Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862

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They were a happy and hilarious family now,--so hilarious that
the President was obliged to be always rapping to Order with his
paper-knife.

Every one of these gentlemen was proud of himself as a Director of so
successful a Company. The Dunderbunk advertisement might now consider
itself as permanent in the newspapers, and the Treasurer had very
unnecessarily inserted the notice of a dividend, which everybody knew of
already.

When Mr. Churm was not by, they all claimed the honor of having
discovered Wade, or at least of having been the first to appreciate him.

They all invited him to dinner,--the others at their houses, Sam Gwelp
at his club.

They had not yet begun to wax fat and kick. They still remembered
the panic of last summer. They passed a unanimous vote of the most
complimentary confidence in Wade, approved of his system, forced upon
him an increase of salary, and began to talk of "launching out" and
doubling their capital. In short, they behaved as Directors do when all
is serene.

Churm and Wade had a hearty laugh over the absurdities of the Board and
all their vague propositions.

"Dunderbunk," said Churm, "was a company started on a sentimental basis,
as many others are."

"Mr. Brummage fell in love with pig-iron?"

"Precisely. He had been a dry-goods jobber, risen from a retailer
somewhere in the country. He felt a certain lack of dignity in his work.
He wanted to deal in something more masculine than lace and ribbons. He
read a sentimental article on Iron in the 'Journal of Commerce': how
Iron held the world together; how it was nerve and sinew; how it was
ductile and malleable and other things that sounded big; how without
Iron civilization would stop, and New Zealanders hunt rats among the
ruins of London; how anybody who would make two tons of Iron grow
where one grew before was a benefactor to the human race greater than
Alexander, Caesar, or Napoleon; and so on,--you know the eloquent style.
Brummage's soul was fired. He determined to be greater than the three
heroes named. He was oozing with unoccupied capital. He went about among
the other rich jobbers, with the newspaper article in his hand, and
fired their souls. They determined to be great Iron-Kings,--magnificent
thought! They wanted to read in the newspapers, 'If all the iron rails
made at the Dunderbunk Works in the last six months were put together in
a straight line, they would reach twice round our terraqueous globe and
seventy-three miles two rails over.' So on that poetic foundation they
started the concern."

Wade laughed. "But how did you happen to be with them?"

"Oh! my friend Damer sold them the land for the shop and took stock in
payment. I came into the Board as his executor. Did I never tell you so
before?"

"No."

"Well, then, be informed that it was in Miss Damer's behalf that you
knocked down Friend Tarbox, and so got your skates for saving her
property. It's quite a romance already, Richard, my boy! and I suppose
you feel immensely bored that you had to come down and meet us old
chaps, instead of tumbling at her feet on the ice again to-day."

"A tumble in this wet day would be a cold bath to romance."

The Gulf Stream had sent up a warm spoil-sport rain that morning. It did
not stop, but poured furiously the whole day.

From Cohoes to Spuyten Duyvil, on both sides of the river, all the
skaters swore at the weather, as profane persons no doubt did when the
windows of heaven were opened in Noah's time. The skateresses did not
swear, but savagely said, "It is too bad,"--and so it was.

Wade, loaded with the blessings of his Directors, took the train next
morning for Dunderbunk.

The weather was still mild and drizzly, but promised to clear. As the
train rattled along by the river, Wade could see that the thin ice
was breaking up everywhere. In mid-stream a procession of blocks was
steadily drifting along. Unless Zero came sliding down again pretty soon
from Boreal regions, the sheets that filled the coves and clung to the
shores would also sail away southward, and the whole Hudson be left
clear as in midsummer.

At Yonkers a down train ranged by the side of Wade's train, and, looking
out, he saw Mr. and Mrs. Skerrett alighting.

He jumped down, rather surprised, to speak to them.

"We have just been telegraphed here," said Peter, gravely. "The son of a
widow, a friend of ours, was drowned this morning in the soft ice of the
river. He was a pet of mine, poor fellow! and the mother depends upon me
for advice. We have come down to say a kind word. Why won't you report
us to the ladies at my house, and say we shall not be at home until the
evening train? They do not know the cause of our journey, except that it
is a sad one."

"Perhaps Mr. Wade will carve their turkey for them at dinner, Peter,"
Fanny suggested.

"Do, Wade! and keep their spirits up. Dinner's at six."

Here the engine whistled. Wade promised to "shine substitute" at his
friend's board, and took his place again. The train galloped away.

Peter and his wife exchanged a bright look over the fortunate incident
of this meeting, and went on their kind way to carry sympathy and such
consolation as might be to the widow.

