CHAPTER 17
Several Surprises Take Effect
Mr. Black opened the door of his hotel apartment in Washington onesultry noon in response to a vigorous, prolonged rapping from without.The bellboy handed him a telegram. When Mr. Black had read the longmessage he smiled and frowned, but cheerfully paid the three dollars andforty-one cents additional charges that the messenger demanded.
It was Mabel's message; the clerk had transmitted it faithfully, evento the two misspelled words that had proved too much for the excitedlittle writer. If the receiving clerk had not considerately tucked in afew periods for the sake of clearness, there would have been nopunctuation marks, because, as everybody knows, very few telegrams _are_punctuated; but Mabel, of course, had not taken that into consideration.It was quite the longest message and certainly the most amusing one thatMr. Black had ever received. It read:
"DEAR MR. BLACK,
"We are well but terribly unhappy for the worst has happened. Cant you come to the reskew as they say in books for we are really in great trouble because the Milligans a very unpolite and untruthful family next door want dandelion cottage for themselves the pigs and Mr. Downing says we must move out at once and return the key our own darling key that you gave us. We are moving out now and crying so hard we can hardly write. I mean myself. Is Mr. Downing the boss of the whole church. Cant you tell him we truly paid the rent for all summer by digging dandelions. He does not believe us. We are too sad to write any more with love from your little friends
"JEAN MARJORY BETTIE AND I.
"P. S. How about your dinner party if we lose the cottage?"
Mr. Black read and reread the typewritten yellow sheet a great manytimes; sometimes he frowned, sometimes he chuckled; the postscriptseemed to please him particularly, for whenever he reached that pointhis deep-set eyes twinkled merrily. Presently he propped the dispatchagainst the wall at the back of his table and sat down in front of it towrite a reply. He wrote several messages, some long, some short; then hetore them all up--they seemed inadequate compared with Mabel's.
"That man Downing," said he, dropping the scraps into the waste-basket,"means well, but he muddles every pie he puts his finger in. Probably ifI wire him he'll botch things worse than ever. Dear me, it _is_ too badfor those nice children to lose any part of their precious stay in thatcottage, now, for of course they'll have to give it up when cold weathercomes. If I can wind my business up today there isn't any good reasonwhy I can't go straight through without stopping in Chicago. It's time Iwas home, anyway; it's pretty warm here for a man that likes a coldclimate."
Meanwhile, things were happening in Mr. Black's own town.
It was a dark, threatening day when the Milligans, delighted at thesuccess of their efforts to dislodge its rightful tenants, hurriedlymoved into Dandelion Cottage; but, dark though it was, Mrs. Milligansoon began to find her new possession full of unsuspected blemishes.Now that the pictures were down and the rugs were up, she discovered thebadly broken plaster, the tattered condition of the wall paper, theleaking drain, and the clumsily mended rat-holes. She found, too, thatshe had made a grievous mistake in her calculations. She had supposedthat the tiny pantry was a third bedroom; with its neat muslin curtains,it certainly looked like one when viewed from the outside; and craftyLaura, intensely desirous of seeing the enemy ousted from the cottage atany price, had not considered it necessary to enlighten her mother.
"My goodness!" exclaimed Mrs. Milligan, a thin woman with a shrewishcountenance now much streaked with dust. "I thought you said there was afine cellar under this house? It's barely three feet deep, and there'sno stairs and no floor. It's full of old rubbish."
"I never was down there," admitted Laura, dropping a dishpanful ofcooking utensils with a crash and hastily making for safe quartersbehind a mountain of Milligan furniture, "but I've often seen the trapdoor."
"It hasn't been opened for years. And where's the nice big closet yousaid opened off the bedroom? There isn't a decent closet in this house.I don't see what possessed you--"
"It serves you right," said Mr. Milligan, unsympathetically. "Youwouldn't wait for anything, but had to rush right in. I told you you'dbetter take your time about it, but no--"
"You know very well, James Milligan," snapped the irate lady, "that theKnapps wouldn't have taken our house if they couldn't have had it atonce."
