Our House and London out of Our Windows

by Elizabeth Robins Pennell

The Ground Floor Front, a thin, spry old gentleman, hovered about us, bobbing in and out like the little man in the weather-house. He was in the insurance business, I was immediately informed, and it seemed a comfort to us all to know it, though I cannot for the life of me imagine why it should have been to me, not one stick or stitch up there in our chambers being insured. The Ground Floor Back was at his club, and his wife and two children had not been disturbed, as in their chambers the risk was not immediate, and, anyway, they could easily walk out should it become so. He had been promptly sent for, and when a message came back that he was playing whist and would hurry to the rescue of his family as soon as his rubber was finished, the indignation in the Housekeeper's room was intense. "Brute!" the Housekeeper said, and after that, through the rest of the night, she would ask every few minutes if he had returned, and the answer in the negative was fresh fuel to her wrath.

She was, if anything, more severe with the young man whose chambers were blazing, and who confessed he had gone out toward midnight leaving a burning candle in one of his rooms. He treated the fire as a jest, which she could not forgive; and when at dawn, he decided that all his possessions, including account-books committed to his care, were in ashes, and that it was useless to wait, and he wished us good-morning and good-by, she hinted darkly that fires might be one way of disposing of records it was convenient to be rid of.

Indignation served better than salts to rouse the Housekeeper from her hysterics, and I was glad of the distraction it gave her for another reason: without it, she could not long have remained unconscious of an evil that I look back to as the deadliest of all during that night's vigil. For, gradually through her room, by this time close to suffocation, there crept the most terrible smell. It took hold of me, choked me, sickened me. The Housekeeper's daughter and the First Floor Back blanched under it, the Housekeeper turned from white to green. I have often marvelled since that they never referred to it, but I know why I did not. For it was I who sent that smell downstairs when I threw the Russian schube into the arms of the Third Floor Front's servant. Odours, they say, are the best jogs to memory, and the smell of the schube is for me so inextricably associated with the fire, that I can never think of one without remembering the other.

The schube was the chief treasure among the fantastic costumes it is J.'s joy to collect on his travels. His Hungarian sheepskins, French hooded capes, Swiss blouses, Spanish berêts, Scotch tam-o'-shanters, Dalmatian caps, Roumanian embroidered shirts, and the rest, I can dispose of by packing them out of sight and dosing them with camphor. But no trunk was big enough to hold the Russian schube, and its abominable smell, even when reinforced by tons of camphor and pepper, could not frighten away the moths. It was picturesque, so much I admit in its favor, and Whistler's lithograph of J. draped in it is a princely reward for my trouble. But that trouble lasted for eighteen years, during which time J. wore the schube just twice,—once to pose for the lithograph and once on a winter night in London, when its weight was a far more serious discomfort than the cold. Occasionally he exhibited it to select audiences. At all other times it hung in a colossal linen bag made especially to hold it. The eighteenth summer, when the bag was opened for the periodical airing and brushing, no schube was there; not a shred of fur remained, the cloth was riddled with holes; it had fallen before its hereditary foe and the moths had devoured it. For this had I toiled over it; for this had I rescued it on the night of the fire as if it were my crowning jewel; for this had I braved the displeasure of the Housekeeper, from which indeed I escaped only because, at the critical moment, the policeman who had ordered me downstairs appeared to say that the lady from the Third Floor Back could go up again if she chose.

The stairs were a waterfall under which I ascended. The two doors of our chambers were wide open, with huge gaps where panels had been, the young man's servant having carefully shut them after me in our flight, thinking, I suppose, that the firemen would stand upon ceremony and ask for the key before venturing in. A river was drying up in our hall, and the strip of matting down the centre was sodden. Empty soda-water bottles rolled on the floor, though it speaks well for London firemen that nothing stronger was touched. Candles were stuck upside down in our hanging Dutch lamp and all available candlesticks, curtains and blinds were pulled about, chairs were upset, the marks of muddy feet were everywhere. I ought to have been grateful, and I was, that the damage was so small, all the more when I went again on to the leads and saw the blackened heap to which the night had reduced the young man's chambers. But the place was inexpressibly cheerless and dilapidated in the dawning light.

