the tedium of the two railway journeys every weekday, and when you have
made friends with your fellow-commuters, you will get to like it, for
your morning trip in will take the place with you of your present
afternoon call at your club. And you are pretty sure to enjoy the
novelty of the first few months. You have moved out in the spring, and,
dulled as your perceptions are by years of city life, you cannot fail to
be astonished and thrilled, and perhaps a little bit awed, at the wonder
of that green awakening. And when you see how the first faint, seemingly
half-doubtful promise of perfect growth is fulfilled by the procession
of the months, you yourself will be moved with the desire to work this
miracle, and to make plants and flowers grow at your own will. You will
begin to talk of what you are going to do next year--for you have taken
a three years' lease, I trust--if only as an evidence of good faith. You
will lay out a tract for your flower garden and your vegetable garden,
and you will borrow your neighbor's seed-catalogue, and you will plan
out such a garden as never blossomed since Eden.
[Illustration]
And in your leisure days, of course, you _will_ enjoy it more or less.
You will sit on your broad veranda in the pleasant mornings and listen
to the wind softly brushing the tree-tops to and fro, and look at the
blue sky through the leaf-framed spaces in the cool, green canopy above
you; and as you remember the cruel, hot, lifeless days of summer in your
town house, when you dragged through the weeks of work that separated
you from the wife and children at the sea-side or in the
mountains--then, Modestus, you must look upon what is before you, and
say: it is good.
It is true that you can't get quite used to the sensation of wearing
your tennis flannels at your own domestic breakfast table, and you
cannot help feeling as if somebody had stolen your clothes, and you were
going around in your pajamas. But presently your friend--for of course
you have followed the trail of a friend, in choosing your new
abode--your friend drops in clad likewise, and you take the children and
start off for a stroll. As the pajama-feeling wears off, you become
quite enthusiastic. You tell your friend that this is the life that you
always wanted to lead; that a man doesn't really live in the city, but
only exists; that it is a luxury to breathe such air, and enjoy the
peaceful calm and perfect silence. Away inside of you something says
that this is humbug, for, the fact is, the perfect silence strikes you
as somewhat lonesome, and it even scares you a little. Then your
children keep running up to you with strange plants and flowers, and
asking you what they are; and you find it trying on the nerves to keep
up the pretence of parental omniscience, and yet avoid the too-ready
corrections of your friend.
[Illustration]
"Johnny-jumper!" he says, scornfully, when you have hazarded a guess out
of your meagre botanical vocabulary: "Why, man, that's no Johnny-jumper,
that's a wild geranium." Then he addresses himself to the other
inquiring youngster: "No, my boy, that's not a chestnut; that's an
acorn. You won't get chestnuts till the fall, and then you'll get them
off the chestnut trees. That's an oak."
And so the walk is not altogether pleasant for you, and you find it
safest to confine your remarks on country life to generalizations
concerning the air and the silence.
No, Modestus, do not think for a moment that I am making game of you.
Your friend would be no more at home at the uptown end of your little
New York path than you are here in his little town; and he does not look
on your ignorance of nature as sternly as you would look upon his
unfamiliarity with your familiar landmarks. For his knowledge has grown
upon him so naturally and unconsciously, that he hardly esteems it of
any value.
But you can have no idea of the tragico-comical disadvantage at which
you will find yourself placed during your first year in the
country--that is, the suburban country. You know, of course, when you
move into a new neighborhood in the city you must expect to find the
local butcher and baker and candlestick-maker ready to fall upon you,
and to tear the very raiment from your back, until they are assured that
you are a solvent permanency--and you have learned how to meet and repel
their attacks. When you find that the same thing is done in the country,
only in a different way, which you don't in the least understand, you
will begin to experience a certain feeling of discouragement. Then, the
humorous papers have taught you to look upon the Suburban Furnace as
part of the machinery or property of a merry jest; and you will be
shocked to discover that to the new-comer it is a stern and cold
reality. I use the latter adjective deliberately and advisedly. There
will surely come an awful night when you will get home from New York
with Mrs. Modestus in the midnight train, too tired for anything but a
drowsy chat by the lingering embers of the library fire over the
festivities of the evening. You will open your broad hospitable door,
and enter an abode of chill and darkness. Your long-slumbering
household has let fires and lights go out; the thermometer in the
children's room stands at forty-five degrees, and there is nothing for
you to do but to descend to the cellar, arrayed in your wedding
garments, and try your unskilful best to coax into feeble circulation a
small, faintly throbbing heart of fire that yet glows far down in the
fire-pot's darksome internals. Then, when you have done what you can at
the unwonted and unwelcome task, you will see, by the feeble
candle-light, that your black dress-coat is gray with fine cinder dust,
and that your hands are red and raw from the handling of heavy
implements of toil. And then you will think of city home-comings after
the theatre or the ball; of the quiet half-hour in front of the dying
cannel; of the short cigar and the little nightcap, and of the gentle
passage bedward, so easy in that warm and slumberous atmosphere that you
hardly know how you have passed from weariness to peaceful dreams. And
there will come to your spirit a sudden passion of humiliation and
revolt that will make you say to yourself: This is the end!
