Of course I don’t when John is here, or anybody else, but when I am
alone.
And I am alone a good deal just now. John is kept in town very often by
serious cases, and Jennie is good and lets me alone when I want her to.
So I walk a little in the garden or down that lovely lane, sit on the
porch under the roses, and lie down up here a good deal.
I’m getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps
because of the wallpaper.
It dwells in my mind so!
I lie here on this great immovable bed—it is nailed down, I believe—and
follow that pattern about by the hour. It is as good as gymnastics, I
assure you. I start, we’ll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over
there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth
time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a
conclusion.
I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was
not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition,
or symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of.
It is repeated, of course, by the breadths, but not otherwise.
Looked at in one way each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and
flourishes—a kind of “debased Romanesque” with delirium tremens—go
waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity.
But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling
outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of
wallowing seaweeds in full chase.
The whole thing goes horizontally, too, at least it seems so, and I
exhaust myself in trying to distinguish the order of its going in that
direction.
They have used a horizontal breadth for a frieze, and that adds
wonderfully to the confusion.
There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when
the cross-lights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it, I can
almost fancy radiation after all,—the interminable grotesques seem to
form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal
distraction.
It makes me tired to follow it. I will take a nap, I guess.