CO-OPERATING.
When mother first read that article in the Atlantic she had said,
right off,--
"I'm sure I wish they would!"
"Would what, mother?" asked Barbara.
"Co-operate."
"O mother! I really do believe you must belong, somehow, to the
Micawber family! I shouldn't wonder if one of these days, when they
come into their luck, you should hear of something greatly to your
advantage, from over the water. You have such faith in 'they'! I don't
believe '_they_' will ever do much for '_us_'!"
"What is it, dear?" asked Mrs. Hobart, rousing from a little arm-chair
wink, during which Mrs. Holabird had taken up the magazine.
Mrs. Hobart had come in, with her cable wool and her great ivory
knitting-pins, to sit an hour, sociably.
"Co-operative housekeeping, ma'am," said Barbara.
"Oh! Yes. That is what they _used_ to have, in old times, when we
lived at home with mother. Only they didn't write articles about it.
All the women in a house co-operated--to keep it; and all the
neighborhood co-operated--by living exactly in the same way.
Nowadays, it's co-operative shirking; isn't it?"
One never could quite tell whether Mrs. Hobart was more simple or
sharp.
That was all that was said about co-operative housekeeping at the
time. But Ruth remembered the conversation. So did Barbara, for a
while, as appeared in something she came out with a few days after.
"I could--almost--write a little poem!" she said, suddenly, over her
work. "Only that would be doing just what the rest do. Everything
turns into a poem, or an article, nowadays. I wish we'd lived in the
times when people _did_ the things!"
"O Barbara! _Think_ of all that is being done in the world!"
"I know. But the little private things. They want to turn everything
into a movement. Miss Trixie says they won't have any eggs from their
fowls next winter; all their chickens are roosters, and all they'll do
will be to sit in a row on the fence and crow! I think the world is
running pretty much to roosters."
"Is that the poem?"
"I don't know. It might come in. All I've got is the end of it. It
came into my head hind side before. If it could only have a beginning
and a middle put to it, it might do. It's just the wind-up, where they
have to give an account, you know, and what they'll have to show for
it, and the thing that really amounts, after all."
"Well, tell us."
"It's only five lines, and one rhyme. But it might be written up to.
They could say all sorts of things,--one and another:--
"_I_ wrote some little books;
_I_ said some little says;
_I_ preached a little preach;
_I_ lit a little blaze;
_I_ made things pleasant in one little place."
There was a shout at Barbara's "poem."
"I thought I might as well relieve my mind," she said, meekly. "I knew
it was all there would ever be of it."
But Barbara's rhyme stayed in our heads, and got quoted in the family.
She illustrated on a small scale what the "poems and articles" _may_
sometimes do in the great world,
We remembered it that day when Ruth said, "Let's co-operate."
We talked it over,--what we could do without a girl. We had talked it
over before. We had had to try it, more or less, during interregnums.
But in our little house in Z----, with the dark kitchen, and with
Barbara and Ruth going to school, and the washing-days, when we had to
hire, it always cost more than it came to, besides making what Barb
called a "heave-offering of life."
"They used to have houses built accordingly," Rosamond said, speaking
of the "old times." "Grandmother's kitchen was the biggest and
pleasantest room in the house."
"Couldn't we _make_ the kitchen the pleasantest room?" suggested
Ruth. "Wouldn't it be sure to be, if it was the room we all stayed in
mornings, and where we had our morning work? Whatever room we do that
in always is, you know. The look grows. Kitchens are horrid when girls
have just gone out of them, and left the dish-towels dirty, and the
dish-cloth all wabbled up in the sink, and all the tins and irons
wanting to be cleaned. But if we once got up a real ladies' kitchen of
our own! I can think how it might be lovely!"
"I can think how it might be jolly-nificent!" cried Barbara, relapsing
into her dislocations.
"_You_ like kitchens," said Rosamond, in a tone of quiet ill-usedness.
"Yes, I do," said Barbara. "And you like parlors, and prettinesses,
and feather dusters, and little general touchings-up, that I can't
have patience with. You shall take the high art, and I'll have the low
realities. That's the co-operation. Families are put up assorted, and
the home character comes of it. It's Bible-truth, you know; the head
and the feet and the eye and the hand, and all that. Let's just see
what we _shall_ come to! People don't turn out what they're meant, who
have Irish kitchens and high-style parlors, all alike. There's a great
deal in being Holabirdy,--or whatever-else-you-are-y!"
