“Once upon a time,” reads the familiar nursery
tale, while the fairies, invited by a king and queen to the
christening of their daughter, were showering good gifts on the
baby princess, a disgruntled old witch, whom no one had thought
of asking to the ceremony, appeared uninvited on the scene and
revenged herself by decreeing that the presents of the good
fairies, instead of proving beneficial, should bring only trouble
and embarrassment to the royal infant.
A telling analogy might be drawn between that unhappy princess
over whose fate so many youthful tears have been shed, and the
condition of our invention-ridden country; for we see every day
how the good gifts of those nineteenth century fairies, Science
and Industry, instead of proving blessings to mankind, are being
turned by ignorance and stupidity into veritable afflictions.
If a prophetic gentleman had told Louis Fourteenth’s
shivering courtiers—whom an iron etiquette forced on winter
mornings into the (appropriately named) Galerie des Glaces,
stamping their silk-clad feet and blowing on their blue fingers,
until the king should appear—that within a century and a
half one simple discovery would enable all classes of people to
keep their shops and dwellings at a summer temperature through
the severest winters, the half-frozen nobles would have flouted
the suggestion as an “iridescent dream,” a sort of
too-good-to-be-true prophecy.
What was to those noblemen an unheard-of luxury has become
within the last decade one of the primary necessities of our
life.
The question arises now: Are we gainers by the change?
Has the indiscriminate use of heat been of advantage, either
mentally or physically, to the nation?
The incubus of caloric that sits on our gasping country is
particularly painful at this season, when nature undertakes to do
her own heating.
In other less-favored lands, the first spring days, the
exquisite awakening of the world after a long winter, bring to
the inhabitants a sensation of joy and renewed vitality.
We, however, have discounted that enjoyment. Delicate
gradations of temperature are lost on people who have been
stewing for six months in a mixture of steam and twice-breathed
air.
What pleasure can an early April day afford the man who has
slept in an overheated flat and is hurrying to an office where
eighty degrees is the average all the year round? Or the
pale shop-girl, who complains if a breath of morning air strays
into the suburban train where she is seated?
As people who habitually use such “relishes” as
Chutney and Worcestershire are incapable of appreciating
delicately prepared food, so the ”soft” mortals who
have accustomed themselves to a perpetual August are insensible
to fine shadings of temperature.
The other day I went with a friend to inspect some rooms he
had been decorating in one of our public schools. The
morning had been frosty, but by eleven o’clock the sun
warmed the air uncomfortably. On entering the school we
were met by a blast of heated air that was positively
staggering. In the recitation rooms, where, as in all New
York schoolrooms, the children were packed like dominoes in a
box, the temperature could not have been under eighty-five.
The pale, spectacled spinster in charge, to whom we complained
of this, was astonished and offended at what she considered our
interference, and answered that “the children liked it
warm,” as for herself she “had a cold and could not
think of opening a window.” If the rooms were too
warm it was the janitor’s fault, and he had gone out!
Twelve o’clock struck before we had finished our tour of
inspection. It is to be doubted if anywhere else in the
world could there be found such a procession of pasty-faced,
dull-eyed youngsters as trooped past us down the stairs.
Their appearance was the natural result of compelling children
dressed for winter weather to sit many hours each day in
hothouses, more suited to tropical plants than to growing human
beings.
A gentleman with us remarked with a sigh, “I have been
in almost every school in the city and find the same condition
everywhere. It is terrible, but there doesn’t seem to
be any remedy for it.” The taste for living in a
red-hot atmosphere is growing on our people; even public vehicles
have to be heated now to please the patrons.
When tiresome old Benjamin Franklin made stoves popular he
struck a terrible blow at the health of his compatriots; the
introduction of steam heat and consequent suppression of all
health-giving ventilation did the rest; the rosy cheeks of
American children went up the chimney with the last whiff of wood
smoke, and have never returned. Much of our home life
followed; no family can be expected to gather in cheerful
converse around a “radiator.”
How can this horror of fresh air among us be explained?
