treating the phenomenon as a rare exception in housekeeping. I aroused a
dying fire in the coal range with great speed and an abundance of
kindling, and conveyed my gems across kitchen. It is a sweet-tempered
popover, indeed, which will bear shifting from a hot oven to a
moderately comfortable one. I began steadily to lose my unconcern. Once
on my knees before an oven door, I usually ask no quarter and receive no
advice. Advice is sometimes given me, but my advisers realize that it is
not being received. This time I called Margaret in consultation.
"I think they are going to pop," she pronounced judicially, "but not
over." She was right.
Does Life hold, I wonder, a more sorrowful moment than that time when a
true cook has to instruct her guest to scoop out the inside of her
popover for the chickens, and eat only the outside? Every one knows that
delicate tinkling sound that a good popover makes when tossed on a china
plate. These made somewhat the same sound as a Florida orange. We
learned quite cogently that evening that Hospitality may depend, not
upon greatness of heart, but upon the gas stove.
This experience of ours, however, could not be regarded strictly as a
test case. Any one would admit that all of our adversity was unusual. It
is the rare exception when all the pipes in the house burst at once,
when there is no gas in the gas-stove, and when one loses a slipper in
making a cherry pie.
It took another day to show us that running a house _normally_ consists
in dealing with a succession of unusual events.
We did not court disaster, or attempt anything ambitious. We had not
even planned to invite any more company. But an old friend of Geoffrey's
appeared at our door in uniform with his new wife, to wait over a train.
Margaret promptly invited them to lunch. Our lunch, as already planned,
was simple. We told them that it would be simple. Margaret leans, during
hot weather, to such things as iced tea, lettuces, cheese wafers, and
simple frozen desserts. Fiction has it that the water-ices are the
simplest of anything. They _are_ simple to eat. We had planned to freeze
the water-ice together. But in view of the fact that we had company,
Margaret, who had first suggested our simple dessert, slipped quietly
out to freeze it alone.
Ice may be cold stuff, but it is heating to chop. Three minutes may
freeze a pudding in some freezers, but not in ours. As much time wore
away, I gradually hitched my chair in a backward direction, to permit a
stealthy glance at Margaret on the back piazza. It is almost as wearing
to hold our freezer down as it is to turn the crank. Margaret was doing
both at once, stopping frequently to chase a slippery chunk of ice about
with her pick, chivying the bits of ice and salt finally into a cup. Her
cheeks had become flushed a vivid freight-car color. It was with great
relief that I finally saw her peer into the freezer, remove the dasher,
and proceed to seal up her confection and cover it with newspapers and
an astrakhan cape.
The precise moment when a water-ice becomes simple is when it is
smoothly slipped into a long-stemmed sherbet glass. Our guests, we
think, enjoyed our simple meal. But after they had gone, the word which
exactly described our state of mind was not the word nonchalant.
"Barbara!" said Margaret energetically, "for supper, let's open a box of
blueberries."
We did. Blueberries really _are_ simple. We made our evening meal of
them, accompanied by a few left-over popover skins.
Margaret and I still feel that we could deal somewhat hopefully with a
leaking pipe. We still think that our calamities were a little out of
the ordinary. But we do not wonder quite so much now that Mother does
not wholly appreciate her dinner when she has guests, that she does not
oftener make simple frozen desserts, or that she stays in such close
company with her wheels when they are on their way around.
THE WILL TO BOSS
There are people who have a right to boss;--parents, for instance, and
generals in the army. With these we are not concerned. But most of us,
not officially in authority, now and then have ideas of our own that we
are willing to pass on. Some of us have them more than others.
The typical boss is usually a capable executive with a great unselfish
imagination and the gift of speech. He usually knows enough to curb
himself in public; it is only in the home that his tendencies run riot.
In a family where all the brothers and sisters belong to this type, you
can run riot only to a certain extent. If you go too far, you meet
somebody else also running riot, and collisions ensue.
