boarding-house, and its charm lies as much in its literary aroma as its
actuality. We visit inns oftener in books than in life, but in both they
have the same characteristics. The tiniest inn is always big enough for
personality. The innkeeper is a person, the guest is a person, the cook,
the boots, the hostler, they are all real persons. There is time for
flavoring food with conversation. The chairs are friendly and inviting.
The hearth leaps warm with welcome. But note well, one sometimes lives
at a hotel, one often lives at a boarding-house, but one never lives at
an inn, one merely stops. The reason why the welcome and the speeding
of an inn can be so warm and genuine is that host and guest never have
too much of each other. Both can present their best foot for three days
when a stretch of three weeks would strain its tendons. In an inn food
never seems skimped, the financial aspect never seems prominent, because
the guest never stays long enough to discover sordid secrets, nor long
enough to have his own private affairs invaded. Company manners, the
outward and visible sign of hospitality’s inward and spiritual grace,
can prevail in an inn, for the simple reason that no matter how often
one returns, exactly as often one departs.
It is clearly easier to enumerate the effects of boarding upon human
nature than to ascertain the psychological causes underlying them.
One ventures to hazard a few random reasons, all interrelated and all
growing out of the fact that we are still cave-dwellers at heart. The
cave household feared and hated the stranger; and with good cause.
They eyed him askance, exactly as the other boarders in a house eye
the recent comer. The newest boarder never coalesces with the group
until the advent of another still newer, when he is tentatively
admitted to ranks needing union against the latest intruder. This
survival of prehistoric manners may be observed and experienced in any
boarding-house.
The hostility of older occupants toward the stranger is exactly matched
by his suspicion of them, hostile suspicion always, no matter how
obsequiously concealed. When a cave-dweller penetrated the seclusion of
another cave, he was wary, on the defensive, and this attitude made him
critical of the inmates, of course, and therefore, for them, a person
to fear. We are still afraid of the stranger, of his eye that may see,
and his tongue that may tell, our secrets. Boarding hurts us because we
suffer continual abrasion of our reserve. In a boarding-house, family
life has to go on in whispers; strangers are in our midst looking and
listening, and even if they are friendly their attention is irksome: Eve
got tired of having even the angels around all the time.
The human soul demands retirement, but is often unwilling to pay the
price. Home-making is to be had only by house-keeping. In order to live
by ourselves we have to take care of ourselves, and the effort to evade
this issue drives us to the boarding-house. The home-keeping instinct
is, however, as active in us as in our cave-dwelling ancestors, only
they knew better than to try to suppress it. They knew they wanted
seclusion, and so they rolled a rock to the cave-mouth, and possessed
their souls in privacy. It is our doom to inherit from them a desire for
our own front door, in order that we may not have to sue for entrance
at some one else’s door, and also that we may never have to open ours
except when we do so in free and voluntary welcome. Boarding is often
necessary, but it goes contrary to impulses as ineradicable in us as
nest-making in a bird. Even the feminists, when they inveigh against
family life, will be found not free from prehistoric impulses toward
privacy. They do not advocate caravansary existence, but rather the
group system, in all its cave-dweller isolation; only the group must be
based on congeniality, not on mere arbitrary and accidental kinship.
The joy of slamming our own front door upon the world is only equaled
by the joy of flinging that door wide to the world when we wish to. Of
all commodities hospitality should be free from money-taint. The trouble
with boarding is that it attempts to buy and sell a welcome. Everything
is cheapened the moment we can pay a price for it. The instant we lay
our dollars on the counter, we have the right to criticize our purchase.
A buyer does not have to say thank you with his lips nor yet with his
heart, and this is why a certain uncouthness is to be incurred in any
purely commercial relation. Hospitality is essentially not sordid, but
spiritual: a host is gracious with the generosity that offers what money
cannot buy, a guest is gracious with the gratitude that accepts what
money cannot pay for. Boarding is an anomalous and enforced relation
between people who offer and accept house-room, and only those can
escape its blight who have the power always to elevate the commercial to
the plane of the human and the friendly. Luckily, among this small but
noble company are many persons that board and many that take boarders.
