That House I Bought

You know, when a woman doesn't care, so there, she usually gets all worked up about it. It's a way she has of showing her indifference.

"Have you seen him yet—the Man Silhouette?" I asked.

"No," she replied; "but I thought, if he came to-night, it's so bright and all, I'd get a peep at his face. It would be awful if he were a dissipated man!"

"You don't know her, and you don't know him, and you don't know her folks, and what difference does it make to you whether he runs a church or a roulette wheel?" I asked mildly.

I went into the house and—well, yes, I might as well admit it—sat at the window where I could command a clear view of the parlor opposite. This affair was getting to be personal with me. And then I think a fellow ought to show an interest in anything that is close to his wife's sympathies. So while she watched on the porch, I watched from the window.

He didn't come that night, and he didn't come the next night. But while I was watching—not obtrusively, you know, but just sympathetically—a messenger boy ran up the steps. The door opened halfway and he delivered a message and waited a moment, and then left, dashing up street on his wheel. I was pondering, when our telephone bell rang. I answered. A sweet young voice called:

"Exchange, give me Mount Vernon 1,000, please—the Hotel Belvedere."

I broke in.

"Hello! Hello! You're on a busy wire! Exchange–"

"Oh, please, sir, please get off the line and let me have it! This is very important!"

I mumbled something and hung up the receiver. Then I went back to my window and gazed across the street again. The hall light was turned on—the first time I had noticed it alone. The pale blind was down, but the light—why, a Silhouette at the telephone!

I ran to the kitchen, where my wife was messing with pots and pans.

"I've got it, I've got it!" I screamed, waltzing her around.

"You act like it," she said, laughing and disengaging herself. "What have you got?"

"She's calling him up at the Belvedere! Telegram—telephone in hall—light—Silhouette—go look!"

She ran all the way to the window, and then I had to sit down and tell her just how I knew it must be the Man Silhouette. All the circumstances were too plain. There was no doubt of it. Her intuition backed up my judgment. We sat on the porch until after ten, and then a closed taxi was driven rapidly to the little walk. A man, bundled in a big coat, handed the chauffeur something and dismissed him, and hurried up to the porch. The door swung open without summons and he entered.

Ten minutes later my wife said:

"I wonder if the belt has slipped off down at the power house?"

I grunted.

"My dear," I said, "if you had quarreled and if you were making up on a moonlight night, would you bother about wasting kilowatts of electricity?"

She wrinkled her forehead.

"But the moonlight is on the outside of the house."

"That's just where you're mistaken," I ventured. "It was all outside, but they're getting all they need of it through the cracks on the sides of the curtain."

She sighed.

"And moreover," I added, "I'm going to bed."

And I did; and there were no Silhouettes. At midnight or worse my wife said:

"I don't know much else about that man, but I know one thing."

"What's that?" I asked.

"He's stingy," was her reply; and I'll admit, myself, that he might have turned up the lights just a little while.

But all this is foreign to the House. We awoke next morning to a busy experience, for our friends descended upon us. You know there is one stage through which you will have to pass when you buy a house, and for the sake of a name we'll call it the Inspection of Your Intimates.

The ink is hardly dry on the deed, or mortgage, or agreement, or whatever your instrument of conveyance may be, before you are on the telephone inviting them out to look at you. You want all your friends to see your new house—to make faces at it and chuck it under the chin, to talk baby talk to it and admire your pantry.

The first crack out of the box Mrs. Smith walks in, sizes up the exterior with a sweeping glance as she enters, sniffs the atmosphere laden with fresh smells and as you stand at judgment remarks:

"H'm!"

Now, "H-m!" may mean any one of twenty-seven things. You stand on one foot and wait.

"My goodness, what small rooms!" is the next remark, which is somewhat softened by the addition, "but the wall paper is very pretty," and the reservation damns the praise again, "in places."

All this time you are alternating flushes and chills. Your spinal column is a sort of marathon track for emotions. You go through the house with her and show the bathroom with its shower, over which she enthuses, and you are in the seventh heaven of satisfaction. But the minute she reaches the third floor, which is a sort of three-quarter floor, your heart sinks again, because she remarks:

"I suppose you will just use these little rooms for storage!" And you had fondly thought of occupying them yourself and renting the second floor to help out your investment.

Mrs. Smith thinks your piano is too brilliant on the hardwood floor, and when she has gone home you shove a rug under it. Mrs. Jones comes next day and says it sounds dead on the rug, and you put it back on the floor. Mrs. Brown gets you to try it both ways in her presence and concludes that it lacks elevation and would sound better if you took it upstairs; while Mrs. Harris conceives the novel idea of turning the conservatory into a music-room for the benefit of the base tiling.

