hear my mother, 'Who _is_ the lunatic?'--takes me away from the kitchen.
I hurry back to it, for, although it is not a place where I wish to
live, it is very much a place where I like to visit. Though not with the
cook. When I was younger, I enjoyed visiting with the cook, but the
years have separated us; I have, as it were, grown apart from her.
Granting her absence, there is a homely, cheery informality about a
kitchen; and if the lady of the house will take you there herself, some
rainy afternoon in the country, and serve tea on the clean, plain table,
and let you butter the toasted crackers yourself, _with all the butter
you please_, why, for my part, I ask no more this side of Paradise. To
use a quaint old obsolete word, I like to be 'kitchened'--provided, of
course, that I may select my kitchener. So, I understand, does the
policeman: our tastes are different, but we are both human.
And yet this kitchen, as we know it to-day, is comparatively recent, and
already insidiously passing away from the larger cities to, I hope, a
long survival in the country and suburbs. If I were of an older
generation (also insidiously passing away), I would be able to recall
another kind of kitchen, where colonial customs of cookery held sway
well into the twentieth century. To me the stove seems ancient only
because, thank God! I am not ancient myself; I find it hard to believe
that when my grandmother bought her stove, her up-to-date spirit marched
bravely from one period of kitchendom into another. But men still living
remember how their very mothers baked bread in a brick oven, and have
seen in operation many of the queer old cooking things we somewhat
younger mortals wonder at in museums. Only a bit further back, the
fireplace, at its most generous, had room for a seat in the corner, and
grandmother sat there,--it was really what the kitchen-planners would
call a rest corner,--sometimes, comfortable old creature, smoking her
honest pipe and observing the stars by daytime as she watched the smoke
on its journey up the big chimney. But the newfangled kitchen range was
much more convenient; the easier management of a coal fire made a new
day in household economics; a delighted generation busily bricked up the
fireplaces. And so the sturdy useful kitchen stove is not so very
ancient; and the homely, hospitable kitchen, even of our childhood
memory, is still so new that only to-day is the Spirit of Efficiency
providing it with routes of travel to save those wasted steps that
mother used to take, and a cosy rest corner, cunningly placed to solace
the soul of a tired cook with prophylactic contemplation of the most
restful available scenery.
All day long on the kitchen routes
Her helpful feet have gone,
With never a senseless, wasted step
Between the dusk and dawn;
And now, dear soul, at the kitchen sink
She has washed the final spoon,
And sat her down in her rest corner
To look at the rising moon.
But the life of our larger cities is growingly inimical to kitchens. In
the more distinguished sections, unfortunately, one must be more than
ordinarily well-to-do to live in a house that has a kitchen: otherwise
one lives in an apartment and has a kitchenette. In my bright lexicon,
published by the Century Company in 1889, there is no such word. The
thing did not exist. This Peter Pan of domestic institutions, the baby
kitchen that never grows up, had yet to be born. And a great army of
other equally unborn babies, who would be shrewdly created male and
female, waited in the mystery of non-existence until such time as they,
too, should enter upon life, grow up, discover each other in happily
surprised couples, love, marry, and set up housekeeping with two rooms,
a bath, and a kitchenette. It was then impossible--though I have since
done it myself--for a gentleman to take his morning bath, shave, and
cook the breakfast all at the same time, stepping with accurate judgment
out of his porcelain bath-tub and into the contiguous kitchenette, and
so back and forth, bathing, lathering, shaving, percolating the coffee,
and turning the toast. Perhaps, also, humming a little tune.
Here, too, as the rhapsodist I have already quoted would say, is rhythm;
nor is it impossible that the same imagination would find a wild yet
orderly beauty in the design extemporized by his wet footprints between
his kitchenette and his bath-tub.
But the thing isn't a kitchen, though it serves many of the kitchen's
practical purposes. It lacks the space, dignity, comfort, and
opportunity for helpful conversation. I cannot imagine any gentleman of
the future recalling with poignant pleasure his childhood kitchenette.
In fact, I cannot even imagine a child in a kitchenette.
THE PLUMBER APPRECIATED
'DID you ever,' said he, 'know a plumber who had grown rich?'
