WHEN the first gust was over, the Reverend Bronson seemed sad rather
than enraged. He reproached the machine for the failure of his effort
against that gambling den.
“But why do you call yourself defeated?” I asked. It was no part of my
purpose to concede, even by my silence, that either I or Tammany was
opposed to the Reverend Bronson. “You should put the matter to the test
of a trial before you say that.”
“What can I do without Inspector McCue? and he has been removed from the
affair. I talked with him concerning it; he told me himself there was no
hope.”
“Now, what were his words?” said I, for I was willing to discover how
far Inspector McCue had used my name.
“Why, then,” returned the Reverend Bronson, with a faint smile at the
recollection, “if I am to give you the precise words, our talk ran
somewhat like this:
“'Doctor, what's the use?' said Inspector McCue. 'We're up against it;
we can't move a wheel.'
“'There's such a word as law,' said I, advancing much, the argument you
have just now given me; 'and such a thing as justice.'
“'Not in the face of the machine,' responded Inspector McCue. 'The will
of the machine stands for all the law and all the justice that we're
likely to get. The machine has the courts, the juries, the prosecuting
officers, and the police. Every force we need is in its hands.
Personally, of course, they couldn't touch you; but if I were to so much
as lift a finger, I'd be destroyed. Some day I, myself, may be chief;
and if I am, for once in a way, I'll guarantee the decent people of this
town a run for their money.'
“'And yet,' said I, 'we prate of liberty!'
“'Liberty!' cried he. 'Doctor, our liberties are in hock to the
politicians, and we've lost the ticket.'”
It was in my mind to presently have the stripes and buttons off the
loquacious, honest Inspector McCue. The Reverend Bronson must have
caught some gleam of it in my eye; he remonstrated with a gentle hand
upon my arm.
“Promise me that no more harm shall come to McCue,” he said. “I ought
not to have repeated his words. He has been banished to the Bronx; isn't
that punishment enough for doing right?”
“Yes,” I returned, after a pause; “I give you my word, your friend is
in no further peril. You should tell him, however, to forget the name,
'machine.' Also, he has too many opinions for a policeman.”
The longer I considered, the more it was clear that it would not be a
cautious policy to cashier McCue. It would make an uproar which I
did not care to court when so near hand to an election. It was not
difficult, therefore, to give the Reverend Bronson that promise, and I
did it with a good grace.
Encouraged by my compliance, the Reverend Bronson pushed into an
argument, the object of which was to bring me to his side for the town's
reform.
“Doctor,” said I, when he had set forth what he conceived to be my duty
to the premises, “even if I were disposed to go with you, I would have
to go alone. I could no more take Tammany Hall in the direction you
describe, than I could take the East River. As I told you once before,
you should consider our positions. It is the old quarrel of theory and
practice. You proceed upon a theory that men are what they should be; I
must practice existence upon the fact of men as they are.”
“There is a debt you owe Above!” returned the Reverend Bronson, the
preacher within him beginning to struggle.
“And what debt should that be?” I cried, for my mind, on the moment, ran
gloomily to Blossom. “What debt should I owe there?--I, who am the most
unhappy man in the world!”
There came a look into the eyes of the Reverend Bronson that was at once
sharp with interrogation and soft with sympathy. He saw that I had
been hard wounded, although he could not know by what; and he owned the
kindly tact to change the course of his remarks.
“There is one point, sure,” resumed the Reverend Bronson, going backward
in his trend of thought, “and of that I warn you. I shall not give up
this fight. I began with an attack upon those robbers, and I've been
withstood by ones who should have strengthened my hands. I shall now
assail, not alone the lawbreakers, but their protectors. I shall attack
the machine and the police. I shall take this story into every paper
that will print it; I shall summon the pulpits to my aid; I shall
arouse the people, if they be not deaf or dead, to wage war on those who
protect such vultures in their rapine for a share of its returns. There
shall be a moral awakening; and you may yet conclude, when you sit down
in the midst of defeat, that honesty is after all the best policy, and
that virtue has its reward.”
The Reverend Bronson, in the heat of feeling, had risen from the chair,
and declaimed rather than said this, while striding up and down. To
him it was as though my floor were a rostrum, and the private office of
Tammany's Chief, a lecture room. I am afraid I smiled a bit cynically at
his ardor and optimism, for he took me in sharp hand, “Oh! I shall not
lack recruits,” said he, “and some will come from corners you might
least suspect. I met your great orator, Mr. Gutterglory, but a moment
ago; he gave me his hand, and promised his eloquence to the cause of
reform.”
