When they went to South America for six months, the Henslows, that live
across the street from me, wanted to rent their cottage. And of course,
being a neighbor, I wanted them to get the fifteen dollars a month.
But--being the cottage was my neighbor--I couldn't help, deep down in my
inner head, feeling kind of selfish pleased that it stood vacant a
while. It's a chore to have a new neighbor in the summer. They always
want to borrow your rubber fruit-rings, and they forget to return some;
and they come in and sit in the mornings when you want to get your work
out of the way before the hot part of a hot day crashes down on you. I
can neighbor agreeable when the snow flies, but summers I want my porch
and my rocker and my wrapper and my palm-leaf fan, and nobody to call
on. And--I don't want to sound less neighborly than I mean to sound--I
don't want any real danger of being what you might say called-on--not
till the cool of the day.
Then, on a glorious summer morning, right out of a clear blue sky, what
did I see but two trunks plopped down on the Henslows' porch! I knew
they were never back so soon. I knew the two trunks meant renters, and
nothing but renters.
"I'll bet ten hundred thousand dollars one of them plays the flute and
practices evenings," I says.
I didn't catch sight of them till the next morning, and then I saw him
head for the early train into the city, and her stand at the gate and
watch him. And, my land, she was in a white dress and she didn't look
twenty years old.
So I went right straight over.
"My dear," I says, "I dunno what your name is, but I'm your neighbor,
and I dunno what more we need than that."
She put out her hand--just exactly as if she was glad. She had a
wonderful sweet, loving smile--and she smiled with that.
So I says: "I thought moving in here with trunks, so, you might want
something. And if I can let you have anything--jars or jelly-glasses or
rubber rings or whatever, why, just you--"
"Thank you, Miss Marsh," she says. "I know you're Miss Marsh--Mrs.
Henslow told me about you."
"The same," says I, neat.
"I'm Mrs. Harry Beecher," she says. "I--we were just married last week,"
she says, neat as a biography.
"So you was!" I says. "Well, now, you just let me be to you what your
folks would want me to be, won't you?" says I. "Feel," I says, "just
like you could run in over to my house any time, morning, noon or night.
Call on me for anything. Come on over and sit with me if you feel
lonesome--or if you don't. My side porch is real nice and cool and shady
all the afternoon--"
And so on. And wasn't that nice to happen to me, right in the middle of
the dead of summer, with nothing going on?
If you have lived in the immediate neighborhood of a bride and groom,
you know what I am going to tell about.
But if you haven't, try to rent your next house--if you rent--or try to
buy your next home--if you buy--somewhere in the more-or-less
neighborhood of a bride and groom. Because it's an education. It's an
education in living. No--I don't believe I mean that the way you think I
mean it at all. I mean it another way.
To be sure, there were the mornings, when I saw them come out from
breakfast and steal a minute or two hanging round the veranda before he
had to start off. That was as nice as a picture, and nicer. I got so I
timed my breakfast so's I could be watering my flower-beds when this
happened, and not miss it. He usually pulled the vines over better, or
weeded a little near the step, or tinkered with the hinge of the screen,
or fussed with the bricks where the roots had pushed them up. And she
sat on the steps and talked with him, and laughed now and then with her
little pretty laugh. (Not many women can laugh as pretty as she did--and
we all ought to be able to do it. Sometimes I wish somebody would start
a school to teach pretty laughing, and somebody else would make us all
go to it.) And I knew how they were pretending that this was really
their own home, and playing proprietor and householder, just like
everybody else. And of course that was pleasurable to me to see--but
that wasn't what I meant.
Nor I didn't mean times when she'd be out in the garden during the day,
and the telephone bell would ring, and she would throw things and head
for the house, running, because she thought it might be him calling her
up from the city. Most usually it was. I always knew it had been him
when she came back singing.
And then there were the late afternoons, say, almost an hour before the
first train that he could possibly come on and that now and then he
caught. Always before it was time for that she would open her front door
that she'd had closed all day to keep her house cool, and she'd bring
her book or her sewing out on the porch, and never pay a bit of
attention to either, because she sat looking up the street. There was
only a little bit of shade on her porch that time in the afternoon, and
I used to want to ask her to come over on my cool, shady side porch,
but I had the sense not to. I sort of understood how she liked to sit
out there where she was, on their own porch, waiting for him. Then he'd
come, and she'd sit out in the garden and read to him while he dug in
the beds, or she'd sew on the porch while he cut the grass--well, now,
it don't sound like much as I tell it, does it?--and yet it used to look
wonderful sweet to me, looking across the street.
But as I said, it wasn't any of these times, nor yet the long summer
evenings when I could just see the glimmer of her white dress on the
porch or in the garden, or their shadows on the curtain, rainy evenings;
no, it wasn't these times that made me wish for everybody in the world
that they lived next door to a bride and groom. But the thing I mean
came to me all of a sudden, when they hadn't been my neighbors for a
week. And it came to me like this:
One night I'd had them over for supper. It had been a hot day, and
ordinarily I'm opposed to company on a hot day; but some way having
_them_ was different. And then I didn't imagine she was so very used to
cooking, and I got to thinking maybe a meal away from home would be a
rest.
And after supper we'd been walking around my yard, looking at my late
cosmos and wondering whether it would get around to bloom before the
frost. And they had been telling me how they meant to plant their
garden when they got one of their own. I liked to keep them talking
about it, because his face lit up so young and boyish, and hers got all
soft and bright; and they looked at each other like they could see that
garden planted and up and growing and pretty near paid for. So I kept
egging them on, asking this and that, just to hear them plan.
"One whole side of the wall," said he, "we'll have lilacs and
forsythia."
She looked at him. "I thought we said hollyhocks there," she said.
"Well, don't you remember," he said, "we changed that when you said
you'd planned, ever since you were a little girl to have lilacs and
forsythia on the edge of your garden?"
"Well--so I did," she remembered. "But I thought you said you liked
hollyhocks best?"
"Maybe I did," says he. "I forget. I don't know but I did for a while.
But I think of it this way now."