The House of All Sorts (7 page)

Her family brought her to my house suddenly because the whole lot of them had come down with measles while staying in a boarding-house nearby. The other boarders got panicky and asked them to go! Early in the morning the mother came to me, very fussed. Lower West was empty and measles being a temporary complaint, I let the woman have the flat.

When the taxi load of spotty children drove up to my door I was hustling to warm up the beds and make up extras. Some of the children sat limp and mute waiting, while others whimpered fretfully. The infant, a lumpy child of un-walking, un-talking age, was the only one who had not got measles. The mother set the child on the floor while she went to fetch the sick, spotty miseries from the cab. The infant's head, as it were, split in two—eyes, cheeks, brow retired, all became mouth, and out of the mouth poured a roar the equal of Niagara Falls.

The lady in the Doll's Flat above stuck her head out of the window and looked down. “Measles,” I warned, and she drew her own and her small son's head back, closed her windows and locked her door.

THE MEASLES TOOK
their course under a doctor and a trained nurse. I ran up and down the stairs with jellies and gruel. Night and day the baby cried. The House of All Sorts supposed she was sickening for measles and endured it as best they could. The baby did not get measles. After fumigation and quarantine were over and nothing ailed the child we had the doctor's word as assurance that it was only a cranky, mean temper that was keeping us awake all night. The tenants began coming to me with complaints, and I had to go down and talk to the mother.

I said, “No one in the house can sleep for the child's crying, something will have to be done. I cannot blame my tenants for threatening to go and I cannot afford to lose them.” The woman was all syrupy enthusing over the soups and jellies I had sent the measles; but she suddenly realized that I was in earnest and that my patience for my household's rest was at an end.

If only I could have gone down to the mother in the middle of the night when we were all peevish for sleep, it would have been different, but, with the child sitting for the moment angel-like in her mother's lap, it was not easy to proceed. I looked out the window. Near the front gate I saw the child's pram drawn up dishevelled from her morning nap. What my tenants resented most was not that the child kept the whole household awake at night but that the mother put her baby to sleep most of the day in the garden, close by the gate through which people came and went to the house. After listening to
her yelling all night every one was incensed to be told in the daytime, “Hush, hush! my baby is asleep: don't wake her.” The mother pounced upon the little boy upstairs, upon baker, postman, milkman, visitors; every one was now afraid to come near our house; people began to shun us. I looked at the disordered pram and took courage.

“Would you please let the baby take her day naps on the back verandah; she would be quiet there and not interfere with our coming and going.”

“My baby on the back porch! Certainly not!”

“Why does the child cry so at night? My tenants are all complaining; something will have to be done.”

“People are most unreasonable.”

She was as furious as a cow whose calf has been ill-treated.

“Who is it that suffers most, I'd like to know? Myself and my husband! It is most ill-natured of tenants to complain.”

Standing the baby on her knee and kissing her violently, “Oose never been werry seepsy at night has oo, Puss Ducksey?”

The child smacked the mother's face with extraordinary vigour, leaving a red streak across the cheek. The mother kissed the cruel little fist.

“Something will have to be done, otherwise I shall have an empty house,” I repeated determinedly for the third time.

“What, for instance?”

“A few spankings.”

The woman's face boiled red.

“Spank Puss! Never!”

My hand itched to spank both child and mother.

“Why don't you train the child? It is not fair to her, only makes people dislike her.”

“As if any one could dislike Puss, our darling!” She looked hate at me.

DURING OUR CONVERSATION
Puss had been staring at me with all her pale eyes, her brow wrinkled. Now she scrambled from her mother's lap to the floor and by some strange, crablike movement contrived not only to reach me but to drag herself up by my skirt and stand at my knee staring up into my face.

“Look! Look! Puss has taken her first steps alone and to you, you, who hate her,” said the angry mother.

“I don't hate the youngster. Only I cannot have a spoiled child rob me of my livelihood and you must either train her or go elsewhere.”

