The old man joined his two little grandchildren in the cluster of young
tulip trees, and RoBards later built a fence about the knoll to make it
sacred ground.
The New York papers published encomiums upon Mr. Jessamine and called
him one of the merchant princes who had made New York the metropolis of
the New World. A stranger reading them would have imagined him a giant
striding through a great long day to a rich sunset.
But RoBards remembered him as one whose toil had been rewarded with
unmerited burlesque. And for nights and nights afterward he was wakened
by Patty strangling with sobs:
“Poor papa! I was so mean to him. The last word he had from me was a
scolding. He was afraid of life like a baby in the dark. Poor little
papa! I was so mean to you! and you asked me to forgive you!”
Then RoBards would gather her to his breast and his heart would swell
with pain till it seemed ready to burst. He would clench Patty to him
as if by that constriction their two hearts might become one. And
he would stare up at the invisible ceiling, as Dives looked up from
hell for a touch of some cool finger on his forehead. After a while
the mercy would be granted; he would know by the soft slow rhythm of
Patty’s bosom that she was asleep; and thanking God for that peace,
beatitude of all beatitudes, he would draw his eyelids down over his
eyes to shut out the black. His own breath would take up the cadence
of the tulip boughs lulled by the soft wind that fanned the window and
fingered the curtains drowsily.
And the walls of that tormented home would be filled with the stately
calm of the grave, until the resurrection of the next day’s sun.
The question of returning at once to town was answered by Mrs.
Jessamine’s inability to rise from her bed after the funeral of her
husband. She had had the harder life of the two.
She had been that woman so much praised, who effaced herself, spoke
with a low voice, went often to church, and often to childbed, who
brought up her children in the fear of God, nursed them, mended their
clothes and their manners, and saw them go forth to their various
miseries, to death, to marriage, to maternity. She had been a good wife
for a good long life and had taken passively what God or her husband or
her children brought home.
And the horror of that estate had been growing upon womankind through
the centuries until the greatest revolution the world has ever known
began to seethe, and a sex began to demand the burdens of equality
instead of the mixture of idolatry and contempt that had been its
portion.
Mrs. Jessamine had never joined any of the women’s rights movements;
nor had she joined in their denunciation. She had felt that her time
was passed for demanding anything. Her children had all grown beyond
even the pretense of piety toward her; but her husband had returned to
second childishness and renewed her motherhood.
She had suffered a new travail, but she had been needed, and that kept
her important. Now she had no further task to perform except to keep
a rocking chair rocking, and to knit the air with her restless old
bone-needle fingers.
Her husband had killed himself because he felt disgraced, cheated,
dishonorably discharged from the army of industry. She did not kill
herself; she just refused to live any longer. She resigned from the
church called life. She ceased to believe in it.
Dr. Chirnside when he came up again to her funeral said that she died
of a broken heart, and like a faithful helpmeet went to join the
faithful husband where he waited for her at the foot of the Throne.
And now another generation of the Jessamines was nothing more than an
inscription on headstones.
Hot as it was in the city, Patty and David went back to it to escape
the oppression of solemnity. Patty’s face was lost in thick black
veils, though her tears glistened like dew in the mesh.
After the hushed loneliness and the fragrant comeliness of billowy
Westchester, RoBards suffered from the noise of the train leading to
the noisy city.
The children greeted him with rapture, but Immy protested:
“Papa, please don’t call me baby any longer.”
“All right, old lady,” he laughed and winked at Patty, who winked at
him. And neither of them could see how childhood was already the Past
for this girl. It was only from the parental eyes that the scales had
yet to fall. Their daughter was another creature from what she looked
to the young men—and some not so young—who stared at her where she
walked or rode in the busses on her way to school, to church, to a
dancing lesson.
RoBards did not know that Immy was already undergoing ogling, being
followed, at times spoken to. She had entered that long gauntlet women
run. Sometimes the young roughs and “b’hoys” who made the policeless
street corners hazardous for women alone or in couples actually laid
hands on her. She never told her father or mother of these adventures,
because she did not want to worry them; she did not want them to know
how much she knew; she did not want them to forbid her going about. She
preferred freedom with risk to safety in the chains even of love.
Musing upon her ignorance and goodness one evening, her father was,
by a dissociation of ideas, reminded of his promise to look for Mrs.
Lasher’s girl Molly. It would be a partial atonement for destroying
the son, if he could retrieve the daughter from what was decently
referred to (when it had to be) as “a fate worse than death.” He rose
abruptly, and said that he had to go to his office. He left Patty with
a parlorful of callers who brought condolences for her in her loss of
both parents.
RoBards thought that nothing could make death more hateful than to
receive sympathy for it on a hot night in a crowded room.
As he sauntered the streets he thought that nothing could make life or
love more hateful than their activity on a hot night on crowded streets.
