II SOME DETAILS OF LIVING

Cordelia and I duly got married (see the newspaper a piece back) and are still married, and, speaking for myself and, as far as observation enables me, for Cordelia, we are still pleased with our audacious experiment. But why should I call it audacious? I am more and more impressed, so far, with the calculating prudence of it, and surely sensible observers must agree with me, and for ten who will think we were rash to get married on sixty dollars a week there will be hundreds, certainly, who will smile at the idea of that being a doubtful income to marry on.

Our maid, Matilda Finn, is a person of considerable talent. I doubt whether two people who aim to subsist on sixty dollars a week are entitled to have a maid at all. I dare say they belong in a boarding-house, or else in a flat where they do their own work and put at least fifty dollars in the bank the first of every month. Oh, delightful thought! Imagine being six hundred dollars to the good at the end of the year, and putting it into some safe gamble that would be the corner-stone of a competence! And if I had only courted Matilda Finn instead of Cordelia it would have been so easy! Do you remember Andrew Cannybee and his first investment in Pullman? But he was living with his mother then and had few expenses. I suppose the money-savers are folks who go without everything they want except money until they cease to want it. That would have been all right if I had wanted Matilda Finn. I know I could have held myself down to self-denial until I could really afford to marry, and by that time I should have got over wanting Matilda. Whereas I never could endure the thought of not wanting Cordelia. I am afraid the Cannybee strain in me isn’t strong enough to do any good. I seem to like life while it is here.

All the same I like Matilda, who is part of life at these presents, and so does Cordelia. Matilda is cheerful, she is clean and indulgent, and she can cook. When food is scarce and dear and you have to have it, you don’t want to have it fooled with by the wasteful or the inexpert. The little that man wants here below he has to have two or three times a day, and it does make a difference how it is fixed up for him. Consider the staples of nourishment—bread, toast, tea, coffee, bacon, eggs, chickens, chops, beefsteak, fish, codfish, oysters, clams, lettuce, rice, beans, milk, and the package foods that some of us eat for breakfast to divert our minds from diet! How various are the dealings of the human mind and hand with these simple alimentary provisions! What grace or defect of human character is there that cannot find its demonstration in the way an egg is dropped on toast! There is as much difference in toast as there is in people; there is a great native difference in eggs, and much individuality; no two slabs of bacon are alike to start with, or are affected quite the same by smoke and other processes of education. When it comes to coffee, what a problem! Leaving out all the coffee that is not coffee at all, consider the horde of coffees that are coffee; their propensity to masquerade under names that do not belong to them, to be blended, and to taste unexpectedly every time you get a new lot!

But give the coffees their due. Nearly all of them are good. It is only that some of them are enough better than others to interest an aspiring spirit which reaches out instinctively in the direction of the highest good for the money. Such a spirit will early recognize that, food being variable, the mind that prepares it should be constant and sagacious in its processes.

I would not have you suppose I am an epicure. I never think much about food unless it is not so good as I think it ought to be, all things considered; or else is better than I expected. There needs to be some standard of nourishment in a family, and in our family of three it has to be adjusted to an expenditure of three dollars a day. Cordelia says that I contribute the standard and the dollars and leave her to furnish the adjustment. That is where Matilda Finn comes in. I asked Mrs. French once if Cordelia could cook—asked her quite casually, and not, of course, as though it was of any consequence. She said yes, that every woman could cook, and that Cordelia could, of course, and that the question was whether any man could live off her cooking. She has taken cooking lessons since then and courses in Domestic Science, which includes cooking, and I think she can do it. But cooking is an agitating job, and I don’t like to have Cordelia agitated. Nor is there any need. I like better to have her stick to her own profession, which is ministering to happiness. I suppose they don’t teach that in the domestic-science courses. Cordelia ministers to Matilda Finn’s happiness, and Matilda cooks and does all the other things that need to be done in a flat, except what Cordelia and I do; and Cordelia ministers to my happiness remarkably. All sorts and conditions of folks Cordelia ministers to: she has captivated her mother’s market-man, with whom she talks meat, poultry, fish, politics, and current events every morning. She knows all his reasons for the high price of meat. “That man,” she said the other day, “can bamboozle me into anything!” Nevertheless, she seems to be getting intimately acquainted with the butcher business and the anatomy of the animals on which we elect to subsist, and the comparative cost and edibleness of their various sections. The spring lamb that we had for dinner the day Caseby dined with us was “a bargain I got off of Mr. Cooper,” who had an oversupply of fore quarters and sold one at a great reduction to young Mrs. Jesup. As a rule, we do not subsist on spring lamb at home in the spring. That seems to be a favorite dinner-party provision, and we still dine out enough to keep up our acquaintance with it. The “lamb” we have is the most neutral of all meats, unexciting, but sufficient for the purpose of nourishment.

