V
Detached Thoughts on Boarding
BOARDING is a puzzling and provocative subject for any student of human nature. Some clue to its psychology is revealed by the fact that even Adam and Eve got tired of it. Eden itself could not keep them from wanting their own ménage. One can conjecture the course of their growing ennui and irritation as the suspicion dawned upon them that in Paradise they were not getting all the comforts of home. Having nothing to do but board, they probably conversed a great deal about their food, when the celestial ministrants were out of earshot, and eventually decided that they could have run the table a great deal better themselves. Then, too, they had no privacy, they were absolutely at the mercy of any archangel who might choose to drop in on them. Possibly, also, Eve felt that Eden was no sort of place for bringing up children. They might be spoiled by the attentions of other boarders, elephant or ape, fish or fowl, any one of a perfectly indiscriminate menagerie, while she herself, as a mother, might be subjected to constant advice from angels who did not know one thing more about human babies than she did herself. After Eve had thought over these matters for some time, and whispered them all to Adam, she did what many another boarder has done since; she up and precipitated a crisis.
The case of Adam and Eve is sufficiently typical to afford some light upon the puzzling effects of boarding, but not quite enough illumination to satisfy the psychologist. He is teased by the conviction that there is more in this matter than he can get at. Without an ultimate analysis of causes it may still be of interest to examine some results to the human spirit of both the selling and the buying of house-room, and to offer some tentative explanation of the curious phenomena that for many of us are too familiar for attention.
We all recognize as a distinct human type the woman who keeps boarders. One writes woman rather than man, not that in strict accuracy one could say that men never keep boarders; when men do engage in the business, however, they do so by wholesale, never by retail, while it is precisely the increased personal intimacy of the retail relation that occasions the peculiar blight incurred by the proprietor of a boarding-house, but escaped by the proprietor of a hotel. There is an expression familiar to our tongues, distressing in its figurative suggestion, which is frequently descriptive of the class under discussion, “decayed gentlewoman.” No one knows whether a gentlewoman takes boarders because she has decayed or whether she decays because she takes them. Of course, not all women who take boarders are decrepit either in soul or body,—some of them are very buxom indeed; and, equally, not all are refined,—some of them are refreshingly vulgar; still, as a whole, the attributes inherent in the term “decayed gentlewoman” so generally characterize the profession that in whatever country one travels one is received by ladies so consciously redolent of better days as to shame a boarder for not having had better days himself. However adroitly they conceal their emotions, women who entertain paying guests generally have toward their occupation a feeling of perpetual apology or of perpetual resentment. Sometimes the apology element predominates, and then a blundering boarder had better be mindful of the sensitive toes of his hostess; sometimes the resentment is uppermost, and then the boarder had better be mindful for his own toes. There is no reason why these facts should characterize so worthy a business, and there are conspicuous exceptions in which both the woman and the domicile remain invincibly warm-hearted and welcoming, but the rule still holds that only the rarest of women can invite the public into her home and not herself suffer from the exposure, only the rarest of women can as the mistress of a boarding-house still be perfectly herself.
Having boarders, however, is not so demoralizing as being a boarder. The chronic boarder is an easily recognizable type, fat, fussy, futile, and usually feminine. This caustic characterization does not apply to women who go out by the day to any form of scrubbing, as doctors, lawyers, or whatnot, professional women too busy for carping; it is the woman who has no profession except boarding that suffers its utmost injury. To give primary attention to the manner in which one is fed and lodged has the same effect as any other reversion to an animal attitude. The faces of women who do nothing but keep house are always harassed; the faces of women who do nothing but board are always vacuous. Men-boarders in a house are generally preferred to women; a he-boarder is more to be desired than a she-boarder because there is less of him underfoot. On the other hand, since a man can always beat a woman on her own ground whenever he thinks it worth while, a man who gives his undivided attention to his boarding can in fume and fuss out-boarder any woman.
The insidious influence of boarding upon the spirit is most evident when we watch it operate upon a child. We all know the type of youngster that even the very best of boarding-houses is prone to produce. He is noisy, aggressive, self-conscious, and yet to sympathetic penetration profoundly pathetic. He knows that all his little life is overheard, that every room knows when he is scolded or spanked or entreated. A grown-up learns how to conceal his soul from even boarding-house scrutiny, but a child has no refuge except in slamming doors and thundering on the stairs and jumping into the secrets of those who have trespassed upon his own.
The effect of boarding upon our own soul may best be seen by contrasting our reactions to our geography, according as we wake in the morning to find ourselves at home, in a friend’s home, or in a boarding-house. At home our attitude toward the ensuing day is one of absolute sincerity,—we expect to be our best self or our worst, for frankness is the chief comfort of kinship; if, on the other hand, we open our eyes in somebody’s guest chamber, we marshal our forces to insure our good behavior, we owe it to our host to put out best foot foremost; but if we wake in a boarding-house? There our morning resolve reduces itself to the single sordid intention to get our money’s worth. This latent hostility is ignominious and unworthy, but it is true. Yet we all know that any hostelry is richer in Samaritan opportunities than the road to Jericho.
