Our House and London out of Our Windows

by Elizabeth Robins Pennell

If I try now to make the best of what was good in Mrs. Haines, at the time she did not give me much chance. Grumbling was such a habit with her that, even had the Socialists' Millennium come, she would have kept on, if only because it removed all other reason for her grumbles. Her prejudice against work of any kind did not lessen her displeasure with everybody who did not provide her with work of some kind to do. She treated me as if I imposed on her when I asked her to sew or to mend or to cook, and she abused the other tenants because they did not ask her. This indeed was her principal grievance. She could not see why they were in the house if it were not to increase her income, and she hated the landlord for having led her to believe they would. She paid me innumerable visits, the object of which never varied. It was to borrow, which she did without shame or apology. She never hesitated in her demands, she never cringed. She ran short because the other tenants were not doing the fair and square thing by her, and she did not see why she should not draw upon me for help. One inexhaustible debt was the monthly bill for her furniture, bought on the instalment system and forfeited if any one instalment were not met. I do not remember how many pounds I advanced, but enough to suggest that she had furnished her rooms, of which she never gave me as much as a glimpse, in a style far beyond her means. I could afford to be amiable, for I knew I could make her pay me back in work, though my continual loans did so little to improve her financial affairs that after a while my patience gave out, and I refused to advance another penny.

It was not until the illness of her husband, after they had been in the house for some two years, that I realized the true condition of things behind the door they kept so carefully closed. The illness was sudden, so far as I knew. I had not seen Mr. Haines for long, but I was accustomed to not seeing him, and curiously, when Mrs. Haines's need was greatest, she showed some reluctance in asking to be helped out of it. Her husband was dying before she appealed to anybody, and then it was not to me, but to Mrs. Burden, my old charwoman, who was so poor that I had always fancied that to be poorer still meant to live in the streets or on the rates. But Mrs. Haines was so much worse off, that Mrs. Burden, in telling me about it, thanked Our Lady that she had never fallen so low. It was cold winter and there was no fire, no coal, no wood, behind the closed door. The furniture for which I had advanced so many pounds consisted, I now found out, of two or three rickety chairs and a square of tattered carpet in the front room, a few pots and pans in the kitchen. In the dark bedroom between, the dying man lay on a hard board stretched on the top of a packing-box, shivering under his threadbare overcoat, so pitiful in his misery and suffering that Mrs. Burden was moved to compassion and hurried home to fetch him the blankets from her own bed and buy him a pennyworth of milk on the way.

When the tenants knew how it was with Mrs. Haines and her husband, as now they could not help knowing, they remembered only that he was ill, and they sent for the doctor and paid for medicine, and did what they could to lighten the gloom of the two or three days left to him. And they arranged for a decent burial, feeling, I think, that a man who had been in the Civil Service should not lie in a pauper's grave. For a week or so we wondered again who he was, why he kept so persistently out of sight; after that we thought as little of him as when he had skulked, a shadow, between his rooms and the street door on the stroke of eleven.

Hitherto everybody had been patient with Mrs. Haines, for the London housekeeper, though she has not got the tenants as completely in her power as the Paris concierge, can, if she wants, make things very disagreeable for them. Now that she was alone in the world, everybody was kind to her. The landlord overlooked his announced decision "to sack the pair," and retained her as housekeeper, though in losing her husband she had lost her principal recommendation. The tenants raised a fund to enable her to buy the mourning which is often a consolation in widowhood. Work was offered to her in chambers which she had never entered before, and I added to the tasks in ours. The housekeepers in the street with families to support must have envied her. She had her rooms rent free, wages from the landlord, plenty of extra work, and though this might not seem affluence to people who do not measure their income by pence or scramble for the odd shilling, it was wealth in housekeeping circles.

Mrs. Haines, however, did not see her position in that light. She had complained when work was not offered to her, she complained more bitterly when it was. Perhaps her husband had had some restraining influence upon her. I cannot say; but certainly once he was gone, she gave up all pretence of controlling her temper. She would sweep like a hurricane through the house, raging and raving, on the slightest provocation. She led us a worse life than ever over the drain-pipe. She left the house more and more to take care of itself, dust lying thick wherever dust could lie, the stairs turned to a dingy grey, the walls blackened with London smoke and grime. Once in a while she hired a forlorn, ragged old woman to wash the stairs and brush the front-door mat, for in London, more than anywhere else, "poverty is a comparative thing," and every degree has one below to "soothe" it. No matter how hard up Mrs. Haines was, she managed to scrape together a few pennies to pay to have the work done for her rather than do it herself. The greater part of her leisure she spent out of the house, and when I passed her door I would see pinned up on it a bit of paper stating in neat, even elegant, writing, "Apply on the First Floor for the Housekeeper," or "Gone out. Back in ten minutes"; and hours, sometimes days, later the same notice would still be there. She became as neglectful of herself as of the house: her one dress grew shabbier and shabbier, her apron was discarded, no detail of her toilet was attended to except the frizzing of her coarse black hair. All this came about not at once, but step by step, and things were very bad before J. and I admitted, even to each other, that she was a disgrace to the house. We would admit it to nobody else, and to my surprise the other tenants were as forbearing. I suppose it was because they understood, as well as we did, that at a word to the landlord she would be adrift in London, where for one vacant post of housekeeper there are a hundred applications. To banish her from our own chambers, however, was not to drive her to the workhouse, and I called for her services less and less often.

