GRAY, weather-worn, beaten of years, there in the door was my Sicilian!
I observed, as he took a seat, how he limped, with one leg drawn and
distorted. I had him in and gave him a chair.
My Sicilian and I sat looking one upon the other. It was well-nigh the
full quarter of a century since I'd clapped eyes on him. And to me
the thing marvelous was that I did not hate him. What a procession
of disasters, and he to be its origin, was represented in that little
weazened man, with his dark skin, monkey-face, and eyes to shine like
beads! That heart-breaking trial for murder; the death of Apple Cheek;
Blossom and the mark of the rope;--all from him! He was the reef upon
which my life had been cast away! These thoughts ran in my head like a
mill-race; and yet, I felt only a friendly warmth as though he were some
good poor friend of long ago.
My Sicilian's story was soon told. He had fallen into the hold of a
vessel and broken his leg. It was mended in so bad a fashion that he
must now be tied to the shore with it and never sail again. Could I find
him work?--something, even a little, by which he might have food and
shelter? He put this in a manner indescribably plaintive.
Then I took a thought full of the whimsical. I would see how far a
beaten Chief of Tammany Hall might command. There were countless small
berths about the public offices and courts, where a man might take a
meager salary, perhaps five hundred dollars a year, for a no greater
service than throwing up a window or arranging the papers on a desk.
These were within the appointment of what judges or officers prevailed
in the departments or courtrooms to which they belonged. I would offer
my Sicilian for one.
And I had a plan. I knew what should be the fate of the fallen. I had
met defeat; also, personally, I had been the target of every flinging
slander which the enemy might invent. It was a time when men would fear
my friendship as much as on another day they had feared my power. I was
an Ishmael of politics. The timid and the time-serving would shrink away
from me.
There might, however, be found one who possessed the courage and the
gratitude, someone whom I had made and who remembered it, to take my
orders. I decided to search for such a man. Likewise (and this was my
plan) I resolved--for I knew better than most folk how the town would be
in my hands again--to make that one mayor when a time should serve.
“Come with me,” said I. “You shall have a berth; and I've nothing now to
do but seek for it.”
There was a somber comicality to the situation which came close
to making me laugh--I, the late dictator, abroad begging a
five-hundred-dollar place!
Twenty men I went to; and if I had been a leper I could not have filled
them with a broader terror. One and all they would do nothing. These
fools thought my downfall permanent; they owed everything to me, but
forgot it on my day of loss. They were of the flock of that Frenchman
who was grateful only for favors to come. Tarred with the Tammany stick
as much as was I, myself, each had turned white in a night, and must
mimic mugwumpery, when now the machine was overborne. Many were those
whom I marked for slaughter that day; and I may tell you that in a later
hour, one and all, I knocked them on the head.
Now in the finish of it, I discovered one of a gallant fidelity, and
who was brave above mugwump threat. He was a judge; and, withal, a man
indomitably honest. But as it is with many bred of the machine, his
instinct was blindly military. Like Old Mike, he regarded politics as
another name for war. To the last, he would execute my orders without
demur.
With this judge, I left my Sicilian to dust tables and chairs for
forty dollars a month. It was the wealth of Dives to the poor broken
sailorman, and he thanked me with tears on his face. In a secret,
lock-fast compartment of my memory I put away the name of that judge. He
should be made first in the town for that one day's work.
My late defeat meant, so far as my private matters were involved,
nothing more serious than a jolt to my self-esteem. Nor hardly that,
since I did not blame myself for the loss of the election. It was the
fortune of battle; and because I had seen it on its way, that shaft of
regret to pierce me was not sharpened of surprise.
My fortunes were rolling fat with at least three millions of dollars,
for I had not held the town a decade to neglect my own good. If it had
been Big Kennedy, now, he would have owned fourfold as much. But I was
lavish of habit; besides being no such soul of business thrift as was my
old captain. Three millions should carry me to the end of the journey,
however, even though I took no more; there would arise no money-worry to
bark at me. The loss of the town might thin the flanks of my sub-leaders
of Tammany, but the famine could not touch me.
