“They’re beautiful!” said Florence.
“The instant I saw them,” said Mrs. Dwan, “I knew this was going to be our home!”
“I can imagine!” said Florence.
“We made inquiries and learned that the place belonged to a family named Taylor,” said Mrs. Dwan. “The house had burned down and they had moved away. It was suspected that they had started the fire themselves, as they were terribly hard up and it was insured. Jim wrote to old Mr. Taylor in Seattle and asked him to set a price on the barn and the land, which is about four acres. They exchanged several letters and finally Mr. Taylor accepted Jim’s offer. We got it for a song.”
“Wonderful!” said Florence.
“And then, of course,” Mrs. Dwan continued, “we engaged a house-wrecking company to tear down the other four sections of the barn—the stalls, the cowshed, the tool-shed, and so forth—and take them away, leaving us just this one room. We had a man from Seattle come and put in these old pine walls and the flooring, and plaster the ceiling. He was recommended by a friend of Jim’s and he certainly knew his business.”
“I can see he did,” said Florence.
“He made the hayloft over for us, too, and we got the wings built by day-labor, with Jim and me supervising. It was so much fun that I was honestly sorry when it was finished.”
“I can imagine!” said Florence.
Well, I am not very well up in Early American, which was the name they had for pretty nearly everything in the place, but for the benefit of those who are not on terms with the Dwans I will try and describe from memory the objets d’art they bragged of the most and which brought forth the loudest squeals from Florence.
The living-room walls were brown bare boards without a picture or scrap of wallpaper. On the floor were two or three “hooked rugs,” whatever that means, but they needed five or six more of them, or one big carpet, to cover up all the knots in the wood. There was a maple “lowboy”; a “dough-trough” table they didn’t have space for in the kitchen; a pine “stretcher” table with sticks connecting the four legs near the bottom so you couldn’t put your feet anywhere; a “Dutch” chest that looked as if it had been ordered from the undertaker by one of Singer’s Midgets, but he got well; and some “Windsor” chairs in which the only position you could get comfortable was to stand up behind them and lean your elbows on their back.
Not one piece that matched another, and not one piece of mahogany anywhere. And the ceiling, between the beams, had apparently been plastered by a workman who was that way, too.
“Some day soon I hope to have a piano,” said Mrs. Dwan. “I can’t live much longer without one. But so far I haven’t been able to find one that would fit in.”
“Listen,” I said. “I’ve got a piano in storage that belonged to my mother. It’s a mahogany upright and not so big that it wouldn’t fit in this room, especially when you get that ‘trough’ table out. It isn’t doing me any good and I’ll sell it to you for $250. Mother paid $1,250 for it new.”
“Oh, I couldn’t think of taking it!” said Mrs. Dwan.
“I’ll make it $200 even just because you’re a friend of Florence’s,” I said.
“Really, I couldn’t!” said Mrs. Dwan.
“You wouldn’t have to pay for it all at once,” I said.
“Don’t you see,” said Florence, “that a mahogany upright piano would be a perfect horror in here? Mildred wouldn’t have it as a gift, let alone buy it. It isn’t in the period.”
“She could get it tuned,” I said.
The answer to this was, “I’ll show you the upstairs now and we can look at the dining-room later on.”
We were led to the guest-chamber. The bed was a maple four-poster, with pineapple posts, and a “tester” running from pillar to post. You would think a “tester” might be a man that went around trying out beds, but it’s really a kind of frame that holds a canopy over the bed in case it rains and the roof leaks. There was a quilt made by Mrs. Dwan’s great-grandmother, Mrs. Anthony Adams, in 1859, at Lowell, Mass. How is that for a memory?
“This used to be the hayloft,” said Mrs. Dwan.
“You ought to have left some of the hay so the guests could hit it,” I said.
The dressers, or chests of drawers, and the chairs were all made of maple. And the same in the Dwans’ own room; everything maple.
“If you had maple in one room and mahogany in the other,” I said, “people wouldn’t get confused when you told them that so-and-so was up in Maple’s room.”
Dwan laughed, but the women didn’t.
The maid hollered up that dinner was ready.
“The cocktails aren’t ready,” said Dwan.
“You will have to go without them,” said Mrs. Dwan. “The soup will be cold.”
This put me in a great mood to admire the “sawbuck” table and the “slat back” chairs, which were evidently the chef d’oeuvre and the pièce de résistance of the chez Dwan.
“It came all the way from Pennsylvania,” said Mildred, when Florence’s outcries, brought on by her first look at the table, had died down. “Mother picked it up at a little place near Stroudsburg and sent it to me. It only cost $550, and the chairs were $45 apiece.”
“How reasonable!” exclaimed Florence.
That was before she had sat in one of them. Only one thing was more unreasonable than the chairs, and that was the table itself, consisting of big planks nailed together and laid onto a railroad tie, supported underneath by a whole forest of crosspieces and beams. The surface was as smooth on top as the trip to Catalina Island and all around the edges, great big divots had been taken out with some blunt instrument, probably a bayonet. There were stains and scorch marks
