The cry is that the institution of the home is being undermined, and
that, therefore, society is in the way of perishing. It is stated that
the home is insidiously attacked, at one end of the scale, by the hotel
and restaurant habit, and, at the other, by such innovations as the
feeding-of-school-children habit. We are asked to contemplate the
crowded and glittering dining-rooms of the Midland, the Carlton, the
Adelphi, on, for instance, Christmas Night, when, of all nights, people
ought! to be on their own hearths, and we are told: “It has come to
this. This! is the result of the craze for pleasure! Where is the home
now?”
To which my reply would be that the home remains just about where it
was. The spectacular existence of a few great hotels has never mirrored
the national life. Is the home of the Smiths, for example, being
gradually overthrown by the restaurant habit? The restaurant habit will
only strengthen the institution of the home. The most restaurant-loving
people on the face of the earth are the French, and the French home is a
far more powerful, more closely-knit organisation than our own. Why! Up
to last year a Frenchman of sixty could not marry without the consent
of his parents, if they happened to be alive. I wonder what the Smiths
would say to that as an example of the disintegration of the home by the
restaurant habit!
Most assuredly the modest, medium, average home founded by Mr. Smith
has not been in the slightest degree affected either by the increase of
luxury and leisure, or by any alleged meddlesomeness on the part of the
State. The home founded by Mr. Smith, with all its faults--and I have
not spared them--is too convenient, too economical, too efficient, and,
above all, too natural, to be overthrown, or even shaken, by either
luxury or grandmotherliness. To change the metaphor and call it a ship,
it remains absolutely right and tight. It is true that Mr. and Mrs.
Smith assert sadly that young John and young Mary have much more liberty
than _they_ ever had, but Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s parents asserted exactly
the same thing of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and their grandparents of their
parents, and so on backwards doubtless up to Noah. That is only part of
a process, a beneficent process.
*****
Nevertheless, the home of the Smiths has a very real enemy, and that
enemy is not outside, but inside. That enemy is Matilda. I have not
hitherto discussed Matilda. She sleeps in the attic, and earns £18 a
year, rising to £20. She doesn’t count, and yet she is the factor which,
more than any other, will modify the home of the Smiths.
Let me say no word against Matilda. She is a respectable and a passably
industrious, and a passably obedient girl. I know her. She usually
opens the door for me, and we converse “like anything”! “Good evening,
Matilda,” I say to her. “Good evening, sir,” says she. And in her tone
and mine is an implicit recognition of the fact that I have been very
good-natured and sympathetic in greeting her as a human being. “Mr.
Smith in?” I ask, smiling. “Yes, sir. Will you come this way?” says she.
Then I forget her. A nice, pleasant girl! And she has a good place, too.
The hygienic conditions are superior to those of a mill, and the labour
less fatiguing. And both Mrs. Smith and Miss Mary, help her enormously
in “little ways.” She eats better food than she would eat at home, and
she has a bedroom all to herself. You might say she was on velvet.
And yet, in the middle of one of those jolly, unaffected evenings that I
occasionally spend with the Smiths, when the piano has been going, and I
have helped Mrs. Smith to cheat herself at patience, and given Mr.
Smith the impression that he can teach me a thing or two, and discussed
cigarettes with John, and songs with Mary, and the sense of intimate
fellowship and mutual comprehension is in the air, in comes Matilda
suddenly with a tray of coffee--and makes me think furiously! She goes
out as rapidly as she came in, for she is bound by an iron law not to
stop an instant, and if she happened to remark in a friendly, human way:
“You seem to be having a good time here!”
All the Smiths, and I too, would probably drop down dead from pained
shock.
But though she is gone I continue to think furiously. Where had she been
all the jolly evening? Where has she returned to? Well, to her beautiful
hygienic kitchen, where she sits or works all by herself, on velvet. My
thoughts follow her existence through the day, and I remember that from
morn till onerous eve she must not, save on business, speak unless she
is spoken to. Then I give up thinking about Matilda’s case, because
it annoys me. I recall a phrase of young John’s; he is youthfully
interested in social problems, and he wants a latch-key vote. Said John
to me once, when another Matilda had left: “Of course, if one thought
too much about Matilda’s case, one wouldn’t be able to sleep at nights.”
*****
When you visit the Smiths the home seems always to be in smooth working
order. But ask Mrs. Smith! Ask Mary! Get beneath the surface. And you
will glimpse the terrible trouble that lies concealed. Mrs. Smith began
with Matilda the First. Are you aware that this is Matilda the Fortieth,
and that between Matilda the Fortieth and Matilda the Forty-first there
will probably be an interregnum? Mrs. Smith simply cannot get Matildas.
And when by happy chance she does get a Matilda, the misguided girl
won’t see the velvet with which the kitchen and the attic are carpeted.
Mrs. Smith says the time will come when the race of Matildas will have
disappeared. And Mrs. Smith is right. The “general servant” is bound to
disappear utterly. In North America she has already almost disappeared.
Think of that! Instead of her, in many parts of the American continent,
there is an independent stranger who, if she came to the Smiths, would
have the ineffable impudence to eat at the same table as the Smiths,
just as though she was of the same clay, and who, when told to do
something, would be quite equal to snapping out: “Do it yourself.”
But you say that the inconvenience brought about by the disappearance of
Matilda would be too awful to contemplate. I venture to predict that the
disappearance of Matilda will not exhaust the resources of civilisation.
The home will continue. But mechanical invention will have to be
quickened in order to replace Matilda’s red hands. And there will be
those suburban restaurants! And I have a pleasing vision of young John,
in the home which _he_ builds, cleaning his own boots. Inconvenient, but
it is coming!