The Dwelling of a Night

by Oliver Onions

·THE ·DWELLING ·
· OF · A · NIGHT ·

---

By Oliver Onions

---

THE poster at Euston told you nothing of the real facts of the case. It merely represented, in a very grandiose and pink light, the new and popular seaside resort, with its panorama of indigo-blue mountains at the back, the town itself (promenades, golf-links and so forth) in the middle distance, and the wavelets breaking upon its crowded and chrome-yellow plage in front—the whole held, as it were, in the arms of a young Welsh giantess in national costume, with a notice across her petticoat that for further information you might see small bills. But no more than the poster did the small bills tell you anything about Tommy Kerr and his cottage.

And yet Llanyglo, which was hardly yet accustomed to its new and glittering Kursaal, had Tommy Kerr very much on its mind. It had ever so many names for him, in Welsh, English and English in a Welsh accent. He was an obstacle to the tide of Progress; he was a setter-back of the fingers of History’s clock; he was a mongrel in their magnificent new manger; he was a thorn in the flesh of that lusty young Welsh giantess who had grown at such a rate that many of the older inhabitants of Llanyglo hardly knew their way about their own town. But, for every name they gave him, Tommy Kerr gave them as good back again, in the accents of the county that had the discredit of having given him birth Lancashire.

He came from Ratchet, and he hated Welshmen. He told Llanyglo both these things, five and ten times a day, breathing the fumes of stale beer over his hearers as he did so. When they turned from him in disgust, he departed to freshen up those same fumes a little; and later, when everybody was thinking of going to bed, could be heard returning unsteadily along Pontnewydd Street, once more roaring, huskily and uncouthly, that he came from Lancasheer (dammit)—from good old Ratchet (dynamite all Welshmen) and he’d a job to go back to whenever he wanted, at Turner’s Asbestos Factory (but he wouldn’t go if he didn’t want) and so on. Then, still filling the night with offence, he would zigzag across under the electric-tram wires to his own door, would lurch through, would sleep in his clothes where he fell—across his bed or on the floor indifferently. He always disappointed those who hoped that he might one night upset his candle and burn himself and his hovel up together.

For his hovel was his very own. It was as much his own as was his soul. But there was this difference: that whereas for his soul nobody would have given the price of a tram-ticket from the Kursaal to the Marine Parade (one halfpenny), time after time they had offered him large sums for his cottage. The Grand Hotel would have bought it on the one side, the Imperial on the other; at the back, the Kursaal wanted to be rid of the unsightly spectacle its filthy yard and broken roof presented; and the District Council in front coveted it in order to make a new entrance to the public tennis-courts. That was the problem about which the poster and the hand-bills at Euston said nothing.

Kerr called himself a fisherman. That meant that he stumped up and down the Marine Parade telling visitors that it was a gradely morning for fishing. But it was never so gradely a morning for fishing but it was a gradelier for drinking. He drank in the best compartments, taken there by flannelled and panama-hatted young men who affected to find him a “character”; he drank in the worst compartments, among his own canaille, with one eye in his blue-and-white mug, and the other drifting across the intervening space where barmaids drew corks and wiped glasses, on the look-out for his victims. These he would accost when they came out of the other door a few minutes later. His hooked forefinger would fly to the peak of his dirty old petty officer’s cap; his grey tuft of a billy-goat beard would be thrust forward over his blue jersey; and again the comparatively pleasant odour of fresh beer would hang about him like an invisible cloud as he would say, “A gradely morning for fishing, sir!”

But it was all very well for the panama-hatted young men to say they found him amusing. They could shake him off when they had had enough of him. But Llanyglo could not. He had that eyesore of a dog-kennel of his, between the Grand and the Imperial Hotels, and in the very middle of the view from the Kursaal Gardens, on a life-tenancy.