The detriment due to boarding does not confine itself to animate beings, but extends to the inanimate. In a boarding-house even the chairs look protesting and sat upon. The curtains seem exhausted by enforced welcome. The overworked kitchen has not enough pride left to keep its savors to itself. The piano has clattered until it has forgotten it was ever meant for music. The doom of dejection falls upon a boarding-house both without and within, so that one always regrets its entrance into a street cozy with homes. Its windows stare forth so blankly that the homes grow uncomfortable and move away. There is a blur over the face-walls of a boarding-place obliterating the individuality to which every house has a right.
This very absence of personality gives the boarding-house a certain personality of its own. The effort to analyze this character has made the boarding-house a favorite background with story-writers. Balzac, in “Père Goriot,” caught and reproduced its very soul as well as the soul of the homeless home-lover that it harbored. The frequency of the hall bedroom and the long table in magazine stories to-day suggests the wistful familiarity with both of writer and reader. The juxtaposition of types in a group bound together by no more congenial tie than the brute need of food and shelter has always opened a fascinating field to the romancer from Chaucer’s day to ours.
The mere mention of Chaucer’s name is eloquent with contrast, for surely the Tabard was no bleak spot, but warm and tingling with hospitality. Yet even Chaucer’s blithe company had a sharp eye and a gossipy tongue ready for each other’s foibles, and if they had remained together too long, it would have taken more than mine host to keep them in order, but fortunately they had their picnic and parted. Another week or two and even the Canterbury pilgrims might have degenerated into boarders, and dear knows what metamorphosis mine host the merry, might have undergone.
To place Balzac’s boarding-house and Chaucer’s Tabard side by side is to produce a pregnant contrast. Yet if the primary purpose of both is akin, why the world of difference connoted by the word “boarding-house” and the word “inn”? Inn suggests comfort, coziness, congenial conversation, but, alas, it also suggests a dear departed day. The only inns left are survivors from dead decades, and they themselves have no descendants. “Mine ease in mine inn” is a phrase from the past.
It is interesting to examine the difference in meaning of the three types of hostelry—hotel, boarding-house, and inn. The hotel does not try to be something it is not. It neither offers nor expects anything personal. Its purpose is to make money out of the visitor, as his purpose is to get comfort out of it. A hotel is not a home, and it does not pretend to be. Now a boarding-house is pathetic because it is always trying to be a home when it is not. It is we, the boarders, who are responsible for its being the wistful anomaly that it is, for at one moment we demand of it the indifference of a hotel and the next the coziness of a home, and at all moments we ask of it that which money cannot buy—hospitality.
The little word inn stands apart from those other two, hotel and boarding-house, and its charm lies as much in its literary aroma as its actuality. We visit inns oftener in books than in life, but in both they have the same characteristics. The tiniest inn is always big enough for personality. The innkeeper is a person, the guest is a person, the cook, the boots, the hostler, they are all real persons. There is time for flavoring food with conversation. The chairs are friendly and inviting. The hearth leaps warm with welcome. But note well, one sometimes lives at a hotel, one often lives at a boarding-house, but one never lives at an inn, one merely stops. The reason why the welcome and the speeding of an inn can be so warm and genuine is that host and guest never have too much of each other. Both can present their best foot for three days when a stretch of three weeks would strain its tendons. In an inn food never seems skimped, the financial aspect never seems prominent, because the guest never stays long enough to discover sordid secrets, nor long enough to have his own private affairs invaded. Company manners, the outward and visible sign of hospitality’s inward and spiritual grace, can prevail in an inn, for the simple reason that no matter how often one returns, exactly as often one departs.
It is clearly easier to enumerate the effects of boarding upon human nature than to ascertain the psychological causes underlying them. One ventures to hazard a few random reasons, all interrelated and all growing out of the fact that we are still cave-dwellers at heart. The cave household feared and hated the stranger; and with good cause. They eyed him askance, exactly as the other boarders in a house eye the recent comer. The newest boarder never coalesces with the group until the advent of another still newer, when he is tentatively admitted to ranks needing union against the latest intruder. This survival of prehistoric manners may be observed and experienced in any boarding-house.
The hostility of older occupants toward the stranger is exactly matched by his suspicion of them, hostile suspicion always, no matter how obsequiously concealed. When a cave-dweller penetrated the seclusion of another cave, he was wary, on the defensive, and this attitude made him critical of the inmates, of course, and therefore, for them, a person to fear. We are still afraid of the stranger, of his eye that may see, and his tongue that may tell, our secrets. Boarding hurts us because we suffer continual abrasion of our reserve. In a boarding-house, family life has to go on in whispers; strangers are in our midst looking and listening, and even if they are friendly their attention is irksome: Eve got tired of having even the angels around all the time.
The human soul demands retirement, but is often unwilling to pay the price. Home-making is to be had only by house-keeping. In order to live by ourselves we have to take care of ourselves, and the effort to evade this issue drives us to the boarding-house. The home-keeping instinct is, however, as active in us as in our cave-dwelling ancestors, only they knew better than to try to suppress it. They knew they wanted seclusion, and so they rolled a rock to the cave-mouth, and possessed their souls in privacy. It is our doom to inherit from them a desire for our own front door, in order that we may not have to sue for entrance at some one else’s door, and also that we may never have to open ours except when we do so in free and voluntary welcome. Boarding is often necessary, but it goes contrary to impulses as ineradicable in us as nest-making in a bird. Even the feminists, when they inveigh against family life, will be found not free from prehistoric impulses toward privacy. They do not advocate caravansary existence, but rather the group system, in all its cave-dweller isolation; only the group must be based on congeniality, not on mere arbitrary and accidental kinship.