The train galloped northward. Until now, the beat of its wheels, like
the click of an enormous metronome, had kept time to jubilant measures
singing in Wade's brain. He was hurrying back, exhilarated with success,
to the presence of a woman whose smile was finer exhilaration than any
number of votes of confidence, passed unanimously by any number of
conclaves of overjoyed Directors, and signed by Brummage after Brummage,
with the signature of a capitalist in a flurry of delight at a ten per
cent dividend.

But into this joyous mood of Wade's the thought of death suddenly
intruded. He could not keep a picture of death and drowning out of his
mind. As the train sprang along and opened gloomy breadth after breadth
of the leaden river, clogged with slow-drifting files of ice-blocks, he
found himself staring across the dreary waste and forever fancying some
one sinking there, helpless and alone.

He seemed to see a brave, bright-eyed, ruddy boy, venturing out
carelessly along the edges of the weakened ice. Suddenly the ice gives
way, the little figure sinks, rises, clutches desperately at a fragment,
struggles a moment, is borne along in the relentless flow of the chilly
water, stares in vain shoreward, and so sinks again with a look of
agony, and is gone.

But whenever this inevitable picture grew before Wade's eyes, as the
drowning figure of his fancy vanished, it suddenly changed features, and
presented the face of Mary Damer, perishing beyond succor.

Of course he knew that this was but a morbid vision. Yet that it came at
all, and that it so agonized him, proved the force of his new feeling.

He had not analyzed it before. This thought of death became its
touchstone.

Men like Wade, strong, healthy, earnest, concentrated, straightforward,
isolated, judge men and women as friends or foes at once and once for
all. He had recognized in Mary Damer from the first a heart as true,
whole, noble, and healthy as his own. A fine instinct had told him that
she was waiting for her hero, as he was for his heroine.

So he suddenly loved her. And yet not suddenly; for all his life, and
all his lesser forgotten or discarded passions, had been training him
for this master one.

He suddenly and strongly loved her; and yet it had only been a beautiful
bewilderment of uncomprehended delight, until this haunting vision of
her fair face sinking amid the hungry ice beset him. Then he perceived
what would be lost to him, if she were lost.

The thought of Death placed itself between him and Love. If the love
had been merely a pretty remembrance of a charming woman, he might have
dismissed his fancied drowning scene with a little emotion of regret.
Now, the fancy was an agony.

He had too much power over himself to entertain it long. But the grisly
thought came uninvited, returned undesired, and no resolute Avaunt, even
backed by that magic wand, a cigar, availed to banish it wholly.

The sky cleared cold at eleven o'clock. A sharp wind drew through the
Highlands. As the train rattled round the curve below the tunnel through
Skerrett's Point, Wade could see his skating course of Christmas-Day
with the ladies. Firm ice, glazed smooth by the sudden chill after the
rain, filled the Cove and stretched beyond the Point into the river.

It was treacherous stuff, beautiful to the eyes of a skater, but sure
to be weak, and likely to break up any moment and join the deliberate
headlong drift of the masses in mid-current.

Wade almost dreaded lest his vision should suddenly realize itself,
and he should see his enthusiastic companion of the other day sailing
gracefully along to certain death.

Nothing living, however, was in sight, except here and there a crow,
skipping about in the floating ice.

The lover was greatly relieved. He could now forewarn the lady against
the peril he had imagined. The train in a moment dropped him at
Dunderbunk. He hurried to the Foundry and wrote a note to Mrs. Damer.

"Mr. Wade presents his compliments to Mrs. Damer, and has the honor to
inform her that Mr. Skerrett has nominated him carver to the ladies
to-day in their host's place.

"Mr. Wade hopes that Miss Damer will excuse him from his engagement to
skate with her this afternoon. The ice is dangerous, and Miss Damer
should on no account venture upon it."

Perry Purtett was the bearer of this billet. He swaggered into Peter
Skerrett's hall, and dreadfully alarmed the fresh-imported Englishman
who answered the bell, by ordering him in a severe tone,--

"Hurry up now, White Cravat, with that answer! I'm wanted down to the
Works. Steam don't bile when I'm off; and the fly-wheel will never buzz
another turn, unless I'm there to motion it to move on."

Mrs. Damer's gracious reply informed Wade "that she should be charmed to
see him at dinner, etc., and would not fail to transmit his kind warning
to Miss Damer, when she returned from her drive to make calls."