"If it only weren't for that cellar-kitchen," said Mrs. Holabird.
"Mother," said Ruth, "what if we were to take this?"
We were in the dining-room.
"This nice room!"
"It is to be a ladies' kitchen, you know."
Everybody glanced around. It was nice, ever so nice. The dark stained
floor, showing clean, undefaced margins,--the new, pretty
drugget,--the freshly clad, broad old sofa,--the high wainscoted
walls, painted in oak and walnut colors, and varnished brightly,--the
ceiling faintly tinted with buff,--the buff holland shades to the
windows,--the dresser-closet built out into the room on one side, with
its glass upper-halves to the doors, showing our prettiest china and a
gleam of silver and glass,--the two or three pretty engravings in the
few spaces for them,--O, it was a great deal too nice to take for a
kitchen.
But Ruth began again.
"You know, mother, before Katty came, how nice everything was down
stairs. We cooked nearly a fortnight, and washed dishes, and
everything; and we only had the floor scrubbed once, and there never
was a slop on the stove, or a teaspoonful of anything spilled. It
would be so different from a girl! It seems as if we _might_ bring the
kitchen up stairs, instead of going down into the kitchen."
"But the stove," said mother.
"I think," said Barbara, boldly, "that a cooking-stove, all polished
up, is just as handsome a thing as there is in a house!"
"It is clumsy, one must own," said Mrs. Holabird, "besides being
suggestive."
"So is a piano," said the determined Barbara.
"I can _imagine_ a cooking-stove," said Rosamond, slowly.
"Well, do! That's just where your gift will come in!"
"A pretty copper tea-kettle, and a shiny tin boiler, made to
order,--like an urn, or something,--with a copper faucet, and nothing
else ever about, except it were that minute wanted; and all the tins
and irons begun with new again, and kept clean; and little cocoanut
dippers with German silver rims; and things generally contrived as
they are for other kinds of rooms that ladies use; it _might_ be like
that little picnicking dower-house we read about in a novel, or like
Marie Antoinette's Trianon."
"That's what it _would_ come to, if it was part of our living, just as
we come to have gold thimbles and lovely work-boxes. We should give
each other Christmas and birthday presents of things; we should have
as much pleasure and pride in it as in the china-closet. Why, the
whole trouble is that the kitchen is the only place taste _hasn't_ got
into. Let's have an art-kitchen!"
"We might spend a little money in fitting up a few things freshly, if
we are to save the waste and expense of a servant," said Mrs.
Holabird.
The idea grew and developed.
"But when we have people to tea!" Rosamond said, suddenly demurring
afresh.
"There's always the brown room, and the handing round," said Barbara,
"for the people you can't be intimate with, and _think_ how crowsy
this will be with Aunt Trixie or Mrs. Hobart or the Goldthwaites!"
"We shall just settle _down_," said Rose, gloomily.
"Well, I believe in finding our place. Every little brook runs till it
does that. I don't want to stand on tip-toe all my life."
"We shall always gather to us what _belongs_. Every little crystal
does that," said mother, taking up another simile.
"What will Aunt Roderick say?" said Ruth.
"I shall keep her out of the kitchen, and tell her we couldn't manage
with one girl any longer, and so we've taken three that all wanted to
get a place together."
And Barbara actually did; and it was three weeks before Mrs. Roderick
found out what it really meant.
We were in a hurry to have Katty go, and to begin, after we had made
up our minds; and it was with the serenest composure that Mrs.
Holabird received her remark that "her week would be up a-Tuesday, an'
she hoped agin then we'd be shooted wid a girl."
"Yes, Katty; I am ready at any moment," was the reply; which caused
the whites of Katty's eyes to appear for a second between the lids and
the irids.
There had been only one applicant for the place, who had come while we
had not quite irrevocably fixed our plans.
Mother swerved for a moment; she came in and told us what the girl
said.
"She is not experienced; but she looks good-natured; and she is
willing to come for a trial."
"They all do that," said Barbara, gravely. "I think--as
Protestants--we've hired enough of them."
