University of Virginia Library

V
Detached Thoughts on Boarding

Boarding is a puzzling and provocative subject for any student of human nature. Some clue to its psychology is revealed by the fact that even Adam and Eve got tired of it. Eden itself could not keep them from wanting their own menage. One can conjecture the course of their growing ennui and irritation as the suspicion dawned upon them that in Paradise they were not getting all the comforts of home. Having nothing to do but board, they probably conversed a great deal about their food, when the celestial ministrants were out of earshot, and eventually decided that they could have run the table a great deal better themselves. Then, too, they had no privacy, they were absolutely at the mercy of any archangel who might choose to drop in on them. Possibly, also, Eve felt that Eden was no sort of place for bringing up children. They might be spoiled by the attentions of other boarders, elephant or ape, fish or fowl, any one of a perfectly indiscriminate menagerie,

while she herself, as a mother, might be subjected to constant advice from angels who did not know one thing more about human babies than she did herself. After Eve had thought over these matters for some time, and whispered them all to Adam, she did what many another boarder has done since; she up and precipitated a crisis.

The case of Adam and Eve is sufficiently typical to afford some light upon the puzzling effects of boarding, but not quite enough illumination to satisfy the psychologist. He is teased by the conviction that there is more in this matter than he can get at. Without an ultimate analysis of causes it may still be of interest to examine some results to the human spirit of both the selling and the buying of house-room, and to offer some tentative explanation of the curious phenomena that for many of us are too familiar for attention.

We all recognize as a distinct human type the woman who keeps boarders. One writes woman rather than man, not that in strict accuracy one could say that men never keep boarders; when men do engage in the business, however, they do so by wholesale, never by retail, while it is precisely the increased personal intimacy of the retail relation that

occasions the peculiar blight incurred by the proprietor of a boarding-house, but escaped by the proprietor of a hotel. There is an expression familiar to our tongues, distressing in its figurative suggestion, which is frequently descriptive of the class under discussion, "decayed gentlewoman." No one knows whether a gentlewoman takes boarders because she has decayed or whether she decays because she takes them. Of course, not all women who take boarders are decrepit either in soul or body,—some of them are very buxom indeed; and, equally, not all are refined,—some of them are refreshingly vulgar; still, as a whole, the attributes inherent in the term "decayed gentlewoman" so generally characterize the profession that in whatever country one travels one is received by ladies so consciously redolent of better days as to shame a boarder for not having had better days himself. However adroitly they conceal their emotions, women who entertain paying guests generally have toward their occupation a feeling of perpetual apology or of perpetual resentment. Sometimes the apology element predominates, and then a blundering boarder had better be mindful of the sensitive toes of his hostess; sometimes the resentment is uppermost, and then the boarder had better be mindful for his own toes. There is no reason why these facts should characterize so worthy a business, and there are conspicuous exceptions in which both the woman and the domicile remain invincibly warm-hearted and welcoming, but the rule still holds that only the rarest of women can invite the public into her home and not herself suffer from the exposure, only the rarest of women can as the mistress of a boarding-house still be perfectly herself.

Having boarders, however, is not so demoralizing as being a boarder. The chronic boarder is an easily recognizable type, fat, fussy, futile, and usually feminine. This caustic characterization does not apply to women who go out by the day to any form of scrubbing, as doctors, lawyers, or what-not, professional women too busy for carping; it is the woman who has no profession except boarding that suffers its utmost injury. To give primary attention to the manner in which one is, fed and lodged has the same effect as any other reversion to an animal attitude. The faces of women who do nothing but keep house are always harassed; the faces of women who do nothing but board are always vacuous. Men-boarders in a house are

generally preferred to women; a he-boarder is more to be desired than a she-boarder because there is less of him underfoot. On the other hand, since a man can always beat a woman on her own ground whenever he thinks it worth while, a man who gives his undivided attention to his boarding can in fume and fuss out-boarder any woman.

