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The Three Black Pennys by Joseph Hergesheimer

J >> Joseph Hergesheimer >> The Three Black Pennys




Finally the train brigade reached the inclined plane leading to the
river and city; the engine was detached, and the cars, fastened to a
hemp cable, were lowered spasmodically to where a team of mules drew
them through a gloomy, covered bridge echoing to the slow hoof falls and
creaking of loose planks. Jasper Penny fastened the elaborate frogs of
his heavily furred overcoat over his injured arm, and with a florid
bandanna wiped the cinders from his silk hat.

The coaches rolled into the station shed, where he changed, taking a
swaying Mulberry Street omnibus to Fourth, and Sanderson's Hotel. It was
a towering, square structure of five stories, with a columned white
portico, and high, divided steps. The clerk, greeting him with a precise
familiar deference, directed him to a select suite with a private
parlour, a sombre chamber of red plush, dark walls and thickly draped,
long windows. There he sat grimly contemplating a distasteful prospect.
He knew the casual, ill-prepared dinners presided over by Essie, the
covertly insolent man servant; and an overpowering reluctance came upon
him to sit again at her table. But the confusion of the hotel ordinary
repelled him too: he had seen in passing a number of men who would
endeavour to force his opinion on the specie situation or speculation in
canals. He rose and pulled sharply at the tasselled bell rope, ordering
grilled pheasant, anchovy toast and champagne to be served where he sat.

Jasper Penny ate slowly, partly distracted by the market reports in the
_U.S. Gazette_. Ninety-two and a half had been offered for Schuylkill
Navigation, only fifteen for the West Chester Railroad, but Philadelphia
and Trenton had gone to ninety-eight; while a three and a half dividend
had been declared on the French Town Turnpike and Railway Company. He
was annoyed afresh by the persistent refusal of the Government to award
the mail to the Reading Steam System. His thoughts returned to Eunice,
his daughter, the coming scene--it would at least be that--with Essie
Scofield.

It was but a short distance from the hotel to where Essie lived, over
Fourth Street to Cherry; and almost immediately he turned by the three
story brick dwelling at the corner and was at her door. The servant, in
an untidy white jacket, stood stupidly blocking the narrow hall, until
Jasper Penny with an angry impatience waved him aside. There were other
silk hats and coats, and a woman's fringed wrap, on the stand where he
left his stick and outer garments; and from above came a peal of mingled
laughter. The presence of others, now, was singularly inopportune; it
would be no good waiting for their departure--here such gatherings
almost invariably drew out until dawn; and he abruptly decided that,
after a short interval, he would give Essie to understand that he wished
to talk to her privately.

A young woman with a chalk-white face and oleaginous bandeaux of dead
black hair, in scarlet and green tartan over an extravagant crinoline,
was seated on a sofa between two men, each with an arm about her waist
and wine glasses elevated in their free hands. Essie was facing them
from a circular floor hassock, in a blue satin, informal robe over
mussed cambric ruffles, heelless nonchalants, and her hair elaborately
dressed with roses, white ribbons and a short ostrich feather. Her body,
at once slim and full, was consciously seductive, and her face, slightly
swollen and pasty in the shadows, bore the same, heedless unrestraint.
Her dark, widely-opened eyes, an insignificant nose and shortly curved,
scarlet lips, held almost the fixed, painted impudence of a cynically
debased doll. She turned and surveyed Jasper Penny with a petulant,
silent inquiry, and whatever gaiety was in progress abruptly terminated
as he advanced into the room.

