I am told that the English are learning the habit of restlessness from the Americans, as indeed they have learned many other things. If they learn it thoroughly they will, I think, have to give up the hope of being able to marry wealthy American women. Their titles will not purchase desirable brides for them if they are no longer able to offer settled homes. According to a very learned German historian, it was the introduction of the "stabilitas loci" ideal into the western rules which made monasticism the popular career it was in the church. It is his old fondness for settling down and staying there which made the Englishman so popular as a husband.
CHAPTER XI
THE OPEN DOOR
Americans are forced by the restlessness of their nature to move about frequently from house to house, but they have arranged that each temporary abode is very comfortable. They are ahead of the English in their domestic arrangements. I pay this tribute to them very unwillingly, because I myself am more at my ease in an inconveniently arranged house. That is because I am accustomed to inconvenience. The English houses are greatly superior to the Irish, therefore to go straight from an Irish house to an American, from Connaught to Chicago, is to plunge oneself too suddenly into strangely civilized surroundings. I admire, but I fear it would be years before I could enjoy, an American house. I go to bed most contentedly in a bedroom in which a single candle lights a little circle round it, leaving dim, fascinating spaces in which anything may lurk. I like when the candle is extinguished to see a faint glow of light from a fire reflected on the ceiling. I find it pleasant to remember, after I have got into bed, that I do not know in what part of the room I left the matches, that if I awake in the night and want the light I must go on a dangerous and exciting quest, feeling my way toward the dressing table, sweeping one thing after another off it while I pass my hand along in search of the matchbox. The glare of the electric light robs bed-going of its romance. The convenient switch beside my hand cuts me off from all chance of midnight adventure.
I like to get out of bed on a frosty morning and find myself in a thoroughly cold room. The effort to do this very trying thing braces me for the day. I slip a hand, an arm, a foot, from the blankets, feel the nip of the air, draw them back again, go through a period of intense mental struggle, make a gallant effort, fling all the bedclothes from me and stand shivering on the floor. I feel then that I am a strong, virtuous man, fit to go forth and conquer. The glow of righteousness becomes even more delightful if I find a film of ice on the water of my jug and break it with the handle of a toothbrush. All this is denied me in an American house. Getting out of bed there is no real test of moral courage. The room is pleasantly warm, a sponge is soft and pliable, not a frozen stone.
I like, where this is still possible, to have my bath in a large tin dish, shallow and flat, which stands in the middle of the bedroom floor with a mat under it. There are fine old Irish houses in which this delightful way of bathing still survives. Alas! they are, even in Ireland, getting fewer every day. The next best thing is to wander down chilly corridors in search of the single bathroom which the house contains. This is, fortunately, still necessary in most English and nearly all Irish houses. Any one who is fond of the amusement of reading house agents' advertisements must have noticed the English economy in bathrooms. "Handsome mansion, four reception rooms, lounge hall, billiard room, fifteen bedrooms, bath, hot and cold." I do not believe that there is a house like that in all America. Imagine the excitement of living in it when all the fifteen bedrooms are full. It stimulates a man to feel, as he sallies forth with his towel over his arm, that any one of the other fourteen inhabitants may have reached the bath before him, that thirteen people may possibly be waiting in a queue outside the door. To get into the bathroom in a house of that kind at the first attempt must be like holding a hand at bridge with four aces, four kings, four queens and a knave in it, a thing worth living and waiting for. In America all this is denied us. A bathroom, luxuriously arranged, adjoins each bedroom. Washing is made so ridiculously easy that there ceases to be any virtue in it. No one would say in America that cleanliness is next to godliness. There is no connection between the two things. It would be as sensible to say that breathing is a subordinate kind of virtue. In England a dressing gown is well-nigh a necessity. I know a thoughtful host who provides one for his guests; a warm voluminous garment in which it is possible to go comfortably to the bathroom. In America a dressing gown, for a man, is a useless incumbrance. I dragged one with me, but I shall never take it again; for, like many other things, it is misnamed. It is only when one has to stop dressing that a dressing gown is any use.
In these matters of the heating of houses and the arrangement of baths I prefer what I am accustomed to, but I know that I am little better than a barbarian. I might, if I had lived in the days when matches were first invented, have sighed for my flint and steel, but I hope I should have recognized the superiority of matches. I might, in the early days of railways, have wished to go on traveling in stage coaches, but I should have known that steam engines are really better things than horses at dragging heavy weights for long distances. Thus I cling to the romance of icy bedrooms and inconvenient baths, but I acknowledge freely that the Americans have found the better way and made a step forward along the road of human progress.
I am not, however, so obstinately conservative as to fail in appreciating some other points in the American mastery of the domestic arts. I may long for chilly rooms and remote baths, but I thoroughly enjoy clean towels. Never have I met so many clean towels as in America. The English middle-class housekeeper is behind her French sister in the provision of towels, but the American is ahead even of France. The American towel is indeed small, the bath towel particularly small; but that seems to me a trifling matter, hardly worth mentioning, when the supply is abundant. I would rather any day have three small apples than one large one, and my feeling about towels is the same. It is a real pleasure to find a row of clean ones waiting every time it becomes necessary to wash. It is certainly a mark of superior civilization to realize the importance of house linen in daily life. On the other hand, it must be admitted that the American fails in the matter of sheets. What you get are good, very good, smooth and cool. You are constantly given clean ones. But they are not long enough. In England the sheet on your bed covers your feet completely and leaves a broad flap at the other end which you can turn over the blankets and tuck under your chin. In America you must either leave your feet sheetless or be content with a mere ribbon of linen under your chin, a narrow strip which will certainly wriggle away during the night. This may not be the fault of the American housekeeper. There may be some kind of linen drapers' trust which baffles the efforts of reformers. I have heard that in one of the western states, where the suffrage has been granted to women, a law has been passed that all sheets must be made eighteen inches longer than they usually are in the other American states. That law is a strong proof of the advantages to the community of allowing women to vote. It also seems to show that the American woman, at all events, is alive to the necessity of reform in this matter of sheets, and is determined to do her best to remedy a defect in her household management.
The disuse of doors in those parts of the house which are inhabited during the daytime is a very interesting feature of American domestic life. The first action of an Englishman when he enters a room is to shut the door. His first duty when leaving it, if any one remains inside, is to shut the door. No well-trained servant ever leaves a door open unless specially requested to do so. Children, from their very earliest years, are taught to shut doors, and punished—it is one of the few things for which a child is systematically punished now—for leaving doors open. An English mother calls after her child as he leaves the room the single word "door," or, if she is a very polite and affectionate mother, two words, "door, dear," or "door, please." An American child would not understand a request made in this elliptical form. It knows of course what a door is, just as it knows what a wall is, but it would be puzzled by the mere utterance of the word, just as an English child would be if its mother suddenly called to it, "wall," or "wall, dear," or "wall, please." The American child would wonder what its mother wanted to say about a door. The English child understands thoroughly in the same way as we all understand what a dentist means when he says, "Open, please." It is never our favorite books, our tightly clenched hands, or our screwed up eyes which he wants us to open, always our mouths. The word "open" is enough for us. So the word "door" through a long association of ideas at once suggests to the English child the idea of shutting it.
An Englishman is thoroughly uncomfortable in a room with the door open. An American's feeling about shut doors was very well expressed to me by a lady who had been paying a number of visits to friends in England.
"English houses," she said, "always seem to me like hotels. When you go into them you see nothing except shut doors."