TWO PRAYERS
Only for these I pray,
Pray with assurance strong:
Light to discover the way,
Power to follow it long.
Let me have light to see,
Light to be sure and know,
When the road is clear to me
Willingly I go.
Let me have Power to do,
Power of the brain and nerve,
Though the task is heavy and new
Willingly I will serve.
My prayers are lesser than three,
Nothing I pray but two;
Let me have light to see,
Let me have power to do.
AN OFFENDER
"Where's Harry?" was Mr. Gortlandt's first question.
"He's gone to the country, to mother. It was so hot this last day or two, I've sent him out, with Miss Colton. I'm going Saturday. Sit down."
"I miss him," said her visitor, "more than I thought I could. I've learned more in these seven years than I thought there was to know. Or in the last two perhaps, since I've found you again."
She looked at him with a little still smile, but there was a puzzled expression behind it, as of one whose mind was not made up.
They sat in the wide window of a top floor apartment, awning-shaded. A fresh breeze blew in upon them, and the city dust blew in upon them also, lying sandy on the broad sill.
She made little wavy lines in it with one finger—
"These windows ought to be shut tight, I suppose, and the blinds, and the curtains. Then we should be cleaner."
"As to furniture," he agreed, "but not as to our lungs."
"I don't know about that," she said; "we get plenty of air—but see what's in it."
"A city is a dirty place at the best; but Mary—I didn't come to consider the ethics of the dust—how much longer must I wait?" he asked, after a little pause. "Isn't two years courting, re-courting—enough? Haven't I learned my lesson yet?"
"Some of it, I think," she admitted, "but not all."
"What more do you ask?" he pursued earnestly. "Can't we come to a definite understanding? You'll be chasing off again in a few days; it's blessed luck that brought you to town just now, and that I happened to be here too."
"I don't how about the luck," said she. "It was business that brought me. I never was in town before when it was so hot."
"Why don't you go to a hotel? This apartment is right under the roof, gets the sun all day."
"It gets the breeze too, and sunlight is good. No, I'm better off in the apartment, with Harry. It was very convenient of the Grants to be away, and let me have it."
"How does Hal stand the weather?"
"Pretty well. But he was getting rather fretful, so I sent him off two hours ago. I do hope he won't run away from Miss Colton again. She's as nervous as I am about him."
"Don't you think he is fond of me?" asked the man. "I've got to catch up, you see. He can't help being mine—half mine," he hastily added, seeing a hint of denial in her look.
"Why yes, he seems fond of you, he is fond of you," she conceded. "I hope he always will be, and I believe you are beginning to love him."
"A pretty strong beginning, Mary," said the man. "Of course I don't pretend to have cared much at first, but now!—why he's so handsome, and quick, and such a good little duffer; and so affectionate! When he gives a jump and gets his arms around my neck and his legs around my waist and 'hugs me all over' as he calls it, I almost feel as if I was a mother! I can't say more than that, can I?"
"No, you certainly can't say more than that. I believe you, I'm not questioning," for he looked up sharply at her tone.
"I've never had much to do with children, you see," he went on slowly, "no little brothers or sisters, and then only— What astonishes me is how good they feel in your arms! The little fellow's body is so firm and sinewy—he wriggles like a fish—a big fish that you're trying to hold with both hands."
The mother smiled tenderly. She knew the feel of the little body so well! From the soft pink helplessness, the little head falling so naturally into the hollow of the arm or neck, the fumbling little hands; then the gradual gain in size and strength, till now she held that eager bounding little body, almost strong enough to get away from her—but not wanting to. He still loved to nestle up to "Muzz," and was but newly and partially won by this unaccustomed father.
"It's seven years Mary! That makes a man all over, they say. I'm sure it has made me over. I'm an older man—and I think, wiser. I've repented, I've outgrown my folly and seen the justice of my punishment. I don't blame you an atom for divorcing me—I think you did right, and I respect you for it. The biggest lesson I've learned is to love you! I can see—now—that I didn't before.
Her face hardened as she looked at him. "No, you didn't, Harry, you certainly didn't, nor the child— When I think of what I was when you married me! Of my proud health!—"
"You are not hurt!" he cried. "I don't mean that you haven't been hurt, I could kill myself when I think of how I made you suffer! But you are a finer woman now than you were then; sweeter, stronger, wiser, and more beautiful. When I found you again in Liverpool two years ago it was a revelation. Now see—I don't even ask you to forgive me! I ask you to try me again and let me prove I can make it up to you and the boy!"
