmed, yet when I looked into those eyes, he was like a flame.”

This pilgrim had come with financial problems, illness in his family, and other troubles, but two or three hours of contemplation had wiped them out; he knew they were insignificant and trivial in contrast to his regeneration. In faith, the people in the _ashram_ were comparable to those who cast away their crutches at some miracle-working shrine, except that they had come for inner illumination rather than healing for bodily ailments. They visited the Maharshi to receive the radiance of his soul, just as we sought the sun to be warmed.

Only when children or babies were made to prostrate themselves did the Maharshi smile, somewhat skeptically it seemed to me. He appeared amused when a boy of three or four began a prayer in Tamil but forgot the rest. Otherwise he remained apart from it all. He was gradually withdrawing himself and letting go material things. He wanted spiritually to fade away, leaving the shell behind.

The second day the Maharshi slept; nothing save an occasional singer broke into the hush, or a monkey had the temerity to dash in and seize an orange.

For the third day I attended the _ashram_. Now the meditation was like a linking up of mind and emotion, where even breathing was stilled. I could understand why the yogis went into the silence. Even the noises next door, the clatter of dishes, sounded remote and very far away. It was a state of consciousness rather like that which precedes sleep.

I regretted that I did not feel the Maharshi’s power. His utter indifference—sitting all day in a semi-trance, engaging in no activity—seemed to me a waste. Nevertheless, I was most grateful to Paul Brunton for the experience, and understood the Indians better thereafter. They saw within and beyond the external appearance; this was at the very basis of their character, akin to the sensitivity of the grapevine telegraph. All people in the Orient spoke of it. Something happened to you or to me and before you could get to another place by the fastest conveyance it was known. Perhaps it was a primitive function of mind, this form of thought transference, but it existed there.

Dr. Sundaram, who popped up again when I returned to Madras, was still insistent that I go to Calicut, and I finally gave in. I was glad I had done so, because this city of forty thousand, ringed around a bay on the Malabar Coast and caressed by gentle breezes, was a beautiful spot with forests of palms. The almost-black women wore saris of vari-colored blues and greens, violets and yellows, with garlands of jasmine about their necks, plump, formal bouquets of roses in their hands, and in the center of every forehead was a circular red caste mark.

The meeting was held in the courtyard of a Buddhist temple. The sun was setting and part of the shell-pink sky was melting into deep carmine, like a flower. Directly in front sat three priests, each with shaved head, orange robe, and thick stave. Hundreds of rooks were chattering and other birds twittering in the trees, children were shouting at their games, the shrill chant of pilgrims walking through the streets saturated the dust-filled dusk. Mainly you heard the tinkling of the bullocks going up and down the road. The audience sat in utter silence surrounded by all these sounds.

Two days later we motored through the heavy woods to Mysore. Joseph, still coughing until it racked his frame, had rejoined me. I took my little drug shop and administered Vitamin A and D tablets, curing him and achieving thereby a reputation. Other Indians began hunting up colds and asthma and pains, and coming to me to give them some American medicine, in which they had much faith.

Soon I was on the train to Bangalore, again as state guest. The Dewan of Mysore, Sir Mirza Ismail, knew everybody in Europe, was well informed on Western methods of health, and was full of ideas about public buildings, roads, streets, industries, and the great dam which was to furnish electricity for the state. He was the first person in India who inquired after Katherine Mayo. I had been expecting to meet antagonism because of _Mother India_, which I myself now considered misleading. Certainly the conditions when I was there seemed vastly different from those she had depicted only a few years earlier.

The British believed every word true, but most of the Indians I saw looked upon Miss Mayo as having gone into their homes and then betrayed their confidences. They claimed she was definitely prejudiced, and, like the clever craftsman she was, had fixed her statistics. For example, when she discussed the age of marriage, she made sweeping statements and quoted on page so and so of such and such a report; you turned there and they were correct, and that was the reason for the astounding acceptance of her book. Nevertheless, she had violated the spirit, because two pages further in the same report followed an explanation of, or exception to, her conclusions.

Mirza Ismail, a Mohammedan, thought she had benefited Indians by shaking them awake, and that the facts she had brought out, even if not true of all the country, should be corrected; that India had to defend herself was good for her.

After visiting Hyderabad, which was pleasant and social, and after seeing this startling landscape in which the mountains seemed to have been smashed by a giant maul into enormous pieces, I started towards home. India was a land of dramatic contrasts—the highest mountains, the hottest plains, the densest jungles, the most violent rains. The loveliest architecture in the world was set against a background of nauseating squalor. Wealth beyond calculation existed alongside poverty that was living death, dazzling mental attainments beside an ignorance utterly abysmal. I could not tell precisely what the results of the trip had been; these rarely came immediately. And, if you had to hammer away and hammer away for years in the United States, you had to do it ten times over in India.

