THOSE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR
The case which has occupied the courts recently of the man who beat a tin can as a way of retaliating upon a neighbour who strummed the piano touches one of the most difficult problems of urban life. We who live in the cities all have neighbours, and for the most part "thin partitions do our realms divide." It is true that, however thin the walls, we seldom know our neighbours. If the man who has lived next door to me in a northern suburb for the last half-dozen years stopped me in the Strand or came and sat down beside me in a restaurant I should not, as the saying is, know him from Adam. In this vast whirlpool of London he goes his way and I go mine, and I daresay our paths will not cross though we go on living beside each other until one or other of us takes up a more permanent abode.
I do not know whether he is short or tall, old or young, or anything about him, and I daresay he is in the same state of contented ignorance about me. I hear him when he pokes the fire on his side late at night, and I suppose he hears me when I poke the fire on my side. Our intercourse is limited to the respective noises we make with the fire-irons, the piano, and so on. When he has friends to visit him we learn something about him from the sounds they make, the music they affect, and the time they go away (often unconscionably late). But apart from that vague intimation, my neighbour might be living in Mars and I might be living in Sirius, for all we know, or care, about each other. Perhaps some day his house (or mine) will be on fire, and then I daresay we shall become acquainted. But apart from some such catastrophe as this there seems no reason why we should ever exchange a word on this side of the grave.
It is not pride or incivility on either side that keeps us remote from each other. It is simply our London way. People are so plentiful that they lose their identity. By the Whitestone Pond at Hampstead not long ago I met my old friend John O'Connor—"Long John," as he was affectionately called in the House of Commons, of which he was for so long one of the most popular members—and he said, in reply to inquiries, that he was living in Frognal, had lived there for years, "next door to Robertson Nicoll—not that I should know him," he added, "for I don't think I have ever set eyes on him." And I should have expected to find that Sir William was no better informed about his neighbour than his neighbour was about him. In London men are as lonely as oysters, each living in his own shell. We go out into the country to find neighbours. If the man next door took a cottage a mile away from me in the country I should probably know all about him, his affairs, his family, his calling, and his habits inside a week, and be intimate enough with him in a fortnight to borrow his garden-shears or his bill-hook. This is not always so idyllic as it seems. Village life can be poisoned by neighbours until the victim pines for the solitude of a London street, where neighbours are so plentiful that you are no more conscious of their individual existence than if they were blackberries on a hedgerow.
On the occasions on which we become acutely conscious of our neighbours, the temptation is to think ill of them. For example, we were all late the other morning, and Matilda, whose function it is to keep us up to time, explained that she had overslept herself because of those people next door. Four o'clock it was, m'm, before the din ended. Some of us had lost count of the hours at two and others at three but Matilda was emphatic. She had heard the last of the revellers go away in a car, and had looked at her watch and it was exactly four. No one disputed her word. It was gratifying to know that the hour was four rather than three. If it had been five we should doubtless have been still more gratified. It would have made the case against those people next door still blacker. And it can never be too black for their deserts. Our neighbours are at once too near to us and too far away from us. If they were under our own roof we might be able to make something of them; if they were only in the next street we could forget all about them. But they are just far enough away to escape our celestial influence and quite close enough to be a nuisance.
They are always in the wrong. Consider the hours they keep—entirely different from our hours and therefore entirely reprehensible. If they do not offend by their extravagant piety they shock you by their levity. Perhaps they play tennis on Sunday, or perhaps they don't, and in either case they are vulnerable to criticism. They always manage to be gay when you are sleepy. They take a delight in going away for more holidays than you can possibly have, or perhaps they don't go away for holidays at all, in which case their inferiority is clearly established. If they are not guilty of criminal waste, they can be convicted of shabby parsimony. They either dress too luxuriously or do not dress luxuriously enough for the decencies of the neighbourhood. We suspect that they are no better than they should be. Observe the frequency with which their servants come and go. Depend upon it, they find those people next door impossible. Their habits and their friends, the music they play, the pets that they keep, the politics they affect, the newspapers they read—all these things confirm our darkest fears.
It is possible to believe anything about them—especially the worst. What are those strange sounds that penetrate the wall in the small hours? Surely that is the chink of coin! And those sudden shrieks and gusts of laughter? Is there not an alcoholic suggestion about such undisciplined hilarity? We know too much about them, and do not know enough. They are revealed to us in fragments, and in putting the fragments together we do not spare them. There is nothing so misleading as half heard and half-understood scraps. And the curious thing about those people next door is that, if you ever come to know them, you find they are not a bit like what you thought they were. You find to your astonishment that they have redeeming features. Perhaps they find that we have redeeming features too. For the chastening truth is that we all play the rôle of those people next door to somebody. We are all being judged, and generally very unfavourably judged, on evidence which, if we knew it, would greatly astonish us. It might help us to be a little more charitable about those people next door if we occasionally remembered that we are those people next door ourselves.
But the St. John's Wood case illustrates the frail terms on which immunity from annoyance by neighbours is enjoyed. Two musicians dwelling in one house gave lessons to pupils on the piano, and the man next door, who objected to his peace being disturbed in this way, took his revenge by banging on tin cans, and otherwise making things unpleasant for the musicians. I do not know what the law said on the subject. It may be admitted that the annoyances were equal in effect, but they were not the same in motive. In the one case the motive was the reasonable one of earning an honest living: there was no deliberate intention of being offensive to the neighbours. In the other case, the motive was admittedly to make a demonstration against the neighbours. What is to be done in such circumstances? It is not an offence to play the piano in one's own house even for a living. On the other hand, it is hard, especially if you don't like music, or perhaps even more if you do, to hear the scales going on the piano next door all day.
The question of motive does not seem to be relevant. If my neighbour makes noises which render my life intolerable, it is no answer to say that he makes them for a living and without intending to destroy my peace. He does destroy my peace, and it is no comfort to be assured that he does not mean to. Hazlitt insisted that a man might play the trombone in his own house all day if he took reasonable measures to limit the annoyance to his neighbours; but Hazlitt had probably never lived beside a trombone. I find the argument is leading me on to the side of the tin-can gentleman, and I don't want it to do that, for my sympathies are with the musicians. And yet——
Well, let us avoid a definite conclusion altogether and leave the incident to make us generally a little more sensitive about the feelings of our neighbours. They cannot expect us never to play the piano, never to sit up late, never to be a little hilarious, any more than we can expect never to be disturbed by them. But the amenities of neighbourliness require that we should mutually avoid being a nuisance to each other as much as we can. And if our calling compels us to be a little noisy, we should bear that in mind when we choose a house and when we choose the room in which we make our noises. The perfect neighbour is one whom we never see and whom we never hear except when he pokes the fire.