About Homes in Bondage
Do you wish to feel human emotion spring from inanimate things? Do you wish to meet ghosts? Then come with me to one of London's great furniture store-houses, in which a thousand homes lie piled to the roof, silent, sheeted, tomb-like.
A store-man switches on a line of lights, and we see stretching to the distance great pyramids of household goods, whole homes of furniture, neatly stacked and carefully ticketed against the time when a man and a woman will come to claim them. Some of the pyramids suggest Park Lane, others suggest Clapham Common.
Let us peep beneath this shroud, and what do we see: "Good morning, Mrs. Everyman, and what can I do for you? Kindly accept this cushion as a souvenir of your visit." There lies the gift cushion, there the once-so-loved instalment suite that was delivered in the plain van. Note the pictures by Watts, Rossetti, and others of the Victorians to whom the suburbs are so loyal. "Love's Awakening." Ah!
What do we see in the next tomb? Yes; here was an elegant home with a cheque-book behind it. The low satinwood dresser had a compartment like a knee desk, so that she might get close up when she rouged her lips, and three swinging mirrors in order that she might know whether her shoulders were evenly powdered before he took her out to the Berkeley. Engravings, a Japanese cabinet, a good one, a beautiful round table with a surface like that of a still pool. Little home and big home side by side, social differences forgotten. Do you see the ghosts of Mrs. Everyman and Lady Nobody meeting like sisters over their shrouded homes crying a little on each other's arms? I do. The tombs go on waiting ... waiting.
Homes in bondage!
As we wander down the line our eyes are caught by a doll's house, relic of some distant nursery, a child's cot, or a piece of furniture with distinct personality, and we wonder how much heartache and hope this place represents. There are people living in lodgings dreaming of the home that they will build again one day, longing to surround themselves with loved things, to tear off the wrappings and see again those precious ordinary objects that mean so much in every life—those sentimental anchors.
Sentiment—that is the keynote. Without it London's store-rooms would be half empty.
"Yes, sir," says the store-man, as he pulls aside a wrapping, "people don't seem able to bring themselves to part with things. It's mighty queer. Look at this old box, now—what would you think is inside it?"
The box is an ancient nail-studded chest with a curved lid that might have contained all the gold of Treasure Island. I hazard a guess just to please him.
"No, sir. It's just full of little old bits of cloth, the kind of things that women collect and put in old baskets because they may come in useful some day. There's bits of tinsel and lace, and pretty little cases full of red and blue beads and needles by the score. But what's the sense of letting it eat its head off here? That's what I want to know. If they've paid a penny for this old box they must have paid fifty pounds, for it was here before ever I was. O yes, there's funny people about, and no mistake. Now if it belonged to me...."
As he rambles on, I examine the old box with interest. I know why it was put there; and so do you! Memories cling round it—memories so sweet that the heart revolts at the thought of burning those poor fragments.
Most people have a box of this sort. In it are queer trifles, little geometric nets on which beads are strung or sewn. Green and scarlet parrots preen themselves on half-finished trees. It is that note of half completion, as of a task suddenly put down and soon to be resumed, which makes such things so appealing. Perhaps a needle is still sticking in a corner of the fabric, waiting, it seems, for the fingers that will never come again. And when you look you see the hand that placed it there, you hear a voice and see a face bending over the pretty, unimportant thing, and it's ten to one that you are a child again on some slow, lazy afternoon of sun; and the voice is the voice of your mother telling you the same old story you have heard a hundred times as you watch her, fascinated by her brilliance, hypnotized by the growth of the brocade bird and its beaded eye: a masterpiece which fills your mind and stands out as the most marvellous and beautiful thing the world has ever seen. Clever, wonderful mother....
"There's funny people about, and no mistake!" says the storeman again, giving the box a prod with his foot.
We go on. He unties the wrappings round another deposit. All these things, he explains, belong to "a divorced couple." How new they are, he comments. How quickly they must have found out their mistake; no sooner married than divorced and storing their things, and chucking away good money after bad!
I peep in with a feeling that I am eavesdropping. There, piled up sideways, is the table round which this unknown tragedy of married life was acted, the solemn, stiff chairs, witness to it all, the pictures which for a little while were gathered for this mockery of a home.
"Why they don't sell it I can't think," says the storeman.
I wonder, too, why they keep it! Neither one nor the other can bear to live with it. Then what queer sentiment, what common memory, retains this split home here in the pathetic silence of lapsed things?
We turn a corner. More avenues, sheeted, deserted.
"Some of these people are dead, we think," remarks my guide, waving his hand towards the dim roof. "This lot was put in at the beginning of the war. We had to sell quite a lot. Payments lapsed, and no one replied to advertisements. It is a mystery to know who it belongs to now, sir, and that's a fact."
* * *
As we turn into another warehouse we meet a man and woman. They have pulled aside the sheeting and are standing among chairs and tables and pictures. The woman comes out and says nervously:
"We've just come to see our things. The manager said that we might."
As we enter the next compartment we hear this man and woman talking.
"Oh, look! There it is, next to mother's writing-table. Do pick it up and let me hold it!"
There is the sound of the man walking over the stiff wrappings.
"Oh, my dear!" comes the woman's voice. "My dear!"
We go on through the silent aisles, the storeman talkative, amusing, insensible to the drama we have met, oblivious of the longing in those few words spoken by a woman, among the sheeted pathos of a home in bondage.