We Girls - Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney (the gingerbread man read aloud .txt) 📗

come in, with her cable wool and her great ivory knitting-pins, to sit an hour, sociably.

"Co-operative housekeeping, ma'am," said Barbara.

"Oh! Yes. That is what they _used_ to have, in old times, when we lived at home with mother. Only they didn't write articles about it. All the women in a house co-operated--to keep it; and all the neighborhood co-operated--by living exactly in the same way. Nowadays, it's co-operative shirking; isn't it?"

One never could quite tell whether Mrs. Hobart was more simple or sharp.

That was all that was said about co-operative housekeeping at the time. But Ruth remembered the conversation. So did Barbara, for a while, as appeared in something she came out with a few days after.

"I could--almost--write a little poem!" she said, suddenly, over her work. "Only that would be doing just what the rest do. Everything turns into a poem, or an article, nowadays. I wish we'd lived in the times when people _did_ the things!"

"O Barbara! _Think_ of all that is being done in the world!"

"I know. But the little private things. They want to turn everything into a movement. Miss Trixie says they won't have any eggs from their fowls next winter; all their chickens are roosters, and all they'll do will be to sit in a row on the fence and crow! I think the world is running pretty much to roosters."

"Is that the poem?"

"I don't know. It might come in. All I've got is the end of it. It came into my head hind side before. If it could only have a beginning and a middle put to it, it might do. It's just the wind-up, where they have to give an account, you know, and what they'll have to show for it, and the thing that really amounts, after all."

"Well, tell us."

"It's only five lines, and one rhyme. But it might be written up to. They could say all sorts of things,--one and another:--

"_I_ wrote some little books; _I_ said some little says; _I_ preached a little preach; _I_ lit a little blaze; _I_ made things pleasant in one little place."

There was a shout at Barbara's "poem."

"I thought I might as well relieve my mind," she said, meekly. "I knew it was all there would ever be of it."

But Barbara's rhyme stayed in our heads, and got quoted in the family. She illustrated on a small scale what the "poems and articles" _may_ sometimes do in the great world,

We remembered it that day when Ruth said, "Let's co-operate."

We talked it over,--what we could do without a girl. We had talked it over before. We had had to try it, more or less, during interregnums. But in our little house in Z----, with the dark kitchen, and with Barbara and Ruth going to school, and the washing-days, when we had to hire, it always cost more than it came to, besides making what Barb called a "heave-offering of life."

"They used to have houses built accordingly," Rosamond said, speaking of the "old times." "Grandmother's kitchen was the biggest and pleasantest room in the house."

"Couldn't we _make_ the kitchen the pleasantest room?" suggested Ruth. "Wouldn't it be sure to be, if it was the room we all stayed in mornings, and where we had our morning work? Whatever room we do that in always is, you know. The look grows. Kitchens are horrid when girls have just gone out of them, and left the dish-towels dirty, and the dish-cloth all wabbled up in the sink, and all the tins and irons wanting to be cleaned. But if we once got up a real ladies' kitchen of our own! I can think how it might be lovely!"

"I can think how it might be jolly-nificent!" cried Barbara, relapsing into her dislocations.

"_You_ like kitchens," said Rosamond, in a tone of quiet ill-usedness.

"Yes, I do," said Barbara. "And you like parlors, and prettinesses, and feather dusters, and little general touchings-up, that I can't have patience with. You shall take the high art, and I'll have the low realities. That's the co-operation. Families are put up assorted, and the home character comes of it. It's Bible-truth, you know; the head and the feet and the eye and the hand, and all that. Let's just see what we _shall_ come to! People don't turn out what they're meant, who have Irish kitchens and high-style parlors, all alike. There's a great deal in being Holabirdy,--or whatever-else-you-are-y!"

"If it only weren't for that cellar-kitchen," said Mrs. Holabird.

"Mother," said Ruth, "what if we were to take this?"

We were in the dining-room.

"This nice room!"

"It is to be a ladies' kitchen, you know."

Everybody glanced around. It was nice, ever so nice. The dark stained floor, showing clean, undefaced margins,--the new, pretty drugget,--the freshly clad, broad old sofa,--the high wainscoted walls, painted in oak and walnut colors, and varnished brightly,--the ceiling faintly tinted with buff,--the buff holland shades to the windows,--the dresser-closet built out into the room on one side, with its glass upper-halves to the doors, showing our prettiest china and a gleam of silver and glass,--the two or three pretty engravings in the few spaces for them,--O, it was a great deal too nice to take for a kitchen.

But Ruth began again.

"You know, mother, before Katty came, how nice everything was down stairs. We cooked nearly a fortnight, and washed dishes, and everything; and we only had the floor scrubbed once, and there never was a slop on the stove, or a teaspoonful of anything spilled. It would be so different from a girl! It seems as if we _might_ bring the kitchen up stairs, instead of going down into the kitchen."

