CHAPTER LII
Fleeingfrom the oppressiveness of the farm, RoBards returned to St. John’s Park to find it alive with memories of Patty. He loved to recall their quarrels, her vanities, her extravagances, her fierce unreasonable tempers, the impudent advantages she took of his love, her hostility to all laws and orders, the flitting graces she revealed. He loved her for them, more than for her earnest moods, her noble whims, her instants of grandeur. A swallow for its wildness, a humming bird for its teasing, a kitten for its scampers—a woman for her unlikeness to a man’s ideals—we love them for what they will not give us!
Only a little while could RoBards revel in his lavendered memories, for St. John’s Park was taken over by a railroad company as the site for a big freight station. All of the inhabitants were evicted like paupers from a tenement. The quondam retreat of gentility in search of peace was now a bedlam of noisy commerce, of thudding cars and squeaking brakes.
RoBards wanted to seal the house like a sacred casket of remembrances, but it was torn down in spite of him and the place of it knew it no more.
The city seemed to pursue RoBards. The people swarmed after him and never retreated. Keith took a house in town, and asked his father to live with him, but RoBards, thinking of what a burden old Jessamine had been in his own home, would not risk a repetition of that offense.
Again he lived at a hotel and at his office. Having nothing else to fill his heart, he gave all his soul to the law and became a mighty pleader in the courts. As the city grew, great businesses developed and ponderous litigations increased, involving enormous sums. His fees were in proportionand, finding that his value seemed to be measured by the size of his charges, he flattered his clients by his exorbitance.
For his own satisfaction he took up now and then the defense of a criminal, a murderer, a murderess, anybody who had passionately smashed the laws of God and man. And it fascinated him to rescue the culprit from penalty of any sort; to play upon the public and its twelve senators in the jury box until they all forgave the offense and made a martyr of the offender, applauded the verdict of “Not Guilty.”
After all, RoBards thought, justifying his seeming anarchy: who is truly guilty of anything? Who would shoot or poison another except under the maddening torment of some spiritual plague?
And if one must say, as the pious pleaded, that Heaven was all-wise and all-merciful and all-loving even though it sent cancer and cholera and mania and jealousy to prey upon helpless humans, why should one abhor a human being who followed that high example and destroyed with ruthlessness?
In this ironic bitterness, RoBards saved from further punishment many a scandalous rebel and felt that he was wreaking a little revenge on the hateful world for its cruelty to Patty, saving other wretches from the long, slow tortures she endured.
But nothing mattered much. His riches annoyed him, since they came too late to make Patty happy with luxuries. It was another sarcasm of the world.
It amused him dismally to furnish old Mrs. Lasher with money to spend; with a coat of paint and new shingles for her house, and credit at A. T. Stewart’s big store. This gave her a parting glimpse of the life she had missed; and when she died, he provided her with a funeral that put a final smile on her old face.
This was not in penance for what he had done to her son. That was only a dim episode now, with condemnation, forgiveness, and atonement all outlawed beyond the statutorylimitations. Time does our atoning for us by smoothing sins and virtues to one common level.
Aletta was a more profitable investment for money. He made her so handsome that she attracted suitors. And one day she tearfully confessed that she was in love with a man who besought her in marriage. This meant that Mrs. David RoBards, Junior, would cease to keep that sacred name alive, and when Junior’s daughter should grow up she would also shed the family name.
But nothing mattered much—except that people should get what they wanted as fully and as often as possible. He made over to Aletta a large sum of money, on the condition that she should keep its source a secret.
The habit of secrecy concerning deeds of evil grew to a habit of secrecy concerning deeds of kindliness. He tended more and more to keep everything close, the least important things as well as the most.
He could not be generous often to his son Keith; Keith was too proud of his own success to take tips. He had chosen wisely when he made a career of hydraulic engineering, for water seemed to be the one thing that New York could never buy enough of.
The reservoir in Central Park, Lake Manahatta, had been opened in the second year of the war and though it held a thousand and thirty million gallons, it sufficed but briefly. Sometimes, riding a horse in the new pleasance, RoBards would make the circuit of that little artificial sea and, pausing to stare down into its glass, try to recall that once it had been a ravine where squatters kept their squalid homes.
