My, my, but how my sense of understanding did broaden under the influence of the auction sales we attended through the spring and on into the Summer. When the morning paper came we would turn to the advertising section and look for auction announcements. If there was to be one, and generally there was—one or more—we canceled all other plans and attended. Going to auctions became our regular employment, our pastime, our entertainment. It became our obsession. It almost became our joint calling in life. To our besetting mania we sacrificed all else.
I remember there was one afternoon when John McCormack was billed to sing. I am very fond of hearing John McCormack. For one thing, he generally sings in a language which I can understand, and for another, I like his way of singing. He sings very much as I would sing if I had decided to take up singing for a living instead of writing. This is only one of the sacrifices I have made for the sake of English literature.
McCormack that day had to struggle through without me. Because there was a sale of Italian antiques billed for three p. m., and we were going to have an Italian hall and an Italian living room in the new house, and we felt it to be our bounden duty to attend.
It took some time and considerable work on the part of those fitted to guide me in the matter of decorations before I fell entirely into the idea of an Italian room, this possibly being due to the fact that I was born so far away from Italy and passed through childhood with so few Italian influences coming into my life. Even now I balk at the idea of hanging any faded red-silk stoles or copes, or whatever those ecclesiastical garments are, on my walls. I reserve the right to admire such a vestment when it is worn by the officiating cleric at church, but for the life of me and despite all that has repeatedly been said to me on the subject I fail to see where it belongs in a simple household as a part of the scheme of ornamentation.
I do not think it proper to display a strange clergyman's cast-off costume in my little home any more than I would expect the canon of a cathedral to let me hang up a pair of my old overalls in his cathedral. Nor—if I must confess it—have I felt myself greatly drawn to the suggestion that we should have a lot of tall hand-painted candles sitting or standing round in odd spots. I mean those candlesticks which are painted in faded colors, with touches of dull gilt here and there on them and which are called after a lady named Polly Crome—their original inventor, I suppose she was, though her name does sound more as if Arnold Bennett had written her than as if she were a native Italian. I imagine she thought up this idea of a hand-painted candlestick nine feet tall and eighteen inches through at the base, and then in her honor the design was called after her, which in my humble opinion was compounding one mistake on top of another. Likewise I fear that I shall never become entirely reconciled to these old-model Italian chairs. My notion of a chair is something on which a body can sit for as long as half an hour without anesthetics. In most other details concerning antique furniture they have made a true believer out of me, but as regards chairs I am still some distance from being thoroughly converted. In chairs I favor a chair that is willing to meet you halfway, as it were, in an effort to be mutually comfortable. The other kind—the kind with a hard flat wooden seat and short legs and a stiff high back, a chair which looks as though originally it had been designed to be used by a clown dog in a trained animal act—may be artistic and beautiful in the chasteness of its lines and all this and that; but as for me, I say give me the kind of chair that has fewer admirers and more friends in the fireside circle. I take it that the early Italians were not a sedentary race. They could not have figured on staying long in one place.
I suppose the trouble with me is that I was born and brought up on the American plan and have never entirely got over it. In fact I was told as much, though not perhaps in exactly those words, when antiques first became a vital issue in our domestic life. In no uncertain terms I was informed that everybody who is anybody goes in for the Italian these times. I believe the only conspicuous exceptions to the rule are the Italians who have emigrated to these shores. They, it would appear, are amply satisfied with American fixtures and fittings. I have a suspicion that possibly some of them in coming hither may have been actuated by a desire to get as far away as possible from those medieval effects in plumbing which seem to be inseparable from Old World architecture.
My education progressed another step forward on the occasion of my first visit to an auction room where presumably desirable pieces of Italian workmanship were displayed as a preliminary to their being disposed of by public outcry. I was accompanied by a friend—the wormholeist already mentioned—and when he lapsed into rhapsodies over a pair of gilt mirrors, or rather mirrors which once upon a time, say about the time of the Fall of the Roman Empire, had been gilded, I was astonished.
“Surely,” I said, “nobody would want those things. See where the glass is flawed—the quicksilver must be pretty nearly all gone from the backs of them. And the molding is falling off in chunks and what molding is left is so dingy and stained that it doesn't look like anything at all. If you're asking me, I'd call those mirrors a couple of total losses.”
“Exactly!” he said. “That is precisely what makes them so desirable. You can't counterfeit such age as these things show, my boy.”
“I shouldn't care to try,” I said. “Where I came from, when a mirror got in such shape that you couldn't see yourself in it it was just the same to us as a chorus girl that had both legs cut off in a railroad accident—it was regarded as having lost most of its practical use in life. Still, it is not for me, a raw green novice, a sub-novice as you might say, to set myself up against an expert like you. Anyhow, as the fellow said, live and learn. Let us move along to the next display of moldy remains.”