Our House and London out of Our Windows

by Elizabeth Robins Pennell

I understood it before we were settled in our chambers, for they were not really ours until after a long delay over the legal formalities with which the English love to entangle their simplest transactions at somebody else's expense, and a longer one in proving our personal and financial qualifications, the landlord being disturbed by a suspicion that, like the Housekeeper's daughter, we were in the profession and spent most of our time "resting," a suspicion confirmed by the escape of the last tenant, also in the profession, with a year's rent still to pay. And then came much the longest delay of all over the British Workman, who, once he got in, threatened never to get out. In the mean while we saw the Housekeeper almost every day.

We did not have to see her often to discover that she was born a housekeeper, that she had but one thought in life, and that this was the house under her charge. I am sure she believed that she came into the world to take care of it, unless indeed it was built to be taken care of by her. She belonged to a generation in England who had not yet been taught the folly of interest in their work, and she was old-fashioned enough to feel the importance of the post she filled. She would have lost her self-respect had she failed in the slightest detail of her duty to the house. From the first, the spotless marvel she made of it divided our admiration with our windows. The hall and front steps were immaculate, the white stone stairs shone, there was not a speck of dust anywhere, and I appreciated the work this meant in an old London building, where the dirt not only filters through doors and windows, but oozes out of the walls and comes up through the floors. She did not pretend to hide her despair when our painters and paperers tramped and blundered in and out; she fretted herself ill when our furniture was brought up the three flights of her shining stairs. Painters and paperers and the bringing up of furniture were rare incidents in the life of a tenant and had to be endured. But coal, with its trail of dust, was an endless necessity, and at least could be regulated. This was why, after her daily cleaning was done, she refused to let it pass.

Once we were established, we saw her less often. Her daily masterpiece was finished in the morning before we were up, and at all times she effaced herself with the respect she owed to tenants of a house in which she was the servant. If we did meet her she acknowledged our greeting with ostentatious humility, for she clung with as little shame to servility as to cleanliness; servility was also a part of the business of a housekeeper, just as elegance was the mark of the profession which her daughter graced, and the shame would have been not to be as servile as the position demanded.

This daughter was in every way an elegant person, dressing with a fidelity to fashion which I could not hope to emulate, and with the help of a fashionable dressmaker whom I could not afford to pay. She was "resting" from the time we came into the house until her mother left it, but if in the profession it is a misfortune to be out of work, it is a crime to look it, and her appearance and manner gave no hint of unemployment. In an emergency she would bring us up a message or a letter, but her civility had none of her mother's obsequiousness; it was a condescension, and she made us feel the honor she conferred upon the house by living in it. She was engaged to be married to a stage manager who for the moment seemed to be without a stage to manage, for he spent his evenings with her in the Housekeeper's little sitting-room, where photographs of actors and actresses, each with its sprawling autograph, covered the walls, crowded the mantelpiece, and littered the table. I think the Housekeeper could have asked for nothing better than that they should both continue to "rest," not so much because it gave her the pleasure of their society as because it was a protection to the house to have a man about after dark until the street door was closed at eleven. Had it come to a question between the house and her daughter, the daughter would not have had a chance.

The Housekeeper, for all her deference to the tenants, was a despot, and none of us dared to rebel against her rule and disturb the order she maintained. To anybody coming in from the not too respectable little street the respectability of the house was overwhelming, and I often noticed that strangers, on entering, lowered their voices and stepped more softly. The hush of repose hung heavy on the public hall and stairs, whatever might be going on behind the two doors that faced each other on every landing. We all emulated her in the quiet and decorum of our movements. We allowed ourselves so seldom to be seen that after three months I still knew little of the others except their names on their doors, the professions of those who had offices and hung up their signs, and the frequency with which the Church League on the First Floor drank afternoon tea. On certain days, when I went out towards five o'clock, I had to push my way through a procession of bishops in aprons and gaiters, deans and ordinary parsons who were legion, dowagers and duchesses who were as sands on the stairs. I may be wrong, but I fancy that the Housekeeper would have found a way to rout this weekly invasion if, in the aprons and gaiters, she had not seen symbols of the respectability which was her pride.

What I did not find out about the tenants for myself, there was no learning from her. She disdained the gossip which was the breath of life to the other housekeepers in the street, where, in the early mornings when the fronts were being done, or in the cool of summer evenings when the day's work was over, I would see them chattering at their doors. She never joined in the talk, holding herself aloof, as if her house were on a loftier plane than theirs, and as if the number of her years in it raised her to a higher caste. Exactly how many these years had been she never presumed to say, but she looked as ancient as the house, and had she told me she remembered Bacon and Pepys, who were tenants each in his own day, or Peter the Great, who lived across the street, I should have believed her. She did not, however, claim to go further back than Etty, the Royal Academician, who spent over a quarter of a century in our chambers, and one of whose sitters she once brought up to see us,—a melancholy old man who could only shake his head, first over the changes in the house since Etty painted those wonderful Victorian nudes, so demure that "Bob" Stevenson insisted that Etty's maiden aunts must have sat for them, and then over the changes in the River, which also, it seemed, had seen better days. Really, he was so dismal a survivor of an older generation that we were glad she brought no more of his contemporaries to see us.