She clutched the honey-haired creature to her.

“The people upstairs have left because of your baby's crying at night. They gave no notice. How could I expect it: the man has to go to business whether your child has yelled all night or not. Another tenant is going too. I wish I could leave myself!”

I SAW THAT MY
notice was being ignored. I had sent it in when I served her last rent. Go she must! It was in her hand when she came up to pay.

“Of course you don't mean this?” She held out the notice.

“I do.”

“But have you not observed an improvement? She only cried four times last night.”

“Yes, but each time it lasted for a quarter of the night.”

“Sweet Pussy!” she said, and smothered the scowling face with kisses. “They don't want us, Puss!”

“That notice stands,” I said, looking away from Puss. “I got no notices from the tenants Puss drove away.”

The angry mother rushed for the door. I went to open it for her and a little pink finger reached across her mother's shoulder and gave me a little, pink poke and a friendly gurgling chuckle.

“What I cannot understand,” the woman blazed at me as she turned the corner, “is
why
Puss, my shy baby who won't allow any one to speak to her, appears actually to
like
you, you who hate her.”

But did I hate the little girl with honey-coloured hair? She had cost me two tenants and no end of sleep, had heated my temper to boiling, yet, somehow I could not hate that baby. The meanest thing about her was the way she could make you feel yourself. One has to make a living and one must sleep. It is one of the crooked-nesses of life when a little yellow-haired baby can cause you so much trouble and yet won't even let you hate her.

Puss sailed off to her new home in a pram propelled by an angry parent.

“Ta ta,” she waved as they turned the corner—and I? I kissed my hand to Puss when her mother was not looking.

WHEN A FLAT
housed a solitary bachelor, there was a curious desolation about it. The bachelor's front door banged in the morning and again at night. All day long there was deadly stillness in that flat, that secret silence of “Occupied” emptiness, quite a different silence from “To Let” emptiness.

Pedlars passed the flat without calling. The blinds dipped or were hoisted at irregular levels. Sometimes they remained down all day. Sometimes they were up all night. There were no callers and there was no garbage. Men ate out.

Bachelors that rent flats or houses do so because they are home-loving; otherwise they would live in a boarding-house and be “done” for. They are tired of being tidied by landladies; they like to hang coats over chair backs and find them there when they come home. It is much handier to toss soiled shirts behind the dresser than to stuff them into a laundry bag; men do love to prowl round a kitchen. A gas stove, even if it is all dusty over the top from unuse, is home-like, so is the sink with its taps, the saucepan, the dishes. The men do not want to cook, but it is nice to know they could do so if they wished. In the evening, when I tended the furnace, I heard the bachelor tramp,
tramp, tramping from room to room as if searching for something. This would have fidgeted a wife, but, if the bachelor had had a wife he would probably not have tramped.

During the twenty-odd years that I rented apartments I housed quite a few bachelors. Generally they stayed a long while and their tenancy ended in marriage and in buying themselves a home.

A BACHELOR OCCUPIED
Lower West for several years. Big, pink and amiable, he gave no trouble. Occasionally his sister would come from another town to visit him. He boarded her with me up in my flat. I enjoyed these visits, so did her brother. I saw then how domestic and home-loving the man was. He loved his sister and was very good to my Bobtail dogs. Once the sister hinted—there
was
“somebody,” but, she did not know for certain; brother thought he was too old to marry—all fiddlesticks! She hoped he would. Therefore, I was not surprised when the bachelor came into my garden, and, ducking down among the dogs to hide how red he was, said, “I am going to be married. Am I an old fool?”

“Wise, I think.”

“Thank you,” he said, grinning all over—“I have been happy here.”

He gave formal notice, saying, “I have bought a house.”

“I hope you will be very happy.”

“Thanks. I think we shall.”

He went to the garden gate, turned, such a sparkle in his eye it fairly lit the garden.

“She's fine,” he said. “Not too young—sensible.”

