The House of All Sorts (10 page)

“You have never been back since?”

“No.”

She saw me thinking.

“How the first language one hears sticks to the tongue!” she remarked. “It's queer, isn't it?”

“Very!”

As far as I was concerned, I let her remain the brave little Belgian widow with a son fighting on our side, but the son came back to his mother, returned without thanks from training camp, a schoolboy who had lied about his age and broken down under training. Now the widow added to her pose, “Belgian refugee widow with a war-broken son.”

Tonics and nourishing dishes to build Herb up were now her chief topic of conversation with her tenant neighbours. Daily, at a quarter to twelve, one or the other of us could expect a tap on our door and…would we lend the mother of Herb a cup of rice, or macaroni, or tapioca, an egg for his “nog” or half a loaf. The baker was always missing her, or the milkman forgot. We got sick of her borrowings and bobbed below the windows when she passed up the stair, but she was a patient knocker and kept on till something on the gas stove began to burn and the hider was obliged to come from hiding. She never dreamed of returning her borrowings. The husbands declared they had had enough. They were not going to support her. She appeared very comfortably off, took in all the shows, dressed well, though too youthfully.

Having no husband to protest I became the victim of all her borrowings, and the inroad on my rice and tapioca and macaroni became so heavy my pantry gave up keeping them.

When the “flu” epidemic came along, Herb sneezed twice. His mother knew he had it, shut him in his bedroom, poking cups of gruel in at the door and going quickly away. She told every one Herb had “flu” and she knew she was getting it from nursing him, but Herb had not got “flu” and, after a day or two, was out again. Then the widow told every one she had contracted “flu” from Herb. She hauled the bed from her room out into the middle of the studio before the open fire and lay there in state, done up in fancy bed-jackets, smoking innumerable cigarettes and entertaining anybody whom she could persuade to visit. For six weeks she lay there for she said it was dangerous to get out of bed for six weeks if you had had “flu.” The wretched Herbert came to me wailing for help.

“Get mother up,” he pleaded. “Make her take her bed out of the studio; make her open the windows.”

“How can I, Herbert? She has rented the flat.”

“Do something,” he besought. “Burn the house down—only get Mother out of bed.”

But she stayed her full six weeks in bed. When she saw that people recognized her sham and did not visit her any more she got up—well.

IT WAS A YEAR
of weddings. The widow took a tremendous interest in them, sending Herb to borrow one or another of my tenants' newspapers before they were up in the morning to find out who was marrying. She attended all the church weddings, squeezing in as a guest.

“You never know who it will be next,” she giggled, sparkling her eyes coyly, and running from flat to flat telling the details of the weddings.

One day she hung her head and said, “Guess.” Several of us happened to be together.

“Guess what?”

“Who the next bride is to be?”

“You!” joked an old lady.

The widow drooped her head and simpered, “How
did
you guess?”

HE WAS A FRIEND
of Herbert's and “coming home very soon,” so she told us.

The house got a second shock when from somewhere the widow produced the most terrible old woman whom she introduced as “My mother, Mrs. Dingham—come to stay with me till after the wedding.”

Mrs. Dingham went around the house in the most disgusting, ragged and dirty garments. Her upper part was clothed in a black sateen dressing sacque with which she wore a purple quilted petticoat. Her false teeth and hair “additions” lay upon the studio table except in the afternoons when she went out to assist the widow to buy her trousseau. Then she was elegant. Herb's expression was exasperated when he looked across the table and saw the teeth, the tin crimpers that caught her scant hair to her pink scalp. The House of All Sorts was shamed at having such a repulsive old witch scuttling up and down the stairs and her hooked nose poking over the verandah rail whenever there was a footstep on the stair. It was a relief when she put all her “additions” on and went off to shop.

I wanted my studio back; I was homesick for it, besides I knew if I did not rescue it soon it would be beyond cleaning. Two years of the widow's occupancy had about ruined everything in it. When I heard that Herb and the old mother were to keep house there during the honeymoon, while the bridegroom was taking some six weeks' course in Seattle, I made up my mind.

