Part 20

Certainly the little dog is a great convenience, and as certainly he is a great negation,--the substitution, as with most conveniences, of a thing for a self.

Our birth may be a sleep and a forgetting, but life immediately after is largely an inconvenience. That is the meaning of an infant’s first strangling wail. He is protesting against the inconvenience of breathing. Breathing is an inconvenience; eating is an inconvenience; sleeping is an inconvenience; praying is an inconvenience; but they are part and parcel of life, and nothing has been done yet to relieve the situation, except in the item of prayer. From prayer, and from a multitude of other inconveniences, not mentioned above, that round out life (death excepted), we have found ways of escape--by borrowing, renting, hiring, avoiding, denying, until life, which is the sum of all inconveniences, has been reduced to its infantile nothingness--the protest against the personal effort of breathing which is existence.

Not so for the Commuter. He is compelled to live. I have been reckoning up my inconveniences: the things that I possess; the things I have that are mine; not rented, borrowed, hired, avoided, but claimed, performed, made, owned; that I am burdened with, responsible for; that require my time and my hands. And I find that, for a fairly full life there are inconveniences enough incidental to commuting.

To begin with, there is the place of the Commuter’s home. Home? Yes, no doubt, he has a home, but where is it? Can Heaven, besides the Commuter, find out the way there?

You are standing with your question at the entrance of the great terminal station as the wintry day and the city are closing, and it is small wonder that you ask if God knows whither, over the maze of tracks reaching out into the night, each of this commuting multitude is going. But follow one, any one of the bundled throng--this one, this tired, fine-faced Scotchman of fifty years whom we chanced to see during the day selling silks behind the counter of a department store.

It is a chill November evening, with the meagre twilight already spent. Our Commuter has boarded a train for a nineteen-mile ride; then an electric car for five miles more, when he gets off, under a lone electric light, swinging amid the skeleton limbs of forest trees. We follow him, now on foot, down a road dark with night and overhanging pines, on past a light in a barn, and on--when a dog barks, a horse whinnies, a lantern flares suddenly into the road and comes pattering down at us, calling, “Father! father!”

We stop at the gate as father and daughter enter the glowing kitchen. A moment later we hear a cheerful voice greeting the horse, and then, had we gone closer to the barn, we might have heard the creamy tinkle of milk, spattering warm into the bottom of the tin pail.

Heaven knew whither, over the reaching rails, this tired seller of silks was going. Heaven was there awaiting him. The yard-stick was laid down at half-past five o’clock; at half-past six by the clock the Commuter was far away, farther than the other side of the world, in his own small barn where they neither sell silk nor buy it, but where they have a loft full of fragrant meadow hay, and keep a cow, and eat their oatmeal porridge with cream.

It is an inconvenient world, this distant, darkened, unmapped country of the Commuter. Only God and the Commuter know how to get there, and they alone know why they stay. But there are reasons, good and sufficient reasons--there are inconveniences, I should say, many and compelling inconveniences, such as wife and children, miles in, miles out, the isolation, the chores, the bundles--loads of bundles--that keep the Commuter commuting. Once a commuter, always a commuter, because there is no place along the road, either way, where he can put his bundles down.

Bundles, and miles in, and miles out, and isolation, and children, and chores? I will count them all.

The bundles I have carried! And the bundles I have yet to carry! to “tote”! to “tote”! But is it all of life to be free from bundles? How, indeed, may one so surely know that one has a hold upon life as when one has it done into a bundle? Life is never so tangible, never so compact and satisfactory as while still wrapped up and tied with a string. One’s clothes, to take a single example, as one bears them home in a box, are an anticipation and a pure joy--the very clothes that, the next day, one wears as a matter of course, or wears with disconcerting self-consciousness, or wears, it may be, with physical pain.

Here are the Commuter’s weary miles. Life to everybody is a good deal of a journey; to nobody so little of a journey, however, as to the Commuter, for his traveling is always bringing him home.

And as to his isolation and his chores it is just the same, because they really have no separate existence save in the urban mind, as hydrogen and oxygen have no separate existence save in the corked flasks of the laboratory. These gases are found side by side nowhere in nature. Only water is to be found free in the clouds and springs and seas--only the union of hydrogen and oxygen, because it is part of the being of these two elements to combine. So is it the nature of chores and isolation to combine--into water, like hydrogen and oxygen, into a well of water, springing up everlastingly to the health, the contentment, and to the self-sufficiency of the Commuter.

At the end of the Commuter’s evening journey, where he lays his bundles down, is home, which means a house, not a latch-key and “rooms”; a house, I say, not a “floor,” but a house that has foundations and a roof, that has an outside as well as inside, that has shape, character, personality, for the reason that the Commuter and not a Community, lives there. Flats, tenements, “chambers,” “apartments”--what are they but public buildings, just as inns and hospitals and baths are, where you pay for your room and ice-water, or for your cot in the ward, as the case may be? And what are they but unmistakable signs of a reversion to earlier tribal conditions, when not only the cave was shared in common, but the wives and children and the day’s kill? The differences between an ancient cliff-house and a modern flat are mere details of construction; life in the two would have to be essentially the same, with odds, particularly as to rooms and prospect, in favor of the cliff-dweller.

