Far from the Maddening Girls/Chapter 2
In the course of the following fortnight I received, with what emotions I shall not attempt to say, the plan for my bungalow. At that moment it was precisely as if the house was in actual existence. I think the feeling was not unnatural. Of course, a plan is no more a house than a heifer is a tub of butter; but in either case the mere fact that you have acquired the former perceptibly increases your chance of one day getting the latter.
My plan, like those I had already seen in Arbuthnot’s office, was executed in white ink on blue paper, with its name and dimensions neatly lettered in the centre of each room, the doors all invitingly ajar, and the beds indicated by little devices which looked like the first stage of cat’s cradle. The chimneys were cunningly inserted in red, which subtlety lent a singular air of reality to the whole. It was nothing short of sublime!
You may smile, and I have no doubt you do, at my enthusiasm. You may say (what is undeniable) that its cause was nothing more than a sheet of blue paper, upon which a young man in shirt-sleeves, personally unknown to me, had exercised his craft with a ruling-pen. You will be quite right; but I shall retort that a plan’s a plan for a’ that, and that if you have never had the pleasure of gloating over one of your own you are as much to be pitied as the boy who has never filched a watermelon.
Arbuthnot had asked for the prompt return of the plan, with my indorsement, but I kept it by me for a full week before I could bring myself to part with it; and when I realized that the delay was becoming ridiculous, and that I should presently have to let it go, I was in what I conceive to be a father’s state of mind when the day comes for his boy to return to boarding-school. I made, as well as I was able, a tracing of it — which was equivalent to having the aforesaid boy’s tintype taken — and trimmed it, where the edges were frayed with much fondling, and pressed out the wrinkles — which corresponded to a haircut and a new suit of clothes. It was too large to kiss, so I contented myself with patting it on the back, and we went round to Arbuthnot’s together. When I left the plan in his hands once more I think I was upon the point of asking him to be particular that it did not change its winter flannels too soon. At all events, I know my attitude was distinctly paternal.
They broke ground for “Sans Souci” on the first of May. The morning newspaper remarked, I remember, that another moving day had come, and, in looking back that evening upon this observation, it impressed me as having been peculiarly appropriate. It was, by all odds, the most moving day in my experience. I went down from town, of course, to see the work begun, and at the first fall of the pick such a thrill ran through me as I am sure must have coursed through the system of De Lesseps when the initial spadeful of earth was stirred on the Isthmus of Panama. I looked, almost with affection, upon the sturdy labourer who was responsible for this first pick-nick in the vicinity of my future home, and, when I had an opportunity, addressed him in a friendly manner.
“Fine day, my man.”
He looked at me with the peculiar vacuity observable in the eye of a dried mackerel, and answered:
“Non capisco.”
The conversation had been neither prolonged nor, in any sense, spirited, but it was, nevertheless, at an end, for his remark not only acquainted me with his inability to comprehend the English language, but it happened to be the extent of my knowledge of Italian. It was evident that there were not enough words to go round, to say nothing of a second helping.
The work went forward famously. Only a week later the cellar walls were standing, and I was able to step inside and look out of a window. The entire aspect of the world undergoes some subtle, psychological transformation from the moment when first you survey it out of your own window. You are no longer a supernumerary in the second row of the Soldiers’ Chorus, but the occupant of a grand tier box, and of station somewhat more exalted than that of Faust himself. I could fancy with what contentment, with what calm philosophy, I would look through that window, after the trim, green blinds, and the glass, and the dimity curtains should be in place; and said as much to the head-mason. He reminded me, with unnecessary particularity, that I would not be apt to spend much of my time at a cellar window, especially as the one in question was designed to light the coal-bin; but I felt that the moral held good, even when applied to another story.
Then the carpenters came, and sawed, and conquered.
