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Django for APIs
Build web APIs with Python and Django

William S. Vincent

© 2018 - 2020 William S. Vincent

1
Table of Contents
Introduction
Prerequisites
Why APIs
Django REST Framework
Why this book
Conclusion

Chapter 1: Web APIs

World Wide Web
URLs
Internet Protocol Suite
HTTP Verbs
Endpoints
HTTP
Status Codes
Statelessness
REST
Conclusion

Chapter 2: Library Website and API

Traditional Django
First app
Models
Admin
Views
URLs
Webpage
Django REST Framework
URLs
Views
Serializers
cURL
Browsable API
Conclusion

Chapter 3: Todo API

2
 Initial Set Up
Models
Django REST Framework
URLs
Serializers
Views
Consuming the API
Browsable API
CORS
Tests
Conclusion

Chapter 4: Todo React Front-end

Install Node
Install React
Mock data
Django REST Framework + React
Conclusion

Chapter 5: Blog API

Initial Set Up
Model
Tests
Django REST Framework
URLs
Serializers
Views
Browsable API
Conclusion

Chapter 6: Permissions
Create a new user
Add log in to the browsable API
AllowAny
View-Level Permissions
Project-Level Permissions
Custom permissions
Conclusion

Chapter 7: User Authentication

3
 Basic Authentication
Session Authentication
Token Authentication
Default Authentication
Implementing token authentication
Endpoints
Django-Rest-Auth
User Registration
Tokens
Conclusion

Chapter 8: Viewsets and Routers

User endpoints
Viewsets
Routers
Conclusion

Chapter 9: Schemas and Documentation

Schemas
Documentation
Django REST Swagger
Swagger Log In and Log Out
Conclusion

Conclusion
Next Steps
Giving Thanks

4
Introduction
The internet is powered by RESTful APIs. Behind the scenes
even the simplest online task involves multiple computers
interacting with one another.

An API (Application Programming Interface) is a formal way to

describe two computers communicating directly with one another.
And while there are multiple ways to build an API, web APIs—
which allow for the transfer of data over the world wide web—are
overwhelmingly structured in a RESTful (REpresentational State
Transfer) pattern.

In this book you will learn how to build multiple RESTful web APIs
of increasing complexity from scratch using Django and Django
REST Framework.

The combination of Django and Django REST Framework is one

of the most popular and customizable ways to build web APIs,
used by many of the largest tech companies in the world including
Instagram, Mozilla, Pinterest, and Bitbucket. It is also uniquely
well-suited to beginners because Django’s “batteries-included”
approach masks much of the underlying complexity and security
risks involved in creating any web API.

Prerequisites
If you’re brand new to web development with Django, I
recommend first reading my previous book Django for Beginners.
The first several chapters are available for free online and cover
proper set up, a Hello World app, Pages app, and a Message
Board website. The full-length version goes deeper and covers a
Blog website with forms and user accounts as well as a
production-ready Newspaper site that features a custom user
model, complete user authentication flow, emails, permissions,
and more.

5
This background in traditional Django is important since Django
REST Framework deliberately mimics many Django conventions.

It is also recommended that readers have a basic knowledge of

Python itself. Truly mastering Python takes years, but with just a
little bit of knowledge you can dive right in and start building
things.

Why APIs
Django was first released in 2005 and at the time most websites
consisted of one large monolithic codebase. The “back-end”
consisted of database models, URLs, and views which interacted
with the “front-end” templates of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that
controlled the presentational layout of each web page.

However in recent years an “API-first” approach has emerged as

arguably the dominant paradigm in web development. This
approach involves formally separating the back-end from the
front-end. It means Django becomes a powerful database and API
instead of just a website framework.

Today Django is arguably used more often as just a back-end API

rather than a full monolithic website solution at large companies!

An obvious question at this point is, “Why bother?” Traditional

Django works quite well on its own and transforming a Django site
into a web API seems like a lot of extra work. Plus, as a
developer, you then have to write a dedicated front-end in another
programming language.

This approach of dividing services into different components, by

the way, is broadly known as Service-oriented architecture.

It turns out however that there are multiple advantages to

separating the front-end from the back-end. First, it is arguably
much more “future-proof” because a back-end API can be
consumed by any JavaScript front-end. Given the rapid rate of
change in front-end libraries–React was only released in 2013 and
Vue in 2014!–this is highly valuable. When the current front-end
frameworks are eventually replaced by even newer ones in the

6
years to come, the back-end API can remain the same. No major
rewrite is required.

Second, an API can support multiple front-ends written in different

languages and frameworks. Consider that JavaScript is used for
web front-ends, while Android apps require the Java programming
language, and iOS apps need the Swift programming language.
With a traditional monolithic approach, a Django website cannot
support these various front-ends. But with an internal API, all
three can communicate with the same underlying database back-
end!

Third, an API-first approach can be used both internally and

externally. When I worked at Quizlet back in 2010 we did not have
the resources to develop our own iOS or Android apps. But we did
have an external API available that more than 30 developers used
to create their own flashcard apps powered by the Quizlet
database. Several of these apps were downloaded over a million
times, enriching the developers and increasing the reach of
Quizlet at the same time. Quizlet is now a top 20 website in the
U.S. during the school year.

The major downside to an API-first approach is that it requires

more configuration than a traditional Django application. However
as we will see in this book, the fantastic Django REST Framework
library removes much of this complexity.

Django REST Framework

There are hundreds and hundreds of third-party apps available
that add further functionality to Django. (You can see a complete,
searchable list over at Django Packages.) However Django REST
Framework is arguably the killer app for Django. It is mature, full
of features, customizable, testable, and extremely well-
documented. It also purposefully mimics many of Django’s
traditional conventions, which makes learning it much faster. And
it is written in the Python programming language, a wonderful,
popular, and accessible language.

If you already know Django, then learning Django REST

Framework is a logical next step. With a minimal amount of code,

7
it can transform any existing Django application into a web API.

Why this book

I wrote this book because there is a distinct lack of good
resources available for developers new to Django REST
Framework. The assumption seems to be that everyone already
knows all about APIs, HTTP, REST, and the like. My own journey
in learning how to build web APIs was frustrating… and I already
knew Django well enough to write a book on it!

This book is the guide I wish existed when starting out with
Django REST Framework.

Chapter 1 begins with a brief introduction to web APIs and the

HTTP protocol. In Chapter 2 we review the differences between
traditional Django and Django REST Framework by building out a
Library book website and then adding an API to it. Then in
Chapters 3-4 we build a Todo API and connect it to a React front-
end. The same process can be used to connect any dedicated
front-end (web, iOS, Android, desktop, or other) to a web API
back-end.

In Chapters 5-9 we build out a production-ready Blog API which

includes full CRUD functionality. We also cover in-depth
permissions, user authentication, viewsets, routers,
documentation, and more.

Complete source code for all chapters can be found online on

Github.

Conclusion
Django and Django REST Framework is a powerful and
accessible way to build web APIs. By the end of this book you will
be able to build your own web APIs from scratch properly using
modern best practices. And you’ll be able to extend any existing
Django website into a web API with a minimal amount of code.

Let’s begin!

8
Chapter 1: Web APIs
Before we start building our own web APIs it’s important to review
how the web really works. After all, a “web API” literally sits on top
of the existing architecture of the world wide web and relies on a
host of technologies including HTTP, TCP/IP, and more.

