Crumbling Houses

They are beautiful houses, most of them lofty of structure, all of them firm of foundation; there is no fear that their roofs, painted in beautiful colors, will fall, and no fear that their walls, adorned with splendid carvings and pictures, will collapse. They are scattered here and there, in every corner of the country.

If you pass by them, your eyes are caught by their lush gardens, whose flowers perfume the air of the quarter and add to its splendor and cheer. Before their entrances stand elegant, magnificent automobiles, the newest and grandest the West has produced in this line.

And if you enter them, the signs of luxury greet you at once; the tokens of affluence and the marks of vast wealth arrest you; and your ears are filled with loud, blaring strains of music in a great hall where people have gathered, singing and dancing, on their faces the marks of gladness, and from their sleeves wafting the fragrance of happiness.

You turn to the right and see the great salon with its costly furnishings, in which stretches the sumptuous buffet laden with every delicacy, and you shake your head, saying: Life belongs to such as these, whose pockets are full and whose tables are laden, so that their hearts are filled with happiness, their souls are content, and their consciences are at ease, for life has singled them out for its glory and showered them with its bounty. And you go out with something of regret in your soul and much desire in your heart to have, like these people, towering houses with spacious halls adorned with costly furnishings, their air filled with the scent of fragrant, perfumed flowers, with no small number of servants standing in their service. You may even resent life and rebel against yourself, and a painful wave of despair and hopelessness may come over you that makes you see life other than as it truly is—the hour you look at it through a black lens that shows you ugliness as beauty and beauty as ugliness, health as sickness and sickness as health, until you are dazed and imagine misery to be happiness and happiness to be pain. But if you returned to yourself and rested a little, and then looked out at life with the eye of earnestness and fairness, it would appear to you—when you regard it with the gaze of one who contemplates, who stands upon the core of its truth and penetrates the folds of its depths—other than the life for which you envied the wealthy folk; and you would be certain that happiness has never been so dazzled by magnificent palaces, great buildings, sumptuous furnishings, and splendid pearls as to settle in the hearts of their owners! Rather it has been, in every age and every time, a just democrat that dwells only in hearts at peace in the integrity of their wishes and the sweetness of their hopes, and enters only those houses whose people have been faithful to their work and their duties, walking the straight path, professing the creed of sincerity and disinterestedness, and drawing up for themselves sound, methodical plans by which they proceed and for which they labor.

Come with me now and let us stroll a little among these houses and those—among these buildings that dazzled you yesterday, which you imagined nature had favored with every color of comfort and happiness while denying you, who labor in life with diligence and steadfastness, armed with resolve and knowledge and armored with hope, disinterestedness, and competence, your right to abundant money, a bustling life, and fine wealth.

Do you not see with me this family?? It possesses vast wealth and broad standing. Its members—two parents, a girl in the bloom of youth and the springtime of life, and two brothers still in adolescence—enjoy every means of comfort and every cause of ease. For money has piled up in the husband's coffers, furnishings have filled the house, spacious in all its corners, and the visitors, men and women of the rich, have lent the atmosphere of the house liveliness and beauty. One day I heard the mistress of this family say: Three days have passed in which I have not seen my children, and I miss them dearly. I was astonished and said: Pardon me if I find this strange of you, madam—were you outside the city?

The lady laughed and said: No. So I said: Were the children, then? She answered again: No. And when she noticed my astonishment she said: It is the long soirées that have kept me from seeing them. Then I understood her answer and knew that the green tables had left her no spare time in which to see her children. She would not return home until a late hour of the night, to find the two boys asleep and her young daughter still out of the house with a troop of her girlfriends—and her men friends as well. And the lady sleeps drained of strength, for the effort and attention she has spent, and the money she has squandered, at the green table have wearied her eyelids and dragged fatigue into her thoughts and her nerves; so she surrenders to a long slumber that does not return her to wakefulness until a late hour of the day. She rises to find the children gone from the house to their schools and her husband gone off to his work, to return likewise at late hours of the night. His day is for work and his money for banquets, wine, and idle play. And the wife—with no one to watch over her and no companion to cheer her life—plunges in her own turn to avenge herself on her husband by finding company at the green tables and finding companions among friends.

