Hunting a House

The leases of both my own flat and the Paggs’s are up soon. Round this catastrophe has been hatched a fiendish plot to hasten on my wedding with Gladys Paggs. Now, if there’s one thing a man ought not to be hurried over it is his wedding. It’s a very serious step he’s taking, and once taken he can’t undo it just as if it were a safety-pin or a home-made sock.

You’d think a girl would appreciate that point, but Miss Paggs didn’t. She suddenly heard of a house to let, and that was taken as sufficient reason for getting a move on. I said I didn’t want to live in a house. I wanted to save up until we could live in a Park Lane mansion, and have a French maid named Suzanne for my wife and a valet named Wackerbath for me.

Gladys retorted that she’d life her wedding to come before her funeral, if possible, and would I just come round and look at the house? She had already secured an order to view.

“Where is this insanitary hovel?” I asked, as we started off that afternoon.

“Number five Acacia Gardens,” said Gladys.

“Well, I don’t like acacias,” I objected. “They attract the moth and lightning and hawkers and circulars.”

“Don’t worry about that,” said Gladys. “Did you ever know a house called ‘Belle Vue’ that looked out on anything but a bill-poster’s hoarding in front and a mews at the back?

“Then the drains will be all wrong,” I continued, “or there won’t be any at all, or the house will turn out to be haunted by the ghost of a woman who suffocated her husband with a patent mop and drowned all her children in the soap dish.”

“You do seem to meet trouble half-way,” commented Gladys, and immediately after that I ran into an errand-boy who met me just below the watch-chain. He had a smut on his nose and a facial affliction that I took to be toothache, but which subsequently transpired to be chewing-gum. He directed us to Acacia Gardens, and when we got there we found a queue of about twenty others — all men with notebooks who looked somewhat askance at Gladys and myself. A policeman was at the gate keeping the queue in order, examining the orders to view, and passing the folks in two at a time at about intervals of a quarter of an hour.

Waiting our turn became a tedious business. It was bitterly cold, and I felt myself catching chilblains in all directions. Gladys’s nose went red, then blue, then heliotrope. I sneezed seventeen times straight off the reel, and the man in front of me put up his umbrella.

“I think,” I said at last, “it will be quicker to go home and wait for the Park Lane mansion. Here we are catching quinsies and pneumonia, and malaria and calceolaria, when we might be sitting by the fire holding one another’s thumbs and masticating crumpets.”

“Never mind,” said Gladys. “Fancy, if we can one secure number five Acacia Gardens for our own! Won’t it be worth the waiting?

I was about to reply that even the whole of the Zoological Gardens wasn’t worth waiting two hours and a half for with a blizzard blowing down the back of your neck, twenty degrees of frost in each boot, and the microbes of every disease known to pathology assaulting you at every unprotected spot, when the man in front looked round.

“Excuse me,” he said politely, “but did I hear this lady mention number five Acacia Gardens?

“You did,” I replied, “and as man to man I may tell you that she’s mentioned nothing else but Acacia Gardens at intervals during the whole of the day.”

“Well,” he continued, “I don’t know whether you know it, but this is number five Laburnum Gardens.”

I said I was very glad to hear it, as I much preferred laburnums to acacias.

“Laburnum Gardens!” cried Gladys. “I must have put the address down wrong. It is so easy to confuse acacias and laburnums.

“Quite,” I remarked. “They’re only spelt differently, pronounced differently, and look differently. Otherwise they’re exactly the same.

“May I inquire your object in waiting?” asked the man.

And we told him. We opened our hearts to him. We unbosomed ourselves to him. We laid bare our souls to him. I almost took off my boots and laid bare my heels to him.

“Guess you’ve made a mistake,” he said at length. “Number five Acacia Gardens is doubtless to let. Number five Laburnum Gardens was this morning the scene of a dastardly robbery. Old lady found gagged with a Bath bun and bound to the piano-leg with her own boot-laces. Thieves decamped with a pound of butter, a ton of coal, and the poor lady’s sugar card. This queue is composed of reporters. I represent the ‘Daily Mug.’ This means a couple of columns to me.”

“It means a temporary reprieve from a life-sentence for me,” I said cheerily. “Come along, Gladys.”

She didn’t conceal her disappointment. Inquiries at the house-agent’s later elicited the fact that number five Acacia Gardens had been let that very afternoon.

“I shall now try to secure a self-contained flat,” said Gladys, as we discussed the matter that evening.

Well, I can give her the name of one self-contained flat she’s secured already.