a curious vertigo afflicts the mind of the house-hunter. in the first place, it is sufficiently maddening to see the settled homes of other happier souls, all apparently so firmly rooted in a warm soil of contentment while he floats, an unhappy sea-urchin, in an ocean of indecision. furthermore, how confusing (to one who likes to feel himself somewhat securely established in a familiar spot) the startling panorama of possible places in which he visualizes himself. one day it is great neck, the next it is nutley; one day hollis, the next[pg 204] englewood; one day bronxville, and then garden city. as the telephone rings, or the suasive accents of friendly realtors expound the joys and glories of various regions, his uneasy imagination flits hoppingly about the compass, conceiving his now vanished household goods reassembled and implanted in these contrasting scenes.
startling scenarios are filmed in his reeling mind while he listens, over the tinkling wire, to the enumeration of rooms, baths, pantries, mortgages, commuting schedules, commodious closets, open fireplaces, and what not. in the flash and coruscation of thought he has transported his helpless family to yonkers, or to manhasset, or to forest hills, or wherever it may be, and tries to focus and clarify his vision of what it would all be like. he sees himself (in a momentary close-up) commuting on the bland and persevering erie, or hastening hotly for a liberty street ferry, or changing at jamaica (that mystic ritual of the long island brotherhood). for an instant he is settled again, with a modest hearth to return to at dusk ... and then the sorrowful compliment is paid him and he wonders how the impression got abroad that he is a millionaire.
there is one consoling aspect of his perplexity, however, and that is the friendly intercourse he has with high-spirited envoys who represent real estate firms and take him voyaging to see “properties” in the country. for these amiable souls he expresses[pg 205] his candid admiration. just as when one contemplates the existence of the doctors one knows, one can never imagine them ill, so one cannot conceive of the friendly realtor as in any wise distressed or grieved by the problems of the home. there is something olympian about them, happy creatures! they deal only in severely “restricted” tracts. they have a stalwart and serene optimism. odd as it seems, one of these friends told us that some people are so malign as to waste the time of real estate men by going out to look at houses in the country without the slightest intention of “acting.” as a kind of amusement, indeed! a harmless way of passing an afternoon, of getting perhaps a free motor ride and enjoying the novelty of seeing what other people's houses look like inside. but our friend was convinced of one humble inquirer's passionate sincerity when he saw him gayly tread the ice floes of rustic long island in these days of slush and slither.
how do these friends of ours, who see humanity in its most painful and distressing gesture (i.e., when it is making up its mind to part with some money), manage to retain their fine serenity and blitheness of spirit? they have to contemplate all the pathetic struggles of mortality, for what is more pathetic than the spectacle of a man trying to convince a real estate agent that he is not really a wealthy creature masking millions behind an eccentric pose of humility? our genial adviser grenville kleiser, who[pg 206] has been showering his works upon us, has classified all possible mental defects as follows:
too easy acquiescence
a mental attitude of contradiction
undue skepticism
a dogmatic spirit
lack of firmness of mind
a tendency to take extreme views
love of novelty; that is, of what is foreign, ancient, unusual, or mysterious.
all these serious weaknesses of judgment may be discerned, in rapid rotation, in the mind of the house-hunter. it would be only natural, we think, if the real estate man were to tell him to go away and study mr. kleiser's “how to build mental power.” in the meantime, the vision of the home he had dreamed of becomes fainter and fainter in the seeker's mind—like the air of a popular song he has heard whistled about the streets, but does not know well enough to reproduce. how he envies the light-hearted robins, whose house-hunting consists merely in a gay flitting from twig to twig. yet, even in his disturbance and nostalgia of spirit, he comforts himself with the common consolation of his cronies—“oh, well, one always finds something”—and thus (in the words of good sir thomas browne) teaches his haggard and unreclaimed reason to stoop unto the lure of faith.
