Bits about Home Matters Part 13

The Old-Clothes Monger in Journalism.

The old-clothes business has never been considered respectable. It is supposed to begin and to end with cheating; it deals with very dirty things. It would be hard to mention a calling of lower repute. From the men who come to your door with trays of abominable china vases on their heads, and are ready to take any sort of rags in payment for them, down--or up?--to the bigger wretches who advertise that "ladies and gentlemen can obtain the highest price for their cast-off clothing by calling at No. so and so, on such a street," they are all alike odious and despicable.

We wonder when we find anybody who is not an abject Jew, engaged in the business. We think we can recognize the stamp of the disgusting traffic on their very faces. It is by no means uncommon to hear it said of a sorry sneak, "He looks like an old-clothes dealer."

But what shall we say of the old-clothes mongers in journalism? By the very name we have defined, described them, and pointed them out. If only we could make the name such a badge of disgrace that every member of the fraternity should forthwith betake him or herself to some sort of honest labor!

These are they who crowd the columns of our daily newspapers with the dreary, monotonous, worthless, scandalous tales of what other men and women did, are doing, or will do, said, say, or will say, wore, wear, or will wear, thought, think, or will think, ate, eat, or will eat, drank, drink, or will drink: and if there be any other verb coming under the head of "to do, to be, to suffer," add that to the list, and the old-clothes monger will furnish you with something to fill out the phrase.

These are they who patch out their miserable, little, sham "properties"

for mock representations of life, by sc.r.a.ps from private letters, bits of conversation overheard on piazzas, in parlors, in bedrooms, by odds and ends of untrustworthy statements picked up at railway-stations, church-doors, and offices of all sorts, by impudent inferences and suppositions, and guesses about other people's affairs, by garblings and partial quotings, and, if need be, by wholesale lyings.

The trade is on the increase,--rapidly, fearfully on the increase. Every large city, every summer watering-place, is more or less infested with this cla.s.s of dealers. The goods they have to furnish are more and more in demand. There is hardly a journal in the country but has column after column full of their tattered wares; there is hardly a man or woman in the country but buys them.

There is, perhaps, no remedy. Human nature has not yet shed all the monkey. A lingering and grovelling baseness in the average heart delights in this sort of cast-off clothes of fellow-worms. But if the trade must continue, can we not insist that the profits be shared? If A is to receive ten dollars for quoting B's remarks at a private dinner yesterday, shall not B have a small percentage on the sale? Clearly, this is only justice.

And in cases where the wares are simply stolen, shall there be no redress?

Here is an opening for a new Bureau. How well its advertis.e.m.e.nts would read:--

"Ladies and gentlemen wishing to dispose of their old opinions, sentiments, feelings, and so forth, and also of the more interesting facts in their personal history, can obtain good prices for the same at No.-- t.i.ttle-tattle street. Inquire at the door marked 'Regular and Special Correspondence.'

"N. B.--Persons willing to be reported _verbatim_ will receive especial consideration."

We commend this brief suggestion of a new business to all who are anxious to make a living and not particular how they make it. Perhaps the cla.s.s of whom we have been speaking would find it profitable to set it up as a branch of their own calling. It is quite possible that n.o.body else in the country would like to meddle with it.

The Country Landlord's Side.

It is only one side, to be sure. But it is the side of which we hear least. The quarrel is like all quarrels,--it takes two to make it; but as, of those two, one is only one, and the other is from ten to a hundred, it is easy to see which side will do most talking in setting forth its grievances.

"It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer; and when he is gone his way then he boasteth." We are oftener reminded of this text of Scripture than of any other when we listen to conversations in regard to boarders in country houses.

"Oh, let me tell you of such a nice place we have found to board in the country. It is only--miles from Mt.--or--Lake; the drives are delightful, and board is only $7 a week."

"Is the table a good one?"

"Oh, yes; very good for the country. We had good b.u.t.ter and milk, and eggs in abundance. Meats, of course, are never very good in the country. But everybody gained a pound a week; and we are going again this year, if they have not raised their prices."

Then this model of a city woman, in search of country lodgings, sits down and writes to the landlord:--

"Dear Sir,--We would like to secure our old rooms in your house for the whole of July and August. As we shall remain so long a time, we hope you may be willing to count all the children at half-price. Last year, you may remember, we paid full price for the two eldest, the twins, who are not yet quite fourteen. I hope, also, that Mrs. ---- has better arrangements for washing this summer, and will allow us to have our own servant to do the washing for the whole family. If these terms suit you, the price for my family--eight children, myself, and servant--would be $38.50 a week.

Perhaps, if the servant takes the entire charge of my rooms, you would call it $37; as, of course, that would save the time of your own servants."

