Our Next-Door Neighbors

As the result of their better nourishment at our table, the imps of the devil daily grew more obstreperous and life became so burdensome to Silvia that I proposed moving away to a childless neighborhood.

“They’d find us out,” said Silvia wearily, “wherever we went. Distance would be no obstacle to them.”

“Then we might move out of town, as a last resort,” I suggested. “Rob says he thinks there is a good legal field in–”

“No, Lucien,” vetoed Silvia. “You’ve a fine practice here, and then there’s that attorneyship for the Bartwell Manufacturing Company.”

My hope of securing this appointment meant a good deal to us. We were now living up to every cent of my income and though we had the necessities, it was the luxuries of life I craved–for Silvia’s sake. She was a lover of music and we had no piano. She yearned to ride and she had no horse. We both had longings for a touring-car and we wanted to travel.

“I’ve thought of a scheme for a little respite from the sight and sound of the Polydores,” I remarked one day. “We’ll enter them in the public school. There are four more weeks yet before the long summer vacation.”

“That would be too good to be true,” declared Silvia. “Five or six hours each day, and then, too, their deportment will be so dreadful that they will have to stay after school hours.”

I thought more likely their deportment would lead to suspension, but forbore to wet-blanket Silvia’s hopes.

I made my second call upon the male head of the House of Polydore to recommend and urge that its young scions be sent to the public school. I had misgivings as to the outcome of my proposition, as the Polydore parents believed themselves to be the only fount of learning in the town. To my surprise and intense gratification, my suggestion met with no objections whatever. Felix Polydore referred me to his wife and said he would abide by her decision. I found her, of course, buried in books, but remembering Ptolemy’s mode of gaining attention, I peremptorily closed the volume she was studying.

My audacity attained its object and I proferred my request, laying great stress on the quietude she would gain thereby. She replied that attendance at school would doubtless do them no harm, although she expressed her belief that the most thorough educations were those obtained outside of schools.

Silvia was wafted into the eighth heaven of bliss and then some, as the result of my diplomatic mission. Of course the task of preparing pupils out of the pestiferous Polydores devolved upon her, but she was actively aided by the eager and willing Huldah and between them they pushed the project that promised such an elysium with all speed. The prospective pupils themselves were not wildly enthusiastic over this curtailment of their liberty, but Huldah won the day by proposing that they carry their luncheon with them, promising an abundant supply of sugared doughnuts and small pies.

Pythagoras foresaw recreation ahead in the opportunity to “lick all the kids,” and I assumed that Ptolemy had deep laid schemes for the outmaneuvering of teachers, but as his left hand never made confidant of his right, I could not expect to fathom the workings of his mind.

Early on a Monday morning, therefore, our household arose to lick our Polydore protégés into a shape presentable for admission to school. It took two hours to pull up stockings and make them stay pulled, tie shoestrings, comb out tangles, adjust collars and neckties, to say nothing of vigorous scrubbings to five grimy faces and ten dirt-stained hands.

At last with an air of achievement Silvia corralled her round-up and unloaded the four eldest upon the public school and then proceeded to install the protesting Diogenes in a nursery kindergarten. Huldah stood in the doorway as they marched off and sped the parting guests with a muttered “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

Silvia returned radiant, but her rejoicing was shortlived. She had scarcely taken off her hat and gloves when the four oldest came trooping and whooping into the house.

“What’s the matter?” gasped Silvia.

“Got to be vaccinated,” explained Ptolemy with an appreciative grin. Of all the Polydores he was the one who had least objected to scholastic pursuits, but he seemed quite jubilant at our discomfiture.

We were somewhat reluctant to undertake the responsibility of their inoculation, especially after Ptolemy told us that his mother didn’t believe in vaccination.

“I’ll take ’em down and get ’em vaccinated right,” declared Huldah. “Their ma won’t never notice the scars, and if one of you young uns blabs about it,” she added, turning upon them ferociously, “I’ll cut your tongue out.”

“Suppose there should be some ill result from it,” said Silvia apprehensively.

“Don’t you worry!” exclaimed Huldah. “Most likely it won’t amount to anything. It’ll take some new kind of scabs to work in these brats. They’re too tough to take anything. Come on now with me,” she commanded, “and after it’s done, I’ll get you each an ice cream sody.”

Through Huldah’s efficiency the vaccination was quickly accomplished and the children of our neighbor were reluctantly accepted by the school authorities.

The Polydores were not parted by reason of dissimilarity of age or learning, as they were put into the ungraded room. To keep them there enrolled taxed to the utmost our ingenuity in the way of framing excuses for their repeated cases of tardiness and suspension.

Silvia felt a little remorseful when she listened to the tale of woe recited to her by their teacher at a card party one Saturday afternoon.

