NICE NEIGHBOURS
By MARY S. WATTS
From Harper’s
GUIDING the possible tenant about the house, Miss Wilcox pointed out its desirable features in a dry little monotone that gave no hint, she hoped, of her inward taut anxiety. She could not have achieved the persuasive enthusiasm of the young man from the real-estate office even if she had thought it becoming to a gentlewoman. Apparently he could see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil; there was something abnormal about his incapacities; he was magnificent, but at moments Miss Martha feared that he was not strictly conscientious. And besides, to what end shutting his eyes and thereby perhaps influencing others to shut theirs against unhappy facts? Truth will out. The house was old; the floors did need refinishing: the front-parlour fireplace did smoke——
“Them ceilings sure are high!” ejaculated the possible tenant, cocking a measuring eye heavenward.
“Y-yes, they are high,” Miss Martha admitted helplessly. At this familiar—and perfectly just—criticism the agent always burst into flaming eulogies of high ceilings. Just the thing for our summer climate, our super-heated furnaces in winter! Tell you, the old-timers knew how to build for comfort! Miss Martha shrank from conjecturing what he said when ceilings were low. This whole experience illuminated depressingly the practice current in what it was the modern shibboleth to call “big business,” she thought.
“Well, eight-five per is a whole lotta money,” said the possible tenant. She gazed round indifferently as they stepped out on the little side porch; then all at once her expression altered with surprise and interest. She clutched Miss Wilcox’s arm, holding her back with an energetic whisper of warning. “Sh-h! See that bird? See him? Washing himself in that old pedestal washstand somebody’s left out there? If that ain’t the cutest thing! He’s just sloshin’ right in like a person, you ’r I ’r anybody. Like it was put there just on purpose for him!”
“Why, it was. It’s a birds’ bath, you know,” said Miss Martha, somewhat startled, fumbling for her eyeglasses; the pretty spectacle was no novelty to her, yet it never lost its charm. “Oh, that’s one of the thrushes. They must have a nest somewhere near——”
“Sh-h!” the other interrupted peremptorily. “There’s another one goin’ in!” She tiptoed to the edge of the porch and stood there entranced, following the movements of the birds, a vague smile irradiating her worn, sharpened, insignificant features. The shoving and spattering and small outcry finally subsided, the last robin hopped out, spinning the moisture from his feathers with quick wings; and she turned away reluctantly, drawing a long breath in childishly frank delight. “What d’you know about that, huh? I wouldn’ta believed they’d do that, take a bath that way. You couldn’ta made me believe it? I don’t know much about ’em, but I always have liked ’em. Birds, I mean, and—well, dogs and all kinds of regular pets, you know. I always did like ’em. Say, you got your grounds fixed up real nice, ain’t you? I like flowers, too.”
She went down the steps, and Miss Wilcox trailed after, resigned to seeing the garden butchered to make a possible tenant’s holiday; but the visitor moved about carefully, without offering to pluck or mishandle, and paused at last in the middle of the tidy plot, surveying its beds and borders with full appreciation. Then she wheeled to appraise again the mid-Victorian house whose stark tastelessness and characterlessness no garden setting could relieve; and Miss Martha’s heart sank.
“The neighbourhood’s very nice,” she murmured desperately; this ladylike insinuation went to the limits of propriety in salesmanship according to Miss Martha’s code. “So—so permanent. The church on the corner and the parsonage next door. It will always be nice. Everybody likes it so much on that account—that is——” She could get no farther, overcome by a hideous sense of disloyalty to this same neighbourhood whose select character she was exploiting. For, looking upon her, the conviction would not down that Mrs. Shields, if a possible tenant, was abysmally impossible otherwise. She must be near Miss Martha’s own age, yet was dressed, tinted, bedizened as if sixteen; there was a kind of withered pertness about her; she had a trick of glancing sidewise with her large, shadowed eyes in a style of roguish challenge and invitation combined; and her disturbingly frequent and facile smile suggested somehow a mere embellishment, obvious and inexpressive as her rouge. Such a figure in the rarefied atmosphere of Saint Luke’s was unthinkable; but here she was, Martha Wilcox, making capital out of that proximity with all its implications. Contact with “big business” had done its debasing work! “Of course, the music might be an objection,” she faltered, conscience-struck. “And sometimes one can hear Doctor Gowdy quite distinctly on Sundays in warm weather when the windows are open.”
“Music? Oh, you mean hymns?” queried Mrs. Shields. “Doctor Gowdy’s the preacher, huh? I went to Billy Sunday once. Tell you, the rev’rend’d have to go some to beat him! Well, I don’ know—eighty-five—” She hesitated, looking around the genteel landscape; then faced Miss Martha with the air of giving up argument, not without wonder and some amusement at herself. “Well, I guess them birds has got me going. I guess you’ve rented a house!”