The Lasting Things
WE may be very progressive, but we do like our own ways. Between the ages of twenty and sixty our dread of getting into a rut has power to keep us uneasy; but, even during those critical years, our own ways hardly seem to us like ruts. A rut is generally a groove made by the wheels of others. We are glad to think that the paths we have blazed are a little aside from the maintraveled road.
Traced through a life-time, traced through the generations, these private ways of ours would be found to mark the regions where individuality is most pronounced, where the historical background is most charming, where we have the most memorable encounters with our friends.
They mark, also, the regions where we form the most memorable customs with our relatives. In a family made up of resourceful people, with ways that sometimes coincide and sometimes intersect, the chances for comradeship and the chances for collision are about even. From the resulting combination of accepted and contested modes of procedure, the permanent family tradition is made up.
The most distinctive customs in household life are likely to gather around very simple things, such as the material equipment which the family has in common, especially four great subjects for debate: furniture, personal property, the automobile, and the food-supply. Nobody deliberately sets out to establish individual customs in connection with these things; but years afterward the accidental associations come to have a striking significance.
Furniture, for example, is a matter of genuine idealism with most householders. We intend to accumulate only things worth owning — the fine, durable things that can be handed down with unimpaired dignity through the generations. With adequate funds and trained judgment, this ideal can be approached. But when the average family is developing within financial limitations, certain articles of furniture that are not representative are bound to creep in. And if this goes on through a period of years, the final accumulation is not homogeneous.
In the most comfortable of homes, therefore, we find things in which nobody takes much artistic pride. As ‘period furniture’ these pieces are not a success, for they are not purely of any recognized type, not even earlyor mid-Victorian. If anything, they are early McKinley or mid-Ulysses Grant. In spite of excellent reasons for keeping these objects, the owners are quite aware of the inharmonious note. Those members of the family who, like Mrs. Gummidge, feel it more than the rest, are continually suggesting new locations for the offending articles, manœuvring to get them into inconspicuous positions. But you cannot hope to obscure such things entirely. The more you try to suppress them, the more they prey upon the mind. Some profounder, more penetrating Freud ought to investigate the effect of suppressed furniture upon the inner life of the home.
People who find themselves in possession of such things have a baffled feeling. Their ideals were dignified, but their success was uneven. Yet, if they wait long enough, they will find that it is not exclusively the old mahogany that is carefully cherished by the younger generation. The memory of the stuffed sofa over the back of which we fished for trout, and of the unsteady little pine tea-table where we used to find the cooky-pail, can assume a value in our later thought quite equal to that of the ancestral highboy.
A famous logician has said that furniture is divided into two classes: furniture made to hold people, and furniture made to hold things. But within these two great logical divisions there is a peculiar extra class — furniture made to hold memories. Leaving out of the account such poetic examples as the trundle-bed and the settle by the fire, we can all of us think of articles that have formed, not only the social centre of the group, but also the centre of discussion.
In one household, this kind of furniture is represented by a chair where the lower part is stationary and the upper part rocks. Everyone knows this kind of chair — the kind where the top has a curved solid-wood foundation that rocks on a stationary base, the whole thing held together by springs, if I make myself clear. The English language is curiously inadequate to a description of this chair. But the man who owns one knows that, as you seat yourself in it, you are likely to take a backward swoop, very startling indeed if you are new to the manner. Since the foundation is firm, you do not really fall; you simply go through the preliminaries without the crash.
Suppose that, for some unaccountable reason, this happens to be somebody’s favorite chair — what can you do about it? The sensitive members of the family, deploring, not only its manners, but the way it is upholstered, do their best to retire it to a cranny. But since, when it rocks backward, it blemishes the wall behind it and bumps annoyingly, the comfort-loving classes keep dragging it out again as fast as it is set away. This breeds dissension. And any inanimate object that can outride the gales of household strife is perfectly sure of an eternal place in our memories. Whether we attacked it or defended it, we remember it.
An entirely different variety of hotly discussed furniture is the sort not ugly in itself, but by nature untidy. Some pieces of furniture seem made to hold more things than others. There are tables that are positive magnets. They attract the entire deposit of the day. You may put such a table in perfect order in the morning, and by night it will be completely hidden beneath an accumulation of newspapers, notions, and small wares. In the same way, certain backs of chairs form natural hanging-places for caps and book-straps and shopping-bags. ‘Have you looked on the back of the Morris chair? ’ — ‘Have you looked on the hall table?' Magnetic furniture governs not only the domestic trade-routes and thoroughfares and the line of traffic from room to room: it governs also the line of argument when things are lost and not found.
Sometimes it is not a single bit of furniture, but a whole room, that must be suppressed. In one house, this room is the ‘plaything-closet’; in another, it is the ‘cubby-hole’ — a cache for rubber overshoes, dry-mops, and hockeysticks; in another, it is the boys’ room, a sort of Tramps’ Paradise, where the boys keep their dynamo and all their odds and ends. The doors of such places have a universal tendency to stand ajar. As you ring the doorbell of certain pleasant homes, you hear the careful closing of doors before your ring is answered. I like to think that this is the gentle shutting of plaything-closets and cubby-holes.
