Through the Eye of the Needle

W >> W. D. Howells >> Through the Eye of the Needle

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15

In fine, the American house as it is, the American household, is what the
American woman makes it and wills it to be, whether she wishes it to be
so or not; for I often find that the American woman wills things that she
in no wise wishes. What the normal New York house is, however, I had
great difficulty in getting Mrs. Makely to tell me, for, as she said
quite frankly, she could not imagine my not knowing. She asked me if I
really wanted her to begin at the beginning, and, when I said that I did,
she took a little more time to laugh at the idea, and then she said, "I
suppose you mean a brown-stone, four-story house in the middle of a
block?"

"Yes, I think that is what I mean," I said.

"Well," she began, "those high steps that they all have, unless they're
English-basement houses, really give them another story, for people used
to dine in the front room of their basements. You've noticed the little
front yard, about as big as a handkerchief, generally, and the steps
leading down to the iron gate, which is kept locked, and the basement
door inside the gate? Well, that's what you might call the back elevator
of a house, for it serves the same purpose: the supplies are brought in
there, and market-men go in and out, and the ashes, and the swill, and
the servants--that you object to so much. We have no alleys in New York,
the blocks are so narrow, north and south; and, of course, we have no
back doors; so we have to put the garbage out on the sidewalk--and it's
nasty enough, goodness knows. Underneath the sidewalk there are bins
where people keep their coal and kindling. You've noticed the gratings in
the pavements?"

I said yes, and I was ashamed to own that at first I had thought them
some sort of registers for tempering the cold in winter; this would have
appeared ridiculous in the last degree to my hostess, for the Americans
have as yet no conception of publicly modifying the climate, as we do.

"Back of what used to be the dining-room, and what is now used for a
laundry, generally, is the kitchen, with closets between, of course, and
then the back yard, which some people make very pleasant with shrubs and
vines; the kitchen is usually dark and close, and the girls can only get
a breath of fresh air in the yard; I like to see them; but generally it's
taken up with clothes-lines, for people in houses nearly all have their
washing done at home. Over the kitchen is the dining-room, which takes up
the whole of the first floor, with the pantry, and it almost always has a
bay-window out of it; of course, that overhangs the kitchen, and darkens
it a little more, but it makes the dining-room so pleasant. I tell my
husband that I should be almost willing to live in a house again, just on
account of the dining-room bay-window. I had it full of flowers in pots,
for the southern sun came in; and then the yard was so nice for the dog;
you didn't have to take him out for exercise, yourself; he chased the
cats there and got plenty of it. I must say that the cats on the back
fences were a drawback at night; to be sure, we have them here, too; it's
seven stories down, but you do hear them, along in the spring. The
parlor, or drawing-room, is usually rather long, and runs from the
dining-room to the front of the house, though where the house is very
deep they have a sort of middle room, or back parlor. Dick, get some
paper and draw it. Wouldn't you like to see a plan of the floor?"

I said that I should, and she bade her husband make it like their old
house in West Thirty-third Street. We all looked at it together.

"This is the front door," Mrs. Makely explained, "where people come in,
and then begins the misery of a house--stairs! They mostly go up
straight, but sometimes they have them curve a little, and in the new
houses the architects have all sorts of little dodges for squaring them
and putting landings. Then, on the second floor--draw it, Dick--you have
two nice, large chambers, with plenty of light and air, before and
behind. I do miss the light and air in a flat, there's no denying it."

"You'll go back to a house yet, Dolly," said her husband.

"Never!" she almost shrieked, and he winked at me, as if it were the best
joke in the world. "Never, as long as houses have stairs!"

"Put in an elevator," he suggested.

"Well, that is what Eveleth Strange has, and she lets the servants use
it, too," and Mrs. Makely said, with a look at me: "I suppose that would
please you, Mr. Homos. Well, there's a nice side-room over the front door
here, and a bath-room at the rear. Then you have more stairs, and large
chambers, and two side-rooms. That makes plenty of chambers for a small
family. I used to give two of the third-story rooms to my two girls. I
ought really to have made them sleep in one; it seemed such a shame to
let the cook have a whole large room to herself; but I had nothing else
to do with it, and she did take such comfort in it, poor old thing! You
see, the rooms came wrong in our house, for it fronted north, and I had
to give the girls sunny rooms or else give them front rooms, so that it
was as broad as it was long. I declare, I was perplexed about it the
whole time we lived there, it seemed so perfectly anomalous."

