Saturdays were great days for “the Knapp Family, Incorporated.”
They were together at home all day, and always with a great variety
of schemes on hand. In the morning Henry usually relapsed from his
eleven-year-old dignity back into younger days and played with Stephen,
especially since the sandpile settlement had been started, and since
they had a brood of chickens to care for. Old Mrs. Hennessy came to
give the house the weekly, thorough, cellar-to-garret cleaning which
Lester had found was the best way to keep Evangeline from spending
Sunday with a mop and broom. In the kitchen Helen and her father,
foregathering over the cook-book, struggled fervently with cookery more
ambitious than that of the usual week-day.
Helen loved these Saturday morning cooking-bees as she called them.
She and Father had such a good time together. It was so funny, Father
not knowing any more than she did about it all and having to study it
out from the book. Lots of times she, even she, was able to give him
pointers about things the cook-book didn’t tell.
For instance, at the very beginning, that historic first day, long
ago, when they had first cooked together and timorously tried to
have scrambled eggs for lunch, it had been Helen who conquered those
bomb-like raw eggs. Lester had gingerly broken off the top of one, and
was picking the shell carefully away, when Helen said informingly,
“That’s not the way. Mother gives them a crack in the middle on the
edge of the bowl and opens them that way.”
“How? Show me,” said her father docilely, handing her another egg.
Feeling very important, Helen took it masterfully and, holding it over
the edge of the bowl, lifted her hand with an imitation of Mother’s
decisive gesture. But she did not bring it down. She shuddered, rolled
her eyes at her father and said miserably, “Suppose I hit it too hard,
and it all spurts out?”
Her father felt no impulse to cry out bitterly on her imbecile
ineptitude. Rather he sympathized with her panic, “Yes, raw eggs are
the dickens!” he said, understandingly.
Intimidated, they both looked at the smooth, oval enigma.
“_You_ do it,” said Helen, with her self-distrusting impulse to shift
responsibility to some one else.
Her father refused with horror to assume it. “Not on your life!” he
cried. “You were the one who’d seen Mother do it.”
“Doesn’t the cook-book say how to do it anywhere?” asked Helen, trying
to fall back on some one else. “There is a chapter at the end that
tells you how to take out ink-stains and what to do for people who have
got poisoned, and all sorts of things. Maybe it’ll say there.”
They laid down the egg to search, but found nothing in the four hundred
pages of the big book that told them how to break a raw egg.
“Perhaps you could lay it down on a plate and cut it in two with a
knife,” suggested Lester.
Even Helen knew better than this. She knew better than that when she
was _born_, she thought, suppressing a pitying smile, “Gracious no! You
would get the shell all mixed up with the insides,” she explained. They
stared again at the egg.
To Helen came the knowledge that responsibility must be assumed.
“Somebody’s got to,” she said grimly. “I’ll try again.”
She took the egg in her hand and resolutely struck it a small blow on
the edge of the bowl. The shell cracked a little.
“That sounds good,” said Lester; “give it another whack.”
She repeated the blow and, holding the egg up above her head till she
could see the under side, reported that there was a perceptible crack
and some wetness oozing out.
But that was not enough. She must go on and see it through. How queer
not to have somebody tell her what to do and make her do it. “I’m going
to try to pull it apart,” she announced courageously, feeling like
a heroine. She got the tips of her fingers into the tiny crack and
pulled, shutting her eyes.
Something happened. A gush of cold sticky stuff over her fingers, a
little glass-like tinkle of breaking egg-shell in her hand, and there
in the bowl were the contents of the egg, the golden yolk swimming
roundly in the transparent white.
“Hurrah! Good for you!” shouted her father admiringly.
But Helen found in her heart a new conscience which made her refuse
to accept too easily won praise. “No, that’s not right,” she said,
frowning at the crushed, dripping shell in her hand. “When Mother does
it, the stuff comes out nice and clean, with each half of the shell
like a little cup.”
