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Title: The House of All Sorts
Author: Emily Carr (1871-1945)
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Language:   English
Date first posted: October 2001
Date most recently updated: October 2001

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Title: The House of All Sorts, 1944
Author: Emily Carr 1871-1945

an autobiographical work of non-fiction





CONTENTS

The House of All Sorts

PART I

Foundation
Friction
Sounds and Silences
Old Attic
Attic Eagles
Brooding and Homing
Space
First Tenant
Dew and Alarm Clocks
Money
Direct Action
Cold Sweat
A Tyrant and a Wedding
A Visitor
The Doll's House Couple
References
Dogs and Cats
Matrimony
Life Loves Living
Brides
Always Something
Mean Baby
Bachelors
Bangs and Snores
Zig-Zag...Ki-Hi
Blind
Snow
Arabella Jones's Home
Awful Partic'lar
Gran's Battle
Peach Scanties
Sham
Mrs. Pillcrest's Poems
Unmarried
Studio
Art and the House
Men Called Her Jane
Furniture
Making Musicians
John's Pudding
How Long!

PART II

Bobtails

Kennel
Punk
Beacon Hill
The Garden
Sunday
Puppy Room
Poison
Naming
Meg the Worker
Basement
Night
The Dog-Thief
Kipling
Lorenzo Was Registered
Sissy's Job
Min the Nurse
Babies
Distemper
Gertie
The Cousins' Bobtails
Blue or Red
Decision
Loo
Last of the Bobtails



PART I

Foundation

THE HOUSE OF ALL SORTS could not have been quite itself in any
other spot in the world than just where it stood, here, in Victoria,
across James' Bay and right next to Beacon Hill Park. The house
was built on part of the original property my father had chosen
when he came to the new world and settled down to raise his family.
This lot was my share of the old cow pasture. Father's acreage had
long ago been cut into city lots. Three houses had been built in
the cow yard, more in the garden and others in the lily field. The
old house in which I was born was half a block away; one of my
sisters still lived in it, and another in her little schoolhouse
built in what had once been the family vegetable garden.

Bothers cannot be escaped by property owners and builders of houses.
I got my share from the very digging of the hole for the foundation
of the House of All Sorts. But the foundations of my house were
not entirely of brick and cement. Underneath lay something too deep
to be uprooted when they dug for the basement. The builders did
not even know it was there, did not see it when they spread the
cement floor. It was in my memory as much as it was in the soil.
No house could sit it down, no house blind what my memory saw--a
cow, an old white horse, three little girls in pinafores, their
arms full of dolls and Canton-flannel rabbits made and stuffed with
bran by an aunt, three little girls running across the pasture to
play "ladies" in the shrubberies that were screened from Simcoe
Street by Father's hawthorn hedge, a hedge now grown into tall
trees, flowering in the month of May.

I remembered how I had poked through the then young bushes to hang
over those old rotted pickets, now removed to permit the dumping
of the lumber for my house. I remembered how I had said to Bigger
and Middle, "Listen, girls, see if you can tell what sort of person
is coming up the street by the kind of tune I blow," and I put the
harmonica to my lips and puffed my cheeks. But a gentle little old
lady passed, so I played very softly. She stopped and smiled over
the fence at the three of us, and at the dolls and foolish, lop-eared,
button-eyed rabbits.

"Eh, dearies, but how you are happy playing ladies in this sweetie
wee grove!"

And now my house was built in the "sweetie wee grove," and I was
not playing "lady," but was an actual landlady with tenants, not
dollies, to discipline. And tenants' pianos and gramophones were
torturing my ears, as my harmonica had tortured the ears of Bigger
and Middle. The little old lady had made the long pause-she would
not come that way again.

Ah! little old lady, you, like cow, horse, dolls and rabbits,
contributed a foundation memory to the House of All Sorts.



Friction

FRICTION quickly scraped the glamour of newness from my house-even
from the start of its building. My Architect was a querulous,
dictatorial man who antagonized his every workman. He had been
recommended to me by an inlaw; like a fool I trusted and did not
investigate for myself, making enquiry of the two Victoria families
he had built for since coming out from England. Always impatient,
as soon as I decided to build I wanted the house immediately.

I drew up a plan and took it to the Architect asking what roughly
such a building would cost. He took my plan, said it was "concise
and practical"-if I would leave it with him a day or two he'd look
it over and return it to me with some idea of the cost so that I
could decide whether I wanted to build or not.

"A very good little plan," the man said. "But naturally I could
make a suggestion or two."

In a few days he returned my drawing so violently elaborated that
I did not recognize it. I said, "But this is not the house I want."
He replied tartly that I would have to pay him two hundred dollars
whether I accepted his plan or not because of the time he had spent
mutilating it unasked! I made enquiry from the other people he had
built for, finding out he had been most unsatisfactory. I was too
inexperienced to fight. I knew nothing about house building; besides,
I was at the time living and teaching in Vancouver. I could not
afford to pay another architect as well as this one for his wretched
plan. It seemed there was nothing to do but go on.

The man hated Canada and all her living. He was going to show her
how to build houses the English way. He would not comply with
Canadian by-laws; I had endless trouble, endless expense through
his ignorance and obstinacy. I made frequent trips up and down
between Vancouver and Victoria. Then the man effected measles and
stayed off the job for six weeks, babying himself at home, though
he lived just round the corner from my half-built house.

I had hundreds of extra dollars to pay because of the man's refusal
to comply with the city by-laws and the building inspectors' ripping
the work out. It was a disheartening start for the House of All
Sorts, but, when once I was quit of the builders and saw my way to
climbing out of the hole of debt they had landed me in, I was as
thrilled as a woman is over her first baby even if it is a cripple.

The big boom in Victoria property tumbled into a slump, an anxious
shuddery time for every land-owner. There had been no hint of such
a reverse when I began building. Houses were then badly needed.
Now the houses were half of them staring blankly at each other.

Tenants were high-nosed in their choosing of apartments. The House
of All Sorts was new and characterless. It had not yet found
itself--and an apartment house takes longer to find itself than do
individual private houses.

I had expected to occupy the Studio flat and paint there, but now
the House of All Sorts could not afford a janitor. I had to be
everything. Rents had lowered, taxes risen. I was barely able to
scrape out a living. Whereas I had been led to believe when I
started to build there would be a comfortable living, all the
rentals together barely scraped out a subsistence.

The House of All Sorts was at least honest even if it was not smart.
People called it quaint rather than that. It was an average house,
built for average tenants. It was moderately made and moderately
priced. It had some things that ultra-modern apartments do not have
these days-clear views from every window, large rooms and open
fire-places as well as furnace heat. Tenants could make homes there.
Lower East and Lower West were practically semidetached cottages.

It takes more than sweet temper to prevent a successful Landlady
from earning the title of "Old Crank." Over-awareness of people's
peculiarities is an unfortunate trait for a Landlady to possess.
I had it. As I approached my house from the street its grim outline
seemed to slap me in the face. It was mine. Yet by paying rent
others were entitled to share it and to make certain demands upon
me and upon my things. I went up a long, steep stair to my door.
The door opened and gulped me. I was in the stomach of the house,
digesting badly in combination with the others the House of All
Sorts had swallowed, mulling round in one great, heavy ache. Then
along would come Christmas or the signing of the armistice, or a
big freeze-up with burst pipes, an earthquake, a heat wave--some
universal calamity or universal joy which jumped us all out of
ourselves and cleared the atmosphere of the house like a big and
bitter pill.



Sounds and Silences

SOMETIMES I rented suites furnished, sometimes unfurnished, according
to the demand. Two things every tenant provided for himself--sound
and silence. His own personality manufactured these, just as he
stamped his imprint on every inch of his environment, placing his
furniture just so, hoisting and lowering his window blinds straight
or crooked. Even the boards of the floor creaked differently to
each tenant's tread, walls echoed his noises individually, each
one's hush was a different quiet.

Furniture is comical. It responds to humans. For some it looks its
drabbest, for others it sparkles and looks, if not handsome, at
any rate comfortable. And heavens! how tormenting furniture is to
a guilty conscience--squeaking, squealing, scrooping! Let someone
try to elude rent day or contemplate a fly-by-night. That man the
furniture torments.



Old Attic

THE ATTIC was no older than the rest of the house. Yet, from the
first to me it was very old, old in the sense of dearness, old as
the baby you hug and call "dear old thing" is not old in years,
but just in the way he has tangled himself round your heart, has
become part of you so that he seems always to have existed, as far
back as memory goes. That was the way with my attic. Immediately
I came into the house the attic took me, just as if it had always
"homed" me, became my special corner-the one place really my own.
The whole house, my flat, even my own studio, was more or less
public. People could track me down in any part of the house or even
in the garden. Nobody ever thought of tracking me up to my attic.

I had a fine bedroom off the studio, but I kept that as a guest
room, preferring to sleep in my attic. A narrow, crooked little
stair in one corner of the studio climbed to a balcony, no more
than a lower lip outside the attic door. If people could not find
me about house or garden, they stood in the studio and shouted.
Out I popped on the tiny balcony, high up on the studio wall, like
a cuckoo popping out of a clock.

In the attic I could wallow in tears or in giggles; nobody saw.

There was an outer hall and front door shared by the doll's flat
and my own. If the doorbell rang while I was in my attic, I stuck
my head out of the window in the gable without being seen, and
called, "Who? Down in a second!"

That second gave me a chance to change my face. Those experienced
in landladying told me, "Develop the 'landlady face,' my dear-not
soft, not glad, not sorry, just blank."



Attic Eagles

THE SLOPE of my attic roof rose in a broad benevolent peak, poking
bluntly into the sky, sinking to a four-foot wall. At one end of
the gable were two long, narrow windows which allowed a good view
to come into the room, a view of sea, roof tops and purple hills.
Directly below the windows spread a great western maple tree, very
green. Things about my place were more spready than high, myself;
my house, the sheep-dogs, and Dolf, the Persian cat, whose silver
fleece parted down the centre of his back and fluffed wide. Even
my apple trees and lilacs grew spready.

In the wall, opposite the windows of my attic, was the room door
with a tiny landing before it. Off this landing and over the studio
was a dark cobwebby place, tangled with wiring, plumbing, ventilation
and mystery. The plaster had oozed up through the lathing on the
wrong side of the ceiling and set in bumpy furrows. I had a grim
dislike of this place but the high studio ventilated through it,
so the little square door had to be left ajar. I painted an Indian
bear totem on this white-washed door.

On the generous slope of the attic roof I painted two Indian eagles.
They were painted right on the under side of the roof shingles.
Their great spread wings covered the entire ceiling of the attic.
The heads of the eagles tilted upwards in bold, unafraid enquiry.
I loved to lie close under these strong Indian symbols. They were
only a few feet above my face as I slept in this attic bedroom.
They made "strong talk" for me, as my Indian friends would say.

When, after twenty years, people bought my house and turned it into
a fine modern block, they did not require the attic, so they took
away the little stair leading from the studio, they removed the
door and windows, but they could not remove my eagles without
tearing the roof off the house. The eagles belonged to the house
for all time.

Old eagles, do you feel my memories come creeping back to you in
your entombed, cobwebby darkness?



Brooding and Homing

HOUSE, I have gone to bed in your attic crying with smart and hurt
as though I had been a hen under whose wing hornets had built their
nest and stung me every time I quivered a feather. House, I have
slept too in your attic, serene as a brooding dove.

The Indian eagles painted on the underside of the roof's shingles
brooded over my head, as I brooded over the House of All Sorts.
Three separate sets of souls beside my own it housed, souls for
whose material comfort I was responsible. Every hen loosens up her
feathers to brood over what she has hatched. Often the domestic
hen is badly fooled, finds herself mothering goslings, ducks or
guineafowl instead of good, ordinary chickens. Only the hen who
"steals her nest away" can be sure whose eggs she is sitting on.

The House of All Sorts seemed to get more goslings and guinea-fowl
than plain chickens. I tried to be a square old hen, but the mincing
guineas and the gawky goslings tried me. The guineas peeped
complainingly, the goslings waddled into all the puddles and came
back to chill my skin. In no time too they outgrew my brooding
squat, hoisting me clear off my feet.

You taught me, old House, that every bird wants some of her own
feathers in the lining of her nest.

At first I tried to make my suites into complete homes--arranged
everything as I would like it myself--but people changed it all
round, discarded, substituted. It is best in a House of All Sorts
to provide the necessary only and leave each woman to do her own
homing.



Space

ROOF, WALLS, floor can pinch to hurting while they are homing you,
or they can hug and enfold. Hurt enclosed is hurting doubled; to
spread misery thins it. That is why pain is easier to endure out
in the open. Space draws it from you. Enclosure squeezes it close.

I know I hurt my tenants sometimes--I wanted to; they hurt me! It
took a long time to grind me into the texture of a landlady, to
level my temperament, to make it neither all up nor all down.

The tenant always had this advantage--he could pick up and go. I
could not. Fate had nailed me down hard. I appeared for the present
to have no hammer-claw strong enough to pry myself loose. No, I
was not nailed, I was screwed into the House of All Sorts, twist
by twist. Every circumstance, financial, public, personal, artistic,
had taken a hand in that cruel twirling of the driver. My screws
were down to their heads. Each twist had demanded-"Forget you ever
wanted to be an artist. Nobody wanted your art. Buckle down to
being a landlady."

If only I could have landladied out in space it would not have
seemed so hard. The weight of the house crushed me.



