Through the Eye of the Needle: A Romance

by William Dean Howells

  VII

  I can never insist enough, my dear Cyril, upon the illogicality ofAmerican life. You know what the plutocratic principle is, and what theplutocratic civilization should logically be. But the plutocraticcivilization is much better than it should logically be, bad as it is;for the personal equation constantly modifies it, and renders it far lessdreadful than you would reasonably expect. That is, the potentialities ofgoodness implanted in the human heart by the Creator forbid theplutocratic man to be what the plutocratic scheme of life implies. He isoften merciful, kindly, and generous, as I have told you already, inspite of conditions absolutely egotistical. You would think that theAmericans would be abashed in view of the fact that their morality isoften in contravention of their economic principles, but apparently theyare not so, and I believe that for the most part they are not aware ofthe fact. Nevertheless, the fact is there, and you must keep it in mind,if you would conceive of them rightly. You can in no other way accountfor the contradictions which you will find in my experiences among them;and these are often so bewildering that I have to take myself in hand,from time to time, and ask myself what mad world I have fallen into, andwhether, after all, it is not a ridiculous nightmare. I am not sure that,when I return and we talk these things over together, I shall be able toovercome your doubts of my honesty, and I think that when I no longerhave them before my eyes I shall begin to doubt my own memory. But forthe present I can only set down what I at least seem to see, and trustyou to accept it, if you cannot understand it.

  Perhaps I can aid you by suggesting that, logically, the Americans shouldbe what the Altrurians are, since their polity embodies our belief thatall men are born equal, with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuitof happiness; but that illogically they are what the Europeans are, sincethey still cling to the economical ideals of Europe, and hold that menare born socially unequal, and deny them the liberty and happiness whichcan come from equality alone. It is in their public life and civic lifethat Altruria prevails; it is in their social and domestic life thatEurope prevails; and here, I think, is the severest penalty they must payfor excluding women from political affairs; for women are at once thebest and the worst Americans: the best because their hearts are thepurest, the worst because their heads are the idlest. "Anothercontradiction!" you will say, and I cannot deny it; for, with all theircultivation, the American women have no real intellectual interests, butonly intellectual fads; and while they certainly think a great deal, theyreflect little, or not at all. The inventions and improvements whichhave made their household work easy, the wealth that has released them insuch vast numbers from work altogether, has not enlarged them to thesphere of duties which our Altrurian women share with us, but has leftthem, with their quickened intelligences, the prey of the trivialitieswhich engross the European women, and which have formed the life of thesex hitherto in every country where women have an economical and socialfreedom without the political freedom that can alone give it dignity andimport. They have a great deal of beauty, and they are inconsequentlycharming; I need not tell you that they are romantic and heroic, or thatthey would go to the stake for a principle, if they could find one, aswillingly as any martyr of the past; but they have not much moreperspective than children, and their reading and their talk about readingseem not to have broadened their mental horizons beyond the old sunriseand the old sunset of the kitchen and the parlor.

  In fine, the American house as it is, the American household, is what theAmerican woman makes it and wills it to be, whether she wishes it to beso or not; for I often find that the American woman wills things that shein no wise wishes. What the normal New York house is, however, I hadgreat difficulty in getting Mrs. Makely to tell me, for, as she saidquite frankly, she could not imagine my not knowing. She asked me if Ireally wanted her to begin at the beginning, and, when I said that I did,she took a little more time to laugh at the idea, and then she said, "Isuppose you mean a brown-stone, four-story house in the middle of ablock?"

  "Yes, I think that is what I mean," I said.

  "Well," she began, "those high steps that they all have, unless they'reEnglish-basement houses, really give them another story, for people usedto dine in the front room of their basements. You've noticed the littlefront yard, about as big as a handkerchief, generally, and the stepsleading down to the iron gate, which is kept locked, and the basementdoor inside the gate? Well, that's what you might call the back elevatorof a house, for it serves the same purpose: the supplies are brought inthere, and market-men go in and out, and the ashes, and the swill, andthe servants--that you object to so much. We have no alleys in New York,the blocks are so narrow, north and south; and, of course, we have noback doors; so we have to put the garbage out on the sidewalk--and it'snasty enough, goodness knows. Underneath the sidewalk there are binswhere people keep their coal and kindling. You've noticed the gratings inthe pavements?"

