"Things Using Us"

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Title:     "Things Using Us"
Author: Elizabeth Rundle Charles [More Titles by Charles]

It was my first visit from a home full of children, and not too full of Things, to a house where there were no children, and where the Things were in the greatest abundance and the completest preservation. Gardens and hot-houses without a broken stem; flowers evidently never gathered except by strictly authorized hands. Rooms studded fearlessly with ornaments from all ends of the earth and all kingdoms of nature; stuffed birds in domed glass sepulchres, wonderful to me, and unlife-like as the Tomb cities of Egypt; delicate fragile porcelain, and exquisite statuettes, evidently needing no protection from little investigating fingers; carpets needing no protection from little stirring feet. Gradually there settled down on me an awe-stricken sense of being perpetually watched with anxious solicitude, and of having to walk mentally, morally, and corporeally quite upright in the middle of all clear spaces, so as not to interfere with any of the sacred Things wherewith I was surrounded; until, finally, came the retiring to rest on an ancient damask-curtained bed, in a stately, solemn chamber, with a heavy consciousness of being like an insignificant, and, at the same time, rather dangerous fly in a world constructed with no reference to flies,--a crushing conviction of having nothing, and consequently being nothing in a universe of Things,--a mingled feeling of responsibility and insignificance culminating in a depressed apprehension of accountability to the lords and possessors of this universe of possessions, who thus graciously suffered an extraneous atom endowed with a perilous power of motion to enter it.

All this came to a climax when the housekeeper, who had herself, in some dim traditional past, watched over the slumbers of children now developed into the guardians of similar shrines, "tucked me up" and left me alone with the Things.

Ah, the mockery of that "tucking up" in the vast spaces of a bed which reckoned its chronology by centuries! She might as well have talked of "tucking up" a mouse under the dome of St. Paul's.

Visions of a cozy crib at home, flanked by sundry other cribs and cradles, and soothed by a dim murmur of nurses' voices through the half-open door, came tenderly over me, with a wonder how it looked that evening to the two loving faces which bent over it every night. But the very thought of those faces broke the icy spell which had been freezing me, and seemed to fold me up to sleep.

Then, all at once, from all corners of the antique room, came the strangest chucklings and gurglings of half-suppressed laughter; and the fire in the vast old chimney began to make the most uncouth caperings and flickerings, as if it were dancing to some wild elfish music.

"Ha! ha! ha!" laughed the little Dresden china Cupids around the toilet-glass (and that they should laugh might not seem so strange); but the solemn old bed itself chuckled a fat "Ho! ho! ho!" until its heavy draperies shook again; the very tongs held its sides for laughing; and the little modern poker, which did all the work, screamed a plebeian "He! he! he!" in response.

"We shall never recover it!" they all laughed in chorus. "This child is making the old mistake! She thinks we belong to the people of the house! She thinks it is they who use us, instead of their belonging to us, and our using them!"

"As if we had not sheltered generation after generation of them," creaked the bed.

"As if we had not seen face after face change and grow wrinkled," smiled the Cupids, "while we keep our bloom and smoothness undiminished."

"As if only last week," said the steel tongs, "a young woman had not been dismissed for leaving a spot of rust on me."

So they went on, until really I could stand it no longer. It seemed to me so very unbecoming and treasonable in these possessions to speak in so sarcastic and disrespectful a way of their possessors, that at length, with a great effort, I sat up in bed and remonstrated.

"I cannot let you talk so," I said, in a voice trembling at once with indignation and awe. "You are forgetting yourselves altogether. You are nothing but Things, any of you. And we are Persons. It says so in the Grammar. We are Persons, the least of us, even a little child like me! What would become of any of you, I should like to know, if some of us did not take care of you?"

"Things and Persons indeed!" they all said, in a very unpleasant and satirical tone. "We know nothing of such philosophical distinctions. But who ever said you or your kind were Things? We paid you no such honour. Who ever said we could get on unless you took care of us? You are not Things indeed! You are servants of Things. We possess you, use you, and outlast you. Who stays in the house--the owner, or the servants? If you were the owners, you would stay. But it is we who stay. We outstay you, generation after generation. Doubtless, therefore, this is our world, and you are merely our slaves--sojourning here for our service, and at our pleasure."

It was useless arguing any further with such obstinate, impenetrable Things. But when, on my return home, I told my mother what they had said, to my surprise she said they were not altogether wrong.

"For," said she, "if we do not use and distribute our possessions, we do not merely sink to their level, but below it. If we are not truly the masters of our Things, we become their slaves."

This set me thinking of my own tiny hoard of treasures, and it occurred to me how disagreeable it would be if at that moment they were talking in any such sarcastic and disrespectful way of me!

How was I to show myself truly the possessor and mistress of those cherished Things of my own?

At last I propounded the question to my mother.

"I know no way," she said, "but to get Love to be lord and possessor of you and of them. For while Selfishness sinks us below the very Things we are supposed to possess, making us fade, and rust, and perish like them, Love lifts these very perishing things themselves into our higher world, transfiguring them into ladders on which angels go up and down, and into keys of the kingdom of heaven."

[The end]
Elizabeth Rundle Charles's short story: "Things Using Us"

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