I
“TAKE your choice; I have bungalows to burn,” said the architect.
He and his ally, the real-estate man, had been unduly zealous in the
planting of bungalows in the new addition beyond the college. About
half of them remained unsold, and purchasers were elusive. A promised
extension of the trolley-line had not materialized; and half a dozen
houses of the bungalow type, scattered along a ridge through which
streets had been hacked in the most brutal fashion, spoke for the
sanguine temper of the projectors of Sherwood Forest. The best thing
about the new streets was their names, which were a testimony to the
fastidious taste of a professor in the college who had frequently
thundered in print against our ignoble American nomenclature.
It was hoped that Sherwood Forest would prove particularly attractive
to newly married folk of cultivation, who spoke the same social
language. There must, therefore, be a Blackstone Road, as a lure for
struggling lawyers; a Lister Avenue, to tickle the imagination of young
physicians; and Midas Lane, in which the business man, sitting at
his own hearth side far from the jarring city, might dream of golden
harvests. To the young matron anxious to keep in touch with art and
literature, what could have been more delightful than the thought of
receiving her mail in Emerson Road, Longfellow Lane, Audubon Road, or
any one of a dozen similar highways (if indeed the new streets might
strictly be so called) almost within sound of the college bell? The
college was a quarter of a mile away, and yet near enough to shed
its light upon this new colony that had risen in a strip of forest
primeval, which, as the promoting company’s circulars more or less
accurately recited, was only thirty minutes from lobsters and head
lettuce.
This was all a year ago, just as August haughtily relinquished the
world to the sway of September. I held the chair of applied sociology
in the college, and had taken a year off to write a number of articles
for which I had long been gathering material. It had occurred to me
that it would be worth while to write a series of sociological studies
in the form of short stories. My plan was to cut small cross-sections
in the social strata of the adjoining city, in the suburban village
which embraced the college, and in the adjacent farm region, and
attempt to portray, by a nice balancing of realism and romance, the
lives of the people in the several groups I had been observing. I had
talked to an editor about it and he had encouraged me to try my hand.
I felt enough confidence in the scheme to risk a year’s leave, and I
now settled down to my writing zestfully. I had already submitted three
stories, which had been accepted in a cordial spirit that proved highly
stimulating to further endeavor, and the first of the series, called
_The Lords of the Round House_--a sketch of the domestic relationships
and social conditions of the people living near the railroad shops--had
been commented on favorably as a fresh and novel view of an old
subject. My second study dealt with a settlement sustained by the
canning industry, and under the title, _Eros and the Peach Crop_, I had
described the labors and recreations of this community honestly, and
yet with a degree of humor.
As a bachelor professor I had been boarding near the college with
the widow of a minister; but now that I was giving my time wholly to
writing I found this domicile intolerable. My landlady, admirable
woman though she was, was altogether too prone to knock at my door on
trifling errands. When I had filled my note-book with memoranda for a
sketch dealing with the boarding-house evil (it has lately appeared
as _Charging What the Onion Will Bear_), I resolved to find lodgings
elsewhere. And besides, the assistant professor of natural sciences
occupied a room adjoining mine, and the visits of strange _reptilia_ to
my quarters were far from stimulating to literary labor.
I had long been immensely curious as to those young and trusting souls
who wed in the twenties, establish homes, and, unterrified by cruel
laws enacted for the protection of confiding creditors, buy homes on
the instalment plan, keep a cow, carry life insurance, buy theatre
tickets, maintain a baby, and fit as snugly into the social structure
as though the world were made for them alone. In my tramps about the
city I had marked with professional interest the appearance of great
colonies of bungalows which had risen within a few years, and which
spoke with an appealing eloquence for an obstinate confidence in the
marriage tie. In my late afternoon excursions through these sprightly
suburban regions I had gazed with the frankest admiration upon wholly
charming young persons stepping blithely along new cement walks,
equipped with the neatest of card-cases, or bearing embroidered bags of
sewing; and maids in the smartest of caps opened doors to them. Through
windows guarded by the whitest of draperies, I had caught glimpses of
our native forests as transformed into the sturdiest of arts-and-crafts
furniture. Both flower and kitchen gardens were squeezed into compact
plots of earth; a Gerald or a Geraldine cooed from a perambulator at
the gate of at least every other establishment; and a “syndicate”
man-of-all-work moved serenely from furnace to furnace, from lawn to
lawn, as the season determined. On Sundays I saw the young husbands
hieing to church, to a golf-links somewhere, to tennis in some
vacant lot, or aiding their girlish wives in the cheerfulest fashion
imaginable to spray rose-bushes or to drive the irrepressible dandelion
from the lawn of its delight.
