CHAPTER XXXI
Somethingmore precious than gold came to light in 1846, something of more moment to human history than a dozen Mexican wars—a cure for pain.
It came divinely opportune to Patty’s need, for her next child was about to tear its way into the world through her flesh suffering from old lacerations, and she prophesied that she would die of agony and take back with her into oblivion the boy or girl or both or whatever it was or they were that she was helplessly manufacturing.
And just then there came to RoBards a letter from a Boston client stating that a dentist named Morton had discovered a gas that enabled him to extract a tooth without distress; another surgeon had removed a tumor from a patient made indifferent with ether; and that the long deferred godsend would make childbirth peaceable. Patty sang hosannas to the new worker of miracles.
“1846 is a greater year than 1776—or 1492. That man Morton is a bigger man than Columbus and there should be a holiday in his honor. What did the discoverer of America, or the inventor of the telegraph or anything else, do for the world to compare with the angel of mercy who put a stop to pain? The Declaration of Independence!—Independence from what?—taxes and things. But pain—think of independence from pain! Nothing else counts when something aches. And the only real happiness is to hurt and get over it.”
She repeated her enthusiasm to Dr. Chirnside when he happened in on his pastoral rounds. To her dismay the old clergyman was not elated, but horrified.
Dr. Chirnside, who opposed everything new as an atheism, everything amusing as a sin, declared that God decreed pain for his own inscrutable purposes in his own infinite love.Since Holy Writ had spoken of a woman crying aloud in travail it would be a sacrilege to deny her that privilege. The kindly old soul would have crucified a multitude for the sake of a metaphor. He had in his earlier days preached a sermon against railroads because God would have mentioned them to Moses or somebody if he had approved of having his creatures hurled through space at the diabolic speed of twenty miles an hour. He had denounced bowling alleys for the same reason, and also because they were fashionable and more crowded than his own pews.
RoBards having seen operations where the patient had to be clamped to a board and gagged for the sake of the neighbors’ ears, could not believe that this was a pleasant spectacle to any respectable deity.
He almost came to a break with Dr. Chirnside, who seemed to see nothing incongruous in calling that divine which men called inhuman.
All of the learned men called “doctors,” whether of divinity, medicine, law, philosophy, or what-not, seemed to fight everything new however helpful. Martyrdom awaited the reformer and the discoverer whether in religion, astronomy, geography, chemistry, geology, anything.
The names of well-meaning gentlemen like Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall had recently been howled at with an irate disgust not shown toward murderers and thieves.
For the next twenty years a war would be waged upon the pain-killers, and the names of Morton, Jackson, and Wells would inspire immediate quarrel. Each had his retainers in the contest for what some called the “honor” of discovering the placid realm of anæsthesia; and what some called the “sacrilege” of its discovery.
It was written in the sibylline books of history as yet undisclosed that Wells should be finally humbled to insanity and suicide; and that Morton, after years of vain effort to get recognition, should retire to a farm, where he would die from the shock of reading a denial of his “pretensions.” They would put on his tombstone the legend: “By whom pain in surgery was averted and annulled; before whom, inall time, surgery was agony since whom science has had control of pain.” Yet one’s own epitaph is a little late, however flattering.
RoBards shared Patty’s reverence for the Prometheus who had snatched from heaven the anodyne to the earth’s worst curse. He made sure that she should have the advantage of the cloud of merciful oblivion when she went down into the dark of her last childbed.
Her final baby was born “still,” as they say; but Patty also was still during the ordeal. That was no little blessing. RoBards was spared the hell of listening in helplessness to such moans as Patty had hitherto uttered when her hour had come upon her unawares.
But the high hopes from this discovery were doomed to sink, for man seems never to get quite free from his primeval evils, and RoBards was to find that the God or the devil of pain had not yet been baffled by man’s puny inventions.
Longing for opportunities to exploit the suppressed braveries in his soul, RoBards found nothing to do but run to fires. There were enough of these and the flames fell alike upon the just and the unjust. Christ Church in Ann Street went up in blazes; the Bowery Theatre burned down for the fourth time; a sugar house in Duane Street was next, two men being killed and RoBards badly bruised by a tumbling wall. The stables of Kipp and Brown were consumed with over a hundred screaming horses; the omnibus stables of the Murphys roasted to death a hundred and fifty horses, and took with them two churches, a parsonage, and a school. While this fire raged, another broke out in Broome Street, another in Thirty-fifth Street and another in Seventeenth. The Park Theatre was burned for only the second time in its fifty years of life; but it stayed burned.
And then Patty succeeded in persuading her husband to resign from the volunteers and remove his boots and helmet from the basket under the bed.
