Flamsted quarries

Mary E. (Mary Ella) Waller

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• Publié par: vaum
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 90
• Langue: English

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Flamsted quarries, by Mary E. Waller

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Title: Flamsted quarries

Author: Mary E. Waller

Illustrator: G. Patrick Nelson

Release Date: November 30, 2007 [EBook #23664]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

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Flamsted Quarries

BY MARY E. WALLER

Author of "The Wood Carver of Lympus," "The Daughter of the Rich," "The Little Citizen," etc.

W ITH F O UR I LLUSTRATIO NS B Y G. PATRICK NELSON

A. L. BURT COMPANY P UBLISHERS N EW Y O RK

Copyright, 1910, B Y M ARY E. W ALLER

Published September, 1910

Reprinted, September, 1910; November, 1910; December, 1910

TO THOSE WHO TOIL

"She sang straight on, verse after verse without pause"

Contents

T HE B ATTERYIN L IEUO FA P REFACE P ART F IRST , A C HILDFRO MTHE V AUDEVILLE P ART S ECO ND , H O ME S O IL P ART T HIRD , I NTHE S TREAM P ART F O URTH , O BLIVIO N P ART F IFTH , S HED N UMBER T WO T HE L AST W O RD

A. L. Burt Company's Popular Copyright Fiction.

Illustrations

"She sang straight on, verse after verse without pause"

"Those present loved in after years to recall this scene"

"What a picture she made leaning caressingly against the charmed and patient Bess"

"'Unworthy—unworthy!' was Champney Googe's cry, as he knelt before Aileen"

FLAMSTED QUARRIES

"Abysmal deeps repose Beneath the stout ship's keel whereon we glide; And if a diver plunge far down within Those depths and to the surface safe return, His smile, if so it chance he smile again, Outweighs in worth all gold."

The Battery in Lieu of a Preface

A few years ago, at the very tip of that narrow rocky strip of land that has been well named "the Tongue that laps the Commerce of th e World," the million- teeming Island of Manhattan, there was daily presented a scene in the life- drama of our land that held in itself, as in solution, a great national ideal. The old heroic "Epic of the Nations" was still visible to the naked eye, and masquerading here among us of the then nineteenth century in the guise of the arrival of the immigrant ship.

The scenic setting is in this instance incomparably fine. As we lean on the coping of the sea wall at the end of the green-swarded Battery, in the flush of a May sunset that, on the right, throws the Highlands of the Navesink into dark purple relief and lights the waters of Harbor, Rive r, and Sound into a softly swelling roseate flood, we may fix our eyes on the approach to The Narrows and watch the incoming shipping of the world: the fruit-laden steamer from the Bermudas, the black East Indiaman heavy with teakwo od and spices, the lumberman's barge awash behind the tow, the old three-masted schooner, low in the water, her decks loaded with granite from the far-away quarries of Maine. We may see, if we linger, the swift approach of a curiously foreshortened ocean steamship, her smokestack belching blackness, and the slower on-coming of a Norwegian bark, her sails catching the sunset light and gleaming opaline against the clear blue of the southern horizon. These last are the immigrant

ships.

An hour later in old Castle Garden the North and South of Europe clasp hands on the very threshold of America. Four thousand feet are planted on the soil of the New World. Four thousand hands are knocking at its portals. Two thousand hearts are beating high with hope at prospect of the New, or palpitating with terror at contact with the Strange.

A thousand tragedies, a thousand comedies are here enacted before our very eyes: hopes, fears, tears, laughter, shrieks, groans, wailings, exultant cries, welcoming words, silent all-expressing hand-clasp, embrace, despairing wide- eyed search, hopeless isolation, the befriended, th e friendless, the home- welcomed, the homeless—all commingled.