The joy of slamming our own front door upon the world is only equaled by the joy of flinging that door wide to the world when we wish to. Of all commodities hospitality should be free from money-taint. The trouble with boarding is that it attempts to buy and sell a welcome. Everything is cheapened the moment we can pay a price for it. The instant we lay our dollars on the counter, we have the right to criticize our purchase. A buyer does not have to say thank you with his lips nor yet with his heart, and this is why a certain uncouthness is to be incurred in any purely commercial relation. Hospitality is essentially not sordid, but spiritual: a host is gracious with the generosity that offers what money cannot buy, a guest is gracious with the gratitude that accepts what money cannot pay for. Boarding is an anomalous and enforced relation between people who offer and accept house-room, and only those can escape its blight who have the power always to elevate the commercial to the plane of the human and the friendly. Luckily, among this small but noble company are many persons that board and many that take boarders. The existence of this minority does not alter the fact that for most of us boarding is a demoralizing occupation. The reason lies deep: hospitality, given or received, is too sacred for barter.
VI
The Lady Alone at Night
I AM a lady, and a coward. The two facts have no relation to each other, but both are necessary to a comprehension of my sentiments about to be delivered. Soberly revolving the universe in my mind, I find only one thing of which I am sure I am not afraid, and that is—dying. I mean merest dying, for I am as fearsome as any of being tossed in air, disjecta membra, by an automobile; of furnishing lingering sweetness to an epicurean tiger; of being played with, and pawed and tweaked by disease, cat-and-mouse-like; it is only the actual slipping by the portal of which I am not afraid. With this sole exception, I am afraid of everything: firecrackers, reptiles, drunken cooks, dogs, tunnels, trolleys, and caterpillars. About ghosts I am a little uncertain; experience leads me to conjecture that ghosts are usually your own fault: that is, they are a little like rattlesnakes; if you don’t intrude, neither will they. But that circumstance which is to me the very quintessence of terror is Night and A Man. I speak hypothetically—it has never happened.
Strange what a difference mere plurality of a noun and mere presence or absence of an article make to my mind. Now Men, Man, and A Man stand for most diverse conceptions. Man,—I think of Mr. Alexander Pope, and of a creature of watery intellect, whose vitality is something between that of a frog and a jumping-jack, and who is diddled puppet-wise by an equally anæmic deity. Man is humanity dehumanized, but Men are about the most human thing there is. Men are the big people, clean-scrubbed spiritually and physically, who come to see you and take you about, and look after the universe, and keep it in a good humor; who, when you are making a fool of yourself, laugh at you in a genial, masculine fashion. In a thin, tentative, feminine way, you try to imitate, and the effort, however quavering, somehow makes you feel better. Men, of your own family or out of it, sometimes put you on trains, and take care of you—sometimes. Thus Men.
But A Man—ugh! I saw him first in a nightmare when I was six. He wore a black Prince Albert, and on his head three high hats jammed down one on top of the other. He stood on the cone of a hill, black as a coal against the red light of fires in the rear. From under his three hats he grinned at me, and on that black hill, against that lurid sky, he danced and danced and danced. He frightens me still. It is since then that Night and A Man have been my crown of terrors. A Man lurks in every darkened doorway, stretches an arm from every tree trunk, pursues me,—pat, pat, pat,—and fades into the common light of lamp and fire only when I am safely under my own roof-tree. Even in the daytime, A Man never deserts me: he haunts the solitary country lanes, lush and lovely with spring; he pops out upon me from mountain woods; on the stretches of beach he lurks just around the point. He is always there; at least, I suppose he is, for I never am—alone.
By day, A Man is a leering horror, but at night he becomes, like that figure in my dream, pure devil. I am a suburbanite, and as I said before, a lady, a laboring lady. This is why I find myself not infrequently alone at night. The alarm set a-quiver when I descend from the social, bright-lit, suburban car and plunge forth into the dark is something that custom cannot stale. Yet sometimes the spell of the night is as a buckler against fear, making me wonder if solitude is really terror, genuine solitude, solitude belonging to me, and not to A Man. I remember one early winter evening, white with a recent snowfall; there had been an ice storm, and our trees were all incased, each tiniest twig, and the full moon rode low: I forgot A Man, in every nerve I was glad to be alone, but hark, a step in the distance, and earth again!
It is worth some study, the sensation of that approaching step, that emerging shadow,—bifurcated or petticoated, two feet or four? I am never afraid of two men: neither actually nor grammatically can A Man be two. Joseph and the Babes in the Wood for precedent, dissension steps in between violence and its victim so soon as the aggressive party is multiplied by even two. And as for a group of men, whatever their caste or condition, however socially uncouth, by mere virtue of numbers they become a protection rather than a peril; by mere aggregate of protective instinct, A Man sufficiently multiplied equals Men (supra).