First Tenant

SHE WAS a bride just returned from honeymooning, this first tenant
of mine. Already she was obviously bored with a very disagreeable
husband. In her heart she knew he was not proud of her. He kept
his marriage to this Canadian girl secret from his English mother.

The bride was a shocking housekeeper and dragged round all day in
boudoir cap, frowsy negligee and mules--slip, slop, slip, slop. In
my basement I could hear her overhead. Occasionally she hung out
a grey wash, left it flapping on the line for a week, unless, for
very shame, I took it in to her. "Awfully kind," she would say,
"I've been meaning to bring it in these six days. Housekeeping is
such a bore!" As far as I could see she did not do any. Even trees
and bushes flutter the dust off, manage to do some renewing. Slip,
slop--slip, slop--her aimless feet traipsed from room to room. She
did not trouble to raise the lid of the garbage can, but tossed
her discards out of the back door. Occasionally she dressed herself
bravely and, hanging over the front gate, peered and peered. As
people passed, going to Beacon Hill Park, she would stop them,
saying, "Was there a thin man in grey behind you when you turned
into this street?"

Astonished they asked, "Who would it be?"

"My husband--I suppose he has forgotten me again-a bachelor for so
long he forgets that he has a wife. He promised to take me to the
Races to-day--Oh, dear!"

Going into her flat she slammed the door and melted into negligee
again.

He was a horrid man, but I too would have tried to forget a wife
like that. Negligee, bad cooking, dirty house!

They had leased my flat for six months. Three days before the fourth
month was up, the man said to me casually, "We leave here on the
first."

"Your lease?" I replied.

"Lease!" He laughed in my face. "Leases are not worth their ink.
Prevent a landlady from turning you out, that's all."

I consulted the lawyer who admitted that leases were all in favour
of the tenant. He asked, "Who have you got there?" I told him.

"I know that outfit. Get 'em out. Make 'em go in the three days'
notice they gave you. Tell them if they don't vacate on the dot
they must pay another full month. Not one day over the three, mind
you, or a full month's rental!"

When I told the couple what the lawyer had said they were very
angry, declaring that they could not move in three days' time,
but that they would not pay for overtime.

"All right," I said. "Then the lawyer..."

They knew the lawyer personally and started to pack violently.

The bride and groom had furnished their own flat--garish newness,
heavily varnished, no nearer to being their own than one down
payment, less near, in fact, as the instalments were overdue. Store
vans came and took the furniture back. The woman left in a cab with
a couple of suitcases. The forwarding address she left was that of
her mother's home. The man left a separate forwarding address. His
was a hotel.

To describe the cleaning of that flat would be impossible. As a
parting niceness the woman hurled a pot of soup--meat, vegetables
and grease--down the kitchen sink. She said, "You hurried our
moving," and shrugged.

The soup required a plumber.

This first tenant nearly discouraged me with landladying.

I consulted an experienced person. She said, "In time you will
learn to make yourself hard, hard!"



Dew and Alarm Clocks

POETICAL extravagance over "pearly dew and daybreak" does not ring
true when that most infernal of inventions, the alarm clock, wrenches
you from sleep, rips a startled heart from your middle and tosses
it on to an angry tongue, to make ugly splutterings not complimentary
to the new morning; down upon you spills cold shiveriness--a new
day's responsibilities have come.

To part from pillow and blanket is like bidding goodbye to all your
relatives suddenly smitten with plague.

The attic window gaped into empty black. No moon, no sun, no street
lamps. Trees, houses, telephone poles muddled together and out in
that muddle of blank perhaps one or two half-hearted kitchen lights
morosely blinking. Sun had not begun.

The long outside stair, from flat to basement, never creaked so
loudly as just before dawn. No matter how I tiptoed, every tread
snapped, "Ik!"

Punk, the house dog, walked beside me step by step, too sleepy to
bounce.

Flashlights had not been invented. My arms threshed the black of
the basement passage for the light bulb. Cold and grim sat that
malevolent brute the furnace, greedy, bottomless-its grate bars
clenched over clinkers which no shaker could dislodge. I was obliged
to thrust head and shoulders through the furnace door. I loathed
its black, the smell of soot. I was sure one day I should stick.
I pictured the humiliation of being hauled out by the shoes. Could
I ever again be a firm dignified landlady after being pulled like
that from a furnace mouth!

I could hear tenants still sleeping-the house must be warm for them
to wake to....

"Woo, Woo!" A tiny black hand drew the monkey's box curtain back.
"Woo, Woo!" A little black face enveloped in yawn peeped out. One
leg stretched, then the other. "Woo." She crept from her box to
feel if her special pipe was warm, patted approvingly, flattened
her tummy to the heat. The cat came, shaking sleep out of her fur.
Crackle, crackle!--the fire was burning. Basement windows were now
squares of blue-grey dawn.

Carrying a bucket of ashes in each hand I went into the garden,
feeling like an anchor dropped overboard. Everything was so coldly
wet, I so heavy. Dawn was warming the eastern sky just a little.
The Bobbies were champing for liberty. They had heard my step. The
warmth of their loving did for the garden what the furnace was
doing for the house.

Circled by a whirl of dogs I began to live the day.

We raced for Beacon Hill, pausing when we reached its top. From
here I could see my house chimney--mine. There is possessive joy,
and anyway the alarm clock would not rouse me from sleep for another
twenty-three hours--might as well be happy!

Up came the sun, and drank the dew.



Money

FROM THE moment key and rent exchanged hands a subtle change took
place in the attitude of renter towards owner.

The tenant was obviously anxious to get you out, once the flat was
hers. She might have known, silly thing, that you wanted to be
out--before she began to re-arrange things.

Bump, bump, bump! It would never do to let a landlady think her
taste and arrangement were yours. Particularly women with husbands
made it their business to have the man exchange every piece of
furniture with every other. When they left you had to get some one
to move them all back into place. When once they had paid and called
it "my flat" they were always asking for this or that additional
furniture or privilege.

There was the tenant who came singing up my long stair and handed
in the rent with a pleasant smile. It was folded in a clean envelope
so that the raw money was not handled between you. You felt him
satisfied with his money's worth. Perhaps he did change his furniture
about, just a little, but only enough to make it home him. Every
hen likes to scrape the straw around her nest, making it different
from every other hen's. There was the pompous person who came
holding a roll of bills patronizingly as if he were handing you a
tip. There was the stingy one, parting hardly with his cash, fishing
the hot tarnished silver and dirty bills from the depths of a
trouser pocket and counting them lingeringly, grudgingly, into your
palm. There was the rent dodger who always forgot rent date. There
was every kind of payer. But most renters seemed to regard rent
as an unfairness--was not the earth the Lord's? Just so, but who
pays the taxes?



Direct Action

OUR DISTRICT was much too genteel to settle disagreements by a
black eye or vituperation. Troubles were rushed upstairs to the
landlady. I wished my tenants would emulate my gas stove. In proud
metallic lettering she proclaimed herself "Direct action" and lived
up to it.

How bothersome it was having Mrs. Lemoyne mince up my stair to
inform on Mrs. FitzJohn; having to run down the long stair, round
the house and carry the complaint to Mrs. FitzJohn, take the retort
back to Mrs. Lemoyne and return the ultimatum--upping and downing
until I was tired! Then, often, to find that there was no trouble
between the two ladies at all. The whole affair was a fix-up, to
convey some veiled complaint against my house or against me, to
have the complainer send a sweet message to the complained-of:
"Don't give the matter another thought, my dear. It is really of
no consequence at all," and from my window see the ladies smiling,
whispering, nodding in the direction of my flat. I would have liked
better an honest pig-sow who projected her great grunt from the
depths of her pen right into one's face.

My sisters, who lived round the corner from the House of All Sorts,
watched my landladying with disapproval, always siding with the
tenant and considering my "grunt" similes most unrefined. But they
did not have to be landladies.



Cold Sweat

HIS HAND trembled--so did his voice.

"You will leave the door of your flat unlocked tonight? So that I
could reach the 'phone?"

"Certainly."

He went to the door, stood there, clinging to the knob
as if he must hold on to something.

"Beautiful night," he said and all the while he was turning up his
coat collar because of the storming rain outside. He went into the
night. I closed the door; the knob was wet with the sweat of his
hand.

Bump, bump, bump, and a curse. I ran out and looked over the rail.
He was rubbing his shins.

"That pesky cat--I trod on her--" he cursed again. He loved that
cat. I heard him for half an hour calling among the wet bushes.
"Puss, Puss, poor Puss." Maybe that mother cat knew his mind needed
to be kept busy and was hiding.

I was just turning in when he came again.

"She's all right."

"You have had word? I am so glad--"

"The cat, I mean," he said, glowering at me. "She was not hurt when
I trod on her--shan't sleep tonight--not one wink, but if I should
not hear your 'phone--would you call me?--leave your window open
so I shall hear the ring?"

"All right, I'll call you; I am sure to hear if you don't."

"Thanks, awfully."

The telephone did not ring. In the morning he looked worse.

He came up and sat by the 'phone, scowling at the instrument as if
it were to blame. At last he found courage to ring the hospital.
After a terse sentence or two he slammed the receiver down and sat
staring.

"That your porridge burning?"

"Yes!" He rushed down the stair, and returned immediately with the
black, smoking pot in his hand.

"If it were not Sunday I'd go to the office--hang! I'll go anyhow."

"Better stay near the 'phone. Why not a hot bath?"

"Splendid idea. But--the 'phone?"

"I'll be here."

No sooner was he in the tub than the message came.

"You are wanted on the 'phone." I shouted through two doors.

"Take it." He sounded as if he were drowning.

I was down again in a moment. "A boy--both doing well." Dead
stillness.

By and by I went down. He was skimming the cream off the milk jug
into the cat's dish. The hair stuck damp on his forehead, his cheeks
were wet.

"Thank God I was in the tub! I could not have stood it--I should
never have thought of asking how she--they --were." Realization of
the plural clicked a switch that lit up his whole being.



A Tyrant and a Wedding

SHE CAME from the prairie, a vast woman with a rolling gait, too
much fat, too little wind, only one eye.

She stood at the bottom of the long stair and bribed a child to
tell me she was there. Her husband sat on the verandah rail leaning
forward on his stick, her great shapeless hand steadying him. This
lean, peevish man had no more substance than a suit on a hanger.
A clerical collar cut the mean face from the empty clothes.

The old lady's free hand rolled towards the man. "This," she said,
"is the Reverend Daniel Pendergast. I am Mrs. Pendergast. We came
about the flat."

The usual rigmarole--rental--comfortable beds--hot water . . . They
moved in immediately.

I despised the Reverend Pendergast more every day. His heart was
mean as well as sick. He drove the old lady without mercy by night
and by day. She did his bidding with patient, adoring gasps. He
flung his stick angrily at every living thing, be it wife, beast
or bird--everything angered him. Then he screamed for his wife to
pick up his stick--retrieve it for him like a dog. She must share
his insomnia too by reading to him most of the night; that made
the tears pour out of the seeing and the unseeing eye all the next
day. Her cheeks were always wet with eye-drips.

I was sorry for the old lady. I liked her and did all I could to
help her in every way except in petting the parson. She piled all
the comforts, all the tidbits, on him. When I took her flowers and
fruit from my garden, it was he that always got them, though I
said, most pointedly, "For you, Mrs. Pendergast," and hissed the
"S's" as loud as I could. She would beg me, "Do come in and talk
to 'Parson'; he loves to see a fresh face."

Sometimes, to please her, I sat just a few minutes by the sour
creature.

One morning when I came down my stair she moaned through the crack
of the door, "Come to me."

"What is the matter?" I said. She looked dreadful.

"I fell into the coal-bin last night. I could not get up. My foot
was wedged between the wall and the step."

"Why did you not call to me?"

"I was afraid it would disturb the Parson. I got up after a while
but the pain of getting up and down in the night to do for my
husband was dreadful torture."

"And he let you do it?"

"I did not tell him I was hurt. His milk must be heated--he must
be read to when he does not sleep."

"He is a selfish beast," I said. She was too deaf, besides hurting
too much, to hear me.

When I had helped to fix her broken knees and back, I stalked into
the living-room where the Reverend Pendergast lay on a couch.

"Mrs. Pendergast has had a very bad fall. She can scarcely move
for pain."

"Clumsy woman! She is always falling down," he said indifferently.

I can't think why I did not hit him. I came out and banged the door
after me loudly, hoping his heart would jump right out of his body.
I knew he hated slams.

There was an outbreak of caterwaulings. The neighbourhood was much
disturbed. The cats were strays-miserable wild kittens born when
their owners went camping and never belonging to anyone.

The tenants put missiles on all window ledges to hurl during the
night. In the morning I took a basket and gathered them up and took
them to the tenants' doors so that each could pick out his own
shoes, hairbrushes, pokers and scent bottles. Parson Pendergast
threw everything portable at the cats. The old lady was very much
upset at his being so disturbed. At last, with care and great
patience, I enticed the cats into my basement, caught them and had
them mercifully destroyed.

When I told the Pendergasts, the Parson gave a cruel, horrible
laugh. "I crushed a cat with a plank once--beat the life out of
her, just for meowing in our kitchen--threw her into the bush for
dead; a week later she crawled home--regular jelly of a cat." He
sniggered.

"You--a parson--you did that? You cruel beast! To do such a filthy
thing!"

Mrs. Pendergast gasped. I bounced away.

I could not go near the monster after that. I used to help the old
lady just the same, but I would not go near the Reverend Pendergast.