The existence of this minority does not alter the fact that for most
of us boarding is a demoralizing occupation. The reason lies deep:
hospitality, given or received, is too sacred for barter.
VI
_The Lady Alone at Night_
I am a lady, and a coward. The two facts have no relation to each
other, but both are necessary to a comprehension of my sentiments
about to be delivered. Soberly revolving the universe in my mind,
I find only one thing of which I am sure I am not afraid, and that
is--dying. I mean merest dying, for I am as fearsome as any of being
tossed in air, _disjecta membra_, by an automobile; of furnishing
lingering sweetness to an epicurean tiger; of being played with, and
pawed and tweaked by disease, cat-and-mouse-like; it is only the
actual slipping by the portal of which I am not afraid. With this sole
exception, I am afraid of everything: firecrackers, reptiles, drunken
cooks, dogs, tunnels, trolleys, and caterpillars. About ghosts I am a
little uncertain; experience leads me to conjecture that ghosts are
usually your own fault: that is, they are a little like rattlesnakes;
if you don’t intrude, neither will they. But that circumstance which
is to me the very quintessence of terror is Night and A Man. I speak
hypothetically--it has never happened.
Strange what a difference mere plurality of a noun and mere presence or
absence of an article make to my mind. Now Men, Man, and A Man stand for
most diverse conceptions. _Man_,--I think of Mr. Alexander Pope, and
of a creature of watery intellect, whose vitality is something between
that of a frog and a jumping-jack, and who is diddled puppet-wise by an
equally anæmic deity. Man is humanity dehumanized, but Men are about
the most human thing there is. Men are the big people, clean-scrubbed
spiritually and physically, who come to see you and take you about, and
look after the universe, and keep it in a good humor; who, when you are
making a fool of yourself, laugh at you in a genial, masculine fashion.
In a thin, tentative, feminine way, you try to imitate, and the effort,
however quavering, somehow makes you feel better. _Men_, of your own
family or out of it, sometimes put you on trains, and take care of
you--sometimes. Thus Men.
But _A Man_--ugh! I saw him first in a nightmare when I was six. He wore
a black Prince Albert, and on his head three high hats jammed down one
on top of the other. He stood on the cone of a hill, black as a coal
against the red light of fires in the rear. From under his three hats
he grinned at me, and on that black hill, against that lurid sky, he
danced and danced and danced. He frightens me still. It is since then
that Night and A Man have been my crown of terrors. A Man lurks in
every darkened doorway, stretches an arm from every tree trunk, pursues
me,--pat, pat, pat,--and fades into the common light of lamp and fire
only when I am safely under my own roof-tree. Even in the daytime, A Man
never deserts me: he haunts the solitary country lanes, lush and lovely
with spring; he pops out upon me from mountain woods; on the stretches
of beach he lurks just around the point. He is always there; at least, I
suppose he is, for I never am--alone.
By day, A Man is a leering horror, but at night he becomes, like
that figure in my dream, pure devil. I am a suburbanite, and as I
said before, a lady, a laboring lady. This is why I find myself not
infrequently alone at night. The alarm set a-quiver when I descend from
the social, bright-lit, suburban car and plunge forth into the dark is
something that custom cannot stale. Yet sometimes the spell of the night
is as a buckler against fear, making me wonder if solitude is really
terror, genuine solitude, solitude belonging to me, and not to A Man. I
remember one early winter evening, white with a recent snowfall; there
had been an ice storm, and our trees were all incased, each tiniest
twig, and the full moon rode low: I forgot A Man, in every nerve I was
glad to be alone, but hark, a step in the distance, and earth again!
It is worth some study, the sensation of that approaching step, that
emerging shadow,--bifurcated or petticoated, two feet or four? I am
never afraid of two men: neither actually nor grammatically can A Man be
two. Joseph and the Babes in the Wood for precedent, dissension steps
in between violence and its victim so soon as the aggressive party is
multiplied by even two. And as for a group of men, whatever their caste
or condition, however socially uncouth, by mere virtue of numbers they
become a protection rather than a peril; by mere aggregate of protective
instinct, _A Man_ sufficiently multiplied equals _Men_ (_supra_).