Then the country landlord hesitates. He is not positively sure of filling all his rooms for the season. Thirty-seven dollars a week would be, he thinks, better than nothing. In his simplicity, he supposes that, if he confers, as he certainly does, a favor on Mrs.----, by receiving her great family on such low terms, she will be thoroughly well disposed toward him and his house, and will certainly not be over-exacting in matter of accommodations. In an evil hour, he consents; they come, and he begins to reap his reward. The twins are stout boys, as large as men, and much hungrier. The baby is a sickly child of eighteen months, and requires especial diet, which must be prepared at especial and inconvenient hours, in the crowded little kitchen. The other five children are average boys and girls, between the ages of three and twelve, eat certainly as much as five grown people, and make twice as much trouble. The servant is a slow, inefficient, impudent Irish girl, who spends the greater part of four days in doing the family washing, and makes the other servants uncomfortable and cross.

If this were all; but this is not. Mrs.----, who writes to all her friends boastingly of the cheap summer quarters that she has found, and who gains by the village shop-keeper's scales a pound of flesh a week, habitually finds fault with the food, with the mattresses, with the chairs, with the rag-carpets, with every thing, in short, down to the dust and the flies, for neither of which last the poor landlord could be legitimately held responsible. This is not an exaggerated picture. Everybody who has boarded in country places in the summer has known dozens of such women. Every country landlord can produce dozens of such letters, and of letters still more exacting and unreasonable.

The average city man or woman who goes to a country house to board, goes expecting what it is in the nature of things impossible that they should have. The man expects to have boots blacked and hot water ready, and a bell to ring for both. What experienced country boarder has not laughed in his sleeve to see such an one, newly arrived, putting his head out snappingly, like a turtle, from his doorway, and calling to chance pa.s.sers, "How d'ye get at anybody in this house?"

If it is a woman, she expects that the tea will be of the finest flavor, and never boiled; that steaks will be porter-house steaks; that green peas will be in plenty; and that the American girl, who is chambermaid for the summer, and school-teacher in the winter, and who, ten to one, could put her to the blush in five minutes by superior knowledge on many subjects, will enter and leave her room and wait upon her at the table with the silent respectfulness of a trained city servant.

This is all very silly. But it happens. At the end of every summer hundreds of disappointed city people go back to their homes grumbling about country food and country ways. Hundreds of tired and discouraged wives of country landlords sit down in their houses, at last emptied, and vow a vow that never again will they take "city folks to board." But the great law of supply and demand is too strong for them. The city must come out of itself for a few weeks, and get oxygen for its lungs, sunlight for its eyes, and rest for its overworked brain. The country must open its arms, whether it will or not, and share its blessings. And so the summers and the summerings go on, and there are always to be heard in the land the voices of murmuring boarders, and of landlords deprecating, vindicating.

We confess that our sympathies are with the landlords. The average country landlord is an honest, well-meaning man, whose idea of the profit to be made "off boarders" is so moderate and simple that the keepers of city boarding-houses would laugh it and him to scorn. If this were not so, would he be found undertaking to lodge and feed people for one dollar or a dollar and a half a day? Neither does he dream of asking them, even at this low price, to fare as he fares. The "Excelsior" mattresses, at which they cry out in disgust, are beds of down in comparison with the straw "tick" on which he and his wife sleep soundly and contentedly. He has paid $4.50 for each mattress, as a special concession to what he understands city prejudice to require. The cheap painted chamber-sets are holiday adorning by the side of the cherry and pine in the bedrooms of his family.

He buys fresh meat every day for dinner; and n.o.body can understand the importance of this fact who is not familiar with the habit of salt-pork and codfish in our rural districts. That the meat is tough, pale, stringy is not his fault; no other is to be bought. Stetson, himself, if he dealt with this country butcher, could do no better. Vegetables? Yes, he has planted them. If we look out of our windows, we can see them on their winding way. They will be ripe by and by. He never tasted peas in his life before the Fourth of July, or cuc.u.mbers before the middle of August. He hears that there are such things; but he thinks they must be "dreadful unhealthy, them things forced out of season,"--and, whether healthy or not, he can't get them. We couldn't ourselves, if we were keeping house in the same township. To be sure, we might send to the cities for them, and be served with such as were wilted to begin with, and would arrive utterly unfit to be eaten at end of their day's journey, costing double their market price in the added express charge. We should not do any such thing.

We should do just as he does, make the best of "plum sauce," or even dried apples. We should not make our sauce with mola.s.ses, probably; but he does not know that sugar is better; he honestly likes mola.s.ses best. As for saleratus in the bread, as for fried meat, and fried doughnuts, and ubiquitous pickles,--all those things have he, and his fathers before him, eaten, and, he thinks, thriven on from time immemorial. He will listen incredulously to all we say about the effects of alkalies, the change of fats to injurious oils by frying, the indigestibility of pickles, &c.; for, after all, the unanswerable fact remains on his side, though he may be too polite or too slow to make use of it in the argument, that, having fed on these poisons all his life, he can easily thrash us to-day, and his wife and daughters can and do work from morning till night, while ours must lie down and rest by noon. In spite of all this, he will do what he can to humor our whims. Never yet have we seen the country boarding-house where kindly and persistent remonstrance would not introduce the gridiron and banish the frying-pan, and obtain at least an attempt at yeast-bread.

Good, patient, long-suffering country people! The only wonder to us is that they tolerate so pleasantly, make such effort to gratify, the preferences and prejudices of city men and women, who come and who remain strangers among them; and who, in so many instances, behave from first to last as if they were of a different race, and knew nothing of any common bonds of humanity and Christianity.