[Illustration]
But you know perfectly well that it is _not_ the end, however ardently
you may wish that it was. There still remain two years of your
un-subletable lease; and you set yourself, courageously and firmly, to
serving out the rest of your time. You resolve, as a good prisoner, to
make the best of it. You set to work to apply a little plain
common-sense to the problem of the furnace--and find it not so difficult
of partial solution after all. You face your other local troubles with a
determination to minimize them at least. You resolve to check your too
open expressions of dissatisfaction with the life you are leading. You
hardly know why you do this, but you have, half-unconsciously, read a
gentle hint in the faces of your neighbors; and as you see those kindly
faces gathering oftener and oftener about your fire as the winter nights
go on, it may, perhaps, dawn upon your mind that the existence you were
so quick to condemn has grown dear to some of them.
But, whether you know it or not, that second year in the suburban house
is a crisis and turning-point in your life, for it will make of you
either a city man or a suburban, and it will surely save you from being,
for all the rest of your days, that hideous betwixt-and-between thing,
that uncanny creation of modern days of rapid transit, who fluctuates
helplessly between one town and another; between town and city, and
between town and city again, seeking an impossible and unattainable
perfection, and scattering remonstrant servant-maids and disputed bills
for repairs along his cheerless track.
You have learned that the miseries of country life are not dealt out to
you individually, but that they belong to the life, just as the
troubles you fled from belong to the life of a great city. Of course,
the realization of this fact only serves to make you see that you erred
in making so radical a change in the current of your life. You perceive
only the more clearly that as soon as your appointed time is up, you
must reëstablish yourself in urban conditions. There is no question
about it; whatever its merits may be--and you are willing to concede
that they are many--it is obvious that country life does not suit you,
or that you do not suit country life, one or the other. And yet--somehow
incomprehensibly--the understanding that you have only shifted the
burden you bore among your old neighbors has put a strangely new face on
things, and has made you so readily tolerant that you are really a
little surprised at yourself.
[Illustration]
The winter goes by; the ever welcome glory of the spring comes back, and
with it comes the natural human longing to make a garden, which is
really, although we treat it lightly, a sort of humble first-cousin to
the love of children. In your own breast you repress this weakness. Why
taste of a pleasure which in another short year you mean to put
permanently out of your reach? But there is no resisting the entreaties
of your children, nor your wife's ready interest in their schemes, and
you send for Pat Brannigan, and order a garden made. Of course, it is
only for the children, but it is strange how readily a desire to please
the little ones spreads into a broader benevolence. When you look over
your wife's list of plants and seeds, you are surprised to find how many
of them are perennials. "They will please the next tenants here," says
your wife; "think how nice it would have been for us to find some
flowers all already for us, when we came here!" This may possibly lead
you to reflecting that there might have been something, after all, in
your original idea of suppressing the gardening instinct.
But there, after a while, is the garden--for these stories of suburban
gardens where nothing grows, are all nonsense. True, the clematis and
the moonflower obstinately refuse to clothe your cot with beauty; the
tigridia bulbs rot in the ground, and your beautiful collection of
irises produces a pitiful pennyworth of bloom to an intolerable quantity
of leaves. But the petunias and the sweet-williams, and the balsams, and
all the other ill-bred and obtrusive flowers leap promptly into life and
vigor, and fight each other for the ownership of the beds. And the
ever-faithful and friendly nasturtium comes early and stays late, and
the limp morning-glory may always be counted upon to slouch familiarly
over everything in sight, window-blinds preferred. But, bless you dear
urban soul, what do _you_ know about the relative values of flowers?
When Mrs. Overtheway brings your wife a bunch of her superbest gladioli,
you complacently return the compliment with a half-bushel of magenta
petunias, and you wonder that she does not show more enthusiasm over the
gift.
In fact, during the course of the summer you have grown so friendly with
your garden that, as you wander about its tangled paths in the late fall
days, you cannot help feeling a twinge of yearning pain that makes you
tremble to think what weakness you might have been guilty of had you not
already burned your bridges behind you, and told the house agent that
nothing would induce you to renew the lease next spring. You remember
how fully and carefully you explained to him your position in the
matter. With a glow of modest pride you recall the fact that you stated
your case to him so convincingly, that he had to agree with you that a
city life was the only life you and your family could possibly lead. He
understood fully how much you liked the place and the people, and how,
if this were only so, and that were only the other way, you would
certainly stay. And you feel if the house agent agrees with you against
his own interest, you must be right in your decision. Ah, dear Modestus!
