“It doesn’t seem as if it would ever come together again—to be a pump,” I said in some depression.
“Oh, that’s easy! It’s just a question of time.”
“How much time?”
“Heaven knows.”
“Was it the valve?”
“It was—several things.”
His tone had the vagueness born of concentration. I could see that this was no time to press for information. Besides, in the field of mechanics, as Jonathan has occasionally pointed out to me, I am rather like a traveler who has learned to ask questions in a foreign tongue, but not to understand the answers.
“Well, I’ll bring my sewing out here—or would you rather have me read to you? There’s something in the last number of—”
“No—get your sewing—blast that screw! Why doesn’t it start?”
Evidently sewing was better than the last number of anything. I settled myself under a lamp, while Jonathan, in the twilight beneath the sink, continued his mystic rites, with an accompaniment of mildly vituperative or persuasive language, addressed sometimes to his tools, sometimes to the screws and nuts and other parts, sometimes against the men who made them or the plumbers who put them in. Now and then I held a candle, or steadied some perverse bit of metal while he worked his will upon it. And at last the phœnix did indeed rise, the pump was again a pump,—at least it looked like one.