Read Online Kept by D. J. Taylor - Free Book Online

choose!
    Yrs., &c.,
    R. PARDEW
     

THE GOODS ARE DELIVERED
     
    E arly afternoon in Tite Street, and already the twilight is seeping up through the area steps and out into the grey pavements beyond. A bitter February day here in Tite Street (“that most respectable locality,” as the house agents’ particulars so truly represent it) with a raw fog hanging in the air since dawn, and little flicks of wind agitating the washing hung out in the smoky courts and byways—there is always washing in Tite Street, it will be there when all else has perished—like an unseen hand. Tite Street. King’s Cross Station half a mile away and Somers Town hard by. “Tite Street!” the cabman echoes his passenger, as if to say, “You wouldn’t go there if you knew about it.”
    Tite Street. Forty stucco houses in varying states of dilapidation, a profusion of polished brass plates (apothecaries, insurance agents, water bailiffs—Tite Street has them all), so many cards offering furnished apartments, pianoforte lessons and the like that to gather them up and deal them out would be to commence an all but interminable game of whist. Tite Street. At the nearer end an undertaker’s parlour, with a couple of great horses, their plumes dyed nearly purple, stamping on the kerb. At the further, the Tite Arms and Refreshment Emporium, Jno Phelps, prop., the dreariest public house you ever saw, with a couple of smeary windows through which the melancholy figure of a man in a nankeen jacket and side-whiskers, possibly even Mr. Phelps himself, can be seen polishing a row of pewter pots. A shooting gallery, a tobacconist-cum-newspaper-seller and a faded French milliner’s whose door no customer has been seen to enter in the three years of the shop’s existence complete the scope of Tite Street’s amenities. Tite Street. Forty brass doorknobs, forty dark casement windows, for all the world like forty dim aquariums were it not that no fish swim inside them, on a grim, grey day in February and no one at home.
    Or not quite no one. For old Mrs. Farthing, seated at present inher back kitchen with the lamps turned low and the shadows crawling consequently up the pale wall like so many phantoms, is always at home. One might as well expect the Sphinx to pick up its skirts and go hobbling across the desert as to conceive of Mrs. Farthing quitting her roost in Tite Street, where she has squatted these past twenty years and become so much a fixture that were she to depart on a little excursion to Camden Town or Marylebone market, Tite Street would feel itself robbed of an essential part of its character and get up a petition for her swift return.
    Who is Mrs. Farthing? To be sure, a queer old woman of seventy-five, with a queer old face whose nose and chin threaten to meet in midair like a pair of nutcrackers, peeping up out of shiny widow’s weeds of black bombazine. There is no Mr. Farthing, has not been for thirty years, and nobody—least of all his relict—has anything to say of him. Perhaps he was a half-pay officer, or a commission agent, or took in lodgers—all occupations with which Tite Street is passingly familiar. Perhaps his is the face, having a pair of muttonchop whiskers and a sprightly blue eye, that gazes from the further wall of the back kitchen, but Tite Street neither knows nor cares.
    Had this putative Mr. Farthing the ability to look down on his relict’s back kitchen, what would he see? Well, a monstrous old black-leaded range looking as if half a ton of coals at least were needed to keep it hot, a dreary old mahogany sideboard covered over with cups and plates and what-not, a quantity of copper saucepans, warming pans and chafing dishes piled in a heap, an old white-whiskered cat looking as if she were placed on this earth at approximately the same time as her owner. Everything old, ugly and inconvenient, and sitting amidst them perhaps the oldest, ugliest and most inconvenient article of all, namely Mrs. Farthing, hunched up