The Servantless Cottage

STAIRS are done for. Observe the growing popularity of bungalows. Observe the multiplication of apartment houses. Listen to the words of the man who has lately built, and written about, what he calls a servantless cottage: —

‘Climbing is ofttimes all too strenuous for a happy housewife, so there must be no stairs.’

For a few more decades, miserable women, unhappy housewives, and, by inference, undesirable mothers, will continue to drag out painful existences in houses of more than one story.

And observe also the end of the servant-problem. For in the servantless cottage, says the satisfied designer, ‘ milady need fear no drudgery. A very few hours will suffice for housekeeping and cookery. Work becomes a pleasure and a maid becomes undesirable.’

Well, well! there are solutions and solutions of this servant-problem, and of the always interesting question of how other people ought to live. The question being somewhat personal to myself, I have examined a good many of these solutions without finding that any of them solved it to my personal satisfaction.

There is, of course, much to be said for the servantless cottage, although to solve a problem by giving it up is no very startling triumph of domestic mathematics. The experience of innumerable couples with kitchenettes proves that life is possible under this solution, but the frank admission of discontent among these experimenters indicates that it leaves much to be desired. My own domesticity is of the kitchenette kind in winter, but expands in summer to a modest establishment in the country with real stairs and a real cook in a real kitchen. I can see therefore — so at least I believe — not only the possibilities of the servantless cottage, its economy of effort in the details of housework, and its excellent adaptability to a small family unaccustomed to any other standard of living, but also its complete, unwitting abnegation of some of the finer things in human existence.

Now, if this man, in describing his servantless cottage, had contented himself with a plain and simple statement of its advantages, I dare say I should have read his description in the most friendly spirit imaginable; and certainly with no desire to criticize his results. It was that silly remark about milady that aroused opposition. We live in a republic and we are most of us reasonably self-respecting men and women, not a milady among us, unless she happens to be making a visit — in which case, one place she is not visiting is a servantless cottage. And so, in a word, the servantless cottage ceases to be an honest, more or less successful effort to provide a home in which the housewife can most conveniently do her own work, and becomes a neat little example of snobbish absurdity. Work becomes a pleasure to the happy housewife for whom climbing a flight of stairs is ofttimes all too strenuous — so keen and persistent a pleasure that domestic service becomes ‘undesirable! ’ Is anybody really expected to believe it? Or is domestic service itself a phase of domesticity that can be so cheerfully eliminated? Has the servant — and, bless you! the word has often enough been a term of honor — no really fine and enduring place in the scheme of gracious and cultivated domestic management?

For many generations, stairs and service have been inseparable from the amenities of domestic living. One has only to imagine these two essentials suddenly eliminated from literature to experience a pained sensation at the care-free way in which the man of the servantless cottage gets rid of them. And one has only to look about the world as it stands at present, servantproblem and all, to realize that it is the value of good domestic service which actually creates and keeps alive the problem itself. For even if the happy housewife enjoys every single item of housekeeping and cookery, there are times when her personal attention to them is obviously undesirable.

Imagine our servantless cottage as an example. Milady sings at her work. The portable vacuum cleaner — milord keeps up with all the latest improvements — gratefully eats up its daily dust. The fireless cooker prepares the meals ‘ with a perfection and deliciousness unrealized in the old days.’ A bas mother and the way she used to cook! But in serving these meals of a hitherto unrealized perfection and deliciousness, milord and milady must needs chase each other between kitchen and diningroom. The guest at dinner, if he is luckily accustomed to picnics, carries his own plate and washes it afterward. I have myself entertained many a guest in this fashion, and he has carried his own plate, and, being that kind of a guest or I would n’t have invited him, he has cheerfully helped wash the dishes, wearing a borrowed apron. But it would be absurd to claim that this performance, indefinitely repeated, is an improvement upon an orderly, efficiently served dinner-party. Conversation at dinner is more desirable than a foot-race between the courses; nor do I believe that life under such conditions can possibly ‘become so alluring that one day the great majority of us will choose it first of all.'

Concerning stairs: I perhaps have more feeling for them than most; but I am quite sure that I speak at least for a large minority. It is the flatness of the flat, its very condensed and restricted cosiness, its very lack of upstairs and downstairs, which prevents it from ever attaining completely the atmosphere of a home. The feet which cross the floor above my head are those of another family; the sounds which reach me from below are the noises of strangers; the life horizontal of the flat serves its convenient use but only emphasizes the independence and self-respect of the life vertical, master of the floor above, master likewise of the basement. I feel more human, less like some ingeniously constructed doll, when I can take my candle in hand and go upstairs to sleep. I want no bungalow. There is something fine in going to sleep even one flight nearer the stars — and away from the dining-room.

