VII

I can never insist enough, my dear Cyril, upon the illogicality of

American life. You know what the plutocratic principle is, and what the

plutocratic civilization should logically be. But the plutocratic

civilization is much better than it should logically be, bad as it is;

for the personal equation constantly modifies it, and renders it far less

dreadful than you would reasonably expect. That is, the potentialities of

goodness implanted in the human heart by the Creator forbid the

plutocratic man to be what the plutocratic scheme of life implies. He is

often merciful, kindly, and generous, as I have told you already, in

spite of conditions absolutely egotistical. You would think that the

Americans would be abashed in view of the fact that their morality is

often in contravention of their economic principles, but apparently they

are not so, and I believe that for the most part they are not aware of

the fact. Nevertheless, the fact is there, and you must keep it in mind,

if you would conceive of them rightly. You can in no other way account

for the contradictions which you will find in my experiences among them;

and these are often so bewildering that I have to take myself in hand,

from time to time, and ask myself what mad world I have fallen into, and

whether, after all, it is not a ridiculous nightmare. I am not sure that,

when I return and we talk these things over together, I shall be able to

overcome your doubts of my honesty, and I think that when I no longer

have them before my eyes I shall begin to doubt my own memory. But for

the present I can only set down what I at least seem to see, and trust

you to accept it, if you cannot understand it.

Perhaps I can aid you by suggesting that, logically, the Americans should

be what the Altrurians are, since their polity embodies our belief that

all men are born equal, with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit

of happiness; but that illogically they are what the Europeans are, since

they still cling to the economical ideals of Europe, and hold that men

are born socially unequal, and deny them the liberty and happiness which

can come from equality alone. It is in their public life and civic life

that Altruria prevails; it is in their social and domestic life that

Europe prevails; and here, I think, is the severest penalty they must pay

for excluding women from political affairs; for women are at once the

best and the worst Americans: the best because their hearts are the

purest, the worst because their heads are the idlest. “Another

contradiction!” you will say, and I cannot deny it; for, with all their

cultivation, the American women have no real intellectual interests, but

only intellectual fads; and while they certainly think a great deal, they

reflect little, or not at all. The inventions and improvements which

have made their household work easy, the wealth that has released them in

such vast numbers from work altogether, has not enlarged them to the

sphere of duties which our Altrurian women share with us, but has left

them, with their quickened intelligences, the prey of the trivialities

which engross the European women, and which have formed the life of the

sex hitherto in every country where women have an economical and social

freedom without the political freedom that can alone give it dignity and

import. They have a great deal of beauty, and they are inconsequently

charming; I need not tell you that they are romantic and heroic, or that

they would go to the stake for a principle, if they could find one, as

willingly as any martyr of the past; but they have not much more

perspective than children, and their reading and their talk about reading

seem not to have broadened their mental horizons beyond the old sunrise

and the old sunset of the kitchen and the parlor.

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.