IX
THE TENANTS
It is impossible to live in chambers without knowing something of the other tenants in the house. I know much even of several who were centuries or generations before my time, and I could not help it if I wanted to, for the London County Council has lately set up a plaque to their memory on our front wall. Not that I want to help it. I take as much pride in my direct descent from Pepys and Etty as others may in an ancestor on the Mayflower or with the Conqueror, while if it had not been for J. and his interest in the matter we might not yet boast the plaque that gives us distinction in our shabby old street, though, to do us full justice, its list of names should be lengthened by at least one, perhaps the most distinguished.
I have never understood why Bacon was left out. Only the pedant would disown so desirable a tenant for the poor reason that the house has been rebuilt since his day. As it is, Pepys heads the list, and we do not pretend to claim that the house is exactly as it was when he lived in it. He never saw our Adam ceilings and fireplaces, we never saw his row of gables along the River front except in Canaletto's drawing of the old Watergate which our windows still overlook. However, except for the loss of the gables, the outside has changed little, and if the inside has been remodelled beyond recognition, we make all we can of the Sixteenth-Century drain-pipe discovered when the London County Council, in the early throes of reform, ordered our plumbing to be overhauled. Their certified plumber made so much of it, feeling obliged to celebrate his discovery with beer and in his hurry forgetting to blow out the bit of candle he left amid the laths and plaster, that if J. had not arrived just in time there would be no house now for the plaque to decorate. Pepys, I regret to say, waited to move in until after the Diary ended, so that we do not figure in its pages. Nor, during his tenancy, does he figure anywhere except in the parish accounts, which is more to his credit than our entertainment.
Etty was considerate and left a record of his "peace and happiness" in our chambers, but I have no proof that he appreciated their beauty. If he liked to walk on our leads in the evening and watch the sun set behind Westminster, he turned his back on the River at the loveliest hour of all. It was his habit as Academician to work like a student at night in the Royal Academy Schools, then in Trafalgar Square,—an admirable habit, but one that took him away just when he should have stayed. For when evening transformed the Thames and its banks into Whistler's "Fairyland" he, like Paul Revere, hung out a lantern from his studio window as a signal for the porter, with a big stick, to come and fetch him and protect him from the robbers of the Quarter, which had not then the best of reputations. Three generations of artists climbed our stairs to drink tea and eat muffins with Etty, but they showed the same ignorance of the Thames, all except Turner, who thought there was no finer scenery on any river in Italy, and who wanted to capture our windows from Etty and make them his own, but who, possibly because he could not get them, never painted the Thames as it was and is. One other painter did actually capture the windows on the first floor, and, in the chambers that are now the Professor's, Stanfield manufactured his marines, and there too, they say, Humphry Davy made his safety lamp.
We do not depend solely upon the past for our famous tenants. Some of the names which in my time have been gorgeously gilded inside our vestibule, later generations may find in the list we make a parade of on our outer wall. For a while, in the chambers just below ours, we had the pleasure of knowing that Mr. Edmund Gosse was carrying on for us the traditions of Bacon and Pepys. Then we have had a Novelist or two, whose greatness I shrink from putting to the test by reading their novels, and also one or more Actors, but fame fades from the mummer on the wrong side of the footlights. We still have the Architect who, if the tenants were taken at his valuation, would, I fancy, head our new list.
He is not only an architect but, like Etty,—like J. for that matter,—an Academician. He carries off the dignity with great stateliness, conscious of the vast gulf fixed between him and tenants with no initials after their name. Moreover, he belongs to that extraordinary generation of now elderly Academicians who were apparently chosen for their good looks, as Frederick's soldiers were for their size. The stoop that has come to his shoulder with years but adds to the impressiveness of his carriage. His air of superiority is a continual reminder of his condescension in having his office under our modest roof. His "Aoh, good-mornin'," as he passes, is a kindness, a few words from him a favour rarely granted, and there is no insolent familiar in the house who would dare approach him. Royalty, Archbishops, University dignitaries are his clients, and it would seem presumption for the mere untitled to approach him with a commission. His office is run on dignified lines in keeping with the exalted sphere in which he practises. A parson of the Church of England is his chief assistant. A notice on his front door warns the unwary that "No Commercial Travellers need Apply," and implies that others had better not.
William Penn is probably the only creature in the house who ever had the courage to enter the Academic precincts unbidden. William was a cat of infinite humour, and one of his favourite jests was to dash out of our chambers and down the stairs whenever he had a chance; not because he wanted to escape,—he did not, for he loved his family as he should,—but because he knew that one or all of us would dash after him. If he was not caught in time he added to the jest by pushing through the Academician's open door and hiding somewhere under the Academic nose, and I am certain that nobody had a keener sense of the audacity of it than William himself. More than once a young assistant, trying to repress a grin and to look as serious as if he were handing us a design for a Deanery, restored William to his family; and once, on a famous occasion when, already late, we were starting for the Law Courts and the Witness-box, the Architect relaxed so far as to pull William out from among the Academic drawing-boards and to smile as he presented him to J. who was following in pursuit. Even Jove sometimes unbends, but when Jove is a near neighbour it is wiser not to presume upon his unbending, and we have never given the Architect reason to regret his moment of weakness.