Your prides-in-chief are the linen closet, the big closets in each room, the gas range, the refrigerator built into the wall and the plumbing fixtures. And you are a bit peeved when Mrs. Johnson passes every one of these features by with calm indifference and raves over an unimportant railing you've had hammered onto the back porch. Nearly every one of your Intimates comments on the fact that your yard looks like a quarry, but you assure each one that William is going to put on a top soil and seed it down and you are going to plant a turnip and substitute a peach tree for the oak that was struck by lightning. You work yourself up into a human catalogue of advantages as you describe your wonderful plans, and then your Intimate shakes her head smilingly.

"My dear," she says, like a blooming icicle, "John and I had all these plans when we owned a house, and we never did get our yard fixed. You have no idea of the work and the expense and the disappointments! And don't plant any Government seeds. They never come up."

It's an odd coincidence that your Congressman has just supplied you with a lot of radish, onion, lettuce, and other seeds, and that you have been lying awake nights passing resolutions of thanks to the Agricultural Department.

But there is one who comes—Heaven bless her!—who goes into seven fits of joy and envies you your happiness. You love her because of it—and because she is your mother.

EIGHTH PERIOD

The real enjoyment of home comes when for the first time you are taking a week off.

"Are you going to Atlantic City?" asks Jones.

You curl your lip in a sneer and tilt your nose and snort, and make yourself superior.

"Atlantic City! Do I look easy? Atlantic City, boardwalk, red hot sun, skinny bathers, flies in the dining-room, at $7 a day? Not on your life! I'm going to stay home and take the rest cure—that's me! I'm going to sleep late, eat four meals a day, spade my garden when I feel like it and enjoy life right. I'm going to take a shower bath every thirty-six minutes and no company—not a blooming visitor—the whole week. What I want is absolute rest."

Jones listens, but with an air of one who is wise.

That was my experience.

I was getting fagged, brain-weary and nervous from a terrific strain of making an appearance at work. The bluff went over and the powers that be told me to go away and cut out the telephone. So out to That House I Bought forthwith hied me—instanter removed. To drop the load, to forget the worries, to submerge the business ego in a week of solid rest! I was getting near to Heaven.

The first morning I awoke with a start, leaped out of bed, shed my pajamas and grabbed for the things on the chair. I was dressed and halfway down stairs before I realized that it was off duty for mine. O joy! I got The Sun from the porch and read the leading locals and saw half a dozen stories sticking out between the lines. The telephone was handy; I'd call up the office and suggest—whoa! The telephone had been cut out.

"Good!" I exclaimed internally. "I'll have late breakfast and sleep a couple of hours."

My wife came down.

"While I'm getting breakfast," she said, "suppose you turn the hose on the porch, and just kind of dust it off with this broom. The girl won't come until next week, and you know I'm a sick woman."

I squirted the hose and dusted. Scrubbery is one of my short talents. When the sun dried it off, the porch was streaked from end to end, and I had to do it over with my wife supervising.

"It is so sweet for us to be together in our nice new home," she said, as I dutifully toted dishes to the kitchen. "You wipe while I wash them, and then you can take a hammer and some tacks and fix these old chairs for the kitchen. When you get that done you can put up some shelves for me in the fruit pantry, and why don't you arrange your books to-day? They're in all sorts of places. There are lots of sticks and stones around the yard. Suppose you pick them up and mow the lawn. Oh, I know what you can do! You can level up all these little gullies where the rain has cut up the loose dirt in the back yard. Isn't it just too dear for anything for us to have a whole week of fun fixing up around the house? I think after you get through with the yard you can–"

And so on and so on, to the end of the chapter!

Some people think cleaning up around a new house is pie for papa, but it isn't. There is none of that glamour you read about in "The Delights of Home" articles, and it isn't a thing on earth but a case of chuck the cuffs and collars and yield your soul to perspiration and persistence.

First, when you start to follow the carpenter into nooks and corners of the cellar and little hiding places in the top floor, you find that he has invented innumerable kinds of leavings, deftly tucked here and there where nobody but a second-sight man would ever figure on locating them. You begin to pick up and after you've stooped about two thousand times you remember the picture in the liver medicine ad., where the man stands with his hands on the small of his back, looking unhappy and pessimistic.

And it isn't only picking up, but it's cleaning out. What to do with the stuff bothers you. It's a cinch to burn the shavings and little pieces of wood and that kind of material, but you've got to deal again with bits of putty and glass and bent nails and tacks and other unburnable debris, and you hate to throw them into the bathtub because of the plumbing. You finally throw them out the window.

