"Oh, you have some rooms to let."
"Mother!"
"Well, what is it?"
"'Ere's a gentleman about the rooms."
"Ask 'im in. I'll be up in a minute."
"Will yer step inside, sir? Mother'll be up in a minute."
So you step inside and after a minute "mother" comes slowly up the
kitchen stairs, untying her apron as she comes and calling down
instructions to some one below about the potatoes.
"Good-morning, sir," says "mother," with a washed-out smile. "Will you
step this way, please?"
"Oh, it's hardly worth while my coming up," you say. "What sort of rooms
are they, and how much?"
"Well," says the landlady, "if you'll step upstairs I'll show them to
you."
So with a protesting murmur, meant to imply that any waste of time
complained of hereafter must not be laid to your charge, you follow
"mother" upstairs.
At the first landing you run up against a pail and a broom, whereupon
"mother" expatiates upon the unreliability of servant-girls, and bawls
over the balusters for Sarah to come and take them away at once. When
you get outside the rooms she pauses, with her hand upon the door, to
explain to you that they are rather untidy just at present, as the
last lodger left only yesterday; and she also adds that this is their
cleaning-day--it always is. With this understanding you enter, and both
stand solemnly feasting your eyes upon the scene before you. The rooms
cannot be said to appear inviting. Even "mother's" face betrays no
admiration. Untenanted "furnished apartments" viewed in the morning
sunlight do not inspire cheery sensations. There is a lifeless air about
them. It is a very different thing when you have settled down and are
living in them. With your old familiar household gods to greet your gaze
whenever you glance up, and all your little knick-knacks spread around
you--with the photos of all the girls that you have loved and lost
ranged upon the mantel-piece, and half a dozen disreputable-looking
pipes scattered about in painfully prominent positions--with one carpet
slipper peeping from beneath the coal-box and the other perched on the
top of the piano--with the well-known pictures to hide the dingy walls,
and these dear old friends, your books, higgledy-piggledy all over the
place--with the bits of old blue china that your mother prized, and the
screen she worked in those far by-gone days, when the sweet old face was
laughing and young, and the white soft hair tumbled in gold-brown curls
from under the coal-scuttle bonnet--
Ah, old screen, what a gorgeous personage you must have been in your
young days, when the tulips and roses and lilies (all growing from one
stem) were fresh in their glistening sheen! Many a summer and winter
have come and gone since then, my friend, and you have played with the
dancing firelight until you have grown sad and gray. Your brilliant
colors are fast fading now, and the envious moths have gnawed your
silken threads. You are withering away like the dead hands that wove
you. Do you ever think of those dead hands? You seem so grave and
thoughtful sometimes that I almost think you do. Come, you and I and
the deep-glowing embers, let us talk together. Tell me in your silent
language what you remember of those young days, when you lay on my
little mother's lap and her girlish fingers played with your rainbow
tresses. Was there never a lad near sometimes--never a lad who would
seize one of those little hands to smother it with kisses, and who would
persist in holding it, thereby sadly interfering with the progress of
your making? Was not your frail existence often put in jeopardy by this
same clumsy, headstrong lad, who would toss you disrespectfully aside
that he--not satisfied with one--might hold both hands and gaze up
into the loved eyes? I can see that lad now through the haze of the
flickering twilight. He is an eager bright-eyed boy, with pinching,
dandy shoes and tight-fitting smalls, snowy shirt frill and stock,
and--oh! such curly hair. A wild, light-hearted boy! Can he be the
great, grave gentleman upon whose stick I used to ride crosslegged, the
care-worn man into whose thoughtful face I used to gaze with childish
reverence and whom I used to call "father?" You say "yes," old screen;
but are you quite sure? It is a serious charge you are bringing. Can
it be possible? Did he have to kneel down in those wonderful smalls and
pick you up and rearrange you before he was forgiven and his curly head
smoothed by my mother's little hand? Ah! old screen, and did the lads
and the lassies go making love fifty years ago just as they do now? Are
men and women so unchanged? Did little maidens' hearts beat the same
under pearl-embroidered bodices as they do under Mother Hubbard cloaks?
