第22章 PART FIRST(20)

"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."X.