The insatiable city was drowning land everywhere with dammed-up water, but the undammed people were flowing outward like water. In 1869 there was a drought and the four great reservoirs were all empty. No water came in at all save from the Croton River. A new reservoir was established at High Bridge to take care of the colony increasing in Washington Heights. A reservoir was made at Boyd’s Corner to hold nearly three hundred million gallons.
The next year the city laid its great hands upon a partof Westchester County, and not content to reach out for water annexed the land as well.
Recalling when it had seemed a ridiculous boast that New York would one day reach the Harlem River, RoBards already saw its boundary pushed north to Yonkers and eastward along the banks of his Bronx.
He felt as if the city were some huge beast clumsily advancing toward his home.
Its thirst was its excuse, and when the next shortage of water forced the town to make a house-to-house inspection of plumbing to cut down the waste, the engineers went out to hunt new ponds, while its ambassadors marched on Albany and forced the state to cede it three more lakes in the Croton watershed.
The property owners on their shores filled up the outlets and fought the octopus in vain; and RoBards once more distinguished himself for his brilliant rear-guard actions, ending always with defeat in the courts.
At Middle Branch on the Croton, a reservoir of four thousand million gallons failed to satisfy the town, and in 1880 began the two driest years ever heard of. All the reservoirs were drained and even the Croton wearied. The thirty million gallons a day it poured into the city’s dusty gullet fell to ten million. The public fountains were sealed, the hydrants turned off, the Mayor urged the citizens to thrift, thrift, thrift.
Isaac Newton, the Chief Engineer, proposed a second aqueduct to drain the Croton region, a great dam below the old, a tunnel, the longest in the world, to the city and a great inverted siphon under the Harlem’s oozy bed. And this was decreed; and in time accomplished under Engineer Fteley.
But the promise of these two hundred and fifty million gallons a day was not enough; and now the city turned its eyes to the Bronx River, and RoBards felt that his doom was announced. The sacred stream had kept its liberty in the face of greedy projects since it was first named in 1798 as a victim of the all-swallowing town.
In place of the sixty thousand population then, there were twelve hundred thousand people now, and buildings were lifted so high that people were living six stories in air. They expected the city to pump water to their faucets. It did, while the supply held.
Up the railroad came an army of engineers with Keith high among them to stretch a dam at the very edge of Kensico, trapping the Bronx and its cousin the Byram stream. With the engineers came the laborers, a horde of Italians and all the muck and vermin that had marked the building of the Croton dam.
The Kensico dam would impound only sixteen hundred and twenty million gallons and there were sixteen hundred thousand people in New York by the time it was finished. The two Rye ponds dammed and a Byram reservoir completed and the Gun Hill reservoir at Williamsbridge raised the total to three and a half billion gallons, but RoBards saw that nothing could check the inevitable command to build a higher parapet at Kensico and spread a tributary lake across his farm and his tulip trees, his home, and his graves.
Meanwhile, as the townspeople inundated the country all about, the greater tides of the republic overflowed all the continent. When Immy had married Chalender, she had had to sail around the peak of South America to San Francisco. But now the lands between were filled with cities, and the farmers were pushing out to retrieve the deserts from sterility.
Railroads were shuttling from ocean to ocean and it took hardly more days now than months then for letters and people to go and come.
Letters from Immy had not been many nor expressed much joy in the romance of the Pacific colonists. The return of Chalender to San Francisco seemed rather to cause a recrudescence of unhappiness.
After Patty’s death a letter came, addressed to her, that RoBards opened as her earthly proxy and read with tangled feelings:
“My husband is what he always was, a flirt incorrigible, a rake for all his loss of teeth. He still kisses the old ladies’ hands and gives them a charitable thrill. And he kisses all the young girls’ lips that he can reach.“But I can’t complain. I was shopworn when he took me from the shelf. I am so domestic that I can hardly believe my own eventless diary. I am plain and plump and my husband, such as he is, brings home so many stories that I don’t miss the novels much.“The neighbors run in with scandals, but I can usually say that Harry told me first. He is a beast but a lot of fun. For the children’s sake, I endure. I grow very homesick, though, and cry myself to sleep after my children have cried themselves to sleep. But oh, to have you tuck me in again, my pretty, my darling Mamma, and oh, to look into Papa’s sad, sweet eyes, and the unwavering love that seemed to grow the greater as I deserved it less and less!”
