Part 3

Then Emily had arrived upon the scene, whom he described as “a fine figure of a woman” (she weighed something over two hundred), and if she was too inert to join in the general pursuit of him, she was also too inert to _avoid_ pursuit herself--hence the marriage, and though, while praising her housekeeping, he openly expressed his doubts of her soul’s salvation--the new, phlegmatic Mrs. Brockwell remained quite undisturbed. She was an experienced chewer of gum--she said she _had_ to chew it to aid her digestion--but be that as it may, a certain mental clearness, a sort of spiritual calm, seemed to come to her from her steady, cow-like munching. On the occasion of her second marriage she had contentedly chewed until she took her place before the lean, old minister; then, having no bridesmaid to act for her, she stuck her gum on her breast-pin, temporarily, while she promised to accept the big party at her side, and all his belongings, and to nurse him for the rest of his life without further remuneration--and with the nuptial benediction she had resumed her gum and had gone forth a slowly-chewing, contented bride--and on Sunday, he wishing, probably, to do all that was courteous and polite under the circumstances, took his new wife out to the cemetery and proceeded to introduce her--as it were--to the other members of the family.

A hideous chunk of stone stood in the middle of a plot, from which the graves rayed out like the spokes of a wheel--and old Thomas, with a cane, which so surely only appeared on Sundays that a bad little boy once said: “God made the Sabbath day and old Brockwell’s cane!”--with this cane he immediately bored a little hole at the foot of one grave and remarked: “I buried my _first_ wife there”--and Emily brought her jaws to with a snap, and bowed her head slightly, as though acknowledging an introduction. Then she chewed again, and old Thomas yanked out the cane with some effort, as though Mrs. Brockwell No. 1 was holding on to it. Then he bored another little hole at the foot of another grave with the cane and announced: “I buried my eldest son here”--another stoppage of the jaws and another bow--and so the old “borer” went on, till each member of the family had been presented to the new-comer in turn, and then he gave the final touch of brightness to this very original bridal outing by carefully measuring with the cane the space, to see if there was enough left for two more spokes to his family “wheel of death.”

Mrs. Brockwell was wont to declare she would remember that day as long as she lived. Not because her sensibilities were wounded, but because she had not been constructed for rapid action, and she declared she would never have lived through the homeward walk but for the sustaining power of an extra piece of gum, which she luckily had in her pocket--for this was the golden age of the world when women still had pockets.

Old Thomas Brockwell narrowly--very narrowly--escaped being a religious monomaniac. Unquestionably sincere, his religion was yet a thing so warped and bitter as to fill most people with shrinking dread. He studied only the Old Testament, rarely reading the New. In his ears the rolling thunders of Sinai drowned the gentle “Voice” preaching from the “Mount.” He believed in a personal Devil--he believed in a material Hell.

I have never known anyone who got as much satisfaction out of the _whole_ of his religion as he got out of Hell alone. He talked of it, thought of it, and, in regretful tones, told many of his friends that they were going _there_. All its accessories were dear to him. The “brimstone,” the “burning lake” and that “undying worm,” which seemed, in his imagination, something between a boaconstrictor and a Chinese dragon, while the “bottomless pit” not only gave him two words to roll sweetly under his tongue, but provided an ideal place to shake frightened little boys over at Sunday-school--for he labored faithfully Sunday after Sunday to frighten sinful youth into the church or the idiot asylum.

His God was a bitterly revengeful God! The Bible told him to fear Him and to obey His commandments. The base of his religion was “an eye for an eye--a tooth for a tooth!” He knew no “turning of the other cheek”--no “forgiveness of enemies,” and many a time, in his efforts to show his disapproval of the loving, gentle, yet strong teaching of the New Testament, he blasphemed unconsciously. Few things made him so angry as to suggest “a Hell of remorse”--of “tortured conscience”--of “mental agony”--while a hint at “atonement”--a final winning of forgiveness--was a rag so red as to set him madly charging through the harshest and most cruelly just punishments meted out in the Bible--and the worse one promised for the future--_Hell_! “And _their_ future is _now_!” he would shout, with glaring eyes! “_Now_, do you understand? All these disobedient servants of the Lord are in fiery torments _now!_ and _will_ be forever! Ah! it’s a big place--a _mighty_ big place!--far and far away bigger than Heaven! It has to be, there’s so many more to go there!”

Night and morning he read a portion of the Bible, and prayed loud and long--and right there he came in conflict with his Emily. There was just one point they differed on--they did not quarrel, because Emily was too slow in speech. There’s no comfort to be had out of a quarrel, unless it’s quick--_very_ quick; and if Emily had had her choice she would a good deal rather have died than try to be quick.

