“RENTS ARE LOW IN EDEN”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 26 February 1940, Page 10

“RENTS ARE LOW IN EDEN”

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT. COPYRIGHT.

By

PETER BENEDICT.

CHAPTER XII. ‘‘Come in," said Mrs Garland, and stood back from the doorway with a ready smile in response; and in spite of the lines of worry with which it had to contend, that smile struck Catherine as one of the pleasantest sights she had even seen, perhaps because it bloomed among so much squalor. “It isn’t a palace.” said Mrs Garland cheerfully, as she closed the door, “but there, you won’t be expecting one, after coming up the Pleasance. Such a nice name, isn’t it? This must be an awful let-down to you, if you haven’t seen it before.”

“And I haven’t,” said Catherine soberly. She stood in the middle of Mrs Garland’s little living-room, and knew by the light which entered through a door opposite that there was nothing beyond larger than a scullery. The place was deeper from back to front than the width of its frontage, but even that was not very great. The walls sadly needed re-papering, though she judged from the brightness of the portions which still retained their colour that the fault for that lay in the extreme dampness of every outside wall, and not with the spirit of the tenant. For in every other way the little house was very well-kept, and well-kept without assistance from the elements, which entered round the frame of every door and window as freely as she thought they must blow through the broken panes further down the alley. The furniture sufficed for the room, and if it was poor, it was wonderfully neat; and the health and its fire looked more inviting to her than many she had seen which were richer and brighter.

“Of course you weren’t expecting me,” said Catherine. “My name’s Court —Mrs Court. I daresay you’ve often had Nurse Hayes knocking at your door, though, and today I’m Nurse Hayes’s deputy.” She explained how she had been mistaken for the goodnatured messenger, and insisted on taking the message. “Perhaps I should have left it to Nurse, really, but there was just a chance she wouldn’t be going; and it was no trouble to me, none in the least. I was glad to come.” Mrs Garland, a queen in her own house, poked the fire into a demux e blaze, and persuaded Catherine into a chair beside it with a royal simplicity. “There, that’s better." she said, dusting her hands. “You’d never believe the stuff they sell us here for coal; and such a price as it is, too.” She took the little parcel, and opened it upon her lap, and stroked the blue silk admiringly. (‘There, now, isn t that pretty? And (just like that scatterbrained girl of mine to have the baby in silk, and like as not the house floors covered in newspaper.”

“They weren’t,” said Catherine, laughing. "The house was beautiful, and so was the baby. And I think your daughter is a very good little housekeeper.”

“Not so bad, considering she was never brought up to it exactly. She worked from the time she left school, did my girl, and never missed a day. except now and then when she was ill. She was on a litho on one of the potbanks, but I don’t believe as it ever rightly suited her. I was glad when she got married, and out of it. Whiles I miss her, of course, but there,” she said with a sigh, “you can’t have them for ever. Well, thank you for being postman, my dear. I suppose I must be occupying my evenings with this sort of work, instead—clothes for the baby. No, sit where you are for a bit, Mrs Court; I’m going to put the kettle on, and we’ll have some tea. I daresay you can do with a cup, and I know I can.”

It was all a little like a dream, though Catherine did not know why. It was as if she could not remember ever having come to .that house at all, but had simply been flung into it by some unheaval. She had always known that there were slums; she could have described them in detail, out of the specialist knowledge of half-a-dozen inquisitive people; but to be actually there, picking her way between the sprawling children in the filthy gutters knocking on the crazy, blistered doors, sitting here in the damp, draughty liv-ing-room over a cup of tea as good as any Mabel made for her at home—this was a very different thing. The people mentioned so glibly as slum-dwellers were suddenly real people, with indivualities of their own.

It was Mrs Garland, now, who distressed her by living in this deplorable place; it was Mrs Garland who sat in the midst of unceasing draughts, and whose wall-paper was peeling from the walls in the corners of the front face of her living-room; it was Mrs Garland who. at her guest’s slight start of disgust, put out. a swift foot, and squashed the scuttling cockroach, and scooped him with the shovel into the fire.

