"You are a brick," said he, "the last and the biggest of them. There
isn't the like of you in this or any other world, and never was and never
will be, world without end, amen."
"Oh, don't say that," said she shyly.
"I will," he replied, "for it's the truth. I'll hire a sandwichman to
stop people in the street and tell it to them. I'll get a week's
engagement at the theatre and sing it from the stage. I'll make up a
poem about your goodness. I don't know what to do to thank you. Do you
see, if I had to pay you now I'd have to pawn something, and I really
believe I have pawned everything they'd lend on to get the money for that
two weeks' rent. I'm broke until Friday, that's my pay day, but that
night I'll come home with my wages piled up on a cart."
"I can lend you a few shillings until then," said she laughing.
"Oh, no," said he. "It's not fair. I couldn't do that," but he could.
Well the light of the world shone out of the lodger. He was like a sea
breeze in a soap factory. When he awakened in the morning he whistled.
When he came down to breakfast he sang. When he came home in the evening
he danced. He had an amazing store of vitality: from the highest hair on
the top of his head down to his heels he was alive. His average language
was packed with jokes and wonderful curses. He was as chatty as a girl,
as good-humoured as a dog, as unconscious as a kitten--and she knew
nothing at all of men, except, perhaps, that they wore trousers and were
not girls. The only man with whom she had ever come in contact was her
uncle, and he might have been described as a sniffy old man with a cold;
a blend of gruel and grunt, living in an atmosphere of ointment and pills
and patent medicine advertisements--and, behold, she was living in
unthinkable intimacy with the youngest of young men; not an old,
ache-ridden, cough-racked, corn-footed septuagenarian, but a young,
fresh-faced, babbling rascal who laughed like the explosion of a
blunderbuss, roared songs as long as he was within earshot and danced
when he had nothing else to do. He used to show her how to do
hand-balances on the arm-chair, and while his boots were cocked up in the
air she would grow stiff with terror for his safety and for that of the
adjacent crockery.
The first morning she was giving him his breakfast, intending afterwards
to have her own meal in the kitchen, but he used language of such
strangely attractive ferocity, and glared at her with such a
humorously-mad eye that she was compelled to breakfast with him.
At night, when he returned to his tea, he swore by this and by that he
would die of hunger unless she ate with him; and then he told her all the
doings of the day, the bets that had been made and lost, and what sort of
a man his boss was, and he extolled the goodness of his friends, and
lectured on the vast iniquity of his enemies.
So things went until she was as intimate with him as if he had been her
brother. One night he came home just a trifle tipsy. She noted at last
what was wrong with him, and her heart yearned over the sinner. There
were five or six glasses inside of him, and each was the father of an
antic. He was an opera company, a gymnasium, and a menagerie at once,
all tinged with a certain hilarious unsteadiness which was fascinating.
But at last he got to his bed, which was more than she did.
She sat through the remainder of the night listening to the growth of her
half-starved heart. Oh, but there was a warmth there now. . . .!
Springtime and the moon in flood. What new leaves are these which the
trees put forth? Bird, singing at the peep of morn, where gottest thou
thy song? Be still, be still, thou stranger, fluttering a wing at my
breast. . . .
At the end of a month the gods moved, and when the gods move they trample
mortals in the dust.
The lodger's employer left Dublin for London, taking his clerk with him.
"Good-bye," said he.
"Good-bye," she replied, "and a pleasant journey to you."
And she took the card with "Apartments to Let" written upon it and placed
it carefully in the window, and then, folding her mittened hands, she sat
down to await the coming of another lodger, and as she sat she wept
bitterly.