What should I do with myself? That was my problem, when I went out into
the world again. No boarding-house could satisfy me, so I determined to
set up in light housekeeping, which is a city imitation of Robinson
Crusoe in two rooms. There I could be melancholy without interruption;
it would not be necessary to chatter with the other boarders either to
keep them from observing my absent-mindedness or to divert my own
attention from the dull routine of cannery products, synthetic meats,
and "laid down eggs"--laid only a little way down by the hen and away
down in a barrel by a man under water-glass for eight months and eight
cents more per dozen. Besides, if you keep house in the city an
arrangement may be made with your milkman so that you may irrigate your
milk to suit yourself. You simply request him to deliver the water he
usually blends with the milk in a separate vessel, which, of course, you
are glad to provide. Then if you get only a pint of cow's milk for the
price of a quart, you are satisfied, because you have the privilege of
seasoning it by superior home-methods of irrigation to suit yourself. I
was too much of a farmer to ever board comfortably in the city.
Jim always agreed with me in those days before nervousness induced by
woman drove us through fire and over the bumpy paths of error, that
housekeeping was the ideal life. Knowledge of what the people will stand
is power, and it has packed some powerful doses in cans. They used to
throw away half the hog until they got knowledge. Some epicure who lived
on rats and bats' eyes, announced that the black spot in the oyster is
the best part. What he had to say was published in a bulletin or a
report--let me see, was it from the Department of Agriculture? I've read
a good many of their bulletins, but I can't be sure if they did that for
the country or not. At any rate, the report went into oysters from away
back, quoted authorities from Egypt and Persia, who were fond of dogs,
and gave the needed impetus to the captains of the canning industry, who
are always on the lookout for pointers--or pugs. Since then all the
black spots have been saved on the farm, whether in hogs or apples, done
up at some factory in neat glass jars, with a chemist's certificate
that they do not contain boracic acid or turpentine, and will not eat
the enamel off a stew-kettle; sterilized, gold-labeled and rechristened
"Meadfern" crab apples, mince-meat, gelatine, invalid's food and what
not, until it is hard to tell where the economy will stop. The latest
thing in this line is the current information that it pays to feed the
stimulating prickers from the wild gooseberries to make the hens lay.
I once asked a fellow who ran a cannery why he used such expensive
labels.
"To please the goats," he answered.
And so his business is largely human nature, too. We laugh at the
foolish goats for eating the label off a can--we eat the same thing
ourselves. When I come to drink the bitter hemlock, I pray it may be
labeled so as to take the pucker out of it.
I would rather starve than board, so I started out to find my desert
island.
"You advertise rooms for light housekeeping," said I to a sad-faced,
middle-aged woman, who answered my ringing of the bell of a three-story
brownstone house in East Thirty-eighth Street. Some prosperous merchant
had probably lived there twenty years before, but it had been converted
into a nest for workers.
[Illustration: "YOU ADVERTISE ROOMS FOR LIGHT HOUSEKEEPING."]
"Yes, sir," she replied. "Two back rooms."
"What floor?" I asked, having in mind the force of gravity.
"Second floor. How many in your family?"
"Only me."
"You keep house alone?"
"Certainly. I know how."
"Don't you find it lonesome?"
"I hope so. I want to be lonesome."
"Well, I don't know." She hesitated and looked me over with great care.
"Have you anybody to recommend you?"
"I see that you doubt my sanity, madam. My nerves are a little out of
line; I have just left the hospital and must be quiet. Do you see? If
you must have references, I work for the Department of Health."
"Oh, that's all right, then, if you work for the Department of Health."
The rooms suited me. The small hall-room was the kitchen, and the larger
room was the living-room, equipped with one of those furniture
alligators and diabolical economizers of space, a folding bed, and a few
chairs bravely presenting a polished but brittle front, under the
bracing influence of the gluepot, as I afterward learned. Every time one
of those chairs broke down under me, my heart also went out to the poor
soul, Mrs. Dewey, the landlady, who made her living by pinching a profit
out of every penny. She was a generous creature, so far as she could be;
but a hard world's exactions squeezed her to a meanness she herself
detested, but must practice or starve. When I think long of poor Mrs.
