An amah called, "The morning rice is ready."
Dong-Yung hurried into the open room, where the light was still faint,
filtering in through a high-silled window and the door. A round, brown
table stood in the center of the room. In the corner of the room behind
stood the crescentic, white plaster stove, with its dull wooden
kettle-lids and its crackling straw. Two cooks, country women, sat in
the hidden corner behind the stove, and poked in the great bales of
straw and gossiped. Their voices and the answers of the serving amah
filled the kitchen with noise. In their decorous niche at the upper
right hand of the stove sat the two kitchen gods, small ancient idols,
with hidden hands and crossed feet, gazing out upon a continually hungry
world. Since time was they had sat there, ensconced at the very root of
life, seemingly placid and unseeing and unhearing, yet venomously
watching to be placated with food. Opposite the stove, on the white
wall, hung a row of brass hooks, from which dangled porcelain spoons
with pierced handles. On a serving-table stood the piled bowls for the
day, blue-and-white rice patterns, of a thin, translucent ware, showing
the delicate light through the rice seeds; red-and-green dragoned bowls
for the puddings; and tiny saucer-like platters for the vegetables. The
tea-cups, saucered and lidded, but unhandled, stood in a row before the
polished brass hot-water kettle.
The whole room was full of a stirring, wakening life, of the crackling
straw fire, of the steaming rice, all white and separate-kerneled in its
great, shallow, black iron kettles lidded with those heavy hand-made
wooden lids while the boiling tea water hissed, and spat out a snake of
white steam.
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