Well, my new house is finished--and so am I. I hope Mrs. Potiphar is
satisfied. Everybody agrees that it is “palatial.” The daily papers
have had columns of description, and I am, evidently, according to
their authority, “munificent,” “tasteful,” “enterprising,” and
“patriotic.”
Amen! but what business have I with palatial residences? What more can
I possibly want, than a spacious, comfortable house? Do _I_ want
buhl _escritoires_? Do I want or _molu_ things? Do I know
anything about pictures and statues? In the name of heaven do I want
rose-pink bed-curtains to give my grizzly old phiz a delicate “uroral
hue,” as Cream Cheese says of Mrs. P.’s complexion? Because I have made
fifty thousand this last year in Timbuctoo bonds, must I convert it
all into a house, so large that it will not hold me comfortably,--so
splendid that I might as well live in a porcelain vase, for the
trouble of taking care of it,--so prodigiously “palatial” that I have
to skulk into my private room, put on my slippers, close the door,
shut myself up with myself, and wonder why I married Mrs. Potiphar?
This house is her doing. Before I married her, I would have worn
yellow silk breeches on ‘Change if she had commanded me--for love. Now
I would build her two houses twice as large as this, if she required
it--for peace. It’s all over. When I came home from China I was the
desirable Mr. Potiphar, and every evening was a field-day for me, in
which I reviewed all the matrimonial forces. It is astonishing, now I
come to think of it, how skilfully Brigadier-General Mrs. Pettitoes
deployed those daughters of hers; how vigorously Mrs. Tabby led on her
forlorn hope; and how unweariedly, Murat-like, Mrs. De Famille charged
at the head of her cavalry. They deserve to be made Marshals of
France, all of them. And I am sure, that if women ought ever to
receive honorary testimonials, it is for having “married a daughter
well.”
That’s a pretty phrase! The mammas marry, the misses are married.
And yet, I don’t see why I say so. I fear I am getting sour. For
certainly, Polly’s mother didn’t marry Polly to me. I fell in love
with her, the rest followed. Old Gnu says that it’s true Polly’s
mother didn’t marry her, but she did marry herself, to me.
{Illustration}
“Do you really think, Paul Potiphar,” said he, a few months ago, when
I was troubled about Polly’s getting a livery, “that your wife was in
love with you, a dry old chip from China? Don’t you hear her say
whenever any of her friends are engaged, that they ‘have done very
well!’ and made a ‘capital match!’ and have you any doubt of her
meaning? Don’t you know that this is the only country in which the
word ‘money’ must never be named in the young female ear; and in whose
best society--not universally nor without exception, of course not;
Paul, don’t be a fool--money makes marriages? When you were engaged,
‘the world’ said that it was a ‘capital thing’ for Polly. Did that
mean that you were a good, generous, intelligent, friendly, and
patient man, who would be the companion for life she ought to have?
You know, as well as I do, and as all the people who said it know,
that it meant you were worth a few hundred thousands, that you could
build a splendid house, keep horses and chariots, and live in
style. You and I are sensible men, Paul, and we take the world as we
find it; and know that if a man wants a good dinner he must pay for
it. We don’t quarrel with this state of things. How can it be helped?
But we need not virtuously pretend it’s something else. When my wife,
being then a gay girl, first smiled at me, and looked at me, and smelt
at the flowers I sent her in an unutterable manner, and proved to me
that she didn’t love me by the efforts she made to show that she did,
why, I was foolishly smitten with her, and married her. I knew that
she did not marry me, but sundry shares in the Patagonia and Nova
Zembla Consolidation, and a few hundred house lots upon the
island. What then? I wanted her, she was willing to take me,--being
sensible enough to know that the stock and the lots had an
incumbrance. _Voila tout,_ as young Boosey says. Your wife wants
you to build a house. You’d better build it. It’s the easiest
way. Make up your mind to Mrs. Potiphar, my dear Paul, and thank
heaven you’ve no daughters to be married off by that estimable woman.”
