Cakes and Ale

XII

MY PROMISE to Roy sent my thoughts back to my first years in London. Having nothing much to do that afternoon, it occurred to me to stroll along and have a cup of tea with my old landlady. Mrs. Hudson’s name had been given to me by the secretary of the medical school at St. Luke’s when, a callow youth just arrived in town, I was looking for lodgings. She had a house in Vincent Square. I lived there for five years, in two rooms on the ground floor, and over me on the drawing-room floor lived a master at Westminster School. I paid a pound a week for my rooms and he paid twenty-five shillings. Mrs. Hudson was a little, active, bustling woman, with a sallow face, a large aquiline nose, and the brightest, the most vivacious, black eyes that I ever saw. She had a great deal of very dark hair, in the afternoons and all day on Sunday arranged in a fringe on the forehead with a bun at the nape of the neck as you may see in old photographs of the Jersey Lily. She had a heart of gold (though I did not know it then, for when you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right) and she was an excellent cook. No one could make a better omelette soufflée than she. Every morning she was up betimes to get the fire lit in her gentlemen’s sitting room so that they needn’t eat their breakfasts simply perishin’ with the cold, my word it’s bitter this morning; and if she didn’t hear you having your bath, a flat tin bath that slipped under the bed, the water put in the night before to take the chill off, she’d say: “There now, there’s my dining-room floor not up yet, ’e’ll be late for his lecture again,” and she would come tripping upstairs and thump on the door and you would hear her shrill voice: “If you don’t get up at once you won’t ’ave time to ’ave breakfast, an’ I’ve got a lovely ’addick for you.” She worked all day long and she sang at her work and she was gay and happy and smiling. Her husband was much older than she. He had been a butler in very good families, and wore side-whiskers and a perfect manner; he was verger at a neighbouring church, highly respected, and he waited at table and cleaned the boots and helped with the washing-up. Mrs. Hudson’s only relaxation was to come up after she had served the dinners (I had mine at half-past six and the schoolmaster at seven) and have a little chat with her gentlemen. I wish to goodness I had had the sense (like Amy Driffield with her celebrated husband) to take notes of her conversation, for Mrs. Hudson was a mistress of Cockney humour. She had a gift of repartee that never failed her, she had a racy style and an apt and varied vocabulary, she was never at a loss for the comic metaphor or the vivid phrase. She was a pattern of propriety and she would never have women in her house, you never knew what they were up to (“It’s men, men, men all the time with them, and afternoon tea and thin bread and butter, and openin’ the door and ringin’ for ’ot water and I don’t know what all”); but in conversation she did not hesitate to use what was called in those days the blue bag. One could have said of her what she said of Marie Lloyd: “What I like about ’er is that she gives you a good laugh. She goes pretty near the knuckle sometimes, but she never jumps over the fence.” Mrs. Hudson enjoyed her own humour and I think she talked more willingly to her lodgers because her husband was a serious man (“It’s as it should be,” she said, “ ’im bein’ a verger and attendin’ weddings and funerals and what all”) and wasn’t much of a one for a joke. “Wot I says to ’Udson is, laugh while you’ve got the chance, you won’t laugh much when you’re dead and buried.”

Mrs. Hudson’s humour was cumulative and the story of her feud with Miss Butcher who let lodgings at number fourteen was a great comic saga that went on year in and year out.

“She’s a disagreeable old cat, but I give you my word I’d miss ’er if the Lord took ’er one fine day. Though what ’e’d do with ’er when ’e got ’er I can’t think. Many’s the good laugh she’s give me in ’er time.”

Mrs. Hudson had very bad teeth and the question whether she should have them taken out and have false ones was discussed by her for two or three years with an unimaginable variety of comic invention.

“But as I said to ’Udson on’y last night, when he said, ’Oh, come on, ’ave ’em out and ’ave done with it’, I shouldn’t ’ave anythin’ to talk about.”

I had not seen Mrs. Hudson for two or three years. My last visit had been in answer to a little letter in which she asked me to come and drink a nice strong cup of tea with her and announced: “Hudson died three months ago next Saturday, aged seventy-nine, and George and Hester send their respectful compliments.” George was the issue of her marriage with Hudson. He was now a man approaching middle age who worked at Woolwich Arsenal, and his mother had been repeating for twenty years that George would be bringing a wife home one of these days. Hester was the maid-of-all-work she had engaged toward the end of my stay with her, and Mrs. Hudson still spoke of her as “that dratted girl of mine.” Though Mrs. Hudson must have been well over thirty when I first took her rooms, and that was five and thirty years ago, I had no feeling as I walked leisurely through the Green Park that I should not find her alive. She was as definitely part of the recollections of my youth as the pelicans that stood at the edge of the ornamental water.

I walked down the area steps and the door was opened to me by Hester, a woman getting on for fifty now and stoutish, but still bearing on her shyly grinning face the irresponsibility of the dratted girl. Mrs. Hudson was darning George’s socks when I was shown into the front room of the basement and she took off her spectacles to look at me.

“Well, if that isn’t Mr. Ashenden! Who ever thought of seeing you? Is the water boiling, ’Ester? You will ’ave a nice cup of tea, won’t you?”

