Our Next-Door Neighbors

Chapter I

About Silvia and Myself

Some people have children born unto them, some acquire children and others have children thrust upon them. Silvia and I are of the last named class. We have no offspring of our own, but yesterday, today, and forever we have those of our neighbor.

We were born and bred in the same little home-grown city and as a small boy, even, I was Silvia’s worshiper, but perforce a worshiper from afar.

Her upcoming had been supervised by a grimalkin governess who drew around the form of her young charge the awful circle of exclusiveness, intercourse with child-kind being strictly prohibited.

Children are naturally gregarious little creatures, however, and Silvia on rare occasions managed to break parole and make adroit escape from surveillance. Then she would speed to the top of the boundary wall that separated the stable precincts from an alluring alley which was the playground of the plebeian progeny of the humble born.

To the circle of dirty but fascinating ragamuffins she became an interested tangent, a silent observer. Here I had my first meeting with her. I was not of her class, neither was I to the alley born, but sailed in the sane mid-channel that ameliorates the distinction between high and low life.

On this eventful day I was taking a short cut on my way to school. One of the group of alleyites, with the inherent friendliness of the unchartered but big-hearted members of the silt of the stream of humans, had proffered to little Silvia a chip on which was a patch of mud designed to become a fruitcake stuffed with pebbles in lieu of raisins and frosted with moistened ashes. Before the enticing pastime of transformation was begun, however, Silvia was swiftly snatched from the contaminating midst and borne away over the ramparts.

Thereafter I haunted the alley, hoping for another glimpse of the little picture girl on the wall. At last I attained my desire. One Saturday afternoon I saw her coming, alone, down a long rosebush bordered path. A thrill ran through me. Our eyes met. Yet all I found to say was: “C’mon over.”

She responded to this invitation and I helped her over the wall. She looked longingly at the Irish playing in the mud, but a clean sandpile in my own backyard not far away seemed to me a more fitting environment for one so daintily clad.

We played undisturbed for a never-to-be-forgotten half hour and then they found her out. Reprimanding voices jangled and the whole world was out of tune.

Thereafter a strict watch was kept on little Silvia’s movements and I saw her only at rare intervals, when she was going into church or as she rode past our house. She always remembered me and on such meetings a faint, reminiscent smile lighted the somber little face and her eyes met mine as if in a mysterious promise.

She grew up an outlawed, isolated child deprived of her birthright, but in spite of the handicaps of so barren a childhood, she achieved young womanhood unspoiled and in possession of her early democratic tendencies.

When I was making a modest start in a legal way, her parents died and left her with that most unprofitable of legacies, an encumbered estate. Then I dared to renew our acquaintance begun on the sandpile. She went to live with a poor but practical relation and was initiated into the science of stretching an inadequate income to meet everyday needs. In time I wooed and won her.

We set up housekeeping in a small, thriving mid-Western city where I secured a partnership in a legal firm. Silvia had all the requisites of mind and manner and Domestic Science necessary to a “hearth-and home-” maker.

We lived in a house which was one of many made to the same measure with the inevitable street porch, big window, trimmed lawn in front and garden in the rear. We had attained the standard of prosperity maintained in our home town by keeping “hired help” and installing a telephone, so our social status was fixed.

There was but one adjunct missing to our little Arcadia. While at a word or look children flocked to me like friendly puppies in response to a call, to Silvia they were still an unknown quantity.

I had hoped that her understanding and love for children might be developed in the usual and natural way, but we had now been married ten years and this hope had not been realized.

She had tried most assiduously to cultivate an acquaintance with members of child-world, but into that kingdom there is no open sesame. The sure keen intuition of a child recognizes on sight a kindred spirit and Silvia’s forced advances met with but indifferent response. She wistfully proposed to me one day that we adopt a child. My doubts as to the advisability of such a course were confirmed by Huldah, our strong staff in household help. In our section of the country servants were generally quite conversant with the intimate and personal affairs of the home.

“Don’t you never do it, Mr. Wade,” she counseled. “Ready-mades ain’t for the likes of her.”

