Part 12

But you know perfectly well that it is not the end, however ardently you may wish that it was. There still remain two years of your un-subletable lease; and you set yourself, courageously and firmly, to serving out the rest of your time. You resolve, as a good prisoner, to make the best of it. You set to work to apply a little plain common-sense to the problem of the furnace--and find it not so difficult of partial solution after all. You face your other local troubles with a determination to minimize them at least. You resolve to check your too open expressions of dissatisfaction with the life you are leading. You hardly know why you do this, but you have, half-unconsciously, read a gentle hint in the faces of your neighbors; and as you see those kindly faces gathering oftener and oftener about your fire as the winter nights go on, it may, perhaps, dawn upon your mind that the existence you were so quick to condemn has grown dear to some of them.

But, whether you know it or not, that second year in the suburban house is a crisis and turning-point in your life, for it will make of you either a city man or a suburban, and it will surely save you from being, for all the rest of your days, that hideous betwixt-and-between thing, that uncanny creation of modern days of rapid transit, who fluctuates helplessly between one town and another; between town and city, and between town and city again, seeking an impossible and unattainable perfection, and scattering remonstrant servant-maids and disputed bills for repairs along his cheerless track.

You have learned that the miseries of country life are not dealt out to you individually, but that they belong to the life, just as the troubles you fled from belong to the life of a great city. Of course, the realization of this fact only serves to make you see that you erred in making so radical a change in the current of your life. You perceive only the more clearly that as soon as your appointed time is up, you must reestablish yourself in urban conditions. There is no question about it; whatever its merits may be--and you are willing to concede that they are many--it is obvious that country life does not suit you, or that you do not suit country life, one or the other. And yet--somehow incomprehensibly--the understanding that you have only shifted the burden you bore among your old neighbors has put a strangely new face on things, and has made you so readily tolerant that you are really a little surprised at yourself.

The winter goes by; the ever welcome glory of the spring comes back, and with it comes the natural human longing to make a garden, which is really, although we treat it lightly, a sort of humble first-cousin to the love of children. In your own breast you repress this weakness. Why taste of a pleasure which in another short year you mean to put permanently out of your reach? But there is no resisting the entreaties of your children, nor your wife's ready interest in their schemes, and you send for Pat Brannigan, and order a garden made. Of course, it is only for the children, but it is strange how readily a desire to please the little ones spreads into a broader benevolence. When you look over your wife's list of plants and seeds, you are surprised to find how many of them are perennials. "They will please the next tenants here," says your wife; "think how nice it would have been for us to find some flowers all already for us, when we came here!" This may possibly lead you to reflecting that there might have been something, after all, in your original idea of suppressing the gardening instinct.

But there, after a while, is the garden--for these stories of suburban gardens where nothing grows, are all nonsense. True, the clematis and the moonflower obstinately refuse to clothe your cot with beauty; the tigridia bulbs rot in the ground, and your beautiful collection of irises produces a pitiful pennyworth of bloom to an intolerable quantity of leaves. But the petunias and the sweet-williams, and the balsams, and all the other ill-bred and obtrusive flowers leap promptly into life and vigor, and fight each other for the ownership of the beds. And the ever-faithful and friendly nasturtium comes early and stays late, and the limp morning-glory may always be counted upon to slouch familiarly over everything in sight, window-blinds preferred. But, bless you dear urban soul, what do you know about the relative values of flowers? When Mrs. Overtheway brings your wife a bunch of her superbest gladioli, you complacently return the compliment with a half-bushel of magenta petunias, and you wonder that she does not show more enthusiasm over the gift.

In fact, during the course of the summer you have grown so friendly with your garden that, as you wander about its tangled paths in the late fall days, you cannot help feeling a twinge of yearning pain that makes you tremble to think what weakness you might have been guilty of had you not already burned your bridges behind you, and told the house agent that nothing would induce you to renew the lease next spring. You remember how fully and carefully you explained to him your position in the matter. With a glow of modest pride you recall the fact that you stated your case to him so convincingly, that he had to agree with you that a city life was the only life you and your family could possibly lead. He understood fully how much you liked the place and the people, and how, if this were only so, and that were only the other way, you would certainly stay. And you feel if the house agent agrees with you against his own interest, you must be right in your decision. Ah, dear Modestus! You know little enough about flowers; but oh, how little, little, little you know about suburban house agents!

