The House of All Sorts (4 page)

Astonished they asked, “Who would it be?”

“My husband—I suppose he has forgotten me again—a bachelor for so long he forgets that he has a wife. He promised to take me to the Races today—Oh, dear!”

Going into her flat she slammed the door and melted into negligée again.

He was a horrid man, but I too would have tried to forget a wife like that. Negligée, bad cooking, dirty house!

They had leased my flat for six months. Three days before the fourth month was up, the man said to me casually,

“We leave here on the first.”

“Your lease?” I replied.

“Lease!” He laughed in my face. “Leases are not worth their ink. Prevent a landlady from turning you out, that's all.”

I consulted the lawyer who admitted that leases were all in favour of the tenant. He asked, “Who have you got there?” I told him.

“I know that outfit. Get 'em out. Make 'em go in the three days' notice they gave you. Tell them if they don't vacate on the dot they must pay another full month. Not one day over the three, mind you, or a full month's rental!”

When I told the couple what the lawyer had said they were very angry, declaring that they could not move in three days' time, but that they would not pay for overtime.

“All right,” I said. “Then the lawyer…”

They knew the lawyer personally and started to pack violently.

The bride and groom had furnished their own flat—garish newness, heavily varnished, no nearer to being their own than one down payment, less near, in fact, as the instalments were overdue. Store vans came and took the furniture back. The woman left in a cab with a couple of suitcases. The forwarding address she left
was that of her mother's home. The man left a separate forwarding address. His was a hotel.

TO DESCRIBE THE
cleaning of that flat would be impossible. As a parting niceness the woman hurled a pot of soup—meat, vegetables and grease—down the kitchen sink. She said, “You hurried our moving,” and shrugged.

The soup required a plumber.

THIS FIRST TENANT
nearly discouraged me with landladying. I consulted an experienced person. She said, “In time you will learn to make yourself hard, hard!”

POETICAL EXTRAVAGANCE
over “pearly dew and daybreak” does not ring true when that most infernal of inventions, the alarm clock, wrenches you from sleep, rips a startled heart from your middle and tosses it on to an angry tongue, to make ugly splutterings not complimentary to the new morning; down upon you spills cold shiveriness—a new day's responsibilities have come.

To part from pillow and blanket is like bidding goodbye to all your relatives suddenly smitten with plague.

The attic window gaped into empty black. No moon, no sun, no street lamps. Trees, houses, telephone poles muddled together and out in that muddle of blank perhaps one or two half-hearted kitchen lights morosely blinking. Sun had not begun.

The long outside stair, from flat to basement, never creaked so loudly as just before dawn. No matter how I tiptoed, every tread snapped, “Ik!”

Punk, the house dog, walked beside me step by step, too sleepy to bounce.

Flashlights had not been invented. My arms threshed the black of the basement passage for the light bulb. Cold and grim sat that malevolent brute the furnace, greedy, bottomless—its
grate bars clenched over clinkers which no shaker could dislodge. I was obliged to thrust head and shoulders through the furnace door. I loathed its black, the smell of soot. I was sure one day I should stick. I pictured the humiliation of being hauled out by the shoes. Could I ever again be a firm dignified landlady after being pulled like that from a furnace mouth?

I could hear tenants still sleeping—the house must be warm for them to wake to…

“WOO, WOO!” A
tiny black hand drew the monkey's box curtain back. “Woo, Woo!” A little black face enveloped in yawn peeped out. One leg stretched, then the other. “Woo.” She crept from her box to feel if her special pipe was warm, patted approvingly, flattened her tummy to the heat. The cat came, shaking sleep out of her fur. Crackle, crackle!—the fire was burning. Basement windows were now squares of blue-grey dawn.

Carrying a bucket of ashes in each hand I went into the garden, feeling like an anchor dropped overboard. Everything was so coldly wet, I so heavy. Dawn was warming the eastern sky just a little. The Bobbies were champing for liberty. They had heard my step. The warmth of their loving did for the garden what the furnace was doing for the house.