In addition to these distinctions in regard to the number of your potential aggressor, there are also distinctions geographic and geometric. I appeal to any lady of my sex and condition, whether there is not the greatest possible difference in amount of peril to be inferred between the man who is walking in front of you on a lonely street, and the man who is walking behind. If a man paces on soberly and regularly some few discreet rods ahead, straightway he is enhaloed with succor and salvation,—you are safe, you need only to call him in your need, and he will save. But should he go more slowly, fall behind, then in the very instant of passing you this same protecting saint becomes decanonized, and worse. There is nothing so suspicious as this dropping behind. True, you preserve a bold back, walk no faster,—note, sir, my valiancy, my unconcern,—but still your knee crooks for flight, and your vocal cords contract for that scream you wonder if you could ever really utter. A corresponding transformation in moral intention, blackguard and chevalier, is possible for the man in your rear. On a recent evening I was hurrying home along the solitary street—steps behind! Flying, pursuing steps! Nearer, nearer! Upon me, and my heart sickened and stopped beating! But past me, fleeting on and on, disappearing, oh, too swiftly! For as he left me so quickly again to solitude, I could hardly resist an impulse to gather up my skirts and scamper after, after my retreating protector. I think he made his train.
I have been at some pains to prove the second of my introductory assertions. The reason I have not tried to prove the first is explained by the difference between the essay and polite society. In polite society, one is under the obligation of confessing one’s virtues, not blatantly, but none the less persistently, wearily,—one’s dogging old virtues, as if it were not enough of a bore to live with them in private without having to be seen with them in public. In the essay one may have the exquisite pleasure of confessing one’s vices. In society I must be a lady; in the essay I may be, as here and now, a coward.
VII
In Sickness and in Health
I HAVE been sick, but not utterly,—a tooth. I am in the convalescent’s mood of confidence and confession; therefore, I write in haste, for in health I am buoyant and amiable, and not fluently penitent; indeed, there is little then to be penitent about. For a week I have been very unpleasant, and the circumstance leads to remarks on the moral disintegration attendant upon indisposition. I speak of petty disorders, for illnesses of dramatic magnitude, a run of typhoid for instance, sometimes tend to spiritual upbuilding,—at least, it is so demonstrated in fiction. Doubtless the pawing of the white horse in the dooryard has a soothing effect upon the patient’s nerves, but illnesses in which one has not the comfort of composing one’s epitaph are not composing to the soul. The lesser ailments make appalling holes in our integrity: myself last week threw a teaspoon at my most immediate forbear. Ferocious, but it was the elemental ferocity of suffering. It is a fact, belonging rather to the science of psychology than of medicine, that small sicknesses hurt more than big ones. I appeal to all connoisseurs in invalidism whether a tooth, an ear, an ankle, are not more direct in their methods of torture than pneumonia, smallpox, or appendicitis. Believing this, I have always had much sympathy for the vilified hero of a certain novelette of my acquaintance; in this romance, the husband has a tooth; the wife, a heart,—a literal heart, mechanical, physiological. Everybody knows which suffered more, and yet because the gentleman got a little crusty over a most outrageous molar, how joyously the author trounced him through page after page! I am hot with indignation. There ought to be a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Creations. Manufacturers of heroes and heroines should not be allowed to flay and burn and quarter so wantonly as they do; a humane reading public should take from them the prerogative of so unnatural a parenthood.
This one man should have been forgiven; he had a toothache, and non-fatal illnesses may make monsters of the meekest of us; but fortunately, the illness being temporary, so is the monster. Only the recollection is humiliating; I am recovered, but I shudder at the legion so recently cast out of me. Sickness sets free all the processes of atavism, and whirls us back into savagery at a breathless rate. The first bit of baggage we leave behind us on this rapid return journey is family affection. Last week my kin stood about my couch day and night with poultices and sympathy in their hands. I took the poultices and tossed back evil words out of my mouth. I looked upon my relatives with frankest loathing. Why? Their insulting forbearance, their aggressive meekness, their poor-sufferer-here-is-my-other-cheek attitude stirred the foundations of my bile. Their serene patience provoked my utmost effort to destroy it, and I was impotent; their invulnerability was an affront to my powers of invention. My own possibilities of vituperation were only less surprising to me than the endurance of the abused. And all the time that I listened to my own reviling tongue, my self-respect was ebbing from me most uncomfortably,—and it was all their fault.
A concomitant loss in this dissolving of our civilization is that of the sense of humor. Being so recently returned from barbarism and its beyond, I can confidently assert that the ape and the savage, while they may be laughable, do not laugh. In the sickroom of the not very sick, the brightest witticisms seem only studied banalities. There is no comedy in the incidents of ministration; it is all unrelieved tragedy. Yet it is not the humorous, but the humor that is lacking, for frequently the situations are appreciated at recovery, and furnish us amusement at intervals for a lifetime. I doubt whether this suspension of the processes of humor could be established in the case of serious illness, admitting of disastrous outcome. There are soldiers a-plenty who have jested at their wounds, and instances enough on record where a timely jest or a merry incident has saved the day. I cite one such situation. A husband lay at death’s door, and the door was ajar. It was midnight, and the wife watched. Suddenly the patient seemed to be sinking, slipping from her. She put the hartshorn bottle to his nostrils, but he could smell nothing. Both were terrified as they realized the import of this. Then the wife glancing down discovered that the bottle contained witch-hazel. The man laughed—and lived.
In serious illness there is perhaps sometimes a positive stimulus to the comic sensibilities; there is such a thing as dying game, or the fight for life may be worth some bravado. But imagine feeling gamy with tonsillitis or a felon on your finger; there is absolutely no histrionic appeal. If your sickness has no spice of fatality, you might just as well give up; you won’t see the light of humor again until you recover.