"And what is an English-basement house like?" I ventured to ask, in
interruption of the retrospective melancholy she had fallen into.

"Oh, _never_ live in an English-basement house, if you value your
spine!" cried the lady. "An English-basement house is nothing _but_
stairs. In the first place, it's only one room wide, and it's a story
higher than the high-stoop house. It's one room forward and one back, the
whole way up; and in an English-basement it's always _up_, and
_never_ down. If I had my way, there wouldn't one stone be left upon
another in the English-basements in New York."

I have suffered Mrs. Makely to be nearly as explicit to you as she was to
me; for the kind of house she described is of the form ordinarily
prevailing in all American cities, and you can form some idea from it how
city people live here. I ought perhaps to tell you that such a house is
fitted with every housekeeping convenience, and that there is hot and
cold water throughout, and gas everywhere. It has fireplaces in all the
rooms, where fires are often kept burning for pleasure; but it is really
heated from a furnace in the basement, through large pipes carried to the
different stories, and opening into them by some such registers as we
use. The separate houses sometimes have steam-heating, but not often.
They each have their drainage into the sewer of the street, and this is
trapped and trapped again, as in the houses of our old plutocratic
cities, to keep the poison of the sewer from getting into the houses.

VIII

You will be curious to know something concerning the cost of living in
such a house, and you may be sure that I did not fail to question Mrs.
Makely on this point. She was at once very volubly communicative; she
told me all she knew, and, as her husband said, a great deal more.

"Why, of course," she began, "you can spend all you have in New York, if
you like, and people do spend fortunes every year. But I suppose you mean
the average cost of living in a brown-stone house, in a good block, that
rents for $1800 or $2000 a year, with a family of three or four children,
and two servants. Well, what should you say, Dick?"

"Ten or twelve thousand a year--fifteen," answered her husband.

"Yes, fully that," she answered, with an effect of disappointment in his
figures. "We had just ourselves, and we never spent less than seven, and
we didn't dress, and we didn't entertain, either, to speak of. But you
have to live on a certain scale, and generally you live up to your
income."

"Quite," said Mr. Makely.

"I don't know what makes it cost so. Provisions are cheap enough, and
they say people live in as good style for a third less in London. There
used to be a superstition that you could live for less in a flat, and
they always talk to you about the cost of a furnace, and a man to tend it
and keep the snow shovelled off your sidewalk, but that is all stuff.
Five hundred dollars will make up the whole difference, and more. You pay
quite as much rent for a decent flat, and then you don't get half the
room. No, if it wasn't for the stairs, I wouldn't live in a flat for an
instant. But that makes all the difference."

"And the young people," I urged--"those who are just starting in
life--how do they manage? Say when the husband has $1500 or $2000 a
year?"

"Poor things!" she returned. "I don't know how they manage. They board
till they go distracted, or they dry up and blow away; or else the wife
has a little money, too, and they take a small flat and ruin themselves.
Of course, they want to live nicely and like other people."

"But if they didn't?"

"Why, then they could live delightfully. My husband says he often wishes
he was a master-mechanic in New York, with a thousand a year, and a flat
for twelve dollars a month; he would have the best time in the world."

Her husband nodded his acquiescence. "Fighting-cock wouldn't be in it,"
he said. "Trouble is, we all want to do the swell thing."

"But you can't all do it," I ventured, "and, from what I see of the
simple, out-of-the-way neighborhoods in my walks, you don't all try."

"Why, no," he said. "Some of us were talking about that the other night
at the club, and one of the fellows was saying that he believed there was
as much old-fashioned, quiet, almost countrified life in New York, among
the great mass of the people, as you'd find in any city in the world.
Said you met old codgers that took care of their own furnaces, just as
you would in a town of five thousand inhabitants."

"Yes, that's all very well," said his wife; "but they wouldn't be nice
people. Nice people want to live nicely. And so they live beyond their
means or else they scrimp and suffer. I don't know which is worst."