“She said,” my wife repeated, “that yesterday Pythagoras brought two mice to school in his marble-bag and let them loose. She doesn’t believe in corporal punishment, but she determined to experiment with its effect on Pythagoras, so she kept him and Emerald, who was slightly implicated, after school and sent the latter out to get a whip. When he came back he said: ‘I couldn’t find any stick, but here’s some rocks you can throw at him,’ and handed her a hat full of stones. This made her too hysterical to try her experiment, so she took away his recess for a week.”

“We ought to make her a present,” I observed.

“She said,” continued Silvia, “that they had given her nervous prostration, but she had no time to prostrate, and if she didn’t succeed in getting them graded by the coming fall term, she should accept an offer of marriage she had received from a cross-eyed man, and you know how unlucky that would be, Lucien!”

“We may be driven to worse things than that by fall,” I replied ruefully.

Chapter IV

In Which We Take Boarders

Four weeks of unalloyed bliss and then the summer vacation times arrived, bringing joy to the heart of the Polydores and the teacher of the ungraded room, but deep gloom to the hearthside of the Wades.

One misfortune always brings another. A rival applicant received the coveted attorneyship and we bade a sad farewell to piano, saddle-horse, automobile and journey, the furnishings to our Little House of Dreams.

“I did want you to have a car, Lucien,” sighed Silvia, regretfully, “and you worked so hard this last year, you need a trip. Won’t you go somewhere with Rob–without me?”

I assured her it would be no vacation without her.

“Do you know, Lucien,” she proposed diffidently, “I think it would be an excellent plan to invite Uncle Issachar to visit us. He knows no more about children than I do–than I did, I mean, and if he should see the Polydores he’d give us five thousand each for the children we didn’t have.”

I wouldn’t consent to this plan. I had met Uncle Issachar once. He was a crusty old bachelor with a morbid suspicion that everyone was working him for his money. I don’t wonder he thought so. He had no other attractions.

Perceiving the strength of my opposition Silvia sweetly and sagaciously refrained from further pressure.

“We should not repine,” she said. “We have health and happiness and love. What are pianos and cars and trips compared to such assets?”

What, indeed! I admitted that things might be worse.

Alas! All too soon was my statement substantiated. That night after we had gone to bed, I heard a taxicab sputtering away at the house next door.

“The Polydores must have unexpected guests,” I remarked.

“I trust they brought no children with them,” murmured Silvia drowsily.

The next morning while we were at breakfast, the odor of June roses wafting in through the open window, the delicious flavor of red-ripe strawberries tickling our palate, and the anticipation of rice griddle-cakes exhilarating us, the millennium came.

For the five young Polydores bore down upon us en masse.

“Father and mother have gone away,” proclaimed Ptolemy, who was always spokesman for the quintette.

This intelligence was of no particular interest to us–not then, at least. We rarely saw father and mother Polydore, and they were apparently of no need to their offspring.

Ptolemy’s next announcement, however, was startling and effective in its dramatic intensity.

“We’ve come over to stay with you while they are away.”

I laughed; jocosely, I thought.

Silvia paid no heed to my forced hilarity, but ejaculated gaspingly:

“Why, what do you mean!”

“They have gone away somewhere,” enlightened our oracle. “They went to the train last night in a taxi. They have gone somewhere to find out something about some kind of aborigines.”

“Which reminds me,” I remarked reminiscently, “of the man who traveled far and vainly in search of a certain plant which, on his return, he found growing beside his own doorstep.”

Silvia paid no heed to my misplaced pleasantry. She was right–as usual. It was no time for levity.

“I don’t see,” spoke my unappreciative wife, addressing Ptolemy, “why their absence should make any difference in your remaining at home. Gladys can cook your meals and put Diogenes to bed as usual.”

“Gladys has gone,” piped Demetrius. “She left yesterday afternoon. She was only staying till she could get her pay.”

“Father forgot to get another girl in her place,” informed Ptolemy, “and he forgot to tell mother he had forgotten until just before they went to the train. She said it didn’t matter–that we could just as well come over here and stay with you.”

“She said,” added Pythagoras, “that you were so crazy over children, that probably you’d be glad to have us stay with you all the time.”

My last strawberry remained poised in mid-air. It was quite apparent to me now that there was nothing funny about this situation.

“Milk, milk!” whimpered Diogenes, pulling at Silvia’s dress and making frantic efforts to reach the cream pitcher.

Huldah had come in with the griddle-cakes during this avalanche of news.

“Here, all you kids!” commanded our field marshal, as she picked up Diogenes, “beat it to the kitchen, and I’ll give you some breakfast. Hustle up!”

The Polydores, whose eyes were bulging with expectancy and semi-starvation, tumbled over each other in their eagerness to “hustle up and beat it to the kitchen.” Our oiler of troubled waters followed, and there was assurance of a brief lull.