“My husband is what he always was, a flirt incorrigible, a rake for all his loss of teeth. He still kisses the old ladies’ hands and gives them a charitable thrill. And he kisses all the young girls’ lips that he can reach.
“But I can’t complain. I was shopworn when he took me from the shelf. I am so domestic that I can hardly believe my own eventless diary. I am plain and plump and my husband, such as he is, brings home so many stories that I don’t miss the novels much.
“The neighbors run in with scandals, but I can usually say that Harry told me first. He is a beast but a lot of fun. For the children’s sake, I endure. I grow very homesick, though, and cry myself to sleep after my children have cried themselves to sleep. But oh, to have you tuck me in again, my pretty, my darling Mamma, and oh, to look into Papa’s sad, sweet eyes, and the unwavering love that seemed to grow the greater as I deserved it less and less!”
Finishing the letter RoBards was glad, for some reason, that Patty had never seen it. She might have hated Chalender for being so fickle, but RoBards had heard him cry out in his loneliness and he could never hate him any more.
He could not have sent him to hell or kept him there if he had been God, even the jealous God of Genesis. Yet if Chalender were not to go to hell, who could be sent?
So feeble grew RoBards’ grudge that when he received a telegram all the way from San Francisco that Harry Chalender had died, he felt lonely; and tears ran down into his tremulous mouth. As always, Chalender had been engaged on a work of public benefaction. He had thrown himself, heart and soul, into the irrigation projects that were rescuing the Golden State into a paradise of vines and fig-trees, almonds and oranges and palms. Overwork and overexertion in the mountains broke his old heart. It was quaintly appropriate that his ever-driven heart should crack.
Like so many of the republic’s heroes, his public morals were as pure as his private were sullied, and his funeral brought forth eulogium all across the continent. The public said, “He was a patriot!” and none knew how many women keened, “Harry was a darling, a darling, a darling.”
The departure of Chalender took a prop from RoBards. He had outlived the rival who had saved his life and embittered it, and had confessed that RoBards had done him greater injury.
He, RoBards, was ready now to go, and merely waited. The only thing he wished to see was Immy. She wrote that she would come to live with him as soon as she could close up her husband’s mixed affairs and learn whether she were rich or poor.
As an earnest of her coming she sent along a daughter, to go to an Eastern finishing school. She had been named Patty, and the girl had grown to such likeness that when she stood at last before RoBards he almost fell to his knees to welcome a revenant ghost to his arms.
She stood mischievous, exquisite, ambrosially winsome, ready to laugh or cry, threaten or take flight, according to whichever stratagem she could best use to gain her whim.
She ran into her grandfather’s bosom and set his old heart to clamoring like a firebell in the night. Her lips tasted like Patty’s lips. Her flesh beneath his caress had the same peachy mellowness.
So there was a new Patty in the world! The world would never lack for Patty Jessamines.
Nor for David RoBardses, either, it seemed; for every body said that Keith’s son, Ward, was just like his grandfather. But only in looks, for Ward was already an engineer in his father’s office and even more zealous to build inland seas upon other people’s lands for the sake of the infinite New York he loved.
Ward fought his grandfather, called him an old fogy, a poor Canute who wanted to check the world’s greatest city; and in his very ardor resembled RoBards more than either realized.
He resembled him, too, in his response to the fascination of this new Patty. They were cousins, and in RoBards’ youth that had implied a love-affair. But nowadays such alliances were looked upon as perilous and scandalous.
So Ward gave Patty merely the glance of admiration atemperate man casts upon a jeweler’s window and resumed his efforts to convert his grandfather to the justice of making Westchester a mere cistern for New York.
The young man knew nothing of the meaning of the land to RoBards; he knew nothing of the secrets the house retained like a strong vault. He had the imperial eye of youth, a hawk’s look to far horizons.
He found old David querulous and old David found him sacrilegious; so they fought a civil war as uncivilly over the enslaving of the Westchester waters as North and South over the enslaving of the black nations stolen out of Africa.
Keith began to incline to his father’s side, for he shared with him the love of the natal soil. Then Ward turned on Keith with equal impatience, denouncing him as a “back number.”
This brought about another alliance between Keith and his father, and they solemnly pledged themselves to save Tuliptree from New York.