When, in acting on this advice, I vetoed Silvia’s lukewarm proposition, I was convinced of Huldah’s wisdom by seeing the look of relief that flashed into my wife’s troubled countenance, and I knew that her suggestion had been but a perfunctory prompting of duty.

Time alone could overcome the effects of her early environment!

Chapter II

Introducing Our Next-door Neighbors

One morning Silvia and I lingered over our coffee cups discussing our plans for the coming summer, which included visits from my sister Beth and my college chum, Rob Rossiter. We wished to avoid having their arrivals occur simultaneously, however, because Rob was a woman-hater, or thought he was. We decided to have Beth pay her visit first and later take Rob with us on our vacation trip to some place where the fishing facilities would be to our liking. However, summer vacation time like our plans was yet far, vague and dim.

While I was putting on my overcoat, Silvia had gone to the window and was looking pensively at the vacant house next to ours.

“I fear,” she said abruptly and irrelevantly, “that we are destined to receive no part of Uncle Issachar’s fortune.”

Uncle Issachar was a wealthy but eccentric relative of my wife. He had made us no wedding gift beyond his best wishes, but he had then informed us that at the birth of each of our prospective sons he should place in the bank to Silvia’s account the sum of five thousand dollars. We had never invited him to visit us or made any overtures in the way of communication with him, lest he should think we were cultivating his acquaintance from mercenary motives.

While I was debating whether the lament in Silvia’s tone was for the loss of the money or the lack of children, she again spoke; this time in a tone which had lost its languor.

“There is a big moving van in front of the house next door. At last we will have some near neighbors.”

“Are they unloading furniture?” I asked inanely, crossing to the window.

“No; course not,” came cheerfully from Huldah, who had come in to remove the dishes. “Most likely they are unloading lions and tigers.”

As I have already intimated, Huldah was a privileged servant.

“They are unloading children!” explained Silvia, in a tone implying that Huldah’s sarcastic implication would be infinitely more preferable. “The van seems to be overflowing with them–a perfect crowd. Do you suppose the house is to be used as an orphan asylum?”

“I think not,” I assured her as I counted the flock. Five children would seem like a crowd to Silvia.

“Boys!” exclaimed Huldah tragically, as she joined us for a survey. “I’ll see that they don’t keep the grass off our lawn.”

Late that afternoon I opened the outer door of the dining-room in response to the rap of strenuously applied knuckles.

A lad of about eleven years with the sardonic face of a satyr and diabolically bright eyes peered into the room.

“We’re going to have soup for dinner,” he announced, “and mother wants to borrow a soup plate for father to eat his out of.”

Silvia stared at him aghast. She seemed to feel something compelling in the boy’s personnel, however, and she went to the china closet and brought forth a soup plate which she handed to him without comment.

In silence we watched him run across the lawn, twirling the plate deftly above his head in juggler fashion.

The next day when we sat down to dinner our new young neighbor again appeared on our threshold.

“Halloa!” he called chummily. “We are going to have soup again and we want a soup plate for father.”

“Where is the one I loaned you yesterday?” demanded Silvia in a tone far below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, while her features assumed a frigidity that would have congealed father’s favorite sustenance had it been in her vicinity.

“Oh, we broke that!” he casually and cheerfully explained.

With much reluctance Silvia bestowed another plate upon the young applicant.

“Wait!” I said as he started to leave, “don’t you want the soup tureen, too, or the ladle and some soup spoons?”

“No, thank you,” he answered politely. “None of the rest of us like soup, so we dish father’s up in the kitchen. He doesn’t like soup particularly, but he eats it because it goes down quick and lets him have more time for work.”

This time as he sped homeward, he didn’t spin the plate in air, but tried out a new plan of balancing it on a stick.

“I think,” I suggested gently, when our young neighbor was lost to our sorrowful sight, “that it might be well to invest in another dozen or so of soup plates. I will see about getting them at wholesale rates. Our supply will soon give out if our new neighbors continue to cultivate the soup and borrowing habit.”

“I will buy some at the five cent store,” replied Silvia. “I think I had better call upon them tomorrow and see what manner of people they can be.”

When I came home the next day it was quite evident that she had called.

“Well,” I inquired, “what do they keep–a soup house?”