But when Miss Damer returned in the afternoon, her mother was taking a
gentle nap over the violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red
stripes of a gorgeous Afghan she was knitting. The daughter heard
nothing of the billet. The house was lonely without Fanny Skerrett. Mr.
Wade did not come at the appointed hour. Mary was not--willing to say to
herself how much she regretted his absence.

Had he forgotten the appointment?

No,--that was a thought not to be tolerated.

"A gentleman does not forget," she thought. And she had a thorough
confidence, besides, that this gentleman was very willing to remember.

She read a little, fitfully, sang fitfully, moved about the house
uneasily; and at last, when it grew late, and she was bored and Wade did
not arrive, she pronounced to herself that he had been detained in town.

This point settled, she took her skates, put on her pretty Amazonian hat
with its alert feather, and went down to waste her beauty and grace on
the ice, unattended and alone.

CHAPTER XI.

CAP'S AMBUSTER'S SKIFF.

It was a busy afternoon at the Dunderbunk Foundry.

The Superintendent had come back with his pocket full of orders.
Everybody, from the Czar of Russia to the President of the Guano
Republic, was in the market for machinery. Crisis was gone by.
Prosperity was come. The world was all ready to move, and only waited
for a fresh supply of wheels, cranks, side-levers, walking-beams, and
other such muscular creatures of iron, to push and tug and swing and
revolve and set Progress a-going.

Dunderbunk was to have its full share in supplying the demand. It was
well understood by this time that the iron Wade made was as stanch
as the man who made it. Dunderbunk, therefore, Head and Hands, must
despatch.

So it was a busy afternoon at the industrious Foundry. The men bestirred
themselves. The furnaces rumbled. The engine thumped. The drums in the
finishing-shop hummed merrily their lively song of labor. The four
trip-hammers--two bull-headed, two calf-headed--champed, like
carnivorous maws, upon red bars of iron, and over their banquet they
roared the big-toned music of the trip-hammer chorus,--

"Now, then! hit hard!
Strike while Iron's hot. Life's short. Art's long."

By this massive refrain, ringing in at intervals above the ceaseless
buzz, murmur, and clang throughout the buildings, every man's work was
mightily nerved and inspired. Everybody liked to hear the sturdy song of
these grim vocalists; and whenever they struck in, each solo or duo or
quatuor of men, playing Anvil Chorus, quickened time, and all the action
and rumor of the busy opera went on more cheerily and lustily. So work
kept astir like play.

An hour before sunset, Bill Tarbox stepped into Wade's office. Even oily
and begrimed, Bill could be recognized as a favored lover. He looked
more a man than ever before.

"I forgot to mention," says the foreman, "that Cap'n Ambuster was in,
this morning, to see you. He says, that, if the river's clear enough for
him to get away from our dock, he'll go down to the City to-morrow, and
offers to take freight cheap. We might put that new walking-beam, we've
just rough-finished for the 'Union,' aboard of him."

"Yes,--if he is sure to go to-morrow. It will not do to delay. The
owners complained to me yesterday that the 'Union' was in a bad way for
want of its new machinery. Tell your brother-in-law to come here, Bill."

Tarbox looked sheepishly pleased, and summoned Perry Purtett.

"Run down, Perry," said Wade, "to the 'Ambuster,' and ask Captain Isaac
to step up here a moment. Tell him I have some freight to send by him."

Perry moved through the Foundry with his usual jaunty step, left his
dignity at the door, and ran off to the dock.

The weather had grown fitful. Heavy clouds whirled over, trailing
snow-flurries. Rarely the sun found a cleft in the black canopy to shoot
a ray through and remind the world that he was still in his place and
ready to shine when he was wanted.

Master Perry had a furlong to go before he reached the dock. He crossed
the stream, kept unfrozen by the warm influences of the Foundry. He ran
through a little dell hedged on each side by dull green cedars. It was
severely cold now, and our young friend condescended to prance and jump
over the ice-skimmed puddles to keep his blood in motion.

The little rusty, pudgy steamboat lay at the down-stream side of the
Foundry wharf. Her name was so long and her paddle-box so short, that
the painter, beginning with ambitious large letters, had been compelled
to abbreviate the last syllable. Her title read thus:--

I. AMBUSTER.

Certainly a formidable inscription for a steamboat!

When she hove in sight, Perry halted, resumed his stately demeanor, and
em-barked as if he were a Doge entering a Bucentaur to wed a Sea.

There was nobody on deck to witness the arrival and salute the
_magnifico_.

Perry looked in at the Cap'n's office. He beheld a three-legged stool,
a hacked desk, an inky steel-pen, an inkless inkstand; but no Cap'n
Ambuster.