“What shall we do!” I exclaimed helplessly when the door had closed on the last Polydore. I felt too limp and impotent to cope with the situation. Not so Silvia.

“Do!” she echoed with an intensity of tone and feeling I had never known her to display. “Do! We’ll do something, I am sure! I will not for a moment submit to such an imposition. Who ever heard of such colossal nerve! That father and mother should be brought back and prosecuted. I shall report them to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. But we won’t wait for such procedure. We’ll express each and every Polydore to them at once.”

“I should certainly do that P.D.Q. and C.O.D.,” I acquiesced, “if the Polydore parents could be located, but you know the abodes of aborigines are many and scattered.”

My remarks seemed to fall as flat as the flapjacks I was siruping.

Silvia arose, determination in every lineament and muscle, and crossed the room. She opened the door leading into the kitchen.

“Ptolemy,” she demanded, “where have your father and mother gone?”

He came forward and replied in a voice somewhat smothered by cakes and sirup.

“I don’t know. They didn’t say.”

“We can find out from the ticket-agent,” I optimistically assured her.

“They never bother to buy tickets. Pay on the train,” Ptolemy explained.

My legal habit of counter-argument asserted itself.

“We can easily ascertain to what point their baggage was checked,” I remarked, again essaying to maintain a rôle of good cheer.

But the pessimistic Ptolemy was right there with another of his gloom-casting retaliations.

“They only took suit-cases and they always keep them in the car. Here’s a check father said to give you to pay for our board. He said you could write in any amount you wanted to.”

“He got a lot of dough yesterday,” informed Pythagoras, “and he put half of it in the bank here.”

Ptolemy handed over a check which was blank except for Felix Polydore’s signature.

“I don’t see,” I weakly exclaimed when my wife had closed the kitchen door, “why she put them off on us. Why didn’t she trade her brats off for antiques?”

Silvia eyed the check wistfully. I could read the unspoken thought that here, perhaps, was the opportunity for our much-desired trip.

“No, Silvia,” I answered quickly, “not for any number of blank checks or vacation trips shall you have the care and annoyance of those wild Comanches.”

“I know what I’ll do!” she exclaimed suddenly. “I’ll go right down to the intelligence office and get anything in the shape of a maid and put her in charge of the Polydore caravansary with double wages and every night out and any other privileges she requests.”

This seemed a sane and sensible arrangement, and I wended my way to my office feeling that we were out of the woods.

When I returned home at noon, I found that we had only exchanged the woods for water–and deep water at that.

I beheld a strange sight. Silvia sat by our bedroom window twittering soft, cooing nonsensical nothings to Diogenes, who was clasped in her arms, his flushed little face pressed close to her shoulder.

“He’s been quite ill, Lucien. I was frightened and called the doctor. He said it was only the slight fever that children are subject to. He thought with good care that he’d be all right in a few days.”

“Did you succeed in getting a cook to go to the Polydores?” I asked anxiously. “You’ll need a nurse to go there, too, to take care of Diogenes.”

She looked at me reproachfully and rebukingly.

“Why, Lucien! You don’t suppose I could send this sick baby back to that uninviting house with only hired help in charge! Besides, I don’t believe he’d stay with a stranger. He seems to have taken a fancy to me.”

Diogenes confirmed this belief by a languid lifting of his eyelids, as he feelingly patted her cheek with his baby fingers.

I forebore to suggest that the fancy seemed to be mutual. Diogenes, sick, was no longer an “imp of the devil”, but a normal, appealing little child. It occurred to me that possibly the care of a sick Polydore might develop Silvia’s tiny germ of child-ken.

“Keep him here of course,” I agreed, “but–the other children must return home.”

“Diogenes would miss them,” she said quickly, “and the doctor says his whims must be humored while he is sick. He is almost asleep now. I think he will let me put him down in his own little bed. Ptolemy brought it over here. Pull back the covers for me, Lucien. There!”

Diogenes half opened his eyes, as she laid him in the bed and smiled wanly.

“Mudder!” he cooed.

Silvia flushed and looked as if she dreaded some expression of mirth from me. Relieved by my silence and a suggestion of moisture in the region of my eyes–the day was quite warm–she confessed:

“He has called me that all the morning.”

“It would be a wise Polydore that knows its own parents,” I observed.

The slight illness of Diogenes lasted three or four days. I still shudder to recall the memory of that hideous period. Silvia’s time and attention were devoted to the sick child. Huldah was putting in all her leisure moments at the dentist’s, where she was acquiring her third set of teeth, and joy rode unconfined and unrestrained with our “boarders.”

