Life's Minor Collisions Part 2

"Probably he had been trained to obey the opposite signals," said our mother. "You must study your horse as an individual."

That horse was an individual. Geoffrey studied him as such. He is quite willing to believe that he had been trained to obey the opposite signals. But Geoffrey says that he still cannot stifle one last question in his mind:--signals opposite to what?

WHEELS AND HOW THEY GO ROUND

It is a simple matter, I have been told, to keep a locomotive running smoothly on its track, once it is well coaled-up and started. In an artistic moment in a summer vacation, Margaret and I likened our house and all its simple well-oiled machinery to a locomotive--Mother and Carrie being the engineer.

Therefore, we accepted rather blandly the charge of the house and grounds while the engineer took a vacation. I rather think we had it in mind to look in occasionally upon the house as it ran along, and to save the bulk of the day for other things. We were already accustomed to the complexities of a house; we had officiated at each separate complexity.

But I am not sure that we did not plan to run the house a trifle more nonchalantly than the average anxious housewife, and welcome both our daily duties and any unexpected guests with a minimum of morbid foreboding.

The first thing we noticed after we were left alone was a little steady drip in the back room. This was the refrigerator leaking. When this fact had once been agreed upon, Margaret and I began to see with eyes of the mind fragments of motion pictures in which the refrigerator was being fixed. It is queer what vague remnants of a scene will stay with you, when at the time of the scene you were not responsible for the outcome.

Margaret, from her ever-active and interesting memory, called up Mother's dream-shape at the silc.o.c.k, all ready to turn on the garden-hose. I dimly remembered Carrie with her arm under the refrigerator holding the hose and calling respectfully from the back room--"All ready, mum." So we hatched a plot and proceeded to act it.

We had to a.s.sume the pipe at the rear of the ice-box, for we could not see it. We a.s.sumed also that it was plugged up. I had chanced once upon Carrie, lying p.r.o.ne on a rug in the back room, directing the nozzle of the hose into this inaccessible pipe-hole near the farther wall. I elected to plumb for the hole, with Margaret to run about alternately holding matches for me and working the spray. My arms are the longer; her fear of fire is somewhat less. After I had found the hole, Margaret attached the hose to the silc.o.c.k outside the house, threaded it through the screen door, pa.s.sed the nozzle to me, and went back to turn on the water. Hose in hand, face averted,--p.r.o.ne,--I waited. p.r.o.ne means on your face. If you turn your head to look under the refrigerator, your arm is not long enough. I directed the water almost wholly by the Braille system. Why it should have entered into the heart of man to construct a refrigerator so deep that the arm of man is not long enough to reach its drain, will have to be explained to us when we reach the city four-square. But a good workman never finds fault with his tools, Margaret said, so we set to work with what Nature offered us.

I soon found that no cue was needed for some of my lines. My manner of shouting, "Turn it off!" was extremely unstudied;--art disguising art.

Twice the back room was inundated. I became a saturated solution. I felt like the brave boy of Haarlem. Margaret came in and advanced the theory that, when you have reached a certain stage of wetness, it does not matter at all how much more water you lie in. Acting on this supposition, and with my consent, she turned on all the city's water-power with great suddenness. I shall always think that this did make a difference in my wetness, but it dislodged the obstruction. We could hear the glad water leaping and gurgling through the pipe out of doors.

Why this pipe should have had any connection with the boiler and attendant pipes behind the stove remains forever shrouded in mystery.

These pipes began to leak on the morning of the second day, and we sent for a plumber. He p.r.o.nounced us unpatchable, unsolderable. Margaret and I convened. We decided, in committee of the whole, to be re-piped and re-boilered. We did not know then that the plumbers were going to find still more serious trouble with the pipes that led to the main. Were we justified in ordering complete repairs? Our eternal query of Life became, "What would Mother do?" We went the whole figure--well up into three figures.

It was not until the third day that we succeeded in making our nonchalance at all prominent. We invited a guest to supper, nonchalantly. She was not the type of guest that you take into the kitchen and tie an ap.r.o.n around. In her honor, we decided to have, among other things, popovers and cherry pie. We decided that we could conventionally have popovers because the hour was really a supper hour; that we might have cherry pie because the meal was really a dinner. To make this strange plan at all intelligible, I shall have to state that, as far as our names are known, we are famous for our popovers and our cherry pie. We were at our nonchalant best.