This was the knell of his youth and he felt that he had been put out to grass like an old fire horse, but his heart leaped for years after when some old brazen-mouthed bellgave tongue. He left it to others, however, to take out the engine and chase the sparks.
He had come to the port of slippered evenings, but monotony was not yet his portion. For there were domestic fire bells now.
Patty and Immy were mutual combustibles. They had reached the ages when the mother forgets her own rebellious youth as completely as if she had drunk Lethe water; and when the daughter demands liberty for herself and imposes fetters on her elders.
Patty developed the strictest standards for Immy and was amazed at the girl’s indifference to her mother’s standards. All of Patty’s quondam audacities in dress and deportment were remembered as conformities to strict convention. Immy’s audacities were regarded as downright indecencies.
Immy, for her part, was outraged at the slightest hint of youthfulness in her mother. With her own shoulders gleaming and her young breast brimming at the full beaker of her dress, Immy would rebuke her mother for wearing what they called a “half-high.” Both powdered and painted and were mutually horrified. Immy used the perilous liquid rouge and Patty the cochineal leaves, and each thought the other unpardonable—and what was worse, discoverable.
Breathless with her own wild gallopades in the polka and dizzy from waltzing in the desperate clench of some young rake, Immy would glare at her mother for twirling about the room with a gouty old judge holding her elbow-tips; or for laughing too loudly at a joke that her mother should never have understood.
Finally, Patty had recourse to authority and told her husband that the city was too wicked for the child. She—even Patty—who had once bidden New York good-by with tears, denounced it now in terms borrowed from Dr. Chirnside’s tirades.
Immy was mutinous and sullen. She refused to leave and threatened to run off with any one of a half dozen beaux, none of whom her parents could endure.
This deadlock was ended by aid from a dreadful quarter.By a strange repetition of events, the cholera, which had driven Patty into RoBards’ arms and into the country with him—the cholera which had never been seen again and for whose destruction the Croton Water party had taken full glory—the cholera came again.
It began in the pus-pocket of the Points and drained them with death; then swept the town. Once more there was a northward hegira. Once more the schoolhouses were hospitals and a thousand poor sufferers died in black agony on the benches where children had conned their Webster’s spelling books. Five thousand lives the cholera took before it went its mysterious way.
Coming of a little bolder generation, Immy was not so panic-stricken as her mother had been. But since all her friends deserted the town, she saw no reason for tarrying.
The country was not so dull as she had feared. The air was spicy with romance; fauns danced in the glades and sat on the stone fences to pipe their unspeakable tunes; nymphs laughed in the brooks, and dryads commended the trees.
The railroads made it easy for young bucks to run out on a train farther in an hour or two than they could have ridden in a day in the good old horseback times. A fashion for building handsome country places was encouraged by the cholera scare. White Plains began to grow in elegance and Robbin’s Mills changed its homely name to Kensico, after an old Indian chief.
Before many days Immy was busier than in town. Young men and girls made the quiet yard resound with laughter. The tulip trees learned to welcome and to shelter sentimental couples. Their great branches accepted rope swings, and petticoats went foaming toward the clouds while their wearers shrieked and fell back into the arms of pushing young men.
Picnics filled the groves with mirth, dances called gay cliques to lamplit parlors and to moonlit porches. Tuliptree Farm began to resemble some much frequented roadside tavern. It was as gay as Cato’s once had been outside New York.
Immy seemed to gather lovers as a bright candle summons foolish moths. Patty and her husband were swiftly pushed back upon a shelf of old age whence they watched, incredulous, and unremembering, the very same activities with which they had amazed their own parents.
Two lovers gradually crowded the rest aside. The more attractive to Immy’s parents was a big brave youth named Halleck. He had joined the old Twenty-seventh Regiment, recently reorganized as the Seventh, just in time to be called out in the Astor Place riots.
The citizens had lain fairly quiet for a long while and had not attacked a church or a minister or a theatre for nearly fifteen years. But the arrival of the English actor Macready incensed the idolators of Edwin Forrest and developed a civil war.
Young Halleck was with the Seventh when it marched down to check the vast mob that overwhelmed the police, and drove back a troop of cavalry whose horses were maddened by the cries and the confinement. The populace roared down upon the old Seventh and received three volleys before it returned to civil life.
This exploit in dramatic criticism cost the public thirty-four deaths and an unknown number of wounds. The Seventh had a hundred and forty-one casualties. Halleck had been shot with a pistol and battered with paving stones. To RoBards the lawyer he was a civic hero of the finest sort. The only thing Immy had against him was that her parents recommended him so highly.
Love that will not be coerced turned in protest toward the youth whom her parents most cordially detested, Dr. Chirnside’s son, Ernest, a pallid young bigot, more pious than his father, and as cruel as Cotton Mather. Patty wondered how any daughter of hers could endure the milk-sop. But Immy cultivated him because of his very contrast with her own hilarity.
