Love and Skates/Chapter II

Wade packed his kit, and took the Hudson River train for Dunderbunk the same afternoon.
 * Chapter II. Barracks for the Hero

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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