"Seems to me, papa, you are beginning to soar into metaphysics."
"Everything in creation is metaphysical in its abstract terms," said
I, with a look calculated to reduce her to a respectful condition.
"Everything has a subjective and an objective mode of presentation."
"There papa goes with subjective and objective!" said Marianne. "For
my part, I never can remember which is which."
"I remember," said Jenny; "it's what our old nurse used to call
internal and _out_-ternal,--I always remember by that."
"Come, my dears," said my wife, "let your father read;" so I went on
as follows:--
* * * * *
I remember in my bachelor days going with my boon companion, Bill
Carberry, to look at the house to which he was in a few weeks to
introduce his bride. Bill was a gallant, free-hearted, open-handed
fellow, the life of our whole set, and we felt that natural aversion
to losing him that bachelor friends would. How could we tell under
what strange aspects he might look forth upon us, when once he had
passed into "that undiscovered country" of matrimony? But Bill laughed
to scorn our apprehensions.
"I'll tell you what, Chris," he said, as he sprang cheerily up the
steps and unlocked the door of his future dwelling, "do you know what
I chose this house for? Because it's a social-looking house. Look
there, now," he said, as he ushered me into a pair of parlors,--"look
at those long south windows, the sun lies there nearly all day long;
see what a capital corner there is for a lounging-chair; fancy us,
Chris, with our books or our paper, spread out loose and easy, and
Sophie gliding in and out like a sunbeam. I'm getting poetical, you
see. Then, did you ever see a better, wider, airier dining-room?
What capital suppers and things we'll have there! the nicest
times,--everything free and easy, you know,--just what I've always
wanted a house for. I tell you, Chris, you and Tom Innis shall have
latch-keys just like mine, and there is a capital chamber there at the
head of the stairs, so that you can be free to come and go. And
here now's the library,--fancy this full of books and engravings from
the ceiling to the floor; here you shall come just as you please and
ask no questions,--all the same as if it were your own, you know."
"And Sophie, what will she say to all this?"
"Why, you know Sophie is a prime friend to both of you, and a capital
girl to keep things going. Oh, Sophie'll make a house of this, you may
depend!"
A day or two after, Bill dragged me stumbling over boxes and through
straw and wrappings to show me the glories of the parlor furniture,
with which he seemed pleased as a child with a new toy.
"Look here," he said; "see these chairs, garnet-colored satin, with a
pattern on each; well, the sofa's just like them, and the curtains to
match, and the carpets made for the floor with centrepieces and
borders. I never saw anything more magnificent in my life. Sophie's
governor furnishes the house, and everything is to be A No. 1, and all
that, you see. Messrs. Curtain & Collamore are coming to make the
rooms up, and her mother is busy as a bee getting us in order."
"Why, Bill," said I, "you are going to be lodged like a prince. I hope
you'll be able to keep it up; but law business comes in rather slowly
at first, old fellow."
"Well, you know it isn't the way I should furnish, if my capital was
the one to cash the bills; but then, you see, Sophie's people do it,
and let them,--a girl doesn't want to come down out of the style she
has always lived in."
I said nothing, but had an oppressive presentiment that social freedom
would expire in that house, crushed under a weight of upholstery.
But there came in due time the wedding and the wedding-reception, and
we all went to see Bill in his new house, splendidly lighted up and
complete from top to toe, and everybody said what a lucky fellow he
was; but that was about the end of it, so far as our visiting was
concerned. The running in, and dropping in, and keeping latch-keys,
and making informal calls, that had been forespoken, seemed about as
likely as if Bill had lodged in the Tuileries.
Sophie, who had always been one of your snapping, sparkling, busy sort
of girls, began at once to develop her womanhood and show her
principles, and was as different from her former self as your
careworn, mousing old cat is from your rollicking, frisky kitten.
Not but that Sophie was a good girl. She had a capital heart, a
good, true womanly one, and was loving and obliging; but still she
was one of the desperately painstaking, conscientious sort of
women whose very blood, as they grow older, is devoured with
anxiety, and she came of a race of women in whom housekeeping was
more than an art or a science,--it was, so to speak, a religion.