Let us pass lightly over the third winter. It is a period of hesitation, perplexity, expectancy, and general awkwardness. You are, and you are not. You belong nowhere, and to no one. You have renounced your new allegiance, and you really do not know when, how, or at what point you are going to take up the old one again. And, in point of fact, you do not regard this particular prospect with feelings of complete satisfaction. You remember, with a troubled conscience, the long list of social connections which you have found it too troublesome to keep up at long range. I say you, for I am quite sure that Mrs. Modestus will certify me that it was You and not She, who first declared that it was practically impossible to keep on going to the Smith's dinners or the Brown's receptions. You don't know this, my dear Modestus, but I assure you that you may take it for granted. You remember also that your return must carry with it the suggestion of the ignominy of defeat, and you know exactly the tone of kindly contemptuous, mildly assumed superiority with which your friends will welcome you back. And the approaching severance of your newer ties troubles your mind in another way. Your new friends do not try to dissuade you from going (they are too wise in a suburban way for that), but they say, and show in a hundred ways, that they are sorry to think of losing you. And this forbearance, so different from what you have to expect at the other end of your moving, reproaches and pains while it touches your heart. These people were all strangers to you two years and a half ago; they are chance rather than chosen companions. And yet, in this brief space of time--filled with little neighborly offices, with faithful services and tender sympathies in hours of sickness, and perhaps of death, with simple, informal companionship--you have grown into a closer and heartier friendship with them than you have ever known before, save with the one or two old comrades with whose love your life is bound up. When you learned to leave your broad house-door open to the summer airs, you opened, unconsciously, another door; and these friends have entered in.

* * * * *

It is a sunny Saturday afternoon in early April, but not exactly an April afternoon, rather one of those precocious days of delicious warmth and full, summer-like sunshine, that come to remind us that May and June are close behind the spring showers. You and Mrs. Modestus sit on the top step of your front veranda, just as you sat there on such a day, nearly three years ago. As on that day, you are talking of the future; but you are in a very different frame of mind to-day. In a few short weeks you will be adrift upon a sea of domestic uncertainty. For weeks you have visited the noisy city, hunting the proud and lofty mansion and the tortuous and humiliating flat, and it has all come to this--a steam-heated "family-hotel," until such time when you can find summer quarters; and then, with the fall, a new beginning of the weary search. And then--and then----

Coming and going along the street, your friends and neighbors give you cheery greeting, to which you respond somewhat absent-mindedly. You can hear the voices of your children and their little neighbor-friends playing in the empty garden plot. Your talk flags. You do not know just what you are thinking about; still less do you know what your wife is thinking about--but you know that you wish the children would stop laughing, and that the people would stop going by and nodding pleasantly.

And now comes one who does not go by. He turns in at the gate and walks up the gravel path. He smiles and bows at you as if the whole world were sunshine--a trim little figure, dressed with such artistic care that there is cheerfulness in the crease of his trousers and suavity in his very shirt-front. He greets Mrs. Modestus with a world of courtesy, and then he sits confidentially down by your side and says: "My dear sir, I am come to talk a little business with you."

No, you will not talk business. Your mind is firmly made up. Nothing will induce you to renew the lease.

"But, my dear sir," he says, with an enthusiasm that would be as boisterous as an ocean wave, if it had not so much oil on its surface: "I don't want you to renew the lease. I have a much better plan than that! I want you to buy the house!"

And then he goes on to tell you all about it; how the estate must be closed up; how the house may be had for a song; and he names a figure so small that it gives you two separate mental shocks; first, to realize that it is within your means; second, to find that he is telling the truth.

He goes on talking softly, suggestively, telling you what a bargain it is, telling you all the things you have put out of your mind for many months; telling you--telling you nothing, and well he knows it. Three years of life under that roof have done his pleading for him.

Then your wife suddenly reaches out her hand and touches you furtively.

"Oh, buy it," she whispers, huskily, "if you can." And then she gathers up her skirts and hurries into the house.

Then a little later you are all in the library, and you have signed a little plain strip of paper, headed "Memorandum of Sale." And then you and the agent have drunk a glass of wine to bind the bargain, and then the agent is gone, and you and your wife are left standing there, looking at each other with misty eyes and questioning smiles, happy and yet doubtful if you have done right or wrong.

But what does it matter, my dear Modestus?

For you could not help yourselves.