Kitabı oku: «That House I Bought», sayfa 6
TENTH PERIOD
Getting acquainted is part and parcel of buying a house. There is something in the human chest that yearns for speaking terms, at least with the fellow who is liable to lend you his lawn mower or by whose wife you may some day be called upon for emergency aid in the culinary department.
Our good friends came out, it's true, and last night Kittie and Lucy Eugenie sat on the porch, and afterward had iced tea and peanut sandwiches in the kitchen, but I mean the regular acquaintance of the long day that makes the wife forget distances and isolation.
Whooping cough was our visiting card.
I got acquainted with the nearest neighbor through the courtesy of his advice when I made some fool remark about the nature of the ground for light gardening, and he gave me the benefit of his information to the contrary. We knew one family so intimately that we could almost nod as we passed without fear of being snubbed—but not a soul called, inquired, or seemed to care. It was the busy time, and we didn't mind so much then. When things lightened up on the labor end we would begin to notice it.
And then we brought Lydie out for the air. Poor little thing! She whooped and whooped and whooped. In the middle of the night she whooped, and she whooped in the morning. She would stop doing almost anything else to run to her auntie and whoop. She knew her responsibility. In the city she had gone from door to door ringing bells and gravely informing the occupants that their children mustn't play with her, because it was catching. She ran her quarantine strictly, but, of course, our new community sharers didn't know that.
The groceryman, milkman, iceman, paper boy, the plumber, carpenter, stableman—all manner of men who circulate—learned that Lydie had the whooping cough. It wasn't long before our neighbors began to take notice—I mean our neighbors several houses removed, and across the street. We already knew our nearest neighbors, and their stout little red-haired heir and the little baby that sang miserere in the stilly night. But the niece with the whooping cough made us talked about and observed. One day a little girl ran up to Lydie.
"My mamma says I can play with you, 'cause I've had the whooping cough!"
Lydie promptly produced her jumping rope. And then there was another from the same house, and we discovered, to our joy, that the children of the horny-handed city editor had also had the whooping cough. We didn't need an introduction there, but the play privilege was pie for the baby. First thing I knew baby was on this porch and that porch, and on the way home in the evening I whistled for her and nodded to the grownups who were entertaining her.
But we've lost our intermediary. The other night baby whooped and I whooped. Mine was nervous indigestion, combined with a lot of imagination that makes the patent medicine business profitable. Between us, baby and I kept up a merry circus all night. She was really sick, and we sent her home to her mother.
What a wonderful thing it is to have a baby in the house!
Every morning Catherine and Eleanor go out and pick buttercups and forget-me-nots, and bring them to my wife; and she puts them in a vase with the greatest show of gratitude you ever saw, and then proceeds to stuff the children with cakes until they choke, and sends them home full.
Every day the little auburn-haired boy king in the House Next Door trots out with his tiny red wagon and laboriously drags that treasure of childhood up and down the pavement—sometimes prancing like a race horse, sometimes plodding along like a mule that curses his ancestry, sometimes ambling by like a good-natured family horse, guaranteed not to run away or scare at an automobile!
And the little one—the baby in the go-cart. What a time the baby has watching Big Brother, and admiring his strength as he performs miracles, not only pulling and backing the tiny red wagon all by himself, but actually turning it around and running the other way, without so much as getting caught in the cracks or stuck in the sod! You can see admiration fairly oozing from baby's eyes; and when he runs at her and pretends to kick his heels into the dashboard, what a laugh she has!
Up the street, where the apartments are with the shiny sets of bells on the front by the door, and the big rocking chairs and air of solid comfort, there are some other children, but I haven't learned their names. They play around the porch and front yard, and run across the street, scampering up the hill to pick flowers from the lots that soon will feel the plow; and their mothers keep an eye on them—not that any accident could happen, for vehicles are scarce out our way and the street car doesn't enter the quiet of our lives; but just because—well, mothers are a bit peculiar that way—I mean that way of keeping an eye on the young ones.
A fellow never knows what a remarkable head a child has, if he has none of his own, until he begins borrowing babies from the neighbors.
There's Catherine, for instance. Catherine and Eleanor and I were looking for the little pale anemones that hide around the roots of trees. I picked some four-petaled blue flowers and instructed the children.
"These," I said, "are forget-me-nots."
"No, they're not," said Catherine promptly. "They are bluettes. Forget-me-nots have five petals and these have only four."
"Oh!" I said; "and where did you learn that?"
"My teacher told me, and she told me–" which ran into a long lecture on botany and horticulture and forest-lore and things that made me ashamed, for, frankly, I didn't know whether the tree that shaded us was an oak or a maple. I think there should be a limit on male suffrage, and woman domination, and child education. There are some things that make the average man feel cheap, if he has pride.
But this is all about the babies, and about the House only indirectly. We love children, my wife and I, and, perhaps, we love them the more because we can send them back to where we borrowed them when they become troublesome. But the most wonderful thing about babies to me is that not so long ago we were all, you and I and your neighbor, all helpless, gooing, crowing, dimpling, fat or slim kids, bundled up in carriages and looking wonder-eyed at the great picture life unfolded before us. And these babies around us—some of these days they'll be the men and women, and some of them will borrow babies, and some will cuddle their own.
The babies, God bless 'em!—and the flowers! They are very alike.
