That House I Bought. Henry Edward Warner

Warner

      That House I Bought / A little leaf from life

      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.

      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