Twice-Told Tales (17 page)

I conceive, also, that these twenty years would appear in the
retrospect scarcely longer than the week to which Wakefield had at
first limited his absence. He would look on the affair as no more than
an interlude in the main business of his life. When, after a little
while more, he should deem it time to re-enter his parlor, his wife
would clap her hands for joy on beholding the middle-aged Mr.
Wakefield. Alas, what a mistake! Would Time but await the close of our
favorite follies, we should be young men—all of us—and till
Doomsday.

One evening, in the twentieth year since he vanished, Wakefield is
taking his customary walk toward the dwelling which he still calls his
own. It is a gusty night of autumn, with frequent showers that patter
down upon the pavement and are gone before a man can put up his
umbrella. Pausing near the house, Wakefield discerns through the
parlor-windows of the second floor the red glow and the glimmer and
fitful flash of a comfortable fire. On the ceiling appears a grotesque
shadow of good Mrs. Wakefield. The cap, the nose and chin and the
broad waist form an admirable caricature, which dances, moreover, with
the up-flickering and down-sinking blaze almost too merrily for the
shade of an elderly widow. At this instant a shower chances to fall,
and is driven by the unmannerly gust full into Wakefield's face and
bosom. He is quite penetrated with its autumnal chill. Shall he stand
wet and shivering here, when his own hearth has a good fire to warm
him and his own wife will run to fetch the gray coat and small-clothes
which doubtless she has kept carefully in the closet of their
bedchamber? No; Wakefield is no such fool. He ascends the
steps—heavily, for twenty years have stiffened his legs since he came
down, but he knows it not.—Stay, Wakefield! Would you go to the sole
home that is left you? Then step into your grave.—The door opens. As
he passes in we have a parting glimpse of his visage, and recognize
the crafty smile which was the precursor of the little joke that he
has ever since been playing off at his wife's expense. How
unmercifully has he quizzed the poor woman! Well, a good night's rest
to Wakefield!

This happy event—supposing it to be such—could only have occurred at
an unpremeditated moment. We will not follow our friend across the
threshold. He has left us much food for thought, a portion of which
shall lend its wisdom to a moral and be shaped into a figure. Amid the
seeming confusion of our mysterious world individuals are so nicely
adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that
by stepping aside for a moment a man exposes himself to a fearful risk
of losing his place for ever. Like Wakefield, he may become, as it
were, the outcast of the universe.

(SCENE,
the corner of two principal streets
,
[3]
the
TOWN-PUMP
talking through its nose
.)

Noon by the north clock! Noon by the east! High noon, too, by these
hot sunbeams, which full, scarcely aslope, upon my head and almost
make the water bubble and smoke in the trough under my nose. Truly,
we public characters have a tough time of it! And among all the
town-officers chosen at March meeting, where is he that sustains for a
single year the burden of such manifold duties as are imposed in
perpetuity upon the town-pump? The title of "town-treasurer" is
rightfully mine, as guardian of the best treasure that the town has.
The overseers of the poor ought to make me their chairman, since I
provide bountifully for the pauper without expense to him that pays
taxes. I am at the head of the fire department and one of the
physicians to the board of health. As a keeper of the peace all
water-drinkers will confess me equal to the constable. I perform some
of the duties of the town-clerk by promulgating public notices when
they are posted on my front. To speak within bounds, I am the chief
person of the municipality, and exhibit, moreover, an admirable
pattern to my brother-officers by the cool, steady, upright, downright
and impartial discharge of my business and the constancy with which I
stand to my post. Summer or winter, nobody seeks me in vain, for all
day long I am seen at the busiest corner, just above the market,
stretching out my arms to rich and poor alike, and at night I hold a
lantern over my head both to show where I am and keep people out of
the gutters. At this sultry noontide I am cupbearer to the parched
populace, for whose benefit an iron goblet is chained to my waist.
Like a dramseller on the mall at muster-day, I cry aloud to all and
sundry in my plainest accents and at the very tiptop of my voice.

Here it is, gentlemen! Here is the good liquor! Walk up, walk up,
gentlemen! Walk up, walk up! Here is the superior stuff! Here is the
unadulterated ale of Father Adam—better than Cognac, Hollands,
Jamaica, strong beer or wine of any price; here it is by the hogshead
or the single glass, and not a cent to pay! Walk up, gentlemen, walk
up, and help yourselves!