ELEVENTH PERIOD
When the house was put in order we invited our professional associates jointly—the city editor and myself and our wives—to come out and see us. It was not a dress affair. It was a case of pajamas preferred and boiled shirts common, out under the hot sun in the flat, or lolling under the oaks in the grove, where we had hard benches to make our guests appreciate upholstery. There were fifty guests, boys and girls of all ages, and, Lord, what a time we had! Not that it beat a Hibernian picnic, because it didn't; but in the pride of your first possession, to have your daily associates come out and look you over and help you enjoy it makes owning a house really worth while.
What with getting ready and getting over it, catching up sleep and massaging aching muscles, that event stands as epochal in the history of our family. For days the wives worried each other to death about what they'd have. First, one would suggest ham sandwiches and chicken salad, and the minute they agreed on that the other would switch in soft crabs and roast beef. Whether to drink coffee, tea, or lemonade, or all three; whether to have a modest modicum of malt, whether to make a punch or just let the guests drink from the air, like trees and flowers—these were all vexing points, by no means to be settled offhand. And it was not only one night that I was aroused by dream-talk like this:
"Really, I think lemonade would be nicer—and just a few sandwiches and coffee and ice cream, and–" The dream trailed off into a weary sigh that is the closest approach a real lady ever makes to a snore.
Well, it happened. They came by twos and threes, and I toted chairs and camp stools from the house the three long blocks to the grove. At first we made conversation with the children—Eleanor and Catherine—and then our intellectual dean, observing a Catholic institution nearby, correctly surmised by its mansard slate roof that it was built before the eighties; it was built in '72. With such mental diversions we killed time until the managing editor arrived and started a game of duck on the rock, at which the city editor skinned his shoulder. We ran races, and the littlest copy reader's legs twinkled with joy over the rough course. The girls jumped rope and screamed, and it was altogether kid-dish. Then we ate ham and roast beef sandwiches and drank coffee and cooled our æsophagi with ice cream and cake chasers. Our member with the porcupine summit insisted upon singing, and the stenographer played all the popular things. We gathered at the reservoir, while two of the men and the healthiest girl ran a marathon around that long mile, and she finished beautifully. Then we sat on the porch and had our pictures taken by flashlight.
Somebody burgled That House and moved the parlor furniture and piano into the dining-room and the dining-room stuff into the parlor. A merry wit tacked attachments to our houses, the managing editor put an "Open for Inspection" sign on the city editor's castle and some one stuck a "For Rent" placard on ours. And then they began leaving, by twos and threes, and the telephone girl was one of the last to go, lingeringly.
We slept that night—slept the sleep of the properly weary. All sorts of dreams romped through the long stillness and entertained us. The Duke of Mont Alto was in one of mine, and he was telling me something about taxes and water rent. But before his conversation got disagreeable I was awakened by a racket on the roof.
There's a fool woodpecker that comes there every morning at six o'clock and tries to drill through the slate. He's after a nest. It must be hard work. But if he ever gets through I know how he'll feel. He will have hustled some, but it will have been worth while. Anything is worth while, friend, if the goal is a nest of your own, where you can have your friends out and nobody can tell you to keep off the grass or wipe your feet on the mat—excepting your wife!
Not at all apropo of The House, there's a thought I want to get out of my system. What a lot of braggarts we men are, anyhow—and what a queer old world it is! There are two classes of people in the world—those who are doing something worth while and those who are trying to steal the credit. A modest little hen two or three doors away laid an egg, and in very few words cackled the event; but you ought to have heard that insufferable rooster! The moment the thing happened he strutted around with his chest out, yelling at the top of his voice, drowning out the whole poultry yard: "Ur-r-r-r, Ur-r-r-r, Ur-r-r-r! I'm the daddy of another egg!" How much more decent it would have been had he quietly stood by, preserving his dignity and judicial calm.
Now we'll get back to the story.
I'm sifting top soil to make our garden right, and my wife is doing wonderful things inside the house with the furniture and fixings. Every day she turns me around three times and shows me something new—something marvelous of her handiwork, immensely flattering to me since it justifies my judgment in the selection of a helpmeet. Every day the business of buying the house looks more possible and less of a financial mountain. Why, I can even afford to joke with the Duke, who asked me what I intended to plant in our front garden against the porch.
"I think," I said, "I'll plant a nice little row of mortgage vines and let 'em grow up and crawl all over the house. A mortgage vine, Duke, has flowers on it all the year round, and it's the most homelike thing I know."
The Duke enjoyed that immensely—but then he can afford to laugh, because he lives on the other side of the road.
And now the time has come to end this recital of everyday incidents in the personal affairs of Yours Truly—a humble man of no importance whatever, who for that reason may be representative of eighty per cent. of the world's population.
In closing, here is a thought that sticks with me: If I had started to buy a home when I was married, that home would long ago have been my clean-title property. If I had started to systematically bank or invest twenty per cent. of my earnings from the date of my first cub job, I'd have owned stock in the newspaper that lets me live. If I had to do it all over again—
Why, Lord bless you, I'd do just as I have done! I'd live the same sort of life, be just the same profligate fellow with no care for the morrow, go through just the same sort of trials and troubles and throw them off with just the same sort of optimism. After all, a fellow isn't capable of appreciating to the full a little possession until he has gone the route of silly extravagances and been pulled together by some sudden impulse to be a better citizen. And listen:
Without the least reflection on the good qualities of other men, the very best citizen of any community is the man who has married early and provided a nest of his own—who pays taxes and contributes his share to the happiness of society at large—who obeys the law and is not ashamed to be in love with his own wife—who works hard and plays hard, and who goes fishing.
Enough of That House I Bought. Come out and sit on our porch, and if there is anything in the larder you may sup with us.
