Household Papers and Stories. Гарриет Бичер-СтоуЧитать онлайн книгу.
your coat is! You must have a new one,” and I shall get a new coat. Then she will say, “Now, my dear, that hat will never do,” and then I shall have a new hat; and then I shall say, “My dear, it will never do for me to be so fine and you to wear your old gown,” and so my wife will get a new gown; and then the new gown will require a new shawl and a new bonnet; all of which we shall not feel the need of if I don’t take this pair of silk stockings, for, as long as we don’t see them, our old things seem very well suited to each other.’ ”
The girls laughed at this story, and I then added, in my most determined manner—
“But I must warn you, girls, that I have compromised to the utmost extent of my power, and that I intend to plant myself on the old stair carpet in determined resistance. I have no mind to be forbidden the use of the front stairs, or condemned to get up into my bedroom by a private ladder, 19 as I should be immediately if there were a new carpet down.”
“Why, papa!”
“Would it not be so? Can the sun shine in the parlor now for fear of fading the carpet? Can we keep a fire there for fear of making dust, or use the lounges and sofas for fear of wearing them out? If you got a new entry and stair carpet, as I said, I should have to be at the expense of another staircase to get up to our bedroom.”
“Oh no, papa,” said Jane innocently; “there are very pretty druggets now for covering stair carpets, so that they can be used without hurting them.”
“Put one over the old carpet, then,” said I, “and our acquaintance will never know but it is a new one.”
All the female senate laughed at this proposal, and said it sounded just like a man.
“Well,” said I, standing up resolutely for my sex, “a man’s ideas on woman’s matters may be worth some attention. I flatter myself that an intelligent, educated man doesn’t think upon and observe with interest any particular subject for years of his life without gaining some ideas respecting it that are good for something; at all events, I have written another article for the ‘Atlantic,’ which I will read to you.”
“Well, wait one minute, papa, till we get our work,” said the girls, who, to say the truth, always exhibit a flattering interest in anything their papa writes, and who have the good taste never to interrupt his readings with any conversations in an undertone on cross-stitch and floss-silks, as the manner of some is. Hence the little feminine bustle of arranging all these matters beforehand. Jane, or Jenny, as I call her in my good-natured moods, put on a fresh clear stick of hickory, of that species denominated shagbark, which is full of most charming slivers, burning with such a clear flame, and emitting such a delicious perfume in burning, 20 that I would not change it with the millionaire who kept up his fire with cinnamon.
You must know, my dear Mr. Atlantic, and you, my confidential friends of the reading public, that there is a certain magic or spiritualism which I have the knack of in regard to these mine articles, in virtue of which my wife and daughters never hear or see the little personalities respecting them which form parts of my papers. By a peculiar arrangement which I have made with the elves of the inkstand and the familiar spirits of the quill, a sort of glamour falls on their eyes and ears when I am reading, or when they read the parts personal to themselves; otherwise their sense of feminine propriety would be shocked at the free way in which they and their most internal affairs are confidentially spoken of between me and you, O loving readers.
Thus, in an undertone, I tell you that my little Jenny, as she is zealously and systematically arranging the fire, and trimly whisking every untidy particle of ashes from the hearth, shows in every movement of her little hands, in the cock of her head, in the knowing, observing glance of her eye, and in all her energetic movements, that her small person is endued and made up of the very expressed essence of housewifeliness—she is the very attar, not of roses, but of housekeeping. Care-taking and thrift and neatness are a nature to her; she is as dainty and delicate in her person as a white cat, as everlastingly busy as a bee; and all the most needful faculties of time, weight, measure, and proportion ought to be fully developed in her skull, if there is any truth in phrenology. Besides all this, she has a sort of hard-grained little vein of common sense, against which my fanciful conceptions and poetical notions are apt to hit with just a little sharp grating, if they are not well put. In fact, this kind of woman needs carefully to be idealized in the process of education, or she will stiffen and dry, as 21 she grows old, into a veritable household Pharisee, a sort of domestic tyrant. She needs to be trained in artistic values and artistic weights and measures, to study all the arts and sciences of the beautiful, and then she is charming. Most useful, most needful, these little women: they have the centripetal force which keeps all the domestic planets from gyrating and frisking in unseemly orbits, and, properly trained, they fill a house with the beauty of order, the harmony and consistency of proportion, the melody of things moving in time and tune, without violating the graceful appearance of ease which Art requires.
So I had an eye to Jenny’s education in my article which I unfolded and read, and which was entitled
HOMEKEEPING VERSUS HOUSEKEEPING
There are many women who know how to keep a house, but there are but few that know how to keep a home. To keep a house may seem a complicated affair, but it is a thing that may be learned; it lies in the region of the material; in the region of weight, measure, color, and the positive forces of life. To keep a home lies not merely in the sphere of all these, but it takes in the intellectual, the social, the spiritual, the immortal.
Here the hickory stick broke in two, and the two brands fell controversially out and apart on the hearth, scattering the ashes and coals, and calling for Jenny and the hearth-brush. Your wood fire has this foible, that it needs something to be done to it every five minutes; but, after all, these little interruptions of our bright-faced genius are like the piquant sallies of a clever friend—they do not strike us as unreasonable.
When Jenny had laid down her brush she said—
“Seems to me, papa, you are beginning to soar into metaphysics.”
22
“Everything in creation is metaphysical in its abstract terms,” said I, with a look calculated to reduce her to a respectful condition. “Everything has a subjective and an objective mode of presentation.”
“There papa goes with subjective and objective!” said Marianne. “For my part, I never can remember which is which.”
“I remember,” said Jenny; “it’s what our old nurse used to call internal and out-ternal—I always remember by that.”
“Come, my dears,” said my wife, “let your father read;” so I went on as follows:—
I remember in my bachelor days going with my boon companion, Bill Carberry, to look at the house to which he was in a few weeks to introduce his bride. Bill was a gallant, free-hearted, open-handed fellow, the life of our whole set, and we felt that natural aversion to losing him that bachelor friends would. How could we tell under what strange aspects he might look forth upon us, when once he had passed into “that undiscovered country” of matrimony? But Bill laughed to scorn our apprehensions.
“I’ll tell you what, Chris,” he said, as he sprang cheerily up the steps and unlocked the door of his future dwelling, “do you know what I chose this house for? Because it’s a social-looking house. Look there, now,” he said, as he ushered me into a pair of parlors—“look at those long south windows, the sun lies there nearly all day long; see what a capital corner there is for a lounging-chair; fancy us, Chris, with our books or our paper, spread out loose and easy, and Sophie gliding in and out like a sunbeam. I’m getting poetical, you see. Then, did you ever see a better, wider, airier dining-room? What capital suppers and things we’ll have there! the nicest times—everything free and easy, you know—just what I’ve always 23 wanted a house for. I tell you, Chris, you and Tom Innis shall have latch-keys just like mine, and there is a capital chamber there at the head of the stairs, so that you can be free to come and go. And here now’s the library—fancy this full of books and engravings