Period Furniture
THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB
IN our town, as in others like it, the recent years have proved epochal. First there was the War, and after that the H. C. L., and after that the Coal Boom, and after that the Interior Decorator. On every hand new houses are going up and old ones either coming down or undergoing a transforming process of rejuvenation.
Contractors and builders are bustling busily, and our afternoon bridge clubs flow gently along, — like the tide of Sweet Afton, — to a murmuring stream of period furniture, oriental rugs, glassed-in porches, grass-cloth hangings, refectory tables, and breakfast alcoves.
One morning I received a call from an interior decorator. He was a pleasant little gentleman with a portfolio under his arm, and he greeted me with so obvious an assurance of being expected that I asked him to come in.
‘I have called,’said he, ‘about the period furniture for the library and dining-room, and I have here’— indicating the portfolio — ‘ the photographs of the special “pieces” which our Mr. Astrachan has selected for those rooms. The designs are extremely chaste, as you will see, and entirely correct in line and detail. If you are at leisure — ’
And then it developed that he was a pleasant little gentleman who had made a mistake.
He had been assigned by Messrs. Astrachan & Kolinsky, Interior Decorators, of Fifth Avenue, to take charge of the furnishings and fittings of an extensively remodeled mansion farther up the street, whose owner bore the same name as my own. The homes in this section of the town are not numbered, and inquiries at the hotel had resulted in his arrival at my door.
Followed explanations, profuse apologies, and a bowing exit.
Our interview had taken place in the hall, from which, through uncurtained doorways, were widely visible the contents of the library, the living-room, and the dining-room; and during the brief colloquy the pleasant little gentleman’s glance — heavily bounded by tortoise-shell — had embraced with the sweeping observation of an expert the varied appurtenances of those apartments.
Incredulity, shocked disapproval, a look akin to horror, following his swift survey of the dining-room, passed rapidly in procession across his mobile countenance; and as he politely backed away, it was with the feeling of one artistically condemned that I closed the door.
In the hall I stood still and looked about me.
‘Period furniture!’ Surely no dwelling-place in all the town was so thoroughly period-furnitured as mine! The dining-room, now, — the dining-room, whose time-honored plenishings had received that devastating lightning glance from Mr. Astrachan’s dismayed deputy, — were not that massive board of convoluted oak, and those six accompanying chairs, ‘Jacobean’? They were — great-uncle Jacobean; indirectly inherited by my husband at the dismantling of his bachelor relative’s old-fashioned domicile. The sideboard and china-closet — also inherited, but not from the same source — were eloquent emblems of an obsolete pattern, whose material and finish contrasted neatly with the table and chairs. The library at my right harbored the customary craft of libraries, — books aplenty, magazines galore, — but the desk between the windows was a middle-aged ‘rolltop,’ and before the fireplace stood an armchair with a gilt-embossed back and permanently waved legs — a ‘William and Mary’ chair, presented at my marriage, twenty years ago, by Aunt Mary and Uncle William, and held ever since in the reverence befitting the wedding-gift that was accompanied by a check.
The living-room across the hall — but here my descriptive powers fail, coming to a full stop, as it were, before the florid architecture of the mid-Victorian ‘sofa,’ the Bronze Age on the mantelpiece, the bent-wood rocker of the early eighties, the monastic simplicity of the Mission table, with its bulging-bowled lamp of Royal Worcester, and the rigid outlines, blackly angular, of the ‘upright’ piano in the corner. No, the familiar furniture of this wellloved and lived-in room is not, strictly speaking, ‘Period’ — it is exclamation point, preceded by a dash!
My mind’s eye in its travels ascends the stairs.
In the large front bedroom is the Period of Archibald II. Here stands austerely the bed of black walnut, — the wide double bed of the old régime, — whereon my grandparents slumbered peacefully, undisturbed by scandalized fore-visionings of the slim twin couches of fashionable modernity. Here, too, is its companion bureau, ponderous, moving reluctantly, when needs must, upon complaining castors, and boasting a swinging oval mirror and a mottled marbled top.
Through the doorway of the adjoining dressing-room looms a mausoleum-like structure of carved and paneled cherry, which, like the dining-room table and chairs, had once belonged to Great-uncle Jacob. Blatantly this article of vertu hits the eye. Frankly hideous it is, indeed — exteriorly; but within — ah, it is within that one must seek its adequate excuse for being; for behind its glossy red panels are smooth, wide shelves of fragrant cedar, where moth-inviting peltry may be safely stored. A separate compartment is divided into broad dust-proof spaces — spaces fortuitously ideal for shoes, admirable for hats. Beneath are four brass-handled drawers, deep and generous, wherein repose my most cherished linens and where, in un-cramped ease, my treasured centre-pieces lie extended, their broidered surfaces untroubled by a fold.
At one side an unexpected door, fitted with a lock and key, conceals a small receptacle quite perfectly adapted to the particular use to which I am confident it was put by bachelor Great-uncle Jacob. At any rate, as the little door swings back, a faint bouquet, subtle, alluring, salutes my nostrils, and I find myself thinking oddly of — of lemonpeel and Araby the Blest, and tinkling, delicate glasses.
There is, indeed, a legend extant, to the effect that, in the reign of Great-grandfather Archibald I, there existed certain possessions of rare old mahogany. Whispers have reached me of a glass-knobbed ‘low-boy,’ of Chippendale chairs, of adorable top-tipping card-tables with pie-crust edges; there is even a tradition of a wondrous Sheraton sideboard. But, alas, these gems of antiquity were all reduced to ashes by a destructive fire, which necessitated the immediate erection of a new house furnished throughout in ‘modern’ style.
Perhaps, after all, it is just as well. As a family we should probably have quarreled violently over the distribution of those gracious relics. For what domestic disintegrations might not that Sheraton sideboard have been responsible? — besides occasioning the sin of covetousness in the souls of our friends and acquaintances.
As it is, we accepted our just apportionment of our ancestors’ ‘delusions of grandeur ’ in a spirit of resigned calm and the harmony of mutual commiseration.
But what is one to do — such a one as I, that is, to whom has descended, in the fullness of time, a proportionate share of the Lares and Penates of two dismantled homesteads, as well as a sprinkling of bestowals from several on the side-lines?
Sell them? Give them away? Cast them to the flames? Never! Forbid such sacrilege! Besides, — I confess it unashamed, — I don’t want to. I like these things. I am ‘attached’ to them. The ‘Elizabethan’ roll-top desk in the library where, in years agone, Aunt Elizabeth kept her circumspect accounts and copied her recipes; the cherry sarcophagus, where Great-uncle Jacob housed his wardrobe and assembled the ingredients of the mellow consolation that warmed his lonely heart, are companions tried and true. Chosen with anxious care and conscientious economy in the placid ‘boomless’ past, endeared by long usage and hallowed by memory, these ‘Period’ furnishings are now beloved members of the family; and so I am determined they shall remain, even though my gardener’s spade should strike oil in the backyard, or my facetious Airedale unearth a coal-mine under the front steps. Nevertheless, my inherited honesty, chaste in design and correct in line and detail, forces me to admit that, at times, the rummage-sale has been a help.