I soon perceived that the construction of “Sans Souci” was to be an experience in progressive emotion. I had already looked out of my own window: now I was able to walk up my own cellar stairs and watch the carpenters laying the floor. This part of the work was accomplished with the most amazing celerity, and, as I saw the progress made from day to day, I could almost believe that the obliging brownies had returned to earth, and were helping things along in the middle of the night. In reality, three weeks elapsed before the framework was boarded in; but the time seemed shorter because so many things were happening at once. Carpenters were swarming all over the house, inside and out, like flies on a cantaloupe rind; and the sound of their hammers, heard from a distance as I approached, suggested that Senorita Goliath was engaged in doing a castanet dance. The rooms were partitioned off by timbers, in readiness for lathing. Gradually the roof spread over me the protection of shingle blessedness. It was a scene of magnificent industry and diligence, upon which I was content to gaze for hours, as if I had been one entranced. There was but one small cloud upon the firmament of my satisfaction.
Although she lived a mile away, I soon found that Miss Susie Berrith was as prone to running over as a drinking-trough. She was constantly on the scene, leaning against a red cedar which stood near to the piazza, and observing operations with an attentive eye. No doubt she was a very nice girl in her way, but she was also in mine, and I resented it. After all, a promising house is not a performing bear. I am afraid I was not overcordial on these occasions; indeed, I was more than apt to sniff. But she had an innocent way of turning up her eyes which, in a manner, disarmed me. For I have noticed that when a man turns up his nose at a woman, and a woman turns up her eyes at a man — well, it is like a vote to increase the pension list: the eyes have it, every time! So I came to tolerate her presence, and even to engage her in polite, if somewhat uneasy, conversation.
“I wonder,” I said on one occasion, “whether you have any conception of what all this means to me. Think of it! From now on I shall have everything my own way!”
“And you think you will enjoy that?” asked Miss Berrith.
“Why not?” I demanded.
“Why not, indeed?” she assented. “But has it never occurred to you that there is really more pleasure in having things another person’s way?”
It never had occurred to me, and I said so quite frankly, but without adding what I thought — that it was by all odds the silliest theory I had ever heard in my life.
“The mere fact that tastes differ,” said I, “seems to me to prove the contrary. Just by way of example, and with all the respect in the world for your taste, which I have no doubt is most excellent, I don’t suppose that you will endeavour to persuade me that I should actually prefer a wall-paper, or an ornament, of your choosing to one of my own.”
“No,” said Miss Berrith, with the oddest little smile imaginable, “that isn’t what I meant.”
“It is what you said,” I protested, somewhat peevishly.
She made no reply — which, of course, showed I had the best of it.
I am bound, however, to confess that, to a certain extent, I was afraid of her. There is something about a girl — even about a girl in whom one has no particular interest — which is profoundly disconcerting. If you have ever passed much time in the company of an Angora cat you have probably experienced much the same sensations which are wont to affect me in the society of a girl. There is the same impenetrable calm, the same simultaneous purring and sharpening of claws, the same abrupt transition from an attitude of the utmost friendliness to one of the most humiliating disdain. I beg to be understood as speaking exclusively in metaphor when I say that both jump into my lap when I don’t want them, and persist in jumping down when I do. Above all, with neither do I feel wholly assured as to what is going to happen next.
No conversation can be entirely free from embarrassment in which you are uncertain of your companion’s point of view. As regards Miss Berrith, I found that I was constantly making remarks which appeared to me to be as clear as a mirror when they left my lips. A breath from her, and — well, you know the effect of a breath upon a mirror. I was forever falling back upon some rag of an apology with which to make things clear.
But her silence at this moment rather impelled me to pity her. When one admiral sinks another’s flagship, he immediately orders his boats lowered away to pick up the survivors, and I have a very similar method of procedure as toward those whom I have worsted in an argument. So now I kindly came back to the original topic.
“The common, or garden, hen,” I said, “which lays in a soap-box filled with straw, of the farmer’s providing, is surely a creature less enviable than the oriole, which constructs its own nest with infinite taste and ingenuity. And so I contend that the man who builds his own house according to his own ideas is more admirable than the man who simply accepts another’s ideas of what a house ought to be. I am building my bungalow around me, as it were, and it is going to fit me to a nicety. To employ a metaphor, I shall be in no fear of dashing out my brains on the lintels because a five-foot man has seen fit to make the door- ways five feet one.”