She closed her eyes, summoned all her will-power and thought back to
the times when she had watched Mother cook.
Mother held it so (Helen went through the pantomime), she brought it
down with a little quick jerk, _so_, and then.... “Oh, goody! goody!
I know!” she cried, hopping up and down. “_I_ know. She turns it over
after she’s cracked it, with the crack on the up-side, and then she
_pries_ it open. Give me another egg.”
* * * * *
Well, it certainly was a far cry from those early fumbling days, wasn’t
it, to now, when both she and Father could crack and separate an egg
with their eyes shut and one hand tied behind their backs, so to speak;
when they thought nothing of turning out in a Saturday morning a batch
of bread, two pies, and enough cookies to last them a week. They didn’t
even talk about their cooking much any more, just decided what they
were going to make and went ahead and made it, visiting together as
they worked like a couple of magpies chattering.
Father often told her poetry as she stepped to and fro; the kitchen
seemed to her just chock-full of poetry. Father had said so much there
the walls seemed soaked with it. Sometimes in the evening when she went
in just before she went to bed to get a drink of water or to see that
the bread sponge was all right, it seemed to her, especially if she
were a little sleepy, that she could hear a murmur of poetry all around
her, the way a shell murmurs when you put it to your ear....
“Now all away to Tir na n’Og are many roads that run,”
“Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere.”
“Waken, lords and ladies gay!
To the greenwood haste away!”
“Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
But sad mortality o’ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea....”
It was not water that Helen Knapp drank out of the tin dipper hung over
the sink. It was ambrosia.
And Father told her stories, too, all kinds, lots of funny ones that
set them into gales of laughter!
And they talked, talked about everything, about her writing, and what
she was reading in school, and the last book she had got out of the
Library, and once in a great while Father would tell her something
about when he went to the State University and what an exciting
time he’d had finding out how much he loved books and poetry. Helen
had never heard Father speak of those years till now. He seemed to
feel, the way she did, that it was easier to talk about things you
cared awfully about when you were working together. Helen often
wondered why this was, why she didn’t feel so queer and shy when
she was doing something with her hands, buttering a cake-tin, or
cutting animal-shaped cookies out of the dough that Father rolled so
beautifully thin. She even found that she could talk to Father about
“things.”
By “things” Helen meant all that she had always before kept to
herself, what she had never supposed you could talk about to
anybody--the little poems that sprang up in your head; what you felt
when the spring days began to dapple the sidewalks with shadows from
the baby leaves; what you felt when you woke up at night and heard the
freight-trains hooting and groaning to and fro in the yards--Helen
loved living near the railroad--what you thought about growing up; what
you thought about God; what kind of a husband you would like to have
when you were big; what kind of children you hoped you’d have. “I’d
kind of _like_ a little baby boy with curly yellow hair,” she said
thoughtfully one day, as she bent her head over the butter and sugar
she was creaming together.
“Henry was like that when he was little,” her father said
reminiscently. “It _was_ nice. You were an awfully nice baby, too,
Helen. Of course, being the first, you made the biggest impression on
me. You had ideas of your very own from the time you began to creep.
You never would go on your hands and knees like other babies. You
always went on your hands and feet, with your little behinder sticking
up in the air like a ship’s prow.”
Helen laughed over that. She loved to have her father tell all about
when she had been a baby, and how much he had loved her, and how smart
she had been, and sometimes how funny, as on the day when she had
thought Mrs. Anderson had stayed long enough and had toddled over to
her, putting out a fat little hand and saying firmly, “By-by, Mis’
Anderson. By-by!”
Gracious! How long ago that seemed to Helen, and how grown-up it made
her feel, now that she was such a big girl, thirteen years old, helping
to do up the week’s baking and all. She felt old and ripe and sure
of herself as she listened to those baby-stories and wrung out the
dishcloths competently. (She and Father had wrestled with the question
of how to hold the dishcloths when you wrung them out, as they had
wrestled with the method of breaking an egg, and had slowly worked it
out together.)
