A BACHELOR'S ROOM.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XL, Issue 12278, 23 May 1903, Page 1 (Supplement)

A BACHELOR'S ROOM.

[Br sujivEron.]

If one could only look at life through the mind of a snail, a comparative study of snail shells would be an extraordinarily interesting thing. Man leaves his character impressed on his dwelling, but it is not a part, of him in the same way as the snail's shell. And if you can tell at a glance on entering a man's room what are his tastes—sport, art, natural history, literature—think how deeply would be imprinted on his shell the habits 01 the sporting snail, the artistic snail, the racing snail, etc.

j Next to the snail in this particular comes ! perhaps the bachelor (male). 1 cannot an- ; sver for the girl bachelor for want oi' ex- : perience, but it is a fatal drawback to ; marriage, in the eyes of many of us that from this point of view it appears to wipe ; out all true character, all originality. Go into a bachelor's room, and you cannot fail to be interested and to cany away i some impression ot its inhabitant, though ! you have never seen him. Go into a few i of the thousands of married homes (the I country is covered with them) and you ; will be saddened, or at any rate bored. I The only thing you can expect to rind ; without fail under the bachelor roof is a. ; representation in one or other form of art ' of the most beautiful thing on earth, the female figure. In the married man's bestparlour you will invariably find the same marble clock on the mantelpiece, the same enlarged photograph-! of his mother-in-law or of himself (a pathetic reminder that he still exists as a separate personality), the same plush brackets, the same basket tables, the same bent-wood chairs, handpainted mirrors, lace window curtains, etc., with the same deathly air of unnatural cleanness brooding over all. It is a heavy price that a man pays in exchanging the shadow for the reality. That is why, standing on the threshold of the great transformation, a certain feeling of sadness creeps over you, on feeling how much of yourself you are. leaving behind. That is why lam moved to record a last impression, a last farewell to my old bachelor room. . It was indeed a part of me. Everyone knows how a, change to a new country or a new life seems literally to turn over a new leaf in one's nature. For a tune you really think the old self is left behind, and you can start fair, and at last fulfil your best aspirations. Alas, the old self all too soon begins stealthily to assert itself. Even so, but much more pleasantly, when I came back to my old room after ah absence, a real part of my personality seemed to meet me as I opened the door and entered. I might almost imagine it seated waiting for me in the old armchair; I can hear the wicker-work creak as it. springs up to greet me, and I can remember the thrill of pleasure as I gawd round the familiar walls, and recognised my full, united self again— " Look where your life broke off from mine. How fresh the splinters keep, and fine, Only a touch, and we combine." Only for five years have I been fitting myself to my room—building my shell round me— every phase of my life has been concentrated within these four walls, and the bedroom which opens out of and is practically a part of it. Now I shall dissipate my experience through half a dozen rooms, and not one of them will possess a tithe of the interest of this. When I have slept the night through in one, I shall rise and leave it, and it is forgotten for the day. I shall eat in the dining-room, and desert it with the smell of the dishes. And the best parlour will be reserved for certain evenings which I anticipate with mingled feelings, when I and my fellow oreatures will meet together to make the best of of one another for a time. As for the kitchen, if I ever enter it I shall be like a traveller in astrange land. 1 am not speaking of my single room merely -with an eye to the comfort or convenience of its arrangement. The fact that sitting in one easy chair I can stretch out.my hand and put a saucepan on the fire, make myself a cup of tea., reach down a novel from the bookcase, write a letter, or throw my boots into their proper place in the bedroom—all this might of itself have a charm to the idle man. But this is of small account to me beside the satisfaction of including all the substance of my life, all that I need, use, or even wish for, in a single glance. Some men desire to extend their interests beyond the horizon, to boast that the sun never sets on. their possessions. It seem to me that there may be as much pleasure and as much sense in this quintessence of ownership, as much ground for pride in the fact that I can illuminate my property by the light of a single candle. No one would smile if I were referring to a single priceless diamond.

Even cookery and housework loses some of its drudgery when it is rubbing shoulders with literature and the other arts. Do you remember, G , that autumn evening when we were sitting by the stove waiting for the kettle to boil for tea, which was ready prepared on the table. We had dropped into some talk of Shakespere, and I had reached down my old copy, and was in the middle of a "passage of " Henry the Fifth," by the light of the fire —I think it was that scene where the king in disguise moves among the camp fires the night before the battle and accepts the challenge from that most excellent English grumbler, John Bates. I don't know whether I had convinced you that Shakespere was a modem writer, when a confused noise at the door made us both spring up in a hurry. . We were just in time to see the chief part of our meal, a cold end of mutton, disappearing out of the room in the company of two cats. It was this —perhaps hardly a fair illustration of my point —that made us invest in the wire covers. You cannot reform cats.

There is indeed hardly a detail of the furniture that has not its history as well as its use, from a frying-pan to an engraving. Take that 'very article which I only quoted as standing at the lowest end of the scale of dignitythough there is nothing more useful and honourable in its way than a frying-pan. I hope, G , you have not forgotten that sale of second-hand furniture which seemed to be sent providentially for our needs. It was held in the Town Hall,, and overflowed under the big willow tree outside, Where most of our buying was done. Inside were the suites "of chairs and the gilt-edged looking-glasses and the brass bedsteads and the blue and pink glass vases, which we knew were not for us. But wc made some wonderful bargains among the rustier articles which had to take their chance of the weather outside. It seemed that Providence or the auctioneer looked on us with favoui. We had just, if you remember, secured a. special cheap lot, consisting of three fry-ing-pans, a gridiron, a hammer and a baby's bottlethe last thrown in facetiously by the auctioneer vr'hcn he saw that we were bidding—when we were . approached by a little, old man with a white and flowing beard, who asked us in a cracked voice, peering eagerly up in our faces: ''How—how—how much for the little frying-pan?" We had noticed the old fellow investing in several cheap odds and ends of furniture, and in the midst of our own good luck we feU the pathos of the old man starting housekeeping at the other end of life. .So we offered the frying-pan in good fellowship as a gift, but. he refused to take it, and we finally accepted the nominal sum of threepence. It was not till afterwards that we found our pity had been wasted. The old man was an eccentric miser, who frequented sales and bought up all the old frying-pans and billies, ol which he had a collection that filled several sheds. Otherwise the memory of that sale is clouded only by the loss, of the dresser. We were separated in the crowd, each waited for the other to bid, and the dresser went to a third party lor ten ,

