Christmas stories

My wife was Priscilla Lord, daughter of the Hon. Erastus Lord, but I always call her Cilly for short, and she rather likes that pet name, inasmuch as it is not spelled with an S. We had been married and kept house ten years, and it had never occurred to me that we were not as comfortable, and cozy, and happy as our neighbors, until one Saturday night in the month of May, when I was superintending the packing of my shirts, and socks, and neckties, preparatory to a business trip which I was to make for the firm which employed me, and which was to last four weeks positively, if not longer. Then, after sewing on the last button, and darning the last sock, and wondering why men always wore out their heels and toes so fast, Cilly suddenly informed me that we were neither cozy nor comfortable, nor respectable, in the present condition of things.

I was taking off my boots, and sat staring at her with one uplifted in the air, while she went on to say that the view from our bed-room was just horrid, looking out upon nothing but a lane, and a board fence, and Mrs. Patterson’s kitchen—that we had no china closet proper at all, which was a shame for people of our means—that we had to pass through the dining-room to go down cellar, which was a great inconvenience—that we had no conservatory, and the bay window was always crowded with plants in the winter, giving a littered appearance to the room—that the west piazza was altogether too short a walk for her mother, who had lived with us for the past year, and who needed a longer promenade, especially in bad weather. And she continued to inform me further that there was space for such a nice room in the attic, which we really needed in the summer when the house was full, and Lizzie was there with all her children and the nurse.

I liked Lizzie, and liked the children, and liked to have them with us, especially as there were no little Logans of my own playing in the yard; but I thought three spare rooms ought to be enough for them, until I reflected that my mother-in-law, Mrs. Erastus Lord, now occupied one of the spare rooms, leaving a surplus of only two, so I still kept silent until Cilly, thinking she had succeeded in convincing me that of all tucked-up, inconvenient, disreputable houses in town, ours was the worst, went on to say that she thought and her mother thought, and her grandma thought, (grandma was the old Mrs. Lord of all, Mrs. Erastus, senior,) that we ought to “go through a set of repairs;” I think that’s the way she worded it, and as brother John had left her two thousand dollars “to do just exactly what she pleased with” she had made up her mind to repair, and was going to do it while I was away, so as to save me all the trouble of the muss, and—and—Cilly got a little confused here and stammered a good deal, and finally went on rapidly: “You see, I have quite decided, and mother has seen the men, and they are coming Monday morning, and it will all be done beautifully before you get back, and you’ll never know the old hut at all.”

I felt a little hurt to hear her stigmatize, as the old hut, what we had thought so pretty and nice when we took possession of it ten years ago, but had no time to protest before she added:

“I didn’t mean to tell you, as I wished to see how surprised you would be when you returned; but I was afraid something might happen, the carpenters get sick, or you come home sooner than you intended, and so I had to tell you. See, here is the plan. I had an architect come and make it the day you were in New York. Isn’t it lovely, and such an improvement?”

I looked at the paper which she held toward me, and saw on it a drawing which reminded me of one of the boats of the White Star Line, it was so long and narrow, with chimneys and smoke-stacks and gables jutting out everywhere.

“Don’t you like it John?” Cilly asked, with a most rueful face, and I replied:

“Why, yes, I dare say it is nice, but you see I haven’t the least bit of building genius, and less imagination, so I’ve no idea what it’s to be.”

“Why, John, what a stupid; that’s the new piazza, and maybe the front door will have to be moved, and that’s the new gable, and that’s the conservatory, and here is our room right over the kitchen.”

“Over the kitchen!” and I involuntarily sniffed as I thought of onions, and codfish, and boiled cabbage, each one of which was a favorite dish of mine, though I did not like the smell in my sleeping room.

Cilly understood my meaning and hastened to say:

“Oh, we have fixed all that; there’s to be deafening, a double floor and a whole lot of mortar, and we shall never hear a sound nor smell a smell, Jane is so quiet; and it will be so pleasant with a broad balcony and a door to go out. I wish you would try to have a little interest in it, John.”

So I tried to be interested, but could not forbear asking her if she had the slightest conception of all it involved, this raising the roof and Cain generally; and then she cried, and the Lord part of her got the ascendant, and she said I was mean, and an old fogy, and a conservative, and a—well, she called me several names, and then we made it up, and I told her to fix away, and knock things endways if she wanted to, and that’s about the way matters stood Monday morning, when I said good-bye to her at half-past six and hurried to the train. She was up to see me off, the carpenters were coming at seven, and she must be ready to receive them.

“You won’t know the house when you get home,” she said, “it will be so changed and improved; and if you are at all puzzled to find it, look for the very biggest and handsomest place on the street. Good-by.”

She was so elated with her repairing that I do not think she was a bit sorry to have me go, and this did not console me much, or make me take any more kindly to the repairs. I did not hear from her for three or four days, and then she was in high spirits. Such nice men as the carpenters were, and such fun to superintend them: she began to think nature had intended her for a builder, or at least a designer of houses.