"But there is no obligation to do either?" I asked.

"Oh yes, there is," she returned. "If you've been born in a certain way,
and brought up in a certain way, you can't get out of it. You simply
can't. You have got to keep in it till you drop. Or a woman has."

"That means the woman's husband, too," said Mr. Makely, with his wink for
me. "Always die together."

In fact, there is the same competition in the social world as in the
business world; and it is the ambition of every American to live in some
such house as the New York house; and as soon as a village begins to
grow into a town, such houses are built. Still, the immensely greater
number of the Americans necessarily live so simply and cheaply that such
a house would be almost as strange to them as to an Altrurian. But while
we should regard its furnishings as vulgar and unwholesome, most
Americans would admire and covet its rich rugs or carpets, its papered
walls, and thickly curtained windows, and all its foolish ornamentation,
and most American women would long to have a house like the ordinary
high-stoop New York house, that they might break their backs over its
stairs, and become invalids, and have servants about them to harass them
and hate them.

Of course, I put it too strongly, for there is often, illogically, a
great deal of love between the American women and their domestics, though
why there should be any at all I cannot explain, except by reference to
that mysterious personal equation which modifies all conditions here. You
will have made your reflection that the servants, as they are cruelly
called (I have heard them called so in their hearing, and wondered they
did not fly tooth and nail at the throat that uttered the insult), form
really no part of the house, but are aliens in the household and the
family life. In spite of this fact, much kindness grows up between them
and the family, and they do not always slight the work that I cannot
understand their ever having any heart in. Often they do slight it, and
they insist unsparingly upon the scanty privileges which their mistresses
seem to think a monstrous invasion of their own rights. The habit of
oppression grows upon the oppressor, and you would find tender-hearted
women here, gentle friends, devoted wives, loving mothers, who would be
willing that their domestics should remain indoors, week in and week out,
and, where they are confined in the ridiculous American flat, never see
the light of day. In fact, though the Americans do not know it, and would
be shocked to be told it, their servants are really slaves, who are none
the less slaves because they cannot be beaten, or bought and sold except
by the week or month, and for the price which they fix themselves, and
themselves receive in the form of wages. They are social outlaws, so far
as the society of the family they serve is concerned, and they are
restricted in the visits they receive and pay among themselves. They are
given the worst rooms in the house, and they are fed with the food that
they have prepared, only when it comes cold from the family table; in the
wealthier houses, where many of them are kept, they are supplied with a
coarser and cheaper victual bought and cooked for them apart from that
provided for the family. They are subject, at all hours, to the pleasure
or caprice of the master or mistress. Every circumstance of their life is
an affront to that just self-respect which even Americans allow is the
right of every human being. With the rich, they are said to be sometimes
indolent, dishonest, mendacious, and all that Plato long ago explained
that slaves must be; but in the middle-class families they are mostly
faithful, diligent, and reliable in a degree that would put to shame most
men who hold positions of trust, and would leave many ladies whom they
relieve of work without ground for comparison.

IX

After Mrs. Makely had told me about the New York house, we began to talk
of the domestic service, and I ventured to hint some of the things that I
have so plainly said to you. She frankly consented to my whole view of
the matter, for if she wishes to make an effect or gain a point she has a
magnanimity that stops at nothing short of self-devotion. "I know it,"
she said. "You are perfectly right; but here we are, and what are we to
do? What do you do in Altruria, I should like to know?"

I said that in Altruria we all worked, and that personal service was
honored among us like medical attendance in America; I did not know what
other comparison to make; but I said that any one in health would think
it as unwholesome and as immoral to let another serve him as to let a
doctor physic him. At this Mrs. Makely and her husband laughed so that I
found myself unable to go on for some moments, till Mrs. Makely, with a
final shriek, shouted to him: "Dick, do stop, or I shall die! Excuse me,
Mr. Homos, but you are so deliciously funny, and I know you're just
joking. You _won't_ mind my laughing? Do go on."

