Читать книгу Our Little Life - Jessie Georgina Sime - Страница 5

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At the acute angle formed by O'Neil Street and Drayton Place there was, in the eighteen-sixties, a cluster of houses that were "good." The Agent, whenever he had occasion to advertise one of these houses in Regalia's Daily Planet was accustomed to say, "A Desirable Residence on O'Neil Street—or Drayton Place, whichever it might happen to be—to Rent"; and forthwith came a rush of desirable citizens, each eager to get ahead of the other and occupy the house. But the eighteen-sixties are a long time ago. By the eighteen-eighties the houses were no longer in such demand. By the time the 'nineties came along they were distinctly on the down grade—and with the end of the century they came more or less to an end too. Regalia had, like the generality of cities, stepped westward. Her citizens had stepped with her. They had begun their exodus when one of the great Railway Companies of the Dominion had placed its Yards straight opposite the O'Neil Street windows. When a car-line was laid along the street, and another matched it on the parallel St. Hubert Boulevard—the main street of Regalia; when Drayton Place, the short uniting link between the thoroughfares, came to be peopled with cut-rate drug-stores, corner groceries, demi-semi-repair tailors, and "dagos" who stood at the doors of their Shoe-Shine Parlors showing their excellent teeth, it seemed time for desirable citizens to quit. They quitted. They packed up their belongings, their drawing-room suites and their leather-backed dining-room chairs, and they betook themselves to where no car-lines are. They formed a desirable cluster in Regalia West, as they named the suburb they fled to; and they left the O'Neil Street homes alone, forlorn, bereft of respectability, something that no desirable citizen would ever look at again. The houses stood empty, becoming less desirable every week.

It was early in the twentieth century that a Business Woman with a little money to invest, passed the O'Neil Street way. She was desirous of finding a good investment for her hard-earned money, something sure and safe yet bringing in a satisfactory yearly return. She paused before the O'Neil Street houses. She thought she saw her investment there.

Slowly she walked into Drayton Place and considered the houses from that point of view. More slowly she returned to O'Neil Street, observing all the way. Next morning saw her at the down-town Agent's, talking the matter over with him: and the following week she was the possessor of the whole block of what had once been desirable residences, considering with how little expenditure of her hard-earned money she could convert them into an Apartment House. This was rapidly done. Three months later she was christening the finished investment after herself. So Penelope's Buildings came into existence.

The fact of the Buildings having begun life as a cluster of semi-detached dwelling-places explained certain odd constructions in the flats; also the many undesired intimacies—common taps of water on the landings, verandas that belonged to everyone and no one—that the inhabitants so reluctantly shared with one another. The Apartment House was the uncomfortable place it was because when it had been "made over" comfort had been the last thing in anyone's mind. The Business Woman was wanting a good investment for her money. The Agent wanted to be rid of his property so as to get his percentage. The Builder wanted to "make" his contract. The Penelopians found themselves in the end packed like so many herrings in a barrel, with the additional disadvantage (which herrings know nothing of) of being expected to pay as high a rent as could possibly be extracted from them, mainly for things they didn't get. Penelope's Buildings, almost as soon as it was evolved, began to become the Palace of Disagreement which such places generally are.

Before long the Penelopians took to moonlight flittings—for of such flesh were they made. Then the Business Woman began to find her job, as the Agent said, a bit too tough for her. She retired, handing over her property to a French-Canadian on the make, for a consideration of a small cash-payment down, the rest to be paid in yearly instalments. The French-Canadian punctually made his first small cash-payment; he then punctually re-sold the property for a rather larger cash-payment to a Jew—and then decamped. The Jew, having bought the property out-and-out, took possession; the Business Woman went on claiming her further cash-instalments; the French-Canadian remained prudently invisible: and the affair went into the hands of that Great Instrument, the Law. Now the Law, as we all know, is the one thing the mind of man has as yet been able to devise that can go on moving forever without getting anywhere. It is like the earth—except that it has no sun to go round. Until the Buildings were out of the Law again no tenant might have his rent increased or decreased by so much as a dollar, no flat might be repaired by the landlord to the extent of a washer on a tap: the Law revolved, the Buildings stood still. They stood so very still that soon it became patent, even to little Mr. Bellerose, the letter-carrier who went daily up and down the Penelopian stair, that before long there would be no Buildings to stand. The cracks in the walls became bigger and bigger; the fissures in the ceilings grew wider and wider. Cassie Healy, operator on pants to trade, knew what it was up in the attic flat, to have leakage from the roof: and Mrs. Savourin, the Janitress, down in her basement dwelling, was able to calculate from the amount of the floodings in her kitchen, just how damp and depressed Miss Healy must be feeling. The balustrades "gave." The whole tenement "settled." By the first year of the War it was plain to anyone who thought about it that when the Law had finished with Penelope's Buildings the Business Woman's good investment would have gone where good investments go—to that bourne whence no money can return. Yet the Jew and the Business Woman went on claiming their respective pounds of flesh. The French-Canadian went on remaining invisible. The tenants—happy at least in the surety that no rent could be raised on them—went on growing more and more disreputable. And in the midst of the clamor of the flats falling from one another brick by brick, in the midst of the down-at-heelness and general dilapidation, the Law, in its most magniloquent and majestic manner—went on talking. Penelope's Buildings were doomed.