A terrific change in temperature froze me at Hong Kong; the poor huddled around little fires in the streets. Dr. Arthur Woo, a Rockefeller Foundation protégé, enthusiastic, full of energy, like magic procured quarters for me in one of the crowded hotels on the top floor, quiet and restful but, oh, how cold!

According to my schedule I was to remain twenty-four hours, into which were to be crammed a lunch, a tea, a lecture, a Chinese supper, and a public meeting. Then I decided to stay over a day for a medical gathering. Ho Kum Tong, a wealthy Chinese, provided another luncheon in his beautiful home.

In Hong Kong I heard rumors of a practical scholar in eugenics, in which the Chinese were very much interested. He was said to have, in addition to a wife, thirty concubines, by each of whom he had had three children. One of the Negro offspring—tall, kinky-haired, and oblique-eyed—was a most extraordinary-looking youth; he did not appear to belong anywhere. The daughters were much larger of stature than the average Chinese; all were educated and doing excellent work. Not only the features of the cultured types on the Island, but even those of the coolies, the longshoremen, struck me as growing less Oriental and more Anglo-Saxon, the foreheads fuller, the eyes less slanting.

When I reached Japan I found that Westernization had leaped ahead. Tokyo was not the same city I had seen in 1922—automobiles and wide-paved streets, many bicycles, many men and small children in European dress. Everywhere also was an atmosphere of tenseness on account of the assassination of the cabinet members about ten days before. Telephone communication in English was forbidden; people in Yokohama were unable to get to Tokyo because all transportation was cut off. War seemed inevitable. Baroness Ishimoto told me the activities of her organization had been curtailed, but articles and discussion and the spreading of knowledge had continued. The dissemination now was as it had been in France—from house to house, family to family, by word of mouth instead of under proper auspices.

At the end of a dismal voyage to Honolulu, I had hardly registered at the hotel when I heard a feminine voice in my ear, “Are you Mrs. Sanger?”

“Yes.”

Dr. Muriel Cass, as this welcoming committee turned out to be, knew that I was recently out of a hospital, and disappeared for a few moments to telephone for a doctor. When he arrived she said, “All we want of you is to give Mrs. Sanger something to keep her going. She’s got eight lectures to deliver.”

I felt like a poor old war horse being fed the last measure of oats. I had a horrible memory of two weeks of fog and rain and cold at Memorial Hospital in Hong Kong, and now here I was to die in Honolulu.

But Dr. Cass, an efficient, self-sacrificing manager, did the most amazing things for me. She ordered the telephone operator to switch every call to her. There I was, quite alone. Nobody could see me or even talk to me; I must conserve my strength for the meetings. Repeatedly she rushed me to and from halls, put me in cars, and trundled me off to bed. Really I was better after each lecture than I had been before. When I left Honolulu she herself was so worn out she had to take a vacation, but I was nearly well.

The hospitality and luxuriance of this Pacific paradise were almost indescribable. Hula-hulas at the hotels, bathing on the beaches, outriggers swooping in, the native women in great flowered Mother Hubbards twining leis, the songs they sang, the air of leisure and fun and play, these made Honolulu a city apart. It was the sounding board of the Orient, people going, people coming back, but all there to enjoy themselves.

In Honolulu I repacked and, to save space, stuffed Grant’s tiger skin in the trunk around my box of Darjeeling tea. When, four weeks later, I ripped off the cover at Willow Lake, it was reeking with camphor. I tried to aerate the leaves, dry them out, fumigate them with sunshine, but it remained moth ball tea. One package I had given away before I discovered the tragedy. Its receipt was ignored. No thank-you letter, no mention of it. The other friends to whom I had planned to present this choice gift had to go without.

I spent the summer at Willow Lake and in the winter, remembering Arizona from the time I had been there with Stuart, went out again in response to the summons of the desert. My husband and I found a house near Tucson of adobe, trimmed in blue. The mountains, not distant or aloof or towering over all, reached into the sky, but they were also somehow intimate, cupping the town gently on all four sides.

You settled there in the Catalina foothills and felt such a part of the whole. The first thing when you opened your eyes, before actual dawn, you beheld the gold and purple and then the entire sky break into color. In the evening the sunsets were reflected on the mountains in pink-lavender shades; sometimes the glow sprayed from the bottom upward, like the footlights of a theater, until the tips were aflame. Sunset vanished as quickly as sunrise, never lingering long.

When the marvel of spring came to the desert, you saw the cactus and the flowering, saw the brown floor change to delicate pale yellow, stood in awe of nature daring to live without water. You were reminded of the futility of wearing out your life merely providing food and raiment. Like the challenge of death, which so many of the people there were gallantly facing, the desert itself was a challenge.