While young Van Flange had been the reason of a deal that was unhappy in
my destinies, I had never met the boy. Now I was to see him. Morton sent
him to me on an errand of business; he found me in my own house just as
dinner was done. I was amiably struck with the look of him. He was tall
and broad of shoulder, for he had been an athlete in his college and
tugged at an oar in the boat.
My eye felt pleased with young Van Flange from the beginning; he was as
graceful as an elm, and with a princely set of the head which to my
mind told the story of good blood. His manner, as he met me, became
the sublimation of deference, and I could discover in his air a tacit
flattery that was as positive, even while as impalpable, as a perfume.
In his attitude, and in all he did and said, one might observe the
aristocrat. The high strain of him showed as plain as a page of print,
and over all a clean delicacy that reminded one of a thoroughbred colt.
While we were together, Anne and Blossom came into the room. This last
was a kind of office-place I had at home, where the two often visited
with me in the evening.
It was strange, the color that painted itself in the shy face of
Blossom. I thought, too, that young Van Flange's interest stood a bit on
tiptoe. It flashed over me in a moment:
“Suppose they were to love and wed?”
The question, self-put, discovered nothing rebellious in my breast. I
would abhor myself as a matchmaker between a boy and a girl; and yet, if
I did not help events, at least, I wouldn't interrupt them. If it were
to please Blossom to have him for a husband: why then, God bless the
girl, and make her day a fair one!
Anne, who was quicker than I, must have read the new glow in Blossom's
face and the new shine in her eyes. But her own face seemed as friendly
as though the picture gave her no pang, and it reassured me mightily to
find it so.
Young Van Flange made no tiresome stay of it on this evening. But he
came again, and still again; and once or twice we had him in to dinner.
Our table appeared to be more complete when he was there; it served to
bring an evenness and a balance, like a ship in trim. Finally he was in
and out of the house as free as one of the family.
For the earliest time in life, a quiet brightness shone on Blossom that
was as the sun through mists. As for myself, delight in young Van Flange
crept upon me like a habit; nor was it made less when I saw how he had a
fancy for my girl, and that it might turn to wedding bells. The thought
gave a whiter prospect of hope for Blossom; also it fostered my own
peace, since my happiness hung utterly by her.
One day I put the question of young Van Flange to Morton.
“Really, now!” said Morton, “I should like him vastly if he had a
stronger under jaw, don't y' know. These fellows with chins like cats'
are a beastly lot in the long run.”
“But his habits are now good,” I urged. “And he is industrious, is he
not?”
“Of course, the puppy works,” responded Morton; “that is, if you're to
call pottering at a desk by such a respectable term. As for his habits,
they are the habits of a captive. He's prisoner to his poverty. Gad! one
can't be so deucedly pernicious, don't y' know, on nine hundred a year.”
Then, with a burst of eagerness: “I know what you would be thinking. But
I say, old chap, you mustn't bank on his blood. Good on both sides, it
may be; but the blend is bad. Two very reputable drugs may be combined
to make a poison, don't y' know!”
There the matter stuck; for I would not tell Morton of any feeling my
girl might have for young Van Flange. However, Morton's view in no wise
changed my own; I considered that with the best of motives he might
still suffer from some warping prejudice.
There arose a consideration, however, and one I could not look in the
face. There was that dread birthmark!--the mark of the rope! At last I
brought up the topic of my fears with Anne.
“Will he not loathe her?” said I. “Will his love not change to hate when
he knows?”
“Did your love change?” Anne asked.
“But that is not the same.”
“Be at peace, then,” returned Anne, taking my hand in hers and pressing
it. “I have told him. Nor shall I forget the nobleness of his reply: 'I
love Blossom,' said he; 'I love her for her heart.'”
When I remember these things, I cannot account for the infatuation of us
two--Anne and myself. The blackest villain of earth imposed himself upon
us as a saint! And I had had my warning. I should have known that he who
broke a mother's heart would break a wife's.