"But the stove," said mother.

"I think," said Barbara, boldly, "that a cooking-stove, all polished up, is just as handsome a thing as there is in a house!"

"It is clumsy, one must own," said Mrs. Holabird, "besides being suggestive."

"So is a piano," said the determined Barbara.

"I can _imagine_ a cooking-stove," said Rosamond, slowly.

"Well, do! That's just where your gift will come in!"

"A pretty copper tea-kettle, and a shiny tin boiler, made to order,--like an urn, or something,--with a copper faucet, and nothing else ever about, except it were that minute wanted; and all the tins and irons begun with new again, and kept clean; and little cocoanut dippers with German silver rims; and things generally contrived as they are for other kinds of rooms that ladies use; it _might_ be like that little picnicking dower-house we read about in a novel, or like Marie Antoinette's Trianon."

"That's what it _would_ come to, if it was part of our living, just as we come to have gold thimbles and lovely work-boxes. We should give each other Christmas and birthday presents of things; we should have as much pleasure and pride in it as in the china-closet. Why, the whole trouble is that the kitchen is the only place taste _hasn't_ got into. Let's have an art-kitchen!"

"We might spend a little money in fitting up a few things freshly, if we are to save the waste and expense of a servant," said Mrs. Holabird.

The idea grew and developed.

"But when we have people to tea!" Rosamond said, suddenly demurring afresh.

"There's always the brown room, and the handing round," said Barbara, "for the people you can't be intimate with, and _think_ how crowsy this will be with Aunt Trixie or Mrs. Hobart or the Goldthwaites!"

"We shall just settle _down_," said Rose, gloomily.

"Well, I believe in finding our place. Every little brook runs till it does that. I don't want to stand on tip-toe all my life."

"We shall always gather to us what _belongs_. Every little crystal does that," said mother, taking up another simile.

"What will Aunt Roderick say?" said Ruth.

"I shall keep her out of the kitchen, and tell her we couldn't manage with one girl any longer, and so we've taken three that all wanted to get a place together."

And Barbara actually did; and it was three weeks before Mrs. Roderick found out what it really meant.

We were in a hurry to have Katty go, and to begin, after we had made up our minds; and it was with the serenest composure that Mrs. Holabird received her remark that "her week would be up a-Tuesday, an' she hoped agin then we'd be shooted wid a girl."

"Yes, Katty; I am ready at any moment," was the reply; which caused the whites of Katty's eyes to appear for a second between the lids and the irids.

There had been only one applicant for the place, who had come while we had not quite irrevocably fixed our plans.

Mother swerved for a moment; she came in and told us what the girl said.

"She is not experienced; but she looks good-natured; and she is willing to come for a trial."

"They all do that," said Barbara, gravely. "I think--as Protestants--we've hired enough of them."

Mother laughed, and let the "trial" go. That was the end, I think, of our indecisions.

We got Mrs. Dunikin to come and scrub; we pulled out pots and pans, stove-polish and dish-towels, napkins and odd stockings missed from the wash; we cleared every corner, and had every box and bottle washed; then we left everything below spick and span, so that it almost tempted us to stay even there, and sent for the sheet-iron man, and had the stove taken up stairs. We only carried up such lesser movables as we knew we should want; we left all the accumulation behind; we resolved to begin life anew, and feel our way, and furnish as we went along.

Ruth brought home a lovely little spice-box as the first donation to the art-kitchen. Father bought a copper tea-kettle, and the sheet-iron man made the tin boiler. There was a wide, high, open fireplace in the dining-room; we had wondered what we should do with it in the winter. It had a soapstone mantel, with fluted pilasters, and a brown-stone hearth and jambs. Back a little, between these sloping jambs, we had a nice iron fire-board set, with an ornamental collar around the funnel-hole. The stove stood modestly sheltered, as it were, in its new position, its features softened to almost a sitting-room congruity; it did not thrust itself obtrusively forward, and force its homely association upon you; it was low, too, and its broad top looked smooth and enticing.

There was a large, light closet at the back of the room, where was set a broad, deep iron sink, and a pump came up from the cistern. This closet had double sliding doors; it could be thrown all open for busy use, or closed quite away and done with.

There were shelves here, and cupboards. Here we ranged our tins and our saucepans,--the best and newest; Rosamond would have nothing to do with the old battered ones; over them we hung our spoons and our little strainers, our egg-beaters, spatulas, and quart measures,--these last polished to the brightness of silver tankards; in one corner stood the flour-barrel, and over it was the sieve; in the cupboards were our porcelain kettles,--we bought two new ones, a little and a big,--the frying-pans,