Chapter 15

SATURDAYS were great days for “the Knapp Family, Incorporated.” They were together at home all day, and always with a great variety of schemes on hand. In the morning Henry usually relapsed from his eleven-year-old dignity back into younger days and played with Stephen, especially since the sandpile settlement had been started, and since they had a brood of chickens to care for. Old Mrs. Hennessy came to give the house the weekly, thorough, cellar-to-garret cleaning which Lester had found was the best way to keep Evangeline from spending Sunday with a mop and broom. In the kitchen Helen and her father, foregathering over the cook-book, struggled fervently with cookery more ambitious than that of the usual week-day.

Helen loved these Saturday morning cooking-bees as she called them. She and Father had such a good time together. It was so funny, Father not knowing any more than she did about it all and having to study it out from the book. Lots of times she, even she, was able to give him pointers about things the cook-book didn’t tell.

For instance, at the very beginning, that historicfirst day, long ago, when they had first cooked together and timorously tried to have scrambled eggs for lunch, it had been Helen who conquered those bomb-like raw eggs. Lester had gingerly broken off the top of one, and was picking the shell carefully away, when Helen said informingly, “That’s not the way. Mother gives them a crack in the middle on the edge of the bowl and opens them that way.”

“How? Show me,” said her father docilely, handing her another egg. Feeling very important, Helen took it masterfully and, holding it over the edge of the bowl, lifted her hand with an imitation of Mother’s decisive gesture. But she did not bring it down. She shuddered, rolled her eyes at her father and said miserably, “Suppose I hit it too hard, and it all spurts out?”

Her father felt no impulse to cry out bitterly on her imbecile ineptitude. Rather he sympathized with her panic, “Yes, raw eggs are the dickens!” he said, understandingly.

Intimidated, they both looked at the smooth, oval enigma.

“Youdo it,” said Helen, with her self-distrusting impulse to shift responsibility to some one else.

Her father refused with horror to assume it. “Not on your life!” he cried. “You were the one who’d seen Mother do it.”

“Doesn’t the cook-book say how to do it anywhere?”asked Helen, trying to fall back on some one else. “There is a chapter at the end that tells you how to take out ink-stains and what to do for people who have got poisoned, and all sorts of things. Maybe it’ll say there.”

They laid down the egg to search, but found nothing in the four hundred pages of the big book that told them how to break a raw egg.

“Perhaps you could lay it down on a plate and cut it in two with a knife,” suggested Lester.

Even Helen knew better than this. She knew better than that when she wasborn, she thought, suppressing a pitying smile, “Gracious no! You would get the shell all mixed up with the insides,” she explained. They stared again at the egg.

To Helen came the knowledge that responsibility must be assumed.

“Somebody’s got to,” she said grimly. “I’ll try again.”

She took the egg in her hand and resolutely struck it a small blow on the edge of the bowl. The shell cracked a little.

“That sounds good,” said Lester; “give it another whack.”

She repeated the blow and, holding the egg up above her head till she could see the under side, reported that there was a perceptible crack and some wetness oozing out.

But that was not enough. She must go on and see it through. How queer not to have somebody tell her what to do and make her do it. “I’m going to try to pull it apart,” she announced courageously, feeling like a heroine. She got the tips of her fingers into the tiny crack and pulled, shutting her eyes.

Something happened. A gush of cold sticky stuff over her fingers, a little glass-like tinkle of breaking egg-shell in her hand, and there in the bowl were the contents of the egg, the golden yolk swimming roundly in the transparent white.

“Hurrah! Good for you!” shouted her father admiringly.

But Helen found in her heart a new conscience which made her refuse to accept too easily won praise. “No, that’s not right,” she said, frowning at the crushed, dripping shell in her hand. “When Mother does it, the stuff comes out nice and clean, with each half of the shell like a little cup.”

She closed her eyes, summoned all her will-power and thought back to the times when she had watched Mother cook.

Mother held it so (Helen went through the pantomime), she brought it down with a little quick jerk,so, and then.... “Oh, goody! goody! I know!” she cried, hopping up and down. “Iknow. She turns it over after she’s cracked it, with the crack on theup-side, and then shepriesit open. Give me another egg.”

Well, it certainly was a far cry from those early fumbling days, wasn’t it, to now, when both she and Father could crack and separate an egg with their eyes shut and one hand tied behind their backs, so to speak; when they thought nothing of turning out in a Saturday morning a batch of bread, two pies, and enough cookies to last them a week. They didn’t even talk about their cooking much any more, just decided what they were going to make and went ahead and made it, visiting together as they worked like a couple of magpies chattering.

