All summer the water-battle went on in town, but with flagging
interest. Colonel DeWitt Clinton threw his powerful influence into the
plan for an open canal from a dam in the Croton down to a reservoir
to be built on Murray’s Hill. Even Clinton’s fervor left the people
cold. When he pointed out that they were paying hundreds of thousands
of dollars every year for bad water hauled in hogsheads, they retorted
that the Croton insanity would cost millions. When he pointed out that
the Croton would pour twenty million gallons of pure water every day
into the city, and declared that New York water was not fit to drink,
the answer came gaily that it did not need to be, since the plainest
boarding house kept brandy bottles on the table.
One old gentleman raised a town laugh by boasting that he had taken a
whole tumblerful of Manhattan water every morning for years and was
still alive. And yet the dream of bringing a foreign river in would not
down, though the believers in the artesian wells were ridiculed for
“the idea of supplying a populous city with water from its own bowels.”
The cholera had brought a number round to the Westchester project, but
the cholera passed in God’s good time. It would come back when God
willed. Plagues were part of the human weather like floods and drouths,
and not to be forefended.
In any case Patty was busied with her own concerns. Her baby was born
on Tuliptree Farm before her husband could get back from White Plains
with the doctor, though he had lashed his horses till the carry-all
flung to and fro like a broken rudder.
The son and heir was a girl, and in the hope that she would be an
heiress they named her after Patty’s Aunt Imogene, whose husband had
recently died and left her a fleet of vessels in the Chinese trade.
For a time instinct and pride in the flattery of people who cried that
the child was its mother’s own beautiful image gave the tiny replica a
fascination to Patty. She played with it as if it were a doll, and she
a little girl only pretending to motherhood.
But she tired of the bauble and turned the baby over to the servants.
Her Aunt Imogene cried out against her:
“Nowadays women don’t take care of their babies like they used to when
I was a girl. In the good old-fashioned days a mother was a mother. She
was proud to nurse her children and she knew all about their ills and
ailments. I had eleven children and raised all of them but six, and I
would no more have dreamed of hiring a nurse for them than I would have
I don’t know what. But these modern mothers!”
Criticism had no power over Patty, however. She admitted all that was
charged against her and simply added it to the long list of grievances
she had against her fate. RoBards often felt that this was cheating of
the lowest kind. It left a man no means of either comforting distress
or rebuking misbehavior.
As soon as the baby could be weaned from her mother to a nurse, Patty
made a pretext of ill health and joined the hegira to Saratoga Springs,
which was winning the fashion hunters away from Ballston Spa. She
traveled with some friends from the South who brought North a convoy
of slaves and camped along the road, preferring that gypsy gait to the
luxury of a voyage up the river on the palatial steamboats, in which
America led the world.
During that summer RoBards was both mother and father to the child,
and Immy’s fingers grew into and around his heart like the ivy that
embraced the walls of the house. He was bitter against his wife, whose
fingers had let his heart slip with ease and indifference.
Yet, by the time Patty returned from taking the waters in the North,
he was so lonely for her that their reunion was another and a first
marriage. He found a fresh delight in her company and learned the new
dances to keep her in his sight and out of the arms of other men.
By one of Nature’s mysterious dispensations, this girl with the soul
of a flirt and a gadabout had the bodily fertility of a great mother.
To her frank and hysterical disgust heaven sent her a second proof
of its bounty, which she received with an ingratitude that dazed her
husband—and frightened him, lest its influence be visited on the next
hostage to fortune. If the child should inherit the moods of its mother
it would come into the world like another Gloster, with hair and teeth
and a genius for wrath.
But the child arrived so placidly that the doctor could hardly wring
a first cry from him by slapping him and dipping him into a tub of
cold water. And he wept almost never. What he had he wanted. When it
was taken from him he wanted it no more. He chuckled and glowed in his
cradle like a little brook. He gave up his mother’s breast for a bottle
with such lack of peevishness that it was almost an act of precocious
gallantry. They named him Keith after an uncle.
