CHAPTER VIII
Thecart with the powder kegs moved on, but RoBards did not follow. The holiday of overturning buildings had ceased to suggest either a sacred duty or a pastime. He drifted irresolute about the town.
He went home at last, cold, cold, cold. The distance was thrice as long as when he ran with the Fire Kings. St. John’s Park was like a graveyard when he reached it. Though it was far from the hour of winter sunrise, the bare trees were thrilled with daybreak ardor; the houses were pink with tremulous auroral rose. But no birds sang or flew, and the dawn in the sky was the light of devastation.
He hoped for and dreaded the meeting with his wife. He had been preparing his defence all the way home. He was a good lawyer and he had a good case, but women were not like the judges he found on the bench before him. Women had their own statutes and procedures, and appeals were granted on the most peculiar grounds.
But his wife was not at home. She had stopped at her father’s, of course, for a while. The black folk about the house were asleep while the white man’s town went up in smoke. It was none of their affair.
He flung down his crushing helmet, drew off his sodden boots, and put his benumbed toes against the warming stove.
He meant to keep awake till Patty came back. But he nodded stupidly. When, as it seemed, he flung up his head for the last long nod, his eyes found broad daylight. The stove was cold, and he was chilled again.
He heard the sounds of breakfast-getting on the floor below. Some one was shoveling up coal from the bin in the hall closet.
He glanced at his own clothes. His hands were grimed.His red flannel shirt was foul. He fell back from the mirror at the sight of his reflection. He looked a negro, with only his eyeballs white.
Aching with fatigue, he stripped to the skin and put on clean underclothes. He cracked the water in the pitcher and filled the bowl with lumps of ice. When he had soused his face and hands, the bowl was full of ink and his face was not half clean.
He went to the door and, with jaws dripping darkly, howled to his black man, Cuff, for water.
The answer came up the stairs:
“Cistern done froze. Pump at de corner don’t pump. Man who sells de bottles of water ain’t come round—he bottles all pop, most like. I’ll fotch you what we got in de kittle.”
The hot water helped, but he blackened three towels before he could see his own skin.
He put on a fresh shirt and stock and his best suit—for Patty’s sake—and went down to breakfast.
It was the usual banquet of meat, potatoes, eggs, fruit, vegetables, hot breads, preserves, sauces, and coffee. The coffee bettered his inner being so much that he assumed the outer world improved. He found courage to look at the morning paper. RoBards was one of the seventeen hundred New Yorkers who subscribed to a paper.
He took theCourier and Enquirer, edited by General Webb, who had proved himself a soldier, indeed, a year ago when the mob attacked his building and he drove it off. That was the first time the mayor was ever elected by a popular vote, and the riots gave little encouragement to the believers in general male suffrage.
During the fire theCourierreporters had been scurrying about gathering up information, and RoBards read with awe the list of streets destroyed and the summing-up:
“Six hundred and seventy-four tenements, by far the greater part in the occupancy of our largest shipping and wholesale drygoods merchants, and filled with the richest produce of every portion of the globe. How estimate theimmense loss sustained, or the fearful consequences to the general prosperity?”
The paper dropped from RoBards’ hands. If that had been the state of affairs at the hour when the paper’s forms were closed, where could the fire be now?
He rose to go to the roof and see if herald embers were not already alighting there. But the knocker clattered on the front door, and his heart leaped at the sound of Patty’s voice.
He ran to meet her and take her pauper family under his roof, while it lasted. But she was alone. She was explaining to her astonished maid, Teen, that she had come home for clean clothes. She needed them evidently, for her pretty gown was streaked and blackened.
She greeted her husband with a look as icy as the air she brought in with her from the street:
“I see you haven’t blown up your own house yet, Mist’ RoBards. May I take some of the things my poor father bought me before you ruined him?”
“Patty!” he groaned. It was some time before he dared go up the stairs she had scaled at a run. He went as reluctantly into her room as he had gone to the principal’s desk at the academy to be whipped for some mischief.
