Something more precious than gold came to light in 1846, something of
more moment to human history than a dozen Mexican wars—a cure for pain.
It came divinely opportune to Patty’s need, for her next child was
about to tear its way into the world through her flesh suffering from
old lacerations, and she prophesied that she would die of agony and
take back with her into oblivion the boy or girl or both or whatever it
was or they were that she was helplessly manufacturing.
And just then there came to RoBards a letter from a Boston client
stating that a dentist named Morton had discovered a gas that enabled
him to extract a tooth without distress; another surgeon had removed
a tumor from a patient made indifferent with ether; and that the long
deferred godsend would make childbirth peaceable. Patty sang hosannas
to the new worker of miracles.
“1846 is a greater year than 1776—or 1492. That man Morton is a bigger
man than Columbus and there should be a holiday in his honor. What
did the discoverer of America, or the inventor of the telegraph or
anything else, do for the world to compare with the angel of mercy
who put a stop to pain? The Declaration of Independence!—Independence
from what?—taxes and things. But pain—think of independence from pain!
Nothing else counts when something aches. And the only real happiness
is to hurt and get over it.”
She repeated her enthusiasm to Dr. Chirnside when he happened in on his
pastoral rounds. To her dismay the old clergyman was not elated, but
horrified.
Dr. Chirnside, who opposed everything new as an atheism, everything
amusing as a sin, declared that God decreed pain for his own
inscrutable purposes in his own infinite love. Since Holy Writ had
spoken of a woman crying aloud in travail it would be a sacrilege to
deny her that privilege. The kindly old soul would have crucified
a multitude for the sake of a metaphor. He had in his earlier days
preached a sermon against railroads because God would have mentioned
them to Moses or somebody if he had approved of having his creatures
hurled through space at the diabolic speed of twenty miles an hour. He
had denounced bowling alleys for the same reason, and also because they
were fashionable and more crowded than his own pews.
RoBards having seen operations where the patient had to be clamped to a
board and gagged for the sake of the neighbors’ ears, could not believe
that this was a pleasant spectacle to any respectable deity.
He almost came to a break with Dr. Chirnside, who seemed to see nothing
incongruous in calling that divine which men called inhuman.
All of the learned men called “doctors,” whether of divinity, medicine,
law, philosophy, or what-not, seemed to fight everything new however
helpful. Martyrdom awaited the reformer and the discoverer whether in
religion, astronomy, geography, chemistry, geology, anything.
The names of well-meaning gentlemen like Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall
had recently been howled at with an irate disgust not shown toward
murderers and thieves.
For the next twenty years a war would be waged upon the pain-killers,
and the names of Morton, Jackson, and Wells would inspire immediate
quarrel. Each had his retainers in the contest for what some called the
“honor” of discovering the placid realm of anæsthesia; and what some
called the “sacrilege” of its discovery.
It was written in the sibylline books of history as yet undisclosed
that Wells should be finally humbled to insanity and suicide; and that
Morton, after years of vain effort to get recognition, should retire to
a farm, where he would die from the shock of reading a denial of his
“pretensions.” They would put on his tombstone the legend: “By whom
pain in surgery was averted and annulled; before whom, in all time,
surgery was agony since whom science has had control of pain.” Yet
one’s own epitaph is a little late, however flattering.
RoBards shared Patty’s reverence for the Prometheus who had snatched
from heaven the anodyne to the earth’s worst curse. He made sure that
she should have the advantage of the cloud of merciful oblivion when
she went down into the dark of her last childbed.
Her final baby was born “still,” as they say; but Patty also was still
during the ordeal. That was no little blessing. RoBards was spared the
hell of listening in helplessness to such moans as Patty had hitherto
uttered when her hour had come upon her unawares.
But the high hopes from this discovery were doomed to sink, for man
seems never to get quite free from his primeval evils, and RoBards was
to find that the God or the devil of pain had not yet been baffled by
man’s puny inventions.
Longing for opportunities to exploit the suppressed braveries in his
soul, RoBards found nothing to do but run to fires. There were enough
of these and the flames fell alike upon the just and the unjust. Christ
Church in Ann Street went up in blazes; the Bowery Theatre burned down
for the fourth time; a sugar house in Duane Street was next, two men
being killed and RoBards badly bruised by a tumbling wall. The stables
of Kipp and Brown were consumed with over a hundred screaming horses;
the omnibus stables of the Murphys roasted to death a hundred and fifty
horses, and took with them two churches, a parsonage, and a school.
While this fire raged, another broke out in Broome Street, another in
Thirty-fifth Street and another in Seventeenth. The Park Theatre was
burned for only the second time in its fifty years of life; but it
stayed burned.
And then Patty succeeded in persuading her husband to resign from the
volunteers and remove his boots and helmet from the basket under the
bed.
This was the knell of his youth and he felt that he had been put out
to grass like an old fire horse, but his heart leaped for years after
when some old brazen-mouthed bell gave tongue. He left it to others,
however, to take out the engine and chase the sparks.