"You never let me know you'd be here," Essie complained; "but I suppose
I ought to be glad to see you anyway--after four months without a line.
Jasper, Mr. Daniel Culser." The younger of the men on the sofa, a
stolidly handsome individual with hard, blue eyes, rose with an
over-emphasized composure. "Mr. Penny, extremely pleased." Jasper Penny
was irritated by the other's instant identification, and he nodded
bluntly. "Lambert Babb and Myrtilla Lewis," Essie continued
indifferently. Babb, an individual of inscrutable age, with ashen
whiskers and a blinking, weak vision in a silvery face, was audibly
delighted. Myrtilla Lewis smiled professionally over her expanse of
bewildering silk plaid. "Wine in the cooler," Essie added, and Daniel
Culser moved to where a silver bucket reposed by a tray of glasses and
broken, sugared rusks. Jasper Penny refused the offered drink, and found
a chair apart from the others. A moody silence enveloped him which he
found impossible to break, and an increasing uneasiness spread over the
room.

"Well," Essie Scofield commanded, "say something. You look as black as
an Egyptian. What'll my friends think of you? I suppose it doesn't
matter any more what it is to me; but you might play at being polite."

"Don't chip at a man like that," Myrtilla advised. "Mr. Penny has a
right to talk or not." She smiled more warmly at him, and he saw that
she had had too much champagne. The room reeked with the thin, acrid
odour of the wine, and a sickly perfume of vanilla essence. Essie, as
usual, had a glass of her favourite drink--orange juice and French
brandy--on the floor beside her, the brandy bottle and fresh oranges
conveniently near. His repulsion for her deepened until it seemed as if
actual fingers were compressing his throat, stopping his breath. He
wondered suddenly how far he was responsible for her possible
degeneration. But he had not been the first; her admission of that fact
had in the beginning attracted him to an uncommon frankness in her
peculiar make-up. He was willing to assume his fault, to pay for it,
whatever payment was possible, and escape.... Not only from her, but
from all that she embodied, from himself--what he had been--as much as
anything else.

"You are an Ironmaster," Mr. Babb finally announced; "in fact, one of
our greatest manufacturers. Now, Mr. Penny, what is your personal
opinion of engine as against the public coach? Will the railroad survive
the experimental stage, and are such gentlemen as yourself behind it?"

"I saw in the _Ledger_ some days back," Daniel Culser added, "that your
arm had been broken travelling by steam."

"One had nothing to do with the other," Jasper stated tersely, ignoring
Babb's query, "but was entirely my own fault." The conversation lagged
painfully again, during which Essie skilfully compounded another mixture
of spirits and thick, yellow juice. She grew sullen with resentment at
Jasper Penny's attitude, and exchanged enigmatic glances with Culser.
The liquor brought a quick flush to her slightly pendulous cheeks, and
she was enveloped in an increasing bravado. "Penny's a solemn old boy,"
she announced generally. Lambert Babb attempted to embrace Myrtilla,
but, her gaze on the newcomer, she pushed him away. "You got to be a
gentleman with me," she proclaimed with a patently unsteady dignity. "My
grandfather was a French noble."

"What I'd like to know," Essie remarked, "is what's his granddaughter?"

"Better'n you!" Myrtilla heatedly asserted; "one who'd appreciate a real
man, and not be playing about private with a tailor's dummy." Daniel
Culser's face grew noticeably pinker. "I'm going," Myrtilla continued,
rising. "Mr. Penny, I'd be happy to meet you under more social
conditions. Here I cannot remain for--for reasons. I might be tempted
to--" Mr. Babb caught her arm under his, and, at an imperious gesture
from Essie, piloted her from the room. Culser rose.

"Don't go, Dan," Essie Scofield told him defiantly. But Jasper Penny
maintained a silence that forced the younger man to make a stiff exit.
"Well," Essie demanded, flinging herself on the deserted sofa, "now
you've spoiled my evening. Why did you come at all if you couldn't
behave genteel?"

"Where, exactly, is Eunice?" he asked abruptly.

She glanced at him with an instant masking of her resentment. "I've told
you a hundred times--in the house of a very respectable clergyman. My
letter was clear enough; she's had bronchitis, and there's the doctor,
and--"

"Just where is Eunice?" he repeated, interrupting her aggrieved recital.

