ROOMS

Would Madame like a little orange-flower water in her milk?” the

waiter asked. Madame thought she would, and the waiter went off to fetch

it.

We were seated on the terrace of a café at Rouen, a café on the quays.

There was a long rank, three deep, of small marble tables, untenanted

for the most part, sheltered by a bright red-and-white striped

awning, and screened from the street by a hedge of oleanders in big

green-painted tubs; so that one had a fine sense of cosiness and

seclusion, of refreshing shade and coolness and repose. Beyond the

oleanders, one was dimly conscious of hot sunshine, of the going and

coming of people on the pavement, of the passing of carts and tram-cars

in the grey road, and then of the river—the slate-coloured river,

with its bridges and its puffing penny steamboats, its tall ships out of

Glasgow or Copenhagen or Barcelona, its high green banks, farther away,

where it wound into the country, and the pure sky above it. From all

the interesting things the café provided, lucent-tinted syrups,

fiery-hearted, aromatic cordials, Madame (with subtle feminine

unexpectedness) had chosen a glass of milk. But the waiter had

suggested orange-flower water, to give it savour; and now he brought the

orange-flower water in a dark-blue bottle.

It was partly, I daresay, the sight of the dark-blue bottle, but it was

chiefly, perhaps, the smell of the orange-flower water, that suddenly,

suddenly, whisked my thoughts far away from Rouen, far away from 1897,

back ten, twenty, I would rather not count how many years back in the

past, to my childhood, to Saint-Graal, and to my grandmother’s room in

our old rambling house there. For my grandmother always kept a dark-blue

bottle of orange-flower water in her closet, and the air of her room was

always faintly sweet with the perfume of it.

Suddenly, suddenly, a sort of ghost of my grandmother’s room rose

before me; and as I peered into it and about it, a ghost of the old

emotion her room used to stir in me rose too, an echo of the old wonder,

the old feeling of strangeness and mystery. It was a big room—or, at

least, it seemed big to a child—a corner room, on the first floor,

with windows on two sides. The windows on one side looked through the

branches of a great elm, a city of birds and squirrels, out upon the

lawn, with the pond at the bottom of it. On the other side, the windows

looked over the terrace, into the shrubberies and winding paths of the

garden. The walls of the room were hung with white paper, upon which, at

regular intervals, was repeated a landscape in blue, a stretch of meadow

with cows in it, and a hillside topped by a ruined castle. In a corner,

the inmost corner, stood my grandmother’s four-post bed, with its

canopy and curtains of dark-green tapestry. Then, of course, there was

the fireplace, surmounted by a high, slender mantelpiece, on which

were ranged a pair of silver candlesticks, a silver tray containing the

snuffers and the extinguisher, and, in the middle, a solemn old buhl

clock. From above the mantelpiece a picture looked down at you, the only

picture in the room, the life-size portrait of a gentleman in a white

stock and an embroidered waistcoat—the portrait of my grandfather,

indeed, who had died long years before I was born, when my mother was a

schoolgirl. And then there was the rest of the furniture of the room—a

chair at each window, and between the various windows my grandmother’s

dressing-table, her work-table, her armoire-à-glace, her great mahogany

bureau, a writing-desk above, a chest-of-drawers below. In two or three

places—besides the big double door that led into her room from the

outer passage—the wall was broken by smaller doors, doors papered over

like the wall itself, and even with it, so that you would scarcely have

noticed them. One of these was the door of my grandmother’s oratory,

with its praying-desk and its little altar. The others were the doors of

her closets: the deep black closet, where her innumerable dresses

were suspended, and the closets where she kept her bandboxes and her

sunshades and her regiment of bottles—chief among them the tall

dark-blue bottle of orange-flower water.

I don’t know, I can’t think, why this room should always have

awakened in me a feeling of strangeness and mystery, why it should

always have set me off day-dreaming and wondering; but it always did.

The mahogany bureau, the tapestried four-post bed, the portrait of my

grandfather, the recurrent landscape on the wall-paper, the deep

black closet where the dresses hung, the faint smell of orange-flower

water—each of these was a surface, a curtain, behind which, on the

impenetrable other side of which, vaguely, wonderingly, I divined

strange vistas, a whole strange world. Each of these silently hinted to

me of strange happenings, strange existences, strange conditions. And

vaguely, longingly, I would try to formulate my feeling into some sort

of distinct mental vision, try to translate into my own language their

occult suggestions. They were hieroglyphs, full of meaning, if only I

could understand. Was it because the things in my grandmother’s room

were all old things, old-fashioned things? Was the strange world they

spoke of simply the world as it had been in years gone by, before I came

into it, before even my mother and father came into it, when people long

since dead were alive, important, the people of the day, and when these

faded, old-fashioned things were fresh and new? I doubt if it could

have been entirely this. There were plenty of old things in our house

at Saint-Graal—in the hall, the library, the garret, everywhere;

the house itself was very old indeed; yet no other part of it gave me

anything like the same emotion.

