The Van Dwellers Part 7

"Here--up-stairs, down-stairs, everywhere!" gasped the Little Woman, while the Precious Ones continued to insist that I guess and keep on guessing without rest or sustenance till the crack of doom.

Then suddenly I grew quite stern.

"Tell me," I commanded, "what is the matter with you people, and stop this nonsense! Who is it that's here?"

The Little Woman became calm for a brief instant, and emitted a single word. "Thomas!"

I sank weakly into a chair. "Thomas?"

"Yes, Thomas! Thomas!" shrieked the Precious Ones, and then they, too, went off into a fit of ridiculous mirth, while recalling now the sudden transfiguration of the halls I knew they had spoken truly. The Little Woman was wiping her eyes.

"And Mr. Griffin, too," she said, calmly, as if that was quite a matter of course.

"And Mr. Griffin, too!" chorused the Precious Ones.

"Mr. Griffin?"

"Why, yes," said the Little Woman. "He bought this house yesterday, and put Thomas over here in charge. He will occupy the top floor himself."

"Oh!"

"And you never saw anybody so glad of anything as Thomas was to see us here. It was the first time I ever saw him laugh!"

"Oh, he laughed, did he?"

"Yes; and he gave us each some candy!" chanted the Precious Ones. "He said it was like meeting home folks."

"Oh, he did?"

"Mine was chocolate," declared our elder joy.

"Mine was marshmallows!" piped the echo.

"Little Woman," I said, "our dinner is getting cold; suppose we eat it."

XI.

_Inheritance and Mania._

And now came one of these episodes which sometimes disturb the sequestered quiet of even the best regulated and most conventional of households. We were notified one day that my Aunt Jane, whom I believe I have once before mentioned having properly arranged her affairs had pa.s.sed serenely out of life at an age and in a manner that left nothing to be desired.

I was sorry, of course,--as sorry as it was possible to be, considering the fact that she had left me a Sum which though not large was absurdly welcome. I did not sleep very well until it came, fearing there might be some hitch in administrating the will, but there was no hitch (my Aunt Jane, heaven rest her spirit, had been too thoroughly business for that) and the Sum came along in due season.

We would keep this Sum, we decided, as a sinking fund; something to have in the savings bank, to be added to, from time to time, as a provision for the future and our Precious Ones. This seemed a good idea at the time, and it seems so yet, for that matter. I have never been able to discover that there is anything wrong with having money in a good savings bank.

I _put_ the Sum in a good savings bank, and we were briefly satisfied with our prudence. It gave us a sort of safe feeling to know that it was there, to be had almost instantly, in case of need.

It was this latter knowledge that destroyed us. When the novelty of feeling safe had worn off we began to need the Sum. Casually at first, coming as a mere suggestion, in fact, from one or the other of us, of what we could buy with it. It is wonderful how many things we were constantly seeing that the Sum would pay for.

Our furniture, for instance, had grown old without becoming antique, and was costly only when you reckon what we had paid for moving it. We had gradually acquired a taste (or it may have been only the need of a taste) for the real thing. Whatever it was it seemed expensive--too expensive to be gratified heretofore, but now that we had the Sum----

The shops along Fourth Avenue were literally bulging with things that we coveted and that the Sum would pay for. I looked at them wistfully in pa.s.sing, still pa.s.sing strong in my resolution to let the Sum lie untouched. Then I began to linger and go in, and to imagine that I knew a good piece and a bargain when I saw it. This last may be set down as a fatal symptom. It led me into vile second-hand stores in the hope of finding some hitherto undiscovered treasure. In these I hauled over the wretched jetsam of a thousand cheap apartments and came out dusty and contaminated but not discouraged.

I suggested to the Little Woman one day that it would be in the nature of an investment to buy now, in something old and good, the desk I had needed so long. I a.s.sured her that antiques were becoming scarcer each year, and that pieces bought to-day were quite as good as money in the savings bank, besides having the use of them. The Little Woman agreed readily. For a long time she had wanted me to have a desk, and my argument in favor of an antique piece seemed sound.

I did not immediately find a desk that suited me. There were a great many of them, and most of them seemed sufficiently antique, but being still somewhat modern in my ideas I did not altogether agree with their internal arrangements, while such as did appeal would have made too large an incursion into the Sum. What I did find at length was a table--a mahogany veneered table which the dealer said was of a period before the war. I could readily believe it. If he had said that it had been _through_ the war I could have believed that, too. It looked it.

But I saw in it possibilities, and reflected that it would give me an opportunity to develop a certain mechanical turn which had lain dormant hitherto. The Little Woman had been generous in the matter of the desk.

I would buy the table for the Little Woman.

She was pleased, of course, but seemed to me she regarded it a trifle doubtfully when it came in. Still, the price had not been great, and it was astonis.h.i.+ng to see how much better it looked when I was through with it, and it was in a dim corner, with its more unfortunate portions next the wall. Indeed, it had about it quite an air of genuine respectability, and made the rest of our things seem poor and trifling.

It was the beginning of the end.

Some Colonial chairs came next.

The Little Woman and I discovered their battered skeletons one day as we were hurrying to catch a car. They were piled in front of a place that under ordinary conditions we would have shunned as a pest-house.

