Israel Potter: Chapter 26

Chapter 26

FORTY-FIVE YEARS.

For the most part, what befell Israel during his forty years wanderings
in the London deserts, surpassed the forty years in the natural
wilderness of the outcast Hebrews under Moses.

In that London fog, went before him the ever-present cloud by day, but
no pillar of fire by the night, except the cold column of the monument,
two hundred feet beneath the mocking gilt flames on whose top, at the
stone base, the shiverer, of midnight, often laid down.

But these experiences, both from their intensity and his solitude, were
necessarily squalid. Best not enlarge upon them. For just as extreme
suffering, without hope, is intolerable to the victim, so, to others, is
its depiction without some corresponding delusive mitigation. The
gloomiest and truthfulest dramatist seldom chooses for his theme the
calamities, however extraordinary, of inferior and private persons;
least of all, the pauper's; admonished by the fact, that to the craped
palace of the king lying in state, thousands of starers shall throng;
but few feel enticed to the shanty, where, like a pealed knuckle-bone,
grins the unupholstered corpse of the beggar.

Why at one given stone in the flagging does man after man cross yonder
street? What plebeian Lear or Oedipus, what Israel Potter, cowers there
by the corner they shun? From this turning point, then, we too cross
over and skim events to the end; omitting the particulars of the
starveling's wrangling with rats for prizes in the sewers; or his
crawling into an abandoned doorless house in St. Giles', where his hosts
were three dead men, one pendant; into another of an alley nigh
Houndsditch, where the crazy hovel, in phosphoric rottenness, fell
sparkling on him one pitchy midnight, and he received that injury,
which, excluding activity for no small part of the future, was an added
cause of his prolongation of exile, besides not leaving his faculties
unaffected by the concussion of one of the rafters on his brain.

But these were some of the incidents not belonging to the beginning of
his career. On the contrary, a sort of humble prosperity attended him
for a time; insomuch that once he was not without hopes of being able to
buy his homeward passage so soon as the war should end. But, as stubborn
fate would have it, being run over one day at Holborn Bars, and taken
into a neighboring bakery, he was there treated with such kindliness by
a Kentish lass, the shop-girl, that in the end he thought his debt of
gratitude could only be repaid by love. In a word, the money saved up
for his ocean voyage was lavished upon a rash embarkation in wedlock.

Originally he had fled to the capital to avoid the dilemma of
impressment or imprisonment. In the absence of other motives, the dread
of those hardships would have fixed him there till the peace. But now,
when hostilities were no more, so was his money. Some period elapsed ere
the affairs of the two governments were put on such a footing as to
support an American consul at London. Yet, when this came to pass, he
could only embrace the facilities for a return here furnished, by
deserting a wife and child, wedded and born in the enemy's land.

The peace immediately filled England, and more especially London, with
hordes of disbanded soldiers; thousands of whom, rather than starve, or
turn highwaymen (which no few of their comrades did, stopping coaches at
times in the most public streets), would work for such a pittance as to
bring down the wages of all the laboring classes. Neither was our
adventurer the least among the sufferers. Driven out of his previous
employ--a sort of porter in a river-side warehouse--by this sudden
influx of rivals, destitute, honest men like himself, with the ingenuity
of his race, he turned his hand to the village art of chair-bottoming.
An itinerant, he paraded the streets with the cry of "Old chairs to
mend!" furnishing a curious illustration of the contradictions of human
life; that he who did little but trudge, should be giving cosy seats to
all the rest of the world. Meantime, according to another well-known
Malthusian enigma in human affairs, his family increased. In all, eleven
children were born to him in certain sixpenny garrets in Moorfields. One
after the other, ten were buried.

When chair-bottoming would fail, resort was had to match-making. That
business being overdone in turn, next came the cutting of old rags, bits
of paper, nails, and broken glass. Nor was this the last step. From the
gutter he slid to the sewer. The slope was smooth. In poverty--"Facilis
descensus Averni."

But many a poor soldier had sloped down there into the boggy canal of
Avernus before him. Nay, he had three corporals and a sergeant for
company.