Mrs. Lasher had feared that Molly had joined the “eighteen thousand
women” of a certain industry. The number was probably inexact, but
RoBards was convinced that none of them all was idle that night. Every
age and condition seemed to be represented, and every allurement
employed from vicious effrontery to the mock demure. But he found no
one like Molly Lasher in the long, straggling parade.
He glanced in at many of the restaurants, the bar rooms, the oyster
palaces, the dance houses, the “watering places,” the tobacco counters;
but he dared not even walk down some of the streets where music came
faintly through dark windows. His face was known, his true motive would
not be suspected, and it would be priggish to announce it.
He saw much that was heartbreaking, much that was stomach-turning. He
ventured to drift at last even to the infamous Five Points. It was
foolhardy of him to wander alone in that region where human maggots
festered among rotten timbers. Mr. Charles Dickens, the popular English
novelist, had recently gone there with two policemen, and found
material for a hideous chapter in his insulting volume _American Notes_.
But RoBards felt that he owed Mrs. Lasher a little of his courage, and
he gripped his walking stick firmly. The policemen with their stars
glinting in the dark gave him some courage, but even the policemen’s
lives were not safe here, where murder was the cleanest thing that
happened.
The thronged hovels were foul enough, but their very cellars were
a-squirm with men and women and children. In some of these rat holes
there were filthy soup houses, bars, dance dives where blacks, whites
and mulattoes mixed. Such odious folk the whites were that RoBards
wondered how the negroes could mix with them. And children danced
here, too, with the slime from the wharves and the foreign ships.
The poverty was grisly. In one sink, three men with three spoons
drained one penny bowl of broth. A man shared a glass of turpentine
gin with his five-year-old son. Another fought with his shrieking wife
over a mug of bog-poteen. Men whiffed rank tobacco at a penny a load
in rented clay pipes they could not even buy, but borrowed for the
occasion.
On the cellar steps, in the gutters, on the door sills and hanging out
of the windows were drunkards, whole families drunk from grandam to
infant at a boozy breast. RoBards had trouble in dodging the wavering
steps of a six-year-old girl who was already a confirmed sot. Children
offered themselves with terrifying words.
Only the other day six little girls of respectable family had been
taken from one of these dives: their parents had supposed them to
be at school. There were ten thousand vagrant children in New York.
The little girls who swept crossings and sold matches or flowers or
what-not sold themselves, too. And the homeless boys who blacked boots
studied crime and learned drunkenness in their babyhood. Here was the
theory of infant damnation demonstrated on earth, with gin-soaked girls
of ten and twelve maudlin at the side of their spewing mothers. One
smutty-faced chit of twelve sidled up to the shuddering RoBards with
words that made him almost faint, and tried to pick his pocket as he
fled in horror.
Beggars for coin half besought, half threatened him. Thugs, male and
female, glared at him and cursed him for a nob, or meditated attacks
upon the “goldfinch,” but their brains were too drenched for action.
The very offal of poverty and crime reeled about his path, yet there
was laughter. In one rookery two hundred negroes sang and patted while
a juba dancer “laid it down.” Everywhere there was the desperate effort
to escape from the dung of existence by way of drug or sleep or song or
combat.
He reached the Old Brewery at last. The ancient distillery was now a
vast ant hill of swarming misery. In every dirty room, in the grimy
cellars beneath it, the victims of want, of disease, of vice slept or
quarreled, vomited aloud, whimpered in sickness, or died half-naked and
half-noticed. In front of it was a little barren triangle of ground,
surrounded by a wooden fence usually draped with filthy clothes. They
mocked it with the name of “Paradise Square.”
He glanced into the dark and stinking alley known as Murderers’
Lane, but he dared not thrid it. Baffled and revolted he returned to
Broadway, a Dante coming up from the pit of horror.
If Molly were in the Points she was beyond redemption. If she were in
a higher circle of hell, she would not listen to him. She might be
exploiting her youth in one of the secret “Model Artist” exhibitions of
nude men and women. She might be a banker’s friend, a street vendor, a
cigar girl, a barmaid, a chambermaid in a hotel or a boarding house or
in an honest home. She might have thrown herself in one of the rivers.
What else could a girl do for respite from hunger and loneliness but go
into menial service, or into the most ancient profession, or into the
grave? The stage was the only other open door except the convent, and
Molly had probably no genius for either life.
At any rate, he could not hope to find this one among the thousands of
New York’s “lost” women by seeking for her. He went slowly to his home
in St. John’s Square, despondent and morose, feeling himself soiled by
his mere inspection of the muck heap.
Afterward he kept his eyes alert for Molly, but it was months before he
found her. She had been dragged into court for working the panel-crib
game. She was not only a wanton, but a thief; using her grace and her
jocund prettiness to entice fools within the reach of confederates who
slid aside a panel in a wall and made off with their wallets after the
classic method.
She lured the wrong man once, a fellow who had no reputation to lose
and did not hesitate to set up a cry that brought the watch.