The point of difference between this otherwise peaceful pair was whether the chewing of gum was un-Christianlike and disrespectful when indulged in during family service. The first time he had caught her in the heinous act he had roared out: “Woman, have you no decency? Would you chaw the ten commandments up into a hunk of gum?”

Emily had mildly stated that she chewed “to keep herself awake,” and after many struggles it had come to a compromise--she was only to chew while he read; _not_ while he prayed.

Emily explained matters to me one day in this way: “You see, Mr. Brockwell, he gets riled up because I chew gum while he’s reading gospel, but it’s really his own fault; if he’d only read one chapter, like an ordinary Christian man! My father, now, was a deacon, and he never read mor’n one chapter at a time at family service; but Mr. Brockwell, when he gets a smiting people hip and thigh, and a raining down plagues and things; why, there’s no stop to him; he goes right along over ever so many chapters--and I don’t take to the stoning and the killing--and so I go off to sleep, unless I chew gum right hard. Why, never once since we’ve been married has Mr. Brockwell been satisfied with the ‘Fall of Jericho’ for one reading. On he goes, and tackles that city of ‘Ai,’ and I always feel sorry when that line comes about the ‘men and _women_ that were slaughtered bein’ twelve thousand.’ But, land sakes! it’s all sweeter than honey to Mr. Brockwell--’specially the hanging of the king, and piling stones on his body for the beginning of an altar--nasty, bad-smelling idea I call it. _But_ when Mr. Brockwell begins with them ‘seven trumpets of rams’ horns’ I begin to chew hard, for I know there’s a lot to be gone over before praying begins. If he’d read oftener about Hannah and little Samuel I’d keep awake. Ain’t that a nice little Samuel on the mantel--his left foot’s broken, but kneeling like that you’d never know it, unless you turn him around.” That being the sort of tangent Mrs. Emily was apt to go off on during a conversation.

The old man might have lived without working at that time, but he held idleness as sinful, so he, without any feeling of shame, acted as night watchman in a large building down town. One winter there were many burglaries, and his employer grew a bit uneasy, knowing his was a tempting establishment and remembering that Thomas Brockwell was an elderly man. So he asked his watchman if he would not like to have some one to help him during the rest of the winter. And Brockwell was hot with anger and answered that he could take care of his employer’s property, but he didn’t want to protect some young nincompoop besides. “I am able to take care of any burglars that come my way. A man of the Lord can always lick a law-breaker,” and looking at the really splendid old body of his watchman, the gentleman had laughingly declared he “believed old Brockwell would be up to two or three younger men!” and let him go his obstinate, lonely way, and like many another word spoken in jest, these words proved true.

One bitter night, after reading with great enjoyment of the prompt action of the bears in the taking off of those ribald little boys who had made unpleasant remarks about the scarcity of hair among the prophets (surprising how alike the boys of to-day are with the boys of the scriptural epoch), and had prayed till Emily had fallen asleep, with her face squelched in the seat of the chair she knelt by, and had awakened and acknowledged her fault. “For,” as she said to me, “after he had fallen over my legs without waking me, he might have thought I was lying if I had said I was just thinking.”

And I had quite agreed with her and complimented her on her truthful nature--and he had taken his tin pail of coffee in his mittened hand and his package of sandwiches in his pocket and gone forth to his night’s watch. He had been a sailor in his early manhood, and, in addition to the tattooed anchor and star on the backs of his hands, he still retained a few words from his sailor’s vocabulary which he used now and then with bewildering effect upon the landsmen. Mrs. Brockwell found that habit particularly trying. She was one of those women who always get drabbled when they walk. Long street dresses were worn in her day, and had she possessed six hands instead of two, she would have failed still to keep her dress out of the wet or the mud. On Sundays when she was crowded into her best gown and was clutching her skirt in the most useless places, trying to pick her way across a muddy street, old Thomas was wont to exclaim from the rear: “Take a reef in the la’board side of your petticoat, Emily!” and Emily would hoist high the right side instead, and the left would go trailing through the mud, while the old man pounded the walk with his Sunday cane, crying: “La’board--la’board--la’board, not sta’board. Now just look at your sails! Oh, woman, the ignorance of you at forty-six, not to know your la’board from your sta’board side!” And meek Emily never suggested that left and right were the generally accepted terms for use on shore.

And as old Thomas walked through the biting cold, he congratulated himself on the honesty his wife had shown in admitting she had fallen asleep during prayers, and said to himself that it was the end of _her_ day’s work and he supposed she was tired--and--“great guns, how cold it was!” And so he maundered on and reached his store and entered and made his rounds, and finally at about two o’clock he took his coffee from the heater and began to drink it, when he paused--to listen. Then he put the coffee gently down and stole softly to the office--and saw two men at the safe, and with a cry, “Avast there!” he was upon them, striving to grasp them both! The smaller one was like an eel and had slipped from his clutch, but the larger one he held on to, and after a short struggle, he got his head “in chancery.” He had just put in a couple of good blows--when he heard an ominous click behind him--at the same instant the man he was pounding fiercely growled: “No, no, don’t use the ‘barker’--you fool, you’ll ‘jug’ us all yet! Choke the devil off, so I can do something--choke him, I say!”