I tried to give her some notion as to how we manage, in our common life,
which we have simplified so much beyond anything that this barbarous
people dream of; and she grew a little soberer as I went on, and seemed
at least to believe that I was not, as her husband said, stuffing them;
but she ended, as they always do here, by saying that it might be all
very well in Altruria, but it would never do in America, and that it was
contrary to human nature to have so many things done in common. "Now,
I'll tell you," she said. "After we broke up housekeeping in Thirty-third
Street, we stored our furniture--"

"Excuse me," I said. "How--stored?"

"Oh, I dare say you never store your furniture in Altruria. But here we
have hundreds of storage warehouses of all sorts and sizes, packed with
furniture that people put into them when they go to Europe, or get sick
to death of servants and the whole bother of house-keeping; and that's
what we did; and then, as my husband says, we browsed about for a year
or two. First, we tried hotelling it, and we took a hotel apartment
furnished, and dined at the hotel table, until I certainly thought I
should go off, I got so tired of it. Then we hired a suite in one of the
family hotels that there are so many of, and got out enough of our
things to furnish it, and had our meals in our rooms; they let you do
that for the same price, often they are _glad_ to have you, for the
dining-room is so packed. But everything got to tasting just the same as
everything else, and my husband had the dyspepsia so bad he couldn't half
attend to business, and I suffered from indigestion myself, cooped up in
a few small rooms, that way; and the dog almost died; and finally we gave
that up, and took an apartment, and got out our things--the storage cost
as much as the rent of a small house--and put them into it, and had a
caterer send in the meals as they do in Europe. But it isn't the same
here as it is in Europe, and we got so sick of it in a month that I
thought I should scream when I saw the same old dishes coming on the
table, day after day. We had to keep one servant--excuse me, Mr. Homos:
_domestic_--anyway, to look after the table and the parlor and
chamber work, and my husband said we might as well be hung for a sheep as
a lamb, and so we got in a cook; and, bad as it is, it's twenty million
times better than anything else you can do. Servants are a plague, but
you have got to have them, and so I have resigned myself to the will of
Providence. If they don't like it, neither do I, and so I fancy it's
about as broad as it's long." I have found this is a favorite phrase of
Mrs. Makely's, and that it seems to give her a great deal of comfort.

"And you don't feel that there's any harm in it?" I ventured to ask.

"Harm in it?" she repeated. "Why, aren't the poor things glad to get the
work? What would they do without it?"

"From what I see of your conditions I should be afraid that they would
starve," I said.

"Yes, they can't all get places in shops or restaurants, and they have to
do something, or starve, as you say," she said; and she seemed to think
what I had said was a concession to her position.

"But if it were your own case?" I suggested. "If you had no alternatives
but starvation and domestic service, you would think there was harm in
it, even although you were glad to take a servant's place?"

I saw her flush, and she answered, haughtily, "You must excuse me if I
refuse to imagine myself taking a servant's place, even for the sake of
argument."

"And you are quite right," I said. "Your American instinct is too strong
to brook even in imagination the indignities which seem daily, hourly,
and momently inflicted upon servants in your system."

To my great astonishment she seemed delighted by this conclusion. "Yes,"
she said, and she smiled radiantly, "and now you understand how it is
that American girls won't go out to service, though the pay is so much
better and they are so much better housed and fed--and everything.
Besides," she added, with an irrelevance which always amuses her husband,
though I should be alarmed by it for her sanity if I did not find it so
characteristic of women here, who seem to be mentally characterized by
the illogicality of the civilization, "they're not half so good as the
foreign servants. They've been brought up in homes of their own, and
they're uppish, and they have no idea of anything but third-rate
boarding-house cooking, and they're always hoping to get married, so
that, really, you have no peace of your life with them."

"And it never seems to you that the whole relation is wrong?" I asked.

"What relation?"

"That between maid and mistress, the hirer and the hireling."

"Why, good gracious!" she burst out. "Didn't Christ himself say that the
laborer was worthy of his hire? And how would you get your work done, if
you didn't pay for it?"

"It might be done for you, when you could not do it yourself, from
affection."

"From affection!" she returned, with the deepest derision. "Well, I
rather think I _shall_ have to do it myself if I want it done
from affection! But I suppose you think I _ought_ to do it
myself, as the Altrurian ladies do! I can tell you that in America it
would be impossible for a lady to do her own work, and there are no
intelligence-offices where you can find girls that want to work for love.
It's as broad as it's long."