Sophie's mother, aunts, and grandmothers, for nameless generations
back, were known and celebrated housekeepers. They might have been
genuine descendants of the inhabitants of that Hollandic town of
Broeck, celebrated by Washington Irving, where the cows' tails are
kept tied up with unsullied blue ribbons, and the ends of the
fire-wood are painted white. He relates how a celebrated preacher,
visiting this town, found it impossible to draw these housewives from
their earthly views and employments, until he took to preaching on the
neatness of the celestial city, the unsullied crystal of its walls
and the polish of its golden pavement, when the faces of all the
housewives were set Zionward at once.
Now this solemn and earnest view of housekeeping is onerous enough
when a poor girl first enters on the care of a moderately furnished
house, where the articles are not too expensive to be reasonably
renewed as time and use wear them; but it is infinitely worse when a
cataract of splendid furniture is heaped upon her care,--when splendid
crystals cut into her conscience, and mirrors reflect her duties, and
moth and rust stand ever ready to devour and sully in every room and
passageway.
Sophie was solemnly warned and instructed by all the mothers and
aunts,--she was warned of moths, warned of cockroaches, warned of
flies, warned of dust; all the articles of furniture had their covers,
made of cold Holland linen, in which they looked like bodies laid
out,--even the curtain tassels had each its little shroud,--and
bundles of receipts, and of rites and ceremonies necessary for the
preservation and purification and care of all these articles, were
stuffed into the poor girl's head, before guiltless of cares as the
feathers that floated above it.
Poor Bill found very soon that his house and furniture were to be kept
at such an ideal point of perfection that he needed another house to
live in,--for, poor fellow, he found the difference between having a
house and a home. It was only a year or two after that my wife and I
started our menage on very different principles, and Bill would often
drop in upon us, wistfully lingering in the cosy armchair between my
writing-table and my wife's sofa, and saying with a sigh how
confoundedly pleasant things looked there,--so pleasant to have a
bright, open fire, and geraniums and roses and birds, and all that
sort of thing, and to dare to stretch out one's legs and move without
thinking what one was going to hit. "Sophie is a good girl!" he would
say, "and wants to have everything right, but you see they won't let
her. They've loaded her with so many things that have to be kept in
lavender that the poor girl is actually getting thin and losing her
health; and then, you see, there's Aunt Zeruah, she mounts guard at
our house, and keeps up such strict police regulations that a fellow
can't do a thing. The parlors are splendid, but so lonesome and
dismal!--not a ray of sunshine, in fact not a ray of light, except
when a visitor is calling, and then they open a crack. They're afraid
of flies, and yet, dear knows, they keep every looking-glass and
picture-frame muffled to its throat from March to December. I'd like,
for curiosity, to see what a fly would do in our parlors!"
"Well," said I, "can't you have some little family sitting-room where
you can make yourselves cosy?"
