Part 6

Watch for a week the table conversation of your family and its guests. Count the number of times you hear the word “servant,” and remarks in regard to “household drudgery,” “menial service,” “knowing one’s place,” and “superiority to housework.” _What if the household employee has also kept count?_

Imagine that you can accept ten cents from a friend for doing an errand, half a dollar from a guest as he leaves the house and a dollar from another, and can flatter an unwelcome cousin in the hope of getting two dollars at his departure. Criticise mercilessly all of your friends after you have invited them to afternoon tea. Repeat at table all the gossip retailed by officious busy-bodies. Your own self-respect will be lowered. _What if moral deterioration takes place in the kitchen under the same conditions?_

_But what can I do?_

Try putting all the laundry-work out of the house; take up the carpets, paint the floors, put down rugs and send these out of the house to be cleaned, or clean house with a vacuum cleaning-machine; reduce useless work and incidentally add to the attractiveness of your house by taking down portières and paying storage on half of the bric-à-brac; buy ice-cream and cake and all “extras” at the woman’s exchange. These additional expenses will materially reduce your subscriptions to half-orphan asylums and to vacation funds for the indigent. _What if this course saves you from hotel existence and enables others to keep their homes intact and to pay for their own vacations?_

Substitute praise for constant censure and the principle of coöperation for that of “giving orders;” see that the daily paper is on the kitchen-table before it is a week old and that the magazines are promptly supplied; encourage the singing-class, the flower-bed, basket-making, bead-work, in-door evening games, and out-of-doors recreation; at least make the effort to give in some form a new and wholesome interest to lives that may have been repressed and mentally starved. Friends may smile and call the plan quixotic. _What if it encourages self-respect in the employee and therefore respect for his work?_

Consider the kitchen with its accompanying rooms in the light of an economic plant. Give the same careful attention to its arrangement and equipment that the owner of a manufacturing establishment gives to the fitting-up of a new factory with all the latest labor-saving contrivances and facilities for work; study the plumbing and the water-supply with the zest of a scientific investigator and select the cooking- and baking-utensils with the interest of an artist. This course may curtail expenditures for the “den” and the relinquishment of the “cosy corner.” _What if thereby your house and home gain in unity for employer as well as for employee?_

Abandon the attempt to maintain a Waldorf-Astoria style of living on a fifteen-hundred-dollar salary; abandon it, if you have the income to maintain it, if in maintaining it you are putting temptation in the path of a weaker friend and neighbor. This may reduce your calling-list by two hundred names. _What if you gain thereby peace of mind and a contented household?_

Establish household settlements among the cottagers at Newport, in the vicinity of Central Park, on Riverside Drive, Commonwealth Avenue, Euclid Avenue, and the North Shore Drive. _What if successful settlement work in these localities should enable the families of millionaires to bridge the impassable chasm that now separates the dining-room from the butler’s pantry and the reception-room from the linen-closet?_

* * * * *

_Will these temporary devices remove all friction in the running of my household machinery?_

No, they will probably not even lessen it. But these and similar expedients may be of benefit to you, inasmuch as they may help you to carry out the commendable advice of Charles Reade, “Put yourself in his place.” They may also be of benefit to your granddaughter in enabling her to be a member of that ideal trades-union--that between employer and employee.

OUR KITCHEN

Our kitchen is not that of a millionaire; it has not a tiled floor, enameled brick walls or glass shelves; it is not fitted with appliances for cooking by electricity or with automatic arrangements for bringing up coal and sending down ashes. It is a plain, ordinary kitchen, built new six years ago, and attached to an old house to take the place of the former basement kitchen. It was planned by the landlord and the carpenter for unknown tenants, and the general arrangement had to conform to the plan of a house built many years before. If, then, it has been possible, with these usual, every-day conditions to develop a kitchen that possesses convenience of arrangement and unity of purpose, it would seem that similar ends might be obtained in any kitchen, anywhere, by any person, through use of the same means,--careful thought.

We are busy women who have learned, in other lines of work outside the household, the value of order and system, and when we began housekeeping we saw no reason why the application to the kitchen of the same principles that were used in arranging a study or a library should not produce the same ease and joy in the work of the household. If a library, to be of service to those who work in it, must have its books classified according to some clearly recognized principle, would not a kitchen gain in usefulness if some principles of classifying its utensils were employed? If a study-table demands every convenience for work, ought not a kitchen-table to be equally well equipped? If the student can work more effectively in a cool room than in one that is stifling hot, will not a cook produce better results if working in a well-ventilated room? If the librarian needs special equipment, does not the butler need appliances adapted for his work? If the instructor needs the materials for investigation if his work is not to perish of dry rot, should not the houseworker have at hand all the materials needed if her work is to represent progress? If the parlor gains in attractiveness if its colors are harmonious, will not the kitchen gain if thought is given to appropriate decoration?

