Elbow-Room Part 13

One evening I met Mr. Potts out upon the turnpike, taking a walk; and I joined him. As we proceeded he became rather confidential. The subject of the mania for collecting bric-a-brac came up; and after an expression of opinion from me respecting the matter, Mr. Potts told the story of his wife's fondness for that kind of thing. He said,

"My wife is the most infatuated bric-a-brac hunter I ever heard of.

She's an uncommonly fine woman about most things; loves her children; makes splendid pies; don't fool with any of those fan-dangling ways women have of fixing their hair; and she's an angel for temper. But she beats Mrs. Toodles for going to auctions. She's filled my house with the wildest mess of bric-a-brac and such stuff you ever came across outside of a museum of natural curiosities. She's spent more money for wrecks that wouldn't be allowed in the cellar of a poor-house than'd keep a family in comfort for years.

"You know Scudmore, who sold out the other day? She was there, bidding away like a millionaire. Came home with a wagon-load of things--four albata tea-pots without lids or handles; two posts of a bedstead and three slats; a couple of churns and fourteen second-hand sun-bonnets, and more mournful refuse like that. Said she didn't intend to buy, but she bid on them to run them up to help Mrs. Scudmore, and the auctioneer knocked them down quicker'n a wink. Said it was 'Lot 47,'

and she had to take it all. And she said maybe she could make up the sun-bonnets into bibs for the baby and use the tea-pots for preserves.

She thought she might make a pretty fair bedstead out of the posts by propping the other ends on a chair; and she said it was a lucky thing she was so forehanded about those churns, because she might have a cow knocked down to her, and then she would be all ready for b.u.t.ter-making. More'n likely she'll buy some old steer and bring him home while she's rummaging around for bric-a-brac.

"When the Paxtons had their sale in January she was around there, of course, and came home after dinner with the usual dismembered furniture; and when I said to her, 'Emma, why under Heaven did you buy in the mud-dredge and the sausage-stuffer?' she said she thought the sausage-stuffer would do for a cannon for the boys on the Fourth of July, and there was no telling if Charley wouldn't want to be a civil engineer when he grew up, and perhaps he'd get a contract for deepening the channel of the river; and then he'd rise up and bless the foresight of the mother who'd bought a mud-dredge for two dollars and saved it up for him.

"I sold that scoop on Wednesday for old iron for fifteen cents; and I'll bang the head off of Charley if he ever goes to dredging mud or playing cannon with the sausage-stuffer. I won't have my boys carrying on in that way.

"Over there at Robinson's sale I believe she'd've bid on the whole concern if I hadn't come in while she was going it. As it was, she bought an aneroid barometer, three dozen iron skewers, a sacking-bottom and four volumes of Eliza Cook's poems. Said she thought those volumes were some kind of cookery-books, or she wouldn't have bid on them, and the barometer would be valuable to tell us which was north. _North_, mind you! She thought it indicated the points of the compa.s.s. And yet they want to let women vote! I threw in those skewers along with the mud-dredge, and she's used the sacking-bottom twice to patch Charley's pants; and that's all the good we ever got out of that auction.

"But she don't care for utility; it's simply a mania for buying things. We haven't a stove in the house, and yet what does she do at Murphy's sale but bid on sixty-two feet and three elbows of rusty stovepipe and cart it home with four debilitated gingham umbrellas.

Said the umbrellas were a bargain because, by putting in new covers and handles and a rib here and there, they would do for birthday presents for her aunts. And the stovepipe could be sent out to the farm to be put around the peach trees to keep the cows off. How in thunder she was ever going to get a stovepipe around a peach tree never crossed her mind. She is just as impractical as a baby.

"When Bailey had the auction at his insurance office, there she was, and, sure enough, that afternoon she landed in our side yard with Bailey's poll-parrot and a circular saw. It amused me. She wanted to use that saw as a dinner-gong, but it was cracked, and so she has turned it into a griddle for m.u.f.fins. Bailey had taught the parrot to swear so that I was afraid it'd demoralize Charley, and I don't mind telling you in confidence that I killed it by putting bug-poison in a water-cracker.

