The House of All Sorts (8 page)

Always at noon on Sundays I dined with my sisters in our old home round the corner. I shut Lady Loo in her pen in the basement; I would hurry back. When I re-entered the basement, “Ki-hi!”—a head popped in the window of Loo's pen. On the pavement outside sat little “Ki-hi.”

“Loo whimpered a little, was lonely when she heard you go. I brought my camp stool and book to keep her company. Ki-hi, Lady Loo! Good luck!” She was away!

I think that little kindness to my mother Bobtail touched me deeper than anything any tenant ever did for me.

MOTHER AND DAUGHTER
came looking for a flat, not in the ordinary way—asking about this and that, looking out of the windows to see what view they would have. They did not note the colour of the walls, but poked and felt everything, smoothed their fingers over surfaces, spaced the distance of one thing from another. I sensed they sought something particular; they kept exchanging glances and nods, asked questions regarding noises. They went away and I forgot about them. Towards evening they came back; they were on their way to the Seattle boat, had decided to take my flat, and wanted to explain something to me. The cab waited while we sat on my garden bench.

“There will be three people in the flat,” said the woman. “My mother, my daughter and my daughter's fiancé.”

“It is necessary to get the young man away from his present environment; he has been very, very ill.”

She told me that while he was making some experiments recently something had burst in his face, blowing his eyes out. The shock had racked the young man's nerves to pieces. His fiancée was the only person who could do anything with him. She was devoted. The grandmother would keep house for them. They asked me to
buy and prepare a meal so that they could come straight from the boat next day and not have to go to a restaurant.

THE MEAL WAS
all ready on the table when the girl led the crouching huddle that was her sweetheart into the flat. Old grandmother paddled behind—a regular emporium of curiosities. She looked like the bag stall in a bazaar; she was carrying all kinds—paper, leather, string and cloth. They dangled from her hands by cords and loops, or she could never have managed them all. She hung one bag or two over each door-knob as she passed through the flat, and then began taking off various articles of her clothing. As she took each garment off, she cackled, “Dear me, now I must remember where I put that!” Her hat was on the drainboard, her shoes on the gas stove, her cloak on the writing desk, her dress hung over the top of the cooler door. Her gloves and purse were on the dinner-table, and her spectacles sat on top of the loaf. She looked pathetic, plucked. After complete unbuilding came reconstruction. She attacked the bags, pulling out a dressing sacque, a scarf, an apron and something she put on her head. She seemed conscious of her upper half only, perhaps she used only a hand-mirror. Her leg half was pathetic and ignored. The scant petticoat came only to her knees, there was a little fence of crocheted lace around each knee. Black stockings hung in lengthwise folds around the splinters of legs that were stuck into her body and broke at right angles to make feet. Her face-skin was yellow and crinkled as the shell of an almond—the chin as pointed as an almond's tip.

The girl led the boy from room to room. She held one of his hands, with the other he was feeling, feeling everything that he could reach. So were his feet—shuffling over the carpet, over the polished floor. Grannie and I kept up a conversation, turning
from him when we spoke so that he could hear our voices coming from behind our heads and not feel as if we were watching him.

Grannie “clucked” them in to dinner; I came away.

IT WAS NATURAL
enough that the blind man should be fussy over sounds. Grannie flew up to my flat and down like a whiz cash-box. The wind caught her as she turned the corner of my stairs, exposing a pink flannelette Grannie one week and a blue flannelette Grannie the next. She was very spry, never having to pause for breath before saying, “Tell those folks above us to wear slippers—tell them to let go their taps gently—have a carpenter fix that squeaky floor board.”

Then she whizzed downstairs and the door gave back that jerky smack that says, “Back again with change!”

ON SUNDAY MORNING
the house was usually quiet. Settling in families was always more or less trying. I determined to have a long late lie, Grannie and family being well established. At seven
A.M
. my bell pealed violently. I stuck my head out into the drizzling rain and called, “What is wanted?”

Grannie's voice squeaked—“You!”

