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THE COMFORTS OF HOME
OTHER ATLANTIC BOOKS
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THE AMENITIES OF BOOK-COLLECTING.
By _A. E. Newton_ (in preparation)
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS
BOSTON
_The_
COMFORTS _of_ HOME
BY
RALPH BERGENGREN
[Illustration: colophon]
The Atlantic Monthly Press
Boston
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS, INC.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CONTENTS
Thoughts While Getting Settled 1
Praise of Open Fires 16
Furnace and I 29
No Stairs--No Attic 41
Concerning Kitchens 56
The Plumber Appreciated 68
The Home of the Porcelain Tub 81
At Home in the Guest Chamber 95
THOUGHTS WHILE GETTING SETTLED
PROPERLY speaking, the new house was old. A hundred years and more had
gone over its chimney,--down which, as we were to discover later, a
hundred flies and more would come when the open fires had warmed
it,--and within doors it would have charmed any amateur of the Colonial
by the antiquity of its furnishings. Temporarily it belonged to me, my
executors, administrators, and assigns. But there were limits to our
possession. None of us might 'permit any hole to be drilled or made in
the stone or brick-work of said building'; no 'sign or placard' might we
place upon it; we might not 'over-load, damage, or deface' it; nor might
we 'carry on any unlawful, improper, noisy, or offensive trade' in it.
We had admitted that the glass was whole and in good order, and bound
ourselves to keep it good, unless broken by fire, with glass of the same
kind and quality. In case I became bankrupt I had agreed that the owner,
the owner's executors, the owner's administrators, and the owner's
assigns should treat me with every form of ignominy that the law has yet
invented to make bankruptcy more distressing. Nor could I hold them
responsible if our guests fell down the cellar stairs; although there I
think they would be morally responsible, for a steeper flight of cellar
stairs I simply cannot imagine.
Of all documents there is hardly another so common as a lease, or more
suspicious. Observe the lessor--a benevolent, dignified, but cautious
person! Observe the lessee--a worm with criminal tendencies! Perhaps he
is a decent sort of worm, but the lessor had better look out for him.
Very likely he will commit murders in the dining-room, read the _Contes
Drolatiques_ in the library, play bass-drum solos in the parlor, and
start a piggery in the cellar. One suspects that possibly the great army
of hoboes is partly recruited from among supersensitive men who read
their leases before signing them and preferred vagabondage to insult.
But some of us control our sensitiveness. I, for example, read my lease;
and when, having agreed mentally to post no placard myself, I discovered
a clause allowing the lessor to decorate my residence with the
information that it was
FOR SALE
_I crossed that clause out!_
Observe the worm turning!
It was the dining-room that had won us, formerly the kitchen and still
complete--with the brick oven; the crane; the fat, three-legged pots and
spider; a thing that, after much debate, we think must have been a
bread-toaster; and a kind of overgrown curry-comb with which, so we
imagine, the original dwellers were wont to rake the hot ashes from the
brick oven. Also a warming-pan. And although these objects charm me, and
I delight to live with them, I cannot but wonder whether a hundred years
from now there may not be persons to furnish their dining-rooms with
just such a stove as stands at present in my real kitchen; and perhaps
to suspend beside it one of those quaint contraptions with which the
jolly old chaps in the early twentieth century used to kill flies. I
hear in imagination the host of that period explaining the implement to
his wondering guests,--being expert in such matters, he will produce the
technical term 'swat' with an air of easy familiarity,--and see him
hanging it reverently up again beside the dear old stove and right over
the picturesque old coal-hod. Perhaps, too, he will point out the
beautiful, sturdy lines of the coal-hod.
Now in due time, or, to be exact, some hours later, strong men came to
this house with a motor truck; and, working with concentrated fury, they
put into it all our own furniture, our trunks, our books, our clothes,
and everything that was ours. It had been our purpose to direct these
men: to say, 'This goes here, kind sirs,' and, 'That goes there,
gentlemen'; or, 'Believe me, this is the place for _that_,' or, 'Thank
you, sir, but _that_ is the place for _this_.' When they had come and
gone, and the empty truck had rumbled away in the early autumn
twilight, everything was to be just where we had planned in advance;
'getting settled' would be a light but satisfying pleasure;
organization, 'efficiency in business,' for we had been reading an
article in a magazine, would have made changing our home as easy as
changing our clothes. But these men were beyond mortal control. They
came late and their mood was to depart early. Movers always come late,
for two reasons: first, because they like to feel that you are glad to
see them, and, second, because they do not like to place each object
just where it belongs. They prefer concentrated fury. Children of
nature, they inherit their mother's abhorrence of a vacuum; unable, as
they saw at a glance, to stuff the whole house from floors to ceilings,
they devoted their attention, brushing us aside like annoying insects
that they lacked time for killing, to stuffing such rooms as they
instantly decided could be stuffed the tightest. If there was anything
that we might presumably need at once, they put it at the bottom and
buried it under the heaviest available furniture. It was wonderful to
see them. In the end they actually took money for what they had done and
went away hastily. Organization and 'efficiency in business' had
accomplished something: the trunks were upstairs, and two barrels had
reached their predestined place in the cellar.
