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There were delightful long perspectives of model kitchens, of vegetable gardens, orchards, and dairies. There were pictures of girls making jam, and sterilizing bottles, and arranging trays for the sick. There were girls amusing children and making beds. There were glimpses of the model flats, built into the college buildings, with gas stoves and dumb-waiters.
The big forest trees were bare, but there were flowers in all the cottage gardens, even late lingering roses on southern walls, and the clipped yew-tree abominations dumb-waiters, peacocks, and other monstrosities were in their pride of winter beauty. The ducks were swimming gaily in the village pond, and the village inn was still glorious with red geraniums, in redder pots.
They came on dumb-waiters from some place either above or below. At the left of the stairs were some five chefs of as many nationalities—Italian, Spanish, South American, French, Austrian, who filled hot orders, frying and broiling and roasting.
Dumb-waiters with clean plates, glasses, etc. stand at each corner of the table, so that there is very little need to get up for what you want. The afternoon is usually passed by the ladies alone or with only one or two gentlemen who don't care to shoot, etc., and is spent in riding, driving and walking. Englishwomen are great walkers.
It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched, through slides and dumb-waiters, as it were; in other words, the parlor is so far from the kitchen and workshop. The dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly.
"You cannot imagine the majestic feminine disdain with which you may be informed that a five-cent bar of soap should be delivered at the back door instead of the front door. The most indignant example was a red-haired woman who was doing her own work in a flat. She fairly blazed. She wanted to know if I didn't know what dumb-waiters were for."
He could therefore describe with color their resources the janitor; the elevator; the dumb-waiters to carry up domestic supplies and carry down ashes and refuse; the refrigerator; the unlimited supply of hot and cold water, the heating plan; the astonishing little kitchen, with stationary wash-tubs; the telephone, if you could afford it, all the conveniences which to Miss Alicia, accustomed to the habits of Rowcroft Vicarage, where you lugged cans of water up-stairs and down if you took a bath or even washed your face; seemed luxuries appertaining only to the rich and great.
On the table at equidistant points stand two tiny tables or dumb-waiters, which are made to revolve.
These chief specimens of the marriage provision were supported on the right by a couple of kitchen dressers, each fitted complete with their cups, dishes, and plates, in their turn followed by two dumb-waiters, two family Bibles, two warming- pans, and two intermixed sets of chairs. But the position last reached the chimney-corner was, after all, the most attractive side of the parallelogram.
I found my way by the touch of the hand, and very soon I seemed to have the eyesight of a cat to find shafts, dumb-waiters, circuitous turnings in the sub-cellars of large apartment houses. The life of a milkman is a busy one, but I found time to mumble my Greek roots as I trotted in and out of the cellars. My grammar, when weather permitted, was tied open to a bottle in the cart.
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