Part 3

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 repetition 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 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.'