Furnishings are Simple.
The office has a few rickety chairs, and one less rickety than the others which is reserved for the Big Works, as he is affectionately called, on the occasion of his few but none the less disquieting visits. It has a rickety table or two, usually only one, for firewood is scarce in France. It has a stove, which, from its battered appearance, must have been used as a street barricade during the Reign of Terror in the days of the First Revolution. Said stove requires the concentrated efforts of one husky Yank, speaking three languages—French, United States, and profane—all the live-long day to keep it going. Even then the man sitting nearest the window is always out of luck.
The walls are unkempt in appearance, as if the plaster had shivered involuntarily for many a weary day before the coming of "les Americains" and their insistence upon the installation of the stove. The paper is seamed and smeared until it resembles a bird's-eye view of the battlefield of the Marne. The ceiling is as smudged as the face of a naughty little boy caught in the midst of a raid on the jam in the pantry, due, no doubt, to the aforesaid stove and to the over-exuberant rising-and-shining of the kerosene lamps. Some people ascribe the state of the celling to the grade of tobacco which the Boss smokes; but the Boss always thunders back, ["Well, what the devil can a man do] in a country where even cornsilk would be a blessing?" And, as what the Boss says goes, that ends it.
There is one rug on the floor, a dilapidated affair that might well be the flayed hide of a flea-bitten mule. There is a mantlepiece, stretching across what used to be a fireplace in the days of the First Napoleon, but which is a fireplace no more. On top of the mantlepiece is a lot of dry reading—wicked-looking little books full of fascinating facts about how to kill people with a minimum of effort and ammunition. On the floor, no matter how carefully the office occupants scrape their hobnails before entering, there is always a thin coating of mud.
The office telephone is on the wall, instead of on the Boss's desk, as it ought to be. One has to take down receiver and transmitter all in the same piece in order to use it. And it has the same old Ford-crank attachment on the side that is common to phones in the rural free [delivery districts of the United States of America.]