"It's not easy for me to forgive," she answered slowly— "I'm not of the forgiving nature. But there is a good deal of reason in your position. You were my husband, you are Hal's father, there's no escaping that."
"Perhaps, if you will let the rest of my life make up for that time of my Godforsaken meanness, you won't want to escape it, Mary! See—I have followed you about for two years. I accepted your terms, you did not promise me anything, but for the child's sake I might try once more, try only as one of many, to see if I could win you—again. And I love you now a hundred times better than I did when I married you!"
She fanned herself slowly with a large soft fan, and looked out across the flickering roofs. Below them lay the highly respectable street on which the house technically fronted, and the broad, crowded, roaring avenue which it really overlooked.
The rattle of many drays and more delivery wagons rose up to them. An unusual jangle drowned his words just then and she smilingly interpreted "that's railroad iron—or girders, I can tell lots of them now. About four A. M. there is a string of huge milk wagons. But the worst is the cars. Hear that now—that's a flat wheel. How do you like it?"
"Mary—why do you bring up these cars again when I'm trying my best to show you my whole heart? Don't put things like that between us!"
"But they are between us, Henry, all the time. I hear you tell me you love me, and I don't doubt you do in a way; yes, as well as you can, very much indeed!—I know. But when it comes to this car question; when I talk to you of these juggernauts of yours; you are no more willing to do the right thing than you were when I first knew you."
Mr. Cortlandt's face hardened. He drew himself up from the eager position in which he had leaned forward, and evidently hesitated for a moment as to his words.
In spite of his love for this woman, who, as he justly said, was far more beautiful and winsome than the strong, angular, over-conscientious girl he had married, neglected and shamed, his feelings as a business man were strong within him.
"My dear—I am not personally responsible for the condition of these cars."
"You are President of the Company. You hold controlling shares of the stock. It was your vote that turned down the last improvement proposition."
He looked at her sharply.
"I'm afraid someone has been prejudicing you against me Mary. You have more technical information than seems likely to have reached you by accident."
"It's not prejudice, but it is information; and Mr. Graham did tell me, if that's what you mean. But he cares. You know how hard the Settlement has worked to get the Company to make the streets safer for children—and you wouldn't do a thing."
Mr. Cortlandt hesitated. It would never do to pile business details on his suit for a love once lost and not yet regained.
"You make it hard for me Mary," he said. "Hard because it is difficult to explain large business questions to a—to anyone not accustomed to them. I cannot swing the affairs of a great corporation for personal ends, even to please you."
"That is not the point," she said quickly.
He flushed, and hastily substituted "Even to suit the noblest humanitarian feelings."
"Why not?" said she.
"Because that is not what street cars are run for," he pursued patiently. "But why must we talk of this? It seems to put you so far away. And you have given me no answer."
"I am sorry, but I am not ready yet."
"Is it Hugh Graham?" he demanded. The hot color leaped to her face, but she met his eyes steadily. "I am much interested in Mr. Graham," she said, "and in the noble work he is doing. I think I should really be happier with him than with you. We care for the same things, he calls out the best in me. But I have made no decision in his favor yet, nor in yours. Both of you have a certain appeal to my heart, both to my duty. With you the personal need, with him the hope of greater service. But—you are the father of the child, and that gives you a great claim. I have not decided."
The man looked relieved, and again drew his chair a little closer. The sharp clangor of the cars rose between the,.
"You think I dragged in this car question," she said. "Really, I did it because it is that sort of thing which does most to keep us apart, and—I would like to remove it."
He leaned forward, playing with her big fan. "Let's remove it by all means!" he said.
She looked at his bent head, the dark hair growing somewhat thin on top, almost tenderly.
"If I could feel that you were truly on the right side, that you considered your work as social service, that you tried to run your cars to carry people—not to kill them!—If you could change your ground here I think—almost—" she stopped, smiling up at him, her fan in her lap, her firm delicate white hands eagerly clasped; then went on,
"Don't you care at all for the lives lost every day in this great city—under your cars?"
"It cannot be helped, my dear. Our men are as careful as men can be.
But these swarming children will play in the streets—"
"Where else can they play!" she interjected.
"And they get right in front of the cars. We are very sorry; we pay out thousands of dollars in damages: but it cannot be helped!"
She leaned back in her chair and her face grew cold.
"You speak as if you never heard of such things as fenders," she said.
"We have fenders!—almost every car—"
"Fenders! Do you call that piece of rat-trap a fender! Henry Cortlandt! We were in Liverpool when this subject first came up between us! They have fenders there that fend and no murder list!"
