Part 9

It all depends on how much or how little you have to move--the much or little referring to the amount of impediment with which your habitat is furnished. At either end of the scale moving is a matter involving slight personal inconvenience. But midway toil and trouble lie.

If you live and move and have your meals in what reporters are fond of describing as a "palatial residence," and if it occurs to you to remove yourself and all that is yours to a still more palatial mansion, you have only to give orders. The work and worry you leave to the 'elp, while you and the family spend the interval gaily at Palm Beach or Monte Carlo. When you come back everything is in readiness. You can walk right in, chuck your grip to your valet, and jump into the new porcelain bath-tub. When you emerge, the bath-towel is waiting for you on the gold-plated rack to which you have always been accustomed.

And if, gentle reader, instead of a valet you should have a maid--even among the most modern women maids are still usual--it makes no difference in the general readiness of the new home. You trip joyously into your boudoir, she unhooks your gown, and you--but, of course, at this point visitors are always asked to wait in the library. But these details are irrelevant. The main thing is that all the work has been done for you. All the worry has been borne by someone else. It only remains for you to accustom yourself to your new surroundings.

In the same way at the other end of the social scale, moving is equally a matter calling for little thought and less trouble. The mover puts his tooth-brush and his comb in his vest-pocket; he throws his other pair of trousers into his bag along with his other shirt and the pair of shoes he had half-soled; and then he slips quietly away while his landlady is not looking. It is not that he is running away exactly, but that he is sensitive and shy, and dreads the emotional strain of bidding farewell. Parting is such sweet sorrow that she might not let him go without keeping his grip as a souvenir--just to remind her of that "ten" he promised to give her at the end of the week.

Gentlemen who make these periodical migrations do not worry much about it. Even if they did pay their bills, they would still grow tired of staying in the same place. So they pack up and move, suddenly and with light-hearted unconcern. They don't call it "moving." They refer to it as "making a getaway."

It is not our intention, however, to treat of either the wealthy or the "stony broke" in this serious consideration of the crises in the affairs of house-holders known as "moving-days." The wealthy don't move often enough, the "busted" move too often, and both move too easily to make the operation an important factor in their lives. But the fellow on a one-cylinder salary who uses a fifty-dollar-a-month house for purposes of domicile--he is the man to whom moving is all that General Sherman declared war to be. It is a revolution, a cataclysm. He dates important events as occurring in "the year we moved" from this house to that other. Moving-days mark off periods of existence the way the Olympian games served for the ancient Greeks.

Why then do people do it? Sometimes because they can't help it. Landlords have a way of handing over their property to syndicates to build apartment-houses on the site. At other times landlords, whose actions no man can foretell, decide to raise the rent. Or they may object to the playful ways of the tenant's children--perhaps the little dears have dug a cave or two in the wall of the living-room, or have in childish glee filled the plumbing with half-bricks and gunny-sacks.

Then there are landlords who have acquired the please-remit habit to such an extent that a trifling delay of a couple of months with the rent leads to intense unpleasantness. They won't even take it in kind--except Scotch, perhaps. And that, of course, is too good for landlords. In fact, there are a thousand and one things which may cause friction between the man who lives in the house and the man who merely owns it. As the landlord generally refuses to leave, the tenant has to.

This explains a good many movings, but not all, nor even the greater number of them. Most people, as a matter of fact, move for the simple reason that hope springs eternal, and man never is but always to be. Every house has its faults and drawbacks. Even the palaces which cost eighty-five dollars a month serve to remind their occupants that there are beauties and comforts which even their comparative affluence cannot command. And naturally the lower one drops in the financial scale the truer this truism--the truth of truisms is our chief objection to them.

Man wants but little here below--just a nice, twelve-room house, hot-water heating, lawn all around, commodious shed where he can stow the lawn-mower and the spade during the period of hibernation, enamel bath, electric lighting, and such other necessities of the simple life as improved by Edison. But he wants that little a long time before he gets it--for fifty dollars a month. Therefore he moves.

Probably the house he already lives in has a hot-air furnace that goes into a state of coma on cold nights, the kind of plumbing that has to be operated on every few days by a surgeon in over-alls, and a roof that permits every thunderstorm to come right down and jump into bed with him. Probably the girl next door plays "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" till midnight every night of the week, except Sunday when she plays hymn-tunes. But he has hopes. He feels that the next house is going to possess all the beauty and comfort of Aladdin's fairy palace, and that the landlord will be one of those dear old boys with white whiskers, who will answer every complaint with, "Just have the work done and send the bill to me." There is no such landlord, but the tenant keeps on looking for him. He moves. And lo, in another little while he moves again. He keeps right on moving, poor chap, till that final move when they put plumes on the moving-van.