The insidious influence of boarding upon the spirit is most evident when we watch it operate upon a child. We all know the type of youngster that even the very best of boarding-houses is prone to produce. He is noisy, aggressive, self-conscious, and yet to sympathetic penetration profoundly pathetic. He knows that all his little life is overheard, that every room knows when he is scolded or spanked or entreated. A grown-up learns how to conceal his soul from even boarding-house scrutiny, but a child has no refuge except in slamming doors and thundering on the stairs and jumping into the secrets of those who have trespassed upon his own.

The effect of boarding upon our own soul may best be seen by contrasting our reactions to our geography, according as we wake in the morning to find ourselves at home, in a friend's home, or in a boarding-house. At home our attitude toward the ensuing day is

one of absolute sincerity,—we expect to be our best self or our worst, for frankness is the chief comfort of kinship; if, on the other hand, we open our eyes in somebody's guest chamber, we marshal our forces to insure our good behavior, we owe it to our host to put out best foot foremost; but if we wake in a boarding-house? There our morning resolve reduces itself to the single sordid intention to get our money's worth. This latent hostility is ignominious and unworthy, but it is true. Yet we all know that any hostelry is richer in Samaritan opportunities than the road to Jericho.

The detriment due to boarding does not confine itself to animate beings, but extends to the inanimate. In a boarding-house even the chairs look protesting and sat upon. The curtains seem exhausted by enforced welcome. The overworked kitchen has not enough pride left to keep its savors to itself. The piano has clattered until it has forgotten it was ever meant for music. The doom of dejection falls upon a boarding-house both without and within, so that one always regrets its entrance into a street cozy with homes. Its windows stare forth so blankly that the homes grow uncomfortable and move away. There is a blur over the face-walls of

a boarding-place obliterating the individuality to which every house has a right.

This very absence of personality gives the boarding-house a certain personality of its own. The effort to analyze this character has made the boarding-house a favorite background with story-writers. Balzac, in "Pere Goriot," caught and reproduced its very soul as well as the soul of the homeless home-lover that it harbored. The frequency of the hall bedroom and the long table in magazine stories to-day suggests the wistful familiarity with both of writer and reader. The juxtaposition of types in a group bound together by no more congenial tie than the brute need of food and shelter has always opened a fascinating field to the romancer from Chaucer's day to ours.

The mere mention of Chaucer's name is eloquent with contrast, for surely the Tabard was no bleak spot, but warm and tingling with hospitality. Yet even Chaucer's blithe company had a sharp eye and a gossipy tongue ready for each other's foibles, and if they had remained together too long, it would have taken more than mine host to keep them in order, but fortunately they had their picnic and parted. Another week or two and even the Canterbury pilgrims might have degen

erated into boarders, and dear knows what metamorphosis mine host the merry, might have undergone.

To place Balzac's boarding-house and Chaucer's Tabard side by side is to produce a pregnant contrast. Yet if the primary purpose of both is akin, why the world of difference connoted by the word "boarding-house" and the world{sic} "inn"? Inn suggests comfort, coziness, congenial conversation, but, alas, it also suggests a dear departed day. The only inns left are survivors from dead decades, and they themselves have no descendants. "Mine ease in mine inn" is a phrase from the past.

It is interesting to examine the difference in meaning of the three types of hostelry—hotel, boarding-house, and inn. The hotel does not try to be something it is not. It neither offers nor expects anything personal. Its purpose is to make money out of the visitor, as his purpose is to get comfort out of it. A hotel is not a home, and it does not pretend to be. Now a boarding-house is pathetic because it is always trying to be a home when it is not. It is we, the boarders, who are responsible for its being the wistful anomaly that it is, for at one moment we demand of it the indifference of a hotel and the next the coziness

of a home, and at all moments we ask of it that which money cannot buy—hospitality.