Our cherry tree is a unique specimen among the vegetables. It has a curious short, gnarled trunk just as a cherry tree should; but, aside from that, it runs along the general lines of a spirea. Each main branch, nearly six inches in diameter at the point of departure, sprangles instantly into showers of fragile twigs. These in turn branch gracefully higher and higher, occasional cherries on the outskirts. To pick our cherries, one really ought to be a robin. Each cherry has an exquisite red cheek and a black ant running to and fro across it.

We chose Margaret to pick the cherries. We chose her because she is lighter than I by half a stone; and we thought the fewer stone on the twigs, the better. Then it was going to be her pie.

The cherries which could be reached from the ground were satisfactory in the extreme. They rattled into the pail, just as other people's cherries rattle. It would have been my instinct to leave these till the last. But I was not picking the cherries. I found it impossible, however, to stay away from the cherry-picking. Margaret is rather quick in some of her mannerisms. And her mannerism of mounting our cherry tree was little short of lightning. She was wearing white silk hose and white canvas slippers. Personally I did not consider these correct climbing shoes, but Margaret is accustomed, when far from home, to choose her own boots for all occasions, and to pay for new ones when her choice proves disastrous. So I watched her rise above me without remark.

I freely admit that it always seems less dangerous to one whose feet can feel the crotches on the tree, and on whose arm the tin pail is, than to the anxious relative on the ground below. As Margaret's manoeuvres transmitted unpleasant little cracks along the tree, I recalled bits of sage advice that I had on a time given to my mother concerning her att.i.tude when Geoffrey was climbing trees. I had told Mother that Geoffrey was just as safe in a tree as in his bed. But Margaret did not give this rea.s.suring appearance. Perhaps I like Margaret better than I do Geoffrey. Certainly I was more afraid she would fall out of the cherry tree.

She finally pa.s.sed out of my sight. After a prolonged interval of silence, I suggested to Margaret that she come down.

"My foot is caught," returned my sister, her tone of voice wholly explanatory. "It won't come out."

"The shoe tapers to a point," I called encouragingly. "Try to turn it sideways and pull backwards at the same time."

"Barbara," said my sister tonelessly, "I just said it wouldn't come out."

"Then you'll have to take your foot out, and leave the slipper up there," I responded with finality.

"What would Mother do?" called Margaret from her lady's bower.

It was so obvious, even to me, that Mother would not have been up a tree at this hour that I could only repeat my original project of abandoning the slipper. I learned afterwards that it is not an entirely uncomplicated process to buckle in the centre when swinging in a tree-top with one foot stationary and a tin pail on one's arm, and untie a slipper-strap without tipping the pail or falling out of the tree.

Margaret soon appeared within my line of vision, listing dangerously, chastened, dignified, and stocking-footed. She reminded me simultaneously, as she descended, of a mystic Russian premiere danseuse, a barefooted native swinging down his cocoanut grove, and High Diddle Dumpling my son John.

I was rash enough later to inquire into the mechanics of retrieving the slipper, but Margaret, as she finished her tart, replied so appropriately in the words of the Scriptures as to be too sacrilegious to repeat.

As our nonchalant day wore on, I lighted the gas-oven for popovers.

Popovers are casuals. They are not supposed to be a _chef d'oeuvre_.

They are the high-grade moron of the hot-bread family. A guest expects the popovers to be good, just as he expects the b.u.t.ter to be good. I expected mine to be good.

As they neared the crisis, the city gas was shut off. I acted instantly, treating the phenomenon as a rare exception in housekeeping. I aroused a dying fire in the coal range with great speed and an abundance of kindling, and conveyed my gems across kitchen. It is a sweet-tempered popover, indeed, which will bear shifting from a hot oven to a moderately comfortable one. I began steadily to lose my unconcern. Once on my knees before an oven door, I usually ask no quarter and receive no advice. Advice is sometimes given me, but my advisers realize that it is not being received. This time I called Margaret in consultation.

"I think they are going to pop," she p.r.o.nounced judicially, "but not over." She was right.

Does Life hold, I wonder, a more sorrowful moment than that time when a true cook has to instruct her guest to scoop out the inside of her popover for the chickens, and eat only the outside? Every one knows that delicate tinkling sound that a good popover makes when tossed on a china plate. These made somewhat the same sound as a Florida orange. We learned quite cogently that evening that Hospitality may depend, not upon greatness of heart, but upon the gas stove.