Keithkins, as too often happens in a world of injustice, made it so
convenient to neglect him that his chivalry must be its own and only
reward. Patty left him in the country—“for his own good”—and went
earlier to New York than in the other autumns. There she plunged into a
whirlpool of recklessness.
She seemed to welcome every other beau but her husband. She would not
even flirt with him. She said he was too dangerous!
She laughed at his jealous protests against the worthless company she
affected. But when he courted her she fought him. Her extravagance in
the shops alarmed him, but when he quarreled with her on that score,
and demanded that she cease to smirch his credit with debts upon the
merchants’ books, she would run away from home and stay until he sought
her out in Park Place, where she was wheedling her father into ruinous
indulgence.
The old man’s business was prospering and his gifts to Patty were
hardly so much generosities as gestures of magnificence.
Harry Chalender was constantly seen with old Jessamine. They talked the
Croton project, but RoBards felt this to be only a tinsel pretext of
Chalender’s to keep close to Patty.
By the gods, he even infected her with his talk of water-power!
Everybody was talking it now. It had become politics.
For sixty years or so the town had dilly-dallied over a water
supply—ever since the Irishman Christopher Colles had persuaded the
British governor Tryon to his system of wells and reservoirs. Every
year a bill was put forward, and the Wars of the Roses were mimicked in
the Wars of the Rivers.
Bronx fought Croton incessantly but neither gained a victory. Wily
old Aaron Burr stole a march on both with his Manhattan Company and
sneaking a bank in under the charter of a waterworks sank a well and
purveyed liquid putridity at a high price.
It was a great relief to RoBards when the Crotonians gained the upper
hand in 1833, for it left his Bronx to purl along in leafy solitudes
undammed. But it took two years to bring the project to a vote and then
the majority was only seventeen thousand Ayes to six thousand Nos.
Just after the skyrockets of the Fourth of July died down, the
engineers went out into Westchester to plant their stakes, outlining
the new lake that the dam would form, and the pathway of the aqueduct
from the Croton to the Harlem.
This row of posts billowing up hill and down alongside the Hudson
stretched like a vast serpent across the homes and farms and the sacred
graveyards of villages and towns and old families. It was the signal
for a new war.
The owners of the land fell into two classes: those who would not let
the water pass through their demesnes at any price, and those who
sought to rob the city by unwarranted demands.
The farmers seemed to RoBards to comport themselves with dignity and
love of their own soil, though Chalender denounced them for outrageous
selfishness in preferring the integrity of their estates to the health
of a vast metropolis.
But RoBards saw through Chalender’s lofty patriotism. Chalender could
not unload his own land upon the city unless the whole scheme were
established, and Chalender’s price was scandalously high.
The stakes were not yet nearly aligned when an almost unequaled frost
turned the buxom hills to granite overnight. It seemed that the havoc
which this high emprise was to forestall had been purposely held in
leash by the ironic fiends until the procrastinating city had drawn
this parallel of stakes, this cartoon of an aqueduct. For almost
immediately the cataclysm broke.
The idleness enforced upon the engineers by the evil weather drove
most of them back to town, Harry Chalender among them. And now he
dragged Patty into that vortex of dissipation for which the city was
notorious. Dancing, drinking, theatre-going, riotous sleigh-rides,
immodest costumes, and dinners of wild revel gave the moralists reason
to prophesy that God would send upon the wicked capital fire from the
skies—as indeed He did in terrible measure.
Harry Chalender began to follow Patty about and to encounter her with
a regularity that ceased to resemble coincidence. There was gossip.
One of the slimy scandal-mongering newspapers well-named _The Hawk and
Buzzard_ printed a blind paragraph in which RoBards recognized his own
case.
But what could RoBards do? To horsewhip the editor or shoot the lover
would not only feed the newspapers but blacken the lives of the babies,
who were suffering enough now in the lack of a mother’s devotion
without being cursed for life with a mother of no reputation. In a
world governed by newspapers the old rules of conduct were altered.
