"Seems to me, papa, you are beginning to soar into metaphysics."
"Everything in creation is metaphysical in its abstract terms," said I,
with a look calculated to reduce her to a respectful condition.
"Everything has a subjective and an objective mode of presentation."
"There papa goes with subjective and objective!" said Marianne. "For my
part, I never can remember which is which."
"I remember," said Jennie; "it's what our old nurse used to call
internal and _out_-ternal,--I always remember by that."
"Come, my dears," said my wife, "let your father read"; so I went on as
follows:--
I remember in my bachelor days going with my boon companion, Bill
Carberry to look at the house to which he was in a few weeks to
introduce his bride. Bill was a gallant, free-hearted, open-handed
fellow, the life of our whole set, and we felt that natural aversion to
losing him that bachelor friends would. How could we tell under what
strange aspects he might look forth upon us, when once he had passed
into "that undiscovered country" of matrimony? But Bill laughed to scorn
our apprehensions.
"I'll tell you what, Chris," he said, as he sprang cheerily up the steps
and unlocked the door of his future dwelling, "do you know what I chose
this house for? Because it's a social-looking house. Look there, now,"
he said, as he ushered me into a pair of parlors,--"look at those long
south windows, the sun lies there nearly all day long; see what a
capital corner there is for a lounging-chair; fancy us, Chris, with our
books or our paper, spread out loose and easy, and Sophie gliding in and
out like a sunbeam. I'm getting poetical, you see. Then, did you ever
see a better, wider, airier dining-room? What capital suppers and things
we'll have there! the nicest times,--everything free and easy, you
know,--just what I've always wanted a house for. I tell you, Chris, you
and Tom Innis shall have latch-keys just like mine, and there is a
capital chamber there at the head of the stairs, so that you can be free
to come and go. And here now's the library,--fancy this full of books
and engravings from the ceiling to the floor; here you shall come just
as you please and ask no questions,--all the same as if it were your
own, you know."
"And Sophie, what will she say to all this?"
"Why, you know Sophie is a prime friend to both of you, and a capital
girl to keep things going. Oh, Sophie'll make a house of this, you may
depend!"
A day or two after, Bill dragged me stumbling over boxes
and through straw and wrappings to show me the glories of the
parlor-furniture,--with which he teemed pleased as a child with a new
toy.
"Look here," he said; "see these chairs, garnet-colored satin, with a
pattern on each; well, the sofa's just like them, and the curtains to
match, and the carpets made for the floor with centrepieces and borders.
I never saw anything more magnificent in my life. Sophie's governor
furnishes the house, and everything is to be A No. 1, and all that, you
see. Messrs. Curtain and Collamore are coming to make the rooms up, and
her mother is busy as a bee getting us in order."
"Why, Bill," said I, "you are going to be lodged like a prince. I hope
you'll be able to keep it up; but law-business comes in rather slowly at
first, old fellow."
"Well, you know it isn't the way I should furnish, if my capital was the
one to cash the bills; but then, you see, Sophie's people do it, and let
them,--a girl doesn't want to come down out of the style she has always
lived in."
I said nothing, but had an oppressive presentiment that social freedom
would expire in that house, crushed under a weight of upholstery.
But there came in due time the wedding and the wedding-reception, and we
all went to see Bill in his new house splendidly lighted up and complete
from top to toe, and everybody said what a lucky fellow he was; but that
was about the end of it, so far as our visiting was concerned. The
running in, and dropping in, and keeping latch-keys, and making informal
calls, that had been forespoken, seemed about as likely as if Bill had
lodged in the Tuileries.
