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.”