The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862

But we must bring this long paper to a close. We cannot give to it the interest which comes from personal recollections. We saw Cooper once, and but once. This was the very year before he died, in his own home, and amid the scenes which his genius has made immortal. It was a bright midsummer’s day, and we walked together about the village, and around the shores of the lake over which the canoe of Indian John had glided. His own aspect was as sunny as that of the smiling heavens above us; age had not touched him with its paralyzing finger: his vigorous frame, elastic step, and animated glance gave promise of twenty years more of energetic life. His sturdy figure, healthy face, and a slight bluffness of manner reminded one more of his original profession than of the life and manners of a man of letters. He looked like a man who had lived much in the open air,—upon whom the rain had fallen, and against whom the wind had blown. His conversation was hearty, spontaneous, and delightful from its frankness and fulness, but it was not pointed or brilliant; you remembered the healthy ring of the words, but not the words themselves. We recollect, that, as we were standing together on the shores of the lake,—shores which are somewhat tame, and a lake which can claim no higher epithet than that of pretty,—he said: “I suppose it would be patriotic to say that this is finer than Como, but we know that it is not.” We found a chord of sympathy in our common impressions of the beauty of Sorrento, about which, and his residence there, he spoke with contagious animation. Who could have thought that that rich and abundant life was so near its close? Nothing could be more thoroughly satisfying than the impression he left in this brief and solitary interview. His air and movement revealed the same manly, brave, true-hearted, warm-hearted man that is imaged in his books. Grateful are we for the privilege of having seen, spoken with, and taken by the hand the author of “The Pathfinder” and “The Pilot”: “it is a pleasure to have seen a great man.” Distinctly through the gathering mists of years do his face and form rise up before the mind’s eye: an image of manly self-reliance, of frank courage, of generous impulse; a frank friend, an open enemy; a man whom many misunderstood, but whom no one could understand without honoring and loving.

PER TENEBRAS, LUMINA

I know how, through the golden hoursWhen summer sunlight floods the deep,The fairest stars of all the heavenClimb up, unseen, the effulgent steep.Orion girds him with a flame;And, king-like, from the eastward seas,Comes Aldebaran, with his trainOf Hyades and Pleiades.In far meridian pride, the TwinsBuild, side by side, their luminous thrones;And Sirius and Procyon pourA splendor that the day disowns.And stately Leo, undismayed,With fiery footstep tracks the Sun,To plunge adown the western blaze,Sublimely lost in glories won.I know, if I were called to keepPale morning watch with Grief and Pain,Mine eyes should see their gathering mightRise grandly through the gloom again.And when the Winter Solstice holdsIn his diminished path the Sun,—When hope, and growth, and joy are o’er,And all our harvesting is done,—When, stricken, like our mortal Life,Darkened and chill, the Year lays downThe summer beauty that she wore,Her summer stars of Harp and Crown,—Thick trooping with their golden treadThey come, as nightfall fills the sky,Those strong and solemn sentinels,To hold their mightier watch on high.Ah, who shall shrink from dark and cold,Or fear the sad and shortening days,Since God doth only so unfoldThe wider glory to his gaze?Since loyal Truth, and holy Trust,And kingly Strength defying Pain,Stern Courage, and sure BrotherhoodAre born from out the depths again?Dear Country of our love and pride!So is thy stormy winter given!So, through the terrors that betide,Look up, and hail thy kindling heaven!

LOVE AND SKATES

IN TWO PARTS

PART I

CHAPTER I.

A KNOT AND A MAN TO CUT IT

Consternation! Consternation in the back office of Benjamin Brummage, Esq., banker in Wall Street.

Yesterday down came Mr. Superintendent Whiffler, from Dunderbunk, up the North River, to say, that, “unless something be done, at once, the Dunderbunk Foundry and Iron-Works must wind up.” President Brummage forthwith convoked his Directors. And here they sat around the green table, forlorn as the guests at a Barmecide feast.

Well they might be forlorn! It was the rosy summer solstice, the longest and fairest day of all the year. But rose-color and sunshine had fled from Wall Street. Noisy Crisis towing black Panic, as a puffing steam-tug drags a three-decker cocked and primed for destruction, had suddenly sailed in upon Credit.

As all the green inch-worms vanish on the tenth of every June, so on the tenth of that June all the money in America had buried itself and was as if it were not. Everybody and everything was ready to fail. If the hindmost brick went, down would go the whole file.