He had come to the port of slippered evenings, but monotony was not yet
his portion. For there were domestic fire bells now.
Patty and Immy were mutual combustibles. They had reached the ages when
the mother forgets her own rebellious youth as completely as if she had
drunk Lethe water; and when the daughter demands liberty for herself
and imposes fetters on her elders.
Patty developed the strictest standards for Immy and was amazed at the
girl’s indifference to her mother’s standards. All of Patty’s quondam
audacities in dress and deportment were remembered as conformities
to strict convention. Immy’s audacities were regarded as downright
indecencies.
Immy, for her part, was outraged at the slightest hint of youthfulness
in her mother. With her own shoulders gleaming and her young breast
brimming at the full beaker of her dress, Immy would rebuke her mother
for wearing what they called a “half-high.” Both powdered and painted
and were mutually horrified. Immy used the perilous liquid rouge and
Patty the cochineal leaves, and each thought the other unpardonable—and
what was worse, discoverable.
Breathless with her own wild gallopades in the polka and dizzy from
waltzing in the desperate clench of some young rake, Immy would glare
at her mother for twirling about the room with a gouty old judge
holding her elbow-tips; or for laughing too loudly at a joke that her
mother should never have understood.
Finally, Patty had recourse to authority and told her husband that the
city was too wicked for the child. She—even Patty—who had once bidden
New York good-by with tears, denounced it now in terms borrowed from
Dr. Chirnside’s tirades.
Immy was mutinous and sullen. She refused to leave and threatened to
run off with any one of a half dozen beaux, none of whom her parents
could endure.
This deadlock was ended by aid from a dreadful quarter. By a strange
repetition of events, the cholera, which had driven Patty into RoBards’
arms and into the country with him—the cholera which had never been
seen again and for whose destruction the Croton Water party had taken
full glory—the cholera came again.
It began in the pus-pocket of the Points and drained them with death;
then swept the town. Once more there was a northward hegira. Once more
the schoolhouses were hospitals and a thousand poor sufferers died in
black agony on the benches where children had conned their Webster’s
spelling books. Five thousand lives the cholera took before it went its
mysterious way.
Coming of a little bolder generation, Immy was not so panic-stricken as
her mother had been. But since all her friends deserted the town, she
saw no reason for tarrying.
The country was not so dull as she had feared. The air was spicy with
romance; fauns danced in the glades and sat on the stone fences to
pipe their unspeakable tunes; nymphs laughed in the brooks, and dryads
commended the trees.
The railroads made it easy for young bucks to run out on a train
farther in an hour or two than they could have ridden in a day in the
good old horseback times. A fashion for building handsome country
places was encouraged by the cholera scare. White Plains began to grow
in elegance and Robbin’s Mills changed its homely name to Kensico,
after an old Indian chief.
Before many days Immy was busier than in town. Young men and girls
made the quiet yard resound with laughter. The tulip trees learned
to welcome and to shelter sentimental couples. Their great branches
accepted rope swings, and petticoats went foaming toward the clouds
while their wearers shrieked and fell back into the arms of pushing
young men.
Picnics filled the groves with mirth, dances called gay cliques to
lamplit parlors and to moonlit porches. Tuliptree Farm began to
resemble some much frequented roadside tavern. It was as gay as Cato’s
once had been outside New York.
Immy seemed to gather lovers as a bright candle summons foolish moths.
Patty and her husband were swiftly pushed back upon a shelf of old age
whence they watched, incredulous, and unremembering, the very same
activities with which they had amazed their own parents.
Two lovers gradually crowded the rest aside. The more attractive to
Immy’s parents was a big brave youth named Halleck. He had joined the
old Twenty-seventh Regiment, recently reorganized as the Seventh, just
in time to be called out in the Astor Place riots.
The citizens had lain fairly quiet for a long while and had not
attacked a church or a minister or a theatre for nearly fifteen years.
But the arrival of the English actor Macready incensed the idolators of
Edwin Forrest and developed a civil war.
Young Halleck was with the Seventh when it marched down to check the
vast mob that overwhelmed the police, and drove back a troop of cavalry
whose horses were maddened by the cries and the confinement. The
populace roared down upon the old Seventh and received three volleys
before it returned to civil life.
This exploit in dramatic criticism cost the public thirty-four deaths
and an unknown number of wounds. The Seventh had a hundred and
forty-one casualties. Halleck had been shot with a pistol and battered
with paving stones. To RoBards the lawyer he was a civic hero of the
finest sort. The only thing Immy had against him was that her parents
recommended him so highly.
Love that will not be coerced turned in protest toward the youth whom
her parents most cordially detested, Dr. Chirnside’s son, Ernest, a
pallid young bigot, more pious than his father, and as cruel as Cotton
Mather. Patty wondered how any daughter of hers could endure the
milk-sop. But Immy cultivated him because of his very contrast with her
own hilarity.