“Anything special? I am not up.”

“Right away! Important!”

I hurried. Anything might have happened with that boy in the state he was.

When I opened the door, Grannie poked an empty vase at me, “The flowers you put in our flat are dead. More!”

THE GIRL AND
the boy sat in my garden at the back of the house. It was quiet and sheltered there, away from the stares the boy could
not bear. The monkey was perched in her cherry tree, coy as Eve, gibbering if some one pulled in the clothes-line which made her tree shiver and the cherries bob, stretching out her little hands for one of the pegs she had coveted all the while that the pyjamas, the dresses and aprons had been drying. The girl told him about it all, trying to lighten his awful dark by making word-pictures for him—the cat on the fence, the garden, flowers, me weeding, the monkey in her cherry tree.

“Is that monkey staring at me?”

“No, she is searching the dry grass round the base of the cherry tree for earwigs now. Hear her crunch that one! Now she is peeping through the lilac bush, intensely interested in something. Oh, it's the Bobtails!”

I had opened the gates from dog-field and puppy-pen. Bobtails streamed into the garden. People sitting with idle hands suggested fondling, which dogs love. They ringed themselves around the boy and girl. The mother dog led her pups up to them—the pups tugged at his shoelaces, the mother dog licked his hand. He was glad to have them come of themselves. He could stoop and pick them up without someone having to put them into his arms. He buried his blackness in the soft black of their live fur. A pup licked his face, its sharp new teeth pricked his fingers, he felt its soft clinging tongue, smelled the puppy breath. The old dog sat with her head resting on his knee. He could feel her eyes on him; he did not mind those eyes. The sun streamed over everything. His taut nerves relaxed. He threw back his head and laughed!

The girl gathered a red rose, dawdled it across his cheek and forehead. She did not have to tell him the colour of the rose; it had that exultant rich red smell. He put his nose among the petals and drew great breaths.

Suddenly the back door of their flat flew open—
PLOSH
!—Out among the flowers flew Grannie's dishwater. Grannie was raised in drought. She could not bear to waste water down a drain.

OLD GRANNIE OVER-FUSSED
the young folks. She was kind, but she had some trying ways. Afternoon house-cleaning was one of them.

The new bride in Lower East was having her post-nuptial “at home” and Grannie must decide that very afternoon to house-clean her front room. She heaved the rugs and chairs out onto the front lawn; all the bric-a-brac followed. She tied the curtains in knots and, a cloth about her head, poised herself on a table right in front of the window. Everyone could see the crochet edging dangling over the flutes of black stocking. She hung out—she took in; her arms worked like pistons. The bride's first guest met a cloud of Bon Ami as Gran shook her duster. The waves from Gran's scrub bucket lapped to the very feet of the next guest—dirty waves that had already washed the steps. The bride came up the next day to see me about it.

Why—oh, why—oh, why—could one not secure tenants in packets of “named varieties”—true to type like asters and sweet peas? The House of All Sorts got nothing but “mixed.”

TALL—LOOSEKNIT—DARK-SKINNED
—big brown eyes that could cry grandly without making her face ugly—sad eyes that it took nothing at all to fire and make sparkle.

That funny joker, life, had mated her to a scrunched-up whipper-snapper of a man, with feet that took girls' boots and with narrow, white hands. They had a fiery-haired boy of six. His mother spoiled him. It was so easy for her to fold her looseknit figure down to his stature. They had great fun. The father scorned stooping. Neither his body nor his mind was bendable.

I heard mother and son joking and sweeping snow from their steps. Sweeping, snowballing—sweeping, laughing. That was on Monday. By Wednesday more snow had fallen, and she was out again sweeping furiously—but she was alone.

“Where is your helper?”

“Sick.”

“Anything serious?”

“I have sent for the doctor. I am clearing the snow so that he can get in.” She had finished now and went in to her flat and banged the door angrily—evident anger, but not at me.

The doctor came and went; I ran down to her.

“What does the doctor say?”

