It is pitiful how helpless we are against the invasions of a new enthusiasm like this—we sober, conservative folk. I still sleep in my bed, in my room, but the satisfaction I used to take in the innocent practice is broken of late by haunting fears that I may not be able to keep it up. My friends will not let me alone.
'Of all things! why don't you sleep out here, on this little upper piazza? Precisely the place! I can't understand how you can ignore such an opportunity.'
'Well, you see,'—my answer was glib at first,—'the piazza overhangs the road, and the milk-wagons go by very early. I don't want to get up at four o'clock every morning.'
'They couldn't see much of you, I should think,'—with a thoughtful measuring glance,—'not more than your toes and the tip of your nose.'
'Oh, thank you, that's quite enough!'
'Well, you might saw off the legs of a cot, to bring it below the railing. Or just a mattress spread on the floor would do very well.'
Just a mattress spread on the floor! That closes the argument. I have no spirit left to prefer any other objections to these dauntless souls, such as the rain (the piazza has no roof). But what would a cold bath be if not distinctly so much to the good in view of the toilet operations of the following morning? There is no course left me but that final one,—which should in honesty have come first,—of damning myself by the hopeless assertion, 'I don't want to sleep out of doors.' This locks the argument, and the barrier stands complete, shutting me off in a world by myself, interrupting the genial flow of sympathetic friendship. But I love my friends. Therefore it follows that I tremble for my further repose in my bed. I fear I shall yet utter midnight sighs on that piazza floor.
Indoors, dear indoors! I would I might plead its cause a little here. Does no one ever pause to reflect that there was never any outdoors at all until indoors was created? The two had a simultaneous birth, but it was an appurtenance of the latter that marked the distinction and gave the names. A little humiliating that might have seemed to any creatures less generous than woods and mountains—to have been here really from the beginning, ages and ages in glorious life, and then to take their first generic name, find their first classification, all of them in a lump together (what a lump!) as the other side of a fragile barrier to a mushroom construction. One wonders that those who exalt the outdoors as everything nowadays, do not find some better title for it than its dooryard term. But those who love the indoors too, though they may smile at the calm presumption of its dubbing the universe, accept the conclusion without any question. Man is after all the creature of creatures, and his life is of first importance. We do not hear that the woodchuck speaks of out-hole, or the bird of out-tree.
Such life of man is an inner thing, intensely inner; its essence lies in its inwardness. It can hardly know itself 'all abroad'; it must needs have devised for itself a shelter as soon as it came to self-consciousness, a refuge, not only from storm and cold but from the distracting variety of the extensive world. Indoors is really an august symbol, a very grave and reverend thing, if we apprehend it rightly. It stands for the separate life of man, apart from (though still a part of, too) the rest of the universe. Take any one room inhabited daily by a person of strong individuality,—how alive it is! How brisk and alert in the very attitudes of the chairs and the pictures on the walls! Or, more happily, how serene and reposeful! Or how matter-of-fact! Morbid and passionate, flippant, austere, boisterous, decorous,—anything, everything a room may be which a human creature may be; and that range, as most of us know, is almost unlimited.
It is hard to understand how any person can fail to respond to the warm appeal of his own abode. Say one has been abroad all day (another term that assumes the house as a starting-point), climbing the mountains, exploring the woods, ravishing eyes and heart with the beauty of the excellent world. Night comes at last, and weariness droops upon the flesh. Enough! Even the spirit's cry finds a pause. Enough, enough! The wide world suddenly spreads so vast that it overwhelms and frightens; there is something pitiless in the reach of the unbounded sky. Then, as fast as they can, the lagging feet make for a point on the hillside where the eyes can command the valley, and swiftly, eagerly flies the glance to one dear accustomed goal. A white house nestled among the trees,—that is all, yet it thrills the heart with a potent summons which mountain-peaks and sunsets do not know. Home! Ah, hurry, then!