In this chapter we will review the basic terminology of web APIs:

endpoints, resources, HTTP verbs, HTTP status codes, and
REST. Even if you already feel comfortable with these terms, I
encourage you to read the chapter in full.

World Wide Web

The Internet is a system of interconnected computer networks that
has existed since at least the 1960s. However, the internet’s early
usage was restricted to a small number of isolated networks,
largely government, military, or scientific in nature, that exchanged
information electronically. By the 1980s, many research institutes
and universities were using the internet to share data. In Europe,
the biggest internet node was located at CERN (European
Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, Switzerland,
which operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world.
These experiments generate enormous quantities of data that
need to be shared remotely with scientists all around the world.

Compared with today, though, overall internet usage in the 1980s

was miniscule. Most people did not have access to it or even
understood why it mattered. A small number of internet nodes
powered all the traffic and the computers using it were primarily
within the same, small networks.

This all changed in 1989 when a research scientist at CERN, Tim

Berners-Lee, invented HTTP and ushered in the modern World
Wide Web. His great insight was that the existing hypertext
system, where text displayed on a computer screen contained

9
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links (hyperlinks) to other documents, could be moved onto the
internet.

His invention, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), was the first

standard, universal way to share documents over the internet. It
ushered in the concept of web pages: discrete documents with a
URL, links, and resources such as images, audio, or video.

Today, when most people think of “the internet,” they think of the
World Wide Web, which is now the primary way that billions of
people and computers communicate online.

URLs
A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the address of a resource
on the internet. For example, the Google homepage lives at
https://www.google.com.

When you want to go to the Google homepage, you type the full
URL address into a web browser. Your browser then sends a
request out over the internet and is magically connected (we’ll
cover what actually happens shortly) to a server that responds
with the data needed to render the Google homepage in your
browser.

This request and response pattern is the basis of all web

communication. A client (typically a web browser but also a native
app or really any internet-connected device) requests information
and a server responds with a response.

Since web communication occurs via HTTP these are known

more formally as HTTP requests and HTTP responses.

Within a given URL are also several discrete components. For

example, consider again https://www.google.com. The first part,
https, refers to the scheme used. It tells the web browser how to
access resources at the location. For a website this is typically
http or https, but it could also be ftp for files, smtp for email, and
so on. The next section, www.google.com, is the hostname or the
actual name of the site. Every URL contains a scheme and a host.

10
Many webpages also contain an optional path, too. If you go to
the homepage for Python at https://www.python.org and click on
the link for the “About” page you’ll be redirected to
https://www.python.org/about/. The /about/ piece is the path.

In summary, every URL like https://python.org/about/ has three

potential parts:

a scheme - https
a hostname - www.python.org
and an (optional) path - /about/

Internet Protocol Suite

Once we know the actual URL of a resource, a whole collection of
other technologies must work properly (together) to connect the
client with the server and load an actual webpage. This is broadly
referred to as the internet procotol suite and there are entire
books written on just this topic. For our purposes, however, we
can stick to the broad basics.

Several things happen when a user types https://www.google.com

into their web browser and hits Enter. First the browser needs to
find the desired server, somewhere, on the vast internet. It uses a
domain name service (DNS) to translate the domain name
“google.com” into an IP address, which is a unique sequence of
numbers representing every connected device on the internet.
Domain names are used because it is easier for humans to
remember a domain name like “google.com” than an IP address
like “172.217.164.68”.

After the browser has the IP address for a given domain, it needs
a way to set up a consistent connection with the desired server.
This happens via the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) which
provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of bytes
between two application.

To establish a TCP connection between two computers, a three-

way “handshake” occurs between the client and server:

1. The client sends a SYN asking to establish a connection

11
 2. The server responds with a SYN-ACK acknowledging the
request and passing a connection parameter
3. The client sends an ACK back to the server confirming the
connection

Once the TCP connection is established, the two computers can

start communicating via HTTP.

HTTP Verbs
Every webpage contains both an address (the URL) as well as a
list of approved actions known as HTTP verbs. So far we’ve
mainly talked about getting a web page, but it’s also possible to
create, edit, and delete content.

Consider the Facebook website. After logging in, you can read
your timeline, create a new post, or edit/delete an existing one.
These four actions Create-Read-Update-Delete are known
colloquially as CRUD functionality and represent the
overwhelming majority of actions taken online.

The HTTP protocol contains a number of request methods that

can be used while requesting information from a server. The four
most common map to CRUD functionality. They are POST, GET, PUT,
and DELETE.
Diagram
CRUD HTTP Verbs
---- ----------
Create <--------------------> POST
Read <--------------------> GET
Update <--------------------> PUT
Delete <--------------------> DELETE

To create content you use POST, to read content GET, to update it

PUT, and to delete it you use DELETE.

Endpoints
A website consists of web pages with HTML, CSS, images,
JavaScript, and more. But a web API has endpoints instead which
are URLs with a list of available actions (HTTP verbs) that expose

12
data (typically in JSON, which is the most common data format
these days and the default for Django REST Framework).

For example, we could create the following API endpoints for a

new website called mysite.
Diagram
https://www.mysite.com/api/users # GET returns all users
https://www.mysite.com/api/users/<id> # GET returns a single user

In the first endpoint, /api/users, an available GET request returns a

list of all available users. This type of endpoint which returns
multiple data resources is known as a collection.

The second endpoint /api/users/<id> represents a single user. A

GET request returns information about just that one user.

If we added POST to the first endpoint we could create a new user,

while adding DELETE to the second endpoint would allow us to
delete a single user.

We will become much more familiar with API endpoints over the
course of this book but ultimately creating an API involves making
a series of endpoints: URLs with associated HTTP verbs.

A webpage consists of HTML, CSS, images, and more. But an

endpoint is just a way to access data via the available HTTP
verbs.

HTTP
We’ve already talked a lot about HTTP in this chapter, but here we
will describe what it actually is and how it works.

HTTP is a request-response protocol between two computers that

have an existing TCP connection. The computer making the
requests is known as the client while the computer responding is
known as the server. Typically a client is a web browser but it
could also be an iOS app or really any internet-connected device.
A server is a fancy name for any computer optimized to work over
the internet. All we really need to transform a basic laptop into a

13
server is some special software and a persistent internet
connection.

Every HTTP message consists of a status line, headers, and

optional body data. For example, here is a sample HTTP
message that a browser might send to request the Google
homepage located at https://www.google.com.
Diagram
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: google.com
Accept_Language: en-US

The top line is known as the request line and it specifies the HTTP
method to use (GET), the path (/), and the specific version of HTTP
to use (HTTP/1.1).

The two subsequent lines are HTTP headers: Host is the domain
name and Accept_Language is the language to use, in this case
American English. There are many HTTP headers available.

HTTP messages also have an optional third section, known as the

body. However we only see a body message with HTTP
responses containing data.

For simplicity, let’s assume that the Google homepage only

contained the HTML “Hello, World!” This is what the HTTP
response message from a Google server might look like.
Diagram
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2019 23:26:07 GMT
Server: gws
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 13
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Hello, world!

The top line is the response line and it specifies that we are using
HTTP/1.1. The status code 200 OK indicates the request by the
client was successful (more on status codes shortly).

