• When Does a Woman Know?
When Does a Woman Know?
In June 1877, Hannah's father died. He had been paralyzed for some months before his death and failed very rapidly through the winter. As Hannah recorded it: He fell asleep in Jesus, just like a tired child falling asleep in its mother s arms. It was a sweet, peaceful, close to a noble, completed
1 Rather than dwell on her loss, Hannah rejoiced that her father was "safely gathered," her quaint term for the departed loved one who is released from the sufferings of life. this life.
Life went on in the Smith family. In the summer of 1 878, they were all at The Cedars with assorted cousins. Mary was then 14, Logan 12, Alice 11, and Ray 9. Robert had returned from his second trip to the west coast, having put on so much weight he could barely get into his clothes.
On a warm July evening Hannah was preparing for bed after an exhausting day helping the children to construct a lawn tennis game. She lowered her tired body into the rustic but seemingly sturdy bed in the austere pine-walled bedroom that had been Frank's room until he died. She yawned and sighed contentedly. The bed felt good to her aching muscles. She had left the oil lamp burning for Robert (gas lights had not yet come to the woods of New Jersey).
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Soon she could hear him stomping up the stairs. He entered the room and, with much grunting and assorted noises, removed his clothes and boots. Hannah was drifting off to sleep when he heaved his corpulent body onto the bed. The much-abused bed groaned under his weight; then, as he thrashed about, trying to get comfortable, there was an ominous splintering crack. Hannah found herself doubled up in the mattress as it sagged to the floor.2
In a sad way, this broken marriage bed was symbolic of the deteriorating relationship between Robert and Hannah.
In the fall of 1878, Mary was sent to Howland College in New York. This "college" would be regarded now as a private high school. In the 1870s, however, there were very few schools for girls that offered twelve grades of good instruction. The Smiths had to send Mary hundreds of miles from home to provide her a quality education. Hannah was determined that her daughters should have the college education that she herself had wanted so desperately and had been unable to receive. Mary, an intelligent girl with a thirst for knowledge, went along enthusiastically with her mother's plans.
Logan, 12, suffered from attacks of malaria. Through family connections he was able to spend the summer of 1878 in the rarified climate of Wyoming where he recovered his health. That fall, Logan and Alice, now age 11, went to a boarding school in Providence, Rhode Island. Ten-yearold
Ray, the most spiritually sensitive of the four, the daughter closest to Hannah in thought and style, remained at home.
Early in 1880, Hannah's mother passed away peacefully after a short bout of pneumonia. Hannah missed her mother very much but always rejoiced in the deaths of elderly people, and considered her "safely gathered."
In the latter part of January, Alice and Logan were sent home from the Providence school. There had been an epidemic of scarlet fever at the school and both children had
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light cases. The children were delighted to receive an extra holiday, and the house on Filbert Street resounded to the cries of children dashing in from afternoons spent skating on a nearby pond or sledding.
Then Ray took sick with scarlet fever. This terrifying, nineteenth-century child-killer had gotten a severe grip on Ray. For three days her body burned with fever as Hannah hovered at her bedside. Helplessly she watched the relentless disease sap away the life of her precious youngest child.
On February 7, Hannah's forty-eighth birthday, she was lying in bed beside her fever-baked little daughter. Tenderly she sang a hymn to soothe the sick girl. Twilight was seeping into the room even though it was not yet five o'clock.
All of a sudden the watchful mother observed that Ray was no longer breathing. The child's face was radiant with a surprised, happy smile, as though she had seen a glorious sight while passing from life to death.
It was well that Hannah was granted this blessed sense of her youngest child's happiness in heaven, for she herself ached with pain over the loss of the one child, of all her children, whose spirit was closest to hers. Ray was, as Hannah said in a letter to Anna Shipley, a most uncommonly mature little thing.
. 3
Hannah's last entry in her journal—begun thirty-two years before, in 1848—was dated December 30, 1880. In it she summed up her feelings about the death of Ray: Since
I last wrote in this book, my mother and my darling little Ray have both gone home to God. My dear mother was feeble and aged, and though her going left a great blank, yet we could not but feel thankful to have her spared any further weariness or sorrow in this world. But little Ray, our youngest, our perfect little girl, was only 11, and her life was full of promise. For her loss there was no comfort, but simply and only the sweet will of God. As I sorrowed, I began at once to say, "Thy will be done," and that blessed will has surrounded me like a fortress from that moment to this and I have been able to say to myself:4
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''Meanwhile," the mother cried, "Content!"
Our love was well divided; Its sweetness following where she went, Its anguish stayed where I did.
Well done of God to half the lot, And give her all the sweetness.
