Part 21

“If we went,” said Irais, “Elizabeth and I would be placed with great ceremony on a sofa behind a large, polished oval table with a crochet-mat in the centre—it has got a crochet-mat in the centre, hasn’t it?” I nodded. “And you would sit on one of the four little podgy, buttony, tasselly red chairs that are ranged on the other side of the table facing the sofa. They are red, Elizabeth?” Again I nodded. “The floor is painted yellow, and there is no carpet except a rug in front of the sofa. The paper is dark chocolate colour, almost black; that is in order that after years of use the dirt may not show, and the room need not be done up. Dirt is like wickedness, you see, Miss Minora—its being there never matters; it is only when it shows so much as to be apparent to everybody that we are ashamed of it. At intervals round the high walls are chairs, and cabinets with lamps on them, and in one corner is a great white cold stove—or is it majolica?” she asked, turning to me.

“No, it is white.”

“There are a great many lovely big windows, all ready to let in the air and the sun, but they are as carefully covered with brown lace curtains under heavy stuff ones as though a whole row of houses were just opposite, with peering eyes at every window trying to look in, instead of there only being fields, and trees, and birds. No fire, no sunlight, no books, no flowers; but a consoling smell of red cabbage coming up under the door, mixed, in due season, with soapsuds.”

“When did you go there?” asked Minora.

“Ah, when did I go there indeed? When did I not go there? I have been calling there all my life.”

Minora’s eyes rolled doubtfully first at me then at Irais from the depths of her head-wrappings; they are large eyes with long dark eyelashes, and far be it from me to deny that each eye taken by itself is fine, but they are put in all wrong.

“The only thing you would learn there,” went on Irais, “would be the significance of sofa corners in Germany. If we three went there together, I should be ushered into the right-hand corner of the sofa, because it is the place of honour, and I am the greatest stranger; Elizabeth would be invited to seat herself in the left-hand corner, as next in importance; the hostess would sit near us in an arm-chair; and you, as a person of no importance whatever, would either be left to sit where you could, or would be put on a chair facing us, and with the entire breadth of the table between us to mark the immense social gulf that separates the married woman from the mere virgin. These sofa corners make the drawing of nice distinctions possible in a way that nothing else could. The world might come to an end, and create less sensation in doing it, than you would, Miss Minora, if by any chance you got into the right-hand corner of one. That you are put on a chair on the other side of the table places you at once in the scale of precedence, and exactly defines your social position, or rather your complete want of a social position.” And Irais tilted her nose ever so little heavenwards.

“Note it,” she added, “as the heading of your next chapter.”

“Note what?” asked Minora impatiently.

“Why, ‘The Subtle Significance of Sofas’, of course,” replied Irais. “If,” she continued, as Minora made no reply appreciative of this suggestion, “you were to call unexpectedly, the bad luck which pursues the innocent would most likely make you hit on a washing-day, and the distracted mistress of the house would keep you waiting in the cold room so long while she changed her dress, that you would begin to fear you were to be left to perish from want and hunger; and when she did appear, would show by the bitterness of her welcoming smile the rage that was boiling in her heart.”

“But what has the mistress of the house to do with washing?”

“What has she to do with washing? Oh, you sweet innocent—pardon my familiarity, but such ignorance of country-life customs is very touching in one who is writing a book about them.”

“Oh, I have no doubt I am very ignorant,” said Minora loftily.

“Seasons of washing,” explained Irais, “are seasons set apart by the Hausfrau to be kept holy. They only occur every two or three months, and while they are going on the whole house is in an uproar, every other consideration sacrificed, husband and children sunk into insignificance, and no one approaching, or interfering with the mistress of the house during these days of purification, but at their peril.”

“You don’t really mean,” said Minora, “that you only wash your clothes four times a year?”

“Yes, I do mean it,” replied Irais.

“Well, I think that is very disgusting,” said Minora emphatically.

Irais raised those pretty, delicate eyebrows of hers. “Then you must take care and not marry a German,” she said.

“But what is the object of it?” went on Minora.

“Why, to clean the linen, I suppose.”

“Yes, yes, but why only at such long intervals?”

“It is an outward and visible sign of vast possessions in the shape of linen. If you were to want to have your clothes washed every week, as you do in England, you would be put down as a person who only has just enough to last that length of time, and would be an object of general contempt.”

“But I should be a clean object,” cried Minora, “and my house would not be full of accumulated dirt.”

We said nothing—there was nothing to be said.

“It must be a happy land, that England of yours,” Irais remarked after a while with a sigh—a beatific vision no doubt presenting itself to her mind of a land full of washerwomen and agile gentlemen darting at door-handles.

“It is a clean land, at any rate,” replied Minora.

“I don’t want to go and live in it,” I said—for we were driving up to the house, and a memory of fogs and umbrellas came into my mind as I looked up fondly at its dear old west front, and I felt that what I want is to live and die just here, and that there never was such a happy woman as Elizabeth.

April 18th.—I have been so busy ever since Irais and Minora left that I can hardly believe the spring is here, and the garden hurrying on its green and flowered petticoat—only its petticoat as yet, for though the underwood is a fairyland of tender little leaves, the trees above are still quite bare.