Our gallant Bob Stephens, into whose life-boat our Marianne has been
received, has lately taken the mania of house-building into his head.
Bob is somewhat fastidious, difficult to please, fond of domesticities
and individualities; and such a man never can fit himself into a house
built by another, and accordingly house-building has always been his
favorite mental recreation. During all his courtship as much time was
taken up in planning a future house as if he had money to build one, and
all Marianne's patterns, and the backs of half their letters, were
scrawled with ground-plans and elevations. But latterly this chronic
disposition has been quickened into an acute form by the falling-in of
some few thousands to their domestic treasury,--left as the sole
residuum of a painstaking old aunt, who took it into her head to make a
will in Bob's favor, leaving, among other good things, a nice little bit
of land in a rural district half an hour's railroad-ride from Boston.
So now ground-plans thicken, and my wife is being consulted morning,
noon, and night, and I never come into the room without finding their
heads close together over a paper, and hearing Bob expatiate on his
favorite idea of a library. He appears to have got so far as this, that
the ceiling is to be of carved oak, with ribs running to a boss
overhead, and finished mediaevally with ultramarine blue and
gilding,--and then away he goes sketching Gothic patterns of
book-shelves which require only experienced carvers, and the wherewithal
to pay them, to be the divinest things in the world.
Marianne is exercised about china-closets and pantries, and about a
bed-room on the ground-door,--for, like all other women of our days, she
expects not to have strength enough to run up-stairs oftener than once
or twice a week; and my wife, who is a native genius in this line, and
has planned in her time dozens of houses for acquaintances, wherein they
are at this moment living happily, goes over every day with her pencil
and ruler the work of rearranging the plans, according as the ideas of
the young couple veer and vary.
One day Bob is importuned to give two feet off from his library for a
closet in the bed-room,--but resists like a Trojan. The next morning,
being mollified by private domestic supplications, Bob yields, and my
wife rubs out the lines of yesterday, two feet come off the library, and
a closet is constructed. But now the parlor proves too narrow,--the
parlor-wall must be moved two feet into the hall. Bob declares this will
spoil the symmetry of the latter, and if there is anything he wants, it
is a wide, generous, ample hall to step into when you open the
front-door.
"Well, then," says Marianne, "let's put two feet more into the width of
the house."
"Can't, on account of the expense, you see," says Bob. "You see, every
additional foot of outside wall necessitates so many more bricks, so
much more flooring, so much more roofing, etc."
And my wife, with thoughtful brow, looks over the plans, and considers
how two feet more are to be got into the parlor without moving any of
the walls.
"I say," says Bob, bending over her shoulder, "here, take your two feet
in the parlor, and put two more feet on to the other side of the
hall-stairs"; and he dashes heavily with his pencil.
"Oh, Bob!" exclaims Marianne, "there are the kitchen-pantries! you ruin
them,--and no place for the cellar-stairs!"
"Hang the pantries and cellar-stairs!" says Bob, "Mother must find a
place for them somewhere else. I say the house must be roomy and
cheerful, and pantries and those things may take care of themselves;
they can be put _somewhere_ well enough. No fear but you will find a
place for them somewhere. What do you women always want such a great
enormous kitchen for?"
"It is not any larger than is necessary," said my wife, thoughtfully;
"nothing is gained by taking off from it."
"What if you should put it all down into a basement," suggests Bob, "and
so get it all out of sight together?"
"Never, if it can be helped," said my wife. "Basement-kitchens are
necessary evils, only to be tolerated in cities where land is too dear
to afford any other."
So goes the discussion till the trio agree to sleep over it. The next
morning an inspiration visits my wife's pillow. She is up and seizes
plans and paper, and before six o'clock has enlarged the parlor very
cleverly, by throwing out a bow-window. So waxes and wanes the
prospective house, innocently battered down and rebuilt with
India-rubber and black-lead. Doors are cut out to-night, and walled up
to-morrow,--windows knocked out here and put in there, as some observer
suggests possibilities of too much or too little draught. Now all seems
finished, when, lo, a discovery! There is no fireplace nor stove-flue in
my lady's bed-room, and can be none without moving the bathing-room.
Pencil and India-rubber are busy again, and for a while the whole house
seems to threaten to fall to pieces with the confusion of the moving;
the bath-room wanders like a ghost, now invading a closet, now
threatening the tranquillity of the parlor, till at last it is laid by
some unheard-of calculations of my wife's, and sinks to rest in a place
so much better that everybody wonders it never was thought of before.
"Papa," said Jennie, "it appears to me people don't exactly know what
they want when they build; why don't you write a paper on
house-building?"
"I have thought of it," said I, with the air of a man called to settle
some great reform. "It must be entirely because Christopher has not
written that our young people and mamma are tangling themselves daily in
webs which are untangled the next day."
"You see," said Jennie, "they have only just so much money, and they
want everything they can think of under the sun. There's Bob been
studying architectural antiquities, and nobody knows what, and sketching
all sorts of curly-whorlies; and Marianne has her notions about a parlor
and boudoir and china-closets and bedroom-closets; and Bob wants a
baronial hall; and mamma stands out for linen-closets and bathing-rooms
and all that; and so among them all it will just end in getting them
head over ears in debt."
The thing struck me as not improbable.
"I don't know, Jennie, whether my writing an article is going to prevent
all this; but as my time in the 'Atlantic' is coming round, I may as
well write on what I am obliged to think of, and so I will give a paper
on the subject to enliven our next evening's session."
So that evening, when Bob and Marianne had dropped in as usual, and
while the customary work of drawing and rubbing-out was going on at Mrs.
Crowfield's sofa, I produced my paper and read as follows:--