“Ah, well,” she would reply, “I don't mind if I do. It's a poor heart that never rejoices.”
And then, her tongue unloosened, she would sit there and tell me stories of my predecessors, young men lodgers who like myself had taken her bed-sitting-rooms, and of the woes and misfortunes that had overtaken them. I gathered that a more unlucky house I could not have selected. A former tenant of my own room, of whom I strangely reminded her, had written poetry on my very table. He was now in Portland doing five years for forgery. Mrs. Peedles appeared to regard the two accomplishments as merely different expressions of the same art. Another of her young men, as she affectionately called us, had been of studious ambition. His career up to a point appeared to have been brilliant. “What he mightn't have been,” according to Mrs. Peedles, there was practically no saying; what he happened to be at the moment of conversation was an unpromising inmate of the Hanwell lunatic asylum.
“I've always noticed it,” Mrs. Peedles would explain; “it's always the most deserving, those that try hardest, to whom trouble comes. I'm sure I don't know why.”
I was glad on the whole when that bottle of whiskey was finished. A second might have driven me to suicide.
There was no Mr. Peedles—at least, not for Mrs. Peedles, though as an individual he continued to exist. He had been “general utility” at the Princess's—the old terms were still in vogue at that time—a fine figure of a man in his day, so I was given to understand, but one easily led away, especially by minxes. Mrs. Peedles spoke bitterly of general utilities as people of not much use.
For working days Mrs. Peedles had one dress and one cap, both black and void of ostentation; but on Sundays and holidays she would appear metamorphosed. She had carefully preserved the bulk of her stage wardrobe, even to the paste-decked shoes and tinsel jewelry. Shapeless in classic garb as Hermia, or bulgy in brocade and velvet as Lady Teazle, she would receive her few visitors on Sunday evenings, discarded puppets like herself, with whom the conversation was of gayer nights before their wires had been cut; or, her glory hid from the ribald street beneath a mackintosh, pay her few calls. Maybe it was the unusual excitement that then brought colour into her furrowed cheeks, that straightened and darkened her eyebrows, at other times so singularly unobtrusive. Be this how it may, the change was remarkable, only the thin grey hair and the work-worn hands remaining for purposes of identification. Nor was the transformation merely one of surface. Mrs. Peedles hung on her hook behind the kitchen door, dingy, limp, discarded; out of the wardrobe with the silks and satins was lifted down to be put on as an undergarment Miss Lucretia Barry, like her costumes somewhat aged, somewhat withered, but still distinctly “arch.”
In the room next to me lived a law-writer and his wife. They were very old and miserably poor. The fault was none of theirs. Despite copy-books maxims, there is in this world such a thing as ill-luck-persistent, monotonous, that gradually wears away all power of resistance. I learned from them their history: it was hopelessly simple, hopelessly uninstructive. He had been a schoolmaster, she a pupil teacher; they had married young, and for a while the world had smiled upon them. Then came illness, attacking them both: nothing out of which any moral could be deduced, a mere case of bad drains resulting in typhoid fever. They had started again, saddled by debt, and after years of effort had succeeded in clearing themselves, only to fall again, this time in helping a friend. Nor was it even a case of folly: a poor man who had helped them in their trouble, hardly could they have done otherwise without proving themselves ungrateful. And so on, a tedious tale, commonplace, trivial. Now listless, patient, hard working, they had arrived at an animal-like indifference to their fate, content so long as they could obtain the bare necessities of existence, passive when these were not forthcoming, their interest in life limited to the one luxury of the poor—an occasional glass of beer or spirits. Often days would go by without his obtaining any work, and then they would more or less starve. Law documents are generally given out to such men in the evening, to be returned finished the next morning. Waking in the night, I would hear through the thin wooden partition that divided our rooms the even scratching of his pen.
Thus cheek by jowl we worked, I my side of the screen, he his: youth and age, hope and realisation.
Out of him my fears fashioned a vision of the future. Past his door I would slink on tiptoe, dread meeting him upon the stairs. Once had not he said to himself: “The world's mine oyster?” May not the voices of the night have proclaimed him also king? Might I not be but an idle dreamer, mistaking desire for power? Would not the world prove stronger than I? At such times I would see my life before me: the clerkship at thirty shillings a week rising by slow instalments, it may be, to one hundred and fifty a year; the four-roomed house at Brixton; the girl wife, pretty, perhaps, but sinking so soon into the slatternly woman; the squalling children. How could I, unaided, expect to raise myself from the ruck? Was not this the more likely picture?
Our second floor front was a young fellow in the commercial line. Jarman was Young London personified—blatant yet kind-hearted; aggressively self-assertive, generous to a fault; cunning, yet at the same time frank; shrewd, cheery, and full of pluck. “Never say die” was his motto, and anything less dead it would be difficult to imagine. All day long he was noisy, and all night long he snored. He woke with a start, bathed like a porpoise, sang while dressing, roared for his boots, and whistled during his breakfast. His entrance and exit were always to an orchestration of banging doors, directions concerning his meals shouted at the top of his voice as he plunged up or down the stairs, the clattering and rattling of brooms and pails flying before his feet. His departure always left behind it the suggestion that the house was now to let; it came almost as a shock to meet a human being on the landing. He would have conveyed an atmosphere of bustle to the Egyptian pyramids.