FORTY-FIVE YEARS.
For the most part, what befell Israel during his forty years wanderings
in the London deserts, surpassed the forty years in the natural
wilderness of the outcast Hebrews under Moses.
In that London fog, went before him the ever-present cloud by day, but
no pillar of fire by the night, except the cold column of the monument,
two hundred feet beneath the mocking gilt flames on whose top, at the
stone base, the shiverer, of midnight, often laid down.
But these experiences, both from their intensity and his solitude, were
necessarily squalid. Best not enlarge upon them. For just as extreme
suffering, without hope, is intolerable to the victim, so, to others,
is its depiction without some corresponding delusive mitigation. The
gloomiest and truthfulest dramatist seldom chooses for his theme the
calamities, however extraordinary, of inferior and private persons;
least of all, the pauper’s; admonished by the fact, that to the craped
palace of the king lying in state, thousands of starers shall throng;
but few feel enticed to the shanty, where, like a pealed knuckle-bone,
grins the unupholstered corpse of the beggar.
Why at one given stone in the flagging does man after man cross yonder
street? What plebeian Lear or Oedipus, what Israel Potter, cowers there
by the corner they shun? From this turning point, then, we too cross
over and skim events to the end; omitting the particulars of the
starveling’s wrangling with rats for prizes in the sewers; or his
crawling into an abandoned doorless house in St. Giles’, where his
hosts were three dead men, one pendant; into another of an alley nigh
Houndsditch, where the crazy hovel, in phosphoric rottenness, fell
sparkling on him one pitchy midnight, and he received that injury,
which, excluding activity for no small part of the future, was an added
cause of his prolongation of exile, besides not leaving his faculties
unaffected by the concussion of one of the rafters on his brain.
But these were some of the incidents not belonging to the beginning of
his career. On the contrary, a sort of humble prosperity attended him
for a time; insomuch that once he was not without hopes of being able
to buy his homeward passage so soon as the war should end. But, as
stubborn fate would have it, being run over one day at Holborn Bars,
and taken into a neighboring bakery, he was there treated with such
kindliness by a Kentish lass, the shop-girl, that in the end he thought
his debt of gratitude could only be repaid by love. In a word, the
money saved up for his ocean voyage was lavished upon a rash
embarkation in wedlock.
Originally he had fled to the capital to avoid the dilemma of
impressment or imprisonment. In the absence of other motives, the dread
of those hardships would have fixed him there till the peace. But now,
when hostilities were no more, so was his money. Some period elapsed
ere the affairs of the two governments were put on such a footing as to
support an American consul at London. Yet, when this came to pass, he
could only embrace the facilities for a return here furnished, by
deserting a wife and child, wedded and born in the enemy’s land.
The peace immediately filled England, and more especially London, with
hordes of disbanded soldiers; thousands of whom, rather than starve, or
turn highwaymen (which no few of their comrades did, stopping coaches
at times in the most public streets), would work for such a pittance as
to bring down the wages of all the laboring classes. Neither was our
adventurer the least among the sufferers. Driven out of his previous
employ—a sort of porter in a river-side warehouse—by this sudden influx
of rivals, destitute, honest men like himself, with the ingenuity of
his race, he turned his hand to the village art of chair-bottoming. An
itinerant, he paraded the streets with the cry of “Old chairs to mend!”
furnishing a curious illustration of the contradictions of human life;
that he who did little but trudge, should be giving cosy seats to all
the rest of the world. Meantime, according to another well-known
Malthusian enigma in human affairs, his family increased. In all,
eleven children were born to him in certain sixpenny garrets in
Moorfields. One after the other, ten were buried.
When chair-bottoming would fail, resort was had to match-making. That
business being overdone in turn, next came the cutting of old rags,
bits of paper, nails, and broken glass. Nor was this the last step.
From the gutter he slid to the sewer. The slope was smooth. In
poverty—“Facilis descensus Averni.”
But many a poor soldier had sloped down there into the boggy canal of
Avernus before him. Nay, he had three corporals and a sergeant for
company.
