Anne Douglas Sedgwick

“ She shifted and rearranged like a bird building its nest, and Chislebridge stared again and said that the white walls were like a workhouse; and then they began to look for lacquer and to put up white paper. Her very grouping has been copied, the smallest points of adjustment. It's not," Mrs. Waterlow pursued, "that I mind people imitating, if they do it frankly and own themselves plagiarists. We must all see the things we like for the first time. But it's not because they like the things that they have them; they have them because some one else likes them. ”

“ Yours is meant to be a soulless room, isn't it? That's your intention?"
"Exactly," said Guendolen, with eager apprehension; "that is just it—a soulless room. One is sick of souls, just as one is sick of beauty."
"Exactly," Owen echoed her. "But, since you have here a travesty of beauty, what you need to complete your idea is a travesty of soul. You need a center that draws it all into focus. You need something that, alas! you might have had, and have lost forever. The white pagoda, Guendolen, that Mrs. Waterlow found. Your room needs that, and only that, to make it perfect." ”

“ He raised his head. It was to face the mantelpiece, with its oval, gilt mirror and crystal lusters and gilt-and-marble clock. No, there were not doves and a nest upon it. This was a finer clock than the one with the doves, and the lusters were larger, and the flowers that stood between were mauve orchids. Guendolen always went astray over her flowers.
"Here is tea," she said, seating herself at a little mahogany table with bowed and decorated legs. "Of course you 're bound to feel tired, dear Owen, after your journey. Tea will be the very thing for you." ”

“ Guendolen asked him, tactfully turning from the question of his weakness. "I love it myself, I own, though of course Chislebridge thinks I've lost my wits. To tell you the truth, Owen, I was tired of beauty. One may come to that. One may feel," said Guendolen, pouring out the tea, "that one needs a discipline. This room is my discipline, and after it I know that I shall find self-indulgence almost vulgar." ”

“ Guendolen's drawing-room, too, had undergone, since the days of her girlhood, as complete a metamorphosis as she had. When she had married and left the big house in Kensington where Owen had spent many a happy holiday—when she had married crabbed old Mr. Conyers, the Chislebridge dignitary, and gone to live in Chislebridge, her convictions had at once expressed themselves luxuriantly in large-patterned wall-papers and deep-cushioned divans and in Eastern fabrics draping the mantelpiece or cast irrelevantly over carved Indian screens. ”

“ And he wondered how far Guendolen had gone, how far she could be made to go. "There's only one thing that it lacks," he said. "Shall I tell you?"
"Oh, do," she urged, beaming over her tea. "You know how much I value your taste."
"Oh, I haven't much taste," said Owen, "I've never gone in for having taste. And doesn't your room prove that taste is a mistake if indulged too far? It's more a sense of literary fitness I allude to. ”

“ Negligible-looking as he knew he was, he had sometimes been amused to note old Mr. Conyers's bewilderment when a cabinet minister or a duchess manifested their pleasurable excitement in meeting him. As for Guendolen, her essential loyalty and kindness had always remained the same since the days when she had protected him from the sallies of her boisterous brothers and sisters in the Kensington family mansion—the same till now. Last night and to-day he had recognized a difference. He wondered whether he was a conceited fool for imagining in Guendolen a dwelling tenderness ”

“ Between the clock and the lusters, on each side, was a vase of Bohemian glass, each holding a small nosegay of red and white roses. Mahogany footstools, with bead-worked tops, stood before the fire, and upon the walls hung, exquisite in their absurdity, like the pagoda, a whole botanical series of flat, feeble old flower-pieces, neatly colored drawings, as accurate and as lifeless as vigilant, uninspired labor could make them. ”

“ I believe that Guendolen does like it."
"Yes, she does indeed," said old Mrs. Waterlow. "She says so. She says she never cared for any room so much as that. She intends to live and die with it. Her only refuge now is to go on faithfully loving it. So there she is, buttoned into her black satin forever!"
Until now Mrs. Conyers has remained faithful, and her consistency is still made good to her; for none of her drawing-rooms has brought her such appreciation. ”

“ Of how very little importance it was that a woman should not show originality in her drawing-room when she could show in taxing daily intercourse such wisdom and resource and sweetness! Life had contracted about them, and on these simple and elementary terms he found that Guendolen neither bored nor ruffled him. ”

“ They dress themselves in other people's tastes and make a fine figure as originators." The vexation of years was crystallized in the lightness and crispness of her voice.
Poor, stupid Guendolen! After all, one could not be too hard on her. He felt Mrs. Waterlow to be so hard that he reacted to something approaching pitying tolerance. Guendolen could be stupid in such good faith. There was nothing, when he came to think of it, surprising in this revelation of her stupidity, nothing painful, as there had been in suspecting Cicely Waterlow of stupidity. ”

“ I don't know, I really don't know, Owen. Cicely is always changing her room, you know. She is very quick at feeling what's in the air—as quick as I am really, and I haven't seen her for ages. She has gone to live in London; oh, yes, didn't you know? Yes, she came into a little money over a year ago, and she and old Mrs. Waterlow have taken a house in Chelsea, and are coming back to Chislebridge only for two or three months in every year. They are very fond of Chislebridge. So I haven't an idea of what her drawing-room is like now. ”

“ Waterlow, though he had been more than willing that Guendolen should occupy the slightly ridiculous and humiliating position that he had imagined to be Mrs. Waterlow's, he had never for a moment imagined that Guendolen's disingenuous docility would go as far as this. So many people might love red lacquer and old glass with a clear conscience once they had been brought to see them; but who, with a clear conscience, could love black satin furniture and marble urns?
"It is a very singular room," he found at last, in comment upon her information. ”