One day, I found her crying. "What is it?"

"Our daughter--is going to be married."

"Why should she not?"

"He is not the kind of man the Parson wishes his daughter to marry.
Besides they are going to be married by a J.P. They will not wait
for father. There is not another parson in the vicinity."

The old lady was very distressed indeed.

"Tell your daughter to come here to be married. I will put her up
and help you out with things."

The old lady was delighted. The tears stopped trickling out of her
good eye and her bad eye too.

We got a wire off to the girl and then we began to bake and get
the flat in order.

The Parson insisted it should be a church wedding--everything in
the best ecclesiastical style, with the bishop officiating. The
girl would be two days with her parents before the ceremony. She
was to have my spare room. However, the young man came too, so she
had the couch in her mother's sitting room. They sent him upstairs
without so much as asking if they might.

I was helping Mrs. Pendergast finish the washing-up when the young
couple arrived. Mrs. Pendergast went to the door. She did not bring
them out where I was, but, keeping her daughter in the other room,
she called out some orders to me as if I had been her servant. I
finished and went away; I began to see that the old lady was a
snob. She did not think me the equal of her daughter because I was
a landlady.

It was very late when the mother and daughter brought the young
man upstairs to my flat to show him his room. They had to pass
through my studio. From my bedroom up in the attic I could look
right down into the studio. My door was ajar. There was enough
light from the hall to show them the way, but the girl climbed on
a chair and turned all the studio lights up full. The three then
stood looking around at everything, ridiculed me, made fun of my
pictures. They whispered, grimaced and pointed. They jeered,
mimicked, playacted me. I saw my own silly self bouncing round my
own studio in the person of the old lady I had tried to help. When
they had giggled enough, they showed the young man his room and
the women went away.

I was working in my garden next morning when the woman and the girl
came down the path. I did not look up or stop digging.

"This is my daughter...You have not met, I think."

I looked straight at them, and said, "I saw you when you were in
my studio last night."

The mother and daughter turned red and foolish looking; they began
to talk hard.

The wedding was in the Cathedral; the old man gave his daughter
away with great pomp. The other witness was a stupid man. I was
paired with him. We went for a drive after the ceremony.

I had to go to the wedding breakfast because I had promised to help
the old lady; I hated eating their food. The bride ordered me around
and put on a great many airs.

The couple left for the boat. Mrs. Pendergast and I cleared up. We
did not talk much as we worked. We were tired.

Soon the doctor said the Reverend Daniel Pendergast could go home
to the prairies again because his heart was healed. I was glad when
the cab rolled down the street carrying the cruel, emaciated Reverend
and the one-eyed ingrate away from my house--I was glad I did not
have to be their landlady any more.



A Visitor

DEATH had been snooping round for a week. Everyone in the house
knew how close he was. The one he wanted lay in my spare room but
she was neither here nor there. She was beyond our reach, deaf to
our voices.

The sun and spring air came into her room--a soft-coloured,
contented room. The new green of spring was close outside the
windows. The smell of wall-flower and sweet alyssum rose from the
garden, and the inexpressible freshness of the daffodils.

The one tossing on the bed had been a visitor in my house for but
a short time. Death made his appointment with her there. The meeting
was not hateful--it was beautiful and welcome to her.

People in the house moved quietly. Human voices were tuned so low
that the voices of inanimate things--shutting of doors, clicks of
light switches, crackling of fires-swelled to importance. Clocks
ticked off the solemn moments as loudly as their works would let
them.

Death came while she slept. He touched her, she sighed and let go.

We picked the wall-flowers and the daffodils, and brought them to
her, close. There was the same still radiance about them as about
her. Every bit of her was happy. The smile soaked over her forehead,
eyelids and lips--more than a smile--a glad; silent expression.

Lots of people had loved her; they came to put flowers near and to
say goodbye. They came out of her room with quiet, uncrying eyes,
stood a moment by the fire in the studio, looking deep into it,
and then they went away. We could not be sad for her.

The coffin was taken into the studio. One end rested on the big
table which was heaped with flowers. The keen air came in through
the east windows. Outside there was a row of tall poplars, gold
with young spring.

Her smile--the flowers--quiet--possessed the whole house.

A faint subtle change came over her face. She was asking to be
hidden away.

A parson came in his mournful black. He had a low, sad voice---while
he was talking we cried.

They took her down the long stairs. The undertakers grumbled about
the corners. They put her in the waiting hearse and took her away.

The house went back to normal, but now it was a mature place. It
had known birth, marriage and death, yet it had been built for but
one short year.



The Doll's House Couple

IT WAS made for them, as surely as they were made for each other.
I knew it as soon as I saw the young pair standing at my door. They
knew it too the moment I opened the door of the Doll's House. His
eyes said things into hers, and her eyes said things into his.
First their tongues said nothing, and then simultaneously, "It's
ours!" The key hopped into the man's pocket and the rent hopped
into mine.

One outer door was common to their flat and to mine. Every time I
came in and out passing. their door I could hear them chatting and
laughing. Their happiness bubbled through. Sometimes she was singing
and he was whistling. They must do something, they were so happy.

At five o'clock each evening his high spirits tossed his body right
up the stair--there she was peeping over the rail, or hiding behind
the door waiting to pounce on the tragedy written all over him
because he had not found her smiling face hanging over the verandah
rail. She pulled him into the Doll's House, told him all about her
day--heard all about his.

She tidied the flat all day and he untidied it all night. He was
such a big "baby-man," she a mother-girl who had to take care of
him; she had always mothered a big family of brothers. They had
taught her the strangeness of men, but she made more allowance for
the shortcomings of her man than she had done for the shortcomings
of her brothers.

I was making my garden when they came to live in my house. They
would come rushing down the stair, he to seize my spade, she to
play the hose so that I could sit and rest a little. They shared
their jokes and giggles with me. When at dusk, aching, tired, I
climbed to my flat, on my table was a napkined plate with a little
surprise whose odour was twin to that of the supper in the Doll's
House. Sometimes, when my inexperience was harried by Lower East
or Lower West, when things were bothersome, difficult, so that I
was just hating being a landlady, she would pop a merry joke or
run an arm round me, or he would say, "Shall I fix that leak?--put
up that shelf?"

Oh, they were like sunshine pouring upon things, still immature
and hard by reason of their greenness. Other tenants came and went
leaving no print of themselves behind--that happy couple left the
memory of their joyousness in every corner. When, after they were
gone, I went into the Doll's House emptiness, I felt their laughing
warmth still there.



References

EXPERIENCEE taught me to beware of people who were glib with
references. I never asked a reference. I found that only villains
offered them.

There was a certain Mrs. Panquist. The woman had a position in a
very reputable office. Her husband was employed in another. Her
relatives were people of position, respected citizens. She gave me
this voluntary information when she came to look at the flat.

"It suits me," she said. "I will bring my husband to see it before
deciding."

Later she rang up to say he was not coming to see it. They had
decided to take the flat and would move in early the next morning.
She would bring her things before business hours. Furthermore she
asked that I prepare an extra room I had below for her maid. To do
this I had to buy some new furniture.

She did not come or send her things next morning; all day there
was no word of her. I had the new furniture bought and everything
ready.

Late in the evening she arrived very tired and sour.

She snatched the key out of my hand.

"It is usual to exchange the rent for the key," I said knowing this
was war-time and that there were some very shady fly-by-nights
going from one apartment house to another.

"I am too tired to bother about rent tonight!" she snapped. "I will
come up with it in the morning before I go to work."

Again she failed to keep her promise. I asked her for the rent
several times but she always put me off. Finally she said rudely,
"I am not going to pay; my husband can."

I went to the man, who was most insolent, saying, "My wife took
the flat; let her pay."

"Come," I said. "Time is going on, one or the other of you must
pay." I pointed to the notice on the kitchen door "RENTS IN ADVANCE."
He laughed in my face. "Bosh!" he said. "We don't pay till we are
ready."

I began to make enquiries about the couple, not from those people
whose names they had given as reference, but from their former
landlady. Their record was shocking. They had rented from a war
widow, destroyed her place, and gone off owing her a lot of money.

Both of the Panquists had jobs; they could pay and I was not going
to get caught as the war widow had been.

I consulted the law--was turned over to the Sheriff. "Any furniture
of their own?"

"Only a couple of suitcases."

"Not enough value to cover the rental they owe?"

"No."

"This is what you are to do. Watch--when you see them go out take
a pass key, go in and fasten up the flat so that they cannot get
in until the rental is paid."

"Oh, I'm scared; the man is such a big powerful bully!"

"You asked me for advice. Take it. If there is any trouble call
the police."

I carried out the Sheriff's orders, trembling.

The Panquists had a baby and a most objectionable nursemaid. She
was the first to come home, bringing the child.

I was in my garden. She screamed, "The door is locked. I can't get
in!"

"Take the child to the room I prepared for you." (The woman had
decided she did not want it after I had bought furniture and prepared
the room.) I took down milk and biscuits for the child. "When your
mistress has paid the rent the door will be opened," I said. The
maid bounced off and shortly returned with the woman, who stood
over me in a furious passion.

"Open that door! You hear--open that door!"

"When the rent is paid. You refuse, your husband refuses. The flat
is not yours till you pay. I am acting under police orders."

"I'll teach you," she said, livid with fury, and turned, rushing
headlong; she had seen her husband coming.

He was a huge man and had a cruel face. His mouth was square and
aggressive; out of it came foul oaths. He looked a fiend glowering
at me and clenching his fists.

"You--(he called me a vile name)! Open or I will break the door
in!" He braced his shoulder against it and raised his great fists.
I was just another woman to be bullied, got the better of, frightened.

I ran to the 'phone. The police came. The man stood back, his hands
dropping to his sides.

"What do you want me to do?" said the officer.

"Get them out. I won't house such people. They got away with it in
their last place, not here."

I was brave now though I shook.

"The town is full of such," said the officer. "House owners are
having a bad time. Scum of the earth squeezing into the shoes of
honest men gone overseas. How much do they owe?"

I told him.

He went to the man and the woman who were snarling angrily at one
another.

"Pay what you owe and get out."

"No money on me," said the man, "my wife took the flat."

"One of you must," said the officer.

"Shell out," the man told the woman brutally.

She gave him a look black with hatred, took money from her purse
and flung it at me. My faith in proffered references was dead.



Dogs and Cats

AT FIRST, anxious to make people feel at home, happy in my house,
I permitted the keeping of a dog or a cat, and I endured babies.

My Old English Bobtail Sheep-dogs lived in kennels beyond the foot
of my garden. They had play fields. The tenants never came in
contact with the dogs other than seeing them as we passed up the
paved way in and out for our run in Beacon Hill Park. One old
sheep-dog was always in the house with me, always at my heels. He
was never permitted to go into any flat but mine. There was, too,
my great silver Persian cat, Adolphus. He also was very exclusive.
People admired him enormously but the cat ignored them all.

I enjoyed my own animals so thoroughly that when a tenant asked,
"May I keep a dog or a cat?" I replied, "Yes, if you look after
it. There are vacant lots all round and there is Beacon Hill Park
to run the animal in."

But no, people were too lazy to be bothered. They simply opened
their own door and shoved the creature into the narrow strip of
front garden, let him bury his bones and make the lawn impossible.
Always it was the landlady who had to do the tidying up. I got
tired of it. Anyone should be willing to tend his creature if he
has any affection for it. They managed cats even worse, these
so-called "animal lovers." Stealthily at night a basement window
would open, a tenant's cat be pushed through. The coal pile became
impossible. I was obliged to ban all animals other than a canary
bird, although I would far rather have banned humans and catered
to creatures.


Matrimony

I HAD NEVER before had the opportunity of observing the close-up
of married life. My parents died when I was young. We four spinster
sisters lived on in the old home. My girlhood friends who married
went to live in other cities. I did not know what
"till-death-do-us-part" did to them.

Every couple took it differently of course, but I discovered I
could place "Marrieds" in three general groupings--the happy, the
indifferent, and the scrappy.

My flat being at the back of the house I overlooked no tenant nor
did I see their comings and goings. The walls were as soundproof
as those of most apartments, only voice murmurs came through them,
not words. No secrets were let out. I neither saw nor heard, but
I could feel in wordless sounds and in silences; through the floor
when I went into my basement to tend the furnace I heard the crackle
of the man's newspaper turning and turning-the creak of the woman's
rocker.

There are qualities of sound and qualities of silence. When the
sounds were made only by inanimate things, you knew that couple
were the indifferent type. When you heard terse jagged little
huddles of words, those were the snappers! If there was a continuous
rumbling of conversation, contented as the singing of a tea kettle
or the purring of a cat, you knew that couple had married happily.
There was the way they came to pay the rent too, or ask a small
favour, or project a little grumble. The happily married ones spared
each other; the wife asked or grumbled for the husband, the husband
for the wife.

Snappy couples tore up my stairs, so eager to "snap their snaps"
that they often found themselves abreast of each other anxious to
be first!

It was immaterial whether the man or the woman of the indifferent
pair came. They handed in the rent grudgingly and went away without
comment. I liked them the least.