So I say to myself: What delusions!! Is it true that this family is happy? The husband finds his ease only among night-revelers and addicts; the wife, forgotten, takes her revenge and seeks her ease outside the house; and the young girl walks without guidance—no tenderness from a father, no direction from a mother—and no doubt she sees in her mother the example fit to be followed, so she seeks her happiness in her own particular way.

And these two boys—who cares for them? Who watches over their affairs? They are at a stage of life full of danger. And this great house—who manages its affairs, orders its budget, and supervises its workings, its income and its outlay? Everything in it is in the hands of the servants. The servants run the house, raise the children, deal with the husband, and keep him company in the hours when the master of the house misses his wife and feels his loneliness.

And if you listen to the husband, he talks on at length, telling you in detail of his financial worries and of his shares in companies exposed every hour to violent economic shocks; and he complains to you of the poor state of health he suffers—for addiction has bequeathed weakness to his nerves, and excess in the pursuit of pleasures has bred in his frame countless kinds of disorder; and the wife's demands, her extravagance in spending on her jewels, her gowns, and her perfumes, and her continual losses at the gaming tables have troubled his mind and made of him a man weary of life and resentful of woman.

Then you listen to the wife, and she pours out to you complaints for which you could never have understood a cause, had you not been listening to a striking lady who is, in the estimation of some, of notable place and high rank:

She is perpetually preoccupied; she has no talk except of the state of health to which she has come in these days—her blood pressure, rising and falling, disturbs her rest and demands constant medical consultations. She finds nothing in her program of engagements to allow her the enjoyment of a little rest. Her gilded notebook, with its exquisitely fine pen, is full of appointments; her women friends and men friends, devoted to her, pursue her with invitations. Now she is angry because the husband is very forgetful, excessively distracted from house and children by his business and his appointments; now she is lamenting because the maidservants have today become the rulers of the houses, no one of them distinguished from the mistress of the house in anything. Through this impudence and this defiance, theirs is the word of command and prohibition in every matter. One of them will flirt with the master of the house or with the son, and no modesty restrains her, no decorum checks her; and if the lady calls her to account for it, she threatens and menaces and gives warning that she will leave the house, and the lady is then obliged to submit.

Then the lady runs on—cutting off your every right to speak—about the dressmakers who respect no appointment; and you gather after that that what Paris has decreed in fashions for this year obliges her to prepare all the requirements of the season of parties—gowns, furs, and hats—so that she is in constant occupation, vexation, and anxiety, because she has decided to take part in the masked ball her friend will give on the occasion of her birthday, and the preparation of her costumes is not yet finished—and here is the party drawing near.

And if some occasion brings you together with the children, and you talk with the girl about her affairs and her studies, you learn that her knowledge of what goes on around her does not much exceed your knowledge of some Semitic language dead these many distant centuries. Yes—the styles of living that make some of our rich 'civilized' in the parlance of society have created of the rising generation a generation superficial in its knowledge, drowned in a sea of delusions, wrapped in a garment of flabbiness that has carried off its awareness and its conscience, and pictured life to it in seductive images, rotten in their foundations and crooked in their ways, which have turned it aside from the road that a generation created for the right and virtuous life ought to walk.

Our young people today know every little and great thing about Hollywood, and will tell you at length of the marriage of this actress and the divorce of that one; but if you ask one of them about an event in his own history or a matter in his own country, he looks at you with disdain, and in his eyes—in which there is no trace of a glimmer of the tokens of knowledge—you glimpse all the meanings of ignorance and all the effects of the mistaken direction of modern upbringing in these crumbling houses.

I say crumbling, and I mean what I say. As I mentioned at first, there is no fear that their walls will collapse; but the fear—all the fear—is for these families whose parts have come loose, and for these morals which today are thrown down on the gaming tables, among cronies and boon companions, in the cinema theaters and the halls of amusement, as cheap goods are thrown down for cheap sale. — This is one of the pictures of society, which I have displayed in a great house lofty of structure, inhabited by a family of vast wealth, envied by many of the deluded who look at life with a gaze far from its true meaning, and so reckon the matter happiness where it is only a mirage of happiness, and think life a living confined—as it is with some—to purely material things, whereas in its essence it is values and high ideals, deserved only by those who have schooled themselves in its lofty meaning and followed in their course a right way.