第8章 CHAPTER II(4)

"It gave your mother a headache, that stream, and made me mad. The agent's office was opposite the station. I allowed myself half an hour on my way back to tell him what I thought of him, and then I missed the train. I could have got it in if he had let me talk all the time, but he would interrupt. He said it was the people at the paper-mill--that he had spoken to them about it more than once; he seemed to think sympathy was all I wanted. He assured me, on his word as a house-agent, that it had once been a trout stream. The fact was historical. Isaac Walton had fished there--that was prior to the paper-mill. He thought a collection of trout, male and female, might be bought and placed in it; preference being given to some hardy breed of trout, accustomed to roughing it. I told him I wasn't looking for a place where I could play at being Noah; and left him, as I explained to him, with the intention of going straight to my solicitors and instituting proceedings against him for talking like a fool; and he put on his hat and went across to his solicitors to commence proceedings against me for libel.

"I suppose that, with myself, he thought better of it in the end.

But I'm tired of having my life turned into one perpetual first of April. This house that I have bought is not my heart's desire, but about it there are possibilities. We will put in lattice windows, and fuss-up the chimneys. Maybe we will let in a tablet over the front-door, with a date--always looks well: it is a picturesque figure, the old-fashioned five. By the time we have done with it--for all practical purposes--it will be a Tudor manor-house. I have always wanted an old Tudor manor-house. There is no reason, so far as I can see, why there should not be stories connected with this house. Why should not we have a room in which Somebody once slept?

We won't have Queen Elizabeth. I'm tired of Queen Elizabeth.

Besides, I don't believe she'd have been nice. Why not Queen Anne?

A quiet, gentle old lady, from all accounts, who would not have given trouble. Or, better still, Shakespeare. He was constantly to and fro between London and Stratford. It would not have been so very much out of his way. 'The room where Shakespeare slept!' Why, it's a new idea. Nobody ever seems to have thought of Shakespeare. There is the four-post bedstead. Your mother never liked it. She will insist, it harbours things. We might hang the wall with scenes from his plays, and have a bust of the old gentleman himself over the door. If I'm left alone and not worried, I'll probably end by believing that he really did sleep there."

"What about cupboards?" suggested Dick. "The Little Mother will clamour for cupboards."

It is unexplainable, the average woman's passion for cupboards. In heaven, her first request, I am sure, is always, "Can I have a cupboard?" She would keep her husband and children in cupboards if she had her way: that would be her idea of the perfect home, everybody wrapped up with a piece of camphor in his or her own proper cupboard. I knew a woman once who was happy--for a woman. She lived in a house with twenty-nine cupboards: I think it must have been built by a woman. They were spacious cupboards, many of them, with doors in no way different from other doors. Visitors would wish each other good-night and disappear with their candles into cupboards, staggering out backwards the next moment, looking scared. One poor gentleman, this woman's husband told me, having to go downstairs again for something he had forgotten, and unable on his return to strike anything else but cupboards, lost heart and finished up the night in a cupboard. At breakfast-time guests would hurry down, and burst open cupboard doors with a cheery "Good-morning." When that woman was out, nobody in that house ever knew where anything was; and when she came home she herself only knew where it ought to have been.

Yet once, when one of those twenty-nine cupboards had to be cleared out temporarily for repairs, she never smiled, her husband told me, for more than three weeks--not till the workmen were out of the house, and that cupboard in working order again. She said it was so confusing, having nowhere to put her things.

The average woman does not want a house, in the ordinary sense of the word. What she wants is something made by a genii. You have found, as you think, the ideal house. You show her the Adams fireplace in the drawing-room. You tap the wainscoting of the hall with your umbrella: "Oak," you impress upon her, "all oak." You draw her attention to the view: you tell her the local legend. By fixing her head against the window-pane she can see the tree on which the man was hanged. You dwell upon the sundial; you mention for a second time the Adams fireplace.

"It's all very nice," she answers, "but where are the children going to sleep?"

It is so disheartening.

If it isn't the children, it's the water. She wants water--wants to know where it comes from. You show her where it comes from.

"What, out of that nasty place!" she exclaims.

She is equally dissatisfied whether it be drawn from a well, or whether it be water that has fallen from heaven and been stored in tanks. She has no faith in Nature's water. A woman never believes that water can be good that does not come from a water-works. Her idea appears to be that the Company makes it fresh every morning from some old family recipe.

If you do succeed in reconciling her to the water, then she feels sure that the chimneys smoke; they look as if they smoked. Why--as you tell her--the chimneys are the best part of the house. You take her outside and make her look at them. They are genuine sixteenth-century chimneys, with carving on them. They couldn't smoke. They wouldn't do anything so inartistic. She says she only hopes you are right, and suggests cowls, if they do.

After that she wants to see the kitchen--where's the kitchen? You don't know where it is. You didn't bother about the kitchen. There must be a kitchen, of course. You proceed to search for the kitchen.