Life Loves Living

THERE were four western maple trees growing in the lot upon which
I built my house. Two were in the strip of front lawn, clear of
foundations, but when the builders came to overhead wiring they
found one of the trees interfered. The line-men cut it down. The
other front-lawn maple was a strong, handsome tree. I circled her
roots with rock and filled in new earth. The tree throve and branched
so heavily that the windows of Lower West and the Doll's Flat were
darkened. Experts with saws and ladders came and lopped off the
lower branches. This sent the tree's growth rushing violently to
her head in a lush overhanging which umbrellaed the House of All
Sorts. She was lovely in spring and summer, but when fall came her
leaves moulted into the gutters and heaped in piles on the roof,
rotting the cedar shingles. It put me to endless expense of having
roof-men, gutter-men and tree-trimmers. At last I gave the grim
order, "Cut her down."

It is horrible to see live beauty that has taken years to mature
and at last has reached its prime hacked down, uprooted.

The other two maple trees had stood right on the spot Where my
house was to be built. The builders had been obliged to saw them
to within three or four feet of the ground. Both trees' roots were
in that part underneath the house which was not to be cemented; it
would always be an earthy, dark place. The maple stumps were left
in the ground. One died soon. The other clung furiously to life,
her sap refused to dry up; grimly she determined to go on living.

The cement basement was full of light and air, but light and air
were walled away from that other part, which was low. I could not
stand there upright; there was but one small square of window in
the far corner. The old maple stump shot sickly pink switches from
her roots, new switches every year. They crept yearningly toward
the little square of window. Robbed of moisture, light and air,
the maple still remembered spring and pushed watery sap along her
pale sprouts, which came limper and limper each year until they
were hardly able to support the weight of a ghastly droop of leaves
having little more substance than cobwebs.

But the old maple stump would not give up. It seemed no living
thing in the House of All Sorts had less to live for than that old
western maple, yet she clung to life's last shred--she loved living.



Brides

LOWER EAST and Lower West were both rented to brides. The brides
sat in their living-rooms with only a wall dividing; they looked
out at the same view. They did not know each other.

In the East flat, the young husband was trying to accommodate
himself to a difficult and neurotic wife.

In the West flat a middle-aged groom was trying to slow a bright
young girl down to his dullness. The girl drooped, was home-sick,
in spite of all the pretty things he gave her and the smart hats
she made for herself (she had been a milliner in New York before
she married the middle-aged man). It was freedom she thought she
was marrying--freedom from the drudgery of bread-and-butter-earning.
When he dangled a "home of her own" before her eyes, she married
him and was numbed; now came the pins and needles of awaking.

I had known the other bride since she was a child. When I welcomed
her into my house, she chilled as if to remind me that she was a
popular young bride--I a landlady; I took the hint. I had put the
best I had into her flat, but she scornfully tossed my things into
her woodshed, replacing them with things of her own. The rain came,
and spoiled my things. When I asked her to hand back what she did
not want, so that I might store them safely, she was very insulting,
as if my things were beyond contempt or hurting.

The little New York bride was very, very lonely, with her dull,
heavy husband. She came up to my flat on any excuse whatever. One
day she cried and told me about it. She said that she knew no one.
"The girl next door is a bride too; she's smart; she has lots of
friends. I see them come and go. Oh, I do wish I knew her." Then
she said, "You know her; couldn't you introduce me? Please!"

"I have known her since she was a child, but I could not introduce
you to each other."

"Why?"

"It is not my place to introduce tenants. People make opportunities
of speaking to each other if they are neighbours, but they would
resent being compelled by their landlady to know each other."

"But you have known this girl since she was little--couldn't you? I
have no friends at all. Please, please."

"Listen, it would not make you happy. She is a snob."

I would not subject this unhappy, ill-bred, little bride, with her
ultra clothes worn wrong, her overdone make-up and her slangy talk,
to the snubs of the stuck-up bride next door.

"You'll come and see me, won't you? Come often-he is out so much."

"I will come when I can."

She went slowly down to her empty flat, this lonely little bride
who had sold her pretty face for laziness and a home.

Next day she ran up, all excitement.

"My opportunity came! The postman asked me to deliver a registered
letter, because my neighbour was out; you are all wrong, she is
lovely. I expect we shall see a lot of each other now. I am so
happy."

She flew down-stairs, hugging her joy.

I missed her for some days. I went to see if she were ill, found
her crumpled into a little heap on the sofa. She had red eyes.

"Hello! Something wrong?"

She gulped hard. "It is as you said-she is a snob. We met in the
street. They saw me coming. When I was close they looked the other
way and talked hard. Her husband did not even raise his hat!"

"Perhaps they did not see it was you."

"They could not help seeing--not if they'd been as blind as new
kittens. I spoke before I saw how they felt," she sobbed.

"Pouf! Would I care? She is not worth a cry! What pretty hats you
make!"

She had been working on one--it lay on the table half finished.

"You like them? I make them all myself. I was a milliner in New
York--head of all the girls. They gave me big pay because I had
knack in designing--big fine store it was too!"

"Here you are crying because a snob who couldn't make one 'frump's
bow' did not speak to you! Come, let's go into garden and play with
the pups."

She was soon tumbling with them on the lawn, kind whole-hearted
clumsy pups, much more her type than the next-door bride.



Always Something

SHE WAS so young, so pretty, so charming! But when it came to a
matter of shrewd bargaining, you couldn't beat her. Her squeezing
of the other fellow's price was clever--she could have wrung juice
from a raw quince. Her big husband was entirely dominated by his
tall, slender wife; he admired her methods enormously. Sometimes
he found it embarrassing to look into the face of the "squeezed."
While she was crumbling down my rent, he turned his back, looking
out of the window, but I saw that his big ears were red and that
they twitched.

It was the Doll's Flat she bargained for, which seemed ridiculous
seeing that he was so large, she so tall, and the Doll's Flat so
little. "Won't it be rather squeezy?" I suggested.

"My husband is used to ship cabins. For myself I like economy."

She was an extremely neat, orderly person, kept the Doll's Flat
like a Doll's Flat-no bottles, no laundry, no garbage troubles, as
one had with so many tenants. She made the place attractive.

She entertained a bit and told me all the nice things people said
about her flat.

"If only I had 'such and such a rug' or 'such and such a curtain'
it would be perfect!" and she wheedled till I got it for her. But
these added charms to make her flat perfect always came out of my
pocket, never out of hers.

I had a white cat with three snowball kittens who had eyes like
forget-me-nots. When the tall, slim wife was entertaining, she
borrowed my "cat family," tied blue ribbons round their necks.
Cuddled on a cushion in a basket they amused and delighted her
guests--inexpensive entertainment. Flowers were always to be had
out of my garden for the picking.

"If only toasted buns grew on the trees!" She liked toasted buns
for her tea parties--the day-before's were half price and toasted
better. . . . I heard her on my 'phone.

"Not deliver five cents' worth! Why should I buy more when I don't
require them?" Down slammed the receiver and she turned to me.

"They do not deserve one's custom! I shall have to walk to town:
it is not worth paying a twelve-cent carfare to fetch five cents'
worth of stale buns!"

I swore at the beginning of each month I would buy nothing new for
her, but before the month was out I always had, and wanted to kick
myself for a weak fool. I liked her in spite of her meanness.

She was proud of her husband's looks; he wore his navy lieutenant's
clothes smartly.

"Ralph, you need a new uniform."--He ordered it. "How much is the
tailor charging? . . . Ridiculous!"

"He is the best tailor in town, my dear."

"Leave him to me."

The next day she came home from town. "I've cut that tailor's price
in half!"

"What a clever wife!" But the lieutenant went red. He took advantage
of her bargaining but he shivered at her boasting in front of me
about it.

She did hate to pay a doctor. She had been a nurse before she
married; she knew most of the doctors in town. It was wonderful
how she could nurse along an ailment till someone in the house fell
sick, then she just "happened to be coming in the gate" as the
doctor went out. He would stop for a word with the pretty thing.

"How are you?"

Out came tongue and all her saved-up ailments. She ran down to the
druggist's to fill the prescription, to shop a little. Butcher,
grocer always added a bit of suet, or a bone, or maybe she spotted
a cracked egg, had it thrown in with her dozen. They loved doing
it for her, everybody fell before her wheedle.

"I am going to stay with you forever," she had said as an inducement
to make me lower the rent and buy this or that for her flat. Then,
"The very smartest apartment block in town--Ralph always fancied
it, but it was too expensive for us. But-only one room, a bachelor
suite-the man is sub-letting at half its usual price, furniture
thrown in. He will be away one year. Wonderful for us! Such a
bargain, isn't it my dear?"

"One room!"

"But, the block is so smart: such a bargain!"

They went to their bargain room. A professor and his wife moved
into my Doll's Flat. They were as lavishly openhanded as the others
had been stingy. The professor was writing a book. He had a talkative
wife whom he adored, but though he loved her tremendously, he could
not get on with his book because of her chattering. He just picked
her up, opened my door, popped her in.

"There! chatter, dear, all you like." He turned the key on his
peace--what about mine? I pulled the dust-sheet over my canvas.
Landlady's sighs are heavy--is it not enough to give shelter,
warmth, furniture? Must a landlady give herself too?



Mean Baby

THE BABY had straight honey-coloured hair, pale eyes, puckered
brow, pouting mouth, and a yell, a sheer, bad-tempered, angry yell
which she used for no other reason than to make herself thoroughly
unpleasant. Bodily she was a healthy child.

Her family brought her to my house suddenly because the whole lot
of them had come down with measles while staying in a boarding-house
nearby. The other boarders got panicky and asked them to go! Early
in the morning the mother came to me, very fussed. Lower West was
empty and measles being a temporary complaint, I let the woman have
the flat.

When the taxi load of spotty children drove up to my door I was
hustling to warm up the beds and make up extras. Some of the children
sat limp and mute waiting, while others whimpered fretfully. The
infant, a lumpy child of un-walking, un-talking age, was the only
one who had not got measles. The mother set the child on the floor
while she went to fetch the sick, spotty miseries from the cab.
The infant's head, as it were, split in two--eyes, cheeks, brow
retired, all became mouth, and out of the mouth poured a roar the
equal of Niagara Falls.

The lady in the Doll's Flat above stuck her head out of the window
and looked down. "Measles," I warned, and she drew her own and her
small son's head back, closed her windows and locked her door.

T'he measles took their course under a doctor and a trained nurse.
I ran up and down the stairs with jellies and gruel. Night and day
the baby cried. The House of All Sorts supposed she was sickening
for measles and endured it as best they could. The baby did not
get measles. After fumigation and quarantine were over and nothing
ailed the child we had the Doctor's word as assurance that it was
only a cranky; mean temper that was keeping us awake all night.
The tenants began coming to me with complaints, and I had to go
down and talk to the mother.

I said, "No one in the house can sleep for the child's crying,
something will have to be done. I cannot blame my tenants for
threatening to go and I cannot afford to lose them." The woman was
all syrupy enthusing over the soups and jellies I had sent the
measles; but she suddenly realized that I was in earnest and that
my patience for my household's rest was at an end.

If only I could have gone down to the mother in the middle of the
night when we were all peevish for sleep, it would have been
different, but, with the child sitting for the moment angel-like
in her mother's lap, it was not easy to proceed. I looked out the
window. Near the front gate I saw the child's pram drawn up
dishevelled from her morning nap. What my tenants resented most
was not that the child kept the whole household awake at night but
that the mother put her baby to sleep most of the day in the garden,
close by the gate through which people came and went to the house.
After listening to her yelling all night every one was incensed to
be told in the daytime, "Hush, hush! my baby is asleep: don't wake
her." The mother pounced upon the little boy upstairs, upon baker,
postman, milkman, visitors; every one was now afraid to come near
our house; people began to shun us. I looked at the disordered pram
and took courage.

"Would you please let the baby take her day naps on the back
verandah; she would be quiet there and not interfere with our coming
and going."

"My baby on the back porch! Certainly not!"

"Why does the child cry so at night? My tenants are all complaining;
something will have to be done."

"People are most unreasonable."

She was as furious as a cow whose calf has been ill-treated.

"Who is it that suffers most, I'd like to know? Myself and my
husband! It is most ill-natured of tenants to complain."

Standing the baby on her knee and kissing her violently, "Oose
never been werry seepsy at night has Oo, Puss Ducksey?"

The child smacked the mother's face with extraordinary vigour,
leaving a red streak across the cheek. The mother kissed the cruel
little fist.

"Something will have to be done, otherwise I shall have an empty
house." I repeated determinedly for the third time. "What, for
instance?"

"A few spankings."

The woman's face boiled red. "Spank Puss! Never!"

My hand itched to spank both child and mother.

"Why don't you train the child? It is not fair to her, only makes
people dislike her."

"As if any one could dislike Puss, our darling!" She looked hate
at me.

During our conversation Puss had been staring at me with all her
pale eyes, her brow wrinkled. Now she scrambled from her mother's
lap to the floor and by some strange, crablike movement contrived
not only to reach me but to drag herself up by my skirt and stand
at my knee staring up into my face.

"Look! Look! Puss has taken her first steps alone and to you, you,
who hate her," said the angry mother.

"I don't hate the youngster. Only I cannot have a spoilod child
rob me of my livelihood and you must either train her or go
elsewhere."

She clutched the honey-haired creature to her.

"The people upstairs have left because of your baby's crying at
night. They gave no notice. How could I, expect it: the man has to
go to business whether your child has yelled all night or not.
Another tenant is going too. I wish I could leave myself!"

I saw that my notice was being ignored. I had sent it in when I
served her last rent. Go she must! It was in her hand when she came
up to pay.

"Of course you don't mean this?" She held out the notice.

"I do."

"But have you not observed an improvement? She only cried four
times last night."