But an official routine soon sorts, separates, pair s, locates; speaks in Norwegian, speaks in Neapolitan. An hour passes; the dusk falls; the doors are opened; the two thousand, ticketed, labelled, are to enter upon the new life. The confusing chatter grows less and less. A child wail s, and is hushed in soft Italian—a Neapolitan lullaby—by its mother as she sits on a convenient bench and for the first time gives her little one the breast in a strange land. An old Norwegian, perhaps a lineal descendant of our Viking visitors some thousand years ago, makes his way to the door, bent beneath a sack-load of bedding; his right hand holds his old wife's left. They are the last to leave.

The dusk has fallen. To the sea wall again for air after the thousands of garlic- reeking breaths in old Castle Garden. The sea is dark. The heavens are deep indigo; against them flashes the Liberty beacon; within them are set the Eternal Lights. Upon the waters of the harbor the illumined cabin windows of a multitude of river craft throw quivering rays along the slow glassy swell.

For a moment on River, and Harbor, and Sound, there is silence. But behind us we hear the subdued roar and beat of the metropolis, a sound comparable to naught else on earth or in heaven: the mighty systole and dyastole of a city's heart, and the tramp, tramp of a million homeward bound toilers—the marching tune of Civilization's hosts, to which the feet of the newly arrived immigrants are already keeping time, for they have crossed the threshold of old Castle Garden and entered the New World.

PART FIRST

A Child from the Vaudeville

I

The performance in itself was crude and commonplace, but the demonstration in regard to it was unusual. Although this scene ha d been enacted both afternoon and evening for the past six weeks, the audience at the Vaudeville

was showing its appreciation by an intent silence.

The curtain had risen upon a street scene in the metropolis at night. Snow was falling, dimming the gas jets at the corner and hal f-veiling, half-disclosing the imposing entrance-porch of a marble church. The doo rs were closed; the edifice dark. As the eyes of the onlookers became a ccustomed to the half- lights, they were aware of a huddle of clothes agai nst the iron railing that outlined the curve of the three broad entrance-steps. As vision grew keener the form of a child was discernible, a little match girl who was lighting one by one a few matches and shielding the flame with both hands from the draught. Suddenly she looked up and around. The rose window above the porch was softly illumined; the light it emitted transfused the thickly falling snow. Low organ tones became audible, although distant and muffled.

The child rose; came down the centre of the stage to the lowered footlights and looked about her, first at the orchestra, then around and up at the darkened house that was looking intently at her—a small ill-clad human, a spiritual entity, the only reality in this artificial setting. She grasped her package of matches in both hands; listened a moment as if to catch the low organ tones, then began to sing.

She sang as a bird sings, every part of her in motion: throat, eyes, head, body. The voice was clear, loud, full, strident, at times, on the higher notes from over- exertion, but always childishly appealing. The gall ery leaned to catch every word of "The Holy City."

She sang straight on, verse after verse without pau se. There was no modulation, no phrasing, no interpretation; it was merely a steady fortissimo outpouring of a remarkable volume of tone for so small an instrument. And the full power of it was, to all appearance, sent upwards with intent to the gallery. In any case, the gallery took the song unto itself, and as the last words, "Hosanna for evermoredrawn" rang upward, there was audible from above a long- universal "Ah!" of satisfaction.

It was followed by a half minute of silence that wa s expressive of latent enthusiasm. The child was still waiting at the footlights, evidently for the expected applause from the higher latitudes. And the gallery responded—how heartily, those who were present have never forgotten: roar upon roar, call upon call, round after round of applause, cries of appro bation couched in choice Bowery slang, a genuine stampede that shook the spectators in their seats. It was an irresistible, insatiable, unappeasable, overwhelming clamor for more. The infection of enthusiasm was communicated to flo ors, balconies, boxes; they answered, as it were, antiphonally. Faces were seen peeking from the wings; hands were visible there, clapping frantical ly. In the midst of the tumultuous uproar the little girl smiled brightly and ran off the stage.