There appears in many business offices, although it is not, so far as I
know, the official slogan of 'efficiency in business,' a card with the
motto, 'Do It Now.' I looked into that room which was destined to be the
library: formerly it had been a bedroom, and the four-poster bed and
noble mahogany bureau were to have vanished upstairs before my arrival.
But now, peering past and above and under the debris that the avalanche
had left there, I recognized the noble mahogany bureau in the far
corner, mourning presumably for its departed companion, the four-poster.
I beheld it with a misgiving which I tried to put from me, but which
came back from moment to moment and whispered in whichever ear was
nearer.
'Just suppose,' whispered Misgiving, 'that the man who was hired to take
that bureau upstairs found that it wouldn't go up!!!!'
And I thought of that stairway, that went up furtively from the
dining-room which had once been the kitchen, a delightful stairway
(especially when one realized what a discouraging time a burglar would
have in finding it, and how he would probably find the cellar stairs
instead and die of a broken neck at the bottom), but narrow, narrow; and
with a right angle just where a right angle was least desirable. It had
been as much as they could do to get up the trunks.
'You will very likely have to leave the bureau in the library,'
whispered Misgiving, 'and that will be inconvenient--won't it?--when you
have company. Company will have to dress in the library or else gather
up its clothes and run.'--'Library!' said Misgiving. 'Who ever heard of
a bureau in a library? People will think the library table is a folding
bed. You can't disguise a noble old bureau like that by putting books on
it,' said Misgiving. 'Once a bureau always a bureau.--What will your
wife say,' asked Misgiving, 'when she learns that the spare-room bureau
has to stay downstairs in the library?'
People who, having something to do, 'do it now,' live in the present. I
seized the nearest object, a chair, and dragged it into the next room; I
seized the next object, a box, and carried it to the cellar; I risked my
life on the cellar stairs; I became concentrated fury myself. In getting
settled, whether you are a pioneer or a householder, the first thing is
to make a clearing. No matter where things go, provided only that they
go somewhere else. No matter what happened, no matter if bureaus
remained forever in libraries, no matter if the awful puzzle that the
strong men of the moving van had left me remained forever
insoluble--this was my home and I had to live in it for the term of one
year. I took off my coat, hung it up somewhere--and found it again two
days afterward. I attacked boxes, chairs, tables, boxes, books,
bric-a-brac, more boxes, chairs, tables. I ran here and there, carrying
things. I excelled the bee. I made a clearing, which grew larger and
larger. I gained self-confidence. Elsewhere I knew that other hands were
unpacking trunks; that another mind was directing those mysteries which
out of chaos would evolve dinner; now and then, in my death-defying feat
of going down cellar, I caught a glimpse of the furnace,--fat-bellied
monster whom I must later feed like a coal-eating baby.
It is a question--parenthetically--whether it is truly sportsmanlike to
live in a quaint old colonial cottage with a furnace and electric
lights. I have heard amateurs of the Colonial declare that they would
willingly die before they would live in an electrically lighted
colonial cottage. The anachronism horrifies them: they would have death
or candles. Probably they feel the same way about a furnace and a
bath-room. Yet I have no doubt that the builders of this colonial
cottage would have opened their hearts to all these inventions; and I am
not sure that they would have regarded as anything but funny the idea
that their own kitchen paraphernalia would some day be used to decorate
my dining-room. I go further. Granting that electric lights, a furnace,
and a bath-room are anachronisms in this quaint old colonial
cottage--what am I but an anachronism myself? We must stand together,
the furnace, the electric metre, the porcelain bath-tub, and I, and keep
each other in countenance.
'H-m-m-m-m!' whispered Misgiving. '_How_ about a bureau in the library?
That isn't an anachronism; it's an absurdity.'
Making a clearing is a long step forward in getting settled; after that
it is a matter of days, a slow dawn of orderliness. In a quaint old
colonial cottage are many closets, few if any of them located according
to modern notions of convenience. The clothes closet that ought to be in
the spare room upstairs is downstairs in the library with the spare-room
bureau; the upstairs closets are under the eaves of the sloping
roof--the way to utilize them to the best advantage is to enter on your
hands and knees, carrying an electric torch between your teeth. Inside
the closet you turn on your back, illuminate the pendant garments with
your torch, drag whatever you select down from the hook, grasp it firmly
with your teeth, and so out again on your hands and knees, rolling the
electric torch gently before you. We see now why in those good old days
chests of drawers were popular--fortunately we have one of our own that
somehow has got up the stairway; and we see also, as we begin to settle
into it, what is perhaps the secret of this humbler colonial
architecture. The Colonial Jack who built this house wanted some rooms
round a chimney and a roof that the snow would slide off; and so he
built it; and where-ever he found a space he made a closet or a
cupboard; and because he had no other kind, he put in small-paned
windows; and all he did was substantial and honest--and beautiful, in
its humble way, by accident.
But about that bureau?
Two strong, skillful men, engaged for the purpose, juggled with it, this
way and that, muttering words of equally great strength--_and it went
upstairs_. Had it been a quarter of an inch wider, they said afterward,
the feat would have been impossible. It was a small margin, but it will
save the company from having to knock timidly on the library door when
it wishes to dress for dinner.