Whatever the Architect thinks of himself, the other tenants think more of Mr. Square, whose front door faces ours on the Third Floor. Mr. Square is under no necessity of assuming an air of superiority, so patent to everybody in the house is his right to it. If anything, he shrinks from asserting himself. He had been in his chambers a year, coming a few months "after the fire," before I knew him by sight, though by reputation he is known to everybody from one end of the country to the other. Not only is there excitement in our house when the police officer appears on our staircase with a warrant for his arrest for murder, but the United Kingdom thrills and waits with us for the afternoon's Police Report. In the neighbourhood I am treated with almost as much respect as when I played a leading part in the Law Courts myself. The milkman and the postman stop me in the street, the little fruiterer round the corner and the young ladies at the Temple of Pomona in the Strand detain me in giving me my change as if I were an accessory to the crime. What if the murder is only technical, Mr. Square's arrest a matter of form, his discharge immediate? The glory is in his position which makes the technical murder an achievement to be envied by every true-born Briton. For he is Referee at the Imperial Boxing Club, and therefore the most important person in the Empire, except, perhaps, the winning jockey at the Derby or the Captain of the winning Football Team. The Prime Minister, Royalty itself, would not shed a brighter lustre on our ancient house, and there could be no event of greater interest than the fatal "accident" in the ring for which Mr. Square has been so many times held technically responsible.
In his private capacity Mr. Square strikes me as in no way remarkable. He is a medium-sized man with sandy hair and moustache, as like as two peas to the other men of medium height with sandy hair and moustache who are met by the thousand in the Strand. He shares his chambers with Mr. Savage, who is something in the Bankruptcy Court. Both are retiring and modest, they never obtrude themselves, and either their domestic life is quiet beyond reproach, or else the old builders had the secret of soundless walls, for no sound from their chambers disturbs us. With them we have not so much as the undesirable intimacy that comes from mutual complaint, and such is their amiability that William, in his most outrageous intrusions, never roused from them a remonstrance.
I am forced to admit that William was at times ill-advised in the hours and places he chose for his adventures. He often beguiled me at midnight upon the leads that he might enjoy my vain endeavours to entice him home with the furry monkey tied to the end of a string, which during the day never failed to bring him captive to my feet. By his mysterious disappearances he often drove J., whose heart is tender and who adored him, out of his bed at unseemly hours and down into the street where, in pyjamas and slippers, and the door banged to behind him, he became an object of suspicion. On one of these occasions, a policeman materializing suddenly from nowhere and turning a bull's-eye on him,—
"Have you seen a cat about?" J. asked.
"Seen a cat? Oi've seen millions on 'em," said the policeman. "Wot sort o' cat?" he added.
"A common tabby cat," said J.
"Look 'ere," said the policeman, "where do you live any'ow?"
"Here," said J., who had retained his presence of mind with his latch-key.
"Aoh, Oi begs your parding, sir," said the policeman. "Oi didn't see you, sir, in the dim light, sir, but you know, sir, there's billions o' tabby cats about 'ere of a night, sir. But if Oi find yours, sir, Oi'll fetch 'im 'ome to you, sir. S'noight, sir. Thank e' sir."
When the kitchen door was opened the next morning, William was discovered innocently curled up in his blanket. And yet, when he again disappeared at bedtime a week or two later, J. was again up before daybreak, sure that he was on the doorstep breaking his heart because he could not get in. This time I followed into our little hall, and Augustine after me. She was not then as used to our ways as she is now, and I still remember her sleepy bewilderment when she looked at J., who had varied his costume for the search by putting on knickerbockers and long stockings, and her appeal to me: "Mais pourquoi en bicyclette?" Why indeed? But there was no time for explanation. We were interrupted by an angry but welcome wail from behind the opposite door, and we understood that William was holding us responsible for having got himself locked up in Mr. Square's chambers. We had to wake up Mr. Square's old servant before he could be released, but it was not until the next morning that the full extent of his iniquity was revealed. A brand-new, pale-pink silk quilt on Mr. Square's bed having appealed to him as more luxurious than his own blanket, he had profited by Mr. Square's absence to spend half the night on it, leaving behind him a faint impression of his dear grimy little body. Even then, Mr. Square remained as magnanimously silent as if he shared our love for William and pride in his performances.
All we know of Mr. Square and Mr. Savage, in addition to their fame and modesty, we have learned from their old man, Tom. He is a sailor by profession, and for long steward on Mr. Savage's yacht. He clings to his uniform in town, and when we see him pottering about in his blue reefer and brass buttons, Mr. Savage's little top floor that adjoins ours and opens out on the leads we share between us looks more than ever like a ship's quarter-deck. He is sociable by nature, and overflows with kindliness for everybody. He is always smiling, whatever he may be doing or wherever I may meet him, and he has a child's fondness for sweet things. He is never without a lemon-drop in his mouth, and he keeps his pockets full of candy. As often as the opportunity presents itself, he presses handfuls upon Augustine, whom he and his wife ceremoniously call "Madam," and to whom he confides the secrets of the household.
