From the Improvement Era, March 1945 —

But, My Dear … a Woman!

By Edith Russell

He was a very ugly man . . . except when he read Milton. Then I forgot his bald pate glistening in the light shed from the dusty windows of the village schoolhouse. I forgot everything except the beauty of what he was saying and the incredible pathos of his voice.

To the villagers he was “t’ old school-mairster.” His pallid features were the whitened sepulchre of their dead education. He was at once a character and a monument, strewn about with furtive memories of a tyrannical, pedantic dictatorship. I was ten years old when I inherited my portion of their fear.

One afternoon we were doing Shakespeare — badly. I saw the fearsome color rush to his head, and he quaked as he licked his white, thin lips. The storm burst, as it always did, and when it was spent, he turned to me.

“Come here. You …” the word was a threat. “You are going to read Portia. And you are going to read it well. Do you hear? That means you are going to have to think. I might suggest that sufficient insults have been offered to Shakespeare for one afternoon.”

I was not afraid. Somewhere in my heart was a thrill. My hands were icy and my face burned, but I was not afraid . . . and looking up into the eyes of the ogre, I saw that he knew it . . . and approved.

The next day he sent for me to go to his desk. By this time my fleeting courage was gone, and I was afraid again. He talked to me for nearly an hour. I told him I wanted to become a great writer, and for some reason he was not amused.

After that, books began to arrive from his home in Harden. I was made to enter every sort of literary contest available to youth. I had a different literary syllabus from any other child in the school. I was coached in English, given words to play with, to work with. He gave me the keys to a world I had not even dreamed of; a world of poetry, and music enshrined in prose, all the consecrated genius of men’s lives bound between the covers of a book.

He was harsh when I slipped. He seldom praised. He was never satisfied. I alternately hated and loved him. I do not know at what moment I realized that he had made me, a small, unlovely child, the vessel into which he desired to pour all his learning, his aspirations and dreams.

When he died, as violently as he had lived, the villagers did not greatly mourn his passing. He was a strange, wild man, “t’ old schoolmairster.” But on his grave at least one person could and did place a small bunch of white anemones, such as children gather, bearing the text “With love, to a very great man.”

I went on writing. I wrote much that was bad, a little that was good.

I never thought of God. I peopled the universe with creatures of my own fancy. Immortality was what people such as Shakespeare, Dumas, and Euripides earned as their right. My only road to heaven had a pen for a signpost.

Then I met a Mormon. . . .

He had a fervency which could not be denied. He radiated something which was clean, beautiful, and essentially lifegiving. I told him of my hopes, my dreams of writing; almost it was a plea not to distract me with this stupendous thing he brought as an elder of Christ’s Church. He did not press me, and by his silence I was converted. I decided to put away my pen and go to preach Jesus Christ, and him crucified.

For a year I used what eloquence I had to carry the restored gospel to those people with whom I lived and worked and played. But every day brought a strange, renewed urgency to serve him with my pen. I had thought it was buried in the waters of baptism. It seemed its wooden stick had taken root there, grown and blossomed . . . and there were all the perfumes of Arabia in its fragrance. I ultimately submitted two or three articles to the Millennial Star. They were accepted and published, and somewhere, far off in the darkness, I caught the white gleam of a star. . . . A month later my call came to serve a mission in the editorial office of the Millennial Star.

Having been duly initiated into the mysteries of proofreading, selecting types and blocks, and establishing contact with contributors, I yearned to make sweeping changes, to institute new methods, and to make the Star a real contribution to the life of every Latter-day Saint. I prayed for an opportunity, and swiftly it came, so swiftly, indeed, I found myself one day, marooned on an island inhabited by a strange tribe of printers, furnished solely by lots of ideas and a startling old museum of blocks, and with a man-sized associate editorship on my hands. The mission president was kind but I could sense his doubt. It stiffened that in me which trembled. All I asked was a blessing to accompany my appointment. It was solemn, impressive. “You are treading in the footsteps of great men, even apostles of God. Seek the Lord in humility at all times. You are the first woman to hold this office . . . seek the Lord and he will direct you as to how you should proceed.” The first woman — how terrifying, how — how kind of God. I felt as I did when I was told to read Portia, the same thrill which had nothing of fear in it.

How exhilarating were those days spent at the untidy oaken desk which I inherited. I suffered tortures over my first edition.

I was never alone at my desk. Always there was someone, prompting, restraining, inspiring. There was in that presence a sweet sense of companionship. Does it seem absurd that the Holy Spirit could be concerned with line blocks and the right length of articles? If it does, I can only say that it constituted a strengthening of my testimony such as could not be touched by anyone’s sense of the ludicrous.

Every Star that is born imparts to me the joy of creation. Each one is an adventure. But some day, very soon, my mission will be at an end. When it began I stood in the darkness and reached for a star. Somewhere, someone laughed at my audacity. When it is finished I shall stand on a star and reach for the moon. God will not laugh.