Tante

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

Madame von Marwitz continued to examine the cup and, as she set it down among the others, with the deliberate nicety of gesture that gave at once power and grace to her slightest movement, she said: "You were fortunate in your great-grandmother, Mr. Jardine."

Her voice, her glance, her gestures, were already affecting Gregory unpleasantly. There was in them a quality of considered control, as though she recognised difficulty and were gently and warily evading it. Seated on his chintz sofa in the bright, burnished room, all in white, with a white lace head-dress, half veil, half turban, binding her hair and falling on her shoulders, she made him think, in her inappropriateness and splendour, of her own Bouddha, who, in his glimmering shrine, lifted his hand as if in a gesture of bland exorcism before which the mirage of a vulgar and trivial age must presently fade away. The Bouddha looked permanent and the room looked transient; the only thing in it that could stand up against him, as it were, was Karen. To her husband's eye, newly aware of æsthetic discriminations, Karen seemed to interpret and justify her surroundings, to show their commonplace as part of their charm and to make the Bouddha and Madame von Marwitz herself, in all their portentous distinction, look like incidental ornaments.

Madame von Marwitz's silence in regard to the Bouddha had already become a blight, but it was, perhaps, the growing crisp decision in Gregory's manner that made Karen first aware of constraint. Her eyes then turned from Tante to the shrine at the end of the room, and she said: "You don't care for the way it looks here, Tante, do you—your present?"

Madame von Marwitz had finished her tea and she turned in the sofa so that she could consider the Bouddha no longer incidentally but decisively. "I am glad that it is yours, ma chérie," she said, after the pause of her contemplation. "Some day you must place it more happily. You don't intend, do you, Mr. Jardine, to live for any length of time in these rooms?"

"Oh, but I like it here so much, Tante," Karen took upon herself the reply. "I want to go on living where Gregory has lived for so long. We have such a view, you see; and such air."

Madame von Marwitz mused upon her for a moment and then giving her chin a little pinch, half meditative, half caressing, she inquired, with Continental frankness: "A very pretty sentiment, ma petite, but what will you do when the babies come?"

Karen was not disconcerted. "I rather hope we may not have babies for a year or two, Tante; and when they do come there will be room, quite happily, for several. You don't know how big the flat is; you will see. Gregory has always been able to put up his married sister and her husband; that gives us one quite big room over and a small one."

"But then you can have no friends if your rooms are full of babies," Madame von Marwitz objected, still with mild playfulness.

"No," Karen had to admit it; "but while they were very small I do not think I should have much time for friends in the house, should I. And we think, Gregory and I, of soon taking a tiny cottage in the country, too."

"Then, while you remain here, and unless my Bouddha is to look very foolish," said Madame von Marwitz, "you must, I think, change your drawing-room. It can be changed," she gazed about her with a touch of wildness. "Something could be done. It could be darkened; quieted; it talks too much and too loudly now, does it not? But you could move these so large chairs and couches away and have sober furniture, of a good period; one can still pick up good things if one is clever; a Chinese screen here and there; a fine old mirror; a touch of splendour; a flavour of dignity. The shape of the room is not impossible; the outlook, as you say, gives space and breathing; something could be done."