It is through him, by way of Augustine, that we follow the movements of the yacht, and know what "his gentlemen" have for dinner and how many people come to see them. At times I have feared that his confidences to Augustine and the tenderness of his attentions were too marked, and that his old wife, who is less liberal with her smiles, disapproved. Over the grille that separates our leads from his, he gossips by the hour with Augustine, when she lets him, and once or twice, meeting her in the street, he has gallantly invited her into a near public to "'ave a drink," an invitation which she, with French scorn for the British substitute of the café, would disdain to accept. To other tributes of his affection, however, she does not object. On summer evenings he sometimes lays a plate of salad or stewed fruit at our door, rings, runs, and then from out a porthole of a window by his front door, watches the effect when she finds it, and is horribly embarrassed if I find it by mistake. In winter his offering takes the shape of a British mince-pie or a slice of plum pudding, and, on a foggy morning when she comes home from market, he will bring her a glass of port from Mr. Square's cellar. He is always ready to lend her a little oil, or milk, or sugar, in an emergency. Often he is useful in a more urgent crisis. In a sudden thunder-storm he will leap over the grille, shut our door on the leads, and make everything ship-shape almost before I know it is raining. He has even broken in for me when I have come home late without a key, and by my knocking and ringing have roused up everybody in the whole house except Augustine. Mrs. Tom, much as she may disapprove, is as kindly in her own fashion; she is quite learned in medicine, and knows an old-fashioned remedy for every ailment. She has seen Augustine triumphantly through an accident, she has cured Marcel, Augustine's husband, of a quinsy, and she rather likes to be called upon for advice. She is full of little amiabilities. She never gets a supply of eggs fresh from the country at a reasonable price without giving me a chance to secure a dozen or so, and when her son, a fisherman, comes up to London, she always reserves a portion of his present of fish for me. I could not ask for kindlier neighbours, and they are the only friends I have made in the house.
I was very near having friendship thrust upon me, however, by the First Floor Back, Mrs. Eliza Short. She is an elderly lady of generous proportions and flamboyant tastes, "gowned" elaborately by Jay and as elaborately "wigged" by Truefitt. The latest fashions and golden hair cannot conceal the ravages of time, and, as a result of her labours, she looks tragically like the unwilling wreck of a Lydia Thompson Blonde. I may be wrong; she may never have trod the boards, and yet I know of nothing save the theatre that could account for her appearance. The most assiduous of her visitors, as I meet them on the stairs, is an old gentleman as carefully made up in his way, an amazing little dandy, whom I fancy as somebody in the front row applauding rapturously when Mrs. Eliza Short, in tights and golden locks, came pirouetting down the stage. I should have been inclined to weave a pretty romance about them as the modern edition of Philemon and Baucis if, knowing Mrs. Short, it did not become impossible to associate romance of any kind with her.
Our acquaintance was begun by my drinking tea in her chambers the morning "after the fire," of which she profited unfairly by putting me on her visiting-list. She was not at all of Montaigne's opinion that "incuriosity" is a soft and sound pillow to rest a well-composed head upon. On the contrary, it was evident that for hers to rest in comfort she must first see every room in our chambers and examine into all my domestic arrangements. I have never been exposed to such a battery of questions. I must say for her that she was more than ready to pay me in kind. Between her questions she gave me a vast amount of information for which I had no possible use. She told me the exact amount of her income and the manner of its investment. She explained her objection to servants and her preference for having "somebody in" to do the rough work. She confided to me that she dealt at the Stores where she could always get a cold chicken and a bit of ham at a pinch, and the "pinch" at once presented itself to my mind as an occasion when the old dandy was to be her guest. She edified me by her habit of going to bed with the lambs, and getting up with the larks to do her own dusting. The one ray of hope she allowed me was the fact that her winters were spent at Monte Carlo. She could not pass me on the stairs, or in the hall, or on the street, where much of her time was lost, without buttonholing me to ask on what amount of rent I was rated, or how much milk I took in of a morning, or if the butcher sent me tough meat, or other things that were as little her business. I positively dreaded to go out or to come home, and the situation was already strained when Jimmy rushed to the rescue. Elia regretted the agreeable intimacies broken off by the dogs whom he loved less than their owners, but I found it useful to have a cat Mrs. Short could not endure, to break off my intimacy with her, and he did it so effectually that I could never believe it was not done on purpose. One day, when she had been out since ten o'clock in the morning, she returned to find Jimmy locked up in her chambers alone with her bird. That the bird was still hopping about its cage was to me the most mysterious feature in the whole affair, for Jimmy was a splendid sportsman. After his prowls in the garden he only too often left behind him a trail of feathers and blood-stains all the way up the three flights of our stairs. But if the bird had not escaped, Mrs. Short could hardly have been more furious. She demanded Jimmy's life, and when it was refused, insisted on his banishment. She threatened him with poison and me with exposure to the Landlord. For days the Housekeeper was sent flying backwards and forwards between Mrs. Short's chambers and ours, bearing threats and defiances. Jimmy, who knew as well as I did what was going on, rejoiced, and from then until his untimely death never ran downstairs or up—and he was always running down or up—without stopping in front of her door, giving one unearthly howl, and then flying; and never by chance did he pay the same little attention to any one of the other tenants.