PRAISE OF OPEN FIRES
I HAVE read and heard much praise of open fires, but I recall no praise
of bringing in the wood. There is, to be sure, the good old song:--
Come bring with a noise,
My merrie, merrie boys,
The Christmas log to the firing;
While my good dame, she
Bids ye all make free,
And drink to your heart's desiring.
But this refers to a particular log, the Yule log (or clog, as they used
to call it) which was brought in only once a year, and, even so, the
singer evidently is _not_ bringing it in himself. He is looking on. The
merrie, merrie boys, he thinks, need encouragement. After they have got
the log in, and the good dame has produced the rewarding jug, bowl, or
bottle, everybody will feel better. Dry without and wet within; how
oft, indeed, has praise of open fire kept company with praise of open
bottle! Forests uncounted have been cut down,--the hillside beech, from
where the owlets meet and screech; the crackling pine, the cedar sweet,
the knotted oak, with fragrant peat,--and burned up, stick by stick; so
that, as the poet explains, the bright flames, dancing, winking, shall
light us at our drinking.
Others than inebriates have sung the praise of open fires; but the most
highly respectable, emulating the bright flames, have usually winked at
drinking. But never one of them, so far as I remember, has praised the
honest, wholesome, _temperate_ exercise of bringing in the wood.
And there is the Song That Has Never Been Sung--nor ever will be, so the
tune is immaterial:--
How jolly it is, of a cold winter morning,
To pop out of bed just a bit before dawning,
And, thinking the while of your jolly cold bath,
To kindle a flame on your jolly cold hearth!
Ah me, it is merry!
Sing derry-down-derry!
Where now is the lark? I am up before him.
I chuckle with glee at this quaint little whim.
I make up the fire--pray Heaven it catches!
But what in the world have they done with the matches?
Ah me, it is merry!
Sing derry-down-derry!
And so forth, and so forth.
I invented that song myself, in January, 1918, when circumstances led
me--so to speak, by the nape of the neck--to heat my home with wood
because nowhere could I buy coal. But I felt no inpulse to sing
it--simply a deeper, kindlier sympathy for forefather in the good old
days before stoves and furnaces. I do not blame him for not taking a
cold bath. I wish in vain that he had had the thing that I call a
match. An archaeological authority tells me how forefather managed
without it:--
'Holding between the thumb and forefinger of the right hand a piece of
imported gun-flint (long quarried at Brandon in Suffolk, England),
strike it diagonally against a circlet of properly tempered steel held
in the left hand, so that the spark flies downward on a dry, scorched
linen rag lying in a tin cup (the tinder-box). When the spark instantly
catches the rag, blow or touch it into flame against the sulphur-tipped
end of a match, which will not otherwise ignite. Then with the burning
match, light a candle socketed in the lid of the tinder-box, and smother
the smouldering rag with an inner tin lid dropped upon it. Thus you were
master of the house of a winter's morning when the fires were out.'
But I wouldn't believe that archaeological authority if he had added,
'singing at your task.' Singeing at it seems more plausible.
To many of us plain bread-and-butter persons, praise of open fires
sometimes seems a little too warm and comfortable--too smugly
contemplative. We like open fires. We would have them in every room in
the house except the kitchen and bath-room--and perhaps in the
bath-room, where we could hang our towels from the mantelpiece (as
gallant practical gentlemen, now some centuries dead, named it by
hanging up their wet mantles), and let them warm while we were taking
our baths. We go as far as any in regarding the open fire as a welcoming
host in the hall, an undisturbing companion in the library, an
encourager of digestion in the dining-room, an enlivener in the
living-room, and a good-night thought of hospitality in the
guest-chamber. But we cannot follow the essayist who speaks scornfully
of hot-water pipes. 'From the security of ambush,' says he, 'they merely
heat, and heat whose source is invisible is not to be coveted at all.'
Oh, _merely_ heat! The blithe gentleman betrays himself out of his own
ink-well. He may have forgotten it,--very likely somebody else takes
care of it,--but there is a furnace in his cellar. Does he, we ask him
seriously, covet the reciprocal affection of some beloved woman--start
as angrily as he may at our suggestion of any comparison between _her_
and a hot-water pipe--_only when he can see her?_ Or, supposing him a
confirmed woman-hater, does he repudiate underwear?
He brushes aside the questions. 'With a fire in one's bedroom,' says he,
'sleep comes witchingly.'
'Unless,' say we, 'a spark or coal jumps out on the rug and starts to
set the bedroom afire. Better,' say we, pursuing the subject in our
heavy way, 'a Philistine in bed than a _fellow of fine_ taste stamping
out a live coal with his bare feet.'
And so we thank the thoughtful host who safely and sanely screens the
open fire in his guest-chamber; but fie, fie upon him if he has
decoratively arranged on our temporary hearth _Wood without Kindlings_!
If you give it half a chance, my friend, this 'joy perpetual,' as you
call it, will eat you up.
