Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/10

2 interesting when the servant filled great wooden tubs out of it, and created huge foamy waves in them, and beat and rubbed, and then filled long clothes-lines with damp white garments which coiled around you clammily and disgustingly if you ran too close under them when you were playing.

The dining-room always had a musty smell, and was always cold in winter, though the door into the warm kitchen was propped open with a brick. Gilbert would eat his breakfast and run out quickly to warm his hands at the shining black range. In the summer, it was close and stuffy, for it was lighted only by two low windows at the top which were level with the ground and opened into a little depression, so that the shutters would move freely. In the great thunder-storms of summer, this hollow would fill with water, and as Gilbert sat there eating his lunch, thrilling at the loud claps and the darting lightning, the water would begin to stream over the sill and down the walls. Then Annie would have to be hastily called, and, with many ejaculations she would throw her apron over her head, and rush out with a dish-pan to bail out the hollow. Gilbert would stand on a chair and see dimly through rain-streaming panes, this huge slopping figure, throwing pails of water into the path. But ordinarily nothing happened in the dining-room. Sometimes in the summer, an odious snail or two would come out of the walls and leave his track across the worn carpet. In a vast closet were stored rows of jellies which Garna had put up, and which Gilbert and Olga would sometimes get a taste of, for a treat. Behind the dining-room was the cellar, gratefully warm in winter with its glowing furnace, and cool in summer with its whitewashed walls. Gilbert loved to spend long summer afternoons there watching Annie turn the ice-cream freezer, and waiting anxiously until the top was taken off to be tested, and you got a taste of the fresh churned cream, or licked the dasher when it was all over. Or sometimes, in winter while Annie shovelled coal into the furnace, Gilbert stood fearfully by and saw the blackish flame shoot up through the new coal. But on the whole, the basement was not a pleasant place. The furnace, so hot when you stood by it, sent only feeble currents of air up to the little registers that opened into the vast rooms above. And always, the year round, there was that musty dining-room to descend into three times a day, with its old frayed chairs, its uncertain carpet, its stained brown walls.