Several Surprises Take Effect
Mr. Black opened the door of his hotel apartment in Washington one
sultry noon in response to a vigorous, prolonged rapping from without.
The bellboy handed him a telegram. When Mr. Black had read the long
message he smiled and frowned, but cheerfully paid the three dollars and
forty-one cents additional charges that the messenger demanded.
It was Mabel's message; the clerk had transmitted it faithfully, even
to the two misspelled words that had proved too much for the excited
little writer. If the receiving clerk had not considerately tucked in a
few periods for the sake of clearness, there would have been no
punctuation 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 that
Mr. 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 many
times; sometimes he frowned, sometimes he chuckled; the postscript
seemed to please him particularly, for whenever he reached that point
his deep-set eyes twinkled merrily. Presently he propped the dispatch
against the wall at the back of his table and sat down in front of it to
write a reply. He wrote several messages, some long, some short; then he
tore 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 if
I wire him he'll botch things worse than ever. Dear me, it _is_ too bad
for those nice children to lose any part of their precious stay in that
cottage, now, for of course they'll have to give it up when cold weather
comes. If I can wind my business up today there isn't any good reason
why I can't go straight through without stopping in Chicago. It's time I
was home, anyway; it's pretty warm here for a man that likes a cold
climate."
Meanwhile, things were happening in Mr. Black's own town.
It was a dark, threatening day when the Milligans, delighted at the
success of their efforts to dislodge its rightful tenants, hurriedly
moved into Dandelion Cottage; but, dark though it was, Mrs. Milligan
soon began to find her new possession full of unsuspected blemishes.
Now that the pictures were down and the rugs were up, she discovered the
badly broken plaster, the tattered condition of the wall paper, the
leaking drain, and the clumsily mended rat-holes. She found, too, that
she had made a grievous mistake in her calculations. She had supposed
that the tiny pantry was a third bedroom; with its neat muslin curtains,
it certainly looked like one when viewed from the outside; and crafty
Laura, intensely desirous of seeing the enemy ousted from the cottage at
any price, had not considered it necessary to enlighten her mother.
"My goodness!" exclaimed Mrs. Milligan, a thin woman with a shrewish
countenance now much streaked with dust. "I thought you said there was a
fine cellar under this house? It's barely three feet deep, and there's
no stairs and no floor. It's full of old rubbish."
"I never was down there," admitted Laura, dropping a dishpanful of
cooking utensils with a crash and hastily making for safe quarters
behind a mountain of Milligan furniture, "but I've often seen the trap
door."
"It hasn't been opened for years. And where's the nice big closet you
said 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. "You
wouldn't wait for anything, but had to rush right in. I told you you'd
better take your time about it, but no--"
"You know very well, James Milligan," snapped the irate lady, "that the
Knapps wouldn't have taken our house if they couldn't have had it at
once."
"Well, I _don't_ know," growled Mr. Milligan, scowling crossly at the
constantly growing heaps of incongruously mixed household goods, "where
in Sam Hill you're going to put all that stuff. There isn't room for a
cat 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 busy
day how hopelessly out of repair the cottage really was; but he was soon
to find out.
The summer had been an unusually dry one; so dry that the girls had been
obliged to carry many pails of water to their garden every evening. The
moving-day had been cloudy--out of sympathy, perhaps, for the little
cottagers. That night it rained, the first long, steady downpour in
weeks. This proved no gentle shower, but a fierce, robust, pelting
flood. Seemingly a discriminating rain, too, choosing carefully between
the just and the unjust, for most of it fell upon the Milligans. With
the sole exception of the dining-room, every room in the house leaked
like a sieve.
The tired, disgusted Milligans, drenched in their beds, leaped hastily
from 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 an
uncomfortable 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 ten
o'clock; and, with an expert carpenter, made a thorough examination of
the house, which the rain had certainly not improved.
"It will take three hundred--possibly four hundred dollars," said the
carpenter, who had been making a great many figures in a worn little
note-book, "to make this place habitable. It needs a new roof, new
chimneys, new floors, a new foundation, new plumbing, new plaster--in
short, just about _everything_ except the four outside walls. Then there
are no lights and no heating plant, which of course would be extra. It's
probably 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 it
were placed in good repair it would be six years at least before you
could expect to get the money expended on repairs back in rent. The
only thing to do is to tear it down and build a larger and more modern
house that will bring a better rent, for there's no money in a
ten-dollar house on a lot of this size--the taxes eat all the profits."
"Well," said Mr. Downing, "this house certainly looked far more
comfortable when I saw it the other day than it does now. Those children
must have had the defects very well concealed. They deceived me
completely."
"They deceived us all," said Mrs. Milligan, resentfully. "Half of our
furniture is ruined. Look at that sofa!"
Mr. Downing looked. The drenched old-gold plush sofa certainly looked
very much like a half-drowned Jersey calf.
"Of course," continued Mrs. Milligan, sharply, "we expect to have our
losses made good. Then we've had all our trouble for nothing, too. Of
course we can't stay here--the place isn't fit for pigs. I suppose the
best thing _we_ can do is to move right back into our own house."
"Ye-es," said Mr. Milligan, overlooking the fact that Mrs. Milligan had
inadvertently called her family pigs, "it certainly looks like the best
thing to do. I'll go and tell the Knapps that they'll have to move out
at once--we can't spend another night under this roof."
The Knapps, however, proved disobliging and flatly declined to move a
second time. The Milligans had begged them to take the house off their
hands, and they had signed a contract. Moreover, it was just the kind of
house the Knapps had long been looking for, and now that they were
moved, more than half settled, and altogether satisfied with their part
of the bargain, they politely but firmly announced their intention of
staying where they were until the lease should expire.
There was nothing the former tenants could do about it. They were
homeless and quite as helpless as the four little girls had been in
similar circumstances; and they made a far greater fuss about it. By
this they gained, however, nothing but the disapproval of everybody
concerned; 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, and
moved hurriedly out of Dandelion Cottage--and, except for the memories
they left behind them, out of the story.