Why does a man build a house? To live in, I suppose--to have a
home. But is a fine house a home? I mean, is a “palatial residence,”
with Mrs. Potiphar at the head of it, the “home” of which we all dream
more or less, and for which we ardently long as we grow older? A
house, I take it, is a retreat to which a man hurries from business,
and in which he is compensated by the tenderness and thoughtful regard
of a woman, and the play of his children, for the rough rubs with
men. I know it is a silly view of the case, but I’m getting old and
can’t help it. Mrs. Potiphar is perfectly right when she says:
“You men are intolerable. After attending to your own affairs all day,
and being free from the fuss of housekeeping, you expect to come home
and shuffle into your slippers, and snooze over the evening paper--if
it were possible to snooze over the exciting and respectable evening
journal you take--while we are to sew, and talk with you if you are
talkative, and darn the stockings, and make tea. You come home tired,
and likely enough, surly, and gloom about like a thundercloud if
dinner isn’t ready for you the instant you are ready for it, and then
sit mum and eat it; and snap at the children, and show yourselves the
selfish, ugly things you are. Am _I_ to have no fun, never go to
the opera, never go to a ball, never have a party at home? Men are
tyrants, Mr. Potiphar. They are ogres who entice us poor girls into
their castles, and then eat up our happiness and scold us while they
eat.”
Well, I suppose it is so. I suppose I am an ogre and enticed Polly
into my castle. But she didn’t find it large enough, and teased me to
build another. I suppose she does sit with me in the evening, and
sew, and make tea, and wait upon me. I suppose she does, but I’ve not
a clear idea of it. I know it’s unkind of me, when I have been hard
at work all day, trying to make and secure the money that gives her
and her family everything they want, and which wearies me body and
soul, to expect her to let me stay at home, and be quiet. I know I
ought to dress and go into Gnu’s house, and smirk at his wife, and
stand up in a black suit before him attired in the same way, and talk
about the same stocks that we discussed down town in the morning in
colored trowsers. That’s a social duty, I suppose. And I ought to see
various slight young gentlemen whirl my wife around the room, and hear
them tell her when they stop, that it’s very warm. That’s another
social duty, I suppose. And I must smile when the same young gentlemen
put their elbows into my stomach, and hop on my feet in order to
extend the circle of the dance. I’m sure Mrs. P. is right. She does
very right to ask, “Have we no social duties, I should like to know?”
And when we have performed these social duties in Gnu’s house, how
mean it is, how “it looks,” not to build a larger house for him and
Mrs. Gnu to come and perform their social duties in. I give it up.
There’s no doubt of it.
One day Polly said to me:
“Mr. Potiphar, we’re getting down town.”
“What do you mean, my dear?”
“Why, everybody is building above us, and there are actually shops in
the next street. Singe, the pastry-cook, has hired Mrs. Croesus’s old
house.”
“I know it. Old Croesus told me so some time ago; and he said how
sorry he was to go. ‘Why, Potiphar,’ said he, ‘I really hoped when I
built there, that I should stay, and not go out of the house, finally,
until I went into no other. I have lived there long enough to love the
place, and have some associations with it; and my family have grown up
in it, and love the old house too. It was our _home_. When any of
us said ‘home’ we meant not the family only, but the house in which
the family lived, where the children were all born, and where two have
died, and my old mother, too. I’m in a new house now, and have lost my
reckoning entirely. I don’t know the house; I’ve no associations with
it. The house is new, the furniture is new, and my feelings are
new. It’s a farce for me to begin again, in this way. But my wife
says it’s all right, that everybody does it, and wants to know how it
can be helped; and, as I don’t want to argue the matter, I look amen.’
That’s the way Mr. Croesus submits to his new house, Mrs. Potiphar.”
She doesn’t understand it. Poor child! how should she? She, and
Mrs. Croesus, and Mrs. Gnu, and even Mrs. Settum Downe, are all as
nomadic as Bedouin Arabs. The Rev. Cream Cheese says, that he sees in
this constant migration from one house to another, a striking
resemblance to the “tents of a night,” spoken of in Scripture. He
imparts this religious consolation to me when I grumble. He says, that
it prevents a too-closely clinging affection to temporary abodes. One
day, at dinner, that audacious wag, Boosey, asked him if the “many
manthuns” mentioned in the Bible, were not as true of mortal as of
immortal life. Mrs. Potiphar grew purple, and Mr. Cheese looked at
Boosey in the most serious manner over the top of his champagne-glass.
I am glad to say that Polly has properly rebuked Gauche Boosey for his
irreligion, by not asking him to her Saturday evening _matinees
dansantes_.
