The Comforts of Home Part 2

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 ap.r.o.n. 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 bas.e.m.e.nt. 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 pa.s.sive 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 Sat.u.r.day-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 sc.r.a.ped 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 repet.i.tion 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!

But this digression into the 'ichthus and pause' of housework--I seem to 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 b.u.t.ter the toasted crackers yourself, _with all the b.u.t.ter 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sing 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 G.o.d! 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 st.u.r.dy 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 inst.i.tutions, 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 s.p.a.ce, 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, impa.s.sive 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 f.a.ggots."' 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 att.i.tude 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, impa.s.sive 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 a.s.sumed grandeur. His strange, impa.s.sive 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 ap.r.o.n before he began plumbing. And in all the world there was n.o.body 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.