And yet we agree with anybody that nothing else in the house has
appealed so long and so universally to the imagination of man. It began
before houses. Remote and little in the far perspective of time, we see
a distant and awful-looking relative, whom we blush to acknowledge,
kindling his fire; and that fire, open as all outdoors, was the seed and
beginning of domestic living. With it, the Objectionable Ancestor
learned to cook, and in this way differentiated himself from the beasts.
Kindling it, he learned to swear, and differentiated himself further.
Thinking about it, his dull but promising mind conceived the advantage
of having somebody else to kindle it; so he caught an awful-looking
woman, and instituted the family circle. Soon, I fancy, he acquired the
habit of sitting beside his fire when he should have been doing
something more active; but a million years must pass before he was
presentable, and another million before he had coat-tails, and could
stand in front of it, spreading them like a peacock in the pride of his
achievement--a Captain Bonavita turning his back on the lion. I would
have you note, for what it may be worth, that praise of open fires has
always been masculine rather than feminine.
Nowadays, I judge, many of his descendants find the open fire much like
a little movie theatre in the home. Under the proscenium arch of the
fireplace the flames supply actors and scenery, and the show goes on
indefinitely. It is better than a movie, for it has color, and lacks the
agonizing facial contortions and interpolated text: 'Even a Princess is
just a girl--at Coney Island'; 'It is like the nobility of your true
heart, old friend, but I cannot accept the heroic sacrifice.'
Sometimes it is useful. An author sits by the fire, and smokes; and soon
the puppets of his next romance obligingly appear and act a chapter for
him. To-morrow he will dictate that chapter to his pretty stenographer.
Sometimes it is consoling. A lover sits by the fire and smokes;
presently he sees his love in the flames, and sighs--as Shakespeare
would say--like a furnace. Sometimes it doesn't work. _I_ sit by the
fire, and smoke; and I see nothing but fire and smoke.
It is a pleasant place to sit--and yet how rapidly and unanimously, when
coal came into use, and stoves came on the market, did people stop
sitting, and brick up their fireplaces! They had no time for essays, but
praise of stoves ascended wherever the wonderful things were available.
A new world was born: stoves! kitchen ranges! furnaces! hot-water pipes!
heat all over the house!--invisible, to be sure, but nobody seemed to
worry about that. And out went the open fire--to be lit again later,
but never again as a cooker of food and a warmer of the whole house. It
came back to be sat by.
There are times, indeed,--speaking as the spokesman of
bread-and-butter,--when the open fire _seems_ to stimulate amazingly our
powers of conversation. We sparkle (for us); we become (or at least we
feel) engagingly animated; but is it really the open fire? I have met
those with whom it is no more stimulating to sit cosily beside an open
fire than cosily beside an open sea or an open trolley-car or an open
window or an open oyster. I have known others in whose company a kitchen
range seemed just as stimulating.
Fires go out, but each new flame is a reincarnation. Our open fires are
but miniatures of the old-time roarers that set the hall or tavern
harmlessly ablaze, and lit its windows for the ruddy encouragement of
winter-blown travelers. Reverting to the menagerie for a figure, the
open fires of the past were lions, those of to-day are cubs. Like cubs
they amuse us; and so we forget what grim and tragic humors of life the
open fire must necessarily have witnessed. Was it not before an open
fire that Cain killed Abel? In the glow of those bright flames, dancing,
winking, has been planned every villainy of which mankind is capable:
winked they have at every sin that could be sinned by fire-light.
Elemental and without morals, the open fire has lived in hovels as well
as in palaces; it has lighted the student, heels in air and lying on his
belly to study his book; the Puritan on his knees at prayer; the
reveler, flat on his back and snoring in maudlin sleep under the table.
And now, a luxury of the well-to-do, it is departing, dancing and
winking as usual, out of the universal life to which it has been as
necessary as cooked food and warmth in winter.
But perhaps, after all, it is not yet too late for praise of bringing in
the wood. Let us at least provide the good old song, and trust to luck
that four or five hundred years from now some imaginative gentleman,
digesting his dinner before a surviving open fire, will hear afar off
the faint but jolly chorus:--
Come, lads, all together,
And get the wood in.
This brisk zero weather
Is pleasant as sin.
Put on your warm hosen,
And shuffle a bit;
Your toes may be frozen
Before you know it.
To sit mug-a-mugging
The fire who could,
That might be out lugging
In armfuls of wood?
In--armfuls--of--wood!
FURNACE AND I
SUMMER is the favorite time to advertise furnaces, for, although a
pacifist might argue that being prepared for cold weather encourages
frost, the practical persons who make and sell heating plants are firm
believers in preparedness. They produce diagrams and pictures, showing
how _their_ furnace bisects the coal bill, and how easily a pretty child
can run it from the front hall.
But my furnace is different. I defy the prettiest child imaginable to
run it. Indeed, in a strict sense, I defy anybody to run it; for this
furnace has a mind of its own and an odd ambition to behave like a
thermometer. On a warm day it goes up, on a cold day it goes down; in
zero weather it takes all the time of a determined man to head it off
from becoming a large, inconvenient refrigerator. As for bisecting coal
bills, the creature _likes coal_. I have even thought that it uttered
strange, self-congratulatory, happy noises whenever there occurred a
rise in the price of its favorite edible.
