CHAPTER XVI.
“Mildred Brewster Everett, do you mean to say that you, a woman worth your tens of millions, are going to come down to living again in a brick block with little narrow rooms? Are you going to give up the splendid library, the gallery of rare paintings, the grand music-room, the conservatories and stables, and all the lovely things that you had planned?”
Mildred dropped her wax and seal, and turned from her writing-desk with a gesture of mock despair, as I continued, somewhat vehemently and without pausing for a reply:—
“Have you forgotten all those magnificent halls, those terra-cottas and mosaic floors and glorious painted windows? Think of the many times that we have planned it all out, the baronial fireplaces with the spreading elk antlers overhead, and the big tiger-skin rugs; and then the cosy, cushioned window-seats and quaintly carved lattices, the great organ with golden pipes, and the high, wind-swept turrets with winding stairs!
“Last spring you were planning to bring all this about when the tenement houses and more necessary things should be under way, and now,” I continued crossly, “to think of your fancyingthat you are too poor to build a beautiful house for yourself, when you have money enough to buy houses for every one else!”
I think that Mildred had a passion for noble architecture. Her keen eyes would detect beauties or incongruities where my untrained sight perceived nothing.
“If a man writes a bad poem, I am not compelled to read it; if he paints a bad picture, I need not see it more than once,” she was wont to say; “but if he erects an ugly building in my city he hurts me every time I walk the street, and I am helpless.”
“When constructive beauty costs no more than this fantastic ugliness, why must such an absurdity be inflicted upon a long-suffering public?” she once asked in despair, as we were contemplating an expensive monument to architectural stupidity. And she never tempered her scorn when railing at the angular, parti-colored houses, run mad in the direction of ostentatious eccentricities, which are fast displacing the simple white dwellings with green blinds that, as she once declared, “at least have the merit of being modest and wholesome, and do not outrage all one’s sense of the fitness of things.”
“Wait until I build my house; then you shall see,” she would exclaim, with a decided little nod which carried the conviction, to one listener at least, that she would some time show what money and brains combined could do towards creating an ideal home.
Many an hour, when driving about together, we had amused ourselves, in the intervals of serious work, in planning the charming mansion which she would build, and she had entered into it all with great zest.
“My idea of a house,” she had said, “is to have it even more beautiful without than within, so that every line may be a positive delight to the many who can never look within its doors. Think what a boon to the thousands who never step inside a church are those Back Bay towers and steeples which I used to see from my attic window on the hill.
“A poor man has no money for a concert of good music; he has no time for a visit to an art museum to see a good picture or statue, or to go to a library to read a great poem; but in sunlight and in moonlight, seven days in the week, as he looks from his window or passes to his work, the beauty wrought in stone is his; it costs him neither time nor money, and consciously or unconsciously it appeals to him. His life is larger and richer for it.
“A walk across the Public Garden on a winter afternoon, with that campanile and the spires near it looming large and dark against the crimson glow in the west, has made me fresh and strong after many a tired day,” she used to say.
So it was settled that when the walls of the House Beautiful should be reared, the first thought should be, not for its inmates, but for the countless unknown passers-by.
Then the next requirement was that it should have ample room for the many guests whom its hospitable mistress would always have around her. There was to be air and sunshine everywhere, and nothing too fine for constant use.
Unlike most women, Mildred had little fancy for beauty of the fragile sort. Exquisitely painted sèvres which a careless touch might shiver to atoms; cobweb lace that had cost the eyesight and health of other women; tapestry which had swallowed up years of another’s life, only to be inferior to a painting, and become food for moths,—all this she obstinately refused to have.
