Time was spreading its rust and its vines over everything, eating away
the edges of his passions and fastening the hinges of his will so that
it could not turn.
The hate he felt for Chalender was slowly paralyzed. Having forborne
the killing of him lest the public be apprised of what he had killed
him for, it followed that Chalender must be treated politely before
the public for the same reason. Thus justice and etiquette were both
suborned to keep people from wondering and saying, Why?
Being unable to avoid Chalender, he had to greet him casually, to pass
the time of day, even to smile at Chalender’s flippancies. Under such
custom the grudge itself decayed, or retreated at least to the place
where old heartbreaks and horrors make their lair.
There was much talk of Chalender’s splendid engineering work. His
section of the aqueduct prospered exceedingly. He had a way with his
men and though there was an occasional outburst, he kept them happier
and busier than they were in most of the other sections.
He had a joke or a picturesque sarcasm for everyone, and the men
were aware that his lightness was not a disguise for cowardice. They
remembered that when two of them had fought with picks, he had jumped
into the ditch between them. He could now walk up to drunken brutes of
far superior bulk and take away their weapons, and often their tempers.
He composed quarrels with a laugh or leaped in with a quick slash of
his fist on the nearest nose.
People said to RoBards: “Fine lad, Harry Chalender, great friend of
yours, isn’t he? Plucky devil, too.”
That was hard to deny without an ugly explanation. It would have been
peculiarly crass to sneer or snarl at a man held in favor for courage.
So the tradition prospered that Chalender and RoBards were cronies.
It was a splendid mask for the ancient resentment. And by and by the
disguise became the habitual wear, the feelings adapted themselves to
their clothes. He would have felt naked without them.
RoBards had to shake himself now and then to remind himself that he was
growing not only tolerant of Chalender, but fond of him.
This was not entirely satisfactory to Patty. She had a woman’s
terrified love of conflict in her behalf. A woman who sees a man slain
on her account suffers beyond doubt, but there is a glory in her
martyrdom. Patty’s intrigue had ended in a disgusting armistice, a
smirking truce. It was comfortable to have a husband and a home, but it
was ignominious to have the husband at peace with the intruder.
* * * * *
The aqueduct was all the while growing, a vast cubical stone serpent
increasing bone by bone and scale by scale.
It still lacked a head, and RoBards the lawyer like a tiny Siegfried
continued to assail the dragon everywhere, seeking a mortal spot.
The Croton dam was yet to be built, as well as two big bridges and two
great reservoirs in the city. It grew plain that the seven miles within
the island of Manhattan would cost nearly as much as the original
estimates for the whole forty-six.
And the times were cruelly hard. The estimates rose as the difficulty
of raising money increased. Four and a half million dollars were
disbursed without the error of a cent, and the devotion and dogged
heroism of all the water army won even RoBards’ admiration.
By the beginning of 1841 thirty-two miles were finished, including
Harry Chalender’s section. He was called next to aid the work of
completing the dam. A new lake now submerged four hundred acres of
hills and vales with a smooth sheet of water.
Then the laborers on the upper line struck for higher wages and marched
down the aqueduct, driving away or gathering into their own ranks all
the workmen they met. They overawed the rural police, but when the
Mayor of New York called out the militia, the laborers were forced back
to their jobs.
The building of the dam was a work of titanic nicety. The rock bottom
of gneiss was so far down that an artificial foundation had to be laid
under a part of the wall, while a long tunnel and a gateway must be
cut through living rock. A protection wall was building from a rock
abutment, but there came a vast rain on the fifth of January and it
fell upon the deep snow for two days and nights. The overfall had been
raised to withstand a rise of six feet, but the flood came surging up a
foot an hour until it lifted a sea fifteen feet above the apron of the
dam.
Foreseeing a devastation to come, a young man named Albert Brayton
played the Paul Revere and ran with the alarm until he was checked by a
gulf where Tompkins Bridge had stood a while before. Then he got a horn
and played the Angel Gabriel: blew a mighty blast to warn the sleeping
folk on the other shore that their Judgment Day had come.
The earthen embankment of the dam dissolved and took the heavy stone
work with it. Just before dawn the uproar of the torrent wakened the
farmers miles away as the catapult of water hurtled down the river,
sweeping with it barns, stables, homes, grist mills, cattle, people,
and every bridge across the Croton’s whole length, till it flung them
upon the Hudson’s icy waste.
The Quaker Bridge, which carried the Albany stages, went swirling;
also the Pines Bridge that Washington and his men had traversed time
and again. At Bailey’s iron and wire mills the snarling wave fell so
swiftly upon the settlement that it made driftwood of the factory and
flung fifty women and men from their beds into the current. There was
such a fleet of uprooted trees afloat that all of the people were saved
except two stout men who overweighted the boughs they clung to. A Mr.
Bailey waded breast deep carrying his father and a box of gold in his
arms and got them both to safety.
Harry Chalender played the hero as usual. After one laborer on the dam
had lost his outstretched hand and was drowned, he ran along the black
waters and darting in here and there brought forth whatever his hand
found, whether girl or babe, lowing calf or squeaking pig. He brought
one swirling bull in by the tail and had like to have been gored to
death for his courtesy. But with his wonted nimbleness he stepped
aside, and the bull charging past him plunged into another arm of the
stream and went sailing down with all fours in air.
The collapse of the dam was a grave shock to the public confidence. It
meant a heavy loss in precious cash and its time equivalent, but the
Crotonians grew only a little grimmer, a little more determined.
There was much blazon of Chalender in the newspapers, and a paragraph
describing how meek he was about the strength and courage of his own
hands and how proud of the fact that his section at Sing Sing had stood
the battering rams of the deluge without a quiver.
Patty’s comment on this was a domestic sniff: “I suppose he got his
feet so wet he’ll catch a terrible cold. Well, I hope he doesn’t come
here to be nursed. If he should I’ll send him packing mighty quick,
I’ll tell you.”
Comment was difficult for RoBards, to whom the mention of Chalender’s
mere name was the twisting of a rusty nail in his heart, but his mind
leaped with a wonderful meditation:
There had been progress not only in the building of the aqueduct but in
the laying of a solid causeway under the feet of his family. A sudden
storm had swept Patty’s emotions over the dam of restraint and wrecked
their lives for a while, but now the damage was so well repaired that
she could speak with light contempt of the man who had carried her
heart away; she could say that she would shut in his face the door to
the home he had all but destroyed. Plainly the house was now her home,
too, and Chalender vagrant outside.
This thought filled RoBards’ heart with a flood of overbrimming
tenderness for Patty. He watched her when she tossed the newspaper to
the floor and caught her more exciting baby from its cradle to her
breast. She laughed and nuzzled the child and crushed him to her heart
and made up barbaric new words to call him. Calling him Davie Junior
and little Davikins was in itself a way of making love to her husband
by the proxy of their child.
The sunlight that made a shimmering aureole about her flashed in her
eyes shining with the tears of rapture. RoBards understood one thing at
last about her: She wanted someone to caress and to defend.
He had always read her wrong. He had offered to be her champion and to
shelter her under his strong arms. But Chalender had won her by being
hungry for her and by stretching his arms upward to drag her down to
him.
RoBards felt that he had never really won Patty because he had always
been trying to be lofty and noble. She had rushed to him always when he
was dejected or helpless with anger; but he had always lost her as soon
as he recovered his self-control.
He wished that he might learn to play the weakling before her to keep
her busy about him. But he could not act so uncongenial a part at home
or abroad.