"It's simply business," her husband said.

They were right, my dear friend, and I was wrong, strange as it must
appear to you. The tie of service, which we think as sacred as the tie of
blood, can be here only a business relation, and in these conditions
service must forever be grudgingly given and grudgingly paid. There is
something in it, I do not quite know what, for I can never place myself
precisely in an American's place, that degrades the poor creatures who
serve, so that they must not only be social outcasts, but must leave such
a taint of dishonor on their work that one cannot even do it for one's
self without a sense of outraged dignity. You might account for this in
Europe, where ages of prescriptive wrong have distorted the relation out
of all human wholesomeness and Christian loveliness; but in America,
where many, and perhaps most, of those who keep servants and call them so
are but a single generation from fathers who earned their bread by the
sweat of their brows, and from mothers who nobly served in all household
offices, it is in the last degree bewildering. I can only account for it
by that bedevilment of the entire American ideal through the retention of
the English economy when the English polity was rejected. But at the
heart of America there is this ridiculous contradiction, and it must
remain there until the whole country is Altrurianized. There is no other
hope; but I did not now urge this point, and we turned to talk of other
things, related to the matters we had been discussing.

"The men," said Mrs. Makely, "get out of the whole bother very nicely, as
long as they are single, and even when they're married they are apt to
run off to the club when there's a prolonged upheaval in the kitchen."

"_I_ don't, Dolly," suggested her husband.

"No, _you_ don't, Dick," she returned, fondly. "But there are not
many like you."

He went on, with a wink at me, "I never live at the club, except in
summer, when you go away to the mountains."

"Well, you know I can't very well take you with me," she said.

"Oh, I couldn't leave my business, anyway," he said, and he laughed.

X

I had noticed the vast and splendid club-houses in the best places in the
city, and I had often wondered about their life, which seemed to me a
blind groping towards our own, though only upon terms that forbade it to
those who most needed it. The clubs here are not like our groups, the
free association of sympathetic people, though one is a little more
literary, or commercial, or scientific, or political than another; but
the entrance to each is more or less jealously guarded; there is an
initiation-fee, and there are annual dues, which are usually heavy enough
to exclude all but the professional and business classes, though there
are, of course, successful artists and authors in them. During the past
winter I visited some of the most characteristic, where I dined and
supped with the members, or came alone when one of these put me down, for
a fortnight or a month.

They are equipped with kitchens and cellars, and their wines and dishes
are of the best. Each is, in fact, like a luxurious private house on a
large scale; outwardly they are palaces, and inwardly they have every
feature and function of a princely residence complete, even to a certain
number of guest-chambers, where members may pass the night, or stay
indefinitely in some cases, and actually live at the club. The club,
however, is known only to the cities and larger towns, in this highly
developed form; to the ordinary, simple American of the country, or of
the country town of five or ten thousand people, a New York club would be
as strange as it would be to any Altrurian.

"Do many of the husbands left behind in the summer live at the club?" I
asked.

"All that _have_ a club do," he said. "Often there's a very good
table d'hote dinner that you couldn't begin to get for the same price
anywhere else; and there are a lot of good fellows there, and you can
come pretty near forgetting that you're homeless, or even that you're
married."

He laughed, and his wife said: "You ought to be ashamed, Dick; and me
worrying about you all the time I'm away, and wondering what the cook
gives you here. Yes," she continued, addressing me, "that's the worst
thing about the clubs. They make the men so comfortable that they say
it's one of the principal obstacles to early marriages. The young men try
to get lodgings near them, so that they can take their meals there, and
they know they get much better things to eat than they could have in a
house of their own at a great deal more expense, and so they simply don't
think of getting married. Of course," she said, with that wonderful,
unintentional, or at least unconscious, frankness of hers, "I don't blame
the clubs altogether. There's no use denying that girls are expensively
brought up, and that a young man has to think twice before taking one of
them out of the kind of home she's used to and putting her into the kind
of home he can give her. If the clubs have killed early marriages,
the women have created the clubs."

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15