VI
The constitution of the family in Christianopolis follows pretty definitely upon the lines dictated by urban occupations; for Andreae is a city man, and since he does not despise the advantages city life can give, he does not shrink from their consequences. One of these consequences is, surely, the restriction of domesticity, or rather, the projection in the city at large of the functions that in a farmstead would be carried on within the bosom of the family.
When a lad is twenty-four and a lass is eighteen, they are permitted to marry, with the benefit of Christian rites and services, and a decorous avoidance of drunkenness and gluttony after the ceremony. Marriage is a simple matter. There are no dowries to consider, no professional anxieties to face, no housing shortage to keep one from finding a home, and above all, perhaps, no landlord to propitiate with money, since all houses are owned by the city and are granted and assigned to individuals for their use. Virtue and beauty are the only qualities that govern a marriage in Christianopolis. Furniture is provided with the house out of the public store. If in Utopia the families are grouped together in a patriarchal household, such as More himself maintained at Chelsea, in Christianopolis they consist of isolated couples, four, at most six people in all, a woman, a man, and such children as are not yet of school age.
Let us visit a young couple in Christianopolis. We reach the house by way of a street, twenty feet broad, faced by houses with a wide frontage on the street, some forty feet in length, and of from fifteen to twenty-five feet in depth. In our crowded towns, today, where people pay for land by the front foot, the frontage is narrow and the houses are deep; and as a result there is a dreadful insufficiency of light and air; but in Christianopolis, as in some of the older European towns, the houses are built to get a maximum of air and sunlight. If it is raining when we make our visit, a covered walk, five feet wide, supported by columns twelve feet high, will shelter us from the rain.
Our friends live, we shall say, in one of the average apartments; so they have three rooms, a bathroom, a sleeping apartment, and a kitchen. “The middle part within the tower has a little open space with a wide window, where wood and the heavier things are raised aloft by pulleys”—in short, a dumbwaiter. Looking out from the window in the rear, we face a well-kept garden; and if our host is inclined to give us wine, he may let us take our pick from among the cobwebs of a small private cellar in the basement, where such things are kept. If it is a cold day, the furnace is going; or if we happen to make our visit in the summer time, the awnings are drawn.
Our host makes apologies, perhaps, for a litter of wood and shavings that occupies a corner of the kitchen, for he has just been putting up a few shelves in his spare time, and has borrowed a kit of tools from the public supply house. (Since he is not a carpenter, he has no need for these tools the rest of the year; and other people can have their turn at them.) Coming from Utopia, one of the things that strikes us is the absence of domestic attendance; and when we ask our hostess about it, she tells us that she will not have anyone to wait upon her until she is confined.
“But isn’t there a lot of work for you to do all by yourself?” we shall ask.
“Not for anybody with a college training,” she will answer. “You see that our furnishings are quite simple; and since there are no gimcracks to be dusted, no polished tables to be oiled, no carpets to be swept, and nothing in our apartment that is just for show to prove that we can afford to live better than our neighbors, the work is scarcely more than enough to keep one in good health and temper. Of course, cooking meals is always something of a nuisance; and washing up is worse. But my husband and I share the work together, in everything but sewing and washing clothes, and you would be surprised how quickly everything gets done. Work is usually galling when somebody else is taking his ease while one is doing it; but where husband and wife share alike, as in Christianopolis, there is really nothing to it. If you’ll stay to dinner, you’ll find out how easily it goes. Since you haven’t brought your rations, my husband will get some cooked meats in the public kitchen, and that will do for all of us.”
“No one need be surprised at the rather cramped quarters,” Andrea hastens to interject. “People who house vanity … can never live spaciously enough. They burden others and are burdened themselves, and no one measures their necessities, nay even their comforts, easily otherwise than by an unbearable and unmovable mass. Oh, only those persons are rich who have all of which they have real need, who admit nothing else, merely because it is possible to have it in abundance.”
Carried to its extreme, you will find this philosophy put once for all in Thoreau’s Walden. We have got our bearings in Utopia, I believe, when we have determined what a life abundance consists of, and what will suffice for it.