You know little enough about flowers; but oh, how little, little, little
you know about suburban house agents!
Let us pass lightly over the third winter. It is a period of hesitation,
perplexity, expectancy, and general awkwardness. You are, and you are
not. You belong nowhere, and to no one. You have renounced your new
allegiance, and you really do not know when, how, or at what point you
are going to take up the old one again. And, in point of fact, you do
not regard this particular prospect with feelings of complete
satisfaction. You remember, with a troubled conscience, the long list of
social connections which you have found it too troublesome to keep up at
long range. I say you, for I am quite sure that Mrs. Modestus will
certify me that it was You and not She, who first declared that it was
practically impossible to keep on going to the Smith's dinners or the
Brown's receptions. You don't know this, my dear Modestus, but I assure
you that you may take it for granted. You remember also that your return
must carry with it the suggestion of the ignominy of defeat, and you
know exactly the tone of kindly contemptuous, mildly assumed superiority
with which your friends will welcome you back. And the approaching
severance of your newer ties troubles your mind in another way. Your new
friends do not try to dissuade you from going (they are too wise in a
suburban way for that), but they say, and show in a hundred ways, that
they are sorry to think of losing you. And this forbearance, so
different from what you have to expect at the other end of your moving,
reproaches and pains while it touches your heart. These people were all
strangers to you two years and a half ago; they are chance rather than
chosen companions. And yet, in this brief space of time--filled with
little neighborly offices, with faithful services and tender sympathies
in hours of sickness, and perhaps of death, with simple, informal
companionship--you have grown into a closer and heartier friendship with
them than you have ever known before, save with the one or two old
comrades with whose love your life is bound up. When you learned to
leave your broad house-door open to the summer airs, you opened,
unconsciously, another door; and these friends have entered in.
* * * * *
It is a sunny Saturday afternoon in early April, but not exactly an
April afternoon, rather one of those precocious days of delicious warmth
and full, summer-like sunshine, that come to remind us that May and June
are close behind the spring showers. You and Mrs. Modestus sit on the
top step of your front veranda, just as you sat there on such a day,
nearly three years ago. As on that day, you are talking of the future;
but you are in a very different frame of mind to-day. In a few short
weeks you will be adrift upon a sea of domestic uncertainty. For weeks
you have visited the noisy city, hunting the proud and lofty mansion and
the tortuous and humiliating flat, and it has all come to this--a
steam-heated "family-hotel," until such time when you can find summer
quarters; and then, with the fall, a new beginning of the weary search.
And then--and then----
Coming and going along the street, your friends and neighbors give you
cheery greeting, to which you respond somewhat absent-mindedly. You can
hear the voices of your children and their little neighbor-friends
playing in the empty garden plot. Your talk flags. You do not know just
what you are thinking about; still less do you know what your wife is
thinking about--but you know that you wish the children would stop
laughing, and that the people would stop going by and nodding
pleasantly.
And now comes one who does not go by. He turns in at the gate and walks
up the gravel path. He smiles and bows at you as if the whole world were
sunshine--a trim little figure, dressed with such artistic care that
there is cheerfulness in the crease of his trousers and suavity in his
very shirt-front. He greets Mrs. Modestus with a world of courtesy, and
then he sits confidentially down by your side and says: "My dear sir, I
am come to talk a little business with you."
No, you will not talk business. Your mind is firmly made up. Nothing
will induce you to renew the lease.
"But, my dear sir," he says, with an enthusiasm that would be as
boisterous as an ocean wave, if it had not so much oil on its surface:
"I don't want you to renew the lease. I have a much better plan than
that! I want you to _buy the house_!"
And then he goes on to tell you all about it; how the estate must be
closed up; how the house may be had for a song; and he names a figure so
small that it gives you two separate mental shocks; first, to realize
that it is within your means; second, to find that he is telling the
truth.
He goes on talking softly, suggestively, telling you what a bargain it
is, telling you all the things you have put out of your mind for many
months; telling you--telling you nothing, and well he knows it. Three
years of life under that roof have done his pleading for him.
[Illustration]
Then your wife suddenly reaches out her hand and touches you furtively.
"Oh, buy it," she whispers, huskily, "if you can." And then she gathers
up her skirts and hurries into the house.
Then a little later you are all in the library, and you have signed a
little plain strip of paper, headed "Memorandum of Sale." And then you
and the agent have drunk a glass of wine to bind the bargain, and then
the agent is gone, and you and your wife are left standing there,
looking at each other with misty eyes and questioning smiles, happy and
yet doubtful if you have done right or wrong.
But what does it matter, my dear Modestus?
For you could not help yourselves.
End of Project Gutenberg's Jersey Street and Jersey Lane, by H. C. Bunner