Their house-hunting no longer had novelty, but it still had interest; and
they varied their day by taking a coupe, by renouncing advertisements,
and by reverting to agents. Some of these induced them to consider the
idea of furnished houses; and Mrs. March learned tolerance for Fulkerson
by accepting permits to visit flats and houses which had none of the
qualifications she desired in either, and were as far beyond her means as
they were out of the region to which she had geographically restricted
herself. They looked at three-thousand and four-thousand dollar
apartments, and rejected them for one reason or another which had nothing
to do with the rent; the higher the rent was, the more critical they were
of the slippery inlaid floors and the arrangement of the richly decorated
rooms. They never knew whether they had deceived the janitor or not; as
they came in a coupe, they hoped they had.
They drove accidentally through one street that seemed gayer in the
perspective than an L road. The fire-escapes, with their light iron
balconies and ladders of iron, decorated the lofty house fronts; the
roadway and sidewalks and door-steps swarmed with children; women's heads
seemed to show at every window. In the basements, over which flights of
high stone steps led to the tenements, were green-grocers' shops
abounding in cabbages, and provision stores running chiefly to bacon and
sausages, and cobblers' and tinners' shops, and the like, in proportion
to the small needs of a poor neighborhood. Ash barrels lined the
sidewalks, and garbage heaps filled the gutters; teams of all trades
stood idly about; a peddler of cheap fruit urged his cart through the
street, and mixed his cry with the joyous screams and shouts of the
children and the scolding and gossiping voices of the women; the burly
blue bulk of a policeman defined itself at the corner; a drunkard
zigzagged down the sidewalk toward him. It was not the abode of the
extremest poverty, but of a poverty as hopeless as any in the world,
transmitting itself from generation to generation, and establishing
conditions of permanency to which human life adjusts itself as it does to
those of some incurable disease, like leprosy.
The time had been when the Marches would have taken a purely aesthetic
view of the facts as they glimpsed them in this street of
tenement-houses; when they would have contented themselves with saying
that it was as picturesque as a street in Naples or Florence, and with
wondering why nobody came to paint it; they would have thought they were
sufficiently serious about it in blaming the artists for their failure to
appreciate it, and going abroad for the picturesque when they had it here
under their noses. It was to the nose that the street made one of its
strongest appeals, and Mrs. March pulled up her window of the coupe. "Why
does he take us through such a disgusting street?" she demanded, with an
exasperation of which her husband divined the origin.
"This driver may be a philanthropist in disguise," he answered, with
dreamy irony, "and may want us to think about the people who are not
merely carried through this street in a coupe, but have to spend their
whole lives in it, winter and summer, with no hopes of driving out of it,
except in a hearse. I must say they don't seem to mind it. I haven't seen
a jollier crowd anywhere in New York. They seem to have forgotten death a
little more completely than any of their fellow-citizens, Isabel. And I
wonder what they think of us, making this gorgeous progress through their
midst. I suppose they think we're rich, and hate us--if they hate rich
people; they don't look as if they hated anybody. Should we be as patient
as they are with their discomfort? I don't believe there's steam heat or
an elevator in the whole block. Seven rooms and a bath would be more than
the largest and genteelest family would know what to do with. They
wouldn't know what to do with the bath, anyway."
His monologue seemed to interest his wife apart from the satirical point
it had for themselves. "You ought to get Mr. Fulkerson to let you work
some of these New York sights up for Every Other Week, Basil; you could
do them very nicely."
"Yes; I've thought of that. But don't let's leave the personal ground.
Doesn't it make you feel rather small and otherwise unworthy when you see
the kind of street these fellow-beings of yours live in, and then think
how particular you are about locality and the number of bellpulls? I
don't see even ratchets and speaking-tubes at these doors." He craned his
neck out of the window for a better look, and the children of discomfort
cheered him, out of sheer good feeling and high spirits. "I didn't know I
was so popular. Perhaps it's a recognition of my humane sentiments."
"Oh, it's very easy to have humane sentiments, and to satirize ourselves
for wanting eight rooms and a bath in a good neighborhood, when we see
how these wretched creatures live," said his wife. "But if we shared all
we have with them, and then settled down among them, what good would it
do?"
"Not the least in the world. It might help us for the moment, but it
wouldn't keep the wolf from their doors for a week; and then they would
go on just as before, only they wouldn't be on such good terms with the
wolf. The only way for them is to keep up an unbroken intimacy with the
wolf; then they can manage him somehow. I don't know how, and I'm afraid
I don't want to. Wouldn't you like to have this fellow drive us round
among the halls of pride somewhere for a little while? Fifth Avenue or
Madison, up-town?"
"No; we've no time to waste. I've got a place near Third Avenue, on a
nice cross street, and I want him to take us there." It proved that she
had several addresses near together, and it seemed best to dismiss their
coupe and do the rest of their afternoon's work on foot. It came to
nothing; she was not humbled in the least by what she had seen in the
tenement-house street; she yielded no point in her ideal of a flat, and
the flats persistently refused to lend themselves to it. She lost all
patience with them.
"Oh, I don't say the flats are in the right of it," said her husband,
when she denounced their stupid inadequacy to the purposes of a Christian
home. "But I'm not so sure that we are, either. I've been thinking about
that home business ever since my sensibilities were dragged--in a
coupe--through that tenement-house street. Of course, no child born and
brought up in such a place as that could have any conception of home. But
that's because those poor people can't give character to their
habitations. They have to take what they can get. But people like
us--that is, of our means--do give character to the average flat. It's
made to meet their tastes, or their supposed tastes; and so it's made for
social show, not for family life at all. Think of a baby in a flat! It's
a contradiction in terms; the flat is the negation of motherhood. The
flat means society life; that is, the pretence of social life. It's made
to give artificial people a society basis on a little money--too much
money, of course, for what they get. So the cost of the building is put
into marble halls and idiotic decoration of all kinds. I don't object to
the conveniences, but none of these flats has a living-room. They have
drawing-rooms to foster social pretence, and they have dining-rooms and
bedrooms; but they have no room where the family can all come together
and feel the sweetness of being a family. The bedrooms are black-holes
mostly, with a sinful waste of space in each. If it were not for the
marble halls, and the decorations, and the foolishly expensive finish,
the houses could be built round a court, and the flats could be shaped
something like a Pompeiian house, with small sleeping-closets--only lit
from the outside--and the rest of the floor thrown into two or three
large cheerful halls, where all the family life could go on, and society
could be transacted unpretentiously. Why, those tenements are better and
humaner than those flats! There the whole family lives in the kitchen,
and has its consciousness of being; but the flat abolishes the family
consciousness. It's confinement without coziness; it's cluttered without
being snug. You couldn't keep a self-respecting cat in a flat; you
couldn't go down cellar to get cider. No! the Anglo-Saxon home, as we
know it in the Anglo-Saxon house, is simply impossible in the
Franco-American flat, not because it's humble, but because it's false."
"Well, then," said Mrs. March, "let's look at houses."
He had been denouncing the flat in the abstract, and he had not expected
this concrete result. But he said, "We will look at houses, then."