“You don't know 'ow to breathe,” explained our second floor front to her on one occasion, a kindly young man; “you don't swallow it, you only gargle with it. Take a good draught and shut your mouth; don't be frightened of it; don't let it out again till it's done something: that's what it's 'ere for.”
He stood over her with his handkerchief pressed against her mouth to assist her; but it was of no use.
“There don't seem any room for it inside me,” she explained.
Bells had become to her the business of life; she lived listening for them. Converse to her was a filling in of time while waiting for interruptions.
A bottle of whiskey fell into my hands that Christmas time, a present from a commercial traveller in the way of business. Not liking whiskey myself, it was no sacrifice for me to reserve it for the occasional comfort of Mrs. Peedles, when, breathless, with her hands to her side, she would sink upon the chair nearest to my door. Her poor, washed-out face would lighten at the suggestion.
“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.