No love in our heart, no humor in our head, there is another evil of savagery thrust upon us by illness. It is the sudden acquisition of personality by inanimate objects. What possibilities of abusive conduct lurk within the four walls of a room yesterday, in health, perfectly inoffensive! What malevolence in the wall-paper! Such a sneaking, underhand, leering pattern for curtains with any pretensions to respectability! How tipsy the books look, crowding and pushing themselves askew for very perversity! No amount of chastisement will make the pillows conduct themselves comfortably. There is something about the billows of that malicious counterpane that makes me think of the oozy, oily, shiny unpleasantness of the ocean when the sailboat is becalmed. I am as much at the mercy of my furniture as any Fiji before his fetish.
Thus sickness reduces us to cave-dwellers or gorillas rampant, by perhaps just a day of pain no greater in compass than one’s little finger-nail,—soulful, strenuous, high-stepping beings though we are! Sad enough to think about; yet on the other hand, of all insupportables, the people whom sickness makes saints are the most contemptible. I know men and ladies, in health normal, human, unworthy, likable,—but give them so much as a cold in the head, and at once their smile smacks of Heaven, and their eyes are uplift with the watery mysticism of those about to be canonized. When a small boy I know voluntarily allows his younger sister a canter on his rocking-horse, his nurse immediately applies red flannel and turpentine; generosity with him is a sure presage of sore throat. I have seen great strapping lads, full of sin, reduced to sudden and spurious saint-hood by a black eye. There is no more unfeeling conduct than patient suffering,—there is nothing more alarming to an anxious family than a course of virtuous endurance obstinately persisted in. So long as you rage and are unseemly your kinsfolk will never pipe their eye, but docility under the minor physical afflictions makes a stubbed toe as much a matter of apprehension as angina pectoris. This being good when sick is a bid for unmerited martyrdom. These gentle sufferers are likely to employ the emaciated voice of those who ail, knowing well that the bellow of rebellion is much too reassuring. I am glad I am not as one of these; sick, I throw things.
Thus all mankind and all woman and child kind, too, are divided, though unevenly, into those who are better in sickness and those who are worse. The marriage service on examination will be found to be a very canny document, and its compilers nowhere showed greater shrewdness than in just that little phrase which insures conjugal devotion in sickness and in health. For of some, sickness makes Mr. Hydes, and of others, Dr. Jekylls, and in the matter of spouses, how in the world can the contracting parties foresee, demon or angel, which will develop, or, having developed, which will be better company?
VIII
An Educational Fantasy
WHEN I look back upon a half-century of wasted life, I find that there are no years that accuse me of neglected opportunity more poignantly than those between five and twelve. If only I had had the foresight then to apply myself with earnestness to the tasks set before me! If only now I possessed those priceless stores of knowledge that I feel sure must then have been pumped into me! That I must have received abundant elementary instruction I feel confident, although I do not in the least remember receiving it. My purely academic activities at this period remain wrapped in obscurity, while other memories are lively enough. I distinctly recall the scientific invention displayed in our efforts to produce new shades and colors in the soapy water with which we cleaned our slates. It was I who discovered that the yolk of an egg well beaten made a more satisfactory admixture than butter, even though both are equally yellow to begin with. I remember how one may by judicious spooning out with a pin, extract the inner riches of a chocolate drop without visible disturbance of the outer crust. Despite my scholastic indifference, I can have been no sluggard, without spirit, for of my fifty coevals there was not one who could tag me in the open except Percy Dent alone, and that only (but in my wisdom I never let him discover the fact) when I would let him; well do I recollect with what éclat, with what flutter of petticoats and pinafore, I could execute a pas seul at hop-scotch. These attainments, the thrill of which still warms me, prove me not without ambition;—
Annulling youth’s brief years,
Do I remonstrate,”
but for
Of sense and outward things,”—
such as the multiplication table, and the capital of Arizona, and the difference between an adjective and an adverb,—questionings so obstinate that I am convinced that not even at ten years old did I know the answers; hinc illæ lacrimæ.
To some extent it is possible to go back and piece out the stitches dropped in the course of an education; only, one is not allowed to go back so far as I desire. Roughly speaking, I should say that life does not allow one to relearn what one has failed to learn before sixteen, whereas it is the knowledge belonging to eight years, and ten and twelve, after which I hunger and thirst. I wish some one would open a school for able-minded but ignorant grown-ups. Believe me, enough of us could be found to attend, enough of us glad to jump down from our college chairs, to leave our laboratories with their clutter of advanced research, our counting-houses with their problems, and gladly go to school, gladly learn once and forever how much nine times thirteen is, and build Vesuvius past and present out of clay, and follow out of doors some charming young lady who would tell us exactly what the birds and the wild waves are saying.
But I stipulate at the outset that I will have no offensive superiority in my instructors. If I am to learn as a child I will be treated as a child. I will have no one caviling at me, for instance, because I do not know when Washington was born. I never did know when Washington was born, but I desire now to amend this my iniquity of ignorance, and I am even minded, if only my teachers will be patient, to plod on from the Revolution to the Civil War, and to learn the succession of battles thereof, and which side won them. I wish my instructors to understand that my humility of spirit needs no augmenting on their part. I wish them to be as sweetly patient and cheerily maternal as they would be to my daughter’s daughter. I wish my teachers to administer boundary lines but mildly, and to give me their minimum doses of mental arithmetic; for in mathematics and geography my mind is willing but weak. I think I could promise that patience in my instructors would have a reward in a proficiency of pupil such as they could never hope to win from the iniquitous immature, on whose preoccupied minds and thankless hearts they squander such devotion.