But his lot was relieved by two strange things, presently to appear. In
1793 war again broke out, the great French war. This lighted London of
some of its superfluous hordes, and lost Israel the subterranean society
of his friends, the corporals and sergeant, with whom wandering forlorn
through the black kingdoms of mud, he used to spin yarns about sea
prisoners in hulks, and listen to stories of the Black Hole of Calcutta;
and often would meet other pairs of poor soldiers, perfect strangers, at
the more public corners and intersections of sewers--the Charing-Crosses
below; one soldier having the other by his remainder button, earnestly
discussing the sad prospects of a rise in bread, or the tide; while
through the grating of the gutters overhead, the rusty skylights of the
realm, came the hoarse rumblings of bakers' carts, with splashes of the
flood whereby these unsuspected gnomes of the city lived.

Encouraged by the exodus of the lost tribes of soldiers, Israel returned
to chair-bottoming. And it was in frequenting Covent-Garden market, at
early morning, for the purchase of his flags, that he experienced one
of the strange alleviations hinted of above. That chatting with the
ruddy, aproned, hucksterwomen, on whose moist cheeks yet trickled the
dew of the dawn on the meadows; that being surrounded by bales of hay,
as the raker by cocks and ricks in the field; those glimpses of garden
produce, the blood-beets, with the damp earth still tufting the roots;
that mere handling of his flags, and bethinking him of whence they must
have come, the green hedges through which the wagon that brought them
had passed; that trudging home with them as a gleaner with his sheaf of
wheat;--all this was inexpressibly grateful. In want and bitterness,
pent in, perforce, between dingy walls, he had rural returns of his
boyhood's sweeter days among them; and the hardest stones of his
solitary heart (made hard by bare endurance alone) would feel the stir
of tender but quenchless memories, like the grass of deserted flagging,
upsprouting through its closest seams. Sometimes, when incited by some
little incident, however trivial in itself, thoughts of home
would--either by gradually working and working upon him, or else by an
impetuous rush of recollection--overpower him for a time to a sort of
hallucination.

Thus was it:--One fair half-day in the July of 1800, by good luck, he
was employed, partly out of charity, by one of the keepers, to trim the
sward in an oval enclosure within St. James' Park, a little green but a
three-minutes' walk along the gravelled way from the brick-besmoked and
grimy Old Brewery of the palace which gives its ancient name to the
public resort on whose borders it stands. It was a little oval, fenced
in with iron pailings, between whose bars the imprisoned verdure peered
forth, as some wild captive creature of the woods from its cage. And
alien Israel there--at times staring dreamily about him--seemed like
some amazed runaway steer, or trespassing Pequod Indian, impounded on
the shores of Narraganset Bay, long ago; and back to New England our
exile was called in his soul. For still working, and thinking of home;
and thinking of home, and working amid the verdant quietude of this
little oasis, one rapt thought begat another, till at last his mind
settled intensely, and yet half humorously, upon the image of Old
Huckleberry, his mother's favorite old pillion horse; and, ere long,
hearing a sudden scraping noise (some hob-shoe without, against the iron
pailing), he insanely took it to be Old Huckleberry in his stall,
hailing him (Israel) with his shod fore-foot clattering against the
planks--his customary trick when hungry--and so, down goes Israel's
hook, and with a tuft of white clover, impulsively snatched, he hurries
away a few paces in obedience to the imaginary summons. But soon
stopping midway, and forlornly gazing round at the enclosure, he
bethought him that a far different oval, the great oval of the ocean,
must be crossed ere his crazy errand could be done; and even then, Old
Huckleberry would be found long surfeited with clover, since, doubtless,
being dead many a summer, he must be buried beneath it. And many years
after, in a far different part of the town, and in far less winsome
weather too, passing with his bundle of flags through Red-Cross street,
towards Barbican, in a fog so dense that the dimmed and massed blocks
of houses, exaggerated by the loom, seemed shadowy ranges on ranges of
midnight hills, he heard a confused pastoral sort of sounds--tramplings,
lowings, halloos--and was suddenly called to by a voice to head off
certain cattle, bound to Smithfield, bewildered and unruly in the fog.
Next instant he saw the white face--white as an orange-blossom--of a
black-bodied steer, in advance of the drove, gleaming ghost-like through
the vapors; and presently, forgetting his limp, with rapid shout and
gesture, he was more eager, even than the troubled farmers, their
owners, in driving the riotous cattle back into Barbican. Monomaniac
reminiscences were in him--"To the right, to the right!" he shouted, as,
arrived at the street corner, the farmers beat the drove to the left,
towards Smithfield: "To the right! you are driving them back to the
pastures--to the right! that way lies the barn-yard!" "Barn-yard?" cried
a voice; "you are dreaming, old man." And so, Israel, now an old man,
was bewitched by the mirage of vapors; he had dreamed himself home into
the mists of the Housatonic mountains; ruddy boy on the upland pastures
again. But how different the flat, apathetic, dead, London fog now
seemed from those agile mists which, goat-like, climbed the purple
peaks, or in routed armies of phantoms, broke down, pell-mell, dispersed
in flight upon the plain, leaving the cattle-boy loftily alone,
clear-cut as a balloon against the sky.