There were ten Directors of the Dunderbunk Foundry.

Now, not seldom, of a Board of ten Directors, five are wise and five are foolish: five wise, who bag all the Company’s funds in salaries and commissions for indorsing its paper; five foolish, who get no salaries, no commissions, no dividends,—nothing, indeed, but abuse from the stockholders, and the reputation of thieves. That is to say, five of the ten are pick-pockets; the other five, pockets to be picked.

It happened that the Dunderbunk Directors were all honest and foolish but one. He, John Churm, honest and wise, was off at the West, with his Herculean shoulders at the wheels of a dead-locked railroad. These honest fellows did not wish Dunderbunk to fail for several reasons. First, it was not pleasant to lose their investment. Second, one important failure might betray Credit to Crisis with Panic at its heels, whereupon every investment would be in danger. Third, what would become of their Directorial reputations? From President Brummage down, each of these gentlemen was one of the pockets to be picked in a great many companies. Each was of the first Wall-Street fashion, invited to lend his name and take stock in every new enterprise. Any one of them might have walked down town in a long patchwork toga made of the newspaper advertisements of boards in which his name proudly figured. If Dunderbunk failed, the toga was torn, and might presently go to rags beyond repair. The first rent would inaugurate universal rupture. How to avoid this disaster?—that was the question.

“State the case, Mr. Superintendent Whiffler,” said President Brummage, in his pompous manner, with its pomp a little collapsed, pro tempore.

Inefficient Whiffler whimpered out his story.

The confessions of an impotent executive are sorry stuff to read. Whiffler’s long, dismal complaint shall not be repeated. He had taken a prosperous concern, had carried on things in his own way, and now failure was inevitable. He had bought raw material lavishly, and worked it badly into half-ripe material, which nobody wanted to buy. He was in arrears to his hands. He had tried to bully them, when they asked for their money. They had insulted him, and threatened to knock off work, unless they were paid at once. “A set of horrid ruffians,” Whiffler said,—“and his life wouldn’t be safe many days among them.”

“Withdraw, if you please, Mr. Superintendent,” President Brummage requested. “The Board will discuss measures of relief.”

The more they discussed, the more consternation. Nobody said anything to the purpose, except Mr. Sam Gwelp, his late father’s lubberly son and successor.

“Blast!” said he; “we shall have to let it slide!”

Into this assembly of imbeciles unexpectedly entered Mr. John Churm. He had set his Western railroad trains rolling, and was just returned to town. Now he was ready to put those Herculean shoulders at any other bemired and rickety no-go-cart.

Mr. Churm was not accustomed to be a Director in feeble companies. He came into Dunderbunk recently as executor of his friend Damer, a year ago bored to death by a silly wife.

Churm’s bristly aspect and incisive manner made him a sharp contrast to Brummage. The latter personage was flabby in flesh, and the oppressively civil counter-jumper style of his youth had grown naturally into a deportment of most imposing pomposity.

The Tenth Director listened to the President’s recitative of their difficulties, chorused by the Board.

“Gentlemen,” said Director Churm, “you want two things. The first is Money!”

He pronounced this cabalistic word with such magic power that all the air seemed instantly filled with a cheerful flight of gold American eagles, each carrying a double eagle on its back and a silver dollar in its claws; and all the soil of America seemed to sprout with coin, as after a shower a meadow sprouts with the yellow buds of the dandelion.

“Money! yes, Money!” murmured the Directors.

It seemed a word of good omen, now.

“The second thing,” resumed the newcomer, “is a Man!”

The Directors looked at each other and did not see such a being.

“The actual Superintendent of Dunderbunk is a dunderhead,” said Churm.

“Pun!” cried Sam Gwelp, waking up from a snooze.

Several of the Directors, thus instructed, started a complimentary laugh.

“Order, gentlemen! Orrderr!” said the President, severely, rapping with a paper-cutter.

“We must have a Man, not a Whiffler!” Churm continued. “And I have one in my eye.”

Everybody examined his eye.

“Would you be so good as to name him?” said Old Brummage, timidly.

He wanted to see a Man, but feared the strange creature might be dangerous.

“Richard Wade,” says Churm. They did not know him. The name sounded forcible.

“He has been in California,” the nominator said.