"Yes, but each time it lasted for a quarter of the night."

"Sweet Pussy!" she said, and smothered the scowling face with
kisses. "They don't want us, Puss!"

"That notice stands," I said, looking away from Puss. "I got no
notices from the tenants Puss drove away."

The angry mother rushed for the door. I went to open it for her
and a little pink finger reached across her mother's shoulder and
gave me a little, pink poke and a friendly gurgling chuckle.

"What I cannot understand," the woman blazed at me as she turned
the corner, "is why Puss, my shy baby who won't allow any one to
speak to her, appears actually to like you, you who hate her."

But did I hate the little girl with honey-Coloured hair? She had
cost me two tenants and no end of sleep, had heated my temper to
boiling, yet, somehow I could not hate that baby. The meanest thing
about her was the way she could make you feel yourself. One has to
make a living and one must sleep. It is one of the crookednesses
of life when a little yellow-haired baby can cause you so much
trouble and yet won't even let you hate her.

Puss sailed off to her new home in a pram propelled by an angry
parent.

"Ta ta," she waved as they turned the corner--and I? I kissed my
hand to Puss when her mother was not looking.



Bachelors

WHEN a flat housed a solitary bachelor, there was a curious desolation
about it The bachelor's front door banged in the morning and again
at night. All day long there was deadly stillness in that flat,
that secret silence of "Occupied" emptiness, quite a different
silence from "To Let" emptiness.

Peddlers passed the flat without calling. The blinds dipped or were
hoisted at irregular levels. Sometimes they remained down all day.
Sometimes they were up all night. There were no callers and there
was no garbage. Men ate out.

Bachelors that rent flats or houses do so because they are
home-loving; otherwise they would live in a boarding-house and be
"done" for. They are tired of being tidied by landladies; they like
to hang coats over chair backs and find them there when they come
home. It is much handier to toss soiled shirts behind the dresser
than to stuff them into a laundry bag; men do love to prowl round
a kitchen. A gas stove, even if it is all dusty over the top from
unuse, is home-like, so is the sink with its taps, the saucepan,
the dishes. The men do not want to cook, but it is nice to know
they could do so if they wished. In the evening, when I tended the
furnace, I heard the bachelor tramp, tramp, tramping from room to
room as if searching for something. This would have fidgeted a
wife, but, if the bachelor had had a wife he would probably not
have tramped.

During the twenty-odd years that I rented apartments I housed quite
a few bachelors. Generally they stayed a long while and their
tenancy ended in marriage and in buying themselves a home.

A bachelor occupied Lower West for several years. Big, pink and
amiable, he gave no trouble. Occasionally his sister would come
from another town to visit him. He boarded her with me up in my
flat. I enjoyed these visits, so did her brother. I saw then how
domestic and home-loving the man was. He loved his sister and was
very good to my Bobtail dogs. Once the sister hinted--there was
"somebody," but, she did not know for certain; brother thought he
was too old to marry--all fiddlesticks! She hoped he would. Therefore,
I was not surprised when the bachelor came into my garden, and,
ducking down among the dogs to hide how red he was, said, "I am
going to be married. Am I an old fool?"

"Wise, I think."

"Thank you," he said, grinning all over--"I have been happy here."

He gave formal notice, saying, "I have bought a house."

"I hope you will be very happy."

"Thanks. I think we shall."

He went to the garden gate, turned; such a sparkle in his eye it
fairly lit the garden.

"She's fine," he said. "Not too young--sensible."

Then he bolted. I heard the door of his flat slam as if it wanted
to shut him away from the temptation of babbling to the world how
happy he was.

The wedding was a month distant. During that month, when I tended
the furnace there was no tramp, tramp, tramp overhead. I heard
instead the contented scrunch, scrunch of his rocking chair.

The morning of the wedding he bounded up my stair, most tremendously
shaved and brushed, stood upon my doormat bashfully hesitant. I
did not give him the chance to get any pinker before I said, "You
do look nice."

"Do I really?" He turned himself slowly for inspection.

"Hair, tie, everything O.K.?"

"Splendid." But I took the clothes brush from the hall stand and
flicked it across his absolutely speckless shoulders. It made him
feel more fixed.

His groomsman shouted from the bottom of the stair, "Hi there!" He
hurried down and the two men got into a waiting cab.


Bangs and Snores

A YOUNG lawyer and his mother lived in Lower West. They were big,
heavy-footed people. Every night between twelve and two the lawyer
son came home to the flat. First he slammed the gate, then took
the steps at a noisy run, opened and shut the heavy front door with
such a bang that the noise reverberated through the whole still
house. Every soul in it was startled from his sleep. People
complained. I went to the young man's mother and asked that she
beg the young man to come in quietly. She replied, "My son is my
son! We pay rent! Good-day."

He kept on banging the house awake at two A.M.

One morning at three A.M. my telephone rang furiously. In alarm I
jumped from my bed and ran to it. A great yawn was on the other
end of the wire. When the yawn was spent, the voice of the lawyer's
mother drawled "My son informs me your housedog is snoring; kindly
wake the dog, it disturbs my son."

The dog slept on the storey above in a basket, his nose snuggled
in a heavy fur rug. I cannot think that the noise could have been
very disturbing to anyone on the floor below.

The next morning I went down and had words with the woman regarding
her selfish, noisy son as against my dog's snore.

Petty unreasonableness nagged calm more than all the hard work of
the house. I wanted to loose the Bobtails, follow them--run, and
run, and run into forever--beyond sound of every tenant in the
world--tenants tore me to Shreds.



Zig-Zag . . . Ki-Hi

SIMULTANEOUSLY, two young couples occupied, one Lower East, one
Lower West. The couples were friends. One pair consisted of a
selfish wife and an unselfish husband. The other suite housed a
selfish husband and an unselfish wife.

Zig-zag, zig-zag. There was always pulling and pushing, selfishness
against unselfishness.

I used to think, "What a pity the two selfish ones had not married,
and the two unselfish." Then I saw that if this had been the case
nobody would have got anywhere. The unselfish would have collided,
rushing to do for each other. The selfish would have glowered from
opposite ends of their flat, refusing to budge....

Best as it was, otherwise there would have been pain--stagnation.

The unselfish wife was a chirping, cheerful creature. I loved to
hear her call "Ki-hi, Ki-hi! Taste my jam tarts." And over the rail
of my balcony would climb a handful of little pies, jam with
criss-cross crust over the top! Or I would cry over the balcony
rail, "Ki-hi, Ki-hi! Try a cake of my newest batch of home-made
soap."

We were real neighbours, always Ki-hi-ing, little exchanges that
sweetened the sour of landladying. This girl-wife had more love
than the heart of her stupid husband could accommodate. The overflow
she gave to me and to my Bobtails. She did want a baby so, but did
not have one. The selfish wife shook with anxiety that a child
might be born to her.

Zig-zag, zig-zag. Clocks do not say "tick, tick, tick,"
eternally--they say "tick, tock, tick, tock." We, looking at the
clock's face, only learn the time. Most of us know nothing of a
clock's internal mechanism, do not know why it says "tick, tock,"
instead of "tick, tick, tick."

Lady Loo, my favourite Bobtail mother, was heavy in whelp. Slowly
the dog padded after my every footstep. I had prepared her a
comfortable box in which to cradle her young. She was satisfied
with the box, but restless. She wanted to be within sight of me,
or where she heard the sound of my voice. It gave the dog comfort.

Always at noon on Sundays I dined with my sisters in our old home
round the corner. I shut Lady Loo in her pen in the basement; I
would hurry back. When I re-entered the basement, "Ki-hi!"--a head
popped in the window of Loo's pen. On the pavement outside sat
little "Ki-hi."

"Loo whimpered a little, was lonely when she heard you go. I brought
my camp stool and book to keep her company. Ki-hi, Lady Loo! Good
luck!" She was away! I think that little kindness to my mother
Bobtail touched me deeper than anything any tenant ever did for
me.



Blind

MOTHER and daughter came looking for a flat, not in the ordinary
way--asking about this and that, looking out of the windows to see
what view they would have. They did not note the colour of the
walls, but poked and felt everything, smoothed their fingers over
surfaces, spaced the distance of one thing from another. I sensed
they sought something particular; they kept exchanging glances and
nods, asked questions regarding noises. They went away and I forgot
about them. Towards evening they came back; they were on their way
to the Seattle boat, had decided to take my flat, and wanted to
explain something to me. The cab waited while we sat on my garden
bench.

"There will be three people in the flat," said the woman. "My
mother, my daughter and my daughter's fiance."

"It is necessary to get the young man away from his present
environment; he has been very, very ill."

She told me that while he was making some experiments recently
something had burst in his face, blowing his eyes out. The shock
had racked the young man's nerves to pieces. His fiancee was the
only person who could do anything with him. She was devoted. The
grandmother would keep house for them. They asked me to buy and
prepare a meal so that they could come straight from the boat next
day and not have to go to a restaurant.

The meal was all ready on the table when the girl led the crouching
huddle that was her sweetheart into the flat. Old grandmother
paddled behind--a regular emporium of curiosities. She looked like
the bag stall in a bazaar; she was carrying all kinds--paper,
leather, string and cloth. They dangled from her hands by cords
and loops, or she could never have managed them all. She hung one
bag or two over each door-knob as she passed through the flat, and
then began taking off various articles of her clothing. As she took
each garment off, she cackled, "Dear me, now I must remember where
I put that!" Her hat was on the drainboard, her shoes on the gas
stove, her cloak on the writing desk, her dress hung over the top
of the cooler door. Her gloves and purse were on the dinner-table,
and her spectacles sat on top of the loaf. She looked pathetic,
plucked. After complete unbuilding came reconstruction. She attacked
the bags, pulling out a dressing sacque, a scarf, an apron and
something she put on her head. She seemed conscious of her upper
half only, perhaps she used only a handmirror. Her leg half was
pathetic and ignored. The scant petticoat came only to her knees,
there was a little fence of crocheted lace around each knee. Black
stockings hung in lengthwise folds around the splinters of legs
that were stuck into her body and broke at right angles to make
feet. Her face-skin was yellow and crinkled as the shell of an
almond--the chin as pointed as an almond's tip.

The girl led the boy from room to room. She held one of his hands,
with the other he was feeling, feeling everything that he could
reach. So were his feet--shuffling over the carpet, over the polished
floor. Grannie and I kept up a conversation, turning from him when
we spoke so that he could hear our voices coming from behind our
heads and not feel as if we were watching him.

Grannie "clucked" them in to dinner; I came away.

It was natural enough that the blind man should be fussy over
sounds. Grannie flew up to my flat and down like a whiz cash-box.
The wind caught her as she turned the corner of my stairs, exposing
a pink flannelette Grannie one week and a blue flannelette Grannie
the next. She was very spry, never having to pause for breath before
saying, "Tell those folks above us to wear slippers--tell them to
let go their taps gently--have a carpenter fix that squeaky floor
board."

Then she whizzed downstairs and the door gave back that jerky smack
that says, "Back again with change!"

On Sunday morning the house was usually quiet. Settling in families
was always more or less trying. I determined to have a long late
lie, Grannie and family being well established. At seven A.M. my
bell pealed violently. I stuck my head out into the drizzling rain
and called, "What is wanted?"

Grannie's voice squeaked--"You!"

"Anything special? I am not up." "Right away! Important!"

I hurried. Anything might have happened with that boy in the state
he was.

When I opened the door, Grannie poked an empty vase at me, "The
flowers you put in our flat are dead. More!"

The girl and the boy sat in my garden at the back of the house. It
was quiet and sheltered there, away from the stares the boy could
not bear. The monkey was perched in her cherry-tree, coy as Eve,
gibbering if some one pulled in the clothes-line which made her
tree shiver and the cherries bob, stretching out her little hands
for one of the pegs she had coveted all the while that the pyjamas,
the dresses and aprons had been drying. The girl told him about it
all, trying to lighten his awful dark by making word-pictures for
him-the cat on the fence, the garden, flowers, me weeding, the
monkey in her cherry-tree.

"Is that monkey staring at me?"

"No, she is searching the dry grass round the base of the cherry-tree
for earwigs now. Hear her crunch that one! Now she is peeping
through the lilac bush, intensely interested in something. Oh, it's
the Bobtails!"

I had opened the gates from dog-field and puppy-pen. Bobtails
streamed into the garden. People sitting with idle hands suggested
fondling, which dogs love. They ringed themselves around the boy
and girl. The mother dog led her pups up to them--the pups tugged
at his shoelaces, the mother dog licked his hand. He was glad to
have them come of themselves. He could stoop and pick them up
without someone having to put them into his arms. He buried his
blackness in the soft black of their live fur. A pup licked his
face, its sharp new teeth pricked his fingers, he felt its soft
clinging tongue, smelled the puppy breath. The old dog sat with
her head resting on his knee. He could feel her eyes on him; he
did not mind those eyes. The sun streamed over everything. His taut
nerves relaxed. He threw back his head and laughed!

The girl gathered a red rose, dawdled it across his cheek and
forehead. She did not have to tell him the colour of the rose; it
had that exultant rich red smell. He put his nose among the petals
and drew great breaths.

Suddenly the back door of their flat flew open--PLOSH!--Out among
the flowers flew Grannie's dishwater. Grannie was raised in drought.
She could not bear to waste water down a drain.

Old Grannie over-fussed the young folks. She was kind, but she had
some trying ways. Afternoon house-cleaning was one of them.

