At the top of the stairs, a hallway led to rooms both front and back. The ceiling of these rooms, low even in the middle, sloped to windows of half height in dormers. The poet waved his hand. "I have been living in the front room," he said, "but I am adding this room behind for a study."
We entered the study. A man was mopping up the floor. Evidently the room had not been lived in for years, for the dirt was caked to a half inch. A general wreckage of furniture—a chair, a table with marble top, a carved sideboard with walnut dingles, a wooden bed with massive headboard, a mattress and a broken pitcher—had been swept to the middle of the room. There was also a pile of old embalmer's journals, and a great carton that seemed to contain tubes of tooth-paste.
"You see," said the poet, "I have been living in the other room. This used to be a storage—years ago, for the family that once lived here, and more recently for the embalmer."
"Storage!" I exclaimed. "You don't suppose that they kept any—?"
"No."
"Well," I said, "it's a snug little place."
I bent over and picked up one of the embalmer's journals. On the cover there was a picture of a little boy in a night-gown, saying his prayer to his mother. The prayer was printed underneath. "And, mama," it read, "have God make me a good boy, and when I grow up let me help papa in his business, and never use anything but Twirpp's Old Reliable Embalming Fluid, the kind that papa has always used, and grandpa before him."
Now, Charles Lamb, I recall, once confessed that he was moved to enthusiasm by an undertaker's advertisement. "Methinks," he writes, "I could be willing to die, in death to be so attended. The two rows all round close-drove best black japanned nails,—how feelingly do they invite, and almost irresistibly persuade us to come and be fastened down." But the journal did not stir me to this high emotion.
I crossed the room and stooped to look out of the dormer window—into a shallow yard where an abandoned tin bath-tub and other unprized valuables were kept. A shabby tree acknowledged that it had lost its way, but didn't know what to do about it. It had its elbow on the fence and seemed to be in thought. A wash-stand lay on its side, as if it snapped its fingers forever at soap and towels. Beyond was a tall building, with long tables and rows of girls working.
One of the girls desisted for a moment from her feathers with which she was making hats, and stuck out her tongue at me in a coquettish way. I returned her salute. She laughed and tossed her head and went back to her feathers.