Sophie, who had always been one of your snapping, sparkling, busy sort
of girls, began at once to develop her womanhood, and show her
principles, and was as different from her former self as your careworn,
mousing old cat is from your rollicking, frisky kitten. Not but that
Sophie was a good girl. She had a capital heart, a good, true womanly
one, and was loving and obliging; but still she was one of the
desperately painstaking, conscientious sort of women whose very blood,
as they grow older, is devoured with anxiety, and she came of a race of
women in whom house-keeping was more than an art or a science,--it was,
so to speak, a religion. Sophie's mother, aunts, and grandmothers for
nameless generations back, were known and celebrated housekeepers. They
might have been genuine descendants of the inhabitants of that Hollandic
town of Broeck, celebrated by Washington Irving, where the cows' tails
are kept tied up with unsullied blue ribbons, and the ends of the
firewood are painted white. He relates how a celebrated preacher,
visiting this town, found it impossible to draw these housewives from
their earthly views and employments, until he took to preaching on the
_neatness_ of the celestial city, the unsullied crystal of its walls and
the polish of its golden pavement, when the faces of all the housewives
were set Zionward at once.
Now this solemn and earnest view of housekeeping is onerous enough when
a poor girl first enters on the care of a moderately furnished house,
where the articles are not too expensive to be reasonably renewed as
time and use wear them; but it is infinitely worse when a cataract of
splendid furniture is heaped upon her care,--when splendid crystals cut
into her conscience, and mirrors reflect her duties, and moth and rust
stand ever ready to devour and sully in every room and passage-way.
Sophie was solemnly warned and instructed by all the mothers and
aunts,--she was warned of moths, warned of cockroaches, warned of flies,
warned of dust; all the articles of furniture had their covers, made of
cold Holland linen, in which they looked like bodies laid out,--even the
curtain-tassels had each its little shroud--and bundles of receipts and
of rites and ceremonies necessary for the preservation and purification
and care of all these articles were stuffed into the poor girl's head,
before guiltless of cares as the feathers that floated above it.
Poor Bill found very soon that his house and furniture were to be kept
at such an ideal point of perfection that he needed another house to
live in,--for, poor fellow, he found the difference between having a
house and a home. It was only a year or two after that my wife and I
started our _menage_ on very different principles, and Bill would often
drop in upon us, wistfully lingering in the cozy arm-chair between my
writing-table and my wife's sofa, and saying with a sigh how
confoundedly pleasant things looked there,--so pleasant to have a
bright, open fire, and geraniums and roses and birds, and all that sort
of thing, and to dare to stretch out one's legs and move without
thinking what one was going to hit. "Sophie is a good girl," he would
say, "and wants to have everything right, but you see they won't let
her. They've loaded her with so many things that have to be kept in
lavender, that the poor girl is actually getting thin and losing her
health; and then, you see, there's Aunt Zeruah, she mounts guard at our
house, and keeps up such strict police-regulations that a fellow can't
do a thing. The parlors are splendid, but so lonesome and dismal!--not a
ray of sunshine, in fact not a ray of light, except when a visitor is
calling, and then they open a crack. They're afraid of flies, and yet,
dear knows, they keep every looking-glass and picture-frame muffled to
its throat from March to December. I'd like for curiosity to see what a
fly would do in our parlors!"
"Well," said I, "can't you have some little family sitting-room, where
you can make yourselves cozy?"
