Part 10 (1/2)
But one of the great evils of this day is found in the fact that a large population of our towns and cities are giving up and have given up their homes and taken apartments, that they may have more freedom from domestic duties and more time for social life, and because they like the whirl of publicity better than the quiet and privacy of a residence they can call their own. The lawful use of these hotels and boarding-houses is for most people while they are in transitu: but as a terminus they are in many cases demoralization, utter and complete.
That is the point at which families innumerable have begun to disintegrate. There never has been a time when so many families, healthy and abundantly able to support and direct homes of their own, have struck tent and taken permanent abode in these public establishments. It is an evil wide as Christendom, and by voice and through the newspaper press I utter warning and burning protest, and ask Almighty G.o.d to bless the word, whether in the hearing or reading.
PROMOTERS OF GOSSIP.
In these public caravanseries the demon of gossip is apt to get full sway. All the boarders run daily the gauntlet of general inspection--how they look when they come down in the morning and when they get in at night, and what they do for a living, and whom they receive as guests in their rooms, and what they wear, and what they do not wear, and how they eat, and what they eat, and how much they eat, and how little they eat. If a man proposes in such a place to be isolated and reticent and alone, they will begin to guess about him: Who is he? Where did he come from? How long is he going to stay? Has he paid his board? How much does he pay? Perhaps he has committed some crime and does not want it to be known; there must be something wrong about him, or he would speak.
The whole house goes into the detective business. They must find out about him. They must find out about him right away. If he leave his door unlocked by accident he will find that his rooms have been inspected, his trunk explored, his letters folded differently from the way they were folded when he put them away. Who is he? is the question, asked with intenser interest, until the subject has become a monomania. The simple fact is, that he is n.o.body in particular, but minds his own business. The best landlords and landladies cannot sometimes hinder their places from becoming
A PANDEMONIUM
of whisperers, and reputations are torn to tatters, and evil suspicions are aroused, and scandals started, and the parliament of the family is blown to atoms by some Guy Fawkes who was not caught in time, as was his English predecessor of gunpowdery reputation.
The reason is that while in private homes families have so much to keep them busy, in these promiscuous and mult.i.tudinous residences there are so many who have nothing to do, and that always makes mischief. They gather in each other's rooms and spend hours in consultation about others. If they had to walk a half mile before they got to the willing ear of some listener to detraction they would get out of breath before reaching there, and not feel in full glow of animosity or slander, or might, because of the distance, not go at all. But rooms 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 and 25 are on the same corridor, and when one carrion crow goes ”Caw! Caw!” all the other crows hear it and flock together over the same carca.s.s. ”Oh, I have heard something rich! Sit down and let me tell you all about it.” And the first guffaw increases the gathering, and it has to be told all over again, and as they separate each carries a spark from the altar of Gab to some other circle, until from the coal-heaver in the cellar to the maid in the top room of the garret all are aware of the defamation, and that evening all who leave the house will bear it to other houses, until autumnal fires sweeping across Illinois prairies are less raging and swift than that flame of consuming reputation blazing across the village or city.
Those of us who were brought up in the country know that the old-fas.h.i.+oned hatching of eggs in the hay-mow required four or five weeks of brooding, but there are new modes of hatching by machinery, which take less time and do the work in wholesale. So, while the private home may brood into life an occasional falsity, and take a long time to do it, many of the boarding-houses and family hotels afford a swifter and more mult.i.tudinous style of moral incubation, and one old gossip will get off the nest after one hour's brooding, clucking a flock of thirty lies after her, each one picking up its little worm of juicy regalement. It is no advantage to hear too much about your neighbors, for your time will be so much occupied in taking care of their faults that you will have no time to look after your own. And while you are pulling the chickweed out of their garden yours will get all overgrown with horse-sorrel and mullen stalks.
A WRONG TO CHILDREN.
One of the worst damages that comes from the herding of so many people into boarding-houses and family hotels is inflicted upon children. It is only another way of bringing them up on the commons. While you have your own private house you can, for the most part, control their companions.h.i.+p and their whereabouts; but by twelve years of age in these public resorts they will have picked up all the bad things that can be furnished by the prurient minds of dozens of people. They will overhear blasphemies, and see quarrels, and get precocious in sin, and what the bartender does not tell them the porter or hostler or bell-boy will.