She came to feel that talking to Father, when they were alone together,
was almost like thinking aloud, only better, because there was somebody
to help you figure things out when you got yourself all balled up.
Before this Helen had spent a great deal of time trying to figure
things out by herself, and getting so tangled that she didn’t know
where she had begun nor how to stop the wild whirl racing around in
her head. But now, with Father to hang on to, she could unravel those
twisted skeins of thought and wind them into balls where she could get
at them.
One day, as she washed the breakfast dishes for Father to wipe, she
noticed how the daffodils Aunt Mattie had brought were reflected in a
wet milk-pan. It made her think a poem, which she said over in her head
to make sure it was all right, and then repeated to Father,
“The shining tin usefulness of the milk-pan
Is glorified into beauty
By the presence of a flower.”
Father listened, looked at the golden reflection in the pan, said
appreciatively, “So it is,” and added, “That’s quite a pretty poem,
especially the last phrase.”
Helen knew it was pretty. She had secretly a high opinion of her own
talents. Why had she said it aloud except to make Father think what a
remarkable child she was? She washed the dishes thoughtfully, feeling a
gnawing discomfort. It was horrid of her to have said that just to make
Father admire her. It was showing off. She hated people who showed off.
She decided ascetically to punish herself by owning up to her conceit.
“I only told that poem to you because I thought it would make you think
what a poetic child I am,” she confessed contritely. “It wasn’t really
that I thought so much about the flower.”
She felt better. There now! Father would think what an honest, sincere
child she was!
Oh, dear! Oh, dear! That was showing off too! As bad as the first time!
She said hastily, “And I only owned up because I thought it would make
you think I’m honest and didn’t want to show off!”
This sort of tortuous winding was very familiar to Helen. She
frequently got herself into it and never knew how to get out. It always
frightened her a little, made her lose her head. She felt startled
now. “Why, Father, do you suppose I only said _that_, too, to make
you....” She lifted her dripping hands out of the dishwater and turned
wide, frightened eyes on her father. “Oh, Father, there I go! Do _you_
ever get going like that? One idea hitched to another and another and
another; and you keep grabbing at them and can’t get hold of one tight
enough to hold it still?”
Lester laughed ruefully. “_Do_ I? Nothing but! I often feel like a dog
digging into a woodchuck hole, al_most_ grabbing the woodchuck’s tail
and never quite getting there.”
“That’s just _it_!” said the little girl fervently.
“I tell you, Helen,” said Lester, “that’s one of the reasons why it’s a
pretty good thing for anybody with your kind of mind, or mine, to go to
college. If you try, you can find out in college how to get after those
thoughts that chase their own tails like that.”
“You _can_?” said Helen, astonished that other people knew about them.
“I suppose you think,” conjectured Lester, hanging up the
potato-masher, “that you’re the only person bothered that way. But as
a matter of fact, lots and lots of people have been from the beginning
of time! You’ve heard about the Greek philosophers, haven’t you? Well,
that is really about all they were up to.”
There was a pause, while Helen wiped off the top of the kitchen table.
Then she remarked thoughtfully, “I believe I’d _like_ to go to college.”
It was the first time she had ever thought of it.
Oh, no, it was not always recipes they talked about on Saturday
mornings!
And on Saturday nights, as he reached for some book to take to bed with
him, Lester’s hand not infrequently fell on an old, rubbed, shabby
volume which fell open at the passage,
“The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest--
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of childhood whether busy or at rest,
* * * * *
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,
High instincts, before which our mortal nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet the master-light of all our seeing;
Uphold us--cherish--and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence: truths that wake,
To perish never:
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor,
Nor man, nor boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!”
From here on, Lester always felt a great tide lift him high....
“Hence, in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.”
It was to the shouts of those children, to the reverberation of those
mighty waters that the paralyzed accountant often slipped quietly from
his narrow, drudging life into the “being of eternal silence.”