IV
I had written several couplets imploring the protection of the gods for the Lady of the Lane, and these I had sketched upon a large sheet of cardboard the better to scrutinize them. And thereby hangs the saddest of revelations. My friend the architect had sent me a number of advertisements with a request that I should persuade Banzai to attach them to the adjacent landscape. Returning from a tramp I beheld Olive (as I shall not scruple to call her) studying a placard on a telephone-post in the lane a little beyond her bungalow. It struck me as odd that she should be so interested in a mere advertisement of bungalows, when she was already cosily domiciled in the prettiest one the addition boasted. She laughed aloud, then turned guardedly, saw me, and marched demurely home without so much as glancing a second time in my direction.
After she had tripped up the steps and vanished I saw the grievous thing that Banzai had done. By some inadvertence he had thrust the card bearing my verses among the advertisements, and with all the posts and poles and tree-boxes in Christendom to choose from, he had with unconscious malevolence nailed my couplets to the telephone-pole nearest the Manderson bungalow. It was an unpardonable atrocity, the enormity of which I shall not extenuate by suppressing the verses:
“Spirits that guard all lovely things
Bend o’er this path thy golden wings.
Shield it from storms and powers malign:
Make stars and sun above it shine.
May none pass here on evil bent:
Bless it to hearts of good intent,
And when (like some bright catch of song
One hears but once though waiting long)
Lalage suddenly at the door
Views the adoring landscape o’er,
O swift let friendly winds attend
And faithful to her errands bend!
Then when adown the lane she goes
Make leap before her vine and rose!
From elfin land bring Ariel
To walk beside and guard her well.
Defend her, pray, from faun and gnome
Till through the Lane she wanders home!”
It was bad enough to apostrophize my neighbor’s wife in song; but to publish my infamy to the world was an even more grievous sin. I tore the thing down, bore it home, and thrust it into the kitchen range before the eyes of the contrite Banzai. Across the way Olive played, and I thought there was mockery in her playing.
Realism is, after all, on much better terms with Romance than the critics would have us believe. If Manderson had not thawed sufficiently to borrow the realistic monkey-wrench which Banzai used on our lawn-mower, and if Olive had not romantically returned it a week later with a card on which she had scribbled “Many apologies for the long delay,” I might never have discovered that she was not in fact Manderson’s wife but his sister. Hers was the neatest, the best-bred of cards, and bore the name incontrovertibly——
Miss Olive Manderson
44 LANDOR LANE
I throw this to the realists that they may chortle over it in the way of their grim fraternity. Were I cursed with the least taint of romanticism I should not disclose her maiden state at this point, but hold it for stirring dramatic use at the moment when, believing her to be the wife of the mournful tile-grate man, I should bid her good-by and vanish forever.
The moment that card reached me by the hand of her housemaid she was playing a Chopin polonaise, and I was across the lane and reverently waiting at the door when the last chord sounded. It was late on an afternoon at the threshold of October, but not too cool for tea al fresco. When the wind blew chill from the lake she disappeared, and returned with her hands thrust into the pockets of a white sweater.
It was amazing how well we got on from the first. She explained herself in the fewest words. Her brother’s wife had died two years before, and she had helped to establish a home for him in the hope of mitigating his loneliness. She spoke of him and the child with the tenderest consideration. He had been badly broken by his wife’s death, and was given to brooding. I accused myself bitterly for having so grossly misjudged him as to think him capable of harshness toward the fair lady of his bungalow. He came while I still sat there and greeted me amiably, and when I left we were established on the most neighborly footing.
Thenceforth my work prospered. Olive revealed, with the nicest appreciation and understanding of my needs, the joys and sorrows of suburban bungalowhood. The deficiencies of the trolley service, the uncertainties of the grocer’s delivery she described in the aptest phrases, her buoyant spirit making light of all such vexations.
The manifold resources and subterfuges of bungalow housekeeping were unfolded with the drollest humor. The eternal procession of cooks, the lapses of the neighborhood hired man, the fitfulness of the electric light—all such tragedies were illuminated with her cheery philosophy. The magazine article that I had planned expanded into a discerning study of the secret which had baffled and lured me, as to the flowering of the bungalow upon the rough edges of the urban world. The aspirations expressed by the upright piano, the perambulator, the new book on the arts-and-crafts table, the card-case borne through innumerable quiet lanes—all such phenomena Olive elucidated for my instruction. The shrewd economies that explained the occasional theatre tickets; the incubator that robbed the grocer to pay the milliner; the home-plied needle that accounted for the succession of crisp shirt waists—into these and many other mysteries Olive initiated me.
Sherwood Forest suddenly began to boom, and houses were in demand. My architect friend threatened me with eviction, and to avert the calamity I signed a contract of purchase, which bound me and my heirs and assigns forever to certain weekly payments; and, blithe opportunist that I am, I based a chapter on this circumstance, with the caption “Five Dollars a Month for Life.” I wrote from notes supplied by Olive a dissertation on “The Pursuit of the Lemon”—suggested by an adventure of her own in search of the fruit of the citrus limonum for use in garnishing a plate of canned salmon for Sunday evening tea.
Inspired by the tender, wistful autumn days I wrote verses laboriously, and boldly hung them in the lane in the hope of arresting my Rosalind’s eye. One of these (tacked to a tree in a path by the lake) I here insert to illustrate the plight to which she had brought me:
“At eve a line of golden light
Hung low along the west;
The first red maple bough shone bright
Upon the woodland’s breast.
The wind blew keen across the lake,
A wave mourned on the shore;
Earth knew an instant some heartache
Unknown to earth before.
The wandering ghosts of summers gone
Watched shore and wood and skies;
The night fell like a shadow drawn
Across your violet eyes.”