IN A FURNITURE SALEROOM.
A DAY-DREAM.
I just missed by a neck, as they say in steeplechasing dialect—though on second thoughts I think it must have been liker a full horse-length—my lot being cast among second-hand furniture. I believe I was of too philosophic a nature to make a practical auctioneer and furniture-broker of. At least, such was something like the opinion held by my employer—the old gentleman was a bit of a wag—who told my father, when the latter went to see why this knight of the hammer had dispensed with his son’s services, that my mind, like the late lamented Prince of Denmark’s, was of too speculative a character ever to ‘mak’ saut to my kail’ at his profession, and advised him to bring me ‘out for a minister.’ I need not say that this advice was, for divers reasons, never acted upon.
I suppose it must have been my twelve-months’ sojourn in this old worthy’s service which gives me to this day a certain meditative interest in brokers’ shops and old furniture salerooms. I am not at any time much of a stroller about the streets and gazer into shop-windows; but next to looking into the windows of book or print and picture shops, I have a weakness for sauntering into musty old salerooms, and staring idly at the miscellaneous articles of second-hand furniture huddled within their walls, and moralising on the mutability of human hopes and possessions. A spick-and-span new furniture and upholstery establishment has no more fascination for me than a black-and-white undertaker’s. But out of the bustle of the street and the broiling heat of the mid-day sun—which is my favourite time of indulgence—and in the dusty and shadowy corners, festooned with cobwebs, of a broker’s shop or old furniture saleroom, I forget how the time goes, as I join over again the sundered human relationships to the pieces of furniture at which I stand staring in half-reverie. I fancy it must have been this same dreamy tendency which, peeping forth in my boyish career, led my shrewd master to forecast my future with so much certainty to my parent. I care not about purchasing any of the articles that so absorb me. It is not the barren desire of possession which makes me haunt these dusty salerooms. When the place becomes crowded with people, and the auctioneer mounts his little pulpit, I gather my wandered wits together and ‘silently steal away.’
I say I love to linger among the cobwebs and amid the silence of old furniture salerooms—as fruitful a source of meditation to me as loitering among tombs ever was to Harvey. That venerable eight-day clock standing against the wall, behind those slim walnut chairs and couch done up in the bright green repp, its mahogany almost as black as your Sunday hat with age, turns on my thinking faculty just as the ‘auld Scots’ sangs’ moves my guidwife Peggy to tears. I think of all the pairs of eyes that have gazed up at the hands and figures on its olive-tinted face, and wonder how many of them have taken their last look of earth. My imagination transports it to some well-to-do Scottish cottage home, where I see, held up in fond arms, the marvelling youngsters, in striped cotton pinafores, with their wide-open eyes staring at the representatives of the four quarters of the globe, painted in bright dazzling colours on each corner of the dial-plate. Perhaps some of those same youngsters, to whose inquiring and wondering minds the pictures were an every-day exercise, are settled down, old men and women now, in one of these distant quarters of the globe, say America, and are sitting at this very moment in their log-hut in the backwoods, their minds’ eyes reverting to the familiar face of that old clock tick-ticking away in their childhood’s home.
Over against where it stood in that same old home, between the room door and the end of the white scoured wooden dresser with its well-filled delf rack, I picture to myself the wasted face of a sick woman pillowed up in bed. What weary nights she has listened to its tick-tack, and counted the slow hours as they struck, waiting for the dawn! I know that her head aches no longer, and that she sleeps sound enough now, with the summer breeze stirring the green grass on her grave.
Turning away from the venerable time-keeper, my eye falls on an old-fashioned low-set chest of drawers, with dingy folding brass handles, and little bits of the veneer chipped off here and there, and the ivory awanting in some of the keyholes. Where are now, I ask myself, the ashes of those bright household fires, which have winked in the shining depths of their mahogany in the darkening gloaming, before the blinds were drawn and the candles lit? What secrets and treasures have not these same drawers been the repositories of! I see a pensive female form, in striped shortgown and drugget petticoat, stop while she is sweeping the kitchen floor, and, with palpitating heart, pull out the centre small top drawer to take another look at the golden curl, wrapped in a precious letter, in the corner beside two or three well-worn toys. That bruised heart will throb no more with joy or pain; neither will her tears fall any more like scalding lead on the blurred parchment, as she lifts the bright curl to her lips before wrapping it away out of sight again—till, mayhap, the next day, when the old yearning returns, and she must needs go and unfold her treasure, the sight of which brings the little chubby face—over which the curl used to hang—once more before her brimming eyes.
