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"I never knew knives and forks and things were washed like that," observed Louis. "They generally aren't," said Rachel. "But they ought to be. I leave all the other washing-up for the charwoman in the morning, but I wouldn't trust these to her." Louis acquiesced sagely in this broad generalization as to charwomen. "Why don't you wash the handles of the knives?" he queried.
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.
'There's a right way and a wrong way of doing everything, but you've got the right way of washing-up, and it makes a deal of difference, though folk won't believe it. I can't bear to see a young girl doing a few things at a time, and then going to find some more, and putting in the greasy things first, and the glasses and silver last, she observed.
Mr Gulching, she finds, is absent in search of a job, while Mrs Gulching, thoroughly cross and worried, is doing the housework with one hand and dangling a fractious teething baby from the other. Dolly, not a whit dismayed by a thoroughly ungracious reception, tucks up her skirt, rolls up her sleeves, finishes washing-up, makes a bed, and peels some potatoes.
'Mother, where did you put the washing-up rag? came the voice of Jinny in plaintive accents from the tiny kitchen that lay beyond the adjoining bedroom. 'I can't find it anywhere, she added, poking her head round the door suddenly.
Washing-up was one; carrying back the empty basket of tea-things to the Pension was another. Daddy wrote books. As Jane Anne put it forcibly and finally once, 'Shakespeare never washed up or carried a tea-basket in the street! which the others accepted as a conclusive statement of authority.
He was turned sixty years of age, and of course had seen many and great changes in Plymouth during his time, yet, although well advanced in the "sere and yellow," was still a hale and hearty man, able to do a hard day's work against the best individual in his yard; and although he had the reputation of being wealthy he lived alone in a little four-roomed cottage occupying one corner of his yard, and did everything cooking, washing-up, bed-making, etcetera, etcetera, for himself, with the assistance of a woman who came, for one day a week, to clean house, and wash and mend for him.
"Will that be enough to last us all the way? And what happens when we want to rest? And do we do all the cooking and washing-up ourselves, just like a picnic? What fun!" Which shows that Jill had no idea of what unlimited money can do to mitigate the discomfort of desert travelling by providing every possible comfort, even luxury.
Haim was a different woman for him now that he had carried her upstairs and laid her all limp and girlish on the solemn conjugal bed! He felt quite sure that old Haim was incapable of washing-up.
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