"Conditions are different there," said he with an enforced quiet. "Our pavement is different."
"Our children are not so different, are they?" she demanded. "Our mothers are made of the same stuff I suppose?"
"You speak at if I wanted to kill them! As if I liked to!"
"I thought at first it would hurt you as it did me," she said warmly. "I turned to you with real hope when we met in Liverpool. I was glad to think I knew you, and I had not been glad of that for long! I thought you would care, would do things."
Do what he would, his mouth set hard in its accustomed lines. "Those English fender are not practicable in this country, Mary. They have been tried."
"When? Where? By whom?" she threw at him. "I have read about it, and heard about it. I know there was an effort to get them adopted, and that they were refused. They cost more than this kind!" and she pointed disdainfully at the rattling bit of stub-toed slat-work in front of a passing car.
"Do you expect me to make a revolution in the street car system of America—to please you? Do you make it a condition? Perhaps I can accomplish it. Is it a bargain? Come—"
"No," she said slowly. "I'm not making bargains. I'm only wishing, as I have wished so often in years past—that you were a different kind of man—"
"What kind do you want me to be?"
"I want you to be—I wish you were—a man who cared to give perfect service to his country, in his business."
"Perhaps I can be yet. I can try. If I had you to help me, with your pure ideals, and the boy to keep my heart open for the children. I don't know much about these things, but I can learn. I can read, you can tell me what to read. We could study together. And in my position perhaps, I could really be of some service after all."
"Perhaps?" She watched him, the strong rather heavy face, the attractive smile, the eyes that interested and compelled. He was an able, masterful man. He surely loved her now. She could feel a power over him that her short miserable marriage had never given her; and her girlhood's attraction toward him reasserted itself.
A new noise rose about them, a dissonant mingled merry outcry, made into a level roaring sound by their height above the street.
"That's when the school up here lets out," she said. "We hear it every day. Just see the crowds of them!"
They leaned on the broad sill and watched the many-colored torrent of juveniles pouring past.
"One day it was different," she said. "A strange jarring shrillness in it, a peculiar sound. I looked out, and there was a fight going on; two boys tumbling about from one side of the street to the other, with a moving ring around them, a big crowd, all roaring in one key."
"You get a birdseye view of life in these streets, don't you. Can you make out that little chap with the red hair down there?"
"No—we are both near-sighted, you know. I can't distinguish faces at this distance. Can you?"
"Not very clearly," he said. "But what a swarm they are!"
"Come away," said she, "I can't bear to look at them. So many children in that stony street, and those cars going up and down like roaring lions!"
They drew back into the big sunny room, and she seated herself at the piano and turned over loose sheets of music.
He watched her with a look of intensest admiration, she was so tall, so nobly formed, her soft rich gown flowed and followed as she walked, her white throat rose round and royal from broad smooth shoulders.
He was beside her; he took away the music, laid it out of reach, possessed himself of her hands.
"Give them back to me, Mary," he pleaded. "Come to me and help me to be a better man! Help me to be a good father. I need you!"
She looked at him almost pleadingly. His eyes, his voice, his hands,—they had their old-time charm for her. Yet he had only said "Perhaps"—and he might study, might learn.
He asked her to help him, but he did not say "I will do this"—only "I may."
In the steady bright June sunshine, in the sifting dust of a city corner, in the dissonant, confused noise of the traffic below, they stood and looked at one another.
His eyes brightened and deepened as he watched her changing color. Softly he drew her towards him. "Even if you do not love me now, you shall in time, you shall, my darling!"
But she drew back from him with a frightened start, a look of terror.
"What has happened!" she cried. "It's so still!"
They both rushed to the window. The avenue immediately below them was as empty as midnight, and as silent. A great stillness widened and spread for the moment around one vacant motionless open car. Without passenger, driver, or conductor, it stood alone in the glaring space; and then, with a gasp of horror, they both saw.
Right under their eyes, headed towards them, under the middle of the long car—a little child.
He was quite still, lying face downward, dirty and tumbled, with helpless arms thrown wide, the great car holding him down like a mouse in a trap.
Then people came rushing.
She turned away, choking, her hands to her eyes.
"Oh!" she cried, "Oh! It's a child, a little child!"
"Steady, Mary, steady!" said he, "the child's dead. It's all over. He's quite dead. He never knew what hit him." But his own voice trembled.
She made a mighty effort to control herself, and he tried to take her in his arms, to comfort her, but she sprang away from him with fierce energy.