If you are an elder sister, for instance, with a tendency toward what
your younger brothers call "getting bossy," you find yourself constantly
having vivid mental pictures of the best way to do a given thing. With
these fancy-pictures in mind, it is hard for you to believe that your
companions have any ideas at all. As you look at another person from the
outside, you find it hard to believe that his head is working. If our
heads were only made like these ovens with glass in the door, so that
you could watch the half-baked thinking rise and fall--but no. Your
brother sitting carelessly on the veranda may have his mind on the time;
he may be planning just how he will presently rush to his room, bathe
and change, snatch his hat, run to the station, and connect with the
train on daylight-saving time. He may be thinking hard about all this,
but he does not look as if he were. You fidget while the minutes go by,
and then you go to the window and speak. If your spirit has been broken
by much browbeating for past attempts to give advice, you speak timidly.
If you are of stouter stuff, you speak roughly to your little boy.
"Tom," you say (timidly or roughly as the case may be)--"I suppose you
know what time it is."
"Yes," says Tom.
That ought to end it. But if you are a true boss, you go on. You know
that you are being irritating. You know that Tom is of age. But you are
willing, like all great prophets, to risk unpopularity for the sake of
your Message. The spirit of the crier in the wilderness is upon you, and
you keep at it until one of two things happens. If Tom is in a good
temper, he goes upstairs to humor you, with a condescending tread and a
tired sigh. If he is fractious, he argues: Did you ever know him to miss
a train? Did you ever hear of his forgetting an appointment? How do you
suppose he ever manages to get to places when you are away from home?
My brother Geoffrey, in his day, has been a great sufferer from this
kind of thing. As memory reviews his youth, there stands out only one
occasion when he really achieved anything like freedom from sisterly
counsel. This was when he picked the pears. The pears on six large
loaded trees were ready to harvest. Geoffrey said that he was willing to
pick, but not to pick to order. We would have to engage to let him pick
the pears in his own way. We promised, though we knew too well our
brother's way of picking pears. He holds quite a little reception from
the tree-tops, entertaining passers-by with delightful repartee, and
giving everybody a pear. As time goes on, he gets to throwing pears.
"Somebody will get hurt," said our mother anxiously. But a contract is a
contract, and we tried not to look out of the window. In this
unaccustomed air of freedom, Geoffrey's spirits rose and rose. High in
the branches, taking his time, he grew more and more abandoned. He had
just reached the very top of the tallest tree when he saw far up the
street the form of the ugliest and largest dog who ever visited our
town, a strange white creature named Joe--a dog hard to define, but
resembling one's childhood idea of the blood-hound type. Every one spoke
of this dog as "Joseph A. Graham": "Joe" seemed too simple a name to be
in scale with his size and ferocity. Down the street he came, loafing
along. Geoffrey, ordinarily kind to pets, selected a large mellow pear,
aimed it with steady eye, and hit Joseph A. Graham, accurately,
amidships. Joseph flew up into the air, landed on a slant, gathered his
large feet together for a plunge, and came dashing down the street with
murder in his great red eye. At that moment Geoffrey looked down and saw
with horror that an elderly gentleman was just coming up the street. It
was obvious that Joseph thought that the old gentleman threw the pear.
Geoffrey, emitting hoarse cries of warning, came swarming down the tree
to the rescue, swinging from branch to branch like an orang-outang. The
elderly gentleman, grasping the situation in the nick of time, stepped
neatly inside our screen door, and Joseph, thwarted of reprisal, snuffed
around the steps, muttered to himself for a few moments, and then went
shuffling on down the street. Geoffrey, still ardently apologizing to
the passer-by, went back to his tree-top to recover from this, the only
troubled moment in that influential day.
By clever bargaining, you can occasionally buy off your natural advisers
in this way, and enjoy perfect independence. But there are projects that
really call for a good boss. When a number of people are at work
together, the trained worker should direct the group. Even in your
family, you are allowed to be an autocrat in things that are your
specialty. But you are supposed to be pleasant about it. This is not so
easy when you are in the full heat of action. When you have your mind on
a difficult project, your commands to your helpers are apt to sound
curt. You are likely to talk to them as if they were beneath you. The
unskilled helper in an affair demanding skill gives the impression of
belonging to an inferior class--something a little below the social
status of a coolie. He even feels inferior, and is therefore touchy. If
you order him too gruffly, he is likely to take offence and knock off
for the day.