Perry inspected the Cap'n's state-room. There was a cracked
looking-glass, into which he looked; a hair-brush suspended by the
glass, which he used; a lair of blankets in a berth, which he had no
present use for; and a smell of musty boots, which nobody with a nose
could help smelling. Still no Captain Ambuster, nor any of his crew.

Search in the unsavory kitchen revealed no cook, coiled up in a corner,
suffering nightmares for the last greasy dinner he had brewed in his
frying-pan. There were no deck hands bundled into their bunks. Perry
rapped on the chain-box and inquired if anybody was within, and nobody
answering, he had to ventriloquize a negative.

The engine-room, too, was vacant, and quite as unsavory as the other
dens on board. Perry patronized the engine by a pull or two at the
valves, and continued his tour of inspection.

The Ambuster's skiff, lying on her forward deck, seemed to entertain him
vastly.

"Jolly!" says Perry. And so it was a jolly boat in the literal, not the
technical sense.

"The three wise men of Gotham went to sea in a bowl; and here's the
identical craft," says Perry.

He gave the chubby little machine a push with his foot. It rolled and
wallowed about grotesquely. When it was still again, it looked so comic,
lying contentedly on its fat side like a pudgy baby, that Perry had a
roar of laughter, which, like other laughter to one's self, did not
sound very merry, particularly as the north-wind was howling ominously,
and the broken ice on its downward way was whispering and moaning and
talking on in a most mysterious and inarticulate manner.

"Those sheets of ice would crunch up this skiff, as pigs do a punkin,"
thinks Perry.

And with this thought in his head he looked out on the river, and
fancied the foolish little vessel cast loose and buffeting helplessly
about in the ice.

He had been so busy until now, in prying about the steamboat and making
up his mind that Captain and men had all gone off for a comfortable
supper on shore, that his eyes had not wandered toward the stream.

Now his glance began to follow the course of the icy current. He
wondered where all this supply of cakes came from, and how many of them
would escape the stems of ferry-boats below and get safe to sea.

All at once, as he looked lazily along the lazy files of ice, his eyes
caught a black object drifting on a fragment in a wide way of open water
opposite Skerrett's Point, a mile distant.

Perry's heart stopped beating. He uttered a little gasping cry. He
sprang ashore, not at all like a Doge quitting a Bucentaur. He tore back
to the Foundry, dashing through the puddles, and, never stopping to pick
up his cap, burst in upon Wade and Bill Tarbos in the office.

The boy was splashed from head to foot with red mud. His light hair,
blown wildly about, made his ashy face seem paler. He stood panting.

His dumb terror brought back to Wade's mind all the bad omens of the
morning.

"Speak!" said he, seizing Perry fiercely by the shoulder.

The uproar of the Works seemed to hush for an instant, while the lad
stammered faintly,--

"There's somebody carried off in the ice by Skerrett's Point. It looks
like a woman. And there's nobody to help."

CHAPTER XII.

IN THE ICE.

"Help! help!" shouted the four triphammers, bursting in like a magnified
echo of the boy's last word.

"Help! help!" all the humming wheels and drums repeated more
plaintively.

Wade made for the river.

This was the moment all his manhood had been training and saving for.
For this he had kept sound and brave from his youth up.

As he ran, he felt that the only chance of instant help was in that
queer little bowl-shaped skiff of the "Ambuster."

He had never been conscious that he had observed it; but the image
had lain latent in his mind, biding its time. It might be ten, twenty
precious moments before another boat could be found. This one was on the
spot to do its duty at once.

"Somebody carried off,--perhaps a woman," Wade thought. "Not--No, she
would not neglect my warning! Whoever it is, we must save her from this
dreadful death!"

He sprang on board the little steamboat. She was swaying uneasily at her
moorings, as the ice crowded along and hammered against her stem. Wade
stared from her deck down the river, with all his life at his eyes.

More than a mile away, below the hemlock-crested point, was the dark
object Perry had seen, still stirring along the edges of the floating
ice. A broad avenue of leaden-green water wrinkled by the cold wind
separated the field where this figure was moving from the shore. Dark
object and its footing of gray ice were drifting deliberately farther
and farther away.

For one instant Wade thought that the terrible dread in his heart would
paralyze him. But in that one moment, while his blood stopped flowing
and his nerves failed, Bill Tarbos overtook him and was there by his
side.

"I brought your cap," says Bill, "and our two coats."

Wade put on his cap mechanically. This little action calmed him.

