The Van Dwellers Part 9

"So it does--automatically, if--if it holds! It must have worked! I'll telephone at once, and see."

There was a telephone in the Apollo and I hurried to it. Five women and three men were waiting ahead of me, and every one tried to telephone about stocks. Some got replies and became hysterical. One elderly woman with a juvenile make-up and a great many rings fainted and was borne away unconscious. A good many got nothing whatever.

I was one of the latter. The line to my brokers was busy. It was busy all that day, during which we bought extras and suffered. By night-fall we would have rejoiced to know that even the original fragment of the Sum had been saved out of the general wreck of things on the Street.

It was. Even a little more, for the stop-loss that had failed to hold against the first sudden and overwhelming pressure, had caught somewhere about twenty, and our brokers next morning advised us of the sale.

It was a quiet breakfast that we had. We were rather mixed as to our feelings, but I know now that a sense of relief was what we felt most.

It was all over--the tension of anxious days, and the restless nights.

Many had been ruined utterly. We had saved something out of the wreck--enough to pay the difference in our rent. Then, too, we were alive and well, and we had our Precious Ones. Also our furniture, which was both satisfactory and paid for. Through the open windows the sweet spring air was blowing in, bringing a breath and memory of country lanes. Even before breakfast was over I reminded the Little Woman of what she had once said about needing a home of our own, now that we had things to put in it. I said that the memory of our one brief suburban experience was like a dream of sunlit and perfumed fields. That we had run the whole gamut of apartment life and the Apollo had been the post-graduate course. In some ways it was better than the others, and if we chose to pinch and economize in other ways, as many did, we still might manage to pay for its luxury, but after all it was not, and never had been a home to me, while the ground and the Precious Ones were too far apart for health.

And the Little Woman, G.o.d bless her, agreed instantly and heartily, and declared that we would go. Onyx and gilded elegance she said were obtained at too great a price for people with simple tastes and moderate incomes. As for stocks, we agreed that they were altogether in keeping with our present surroundings--with the onyx and the gilt--with the fallen n.o.bleman below stairs and those who were fallen and not n.o.ble, the artificial aristocrats, who rode up and down with us on the elevator. We had had quite enough of it all. We had taken our apartment for a year, but as the place was already full, with tenants waiting, there would be no trouble to sublet to some one of the many who are ever willing to spend most of their income in rent and live the best way they can. Peace be with them. They are welcome to do so, but for people like ourselves the Apollo was not built, and _Vanitas Vanitatum_ is written upon its walls.

XIII.

_A Home at Last._

We began reading advertis.e.m.e.nts at once and took jaunts to "see property." The various investment companies supplied free transportation on these occasions. It was a pleasant variation from the old days of flat hunting. The Precious Ones, who remembered with joy our former brief suburban experiment, appreciated it, and raced shouting through rows of new "instalment houses" with nice lawns, all within the commutation limits. We settled on one, at last, through an agency which the trolley-man referred to as the "Reality Trust."

The cash-payment was small and the instalments, if long continued, were at least not discouraging as to size. We had a nice wide lawn with green gra.s.s, a big, dry cellar with a furnace, a high, light garret, and eight beautiful light rooms, all our own. At the back there were clothes-poles and room for a garden. In front there was a long porch with a place for a hammock. There was room in the yard for the Precious Ones to romp, as well as s.p.a.ce to spread out our rugs. We closed the bargain at once, and engaged a moving man. Our Flat days were over.

And now fortune seemed all at once to smile. The day of our last move was perfect. The moving man came exactly on time and delivered our possessions at the new home on the moment of our arrival there. The Little Woman superintended matters inside, while I spread out my rugs on the gra.s.s in the sun and shook them and swept them and scolded the Precious Ones, who were inclined to sit on the one I was handling, to my heart's content. Within an hour the butcher, the baker, and the merry milk-maker had called and established relations. By night-fall we were fairly settled--our furniture, so crowded in a little city apartment, airily scattered through our eight big, beautiful rooms, and our rugs, all fresh and clean, reaching as far as they would go, suggesting new additions to our collection whenever the spell of the dark-faced Armenians in their dim oriental Broadway recess should a.s.sert itself during the years to come.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OUR GARDEN FLOURISHED.]

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 cras.h.i.+ng 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, refres.h.i.+ng 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 Va.s.sar, 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 s.h.i.+ne 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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.

Also, there are the servant girls. We cannot hope that a highly efficient, intelligent young girl will perform menial labor some sixteen hours a day for a few dollars a week and board, with the privilege of eating off the tubs and sleeping in a five-by-seven closet off the kitchen, when she can obtain a clerks.h.i.+p in one of the department stores where she has light, clean employment, shorter hours, and sees something of the pa.s.sing show; or when, by attending night school for a short time, she can learn stenography and command even better salary for still shorter hours. It requires quite as much intelligence to be a capable house servant as to be a good clerk; and as for education, there is no lack of that in these days, whatever the rank of life. Even when a girl prefers household service, if she be bright and capable it is but a question of time when she will find employment with those to whom the question of wages is considered as secondary to that of the quality of service obtained in return.

So you see we must not expect too much of our "girl for general housework," unless we are prepared to pay her for her longer hours and harder work something approximating the sum we pay to the other girl who comes down in a sailor hat and pretty s.h.i.+rt waist at nine or ten to take a few letters and typewrite them, and read a nice new novel between times until say five o'clock, and who gets four weeks' vacation in hot weather, and five if she asks for it prettily, with no discontinuance of salary. All this may be different, some day, but while we are waiting, let us not forget that there are many things in the world that it would be well to remember, and that "_the greatest of these_" and the one that embraces all the rest, "_is Charity!_"