“They are literary people, the highest of high-brows. Their name is Polydore, and the head of the house–”

“Mr. or Mrs.?” I interrupted.

“The head of the house,” pursued Silvia, ignoring my question, “is a collector.”

“So I inferred. Has he a large collection of soup plates?”

“She collects antiquities and writes their history. He pursues science.”

“They were seemingly communicative. What did they look like?”

“I didn’t see them. After I rang I heard a woman’s voice bidding some one not to answer the bell. She said she couldn’t be bothered with interruptions, so I went on up the street to call on Mrs. Fleming, who told me all about them. She was also refused admittance when she called. On my way home I met that boy–that awful boy–”

She paused, evidently overcome by the consideration of his awfulness.

“He had been digging bait–”

Again she paused as if words were inadequate for her climax.

“Well,” I encouraged.

“He was carrying his bait–horrid, wriggling angleworms–in our soup plate!”

“Then it is not broken yet!” I exclaimed joyfully. “Let us hope it is given an antiseptic bath before father’s next indulgence in consommé. After dinner I will go over and try my luck at paying my respects to the soup savant.”

“They won’t let you in.”

“In that case I shall follow their lead of setting aside all ceremony and formality and admit myself, as their heir apparent does here.”

After dinner and my twilight smoke, I went next door, first asking Silvia if there was anything we needed that I could borrow, just to show them there were no hard feelings.

My third vigorous ring brought results. A slipshod servant appeared and reluctantly seated me in the hall. She read with seeming interest the card I handed to her and then, pushing aside some mangy looking portières, vanished from view.

She evidently delivered my card, for I heard a woman’s voice read my name, “Mr. Lucien Wade.”

After another short interval the slovenly servant returned and offered me my card.

“She seen it,” she assured me in answer to my look of surprise.

She again put the portières between us and I was obliged to own myself baffled in my efforts to break in. I was showing myself out when my onward course was deflected by a troop of noisy children leaded by the soup plate skirmisher, who was the oldest and apparently the leader of the brood.

“Oh, halloa!” he greeted me with the air of an old acquaintance, “didn’t you see the folks?”

On my informing him that I had seen no one but the servant, he exclaimed:

“Oh, that chicken wouldn’t know enough to ask you in! Just follow us. Mother wouldn’t remember to come out.”

I was loth to force my presence on mother, but by this time my hospitable young friend had pulled the portières so strenuously that they parted from the pole, and I was presented willy nilly to the collector of antiquities, who had the angular sharp-cut face and form of a rocking horse. She was seated at a table strewn with books and papers, writing at a rate of speed that convinced me she was in the throes of an inspiration. I forebore to interrupt. My scruples, however, were not shared by her eldest son. He gave her elbow a jog of reminder which sent her pencil to the floor.

“Mother!” he shouted in megaphone voice, “here’s the man next door–the one we get our soup plates from.”

She looked up abstractedly.

“Oh,” she said in dismayed tone, “I thought you had gone. I am very much engaged in writing a paper on modern antiquities.”

I murmured some sort of an apology for my untimely interruption.

“I am so absorbed in my great work,” she explained, “that I am oblivious to all else. I have the rare and great gift of concentration in a marked degree.”

I was quite sure of this fact. She took another pencil from a supply box and resumed her literary occupation. As my presence seemed of so little moment, I lingered.

“Mother,” shouted one of the boys, snatching the pencil from her grasp, “I’m hungry. I didn’t have any supper.”

“Yes, you did!” she asserted. “I saw Gladys give you a bowl of bread and milk.”

“Emerald took it away from me and drank it up.”

“Didn’t neither!” denied a shaggy looking boy. “I spilled it.”

He accompanied this denial by a fierce punch in his accuser’s ribs.

“Here!” said the author of Modern Antiquities, taking a nickel from her pocket, “go get yourself some popcorn, Demetrius.”

“I ain’t Demetrius! I’m Pythagoras.”

“It makes no difference. Go and get it and don’t speak to me again tonight.”

The boy had already snatched the coin, and he now started for the exit, but his outgoing way was instantly blocked by a promiscuous pack of pugilistic Polydores, and an ardent and general onslaught followed.