Mrs. Hudson was a little heavier than when I first knew her and her movements were more deliberate, but there was scarcely a white hair on her head, and her eyes, as black and shining as buttons, sparkled with fun. I sat down in a shabby little armchair covered with maroon leather.

“How are you getting on, Mrs. Hudson?” I asked.

“Oh, I’ve got nothin’ much to complain of except that I’m not so young as I used to was,” she answered. “I can’t do so much as I could when you was ’ere. I don’t give my gentlemen dinner now, only breakfast.”

“Are all your rooms let?”

“Yes, I’m thankful to say.”

Owing to the rise of prices Mrs. Hudson was able to get more for her rooms than in my day, and I think in her modest way she was quite well off. But of course people wanted a lot nowadays.

“You wouldn’t believe it, first I ’ad to put in a bathroom, and then I ’ad to put in the electric light, and then nothin’ would satisfy them but I must ’ave a telephone. What they’ll want next I can’t think.”

“Mr. George says it’s pretty near time Mrs. ’Udson thought of retiring,” said Hester, who was laying the tea.

“You mind your own business, my girl,” said Mrs. Hudson tartly. “When I retire it’ll be to the cemetery. Fancy me livin’ all alone with George and ’Ester without nobody to talk to.”

“Mr. George says she ought to take a little ’ouse in the country an’ take care of ’erself,” said Hester, unperturbed by the reproof.

“Don’t talk to me about the country. The doctor said I was to go there for six weeks last summer. It nearly killed me, I give you my word. The noise of it. All them birds singin’ all the time, and the cocks crowin’ and the cows mooin’. I couldn’t stick it. When you’ve lived all the years I ’ave in peace and quietness you can’t get used to all that racket goin’ on all the time.”

A few doors away was the Vauxhall Bridge Road and down it trams were clanging, ringing their bells as they went, motor buses were lumbering along, taxis were tooting their horns. If Mrs. Hudson heard it, it was London she heard, and it soothed her as a mother’s crooning soothes a restless child.

I looked round the cosy, shabby, homely little parlour in which Mrs. Hudson had lived so long. I wondered if there was anything I could do for her. I noticed that she had a gramophone. It was the only thing I could think of.

“Is there anything you want, Mrs. Hudson?” I asked.

She fixed her beady eyes on me reflectively.

“I don’t know as there is, now you come to speak of it, except me ’ealth and strength for another twenty years so as I can go on workin’.”

I do not think I am a sentimentalist, but her reply, unexpected but so characteristic, made a sudden lump come to my throat.

When it was time for me to go I asked if I could see the rooms I had lived in for five years.

“Run upstairs, ’Ester, and see if Mr. Graham’s in. If he ain’t, I’m sure ’e wouldn’t mind you ’avin’ a look at them.”

Hester scurried up, and in a moment, slightly breathless, came down again to say that Mr. Graham was out. Mrs. Hudson came with me. The bed was the same narrow iron bed that I had slept in and dreamed in and there was the same chest of drawers and the same washing stand. But the sitting room had the grim heartiness of the athlete; on the walls were photographs of cricket elevens and rowing men in shorts; golf clubs stood in the corner and pipes and tobacco jars, ornamented with the arms of a college, were littered on the chimney-piece. In my day we believed in art for art’s sake and this I exemplified by draping the chimney-piece with a Moorish rug, putting up curtains of art serge and a bilious green, and hanging on the walls autotypes of pictures by Perugino, Van Dyck and Hobbema.

“Very artistic you was, wasn’t you?” Mrs. Hudson remarked, not without irony.

“Very,” I murmured.

I could not help feeling a pang as I thought of all the years that had passed since I inhabited that room, and of all that had happened to me. It was at that same table that I had eaten my hearty breakfast and my frugal dinner, read my medical books and written my first novel. It was in that same armchair that I had read for the first time Wordsworth and Stendhal, the Elizabethan dramatists and the Russian novelists, Gibbon, Boswell, Voltaire, and Rousseau. I wondered who had used them since. Medical students, articled clerks, young fellows making their way in the city, and elderly men retired from the colonies or thrown unexpectedly upon the world by the break up of an old home. The room made me, as Mrs. Hudson would have put it, go queer all over. All the hopes that had been cherished there, the bright visions of the future, the flaming passion of youth; the regrets, the disillusion, the weariness, the resignation; so much had been felt in that room, by so many, the whole gamut of human emotion, that it seemed strangely to have acquired a troubling and enigmatic personality of its own. I have no notion why, but it made me think of a woman at a crossroad with a finger on her lips, looking back and with her other hand beckoning. What I obscurely (and rather shamefacedly) felt, communicated itself to Mrs. Hudson, for she gave a laugh and with a characteristic gesture rubbed her prominent nose.

“My word, people are funny,” she said. “When I think of all the gentlemen I’ve ’ad here, I give you my word you wouldn’t believe it if I told you some of the things I know about them. One of them’s funnier than the other. Sometimes I lie abed thinkin’ of them, and laugh. Well, it would be a bad world if you didn’t get a good laugh now and then, but, lor’, lodgers really are the limit.”