And observe further, if you please: this servantless cottage necessarily has no attic. Has the man no feeling whatever for the joys of his possible grandchildren? Or is the stairless, servantless cottage — ‘truly the little house is the house of the future’ — meant also to be childless? An examination of the plan shows a so-called bedroom marked ‘guest or children,’which indicates that the happy housewife must exercise her own judgment. There are accommodations for one guest or two children, but it seems fairly evident that guest and children exclude each other. Milord and milady must decide between hospitality and race-suicide, or two children and no week-end visitor. Some will choose guest; some will choose children. Personally I hope they will all choose children, for, even without an attic, there is plenty of playground. ‘People with tiny incomes’ must always be careful not to purchase too small a lot; and so we find that the servantless cottage has paths, and a lawn, and flowers, and shrubbery, and a sundial, and an American elm, and a ‘ toadstool canopy ’ between the poplars and the white birches, and an ivy-covered ‘cache’ to store the trunks in. I am glad there is going to be such a domestic convenience as a sun-dial; and perhaps, when there is a guest, the trunks can be taken out on the lawn and the children put to bed in the ‘cache.’

But I guess that, after all, stairs will survive, and attics, and the servantproblem. Innumerable families are already living in servantless houses, with stairs, and it does n’t even occur to them that they are solving any problem whatsoever. Innumerable housewives are about as happy under these conditions as most of us get to be under any conditions. The servantproblem itself is not the young and tender problem that many of us imagine. An examination of old newspapers will show anybody who is sufficiently patient and curious that a hundred years ago there was much indignant wonder that young women, visibly suited for domestic service, preferred to be seamstresses! What is more modern is the grave enthusiasm with which so many persons are trying to decide how the rest of us shall live with the maximum amount of comfort and culture for the minimum expenditure. And one interesting similarity between many of these suggestions is their passive opposition to another important group of critics.

‘Have large families or perish as a nation!’ shriek our advisers on one hand. ‘Have small families or perish as individuals!’ proclaim our advisers on the other.

For this servantless cottage is typical of a good many other housing suggestions in which the essential element is the small family; and even the possibility that the children may live to grow up seems to have been left out of consideration. Milord and milady, I imagine, have chosen children instead of a guest. These children (a boy and girl, as I like to picture them) grow up; marry; settle in their own servantless cottages, and have two children apiece. There are now a grandfather and a grandmother, a son and a daughter, a son-in-law and a daughter-in-law, and four grandchildren. In each servantless cottage there is that one bedroom marked ‘guest, or children.’ Granting all the possibilities of the ivy-covered ‘cache,’— and now the trunks will simply have to be taken out and stood on the lawn even if the snow does fall on them, — milord and milady, come Christmas or other anniversary, can entertain a visit from two grandchildren and their father and mother. And by utilizing the ‘cache’ a son or daughter can receive a short visit from the aged parents, not too long, of course, or it would ruin the trunks. As for any of the hearty, old-fashioned, up-anddown-stairs hospitality — I may be an old fogey myself, but the servantless cottage shocks me.

' Our bedroom resembles a cosy stateroom on board ship.’ Oh! la-la-la-lala! Why does n’t somebody solve the problem of domestic living by suggesting that we all live in house-boats?

TRAVELING LIKE A GENTLEMAN

THE nineteenth century has seen the passing of the democracy of travel. With the twentieth, has come a return to the aristocratic methods of the eighteenth century, when a gentleman, if he wished to tour the continent, did so in his own coach. Friends in the country, inviting a lady of quality to visit them, wrote asking where horses should meet her. She naturally came in her own carriage. When Miss Edgeworth’s heroine ‘Helen’ wished to pay her debts, her principal asset was her traveling chaise.

In the youth of our own grandfathers, the truly great, enshrined in an aristocratic vehicle, refused to descend from it even when on shipboard. The opera-singer, Grisi, crossed the Channel in her own coach, while her dutiful husband stood on deck at the coachwindow, holding the harmless, necessary basin. The individual vehicle was a hall-mark of distinction.

There has been an interval when people were content to herd together in railway trains, but it has already passed away. We have returned to the private, the special, the personal; in a word, we have gone back to the eighteenth century. Now, as then, a gentleman travels in his own conveyance.

These reflections were brought home forcibly to me last summer, when a friend from Denver nearly ran over me on Rue des Pyramides, with his triumphal chariot in which he was joyously making the grand tour. He had sailed with it in June (f.o.b. from Detroit).

Once again the truly fortunate can taste the delights of exclusive travel. Unhampered by time-tables, unfettered by iron rails, what limitless vistas, what alluring possibilities are theirs!

Will the Pullman car soon join the well-appointed carriage as a museum curiosity? Perhaps so. In the meantime, a change in public monuments and memorials should be made to meet changing conditions, for that art only is true which reflects the vital needs of life. Think of the memorial drinking-fountains erected near country estates! They are already obsolete. A free gasoline station, however, would be a memorial worthy of a modern, public-spirited millionaire. Instead of meeting our guests with free horses, let us send them free petrol and prove ourselves possessed of true hospitality.

Alas! had I lived in the old coachingdays, I could not have afforded my own chaise, unless I had risked being sold up like Miss Edgeworth’s Helen. So to-day I belong in the rapidly diminishing class of the motorless, having so far declined to join the ranks of those progressive souls who keep a chauffeur but no cook. Yet the railroads seem to be going out of commission. Soon they will confine their attention to freight, which they assure us ought to pay even if it does n’t. Already our local line has taken off eighteen suburban trains. What is a motorless person to do?

In this dilemma I fortify myself with the memory of that noble saying of the late Ward McAllister, ‘A gentleman can always walk.’