Now when the forces of reform governed the town, affairs went badly for
that superlative tribe, and each day offered additional claim for the
return of the machine. Government is not meant to be a shepherd of
morals. Its primal purposes are of the physical, being no more than to
safeguard property and person. That is the theory; more strongly still
must it become the practice if one would avoid the enmity of men. He
whose morals are looked after by the powers that rule, grows impatient,
and in the end, vindictive. No mouth likes the bit; a guardian is never
loved. The reform folk made that error against which Old Mike warned Big
Kennedy: They got between the public and its beer.
The situation, thus phrased, called for neither intrigue nor labor on my
own part. I had but to stay in my chair, and “reform” itself would drive
the people into Tammany's arms.
In those days I had but scanty glimpses of the Reverend Bronson.
However, he now and then would visit me, and when he did, I think I read
in his troubled brow the fear of machine success next time. Morton was
there on one occasion when the Reverend Bronson came in. They were well
known to one another, these two; also, they were friends as much as men
might be whose lives and aims went wide apart.
“Now the trouble,” observed Morton, as the two discussed that backward
popularity of the present rule, “lies in this: Your purist of politics
is never practical. He walks the air; and for a principle, he fixes
his eyes on a star. Besides,” concluded Morton, tapping the Reverend
Bronson's hand with that invaluable eyeglass, “you make a pet, at the
expense of statutes more important, of some beggarly little law like the
law against gambling.”
“My dear sir,” exclaimed the Reverend Bronson, “surely you do not defend
gambling.”
“I defend nothing,” said Morton; “it's too beastly tiresome, don't y'
know. But, really, the public is no fool; and with a stock-ticker and a
bucket shop on every corner, you will hardly excite folk to madness over
roulette and policy.”
“The policy shops stretch forth their sordid palms for the pennies of
the very poor,” said the Reverend Bronson earnestly.
“But, my boy,” retorted Morton, his drooping inanity gaining a color,
“government should be concerned no more about the poor man's penny than
the rich man's pound. However, if it be a reason, why not suppress the
barrooms? Gad! what more than your doggery reaches for the pennies of
the poor?”
“There is truth in what you say,” consented the Reverend Bronson
regretfully. “Still, I count for but one as an axman in this wilderness
of evil; I can fell but one tree at a time. I will tell you this,
however: At the gates of you rich ones must lie the blame for most of
the immoralities of the town. You are guilty of two wrongs: You are not
benevolent; and you set a bad moral example.”
“Really!” replied Morton, “I, myself, think the rich a deuced bad lot;
in fact, I hold them to be quite as bad as the poor, don't y' know. But
you speak of benevolence--alms-giving, and that sort of thing. Now I'm
against benevolence. There is an immorality in alms just in proportion
as there's a morality to labor. Folk work only because they lack money.
Now you give a man ten dollars and the beggar will stop work.”
“Let me hear,” observed the Reverend Bronson, amused if not convinced,
“what your remedy for the town's bad morals would be.”
“Work!” replied Morton, with quite a flash of animation. “I'd make every
fellow work--rich and poor alike. I'd invent fardels for the idle. The
only difference between the rich and the poor is a difference of cooks
and tailors--really! Idleness, don't y' know, is everywhere and among
all classes the certain seed of vice.”
“You would have difficulty, I fear,” remarked the Reverend Bronson, “in
convincing your gilded fellows of the virtuous propriety of labor.”
“I wouldn't convince them, old chap, I'd club them to it. It is a
mistake you dominies make, that you are all for persuading when you
should be for driving. Gad! you should never coax where you can drive,”
and Morton smiled vacantly.
“You would deal with men as you do with swine?”
“What should be more appropriate? Think of the points of resemblance.
Both are obstinate, voracious, complaining, cowardly, ungrateful,
selfish, cruel! One should ever deal with a man on a pig basis.
Persuasion is useless, compliment a waste. You might make a bouquet
for him--orchids and violets--and, gad! he would eat it, thinking it a
cabbage. But note the pleasing, screaming, scurrying difference when
you smite him with a brick. Your man and your hog were born knowing all
about a brick.”