We stood in the kitchen. Outdoors it was a wonderful winter morning,
snow-white and sparkling, felt rather than seen through frosted windows,
for the mercury last night had dropped below zero, and, although
reported on the way up, was not climbing with real enthusiasm. On the
floor was a little sea of water, in shape something like the
Mediterranean, with Gibraltar out of sight under the kitchen sink. The
stove (unfortunately) had been lighted; and a strange, impassive boy
stood beside it, holding in pendant hands various tools of the plumber's
craft. The plumber stood in the Mediterranean. And I, in my slippers and
bath-robe,--a foolish costume, for the sea was not deep enough to bathe
in,--hovered, so to speak, on the edge of the beach.
I suppose I wished to impress this plumber with my imperturbable calm.
Upset as I was, I must have realized the impossibility of impressing the
boy. Swaggering a little in my bath-robe, I had said something jocular,
I do not remember just what, about the rapid accretion of wealth by
plumbers. He lit his pipe. 'Did you ever,' said he, 'know a plumber who
had grown rich?'
Now until that winter I had never thought of the plumber as a man in
many respects like myself. One may winter for years in a city apartment
without meeting a plumber, but hardly without reading a good many
humorous trifles about them in current literature; and my idea of this
craftsman had been insidiously formed by the minor humorists. Summer,
in my experience, had been a plumberless period, in which water flowed
freely through the pipes of my house, and gushed obligingly from faucets
at the touch of a finger. It was like an invisible brook; and, like a
brook, I thought of it (if I thought of it at all) as going on forever.
Nothing worse happened than a leak at the faucet. And when that happens
I can fix it myself. All it needs is a new washer.
I run down cellar and turn off the water. I run up from the cellar and
take off the faucet. I put in the new washer, which is like a very fat
leather ring for a very thin finger, and screw on the faucet. I run down
cellar, turn on the water, run up from the cellar, and look at the
faucet. It still leaks. So I run down cellar, turn off the water, run up
from the cellar, take off the faucet, make some slight alteration in the
size, shape, or position of the washer, put on the faucet, run down
cellar, turn on the water, run up from the cellar, and look at the
faucet. If it _still_ leaks (as is rather to be expected), I repeat as
before; and if it _then_ leaks (as is more than likely), I run down
cellar, turn off the water, run up from the cellar, take off the faucet,
make some slight alteration in the size, shape, or position of the
washer, put on the faucet, run down cellar, turn on the water, run up
from the cellar, and look at the faucet. Perhaps it leaks more. Perhaps
it leaks less. So I run down cellar--and turn off the water--and run up
from the cellar--and take off the faucet. Then, talking aloud to myself,
I take out the new washer, throw it on the floor, stamp on it, kick it
out of the way, put in a newer washer, put on the faucet, run down
cellar, turn on the water, run up from the cellar, and look at the
faucet. If (and this may happen) it still _leaks_, I make queer,
inarticulate, animal noises; but I run down cellar, turn off the water,
run up from the cellar, and take off the faucet. Then I monkey a little
with the washer (still making those queer animal noises), put on the
faucet, run down cellar, turn on the water, run up from the cellar, and
look at the faucet. _Sooner or later the faucet always stops leaking._
It is a mere matter of adjusting the washer; any handy man can do it
with a little patience.
Winter in the country is the time and place to get acquainted with the
plumber. And I would have you remember, even in that morning hour when
the ordinary life of your home has stopped in dismay, and then gone
limping toward breakfast with the help of buckets of water generously
loaned you by your nearest neighbor,--rarely, if ever, does he carry
his generosity so far as to help carry the buckets,--that because of
this honest soul in overalls, winter has lost the terrors which it held
for your great-grandfather.
Revisit your library, and note what the chroniclers of the past thought
about winter--'this cousin to Death, father to sickness, and brother to
old age' (as Thomas Dekker bitterly called it; and well would your
great-grandfather have agreed with him), when 'the first word that a
wench speaks on your coming into a room in the morning is, "Prithee send
for some faggots."' It is bad enough when--to adapt Dekker's
sixteenth-century phraseology--the first word that a wench speaks on
your coming into a room in the morning is, 'Prithee send for a plumber';
but how seldom it happens! And because we _can_ send for a plumber, our
attitude toward winter is joyfully changed for the better: lovely autumn
is no longer regarded as melancholy because winter is coming, nor is
backward spring esteemed beyond criticism because winter is over.