“I want beautiful things about me,” she said; “but beauty that is so perishable as to be a constant care to the owner, or else to entail an army of servants, is a luxury which I think no rational being can afford. I shall have everything rich and strong and yet simple; there shall be no satin, gilded-legged chairs, no elaborate dust-catching carvings; no draperies and carpets that cannot bear the sun; but there shall be noble statues, pictures by great masters, luxurious rugs and divans, glorious color from jewelled windows and precious, many-hued marbles. I do not want a palace with dreary suites of high-studded rooms and frescoed ceilings, and I do not want a house that is nothing but a crowded museum of bric-à-brac, like so many I see. No; my house shall be a stately mansion with far-seeing towers and turrets, with cosy, low-studded rooms and wainscotedwalls, with pillared arcades and richly carved stone balconies. All Spain and Venice and Nuremberg shall be studied for hints of beauty, and it shall be a home, a perfectly ideal American home; beautiful without and within; built to stand while generations come and go, graced by children, pets, and flowers, and the charming society of noble men and women.”
Where this home was to be built had not yet been decided. Sometimes Mildred would in imagination place it on some smooth, green slope on the banks of the Hudson; sometimes among the elms on some hilltop overlooking the golden dome on Beacon Hill, with a glimpse of blue sea and white sails on the far horizon beyond.
Of course I was to have the fun of helping to plan about it all, and Mildred was to bring home hosts of treasures from Europe after her sojourn abroad. But now, this morning, all this dream of the beauty that was to be had been ended by what Mildred had been saying.
“I have settled one hundred thousand dollars on Ralph,” she had said, “for his own personal use. He would not accept any more, and I have decided to set apart for myself the same sum. The interest on two hundred thousand dollars ought, I think, to provide all the travel and luxuries that two reasonable mortals need; and the rest of the money which I had at first thought of spending on myself we are going to devote to several things, rather better worth doing than building a house,which not one in a hundred thousand could afford to maintain after we have gone.”
“But, Mildred,” I expostulated, “you have always asserted that it was right to encourage art; that it was folly to refuse to buy a picture or a jewel just because there were still starving people in existence somewhere. I have heard you say repeatedly that money thus spent gave employment to labor, encouraged art, and”—
“Yes,” she interrupted, “that is true in a certain way, no doubt; but listen: I have been thinking this over a great deal of late. Suppose now that I spend half a million or so in employing a certain number of people to make and furnish a magnificent house. Grant that it is a real work of art, and will be a thing of beauty and a joy forever. My husband and a score of friends and I enjoy it; the workmen are paid; ‘art is encouraged.’
“Now suppose again that, instead of erecting an expensively beautiful house for myself, I employ the same number of people to provide a beautiful building which shall be for the use, in the course of its existence, of scores of thousands whose eyes are inured to ugliness and into whose lives a bit of beauty rarely comes.
“Suppose that the spacious marble staircases, the tiles and wood carvings and painted windows, are put where they shall awaken the imagination and delight the soul of tired mothers and little children who have known nothing beyond theirnarrow alley and grimy chimney-pots; of girls who stand all day before a machine, or over a hot stove, and who spend their money for the bits of tawdry finery which are the nearest approach to beauty that their means can compass? Which building would encourage art the most, think you?
“Why, Ruby,” said Mildred, wheeling around from her desk, while I stood opposing to her ardor a face of grim discontent; “do you fancy that I could sit in my great, palatial house, remembering the sights that I have seen this year in the one-roomed sod houses on bleak Western prairies, in the dingy, cheerless cabins of the colored people at the South, and in the vile-smelling tenements of this great city, and satisfy my soul by saying that I gave employment to the men who did this work for me?
“Could I honestly call myself in any sense a follower of Him who had not where to lay his head, and know that this wealth of beauty was kept for me and a dozen or so cultivated people who need it scarcely more than I, while a thousand beauty-loving natures were starving who might be fed by my superabundance?”
“Mildred, you are positively morbid,” I exclaimed, thoroughly vexed. “To be sure, no one has a right to be selfish, to think of himself first,—but that you have not done. You planned your house in the beginning for the pleasure of others far more than for yourself. You meant to make your home a perfect retreat for all the poor artistsand students and broken-down teachers that it could hold, and I say you are making a great mistake if you think that you are going to serve humanity better by building a big art museum down at the Mulberry Bend for the benefit of the ragpickers and stevedores, than by giving the hospitality of such a home as yours would be to those to whom it would be a rest and an inspiration.”
Mildred laughed heartily as I paused, and dropping upon the hassock beside me, she drew me close to her, while I prepared to renew my expostulations.
