Perhaps some day it may be possible to tell in English again, in the
language of Shakspeare and Herrick, of the passion, the tenderness, the
beauty, and the delightful familiarizations of a happy honeymoon;
suffice it now, in this delicate period, to record only how our two
young lovers found one day that neither had a name for the other. He
said she could be nothing better than Marjorie to him; and she, after a
number of unsuccessful experiments, settled down to the old school-boy
nickname made out of his initials, R. A. G.
"Dick," she said, "is too bird-like and boy-like. Andrew I can't abide.
Goodwin gives one no chances for current use. Rag you must be. Mag and
Rag--poor innocents! Old rag!"
"Mag," he said, "has its drawbacks! The street-boy in London says, 'Shut
your mag.' No, I think I shall stick to Marjorie...."
All honeymoons must end at last, so back they came to London, still very
bright and happy. And then, Marjorie, whose eyes had changed from
flashing stones to darkly shining pools of blue, but whose soul had
still perhaps to finds its depths, set herself to the business of
decorating and furnishing the little house Mrs. Trafford had found for
them within ten minutes of her own. Meanwhile they lived in lodgings.
There can be no denying that Marjorie began her furnishing with severely
virtuous intentions. She was very particular to ask Trafford several
times what he thought she might spend upon the enterprise. He had
already a bedroom and a study equipped, and he threw out three hundred
pounds as his conception of an acceptable figure. "Very well," said
Marjorie, with a note of great precision, "now I shall know," and
straightway that sum took a place in her imagination that was at once
definitive and protective, just as her estimate of fifty pounds for her
Oxbridge debts had always been. She assured herself she was going to do
things, and she assured herself she was doing things, on three hundred
pounds. At times the astonishment of two or three school friends, who
joined her in her shopping, stirred her to a momentary surprise at the
way she was managing to keep things within that limit, and following a
financial method that had, after all, in spite of some momentary and
already nearly forgotten distresses, worked very well at Oxbridge, she
refrained from any additions until all the accounts had come to hand.
It was an immense excitement shopping to make a home. There was in her
composition a strain of constructive artistry with such concrete things,
a strain that had hitherto famished. She was making a beautiful, secure
little home for Trafford, for herself, for possibilities--remote
perhaps, but already touching her imagination with the anticipation of
warm, new, wonderful delights. There should be simplicity indeed in this
home, but no bareness, no harshness, never an ugliness nor a discord.
She had always loved colour in the skies, in the landscapes, in the
texture of stuffs and garments; now out of the chaotic skein of
countless shops she could choose and pick and mingle her threads in a
glow of feminine self-expression.
On three hundred pounds, that is to say--as a maximum.
The house she had to deal with was, like Mrs. Trafford's, old and rather
small; it was partly to its lack of bedroom accommodation, but much more
to the invasion of the street by the back premises of Messrs. Siddons &
Thrale, the great Chelsea outfitters, that the lowness of the rent was
due, a lowness which brought it within the means of Trafford. Marjorie
knew very clearly that her father would say her husband had taken her to
live in a noisy slum, and that made her all the keener to ensure that
every good point in the interior told to its utmost, and that whatever
was to be accessible to her family should glow with a refined but warm
prosperity. The room downstairs was shapely, and by ripping off the
papered canvas of the previous occupier, some very dilapidated but
admirably proportioned panelling was brought to light. The dining-room
and study door on the ground floor, by a happy accident, were of
mahogany, with really very beautiful brass furnishings; and the
dining-room window upon the minute but by no means offensive paved
garden behind, was curved and had a little shallow balcony of ironwork,
half covered by a devitalized but leafy grapevine. Moreover, the
previous occupier had equipped the place with electric light and a
bathroom of almost American splendour on the landing, glass-shelved,
white-tiled, and white painted, so that it was a delight to go into.
Marjorie's mind leapt very rapidly to the possibilities of this little
establishment. The panelling must be done and done well, anyhow; that
would be no more than a wise economy, seeing it might at any time help
them to re-let; it would be painted white, of course, and thus set the
key for a clean brightness of colour throughout. The furniture would
stand out against the softly shining white, and its line and
proportions must be therefore the primary qualities to consider as she
bought it. The study was much narrower than the dining-room, and so the
passage, which the agent called the hall, was much broader and more
commodious behind the happily wide staircase than in front, and she was
able to banish out of the sight of the chance visitor all that litter of
hat-stand and umbrella-stand, letters, boxes arriving and parcels to
post, which had always offended her eye at home. At home there had been
often the most unsightly things visible, one of Theo's awful caps, or
his school books, and not infrequently her father's well-worn and all
too fatally comfortable house slippers. A good effect at first is half
the victory of a well done house, and Marjorie accomplished another of
her real economies here by carpeting hall and staircase with a
fine-toned, rich-feeling and rather high-priced blue carpet, held down
by very thick brass stair-rods. She hung up four well-chosen steel
engravings, put a single Chippendale chair in the hall, and a dark old
Dutch clock that had turned out to be only five pounds when she had
expected the shopman to say eleven or twelve, on the half-landing. That
was all. Round the corner by the study door was a mahogany slab, and the
litter all went upon a capacious but very simple dark-stained hat-stand
and table that were out of the picture entirely until you reached the
stairs.
