Sham

As the world war progressed rentals went down till it became impossible to meet living expenses without throwing in my every resource. I had no time to paint so had to rent the studio flat and make do myself with a basement room and a tent in my back garden. Everything together only brought in what a flat and a half had before the war.

A woman came to look at the Studio flat and expressed herself delighted with it.

“Leave your pretty things, won’t you?” she begged with a half sob. “I have nothing pretty now and am a widow, a Belgian refugee with a son in the army.”

She spoke broken English. We were all feeling very tender towards the Belgians just then.

“Come and see me; I am very lonely,” she said and settled into the big studio I had built for myself. I granted her request for a substantial cut off the rental because of her widowhood, her country and her soldier son. Poor, lisping-broken-English stranger! I asked her several questions about Belgium. She evaded them.

When she did not remember she talked perfect English, but when she stopped to think, the words were all mixed and broken. When she met any one new her sputterings were almost incoherent. I asked her, “How long since you left Belgium?” She hesitated, afraid of giving away her age, which I took to be fifty-five or thereabouts.

“I was born in Belgium of English parents. We left Belgium when I was four years old.”

“You have never been back since?”

“No.”

She saw me thinking.

“How the first language one hears sticks to the tongue!” she remarked. “It’s queer, isn’t it?”

“Very!”

As far as I was concerned, I let her remain the brave little Belgian widow with a son fighting on our side, but the son came back to his mother, returned without thanks from training camp, a schoolboy who had lied about his age and broken down under training. Now the widow added to her pose, “Belgian refugee widow with a war-broken son.”

Tonics and nourishing dishes to build Herb up were now her chief topic of conversation with her tenant neighbours. Daily, at a quarter to twelve, one or the other of us could expect a tap on our door and… would we lend the mother of Herb a cup of rice, or macaroni, or tapioca, an egg for his “nog” or half a loaf. The baker was always missing her, or the milkman forgot.

We got sick of her borrowings and bobbed below the windows when she passed up the stair, but she was a patient knocker and kept on till something on the gas stove began to burn and the hider was obliged to come from hiding. She never dreamed of returning her borrowings.

The husbands declared they had had enough. They were not going to support her. She appeared very comfortably off, took in all the shows, dressed well, though too youthfully. Having no husband to protest I became the victim of all her borrowings, and the inroad on my rice and tapioca and macaroni became so heavy my pantry gave up keeping them.

When the “flu” epidemic came along, Herb sneezed twice. His mother knew he had it, shut him in his bedroom, poking cups of gruel in at the door and going quickly away. She told every one Herb had “flu” and she knew she was getting it from nursing him, but Herb had not got “flu” and, after a day or two, was out again. Then the widow told every one she had contracted “flu” from Herb.

She hauled the bed from her room out into the middle of the Studio before the open fire and lay there in state, done up in fancy bed-jackets, smoking innumerable cigarettes and entertaining anybody whom she could persuade to visit. For six weeks she lay there for she said it was dangerous to get out of bed for six weeks if you had had “flu.” The wretched Herbert came to me wailing for help.

“Get mother up,” he pleaded. “Make her take her bed out of the studio; make her open the windows.”

“How can I, Herbert? She has rented the flat.”

“Do something,” he besought. “Burn the house down–only get mother out of bed.”

But she stayed her full six weeks in bed. When she saw that people recognized her sham and did not visit her any more she got up–well.

It was a year of weddings. The widow took a tremendous interest in them, sending Herb to borrow one or another of my tenants’ newspapers before they were up in the morning to find out who was marrying. She attended all the church weddings, squeezing in as a guest.

“You never know who it will be next,” she giggled, sparkling her eyes coyly, and running from flat to flat telling the details of the weddings.

One day she hung her head and said, “Guess.” Several of us happened to be together.

“Guess what?”

“Who the next bride is to be?”

“You!” joked an old lady.

The widow drooped her head and simpered, “How did you guess?”

He was a friend of Herbert’s and “coming home very soon,” so she told us.

The house got a second shock when from somewhere the widow produced the most terrible old woman whom she introduced as “My mother, Mrs. Dingham–come to stay with me till after the wedding.”

Mrs. Dingham went around the house in the most disgusting, ragged and dirty garments. Her upper part was clothed in a black sateen dressing sacque with which she wore a purple quilted petticoat. Her false teeth and hair “additions” lay upon the studio table except in the afternoons when she went out to assist the widow to buy her trousseau.

Then she was elegant. Herb’s expression was exasperated when he looked across the table and saw the teeth, the tin crimpers that caught her scant hair to her pink scalp. The House of All Sorts was shamed at having such a repulsive old witch scuttling up and down the stairs and her hooked nose poking over the verandah rail whenever there was a footstep on the stair. It was a relief when she put all her “additions” on and went off to shop.

I wanted my Studio back; I was homesick for it, besides I knew if I did not rescue it soon it would be beyond cleaning. Two years of the widow’s occupancy had about ruined everything in it. When I heard that Herb and the old mother were to keep house there during the honeymoon, while the bridegroom was taking some six weeks’ course in Seattle, I made up my mind.

The groom came–he was only a year or two older than Herb. The boys had been chums at school. He was good-looking with a gentle, sad, sad face, like a creature trapped. She delighted to show him off and you could see that when she did so they bit him to the bone, those steel teeth that had caught him. On one point he was firm, if there was to be a wedding at all it was to be a very quiet one. In everything Herb was with his friend, not his mother.

They were married. After the ceremony the old woman and daughter rushed upstairs to the studio. Herb and the groom came slowly after. The bride’s silly young fixings fluttered back over their heads, and the old woman’s cackle filled the garden as they swept up the stair. They had a feast in the studio to which I was not invited. I had raised the rent and they were going–violently indignant with me.