Man-woman relationships -- Drama; Marriage -- Drama
The best view of Victoria Park is from the front window of St.
Dominic's Parsonage, from which not a single chimney is visible. The
parsonage is a semi-detached villa with a front garden and a porch.
Visitors go up the flight of steps to the porch: tradespeople and
members of the family go down by a door under the steps to the
basement, with a breakfast room, used for all meals, in front, and the
kitchen at the back. Upstairs, on the level of the hall door, is the
drawing-room, with its large plate glass window looking on the park. In
this room, the only sitting-room that can be spared from the children
and the family meals, the parson, the Reverend James Mavor Morell does
his work. He is sitting in a strong round backed revolving chair at the
right hand end of a long table, which stands across the window, so that
he can cheer himself with the view of the park at his elbow. At the
opposite end of the table, adjoining it, is a little table; only half
the width of the other, with a typewriter on it. His typist is sitting
at this machine, with her back to the window. The large table is
littered with pamphlets, journals, letters, nests of drawers, an office
diary, postage scales and the like. A spare chair for visitors having
business with the parson is in the middle, turned to his end. Within
reach of his hand is a stationery case, and a cabinet photograph in a
frame. Behind him the right hand wall, recessed above the fireplace, is
fitted with bookshelves, on which an adept eye can measure the parson's
divinity and casuistry by a complete set of Browning's poems and
Maurice's Theological Essays, and guess at his politics from a yellow
backed Progress and Poverty, Fabian Essays, a Dream of John Ball,
Marx's Capital, and half a dozen other literary landmarks in Socialism.
Opposite him on the left, near the typewriter, is the door. Further
down the room, opposite the fireplace, a bookcase stands on a cellaret,
with a sofa near it. There is a generous fire burning; and the hearth,
with a comfortable armchair and a japanned flower painted coal scuttle
at one side, a miniature chair for a boy or girl on the other, a nicely
varnished wooden mantelpiece, with neatly moulded shelves, tiny bits of
mirror let into the panels, and a travelling clock in a leather case
(the inevitable wedding present), and on the wall above a large
autotype of the chief figure in Titian's Virgin of the Assumption, is
very inviting. Altogether the room is the room of a good housekeeper,
vanquished, as far as the table is concerned, by an untidy man, but
elsewhere mistress of the situation. The furniture, in its ornamental
aspect, betrays the style of the advertised "drawing-room suite" of the
pushing suburban furniture dealer; but there is nothing useless or
pretentious in the room. The paper and panelling are dark, throwing the
big cheery window and the park outside into strong relief.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account