Before meeting this furnace I had lived in apartments, and my mental
conception of a ton of coal had been as of something enormous,
sufficient to heat the average house a month. A furnace was to me a
remote mystery operated by a high priest called 'janitor,' whom I
vaguely connected with the lines of Smollett,--
Th' Hesperian dragon not more fierce and fell;
Nor the gaunt, growling janitor of Hell.
I took my heat as a matter of course. If I wanted more of it, I spoke
warmly to the janitor through a speaking tube, and--after a
while--there was more heat. If I wanted less, I spoke to him coldly, in
the same distant, godlike way, and--after a while--there was less heat.
In neither case, I discovered, did an ordinary tone of voice get any
result whatever; and, although a fat man himself, he sometimes growled
back through the tube very much like the gaunt specimen mentioned by
Smollett. But I gave little thought to him. I had what is called an
'intelligent idea' that to produce more heat he opened a 'draft,' and to
reduce heat he closed it, the effect of a draft on a furnace being just
the opposite to its effect on a janitor. At night he 'shook the furnace
down,' in the morning he 'shook the furnace up.' One gathers such
knowledge casually, without conscious effort or realization. I had in
fact no more curiosity about the furnace than about the sun, for I
seemed as unlikely to run one heater as the other.
Then, like many another man who has lived in apartments, I turned
suburbanite. I had a furnace, and I had to run it myself. How well I
remember that autumn day when I started my first furnace fire!
There sat the monster on the floor of the cellar, impassive as Buddha,
and apparently holding up the house with as many arms as an
octopus--hollow arms through which presently would flow the genial heat.
I peeked cautiously through a little door into his stomach, and marveled
at its hollow immensity. I reached in till my arm ached--and my hand
dangled in empty space. But my intelligence told me that there must be a
bottom. Crumpling a newspaper into a great wad, I dropped it down, down
into the monster's gullet, where it vanished forever. I crumpled and
dropped another; I continued, until at last--oh, triumph of mind and
industry over incalculable depth!--I _saw newspaper_, and had something
tangible on which to erect a pyre of kindlings. Where I could reach I
laid them crosswise, and where I couldn't I tossed them in at varying
angles, gaining skill with practice.
'It is like a great wooden nest!' cried I in astonishment. '_Now_ I know
why the coal I have bought for my furnace is called "egg."'
I lit the fire and made a grand smoke.
It rose through the kindlings; it piled out through the little door; it
hung like great cobwebs to the roof of the cellar. With great presence
of mind I hastily closed the little door and ran lightly up the
cellar-stairs. The smoke had preceded me; it got there first through
the registers; and more was coming.
I met a woman.
'_Is_ the house afire?' she asked excitedly.
I calmed her. 'It is _not_,' I replied quietly, in a matter-of-course
way. 'When you start a fire for the winter it always smokes a little.'
We opened the windows. We went outside and looked at the house. It
leaked smoke through every crevice except, curiously enough, the
chimney. Ah-h-h-h-h! I saw what had happened. I groped my way to the
cellar and opened the back damper. Now the smoke went gladly up the
chimney, and the view through the little door was at once beautiful and
awful: it was like looking into the heart of an angry volcano. Evidently
it was time to lay the eggs on the nest.
I shoveled the abyss full of coal, and the volcano became extinct.
Presently, instead of a furnace full of fire, I had a furnace full of
egg coal. I began taking it out, egg by egg, at first with my fingers
and then with the tongs from the dining-room fireplace. And when the
woman idly questioned me as to what I was going to do down cellar with
the tongs, I bit my lips.
To the man who runs it (an absurd term as applied to a thing that has no
legs and weighs several tons) the furnace is his first thought in the
morning and his last thought at night. His calendar has but two
seasons--winter, when the furnace is going, and summer, when the furnace
is out. But in summer his thoughts are naturally more philosophical. He
sees how profoundly this recent invention (which he is not at the time
running) has changed man's attitude toward nature.
I am, of course, not referring to those furnaces which are endowed with
more than the average human intelligence; those superfurnaces which are
met with in the advertisements, which shake themselves down, shovel
their own coal, carry and sift their own ashes, regulate their own
draughts, and, if they do not actually order and pay for their own coal,
at least consume it as carefully as if they did.
With a furnace like mine a man experiences all the emotions of which he
is capable. He loves, he hates, he admires, he despises, he grieves, he
exults. There have been times when I have felt like patting my furnace;
and again, times when I have slammed his little door and spoken words to
him far, far hotter than the fire that smouldered and refused to burn
in his bowels. I judge from what I have read that taming a wild animal
must be a good deal like taming a furnace, with one important exception:
the wild-animal-tamer never loses his temper or the beast would kill
him; but a furnace, fortunately for suburban mortality, cannot kill its
tamer.
When his furnace happens to be good-natured, however, a man will often
find the bedtime hour with it pleasant and even enjoyable. He descends,
humming or whistling, to the cellar; and the subsequent shaking and
shoveling is, after all, no more than a healthy exercise which he would
not otherwise take and which will make him sleep better. He is friendly
with this rotund, coal-eating giant; he regards it almost like a big
baby which he is putting to bed--or, at least, he _might_ so regard it
if putting a baby to bed was one of his recognized pleasures.