In 1817 he once more endured extremity; this second peace again drifting
its discharged soldiers on London, so that all kinds of labor were
overstocked. Beggars, too, lighted on the walks like locusts.
Timber-toed cripples stilted along, numerous as French peasants in
_sabots_. And, as thirty years before, on all sides, the exile had heard
the supplicatory cry, not addressed to him, "An honorable scar, your
honor, received at Bunker Hill, or Saratoga, or Trenton, fighting for
his most gracious Majesty, King George!" so now, in presence of the
still surviving Israel, our Wandering Jew, the amended cry was anew
taken up, by a succeeding generation of unfortunates, "An honorable
scar, your honor, received at Corunna, or at Waterloo, or at Trafalgar!"
Yet not a few of these petitioners had never been outside of the London
smoke; a sort of crafty aristocracy in their way, who, without having
endangered their own persons much if anything, reaped no insignificant
share both of the glory and profit of the bloody battles they claimed;
while some of the genuine working heroes, too brave to beg, too cut-up
to work, and too poor to live, laid down quietly in corners and died.
And here it may be noted, as a fact nationally characteristic, that
however desperately reduced at times, even to the sewers, Israel, the
American, never sunk below the mud, to actual beggary.

Though henceforth elbowed out of many a chance threepenny job by the
added thousands who contended with him against starvation, nevertheless,
somehow he continued to subsist, as those tough old oaks of the cliffs,
which, though hacked at by hail-stones of tempests, and even wantonly
maimed by the passing woodman, still, however cramped by rival trees and
fettered by rocks, succeed, against all odds, in keeping the vital
nerve of the tap-root alive. And even towards the end, in his dismallest
December, our veteran could still at intervals feel a momentary warmth
in his topmost boughs. In his Moorfields' garret, over a handful of
reignited cinders (which the night before might have warmed some lord),
cinders raked up from the streets, he would drive away dolor, by talking
with his one only surviving, and now motherless child--the spared
Benjamin of his old age--of the far Canaan beyond the sea; rehearsing to
the lad those well-remembered adventures among New England hills, and
painting scenes of rustling happiness and plenty, in which the lowliest
shared. And here, shadowy as it was, was the second alleviation hinted
of above.

To these tales of the Fortunate Isles of the Free, recounted by one who
had been there, the poor enslaved boy of Moorfields listened, night
after night, as to the stories of Sinbad the Sailor. When would his
father take him there? "Some day to come, my boy," would be the hopeful
response of an unhoping heart. And "Would God it were to-morrow!" would
be the impassioned reply.

In these talks Israel unconsciously sowed the seeds of his eventual
return. For with added years, the boy felt added longing to escape his
entailed misery, by compassing for his father and himself a voyage to
the Promised Land. By his persevering efforts he succeeded at last,
against every obstacle, in gaining credit in the right quarter to his
extraordinary statements. In short, charitably stretching a technical
point, the American Consul finally saw father and son embarked in the
Thames for Boston.

It was the year 1826; half a century since Israel, in early manhood, had
sailed a prisoner in the Tartar frigate from the same port to which he
now was bound. An octogenarian as he recrossed the brine, he showed
locks besnowed as its foam. White-haired old Ocean seemed as a brother.

Back to chapter list of: Israel Potter