Cordelia sings at her work, and that makes me think she must like the life. Perhaps I should say her employments rather than her work. Being away all day, I don’t know very much about them, but at least I hear her singing while she is putting up her hair.

This matter of woman’s work looks important. I wonder what they do all day—girls, that is, like Cordelia. If she had a job it would simplify matters, particularly if it was a remunerated job, for I dare say Cordelia would spend more money if she had it. I could. But it would have to be some kind of an independent home job, like painting or writing or taking in washing. If she went out to work and had any boss but me, it would not be tolerable. Moreover, if she had a job that she was qualified for and was worthy of her talents, she would probably be better at it than I am at mine and earn more at it than I do, and then where would I come in! Think of us both coming home tired from wage-earning! Awful! I am glad she has no job except, as I said before, the great one of ministering to happiness. I seem to be just a poor old-fashioned monopolist, not much farther along than the Stone Age.

But she does keep busy in a way. I hear of her making calls—though she says calls are a queer employment for a lady who lives over a tailor shop—and she goes to see her mother, and my mother, and various girls, and goes to market, and sews a little and reads a little and does charities a good deal, and has girls in to lunch and feeds them on I don’t know what. She says it’s not wise to break with the life you know any more than you have to, and of course that’s so; though neither is it wise to hang on to the life you know when you can’t afford it. The life you know isn’t the only good one even for you. I have come to feel that tremendously since I turned anarchist—to feel that life is a big thing, a bully thing, and that we are fools to cramp it and trim it down too much to fit usage and environment. Friends are very valuable, acquaintance is valuable, a standard of living and a set of associations when once you are used to them are very hard to shift from; but all those things are the accessories of life rather than life itself, and it seems a chicken-hearted sort of prudence that would sacrifice life to its accessories.

This from a man who is as sensitive as I am to the differences in dropped eggs, and feels as strongly as I do about fish-balls and bacon, and who likes caviare when it is really good, and alligator-pears, and pâtés of goose-livers, may sound a little forced; but must it follow that because one sees and admires the trees he cannot see the forest?

Yes, I am glad Cordelia has no money-making job, but I suppose that is no argument against such employments for women in general who need them. I, being so gifted in money-getting and commanding the income I do, did not need to have my labors supplemented in the wage-earning line. My need was for assistance in spending our money.

By the way, as I meditate on money and my large appetite for it and the ways of getting it, it occurs to me that there is a new profession—muck-raking. Maybe it’s not new, since nothing is, but at any rate it’s coming along on a good slant just now, is very lively, looks altruistic, and I dare say can be made modestly remunerative; for muck-rakers, of course, like other working folks, must live. More than moderately remunerative it can hardly be without spoiling it, for the great business opportunity in it would be to make a great record as a prosecutor and then be retained for the defense. To me, as a lawyer, that looks good, but there are those who would gibe at it as a sort of blackmail.

Well, there does seem to be a lot of tar in money. Sometimes I despair of ever getting enough to keep an auto on without having to pay some impossibly defiling or enslaving price for it; but I haven’t got to have an auto yet, so I take courage.

Father and Father-in-law both growl at the muck-rakers, as is proper enough for gentlemen of their years and responsibilities, but the muck-rakers look to me like microbes of a very natural and timely kind, lawfully and inevitably produced, and going about a necessary business with a catching sort of enthusiasm. When they beat a bad grab, the anarchist in me insists upon rejoicing, no matter what respect the lawyer in me may feel for clients who appreciate lawyers and pay them suitably.

Father-in-law has sent me three gallons of superior European champagne put up in bottles the usual way, mostly pints. He is a kind man. Why he thinks it wise to cultivate expensive thirsts in Cordelia and me I do not know, but my theory is that he thinks a taste for beverages that we can’t afford will make for abstemiousness. So it will, I dare say. Cordelia says the gallons are just a tribute of affection, unsullied by ulterior purposes of any sort. We are going to ask Father-in-law to dinner, and that is a great tribute, for even reduced to his simplest needs he is expensive to feed.

