Waiting Years

The two years succeeding his fourteenth birthday were somber cycles of time for young Astor. It was a time when his thoughts ran riot, aims and aspirations and longings overtaking each other, and stretching out longing arms into the future. Life seemed full of boundless possibilities, always just beyond his reach. These visions haunted him night and day, tormenting him in proportion to his inability to take one step forward, or cherish one tangible hope. He felt like a prisoner in his own town, a captive in his own home.

The life of the village ceased to interest him. Where once he had felt loyal pride in her institutions, now all seemed flat and tasteless. Nor was this state of mind produced entirely by disappointed ambition. The boy had much natural cause for depression. Within a few years his mother had died, and his father had married again. As an old chronicler puts it, the new wife "loved not Jacob or John Jacob."

The wife and mother in this hap-hazard household had been its mainspring and inspiration. From his mother John Jacob had received most that made his life worth living. Her provident, industrious ways had caused their little to go as far as possible, and had surrounded her youngest son with a sense of warm-hearted affection, which created a home atmosphere, and in some measure made up to him for the scantily furnished larder.

There had been little ones added to the family in these later years, but there was no increase in the exchequer. So unhappy was life in his own home, that rather than sleep in his own bed, young Astor often spent the night with a friend, preferring to rise before daylight, in order to appear at his own door, ready to assist his father at the accustomed hour.

During these years he formed the habit of absenting himself from the social gatherings of friends, and in his hours of leisure went away to brood by himself. There were doubtless many reasons why it was not easy for him to join in the village festivities, and possibly in these seasons of loneliness, his thoughts fled across the seas, and for a time he forgot the adverse conditions about him.

Letters were not frequent in those days, but when they came, they bore momentous news—family stories covering long periods, tales of thrilling adventure, and accounts of how the world was making history. John Jacob boasted in after years, that he had once walked forty-five miles to get a letter that had come from a brother in England or America. It was thought that the news of Burgoyne's surrender lighted a spark in the boy's mind, that burned secretly brighter and brighter, till he at last left his German home.

A spark of hope from any favorable source was invaluable to him just at this time, for there were still two long years before him, full of patient effort to assist his father in the business he so disliked, and also to fulfill home duties in such a way as to conciliate his step-mother. One of these home duties was the care of the little sisters who had come with baby gladness into this depressing home.

Though all beside failed the boy, though there was no one at this important period of his life whose thought was bent either on his happiness or advancement, the baby sisters were like stars of promise of good things to come. The warm, affectionate nature of the lonely lad went out to his little charges, and the feeling of a soft baby hand in his hardened boyish palm, struck straight to his heart, melting the bitter feelings which his environment engendered. He could always be trusted to care for the children.

It has been seen that occasional letters came to the Astor family from England and America. There was also another source of information regarding the "New Land," which kept its memory bright in John Jacob's heart.

The year the boy was born, July 17th, 1763, the Rev. John Frederick Gebhard, the old pastor of the Reformed Church of Waldorf, died, and the Rev. Philip Steiner succeeded him. The old pastor had baptised the three older Astor boys, and for years counted the Astor family among his parishioners. After his death, his widow stayed on at Waldorf for some years, with her children. Her eldest son, John Gabriel Gebhard, was thirteen years John Jacob Astor's senior, so when he left Waldorf for a college course in Heidelberg University, John Jacob was but a little fellow of five years old.

Heidelberg was only about eight miles from Waldorf, and John Gebhard came and went to and from his mother's home, on holidays and at other convenient times. A college student always brings a touch of the college life back with him to his home town, and Heidelberg was rich in interest over and above the usual university student's stories.

Young as he was, John Jacob's eyes would open wide at the tale of the great tun in the cellar of the Schloss, on which the students were wont to climb. A barrel thirty-six feet long, and twenty-four feet high would hold many a student upon its curved outer surface, as well as forty-nine thousand gallons within. It had only been built about a dozen years when John Jacob was born, so it was still a great and recent wonder to the young people of that day.

A Waldorf boy would glory in the magnificence of Heidelberg Castle, rather than listen to tales of imaginary grandeur. It had been struck by lightning when John Jacob was a baby, and by this time had become one of the grandest ruins in Germany.

After his course at Heidelberg, young Gebhard studied theology for a season in the University of Utrecht, and there he met John Henry Livingston, from America, a most able young man, and an earnest student. Naturally, word of the young American theologian of good family reached Waldorf, and the trip across the ocean seemed the more possible, because the ocean was being crossed both ways.

When John Jacob was eight years old, their old pastor's son set sail for America. His mother was almost heart-broken, yet laid no hand upon him to detain him, giving her best to the service of God. The heart of his father's old congregation was with the young minister in his momentous undertaking, and equalty with the mother in this great separation. John Jacob was not likely to forget that day, or the wave of sympathy that swept the village.

The going of the Rev. John Gabriel Gebhard to America was the more note-worthy, since he went in company with two other young men, John Helffrich and John Helffenstein, half-brothers, who had also been students of the University of Heidelberg.

The three Johns were going to preach the Gospel in the "New Land," not a foreign land in the usual language of missions, but to carry the good tidings of salvation from the birthland of the Reformation to the "New Land," whose population was growing rapidly, but whose clergymen were few. They all signed themselves, as was common at that period, "V. D. M." Ministers, or Servants of the Word of God.

John Helffrich kept a journal of the voyage, whose main points doubtless were retold to the Helffrich and Gebhard homes, and were shared by friends in the native towns of all three young men.