“Are there no tucks or hems in your house?” asked Miss Berrith.
I looked at her inquiringly.
“Nothing to let out,” she explained, “in case — in case you should happen to grow, Mr. Sands?”
“I am building my bungalow to live in, not to let out,” I replied, with some humour, I fancy. “And I shall be thirty on my next birthday, Miss Berrith. Do you think there is much chance of my growing?”
“Let us hope for the best,” she answered quietly.
Now that is what I mean by blowing on the mirror.
It was when the plasterers came upon the scene that the interior of my bungalow began to assume a certain dignity. A plasterer, it appears, is nothing more than a mason in white overalls. They slathered. The word is not elegant, but there is no other which fitly describes their operations. What had been lath was lather. The whole house looked as if it was about to be shaved.
This was the most tantalizing stage of the proceedings. Plaster is a substance which has adopted as its motto “Never say dry!” and day after day went by, on each of which it seemed only to grow softer. Arbuthnot had said that what was wanted was hot, dry air; but the weather had changed, and we had rains as long as Queen Victoria’s, with never a chance for the air apparent.
Nevertheless, little by little the house was approaching completion. The window-frames were in, the hardwood floors were down, and there were doors to open and shut. The painter was at work, as well: a charming person, who whistled as he worked, quoted Whittier to me, and produced the most astounding effects, the most pleasing transformations, in the aspect of everything upon which he laid his brush. I have travelled not inconsiderably: I have seen much: I have experienced many emotions: but I contend, and shall always contend, that the thing that contributes most largely to human comfort and to human self-respect is fresh paint. It is soul-satisfying. It is eminently respectable. It remedies past errors: it challenges future indiscretions. It is the hall-mark of cleanliness, the guarantee of gentility, the stamp of self-respect.
In course of time the plaster dried, and, in a high state of exhilaration, I went to choose my wall-papers. I give you my word that never before had I so much as imagined that so many varieties of wall-paper existed. I despaired, at first, of making a choice. They all seemed born to be hung, and I found myself in a kind of embarrassment as to which was. The one which appealed to me most strongly was a daring arrangement of scarlet poppies on a yellow background. But then, poppies are such sleepy, dead-and-alive things, to have about one. You might as well surround yourself with mummies as with poppies. So I rejected this design, and, in the end, came down to plain, cool colours. For this inspiration I was indebted to one of those freaks of memory whereby a trivial incident pops out of the past like a cork from a soda-bottle — when you’re not looking. A gaudy scheme of large, and what I should call floppy, roses against a green trellis suddenly caused me to remember the mumps. There had been roses on the wall opposite my infantile pallet — thirty-two roses across and seventeen roses up and down — and when you squinted your eyes, every second rose had the face of an old lady in a turban and a tippet. The mumps is a tedious disease and aggravated, rather than in the least degree ameliorated, by a continuous process of counting seventeen up and down and thirty-two across. As Mr. Swinburne says, “I shall never be friends again with roses.”
But, what was more to the point, I also remembered that I had been thus direfully afflicted on one side only. I reflected that somewhere that other mump might be lurking in ambush, awaiting its chance to spring at my throat. And should I, then, fall once more to computing the insensate figures on a bedroom wall? A thousand times no! Solid colours, or nothing, for me!
So I made my bedroom a cool blue, my den a tranquil green, my library a rich yellow, and my dining-room a glowing red. It was a rain- bow on the instalment plan. Only in my guest-room did I permit myself a deviation from the severity of my scheme. There was no such thing as resisting a certain design in pansies, and I determined that such of my guests as might be so ill-advised as to come down with the mumps over-night would do so entirely at their own risk, and must pay the penalty of their indiscretion.