A shudder ran around the green table. They seemed to see a frowzy desperado, shaggy as a bison, in a red shirt and jackboots, hung about the waist with an assortment of six-shooters and bowie-knives, and standing against a background of mustangs, monte-banks, and lynch-law.

“We must get Wade,” Churm says, with authority. “He knows Iron by heart. He can handle Men. I will back him with my blank check, to any amount, to his order.”

Here a murmur of applause, swelling to a cheer, burst from the Directors.

Everybody knew that the Geological Bank deemed Churm’s deposits the fundamental stratum of its wealth. They lay there in the vaults, like underlying granite. When hot times came, they boiled up in a mountain to buttress the world.

Churm’s blank check seemed to wave in the air like an oriflamme of victory. Its payee might come from Botany Bay; he might wear his beard to his knees, and his belt stuck full of howitzers and boomerangs; he might have been repeatedly hung by Vigilance Committees, and as often cut down and revived by galvanism; but brandishing that check, good for anything less than a million, every Director in Wall Street was his slave, his friend, and his brother.

“Let us vote Mr. Wade in by acclamation,” cried the Directors.

“But, gentlemen,” Churm interposed, “if I give him my blank check, he must have carte blanche, and no one to interfere in his management.”

Every Director, from President Brummage down, drew a long face at this condition.

It was one of their great privileges to potter in the Dunderbunk affairs and propose ludicrous impossibilities.

“Just as you please,” Churm continued. “I name a competent man, a gentleman and fine fellow. I back him with all the cash he wants. But he must have his own way. Now take him, or leave him!”

Such despotic talk had never been heard before in that Directors’ Room. They relucted a moment. But they thought of their togas of advertisements in danger. The blank check shook its blandishments before their eyes.

“We take him,” they said, and Richard Wade was the new Superintendent unanimously.

“He shall be at Dunderbunk to take hold to-morrow morning,” said Churm, and went off to notify him.

Upon this, Consternation sailed out of the hearts of Brummage and associates.

They lunched with good appetites over the green table, and the President confidently remarked,—

“I don’t believe there is going much of a crisis, after all.”

CHAPTER II.

BARRACKS FOR THE HERO

Wade packed his kit, and took the Hudson-River train for Dunderbunk the same afternoon.

He swallowed his dust, he gasped for his fresh air, he wept over his cinders, he refused his “lozengers,” he was admired by all the pretty girls and detested by all the puny men in the train, and in good time got down at his station.

He stopped on the platform to survey the land—and water-privileges of his new abode.

“The June sunshine is unequalled,” he soliloquized, “the river is splendid, the hills are pretty, and the Highlands, north, respectable; but the village has gone to seed. Place and people look lazy, vicious, and ashamed. I suppose those chimneys are my Foundry. The smoke rises as if the furnaces were ill-fed and weak in the lungs. Nothing, I can see, looks alive, except that queer little steamboat coming in,—the ‘I. Ambuster,’—jolly name for a boat!”

Wade left his traps at the station, and walked through the village. All the gilding of a golden sunset of June could not make it anything but commonplace. It would be forlorn on a gray day, and utterly dismal in a storm.

“I must look up a civilized house to lodge in,” thought the stranger. “I cannot possibly camp at the tavern. Its offence is rum, and smells to heaven.”

Presently our explorer found a neat, white, two-story, home-like abode on the upper street, overlooking the river.

“This promises,” he thought. “Here are roses on the porch, a piano, or at least a melodeon, by the parlor-window, and they are insured in the Mutual, as the Mutual’s plate announces. Now, if that nice-looking person in black I see setting a table in the back-room is a widow, I will camp here.”

Perry Purtett was the name on the door, and opposite the sign of an omnium-gatherum country-store hinted that Perry was deceased. The hint was a broad one. Wade read, “Ringdove, Successor to late P. Purtett.”

“It’s worth a try to get in here out of the pagan barbarism around. I’ll propose—as a lodger—to the widow.”

So said Wade, and rang the bell under the roses. A pretty, slim, delicate, fair-haired maiden answered.

“This explains the roses and the melodeon,” thought Wade, and asked, “Can I see your mother?”

Mamma came. “Mild, timid, accustomed to depend on the late Perry, and wants a friend,” Wade analyzed, while he bowed. He proposed himself as a lodger.