The Good Staff of Pleasure.

In an inn in Berchtesgaden, Bavaria, where I dined every day for three weeks, one summer, I made the acquaintance of a little maid called Gretchen. She stood all day long washing dishes, in a dark pa.s.sageway which communicated in some mysterious fashion with cellar, kitchen, dining-room, and main hall of the inn. From one or other of these quarters Gretchen was sharply called so often that it was a puzzle to know how she contrived to wash so much as a cup or a plate in the course of the day.

Poor child! I am afraid she did most of her work after dark; for I sometimes left her standing there at ten o'clock at night. She was blanched and shrunken from fatigue and lack of sunlight. I doubt if ever, unless perhaps on some exceptional Sunday, she knew the sensation of a full breath of pure air or a warm sunbeam on her face.

But whenever I pa.s.sed her she smiled, and there was never-failing good-cheer in her voice when she said "Good-morning." Her uniform atmosphere of contentedness so impressed and surprised me that, at last, I said to Franz, the head waiter,--

"What makes Gretchen so happy? She has a hard life, always standing in that narrow dark place, washing dishes."

Franz was phlegmatic, and spoke very little English. He shrugged his shoulders, in sign of a.s.sent that Gretchen's life was a hard one, and added,--

"Ja, ja. She likes because all must come at her door. There will be no one which will say not nothing if they go by."

That was it. Almost every hour some human voice said pleasantly to her, "Good-morning, Gretchen," or "It is a fine day;" or, if no word were spoken, there would be a friendly nod and smile. For nowhere in kind-hearted, simple Germany do human beings pa.s.s by other human beings, as we do in America, without so much as a turn of the head to show recognition of humanity in common.

This one little pleasure kept Gretchen not only alive, but comparatively glad. Her body suffered for want of sun and air. There was no helping that, by any amount of spiritual compensation, so long as she must stand, year in and year out, in a close, dark corner, and do hard drudgery. But, if she had stood in that close, dark corner, doing that hard drudgery, and had had no pleasure to comfort her, she would have been dead in three months.

If all men and women could realize the power, the might of even a small pleasure, how much happier the world would be! and how much longer bodies and souls both would bear up under living! Sensitive people realize it to the very core of their being. They know that often and often it happens to them to be revived, kindled, strengthened, to a degree which they could not describe, and which they hardly comprehend, by some little thing,--some word of praise, some token of remembrance, some proof of affection or recognition. They know, too, that strength goes out of them, just as inexplicably, just as fatally, when for a s.p.a.ce, perhaps even a short s.p.a.ce, all these are wanting.

People who are not sensitive also come to find this out, if they are tender. They are by no means inseparable,--tenderness and sensitiveness; if they were, human nature would be both more comfortable and more agreeable. But tender people alone can be just to sensitive ones; living in close relations with them, they learn what they need, and, so far as they can, supply it, even when they wonder a little, and perhaps grow a little weary.

We see a tender and just mother sometimes sighing because one over-sensitive child must be so much more gently restrained or admonished than the rest. But she has her reward for every effort to adjust her methods to the instrument she does not quite understand. If she doubts this, she has only to look on the right hand and the left, and see the effect of careless, brutal dealing with finely strung, sensitive natures.

We see, also, many men,--good, generous, kindly, but not sensitive-souled,--who have learned that the sunshine of their homes all depends on little things, which it would never have entered into their busy and composed hearts to think of doing, or saying, or providing, if they had not discovered that without them their wives droop, and with them they keep well.

People who are neither tender nor sensitive can neither comprehend nor meet these needs. Alas! that there are so many such people; or that, if there must be just so many, as I suppose there must, they are not distinguishable at first sight, by some mark of color, or shape, or sound, so that one might avoid them, or at least know what to expect in entering into relation with them. Woe be to any sensitive soul whose life must, in spite of itself, take tone and tint from daily and intimate intercourse with such! No bravery, no philosophy, no patience can save it from a slow death. But, while the subtlest and most stimulating pleasures which the soul knows come to it through its affections, and are, therefore, so to speak, at every man's mercy, there is still left a world of possibility of enjoyment, to which we can help ourselves, and which no man can hinder.

And just here it is, I think, that many persons, especially those who are hard-worked, and those who have some special trouble to bear, make great mistake. They might, perhaps, say at hasty first sight that it would be selfish to aim at providing themselves with pleasures. Not at all. Not one whit more than it is for them to buy a bottle of Ayer's Sarsaparilla (if they do not know better) to "cleanse their blood" in the spring! Probably a dollar's worth of almost any thing out of any other shop than a druggist's would "cleanse their blood" better,--a geranium, for instance, or a photograph, or a concert, or a book, or even fried oysters,--any thing, no matter what, so it is innocent, which gives them a little pleasure, breaks in on the monotony of their work or their trouble, and makes them have for one half-hour a "good time." Those who have near and dear ones to remember these things for them need no such words as I am writing here. Heaven forgive them if, being thus blessed, they do not thank G.o.d daily and take courage.