CHAPTER X
Bothfire and water conspired to embitter RoBards against New York, for both had laid personal hands upon his home and his career, invaded his very soul.
The first mood of the stricken city was one of despair. Then anger mounted. Scapegoats were sought. Some laid the blame on the piped gas that had come into vogue ten years before. Samuel Leggett had been the first to light his house with the explosive and his guests had felt that they took their lives in their hands when they accepted his hospitality. He had been one of the leaders of the Bronx River party, too.
Others complained that the fire had gone beyond control because the unchecked insolence and greed of the builders had led them to pile up structures as high as five or six stories. So an ordinance was passed forbidding future Babel towers to rise above the fourth floor.
The true cause of the fire was proclaimed from many pulpits as a magnificent rebuke from heaven upon a city in which extravagance had gone mad and sin flourished exceedingly. One text for a scathing sermon was: “Is there evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?” Another preacher chose the fall of the tower of Siloam upon sinners as his parallel.
But if God punished the new Nineveh, it paid him little heed, for a revel of crime ensued; burglaries were countless. Vice ruled and people danced and drank with desperate zeal.
More amazing yet, a fever of prosperity followed. When lots in the burned district were offered at auction, the first of them brought prices above anybody’s dreams. A panic of enthusiasm made skyrockets of values. People who hada little cash laid it down as a first payment on property far beyond their means, and then borrowed money to build with. New shops and tenements began to shoot up, and of a statelier sort than before. Brick and marble replaced wood, and the builders were so active that the editor of theMirrorwas reminded of his classics and quoted the scene in Vergil where Æneas watched the masons and architects of Tyre raising Carthage to glory.
It was ominous, however, that most of these buildings were founded upon mortgages. There was frenzy, not sanity, in the land speculation. Wildcat banks were opened everywhere. Prices for all things soared till flour reached fifteen dollars a barrel and wheat two dollars a bushel. The poor grew restive. Everybody grew restive.
War broke out against the Catholics. In the Protestant pulpits they were assailed as worse than atheists. The monasteries and nunneries were described as dens of vice, and the populace was finally so aroused that a Protestant mob attacked Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, and would have set it afire if it had not been turned into a fortress of armed men with rifles aimed through walls crenelated for defense. There was a riot also in a theatre.
New York was all riot. Mobs gathered at every pretext, and nothing would stop them but bullets or the threat of them. The only subject on which there was even partial agreement was water. The one insurance policy that could be trusted was offered by the Croton Company. The aqueduct would cost only four and a half millions. They said “only” now, for the fire had burned up seventeen millions in a night or two.
In April the engineers went out upon the mellowing hills and began to pound stakes again, to re-survey and to wrangle with the landholders.
The people of Tarrytown and the other communities met to protest that the taking of their land was unconstitutional, but nothing could check the city’s ruthlessness. The Water Commissioners, unable to buy, were authorized to condemn and to take over at their own appraisement. But the landholdersmade a hard fight, and some of them brought their claims to RoBards’ office. They found in him a ready warrior, for he understood the spirit that actuated them.
Lawyer though he was, RoBards could never keep his own heart out of his cases. If he had been a surgeon he would have suffered every pang that his patients endured; he would have gone frantic with rage against the mysteries of anguish, the incomprehensible, immemorial torture-festival that life has been. He would either have howled blasphemies at his God for his inhumanity, or he would have taken refuge in atheism from the horror of blaming a deity for infinite cruelties, the least of which, if inflicted by a man upon an animal, would have caused his fellowmen to destroy him as a hydrophobic wolf.
The law was a like insanity to RoBards. Since it is a condition of human nature that almost every man sees a sacredness in his own rights and a wickedness in every claim that conflicts with his own happiness; and since such rights and wrongs crisscross inextricably and are intertangled in such a Gordian knot as only a sword can solve, it is inevitable that cheap or bitter humorists should continue to find material for easy satire or fierce invective in the lawyers and judges who endeavor to reach peace by compromise.
Lawyers can prosper only as doctors do, by stifling their passions and devoting their intellects to their professions as a kind of noble sport. But RoBards was not a sportsman.
The suit of Jessamine vs. The City of New York should have been a cold matter of dollars and cents and justice, but nothing has ever been hotter or more passionate than money wars. When RoBards appeared before the Superior Court to secure damages against the city for the ruination of Jessamine’s property, the corporation counsel demurred to his Declaration against the Mayoret al.on the ground that the Mayor and the aldermen had statutory authority. The demurrers were sustained. Of course, RoBards appealed to the Court of Errors, and of course it would take eleven years for his case to come up again.
