“Oh, Jean,” he said. “Say, is your water running all right this morning?”
“Why, no,” said Jean. “No, it isn’t. There’s just a little trickle coming out.”
She closed the door, and Ish went down the porch steps and headed for Molly’s house. He felt a sudden little chill of apprehension.
He picked up Ezra at Molly’s, and discovered that she at least had no difficulty with water. That, however, might be the result of her house being several feet lower than Jean’s so that the water might not yet have run out of the pipes.
They went over to George’s house, which stood neat and trim inside its freshly painted white picket-fence. Maurine showed them into the living-room, and told them to sit down while she went to get George, who was puttering around somewhere as usual. Ish sat down in one of the big velourcovered overstuffed chairs. Then, as always, he looked around the living-room with a sense of amazement, mingled with an almost perverted pleasure. The living-room in George and Maurine’s house looked exactly the way the living-room of any prosperous carpenter would have looked back in the years before the Great Disaster. There were bridge-lamps with pink shades, and tassels hanging from them. There was a very expensive electric clock, and a magnificent console radio-phonograph, which had four different bands of reception. There was also a television set. On both tables were scarves carefully crumpled up to give an elegant look to things, and on one table were neat piles of several popular magazines.
The bridge-lamps did not work, because there was no electricity, and the hands of the electric clock always stood at 12:17. The magazines were at least twenty-one years old. There were no programs on the air for the radio to pick up, even if there had been any electric current by which the radio and the phonograph could run.
Yet all these things were the symbols of prosperity. George had been a carpenter in the Old Times. Maurine had then been married to a man who must have been about the social and financial equal of George. Such people always wanted to have fine bridge-lamps and electric clocks and radios and all the rest, and now that it was possible to have all these things, they had merely gone out and got them and put them into the house. Their not working was secondary. In the evening Maurine merely brought in a kerosene lamp, and stood it on the table and they got their light from it instead of from the bridge-lamps, and they had a wind-up phonograph for actual use. It was ridiculous, and also a little pitiful. Yet, when Ish considered the matter, he always remembered Em’s first reaction to it.
“Well,” she had said, “don’t you remember in the Old Times people would have a piano, maybe a grand piano, in the living-room, even though nobody could play it? And they had a set of those books—what did they call them?—the Harvard Classics, though they never read them. And maybe they had a fireplace that never even had a chimney attached to it. All those things were just to show off that you could afford them. They were proof that you had arrived. So I don’t see much difference now if George and Maurine want to have their bridge-lamps, even if they can’t get any light from them.”
They heard George coming in from the back, and then his bulky form filled the doorway. He held a pipe- wrench in one hand, and was wearing his usual costume of carpenter’s overalls, rather dirty and well stained with paint smears. He could have used new overalls every day, but apparently he felt more comfortable in ones that were well broken in.
“Hi, George,” said Ezra, who usually managed to say the first word.
“G’morning, George,” said Ish.
George seemed to chew his tongue for a moment, as if really considering what the situation demanded. Then he said: “Morning, Ish…. Morning, Ezra.”
“Say, George,” said Ish. “No water over at Jean’s or at our place this morning. How about here?” There was a pause.
“None here, neither,” said George.
“Well,” said Ish, “what do you make of it?”
George hesitated, working his mouth and lips, as if he were chewing the end of an imaginary cigar. Ish felt a sense of irritation at George’s lumpishness. Yet he reflected, controlling himself, that George was a solid person and a very good one to have around.
“Well,” he repeated, “what do you make of it, George?”
George made a motion as if to put the imaginary cigar into one comer of his mouth, and then he replied. “Well, if she’s off over there too, I guess there’s no use looking any more for some block in my pipes around here, way I was. I guess she’s broke or clogged up somewheres on the main pipe that comes to all these houses.”
Ish caught a sidelong glance from Ezra, and a ghost of a smile on his face as much as to say that after all any of them might have figured that out and that George’s pronouncement was not exactly the word of a mental giant.
“I guess you must be right, George,” Ish said. “But what are we going to do about it?”
George shifted the imaginary cigar again, and then spoke: “Well, I dunno.”
Like Em, George obviously considered this to be out of his province. Give him a dripping faucet or a plugged toilet, and he would be happy taking care of it for you. But he was no mechanic, and certainly no engineer. So, as it always happened, Ish had to fake the lead.
“Where did all this water come from anyway?” he asked on the impulse.
The others both were silent. It was curious. Here they had been for twenty-one years merely using water that continued to flow, and yet they had never given any real consideration to where the water came from. It had been a gift from the past, as free as air, like the cans of beans and bottles of catsup that could be had just by walking into a store and taking them from the shelves. Ish indeed had vaguely thought about the matter sometimes, and wondered how long the water would continue to run, and even considered vaguely what they should do to develop another supply. But he had never got round to doing anything. Water which had already run for many years might well continue to run for many years more, and so there was no pressure for action. In all those years there had never been one single day, until this one, when there had been any immediate reason why he should say to himself. “Today I must do something about the water-supply.”
So now Ish glanced from George to Ezra, and had no response to his question. George merely stood, shifting weight from one foot to the other. Ezra had a little twinkle in his eyes, to indicate that this was not his department. Ezra knew people. When he had clerked in that liquor-store he must have been good at jollying his customers along and making tie-in sales. But when it came to handling ideas and things, Ish was better than Ezra. Ish saw that he would have to answer his own question.
“This water must come from the old city water-system, somewhere,” he said. “Must
“O.K.,” said Ezra, agreeable as ever. “Maybe, though, we should see what the boys think about it.”
“No,” said Ish. “They won’t know anything about it. If it was a question of hunting or fishing, we could ask the boys. But the boys wouldn’t know anything about this.”
They went out and began calling the dogs, and getting ready to harness up the teams to the wagons. The reservoir was not more than a mile away, but ever since he had been mauled by the mountain-lion, Ish was not good at long walks, and George was beginning to suffer from the stiffness of old age in his legs. Getting the dogs together and making everything ready always took some time. At moments like these, Ish regretted that horse- taming had come to be a lost art. There were no wild horses left in the immediate vicinity, but he was sure that they could find plenty of them farther east in the open plains country of the San Joaquin Valley. But the trouble really was that all three men had been city-people who were used to driving automobiles; not one of them really knew anything about horse-keeping or horse-managing, and so they had never made the effort to keep horses. Actually, the dogs were in many ways more convenient because they demanded little care, and fed on the less choice cuts of the many cattle which could be killed easily in the surrounding country. But to have horses, you would have had to see that they were kept on good pasture, and protected from wolves and lions. So on the whole, now that automobiles were difficult to keep running, the dog-teams were probably the simplest answer to their modest requirements for transportation, and George was very happy to make the little wagons and keep them in repair. It had taken Ish years to get over the feeling, when he was driving in one of the wagons behind four dogs, that he was acting in some kind of ridiculous pageant, and made a ludicrous spectacle. But, of course, no one else felt the same, and he had gradually come to accept the situation. After all, people had thought it natural to have dogs pull sleds. Why not wagons?
They left the dog-teams at the foot of the final slope, and climbed up along the old path, breaking their way
