It sounds like the tinkle of triviality to descend from the stern business of this present time to write of night-caps: And yet while the discordant battles are puffing their cheeks upon the rumbling bass pipes, it is relief if there be intermingled a small, shrill treble--any slightest squeak outside the general woe.
There was a time when the chief issue of fowl was feather-beds. Some few tallest and straightest feathers, maybe, were used on women's hats, and a few of better nib than common were set aside for poets' use--goose feathers in particular being fashioned properly for the softer flutings, whether of Love or Spring--but in the main the manifest destiny of a feather was a feather-bed.
In those days it was not enough that you plunged to the chin in this hot swarm of feathers, for discretion, in an attempt to ward off from you all snuffling rheums, coughings, hackings and other fleshly ills, required you before kicking off the final slippers to shut the windows against what were believed to be the dank humors of the night. Nor was this enough. You slept, of course, in a four-post bed; and the curtains had to be pulled together beyond the peradventure of a cranny. Then as a last prophylaxis you put on a night-cap. Mr. Pickwick's was tied under the chin like a sunbonnet and the cords dangled against his chest, but this was a matter of taste. It was behind such triple rampart that you slept, and were adjudged safe from the foul contagion of the dark. Consequently your bed was not exactly like a little boat. Rather it was like a Pullman sleeper, which, as you will remember, was invented early in the nineteenth century and stands as a monument to its wisdom.
I have marveled at the ease with which Othello strangled Desdemona. Further thought gives it explanation. The poor girl was half suffocated before he laid hands on her. I find also a solution of Macbeth's enigmatic speech, "Wicked dreams abuse the curtain'd sleep." Any dream that could get at you through the circumvallation of glass, brocade, cotton and feathers could be no better than a quadruplicated house-breaker, compounded out of desperate villainies.
Reader, have you ever purchased a pair of pajamas in London? This is homely stuff I write, yet there's pathos in it. That jaunty air betokens the beginning of your search before question and reiteration have dulled your spirits. Later, there will be less sparkle in your eye. What! Do not the English wear pajamas? Does not the sex that is bifurcated by day keep by night to its manly bifurcation? Is not each separate leg swathed in complete divorcement from its fellow? Or, womanish, do they rest in the common dormitory of a shirt _de nuit_? The Englishman _does_ wear pajamas, but the word with him takes on an Icelandic meaning. They are built to the prescription of an Esquimo. They are woolly, fuzzy and the width of a finger thick. If I were a night-watchman, "doom'd for a certain term to walk the night," I should insist on English pajamas to keep me awake. If Saint Sebastian, who, I take it, wore sackcloth for the glory of his soul, could have lighted on the pair of pajamas that I bought on Oxford Circus, his halo would have burned the brighter.
Just how the feathery and billowy nights of our great-grandparents were changed into the present is too deep for explanation. Perhaps Annie left a door or window open--such neglect fitting with her other heedlessness--and notwithstanding this means of entry, it was found in the morning that no sprite or ooph had got in to pinch the noses of the sleepers. At least, there was no evidence of such a visitation, unless the snoring that abounded all the night did proceed from the pinching of the nose (the nasal orifice being so clamped betwixt the forefinger and the thumb of these devilish sprites that the breath was denied its proper channel). Unless snoring was so caused, it is clear that no ooph had clambered through the window.
Or perhaps some brave man--a brother to him who first ate an oyster--put up the window out of bravado to snap thereby his fingers at the forms of darkness, and being found whole and without blemish or mark of witch upon his throat and without catarrhal snuffling in his nose, of a consequence the harsh opinion against the night softened.
Or maybe some younger woman threw up her window to listen to the slim tenor of moonlight passion with such strumming business as accompanied--tinkling of cithern or mandolin--and so with chin in hand, she sighed her soul abroad, to the result that the closing was forgotten. It is like enough that her dreams were all the sweeter for the breeze that blew across her bed--loaded with the rhythmic memory of the words she had heard within the night.