"Very well!" she said. "You are right! The child is dead. We can not save him. No one can save him. Now come back—come here to the window—and see what follows. I want to see with my own eyes—and have you see—what is done when your cars commit murder! Child murder!"
She held up her watch. "It's 12:10 now," she said.
She dragged him back to the window, and so evident was the struggle with which she controlled herself, so intense her agonized excitement, that he dared not leave her.
"Look!" she cried. "Look! See the them crowd now!"
The first horrified rush away from the instrument of death was followed by the usual surging multitude.
From every direction people gathered thickly in astonishing numbers, hustling and pushing about the quiet form upon the ground; held so flat between iron rails and iron wheels, so great a weight on so small a body! The car, still empty, rose like an island from the pushing sea of heads. Men and women cried excited directions. They tried with swarming impotent hands to lift the huge mass of wood and iron off the small broken thing beneath it, so small that it did not raise the crushing weight from the ground.
A whole line of excited men seized the side rail and strove to lift the car by it, lifting only the rail.
The crowd grew momently, women weeping, children struggling to see, men pushing each other, policemen's helmets rising among them. And still the great car stood there, on the body of the child.
"Is there no means of lifting these monsters?" she demanded. "After they have done it, can't they even get off."
He moistened his lips to answer.
"There is a jacking crew," he said. "They will be here presently."
"Presently!" she cried. "Presently! Couldn't these monsters use their own power to lift themselves somehow? not even that?"
He said nothing.
More policemen came, and made a scant space around the little body, covering it with a dark cloth. The motorman was rescued from many would be avengers, and carried off under guard.
"Ten minutes," said she looking at her watch. "Ten minutes and it isn't even off him yet!" and she caught her breath in a great sob.
Then she turned on the man at her side: "Suppose his mother is in that crowd! She may be! Their children go to this school, they live all about below here, she can't even get in to see! And if she could, if she knew it was her child, she can't get him out!"
Her voice rose to a cry.
"Don't, Mary," said he, hoarsely. "It's—it's horrible! Don't make it worse!"
She kept her eyes on her watch-face, counting the minutes She looked down at the crowd shudderingly, and said over and over, under breath, "A little child! A little soft child!"
It was twelve minutes and a-half before the jacking crew drove up, with their tools. It was a long time yet before they did their work, and that crushed and soiled little body was borne to a near-by area grating and laid there, wrapped in its dingy shroud, and guarded by a policeman.
It was a full half hour before the ambulance arrived to take it away.
She drew back then and crouched sobbing by the sofa. "O the poor mother! God help his mother!"
He sat tense and white for a while; and when she grew quieter he spoke.
"You were right, Mary. I—naturally, I never—visualized it! It is horrible! I am going to have those fenders on every car of the four systems!"
She said nothing. He spoke again.
"I hate to leave you feeling so, Dear. Must I go?"
She raised a face that was years older, but did not look at him.
"You must go. And you must never come back. I cannot bear to see your face again!"
And she turned from him, shuddering.
BEFORE WARM FEBRUARY WINDS
Before warm February winds
Arouse an April dream—
Or sudden rifts of azure sky
Suggest the bluebird's gleam;
Before the reddening woods awake,
Before the brooks are free—
Here where all things are sold and hired,
The driven months we see.
Wither along our snow-soiled streets,
Or under glass endure,
Fruits of the days that have not come,
Exotic—premature.
I hear in raw, unwelcome dawns
The sordid sparrows sing,
And in the florist's windows watch
The forced and purchased spring.
KITCHEN-MINDEDNESS
It is physically possible to see through a knot-hole. If the eye be near enough, and the board be movable, one can, with patient rotation, see the universe in spots, through a knot-hole. Such a purview is limited of necessity, and while suitable to the microscope, is not congenial to the study of life in general.
When those who would save the forests of America began their work, the burden of effort lay in so stimulating and stretching the mental vision of our people, that they could see wider than their own immediate acreage, deeper than their own immediate profit, further than their own immediate time. Some such struggle was no doubt gone through, when that far-seeing iconoclast of early times strove to prove to the greedy hunter that more food was to be attained by breeding cattle than by killing them all at once; that meat kept better when alive. What mental labor, what arduous conflict between that prehistoric ant and grasshopper!
Steadily up the ages the mind of man has had to stretch, and sturdily has he resisted the process. That protoplasmic substance of the brain, used so much and understood so little, astonishes us no less by its infinite capacity for new extension, for endless fluent combination, than by its leaden immobility. Here are some, open-minded, sensitive and hospitable to new impressions; and here are others, an innumerable majority, preferring always to know only what they have known, to think only what they have thought before. The distinction does not seem innate. A normal child provided with proper stimulus, responds with ever fresh interest as field after field of new fact and new idea opens before him.