“Not so fast, my dear,” she said, forestalling me. “Pray don’t imagine that I am bereft of my senses, and propose to reform the slums by giving them free access to a gallery of casts from the antique. It would require a small army of policemen and scrubbing-women to preserve it in decent condition, if the rabble were admitted indiscriminately, and I do not propose to give people that form of beauty which they do not want and could not possibly appreciate.”
“But you blame all the rich, who, no matter how much they may give away, still reserve enough to buy steam yachts and build fine houses and indulge their æsthetic tastes to the extent of one thirtieth of their fortune,” I said pettishly.
“No,” said Mildred, slowly; “I do not blame them. I am not their judge. I cannot speak for others: it is right, more than that, it is necessary, that man should create beauty, for he cannot live by bread alone.
“But I cannot help feeling that the beauty should be for all; should be where all may see and enjoy it. The old Greeks were right about that, when the temples, the agora, the gymnasia were consecrated to beauty, and it was the glory of the rich to minister to the state and not spend lavish sums in collecting private treasures.
“No, dear. Once I thought to have all that was rich and fine, and that could delight the eye, around me in my own home. I felt that I had a right to it, provided that I thought of others first and most. But now I see things differently. I wonder that I ever could have been so selfish.
“Yes, Ruby,” she added, almost sternly, as she saw my look of protest, “it was selfishness. I meant, in spite of all my giving, to sacrifice nothing. But I have been trying these last few months,—yes, since that time last summer when my power to make life better for others seemed about to be forever taken from me,—I have been trying, and Ralph has helped me, oh, so much, to look at all this short life of ours in its beginning here on this little planet, as I shall look back upon it with the eyes of eternity, when it has all gone into the irrevocable past. How will it seem then, little sister, when all our foolish ambitions and traditions and false social standards have been swept away? Shall I be glad or sorry then, do you think, to remember that the one talent which was placed in my hands was used to its utmost, that nothing was withheld but what was needed to make me thebetter fitted for my work? Ah, when my naked soul shall stand before the judgment bar of its own conscience and the moral law, and hears the sentence, ‘This ought ye to have done, and not to have left the other undone,’ what shall I plead in excuse?”
Mildred’s voice had sunk almost to a whisper, and her eyes were filled with unshed tears. We did not speak for a few moments. I felt a lump rising in my throat and could only choke it down while I stroked the dear head that lay warm against my arm. My foolish questionings were stilled. The clear insight of this simple, true-hearted woman had pierced through and through my flimsy protests, and I sat awed and abashed. Presently she went on in her natural, common-sense way to explain more definitely what she meant.
“I mean to make a little more beauty in this world, if I can,” she said, “and accomplish some more important things as well; but the art of all arts which I shall try to learn and teach is the one which we Americans most need to study, the art of simple living.
“I shall have the pictures and the books, the statues and the music that I love; but what matters it whether they are all in my own home or not, or whether or not I seek them in galleries open to all alike? Not until our glaring, stony streets are made less dreary by more trees and fountains and statues, not until there is a littlebeauty for every one, can I claim the moral right to spend a fortune on Meissoniers or ancient Satsuma, for my own private delight.
“For a long time I have been thinking of what could bring the greatest stimulus and joy into the lives of the wretched poor in our great city; the washerwomen and truckmen and foul-mouthed, dirty little streetgaminswhose highest bliss is reached with the attainment of a full stomach and the sight of a street fight or a circus procession. It would be folly to give them money outright; but here in amusements, just as I have found it in regard to tenement houses and everything else, coöperation is the key to success.
“The gift of a Peabody Museum or a Hemenway Gymnasium does not offend the pride or help to pauperize the Harvard student, nor do the Lowell lectures make the most cultivated people of Boston count themselves recipients of charity when they crowd the hall to hear Professor Morse talk about Japanese pottery, or the Englishman Haweis discourse on music. Money given like that, in a large way, in the enjoyment of which all unite, never does the harm that the gift to the individual would surely do.