Polydore proclivities made the Reign of Terror formerly known as the French Revolution seem like an ice cream festival. I don’t regard myself as a particularly nervous man, but there’s a limit! Their war whoops and screeches got on my nerves and temper to the extent of sending me into their midst one evening brandishing a whip and commanding immediate silence. I got it. Not through fear of chastisement, for fear was an emotion unknown to a Polydore, but from astonishment at so unexpected a procedure from so unexpected a source. Heretofore I had either ignored them or frolicked with them. Before they had recovered from their shock, Silvia appeared on the scene.

“Diogenes,” she informed them, “was not used to such unwonted quiet, and was fretting at the unaccustomed stillness. Would the boys please play Indian or some of their games again?”

The boys would. I backed from the room, the whip behind me, carefully kept without Silvia’s angle of vision. Before Ptolemy resumed his rôle of chief, he bestowed a knowing and maddening wink upon me.

I wished that we had remained neighbor-less. I wished that the aborigines would scalp Felix Polydore and the writer of Modern Antiquities. Then we could land their brats on the Probate Court. I wished that this were the reign of Herod. I vowed I would backslide from the Presbyterian faith since it no longer included in its articles of belief the eternal damnation of infants. How long, O Catiline, would–

A paralyzing suspicion flashed into the maelstrom of my vituperative maledictions. I rushed wildly upstairs to our combination bedroom, sickroom, and nursery, where Silvia sat like a guardian angel beside the Polydore patient.

“Silvia,” I shouted excitedly, “do you suppose those diabolical Polydore parents purposely played this trick on us? Was it a premeditated Polydore plan to abandon their young? And can you blame them for playing us for easy marks? Could any parents, Polydore, or otherwise, ever come back to such fiends as these?”

“Hush!” she cautioned, without so much as a glance in my direction. “You’ll wake Diogenes!”

Wake Diogenes! Ye Gods! And she had also implored the brothers of Diogenes to continue their anvil chorus! This took the last stitch of starch from my manly bosom. Spiritless and spineless I bore all things, believed all things–but hoped for nothing.

Chapter V

In Which We Take a Vacation

Diogenes finally convalesced to his former state of ruggedness and obstreperousness. He continued, however, to cling to Silvia and to call her “mudder.” To my amusement the other children followed suit and she was now “muddered” by all the Polydores.

“I am glad,” I remarked, “that they scorn to include me in their adoption. I wouldn’t fancy being ‘faddered’ by the Polydores.”

“You won’t be,” Ptolemy, appearing seemingly from nowhere, assured me. “We’ve named you stepdaddy.”

“If it be possible, Silvia,” I implored, “let this cup pass from me.”

“I am going down to the intelligence office today,” replied Silvia soothingly. “Diogenes is well enough to go home now, and I can run over there every evening and see that he is properly put to bed.”

I went down town feeling like a mule relieved of his pack.

When I came home that afternoon, I found Silvia sitting on the shaded porch serenely sewing. A Sabbath-like stillness pervaded. Not a Polydore in sight or sound.

“Oh!” I cried buoyantly. “The Polydores have been returned to their home station!”

“No,” she replied calmly. “They told me at the intelligence office that it would be absolutely impossible to persuade, bribe, or hire a servant to assume the charge of the Polydore place.”

“I suppose,” I said glumly, “that Gladys gave the job a double cross. But will you please account for the phenomenon of the utter absence of Polydores at the present period? Has Huldah at last carried out her oft-repeated threat of exterminating the Polydore race?”

“Pythagoras,” explained Silvia dejectedly, “has gone to the doctor’s. He broke his wrist this morning. Diogenes is lost and Emerald has gone to look for him–”

“Oh, why hunt him up?” I remonstrated. “Maybe Emerald, too, will get lost or strayed or stolen.”

“Huldah,” continued Silvia, “has locked Demetrius in the cellar. I am unable to report on Ptolemy. Huldah is half sick, but she won’t go to bed. She said no beds in Bedlamite for her. But I have a wonderful plan to suggest. There is relief in sight if you will consent.”

“I will consent to any committable crime on the calendar,” I assured her, “that will lead to the parting of the Polydore path from ours. Divulge.”

“We both need a change and rest. Today I heard of a most alluring, inexpensive, unfrequented resort called Hope Haven. Unfashionable, fine fishing, beautiful scenery, twelve miles from a railroad, and a stage stops there but once a day.”

“If there is such a place, we’ll go there at once, though why such an enticing spot should be unfrequented is beyond me. Do we leave the Polydores to their fate, or as a town charge?”

“We’ll leave them to Huldah. She offered to keep them here if we’d take the outing. She said she’d either give them free rein or beat their brains out.”

“Then I see where the Polydores land in a juvenile jail, or else I return to defend Huldah for a charge of murder. We’ll take our departure by night–tomorrow night–and like the Arabs, or the Polydore parents, silently steal away.”

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