University of Virginia Library

49. CHAPTER XLIX.
PICNICKING IN NEW YORK.

OUR house seemed so far to be ours that it was apparently
regarded by the firm of good fellows
as much their affair as mine. The visits of
Jim and Bolton to our quarters were daily, and sometimes
even hourly. They counseled, advised, theorised,
and admired my wife's generalship in an artless solidarity
with myself. Jim was omnipresent. Now he would be
seen in his shirt-sleeves nailing down a carpet, or unpacking
a barrel, and again making good the time lost in these
operations by scribbling his articles on the top of some
packing-box, dodging in and out at all hours with news of
discoveries of possible bargains that he had hit upon
in his rambles.

For a while we merely bivouacked in the house, as of old
the pilgrims in a caravansary, or as a picnic party might
do, out under a tree. The house itself was in a state of
growth and construction, and, meanwhile, the work of eating
and drinking was performed in moments snatched in
the most pastoral freedom and simplicity. I must confess
that there was a joyous, rollicking freedom about these
times that was lost in the precision of regular housekeepers.
When we all gathered about Mary's cooking-stove in
the kitchen, eating roast oysters and bread and butter, without
troubling ourselves about table equipage, we seemed to
come closer to each other than we could in months of orderly
housekeeping.

Our cooking-stove was Bolton's especial protégé and pet.

He had studied the subject of stoves, for our sakes, with
praiseworthy perseverance, and after philosophic investigation
had persuaded us to buy this one, and of course had a
fatherly interest in its well-doing. I have the image of him
now as he sat, seriously, with the book of directions in his
hand, reading and explaining to us all, while a set of muffins
were going through the “experimentum crucis”—the
oven. The muffins were excellent and we ate them hot out
of the oven with gladness and singleness of heart, and
agreed that we had touched the absolute in the matter of
cooking-stoves. All my wife's plans and achievements, all
her bargains and successes, were reported and admired in
full conclave, when we all looked in at night, and took our
snack together in the kitchen.

One of my wife's enterprises was the regeneration of the
dining-room. It had a pretty window draped pleasantly by
the grape-vine, but it had a dreadfully common wall-paper,
a paper that evidently had been chosen for no other reason
than because it was cheap. It had moreover a wainscot of
dark wood running round the side, so that what with our
low ceiling, the portion covered by this offending paper
was only four feet and a half wide.

I confess, in the multitude of things on hand in the work
of reconstruction, I was rather disposed to put up with the
old paper as the best under the circumstances.

“My dear,” said I, “why not let pretty well alone.”

“My darling child!” said my wife, “it is impossible—that
paper is a horror.”

“It certainly isn't pretty, but who cares?” said I. “I
don't see so very much the matter with it, and you are undertaking
so much that you'll be worn out.”

“It will wear me out to have that paper, so now, Harry
dear, be a good boy, and do just what I tell you. Go to
Berthold & Capstick's and bring me one roll of plain black
paper, and six or eight of plain crimson, and wait then to
see what I'll do.”

The result on a certain day after was that I found my

dining-room transformed into a Pompeiian saloon, by the
busy fingers of the house fairies.

The ground-work was crimson, but there was a series of
black panels, in each of which was one of those floating
Pompeiian figures, which the Italian traveler buys for a
trifle in Naples.

“There now,” said my wife, “do you remember my portfolio
of cheap Neapolitan prints? Haven't I made good use
of them?”

“You are a witch,” said I. “You certainly can't paper
walls.”

“Can't I! haven't I as many fingers as your mother? and
she has done it time and again; and this is such a crumb of
a wall. Alice and Jim and I did it to-day, and have had
real fun over it.”

“Jim?” said I, looking amused.

“Jim!” said my wife, nodding with a significant laugh.

“Seems to me,” said I.

“So it seems to me,” said she. After a pause she added,
with a smile, “but the creature is both entertaining and
useful. We have had the greatest kind of a frolic over this
wall.”

“But, really,” said I, “this case of Jim and Alice is getting
serious.”

“Don't say a word,” said my wife, laughing. “They are
in the F's; they have got out of Flirtation and into Friendship.”

“And friendship between a girl like Alice and a young
man, on his part soon gets to mean —.”

“Oh, well, let it get to mean what it will,” said my wife;
“they are having nice times now, and the best of it is, nobody
sees anything but you and I. Nobody bothers Alice, or asks
her if she is engaged, and she is careful to inform me that
she regards Jim quite as a brother. You see that is one advantage
of our living where nobody knows us —we can all
do just as we like. This little house is Robinson Crusoe's
island—in the middle of New York. But now, Harry, there

is one thing you must do toward this room. There must
be a little gilt molding to finish off the top and sides. You
just go to Berthold & Capstick's and get it. See, here are
the figures,” she said, showing her memorandum-book.
We shall want just that much.”

“But, can we put it up?”

“No, but you just speak to little Tim Brady, who is a
clerk there—Tim used to be a boy in father's office—he will
like nothing better than to come and put it up for us, and
then we shall be fine as a new fiddle.”

And so, while I was driving under a great pressure of
business at the office daily, my home was growing leaf by
leaf, and unfolding flower by flower, under the creative
hands of my home-queen and sovereign lady.

Time would fail me to relate the enterprises conceived,
carried out, and prosperously finished under her hands. Indeed
I came to have such a reverential belief in her power
that had she announced that she intended to take my house
up bodily and set it down in Japan, in the true `Arabian
Nights' style, I should not in the least have doubted her
ability to do it. The house was as much an expression of
my wife's personality, a thing wrought out of her being, as
any picture painted by an artist.

Many homes have no personality. They are made by the
upholsterers; the things in them express the tastes of David
and Saul, or Berthold & Capstick, or whoever else of artificers
undertake the getting up of houses. But our house
formed itself around my wife like the pearly shell around
the nautilus. My home was Eva,—she the scheming, the
busy, the creative, was the life, soul, and spirit of all that
was there.

Is not this a species of high art, by which a house, in itself
cold and barren, becomes in every part warm and inviting,
glowing with suggestion, alive with human tastes and personalities?
Wall-paper, paint, furniture, pictures, in the
hands of the home artist, are like the tubes of paint out of
which arises, as by inspiration, a picture. It is the woman

who combines them into the wonderful creation which we
call a home.

When I came home from my office night after night, and
was led in triumph by Eva to view the result of her achievements,
I confess I began to remember with approbation
the old Greek mythology, and no longer to wonder that
divine honors had been paid to household goddesses.

It seemed to me that she had a portion of the talent of
creating out of nothing. Our house had literally nothing in
it of the stereotyped sets of articles expected as a matter of
course in good families, and yet it looked cosy, comfortable,
inviting, and with everywhere a suggestion of ideal tastes,
and an eye to beauty. There were chambers which seemed
to be built out of drapery and muslins, every detail of
which, when explained, was a marvel of results at small
expense. My wife had an aptitude for bargains, and when
a certain article was wanted, supplied it from some second-hand
store with such an admirable adaptation to the place
that it was difficult to persuade ourselves after a few days
that it had not always been exactly there, where now it was
so perfectly adapted to be.

In fact, her excursions into the great sea of New York
and the spoils she brought thence to enrich our bower reminded
me of the process by which Robinson Crusoe furnished
his island home by repeated visits to the old ship
which was going to wreck on the shore. From the wreck
of other homes came floating to ours household belongings,
which we landed reverently and baptized into the fellowship
of our own.