Sweet spring days followed. We fairly reveled in seed catalogues, and our garden flourished. Our neighbors, instead of borrowing our loose property, as we had been led to expect by the comic papers, literally overwhelmed us with garden tools and good advice. We needed both, certainly, and were duly thankful.
As for the Precious Ones, they grew fat and brown, refused to wear hats and shoes when summer came, and it required some argument to convince them that even a fragmentary amount of clothes was necessary. All day now they run, and shout, and fall down and cry, and get up again and laugh, sit in the hammock and swing their disreputable dolls, and eat and quarrel and make up and have a beautiful time. At night they sleep in a big airy room where screens let the breeze in and keep out the few friendly mosquitoes that are a part of all suburban life. We are commuters, and we are glad of it, let the comic papers say what they will. The fellows who write those things are bitten with something worse than mosquitoes, i. e., envy—I know, because I have written some of them myself, in the old days. Perhaps it is hard to get to and from the train sometimes—perhaps the snow may blow into the garret and the lawn be hard to mow on a hot day. But the joy of the healthy Precious Ones and of coming out of the smelly, clattering city at the end of a hot summer day to a cool, sweet quiet, more than makes up for all the rest; while as one falls asleep, in a restful room that lets the breeze in from three different directions, the memories of flat-life, flat-hunting, and janitors—of sweltering, disordered nights, of crashing cobble and clanging trolleys, of evil-smelling halls and stairways, of these and of every other phase of the yardless, constricted apartment existence, blend into a sigh of relief that is lost in dreamless, refreshing suburban sleep.
XIV.
Closing Remarks.
To those who of necessity are still living in city apartments, and especially to those who are contemplating flat life I would in all seriousness say a few closing words.
It requires education to get the best out of flat life. Not such education as is acquired at Harvard, or Vassar, or even at the Industrial or Cooking schools, but education in the greater school of Humanity. In fact, flat living may be said to amount almost to a profession. The choice of an apartment is an art in itself, and, as no apartment is without drawbacks, the most vital should be considered as all-important, and an agreeable willingness to put up with the minor shortcomings of equal value. Sunlight, rental, locality, accessibility, janitor-service, size, and convenience are all important, and about in the order named. A dark apartment means doctor's bills, and by dark I mean any apartment into which the broad sun does not shine at least a portion of the day. Sunlight is the great microbe-killer, and as moss grows on the north side of a tree, so do minute poison fungi grow in the dim apartment. As to locality, a clean street, as far as possible from the business center is to be preferred, and away from the crash of the elevated railway. People are killed, morally and physically, by noise. For this reason an apartment several flights up is desirable, though the top floor is said by physicians to be somewhat less healthy than the one just below.
It is hard to instruct the novice in these matters. He must learn by experience. But there is one word that contains so much of the secret of successful apartment life that I must not omit it here. That word is Charity. I do not mean by this the giving of money or old clothes to those who slip in whenever the hall door is left unlocked. I mean that larger Charity which comes of a wider understanding of the natures and conditions of men.
You cannot expect, for instance, that a man or a woman, who serves for rent only, and wretched basement rent at that, or for a few dollars monthly additional at most, can be a very intelligent, capable person, of serene temper and with qualities that one would most desire in the ideal janitor. In the ordinary New York flat house janitors are engaged on terms that attract only people who can find no other means of obtaining shelter and support. Those who would fulfill your idea of what a janitor should do have been engaged for the more expensive apartments, or they have gone into other professions. The flat-house janitor's work is laborious, unclean, and never ending. It is not conducive to a neat appearance or a joyous disposition. If your janitor is only fairly prompt in the matter of garbage and ashes, and even approximately liberal as to heat and hot water, be glad to say a kind word to him now and then without expecting that he will be humble or even obliging. If you hear him knocking things about and condemning childhood in a general way, remember that your children are only children, like all the rest, and that a great many children under one roof can stretch even a strong, wise person's endurance to the snapping point.
Then there are the neighbors. Because the woman across the hall is boiling onions and cabbage to-day, do not forget that your cabbage and onion day will come on Wednesday, and she will probably enjoy it just as little as you are appreciating her efforts now. And because the children overhead run up and down and sound like a herd of buffaloes, don't imagine that your own Precious Ones are any more fairy-footed to the people who live just below. It's all in the day's endurance, and the wider your understanding and the greater your charity, the more patiently you will live and let live. It was an old saying that no two families could live under one roof; but in flat life ten and sometimes twenty families must live under one roof, and while you do not need to know them all, or perhaps any of them, you will find that they do, in some measure, become a part of your lives, and that your own part of the whole is just about what you make it.