Twenty years later that same child has lost this capacity, has become dull, inert, conventional, conservative, contented. Upon his growing mind have been imposed in long succeeding years, the iron limitations of his "elders and betters"; only in the rarest of cases has he the mental strength to resist these influences and "think new," think for himself.
Here we all are, living together in relations as complex as the pattern of some mighty tapestry; each of us, seeing only his own part in it, considering the pattern from the point of view of a stitch. This attitude is exquisitely expressed by the reply of a dull student to the earnest teacher who strove to arouse in him some spontaneous opinion on human conduct. With enthusiasm and dramatic force, this instructor exhibited the career of Nero,—showed his list of crimes natural and unnatural, personal and political; his indecency, and cruelty, demanding what should be said of the monster. The student, spurred by questions, some-what fretfully responded, "He never did anything to me!"
Consciousness is of varying range. We know its gradual development, its narrow field in childhood, its permanent restriction in idiocy. We know how it may be developed, even in animals, how we have added to the dog's field of consciousness a deep and passionate interest in his master's life; how a well-befriended cat becomes desperately uneasy, when the family begins to pack for a journey. We know personally the difference between our range of thought at one age, and at another; how one's consciousness may include wider and wider fields of knowledge, longer ranges of time, deeper causal relations; and how the same object, viewed by different minds, may arouse in one as it were, a square inch, and in the other a square mile of consciousness. Those of us, who have the larger area under cultivation,—who are accustomed to think of human life as age-long, world-wide, and in motion, learn to see human conduct, not as something in neat detachable strata, like a pile of plates, but as having long roots and longer branches, and requiring careful handling to alter.
To these, studying the world's affairs, clear lines of causal sequence present themselves. Is it a thousand cases of typhoid? They trace the fever to its lair as one would hunt a tiger; they point out every step of its course; they call on the citizens to rise and fight the enemy, to save their lives. Do the citizens do it? Not they. Individually they suffer and die. Individually they grieve and mourn, bury,their dead (when they should cremate them), and pay the doctor and the undertaker. Hundreds of dollars they pay as individuals to nurses, doctors, graveyard men, and monument makers. If, collectively they would put up a tenth of the sum to ensure a pure water and milk supply, they would save not only hundreds for themselves, but thousands and millions for those after them.—to say nothing of grief!
But they look at life through a knot-hole. They see their own personal affairs as things of sky-shadowing importance, and those same affairs, taken collectively, become as remote and uninteresting as the Milky Way.
Now in the mere labor of intellectual comprehension our average citizen of common-school education is able to see that where so much tuberculous milk is fed into so many babies, that such a proportion will surely die. He sees, but it does interest him. Show him tubercular bacilli from the autopsy of his dead baby, show him the same in the bottle of milk reposing in his refrigerator, and show him the man who put them there—and you may get results.
He could see the larger facts, but only feel the smaller ones. It is a limitation of consciousness.
All workers for human advance know this. Whatever the cause upheld, those who work for it find everywhere the same difficulty; they have to stretch the minds, to stimulate the consciousness, to arouse the interest of their hearers, so that they will take action for the common good.
In one field it is easy, that of public danger from war. The reason is clear. Wars are carried on by men, and men have reacted to conflict stimuli collectively, for so many ages, that it is a race habit with them. Only in the last extreme of terror is this habit broken, and the battle turns to rout, with every man for himself. Then comes the officer and strives to rekindle that common consciousness without which is no human victory.
In the economic world our habits of organization are not so old. We have fought in company since we fought at all, as humans; but we have worked, for the most part alone. The comradeship of shop and factory is of yesterday, compared to the solitary spindle, loom and forge of earlier centuries. Yet in that comradeship wherever found, comes the new consciousness, that recognizes common danger or common gain, and substitutes the army for the mob, the victory for the rout.
This effect is so strong, so clear, so quick in appearance, that even with one poor century or two of economic combination, we ought to find much better results than we do. Where the common interest is as clear as day, where the common strength is so irresistible, where the loss and the danger lie so wholly in isolation, one wonders over and over at the lack of comprehension which keeps us so helplessly apart.
We can see the immense activities of the nation, the multiplication of national wealth, power, and progress,—the saving of life, the elimination of disease, the development of art and science, of beauty and of health and glorious living that we might have, but we cannot feel these things. Therefore we do not act.
