But she entered whole-heartedly into the fulfilment of the suggestion, and said she would do her best to make the scheme pay.
Then began the long, long search for a house, with a garden, where she might create modest and wholesome apartments for the poor. Landlords and agents as soon as they learned what she was after interposed all manner of objections.
In answer to one of these heartless rebuffs Octavia exclaimed: “Where, then, are the poor to live?”
“I don’t know,” said the agent. “I only know they’ve got to keep away from the St. John’s Wood Estate.”
In the spring of 1865, she was able to announce triumphantly that Ruskin had bought for her, for a term of fifty-six years, three houses in a court close by. The tenants came with the houses. She had schemes for the recreation of the children, and she meant to secure a playground for them. “The plan promises to pay; but of this I say very little; so very much depends on management, and the possibility of avoiding bad debts.” To Mrs. Shaen, wife of the lawyer who negotiated the sale, she wrote presently: “The money part is very regular and simple, just so much paid into Ruskin’s bank each quarter; but to me the work is of engrossing interest. We have three houses, each with six rooms; and we have managed gradually to get the people to take two rooms, in many cases.” The garden had come with Ruskin’s enthusiastic purchase of six more houses; and the cup of the busy landlady’s satisfaction is filled to overflowing. “The children seem to have so few joys, and they spring to meet any suggestion of employment with such eagerness, instead of fighting and sitting in the gutter, with dirty faces and listless, vacant expression. I found an eager little crowd threading beads last time I was in the playground. We hope to get some tiny gardens there; and Ruskin has promised some seats. I hope to teach them to draw a little; singing we have already introduced. On the whole, I am so thankful, so glad, so hopeful in it all; and, when I remember the old days when I seemed so powerless, I am almost awed.”
Here we see in embryo several present day social movements of wide outreach, all at once:—the suggestion and direction of children’s games; the cultivation of home and school gardens; community singing.
The new owner found the houses occupied—to quote her own words—“by a desperate and forlorn set of people; wild, dirty, violent, ignorant as ever I have seen.”
“I worked on quite alone about it,” she tells us, “preferring power and responsibility and work, to committees, and their slow, dull movements.”
But as soon as she let her friends know what she was doing, they rallied in force to her assistance.
Presently in the crowding multiplicity of detail her life became, she tells us, “a fight for mere existence. References, notices, rents, repairs, the dry necessary matters of business, take up almost all time and thought; only”—and here comes the saving clause—“as, after all, we are human beings, and not machines, people round, and all we see and hear, leave a kind of mark on us; an impression of awe, or pity and wonder, or sometimes love.”