The Penelopians, naturally, did not take this uncheerful view of the matter. They could not be evicted (unless the Police felt itself entitled to call upon them), they could not have their rents raised, there was no one to come and remonstrate with them on their ever-increasing dirtiness—they had, on the whole, a pleasant time. The Buildings from the outside, it is true, looked a sorry sight. But inside, where the Penelopians were deciding what they would have for the next meal, things were far less gloomy. Breakfast, dinner, tea—that is the great Empire on which the sun never sets: meals are the true preoccupation of the lives of almost all of us, and the Penelopians were no exception to the rule. They fought with one another, sometimes with tongues and sometimes with fists. They gave black eyes and received them back again. They did wonders in the slandering and back-biting line: and when they were ill, they were angels to one another. It is queer to think that good things can spring from such a soil; yet loyalty does spring at times from the most desperate ill-usage. Courage may arise from cruelty. Cheerfulness is often born where things are hardest. The Penelopians hung up at their windows poor little ragged bits of curtains that once were white. They placed on their window-sills pots of something that looked like plants. They trusted that some day they would have time to wash the curtains; they hoped that in the spring the plants would flower . . . their curtains and their plants were the flags they flaunted in the face of Fate: and the fine things that sometimes sprang up in themselves were, in a sense, the outcome of their wretched way of life. Had you gone into any one of the flats and lived there awhile, you would have found the inhabitants of the flat planning for the future, just as people plan in grander residences. One would be planning for the time when she would live in a "real" apartment, where there would be a gramophone always playing and cut glass on the buffet. Another would have a vision of that country garden that grows in dreams—always full of flowers and vegetables and needing no one to work it. A third would run to new hats and fine furs and smart boots whenever she wanted them, and the man would see himself boss in the softest of snaps with a fifty-cent cigar in his mouth all day long. The Penelopians were much like the rest of the world. Hope sprang eternal in their human breasts. Had Pope come back in order to protest against the over-usage of his famous remark, even he could not have denied that its truth was exemplified once more in Penelope's Buildings. There seemed little enough to hope about, but the Penelopians went on hoping. It was that that kept them alive.

By 1917 the Business Woman's investment was on its last legs. It stood, but it stood totteringly, ready to fall whenever the word was given. Round about things had not improved. The Railway Yards had waxed strong and were kicking hard; beyond, there was the apparently limitless expanse of chimney-pots and roofs that proved Regalia to be taking her place as one of the world's cities. The cut-rate store at the corner of Drayton Place was growing with the Yards. It had inaugurated a big clock over its door, and every month or so a new clerk, as dingy, as polite, as unappetizing as the rest, made his appearance: Semple's Cut-rate Drug-Store was on its way to be a thriving business concern. The rest of Drayton Place, with the exception of Dufour's grocery at the St. Hubert Boulevard corner, was still composed of small "individual" businesses, where the boss did the major part of his own work and his wife took in roomers in the house above the shop. From the front windows of the Buildings there was dinginess to look upon; from the back windows there was an uninterrupted view of other back windows across a triangular court. And from both ends of Drayton Place, unceasing, unresting, night and day, came the everlasting hum of the electric car-line. Noise, grime, squalor; by this great trinity of words did Penelope's Buildings justify its existence.

One thing, and one thing only, was beautiful to look at. From the windows of Drayton Place, and even, slantingly, from the windows overlooking O'Neil Street, the tall slender spire of St. Patrick's church was visible. There it was, whenever you looked out, shooting, as it seemed from far underneath, right into the sky. The rest of the church was invisible; houses and shops hid it from Penelope's Buildings. But the spire—constructed in an age when men had more time for their work—was there; and high up in the belfry was the bell that warned the Penelopians of the flight of hours. Night and day the bell broke in on the hum of the street-cars. Each quarter of an hour it told solemnly off what had gone before from what was yet to come. It spoke of things calm, peaceful, eternal. It told of what was to come long after Penelope's Buildings had crumbled into dust, and, in a curious way, it told of what had been long before Penelope's Buildings had been thought of. By the sight of the spire, by the sound of the bell, and by these things alone, was beauty brought to O'Neil Street and Drayton Place. St. Patrick's, even when it was least thought of, dominated the scene. It was there. You could not get rid of it. And, when you turned your eyes to it from the Yards, from the sight of the big clock over the cut-rate store, from the uncleared filth of the street; when you lent your ear for a moment to the sound of the deep-toned bell, you could not but be conscious that here was something by which mere passing life could be regulated; that here was not only peace for a moment, but peace for ever, if you chose to make it so. There were those in Penelope's Buildings who did listen, who did find—if it were only for a moment—peace to their souls in the chiming of the bell. There was one at least who would cry to herself as she waked in the night and turned restlessly on her bed, "Glory be to God that He built St. Patrick's here close be me home. For without ut, God help me, I'd not be able to go on."

The bell of St Patrick's did, perhaps, more than it knew.