“The rich do a deal of harm,” remarked the Reverend Bronson
thoughtfully. “Their squanderings, and the brazen spectacle thereof,
should be enough of themselves to unhinge the morals of mankind. Think
on their selfish vulgar aggressions! I've seen a lake, once the open
joy of thousands, bought and fenced to be a play space for one rich man;
I've looked on while a village where hundreds lived and loved and had
their pleasant being, died and disappeared to give one rich man room; in
the brag and bluster of his millions, I've beheld a rich man rearing a
shelter for his crazy brain and body, and borne witness while he bought
lumber yards and planing mills and stone quarries and brick concerns
and lime kilns with a pretense of hastening his building. It is all a
disquieting example to the poor man looking on. Such folk, dollar-loose
and dollar-mad, frame disgrace for money, and make the better sentiment
of better men fair loathe the name of dollar. And yet it is but a
sickness, I suppose; a sort of rickets of riches--a Saint Vitus dance
of vast wealth! Such go far, however, to bear out your parallel of the
swine; and at the best, they but pile exaggeration on imitation and
drink perfumed draff from trough of gold.”
The Reverend Bronson as he gave us this walked up and down the floor
as more than once I'd seen him do when moved. Nor did he particularly
address himself to either myself or Morton until the close, when he
turned to that latter personage. Pausing in his walk, the Reverend
Bronson contemplated Morton at some length; and then, as if his thoughts
on money had taken another path, and shaking his finger in the manner of
one who preferred an indictment, he said:
“Cato, the Censor, declared: 'It is difficult to save that city from
ruin where a fish sells for more than an ox.' By the bad practices of
your vulgar rich, that, to-day, is a description of New York. Still,
from the public standpoint, I should not call the luxury it tells of,
the worst effect of wealth, nor the riches which indulge in such luxury
the most baleful riches. There be those other busy black-flag millions
which maraud a people. They cut their way through bars and bolts of
government with the saws and files and acids of their evil influence--an
influence whose expression is ever, and simply, bribes. I speak of
those millions that purchase the passage of one law or the downfall of
another, and which buy the people's officers like cattle to their
will. But even as I reproach those criminal millions, I marvel at their
blindness. Cannot such wealth see that in its treasons--for treason it
does as much as any Arnold--it but undermines itself? Who should need
strength and probity in government, and the shelter of them, more than
Money? And yet in its rapacity without eyes, it must ever be using the
criminal avarice of officials to pick the stones and mortar from the
honest foundations of the state!”
The Reverend Bronson resumed his walking up and down. Morton, the
imperturbable, lighted a cigarette and puffed bland puffs as though
he in no fashion felt himself described. Not at all would he honor the
notion that the reverend rhetorician was talking either of him or at
him, in his condemnation of those pirate millions.
“I should feel alarmed for my country,” continued the Reverend Bronson,
coming back to his chair, “if I did not remember that New York is not
the nation, and how a sentiment here is never the sentiment there. The
country at large has still its ideals; New York, I fear, has nothing
save its appetites.”
“To shift discussion,” said Morton lightly, “a discussion that would
seem academic rather than practical, and coming to the City and what you
call its appetites, let me suggest this: Much of that trouble of
which you speak arises by faults of politics as the latter science is
practiced by the parties. Take yourself and our silent friend.” Here
Morton indicated me: “Take the two parties you represent. Neither was
ever known to propose an onward step. Each of you has for his sole
issue the villainies of the other fellow; the whole of your cry is the
iniquity of the opposition; it is really! I'll give both of you this for
a warning. The future is to see the man who, leaving a past to bury a.
past, will cry 'Public Ownership!' or some equally engaging slogan. Gad!
old chap, with that, the rabble will follow him as the rats followed the
pied piper of Hamelin. The moralist and the grafter will both be left,
don't y' know!” Morton here returned into that vapidity from which, for
the moment, he had shaken himself free. “Gad!” he concluded, “you will
never know what a passion to own things gnaws at your peasant in his
blouse and wooden shoes until some prophetic beggar shouts 'Public
Ownership!' you won't, really!”
“Sticking to what you term the practical,” said the Reverend Bronson,
“tell me wherein our reform administration has weakened itself.”
