The Disappearance of the Woodshed

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

SOME two or three years ago she whom I delight to honor, as well as to love and obey, took occasion to announce, through the columns of the Contributors’ Club, to the world at large, that we have no spare chamber. She had discovered, moreover, that none of our neighbors or friends have spare chambers ; and from this fact, if I remember rightly, she deduced the degeneracy of poets.

It seemed to me at the time, and it still seems to me, that the importance of the spare chamber in a scheme of being is liable to be overrated. One can conceive times when the lack of the spare chamber, or its equivalent, is not to be deplored, when it may even assume something of the nature of a rescue, — in the case of relatives in the third or fourth degree removed, for instance. But this is a merely masculine view, and is tentatively advanced for what it may be worth.

There is, however, one feature of the modern dwelling — or, rather, lack of feature — that causes me much anxiety and some perturbation of soul. It is not, as in the case of the spare chamber, a mere internal defect, concealed from sight, and capable of being remedied by a little readjustment and crowding. The evil of which I speak is external and irremediable. I refer to the disappearance of the woodshed. The street on which I live is thoroughly respectable and modern ; some of the houses have plate-glass windows, all of them have porches, front and rear, and most of them have hydrangea bushes and shrub oaks in the front yard. But not one of them has a respectable, comfortable, interesting, enigmatic, open-faced woodshed stretching in the rear. The detriment to the outside of the house I pass over lightly. I am not prepared to defend the woodshed as an architectural ornament. Neither as a place to keep wood in, is the loss of the woodshed greatly to be deplored. Wood can be kept in the cellar. It can be sawed and split there if a man happens to be foolish enough to take exercise that way, or old-fashioned enough to have boys to do it. As a utilitarian appendage the woodshed cannot be defended. Man has dropped his useless accessories. He stands upright, walks on two feet, eats with his fork, and goes to receptions. Yet who shall say that there does not, now and then, as he chases the solitary and slippery pea, with a fork, over the surface of his plate, or bows above the white-gloved hand of his hostess, who shall say that there does not arise in his soul a longing for the old, wild joys of swinging ? — swinging by a tail from bough to bough, where the cocoanuts grow and the parrots scream. These amputated joys of being are gone forever ; and in their place has arisen — evoluted man, with sleek tail coat and a taste for olives.

The moral of which is — the woodshed.

The inner significance of the woodshed is not to be atoned for by an aspect of cleanliness and respectability. Perhaps there is not to-day, living, a man who can define what the woodshed did for his innermost soul, the moral support that it gave to his spinal column, the air of ownership it imparted to his walk. Yet a little thought will make it obvious to the most hardened that with the disappearance of the woodshed man has lost the one spot that made him, in the eyes of gods and men, a householder on the face of the earth. There was sometimes a loft above the shed, reached by rickety stairs and too disreputable to be cleaned, where one could keep fishing tackle and snowshoes and muskrat traps and bits of old iron and copper and invaluable ropes and string. There is always something a little pathetic to me in the sight of a man getting a piece of string out of a well-arranged bag behind the pantry door, or off a respectable ball in the upper lefthand drawer of his desk. Oh, for the joys of hunting! The search in the woodshed chamber for the bit of string or rope the right size and length and strength — the triumph of finding it — if one did — and the glow of making something else do, if one did n’t! Order and respectability! Chaos is no more, and the heart of man is as water in his breast. When the storms of life sweep over him whither shall he flee ? Merely as a place of refuge the woodshed was worth the ground it occupied. In its ample doorway, with his hands in his pockets and his back to the kitchen door, man could stand, serene, and gaze at the weather — or at nothing. Is there a place left to which man may flee — a place to which, when expedient, he may retire, with his hands in his pockets, and gaze at nothing ? Is the cellar such a place, or the attic ?

Between the mockings of the voice within and the whirling of the winds without, which shall a man choose ? If he is a wise man, he will — when the storm within is at its height — don hat and overcoat and overshoes, — very slowly, that she may have ample time to reflect, — and he will open the front door carefully, and raise his umbrella to the blasts, and shut the door softly behind him, and descend the slippery steps with caution. Before he has reached the last one, perchance, the door will fly open and a voice will call to him, and he will reascend the steps and the door will close behind them. It is not necessary for the rest of us to intrude. Everything comes out right in the end. But the woodshed would have answered just as well, and have saved the overshoes.