My Uncle Edmond’s room, for instance, gave me a directly contrary

emotion, though here, too, all the furniture was old-fashioned. It gave

me a sense of brisk, almost of stern, actuality; of present facts and

occupations; of alert, busy manhood. As I followed Alexandre into it, in

the morning, when he went to dust it and put it in order, I was filled

with a kind of fearful admiration: the fear, the admiration, of the

small for the big, of the weak for the strong, of the helpless for the

commanding. The arrangement of the room, the lines of the room, the very

colours of the room, seemed strong, and commanding, and severe. Yet,

when you came to examine it, the only really severe-looking object was

the bedstead; this being devoid of curtains, its four varnished pillars

shone somewhat hard and bare. For the rest, there was just the natural

furniture of a sleeping-room: a dressing-table, covered with a man’s

toilet accessories—combs and brushes, razors, scissors, shoehorns,

button-hooks, shirt-studs, and bottles enclosing I know not what

necessary fluids; a bigger table, with writing-materials on it, with an

old epaulette-box used now to hold tobacco, and endless pipes and little

pink books of cigarette-papers; a bureau like my grandmother’s; a

glazed bookcase; and the proper complement of chairs. The walls of the

room were painted white, and ornamented by two pictures, facing each

other: two steel-engravings, companion-pieces, after Rembrandt, I

believe. “Le Philosophe en Contemplation” was the legend printed

under one; and under the other, “Le Philosophe en Méditation.” I

can only remember that the philosopher had a long grey beard, and that

in both pictures he was seated in a huge easy-chair. My Uncle Edmond had

been in the army when he was a young man, and in his closets (besides

his ordinary clothes and his countless pairs of boots) there were old

uniform coats, with silver buttons, old belts, clasps, spurs, and

then, best of all, three or four swords, and a rosewood case or two of

pistols. Needless to say whether my awe and my admiration mounted to

their climax when I peeped in upon these historic trophies. And just as

the smell of orange-flower water pervaded my grandmother’s room, so

another, a very different smell, pervaded my Uncle Edmond’s, a dry,

clean smell, slightly pungent, bitter, but not at all unpleasant. I

could never discover what it came from, I can’t even now conjecture;

but it seemed to me a manly smell, just the smell that a man’s room

ought to have. In my too-fruitless efforts to imitate Uncle Edmond’s

room in the organisation of my own, it was that smell, more than

anything else, which baffled me. I could not achieve the remotest

semblance of it. Of course, I was determined that when I grew up I

should have a room exactly like my uncle’s in every particular, and I

trusted, no doubt, that it would acquire the smell, with time.

But of all the rooms at Saint-Graal, the one that gave you the

thrillingest, the most exquisite emotion, was my mother’s. If my

grandmother’s room represented the silence and the strangeness of the

past, and my uncle’s the actuality and activity of the present,

my mother’s room represented the Eternal Feminine, smiling at you,

enthralling you, in its loveliest incarnation; singing to you, amid

delicate luxuries, of youth and beauty and happiness, and the fine

romance of mirth. In my mother’s room, for example, so far from being

old-fashioned, the furniture was of the very latest, daintiest design,

fresh from Paris. The wallpaper was cream-coloured, with garlands

of pink and blue flowers trailing over it, and here and there a

shepherd’s hat and a shepherd’s pipes tied together by a long

fluttering blue ribbon. The chairs and the sofa were covered with

chintz, gayer even, if that were possible, than this paper: chintz on

which pretty little bright-blue birds flew about among poppies, red as

scarlet, and pale-green leaves. The window-curtains and the bed-curtains

were of the same merry chintz; the bed-quilt was an eider-down of the

softest blush-rose silk; the bedstead was enamelled white, and so highly

polished that you could see an obscure reflection of your features in

it. And then, the dressing-table, with its wide bevelled mirror, and the

glistening treasures displayed upon it!—the open jewel-case, and

the rings, brooches, bracelets, necklaces, that sparkled in it; the

silver-backed brushes, the silver-topped bottles, the silver-framed

hand-glass; the hundred shining trifles. One whole side of the room had

been converted into a vast bay-window; this looked due south, over

the floweriest part of our flower-garden, over the rich green country

beyond, miles away, to where the Pyrenees gloomed purple. As a shield

against the sun the window was fitted with Venetian blinds, besides the

curtains; and every morning, when I crept in from my own adjoining

room, to pay my mother a visit, it was given me to witness a marvellous

transformation scene. At first all was dark, or nearly dark, so that

you could only distinguish things as shadowy masses. But presently my

mother’s maid, Aurélie, arrived with the chocolate, and drew back the

curtains, filling the room with a momentary twilight; then she opened

the Venetian blinds, and suddenly there was a gush of sunlight, and the

room gleamed and glittered like a room in a crystal palace. Sweet airs

came in from the garden, bird-notes came in, the day came in, dancing

and laughing joyously; and my mother and I joyously laughed back at it.

Another transformation scene, at which I was permitted to assist, took

place in this room in the evening, when my mother dressed for dinner.

I would sit at a distance, not to be in the way, and watch the ceremony

with eyes as round as O’s doubtless, and certainly with an enravished

soul; while Aurélie did my mother’s hair (sprinkling it, as a

culmination, with a pinch of diamond-dust, according to the mode of

the period), and moved to and from the wardrobe, where my mother’s

bewildering confections of silks and laces were enshrined, and her satin

slippers glimmered in a row on their shelf. And after the toilet was

completed, and my mother, in dazzling loveliness, had kissed me good-bye

and vanished, I would linger a little, to gaze about the temple in which

such miracles could happen; taking up and studying one by one the combs,

brushes, powder-puffs, or what not, as you would study the

instruments employed by a conjurer; and removing the stoppers from the

scent-bottles, to inhale their delicious fragrance....

“Don’t you think,” asked my companion, “that it’s time you

paid the waiter and we were off?”

I looked up, and suddenly there was Rouen—Rouen, the café on the

quays, Madame’s empty glass of milk, and Madame herself questioning me

from anxious eyes.

“Yes,” I said, “I think it’s time we were off; and what’s

more, I’ll tell you this: every room in the universe has not only

its peculiar physiognomy and its peculiar significance, but it wakes a

particular sentiment also, and has a special smell.”

“Oh, I see,” said Madame; “that’s why you’ve been silent all

this while.”

So I paid the waiter, and we took the puffing little steamboat, down

the river, between its green banks and its flowery islets, back to La

Bouille.