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That House I Bought

_A LITTLE LEAF FROM LIFE_

BY
HENRY EDWARD WARNER

[Illustration: Logo]

G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY
PUBLISHERS      NEW YORK


COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY
G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY

_That House I Bought_




DEDICATION


Why a dedication? Why a preface--a foreword? Why any comment, save the
title and the price mark?

Simplicity itself! The preface, foreword, dedication--what you may term
it--gives opportunity to apologize for the liberality with which the
author betrays his egotism, in the thickly sprinkled perpendicular
pronoun.

And yet this plain young tale of plain things could not be told in the
third person, since it is a mere setting down of real experience,
painfully truthful and laboriously pruned where imagination was tempted
to stray into fields of fiction. There is but one confession of romantic
mendacity--and it shall not be made, for it _might_ have happened! Quien
Sabe?

And now this little story is dedicated to all who have bought or intend
to buy homes, who have lost or expect to lose them; to the bird of
passage and to the homing, and to all who love their fellowmen--but very
especially to you who read it.

H. E. W.




CONTENTS

                     PAGE
DEDICATION              5

FIRST PERIOD            7

SECOND PERIOD          18

THIRD PERIOD           31

FOURTH PERIOD          42

FIFTH PERIOD           54

SIXTH PERIOD           68

SEVENTH PERIOD         90

EIGHTH PERIOD         105

NINTH PERIOD          120

TENTH PERIOD          132

ELEVENTH PERIOD       143

THE EVEN DOZENTH      155




That House I Bought




FIRST PERIOD


Thirty-three years ago I formed a box of blocks into a castle and then
kicked it down in disgust because I didn't like the chimney. Mother said
I displayed temper.

Birds build nests in tree-tops with horse-hair and straw, and odd bits
of stuff; but my wife and I aren't birds. Far from it. And we've been
going along for fifteen years without a regular nest. All that time
I've been building a house with blocks and kicking it down.

The other day we went out to Mont Alto to take dinner with our friends,
and on the way we saw a new house numbered "3313." The number stuck out
in letters of silver, burnished into brilliancy by a noonday sun.

"That's an odd number," I remarked. "Anyway you look at it, it's
unlucky--3313. And I'm not superstitious."

"Let's go in and examine it," she said.

That's where it all started. We bought the house after dinner. It took
fifteen minutes to decide, and in that time, of course, we didn't
notice the place on the dining-room ceiling where the plumbing--but let
it pass. The Duke of Mont Alto would fix it up. We had great faith in
the Duke. The point is, we owned a house at last. That is, we had
started to own it. We were tickled to death--also scared to death. There
are two emotions for you, both fatal!

Coming into possession of a castle with ten rooms and large open
plumbing, fronting fifty feet and going back one hundred and fifty-three
feet to the company's stable, is a thrilling experience. My first thrill
was in connection with the initial terms of the contract, which called
for certain financial daring. Up to this time I had laid to my soul the
happy thought that a clean conscience is more than money; but believe
me, friend, a silver quarter began to look like a gold eagle. Change
that in other days went merrily across the table without thought for the
morrow, I found myself wearing to a frazzle, counting the cracks in the
milled edges affectionately, hopefully, and yet with certain misgivings.


Naturally, we first paced off our yard, to see whether it was 50 by 153
feet, more or less, as shown in the plot. Every man who buys a house
paces off his yard. So does his wife. My wife made seventy-eight steps
of it and I made fifty-one, on the length. By deducting for my long legs
and adding for her confining skirt we came to the conclusion that
mathematics was an inexact science, and decided to do it later with a
tape measure.

But for the purpose of this narrative we must get inside the house and
look about. We found a wide hall with a grand staircase; a roomy parlor
connecting by folding door with a spacious dining-room, and off the
dining-room a real conservatory, all glass and tiles. Opening into the
pantry a swinging door, and another into the kitchen, and in the wall a
refrigerator. In the basement a furnace with a barometer and
thermometer atop. On the second floor four big rooms and a centre
hallway, and in the bathroom large, open plumbing and the addition of a
shower and spray bath. On the third floor two cozy rooms and another
hallway and bath. Item: Slate roof; item: water-heated, hot and cold
water all the time sometimes; item: hardwood floor downstairs.
Conveniences in every direction, gas and electric fittings throughout.
And the whole sheltered by oak trees that leaned over to embrace us,
wagging flirtatious branches through the big windows.

"Isn't this living!" I exclaimed.

My wife looked out through the window at the distant picture of the
low-lying city against the bay, and held my hand. It was as though we
had not been married fifteen years, but were beginning our honeymoon--a
couple of birds just mated, fetching things for the nest and glorying in
its construction--silent in a dream of contemplation, but just ready to
burst into song, the song of achievement. She did not reply, but pressed
my hand. When finally she spoke, what was in her heart broke its leash.