The new bride in Lower East was having her post-nuptial "at home"
and Grannie must decide that very afternoon to house-clean her
front room. She heaved the rugs and chairs out onto the front lawn;
all the bric-a-brac followed. She tied the curtains in knots and,
a cloth about her head, poised herself on a table right in front
of the window. Everyone could see the crochet edging dangling over
the flutes of black stocking. She hung out-she took in; her arms
worked like pistons. The bride's first guest met a cloud of Bon
Ami as Gran shook her duster. The waves from Gran's scrub bucket
lapped to the very feet of the next guest--dirty waves that had
already washed the steps. The bride came up the next day to see me
about it.

Why--oh, why--Oh, why--could one not secure tenants in packets of
"named varieties"--true to type like asters and sweet peas? The
House of All Sorts got nothing but "mixed."



Snow

TALL--LOOSKNIT--dark-skinned--big brown eyes that could cry grandly
without making her face ugly--sad eyes that it took nothing at all
to fire and make sparkle.

That funny joker, life, had mated her to a scrunched-up
whipper-snapper of a man, with feet that took girls' boots and with
narrow, white hands. They had a fiery-haired boy of six. His mother
spoiled him. It was so easy for her to fold her loose-knit figure
down to his stature. They had great fun. The father scorned stooping.
Neither his body nor his mind was bendable.

I heard mother and son joking and sweeping snow from their steps.
Sweeping, snowballing-sweeping, laughing. That was on Monday. By
Wednesday more snow had fallen, and she was out again sweeping
furiously-but she was alone.

"Where is your helper?"

"Sick."

"Anything serious?"

"I have sent for the doctor. I am clearing the snow so that he can
get in." She had finished now and went in to her flat and banged
the door angrily--evident anger, but not at me.

The doctor came and went; I ran down to her. "What does the doctor
say?"

"Nothing to be alarmed over."

She was out in the snow again. Little red-head was at the window;
both were laughing as if they shared some very good joke. Then I
saw what she was doing. She was filling snow back into the path
she had cleared in the morning, piling the snow deeper than it was
before, spanking it down with the shovel to keep it from blowing
away. She carried snow from across the lawn, careful not to leave
any clear path to her door.

"Why are you doing that?"

Her eyes sparkled; she gave the happiest giggle and a nod to her
boy.

"My husband would not get up and shovel a path for the doctor. Do
you think he is going to find a clear path when he comes home to
lunch? Not if I know it, he isn't."

"If it were not already finished, I would be delighted to help,"
I said and we both ran chuckling into our own flats.



Arabella Jones's Home

ARABELLA JONES ran out of the back door, around the house and into
the front door of her flat. Over and over she did it. Each time
she rang her own door bell and opened her own front door and walked
in with a laugh as if such a delightful thing had never happened
to her before.

"It is half like having a house of my own," she said, and rushed
into the garden to gather nasturtiums. She put them into a bowl
and dug her nose down among the blossoms. "Bought flowers don't
smell like that, and oh, oh, the kitchen range! and a pulley
clothes-line across the garden! my own bath! Nothing shared--no
gas plate hidden behind a curtain--no public entrance and no public
hall! Oh, it is only the beginning too; presently we shall own a
whole house and furniture and our own garden, not rented but our
very own!"

It was not Silas Jones but "a home" that had lured Arabella into
marriage. When dull, middle-aged Silas said, "I am tired of knocking
round, I want a home and a wife inside that home--what about it,
Arabella?" she lifted her face to his like a "kiss-for-a-candy"
little girl. And they were married.

That was in Eastern Canada--they began to move West. It was fun
living in hotels for a bit, but soon Arabella asked, "When are we
going to get the home?"

"We have to find out first where we want it to be."

The place did not matter to Arabella. She wanted a home. They
travelled right across Canada, on, on, till they came to Vancouver
and the end of the rail.

"Now there is no further to go, can we get our home?"

"There is still Vancouver Island," he said.

They took the boat to Victoria. Here they were in "Lower West,"
while Silas Jones looked around. He was in no hurry to buy. The
independence of a self-contained flat would satisfy his young wife
for the time being.

Arabella Jones kept begging me, "Do come down to our flat of an
evening and talk before my husband about the happiness of owning
your own home."

Mortgage, taxes, tenants, did not make home-owning look too nice
to me just then--I found it difficult to enthuse.

Silas had travelled. He was a good talker, but I began to notice
a queerness about him, a "far-offness"--when his eyes glazed, his
jaw dropped and he forgot. Arabella said, "Silas is sleeping badly,
has to take stuff." She said too, "He is always going to Chinatown,"
and showed me vases and curios he bought in Chinatown for her.

One night Silas told me he had been looking round, and expected to
buy soon, so I could consider my flat free for the first of the
next month should I have an applicant.

The following day I was going down my garden when he called to me
from his woodshed. I looked up-drew back. His face was livid--eyes
wild; foam came from his lips.

"Hi, there, you!" he shouted. "Don't you dare come into my flat,
or I'll kill you--kill you, do you hear? None of your showing off
of my flat!"

He was waving an axe round his head, looking murderous. I hurried
past, did not speak to him. I went to the flat at the other side
of the house; this tenant knew the Joneses.

I said, "Silas Jones has gone crazy or he is drunk."

"You know what is the matter with that man, don't you?"

"No, what?"

"He"--a tap at the door stopped her. Silas Jones's young wife was
there.

"Somebody wants to see over our flat," she said.

"Would you be kind enough to show it to them?"

"It would be better for you to do it yourself," she said shortly.
I saw she was angry about something.

"I can't--your husband--"

"My husband says you insulted him--turned your back on him when he
spoke to you. He is very angry."

"I do not care to talk to drunken men."

"Drunken? My--husband--does--not--drink...." She spoke slowly as
if there were a wonder between every word; her eyes had opened wide
and her face gone white. "I will show the flat," she said.

I stood on the porch waiting while the women went over the Joneses'
flat. Suddenly, Silas was there-gripping my shoulder, his terrible
lips close to my ear.

"You told...!"

His wife was coming--he let go of me. I went back to my other
tenant.

"What was it you were going to tell me about Silas Jones?"

"Dope."

"Dope! I have never seen any one who took dope."

"You have now--you have let the cat out of the bag, too. Did you
see the girl's face when you accused her husband of being drunk?
She was putting two and two together--his medicine for insomnia--his
violent tempers--Chinatown....Poor child...."

I kept well out of the man's way. He was busy with agents. His wife
was alternately excited about the home and very sad.

I knew it was her step racing up the stairs. "My husband has bought
a house, furniture and all. It is a beauty. It has a garden. Now
I shall have a home of my very own!"

She started to caper about...stopped short ...her hands fell to
her sides, her face went dead. She stood before the window looking,
not seeing.

"I came to ask if you know of a woman I could get, one who would
live in. My husband wants to get a Chinaman to do the work, but
I...I must have a woman."

Her lips trembled, great fear was in her eyes.

She came back to see me a few days after they had moved, full of
the loveliness of the new home.

"You must come and see it--you will come, won't you?"

"I had better not."

"Because of Silas?"

"Yes."

"If I 'phone some day when he is going to be out, please, will you
come?"

"Yes."

She never telephoned. They had been in their new home less than a
month when this notice caught my eyes in the newspaper:

"For sale by public auction, house, furniture and lot."

The name of the street and the number of the house were those of
Arabella Jones's new home.


Awful Partic'lar

"PRICE of flat?"

"Twenty-five a month."

"Take twenty?"

"No."

"Twenty-two?"

"No."

"Quiet house? No children? No musical instruments? No mice? My
folks is partic'lar, awful partic'lar--awful clean! ... They's out
huntin' too-maybe they's found somethin' at twenty. Consider
twenty-three?"

"No. Twenty-five is my price, take it or leave it."

He went back to pinch the mattress again, threw himself into an
easy chair and moulded his back into the cushions. ..."Comfortable
chair! Well, guess I better go and see what's doin' with the folks.
Twenty-three-fifty? Great to get partic'lar tenants, you know."

I waved him to the door.

Soon he was back with his wife, dry and brittle as melba toast,
and a daughter, dull and sagging. Both women flopped into easy
chairs and lay back, putting their feet up on another chair; they
began to press their shoulder-blades into the upholstery, hunting
lumps or loose springs. Meanwhile their noses wriggled like rabbits,
inflated nostrils spread to catch possible smells, eyes rolling
from object to object critically. After resting, they went from
one thing to another, tapping, punching; blankets got smelled, rugs
turned over, cupboards inspected, bureau drawers and mirrors tested.

"Any one ever die in this apartment?"

"No."

"Any one ever sick here?" The woman spat her questions.

"Any caterwauling at nights?"

"We do not keep cats."

"Then you have mice--bound to."

"Please go. I don't want you for tenants!"

"Hoity, toity! Give my folks time to look around. They's partic'lar.
I telled you so."

The woman and the girl were in the kitchen insulting my pots and
pans. The woman stuck a long thin nose into the garbage pail. The
girl opened the cupboards.

"Ants? Cockroaches?"

I flung the outer door wide. "Go! I won't have you as tenants!"

Melba toast scrunched. Pa roared. "You can't do that! You can't do
that! The card says 'Vacant.' We've took it."

His hand went reluctantly into his pocket, pulled out a roll of
bills, laid two tens upon the table; impertinently leering an
enquiring "O.K.?", he held out his hand for the key. I stuck it
back into my pocket-did not deign an answer. Slowly he fumbled with
the bill-roll, laid five ones on the table beside the two tens.
Between each laying down he paused and looked at me. When my full
price was on the table I put my hand in my pocket, handed him the
key.

At six o'clock the next morning the "partic'lar woman" jangled my
doorbell as if the house was on fire.

"There's a rust spot on the bottom of the kettle---Old Dutch."

I gave her a can of Old Dutch. She was scarcely gone before she
was back.

"Scoured a hole clean through. Give me another kettle." Hardly was
she inside her door before the old man came running. "She says
which is hot and which cold?"

"Tell her to find out!"

No other tenant in that or any other flat in my house left the
place in such filth and disorder as those partic'lar people.



Gran's Battle

THE FAMILY in Lower West consisted of a man, a woman and a child.
A week after they moved in, the woman's sister came to stay with
her. She was straight from hospital and brought a new-born infant
with her--a puny, frail thing, that the doctor shook his head over.

Immediately the baby's grandma was sent for, being, they declared,
the only person who could possibly pull the baby through. Grandma
could not leave her young son and a little adopted girl, so she
brought them along.

The flat having but one bedroom, a kitchen and livingroom, the
adults slept by shifts. The children slept on sofas, or on the
floor, or in a bureau drawer. Gran neither sat nor lay--she never
even thought of sleep; she was there to save the baby. The man of
the family developed intense devotion to his office, and spent most
of his time there after Gran moved in.

We were having one of our bitterest cold snaps. Wind due north,
shrieking over stiff land; two feet of snow, all substances glibbed
with ice and granite-hard. I, as landlady, had just two
jobs--shovelling snow--shovelling coal. Gran's job was shooing off
death--blowing up the spark of life flickering in the baby.

No one seemed to think the baby was alive enough to hear sounds.
Maybe Gran thought noise would help to scare death. The cramming
of eight souls into a three-room flat produced more than noise--it
was bedlam!

The baby was swaddled in cotton-wool saturated with the very
loudest-smelling brand of cod-liver oil. The odour of oil permeated
the entire house. The child was tucked into his mother's darning-basket
which was placed on the dining table.

The infant's cry was too small to be heard beyond the edge of the
table. We in the rest of the house might have thought him dead had
not Gran kept us informed of her wrestling, by trundling the heavy
table up and down the polished floor day and night. The castor on
each of the table-legs had a different screech, all four together
a terrible quartet with the slap, slap of Gran's carpet slippers
marking time. Possibly Gran thought perpetual motion would help to
elude death's grip on the oiled child.

Periodically the aunt of the infant came upstairs to my flat to
telephone the doctor. She sat hunched on the stool in front of the
'phone, tears rolled out of her eyes, sploshed upon her chest.

"Doctor, the baby is dying--his mother cries all the time--when he
dies she will die too.... Oh, yes, Gran is here, she never leaves
him for a minute; night and day she watches and wheels him on the
table."

The whole house was holding its breath, waiting on the scrap of
humanity in the darning basket. Let anybody doze off, Grandma was
sure to drop a milk bottle, scrunch a tap, tread on a child! The
house had to be kept tropical. Gran was neither clothed nor entirely
bare. She took off and took off, her garments hung on the backs of
all the chairs. She peeled to the limit of the law, and snatched
food standing. Three whole weeks she waged this savage one-man
battle to defeat death--she won--the infant's family were uproarious
with joy.

Gran toppled into bed for a long, long sleep. Mother and aunt sat
beside the darning basket planning the baby's life from birth to
death at a tremendous age.

Gran woke refreshed--vigorous, clashed the pots and pans, banged
doors, trundled the table harder than ever, and sang lullabies in
a thin high voice, which stabbed our ears like neuralgia.

The House of All Sorts was glad the child was to live. They had
seen the crisis through without a murmur. Now, however, they came
in rebellion and demanded peace. The doctor had said the child
could go home with safety--my tenants said he must go! I marched
past twelve dirty milkbottles on the ledges of the front windows.
Gran opened, and led me to the basket to see the infant, red now
instead of grey.

I said, "Fine, fine! All the tenants are very glad, and now, when
is he going home?"

"Doctor says he could any day. We have decided to keep him here
another month."

