The Natural History Club's excursion to Nahant

The Natural History Club's excursion to Nahant stands as the climax of Mary Antin's second transformation, a day that welded her scattered fragments of dawning knowledge into a solid structure of wisdom. It was the day the sea, the tide pools, and the cliffs of Nahant completed what her coming to America had begun, turning the immigrant girl who had once believed the Dvina River was the world's great water into a young woman who could feel the endless ages throbbing through her blood. The excursion was the outward event; the inward event was a rebirth of the spirit, the moment when nature first took the first place in her affections and her mind leaped to the intellectual summit of the latest century.

The Day at Nahant

The Natural History Club spent the entire day at Nahant, studying marine life in the tide pools with no thought for decorum, bent only on securing starfish, limpets, sea-urchins, and other trophies of the chase. The members scrambled up and down the cliffs, their single-minded pursuit of specimens overriding any concern for ladylike behavior. There had been a merry luncheon on the rocks, with talk and laughter between sandwiches, and strange jokes intelligible only to the practising naturalist. The tide rushed in at its proper time, stealing away the seaweed cushions, drowning the transparent pools, spouting in the crevices, booming and hissing, and tossing high the snowy foam. From the deck of the jolly excursion steamer carrying them home, the club members watched the rosy sun dip down below the sea, grouped in twos and threes, discussing the day's successes, comparing specimens, exchanging field notes, or watching the western horizon in sympathetic silence.

For Mary, it had been a great day. She had seen a dozen new forms of life and caught a hundred fragments of the song of nature by the sea, her mind seething with meanings that crowded in. She addressed her questions to one of her most learned friends, who took up all her fragments of dawning knowledge in his discourse and welded them into a solid structure of wisdom, with windows looking far down the past and a tower overlooking the future. She was so absorbed in her private review of creation that she hardly realized when they landed, or how they got into the electric cars, till they were a good way into the city.

The Vision at the Public Library

At the Public Library, Mary parted from her friends and stood on the broad stone steps, her jar of specimens in her hand, watching the car that carried them glide out of sight. Her heart was full of a stirring wonder. She was hardly conscious of the place where she stood, or of the day, or the hour. She was in a dream, and the familiar world around her was transfigured. Her hair was damp with sea spray; the roar of the tide was still in her ears. Mighty thoughts surged through her dreams, and she trembled with understanding.

She sank down on the granite ledge beside the entrance to the Library, and for a mere moment covered her eyes with her hand. In that moment she had a vision of herself, the human creature, emerging from the dim places where the torch of history has never been, creeping slowly into the light of civilized existence, pushing more steadily forward to the broad plateau of modern life, and leaping, at last, strong and glad, to the intellectual summit of the latest century. The awful stretch of years to contemplate, the weighty past to carry in memory—she wondered how she should number the days of her life, except by the stars of the night, except by the salt drops of the sea.

The Meaning of the Transformation

The vision on the Library steps resolved the central tension of Mary's American life. She had come to believe that the past was only her cradle, and now it could not hold her, because she was grown too big; just as the little house in Polotzk, once her home, had become a toy of memory, as she moved about at will in the wide spaces of the splendid palace whose shadow covers acres. It was not she that belonged to the past, but the past that belonged to her. America was the youngest of the nations, and inherited all that went before in history. And she was the youngest of America's children, and into her hands was given all her priceless heritage, to the last white star espied through the telescope.

This awakening had been prepared by a long chain of earlier experiences. As a child in Polotzk, Mary had felt Life Universal burst upon her one spring day by the Polota River, when a peasant's plowman's song had made her feel herself discovering things, and she had put her little hand on the Great Pulse for the space of a wild heartbeat. At the seaside during her first American summer, she had lain stretched out in the sun, her eyes level with the sea, till she seemed to be absorbed bodily by the very materials of the world around her, unable to feel her hand as separate from the warm sand in which it was buried. She had crouched on the beach at full moon, wondering between the two splendors of the sky and the sea, and run out to meet the incoming storm, her face full in the wind, her being a-tingle with an awesome delight. These were the seeds of ideas, and the Nahant excursion brought them to flower.

The transformation also completed a process that had begun with the spider lecture at Hale House, when Mr. Emerson had woven a gigantic spider's web across the doorway with a ball of twine, and Mary, forgetting her terrors, had been surprised to hear how much there was to know about a dusty little spider. The drama of the spider's daily life—his struggle for existence, his wars with his enemies, his wiles, his traps, his patient labors—had filled her with a great wonder and left no room in her mind for repugnance or fear. It was the first time the natural history of a living creature had been presented to her under such circumstances that she could not avoid hearing and seeing, and she was surprised at her dulness in the past when she had rejected books on natural history. The Nahant excursion was the outdoor fulfillment of that indoor revelation.

The Citizen in the Making

The excursion was also a social triumph, the culmination of Mary's acceptance by the American friends who had made way for her because she was their foster sister. They opened their homes to her that she might learn how good Americans lived, and in the least of their attentions to her, they cherished the citizen in the making. The learned friend who welded her fragments of knowledge into wisdom was one of these friends, and the Natural History Club itself was the institution through which she came to a better understanding of her animal neighbors on all sides. The day at Nahant proved that the investment others had made in her—the grocer Mr. Rosenblum who gave her oil for her lamp and helped keep her in school for years, the teachers who had promoted her to grammar school where she walked on air with the great big geography book under her arm—was yielding its promised return. She was becoming the student her father had dreamed of when he led his children to school on that first day, taking long strides in his eagerness, the rest of them running and hopping to keep up, and gave them over to Miss Nixon's charge with some broken word of his hopes that his swelling heart could no longer contain.

The vision at the Library steps was thus the personal confirmation of a collective faith. The endless ages had indeed throbbed through her blood, but a new rhythm danced in her veins. Her spirit was not tied to the monumental past, any more than her feet were bound to her grandfather's house below the hill. The clamor of the city all about her was her latest home, and it invited her to a glad new life. The Natural History Club's excursion to Nahant had given her not merely specimens of starfish and sea-urchins, but the certainty that she, Mashke, granddaughter of Raphael the Russian, born to a humble destiny, was at home in an American metropolis, free to fashion her own life, and dreaming her dreams in English phrases.