Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  After Mrs. Makely had told me about the New York house, we began to talk of the domestic service, and I ventured to hint some of the things that I have so plainly said to you. She frankly consented to my whole view of the matter, for if she wishes to make an effect or gain a point, she has a magnanimity that stops at nothing short of self-devotion. “I know it,” she said. “You are perfectly right; but here we are, and what are we to do? What do you do in Altruria, I should like to know?”

  I said that in Altruria we all worked, and that personal service was as honored among us as medical attendance in America; I did not know what other comparison to make; but that any one in health would think it as unwholesome and as immoral to let another serve him as to let a doctor physic him. At this Mrs. Makely and her husband laughed so that I found myself unable to go on for some moments, till Mrs. Makely, with a final shriek, shouted to him, “Dick, do stop, or I shall die! Excuse me, Mr. Homos, but you are so deliciously funny, and I know you’re just joking. You won’t mind my laughing. Do go on!”

  I tried to give her some notion as to how we manage, in our common life, which we have simplified so much beyond anything that this barbarous people dream of; and she grew a little soberer as I went on, and seemed at least to believe that, as her husband said, I was not stuffing them; but she ended, as they always do here, by saying that it might be all very well in Altruria, but it would never do in America, and that it was contrary to human nature to have so many things done in common. “Now, I’ll tell you,” she said. “After we broke up housekeeping in Thirty-third street, we stored our furniture—”

  “Excuse me!” I said. “How, stored?”

  “Oh, I dare say you never store your furniture in Altruria. But here we have hundreds of storehouses of all sorts and sizes, packed with furniture that people put into them when they go to Europe, or get sick to death of servants and the whole bother of housekeeping; and that’s what we did; and, then, as my husband says, we browsed about for a year or two. First, we tried hotelling it, and we took a hotel apartment furnished, and dined at the hotel table, until I certainly thought I should go off, I got so tired of it. Then, we hired a suite in one of the family hotels that there are so many of, and got out enough of our things to furnish it, and had our meals in our rooms; they let you do that for the same price, often they are glad to have you, for the dining-room is so packed. But everything got to tasting just the same as everything else, and my husband had the dyspepsia so bad he couldn’t half attend to business, and I suffered from indigestion myself, cooped up in a few small rooms, that way; and the dog almost died; and finally, we gave that up, and took an apartment, and got out our things — the storage cost as much as the rent of a small house — and put them into it, and had a caterer send in the meals, as they do in Europe. But it isn’t the same here as it is in Europe, and we got so sick of it in a month that I thought I should scream when I saw the same old dishes coming on the table, day after day.

  We had to keep one servant — excuse me, Mr. Homos; domestic — anyway, to look after the table and the parlor and chamber work, and my husband said we might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, and so we got in a cook; and bad as it is, it’s twenty million times better than anything else you can do. Servants are a plague, but you have got to have them, and so I have resigned myself to the will of Providence. If they don’t like it, neither do I, and so I fancy it’s about as broad as it’s long.” I have found this is a favorite phrase of Mrs. Makely’s, and that it seems to give her a great deal of comfort.

  “And you don’t feel that there’s any harm in it?” I ventured to ask.

  “Harm in it?” she repeated. “Why, aren’t the poor things glad to get the work? What would they do without it?”

  “From what I see of your conditions I should be afraid that they would starve,” I said.

  “Yes, they can’t all get places in shops or restaurants, and they have to do something, or starve, as you say,” she said; and she seemed to think what I had said was a concession to her position.

  “But if it were your own case?” I suggested. “If you had no alternatives but starvation and domestic service, you would think there was harm in it, even although you were glad to take a servant’s place?”

  I saw her flush, and she answered haughtily, “You must excuse me if I refuse to imagine myself taking a servant’s place, even for the sake of argument.”

  “And you are quite right,” I said. “Your American instinct is too strong to brook even in imagination the indignities which seem daily, hourly and momently inflicted upon servants in your system.” To my great astonishment she seemed delighted by this conclusion. “Yes,” she said, and she smiled radiantly, “and now you understand how it is that American girls won’t go out to service, though the pay is so much better and they are so much better housed and fed; and everything. Besides,” she added, with an irrelevance which always amuses her husband, though I should be alarmed by it for her sanity if I did not find it so characteristic of women here, who seem to be mentally characterized by the illogicality of the civilization, “they’re not half so good as the foreign servants, even when you can get them. They’ve been brought up in homes of their own, and they’re uppish, and they have no idea of anything but third-rate boarding-house cooking, and they’re always hoping to get married, so that, really, you have no peace of your life with them.”

  “And it never seems to you that the whole relation is wrong?” I asked.

  “What relation?”

  “That between maid and mistress, the hirer and the hireling.”

  “Why, good gracious!” she burst out. “Didn’t Christ himself say that the laborer was worthy of his hire? And how would you get your work done, if you didn’t pay for it?”

  “It might be done for you, when you could not do it yourself, from affection.”

  “From affection!” she returned, with the deepest derision. “Well, I rather think I shall have to do it myself if I want it done from affection! But I suppose you think I ought to do it myself, as the Altrurian ladies do? I can tell you that in America it would be impossible for a lady to do her own work, and there are no intelligence offices where you can find girls that want to work for love. It’s as broad as it’s long.”

