The Belfry

by May Sinclair

Viola ordered the carpenter to go into the study again and measure for those bookshelves. He was her slave and he went.

"Jimmy's been going on like that all day," she said. "He's taken up hours of that man's time. We shall never get him out of the house."

"I don't want to get him out of the house," said Jevons. "I'm awfully happy with him."

He was happy (like a child) with everything, with his house and his garden and his furniture, his oak chests and the dresser and the bureau, above all he was happy with his bed-tester. He said be had never slept under a bed-tester in his life, and he was dying to know what it would be like—to lie there with hundreds of dear little, shy little chintz rosebuds squinting down at you.

"You'll not lay under them rosebuds, not for a twenty-four hour—"

The carpenter had come back to us. He treated Jevons exactly like a child.

"That tester can't be set up to-night. Not unless, as I say, you squeeges of it jam tight between the ceilin' and the floor. An' then you'll 'ave to prise the ceilin' up every time you moves of it, else you'll start them postsis all a twistin' and a rockin', an' 'ow'll you feel then?"

Jevons said he felt frightened to death as it was, and the carpenter could have it his own way provided he didn't hurt the little rosebuds or frighten them; and the carpenter sighed and said that the study was ten by thirteen and would take a hundred and sixteen feet of bookshelves.

"Let's go and look at the study," said Viola. And we went and looked at it. And the carpenter came up and looked at us. And the foreman and the other men came in with furniture and things out of the garden, and they looked at us. There wasn't one really large and heavy piece of furniture except the four-post bed and the tester, and they treated the whole thing as a joke, as a funny game they were helping two small children to play at. And when Viola and Jevons ought to have been telling the men what things were to go into which room and where, they ran back into the garden to see what flowers they would plant in it and where.

Then they took me to look all over the house. It was an absurd house. Of its four rooms there was one in front that served as a dining-room and a drawing-room and a boudoir for Viola, and there was a kitchen at the back, and a bedroom over the front room, and Jevons's study was over the kitchen. Viola said there were six rooms if you counted the pantry and the bathroom, and they were going to put a settee in Jimmy's study that would turn into a bed when anybody came to stay. And Mrs. Pavitt knew a nice woman who would come in and scrub for them, and sleep in the kitchen when they weren't there.