But, oh, what a difference in the morning! He awakes in the dark,
startled perhaps from some pleasant dream by the wild alarm-m-m-m of a
clock under his pillow; and outside the snug island of warmth on which
he lies, the Universe stretches away in every direction, above, below,
and on every side of him, cold, dreary, and unfit for human habitation,
to and beyond the remotest star. In that cold Universe how small he
is!--how warm and how weak! Instantly he thinks of the furnace, and the
remotest star seems near by comparison. The thought of getting up and
going down cellar seems as unreal as the thought of getting up and going
to meet the sun at that pale streak which, through his easterly window,
heralds the reluctant coming of another day. Yet he knows that he
_must_, and that eventually he _will_, get up. In vain he tells himself
how splendid, how invigorating will be the plunge _from his warm bed_
right into the fresh, brisk, hygienic morning air.
The fresh, brisk, hygienic morning air does not appeal to him.
Unwillingly he recalls a line in the superfurnace advertisement,--'Get
up warm and cosy,'--and helplessly wishes that _he_ had such a furnace.
'Like Andrew Carnegie!' he adds bitterly. At that moment he would
anarchistically assassinate Andrew, provided he could do it without
getting up. Nevertheless--he gets up! He puts on--'Curse it, _where_ is
that sleeve?'--the bath-robe and slippers that have been all night
cooling for him, and starts on his lonely journey through the tomblike
silence. Now, if ever, is the time to hum, but there is not a hum in
him: down, down, down he goes to the cellar and peeks with dull hope
through the familiar little door. 'Good morning, Fire.' He shakes, he
shovels, he opens drafts and manipulates dampers. And the Furnace,
impassive, like a Buddha holding up the house with as many arms as an
octopus, seems to be watching him with a grave yet idle interest. Which
is all the more horrible because it has no face.
NO STAIRS!--NO ATTIC
ATTICS are done for! Listen to the words of the man who has built, and
written about, what he calls a Servantless Cottage:--
'Climbing stairs is ofttimes too strenuous for the happy housewife, so
there must be no stairs.'
Shades of our grandmothers! If we can believe this enthusiastic designer
and builder, only a few more decades at most will miserable women,
unhappy housewives, and, by inference, undesirable mothers, continue to
drag up and down stairs their pitiful existences in houses of more than
one story.
'No stairs! No stairs!' the young wife cried,
And clapped her hands to see
A house as like a little flat
As any house could be!
And observe also, not only the vanishing of stairs and attics, but the
disappearance of the servant-problem. 'For in this Servantless Cottage,'
says the satisfied man, 'milady need fear no drudgery. A very few hours
will suffice for housekeeping and cookery. Work becomes a pleasure and a
maid undesirable.'
Well, well! There have been a good many proposed solutions of the
domestic service question--but to solve it by giving it up seems no very
crowning triumph of domestic mathematics. The experience of innumerable
young married couples with kitchenettes goes to show that life can be
conducted under that solution, especially when the couples are young and
but recently married. Then, indeed, they need neither an attic in the
top of the house nor a general--that brave girl capable of turning a
quick efficient hand to everything from dusting to doughnuts--all over
it. But why not, for that matter, admit that 'climbing is ofttimes too
strenuous for a happy general.' She, too is human--has legs--gets
tired--
This designer of servantless cottages was, I imagine, an atticless
child: he climbed no stairs to that room of pleasing mystery, rich in
dusty and discarded things that had once been living and important in
the life of his family, where the sunbeams streamed like a ladder down
through the skylight, or, on other days, the drops of water pelted its
narrow panes and added their orchestral voices to the symphony of rain
on the roof. His grandparents had died when he was a baby; their house
had been sold or torn down, their attic accumulations scattered, and his
family lived in a new house where the attic had as yet taken on no more
attraction to juvenile adventure than the spare bedroom. He was,
probably, a thoughtful child who brooded over his mother's troubles in
securing and keeping satisfactory 'help.' The house in which he passed
those young years was very likely built in the time of high ceilings and
long flights of stairs,--how often, through the banisters, had the
little fellow seen his mother's tired ankles lagging on the ascent as he
sat in the library poring over some volume of architecture!--and he took
a childish oath that when _he_ married--how little he knew about
that!--_his_ wife should not have to climb stairs, _his_ wife should not
have to worry about servants. Yet for a long time it seemed as if he
would never marry, for it did not occur to him to put in an escalator.
And then one day, in his maturity, spurred perhaps by a more
understanding and ardent desire, and driven harder by the unselfish
thought that, even while he dreamed, SHE might marry somebody else and
be doomed for life to climbing stairs and engaging new servants, he saw
the solution. He would build a house of only one story and let HER do
the work.
Now, as a matter of fact, a bungalow is a pretty good thing. If this
student of architecture and domestic economics had contented himself
with a plain and simple description of his servantless cottage, I dare
say I should have read it in the most friendly spirit imaginable: and
certainly with no desire to criticize his conclusions. It was that silly
remark about 'milady' that aroused opposition. We live in a republic and
we are most of us reasonably self-respecting men and women, not a milady
among us, unless she happens to be making a visit--in which case, one
place she is not visiting is a servantless cottage. And so, in a word,
the servantless cottage ceases to be an honest, more or less successful
effort to provide a home in which the housewife can most conveniently do
her own work, and appears a neat little example of snobbish absurdity.