Llanyglo had made its mistake ten years and more before. They ought never to have set Gruffydd Davies at Tommy Kerr. At that time Kerr had not cared two straws about his dwelling; the probability is that for ten fair words (in the Ratchet dialect), a screw of tobacco and a quart of beer, he would have commuted his tenancy on the spot. But the moment that Kerr learned that Gruffydd Davies, all blandishments to his face, had been privately making inquiries about his title behind his back, the mischief had been done. … That was their game, was it? They were talking about “handsome compensation” and nosing about attorneys’ back offices, asking questions about his title, were they?

Kerr had always more or less had the conception of the Welshman that his one eye might be aflow with tears of sentiment, but that would be no hindrance to the other being glued to the main chance. … “So that’s it, is it, Mister Treacle-tongue?” Kerr had muttered. “Reight. As long as we know where we are. I’m off out to buy a ha’porth o’ thread——”

And with the ha’porth of thread he had sewn a large button on each of his pocket-flaps, and thenceforward, at subsequent interviews with Gruffydd Davies, had buttoned every pocket up before proceeding to the business in hand.

His title, as a matter of fact, was a rather curious one. It might or might not have held in law; in the prevailing belief at any rate it stood good. That belief, shortly put, was this:—The man who could build a house on common land, within the space of a single night, created thereby a title to enjoy the said house during the rest of his life. (Look for a house called “Hafod Unos” the next time you go to Wales.)

Kerr had not built this house of his, but his four brothers had, himself, a boy of twelve, assisting: and on the death of the last brother he had claimed it.

Apparently Gruffydd Davies had found the claim unshakeable; but he had shaken something of greater stability than a title. He had stirred up a Lancashire man’s mistrust.

There is no need to trace the quarrel, year by year, for ten years. It was not now a question of price. It seemed, and in a way was, epic—one man against overwhelming forces; but it was more even than that. No doubt in the end it was one man who believed he was right against another man who equally believed he was right. And it made no difference that the one protagonist was Chairman of the Council and a preacher who could make two tears flow where another preacher could hardly have started one, and the other a drunken vagabond of a harbour loafer who began the day with pints and finished it with quarts.

It had been ding-dong, hammer and tongs, with the advantage varying. It had been a score for Llanyglo when Kerr’s dwelling had been all but condemned as insanitary; but even Kerr’s enemies had had to smile when he had threatened that he would make those two splendid hotels, then a-building, pay for the support of his rickety old walls; that had made him the hero of the baser sort for a month.

After that the Council had set its sons of Belial at Kerr—collectors, inspectors of this and that and the other, policemen to apprehend him for drunkenness and to bear him off to the Police-station, sergeants to warn the publicans that if they harboured Kerr they might be made to feel it in other ways. … But later they had withdrawn this last prohibition. Putting their heads together, they had found it best that Kerr should drink all he could, and more. Kerr did so, zigzagging home at night, crying out against smiling, thievish Welshmen (devastate ’em!)—against their chapels (a snuffling lot!)—against their Kursaals (Curse-halls more like!)—against their Promenades and Bathing-places and Concerts Llanyglo. And he indulged to the full a vinegar-like humour. He carried a railway-ticket to Ratchet in his pocket, to show them. Deliberately he made his back yard a scandal to the Kursaal Gardens. He offered to give the cottage away to any Welshman who would repeat after him, word for word … but his forms of words varied too widely for any one of them to be set down here to the exclusion of the others. No more than the Amalekites could they pronounce his words that began with “sh.”

In a word, he insulted the whole place. Llanyglo looked for signs of its life-tenant’s drinking himself to death. But this he seemed as far as ever from doing.

II

There however, another solution. This was, not that Kerr should succumb to his excesses, but that his cottage itself should collapse from sheer age and weariness of standing up any longer. The day came when Kerr wished he had not quarrelled with the owners of the hotels that stood one on either hand; he might then have arranged for the support of their walls. As it was, these did not approach his own nearer than two feet on either side. It was as if they gathered their garments of fashionable stone out of the way of the cottage’s contamination. Nor did Kerr’s squatter’s right allow him to put up as much as a shore or a buttress. The surveyor, strolling past one day as Kerr looked at one end of his house with some alarm, volunteered this information. It was a long time since the surveyor had spoken to Kerr.