"Where I put her," her voice grew shrill. "You haven't asked to see her
for near a year, you haven't even pretended an interest in--in your own
daughter. I've done the best I could; you know I don't like children
around; but I have attended to as much of my duty as you. Now you come
out and insist on being unpleasant all in an hour. Why didn't you write?
I'd had her here for you. Come back in two or three days."

"To-morrow," he replied. "I am going to see her in the morning."

"You just ain't. I did the best I knew, but, if it isn't all roses,
you'll blame everything on me. I will have Eunice fetched--"

"Where is she?" he asked still again, wearily.

Every instinct revolted against the degradation into which he had
blindly walked. His youth had betrayed him, involving him, practically a
different man, in a payment which he realized had but commenced.... To
escape. He had first thought of that with the unconscious conviction
that the mere wish carried its fulfilment. In fact, it would be
immensely difficult; a man, he saw, could not sever himself so casually
from the past; it reached without visible demarcation into the present,
the future. All was a piece, one with another; and Essie Scofield was
drawn in a vivid thread through the entire fabric of his being.

Yet the need, the longing forward, so newly come into his consciousness,
persisted, grew--it had become the predominate design of his weaving.
Through this he recognized a reassertion of his pride, the rigid pride
of a black Penny, which, in the years immediately past, had been
overwhelmed by a temporary inner confusion. Beyond forty men returned to
their inheritance, their blood; this fact echoed vaguely among his
memories of things heard; and he felt in himself its measure of truth.
His distaste for a largely muddled, pandering society, for men huddled,
he thought, like domestic animals, returned in choking waves. In the
maculate atmosphere of flat wine and stale cologne he had a sharp
recurrence of the scent of pines, lifting warmly in sunny space.

He produced a morocco bound note book, a gold pencil; and, with the
latter poised, directed a close interrogation at Essie. Her face flushed
with an ungovernable anger, and she pressed a hand over her labouring
heart. "Get her then; out Fourth Street, Camden; the Reverend Mr.
Needles. But afterwards don't come complaining to me. You ought to have
seen to her; you've got the money, the influence. And you have done
nothing, beyond some stinking dollars ... wouldn't even name her. Eunice
Scofield, a child without--"

All that she had said was absolutely true, just.

"I suppose you'll even think I didn't give her the sums you sent; that
damned Needles has been bleeding me, suspects something." She stopped
from a lack of breath; her darkened face was purplish, in the shadows.
"I haven't been well, either--a fierce pain here, in my heart."

It was the brandy, he told her; she should leave the city, late wine
parties, go back into the country. "Go back," she echoed bitterly.
"Where? How?" He winced--the past reaching inexorably into the future.
Jasper Penny made no attempt to ignore, forget, his responsibility; he
admitted it to her; but at the same time the tyrannical hunger increased
within him--the mingled desire for fresh paths and the nostalgia of the
old freedom of spirit. But life, that had made him, had in the same
degree created Essie; neither had been the result of the other; they had
been swept together, descended blindly in company, submerged in the
passion that he had thought must last forever, but which had burned to
ashes, to nothing more than a vague sense of putrefaction in life.

"Thank you," he said formally, putting away the note book. "Something,
of course, must be done; but what, I can only say after I have seen
Eunice. I am, undoubtedly, more to blame than yourself."

"I suppose, in this holy strain, you'll end by giving her all and me
nothing."

"... what you are getting as long as you live?"

"That's little enough, when I hear how much you have, what all that iron
is bringing you. Why, you could let me have twenty, thirty thousand, and
never know it."

"If you are unable to get on, that too will be rectified."

"You are really not a bad old thing, Jasper," she pronounced, mollified.
"At one time--do you remember?--you said if ever the chance came you
would marry me. Ah, you needn't fear, I wouldn't have you with all your
iron, gold. I--" she stopped abruptly, uneasily. "Not a bad old thing,"
she repeated, moving to secure a half-full glass.

