and, besides, you could not climb up its slippery sides very easily. And once you were perched up there, you began to slide and slide until you would fall in a heap ignominiously off that ungainly and inhospitable bulk of a sofa. So you would go over and sit at Garna's feet, as she rocked slowly in her great chair, which you must never tip too far back for fear of the grandfather's clock that stood in the corner behind it. The clock had a loud and lovely bell which struck the hours. Gilbert could always tell when it was going to strike, for a minute or two before the hour there was a sharp click. Then a little later would begin a vast rumbling from the very chest of the old clock, as if it were taking a long, deep breath for its pealing song. When Gilbert was in the room, he always stopped and listened for the whole long satisfactory performance. It was slow, it was prepared, it was beautiful, and when Garna got a clock for the dining-room which rattled off a quick little tinkle of a stroke, Gilbert despised it, and would have covered his ears if he had not thought it would be silly.
Upstairs the rooms were just as vast. There was Mother's room, into which the sunlight poured, and which was the warmest in winter, though you took turns rushing to the register to dress where it was warm, before washing in the cold water of the wash-bowl. Just off from Mother's room was a little room, with nothing in it but a huge bed, where Olga and Gilbert slept, and a dresser, in which Gilbert's clothes were kept. On the wall were two old pictures, one representing a donkey in the midst of illimitable and ineffable summer pastures, and marked, "Everything Lovely!" the other showing him in the blizzard before a locked stable-door, with "Nobody loves me!" Against the tall window, at the foot of the bed, were rows and rows of shelves, on which stood flower-pots all winter long, geraniums and begonias, and heliotrope plants, so that they could catch the full warmth of the winter sun and keep green for summer, when Mother took them out of the pot and put them out in rows in the garden again. The window was almost smothered in rich greenery, and sometimes when Gilbert would wake up early on a winter morning, when the light was just beginning to come through the leaves, he would find that the shelves had become a black silhouetted tracery of amazing figures. Queer outlandish heads,—fierce dragomans with pipes in their mouths, Chinamen with queues, policemen with round helmets, or animals like Gilbert had seen at the Zoo—
