My Wife and I. Harry Henderson's History

"And then," said she, "by Fall I trust we shall find a house to suit us."

"Certainly," said I. "I have faith that such a house is all waiting for us somewhere in the unknown future. We are traveling toward it, and shall know it when we see it."

"Just think," said my wife, "of Aunt Maria as suggesting that we should board so that we could shirk all obligations of hospitality! What's life good for if you can't have your friends with you, and make people happy under your roof?"

"And who would think of counting the money spent in hospitality?" said I.

"Yet I have heard of people who purposely plan to have no spare room in their house," answered Eva. "I remember, now, Aunt Maria's speaking of Mrs. Jacobs with approbation for just this piece of economy."

"By which she secures money for party dresses and a brilliant annual entertainment I suppose," said I.

"Well," said Eva, "I have always imagined my home with friends in it. A warm peculiar corner for each one of yours and mine. It is the very charm of the prospect when I figure this, that, and the other one enjoying with us, and then I have the great essential of "help" secured. Do you know that there was one Mary McClellan married from our house years ago who was a perfect adorer at my shrine and always begged me to be married that she might come and live with me? Now she is a widow with a little girl eight years old, and it is the desire of her heart to get a place where she can have her child with her. It will fit exactly. The little cub, under my training, can wait on the table and tend the door, and Mary will be meanwhile a mother to me in my inexperience."

"Capital!" said I. "I am sure our star is in the ascendant, and we shall hear from our house before the summer is through."

One day, near the first of October, while up for a Sunday at our country boarding-place, I got the following letter from Jim Fellows:

My Dear Old Boy: – I think we have got it, I mean got the house. I am not quite sure what your wife will say, but I happened to meet Miss Alice last night and I told her, and she says she is sure it will do. Hear and understand.

Coming down town yesterday I bought the Herald and read to my joy that Jack Fergus had been appointed Consul to Algiers. To say the truth we fellows have thought the game was pretty much up with poor Jack; his throat and lungs are so bad, and his family consumptive. So I said when I read it, 'Good! there's a thing that'll do.' I went right round to congratulate him and found three or four of our fellows doing the same thing. Jack was pleased, said it was all right, but still I could see there was a hitch somewhere, and that in fact it was not all right, and when the other fellows went away I staid, and then it came out. He said at once that he was glad of the appointment, but that he had no money; the place at Algiers does not support a man. He will have to give up his bank salary, and unless he could sell his house for ready money he could do nothing. I never knew he had any house. Heaven knows none of the rest of us have got any houses. But it seems some aunt of his, an old Knickerbocker, left him one. Well, I asked him why he didn't sell it. He said he couldn't. He had had two agents there that morning. They wouldn't give him any encouragement till the whole place was sold together. They wouldn't offer anything, and would only say they would advertise it on his account. You see it is one of those betwixt and between places which is going to be a business place, but isn't yet. So he said; and it was that which made me think of you and your wife.

I asked where it was, and he told me. It is one of those little streets that lead out of Varick street, if you know where that is, I'll bet Mrs. Henderson a dozen pair that she doesn't. Well, I went with him to see it when the bank closed, for I still thought of you. By George, I think you will like it. It is the last house in a block, the street is dull enough but is inhabited by decent quiet people, who mind their own business. Of course the respectable Mrs. Wouverman's would think it an unknown horror to live there; and be quite sure they were all Jews or sorcerers, or some other sort of come-outers. Well, this house itself is not like the rest of the block – having been built by this old Aunt Martila, or Van Beest, or whatever else her name was, for her own use. It is a brick house, with a queer stoop, two and a half stories high (the house, not the stoop), with a bay-window on the end, going out on a sort of a church-yard, across which you look to what is, I believe, St. John's Park1 – a place with trees, and English sparrows, and bird-houses and things. Jack and his wife have made the place look quite cosy, and managed to get a deal of comfort out of it. I wish I could buy it and take my wife there if only I had one. This place Jack will sell for eight thousand dollars – four thousand down and four thousand on mortgage. I call that dirt cheap, and Livingstone, our head book-keeper, who used to be a house-broker, tells me it is a bargain such as he never heard of, and that you can sell it at any time for more than that. I have taken the refusal for three days, so come down, both of you, bright and early Monday and look at it.