Can there be still among us some general cause, acting on everyone, which mysteriously checks out progress, which makes us "penny-wise and pound-foolish," makes us "save at the spigot and spend at the bung-hole," which continually intensifies our consciousness of personal interest and continually prevents the recognition of social interests?
It may seem almost grotesque to make so heavy a complaint as this, and then to put forward as chief offender our old companion the kitchen.
Briefly the charge is this: that in the private kitchen, we maintain in our civilization an economic institution as old as house-building, almost as old as the use of fire. The results of this surviving rudiment of a remote past are many. The one presented here is the effect of the kitchen on the mind.
The condition is practically universal. For each house a kitchen. Be it the merest hut, the smallest tenement, one room; wherever the family is found, there is the kitchen. For each man there is a cook. In the great majority of cases the man's wife is his cook, and as she must spend most of her time in the kitchen, there must be her little ones also. In fifteen-sixteenths of American families, the children are thus reared,—by cooks in kitchens.
We, in our fatuous acceptance of race habits, have ceaselessly perpetuated this kitchen-bred population, and even defended it as an educational influence of no mean importance. "Children brought up by their mothers in the kitchen," we say, "early acquire knowledge and skill in various occupations; they see things done, and learn how to do them themselves."
This seems to the superficial listener like good sense. He never looks below the allegation for the evidence. He sees that daily observation, and practice should develop knowledge and skill, and fails to inquire further to see if it does.
Surely if all children were brought up in blacksmith shops, it would make them good blacksmiths; if they were brought up in dental parlors they would become good dentists!
Waiving the desirability of a form of training calculated to turn out an unvarying population of cooks, let us see if this daily association with the maternal house-servant in her workshop does educate as stated. On this point one clear comment has been made: "If kitchen life is such good training to mind and hand, why is it that so few of us are willing to follow the kitchen trades when we are grown? and why is it that competence in the kitchen is so rare?" This is a most practical observation. If fifteen-sixteenths of our women followed incessantly the occupation of shoemaking, and brought up their children in the shoe shop, we should hardly claim great educational advantages for that arrangement. If we did, would it not be disappointing to find that the trade of shoemaking was universally disliked and despised, and that good shoemakers were hard to find at any price?
Yet this is precisely the case in hand. Our kitchen-bred children, boy and girl alike, prefer almost any other trade, and when we wish to secure competent workers in the kitchen we find them extremely scarce.
Moreover, in its own special activities, the private kitchen makes no advance. Advance comes to it from outside; from the wider and more progressive professionalism of its various industries; specialized and socialized one by one. But, left to itself, domestic cook hands down to domestic cook the recipes of female ancestors, occasionally added to by obliging friends. It is endless repetition, but not progress.
The purpose of this discussion, however, is not to show the inefficacy of this ancient workshop, as a means of carrying on that great art, science, handicraft, and business—the preparation of food; but to point out the effect of the kitchen on the human mind.
The one dominant note of kitchen work is personality. Its products are all prepared for home consumption only. Its provisions are all secured and its processes directed with a view to pleasing a small group. It does not and cannot consider the general questions of hygiene, of nutrition, of the chemistry of improved processes of preparation, and the immense and pressing problems of pure food.
The kitchen mind, focussed continually upon close personal concerns, limited in time, in means, in capacity, and in mechanical convenience, can consider only; a, what the family likes; b, what the family can afford; and, c, what the cook can accomplish.
The most perfect type of organization we have is the military. Military success depends most absolutely on the commissary and sanitary departments. "An army travels on its belly," is the famous dictum.
Is there any difference in this respect between soldiers and other people? Are we not all gasteropods whether singly or in regiments? Is not the health and strength of the productive workers of the world, at least as valuable as that of the cumbrous forces of destruction?
In our last little war, and in the big one before that, disease killed more than sword and steel. We lament this—in armies. We prefer to keep our soldiers healthy that they may fight more strongly, and die more efficaciously, and this sick list is pure waste.
Is it any less waste in private life? Can we easily afford the loss in money—annual billions; the loss in strength, the loss in intellect, the loss in love, that falls on us so heavily from year to year? Study the record of man's fight with disease. See how the specialists devoting not only lifetimes, but the accumulating succession of lifetimes to the study of causes, cures and preventions, announce to us at last, "thus and thus are you made sick. Thus may you be cured, and thus may you so live as to be well."
See then the sanitary work of an aroused public; a truth is discovered; a truth is announced; a law is made; the law is enforced—a disease is conquered.