Work becomes a pleasure to the happy housewife for whom climbing a
flight of stairs is ofttimes all too strenuous--so keen and persistent a
pleasure that domestic service is 'undesirable!' Is anybody really
expected to believe it? Or is domestic service itself a phase of
domesticity that can be so cheerfully eliminated? Has the servant--and,
bless you! the word has often enough been a term of honor--no really
fine and enduring place in the scheme of gracious and cultivated
domestic management?
For many generations, stairs and service have been inseparable from the
amenities of domestic living. One has only to imagine these two
essentials suddenly eliminated from literature, to experience a pained
sensation at the care-free way in which the man of the servantless
cottage gets rid of them. And one has only to look about the world as it
stands at present, servant-problem and all, to realize that it is the
value of good domestic service which actually creates and keeps alive
the problem itself. For even if the happy housewife enjoys every single
item of housekeeping and cookery, there are times when her personal
attention to them is obviously undesirable.
Imagine our servantless cottage as an example. Milady sings at her work.
The portable vacuum cleaner--milord keeps up with all the latest
improvements--gratefully eats up its daily dust. The fireless cooker
prepares the meals 'with a perfection and deliciousness unrealized in
the old days.' _A bas_ mother and the way she used to cook! But in
serving these meals of a hitherto unrealized perfection and
deliciousness, milord and milady must needs chase each other between
kitchen and dining-room. The guest at dinner, if he is luckily
accustomed to picnics, carries his own plate and washes it afterward. I
have myself entertained many a guest in this fashion, and he has carried
his own plate, and, being that kind of a guest or I wouldn't have
invited him, he has cheerfully helped wash the dishes, wearing a
borrowed apron. But it would be absurd to claim that this performance,
indefinitely repeated, is an improvement upon an orderly, efficiently
served dinner-party. Conversation at dinner is more desirable than a
foot-race between the courses; nor do I believe that life under such
conditions can possibly 'become so alluring that one day the great
majority of us will choose it first of all.'
Concerning stairs: I perhaps have more feeling for them than most; but I
am quite sure that I speak at least for a large minority. It is the
flatness of the flat, its very condensed and restricted cosiness, its
very lack of upstairs and downstairs, which prevents it from ever
attaining completely the atmosphere of a home. The feet which cross the
floor above your head are those of another family; the sounds which
reach you from below are the noises of strangers; the life horizontal of
the flat serves its convenient use but only emphasizes the independence
and self-respect of the life vertical, master of the floor above,
master likewise of the basement. I, who have lived happily in a flat,
nevertheless feel more human, less like some ingeniously constructed
doll, when I can take my candle in hand and go upstairs to sleep.
Because I have lived happily in a flat, I want no bungalow. There is
something fine in going to sleep even one flight nearer the stars--and
away from the dining-room.
And no stairs--no attic. My conviction increases that this man was an
atticless child, without grandparents himself, and without thought of
his own possible grandchildren. Or is the stairless, servantless,
atticless cottage--'truly the little house is the house of the
future'--meant also to be childless? An examination of the plan shows a
so-called bedroom marked 'guest or children,' which indicates that the
happy housewife must exercise her own judgment. There are
accommodations for one guest or two children, but it seems fairly
evident that guest and children exclude each other. Milord and milady
must decide between hospitality and race-suicide, or two children and no
week-end visitor. Some will choose guest; some will choose children.
Personally I hope they will all choose children; for, even without an
attic, there is plenty of playground. 'People with tiny incomes' must
always be careful not to purchase too small a lot; and so we find that
the servantless cottage has paths, and a lawn, and flowers, and
shrubbery, and a sun-dial, and an American elm, and a 'toadstool canopy'
between the poplars and the white birches, and an ivy-covered 'cache' to
store the trunks in. I am glad there is going to be such a domestic
convenience as a sun-dial; and perhaps, when there is a guest, the
trunks can be taken out on the lawn and the children put to bed in the
'cache.'
But I guess that, after all, stairs will survive, and attics, and the
servant-problem. Innumerable families are already living in servantless
houses, with stairs, and it doesn't even occur to them that they are
solving any problem whatsoever. Innumerable housewives are about as
happy under these conditions as most of us get to be under any
conditions. The servant-problem itself is not the young and tender
problem that many of us imagine. An examination of old newspapers will
show anybody who is sufficiently patient and curious that a hundred
years ago there was much indignant wonder that young women, visibly
suited for domestic service, preferred to be seamstresses! What is more
modern is the grave enthusiasm with which so many persons are trying to
decide how the rest of us shall live with the maximum amount of comfort
and culture for the minimum expenditure. And one interesting similarity
between many of these suggestions is their passive opposition to another
important group of critics.
'Have large families or perish as a nation!' shriek our advisers on one
hand. 'Have small families or perish as individuals!' proclaim our
advisers on the other.