What a joyous picture it is, as I conjure it up, this going to school again! What happiness to slip out of our grown-up households, and go forth into the morning, with book-strap and luncheon in hand, to meet by the way our harried and over-busy acquaintance, men and women, some whiteheaded in ignorance, perhaps, all skipping and dancing along to the same glad place. Gleeful, we enter a sunny room with geraniums on the window-sill, bright maps on the wall, and a beautiful young lady at the desk. We are no longer hard and hardened children: our hearts as well as our intellects are softened by the debility of age, and we appreciate the graciousness of our instructor with the rose in her belt, the milk of human kindness in her eye, and the carefully preserved smile upon her lips. It is with responsive smiles of gratitude that we feel arithmetic and history and geography trickling into our craniums from the cranium of our teacher. Then, when she feels that, still willing, we are perhaps grown weary with well-doing, she gives a signal, and with one accord we raise our cracked voices in ecstatic, yet instructive song, in which perhaps we are poetically informed of some new fact about the firefly, or the green grass, or perhaps our own gastronomy, or in glittering phrase we unweave the rainbow into the colors of the spectrum. Or, to forestall the ennui resulting from our too earnest effort, our instructor bids us stretch our cramped, rheumatic limbs, and with graceful contortions of her lithe young body, directs us as we prance stiffly through a calisthenic exercise.
But it is not on these diversions that my fancy lingers most fondly, but on those more solid parts of our education. How happy I should be, for example, if I could only add, both in my head and on paper! How many bewildered and distrustful moments would thus be eliminated from my existence! And if to a proficiency in addition I superadded an adeptness in subtraction, then perhaps on some proud day might my opinion of the bulk of my bank account approximate more nearly the opinion of the cashier. And if my rudimentary bump of mathematics were carefully manipulated according to the newest system of educational massage, I might even progress as far as percentage. I might learn how to be richer if I could once understand the allurements of compound interest. So much depends on the attitude of mind that I wonder whether, if I approached fractions in a spirit of friendliness rather than of enmity to the knife, they would reward me by allowing me an entrance into their intricacies, so that I could with impunity buy things on the bias, or estimate the reduction by the dozen of merchandise that tags a half-cent to its price when purchased singly. There are, besides, other valuable facts to be gleaned from the study of arithmetic, the possession of which would be matter for gloating. How proudly I should proclaim to some ignorant companion of a country stroll the number of feet in a mile! I should be happy to know under all circumstances the number of ounces in a pound, grocer’s or apothecary’s: how exalted I should be if I knew the exact amount of a scruple, that being a fact of which I am sure most of my friends are ignorant. An exhaustive knowledge of weights and measures would not only entitle one to distinction among one’s acquaintance, but would open up many new avenues of interest in one’s daily life.
History is another of the subjects for which I hanker; not history as it is administered to me now, spiced for the mature palate, with philosophy and evolution, the ebb and flow of tendencies, but history for the infant mind, the bread and milk of history, as it were. I have sometimes thought that historic research would be easier for me if sometimes I knew what men did before I was forced to understand why they did it; and a simple statement of what the actual fact is under consideration would clarify for me much of the historian’s discussion of cause and effect. I have a distinct conception of the development of the great and glorious English people, but even such knowledge would be materially strengthened if I were able instantly to sort out all the Henrys and Edwards and stow them away in their proper cubby-holes among the embarrassment of decades. As to my own respected fatherland, I have discussed intelligently the growth of the spoils system, skipping from presidential term to presidential term with all a grown-up’s airy superiority; but ask me by whom and when and why North Carolina was colonized, or just what Captain John Smith was about when Pocahontas intercepted the executioner, and you have me. I want to study history at last fairly and squarely, out of a dapper little textbook that I can stow away handily in my brain, with fine fair outlines at beginning and end of it, and all important events made salient by heavy type, and a brisk brushing together of one’s information by a résumé after each chapter. Such a primer would greatly assist me in my study of the metaphysics of history.
Yet perhaps I do but hanker after impossibilities; perhaps this school I so happily image forth would refuse to teach me what I want to know. Possibly such information belongs only to the period of my negligent infancy. Perhaps my charming young teacher, exuding the wit and wisdom of the newest normal school, would refuse to stand and deliver the knowledge I long for. If I desired the facts of the French and Indian War, I might merely be set to building wigwams and drawing braves in war-paint with colored crayons on the blackboard. Perhaps after all there is nobody left who knows how to teach the things I have forgotten. For example, do they now acknowledge in the primary curriculum that fair, old-fashioned study called penmanship? I yearn to be put once more into a copybook. I long to set forth once more wise saws in round v’s and unquestioned e’s and i’s. My fingers long since became callous and conscienceless to distinguish t from l, b from p, and I wish somebody would reform the rascally old digits. It would be a great relief to my friends and myself if I could only become legible in my old age.