Mrs. Short does not allow me to forget her. As her voice is deep and harsh and thunders through the house when she buttonholes somebody else, or says good-bye to a friend at her door, I hear her far more frequently than I care to; as she has a passion for strong scent, I often smell her when I do not see her at all; and as in the Quarter we all patronize the same tradesmen, I am apt to run into her not only on our stairs, but in the dairy, or the Temple of Pomona, or further afield at the Post Office. Then, however, we both stare stonily into vacancy, failing to see each other, and during the sixteen years since that first burst of confidence, we have exchanged not a word, not as much as a glance: an admirable arrangement which I owe wholly to Jimmy.
With her neighbours on the other side of the hall, Mrs. Short has nothing in common except permanency as tenant. Her name and the sign of the Church League faced each other on the First Floor when we came to our chambers; they face each other still. Her golden wig is not oftener seen on our stairs than the gaiters and aprons of the Bishops who rely upon the League for a periodical cup of tea; her voice is not oftener heard than the discreet whispers of the ladies who attend the Bishops in adoring crowds. But Jimmy's intervention was not required to maintain the impersonality of my relations with the League. It has never shown an interest in my affairs nor a desire to confide its own to me. Save for one encounter we have kept between us the distance which it should be the object of all tenants to cultivate, and I might never have looked upon it as more than a name had I not witnessed its power to attract some of the clergy and to enrage others. Nothing has happened in our house to astound me more than the angry passions it kindled in two of our friends who are clergymen. One vows that he will never come to see us again so long as to reach our chambers he must pass the League's door; the second reproaches us for having invited him, his mere presence in the same house being sufficient to ruin his clerical reputation. As the League is diligently working for the Church of which both my friends are distinguished lights, I feel that in these matters there are fine shades beyond my unorthodox intelligence. It is also astounding that the League should inflame laymen of no religious tendencies whatever to more violent antagonism. Friends altogether without the pale have taken offence at what they call the League's arrogance in hanging up its signs not only at its front door, but downstairs in the vestibule, and again on the railings without, and they destroyed promptly the poster it once ventured to put upon the stairs, assuring us that theirs was righteous wrath, and then, in the manner of friends, leaving us to face the consequences.
For myself I bear no ill-will to the League. I may object to the success with which it fills our stairs on the days of its meetings and tea-parties, but I cannot turn this into a pretext for quarrelling, while I can only admire the spirit of progress that has made it the first in the house to do its spring-cleaning by a vacuum cleaner and to set up a private letter-box. I can only congratulate it on the prosperity that has caused the overflow of its offices into the next house, and so led indirectly to the one personal encounter I have referred to. A few of the rooms were to let, and J.'s proposal to set up his printing-press in one of them involved us in a correspondence with the Secretary. Then I called, as by letter we were unable to agree upon details. The League, with a display of hospitality that should put the Architect to shame, bids everybody enter without knocking. But when I accepted this Christian invitation, I was confronted by a tall, solemn-faced young man, who informed me that the Secretary was "engaged in prayer," and I got no further than the inner hall. As I failed to catch the Secretary in his less professional moments, and as his devotions did not soften his heart to the extent of meeting us halfway, we quickly resumed the usual impersonality of our relations.
I cannot imagine our house without the Church League and Mrs. Eliza Short, the Architect and Mr. Square. Were their names to vanish from the doors where I have seen them for the last sixteen years, it would give me the same sense of insecurity as if I suddenly looked out of my window to a Thames run dry, or to a domeless city in the distance. With this older group of tenants, who show their respect for a house of venerable age and traditions by staying in it, I think we are to be included and also the Solicitor of the Ground Floor Front. He has been with us a short time, it is true, but he succeeded our old Insurance Agent whom nothing save death could have removed, and for years before he lived no further away than Peter the Great's house across the street, where he would be still, had it not been torn down over his head to make way for the gaudy, new, grey stone building which foretells the beginning of the end of our ancient street. The Solicitor cloisters himself in his chambers more successfully even than the Architect or the Church League, and I have never yet laid eyes on him or detected a client at his door.
I wish the same could be said of our other newcomers who, with rare exceptions, exhibit a restlessness singularly unbecoming in a house that has stood for centuries. In the Ground Floor Back change for long was continued. It was the home of a Theatrical Agent and his family, and babyish prattle filled our once silent halls; it was the office of a Music Hall Syndicate, and strange noises from stranger instruments came floating out and up our stairs, and blonde young ladies in towering hats blocked the door. Then a Newspaper Correspondent drifted in and drifted out again; and next a publisher piled his books in the windows, and made it look so like the shop which is against the rules of the house that his disappearance seemed his just reward.
After this a Steamship Company took possession, bringing suggestions of sunshine and spice with the exotic names of its vessels and the far-away Southern ports for which they sailed,—bringing, too, the spirit of youth, for it employed many young men and women whom I would meet in couples whispering on the stairs or going home at dusk hand in hand. Tender little idyls sprang up in our sober midst. But the staff of young lovers hit upon the roof as trysting-place at the luncheon hour, running races and playing tag up there, and almost tumbling through our skylight. Cupid, sporting overhead with wings exchanged for hob-nailed boots, was unendurable, and I had to call in the Landlord's Agent. He is the unfortunate go-between in all the tenants' differences and difficulties: a kind, weary, sympathetic man, designed by Nature for amiable, good-natured communication with his fellow men, and decreed by Fate and his calling to communicate with them constantly in their most disagreeable moods and phases. Half my fury evaporated at sight of his troubled face, and I might have endured the races and games of tag could I have foreseen that, almost as soon as he put a stop to them, the Steamship Company would take its departure.
