The Forerunner Part 106

Let us face this fact. In the residence part of a city the kitchen is almost the only source of dirt.

The kitchen-stove furnishes its quota of coal-dust, coal-gas and coal ashes. But for the kitchen a heating plant could warm many blocks of houses, and keep that source of dirt at a minimum, thus clearing our streets of the ash-can and ash-cart nuisances.

The kitchen is wholly responsible for the garbage pail; each area or alley gate offering for inspection and infection its unsavory receptacle; and beyond that, the kitchen is in large measure responsible for the stable. In the quiet streets where people live, the horses which defile those streets, which break the quiet, wear the pavement, and wring the hearts of lovers of animals, are almost all kitchen horses.

At early dawn the milkman's horse--many milkmen's horses. Then the baker's horse--many bakers' horses. Then the iceman's horse, the fishman's horse, the market man's horse, the vegetable man's horse, the grocer's horse, the confectioner's horse; with, of course, the ashman's horse, the garbage man's horse, and the coal man's horse. All these horses and their various stables, help to maintain the breeding of flies; and the kitchen maintains them.

n.o.body ever liked flies. The rigorous housewife has long pursued them with waving towel and flapping paper; dark plates of fly poison are set on high places where the children can only occasionally get it; and the dreadful "tanglefoot" hangs here and there, agonizing our ears with the frantic buzzing of its slow-dying victims.

The housewife objected to the fly because he made work for her, speckling all things offensively; and the house-husband objected to him because he walked on his face, or his bald spot, and woke him from needed slumber.

Also no one likes flies floating dankly in the soup, disguised as currants, or sacrificing their legs to the b.u.t.ter. But these distastes are as nothing to the new Terror of the Fly. He is now seen to be a purveyor of disease--we might say _the_ purveyor of disease.

The cat and the dog, the rat and the mouse and their small parasites are responsible for some diseases. The deadly Anopheles only brings malaria, even the Stegonyia has but one fever in his gift, albeit a yellow one; but Musca Domestica deposits on our food, on our clothing, on our pillows, on our very faces, according to the N. Y. Medical Journal, the germs of "tuberculosis, leprosy, cholera, summer diarrhea of children, plague, carbuncle, yaws, tapeworm, swine-plague and typhoid fever."

Now that is a nice beast to have in the house! And more especially that is a nice beast to breed in the house, to maintain, feed, shelter, and encourage.

When shall we be willing to face the simple fact that the preparation of food is not a suitable process for the home?

The vegetarian will say that if we eliminate meat all will be well; let him read again my tale of the Cabbage and the Bluebottle. But meat is unquestionably the worst of our food supply as far as flies are concerned. The fly delights in the voluminous cow, even while alive; thrives in her stable, makes free with her milk, and follows her from steak to soup with ceaseless interest. If we had no meat, no fish, no milk, no cheese, no b.u.t.ter, no eggs, we should reduce our bait a little; but there would still remain plenty of fly provender, and also the horses to bring it to our myriad doors.

Why not keep the food and leave out the fly?

Let us for once fairly face the possibility of a home without a kitchen.

Look at it--a real house, in no way different from any other house in front. But it does differ in the back--for it has no back! Its back is another front, just as pretty, just as dignified, just as _clean._ There is a dining-room in this house, cool, sweet, well-screened from pa.s.sing, vagrant winged things, but that is all; no kitchen, no kitchen-sink, no raw meat coming in and garbage going out, no grease, no smell of frying.

But how shall we get our food into our dining-rooms?

It will be delivered, cooked, in shining aluminium receptacles hot and steaming, cold and fresh--all this _has been done._ And it and its dishes, will go away again, tight-closed, leaving you to brush up the crumbs and fold the tablecloth. If you want your own elaborate sets of china enough to wash dishes, that is quite permissible, a butler's pantry will take care of that.

There is no more reason why a civilized family should cook its own food in its own kitchen than kill its own pig in its own backyard.

Then rises the pathetic cry about not liking it. Of course some people won't like it. Some people never like any new way of doing things.

Food habits are proverbially hard to change.

But I can tell you who will like it--that is the woman who is tired of planning meals, tired of ordering meals, tired of managing servants, or tired--deadly tired--of her own cooking.

And one generation of children, growIng up in kitchenless homes, eating food that is prepared by trained experts and not by "greenhorns," used to science and art in the food supply instead of affection and ignorance--they will like it.

We like what we are used to, and if we have been used to it for a thousand years we like it more intensely. But that proves nothing at all except that we are used to it. It does not prove the thing is good for us--nor that we can not get used to something better and like that, in course of time, just as devotedly. One would think, observing the att.i.tude of most of us toward any proposed change, that so far we had never changed at all.

But with all history behind us; with that long, long flight of little steps we took so many centuries to climb, and then, closer, the swiftly heightening large steps we have been taking in these later years ever more swiftly; what then accounts for our always clinging so desperately to the one behind, and resisting so furiously being forced up one more!

It is like the old story of the liberal-minded Grandma and the combination suit. She visited her daughter in New York, resolved to keep up with Progress.