Naturalists have observed and recorded a tendency in married people to duplication. That is, in some respects, a solemn thought. I understand you can get lots more room in Brooklyn for the same money, and people do it; but to me that’s a much more solemn thought than the other one—too solemn altogether. Up the island there are extraordinary rows and successions of human hives. Cordelia and I catch a Sunday afternoon automobile ride up there once in a while and marvel at them as we pass. One could get a fine detachment up there; though for that matter there is an interesting grade of detachment to be had in Brooklyn. And detachment has its value—breaks habits, brings folks in some ways harder up against the facts of life, invites a new inspection of people, brings various releases and stimulations—but I don’t know that it is a thing that Cordelia and I are disposed to chase very hard for its own sake. We are hard enough up against the facts of life as it is, and we are gregarious people and like companions, and if we got a good detachment would go right to work, I suppose, to mitigate it by new associations. We will never move to Harlem or beyond merely for the sake of pioneering, nor swap associations for the mere benefit of swapping. And yet that’s what the Methodist ministers used to do under the old three-years-in-a-place rule—may be doing it still. It was the intention that they should gather no moss, so the plan was to keep them rolling. To me, now, moss looks very nice, and I wouldn’t mind its adhering. I love old associations and permanence of relation, and my heart is even hospitable to some fixity of condition; but there is plenty to be said in favor of wearing the garments of life loose enough to shed them when they get seriously in the way. One should be enough of a change artist to quit a part he cannot excel in before the scene-shifters shut him out. The predicament of people who haven’t it in them to prosper in the social level they find themselves in, and who are so fettered by the conventions and expectations of that level that they can’t break into another, is very pathetic. We hear plenty about the tragedies of families that sink, but what of the tragedies of those that rise, as when a man makes a raft of money and his sons experiment with leisure, drink, chorus-girls, and divorce; and his daughter, for lack of inviting marital opportunities, is obliged to elope with the chauffeur! That sounds better than eloping with the coachman, as used to happen; but still there is a prejudice against it. Of course advantages—most of them—are advantageous, else civilization wouldn’t get ahead; but, by George! they have their price. If Cordelia and I were a grain less stylish we might be living in a model tenement and saving money. (I wonder if we could get one that would hold Matilda too!) The residents of New York around here where we live are roughly divided into two classes, people who eat in the front basement and are getting rich, and people who are too stylish to eat in the front basement, and have upstairs dining-rooms and butler’s pantries, and are (some of them) getting poor. The receipt for getting rich in this neighborhood is—Eat in the basement! But I’m not sure that it is a reliable receipt. It tends to blight some opportunities. Anyhow, it does not fit the ambitions of the socially ambitious of this generation, to whom eating in the basement would seem to conflict with about all that is delectable in life. Of course basement dining-rooms belong to the habits of forty years ago, and invited the simple life, which now for the most part has been chased into flats. But the truth remains that advantages are bought with a price.

It is harder to get something for nothing than we think it is when we read of wills going to probate. They do go there, and then it is to observe whether the heirs get the money or the money gets the heirs. We don’t take medicine unless we are sick. Money in large chunks is pretty strong medicine, but we take it when it offers without regard to our condition, and it does not always do us good.

Tom Merchant was saying something the other day to the effect that a man could not be of very considerable use in the world until he ceased to be dependent on his work for his living. Of course that is not so, as Lincoln’s case and innumerable others attest, and as new cases keep attesting every day. Nevertheless, the venerable John Bigelow has said something very like what Tom said, and I think there is a slice of truth in it. Money in store is power, and makes for leisure to think and act, and may help enormously, in a crisis, to independence in thought and action. Lincoln was poor, but, after all, he had enough cash in hand to spare the time for the debate with Douglas and for all the politics that followed, up to the time when he began to draw a salary as President.

The trouble with the chaps that come early into ready-made money is that so few of them ever learn enough about common human life, and people, and the elements of the job, to be considerably useful, even if they aspire to be. Still, I think they do better nowadays than they used to. The money-getting school, whatever course you take, is an exacting school. Somehow you have to deliver the goods—some kind of goods that somebody is willing to pay for. I wonder how much the girls miss, those of them who do miss it, by not taking the courses in that school! Of course, they miss some great possibilities of development, but against that you have to measure what they would miss by not being able to do two kinds of things in the same years, and sacrificing what they get as it is, for what they might get as it might be. There comes in the division of work between men and women and the difference in their natural careers. Cordelia as she is, for me.

