Do you wish to feel human emotion spring from inanimate things? Do
you wish to meet ghosts? Then come with me to one of London's great
furniture store-houses, in which a thousand homes lie piled to the
roof, silent, sheeted, tomb-like.
A store-man switches on a line of lights, and we see stretching to
the distance great pyramids of household goods, whole homes of
furniture, neatly stacked and carefully ticketed against the time
when a man and a woman will come to claim them. Some of the pyramids
suggest Park Lane, others suggest Clapham Common.
Let us peep beneath this shroud, and what do we see: "Good morning,
Mrs. Everyman, and what can I do for you? Kindly accept this cushion
as a souvenir of your visit." There lies the gift cushion, there the
once-so-loved instalment suite that was delivered in the plain van.
Note the pictures by Watts, Rossetti, and others of the Victorians to
whom the suburbs are so loyal. "Love's Awakening." Ah!
What do we see in the next tomb? Yes; here was an elegant home with
a cheque-book behind it. The low satinwood dresser had a compartment
like a knee desk, so that she might get close up when she rouged her
lips, and three swinging mirrors in order that she might know whether
her shoulders were evenly powdered before he took her out to the
Berkeley. Engravings, a Japanese cabinet, a good one, a beautiful
round table with a surface like that of a still pool. Little home
and big home side by side, social differences forgotten. Do you see
the ghosts of Mrs. Everyman and Lady Nobody meeting like sisters over
their shrouded homes crying a little on each other's arms? I do.
The tombs go on waiting ... waiting.
Homes in bondage!
As we wander down the line our eyes are caught by a doll's house,
relic of some distant nursery, a child's cot, or a piece of furniture
with distinct personality, and we wonder how much heartache and hope
this place represents. There are people living in lodgings dreaming
of the home that they will build again one day, longing to surround
themselves with loved things, to tear off the wrappings and see again
those precious ordinary objects that mean so much in every
life--those sentimental anchors.
Sentiment--that is the keynote. Without it London's store-rooms
would be half empty.
"Yes, sir," says the store-man, as he pulls aside a wrapping, "people
don't seem able to bring themselves to part with things. It's mighty
queer. Look at this old box, now--what would you think is inside it?"
The box is an ancient nail-studded chest with a curved lid that might
have contained all the gold of Treasure Island. I hazard a guess
just to please him.
"No, sir. It's just full of little old bits of cloth, the kind of
things that women collect and put in old baskets because they may
come in useful some day. There's bits of tinsel and lace, and pretty
little cases full of red and blue beads and needles by the score.
But what's the sense of letting it eat its head off here? That's
what I want to know. If they've paid a penny for this old box they
must have paid fifty pounds, for it was here before ever I was. O
yes, there's funny people about, and no mistake. Now if it belonged
to me...."
As he rambles on, I examine the old box with interest. I know why it
was put there; and so do you! Memories cling round it--memories so
sweet that the heart revolts at the thought of burning those poor
fragments.
Most people have a box of this sort. In it are queer trifles, little
geometric nets on which beads are strung or sewn. Green and scarlet
parrots preen themselves on half-finished trees. It is that note of
half completion, as of a task suddenly put down and soon to be
resumed, which makes such things so appealing. Perhaps a needle is
still sticking in a corner of the fabric, waiting, it seems, for the
fingers that will never come again. And when you look you see the
hand that placed it there, you hear a voice and see a face bending
over the pretty, unimportant thing, and it's ten to one that you are
a child again on some slow, lazy afternoon of sun; and the voice is
the voice of your mother telling you the same old story you have
heard a hundred times as you watch her, fascinated by her brilliance,
hypnotized by the growth of the brocade bird and its beaded eye: a
masterpiece which fills your mind and stands out as the most
marvellous and beautiful thing the world has ever seen. Clever,
wonderful mother....
"There's funny people about, and no mistake!" says the storeman
again, giving the box a prod with his foot.
We go on. He unties the wrappings round another deposit. All these
things, he explains, belong to "a divorced couple." How new they
are, he comments. How quickly they must have found out their
mistake; no sooner married than divorced and storing their things,
and chucking away good money after bad!
I peep in with a feeling that I am eavesdropping. There, piled up
sideways, is the table round which this unknown tragedy of married
life was acted, the solemn, stiff chairs, witness to it all, the
pictures which for a little while were gathered for this mockery of a
home.
"Why they don't sell it I can't think," says the storeman.
I wonder, too, why they keep it! Neither one nor the other can bear
to live with it. Then what queer sentiment, what common memory,
retains this split home here in the pathetic silence of lapsed things?
We turn a corner. More avenues, sheeted, deserted.
"Some of these people are dead, we think," remarks my guide, waving
his hand towards the dim roof. "This lot was put in at the beginning
of the war. We had to sell quite a lot. Payments lapsed, and no one
replied to advertisements. It is a mystery to know who it belongs to
now, sir, and that's a fact."
* * *
As we turn into another warehouse we meet a man and woman. They have
pulled aside the sheeting and are standing among chairs and tables
and pictures. The woman comes out and says nervously:
"We've just come to see our things. The manager said that we might."
As we enter the next compartment we hear this man and woman talking.
"Oh, look! There it is, next to mother's writing-table. Do pick it
up and let me hold it!"
There is the sound of the man walking over the stiff wrappings.
"Oh, my dear!" comes the woman's voice. "My dear!"
We go on through the silent aisles, the storeman talkative, amusing,
insensible to the drama we have met, oblivious of the longing in
those few words spoken by a woman, among the sheeted pathos of a home
in bondage.