"Why do you call me old?" he asked curiously.

"I hadn't thought of it before," she admitted; "but, this evening, you
looked so solemn, and there is grey in your hair, that all at once you
seemed like an old gentleman. Now Dan Culser," she hesitated, and then
swept on, "he's what you'd name young." At Daniel Culser's age, he told
himself, he, Jasper Penny, could have walked the other blind; and now
Essie Scofield was calling him old; she had noticed the grey in his
hair. He rose to go, and she came close to him, a clinging, soft thing
of flesh faintly reeking with brandy. "I have a great deal to pay, where
money goes I don't know, even a little would be a help." He left some
gold in her hand, thankful to purchase, at that slight price, a
momentary release.

Outside Cherry Street was blackly cold, a gas lamp at the corner shed a
watery, contracted illumination. He made his way back toward the hotel,
but a sudden reluctance to mount to his lonely chambers possessed him.
Before the glimmering marble facade he took out his watch, a pale gold
efflorescence in the gloom, and rang the hour in minute, clear notes.
The third quarter past ten. He recalled the ball, but then commencing,
at Stephen Jannan's; there it would be indescribably gay, a house
flooded with the music of quadrilles, light, polite-chatter; and he
determined to proceed and have a cigar with Stephen.

He walked briskly up Mulberry Street to Sixth and there turned to the
left. Jasper Penny soon passed the shrouded silence of Independence
Square, with the new Corinthian doorway of the State House showing
vaguely through the irregularly grouped ailanthus trees. Beyond, the
brick wall with its marble coping and high iron fence reached, on the
opposite side, to the Jannan corner. The length of the brick dwelling,
with white arched windows and coursings faced the vague emptiness of
Washington Square, closed for the winter.

Inside the hall was bright and filled with the pungent warmth of fat
hearth coal. A servant, with a phrase of recognition, directed him
above, to a room burdened with masculine greatcoats and silk hats. There
an attendant told him that Mr. Jannan was below. Jasper Penny had no
intention of becoming a participant in the hall, but neither did he
propose to linger among wraps, listening to the supercilious chatter of
young men in the extreme mode of bright blue coats, painfully tight
black trousers with varnished pumps and expanses of ankle in grey silk.
One, inspecting him through an eyeglass on a woven hair guard, expressed
a pointed surprise at Jasper Penny's informal garb. "Christoval!" he
ejaculated. "It approaches an insult to the da-da-darlings." Another
commenced to sing a popular minstrel air:

"Blink--a--ho--dink! Ah! Ho!

"Roley Boley--Good morning Ladies all!"

Jasper Penny abruptly descended to a small room used for smoking. Young
men, he thought impatiently, could no longer even curse respectably.
They lisped like females at an embroidery frame. When he was young,
younger, he corrected himself, he could have outdrunk, outridden.... His
train of thought was abruptly terminated by a group unexpectedly
occupying the smoking room. He saw Stephen Jannan, his wife Liza, the
newly married young Jannans, and a strange woman in glace muslin and a
black Spanish lace shawl about her shoulders. Stephen greeted him
cordially. "Jasper, just at the moment for a waltz with--with Susan."
The stranger blushed painfully, made an involuntary movement backward,
and Liza Jannan admonished her husband. "Do you know Miss Brundon,
Jasper?" she asked.

Jasper Penny bowed, and Miss Brundon, with an evident effort, smiled,
her shy, blue eyes held resolutely on his countenance. She at once
slipped into the background, talking in a low, clear voice to Graham
Jannan's wife; while the older men enveloped themselves in a fragrant
veil of cigars. "Come, Mary, Susan," Mrs. Jannan directed, "out of this
horrid, masculine odour." Accompanied by her son the women left, and
Stephen turned to his cousin. "Thought, of course, you knew Susan
Brundon," he remarked. "A school mistress, but superior, and a lady. Has
a place on Spruce Street, by Raspberry Alley, for select younger girls;
unique idea, and very successful, I believe."