Cordelia and I are agreed that we will have rhododendrons in our garden. Those in the Park have begun to bloom, and I am excessively pleased with them. They have such a fine Greek name that takes me back to Xenophon’s Anabasis, and such splendid blossoms and such interesting shades of color, and then they bloom in the shade. I respect them most of all for that. To live in the shade and turn out so splendid—well, allegorically speaking, it happens more or less to folks, too. It will cost us something to have a good lot of rhododendrons in our garden, but when it comes to planning for our country place we never spare expense. Why should we? Frugality of imagination is no saving to anybody. Cordelia is less extravagant in that particular than I am, because when I see the men who earn a lot of money I speculate in my mind as to how they do it and whether I could do it, and I usually decide that I shall be able to presently if I have time, and then, naturally, I think what I shall have when I get all that money, and just now it is rhododendrons because they are just coming along. A good deal goes with rhododendrons: hired men, domestic animals, chariots of locomotion; I dare say by the time Cordelia and I get around to have them aeroplanes will have become a reasonable solicitation. But there’s no hurry. The rhododendrons in the Park are lovely, and I dare say there are more in the Bronx (if you can get there), and we have hospitable friends who have them in gardens.

This observing the money-getters and noticing how they do it, and computing how long it will take to learn the trick and acquire the necessary prestige, is all right enough and even useful, but it plagues me when I get my mind too much on it. That’s not really the way to live—and yet, and yet. “The life is more than meat; the body more than raiment,” but, having life, meat comes very handy, and having a body, raiment is convenient. The people who miss it are those who starve life, or overlook it, in their solicitude for meat and motors.

The prevalent habit of going to Europe is curious. For that matter the habits of contemporary Americans are very curious—the motor-car habit so conspicuous just now, their travel habit, much cultivated by farmers in winter and by city people in summer. They are remarkable habits; instructive, no doubt; expensive, but somehow at present there is money for them. Cordelia says she has traveled, and need not go on the road again for some time. I haven’t, but I am content to wait until it is convenient. This town of New York is trying to live in in some ways, but it can be said for it that here a great many things are brought to the door. There are pictures here, and very pleasing objects in the shop windows, and a variety of people, and spoken languages enough to satisfy the most ambitious, and a mighty interesting assortment of architecture, and more making while you wait. Some Americans in time past have been to Europe to good purpose—as witness our newer architecture—and some keep going there to pretty good purpose every year. That makes it the easier to stay at home and say Cœlum non animum to oneself, and grub along. Cordelia and I bestow some of our spare attention on the growth of characters. They don’t seem to grow so very much on the road. Intelligence and powers of comparison may get a boost in the school of itineracy, but character not so probably. Corlear Van Terminal has been to Europe once or twice every year since I can remember, and gads constantly when at home, and all but sleeps in a motor-car, and yet, so far as I can see, he’s always just the same as he was the last time. I can’t see that he’s got ahead one lap. Chapman says the soul of man requires to be fed on the Bible and the Greek poets. One can do that at home, and one can work at home, and have faith and endure and plug along—all quite useful to character, and as developing in some ways as travel and Europe can be in others.

Cordelia and I have been reading about the Wesleys and the characters they got and how they got them. There were eighteen children or thereabouts, and a dozen or so grew up. Fine people, too; admirable stock and developed by discipline, privation, and pious training, all tempered by affection, humor, and lots of quality in the trainers. It makes you feel that character is a very expensive product, and hardly to be had at the ten-cent store where we and our contemporaries are prone to go for it.

The Wesleys were poor; very much poorer than is thought at all suitable in these times, even for the reverend clergy or for the teachers of our youth. The father was a clergyman; the mother was a lady of excellent abilities and education, and they lived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Food was plain and hard to get in that family, and raiment was only slightly related to embellishment, and sickness was frequent and poverty perpetual; but with what audacity those Wesleys took hold on life! It makes our timid overtures look like mill-pond voyaging. Really it is wholesome to sit by the window, within ear-shot of the rattle of the street-cars and the chug-chug of the automobiles, and read of the past straits of the straitened and the courage of the bold, and observe on what shoulders of men and women, and through what bogs of privation, civilization has come along.

