Wood Ashes And Progress

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Title:     Wood Ashes And Progress
Author: Walter Prichard Eaton [More Titles by Eaton]

"Once man defended his home and hearth; now he defends his home and radiator." The words stared out of the bulk of print on the page with startling vividness, a gem of philosophy, a "criticism of life," in the waste of jokes which the comic-paper editor had read and doubtless paid for, and which the public was doubtless expected to enjoy. The Man Above the Square laid aside the paper, leaned toward his fire, took up the poker (an old ebony cane adorned with a heavy silver knob which bore the name of an actor once loved and admired) and rolled the top log over slowly and meditatively. The end of the cane was scarred and burned from many a contest with stubborn logs, and the Man Above the Square looked at the marks of service with a smile before he stood the heavy stick again in its place by the fireside.

"It isn't every walking-stick which comes to such a good end," he said aloud.

Then either because he was cold or in penitence for the pun, he walked over to the windows to pull down the shades. But before he did so he looked out into the night, his breath making a frosty vapor on the pane. Below him the Square gleamed in white patches under the arc-lamps, and across these white patches here and there a belated pedestrian, coat collar turned up, hurried, a black shadow. The cross on the Memorial Church gleamed like a cluster of stars, and deep in the cold sky the moon rode silently. A chill wind was complaining in the bare treetops beneath him and found its way to his face and body through the window chinks. He drew down the shades quickly and pulled the heavy draperies together with a rattle of rings on the rods. Then he turned and faced his room.

A scarf of Oriental silk veiled the light of the single lamp, set low on his desk, and the fire had its own way with the illumination. It sent dancing shadows over the olive walls, it made points of light of the picture-frames and a glowing coal of the polished coffee-urn in the corner; it pointed pleasantly out the numberless books, but told nothing of their contents; it made dark the spaces where the alcoves were, but suffused the little radius of the hearth that was bounded by an easy chair and a pipe-stand with a glow and warmth and comfort which were irresistible. The Man Above the Square came quickly into this charmed radius and sank again into the chair. "And some people insist on steam heat!" he said.

Then he looked into the rosy pit of wallowing, good-natured flames, and fancied he was meditating. But in reality he was going to sleep. When he woke up the fire was out and he was cramped and cold. He stumbled to a corner, turned on the steam in a radiator, that the room might be warm in the morning, and returned to his chamber.

"After all, you have to build a fire; but the steam just comes," he growled, as he crawled sleepily into bed.

Toward morning the steam did come, but some hours before he was ready to rise. It came at intervals, forcing the water up ahead and thumping it against the top of the radiator with the force of a trip-hammer and the noise of a cannon. The Man Above the Square woke up and cursed. The intervals between thumps he employed in wondering how soon the next report would come, which effectively prevented his going to sleep again. Presently the thumping ceased, and he dozed off, to awake later in ugly temper. He went out into the sitting room and found it cold as an ice-box.

"Where in blazes is all that steam which woke me up at daylight?" he shouted down the speaking-tube to the janitor. The answer, as usual, admitted of no reply, even as it offered no satisfactory explanation. He dug into the wood-box and on the heap of feathery white ashes which topped the pile in the fireplace like snow--"the fall of last night" he called it--he laid a fire of pine and maple. In three minutes he was toasting his toes in front of the blaze, and good nature was spreading up his person like the tide up a bay.

"Modern conveniences would be all right," he chuckled, looking from the merry fire to the ugly radiator, "if they were ever convenient!"

Then he swung Indian clubs for a quarter of an hour, jumped into a cold plunge, and went rosy to his breakfast and the day's work, with the cheeriness of the fire in his heart.

But while he was gone there entered the chambermaid, and sad desecration was wrought. Chambermaids are another modern inconvenience. The Pilgrim Fathers got along without chambermaids; and even at a much later period chambermaids worked at least under the supervision of a mistress of the household. But nowadays they have their own way, even in abodes where there is one who could be a mistress if she would, or time from social duties and the improvement of her mind permitted. Of course, in the abode of a bachelor the chambermaid is supreme, for bachelors, at least in New York, have of necessity to live in apartments, not private boarding houses presided over by a careful mistress. Probably most of them prefer to; but that does not prove progress, none the less. But the Man Above the Square was not of this class. He had a sharp elbow bone, in the first place, which is to signify that he was a "good house-keeper," as they say in New England. And in the second place, he knew the value to the aesthetic and moral sense of personality in living rooms, of an orderly, tasteful arrangement of inanimate objects, carpets, pictures, furniture, which, through weeks of comparative changelessness, takes on the human aspect of a friend and silently welcomes you when you return at night, saying comfortably, "I am here, as you left me; I am home."