The Professor who then came in is so exemplary a tenant that I hope there will be no more changes in the Ground Floor Back. He is a tall, ruddy, well-built man of the type supposed to be essentially British by those who have never seen the other type far more general in the provincial town or, nearer still, in the East of London. He is of middle-age and should therefore have out-grown the idyllic stage, and his position as Professor at the University is a guarantee of sobriety and decorum. I do not know what he professes, but I can answer for his conscientiousness in professing it by the regularity with which, from our windows, I see him of a morning crossing the garden below on his way to his classes. His household is a model of British propriety. He is cared for by a motherly housekeeper, an eminently correct man-servant, and a large hound of dignified demeanour and a sense of duty that leads him to suspect an enemy in everybody who passes his master's door. His violence in protesting against unobjectionable tenants like ourselves reconciles me to dispensing with a dog, especially as it ends with his bark. It was in his master's chambers that our only burglar was discovered,—a forlorn makeshift of a burglar who got away with nothing, and was in such an agony of fright when, in the small hours of the morning, he was pulled out from under the dining-room table, that the Professor let him go as he might have set free a fly found straying in his jam-pot.
The Professor, as is to be expected of anybody so unmistakably British, cultivates a love for sport. I suspect him of making his amusements his chief business in life, as it is said a man should and as the Briton certainly does. He hunts in the season, and, as he motors down to the meet, he is apt to put on his red coat and white breeches before he starts, and they give the last touch of respectability to our respectable house. He is an ardent automobilist, and his big motor at our door suggests wealth as well as respectability. This would have brought us into close acquaintance had he had his way. Sport is supposed to make brothers of all men who believe in it, but from this category I must except J. at those anxious moments which sport does not spare its followers. He was preparing to start somewhere on his fiery motor bicycle, and the Professor, who had never seen one before, wanted to know all about it. J., deeper than he cared to be in carburettors and other mysterious matters, was not disposed to be instructive, and I think the Professor was ashamed of having been beaten in the game of reserve by an American, for he has made no further advances. His most ambitious achievement is ballooning, to which he owes a fame in the Quarter only less than Mr. Square's. We all watch eagerly, with a feeling of proprietorship, for the balloons on the afternoons when balloon races and trials start from the Crystal Palace or Ranelagh. I have caught our little fruiterer in the act of pointing out the Professor's windows to chance customers; and on those days I am absorbed in the sporting columns of the afternoon paper, which, at other times, I pass over unread. He has now but to fly to complete his triumph and the pride of our house in him.
Restlessness also prevails in the Second Floor Back, and as we are immediately above, we suffer the more. Hardly a tenant has remained there over a year, or a couple of years at most, and all in succession have developed a talent for interfering with our comfort. First, an Honourable occupied the chambers. His title was an unfailing satisfaction to Mrs. Haines, the Housekeeper, who dwelt upon it unctuously every time she mentioned him. I am not learned in Debrett and Burke and may not have appreciated its value, but he might have been Honourable ten times over and it would not have reconciled me to him as neighbour. He was quite sure, if I was not, that he was a great deal better than anybody else, and he had the Briton's independent way of asserting it. He slammed behind him every door he opened, and when the stairs were barricaded by himself, his friends, or his parcels, and we wanted to pass, he failed to see us as completely as if we had been Mr. Wells's Invisible Man. He went to the City in the morning and was away all day, even an Honourable being sometimes compelled to pretend to work. But this was no relief. During his absence his servants availed themselves of the opportunity to assert their independence, which they did with much vigour. When they were not slamming doors they were singing hymns, until Mrs. Eliza Short from her chambers below and we from ours above, in accord the first and only time for years, joined in protest, and drove Mrs. Haines to the unpleasant task of remonstrating with an Honourable.
The Honourable who had come down from the aristocracy was followed by a Maître d'Hôtel who was rapidly rising in rank, and was therefore under as urgent necessity to impress us with his importance. Adolf was an Anglicized German, with moustaches like the Kaiser's, and the swagger of a drum-major. He treated our house as if it was the dining-room under his command, locking and unlocking the street door, turning on and out the lights on the stairs at any hour that suited him, however inconvenient to the rest of us. He littered up the hall with his children and his children's perambulators and hobby-horses, just where we all had to stumble over them to get in or out. Nobody's taxi tooted so loud as his, not even the Honourable's door had shut with such a bang. Augustine's husband being also something in the same profession, they both despised the Adolfs for putting on airs though no better than themselves, while the Adolfs despised them for not having attained the same splendid heights, and the shaking of my rugs out of the back windows was seized upon as the excuse for open warfare. Augustine said it was there they should be shaken according to the law in Paris, which she thought good enough for London. Mrs. Adolf protested that the shaking sent all the dust into her rooms. Augustine, whose English is small and what there is of it not beyond reproach, called Mrs. Adolf "silly fou," which must have been annoying, or harangued her in French when Mrs. Adolf, who could not understand, suspected an offence in every word.