“As I've observed,” responded Morton, “you pick out a law and make a pet
of it, to the neglect of criminal matters more important. It is
your fad--your vanity of party, to do this. Also, it is your heel of
Achilles, and through it will come your death-blow.” Then, as if weary
of the serious, Morton went off at a lively tangent: “Someone--a very
good person, too, I think, although I've mislaid his name--observed:
'Oh, that mine enemy would write a book!' Now I should make it: 'Oh,
that mine enemy would own a fad!' Given a fellow's fad, I've got him.
Once upon a time, when I had a measure of great railway moment--really!
one of those measures of black-flag millions, don't y' know!--pending
before the legislature at Albany, I ran into a gentleman whose name
was De Vallier. Most surprising creature, this De Vallier! Disgustingly
honest, too; but above all, as proud as a Spanish Hidalgo of his name.
Said his ancestors were nobles of France under the Grand Monarch, and
that sort of thing. Gad! it was his fad--this name! And the bitterness
wherewith he opposed my measure was positively shameful. Really, if the
floor of the Assembly--the chap was in the Assembly, don't y' know--were
left unguarded for a moment, De Vallier would occupy it, and call
everybody but himself a venal rogue of bribes. There was never anything
more shocking!
“But I hit upon an expedient. If I could but touch his fad--if I might
but reach that name of De Vallier, I would have him on the hip. So with
that, don't y' know, I had a bill introduced to change the fellow's name
to Dummeldinger. I did, 'pon my honor! The Assembly adopted it gladly.
The Senate was about to do the same, when the horrified De Vallier threw
himself at my feet. He would die if he were called Dummeldinger!
“The poor fellow's grief affected me very much; my sympathies are easily
excited--they are, really! And Dummeldinger was such a beastly name! I
couldn't withstand De Vallier's pleadings. I caused the bill changing
his name to be withdrawn, and in the fervor of his gratitude, De Vallier
voted for that railway measure. It was my kindness that won him; in his
relief to escape 'Dummeldinger,' De Vallier was ready to die for me.”
It was evening, and in the younger hours I had pulled my chair before
the blaze, and was thinking on Apple Cheek, and how I would give the
last I owned of money and power to have her by me. This was no uncommon
train; I've seen few days since she died that did not fill my memory
with her image.
Outside raged a threshing storm of snow that was like a threat for
bitterness, and it made the sticks in the fireplace snap and sparkle in
a kind of stout defiance, as though inviting it to do its worst.
In the next room were Anne and Blossom, and with them young Van Flange.
I could hear the murmur of their voices, and at intervals a little laugh
from him.
An hour went by; the door between opened, and young Van Flange, halting
a bit with hesitation that was not without charm, stepped into my
presence. He spoke with grace and courage, however, when once he was
launched, and told me his love and asked for Blossom. Then my girl came,
and pressed her face to mine. Anne, too, was there, like a blessing and
a hope.
They were married:--my girl and young Van Flange. Morton came to my aid;
and I must confess that it was he, with young Van Flange, who helped us
to bridesmaids and ushers, and what others belong with weddings in their
carrying out. I had none upon whom I might call when now I needed wares
of such fine sort; while Blossom, for her part, living her frightened
life of seclusion, was as devoid of acquaintances or friends among the
fashionables as any abbess might have been.
The street was thronged with people when we drove up, and inside the
church was such a jam of roses and folk as I had never beheld. Wide was
the curious interest in the daughter of Tammany's Chief; and Blossom
must have felt it, for her hand fluttered like a bird on my arm as, with
organ crashing a wedding march, I led her up the aisle. At the altar
rail were the bishop and three priests. And so, I gave my girl away.
When the ceremony was done, we all went back to my house--Blossom's
house, since I had put it in her name--for I would have it that they
must live with me. I was not to be cheated of my girl; she should not
be lost out of my arms because she had found a husband's. It wrought
a mighty peace for me, this wedding, showing as it did so sure of
happiness to Blossom. Nor will I say it did not feed my pride. Was it
a slight thing that the blood of the Clonmel smith should unite itself
with a strain, old and proud and blue beyond any in the town? We made
one family of it; and when we were settled, my heart filled up with a
feeling more akin to content than any that had dwelt there for many a
sore day.