Read Ebook: Niobe: Nykyajan romaani by Lie Jonas Inha Into Konrad Translator

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Ebook has 573 lines and 54211 words, and 12 pages

Thoughts While Getting Settled 1

Praise of Open Fires 16

Furnace and I 29

No Stairs--No Attic 41

Concerning Kitchens 56

The Plumber Appreciated 68

The Home of the Porcelain Tub 81

At Home in the Guest Chamber 95

THOUGHTS WHILE GETTING SETTLED

PROPERLY speaking, the new house was old. A hundred years and more had gone over its chimney,--down which, as we were to discover later, a hundred flies and more would come when the open fires had warmed it,--and within doors it would have charmed any amateur of the Colonial by the antiquity of its furnishings. Temporarily it belonged to me, my executors, administrators, and assigns. But there were limits to our possession. None of us might 'permit any hole to be drilled or made in the stone or brick-work of said building'; no 'sign or placard' might we place upon it; we might not 'over-load, damage, or deface' it; nor might we 'carry on any unlawful, improper, noisy, or offensive trade' in it. We had admitted that the glass was whole and in good order, and bound ourselves to keep it good, unless broken by fire, with glass of the same kind and quality. In case I became bankrupt I had agreed that the owner, the owner's executors, the owner's administrators, and the owner's assigns should treat me with every form of ignominy that the law has yet invented to make bankruptcy more distressing. Nor could I hold them responsible if our guests fell down the cellar stairs; although there I think they would be morally responsible, for a steeper flight of cellar stairs I simply cannot imagine.

FOR SALE

Observe the worm turning!

It was the dining-room that had won us, formerly the kitchen and still complete--with the brick oven; the crane; the fat, three-legged pots and spider; a thing that, after much debate, we think must have been a bread-toaster; and a kind of overgrown curry-comb with which, so we imagine, the original dwellers were wont to rake the hot ashes from the brick oven. Also a warming-pan. And although these objects charm me, and I delight to live with them, I cannot but wonder whether a hundred years from now there may not be persons to furnish their dining-rooms with just such a stove as stands at present in my real kitchen; and perhaps to suspend beside it one of those quaint contraptions with which the jolly old chaps in the early twentieth century used to kill flies. I hear in imagination the host of that period explaining the implement to his wondering guests,--being expert in such matters, he will produce the technical term 'swat' with an air of easy familiarity,--and see him hanging it reverently up again beside the dear old stove and right over the picturesque old coal-hod. Perhaps, too, he will point out the beautiful, sturdy lines of the coal-hod.

There appears in many business offices, although it is not, so far as I know, the official slogan of 'efficiency in business,' a card with the motto, 'Do It Now.' I looked into that room which was destined to be the library: formerly it had been a bedroom, and the four-poster bed and noble mahogany bureau were to have vanished upstairs before my arrival. But now, peering past and above and under the d?bris that the avalanche had left there, I recognized the noble mahogany bureau in the far corner, mourning presumably for its departed companion, the four-poster. I beheld it with a misgiving which I tried to put from me, but which came back from moment to moment and whispered in whichever ear was nearer.

'Just suppose,' whispered Misgiving, 'that the man who was hired to take that bureau upstairs found that it wouldn't go up!!!!'

And I thought of that stairway, that went up furtively from the dining-room which had once been the kitchen, a delightful stairway , but narrow, narrow; and with a right angle just where a right angle was least desirable. It had been as much as they could do to get up the trunks.

'You will very likely have to leave the bureau in the library,' whispered Misgiving, 'and that will be inconvenient--won't it?--when you have company. Company will have to dress in the library or else gather up its clothes and run.'--'Library!' said Misgiving. 'Who ever heard of a bureau in a library? People will think the library table is a folding bed. You can't disguise a noble old bureau like that by putting books on it,' said Misgiving. 'Once a bureau always a bureau.--What will your wife say,' asked Misgiving, 'when she learns that the spare-room bureau has to stay downstairs in the library?'