_Chapter Thirty-nine_

SLOW GROWS THE SPLENDID PATTERN

“_There is no force in the world so great as that of an idea when its hour has struck._”

VICTOR HUGO

Looking back at the past is like peering from some promontory upon a varied landscape. The years run through it like a road winding through a valley. With the passage of time you get a far-sweeping view, and the small details become blurred and difficult to recall. I wonder whether there should not be a school course to emphasize the importance of keeping diaries, so that you would know the really momentous happenings to put down. Mostly you scribble notes intended to call up a picture rather than an actual account of what has happened—memoranda of dates, engagements and events, leaving the results to recollection. Some inequality in this chronicle as to what is significant and what is not—some gaps in my remembrance of events—may have been the result.

It is strange what tricks the mind can play. My father, the person who had done most in shaping my growth, died in 1926 at the age of eighty. The day he was buried in Corning I was passing the bank on the corner of the town square with my brothers Dick and Bob, and we chanced to glance simultaneously at the clock tower. Faintly startled, we gazed at each other and Dick exclaimed, “Look at that little tiny thing! I’ve always thought it was as big as the Eiffel Tower!”

In all of our travels each of us had been convinced that nothing ever was so tall as that tower. That can happen to so many youthful memories. Months and miles that seemed so long then are so short later.

The same year that took my father summoned also my sister Mary, whose cruel immolation at the shrine of family duty had obliged her to forego marriage; even though I had seen her but seldom, she, too, had had an important influence over me and remained a dear presence whose loss I felt deeply. Out of eleven children seven are still living. Families have a separate and distinct role in your existence. They are closer yet more apart than friends, but often you discover that you have nothing save the ties of childhood to keep you together.

What I have been able to contribute to the birth control movement has been the result of forces which set a clear design almost from infancy, each succeeding circumstance tracing the lines more sharply: my being born into a family so large as to be in part responsible for my mother’s premature death; my preparation as a nurse, which awoke me to the sorrows of women; the inspiration of having come into contact with great minds and having claimed many as friends. It may have been destiny as some have said—I do not know.

To have helped carry the cause thus far has been at times strenuous, but I have never considered it a sacrifice. Every conscious hour, night and day, in any city, in any country, has brought its compensations. My life has been joyous and exulting and full because it has touched profoundly millions of other lives. It is ever a privilege to be a part of something unquestionably proved of value, something so fundamentally right.

From time to time wonder is expressed that so much has been accomplished in so short a period. The fact remains that in an era when huge fortunes have been spent in alleviating human misery progress has been painfully slow. Countless women still die before their time because the bit of knowledge essential to every life is still not theirs. Birth control must seep down until it reaches the strata where the need is greatest; until it has been democratized there can be no rest.

It is true that great advances have been made in the realm of theory. You can almost tell people’s age now by their attitude towards birth control. To the young it is merely one of the accepted facts; if questioned, they assume the whole matter must have been settled long ago.

Over and over again in the past a new epoch has adopted a concept censured by the preceding one, and has wondered derisively how its forefathers could have been so blind to anything so obvious. The use of anesthetics for mothers in childbirth was once condemned as an unholy attempt to escape the Biblical curse pronounced against all women, and, similarly, evolution as striking at the roots of Christianity. Battles over impiety, heresy, blasphemy, obscenity have been fought, temporarily lost, and finally won. Science whittles away such obstructions little by little. “The Moving Finger writes; and having writ moves on.” In January, 1937, in that same Town Hall where fifteen years before I had been forbidden to speak, and whence I had been haled into court, I was honored with a medal. Pearl Buck said on one occasion, “The cause conquers because youth is for you. I have lived in China so long, and know what it is to wait until the old ones die and the young can do what is necessary to be done.” I am glad both my sons are doctors with a background of human interest to which has been added a scientific quality of mind that can aid in pushing the horizon of service further into the future.

I am often asked, “Aren’t you happy now that the struggle is over?” But I cannot agree that it is. Though many disputed barricades have been leaped, you can never sit back, smugly content, believing that victory is forever yours; there is always the threat of its being snatched from you. All freedom must be safeguarded and held. Jubilation is unwarranted while the world is in warring turmoil, each political unit trying to hold on to what it has—some threatening to take it away and others looking covetously towards outlets in countries not yet completely filled. The application of the movement to nations which should, in the interests of peace, control their populations, must endure.

Before 1914 the world trend was towards unity and peace. But a typhoon then caught us and turned us upside down. We began to whirl violently in one direction—that of individual and national emancipation, until at last the great wind blew crowns from the heads of Tsars and Kaisers, sweeping power into the hands of the populace.

When that War had first burst upon a shocked world people everywhere stood aghast and wept for the slaughter of men they did not know. But after four years, in self-defense, they armored themselves against the emotion which should be aroused by any cruelty, and became calloused and hardened until the deaths of thousands left nations unmoved.