Later you realize that you threw them out unwisely. That's when you start to work on your lawn and side yard, and every time you stick in the trowel where you are setting out plants you fetch up a quart of junk. The astonishing lot of garbage they used to make the ground you stand on is bad enough, but with the things you've thrown out added to it the situation is exasperating.

You run your lawn mower over a nail, pick it up, and then wonder why providence ever let you get away from an early death, for sheer imbecility. It was the nail you picked up in the third floor and didn't know how to dispose of it. Pulling up a little bit of ground with your hands, to make a place for some dwarf nasturtium, you cut your finger with the piece of glass you threw out the side window. It's vexing. What to do with this wreckage a second time puzzles you, and you finally throw it over into the next lot. That's the time you find that your neighbor was watching you from his windows, and—it's not easy to be nice to people who throw their refuse over the lot line, is it?

But the worst of all this cleaning-up business is that your wife bosses the job.

Somehow or other, the man who loves his wife still draws the line at matrimonial dictatorship, even in so small a thing as picking up after the carpenter. Neither you nor your wife intended to let it go that far, and she really doesn't intend to go home to her mother, nor do you really intend to drown your domestic griefs in drink. But with some provocations man gets peevish and woman irritable.

The night before it had rained. Our back yard was soaked to the marrow, if a yard has a marrow. We had a wire stretched to mark our lot line and keep people off the grass seed and the garden. On the heels of the rain came one of the company drivers, took down the wire with deliberation and criminal purpose, and drove two goldarned mules and a wagon right through that yard, cutting ruts six inches deep and scattering parsnips, parsley, beans, peas, and lettuce all over the place. In a new development you have to stay at home twenty-four hours a day and yell at such people, or they'll have you rutted out of your possession.

It was pitiful to see those great ruts when we had worked so hard, and the torn-up garden with its sprouts here and there showing what it might have been. But it was more pitiful to see me walking around with a pocketful of manslaughter, looking for the driver who did it. Every driver on the place admitted that he didn't do it; so I came to the conclusion that it couldn't have been done at all. I was having delusions. The ruts and ruined gardens were figments of a disordered imagination.

Oh, well, what's the use?

I got the rake, shovel, spade, hoe, hand cultivator, lawn mower, trowel, and a couple of things you lift young plants with and assembled myself on the lawn to put in a good day's work. With the rake I started to rake off the side yard, and got about halfway through when I discovered that the lawn needed mowing. Halfway through with the mowing job my eye spotted certain thick spots of weeds, and so I started weeding. Halfway through with that I stopped to pick up sticks and stones and throw them, as usual, over my neighbor's lot. Then it was this thing and that thing, never finishing anything, until finally I chucked all things and started something new.

That's the way with enthusiasts. For finishing a job, give me the plodder whose imagination is subordinate to his hoe. You see, he is a one-idea man, and the idea may not be his own; but the fellow with the genius for starting things is very seldom there at the finish. He dreams large and turns the details over to more successful men.

This new thing I started concerns the front plot of garden around the porch. It was a disorganized thing as it stood. I cut out a ditch in front of it, piled all the dirt back against the house and toted baskets of hard stones from a neighboring lot. These I leaned against the sides of the ditch and hammered them in, or cut out the earth and set, making a stone wall that would retain the earth, hold a certain amount of water for irrigation and at the same time be ornamental. It took two hours to make as many yards of this stuff, and several friends called attention to the trouble I was taking for no necessary purpose. Well, that may be so—and probably is—but it is so stupid to be always doing the necessary things, living on the obvious, plugging along on the course of existence that is common to all.

NINTH PERIOD

By the time I had worn my finger nails to a state of complete dishabille—happy thought!—and had become a hopeless problem for the most sanguine manicurist, I began to learn things really. For instance, this is how a lawn ought to be made:

First, grade your ground, then remove all stones and stumps; next roll it and then put on a couple of inches of top soil; then roll that until there isn't a bump in it, sow your grass seed and water constantly, prayerfully. In making our lawn those are the things they didn't do.

I don't dare rake our lawn, because the minute I start, out will come a lot of bolders, leaving terrific yawns in the sod. I'm sure the Duke will forgive me for getting peeved about that lawn, when he understands that there are callouses in my hands and knots in my lawn mower. Also, why on earth, after throwing on the grass seed, do the men drive wagons over it and make ruts and jam their heels into it and make holes, where my vagrant sprinklings with the hose create lakes and puddles and produce never a single grass?

With a little preliminary exercise, pushing the big road-roller on Garrison avenue and shoving marble blocks out of the Courthouse, I tackled our lawn with a new mower, put together by myself in accordance with instructions. Our lawn mower is painted a beautiful green on the blades, to keep out the rust. Also, it was never intended to cut. It would never do, in an emergency, to shave with.

