Sometimes a word or two in Pillcrest’s poems jingled. More occasionally a couple of words made sense. They flowed from her lips in a sing-song gurgle, spinning like pennies, and slapping down dead.
Mrs. Pillcrest was a small, spare woman with opaque blue eyes. While the poems were tinkling out of one corner of her mouth a cigarette was burning in the other. The poems were about the stars, maternity, love, living, and the innocence of childhood. (Her daughter of ten and her son aged seven cursed like troopers. The first time I saw the children they were busy giving each other black eyes at my front gate while their mother was making arrangements about the flat and poeming for me.)
I said, “I do not take children.”
“Canadian children… I can quite understand… my children are English!”
“I prefer them Canadian.”
“Really!” Her eye-brows took a scoot right up under her hat. She said, “Pardon,” lit a new cigarette from the stump of the last, sank into the nearest chair and burst into jingles!
I do not know why I accepted the Pillcrests, but there I was, putting in extra cots for the children–settling them in before I knew it.
The girl was impossible. They sent her away to friends. On taking possession of the flat, Mrs. Pillcrest went immediately to bed leaving the boy of seven to do the cooking, washing, and housework. The complete depletion of hot water and perpetual smell of burning sent me down to investigate.
Mrs. Pillcrest lay in a daze of poetry and tobacco smoke. The sheets (mine) were punctured lavishly with little brown-edged holes. It seemed necessary for her to gesticulate with lighted cigarette as she “poemed.”
She said, “It is lovely of you to come,” and immediately made a poem about it. In the middle there was a loud stumping up the steps, and I saw Mr. Pillcrest for the first time.
He was a soldier. Twice a week the Canadian army went to pot while Dombey Pillcrest came home to visit his family. He was an ugly, beefy creature dressed in ill-fitting khaki, his neck stuck up like a hydrant out of a brown boulevard.
Poems would not “make” on Mr. Pillcrest, so Mrs. Pillcrest made them out of other things and basted him with them. He slumped into the biggest chair in the flat, and allowed the gravy of trickling poems to soothe his training-camp and domestic friction–as stroking soothes a cat.
Mrs. Pillcrest told me about their love-making. She said, “My people owned one of those magnificent English estates–hunting– green-houses–crested plate–Spode–everything! I came to visit cousins in Canada, have a gay time, bringing along trunks of ball dresses and pretty things. I met Dombey Pillcrest…”
She took the cigarette from her lips, threw it away. Her hands always trembled–her voice had a pebbly rattle like sea running out over a stony beach.
“Dombey told me about his prairie farm; the poetry of its endless rolling appealed, sunsets, waving wheat! We were married. Some of the family plate, the Spode and linen came out from home for my house.”
“We went to Dombey’s farm… I did not know it would be like that… too big… poems would not come … space drowned everything!”
“The man who did the outside, the woman who did the inside work kept the place going for a while… babies came… I began to write poems again–our help left–I had my babies and Dombey!”
She poemed to the babies. All her poems were no more than baby talk–now she had an audience… The blue-eyed creatures lying in their cradle watched her lips, and cooed back.
As the children grew older they got bored by Mother’s poems and by hunger. They ran away when she poemed. It hurt her that the children would not listen.
She had another bitter disappointment on that farm. “I did so want to ‘lift’ the Harvesters! When they came to thresh was my chance. I was determined they should have something different, something refined. For once they should see the real thing, eat off Limoges, use crested plate! I put flowers on the table, fine linen; I wrote a little poem for each place. The great brown, hungry men burst into the room-staggered back-most touching!… none of the bestial gorging you see among the lower classes. They stared; they ate little. Not one of them looked at a poem. If you believe it, they asked the gang foreman to request ‘food, not frills’ next day. Ruffians! Canadians, my dear!”
“I am Canadian,” I said.
“My DEEAR! I supposed you were English!”
“One day Dombey said, ‘Our money is finished. We cannot hire help; we must leave the farm. You cannot work, darling!'”
They scraped up the broken implements and lean cows and had a sale. Mrs. Pillcrest sat on a broken harrow in the field and made a poem during the sale. Mr. Pillcrest wandered about, dazed. The undernourished, over-accented children got in everybody’s way. When it was over, the Pillcrests came out west and hunted round to find the most English-accented spot so that their children should not be contaminated by Canada. That was Duncan, B.C., of course. War came; Dombey joined up. Here they were in my flat.
“I had so hoped that you were English, my dear!”
“Well, I’m not.” Mrs. Pillcrest moaned at my tone.
Potato-paring seemed to be specially inspiring for Mrs. Pillcrest. She liked to do it at the back door of her flat, looking across my garden, poeming as she pared. She always wore a purple chiffon scarf about her throat; it had long floating tails that wound round the knife and got stabbed into holes. The thick parings went slap, slap on the boards of the verandah. The peeled flesh of the potatoes was purpled by the scarf while poems rolled out over my garden.
“Have you ever published your poems, Mrs. Pillcrest?”
“I do not write my poems. They spring direct from some hidden source, never yet located, a joyous–joyous source!”
“Curse you, Mother! Come get dinner, instead of blabbing that stuff!”
“Son–my beloved son!” Mrs. Pillcrest said, and kissed the boy’s scowling face.
The Pillcrests were not with me very long because Mr. Pillcrest’s training camp was moved.
Just as their time was up–the flat already re-let–Mrs. Pillcrest and son disappeared. Time went on, the new tenant was fussing for possession. After five days elapsed without sign or sound, I climbed a ladder and looked through the windows. Everything was in the greatest confusion.
I rang the barracks. “Mr. Pillcrest? Mrs. Pillcrest’s tenancy expired five days ago.”
“Yes? Oh, ah–Mrs. Pillcrest is visiting; she will doubtless be returning soon.”
“But the flat–the new tenant is waiting…” I found myself talking over a dead wire.
She tripped home sparkling with poems.
“Your rent was up five days ago, Mrs. Pillcrest.”
“Really! Well, well! Shall I pay five days extra?” (With some rhyme about “honey,” “money” and “funny.”) My patience was done–“Nothing funny about it! It is not business!”
Taut with fury Mrs. Pillcrest’s poem strangled. “Business! Kindly remember, Landlady, Mr. Pillcrest and I do not belong to that class.”
“That is evident, but at six tonight I have promised the key to the waiting tenant! That is business.”
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