THE GROOM CAME
—he was only a year or two older than Herb. The boys had been chums at school. He was good-looking with a gentle, sad, sad face, like a creature trapped. She delighted to show him off and you could see that when she did so they bit him to the bone, those steel teeth that had caught him. On one point he was firm, if there was to be a wedding at all it was to be a very quiet one. In everything Herb was with his friend, not his mother.

THEY WERE MARRIED
. After the ceremony the old woman and daughter rushed upstairs to the studio. Herb and the groom came slowly after. The bride's silly young fixings fluttered back over their heads, and the old woman's cackle filled the garden as they swept up the stair. They had a feast in the studio to which I was not invited. I had raised the rent and they were going—violently indignant with me.

SOMETIMES A WORD
or two in Mrs. Pillcrest's poems jingled. More occasionally a couple of words made sense. They flowed from her lips in a sing-song gurgle, spinning like pennies, and slapping down dead.

Mrs. Pillcrest was a small, spare woman with opaque blue eyes. While the poems were tinkling out of one corner of her mouth a cigarette was burning in the other. The poems were about the stars, maternity, love, living and the innocence of childhood. (Her daughter of ten and her son aged seven cursed like troopers. The first time I saw the children they were busy giving each other black eyes at my front gate while their mother was making arrangements about the flat and poeming for me.)

I said, “I do not take children.”

“Canadian children…I can
quite
understand…
my
children are
English
!”

“I prefer them Canadian.”

“Really!” Her eye-brows took a scoot right up under her hat. She said, “Pardon,” lit a cigarette from the stump of the last, sank into the nearest chair and burst into jingles!

I do not know why I accepted the Pillcrests, but there I was, putting in extra cots for the children—settling them in before I knew it.

The girl was impossible. They sent her away to friends.

On taking possession of the flat, Mrs. Pillcrest went immediately to bed leaving the boy of seven to do the cooking, washing and housework. The complete depletion of hot water and perpetual smell of burning sent me down to investigate.

Mrs. Pillcrest lay in a daze of poetry and tobacco smoke. The sheets (mine) were punctured lavishly with little brown-edged holes. It seemed necessary for her to gesticulate with lighted cigarette as she “poemed.”

She said, “It is lovely of you to come,” and immediately made a poem about it. In the middle there was a loud stumping up the steps, and I saw Mr. Pillcrest for the first time.

He was a soldier. Twice a week the Canadian army went to pot while Dombey Pillcrest came home to visit his family. He was an ugly, beefy creature dressed in ill-fitting khaki, his neck stuck up like a hydrant out of a brown boulevard.

Poems would not “make” on Mr. Pillcrest, so Mrs. Pillcrest made them out of other things and basted him with them. He slumped into the biggest chair in the flat, and allowed the gravy of trickling poems to soothe his training-camp and domestic friction—as stroking soothes a cat.

Mrs. Pillcrest told me about their love-making. She said, “My people owned one of those magnificent English estates—hunting—green-houses—crested plate—Spode—everything! I came to visit cousins in Canada, have a gay time, bringing along trunks of ball dresses and pretty things. I met Dombey Pillcrest…”

She took the cigarette from her lips, threw it away. Her hands always trembled—her voice had a pebbly rattle like sea running out over a stony beach.

“Dombey told me about his prairie farm; the poetry of its endless rolling appealed, sunsets, waving wheat! We were married. Some of the family plate, the Spode and linen came out from home for my house.

“We went to Dombey's farm…I did not know it would be like that…too big…poems would not come…space drowned everything!

“The man who did the outside, the woman who did the inside work kept the place going for a while… babies came…I began to write poems again—our help left—I had my babies and Dombey!”

She poemed to the babies. All her poems were no more than baby talk—now she had an audience…The blue-eyed creatures lying in their cradle watched her lips, and cooed back.

As the children grew older they got bored by Mother's poems and by hunger. They ran away when she poemed. It hurt her that the children would not listen.

