On the Other Side of the Fence

LONG ago, in college years, I was standing one day at the window with a friend, when a particularly irritating classmate walked by. There was nothing the matter with her; she was a nice girl and a conscientious student; but she was — irritating. As she passed, my friend nodded her head decisively. ‘She’s on the other side of the fence,’she said.

‘She’s on the what?’ I questioned dully.

‘On the other side of the fence,’my friend repeated. ‘My world is divided into two parts, separated by a fence — a bright-green wooden fence! On my side are the people who like what I like, or like the opposite agreeably. Tom’s there, because he skates well, and Bess because she likes Ibsen, and my Airedale because he’s so preciously homely, and — and — Charles Lamb, and Roosevelt, and you!’ she finished generously. She shook her head at the retreating figure. ‘She’s not!’ she said.

The comfort of her scheme was irresistible. I began my fence at once, and built it high and strong —not of wooden bars painted bright green, like hers, but of tall brick piers, connected by strong wrought-iron sections, with a sharp dagger design at the top. You can build such barriers easily when you’re young; and if you build them with your own zealous hands, they will last a lifetime. I merely commanded mine to rise, and it stood ready for use. Through its several gates I drove the people I ‘simply could n’t stand,’ and shot the bars behind them.

In those days I was strong — very strong. I could play tennis all day, and dance all night, without fatigue. I could carry my college work and run my Italian club at the settlement without loss of zest. The hectic girls who ‘never had time’ to do interesting things, and went to the Infirmary after exams, bored me — or would have, if I had not remembered that they were safely stowed on the other side of the fence. I used to watch them sometimes and silently, incredulously, ask, ‘Are you tired?’

But the time came when I took a job, a steady job, as teacher in a boardingschool; a most interesting job, combining the roles of hostess, big sister, mother confessor, and teacher. The output of sympathy was large, and the drain on my strength too heavy to be resisted without recreation. My new enthusiasms supplanted my old athletic habits, and I forgot to take exercise. Then, one day, as I lurched to my seat in the crowded five o’clock car, which I had run to catch, I looked at the telltale faces of my fellow passengers, and found myself saying tenderly, ‘You’re tired, are n’t you?’

There was a crash! At first I was startled. Then I looked through a wide breach in my fence, and gayly waved an invitation to all the tired people there to come through it into my garden.

A sense of adventure once sent me for a three years’ term in the Philippines. As it drew to an end, and I bought my passage for America, I suddenly began to wonder whether the friends at home would find me changed. I knew well that the climate of the Islands does not enhance the freshness of one’s complexion; and I remembered how utterly dowdy returning missionaries had always seemed to me. Indeed, I had with difficulty refrained from telling them that I held it a vice, not a virtue, to come home dressed in a way ‘to make God’s little green earth hideous.’

But then — they were on the other side of the fence. On my side people were ‘well but simply dressed’; so I borrowed a fashion magazine of a fastidious friend, bought some charming dark-blue material, and presented myself before the finest dressmaker in Manila. I selected a style of extreme simplicity, whose distinction lay in its lines, and gave my orders. I confess to some misgivings as I left the establishment. It was a single great room, against the four walls of which sat fifty girls, cross-legged on the floor, sewing. The modiste, wearing a short loose blouse, which failed to meet a skirt very short in front and trailing richly behind, paced barefooted up and down, with the bearing of a queen. My misgivings were justified — how could it be otherwise? I presented myself to my family, looking ‘just like a missionary.’

Crack! Rumble! Crash! A large section of my fence is down, and across it I see an interesting group of people doing interesting things. I apologetically, but eagerly, invite into my garden — not a set of oddly dressed missionaries, but people of distinction who, as another recently said of them, ‘have moved off Main Street.’

One especially strong stretch of fence, against which I had gone so far as to plant thistles, kept out people who are slaves to their housekeeping and know but one topic of conversation — the servant problem. Unless a person is a wit, who can make an elegy out of the breaking of a dish, or an epic out of experiences at an intelligence office, she should eschew household gossip. But it so happened that I returned from a Wanderjahr to find a trained nurse on duty in my home, and all the ablebodied members of the family holding jobs. The kitchen was unoccupied, except by little black Phœbe, who was quick, but refused to cook. ‘I don’t want to learn to cook,’ she drawled. ‘I want to git married! ’

I fell upon the new task of cooking with zest, and gave the family delectable dishes such as they had never before tasted. But there were pots and pans to wash, sweeping to do, laundry to supervise, telephone calls to answer, and family correspondence to attend to. Moreover, Phoebe gave herself a holiday once or twice a week, and in time my nerves were apparent to the nurse.

‘You must get out more,’ she said.

So I went to a tea, and chatted gayly for an hour with everyone I knew. It was not until I was leaving that the refrain of all I had said fell on my own ears: ‘I’ll do anything in the world for you, if you’ll put us on the trail of a competent cook!’ I looked at my group, and we simultaneously burst into peals of laughter so loud and merry that I scarcely heard the falling of another stretch of my garden barricade.

Twenty years have passed since I jubilantly erected my ornate fence. Now, as I look back along the line, I find it dowm in a thousand places, its ruins buried in honeysuckle and heartsease. Only here and there does it remain — over against the pessimists and the blase, and the futurists who think they have arrived. Some day, when these parts too shall have fallen, I shall build a little rest house on the spot where the fence stood highest and most fiercely spiked, and over the door I shall paint, in beautiful, illuminated characters, the slowly valued legend —

Put yourself in his place.