  “It’s simply business,” said her husband.

  They were right, my dear Cyril, and I was wrong, strange as it must appear to you. The tie of service, which we think as sacred as the tie of blood, can be here only a business relation, and in these conditions service must forever be grudgingly given and grudgingly paid. There is something in it, I do not quite know what, for I can never place myself precisely in an American’s place, that degrades the poor creatures who serve, so that they must not only be social outcasts, but must leave such a taint of dishonor on their work, that one cannot even do it for oneself without a sense of outraged dignity. You might account for this in Europe, where ages of prescriptive wrong have distorted the relation out of all human wholesomeness and Christian loveliness; but in America, where many, and perhaps most, of those who keep servants and call them so, are but a single generation from fathers who earned their bread by the sweat of their brows, and from mothers who nobly served in all household offices, it is in the last degree bewildering. I can only account for it by that bedevilment of the entire American ideal through the retention of the English economy when the English polity was rejected. But at the heart of America there is this ridiculous contradiction, and it must remain there until the whole country is Altrurianized. There is no other hope; but I did not now urge this point, and we turned to talk of other things, related to the matters we had been discussing.

  “The men,” said Mrs. Makely, “get out of the whole bother very nicely, as long as they are single, and even when they’re married, they are apt to run off to the club, when there’s a prolonged upheaval in the kitchen.”

  “I don’t, Dolly,” suggested her husband.

  “No, you don’t, Dick,” she returned, fondly. “But t
here are not many like you.”

  He went on, with a wink at me: “I never live at the club, except in summer, when you go away to the mountains.”

  “Well, you know I can’t very well take you with me,” she said.

  “Oh, I couldn’t leave my business, anyway,” he said, and he laughed.

  I had noticed the vast and splendid club-houses in the best places in the city, and I had often wondered about their life, which seemed to me a blind groping towards our own, though only upon terms that forbade it to those who most needed it. The clubs here are not like our groups, the free associations of sympathetic people, though one is a little more literary, or commercial, or scientific, or political than another; but the entrance to each is more or less jealously guarded; there is an initiation fee, and there are annual dues, which are usually heavy enough to exclude all but the professional and business classes, though there are, of course, successful artists and authors in them. During the past winter I visited some of the most characteristic, where I dined and supped with the members, or came alone when one of these put me down, for a fortnight or a month.

  They are equipped with kitchens and cellars, and their wines and dishes are of the best. Each is, in fact, like a luxurious private house on a large scale; outwardly they are palaces, and inwardly they have every feature and function of a princely residence complete, even to a certain number of guest-chambers, where members may pass the night, or stay indefinitely, in some cases, and actually live at the club. The club, however, is known only to the cities and the larger towns, in this highly developed form; to the ordinary, simple American, of the country, or of the country town of five or ten thousand people, a New York club would be as strange as it would be to any Altrurian.

  “Do many of the husbands left behind in the summer live at the clubs?” I asked.

  “All that have a club, do,” he said. “Usually, there’s a very good table d’hôte dinner that you couldn’t begin to get for the same price anywhere else; and there are a lot of good fellows there, and you can come pretty near forgetting that you’re homeless, or even that you’re married.”

  He laughed, and his wife said: “You ought to be ashamed, Dick; and me worrying about you all the time I’m away, and wondering what the cook gives you here. Yes,” she continued, addressing me, “that’s the worst thing about the clubs. They make the men so comfortable that they say it’s one of the principal obstacles to early marriages. The young men try to get lodgings near them, so that they can take their meals there, and they know they get much better things to eat than they could have in a house of their own at a great deal more expense, and so they simply don’t think of getting married. Of course,” she said with that wonderful, unintentional, or at least unconscious, frankness of hers, “I don’t blame the clubs altogether. There’s no use denying that girls are expensively brought up, and that a young man has to think twice before taking one of them out of the kind of home she’s’ used to, and putting her into the kind of home he can give her. I suppose it’s as broad as it’s long. If the clubs have killed early marriages, the women have created the clubs.”

  “Do women go much to them?” I asked, choosing this question as a safe one.

  “Much!” she screamed. “They don’t go at all! They can’t! They won’t let us! To be sure, there are some that have rooms where ladies can go with their friends who are members, and have lunch or dinner; but as for seeing the inside of the club-house proper, where these great creatures” — she indicated her husband— “are sitting up, smoking and telling stories, it isn’t to be dreamed of.”

  Her husband laughed. “You wouldn’t like the smoking, Dolly.”

  “Nor the stories, either, some of them,” she retorted.

  “Oh, the stories are always first rate,” he said, and he laughed more than before.

  “And they never gossip, at the clubs, Mr. Homos, never!” she added.

  “Well, hardly ever,” said her husband, with an intonation that I did not understand. It seemed to be some sort of catch-phrase.