"I was just wondering," she said, "if we couldn't rent the second floor
as a flat to pay the expenses, and then all we put in would be invested
in the equity!"

I awoke with a start from my dreaming. Even a honeymoon has its
practical side!

But all sad realities have their recompense in a happy mind. Give me the
optimist and a famine and I'll show you a famine licked to a standstill.
The combination of confident, hopeful ego and material misfortune never
yet met, but that material misfortune took the count in the first round.
The man who stands hugging misfortune in his chest has something coming
to him. When it arrives it will land right square under that point
where, if he were a woman of twenty years ago, he might have worn
earrings. Take the other chap, however--the fellow who not only shakes
hands with Trouble, but slaps it on the back, invites it to have a
drink, sleeps with it, jollies it until it wrinkles up into a gorgeous
grin six miles long; take that chap and put him in the middle of the
Sahara Desert with nothing but a glad smile in his pocket, and he'll
find a way to coax a mint julep out of the blooming sand!

Do you know, the more I think about the fellow who starts out by howling
that _things can't be done_, the more I'm convinced that the Creator got
a lot of cracked forms into the outfit when Man was molded, and these
little defects must really be charged up to accident. The Lord never
intended any man made in His image to be afraid of anything that walks
on hind legs or all fours, crawls or flies, or flops dismally over the
Slough of Despond on a carrion-hunt. And just about the best way to mend
this defect, I reckon, is to get married early and start right out
buying a house and lot. If a fellow's an invertebrate he'll get past the
first payment with a struggle. If he survives the second, it will put
some starch into his hide.

You are asking what all this has to do with That House I Bought.

Why, bless your heart, Friend, it has all to do with it! The very first
thing a man must do when he buys a house and lot is, get himself into
the state of mind. Buying a house and lot is not so much a physical or
financial transaction as a philosophical conclusion. You need the house
and lot; you must argue yourself into a mental attitude toward that
house and lot that simply knocks the props from under every obstacle.
The man who is afraid to own his castle is a good citizen, perhaps, in
every other respect. But the very best citizen is he who has the courage
to own something and pay taxes on it, help support the community, and be
useful to himself and to the world that holds him trustee of his
possessions.




SECOND PERIOD


Heaven bless Murphy!

When my wife was a little girl with braids down her back, Murphy used to
see her in the excited crowd in front of the neighbor's door, as he
toted a grand piano to the waiting van. Many a time Murphy has started
to give that little girl a penny because she was so cute. Many a time he
has reconsidered and kept the penny himself!

It was Murphy who moved us. He is anywhere from seventy to ninety years
old now--a stalwart, steel-muscled young fellow who runs his own wagon
and lifts his end of the heaviest burden with a heart as light as his
chest is deep and his back broad. His beard is long and white.

How we tore up our old rooms and saw our furniture hustled out, how we
looked regretfully back at the den we had papered and fixtured
ourselves, with its rich red base and green forest over that, and the
light sky--that is all another story. It is another story, too, how
mother-in-law bustled here and there helpfully and every now and then
added something of her own to our belongings, and how Mamie telephoned
every one she knew that we were moving to That House I Bought! These
are things we think of, but do not write.

Murphy was indefatigable. We thought we had a load more than Murphy made
it, what with shifting this and changing that, and substituting
something and stuffing small truck under tables and empty boxes that we
wanted for our conservatory. My wife watched him in admiration.

"Mr. Murphy," she said, "you would be invaluable to the United Railways
as a conductor on the Druid Hill avenue line!"

When the last load was about to leave my wife rushed to the door.

"Oh, Mr. Murphy, couldn't you take that couch upstairs and drop it off
at----"

Murphy smiled and glanced at the wagon, with things tied on over the
wheels, and the china closet swinging perilously far out on the tail
piece.

"I can do it," he said, "if I carry the china closet on my lap."

Murphy intended that as a jest.

My wife hadn't thought of the possibilities of Murphy's lap. The instant
he mentioned it, she darted back into the house, quickly to reappear
with a double armful of odds and ends that she couldn't get into the
suit cases and trunks.

"It's mighty kind of you," she said, with the sort of a smile that
nailed me fifteen years ago. "If you can just carry these little things
in your lap----"

Murphy is a game one.

When he drove away Murphy's lap looked like the market burden of a
suburbanite. And because he was so cheerful about it, and so willing to
do so much for so little, and because he is such a good citizen, again I
say:

"Heaven bless Murphy!"

After Murphy had moved us in our real troubles began. I should have said
our real joys, for, believe me, the infant troubles of owning your
castle are so refined and glorified by the pride of possession that they
appear only as strengthening alloy in the pure gold of content.