“Nor does that surprise me,” said I. Then, with a flush of wrath: “You
may say to orator Gutterglory that I shall have something to remind him
of when he takes the stump in your support.”
My anger over Gutterglory owned a certain propriety of foundation. He
was that sodden Cicero who marred the scene when, long before, I called
on Big Kennedy, with the reputable old gentleman and Morton, to consult
over the Gas Company's injunction antics touching Mulberry Traction.
By some wonderful chance, Gutterglory had turned into sober walks. Big
Kennedy, while he lived, and afterward I, myself, had upheld him, and
put him in the way of money. He paid us with eloquence in conventions
and campaigns, and on show occasions when Tammany would celebrate a
holiday or a victory. From low he soared to high, and surely none was
more pleased thereby than I. On every chance I thrust him forward; and
I was sedulous to see that always a stream of dollar-profit went running
his way.
Morton, I remember, did not share my enthusiasm. It was when I suggested
Gutterglory as counsel for Mulberry.
“But really now!” objected Morton, with just a taint of his old-time
lisp, “the creature doesn't know enough. He's as shallow as a skimming
dish, don't y' know.”
“Gutterglory is the most eloquent of men,” I protested.
“I grant you the beggar is quite a talker, and all that,” retorted
Morton, twirling that potential eyeglass, “but the trouble is, old
chap, that when we've said that, we've said all. Gutterglory is a mere
rhetorical freak. He ought to take a rest, and give his brain a chance
to grow up with his vocabulary.”
What Morton said had no effect on me; I clung to Gutterglory, and made
his life worth while. I was given my return when I learned that for
years he had gone about, unknown to me, extorting money from people with
the use of my name. Scores have paid peace-money to Gutterglory, and
thought it was I who bled them. So much are we at the mercy of rascals
who win our confidence!
It was the fact of his learning that did it. I could never be called
a good judge of one who knew books. I was over prone to think him of
finest honor who wrote himself a man of letters, for it was my weakness
to trust where I admired. In the end, I discovered the villain duplicity
of Gutterglory, and cast him out; at that, the scoundrel was rich with
six figures to his fortune, and every dime of it the harvest of some
blackmail in my name.
He became a great fop, did Gutterglory; and when last I saw him--it
being Easter Day, as I stepped from the Cathedral, where I'd been with
Blossom--he was teetering along Fifth Avenue, face powdered and a glow
of rouge on each cheekbone, stayed in at the waist, top hat, frock coat,
checked trousers, snowy “spats” over his patent leathers, a violet in
his buttonhole, a cane carried endwise in his hand, elbows crooked,
shoulders bowed, the body pitched forward on his toes, a perfect picture
of that most pitiful of things--an age-seamed doddering old dandy! This
was he whom the Reverend Bronson vaunted as an ally!
“You are welcome to Gutterglory,” said I to my reverend visitor on that
time when he named him as one to become eloquent for reform. “It but
proves the truth of what Big John Kennedy so often said: Any rogue,
kicked out of Tammany Hall for his scoundrelisms, can always be sure of
a job as a 'reformer.'”
“Really!” observed Morton, when a few days later I was telling him of
the visit of the Reverend Bronson, “I've a vast respect for Bronson. I
can't say that I understand him--working for nothing among the scum and
rubbish of humanity!--for personally I've no talent for religion, don't
y' know! And so he thinks that honesty is the best policy!”
“He seemed to think it not open to contradiction.”
“Hallucination, positive hallucination, my boy! At-least, if taken in a
money sense; and 'pon my word! that's the only sense in which it's worth
one's while to take anything--really! Honesty the best policy! Why, our
dominie should look about him. Some of our most profound scoundrels are
our richest men. Money is so much like water, don't y' know, that it
seems always to seek the lowest places;” and with that, Morton went
his elegant way, yawning behind his hand, as if to so much exert his
intelligence wearied him.
For over nine years--ever since the death of Big Kennedy--I had kept the
town in my hands, and nothing strong enough to shake my hold upon
it. This must have its end. It was not in the chapter of chance that
anyone's rule should be uninterrupted. Men turn themselves in bed, if
for no reason than just to lie the other way; and so will your town turn
on its couch of politics. Folk grow weary of a course or a conviction,
and to rest themselves, they will put it aside and have another in its
place. Then, after a bit, they return to the old.
In politics, these shifts, which are really made because the community
would relax from some pose of policy and stretch itself in new
directions, are ever given a pretense of morality as their excuse. There
is a hysteria to arise from the crush and jostle of the great city.