“I didn’t know it was talked of generally,” replied the widow, plaintively; “but I have said that we felt lonesome, Mr. Purtett bein’ gone, and if the new minister”—

Here she paused. The cut of Wade’s jib was unclerical. He did not stoop, like a new minister. He was not pallid, meagre, and clad in unwholesome black, like the same. His bronzed face was frank and bold and unfamiliar with speculations on Original Sin or Total Depravity.

“I am not the new minister,” said Wade, smiling slightly over his moustache; “but a new Superintendent for the Foundry.”

“Mr. Whiffler is goin’?” exclaimed Mrs. Purtett.

She looked at her daughter, who gave a little sob and ran out of the room.

“What makes my daughter Belle feel bad,” says the widow, “is, that she had a friend,—well, it isn’t too much to say that they was as good as engaged,—and he was foreman of the Foundry finishin’-shop. But somehow Whiffler spoilt him, just as he spoils everything he touches; and last winter, when Belle was away, William Tarbox—that’s his name, and his head is runnin’ over with inventions—took to spreein’ and liquor, and got ashamed of himself, and let down from a foreman to a hand, and is all the while lettin’ down lower.”

The widow’s heart thus opened, Wade walked in as consoler. This also opened the lodgings to him. He was presently installed in the large and small front-rooms up-stairs, unpacking his traps, and making himself permanently at home.

Superintendent Whiffler came over, by-and-by, to see his successor. He did not like his looks. The new man should have looked mean or weak or rascally, to suit the outgoer.

“How long do you expect to stay?” asks Whiffler, with a half-sneer, watching Wade hanging a map and a print vis-à-vis.

“Until the men and I, or the Company and I, cannot pull together.”

“I’ll give you a week to quarrel with both, and another to see the whole concern go to everlasting smash. And now, if you’re ready, I’ll go over the accounts with you and prove it.”

Whiffler himself, insolent, cowardly, and a humbug, if not a swindler, was enough, Wade thought, to account for any failure. But he did not mention this conviction.

CHAPTER III.

HOW TO BEHEAD A HYDRA!

At ten next morning, Whiffler handed over the safe-key to Wade, and departed to ruin some other property, if he could get one to ruin. Wade walked with him to the gate.

“I’m glad to be out of a sinking ship,” said the ex-boss. “The Works will go down, sure as shooting. And I think myself well out of the clutches of these men. They’re a bullying, swearing, drinking set of infernal ruffians. Foremen are just as bad as hands. I never felt safe of my life with ‘em.”

“A bad lot, are they?” mused Wade, as he returned to the office. “I must give them a little sharp talk by way of Inaugural.”

He had the bell tapped and the men called together in the main building.

Much work was still going on in an inefficient, unsystematic way.

While hot fires were roaring in the great furnaces, smoke rose from the dusty beds where Titanic castings were cooling. Great cranes, manacled with heavy chains, stood over the furnace-doors, ready to lift steaming jorums of melted metal, and pour out, hot and hot, for the moulds to swallow.

Raw material in big heaps lay about, waiting for the fire to ripen it. Here was a stack of long, rough, rusty pigs, clumsy as the shillelabs of the Anakim. There was a pile of short, thick masses, lying higgledy-piggledy, stuff from the neighboring mines, which needed to be crossed with foreign stock before it could be of much use in civilization.

Here, too, was raw material organized: a fly-wheel, large enough to keep the knobbiest of asteroids revolving without a wabble; a cross-head, cross-tail, and piston-rod, to help a great sea-going steamer breast the waves; a light walking-beam, to whirl the paddles of a fast boat on the river; and other members of machines, only asking to be put together and vivified by steam and they would go at their work with a will.

From the black rafters overhead hung the heavy folds of a dim atmosphere, half dust, half smoke. A dozen sunbeams, forcing their way through the grimy panes of the grimy upper windows, found this compound quite palpable and solid, and they moulded out of it a series of golden bars set side by side aloft, like the pipes of an organ out of its perpendicular.

Wade grew indignant, as he looked about him and saw so much good stuff and good force wasting for want of a little will and skill to train the force and manage the stuff. He abhorred bankruptcy and chaos.

“All they want here is a head,” he thought.

He shook his own. The brain within was well developed with healthy exercise. It filled its case, and did not rattle like a withered kernel, or sound soft like a rotten one. It was a vigorous, muscular brain. The owner felt that he could trust it for an effort, as he could his lungs for a shout, his legs for a leap, or his fist for a knock-down argument.