This is vividly shown in the work of our Government against pleuro-pneumonia—in cattle. The Federal Government, furnishing information and funds, and cooperating with the various States, attacked that disease, and stamped it out completely.
There is an effort now to rouse our government to fight the White Plague, in people as well as in cattle. And, as always, the difficulty is to stir and stretch and rouse our kitchen minds, to make us see things in common instead of individually. The men whose cattle had pleuro-pneumonia, kept them in herds, and lost them in herds, losing much money thereby. Many men were so afflicted. Therefore these many men got together, and, using the machinery of the State, they together destroyed their enemy. Cattle-raising is a business, a social industry.
But child-raising, husband-feeding, the care of the lives and health of all our families, is a domestic industry, in the management of the kitchen mind.
it has been shown recently that 72 per cent. of the cattle in New York State are tuberculous. This does not kill them quickly like pleuro-pneumonia. They live and may be sold. They live and may give milk. It has been shown recently (as stated in our unimpeachable daily press), that in some of the milk sold in New York City, there were more germs to the cubic millimeter, than in the same amount of sewage!
This milk, and most of the milk in all our cities, goes into the kitchen; the blind, brainless, family-feeding kitchen, and from there is given us to drink.
What protest rises from the kitchens of New York, or Chicago, or any city? What mass-meeting of angry women, presenting to their legislators the horrible facts of strong men poisoned and babies slain by this or any other abomination in the food supply?
A young man writes a novel exhibiting the badness of our meat supply. Men become excited. Men take action. Men legislate. The great meat industries stagger under the shock, recover, and go on smiling. Before this meanwhile, and afterwards, the meat went into out kitchens and we ate it.
Being kitchen-minded we cannot see that health is a public concern; that the feeding of our people is one of the most vital factors in their health, and that the private kitchen with its private cook is not able to keep the public well.
Ask the physician, the sanitary expert. He will tell you that the great advance in sanitary science is in its battle with the filth diseases; and that we die worse than ever from food diseases.
In fighting the filth diseases we have the public forces to work with; compulsory systems of sewage and drainage, quarantine, isolation hospitals, and all the other maneuvers by which an enlightened public protects itself.
But who shall say what a child shall eat, or a man or woman? Is it not wholly their own affair?
We cry out upon our women for the falling birth rate;—why not say something about the death rate of their babies? The average family must have four, merely to maintain a stationary population, said Grant Allen; "two to replace themselves and two to die." The doctor will tell you that they die mostly of what are called "preventable diseases" and that those diseases are mainly of the alimentary canal.
Kitchen-fed are we all, and those of us who survive it, who become immune to it, cry loudly of its excellence! If we could once see outside of these ancient limits, once figure to ourselves the vision of a healthy world, and the noble duty of making it,—then we should no longer be kitchen-minded.
Our narrowness of vision, our petty self-interest, does not end its injuries with our bodily health. Its leaden limitation is felt in all the economic field.
Not a business have we in the world but needs to be considered as a matter of public service; needs to be studied, helped, restricted, generally managed for the public good. Not a business in the world but is crippled and distorted by the childish self-interest of its promoters. Kitchen-bred men born of kitchen-bred mothers are we, and inevitably must we consider the main duty of life to be the service of our own body. What else does the child see his mother do, but work, work, work to cover the family table with food three times a day, and clear up afterward? What else can he grow up to do but work, work, work, to provide the wherewithal for another woman to do the same?
A million women are making bread as their mothers made it. How many women are trying to lift the standard of bread-making for their country? How many even know the difference in nutriment and digestibility between one bread and another?
They do not think "bread," but only "my bread." Their view of the staff of life is kitchen-minded. When our kitchen trades become world trades, when we are fed, not by the most ignorant, but by the wisest; when personal whims and painfully acquired habits give place to the light of science, and the fruit of wide experience; when, instead of dragging duty or sordid compulsion, we have wisdom and art to feed us; the change will be far greater than that of improved health. It will be a great and valuable advance even there. We shall become healthy, clean-fleshed people, intelligent eaters, each generation improving in strength and beauty, but we shall be helped in wider ways than that. We shall have the enlarged mental capacity that comes of a wider area of work and responsibility. We shall have in each man and woman the habitual power of organization, the daily recognition of mutual service and world-duty.
When the world comes out of the kitchen for good and all, and for that primitive little shop is substituted the cool glittering laboratory, wherein the needs of bodily replenishment are fully and beautifully met, it will give to the growing child a different background for his thought processes. At last we shall mark the great division between production, which is the social function, and consumption which is personal.
