Flamsted quarries Part 1

Flamsted quarries.

by Mary E. Waller.

"_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 the 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, River, 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 teakwood 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, the friendless, the home-welcomed, the homeless--all commingled.

But an official routine soon sorts, separates, pairs, locates; speaks in Norwegian, speaks in Neapolitan. An hour pa.s.ses; 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 wails, 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 mult.i.tude of river craft throw quivering rays along the slow gla.s.sy 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 had 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 half-veiling, half-disclosing the imposing entrance-porch of a marble church. The doors were closed; the edifice dark. As the eyes of the onlookers became accustomed to the half-lights, they were aware of a huddle of clothes against 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 m.u.f.fled.

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 ent.i.ty, 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 gallery leaned to catch every word of "The Holy City."

She sang straight on, verse after verse without pause. 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 evermore_" rang upward, there was audible from above a long-drawn universal "Ah!" of satisfaction.

It was followed by a half minute of silence that was expressive of latent enthusiasm. The child was still waiting at the footlights, evidently for the expected applause from the higher lat.i.tudes. 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 approbation 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 floors, balconies, boxes; they answered, as it were, antiphonally. Faces were seen peeking from the wings; hands were visible there, clapping frantically. 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 against 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 wings, there was being enacted a scene which if slightly less tumultuous in 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 j.a.panese 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 c.o.o.n 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 m.u.f.fling 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 s.p.a.ces 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 she 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 G.o.ds 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 c.o.o.n dance the like of which was not to be seen elsewhere in New York; for into it the child 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 should look upon itself as cheated and protest, or submit quietly to being coerced 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 woollen 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 a.s.sociation, 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 have a revelation of new experiences; we find ourselves in subjection to new influences of before unknown personalities; we perceive the opening-up of 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 natural, 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 profound 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 which 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 Elysee _cafe 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 pa.s.sing throng.

The crowd thinned gradually; the priest pa.s.sed 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.