People who, having something to do, 'do it now,' live in the present. I seized the nearest object, a chair, and dragged it into the next room; I seized the next object, a box, and carried it to the cellar; I risked my life on the cellar stairs; I became concentrated fury myself. In getting settled, whether you are a pioneer or a householder, the first thing is to make a clearing. No matter where things go, provided only that they go somewhere else. No matter what happened, no matter if bureaus remained forever in libraries, no matter if the awful puzzle that the strong men of the moving van had left me remained forever insoluble--this was my home and I had to live in it for the term of one year. I took off my coat, hung it up somewhere--and found it again two days afterward. I attacked boxes, chairs, tables, boxes, books, bric-?-brac, more boxes, chairs, tables. I ran here and there, carrying things. I excelled the bee. I made a clearing, which grew larger and larger. I gained self-confidence. Elsewhere I knew that other hands were unpacking trunks; that another mind was directing those mysteries which out of chaos would evolve dinner; now and then, in my death-defying feat of going down cellar, I caught a glimpse of the furnace,--fat-bellied monster whom I must later feed like a coal-eating baby.

It is a question--parenthetically--whether it is truly sportsmanlike to live in a quaint old colonial cottage with a furnace and electric lights. I have heard amateurs of the Colonial declare that they would willingly die before they would live in an electrically lighted colonial cottage. The anachronism horrifies them: they would have death or candles. Probably they feel the same way about a furnace and a bath-room. Yet I have no doubt that the builders of this colonial cottage would have opened their hearts to all these inventions; and I am not sure that they would have regarded as anything but funny the idea that their own kitchen paraphernalia would some day be used to decorate my dining-room. I go further. Granting that electric lights, a furnace, and a bath-room are anachronisms in this quaint old colonial cottage--what am I but an anachronism myself? We must stand together, the furnace, the electric metre, the porcelain bath-tub, and I, and keep each other in countenance.

Making a clearing is a long step forward in getting settled; after that it is a matter of days, a slow dawn of orderliness. In a quaint old colonial cottage are many closets, few if any of them located according to modern notions of convenience. The clothes closet that ought to be in the spare room upstairs is downstairs in the library with the spare-room bureau; the upstairs closets are under the eaves of the sloping roof--the way to utilize them to the best advantage is to enter on your hands and knees, carrying an electric torch between your teeth. Inside the closet you turn on your back, illuminate the pendant garments with your torch, drag whatever you select down from the hook, grasp it firmly with your teeth, and so out again on your hands and knees, rolling the electric torch gently before you. We see now why in those good old days chests of drawers were popular--fortunately we have one of our own that somehow has got up the stairway; and we see also, as we begin to settle into it, what is perhaps the secret of this humbler colonial architecture. The Colonial Jack who built this house wanted some rooms round a chimney and a roof that the snow would slide off; and so he built it; and where-ever he found a space he made a closet or a cupboard; and because he had no other kind, he put in small-paned windows; and all he did was substantial and honest--and beautiful, in its humble way, by accident.

But about that bureau?

PRAISE OF OPEN FIRES

I HAVE read and heard much praise of open fires, but I recall no praise of bringing in the wood. There is, to be sure, the good old song:--

Come bring with a noise, My merrie, merrie boys, The Christmas log to the firing; While my good dame, she Bids ye all make free, And drink to your heart's desiring.

And there is the Song That Has Never Been Sung--nor ever will be, so the tune is immaterial:--

How jolly it is, of a cold winter morning, To pop out of bed just a bit before dawning, And, thinking the while of your jolly cold bath, To kindle a flame on your jolly cold hearth! Ah me, it is merry! Sing derry-down-derry! Where now is the lark? I am up before him. I chuckle with glee at this quaint little whim. I make up the fire--pray Heaven it catches! But what in the world have they done with the matches? Ah me, it is merry! Sing derry-down-derry!

And so forth, and so forth.