This embittered him against the city as a personal enemy. Having accepted the Westchester standpoint as to the farmers’ rights, every motive and activity of everybody south of the Harlem River was an added tyranny.
Chalender and his crowd might accuse the farmers of pettiness because they would not surrender their fields to the thirsty myriads of the city. But RoBards felt that this was only a new campaign in the eternal combat between town and country. He felt that if certain kinds of mankind had their way, every stream would be chained to a wheel, every field would contain a tenement or a shop. A snuff factory and a linen bleachery had all too long disgraced the lower stretches of the Bronx.
New York was pushing its beautiful wheatfields further and further north. The old pond, called “The Collect” (and well pronounced “the colic”) had long since been drained to a swamp and replaced by the hideous crime-nest of The Five Points. The waters that ran through Canal Street were hidden gradually from the light of day as a covered sewer. Taverns and gin hells had taken root in the outlying regions above Madison Square, and the distant roads were noisy with horse races, brandy guzzling, and riotous conversation. Even on the Sabbath the New Yorkers sent their wives to church and went out into the fields for unholy recreation.
RoBards entered the lists as the champion of the rights of God’s free soil. New York was to him a vast octopus thrusting its grisly tentacles deep into the fairest realms to suck them dry and cover them with its own slime. If it were not checked, it would drive all the farmers from Manhattan Island. The real estate speculators talked of a day when the city would be all city up to the Harlem River, as if that time would be a millennium instead of a pandemonium.
Seeing his ardor and hearing his eloquence, more and more of the Westchester patriots engaged RoBards as their attorney. His battle ground was the Chancery Court, where the fate of the lands was settled.
He lost every case. The city’s claim to water was ruled paramount to any American citizen’s rights to his own land. RoBards might cry that New York was repeating the very tyranny that had brought on the Revolution against England. He might protest that the Revolutionary heroes of Westchester had incarnadined their own hills with their blood in vain, if the greed of New Amsterdam were to wrest their homes from them after all.
But the judges only smiled or yawned at his fervor. They would discuss nothing but the price to be paid for the condemned property, and RoBards could do nothing but sell his clients’ lands dear and delay the final defeat as long as he could.
He and his colleagues made New York sweat for its victory. Already the original estimate of the cost of the aqueduct was nearly doubled and three and a half millions added to the amount to be raised. The city was held in check for two years, and in those two years prosperity was lost—the lawless prosperity that had hoisted even bread beyond the reach of the poor and sent them into such a rage that they attacked warehouses where flour was stored, and flinging the barrels to the street, covered the pavements with wheaten snow.
Suddenly the banks began to topple, as a house of cards blown upon. A ripple went along the line of banks and every one of them went down. With them went other businesses in an avalanche. Prices shot from the peak to the abyss in a day. The fall of New York was but the opening crash. The whole proud nation fell in the dust, and the hardest times ever known in the New World made the very name of the year 1837 a byword of disaster. The favorite policy of the day was repudiation. Beggars, bankers, merchants, cities, states, blandly canceled their debts by denying them.
“Now,” RoBards announced to his clients, “Now we’ve got the old wolf by the throat. His teeth and claws are falling out and he’ll have to let go of us as he is letting go of everything else.”
But this was not to be. The great aqueduct that was to rival the works of Rome offered the despondent town a vision and a pride it needed and would not relinquish. It seemed all the more splendid to defy the hardship of the times and rear an edifice that would defy time. If the city were to be buried in poverty, it would at least have left a monument above its head.
Even RoBards could not resist the fire of this resolve. After all he was an American, and New York was the American metropolis. And, besides, he was a lawyer and he loved an opponent who knew how to fight and had the guts to fight hard.
And so the embattled farmers of Westchester knuckled to the inevitable, and the construction of the aqueduct began in the very hour of the general disaster.
The legislature at Albany had all along been coerced by the members from New York City. It had made no difficulty about granting a right of way across the lands of the State Prison.
Through this unhappy territory went the Sing Sing Kill, and the kidnapped Croton River must be conveyed across that brook on a great stone bridge, with an arch of eighty-foot span, and twenty-five-foot rise with stout abutments of stone.
In the allotments of the first thirteen sections of construction, Harry Chalender secured the Sing Sing field. RoBards would have been glad to see him inside the walls of the penitentiary, or in one of the chained gangs that constructed roads thereabout.
But Patty was afraid that some of the desperate convicts might attack him, and she was as anxious for him as if he had gone to war.