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.