Barbara, for instance, once very nearly lost a valued slave when I was
giving her my awkward assistance about the camera. She had decided to
take a picture of Israel Putnam's Wolf-Den from a spot where no
camera-tripod had ever been pitched before. The Wolf-Den sits on a slant
above a cliff in the deep woods. At one side of it there is a capital
place from which to take its picture, a level spot on which a tripod
will stand securely. From this point most of the pictures hitherto taken
of the Den were snapped. But Barbara was resolved to get a full front
view to show the lettering on a bronze tablet that had recently been
placed on the Den. She wanted a time exposure, and she said that she was
going to need assistance. Her idea was to stand on a jutting rock just
at the edge of the cliff and hold the camera in the desired position
while the rest of the party adjusted the legs of the tripod beneath it.
Every one who has ever set up a tripod knows that its loosely hinged
legs can be elongated or telescoped by a system of slides and screws. In
order to arrange our tripod with all its three pods on the uneven
ground, we found that we must shorten one leg to its extreme shortness,
and lengthen the second leg to its maximum length. This left the third
leg out in the air over the brink of the precipice. Our guest was to
manage the short leg, our mother was to manage the important and
strategic leg among the rocks, and I offered to build a combination of
bridge and flying buttress out from the slope of the cliff, for the
third.
We started our project with that cordial fellow-feeling that rises from
a common faith in a visionary enterprise, and I am sure that we could
have kept that beautiful spirit to the end if it had not been for the
mosquitoes. There are no wolves at the Wolf-Den now, but on a muggy day
the mosquitoes are just as hungry. They rise all around in insubstantial
drifts, never seeming to alight, yet stinging in clusters. A true
Wolf-Den mosquito can land, bite, and make good his escape before you
have finished brushing him out of your eyes. You cannot brush insects
out of your eyes, slap the back of your neck, and take a picture at the
same time. Barbara, both hands busy holding the camera, was desperately
kicking the ankle of one foot with the toe of the other. I counted
fifteen mosquitoes sitting unmoved around the rims of her low shoes.
"Don't take too much pains with that bridge," said she to me in
considerate company tones.
"No," said I respectfully, "but I have to build it up high enough to
meet the leg."
"Well, then, hurry," said she, still kindly.
"Yes," said I evenly, "I am."
When two sisters discourse like this before a guest, there creeps into
their voices a note of preternatural sweetness, a restraint and
simplicity of utterance that speak volumes to the trained ear.
I was hurrying all I could, but for my unnatural bridge I had not the
materials I could have wished. I found a weathered wooden fence-rail,
balanced one end of it on the cliff and the other end in the crotch of a
big tree that leaned over the side hill; but this bridge had to be built
up with a pile of sand, leaves, small stones, and stubble balanced
carefully upon it. Meanwhile, my mother was busily drilling a hole in
the rock to make a firm emplacement at a distance for leg number two.
Finally our three positions were approximately correct, and the more
delicate process of adjustment began. Barbara, from under her dark
cloth, gave muffled directions. We obeyed, shifting, screwing,
unscrewing, adjusting. Our guest was still cheery. Success hovered
before us in plain sight. So did the mosquitoes. Barbara's directions
began to sound tense. They sounded especially tense when she spoke to
me. I was balancing precariously part-way down the shale cliff, digging
in my heels and doing the best I could with the materials at hand.
Looking timidly up at my sister's black-draped, mosquito studded figure,
I had been first conciliatory, then surly, then sullen. Barbara had now
begun to focus.
"Lower!" said Barbara between her teeth.
Obediently we all three lowered.
"No, no, not you!" said Barbara to me. "Yours was too low already."
There are moments in this life when the presence of a guest is an
impediment to free speech. Barbara, as anybody can see, had the
advantage. She was the commanding officer. Any response from me would
have been a retort from the ranks. Since one of her other two helpers
was her mother and the other a guest, her words to them had to be
sugared. In a sugar-shortage, it is the lower classes who suffer. By
this time one could easily distinguish her directions to me by their
truculent tone.
"Make the bridge a trifle higher," said she curtly.