The lights were turned on. A drop-scene fell; the stage was transformed, for, in the middle distance, swelling green hills rose agai nst a soft blue sky seen between trees in the foreground. Sunshine lay on the landscape, enhancing the haze in the distance and throwing up the hills more prominently against it. The cries and uproar continued.

Meanwhile, in the common dressing-room beyond the w ings, there was being

enacted a scene which if slightly less tumultuous i n expression was considerably more dangerous in quality. A quick word went the round of the stars' private rooms; it penetrated to the sanctum of the Japanese wrestlers; it came to the ear of the manager himself: "The Little Patti's struck!" It sounded ominous, and, thereupon, the Vaudeville flocked to the dressing-room door to see—what? Merely a child in a tantrum, a heap of rags on the floor, a little girl in white petticoats stamping, dancing, pulling away from an old Italian woman who was trying to robe her and exhorting, imploring, threatening the child in almost one and the same breath.

The manager rushed to the rescue for the house was losing its head. He seized the child by the arm. "What's the matter here, Aileen?"

"I ain't goin' ter dance a coon ter-night—not ter-night!" she cried defiantly and in intense excitement; "he's in the box again, an' I'm goin' to give him the Sunday- night song, like as I did before when he give me the flowers, so now!"

Nonna Lisa, the old Italian, slipped the white dress deftly over the mutinous head, so muffling the half-shriek. The manager laughed. "Hurry up then—on with you!" The child sprang away with a bound. "I've seen this too many times before," he added; "it's an attack of 'the last night's nerves.'—Hark!"

The tumult was drowning the last notes of the orchestral intermezzo, as the little girl, clad now wholly in white, ran in upon the stage and coming again down the centre raised her hand as if to command silence. With the gallery to see was to obey; the floor and balconies having subsided the applause from above died away.

The child, standing in the full glare of the footlights with the sunny skyey spaces and overlapping blue hills behind her, half-faced the brilliant house as, without accompaniment, she began to sing:

"There is a green hill far away Without a city wall."

The childish voice sustained the simple melody perfectly, and it was evident when the little girl began the second verse that sh e was singing wholly to please herself and some one in a proscenium box. Before the close of the first stanza the gallery experienced a turn, the audience as a whole a sensation. Night after night the gallery gods had made it a point to be present at that hour of the continuous performance when the Little Patti—such was the name on the poster—sang either her famous Irish song "Oh, the praties they are small", or "The Holy City", and followed them by a coon dance the like of which was not to be seen elsewhere in New York; for into it the c hild threw such an abandonment of enthusiasm that she carried herself and her audience to the verge of extravagance—the one in action, the other in expression.

And now this!

A woman sobbed outright at the close of the second verse. The gallery heard —it hated hysterics—and considered whether it shoul d look upon itself as cheated and protest, or submit quietly to being coe rced into approval. The scales had not yet turned, when someone far aloft drew a long breath in order to force it out between closed teeth, and this in sign of disapproval. That one

breath was, in truth, indrawn, but whether or no there was ever an outlet for the same remained a question with the audience. A wooll en cap was deftly and unexpectedly thrust between the malevolent lips and several pair of hands held it there until the little singer left the stage.

What appeal, if any, that childish voice, dwelling melodiously on the simple words, made to the audience as a whole, cannot be stated because unknown; but that it appealed powerfully by force of suggestion, by the power of imagination, by the law of association, by the startling contrast between the sentiment expressed and the environment of that expression, to three, at least, among the many present is a certainty.

There is such a thing in our national life—a constant process, although often unrecognized—as social anastomosis: the intercommunication by branch of every vein and veinlet of the politico-social body, and thereby the coming into touch of lives apparently alien. As a result we hav e a revelation of new experiences; we find ourselves in subjection to new influences of before unknown personalities; we perceive the opening-up o f new channels of communication between individual and individual as such. We comprehend that through it a great moral law is brought into operation both in the individual and the national life. And in recognition of this n atural, though oft hidden process, the fact that to three men in that audience—men whose life-lines, to all appearance, were divergent, whose aims and purposes were antipodal—the simple song made powerful appeal, and by means of that appeal they came in after life to comprehend something of the workings of this great natural law, need cause no wonderment, no cavilling at the so-called prerogative of fiction. The laws of Art are the laws of Life, read smaller on the obverse.

