264

THE FALL OF THE KITCHEN

Mrs. Peattie Writes of the Mournful Decay of That Household Feature.

The Change in Home Life Has Revolutionized One of the Sweet Visions of the Past.

From time to time one reads elegant but pessimistic articles in the magazines concerning the decay of the drawing rooms. There is a unanimous opinion among the writers of these articles that the "grande dames" are all dead -- like the doges -- that conversation is a lost art and that "society" has perished, and given place to a mere aggregation of well dressed persons who bore each other.

All this may be so, but it has never impressed me so much as the indubitable fact of the decay of the kitchens. There are in our houses, to be sure, certain rooms that we call kitchens. They have there the improved conveniences for assisting in domestic work. They are equipped with coal stove or gas range. They have a zink, with faucets of hot and cold water. They have stationary tubs, drains, ventilators, they are lit by gas or electricity, and they have in them electric bells, speaking tubs, soiled clothes shafts, dumb waiters, and patent appliances for adjusting the furnace dampers without moving from the room.

Now and then some of us venture to go into them. We do not have a cordial welcome. The neat Swede looks at us suspiciously, and seems to put herself on the aggressive. We are smiling and more or less apologetic, and we get out as soon as consistent with dignity and the well being of the menu for the day's dinner. These kitchens are usually very clean. The Swede women keep them well scrubbed. They face the insidious cockroach, and the vivacious red ant with indignant courage and drive them from the field. They consume our art journals for paper for the shelves, and wash and iron like angels of the third heaven. We are grateful, and let them off every night of the week and two afternoons out of seven. But the kitchen, all the same, has come to seem like a foreign country, where another language than the one we know is spoken, and where foreign manners obtain.

And we reflect with something very like sadness that there has been just such a decay of kitchens all over the continent. For America once made very much of her kitchens. It is only the other day that the best part of the lives of American women were spent there. I'm not talking now about the lower classes -- whatever or whoever they may be -- but about people such as you and me, people who wouldn't let anyone think for a moment that we weren't as good as anybody else; people too comfortably sure of our respectable American citizenship to think anything about aristocracy one way or the other. You see, the kitchen was the drawing room just a little while ago. The women who were the ladies here in Omaha when the rest of the state was still a desert, used to make the kitchen the very most inviting room in the house. It was the warmest room in winter for one thing, having a good store or a fireplace in it. And it had [mualla?] curtains up at the window, and plenty of chairs round about, and a settee or sofa to lounge on if you weren't feeling well, and a big pine table which you ate off at meal time, and afterward used as a reading table.

The flower stand stood on the south side by the window, and the cat slept underneath, or else back of the stove. And the tea kettle was one of the members of the family, and gave a little snort with it steaming nostril when each of the children came in after school. And the boys put their feet up to the fire to thaw them out, and the girls heated their curling irons in the front of the stove. Everybody gravitated to this room instinctively. For one thing, mother was always there. She would sit by the window and peel phenomenally long peelings off the apples she was getting ready for the pies, or she would be chopping meat with the briskest imaginable sound, or cutting out cakes with a little star-shaped tin -- presumably the sort Julliet had reference to when she wished that Romeo were cut up in little stars and put in heaven.

Father always made for the kitchen the first thing, of course. If mother wasn't there he yelled out:

"Where are you, mother?"

It made him uneasy if mother wasn't in the kitchen. As for the children, there was a blight upon them the moment the room was emptied for her presence. They all hung around her. They kept so close about her and couldn't half do her work. And at night she usually toasted the toes of the youngest while the others sat around her and studied. (Of course, you know, I'm not talking about my family, but about your family.)

In those days when we lived in the kitchens the pantry was a wonderful place. On the floor underneath the shelf were a lot of jars. Some of them were uninteresting and only held such things as sifted those, and corn meal, and picked potatoes. But there were others with cookies and apples, and sweet pickles, and quince preserve. The dishes had a sort of individuality, and looked as familiar as the face of mother. And we used to like to sit on the low, broad shelf at the end of our pantry and eat our piece of bread and butter and kick our feet against the flour bin.

These kitchens used to have beautiful perfumes. Whenever you came home from school on a dull, rainy day, sore in spirit at a blunder in school, and a cross word from the teacher, there was always sure to be as delicious odor of chicken pie, or bean soup, or steamed pudding coming out to tell you mother was there and thinking about you. Very likely mother didn't kiss you when you came in. But she unfastened your scarf in a businesslike way, and took off your coat, and hung up your hat, and poured out warm water for you to wash in. And then maybe, if the day was particularly bad outside she told you that you could make popcorn, or pull molasses candy.