I invented that song myself, in January, 1918, when circumstances led me--so to speak, by the nape of the neck--to heat my home with wood because nowhere could I buy coal. But I felt no inpulse to sing it--simply a deeper, kindlier sympathy for forefather in the good old days before stoves and furnaces. I do not blame him for not taking a cold bath. I wish in vain that he had had the thing that I call a match. An archaeological authority tells me how forefather managed without it:--

'Holding between the thumb and forefinger of the right hand a piece of imported gun-flint , strike it diagonally against a circlet of properly tempered steel held in the left hand, so that the spark flies downward on a dry, scorched linen rag lying in a tin cup . When the spark instantly catches the rag, blow or touch it into flame against the sulphur-tipped end of a match, which will not otherwise ignite. Then with the burning match, light a candle socketed in the lid of the tinder-box, and smother the smouldering rag with an inner tin lid dropped upon it. Thus you were master of the house of a winter's morning when the fires were out.'

But I wouldn't believe that archaeological authority if he had added, 'singing at your task.' Singeing at it seems more plausible.

To many of us plain bread-and-butter persons, praise of open fires sometimes seems a little too warm and comfortable--too smugly contemplative. We like open fires. We would have them in every room in the house except the kitchen and bath-room--and perhaps in the bath-room, where we could hang our towels from the mantelpiece , and let them warm while we were taking our baths. We go as far as any in regarding the open fire as a welcoming host in the hall, an undisturbing companion in the library, an encourager of digestion in the dining-room, an enlivener in the living-room, and a good-night thought of hospitality in the guest-chamber. But we cannot follow the essayist who speaks scornfully of hot-water pipes. 'From the security of ambush,' says he, 'they merely heat, and heat whose source is invisible is not to be coveted at all.'

He brushes aside the questions. 'With a fire in one's bedroom,' says he, 'sleep comes witchingly.'

If you give it half a chance, my friend, this 'joy perpetual,' as you call it, will eat you up.

And yet we agree with anybody that nothing else in the house has appealed so long and so universally to the imagination of man. It began before houses. Remote and little in the far perspective of time, we see a distant and awful-looking relative, whom we blush to acknowledge, kindling his fire; and that fire, open as all outdoors, was the seed and beginning of domestic living. With it, the Objectionable Ancestor learned to cook, and in this way differentiated himself from the beasts. Kindling it, he learned to swear, and differentiated himself further. Thinking about it, his dull but promising mind conceived the advantage of having somebody else to kindle it; so he caught an awful-looking woman, and instituted the family circle. Soon, I fancy, he acquired the habit of sitting beside his fire when he should have been doing something more active; but a million years must pass before he was presentable, and another million before he had coat-tails, and could stand in front of it, spreading them like a peacock in the pride of his achievement--a Captain Bonavita turning his back on the lion. I would have you note, for what it may be worth, that praise of open fires has always been masculine rather than feminine.

Nowadays, I judge, many of his descendants find the open fire much like a little movie theatre in the home. Under the proscenium arch of the fireplace the flames supply actors and scenery, and the show goes on indefinitely. It is better than a movie, for it has color, and lacks the agonizing facial contortions and interpolated text: 'Even a Princess is just a girl--at Coney Island'; 'It is like the nobility of your true heart, old friend, but I cannot accept the heroic sacrifice.'

It is a pleasant place to sit--and yet how rapidly and unanimously, when coal came into use, and stoves came on the market, did people stop sitting, and brick up their fireplaces! They had no time for essays, but praise of stoves ascended wherever the wonderful things were available. A new world was born: stoves! kitchen ranges! furnaces! hot-water pipes! heat all over the house!--invisible, to be sure, but nobody seemed to worry about that. And out went the open fire--to be lit again later, but never again as a cooker of food and a warmer of the whole house. It came back to be sat by.