14
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 “Wall, wall! I never seen two bodies with one head till now. Why,
it’s Master Dave! and his female bride!”
The farmer’s wife cackled at the wit of her spouse, and Patty
giggled with well-bred reserve. She treated the old rustics with the
manner she held toward the blacks who had been her father’s slaves
when she was younger. But though the Albesons were quick to
remind any presumptuous prigs that they were as good as royalty in
the great and only republic, they found Patty’s tyranny as pretty as a
baby’s.
They led the way into the house. David’s black man Cuff took the
horses to the stable, and Patty’s brown woman Teen carried the
luggage up the steps and up the stairs to the long, lone room under
the eaves, that grazed the four high tops of bedposts carved as if
the mahogany had been twisted or braided.
The first duty was to wash off the dust of the travel. When Patty
lifted the scuttle hat from the clutter of her curls before the mirror,
she screamed with dismay:
“I’m blacker than Teen!”
RoBards himself poured water into the bowl and boasted of its
clarity.
“Not much like the soup you get from your city cisterns, eh?”
“It’s cold, though,” she murmured.
She put him out of the room while she changed her dress to a
simple, loose house-robe. She slipped out of the steel cuirass of her
stays, and the soft sleeves drooped from her shoulders along her
arms. There was a girl’s body bewitchingly hinted inside the
twinkling wrinkles.
After the return to simple, clinging things of the brief French
republic and the early Empire, the fashions had been departing more
and more from any respect for God’s image beneath. When Patty
came down the steps in something that was rather drapery than a
group of balloons, RoBards was amazed to find how human she was
after all, how Grecian, somehow; how much quainter, littler, dearer.
She apologized for her immodesty, but gave weariness as her
excuse.
“I should have fainted in my room—if you had been there,” she
said, with an audacity he had never dreamed her capable of. “But
where’s the profit of a swoon if you fall into the arms of another
woman—and a black one at that?”
“You don’t have to faint to get into my arms,” he riposted as he
crushed her close.
“I’ll faint if you don’t let me out of them, Mist’ RoBards,” she
gasped.
Then they went in to tea. She made hardly a pretence of eating.
Even if she had not been trained to fast at table like a lady, she
would have been too jaded with the travel.
Afterward he walked with her on the narrow piazza in the rising
moon, and he felt so wonderfully enriched by her possession, so
intimately at home with her, that he asked her if he might smoke.
“I beg you to, Mist’ RoBards,” she said; “I love the flavor of
Havana.”
He took from the portmanteau-like lining of his hat one of the
cigars he carried there with his red silk handkerchief, his black
gloves, and any other small baggage that might otherwise bulge his
pockets. As he lighted it with one of the new spiral sulphur matches,
he remembered that Harry Chalender had smoked much and
expensively.
Harry Chalender even smoked cigars on the street and in office
hours, though no gentleman was supposed to do that, and it would
have ruined a less secure young man financially and socially. Some
of the banks would not lend money to a man eccentric enough to
smoke on the street or to wear a mustache. But Harry had dared
even to grow and wear a mustache down Broadway. It was to pay a
bet on an election, but it shocked the more conservative.
His only effeminacy was his abstention from chewing tobacco and
from snuff. Patty often praised him for not spitting tobacco juice
about over her skirts and carpets, as so many of the gentlemen did.
She had one dress quite ruined on Broadway by a humorist’s
ejaculation of such liquor.
Because of Chalender, RoBards flung down his cigar and glared at
it where it lay in the grass, as smouldering as his sullen jealousy,
and glared back like an eye, watchful and resentful.
Only a little while he was privileged to stroll his porch with his arm
about Patty Jessamine’s unfortressed waist, for she tried to smuggle
away a yawn under the cover of a delicious sigh, and then protested
that she could not keep her eyelids open.
“No wonder!” he answered, “they’re so big!”
She kissed him on the cheek and drifted away before he could
retaliate. He walked up and down alone a while, breathing the
incense of her possession in the quiet air, still faintly flavored with
the perfume she employed.
Then he went in and up the dark stairs to find her. She lay asleep
along the bed as if she had been flung there. She was lying across
the border of the candle’s yellow feud with the blue moonlight; they
divided her form between dim gold and faint azure. She had fallen
aslumber where she fell, and he stole close to wonder over her and
to study her unblushing beauty.
Her face was out of the reach of the candle’s flickering gleam, and
the moon bewitched it with a mist of sapphire. Through the open
window a soft breeze loitered, fingering her curls, lifting them from
her snowy neck and letting them fall. And from the tulip tree a long,
low branch, studded with empty sconces of living brass, beat upon
the pane with muffled strokes.
 “Beautiful! beautiful!” he whispered—not to her, nor to himself, but
to a something that seemed to watch with him. He longed to be
worthy of such beauty, and wondered if she—the she inside that
little bosom—were worthy of such treasures, such perils, as her face
and her fascinations.
His heart ached with a yearning to shelter her from the evil of the
world, the plagues that would rend that lacy fabric, the fiends that
would soil its cleanliness. Such a petulant, froward, reckless little imp
it was that dwelt inside the alabaster shrine! Such loyalty she had for
the gaudy city and its frivolities! Such terror of the pestilence, yet
such terror of the great, sweet loneliness of this beloved solitude!
Else, why had she stared back along the road with a sorrow, with
a regret that seemed to trail almost like a ribbon reaching all the
way to town? Would she ever be divorced from the interests that he
could neither understand nor admire?
Well, she was his for a while—for now—and more his own while
she slept than while she was awake, for when she was awake her
eyes kept studying the plain, dull walls, and his plain, dull self;
wondering, no doubt, what substitute he could provide for the
dances and picnics and romances that crowded the days and nights
in the city.
He bent to kiss a cheek like warm and pliant porcelain, and to
draw the quilt across a shoulder escaped from its sleeve, and all
aglow, as if light itself slumbered there.
He tiptoed from the room and down the stairs and into the August
night. He stepped into a cataract of moonbeams streaming down
upon the breathing grass and the somnolent trees, the old walls and
fences, and the waft flowers in the unkempt garden.
A wind walked to and fro among them like a prisoner in trailing
robes, a wind that seemed to be trying to say something, and could
not, because its tongue had been plucked out. But it kept trying
inarticulately to mumble a warning—against what?—the hazards of
life and love perhaps, and the inevitable calamities that follow
success.
He had succeeded in winning Patty Jessamine. But what else had
he incurred?
 CHAPTER III

