A batch of pinewood, dark and shady, would have saved the situation; one sought everywhere for the comfort of real shadows.
We went into the house, which was in the act of being papered and painted for the millionaires. Delightful in theory as such old buildings are, we were seized with doubt from the moment of crossing the threshold whether any sense of quaint antiquity would compensate one for beams on top of one’s head, for bedrooms the size of a bath-towel, and a general feeling of having one foot on the hearth and another in the passage. We thought the newcomers had shown more taste outside, and came to the conclusion that some one else’s taste ruled in the garden, but that they had allowed their own ideas free scope indoors. These ideas were monotonous. The parlour that gave on the little orchard had a paper all over green parrots; the best bedroom upstairs had a paper all over blue parrots; and the second best bedroom was adorned with terra-cotta parrots. The only chance for a conglomeration of rooms so hopelessly low and contracted, would have been a plain distemper of no tint deeper than cream, or at the outside butter colour. Then the old beams would have had a chance, and one might have felt able to draw one’s breath.
‹Fancy waking in the morning to the dance of all the little parrots on top of one’s eyelids!›
Then, out of a small space, the shapes of trees and flower-beds beyond come upon the vision with no sense of effect if the space within is tormented. Neither can anyone have any proper appreciation of the joy of a bunch of flowers, or a vase of spreading boughs, who has not set them against plain walls where their shadows have play.
CONVERTING A COTTAGE
Another little house near here—set down in the valley this, on the edge of a hamlet, overlooking a wide pond—has been to our thinking more successfully dealt with. Three very old cottages have been knocked into one, and the whole little rambling up-and-down dwelling-place thus produced has been boldly distempered white within from roof to kitchen. The round black oak beams are delightful in these little white rooms, and the pretty, blue-eyed, still youthful spinster who owns them has been content with a short pair of clear white muslin curtains in every window; not, be it understood, the London bedroom kind that cuts across the pane ‹an abomination difficult to avoid in towns›, but proper curtains hanging over the recess. Nothing more suitable could be devised, and it took a “real lady,” in the sense of Hans Andersen’s “Real Princess,” to be content with such fresh simplicity. But attractive as her furnishing is, and full of genuinely beautiful things, there our tastes slightly diverged.
COTTAGE FURNITURE
The largest sitting-room has a set of black lacquer furniture inlaid with vivid mother-of-pearl; it is deliciously gay in this gay cottage parlour, and certainly no one who possessed these early Victorian treasures could bear to put them on one side. We think if we had been the lucky owner, however, we would have eschewed coupling them with velvet—or, indeed, brought velvet at all under those weather beaten tiles. The mistress of the Villino had a vision—a daring vision—of printed linen with scarlet cherries and impossible birds pecking at them; something with a true Jacobean angularity in it, to link the centuries together, and an uncompromising vividness of tint. That for cushions and sofa-covers. On the floor then, no bright carpet would be admitted. We should have enamelled that floor white, and cast a few rugs down on it, with no more colours in them than faint lemons and greys or creams.