Have steel casques and chimney-pot hats made no difference to the brains
that work beneath them? Oh, Time! great Chronos! and is this your power?
Have you dried up seas and leveled mountains and left the tiny human
heart-strings to defy you? Ah, yes! they were spun by a Mightier than
thou, and they stretch beyond your narrow ken, for their ends are made
fast in eternity. Ay, you may mow down the leaves and the blossoms, but
the roots of life lie too deep for your sickle to sever. You refashion
Nature's garments, but you cannot vary by a jot the throbbings of her
pulse. The world rolls round obedient to your laws, but the heart of man
is not of your kingdom, for in its birthplace "a thousand years are but
as yesterday."
I am getting away, though, I fear, from my "furnished apartments," and
I hardly know how to get back. But I have some excuse for my meanderings
this time. It is a piece of old furniture that has led me astray, and
fancies gather, somehow, round old furniture, like moss around old
stones. One's chairs and tables get to be almost part of one's life and
to seem like quiet friends. What strange tales the wooden-headed old
fellows could tell did they but choose to speak! At what unsuspected
comedies and tragedies have they not assisted! What bitter tears have
been sobbed into that old sofa cushion! What passionate whisperings the
settee must have overheard!
New furniture has no charms for me compared with old. It is the old
things that we love--the old faces, the old books, the old jokes. New
furniture can make a palace, but it takes old furniture to make a home.
Not merely old in itself--lodging-house furniture generally is that--but
it must be old to us, old in associations and recollections. The
furniture of furnished apartments, however ancient it may be in reality,
is new to our eyes, and we feel as though we could never get on with it.
As, too, in the case of all fresh acquaintances, whether wooden or human
(and there is very little difference between the two species sometimes),
everything impresses you with its worst aspect. The knobby wood-work and
shiny horse-hair covering of the easy-chair suggest anything but ease.
The mirror is smoky. The curtains want washing. The carpet is frayed.
The table looks as if it would go over the instant anything was rested
on it. The grate is cheerless, the wall-paper hideous. The ceiling
appears to have had coffee spilt all over it, and the ornaments--well,
they are worse than the wallpaper.
There must surely be some special and secret manufactory for the
production of lodging-house ornaments. Precisely the same articles are
to be found at every lodging-house all over the kingdom, and they are
never seen anywhere else. There are the two--what do you call them? they
stand one at each end of the mantel-piece, where they are never safe,
and they are hung round with long triangular slips of glass that clank
against one another and make you nervous. In the commoner class of rooms
these works of art are supplemented by a couple of pieces of china which
might each be meant to represent a cow sitting upon its hind legs, or a
model of the temple of Diana at Ephesus, or a dog, or anything else
you like to fancy. Somewhere about the room you come across a
bilious-looking object, which at first you take to be a lump of dough
left about by one of the children, but which on scrutiny seems to
resemble an underdone cupid. This thing the landlady calls a statue.
Then there is a "sampler" worked by some idiot related to the family, a
picture of the "Huguenots," two or three Scripture texts, and a highly
framed and glazed certificate to the effect that the father has been
vaccinated, or is an Odd Fellow, or something of that sort.
You examine these various attractions and then dismally ask what the
rent is.
"That's rather a good deal," you say on hearing the figure.
"Well, to tell you the truth," answers the landlady with a sudden burst
of candor, "I've always had" (mentioning a sum a good deal in excess
of the first-named amount), "and before that I used to have" (a still
higher figure).
What the rent of apartments must have been twenty years ago makes one
shudder to think of. Every landlady makes you feel thoroughly ashamed of
yourself by informing you, whenever the subject crops up, that she used
to get twice as much for her rooms as you are paying. Young men lodgers
of the last generation must have been of a wealthier class than they are
now, or they must have ruined themselves. I should have had to live in
an attic.