At the tap of the bell, the “bad lot” of men came together. They numbered more than two hundred, though the Foundry was working short. They had been notified that “that gonoph of a Whiffler was kicked out, and a new feller was in, who looked cranky enough, and wanted to see ‘em and tell ‘em whether he was a damn’ fool or not.”

So all hands collected from the different parts of the Foundry to see the head.

They came up with easy and somewhat swaggering bearing,—a good many roughs, with here and there a ruffian. Several, as they approached, swung and tossed, for mere overplus of strength, the sledges with which they had been tapping at the bald shiny pates of their anvils. Several wielded their long pokers like lances.

Grimy chaps, all with their faces streaked, like Blackfeet in their warpaint. Their hairy chests showed, where some men parade elaborate shirt-bosoms. Some had their sleeves pushed up to the elbow to exhibit their compact flexors and extensors. Some had rolled their flannel up to the shoulder, above the bulging muscles of the upper arm. They wore aprons tied about the neck, like the bibs of our childhood,—or about the waist, like the coquettish articles which young housewives affect. But there was no coquetry in these great flaps of leather or canvas, and they were besmeared and rust-stained quite beyond any bib that ever suffered under bread-and-molasses or mud-pie treatment.

They lounged and swaggered up, and stood at ease, not without rough grace, in a sinuous line, coiled and knotted like a snake.

Ten feet back stood the new Hercules who was to take down that Hydra’s two hundred crests of insubordination.

They inspected him, and he them as coolly. He read and ticketed each man, as he came up,—good, bad, or on the fence,—and marked each so that he would know him among a myriad.

The Hands faced the Head. It was a question whether the two hundred or the one would be master in Dunderbunk.

Which was boss? An old question.

It has to be settled whenever a new man claims power, and there is always a struggle until it is fought out by main force of brain or muscle.

Wade had made up his mind on this subject. He waited a moment until the men were still. He was a Saxon six-footer of thirty. He stood easily on his pins, as if he had eyed men and facts before. His mouth looked firm, his brow freighted, his nose clipper,—that the hands could see. But clipper noses are not always backed by a stout hull. Seemingly freighted brows sometimes carry nothing but ballast and dunnage. The firmness may be all in the moustache, while the mouth hides beneath, a mere silly slit. All which the hands knew.

Wade began, short and sharp as a trip-hammer, when it has a bar to shape.

“I’m the new Superintendent. Richard Wade is my name. I rang the bell because I wanted to see you and have you see me. You know as well as I do that these Works are in a bad way. They can’t stay so. They must come up and pay you regular wages and the Company profits. Every man of you has got to be here on the spot when the bell strikes, and up to the mark in his work. You haven’t been,—and you know it. You’ve turned out rotten iron,—stuff that any honest shop would be ashamed of. Now there’s to be a new leaf turned over here. You’re to be paid on the nail; but you’ve got to earn your money. I won’t have any idlers or shirkers or rebels about me. I shall work hard myself, and every man of you will, or he leaves the shop. Now, if anybody has a complaint to make, I’ll hear him before you all.”

The men were evidently impressed with Wade’s Inaugural. It meant something. But they were not to be put down so easily, after long misrule. There began to be a whisper,—

“B’il in, Bill Tarbox! and talk up to him!”

Presently Bill shouldered forward and faced the new ruler.

Since Bill took to drink and degradation, he had been the butt-end of riot and revolt at the Foundry. He had had his own way with Whiffler. He did not like to abdicate and give in to this new chap without testing him.

In a better mood, Bill would have liked Wade’s looks and words; but today he had a sore head, a sour face, and a bitter heart from last night’s spree. And then he had heard—it was as well known already in Dunderbunk as if the town-crier had cried it—that Wade was lodging at Mrs. Purtett’s, where poor Bill was excluded. So Bill stepped forward as spokesman of the ruffianly element, and the immoral force gathered behind and backed him heavily.

Tarbox, too, was a Saxon six-footer of thirty. But he had sagged one inch for want of self-respect. He had spoilt his color and dyed his moustache. He wore foxy-black pantaloons tucked into red-topped boots, with the name of the maker on a gilt shield. His red flannel shirt was open at the neck and caught with a black handkerchief. His damaged tile was in permanent crape for the late lamented Poole.