“Nasty ole man!” Mrs. Harradson barked: and it was not clear whether she was referring to Professor Harding or to “That Other Man,” except that her employer did not belong to that evil category, which she classified invariably as “nasty ole men.”
After a little more desultory conversation about the political scene, the lot of women, and the arbitrary behaviour of men generally, especially those that rang the front doorbell, Essie strolled away into the sitting room, the
Daily Telegraph
and an illustrated tabloid in her hand. She propped herself upon cushions on the settee and plunged into the tabloid. It was not long before she heard Mrs. Harradson at work in the large “cooking” and “eating” room; there was also a piano there and she could hear her dusting the keys. Essie read in the tabloid how a woman had gone into a neighbour’s house about ten in the morning for a nice chat and had not returned till the afternoon. She discovered her two children both dead: they had swallowed all her aspirin tablets, which she had left by the side of her bed. Essie reflected how careless the lower classes were, and yawned. Mrs. Harradson’s voice was heard in the next room, furiously apostrophizing someone as she scrubbed the sink.
“Nasty ole man — nasty ole
maaan
.” She heard “maaan” repeated several times: it could be none other than Hitler, and Essie, smiling, got up and moved, with a smile still on her face, into the next room.
“Who are you talking about, Mrs. Harradson, Herr Hitler?”
“Not Hitler, not him!” Mrs. Harradson replied, after a violent start at the sound of her employer’s voice. “It’s that Lucifer, nasty ole man. Walking the earth, nasty ole man!” She scrubbed harder, as if to scrub him away.
Lucifer was a new one on Essie.
She
thought in terms of Hitler and such minor devils. But Mrs. Harradson was a devout catholic and she of course saw that the Führer was nothing but a minion of Lucifer’s.
Mrs. Harradson was a perpetual Punch and Judy show for Essie. But also, in her way, she had become attached to this little being as she would to a small disgruntled squirrel, had she received so eccentric a gift. One of Essie’s morning amusements, for instance, was to ask Mrs. Harradson to TIM it for her on the telephone, to check the exact time. Mrs. Harradson was always very diffident, polite and nervous while speaking on the telephone. It was a piece of pagan music to which she never grew used. The deference she exhibited on these occasions was quite unlike her usual behaviour. She would dial TIM, in obedience to Essie’s request, but when the voice began saying, “At the third stroke, it will be e-l-e-v-e-n forty-three and ten seconds,” she began nodding, bowing and smiling into the telephone, “Yes, Miss, thank you, Miss. Yes, Miss, twenty seconds. No, Miss,
thirty
seconds. Yes, Miss, thank you, Miss,
forty
seconds — thank you, Miss,” a little confused and nervous at the last at the continued affability of this young woman,whose habit it was to say a different time whenever she spoke. Essie was obliged literally to drag her away from the telephone. She became positively mesmerised and without this intervention of her employer, might have stood there all day bowing and smiling.
The house was run on a principle of extreme parsimony: should the ball valve in a lavatory cease to do its work a shrivelled and diminutive plumber would, sooner or later, appear, a certain Mr. Shotstone. Since the ball valve was constantly in need of attention, the Hardings were very familiar with Mr. Shotstone, and it was seldom that he failed to diversify his professional visits in the following manner. Indeed, with this difficulty of Mr. Shotstone’s Essie was so familiar that she took it as a matter of course when the summons arrived. A hoarse whispered call would reach her from the little lavatory in the hall. “‘Ere, Missis, come ‘ere.” When she approached, finding him standing on the lavatory seat, she would distinguish the words hissed hoarsely over his shoulder — “Me truss is slipping — ask ’er to come” — Essie would signal Mrs. Harradson and repeat the message. “His truss is slipping,” she would say. Mrs. Harradson would be transfixed with indignation, her head would shoot in and out, her white crest weirdly flashing. In a high-pitched staccato grunt came the usual sounds, “Oo ... disgusting ... what, Madam? ... What? ... Did ’ee? ... Did ’ee say that? nasty ole man....” Shooting her head in and out, she hurtled across to the water closet. There her sharp liquid grunts could be heard as she adjusted the truss. In a few minutes she returned. Mr. Shotstone was a prostatic elder and at times literally stank the lavatory out. Herself slightly impregnated with this disagreeable odour, Mrs. Harradson shot angry glances over her shoulder in the direction of the hall and continued to snarl, “Dirty ole man — dirty ole man.”