I obediently brought another grain of sand.
"Higher!"
I silently added five smooth stones.
"Oh, build it up!" she begged. "You ought to see the slant."
I pried a large boulder from the ledge and balanced it on the rail.
"Your rail's breaking!" cried my mother, so suddenly that I lost my
footing.
I seized the leg of the tripod in one hand, the branch of a tree with
the other, while the flying buttress went rumbling down the defile, and
I was left clinging to the bare rock, that refuge of the wild goat.
We have now some very attractive pictures of the Den, taken from a spot
where no tripod was ever pitched before, and where I hope no tripod will
be pitched again. But as we developed the plates that night, I told
Barbara that I did not think that I was qualified to help her much about
the camera any more.
"You were all right," said she kindly. "It was the mosquitoes."
And I was mollified by this as perhaps I could have been by no logic in
the world.
The right to boss is conceded to the expert. It is also sometimes
extended to members of the family who are for the time being in the
centre of the stage. At such times you are permitted to dictate--when
you are to have a guest, for instance, or when you are about to be
married. For a day or two before the wedding, your wish is law. You
really need to stay on hand until the last minute, however, to enforce
the letter of the law to the end. Otherwise, circumstances may get ahead
of you.
Geoffrey, for example, directly after announcing his engagement to our
best friend Priscilla Sherwood, enjoyed a time of perfect power. He knew
that he needed only to say, "Priscilla likes so and so," and so and so
would follow. Barbara and I reminded him that we knew Priscilla better
than he did, but we could not say that we were engaged to her. Just
before the wedding, Geoffrey took us aside to explain seriously about
his plans, and to give us our orders for the day.
"We don't want you to throw anything," said Geoffrey reasonably. "No
rice or confetti or shoes. And you needn't even see us to the train.
Priscilla doesn't care about any demonstration, and I think it would be
just as well to go off quietly. We'd just as soon the other people on
the train didn't know we were a bride and groom."
Barbara and I, struck with the originality of this point of view,
promised to throw nothing. Priscilla, meanwhile, reasoned equally well
with her brothers. After the wedding, we all stood cordially on the
curbstone and let them drive off to the train. Then, deserted, the two
families confronted each other rather blankly.
"It doesn't seem as if they had actually gone, does it?" said Barbara
uneasily.
"They wouldn't mind if we waved to them when the train goes out, would
they?" began one of the Sherwoods tentatively.
Barbara was inspired. "Come on down to our house," said she, "and then
they can see us from the train."
One of the advantages of a home near the railway is the fact that you
can see your friends off on trips without leaving your dooryard. Each
man for himself, we went streaming down the last hill, fearing at any
minute to hear the train pull out. To our dismay, we saw that a long
freight-train was standing on the siding in such a position as to cut
off our view of the express.
"When you are on the train," I panted as I ran, "you can see our
upstairs windows even when freight-cars are in the way."
"We'll wave out of the front windows," said Barbara, and we all rushed
upstairs.
"They'll never think to look up here, will they?" said one of the
brothers Sherwood anxiously as we peered out along the vista of track.
"The pear trees are in the way."
"We might just step outside the window," said Barbara resourcefully.
"The piazza roof is perfectly safe. Then they couldn't help seeing us."
Wrapping our best clothes about us, we crept out through the window one
by one, and went cautiously along the tin roof to a vantage-point beyond
the pear trees. When a company of grown people goes walking on a tin
roof, there are moments of shock when the tin bubbles snap and crackle,
making a sound nothing short of terrifying, like the reverberations of
season-cracks in the ice on a pond. We ranged ourselves in a row near
the eaves-pipe, just in time. The train went hooting by. They saw us. We
waved the wedding flowers, and they waved back. We saw them laughing. We
waved until the end of the train disappeared around the curve. And as we
assisted each other politely one by one through the window again, we had
a comfortable sensation of having wound up the affair with a finish and
completeness that had been lacking after the first farewell.
Still feeling a little uplifted with excitement, we went up the street
to report events to our grandmother.
"You mean to say that you went up on to the _roof_ to wave?" said our
grandmother.