LEAVING the mansion of such a night and entering a mere house,

was less a going in than a going out. The night, vast as space, was
yet closer than the flesh, more intimate than the marrow of the
bones or the retina that sat behind the eyes and observed.
When he left the roomy dark at last he found Patty still asleep, or
pretending to be. He could not quite feel sure of her. He never could.
It was only of himself and of his idolatry that he was forever sure.
If she slept indeed it would be cruel to wake her. If she affected
slumber, it was because she prayed to be spared his love. In either
case he had not the courage to invade her retreat, or compel her
withdrawn presence to return.
This sublimity of devotion was ridiculous. But he achieved it.
The morning found him still a bachelor. He was amazed at first to
hear women’s voices in another room quarreling; it was Patty
berating her stupid maid.
When he met her at the breakfast table she was serene again,
and held up her cheek like a flower to be pressed against his lips.
She had taken command of the household, imperious as a young
queen, a-simmer with overbubbling pride like a little girl suddenly
hoisted to the head of the table in her mother’s absence.
Womanlike, she found a strange comfort in the discovery that the
china in the house was good, the linen of quality, and the silver
dignified. She had erudition of a sort, in a field where he was blankly
ignorant. She recognized at once that the gleaming coffee pot was
from the elegant hand of Paul Revere himself.
“I didn’t know he was a silversmith,” said RoBards.
“What else was he famous for?” Patty said.
 This dazed him as a pretty evidence of the profound difference
between a male and a female mind. He started to tell her about
what Paul Revere had done when she began to praise his mother’s
taste in china. She laughed:
“You never saw the pieces of china I did, did you, Mist’ RoBards?”
“You did china? You never showed me any!”
“It was nothing to boast of. But when I was a little girl at Mrs.
Okill’s school, I drew a pattern of a tea-set—a wreath of sweet peas
and convolvulus surrounding my initial and a lamb holding a cross.
My cousin Peter, who was going out to China as a supercargo, said
he would take it with him and have it put on a tea-set. He made fun
of my drawing and wrote on the design under the lamb: ‘This is not
a wig, but a lamb.’ And in about a year the set came round the Horn
in one of my uncle’s ships. But the foolish, long-tailed apes in China
had put on every cup and saucer the words, ‘This is not a wig, but a
lamb.’ I cried for days, and broke every piece to flinders.”
She could laugh with him now, and when she laughed he found a
new excuse for a new adoration. He was not gifted in frivolity, and
the old house seemed to store up her mirth for dark days when
remembered laughter would make a more heartbreaking echo than
the remembered drip of tears.
Breakfast left his soul famished for her love, but she would not be
serious. She flitted and chirped like a bird that lures a hunter away
from her nest.
She seemed to evade him, “to lock herself from his resort,” to be
preparing retreats and defences. He was humiliated and shamefully
ashamed to find that she was not yet his wife save by ceremony and
appearance. He had sharply rebuked the old farmer for a crassly
familiar joke or two upon a consummation devotedly to be wished,
but he would have hung his head if the truth were known.
Then finally, suddenly, strangely, she was his, and in a manner of
no sanctity at all, in a mood of eddying passion, like an evil intrigue.
Many of the bachelors, and many of the married men, kept
mistresses, but Patty was his wife. And yet he felt a bewildering
sense of infidelity to somebody, something. Was it because she
seemed afterwards to wear a look of guilt? Was she thinking that
she was disloyal to that man Chalender, whose ghost perhaps by
now had left his body and followed her up into this citadel?
If she seemed to feel guilty, she betrayed also an exhilaration in
the crime, a bravado he had never imagined her capable of.
He was the one that suffered remorse, and he came to wonder if
it were not after all man and not woman who had invented modesty
and chastity, and who upheld them as ideals which women accepted
rather in obedience than in conviction.
Evidently woman must be controlled and coerced for her own
salvation.
There had been recently a flurry of a few insane zealots who had
coined a new phrase, “Women’s Rights,” and had invented an
obscene garment named after a shameless Mrs. Bloomer. In Boston
a few benighted wearers of this atrocity had been properly mobbed
off the streets. They were even less popular and less likely to
succeed than the anti-slavery fanatics.
RoBards was glad that Patty was at the other extreme from such
bigots. He would rather have her a butterfly than a beetle. He loved
her for saying once:
“I want to be ruled, Mist’ RoBards, if you please!”
And by God he would rule her—and for God he would rule her,
and save her, soul and body. If either failed it would be his fault.
Pride in her meekness, fear for her frailty, pity for her lack of
intellect, and wonder at her graces, were intertwisted with moods of
a groveling unworthiness of her, of upstaring rapture before her
mystic wisdoms.
Her purity seemed to be replenished after the storms of love, as
the blue sky came back innocent and untarnished after a black cloud
and lightning. Quick tempests rose and passed, and a fleet angelic
quality brought her down to earth on and in a rainbow from heaven.
He found himself studying her as a botanist studies a flower. In
their loneliness they dwelt as on a desert island.
But she could ride a little and he had good saddle horses, and she
found many occasions for excursions to White Plains. They rode
often together up to the Northcastle post office, where the stage
flung off the New York papers and the letters. She had a brave
beauty as she rode, her long skirt like a spinnaker at the horse’s
flank, her veil flying from her hat, her silhouette one with the horse’s
back, where her arched thigh rose above it and clasped the saddle
horn.
The news from the city was blacker every day, and she was more
and more content with her exile, until a letter came to tell her that
Harry Chalender had not died after all, but had somehow won his
duel with the Asiatic death. The same post brought her word that
her father had also passed the crisis. She made a great noise of
delight in the recovery of her father. But she said nothing more of
Harry Chalender.
And so his name rang aloud in the back of RoBards’ mind. He was
hard to please: if she had exclaimed upon Chalender’s escape he
would have winced. Yet her silence was unendurable.
In a ferocious quarrel that began in nothing at all, and was, on his
part, only the outcry of a love too exacting, because it was too
hungry, she flung at him:
“I needn’t have married you, Mist’ RoBards! You made me. You
kept at me.”
“Hush, sweetheart!” he pleaded, “you don’t want the servants to
hear.”
“What do I care for servants? If I hadn’t been such a fool as to
listen to you, I might have married Harry Chalender.”
“Hush!” he stormed, “or, by——”
 “By who, what?” she screamed, staring up at him as if in desire as
in need of a beating. When he could not smite such beauty, she
cried at him:
“This house! This terrible tomb! My father would have called it this
damned house. Well, it’s nothing but a madhouse to me, one of
those places where they lock people up so that they may go insane
really.”
He choked. It was bad enough for a lady to swear, for his wife of
all ladies to swear, but there was a sacrilege in her curse upon this
home.
This anathema and this bridal rebellion must be kept secret. Walls
had ears but no lips to speak. Servants, however, had both long ears
and large mouths; and negroes were blabbers.
And so for the sake of quiet, he crushed back his own wrath and
his sense of her wickedness, and fell on his knees before her,
imploring pardon as an idolater might prostrate himself before a
shrine whence he received only divine outrage and injustice. And she
was appeased by his surrender! And lifted him up in her arms
amorously!
He resented her caresses more than her cruelty, but he preferred
them because they were private and murmurous. He had an
inherited passion for secrecy.
One day he learned that she had ordered her horse saddled
without consulting him, or inviting him to ride with her. He sent the
nag back to the stables, and when she came out habited, she was
furious.
“You can’t ride alone about these woods,” he said.
“Why not? Who’s to harm me?”
“What if the horse bolted and flung you against a rock, or fell on
you or dragged you? Besides, there are many bad characters
hereabouts. Only a mile down the road is a family called Lasher.”
 “Those poor wretches in that tumbledown hut? Who’s afraid of
them?”
“They’re descendants of the Cowboys and Skinners who used to
murder and torture people here during the Revolution. We’re in the
old Neutral Ground, where those hyenas used to prey on patriots
and Tories alike. They burned homes, hung old ministers up by the
neck to make them tell where their money was, mistreated women—
did everything horrible. Major André was captured by some of them
just a few miles from here. Those Lashers are sons of one of the
worst of the Skinners, and I wouldn’t trust you among them.”
When she insisted, he said, “You shall not go!”
Three days later he read in his Herald that Mr. Harry Chalender
was so far recovered from the cholera that he had gone to
recuperate at his farm near the village of Sing Sing, not far from the
country seat of Mr. Irving, the well-known writer.
Sing Sing was only a few miles away. RoBards handed the paper
to his wife, with an accusing finger pointing to the notice. She met
his eye with a bland gaze, and said:
“I knew it. That is where I wanted to ride. But you wouldn’t let
me.”
“Why didn’t you ask me to go along with you?”
“You don’t like Harry.”
This logic dazed him.
“Because I don’t like him, you are to visit him secretly?”
“But his mother and sisters are there, Mist’ RoBards! Am I to
forsake my every friend?”
“Friend!” he groaned.
And that made her laugh. She flung her arms about him and said:
“The only time you’re funny is when you’re mad, Mist’ RoBards. I
love you jealous.”
