“Anybody been here?”
But what could he say when she answered:
“Only that stupid Harry Chalender, with his eternal talk of culverts and protection walls and drunken teamsters, and the prospects of a strike.”
He had long ago learned that beneath her yawn was a readiness to fight. He was usually worn out with the worry and fag of the law courts where even the judges sat in shirt-sleeves and spat tobacco between their cocked-up feet. He came home for peace; but to Patty, a hot argument brought refreshment from a day of languor or of boredom from her dull parents, or of light coquetry with a flattering gallant.
She always whipped her husband out. She would whimper and make him a brute, or she would rail and storm till he implored her for quiet, to cheat the hungry ears of the servants or to appease the two terrified children who hung about his knees; or to escape the sullen glare of Patty’s father and mother.
He felt that, instead of browbeating or being browbeaten by a delicate woman, he ought to go over to Sing Sing and horsewhip Harry Chalender. But that also had its inconveniences, and he had no stomach for adding his own name to the list of knockabouts that accompanied the building of the aqueduct.
For, all along the right of way, as the landholders had prophesied, there was drunken brawling. A river of alcohol paralleled the dry bed for the Croton. Farmers turned their homes into grog shops. Village tavern-owners and city saloon-keepers set up shanties under the dusty trees, whether the easily corrupted magistrates gave them licenses or not.
Together with drink came every other form of dissipation. Gamblers and cheap tricksters abounded, and those burly harpies strangely miscalled “light women” came out of their overcrowded lairs in town until the innocent countryside was one sordid bacchanal.
Whipped up with liquor and the mad eloquence it inspired, the laboring men began to talk of their rights and wrongs and, above all, of their right to organize. In England the first efforts of the lower classes to combine against the upper, and form a new Jacquerie had been dealt with sharply, but without permanent success.
The laws of the United States were strict enough, but loose talk of democracy was undermining them, and the toilers were gaining a sense of unity. They called themselves “Workies” with an affectionate self-pity, and early in 1838 they achieved a turn-out (or, as they called it recently, “a strike”) for higher wages.