“ Your cousin is in the south of France, isn't she?" said Mrs. Waterlow, with bland inconsequence.
"Yes; I'm only passing through. Guendolen's been gone for nearly a month."
"Yes; I know," Mrs. Waterlow pursued, still with the genial blandness. "And as to our little joke, Mr. Stacpole, this room, in fact, is in many ways a room of. my girlhood. The furniture was my mother's, and Cicely, when the idea struck her, had it brought from the garret of my old home, where it has stood in disgrace for many a year. She has been clever about it, hasn't she?"
"It's genius," said Owen. ”

“ The more pots and pans and patterns and palms they could squeeze into them, the better they were pleased. Cicely had simple furniture and quiet spaces and plain green wall-paper when no one else in Chislebridge had. She fell in love with Japanese prints in Paris and bought them when no one else in Chislebridge thought of doing so. It's wrong, now, I hear, to like them. Chinese paintings are the correct thing. Chislebridge stared at them and at her empty room, and wondered how she could care for those hideous women. ”

“ Mrs. Waterlow questioned, her merry, weary eyes, that seemed to open with a little difficulty, resting on her hostess inquiringly. "Was the pagoda yours?"
"Yes; mine," said Guendolen. "It came in a box of rubbish,—you saw the kind of rubbish,—a legacy from an old aunt, and I bundled it off to Glazebrook. Owen says it is really good. Is it?" ”

“ Stacpole, if I'm savage with your cousin when I tell you that she has been inspired with a black satin suite and mahogany furniture and bead-work since seeing Cicely's new drawing-room in Chislebridge."
"Mother!" Cicely protested. "Two people can perfectly well have the same idea at the same time! There's no reason in the world why Guendolen shouldn't feel just my fancy for funny, old, ugly things." ”

“ It's instinct—the instinct of the insignificant for aping the significant. They would probably be annoyed if they were told that they aped Cicely. They hardly know they do it, I will say that for them, if it's anything to their credit. And then, since she is poor, and they—some of them—rich, their copies are seen by a hundred to the one who sees her original, and Cicely, to some people (I've no doubt of it) , seems the ape. It has very much vexed me," Mrs. Waterlow repeated.
Owen, for all his loyal feint of unconsciousness, was growing rather angry with Guendolen. ”

“ Waterlow, pouring out the tea, "that's what Cicely always says, at all events; reactions, repulsions, wearinesses. This room is, she says, a discipline."
"Things in the air?" Had Guendolen felt them first, and Mrs. Waterlow felt them after her? This question of priority became of burning interest for him.
"The trouble is that one may get too much of any discipline," he commented, "if it ceases to be self-inflicted and is imposed upon us. How would your daughter like it if all Chislebridge took to buttoned black satin and old flower-pieces? ”

“ It was an object to be examined with delight, hardly a subject to be lived with with love. And it almost distressed him to see the touch of genial commonplaceness expressing itself pervasively in the big bowls and jars and vases of pink roses that burgeoned everywhere. ”

“ Mama will still be having tea, and she loves people to drop in. But ought you to come away?" Mrs. Waterlow glanced round the crowded room.
"I'll not be missed," he assured her, with some conscious speciousness.
Guendolen, indeed, had time only for a little stare of surprise when he told her that he was going to look at the pagoda with Mrs. Waterlow. She was receiving new guests, richly furred and motor-veiled ladies who had come in from the country and were expatiating over the beauties of the red lacquer cabinets, Guendolen's latest acquisitions. ”

“ I don't suppose that Cicely often has a chance of meeting such an interesting man as you. Of course I'll ask her," said Guendolen. Then, remembering his gift: "It was nice of you to get me a red lacquer box, Owen. I adore red lacquer, and I'm quite sure, whatever you and Cicely Waterlow may say, that it's worth a hundred of your white pagodas."
Mrs. Waterlow came to tea next afternoon, the last of Owen's stay. ”

“ Stacpole," said young Mrs. Waterlow, laughing, yet, he saw, not pleased, and turning from the fire where she had been standing with her foot on the fender.
"Does Mr. Stacpole care for bric-à-brac, too?" old Mrs. Waterlow inquired. "Cicely came home with this last treasure in as much triumph as if some one had left her a fortune. I resent the pagoda because it means that she will go without a spring hat. She is always coming home in triumph and always doing without hats ”

“ Waterlow. "Will it? It has very much vexed me for years to watch Chislebridge picking Cicely's brains. And I said to her that I wondered whether it would be possible for her to make a room that wouldn't be copied, and she said that she believed she could. If she could achieve ugliness, she said; downright ugliness; she believed they would fall back. The room is a sort of wager between us, for I am not at all convinced that she will succeed. Sheep, you know, will leap into the ditch if they see their leader land there."
Owen's head was whirling. ”

“ Chislebridge has never dared to emulate it; Mr. Chambers and his friends have often painted it, and Mrs. Waterlow's original, like a gay jest, uttered and then gone forever, is no longer in existence to vex and perplex her with its mocking smile. Moreover her own drawing-room no longer lacks its travesty of a soul. Owen married Cicely Waterlow in the autumn, and Guendolen, magnanimous, and burning her bridges behind her, sent them for their wedding-present her two lovely and unique red lacquer cabinets. One stands in the front, and one in the back drawing-room in the little house in St. ”

“ Yes; people may have the same idea, but they'll hardly have the same black satin furniture and the same beaded footstools, will they?"
Seeing the deep embarrassment in which his friend was plunged, Owen now interposed.
"Don't try to defend Guendolen on my account," he said. "She really can't be defended. I know it, for I've seen her drawing-room." ”