that all bath-rooms should be equally warm and sunny of a winter's
morning. One might think, sometimes, that people who build houses had
considered the bath-room after everything else. The plans _seem_
complete, and yet there is a vague conviction that something important
has been left out. They go over them again and again, room by room:
surely everything is as it should be--but the vague conviction still
haunts them, and they have to put it out of their minds by force. The
house is built: they move in, and somebody decides to take a bath. He
starts for the bath-room. Presently his voice is heard, annoyed,
astonished, and finally alarmed, anxiously shouting for the rest of the
family. Together they go over the house from top to bottom. There _is_
no bath-room! Luckily, on the coldest side of the house and far away
from the furnace, there is a small hall bedroom intended for an
emergency. The emergency has arrived: the hall bedroom is called for. In
the shortest possible time the nearest plumber and carpenter make it
over into a home for the tub.
But the ideal bath-room will have a southeasterly exposure, and the
new-risen sun, that saw young Adam bathing in the Garden of Eden, will
look cheerily in and add a sun bath. Place it not too near the guest
chamber, for your guest is not sorry to be met on his way thither, clad
in that gorgeous and becoming robe in which otherwise you will never see
him. And do not clutter it, as some do, with extraneous objects. I
remember a bath-room in which stood incongruously a child's
rocking-horse. It gave the tub a kind of instability: and every time I
looked at the rocking-horse, it _seemed to rock_.
AT HOME IN THE GUEST CHAMBER
ABOUT twenty-five years ago the late F. Marion Crawford came to lecture
in a New England city: he was entertained in one of the most charming
houses, given an afternoon reception, and led to the guest chamber,
where he was left alone to rest until it should be time to appear at the
lecture hall. It was an impressive guest chamber, furnished in rare
colonial mahogany; but the day after, the family looked at it and
suddenly wondered, with misgivings, how Mr. Crawford had managed his
resting. He was an unusually tall, large man. Had he, they asked each
other, rested on the dignified four-poster bed?--and if so, how
considerately he had removed all traces of his little holiday! Or had he
rested on either of the rare old colonial chairs--or both together,
using one for his feet? They were a joy to look at, but hard,
straight-backed, and unpromising resting places for a large literary man
storing energy to deliver a lecture. Had he rested on the floor? It was
a refulgently polished floor, but Mr. Crawford might have softened it by
putting two of the rugs together and rolling up a third for a pillow. If
so, how courteously he had restored the rugs to their normal positions!
The final conclusion was that he had rested sitting bolt upright on one
rare old colonial chair until he could bear it no longer, and then
sitting bolt upright on the other. He never came back; but it was
decided in the family that the next distinguished person left alone to
rest in the guest chamber should at least have a rocking-chair.
At that period guests were not expected to stay in a guest chamber
longer than was necessary to sleep, wash their faces and hands, brush
their hair, and change their clothes. It was, literally, a spare room.
If you came to visit, you were supposed to come because you wished to be
with the family as much as possible, and only the most needful provision
was made for your separate existence. If you were a lady, you _might_
retire for a while in the daytime, and lie down on the bed. But no
gentleman had this privilege: only at bedtime could he go to bed, unless
unexpectedly taken so ill that he had to be put there, and the doctor
sent for. The guest who left behind a suspicion of tobacco smoke in the
lace curtains left also the suspicion that this was no gentleman--still
more, no lady! Stern neatness and tidy utilitarianism characterized the
guest chamber: its double bed must be comfortable, its bureau
commodious, its wash-stand provided with fresh towels and a new cake of
pleasingly scented soap. As for pictures and bric-a-brac--it was a fine
place to store a present without offending the kind-hearted giver.
But this period is passing away: a new thought has come in, that the
guest should feel at home, day _or_ night, in the guest chamber, and
human ingenuity is making the place so comfortable that it may soon be
difficult to tempt guests out of it except at meal-times. Already, in
some cases, it has become necessary to serve breakfast in the guest
chamber. It is a home within a home, an apartment (with breakfast) of
one or more rooms and bath, in which the temporary tenant pays no rent,
lunches and dines with the family, and is expected (following the
apartment hotel custom) to tip the house servants. There is, to use a
shocking but expressive figure, one fly in his ointment--the extra and
superfluous twin bed. He cannot escape from it. In the daytime it is a
constant reminder that he is, after all, a stranger in a strange place;
nor can he deceive himself with the idea that he keeps this extra cot
for company. He _is_ the company. In the night, if he happens to awake
and turn on that side, it surprises and startles him with its suggestion
of a ward in a hospital.
_But do not try to eliminate the extra bed by rolling the twins
together. Sleeping, you will forget. And when, instinctively, you seek
the middle of your luxurious couch, the twins (unless you have thought
to bind them leg to leg with a couple of neckties) will separate, and
you will be rather emphatically reminded of what you have done, by
falling out of bed between them_.
I remember a guest chamber of the earlier regime in which the literary
interests of the guest were catered to by an engraving of the desk at
which Dickens wrote as it looked after Dickens was dead. Nowadays this
is not sufficient. Books there must be, as well as a desk for the guest
to write at while he is still alive, with plenty of stamps and
stationery, ink, pens, pencils, rubbers, calendar, blotters, a bottle of
mucilage, sealing-wax, candle, seal, dictionary, Thesaurus, and Mr.
