The man in the street: Papers on American topics

by Meredith Nicholson

III

The lady of the brown bungalow was, however, far more attractive than her sister of the red one, and the Mandersons as a family were far more appealing than the Redmonds. My note-book filled with memoranda touching the ways and manners of the Mandersons, and most of these, I must confess, related to Mrs. Manderson. She was exactly the type I sought, the veritable dea ex machina of the bungalow world. She lived a good deal on her veranda, and as I had established a writing-table on mine I was able to add constantly to my notes by the mere lifting of my eyes. I excused my impudence in watching her on scientific grounds. She was no more to me than a new bird to an ornithologist, or a strange plant to a botanist.

Occasionally she would dart into the house and attack an upright piano that stood by the broad window of the living-room. I could see the firm clean stroke of her arms as she played. Those brilliant, flashing, golden things of Chopin’s she did wonderfully; or again it would be Schumann’s spirit she invoked. Once begun, she would run on for an hour, and Banzai would leave his kitchen and crouch on our steps to listen. She appeared at times quite fearlessly with a broom to sweep the walk, and she seemed to find a childish delight in sprinkling the lawn. Or she would set off, basket in hand, for the grocer’s, and would return bearing her own purchases and none the less a lady for a’ that. There was about her an indefinable freshness and crispness. I observed with awe her succession of pink and blue shirt waists, in which she caught and diffused the sun like a figure in one of Benson’s pictures; and when she danced off with her card-case in a costume of solid white, and with a flappy white hat, she was not less than adorable.

Manderson nodded to me the second day, a little coldly, as we met in the walk; and thereafter bowed or waved a hand when I fell under his eye. One evening I heard him calling her across the dusk of the yard. Her name was Olive, and nothing, it seemed to me, was ever more fitting than that.

One morning as I wrote at my table on the veranda I was aroused by a commotion over the way. The girl of all work appeared in the front yard screaming and wringing her hands, and I rushed across the lane to learn that the water-heater was possessed of an evil spirit and threatened to burst. The lady of the bungalow had gone to town and the peril was imminent. I reversed all the visible valves, in that trustful experimental spirit which is the flower of perfect ignorance, and the catastrophe was averted. I returned to my work, became absorbed, and was only aroused by a tug at my smoking-jacket. Beside me stood the Manderson baby, extending a handful of dahlias! Her manner was of ambassadorial gravity. No word was spoken, and she trotted off, laboriously descended my steps, and toddled across the lane.

Her mother waited at the curb, and as I bowed in my best manner, holding up the dahlias, she called, “Thank you!” in the most entrancing of voices. Mr. James declares that the way one person looks at another may be, in effect, an incident; and how much more may “Thank you,” flung across a quiet street, have the weight of hours of dialogue! Her voice was precisely the voice that the loveliest of feminine names connotes, suggesting Tennysonian harmonies and cadences, and murmuring waters of——

“Sweet Catullus’s all-but-island, olive-silvery Sirmio.”

A bunch of dahlias was just the epistolary form to which a bungalow lady would resort in communicating with a gentleman she did not know. The threatened explosion of the heater had thus served to introduce me to my neighbor, and had given me at the same time a new revelation of her sense of the proprieties, her graciousness, and charm. In my visit to the house I had observed its appointments with a discreet but interested eye, and I jotted down many notes with her dahlias on the table before me. The soft tints of the walls, the well-chosen American rugs, the comfort that spoke in the furniture reflected a consistent taste. There was the usual den, with a long bench piled with cushions, and near at hand a table where a tray of smoker’s articles was hedged in with magazines, and there were books neatly shelved, and others, lying about, testified to familiar use. The upright piano, by the window of my frequent contemplation, bore the imprimatur of one of the most reputable makers, and a tall rack beside it was filled with music. Prone on the player’s seat lay a doll—a fact I noted with satisfaction, as evidence of the bungalow baby’s supremacy even where its mother is a veritable reincarnation of St. Cecilia.

The same evening Manderson came home in haste and departed immediately with a suitcase. I had hoped that he would follow the dahlias in person to discuss the housemaid’s embarrassments with the plumbing and bring me within the arc of his domestic circle, but such was not to be the way of it.

He was gone three days, and while the lady of the bungalow now bowed to me once daily across the lane, our acquaintance progressed no further. Nor, I may add, did my work move forward according to the schedule by which it is my habit to write. I found myself scribbling verses—a relaxation I had not indulged in since my college days. I walked much, surveying the other streets in Sherwood Forest Addition and gloomily comparing them with Landor Lane to their disadvantage. I tramped the shore of the little lake and saw her there once and again, at play with the baby. She and Mrs. Redmond exchanged visits frequently with bungalow informality. One afternoon half a dozen young women appeared for tea on the deep veranda, and the lane was gay with laughter. They were the ladies of the surrounding bungalow district, and their party was the merriest. I wondered whether she had waited for a day when her husband was absent to summon these sisters. It was a gloomy fate that had mated her with a melancholy soul like Manderson.