Men, in their crowded nervousness, will clamor for the new. This is also
given the name of morals. And because I was aware how these conditions
of restlessness and communal hysteria ever subsist, and like a magazine
of powder ask but the match to fire them and explode into fragments
whatever rule might at the time exist, I went sure that some day,
somehow the machine would be overthrown. Also, I went equally certain
how defeat would be only temporary, and that before all was done, the
town would again come back to the machine.
You've seen a squall rumple and wrinkle and toss the bosom of a lake? If
you had investigated, you would have learned how that storm-disturbance
was wholly of the surface. It did not bite the depths below. When the
gust had passed, the lake--whether for good or bad--re-settled to its
usual, equal state. Now the natural conditions of New York are machine
conditions. Wherefore, I realized, as I've written, that no gust of
reformation could either trouble it deeply or last for long, and that
the moment it had passed, the machine must at once succeed to the
situation.
However, when the Reverend Bronson left me, vowing insurrection, I had
no fears of the sort immediate. The times were not hysterical, nor ripe
for change. I would re-carry the city; the Reverend Bronson--if his
strength were to last that long--with those moralists he enlisted, might
defeat me on some other distant day. But for the election at hand I was
safe by every sign.
As I pored over the possibilities, I could discern no present argument
in his favor. He himself might be morally sure of machine protection
for those men of Barclay Street. But to the public he could offer no
practical proof. Should he tell the ruin of young Van Flange, no one
would pay peculiar heed. Such tales were of the frequent. Nor would
the fate of young Van Flange, who had employed his name and his fortune
solely as the bed-plates of an endless dissipation, evoke a sympathy.
Indeed those who knew him best--those who had seen him then, and who saw
him now at his Mulberry Traction desk, industrious, sober, respectable
in a hall-bedroom way on his narrow nine hundred a year, did not scruple
to declare that his so-called ruin was his regeneration, and that those
card-criminals who took his money had but worked marvels for his good.
No; I could not smell defeat in the contest coming down. I was safe for
the next election; and the eyes of no politician, let me tell you, are
strong enough to see further than the ballot just ahead. On these facts
and their deductions, while I would have preferred peace between the
Reverend Bronson and the machine, and might have conceded not a little
to preserve it, I based no present fears of that earnest gentleman, nor
of any fires of politics he might kindle.
And I would have come through as I forejudged, had it not been for that
element of the unlooked-for to enter into the best arranged equation,
and which this time fought against me. There came marching down upon me
a sudden procession of blood in a sort of red lockstep of death. In it
was carried away that boy of my door, Melting Moses, and I may say that
his going clouded my eye. Gothecore went also; but I felt no sorrow
for the death of that ignobility in blue, since it was the rock of his
murderous, coarse brutality on which I split. There was a third to die,
an innocent and a stranger; however, I might better give the story of it
by beginning with a different strand.
In that day when the Reverend Bronson and Inspector McCue worked for the
condemnation of those bandits of Barclay Street, there was one whom they
proposed as a witness when a case should be called in court. This man
had been a waiter in the restaurant which robbed young Van Flange, and
in whose pillage Gothecore himself was said to have had his share.
After Inspector McCue was put away in the Bronx, and the Reverend
Bronson made to give up his direct war upon the dens, this would-be
witness was arrested and cast into a cell of the station where Gothecore
held sway. The Reverend Bronson declared that the arrested one had been
seized by order of Gothecore, and for revenge. Gothecore, ignorant,
cruel, rapacious, violent, and with never a glimmer of innate fineness
to teach him those external decencies which go between man and man as
courtesy, gave by his conduct a deal of plausibility to the charge.
“Get out of my station!” cried Gothecore, with a rain of oath upon oath;
“get out, or I'll have you chucked out!” This was when the Reverend
Bronson demanded the charge on which the former waiter was held. “Do
a sneak!” roared Gothecore, as the Reverend Bronson stood in silent
indignation. “I'll have no pulpit-thumper doggin' me! You show your
mug in here ag'in, an' you'll get th' next cell to that hash-slingin'
stoolpigeon of yours. You can bet your life, I aint called Clean Sweep
Bill for fun!”
As though this were not enough, there arrived in its wake another bit of
news that made me, who was on the threshold of my campaign to retain the
town, bite my lip and dig my palms with the anger it unloosed within
me. By way of added fuel to flames already high, that one waiter, but
the day before prisoner to Gothecore, must be picked up dead in the
streets, head club-battered to a pulp.
Who murdered the man?
Half the town said Gothecore.
For myself, I do not care to dwell upon that poor man's butchery, and
my veins run fire to only think of it. There arises the less call for
elaboration, since within hours--for it was the night of that very day
on which the murdered man was found--the life was stricken from the
heart of Gothecore. He, too, was gone; and Melting Moses had gone with
him. By his own choice, this last, as I have cause to know.