The little bookcase, with the diamond-shaped panes, on the top of the chest of drawers is an object to me of even nobler regard than the drawers themselves. My venerable uncle, who was an author too, had just such a little bookcase on the top of his drawers, about three-fourths filled with sombre-looking volumes. I remember I never looked up at it as a boy, and beheld the dim dusty books, like gray ghosts, sitting erect, or leaning against one another in the twilight shelves, but I associated it in my fancy with the inside of his own gray head. Already I see the titles on the backs of some of these children of dead brains looming out of the empty gloom through the diamond-shaped panes; and I can recognise many of my own favourites among them. The binding is more faded and worn on the backs of some than others, as if they had been more often in the hand and more dear to the heart of the reader. I am almost tempted to stretch forth my hand and renew their acquaintance. One in particular, in faded green-and-gold binding, looking out from amongst a motley company of fiction, The House with the Seven Gables, I have a covetous eye upon.
How I should like to revisit the shadowy chambers of that old puritan mansion, especially that low-studded oak-panelled room with the portrait of the stern old Colonel looking down from the wall; and feel the smell of its decaying timbers, ‘oozy’ with the memories of whole generations of Pyncheons; to see poor perplexed old Hepzibah in the midst of her first day’s shopkeeping, with her wreck of a resurrected brother to care and provide for; and watch—not without reverence, even though we are constrained sometimes to laugh—the miraculously minute workings of her crazed old heart fighting—a kind of comic pathos, as well as rarest heroism in her mimic battling—those troublesome spectres of gentility which she has inherited with her Pyncheon blood.
Alas for this most bewitching of romancers! Well might his friend Longfellow exclaim of him:
Ah! who shall lift that wand of magic power,
And the lost clue regain?
The unfinished window in Aladdin’s tower
Unfinished must remain!
Sitting on the shelf beneath The House with the Seven Gables is the king of all the magicians—the enchanter’s name printed in tarnished gold letters on a faded square of scarlet morocco on its calf back—‘Shakspeare.’
On this hot July forenoon, with dusty smelling streets, when the united heart of our mighty Babylon is panting for the water-brooks, wouldn’t it be a treat just to step into the forest of Arden? You don’t require to change your clothes, or bolt a hurried luncheon, or run to catch a train, or take your place on the crowded deck of a snorting greasy steamboat under a vertical sun; but simply to open out the volume at that most delightful of all comedies, As You Like It, and at once fling yourself down ‘under the shade of melancholy boughs,’ and ‘lose and neglect the creeping hours of time’ listening to the moralising of a Jaques
As he lay along
Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out
Upon the brook that brawls along this wood:
or to an encounter of his wits with the sage fooleries of a Touchstone; or the love-sick ravings of an Orlando; or the nimble pleasantries and caustic humours of a Rosalind.
But, to speak the truth, I don’t know whether I should not prefer at this moment—to a lounge in the forest of Arden—a meditative ramble and chat with the Wanderer in Wordsworth’s Excursion, which I spy leaning against my old friend The Vicar of Wakefield, there, on the other side of Shakspeare. How pleasant it would be, after toiling across the bare wide common, baked with the scorching heat, to join that venerable philosopher and retired packman just where the author himself meets him by appointment, reposing his limbs on the cottage bench beside the roofless hut of poor Margaret!
His eyes as if in drowsiness half shut,
The shadow of the breezy elms above
Dappling his face.
But the unceremonious porter is apparently unwilling to gratify me so far, having, in his preparations for the sale, pushed a tall half-tester bedstead right in front of my view of the chest of drawers and bookcase.
