The cart with the powder kegs moved on, but RoBards did not follow. The
holiday of overturning buildings had ceased to suggest either a sacred
duty or a pastime. He drifted irresolute about the town.
He went home at last, cold, cold, cold. The distance was thrice as
long as when he ran with the Fire Kings. St. John’s Park was like a
graveyard when he reached it. Though it was far from the hour of winter
sunrise, the bare trees were thrilled with daybreak ardor; the houses
were pink with tremulous auroral rose. But no birds sang or flew, and
the dawn in the sky was the light of devastation.
He hoped for and dreaded the meeting with his wife. He had been
preparing his defence all the way home. He was a good lawyer and he had
a good case, but women were not like the judges he found on the bench
before him. Women had their own statutes and procedures, and appeals
were granted on the most peculiar grounds.
But his wife was not at home. She had stopped at her father’s, of
course, for a while. The black folk about the house were asleep while
the white man’s town went up in smoke. It was none of their affair.
He flung down his crushing helmet, drew off his sodden boots, and put
his benumbed toes against the warming stove.
He meant to keep awake till Patty came back. But he nodded stupidly.
When, as it seemed, he flung up his head for the last long nod, his
eyes found broad daylight. The stove was cold, and he was chilled again.
He heard the sounds of breakfast-getting on the floor below. Some one
was shoveling up coal from the bin in the hall closet.
He glanced at his own clothes. His hands were grimed. His red flannel
shirt was foul. He fell back from the mirror at the sight of his
reflection. He looked a negro, with only his eyeballs white.
Aching with fatigue, he stripped to the skin and put on clean
underclothes. He cracked the water in the pitcher and filled the bowl
with lumps of ice. When he had soused his face and hands, the bowl was
full of ink and his face was not half clean.
He went to the door and, with jaws dripping darkly, howled to his black
man, Cuff, for water.
The answer came up the stairs:
“Cistern done froze. Pump at de corner don’t pump. Man who sells de
bottles of water ain’t come round—he bottles all pop, most like. I’ll
fotch you what we got in de kittle.”
The hot water helped, but he blackened three towels before he could see
his own skin.
He put on a fresh shirt and stock and his best suit—for Patty’s
sake—and went down to breakfast.
It was the usual banquet of meat, potatoes, eggs, fruit, vegetables,
hot breads, preserves, sauces, and coffee. The coffee bettered his
inner being so much that he assumed the outer world improved. He found
courage to look at the morning paper. RoBards was one of the seventeen
hundred New Yorkers who subscribed to a paper.
He took the _Courier and Enquirer_, edited by General Webb, who had
proved himself a soldier, indeed, a year ago when the mob attacked his
building and he drove it off. That was the first time the mayor was
ever elected by a popular vote, and the riots gave little encouragement
to the believers in general male suffrage.
During the fire the _Courier_ reporters had been scurrying about
gathering up information, and RoBards read with awe the list of streets
destroyed and the summing-up:
“Six hundred and seventy-four tenements, by far the greater part in the
occupancy of our largest shipping and wholesale drygoods merchants,
and filled with the richest produce of every portion of the globe. How
estimate the immense loss sustained, or the fearful consequences to
the general prosperity?”
The paper dropped from RoBards’ hands. If that had been the state of
affairs at the hour when the paper’s forms were closed, where could the
fire be now?
He rose to go to the roof and see if herald embers were not already
alighting there. But the knocker clattered on the front door, and his
heart leaped at the sound of Patty’s voice.
He ran to meet her and take her pauper family under his roof, while
it lasted. But she was alone. She was explaining to her astonished
maid, Teen, that she had come home for clean clothes. She needed them
evidently, for her pretty gown was streaked and blackened.
She greeted her husband with a look as icy as the air she brought in
with her from the street:
“I see you haven’t blown up your own house yet, Mist’ RoBards. May I
take some of the things my poor father bought me before you ruined him?”
“Patty!” he groaned. It was some time before he dared go up the stairs
she had scaled at a run. He went as reluctantly into her room as he
had gone to the principal’s desk at the academy to be whipped for some
mischief.