  I said yes, and I was ashamed to own that at first I had thought themsome sort of registers for tempering the cold in winter; this would haveappeared ridiculous in the last degree to my hostess, for the Americanshave as yet no conception of publicly modifying the climate, as we do.

  "Back of what used to be the dining-room, and what is now used for alaundry, generally, is the kitchen, with closets between, of course, andthen the back yard, which some people make very pleasant with shrubs andvines; the kitchen is usually dark and close, and the girls can only geta breath of fresh air in the yard; I like to see them; but generally it'staken up with clothes-lines, for people in houses nearly all have theirwashing done at home. Over the kitchen is the dining-room, which takes upthe whole of the first floor, with the pantry, and it almost always has abay-window out of it; of course, that overhangs the kitchen, and darkensit a little more, but it makes the dining-room so pleasant. I tell myhusband that I should be almost willing to live in a house again, just onaccount of the dining-room bay-window. I had it full of flowers in pots,for the southern sun came in; and then the yard was so nice for the dog;you didn't have to take him out for exercise, yourself; he chased thecats there and got plenty of it. I must say that the cats on the backfences were a drawback at night; to be sure, we have them here, too; it'sseven stories down, but you do hear them, along in the spring. Theparlor, or drawing-room, is usually rather long, and runs from thedining-room to the front of the house, though where the house is verydeep they have a sort of middle room, or back parlor. Dick, get somepaper and draw it. Wouldn't you like to see a plan of the floor?"

  I said that I should, and she bade her husband make it like their oldhouse in West Thirty-third Street. We all looked at it together.

  "This is the front door," Mrs. Makely explained, "where people come in,and then begins the misery of a house--stairs! They mostly go upstraight, but sometimes they have them curve a little, and in the newhouses the architects have all sorts of little dodges for squaring themand putting landings. Then, on the second floor--draw it, Dick--you havetwo nice, large chambers, with plenty of light and air, before andbehind. I do miss the light and air in a flat, there's no denying it."

  "You'll go back to a house yet, Dolly," said her husband.

  "Never!" she almost shrieked, and he winked at me, as if it were the bestjoke in the world. "Never, as long as houses have stairs!"

  "Put in an elevator," he suggested.

  "Well, that is what Eveleth Strange has, and she lets the servants useit, too," and Mrs. Makely said, with a look at me: "I suppose that wouldplease you, Mr. Homos. Well, there's a nice side-room over the front doorhere, and a bath-room at the rear. Then you have more stairs, and largechambers, and two side-rooms. That makes plenty of chambers for a smallfamily. I used to give two of the third-story rooms to my two girls. Iought really to have made them sleep in one; it seemed such a shame tolet the cook have a whole large room to herself; but I had nothing elseto do with it, and she did take such comfort in it, poor old thing! Yousee, the rooms came wrong in our house, for it fronted north, and I hadto give the girls sunny rooms or else give them f
ront rooms, so that itwas as broad as it was long. I declare, I was perplexed about it thewhole time we lived there, it seemed so perfectly anomalous."

  "And what is an English-basement house like?" I ventured to ask, ininterruption of the retrospective melancholy she had fallen into.

  "Oh, _never_ live in an English-basement house, if you value yourspine!" cried the lady. "An English-basement house is nothing _but_stairs. In the first place, it's only one room wide, and it's a storyhigher than the high-stoop house. It's one room forward and one back, thewhole way up; and in an English-basement it's always _up_, and_never_ down. If I had my way, there wouldn't one stone be left uponanother in the English-basements in New York."

  I have suffered Mrs. Makely to be nearly as explicit to you as she was tome; for the kind of house she described is of the form ordinarilyprevailing in all American cities, and you can form some idea from it howcity people live here. I ought perhaps to tell you that such a house isfitted with every housekeeping convenience, and that there is hot andcold water throughout, and gas everywhere. It has fireplaces in all therooms, where fires are often kept burning for pleasure; but it is reallyheated from a furnace in the basement, through large pipes carried to thedifferent stories, and opening into them by some such registers as weuse. The separate houses sometimes have steam-heating, but not often.They each have their drainage into the sewer of the street, and this istrapped and trapped again, as in the houses of our old plutocraticcities, to keep the poison of the sewer from getting into the houses.