I endeavored to untangle the arms and legs of the attackers and the attacked in a desire to rescue the youngest, a child of two, but I soon beat a retreat, having no mind to become a punching bag for Polydores.

The concentrator at the writing table, looking up vaguely, perceived the general joust.

“How provoking!” she exclaimed indignantly. “I was in search of an antonym and now they’ve driven it out of my memory.”

I politely offered my sympathy for her loss.

“Did you ever see such misbehaved children?” she asked casually and impersonally as she calmly surveyed the free-for-all fight.

“Children always misbehave before company,” I remarked propitiatingly. “Of course they know better.”

“Why no, they don’t!” she declared, looking at me in surprise, “they–”

At this instant the errant antonym evidently flashed upon her mental vision and her pencil hastened to record it and then flew on at lightning speed.

I was about to try to make an escape when a momentary cessation of hostilities was caused by the entrance of a moth-eaten, abstracted-looking man. As the two-year-old hailed him as “fadder”, I gathered that he was the person responsible for the family now fighting at his feet.

“What’s the trouble?” he asked helplessly.

“She gave Thag a nickel,” explained the eldest boy, “and we want it.”

The man drew a sigh of relief. The solution of this family problem was instantly and satisfactorily met by an impartial distribution of nickels.

With demoniac whoops of delight, the contestants fled from the room.

I introduced myself to the man of the house, who seemed to realize that some sort of compulsory conventionalities must be observed. He looked hopelessly at his wife, and seeing that she was beyond response to an S O S call to things mundane, he frankly but impressively informed me that I must expect nothing of them socially as their lives were devoted to research and study. The children, however, he assured me, could run over frequently to see us.

I instinctively felt that my call was considered ended, so I took my departure. I related the details of my neighborly visit to Silvia, but her sense of humor was not stirred. It was entirely dominated by her dread of the young Polydores.

“How many children are there?” she asked faintly. “More than the five you said you counted that first day?”

“They seemed not so many as much. That is, though I suppose in round numbers there are but five, yet each of those five is equal to at least three ordinary children.”

“Are they all boys? Huldah says the youngest wears dresses.”

“Nevertheless he is a boy. They are all unmistakably boys. I think they must have been born with boots on and,” conscious of the imprints of my shins, “hobnail boots at that. Even the youngest, a two-year old, seems to have been graduated from Home Rule.”

“I can’t bear to think of their going to bed hungry,” she said wistfully. “Think of that unnatural mother expecting them to satisfy their hunger by popcorn.”

“They didn’t though,” I assured her. “I saw them stop a street vender below here and invest their nickels in hot dogs.”

“Hot dogs!” repeated Silvia in horror.

“Wienerwursts,” I hastened to interpret.

Chapter III

In Which We Are Pestered by Polydores

Our life now became one long round of Polydores. They were with us burr-tight, and attached themselves to me with dog-like devotion, remaining utterly impervious to Silvia’s aloofness and repulses. At last, however, she succumbed to their presence as one of the things inevitable.

“The Polydores are here to stay,” she acknowledged in a calmness-of-despair voice.

“They don’t seem to be homebodies,” I allowed.

The children were not literary like the other productions of their profound parents, but were a band of robust, active youngsters unburdened with brains, excepting Ptolemy of soup plate fame. Not that he betrayed any tendencies toward a learned line, but he was possessed of an occult, uncanny, wizard-like wisdom that was disconcerting. His contemplative eyes seemed to search my soul and read my inmost thoughts.

Pythagoras, Emerald, and Demetrius, aged respectively nine, eight, and seven, were very much alike in looks and size, being so many pinched caricatures of their mother. To Silvia they were bewildering whirlwinds, but Huldah, who seemed to have difficulty in telling them apart, always classified them as “Them three”, and Silvia and I fell into the habit of referring to them in the same way. Huldah could not master the Polydore given names either by memory or pronunciation. Ptolemy, whose name was shortened to “Tolly” by Diogenes, she called “Polly.” When she was on speaking terms with “Them three” she nicknamed them “Thaggy, Emmy, and Meetie.”