 A few weeks later when he and Patty came back from a tour of
their fields with the farmer, they saw a cariole (a “carry-all,” as she
called it) hitched to the post in front of the gate. On the porch they
found Chalender, pale, lean, weak, but still smiling.
The cry that escaped Patty’s lips was so poignant with welcome
that RoBards’ heart went rocking in his breast.
If Chalender had been in his usual health, RoBards might have
killed him. It was, oddly, wickeder to kill an ill man than a well one.
He wanted to challenge the fellow to a duel, but dueling was
against the laws of the nation, and latterly against the more
powerful laws of fashion. Besides, what excuse could he give for a
challenge?
And the scandal of it! The newspapers were diabolically
scandalous nowadays; foreign travelers said they had never
imagined anything so outrageous as the American newspapers.
When RoBards saw Patty drop down in front of Chalender and
hold his hand, he had an impulse to shoot the dog dead. But he
could not stain Tuliptree Farm with blood.
While he waited for the stableman to take the horses, he could
see that Chalender’s manner with Patty was intimate, emotional,
intense. He was probably bewailing his loss of her. RoBards felt that
the innocent old house was depraved by such insolence, but in order
to deny his wife the luxury of another festival of his jealousy, when
he came up on the porch he greeted Chalender as cordially as he
could, and complimented him on his appearance—which was
altogether too hale to please RoBards.
Harry Chalender usually suited his talk to his company, and the
gallant became at once the man of affairs.
“That’s the Bronx down there, isn’t it, Dave? We ought to have it
in New York now. It would put an end to this cholera. That’s one
reason why I’m up here in this solitude. New York is dying of thirst;
we’ve got to have water; we’ve put it off too long. But nobody can
decide what to do. The conservative crowd says the well water that
was good enough for our fathers is good enough for us. But our
fathers died in great agony, and we’re doing the same. The New
York water is good enough for cholera and yellow fever. It’s a fine
thing, too, for Greenwich Village, and other far-off points that the
whole town runs away to every few summers. But New York has got
to get good water and plenty of it—or move out of New York.
“Funny, isn’t it, how people hate to be saved? I was reading that
when Pontius Pilate brought water into Jerusalem, the Jews rose in a
mob and demanded somebody’s life—as they did on a certain other
famous occasion. And no doubt it will be devilish hard—pardon me,
Patty!—to persuade the New York mob to take water—and pay for it.
“You could divide the town into two parties, the Drys and the
Wets. And we Wets are at war among ourselves. One party wants to
get a supply from the Passaic River; some favor our Croton; some
lean toward your Bronx.”
RoBards answered with dubious irony:
“I’d thank them to lean the other way. If New York lays hands on
our classic stream, I’ll rise in a mob myself.”
Chalender offered an argument he probably supposed to be
irresistible:
“You could sell out your holdings at a vast profit, and get very rich
without a stroke of work. I’m casting about for a few quiet
investments. If I only knew which way the cat would jump, I could
do very handsomely by myself.”
RoBards answered coldly:
“Different people have different standards of honesty.”
Patty gasped at the directness of this stab, but Chalender laughed:
“And some people call that honesty which is really only an
indifference to opportunity. Most of these starving farmers up here
would shout with joy if I offered them twenty-five dollars an acre. If
I sold it later for a hundred, they would howl that I had cheated
them. But think how much more gracefully I should spend it.”
RoBards nodded. “As for grace, you could have no rivals.”
Chalender did not wince; he did not even shrug. He went on:
“But the thing will have to be decided by an election.”
“You can always buy votes. One of the inalienable rights of our
citizens is the right to sell their birthrights.”
“Yes, but it takes such a pile of money to buy enough birthrights.
Nobody can vote without owning real estate, and property gives
people expensive notions. That’s why I am in favor of universal
suffrage. I should be willing even to give the ladies the vote—or
anything else the darlings desire.”
RoBards was hot enough to sneer:
“In a ladies’ election you would bribe them all with a smile.”
“Thanks!” said Chalender, destroying the insult by accepting it as a
compliment. “But let me have a look at your Bronx, won’t you? As an
engineer it fascinates me. It is the real reason for my visit to-day.”
This thin duplicity made even Patty blush. RoBards bowed:
“Our sacred Bandusian font is always open for inspection, but it’s
really not for sale.”
“Not even to save New York from depopulation?”
“That would be a questionable service to the world,” RoBards
grumbled. “The town is overgrown already past the island’s power to
support. Two hundred thousand is more than enough. Let the people
get out of the pest-hole into the country and till the farms.”
“You are merciless to us poor cits. No, my dear RoBards, what
New York wants she will take. She is the city of destiny. Some day
the whole island will be one swarm up to the Harlem, and it will
have a gigantic thirst. Doesn’t the Bible say something about the
blessedness of him who gives a cup of water to the least of these?
Think what blessings will fall on the head of him who brings gallons
of water to every man Jack in the greatest of American cities!
Quench New York’s thirst and you will check the plagues and the
fevers that hold her back from supremacy.”
“Her supremacy will do the world no good. It will only make her a
little more vicious; give crime and every evil a more comfortable
home.”
“Is there no wickedness up here in Arcadia?”
“None compared to the foulness of the Five Points.”
“Isn’t that because there is almost nobody up here to be wicked—
or to be wicked with?”
“Whatever the reason, we are not complaining of the dearth.”
“That’s fine! It’s a delight to find somebody content with
something. But show me your Bronx, and I may do you a service.
You won’t object if I find fault with the stream, because then I shall
have ammunition to fight with against your real enemies, who want
to dam the brook at Williams’s Bridge and pipe it into town. You and
I should be the best of friends; for I want the people to look to the
Croton for their help. It will enable New York to wash its face
oftener, and drink something soberer than brandy. And it will enrich
me through the sale of the miserable lands that have grown nothing
for me but taxes and mortgage interest.”
But RoBards was not content, and he was a whit churlish as he led
Chalender along the high ridges, and let him remark the silver
highway the river laid among the winding hills of Northcastle, down
into the balsam-snowed levels of the White Plains.
Little as RoBards approved his tenacious guest, he approved
himself less. He felt a fool for letting Chalender pink him so with his
clumsy sarcasms, but he could not find wit for retort or take refuge
in a lofty tolerance.
He suffered a boorish confusion when Chalender said at last, as
they returned to the house and the cocktails that Patty had waiting
for them on the porch:
“I agree with you, David. The Bronx is not our river. I can honestly
oppose its choice. But it’s a pretty country you have here. I love the
sea and the Sound and the big Hudson, but there is a peculiar grace
about these inland hills of Westchester. I shall hope to see much of
them in the coming years.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. I shall bid for a contract to build a section of the Croton
waterway. That may mean that I shall spend several years in your
neighborhood. My office will be the heights along the Hudson. That
is only a few miles away and a pleasant gallop. You won’t mind if I
drop in upon you now and then when I am lonely?”
Though Chalender ignored Patty’s existence in making this plea,
RoBards felt that it was meant for her. But what could he say except
a stupidly formal:
“It will be an honor to receive one of the captains of so great an
enterprise.”
“Thanks! And I can count upon always finding you here?”
Now RoBards amazed himself when he answered:
“I fear not. We came up only to escape the cholera. When that is
over, we shall return to New York. I have my law practice to
remember.”
He could feel, like hot irons in his cheek, the sharp eyes of Patty.
He knew what she was thinking. He had said that he wanted to
dwell here forever. And now he was pretending that he was only a
brief visitor.
Instead of gasping with the shock of her husband’s perversion,
she snickered a little. It was as if he heard a sleighbell tinkle in the
distance. But someone else was in that sleigh with his sweetheart.
He could not understand Patty. He seemed to please her most by
his most unworthy actions. He wondered if she had scented the
jealousy that had prompted his words, and had taken it once more
as an unwitting tribute to her.
He thought he detected a triumphant smile on Chalender’s face,
and he longed to erase it with the flat of his hand. Instead, he found
himself standing up to bow in answer to Chalender’s bow, like a
jointed zany.
The inscrutable Patty, when Chalender had driven out of sight of
the little lace handkerchief she waved at him, turned to her husband
with sudden anger in her face. He braced himself for a rebuke, but
again she confused him by saying:
“The impudence of Harry Chalender! Daring to crowd in on our
honeymoon! It was splendid how you made him understand that we
RoBardses don’t welcome him here.”
“Did I? Don’t we?” stammered RoBards, so pitifully rejoiced to find
her loyal to him and to their sacred union that he gathered her in his
arms, and almost sobbed, “Oh, my dear! my sweet! my darling!”
Though she was as soft and flexile as a shaft of weeping willow,
somehow she was like a stout spar upholding him in the deep waters
of fear, and he felt most ludicrously happy when she talked nursery
talk to him and cooed:
“Poor, little David baby wants its Patty to love it, doesn’t it?”
He could not answer in her language, but he felt a divinity in it,
and was miserably drenched in ecstasy. And she had used his first
name!
 CHAPTER IV