There was another reason for my not employing her to which I have not so far referred, the reason really of her slovenliness and bad temper and gradual deterioration. I shut my eyes as long as I could. But I was prepared for the whispers that began to be heard, not only in our house, but up and down our street. What started them I do not know, but the morning and evening gatherings of the housekeepers at their doors were not held for nothing, and presently it got about that Mrs. Haines had been seen stealing in and out of a public-house, and that this public-house was just beyond the border-line of the Quarter, which looked as if she were endeavouring to escape the vigilant eyes of our gossips. Then, as invariably happens, the whispers grew louder, the evidence against her circumstantial, and everybody was saying quite openly where her money disappeared and why she became shabbier, her rooms barer, and the house more disreputable. It leaked out that her husband also had been seen flitting from public-house to public-house; and, the game of concealment by this time being up, it was bluntly said that drink had killed him, as it would Mrs. Haines if she went on as she was going.

I had kept my suspicions to myself, but she had never come to our chambers at the hour of lunch or dinner that there was not an unusual drain upon our modest wine-cellar. I could not fancy that it was merely a coincidence, that friends dining with us were invariably thirstier when she waited or cooked; but her appearance had been the invariable signal for the disappearance of our wine at a rate that made my employment of her a costly luxury. I never saw her when I could declare she had been drinking, but drink she did, and there was no use my beating about the bush and calling it by another name. It would have been less hopeless had she occasionally betrayed herself, had her speech thickened and her walk become unsteady. But hers was the deadliest form of the evil, because it gave no sign. There was nothing to check it except every now and then a mysterious attack of illness,—which she said defied the doctor though it defied nobody in the house,—or the want of money; but a housekeeper must be far gone if she cannot pick up a shilling here and a half-crown there. I was the last of the old tenants to employ her, but after I abandoned her she still had another chance with a newcomer who took the chambers below ours, and, finding them too small to keep more than one servant, engaged her for a liberal amount of work. She bought aprons and a new black blouse and skirt, and she was so spruce and neat in them that I was encouraged to hope. But before the end of the first week, she was met on the stairs coming down from his room to hers with a bottle under her apron; at the end of the second she was dismissed.

I hardly dare think how she lived after this. With every Christmas there was a short period of prosperity, though it dwindled as the tenants began to realize where their money went. For a time J. and I got her to keep our bicycles, other people in the house followed suit, and during several months she was paid rent for as many as six, keeping them in the empty sitting-room from which even the rickety chairs had disappeared, and where the floor now was thick with grease and stained with oil. If we had trunks to store or boxes to unpack, she would let us the same room for as long as we wanted, and so she managed, one way or the other, by hook or by crook. But it was a makeshift existence, all the more so when her habits began to tell on her physically. She was ill half the time, and by the end of her fourth year in the house, I do not believe she could have sewed or waited or cooked, had she had the chance. She had no friends, no companions, save her cat. They were a grim pair, she with hungry, shifty eyes glowing like fires in the pallor of her face, he more gaunt and ungainly than ever: for a witch and her familiar they would have been burnt not so many hundred years ago.

Then we heard that she was taking in lodgers, that women with the look of hunted creatures stole into her rooms at strange hours of the night. Some said they were waifs and strays from the "Halls," others that they were wanderers from the Strand; all agreed that, whoever they were, they must be as desperately poor as she, to seek shelter where the only bed was the floor. Much had been passed over, but I knew that such lodgers were more than landlord and tenants could endure, and I had not to be a prophet to foresee that the end was approaching.

It came more speedily than I thought, though the manner of it was not left to landlord and tenants. Christmas, her fifth in the house, had filled her purse again. Tenants were less liberal, it is true, but she must have had at least five or six pounds, to which a turkey and plum pudding had been added by our neighbour across the hall, who was of a generous turn. She had therefore the essentials of what passes for a merry Christmas, but how much merriment there was in hers I had no way of telling. On holidays in London I keep indoors if I can, not caring to face the sadness of the streets or the dreariness of house-parties, and I did not go downstairs on Christmas Day, nor on Boxing Day which is the day after. Mrs. Haines, if she came up, did not present herself at our chambers. I trust she was gay because, as it turned out, it was her last chance for gaiety at this or any other season. In the middle of the night following Boxing Day she was seized with one of her mysterious attacks. A lodger was with her, but, from fright, or stupidity, or perhaps worse, called no one till dawn, when she rang up the housekeeper next door and vanished. The housekeeper next door went at once for the doctor who attends to us all in the Quarter. It was too late. Mrs. Haines was dead when he reached the house.