“Nothing to be alarmed over.”

She was out in the snow again. Little red-head was at the window; both were laughing as if they shared some very good joke. Then I saw what she was doing. She was filling snow back into the path she had cleared in the morning, piling the snow deeper than it was before, spanking it down with the shovel to keep it from blowing away. She carried snow from across the lawn, careful not to leave any clear path to her door.

“Why are you doing that?”

Her eyes sparkled; she gave the happiest giggle and a nod to her boy.

“My husband would not get up and shovel a path for the doctor. Do you think he is going to find a clear path when he comes home to lunch? Not if I know it, he isn't.”

“If it were not already finished, I would be delighted to help,” I said and we both ran chuckling into our own flats.

ARABELLA JONES RAN
out of the back door, around the house and into the front door of her flat. Over and over she did it. Each time she rang her own door bell and opened her own front door and walked in with a laugh as if such as delightful thing had never happened to her before.

“It is half like having a house of my own,” she said, and rushed into the garden to gather nasturtiums. She put them into a bowl and dug her nose down among the blossoms. “Bought flowers don't smell like that, and oh, oh, the kitchen range! and a pulley clothes-line across the garden! my own bath! Nothing shared—no gas plate hidden behind a curtain—no public entrance and no public hall! Oh, it is only the beginning too; presently we shall own a whole house and furniture and our own garden, not rented but our very own!”

It was not Silas Jones but “a home” that had lured Arabella into marriage. When dull, middle-aged Silas said, “I am tired of knocking round, I want a home and a wife inside that home—what about it, Arabella?” she lifted her face to his like a “kiss-for-a-candy” little girl. And they were married.

That was in Eastern Canada—they began to move West. It was fun living in hotels for a bit, but soon Arabella asked, “When are we going to get the home?”

“We have to find out first where we want to be.”

The place did not matter to Arabella. She wanted a home. They travelled right across Canada, on, on, till they came to Vancouver and the end of the rail.

“Now there is no further to go, can we get our home?”

“There is still Vancouver Island,” he said.

They took the boat to Victoria. Here they were in Lower West, while Silas Jones looked around. He was in no hurry to buy. The independence of a self-contained flat would satisfy his young wife for the time being.

Arabella Jones kept begging me, “Do come down to our flat of an evening and talk before my husband about the happiness of owning your own home.”

Mortgage, taxes, tenants, did not make home-owning look too nice to me just then—I found it difficult to enthuse.

Silas had travelled. He was a good talker, but I began to notice a queerness about him, a “far-offness”—when his eyes glazed, his jaw dropped and he forgot. Arabella said, “Silas is sleeping badly, has to take stuff.” She said too, “He is always going to Chinatown,” and showed me vases and curios he bought in Chinatown for her.

One night Silas told me he had been looking round, and expected to buy soon, so I could consider my flat free for the first of the next month should I have an applicant.

The following day I was going down my garden when he called to me from his woodshed. I looked up—drew back. His face was livid—eyes wild; foam came from his lips.

“Hi, there, you!” he shouted. “Don't you dare come into my flat, or I'll kill you—kill you, do you hear? None of your showing off of my flat!”

He was waving an axe round his head, looking murderous. I hurried past, did not speak to him. I went to the flat at the other side of the house; this tenant knew the Joneses.

I said, “Silas Jones has gone crazy or he is drunk.”

“You know what is the matter with that man, don't you?”

“No, what?”

“He”—a tap at the door stopped her. Silas Jones's young wife was there.

“Somebody wants to see over our flat,” she said.

“Would you be kind enough to show it to them?”

“It would be better for you to do it yourself,” she said shortly. I saw she was angry about something.

“I can't—your husband—”

“My husband says you insulted him—turned your back on him when he spoke to you. He is very angry.”

“I do not care to talk to drunken men.”

“Drunken? My—husband—does—not—drink…” She spoke slowly as if there were a wonder between every word; her eyes had opened wide and her face gone white. “I will show the flat,” she said.