Ralph Bergengren

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A lover sits by the fire and smokes; presently he sees his love in the flames, and sighs—as Shakespeare would say—like a furnace. Sometimes it doesn't work. I sit by the fire, and smoke; and I see nothing but fire and smoke.
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! ”

“ And so, in a word, the servantless cottage ceases to be an honest, more or less successful effort to provide a home in which the housewife can most conveniently do her own work, and appears a neat little example of snobbish absurdity. Work becomes a pleasure to the happy housewife for whom climbing a flight of stairs is ofttimes all too strenuous—so keen and persistent a pleasure that domestic service is 'undesirable!' Is anybody really expected to believe it? ”

“ 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. ”

“ When his furnace happens to be good-natured, however, a man will often find the bedtime hour with it pleasant and even enjoyable. He descends, humming or whistling, to the cellar; and the subsequent shaking and shoveling is, after all, no more than a healthy exercise which he would not otherwise take and which will make him sleep better. He is friendly with this rotund, coal-eating giant; he regards it almost like a big baby which he is putting to bed—or, at least, he might so regard it if putting a baby to bed was one of his recognized pleasures. ”

“ There are times, indeed,—speaking as the spokesman of bread-and-butter,—when the open fire seems to stimulate amazingly our powers of conversation. We sparkle (for us) ; we become (or at least we feel) engagingly animated; but is it really the open fire? I have met those with whom it is no more stimulating to sit cosily beside an open fire than cosily beside an open sea or an open trolley-car or an open window or an open oyster. I have known others in whose company a kitchen range seemed just as stimulating. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ NO STAIRS!—NO ATTIC ATTICS are done for! Listen to the words of the man who has built, and written about, what he calls a Servantless Cottage:—
'Climbing stairs is ofttimes too strenuous for the happy housewife, so there must be no stairs.'
Shades of our grandmothers! If we can believe this enthusiastic designer and builder, only a few more decades at most will miserable women, unhappy housewives, and, by inference, undesirable mothers, continue to drag up and down stairs their pitiful existences in houses of more than one story. ”

“ Instantly he thinks of the furnace, and the remotest star seems near by comparison. The thought of getting up and going down cellar seems as unreal as the thought of getting up and going to meet the sun at that pale streak which, through his easterly window, heralds the reluctant coming of another day. ”

“ There have been times when I have felt like patting my furnace; and again, times when I have slammed his little door and spoken words to him far, far hotter than the fire that smouldered and refused to burn in his bowels. I judge from what I have read that taming a wild animal must be a good deal like taming a furnace, with one important exception: the wild-animal-tamer never loses his temper or the beast would kill him; but a furnace, fortunately for suburban mortality, cannot kill its tamer. ”

“ And one has only to look about the world as it stands at present, servant-problem and all, to realize that it is the value of good domestic service which actually creates and keeps alive the problem itself. For even if the happy housewife enjoys every single item of housekeeping and cookery, there are times when her personal attention to them is obviously undesirable.
Imagine our servantless cottage as an example. Milady sings at her work. The portable vacuum cleaner—milord keeps up with all the latest improvements—gratefully eats up its daily dust. ”

“ I am glad there is going to be such a domestic convenience as a sun-dial; and perhaps, when there is a guest, the trunks can be taken out on the lawn and the children put to bed in the 'cache.'
But I guess that, after all, stairs will survive, and attics, and the servant-problem. Innumerable families are already living in servantless houses, with stairs, and it doesn't even occur to them that they are solving any problem whatsoever. Innumerable housewives are about as happy under these conditions as most of us get to be under any conditions. ”

“ The servant-problem itself is not the young and tender problem that many of us imagine. An examination of old newspapers will show anybody who is sufficiently patient and curious that a hundred years ago there was much indignant wonder that young women, visibly suited for domestic service, preferred to be seamstresses! What is more modern is the grave enthusiasm with which so many persons are trying to decide how the rest of us shall live with the maximum amount of comfort and culture for the minimum expenditure. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is something fine in going to sleep even one flight nearer the stars—and away from the dining-room.
And no stairs—no attic. My conviction increases that this man was an atticless child, without grandparents himself, and without thought of his own possible grandchildren. Or is the stairless, servantless, atticless cottage—'truly the little house is the house of the future'—meant also to be childless? An examination of the plan shows a so-called bedroom marked 'guest or children,' which indicates that the happy housewife must exercise her own judgment. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For many generations, stairs and service have been inseparable from the amenities of domestic living. One has only to imagine these two essentials suddenly eliminated from literature, to experience a pained sensation at the care-free way in which the man of the servantless cottage gets rid of them. ”

“ On a warm day it goes up, on a cold day it goes down; in zero weather it takes all the time of a determined man to head it off from becoming a large, inconvenient refrigerator. As for bisecting coal bills, the creature likes coal. I have even thought that it uttered strange, self-congratulatory, happy noises whenever there occurred a rise in the price of its favorite edible.
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. ”

“ Mary Brogan's bath-room (which, by the way, revives the colonial custom of bathing in the wash-tub) is a tour de force of invention that is obviously inconvenient for general family use. The glass tub is more dangerous. It appeals to the fancy with its indirect suggestion of Cinderella's slipper. Here and there already a householder has installed one; and the stranger guest feels stranger than ever when he takes a bath in it. One might get used to it, much as one would at first feel like a goldfish without room enough to swim; but there should be no rivalry between glass and porcelain. ”

“ As for any of the hearty, old-fashioned, up-and-down-stairs hospitality—I may be an old fogey myself, but the servantless cottage shocks me.
'Our bedroom resembles a cosy state-room on board ship.' Oh! la-la-la-la-la! Why doesn't somebody solve the problem of domestic living by suggesting that we all live in house-boats?
CONCERNING KITCHENS MANY a man, I am sure, who never in his mature life thinks emotionally of his own kitchen, still keeps a tender memory of some kitchen of his early youth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He awakes in the dark, startled perhaps from some pleasant dream by the wild alarm-m-m-m of a clock under his pillow; and outside the snug island of warmth on which he lies, the Universe stretches away in every direction, above, below, and on every side of him, cold, dreary, and unfit for human habitation, to and beyond the remotest star. ”

“ Some will choose guest; some will choose children. Personally I hope they will all choose children; for, even without an attic, there is plenty of playground. 'People with tiny incomes' must always be careful not to purchase too small a lot; and so we find that the servantless cottage has paths, and a lawn, and flowers, and shrubbery, and a sun-dial, and an American elm, and a 'toadstool canopy' between the poplars and the white birches, and an ivy-covered 'cache' to store the trunks in. ”

“ At that period guests were not expected to stay in a guest chamber longer than was necessary to sleep, wash their faces and hands, brush their hair, and change their clothes. It was, literally, a spare room. If you came to visit, you were supposed to come because you wished to be with the family as much as possible, and only the most needful provision was made for your separate existence. If you were a lady, you might retire for a while in the daytime, and lie down on the bed. ”

“ We live in a republic and we are most of us reasonably self-respecting men and women, not a milady among us, unless she happens to be making a visit—in which case, one place she is not visiting is a servantless cottage. ”