She looked up quizzically into Catherine! face, and said placidly, and with a hint of laughter, too: "I'll bet you don’t see many of them." Catherine, shuddernig, said: “No, thank heaven!" “Oh, bless you, I’ve got quite fond of the little things. It's no use being anything else. I can’t get rid of them, there’s no hope short, of pulling the walls down: the place is riddled with them. All this road is, too, for that matter. Ah. well, I don’t mind so much, now Nancy and her husband and the baby are out of it." She felt, rather than saw, Catherine start again, and knew that this time the prick was in her own words. “Yes,” she said, smiling, “they lived here with me until they got this house they’ve moved into now. They didn t mind;--between us we managed .all right; but it was the baby. We didn't

want her to grown up in this alley, if v.'c could help it. She had nearly eighteen months of it. poor mite. Nancy and Harry want me to go to them; but I know better. I work here, and keep myself by my own work, and it suits me that way; besides, that’s their home, not mine. Young folks are best left alone. Lucky young folks they are too, to get such a chance. Tell me what sort of house they've got." Catherine said, what she had not until then, realised to be true: “A very nice one.' The words rose into her throat of their own volition, and sprang from her lips with passionate fervour. She looked round the room, round even'this gallantly tended room, and remembered the decent little home in Court Brandon as a sort of paradise. “You havent seen it, then?”

“Not yet,” said Mrs Garland, comfortably, reaching for the teapot across the subdued glow of the fire. “No, 1 havent been there yet, but they want me to go soon. Maybe I’ll take this little frock when it’s finished, and have a look at them all again. Maybe I’ll get a little house there myself some day; you never know. They say he’s having some bungalows built, as well.” “Yes, he is,” agreed Catherine, and nothing in the reference, nothing in that unquestioning ‘he,’ as if there were but one man. in the world, struck her as at all strange, either from her own mouth or Mrs Garlands. “There are some almost ready, I should think. And more houses planned, too.” “Its a good thing somebody remembers us poor folks," said Mrs Garland, with satisfaction. Nancys got a garden?”

“Yes, quite a respectable one, but of course it will be hard work getting it into shape. It was meadow land six months ago. Does she like flowers?" “Loves them, always did. She was always hankering for a garden here, but nobody has gardens in Howard’s Pleasance. Will she ” Her worn face was suddenly eager and as suddenly despondent again. “I suppose she won't, have room for a tree.”

“It depends what kind. She could easily grow shrubs —the kind with red berries, and golden flowers; or there's room for some of those little dwarf cypresses with the yellow-edged leaves. I could give her some cuttings from my barberries, if she’d like them.” "I’m sure she would, Mrs Court, and thank you; but she was always so fond of a real big tree ’’ Suddenly Cotherine remembered in her own heart how many trees Court Brandon still had, even now that the limes were cut down, and the holly hedges torn out by the roots. There were still armies of trees wherever the dweller - in that valley cared to turn her eyes. She said very gently: “But there are thousands —trees and brooks everywhere—wherever she looks from her windows she'll see them.” Said Mrs Garland, Wistfully, and half to herself: “It must be a beautiful place.” "It is a beautiful place.”

She was still repeating that within her own mind when she rose to leave the little house in Howard’s Pleasance. it is a beautiful place; not it was, but it is. It had taken the squalor of Gallowshields Road, and its environs to show her how true that was.

“Mrs Garland,” said said impulsively, “may I come and see you sometimes, when I’m in Stanchester?”

“Why, if you can stand the Pleasance, I shall be glad. I don’t have many visitors, as you can guess, but yau’ll always be welcome, my dear.” Not many people called Catherine Court ‘my dear,’ these days; and she was not sure at this moment, that she was really the same Catherine who had lunched with Lyddon Strang that very day.

Something nad changed in her, had broadened and deepened, and for The life of her she did not know why, for she had seen only what she had known existed. But in the doorway she turned, one foot poised above the rickety steps, and looked back at Mrs Garland standing placid and gallant and capable in her deplorable living-room; and something stirred in her admirably controlled and aloof heart, so that she went back as candidly as a child, and stooped, and kissed the older woman’s worn cheek.

Then she ran down the steps without a word, and was away like a hare along the greasy bricks of Howard’s Pleasance. CHAPTER XIII. In the darkness of the late September night there was neither sound nor form in anything; no sense but feeling supplied for her the slur of the ferns against her thighs, and the turf under her feet, and the knotty bole of the tree on which she leaned. Only through the willow leaves ahead could Catherine catch, faintly as the grey' of cobwebs, the sheen of the pool. There was no moon to give it light, to silver the little waves which stirred in its surface even when it seemed most nearly still; it was only a dim grey, in itself luminous, and very faint music a song so grateful to her ears that she could hardly distinguish the moments when she heard it from the moments when she seemed to be lost in the universal silence.

She was calmer now; she had things in focus again. No one would ever know that she had been weeping, there in the glade against the crook of the willow, like the woman in the play; weeping angrily and desolately for her troubled mind and her conscience which would not rest. (To be Continued.)

“And what made you become a nightwatchman, Grandpa?” “Well, with a wife and nine kids, 1 could never get near the fire at home "