If people really enjoy living in overheated rooms with little or
no ventilation, why is it that we hear so much complaining, when
during the summer months the thermometer runs up into the
familiar nineties? Why are children hurried out of town,
and why do wives consider it a necessity to desert their
husbands?
It’s rather inconsistent, to say the least, for not one
of those deserters but would “kick” if the theatre or
church they attend fell below that temperature in December.
It is impossible to go into our banks and offices and not
realize that the air has been breathed again and again, heated
and cooled, but never changed,—doors and windows fit too
tightly for that.
The pallor and dazed expression of the employees tell the same
tale. I spoke to a youth the other day in an office about
his appearance and asked if he was ill. “Yes,”
he answered, “I have had a succession of colds all
winter. You see, my desk here is next to the radiator, so I
am in a perpetual perspiration and catch cold as soon as I go
out. Last winter I passed three months in a farmhouse,
where the water froze in my room at night, and we had to wear
overcoats to our meals. Yet I never had a cold there, and
gained in weight and strength.”
Twenty years ago no “palatial private residence”
was considered complete unless there was a stationary washstand
(forming a direct connection with the sewer) in each
bedroom. We looked pityingly on foreigners who did not
enjoy these advantages, until one day we realized that the latter
were in the right, and straightway stationary washstands
disappeared.
How much time must pass and how many victims be sacrificed
before we come to our senses on the great radiator question?
As a result of our population living in a furnace, it happens
now that when you rebel on being forced to take an impromptu
Turkish bath at a theatre, the usher answers your complaint with
“It can’t be as warm as you think, for a lady over
there has just told me she felt chilly and asked for more
heat!”
Another invention of the enemy is the “revolving
door.” By this ingenious contrivance the little fresh
air that formerly crept into a building is now excluded.
Which explains why on entering our larger hotels one is taken by
the throat, as it were, by a sickening long-dead
atmosphere—in which the souvenir of past meals and decaying
flowers floats like a regret—such as explorers must find on
opening an Egyptian tomb.
Absurd as it may seem, it has become a distinction to have
cool rooms. Alas, they are rare! Those blessed
households where one has the delicious sensation of being chilly
and can turn with pleasure toward crackling wood! The open
fire has become, within the last decade, a test of refinement,
almost a question of good breeding, forming a broad distinction
between dainty households and vulgar ones, and marking the line
which separates the homes of cultivated people from the parlors
of those who care only for display.
A drawing-room filled with heat, the source of which remains
invisible, is as characteristic of the parvenu as clanking chains
on a harness or fine clothes worn in the street.
An open fire is the “eye” of a room, which can no
more be attractive without it than the human face can be
beautiful if it lacks the visual organs. The “gas
fire” bears about the same relation to the real thing as a
glass eye does to a natural one, and produces much the same
sensation. Artificial eyes are painful necessities in some
cases, and therefore cannot be condemned; but the household which
gathers complacently around a “gas log” must have
something radically wrong with it, and would be capable of worse
offences against taste and hospitality.
There is a tombstone in a New England grave-yard the
inscription on which reads: “I was well, I wanted to be
better. Here I am.”
As regards heating of our houses, it’s to be feared that
we have gone much the same road as the unfortunate New
Englander. I don’t mean to imply that he is now
suffering from too much heat, but we, as a nation, certainly
are.
Janitors and parlor-car conductors have replaced the wicked
fairies of other days, but are apparently animated by their
malignant spirit, and employ their hours of brief authority as
cruelly. No witch dancing around her boiling cauldron was
ever more joyful than the fireman of a modern hotel, as he
gleefully turns more and more steam upon his helpless
victims. Long acquaintance with that gentleman has
convinced me that he cannot plead ignorance as an excuse for
falling into these excesses. It is pure, unadulterated
perversity, else why should he invariably choose the mildest
mornings to show what his engines can do?
Many explanations have been offered for this love of a high
temperature by our compatriots. Perhaps the true one has
not yet been found. Is it not possible that what appears to
be folly and almost criminal negligence of the rules of health,
may be, after all, only a commendable ambition to renew the
exploits of those biblical heroes, Shadrach, Meshach, and
Abednego?
