Part 4 (1/2)

Clearly something had to be done, and that very soon, if we were to save even the remnants of respectability. We recalled with fondness some of the very discomforts of apartment life and said we would go back to it at any cost.

Our furniture was in storage. We would get it out, and we would begin anew, profiting by our experience. We would go at once, and among other things we would go farther up town. So far down was too noisy, besides the air was not good for the Precious Ones.

It was coming on spring, too, and it would be pleasanter farther up.

Not so far as we had been before, but far enough to be out of the whirl and clatter and jangle. It was possible, we believed, to strike the happy medium, and this we regarded somewhat in the light of another discovery.

Life now began to a.s.sume a new interest. In the few remaining days of our stay in the boarding-house we grew tolerant and even fond of our fellow-boarders, and admitted that an endless succession of Tuesday stews and Wednesday hashes would make us even as they. We went so far as to sympathize heartily with the landlady, who wept and embraced the Little Woman when we went, and gave the Precious Ones some indigestible candy.

We set forth then, happy in the belief that we had mastered, at last, the problem of metropolitan living. We had tried boarding for a change, and as such it had been a success, but we were altogether ready to take up our stored furniture and find lodgment for it, some place, any place, where the bill of fare was not wholly deductive, where our rooms would not be made a confessional and a scandal bureau, and where we could, in some measure, at least, feel that we had a ”home, sweet home.”

VI.

_Pursuing the Ideal._

I suppose it was our eagerness for a home that made us so easy to please.

Looking back now after a period of years on the apartment we selected for our ideal nest I am at a loss to recall our reasons for doing so.

Innocent though we were, it does not seem to me that we could have found in the brief time devoted to the search so poor a street, so wretched a place, and so disreputable a janitor (this time a man). I only wish to recall that the place was damp and small, with the kitchen in front; that some people across the air shaft were wont to raise Cain all night long; that the two men below us frequently attempted to murder each other at unseemly hours, and that some extra matting and furniture stored in the bas.e.m.e.nt were stolen, I suspect, by the janitor himself.

Once more we folded our tents, such of them as we had left, and went far up town--very far, this time. We said that if we had to live up town at all we would go far enough to get a whiff of air from fresh fields.

There was spring in the air when we moved, and far above the Harlem River, where birds sang under blue skies and the south breeze swept into our top-floor windows, we set up our household goods and G.o.ds once more.

They were getting a bit shaky now, and bruised. The mirrors on sideboard and dresser had never been put on twice the same, and the middle leg of the dining-room table wobbled from having been removed so often. But we oiled out the mark and memory of the moving-man, bought new matting, and went into the month of June fresh, clean, and hopeful, with no regret for past errors.

And now at last we found really some degree of comfort. It is true our neighbors were hardly congenial, but they were inoffensive and kindly disposed. The piano on the floor beneath did not furnish pleasing entertainment, but neither was it constant in its efforts to do so. The stairs were long and difficult of ascent, but our distance from the street was gratifying. The business center was far away, but I had learned to improve the time consumed in transit, and our cool eyrie was refres.h.i.+ng after the city heat.

As for the janitor, or janitress, for I do not know in which side of the family the office was existent, he, she, or both were merely lazy, indifferent, and usually invisible. Between them they managed to keep the place fairly clean, and willingly promised anything we asked. It is true they never fulfilled these obligations, but they were always eager to renew them with interest, and on the whole the place was not at all bad.

But the Precious Ones had, by this time, grown fond of change. We were scarcely settled before they began to ask when we were going to move again, and often requested as a favor that we take them out to look at some flats. We overheard them playing ”flat-hunting” almost every day, in which game one of them would a.s.sume the part of janitor to ”show through” while the other would be a prospective tenant who surveyed things critically and made characteristic remarks, such as, ”How many flights up?” ”How much?” ”Too small,” ”Oh, my, kitchen's too dark,”

”What awful paper,” ”You don't call that closet a room, I hope,” and the like. It seemed a harmless game, and we did not suspect that in a more serious form its fascinations were insidiously rooting themselves in our own lives. It is true we often found ourselves pausing in front of new apartments and wondering what they were like inside, and urged by the Precious Ones entered, now and then, to see and inquire. In fact the Precious Ones really embarra.s.sed us sometimes when, on warm Sunday afternoons, where people were sitting out on the shady steps, they would pause eagerly in front of the sign ”To Let” with: ”Oh, papa, look!

Seven rooms and bath! Oh, mamma, let's go in and see them! Oh, please, mamma! Please, papa!”

At such times we hurried by, oblivious to their importunities, but when the situation was less trying we only too frequently yielded, and each time with less and less reluctance.

It was in the early fall that we moved again,--into a sunny corner flat on a second floor that we strayed into during one of these rambles, and became ensnared by its clean, new attractions. We said that it would be better for winter, and that we were tired of four long flight of stairs.

But, alas, by spring every thing was out of order from the electric bell at the entrance to the clothes-lines on the roof, while janitors came and went like Punch and Judy figures. Most of the time we had none, and some that we had were better dead. So we moved when the birds came back, but it was a mistake, and on the Fourth of July we celebrated by moving again.

We now called ourselves ”van-dwellers,” the term applied by landlord and agent to those who move systematically and inhabit the moving-man's great trundling house no less than four to six times a year. I am not sure, however, that we ever really earned the t.i.tle. The true ”van-dweller” makes money by moving and getting free rent, while I fear the wear and tear on our chattels more than offset any advantage we ever acquired in this particular direction.

I can think of no reason now for having taken our next flat except that it was different from any of those preceding. Still, it was better than the summer board we selected from sixty answers to our advertis.e.m.e.nt, and after eighteen minutes' experience with a sweltering room and an aged and apoplectic dog whose quarters we seemed to have usurped, we came back to it like returning exiles.

It was a long time before we moved again--almost four months. Then the Little Woman strayed into another new house, and was captivated by a series of rooms that ran merrily around a little extension in a manner that allowed the sun to s.h.i.+ne into every window.

We had become connoisseurs by this time. We could tell almost the exact shape and price of an apartment from its outside appearance. After one glance inside we could carry the plan mentally for months and reproduce it minutely on paper at will. We had learned, too, that it is only by living in many houses in rotation that you can know the varied charms of apartment life. No one flat can provide them all.