She had another bitter disappointment on that farm. “I did so want to ‘lift' the harvesters! When they came to thresh was my chance. I was determined they should have something different, something refined. For
once
they should see the
real thing
, eat off Limoges, use crested plate! I put flowers on the table, fine linen; I wrote a little poem for each place. The great brown, hungry men burst into the room—staggered back—most touching!…none of the bestial gorging you see among the lower classes. They stared; they ate little. Not one of them looked at a poem. If you believe
it, they asked the gang foreman to request ‘food, not frills' next day. Ruffians! Canadians, my dear!”

“I am Canadian,” I said.

“
My deear!
I supposed you were English!”

“
ONE DAY DOMBEY
said, ‘Our money is finished. We cannot hire help; we must leave the farm. You cannot work, darling!'”

They scraped up the broken implements and lean cows and had a sale. Mrs. Pillcrest sat on a broken harrow in the field and made a poem during the sale. Mr. Pillcrest wandered about, dazed. The undernourished, over-accented children got in everybody's way. When it was over, the Pillcrests came out west and hunted round to find the most English-accented spot so that their children should not be contaminated by Canada. That was Duncan, B.C., of course. War came; Dombey joined up. Here they were in my flat.

“I had
so
hoped that you were English, my dear!”

“Well, I'm
not
.” Mrs. Pillcrest moaned at my tone.

POTATO-PARING SEEMED
to be specially inspiring for Mrs. Pillcrest. She liked to do it at the back door of her flat, looking across my garden, poeming as she pared. She always wore a purple chiffon scarf about her throat; it had long floating tails that wound round the knife and got stabbed into holes. The thick parings went slap, slap on the boards of the verandah. The peeled flesh of the potatoes was purpled by the scarf while poems rolled out over my garden.

“Have you ever published your poems, Mrs. Pillcrest?”

“I do not write my poems. They spring direct from some hidden source, never yet located, a joyous—joyous source!”

“Curse you, Mother! Come get dinner, instead of blabbing that stuff!”

“Son—my beloved son!” Mrs. Pillcrest said, and kissed the boy's scowling face.

The Pillcrests were not with me very long because Mr. Pillcrest's training camp was moved.

Just as their time was up—the flat already re-let—Mrs. Pillcrest and son disappeared. Time went on, the new tenant was fussing for possession. After five days elapsed without sign or sound, I climbed a ladder and looked through the windows. Everything was in the greatest confusion.

I rang the barracks. “Mr. Pillcrest? Mrs. Pillcrest's tenancy expired five days ago.”

“Yes? Oh, ah—Mrs. Pillcrest is visiting; she will doubtless be returning soon.”

“But the flat—the new tenant is waiting…” I found myself talking over a dead wire.

She tripped home sparkling with poems.

“Your rent was up five days ago, Mrs. Pillcrest.”

“Really! Well, well! Shall I pay five days extra?” (With some rhyme about “honey,” “money” and “funny.”) My patience was done—“Nothing funny about it! It is not business!”

Taut with fury Mrs. Pillcrest's poem strangled. “Business! Kindly remember, Landlady, Mr. Pillcrest and I do
not belong to that class
.”

“That is evident, but at six tonight I have promised the key to the waiting tenant!
That
is business.”

PERHAPS THE MOST
awkward situation for the inexperienced young landlady was how to deal with “unweds.” Every apartment house gets them. They are often undiscernible, even to the experienced. One learns in time to catch on to little indications…

The supposed husband makes all arrangements, the supposed wife approving of everything. A woman who does not nose into the domestic arrangements of the place she is going to occupy gives the first hint, for a woman indifferent to the heating, furnishing, plumbing, cooking utensils of her home is not wifely.

MY FIRST EXPERIENCE
of this sort was with a very prepossessing couple. Their tenancy was secured by an excessively moral old lady living in Lower West. I was out when the couple came seeking. The old lady next door showed them over. She was delighted at having made so good a “let” for me. Within a week it was put to me by the renters of the other suites, “Them or us?” The couple left.