Curious, that in lodgings the rule of life is reversed. The higher you
get up in the world the lower you come down in your lodgings. On
the lodging-house ladder the poor man is at the top, the rich man
underneath. You start in the attic and work your way down to the first
floor.
A good many great men have lived in attics and some have died there.
Attics, says the dictionary, are "places where lumber is stored," and
the world has used them to store a good deal of its lumber in at one
time or another. Its preachers and painters and poets, its deep-browed
men who will find out things, its fire-eyed men who will tell truths
that no one wants to hear--these are the lumber that the world hides
away in its attics. Haydn grew up in an attic and Chatterton starved in
one. Addison and Goldsmith wrote in garrets. Faraday and De Quincey knew
them well. Dr. Johnson camped cheerfully in them, sleeping soundly--too
soundly sometimes--upon their trundle-beds, like the sturdy old soldier
of fortune that he was, inured to hardship and all careless of himself.
Dickens spent his youth among them, Morland his old age--alas! a
drunken, premature old age. Hans Andersen, the fairy king, dreamed his
sweet fancies beneath their sloping roofs. Poor, wayward-hearted Collins
leaned his head upon their crazy tables; priggish Benjamin Franklin;
Savage, the wrong-headed, much troubled when he could afford any softer
bed than a doorstep; young Bloomfield, "Bobby" Burns, Hogarth, Watts the
engineer--the roll is endless. Ever since the habitations of men were
reared two stories high has the garret been the nursery of genius.
No one who honors the aristocracy of mind can feel ashamed of
acquaintanceship with them. Their damp-stained walls are sacred to
the memory of noble names. If all the wisdom of the world and all its
art--all the spoils that it has won from nature, all the fire that it
has snatched from heaven--were gathered together and divided into heaps,
and we could point and say, for instance, these mighty truths were
flashed forth in the brilliant _salon_ amid the ripple of light laughter
and the sparkle of bright eyes; and this deep knowledge was dug up in
the quiet study, where the bust of Pallas looks serenely down on the
leather-scented shelves; and this heap belongs to the crowded street;
and that to the daisied field--the heap that would tower up high above
the rest as a mountain above hills would be the one at which we should
look up and say: this noblest pile of all--these glorious paintings and
this wondrous music, these trumpet words, these solemn thoughts, these
daring deeds, they were forged and fashioned amid misery and pain in the
sordid squalor of the city garret. There, from their eyries, while the
world heaved and throbbed below, the kings of men sent forth their
eagle thoughts to wing their flight through the ages. There, where the
sunlight streaming through the broken panes fell on rotting boards and
crumbling walls; there, from their lofty thrones, those rag-clothed
Joves have hurled their thunderbolts and shaken, before now, the earth
to its foundations.
Huddle them up in your lumber-rooms, oh, world! Shut them fast in and
turn the key of poverty upon them. Weld close the bars, and let them
fret their hero lives away within the narrow cage. Leave them there to
starve, and rot, and die. Laugh at the frenzied beatings of their hands
against the door. Roll onward in your dust and noise and pass them by,
forgotten.
But take care lest they turn and sting you. All do not, like the fabled
phoenix, warble sweet melodies in their agony; sometimes they spit
venom--venom you must breathe whether you will or no, for you cannot
seal their mouths, though you may fetter their limbs. You can lock the
door upon them, but they burst open their shaky lattices and call
out over the house-tops so that men cannot but hear. You hounded wild
Rousseau into the meanest garret of the Rue St. Jacques and jeered at
his angry shrieks. But the thin, piping tones swelled a hundred years
later into the sullen roar of the French Revolution, and civilization to
this day is quivering to the reverberations of his voice.
