The rear and smaller portion of the house was divided into but two apartments, the kitchen below and a sleeping room above. At the back of the kitchen was a small shed, and quite a large yard. Some people believed that this yard, with its pear tree and grape vine, had been the main attraction of the place for Mr. Whitman.
On ascending the staircase, a small landing and the back sleeping room were reached; then, turning about, came more stairs, with a larger landing, part of which had been made into a clothespress. Apart from this landing and a little den, sometimes known as "the anteroom," the upper portion of the main building had only one room. But the two doors in it, and a deep rugged scar across the low ceiling, testified to its having formerly been divided by a partition. As one of the doors was permanently fastened, the only access was through the den, anteroom, or "adjoining apartment," as it was also occasionally called.
In the larger room was a fireplace with a mantel shelf above. There were two windows corresponding with the windows below, while the smaller room or den, reduced to one-half its proper width by some pine shelves and an outjutting chimney, had like the room below but one. The outlook from this window, into which the sun made but a few annual peeps, was the brick wall on one side, the back roof on the other, and a glimpse of the sky.
The situation of the house was anything but inviting, and the locality was one that few would choose to live in. It was near both depot and ferry, and as the tracks were but a block away, or scarcely that, being laid in what would have been the centre of the next street, there was an uninterrupted racket day and night. The noise of the passenger and excursion trains—for the excursions to the coast went by way of Camden—was only a minor circumstance compared with that of the freight trains as they thundered by, or passed and re-passed in making up.
Close at hand was a church with a sharp-toned bell, and a "choir of most nerve-unsettling singers" (Thomas Donaldson); and as if this were not enough, there was at times a most disagreeable odor from a guano factory on the Philadelphia side of the Delaware.
Such was the house to which Mary Davis had now come, and where through the strange, busy days of the next seven years she was destined to be Walt Whitman's indispensable "housekeeper, nurse and friend"—or, from the outsider's point of view, his "single attendant."
The spring of 1885 was far advanced before things were fairly in running order, for from the first there had been no intermission in the poet's erratic mode of living, and Mrs. Davis had been obliged to devote much time to his personal wants. Somehow he had a way of demanding attention which she found it impossible to resist.
Truly she had been hampered on all sides, this faithful Martha-Mary; so many things to be seen to, so many things to handle and rehandle and change about before an established place for them could be found; the strenuous cleaning, for the former tenants had left the place extremely dirty; and the pondering over repairs, and deciding which were absolutely essential and unpostponable, and which could be put off for a little while longer.
She first carpeted, furnished and settled the parlors, intending the back one as the sleeping room for her young charge, until her marriage in the fall, when it could be used as a spare room. But Mr. Whitman had different intentions, for he at once appropriated both rooms, and would not allow the doors separating them to be closed.
One of the front windows became his favorite sitting place, and here he wrote, read his papers and sat while entertaining his friends. He was delighted with these rooms, and in them he enjoyed himself to his heart's content: first in getting things into disorder at once, and then in keeping them so.