CHAPTER IV. SHE SINGS TO HER NEST

From my mother I learned to sing. She was always working and always

singing. There were six children in the house, and she knitted and sewed

and baked and brewed for us all. I used to toddle along at her side when

she carried each day the home-made bread and the bottle of small beer

for father's dinner at the mill. I worshiped my mother, and wanted to be

like her. And that's why I went in for singing. I have sung more songs

in my life than did Caruso. But my voice isn't quite up to his! So my

singing has brought me no returns other than great chunks of personal

satisfaction. The satisfaction was not shared by my hearers, and so I

have quit. But my heart still sings, and always will. And this I owe to

my mother.

I can see her yet in our tiny Welsh cottage, her foot on a wooden cradle

rocking a baby, my baby brother, her hands busy with her knitting, her

voice lifted in jubilant song for hours at a time. And all her songs

were songs of praise.

She thanked God for life and for strong hands to labor for her little

ones. In those days furniture was rare, and few were the pieces in a

worker's home. It took a dozen years for her to acquire two feather

beds. And when at last we owned two bedsteads, we rated ourselves pretty

rich. We boys slept five in a bed. Why were bedsteads in those days

harder to get than automobiles are to-day? Because the wooden age still

lingered, the age of hand work. And it took so long to make a bed by

hand that people came into the world faster than beds. But within my

lifetime the iron mills have made possible the dollar bedstead. The

working man can fill his house with beds bought with the wage he earns

in half a week. This, I suppose, is one of the “curses of capitalism.”

I have heard how “the rights of small peoples” have been destroyed by

capitalism; and if the right to sleep five in a bed was prized by the

little folks, this privilege has certainly been taken away from them.

At the Mooseheart School we are pinched for sleeping room for our

fast-growing attendance. I suggested that, for the time being, we might

double deck the beds like the berths in a sleeping car. “No,” cried the

superintendent. “Not in this age do we permit the crowding of children

in their sleeping quarters.” So this is the slavery that capitalism has

driven us to; we are forced to give our children more comforts than we

had ourselves. When I was sleeping five in a bed with my brothers, there

was one long bolster for five hot little faces. The bolster got feverish

and a boy sang out: “Raise up.” We lifted our tired heads. “Turn over.”

Two boys turned the bolster. “Lie down.” And we put our faces on the

cool side and went to sleep.

Those were not hardships, and life was sweet, and we awoke from our

crowded bed, like birds in a nest awakened by their mother's morning

song. For, as I have said, my mother was always singing. Her voice was

our consolation and delight.

One of the most charming recollections of my boyhood is that of my

mother standing at our gate with a lamp in her hands, sending one boy

out in the early morning darkness, to his work, and at the same time

welcoming another boy home. My brother was on the day shift and I on the

night, which meant that he left home as I was leaving the mills, about

half past two in the morning. On dark nights--and they were all dark at

that hour--my mother, thinking my little brother afraid, would go with

him to the gate and, holding an old-fashioned lamp high in her hands,

would sing some Welsh song while he trudged out toward the mills and

until he got within the radius of the glare from the stacks as they.

belched forth the furnace flames. And as he passed from the light of the

old oil burner into the greater light from the mills, I walked wearily

out from that reflection and was guided home by my mother's lamp and

song on her lips.

Happy is the race that sings, and the Welsh are singers. After the

tiring labor in the mills we still had joy that found its voice in song.

When I was six years old I joined a singing society. The whole land of

Wales echoes with the folk songs of a people who sing because they must.

The memory of my mother singing, has made my whole life sweet. When blue

days came for me, and hardship almost forced me to despair, I turned my

thoughts to her, singing as she rocked a cradle, and from her spirit

my own heart took hope again. I think the reason I have never cared for

drink is this: the ease from mental pain that other men have sought in

alcohol, I always found in song.