The child was singing the last stanza in so profoun d a silence that the fine snapping of an over-charged electric wire was distinctly heard:

"Oh, dearly, dearly has he loved And we must love him too, And trust in his redeeming blood, And try his works to do."

The little girl waited at the footlights for—something. She had done her best for an encore and the silence troubled her. She looked inquiringly towards the box. There was a movement of the curtains at the back; a messenger boy came in with flowers; a gentleman leaned over the railing and motioned to the child. She ran forward, holding up the skirt of her dress to catch the roses that were dropped into it. She smiled and said something. The tension in the audience gave a little; there was a low murmur of approval w hich increased to a buzz of conversation; the conductor raised his baton and the child with a courtesy ran off the stage. But there was no applause.

During the musical intermezzo that followed, the lower proscenium box was vacated and in the first balcony one among a crowd of students rose and made his way up the aisle.

"Lien's keller, Champ?" said a friend at the exit, putting a hand on his shoulder; "I'm with you."

"Not to-night." He shook off the detaining hand and kept on his way. The other stared after him, whistled low to himself and went down the aisle to the vacant seat.

At the main entrance of the theatre there was an incoming crowd. It was not late, only nine. The drawing-card at this hour was a famous Parisian singer of an Elyséecafé chantant. The young fellow stepped aside, beyond the ticket- office railing, to let the first force of the inrushing human stream exhaust itself before attempting egress for himself. In doing so he jostled rather roughly two men who were evidently of like mind with him in their desire to avoid the press. He lifted his hat in apology, and recognized one of them as the occupant of the proscenium box, the gentleman who had given the roses to the little singer. The other, although in citizen's dress, he saw by the tonsure was a priest.

The sight of such a one in that garb and that environment, diverted for the moment Champney Googe's thoughts from the child and her song. He scanned the erect figure of the man who, after immediate and courteous recognition of the other's apology, became oblivious, apparently, of his presence and intent upon the passing throng.

The crowd thinned gradually; the priest passed out under the arch of colored electric lights; the gentleman of the box, observing the look on the student's face, smiled worldly-wisely to himself as he, too, went down the crimson- carpeted incline. Champney Googe's still beardless lip had curled slightly as if his thought were a sneer.

II

The priest, after leaving the theatre, walked rapidly down Broadway past the marble church, that had been shown on the stage, and still straight on for two miles at the same rapid gait, past the quiet churchyards of St. Paul's and Trinity into the comparative silence of Battery Park and across to the sea wall. There he leaned for half an hour, reliving in memory not only the years since his seven-year old feet had crossed this threshold of the New World, but recalling something of his still earlier childhood in his native France. The child's song had been an excitant to the memory in recalling those first years in Auvergne.

"There is a green hill far away Without a city wall."

How clearly he saw that! and his peasant father and mother as laborers on or about it, and himself, a six-year old, tending the goats on that same green hill or minding the geese in the meadows at its foot.

All this he saw as he gazed blankly at the dark waters of the bay, saw clearly as if visioned in crystal. But of subsequent movings and wanderings there was a blurred reflection only, till the vision momentaril y brightened, the outlines defined themselves again as he saw his tired drowsy self put to bed in a tiny room that was filled with the fragrance of newly baked bread. He remembered the awakening in that small room over a bread-fille d shop; it belonged to a

distant great-uncle baker on the mother's side, a p ersonage in the family because in trade. He could remember the time spent in that same shop and the brick-walled, brick-floored, brick-ovened room behi nd it. He recalled having stood for hours, it might have been days, he could not remember—for then Time was forever and its passing of no moment—before the deep ovens with a tiny blue-eyed slip of a girl.P'tite Truite, Little Trout, they called her, the great- uncle baker's one grandchild.