Her dining-room was difficult for some time. She had equipped that with
a dark oak Welsh dresser made very bright with a dessert service that
was, in view of its extremely decorative quality, remarkably cheap, and
with some very pretty silver-topped glass bottles and flasks. This
dresser and a number of simple but shapely facsimiles of old chairs,
stood out against a nearly primrose paper, very faintly patterned, and a
dark blue carpet with a margin of dead black-stained wood. Over the
mantel was a German colour-print of waves full of sunlight breaking
under cliffs, and between this and the window were dark bookshelves and
a few bright-coloured books. On the wall, black-framed, were four very
good Japanese prints, rich in greenish-blues and blueish-greys that
answered the floor, and the window curtains took up some of the colours
of the German print. But something was needed towards the window, she
felt, to balance the warmly shining plates upon the dresser. The deep
rose-red of the cherries that adorned them was too isolated, usurped too
dominating a value. And while this was weighing upon her mind she saw in
a window in Regent Street a number of Bokhara hangings very nobly
displayed. They were splendid pieces of needlework, particularly
glorious in their crimsons and reds, and suddenly it came to her that it
was just one of these, one that had great ruby flowers upon it with
dead-blue interlacings, that was needed to weld her gay-coloured scheme
together. She hesitated, went half-way to Piccadilly Circus, turned
back and asked the prices. The prices were towering prices, ten,
fifteen, eighteen guineas, and when at last the shopman produced one
with all the charm of colour she sought at eight, it seemed like ten
guineas snatched back as they dropped from her hands. And still
hesitating, she had three that pleased her most sent home, "on
approval," before she decided finally to purchase one of them. But the
trial was conclusive. And then, struck with a sudden idea, she carried
off a long narrow one she had had no idea of buying before into the
little study behind. Suppose, she thought, instead of hanging two
curtains as anybody else would do in that window, she ran this glory of
rich colour across from one side on a great rod of brass.
She was giving the study the very best of her attention. After she had
lapsed in some other part of the house from the standards of rigid
economy she had set up, she would as it were restore the balance by
adding something to the gracefully dignified arrangement of this den he
was to use. And the brass rod of the Bokhara hanging that was to do
instead of curtains released her mind somehow to the purchase of certain
old candlesticks she had hitherto resisted. They were to stand, bored to
carry candle electric lights, on either corner of the low bookcase that
faced the window. They were very heavy, very shapely candlesticks, and
they cost thirty-five shillings. They looked remarkably well when they
were put up, except that a sort of hollowness appeared between them and
clamoured for a delightful old brass-footed workbox she had seen in a
shop in Baker Street. Enquiry confirmed her quick impression that this
was a genuine piece (of quite exceptional genuineness) and that the
price--they asked five pounds ten and came down to five guineas--was in
accordance with this. It was a little difficult (in spite of the silent
hunger between the candlesticks) to reconcile this particular article
with her dominating idea of an austerely restrained expenditure, until
she hit upon the device of calling it a _hors d'oeuvre_, and regarding
it not as furniture but as a present from herself to Trafford that
happened to fall in very agreeably with the process of house furnishing.
She decided she would some day economise its cost out of her dress
allowance. The bookcase on which it stood was a happy discovery in
Kensington, just five feet high, and with beautiful oval glass fronts,
and its capacity was supplemented and any excess in its price at least
morally compensated by a very tall, narrow, distinguished-looking set of
open shelves that had been made for some special corner in another
house, and which anyhow were really and truly dirt cheap. The desk
combined grace and good proportions to an admirable extent, the fender
of pierced brass looked as if it had always lived in immediate contact
with the shapely old white marble fireplace, and the two arm-chairs were
marvels of dignified comfort. By the fireplace were a banner-shaped
needlework firescreen, a white sheepskin hearthrug, a little patch and
powder table adapted to carry books, and a green-shaded lamp, grouped in
a common inaudible demand for a reader in slippers. Trafford, when at
last the apartment was ready for his inspection, surveyed these
arrangements with a kind of dazzled admiration.
"By Jove!" he said. "How little people know of the homes of the Poor!"
Marjorie was so delighted with his approval that she determined to show
Mrs. Trafford next day how prettily at least her son was going to live.
The good lady came and admired everything, and particularly the Bokhara
hangings. She did not seem to appraise, but something set Marjorie
talking rather nervously of a bargain-hunter's good fortune. Mrs.
Trafford glanced at the candlesticks and the low bookcase, and returned
to the glowing piece of needlework that formed the symmetrical window
curtain in the study. She took it in her hand, and whispered,
"beautiful!"
"But aren't these rather good?" asked Mrs. Trafford.
Marjorie answered, after a little pause. "They're not too good for
_him_," she said.