Then you make the paste. It smells horrid, and do what you will, cover yourself as best you can, it gets up to the eyes! We wore two old holland skirts of Lorna’s, quite short and trig, and washing shirts, and huge print wrappers; but before we had been working for an hour our fingers were glued together; then we yawned or sneezed and put our hands to our faces, and they were stickied. Then bits of hair—“tendrils” as they call them in books—fell down, and we fastened them up, and our hair got as bad. We were spectacles!
A kettle was kept on the hob, and we were continually bathing our hands in hot water, for, of course, we dared not touch the outside of the paper unless they were quite clean, and the table wanted washing before each fresh strip was laid down, as the paste had always oozed off the edges of the last piece. There is one thing sure and certain: I shall never take up paper-hanging as a profession.
The hanging itself is really rather exciting. Midas climbed to the top of the ladder and held the top of the strip in position; Lorna crouched beneath, and guided it in the way it should go, so as to meet the edge of the one before, and I stood on a chair and smoothed it down and down with a clean white cloth. Doing it with great care like this, we got no wrinkles at all, and when the first side of the room was finished, it looked so professional that we danced—literally danced—for joy.
By the end of the afternoon it was done, and so were we! Simply so tired we could hardly stand, but mentally we were full of triumph, for that room was a picture to behold. We ran out into the passage and brought in everyone we could find, servants and charwoman included. Then they made remarks, and we stood and listened.
The cook said, “My, Miss Lorna, wouldn’t the pattern go round?” The charwoman said, “I like a bit of gilding meself. It looks ’andsome.” The parlourmaid said, “How will the furniture look against it, miss?” which was really the nastiest hit of all; only the little Tweeny stared and flushed, and rolled her hands in her apron, and said, “All them roses on the wall! It would be like a Bank-’oliday to sit aside ’em!”
Tweeny has the soul of a poet. I bought her some flowers the very next time I went out. Wallace came in and twiddled his moustache, and said—
“By Jove, is it really done! Aren’t you dead beat? I say, Miss Sackville, don’t do any more to-day. It’s too bad of Lorna to work you like this. I shall interfere in my professional capacity.”
He was far too much engrossed in Una Sackville to have any eyes for the paper.
Mrs Forbes thought, like the cook, that it was a pity that the pattern didn’t go round; and the dear old doctor tip-toed up and down, jingled the money in his pockets, and said—
“Eh, what? Eh, what? Something quite novel, eh! Didn’t go in for things of this sort in my young days. Very smart indeed, my dear, very smart! Now I suppose you will be wanting some new fixings,” (his hand came slowly out of his waistcoat pocket, and my hopes ran mountains high). “Mustn’t spoil the ship for a penn’orth of tar, you know. There, that will help to buy a few odds and ends.”