"Well, I _don't_ know," growled Mr. Milligan, scowling crossly at theconstantly growing heaps of incongruously mixed household goods, "wherein Sam Hill you're going to put all that stuff. There isn't room for acat to turn around, and the place ain't fit to live in, anyway."
Bad as things looked, even Mr. Milligan did not guess that first busyday how hopelessly out of repair the cottage really was; but he was soonto find out.
The summer had been an unusually dry one; so dry that the girls had beenobliged to carry many pails of water to their garden every evening. Themoving-day had been cloudy--out of sympathy, perhaps, for the littlecottagers. That night it rained, the first long, steady downpour inweeks. This proved no gentle shower, but a fierce, robust, peltingflood. Seemingly a discriminating rain, too, choosing carefully betweenthe just and the unjust, for most of it fell upon the Milligans. Withthe sole exception of the dining-room, every room in the house leakedlike a sieve.
The tired, disgusted Milligans, drenched in their beds, leaped hastilyfrom their shower baths to look about, by candlelight, for shelter. Mr.Milligan spread a mattress, driest side up, on the dining-room floor,and the unfortunate family spent the rest of the night huddled in anuncomfortable heap in the one dry spot the house afforded.
Very early the next morning they sent post-haste for Mr. Downing.
Mr. Downing, who hated to be disturbed before eight, arrived at teno'clock; and, with an expert carpenter, made a thorough examination ofthe house, which the rain had certainly not improved.
"It will take three hundred--possibly four hundred dollars," said thecarpenter, who had been making a great many figures in a worn littlenote-book, "to make this place habitable. It needs a new roof, newchimneys, new floors, a new foundation, new plumbing, new plaster--inshort, just about _everything_ except the four outside walls. Then thereare no lights and no heating plant, which of course would be extra. It'sprobably one of the oldest houses in town. What's it renting for?"
"Ten dollars a month."
"It isn't worth it. Half that money would be a high price. Even if itwere placed in good repair it would be six years at least before youcould expect to get the money expended on repairs back in rent. Theonly thing to do is to tear it down and build a larger and more modernhouse that will bring a better rent, for there's no money in aten-dollar house on a lot of this size--the taxes eat all the profits."
"Well," said Mr. Downing, "this house certainly looked far morecomfortable when I saw it the other day than it does now. Those childrenmust have had the defects very well concealed. They deceived mecompletely."
"They deceived us all," said Mrs. Milligan, resentfully. "Half of ourfurniture is ruined. Look at that sofa!"
Mr. Downing looked. The drenched old-gold plush sofa certainly lookedvery much like a half-drowned Jersey calf.
"Of course," continued Mrs. Milligan, sharply, "we expect to have ourlosses made good. Then we've had all our trouble for nothing, too. Ofcourse we can't stay here--the place isn't fit for pigs. I suppose thebest thing _we_ can do is to move right back into our own house."
"Ye-es," said Mr. Milligan, overlooking the fact that Mrs. Milligan hadinadvertently called her family pigs, "it certainly looks like the bestthing to do. I'll go and tell the Knapps that they'll have to move outat once--we can't spend another night under this roof."
The Knapps, however, proved disobliging and flatly declined to move asecond time. The Milligans had begged them to take the house off theirhands, and they had signed a contract. Moreover, it was just the kind ofhouse the Knapps had long been looking for, and now that they w
eremoved, more than half settled, and altogether satisfied with their partof the bargain, they politely but firmly announced their intention ofstaying where they were until the lease should expire.
There was nothing the former tenants could do about it. They werehomeless and quite as helpless as the four little girls had been insimilar circumstances; and they made a far greater fuss about it. Bythis they gained, however, nothing but the disapproval of everybodyconcerned; so, finally, the Milligans, disgusted with Dandelion Cottage,with Mr. Downing, and for once even a little bit with themselves,dejectedly hunted up a new home in a far less pleasant neighborhood, andmoved hurriedly out of Dandelion Cottage--and, except for the memoriesthey left behind them, out of the story.