The winter of 1835 fell bitterer than any ever known before. The cold
was an excruciation. The sleighs rang along the street as if the snow
were white steel. The pumps froze; the cisterns froze; the pipes of the
water companies froze underground, and the fire-hydrants froze at the
curbs.
The main industry of the town seemed to be the building and coaxing of
fires, though coal and wood were almost impossible to obtain, and the
price rose to such heights that one must either go bankrupt or freeze.
Everybody began to wonder what would happen if a house should blaze
up. The whole city would go. Who would come to the rescue of a burning
house in such weather? And with what water would the flames be fought?
Everybody listened for the new firebell that had been hung in the City
Hall cupola and had sent its brazen yelps across the sky so often, but
was ominously silent of late as if saving its horrific throat for some
Doomsday clangor.
Hitherto, membership in certain of the fire companies had been
cherished as a proof of social triumph. There were plebeian gangs made
up of mechanics and laborers, and the Bowery b’hoys were a byword of
uncouth deviltry.
But RoBards had been accepted into one of the most select fire clubs
with a silver plated engine. He kept his boots, trumpet, and helmet
in a basket under his bed, so that there was never any delay in his
response to the bell. He was so often the first to arrive that they
gave him the key, and in the longest run he always carried more than
his share of the weight in the footrace. But now he wished that he had
never joined the company.
Christmas drew near and Patty wore herself out in the shops and spent
her time at home in the manufacture of gifts with her own hands. They
were very apt hands at anything pretty and useless. She was going to
have a Christmas tree, too, a recent affectation borrowed from the
Hessian soldiers who had remained in the country after the Revolution.
The evening of the sixteenth of December was unbearably chill. The fire
itself seemed to be freezing red. The thermometer outside the house
dropped down to ten below zero. The servants refused to go to the
corner for water and Patty was frightened into staying home from a ball
she was invited to.
That was the ultimate proof of terror. It was one of the times when
the outer world was so cruel that just to sit within doors by a warm
fire was a festival of luxury; just to have a fire to sit by was wealth
enough.
Patty was so nearly congealed that she climbed into her husband’s lap
and gathered his arms about her like the ends of a shawl. It had been
a long while since she had paid his bosom such a visit and he was
grateful for the cold.
And then the great bell spoke in the City Hall tower—spoke one huge
resounding awful word, “Fire!” before it broke into a baying as of
infernal hounds.
When RoBards started to evict Patty from his lap she gasped: “You’re
not going out on such a night?” RoBards groaned: “I’ve got to!” He set
her aside and ran upstairs for the basket of armor, and Patty followed
him wailing with pity.
“Don’t go, darling!” she pleaded. “You can tell them to-morrow that you
were sick. You’ll die if you go out in this hideous cold, and then what
will become of me? Of us? Of our babies?”
Her solicitude heartened him. He was important to her after all! His
death would grieve her. That added a beauty to duty. But it took away
none of its authority.
While he struggled into his boots, she ran to a window looking south
and drew back the curtains. Through the thick lace of frost on the
panes a crimson radiance pierced, imbuing the air with a rosy mist as
if the town were seen through an upheld glass of Madeira.
“It looks like the end of the world!” Patty screamed. “What will become
of our beautiful city now? It will be nothing but ashes to-morrow.
Don’t go! You’ll be buried under a wall, or frozen to death in the
streets. If you’ll promise not to go down into that furnace, I’ll go
with you to-morrow to Tuliptree Farm, and never leave it again!”
His heart ached for her in her agitation, and it was not easy to tear
off the clinging hands for whose touch he had so often prayed. But he
broke free and dashed, helmeted and shod, into the icy world between
him and the advancing hell. The fire’s ancient enemy, water, was not at
hand for the battle, and the whole city lay helpless.
At the firehouse door RoBards met Harry Chalender. He was dressed for
the ball that Patty had planned to attend, and he wore white gloves and
dancing pumps.