“It is foundations that will be lacking,” the surveyor said, “and the vibration of the trams.”

The surveyor was Gruffydd Davies's dearest friend. Kerr had an uneasy feeling that he and his house were being watched anew.

Then, one Sunday morning, before the public-houses opened, he set out to make a thorough examination of his dwelling.

There was not much of it to examine. Downstairs it had a single room and the scullery; upstairs was nothing, if we except the roof-space into which for a year or more Kerr had hardly dared to mount by the short ladder; he would certainly have fallen through, and in doing so would have brought down his only visible ceiling—the series of tacked-up old sheets that were one hanging bag full of dust and plaster and spiders and fallen débris. Kerr went half-way up the ladder this Sunday morning, and thrust his head through the trap at the top. He came down again scared, and stepping very softly. The loft had been far, far lighter than he remembered it.

Gaps in the roof were all very well as a joke against the Kursaal, but one gap, that must have been new, had shown him his own chimney-stack, all tottering, hooped out on one side like a barrel.

He went on tiptoe out into the yard, to look at the chimney-stack from there.

Then hurriedly his eyes cast about for a prop.

The yard was full of old lumber—barrels, broken chairs, provision-tins, vegetable refuse—and in the corner stood his timber-stack. This consisted of a baulk or two, a pole-mast, a couple of old railway-sleepers, and a few cracked and grey oars. He stood for a moment in thought, and then dragged out the pole-mast and a number of boards, and brought them through the scullery into his living-room. Moving with extraordinary softness, he set these against the loft-ladder, and thrust them up through the trap. The boards were for a gang-plank across the insecure old rafters, the prop to support the tottering chimney.

He would not have dared to do it had he not been sober. For the first time for years he was not waiting at the public-house when the door opened at one o'clock. Indeed, it had closed again, at half-past two, and still he was not there. He was attending to his chimney. The afternoon and the early evening had passed before, wedging and lashing, making a strut of his pole-mast, with the foot of it stepped against one of the sounder rafters and its other end fixed against the boards with which he braced the gaping bricks, he thought he had made all safe. Only then did he straighten his back and take a long breath.

Whew! He had been sleeping under that!

He had lost time to make up in the Marine Tap that night. His cronies asked him whether he had been to chapel, he arrived so late. He made no reply. He was vehemently cursing, under his breath, the vibration of the electric trams.

A week or so later these same trams were going more slowly up and down Pontnewydd Street. Men had come to take the roadway up, and there were barriers, with red flags, and, at night, red lamps instead of the flags. They were doing something to the mains. Then, a week later still, the District Council’s men shovelled the heaps of clay back into the graves again, and carts threw hillocks of grey road-metal down. They were about to tackle the surface of the road.

Then, one morning, a road-engine appeared, with a man walking in front of it with a red flag. It began to pass slowly back and forth before Kerr's house. Visitors at the Grand and Imperial Hotels complained of the vibration, but Kerr’s lean face was positively white. That engine of destruction shook his house as if it had been a battering-ram set against its walls.

One morning, with the starting of that infernal machine, his chimney gave a not very loud crack, and, like a heavy sleeper, settled into a more comfortable shape. Nervously, almost politely, Kerr asked the man with the red flag how long the road-engine was to be there. The man’s reply was that he and his mate had orders to “make a job of it.”. Kerr walked slowly away. He knew very well the job that was intended. Morgan, the driver of the engine, and the other son of Belial with the flag, were worshippers at Gruffydd Davies’s chapel at the top of the street.

