The Comforts of Home Part 1

The Comforts of Home.

by Ralph Bergengren.

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 furnis.h.i.+ngs. Temporarily it belonged to me, my executors, administrators, and a.s.signs. 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 gla.s.s was whole and in good order, and bound ourselves to keep it good, unless broken by fire, with gla.s.s 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 a.s.signs 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.

Of all doc.u.ments there is hardly another so common as a lease, or more suspicious. Observe the lessor--a benevolent, dignified, but cautious person! Observe the lessee--a worm with criminal tendencies! Perhaps he is a decent sort of worm, but the lessor had better look out for him.

Very likely he will commit murders in the dining-room, read the _Contes Drolatiques_ in the library, play ba.s.s-drum solos in the parlor, and start a piggery in the cellar. One suspects that possibly the great army of hoboes is partly recruited from among supersensitive men who read their leases before signing them and preferred vagabondage to insult.

But some of us control our sensitiveness. I, for example, read my lease; and when, having agreed mentally to post no placard myself, I discovered a clause allowing the lessor to decorate my residence with the information that it was

FOR SALE

_I crossed that clause out!_

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, st.u.r.dy lines of the coal-hod.

Now in due time, or, to be exact, some hours later, strong men came to this house with a motor truck; and, working with concentrated fury, they put into it all our own furniture, our trunks, our books, our clothes, and everything that was ours. It had been our purpose to direct these men: to say, 'This goes here, kind sirs,' and, 'That goes there, gentlemen'; or, 'Believe me, this is the place for _that_,' or, 'Thank you, sir, but _that_ is the place for _this_.' When they had come and gone, and the empty truck had rumbled away in the early autumn twilight, everything was to be just where we had planned in advance; 'getting settled' would be a light but satisfying pleasure; organization, 'efficiency in business,' for we had been reading an article in a magazine, would have made changing our home as easy as changing our clothes. But these men were beyond mortal control. They came late and their mood was to depart early. Movers always come late, for two reasons: first, because they like to feel that you are glad to see them, and, second, because they do not like to place each object just where it belongs. They prefer concentrated fury. Children of nature, they inherit their mother's abhorrence of a vacuum; unable, as they saw at a glance, to stuff the whole house from floors to ceilings, they devoted their attention, brus.h.i.+ng us aside like annoying insects that they lacked time for killing, to stuffing such rooms as they instantly decided could be stuffed the tightest. If there was anything that we might presumably need at once, they put it at the bottom and buried it under the heaviest available furniture. It was wonderful to see them. In the end they actually took money for what they had done and went away hastily. Organization and 'efficiency in business' had accomplished something: the trunks were upstairs, and two barrels had reached their predestined place in the cellar.

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 n.o.ble mahogany bureau were to have vanished upstairs before my arrival.

But now, peering past and above and under the debris that the avalanche had left there, I recognized the n.o.ble 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 (especially when one realized what a discouraging time a burglar would have in finding it, and how he would probably find the cellar stairs instead and die of a broken neck at the bottom), 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 n.o.ble 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-a-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.

'H-m-m-m-m!' whispered Misgiving. '_How_ about a bureau in the library?

That isn't an anachronism; it's an absurdity.'

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 s.p.a.ce 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?

Two strong, skillful men, engaged for the purpose, juggled with it, this way and that, muttering words of equally great strength--_and it went upstairs_. Had it been a quarter of an inch wider, they said afterward, the feat would have been impossible. It was a small margin, but it will save the company from having to knock timidly on the library door when it wishes to dress for dinner.

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.

But this refers to a particular log, the Yule log (or clog, as they used to call it) which was brought in only once a year, and, even so, the singer evidently is _not_ bringing it in himself. He is looking on. The merrie, merrie boys, he thinks, need encouragement. After they have got the log in, and the good dame has produced the rewarding jug, bowl, or bottle, everybody will feel better. Dry without and wet within; how oft, indeed, has praise of open fire kept company with praise of open bottle! Forests uncounted have been cut down,--the hillside beech, from where the owlets meet and screech; the crackling pine, the cedar sweet, the knotted oak, with fragrant peat,--and burned up, stick by stick; so that, as the poet explains, the bright flames, dancing, winking, shall light us at our drinking.

Others than inebriates have sung the praise of open fires; but the most highly respectable, emulating the bright flames, have usually winked at drinking. But never one of them, so far as I remember, has praised the honest, wholesome, _temperate_ exercise of bringing in the wood.

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 circ.u.mstances 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 (long quarried at Brandon in Suffolk, England), 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 (the tinder-box). 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-b.u.t.ter 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 (as gallant practical gentlemen, now some centuries dead, named it by hanging up their wet mantles), 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.'

Oh, _merely_ heat! The blithe gentleman betrays himself out of his own ink-well. He may have forgotten it,--very likely somebody else takes care of it,--but there is a furnace in his cellar. Does he, we ask him seriously, covet the reciprocal affection of some beloved woman--start as angrily as he may at our suggestion of any comparison between _her_ and a hot-water pipe--_only when he can see her?_ Or, supposing him a confirmed woman-hater, does he repudiate underwear?

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

'Unless,' say we, 'a spark or coal jumps out on the rug and starts to set the bedroom afire. Better,' say we, pursuing the subject in our heavy way, 'a Philistine in bed than a _fellow of fine_ taste stamping out a live coal with his bare feet.'

And so we thank the thoughtful host who safely and sanely screens the open fire in his guest-chamber; but fie, fie upon him if he has decoratively arranged on our temporary hearth _Wood without Kindlings_!

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 inst.i.tuted 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 pa.s.s before he was presentable, and another million before he had coat-tails, and could stand in front of it, spreading them like a peac.o.c.k 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.