Your old experienced mover starts in early. He makes a real occasion of it. After he and his wife and the baby-carriage have strolled around town for about six weeks, they finally select a prospective residence. It is just about the same as the old house--they are lucky, in fact, if it isn't worse. But they see the new one through pink spectacles. Everything looks like a sunset-scene in a musical comedy.

"Oh, how happy we're all going to be!"

Exit dancingly. Then they go home and start packing up.

The first thing you always do when you pack is to take up the carpets and oil-cloths. You don't bother picking up the tacks. They are picked up in instalments by members of the family in the early morning and late at night. No electro-magnet ever had half the allurement for a tack that a bare foot exerts. A defenceless big toe will draw them right across a room.

The next move is to drag all the trunks and packing-cases out of their lairs in the attic or cellar and place them in the upper and lower halls in the most unexpected places. Then one is always sure to find them in the dark. Uncle especially, coming home rather late from the lodge meeting--but this is a tragic theme. We have been in uncle's place.

Pictures are then taken off the walls and laid in readily accessible places on the floor. In this way one can put one's foot through a lovely seascape, or tread upon the features of defunct relatives in enlarged photographs, with the minimum of exertion. Personally, we prefer walking into mirrors--the pieces look so much prettier.

Gradually the house assumes the appearance of a place in the devastated area of Flanders. Furniture is piled up in barricades everywhere. Bales of linen and curtains and that sort of thing are built up into parapets. All they need is a firing-step and a periscope or two to look like the real thing. Behind these obstructions the family cowers as it eats its meals--if the food may be so described--and seeks shelter from the prying eye when it goes to bed. You see, the windows are all bare and one can't be too careful of the observer in the sniping-post across the way. Probably the best course is to sit on the side of one's bed and undress in the dark. Not only would this plan of action be more likely to commend itself to the Moral Reform League, but it has the further advantage of avoiding the tacks. One is not so apt to give an impromptu imitation of a man who has inadvertently stepped on a porcupine.

At last the great day arrives! You are awakened by a large hairy man, who wants to know when you are going to get out of your bed so he can take it apart and load it into the van. Hurriedly you jump into the oldest and most primitive clothing permitted by the rules of society and the state of the weather. And you get busy--Homerically busy!

It is true that you have hired a couple of men and a huge waggon. But these gentlemen are professionals. They direct the operation. They are the headquarters' staff, so to speak. Occasionally they take a hand in the game and then you wish they hadn't. You beg them to be careful with the piano--rented--and promptly they carry off half the front porch on the end of it. The enormous walnut whatnot, which has been "an old family possession" ever since you bought it second-hand, is made to look like part of the steerage furniture of the Ark.

Some artistic friends of ours had a fine cast of the Venus of Milo. It was the only thing in the house to be proud of, and they were. They loved it so much that they had never even pawned it, no matter how bitter the temporary stringency. Then one sad moving-day, a horny-handed cyclops with fusel oil instead of brains picked it up and dropped it. If Venus had disputed the right-of-way with an armored car she couldn't have been reduced to more or smaller pieces.

"Oh, how could you--how could you be so stupid?" sobbed the lady of the house.

"Ah, it ain't worth makin' all that fuss about," growled the son of Anak, "sure the darn old thing was bust anyhow."

Finally all the household effects are piled out on the sidewalk, while the neighbors sit on their stoops and make remarks about the quantity and quality of your equipment. Of course, no furniture would look good under such circumstances. If the fittings of Buckingham Palace were piled up on the front lawn, they would hardly be impressive. And you are keenly conscious that your furniture has nothing on King George's. The only thing to do is to pretend that you don't see your neighbors while your sofas and chairs stand on their heads on the sidewalk, kicking their ancient legs in the air, and showing with painful frankness the places where they have been mended.

In the meantime, you keep travelling between the old house and the new one. As the pile keeps diminishing in front of your home that has been, it keeps growing in front of your home to be. There, too, the neighbors are on the watch, and as your old mattresses are carried in, bleeding excelsior from a dozen wounds, you can see their anticipations of your desirability as an addition to the society of the block going steadily down to below the freezing point.

At last the work is done. Everything you can think of has been piled up higgledy-piggledy at the new place. The family sits forlornly in the midst of it--camping out in a strange house!

"Where's the baby?" shrieks mother suddenly in the midst of the weary silence.

Then you remember that you left the little innocent in the bath-tub in the old house for safe keeping. As you tear madly off to retrieve him, you keep wondering if he has turned on the water and drowned himself.

And yet, the following spring, your fancy lightly turns to thoughts of still another move.