It were a pity if all this outcry should draw no customers. Here they
come.—A hot day, gentlemen! Quaff and away again, so as to keep
yourselves in a nice cool sweat.—You, my friend, will need another
cupful to wash the dust out of your throat, if it be as thick there as
it is on your cowhide shoes. I see that you have trudged half a score
of miles to-day, and like a wise man have passed by the taverns and
stopped at the running brooks and well-curbs. Otherwise, betwixt heat
without and fire within, you would have been burnt to a cinder or
melted down to nothing at all, in the fashion of a jelly-fish. Drink
and make room for that other fellow, who seeks my aid to quench the
fiery fever of last night's potations, which he drained from no cup of
mine.—Welcome, most rubicund sir! You and I have been great strangers
hitherto; nor, to confess the truth, will my nose be anxious for a
closer intimacy till the fumes of your breath be a little less potent.
Mercy on you, man! the water absolutely hisses down your red-hot
gullet and is converted quite to steam in the miniature Tophet which
you mistake for a stomach. Fill again, and tell me, on the word of an
honest toper, did you ever, in cellar, tavern, or any kind of a
dram-shop, spend the price of your children's food for a swig half so
delicious? Now, for the first time these ten years, you know the
flavor of cold water. Good-bye; and whenever you are thirsty, remember
that I keep a constant supply at the old stand.—Who next?—Oh, my
little friend, you are let loose from school and come hither to scrub
your blooming face and drown the memory of certain taps of the ferule,
and other schoolboy troubles, in a draught from the town-pump? Take
it, pure as the current of your young life. Take it, and may your
heart and tongue never be scorched with a fiercer thirst than now!
There, my dear child! put down the cup and yield your place to this
elderly gentleman who treads so tenderly over the paving-stones that I
suspect he is afraid of breaking them. What! he limps by without so
much as thanking me, as if my hospitable offers were meant only for
people who have no wine-cellars.—Well, well, sir, no harm done, I
hope? Go draw the cork, tip the decanter; but when your great toe
shall set you a-roaring, it will be no affair of mine. If gentlemen
love the pleasant titillation of the gout, it is all one to the
town-pump. This thirsty dog with his red tongue lolling out does not
scorn my hospitality, but stands on his hind legs and laps eagerly out
of the trough. See how lightly he capers away again!—Jowler, did your
worship ever have the gout?

Are you all satisfied? Then wipe your mouths, my good friends, and
while my spout has a moment's leisure I will delight the town with a
few historical remniscences. In far antiquity, beneath a darksome
shadow of venerable boughs, a spring bubbled out of the leaf-strewn
earth in the very spot where you now behold me on the sunny pavement.
The water was as bright and clear and deemed as precious as liquid
diamonds. The Indian sagamores drank of it from time immemorial till
the fatal deluge of the firewater burst upon the red men and swept
their whole race away from the cold fountains. Endicott and his
followers came next, and often knelt down to drink, dipping their long
beards in the spring. The richest goblet then was of birch-bark.
Governor Winthrop, after a journey afoot from Boston, drank here out
of the hollow of his hand. The elder Higginson here wet his palm and
laid it on the brow of the first town-born child. For many years it
was the watering-place, and, as it were, the washbowl, of the
vicinity, whither all decent folks resorted to purify their visages
and gaze at them afterward—at least, the pretty maidens did—in the
mirror which it made. On Sabbath-days, whenever a babe was to be
baptized, the sexton filled his basin here and placed it on the
communion-table of the humble meeting-house, which partly covered the
site of yonder stately brick one. Thus one generation after another
was consecrated to Heaven by its waters, and cast their waxing and
waning shadows into its glassy bosom, and vanished from the earth, as
if mortal life were but a flitting image in a fountain. Finally the
fountain vanished also. Cellars were dug on all sides and cart-loads
of gravel flung upon its source, whence oozed a turbid stream, forming
a mud-puddle at the corner of two streets. In the hot months, when its
refreshment was most needed, the dust flew in clouds over the
forgotten birthplace of the waters, now their grave. But in the course
of time a town-pump was sunk into the source of the ancient spring;
and when the first decayed, another took its place, and then another,
and still another, till here stand I, gentlemen and ladies, to serve
you with my iron goblet. Drink and be refreshed. The water is as pure
and cold as that which slaked the thirst of the red sagamore beneath
the aged boughs, though now the gem of the wilderness is treasured
under these hot stones, where no shadow falls but from the brick
buildings. And be it the moral of my story that, as this wasted and
long-lost fountain is now known and prized again, so shall the virtues
of cold water—too little valued since your fathers' days—be
recognized by all.

