|WITH the threatened eruption of the rag carpet as a kind of venerable
successor to the genuine Boston-made Turkish rug, there comes a wail on
the part of the male portion of humanity, and a protest on the part of
all health-loving humanity.
I rise at this moment as the self-appointed representative of poor,
down-trodden and long-suffering man. Already lady friends are looking
with avaricious and covetous eyes on my spring suit, and, in fancy,
constructing a stripe of navy blue, while some other man's spring
clothes are already spotted for the "hit-or-miss" stripe of this
time-honored humbug.
It does seem to me that there is enough sorrowing toil going for nothing
already; enough of back ache and delirium, without tearing the shirts
off a man's back to sew into a big ball, and then weave into a
rag carpet made to breathe death and disease, with its prehistoric
perspiration and its modern drug store dyes.
The rug now commonly known as the Turkish prayer rug, has a sad, worn
look, but it does not come up to the rag carpet of the dear old home.
Around it there clusters, perhaps, a tradition of an Oriental falsehood,
but the rag carpet of the dear old home, rich in association, is an
heir-loom that passes down from generation to generation, like the horse
blanket of forgotten years or the ragbag of the dear, dead past. Here is
found the stripe of all-wool delaine that was worn by one who is now
in the golden hence, or, stricken with the Dakota fever, living in the
squatter's home; and there is the fragment of underclothes prematurely
jerked from the back of the husband and father before the silver of a
century had crept into his hair. There is no question but the dear old
rag carpet, with poisonous greens and sickly yellows and brindle
browns and doubtful blacks, is a big thing. It looks kind of modest and
unpretending, and yet speaks of the dead past, and smells of the antique
and the garret.
It represents the long months when aching fingers first sewed the
garments, then the first dash of gravy on the front breadth, the
maddening cry, the wild effort to efface it with benzine, the sorrowful
defeat, the dusty grease-spot standing like a pork-gravy plaque upon the
face of the past, the glad relinquishment of the garment, the attack
of the rag-carpet fiend upon it, the hurried crash as it was torn into
shreds and sewn together, then the mad plunge of the dust-powdered mass
into the reeking bath of Paris green or copperas, then the weaver's
gentle racket, and at last the pale, consumptive, freckled, sickly
panorama of outrageous coloring, offending the eye, the nose, the thorax
and the larynx, to be trodden under feet of men, and to yield up
its precious dose of destroying poisons from generation even unto
generation.
It is not a thing of beauty, for it looks like the colored engraving
of a mortified lung. It is not economical, for the same time devoted
to knocking out the brains of frogs and collecting their hams for the
metropolitan market would yield infinitely more; and it is not worth
much as an heirloom, for within the same time a mortgage may be placed
upon the old homestead which will pass down from father to son, even to
nations yet unborn, and attract more attention in the courts than all
the rag carpets that it would require to span the broad, spangled dome
of heaven.
I often wonder that Oscar Wilde, the pale patron of the good, the true
and the beautiful, did not rise in his might and knock the essential
warp and filling out of the rag carpet. Oscar did not do right, or he
would have stood up in his funny clothes and fought for reform at so
much per fight. While he made fun of the Chicago water works, a grateful
public would have buried him in cut flowers if, instead, he had warped
it to the rag carpet and the approaching dude.