But his lot was relieved by two strange things, presently to appear. In
1793 war again broke out, the great French war. This lighted London of
some of its superfluous hordes, and lost Israel the subterranean
society of his friends, the corporals and sergeant, with whom wandering
forlorn through the black kingdoms of mud, he used to spin yarns about
sea prisoners in hulks, and listen to stories of the Black Hole of
Calcutta; and often would meet other pairs of poor soldiers, perfect
strangers, at the more public corners and intersections of sewers—the
Charing-Crosses below; one soldier having the other by his remainder
button, earnestly discussing the sad prospects of a rise in bread, or
the tide; while through the grating of the gutters overhead, the rusty
skylights of the realm, came the hoarse rumblings of bakers’ carts,
with splashes of the flood whereby these unsuspected gnomes of the city
lived.
Encouraged by the exodus of the lost tribes of soldiers, Israel
returned to chair-bottoming. And it was in frequenting Covent-Garden
market, at early morning, for the purchase of his flags, that he
experienced one of the strange alleviations hinted of above. That
chatting with the ruddy, aproned, hucksterwomen, on whose moist cheeks
yet trickled the dew of the dawn on the meadows; that being surrounded
by bales of hay, as the raker by cocks and ricks in the field; those
glimpses of garden produce, the blood-beets, with the damp earth still
tufting the roots; that mere handling of his flags, and bethinking him
of whence they must have come, the green hedges through which the wagon
that brought them had passed; that trudging home with them as a gleaner
with his sheaf of wheat;—all this was inexpressibly grateful. In want
and bitterness, pent in, perforce, between dingy walls, he had rural
returns of his boyhood’s sweeter days among them; and the hardest
stones of his solitary heart (made hard by bare endurance alone) would
feel the stir of tender but quenchless memories, like the grass of
deserted flagging, upsprouting through its closest seams. Sometimes,
when incited by some little incident, however trivial in itself,
thoughts of home would—either by gradually working and working upon
him, or else by an impetuous rush of recollection—overpower him for a
time to a sort of hallucination.
Thus was it:—One fair half-day in the July of 1800, by good luck, he
was employed, partly out of charity, by one of the keepers, to trim the
sward in an oval enclosure within St. James’ Park, a little green but a
three-minutes’ walk along the gravelled way from the brick-besmoked and
grimy Old Brewery of the palace which gives its ancient name to the
public resort on whose borders it stands. It was a little oval, fenced
in with iron pailings, between whose bars the imprisoned verdure peered
forth, as some wild captive creature of the woods from its cage. And
alien Israel there—at times staring dreamily about him—seemed like some
amazed runaway steer, or trespassing Pequod Indian, impounded on the
shores of Narraganset Bay, long ago; and back to New England our exile
was called in his soul. For still working, and thinking of home; and
thinking of home, and working amid the verdant quietude of this little
oasis, one rapt thought begat another, till at last his mind settled
intensely, and yet half humorously, upon the image of Old Huckleberry,
his mother’s favorite old pillion horse; and, ere long, hearing a
sudden scraping noise (some hob-shoe without, against the iron
pailing), he insanely took it to be Old Huckleberry in his stall,
hailing him (Israel) with his shod fore-foot clattering against the
planks—his customary trick when hungry—and so, down goes Israel’s hook,
and with a tuft of white clover, impulsively snatched, he hurries away
a few paces in obedience to the imaginary summons. But soon stopping
midway, and forlornly gazing round at the enclosure, he bethought him
that a far different oval, the great oval of the ocean, must be crossed
ere his crazy errand could be done; and even then, Old Huckleberry
would be found long surfeited with clover, since, doubtless, being dead
many a summer, he must be buried beneath it. And many years after, in a
far different part of the town, and in far less winsome weather too,
passing with his bundle of flags through Red-Cross street, towards
Barbican, in a fog so dense that the dimmed and massed blocks of
houses, exaggerated by the loom, seemed shadowy ranges on ranges of
midnight hills, he heard a confused pastoral sort of sounds—tramplings,
lowings, halloos—and was suddenly called to by a voice to head off
certain cattle, bound to Smithfield, bewildered and unruly in the fog.