Sundays it was equally delightful in the kitchen. Mother would be giving instructions tot he older girls so that they could look after dinner while she went to church, and father would have a row of shoes before him on an outspread paper, and be blacking them one after the other, looking rather apprehensively at the soles to make sure they were not wearing out. Sundays one used usually to have a suet pudding. Mother always had to give a great many instructions about not letting the kettle under it get dry. Meanwhile the sun streamed in across the white floor, and made the yellow cat look golden, and forced the buds of the geranium to open their read leaves. Mother put a geranium leaf in the front of her dress when she went to church, and father walked about six inches ahead of her, very self-conscious is his heavy black coat with the little creases between the shoulders. Meanwhile the children staid at home and sniffed the dinner, and read the Little Corporal, or the Youth's Companion, or looked at the war pictures in Frank Leslie's or Harper's Weekly.

After dinner, when everything was cleared away, and the house tidied, it might be that father and mother would sit in the front room for awhile, especially if there was company. But the children preferred the kitchen, where the cat was, and the settee and the picture papers, and where you could tell stories that would make the hair stand straight on your heads. The imagination worked much better in the kitchen than it did in the front room. Little Orphan: Annie could never have told her stories if she had been sitting in a front room.

I don't suppose the kitchen ever meant to any other race just what it has to us. For such a very, very long time it has been only the peasants among the people of Europe who have been intimately acquainted with their kitchens. But the Americans, leaving luxury behind them, and following the instinct of pioneering, which has driven us westward as the Tartars were impelled toward the east, has forced us to live simply. In our small homes, the kitchen has been the shrine, Democracy was kept alive beside our kitchen fires. The principles which are the groundwork of the republic were nurtured there. The poets understood it. Whittler, Longfellow, Lowell, Riley and Holland put their people in the American kitchens. They gave them, too, the simple dignity, the hearty manners, the sincere hospitality that belonged to the place. In those kitchen days we really had hospitality -- and not a vanity, which we mistook for it.

We did our courting in the kitchen -- Lowell says so, and, besides, there are other ways in which we now it. We used to meet our sorrows there, too. Was there ever a day when you spread out the paper there in old war times and ran a trembling finger down the list of the dead, while all the rest of the family stood and watched you with burning eyes, and amid a frightful silence? And was there a place where your finger stopped suddenly, as if a hypnotizer had bidden it to do so and -- ? But there are other things pleasanter to think of.

Christmas always centered around the kitchen. The stockings hung there and were investigated there the next morning, while the turkey, stuffed and awaiting the oven, gleamed out dimly from the recesses of the pantry. One didn't get very many presents in those days. And among the presents were no bunches of La France roses, no little jewelers boxes, stuffed with cotton and something else, no bon-bon baskets, dainty with indigestible confections, no treasures from over the seas, no bric-a-brac oppressing one with its costliness. No, the presents were of quite another sort. But they were just as welcome -- oh, every bit as welcome!

Truly, the kitchen has decayed. We have now only a room where our meals are cooked. The place has no associations. The voices heard in it speak a foreign tongue. The sentiments there are alien to us. The memories there are those with which we have nothing to do. And even such of us as do our own work in the kitchen, leave that room as soon as possible, and if we do not apologize for having been there, we at least confess to ourselves that we think it something of a hardship to be obliged to stay there. We certainly do not invite our friends in, and it is not the room to which our children hurry when they come home from school.

Perhaps there will be those who will maintain that we have got to better things and that we have progressed. I hardly think so. Not that we have retrograded. But we were very happy people back in those kitchens of the frontier. We had a dear family circle there. We said some good things and thought some good thoughts there. And we showed as much taste, exactly, as we show now in our palm-decorated, rug cursed, bric-a-brac-cluttered parlors.

The next reception you go to, when conversation gets dull or personal -- and it is fairly certain to be one or the other -- you ask one of the respected nations of the place if she doesn't think the kitchen she used to have when she came out a bride to Omaha, wasn't one of the nicest rooms she ever saw, and see what she will say. Once get her interested and she'll tell you some pretty tales about how she rode into Omaha sitting on the bottom of a tub in a lumber wagon, and how she sewed the rags for the front room carpet, and how she shot at wolves one night, and how -- . But you just speak to her about it. It will be worth while.

Yes, yes, the kitchen has decayed.
ELIA W. PEATTIE.

GLADSTONE.

Gladstone becomes more and more of a terror in his sarcasm and eloquence the older he grows. His language becomes less scholastic and more Anglo-Saxon. An American stump orator could not be more plain and direct than he was in his speech, in which he chastised the house of lords for its claim that it had the right to force a dissolution of parliament, said Gladstone, and the house of commons had the right, by its vote, to force a dissolution. "But," continues he, "no such thing has been recorded at any period of our history as a dissolution brought about by a vote of the house of lords. Such a contention is a gross, a monstrous innovation, an odious, new-fangled doctrine, and no men are fonder of these doctrines than the modern tories, except it be the modern unionists. But in addition to being a new-fangled doctrine, I hold that it is nothing less than high treason if this is to continue to be a self-governing country."