Jasper Penny said comfortably, "Humm!" The other continued, "I want
Graham to get out to Shadrach Furnace as soon as may be. That old stone
house the foremen have occupied is nearly fixed for him. I am very well
content, Jasper, to have him in the iron trade, with you practically at
its head. No deliberate favours, remember, and I have told him to look
for nothing. But, at the same time--you comprehend: folly not to push
the boy on fast as possible. No reason for us all to go through with
the hardships of the first Gilbert and his times. Must have been
fatiguing, the wilderness and English troubles and all that."

"Splendid, I should say," Jasper Penny replied. He repeated satirically
the conversation he had heard above. "Makes me ill. You will remember
there was a Howat, son of our original settler--now he must have been a
lad! Married some widow or other; wild at first, but made iron in the
end."

"A black Penny, Jasper; resembled you. Personally, I like it better
now." Jasper Penny surveyed with approbation Stephen's full, handsome
presence. Jannan was a successful, a big, man. Well, so was he too. But
he thought with keen longing of the time when he was twenty-one, and
free, free to roam self-sufficient. He thought of that Howat Penny of
which they had spoken, black as he was black in the family tradition; he
had seen Hesselius's portrait of the other; and, but for the tied hair
and continental buff, it might have been a replica of himself. It was
curious--that dark strain of Welsh blood, cropping out undiminished,
concrete, after generations. The one to hold it before Howat had been
burned in Mary's time, in the sixteenth century, dead almost three
hundred years. Jasper had a sudden, vivid sense of familiarity with the
Howat who had married some widow or other. His mind returned to his own,
peculiar problem, to Essie Scofield, to the burden with which he had
encumbered himself, the payment that faced him for--for his sheer
youth. He said abruptly, belated:

"You fit the present formal ease of society, Stephen; you like it and it
likes you. In a superficial way I have done well enough, but
underneath--" his voice sank into silence. A profound, familiar
dejection seized him; incongruously he thought of Miss Brundon's
delicate shrinking from the mere contact of the amenities of speech.
Super-sensitive. "I must go," he announced, and refused Stephen Jannan's
invitation for the night.

"Stay for some supper, anyhow," the other insisted, and, a hand on his
arm, led him past the doors open upon the dancing.

Chandeliers, great coruscating pendants of glass prisms and candles,
glittered above the expanse of whirling crinoline and blue coats,
vermilion turbans, gilt feathers and flowered hair. The light fell on
shoulders as white and elegantly sloping as alabaster vases, draped in
rose and citron, in blanched illusion frosted and looped with silver; on
bouquets of camellias swinging from jewelled chains against ruffled and
belled skirts swaying about the revealed symmetry of lacy silk stockings
and fragile slippers. "Ah, Jasper," Stephen Jannan said; "in our time,
what! Do you remember your first Wellington boots? The gambling room and
veranda at Saratoga? Tender eyes, old boy, and little tapering hands."
Jasper Penny replied, "It seems my hair is grey." Silence fell on them
as they entered the dining room. A long table was burdened with
elaborate pagodas of spun barley sugar topped with sprigs of orange
blossom, the moulded creams of a Charlotte Polonaise, champagne jelly
valanced with lemon peel, pyramids of glazed fruits on lacquered plates;
with faintly iridescent Belleek and fluted glass and ormolu; and,
everywhere, the pale multitudinous flames of candles and the fuller
radiance of astral lamps hung with lustres. Jasper Penny idly tore open
a bon bon wrapped in a verse on fringed paper,

"Viens! Viens! ange du ciel, je t'aime! je t'aime!
Et te le dire ici, c'est le bonheur supreme."

