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The Bond Street man stripped away all the velvet and morocco, plucked up the Turkey carpet, draped the scuttle-ports with pale yellow cretonne garnished with orange pompons, subdued the glare of the skylight by a blind of oriental silk, covered the divans with Persian saddlebags, the floor with a delicate Indian matting, and furnished the saloon with all that was most feminine in the way of bamboo chairs and tea-tables, Japanese screens and fans of gorgeous colouring.
The divans were covered with wondrous stuff which Democrates could not name,—another age would call it silk. A tripod smoked with fragrant Arabian frankincense. Silver lamps, swinging from silver chains, gave brilliant light. The Athenian stood wonderbound, until a voice, not Hiram’s, greeted him. “Welcome, Athenian,” spoke the Cyprian, in his quaint, eastern accent.
The gilded bar-rooms, flashing with mirrors and cut glass; the saloons, with their desert expanse of Turkey carpet and oasis of clustered divans and gilded tables; the great dining-room, with porphyry columns, and walls and ceilings shining with allegory all these things which had attracted his youthful wonder without distracting his correct simplicity of taste he now began to comprehend.
There was not much furniture, but what there was was good old carved armoires, solid divans and joy of joys in each room a carved oak, Seventeenth Century mantelpiece eight feet high and four feet deep. "I must have these rooms!" Betty whispered. "Oh, I could make them so pretty!" The rent of the rooms was almost twice as much as the sum they fixed on, and Paula murmured caution.
"Well," remarked Crane, calmly, "if we have some time to spare, we may as well wait comfortably instead of standing in the middle of the room. I, for one, have a lot of questions to ask about this new world." Acting upon this suggestion, the party seated themselves upon comfortable divans, and Dunark rapidly dismantled the machine he had constructed.
I have heard persons speak very contemptuously of Bagtche Serai. 'How' they ask, 'can any one apply the name of palace to that cluster of wooden houses, daubed with coarse paintings, and furnished only with divans and carpets? From this point of view they are right.
But the little maid beckoned them on, still showing her teeth and tripping in front of them as if a gust of wind were blowing her. Her motion was that of a dance reduced to a walk for the sake of decorum. Through another glass-bead curtain at the farther end of the long room she led them to a second room, all hung about with silks and furnished with deep-cushioned divans.
The smoke rose up in a cloud round Smaïn and his flute, and now I thought that, indeed, there was a wild pathos in the music. The moon went up the sky, and threw silver on the palms. The gay cries from the village died down. The gardeners lay upon the earth divans under the palmwood roofs, and slept. And at last Smaïn bade us good-bye.
Her richness of hue, her generous nose, her eyebrows marked like those of an actress these things, with an added amplitude of person on which middle age had set its seal, seemed to present her insistently as a daughter of the south, or still more of the east, a creature formed by hammocks and divans, fed upon sherbets and waited upon by slaves.
"It is a harmless pose of Howat's," she explained: "a concession to the ghosts of the past." She patted the elder on the shoulder. Above, James Polder ushered them into a room hung with crimson and gilt stamped paper, an elaborately fretted cherry mantel about the asbestos rectangle of an artificial hearth, and a multitude of chairs and divans shrouded in linen.
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