When I returned to England I came across a terrific establishment.
As it may be more or less novel to you I will attempt to describe it,
though the really right words for describing it do not exist in the
English language. In the first place, it is a restaurant, where meals
are served at almost any hour--and not meals such as you get in ordinary
restaurants, but sane meals, spread amid flowers and diaper. Then it
is also a crèche, where babies are tended upon scientific principles;
nothing that a baby needs is neglected. Older, children are also looked
after, and the whole question of education is deeply studied, and advice
given. Also young men and women of sixteen or so are started in the
world, and every information concerning careers is collected and freely
given out.
Another branch of the establishment is devoted to inexpensive but
effective dressmaking, and still another to hats; here you will find the
periodical literature of fashion, and all hints as to shopping. There
is, further, a very efficient department of mending, highly curious
and ingenious, which embraces men’s clothing. I discovered, too, a
horticultural department for the encouragement of flowers, serving
secondarily as a branch of the crèche and nursery. There is a fine art
department, where reproductions of the great masters are to be seen and
meditated upon, and an applied art department, full of antiques. It must
mention the library, where the latest and the most ancient literatures
fraternise on the same shelves; also the chamber-music department.
Lastly, a portion of the establishment is simply nothing but an uncommon
lodging-house for travellers, where electric light, hot water bottles,
and hot baths are not extras. I scarcely expect you to believe what I
say; nevertheless I have exaggerated in nothing. You would never guess
where I encountered this extraordinary, this incredible establishment.
It was No. 137 (the final number) in a perfectly ordinary long street
in a residential suburb of a large town. When I expressed my surprise
to the manager of the place, he looked at me as if I had come from
Timbuctoo. “Why!” he exclaimed, “there are a hundred and thirty-six
establishments much like mine in this very street!” He was right; for
what I had stumbled into was just the average cultivated Englishman’s
home.
*****
You must look at it as I looked at it in order to perceive what an
organisation the thing is. The Englishman may totter continually on the
edge of his income, but he does get value for his money. I do not mean
the poor man, for he is too unskilled, and too hampered by lack of
capital, to get value even for what money he has. Nor do I mean the
wealthy man, who usually spends about five-sixths of his income in
acquiring worries and nuisances. I mean the nice, usual professional or
business islander, who by means of a small oblong piece of paper, marked
£30 or so, once a month, attempts and accomplishes more than a native
of the mainland would dream of on £30 a week. The immense pyramid which
that man and his wife build, wrong side up, on the blowsy head of one
domestic servant is a truly astonishing phenomenon, and its frequency
does not impair its extraordinariness.
The mere machinery is tremendously complex. You lie awake at 6-30 in the
uncommon lodging-house department, and you hear distant noises. It is
the inverted apex of the pyramid starting into life. You might imagine
that she would be intensely preoccupied by the complexity of her duties,
and by her responsibility. Not a bit. Open her head, and you would find
nothing in it but the vision of a grocer’s assistant and a new frock.
You then hear weird bumps and gurgling noises. It is the hot water
running up behind walls to meet you half-way from the kitchen. You catch
the early vivacity of the crèche. A row overhead means that a young man
who has already studied the comparative anatomy of cigars is embarking
on life. A tinkling of cymbals below--it is a young woman preparing to
be attractive to some undiscovered young man in another street.
*****
The Englishman’s home is assuredly the most elaborate organisation for
sustaining and reproducing life in the world--or at any rate, east
of Sandy Hook. It becomes more and more elaborate, luxurious, and
efficient. For example, illumination is not the most important of its
activities. Yet, you will generally find in it four different methods
of illumination--electricity, gas, a few oil lamps in case of necessity,
and candles stuck about. Only yesterday, as it seems, human fancy had
not got beyond candles. Much the same with cookery. Even at a simple
refection like afternoon tea you may well have jam boiled over gas, cake
baked in the range, and tea kept hot by alcohol or electricity.
I am not old, but I have known housewives who would neither eat nor
offer to a guest, bread which they had not baked. They drew water from
their own wells. And the idea of a public laundry would have horrified
them. And before that generation there existed a generation which
spun and wove at home. To-day the English household is dependent on
cooperative methods for light, heat, much food, and several sorts
of cleanliness. True (though it has abandoned baking), the idea of
cooperative cookery horrifies it! However, another generation is coming!
And that generation, while expending no more energy than ourselves,
will live in homes more complicatedly luxurious than ours. When it
is house-hunting it will turn in scorn from an abode which has not a
service of hot and cold water in every bedroom and a steam device for
“washing up” without human fingers. And it will as soon think of keeping
a private orchestra as of keeping a private cook--with her loves and her
thirst.
*****
Leave England and come hack, and you cannot fail to see that this
generation is already knocking at the door. When it once gets inside the
door it will probably be more “house-proud,” more inclined to regard the
dwelling as its toy, with which it can never tire of playing, than even
the present generation. Such is a salient characteristic which strikes
the returned traveller, and which the foreigner goes back to his
own country and talks about--namely, the tremendous and intense
pre-occupation of the English home with “comfort”--with every branch and
sub-branch of comfort.
“_Le comfort anglais_” is a phrase which has passed into the French
language. On spiritual and intellectual matters the Englishman may be
the most sweetly reasonable of creatures--always ready to compromise,
and loathing discussion. But catch him compromising about his hot-water
apparatus, the texture of a beefsteak, or the flushing of a cistern!