Bartlett's Book of Quotations. Here, indeed, is a little library in
itself; but the books unfortunately are not such as the average guest is
likely to pick up, with an exclamation of delight, and take to the
fireside. Nor, if we confess the truth, does the guest often take much
pleasure in the _classical_ literature which his host often provides
for him: he prefers his own meditations to those of Marcus Aurelius.
Many persons can not read classical literature; and there is no little
truth in the conclusion of the poet (first published in 'The Mother's
Assistant, The Young Lady's Friend, and Family Manual,' Boston, 1852),--
When Caesar was a conqueror the Giraffe first was tamed,
And for processions long and gay this creature then was famed;
But no domestication kind could make him fit for use,
And Nature's laws for us to thwart is manifest abuse.
Sooner or later some enterprising publisher will bring out the
Guest-Chamber Book-Shelf, or Twenty-five Best Books for the Best
Bedroom. Such a list would, of course, begin with the Bible and
Shakespeare, and could then conscientiously settle down to business
with twenty-three places left. A book of home exercises, illustrated
with photographs of the same persistent gentleman in forty or fifty more
or less ridiculous and amusing positions, is always interesting. A book
of nature essays will hit some guests, and miss others. A book of poems
to digest will sometimes entertain a guest. There should be several
books of short stories by authors who appeal to different publics. And
(I should say) the book you are now reading. Humor and novels might
wisely be omitted. In the one case the guest may yield to a natural
temptation, and retell at dinner, in his own words, the humorous
narrative he has just been reading; and in the other there is a
possibility that the visit will end before the novel. It becomes more
difficult than ever to get the guest out of the guest chamber. As for
magazines, they are desirable--but not too many of them, or the first
glimpse of your guest chamber may unhappily remind the newcomer of the
waiting room at his doctor's or dentist's.
'My chamber,' wrote Washington Irving, describing in the 'Sketch Book' a
contemporary English home, 'was in an old part of the house, the
ponderous furniture of which might have been fabricated in the days of
the giants. The room was panelled, with cornices of heavily carved work,
in which flowers and grotesque faces were strangely intermingled, and a
row of black-looking portraits stared mournfully at me from the walls.
The bed was of rich, though faded damask, with a lofty tester, and stood
in a niche opposite the bow-window.... The moonbeams fell through the
upper part of the casement, partially lighting up the antiquated
apartment.'
It is an odd thing about the guest chamber of the past, as we enter it
by the door of literature, that it was so often gloomy: it is almost as
if there has been a historic sequence of guest chambers: (1) those in
which the guest was afraid to sleep; (2) those in which he was willing
to sleep; (3) those in which he was delighted to sleep. If there was a
ghost on the premises, it was always likely to butt in (as we say
nowadays) in the guest chamber. If there had been a particularly
undesirable ancestor in the family, they always hung his portrait
(probably to get rid of it) over the guest-chamber fireplace, where the
moon could light it, and his sinister eye, _too natural to be painted_,
could watch the guest trying to count himself to sleep. The
guest-chamber chimney was peculiarly constructed: always the wind,
carefully imitating its idea of a lost soul, sighed and wailed and
shrieked in it. The floor was laid with a board that creaked aloud if
but a mouse stepped on it; and the ivy was trained to tap-tap-tap like a
finger on the window-pane. Often the guest chamber was the ghost
chamber: and I, for one, am glad that it is not so any longer. For in
proportion as the guest feels at home in the guest chamber, the ghost
doesn't. And the complete _at-homeyness_--except for that one fly in the
ointment, the extra twin bed--of our modern guest chamber makes the
guest ghost-proof. He goes to bed and sleeps without a thought of
ghosts, just as an English lady visiting an American family put her
shoes outside the guest-chamber door, slept, and took them in again,
with never a thought of her kind host polishing them in the cellar. He
is haunted only by the thought that every minute brings him nearer the
end of his visit.
_For go he must!_ The hour was set, the train selected, even before his
arrival; and, to make assurance doubly sure, another guest was probably
invited. Truly I spoke without thinking when I said there was but one
fly in his ointment: this Inexorable Fact is another and bigger one.
Formerly the length of the visit took care of itself. The guest, always
with the family except when asleep or dressing, reached the human limit
of visiting at about the same time that the family reached the human
limit of having him visit. Now and then an exception caused pain and
embarrassment; but ordinarily they all reached their human limits with
reasonable unanimity. A day came when the guest said he 'must go'
to-morrow: the family said 'must he go' to-morrow--and to-morrow he
went.
It is not so nowadays. The guest being settled in the guest
chamber,--with its private bath and probably, sooner or later, its
kitchenette,--he and the family are merely pleasantly conscious of each
other: he might stay on and on, in a kind of informal and happy
adoption, until death or matrimony intervened and took him away. But the
family, unless they kept on adding to the house, would have no guest
chamber: and other things being equal, constant building is an
annoyance. And so, wisely, the host or hostess specifies in advance the
length of the visit; and the extra little twin bed is a useful symbol
and reminder of its impermanency.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Comforts of Home, by Ralph Bergengren