With beautiful obedience and the spring of a wild-cat, No. 2 was on Brockwell’s back, and doing his best to carry out orders. But it was that neck--that had given rise to the name _Bull_ Brockwell; and the small ruffian tried in vain to get his clever thief’s fingers in a choking grasp about the massive throat; but his weight was disturbing and distressing, and old Brockwell loosed No. 1 for a moment, while he reached up and tore the incubus from his shoulders. In the effort he wheeled half round and found himself facing a third man in the doorway. He had just time to note that the man had a bull’s-eye lantern in one hand, some weapon in the other, and wore a half-mask on his face--when he received a crushing blow upon the head. He felt the hot blood leap forth in swift response to that savage gash. He staggered a bit, too, but did not fall, to the amazement of the brawny scoundrel, who exclaimed: “Well, I’ll be damned!” Those words were like a veritable “slogan” to old Brockwell. “Aye, aye,” he cried, “right you are, my hearty! Damned you will be, sure, and the burning lake of brimstone you’ll get for this night’s work!” and then they were upon him. He threw No. 3 out of the doorway and took that place himself, thus keeping all of them before him, and like an old bear “baited” by a pack of snapping, snarling dogs, he was slowly driven back until he found himself in the room again where stood his coffee. While he placed many blows where they would do the most good, still a great many more had fallen short. He felt his wind was going, and the streaming blood from his head impaired his sight, and just at that moment of threatened weakness the little thief struck him in the face, not with his fist but with his open hand--slapped him, in fact. With a roar of rage, old Brockwell caught up the pail and dashed the hot coffee full into his assailant’s face, then shouting, “You little whelp, you cur, you worm!” with a mighty blow he drove the tin pail hard and tight on to the thief’s head, half cutting off his ears with its rim, and as the other men made at him, by a happy fluke, he caught each man by the back of the neck and with every ounce of power to be had from his great arms and shoulders, he drove their two heads together in a smashing blow, and dropped their bodies as a well-bred terrier drops the rats he has shaken the life from. Then he turned for the little foe, just in time to catch upon his arm the blow that had been meant for his heart, and, by the hot smarting of his skin, he knew he had been cut by the little ruffian, whom he hammered into submission easily. Then Bull Brockwell sounded his whistle at the door for the police, and when they came he laid his hand on one of the officers’ shoulder and faintly asked: “Why--don’t--you--hold still--officer? You keep--going up--and down--,” and then old Thomas went down, and for a time knew neither prayer, nor burglar, nor even burning brimstone, but only darkness.

When his senses came back to him he gave an exhibition of what might be called pig-headed honesty. There was a drug store and a doctor’s office about two blocks away, and the policeman, on seeing the sorry condition of the old man, urged him to go and have his hurts cared for. _They_ would see that all was safe during his absence, but he refused point blank, saying: “If a man was a watchman, he watched! If he was a night watchman he watched till the night was gone, or deserved the ‘cat.’ His employer paid him to stay in that building till daylight, and he’d stay, and be tended to afterwards.”

Half angrily the policeman exclaimed: “You obstinate, old bull! Do you want to bleed to death, then?” And the “bull,” with some embarrassment, had acknowledged that he did not really desire death, but with a sigh of satisfaction, he suddenly announced: “The Lord will settle all that. All I’ve got to do--is my duty--and though I don’t feel just what you might call--hearty--I--I--guess--I’ll hold out--till time’s up and--” and his gray white lips trembled into silence.

The policeman, finding him immovable in his determination, sent for help, and soon the battered “old Brockwell” was being washed and strapped and bandaged and stitched, and had a few feet of plaster over some strained muscles, and was generally “made over.” And then the stunned burglars had recovered their scattered senses and received a smiling and joyous welcome from the policemen, such as is only offered when the lost is found--and indeed one of these gentlemen had been lost--from the penitentiary--for several months. When the party of three were rounded up, ready for an early morning stroll to the station house, No. 1 had turned to Brockwell and growled: “See here, you old slugger, next time I come up against you just hit me over the head with a loaded cane, or the butt-end of a revolver or something _soft_ like that, will you? I don’t want to be ‘put out’ no more with another ‘mug’s’ head, now I tell you fair!”

“A--a--ah!” cried the little fellow, “he’s a fightin’ freak, he is! He ought to be a doin’ time for jamming a tin pail over a man’s head and half cutting off his ears!”