*Vacation Vagaries*

Vacation is an excellent institution. Anything that makes a man so contented with his job and his ordinary lot in life as it does must be a good thing. After two weeks spent at the average summer resort the food at home or in the old boarding-house in the city seems rich and varied, and the work at the office proves an intellectual recreation.

The best thing about vacation is making plans for it. This is a truism, did you say? Of course, it is a truism. Occasionally we indulge in truisms, though our natural preference is for "isms" that are not true.

When we say "making plans," we mean plans only in the most general and romantic sense. Once you come down to details all the poetry is squeezed out of the thing. The business of writing to hotelkeepers and railway passenger-agents and other rich but dishonest people for information is a bore and a burden. So also is packing up.

Honestly, now, as one man to another, dear reader--or as one woman to a man, or whatever the circumstances may require--did you ever bring half the things you wanted, and did you ever use half the things you brought? Did you? No, of course not. No one ever does.

Personally, we have travelled light, and we have travelled heavy, and the result has always been the same. The year we took a trunk with raincoats and overcoats and various weights of underwear, and all the other encumbrances of civilization, the weather was fine and warm throughout, and all we really needed was a couple of shirts and some duck trousers. Even our toothbrush was useless, for we got practically nothing to eat.

The next time we decided to limit our impedimenta very strictly, and we carried our belongings in our pocket and a brown-paper parcel. That year we encountered every one of the fifty-odd varieties of weather and temperature, and two freight-cars couldn't have carried all the clothes we needed. The irony of things?--yes, also the tinnery and leadery, and any other base metal you can think of.

Therefore, we repeat, the practical details of getting ready for a vacation are a weariness and an abomination. But the general plans, the vague and glowing dreams--ah, the pictures of one's self poised like a god in the path of the breakers while the peaches on the beaches gaze longingly upon one, or again smiling carelessly while one steers canoes containing beautiful ladies down dangerous rapids, or still again singing amorous madrigals by moonlight while one drifts in the shadow of the pines! These visions are well worth the disillusion which follows.

Every young man--whether fifteen or fifty--has cherished these or similar dreams of the joys that await him in the days of vacation. And nearly every young man has had the same experience of going up to the same old summer hotel or boarding-house, where you sleep on a lumpy bed with a crazy quilt, battle with the flies for your food, and spend your evenings rowing a fat girl around a pond in a flat-bottomed boat.

Are we pessimistic?--well, perhaps we are pessimistic. But we have had some experience of summer resorts. We have sat on the porch with the married ladies in the evening, and listened to the merry crash as character after character fell in ruins to the ground. We have gone fishing for mythical bass and trout in famous fishing-grounds, where there hadn't been a fish within the memory of man--driven out by the mosquitoes, probably.

And the girls of summer resorts! We have walked with them, and read poetry to them, and eaten ice-cream cones with them, and discussed with them whether marriage is possible where true love is not. We have paddled them around on hot afternoons, and retrieved the balls which they drove into the river when we played tennis together. We have even proposed to--but we must not carry these confidences too far. Suffice it to state, that even those who accepted us let us see clearly that they regarded the eternal affection we swore to one another as being subject to recall with due notice. Sometimes they didn't even bother to give us the notice.

It was all vanity, vanity! But we cannot help remembering that some of the vanity was of a rather pleasant variety. There was that blonde up at--oh, never mind where!--a little thin, you know, but very soulful. She "adored" Browning, and claimed to understand "Sordello"--which was a lie, of course. And the little brunette, brown eyes and reddish hair--very "chick," eh, what?--with an abnormal appetite for brandied chocolates. Nice girls both. But time passes and one forgets. We don't even remember where they work!

If a man--almost any unattached male will do--wishes to feel the joys of being sought after and an object of general female attention, let him hasten away to a summer hotel, especially in one of the less fashionable resorts. At the fashionable ones there are always a few gilded youth about, who own motor boats and look divine in flannels. Their glory would be apt to make his seem like a star in the presence of the sun.

But at the others, those quiet family-hotels, to which people go ostensibly because the air is so much better, and they dislike the noise and fashion of the other places, but really because the board is five times cheaper--at these seminaries of bored spinsters a rash bachelor who intrudes can easily persuade himself that he is a combination of Richard the Lion-Heart and Don Juan.

What gay and girlish groups will be formed about him! How they will laugh at his jokes and listen with awe to his opinions! With what warmth they will admire his atrocious ties and homicidal socks--the colors are so striking and virile you know. They may even sit still while he sings.

The only objection is that popularity of this sort is apt to send a man back to the office a mental and physical wreck. Even a year of loafing on the boss's time hardly qualifies a man to paddle canoes, play tennis, walk miles, go for hay-cart drives, eat canned goods, and dance the foxtrot till one every morning, and then retire to fight for his life with a dozen big husky mosquitoes that have been sitting on the foot of his bed waiting for him in bloodthirsty fury for hours.

