I
Five days before Christmas, Cheswardine came home to his wife from a
week's sojourn in London on business. Vera, in her quality of the
best-dressed woman in Bursley, met him on the doorstep (or thereabouts)
of their charming but childless home, attired in a teagown that would
have ravished a far less impressionable male than her husband; while
he, in his quality of a prosaic and flourishing earthenware
manufacturer, pretended to take the teagown as a matter of course, and
gave her the sober, solid kiss of a man who has been married six years
and is getting used to it.
Still, the teagown had pleased him, and by certain secret symptoms Vera
knew that it had pleased him. She hoped much from that teagown. She
hoped that he had come home in a more pacific temper than he had shown
when he left her, and that she would carry her point after all.
Now, naturally, when a husband in easy circumstances, the possessor of
a pretty and pampered wife, spends a week in London and returns five
days before Christmas, certain things are rightly and properly to be
expected from him. It would need an astounding courage, an amazing lack
of a sense of the amenity of conjugal existence in such a husband to
enable him to disappoint such reasonable expectations. And Cheswardine,
though capable of pulling the curb very tight on the caprices of his
wife, was a highly decent fellow. He had no intention to disappoint; he
knew his duty.
So that during afternoon tea with the teagown in a cosy corner of the
great Chippendale drawing-room he began to unfasten a small wooden case
which he had brought into the house in his own hand, opened it with
considerable precaution, making a fine mess of packing-stuff on the
carpet, and gradually drew to light a pair of vases of Venetian glass.
He put them on the mantlepiece.
'There!' he said, proudly, and with a virtuous air.
They were obviously costly antique vases, exquisite in form, exquisite
in the graduated tints of their pale blue and rose.
'Seventeenth century!' he said.
'They're very nice,' Vera agreed, with a show of enthusiasm. 'What are
they for?'
'Your Christmas present,' Cheswardine explained, and added 'my dear!'
'Oh, Stephen!' she murmured.
A kiss on these occasions is only just, and Cheswardine had one.
'Duveens told me they were quite unique,' he said, modestly; 'and I
believe 'em.'
You might imagine that a pair of Venetian vases of the seventeenth
century, stated by Duveens to be unique, would have satisfied a woman
who had a generous dress allowance and lacked absolutely nothing that
was essential. But Vera was not satisfied. She was, on the contrary,
profoundly disappointed. For the presence of those vases proved that
she had not carried her point. They deprived her of hope. The
unpleasantness before Cheswardine went to London had been more or less
a propos of a Christmas present. Vera had seen in Bostock's vast
emporium in the neighbouring town of Hanbridge, a music-stool in the
style known as art nouveau, which had enslaved her fancy. She had taken
her husband to see it, and it had not enslaved her husband's fancy in
the slightest degree. It was made in light woods, and the woods were
curved and twisted as though they had recently spent seven years in a
purgatory for sinful trees. Here and there in the design onyx-stones
had been set in the wood. The seat itself was beautifully soft. What
captured Vera was chiefly the fact that it did not open at the top, as
most elaborate music-stools do, but at either side. You pressed a
button (onyx) and the panel fell down displaying your music in little
compartments ready to hand; and the eastern moiety of the music-stool
was for piano pieces, and the western moiety for songs. In short, it
was the last word of music-stools; nothing could possibly be newer.
But Cheswardine did not like it, and did not conceal his opinion. He
argued that it would not 'go' with the Chippendale furniture, and Vera
said that all beautiful things 'went' together, and Cheswardine
admitted that they did, rather dryly. You see, they took the matter
seriously because the house was their hobby; they were always changing
its interior, which was more than they could have done for a child,
even if they had had one; and Cheswardine's finer and soberer taste was
always fighting against Vera's predilection for the novel and the
bizarre. Apart from clothes, Vera had not much more than the taste of a
mouse.
They did not quarrel in Bostock's. Indeed, they did not quarrel
anywhere; but after Vera had suggested that he might at any rate humour
her by giving her the music-stool for a Christmas present (she seemed
to think this would somehow help it to 'go' with the Chippendale), and
Cheswardine had politely but firmly declined, there had been a certain
coolness and quite six tears. Vera had caused it to be understood that
even if Cheswardine was NOT interested in music, even if he did hate
music and did call the Broadwood ebony grand ugly, that was no reason
why she should be deprived of a pretty and original music-stool that
would keep her music tidy and that would be HERS. As for it not going
with the Chippendale, that was simply an excuse ... etc.
Hence it is not surprising that the Venetian vases of the seventeenth
century left Vera cold, and that the domestic prospects for Christmas
were a little cold.
However, Vera, with wifely and submissive tact made the best of things;
and that evening she began to decorate the hall, dining-room, and
drawing-room with holly and mistletoe. Before the pair retired to rest,
the true Christmas feeling, slightly tinged with a tender melancholy,
permeated the house, and the servants were growing excited in advance.
The servants weren't going to have a dinner-party, with crackers and
port and a table-centre unmatched in the Five Towns; the servants
weren't going to invite their friends to an evening's jollity. The
servants were merely going to work somewhat harder and have somewhat
less sleep; but such is the magical effect of holly and mistletoe
twined round picture-cords and hung under chandeliers that the
excitement of the servants was entirely pleasurable.
And as Vera shut the bedroom door, she said, with a delightful,
forgiving smile---
'I saw a lovely cigar-cabinet at Bostock's yesterday.'
'Oh!' said Cheswardine, touched. He had no cigar-cabinet, and he wanted
one, and Vera knew that he wanted one.
And Vera slept in the sweet consciousness of her thoughtful wifeliness.