These phenomena interested me more than I can say. My aim was not
wholly sociological, for not only did I wish in the spirit of strictest
scientific inquiry to understand just how all this was possible, but
the sentimental aspect of it exercised a strange fascination upon me.
When I walked these new streets at night and saw lamps lighted in
dozens of cheery habitations, with the lord and lady of the bungalow
reading or talking in greatest contentment; or when their voices
drifted out to me from nasturtium-hung verandas on summer evenings,
I was in danger of ceasing to be a philosopher and of going over
bodily to the sentimentalists. Then, the scientific spirit mastering,
I vulgarly haunted the doors of the adjacent shops and communed with
grocers’ boys and drug clerks, that I might gain data upon which to
base speculations touching this species, this “group,” which presented
so gallant a front in a world where bills are payable not later than
the tenth of every calendar month.
“You may have the brown bungalow in Audubon Road, the gray one in
Washington Hedge, or the dark green one in Landor Lane. Take any
one you like; they all offer about the same accommodations,” said
the architect. “You can put such rent as you see fit in the nearest
squirrel box, and if you meet an intending purchaser with our
prospectus in his hand I expect you to take notice and tease him to
buy. We’ve always got another bungalow somewhere, so you won’t be
thrown in the street.”
I chose Landor Lane for a variety of reasons. There were as yet only
three houses in the street, and this assured a degree of peace. Many
fine forest trees stood in the vacant lots, and a number had been
suffered to remain within the parking retained between sidewalk and
curb, mitigating greatly the harsh lines of the new addition. But
I think the deciding factor was the name of the little street.
Landor had always given me pleasure, and while it is possible that a
residence in Huxley Avenue might have been more suitable for a seeker
of truth, there was the further reflection that truth, touched with the
iridescent glow of romance, need suffer nothing from contact with the
spirit of Walter Savage Landor.
Directly opposite my green bungalow was a dark brown one flung up
rather high above the lane. The promoters of the addition had refrained
from smoothing out the landscape, so that the brown bungalow was about
twenty feet above the street, while my green one was reached by only
half a dozen steps.
On the day that I made my choice I saw a child of three playing in
the grass plot before the brown bungalow. It was Saturday afternoon,
and the typical young freeholder was doing something with an axe near
the woodshed, and even as I surveyed the scene the domestic picture
was completed by the appearance of the inevitable young woman, who
came from the direction of the trolley-terminus, carrying the usual
neat card-case in her hand. Here was exactly what I wanted--a chance
to study at close hand the bungalow type, and yet, Landor Lane was
so quiet, its trio of houses so distributed, that I might enjoy that
coveted detachment so essential to contemplative observation and wise
judgments.
“I’ve forgotten,” mused the architect, as we viewed the scene together,
“whether the chap in that brown bungalow is Redmond, the patent
lawyer, or Manderson, the tile-grate man. There’s a baby of about the
same vintage at both houses. If that isn’t Redmond over there showing
Gladstonian prowess with the axe, it’s Manderson. Woman with child and
cart; number 58; West Gallery; artist unknown.” It pleased my friend’s
humor to quote thus from imaginary catalogues. “Well, I don’t know
whether those are the Redmonds or the Mandersons; but come to think of
it, Redmond isn’t a lawyer, but the inventor of a new office system by
which profit and loss are computed hourly by a device so simple that
any child may operate it. A man of your cloistral habits won’t care
about the neighbors, but I hope that chap isn’t Redmond. A man who
will think up a machine like that isn’t one you’d expose perfectly
good garden hose to, on dark summer nights.”