"Now, I see there's an auction advertised for Friday at Peters'; and Peters has a pyramid of old tomato cans and bric-a-brac of that sort piled up in his back yard. Now, you see if that woman don't bid on those cans until she runs them up to a dollar apiece, and then come lugging them around to our house with some extraordinary idea about loading them up with gunpowder and selling them to the government during the next war for bombsh.e.l.ls. If she does, that winds the thing up. I'm a good-natured man, but no woman shall bring home three hundred tomato cans to my house and retain a claim upon my affections.

I'll resign first."

My feeling was that he was a little mixed in his notions about bric-a-brac, but that he really had a grievance.

Potts told me, also, that he came home very late one night recently, and when he went up stairs his wife and children were in bed asleep.

He undressed as softly as he could, and then, as he felt thirsty, he thought he would get a drink of water. Fortunately, he saw a gobletful standing on the washstand, placed there for him, evidently, by Mrs.

Potts. He seized it and drank the liquid in two or three huge gulps, but just as he was draining the goblet he gagged, dropped the gla.s.s to the floor, where it was s.h.i.+vered to atoms, while he ejected something from his mouth. He was certain that a live animal of some kind had been in the water, and that he had nearly swallowed it. This theory was confirmed when he saw the object which he spat out go bounding over the floor. He pursued it, kicking a couple of chairs over while doing so, and at last he put his foot on it and held it. Of course Mrs. Potts was wide awake by this time and scared nearly to death, and the baby was screaming at the top of its lungs. Mrs. Potts got out of bed and turned up the gas, and said,

"Mr. Potts, what in the name of common sense is the matter?"

"It's a mouse!" shouted Potts, in an excited manner. "It's a mouse in the goblet. I nearly swallowed it, but I spat it out, and now I've got my foot on it. Get a stick and kill it, quick!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: MR. POTTS' MOUSE]

Mrs. Potts was at first disposed to jump on a chair and scream, for, like all women, she feared a mouse very much more than she did a tiger. But at Potts' solicitation she got the broom and prepared to demolish the mouse when Potts lifted his foot. He drew back, and she aimed a fearful blow at the object and missed it. Then, as it did not move, she took a good look at it. Then she threw down the broom, and after casting a look of scorn at Potts, she said,

"Come to bed, you old fool! that's not a mouse."

"What d'you mean?"

"Why, you simpleton, that's the baby's India-rubber bottle-top that I put in the goblet to keep it sweet. You ought to be ashamed of yourself carrying on in this manner at one o'clock in the morning."

Then Potts turned in. After this he will drink at the pump.

In the course of the conversation I remarked that I had seen some men fixing Potts' roof recently; and when I asked Potts if anything was the matter, he said,

"My roof was s.h.i.+ngled originally; but as it leaked, I had the s.h.i.+ngles removed and a gravel-and-felt roof put on. The first night after it was finished there was a very high wind, which blew the gravel off with such force that it broke thirty-four panes of gla.s.s in b.u.t.terwick's house, next door. The wind also tore up the felt and blew it over the edge, so that it hung down over the front of the house like a curtain. Of course it made the rooms pitch-dark, and I did not get up until one o'clock in the afternoon, but lay there wondering how it was the night seemed so long.

"Then I had a tin roof put on, and it did well enough for a while.

But whenever there was a heavy rain or the wind was high, it used to rattle all night with a noise like the battle of Gettysburg. At last it began to leak, and a tinner sent a man around to find the hole. He spent a week on that roof, and he spread half a ton of solder over it, but still it leaked. And finally, when the snow came, the water trickled down the wall and ran into an eight-hundred-dollar piano, which will be closed out at a low figure to anybody who wants mahogany kindling-wood. When the tin was removed and the new slate roof was put on, the slates used to get loose and slide down on the head of the hired girl while she was hanging up the clothes. And when the man came to replace the slates, he plunged off the roof and broke four ribs and his leg, whereupon he sued me for damages. And while the case was pending in court a snow-storm came. The snow blew in under the slates, and my oldest boy spent the day with some of his friends snow-balling and sledding in the garret. Then the snow on the garret floor melted and wet the wall-paper down stairs, so that the house became frightfully damp, and we had to move over to the hotel for a fortnight.