That morning he met Davies near the Marine Arcade. The Chairman of the Council stopped. His face was odiously intelligent, his smile hatefully affable. “Well, Thomas Kerr,” he said, patting his enemy’s shoulder gently with his hand, “I hear there is improvements at ‘Plas Kerr’; you will have a grand road to your house now, whatever! We shall have to assess you higher, yes indeed, with the burden of debt the town is getting. How are you, Thomas Kerr?”

Kerr was thinking how he hated the Welshman’s fine, small, regular teeth. They were false, but by no means the falsest thing about his mouth. He mumbled something, and was passing along, but Davies continued, smiling the smile that formerly had been Kerr’s.

“I hope William Morgan does not incommode you with the road-engine, Thomas Kerr. Indeed it would be a bad thing to disturb people who are sleeping peacefully in their beds. ‘Drive as gently as you can, William Morgan,’ was my orders. … You are off to the Marine Hotel now, Thomas Kerr? Dear me, it is a curious fascination such places have for some people; would it not be better to go to the chapel on Sundays? …. Thomas Kerr”—for Kerr, without a word, was shuffling away—“you are losing your handkerchief!”

And at this reminder, that for once he had omitted to button up his pockets in the presence of his foe, Kerr was well-nigh ready to weep.

For all was now going against Kerr. He knew very well that the road-engine would not be taken off as long as his crazy house stood. And he was stung and mortified that a few beggarly Welshmen, backed by a pettifogging Railway Company or two, with Kursaals Limited, a miserable District Council, a Pleasure Boats Amalgamation, a few hotel syndicates, and other such trifles should be able to beat him. What was the good of coming from Ratchet, the gradeliest place on earth, if he could do no better than that? Kerr felt puny.

He did not go to the Marine that morning after all. Instead, he chose a “pub” he seldom visited, and sat down in a corner apart. A great longing to return to Ratchet had taken him; he wanted to see its hilly streets again, and the Asbestos Factory, and Hollingworth Lake. He would almost rather be found dead there than continue to live among these indigo mountains and chrome-yellow sands. He and his house had become a spectacle. Even the visitors had their jokes about “Ty Kerr” and “Plas Kerr.”

He sat brooding for half the morning, at first neglecting his liquor, then beginning to down it in great gulps. By-and-by he left that inn, and entered another. That too he left, none too steadily, and entered a third; and thence, at six o’clock, he passed to a timber-merchant’s, where he gave an order to a clerk. The clerk smiled, and sent for his principal. Kerr pointed to various pieces in the yard. “Ye can send that and that—and that t’other,” he said thickly. “Get ’em out now. I'll fetch a cart.”

Then he looked at the builder’s face. He, too, like his clerk, was smiling.

There was no need of words. Gruffydd Davies had been beforehand with him again. And if one builder refused to sell to him, so, he knew, would all the others. He was wasting precious time with builders.

But he now felt the heart in him again. They thought they could dish Tommy Kerr like that, did they? Well, he would show them.

He lurched away to the Marine. But he left it again at a little after eight, three hours before he needed to have done so. He wanted those three hours, and all the other hours between then and sunrise he could get.

III

No sober man would have dreamed of attempting it; but sobriety and great deeds do not always go hand in hand. Neither always do great deeds and very clear thinking—which, stout hearts being commoner than unmuddled brains, is lucky for us. Through Kerr’s bemused head ran one thought, and one thought only, namely, that his house had been built by himself and his four elder brothers in a night—built in a night—built in a night——

If it had been built in a night it could be rebuilt in a night.

He would show them that he did not come from Ratchet for nothing.

But before entering his dwelling he committed an act of theft. He stole something from the cab of the road-engine that had been left opposite the Grand Hotel. Then he went in and locked the door behind him.