Mother laughed, and let the "trial" go. That was the end, I think, of
our indecisions.
We got Mrs. Dunikin to come and scrub; we pulled out pots and pans,
stove-polish and dish-towels, napkins and odd stockings missed from
the wash; we cleared every corner, and had every box and bottle
washed; then we left everything below spick and span, so that it
almost tempted us to stay even there, and sent for the sheet-iron man,
and had the stove taken up stairs. We only carried up such lesser
movables as we knew we should want; we left all the accumulation
behind; we resolved to begin life anew, and feel our way, and furnish
as we went along.
Ruth brought home a lovely little spice-box as the first donation to
the art-kitchen. Father bought a copper tea-kettle, and the sheet-iron
man made the tin boiler. There was a wide, high, open fireplace in the
dining-room; we had wondered what we should do with it in the winter.
It had a soapstone mantel, with fluted pilasters, and a brown-stone
hearth and jambs. Back a little, between these sloping jambs, we had a
nice iron fire-board set, with an ornamental collar around the
funnel-hole. The stove stood modestly sheltered, as it were, in its
new position, its features softened to almost a sitting-room
congruity; it did not thrust itself obtrusively forward, and force its
homely association upon you; it was low, too, and its broad top looked
smooth and enticing.
There was a large, light closet at the back of the room, where was set
a broad, deep iron sink, and a pump came up from the cistern. This
closet had double sliding doors; it could be thrown all open for busy
use, or closed quite away and done with.
There were shelves here, and cupboards. Here we ranged our tins and
our saucepans,--the best and newest; Rosamond would have nothing
to do with the old battered ones; over them we hung our spoons
and our little strainers, our egg-beaters, spatulas, and quart
measures,--these last polished to the brightness of silver tankards;
in one corner stood the flour-barrel, and over it was the sieve; in
the cupboards were our porcelain kettles,--we bought two new ones, a
little and a big,--the frying-pans, delicately smooth and nice now,
outside and in, the roasting-pans, and the one iron pot, which we
never meant to use when we could help it. The worst things we could
have to wash were the frying and roasting pans, and these, we soon
found, were not bad when you did it all over and at once every time.
[Illustration]
Adjoining this closet was what had been the "girl's room," opening
into the passage where the kitchen stairs came up, and the passage
itself was fair-sized and square, corresponding to the depth of the
other divisions. Here we had a great box placed for wood, and a barrel
for coal, and another for kindlings; once a week these could be
replenished as required, when the man came who "chored" for us. The
"girl's room" would be a spare place that we should find twenty uses
for; it was nice to think of it sweet and fresh, empty and available;
very nice not to be afraid to remember it was there at all.
We had a Robinson-Crusoe-like pleasure in making all these
arrangements; every clean thing that we put in a spotless place upon
shelf or nail was a wealth and a comfort to us. Besides, we really did
not need half the lumber of a common kitchen closet; a china bowl or
plate would no longer be contraband of war, and Barbara said she could
stir her blanc-mange with a silver spoon without demoralizing anybody
to the extent of having the ashes taken up with it.
By Friday night we had got everything to the exact and perfect
starting-point; and Mrs. Dunikin went home enriched with gifts that
were to her like a tin-and-wooden wedding; we felt, on our part, that
we had celebrated ours by clearing them out.
The bread-box was sweet and empty; the fragments had been all daintily
crumbled by Ruth, as she sat, resting and talking, when she had come
in from her music-lesson; they lay heaped up like lightly fallen snow,
in a broad dish, ready to be browned for chicken dressing or boiled
for brewis or a pudding. Mother never has anything between loaves and
crumbs when _she_ manages; then all is nice, and keeps nice.
"Clean beginnings are beautiful," said Rosamond, looking around. "It
is the middle that's horrid."
"We won't have any middles," said Ruth. "We'll keep making clean
beginnings, all the way along. That is the difference between work and
muss."
"If you can," said Rose, doubtfully.
I suppose that is what some people will say, after this Holabird story
is printed so far. Then we just wish they could have seen mother make
a pudding or get a breakfast, that is all. A lady will no more make
a jumble or litter in doing such things than she would at her
dressing-table. It only needs an accustomed and delicate touch.
