At Home with the Jardines Part 3

"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 rooms in handsome houses. Oh, if you only knew what people say about you--you women who "don't like to keep house!"

But I forgot. Most women have no sense of humour, and few husbands take the intense interest in a home that the Angel does.

America, foreigners claim, is a country almost as homeless as France is said to be. The French have no word for home in their language, but they have homes in fact, which is much more worth while. We Americans have the lovely word "Home," but we haven't as a nation the article in fact. Americans have houses, but in truth we are a homeless race.

Only the unenlightened will contradict me for saying that, and for the opinion of the unenlightened I do not care.

I am not sentimental after the fas.h.i.+on of women who send flowers to murderers, but I am full of pale and sickly theories as to the making of a home, and I am free to confess that it would give me more pleasure to hear people say of me, "Mrs. Jardine's husband is the happiest man I know," than to have them read on a bronze tablet under a statue in the Louvre, "Faith Jardine, Sculptor." For if more ambitious women would devote themselves to making one neglected husband happy the public would be spared weak and indifferent pictures, silly and rank books, rainy-day skirts in the house, and heaps of other foolishness and bad taste, most of which at bottom is not the necessity to work for a living, but simply Feminine Conceit.

Of course Aubrey and I made some mistakes in spite of all our precautions, for, happily for me, the Angel can be led away by enthusiasm, and is not so faultlessly perfect as to be impossible to get on with. I revel in his weaknesses, they are so human and companionable, and give me such a feeling of satisfaction when summing up my own faults. We got so much fun out of shopping for the house that we dragged out the process to make the delight of it as lingering as possible. I had planned it all out.

My own room was to be pink. Big pink roses splashed all over the cretonne counterpane and valance of the bed. Plain pink wall-paper upon which to hang pictures all in black frames. Small pink roses tumbling on the ceiling and looking as if every moment they would scatter their curling petals on the pink rugs on the floor. The dark furniture against the pink walls toned down the rose colour, which returned the compliment to the furniture by bringing out the carving on bold relief.

The guest-room, on the contrary, was to be pale blue with white furniture. Nothing but gold-framed pictures on the walls and a blue rug on the floor. The chairs were to be upholstered in blue for this room, and in pink for mine. Muslin curtains with full deep ruffles, picked out respectively with pink and blue, would flutter at the sunny windows, and though simplicity itself, nothing ever struck me as any more attractive, for it was all mine--my first house--my first housekeeping! When this dream really came true, I walked around in such a dazed condition of delight that I was black and blue from knocking myself into things I didn't see. But even as I did not see the obstructions, I did not feel the pain of my bruises, for they were all got from my furniture on corners of _my_ house, and thus were sacred.

As I gazed on the delicate beauty of my pretty little guest-chamber I fell to wondering who would be its first occupant. Would it be a man or a woman? Would it be Artie Beguelin, the Angel's best man, or my sweet friend and bridesmaid, Cary Farquhar?

At any rate, he or she would be welcome--oh, so welcome! I hoped the invisible guest would be happy, and would feel that ours was not a compulsory hospitality, with the cost counted beforehand and the benefits we expected in return discounted. No, whoever it was to be would be a guest and a friend. On the wall over the bed hung these words illuminated on vellum and framed, for I had always loved them:

"Sleep sweet, within this quiet room, Oh thou, whoe'er thou art!

And let no mournful yesterday Disturb thy peaceful heart, Nor let to-morrow fret thy dreams With thoughts of coming ill, Thy Maker is thy changeless Friend, His love surrounds thee still.

Sleep sweet!

Good night."

Afterward, when my first guest had come and gone, this momentary reverie came back to me, and I looked up at this benediction with tears in my eyes.

Of course we spent too much money on our house furnis.h.i.+ngs. We always do, but after all--and here come my theories again. I would have fine table and bed linen. The Angel did not believe I would stick to it, but I did embroider it all myself. And as to hemming napkins and table-cloths--I challenge any nun in any convent to make prettier French hems than I put in! Would I be likely to waste all that labour on flimsy napkins or cotton sheets and pillow-cases?

Not at all! I can find infinitely more pleasure in putting invisible st.i.tches into my own first linen than in going to pink teas, and people don't get permanently angry if you invite them to dinner, and let them eat off hemmed and embroidered damask. Believe me. You may send cards to six receptions, and get out of six afternoons of misery and indigestion by one judiciously arranged dinner--if you don't mix your people. And thus we did.

So I got my linen. The Angel laughed at another of my theories, but when I proved to him that I would really see the thing through, he was convinced. It was on the question of beds. Our friends professed themselves astonished that we contemplated the extravagance of a guest-chamber, for here in New York, where rents are so abnormal, people economize first of all upon their friends, and I am told that an extra bedroom where a chance guest may be asked to remain overnight is the exception with people of moderate means. Such monstrous selfishness struck me as appalling. To provide _only_ for ourselves--for our own comfort! To have no room in all your own luxury to share with a friend! To be obliged to tell the woman whose hospitality you have enjoyed in your girlhood: "Now that I am married, I have prepared no place for you! Your kindness to me is all forgotten!"

Well, we simply refused. What if it were a strain on us financially?

I would rather suffer that than cripple myself spiritually and suffer from no pangs of conscience as most New Yorkers do!

However, we managed it, and in this wise. I said:

"Aubrey, if you are willing, we can save a great deal in this way."

Even at this early stage the Angel always grew deeply attentive when I talked of saving anything.

"We can and must order the finest springs and mattresses for the beds, for of all the meanness in this world the meanest is to put a bad bed in the guest-chamber, and that is where most housekeepers are perfectly willing to economize. But we can and will buy white iron beds with bra.s.s tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs for almost nothing,--they are all the same size as the fine bra.s.s ones,--so that at any time when we find ourselves vulgarly rich and able to live up to the dinner-table we shall feel perfectly justified in discarding them, and there you are!"

"But how will it look?" said the man.

"How will our bank-account look, if we don't?"

"I know. But I thought women were afraid of what other women would say," said the Angel.

"Now, Aubrey," I said, "If we have economized on ourselves, or rather included ourselves in a general scheme of economy in order the better to provide for our guests, I think even New Yorkers would hesitate to criticize the Jardines' iron beds,--especially if they ever got a chance to disport themselves on the Jardines' Turkish springs!"

"There's something in that," said the Angel.

CHAPTER III

ON THE SUBJECT OF JANITORS

I used to pride myself on being practical and on possessing no small degree of that peculiar brand of sense known as "horse." However, like most women inclined to take a rosy view of their virtues and to pa.s.s lightly over their obvious faults, I know now that I prided myself on the one thing in my make-up conspicuous by its absence. For I am luxurious to a degree, and so fond of beauty and grace that I feel with the man who said, "Give me the luxuries of life and I will do without the necessities."

This explanation is due to any man, woman, or child who has ever lived in a New York apartment, and who is moved to follow the fortunes of the Jardines further. Also this conversation took place before some of the events already narrated transpired, and while we were still at the Waldorf.

"Now, Aubrey," I said, "to begin at the beginning, marriage is supposed to perfect existence all around, isn't it?"

"It does," said Aubrey.

"No, now, I am speaking seriously. It has fed the mental and spiritual side of us, why not begin life with the determination to make it oil the wheels of daily existence? Why not bend our energies to avoiding the pitfalls of the ordinary mortal, and let _us_ lead a perfect life."

"Very well," said the Angel.

"Now in permitting housekeeping to conquer, most people become slaves to the small ills of life, which I wish to avoid."