In addition to these distinctions in regard to the number of your
potential aggressor, there are also distinctions geographic and
geometric. I appeal to any lady of my sex and condition, whether there
is not the greatest possible difference in amount of peril to be
inferred between the man who is walking in front of you on a lonely
street, and the man who is walking behind. If a man paces on soberly and
regularly some few discreet rods ahead, straightway he is enhaloed with
succor and salvation,--you are safe, you need only to call him in your
need, and he will save. But should he go more slowly, fall behind, then
in the very instant of passing you this same protecting saint becomes
decanonized, and worse. There is nothing so suspicious as this dropping
behind. True, you preserve a bold back, walk no faster,--note, sir, my
valiancy, my unconcern,--but still your knee crooks for flight, and your
vocal cords contract for that scream you wonder if you could ever really
utter. A corresponding transformation in moral intention, blackguard and
chevalier, is possible for the man in your rear. On a recent evening
I was hurrying home along the solitary street--steps behind! Flying,
pursuing steps! Nearer, nearer! Upon me, and my heart sickened and
stopped beating! But past me, fleeting on and on, disappearing, oh, too
swiftly! For as he left me so quickly again to solitude, I could hardly
resist an impulse to gather up my skirts and scamper after, after my
retreating protector. I think he made his train.
I have been at some pains to prove the second of my introductory
assertions. The reason I have not tried to prove the first is explained
by the difference between the essay and polite society. In polite
society, one is under the obligation of confessing one’s virtues, not
blatantly, but none the less persistently, wearily,--one’s dogging old
virtues, as if it were not enough of a bore to live with them in private
without having to be seen with them in public. In the essay one may have
the exquisite pleasure of confessing one’s vices. In society I must be a
lady; in the essay I may be, as here and now, a coward.
VII
_In Sickness and in Health_
I have been sick, but not utterly,--a tooth. I am in the convalescent’s
mood of confidence and confession; therefore, I write in haste, for in
health I am buoyant and amiable, and not fluently penitent; indeed,
there is little then to be penitent about. For a week I have been
very unpleasant, and the circumstance leads to remarks on the moral
disintegration attendant upon indisposition. I speak of petty disorders,
for illnesses of dramatic magnitude, a run of typhoid for instance,
sometimes tend to spiritual upbuilding,--at least, it is so demonstrated
in fiction. Doubtless the pawing of the white horse in the dooryard has
a soothing effect upon the patient’s nerves, but illnesses in which one
has not the comfort of composing one’s epitaph are not composing to the
soul. The lesser ailments make appalling holes in our integrity: myself
last week threw a teaspoon at my most immediate forbear. Ferocious, but
it was the elemental ferocity of suffering. It is a fact, belonging
rather to the science of psychology than of medicine, that small
sicknesses hurt more than big ones. I appeal to all connoisseurs in
invalidism whether a tooth, an ear, an ankle, are not more direct in
their methods of torture than pneumonia, smallpox, or appendicitis.
Believing this, I have always had much sympathy for the vilified hero of
a certain novelette of my acquaintance; in this romance, the husband has
a tooth; the wife, a heart,--a literal heart, mechanical, physiological.
Everybody knows which suffered more, and yet because the gentleman got
a little crusty over a most outrageous molar, how joyously the author
trounced him through page after page! I am hot with indignation. There
ought to be a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Creations.
Manufacturers of heroes and heroines should not be allowed to flay and
burn and quarter so wantonly as they do; a humane reading public should
take from them the prerogative of so unnatural a parenthood.