During the past few weeks he had done a good deal of prowling about his abode, tapping with a stick and listening with his ear to the wall; but he had formed no plan. And yet now, somehow, he was conscious of a plan, and a very clear one. Where it had suddenly come from he did not know: it was as if he heard, somewhere quite near, the voices of his dead brothers again saying in loved Ratchet accents: “Never heed that, Ned—here’s where th’ strain'll come—get this beam up first, and we'll do the filling-in after.” He saw these vital points and master-members in his plan as if they had been marked in red. He had not to stop to reason them out. He knew—Ned seemed to tell him—that the wall between the living-room and the scullery might stand; he knew—he seemed to have it from. Sam—that the whole of the street frontage was all right. The ends near the two hotels were the danger-points; the most perilous point of all was the main beam under the newly-propped chimney. The chimney must be taken down first of all. “To lighten t’ beam,” Walter’s voice seemed to sound. “Nay, dinna fiddle about wi’ it; shove it over into th’ alley; we're pushed for time.”

So, whether you call it drink, or whatever you call it, Kerr did not set to work quite unassisted.

At the very beginning he almost came to grief. This was over the chimney. It was plain, even without those strangely remembered voices, that it would never do to touch the main beam of that wall with so toppling a weight directly above it, and once more he climbed into his crazy loft and out on to the perilous roof. Cautiously he unlashed and removed the pole, and the chimney seemed suddenly to thrust out its stomach at him. He grasped a rope to check his heave, and set his back against it. But the chimney would neither stand nor yet fall as he wished it to fall, over the end of the house into the alley; it wanted to fall inwards, over his head. He thought his agonised effort would never end. … But end it did. He felt the release of weight. The thing hung poised for a moment, and then. …

He was once more down in his kitchen, before the windows which had been flung up in the two hotels had closed again. No doubt they had been waiting for days for that crash. They did not know that Kerr himself had caused it. The ghost of a malicious smile crossed his face. “Sucks,” he muttered, “for Gruffydd.”

Then, at eleven o’clock at night, he fell to his house-breaking.

 

The writer of this record would like to say here where he got part of his information from. He confesses that he has never thrown down and put up again, with his own hands, in the space of a single night, even a small cottage. On the other hand, he has spoken with a man who all but saw this thing of Kerr’s done. Therefore, since fiction, which must continue to be stranger than truth as long as ever it can, must nevertheless own itself beaten sometimes, let that man take up the tale of Kerr’s exploit for a moment.

“Kerr?—Yes, I remember him,” he said. “His cottage?—Yes, it’s perfectly true; he did pull it down and put it up again in one night, or at any rate something like it. An uncouth little animal he was; a drunken little beast; still, he did this. Made quite a job of it too. How? That I can’t tell you. But I saw the place the next morning, and it seems to me that at one time during the night both the ends and half the back must have been as open as that rick-shed there. It was quite preposterous. Six men’s work. I was stopping at the Majestic, and by daybreak half the town must have been in Pontnewydd Street. Nobody lifted a finger. They just watched. He wasn’t to be seen mostly; he was inside, you see; but when he did come out he turned his head. … Sober? Impossible to say. And of course he didn’t quite finish. But you've heard the rest.”

The rest was like this:—

 

By three o'clock in the morning Kerr was neither sober nor drunk; he was a will and a piece of muscular apparatus, the two things quite dissociated, and yet working together with never a jerk to mar their harmony. As a worn-out old machine will continue to do its work provided it is not interrupted, so Kerr worked, in a state to which the only fatal thing would have been to stop. The Kerr Llanyglo knew was a base thing, senseless as the lime and stone through which his chisel drove (with a fearful racket), obstinate as the beams under which he hammered his wedges; but this was another Kerr—somehow the same, yet somehow another—a Kerr who might have been imagined to mutter, as he laboured, that it was a gradely night for a titanic act: that he came from Ratchet, where men did impossible things as a matter of course; and that if any Welshman would pocket his pride and ask him, he would pull down and put up again their whole blasted flashy town for them while he was about it.

