CHAPTER XXIII
The children had apparently forgotten all about the tragedy. The newness of the train-ride, the fear of missing something, of being late somewhere, of not being everywhere at once, kept their little minds so avid that there was no thought of yesterday.
They entered the city as if they were wading into the boisterous surf at Rockaway Beach. The crowds broke about them with a din of breakers thundering shoreward. Yet they were not afraid.
When they descended from the train at the station, RoBards could hardly keep them in leash long enough to get them into a hack. As it bounced across the town to St. John’s Park, he had only their backs and heels for company. Each child hung across a door and stared at the hurrying mobs.
At length they reached the home and all their thoughts were forward. Nothing that had ever happened in the country could pit itself against the revelry of the city.
Their young and pretty mother looked never so New Yorkish as when she ran down the front stoop to welcome them. When she cried the old watchword, “How have you been?” they answered heedlessly, “All right!” Immy, of all people, answered, “All right!”
Even RoBards forgot for the brief paradise of embracing his gracious wife that everything was all wrong. She had to take him about the house and show him the improvements she had made, especially the faucet in the kitchen for the Croton water when it should come gurgling through the pipes. From a parlor window she pointed with delicious snobbery to the hydrant at the edge of the front porch. Most marvelous of all was a shower-bath that she had had installed upstairs. It would be possible to bathe every day! There was something irreligious and Persian about the apparatus, but RoBards rejoiced for a moment in the thought of what musical refreshment it would afford him on hot mornings after long nights of work.
The children were so impatient to get them gone that they had hardly a glance to spare at the new toys, the faucets and hydrants, the municipal playthings which would prevent fires in the future or at least make the life of a fireman a pastime instead of a vain slavery.
Patty’s mother had been caught in the new craze for “Temperance” and she called the Croton water as much of a godsend as the floods that gushed out from the rock that Moses smote. Since the city had removed the old pumps there had been no place for a man to quench his thirst except by going to a grocery store and asking for a cup of water as a charity. Few people had the courage to beg for water, so they either went dry or paid for a glass of brandy. This, she said, had kept up the evil of drunkenness that was undermining the health and character of so many men and women. Once the pure Croton water was accessible and free, intoxication would cease.
But old man Jessamine, himself a child now, belittled the significance of the Croton day. It would be nothing, he said, to the great day when the Erie Canal was opened and the first boat from the lakes started its voyage through the canal to the Hudson and down the river to the sea. He held the frantic children fast while he talked ancient history: described the marvelous speed of the news.