CHAPTER V
Allsummer the water-battle went on in town, but with flagging interest. Colonel DeWitt Clinton threw his powerful influence into the plan for an open canal from a dam in the Croton down to a reservoir to be built on Murray’s Hill. Even Clinton’s fervor left the people cold. When he pointed out that they were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars every year for bad water hauled in hogsheads, they retorted that the Croton insanity would cost millions. When he pointed out that the Croton would pour twenty million gallons of pure water every day into the city, and declared that New York water was not fit to drink, the answer came gaily that it did not need to be, since the plainest boarding house kept brandy bottles on the table.
One old gentleman raised a town laugh by boasting that he had taken a whole tumblerful of Manhattan water every morning for years and was still alive. And yet the dream of bringing a foreign river in would not down, though the believers in the artesian wells were ridiculed for “the idea of supplying a populous city with water from its own bowels.”
The cholera had brought a number round to the Westchester project, but the cholera passed in God’s good time. It would come back when God willed. Plagues were part of the human weather like floods and drouths, and not to be forefended.
In any case Patty was busied with her own concerns. Her baby was born on Tuliptree Farm before her husband could get back from White Plains with the doctor, though he had lashed his horses till the carry-all flung to and fro like a broken rudder.
The son and heir was a girl, and in the hope that she would be an heiress they named her after Patty’s AuntImogene, whose husband had recently died and left her a fleet of vessels in the Chinese trade.
For a time instinct and pride in the flattery of people who cried that the child was its mother’s own beautiful image gave the tiny replica a fascination to Patty. She played with it as if it were a doll, and she a little girl only pretending to motherhood.
But she tired of the bauble and turned the baby over to the servants. Her Aunt Imogene cried out against her:
“Nowadays women don’t take care of their babies like they used to when I was a girl. In the good old-fashioned days a mother was a mother. She was proud to nurse her children and she knew all about their ills and ailments. I had eleven children and raised all of them but six, and I would no more have dreamed of hiring a nurse for them than I would have I don’t know what. But these modern mothers!”
Criticism had no power over Patty, however. She admitted all that was charged against her and simply added it to the long list of grievances she had against her fate. RoBards often felt that this was cheating of the lowest kind. It left a man no means of either comforting distress or rebuking misbehavior.
As soon as the baby could be weaned from her mother to a nurse, Patty made a pretext of ill health and joined the hegira to Saratoga Springs, which was winning the fashion hunters away from Ballston Spa. She traveled with some friends from the South who brought North a convoy of slaves and camped along the road, preferring that gypsy gait to the luxury of a voyage up the river on the palatial steamboats, in which America led the world.
During that summer RoBards was both mother and father to the child, and Immy’s fingers grew into and around his heart like the ivy that embraced the walls of the house. He was bitter against his wife, whose fingers had let his heart slip with ease and indifference.
Yet, by the time Patty returned from taking the waters in the North, he was so lonely for her that their reunionwas another and a first marriage. He found a fresh delight in her company and learned the new dances to keep her in his sight and out of the arms of other men.
By one of Nature’s mysterious dispensations, this girl with the soul of a flirt and a gadabout had the bodily fertility of a great mother. To her frank and hysterical disgust heaven sent her a second proof of its bounty, which she received with an ingratitude that dazed her husband—and frightened him, lest its influence be visited on the next hostage to fortune. If the child should inherit the moods of its mother it would come into the world like another Gloster, with hair and teeth and a genius for wrath.
But the child arrived so placidly that the doctor could hardly wring a first cry from him by slapping him and dipping him into a tub of cold water. And he wept almost never. What he had he wanted. When it was taken from him he wanted it no more. He chuckled and glowed in his cradle like a little brook. He gave up his mother’s breast for a bottle with such lack of peevishness that it was almost an act of precocious gallantry. They named him Keith after an uncle.
Keithkins, as too often happens in a world of injustice, made it so convenient to neglect him that his chivalry must be its own and only reward. Patty left him in the country—“for his own good”—and went earlier to New York than in the other autumns. There she plunged into a whirlpool of recklessness.
She seemed to welcome every other beau but her husband. She would not even flirt with him. She said he was too dangerous!
She laughed at his jealous protests against the worthless company she affected. But when he courted her she fought him. Her extravagance in the shops alarmed him, but when he quarreled with her on that score, and demanded that she cease to smirch his credit with debts upon the merchants’ books, she would run away from home and stay until he sought her out in Park Place, where she was wheedling her father into ruinous indulgence.
The old man’s business was prospering and his gifts to Patty were hardly so much generosities as gestures of magnificence.
Harry Chalender was constantly seen with old Jessamine. They talked the Croton project, but RoBards felt this to be only a tinsel pretext of Chalender’s to keep close to Patty.
By the gods, he even infected her with his talk of water-power! Everybody was talking it now. It had become politics.
For sixty years or so the town had dilly-dallied over a water supply—ever since the Irishman Christopher Colles had persuaded the British governor Tryon to his system of wells and reservoirs. Every year a bill was put forward, and the Wars of the Roses were mimicked in the Wars of the Rivers.
Bronx fought Croton incessantly but neither gained a victory. Wily old Aaron Burr stole a march on both with his Manhattan Company and sneaking a bank in under the charter of a waterworks sank a well and purveyed liquid putridity at a high price.
It was a great relief to RoBards when the Crotonians gained the upper hand in 1833, for it left his Bronx to purl along in leafy solitudes undammed. But it took two years to bring the project to a vote and then the majority was only seventeen thousand Ayes to six thousand Nos.
Just after the skyrockets of the Fourth of July died down, the engineers went out into Westchester to plant their stakes, outlining the new lake that the dam would form, and the pathway of the aqueduct from the Croton to the Harlem.