The little word inn stands apart from those other two, hotel and boarding-house, and its charm lies as much in its literary aroma as its actuality. We visit inns oftener in books than in life, but in both they have the same characteristics. The tiniest inn is always big enough for personality. The innkeeper is a person, the guest is a person, the cook, the boots, the hostler, they are all real persons. There is time for flavoring food with conversation. The chairs are friendly and inviting. The hearth leaps warm with welcome. But note well, one sometimes lives at a hotel, one often lives at a boarding-house, but one never lives at an inn, one merely stops. The reason why the welcome and the speeding of an inn can be so warm and genuine is that host and guest never have too much of each other. Both can present their best foot for three days when a stretch of three weeks would strain its tendons. In an inn food never seems skimped, the financial aspect never seems prominent, because the guest never stays long enough to discover sordid secrets, nor long enough to have his own private affairs invaded. Company manners, the outward and visible sign of hospitality's inward and spiritual grace, can

prevail in an inn, for the simple reason that no matter how often one returns, exactly as often one departs.

It is clearly easier to enumerate the effects of boarding upon human nature than to ascertain the psychological causes underlying them. One ventures to hazard a few random reasons, all interrelated and all growing out of the fact that we are still cave-dwellers at heart. The cave household feared and hated the stranger; and with good cause. They eyed him askance, exactly as the other boarders in a house eye the recent comer. The newest boarder never coalesces with the group until the advent of another still newer, when he is tentatively admitted to ranks needing union against the latest intruder. This survival of prehistoric manners may be observed and experienced in any boarding-house.

The hostility of older occupants toward the stranger is exactly matched by his suspicion of them, hostile suspicion always, no matter how obsequiously concealed. When a cave-dweller penetrated the seclusion of another cave, he was wary, on the defensive, and this attitude made him critical of the inmates, of course, and therefore, for them, a person to fear. We are still afraid of the stranger, of his eye that may see, and his tongue that may

tell, our secrets. Boarding hurts us because we suffer continual abrasion of our reserve. In a boarding-house, family life has to go on in whispers; strangers are in our midst looking and listening, and even if they are friendly their attention is irksome: Eve got tired of having even the angels around all the time.

The human soul demands retirement, but is often unwilling to pay the price. Homemaking is to be had only by house-keeping. In order to live by ourselves we have to take care of ourselves, and the effort to evade this issue drives us to the boarding-house. The home-keeping instinct is, however, as active in us as in our cave-dwelling ancestors, only they knew better than to try to suppress it. They knew they wanted seclusion, and so they rolled a rock to the cave-mouth, and possessed their souls in privacy. It is our doom to inherit from them a desire for our own front door, in order that we may not have to sue for entrance at some one else's door, and also that we may never have to open ours except when we do so in free and voluntary welcome. Boarding is often necessary, but it goes contrary to impulses as ineradicable in us as nest-making in a bird. Even the feminists, when they inveigh against family life, will be found riot free from prehistoric impulses toward

privacy. They do not advocate caravansary existence, but rather the group system, in all its cave-dweller isolation; only the group must be based on congeniality, not on mere arbitrary and accidental kinship.

The joy of slamming our own front door upon the world is only equaled by the joy of flinging that door wide to the world when we wish to. Of all commodities hospitality should be free from money-taint. The trouble with boarding is that it attempts to buy and sell a welcome. Everything is cheapened the moment we can pay a price for it. The instant we lay our dollars on the counter, we have the right to criticize our purchase. A buyer does not have to say thank you with his lips nor yet with his heart, and this is why a certain uncouthness is to be incurred in any purely commercial relation. Hospitality is essentially not sordid, but spiritual: a host is gracious with the generosity that offers what money cannot buy, a guest is gracious with the gratitude that accepts what money cannot pay for. Boarding is an anomalous and enforced relation between people who offer and accept house-room, and only those can escape its blight who have the power always to elevate the commercial to the plane of the human and the friendly. Luckily, among this

small but noble company are many persons that board and many that take boarders. The existence of this minority does not alter the fact that for most of us boarding is a demoralizing occupation. The reason lies deep: hospitality, given or received, is too sacred for barter.