LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

spot intended to rest the human frame in our house shall bring a sigh of relief from the weary one who sinks into it. I have already started it by the couch I ordered last week for your study. I went to the man who takes orders and said: 'Have you ever read "Trilby"?' And he said no, but his wife had when it was the rage about five years ago. I had brought a copy on purpose, so I read him that paragraph from the first chapter describing the studio. Here it is: 'An immense divan spread itself in width and length and delightful thickness just beneath the big north window, the business window—a divan so immense that three well-fed, well-contented Englishmen could all lie lazily smoking their pipes on it at once, without being in each other's way, and very often did!' He smiled and said it made very agreeable reading, to which I replied that I wanted one made just like it."

      "What did he say?"

      "Well, of course he argued. He wanted to make it a normal size. He wanted to know the size of the doors it would have to go through, and I told him it was for an apartment. As soon as he knew that he wanted to make the lower part of cedar to store furs in for the winter. I said: 'No, no! This is a luxury. There is to be nothing useful about it. I want the whole inside given up to springs!' He said, 'Turkish?' and I said yes, and put in two sets of them. At that he began to catch the spirit of the thing and took an interest. We argued so over the size of it that finally I told him to send out and measure the elevator and the door and the room it was to go in and make it just as large as those spaces would allow. So you'll have a divan ten by six. I wanted it bigger, but I couldn't have got it through any front door."

      "Why, won't it about fill that little room?" asked my husband, with a trace of anxiety in his tone.

      "Only about half-way. There's just room for a little table of books at one end of the divan, and I'm going to have a movable electric lamp with a ground-glass globe and a green shade to be good for the eyes. Your pipe-rack will be on the wall over it. Then by squeezing a little there will be just room for my writing-chair—you know the one with the desk on the arm and the little drawer for note-paper?"

      Aubrey got up and came over to where I had my list, and Draper fell to the floor unnoticed.

      "I never heard anything sound so comfortable," he said. The Angel is always appreciative, and, moreover, is never too absorbed or too tired to express it fluently. That's one of the things which make it such a pleasure to plan his comfort.

      "Doesn't it sound winter evening-y and snowy outside?" I said.

      "I can hear the wind howling," said the Angel. "What's the next item?"

      "Well, now we come to a theory. Of course I have had no more experience than you in buying furniture, but it stands to reason that some of the things we buy now will be with us at death. Some furniture stays by you like a murder. For instance, a dining-room table. I have known some very rich people in my life, Aubrey, but I have seldom seen any who grew rich gradually who had had the moral courage to discard a dining-room table if it were even decently good. Have you ever thought about that?"

      "I can't say that I have, but it is fraught with possibility. 'The

       Ethics of Household Furniture' would make good reading."

      "Well, haven't you," I persisted, "in all seriousness, haven't you seen some very handsome modern dining-rooms marred by a dinner-table too good to throw away, which you were convinced the family had begun housekeeping with?"

      "Yes, I have!" cried Aubrey. "You are right, I have. I thought you were jesting at first."

      "Well, I am, sort of half-way. But the sort of dinner-table I want to buy is no joke. It is one which will grace an apartment or a palace. We can be proud of it even when we are rich. Yet it is not showy, or one which will be too screamingly prominent. It is of carved oak with the value all in the carving. It costs—" Here I whispered the price, for to us it was almost a crime to think of it.

      The Angel looked sober when my whisper reached him. But he did not commit himself. I eyed him anxiously.

      "But to make up for that outlay, here is the way I have planned the rest of the house. Let's have no drawing-room."

      "No drawing-room? Then where will you receive guests?"

      "The room will be there, and people may come into it and sit down, but it will not be familiar ground to strangers. They will find themselves in a cheerful room with soothing walls and comfortable chairs. There will be books and magazines. It will not be a library, for quantities of bookcases discourage the frivolous. It will have no gilt chairs, because big men always want to sit in them. It will have no lace curtains, because I hate them. The piano will be there and most of our wedding-presents—all which lend themselves to the decoration of a room which will look as if people lived in it."

      "If you put bric-à-brac in it people will call it a parlour in spite of you," said the Angel.

      "Not at all. It will have one distinguishing feature which will effectually prevent the discriminating from making that mistake. I intend to make the clock on the mantel go. That will settle matters."

      "Of course."

      "This room will lack the stiffness of a drawing-room and so invite conversation, yet will be sufficiently dignified to prevent familiarity. I shall endeavour to invest it with an invitation which will practically say to your college friends, 'You may smoke here, but you may not throw ashes on the floor.' Do you see my point?"

      The Angel looked thoughtful.

      "I hope it will work," he said.

      "We can but try it. I am doing this because I wish our friends to meet us together, and I don't approve of this separating men and women—the women remaining alone to gossip while the men go away to smoke. It is too narrowing on us and too broadening on you."

      "I like it—in theory—but some men are chimneys. They don't know how to smoke when ladies are present."

      "They will soon learn!" I declared, stoutly. "I shall be so attentive to their comfort, so ready with an ash-tray, so eager to offer them the last cigar in the jar (if I think they have smoked enough) that they will notice my slightest cough."

      Aubrey waxed enthusiastic.

      "An evening spent in that room will be 'An Education in Polite

       Smoking,' won't it?"

      "And," I went on, "then when we are rich and want a truly handsome drawingroom we can furnish it in pink silk and cupids with a light heart, for behold, we will simply move all this comfort I have described into a library, and the wear on the furniture will redeem it from newness and give it the proper air of age and use. There is nothing more vulgar to my mind than a perfectly new library. It looks—well, you know!"

      "It does," said the Angel, with conviction. "All of that!"

      We discussed these theories in detail, made many corrections, and finally went down to buy. But a handsome shop and money in my pocket always excite me so that what little common sense I was born with instantly departs, and I buy feverishly, mostly things I do not want and could not use. So the Angel adopted a good, safe rule. When he saw my eyes begin to glitter with a "I-must-have-that-or-die" expression, he used to take me by the arm and say:

      "Now shut your eyes, and I'll get you past this counter."

      I have heard of many curious women who do not enjoy housekeeping. I am free to confess that I do not understand why, unless they started out in life with the conceited idea that to bend their wonderful brains upon the silly problem of keeping a house clean and ordering dinners was beneath women of their possibilities on club essays. I often wonder if they attacked the proposition of housekeeping with the intention of seeing how much fun there is in it, of how much pleasure could be got out of making a home, not merely keeping house, and of feeding their conceit with the fuel of a determination to keep house better than any woman of their acquaintance. The simple but fascinating problem of how to make each room a little prettier than it was last week, would keep even an ingenious woman busy and interested in something worth while, and those of us who are sensitive to impressions would be spared the truly awful sight of certain incongruous

Скачать книгу