This row of posts billowing up hill and down alongside the Hudson stretched like a vast serpent across the homes and farms and the sacred graveyards of villages and towns and old families. It was the signal for a new war.
The owners of the land fell into two classes: those who would not let the water pass through their demesnes at anyprice, and those who sought to rob the city by unwarranted demands.
The farmers seemed to RoBards to comport themselves with dignity and love of their own soil, though Chalender denounced them for outrageous selfishness in preferring the integrity of their estates to the health of a vast metropolis.
But RoBards saw through Chalender’s lofty patriotism. Chalender could not unload his own land upon the city unless the whole scheme were established, and Chalender’s price was scandalously high.
The stakes were not yet nearly aligned when an almost unequaled frost turned the buxom hills to granite overnight. It seemed that the havoc which this high emprise was to forestall had been purposely held in leash by the ironic fiends until the procrastinating city had drawn this parallel of stakes, this cartoon of an aqueduct. For almost immediately the cataclysm broke.
The idleness enforced upon the engineers by the evil weather drove most of them back to town, Harry Chalender among them. And now he dragged Patty into that vortex of dissipation for which the city was notorious. Dancing, drinking, theatre-going, riotous sleigh-rides, immodest costumes, and dinners of wild revel gave the moralists reason to prophesy that God would send upon the wicked capital fire from the skies—as indeed He did in terrible measure.
Harry Chalender began to follow Patty about and to encounter her with a regularity that ceased to resemble coincidence. There was gossip. One of the slimy scandal-mongering newspapers well-namedThe Hawk and Buzzardprinted a blind paragraph in which RoBards recognized his own case.
But what could RoBards do? To horsewhip the editor or shoot the lover would not only feed the newspapers but blacken the lives of the babies, who were suffering enough now in the lack of a mother’s devotion without being cursed for life with a mother of no reputation. In a world governed by newspapers the old rules of conduct were altered.
The winter of 1835 fell bitterer than any ever knownbefore. The cold was an excruciation. The sleighs rang along the street as if the snow were white steel. The pumps froze; the cisterns froze; the pipes of the water companies froze underground, and the fire-hydrants froze at the curbs.
The main industry of the town seemed to be the building and coaxing of fires, though coal and wood were almost impossible to obtain, and the price rose to such heights that one must either go bankrupt or freeze.
Everybody began to wonder what would happen if a house should blaze up. The whole city would go. Who would come to the rescue of a burning house in such weather? And with what water would the flames be fought? Everybody listened for the new firebell that had been hung in the City Hall cupola and had sent its brazen yelps across the sky so often, but was ominously silent of late as if saving its horrific throat for some Doomsday clangor.
Hitherto, membership in certain of the fire companies had been cherished as a proof of social triumph. There were plebeian gangs made up of mechanics and laborers, and the Bowery b’hoys were a byword of uncouth deviltry.
But RoBards had been accepted into one of the most select fire clubs with a silver plated engine. He kept his boots, trumpet, and helmet in a basket under his bed, so that there was never any delay in his response to the bell. He was so often the first to arrive that they gave him the key, and in the longest run he always carried more than his share of the weight in the footrace. But now he wished that he had never joined the company.
Christmas drew near and Patty wore herself out in the shops and spent her time at home in the manufacture of gifts with her own hands. They were very apt hands at anything pretty and useless. She was going to have a Christmas tree, too, a recent affectation borrowed from the Hessian soldiers who had remained in the country after the Revolution.
The evening of the sixteenth of December was unbearably chill. The fire itself seemed to be freezing red. The thermometer outside the house dropped down to ten belowzero. The servants refused to go to the corner for water and Patty was frightened into staying home from a ball she was invited to.
That was the ultimate proof of terror. It was one of the times when the outer world was so cruel that just to sit within doors by a warm fire was a festival of luxury; just to have a fire to sit by was wealth enough.
Patty was so nearly congealed that she climbed into her husband’s lap and gathered his arms about her like the ends of a shawl. It had been a long while since she had paid his bosom such a visit and he was grateful for the cold.
And then the great bell spoke in the City Hall tower—spoke one huge resounding awful word, “Fire!” before it broke into a baying as of infernal hounds.
When RoBards started to evict Patty from his lap she gasped: “You’re not going out on such a night?” RoBards groaned: “I’ve got to!” He set her aside and ran upstairs for the basket of armor, and Patty followed him wailing with pity.
“Don’t go, darling!” she pleaded. “You can tell them to-morrow that you were sick. You’ll die if you go out in this hideous cold, and then what will become of me? Of us? Of our babies?”
Her solicitude heartened him. He was important to her after all! His death would grieve her. That added a beauty to duty. But it took away none of its authority.
While he struggled into his boots, she ran to a window looking south and drew back the curtains. Through the thick lace of frost on the panes a crimson radiance pierced, imbuing the air with a rosy mist as if the town were seen through an upheld glass of Madeira.
“It looks like the end of the world!” Patty screamed. “What will become of our beautiful city now? It will be nothing but ashes to-morrow. Don’t go! You’ll be buried under a wall, or frozen to death in the streets. If you’ll promise not to go down into that furnace, I’ll go with you to-morrow to Tuliptree Farm, and never leave it again!”
His heart ached for her in her agitation, and it wasnot easy to tear off the clinging hands for whose touch he had so often prayed. But he broke free and dashed, helmeted and shod, into the icy world between him and the advancing hell. The fire’s ancient enemy, water, was not at hand for the battle, and the whole city lay helpless.
At the firehouse door RoBards met Harry Chalender. He was dressed for the ball that Patty had planned to attend, and he wore white gloves and dancing pumps.