So down we came; we saw; we bought. In a few days we were ready, key in hand, to open and walk into "Our House."

CHAPTER XLVIII.

OUR HOUSE

There are certain characteristic words which the human heart loves to conjure with, and one of the strongest among them is the phrase, "Our house." It is not my house, nor your house, nor their house, but Our House. It is the inseparable we who own it, and it is the we and the our that go a long way towards impregnating it with the charm that makes it the symbol of things most blessed and eternal.

Houses have their physiognomy, as much as persons. There are common-place houses, suggestive houses, attractive houses, mysterious houses, and fascinating houses, just as there are all these classes of persons. There are houses whose windows seem to yawn idly – to stare vacantly – there are houses whose windows glower weirdly, and look at you askance; there are houses, again, whose very doors and windows seem wide open with frank cordiality, which seem to stretch their arms to embrace you, and woo you kindly to come and possess them.

My wife and I, as we put our key into the door and let ourselves into the deserted dwelling, now all our own, said to each other at once that it was a home-like house. It was built in the old style, when they had solid timbers and low ceilings with great beams and large windows, with old-fashioned small panes of glass, but there was about it a sort of homely individuality, and suggestive of cosy comforts. The front room had an ancient fire-place, with quaint Dutch tiles around it. The Ferguses had introduced a furnace, gas, and water, into it; but the fire-place in most of the rooms still remained, suggestive of the old days in New York when wood was plenty and cheap. One could almost fancy that those days of roaring family hearths had so heartened up the old chimneys that a portion of the ancient warmth yet inhered in the house.

"There, Harry," said my wife, exultantly pointing to the fire-place, "see, this is the very thing that your mother's brass andirons will fit into – how charmingly they will go with it!"

And then those bright, sunny windows, and that bay-window looking across upon those trees was perfectly lovely. In fact, the leaves of the trees shimmering in October light, cast reflections into the room suggestive of country life, which, fresh from the country as we were, was an added charm.

The rooms were very low studded, scarcely nine feet in height – and, by the by, I believe that that feature in old English and Dutch house-building is one that greatly conduces to give an air of comfort. A low ceiling insures ease in warming, and in our climate where one has to depend on fires for nine months in the year, this is something worth while. In general, I have noticed in rooms that the sense of snugness and comfort dies out as the ceiling rises in height – rooms twelve and fifteen feet high may be all very grand and very fine, but they are never sociable, they never seem to brood over you, soothe you, and take you to their heart as the motherly low-browed room does.

My wife ran all over her new dominions-exploring and planning, telling me volubly how she would arrange them. The woman was Queen here; her foot was on her native heath, and she saw capabilities and possibilities with the eye of an artist.

Now, I desire it to be understood that I am not indifferent to the charms of going to housekeeping full-handed. I do not pretend to say that my wife and I should not have enjoyed opening our family reign in a stone palace, overlooking New York Central Park, with all the charms of city and country life united, with all the upholsterers and furniture shops in New York at our feet. All this was none too good for our taste if we could have had it, but since we could not have it, we took another kind of delight, and one quite as vivid, in seeing how charmingly we could get on without it. In fact, I think there is an exultation in the constant victory over circumstances, in little inventions, substitutions, and combinations, rendered necessary by limited means which is wanting to those to whose hand everything comes without an effort.

If, for example, the brisk pair of robins, who have built in the elm tree opposite to our bay-window, had had a nest all made, and lined, and provided for them to go into, what an amount of tweedle and chipper, what a quantity of fluttering, and soaring, and singing would have been wanting to the commencement of their housekeeping! All those pretty little conversations with the sticks and straw, all that brave work in tugging at a bit of twine and thread, which finally are carried off in triumph and wrought into the nest, would be a loss in nature. How much adventure and enterprise, how many little heart-beats of joy go into one robin's nest simply because Mother Nature makes them work it out for themselves!

