RECOLLECTIONS OF LANDLADIES
There is no figure in the human scene which makes so unctuous an appeal
to our relish of humanity as the landlady. When the landlady comes upon
the stage at the theatre, we all awaken to an expectation of delight in
the characteristic manifestations of her nature, and seldom are
disappointed. The genius of the greatest of authors always unfolds with
particular warmth in the presence of their landladies. A moment's
reflection will recall a procession of immortal landladies. Whether it
is that the colorful calling of landlady cultivates in one a peculiar
richness of human nature, or whether landladies are born and not
made--those with characters of especial tang and savor instinctively
adopting this occupation,--I cannot say, but the fact is indisputable
that landladies are not as other persons are. No one ever saw a humdrum
landlady. A commonplace person as a landlady is unthinkable.
Now I think I may say that all my life, or nearly all, I have been an
eager and earnest student of landladies. I am, indeed, much more
familiar with the genus landlady than with courts and kings, or with
eminent personages generally such as supply the material for most of
those who write their recollections. Thus I am competent, I think, to
speak on a subject curiously neglected by the memorist.
One who makes a culture of landladies comes in time to have a flair for
these racy beings, and is drawn by a happy intuition to the habitats of
those most resplendent in the qualities of their kind. Of course, one
never can tell what life will bring forth, but it seems to me that my
present landlady marks the top of my career as a connoisseur, an
amateur, of landladies. She is strikingly reminiscent of an English
landlady. And England, particularly London, is, as all the world knows,
to the devotee of landladies what Africa is to the big game
sportsman--his paradise. There the species comes to luxuriant flower, so
that to possess with the mind one or two well-developed London
landladies is never to be without food for entertainment. My present
landlady, to return, is of course a widow. While it may be, for aught I
know, that all widows are not landladies, with very few exceptions all
landladies worthy of the name are widows. Those who are not widows
outright are, as you might say, widows in a sense. That is, while their
husbands may accurately be spoken of as living, and indeed are visible,
they do not exist in the normal rôle of husband. The commercial impulses
of the bona-fide husband have died in them, generally through their
attachment to alcoholic liquor, and they become satellites, hewers of
wood and drawers of water, to the genius awakened by circumstances in
their wives.
I one time had a landlady of this origin in Norwalk, Connecticut. She
was a woman of angular frame, with a face of flint, a tongue of vinegar,
and a heart of gold. This, I have found in my travels, is the type of
the semi-widowed landlady. I had another such an identical one in
Topeka, Kansas. The asperity, doubtless, is occasioned by biting
disillusionment in the romance of long ago, but it is external; frost on
the window; at the heart's core wells the sense of universe-embracing
maternity which makes the character of the landlady by vocation
sublime. All semi-widowed landladies have (it is their divine
inspiration) large families of half-grown sons. My landlady of Norwalk
grumbled continually; she could be heard out in the kitchen complaining
in a shrill, querulous tone that, with things as high as they were,
people would be crazy to expect meat twice a day. Yet she had at her
board the meanest, most low-down, ornery, contemptible, despicable cuss
in human form I ever knew, and the only fault I ever heard her find with
him was that he didn't eat enough.
The erudite in landladies have, of course, cognizance of a class which
are in no degree widows. Those of this department of the race, however,
frequently are not landladies in fibre, but merely incidentally. They
are young wives who for a transient period seek to help out in the
domestic economy by taking a few lodgers who come with unexceptionable
references. As wives doubtless they are meritorious; but no monument
need be erected to them as landladies. Though I should like to see in
the principal public square of every town and city a monument designed
by an artist of ability placed to the enduring glory of the landladies
of that place. For are not landladies ancient institutions fostering
the public weal, and in their field not a whit less deserving of homage
than governors and soldiers? I would say to a nation, show me your
landladies and I will tell you your destiny. I should be remiss,
however, in my chronicle did I not note that among these partial and
ephemeral landladies occasionally are to be found pronounced landlady
potentialities. I recall a landlady I had on Montague Street, Brooklyn
Heights, whose passion for cleaning amounted to a mania. This young
person's housewifery frenzy always put me in mind of another soul who
could not rest--Hokusai, who at about a hundred and ten was spoken of as
"the old man mad about painting."
Hovering about, tortured by a desire to begin, when I left for my
breakfast, she was still at it upon my return from my morning stroll, my
door barricaded by articles of dismembered furniture; still at it when I
came back a bit impatiently from a second walk; still at it while I read
the paper in her dining-room. And so without surcease throughout the
march of days and seasons. She unscrewed the knobs of the bed to polish
the threads thereof; she removed penpoints from penholders and made them
to shine like burnished gold. I had another landlady moved by the same
springs of feeling, on Spruce Street, Philadelphia. Later, I heard, her
husband died, and she espoused her latent career.
