CHAPTER XLIV
ThoughPatty greeted the decision to leave the country dumbly, the boy Junior emitted noise enough for two.
When his father asked him what difference it made to him, he dodged awkwardly, talking of the beauty of the woods, the cider taste and fragrance of the air, the ugliness and noise of the city. He waxed so fervid that his father said:
“You ought to go in for poetry as a business.”
He could hardly accuse his son of hypocrisy, since he himself was conniving in the secret for Patty’s sake.
He closed the argument by reminding the boy that his classes at Columbia would soon require his presence. Whereupon Junior declared that he was too old to go to school any longer. He wanted to get out and make his own way in the world. He was a man now and—all the ancient refrain of the home-building instinct.
It was a heartache to RoBards to see his child grown suddenly old enough to be skewered with the darts of love; but the romance was premature and it must be suppressed ruthlessly for the boy’s own sake. And for this growing pain also there was no ether.
To town they went.
For a while Junior’s melancholy was complete; then it suddenly vanished. He no longer spent his evenings at home writing long, long letters. He no longer went about with the eyes of a dying gazelle.
Patty said: “He has forgotten his country sweetheart and found a city one.”
From his superior information, RoBards made a shrewder guess that the Lasher girl had come to New York and was supporting herself somehow. He did not mention this suspicion to Patty, but he tried to verify it by shadowing Junior through the streets as through the lanes.
New York, however, was a labyrinth of endless escapes. The boy seemed to know that he was followed and after a long and apparently aimless saunter, would always elude his pursuer.
His father hunted through some of the dance halls, the gambling dives, through Castle Garden and other retreats where lovers sat like Siamese twins, enveloped in their ancient communions. But he never found Junior and he was ashamed to confess that he was searching, since his search was vain.
He dared not ask the boy where he went lest he encourage him to lie, or to retort with impudent defiance.
The eldest son, Keith, was thinking little of women. He was a man’s man, full of civic pride and municipal works. When he was at his business he took delight in being as dirty as possible. He wore the roughest clothes, left his jaws unshaven, talked big aqueduct talk.
Then he would go to the other extreme and cleanse himself to a foppery. But even this was mannishness, for he was a soldier.
He loved his family, his city, his nation, and his was that patriotism which proves itself by an eagerness to be ready to defend his altars.
“Any man who really loves his country,” he would say, “will keep himself strong enough to dig a ditch, build a wall, know a gun, and shoot it straight.”
He had joined the Seventh Regiment as soon as he could get in, though everybody knew that there was no chance of war and the soldiers were counted mere dandies.
Then a civil war broke out at home. New York City fought New York State. The Legislature at Albany, angered at the scandals of the city police, set up in its place a state police. Mayor Fernando Wood, who was always defying somebody, defied the Governor, the Legislature, the Supreme Court.
The criminals reveled in the joyous opportunity while the two police forces fought each other. When a warrant wasissued for the Mayor’s arrest the town police made the City Hall their citadel; the state police besieged it.
The Seventh Regiment was marching down Broadway to take a boat to Boston for a gala week in honor of the new Bunker Hill monument. It passed by the battlefield of City Hall Park. Since it was a state force, its colonel marched into the park and demanded the surrender of the Mayor, who yielded forthwith. The Seventh thereupon went on its way with brass band blaring, all the youthful hearts persuaded that they were invincible.
The Seventh had hardly reached Boston when it was recalled to rescue the town from a venomous mob that gathered in the Five Points, put the police to flight, and promised to destroy the whole city. The mob broke on the bayonets of the Seventh after six men had been killed and a hundred wounded.
Keith came home to his horrified mother with a few bumps on the head. She was still pleading with him the next day to resign from the perilous life when he was called out with his regiment to quell another riot.
A little later there was a parade in honor of the laying of an Atlantic cable, which collapsed after two alleged messages were passed and was voted a gigantic hoax. But while the town laughed at it, the poor Seventh was dragged to Staten Island, where a thousand miscreants had set fire to the quarantine buildings. For three months Keith had to sit there on guard over the cold and malodorous ruins.
When war of this sort was not afoot, there were the ever-recurrent parades under the hot sun, or in the fitful glare of the gas-lighted, banner-blazing nights.
Very gay was the march past the two visiting princes from Japan, that strange new country opened six years before by Commodore Perry. The two royal delegates were almost drowned in wine. New York, just emerged from a few years of legal drouth, spent a hundred thousand dollars on an uproarious reception at which champagne corks blurted by the thousand.
Patty, as the daughter of an old Oriental shipping merchant,went to that reception and wore a scarf of celestial weave and mountain-laurel color. One of the princes recognized the native stuff and advanced to Patty crying, “Me likee! me likee!” To prove how authentic the fabric was and how near and dear to him, he opened his silken robe at the breast and pointed to a most intimate garment for which there was no respectable name. It was of the very same material, and Patty might have swooned if her crinoline had not upheld her.
His Highness’ two words were two more than she could speak, and he took from his sleeve a paper handkerchief, mopped his gleaming brow, and dropped it on the floor.
Besides the Japanese princes, came the French Prince de Joinville, and Garibaldi, and finally the English heir apparent.
