The House of All Sorts (9 page)

I stood on the porch waiting while the women went over the Joneses' flat. Suddenly, Silas was there—gripping my shoulder, his terrible lips close to my ear.

“You told…!”

His wife was coming—he let go of me. I went back to my other tenant.

“What was it you were going to tell me about Silas Jones?”

“Dope.”

“Dope! I have never seen any one who took dope.”

“You have now—you have let the cat out of the bag, too. Did you see the girl's face when you accused her husband of being drunk? She was putting two and two together—his medicine for insomnia—his violent tempers—Chinatown…Poor child…”

I kept well out of the man's way. He was busy with agents. His wife was alternately excited about the home and very sad.

I KNEW IT WAS
her step racing up the stairs. “My husband has bought a house, furniture and all. It is a beauty. It has a garden. Now I shall have a home of my very own!”

She started to caper about…stopped short…her hands fell to her sides, her face went dead. She stood before the window looking, not seeing.

“I came to ask if you know of a woman I could get, one who would live in. My husband wants to get a Chinaman to do the work, but I…I
must
have a woman.”

Her lips trembled, great fear was in her eyes.

She came back to me a few days after they had moved, full of the loveliness of the new home.

“You must come and see it—you will come, won't you?”

“I had better not.”

“Because of Silas?”

“Yes.”

“If I 'phone some day when he is going to be out, please, will you come?”

“Yes.”

She never telephoned. They had been in their new home less than a month when this notice caught my eyes in the newspaper:

“For sale by public auction, house, furniture and lot.”

The name of the street and the number of the house were those of Arabella Jones's new home.

“
PRICE OF FLAT
”

“Twenty-five a month.”

“Take twenty?”

“No.”

“Twenty-two?”

“No.”

“Quiet house? No children? No musical instruments? No mice? My folks is partic'lar, awful partic'lar—awful
clean
!…They's out huntin' too—maybe they's found somethin' at twenty. Consider twenty-three?”

“No. Twenty-five is my price, take it or leave it.”

He went back to pinch the mattress again, threw himself into an easy chair and moulded his back into the cushions… “Comfortable chair! Well, guess I better go and see what's doin' with the folks. Twenty-three fifty? Great to get partic'lar tenants, you know.”

I waved him to the door.

Soon he was back with his wife, dry and brittle as melba toast, and a daughter, dull and sagging. Both women flopped into easy chairs and lay back, putting their feet up on another chair; they
began to press their shoulder-blades into the upholstery, hunting lumps or loose springs. Meanwhile their noses wriggled like rabbits, inflated nostrils spread to catch possible smells, eyes rolling from object to object critically. After resting, they went from one thing to another, tapping, punching; blankets got smelled, rugs turned over, cupboards inspected, bureau drawers and mirrors tested.

“Any one ever die in this apartment?”

“No.”

“Any one ever sick here?” The woman spat her questions.

“Any caterwauling at nights?”

“We do not keep cats.”

“Then you have mice—bound to.”

“Please go. I don't want you for tenants!”

“Hoity, toity! Give my folks time to look around. They's partic'lar. I telled you so.”

The woman and the girl were in the kitchen insulting my pots and pans. The woman stuck a long thin nose into the garbage pail. The girl opened the cupboards.

“Ants? Cockroaches?”

I flung the outer door wide. “Go! I won't have you as tenants!”

Melba toast scrunched. Pa roared. “You can't do that! You can't do that! The card says ‘Vacant.' We've took it.”

His hand went reluctantly into his pocket, pulled out a roll of bills, laid two tens upon the table; impertinently leering an enquiring “O.K.?” he held out his hand for the key. I stuck it back into my pocket—did not deign an answer. Slowly he fumbled with the bill-roll, laid five ones on the table beside the two tens. Between each laying down he paused and looked at me. When my
full price was on the table I put my hand in my pocket, handed him the key.

At six o'clock the next morning the “partic'lar woman” jangled my doorbell as if the house was on fire.

“There's a rust spot on the bottom of the kettle—Old Dutch.”

I gave her a can of Old Dutch. She was scarcely gone before she was back.

“Scoured a hole clean through. Give me another kettle.”

Hardly was she inside her door before the old man came running. “She says, which is hot and which cold?”

“Tell her to find out!”

No other tenant in that or any other flat in my house left the place in such filth and disorder as those
partic'lar
people.

THE FAMILY IN LOWER
West consisted of a man, a woman and a child. A week after they moved in, the woman's sister came to stay with her. She was straight from hospital and brought a newborn infant with her—a puny, frail thing, that the doctor shook his head over.

Immediately the baby's grandma was sent for, being, they declared, the only person who could possibly pull the baby through. Grandma could not leave her young son and a little adopted girl, so she brought them along.

The flat having but one bedroom, a kitchen and living-room, the adults slept by shifts. The children slept on sofas, or on the floor, or in a bureau drawer. Gran neither sat nor lay—she never even thought of sleep; she was there to save the baby. The man of the family developed intense devotion to his office, and spent most of his time there after Gran moved in.

We were having one of our bitterest cold snaps. Wind due north, shrieking over stiff land; two feet of snow, all substances glibbed with ice and granite-hard. I, as landlady, had just two jobs—shovelling snow—shovelling coal. Gran's job was shooing off death—blowing up the spark of life flickering in the baby.

No one seemed to think the baby was alive enough to hear sounds. Maybe Gran thought noise would help to scare death. The cramming of eight souls into a three-room flat produced more than noise—it was bedlam!

The baby was swaddled in cotton-wool saturated with the very loudest-smelling brand of cod-liver oil. The odour of the oil permeated the entire house. The child was tucked into his mother's darning basket which was placed on the dining table.