This one man should have been forgiven; he had a toothache, and
non-fatal illnesses may make monsters of the meekest of us; but
fortunately, the illness being temporary, so is the monster. Only the
recollection is humiliating; I am recovered, but I shudder at the legion
so recently cast out of me. Sickness sets free all the processes of
atavism, and whirls us back into savagery at a breathless rate. The
first bit of baggage we leave behind us on this rapid return journey is
family affection. Last week my kin stood about my couch day and night
with poultices and sympathy in their hands. I took the poultices and
tossed back evil words out of my mouth. I looked upon my relatives with
frankest loathing. Why? Their insulting forbearance, their aggressive
meekness, their poor-sufferer-here-is-my-other-cheek attitude stirred
the foundations of my bile. Their serene patience provoked my utmost
effort to destroy it, and I was impotent; their invulnerability was an
affront to my powers of invention. My own possibilities of vituperation
were only less surprising to me than the endurance of the abused. And
all the time that I listened to my own reviling tongue, my self-respect
was ebbing from me most uncomfortably,--and it was all their fault.
A concomitant loss in this dissolving of our civilization is that of
the sense of humor. Being so recently returned from barbarism and its
beyond, I can confidently assert that the ape and the savage, while
they may be laughable, do not laugh. In the sickroom of the not very
sick, the brightest witticisms seem only studied banalities. There
is no comedy in the incidents of ministration; it is all unrelieved
tragedy. Yet it is not the humorous, but the humor that is lacking, for
frequently the situations are appreciated at recovery, and furnish us
amusement at intervals for a lifetime. I doubt whether this suspension
of the processes of humor could be established in the case of serious
illness, admitting of disastrous outcome. There are soldiers a-plenty
who have jested at their wounds, and instances enough on record where
a timely jest or a merry incident has saved the day. I cite one such
situation. A husband lay at death’s door, and the door was ajar. It
was midnight, and the wife watched. Suddenly the patient seemed to
be sinking, slipping from her. She put the hartshorn bottle to his
nostrils, but he could smell nothing. Both were terrified as they
realized the import of this. Then the wife glancing down discovered that
the bottle contained witch-hazel. The man laughed--and lived.
In serious illness there is perhaps sometimes a positive stimulus to
the comic sensibilities; there is such a thing as dying game, or the
fight for life may be worth some bravado. But imagine feeling gamy
with tonsillitis or a felon on your finger; there is absolutely no
histrionic appeal. If your sickness has no spice of fatality, you might
just as well give up; you won’t see the light of humor again until you
recover.
No love in our heart, no humor in our head, there is another evil
of savagery thrust upon us by illness. It is the sudden acquisition
of personality by inanimate objects. What possibilities of abusive
conduct lurk within the four walls of a room yesterday, in health,
perfectly inoffensive! What malevolence in the wall-paper! Such a
sneaking, underhand, leering pattern for curtains with any pretensions
to respectability! How tipsy the books look, crowding and pushing
themselves askew for very perversity! No amount of chastisement will
make the pillows conduct themselves comfortably. There is something
about the billows of that malicious counterpane that makes me think of
the oozy, oily, shiny unpleasantness of the ocean when the sailboat is
becalmed. I am as much at the mercy of my furniture as any Fiji before
his fetish.
Thus sickness reduces us to cave-dwellers or gorillas rampant, by
perhaps just a day of pain no greater in compass than one’s little
finger-nail,--soulful, strenuous, high-stepping beings though we
are! Sad enough to think about; yet on the other hand, of all
insupportables, the people whom sickness makes saints are the most
contemptible. I know men and ladies, in health normal, human, unworthy,
likable,--but give them so much as a cold in the head, and at once
their smile smacks of Heaven, and their eyes are uplift with the watery
mysticism of those about to be canonized. When a small boy I know
voluntarily allows his younger sister a canter on his rocking-horse,
his nurse immediately applies red flannel and turpentine; generosity
with him is a sure presage of sore throat. I have seen great strapping
lads, full of sin, reduced to sudden and spurious saint-hood by a black
eye. There is no more unfeeling conduct than patient suffering,--there
is nothing more alarming to an anxious family than a course of virtuous
endurance obstinately persisted in. So long as you rage and are
unseemly your kinsfolk will never pipe their eye, but docility under
the minor physical afflictions makes a stubbed toe as much a matter of
apprehension as angina pectoris. This being good when sick is a bid
for unmerited martyrdom. These gentle sufferers are likely to employ
the emaciated voice of those who ail, knowing well that the bellow of
rebellion is much too reassuring. I am glad I am not as one of these;
sick, I throw things.