We spent a cheerful morning merely in running over our house, and telling each other what we could do with it, and congratulating each other that it was "such a bargain," for, look, here is an outlook upon trees; and here is a little back yard, considerably larger than a good sized pocket-handkerchief, where Mrs. Fergus had raised mignonette, heliotropes, and roses and geraniums enough to have a fresh morning bouquet of them daily; and an ancient grape-vine planted by some old Knickerbocker, which Jack Fergus had trained in a sort of arbor over the dining-room window, and which at this present moment was hanging with purple clusters of grapes. We ate of them, and felt like Adam and Eve in Paradise. What was it to us that this little Eden of ours was in an unfashionable quarter, and that, as Aunt Maria would say, there was not a creature living within miles of us, it was still our mystical "garden which the Lord God had planted eastward in Eden." The purchase of it, it is true, had absorbed all my wife's little fortune, and laid a debt upon us – but we told each other that it was, after all, our cheapest way of renting a foothold in New York. "For, you see," said my wife instructively, "papa says it is a safe investment, as it is sure to rise in value, so that even if we want to sell it we can get more than we paid."

"What a shrewd little trader you are getting to be!" I said, admiring this profound financial view.

"Oh, indeed I am; and, now, Harry dear, don't let's go to any expense about furniture till I've shown you what I intend to do. I know devices for giving a room an air with so little; for example, look at this recess. I shall fill this up with a divan that I shall get up for nine or ten dollars."

"You get it up!"

"Yes, I – with Mary to help me – you'll see in time. We'll have all the comfort that could be got out of a sofa, for which people pay eighty or ninety dollars, and the eighty or ninety dollars will go to get other things, you see. And then we must have a stuffed seat running round this bay-window. I can get that up. I've seen at Stewart's such a lovely piece of patch, with broad crimson stripes, and a sort of mauresque figure interposed. I think we had better get the whole of it, and that will do for one whole room. Let's see. I shall make lambrequins for the windows, and cover the window-seats, and then we shall have only to buy two or three great stuffed chairs and cover them with the same. Oh, you'll see what I'll do. I shall make this house so comfortable and charming that people will wonder to see it."

"Well, darling, I give all that up to you, that is your dominion, your reign."

"To be sure, you have all your work up at the office there, and your articles to write, and besides, dear, with all your genius, and all that, you really don't know much about this sort of thing, so give yourself no trouble, I'll attend to it – it is my ground, you know. Now, I don't mean mother or Aunt Maria shall come down here till we have got every thing arranged. Alice is going to come and stay with me and help, and when I want you I'll call on you, for, though I am not a writing genius, I am a genius in these matters as you'll see."

"You are a veritable household fairy," said I, "and this house, henceforth, lies on the borders of the fairy land. Troops of gay and joyous spirits are flocking to take possession of it, and their little hands will carry forward what you begin."

CHAPTER XLIX.

PICNICKING IN NEW YORK

Our house seemed so far to be ours that it was apparently regarded by the firm of good fellows as much their affair as mine. The visits of Jim and Bolton to our quarters were daily, and sometimes even hourly. They counseled, advised, theorised, and admired my wife's generalship in an artless solidarity with myself. Jim was omnipresent. Now he would be seen in his shirt-sleeves nailing down a carpet, or unpacking a barrel, and again making good the time lost in these operations by scribbling his articles on the top of some packing-box, dodging in and out at all hours with news of discoveries of possible bargains that he had hit upon in his rambles.

For a while we merely bivouacked in the house, as of old the pilgrims in a caravansary, or as a picnic party might do, out under a tree. The house itself was in a state of growth and construction, and, meanwhile, the work of eating and drinking was performed in moments snatched in the most pastoral freedom and simplicity. I must confess that there was a joyous, rollicking freedom about these times that was lost in the precision of regular housekeepers. When we all gathered about Mary's cooking-stove in the kitchen, eating roast oysters and bread and butter, without troubling ourselves about table equipage, we seemed to come closer to each other than we could in months of orderly housekeeping.