BY and by the summer sifted from the trees and ebbed from the sky.
The honeymoon passed like a summer, in days and nights of hot
beauty, in thunder-salvos of battle, in passions of impatient rain.
For a while the autumn was a greater splendor, a transit from a
green earth starred with countless blossoms of scarlet, purple,
azure, to a vast realm of gold—red gold, yellow gold, green gold, but
always and everywhere gold. All Westchester was a treasure-temple
of glory. Then the grandeur dulled, the gold was gilt, was only
patches of gilt, was russet, was shoddy. The trees were bare. Sharp
outlines of unsuspected landscape came forth like hags whose robes
have dropped from their gaunt bones. The wind grew despondent.
Savor went with color; hope was memory; warmth, chill.
Something mournful in the air reminded RoBards of a poem that
Mr. Bryant, the editor of the Post, had written a few years before:

“The melancholy days have come, the saddest of the year,

Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown
and sere;
Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie
dead;
They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit’s tread.”

When he quoted this to Patty, her practical little soul was moved,
as always, to the personal:
“Your Mr. Bryant writes better than he fights, Mist’ RoBards. Only
last year, almost in front of our house, I saw him attack Mr. Stone, of
the Commercial Advertiser, with a horsewhip. Mr. Stone carried off
the whip. It was disgusting, but it brightened Broadway. Oh, dear,
does nothing exciting ever happen up here? Wouldn’t it be wonderful
to stroll down to the Battery to watch the sunset and cross the
bridge to Castle Garden, and hear the band play, and talk to all our
friends? And go to a dance, perhaps, or a theatre? The Kembles are
there setting the town on fire! And am I never to dance again? I was
just learning to waltz when the cholera came. I sha’n’t be able to
dance at all unless we go at once.”
It shocked RoBards to think that marriage had not changed the
restless girl to a staid matron. That she should want to waltz was
peculiarly harrowing, for this new and hideously ungraceful way of
jigging and twisting was denounced by all respectable people as a
wanton frenzy, heinously immoral, indecently amorous, and lacking
in all the dignity that marked the good old dances.
But he was in a mood to grant her anything she wished. She had
a right to her wishes now, for she was granting him his greatest
wish; a son and heir was mystically enfolded in her sweet flower-
flesh, as hidden now as the promise of the tulip tree in a bud that
hardly broke the line of a bough in the early spring, but later slowly
unsheathed and published the great leaf and the bright flower.
So he bade the servants pack her things and his, and they set out
again for New York.
Now the tide flowed back with them as it had ebbed with them.
The exiles were flocking once more to the city, and new settlers
were bringing their hopes to market. A tide of lawyers and
merchants was setting strong from New England, and packs of
farmers who had harvested only failure from the stingy lands,
counted on somehow winnowing gold on the city streets, where
sharpers and humbugs of every kind would take from them even
that which they had not.
The drive to New York was amazingly more than a mere return
along a traveled path. Though they had gone out in a panic, they
had been enveloped in a paradise of leaves and flowers and lush
weeds, as well as in a bridal glamor. Now they went back under
boughs as starkly bare as the fences of rail or stone; only the weeds
bore flowers, and those were crude of fabric as of hue. And the
hearts of the twain were already autumnal. Their April, June, and
August of love were gone and November was their mantle. Patty’s
orange blossoms were shed, and they had been artificial, too.
Below White Plains the road was a-throng with cattle that
frightened Patty and the horses. When they were clear of these
moving shoals, they came into the Post Road where the stages went
like elephants in a panic. But Patty found them beautiful. She
rejoiced in the increasing crowds, and as the houses congregated
about her, and the crowded streets accepted her, she clapped her
hands and cried:
“How good it is to be home!”
This sent a graveyard chill through RoBards’ heart, for it meant
that home to her was not in the solitude of his heart, but in the
center of the mob.
Home was to her more definitely the house in Park Place, her
father’s house to which he must take her till he found another
lodging. Her father and mother greeted her as a prodigal and him as
a mere body servant—which was what he felt himself to be.
The chief talk was of the cholera and its havoc. Three thousand
and five hundred dead made up its toll in the city, but the menace
was gone, and those who lived were doubly glad. The crowds in the
streets showed no gaps; there were no ruins visible. New houses
were going up, narrow streets being widened and the names
changed.
It was only when the Sabbath called them to church, or some
brilliant performance took them to see Fanny Kemble and her father
at the Park Theatre, and they inquired for one friend or another, that
they learned dreadfully how many good friends had been hurried
feet first to Washington Square, whence they would never return.
Dinners were few, since nearly every family wore mourning for
someone; but gradually the gayety returned in full sweep. The dead
were forgotten, and the plans for preventing a return of the plague
were dismissed as a tiresome matter of old-fashioned unimportance.
The pumps and cisterns were no longer blamed for the slaughter of
the innocents.
And now Patty must go into eclipse gradually. She grew more and
more peevish. When she complained that everybody worth while
was moving uptown, RoBards bought a house in St. John’s Park, just
south of Canal Street, and only a little distance from the Hudson
River. The house was new and modern, with a new cistern in the
rear. Only a few steps away was a pump supplied with water from
the new city water works in the salubrious region of Thirteenth
Street and Broadway. There was a key that admitted the family to
the umbrageous park, behind whose high fence there was seclusion.
There was something aristocratic and European, too, about the
long iron rail fence that framed the entire square, the same in front
of every house, and giving them all a formal uniform, a black court
dress.
But even aristocracy palled. Patty found but a brief pleasure in the
privilege of walking there at twilight, and she dared not venture out
before dusk. It was chill then and she shivered as she sat on a
bench and breathed in the gloom that drooped from the naked
branches like a shroud. She did not want to be a mother yet, and
she faced the ordeal with dread, knowing how many mothers die,
how few babies lived, for all the pain of their long preparation.
The winter was cold and she complained of the dark of nights,
though her husband multiplied the spermaceti candles and the astral
lamps till her room was as dazzling as an altar. He filled the bins in
the hall closet with the best Liverpool coal and kept the grates
roaring. But she wailed of mornings when he had to break the ice in
the water pitcher for her and she huddled all day by the red-hot iron
stove. She made her servants keep it charged with blazing wood,
until RoBards was sure that the house would be set on fire.
When spring came again and released grass, birds, trees, souls,
flowers, the very air from the gyves of winter, she was so much
more a prisoner that she herself pleaded to be taken back to
Tuliptree Farm. If she could not meet people she did not want to see
them pass her windows, or hear them laugh as they went by in
shadows of evening time. On the farm she could wander about the
yard unterrified and, with increasing heaviness, devote herself to the
flowerbeds. She fled at the sight of any passerby and was altogether
as hidden and craven as only a properly bred American wife
undergoing the shameful glory of motherhood could be.
She was smitten at times with panics of fear. She knew that she
would perish and she called her husband to save her from dying so
young; yet when he got her in his arms to comfort her, she called
him her murderer. She accused him of dragging her into the hasty
marriage, and reminded him that if he had not inflicted his ring and
his name and his burden upon her she could have gone with her
father and mother this summer to Ballston Spa, where there was life
and music, where the waltz flourished in rivalry with the vivacious
polka just imported.
But even in her most insane onsets she did not taunt him now
with the name of Harry Chalender. That was a comfort.
One day Chalender drove up to the house, but she would not see
him. Which gave RoBards singular pleasure. Chalender lingered,
hoping no doubt that she would relent. He sat out an hour, drinking
too much brandy, and cursing New York because it laughed at his
insane talk of going forty miles into the country to fetch a river into
the city. Chalender wanted to pick up the far-off Croton and carry it
on a bridge across the Spuyten Duyvil!
When he had left, Patty, who had overheard his every sentence,
said: “He must be going mad.” She was absent in thought a while,
then murmured as if from far off:
“I wonder if he is drinking himself to death on purpose, and why?”
 CHAPTER V