The infant's cry was too small to be heard beyond the edge of the table. We in the rest of the house might have thought him dead had not Gran kept us informed of her wrestling, by trundling the heavy table up and down the polished floor day and night. The castor on each of the table-legs had a different screech, all four together a terrible quartette with the slap, slap of Gran's carpet slippers marking time. Possibly Gran thought perpetual motion would help to elude death's grip on the oiled child.

Periodically the aunt of the infant came upstairs to my flat to telephone the doctor. She sat hunched on the stool in front of the 'phone, tears rolled out of her eyes, sploshed upon her chest.

“Doctor, the baby is dying—his mother cries all the time—when he dies she will die too… Oh, yes, Gran is here, she never leaves him for a minute; night and day she watches and wheels him on the table.”

The whole house was holding its breath, waiting on the scrap of humanity in the darning basket. Let anybody doze off, Grandma was sure to drop a milk bottle, scrunch a tap, tread on a child! The house has to be kept tropical. Gran was neither clothed nor entirely bare. She took off and took off, her garments hung on the backs of all the chairs. She peeled to the limit of the law, and
snatched food standing. Three whole weeks she waged this savage one-man battle to defeat death—she won—the infant's family were uproarious with joy.

Gran toppled into bed for a long, long sleep. Mother and aunt sat beside the darning basket planning the baby's life from birth to death at a tremendous age.

Gran woke refreshed—vigorous, clashed the pots and pans, banged doors, trundled the table harder than ever, and sang lullabies in a thin high voice, which stabbed our ears like neuralgia.

The House of All Sorts was glad the child was to live. They had seen the crisis through without a murmur. Now, however, they came in rebellion and demanded peace. The doctor had said the child could go home with safety—my tenants said he must go! I marched past twelve dirty milk bottles on the ledges of the front windows. Gran opened, and led me to the basket to see the infant, red now instead of grey.

I said, “Fine, fine! All the tenants are very glad, and now, when is he going home?”

“Doctor says he could any day. We have decided to keep him here another month.”

“No! A three-room flat cannot with decency house eight souls. I rented my flat to a family of three. This noise and congestion must cease.”

Grandmother, mother, aunt all screeched reproaches. I was a monster, turning a new-born infant out in the snow. They'd have the law.

“The snow is gone. His mother has a home. His grandmother has a home. I rented to a family of three. The other tenants have been kindly and patient. The child has had his chance. Now we want quiet.”

My tenant, the aunt of the baby, said, “I shall go too!”

“Quite agreeable to me.”

A “vacancy” card took the place of the twelve dirty milk bottles in the front window of Lower East.

COMING UP SIMCOE STREET
I stopped short and nearly strangled! There, stretched right across the front windows of the Doll's Flat, the street side of my respectable apartment house, dangled from the very rods where my fresh curtains had been when I went out—one huge suit of men's natural wool underwear, one pair of men's socks, one pair of women's emaciated silk stockings, a vest and two pairs of peach scanties.

Who, I wondered, had gone up the street during the two hours of my absence? Who had seen my house shamed?

I could not get up the stairs fast enough, galloping all the way! There was enough breath left for: “Please,
please
take them down.”

I pointed to the wash.

Of course she was transient—here today, gone tomorrow—not caring a whoop about the looks of the place.

“I like our underwear sunned,” she said with hauteur.

“There are lines out in the back.”

“I do not care for our clothes to mix with everybody's—and there are the stairs.”

“I will gladly take them down and hang them for you.”

“Thanks, I prefer them where they are. It is
our
flat. We have the right—”

“But the appearance! The other tenants!”

“My wash is clean. It is darned. Let them mind their own business, and you yours.”

“It
is
my business—this house is my livelihood.”

The woman shrugged.

Merciful night came down and hid the scanties and the rest.

Next wash-day the same thing happened. The heavy woollies dripped and trickled over the tenant's clean washed windows below; of course she rushed up—furious as was I!

Again I went to the Doll's Flat. I refused to go away until the washing was taken down and the curtains hung up. “If you live in this house you must comply with the ways of it,” I said.

On the third week she hung her wash in the windows the same as before. I gave her written notice.

“I shall not go.”

“You will, unless you take that wash down and never hang it on my curtain rods again!”

Sullenly, she dragged the big woollen combination off the rod, threw it on the table; its arms and legs kicked and waved over the table's edge, then dangled dead. Down came the lank stockings, the undervest—last of all the peach scanties. Both pairs were fastened up by the same peg. She snapped it off viciously. A puff of wind from the open door caught and ballooned the scanties; off they sailed, out the window billowing into freedom. As they passed the hawthorn tree its spikes caught them. There they hung over my front gate, flapping, flapping—“Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh dear!”

AS THE WORLD
war progressed rentals went down till it became impossible to meet living expenses without throwing in my every resource. I had no time to paint so had to rent the Studio flat and make do myself with a basement room and a tent in my back garden. Everything together only brought in what a flat and a half had before the war.

A woman came to look at the Studio flat and expressed herself delighted with it.

“Leave your pretty things, won't you?” she begged with a half sob. “I have nothing pretty now and am a widow, a Belgian refugee with a son in the army.”

She spoke broken English. We were all feeling very tender towards the Belgians just then.

“Come and see me; I am very lonely,” she said and settled into the big studio I had built for myself. I granted her request for a substantial cut off the rental because of her widowhood, her country and her soldier son. Poor, lisping-broken-English stranger! I asked her several questions about Belgium. She evaded them. When she did not remember she talked perfect English, but when she stopped to think, the words were all mixed and broken. When
she met any one new her sputterings were almost incoherent. I asked her, “How long since you left Belgium?” She hesitated, afraid of giving away her age, which I took to be fifty-five or thereabouts.

“I was born in Belgium of English parents. We left Belgium when I was four years old.”