Musically, our lawn mower for the first ten feet sang to my soul a song of sweet, rural peace and contentment.

Then it struck a snag and changed the tune.

In the course of two dashes I discovered that the spectacle of a bald-headed front-yard farmer trotting up and down behind a lawn mower was a thing to make acquaintance with. Two men I'd never seen in my life stopped and gazed at me, and one of them asked me if I was mowing my lawn. A little girl came by and stood cross-legged with her finger in her mouth, and, when I looked her way, snickered and ran home to tell her mother what a strange sight she had seen. Our grocer lingered to remark that it was a hot afternoon, and as if in confirmation of his remarkable perspicuity a lake of sweat fell like a cloudburst from my brow and drowned a hill of ants.

"Don't work so hard," said my wife, as I made another turn. "Why don't you take it easy?"

"I am taking it easy," I replied. "All I need now is a leather chair and a highball to look like the Maryland Club in repose!"

Sarcasm is one of my strong points, and my wife realized that she had goaded me into sharp retort, so she giggled at me and ran to the telephone to tell her mother that Henry was perfectly crazy about his new lawn mower and couldn't leave it alone for a minute.

With all those people looking on and my lawn mower hitting a rock or a hole every seven revolutions, I felt cheap. I felt as though it might have been myself whose jawbone was broken by Samson, or who bore Balaam to Jerusalem. The crowd kept growing, and a stream of honest toil rolled down my spine. Somehow or other I finished the job. Then I looked at the crowd. I left the lawn mower and walked over to them with a deadly glare in my eye.

"Any of you fellows want to fight?" I demanded rudely.

Nobody replied.

"Because if you do," I said, "I can tie both hands behind me and lick any six of you right now."

The crowd melted away slowly. One man did stay a moment, but he didn't want to fight. He offered to feel my pulse.

In spite of his sarcasm, and in the face of all criticism, I insist that I was beginning to learn. For instance, shall I tell you of the time I astonished Campbell?

Campbell was raised in the country. The smell of sod is strong in his nostrils, and he is a handy man with a hoe. Campbell is an agent for the Duke, but time hangs on his hands at moments and he dropped around in a casual sort of way to look at our back yard.

"I'm thinking of planting a turnip and some onions," said my wife pleasantly.

Campbell smiled.

"In that soil," he said, "you'll never make them completely happy. They'll be crying for home all the time."

"What's the matter with the soil?" demanded my wife.

"Well, it wasn't built for farming. You always have to put in richer soil. I'll show you."

My wife thinks Campbell is just about right. When he began to talk about how he'd enjoy fixing her garden, and would she please let him have the hoe, rake, spade, and a bucket to tote sod from a pile in the front yard, she began to look upon him as a Dispensation of Providence. Agriculturally, I dwindled in importance as he expanded.

He cut five rows, or furrows, or ditches, or whatever you call them, with the hoe, and into them he dropped peas, beans, onions, parsley, and parsnips. Then he brought buckets of top soil and dumped it on the seeds along the line, and raked the soil over until it was smooth, and stuck the empty envelopes at the end of the rows for fear my wife would get the peas identified as corn, the beans as peanuts, the onions as cauliflower, the parsley as rhubarb, the parsnips as turnips. Campbell let me bring some more buckets of soil. For that favor I have begun to question the degree of Campbell's kindness.

Then I spoke.

"Your rows of top soil will start the seeds," I said, "but never maintain them when they're out. We must get some commercial fertilizer, and the minute the sprouts show, sprinkle it along the sides of the furrows. Then we must soak the farm with a hose."

My wife sneered. "He's right," said Campbell. My wife winked at him to carry on the joke, but he insisted in sign language that I really had the proper dope. She wilted.

"Now," I said, "we'll have William throw five loads of top soil into this next patch, over which we will run a plough, mixing it not less than a foot deep. Then we'll cover it down, roll it and soak it for a week. We will then be ready to plant our tomato vines and more onions, along the rows of which we'll sprinkle our fertilizer about two sacks to ten yards. This temporary work you've done is about as practical as a school of journalism or poetry. We'll let it stand as a horrible example, but all this goes under, too, in the fall. Then we'll dig trenches around the yard, a foot deep, fill in solid with top soil and after a week of settling plant a double row of hedge, one foot apart in length and six inches apart in width. Am I right?"

I had her gasping. She stared at me in wonder, and Campbell—well, he just stood with his mouth open like a catfish, admiring and astounded.

That day when a man becomes a hero in his wife's eyes is a triumph such as Napoleon never knew in his greatest moments, and the feel of it outdoes the joy of a Nero in the plaudits of the claque. It isn't necessary to mention that I got it out of a bulletin from the agricultural department.

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.