Mrs. Adolf wrote to the Agent, to the Landlord, to me; she declared she would summons me to the County Court. Between letters she watched at her window for the rugs, and there both her servant and her charwoman made faces at Augustine, who has a nice sense of justice and a temper that does not permit her, with Elizabeth Bennet's father, to be satisfied by laughing in her turn at those who have made sport of her. I trembled for the consequences. But at the critical moment, Adolf was promoted to the more splendid height of Manager and a larger salary; the taxi was replaced by a motor-car of his own; Mrs. Adolf arrayed herself in muslin and lace for the washtub, in nothing less elegant than velvet for the street, and they left our old-fashioned chambers for the marble halls and gilded gorgeousness of the modern mansion.
Of the several tenants after the Adolfs, I seem to remember little save the complaints we interchanged. I tried my best to do as I would be done by and to keep out of their way, but accident was always throwing us together to our mutual indignation. There was the Bachelor whose atrocious cook filled our chambers with the rank odours of smoked herring and burnt meat, and whose deserted ladylove filled the stairs with lamentations. There was the young Married Couple into whose bathtub ours overflowed. There was the Accidental Actress whose loud voice and heavy boots were the terror not only of our house, but of the street, whose telephone rang from morning till night, whose dog howled all evening when he was left alone as he usually was, and whose rehearsals in her rooms interrupted the work in ours with ear-piercing yells of "Murder" and "Villain."
I cannot recall them all, so rapidly did they come and go. We began to fear that the life of the tenant was, as Tristram Shandy described the life of man, a shifting from sorrow to sorrow. We lived in an atmosphere of fault-finding, though when there was serious cause for complaint, not a murmur could be wrung from the tenant below or, for that matter, from a tenant in the house. All, like true Britons, refused to admit the possibility of interests in common, and would not stir a hand, however pressing the danger, so long as they were not disturbed. If our chambers reeked with smoke and the smell of burning wood, they accepted the information with calm indifference because theirs did not. Nor did it serve as a useful precedent if, as it happened, smoke and smell were traced again to a fire, smouldering as it had been for nobody knew how long, in the cellar of the adjoining house, separated from ours only by the "party wall" belonging to both: that ingenious contrivance of the builder for creating ill-will between next-door neighbours. They declined to feel the bannisters loose under their grasp, or to see the wide gap opened in the same party wall after the fall of the roof of Charing Cross Station had shaken the Quarter to its foundations and made us believe for a moment that London was emulating Messina or San Francisco. And I must add, so characteristic was it, that the Agent dismissed our fears as idle, and that the Surveyor, sent at our request by the County Council, laughed us to scorn. But we laughed best, for we laughed last. A second Surveyor ordered the wall to be pulled down as unsafe and rebuilt, and the Agent in the end found it prudent to support the bannisters with iron braces.
When, after these trials and tribulations, Mr. Allan took the Second Floor Back we thought the Millennium had come. He was a quiet man, employed in the morning, so we were told, in writing a life of Chopin, and in the evening, as we heard for ourselves, in playing Chopin divinely. The piano is an instrument calculated to convert an otherwise harmless neighbour into a nuisance, but of him it made a delight. He was waited upon by a man as quiet, whose consideration for the tenants went to the length of felt slippers in the house, who never slammed doors nor sang, who never even whistled at his work. An eternity of peace seemed to open out before us, but, as they say in novels, it was not to be. Our confidence in Mr. Allan was first shaken by what I still think an unjustified exhibition of nerves. One night, or rather one early morning, a ring at our door-bell startled us at an hour when, in my experience, it means either a fire or an American cablegram. It was therefore the more exasperating, on opening the door, to be faced by an irate little man in pyjamas and smoking jacket who wanted to know when we proposed to go to bed. Only after J.'s answer "when we are ready," did we know it was Mr. Allan by his explanation that his bed was under the room where we were walking about, that the floor was thin, and that he could not sleep. J. would not enter into an argument. He said the hour was not the most appropriate for a criticism of the construction of the house which, besides, was at all hours the Landlord's and not his affair, and Mr. Allan had the grace to carry his complaint no further. It may have occurred to him on reflection that it was not our fault if he had chosen a room to sleep in just below the room we used to sit and see our friends in.
Had I borne malice, I should not have had to wait long for my revenge, nor to plan it myself. Not many days later, Mr. Allan's servant, watering the flowers on the open balcony at Mr. Allan's window, watered by mistake the new Paris bonnet of the lady of the Ground Floor Back who was coming home at that very minute. Under the circumstances few women would not have lost their temper, but few would have been so prompt in action. She walked straight upstairs to Mr. Allan's chambers, the wreck in her hand. The servant opened to her knock, but she insisted upon seeing the master.
"I have come, Allan, to tell you what I think of the conduct of your servant," she said, when the master appeared. "Yes, I call you Allan, for I mean to talk to you as man to man," which she proceeded to do.
I did not hear the talk, but it was almost a week before I heard the piano again. Poor Mr. Allan! And this proved a trifle to the worse humiliation he was soon to endure.
