“Yes, I suppose so. For instance what?”
“Why—hair-pin first, of course, and then scissors, and then button-hook—you needn’t smile. Button-hooks are wonderful for cleaning out pipes. And then I took a pail-handle and straightened it out—” Jonathan was laughing by this time—“Well, I have to use what I have, don’t I?”
“Yes, of course. And after the pail-handle?”
“After that—oh, yes. I tried your cleaning-rod.”
“The devil you did!”
“Not at all. It wasn’t hurt a bit. It just wouldn’t go down, that’s all. So then I thought I’d wait for you.”
“And now what do you expect?”
“I expect you to fix it.”
Of course, after that, there was nothing for Jonathan to do but fix it. Usually it did not take long. Sometimes it did. Once it took a [pg 073] whole evening, and required the services of a young tree, which Jonathan went out and cut and trimmed and forced through a section of the pipe which he had taken up and laid out for the operation on the kitchen floor. It was a warm evening, too, and friends had driven over to visit us. We received them warmly in the kitchen. We explained that we believed in making them members of the family, and that members of the family always helped in whatever was being done. So they helped. They took turns gripping the pipe while Jonathan and I persuaded the young tree through it. It required great strength and some skill because it was necessary to make the tree and the pipe perform spirally rotatory movements each antagonistic and complementary to the other. We were all rather tired and very hot before anything began to happen. Then it happened all at once: the tree burst through—and not alone. A good deal came with it. The kitchen floor was a sight, and there was—undoubtedly there was—a strong smell of coffee. Jonathan smiled. Then he went down cellar and restored the pipe to its position, while the rest [pg 074] of us cleared up the kitchen,—it’s astonishing what a little job like that can make a kitchen look like,—and as our friends started to go a voice from beneath us, like the ghost in “Hamlet,” shouted, “Hold ’em! There’s half a freezer of ice-cream down here we can finish.” Sure enough there was! And then he wouldn’t have to pack it down. We had it up. We looted the pantry as only irresponsible adults can loot, in their own pantry, and the evening ended in luxurious ease. Some time in the black of the night our friends left, and I suppose the sound of their carriage-wheels along the empty road set many a neighbor wondering, through his sleep, “Who’s sick now?” How could they know it was only a plumbing party?
As I look back on this evening it seems one of the pleasantest of the year. It isn’t so much what you do, of course, as the way you feel about it, that makes the difference between pleasant and unpleasant. Shall we say of that evening that we meant to read aloud? Or that we meant to have a quiet evening with friends? Not at all. We say, with all the conviction in the world, that we meant, on [pg 075] that particular evening, to have a plumbing party, with the drain as the pièce de résistance. Toward this our lives had been yearning, and lo! they had arrived!