To us the empty room and cot, To her the heaven s completeness. 5
Elizabeth Barrett Browning Losing four of seven children by death would make any mother question God's goodness, even in an age when child deaths were frequent. How ironic that the author of the bestseller The Christians Secret ofa Happy Life should have her faith so put on trial! Hannah's pious letters to her friends, rejoicing in the "safe gathering" of her children, seemed to reach out for an understanding she didn't quite possess. Having warned her readers not to trust feelings on matters of faith, she was determined not to buckle under the tidal wave of personal blows dealt her in the years that followed. She dug in for a continuing assault, by the enemy—and it came.
In one area, however, the Smiths had no problems.
There was continuing financial prosperity, thanks to the Whitall-Tatum Glass Works and to the able management of John Whitall. After his death, Hannah and Robert received a considerable income from the family business.
Shortly after the death of Ray, the Smiths moved from their house on Filbert Street to a much more spacious dwelling at 4653 Germantown Avenue. The children had horses in Germantown; Robert had a pony phaeton. Hannah, a good household manager, was able to hire sufficient domestic help to relieve her of many of the housekeeping chores.
By the end of summer 1880, events must have occurred to destroy the blind trust Hannah had in her husband's moral integrity. Some of these might have taken place on a
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family trip to California that summer when Robert planned to introduce his wife and children to friends he had made on previous trips. For some reason she refused to meet his friends. It was a low time for Hannah anyway as she was still mourning for Ray and she was also going through menopause. She told her sister afterward, "Somehow it did not seem worthwhile to go on living any longer."6
What had happened? No letters or journals pin down the exact experience that caused the final rift in Hannah and Robert's marriage, but from later statements by family members and other circumstantial evidence, it is possible to assume that something like the following scene took place:
Early in January 1882, Hannah set aside a day for sorting clothes. Nonusable items were given away.
It was a yearly ritual. She cleaned out Alice's and Logan's wardrobes and moved on to Robert's rows of suits hanging tidily in his big old upright mahogany chest.
The cuffs of one coat were badly frayed. It was one of his favorites, but was now distinctly scruffy. Hannah took it down from the hanger and was going through the pockets, preparing to throw it out. There was a crackle of paper in the inside pocket, and Hannah drew out a crumpled letter. Ordinarily she would have ignored such a letter, but there was something about these crumpled sheets that stabbed her heart. Two sentences caught her eye as she stood there, holding the offending papers gingerly in her hand.
"Come and see me when you can, darling. I am always ready to entertain my sweet Robert."
She read the words before she could stop herself. A slow flush suffused her face. She sank down in Robert's big leather-covered armchair, her heart pounding, unable now to stop reading the letter.
The love letter left no doubt in the mind of his wife that the "female friend" was more than a friend to Robert. The big house on Germantown Avenue seemed suddenly very
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quiet. Not the slightest noise penetrated to the lonely reaches of Robert's third-floor bedroom as his stricken wife sat limply in the chair, her flaccid hand dangling over the arm, still absently holding the repulsive letter. She leaned her head back against the fragrant leather and memories flooded over her.
She recalled the romantic walks along the beach in the moonlight during their courtship thirty-one years before.
She remembered the first days of their housekeeping together and how proud she had been of her handsome husband. Later memories came: Robert holding her in his arms as she sobbed out her grief after Nellie's death in 1857
. the sense of togetherness they had felt at the camp meetings at Manheim, Pennsylvania, in the 1860s
. Robert hugging her tightly after he had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit during his morning walk in the woods
. the sense of exaltation when Robert's mellow, persuasive voice rang out in the halls of the Oxford and Brighton conferences
. the many times after praying together when the sense of the Holy Spirit had filled the room.
Where had it begun to go wrong? Brighton—in 1875?
That public humiliation had soured him.
Hannah had to admit to herself at long last what she had refused to face before: Robert was weak.
. Please, dear husband, she could remember writing to him, / wish thee could bow thy neck submissively to the yoke the Lord has put upon thee and not question His dealings. It would take the sting out of thy troubles at once. 1
She believed that Robert should have stood firm in the integrity of his purpose, confessing his mistakes, but refusing to reject any truth of God because of these mistakes.
She believed that if he had done this, God would have sustained him. But Robert had let the unsanctified part of himself get the upper hand. As his faith drained away, his vitality had left too. His charismatic personality faded and now he was becoming a self-indulgent old hypochondriac, irresponsibly investing their money in foolish speculations.
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Hannah's sadness gave way to indignation. She remembered the terrible strain of the months of Robert's nervous breakdowns, the sleepless nights during which she had maintained a staunch loyalty to her spouse. And this was how he had repaid her. She crumpled up the letter that was still in her hand and threw it violently to the floor.