"Not a bit of it. Sophie and Aunt Zeruah have fixed their throne up in
our bedroom, and there they sit all day long, except at calling-hours,
and then Sophie dresses herself and comes down. Aunt Zeruah insists upon
it that the way is to put the whole house in order, and shut all the
blinds, and sit in your bedroom, and then, she says, nothing gets out of
place; and she tells poor Sophie the most hocus-pocus stories about her
grandmothers and aunts, who always kept everything in their houses so
that they could go and lay their hands on it in the darkest night. I'll
bet they could in our house. From end to end it is kept looking as if we
had shut it up and gone to Europe,--not a book, not a paper, not a
glove, or any trace of a human being, in sight. The piano shut tight,
the bookcases shut and locked, the engravings locked up, all the drawers
and closets locked. Why, if I want to take a fellow into the library, in
the first place it smells like a vault, and I have to unbarricade
windows, and unlock and rummage for half an hour before I can get at
anything; and I know Aunt Zeruah is standing tiptoe at the door, ready
to whip everything back and lock up again. A fellow can't be social, or
take any comfort in showing his books and pictures that way. Then
there's our great, light dining-room, with its sunny south
windows,--Aunt Zeruah got us out of that early in April, because she
said the flies would speck the frescos and get into the china-closet,
and we have been eating in a little dingy den, with a window looking out
on a back-alley, ever since; and Aunt Zeruah says that now the
dining-room is always in perfect order, and that it is such a care off
Sophy's mind that I ought to be willing to eat down-cellar to the end of
the chapter. Now, you see, Chris, my position is a delicate one, because
Sophie's folks all agree, that, if there is anything in creation that is
ignorant and dreadful and mustn't be allowed his way anywhere, it's 'a
man'. Why, you'd think, to hear Aunt Zeruah talk, that we were all like
bulls in a china-shop, ready to toss and tear and rend, if we are not
kept down-cellar and chained; and she worries Sophie, and Sophie's
mother comes in and worries, and if I try to get anything done
differently, Sophie cries, and says she don't know what to do, and so I
give it up. Now, if I want to ask a few of our set in sociably to
dinner, I can't have them where we eat down-cellar,--oh, that would
never do! Aunt Zeruah and Sophie's mother and the whole family would
think the family-honor was forever ruined and undone. We mustn't ask
them, unless we open the dining-room, and have out all the best china,
and get the silver home from the bank; and if we do that, Aunt Zeruah
doesn't sleep for a week beforehand, getting ready for it, and for a
week after, getting things put away; and then she tells me, that, in
Sophie's delicate state, it really is abominable for me to increase her
cares, and so I invite fellows to dine with me at Delmonico's, and then
Sophie cries, and Sophie's mother says it doesn't look respectable for a
family-man to be dining at public places; but, hang it, a fellow wants a
home somewhere!"
My wife soothed the chafed spirit, and spake comfortably unto him, and
told him that he knew there was the old lounging-chair always ready for
him at our fireside. "And you know," she said, "our things are all so
plain that we are never tempted to mount any guard over them; our
carpets are nothing, and therefore we let the sun fade them, and live on
the sunshine and the flowers."
"That's it," said Bill, bitterly, "Carpets fading!--that's Aunt Zeruah's
monomania. These women think that the great object of houses is to keep
out sunshine. What a fool I was, when I gloated over the prospect of our
sunny south windows! Why, man, there are three distinct sets of
fortifications against the sunshine in those windows: first, outside
blinds; then, solid, folding, inside shutters; and, lastly, heavy,
thick, lined damask curtains, which loop quite down to the floor. What's
the use of my pictures, I desire to know? They are hung in that room,
and it's a regular campaign to get light enough to see what they are."
"But, at all events, you can light them up with gas in the evening."
"In the evening! Why, do you know my wife never wants to sit there in
the evening? She says she has so much sewing to do that she and Aunt
Zeruah must sit up in the bedroom, because it wouldn't do to bring work
into the parlor. Didn't you know that? Don't you know there mustn't be
such a thing as a bit of real work ever seen in a parlor? What if some
threads should drop on the carpet? Aunt Zeruah would have to open all
the fortifications next day, and search Jerusalem with candles to find
them. No; in the evening the gas is lighted at half-cock, you know; and
if I turn it up, and bring in my newspapers and spread about me, and
pull down some books to read, I can feel the nervousness through the
chamber-door. Aunt Zeruah looks in at eight, and at a quarter past, and
at half-past, and at nine, and at ten, to see if I am done, so that she
may fold up the papers and put a book on them, and lock up the books in
their cases. Nobody ever comes in to spend an evening. They used to try
it when we were first married, but I believe the uninhabited appearance
of our parlors discouraged them. Everybody has stopped coming now, and
Aunt Zeruah says 'it is such a comfort, for now the rooms are always in
order. How poor Mrs. Crowfield lives, with her house such a
thoroughfare, she is sure she can't see. Sophie never would have
strength for it; but then, to be sure, some folks a'n't as particular as
others. Sophie was brought up in a family of _very_ particular
housekeepers.'"
My wife smiled, with that calm, easy, amused smile that has brightened
up her sofa for so many years.