This alteration has brought to light an old armchair among a crowd of odd window-poles and bed-bottoms, a kind of bewilderment and shyness in its wrinkled features, as if it hardly felt at home in this nineteenth-century saleroom, rubbing shoulders, so to speak, with pompous old sideboards, and gouty old sofas and stuff-bottomed chairs, and wishing it were back to the earthen cottage floor again. From its shape and the colour of its wood, it looks more than a hundred years old. My Aunt S——, who was a paralytic, had just such a chair, which she sat in for ten years before she died. It had belonged to her mother’s mother; and she took great pride in averring that Burns—who, her own mother told her, was a crony of her father’s—had many a time sat in it. I think I see herself sitting in it at this moment, with her great black piercing eyes, and hear her clever critical tongue wagging as of old.
This ancient armchair, stuffed away amid the dust and lumber of the saleroom, touches my feelings more nearly than any other object joined together with hands. Its low, firm, but narrow seat, its solid curved arms, its straight sloping back with three spars in the centre, recall the tottering gait of silvery-haired grandfathers in knee-breeches and ‘rig-an’-fur’ stockings, and hale old grandmothers with white bordered ‘mutches’ or caps on their heads, and tartan napkins about their stooping shoulders; and old-fashioned Scotch kitchens with eight-day clocks, and wooden dressers, and clean-clayed roomy fireplaces with big-bellied pots hanging from the links on the ‘swee’ or crane.
But what household god is this which is the subject of whispering criticism behind me? Turning round, I observe two women, evidently intending purchasers from their remarks, and not idle dreamers like myself, moving away from a large chest to inspect some dishes they have suddenly caught sight of on a side-table at the further end of the room. This chest I have seen before, especially about the term-time, mounted on the footboard of a cab beside the driver, while its ‘sonsie’ proprietress—unaccustomed as she is to ride in carriages—sits on the edge of the cushioned seat inside, staring apologetically at the foot-passengers on the pavement. It is the same kind of thing thrifty housewives in the country used to keep their blankets in, before the trunks and tin boxes came so much into vogue. It is painted an oak colour, though to my mind it resembles more a musty gingerbread; and it has a black line forming a square on each of its plain panels. Instinctively I lift the lid and peep in. Its white wood is covered with a wall-paper pattern of moss-roses. It has a ‘shuttle’ too, with a little drawer underneath; the same as was in the chest I had when a bachelor. I used to keep all my valuables in that little drawer, such as love-letters. How those epistles accumulated! I remember I had to press them down before the drawer would shut, when I happened to be refreshing my memory with some of their pleasant sentiments. Peg’s portrait used to lie here in a corner of this same charmed sepulchre. If I were to tell my young readers how often I made an excuse to go into my chest for something or other, and never withdrew my head without taking a peep at Peg’s face, they would no doubt call me spooney, though they know quite well they do the same thing themselves.
The bustling old porter, who kept hovering in my vicinity—a kind of astonished interest looking out of his not unkindly gray eyes—here cut short my amorous reminiscences by shutting down the lid of the chest, and, apparently with a view to economise space—for odd customers were beginning to drop in—lifting a cradle on to the top of it. The cradle is one of the old-fashioned wooden sort, with good solid rockers, which used to be seen in the houses of plain folks in my young days, and was usually of some antiquity, being considered an heirloom, and descending from parent to eldest son. I remember another cradle just like this one, in our old home. It was painted a bluish-green colour inside, and a loud mahogany colour outside, interspersed with numberless artificial black knots, more like figures in the hangings, or wall-paper, than the grains of wood. That cradle had rocked no end of generations of my progenitors; and when baby visitors gave over showing their chubby little red pudding faces at our house, my sister and I used to play at ‘shop’ and ‘church’ in it on wet days. On these occasions, though I allowed her—as I no doubt thought became her good-for-nothing sex—the full management of the shop, yet I always insisted on being the clergyman, turning the cradle on its end, and preaching from under its hood, which served as a canopy.