Diogenes, the two-year old, was a Tartar when emulating his brothers. Alone, he was sometimes normal and a shade more like ordinary children.

When they first began swarming in upon us, Silvia drew many lines which, however, the Polydores promptly effaced.

“They shall not eat here, anyway,” she emphatically declared.

This was her last stand and she went down ingloriously.

One day while we were seated at the table enjoying some of Huldah’s most palatable dishes, Ptolemy came in. There ensued on our part a silence which the lad made no effort to break. Silvia and I each slipped him a side glance. He stood statuesque, watching us with the mute wistfulness of a hungry animal. There were unwonted small red specks high upon his cheekbones, symptoms, Silvia thought, of starvation.

She was moved to ask, though reluctantly and perfunctorily:

“Haven’t you been to dinner, Ptolemy?”

“Yes,” he admitted quickly, “but I could eat another.”

Assuming that the forced inquiry was an invitation, before protest could be entered he supplied himself with a plate and helped himself to food. His need and relish of the meal weakened Silvia’s fortifications.

This opening, of course, was the wedge that let in other Polydores, and thereafter we seldom sat down to a meal without the presence of one or more members of the illustrious and famished family, who made themselves as entirely at home as would a troop of foraging soldiers. Silvia gazed upon their devouring of food with the same surprised, shocked, and yet interested manner in which one watches the feeding of animals.

“I suppose he ought not to eat so many pickles,” she remarked one day, as Emerald consumed his ninth Dill.

“You can’t kill a Polydore,” I assured her.

I never opened a door but more or less Polydores fell in. They were at the left of us and at the right of us, with Diogenes always under foot. We had no privacy. I found myself waking suddenly in the night with the uncomfortable feeling that Ptolemy lurked in a dark corner or two of my bedroom.

Even Silvia’s boudoir was not free from their invasion. But one door in our house remained closed to them. They found no open sesame to Huldah’s apartment.

“I wish she would let me in on her system,” I said. “I wonder how she manages to keep them on the outside?”

“I can tell you,” confided Silvia. “Emerald and Demetrius went in one day and she dropped Demetrius out the window and kicked Emerald out the door. You know, Lucien, you are too softhearted to resort to such measures.”

“I was once,” I confessed, “but I think under Polydore régime I am getting stoical enough to follow in Huldah’s footsteps and go her one better.”

Our conversation was interrupted by the entrance of Diogenes.

Silvia screamed.

Turning to see what the latest Polydore perpetration might be, I saw that Diogenes was frothing at the mouth.

“Oh, he’s having a fit!” exclaimed Silvia frantically. “Call Huldah! Put him in a hot bath. Quick, Lucien, turn on the hot water.”

“Not I,” I refused grimly. “Let him have a fit and fall in it.”

“He ain’t got no fit,” was the cheerful assurance of Pythagoras, as he sauntered in.

“Your mother would have one,” I told him, “if she could hear your English.”

“What is the matter with him?” asked Silvia. “Does he often foam in this way?”

“He’s been eating your tooth powder,” explained Pythagoras. “He likes it ’cause it tastes like peppermint, and then he drank some water before he swallowed the powder and it all fizzed up and run out his mouth.”

“I wondered,” said Silvia ruefully, “what made my tooth powder disappear so rapidly. What shall I do!”

“Resort to strategy!” I advised. “Lock up your powder hereafter and fill an empty bottle with powdered alum or something worse and leave it around handy.”

“Lucien!” exclaimed my wife, who could not seem to recover from this latest annoyance, “I don’t see how you can be so fond of children. I did hope–for your sake and–on account of Uncle Issachar’s offer that I’d like to have one–but I’d rather go to the poorhouse! I’d almost lose your affection rather than have a child.”

“But, Silvia!” I remonstrated in dismay, “you shouldn’t judge all by these. They’re not fair samples. They’re not children–not home-grown children.”

“I should say not!” agreed Huldah, who had come into the room. “They are imps–imps of the devil.”

I believe she was right. They had a generally demoralizing effect on our household. I was growing irritable, Silvia careworn. Even Huldah showed their influence by acquiring the very latest in slang from them. Once in a while to my amusement I heard Silvia unconsciously adopting the Polydore argot.