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        THE COMFORTS OF HOME

        OTHER ATLANTIC BOOKS

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       THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS

               BOSTON




_The_
COMFORTS _of_ HOME

BY

RALPH BERGENGREN

[Illustration: colophon]

The Atlantic Monthly Press

Boston

COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS, INC.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED




CONTENTS


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.

Of all documents 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 bass-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, sturdy 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, brushing 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
noble 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 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
(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 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-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 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?

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 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 (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