Chapter XI

“It’s just a pigpen! That’s what it is!” declared Molly Poppleton, holding up her ample calico skirts and clean gingham apron in a gingerly way. “I don’t know where to begin. I didn’t suppose a human being _could_ be so dirty!” Then she plunged into work. The range got such a cleaning as it had not had in years. The ashes were cleaned out, and the soot removed from all its little doors and traps and openings. Molly was not used to a city range with all its numerous appliances, but she had very keen common sense and she used it. She knew dirt and ashes could not help a fire to burn, so she removed them. While she was about it, she gave it a good washing inside and out, for she found the oven encrusted with burned sugar and juice of some sort, and the top was covered with grease. Then, in the most scientific manner, she started a fire, and before very long it was glowing, and the water in the old tank was steaming hot.

It appeared there really was no time for those dining-room windows that day, after all. With skirts tucked together and sleeves rolled high Molly generously used the hot water and soap in the kitchen. She unceremoniously took the old ragged cloths which must have been Maggie’s wiping towels for scrubbing rags, trusting to Miss Hannah’s sense of the fitness of things to provide others in some way. The kitchen table and shelves and windows and paint and sink were scrubbed, and even the floor, and then Molly stood back and surveyed the room now pervaded with a damp atmosphere redolent of soap.

“There! I guess it’ll do fer over night, and the fust chance I get I’ll give it a good cleaning. I never saw the like in my life! How them poor boarders stood it eating out of a dirty hole like this I don’t see. Now, what’s to do? That sink was a caution! The water and dust was all in a mess underneath and the top was slimy! I wonder what that creature that called herself Maggie thought she was made for.”

Meanwhile Miss Hannah had gone to her trunk and arrayed herself in an old grey gingham and a dark apron that enveloped her completely. She had discovered that they must begin at the very foundation before they could hope to do anything toward getting dinner. She investigated Celia’s stores and found they were ample for present needs. Celia’s training had not been for nothing. She knew by intuition that her aunt and Molly would enquire for soap and yeast and baking powder among the first things. She had thought of the little things that might not be in stock in Mrs. Morris’ kitchen and had a supply for the present. The stores in the pantry were not very full. There was a plate with a pile of sour white-looking pancakes, another with some lumpy oatmeal, a few boiled potatoes, a bowl of watery soup and two or three ends of baker’s loaves. Miss Hannah applied her nose to one of these and then laid it down again and said, “Bah!”

After looking at the array a few minutes, she gathered them all into a pan and dumped them into the garbage pail. A heavy, lifeless pie on a higher shelf also met the same fate. Then she got the dish pan and some clean hot water and washed a few dishes for her immediate use. Having done this she prepared to set some bread. It was late in the day, but it would not take long, and it could rise while she was doing other things and be baked after the dinner was cooked. Then she could hurry up part of it by making it into pulled rolls so that they could be used for dinner. The bread done she started on a searching expedition for bread cloths and clean rags. She could not work without tools. In one of her trunks was a roll of old rags and linen; with Molly’s help she unstrapped the trunk and searched it out. It was a great satisfaction to have that bread covered with a clean cloth and feel that so much of her work was going on right. She decided that the dishes must all be washed. She and Molly both worked at this, Molly washing off the shelves while she wiped the dishes. By that time it was four o’clock.

“It’s high time we was seeing about the dinner,” said Molly, as she thumped the last pile of plates upon the clean shelf. “What are you going to do for a tablecloth? That one in there ain’t fit, an’ there ain’t a clean one about the drawer anywhere. There’s a pile of dirty ones behind the door in the back stairway. I reckon I’ll have to wash one. As for napkins I should suppose they didn’t use ’em. I can’t find any.”

Miss Hannah went on another hunt, and discovered more soiled tablecloths and a stack of soiled napkins. There was nothing for it but to wash some. Molly already had the washtub going and was working as if her life depended upon it. Well for Miss Hannah’s plans and Celia’s hopes that Molly was equal to emergencies, nay delighted in them, and that she was a swift worker. By the time Miss Hannah had the tablecloth and dishes off the table and the dining-room swept and dusted that linen was swinging in a brisk breeze in the back yard and the irons were growing hot on the range.