Dewey, whom I knew for only a few weeks, I want to begin life over again
as a reformer. I'd take an axe to Mr. Dewey, and begin my reforms on him
as a typical subject in need of annihilation, and get as far as a man a
few centuries ahead of his time might expect to.
Old Dewey--the Mr. Dewey herein before referred to--was the black
background and cellar of the institution. Like a rat, he came from the
coal heap or a hidden corner unawares and was gone into further darkness
before you could turn to learn the cause of the noise he made. His
shadowy participation in home management contributed to the family's
progress as a millstone about the neck of its mistress, and did not
follow over-stimulation, the common cause of chronic depression in
husbands of boarding-house keepers and women who rent furnished rooms.
Bone-laziness filling the marrow and changing its natural pink to a
Roquefort verdigris of decay, was my diagnosis of old Dewey's ailment.
He moved with a premeditation which nine times out of ten amounted to
standing still; rest resulted from two opposing forces, Mrs. Dewey's
beseeching and threats colliding with his will traveling against her
purpose with counter-balancing velocity and mass. A hired man would have
left her long ago under such tongue-lashing, but old Dewey could not
leave, because to leave is an act. There were no verbs in his vocabulary
comprehending possibilities of usefulness within range of the present
tense. What an irony in names! I often thought.
A man who is employed in the Department of Health has a pass to the good
wishes of a woman who rents a house in New York. Mrs. Dewey regarded me
as a person of influence with the governing powers, one who could
probably get her landlord to "do something with the old-fashioned
bathtub" by prying him through the official lever of departmental
requirements. It was far from my purpose to deceive her, but nothing I
could say in denial was strong enough to change her conviction. My
presence under her roof induced in Mrs. Dewey a state of expectancy over
a new enameled bathtub that carried with it at first more deference than
she paid to the other tenants. When my milk-bottle fell off the back
window-sill into the yard below, she swept up what the cat left without
complaining.
A few short weeks before I was a man with some confidence in my fellows;
life had its charms, hope sustained me. Rosy views are for those whose
faith has not been shattered. Optimism could find no support in my
bitter experiences. Hermits may find seclusion in crowds, thought I. No
one could find me at my new address, and it was my intention to seek no
new friends, and to avoid every one I knew. I did not want to answer
questions about Jim, and I did not want to hear anything more of him. I
had read all the published accounts of the fire and was glad to note
that the secret had not been revealed. As for Miss Tescheron, she had
probably lost faith in him and suspected me by this time. As I could not
explain to her my change of heart toward Jim without implicating myself,
I proposed to wash my hands of the whole affair and go it alone in
future--for a time at any rate. Should I not write to her and thank her
for sending flowers to me when I was ill? Was it not the grateful thing
to do? I had written Hygeia and no reply came. I had quite a bunch of
Jim's letters on hand also to demonstrate my powers as a letter-writer.
Writing, I concluded, was not fortunate for me. It would be better to
have Miss Tescheron regard me as an ungrateful wretch, a fit associate
of the scoundrel who had toyed with her affections.
Robinson Crusoe started his island home with about as many clothes as I
had when I left the hospital. It was fortunate that the city was such a
kind employer; that my pay went on while I was ill, and that my
connection with the Health Department secured the best hospital service
at a nominal charge. I ordered a new trunk and a new outfit of clothing
the day after my arrival, and when the clothes came I proceeded to try
them on, but there was no fun in it without Jim to guy me. I fought hard
to keep that fellow out of my mind, but he was with me day and night. I
could not get away from him and my sorrow. Was it his ghost hovering
near, longing to return to its earthly habitation, and propose a
housekeeping merger with me? My fried onions might have penetrated the
other world and recalled him with such longings, for there are worse
places than home at dinner-time.
