Mary Fortune

My Lodger

Warsaw 2022

Contents

My Lodger

My Lodger

Why, you know, it was only last summer that I was wearily trudging through Melbourne streets in search of lodgings, and will you credit it that I have today arrived at the dignity of keeping lodgers myself! Instead of speaking humbly to crusty old women who scan me from head to foot inspectively, and watch any loose articles, such as a huckaback towel, that may be lying about when I request to see the “apartment” to let, I have the immense satisfaction of being crusty, and of snapping and turning up my nose at non-eligible inquirers for rooms myself.

Now, I don’t care how much inclined you may be to disagreeable fault-finding, you must acknowledge that I have wonderfully improved my condition within the past few months; not that I expect much sympathy from you in any case, oh, no! (although, if you made anything by it, I have no doubt any quantity of that commodity would be humbly at my service), but you are so much in the habit of considering yourself and your judgments as infallible, and of talking of yourself as a reasonable and reasoning creature (fond public!) that you would not venture upon jeopardising your character by denying a fact so obvious.

And although I calculate upon a hearing of my little insignificant interests from you in a general way, in a particular one how idle it would be to attempt interesting you! You walk on Turkey carpets, or at the least Brussels, you do; and you loll upon, oh, so soft and delicious sofas, and in the downiest of easy-chairs; and what do you care about the cost of dingy-looking drugget, or the price of sea-weed mattresses! Faugh! the very idea of the thing makes you ill, doesn’t it? but that doesn’t trouble me in the least, you know, for it is quite as much pleasure to me to talk of my own petty affairs as it is to you to discuss the most important arrangements connected with your most magnificent menage.

If one has the bump of constructiveness at all well developed, there is nothing more pleasurably exciting than furnishing a house upon nothing. Until you commence to do so with not more than four or five pounds in your purse, and begin to contrive tables and seats out of empty cases, and to convert trunks and boxes into pretty-looking ottomans, you don’t know what fun there is in the world. Until you have to scrape pennies together in a way that the careful can only understand, and lay them together to make shillings for the acquisition of some necessary trifle, you have little idea of the comfort to be derived from the most ordinary of necessities; and I have not the least doubt that I have more real pleasure in contemplating at this moment a very pretty rug, bought for the sum of two shillings and sixpence, than you enjoy in looking at the tout ensemble of your very magnificent drawing-room, the furnishing of which, I myself am aware, cost you a few cool hundreds.

And when I laid that said rug down in front of a fireplace as white as whitening could make it, and looked from the bright cluster of red roses and white lilies in the centre of it, to my muslin-draped toilet, that you would never suppose to be three empty orange cases, I began to feel the entire satisfaction of having a whole “furnished room to let.” You might turn up your nose at my clean matted floor, and the efforts I had made to make two chairs look four in my disposal of them in half a dozen different positions; but, thank goodness, I am not likely to have you looking for lodgings at my door just at present, although I have seen loftier ideas than yours reduced even lower in my time.

Well, my “apartment” being in a state of readiness, the next step was to take expeditious measures to lay my claims for patronage before the public, and, of course, considering my means, or rather my want of them, it was necessary for me to do so in as cheap a form as possible. Firstly, then, I wrote several “cards,” stating that furnished apartments might be had at so-and-so, such a street, and these I distributed to the baker and the butcher and the grocer, with the polite request that they would kindly place the same on view in their several windows. Certainly they all promised to be kind enough, and, with one exception, all were kind enough, for I made it my business to walk round and see that they had done so; and that disgraceful exception was the butcher, who goes round and rings a bell every day to call out his customers, and I should think the foolish man had since repented his conduct in sackcloth and ashes, for I have not since purchased my pound of “chuck” steak, or pennyworth of cat’s meat from his cart.

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