Those good old days, after the sun had entered Capricorn, were cold and
inconvenient old days. Observe great-grandfather: all his plumbing was a
pump, _which often froze beyond his simple skill in plumbery_; and then
he drew water from the well in a dear old oaken bucket (as _we_ like to
think of it), emptied it into other buckets, and carried it by hand,
even as a man now carries the water loaned him by his generous neighbor,
wherever the useful, unintoxicating fluid was needed. No invisible brook
flowed through his house, and gushed obligingly at faucets, hot or cold
according to great-grandfather's whim; no hot-water pipes suffused his
dwelling with grateful warmth. These are _our blessings_--and it is the
plumber, with only a boy to help him, who contends manfully against the
forces of nature, and keeps them going. For the life of the house
depends nowadays on its healthy circulation of water; and when the house
suffers from arteriosclerosis, the plumber is the doctor, and the
strange, impassive boy is the trained nurse.
Sometimes in an emergency he arrives without this little companion: I
have myself, rising to the same occasion, taken the boy's place. I was a
good boy. The plumber admitted it. 'Fill th' kettle again with hot water
off th' stove,' said he, over his arched back, as he peered shrewdly
down a pipe to see how far away it was frozen, 'there's th' good boy.'
Thus I know that the boy is not, as our minor humorists would have us
believe, a mere flourish and gaudy appanage to the plumber's
autocratically assumed grandeur. His strange, impassive manner is
probably nothing more or less than concentrated attention; it is as if
he said, with Hamlet, 'Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away
all foolish, fond regards, all saws of books, all forms, all pressures
past, that youth and observation copied there; and thy commandment all
alone shall live within the book and volume of my brain, unmixed with
baser matter. Yes, by Heaven!'
Even in putting in a new washer, I should do better with a boy.
The most nervous and conscientious plumber, I tell you, must at
intervals appear, to an observer unacquainted with the art and mystery
of plumbery, to be proceeding in a leisurely and perhaps idle fashion.
The most methodical and conscientious man, plumber or not, will
occasionally forget something, and have to go back for it. The most
self-respecting and conscientious minor humorist, after he has exhausted
his witty invention making a joke on a plumber, will try to sell it for
the highest possible price. And if I, for example, am a little proud of
my ability, greater than the plumber's, to write an essay, how shall I
accuse him of arrogance if he is a little proud of his ability, greater
than mine, to accomplish the more necessary feat of thawing a frozen
water-pipe?
He has a heart.
When I was a plumber's boy myself, I walked with my boss to his office
in the village to get a tool. It was a Sunday afternoon: I remember that
a rooster crowed afar off, and how his lonely clarion enhanced and made
more gravely quiet the peace of the Sabbath. And the plumber said, 'I
wouldn't have _felt right_, sitting at home by the fire reading the
paper, when I knew you was in trouble and I could pull you out.' He had
come, mark you, in his Sunday clothes; he had come in his best, not
pausing even for his overalls, so that, in our distressed, waterless
home, the lady of the house had herself encircled his honest waist with
a gingham apron before he began plumbing. And in all the world there was
nobody else whom we would have been so glad to see.
And so, bowing, with my left hand over what I take to be the region of a
grateful heart, I extend him this praise of plumber. No plumber came
over in the Mayflower; but think not, for that reason, that he is a
_parvenu_. He is of ancient lineage--this good fairy in overalls of our
invisible brooks. The Romans knew him as the _artifex plumbareus_. Caesar
may have interrupted the revision of the _Commentaries_ to send for him.
He disappeared, with civilization and water-pipes, in the Dark Ages; he
came back, with civilization and water-pipes, when the darkness lifted.
Neglected by Art, disregarded by Romance, and unconsidered by the drama,
these rich and entertaining expressions of life are as nothing when his
presence is called for.
We may live without painters
Or writers or mummers,
But civilized man cannot
Live without plumbers.