Still the chairs were really beautiful and it was a genuine "find"! I did not restore these myself--they needed too much. I had them delivered to a cabinet-maker who in turn delivered them to us in a condition that made the rest of our belongings look even shabbier, and at a cost that made another incursion into the Sum.

I renovated and upholstered the next lot of chairs myself, and was proud of the result, though the work was attended by certain unpleasant features, and required time. On the whole, I concluded to let the cabinet-maker undertake the heavy lounge that came next, and was in pieces, as if a cyclone had struck it somewhere back in the forties and it had been lying in a heap, ever since. It was wonderful what he did with it. It came to us a thing of beauty and an everlasting joy, and his bill made a definite perforation in the Sum.

We did not mind so much now. It was merely altering the form of our investment, we said, and we had determined to become respectable at any cost. The fact that we had been offered more for the restored lounge than it cost us rea.s.sured us in our position. Most of our old traps we huddled together one day, and disposed of them to a second-hand man for almost enough to pay for one decent piece--a chiffonier this time--and voted a good riddance to bad rubbish.

Reflecting upon this now, it seems to me we were a bit hasty and unkind. Poor though they were, the old things had served us well and gone with us through the ups and downs of many apartments. In some of them we had rocked the Precious Ones, and on most of them the precious Ones had tried the strength and resistance of their toys. They were racked and battered, it is true and not always to be trusted as to stability, but we knew them and their shortcomings, and they knew us and ours. We knew just how to get them up winding stairs and through narrow doors. They knew about the length of time between each migration, and just about what to expect with each stage of our Progress. They must have long foreseen the end. Let us hope they will one day become "antiques" and fall into fonder and more faithful hands.

But again I am digressing--it is my usual fault. We invested presently in a Chippendale sideboard, and a tall clock which gave me no peace night or day until I heard its mellow tick and strike in our own dim little hall. The aperture in the Sum was now plainly visible, and by the time we had added the desk, which I had felt unable to afford at the start, and a chair to match, it had become an orifice that widened to a gap, with the still further addition of a small but not inexpensive Chippendale cabinet and something to put within it.

The Little Woman called a halt now. She said she thought we had enough invested in this particular direction, that it was not wise to put all one's eggs into one basket. Besides, we had all the things our place would hold comfortably: rather more, in fact, except in the matter of rugs. The floors of the Suns.h.i.+ne apartment were hard finished and sh.e.l.lacked. Such rugs as we had were rare only as to numbers, and we were no longer proud of them. I quite agreed with the Little Woman on the question of furniture, but I said that now we had such good things in that line, I would invest in one really good rug.

I did. I drifted one day into an Armenian place on Broadway into which the looms of the Orient had poured a lavish store. Small black-haired men issued from among the heaped-up wares like mice in a granary. I was surrounded--I was beseeched and entreated--I was made to sit down while piece after piece of antiquity and art were unrolled at my feet. At each unrolling the tallest of the black men would spread his hands and look at me.

"A painting, a painting, a masterpiece. I never have such fine piece since I begin business;" and each of the other small black men would spread their hands and look at me and murmur low, reverent exclamations.

I did not buy the first time. You must know that even when one has become inured to the tariff on antique furniture, and has still the remains of a Sum to draw upon, there is something about the prices of oriental rugs that is discouraging when one has ever given the matter much previous thought.

But the memory of those unrolled masterpieces haunted me. There was something fascinating and Eastern and fine about sitting in state as it were, and having the treasures of the Orient spread before you by those little dark men.

So I went again, and this time I made the first downward step. It was a Cashmere--a thick, mellow antique piece with a purple bloom pervading it, and a narrow faded strip at one end that betokened exposure and age.

The Little Woman gasped when she saw it, and the Precious Ones approved it in chorus. It took me more than a week to confess the full price. It had to be done by stages; for of course the Little Woman had not sat as I had sat and had the "paintings of the East" unrolled at her feet and thus grown accustomed to magnificence. To tell her all at once that our one new possession had cost about five times as much as all the rest of our rugs put together would have been an unnecessary rashness on my part. As it was, she came to it by degrees, and by degrees also she realized that our other floor coverings were poor, base, and spurious.

Still I was prudent in my next selections. I bought two smaller pieces, a Kazak strip, and a Beloochistan mat. This was really all we needed, but a few days later a small piece of antique Bokhara overpowered me, and I fell. I said it would be nice on the wall, and the Little Woman confessed that it was, but again insisted that we would better stop now.

She little realized my condition. The small dark men in their dim-lit Broadway cave had woven a spell about me that made the seductions of antique furniture as a forgotten tale.

I bought a book on rug collecting, and I could not pa.s.s their treasure-house without turning in. They had learned to know me from afar, and the sound of my step was the signal for a horde of them to come tumbling out from among the rugs.

It was the old story of Eastern magic. The spell of the Orient was upon me, and in the language of my friends I went plunging down the _rug_ged path to ruin. I added an Anatolian to my collections--a small one that I could slip into the house without the Little Woman seeing it until it was placed and in position to help me in my defense. It was the same with a Bergama and a Coula, but by this time the Precious Ones would come tearing out into the hall when I came home and then rush back, calling as they ran: "Oh, mamma, he's got one and he's holding it behind him! He's got another rug, mamma!"