There was no escape from the house, however. It must be built. It was
not only Mrs. Potiphar that persisted, but the spirit of the age and
of the country. One can’t live among shops. When Pearl street comes to
Park Place, Park Place must run for its life up to Thirtieth street. I
know it can’t be helped, but I protested, and I will protest. If I’ve
got to go, I’ll have my grumble. My wife says:
“I’m ashamed of you, Potiphar. Do you pretend to be an American, and
not give way willingly to the march of improvement? You had better
talk with Mr. Cream Cheese upon the ‘genius of the country.’ You are
really unpatriotic, you show nothing of the enterprising spirit of
your time.” “Yes,” I answer. “That’s pretty from you; you are
patriotic aren’t you, with your liveries and illimitable expenses, and
your low bows to money, and your immense intimacy with all lords and
ladies that honor the city by visiting it. You are prodigiously
patriotic with your inane imitations of a splendor impossible to you
in the nature of things. You are the ideal American woman, aren’t you,
Mrs. Potiphar?”
Then I run, for I’m afraid of myself, as much as of her. I am sick of
this universal plea of patriotism. It is used to excuse all the
follies that outrage it. I am not patriotic if I do not do this and
that, which, if done, is a ludicrous caricature of something
foreign. I am not up to the time if I persist in having my own comfort
in my own way. I try to resist the irresistible march of improvement,
if I decline to build a great house, which, when it is built, is a
puny copy of a bad model. I am very unpatriotic if I am not trying to
outspend foreign noblemen, and if I don’t affect, without education,
or taste, or habit, what is only beautiful, when it is the result of
the three.
However, this is merely my grumble. I knew, the first morning
Mrs. Potiphar spoke of a new house, that I must build it. What she
said was perfectly true; we were getting down town, there was no doubt
of the growing inconvenience of our situation. It was becoming a
dusty noisy region. The congregation of the Rev. Far Niente had sold
their church and moved up town. Now doesn’t it really seem as if we
were a cross between the Arabs who dwell in tents and those who live
in cities, for we are migratory in the city? A directory is a more
imperative annual necessity here than in any other civilized
region. My wife says it is a constant pleasure to her to go round and
see the new houses and the new furniture of her new friends, every
year. I saw that I must submit. But I determined to make little
occasional stands against it. So one day I said:
“Polly, do you know that the wives of all the noblemen who will be
your very dear and intimate friends and models when you go abroad,
always live in the same houses in London, and Paris, and Rome, and
Vienna? Do you know that Northumberland House is so called because it
is the hereditary town mansion of the Duke, and that the son and
daughter-in-law of Lord Londonderry will live after him in the house
where his father and mother lived before him? Did that ever occur to
you, my dear?”
“Mr. Potiphar,” she replied, “do you mean to go by the example of
foreign noblemen? I thought you always laughed at me for what you call
‘aping.’”
“So I do, and so I will continue to do, Mrs. Potiphar; only I thought
that, perhaps, you would like to know the fact, because it might make
you more lenient to me when I regretted leaving our old house here. It
has an aristocratic precedent.”
Poor, dear little Mrs. P.! It didn’t take as I meant it should, and I
said no more. Yet it does seem to me a pity that we lose all the
interest and advantage of a homestead. The house and its furniture
become endeared by long residence, and by their mute share in all the
chances of our life. The chair in which some dear old friend so often
sat--father and mother, perhaps--and in which they shall sit no more;
the old-fashioned table with the cuts and scratches that generations
of children have made upon it; the old book-cases; the heavy
side-board; the glass, from which such bumpers sparkled for those who
are hopelessly scattered now, or for ever gone; the doors they opened;
the walls that echoed their long-hushed laughter,--are we wise when we
part with them all, or, when compelled to do so, to leave them
eagerly?
I remember my brother James used to say: “What is our envy for our
country friends, but that their homes are permanent and
characteristic? Their children’s children may play in the same
garden. Each annual festival may summon them to the old hearth. In
the meeting-house they sit in the wooden pews where long ago they sat
and dreamed of Jerusalem, and now as they sit there, that long ago is
fairer than the holy city. Through the open window they see the grass
waving softly in the summer air, over old graves dearer to them than
many new houses. By a thousand tangible and visible associations they
are still, with a peculiar sense of actuality, near to all they love.”
Polly would call it a sentimental whim--if she could take
Mrs. Croesus’s advice before she spoke of it--but what then? When I
was fifteen, I fell desperately in love with Lucy Lamb. “Pooh, pooh,”
said my father, “you are romantic, it’s til a whim of yours.”
And he succeeded in breaking it up. I went to China, and Lucy married
old Firkin, and lived in a splendid house, and now lies in a splendid
tomb of Carrara marble, exquisitely sculptured.
When I was forty, I came home from China, and the old gentleman said,
“I want you to marry Arabella Bobbs, the heiress. It will be a good
match.”