“Now, I propose to set up a counter-attraction to the delights of the saloon and the dance-hall and the street; and I shall put it right where it is most needed. There shall be one substantial, clean, beautiful building, a beacon light of beauty and delight in a square mile of dinginess and discomfort.
“It shall be of brick, and I shall enjoin upon my architect to show what beautiful lines and arches can be wrought in simple material. In a street of ugly straight lines and right angles, this shall stand as an object-lesson in the power of creating perpetual pleasure to the eye by such simple devices as the substitution of the curve for the straight line over door and window.
“Then within there shall be a dozen immense rooms connected by folding-doors, with sand heaps and swings and blocks for the delight of the gutter child, too old to be in the cradle and too young to be in school. From morning until night, if he behaves himself, he shall be sheltered and warm and happy under the charge of some good woman. At night these rooms shall be filled with older boys and girls learning the use of tools, sawing, planing, hammering, and finding it better fun to vent their energies in manufacturing something which they can take home for their own use than in playing tag around the ash-barrels on the corner.”
“What, would you have boys and girls together?” I asked.
“Certainly,” said Mildred; “they would be together on the street, and why not here?”
“But what is the use of a girl learning carpentering?” I asked. “I should think she might much better learn sewing. Besides, girls can’t do it, and I don’t believe they would like to, if they could.”
“In regard to that, you don’t know those girlsso well as I do. They will sit by a smoky lamp in a close room and grow round-shouldered and near-sighted in crocheting edging and working blue cats on cardboard; but as to plain sewing, they think it a bore. After a day at school or in the shop they don’t want to sit demurely on a bench and ‘backstitch’ and sew ‘over and over.’ Then, too, a course in carpentry would do more for them physically than a course at the gymnasium. There is no danger that city girls will not walk enough at all times; what they lack is development of arms and chest. Moreover, this is not an experiment. I once visited a summer class in carpentering for girls at the Tennyson Street school in Boston, and I can assure you I haven’t forgotten the neat book-racks and little tables those girls of fourteen were making for themselves, nor the good time they were having in doing it, either. Such muscle as they were developing! However, there can be cooking classes and sewing classes too, if they want them, though my House Beautiful is not to be primarily a manual training school. The city may provide that for the child; but I want to do what it cannot do, and that is to give innocent amusement and a bit of beauty to lives that know nothing of it.
“So above these rooms is to be a great auditorium arranged like an amphitheatre, and capable of seating comfortably three thousand people. There shall be no cushions, and no need of them, for every seat shall be planned with reference tothe human figure, and will require no padding to insure absolute comfort.
“There shall be a golden-piped organ and ‘storied windows richly dight,’ not casting a ‘dim religious light,’ but shedding warm, rich color upon the thousand shabby coats and shawls gathered from the alleys and street corners of a Sunday afternoon. Every night in the week, and all day on Sunday, this is to be opened free to every man or woman who wants to sit in a comfortable seat, see interesting pictures, hear sweet music, and give tired nerves and body a respite from the noise and confusion of the tenement and street.”
“And what do you propose to give them,—symphony concerts, or Stoddard lectures?”
“Neither,” answered Mildred calmly, ignoring my attempt at sarcasm, “though you have touched my idea. I mean to give them something as nearly like it as possible.
“There shall be simple talks on every conceivable subject that could interest them which admits of illustration by the stereopticon. By the aid of great pictures thrown upon the screen they shall travel over land and sea. Then there shall be story nights, when a clear-voiced student from the school of oratory will read stories to them. Think what it would be to these men and women, half of whom cannot read or write, to whose minds the facts of history and geography have no meaning, whose knowledge of life is limited to a little village in the Old Country, a steerage passage, and thecrowded slums of New York; think what it would be to them to step from the cold and dinginess without into a brilliant, beautiful hall, with warmth and light and comfort insured for one hour at least out of the twenty-four; and then to sit and listen to the charming story of Little Lord Fauntleroy, or Robinson Crusoe, or to thrilling stories of exploration and adventures.