“Five o’clock and the table not set yet!” commented Molly. She was working on time and the pleasure of the race depended upon her getting done before Miss Celia should arrive, and being able to ring that dinner bell exactly on time. “Well, I reckon we’ll get through somehow. You can’t turn a pigpen into a parlor in one day, you know. I declare, Miss Hannah, it was a pity to turn that girl loose on the community. We ought to have kept her by main force and taught her how to scrub, before we let her go. The things that wasn’t too filthy dirty to be burned or rusted is burned and rusted, and the things that had anything about them to get lost and broken has got that the matter with them. I reckon we’ll have a few things to buy ’fore we get fixed out for comfort.”

But Molly was working swiftly all the while she talked. She had filled the little salts and peppers, and rubbed up the knives. The careful Celia had not forgotten bath brick nor silver polish, though there was very little that had any pretension to silver to clean. The dishes and table appointments were of the plainest. Many would have said it was impossible to make any difference in that table without spending a lot of money. Miss Hannah did not think so. She knew the subtle difference between order and disorder, and the startling contrast between cleanliness and dirt. Cleanliness was next to godliness and she was practicing that to-day. The godliness she hoped would follow hard after. While she pulled the little cushions of responsive velvety dough for the rolls, she prayed a rich blessing on that first meal in the house under her care. Then she let her mind wander for a moment to the home she had left which had been no more of a home to her than this was yet to its inmates. She wondered how they were getting on, and if the baby was well. The only drawback to the joy of leaving Nettie’s had been the baby. Aunt Hannah could not help loving babies, and enjoying the clinging of their soft dimpling arms about her neck and their apple blossom breath upon her cheek. The babies always loved aunt Hannah. It was only after they grew older and began to imitate the grown-up people that they began to be saucy, impertinent, and unloving. Even then, Johnnie and Lily had always come to aunt Hannah with a burn or a bump to be comforted, for somehow her motherly arms knew just how best to gather in the troubled little one and comfort it. But aunt Hannah had no time to think of duties past, and troubles. She gave the last little jerk to the puffy roll and tucked it in the pan to rise for the last time, and then hastened in to set that table. Molly had laid the crisp tablecloth which she had literally forced to dry quickly with her hot irons, on the table and was ironing away for dear life at the napkins. Molly and aunt Hannah had high ideals, brought from comfortable private homes, and they wished this house they had come to take care of to be a home in the best sense of the word. They worked faster now, for the clock was warning them that it was getting late. The roast beef well seared in the most scientific way was roasting away in the oven with a good supply of sweet and Irish potatoes on the grate below, grouped about a huge baked apple dumpling which Molly had hastily concocted, and Molly was straining the spinach and subjecting it to a rubbing through the colander, after which it went back on the stove to keep hot before its butter and last peppering were applied. She looked doubtfully at the water the spinach was cooked in and then with a daring glance at the clock rushed about to carry out another resolution, calling to Miss Hannah:

“You ken put on the soup plates ef your a mine to. I’ve found I can make a taste of spinach soup with the water and some milk and flour and butter. It’ll make things seem nicer I guess for the first night, and don’t take a minute. That’ll give the rolls time to get a little browner before they’re needed, you know.” Then she began to sing at the top of her voice:

“Am I a soldier of the cross,—”

Molly Poppleton always sang at the top of her lungs when she had some important work to do or was in an unusual hurry with her work. It made her very happy to have a good deal of work, and hard work at that.

Celia, opening the front door with her latchkey just then, heard the singing and rejoiced. There was the old Molly. She had not become discouraged and gone home, but was at work with heart and voice as in their old kitchen at home. She ran out into the dining-room to see how things were getting on before she went upstairs. But she stopped in the doorway astounded. Even her highest hopes had not realized the change there would be. What made it? Was it the shining tablecloth, or the glistening glasses, or the knives and forks laid straight, or what? A nice square cake of butter was in each butter-plate at the ends of the table. The salts were smoothed off and stamped with the bottom of the salt-cellars. The plates were in a pile at one end of the table instead of being upside down on the napkins at each place. Where were the plates of crackers and gingersnaps which had not failed to appear at every dinner since she had been boarding there? Where was the inevitable dish of prunes? Gone, and in its place a dish of translucent cranberry jelly which Molly had found time somehow to fix. It was all very wonderful. Even the gas had a clean globe on it. Celia wondered that so much had been accomplished in one short afternoon. She heard the door being opened from the outside and hurried into the kitchen, closing the dining-room door behind her first. This must burst upon them all at once when they entered the dining-room.