Then he bolted. I heard the door of his flat slam as if it wanted to shut him away from the temptation of babbling to the world how happy he was.

The wedding was a month distant. During that month, when I tended the furnace there was no tramp, tramp, tramp overhead. I heard instead the contented scrunch, scrunch of his rocking chair.

THE MORNING OF
the wedding he bounded up my stair, most tremendously shaved and brushed, stood upon my doormat bashfully hesitant. I did not give him the chance to get any pinker before I said, “You
do
look nice.”

“Do I really?” He turned himself slowly for inspection. “Hair, tie, everything O.K.?”

“Splendid.” But I took the clothes brush from the hall stand and flicked it across his absolutely speckless shoulders. It made him feel more fixed.

His groomsman shouted from the bottom of the stair, “Hi there!” He hurried down and the two men got into a waiting cab.

A YOUNG LAWYER
and his mother lived in Lower West. They were big, heavy-footed people. Every night between twelve and two the lawyer son came home to the flat. First he slammed the gate, then took the steps at a noisy run, opened and shut the heavy front door with such a bang that the noise reverberated through the whole still house. Every soul in it was startled from his sleep. People complained. I went to the young man's mother and asked that she beg the young man to come in quietly. She replied, “My son is my son! We pay rent! Good-day.”

He kept on banging the house awake at two
A.M
.

One morning at three
A.M
. my telephone rang furiously. In alarm I jumped from the bed and ran to it. A great yawn was on the other end of the wire. When the yawn was spent, the voice of the lawyer's mother drawled,

“My son informs me your house dog is snoring; kindly wake the dog, it disturbs my son.”

The dog slept on the storey above in a basket, his nose snuggled in a heavy fur rug. I cannot think that the noise could have been very disturbing to anyone on the floor below.

The next morning I went down and had words with the woman regarding her selfish, noisy son as against my dog's snore.

PETTY UNREASONABLENESS
nagged calm more than all the hard work of the house. I wanted to loose the Bobtails, follow them—run, and run, and run into forever—beyond sound of every tenant in the world—tenants tore me to shreds.

SIMULTANEOUSLY, TWO YOUNG
couples occupied, one Lower East, one Lower West. The couples were friends. One pair consisted of a selfish wife and an unselfish husband. The other suite housed a selfish husband and an unselfish wife.

Zig-zag, zig-zag. There was always pulling and pushing, selfishness against unselfishness.

I used to think, “What a pity the two selfish ones had not married, and the two unselfish.” Then I saw that if this had been the case nobody would have got anywhere. The unselfish would have collided, rushing to do for each other. The selfish would have glowered from opposite ends of their flat, refusing to budge…

Best as it was, otherwise there would have been pain—stagnation.

THE UNSELFISH WIFE
was a chirping, cheerful creature. I loved to hear her call “Ki-hi, Ki-hi! Taste my jam tarts.” And over the rail of my balcony would climb a handful of little pies, jam with crisscross crust over the top! Or I would cry over the balcony rail, “Ki-hi, Ki-hi! Try a cake of my newest batch of home-made soap.”

We were real neighbours, always Ki-hi-ing, little exchanges that sweetened the sour of landladying. This girl-wife had more
love than the heart of her stupid husband could accommodate. The overflow she gave to me and to my Bobtails. She did want a baby so, but did not have one. The selfish wife shook with anxiety that a child might be born to her.

ZIG-ZAG, ZIG-ZAG
. Clocks do not say “tick, tick, tick,” eternally—they say “tick, tock, tick, tock.” We, looking at the clock's face, only learn the time. Most of us know nothing of a clock's internal mechanism, do not know why it says “tick, tock,” instead of “tick, tick, tick.”

LADY LOO, MY
favourite Bobtail mother, was heavy in whelp. Slowly the dog paddled after my every footstep. I had prepared her a comfortable box in which to cradle her young. She was satisfied with the box, but restless. She wanted to be within sight of me, or where she heard the sound of my voice. It gave the dog comfort.