And so Hannah went through that fateful day in January 1882 with a lead weight in her heart. Mechanically she did her chores and thanked God that all the children were away at school. When Robert came home for the evening meal, he was so self-absorbed that he did not seem to notice her stiffly formal replies to his comments. She said nothing about the letter, for she had burned it in the stove. Thus the rift between husband and wife widened.
After dinner when Robert had left the house for an unknown destination, Hannah headed for her favorite corner at the end of the parlor where her special writing table and chair had been set up. She longed to sob out her grief, but crying would not help. Instead, she went through her pile of unanswered letters until she found the one that had recently come from her friend Priscilla Mounsey, who lived in England. A lovely spinster lady, Priscilla had written of her depression and loneliness. This now touched a responsive chord in Hannah. Getting out paper, pen, and inkwell, she began to write:
The loneliness thou speaks ofI know all about. For do not think, darling, that it is confined to unmarried people.
It is just as real in lives that have plenty of human ties: husbands and children and friends.
And I believe [God] very rarely allows any human love to be satisfying, just that this loneliness may drive us to himself. I have noticed that where a human love is satisfying, something always comes in to spoil it. Either there is death, or there is separation, or there is change offeeling on one side or the other, or something, and the heart is driven out of its human resting place.
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Now, darling, thy loneliness is not only because thou art unmarried and has no very close human ties.
It is the loneliness ofa heart made for God, but which has not yet reached its full satisfaction in Him. Human love might for a while satisfy thee, but it would not last. If thou can only see this and settle down to it, it will help thee very much. Thou wilt give up, as I have, any expectation of finding satisfaction in the human creature, and will no longer suffer with disappointment at not finding it. And this will deliver thee from the worst part of the suffering of loneliness. Thee will accept it as a God-given blessing meant only to drive thee to himself.
Thy circumstances are lonely, but thy loneliness of spirit does not come from these; it is the loneliness of humanity. Therefore, nothing but God can satisfy it.
No change ofcircumstances, no coming in of the dearest earthly ties .
. could really satisfy for any length of time the hungry depths ofthy soul. I am speaking, darling, out of the depths of my own experience when I say this, and thee may believe me.
But now the question is how to bring oneself to be satisfied in God when there is no feeling. And I do not know what else to say, but that it must be by faith.
I confess that it does seem an odd sort of thing to do, to become satisfied by saying one is satisfied when one is not. But is it not just what faith is described to be,
"calling those things which be not as though they were"? What else can we do?
In my own case, I just determined I would be satisfied with God alone. I gave up seeking after any feeling of satisfaction. I said, "Lord, thou art enough for me, just thyself, without any of thy gifts or thy blessings. I have thee and I am content. I will be content. I choose to be content. I am content." I said this by faith. I still have to say it by faith often. I have to do so this very evening, for I am not very well and feel what I expect thou would call "low." But it makes no difference how
I feel. He is just the same, and He is with me, and I am His, and I am satisfied.
Hannah Whitall Smith, 1886, in the midst of personal tragedy and public acclaim.
Robert Pearsall Smith in 1875, a year of evangelistic fervor and scandal.
Hannah with her firstborn, Nellie, c. 1852.
Bronchitis would claim Nellie's life on Christmas Day, 1857, at age five.
Ray (seated), Logan, and Alys, Mary, 1874. Pretty and brood1874. A bright summer of adventure in England. ing.
The Whitall women: Mary, Hannah, and Alys, 1898.
Mary, 1880.
1885—Mary's husband, Frank Costelloe, whom she would abandon with their 1909—The artist Bernhard Berenson who offered Mary a life of "freedom" in Italy. children, ages two and four.
Charming and intellectual, the outspoken atheist Bertrand Russell swept Alys off her feet in 1894. Unfortunately, he was as strong in his convictions as Alys was weak in her faith. The match was devastating.
C. 1883. At the height of her public life, Hannah spoke out, not only on matters of faith, but frequently addressed groups from the women's Christian Temperance Union and was a leader in the campaign for women's suffrage.
At Friday's Hill, 1894. Standing: Alys and Logan. Seated L-R:
Robert, granddaughter Karin, Hannah, granddaughter Ray, and Mary. Beneath the calm surface the tensions were palpable. Mary was estranged from Frank Costelloe, father of Ray and Karin. Alys was being courted by Bertrand Russell. Robert was now an outsider to the faith, pursuing clandestine relationships.
Hannah and Robert enjoy a word game at Friday's Hill in 1894, several years before Robert was "safely gathered."