Not that the Wesleys had a preference for privation. The Reverend Samuel scrambled actively to maintain his family, but the increasing family outran his best diligence. We have changed all that. Families are less apt to outrun the paternal diligence in these days. So far as numbers go, they trudge along respectfully behind the census man and look over his shoulder at the figures. But that change is all in the day’s work, and springs out of changed conditions. People in our time are not curious enough about the processes of nature to raise very large families in order that they may watch near at hand the workings of the rule about the survival of the fittest. What they can observe of the application of that rule in written biography and among the neighbors seems to suffice, and in their own personal speculation they seem to care for no more progeny than they think they can contrive survival for, whether they are fittest or not. So butts in man, and tries to adjust the processes of nature to match his judgment and his taste in expenditure.

When it gets hot Cordelia will be going off to her father’s country palace in Connecticut, varying that experience in due time by a sojourn in my father’s country palace in New Jersey, and I shall spend with her so much of the time as my urban duties permit. That will save us from dependence on any fresh-air funds this year. Parents are a considerable convenience, especially nowadays, when so many of them have learned their place, and especially in this town of New York, where it costs all you can earn to provide a winter habitation, and where the young wives of earnest workers like me are apt to be a good deal out of a job in summer. Much more systematic provision is made to carry my kind of man through the summer than for Cordelia’s kind of woman—the clubs, for example. For man and wife at our stage of life parents, duly qualified and equipped, are a very suitable and timely provision. Indeed, I feel sometimes that the worthlessness and miscellaneous degeneracy of parents in these times is exaggerated. I don’t say this by way of casting an anchor to the windward, nor out of mere magnanimity, but because I honestly think so. People say that parental authority is all gone. Some think it good riddance; others lament. Since democracy came to be the fashion everybody wants his own way more than formerly, and gets it rather more, children included. But parental direction is still a factor in life, and parental influence is enormous, and influence gets to the springs of action and character even more effectually than dogmatic authority. It is much harder for a fool father to blight a Mirabeau nowadays, and those Wesley parents that I spoke of might in our time have meddled less with their daughters’ marriages, thereby, possibly, avoiding some disasters; for the Wesley girls chose ill, but their parents, in choosing for them, chose still worse. Parents doubtless realize the limitations of their calling better than they did, and a good deal more is done in these days than formerly to piece out their deficiencies and help them with their duties. Doctors give them better advice than the Wesley parents got; schools in this country—in spite of the constant stream of criticism and deprecation which schools endure—average surely a great deal better than schools did fifty years ago. The raising and training of the young, being as important a matter as there is in sight, has had protracted attention from some of the best minds, and has had money showered on it in a huge profusion. All that has been more or less helpful to parents, but it does not warrant the idea, so popular among current commentators, that parents have come to be supernumeraries on the public stage. That is a ridiculous notion, the absurdity of which would be demonstrated in about half a day if parents universally should quit work and take a half-holiday.

We ought to save a little money this summer living on our fathers. It is a grand way to save. I don’t know of a better. It makes frugality possible without self-denial—at least without privation. They say there is excellent sport to be got out of self-denial, and I read that saving money and the repression of the impulse to spend it make like everything for the development of character. I dare say that is so. It is all a part of self-control, and of government by intelligence instead of by impulse. And self-control, including timely and suitable repression of expenditure, means freedom, and power to give, and the power to do, and the power to jump in and seize an opportunity. Possibly I can acquire the accomplishment of not buying some things that I want, even though I have the money to pay for them. That will be a wonderful acquisition to me, though I have got so far as to be mighty particular about what I buy on credit. One has got to get as far as that if he is going to get married on such an income as ours.

That was a great stroke—getting married. I don’t see how I had the nerve to do it. Probably I hadn’t. I dare say we got married on Cordelia’s nerve, for when you come down to the facts it was she who took most of the chances, and really made the choice. To choose and to decide things seem in our day to be very largely women’s work. I am more and more impressed with that as I go more and more to Cordelia to get her views. I get them on pretty much everything except points of law. I am the specialist on that and on the earning of money, but she is the specialist on the arrangement of life. I guess she is an obedient wife, but in practice I seem to make suggestions and she to make decisions. She makes them with great consideration and indulgence for me, and with a degree of judgment that saves me much mental effort. The opportunities of mental effort that I enjoy below Canal Street, between ten o’clock and six, suffice to keep my mind exercised, and I am no glutton about making unnecessary mental efforts after I get uptown. Perhaps that simplifies life for Cordelia. I wonder what women do whose husbands don’t have to work!