Besides which, as life goes on, I am thankful to say that decoration becomes more and more a fine art.
Formerly people rather scorned the idea of being ‘house-proud’ in the same manner in which all are nowadays. Their house-pride was merely expressed in the amount of gilding compressed into a single room; in the thickness of their carpets, the heaviness of their draperies, and the general costliness of the plenishing, and the amount of money these things had cost was far more often spoken of than anything else; while the name of the upholsterer was mentioned, not as a guarantee that taste and skill had been called into action, but as a proof that money in this case had not been an object. Formerly, did I say? Alas! cases still exist of this heavy and depressing style of thing! Money is poured out like water on carpets that are nightmares, and on papers that are as absolutely meaningless as they are ugly, and the despair of anyone who is called in, as I am constantly, to mitigate the horrors of some gigantic monument of bad taste and lavish expenditure.
And then, too, people are still, as a rule, far too timid, and act far too much in a hurry; they believe far too much in the upholsterer, and far too little in themselves; and above all they cannot get out of the terrible English habit, carried through every single department in life, of buying a thing because they admire it, and not because it suits what they already possess, thus marring at every step their chances of having a home which is always a pleasure to inhabit, and a restful refuge from the cares and toils of life.
But it is to assist the timid and those who lack confidence in their own tastes, and furthermore who may live in distant country places, where nothing new penetrates even in these days of parcel-posts and illustrated newspapers, that I am writing this book, and wrote ‘From Kitchen to Garret,’ and therefore I must not scold but rather encourage those who would add to the beauty of their surroundings, but do not quite know how to set about it: and I am most anxious that there may soon be no house anywhere in England that may not have some claim to be considered beautiful or interesting or pretty; for indeed there is no reason why the humblest among us may not have a charming home, as certainly, if he or she have taste, money nowadays is not a barrier between beauty and the public at large. Therefore when any among my readers makes up her mind that it is absolutely necessary that a move should be made, the first piece of advice I would give her is that she should determine on her future locality, if not on the abode itself, before she is driven from her first house by the lapsing of a lease or the necessity of deciding immediately because a tenant is forthcoming for house number one; for if not, she may find herself forced into an uncongenial neighbourhood or into a house that has every unpleasant quality under the sun. Above all she must be prepared for a certain amount of acute misery, mental, at any rate, if not physical, for there is something about one’s first married home that one can never really replace, and that renders our fitting into our new locality only a little less torturing than inhabiting a new skin would be, were we suddenly forced into one.
Personally I am not one bit sentimental; I never cried over a faded flower, or lay awake weeping bitter tears over an unhappy love-affair: I never had one, I am thankful to say. Neither have I hoarded first shoes, snippings of baby curls, nor indeed anything save my wedding-dress, which is a most valuable ‘property’ for characters and private theatricals of all kinds; and therefore I am considered absolutely lacking in ‘fine feelings,’ and unhampered by ‘nonsense’; but I have never yet become reconciled to the moves we have had to make after our first twelve years of married life, and I much doubt now if I ever shall; I certainly shall not until I make move number three, and what is perhaps the most curious point in the whole business is that I did not like the house, nor the town, nor indeed anything much about it, and yet I can never see certain looks in the sky, scent certain odours, without being transported to dear dull Dorsetshire, and without longing in a curious home-sick way for the marvellously lovely range of the Purbeck hills, which haunts me like a dream, and for which I am convinced I should positively pine, had I the smallest touch of sentiment in my composition.
The house itself was most wretchedly inconvenient, the furniture of over twenty years ago—aye, and some of it over fifty years ago—does not bear thinking about in these æsthetic days. I endured dullness such as only a London girl, plunged suddenly into an atmosphere she could not comprehend, much less assimilate, could experience: we had three years of unspeakable worries; and yet, with it all—with its hideous rooms and its cold and ugly passages, its out-of-the-worldness, and its unpleasant associations—there is something about it that no other house can ever hold, and that causes me often and often to dream I am there again, or that makes me hear sometimes on a quiet night the old sound of the sudden clash of the china closet door, the opening of the door at the top of the kitchen stairs—which, I believe, has been taken away now by desecrating hands, and which had a sound all its own—or that causes me to wake suddenly from sleep to wonder at the late return of phantom waggons and ghostly horses over stones that are hundreds of miles away from our present uncongenial abode, and which caused sounds inseparable from thoughts of those dear dead days—days I would have back this moment if I could, if only to live them over once more in a manner a thousand times better than an inexperienced girl could ever do, and use then the experience one buys at such an enormous cost because one will not listen to words of wisdom from those who have lived so very much longer in the world than we had then, and which is useless now, because one sees all too late what one might have done for others.
These experiences and reminiscences of mine may seem out of place here, but they really are not. I shall in this book, as in my last, speak only of what I have experienced; and I am so convinced that when house-moving is done heartbreak must ensue that I dwell upon this aspect of the case in order that the first house may not be left capriciously, but only because it is absolutely necessary to go elsewhere.
I have always felt myself, unsentimental creature though I am, that a house absorbs some of one’s own personality: that the very walls we warm with our breathing, living selves, and among which we spend our lives, and allow ourselves to be ourselves without any company veneer, must in some measure become impregnated by our vitality. You may, for example, re-paper and re-furnish your room, but in a very short time that room looks exactly like you once more, and becomes again in a week or two—a month, at most—part and parcel of your own individuality. But leave your house, and, if you can muster sufficient courage to do so, go and call on the next inhabitant, and you will see in one moment what I mean. The very room is altered. Your successors may have kept your decorations, taken off your ‘fixtures,’ and gone on the very same lines as regards furnishing and arrangement as you did, but it will not look in the very least like you, and you will not believe you are in the same room in which you have spent so many happy and unhappy hours. At first, therefore, in any new house you have not only to adapt yourself and your furniture to it, but you have by your individuality to imprint yourself on the very fabric itself.
The last owner’s individuality fades at once; I have seen few empty houses that do not look precisely like something dead: the body is there, but the spirit is absent. And there is a blank awful chill about such a house that penetrates one’s very soul and depresses one in an extraordinary way; but it takes some time to reanimate the body, and, indeed, in an unloved atmosphere I question if it is ever done. Some folk the house won’t have at any price, and there are one or two places I wot of that are blank still, because uncongenial people have them and are incapable of living up to them properly; they put just the wrong draperies in the windows, wrench the doors round into the wrong places, and finally have hung the very worst colours on the walls, and, indeed, have treated it in such an inconsiderate way that it never responds, and remains silent, angular, unsatisfied, dead, as long as those people remain within its shelter.
Angelina, when she really must move therefore, must remember to think over all these details.