"Then I tried the 'Patent Incombustible' roofing, because the man said it would not only keep out the rain, but it was perfectly fireproof. A week after it was on, b.u.t.terwick's stable caught fire and flung up a great many sparks. All the houses in the neighborhood, however, escaped--all except mine. My roof was in flames before the stable was done burning; and when the firemen had put it out, they got to fighting on my front stairs, with the result that the banister was broken to splinters, a two-inch stream was played into the parlor for fifteen minutes, and Chief Engineer Johnson bled all over our best carpet.

"I have the 'Impervious Cement Roof' on now, and it seems to do well enough, excepting that it isn't impervious. It lets in the water at eight different places; and whenever there is a shower, I have to rush my family out on the roof to shelter it with umbrellas. I fully expect it will explode some night, or do some other deadly and infamous thing. I am going to put the house up at auction and live in a circus tent."

They had a big excitement over at Potts' the other day about their cat. They heard the cat howling and screeching somewhere around the house for two or three days, but they couldn't find her. Potts used to get up at night, fairly maddened with the noise, and heave things out the back window at random, hoping to hit her and discourage her. But she never seemed to mind them; and although eventually he fired off pretty nearly every movable thing in the house excepting the piano, she continued to shriek and scream in a manner that was simply appalling. At last, one day, Potts made a critical examination of the premises, and, guided by the noise, he finally located the cat in the tin waterspout which descends the north wall of the house. He thinks the cat must have been skylarking on the roof some dark night and accidentally tumbled into the spout.

Potts tried to shake her down by hammering on the spout with a stick; but the more he pounded, the louder she yelled, and the two noises roused the entire neighborhood and attracted the attention of the police. Then he procured a clothes-prop; and ascending to the roof, he endeavored to push the animal out. But the stick was not long enough to reach her. All it was good for was to make her howl more loudly; and it did that. At last Potts concluded to take the spout down and coax the cat out. When he got it on the ground, he peeped in at the end, and he could see the animal's eyes s.h.i.+ning like b.a.l.l.s of fire far back in the darkness of the hole. After shaking her up for a while without inducing her to move, he made up his mind that she must be jammed in the pipe and unable to budge. He wanted to cut the pipe open, but b.u.t.terwick said it would be a pity to spoil such a good spout for a mere cat.

So Potts finally determined to blow her out with powder. He procured a small charge; and pus.h.i.+ng it pretty well in with a stick, he "tamped"

the end of the spout with clay and lighted the slow-match. Two minutes later there was an explosion, and the tamping-clay flew out and struck b.u.t.terwick with some violence in the ribs, curling him all up on the gra.s.s by the pump. When he recovered his breath, he got up and said,

"Hang your infernal cat! It's an outrage for you to be endangering the lives of people with your diabolical schemes for getting at a beas'

that ought to've been killed long ago."

Then b.u.t.terwick sullenly got over the fence and went home, and the cat meanwhile kept up a yowling that made everybody's hair stand on end.

Potts said that he made a mistake in not placing the b.u.t.t of the spout against something solid. And so, after putting in a couple of pounds of powder, he turned the spout up and rested the end upon the ground, propping it against the pump. Then he lighted the slow-match, and the crowd scattered. There was a loud explosion, a general distribution of fragments of tin around the yard, and then out from the upper end of the spout there sailed something black. It ascended; it went higher and higher and higher, until it was a mere speck; then it came sailing down, down, down, until it struck the earth. It was the cat, singed off, burned to a crisp, looking as if it had been spending the summer in Vesuvius, but apparently still active and hearty; for as soon as it alighted it set up a wild, unearthly screech and darted off for the woodshed, where it continued to howl until Potts went in and killed it with his shotgun. It cost him forty dollars for a new spout, but he says he doesn't grudge the money now that he has stopped that fiendish noise.