shillings. We. never quite forgave each other or ourselves, and the recoftectiop is still painful. But h I were to recall the history of every piece in the room the list would be endless. Indeed, I should have to begin with the room itself, for the house when we took it was a shell, consisting of studs and weatheibaauls, and it is a fact that we could see the glow of sunset right through the building, like the phantom ship of the " Ancient Mariner." But we held on until those keen winter nights began, when blankets rati short and even the fire seemed to surrender to the icy draughts. Then we shifted to the township for a week until the lining was finished,

I forget whether it was economy pr a right sense of the decorative art that made us prefer plain rimu boards to some foolish wall-paper. i" never regretted it. Good rimu timber, with a few coats of oil to give warmth and mellowness to its redbrown grain, is as fitting a wall-decora-tion as any artist could design. Perhaps the day will come when colonial builders will recognise the beauty of plain woodpanelling and the futile ugliness of cheap paper. In these remoter parts of the Empire we are still lingering in the era of earlv Victorian decorative art. «

For a. time the walls remained almost bare. except for the ornament of pot-lids and plates, with a few photographs and pictures from illustrated papers pinned up until a wandering breeze, or some other accident tore them down. But at last came those cases from the Old Country, bringing a. rich cargo of books and pictures and memories and associations too long to record here. Shelves were soon knocked out of old cases, but the.v never seemed sufficient, and the books overflowed oil to the floor, the table, even among the plates and saucepans. Strangely familiar and "outlandish"' scenes looked down from the walls. Scraps of English countryside , the elm hedgerows, and far blue downs of the Thames Valley, the light-ning-struck oak, the misty, wooded hollows, and the flock of sheep seen in a Derbyshire lane. There Herring's white horse peers round from the dark recesses of 3 great English barn, where pigs and ducks stray in the, corners, and pigeons roost on the huge beams. Along the. mantelpiece are huddled and crowded photographs of the friends and acquaintances of many years, mingled with seed packets, tobacco tins, pipes, and a few dried-up flowers, relics of the last lady visitor who tried to make my room pretty. If is a long time since 1 tried to clear my mantelpiece of rubbish—one of those tasks one postpones until it seems an impossibility. Now it has something of the interest of the prehistoric cave floor to the geologist; some day I shall turn up the Tost treasures of a past and forgotten age. Above it haugs the bishop, stiff and stately in his robes and mitre, next to the college he founded some five hundred years ago. He has looked gravely down on many a scene of good-fellowship, not of revelry, and has been the silent spectator of comedies and conversations innumerable.

I hardly know whether it is the prejudice of affection that makes me think this room a not unfitting casket, so to speak, of the many strange stories that have been told here, and friendly confidences exchanged. Its books give it an air of gravity and repose—those records of human wisdom and sympathy stored away on cramped pages—its homely kitchen furniture seems to laugh at any pretence of social insincerity or humbug; its bare wooden walls and floor are austerely remote from carelessness or excess. And yet, to me, it has the warmth and geniality of a room that is much lived in, and is -alive with human associations and seasoned with fun and laughter. It is a great claim to make for a room, and yet looking back over the past few years the faces of many friends rise up to bear witness in the armchair across the hearth. I hear W , the sailer, telling his tale of shipwreck and suffering in "perilous seas;" the soldier, now a farmer again, talking of strange meetings and chances on the veldt and in the wild valleys of South Africa; the journalist with his stories of life below the surface in great cities, of earthquake, and war, and wanderings ; 1 hear men who have travelled in all parts of the world, bringing news of home, talk of strange and familiar faces, of books, life, and experience, farming and philosophy, history and horses. I think some of them will still remember those pleasant meals, where we' laid the table and prepared the food ourselves before we sat down to enjoy it. 1 call ;rpon you, R , to bear witness to that excellent cold round of beef, and the fried sausages, if the flesh-pots of matrimony have not made you forgetful. And afterwards— we cleared away the dishes and made all clean and snug before we lighted our pipes and began the talk, winter nights when we had to pile on wood and coal still the stove was nearly red-hot, or summer evenings on the verandah watching the moon drop down behind the forested hills.

Good-bye to you, old room! Let me" take a last, flying glimpse with my mind's eye of yourself and your contents. The shining cups of every shape and colour hanging from the loaded shelves in one corner, and the array of saucepans below; the army of tins and bottles that balance them on the other side of the range; the books that overflow the shelves, and are heaped everywhere, along with papers, letters, and miscellaneous lumber; the pictures, or, even better, the glimpses of the broad, open country through the windows on each side, the spreading plain, the groups of dark pines, and the forestcrested ranges far away. Upright in the corner stands the big green riddle-case, and the riddle, with its shining varnish nearly matching the ruddy colour of the? walls, is leaning against the table by a pile of music, ready to my hand. Many melodies and discords have been woven into the fibre of these four walls.

There, too, hangs the loud-ticking brass clock, whose scarred face has been my only companion so many silent winter evenings. 1 say good-bye, and vet lam parting with none of these old" friends, only that the old harmony is dislocated and dissolved ,and henceforward we are to fulfil new functions and new relations to each other.