There is in the galaxy of landladies quite another type, an exotic plant
in the wondrously competent sisterhood, specimens of which may be found
blooming here and there like some rare orchid. I mean the fragile, lady
landlady, the clinging vine bereft of the supporting husband oak. Such
was Mrs. Knoll, of Central Avenue, Indianapolis, a little, plump,
rounded body, exceedingly bright, pleasant, intelligent, amiable, and
helpless; all of which qualities shone from her very agreeable face and
person. In her youth no doubt she was a type of beauty, and she remained
very well preserved. "Life and vanity and disappointment had slipped
away" (in the Thackerian words) from Dr. Knoll some years before; and
his widow and only child, Miss Knoll, were left in possession of the old
family home, and nothing more. They could not bear to leave it, that
would "break their hearts," said good, ineffectual Mrs. Knoll; so it was
viewed by them, unfortunately somewhat fallaciously, in the light of a
possible support.
The Doctor evidently was a man of books, and his widow had sought, more
and more, companionship in reading. Life--the actual world about her,
that is--, and vanity, but not disappointment, had, in a manner of
speaking, slipped from her, too. And she had turned to that great world
of shadows. "In books," she said, "I can choose my own company." She had
plighted her troth in youth to Dickens and to Thackeray, and to these
she had remained ever faithful. In a world of false books and unsafe
friends she knew that she had by the hand two true spirits. Jane Austen
she loaned me with tremulous pleasure. And she was very fond of Mr.
Howells, with whom, she said she lived a great deal; and the Kentons,
the Laphams, and the Marches, were characters better known to her "than
her next-door neighbors." But it must be confessed that the tender
perfume of Mrs. Knoll was not altogether an equivalent in the sphere of
her passive efforts to the homely vegetable odor of the authentic
landlady.
In great cities, amid the sheen of civilization is to be found just
adjacent to smart quarters of the town the tulip in the variegated
garden of landladies--the finished, polished stone gathered from the
mine, the bird of plumage of the species; I mean, of course, the
landlady _du beau monde_, the modish landlady, or perhaps I should say,
the professional hostess, as it were. For it seems rather vulgar, a
thing repellent to the finer sensibilities, to touch this distinguished
figure of immaculate artificiality with the plebeian term of "landlady."
The personages of this type are, so to say, of the peerage of their
order. Such a Lady Drew it was whose guest I became for a time on
Madison Avenue, New York. With silvered hair like a powdered coiffure;
softly tinted with the delicate enamel of cosmetic; rich and stately of
corsage--this expensive and highly sophisticated presence presided, in
the subdued tone of the best society, over the nicely adjusted machinery
of her smart establishment by the authority of a consciousness of highly
cultivated efficiency and an aroma of unexceptionable standards.
This consummate hostess type of landlady is, of course, one which the
passionate collector will preserve in the cabinet of his mind with
tremulous happiness in the sheer preciosity of it. I cannot but feel,
however, myself, that this type fails of complete perfection as a work
of art in this: that in every work of the first genius, it cannot be
denied, there is always a strain of coarseness. And perhaps I should
confess that my own taste in landladies, though I hope it is not
undiscriminating, leans a bit toward the popular taste, the relish of
the Rabelaisian.
Stevenson has observed that most men of high destinies have even
high-sounding names. And anyone who has reflected at all upon the
phenomenon of landladies must have been struck by the singularly
idiosyncratic character of their names. Indeed, an infallible way to
pick out a competent landlady from an advertisement is by her name. Is
it a happy name for a landlady? Go there! As her name is, so is her
nature. I one time had a landlady on Broome Street, New York, whom the
gods named Mrs. Brew. I one time had a landlady (in Milligan Place,
Manhattan) of the name of Mrs. Boggs. One time I had a landlady just off
the East India Dock Road, London, whose name was Wigger. I shall always
cherish the memory of the landlady I had down in Surrey, Mrs. Cheeseman.
One and all, these ladies, as landladies, were without stain.