"Not a bit of it. Sophie and Aunt Zeruah have fixed their throne up in
our bedroom, and there they sit all day long, except at calling-hours,
and then Sophie dresses herself and comes down. Aunt Zeruah insists
upon it that the way is to put the whole house in order, and shut all
the blinds, and sit in your bedroom, and then, she says, nothing gets
out of place; and she tells poor Sophie the most hocus-pocus stories
about her grandmothers and aunts, who always kept everything in their
houses so that they could go and lay their hands on it in the darkest
night. I'll bet they could in our house. From end to end it is kept
looking as if we had shut it up and gone to Europe,--not a book, not a
paper, not a glove, or any trace of a human being in sight; the piano
shut tight, the bookcases shut and locked, the engravings locked up,
all the drawers and closets locked. Why, if I want to take a fellow
into the library, in the first place it smells like a vault, and I
have to unbarricade windows, and unlock and rummage for half an hour
before I can get at anything; and I know Aunt Zeruah is standing
tiptoe at the door, ready to whip everything back and lock up again. A
fellow can't be social, or take any comfort in showing his books and
pictures that way. Then there's our great, light dining-room, with its
sunny south windows,--Aunt Zeruah got us out of that early in April,
because she said the flies would speck the frescoes and get into the
china-closet, and we have been eating in a little dingy den, with a
window looking out on a back alley, ever since; and Aunt Zeruah says
that now the dining-room is always in perfect order, and that it is
such a care off Sophie's mind that I ought to be willing to eat down
cellar to the end of the chapter. Now, you see, Chris, my position is
a delicate one, because Sophie's folks all agree that, if there is
anything in creation that is ignorant and dreadful and mustn't be
allowed his way anywhere, it's 'a man.' Why, you'd think, to hear Aunt
Zeruah talk, that we were all like bulls in a china-shop, ready to
toss and tear and rend, if we are not kept down cellar and chained;
and she worries Sophie, and Sophie's mother comes in and worries, and
if I try to get anything done differently Sophie cries, and says she
don't know what to do, and so I give it up. Now, if I want to ask a
few of our set in sociably to dinner, I can't have them where we eat
down cellar,--oh, that would never do! Aunt Zeruah and Sophie's mother
and the whole family would think the family honor was forever ruined
and undone. We mustn't ask them unless we open the dining-room, and
have out all the best china, and get the silver home from the bank;
and if we do that, Aunt Zeruah doesn't sleep for a week beforehand,
getting ready for it, and for a week after, getting things put away;
and then she tells me that, in Sophie's delicate state, it really is
abominable for me to increase her cares, and so I invite fellows to
dine with me at Delmonico's, and then Sophie cries, and Sophie's
mother says it doesn't look respectable for a family man to be dining
at public places; but, hang it, a fellow wants a home somewhere!"
My wife soothed the chafed spirit, and spake comfortably unto him, and
told him that he knew there was the old lounging-chair always ready
for him at our fireside. "And you know," she said, "our things are all
so plain that we are never tempted to mount any guard over them; our
carpets are nothing, and therefore we let the sun fade them, and live
on the sunshine and the flowers."
"That's it," said Bill bitterly. "Carpets fading,--that's Aunt
Zeruah's monomania. These women think that the great object of houses
is to keep out sunshine. What a fool I was when I gloated over the
prospect of our sunny south windows! Why, man, there are three
distinct sets of fortifications against the sunshine in those windows:
first, outside blinds; then solid, folding, inside shutters; and,
lastly, heavy, thick, lined damask curtains, which loop quite down to
the floor. What's the use of my pictures, I desire to know? They are
hung in that room, and it's a regular campaign to get light enough to
see what they are."
"But, at all events, you can light them up with gas in the evening."
"In the evening! Why, do you know my wife never wants to sit there in
the evening? She says she has so much sewing to do that she and Aunt
Zeruah must sit up in the bedroom, because it wouldn't do to bring
work into the parlor. Didn't you know that? Don't you know there
mustn't be such a thing as a bit of real work ever seen in a parlor?
What if some threads should drop on the carpet? Aunt Zeruah would have
to open all the fortifications next day, and search Jerusalem with
candles to find them. No; in the evening the gas is lighted at
half-cock, you know; and if I turn it up, and bring in my newspapers
and spread about me, and pull down some books to read, I can feel the
nervousness through the chamber floor. Aunt Zeruah looks in at eight,
and at a quarter past, and at half past, and at nine, and at ten, to
see if I am done, so that she may fold up the papers and put a book on
them, and lock up the books in their cases. Nobody ever comes in to
spend an evening. They used to try it when we were first married, but
I believe the uninhabited appearance of our parlors discouraged them.
Everybody has stopped coming now, and Aunt Zeruah says 'it is such a
comfort, for now the rooms are always in order. How poor Mrs.
Crowfield lives, with her house such a thoroughfare, she is sure she
can't see. Sophie never would have strength for it; but then, to be
sure, some folks ain't as particular as others. Sophie was brought up
in a family of very particular housekeepers.'"
My wife smiled, with that calm, easy, amused smile that has brightened
up her sofa for so many years.