Harding showed what can only be described as apprehension where the charlady was concerned. It was as though he had been called upon to enjoy the antics of a demented person. He would join Essie in explosions of mirth, sometimes in spite of himself, but on the whole he was uneasy.
If Mrs. Harradson was a source of cheap amusement for Hester, she had been born, as it were, with the house in which they lived: the House that Jack Built, as René called it. She was as if she had been one of its bricks, cemented into it. And if she was absurd, so was the house and its cast. Essie watched it, mainly through the rapportage of Mrs. Harradson, through which medium its events were magnified and distorted. Her husband, too, was entertained by the continuation of Mrs. Harradson, namely the house. But, as with her, this building, so replete with absurdity, produced in him a
malaise
, which he endeavoured to conceal, although he would say to Essie, “Is it not
unusually
absurd? Or is it just the average human mean? What do you think?” But she would answer, “As you know, darling, the philosophy of the absurd is not in my line. But if you really want to know what I think....” — “Yes? You mean that we are part of the house. That is the difficulty.”
It might be argued that all the absurdity flowed from the owner of the house. This large, circular, red-brick building, containing some twenty flats standing back a little pretentiously from the other houses in the street, was the property of a strong-minded, disagreeable moustachioed old lady, named Mrs. Abbott. She was one of several sisters who had inherited various properties. This house had been her share, and the least desirable legacy. She heartily disliked the house and all her tenants. Her refusal to spend a penny on it had a number of comic consequences. One of the climaxes was when slates began raining on the heads of those leaving or entering it. It needed badly “pointing”: the cement was disintegrating between the bricks. Any day it might begin to collapse. Then half a dozen of the tenants appealed to the local Town Hall. Eventually one morning a notice was found posted inside the front doors,“To whom it may concern” — and a statement declaring that “This building is not safe.” Mrs. Abbott immediately served a week’s notice on the six rebellious tenants, but some repairs were thereupon undertaken.
Mrs. Harradson was the caretaker, at a salary of four and sixpence a week. For this she was needed to wash all the stairs and all the windows that lighted them. She was forbidden to accept any other employment, her charing for the Hardings being a breach of trust. But she was also provided with a small flat. So, legally, she had a roof over her head and four and sixpence a week.
The tenants were a typical set of tenants. “All houses have the same tenants, however much they may be disguised, just as all worlds have congenial inhabitants,” René Harding commented. On the street floor a flat had, much against the grain, been sacrificed by Mrs. Abbott, a three-pound-a-week flat; a family obligation. Her brother, Mr. Buckland, and his wife occupied their flat rent-free, until Mr. Buckland lost his reason. The first notice that the neighbours had had of his approaching derangement were certain violent noises which could be heard within the flat. The next thing they knew was that Mr. Buckland would rush out, and thunder on their doors crying, “Let him out!” Then one day a coalman with a sack of coals on his back was climbing the stairs when Mr. Buckland pursued him, and seized the bag of coals shouting, “Let him out! Let him out!” The coal and the coalman fell on top of Mr. Buckland, who was madly convulsed in the midst of a torrent of glistening carbon, and ended by nearly murdering the amazed coalman. At this point Mr. Buckland left for Colney Hatch. For some years Mrs. Buckland had occupied the flat alone. She was a barmaid-like woman, amiably blonde and somewhat fat.
Now upon the floor immediately above the Hardings dwelt a certain Mr.Whitaker. He was a bank-manager of a most morose and reticent type and not very neighbourly. But he was noticed descending the stairs a little furtively, about nine-thirty in the evening, and on these occasions he would be admitted to Mrs. Buckland’s flat, which he would leave about midnight; and it was said that he was at times intoxicated. But in the flat facing that of Mr. Whitaker dwelt a Mr. Ambrose Dewes. Mr. Dewes was an actor of some thirty-six summers, much addicted to gallantry. If any good-looking girl happened, for whatever reason, to ascend the stairs, and if Mr. Dewes chanced to see her, he would undoubtedly say,“What a fine day it is, and yet how awfully dark on the staircase”; and then, all smiling charm, would produce an electric torch and render her every assistance in his power. And if she were the kind of girl who seemed to suffer from the heat — or from the cold — she might follow him into his flat to have a snort and a little friendly chat, before proceeding on her way. Nor did Mr. Dewes by any means rely upon such girls as might happen to ascend the stairs of this particular house. For great numbers of women were seen to enter his flat by his neighbours. These facts attracted the censorious comment of his immediate neighbour, Mr. Whitaker. But Mr. Dewes retorted by pointedly alluding to the bank manager’s habit of nightly visiting the flat of the blonde downstairs. The actor was a very jovial young Casanova, an old Etonian, not disagreeably impressing Mrs. Hester Harding.
