“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 silcock, 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 assume the pipe at the rear of the ice-box, for we could not see it. We assumed also that it was plugged up. I had chanced once upon Carrie, lying prone 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 silcock outside the house, threaded it through the screen door, passed the nozzle to me, and went back to turn on the water. Hose in hand, face averted,—prone,—I waited. Prone 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 pronounced 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.