But there was at least one lonely figure on the scene, lonely and furtive. It was old Mr. Spofford, moving with the particular agility of a thief, down the path to the river. He carried a mysterious sack. He lived alone at the edge of town, supporting himself by repairing watches. His family was formerly well-to-do, and he had traveled and been to college. What could he be carrying to the river on Christmas Eve in an epochal snowstorm? It must be some secret, something he meant to destroy, but what documents might a lonely old man possess, and why should he choose this of all nights to hide his secret in the river?
The sack he carried was a pillowcase, and in it were nine live kittens. They made a lumpy burden, mewing loudly for milk, and their mistaken vitality distressed him. He had tried to give them away to the butcher, the fish man, the ash man and the druggist, but who wants a stray cat on Christmas Eve, and he couldn’t take care of nine himself. It was not his fault that his old cat conceived—it was no one’s fault, really—and yet the closer he got to the river, the heavier was his burden of guilt. It was the destruction of their vitality, their life, that pained him. Animals are not supposed to apprehend death, and yet the struggle in the pillowcase was vigorous and apprehensive; and he was cold.
He was an old man, and he hated the snow. Pushing on toward the river, he seemed to see in the storm the mortality of the planet. Spring would never come again. The valley of the West River would never again be a bowl of grass and violets. The lilacs would never bloom again. Watching the snow blow over the fields, he knew in his bones the death of civilizations—Paris buried in snow, the Grand Canal and the Thames frozen over, London abandoned, and in the caves of the escarpment at Innsbruck a few survivors huddled over a fire of chair and table legs. This cruel, this dolorous, this Russian winter, he thought; this death of hope. Cheer, valor, all good feelings had been extinguished in him by the cold. He tried to cast the hour into the future, to invent some gentle thaw, some clement southwest wind—blue and moving water in the river, tulips and hyacinths in bloom, the plump stars of a spring night hung about the tree of heaven—but he felt instead the chill of the glacier, the ice age, in his bones and in the painful beating of his heart.
The river was frozen, but there was some open water along the banks where the current turned. It would be easiest to drop a stone into the pillowcase, but this might hurt the kittens that he meant to murder. He knotted the top of the sack, and as he approached the water the noise in the pillowcase got louder and more plaintive. The banks were icy. The river was deep. The snow was blinding. When he put his sack into the water, it floated, and in trying to submerge it he lost his balance and fell into the water himself. “Help! Help! Help!” he cried. “Help! Help! Help! I’m drowning!” But no one heard him, and it would be weeks before he was missed.
Then the train whistle sounded—the afternoon train that had pushed its cowcatcher through the massive drifts, bringing home the last to come, bringing them back to the old houses on Boat Street, where nothing was changed and nothing was strange and nobody worried and nobody grieved, and where in an hour or two the souls of men would be sifted out, the good getting toboggans and sleds, skates and snowshoes, ponies and gold pieces, and the wicked receiving nothing but a lump of coal.
The Wapshot family settled in St. Botolphs in the seventeenth century. I knew them well, I made it my business to examine their affairs, indeed I spent the best years of my life, its very summit, on their chronicle. They were friendly enough. When you met them on the streets of St. Botolphs they behaved as if this chance meeting were something they had anticipated but if you told them anything—told them that the West River had flooded or that Pinkham’s Folly had burned to the ground—they would convey, in a fleeting smile, the fact that you had made a mistake. One did not tell the Wapshots anything. Their resistance to receiving information seemed to be a family trait. They thought well of themselves; they esteemed themselves so healthy that it seemed impossible to them that they would not have known about the flood or the fire, even though they might have been in Europe. I went to school with the boys, raced with Moses at the Travertine Boat Club and played football with them both. They used to cheer one another loudly as if shouting the family name across a playing field would give it some immortality. I spent a lot of pleasant time at their house on River Street and yet what I remember is that it was always in their power to make me feel alone, to make it painfully clear that I was an outsider.