So when he entered his room again that evening and turned up the gas, his immediate utterance was not strictly the subject for reproduction. To begin with, the chambermaid had, in disobedience to his strict orders, taken up the centre rug and sent it up on the roof for the porter to beat. Being an expensive rug, the Man Above the Square did not particularly relish having it frequently beaten. But still less did he relish the way it had been replaced. It was not in the centre of the room, so that two legs of the library desk in the middle stood on the border and two on the diamond centre. One end was too near the piano, the other consequently too far from the hearth. And in trying to tug it into position the maid had managed to pull every edge out of plumb with the lines of the floor. Of course, the photographs on the piano had smooches on the margins, where the maid's thumb had pressed as she held them up to dust beneath. Pudd'n-Head Wilson would alone have prized them in their present state. On the mantel each object was just far enough out of its proper place to throw the whole decorative scheme into a line of Puritanic primness. And the chairs, silent friends that are so companionable when an understanding hand places them in position, were now facing at stiff angles of armed neutrality, as if mutually suspicious. Not one of them said, "Sit in me."

But the worst was yet to come. Walking over to the fireplace, the Man Above the Square looked in and groaned.

"She's done it again!" he cried. "I'd move out of this flat to-night if I wasn't sure that any other would be as bad, this side of the middle of last century."

It was, indeed, a sorry piece of work. The splendid pile of gray and white wood ashes which that morning had been heaped high over the arms of the firedogs, and which drifted high into each corner and out upon the hearth, was no more. A little pile remained, carefully swept into the rear of the fireplace, but the bulk of the ashes had been removed and the arms of the firedogs stood inches above what was left.

"I told her not to do it; confound it! I told her not to do it!" he muttered aloud, storming about the room. "Here I've been since Christmas collecting that pile of ashes, and it had just reached the point where I could kindle a fire with three sticks of kindling and burn only one log if I wished. And then that confounded chambermaid disobeys me--distinctly disobeys me--and shovels it all out!"

He rang angrily for the chambermaid, whose name was Eliza, and who was tall and angular.

"Didn't I tell you under no consideration to take away any of my ashes?" he demanded.

"But I swept the room into them, and they got all dirty," she protested.

"Then don't sweep the room again!" he interposed. "I want the ashes left hereafter."

"But the fire will burn better without so many ashes; they chokes it," said Eliza. "Most people like 'em cleaned out every week."

"Most people are fools," said the Man Above the Square. "You may go now."

The loss of his ashes had so irritated him that it was a long time before he could yield himself to the influence of the blaze, which leapt merrily enough, in spite of the too clear hearth. He filled his pipe and smoked it out and filled it again; he tried the latest autobiography and Heine's prose and the current magazines; and still his mind would not settle to restfulness and content. Then suddenly he remembered the date, the 20th of January. He took down his Keats. The owl, for all his feathers, might well have been a-cold on that night, too, for a shrill wind was up without. He glanced at his fire. Already the kindlings were settling into glowing heaps beneath the logs, a good start on a fresh pile of ashes. He snuggled more comfortably into his chair and began once more the deathless poem.

The clock ticked steadily; the wind sent crashing down the limb of an elm tree outside and shrieked exultingly; a log settled into the fire with a hiss and crackle of sparks. But he heard nothing. Presently he laid the book aside, for the poem was finished, and looked into the fire. It was sometimes a favorite question of his to inquire who ate Madeline's feast, a point which Keats leaves in doubt; but he did not ask it to-night.

"Yes, it was ages long ago," he said at length. "Ages long ago!"

Then he leaned forward, poking the fire meditatively, and added: "Steam heat in Madeline's chamber? Impossible! But there might have been just such another fire as this!"

And was it a sudden thought, "like a full-blown rose," making "purple riot" in his breast, too, or was it simply the leap of the firelight, which caused his face to flush?

"I wonder where they are now?" he whispered. "'They are together in the arms of death,' a later poet says. But surely the world has not so far 'progressed' that they do not live somewhere still."

Then he recalled a visit he once made to a young doctor in a fine old New-England village. The doctor was not long out of college, and he had brought his bride to this little town, to an old house rich in tiny window panes, uneven floors and memories. Great fireplaces supplied the heat for the doctor and his wife, as it had done for the occupants who looked forth from the windows to see the soldiery go by on their way to join Washington at the siege of Boston. And when the Man Above the Square came on his visit he found in the fireplace which warmed the low-studded living room, that was library and drawing room as well, a heap of ashes more than a foot high, on which the great cordwood sticks roared merrily.

The doctor and his wife, sitting down before the blaze, pointed proudly to this heap of ashes, and the doctor said, "I brought Alice to this house a year ago, on the day of our wedding, and we kindled a fire here, on the bare hearth. Since then not a speck of ashes has been removed, except little bits from the front when the carpet was invaded. That pile of ashes is the witness to our year-long honeymoon."

Then Alice smiled fondly into the rosy glow, herself more rosy, and they kissed each other quite unaffectedly.

The Man Above the Square, when his memory reached this point, let the ebony poker slide from his grasp. "Ah!" he exclaimed, "her name was really Madeline!"

Again he looked into the fire. "Could the ashes have been preserved if Madeline had not given the matter her personal attention, but had trusted to a housemaid?" he thought. What further reflections this question inspired must be left to conjecture. He did not speak again.

But presently he got up, went to his desk, and wrote a letter. He was a long time about it, consulting frequently with the fire and smiling now and then. When it was done he took it at once to the elevator to be mailed. Perhaps he thought it unsafe to wait the turning of the mood.

[The end]
Walter Prichard Eaton's essay: Wood Ashes And Progress

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