The tenants became the collector’s friends–and what a field of psychology they were to the embryonic novelist! Many would anticipate his call, knowing to the minute when his knock would sound at the door.
There was Mrs. Black, whose rent was six shillings and sixpence a week. Her husband was a sailmaker. She worked as a milliner. There were no children, but a bed-ridden mother occupied an upstairs room. The front door would be unlocked. The rent and book would be on the table in the front room.
Arthur would arrive, burst in through the latched front door, calling: “How are you today, Mrs. White? When are you going to stop being lazy and get up?” “Oh, I’m about the same, Mr. Upfield. I hope you are well.” A pause at the foot of the stairs to gossip for just a moment, then into the front room to snatch up money and book, make an entry and rush out again calling “Goodbye, Mrs. White, till next Monday. You’ll be up by then. No more pretending.” Slammed door, and again the long silence for Mrs. White.
Then one Monday it happened. Arthur pushed open the door, called up the stairs, received no reply, rushed into the front room. The table wasn’t where it always had been. Resting on two chairs was a coffin with the lid off, and Mrs. White lying amid flowers. The precipitate entry flung Arthur against one of the chairs. The coffin slipped off at that end and the corpse partially slid out.
There was the sound of movement at the rear of the house, and frantically Arthur pulled the body up into the coffin and lifted it to rest on the chair. When he turned from the room, the daughter was in the passage with money and rent book.
“Oh, I am sorry, Mr. Upfield. I hope. . . I hope you didn’t get a shock, like.”
“I’m all right, Mrs. Black. It was a bit of a shock…I didn’t expect…I’m so sorry. I’ll miss Mrs. White.”
“Thank you, Mr. Upfield. Don’t go. Come and have a cup of tea.” A man appeared behind her, the sailmaker. He said: “Yes, and with a drop of doings in it, too. Oughta had that door locked. Come on, young feller. I got real Jamaica what only the Navy gets.” He saw to it that there was more rum than tea.
Then there was Mrs. Pafford, whose husband had been shop-man to the grandmother’s sisters in the butchery business. She lived in a house once owned by Arthur’s grandfather, still the property of the family, and never had she paid any rent. She was large and white-faced, now old and slightly bent. The house was one of six in an alley, and every Monday afternoon young Upfield duly knocked at the door. Mrs. Pafford would open it, having, of course, examined the caller from behind the front room curtain. That Pafford! He was out of work. Or he had been drunk all the week-end. Or he had fallen and hurt himself and was up at the doctor’s. The collector would make a cross in his book, smile and chide Mrs. Pafford for not making the attempt to pay even threepence of the weekly rent of three shillings and threepence. Hopeless for the agents to suggest distraining to the owners.
“Ah, yer pore grandma, Mr. Upfield,” Mrs. Pafford would moan. “What a lovely lady! And those pore dears wot ran the butchers! Saints they was an’ all. That Pafford cried when they was took. The blackguard won’t do no crying when I’m took. Ah. . .”
So it would go on as the collector hurried to the next house. And one day Mrs. Pafford really enjoyed herself.
There was a new clerk to be inducted, and he was taken around and introduced to the tenants. On his arrival at Mrs. Pafford’s house it was some time, and only after the third knock, that she opened the door, suspicion plain in her black eyes.
“This is Mr. So-and-So, Mrs. Pafford. He will be calling for the rent in future. Will you please let him see your rent book?”
“See me rent book!” shrilled Mrs. Pafford. “You want to see me rent book, Mr. So-and-So.” She lifted high the front of her dress, revealing nothing under it, and said: “There’s me rent book, Mr. So-and-So. Sign it.”
When a house fell vacant, it was Arthur’s duty to make an inventory of necessary repairs and pin a ‘To Let’ notice in the window. In those days tenants were not killed in the rush, but reasonable care had to be taken that a house wasn’t let to ladies of easy virtue. Their money was good and prompt, but owners were averse to having their property named in the press as disorderly houses.
Still, they often got past the chief clerk, and were given the keys. At first when Arthur called for the rent, a demure miss would open the door, proffer the book and money, say “Thank you” with a friendly smile and close the door. But later the smiles were promising and often Arthur would be invited to take out the rent upstairs. He might have been tempted, but maybe he didn’t dare.
Shades of the grandparents! And of the aunts!
There were all kinds of houses, from the vermin-infested dwelling to the large residences fronting the harbour or opening to the Square; the latter type having had as tenants admirals, ships’ captains, and before them retired pirates, gun-runners, and looters in foreign wars. Many a famous seafarer had rented one of these houses to instal a mistress.
There was a house near Trinity Church where no one stayed long, and when a tenant paid to have his lease terminated and left, Arthur was sent to make a careful list of renovations deemed necessary, with special attention to the drains.
It was a very spacious house, overlooking the church, and even then the neighbourhood was peaceful and old-worldly. W. W. Jacobs put the local characters into his stories. It was of four floors and built in the reign of George I. The wide stone steps to the front door were strong enough to guard a castle, and the iron door-knocker was a leering devil daring you to touch it. Inside, you found yourself in a large hall, with a beautiful mahogany-railed staircase leading to the three upper floors. The sun, on the day that Arthur visited the house, poured wine- coloured radiance upon everything in that hall-staircase and bare floor.
Furniture sales always began at the drawing-room and ended in the kitchen, and Upfield followed this routine. The drawing-room needed re-papering. The ceiling would pass. The window-frames required cleaning and repainting. And so on. From the ground floor up the stairs to the first floor, all very quiet and sun-filled and warm and friendly. A beautiful house, a dream house, to be dream-filled again with the glorious furniture which had passed under the hammer when Arthur was acting as auctioneer’s clerk.
As he passed up the stairs to the second floor, a coldness caused Upfield to look back and down. He proceeded, and worked through the second floor and went on to the third floor, and there he stood at a window from which he could see over the harbour entrance and watch the sleek form of a destroyer going to sea.
Quite abruptly the view meant nothing at all. His back felt as though bare flesh was pressed to ice. There was nothing in the room. Only the sunlight slanting through the dust motes and laying a golden pathway on the floor–to the door.
Then brave Horatio, who had stalked his brothers in the dark, bolted down all those flights of stairs and out through the front door, at which he paused only long enough to lock it with the great heavy key.
His employer wanted to know why he hadn’t completed the inventory. What were the drains like? The water service? The condition of the kitchen and the cellars and the domestic quarters? It was all extremely silly.
The senior clerk was sent to complete the inventory. He noted the drains and the condition of the domestic quarters. But he didn’t stay on the third floor long enough to do anything about the rooms there. It was a job which had to be done, so they returned to the house together. They entered the hall, and then decided to note the repairs necessary to the top floor with the aid of imagination, and the real sunlight on the front steps.
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