The next day, which was Sunday, I had ample time to survey the premises. There was a double piazza on three sides, which was an improvement; but the hall door was changed, which wasn’t. Then the little conservatory, hitched on to the double bay window, which looked like its father, was doubtful. But all this was nothing to the confusion which reigned at the back of the house; I only marveled that I had not broken my neck. The walk was up, the drain was up, the pump was up, the pipes were up, the cistern floor was up, and the kitchen roof was up, as well, looming into the sky, but the room was far from being finished.
Nothing had worked as she hoped it would, Cilly said, and everything went wrong, especially the eaves-troughs, and conductors, and pipes, and it always rained just at the wrong time, and the cellar filled with water, and everything floated like a boat, and the plastering came down on the stove when Jane was getting dinner, and the soot came down from the chimney on Mary’s clean clothes, and just as she got them all washed again and hung out, they came with a lot of lumber and she had to take them down, and things got so bad that she left in disgust, and Jane had fallen into the drain and sprained her ankle, and mother was sick in bed, and the carpets all up, and, worse than all, the Dunnings were coming next week from New York, and it was more than Cilly could bear.
Of course, I told her I’d help her bear it, and I put my shoulder to the wheel and wrote to the Dunnings to defer their visit, and began to investigate matters, which I found had become a little loose, to say the least of it. The men were good enough and faithful enough, and the troubles Cilly had encountered were only the troubles incident upon repairing any old house, a job which is quite as trying to one’s patience, and as exasperating as putting up a stove pipe when no one joint fits another, particularly the elbows, and the result is that new pipe is almost always bought to take the place of the old. So with our house; nothing was right, nothing would do again. No matter how good or how long the piece of conductor, or lead pipe, or bit of siding or floor, it would not fit, and it went to swell the pile of rubbish which, in our back yard was almost mountain high, and reminded me of the excavations in Rome, when I first looked out upon the debris that dreary Sunday morning. But Monday showed a better state of things. I saw that the open drain and cistern hurt Cilly the most, and so I had them closed up first and then plunged into the midst of the repairing, myself, and was astonished to find how rapidly I began to develop a talent for the business. I believe, after all, there is something exhilarating in the smell of fresh plaster, and something exciting in walking over piles of old lath, and bits of broken siding, and base boards, and moldings, and matched stuff, and so on through the whole list of terms in a carpenter’s vocabulary. I came to know them all, from mitering to nosing, though I never rightly made out the orthography of that last word or its derivation either, but I knew just what it was, and was great on a squint to see if things were square or plumb, as Billy called it, and I think I made them change one window three times, and a certain door twice. What a propensity they did have for getting things wrong, that is, according to my ideas, and poor Cilly had been driven nearly crazy with windows just where she did not want them, and doors opening against her furniture. Then, too, she informed me, she began to suspect that the men thought she was strong-minded, and wanted to vote, because she superintended them, and was always in the thickest of it, and exactly in their way. Whether they liked masculine rule better, I never heard. I only know that they all worked well and faithfully, and they certainly did get on faster when they were not obliged to pull down one day what they had done the day before. This had been Cilly’s method of procedure, aided and abetted by her mother, whom the men stigmatized as “the old one,” and who spied upon them from every keyhole, and came unexpectedly upon them from every corner. She was disabled now, and could only issue daily bulletins to which I paid no heed, and so the repairs went on, and just three months after the first nail was driven the last man departed, and we went to work setting to rights, which would have been delightful business, if only we could have found our things, but everything was lost or mislaid. Curtain fixtures were gone; door keys were gone; stair rods were missing; screw drivers and tack-hammers could not be found; wood-saw broken; both trowels lost; water pails full of plaster, and all the brooms in the house spoiled, to say nothing of the dusters and dust pans broken, and dippers lost.
But then, we had a double piazza, and a place for flowers, and a china closet so big that I had to spend a hundred dollars to fill it, and our bed-room has two arches over the south windows, and a raised platform behind them, and we have each of us a bureau in a dressing-room which looks like a long hall, and I have four drawers all to myself for my shirts and neckties, and a quarter of a closet, and there are east windows and south windows, which make it so bright in the morning that the flies bite me awfully, and we had to buy a mosquito net to keep them off, and instead of being disturbed by Mrs. Patterson’s pump, and looking into nothing but her back yard and kitchen, we now look into Mrs. Alling’s barn-yard, with a most unsightly corn-crib in the center of it, and Mrs. Alling’s roosters have a bad habit of crowing every hour, while at about three or four o’clock in the morning, the noise is so terrible, that I believe her hens crow too.
But Cilly likes that—it sounds rural and like the country; and our room is lovely, with the two broad balconies where we sometimes have tea, when the west wind is not too strong, the sun too hot, or the mosquitoes too thick. Then it is such a nice place to smoke, but Cilly never lets me do that any more; she only smiles so sweetly on her gentlemen friends, and tells them it’s a nice place, that I am tempted to try it sometimes surreptitiously, when she and her mother are down town at some of the temperance meetings, but her mother would smell me a mile off, and so I forbear.
Honestly, though, I do enjoy the balconies, and I rather like the arches over the windows, which I call the twins, and which are very pretty. They ought to be, for they cost enough. I’ve never told Cilly just how much I paid, besides her brother’s windfall, but when the greedy assessors tucked an extra four thousand on our house because of the improvements, I wondered how they guessed so accurately.
We have five spare rooms now, but the new one in the attic, which was built for Lizzie’s children and the nurse, has never been occupied. The nurse is afraid to sleep there, you have to pass through such a menagerie of trunks, and broken chairs, and rag bags, and old hoop skirts, and cast off pants, and last year’s bonnets, to get to it, that it gives her the horrors, and as the children will not sleep without her, that room was made for nothing except to show.
Mrs. Erastus Lord, senior, is dead, and Cilly was very sorry, when she died, and I suppose I was sorry, too; and I know I was glad when Mrs. Erastus, junior, recovered the use of her limbs, and sailed away to Europe, where she finds the manners and customs more congenial to her taste than here.
Cilly and I live very quietly together now, and I do not believe she has any thought of repairing again, though she has told me in confidence that the next time she does so, she means to stow the furniture in the barn, and knock the plaster off from all the old walls, which were so badly cracked when the house was fixed the last time; but when she actually gets to that point, as true as my name is John Logan, I’ll lock her up in a lunatic asylum and then commit suicide.