One branch of knowledge little emphasized in my youth, however, I could be sure of receiving at the hands of my fair instructress of to-day,—I refer to that varied information known as “nature-study.” I am greatly deficient in nature-study. I own to an unanalytical habit of mind as regards out-of-doors. So long as the wild flowers make a glory at my feet, I have never cared much to shred them into pistil and corolla and stamen. So long as the small fowls make me melody, I have never cared to know the color of their pinfeathers. But I would fain amend all this and die knowing something. I picture our band of eager grown-ups pouring over the countryside in the wake of our animated and instructive conductor,—peering into the grass to lay bare the soul in the sod, blinking our old eyes to discover the bird in his coverts, cocking our dull ears to classify the notes of his song. I see us disporting ourselves over the landscape, busily seeking some curious knowledge, and then scampering back to our teacher with treasure trove of leaf or flower or pebble or captured insect. Sweetly she commends our application, and explains the exact nature of our find. We swell with knowledge momentarily, and return to more prosaic tasks elate, having hung its proper label on blade and bush, bird and bough. What a satisfaction it would be, after having lived with nature for a lifetime in awesome ignorance, to feel that one had at last assailed her and ascertained her secrets!
As a young child, I must have been singularly limited in mental scope; I cannot otherwise explain my well-remembered aversion to geography. Those parti-colored maps streaked with inky rivers, and bordered by the wiggling lines of the Gulf Stream, filled me with loathing. The revolving globe, and that oft-repeated image which likens the earth to an orange flattened at the poles, seemed to me almost sickening. How bitterly do I repent my obstinacy! Besides, there is not one trace left now of my former aversion. In fact, geography appeals to me to-day as if it were a brand-new branch of study, so well did I succeed in not learning it as a child. I have tried ever since reaching maturity to make up my geographical deficiencies, but with small success. Often do I find myself relegated to the dunce-seat in the minds of the company present. Despite my constant effort, there are certain countries that always elude my grasp, notably Burma and New Zealand, and there is always for me an airy insubstantiality about the entire continent of South America. Within my own beloved country, certain rivers have a way of turning up in unexpected States when I supposed that they had long comfortably emptied themselves into the ocean; and there are some cities which always flit with agility to and fro across the map.
I wonder if my early antagonism to geography might perhaps have been due to a shrewd sense of its uselessness to me at that stage of my existence. Stay-at-home as I was, why trouble myself with strange lands until necessary? Yet I was lacking in foresight, and should be grateful now if only I had packed away some information against the day I should need it, whereas nowadays I find traveling without any knowledge of geography stimulating but inconvenient. This observation leads me to a broader one on the topsy-turvy nature of our present educational sequence: those studies most astute and useless we put in the college curriculum, and those most immediate and practical to the college graduate about to grapple with life, we relegate to the elementary school, where the children neither desire nor need to master them. I would suggest a turning about. Let the college youth and maid who will suffer from a lack of practical arithmetic learn to add a column accurately; let the irresponsible infant sport with trigonometry and conic sections. These subjects unlearned or forgotten, one could still go through life unfretted by the loss. So with other subjects forever lost to us because entrusted to the intelligence of careless infancy. I would teach geography and handwriting in the senior year at college, and put philosophy in the primary school. So would the young collegian go forth upon life well equipped, and not come to fifty years burdened with regrets for knowledge lost forever,—as I. I have kept afloat in higher mathematics, I have delved into the mines of science, I have trod air with many a prancing philosopher,—therefore who so well fitted as I to appreciate at last the peace of having a foundation!
IX
My Clothes
IN the dear, naughty memoirs of Madame de Brillaye, not inaptly named by the author the “Journal of a Wicked Old Woman,” you remember that scene in the pleasaunce at Château Vernot, where the turf was like fairy velvet and the trees were tortured into all manner of shapes unarboreal,—she liked to have her trees dressed, she said,—“There is something indecent in great naked branches sprawling the good God knows where.” The little old lady is sitting with her great, old-ivory cane across her knees; she rolls it back and forth with her little old-ivory hands, while she scolds Aimée—as always. Aimée has just come through that brisk little encounter of hers with de Brontignac, and seems to have allowed her raiment to look a little battle-worn. “Go dress yourself, baby,” cries Madame Great-Aunt. “Will you let your very laces whimper? Into your rose velvet brocade, and your chin will be jerked up as if by a string. Gowns have healed more hearts than they’ve ever broken: the second, men’s; the first, women’s. Now you think you have a soul; when you are my age, you will know that women are not souls, but dresses. I look back; my history is the history of my gowns; undressed, I do not exist; my clothes are myself.” (A few lines above I used the word “remember,” but merely for the sake of an effective start-off. Madame and her memoirs do not exist outside of this paragraph. I am not the first to perpetrate a spurious quotation; I am merely the first to confess it. To proceed.) It is not the first time that the little old de Brillaye has set me thinking. Is she true in this passage, or merely epigrammatic? If my history is the history of my clothes, let me so study it out, formulate, as it were, the meditations of the pupa upon its successive integumenta. Yet the figure is infelicitous. In fact, the chrysalis image is not over-pretty as regards this side of eternity: pupa suggests the pulpy tenantry of the chestnut; this worminess may be liturgical, but it is unpleasant, is opposed to that sociability with one’s self which makes life entertaining; there is nothing chat-worthy in a worm. Be it granted me to regard these accidental rags of lawn or wool or silk I find adherent, these hardly less transitory hands and feet, this hardly more durable incasing occipital, not as a worm incarcerate, but with the detachment and uplift of the incipient butterfly.