"No! A three-room flat cannot with decency house eight souls. I
rented my flat to a family of three. This noise and congestion must
cease."

Grandmother, mother, aunt all screeched reproaches. I was a monster,
turning a new-born infant out in the snow. They'd have the law.

"The snow is gone. His mother has a home. His grandmother has a
home. I rented to a family of three. The other tenants have been
kindly and patient. The child has had his chance. Now we want
quiet."

My tenant, the aunt of the baby, said, "I shall go too!"

"Quite agreeable to me."

A "vacancy" card took the place of the twelve dirty milk bottles
in the front window of Lower East.



Peach Scanties

COMING up Simcoe Street I stopped short and nearly strangled! There,
stretched right across the front windows of the Doll's Flat, the
street side of my respectable apartment house, dangled from the
very rods where my fresh curtains had been when I went out--one
huge suit of men's natural wool underwear, one pair of men's socks,
one pair of women's emaciated silk stockings, a vest, and two pairs
of peach scanties.

Who, I wondered, had gone up the street during the two hours of my
absence? Who had seen my house shamed?

I could not get up the stairs fast enough, galloping all the way!
There was only enough breath left for: "Please, please take them
down."

I pointed to the wash.

Of course she was transient--here today, gone tomorrow--not caring
a whoop about the looks of the place.

"I like our underwear sunned," she said with hauteur.

"There are lines out in the back."

"I do not care for our clothes to mix with everybody's--and there
are the stairs."

"I will gladly take them down and hang them for you."

"Thanks, I prefer them where they are. It is our flat. We have the
right-"

"But the appearance! The other tenants!"

"My wash is clean. It is darned. Let them mind their own business,
and you yours."

"It is my business--this house is my livelihood."

The woman shrugged.

Merciful night came down and hid the scanties and the rest.

Next wash-day the same thing happened. The heavy woollies dripped
and trickled over the tenant's clean washed windows below; of course
she rushed up--furious as was I!

Again I went to the Doll's Flat. I refused to go away until the
washing was taken down and the curtains hung up. "If you live in
this house you must comply with the ways of it," I said.

On the third week she hung her wash in the windows the same as
before. I gave her written notice.

"I shall not go."

"You will, unless you take that wash down and never hang it on my
curtain rods again!"

Sullenly, she dragged the big woollen combination off the rod,
threw it on the table; its arms and legs kicked and waved over the
table's edge, then dangled dead. Down came the lank stockings, the
undervest--last of all the peach scanties. Both pairs were fastened
up by the same peg. She snapped it off viciously. A puff of wind
from the open door caught and ballooned the scanties; off they
sailed, out the window billowing into freedom. As they passed the
hawthorn tree its spikes caught them. There they hung over my front
gate, flapping, flapping--"Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh dear!"



Sham

AS THE world war progressed rentals went down till it became
impossible to meet living expenses without throwing in my every
resource. I had no time to paint so had to rent the studio flat
and make do myself with a basement room and a tent in my back
garden. Everything together only brought in what a flat and a half
had before the war.

A woman came to look at the Studio flat and expressed herself
delighted with it.

"Leave your pretty things, won't you?" she begged with a half sob.
"I have nothing pretty now and am a widow, a Belgian refugee with
a son in the army."

She spoke broken English. We were all feeling very tender towards
the Belgians just then.

"Come and see me; I am very lonely," she said and settled into the
big studio I had built for myself. I granted her request for a
substantial cut off the rental because of her widowhood, her country
and her soldier son. Poor, lisping-broken-English stranger! I asked
her several questions about Belgium. She evaded them. When she did
not remember she talked perfect English, but when she stopped to
think, the words were all mixed and broken. When she met any one
new her sputterings were almost incoherent. I asked her, "How long
since you left Belgium?" She hesitated, afraid of giving away her
age, which I took to be fifty-five or thereabouts.

"I was born in Belgium of English parents. We left Belgium when I
was four years old."

"You have never been back since?"

"No."

She saw me thinking.

"How the first language one hears sticks to the tongue!" she
remarked. "It's queer, isn't it?"

"Very!"

As far as I was concerned, I let her remain the brave little
Belgian widow with a son fighting on our side, but the son came
back to his mother, returned without thanks from training camp,
a schoolboy who had lied about his age and broken down under
training. Now the widow added to her pose, "Belgian refugee widow
with a war-broken son."

Tonics and nourishing dishes to build Herb up were now her chief
topic of conversation with her tenant neighbours. Daily, at a
quarter to twelve, one or the other of us could expect a tap on
our door and... would we lend the mother of Herb a cup of rice, or
macaroni, or tapioca, an egg for his "nog" or half a loaf. The
baker was always missing her, or the milkman forgot. We got sick
of her borrowings and bobbed below the windows when she passed up
the stair, but she was a patient knocker and kept on till something
on the gas stove began to burn and the hider was obliged to come
from hiding. She never dreamed of returning her borrowings. The
husbands declared they had had enough. They were not going to
support her. She appeared very comfortably off, took in all the
shows, dressed well, though too youthfully. Having no husband to
protest I became the victim of all her borrowings, and the inroad
on my rice and tapioca and macaroni became so heavy my pantry gave
up keeping them.

When the "flu" epidemic came along, Herb sneezed twice. His mother
knew he had it, shut him in his bedroom, poking cups of gruel in
at the door and going quickly away. She told every one Herb had
"flu" and she knew she was getting it from nursing him, but Herb
had not got "flu" and, after a day or two, was out again. Then the
widow told every one she had contracted "flu" from Herb. She hauled
the bed from her room out into the middle of the Studio before the
open fire and lay there in state, done up in fancy bed-jackets,
smoking innumerable cigarettes and entertaining anybody whom she
could persuade to visit. For six weeks she lay there for she said
it was dangerous to get out of bed for six weeks if you had had
"flu." The wretched Herbert came to me wailing for help.

"Get mother up," he pleaded. "Make her take her bed out of the
studio; make her open the windows."

"How can I, Herbert? She has rented the flat."

"Do something," he besought. "Burn the house down--only get mother
out of bed."

But she stayed her full six weeks in bed. When she saw that people
recognized her sham and did not visit her any more she got up--well.

It was a year of weddings. The widow took a tremendous interest in
them, sending Herb to borrow one or another of my tenants' newspapers
before they were up in the morning to find out who was marrying.
She attended all the church weddings, squeezing in as a guest.

"You never know who it will be next," she giggled, sparkling her
eyes coyly, and running from flat to flat telling the details of
the weddings.

One day she hung her head and said, "Guess." Several of us happened
to be together.

"Guess what?"

"Who the next bride is to be?"

"You!" joked an old lady.

The widow drooped her head and simpered, "How did you guess?"

He was a friend of Herbert's and "coming home very soon," so she
told us.

The house got a second shock when from somewhere the widow produced
the most terrible old woman whom she introduced as "My mother, Mrs.
Dingham--come to stay with me till after the wedding."

Mrs. Dingham went around the house in the most disgusting, ragged
and dirty garments. Her upper part was clothed in a black sateen
dressing sacque with which she wore a purple quilted petticoat.
Her false teeth and hair "additions" lay upon the studio table
except in the afternoons when she went out to assist the widow to
buy her trousseau. Then she was elegant. Herb's expression was
exasperated when he looked across the table and saw the teeth, the
tin crimpers that caught her scant hair to her pink scalp. The
House of All Sorts was shamed at having such a repulsive old witch
scuttling up and down the stairs and her hooked nose poking over
the verandah rail whenever there was a footstep on the stair. It
was a relief when she put all her "additions" on and went off to
shop.

I wanted my Studio back; I was homesick for it, besides I knew if
I did not rescue it soon it would be beyond cleaning. Two years of
the widow's occupancy had about ruined everything in it. When I
heard that Herb and the old mother were to keep house there during
the honeymoon, while the bridegroom was taking some six weeks'
course in Seattle, I made up my mind.

The groom came--he was only a year or two older than Herb. The boys
had been chums at school. He was good-looking with a gentle, sad,
sad face, like a creature trapped. She delighted to show him off
and you could see that when she did so they bit him to the bone,
those steel teeth that had caught him. On one point he was firm,
if there was to be a wedding at all it was to be a very quiet one.
In everything Herb was with his friend, not his mother.

They were married. After the ceremony the old woman and daughter
rushed upstairs to the studio. Herb and the groom came slowly after.
The bride's silly young fixings fluttered back over their heads,
and the old woman's cackle filled the garden as they swept up the
stair. They had a feast in the studio to which I was not invited.
I had raised the rent and they were going--violently indignant with
me.



Mrs. Pillcrest's Poems

SOMETIMES a word or two in Pillcrest's poems jingled. More
occasionally a couple of words made sense. They flowed from her
lips in a sing-song gurgle, spinning like pennies, and slapping
down dead.

Mrs. Pillcrest was a small, spare woman with opaque blue eyes.
While the poems were tinkling out of one corner of her mouth a
cigarette was burning in the other. The poems were about the stars,
maternity, love, living, and the innocence of childhood. (Her
daughter of ten and her son aged seven cursed like troopers. The
first time I saw the children they were busy giving each other
black eyes at my front gate while their mother was making arrangements
about the flat and poeming for me.)

I said, "I do not take children."

"Canadian children... I can quite understand... my children are
English!"

"I prefer them Canadian."

"Really!" Her eye-brows took a scoot right up under her hat. She
said, "Pardon," lit a new cigarette from the stump of the last,
sank into the nearest chair and burst into jingles!

I do not know why I accepted the Pillcrests, but there I was,
putting in extra cots for the children--settling them in before I
knew it.

The girl was impossible. They sent her away to friends. On taking
possession of the flat, Mrs. Pillcrest went immediately to bed
leaving the boy of seven to do the cooking, washing, and housework.
The complete depletion of hot water and perpetual smell of burning
sent me down to investigate.

Mrs. Pillcrest lay in a daze of poetry and tobacco smoke. The sheets
(mine) were punctured lavishly with little brown-edged holes. It
seemed necessary for her to gesticulate with lighted cigarette as
she "poemed."

She said, "It is lovely of you to come," and immediately made a
poem about it. In the middle there was a loud stumping up the steps,
and I saw Mr. Pillcrest for the first time.

He was a soldier. Twice a week the Canadian army went to pot while
Dombey Pillcrest came home to visit his family. He was an ugly,
beefy creature dressed in ill-fitting khaki, his neck stuck up like
a hydrant out of a brown boulevard.

Poems would not "make" on Mr. Pillcrest, so Mrs. Pillcrest made
them out of other things and basted him with them. He slumped into
the biggest chair in the flat, and allowed the gravy of trickling
poems to soothe his training-camp and domestic friction--as stroking
soothes a cat.

Mrs. Pillcrest told me about their love-making. She said, "My people
owned one of those magnificent English estates--hunting--
green-houses--crested plate--Spode--everything! I came to visit
cousins in Canada, have a gay time, bringing along trunks of ball
dresses and pretty things. I met Dombey Pillcrest..."

She took the cigarette from her lips, threw it away. Her hands
always trembled--her voice had a pebbly rattle like sea running
out over a stony beach.

"Dombey told me about his prairie farm; the poetry of its endless
rolling appealed, sunsets, waving wheat! We were married. Some of
the family plate, the Spode and linen came out from home for my
house."

"We went to Dombey's farm... I did not know it would be like that...
too big... poems would not come ... space drowned everything!"

"The man who did the outside, the woman who did the inside work
kept the place going for a while... babies came... I began to write
poems again--our help left--I had my babies and Dombey!"

She poemed to the babies. All her poems were no more than baby
talk--now she had an audience... The blue-eyed creatures lying in
their cradle watched her lips, and cooed back.

As the children grew older they got bored by Mother's poems and by
hunger. They ran away when she poemed. It hurt her that the children
would not listen.

She had another bitter disappointment on that farm. "I did so want
to 'lift' the Harvesters! When they came to thresh was my chance.
I was determined they should have something different, something
refined. For once they should see the real thing, eat off Limoges,
use crested plate! I put flowers on the table, fine linen; I wrote
a little poem for each place. The great brown, hungry men burst
into the room-staggered back-most touching!... none of the bestial
gorging you see among the lower classes. They stared; they ate
little. Not one of them looked at a poem. If you believe it, they
asked the gang foreman to request 'food, not frills' next day.
Ruffians! Canadians, my dear!"

"I am Canadian," I said.

"My DEEAR! I supposed you were English!"

"One day Dombey said, 'Our money is finished. We cannot hire help;
we must leave the farm. You cannot work, darling!'"

They scraped up the broken implements and lean cows and had a sale.
Mrs. Pillcrest sat on a broken harrow in the field and made a poem
during the sale. Mr. Pillcrest wandered about, dazed. The
undernourished, over-accented children got in everybody's way. When
it was over, the Pillcrests came out west and hunted round to find
the most English-accented spot so that their children should not
be contaminated by Canada. That was Duncan, B.C., of course. War
came; Dombey joined up. Here they were in my flat.

"I had so hoped that you were English, my dear!"

"Well, I'm not." Mrs. Pillcrest moaned at my tone.

Potato-paring seemed to be specially inspiring for Mrs. Pillcrest.
She liked to do it at the back door of her flat, looking across my
garden, poeming as she pared. She always wore a purple chiffon
scarf about her throat; it had long floating tails that wound round
the knife and got stabbed into holes. The thick parings went slap,
slap on the boards of the verandah. The peeled flesh of the potatoes
was purpled by the scarf while poems rolled out over my garden.

