The House of All Sorts by Emily Carr Read Free Book Online Page A

had the opportunity of observing the close-up of married life. My parents died when I was young. We four spinster sisters lived on in the old house. My girlhood friends who married went to live in other cities. I did not know what “till-death-do-us-part” did to them.
    Every couple took it differently of course, but I discovered I could place “marrieds” in three general groupings—the happy, the indifferent, and the scrappy.
    My flat being at the back of the house I overlooked no tenant nor did I see their comings and goings. The walls were as soundproof as those of most apartments, only voice murmurs came through them, not words. No secrets were let out. I neither saw nor heard, but I could
feel
in wordless sounds and in silences; through the floor when I went into my basement to tend the furnace I heard the crackle of the man’s newspaper turning and turning—the creak of the woman’s rocker.
    There are qualities of sound and qualities of silence. When the sounds were made only by inanimate things, you knew that couple were the indifferent type. When you heard terse jagged little huddles of words, those were the snappers! If there was acontinuous rumbling of conversation, contented as the singing of a tea kettle or the purring of a cat, you knew that couple had married happily. There was the way they came to pay the rent too, or ask a small favour, or project a little grumble. The happily married ones spared each other; the wife asked or grumbled for the husband, the husband for the wife.
    Snappy couples tore up my stairs, so eager to “snap their snaps” that they often found themselves abreast of each other anxious to be first!
    It was immaterial whether the man or the woman of the indifferent pair came. They handed in the rent grudgingly and went away without comment. I liked them the least.

LIFE LOVES LIVING
    THERE WERE FOUR western maple trees growing in the lot upon which I built my house. Two were in the strip of front lawn, clear of foundations, but when the builders came to overhead wiring they found one of the trees interfered. The line-men cut it down. The other front-lawn maple was a strong, handsome tree. I circled her roots with rock and filled in new earth. The tree throve and branched so heavily that the windows of Lower West and the Doll’s Flat were darkened. Experts with saws and ladders came and lopped off the lower branches. This sent the tree’s growth rushing violently to her head in a lush overhanging which umbrellaed the House of All Sorts. She was lovely in spring and summer, but when fall came her leaves moulted into the gutters and heaped in piles on the roof, rotting the cedar shingles. It put me to endless expense of having roof-men, gutter-men and tree-trimmers. At last I gave the grim order, “Cut her down.”
    It is horrible to see live beauty that has taken years to mature and at last has reached its prime hacked down, uprooted.
    The other two maple trees had stood right on the spot where my house was to be built. The builders had been obliged to saw them to within three or four feet of the ground. Both trees’ rootswere in that part underneath the house which was not to be cemented; it would always be an earthy, dark place. The maple stumps were left in the ground. One died soon. The other clung furiously to life, her sap refused to dry up, grimly she determined to go on living.
    The cement basement was full of light and air, but light and air were walled away from that other part, which was low. I could not stand there upright; there was but one small square of window in the far corner. The old maple stump shot sickly pink switches from her roots, new switches every year. They crept yearningly towards the little square of window. Robbed of moisture, light and air, the maple still remembered spring and pushed watery sap along her pale sprouts, which came limper and limper each year until they were hardly able to support the