Benjamin Farjeon - Great Porter Square - A Mystery. Volume 1

MRS. JAMES PREEDY, lodging-house keeper, bred and born in the vocation, and consequently familiar with all the moves of that extensive class of persons in London that has no regular home, and has to be cooked for, washed for, and generally done for, sat in the kitchen of her house, No. 118, Great Porter Square. This apartment was situated in the basement, and here Mrs. Preedy received her friends and “did” for her lodgers, in so far as the cooking for them can be said to be included in that portentous and significant term. The floor of the kitchen was oil-clothed, with, in distinguished places, strips of carpet of various patterns and colours, to give it an air. Over the mantelpiece was a square looking-glass in a mahogany frame, ranged on each side of which were faded photographs of men, women, and children, and of one gentleman in particular pretending to smoke a long pipe. This individual, whose face was square, whose aspect was frowning, and whose shirt sleeves were tucked up in an exceedingly free and easy fashion, was the pictorial embodiment of Mrs. Preedy’s deceased husband. While he lived he was “a worryer, my dear,” to quote Mrs. Preedy – and to do the lady justice, he looked it; but being gone to that bourne from which no lodging-house keeper ever returns, he immediately took his place in the affections of his widow as “the dear departed” and a “blessed angel.” Thus do we often find tender appreciation budding into flower even at the moment the undertaker nails the lid upon the coffin, and Mr. Preedy, when the breath was out of his body, might (spiritually) have consoled himself with the reflection that he was not the only person from whose grave hitherto unknown or unrecognised virtues ascend. The weapons of the dead warrior, two long and two short pipes, were ranged crosswise on the wall with mathematical tenderness. When her day’s work was over, and Mrs. Preedy, a lonely widow, sat by herself in the kitchen, she was wont to look regretfully at those pipes, wishing that he who had smoked them were alive to puff again as of yore; forgetting, in the charity of her heart, the crosses and vexations of her married life, and how often she had called her “blessed angel” a something I decline to mention for defiling the kitchen with his filthy smoke.

The other faded photographs of men, women, and children, represented three generations of Mrs. Preedy’s relations. They were not a handsome family; family portraits, as a rule, when the sun is the painter, are not remarkable for beauty, but these were a worse lot than usual. In their painful anxiety to exhibit themselves in a favourable light, Mrs. Preedy’s relations had leered and stared to such a degree that it must have been no easy matter for them to get their features back into their natural shape after the photographer in the City Road was done with them. To make things worse, they were in their Sunday clothes, and if they had just been going into the penitentiary they could not have looked more unhappy and uncomfortable.

On the mantelpiece, also, were two odd broken lustres which, in the course of their chequered career, had lost half their crystal drops; two fat vases, with a neat device of cabbage roses painted on them; an erratic clock, whose vagaries supplied a healthy irritant to its mistress; and a weather indicator, in the shape of an architectural structure representing two rural bowers, in one of which, suspended on catgut, dwelt an old wooden farmer, and in the other, also suspended on catgut, a young wooden woman. When the weather was going to be stormy, the wooden old farmer swung out, and with an assumption of preternatural wisdom stared vacantly before him; when it was going to be fine, the wooden young woman made her appearance, with a smirk and a leer indicative of weak brains. They never appeared together; when one was in the other was out; and that they were more frequently wrong than right in their vaticinations concerning the weather (being out when they ought to have been in, and in when they ought to have been out: which, in an odd way, has a political signification) did not in the slightest degree affect the wooden impostors. In this respect they were no worse than other impostors, not made of wood, who set themselves up as prophets (announcing, for instance, from time to time, the end of the world), and exhibit no sense of shame at the continual confounding of their predictions.

The other furnishings of the room were in keeping. The kitchen range; the dresser, with its useful array of plates and dishes, and pots and pans; the sideboard, with its obstinate drawers, which, when they did allow themselves to be pulled out, gave way with a suddenness which brought confusion on the operator; the six odd chairs, one of black horsehair, bits of which peeped up, curious to see what was going on; one very sad, of green rep, representing faded gentility; two of wood and two of cane, and all of different breeds; the sofa, with a treacherous sinking in its inside, indicative of spasms and rickets; the solid, useful kitchen table, upon which many a pudding had been made, and many a slice cut from lodger’s joints; the what-not of walnut wood, utterly useless, despite its pretension; the old-fashioned high-backed piano, with very little music in it, which had been taken for a debt from two old maiden sisters who had seen better days, and who had drifted, drifted, till they had drifted to Great Porter Square; the extraordinary production in water colours, which might have been a ship on fire, or a cornfield in a fit, or a pig cut open, or a castle on a sunlit mountain, or the “last-day,” or a prairie of wild buffaloes, executed by one of Mrs. Preedy’s nephews, and regarded as a triumph of art; the two coloured prints, one of the Queen, the other of Prince Albert; the six odd volumes of books, all tattered and torn, like the man in the nursery rhyme; – these were the elegant surroundings which set the stamp upon Mrs. Preedy’s social standing in the neighbourhood of Great Porter Square.

There were four doors in the kitchen – one leading into the passage which communicated with the upper portion of the house, another affording an entrance into Mrs. Preedy’s bedchamber, another disclosing a dark cupboard, apparently about four feet square, but which, being used as a bedroom by the maid-of-all-work, must have been slightly larger, and the last conducting to the scullery, which opened into the area, through the iron grating of which in the pavement above, human nature monotonously presented itself in a panoramic prospect of definite and indefinite human legs and ankles. Here, also, glimpses of a blissful earthly paradise were enjoyed by the various maids-of-all-work who came and went (for none stopped long at No. 118), through the medium of the baker, and the butcher, and even of the scavenger who called to collect the dust. Many a flirtation had been carried on in that dark nook. Beneath area railings, as in the fragrant air of fashionable conservatories, Love is lord of all.

Mrs. Preedy was alone. Not a soul was in the kitchen but herself. In the dark cupboard the maid-of-all-work was enjoying, apparently, a sleep as peaceful and noiseless as the sleep of a flower. It was nearly twelve o’clock at night, and not a sound was to be heard but Mrs. Preedy’s heavy breathing, as, with many a sigh, she read, in the columns of a much-thumbed newspaper, an item of news in the shape of a police report, which must have possessed a singular magnetic power, inasmuch as she had read it so often that she ought to have known it by heart. Nevertheless, upon the present occasion, she did not miss a single word. Spectacles on nose, she followed the report line by line, keeping faithful mark with her forefinger until she reached the end; and then she commenced it all over again, and inflicted what was evidently a serious mortification upon herself. For it was not to be doubted, from the various shades of inquietude and distress which passed over her face as she proceeded, that the subject matter was exceedingly distasteful to her. It would have been the dryest of dry work but for the glass of gin and water from which Mrs. Preedy occasionally took a sip – moistening her grief, as it were. The liquid might have been supposed to have some kind of sympathy for her, exciting her to tears, which flowed the more freely the more she sipped.