Father often told her poetry as she stepped to and fro; the kitchen seemed to her just chock-full of poetry. Father had said so much there the walls seemed soaked with it. Sometimes in the evening when she went in just before she went to bed to get a drink of water or to see that the bread sponge was all right, it seemed to her, especially if she were a little sleepy, that she could hear a murmur of poetry all around her, the way a shell murmurs when you put it to your ear....

“Now all away to Tir na n’Og are many roads that run,”

“Keen as are the arrowsOf that silver sphere.”

“Keen as are the arrows

Of that silver sphere.”

“Waken, lords and ladies gay!To the greenwood haste away!”

“Waken, lords and ladies gay!

To the greenwood haste away!”

“Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless seaBut sad mortality o’ersways their power,How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea....”

“Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea

But sad mortality o’ersways their power,

How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea....”

It was not water that Helen Knapp drank out of the tin dipper hung over the sink. It was ambrosia.

And Father told her stories, too, all kinds, lots of funny ones that set them into gales of laughter!

And they talked, talked about everything, about her writing, and what she was reading in school, and the last book she had got out of the Library, and once in a great while Father would tell her something about when he went to the State University and what an exciting time he’d had finding out how much he loved books and poetry. Helen had never heard Father speak of those years till now. He seemed to feel, the way she did, that it was easier to talk about things you cared awfully about when you were working together. Helen often wondered why this was, why she didn’t feel so queer and shy when she was doing something with her hands, buttering a cake-tin, or cutting animal-shaped cookies out of the dough that Father rolled so beautifully thin. She even found that she could talk to Father about “things.”

By “things” Helen meant all that she had alwaysbefore kept to herself, what she had never supposed you could talk about to anybody—the little poems that sprang up in your head; what you felt when the spring days began to dapple the sidewalks with shadows from the baby leaves; what you felt when you woke up at night and heard the freight-trains hooting and groaning to and fro in the yards—Helen loved living near the railroad—what you thought about growing up; what you thought about God; what kind of a husband you would like to have when you were big; what kind of children you hoped you’d have. “I’d kind oflikea little baby boy with curly yellow hair,” she said thoughtfully one day, as she bent her head over the butter and sugar she was creaming together.

“Henry was like that when he was little,” her father said reminiscently. “Itwasnice. You were an awfully nice baby, too, Helen. Of course, being the first, you made the biggest impression on me. You had ideas of your very own from the time you began to creep. You never would go on your hands and knees like other babies. You always went on your hands and feet, with your little behinder sticking up in the air like a ship’s prow.”

Helen laughed over that. She loved to have her father tell all about when she had been a baby, and how much he had loved her, and how smart she had been, and sometimes how funny, as on the daywhen she had thought Mrs. Anderson had stayed long enough and had toddled over to her, putting out a fat little hand and saying firmly, “By-by, Mis’ Anderson. By-by!”

Gracious! How long ago that seemed to Helen, and how grown-up it made her feel, now that she was such a big girl, thirteen years old, helping to do up the week’s baking and all. She felt old and ripe and sure of herself as she listened to those baby-stories and wrung out the dishcloths competently. (She and Father had wrestled with the question of how to hold the dishcloths when you wrung them out, as they had wrestled with the method of breaking an egg, and had slowly worked it out together.)

She came to feel that talking to Father, when they were alone together, was almost like thinking aloud, only better, because there was somebody to help you figure things out when you got yourself all balled up. Before this Helen had spent a great deal of time trying to figure things out by herself, and getting so tangled that she didn’t know where she had begun nor how to stop the wild whirl racing around in her head. But now, with Father to hang on to, she could unravel those twisted skeins of thought and wind them into balls where she could get at them.

One day, as she washed the breakfast dishes forFather to wipe, she noticed how the daffodils Aunt Mattie had brought were reflected in a wet milk-pan. It made her think a poem, which she said over in her head to make sure it was all right, and then repeated to Father,

“The shining tin usefulness of the milk-panIs glorified into beautyBy the presence of a flower.”

“The shining tin usefulness of the milk-pan

Is glorified into beauty

By the presence of a flower.”

Father listened, looked at the golden reflection in the pan, said appreciatively, “So it is,” and added, “That’s quite a pretty poem, especially the last phrase.”

Helen knew it was pretty. She had secretly a high opinion of her own talents. Why had she said it aloud except to make Father think what a remarkable child she was? She washed the dishes thoughtfully, feeling a gnawing discomfort. It was horrid of her to have said that just to make Father admire her. It was showing off. She hated people who showed off. She decided ascetically to punish herself by owning up to her conceit. “I only told that poem to you because I thought it would make you think what a poetic child I am,” she confessed contritely. “It wasn’t really that I thought so much about the flower.”

