Adventures in indigence, and other essays

by Laura Spencer Portor

The home of those days had, it is true, a far greater educative value than can be claimed justly for the home of the present day, owing mainly—I hold it almost beyond dispute—to the fact that it was more given to the practice of hospitality and the entertainment of guests.

Of the homes of my day my own was, I believe, fairly typical. Though a full description of it and of the men and women who frequented it would make a colored recital, so would a like description of the homes of many others besides myself, who were children also at that time. I do not mean that such homes were entirely the rule; yet there were enough of them certainly to constitute a type. They were not likely to be luxurious; those of people of less position nowadays are far finer.

The old house of my childhood was a large and comfortable one, with low-ceilinged, well-proportioned rooms, and wide verandas. Its furnishings were in taste, and contributed greatly to its character. The big Holland secretary, with its bulging sides and secret drawer, was a very piece of romance; the tall clock, with its brass balls and moon face, the old clawfoot mahogany tables, the long scroll sofa, the heavy scroll mahogany sideboard, were as mellow in tone as the old Martin guitar on which men and women, beaux and belles of a past generation, had played; or the harp that stood in a corner, all gold in the afternoon sunlight; or the square Steck piano of the front room, a true grandee in its day. Several really well-painted portraits looked down from the walls, and added a certain stateliness to the warmth of every welcome.

Many people, recalling that home, have spoken to me since of a peculiarly warm and beautiful light which on sunny days was present in the three lower rooms—parlor, sitting-room, and dining-room—that opened one into another.

This light, which had first to make its way past maples and a few pear trees, entered, it seemed, with an especial graciousness, touching softly and lingeringly the old mahogany as it went; and from morning until late afternoon abode in the rooms with a kind of mellow gentleness hardly to be described. There was something well-mannered, unobtrusive, in its coming and going, as though it were conscious of being a guest there; a kind of gracious enjoyment it seemed to take in the place, noticeable in its gentle behaviors among the dark colors and the old books, and in its manner of moving about delicately from object to object, and pausing at last, as it always did, before the tall pier-glass, as though it pleased it to reflect on the three long rooms, doubled to twice their length, before it slipped away again past the western windows and departed across the hills.

I have mentioned carefully the perpetual coming and going of the sunlight because it seems to me symbolical of that coming and going of guests which perpetually lighted the old house, lent it its chief charm, and gave me my most memorable schooling. The educative value of life has no uncertainty. These men and women who came and went as guests were my first memorable lessons of life, and, as I take it, they were lessons marvelously well adapted to the understanding and needs of a little child.

I would not seem to undervalue the silent influence and worth of that material loveliness which was often found in the old houses of that day, and was evident in my own home; but I believe this alone could have done little to educate me. Such loveliness was but a means to an end. I would be loath to give great credit for my education to the furniture, old and interesting as it was. The real credit is due, first, to the customs of that time, which made hospitality one of the first virtues; and, second, to the guests who, coming there, furnished the house with its best opportunities, and incidentally—I beg you to note that word—afforded me, there can be no doubt, the better part of my education.

How far have we gone, "progressed," as we say, in a short span of years! I am still a young woman, yet guests are not indeed what they once were. There were poverty and riches in those days, too, but the "high cost of living," that phrase forever turning up nowadays, was a bad penny not yet coined, and guest-discouraging "flats" were anomalies that my old home town rejected.

Guests came and stayed then as they do not now. Visiting was still in those days one of the accomplishments of life; a gracious habit not yet broken up by ubiquitous hotels, ten, fifteen, twenty stories high; not yet rendered superfluous by trains every hour on the hour, or old-fashioned by scudding automobiles which, like Aladdin Abushamut's magic sofa, snatch up whole parties of people, and in the twinkling of an eye set them down in new lands with hardly time for greeting or farewell.

Life may be more provident, compact, convenient nowadays. I am not prepared to dispute it. But of one thing I am certain: the modern child in this almost guestless age has no such chance to acquire a broad education out of school hours as had I, whose childhood flourished when guests were the rule and the tinkling of the doorbell was more likely than not to be a summons to a fine adventure in visitors.