"Bill," said he, "I'm afraid it is a woman,--a dear friend of mine,--a
very dear friend."

Bill, a lover, understood the tone.

"We'll take care of her between us," he said.

The two turned at once to the little tub of a boat.

Oars? Yes,--slung under the thwarts,--a pair of short sculls, worn and
split, but with work in them still. There they hung ready,--and a rusty
boat-hook, besides.

"Find the thole-pins, Bill, while I cut a plug for her bottom out of
this broomstick," Wade said.

This was done in a moment. Bill threw in the coats.

"Now, together!"

They lifted the skiff to the gangway. Wade jumped down on the ice and
received her carefully. They ran her along, as far as they could go, and
launched her in the sludge.

"Take the sculls, Bill. I'll work the boat-hook in the bow."

Nothing more was said. They thrust out with their crazy little craft
into the thick of the ice-flood. Bill, amidships, dug with his sculls
in among the huddled cakes. It was clumsy pulling. Now this oar and now
that would be thrown out. He could never get a full stroke.

Wade in the bow could do better. He jammed the blocks aside with his
boat-hook. He dragged the skiff forward. He steered through the little
open ways of water.

Sometimes they came to a broad sheet of solid ice. Then it was "Out with
her, Bill!" and they were both out and sliding their bowl so quick
over, that they had not time to go through the rotten surface. This was
drowning business; but neither could be spared to drown yet.

In the leads of clear water, the oarsman got brave pulls and sent the
boat on mightily. Then again in the thick porridge of brash ice they
lost headway, or were baffled and stopped among the cakes. Slow work,
slow and painful; and for many minutes they seemed to gain nothing upon
the steady flow of the merciless current.

A frail craft for such a voyage, this queer little half-pumpkin! A frail
and leaky shell. She bent and cracked from stem to stern among the
nipping masses. Water oozed in through her dry seams. Any moment a
rougher touch or a sharper edge might cut her through. But that was a
risk they had accepted. They did not take time to think of it, nor to
listen to the crunching and crackling of the hungry ice around. They
urged straight on, steadily, eagerly, coolly, spending and saving
strength.

Not one moment to lose! The shattering of broad sheets of ice around
them was a warning of what might happen to the frail support of their
chase. One thrust of the boat-hook sometimes cleft a cake that to the
eye seemed stout enough to bear a heavier weight than a woman's.

Not one moment to spare! The dark figure, now drifted far below the
hemlocks of the Point, no longer stirred. It seemed to have sunk upon
the ice and to be resting there weary and helpless, on one side a wide
way of lurid water, on the other half a mile of moving desolation.

Far to go, and no time to waste!

"Give way, Bill! Give way!"

"Ay, ay!"

Both spoke in low tones, hardly louder than the whisper of the ice
around them.

By this time hundreds from the Foundry and the village were swarming
upon the wharf and the steamboat.

"A hunderd tar-barrels wouldn't git up my steam in time to do any good,"
says Cap'n Ambuster. "If them two in my skiff don't overhaul the man,
he's gone."

"You're sure it's a man?" says Smith Wheelwright.

"Take a squint through my glass. I'm dreffully afeard it's a gal; but
suthin's got into my eye, so I can't see."

Suthin' had got into the old fellow's eye,--suthin' saline and
acrid,--namely, a tear.

"It's a woman," says Wheelwright,--and suthin' of the same kind blinded
him also.

Almost sunset now. But the air was suddenly filled with perplexing
snow-dust from a heavy squall. A white curtain dropped between the
anxious watchers on the wharf and the boatmen.

The same white curtain hid the dark floating object from its pursuers.
There was nothing in sight to steer by, now.

Wade steered by his last glimpse,--by the current,--by the rush of the
roaring wind,--by instinct.

How merciful that in such a moment a man is spared the agony of thought!
His agony goes into action, intense as life.

It was bitterly cold. A swash of ice-water filled the bottom of the
skiff. She was low enough down without that. They could not stop to
bail, and the miniature icebergs they passed began to look significantly
over the gunwale. Which would come to the point of foundering first, the
boat or the little floe it aimed for?

Bitterly cold! The snow hardly melted upon Tarbox's bare hands. His
fingers stiffened to the oars; but there was life in them still, and
still he did his work, and never turned to see how the steersman was
doing his.

A flight of crows came sailing with the snow-squall. They alighted all
about on the hummocks, and curiously watched the two men battling to
save life. One black impish bird, more malignant or more sympathetic
than his fellows, ventured to poise on the skiff's stern!

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