His young pedantries, his fierce denunciations of the wickedness of his
companions, his solemn convictions that man was born lost in Adam’s sin
and could only be redeemed from eternal torment by certain dogmas,
fascinated Immy, who had overfed on dances and flippancies.
RoBards could not help witnessing from his library window the
development of this curious religious romance. Even when he withdrew
to his long writing table and made an honest effort to escape the
temptation to eavesdropping, he would be pursued by the twangy
sententiousness of Ernest and the silvery answers of Immy. There was an
old iron settee under his window and a rosebush thereby and the young
fanatics would sit there to debate their souls.
It was a godlike privilege and distress to overhear such a courtship.
His daughter bewildered him. At times Immy was as wild as a mænad. She
danced, lied, decoyed, teased, accepted caresses, deliberately invited
wrestling matches for her kisses. She rode wild horses and goaded them
wilder. She would come home with a shrieking cavalcade and set her
foam-flecked steed at the front fence, rather than wait for the gate to
be opened.
Seeing Immy in amorous frenzies RoBards would be stricken with fear
of her and for her. He would wonder if Jud Lasher had not somehow
destroyed her innocence; if his invasion of her integrity had not
prepared her for corruption. How much of that tragedy did she remember?
Or had she forgotten it altogether?
He would shudder with the dread that Jud Lasher, who was lying beneath
his feet, might be wreaking a posthumous revenge, completing his crime
with macaberesque delight.
Then Immy’s mood would change utterly. She would repent her youth as
a curse, and meditate a religious career. There was a new fashion for
sending missionaries to Africa and she was tempted to proselytize the
jungle. Ernest rescued her at least from this. He told her that she
must make sure her own soul was saved before she went out to save Zulus.
Sometimes RoBards, listening with his pen poised above an unfinished
word, would seem to understand her devotion to young Chirnside, her
acceptance of his intolerant tyranny and the insults he heaped upon her
as a wretch whom his God might have foredoomed from past eternity to
future eternity. He would talk of election and the conviction of sin
and of salvation.
And Immy would drink it down.
At last there came an evening when young Chirnside called in manifest
exaltation. He led Immy to the settee beneath the library window, and
RoBards could not resist the opportunity to overhear the business that
was so important.
He went into his library and softly closed the door. He tiptoed to a
vantage point and listened.
Young Chirnside coughed and stammered and beat about the bush for a
maddening while before he came to his thesis, which was that the Lord
had told him to make Immy his wife. He had come to beg her to listen to
him and heaven. He had brought a little ring along for the betrothal
and—and—how about it? His combination of sermon and proposal ended in
a homeliness that proved his sincerity. After all that exordium, the
point was, How about it?
That was what RoBards wanted to know. He waited as breathlessly as his
prospective son-in-law. Immy did not speak for a terrible while. And
then she sighed deeply, and rather moaned than said:
“Ernest, I am honored beyond my dreams by what you have said. To be the
wife of so good a man as you would be heaven. But am I good enough for
you?”
“Immy!” Chirnside gasped, “you’re not going to tell me you’ve been
wicked!”
“I’ve been wicked enough, but not very wicked—considering. The thing I
must tell you about is—it’s terribly hard to tell you, dear. But you
ought to know, you have a right to know. And when you know, you may not
think—you may not think—you may feel that you wouldn’t care to marry
me. I wouldn’t blame you—I’d understand, dear—but——”
“Tell me! In heaven’s name, tell me!”
RoBards was stabbed with a sudden knowledge of what tortured her
thought. He wanted to cry out to her, “Don’t tell! Don’t speak! I
forbid you!”
But that would have betrayed his contemptible position as
eavesdropper. And, after all, what right had he to rebuke such honesty?
She knew her soul. She was inspired perhaps with the uncanny wisdom of
young lovers.
The wish to confess—though “confess” was not the word for her guiltless
martyrdom—was a proof of her nobility. It would be a test of this
young saint’s mettle. If he shrank from her, it would rescue her
from a pigeon-hearted recreant. If he loved her all the more for
her mischance, he would prove himself better than he seemed, more
Christlike than he looked.
And so RoBards, guessing what blighting knowledge Immy was about to
unfold, stood in the dark and listened. Tears of pity for her scalded
his clenched eyelids and dripped bitter into his quivering mouth.
Unseeing and unseen, he heard his child murmuring her little tragedy to
the awesmitten boy at her side. She seemed as pitifully beautiful as
some white young leper whispering through a rag, “Unclean!”
What would this pious youth think now of the God that put his love and
this girl to such a test? Would he howl blasphemies at heaven? Would he
cower away from the accursed woman or would he fling his arms about her
and mystically heal her by the very divinity of his yearning?
RoBards could almost believe that Jud Lasher down there in the walls
was also quickened with suspense. His term in hell might depend on this
far-off consequence of his deed.