He, too, should have his statue, not of bronze, marble, or granite, but
of honest lead, with two figures--the Plumber, holding aloft his torch,
and the Plumber's Boy, strange, impassive, and holding in his pendant
hands a monkey wrench and the coil of flexible tubing with which his
master cunningly directs hot water into the hardened arteries of a
suffering house. And on his pedestal I would carve the motto,--
'Did You Ever Know a Plumber Who Had Grown Rich?'
THE HOME OF THE PORCELAIN TUB
'I AM very glad,' wrote Lord Chesterfield to young Mr. Stanhope, July
30, 1749, 'that my letter, with Dr. Shaw's opinion, has lessened your
bathing; for, since I was born, I never heard of bathing four hours a
day.'
Lord Chesterfield's surprise at the duration of his son's bath still
leaves us wondering how that daily ablution was performed in 1749. Young
Mr. Stanhope lived a long, long time before our Bath-Room Era, when
every well-to-do home has a bath-room, and the daily bath is as natural
a topic of conversation in polite society as the daily weather. He
might, twenty years later, have gone to Dominicetti for the famous
medicated bath which led Dr. Johnson to say to a gentleman who believed
in it, 'Well, sir, go to Dominicetti, and get thyself fumigated, but be
sure that the steam be directed at thy _head_ for _that_ is the _peccant
part_.' Probably he bathed at home: a tin tub was brought by a menial
into his apartment, filled with hot and cold water, tested for
temperature, and the young man left alone with it. But, although this
was better than no bath at all, it had serious disadvantages. When the
water cooled, Mr. Stanhope had perforce to summon the menial, and either
retire to his closet or remain sitting in his tub while the bath was
reheated. Conventionally, I suppose, he was considered invisible to the
menial. If he splashed he splashed on the carpet; and when the tub was
carried away, however carefully, it left a damp spot. He had to hang his
towel on one chair, and his clothes on another. His soap must have
embarrassed him. According to all modern standards it was a makeshift
kind of a bath.
We have changed all that. In every house is a bath-room, so much like
the bath-room in every other house that a stranger guest feels more
immediately at home there than anywhere else. We bathe daily, and talk
about it in public: or, to be exact, many bathe, and even more talk. We
have become skilled--I am referring, of course, to that important
section of society whose members, often otherwise useless, all together
establish the amenities of civilization--in leading conversation
tactfully up to this topic. A few avoid it, but these are of a passing
generation, and regard even the porcelain tub with disfavor. It is, so
they say, dangerous: a treacherous, slippery contraption that you have
to be careful getting in and out of. The mid-Victorian bath-room, with
its _painted tin_ tub built in by a carpenter, suits them better. If
perchance their eyes fall on this essay, they will close the book
hastily, perhaps destroy it, for _in their time_ nice people did not
talk, nor essayists write, about baths and bath-rooms. It was as much as
ever if an author hinted, by some guarded, casual reference to soap when
his hero came down to breakfast, that the dashing, well-groomed fellow
had but just risen from a tub. Only heroes admittedly took morning
baths. Occasionally a heroine may have--but wild horses couldn't have
dragged the information out of her; and the boldest novelist would have
held back from admitting that _he_ knew anything about it. Indeed, how
could he?
But a different point of view came in with the porcelain bath tub,
which, as an advertisement so justly intimates, is less like a tub than
like a great white china dish. One _had_ to talk about it. It dignified
the bath-room; it added beauty to bathing (which had hitherto depended
entirely on the bather), and at the same time struck peremptorily that
keynote of simplicity which has since remained the bath-room's
distinguishing characteristic. The white purity of the tub forbids the
introduction of any jarring note of unnecessary decoration: one cannot
imagine a bath-room with pictures on the walls, a well-chosen bit of
statuary in the window, and photographs on the shelf under the necessary
mirror--except sometimes the photograph of the gentleman who invented
the talcum powder. Even the rug that lies in front of the tub is always
inscribed BATH, yet here, if anywhere, the home of the porcelain tub
might be given a touch of originality. Another motto might be
substituted for BATH.--'Welcome, Bather.' 'Dine and the world dines with
you; bathe, and you bathe alone.' 'I am always drier on the other side,'
etc. But the bath-room, after all, is nobody's single possession, and
the motto that pleased one bather might seem a false note to another.