I will tell you something of how it was, I will take that Monday
morning--and Monday morning is as good, for badness, as you can
take--just after we had begun.
The room was nice enough for breakfast when we left it over night.
There was nothing straying about; the tea-kettle and the tin boiler
were filled,--father did that just before he locked up the house; we
had only to draw up the window-shades, and let the sweet light in, in
the morning.
Stephen had put a basket of wood and kindlings ready for Mrs. Dunikin
in the kitchen below, and the key of the lower door had been left on a
beam in the woodshed, by agreement. By the time we came down stairs
Mrs. Dunikin had a steaming boiler full of clothes, and had done
nearly two of her five hours' work. We should hand her her breakfast
on a little tray, when the time came, at the stair-head; and she would
bring up her cup and plate again while we were clearing away. We
should pay her twelve and a half cents an hour; she would scrub up all
below, go home to dinner, and come again to-morrow for five hours'
ironing. That was all there would be about Mrs. Dunikin.
Meanwhile, with a pair of gloves on, and a little plain-hemmed
three-cornered, dotted-muslin cap tied over her hair with a muslin bow
behind, mother had let down the ashes,--it isn't a bad thing to do
with a well-contrived stove,--and set the pan, to which we had a
duplicate, into the out-room, for Stephen to carry away. Then into the
clean grate went a handful of shavings and pitch-pine kindlings, one
or two bits of hard wood, and a sprinkle of small, shiny nut-coal. The
draughts were put on, and in five minutes the coals were red. In these
five minutes the stove and the mantel were dusted, the hearth brushed
up, and there was neither chip nor mote to tell the tale. It was not
like an Irish fire, that reaches out into the middle of the room with
its volcanic margin of cinders and ashes.
Then--that Monday morning--we had brewis to make, a little buttered
toast to do, and some eggs to scramble. The bright coffee-pot got its
ration of fragrant, beaten paste,--the brown ground kernels mixed with
an egg,--and stood waiting for its drink of boiling water. The two
frying-pans came forth; one was set on with the milk for the brewis,
into which, when it boiled up white and drifting, went the sweet fresh
butter, and the salt, each in plentiful proportion;--"one can give
one's self _carte-blancher_," Barbara said, "than it will do to give a
girl";--and then the bread-crumbs; and the end of it was, in a white
porcelain dish, a light, delicate, savory bread-porridge, to eat
daintily with a fork, and be thankful for. The other pan held eggs,
broken in upon bits of butter, and sprinkles of pepper and salt; this
went on when the coffee-pot--which had got its drink when the milk
boiled, and been puffing ever since--was ready to come off; over it
stood Barbara with a tin spoon, to toss up and turn until the whole
was just curdled with the heat into white and yellow flakes, not one
of which was raw, nor one was dry. Then the two pans and the
coffee-pot and the little bowl in which the coffee-paste had been
beaten and the spoons went off into the pantry-closet, and the
breakfast was ready; and only Barbara waited a moment to toast and
butter the bread, while mother, in her place at table, was serving the
cups. It was Ruth who had set the table, and carried off the cookery
things, and folded and slid back the little pembroke, that had held
them beside the stove, into its corner.
Rosamond had been busy in the brown room; that was all nice now for
the day; and she came in with a little glass vase in her hand, in
which was a tea-rose, that she put before mother at the edge of the
white waiter-napkin; and it graced and freshened all the place; and
the smell of it, and the bright September air that came in at the
three cool west windows, overbore all remembrance of the cooking and
reminder of the stove, from which we were seated well away, and before
which stood now a square, dark green screen that Rosamond had
recollected and brought down from the garret on Saturday. Barbara and
her toast emerged from its shelter as innocent of behind-the-scenes as
any bit of pretty play or pageant.
Barbara looked very nice this morning, in her brown-plaid Scotch
gingham trimmed with white braids; she had brown slippers, also, with
bows; she would not verify Rosamond's prophecy that she "would be all
points," now that there was an apology for them. I think we were all
more particular about our outer ladyhood than usual.