Of course, there are houses where there is no imperfection — no suppressed furniture, no plaything-closet, no paradise. But they are comparatively few.
A family’s treatment of personal property is another famous starting-place for distinctive traditions. Every family has to build up a code, for example, about what shall and what shall not go to the rummage sale. The laws that govern the borrowing of supplies, tools, thimbles, and costume from one’s kin are enforced in most households by an amateur detective system of no small talent.
And customs arise also out of the respect due to people’s eccentricities in the use of their own rooms. Kindly men who are otherwise tractable about the house turn dangerous on the subject of their study-table. The lady of the house is supposed to leave that spot alone, and yet at the same time to be able to produce on application the Outlook of the week before last. Women who dust skillfully learn to handle such stage-properties with amazing success. But occasionally the most experienced will blunder.
A certain small boy once gave out simple orders that nobody was to touch his box of matches or go anywhere near the Bible on his dressing-table. His mother understood about the Bible. Her little son, she knew, was not devout, but he was a man of his word, and he had promised to read the Bible every day for a year. The thing that she wondered about was the match-box. There was an electric light beside his desk, and the matches at the bedside seemed superfluous. Therefore, when she dusted, she left the matches sometimes in one place and sometimes in another, not at all appreciating his rage when he could not find them. But one night, as she went past his room, she saw the flare of a match in the dark. She paused, fascinated, and looked in. There he sat in bed, Bible in one hand, match in the other, reading while the match held out to burn. It is astonishing what an amount of Holy Writ you can absorb before the flame creeps quite up to your thumb. He explained somewhat impatiently that he had to turn out his desklight before he could raise the curtains and open the windows, did n’t he? and he had to read the Bible, did n’t he, after he was in bed?
Most persons have these little ways with their own possessions — ways that they cannot defend and will not reform. But there is no other department of household life in which tradition becomes so suddenly Chinese as it does in an automobile.
The automobile is so new that one does not naturally think of tradition in connection with it; but when you are in an automobile, you can establish a custom in a twinkling. There is no other setting where peculiarities, either of the group or of the individual, so promptly crystallize into something invariable.
Every family, for instance, quickly establishes well-defined relations between the driver and the group. People on the back seat of a touring-car are tempted to shout directions to the driver, especially if he is a member of the clan. This would be well enough if the directions were always succinct, sensible, final, and from one person. But when several of the party lean forward and halloo conflicting suggestions against the wind, the fibre of the family tie is tested.
Drivers react to this according to their temperament and training. The highly disciplined son or brother responds like a sensitive instrument. He swerves the car lightly hither and yon at the cross-roads, turning an impossible corner when a shout from the rear demands it, and instantly making another swoop in the opposite direction when the order is countermanded. By the curve of the car he accurately registers the caprice of the tonneau. Many sons and brothers can make a car cut a perfect figure eight to order without accident, but few can do it without remark.
A very different type of young man goes to the other extreme, and pays no attention at all to anyone who tries to alter his plans or to regulate his speed. Bracing resolute shoulders, he spins along, deaf to the cries of his passengers.
And there is now and then a driver, perhaps the father of the family, who, instead of being merely obedient or disobedient, is diplomatic. If there is an argument as to route, he stops the car, leans a kindly arm along the back of the seat, and turns around to talk things over. He does not start again until a satisfactory group-decision has been reached. This saves wear and tear on the car.
With the automobile, too, comes the question whether or not to put up the curtains when it begins to rain — a subject too painful for more than mention here. And you can take the complete measure of a family’s growth in grace when it comes time to select a spot by the roadside where they can all agree to eat the picnic lunch. All hands on the lookout, they skim along the country road, everybody pointing out perfect spots, which somebody else vetoes on account of mosquitoes, or cows, or poison ivy. That family is fortunate that has already settled upon ideal picnic grounds on every highway — places where they always stop for luncheon without debate.
We like to have traditional places and unchanging rites and ceremonies in connection with our food-supply. The charm of a picnic is in its informality, but also in its conformity with the recognized rites and ceremonies of the picnic. A picnic that tries to be a course dinner is interesting as a feat of special ingenuity, but out of place under the trees. We want even our basket-luncheon to live up to what we expect of the proper picnic tradition.
The most interesting example of the way in which traditions gather around the most informal of meals is the Sunday-night supper. This is the most flexible of all national events. There is no social code to govern it. Each family celebrates it in its own way. Yet nearly everybody has definite ideas as to how this meal should be managed. Some families, like the Children of Israel, eat standing. This saves dishes. In other homes, Sunday night is the favorite time for guests, and the meal is more or less elaborate. Some people have brown bread and milk for supper, some have popcorn and cocoa, some have Welsh rarebit. Then there is the great school of foraging, the teachings of which permit every man to raid the larder for what he wants. The maid is out, and it is the open season for hunting in the refrigerator.