Perhaps it is wiser to stick to BATH, and rest content with providing at
their best those commonplaces which would have seemed such luxuries to
Mr. Stanhope--the soap (imagine his delight) _that floats_, and the
shower (imagine his astonishment) that simulates the fall of rain from
heaven. I am surprised, however, that no manufacturer of porcelain
bath-tubs has yet thought to embellish his product with the legend in
golden letters: 'One for All--and All for One.'
I am speaking, you understand, of the bath-room _ordinaire_. There are,
I believe, bath-rooms _de luxe_, in which the bather, soap and sponge in
hand, gravely descends white marble steps into the bath. I have never
done this myself; but I can see that gravely descending marble steps has
more personal dignity about it than the commoner method of entering the
bath by climbing over the side of the tub. It is like a low white wall:
and only a little imagination is necessary to feel that there may be a
sign somewhere,--
No Bathing in This Tub.
Police Take Notice.
But the gain is temporary. Sooner or later, in either case, the bather
must sit down--and where then is his personal dignity? I have read also
of bath-tubs _made of glass_: but here the effort to attain distinction
is too transparent. And then there is a patent combination
kitchen-and-bath-room: quite rare: I hardly know how to describe it:
perhaps an excerpt from the unpublished novel 'Mary Brogan':--
'Mary felt tired, too tired to go out to the movies. The "words" that
had passed between her and Mrs. Montgomery that morning, justified as
Mary felt in her unwillingness to have another woman's child messing
about in _her_ kitchen--although smacking little Albert had perhaps been
a too objective way of expressing this natural disinclination--had
distressed a native refinement which it would have surprised haughty
Mrs. Montgomery to be told was greater in her cook than in herself.
Albert had been properly smacked, and there should have been an end of
it. Nevertheless Mary Brogan felt tired. Was this all of life--smacking
Albert and "rowing" with his mother? She finished washing and wiping
the dishes slowly, put them away in the pantry, and sat down by the
stove. It seemed as if there was really nothing left in the world that a
girl could do to amuse herself.
'All at once, as if the friendly stove had suggested it, Mary remembered
that this was her night to take a bath.
'Mary Brogan's kitchen was provided with a remarkable invention to
economize space and encourage a hygienic habit. Most of the time it was
a sink for Mary to wash the dishes, Monday it was a couple of convenient
laundry tubs for Mary to wash the clothes, and once a week it was a fine
large porcelain bath-tub for Mary to wash herself. Mary called it the
"Three in Wan." She locked the doors and pulled down the window shades,
so that she could neither be interrupted from within the house nor
observed from without. And then, going to the sink, she turned the cosy
kitchen into a laundry, and the laundry into a bath-room.'
Such bath-rooms, fortunately, remain exceptions to a desirable rule of
uniformity. The bath-room _de luxe_ is rare: it is possible that you,
gentle reader, may gravely descend those marble steps, but it is very
unlikely. Mary Brogan's bath-room (which, by the way, revives the
colonial custom of bathing in the wash-tub) is a _tour de force_ of
invention that is obviously inconvenient for general family use. The
_glass tub_ is more dangerous. It appeals to the fancy with its indirect
suggestion of Cinderella's slipper. Here and there already a householder
has installed one; and the stranger guest feels stranger than ever when
he takes a bath in it. One might get used to it, much as one would at
first feel like a goldfish without room enough to swim; but there should
be no rivalry between glass and porcelain. The tin tub passes: let the
bath-tubs of the future be _all of porcelain_ or _all of glass_.
Let us then tacitly agree to preserve the fine and simple integrity of
the bath-room, with its slight, almost unnoticeable variations in
wall-paper and the choice and arrangement of its normal impedimenta.
Surely we do not want the home of the porcelain tub to express any
single, compelling, individual personality: to say, in effect, 'I am H.
Titherington Lee's bath-room,' or 'Betty Martin's,' rather than, as now,
'I am _the_ Bath-Room.' Let Mr. Lee, if he will, have his initials, H.
T. L., in gold on his tooth-brush: but let him not have them lettered on
the white porcelain of the tub, or woven, instead of BATH, into the rug
in front of it.