Pomander Walk

by Louis Napoleon Parker

No gentleman could hope to carry on a conversation on these lines with any success when all the windows of the Walk were open, and all the inhabitants listening behind the curtains. The Admiral went straight to the Brentford brewer, but the latter gave him no redress. He only asked whether the Admiral had taken the old lady's advice.

She was not only in herself an intolerable nuisance, but she prevented desirable tenants from taking the house. Whenever any candidate appeared she had an excruciating toothache; or she was doubled up with rheumatism; or she shook the whole house with a ghastly churchyard cough. The sympathy of the enquirer forced the information from her that she had been sprightly and well, a picture of a woman, till she came to Pomander Walk. Mind you, she was n't saying anything against the house. It was a good enough house; though, to be sure, the rats were something awful. Still, some people liked rats. In desperate cases she even went so far as to hint that the house was haunted. She was a foolish old woman, of course, but why did locked doors open of themselves? Doors she had locked with her own hands. They did say that the last tenant had hanged himself in the garret. And by that time the enquirer had given her half-a-crown, and had left her in the undisputed possession of her cutty-pipe on the doorstep.

This fertility of imagination led to her undoing, however. For upon hearing of it (from the Admiral, of course) the brewer sent his wife in the guise of an enquiring tenant, and subsequently turned the old woman out without any ceremony whatever.

But the Walk did not recover its self-respect for some time. The house was still undeniably empty. The windows got dirty; dead leaves covered the door-step; the paint peeled off the woodwork and the railings; some wretched boys threw a dead dog into the garden, where it lay hidden for days; and, besides, the old woman's suggestion that the house was haunted, left its poison behind. Presently Mr. Brooke-Hoskyn's nurse saw a face gibbering behind the window, and had hysterics; and next Miss Barbara Pennymint distinctly saw a hand beckoning to her from the same window and fled, shrieking, to her sister.

The Admiral pooh-poohed the whole thing and made elaborate arrangements to spend a night in the house with Jim. Jim expressed his delight at the prospect of such an adventure, and went about describing exactly what he would do to the ghost if he saw it; but he had very bad luck when the time came, with a sudden attack of sciatica which glued him to his bed. The curious thing was that however often the Admiral postponed the day for the undertaking, Jim's sciatica inevitably returned when the day came. So time slipped away. The Admiral said he would explore the mystery alone, but it slipped his memory.

So the house remained tenantless, and when the Walk was painted according to the Admiral's instructions, Number Four had to be passed over, and consequently looked more woe-begone than ever.

And the next thing the Walk knew was that it woke one morning to find strange men bringing loads of furniture, amongst which was a harp, a forte-piano, and a guitar-case, and that painters—not their own painters, but an entirely unknown lot—were at work scraping off the old paint.

The Admiral rushed out—I am shocked to say, in his slippers and shirt-sleeves—and was told that the house was let; let, without any sort of warning or notice; let, so to speak, over the heads of the Walk; over his own head. And the men could not tell him the name of the new tenant. All they knew was that it was a lady. A lady with a name they could n't pronounce. A foreign name. Foreign? Foreign?—Yes; French, by the sound of it.

This was beyond anything the Admiral or the Walk had ever had to cope with. However, the Admiral mastered his indignation and contented himself with giving the painters strict and minute instructions as to the precise shade of green they were to use so as to make the house uniform with the rest.

He had to go to London next day to draw his pay. We know the inevitable consequences of that excursion. The following morning he woke at midday in a very bad humour. The first thing he saw when he threw open his window, was Sempronius digging up his sweet peas; and the next was Number Four painted a creamy white.