His wife squeaked with alarm at his entrance. She had tossed her hat on the bed and her gown with it. She had taken off her stays and was still gasping with the relief. RoBards had vainly protested against her habit of spending half an hour drawing her corset strings so tight that she could hardly breathe, for the ridiculous purpose of distorting her perfect form, to make her bust high and her chest narrow.
She stood before him in a chemise and petticoat, looking very narrow without her great skirts, and startlingly the biped in her ribboned garters and white silk stockings.
“Get out, will you!” she stormed, “and let me change my clothes.”
Instead he put out the hostile Teen, and closing the door, locked it.
“Now, Patty, you’re going to talk to me. Has the fire reached your father’s home yet?”
A sniff was his only answer. It was enough.
“Then you’re not going back to it. You stay here.” He spoke with autocracy, but his hands pleaded as he said: “I can’t tell you how sorry I am that——”
“You can’t tell me anything. And if you lay your grimy hands on me, I’ll scratch your eyes out.”
He stood off and gazed at her, helpless as a mastiff looking down at a kitten with back arched and claws unsheathed. He could have crunched her bones with ease, but she held him at bay by her very petty prettiness.
He was so poor of spirit and resource that he stooped to say:
“Since you’re so interested in Harry Chalender, you may be interested to know that the business of blowing up those buildings was his own idea.”
He thought that this would either reinstate him in her respect or at least debase Harry Chalender there. But she dumbfounded him by her always unexpected viewpoint:
“It was a splendid idea!”
“Then why do you blame me for what I was going to do?”
“Because you destroyed my father’s fortune wantonly—for spite—without any reason.”
“It was to save the city. The building would have burned soon anyway.”
“It would not have burned at all! It lies there now untouched. The wind shifted and carried the fire away from it.”
He dropped to a chair, bludgeoned like an ox, and as bovine in his enjoyment of this hellish witticism of fate.
Patty always loved to spurn him when he was down and she triumphed now:
“Besides, if you must bring Harry Chalender into it, I know that even if Harry had blown up all the other buildings in the world, he would have spared my father’s—especially if I had asked him to.”
RoBards nodded. That was probably true. But what was the uncanny genius of Chalender? He was a very politician among women as well as men. He allied himself with great causes and carried them greatly through, yet always managed to see that he and his friends profited somehow.
For years he and his clique had been storming the public ear for a city water supply, and had made prophecy of just such a calamity as this. And now he and his partisans could stand above the smoking pyre of the city and crow a gigantic, “I told you so!”
As RoBards sat inert and lugubriously ridiculous, Patty regarded him with a studious eye. She dazed him by saying after a long hush:
“Since you don’t want me to go back to my father’s house, I’ll stay here.”
He would have risen and seized her to his breast with a groan of rapture if she had said this in the far-off ages before the last few minutes of their parley. But now he grew even more contemptible in his own mind. There was no note of pity or of love in her voice, and he was so wretched that he muttered:
“Are you staying here because your father’s home is too gloomy to endure, or because you can’t give up the pleasure of gloating over my misery?”
Incomprehensible woman! When he tried to insult her, she always parried or stepped aside and came home with a thrust of perfect confusion for him.
And now that he had hurled at her the dirtiest missile of contempt within his reach, instead of crying out in rage, marching off in hurt pride, or throwing something at him, she laughed aloud and flung herself across his lap and hugged his neck with bare, warm arms till he choked.
“You are the stupidest darling alive. But every now and then, when you get horribly superior or hideously downcast you say the wisest things! Why is it that you understand me only when you are mad at me?”
He put lonely, hunting hands about her lithe, staylesswaist, and smothered his face among the white hawthorn buds in the snowy lane of her bosom.
Men were still calling women “mysterious” because women’s interests were different from men’s. The males, like stupid hounds, found cats occult simply because they said “mew!” instead of “wow!” Patty completely puzzled her husband when she chuckled:
“You are a beast, and an imbecile, and my father hates you and blames me for bringing you into our family, so I’ll have to be a mother to you.”
He winced at being cherished as an idiot child, but anything was better than exile from that fragrant presence, and he clung to her with desperation.