It was on Thursday and Friday that Murphy moved us. On Saturday I went
to the house, and the lady who will hereafter listen for the tinkle of
the door and telephone bells met me, brimming over with cheerfulness and
almost as proud of herself as I was of the lord of the manor who
strutted like a peacock, as for the first time he showed his feathers in
his own front yard.

Never praise your wife too much, or she will dominate you.

But as this is to be a truthful chronicle, be it said that my wife is
the most wonderful woman in the world. How on earth she ever got the
chairs and tables, the china closet and dishes, the cooking hardware and
beds and mattresses and my desk and revolving bookcase, and Heaven knows
what, all in place in one day is beyond me.

There were pictures on the walls--old friends in new places, looking
down to greet me. A foolish Billiken laughed out loud as I held up my
hands in amazement.

"Step high and easy," said my wife. "You'll scratch the hardwood floor,"
and she rubbed my heelprint from the polish with the hem of her working
skirt. Then we started around testing the push-buttons. We pushed every
button there was, and pulled down the curtains to try the effect in the
parlor and dining-room. She hauled me around and showed me the marvelous
gas range that she was going to do wonders with. That refrigerator, that
was yet to have its first load of ice and provisions--it made me hungry
just to look at it! We went upstairs and downstairs. I opened and closed
every window and made wise-foolish observations on the proper care of a
home.

A man can be a fearful idiot when his chest is out.

I chucked my coat and cuffs and collar and went to work on little odds
and ends of chores about the place. Hasn't a fellow a right to whistle
and sing when he comes home from foraging and finds the lady bird
dancing around the new nest?

There was a thermometer on top of the furnace in the basement, and
beside it a round thing to tell how much water we were catapulting into
the radiators. When there is too much water it overflows from a tank
upstairs; when there isn't enough you turn some in downstairs. So I
started a march up and down stairs, first turning some on and then
scooting skyward to listen to the overflow, and after making this trip
about ten times I had an appetite like a typhoid convalescent.

O the tintinnabulation of the bells!

There are church bells and wedding bells, bells that cry the joy of a
new birth or toll the sorrow of the huddled family, bells that ring
victory in war and bells that scream the hilarity of la fiesta! But for
the bell that speaks the common language of all men, I name the dinner
bell! The first biscuits were piping hot on the plate.

"Are they as good as your mother used to make?" asked my wife.

"My mother," I said, "was a piker at biscuit making!"

And she beamed with pleasure when I slandered my honored mother!

After the dinner we went out on the porch--the big, wide porch for
which we had planned a swing on chains, and sat rocking and digesting,
digesting and rocking, in a perfect picture of resident domesticity. In
the house across the street there were lights. The people had just moved
in--that is, they had moved in several days before and were just
beginning to find the trouble with things and why the gas company could
afford to pay considerable dividends on wind. I say, we were sitting
there as cumfy as possible, when my wife caught my hand in a convulsive
grip.

With the other hand she pointed across the street to the second parlor
blind. I followed her, and felt like a Peeping Tom. There on the blind
was a great picture in silhouette--a picture of two figures standing,
and the tall, masculine figure was holding both shoulders of the other
and looking square into her eyes.

"It's the daughter!" my wife almost whispered. "I know her by her hair
ribbon; it's too young for the mother! Look, look, they are going to
ki----"

She finished the word with a little gurgle, for they had done it! Not
only that, but the kiss was followed by an embrace, and another, and
then the lights went out.

A confounded belt had slipped at the powerhouse, I learned afterward.

I think corporations should be heavily penalized for such breaks in the
service. There should be some sort of appliance to keep belts from
slipping. More than once the belt has slipped and left that whole
residence district in darkness.




THIRD PERIOD


I had always regarded the humorous paragraphs about the price of coal as
mere pleasantries. I now deny that they are pleasantries, and they are
far from "mere."

There are several grades of coal. Our furnace takes No. 3, and it's
$6.60 a ton, April price. The man who dominates the situation told me by
way of consolation that if it hadn't been for the big strike coal would
be 50 cents a ton cheaper. I can't see how that sort of consolation
helps a fellow.

Our house burns about ten or twelve tons, normal conditions. We figured
that about eight tons now would be the proper caper, and we could pay
the difference next winter if driven to it. From the way the furnace ate
coal to take the chill off the house the first day, I could see the
Board of Charities asking me my name, address, age, social condition and
whether my parents ever went to jail.

Now $6.60 times eight tons is $52.80, and that's more than taxes, water
rent and interest on a house and lot. So when the man backed up with a
cartload and began to throw it in off-handedly, I was pained. A
coal-heaver should treat $52.80 with more respect. I have seen men
throw high-grade ore out of