Our cooking-stove was Bolton's especial protégé and pet. He had studied the subject of stoves, for our sakes, with praiseworthy perseverance, and after philosophic investigation had persuaded us to buy this one, and of course had a fatherly interest in its well-doing. I have the image of him now as he sat, seriously, with the book of directions in his hand, reading and explaining to us all, while a set of muffins were going through the "experimentum crucis" – the oven. The muffins were excellent and we ate them hot out of the oven with gladness and singleness of heart, and agreed that we had touched the absolute in the matter of cooking-stoves. All my wife's plans and achievements, all her bargains and successes, were reported and admired in full conclave, when we all looked in at night, and took our snack together in the kitchen.

One of my wife's enterprises was the regeneration of the dining-room. It had a pretty window draped pleasantly by the grape-vine, but it had a dreadfully common wall-paper, a paper that evidently had been chosen for no other reason than because it was cheap. It had moreover a wainscot of dark wood running round the side, so that what with our low ceiling, the portion covered by this offending paper was only four feet and a half wide.

I confess, in the multitude of things on hand in the work of reconstruction, I was rather disposed to put up with the old paper as the best under the circumstances.

"My dear," said I, "why not let pretty well alone."

"My darling child!" said my wife, "it is impossible – that paper is a horror."

"It certainly isn't pretty, but who cares?" said I. "I don't see so very much the matter with it, and you are undertaking so much that you'll be worn out."

"It will wear me out to have that paper, so now, Harry dear, be a good boy, and do just what I tell you. Go to Berthold & Capstick's and bring me one roll of plain black paper, and six or eight of plain crimson, and wait then to see what I'll do."

The result on a certain day after was that I found my dining-room transformed into a Pompeiian saloon, by the busy fingers of the house fairies.

The ground-work was crimson, but there was a series of black panels, in each of which was one of those floating Pompeiian figures, which the Italian traveler buys for a trifle in Naples.

"There now," said my wife, "do you remember my portfolio of cheap Neapolitan prints? Haven't I made good use of them?"

"You are a witch," said I. "You certainly can't paper walls."

"Can't I! haven't I as many fingers as your mother? and she has done it time and again; and this is such a crumb of a wall. Alice and Jim and I did it to-day, and have had real fun over it."

"Jim?" said I, looking amused.

"Jim!" said my wife, nodding with a significant laugh.

"Seems to me," said I.

"So it seems to me," said she. After a pause she added, with a smile, "but the creature is both entertaining and useful. We have had the greatest kind of a frolic over this wall."

"But, really," said I, "this case of Jim and Alice is getting serious."

"Don't say a word," said my wife, laughing. "They are in the F's; they have got out of Flirtation and into Friendship."

"And friendship between a girl like Alice and a young man, on his part soon gets to mean – ."

"Oh, well, let it get to mean what it will," said my wife; "they are having nice times now, and the best of it is, nobody sees anything but you and I. Nobody bothers Alice, or asks her if she is engaged, and she is careful to inform me that she regards Jim quite as a brother. You see that is one advantage of our living where nobody knows us – we can all do just as we like. This little house is Robinson Crusoe's island – in the middle of New York. But now, Harry, there is one thing you must do toward this room. There must be a little gilt molding to finish off the top and sides. You just go to Berthold & Capstick's and get it. See, here are the figures," she said, showing her memorandum-book. "We shall want just that much."

"But, can we put it up?"

"No, but you just speak to little Tim Brady, who is a clerk there – Tim used to be a boy in father's office – he will like nothing better than to come and put it up for us, and then we shall be fine as a new fiddle."

And so, while I was driving under a great pressure of business at the office daily, my home was growing leaf by leaf, and unfolding flower by flower, under the creative hands of my home-queen and sovereign lady.