For this servantless cottage is typical of a good many other housing
suggestions in which the essential element is the small family; and even
the possibility that the children may live to grow up seems to have been
left out of consideration. Milord and milady, I imagine, have chosen
children instead of a guest. These children (a boy and girl, as I like
to picture them) grow up; marry; settle in their own servantless
cottages, and have two children apiece. There are now a grandfather and
a grandmother, a son and a daughter, a son-in-law and a daughter-in-law,
and four grandchildren. In each servantless cottage there is that one
bedroom marked 'guest or children.' Granting all the possibilities of
the ivy-covered 'cache,'--and now the trunks will simply _have_ to be
taken out and stood on the lawn even if the snow does fall on
them,--milord and milady, come Christmas or other anniversary, can
entertain a visit from all their children and grandchildren, one family
taking the 'guest or children' bedroom, and the other the 'cache.'
Later, as the children grow older, each family will come back to the old
home on alternate Christmases: and by utilizing the 'cache,' a son or
daughter can receive a short visit from the aged parents, not too long,
of course, or it would ruin the trunks. As for any of the hearty,
old-fashioned, up-and-down-stairs hospitality--I may be an old fogey
myself, but the servantless cottage shocks me.
'Our bedroom resembles a cosy state-room on board ship.' Oh!
la-la-la-la-la! Why doesn't somebody solve the problem of domestic
living by suggesting that we all live in house-boats?
CONCERNING KITCHENS
MANY a man, I am sure, who never in his mature life thinks emotionally
of his own kitchen, still keeps a tender memory of some kitchen of his
early youth. It may have been his mother's, his grandmother's, or his
Aunt Susan's; and not often, but once in a great while, something
reminds him of it. His thoughts hark back, and he touches, in his own
degree, the emotion of Uncle Felix (whom you will remember if you have
ever read 'The Extra Day') alone at night in Mrs. Horton's kitchen.
'And Uncle Felix traveled backwards against the machinery of Time that
cheats the majority so easily with its convention of moving hands and
ticking voice and bullying, staring visage. He slid swiftly down the
long banister-descent of years, and reached in a flash that old sombre
Yorkshire kitchen, and stood, four-foot nothing, face smudged and
fingers sticky, beside the big deal table with the dying embers of the
grate upon his right. His heart was beating. He could just reach the
juicy cake without standing on a chair. He ate the very slice that he
had eaten forty years ago. It _was_ possible to have your cake and eat
it too!'
For my own part,--and no doubt each backward traveler has his particular
kitchen memory,--I ate the crisp brown beans off the top of the
bean-pot. It was a sort of ceremonial; a Saturday-night function,
irrespective of whatever menial might at the time be in official charge
of our kitchendom. The baking of the beans was never altogether trusted
to a menial. My mother, last thing before bed, would go out to the
kitchen, lighting her way with a kerosene lamp; and I with her. We put
the lamp on the table; we opened the oven door--and all over the kitchen
spread the delectable, mouth-watering aroma of the baking bean. We took
out the bean-pot. Then we scraped off the crisp top layer of the beans
into a saucer. And these we ate!
My mother wore a bustle, and at that historic period there were no
kitchenettes; nor had the Spirit of Efficiency inspired the thought of
planning your kitchen with a route for food-preparation which makes a
flying start at the ice-chest, takes in the meat, fish, and vegetable
shelves, touches at the cabinet for dough-mixing, skirts the pan
cabinet, and so (as Master Pepys would say) to the stove. There were no
scientifically determined routes for food-serving and dish-washing.
Each menial, and my mother herself between menials, followed a kind of
cow path. My mother had never had it figured out for her that the lowest
estimate of time spent at the sink alone is two hours daily, and that
these two hours a day count up to five days of twelve hours each in the
course of a month, or sixty twelve-hour days at the sink every year. And
when, as the expert modern kitchen-planner points out, it is realized
that these sixty days are spent in useless stooping, and that, to this
strain, is added the fatigue of miles of unnecessary steps, one gets an
idea of the kitchen which I am glad to think never occurred to her.
Nor, on the other hand, do I think my mother would have quite followed
the mental state of the rhapsodist who writes of housework in
general,--
'When I am about the house, taking part in the work, I am of course
conscious, among other things, of the rhythmical qualities of housework.
But when I stay apart from it, and listen to it, it comes to seem all
rhythm, both in the larger sense of regular recurrence of tasks, and in
the repetition of sounds with insistent ichthus and pause. Ironing, for
example, is nearly as pleasant to listen to as to watch. Not by one
stroke of the iron, but by many, is the linen polished and the cambric
smoothed to a satin daintiness; the blows follow one another, now
slowly, now fast, like the drum-beat of some strange march. There is
rhythm in the kitchen; rhythm in the dining-room.... Most soothing of
all household rhythm is the swish of the broom. It is gentle and
low-keyed. It takes my attention from other things, and makes me think
of abstractions. I wonder whether there is not some mathematical
calculation by which a ratio can be established between power of stroke,
length of arm, and good-will. And so speculating I sink into comfortable
depths of nothingness.'
Oh, shade of Mary Ann, the Perfect Servant Girl!