AMENDING A BILL.
As the drought wore on to its third day I began to perceive that siphoning the pinks with soda-water out of the dining-room window was insufficient to meet the crisis. I rang up the nearest fire station and told them in my most staccato tones that the garden was being burnt to a cinder and would they please—but they rang off suddenly without making a reply. It was then that I had a bright idea—so bright that the thermometer which was hanging near my head went up two degrees higher still.
"Araminta," I cried (she was out on the lawn tantalising a rose-bush with a kind of doll's-house watering-can),—"Araminta, where does one go to get hose?"
Araminta bridled.
"I didn't mean that," I said, hastily coming out of the French-window to explain. "I meant the kind of long wiggly thing you fix on to a tap at one end and it squirts at the other."
She unbridled prettily. "Oh, that!" she said. "Altruage's have them, I suppose. Altruage's have everything. But I shouldn't get one if I were you. I believe they're fearfully expensive, and I'm going to buy a proper watering-can this morning."
My mind, however, was made up. "Expense," I thought, "be irrigated!" I said nothing about it to Araminta, but I decided to act.
The sun was still blazing with abominable ferocity at half-past twelve when I crossed the threshold of the Taj Mahal Stores and button-holed the first peripatetic marquis I could find.
"I want," I said, mopping my brows with the disengaged hand, "to see some hose."
"Certainly, Sir," he replied with a beaming smile. "For wear on the feet, I presume?"
"Not at all," I replied as coolly as possible. "For shampooing the head."
He looked puzzled.
"I want it to water my pinks with," I explained.
A look of divine condescension overspread his features. "Ah, you require our horticultural department for that, Sir," he said. "Fourth to the left, fifth to the right, and ask again." And with an infinitely horticultured gesture of the hand he motioned me on.
After a long and adventurous Odyssey and fifteen fruitless appeals I sighted a kind of green island shore, where a young man stood in an attitude of hauteur, surrounded by a number of pink and grey snakes and brightly coloured agricultural machines.
Making my way to him I sank exhausted into a wheel-barrow and murmured my request again.
"About what size is your garden?" he asked me when I had partially recovered.
"Slim," I said, "slim and graceful, but not really tall. Petite I believe is the technical term. What sizes have you got in stock?"
"Perhaps about forty yards would do, Sir," he suggested, uncoiling a portion of one of the reptiles at his feet. "I can recommend this as a strong and thoroughly reliable article. Then you will want a union, I suppose, and a brass nozzle and a drum."
"We all want union nowadays so much in everything, don't we?" I agreed pleasantly, "but I'm not so sure about the drum. You see the baby makes a most infernal noise as it is with a——"
He interrupted me to explain the uses of these things. The union, it seemed, was a kind of garter to attach the hose to the tap, and the drum was where the snake wound itself to sleep at night. "And the little pepper-castor, of course," I said, "is what one puts at the end to make it sneeze. I understand completely. If you will have them all sent round to me to-morrow I will pay on delivery."
When I got out into the street I found that a great change had taken place. The sky overhead was black with imminent rain. A sharp shower pattered at my heels as I sprinted for the 'bus, and when I disembarked from it the gutters were gurgling with ill-concealed delight. As I walked up the garden I noticed that the majority of the pinks were lying in a drunken stupor upon their beds.
Araminta met me at the door. "Why, you must be wet through," she said. "Go up and change instantly. And aren't you glad now you haven't got a silly old hose after all?"
"I am indeed," I replied.
Whilst I changed I thought deeply, and after dinner I sat down and wrote politely to Messrs. Altruage as follows:
"Mr. Hopkinson regrets that through inadvertence he ordered a quantity of hose this afternoon in Messrs. Altruage's horticultural department instead of their foot-robing studio. If Messrs. Altruage will kindly cancel this order Mr. Hopkinson will call in the morning and select six pairs of woollen socks."
In a climate like ours, I reflected as I posted the letter, there is a good deal to be said for these mammoth stores.
Hodge."That's the best of comin' early, Maria. We've got the best seats in the 'ouse!"