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.”
II
A Japanese boy who was working his way through college offered to assume the responsibilities of my housekeeping for his board. Banzai brought to the task of cooking the deft hand of his race. He undertook the purchase of furniture to set me up in the bungalow, without asking questions—in itself a great relief. In a week’s time he announced that all was in readiness for my transfer, so that I made the change quite casually, without other impedimenta than a portfolio and a suitcase.
On that first evening, as Banzai served my supper—he was a past master of the omelet—I enjoyed a peace my life had not known before. In collecting material for my earlier sketches I had undeniably experienced many discomforts and annoyances; but here was an adventure which could hardly fail to prove pleasant and profitable.