It was the affirmative answer to these and similar questions that led to the evolution of our kitchen from a state of unadorned newness to its present condition. An indulgent landlord provided a model range, a copper boiler, a porcelain-lined sink, and a double shelf; we have added the gas-stove, the instantaneous water-heater, the electric fan, two double shelves and all the utensils. Thus equipped, what does our kitchen represent?

To answer this question it is necessary to consider its general arrangement. The north side is filled by a window, the range, and the outside door. This with the adjacent east side, we call “the cooking side.” Here are arranged boilers, sauce-pans, broilers, and all implements large or small needed for cooking.

The south side is filled by the door leading into the refrigerator-closet, the baking-table, and the door leading into the butler’s pantry. This we call the “baking side,” for here is the baking-table with its bins for flour and meal, its drawers for baking-spoons, knives and forks, and sliding shelves for baking and for bread-cutting. Above it are various small utensils needed in baking, together with spices, essences, and various condiments. A “kitchen indicator” showing articles needed from the grocer’s hangs at the left of the shelf, a peg at the end holds the household bills, and pegs at the right are for shears, scissors, a pin-cushion, and a cushion for needles used in preparing roasts.

The west side is the “cleaning side.” This side is our special pride and delight, for here on a corner shelf is our electric fan, the drop-leaf table for drying dishes, the porcelain sink with its shining brass faucets, the nickel instantaneous water-heater, and our fine forty-gallon copper boiler. Here above the sink are collected the cleaning-brushes of various kinds, ammonia, borax, scouring-sand, and all cleaning preparations. The sink is set about three inches too low for comfortable use, a fault in sinks almost universal, and to remedy this defect a rack was evolved from four nickel towel-bars joined by connecting metal plates. Lack of wall space required that the shelf on this side of the room should be shared equally between the preparations for cleaning and the kitchen library, while the basket for newspapers and magazines occupies the end of the cleaning-table. But does not cleanliness of mind accompany cleanliness of material equipment?

The outside entry to the kitchen serves, in default of other place, as a cleaning-closet. Here are kept brooms, dusters, scrubbing-brushes, polishing-brushes, dusting-mops and cleaning-mops. Here also, easy of access, is kept the garbage-pail,--three times each week emptied by the city garbage collector and three times each week scrubbed with hot soap-suds.

This is our kitchen as regards its ground plan and its exterior aspect. But the student of history always looks behind the external surface and studies the record; hence our kitchen records a belief in a few principles that seem fundamental in a household.

The first principle is that a kitchen should be absolutely sanitary in all its appointments. This means not only filtered cistern water, a still for distilling water, a porcelain-lined sink, and an abundance of hot water, but it means an absence of cubby-holes and cupboards where articles may be tucked away and accumulate dirt. Everything is in the open, every part of the kitchen is kept spotlessly clean, and we have never seen a rat or a water-bug about the house.

A second belief recorded by our kitchen is that of unity of plan. If the artist places before all else in importance the composition of his picture, if the author believes that his book should be the elaboration of a single idea, if the engineer knows that every part of his engine fits by design into every other part, it would seem clear that the application of the same principle is essential in the household. If the kitchen is to sustain an organic relationship to the other parts of the house it must represent in the arrangement of all its details the same idea of unity of composition that is expressed in a painting, of unity of development that gives life to a book, of unity of design that makes the perfect engine.

A third idea represented in our kitchen is that it must be equipped with every labor-saving device and with every convenience for work, if satisfactory results are to be secured. The first thought of the manufacturer is for the equipment of his manufacturing plant with every modern appliance. Can a perfect product come from imperfect, inadequate means of work in the household? The application of this principle has of necessity involved many experiments,--inventions will not work, or good ones are superseded by better ones, or a new need arises and must be met. Every week sees some article discarded because an improvement on it has been found. In the city of twenty-two thousand inhabitants in which we live automobiles have been used six years and approximately three hundred are now owned there and in the vicinity, but not one can be found of a pattern prior to that of three years ago. If an automobile must be disposed of because it is not of the most recent model, does it seem unreasonable to cast aside a twenty-five cent eggbeater that chafes the hands, a pineapple-snipper that wastes the fruit, an unsightly broken sauce-pan, and a patent water-cooler that will not cool the water?

