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.