I groaned a little for fear my hitherto quiet, satisfied Cilly should develop a propensity for building, and ruin me entirely. It was in her family on both sides, for old Mrs. Erastus Lord had ruined her husband that way, while Mrs. Erastus, junior, had sunk over twenty thousand dollars on a place which originally cost five thousand, and which when completed looked as if it had been taken up and shaken by a high wind and thrown down promiscuously. But I hoped better things of my little Cilly, and resuming her letter, read that the piazza was going up so fast, and they had not yet done a single bit of damage, except to knock a hole through one of the front door lights, and kill the ivy, which was just growing so beautifully, and which had come all the way from Kenilworth.

The next letter was not quite so hilarious and assured, though Cilly was still hopeful and plucky, notwithstanding that four windows had been broken, and the arm of my Apollo Belvidere, which I had bought in Florence, and a whole lot of plaster, had fallen from the ceiling of the room where she was sitting, and a man’s leg came right through, lathing and all. I think the leg disturbed her more than all the other mishaps, though her mother told her it was nothing at all to what she must expect, but she didn’t think it was nice, and it was such a muss to have four carpenters, three masons, two tinners, three painters, besides a boy to lath, and a man to clean up, and the two thousand dollars would not begin to pay for it all, and I must make some arrangements, whereby she could get some more money, and if I could she’d like me to stay away as long as possible, not that she did not miss me awfully, and the days seemed a month each, but she did want the house done before I returned, and it went on so slowly, though mother said they were the best workmen she ever saw.

This was the substance of Cilly’s letter, and I did not hear from her again except a few hurried lines saying she was well, and the house progressing, and both drains stopped up, and a chimney blown down, and the hard finish in one of the rooms spoiled by the rain which beat in just as they got the eaves-trough off. This was about as I had expected it would be, but I was sorry for Cilly, and sorry that my business kept me away from her six weeks instead of four, as I had at first proposed. But the day came at last for me to go home, and I almost counted the minutes, until there came a whiz and a crash, and we were off the track, with baggage car smashed but nobody hurt. This made it very late, midnight in fact, when we reached Morrisville, and, valise in hand, I stepped out upon the platform. It was the darkest night I think, I ever knew, and the rain was falling in torrents. Fortunately, however, there was a solitary cab in waiting, and I took it and bade the negro drive me to No.— Guelph street. But he was a stranger in the place, and stared at me stupidly until I explained where Guelph street was, and then remembering what Cilly had said about looking for the handsomest and largest house, bade him drive to the best and most stylish house in the street, if he knew which that was.

“Yes, sar, I done knows now,” and with a grin he banged the door, mounted his box and drove me somewhere, and I alighted, paid my fare, and heard him depart, for I could not see him, or the house either, except with the eye of faith, but of course it was mine, and I groped my way through the gate and up to the front door, to which I tried to fit my night-key, in vain, and after fumbling awhile at the key hole, and trying a shutter to see if it was unfastened, I was hunting for the bell knob, when suddenly a window from above was opened; there was a clicking sound, and then the sharp ring of a pistol broke the midnight stillness. I was not hit, but a good deal scared, and yelled out:

“For Heaven’s sake, Cilly, what do you mean by firing away at a chap like this?”

“John Logan, is that you? We thought it was a burglar. What are you here for?” some one called from the window, while at the same moment the gas flashed up in the hall and showed me where I was.

Not at my house at all, but at the large boarding house at the upper end of the street, kept by a dashing grass widow. Hastily explaining my mistake, I said good night to Bob Sawyer, one of the boarders, whose loud laugh discomfited me somewhat as I felt my way into the street and started toward home.

This time I was sure I was right by the trees near the gate, but the front door was gone—moved, and not wishing to venture into unknown regions, I concluded to try the bath-room door, for our rooms were adjoining it, and I could easily speak to Cilly without alarming her. So I tried it, and after floundering over piles of rubbish, and tearing my trousers on broads full of nails, and plunging up to my knees in what seemed to be a muddy ditch, and which smelled awfully, I suddenly found myself plump in the cistern, with the water up to my chin; at the same time I heard a succession of feminine shrieks, conspicuous among which was Cilly’s voice, crying out:

“Oh, we shall all be murdered. It is a burglar. Throw something at him.”

And they did throw—first a soap dish, then the poker, then the broom, and lastly a pair of my old boots.

“Cilly, Cilly!” I screamed; “are you mad? It’s I, John, drowning in the cistern.”

Then such a Babel as ensued; such a scrambling down stairs, and opening of doors, and thrusting out of tallow candles into the darkness. But I was out of the cistern by this time, and, wet as a drowned rat, confronted Cilly in her night-gown and crimping-pins, and asked her “What the deuse was up?”

“Oh, John!” she sobbed; “everything is up; the drain,” (that explained the smell), “the floor, and the pump, and the walk, and I’ve had such a dreadful time, and mother’s down with the rheumatism, and Jane has sprained her ankle, and Mary has gone, and I have got such a cold, and the town is full of burglars, and I thought you were one, and I wish we hadn’t repaired, it’s all so nasty and awful.”

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.