For so despotic a character, the Housekeeper had a surprisingly feminine capacity for hysterics, of which she made the most the night of the fire. I admit it was an agitating event for us all. The Fire of London was not so epoch-making. Afterwards the tenants used to speak of the days "Before the Fire," as we still talk at home of the days "Before the War." It happened in July, the third month of our tenancy. J. was away, and, owing to domestic complications, I was alone in our chambers at night. I do not recall the period with pride, for it proved me more of a coward than I cared to acknowledge. If I came home late, it was a struggle to make up my mind to open my front door and face the Unknown on the other side. Once or twice there was a second struggle at the dining-room door, the simple search for biscuits exaggerating itself into a perilous adventure. As I was not yet accustomed to the noises in our chambers, fear followed me to my bedroom, and when the trains on the near railroad bridge awoke me, I lay trembling, certain they were burglars or ghosts, forgetting that visitors of that kind are usually shyer in announcing themselves. Then I began to be ashamed, and there was a night when, though the noises sounded strangely like voices immediately outside my window, I managed to turn over and try to sleep again. This time the danger was real, and, the next thing I knew, somebody was ringing the front door-bell and knocking without stopping, and before I had time to be afraid I was out of bed and at the door. It was the young man from across the hall, who had come to give me the cheerful intelligence that his chambers were on fire, and to advise me to dress as fast as I knew how and get downstairs before the firemen and the hose arrived, or I might not get down at all.

I flung myself into my clothes, although, as I am pleased to recall, I had the sense to select my most useful gown, in case but one was left me in the morning, and the curiosity to step for a second on to the leads where the flames were leaping from the young man's windows. As it was too late to help himself, he was waiting, with his servant, to help me. A pile of J.'s drawings lay on a chair in the hall,—I thrust them the young man's outstretched arms. For some incomprehensible reason J.'s huge schube was on another chair,—I threw it into the arms of the young man's servant, who staggered under its unexpected weight. I rushed to my desk to secure the money I was unwilling to leave behind, when a bull's-eye lantern flashed upon me and a policeman ordered me out. Firemen—for London firemen eventually arrive if the fire burns long enough—were dragging up a hose as I flew downstairs, and the policeman had scarcely pushed me into the Housekeeper's room, the young man had just deposited the drawings at my feet, and the servant the schube, when the stairs became a raging torrent.

I had not thought of the Housekeeper till then; after that there was no thinking of anything else. My dread of never again seeing our chambers was nothing to her sense of the outrage to her house. Niobe weeping for her children was not so tragic a spectacle as she lamenting the ruin of plaster and paint that did not belong to her. She was half-dressed, propped up against cushions on a couch, sniffing the salts and sipping the water administered by her daughter, who had taken the time to dress carefully and elegantly for the scene. "Oh, what shall I do! Oh, what shall I do!" the Housekeeper wailed as she saw me, wringing her hands with an abandonment that would have made her daughter's fortune on the stage.

Her sitting-room had been appropriated as a refuge for the tenants, and this sudden reunion was my introduction to them. As the room was small, my first impression was of a crowd, though in actual numbers we were not many. The young man whose distinction was that the fire originated in his chambers, and myself, represented the Third Floor Front and Back. The Architect and his clerks of the Second Floor Front were at home in their beds, unconscious of the deluge pouring into their office; the Second Floor Back had gone away on a holiday. The Church League of the First Floor Front, haunted by bishops and deans, duchesses and dowagers, was of course closed, and we were deprived of whatever spiritual consolation their presence might have provided. But the First Floor Back filled the little room with her loud voice and portly presence. She had attired herself for the occasion in a black skirt and a red jacket, that, for all her efforts, would not meet over the vast expanse of grey Jaeger vest beneath, and her thin wisps of grey hair were drawn up under a green felt hat of the pattern I wore for bicycling. I looked at it regretfully: a hat of any kind would have completed my costume. I complimented her on her fore-thought; but "What could I do?" she said, "they flurried me so I couldn't find my false front anywhere, and I had to cover my head with something." It was extraordinary how a common danger broke down the barrier of reserve we had hitherto so carefully cultivated. She had her own salts which she shared with us all, when she did not need them for the Housekeeper, whom she kept calling "Poor dear!" and who, after every "Poor dear!" went off into a new attack of hysterics.