When she was arraigned, RoBards happened to be in court on behalf
of another client. He saw Molly pink and coquettish, impudently
fascinating, and so ready for deportation or conquest that when he
advanced to her, she accepted him as a gallant before she recognized
him as a neighbor.
“Aren’t you Molly Lasher?” RoBards asked.
“I was.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Oh, I’m on the cross.” He knew that she was “pattering the flash” for
being in thievery; but he answered solemnly:
“Your mother is on the Cross, too, Molly.”
“Poor old thing! I’m sorry for her, but it don’t do her no good for me
to hang there with her.”
He entreated her to go home, and promised that the judge would free her
at his request, but Molly was honest enough to say:
“It wouldn’t work, Mister RoBards. I ain’t built for that life. I’ve
outgrowed it.”
He spoke to the judge, who sent her to the Magdalen Home instead of to
Sing Sing.
But the odor of sanctity was as stifling to Molly’s quivering nostrils
as the smell of new-mown hay, and she broke loose from pious restraint
and returned to her chosen career. She joined destinies with a young
crossman. As she would have put it in her new language, she became the
file of a gonof who was caught by a nab while frisking a fat of his
fawney, his dummy, and his gold thimble. Molly went on a bender when
her chuck was jugged, and a star took her back to the Magdalen Home.
And of this it seemed to RoBards better to leave Mrs. Lasher in
ignorance than to certify the ghastly truth. He had trouble enough in
store for him within his own precincts.
War, for one thing, shook the nation. President Polk called for men and
money to confirm the annexation of the Texas Republic and to suppress
the Mexican Republic.
With a wife and children to support and the heritage of bills from his
father-in-law to pay, RoBards felt that patriotism was a luxury beyond
his means. But Harry Chalender went out with the first troops, and by
various illegitimate devices managed to worm himself into the very
forefront of danger.
Other sons of important families bribed their way to the zone of
death and won glory or death or both at Cerro Gordo, Chapultepec and
Churubusco. New York had a good laugh over the capture of General Santa
Ana’s wooden leg and the return of the troops was a glorious holiday.
Harry Chalender had been the second man to enter the gates of Mexico
City and he marched home with “Captain” in front of his name and his
arm in a graceful sling.
When he met Patty he said: “Thank the Lord the Greasers left me one
wing to throw round you.”
He hugged her hard and kissed her, and then wrung the hand of RoBards,
who could hardly attack a wounded hero, or deny him some luxury after a
hard campaign. RoBards saw with dread that his wife had grown fifteen
years younger under the magic of her old lover’s salute; her cheek was
stained with a blush of girlish confusion.
That night as she dressed for a ball in honor of the soldiers, Patty
begged her husband once more to lend a hand at pulling her corset
laces. When he refused sulkily, she laughed and kissed him with that
long-lost pride in his long-dormant jealousy. But her amusement cost
him dear, and his youth was not restored by hers.
For months his heart seemed to be skewered and toasted like the meat on
the turning spit in the restaurant windows.
And then the word California assumed a vast importance, like a trumpet
call on a stilly afternoon. It advertised a neglected strip of
territory of which Uncle Sam had just relieved the prostrate Mexico.
People said that it was built upon a solid ledge of gold. Much as
RoBards would have liked to be rich, he could not shake off his chains.
But Harry Chalender joined the Argonauts. His finances were in need of
some heaven-sent bonanza, and he had no scruples against leaving his
creditors in the lurch.
When he called to pay his farewells RoBards chanced to be at home. He
waited with smoldering wrath to resent any effort to salute Patty’s
cheek. The returned soldier had perhaps some license, but the outbound
gold-seeker could be knocked down or kicked on his way if he presumed.
The always unexpectable Chalender stupefied him by fastening his eyes
not on Patty, but on Immy, and by daring to say:
“You’re just the age, Immy, just the image of your mother when I first
asked her to marry me. The first nugget of gold I find in California
I’ll bring back for our wedding ring.”
This frivolity wrought devastation in RoBards’ soul. It wakened him
for the first time to the fact that his little daughter had stealthily
become a woman. He blenched to see on her cheek the blush that had
returned of late to Patty’s, to see in her eyes a light of enamored
maturity. She was formed for love and ready for it, nubile, capable of
maternity, tempting, tempted.
The shock of discovery filled RoBards with disgust of himself. He felt
faint, and averting his gaze from his daughter, turned to her mother
to see how the blow struck her. Patty had not been so unaware of
Immy’s advance. But her shock was one of jealousy and of terror at the
realization that she was on the way to grandmotherhood.
RoBards was so hurt for her in her dismay that he could have sprung at
Chalender and beaten him to the floor, crying, “How dare you cease to
flirt with my beautiful wife?”
But this was quite too impossible an impulse to retain for a moment in
his revolted soul. He stood inept and smirked with Patty and murmured,
“Good-by! Good luck!”
They were both pale and distraught when Chalender had gone. But Immy
was rosy and intent.