“I'll do him before I'm through!” sobbed Melting Moses, as he was held
back from Gothecore on the occasion when he would have gone foaming for
his throat; “I'll get him, if I have to go wit' him!”
It was the Chief of Police who brought me word. I had sent for him with
a purpose of charges against Gothecore, preliminary to his dismissal
from the force. Aside from my liking for the Reverend Bronson, and the
resentment I felt for the outrage put upon him, Gothecore must go as a
defensive move of politics.
The Chief's eye, when he arrived, popped and stared with a fishy horror,
and for all the coolness of the early morning his brow showed clammy
and damp. I was in too hot a hurry to either notice or remark on these
phenomena; I reeled off my commands before the visitor could find a
chair.
“You're too late, Gov'nor,” returned the Chief, munching uneasily, his
fat jowls working. “For once in a way, you've gone to leeward of the
lighthouse.”
“What do you mean?” said I.
Then he told the story; and how Gothecore and Melting Moses were taken
from the river not four hours before.
“It was a fire in th' box factory,” said the Chief; “that factory
'buttin' on th' docks. Gothecore goes down from his station. The night's
as dark as the inside of a cow. He's jimmin' along th' edge of th'
wharf, an' no one noticin' in particular. Then of a sudden, there's an
oath an' a big splash.
“'Man overboard!' yells some guy.
“The man overboard is Gothecore. Two or three coves come chasin' up to
lend a hand.
“'Some duck jumps after him to save him,' says this party who yells
'overboard!' 'First one, an' then t'other, hits th' water. They oughter
be some'ers about.'
“That second party in th' river was Melting Moses. An' say! Gov'nor, he
didn't go after Gothecore to save him; not he! Melting Moses had shoved
Gothecore in; an' seein' him swimmin' hard, an' likely to get ashore,
he goes after him to cinch th' play. I'll tell you one thing: he cinches
it. He piles himself on Gothecore's back, an' then he crooks his right
arm about Gothecore's neck--the reg'lar garotte hug! an' enough to choke
th' life out by itself. That aint th' worst.” Here the Chief's voice
sunk to a whisper. “Melting Moses had his teeth buried in Gothecore's
throat. Did you ever unlock a bulldog from his hold? Well, it was easy
money compared to unhookin' Melting Moses from Gothecore. Sure! both was
dead as mackerels when they got 'em out; they're on th' ice right now.
Oh, well!” concluded the Chief; “I told Gothecore his finish more'n
once. 'Don't rough people around so, Bill,' I'd say; 'you'll dig up more
snakes than you can kill.' But he wouldn't listen; he was all for th'
strong-arm, an' th' knock-about! It's a bad system. Nothin's lost by
bein' smooth, Gov'nor; nothin's lost by bein' smooth!” and the Chief
sighed lugubriously; after which he mopped his forehead and looked
pensively from the window.
Your river sailor, on the blackest night, will feel the tide for its
ebb or flow by putting his hand in the water. In a manner of speaking,
I could now as plainly feel the popular current setting against the
machine. It was like a strong flood, and with my experience of the town
and its tempers I knew that we were lost. That murdered man who might
have been a witness, and the violence done to the Reverend Bronson, were
arguments in everybody's mouth.
And so the storm fell; the machine was swept away as by a flood. There
was no sleight of the ballot that might have saved the day; our money
proved no defense. The people fell upon Tammany and crushed it, and the
town went from under my hand.
Morton had seen disaster on its way.
“And, really! I don't half like it,” observed that lounging king of
traction. “It will cost me a round fifty thousand dollars, don't y'
know! Of course, I shall give Tammany the usual fifty thousand, if only
for the memory of old days. But, by Jove! there's those other chaps.
Now they're going to win, in the language of our departed friend, Mr.
Kennedy, I'll have to 'sweeten' them. It's a deuced bore contributing to
both parties, but this time I can't avoid it--really!” and Morton stared
feebly into space, as though the situation held him helpless with its
perplexities.
There is one worth-while matter to be the offspring of defeat. A beaten
man may tell the names of his friends. On the day after I scored a
victory, my ante-rooms had been thronged. Following that disaster to
the machine, just chronicled, I sat as much alone as though Fourteenth
Street were the center of a pathless waste.
However, I was not to be wholly deserted. It was in the first shadows
of the evening, when a soiled bit of paper doing crumpled duty as a card
was brought me. I glanced at it indifferently. I had nothing to give;
why should anyone seek me? There was no name, but my interest flared up
at this line of identification:
“The Man of the Knife!”