"Have you ever published your poems, Mrs. Pillcrest?"

"I do not write my poems. They spring direct from some hidden
source, never yet located, a joyous--joyous source!"

"Curse you, Mother! Come get dinner, instead of blabbing that
stuff!"

"Son--my beloved son!" Mrs. Pillcrest said, and kissed the boy's
scowling face.

The Pillcrests were not with me very long because Mr. Pillcrest's
training camp was moved.

Just as their time was up--the flat already re-let--Mrs. Pillcrest
and son disappeared. Time went on, the new tenant was fussing for
possession. After five days elapsed without sign or sound, I climbed
a ladder and looked through the windows. Everything was in the
greatest confusion.

I rang the barracks. "Mr. Pillcrest? Mrs. Pillcrest's tenancy
expired five days ago."

"Yes? Oh, ah--Mrs. Pillcrest is visiting; she will doubtless be
returning soon."

"But the flat--the new tenant is waiting..." I found myself talking
over a dead wire.

She tripped home sparkling with poems.

"Your rent was up five days ago, Mrs. Pillcrest."

"Really! Well, well! Shall I pay five days extra?" (With some rhyme
about "honey," "money" and "funny.") My patience was done--"Nothing
funny about it! It is not business!"

Taut with fury Mrs. Pillcrest's poem strangled. "Business! Kindly
remember, Landlady, Mr. Pillcrest and I do not belong to that
class."

"That is evident, but at six tonight I have promised the key to
the waiting tenant! That is business."



Unmarried

PERHAPS the most awkward situation for the inexperienced young
landlady was how to deal with "unweds." Every apartment house gets
them. They are often undiscernible, even to the experienced. One
learns in time to catch on to little indications....

The supposed husband makes all arrangements, the supposed wife
approving of everything. A woman who does not nose into the domestic
arrangements of the place she is going to occupy gives the first
hint, for a woman indifferent to the heating, furnishing, plumbing,
cooking utensils of her home is not wifely.

My first experience of this sort was with a very prepossessing
couple. Their tenancy was secured by an excessively moral old lady
living in Lower West. I was out when the couple came seeking. The
old lady next door showed them over. She was delighted at having
made so good a "let" for me. Within a week it was put to me by the
renters of the other suites, "Them or us?" The couple left.

My second experience of the same kind posed as brother and widowed
sister, just out from the Old Country. They offered Old Country
references which would have taken six weeks to verify, yet they
wanted immediate possession. Things looked all right--I was
unsuspicious. You can't ask to see people's marriage certificates.
They had my studio flat. It had the required number of rooms and
they were delighted with the studio. I had removed myself to a tent
in the garden and a gas-ring in the basement for the summer months,
ends being difficult to make meet.

The couple had not been in a week before Mrs. "Below" and Mrs.
"Next Door" rushed simultaneously to the garden to "tell" and bumped
nose to nose.

The House of All Sorts was in ferment. If I was going to cater to
that class--!

I went to the hotel the couple had stayed at before taking my flat.
Here they had registered as man and wife. I took my perplexity to
an experienced apartment-house landlady.

"Mm.... We all get them."

"How are they got rid of? Must I wait until their month is up to
serve the customary notice?"

"Mm...! If you can prove they are 'that kind' you need give no
notice at all, but be sure--libel suits are ugly. Send your janitor
into their suite on some pretext or other."

"I am my own janitor."

"Mm!"

I told her I had been to the hotel and how the couple had registered.
Again the experienced one said, "Mm." I went home. I could "Mm"
there just as well myself.

Mrs. Doubtful was chatty, always running down to my garden to ask
advice about cookery. Brother John was fond of this or that, and
how was it made? She asked me queer questions too. Was it possible
to get lost in British Columbia? To take a cabin in the far woods
and disappear? It would be so amusing to vanish!

Between the Doll's Flat and my studio was a locked door, a sofa
backed up to the door. The Doubtfuls liked to sit on this sofa and
converse. It appeared that Mrs. Doll's Flat's favourite chair was
just the other side of the door. Sitting here her ear was level
with the keyhole. The man said to the woman:

"Go to the garden, darling. Chat casually with our landlady. Watch
her face, her manner."

The woman returned. "Well?"

"She suspects."

The man came to me.

"How long notice is required?"

"None."

The man bowed. No one saw them go. They left no forwarding address.



Studio

IT WOULD not be fair to the House of All Sorts were I to omit
describing its chief room--the Studio--around which the house had
been built. The purpose of its building had been to provide a place
in which I could paint and an income for me to live on. Neither
objective was ever fully realized in the House of All Sorts.

From the front of the house you got no hint that it contained the
finest studio in the town. The tell-tale great north light was at
the back of the house and overlooked my own garden, dominating its
every corner. There were open fields surrounding my garden--fields
that were the playgrounds of my Bobtail Sheep-dogs, kennelled behind
the lilacs and apple-trees at the foot of the garden. It was not
a very large garden, centred by a lawn which again was centred by
a great olivet cherry tree. In the crotch of the tree a shelter
box was fixed for the comfort of my monkey, Woo, during the summer
months.

The garden was fenced and gated. It belonged exclusively to the
animals and myself. No one intruded there. Visitors or tenants who
came to pay or to grumble mounted the long outside stair, that met
the paved walk on the west side of the house, and took their
complaints to me in the studio. The garden seemed more exclusively
mine than the studio. People came to the studio to see me on
business; if I wanted to see myself I went to the garden. If I was
angry I seized a spade and dug my anger into the soil. When I was
sad the garden earth swallowed my tears, when I was merry the garden
lawn danced with bouncing dogs, monkey, the Persian cat, Adolphus,
and me. We did have good times in that old garden. It was in fact
but a projection of my studio into the open at ground level. The
square ugliness of the apartment house cut us off from the publicity
of tenants and the street. High board fences determined the garden's
depth and width.

The studio was a high room; its east end was alcoved and had five
casement windows in a row, out of them you looked across two vacant
lots to Beacon Hill Park. Every bit of the Park was stuffed with
delicious memories--not its present sophistication with cultivated
lawns, formal lakes, flowerbeds, peacocks and swans. Wild wind-tossed
trees, Creator-planted, and very old, tangled bushes were what my
memory saw. It saw also skunk cabbage swamps, where frogs croaked
in chorus all the summer nights, and owls hooted. I saw too the
wicked old "Park Hotel" roaring its tipsy trade. Now where it had
stood the land had gone back to respectable brambles that choked
everything.

The studio had to be an "everything-for-everybody" place. Its walls
were cut by five doors and five windows in addition to a great
north light. It was not a good room for showing pictures but fine
to paint in. The walls were buff, very high and very crowded: I
had no other place to store pictures than on the walls.

The centre space of the room was high emptiness. To ease congestion
I suspended my extra chairs from the ceiling. There they dangled,
out of the way till wanted, when they were lowered to the floor.
Each worked on a pulley of its own.

In one corner of the room was an immense black-topped table, rimmed
and legged with massive polished maple wood.

It was an historical table but I forget exactly why. It used to be
in the Parliament Buildings and important things had been signed
at it.

On top of the table was heaped every kind of article that you could
think of, including Susie the white rat, whose headquarters were
there. There were also huge lumps of potter's clay and unfinished
potteries draped in wet rags to keep them moist during construction.

I had the great brick fire-place with the open grate blocked up.
It looked very nice but used enormous quantities of fuel and heated
heaven only, so I substituted an open-fronted stove which kept the
studio very cosy. It was a lovable room.

In the centre of the studio floor was a long narrow black box not
unlike a coffin except that it did not taper. I kept sketches in
this box and on its top stood a forest of paint brushes and turpentine
bottles. Between this glass-and-bristle forest and the great north
light the space was particularly my own. People never walked there
for fear of their shoes squeezing paint tubes or crushing charcoal.
Canvases stood on two homemade bench-easels.

I never painted if any one was around and always kept my canvases
carefully shrouded in dust sheets. I never did paint much in that
fine studio that I had built: what with the furnace, tenants,
cleaning and the garden there was no time.

The pictures on my walls reproached me. All the twenty-two years I
lived in that house the Art part of me ached. It was not a bit the
sort of studio I had intended to build. My architect had been as
far from understanding the needs of an artist as it would be possible
to believe. The people of Victoria strongly disapproved of my
painting because I had gone from the old conventional way. I had
experimented. Now I paused. I wished my pictures did not have to
face the insulting eyes of my tenants. It made me squirm. The
pictures themselves squirmed me in their own right too. They were
always whispering, "Quit, quit this; come back to your own job!"
But I couldn't quit; I had this house and I had no money. A living
must be squeezed from somewhere.

There were two couches in my studio, one in my own special part,
the other near the fireplace for visitors. The only chance I got
to rest was when a visitor came. I could not leave the visitor
upright while I relaxed on a sofa. When I flung myself down, what
you might have taken for a fur rug in front of the fire broke into
half a dozen pieces, ran to my couch and, springing, heaped themselves
on top of me-cat, dogs, monkey and rat. Life in this studio was
pleasant. Its high, soft north light was good, yet it was not the
sort of studio I wanted.

In Toronto I had seen the ideal artist's studio--a big room about
the size of mine. There was not a picture in the room, the walls
were calm restful grey. The canvases were stowed in racks in an
ante-room. The furnishings were of the simplest. They consisted of
a table, a large working easel, a davenport, a quiet-coloured floor
covering. The building contained several studios and was set in
the quiet corner of a Park. Here the artist came and shut himself
in with his work; there he and his work became one. But then he
did not have to run a House of All Sorts.

After twenty-two years I sold the House of All Sorts.



Art and the House

IT WAS strange that the first and only specially built, specially
lighted studio I ever owned should have been a torment for me to
work in. Through the studio only could you enter my four-room flat.
A tap at the door-I was caught there at my easel; I felt exposed
and embarrassed as if I had been discovered in my bathtub! It was
a curious agony.

Possibly it was the ridicule my work had been subject to in Victoria
which made me foolishly supersensitive. Even at Art School I had
preferred to work in a corner, back to the wall, so that people
could not look over my shoulder. In this house, if a tenant found
me at my easel, I felt as though I had been cornered committing a
crime. Even while landladying, Art would keep poking me from
unexpected places. Art being so much greater than ourselves, it
will not give up once it has taken hold.

Victoria had been very stern about my art. Being conservative in
her tastes, she hated my particular kind, she believed in having
well-beaten tracks and in sticking to them.

The house was fuelling. A huge Negro came to me protesting, "Dat
monk in de basement slam de winder ev'time de sacks come fo' to
empty. What us do?"

I went below, moved the monkey, left Negro and monkey making friends.

By and by the man came up for me to sign his book. He stood at the
studio door.

"Gee! I's envy yous."

"Because I have a monkey?"

"Because you's kin paint. Seem dat what I want all de life of me."

Later that week I was suddenly aware of two men's faces peering
through my studio window. Screening hands framed their stare.

In a fury I bounced out the door on to the little balcony where
the men stood.

"How dare you stare into my window? Don't you know a person's home
is private? Go away."

The men fell back. Then I saw that one was my baker. The other man
was a stranger.

"Pardon, Miss. We didn't mean to be rude--this 'ere feller," thumbing
towards the stranger, "loves pictures. Come along, I sez, I'll show
you!"

I was shamed. Humble people, here in my own town, wanted to see
and know about Art. They might not like my special kind? What
matter? They were interested in pictures.

In Victoria I had only come up against my own class. The art society,
called "Island Arts and Crafts," were the exponents of Art on
Vancouver Island, an extremely exclusive set. They liked what they
liked--would tolerate no innovations. My change in thought and
expression had angered them into fierce denouncement. To expose a
thing deeper than its skin surface was to them an indecency. They
ridiculed my striving for bigness, depth. The Club held exhibitions,
affairs of tinkling teacups, tinkling conversation and little
tinkling landscapes weakly executed in water colours. None except
their own class went to these exhibitions. A baker, a coal-carrier!
Good gracious! Ordinary people would never dream of straying into
an "Arts and Crafts" exhibition, would have been made to feel
awkward had they done so.

An idea popped into my head. I would give an exhibition for ordinary
people, invite the general public, but not invite the Arts and
Crafts. I would invite the people who walked in Beacon Hill on
Saturday afternoon and on Sunday. My house was practically in Beacon
Hill Park. Lower East had just fallen vacant. Lower West was going
to be empty next week. I had a carpenter cut me a connecting door.
This gave me six large, well-lighted rooms. I invited three other
artists to show with me, one a portrait painter, one a lady just
returned from England where she had been painting English cottage
scenes, the third a flower painter. In one room I would hang my
Indian canvases. Examples of my new and disliked work I would hang
in the kitchens.

At the last moment the flower painter, finding that the show was
not to be sponsored by the Arts and Crafts, did not show. As I read
her curt, last-minute withdrawal, a young Chinese came to my door
carrying a roll of paintings. He had heard about the exhibition,
had come to show his work to me--beautiful water colours done in
Oriental style. He was very anxious to carry his work further. He
had asked admittance to the Arts and Crafts Sketching Class, and
had been curtly refused because of his nationality. I invited him
to show in place of the flower painter and he hung a beautiful
exhibit.

The exhibition was a varied show and so successful that a few of
us got together, working on the idea of starting a People's Art
Gallery in these six rooms of mine. It was winter time, there were
no Band Concerts in the Park. People walked until they were tired,
then went home chilled. To drop