After breakfast the little pembroke was wheeled out again, and on it
put a steaming pan of hot water. Ruth picked up the dishes; it was
something really delicate to see her scrape them clean, with a pliant
knife, as a painter might cleanse his palette,--we had, in fact, a
palette-knife that we kept for this use when we washed our own
dishes,--and then set them in piles and groups before mother, on the
pembroke-table. Mother sat in her raised arm-chair, as she might sit
making tea for company; she had her little mop, and three long, soft
clean towels lay beside her; we had hemmed a new dozen, so as to have
plenty from day to day, and a grand Dunikin wash at the end on the
Mondays.
After the china and glass were done and put up, came forth the
coffee-pot and the two pans, and had their scald, and their little
scour,--a teaspoonful of sand must go to the daily cleansing of an
iron utensil, in mother's hands; and _that_ was clean work, and the
iron thing never got to be "horrid," any more than a china bowl. It
was only a little heavy, and it was black; but the black did not come
off. It is slopping and burning and putting away with a rinse, that
makes kettles and spiders untouchable. Besides, mother keeps a bottle
of ammonia in the pantry, to qualify her soap and water with, when she
comes to things like these. She calls it her kitchen-maid; it does
wonders for any little roughness or greasiness; such soil comes off in
that, and chemically disappears.
It was all dining-room work; and we were chatty over it, as if we had
sat down to wind worsteds; and there was no kitchen in the house that
morning.
We kept our butter and milk in the brick buttery at the foot of the
kitchen stairs. These were all we had to go up and down for. Barbara
set away the milk, and skimmed the cream, and brought up and scalded
the yesterday's pans the first thing; and they were out in a
row--flashing up saucily at the sun and giving as good as he sent--on
the back platform.
She and Rosamond were up stairs, making beds and setting straight; and
in an hour after breakfast the house was in its beautiful forenoon
order, and there was a forenoon of three hours to come.
We had chickens for dinner that day, I remember; one always does
remember what was for dinner the first day in a new house, or in new
housekeeping. William, the chore-man, had killed and picked and drawn
them, on Saturday; I do not mean to disguise that we avoided these
last processes; we preferred a little foresight of arrangement. They
were hanging in the buttery, with their hearts and livers inside them;
mother does not believe in gizzards. They only wanted a little salt
bath before cooking.
I should like to have had you see Mrs. Holabird tie up those chickens.
They were as white and nice as her own hands; and their legs and wings
were fastened down to their sides, so that they were as round and
comfortable as dumplings before she had done with them; and she laid
them out of her two little palms into the pan in a cunning and cosey
way that gave them a relish beforehand, and sublimated the vulgar
need.
We were tired of sewing and writing and reading in three hours; it
was only restful change to come down and put the chickens into the
oven, and set the dinner-table.
Then, in the broken hour while they were cooking, we drifted out upon
the piazza, and among our plants in the shady east corner by the
parlor windows, and Ruth played a little, and mother took up the
Atlantic, and we felt we had a good right to the between-times when
the fresh dredgings of flour were getting their brown, and after that,
while the potatoes were boiling.
Barbara gave us currant-jelly; she was a stingy Barbara about that
jelly, and counted her jars; and when father and Stephen came in,
there was the little dinner of three covers, and a peach-pie of
Saturday's making on the side-board, and the green screen up before
the stove again, and the baking-pan safe in the pantry sink, with hot
water and ammonia in it.
"Mother," said Barbara, "I feel as if we had got rid of a menagerie!"
"It is the girl that makes the kitchen," said Ruth.
"And then the kitchen that has to have the girl," said Mrs. Holabird.
Ruth got up and took away the dishes, and went round with the
crumb-knife, and did not forget to fill the tumblers, nor to put on
father's cheese.
Our talk went on, and we forgot there was any "tending."
"We didn't feel all that in the ends of our elbows," said mother in a
low tone, smiling upon Ruth as she sat down beside her.
"Nor have to scrinch all up," said Stephen, quite out loud, "for fear
she'd touch us!"
I'll tell you--in confidence--another of our ways at Westover; what,
we did, mostly, after the last two meals, to save our afternoons and
evenings and our nice dresses. We always did it with the tea-things.
We just put them, neatly piled and ranged in that deep pantry sink; we
poured some dipperfuls of hot water over them, and shut the cover
down; and the next morning, in our gingham gowns, we did up all the
dish-washing for the day.
* * * * *
"Who folded all those clothes?" Why, we girls, of course. But you
can't be told everything in one chapter.