Though Patty greeted the decision to leave the country dumbly, the boy
Junior emitted noise enough for two.
When his father asked him what difference it made to him, he dodged
awkwardly, talking of the beauty of the woods, the cider taste and
fragrance of the air, the ugliness and noise of the city. He waxed so
fervid that his father said:
“You ought to go in for poetry as a business.”
He could hardly accuse his son of hypocrisy, since he himself was
conniving in the secret for Patty’s sake.
He closed the argument by reminding the boy that his classes at
Columbia would soon require his presence. Whereupon Junior declared
that he was too old to go to school any longer. He wanted to get out
and make his own way in the world. He was a man now and—all the ancient
refrain of the home-building instinct.
It was a heartache to RoBards to see his child grown suddenly old
enough to be skewered with the darts of love; but the romance was
premature and it must be suppressed ruthlessly for the boy’s own sake.
And for this growing pain also there was no ether.
To town they went.
For a while Junior’s melancholy was complete; then it suddenly
vanished. He no longer spent his evenings at home writing long, long
letters. He no longer went about with the eyes of a dying gazelle.
Patty said: “He has forgotten his country sweetheart and found a city
one.”
From his superior information, RoBards made a shrewder guess that the
Lasher girl had come to New York and was supporting herself somehow. He
did not mention this suspicion to Patty, but he tried to verify it by
shadowing Junior through the streets as through the lanes.
New York, however, was a labyrinth of endless escapes. The boy seemed
to know that he was followed and after a long and apparently aimless
saunter, would always elude his pursuer.
His father hunted through some of the dance halls, the gambling dives,
through Castle Garden and other retreats where lovers sat like Siamese
twins, enveloped in their ancient communions. But he never found Junior
and he was ashamed to confess that he was searching, since his search
was vain.
He dared not ask the boy where he went lest he encourage him to lie, or
to retort with impudent defiance.
The eldest son, Keith, was thinking little of women. He was a man’s
man, full of civic pride and municipal works. When he was at his
business he took delight in being as dirty as possible. He wore the
roughest clothes, left his jaws unshaven, talked big aqueduct talk.
Then he would go to the other extreme and cleanse himself to a foppery.
But even this was mannishness, for he was a soldier.
He loved his family, his city, his nation, and his was that patriotism
which proves itself by an eagerness to be ready to defend his altars.
“Any man who really loves his country,” he would say, “will keep
himself strong enough to dig a ditch, build a wall, know a gun, and
shoot it straight.”
He had joined the Seventh Regiment as soon as he could get in, though
everybody knew that there was no chance of war and the soldiers were
counted mere dandies.
Then a civil war broke out at home. New York City fought New York
State. The Legislature at Albany, angered at the scandals of the city
police, set up in its place a state police. Mayor Fernando Wood, who
was always defying somebody, defied the Governor, the Legislature, the
Supreme Court.
The criminals reveled in the joyous opportunity while the two police
forces fought each other. When a warrant was issued for the Mayor’s
arrest the town police made the City Hall their citadel; the state
police besieged it.
The Seventh Regiment was marching down Broadway to take a boat to
Boston for a gala week in honor of the new Bunker Hill monument. It
passed by the battlefield of City Hall Park. Since it was a state
force, its colonel marched into the park and demanded the surrender of
the Mayor, who yielded forthwith. The Seventh thereupon went on its way
with brass band blaring, all the youthful hearts persuaded that they
were invincible.
The Seventh had hardly reached Boston when it was recalled to rescue
the town from a venomous mob that gathered in the Five Points, put the
police to flight, and promised to destroy the whole city. The mob broke
on the bayonets of the Seventh after six men had been killed and a
hundred wounded.
Keith came home to his horrified mother with a few bumps on the head.
She was still pleading with him the next day to resign from the
perilous life when he was called out with his regiment to quell another
riot.
A little later there was a parade in honor of the laying of an Atlantic
cable, which collapsed after two alleged messages were passed and was
voted a gigantic hoax. But while the town laughed at it, the poor
Seventh was dragged to Staten Island, where a thousand miscreants had
set fire to the quarantine buildings. For three months Keith had to sit
there on guard over the cold and malodorous ruins.
When war of this sort was not afoot, there were the ever-recurrent
parades under the hot sun, or in the fitful glare of the gas-lighted,
banner-blazing nights.
Very gay was the march past the two visiting princes from Japan, that
strange new country opened six years before by Commodore Perry. The two
royal delegates were almost drowned in wine. New York, just emerged
from a few years of legal drouth, spent a hundred thousand dollars
on an uproarious reception at which champagne corks blurted by the
thousand.
Patty, as the daughter of an old Oriental shipping merchant, went to
that reception and wore a scarf of celestial weave and mountain-laurel
color. One of the princes recognized the native stuff and advanced to
Patty crying, “Me likee! me likee!” To prove how authentic the fabric
was and how near and dear to him, he opened his silken robe at the
breast and pointed to a most intimate garment for which there was no
respectable name. It was of the very same material, and Patty might
have swooned if her crinoline had not upheld her.
His Highness’ two words were two more than she could speak, and he took
from his sleeve a paper handkerchief, mopped his gleaming brow, and
dropped it on the floor.
Besides the Japanese princes, came the French Prince de Joinville, and
Garibaldi, and finally the English heir apparent.