Why not my philosophy of my clothes,—the pronoun italicized, meaning not Teufelsdröckh’s, but my own, both the clothes and the philosophy? Let me here and now make some effort toward system and definition, toward order out of chaos, in that long chapter in a woman’s story, my lady’s wardrobe. How far have these successive wrappings around and prankings out of diverse colors and tissues that are to my fellow passengers labels of my lone pilgrim soul, stating of what age, sex, nation, education, and caste I may be,—how far have these clothes of mine served for triumph or undoing in my spiritual history, the life-history of this “celestial amphibian,” myself?
The clothes of babyhood first. It is a strong-minded adult who does not grow sentimental in regarding the garments of his infancy,—those caps and bibs and socks reminding us of the wabbling heads, the aching gums, the simian feet, of the days when we, for all our present arrogance of maturity, were the sport of colic and nutritive experiment.
How explain the repugnance of the newly born to clothing, the birth-wail that pleads for the sincerity of the nude, protests against the cloakings of convention? Strange paradox that the first emotion of the baby soul should be bitterness against all those contrivances of decency, those hemstitched linens and embroidered flannels, through which the mother heart eased its brooding love. The little pink, squirming creature, fresh out of eternity, cannot be too quickly incased in the wrappings of finite human care. That is why we are so long in seeing ourselves as we really are; all the clothes and the conventions were ready for us; before we had a glimpse at ourselves we were popped into them; it is a merciful long while before we are old enough to undress sufficiently to discover, away inside, the little shy soul-thing, the naked ego, with its eerie eyes.
Thus it is that when I first find myself in those early, misty recesses I see myself all dressed, dressed for company inspection; I am a little girl wearing a crispness of brown curl and a crispness of white muslin; I wear white stockings and Burt’s shoes.—I recognize, also, quite in the same way, as enveloping facts, without which I may not present myself unclothed to my fellows, that I have a peppery, passionate temper, and an imagination,—that is what seeing people in void air and talking to them is called. Thus clad and ticketed, I go pattering along the pilgrimage.
How little clothes mattered then! All spun about with fairy films and the witchery of talking trees and singing winds, I did not remember my clothes. But at times clothes broke in abruptly on my unconsciousness. I well remember a certain mitten. It was a brown mitten on my left hand. My mother and I were walking down a flight of stone steps. I slipped; my mother caught my hand, retained, not it, but the mitten, and I bumped unimpeded to the bottom. My baby resentment against that mitten endured long. It was a surprise, a disappointment, this treachery of the accepted; so my clothes were not to be trusted; it was well to keep half an eye on them. The mitten episode marks a step in my spiritual adjustment; my clothes might at any moment go back on me. It is a lesson I have not yet found it safe to unlearn.
In those days there was a pleasant interest attached to the Burt’s shoes,—not when new and shiny, but later, when they had become well worn. Some unexpected morning I would espy a peering bit of white stocking looking out from the blackness of the leather toe. The hole being not yet so large or so alarming as the cobbler’s charges, a piece of black silk was adjusted over the stocking, the foot deftly slipped into the shoe, a dash of blacking applied to the whole, and behold only mother and I knew the difference.
Penury as such was not yet known to me. The consciousness of shabbiness had not yet frayed the elbows of my soul. The device was merely interesting, beguiling the tedium of the sanctuary, and affording meditation on the ingenuity of mothers.
Here succeeded several years of tranquillity in my relations to my garments, until, at the age of six, I found myself—infelix!—removed to a town possessing a bleak climate and many woolen manufactories. It was the custom of the house mothers to buy flannel by the piece direct from the factory, red flannel, hot, thick, felled like a Laplander, and the invention of Lucifer. Out of this flannel was cut a garment, a continuous, all-embracing garment, of neuter gender, in which every child in that town might have been observed flaming Mephistophelian-like after the morning bath. A pattern was given to our mother.
The hair shirt—I laugh when I read! By definition the hair shirt must have possessed geographical limits of attack, but my flannels left no pore untickled, untortured; they heated the flesh until scarlet fever paled into a mere pleasantry; and they soured the milk of amiability within me forever. The rotation of the seasons reduced itself to terms of red flannel. In the autumn, when the happy fowls and foliage alike moulted, shed the superfluous, when bracing October set the body in a glow, I alone of living things must be done up in flannel! And more,—did you ever try to draw on your stocking smoothly over a red flannel tumor at the ankle, and then attempt to button over the whole the shoe that fitted snugly enough over nothing at all? Did you ever tear off shoe and stocking, and, dancing red-legged and barefooted, cry out in frenzy that you would eschew breakfast and school, aliment and enlightenment, but never, never, never again would you wear footgear? Thus autumn. And spring, that season of vernal bourgeoning, was the time when I, too, like any other seedkin, slipped free of all stuffy incasings, and could sprout and spring in air and sun, clad in blessed, blessed muslin. I shall never forget the corroding bitterness induced by flannels. At times they absolutely reduced me to fisticuffs with my religion, so that filial piety, the ordaining of the seasons, and the very catechism itself, hung in the balance of the conflict. I believe I can hardly over-estimate the spiritual detriment done me by my flannels.
One incident of this, my first decade, I recall with mingled respect and envy:—