Time would fail me to relate the enterprises conceived, carried out, and prosperously finished under her hands. Indeed I came to have such a reverential belief in her power that had she announced that she intended to take my house up bodily and set it down in Japan, in the true "Arabian Nights" style, I should not in the least have doubted her ability to do it. The house was as much an expression of my wife's personality, a thing wrought out of her being, as any picture painted by an artist.

Many homes have no personality. They are made by the upholsterers; the things in them express the tastes of David and Saul, or Berthold & Capstick, or whoever else of artificers undertake the getting up of houses. But our house formed itself around my wife like the pearly shell around the nautilus. My home was Eva, – she the scheming, the busy, the creative, was the life, soul, and spirit of all that was there.

Is not this a species of high art, by which a house, in itself cold and barren, becomes in every part warm and inviting, glowing with suggestion, alive with human tastes and personalities? Wall-paper, paint, furniture, pictures, in the hands of the home artist, are like the tubes of paint out of which arises, as by inspiration, a picture. It is the woman who combines them into the wonderful creation which we call a home.

When I came home from my office night after night, and was led in triumph by Eva to view the result of her achievements, I confess I began to remember with approbation the old Greek mythology, and no longer to wonder that divine honors had been paid to household goddesses.

It seemed to me that she had a portion of the talent of creating out of nothing. Our house had literally nothing in it of the stereotyped sets of articles expected as a matter of course in good families, and yet it looked cosy, comfortable, inviting, and with everywhere a suggestion of ideal tastes, and an eye to beauty. There were chambers which seemed to be built out of drapery and muslins, every detail of which, when explained, was a marvel of results at small expense. My wife had an aptitude for bargains, and when a certain article was wanted, supplied it from some second-hand store with such an admirable adaptation to the place that it was difficult to persuade ourselves after a few days that it had not always been exactly there, where now it was so perfectly adapted to be.

In fact, her excursions into the great sea of New York and the spoils she brought thence to enrich our bower reminded me of the process by which Robinson Crusoe furnished his island home by repeated visits to the old ship which was going to wreck on the shore. From the wreck of other homes came floating to ours household belongings, which we landed reverently and baptized into the fellowship of our own.

CHAPTER L.

NEIGHBORS

"Do you know, Harry," said my wife to me, one evening when I came home to dinner, "I have made a discovery?"

Now, the truth was, that my wife was one of those lively, busy, active, enterprising little women, who are always making incident for themselves and their friends; and it was a regular part of my anticipation, as I plodded home from my office, tired and work-worn, to conjecture what new thing Eva would find to tell me that night. What had she done, or altered, or made up, or arranged, as she always met me full of her subject?

"Well," said I, "what is this great discovery?"

"My dear, I'll tell you. One of those dumb houses in our neighborhood has suddenly become alive to me. I've made an acquaintance."

Now, I knew that my wife was just that social, conversing, conversable creature that, had she been in Robinson Crusoe's island, would have struck up confidential relations with the monkeys and paroquets, rather than not have somebody to talk to. Therefore, I was not in the least surprised, but quite amused, to find that she had begun neighboring in our vicinity.

"You don't tell me," said I, "that you have begun to cultivate acquaintances on this street, so far from the centers of fashion?"

"Well, I have, and found quite a treasure, in at the very next door."

"And pray now, for curiosity's sake, how did you manage it?"

"Well, to tell the truth, Harry, I'm the worst person in the world for keeping up what's called select society; and I never could bear the feeling of not knowing anything about anybody that lives next to me. Why, suppose we should be sick in the night, or anything happen, and we not have a creature to speak to! It seems dreary to think of it. So I was curious to know who lived next door; and I looked down from our chamber-window into the next back-yard, and saw that whoever it was had a right cunning little garden, with nasturtiums and geraniums, and chrysanthemums, and all sorts of pretty things. Well, this morning I saw the sweetest little dove of a Quaker woman, in a gray dress, with a pressed crape cap, moving about as quiet as a chip sparrow among the flowers. And I took quite a fancy to her, and began to think how I should make her acquaintance."