CHAPTER XXIII
Thechildren had apparently forgotten all about the tragedy. The newness of the train-ride, the fear of missing something, of being late somewhere, of not being everywhere at once, kept their little minds so avid that there was no thought of yesterday.
They entered the city as if they were wading into the boisterous surf at Rockaway Beach. The crowds broke about them with a din of breakers thundering shoreward. Yet they were not afraid.
When they descended from the train at the station, RoBards could hardly keep them in leash long enough to get them into a hack. As it bounced across the town to St. John’s Park, he had only their backs and heels for company. Each child hung across a door and stared at the hurrying mobs.
At length they reached the home and all their thoughts were forward. Nothing that had ever happened in the country could pit itself against the revelry of the city.
Their young and pretty mother looked never so New Yorkish as when she ran down the front stoop to welcome them. When she cried the old watchword, “How have you been?” they answered heedlessly, “All right!” Immy, of all people, answered, “All right!”
Even RoBards forgot for the brief paradise of embracing his gracious wife that everything was all wrong. She had to take him about the house and show him the improvements she had made, especially the faucet in the kitchen for the Croton water when it should come gurgling through the pipes. From a parlor window she pointed with delicious snobbery to the hydrant at the edge of the front porch. Most marvelous of all was a shower-bath that she had hadinstalled upstairs. It would be possible to bathe every day! There was something irreligious and Persian about the apparatus, but RoBards rejoiced for a moment in the thought of what musical refreshment it would afford him on hot mornings after long nights of work.
The children were so impatient to get them gone that they had hardly a glance to spare at the new toys, the faucets and hydrants, the municipal playthings which would prevent fires in the future or at least make the life of a fireman a pastime instead of a vain slavery.
Patty’s mother had been caught in the new craze for “Temperance” and she called the Croton water as much of a godsend as the floods that gushed out from the rock that Moses smote. Since the city had removed the old pumps there had been no place for a man to quench his thirst except by going to a grocery store and asking for a cup of water as a charity. Few people had the courage to beg for water, so they either went dry or paid for a glass of brandy. This, she said, had kept up the evil of drunkenness that was undermining the health and character of so many men and women. Once the pure Croton water was accessible and free, intoxication would cease.
But old man Jessamine, himself a child now, belittled the significance of the Croton day. It would be nothing, he said, to the great day when the Erie Canal was opened and the first boat from the lakes started its voyage through the canal to the Hudson and down the river to the sea. He held the frantic children fast while he talked ancient history: described the marvelous speed of the news.
“The very identical moment the first drop of Erie water entered the canal at Buffalo, a cannon was fired. Eight miles away stood another cannon and the minute that cannoneer heard the first shot, he fired the second cannon. Eight miles away was another, and so on all the way to Sandy Hook. For more than five hundred miles the cannon were lined up eight miles apart and it took only an hour and twenty minutes for the news to reach New York, and then they sent the news back to Buffalo the same way; and soit took less than three hours to send a message more than a thousand miles. Wasn’t that wonderful?”
The children wriggled impatiently and said, “Please, grampa, the bands are playing. We’d better hurry.”
The old man held them tighter and went on:
“When the canal boats reached New York there was a grand procession of ships, and there were two elegant kegs of Erie water with gold hoops and Governor Clinton emptied one of them into the ocean to marry the sea to the lakes; and another man poured in phials of water from the Elbe, the Rhine, the Rhone, and all the rivers and seas. And the land parade, you should have seen that! All the societies had wagons: the Hatters’ Society with men making hats before your very eyes; the Rope-makers with a ropewalk in operation; the comb-makers, the cordwainers, the printers printing an ode. To-day will be nothing to what people did when I was young, for in those days——”
But the children had broken away from his sharp knees and his fat stomach and his mildewed legends. The band outside was irresistible, and their father was waiting to say good-by to them.
Keith was mighty proud of his father in his fireman’s uniform. But when RoBards seized Immy, tossed her aloft and brought her down to the level of his lips, she was as wildly afraid as Hector’s child had been of him in his great helmet. Immy was easily frightened now. Her scream pierced the air, and she almost had a fit, squirming in her father’s arms and kicking him in the breast as he turned her over to Patty, who received her, wondering like another Andromache.
“What’s the matter? what on earth?” Patty cried. And Immy sobbed:
“I thought Papa was Jud Lasher.”
“What a funny thought! Why should you——”
Patty’s father called to her opportunely, demanding with senile querulousness, who had hidden his walking stick and where. RoBards forgave the old man much for playing providence this once.
As Patty turned aside, Keith seized Immy’s foot and warned her to “keep still for heavem’s sakes.” She understood; her eyes widened and she pleaded with her father to forgive her. He was as afraid of her penitence as of her terror; but somehow in the flurry of leaving the house, Patty forgot her curiosity, and the incident passed over.
The loyalty of Keith and his quick rally to his father’s protection from Immy’s indiscretion touched RoBards deeply. The boy had evidently inherited the family love of secrecy for the family’s sake.
But RoBards was sick with fear, realizing on what slender threads the secret hung. He dreaded to leave the children with their mother, lest they let slip some new clue to the agony he loved Patty too well to share with her. But he had to take his place with his fire company, though the sky fell in his absence.