ALL summer the water-battle went on in town, but with flagging

interest. Colonel DeWitt Clinton threw his powerful influence into the
plan for an open canal from a dam in the Croton down to a reservoir
to be built on Murray’s Hill. Even Clinton’s fervor left the people cold.
When he pointed out that they were paying hundreds of thousands
of dollars every year for bad water hauled in hogsheads, they
retorted that the Croton insanity would cost millions. When he
pointed out that the Croton would pour twenty million gallons of
pure water every day into the city, and declared that New York water
was not fit to drink, the answer came gaily that it did not need to
be, since the plainest boarding house kept brandy bottles on the
table.
One old gentleman raised a town laugh by boasting that he had
taken a whole tumblerful of Manhattan water every morning for
years and was still alive. And yet the dream of bringing a foreign
river in would not down, though the believers in the artesian wells
were ridiculed for “the idea of supplying a populous city with water
from its own bowels.”
The cholera had brought a number round to the Westchester
project, but the cholera passed in God’s good time. It would come
back when God willed. Plagues were part of the human weather like
floods and drouths, and not to be forefended.
In any case Patty was busied with her own concerns. Her baby
was born on Tuliptree Farm before her husband could get back from
White Plains with the doctor, though he had lashed his horses till the
carry-all flung to and fro like a broken rudder.
The son and heir was a girl, and in the hope that she would be an
heiress they named her after Patty’s Aunt Imogene, whose husband
had recently died and left her a fleet of vessels in the Chinese trade.
 For a time instinct and pride in the flattery of people who cried
that the child was its mother’s own beautiful image gave the tiny
replica a fascination to Patty. She played with it as if it were a doll,
and she a little girl only pretending to motherhood.
But she tired of the bauble and turned the baby over to the
servants. Her Aunt Imogene cried out against her:
“Nowadays women don’t take care of their babies like they used
to when I was a girl. In the good old-fashioned days a mother was a
mother. She was proud to nurse her children and she knew all about
their ills and ailments. I had eleven children and raised all of them
but six, and I would no more have dreamed of hiring a nurse for
them than I would have I don’t know what. But these modern
mothers!”
Criticism had no power over Patty, however. She admitted all that
was charged against her and simply added it to the long list of
grievances she had against her fate. RoBards often felt that this was
cheating of the lowest kind. It left a man no means of either
comforting distress or rebuking misbehavior.
As soon as the baby could be weaned from her mother to a nurse,
Patty made a pretext of ill health and joined the hegira to Saratoga
Springs, which was winning the fashion hunters away from Ballston
Spa. She traveled with some friends from the South who brought
North a convoy of slaves and camped along the road, preferring that
gypsy gait to the luxury of a voyage up the river on the palatial
steamboats, in which America led the world.
During that summer RoBards was both mother and father to the
child, and Immy’s fingers grew into and around his heart like the ivy
that embraced the walls of the house. He was bitter against his wife,
whose fingers had let his heart slip with ease and indifference.
Yet, by the time Patty returned from taking the waters in the
North, he was so lonely for her that their reunion was another and a
first marriage. He found a fresh delight in her company and learned
the new dances to keep her in his sight and out of the arms of other
men.
By one of Nature’s mysterious dispensations, this girl with the soul
of a flirt and a gadabout had the bodily fertility of a great mother. To
her frank and hysterical disgust heaven sent her a second proof of
its bounty, which she received with an ingratitude that dazed her
husband—and frightened him, lest its influence be visited on the
next hostage to fortune. If the child should inherit the moods of its
mother it would come into the world like another Gloster, with hair
and teeth and a genius for wrath.
But the child arrived so placidly that the doctor could hardly wring
a first cry from him by slapping him and dipping him into a tub of
cold water. And he wept almost never. What he had he wanted.
When it was taken from him he wanted it no more. He chuckled and
glowed in his cradle like a little brook. He gave up his mother’s
breast for a bottle with such lack of peevishness that it was almost
an act of precocious gallantry. They named him Keith after an uncle.
Keithkins, as too often happens in a world of injustice, made it so
convenient to neglect him that his chivalry must be its own and only
reward. Patty left him in the country—“for his own good”—and went
earlier to New York than in the other autumns. There she plunged
into a whirlpool of recklessness.
She seemed to welcome every other beau but her husband. She
would not even flirt with him. She said he was too dangerous!
She laughed at his jealous protests against the worthless company
she affected. But when he courted her she fought him. Her
extravagance in the shops alarmed him, but when he quarreled with
her on that score, and demanded that she cease to smirch his credit
with debts upon the merchants’ books, she would run away from
home and stay until he sought her out in Park Place, where she was
wheedling her father into ruinous indulgence.
The old man’s business was prospering and his gifts to Patty were
hardly so much generosities as gestures of magnificence.
 Harry Chalender was constantly seen with old Jessamine. They
talked the Croton project, but RoBards felt this to be only a tinsel
pretext of Chalender’s to keep close to Patty.
By the gods, he even infected her with his talk of water-power!
Everybody was talking it now. It had become politics.
For sixty years or so the town had dilly-dallied over a water supply
—ever since the Irishman Christopher Colles had persuaded the
British governor Tryon to his system of wells and reservoirs. Every
year a bill was put forward, and the Wars of the Roses were
mimicked in the Wars of the Rivers.
Bronx fought Croton incessantly but neither gained a victory. Wily
old Aaron Burr stole a march on both with his Manhattan Company
and sneaking a bank in under the charter of a waterworks sank a
well and purveyed liquid putridity at a high price.
It was a great relief to RoBards when the Crotonians gained the
upper hand in 1833, for it left his Bronx to purl along in leafy
solitudes undammed. But it took two years to bring the project to a
vote and then the majority was only seventeen thousand Ayes to six
thousand Nos.
Just after the skyrockets of the Fourth of July died down, the