Your pardon, good people! I must interrupt my stream of eloquence and
spout forth a stream of water to replenish the trough for this
teamster and his two yoke of oxen, who have come from Topsfield, or
somewhere along that way. No part of my business is pleasanter than
the watering of cattle. Look! how rapidly they lower the water-mark on
the sides of the trough, till their capacious stomachs are moistened
with a gallon or two apiece and they can afford time to breathe it in
with sighs of calm enjoyment. Now they roll their quiet eyes around
the brim of their monstrous drinking-vessel. An ox is your true toper.

But I perceive, my dear auditors, that you are impatient for the
remainder of my discourse. Impute it, I beseech you, to no defect of
modesty if I insist a little longer on so fruitful a topic as my own
multifarious merits. It is altogether for your good. The better you
think of me, the better men and women you will find yourselves. I
shall say nothing of my all-important aid on washing-days, though on
that account alone I might call myself the household god of a hundred
families. Far be it from me, also, to hint, my respectable friends, at
the show of dirty faces which you would present without my pains to
keep you clean. Nor will I remind you how often, when the midnight
bells make you tremble for your combustible town, you have fled to the
town-pump and found me always at my post firm amid the confusion and
ready to drain my vital current in your behalf. Neither is it worth
while to lay much stress on my claims to a medical diploma as the
physician whose simple rule of practice is preferable to all the
nauseous lore which has found men sick, or left them so, since the
days of Hippocrates. Let us take a broader view of my beneficial
influence on mankind.

No; these are trifles, compared with the merits which wise men concede
to me—if not in my single self, yet as the representative of a
class—of being the grand reformer of the age. From my spout, and such
spouts as mine, must flow the stream that shall cleanse our earth of
the vast portion of its crime and anguish which has gushed from the
fiery fountains of the still. In this mighty enterprise the cow shall
be my great confederate. Milk and water—the TOWN-PUMP and the Cow!
Such is the glorious copartnership that shall tear down the
distilleries and brewhouses, uproot the vineyards, shatter the
cider-presses, ruin the tea and coffee trade, and finally monopolize
the whole business of quenching thirst. Blessed consummation! Then
Poverty shall pass away from the land, finding no hovel so wretched
where her squalid form may shelter herself. Then Disease, for lack of
other victims, shall gnaw its own heart and die. Then Sin, if she do
not die, shall lose half her strength. Until now the frenzy of
hereditary fever has raged in the human blood, transmitted from sire
to son and rekindled in every generation by fresh draughts of liquid
flame. When that inward fire shall be extinguished, the heat of
passion cannot but grow cool, and war—the drunkenness of
nations—perhaps will cease. At least, there will be no war of
households. The husband and wife, drinking deep of peaceful joy—a
calm bliss of temperate affections—shall pass hand in hand through
life and lie down not reluctantly at its protracted close. To them the
past will be no turmoil of mad dreams, nor the future an eternity of
such moments as follow the delirium of the drunkard. Their dead faces
shall express what their spirits were and are to be by a lingering
smile of memory and hope.

Ahem! Dry work, this speechifying, especially to an unpractised
orator. I never conceived till now what toil the temperance lecturers
undergo for my sake; hereafter they shall have the business to
themselves.—Do, some kind Christian, pump a stroke or two, just to
wet my whistle.—Thank you, sir!—My dear hearers, when the world
shall have been regenerated by my instrumentality, you will collect
your useless vats and liquor-casks into one great pile and make a
bonfire in honor of the town-pump. And when I shall have decayed like
my predecessors, then, if you revere my memory, let a marble fountain
richly sculptured take my place upon this spot. Such monuments should
be erected everywhere and inscribed with the names of the
distinguished champions of my cause. Now, listen, for something very
important is to come next.