His young pedantries, his fierce denunciations of the wickedness of his companions, his solemn convictions that man was born lost in Adam’s sin and could only be redeemedfrom eternal torment by certain dogmas, fascinated Immy, who had overfed on dances and flippancies.
RoBards could not help witnessing from his library window the development of this curious religious romance. Even when he withdrew to his long writing table and made an honest effort to escape the temptation to eavesdropping, he would be pursued by the twangy sententiousness of Ernest and the silvery answers of Immy. There was an old iron settee under his window and a rosebush thereby and the young fanatics would sit there to debate their souls.
It was a godlike privilege and distress to overhear such a courtship. His daughter bewildered him. At times Immy was as wild as a mænad. She danced, lied, decoyed, teased, accepted caresses, deliberately invited wrestling matches for her kisses. She rode wild horses and goaded them wilder. She would come home with a shrieking cavalcade and set her foam-flecked steed at the front fence, rather than wait for the gate to be opened.
Seeing Immy in amorous frenzies RoBards would be stricken with fear of her and for her. He would wonder if Jud Lasher had not somehow destroyed her innocence; if his invasion of her integrity had not prepared her for corruption. How much of that tragedy did she remember? Or had she forgotten it altogether?
He would shudder with the dread that Jud Lasher, who was lying beneath his feet, might be wreaking a posthumous revenge, completing his crime with macaberesque delight.
Then Immy’s mood would change utterly. She would repent her youth as a curse, and meditate a religious career. There was a new fashion for sending missionaries to Africa and she was tempted to proselytize the jungle. Ernest rescued her at least from this. He told her that she must make sure her own soul was saved before she went out to save Zulus.
Sometimes RoBards, listening with his pen poised above an unfinished word, would seem to understand her devotion to young Chirnside, her acceptance of his intolerant tyranny and the insults he heaped upon her as a wretch whom hisGod might have foredoomed from past eternity to future eternity. He would talk of election and the conviction of sin and of salvation.
And Immy would drink it down.
At last there came an evening when young Chirnside called in manifest exaltation. He led Immy to the settee beneath the library window, and RoBards could not resist the opportunity to overhear the business that was so important.
He went into his library and softly closed the door. He tiptoed to a vantage point and listened.
Young Chirnside coughed and stammered and beat about the bush for a maddening while before he came to his thesis, which was that the Lord had told him to make Immy his wife. He had come to beg her to listen to him and heaven. He had brought a little ring along for the betrothal and—and—how about it? His combination of sermon and proposal ended in a homeliness that proved his sincerity. After all that exordium, the point was, How about it?
That was what RoBards wanted to know. He waited as breathlessly as his prospective son-in-law. Immy did not speak for a terrible while. And then she sighed deeply, and rather moaned than said:
“Ernest, I am honored beyond my dreams by what you have said. To be the wife of so good a man as you would be heaven. But am I good enough for you?”
“Immy!” Chirnside gasped, “you’re not going to tell me you’ve been wicked!”
“I’ve been wicked enough, but not very wicked—considering. The thing I must tell you about is—it’s terribly hard to tell you, dear. But you ought to know, you have a right to know. And when you know, you may not think—you may not think—you may feel that you wouldn’t care to marry me. I wouldn’t blame you—I’d understand, dear—but——”
“Tell me! In heaven’s name, tell me!”
RoBards was stabbed with a sudden knowledge of what tortured her thought. He wanted to cry out to her, “Don’t tell! Don’t speak! I forbid you!”
But that would have betrayed his contemptible position aseavesdropper. And, after all, what right had he to rebuke such honesty? She knew her soul. She was inspired perhaps with the uncanny wisdom of young lovers.
The wish to confess—though “confess” was not the word for her guiltless martyrdom—was a proof of her nobility. It would be a test of this young saint’s mettle. If he shrank from her, it would rescue her from a pigeon-hearted recreant. If he loved her all the more for her mischance, he would prove himself better than he seemed, more Christlike than he looked.
And so RoBards, guessing what blighting knowledge Immy was about to unfold, stood in the dark and listened. Tears of pity for her scalded his clenched eyelids and dripped bitter into his quivering mouth.
Unseeing and unseen, he heard his child murmuring her little tragedy to the awesmitten boy at her side. She seemed as pitifully beautiful as some white young leper whispering through a rag, “Unclean!”
What would this pious youth think now of the God that put his love and this girl to such a test? Would he howl blasphemies at heaven? Would he cower away from the accursed woman or would he fling his arms about her and mystically heal her by the very divinity of his yearning?
RoBards could almost believe that Jud Lasher down there in the walls was also quickened with suspense. His term in hell might depend on this far-off consequence of his deed.