As for myself, however, I like an attic. Not to live in: as residences
they are inconvenient. There is too much getting up and down stairs
connected with them to please me. It puts one unpleasantly in mind of
the tread-mill. The form of the ceiling offers too many facilities for
bumping your head and too few for shaving. And the note of the tomcat
as he sings to his love in the stilly night outside on the tiles becomes
positively distasteful when heard so near.
No, for living in give me a suit of rooms on the first floor of a
Piccadilly mansion (I wish somebody would!); but for thinking in let
me have an attic up ten flights of stairs in the densest quarter of the
city. I have all Herr Teufelsdrockh's affection for attics. There is a
sublimity about their loftiness. I love to "sit at ease and look down
upon the wasps' nest beneath;" to listen to the dull murmur of the human
tide ebbing and flowing ceaselessly through the narrow streets and
lanes below. How small men seem, how like a swarm of ants sweltering in
endless confusion on their tiny hill! How petty seems the work on which
they are hurrying and skurrying! How childishly they jostle against
one another and turn to snarl and scratch! They jabber and screech and
curse, but their puny voices do not reach up here. They fret, and fume,
and rage, and pant, and die; "but I, mein Werther, sit above it all; I
am alone with the stars."
The most extraordinary attic I ever came across was one a friend and I
once shared many years ago. Of all eccentrically planned things, from
Bradshaw to the maze at Hampton Court, that room was the most eccentric.
The architect who designed it must have been a genius, though I cannot
help thinking that his talents would have been better employed in
contriving puzzles than in shaping human habitations. No figure in
Euclid could give any idea of that apartment. It contained seven
corners, two of the walls sloped to a point, and the window was just
over the fireplace. The only possible position for the bedstead was
between the door and the cupboard. To get anything out of the cupboard
we had to scramble over the bed, and a large percentage of the various
commodities thus obtained was absorbed by the bedclothes. Indeed, so
many things were spilled and dropped upon the bed that toward night-time
it had become a sort of small cooperative store. Coal was what it always
had most in stock. We used to keep our coal in the bottom part of the
cupboard, and when any was wanted we had to climb over the bed, fill
a shovelful, and then crawl back. It was an exciting moment when we
reached the middle of the bed. We would hold our breath, fix our eyes
upon the shovel, and poise ourselves for the last move. The next instant
we, and the coals, and the shovel, and the bed would be all mixed up
together.
I've heard of the people going into raptures over beds of coal. We slept
in one every night and were not in the least stuck up about it.
But our attic, unique though it was, had by no means exhausted the
architect's sense of humor. The arrangement of the whole house was a
marvel of originality. All the doors opened outward, so that if any
one wanted to leave a room at the same moment that you were coming
downstairs it was unpleasant for you. There was no ground-floor--its
ground-floor belonged to a house in the next court, and the front
door opened direct upon a flight of stairs leading down to the cellar.
Visitors on entering the house would suddenly shoot past the person who
had answered the door to them and disappear down these stairs. Those of
a nervous temperament used to imagine that it was a trap laid for them,
and would shout murder as they lay on their backs at the bottom till
somebody came and picked them up.
It is a long time ago now that I last saw the inside of an attic. I have
tried various floors since but I have not found that they have made much
difference to me. Life tastes much the same, whether we quaff it from a
golden goblet or drink it out of a stone mug. The hours come laden with
the same mixture of joy and sorrow, no matter where we wait for them. A
waistcoat of broadcloth or of fustian is alike to an aching heart, and
we laugh no merrier on velvet cushions than we did on wooden chairs.
Often have I sighed in those low-ceilinged rooms, yet disappointments
have come neither less nor lighter since I quitted them. Life works upon
a compensating balance, and the happiness we gain in one direction we
lose in another. As our means increase, so do our desires; and we ever
stand midway between the two. When we reside in an attic we enjoy a
supper of fried fish and stout. When we occupy the first floor it takes
an elaborate dinner at the Continental to give us the same amount of
satisfaction.