engineers went out into Westchester to plant their stakes, outlining
the new lake that the dam would form, and the pathway of the
aqueduct from the Croton to the Harlem.
This row of posts billowing up hill and down alongside the Hudson
stretched like a vast serpent across the homes and farms and the
sacred graveyards of villages and towns and old families. It was the
signal for a new war.
The owners of the land fell into two classes: those who would not
let the water pass through their demesnes at any price, and those
who sought to rob the city by unwarranted demands.
The farmers seemed to RoBards to comport themselves with
dignity and love of their own soil, though Chalender denounced
them for outrageous selfishness in preferring the integrity of their
estates to the health of a vast metropolis.
But RoBards saw through Chalender’s lofty patriotism. Chalender
could not unload his own land upon the city unless the whole
scheme were established, and Chalender’s price was scandalously
high.
The stakes were not yet nearly aligned when an almost unequaled
frost turned the buxom hills to granite overnight. It seemed that the
havoc which this high emprise was to forestall had been purposely
held in leash by the ironic fiends until the procrastinating city had
drawn this parallel of stakes, this cartoon of an aqueduct. For almost
immediately the cataclysm broke.
The idleness enforced upon the engineers by the evil weather
drove most of them back to town, Harry Chalender among them.
And now he dragged Patty into that vortex of dissipation for which
the city was notorious. Dancing, drinking, theatre-going, riotous
sleigh-rides, immodest costumes, and dinners of wild revel gave the
moralists reason to prophesy that God would send upon the wicked
capital fire from the skies—as indeed He did in terrible measure.
Harry Chalender began to follow Patty about and to encounter her
with a regularity that ceased to resemble coincidence. There was
gossip. One of the slimy scandal-mongering newspapers well-named
The Hawk and Buzzard printed a blind paragraph in which RoBards
recognized his own case.
But what could RoBards do? To horsewhip the editor or shoot the
lover would not only feed the newspapers but blacken the lives of
the babies, who were suffering enough now in the lack of a mother’s
devotion without being cursed for life with a mother of no
reputation. In a world governed by newspapers the old rules of
conduct were altered.
The winter of 1835 fell bitterer than any ever known before. The
cold was an excruciation. The sleighs rang along the street as if the
snow were white steel. The pumps froze; the cisterns froze; the
pipes of the water companies froze underground, and the fire-
hydrants froze at the curbs.
The main industry of the town seemed to be the building and
coaxing of fires, though coal and wood were almost impossible to
obtain, and the price rose to such heights that one must either go
bankrupt or freeze.
Everybody began to wonder what would happen if a house should
blaze up. The whole city would go. Who would come to the rescue
of a burning house in such weather? And with what water would the
flames be fought? Everybody listened for the new firebell that had
been hung in the City Hall cupola and had sent its brazen yelps
across the sky so often, but was ominously silent of late as if saving
its horrific throat for some Doomsday clangor.
Hitherto, membership in certain of the fire companies had been
cherished as a proof of social triumph. There were plebeian gangs
made up of mechanics and laborers, and the Bowery b’hoys were a
byword of uncouth deviltry.
But RoBards had been accepted into one of the most select fire
clubs with a silver plated engine. He kept his boots, trumpet, and
helmet in a basket under his bed, so that there was never any delay
in his response to the bell. He was so often the first to arrive that
they gave him the key, and in the longest run he always carried
more than his share of the weight in the footrace. But now he
wished that he had never joined the company.
Christmas drew near and Patty wore herself out in the shops and
spent her time at home in the manufacture of gifts with her own
hands. They were very apt hands at anything pretty and useless.
She was going to have a Christmas tree, too, a recent affectation
borrowed from the Hessian soldiers who had remained in the
country after the Revolution.
The evening of the sixteenth of December was unbearably chill.
The fire itself seemed to be freezing red. The thermometer outside
the house dropped down to ten below zero. The servants refused to
go to the corner for water and Patty was frightened into staying
home from a ball she was invited to.
That was the ultimate proof of terror. It was one of the times
when the outer world was so cruel that just to sit within doors by a
warm fire was a festival of luxury; just to have a fire to sit by was
wealth enough.
Patty was so nearly congealed that she climbed into her husband’s
lap and gathered his arms about her like the ends of a shawl. It had
been a long while since she had paid his bosom such a visit and he
was grateful for the cold.
And then the great bell spoke in the City Hall tower—spoke one
huge resounding awful word, “Fire!” before it broke into a baying as
of infernal hounds.
When RoBards started to evict Patty from his lap she gasped:
“You’re not going out on such a night?” RoBards groaned: “I’ve got
to!” He set her aside and ran upstairs for the basket of armor, and
Patty followed him wailing with pity.
“Don’t go, darling!” she pleaded. “You can tell them to-morrow
that you were sick. You’ll die if you go out in this hideous cold, and
then what will become of me? Of us? Of our babies?”
Her solicitude heartened him. He was important to her after all!
His death would grieve her. That added a beauty to duty. But it took
away none of its authority.
While he struggled into his boots, she ran to a window looking
south and drew back the curtains. Through the thick lace of frost on
the panes a crimson radiance pierced, imbuing the air with a rosy
mist as if the town were seen through an upheld glass of Madeira.
“It looks like the end of the world!” Patty screamed. “What will
become of our beautiful city now? It will be nothing but ashes to-
morrow. Don’t go! You’ll be buried under a wall, or frozen to death
in the streets. If you’ll promise not to go down into that furnace, I’ll
go with you to-morrow to Tuliptree Farm, and never leave it again!”
 His heart ached for her in her agitation, and it was not easy to
tear off the clinging hands for whose touch he had so often prayed.
But he broke free and dashed, helmeted and shod, into the icy world
between him and the advancing hell. The fire’s ancient enemy,
water, was not at hand for the battle, and the whole city lay
helpless.
At the firehouse door RoBards met Harry Chalender. He was
dressed for the ball that Patty had planned to attend, and he wore
white gloves and dancing pumps.