Circled by a whirl of dogs I began to live the day.

We raced for Beacon Hill, pausing when we reached its top. From here I could see my house chimney—mine. There
is
possessive joy, and anyway the alarm clock would not rouse me from sleep for another twenty-three hours—might as well be happy!

Up came the sun, and drank the dew.

FROM THE MOMENT
key and rent exchanged hands a subtle change took place in the attitude of renter towards owner.

The tenant was obviously anxious to get you out, once the flat was hers. She might have known, silly thing, that you wanted to be out—before she began to re-arrange things.

Bump, bump, bump! It would never do to let a landlady think her taste and arrangement were yours. Particularly women with husbands made it their business to have the man exchange every piece of furniture with every other. When they left you had to get some one to move them all back into place. When once they had paid and called it “
my
flat” they were always asking for this or that additional furniture or privilege.

THERE WAS THE
tenant who came singing up my long stair and handed in the rent with a pleasant smile. It was folded in a clean envelope so that the raw money was not handled between you. You felt him satisfied with his money's worth. Perhaps he did change his furniture about, just a little, but only enough to make it home him. Every hen likes to scrape the straw around her nest, making it different from every other hen's. There was the pompous
person who came holding a roll of bills patronizingly as if he were handing you a tip. There was the stingy one, parting hardly with his cash, fishing the hot tarnished silver and dirty bills from the depths of a trouser pocket and counting them lingeringly, grudgingly, into your palm. There was the rent dodger who always forgot rent date. There was every kind of payer. But most renters seemed to regard rent as an unfairness—was not the earth the Lord's? Just so, but who pays the taxes?

OUR DISTRICT WAS
much too genteel to settle disagreements by a black eye or vituperation. Troubles were rushed upstairs to the landlady. I wished my tenants would emulate my gas stove. In proud metallic lettering she proclaimed herself “Direct action” and lived up to it.

How bothersome it was having Mrs. Lemoyne mince up my stair to inform on Mrs. FitzJohn; having to run down the long stair, round the house and carry the complaint to Mrs. FitzJohn, take the retort back to Mrs. Lemoyne and return the ultimatum—upping and downing until I was tired! Then, often, to find that there was no trouble between the two ladies at all. The whole affair was a fix-up, to convey some veiled complaint against my house or against me, to have the complainer send a sweet message to the complained-of: “Don't give the matter another thought, my dear. It is really of no consequence at all,” and from my window see the ladies smiling, whispering, nodding in the direction of my flat. I would have liked better an honest pig-sow who projected her great grunt from the depths of her pen right into one's face.

My sisters, who lived round the corner from the House of All Sorts, watched my landladying with disapproval, always siding with the tenant and considering my “grunt” similes most unrefined. But they did not have to be landladies.

HIS HAND TREMBLED
—so did his voice.

“You will leave the door of your flat unlocked tonight? So that I could reach the 'phone?”

“Certainly.”

He went to the door, stood there, clinging to the knob as if he must hold on to something.

“Beautiful night,” he said and all the while he was turning up his coat collar because of the storming rain outside. He went into the night. I closed the door; the knob was wet with the sweat of his hand.

Bump, bump, bump, and a curse. I ran out and looked over the rail. He was rubbing his shins.

“That pesky cat—I trod on her—” he cursed again. He loved that cat. I heard him for half an hour calling among the wet bushes. “Puss, Puss, poor Puss.” Maybe that mother cat knew his mind needed to be kept busy and was hiding.

I was just turning in when he came again.

“She's all right.”

“You have had word? I am so glad—”

“The cat, I mean,” he said, glowering at me. “She was not hurt when I trod on her—shan't sleep tonight—not one wink, but if I should not hear your 'phone—would you call me?—leave your window open so I shall hear the ring?”

“All right, I'll call you; I am sure to hear if you don't.”

“Thanks, awfully.”

The telephone did not ring. In the morning he looked worse.

He came up and sat by the 'phone, scowling at the instrument as if it were to blame. At last he found courage to ring the hospital. After a terse sentence or two he slammed the receiver down and sat staring.