“The story or lecture shall last no more than an hour, as their attention must be held, so that they will want to come again. Then those who have heard enough may go, if they wish, and make room for others to come in to listen to a half-hour concert. There will be no Brahm’s symphonies, but there will be cornet solos of such classics as the ‘Swanee River,’ and ‘Home! Sweet Home!’ and a select orchestra of half a dozen pieces will render Strauss waltzes, airs from ‘Pinafore,’ and the like.
“On Sunday, all day long, there shall be services of song led by the great organ and a trained chorus. Not oratorio music, though a Handel Largo or a ‘Lift Thine Eyes’ might sometimes be ventured on; but simple devout church music, in which all who can may join.
“Of course no preaching would be advisable, else the priests would rapidly diminish the audience; but all the power of music shall be brought to bear to uplift and beautify these poor, pinched lives and bring a glimpse of sweetness and light into the prosaic details of their daily struggle for existence.
“The Romish church has always been wise enough to see the power of music in swaying the emotions of the masses. It is time that we learned a lesson from it.”
“What shall you do with your other rooms on Sunday? Shall you let them be vacant or permit the carpentering by the boys to go on below, while their elders are hearing the music in the great hall above?”
“Neither,” answered Mildred. The rooms shall all be open, but not for work. The tables and tools will have disappeared, and settees will take their places. In one room will be perhaps a debating club of young men, discussing the last strike, and finding this a pleasanter place to meet for that purpose than the street corner or the saloon. In the next room will be a set of children clustered around a young lady who comes down from Fifth Avenue and gives her Sunday evenings regularly to telling stories to them. She is not a creature of my imagination, either, Ruby. Last week I met her at a friend’s house. She came in flushed and radiant from an hour’s romp with the children in the nursery. ‘I believe my one talent must be story-telling,’ she said, as the children appeared on the scene clamoring after her; and her mother fondly said, ‘Ah, there are no stories like sister Helen’s, all the children think.’
“‘So,’ I thought, ‘that is just the girl I want. Her talent shall find a larger field for development; she shall tell stories to forty children insteadof four.’ I told her my plan, and she almost cried with delight. ‘Oh, Mrs. Everett, do you really think that I could do any good in that way? I never dreamed of it, and I should be so glad. I’ve always felt as if I wanted to do something, but mamma won’t let me visit in the Charities. She says I am too young. My eyes won’t admit of my reading to the blind or sewing for the poor, and I began to think there wasn’t anything that I could do.’
“I tell you, Ruby, I am finding every day dozens of girls like her, who are only waiting for some one to say, ‘This is what you can do; here is your work; here is the place; and here are the ones who need you.’ I am beginning to learn that the putting of the right person in the right place is the main thing, after all. The best thing that my money can do is to make it possible for those who can give, to find those who need just what they can give.
“I shall find not only one charming story-teller, but a score, who will meet their circles of little street Arabs week after week and month after month, and if they are half as pretty and entertaining as the girl I know, you may rest assured those youngsters will count it a privilege to come.
“Not every one will be admitted; a clean face and hands and good behavior will be the prerequisite for retaining the ticket of membership to all the classes. Then in another room will be a class of young people listening to an emergency lecture,given by some bright, young medical student, who will arouse their interest by objective illustrations, such as the bandaging of sham wounds and the resuscitating of a person supposed to be drowned.
“In still another room, perhaps, some one will be reading the newspapers aloud to a score of men who are enjoying their pipes.
“All the rooms will be filled with men, women, and children, from nine o’clock in the morning until ten at night; one set coming as another goes; and each having one hour at least, in the day of rest, which shall open to him a little larger outlook on life, and shall give him something to look forward to through the six days of drudgery.
“Of course all this will require a system and a plan; but I shall have as few officials and as few restraints as possible. A neat, white-capped woman, with her badge of authority, will, I think, be quite as efficient as a big policeman; for any unseemly behavior will result in the immediate surrender of the numbered metal check which will serve as a card of entrance; and when admission is recognized as a privilege it will be coveted.
“No one will stay away because he is too shabby to come, and no one will be made to feel that he has no right or share in it all; but every week twenty-five thousand men, women, and children shall have one or two hours of peace and happiness offered them, just because,—think of it, Ruby,—just because I did not build the House Beautiful for myself.”