And the shop—he remembered that, so light and bright and sweet and clean, with people coming and going—men and women and chil dren—and the crisp yard-long loaves carried away in shallow baskets on many a fine Norman head in the old seaport of Dieppe. And always the Little Trout was by his side, even when the great-uncle placed him in one of the huge flat-bottomed bread baskets and drew the two up and down in front of the shop. Then all was dim again; so dim that except for the lap and backward sucking of the waters against the sea wall, whereon he leaned, he had scarcely recalled a ship at the old pier of Dieppe, and the Little Trout standing beside her grandfather on the stringer, frantically waving her hand as the ship left her moorings and the prow nosed the first heavy channel sea that washed against the bulkhead and half- drowned her wailing cry:

"Jean—mon Jean!"

The rest was a blank until he landed here almost on this very spot in old Castle Garden and, holding hard by his father's hand, was bidden to look up at the flag flying from the pole at the top of the queer round building—a brave sight even for his young eyes: all the red and white and blue straining in the freshening wind with an energy of motion that made the boy dance in sympathetic joy at his father's side—

And what next?

Again a confusion of journeyings, and afterwards quiet settlement in a red brick box of a house in a mill town on the Merrimac. He could still hear the clang of the mill-gates, the ringing of the bells, the hum and whir and roar of a hundred thousand spindles, the clacking crash of the ponderous shifting frames. He could still see with the inner eye the hundreds of windows blazing in the reflected fires of the western sun, or twinkling with numberless lights that cast their long reflections on the black waters of the canal. There on the bank, at the entrance to the footbridge, the boy was wont to take his stand regularly at six o'clock of a winter's day, and wait for the hoistin g of the mill-gates and the coming of his father and mother with the throng of toilers.

So he saw himself—himself as an identity emerging at last from the confusion of time and place and circumstance; for there followed the public school, the joys of rivalry, the eager outrush for the boy's Ever New, the glory of scrimmage and school-boy sports, the battle royal for the little Auvergnat when taunted with the epithet "Johnny Frog" by the belligerent youth, American born, and the victorious outcome for the "foreigner"; the Auvergne blood was up, and the temperament volcanic like his native soil where subterranean heats evidence themselves in hot, out-welling waters. And afterwards, at home, there were congratulations and comfortings, plus applications of vinegar and brown butcher's paper to the severely smitten nose of thi s champion of his new

Americanhood. But at school and in the street, henc eforth there was due respect and a general atmosphere of "let bygones be bygones."

Ah, but the pride of his mother in her boy's progre ss! the joy over the first English-French letter that went to the great-uncle baker; the constant toil of both parents that the savings might be sufficient to educate their one child—that the son might have what the parents lacked. Already the mother had begun to speak of the priesthood: she might yet see her son Jean a priest, a bishop, and archbishop. Who could tell? America is America, and opportunities infinite—a cardinal, perhaps, and the gift of a red hat from the Pope, and robes and laces! There was no end to her ambitious dreaming.

But across the day-dreams fell the shadow of hard times: the shutting down of the mills, the father's desperate illness in a workless winter, his death in the early spring, followed shortly by that of the worn-out and ill-nourished mother —and for the twelve-year-old boy the abomination of desolation, and world and life seen dimly through tears. Dim, too, from the l ike cause, that strange passage across the ocean to Dieppe—his mother's uncle having sent for him to return—a weight as of lead in his stomach, a fiery throbbing in his young heart, a sickening craving for some expression of human love. The boyish tendrils, although touched in truth by spring frosts, were outreaching still for some object upon which to fasten; yet he shrank from human touch and sympathy on that voyage in the steerage lest in his grief and loneliness he scream aloud.

