War in the Home...!?

When the lady becomes a servant... and the servant a lady!!

Within the four walls of the house a war rages: it is not hot — the heat of pitched battle having become old-fashioned; nor cold — we have grown so used to that style that we no longer pay it any mind; nor atomic — for we know that kind lies outside the range of application and use. Impossible, then! For the war of the house is all three combined: its axis is the servant, and its victims are the people of the house. No sooner does the axis flare up as it turns, or give the slightest sign from which one may scent that its accustomed heat has sunk into a sudden coldness, than ruin and desolation descend upon the family, and life in general is saddled with all the makings of defeat and dissolution.

But my lady the woman has lately bestirred herself to face this grinding war — or rather has been forced to face it at the prompting of her maid, who never flagged in scolding her mistress every day with that embarrassing question: "Won't you get us a washing machine, a dough-beating machine, a machine for sweeping and wiping, for drying and ironing and wringing?"...

So our lady goes down to scour the markets and review the arms depots: for woman has been a warrior ever since Zenobia and Semiramis and Dido — and why should she imagine herself unfit to enter the fray, when she has that gilded skin bestowed upon her by the scorching sea breezes and the caress of the azure shore's waves all this summer long? Certain, too, that the hand of invention has shaken her hand with every useful novelty — whose benefit shall spread and multiply — from the land of the liberation of slaves?!

Fate signed the order for the first duel of its kind when a decree issued from the pampered servant — without prior notice or warning — that she felt an overpowering longing for the olive harvest, all the more since the season would be followed by the wedding of her cousin to one of her kinsmen! In the face of this decree it was no longer my lady's to consent or not consent to being the first to reach her bolted house in the city, and to enlist a jet-propelled machine to secure the evacuation of the massed armies of dust — until such time as the servant should descend with all speed, that very day, and furnish her with her ample reinforcements. And until that day, may my lady's hours be happy ones!

As for the lady, she rose to meet the danger encircling her kingdom, and took her servant's desertion of her in her most trying circumstances — even if it was put on — as a challenge to prove the truth of the claim, and a touchstone to test her fitness for independence. Her experience of the axis had, over all this time, furnished her with a kind of wariness whose substance was passive defense, and a kind of deluded pretense that she could do without her, whose substance was propaganda to stiffen the fighter's arm. And she, true to her word, makes ready her equipment and prepares to declare the struggle by training the weapon on wall and board — and would that she could train the solution of kerosene and potash on the machinery of the axis itself, instead of on the dirt and dust and grime! God confound her for a base sycophant!

For the design my lady follows in the operation of cleaning is minute in its details and teeming with observations. And the hardest thing of all for her to bear, in this case, is that she will be directing those details and observations at no one but herself — playing killer and killed at once. Killed she surely is, even before she opens combat. And there is no escape for her except to surrender her plan, drawn up years ago, down to its last particular — but by that she exposes herself

to the servant's mockery, when she comes back to her, exactly as she herself used to deal with her. No! She will cling to the plan, stubborn, whatever sweat she pours out and however toil sets her panting! For the law of cleaning ordains beginning from above, not from below; and from the rear before the front, lest the latter be robbed of its splendor. Nor may the covered cube be neglected, lest it brim over with filth and flood the polished surface. And so on down the whole list of "lests"!

She greeted her appointed day with a great deal of optimism. Her forces raced to the deed before the ray of light had flung its ropes from the mountains to the foothills. On the point of departure she began issuing hurried instructions to Issam and Alya and Diya not to fail in shutting fast the windows and doors of the summer house — and then to join her with their father in the city that evening, so as not to be late for their appointments fixed for the following morning. In vain would she have consented to let any of them accompany her: she had never tasted the humiliation of drudgery until after she married. And when the transport wagon blared the signal for departure, she took leave of them with a prayer to keep their days safe from the cares of the axes spinning their rounds in our present world.

The house received her with bated breath, glowering and scowling. She stood at the threshold, surveying the tokens spread here and there: the shrouded pieces of furniture, still with the stillness of the dead. And she started in alarm to find herself nearer to a gravedigger than to a conquering warrior — so she took a firm grip of faith and rushed to grope for the openings of light and air; but these served only to deepen her anguish with what they laid bare, before her astounded eyes, of the landmarks of extinction.

In the wall clock she found the sole living thing that could be wakened. She set its two hands turning; and at the answering sound of its ticking she breathed a happy sigh and fell to rummaging among the wreckage for a costume befitting her grave mission. Before setting to work in earnest she reviewed the objectives: should she begin with the munitions store, or the sleeping barracks, or the halls of recreation?

The clock struck seven — the very trumpet of war and contest! And my lady answered the call of duty with the elation of the most valiant of soldiers, in fullest readiness and completest equipment. Donning her gear, she too began from the top, after the plan of attack: on her head she clamped a helmet of worn swaddling-cloth of faded colors; her tempting bareness — as though she were a young Spartan — was covered by the pieces of a dangling, tattered jacket; and on her feet she strapped the remnants of a sandal in the Greek style. And straightaway she sprang to the long pole

— a couched lance that darted out between her well-aimed strokes, hunting the glittering threads of the spiders on that glorious morning!

She gave herself up to waking dreams, braced by deeds and warranted by struggle. Tomorrow the Athenians shall enjoy the limpid air needed for the work of the mind. The children are all Athenians, God be praised: seekers of knowledge, lovers of truth. As for the father, his successful deals mark him out to rival the genius of Alexander the Great!

Scarcely had an hour passed when my lady, deep in her ordered operations, was caught off guard by a knocking at the door. With the intuition of the seasoned soldier she knew that relief had come. Hastening toward it she all but tumbled, near the entrance, into an ambush of refuse — when there loomed above her the apparition of a fair-haired, bespeckled damsel, who was none other than the servant, transfigured by her rough garments and burnished by perfumes! She burst in upon her mistress like a thunderclap, then returned with the speed of arrows, gripping with her hennaed fingertips the bag of winter clothes. And she flew from the house, shaking off what dust had clung to her. And the fall of her triumphant feet had the boom of drum-rolls in the final scene, as though she were chanting the anthem of liberty:

"The decisive battle has tipped the scale!"