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In the cold hut, as it is called to the right of the outer room two other women were still busily at work; they were carrying out all the rubbish, empty tubs, sheepskins stiff as boards, greasy pots, a cradle with a heap of dish-clouts and a baby covered with spots, and sweeping out the dirt with bathbrooms. Arkady Pavlitch sent them away, and installed himself on a bench under the holy pictures.
I reckon you'd better come below and get a glass of rum under your belt. You're about as wet as mother's dish-clouts. There's one advantage about campaigning. You take your luck when it comes and don't worry about what might have been. I didn't think any more of the business, except that it had cured me of wanting to be sea-sick.
The living-room faced the north-east, the door opening direct on the little patch of garden, so that in winter, when the wind howled across the level fields, it was scarcely warmer indoors than outside, and rags and dish-clouts had to be laid on the door-sill to prevent the entrance of the snow and rain.
But of course the open front of the garden where in two places the bank shelved easily down to the water would leave him in full view of the troopers across the river. It was for this that I had brought the blankets. Across the angle by the gable there ran a clothes line on which the house-servant, Mercedes, hung her dish-clouts to dry.
There they stand, a ragged regiment indeed, dressed in any sort of garment that takes their fancy. Most of them look as if they had collected all the dish-clouts and dusters which had seen service and piled them on anyhow. To add to their adornment each man has a double coil of shabby-looking rope hung round his neck, this is to fasten together the luggage he hopes to carry.
Why do ye want to put a lie on a stone for the Lord to read? But 'e was as obst'nate as pigs. 'Dish-clouts or no dish-clouts, sez 'e, 'I'll 'ave 'er fixed up proper as my Dearly-Beloved Wife for sight o' parson an' neighbours. 'Ah, Sam! sez I 'I've got ye! It's for parson an' neighbours ye want the hepitaph, an' not for the Lord at all!
'Put 'er down, sez 'e 'Put 'er down as the Dearly-Beloved Wife of Samuel Timbs. 'Now, Timbs, sez I 'don't ye go foolin' with 'ell-fire! Ye know she wor'nt yer Dearly Beloved, forbye that she used to throw wet dish-clouts at yer 'ed, screechin' at ye for all she was wuth, an' there ain't no Dearly Beloved in that.
He tiptoed softly from the room and, with his candle, again made his way down to the kitchen, but the spectacle he witnessed there was even still more cheerless; the range cold and fireless, the closets empty, the floor strewn with a disorderly litter of towels, napkins, dish-clouts and women's aprons; as if the hurricane of disaster had swept through that place as well, bearing away on its wings all the charm and cheer that appertain naturally to the things we eat and drink.
In a corner was a tub for washing dishes, and from nails in the wall hung moist dish-clouts and the cook's livery and skull-cap. The only piece of furniture was a rickety dressing-table with water stains, oil stains, milk stains, black, brown, and white stains, and all kinds of mixed stains.
It was the region of "washing-up," that greasy, damp function that followed every meal; its atmosphere had ever a cooling steaminess and the memory of boiled cabbage, and the sooty black stains where saucepan or kettle had been put down for a minute, scraps of potato-peel caught by the strainer of the escape-pipe, and rags of a quite indescribable horribleness of acquisition, called "dish-clouts," rise in my memory at the name.
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