In homes where this last practice is in vogue, the supper-hour is variable. Some time after dark, the family, two or three at a time, begin to drift toward the kitchen. Somebody opens the refrigerator door and goes down on one knee for a survey. The others gather behind him and look over his shoulder at the rows of dishes sitting in the arctic twilight of the shelves. Then one dish after another is called for and handed out, as each announces his choice. Everything is open for selection, except one.
And here is the moment for an almost national debate, carried on perennially, with one side always winning. Shall or shall not the Sunday chicken be eaten cold on Sunday night? Every housewife in the land upholds the negative: resolved, that it shall not. There it is, the chicken, in plain sight, delectable. To-morrow it will be only our Monday dinner. To-night is its perfect moment. But in most homes, the tradition is inflexible, though upheld by only one single personality. Except for a criminal morsel or two snatched under cover of the excitement, the chicken remains undiminished. On this one point, the mildest lady in the land stands firm.
But the most significant phase of the Sunday-night supper will vary with individual experience. Sometimes a prosaic moment is most memorable, as it is in one home where the true spirit of the occasion is always most charming when the time comes for washing the dishes.
The whole household on this one night joins in the process. The son of the family, who normally sojourns very little in kitchens, is provided with a teatowel, and stands immovable, polishing conscientiously. He is not a rapid worker, but he is very thorough. Conversation flourishes as he vigorously rubs a single bread-and-butter plate endlessly round and round. He thinks of a dish-towel, not merely as an instrument for drying moisture, but as a sort of buffer. Still, it is something to have him there, though he does monopolize a dry towel that might otherwise be put to use. His sisters dart about, snatching cups and plates from under his elbow at the right, drying them as they make the détour around him, and depositing them at his left.
Meanwhile his father — also conversational — loans against one of the doors of the china-closet, choosing by instinct the door that bars the way to the place where the next pile of plates must go. Requested to move, he springs aside with alacrity, and with unerring intuition takes up a new position against the shelf that is the destination of the incoming glasses.
Just why it should be so thrilling, on this one night in the week, to have two gentlemen of doubtful serviceableness in the kitchen, is a question that might be puzzling to explain in terms. But it is nevertheless one of the great settled questions of that home.
No matter how commonplace the origin, any simple, unvarying custom, followed for a long time, gathers power to stir the imagination. Thus the little ways of the household, insignificant and even annoying at the moment, become later something more than a series of trivialities. This is particularly true of the things that older people do with children. There are men and women who are artists in this matter of establishing beautiful customs that children love and always remember.
A certain astute business man, who is not generally known as an artist, has this knack with his children. His wife, whose gifts are more along the disciplinary lines, says that, when her headstrong sons and daughters were small, she and her husband were like the Law and the Gospel. She was the Law, and he was the Gospel. He was the one who established, for example, a goodnight custom that involved a plate of apples, a sharp knife, and a book. His children are all grown up now; but one winter evening, when they were at home for vacation, they invited a little party of guests into the house after a long ride.
We found the hostess seated at the table, a tray piled with apples before her, and over by the fireplace her husband, waiting with a book. We all sat down round the table, as her children had done ever since they could remember, and she pared the apples, cutting them into quarters, and giving us each one quarter at a time as it came our turn.
Meanwhile, the father read aloud a selection from Rostand. The mellow blend of Rostand and the Baldwin apples, the pleasure of hearing the reading and of watching the skillful hands at work, and of waiting our turn for our slice of apple — all this was delightful in itself. But there was, besides, a rich sense of the recurrent spirit of the moment kept over so many years unspoiled. There was some! hing very fine and durable about it. We instantly recognize the authentic tradition when we see it.
Such early customs have a curious way of assuming symbolic value in our maturer thought. They are reassuring in moments of insecurity — a steadying element. If it is true that an unfortunate event or terror in childhood can make so deep an impression as later to undermine the mental health, surely it is not making too extravagant a claim to suggest that an exquisite or humorous or gracious moment may serve later as a powerful force for sanity.
Each of us will recall such early significant moments from our own experience. One of my own most perfect childhood memories concerns my visits to my grandmother, when she invited me to stay for supper, and my grandfather walked home with me after dark. All along the way, he used to point out our two shadows on the pavement, as we passed the street-lights one by one. We watched the way the shadows were very short directly below the lamp, and how they lengthened until they were just our height, — his more than twice as tall as mine, — and how they finally grew so long that their tops were almost out of sight. The object was to find the point where the shadows were exactly as tall as ourselves. When we came to the darkest part of the street, where our shadows were lost in the hedges, we used to stop and find the North Star over a pointed tree near my own home.
That was always the way we made the journey from his home to mine, until he thought that I was too old to care to have him show me stars and shadows any more. But for me, as long as I live, the North Star will shine over that particular tree. And I shall always keep the memory of that funny little shadow that used to be mine, clear-cut with the light behind it — and beside it, hand in hand with it, that dear characteristic shadow that never falls now on any road in the world.
We make something that lasts a good while when we make a custom.