The Coal Scuttle - Page 2

are as evanescent as love's young dream. And your solid log
has a certain irritating inertness. It is an absentee fuel, spending its
fire up the chimney, and after its youthful clouds of glory turns but a
cheerless side of black and white char towards the room. And, above all,
the marital mind is strangely exasperated by the log. Smite it with the
poker, and you get but a sullen resonance, a flight of red sparks, a
sense of an unconquerable toughness. It is worse than coke. The crisp
fracture of coal, the spitting flames suddenly leaping into existence
from the shiny new fissures, are altogether wanting. Old-seasoned timber
burns indeed most delightfully, but then it is as ugly as coal, and
withal very dear. So Euphemia went back to coal again with a sigh.
Possibly if Euphemia had been surrounded by the wealth she deserves this
trouble would not have arisen. A silent servant, bearing the due dose of
fresh fuel, would have come gliding from a mysterious Beneath, restored
the waning animation of the grate, and vanished noiselessly again. But
this was beyond the range of Euphemia's possibilities. And so we are
face to face with this problem of the scuttle again.

At first she would feign there was no such thing as coal. It was too
horrible. Only a Zola would admit it. It was the epoch of concealment.
The thing purchased was like a little cupboard on four legs; it might
have held any convenient trifle; and there was a shelf upon the top and
a book of poetry and a piece of crackled Satsuma. You took a little
brass handle and pulled it down, and the front of the little cupboard
came forward, and there you found your coal. But a dainty little
cupboard can no more entertain black coal and inelegant firewood and
keep its daintiness than a mind can entertain black thoughts and yet be
sweet. This cabinet became demoralised with amazing quickness; it became
incontinent with its corruptions, a hinge got twisted, and after a time
it acquired the habit of suddenly, and with an unpleasant oscillatory
laughing noise, opening of its own accord and proclaiming its horrid
secret to Euphemia's best visitors. An air of wickedness, at once
precocious and senile, came upon it; it gaped and leered at Euphemia as
the partner of her secret with such a familiar air of "I and you" that
she could stand it no longer, and this depraved piece of furniture was
banished at last from her presence, and relegated to its proper sphere
of sham gentility below stairs, where it easily passed itself upon the
cook as an exquisite. Euphemia tried to be sensible then, and
determined, since she must have coal in her room, to let no false
modesty intervene, but to openly proclaim its presence to all the world.

The next thing, therefore, was a