That oldest and ever newest tragedy which we must all, some time or other, be witnesses of, or chief performers in, has been enacted in this hollow little bed ere now. I see the worn and anxious mother seated on a stool bending over the little sufferer in the cradle. She has not had her clothes off for nearly a week, but she will not be persuaded to lie down. She could never forgive herself if those glazed little windows, so set-like now in their deep sockets, under the ashy pale brow, were to be darkened for ever, and she not see the final darkening. She wets continually the livid and senseless little lips, and sighs as if her heart would burst, as she watches, in her own words, ‘the sair, sair liftin’ o’ the wee breist, an’ the cauld, cauld dew on the little face!’ The struggle will not last long now, and the mother’s pent-up feelings will ere long get relief.
Whether desirous of diverting my thoughts from this harrowing scene, or merely thinking it a pity that I should be exercising my mind over a lot of lifeless old sticks, the porter, with a delicacy of insight that I would hardly have credited him with, has brought two pictures, and without a word has put them up against the backs of two mahogany chairs in front of me. If that porter had been my friend the biggest half of his natural lifetime—which, judging from the furrows on his lean face and the whiteness of his scant locks, was already anything but a short one—he could not have selected two works of art more pat to my taste or my present mood; and I inwardly blessed him for his thoughtful trouble, though I had a vague suspicion that there might be a gentle touch of irony in his ministrations.
The largest picture, ‘Crossing the Sands,’ is a gloaming or twilight subject, somewhere, I fancy, on the Ayrshire coast. Its features are as familiar to me as the streets and houses in my native town. It brings to mind the days of my childhood, when the old folks used to hire a garret at the seaside for a few brief—for us youngsters all too brief—days in the summer; and the lonely walks and talks of later years, when the sun had gone down, and the newly awakened winds blew all the stronger and fresher in our faces for their afternoon’s slumber, and our voices mingled with the rhythmic murmur of the waves as they broke at our feet.
The artist, I suppose, has named his picture from the dim outline of a horse and cart, with two figures sitting in it, crossing the darkening sands. The tide is far out, and has left long zigzag shallow pools of water lying in the uneven places on the sands, into which the swift vanishing day, through a break in the dark saffron clouds, is casting wistful looks. The same pale reflection is glimmering faintly along the wave-broken verge of the distant sea; while the denser flood, where it stretches out to meet the gray skyline, wears something of a sad melancholy in its cold blue depth. In comfortable contrast with this lonesomeness, sitting among the deepening shadows on a dark clump of moorland, or bent, on the left-hand corner of the picture, is the dreamiest little hut, with the rarest blue smoke rising out of its crazy chimney, and floating like a spirit among the dark grays and purples sleeping on the hillsides.
The smaller upright picture is a street in Dieppe—the time, evening, from the green tinge in the blue of the sky, and the roseate hue of the low-lying clouds. It is just such an old French street as one would delight in strolling through at that poetic hour, to feast one’s eyes on the bewitching mixture of sunlight and shadow, reclining side by side, or locked in loving embrace among the sombre reds, and rich browns, and warm ochres on the quaint roofs and gables and walls; and to note the leisurely figures of the picturesque women in white caps, blue shortgowns, and red petticoats, chatting in the mellow sunlight at the street corner, or moving along in the shadow under the eaves of the overhanging gables; or the slow cart in the middle of the street, its wheels resting on that streak of sunshine slanting from the old gable at the corner; or the decrepit vegetable-woman at her stand on the opposite side of that gutter, the fresh green colour of her vegetables—all the fresher and greener against the daub or two of bright red—wafting one’s thoughts away to cottage gardens and pleasant orchards.
But I must not tarry any longer in this old French street, or, indeed, in this musty old saleroom, which has thrown off its pensive and meditative humour, and taken on a brisk, practical, and business-like air. Already the auctioneer and his spruce clerk have arrived, and the faces of the knots of people scattered up and down the floor are looking with expectancy towards the little pulpit. It is no longer a place for an idle dreamer like myself, and so I saunter out to the street. The sudden transition from the shadow of the saleroom to the bright white sunshine on the bustling city thoroughfare, together with the sight of the refreshing water-cart, with a group of barelegged, merry children prancing in its cooling spray, instantly dispel my illusions; and in another moment I am as completely in the midst of the living present as I was before in the dead past.