A Daughter of the Middle Border Part 33

Here I must make another confession. Up to this time our big living-room had no fireplace. I had thrown out bay-windows, tacked on porches, and constructed bathrooms; but the most vital of all the requisites of a homestead was still lacking. We had no hearth and no outside chimney.

A fireplace was one of the possessions which I really envied my friends.

I had never said, "I wish I had Bach.e.l.ler's house," but I longed to duplicate his fireplace.

Like most of my generation in the West I had been raised beside a stove, with only one early memory of a fireplace, that in my Uncle David's home, in the glow of which, nearly forty years before, I had lain one Thanksgiving night to hear him play the violin--a memory of sweetest quality to me even now. Zulime's childhood had been almost equally bare.

She had hung her Christmas stockings before a radiator, as I had strung mine on the wall, behind the kitchen stove. Now suddenly with a small daughter to think of, we both began to long for a fireplace with a desire which led at last toward action--on my part, Zulime was hesitant.

"As our stay in the Old Homestead comes always during the summer, it seems a wilful extravagance to put our hard-earned dollars into an improvement which a renter would consider a nuisance," she argued.

"Nevertheless I'm going to build a fireplace," I replied.

"You mustn't think of it," she protested.

"Consider what a comfort it would be on a rainy day in June," I rejoined. "Think what it would do for the baby on dark mornings."

This had its effect, but even then she would not agree to have it built.

Another deterrent lay in the inexperience of our carpenters and masons, not one of whom had even built a chimney. Everybody had fireplaces in pioneer days, in the days of the Kentucky rifle, the broad-axe and the tallow-dip; but as the era of frame houses came on, the arches had been walled up, and iron stoves of varying ugliness had taken their places.

In all the country-side (outside of LaCrosse) there was not a hearthstone of the old-fas.h.i.+oned kind, and though some of the workmen remembered them, not one of them could tell how they were constructed, and the idea of an outside chimney was comically absurd.

All these forces working against me had, thus far, prevented me from experimenting, and perhaps even now the towering base-burner would have remained our family shrine had not Mary Isabel put in a wordless plea.

Less than four hundred days old, she was, nevertheless wise in fireplaces. She had begun to burble in the light of the Severances'

hearth in Minnesota, and her eyes had reflected the flame and shadow of a n.o.ble open fire in Katharine Herne's homestead on Peconic Bay. Her cheeks had reddened like apples in the glory of that hickory flame, and when she came to our small apartment in New York City she had seemed surprised and sadly disappointed by the gas pipes and asbestos mat, which made up a hollow show under a gimcrack mantel. Now here, in her own home, was she to remain without the witchery of crackling flame?

As the cold winds of September began to blow my resolution was taken.

"That fireplace must be built. My daughter shall not be cheated of beamed ceilings and the glory of the blazing log."

Zulime, in alarm, again cried out as mother used to do: "Consider the expense!"

"Hang the expense! Consider the comfort, the beauty of the embers. Think of Mary Isabel with her eyes reflecting their light. Imagine the old soldier sitting on the hearth holding his granddaughter----"

She smiled in timorous surrender. "I can see you are bound to do it,"

she said, "but where can it be built?"

Alas! there was only one available s.p.a.ce, a narrow wall between the two west windows. "We'll cut the windows down, or move them," I said, with calm resolution.

"I hate a _little_ fireplace," protested Zulime.

"It can't be huge," I admitted, "but it can be real. It can be as _deep_ as we want it."

Having decided upon the enterprise I hurried forth to engage the hands to do the work. I could not endure a day's delay.

The first carpenter with whom I spoke knew nothing about such things.

The next one had helped to put in one small "hard-coal, wall pocket,"

and the third man had seen fireplaces in Norway, but remembered little about their construction. After studying Zulime's sketch of what we wanted, he gloomily remarked, "I don't believe I can make that thing _gee_."

Zulime was disheartened by all this, but Mary Isabel climbed to my knee as if to say, "Boppa, where is my fireplace?"

My courage returned. "It shall be built if I have to import a mason from Chicago," I declared, and returned to the campaign.

"Can't you build a thing like this?" I asked a plasterer, showing him a magazine picture of a fireplace.

He studied it with care, turning it from side to side. "A rough pile o'

brick like that?"

"Just like that."

"Common red brick?"

"Yes, just the kind you use for outside walls."

"If you'll get a carpenter to lay it out maybe I can do it," he answered, but would fix no date for beginning the work.

Three days later when I met him on the street he looked a little shame-faced. "I hoped you'd forgot about that fireplace," he said. "I don't know about that job. I don't just see my way to it. However, if you'll stand by and take all the responsibility, I'll try it."

"When can you come?"

"To-morrow," he said.

"I'll expect you."

I hastened home. I climbed to the top of the old chimney, hammer in hand, and began the work of demolition.

The whole household became involved in the campaign. While the gardener and my father chipped the mortar from the bricks which I threw down, Zulime drew another plan for the arch and the hearth, and Mary Isabel sat on the lawn, and shouted at her busy father, high in the sky.

A most distressing clutter developed. The carpenters attacked the house like savage animals, chipping and chiseling till they opened a huge gap from window to window, filling the room with mortar, dust and flies.

Zulime was especially appalled by the flies.

"I didn't know you had to slash into the house like that," she said.

"It's like murder."

Our neighbors. .h.i.therto vastly entertained by our urban eccentricities expressed an intense interest in our plan for an open fire. "Do you expect it to heat the house?" asked Mrs. Dutcher, and Aunt Maria said: "An open fire is nice to look at, but expensive to keep going."

Sam McKinley heartily applauded. "I'm glad to hear you're going back to the old-fas.h.i.+oned fireplace. They were good things to sit by. I'd like one myself, but I never'd get my wife to consent. She says they are too much trouble to keep in order."

At last the mason came, and together he and I laid out the ground plan of the structure. By means of bricks disposed on the lawn I indicated the size of the box, and then, while the carpenter crawled out through the creva.s.se in the side of the house, we laid a deep foundation of stone. We had just brought the base to the level of the sill when--the annual County Fair broke out!

All work ceased. The workmen went to the ball game and to the cattle show and to the races, leaving our living-room open to the elements, and our lawn desolate with plaster.

For three days we suffered this mutilation. At last the master mason returned, but without his tender. "No matter," I said to him. "I can mix mortar and sand," and I did. I also carried brick, splas.h.i.+ng myself with lime and skinning my hands,--but the chimney grew!

Painfully, with some doubt and hesitancy, but with a.s.suring skill, Otto laid the actual firebox, and when the dark-red, delightfully rude piers of the arch began to rise from the floor within the room, the entire family gathered to admire the structure and to cheer the workmen on their way.

The little inequalities which came into the brickwork delighted us.

These "accidentals" as the painters say were quite as we wished them to be. Privately, our bricklayer considered us--"Crazy." The idea of putting common rough brick on the _inside_ of a house!

The library floor was splotched with mortar, the dining-room was cold and buzzing with impertinent flies, but what of that--the tower of brick was climbing.