Upon the same landing as the Hardings was an elderly spinster-lady of great respectability who would especially enjoin Mrs. Harding to put a new bulb of somewhat superior power upon the landing when the Marchioness of Shewburyness came to visit her once a month. There were many other tenants of great typicality: in a word, the house was properly stocked, in all its little compartments, in such a way as emotionally to equip it for its passage through time. The Hardings were shortly to leave it. A certain percentage of its tenants were to leave it, too, when London was blitzed. The Blitz, indeed, changed it a great deal: it shook the decaying cement between its bricks, it shook the slates from its roof. Indeed, in the depths of the war years it became somewhat a wild place. Mrs. Abbott had refused to spend any money on blacking-out the stair-windows, and consequently there was no illumination at night. It was not, however, at night that Mrs. Harradson plunged down the stairs and was killed. A pail of water and a brush made it plain what she had been doing. Those familiar with her repertoire of enemies spoke of foul play, and whispered that it was the postman, who had stopped her tongue with his boot. The actor still dwelt there, but he was a changed man, greying at the temples, it was said. By forty-five Mr. Dewes had lost the sight of both eyes. A woman-friend of the Hardings, who saw him not long after the Blitz, recalled how he had told her that the cellar was full of dead leaves and a wild cat had established its home there, a brood of wild kittens springing about among the leaves.This wild cat so terrorized the tenants that they dared not go down to their trash bins just outside the cellar door. And then this same woman narrated how she had passed him down the street while a rain of incendiaries was falling in the district, and the roof of the building where the Hardings had dwelt was on fire, and the tenants of the upper flats were flinging blazing cushions and other articles into the street. Professor Harding’s comment was that the House that Jack Built was always built in the same way. And its destiny was in accordance with its architecture. Some houses built by Jack attracted incendiaries, some did not. But it did not matter whether they did or whether they did not. All in the end had wild cats in their cellars, for civilization never continued long enough to keep the wild cats out — if you call it civilization, René Harding would shout.
II
“YOU ARE NOT BY ANY
CHANCE A FOOL, MY SON?”
T
he sun of St. John’s Wood reddened the walls of a substantial sitting room, and warmed the distracted faces of a family group, sitting in a rather huddled knot, deep in conversation. The birds in the trees outside the open windows sang the sparrow-songs which give the rows of private gardens in this northwest district their rustic sweetness. The shadow of “That Other Man” lay across the ugly lethargic city, but in the beautiful recesses of St. John’s Wood you could believe yourself in the Victorian middleclass paradise, where Mr. Gladstone, big-nosed and big-collared, chopped down trees for longevity, or where the towers of the Crystal Palace looked down upon crinolined throngs moving between the rhododendrons, and stopping to admire the swans upon the glassy lakes.
Could anyone have entered this apartment unperceived, and have stood there observing this agitated group, he would have heard from time to time, phrases in French escaping it, such as
à
la bonne heure
, or
par exemple
, or
mon pauvre petit
,
mon pauvre petit
. This latter phrase in a faint voice fell from the lips of the dominant figure, a very old lady, reminiscent of an ancestral miniature, in her faded dignity. A period costume, of the severest black with the inevitable cameo, was too severe to be English. The
pauvre petit
of the above-mentioned exclamation was René Harding, who, crouching upon a low boat-like stool at the feet of the aged woman, looked unusually the reverse of
petit
. But she was his mother: and the intrusion of French phrases in the talk of these three people, of mother, son, and daughter, had a simple explanation. Mrs. Harding senior was French, which accounted also for the Gallic Christian name of her son, as it did for many other things about Professor René Harding. René’s sister Mary sat close up against Mrs. Harding, on the right-hand side. She was in her early forties, and more obviously
handsome
, with her well-cut nose and broad forehead, than her brother with his hair-sculptured, gothic mask.