They took her to hear Ignatius Donnelly with his Baconian theory; Ingersoll hammering at Moses, and Jenness-Miller with her Reformed Clothes for Women.

Then the old lady broke away and returned to her rural home. "They took away my Shakespeare, and they took away my G.o.d," said she; "but when they took away my chemise I couldn't stand it."

We have seen the home robbed and depleted as years have pa.s.sed; with struggle and objection, no doubt, but inevitably shrinking. Out went the shears and the carders, out went the dye tub and the spinning-wheels; big wool wheel, little flax wheel, all gone. Out went the clattering loom; out went the quilting-frame, the candle-mould, the little mallet to break up the tall blue-papered "sugar loaves."

Some of us have seen all these. In long remote places they are still to be found. In the neighborhood of Chicago's Hull House was found a woman to whom the spinning-wheel was a wonderful modern invention! She spun with a spindle--like Clotho.

Now why do reasoning people, seeing all this behind them, so dread and resist the next step before them--the eliminating of the kitchen? Shall we never learn, that as a means of feeding the world it is not a success? It does not bring health and happiness. Every competent woman is not a competent cook and never will be; any more than every man is a competent carpenter. The preparation of food is too important a task to be left to a private servant--whether hired or married.

There are reasons, many, and good, why the kitchen must go; reasons of health, of economy, of happiness; but this last reason is a good accelerator--the Horror of the Fly.

Here he is by millions and millions: Here She is, by trillions. Their hairy feet, their whiskered probosces, slop and paddle in every foul and nauseous thing. They sit twiddling their paws on the pauper's sickbed; and then twiddle those same paws on our warm chocolate-cake.

And every home that keeps a kitchen, with its attendant stables, helps to maintain and disseminate this scourge of humanity, this universal purveyor of infectious disease--The Kitchen Fly.

ALAS!

Have those in monstrous hats no glimmering dream Of the high beauty of the human head, House of the brain: seat of the sentient soul; Haloed for sainthood; crowned for royalty; Bright-ringed with roses, wreathed with n.o.ble bays, Most beautifully bound with shining hair.

Alas for the soft glory they have lost!

Alas for the Ashantee wigs they wear!

Nor plait nor coil nor ringlet, but a ma.s.s Of shorn dead hair from poorer women's heads.

Of bulging wire and hard, stiff, glittering bands.

A heap no loving hand would long to touch.

This body is the glory of the world; The head the body's crown; but we on this Plant like a fool's-cap these preposterous forms.

Alas for women's folly; and alas For man, who likes his women to be fools, And carefully has bred them to this end.

HER PETS

She saw the pleasant living creatures; bright birds, scattering music in the air, fish like darting lights in the dark water; beasts with soft eyes and softer fur. Therefore to her house she brought them, in chains and cages and glaring jails of gla.s.s she kept them, prisoners and exiles all.

Out of the plenteous, pure water, freshened by free air, darkened by shadowing leaves and hidden ledges; away from pleasant chase of food desired; come the gold-red fish she loves; come to foul airless water, scant and warm, where they gasp faintly to and fro, in dim distress; come to the stale monotonous food that falls to them inert; come with their lidless eyes to the round high-placed globe of gla.s.s, set in a window in the sun, reflecting and refracting the fierce light from every side;--even as the Carthaginians tortured their prisoners she tortures the gold-red fish she loves.

Out of the billowing green boughs of the forest, the endless oceans of bright air, the refreshing rain, the winds that lift and rush and fill with wild rejoicing; out of the whispering darkness of deep leaves, the wide sweet light of sunlit hill and valley; away from pleasant chase of food desired; come the yellow song birds which she loves; come over land and sea in small tight wicker cells; come to prisons of gilded wires scarce larger; come to the smothering house air, the dull constant dreary walls, the sick heat, the smell of coal gas and the smoke of oil; to such stale monotonous food as falls to them inert; to hop and hop and hop, to sing madly to no end, and dream of flight,--to this come the birds she loves.

Out of his long wild past; lifted to be a.s.sistant in the chase, house guardian, brother shepherd; comes the friend of man to be the pet of woman. Down, down, he sinks; no shepherd, no hunter, no guardian now; far from the pleasant chase of food desired; only a pet, her pet.

Dwarfed, distorted, feeble; a snub-nosed monsterling; ears cropped, tail cut, hair shaved in ludicrous patches; collared and chained; basketed, blanketed, braceleted, _dressed,_--O last and utter ignominy!--stuffed on unnatural food till he waddles grossly, panting and diseased; so comes the dog she loves.

Of bird and beast and fish, her pets, what sacrifice is asked? They must first lose freedom, the essential joy of every life; fresh air, fresh water, the daily need of every life. They must lose the search and chase of natural food, the major occupation of every animal, deprived of which they are deprived of function; nerve, muscle, brain,--all must deteriorate, disused. They must lose the joy of long adaptation to environment; no few generations in houses can overcome the longings bred in countless ages for sky and river, forest and plain and hill.