It was too late to go to bed, too early to go to work. I was hungry, and the baker had not come, nor the charwoman. I was faint, the smell of the schube was strong in my nostrils, though the schube itself was now safely locked up in a remote cupboard. I wandered disconsolately from room to room, when, of a sudden, there appeared at my still open front door a gorgeous vision,—a large and stately lady, fresh and neat, arrayed in flowing red draperies, with a white lace fichu thrown over a mass of luxuriant golden hair. I stared, speechless with amazement. It was not until she spoke that I recognized the First Floor Back, who had had time to lay her hands not only on a false front, but on a whole wig, and who had had the enterprise to make tea which she invited me to drink with her in Pepys's chambers.

The Housekeeper and the Housekeeper's daughter were already in her dining-room, the Housekeeper huddled up in a big armchair, pillows at her back, a stool at her feet. Like her house she was a wreck, and her demoralization was sad to see. All her life, until a few short hours ago, she had been the model of neatness; now she did not care how she looked; her white hair was untidy, her dress half-buttoned, her apron forgotten; and she, who had hitherto discouraged familiarity in the tenants, joined us as a friend. She was too exhausted for hysterics, but she moaned over her tea and abandoned herself to her grief. She could not rally, and, what is more, she did not want to. She had no life apart from her house, and in its ruin she saw her own. Her immaculate hall was defaced and stained, a blackened groove was worn in her shining stairs, the water pouring through the chambers in the front, down to her own little apartment, had turned them all into a damp and depressing mess. Her moans were the ceaseless accompaniment to our talk of the night's disaster. Always she had waited for the fire, she said, she had dreaded it, and at last it had come, and there was no sorrow like unto hers.

After the first excitement, after the house had resumed, as well as it could, its usual habits, the Housekeeper remained absorbed in her grief. Hitherto her particular habit was to work, and she had been able, unaided, to keep the house up to her immaculate standard of perfection. But now to restore it to order was the affair of builders, of plasterers and painters and paperers. There was nothing for her to do save to sit with hands folded and watch the sacrilege. Her occupation was gone, and all was wrong with her world.

I was busy during the days immediately "after the fire." I had to insure our belongings, which, of course, being insured, have never run such a risk again. I had to prepare and pack for a journey to France, now many days overdue, and, what with one thing or another, I neglected the Housekeeper. When at last I was ready to shut up our chambers and start and I called at her rooms, it seemed to me she had visibly shrunk and wilted, though she had preserved enough of the proper spirit to pocket the substantial tip I handed over to her with my keys. She was no less equal to accepting a second when, after a couple of months I returned and could not resist this expression of my sympathy on finding the hall still stained and defaced, the stairs still with their blackened groove, the workmen still going and coming, and her despair at the spectacle blacker than ever.

The next day she came up to our chambers. She wore her best black gown and no apron, and from these signs I concluded it was a visit of state. I was right: it was to announce her departure. The house, partially rebuilt and very much patched up, would never be the same. She was too old for hope, and without the courage to pick up the broken bits of her masterpiece and put them together again. She was more ill at ease as visitor than as housekeeper. The conversation languished, although I fancied she had something particular to say, slight as was her success in saying it. We had both been silent for an awkward minute when she blurted out abruptly that she had never neglected her duty, no matter what it might or might not have pleased the tenants to give her. I applauded the sentiment as admirable, and I said good-by; and never once then, and not until several days after she left us, did it dawn upon me that she was waiting to accept graciously the fee it was her right in leaving to expect from me. The fact of my having only just tipped her liberally had nothing to do with it. A housekeeper's departure was an occasion for money to pass from the tenant's hand into hers, and she had too much respect for her duty as housekeeper not to afford me the opportunity of doing mine as tenant. It was absurd, but I was humiliated in my own eyes when I thought of the figure I must cut in hers, and I could only hope she would make allowance for me as an ignorant American.