Aunt Hannah was taking the brown balls from the roll pan and piling them on a plate, when she went into the kitchen, and she greeted her with:

“Celia, go upstairs and wash your hands and then come down and fix the celery. Molly and I haven’t a second to do it, and it is time to ring that bell in five minutes. Have the boarders come yet?”

Celia rushed away and was soon back, bearing aunt Hannah’s white apron and a brush to smooth her hair that she might not be delayed from coming to dinner on account of her appearance, and at last the dinner was ready and it was time to ring the bell. She put the two glasses of celery on the table, and handing Molly the bell went into the parlor. She did not wish anybody yet to know she had a right in the kitchen. She was just the ribbon girl from Dobson and Co.’s. There were things she wanted to accomplish first which could better be done that way, she thought.

The bell rang and the boarders trooped down. The little old lady from upstairs was first and interrupted the advance of the others, for a moment. She walked into the dining-room followed by Miss Burns. Both stopped blinking in the doorway and staring around, before they slowly walked in a dazed way to their respective places. The two girls from the three-cent store became embarrassed, and stood back awkwardly against the wall staring undisguisedly. The three young men came after, Harry Knowles ahead.

He drew a long whistle, and turning on his heel, started back into the hall again. “Whew! this is great!” he said as he went. “I’m going to wash my hands and comb my hair. I don’t fit in there.”

Aunt Hannah with her grey hair and placid face and grey dress with its white apron presided well over that table. The dishes might be thick and the tablecloth coarse, but no dinner on any rich man’s table was ever cooked or served better, nor more thoroughly enjoyed. After they were seated Miss Burns began with her nervous little giggle:

“Oh really, now, this is simply,—simply—simply _fine_, don’t you know. This is quite a change, isn’t it, dear?” and she looked across the table at Celia who was passing celery and handing soup plates as aunt Hannah ladled out the pale green tempting soup. Her guests ate of it in wonder. They were not acquainted with pureè of spinach. They wondered how it got colored, and what it was anyway, and the most of them ate every drop in their plates, some of them tilting the plates to accomplish it. The three-cent store girls and the university student asked for more and got it, and then Molly, her sleeves rolled decorously down and a white apron over her dark one, took out the soup and brought in the platter with that great brown perfectly cooked roast, and brought potatoes and spinach and hot plates, while aunt Hannah with experienced hand and keen knife, sharpened by herself, cut great juicy pink slices in generous plenty and filled the plates.

They were a rather silent table that first night. They were embarrassed to a degree by their surroundings which were so familiar and yet so unfamiliar. And then the dinner was absorbing. It absorbed their thoughts and they absorbed it.

When it came time for the dessert they sat back satisfied, and feeling that perhaps it were as well that the inevitable pie, which they always had for dessert, did not come to spoil this ideal repast. But they forgot such feelings when that great pudding was brought in, its crust browned to a nicety on the top, and light as feathers when it was cut, its luscious quarters of amber apples in the bottom, and a dressing of some sweet transparent syrup with just a dash of cinnamon.

“I tell you what!” said Harry Knowles, leaning back in his chair to fold his napkin and talking in an aside to Celia, “that was the best dinner I have tasted since I left home. I feel as if I had been invited out, don’t you? I don’t know what it means, do you? She certainly can’t keep it up. I suppose she’s just standing treat for the first night, but I declare, if I could have meals like that, I’m not sure but I might be a different kind of a fellow and amount to something. How’s our lamp getting on? I thought of a way to fix the spring in that sofa the other night. I believe I’ll stay in and try it to-night.”

Aunt Hannah, as they were leaving the table, apologized for not having put the rooms in order that day. She had only been in power, she said, since one o’clock, and there had not been time to do everything. She hoped to have things in better shape very soon if they would all be patient. Then the boarders went into the parlor to whisper with one another about that good dinner, and Celia slipped unseen out to the kitchen to exult and to help.