The change in Patty’s soul was so profound that when the Prince of
Wales came down from Canada and everybody fought for tickets to the
ball in his honor as if it were Judgment Day itself, she made no
plans at all. Could this be the same Patty, who, hitherto, would have
bankrupted RoBards for a supreme gown and played the Machiavel for a
presentation?
When at last even RoBards noted her neglect, and asked her what she
expected to wear, she sighed:
“I shan’t go at all. It’s a long time since the newspapers referred to
me as ‘the woman who was.’ The prince is nineteen years old and he is
not interested in grandmothers.”
Then for love of her and for pride of her, RoBards must plead and
compel. He must drive her to the dressmakers and whisper them that
nothing should be spared to drape her so that an emperor would stare
and a bashaw salaam. Men are odd cattle. He had stormed at her for
years for extravagance and now he was outraged by an economy!
Perhaps he was thinking a little of his own position as an important
citizen, an American prince; but his chief zeal was in the defense of
his beloved from that final fatal discouragement which ends a woman’s
joy in this world.
It was he, not Patty, that made sure of the invitation and toadied to
Isaac Brown, the burly old sexton of Grace Church who decided who was
to sit in what pew of his sacred edifice, and who was to be invited to
any affair meriting the high epithet “genteel.”
Even Ikey Brown recognized the solidity of Judge RoBards and his lady,
(who had been a Jessamine) and they received their tickets to the
Academy of Music and, besides, the almost royal honor of dancing in the
_quadrille d’honneur_.
The overcrowded floor gave way with a crash and had to be rebuilt,
but Patty escaped so much as the rumpling of her cherry satin train.
When she was presented to the young prince, her husband fancied that
he saw in those boyish eyes, so avid of beauty, a flash of homage for
the graces that had not yet gone. The cinder was still fierce from the
furnace.
But Patty when she was at home again wept all night. The only excuse
she would give was a whimpering regret that the far-away Immy could
not have been there and danced with the prince. But RoBards knew that
she mourned rather the yet more remote Patty of the long ago, who was
no longer present within her tight stays and her voluminous paneled
brocade. She wept over the grave of herself.
The next night he understood the ravages of the years yet more keenly,
for he must march as a veteran in the firemen’s parade under the
dripping, smoking, bobbing torches. Five thousand marched that night,
and it was his last appearance with the volunteers, whose own last
days were numbered. Philadelphia and Cincinnati already had steam fire
engines drawn by horses, and in a few years hired firemen would replace
the old foot-runners and hand-pumpers.
As RoBards limped along on strangely flagging feet, he thought he
caught a glimpse of his boy Junior and the Lasher girl at his side,
standing arm in arm at the curb. But in the twinkling of an eye-lid
they were gone.
Keith had marched, of course, with the Seventh, but the Sixty-ninth,
made up of Irishmen, had refused to pay honor to the Sassenach prince.
Its colors were taken away and it drilled no more.
When riot or parade or drill was not afoot, the aqueduct was forever
haling Keith forth. For the restless town kept hewing down the hills
that covered its upper regions, or cutting streets through and leaving
houses perched in air. In 1840 the Water Commissioners had decided that
the city would not reach Ninety-fourth Street “for a century or two”;
but it was crawling thither fast.
Like sculptors who, as they carve off the clay, uncover the iron
armature, the engineers were constantly disclosing anew their own
deep-buried water mains and they must needs sink them still deeper.
Often the pipes broke in their subterrene beds. This was like the
rupture of an artery inside a man, and it required quick surgery to
avert a fatal hemorrhage.
On a December midnight in 1860 two mains were rent open twenty feet
below the ground at Sixty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue. The upwelling
flood turned the avenue into a swamp and endangered the foundations of
certain new buildings. Fortunately, they were few and unimportant so
far out of town, mainly crude shacks.
But all the factories in town had to be ordered to cease the use of
water, and the anxious city learned that the Croton was a vital aorta.
The vast accumulation in the reservoir at Forty-Second Street was
sucked down to within a foot of the bottom.
Chief Engineer Craven had his men at work within thirty minutes of the
disaster, and for fifty hours they dabbled in the muck, battling the
leaping waters while new pipes were crowded in.
Keith was among the fiercest toilers. He fought with the ardor of a
Hollander at a broken dyke, and would not give over till he fell prone
and had like to have drowned in the mud.
Shortly after this there was a strange break in the subterranean
financial waters: a mysterious panic shook the commercial peace of New
York. The reservoirs of credit dried up over night. Bankers, the least
unreliable of prophets, were smitten with a great terror, which their
clients promptly shared. Its meaning was public all too soon.
On December twenty-first there was another break in the water mains at
Sixty-fourth Street, where the pipes had been carried across a marsh in
a raised embankment.
As Keith worked with his men that morning his heart was shaken for
the morning papers had shrieked the telegraphic news that, on the day
before, the state of South Carolina had seceded from the Union, had
actually carried out what nearly everybody had pooh-poohed as a silly
threat. The South Carolina newspapers spoke of New York and other
states as foreign countries.
The Charleston _Mercury_ proclaimed: “This is War.” New York bankers
and merchants realized that they must, then, assume the chief burden of
furnishing men, munitions, and money.
RoBards’ heart sank within him. The great war had found him fifty-five
years old. He would never get to a war, never fight for his country.
But Patty’s heart leaped like a doe startled from a covert. It leaped
with a cry:
“My boy is in the first regiment that will go!”