Next instant he saw the white face—white as an orange-blossom—of a
black-bodied steer, in advance of the drove, gleaming ghost-like
through the vapors; and presently, forgetting his limp, with rapid
shout and gesture, he was more eager, even than the troubled farmers,
their owners, in driving the riotous cattle back into Barbican.
Monomaniac reminiscences were in him—“To the right, to the right!” he
shouted, as, arrived at the street corner, the farmers beat the drove
to the left, towards Smithfield: “To the right! you are driving them
back to the pastures—to the right! that way lies the barn-yard!”
“Barn-yard?” cried a voice; “you are dreaming, old man.” And so,
Israel, now an old man, was bewitched by the mirage of vapors; he had
dreamed himself home into the mists of the Housatonic mountains; ruddy
boy on the upland pastures again. But how different the flat,
apathetic, dead, London fog now seemed from those agile mists which,
goat-like, climbed the purple peaks, or in routed armies of phantoms,
broke down, pell-mell, dispersed in flight upon the plain, leaving the
cattle-boy loftily alone, clear-cut as a balloon against the sky.
In 1817 he once more endured extremity; this second peace again
drifting its discharged soldiers on London, so that all kinds of labor
were overstocked. Beggars, too, lighted on the walks like locusts.
Timber-toed cripples stilted along, numerous as French peasants in
_sabots_. And, as thirty years before, on all sides, the exile had
heard the supplicatory cry, not addressed to him, “An honorable scar,
your honor, received at Bunker Hill, or Saratoga, or Trenton, fighting
for his most gracious Majesty, King George!” so now, in presence of the
still surviving Israel, our Wandering Jew, the amended cry was anew
taken up, by a succeeding generation of unfortunates, “An honorable
scar, your honor, received at Corunna, or at Waterloo, or at
Trafalgar!” Yet not a few of these petitioners had never been outside
of the London smoke; a sort of crafty aristocracy in their way, who,
without having endangered their own persons much if anything, reaped no
insignificant share both of the glory and profit of the bloody battles
they claimed; while some of the genuine working heroes, too brave to
beg, too cut-up to work, and too poor to live, laid down quietly in
corners and died. And here it may be noted, as a fact nationally
characteristic, that however desperately reduced at times, even to the
sewers, Israel, the American, never sunk below the mud, to actual
beggary.
Though henceforth elbowed out of many a chance threepenny job by the
added thousands who contended with him against starvation,
nevertheless, somehow he continued to subsist, as those tough old oaks
of the cliffs, which, though hacked at by hail-stones of tempests, and
even wantonly maimed by the passing woodman, still, however cramped by
rival trees and fettered by rocks, succeed, against all odds, in
keeping the vital nerve of the tap-root alive. And even towards the
end, in his dismallest December, our veteran could still at intervals
feel a momentary warmth in his topmost boughs. In his Moorfields’
garret, over a handful of reignited cinders (which the night before
might have warmed some lord), cinders raked up from the streets, he
would drive away dolor, by talking with his one only surviving, and now
motherless child—the spared Benjamin of his old age—of the far Canaan
beyond the sea; rehearsing to the lad those well-remembered adventures
among New England hills, and painting scenes of rustling happiness and
plenty, in which the lowliest shared. And here, shadowy as it was, was
the second alleviation hinted of above.
To these tales of the Fortunate Isles of the Free, recounted by one who
had been there, the poor enslaved boy of Moorfields listened, night
after night, as to the stories of Sinbad the Sailor. When would his
father take him there? “Some day to come, my boy,” would be the hopeful
response of an unhoping heart. And “Would God it were to-morrow!” would
be the impassioned reply.
In these talks Israel unconsciously sowed the seeds of his eventual
return. For with added years, the boy felt added longing to escape his
entailed misery, by compassing for his father and himself a voyage to
the Promised Land. By his persevering efforts he succeeded at last,
against every obstacle, in gaining credit in the right quarter to his
extraordinary statements. In short, charitably stretching a technical
point, the American Consul finally saw father and son embarked in the
Thames for Boston.
It was the year 1826; half a century since Israel, in early manhood,
had sailed a prisoner in the Tartar frigate from the same port to which
he now was bound. An octogenarian as he recrossed the brine, he showed
locks besnowed as its foam. White-haired old Ocean seemed as a brother.