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'hôte 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.”

“Do women go much to them?” I asked, choosing this question as a safe

one.

“_Much_!” she screamed. “They don't go at all! They _can't_!

They won't _let_ us! To be sure, there are some that have rooms

where ladies can go with their friends who are members, and have lunch or

dinner; but as for seeing the inside of the club-house proper, where

these great creatures”--she indicated her husband--“are sitting up,

smoking and telling stories, it isn't to be dreamed of.”

Her husband laughed. “You wouldn't like the smoking, Dolly.”

“Nor the stories, some of them,” she retorted.

“Oh, the stories are always first-rate,” he said, and he laughed more

than before.

“And they never gossip at the clubs, Mr. Homos--never!” she added.

“Well, hardly ever,” said her husband, with an intonation that I did not

understand. It seemed to be some sort of catch-phrase.

“All I know,” said Mrs. Makely, “is that I like to have my husband belong

to his club. It's a nice place for him in summer; and very often in

winter, when I'm dull, or going out somewhere that he hates, he can go

down to his club and smoke a cigar, and come home just about the time I

get in, and it's much better than worrying through the evening with a

book. He hates books, poor Dick!” She looked fondly at him, as if this

were one of the greatest merits in the world. “But I confess I shouldn't

like him to be a mere club man, like some of them.”

“But how?” I asked.

“Why, belonging to five or six, or more, even; and spending their whole

time at them, when they're not at business.”

There was a pause, and Mr. Makely put on an air of modest worth, which he

carried off with his usual wink towards me. I said, finally, “And if the

ladies are not admitted to the men's clubs, why don't they have clubs of

their own?”

“Oh, they have--several, I believe. But who wants to go and meet a lot of

women? You meet enough of them in society, goodness knows. You hardly

meet any one else, especially at afternoon teas. They bore you to death.”

Mrs. Makely's nerves seemed to lie in the direction of a prolongation of

this subject, and I asked my next question a little away from it. “I wish

you would tell me, Mrs. Makely, something about your way of provisioning

your household. You said that the grocer's and butcher's man came up to

the kitchen with your supplies--”

“Yes, and the milkman and the iceman; the iceman always puts the ice into

the refrigerator; it's very convenient, and quite like your own house.”

“But you go out and select the things yourself the day before, or in the

morning?”

“Oh, not at all! The men come and the cook gives the order; she knows

pretty well what we want on the different days, and I never meddle with

it from one week's end to the other, unless we have friends. The

tradespeople send in their bills at the end of the month, and that's all

there is of it.” Her husband gave me one of his queer looks, and she went

on: “When we were younger, and just beginning housekeeping, I used to go

out and order the things myself; I used even to go to the big markets,

and half kill myself trying to get things a little cheaper at one place

and another, and waste more car-fare and lay up more doctor's bills than

it would all come to, ten times over. I used to fret my life out,

remembering the prices; but now, thank goodness, that's all over. I don't

know any more what beef is a pound than my husband does; if a thing isn't

good, I send it straight back, and that puts them on their honor, you

know, and they have to give me the best of everything. The bills average

about the same, from month to month; a little more if we have company

but if they're too outrageous, I make a fuss with the cook, and she

scolds the men, and then it goes better for a while. Still, it's a great

bother.”

I confess that I did not see what the bother was, but I had not the

courage to ask, for I had already conceived a wholesome dread of the

mystery of an American lady's nerves. So I merely suggested, “And that is

the way that people usually manage?”

“Why,” she said, “I suppose that some old-fashioned people still do their

marketing, and people that have to look to their outgoes, and know what

every mouthful costs them. But their lives are not worth having. Eveleth

Strange does it--or she did do it when she was in the country; I dare say

she won't when she gets back--just from a sense of duty, and because she

says that a housekeeper ought to know about her expenses. But I ask her

who will care whether she knows or not; and as for giving the money to

the poor that she saves by spending economically, I tell her that the

butchers and the grocers have to live, too, as well as the poor, and so

it's as broad as it's long.”