Our Philadelphia

by Elizabeth Robins Pennell

I

Naturally, I could not live in Spruce Street and not believe, as every Philadelphian should and once did, that no other kind of a house except the Spruce Street house was fit for a Philadelphian to live in. The Philadelphian, from infancy, was convinced by his surroundings and bringing-up that there was but one way of doing things decently and respectably and that was the Philadelphia way, nor can my prolonged exile relieve me from the sense of crime at times when I catch myself doing things not just as Philadelphians used to do them.

I was safe from any such crime in my Grandfather's house. All Philadelphia might have been let in without fear. Had skeletons been concealed in the capacious cupboards, they would have been of the approved Philadelphia pattern. My Grandfather was not at all of Montaigne's opinion that order in the management of life is sottish, but looked upon it rather as "Heaven's first law." His day's programme was the same as in every red brick house with white marble steps and a back-yard full of roses and shrubs and Johnny-jump-ups. Everything at Eleventh and Spruce was done according to the same Philadelphia rules at the same hour, from the washing of the family linen on Monday, when Sunday's beef was eaten cold for dinner, to the washing of the front on Saturday morning, when Philadelphia streets from end to end were all mops and maids, rivers and lakes.

When my Grandfather, with his family on their knees around him, began the day by reading morning prayers in the back-building dining-room, he could have had the satisfaction of knowing that every other Philadelphia head of a family was engaged in the same edifying duty, but I hope, for every other Philadelphia family's sake, with a trifle less awe-inspiring solemnity. After being present once at my Grandfather's prayers, nobody needed to be assured that life was earnest.

He did not shed his solemnity when he rose from his knees, nor when he had finished his breakfast of scrapple and buckwheat cakes and left the breakfast table. He was as solemn in his progress through the streets to the Philadelphia Bank, at Fourth and Chestnut, of which he was President, and having said so much perhaps I might as well add his name, Thomas Robins, for in his day he was widely known and it is a satisfaction to remember, as widely appreciated both in and out of Philadelphia. His clothes were always of the most admirable cut and fit and of a fashion becoming to his years, he carried a substantial cane with a gold top, his stock was never laid aside for a frivolous modern cravat, his silk hat was as indispensable, and his slow walk had a dignity royalty might have envied. He was a handsome old man and a noticeable figure even in Philadelphia streets at the hour when John Welsh from the corner, and Biddles and Cadwalladers and Whartons and Peppers and Lewises and a host of other handsome old Philadelphians with good Philadelphia names from the near neighborhood, were starting downtown in clothes as irreproachable and with a gait no less dignified. The foreigner's idea of the American is of a slouchy, free-and-easy man for ever cracking jokes. But slouchiness and jokes had no place in the dictionary or the deportment of my Grandfather and his contemporaries, at a period when Philadelphia supplied men like John Welsh for its country to send as representatives abroad and there carry on the traditions of Franklin and John Adams and Jefferson. My Father—Edward Robins—inherited more than his share of this old-fashioned Philadelphia manner, making a ceremony of the morning walk to his office and the Sunday walk to church. But it has been lost by younger generations, more's the pity. In memory I would not have my Grandfather a shade less solemn, though at the time his solemnity put me on anything but easy terms with him.

II

The respectful bang of the front door upon my Grandfather's dignified back after breakfast was the signal for the family to relax. The cloth was at once cleared, my Grandmother and my Aunts—like all Philadelphia mothers and daughters—brought their work-baskets into the dining-room and sat and gossiped there until it was time for my Grandmother to go and see the butcher and the provision dealer, or for my Aunts to make those formal calls for which the morning then was the unpardonable hour.

INDEPENDENCE SQUARE AND THE STATE HOUSE

It seems to me, in looking back, as if my Grandmother could never have gone out of the house except on an errand to the provision man, such an important part did it play in her daily round of duties. She never went to market. That was not the Philadelphia woman's business, it was the Philadelphia man's. My Grandfather, at the time of which I write, must have grown too old for the task, which was no light one, for it meant getting up at unholy hours every Wednesday and every Saturday, leaving the rest of the family in their comfortable beds, and being back again in time for prayers and eight o'clock breakfast. I cannot say how this division of daily labour was brought about. The century before, a short time as things go in Philadelphia, it was the other way round and the young Philadelphia woman at her marketing was one of the sights strangers in the town were taken to see. But in my time it was so much the man's right that as a child I believed there was something essentially masculine in going to market, just as there was in making the mayonnaise for the salad at dinner. A Philadelphia man valued his salad too highly to trust its preparation to a woman. It was almost a shock to me when my Father allowed my motherly little Aunt to relieve him of the responsibility in the Spruce Street house. And later on, when he re-married and again lived in a house of his own, and my Step-Mother made a mayonnaise quite equal to his or to any mere man's, not even to her would he shift the early marketing,—his presence in the Twelfth Street Market as essential on Wednesday and Saturday mornings as in the Stock Exchange every day—and his conscientiousness was the more astonishing as his genius was by no means for domesticity. Philadelphia women respected man's duties and rights in domestic, as in all, matters. I remember an elderly Philadelphian, who was stopping at Blossom's Hotel in Chester, where all Americans thirty years ago began their English tour, telling me the many sauces on the side table had looked so good she would have liked to try them and, on my asking her why in the world she had not, saying they had not been offered to her and she thought perhaps they were for the gentlemen. Only a Philadelphian among Americans could have given that answer.