Perhaps he was not really cobbling up his tottering old cottage at all that night. Perhaps he was rather doing one of those useless and splendid things that alone among man’s contrivances do not crumble and fall. Perhaps he was doing in his old ruin pretty much the same thing that Gruffydd Davies did in his new pulpit—setting up an ideal, and bidding men, though they might never attain, to remember and strive. Or perhaps he was working from the most religious motive known to man— to please himself, trusting that, if he did so, he would please something greater than himself. If so, his idea might have had grandeur, but it was curiously expressed. For he did not cease to grunt from time to time, as his face became grimy and then washed clean again with perspiration, “Damned Treacle-tongue—I'll sew my pockets up th’ next time, owd false teeth—their road-engines!—him and his new brolly!——”

By four o’clock twenty road-engines could not have shaken down the beam on the chimney side of the house; and without another look at it he turned to the other wall. It was Ned’s remembered voice that bade him hasten. As he tackled the second beam he grew quite chatty with Ned. Ned had been the oldest, and foreman of the former job. It was Ned who kept him to those red-marked crucial points, who told him that the essentials of a house are a roof and walls to support it, and that he could rip down his cotton ceiling as a temporary filling for the interstices, and that, if he made haste, the golden days would come again when he had mocked all Welshmen and had had a a few Railway Companies and Kursaals and Hotels on the hip.

It was soon after this that he became conscious of other whispers than Ned’s. He had seen the watching crowd in the street. But by this time he had ripped his ceiling cloth down, and the grey day darkened suddenly again as he ploughed up the talus of débris, nailed it across from beam to beam, and began to make a wall of it. For the great gaps in the scullery wall he used his bed-clothes. That, too, was a wrinkle of wise old Ned’s. You never caught Ned at a loss. Tommy Kerr had been very fond of his brother Ned. He had gone ratting with him, and Ned alone of his brothers had allowed him to have butter with his bread-and-treacle.

Then Tommy Kerr’s brain, which for more than seven hours had been as steady as a sleeping top, gave a little wobble. This came as he paused in the middle of the floor of his incredible house. There was something else; what was it? What was it, now? He knew there was something else.

He would have done better to begin his work all over again than to stop and think.

Ah, yes! He remembered! He remembered and chuckled. He had been on the point of forgetting the cream of the whole joke! He stooped by the grey mound that represented his bed, but his knees gave, and he came with a little thump to the floor. He rolled over on his side, but his fingers found what they sought, and after a few minutes he rose again. In his hand was the red flag he had stolen from the cab of the road-engine. That must certainly go up where his chimney had been. The town, when it awoke, must on no account miss that. Tommy Kerr wanted to see Gruffydd Davies’s face when he saw that flag.

He fell twice from the lower rungs of the ladder, but a foot of lime made his fall soft. He mounted to the top, and crawled on his belly across the gaping rafters. He did not know how he got out on to the roof; it seemed to him that he lay for quite a long time, gazing up through a hole at the paling sky, and wondering how it was to be done, and then miraculously found himself where he wished to be. And then he got on his feet.

He saw them—the people below. He had again forgotten they were there. All the better—they should see him do it … But the little hand-staff was not long enough: he wanted a longer stick, to make more of a show; it took a whole tree to carry the flag on the top of the Kursaal Gardens. It was stupid of Tommy not to have thought of that—not to have brought one up from below, where there were plenty—yes, plenty.

As it happened, he did not need the stick. It all came about very softly and gently. He was standing up, again looking about for a longer stick, when once more his brain gave a wobble. The watchers below saw him lean, as formerly his chimney had leaned, only now Kerr leaned the other way.

And so gently did he go, and so comparatively short a distance had he to fall, that you would have sworn it did not hurt him much. And he stuck to the little square of red calico at the end of the short staff. It was still in his hand when they picked him up dead from the heap of chimney-bricks that choked the little alley.

But the billposters did not paste little red squares over the Welsh giantess at Euston. Nobody would have known what they meant.

Oliver Onions.