Talking of mosquitoes, have you ever seen any mosquitoes or flies to equal for size and ferocity those that flourish at any summer hotel or boarding-house? And the poorer the place the more various and highly developed are the entomological specimens.

There are mosquito-nets on the windows, of course, but they seem merely to annoy those birds of prey, and exacerbate their naturally hasty temper. After being obliged to bite his way through two or three folds of pink or blue gauze, no wonder a mosquito sits on your pillow and shrieks insanely in your ear what he is going to do to you. He then proceeds to do it, worse luck!

As for the flies, deserting in the most heartless manner the cows and horses they have lived with all winter, they rush with a glad shout into the dining-room, and standing with their hind feet in your bacon-and-eggs, reach over and lap up your coffee, or whatever it is people serve under that alias. Very chummy those flies, much more democratic than flies in town. The simple life of the country probably accounts for that--also for the way they wade into the butter like a hired man.

But if you really want to know what flies and mosquitoes--not to speak of ants and beetles and caterpillars--can really do, you ought to go "roughing it." As if the ordinary summer boarding-house wasn't rough enough for anything but the most exotic taste! "Roughing it" is a disease to which Canadian youth between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five is peculiarly liable.

We succumbed once. We went with a canoe and a tent and some beans and a couple of fellows who said they were old woodsmen and knew how to cook. Some day we may be able to bring ourself to write up that trip in detail. But it is only ten years ago, and the memory still rankles too bitterly.

After two weeks of carrying loads over portages, washing dishes, eating the bread and pancakes those two murderers baked, and sitting up nights to stab the bugs that crept upon us in the dark, we had almost to be sent to a sanitarium to recuperate. But good nursing and cod-liver oil brought us around again in a month or so. Roughing it?--yes, only "rough" seems a mild word to apply to it.

Everyone has his own notion of the perfect vacation. We have ours, and that is the vacation which takes one home to a small town a long way off. This, of course, implies considerable foresight in picking out one's ancestral seat. You must also arrange to have a mother there waiting for you--preferably with white hair. Always mention the color of the hair when ordering a mother. White is best, and perhaps next to that iron-grey.

Let us suppose that you haven't been home in a couple of years or more. You have written a number of letters and telegrams telling them the exact hour you will arrive, and so when you finally chug-chug into the little station on the same old stub-line which is always half an hour late, you find them all drawn up to meet you.

For a few minutes the world becomes one blur of arms that go around one's neck, and faces held up to be kissed. And then you are gravely passed in review, the cut of your clothes and the color of your hat, and whether or not you have got stouter or leaner or greyer than before.

In the ordinary world where you live and move and have your job and vote, you may be a man of standing, a well-known politician or banker or editor. But here, whether captain or clerk, you are just "Mollie's boy, Bill," or "Annie's boy, Pete," or whatever may be your mother's first name and your own. Here you are never permitted to grow up. Here you are liable to be called "Willie" or "Babe" to your death at eighty.

Outside the station the same old family horse is rubbing his ear against the same old battered telephone pole to which he is hitched. He gazes with mild indifference on the confusion and bustle around him. He has long ceased to show interest in anything but oats.

As you drive up the main street you notice with extraordinary interest that old man Johnson has put a new plate-glass front in his store, and young Brown has hung his shingle up as a doctor. You pass by the one street-car waiting to make its half-hourly trip, and the motorman yells joyfully, "H'lo, Pete, when did yuh get back?"

At the house the dinner is waiting--ah, a dinner that really is a dinner! There are all the things you used to like, and have ever since wistfully dreamed of in city restaurants, the fried chicken and the pumpkin-pie and all.

"And now," says mother, as you lay down your knife and fork and come up to breathe, "how is your Aunt Kate, and have you seen Cousin Maggie lately, and have you heard how Lizzie is getting on with that fellow she married, and when were you last in--?"

And you begin and talk for two weeks.

*Lawnless Tennis*

Lawn tennis is not generally regarded as a sport of a violent nature. We make this statement without fear of contradiction or controversy. There is little likelihood of our finer feelings ever being harrowed by accounts of the brutalities of tennis. Editors of newspapers are in no danger of being besieged with letters from "Constant Reader" and "Pro Bono Publico" demanding why the police don't interfere in championship tennis matches and bind the participants over to keep the peace.

No, tennis is not usually a violent or brutal sport. In fact, it is frequently associated in the popular mind with weak tea and girls and beg-pardons and curates and other evidences of the amenities of life. Rough persons who play lacrosse or football are apt to class tennis with tiddlywinks or casino.