As I sat with a book by my lamp one evening before dinner, shrieks from his chambers and a crash of crockery sent me rushing to the door and out upon the landing, with Augustine at my heels. Old Tom and his wife arrived there simultaneously, and, looking cautiously over the bannisters, I saw an anxious crowd looking up as cautiously from the hall on the Ground Floor. The shrieks developed into curses intermingled with more riotous crashing of china. The Housekeeper, urged by the crowd below, crept all unwilling to Mr. Allan's door and knocked. The door was flung open, and, before she ventured to "beg pardon but the noise disturbed the other tenants," Mr. Allan's hitherto well-behaved servant greeted her with a volley of blood-curdling epithets and the smash of every pane of glass in the upper panel of the door, and down she fled again. He bolted out after her, but looking up and catching a glimpse of Tom, peacefully sucking a lemon-drop, he became so personal that Tom and his wife retreated hastily, and for the first time the smile faded from the old man's face. In a moment's lull I heard Mr. Allan's voice, low and entreating, then more curses, more crashes. I should not have thought there was so much glass and crockery to be broken in the whole house.
Presently a policeman appeared, and then a second. The door was open, but the servant was busy finishing up the crockery. Mr. Allan spoke to them, and then, like a flash, the servant was there too.
"I dare you to let them come in!" he yelled, so loud he could be heard from the top to the bottom of the house. "I dare you to let them come in! I dare you to give me in charge! I dare you! I dare you!"
And Mr. Allan did not dare, that was the astonishing part of it. And he never lost his temper. He argued with the policemen, he plead with the servant, while one group on our landing and another on the Ground Floor waited anxiously. The policemen did not desert us but stood guard on the Second Floor, which was a reassurance, until gradually the yells were lowered, the crashes came at longer intervals, and at last, I suppose in sheer exhaustion, the servant relapsed into his usual calm, Mr. Allan "sported his oak," and I learned how truly an Englishman's home is his castle.
The Housekeeper spent the evening on the stairs gossiping at every door. There was not much to learn from her. A mystery was hinted—many mysteries were hinted. The truth I do not know to this moment. I only know that before the seven days of our wonder were over, the Agent, more careworn than ever if that were possible, made a round of visits in the house, giving to each tenant an ample and abject apology written by Mr. Allan. At the end of the quarter, the Second Floor Back was again to let.
We should have parted with Mr. Allan less light-heartedly could we have anticipated what was in store for us. He was no sooner gone than the Suffragettes came in.
I have no quarrel on political grounds with the Suffragettes. Theoretically, I believe that women of property and position should have their vote and that men without should not, but I think it a lesser evil for women to be denied the vote than for the suffrage to become as universal for women as for men, and to grant it on any other conditions would be an indignity. I state the fact to explain that I am without prejudice. I do not argue, for, to tell the truth, shocking as it may be, I am not keen one way or the other. Life for me has grown crowded enough without politics, and years have lessened the ardour for abstract justice that was mine when, in my youth, I wrote the "Life of Mary Wollstonecraft," and militant Suffragettes as yet were not. Ours are of the most militant variety, and it is not their fault if the world by this time does not know what this means. Even so, on general principles, I should have no grievance against them. Every woman is free to make herself ridiculous, and it is none of my business if my neighbours choose to make a public spectacle of themselves by struggling in the arms of policemen, or going into hysterics at meetings where nobody wants them; if they like to emulate bad boys by throwing stones and breaking windows, or if it amuses them to slap and whip unfortunate statesmen who, physically, could easily convince them of their inferiority. But when they make themselves a nuisance to me personally I draw the line. And they are a nuisance to me.
They have brought pandemonium into the Quarter where once all was pleasantness and peace. Of old, if the postman, the milkman, a messenger boy, and one or two stray dogs and children lingered in our street, we thought it a crowd; since the coming of the Suffragettes, I have seen the same street packed solid with a horde of the most degenerate creatures in London summoned by them "to rush the House of Commons." They have ground their hurdy-gurdies at our door, Heaven knows to what end; vans covered with their posters have obstructed our crossing; motor-cars adorned with their flags have missed fire and exploded in our street; and they have had themselves photographed as sandwiches on our Terrace. Our house is in a turmoil from morning till night with women charging in like a mob, or stealing out like conspirators. Their badges, their sandwich boards, their banners lie about in our hall, so much in everybody's way that I sympathized with the infuriated tenant whom I caught one night kicking the whole collection into the cellar. They talk so hard on the stairs that often they pass their own door and come on to ours, bringing Augustine from her work and disturbing me at mine, for she can never open to them without poking her head into my room to tell me, "Encore une sale Suffragette!" In their chambers they never stop chattering, and their high shrill treble penetrates through the floor and reaches us up above. The climax came with their invasion of our roof.