Fires go out, but each new flame is a reincarnation. Our open fires are but miniatures of the old-time roarers that set the hall or tavern harmlessly ablaze, and lit its windows for the ruddy encouragement of winter-blown travelers. Reverting to the menagerie for a figure, the open fires of the past were lions, those of to-day are cubs. Like cubs they amuse us; and so we forget what grim and tragic humors of life the open fire must necessarily have witnessed. Was it not before an open fire that Cain killed Abel? In the glow of those bright flames, dancing, winking, has been planned every villainy of which mankind is capable: winked they have at every sin that could be sinned by fire-light. Elemental and without morals, the open fire has lived in hovels as well as in palaces; it has lighted the student, heels in air and lying on his belly to study his book; the Puritan on his knees at prayer; the reveler, flat on his back and snoring in maudlin sleep under the table. And now, a luxury of the well-to-do, it is departing, dancing and winking as usual, out of the universal life to which it has been as necessary as cooked food and warmth in winter.

But perhaps, after all, it is not yet too late for praise of bringing in the wood. Let us at least provide the good old song, and trust to luck that four or five hundred years from now some imaginative gentleman, digesting his dinner before a surviving open fire, will hear afar off the faint but jolly chorus:--

Come, lads, all together, And get the wood in. This brisk zero weather Is pleasant as sin. Put on your warm hosen, And shuffle a bit; Your toes may be frozen Before you know it. To sit mug-a-mugging The fire who could, That might be out lugging In armfuls of wood? In--armfuls--of--wood!

FURNACE AND I

Before meeting this furnace I had lived in apartments, and my mental conception of a ton of coal had been as of something enormous, sufficient to heat the average house a month. A furnace was to me a remote mystery operated by a high priest called 'janitor,' whom I vaguely connected with the lines of Smollett,--

Th' Hesperian dragon not more fierce and fell; Nor the gaunt, growling janitor of Hell.

I took my heat as a matter of course. If I wanted more of it, I spoke warmly to the janitor through a speaking tube, and--after a while--there was more heat. If I wanted less, I spoke to him coldly, in the same distant, godlike way, and--after a while--there was less heat. In neither case, I discovered, did an ordinary tone of voice get any result whatever; and, although a fat man himself, he sometimes growled back through the tube very much like the gaunt specimen mentioned by Smollett. But I gave little thought to him. I had what is called an 'intelligent idea' that to produce more heat he opened a 'draft,' and to reduce heat he closed it, the effect of a draft on a furnace being just the opposite to its effect on a janitor. At night he 'shook the furnace down,' in the morning he 'shook the furnace up.' One gathers such knowledge casually, without conscious effort or realization. I had in fact no more curiosity about the furnace than about the sun, for I seemed as unlikely to run one heater as the other.

Then, like many another man who has lived in apartments, I turned suburbanite. I had a furnace, and I had to run it myself. How well I remember that autumn day when I started my first furnace fire!

I lit the fire and made a grand smoke.

It rose through the kindlings; it piled out through the little door; it hung like great cobwebs to the roof of the cellar. With great presence of mind I hastily closed the little door and ran lightly up the cellar-stairs. The smoke had preceded me; it got there first through the registers; and more was coming.

I met a woman.

We opened the windows. We went outside and looked at the house. It leaked smoke through every crevice except, curiously enough, the chimney. Ah-h-h-h-h! I saw what had happened. I groped my way to the cellar and opened the back damper. Now the smoke went gladly up the chimney, and the view through the little door was at once beautiful and awful: it was like looking into the heart of an angry volcano. Evidently it was time to lay the eggs on the nest.

I shoveled the abyss full of coal, and the volcano became extinct. Presently, instead of a furnace full of fire, I had a furnace full of egg coal. I began taking it out, egg by egg, at first with my fingers and then with the tongs from the dining-room fireplace. And when the woman idly questioned me as to what I was going to do down cellar with the tongs, I bit my lips.

To the man who runs it the furnace is his first thought in the morning and his last thought at night. His calendar has but two seasons--winter, when the furnace is going, and summer, when the furnace is out. But in summer his thoughts are naturally more philosophical. He sees how profoundly this recent invention has changed man's attitude toward nature.

I am, of course, not referring to those furnaces which are endowed with more than the average human intelligence; those superfurnaces which are met with in the advertisements, which shake themselves down, shovel their own coal, carry and sift their own ashes, regulate their own draughts, and, if they do not actually order and pay for their own coal, at least consume it as carefully as if they did.

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