But man does not live by bread alone, and a kitchen may be sanitary in all its arrangements, it may represent unity of plan, it may have every modern convenience, and yet it may lack the essential of attractiveness. The arts and crafts movement has not yet reached the kitchen, and it is thus almost impossible to secure cooking-utensils of good artistic design and color. But the second-hand store will often furnish a piece of good pottery, brass, or copper that may be utilized in the kitchen and serve the added purpose of increasing its attractiveness.

Yet a kitchen may illustrate all of these principles and still lack those subtle features that establish, unconsciously, some connection between it and its predecessors in other times and in other places. If the theory of evolution has taught us not only in science but in art and in politics and in everything connected with our daily life to look behind the surface and to seek the origins of things, if it has taught us ever to look for the relationship between the present and the past, surely the kitchen must not be excluded from this process of thought. Apparently the work performed there each day has neither connection with the past nor outlook into the future, yet this is but a superficial aspect of the situation. The kitchen of to-day with gas-range and instantaneous water-heater is the direct heir of the kitchen of yesterday with coal-range and copper boiler, and of that of the day-before-yesterday, with open fire and cauldron. An attempt to maintain this connection with the past is sought through the photographs on the walls. Two views of early colonial kitchens give historic continuity with the past, a photograph of the interior of a Dutch kitchen gives a touch of that cosmopolitanism that makes the whole world akin, while that of a famous hotel in New York City places us by prophetic fiction in the class of millionaires.

Such is our kitchen. “Does it pay?” It has paid us.

AN ILLUSTRATED EDITION

It is the day of the illustrated edition, and even more the day of the illustrator. Happy is the author to whom is accorded the honor of an illustrated edition of his latest book. Still happier is he whose facile, practiced pen is called into requisition to illustrate the works of the great artists found in our monthly magazines. Unhappy is the one whose book _no_ artist, even if gifted with imagination, can illustrate, and whose name no publishing house has ever entered on its card catalogue of pen illustrators of artistic sketches. But more fortunate times may await the unillustratable and non-illustrating author. A changing phraseology reflects a new _rapprochement_ between author and artist and a breaking-down of the barriers that once confined each within definite limits. There are even indications that the present positions of author and artist may be reversed and that the non-illustrating author may become quite independent of the previously necessary artist. “Pen pictures,” “sketches in black and white,” “pastels in prose,” all indicate the possibilities open to the author of combining with his own vocation that of the artist whose existence thus becomes unnecessary to his own. Nay more, the unillustratable author may take heart, for as the skillful acrobat learns the feat of walking on his hands, so the literary trickster may achieve the paradox of illustrating works that cannot be illustrated.

This theory has been the result of contemplating on the one hand the impossibility of illustrating a modest book dealing with statistics and equally prosaic facts and of noting on the other hand the popular demand that every book shall be illustrated. How shall man attain unto the unattainable?

A reminiscent mood led the author to blow the dust from the top of her last book, written ten years ago and not yet, unhappily, out of its second edition, and to turn over its half-forgotten pages. She found a passing interest in recalling her conclusions as they were laid bare on the pages of the book, but undreamed-of pleasures took form and shape as she remembered the circumstances under which each page had been written. Nay more, there opened out the vision of the unattainable illustrated edition. A series of pictures passed before her, far more interesting than the book they illustrated, and thus a prosaic work attained a place in that desirable class in which are found all books whose text seems only as a pretext for the artist’s brush.

The first picture was that of the receipt of a letter written in reply to a humble request for information in regard to the number of maids employed in the household, the length of time they had been employed, and similar facts obvious to one’s friends and neighbors. The letter was written on Tiffany’s finest stationery, it bore a crest and a coat of arms so undecipherable as to be a guarantee of its high aristocratic lineage, and its perfume was that of Araby the Blest. But the letter was written in the third person and the information it conveyed was not that which had been sought but the unexpected statement that the inquiry was impertinent and under no consideration whatever could be answered. Alas, the questioner had known that her questions would demand time and thought, but what artist, save the author, could depict the abyss into which the questioner was hurled by the epithet “impertinent?”

