The Boarding House

								
Mrs Mooney was a butcher’s daughter. She was a woman who was quite able
to keep things to herself: a determined woman. She had married her
father’s foreman and opened a butcher’s shop near Spring Gardens. But
as soon as his father-in-law was dead Mr Mooney began to go to the
devil. He drank, plundered the till, ran headlong into debt. It was no
use making him take the pledge: he was sure to break out again a few
days after. By fighting his wife in the presence of customers and by
buying bad meat he ruined his business. One night he went for his wife
with the cleaver and she had to sleep in a neighbour’s house.

After that they lived apart. She went to the priest and got a
separation from him with care of the children. She would give him
neither money nor food nor house-room; and so he was obliged to enlist
himself as a sheriff’s man. He was a shabby stooped little drunkard
with a white face and a white moustache and white eyebrows, pencilled
above his little eyes, which were pink-veined and raw; and all day long
he sat in the bailiff’s room, waiting to be put on a job. Mrs Mooney,
who had taken what remained of her money out of the butcher business
and set up a boarding house in Hardwicke Street, was a big imposing
woman. Her house had a floating population made up of tourists from
Liverpool and the Isle of Man and, occasionally, artistes from the
music-halls. Its resident population was made up of clerks from the
city. She governed her house cunningly and firmly, knew when to give
credit, when to be stern and when to let things pass. All the resident
young men spoke of her as The Madam.

Mrs Mooney’s young men paid fifteen shillings a week for board and
lodgings (beer or stout at dinner excluded). They shared in common
tastes and occupations and for this reason they were very chummy with
one another. They discussed with one another the chances of favourites
and outsiders. Jack Mooney, the Madam’s son, who was clerk to a
commission agent in Fleet Street, had the reputation of being a hard
case. He was fond of using soldiers’ obscenities: usually he came home
in the small hours. When he met his friends he had always a good one to
tell them and he was always sure to be on to a good thing—that is to
say, a likely horse or a likely artiste. He was also handy with the
mits and sang comic songs. On Sunday nights there would often be a
reunion in Mrs Mooney’s front drawing-room. The music-hall artistes
would oblige; and Sheridan played waltzes and polkas and vamped
accompaniments. Polly Mooney, the Madam’s daughter, would also sing.
She sang:

     I’m a ... naughty girl.
         You needn’t sham:
         You know I am.

Polly was a slim girl of nineteen; she had light soft hair and a small
full mouth. Her eyes, which were grey with a shade of green through
them, had a habit of glancing upwards when she spoke with anyone, which
made her look like a little perverse madonna. Mrs Mooney had first sent
her daughter to be a typist in a corn-factor’s office but, as a
disreputable sheriff’s man used to come every other day to the office,
asking to be allowed to say a word to his daughter, she had taken her
daughter home again and set her to do housework. As Polly was very
lively the intention was to give her the run of the young men. Besides,
young men like to feel that there is a young woman not very far away.
Polly, of course, flirted with the young men but Mrs Mooney, who was a
shrewd judge, knew that the young men were only passing the time away:
none of them meant business. Things went on so for a long time and Mrs
Mooney began to think of sending Polly back to typewriting when she
noticed that something was going on between Polly and one of the young
men. She watched the pair and kept her own counsel.

Polly knew that she was being watched, but still her mother’s
persistent silence could not be misunderstood. There had been no open
complicity between mother and daughter, no open understanding but,
though people in the house began to talk of the affair, still Mrs
Mooney did not intervene. Polly began to grow a little strange in her
manner and the young man was evidently perturbed. At last, when she
judged it to be the right moment, Mrs Mooney intervened. She dealt with
moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat: and in this case she had
made up her mind.

It was a bright Sunday morning of early summer, promising heat, but
with a fresh breeze blowing. All the windows of the boarding house were
open and the lace curtains ballooned gently towards the street beneath
the raised sashes. The belfry of George’s Church sent out constant
peals and worshippers, singly or in groups, traversed the little circus
before the church, revealing their purpose by their self-contained
demeanour no less than by the little volumes in their gloved hands.
Breakfast was over in the boarding house and the table of the
breakfast-room was covered with plates on which lay yellow streaks of
eggs with morsels of bacon-fat and bacon-rind. Mrs Mooney sat in the
straw arm-chair and watched the servant Mary remove the breakfast
things. She made Mary collect the crusts and pieces of broken bread to
help to make Tuesday’s bread-pudding. When the table was cleared, the
broken bread collected, the sugar and butter safe under lock and key,
she began to reconstruct the interview which she had had the night
before with Polly. Things were as she had suspected: she had been frank
in her questions and Polly had been frank in her answers. Both had been
somewhat awkward, of course. She had been made awkward by her not
wishing to receive the news in too cavalier a fashion or to seem to
have connived and Polly had been made awkward not merely because
allusions of that kind always made her awkward but also because she did
not wish it to be thought that in her wise innocence she had divined
the intention behind her mother’s tolerance.

Mrs Mooney glanced instinctively at the little gilt clock on the
mantelpiece as soon as she had become aware through her revery that the

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