She felt better. There now! Father would think what an honest, sincere child she was!

Oh, dear! Oh, dear! That was showing off too! As bad as the first time! She said hastily, “And I only owned up because I thought it would make you think I’m honest and didn’t want to show off!”

This sort of tortuous winding was very familiar to Helen. She frequently got herself into it and never knew how to get out. It always frightened her a little, made her lose her head. She felt startled now. “Why, Father, do you suppose I only saidthat, too, to make you....” She lifted her dripping hands out of the dishwater and turned wide, frightened eyes on her father. “Oh, Father, there I go! Doyouever get going like that? One idea hitched to another and another and another; and you keep grabbing at them and can’t get hold of one tight enough to hold it still?”

Lester laughed ruefully. “DoI? Nothing but! I often feel like a dog digging into a woodchuck hole, almostgrabbing the woodchuck’s tail and never quite getting there.”

“That’s justit!” said the little girl fervently.

“I tell you, Helen,” said Lester, “that’s one of the reasons why it’s a pretty good thing for anybody with your kind of mind, or mine, to go to college. If you try, you can find out in college how to get after those thoughts that chase their own tails like that.”

“Youcan?” said Helen, astonished that other people knew about them.

“I suppose you think,” conjectured Lester, hanging up the potato-masher, “that you’re the only person bothered that way. But as a matter of fact, lots and lots of people have been from the beginning of time! You’ve heard about the Greek philosophers, haven’t you? Well, that is really about all they were up to.”

There was a pause, while Helen wiped off the top of the kitchen table.

Then she remarked thoughtfully, “I believe I’dliketo go to college.”

It was the first time she had ever thought of it.

Oh, no, it was not always recipes they talked about on Saturday mornings!

And on Saturday nights, as he reached for some book to take to bed with him, Lester’s hand not infrequently fell on an old, rubbed, shabby volume which fell open at the passage,

“The thought of our past years in me doth breedPerpetual benediction: not indeedFor that which is most worthy to be blest—Delight and liberty, the simple creedOf childhood whether busy or at rest,But for those obstinate questioningsOf sense and outward things,Fallings from us, vanishings;Blank misgivings of a creatureMoving about in worlds not realized,High instincts, before which our mortal natureDid tremble like a guilty thing surprised:But for those first affections,Those shadowy recollections,Which, be they what they may,Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,Are yet the master-light of all our seeing;Uphold us—cherish—and have power to makeOur noisy years seem moments in the beingOf the eternal silence: truths that wake,To perish never:Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor,Nor man, nor boy,Nor all that is at enmity with joy,Can utterly abolish or destroy!”

“The thought of our past years in me doth breed

Perpetual benediction: not indeed

For that which is most worthy to be blest—

Delight and liberty, the simple creed

Of childhood whether busy or at rest,

But for those obstinate questioningsOf sense and outward things,Fallings from us, vanishings;Blank misgivings of a creatureMoving about in worlds not realized,High instincts, before which our mortal natureDid tremble like a guilty thing surprised:But for those first affections,Those shadowy recollections,Which, be they what they may,Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,Are yet the master-light of all our seeing;Uphold us—cherish—and have power to makeOur noisy years seem moments in the beingOf the eternal silence: truths that wake,To perish never:Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor,Nor man, nor boy,Nor all that is at enmity with joy,Can utterly abolish or destroy!”

But for those obstinate questionings

Of sense and outward things,

Fallings from us, vanishings;

Blank misgivings of a creature

Moving about in worlds not realized,

High instincts, before which our mortal nature

Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:

But for those first affections,

Those shadowy recollections,

Which, be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,

Are yet the master-light of all our seeing;

Uphold us—cherish—and have power to make

Our noisy years seem moments in the being

Of the eternal silence: truths that wake,

To perish never:

Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor,

Nor man, nor boy,

Nor all that is at enmity with joy,

Can utterly abolish or destroy!”

From here on, Lester always felt a great tide lift him high....

“Hence, in a season of calm weather,Though inland far we be,Our souls have sight of that immortal seaWhich brought us hither,Can in a moment travel thitherAnd see the children sport upon the shore,And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.”

“Hence, in a season of calm weather,

Though inland far we be,

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea

Which brought us hither,

Can in a moment travel thither

And see the children sport upon the shore,

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.”

It was to the shouts of those children, to the reverberation of those mighty waters that the paralyzedaccountant often slipped quietly from his narrow, drudging life into the “being of eternal silence.”

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