Then came the vortex, the center, of the storm, and we awaited breathless the approach of the opposite edge. Everything had been lashed down in readiness, the life lines had been strengthened. Finally, all we had considered constant in rational thought, morals, ethics, started to go with equal violence in the other direction towards dictatorship and nationalism and race prejudice—a giving over of individual freedom. The immediacy of the deaths of women in childbirth seemed so small in comparison, of so little consequence; no longer were felt the pains of problems which used to be of such deep concern.

Over and over again I hear, “How do you fit birth control into a world in which dictators are clamoring for more and yet more people?” I can only answer that momentum must now derive its power from some other source than arousing sympathy. The present insensitivity is due to a horror of hovering peril. Many will be swept away and destroyed but when the battered hulls of the various ships of state emerge into calmer seas, a lesson may have been learned, perhaps, whereby these vessels may be made more seaworthy.

The Greeks, with their innate genius for dramatizing basic truths in images of telling beauty, established of old the relay torch race, or Lampadephoria, in honor of the Titan Prometheus, who had bestowed the divine gift of fire upon humanity. The contest was held at night, the great flambeaux being appropriately kindled at the altar of Eros. Participation was not a distinction indiscriminately conferred; those elect were fitted by discipline to hand on the vital flame, just as parents need training before becoming eligible for their grave responsibilities. The figures speeding around the course symbolize the passing on of the spark of life from generation to generation. Each runner must deliver his torch undimmed to his successor.

“Build thou beyond thyself,” said Nietzsche, and this the birth control movement is doing. All peoples will in the future have greater regard for the quality of the bodies and brains which must be equipped for the task of building the future civilization; birth control will be the cornerstone of that great structure.

INDEX

Abbott, Leonard, 74

Abortion, 89ff., 217, 285, 449, 450

Academy of Medicine, 181, 358, 404, 405, 410

Ackermann, Frances Brooks, 188, 260, 261, 392, 395, 417

Adams, Maude, 37, 38

Agra, 479

Albany, N.Y., 208, 292, 411

Aldred, Guy, 136, 274

Allahabad, 479

Allison, Van Kleek, 207, 211

American Birth Control League, 300, 359, 369, 392ff., 409, 415

American Civil Liberties Union, 309

American Federation of Labor, 78, 80, 421

American Medical Association, 416, 421, 430

American Public Health Association, 298

American Women’s Association, 413

Ankelsaria, Dr., 476ff.

Anti-Religious Museum, Leningrad, 440

Arizona, 459, 460, 491

Armory Exhibition, N.Y., 68

Ashley, Jessie, 71, 96, 100, 101, 207, 232, 234, 252, 264

Astor, Lady Nancy, 390, 391

Atlanta Ga., 413

Bamberger, Charles J., 176, 258

Barber, Billy, 434

Barber-Surgeons’ Hall, 462, 463

Barcelona, 154ff.

Baroda, 479ff.; Maharani of, 480, 481

Barr, Sir James, 272

Bass, Mrs. Robert P., 459

Batum, 455

Bavaria, 287ff.

Bedborough Trial, 135

Bell, George H., Commissioner of Licenses, 252

Bellamy, Edward, 268

Bellows, George, 74

Belmont, Mrs. O. P., 381

Benares, 476, 478ff.

Bendix, Dr. Kurt, 389

Bennett, Arnold, 186, 371

Berger, Victor, 83

Berkman, Alexander, 71, 314

Berlin, 1920, 280ff.; 1927, 388

Besant, Annie, 127, 142, 172, 485

Bijur, Justice Nathan, 252

Bird, Mrs. Charles Sumner, 460

Birth Control, history of, 125–129; morality of, 298, 301; origin of name, 107, 108

_Birth Control Review_, 252ff., 393, 395

Bland, J. O. P., 299

Block, Anita, 76, 96, 180

Blossom, Frederick A., 198, 210, 251, 253ff.

Bocker, Dr. Dorothy, 358ff.

Bombay, 466ff.

Borah, Senator William E., 420, 422

Bose, Sir Jagardis Chandra, 475

Boston, Mass., 207

Boyce, Neith, 96

Boyd, Mary, 362

Boyle, Gertrude, 208, 296

Bradlaugh, Charles, 127, 142

Brattleboro, Vt., 368

Bratton, Senator Sam. G., 420

Brevoort Hotel dinner, 187ff.

British Museum, 124f., 130, 142

_Brooklyn Eagle_, 221

Brooklyn, Raymond Street Jail, 221ff.

Broun, Heywood, 263, 293, 373

Browne, F. W. Stella, 129

Brownsville, clinic, 213ff.; mothers, 231, 244, 414