If the painter had produced transformations in the aspect of the bungalow’s interior, what shall be said of the paper-hanger? I had always had a shamefaced and unconfessed admiration for a dressmaker who could make stripes come together correctly down a seam; but after I had seen that master of precision fitting the two halves of a pansy together down ten feet of wall space, so that you couldn’t for the life of you tell where the “pan” ended and the “sy” began, I perceived that the other was only a weak imitation of this superior being. Have you ever tried to paste on a flat surface a piece of paper the size of this page? If you have, you will not need to be told that, short of putting up a stovepipe, it is the most maddening feat attempted by civilized man. You will remember how it curls up and sticks to the other side of itself: how you get it off one finger only to have it cling to another: how, when you spread it out flat, at last, the air bubbles get under it, as if they heard a burglar in the house, and pull the blankets over their heads, and refuse to come out or be interviewed on any terms whatever. And you will agree with me, I think, when I submit that the eighth wonder of the world is a man who can take two sheets of limp, wet paper, eighteen inches wide by ten feet long, and paste them side by side and edge to edge with such astounding ingenuity that you can have no more hope of perceiving the line of division at a distance of five feet than of discovering the boundary between New York and New Jersey by paddling about in the middle of the Hudson River.
In this philosophical attitude of mind, then, I emerged at length from the maelstrom of plastering, carpentry, painting and paper- hanging, and found myself in a position to furnish. As I look back upon this stage it seems to me to have been characterized by a vast superfluity of what Mr. Longfellow very truthfully called “the strange device, excelsior.” Excelsior is to shavings what spaghetti is to macaroni — smaller, that is, and infinitely more difficult to manipulate. As everything breakable came down from town packed in it, life became a mere struggle to keep it from going up my sleeves and down my neck, and I grew to fear and hate it, to tremble at sight of it, to flee from it when possible, as if it were a pest. I am convinced that hope was the only thing in Pandora’s box — but the hope was packed in excelsior.
Before now I had an offset to Miss Berrith in the person of Mrs. Sarah Galvin, a widow on the perfectly safe side of fifty, who was to serve me thenceforward in the combined capacities of housekeeper, cook, and Sally-de-chambre. She had already taken up her abode in my bungalow, where she was existing, in some precarious fashion of her own, on tea and chronic melancholy until such time as things should be in running order. She was the sort of woman you would not know a second time if you met her in a pint-pot. She had no perceptible features. Her face took no more hold upon one’s attention or memory than a Chinaman’s. I do not remember ever to have looked at her squarely, and I was always curiously surprised when the fact was brought to my attention that such a person existed at all. She was like the new moon: whenever she made her appearance it seemed to me that I had last seen her at least three years back. When, by chance, I encountered her in the house, she melted through a door-way like an alarmed crab in soft sand. She was a woman after my own heart — needless to say, with no chance of getting it — and, in brief, the person of all persons for “Sans Souci.”
It was with something very nearly akin to triumph that I directed Miss Berrith’s attention to her. Miss Berrith “happened to be passing” — that was her euphonious way of explaining her almost daily fit of curiosity — and stopped a moment to watch me unpacking china on the front piazza. I had been handing plates to Galvin over my left shoulder, and my first intimation of my young neighbour’s presence came in the form of what I may describe as the evaporation of my faithful attendant into thin air.
“Excuse me,” I said, looking up. “I did not see you.” I was covered from top to toe with the ubiquitous excelsior, warm, tired, and rather cross.
“You will end by marrying your cook,” observed Miss Berrith with extreme irrelevancy.
“Nothing of the sort!” I exclaimed indignantly. “Whatever put that idea into your head?”
“I’m not sure,” said she. “Just seeing you working there together, all so comfy, I suppose. Propinquity — association — kindred interests — they accomplish wonders, you know.”
“Did you get a good look at her?” I demanded.
“Fleeting,” answered my tormentor, “but fairly comprehensive.”
“And you actually think there is a possibility of my marrying that.”
Miss Berrith shrugged her shoulders.
“Who knows?” she answered flippantly. “There is nothing more illogical than the persons other persons marry.”
