Our gallant Bob Stephens, into whose lifeboat our Marianne has been
received, has lately taken the mania of housebuilding 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 housebuilding 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
bookshelves 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
bedroom on the ground-floor,--for, like all other women of our days,
she expects not to have strength enough to run upstairs 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 bedroom, 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 bedroom, 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 Jenny, "it appears to me people don't exactly know
what they want when they build; why don't you write a paper on
housebuilding?"
"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 Jenny, "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, Jenny, 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:--