The House of All Sorts

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Book: Read The House of All Sorts for Free Online
Authors: Emily Carr
Tags: General Fiction, ART015040
bride ordered me around and put on a great many airs.
    The couple left for the boat. Mrs. Pendergast and I cleared up. We did not talk much as we worked. We were tired.
    Soon the doctor said the Reverend Daniel Pendergast could go home to the prairies again because his heart was healed. I was glad when the cab rolled down the street carrying the cruel, emaciated Reverend and the one-eyed ingrate away from my house—I was glad I did not have to be their landlady any more.

A VISITOR
    DEATH HAD BEEN snooping round for a week. Everyone in the house knew how close he was. The one he wanted lay in my spare room but she was neither here nor there. She was beyond our reach, deaf to our voices.
    The sun and spring air came into her room—a soft-coloured, contented room. The new green of spring was close outside the windows. The smell of wall-flower and sweet alyssum rose from the garden, and the inexpressible freshness of the daffodils.
    The one tossing on the bed had been a visitor in my house for but a short time. Death made his appointment with her there. The meeting was not hateful—it was beautiful and welcome to her.
    People in the house moved quietly. Human voices were tuned so low that the voices in inanimate things—shutting of doors, clicks of light switches, crackling of fires—swelled to importance. Clocks ticked off the solemn moments as loudly as their works would let them.
    Death came while she slept. He touched her, she sighed and let go.
    We picked the wall-flowers and the daffodils, and brought them to her, close. There was the same still radiance about themas about her. Every bit of her was happy. The smile soaked over her forehead, eyelids and lips—more than a smile—a glad, silent expression.
    Lots of people had loved her; they came to put flowers near and to say goodbye. They came out of her room with quiet, uncrying eyes, stood a moment by the fire in the studio, looking deep into it, and then they went away. We could not be sad for her.
    The coffin was taken into the studio. One end rested on the big table which was heaped with flowers. The keen air came in through the east windows. Outside there was a row of tall poplars, gold with young spring.
    Her smile—the flowers—quiet—possessed the whole house.
    A faint subtle change came over her face. She was asking to be hidden away.
    A parson came in his mournful black. He had a low, sad voice—while he was talking we cried.
    They took her down the long stairs. The undertakers grumbled about the corners. They put her in the waiting hearse and took her away.
    The house went back to normal, but now it was a mature place. It had known birth, marriage and death, yet it had been built for but one short year.

THE DOLL’S HOUSE COUPLE
    IT WAS MADE for them, as surely as they were made for each other. I knew it as soon as I saw the young pair standing at my door. They knew it too the moment I opened the door of the Doll’s House. His eyes said things into hers, and her eyes said things into his. First their tongues said nothing, and then simultaneously, “It’s ours!” The key hopped into the man’s pocket and the rent hopped into mine.
    One outer door was common to their flat and to mine. Every time I came in and out passing their door I could hear them chatting and laughing. Their happiness bubbled through. Sometimes she was singing and he was whistling. They must do something, they were so happy.
    AT FIVE O’CLOCK each evening his high spirits tossed his body right up the stair—there she was peeping over the rail, or hiding behind the door waiting to pounce on the tragedy written all over him because he had not found her smiling face hanging over the verandah rail. She pulled him into the Doll’s House, told him all about her day—heard all about his.
    She tidied the flat all day and he untidied it all night. He was such a big “baby-man,” she a mother-girl who had to take

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