  “All I know,” said Mrs. Makely, “is that I like to have my husband belong to his club. It’s a nice place for him in summer; and very often in winter, when I’m dull, or going out somewhere that he hates, he can go down to his club, and smoke a cigar, and come home just about the time I get in, and it’s much better than worrying through the evening with a book. He hates books, poor Dick!” She looked fondly at him, as if this were one of the greatest merits in the world. “But I must confess, I shouldn’t like him to be a mere club man, like some of them.”

  “But how?” I asked.

  “Why, belonging to five or six, or more, even; and spending their whole time at them, when they’re not at business.”

  There was a pause, and Mr. Makely put on an air of modest worth, which he carried off with his usual wink toward me. I said, finally, “And if the ladies are not admitted to the men’s clubs, why don’t they have clubs of their own?”

  “Oh, they have, — several, I believe. But who wants to go and meet a lot of women? You meet enough of them in society, goodness knows. You hardly meet any one else, especially at afternoon teas. They bore you to death.”

  Mrs. Makely’s nerves seemed to lie in the direction of a prolongation of this subject, and I asked my next question a little away from it. “I wish you would tell me, Mrs. Makely, something about your way of provisioning your household. You said that the grocer’s and butcher’s man came up to the kitchen with your supplies—”

  “Yes, and the milkman and the iceman; the iceman always puts the ice into the refrigerator; it’s very convenient, and quite like your own house.”

  “But you go out and select the things yourself, the day before, or in the morning?”

  “Oh, not at all! The men come and the cook gives the order; she knows pretty well what we want on the different days, and I never meddle with it from one week’s end to the other, unless we have friends. The tradespeople send in their bills at the end of the month, and that’s all there is of it.” Her husband gave me one of his queer looks, and she went on: “When we were younger, and just beginning housekeeping, I used to go out and order the things myself; I used even to go to the big markets, and half kill myself, trying to get things a little cheaper at one place than another, and waste more car-fare, and lay up more doctor’s bills than it would all come to, ten times over. I used to fret my life out, remembering the prices; but now, thank goodness, that’s all over. I don’t know any more what beef is a pound than my husband does; if a thing isn’t good, I send it straight back, and that puts them on their honor, you know, and they have to give me the best of everything. The bills average about the same, from month to month; a little more if we have company; but if they’re too outrageous, I make a fuss with the cook, and she scolds the men, and then it goes better for a while. Still, it’s a great bother.”

  I confess that I did not see what the bother was, but I had not the courage to ask, for I had already conceived a wholesome dread of the mystery of an American lady’s nerves. So I merely suggested, “And that is the way that people usually manage?”

  “Why,” she said, “I suppose that some old-fashioned people still do their marketing, and people that have to look to their outgoes, and know what every mouthful costs them. But their lives are not worth having. Eveleth Strange does it — or she did do it when she was in the country; I dare say she won’t when she gets back — just from a sense of duty, and because she says that a housekeeper ought to know about her expenses. But I ask her who will care whether she knows or not; and as for giving the money to the poor that she saves by spending economically, I tell her that the butchers and the grocers have to live, too, as well as the poor, and so it’s as broad as it’s long.”

  I could not make out whether Mr. Makely approved of his wife’s philosophy or not; I do not believe he thought much about it. The money probably came easily with him, and he let it go easily, as an American likes to do. There is nothing penurious or sordid
about this curious people, so fierce in the pursuit of riches. When these are once gained, they seem to have no value to the man who has won them, and he has generally no object in life but to see his womankind spend them.

  This is the season of the famous Thanksgiving, which has now become the national holiday, but has no longer any savor in it of the grim Puritanism it sprang from. It is now appointed by the president and the governors of the several States, in proclamations enjoining a pious gratitude upon the people for their continued prosperity as a nation and a public acknowledgment of the divine blessings. The blessings are supposed to be of the material sort, grouped in the popular imagination as good times, and it is hard to see what they are in these days of adversity, when hordes of men and women of every occupation are feeling the pinch of poverty in their different degree. It is not merely those who have always the wolf at their doors, who are now suffering, but those whom the wolf never threatened before; those who amuse, as well as those who serve the rich, are alike anxious and fearful, where they are not already in actual want; thousands of poor players, as well as hundreds of thousands of poor laborers, are out of employment; and the winter threatens to be one of dire misery. Yet you would not imagine from the smiling face of things, as you would see it in the better parts of this great city, that there was a heavy heart or an empty stomach anywhere below it. In fact, people here are so used to seeing other people in want that it no longer affects them as reality, it is merely dramatic, or hardly so lifelike as that; it is merely histrionic. It is rendered still more spectacular to the imaginations of the fortunate by the melodrama of charity they are invited to take part in by endless appeals, and their fancy is flattered by the notion that they are curing the distress they are only slightly relieving by a gift from their superfluity. The charity, of course, is better than nothing, but it is a fleeting mockery of the trouble at the best. If it were proposed that the city should subsidize a theater at which the idle players could get employment in producing good plays at a moderate cost to the people, the notion would not be considered more ridiculous than that of founding municipal works for the different sorts of idle workers; and it would not be thought half so nefarious, for the proposition to give work by the collectivity is supposed to be in contravention of the sacred principle of monopolistic competition so dear to the American economist, and it would be denounced as an approximation to the surrender of the city to anarchism and destruction by dynamite.