Dieppe again, and the Little Trout with her grandfather awaiting him on the pier; the Little Trout's arms about his neck in loving welcome, the boy's heart full to bursting and his eyelids reddened in his supreme effort to keep back tears. Dependent, an orphan, and destined for the priesthood—those were his life lines for the next ten years. And the end? Revolt, rebellion, partial crime, acquittal under the law, but condemnation before the tribunal of his conscience and his God.

There followed the longing to expiate, to expiate in that America where he was not known but where he belonged, where his parents' dust mingled with the soil; to flee to the Church as to a sanctuary of re fuge, to be priest through expiation. And this he had been for years while working among the Canadian rivermen, among the lumbermen of Maine, sharing their lives, their toil, their joys and sorrows, the common inheritance of the Human. For years subsequent to his Canadian mission, and after his naturalization as an American citizen, he worked in town and city, among high and low, rich and poor, recognizing in his catholicity of outlook but one human plane: that which may be tested by the spirit level of human needs. Now, at last, he was priest by conviction, by inner consecration.

He stood erect; drew a long full breath; squared hi s shoulders and looked around him. He noticed for the first time that a Staten Island ferryboat had moved into the slip near him; that several passengers were lingering to look at him; that a policeman was pacing behind him, his eye alert—and he smiled to himself, for he read their thought. He could not blame them for looking. He had fancied himself alone with the sea and the night an d his thoughts; had lost himself to his present surroundings in the memory o f those years; he had suffered again the old agony of passion, shame, guilt, while the events of that pregnant, preparatory period in France, etched deep with acid burnings into his

inmost consciousness, were passing during that half hour in review before his inner vision. Small wonder he was attracting attention!

He bared his head. A new moon was sinking to the Highlands of the Navesink. The May night was mild, the sea breeze drawing in with gentle vigor. He looked northwards up the Hudson, and southwards to the Lib erty beacon, and eastwards to the Sound. "God bless our Land" he murmured; then, covering his head, bowed courteously to the policeman and took his way across the Park to the up-town elevated station.

Yes, at last he dared assert it: he was priest by consecration; soul, heart, mind, body dedicate to the service of God through Humanity. That service led him always in human ways. A few nights ago he saw the poster: "The Little Patti". A child then? Thought bridged the abyss of ocean to the Little Trout. Some rescue work for him here, possibly; hence his presence in the theatre.

III

That the priest's effort to rescue the child from the artificial life of the stage had been in a measure successful, was confirmed by the presence, six months later, of the little girl in the yard of the Orphan Asylum on ——nd Street.

On an exceptionally dreary afternoon in November, had any one cared to look over the high board fence that bounds three sides of the Asylum yard, he might have seen an amazing sight and heard a still more amazing chorus:

"Little Sally Waters Sitting in the sun, Weeping and crying for a young man; Rise, Sally, rise, Sally, Wipe away your tears, Sally; Turn to the east And turn to the west, And turn to the one that you love best!"

Higher and higher the voices of the three hundred orphans shrilled in unison as the owners thereof danced frantically around a smal l solitary figure in the middle of the ring of girls assembled in the yard on ----nd Street. Her coarse blue denim apron was thrown over her head; her face was bowed into her hands that rested on her knees. It was a picture of woe.

The last few words "you love best" rose to a shriek of exhortation. In the expectant silence that followed, "Sally" rose, pirouetted in a fashion worthy of a ballet dancer, then, with head down, fists clenched, arms tight at her sides, she made a sudden dash to break through the encircling wall of girls. She succeeded in making a breach by knocking the legs of three of the tallest out from under them; but two or more dozen arms, octopus-like, caught and held her. For a few minutes chaos reigned: legs, arms, h ands, fingers, aprons, heads, stockings, hair, shoes of three hundred orph ans were seemingly inextricably entangled. A bell clanged. The three h undred disentangled