Potts' clock got out of order one day last winter and began to strike wrong. That was the cause of the fearful excitement at his house on a certain night. They were all in bed sound asleep at midnight, when the clock suddenly struck _five_. The new hired girl, happening to wake just as it began, heard it, and bounced out of bed under the impression that morning had come. And as it is dark at 5 A.M. just at that season, she did not perceive her mistake, but went down into the kitchen and began to get breakfast.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SHOOTING A BURGLAR]

While she was bustling about in a pretty lively manner, Potts happened to wake, and he heard the noise. He opened his room door cautiously and crept softly to the head of the stairs to listen. He could distinctly hear some one moving about the kitchen and dining-room and apparently packing up the china. Accordingly, he went back to his room and woke Mrs. Potts, and gave her orders to spring the rattle out of the front window the moment she heard his gun go off. Then Potts seized his fowling-piece; and going down to the dining-room door, where he could hear the burglars at work, he c.o.c.ked the gun, aimed it, pushed the door open with the muzzle and fired. Instantly Mrs. Potts sprang the rattle, and before Potts could pick up the lacerated hired girl the front door was burst open by two policemen, who came into the dining-room.

Seeing Potts with a gun, and a bleeding woman on the floor, they imagined that murder had been committed, and one of them trotted Potts off to the station-house, while the other remained to investigate things. Just then the clock struck six. An explanation ensued from the girl, who only had a few bird-shot in her leg, and the policeman left to bring Potts home. He arrived at about three in the morning, just as the clock was striking eight. When the situation was unfolded to him, his first action was to jam the b.u.t.t of his gun through the clock, whereupon it immediately struck two hundred and forty-three, and then Potts pitched it over the fence. He has a new clock now, and things are working better.

The Pottses celebrated their "iron wedding" one day last winter, and they invited about one hundred and twenty guests to the wedding. Of course each person felt compelled to bring a present of some kind; and each one did. When Mr. and Mrs. Smith came, they handed Potts a pair of flatirons. When Mr. and Mrs. Jones arrived, they also had a pair of flatirons. All hands laughed at the coincidence. And there was even greater merriment when the Browns arrived with two pairs of flatirons.

But when Mr. and Mrs. Robinson came in with another pair of flatirons, the laughter became perfectly convulsive.

There was, however, something less amusing about it when the Thompsons arrived with four flatirons wrapped in brown paper. And Potts' face actually looked grave when the three Johnson girls were ushered into the parlor carrying a flatiron apiece. Each one of the succeeding sixty guests brought flatirons, and there was no break in the continuity until old Mr. Curry arrived from Philadelphia with a cast-iron cow-bell. Now, Potts has no earthly use for a cow-bell, and at any other time he would have treated such a present with scorn. But now he was actually grateful to Mr. Curry, and he was about to embrace him, when the Walsinghams came in with the new kind of-double-pointed flatirons with wooden handles. And all the rest of the guests brought the same articles excepting Mr. Rugby, and he had with him a patent stand for holding flatirons. Potts got madder and madder every minute, and by the time the company had all arrived he was nearly insane with rage; and he went up to bed, leaving his wife to entertain the guests.

In the morning they counted up the spoils, and found that they had two hundred and thirteen flatirons, one stand and a cow-bell. And now the Pottses have cut the Smiths and Browns and Johnsons and Thompsons and the rest entirely, for they are convinced that there was a preconcerted design to play a trick upon them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A FLAT-IRON WEDDING]

The fact, however, is that the hardware store in the place had an overstock of flatirons and sold them at an absurdly low figure, and Potts' guests unanimously went for the cheapest thing they could find, as people always do on such occasions. Potts thinks he will not celebrate his "silver wedding."