This roof, built "after the fire," is a modern invention, designed for the torture of whoever lives underneath. It is flat, with a beautiful view to be had among the chimney-pots and telephone wires; it is so thin that a pigeon could not waddle across without being heard by us; and as it is covered with gravel, every sound is accompanied by a scrunching warranted to set the strongest nerves in a quiver. We had already been obliged to represent to the Agent that it was not intended for the Housekeeper's afternoon parties or young people's games of tag, that there were other, more suitable places where postmen could take a rest, or our actress recite her lines, or lovers do their courting amid the smuts. Our patience, indeed, had been so tried in one way or another that at the first sound from above, at any hour of the day or night, J. was giving chase to the trespassers, and they were retreating before the eloquence of his attack. It was in a corner of this roof, just above the studio and in among wood-enclosed cisterns, that the Suffragettes elected to send off fire-balloons, which, in some way best known to themselves, were to impress mankind with the necessity of giving them the vote. The first balloon floated above the chimney-tops, a sheet of flame, and was dropping, happily into the Thames, when J., straight from his printing-press, in blouse, sleeves rolled up, arms and hands black with ink, a cap set sideways, was on the roof, and the Secretary of the Militants and a young man in the brown suit and red tie that denote the Socialist, in their hands matches and spirits of wine, were flying downstairs. I was puzzled to account for their meekness unless it was that never before had they seen anybody so inky, never before listened to language so picturesque and American. J., without giving them time to take breath, called in the Landlord's Agent, supported by the Landlord's Solicitor, and they were convinced of the policy of promising not to do it again. And of course they did.
A week later the Prime Minister was unveiling a statue, or performing some equally innocent function in the garden below our windows, when the Suffragettes, from the roofs of near woodsheds, demanded him through a megaphone to give Votes to Women. We followed the movement with such small zest that when we were first aware something out of the common was going on in the Quarter, the two heroines were already in the arms of policemen, where of late so much of the Englishwoman's time has been spent, and heads were at every window up and down our street, housekeepers at every door, butchers' and bakers' boys grouped on the sidewalk, one or two tradesmen's carts drawn up in the gutter, battalions of police round the corner. The women no doubt to-day boast of the performance as a bold strike for freedom, and recall with pride the sensation it created.
At this point I lost sight of the conflict on the roof below, for, from the roof above, a balloon shot upwards, so high that only the angels could have read the message it bore. The familiar scrunching, though strangely muffled, was heard, and J., again in blouse and ink, was up and away on a little campaign of his own. This time he found six women, each with a pair of shoes at her side and her feet drawn up under her, squatting in a ring behind the cisterns, bending over a can of spirits of wine, and whispering and giggling like school-girls.
"It won't go off," they giggled, and the next minute all chance of its ever going off was gone, for J. had seized the balloon and torn it to tatters.
"You have destroyed our property," shrieked a venerable little old lady, thin and withered, with many wrinkles and straggling grey hair.
He told her that was what he had intended to do.
"But it cost ten shillings," she squeaked in a tremor of rage, and with an attempt at dignity, but it is as hard to be dignified, as Corporal Trim found it to be respectful, when one is sitting squat upon the ground.
A younger woman, golden-haired, in big hat and feathers, whom the others called Duchess, demanded "Who are you anyhow?" And when I consider his costume and his inkiness I wonder he had not been asked it long before.
"You can go downstairs and find out," he said, "but down you go!"
There was a moment's visible embarrassment, and they drew their stocking feet closer up under them. J., in whom they had left some few shreds of the politeness which he, as a true American, believes is woman's due, considerately looked the other way. As soon as they were able to rise up in their shoes, they altogether lost their heads. The Housekeeper and the Agent, summoned in the mean time, were waiting as they began to crawl down the straight precipitous ladder from the roof. In an agony of apprehension, the women clutched their skirts tight about them, protesting and scolding the while. The little old lady tried to escape into our chambers, one or two stood at the top of the stairs, cutting off all approach, the others would not budge from our narrow landing. A telegraph boy and a man with a parcel endeavoured to get past them and up to us, but they would not give way an inch. Finally in despair, J. gently collected them and pushed them down the stairs towards their own door.
"We will have you arrested for assault!" the little old lady shrieked.
"We charge you with assault and battery," the golden-haired lady re-echoed from below.
And we heard no more, for at last, with a sigh of relief, J. could get to our door and shut out the still ascending uproar.
But that was not the end of it. If you can believe it, they were on the roof again within an hour, getting themselves and their megaphone photographed, for the fight for freedom would not be half so sweet without the publicity of portraits in the press. And we were besieged with letters. One Suffragette wrote that an apology was due,—yes, J. replied, due to him. A second lectured him on the offence given to her "dear friend, the Duchess," for to become a Suffragette is not to cease to be a snob, and warned him that the Duchess—who was the golden-haired lady and may have had the bluest blood of England in her veins, but who looked more like one of the Gaiety girls, from whom the stock of the British nobility has been so largely replenished—and the Duke intended to consult their Solicitor if regret were not expressed. And the Landlord's Agent called, and the Landlord's Solicitor followed, and a Police Inspector was sent from Scotland Yard for facts,—and he reprimanded J. for one mistake, for not having locked the door on the inside when they were out,—and the insurance people wanted to know about the fire-balloons, and everybody with any possible excuse came down upon us, except the police officer with the warrant to arrest J. for assault and battery.
It is all over now. If the Suffragettes still hatch their plots under our roof, they are denied the use of it for carrying them out. They leave us in peace for the moment, the quiet which is the charm of an old house like ours has returned to it, and outwardly the tenants cultivate the repose and dignity incumbent upon them as the descendants of Bacon and Pepys and the inheritors of a great past.
The Quarter
