Amiable tenants found excuses for non-payment of rent or were dirty. One I remember brought a sofa into the house the stuffing of which I think must have been mainly bugs. I learned of this by the house becoming infested beyond belief, and seeing hordes of these odoriferous insects coming downstairs. This led to my making enquiries, when the origin or hotbed was found to be the sofa aforesaid. Nothing could have been more amiable than the manner in which my mild remonstrances were received or more suave than the manner in which my modest request for a small contribution towards the heavy expense of getting the house cleansed and fumigated was denied.
Other lodgers smilingly avowed their inability to pay their rent, and playfully urged me to get it if I could. Others fought furious battles overhead, or engaged in gymnastic exercises which brought the ceilings down, or contracted an offensive and defensive alliance with each other (the top and bottom floors), with the avowed object of making us "sit up," in which I may add they were surprisingly successful.
I do not say that I never had a desirable or satisfactory tenant, because I had several, but alas, I never had two sets of desirable tenants at the same time. And one of the nicest families I ever let my ground floor to, seven in number, developed scarlet fever and gave me perhaps more anxiety and put me to more expense than all the rest put together. Taking them all round though, I can see there was ample copy among them for a book on queer tenants. There were the widow and her two daughters, aged respectively seventeen and fourteen. The latter used to take turn about to beat their mother, and the screams would at once attract a crowd, for it was a populous street. Then when I interfered, the whole three would turn upon me, the mother fiercest of all, and threaten me with unheard of penalties for daring to interfere with their menus plaisirs. There was a fine specimen of a British working man, who for six days of the week was a credit to his country; clean, punctual, honest, and hard working. But on Saturday night he invariably got partially drunk, and after eleven P.M. amused himself until about 1 A.M. by stamping heavily up and down stairs, along the passage, past my door, out of the front door, slamming it behind him with great violence, immediately re-entering and repeating the performance, and all the time uttering the most bloodthirsty and blasphemous threats against me. Me! who never exchanged a word with him, and against whom I could have had no possible ground of complaint, except perhaps that he, being a socialist of the Keir Hardie or Will Crooks type, was bound to show his resentment for having to pay me rent.
But I must not multiply instances, though the temptation to do so is very great, but pass on to what must have appeared to the reader to be the inevitable result. I got behind with my rent. Worry began to prey upon me, to gnaw my vitals, and make me look almost despairingly around for some means of earning more money. Fortunately for me, my landlord was a kind hearted tradesman, who had a splendid business of his own, and who had invested some of the profits in this house which I rented. I paid my rent direct to him, and always met with the most kindly consideration short of letting me off paying altogether, which I could not expect.
Unhappily, however, his kindness led to the inevitable result. He became my last resource. Creditors who would not wait got paid while he continued to wait. Finding that he would take excuses and grant delays which no one else would, I grew to depend upon him, and what was worse, to feel aggrieved because others were not like-minded. It is a vicious circle in which an enormous number of people travel, but I think it will be found that the majority of them are too soft-hearted to insist upon their own dues being paid them promptly, and are always filled with wonder that their creditors are not actuated by the same benevolent sentiments.
Meanwhile, if the charge of unbusiness-like and soft-hearted habits could justly have been laid to my charge, extravagance certainly could not. I lived personally poorer than any day labourer, scarcely ever tasting meat except on Sunday, and then only the cheapest and coarsest parts of the animal, which my skill in cookery rendered palatable in stews and curries to all of us. I walked to and fro to business—a matter of ten miles—daily, and never spent a penny for anything but absolute necessaries. My sole recreation was in open air meetings for religious purposes, which to me were theatre, circus, and concert all in one. Yet I grew steadily poorer, and as to saving, well, the only possible means of doing that was by insuring my life, which I am glad to say I did to the amount of ten shillings a month, the utmost I could spare.
I only mention these few details to show how I was being steadily thrust in the direction of doing something outside my regular office work, something to utilise the time which I felt was being wasted. My long sea-training had made me an early riser, indeed I could get up cheerfully at any time (and can still), and nothing was more irksome to me than lying abed after my body was satisfied with rest. I used to get up at most unearthly hours in the summer and go long walks with a book, and lie and read after I came home at night until I could see no more. Yet, thank God, I am writing this in a minute hand at the age of fifty, without spectacles or feeling the need of them.
Constantly the thought would intrude itself, "why can't I get something to do during the hours I am free from the office and don't want to sleep?" My fellow-clerks, with but very few exceptions, had outside employment, but this was usually literary, and for that I felt I had neither aptitude nor training. Mechanical bent I felt sure I had none, for I could hardly drive a nail or put a screw in without spoiling the head. In short, I felt that I was a drug in the market, a passable seaman perhaps, but I had thrown that employment behind me for ever, and now I was a very mediocre junior clerk, getting on into middle age and being reminded of my deficiencies—which, alas, I knew only too well—every day by my superiors.
Since these are confessions, shall I be blamed for saying that I prayed for extra work? Well, anyhow I did; prayed as fervently as some people do at certain crises for forgiveness of sin. You all know that I was what is called very religious, that is to say, I lived an exceedingly narrow life, looking upon all amusements as snares of the devil, and consoled myself continually, for the loss of all that my fellows seemed to prize in this world, by the thought of the glories of immortality. Happily, I did not condemn all who differed from me in my theological concepts to an eternity of unmentionable agony, because although this was insisted upon as a cardinal item in their belief by the people with whom I associated, my heart or brain or feelings—or my thinking gear—simply would not let me do so. In fact, I felt that such an idea of the God I believed in was blasphemy. And my freely expressed opinions led to my being excommunicated in due form from several bodies of Christians with whom I worked.