“That your porridge burning?”

“Yes!” He rushed down the stair, and returned immediately with the black, smoking pot in his hand.

“If it were not Sunday I'd go to the office—hang! I'll go anyhow.”

“Better stay near the 'phone. Why not a hot bath?”

“Splendid idea. But—the 'phone?”

“I'll be here.”

No sooner was he in the tub than the message came.

“You are wanted on the 'phone.” I shouted through two doors.

“Take it.” He sounded as if he were drowning.

I was down again in a moment. “A boy—both doing well.” Dead stillness.

By and by I went down. He was skimming the cream off the milk jug into the cat's dish. The hair stuck damp on his forehead, his cheeks were wet.

“Thank God I was in the tub! I could not have stood it—I should never have thought of asking how she—
they
—were.” Realization of the plural clicked a switch that lit up his whole being.

SHE CAME FROM
the prairie, a vast woman with a rolling gait, too much fat, too little wind, only one eye.

She stood at the bottom of the long stair and bribed a child to tell me she was there. Her husband sat on the verandah rail leaning forward on his stick, her great shapeless hand steadying him. This lean, peevish man had no more substance than a suit on a hanger. A clerical collar cut the mean face from the empty clothes.

The old lady's free hand rolled towards the man. “This,” she said, “is the Reverend Daniel Pendergast. I am Mrs. Pendergast. We came about the flat.”

The usual rigmarole—rental—comfortable beds—hot water… They moved in immediately.

I despised the Reverend Pendergast more every day. His heart was mean as well as sick. He drove the old lady without mercy by night and by day. She did his bidding with patient, adoring gasps. He flung his stick angrily at every living thing, be it wife, beast or bird—everything angered him. Then he screamed for his wife to pick up his stick—retrieve it for him like a dog. She must share his insomnia too by reading to him most of the night; that made
the tears pour out of the seeing and the unseeing eye all the next day. Her cheeks were always wet with eye-drips.

I was sorry for the old lady. I liked her and did all I could to help her in every way except in petting the parson. She piled all the comforts, all the tidbits, on him. When I took her flowers and fruit from my garden, it was he that always got them, though I said, most pointedly, “For
you
,
Mrs
. Pendergast,” and hissed the “s's” as loud as I could.

She would beg me, “Do come in and talk to ‘Parson'; he loves to see a fresh face.”

Sometimes, to please her, I sat just a few minutes by the sour creature.

One morning when I came down my stair she moaned through the crack of the door, “Come to me.”

“What is the matter?” I said. She looked dreadful.

“I fell into the coal-bin last night. I could not get up. My foot was wedged between the wall and the step.”

“Why did you not call to me?”

“I was afraid it would disturb the Parson. I got up after a while but the pain of getting up and down in the night to do for my husband was
dreadful
torture.”

“And he let you do it?”

“I did not tell him I was hurt. His milk must be heated—he must be read to when he does not sleep.”

“He is a selfish beast,” I said. She was too deaf, besides hurting too much, to hear me.

When I had helped to fix her broken knees and back, I stalked into the living-room where the Reverend Pendergast lay on a couch.

“Mrs. Pendergast has had a very bad fall. She can scarcely move for pain.”

“Clumsy woman! She is always falling down,” he said indifferently.

I can't think why I did not hit him. I came out and banged the door after me loudly, hoping his heart would jump right out of his body. I knew he hated slams.

THERE WAS AN OUTBREAK
of caterwaulings. The neighbourhood was much disturbed. The cats were strays—miserable wild kittens born when their owners went camping and never belonging to anyone.

The tenants put missiles on all window ledges to hurl during the night. In the morning I took a basket and gathered them up and took them to the tenants' doors so that each could pick out his own shoes, hairbrushes, pokers and scent bottles. Parson Pendergast threw everything portable at the cats. The old lady was very much upset at his being so disturbed. At last, with care and great patience, I enticed the cats into my basement, caught them and had them mercifully destroyed.