The Plumber in Residence

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

THE plumber is with us always — but there his resemblance to the poor ceases. His sleek little Buick stands often at my door, taking precedence of my modest Ford; and there you have our relative financial status in a nutshell — and a real car.

But although he is with us always, yet he is never really a permanent inmate of our house. A chronic transient, he might be called, and I have often wished that he were actually living under my leaky roof, and could be paid a salary instead of drawing the same amount in monthly installments as income.

When I think of the Rich and Great keeping private chaplains as household pets, or domesticating resident physicians, my soul is untouched by envy. The thought of a clerical ear or a medical eye forever cocked in my direction leaves me cold; but if the wealth of all terrestrial leak-menders were mine to squander on luxuries, my first extravagance would be a Resident Plumber, in whose calling are combined the ecclesiastical and the surgical functions.

My experience of plumbers as a class being limited to one specimen of his race, it may be that I am guilty of exaggeration, or at least of generalization, when I speak of plumbers generically as alarmists; but the impression produced by Mr. Piper (who happens to be my own minister of grace and healer of leaks), when I open the door of his shop to give him an emergency call, always brings to mind Hamlet’s disordered aspect as seen through Ophelia’s terrified eyes: —

‘What is it?’ he asks hoarsely.

When I report the murmurings and gaspings of my laundry tub, he looks far more apprehensive than Dr. Mendum would look if I had summoned him to investigate my own bronchial wheezing.

‘That sounds very serious,’Mr. Piper says, frowning and shaking his head; ‘I can’t tell at all what may happen. I must come over at once.’

Thereupon he nervously clutches his bag of tools, and in trembling tones calls to some fellow in the cellarage to come and join him at once in this probably vain effort to save the fife of my waste-pipe. By this time I am as nervous as he, and we hurl ourselves into our respective cars and dash down the street in agitated procession, dreading to see the patient, for fear that we merely shall be viewing the remains.

It is at my back door that the ecclesiastical aspect of plumbing comes to the front. The attendant boy produces a candle from some hidden recess of his vestments, and, like a faithful acolyte, reverently follows the high priest of plumbing through the kitchen and into the laundry, where both kneel at the washerwoman’s high altar and inspect the foundations of her faith—the laundry tub.

At this point the officiating priest is transformed into the surgeon, and the clumsy tools turn into delicate instruments. In his hands the wrench becomes a lancet, and the acolyte seems suddenly transformed into the physician’s assistant, whose task is apparently to give ether, for a sponge is produced from some inner shrine and Mr. Piper’s hoarse whisper utters the command, ‘Turn off the water instantly! Quick! I think we are just in time!’

Of course, if this were an isolated experience, it could be borne; but the trouble with my household pipes seems to be organic rather than functional, chronic rather than occasional; and if a resident plumber were always in the attic or the cellar, he could be occupied with the preventive work which we are now told is going to save the human race. Under present conditions, Paying the Piper has come to be something more than a phrase in the family: it has come to be an impossibility — and if he were a member of our immediate circle, our relations would be less strained the first of every month.

The climax to my mortifying dependence on Mr. Piper occurred a few weeks ago, during the middle of a starlit night, when I was awakened by the sound of a steady downpour of rain which seemed to be descending just outside my chamber door. This it was, and nothing more. Investigation proved that the bottom had inadvertently dropped out of a tank on the upper floor, and that the city’s water-supply was inundating the house in an unexpected deluge.

Ah, then and there was hurrying to and fro, and gathering tears, and tremblings of distress, and cheeks all pale — and all the usual symptoms of acute Plumber necessity. I rushed to the telephone. A sleepy operator finally located Mr. Piper in his suburban bed; and presently the well-known accents of alarm rang over the wire. ‘Turn off the main!’ he commanded (if he had said, ‘Remember the Maine!’ the slogan would have been no more fruitless, for to remember the location of the main was just what I could not do).

My family were, meanwhile, slopping about in rubbers and wrappers, holding umbrellas over their heads and offering futile directions to one another. But Mr. Piper ruled the storm that had burst from my cloudless ceiling, and gave at long distance the latitude and longitude and deep-sea soundings that finally disclosed the crucial point of my own connection with the city’s watersupply.

This was done in so masterly a way that I was able, as by a nautical chart, to wade through the hall, swim down the stairs, and finally dive to the cellar, where I found the key to the situation, turned it, and the waters were stilled. Like Noah, I stood and viewed the desolation caused by the flood; and as I looked at the disheartening pile of saturated rugs and pictures, dripping draperies, and miscellaneous household articles, all jumbled together into a sort of gigantic soggy pudding, I would have given a great deal to be able to retire to a corner, and, like little Jack Horner, to put in my thumb and pull out — a Plumber!