Regarded as a bibelot, Mrs. Wigger was, I think, of the first
perfection. In her own genre, so to say, she was as finished, as
impossible of improvement, as an Elgin marble, a Grecian urn, a bit of
Chinese blue and white, a fan of old Japan, a Vermeer, a Whistler
symphony, a caricature by Max Beerbohm. She was of massive mould and
very individually shapen. Her face was very large and very red and
heavily pock-marked. In her bizarre garments, in some indefinable way
she imparted to the character of the born slattern something of the
Grand Style. Her utterance was quavered in a weird, cracked voice, which
had somewhat an effect as of the wind crying high aloft in a ship's
rigging. She slipslod about, always a bit unsteadily. Her movements and
her manner generally, I felt, made it not unreasonable to suppose that
she had in secret certain habits no longer widely approved by society.
The apple of her eye was an unkempt parrot which spent its days in
vainly attempting to ascend the embracing sides of a tin bathtub.
Landladies, beyond all other persons, have the esoteric power of
becoming for one the geniuses of places. It would, for instance, be
quite impossible for anyone to visualize my Mrs. Cheeseman torn from, as
you might say her context. If you were asked to describe Mrs. Cheeseman
you would naturally do it in this way: You would say, "Well, I wonder
what has become of the sweetest, quaintest, fairest old inn in all
England!" And into your mind would come a rapid cinematograph picture:
A highway winding out of Dorking, stretching its way between hills to
the sea. You round a turn and see before you long, low, glistening white
stables--the stables, evidently, of a coaching inn. And presently you
come into view of an ancient, white, stone building with a "Sussex
roof." From a tall post before the door swings the board of the "King's
Head." White ducks ride in a pond at the roadside there. Round this inn
which you are approaching is the greenest, handsomest hedge ever seen.
And along the road beyond you perceive the cottages of a wee village.
"We know that all things work together for good to them that love God."
The romance of destiny which in its inscrutable way has been leading you
all your long life long to the bosom, if I may so put it, of Mrs.
Cheeseman, reveals its beneficence now by carefully graduated steps. At
the other side of the main bulk of the "King's Head," which it was given
you first to see, you come upon a delicious little flagged yard leading
to another arm of the house, older still, very venerable, with a high
roof low descending, a roof which tucks under its projecting wing many
oddly placed little latticed windows gayly sporting innumerable tiny
panes. Like a miniature cathedral spire, a tall, quaint chimney stands
sentinel at one corner, and several chimney-pots peep over the roof's
dark crown.
Up this little yard, bounded on one side by a multicolored flower garden
whose fragrance bathes you in a softening vapor of perfume, you enter,
by a door which requires you to stoop, the wee taproom. Here: a
cavernous fireplace, settles are within against its sides, a gigantic
blackened crane swung across its middle, and a cubby-hole of a window at
its back. Above it is swung an ancient fowling-piece. The stone floor of
the room, like the ancient flags without, is worn into dips and hollows.
Along the window-sill of an oblong window measuring one wall is a bright
parade of potted plants.
It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that there is something psychic
about landladies. As you look about you at the environment in which you
find yourself, you experience a premonition that you are nearing an
affinity in the landlady world. It is strange, too, that there are
places where you have never been before (in the life which you
consciously remember) that give you at once completely the feeling of
your having arrived at the home familiar to your spirit. And there
presently occurs here an event in your career predetermined (I doubt
not) æons and æons ago. A buxom body with the most glorious complexion
(you ween) in all England--which is to say in the world--enters the
ancient room: a lass whose rosy, honest, pedestrian face and bursting
figure are to become forever more for you the connotation of the name
"Maggie." The daughter, this, (you later learn) of your Mrs. Cheeseman.
Soon it is all arranged, and you are having your tea--a "meat tea"--in
the sitting-room of the "King's Head," your sitting-room now. A bucolic
slavey--a person whose cheerful simpleness is like to that of the little
creatures of the field--attends you. In this commodious apartment of
yours is a great scintillation of chintz; flowers, in pots and vases,
everywhere caress the eye; and the fancy is kindled by the spectacle of
many stuffed birds in glass cases. On the heavily flowered wall hangs a
handsome specimen of the "glass" (invariably found in England) for
forecasting the weather; a "pianoforte," as piquantly old-fashioned as a
cocked hat, crosses one end wall; and venerable paintings (which time
has mellowed to the richness and the general color effect of an old plug
of tobacco), bright sporting prints, and antique oddities of furniture
to an extent that it would require a catalogue to name, all combine to
give an air of true sitting-room opulence to the chamber.
But of landladies, and the connotations of landladies, one could write a
book of several volumes; and it being a very fair day, and a Sunday, and
the first cool breath after a very hot summer, I do not think I shall
write those volumes this afternoon; I shall go out for a bit of air and
a look at the world.