And so they went forth, cursing the night they had tackled “old Bull Brockwell!”

And then he had returned home, “sans buttons et sans reproche,” and finding a barrel of flour standing at the side door, had picked it up and carried it into the house, apparently to convince himself that he was not much hurt. Then, beginning to feel stiff and lame, he put himself into Emily’s hands, and she promptly put him into his bed, and scrambled through the “Fall of Jericho,” stuck her gum upon the bed-post while she did it, then she had looked at his head and said, “she’d no idea a man could sew so neatly!” and then old Brockwell got hot and feverish, and his eye and cheek had blackened, and the doctor said he must be kept quiet a few days, at which dictum Emily had groaned aloud: “Kept quiet? Him? Good Lord!”

And, truly, had she been alone with him those days, her work would have been cut out for her. The ideal “bull in a china shop” would have proved an inoffensive and lymphatic creature compared to this pawing, plunging, irritable old Bull Brockwell! Bad enough at any time, when his eyes had swelled so he could no longer by the aid of his Bible put women and children to “the edge of the sword,” nor erect altars, nor even calculate the dollars’ worth of a “wedge of gold of fifty shekels weight,” he proceeded to fret himself into a fever, and I was moved partly by pity and partly, I am sorry to say, by a spirit of mischief, to seat myself by his side, and with the air of one who carefully selects a soothing and pleasant topic for sick-room conversation, I brought forward the subject of eternal punishment, and for my reward had his fixed attention in a moment.

For a time he expatiated on the strong points of that place of torment, seeing no inconsistency in _paving_ with broken promises a _bottomless_ pit, and as he began to run down, assuming the air of one eager for information, I asked his opinion of that place of eternal coldness--that frozen lake.

“Coldness--coldness?” he repeated, “Why, I don’t seem to remember!” and then another thought came to him and he broke out: “Fine! Splendid! I never felt such pain in my life as when I went near a fire with my frosted hands. Cold _and_ fire! That’s good! Ah, it would have been better to have respected them commandments--only ten of ’em too!”

Egged on by his evident satisfaction, I went on introducing to him “circle” after “circle” of the great Italian’s Vision of Hell, and if Mr. Thomas Brockwell ever knew a genuinely happy afternoon, _that_ was the one. And when I got a soft pencil and made black lines about the inside of his shaving-mug to illustrate the idea of the “circle,” he eagerly peered in with his nearly-closed, discolored eyes and triumphantly cried: “And the old, burning-brimstone lake right at the bottom--eh?”

All the punishments had met with his hearty approval save one. That great, black, “windy horror,” through which unfortunate lovers beat their blind way--seeking, eternally seeking their sinful mates--met with instant condemnation. “If they had sinned--they had broken a very important law--a law, mind you, that Moses had received direct from Heaven. Just flying round in the dark was no punishment for such a sin! They got worse than that when they were alive!” For, you see, the old man was very material, and he failed to imagine the anguish of that “eternal, loving, despairing search!”

All went well. Old Brockwell not only kept to his bed, but enjoyed himself until night and time for family service arrived, and then the “snag” appeared in my way that I should have seen from the first. Suddenly suspicious, he placed his hand on the book and asked: “Just in what part of ‘this’ did you find all that new ‘Hell’ you’ve been telling me about, lass?”

I sat stupidly silent. I had a vision of myself being driven away as unworthy to enter in with true believers, having jested upon the great subject. I tried to force my lips to speak, to tell him I would bring the book I had read it all in--but, truth to tell, I was too frightened to speak, and his brow blackening with anger, Mattie, his step-daughter, calmly asked: “Mother where was it in the old-world they found those ‘sacred’ manuscripts the other day?” (Poor Emily wasn’t at all sure there was an old-world.) “Mr. Brockwell, you’ll know--Egypt wasn’t it? Those wise men are working over them, you know, to translate them; they say they are parts of the old--”

“Egypt,” declared the battered Brockwell. “Egypt, and very interesting they are too!”

“But,” I meekly started, “but”--then Mattie cleared her throat loudly, and bending over me, muttered: “Don’t be a fool--leave well-enough alone!” and I followed her advice and was silent. A month later, I told them “good-bye,” my profession taking me far from them, and I could not help admiring the upright, powerful figure of the old man, as he stood at his gate--so perfectly proportioned that it was hard to believe that he was inches over six feet in height. As I reached the walk I looked back. Emily, large and buxom, stood in the door, a soft, red shawl about her ample shoulders--her jaws working with a slow precision that told me plainly she was “breaking in” a new piece of gum. Bull Brockwell waved his hat to me, and, against the westering sun, he loomed up black and big! And I said to myself: “In faith as in body--a giant!”