The least of the troubles of flatting is the flat; the greatest is the shaping of life to fit the flat, conforming, and sharing one’s personality, losing it indeed! I’ll commute first! The only thing I possess that distinguishes me from a factory shoe-last or an angel of heaven is my personality. Shoe-lasts are known by sizes and styles, angels by ranks; but a man is known by what he isn’t, and by what he hasn’t, in common with anybody else.

One must commute, if one would live in a house, and have a home of one’s own, and a personality of one’s own, provided, of course, that one works in New York City or in Boston or Chicago; and provided, further, that one is as poor as one ought to be. And most city workers are as poor as they ought to be--as poor, in other words, as I am.

Poor! Where is the man rich enough to buy Central Park or Boston Common? For that he must needs do who would make a city home with anything like my dooryard and sky and quiet. A whole house, after all, is only the beginning of a home; the rest of it is dooryard and situation. A house is for the body; a home for body and soul; and the soul needs as much room outside as inside the house,--needs a garden and some domestic animal and the starry vault of the sky.

It is better to be cramped for room within the house than without. Yet the yard need not be large, certainly not a farm, nor a gentleman’s estate, nor fourteen acres of woodchucks, such as my own. Neither can it be, for the Commuter, something abandoned in the remote foothills, nor something wanton, like a brazen piece of sea-sand “at the beach.”

The yard may vary in size, but it must be of soil, clothed upon with grass, with a bush or a tree in it, a garden, and some animal, even if the tree has to grow in the garden and the animal has to be kept in the tree, as with one of my neighbors, who is forced to keep his bees in his single weeping willow, his yard not being large enough for his house and his hive. A bee needs considerable room.

And the soul of the Commuter needs room,--craves it,--but not mere acres, nor plentitude of things. I have fourteen acres, and they are too many. Eight of them are in woods and gypsy moths. Besides, at this writing, I have one cow, one yearling heifer, one lovely calf, with nature conspiring to get me a herd of cows; I have also ten colonies of bees, which are more than any Commuter needs, even if they never swarmed; nor does he need so many coming cows.

But with only one cow, and only one colony of bees, and only one acre of yard, still how impossibly inconvenient the life of the Commuter is! A cow is truly an inconvenience if you care for her yourself--an inherent, constitutional, unexceptional inconvenience are cows and wives if you care for them yourself. A hive of bees is an inconvenience; a house of your own is an inconvenience, and, according to the figures of many of my business friends, an unwarranted luxury. It is cheaper to rent, they find. “Why not keep your money in your business, where you can turn it?” they argue. “Real estate is a poor investment generally,--so hard to sell, when you want to, without a sacrifice.”

It is all too true. The house, the cow, the children, are all inconvenient. I can buy two quarts of blue Holstein milk of a milkman, typhoid and scarlet-fever germs included, with much less inconvenience than I can make my yellow-skinned Jersey give down her fourteen quarts a day. I can live in a rented house with less inconvenience than in this house of my own. I am always free to go away from a rented house, and I am always glad to go. The joy of renting is to move, or sublet; to be rid also of taxes and repairs.

“Let the risers rot! It isn’t my house, and if I break my neck I’ll sue for damages!”

There is your renter, and the joy he gets in renting.

There are advantages, certainly, in renting; your children, for instance, can each be born in a different house, if you rent; and if they chance to come all boys, like my own, they can grow up at the City Athletic Association--a convenient, and more or less permanent place, nowadays, which may answer very well their instinctive needs for a fixed abode, for a home. There are other advantages, no doubt. But however you reckon them, the rented house is in the end a tragedy, as the willful renter and his homeless family is a calamity, a disgrace, a national menace. Drinking and renting are vicious habits. A house and a bit of land of your own are as necessary to normal living as fresh air, food, a clear conscience, and work to do.

If so, then the question is, Where shall one make his home? “Where shall the scholar live?” asks Longfellow; “In solitude or in society? In the green stillness of the country, where he can hear the heart of Nature beat, or in the dark gray city, where he can feel and hear the throbbing heart of man? I make answer for him, and say, In the dark, gray city.”

I should say so, too, and I should say it without so much oracular solemnity. The city for the scholar. He needs books, and they do not grow in cornfields. The pale book-worm is a city worm, and feeds on glue and dust and faded ink. The big green tomato-worm lives in the country. But this is not a question of where scholars should live; it is where men should live and their children. Where shall a man’s home be? Where shall he eat his supper? Where lay him down to sleep when his day’s work is done? Where find his odd job and spend his Sunday? Where shall his children keep themselves usefully busy and find room to play? Let the Commuter, not the scholar, make answer.

The Commuter knows the dark gray city, knows it darker and grayer than the scholar, for the Commuter works there, shut up in a basement, or in an elevator, maybe, six days a week; he feels and hears the throbbing heart of man all the day long; and when evening comes he hurries away to the open country, where he can hear the heart of Nature beat, where he can listen a little to the beating of his own.