"Well," said Barbara thoughtfully, "it didn't seem quite like going up
on the roof at the time. It all happened so gradually. We just stepped
out."
"And they saw you?" inquired Grandmother.
"Oh, yes. Nobody could help it. Everybody saw us." Barbara glowed
reminiscently.
"And you waved the wedding flowers?"
"Yes," said Barbara happily. "Father Sherwood gave us each an armful."
"Well," said our grandmother, resuming her sewing, "I shouldn't wonder
if the other passengers on that train thought that something had
happened to Geoffrey."
* * * * *
To govern one's own kinsmen successfully, one certainly does need to be
on the spot. One cannot afford to leave them for an instant. One should
be alert and watchful, and as diplomatic as circumstances will allow.
The ability to boss implies a ready understanding and the knack of
seeing the end from the beginning. It implies also a hardy constitution
and the gift of tongues. But after all, in the last analysis, it is
largely a matter of the Will.
MORE TO IT THAN YOU'D THINK
I am often reminded of a lady, who, during the war, volunteered to
oversee all the Canteen work for soldiers passing through our town. Her
favorite phrase, accompanied by a surprised accent, became the following
one: "There's more _to_ this job than you'd think from the outside
looking in." Then she would proceed with many astounding details:
soldiers who required two cups of coffee, or three lumps of sugar, milk
that in the course of time became dubious, and trains that in the course
of time became late.
I sympathized with this lady and helped her wash the dishes. And I have
never questioned her statement. Moreover, I have yet to find the job to
which this statement does not apply. I suppose that, until you become a
postal clerk, you know very little about the intricacies into which a
capital "S" may go, or how the rats eat the stamps. A job is always
annotated for the employee.
Certainly, teaching school introduces you to manifold works which could
not be anticipated by looking in. In fact, when my friendly janitor once
said that it must be very easy to teach the First Grade, I caught myself
falling back on the popular phrase with some emotion--"There's more to
it than you'd think." My most baffling problems were just a little too
complex to mention to my janitor.
"What instantly comes to your mind," says my college friend who is
"taking" Psychology, "when I say the word 'ping-pong'?"
I tell him. By right of which I retaliate, "What instantly comes to your
mind when I say the word 'sand-table'?"
"Oh, little paper pine trees," responds the student (who is also
"taking" Education),--"and wigwams and canoes, and a real piece of glass
for a pond."
All this comes to my mind, too,--with addenda. The addenda, however,
come to my mind first: Spilling Sand, Sweeping up Sand, Trailing your
fingers in Sand as you march past, and, if you are _very_ newly five
years old, Throwing Sand. This is not because I am soured on the
sand-table. I have merely learned that there is more _to_ one than you
would suspect from the outside of one, looking in. Sand-tables may mean
pine trees, and they may mean pandemonium.
Throw several such freighted words into a mixed group, and the reactions
are passionately interesting. If you say, "Muscular movement," "Interest
and Attention," "Socialized Classes," or "Projects," you can sift out
the school-teachers by their smile.
In fact, there is a very large group of noun substantives which mark,
for an Elementary teacher, at least, the seasons of the year. Usually
she has a top drawer full of these. Many a teacher longs for the
horse-chestnut-on-a-string season to appear, if only to finish up the
season of the maple-key;--that large pale-green maple-key, which, by
clever splitting of the central seed, may be made to stay on one's nose.
My young friend Junior O'Brien once read to me "The Three Billy Goats
Gruff," with a maple-key over each ear, one on his freckled nose, and
two on his apple cheeks. I gave over my reading-lesson period to
researches as to how his hard little cheeks could yield enough slack to
accommodate a key; and before I was ready to ask Junior to remove his
decorations, the force of gravity intervened.
The maple-key, I suppose, suggests eye-glasses. Certainly a bit of wire,
twisted into spectacles, follows keys. These may be very ornate in the
upper grades, more nearly approaching the lorgnette, or even the
opera-glass. It is a fascinating thing to see what a wire hairpin
correctly treated will do to a young face. It lightens my day's load,
this vision of grave childish eyes through the twisted rims, and that
magnificent effort of will, contrary to nature, to obtain perfect
immobility of the nose.