It was vanity killed the night-cap. What aldermanic man would risk the chance of seeing himself in the mirror? What judge, peruked by day, could so contain his learned locks? What male with waxed moustachios, or with limpest beard, or chin new-reaped would put his ears in such a compress? You will recall how Mr. Pickwick snatched his off when he found the lady in the curl papers in his room. His round face showed red with shame against the dusky bed-curtains, like the sun peering through the fog.
As for bed-curtains, they served the intrigue of at least five generations of novelists from Fielding onward. There was not a rogue's tale of the eighteenth century complete without them. The wrong persons were always being pinned up inside them. The cause of such confusion started in the tap, too much negus or an over-drop of pineapple rum with a lemon in it or a potent drink whose name I have forgotten that was always ordered "and make it luke, my dear." Then, after such evening, a turn to the left instead of right, a wrong counting of doors along the passage, the jiggling of bed-curtains, screams and consternation. It is one of the seven original plots. Except for clothes-closets, screens and bed-curtains, Sterne must have gone out of the novel business, Sheridan have lost fecundity and Dryden starved in a garret. But the moths got into their red brocade at last and a pretty meal they made.
A sleeping porch is the symbol of the friendly truce between man and the material universe. The world itself and the void spaces of its wanderings, together with the elements of our celestial neighborhood, have been viewed by man with dark suspicion, with rather a squint-eyed prejudice. Let's take a single case! Winds for a long time have borne bad reputations--except such anemic collateral as are called zephyrs--but winds, properly speaking, which are big and strong enough to have rough chins and beards coming, have been looked upon as roustabouts. What was mere humor in their behavior has been set down to mischief. If a wind in playfulness does but shake a casement, or if in frolic it scatters the ashes across the hearth, or if in liveliness it swishes you as you turn a corner and drives you aslant across the street, is it right that you set your tongue to gossip and judge it a son of Belial?
There are persons also--but such sleep indoors--in whose ears the wind whistles only gloomy tunes. Or if it rise to shrill piping, it rouses only a fear of chimneys. Thus in both high pitch and low there is fear in the hearing of it. Into their faces will come a kind of God-help-the-poor-sailors-in-the-channel look, as in a melodrama when the paper snowstorm is at its worst and the wind machine is straining at its straps. One would think that they were afraid the old earth itself might be buffeted off its course and fall afoul of neighboring planets.
But behold the man whose custom is to sleep upon a porch! At what slightest hint--the night being yet young, with scarce three yawns gone round--does he shut his book and screen the fire! With what speed he bolts the door and puts out the downstairs lights, lest callers catch him in the business! How briskly does he mount the stairs with fingers already on the buttons! Then with what scattering of garments he makes him ready, as though his explosive speed had blown him all to pieces and lodged him about the room!
Then behold him--such general amputation not having proved fatal--advancing to the door muffled like a monk! There is a slippered flight. He dives beneath the covers. (I draw you a winter picture.) You will see no more of him now than the tip of his nose, rising like a little AEtna from the waves.
But does _he_ fear the wind as it fumbles around the porch and plays like a kitten with the awning cords? Bless you, he has become a playmate of the children of the night--the swaying branches, the stars, the swirl of leaves--all the romping children of the night. And if there was any fear at all within the darkness, it has gone to sulk behind the mountains.
But the wind sings a sleepy song and the game's too short. Then the wind goes round and round the house looking for the leaves--for the wind is a bit of a nursemaid--and wherever it finds them it tucks them in, under fences and up against cellar windows where they will be safe until morning. Then it goes off on other business, for there are other streets in town and a great many leaves to be attended to.
But the fellow with the periscopic nose above the covers lies on his back beneath the stars, and contemplation journeys to him from the wide spaces of the night.
[The end]
Charles S. Brooks's essay: Decline Of Night-Caps