As we now emerge from the warm and greasy confines of our ancient cookshop, we begin to see with new eyes its true place as an economic factor. We are learning the unbridled waste of it; how it costs struggling humanity about forty-three per cent. of its productive labor, and two-thirds of its living expenses; how it does not conserve the very end for which we uphold it,—the health of the family; how it leaves us helpless before the adulterators of food, the purveyors of impure milk, diseased meat, and all unpleasantness. We are beginning to see how, most dangerous of all, it works against our economic progress, by perpetuating a primitive selfishness.
Public interest grows in public service. Self-interest is maintained by self-service. We can neither rightly estimate social gain, nor rightly condemn social evil, because we are so soddenly habituated to consider only personal gain, personal good and personal evil; because we are kitchen-minded.
TWO STORKS
Two storks were nesting.
He was a young stork—and narrow-minded. Before he married he had consorted mainly with striplings of his own kind, and had given no thought to the ladies, either maid or matron.
After he married his attention was concentrated upon his All-Satisfying Wife; upon that Triumph of Art, Labor, and Love—their Nest, and upon those Special Creations—their Children. Deeply was he moved by the marvellous instincts and processes of motherhood. Love, reverence, intense admiration, rose in his heart for Her of the Well-built Nest; Her of the Gleaming Treasure of Smooth Eggs; Her of the Patient Brooding Breast, the Warming Wings, the downy wide-mouthed Group of Little Ones.
Assiduously he labored to help her build the nest, to help her feed the young; proud of his impassioned activity in her and their behalf; devoutly he performed his share of the brooding, while she hunted in her turn. When he was o-wing he thought continually of Her as one with the Brood—His Brood. When he was on the nest he thought all the more of Her, who sat there so long, so lovingly, to such noble ends.
The happy days flew by, fair Spring—sweet Summer—gentle Autumn. The young ones grew larger and larger; it was more and more work to keep their lengthening, widening beaks shut in contentment. Both parents flew far afield to feed them.
Then the days grew shorter, the sky greyer, the wind colder; there was less hunting and small success. In his dreams he began to see sunshine, broad, burning sunshine day after day; skies of limitless blue; dark, deep, yet full of fire; and stretches of bright water, shallow, warm, fringed with tall reeds and rushes, teeming with fat frogs.
They were in her dreams too, but he did not know that.
He stretched his wings and flew farther every day; but his wings were not satisfied. In his dreams came a sense of vast heights and boundless spaces of the earth streaming away beneath him; black water and white land, grey water and brown land, blue water and green land, all flowing backward from day to day, while the cold lessened and the warmth grew.
He felt the empty sparkling nights, stars far above, quivering, burning; stars far below, quivering more in the dark water; and felt his great wings wide, strong, all sufficient, carrying him on and on!
This was in her dreams too, but he did not know that.
"It is time to Go!" he cried one day. "They are coming! It is upon us!
Yes—I must Go! Goodbye my wife! Goodbye my children!" For the
Passion of Wings was upon him.
She too was stirred to the heart. "Yes! It is time to Go! To Go!" she cried. "I am ready! Come!"
He was shocked; grieved; astonished. "Why, my Dear!" he said. "How preposterous! You cannot go on the Great Flight! Your wings are for brooding tender little ones! Your body is for the Wonder of the Gleaming Treasure!—not for days and nights of ceaseless soaring! You cannot go!"
She did not heed him. She spread her wide wings and swept and circled far and high above—as, in truth, she had been doing for many days, though he had not noticed it.
She dropped to the ridge-pole beside him where he was still muttering objections. "Is it not glorious!" she cried. "Come! They are nearly ready!"
"You unnatural Mother!" he burst forth. "You have forgotten the Order of Nature! You have forgotten your Children! Your lovely precious tender helpless Little Ones!" And he wept—for his highest ideals were shattered.
But the Precious Little Ones stood in a row on the ridge-pole and flapped their strong young wings in high derision. They were as big as he was, nearly; for as a matter of fact he was but a Young Stork himself.
Then the air was beaten white with a thousand wings, it was like snow and silver and seafoam, there was a flashing whirlwind, a hurricane of wild joy and then the Army of the Sky spread wide in due array and streamed Southward.
Full of remembered joy and more joyous hope, finding the high sunlight better than her dreams, she swept away to the far summerland; and her children, mad with the happiness of the First Flight, swept beside her.
"But you are a Mother!" he panted, as he caught up with them.
"Yes!" she cried, joyously, "but I was a Stork before I was A Mother! and afterward!—and All the Time!"
And the Storks were Flying.