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Upon the same landing as the Hardings was an elderly spinster-lady of great respectability who would especially enjoin Mrs. Harding to put a new bulb of somewhat superior power upon the landing when the Marchioness of Shewburyness came to visit her once a month. There were many other tenants of great typicality: in a word, the house was properly stocked, in all its little compartments, in such a way as emotionally to equip it for its passage through time. The Hardings were shortly to leave it. A certain percentage of its tenants were to leave it, too, when London was blitzed. The Blitz, indeed, changed it a great deal: it shook the decaying cement between its bricks, it shook the slates from its roof. Indeed, in the depths of the war-years it became somewhat a wild place. Mrs. Abbott had refused to spend any money on blacking-out the stair-windows, and consequently there was no illumination at night. It was not, however, at night that Mrs. Harradson plunged down the stairs and was killed. A pail of water and a brush made it plain what she had been doing. Those familiar with her repertoire of enemies spoke of foul play, and whispered that it was the postman, who had stopped her tongue with his boot. The actor still dwelt there, but he was a changed man, greying at the temples, it was said. By forty-five Mr. Dewes had lost the sight of both eyes. A woman-friend of the Hardings, who saw him not long after the Blitz, recalled how he had told her that the cellar was full of dead leaves and a wild cat had established its home there, a brood of wild kittens springing about among the leaves. This wild cat so terrorized the tenants that they dared not go down to their trash bins just outside the cellar-door. And then this same woman narrated how she had passed him down the street while a rain of incendiaries was falling in the district, and the roof of the building where the Hardings had dwelt was on fire and the tenants of the upper flats were flinging blazing cushions and other articles into the street. Professor Harding's comment was that the House that Jack Built was always built in the same way. And its destiny was in accordance with its architecture. Some houses built by Jack attracted incendiaries, some did not. But it did not matter whether they did or whether they did not. All in the end had wild cats in their cellars, for civilization never continued long enough to keep the wild cats out—if you call it civilization, René Harding would shout.