The second picture also had a letter in the foreground. The quest for information had led to an appeal to the only authority known to the questioner, but it was to an authority of world-wide reputation, and the unknown questioner hesitated long. Would the great man heed the appeal, even if the questioner could justify herself in making it? But the die was cast and the result was a long, kindly, painstaking letter not only giving in detail all the information sought but also suggesting similar by-paths to be explored. “Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

The third picture was that of a woman’s club. The writer had never belonged to a woman’s club, save for a brief period of nominal connection with one, and it had been with much trepidation that she had accepted an invitation to read a paper before one of these organizations. But she wrote an article in which she attempted to show by means of all the facts and arguments at her command that the establishment of training-schools for domestic employees would not and could not remedy household ills. She valiantly read the paper and at the close of the hour one of the company thanked her heartily “for advocating the establishment of training-schools for servants.” Was it the woman, or the club?

The fourth picture is of a large corner room, with low ceiling, facing south and west. Its long table is covered with papers, reports, schedules, and census publications, and here, from early morning until late at night, during the hottest weeks of the early summer, the occupant of the room attempted to work out some of the economic laws governing domestic service. Her fellow occupants of the large building were the numerous maids engaged in cleaning it. Their work also was difficult, but morning tea tided over the time between breakfast and dinner, and work for the day closed at four o’clock. How would an artist portray the question that came each night--what would be the effect of an eight-hour day on economic investigation?

The fifth picture is one of a small room opening on an air-shaft, in a New York hotel. The occupant had arrived late, the hotel was crowded, and no other room was available. But it was not the smallness of the room, or the single window opening on the air-shaft that gave the occupant a chill on a July night,--it was the folding-bed. Her traveling-bag contained a new work on economic history, having a chapter on domestic service, and turning on all the electric lights, she read until daylight, never since quite sure whether it was devotion to history or craven fear of the deadly folding-bed.

The sixth picture is one of a railway carriage in provincial France. The American traveler, in search of information, had attempted to learn from her chance companion in the carriage somewhat of domestic service in France. Much valuable information was politely given, and then the tables were turned. But the interest of the French lady was centred, not in the status of domestic service in America, but in the personal status of her new acquaintance. That she was traveling alone might be accepted, though certainly to be deprecated. But what artist shall show forth the amazement on the face of the French lady when she heard the affirmative answer to her question, “But surely it is not possible that Madame will find no one at the station to meet her?”

The seventh picture is a series of dissolving views that suggest the portrait of a lady standing with her back to the onlooker and gazing at her own face reflected in a mirror opposite. A few months after the book was published, its author, attracted by the title of an article, purchased a new review to while away a railway journey. She read the article--and pondered. It seemed strangely familiar and soon she realized that it was in effect one of the chapters in her own book. It had not even suffered “a sea-change into something rich and strange,” for the illustrations used were the same that the first author had collected from the experiences of her personal friends, and to every one she could have attached a name, as presumably the second author could not do. The second in the series of dissolving views is of a correspondence with a gentleman who had given a course of lectures on domestic service in a remote city. The author of the book had expressed a desire to sit at the feet of Gamaliel and at length secured the loan of the manuscript from which the lectures were given. Probably a sea-change was not to be looked for in an interior city, and the author of the book rejoiced to find so much community of interest with the author of the lectures. The third in the series of dissolving views was of a certain bibliography. It had appeared in the first number of a new report on household affairs and the author was interested in it as a probable illustration of thought transference. Here was the title of a book she had consulted in the Bibliothèque Nationale and that presumably was not to be found in American libraries. Here was the title of a curious book she had picked up when “bouquinering” on the Quai Voltaire and had added to her private library. This was the title of another curious book found in a great university library,--interesting, but of little value. This was the line-long title of a collection of technical German laws found in Saxony. Here was the title of an old book that had been valued as a family heritage, but of no special importance to any one else. The compiler of the so-called “books of reference” had overlooked the sub-title in the book--“full titles of works referred to in the text”--and had not realized that the use of the word “bibliography” had been demanded by the exigencies of type. To recommend for use as a working bibliography a list of “full titles of works referred to in the text,”--was it perhaps donning an evening dress when starting for the golf-links?

The dissolving views have given the author the greatest pleasure of all the illustrations of the book. There is a favorite jest concerning books that have been read only by the author and the proof-reader. It is indeed true that for the most part an author writes a book to please himself, not to gain readers. But there is a secret joy if two birds can be brought down with the same stone and a reader, other than the proof-reader, be found. The purchase of a book does not necessarily imply that the book is read,--public libraries add the latest new books, private libraries are interested in first editions, and authors buy presentation copies for their friends. But none of these purchasers guarantee that the book purchased will be read. Was it not a cause for open rejoicing that not only one but three readers had been found, and more than that, that these three readers had not only been non-combatants, but had agreed so entirely with the views of the author?