Beside that, the children will go out into this world without the restraining, anchoring, steadying and all-controlling memory of a home. From that none of us who have been blessed of such memory have escaped. It grips a man for eighty years, if he lives so long. It pulls him back from doors into which he otherwise would enter. It smites him with contrition in the very midst of his dissipations. As the fish already surrounded by
THE LONG WIDE NET
swim out to sea, thinking they can go as far as they please, and with gay toss of silvery scale they defy the sportsman on the beach, and after a while the fishermen begin to draw in the net, hand over hand, and hand over hand, and it is a long while before the captured fins begin to feel the net, and then they dart this way and that, hoping to get out, but find themselves approaching the sh.o.r.e, and are brought up to the very feet of the captors, so the memory of an early home sometimes seems to relax and let men out further and further from G.o.d and further and further from sh.o.r.e--five years, ten years, twenty years, thirty years; but some day they find an irresistible mesh drawing them back, and they are compelled to retreat from their prodigality and wandering; and though they make desperate effort to escape the impression, and try to dive deeper down in sin, after a while are brought clear back and held upon the Rock of Ages.
If it be possible, O father and mother! let your sons and daughters go out into the world under the semi-omnipotent memory of a good, pure home. About your two or three rooms in a boarding-house or a family hotel you can cast no such glorious sanct.i.ty. They will think of these public caravanseries as an early stopping place, malodorous with old victuals, coffees perpetually steaming, and meats in everlasting stew or broil, the air surcharged with carbonic acid, and corridors along which drunken boarders come staggering at one o'clock in the morning, rapping at the door till the affrighted wife lets them in. Do not be guilty of the sacrilege or blasphemy of calling such a place a home.
WHAT A HOME IS.
A home is four walls enclosing one family with ident.i.ty of interest, and a privacy from outside inspection so complete that it is a world in itself, no one entering except by permission--bolted and barred and chained against all outside inquisitiveness. The phrase so often used in law books and legal circles is mightily suggestive--every man's house is his castle. As much so as though it had drawbridge, portcullis, redoubt, bastion and armed turret. Even the officer of the law may not enter to serve a writ, except the door be voluntarily opened unto him; burglary, or the invasion of it, a crime so offensive that the law clashes its iron jaws on any one who attempts it. Unless it be necessary to stay for longer or shorter time in family hotel or boarding-house--and there are thousands of instances in which it is necessary, as I showed you at the beginning--unless in this exceptional case, let neither wife nor husband consent to such permanent residence.
HAZARDOUS TO MORALS.
The probability is that the wife will have to divide her husband's time with public smoking or reading room, or with some coquettish spider in search of unwary flies; and if you do not entirely lose your husband it will be because he is divinely protected from the disasters that have whelmed thousands of husbands with as good intentions as yours. Neither should the husband, without imperative reason, consent to such a life unless he is sure his wife can withstand the temptation of social dissipation which sweeps across such places with the force of the Atlantic Ocean when driven by a September equinox. Many wives give up their homes for these public residences so that they may give their entire time to operas, theatres, b.a.l.l.s, receptions and levees, and they are in a perpetual whirl, like a whip-top, spinning round and round and round very prettily until it loses its equipoise and shoots off into a tangent. But the difference is, in one case it is a top and in the other a soul.
THE LARES AND PENATES.
Beside this there is an a.s.siduous acc.u.mulation of little things around the private home which in the aggregate make a great attraction, while the denizen of one of these public residences is apt to say: ”What is the use? I have no place to keep them if I should take them.”
Mementoes, bric-a-brac, curiosities, quaint chair or cosy lounge, upholsteries, pictures, and a thousand things that accrete in a home are discarded or neglected because there is no homestead in which to arrange them. And yet they are the case in which the pearl of domestic happiness is set. You can never become as attached to the appointments of a boarding-house or family hotel as to those things that you can call your own, and are a.s.sociated with the different members of your household, or with scenes of thrilling import in your domestic history. Blessed is that home in which for a whole lifetime they have been gathering until every figure in the carpet, and every panel of the door, and every cas.e.m.e.nt of the window has a chirography of its own, speaking out something about father or mother, or son or daughter, or friend that was with us a while. What a sacred place it becomes when one can say: ”In that room such a one was born; in that bed such a one died; in that chair I sat on the night I heard such a one had received a great public honor; by that stool my child knelt for her last evening prayer; here I sat to greet my son as he came back from a sea voyage; that was father's cane; that was mother's rocking chair.” What a joyful and pathetic congress of reminiscences!
HOSPITALITY CURTAILED.