“I think I am quite safe, so far as Galvin is concerned,” I said haughtily, “and it is a mile to another woman.”
“Is it?” asked Miss Berrith with a pretense at innocence. “I should not have thought the distance more than five yards.”
I considered this to be the extreme of audacity, and very properly ignored it.
“And in any event— a cook!” I protested.
She appeared to reflect. Little did I foresee the bomb which she was preparing to explode at my devoted feet.
“Why,” she asked slowly, “is a girl like a cook?”
“I can’t imagine,” says I.
“Because,” said Miss Berrith, “she’s a ready maid before she’s engaged and a maid to order afterward.”
“Aha!” I cried triumphantly, “you admit the inferiority of the wife!”
“I haven’t said whom she is made to order,” said Miss Berrith.
For a moment I felt as I do after trying to recover a wet cake of soap before it reaches the carpet.
“Of course,” I ventured, “our ideas upon marriage are bound to be very dissimilar. I have the masculine point of view.”
Miss Berrith looked at me curiously.
“A friend of my father,” she observed slowly, “once referred to the violet as a ‘thundering pretty flower.’”
“I’m afraid that I don’t see the connection,” said I uneasily.
“Only,” answered Miss Berrith, “that in relation to at least one very sweet and tender and beautiful thing the masculine point of view would seem to border upon the inadequate.”
“I should be the last man in the world,” I exclaimed resentfully, “to call the violet ‘a thundering pretty flower.’”
“Oh, we all have our virtues,” said Miss Berrith airily. “The gentleman in question, for instance, has been married thirty years.”
If a ruler of Para rubber has ever been applied to your knuckles you will recall the effect produced as a particularity of sensation as distressing as it is abrupt. I had not experienced it since I was a child.
A week later I assembled in a valise the remainder of my belongings in town, squared accounts with my landlady, cast one brief unregretful look at the wicker furniture, the dispirited curtains, and the lamentable plush table-cover of my late apartment, and took final flight for “Sans Souci.”
What a night it was, to be sure, that first one under the shelter of my own roof-tree! Galvin prepared me a delicious little dinner, and afterwards I installed myself in my largest and most comfortable chair, with a favourite book and a pipeful of mild tobacco.
For a time I read steadily. It was Mr. Kipling’s “Story of the Gadsbys,” which ends with that marvellous “Envoi,” which I have always thought the final words on the advantages of celibacy:
One may fall but he falls by himself —
Falls by himself with himself to blame;
One may attain and to him is the pelf.
Loot of the city in Gold or Fame:
Plunder of earth shall be all his own
Who travels the fastest and travels alone.
I looked up and about my pleasant library, and I think my eyes were a little moist as I dwelt affectionately upon the memory of excellent Uncle Ezra and all he had thus made possible. I was a bachelor at last! Everything had turned out exactly as I had planned it. Celibacy lay upon that scene like a caress. Suppose — suppose I had been married!
Married!
I spoke the word half-aloud, and somehow, in these surroundings, it was as incongruous as an icicle in June!
Married!
I put my feet upon the chair which faced me — not that I approve this practice, but simply to show my independence. A married man’s chairs are like the man himself — made only to be sat upon.
Married!
I re-lit my pipe. Should I have had to smoke it out on the front steps had things been otherwise? Ah, there are worse matches than the one I used!
Married!
I switched off all the incandescent bulbs — reflecting that married men are even more frequently made light of and put out — and sought the piazza.
The night was perfection, soft and still, save for a tiny lisp of leaves, the high whine of insects, and the distant murmur of the sea. Out of the fullness of my content I spoke aloud to the surrounding woodland:
“Hail, ‘Sans Souci!’”
If there is one thing I abominate it is an echo. It is so essentially feminine. It always has to have the last word.
There was an echo in those woods, and when I made the above innocent observation of course it had to up and answer back. And what, pray, was the form of remark, it saw fit to make? Nothing less than:
“Su-sie!”
I felt that I was getting a little too much of the Berrith girl.