His wife squeaked with alarm at his entrance. She had tossed her hat
on the bed and her gown with it. She had taken off her stays and was
still gasping with the relief. RoBards had vainly protested against her
habit of spending half an hour drawing her corset strings so tight that
she could hardly breathe, for the ridiculous purpose of distorting her
perfect form, to make her bust high and her chest narrow.
She stood before him in a chemise and petticoat, looking very narrow
without her great skirts, and startlingly the biped in her ribboned
garters and white silk stockings.
“Get out, will you!” she stormed, “and let me change my clothes.”
Instead he put out the hostile Teen, and closing the door, locked it.
“Now, Patty, you’re going to talk to me. Has the fire reached your
father’s home yet?”
A sniff was his only answer. It was enough.
“Then you’re not going back to it. You stay here.” He spoke with
autocracy, but his hands pleaded as he said: “I can’t tell you how
sorry I am that——”
“You can’t tell me anything. And if you lay your grimy hands on me,
I’ll scratch your eyes out.”
He stood off and gazed at her, helpless as a mastiff looking down
at a kitten with back arched and claws unsheathed. He could have
crunched her bones with ease, but she held him at bay by her very petty
prettiness.
He was so poor of spirit and resource that he stooped to say:
“Since you’re so interested in Harry Chalender, you may be interested
to know that the business of blowing up those buildings was his own
idea.”
He thought that this would either reinstate him in her respect or at
least debase Harry Chalender there. But she dumbfounded him by her
always unexpected viewpoint:
“It was a splendid idea!”
“Then why do you blame me for what I was going to do?”
“Because you destroyed my father’s fortune wantonly—for spite—without
any reason.”
“It was to save the city. The building would have burned soon anyway.”
“It would not have burned at all! It lies there now untouched. The wind
shifted and carried the fire away from it.”
He dropped to a chair, bludgeoned like an ox, and as bovine in his
enjoyment of this hellish witticism of fate.
Patty always loved to spurn him when he was down and she triumphed now:
“Besides, if you must bring Harry Chalender into it, I know that even
if Harry had blown up all the other buildings in the world, he would
have spared my father’s—especially if I had asked him to.”
RoBards nodded. That was probably true. But what was the uncanny genius
of Chalender? He was a very politician among women as well as men. He
allied himself with great causes and carried them greatly through, yet
always managed to see that he and his friends profited somehow.
For years he and his clique had been storming the public ear for a city
water supply, and had made prophecy of just such a calamity as this.
And now he and his partisans could stand above the smoking pyre of the
city and crow a gigantic, “I told you so!”
As RoBards sat inert and lugubriously ridiculous, Patty regarded him
with a studious eye. She dazed him by saying after a long hush:
“Since you don’t want me to go back to my father’s house, I’ll stay
here.”
He would have risen and seized her to his breast with a groan of
rapture if she had said this in the far-off ages before the last few
minutes of their parley. But now he grew even more contemptible in his
own mind. There was no note of pity or of love in her voice, and he was
so wretched that he muttered:
“Are you staying here because your father’s home is too gloomy to
endure, or because you can’t give up the pleasure of gloating over my
misery?”
Incomprehensible woman! When he tried to insult her, she always parried
or stepped aside and came home with a thrust of perfect confusion for
him.
And now that he had hurled at her the dirtiest missile of contempt
within his reach, instead of crying out in rage, marching off in hurt
pride, or throwing something at him, she laughed aloud and flung
herself across his lap and hugged his neck with bare, warm arms till he
choked.
“You are the stupidest darling alive. But every now and then, when you
get horribly superior or hideously downcast you say the wisest things!
Why is it that you understand me only when you are mad at me?”
He put lonely, hunting hands about her lithe, stayless waist, and
smothered his face among the white hawthorn buds in the snowy lane of
her bosom.
Men were still calling women “mysterious” because women’s interests
were different from men’s. The males, like stupid hounds, found
cats occult simply because they said “mew!” instead of “wow!” Patty
completely puzzled her husband when she chuckled:
“You are a beast, and an imbecile, and my father hates you and blames
me for bringing you into our family, so I’ll have to be a mother to
you.”
He winced at being cherished as an idiot child, but anything was better
than exile from that fragrant presence, and he clung to her with
desperation.