Love and the great hour of life! He had missed both; one, perhaps, with
the other. His marriage to Phebe, except for a brief flare at the
beginning, had been as empty as the affair with Essie Scofield. God, how
hollow living seemed! He had missed something; or else existence was an
ugly deception, the false lure of an incomprehensible jest. The music
beat in faint, mocking waves on his hearing, the lights of the supper
shone in the gold bubbles of his wine glass. He drained it hurriedly.
Outside the night, lying cold on deserted squares, blurred with gas
lamps, was like a vain death after the idle frivolity of Stephen
Jannan's ball. In an instant, in the shutting of a door, the blackness
had claimed him; the gaiety of warm flesh and laughter vanished. Death
... and he had literally nothing in his hands, nothing in his heart. A
duty, Eunice, remained. The sound of his footfalls on the bricks, thrown
back from blank walls, resembled the embodied, stealthy following of the
injustice he had wrought.




XII


The following morning he made his way past the continuous produce arcade
that held the centre of Market Street to the Camden Ferry. At the river
the fish stall, with its circular green roof and cornucopias, reached
almost to the gloomy ferry-house with its heavy odour of wet wood. The
boat clattered through broken ice, by a trim packet ship, the
_Susquehanna_, and into the narrow canal through Windmill Island. Camden
was a depressing region of low, marshy land, its streets unpaved and
without gas, the gutters full of frozen, stagnant water. He inquired the
way to the Reverend Mr. Needles', passed a brick meeting house, and,
turning into Fourth Street, isolated frame dwellings, coming at last to
a dingy wooden house with broken panes in the upper windows and a
collapsing veranda at the edge of a blackened, skeleton wood.

A tall, gaunt woman in a ravelled worsted shawl answered his summons,
and informed him, interrupted by a prolonged coughing, that Mr. Needles
was away on circuit. "I came for a child staying with you," Jasper Penny
explained shortly, suppressing an involuntary repulsion at the degraded
surroundings. "She's not well," the woman replied, with instant
suspicion. "I don't just like to let a chancy person see her." He
discarded all subterfuge. "I am her father," he stated. The other
shifted to a whining self-defence. "And her in this sink!" she
exclaimed, gazing at Jasper Penny's furred coat, his glossy hat and
gloves and ebony cane.

"I did all for her I could, considering the small money I was promised,
and then half the time I didn't get that, neither. The lady owes for
three weeks right now. I suppose you'll have to come in," she concluded
grudgingly. They entered a dark hall, clay cold. Beyond, in a slovenly
kitchen hardly warmer, he found Eunice, his daughter; a curiously
sluggish child with a pinched, hueless face and a meagre body in a man's
worn flannel shirt and ragged skirt and stockings.

"Here's your father," Mrs. Needles ejaculated.

Eunice stood in the middle of the bare floor, staring with pallid, open
mouth at the imposing figure of the man. She said nothing; and Jasper
Penny found her silence more accusing than a shrill torrent of reproach.
"She's kind of heavy like," Mrs. Needles explained. "I have come to take
you away," Jasper Penny said. Then, turning to the woman: "Are those all
the clothes she has?" She grew duskily red. "There are some others
about, but I don't just know where, and then she spoils them so fast."

"That's a lie," the child announced, with a faint patch of colour on
either thin cheek. "Mr. Needles sold them." The man decided to ignore
such issues; his sole wish now was to take Eunice away as speedily as
possible. "Well," he directed impatiently, "get a shawl, something to
wrap her in." He regretted vainly that he had not come for the child in
a carriage. He paid without a question what the woman said was owing;
and, with Eunice folded in a ragged plaid, prepared to depart. "I
guess," the child decided, in a strangely mature voice, "we'd better
take my medicine." She turned toward a mantel, Mrs. Needles made a quick
movement in the same direction, but the small shape was before her.
Jasper Penny took a bottle from the diminutive, cold hand. The label had
been obliterated; but, impelled by a distrustful curiosity, he took out
the cork.

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