Thus all mankind and all woman and child kind, too, are divided, though
unevenly, into those who are better in sickness and those who are worse.
The marriage service on examination will be found to be a very canny
document, and its compilers nowhere showed greater shrewdness than in
just that little phrase which insures conjugal devotion in sickness
and in health. For of some, sickness makes Mr. Hydes, and of others,
Dr. Jekylls, and in the matter of spouses, how in the world can the
contracting parties foresee, demon or angel, which will develop, or,
having developed, which will be better company?
VIII
_An Educational Fantasy_
When I look back upon a half-century of wasted life, I find that there
are no years that accuse me of neglected opportunity more poignantly
than those between five and twelve. If only I had had the foresight
then to apply myself with earnestness to the tasks set before me! If
only now I possessed those priceless stores of knowledge that I feel
sure must then have been pumped into me! That I must have received
abundant elementary instruction I feel confident, although I do not in
the least remember receiving it. My purely academic activities at this
period remain wrapped in obscurity, while other memories are lively
enough. I distinctly recall the scientific invention displayed in our
efforts to produce new shades and colors in the soapy water with which
we cleaned our slates. It was I who discovered that the yolk of an
egg well beaten made a more satisfactory admixture than butter, even
though both are equally yellow to begin with. I remember how one may
by judicious spooning out with a pin, extract the inner riches of a
chocolate drop without visible disturbance of the outer crust. Despite
my scholastic indifference, I can have been no sluggard, without spirit,
for of my fifty coevals there was not one who could tag me in the open
except Percy Dent alone, and that only (but in my wisdom I never let him
discover the fact) when I would let him; well do I recollect with what
_éclat_, with what flutter of petticoats and pinafore, I could execute a
_pas seul_ at hop-scotch. These attainments, the thrill of which still
warms me, prove me not without ambition;--
“Not for such hopes and fears,
Annulling youth’s brief years,
Do I remonstrate,”
but for
“Those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,”--
such as the multiplication table, and the capital of Arizona, and
the difference between an adjective and an adverb,--questionings so
obstinate that I am convinced that not even at ten years old did I know
the answers; _hinc illæ lacrimæ_.
To some extent it is possible to go back and piece out the stitches
dropped in the course of an education; only, one is not allowed to go
back so far as I desire. Roughly speaking, I should say that life does
not allow one to relearn what one has failed to learn before sixteen,
whereas it is the knowledge belonging to eight years, and ten and
twelve, after which I hunger and thirst. I wish some one would open a
school for able-minded but ignorant grown-ups. Believe me, enough of
us could be found to attend, enough of us glad to jump down from our
college chairs, to leave our laboratories with their clutter of advanced
research, our counting-houses with their problems, and gladly go to
school, gladly learn once and forever how much nine times thirteen is,
and build Vesuvius past and present out of clay, and follow out of doors
some charming young lady who would tell us exactly what the birds and
the wild waves are saying.
But I stipulate at the outset that I will have no offensive superiority
in my instructors. If I am to learn as a child I will be treated as a
child. I will have no one caviling at me, for instance, because I do
not know when Washington was born. I never did know when Washington was
born, but I desire now to amend this my iniquity of ignorance, and I am
even minded, if only my teachers will be patient, to plod on from the
Revolution to the Civil War, and to learn the succession of battles
thereof, and which side won them. I wish my instructors to understand
that my humility of spirit needs no augmenting on their part. I wish
them to be as sweetly patient and cheerily maternal as they would be to
my daughter’s daughter. I wish my teachers to administer boundary lines
but mildly, and to give me their minimum doses of mental arithmetic;
for in mathematics and geography my mind is willing but weak. I think
I could promise that patience in my instructors would have a reward in
a proficiency of pupil such as they could never hope to win from the
iniquitous immature, on whose preoccupied minds and thankless hearts
they squander such devotion.