Mrs. Dewey entered one day and found me with my feet on the window-trim
and the rest of me crouched in the most substantial rocker. I was
smoking and cogitating. It was so quiet and I was so far out of sight
that she did not know I was there until she started to dust the chair.
The smoke had not suggested my presence, for old Dewey was always doing
that--he had learned how when young, and so it was no trouble.
"Oh, excuse me, I didn't know you were in the room. You're always so
quiet," she said.
"Sorrow makes a man quiet."
"Sorrow? Yes, you're right; but what have you--"
"Yes, I have much," I answered. "I know your tragedy, but you can't
guess mine. You have my sympathy, and if I could help you I would; but
you can't help me."
"Some woman, Mr. Hopkins--I did not think you were married. You must
be--"
"No," said I, and I spoke slowly, with some choking. "I have been
wronged by a man, a friend in whom I had faith; with whom I lived for
ten years. We were closer than brothers. He deserted me in my hour of
need--but go on with your dusting; what matters it? I tell you so that
you may understand why I feel so badly. Heaviness grows upon me, so that
I doubt if I shall ever see the bright side of things again."
Mrs. Dewey wiped away the tears from her careworn face.
"Ten weeks ago," I continued, "we parted, and he has fled, branded as a
criminal in my eyes, by evidence which no one can doubt. I am alone,
despondent, and insanity or hard work must be my escape. As I cannot get
my mind on my business, I fear the worst. The blow is more than I can
bear."
"Pshaw! You're only a young man. You don't know what sorrow is. When you
spoke so sad, you brought a tear to my eye, but I never let the tears
get the best of me. I think you are weak in body yet. You need better
food. You don't eat right. You ought to go out to some good restaurant
and get three square meals a day. You have the money to pay for them,
and you ought to do it."
"Eat! Don't speak of eating. My appetite is all gone. Some day I may get
over this dismal feeling and take your kind advice, but not now."
"Men have no grit. It takes a woman, I'm thinking, to carry a
heart-load. If it was a woman you were worrying about, I'd coddle you a
little; but I never knew a man who ran away from his friends who was
worth a tear. You'll soon see the folly of it."
"I don't blame you for hating all men," said I, knowingly. "You judge
the sex by the specimen you have at home. All women do the same at your
age."
"You're crazy, now, Mr. Hopkins," blurted the woman, her anger quickly
rising. "Two days in my house and you undertake to advise me against my
husband with whom I have lived in peace for twenty-five years. Have I
given you license to interfere in my affairs? You astonish me with your
impertinence! You amaze me! No man has ever dared to offer me such an
insult! I will have you understand, sir, that Mr. Dewey is my husband,
and I will allow no one to slightingly refer to him in my presence." She
was heaving and grasping the broom pretty firmly. I crawled into a
farther chair.
"Why, madam, I overheard you in the hall this morning berating him as
the laziest vagabond that ever breathed, and you prayed--"
"Never mind. He's my husband. When I want some one to interfere, I'll go
to a lawyer, who's in that business. I won't peddle my troubles to
strangers. If you haven't any more sense than to interfere in our
affairs, you must be crazy now, and if I were you I wouldn't worry about
getting crazy."
Mrs. Dewey passed out and slammed the door.
I wanted to go right down and jump off the dock when this
counter-irritant blistered me and her tonic bitters were poured into my
lethargic circulation. Stimulation brought a reaction of brighter views,
however. Mrs. Dewey's old-fashioned drubbing held the mirror so that I
could behold a life-sized burro every time I looked into it. There never
can be any use for a middleman, before or after the marriage contract,
thought I. Shame took the place of conceit; my pride was humbled and
fear was swept away. I mended with amazing rapidity under the earnest
eloquence of that short sermon, delivered by a woman with a broom.