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Updated: April 30, 2025
Anderson Crow stood aside and the tall, black figure entered the hall. He led her to the warm sitting-room and gave her a chair before the "base-burner." "Here, Mr. Crow, is an envelope containing two hundred and fifty dollars. That proves my good faith. I cannot tell you who I am nor what relation I bear to the baby.
In one corner of the room stood a closed cabinet organ; behind me, a tall base-burner, polished till it seemed to light the dimmest corners of the room. There was no fire in the stove; there was no air in the room, only the mingled breath of soot and the hair-flowers and the plush album and the stuffed blue jay under the bell-jar on the mantelpiece, and the heavy brass-clasped Bible.
The man's face and neck were of a purplish, apoplectic hue; he seemed to radiate heat-waves like a base-burner. "Is this Mr. Weeks?" Kirk inquired. "That's me." "My name is Anthony." "Glad to meet you," wheezed the fat man, extending a limp, moist hand without rising. When Kirk had grasped it he felt like wiping his own palm. "Have a seat."
With the front of her garments dripping wet, she stood erect from her tub, looked at him where he sat near the kitchen fire the base-burner had long been cold and said: "Sammy, you must go to work. I can do no more. It is killing me." "But what can I do, mother dear?" he answered kindly. "I do not know," she said weariedly. "Something, maybe, that will help. You are educated.
Mr. Burkhardt sat up, shook himself of sleep. "Little chilly," he said, and in carpet slippers and unbuttoned waistcoat moved over to the base-burner, his feet, to avoid sloughing, not leaving the floor. He was slightly stooped, the sateen back to his waistcoat hiking to the curve of him. But he swung up the scuttle with a swoop, rattling coal freely down into the red-jowled orifice.
Beside the stove, a base-burner with faint fire showing through its mica, the identity of her figure merged with the fat upholstery of the chair, except where the faint pink through the mica lighted up old flesh, Mrs. Miriam Horowitz, full of years and senile with them, wove with grasses, the écru of her own skin, wreaths that had mounted to a great stack in a bedroom cupboard.
The kitchen of the house was turned into a laundry, and the big base-burner allowed to grow cold; for she could not afford two fires. In her laundry she worked, and in wintertime slept, and only on Saturdays was she seen on the street, when, with deepening lines in her face and a growing gray tinge to her hair, she struggled back and forth with her basket of clothes.
The boy acquired a wonderful increase of health and strength, and a consuming love for a pretty girl of the village, a trader's daughter named Minnie, who repulsed him firmly and emphatically because of his poverty for the house and base-burner were not desirable assets and because of his weak mental and physical equipment. But there is a school for weak mentality and physique the Seven Seas.
Wade's face grew grave and tender as he looked about him. On the sewing machine a shallow basket held sewing materials and a few pairs of coarse woollen stockings, neatly rolled. The poker was laid straight along the ledge of the big "base-burner" in the corner. A table with a green cloth stood in front of a window and bore a few magazines dated almost ten years before.
If we could have looked out through the eyes of these dreamers, we should have seen their tidy little wooden house disappear, and two-story brick with a cast-iron fence in front of it take its place; we should have seen a three-globed gas-chandelier grow down from the parlor ceiling; we should have seen the homely rag carpet turn to noble Brussels, a dollar and a half a yard; we should have seen the plebeian fireplace vanish away and a recherche, big base-burner with isinglass windows take position and spread awe around.
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