This experience of ours, however, could not be regarded strictly as a test case. Any one would admit that all of our adversity was unusual. It is the rare exception when all the pipes in the house burst at once, when there is no gas in the gas-stove, and when one loses a slipper in making a cherry pie.

It took another day to show us that running a house _normally_ consists in dealing with a succession of unusual events.

We did not court disaster, or attempt anything ambitious. We had not even planned to invite any more company. But an old friend of Geoffrey's appeared at our door in uniform with his new wife, to wait over a train.

Margaret promptly invited them to lunch. Our lunch, as already planned, was simple. We told them that it would be simple. Margaret leans, during hot weather, to such things as iced tea, lettuces, cheese wafers, and simple frozen desserts. Fiction has it that the water-ices are the simplest of anything. They _are_ simple to eat. We had planned to freeze the water-ice together. But in view of the fact that we had company, Margaret, who had first suggested our simple dessert, slipped quietly out to freeze it alone.

Ice may be cold stuff, but it is heating to chop. Three minutes may freeze a pudding in some freezers, but not in ours. As much time wore away, I gradually hitched my chair in a backward direction, to permit a stealthy glance at Margaret on the back piazza. It is almost as wearing to hold our freezer down as it is to turn the crank. Margaret was doing both at once, stopping frequently to chase a slippery chunk of ice about with her pick, chivying the bits of ice and salt finally into a cup. Her cheeks had become flushed a vivid freight-car color. It was with great relief that I finally saw her peer into the freezer, remove the dasher, and proceed to seal up her confection and cover it with newspapers and an astrakhan cape.

The precise moment when a water-ice becomes simple is when it is smoothly slipped into a long-stemmed sherbet gla.s.s. Our guests, we think, enjoyed our simple meal. But after they had gone, the word which exactly described our state of mind was not the word nonchalant.

"Barbara!" said Margaret energetically, "for supper, let's open a box of blueberries."

We did. Blueberries really _are_ simple. We made our evening meal of them, accompanied by a few left-over popover skins.

Margaret and I still feel that we could deal somewhat hopefully with a leaking pipe. We still think that our calamities were a little out of the ordinary. But we do not wonder quite so much now that Mother does not wholly appreciate her dinner when she has guests, that she does not oftener make simple frozen desserts, or that she stays in such close company with her wheels when they are on their way around.

THE WILL TO BOSS

There are people who have a right to boss;--parents, for instance, and generals in the army. With these we are not concerned. But most of us, not officially in authority, now and then have ideas of our own that we are willing to pa.s.s on. Some of us have them more than others.

The typical boss is usually a capable executive with a great unselfish imagination and the gift of speech. He usually knows enough to curb himself in public; it is only in the home that his tendencies run riot.

In a family where all the brothers and sisters belong to this type, you can run riot only to a certain extent. If you go too far, you meet somebody else also running riot, and collisions ensue.

If you are an elder sister, for instance, with a tendency toward what your younger brothers call "getting bossy," you find yourself constantly having vivid mental pictures of the best way to do a given thing. With these fancy-pictures in mind, it is hard for you to believe that your companions have any ideas at all. As you look at another person from the outside, you find it hard to believe that his head is working. If our heads were only made like these ovens with gla.s.s in the door, so that you could watch the half-baked thinking rise and fall--but no. Your brother sitting carelessly on the veranda may have his mind on the time; he may be planning just how he will presently rush to his room, bathe and change, s.n.a.t.c.h his hat, run to the station, and connect with the train on daylight-saving time. He may be thinking hard about all this, but he does not look as if he were. You fidget while the minutes go by, and then you go to the window and speak. If your spirit has been broken by much browbeating for past attempts to give advice, you speak timidly.

If you are of stouter stuff, you speak roughly to your little boy.

"Tom," you say (timidly or roughly as the case may be)--"I suppose you know what time it is."

"Yes," says Tom.

That ought to end it. But if you are a true boss, you go on. You know that you are being irritating. You know that Tom is of age. But you are willing, like all great prophets, to risk unpopularity for the sake of your Message. The spirit of the crier in the wilderness is upon you, and you keep at it until one of two things happens. If Tom is in a good temper, he goes upstairs to humor you, with a condescending tread and a tired sigh. If he is fractious, he argues: Did you ever know him to miss a train? Did you ever hear of his forgetting an appointment? How do you suppose he ever manages to get to places when you are away from home?