The change in Patty’s soul was so profound that when the Prince of Wales came down from Canada and everybody fought for tickets to the ball in his honor as if it were Judgment Day itself, she made no plans at all. Could this be the same Patty, who, hitherto, would have bankrupted RoBards for a supreme gown and played the Machiavel for a presentation?
When at last even RoBards noted her neglect, and asked her what she expected to wear, she sighed:
“I shan’t go at all. It’s a long time since the newspapers referred to me as ‘the woman who was.’ The prince is nineteen years old and he is not interested in grandmothers.”
Then for love of her and for pride of her, RoBards must plead and compel. He must drive her to the dressmakers and whisper them that nothing should be spared to drape her so that an emperor would stare and a bashaw salaam. Men are odd cattle. He had stormed at her for years for extravagance and now he was outraged by an economy!
Perhaps he was thinking a little of his own position as an important citizen, an American prince; but his chief zeal was in the defense of his beloved from that final fatal discouragement which ends a woman’s joy in this world.
It was he, not Patty, that made sure of the invitation and toadied to Isaac Brown, the burly old sexton of GraceChurch who decided who was to sit in what pew of his sacred edifice, and who was to be invited to any affair meriting the high epithet “genteel.”
Even Ikey Brown recognized the solidity of Judge RoBards and his lady, (who had been a Jessamine) and they received their tickets to the Academy of Music and, besides, the almost royal honor of dancing in thequadrille d’honneur.
The overcrowded floor gave way with a crash and had to be rebuilt, but Patty escaped so much as the rumpling of her cherry satin train. When she was presented to the young prince, her husband fancied that he saw in those boyish eyes, so avid of beauty, a flash of homage for the graces that had not yet gone. The cinder was still fierce from the furnace.
But Patty when she was at home again wept all night. The only excuse she would give was a whimpering regret that the far-away Immy could not have been there and danced with the prince. But RoBards knew that she mourned rather the yet more remote Patty of the long ago, who was no longer present within her tight stays and her voluminous paneled brocade. She wept over the grave of herself.
The next night he understood the ravages of the years yet more keenly, for he must march as a veteran in the firemen’s parade under the dripping, smoking, bobbing torches. Five thousand marched that night, and it was his last appearance with the volunteers, whose own last days were numbered. Philadelphia and Cincinnati already had steam fire engines drawn by horses, and in a few years hired firemen would replace the old foot-runners and hand-pumpers.
As RoBards limped along on strangely flagging feet, he thought he caught a glimpse of his boy Junior and the Lasher girl at his side, standing arm in arm at the curb. But in the twinkling of an eye-lid they were gone.
Keith had marched, of course, with the Seventh, but the Sixty-ninth, made up of Irishmen, had refused to pay honor to the Sassenach prince. Its colors were taken away and it drilled no more.
When riot or parade or drill was not afoot, the aqueductwas forever haling Keith forth. For the restless town kept hewing down the hills that covered its upper regions, or cutting streets through and leaving houses perched in air. In 1840 the Water Commissioners had decided that the city would not reach Ninety-fourth Street “for a century or two”; but it was crawling thither fast.
Like sculptors who, as they carve off the clay, uncover the iron armature, the engineers were constantly disclosing anew their own deep-buried water mains and they must needs sink them still deeper. Often the pipes broke in their subterrene beds. This was like the rupture of an artery inside a man, and it required quick surgery to avert a fatal hemorrhage.
On a December midnight in 1860 two mains were rent open twenty feet below the ground at Sixty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue. The upwelling flood turned the avenue into a swamp and endangered the foundations of certain new buildings. Fortunately, they were few and unimportant so far out of town, mainly crude shacks.
But all the factories in town had to be ordered to cease the use of water, and the anxious city learned that the Croton was a vital aorta. The vast accumulation in the reservoir at Forty-Second Street was sucked down to within a foot of the bottom.
Chief Engineer Craven had his men at work within thirty minutes of the disaster, and for fifty hours they dabbled in the muck, battling the leaping waters while new pipes were crowded in.
Keith was among the fiercest toilers. He fought with the ardor of a Hollander at a broken dyke, and would not give over till he fell prone and had like to have drowned in the mud.
Shortly after this there was a strange break in the subterranean financial waters: a mysterious panic shook the commercial peace of New York. The reservoirs of credit dried up over night. Bankers, the least unreliable of prophets, were smitten with a great terror, which their clients promptly shared. Its meaning was public all too soon.
On December twenty-first there was another break in thewater mains at Sixty-fourth Street, where the pipes had been carried across a marsh in a raised embankment.
As Keith worked with his men that morning his heart was shaken for the morning papers had shrieked the telegraphic news that, on the day before, the state of South Carolina had seceded from the Union, had actually carried out what nearly everybody had pooh-poohed as a silly threat. The South Carolina newspapers spoke of New York and other states as foreign countries.
The CharlestonMercuryproclaimed: “This is War.” New York bankers and merchants realized that they must, then, assume the chief burden of furnishing men, munitions, and money.
RoBards’ heart sank within him. The great war had found him fifty-five years old. He would never get to a war, never fight for his country.
But Patty’s heart leaped like a doe startled from a covert. It leaped with a cry:
“My boy is in the first regiment that will go!”