Bobbie, General Manager: A Novel

by Olive Higgins Prouty

CHAPTER XXI

DID you ever attempt to buy a lot of fifteen thousand feet at fifty cents a foot, and build a house on it of twelve rooms, three baths, a shower, a sleeping-porch and a small unpretentious garage for fourteen thousand dollars? This isn't an example in mental arithmetic, but it was a problem Will and I laboured over every March and April for three successive springs, before deciding each year to stay on for another twelve months in our old rented brown box, gas-lighted and tin-tubbed. I am not going to explain how such a problem can be solved, because frankly I don't know.

Will is a regular miracle-performer in some lines. He'll work for hours over some knotty proposition in his laboratory, and come home from the hospital simply glowing with enthusiasm over the successful onslaught of a squad of his well-trained microbes upon an unruly lot of beasts who were making life miserable for a poor man almost dying with carbuncles. The medical journals describe Dr. William Ford Maynard's accomplishments as miraculous. However, I can vouch that he is utterly unable to perform any feats with wood and plaster and plumbers' supplies. Two hours working over our house-plans used to exhaust Will more than four days solid in his laboratory. He said there was more hope in discovering the haunts of the wary meningitis microbe than in finding a contractor who would build us a house at our price.

Will and I adored our first little home, of course, but then there were disadvantages. Every time it rained I had to put a basin in the middle of my bed—in case the roof leaked—and the fireplaces did smoke when you first lit them, and the kitchen stove did need a new lining. The owner was awfully disagreeable about repairs, and after we had been vainly pleading for three months solid for a new brick or two in a disabled chimney, which threatened to burn down the house, we began to consider moving. We didn't intend to build. We thought it would cost too much. We didn't even intend to buy. We simply wanted to find something better to rent.

Rummaging about among second-hand houses is very depressing, I can tell you. Some of the same old arks that had been on the market when we were first married, were still without a master, like certain wrecks of servants who haunt intelligence-offices. Dilapidated run-down old things—I hate the very thought of them! They have a musty, dead-rat sort of odour that's far from welcoming when you enter their darkened halls. You always wonder if it's the plumbing and ask why the last people left. And oh, the closets in those houses—little, black horrid holes! I used to pull open their doors, and time and again find some sort of human paraphernalia left behind on one of the hooks—a man's battered straw hat, or once, I remember, a solitary pair of discarded corsets. Spattered places in the bedrooms, paths worn on the hardwood floors, ink spots, grease spots, and on the walls an accurate pattern of the arrangement of the last family's pictures, actually offended me. I've heard that robins will never take possession of a last year's birds' nest. I know exactly how they feel about them. Oh, it isn't inspiring to hunt for a home among other people's cast-offs. Will and I were awfully discouraged after we had inspected the fifteenth impossibility—a dreadful affair with high ceilings, elaborately stencilled, and in the corners of each room little arched plaster grooves designed for statuary. For six months Will and I searched in vain for the sweet, clean little ready-made cottage of our dreams, shining in a fresh coat of white paint, its perennial garden in full-bloom, waiting for two nice home-loving people like ourselves to open its gate, stroll up its flag-stoned walk, and claim it for our own.

On our way home from impossibility the fifteenth, we took a street that had just been cut through some new land where little brand new houses were springing up like mushrooms. There was one, a tiny plaster house trimmed with light green blinds with half-moons cut in them, that I thought was simply adorable. It wasn't completed; I could see the workmen through the open windows. The temporary pine door stood open.

"Let's go in, for fun," I suggested, and Will helped me up the inclined plank that led to the little front stoop.

We stayed for a whole hour in that house! It was like gazing on sweet sixteen; it was simply refreshing; we didn't know anything so lovely existed. There was a darling little bathroom with open plumbing, and a shining porcelain tub. There was a marble slab for mixing in the pantry. The bedrooms were painted white. The closets, tiny though they were, smelled of fresh plaster. Will got into conversation with the contractor while I amused myself by planning which room I would choose for ours. But the house wasn't for rent. A man who ran a fish-market was building it. I saw Will get out an old letter and begin figuring on the back of the envelope. That place, lot and all, wasn't going to cost that fish man but ten thousand dollars—Will told me that night that we could own a house that cost fourteen thousand and still save money on our rent. I was excited. We didn't look at another house to hire. We dropped them as if they were infected. The very next Saturday afternoon we set out to search for lots.

We weren't very particular at first. Any little square of ground that we looked at with the idea of possible ownership seemed perfectly lovely to me; anything with a tiny glimpse of horizon, and a place in the back for a garden, was like a little piece of heaven. We were both awfully easily pleased the first month. There were so many pretty places to build on, we simply didn't know which one to choose. Then one day the agent sent us up to look at some land that had just been put on the market at sixty cents a foot. Of course it was more than we could pay, and we went to inspect it simply out of idle curiosity. The result was that the next day among that whole townful of open spaces and green fields, there was only one solitary spot that Will and I wanted for our own. You see after we had once climbed up on to that expensive little hilltop and looked off and seen the view—a round bowl of a lake with a clump of pines beside it, and beyond, a hill with a long ribbon of road leading up to a real New England white farmhouse with a splash of red barn beside it, we couldn't think kindly of any other spot in town. After we had sat down on the stone wall that ran right square through the back of the lot, and watched a glorious sunset reflected in the lake below, Will said, "By Jove, we'll have this!" There were six old apple-trees on the lot, a wild cherry and a dear little waif of a pine-tree. Will and I made a solemn vow to each other that we would build a cheap house, and get along a while longer with one maid for the sake of that lovely sunset every night when we ate supper. I said I'd as soon live in a lean-to. Will said we'd live just where we were for another year until we could afford to put up even a lean-to. We bought the darling of our hearts seven days later. It used up over two-thirds of our fourteen-thousand-dollar house fund.

We ate picnic suppers on our stone wall, and winter-times drank hot coffee there boiled over a tiny bon-fire built in the rocks, for three solid years before we began to dig the cellar of our lean-to. I had hollyhocks and a whole row of Canterbury-bells flowering in our garden for two springs before there was a door and some steps to lead out to it. It's all very well to vow you'll build a cheap house, but it's another thing to do it. Of course we had to have plumbing and heat; electric light fixtures seemed a necessity too, as well as a few doors here and there.