us are not as ingenious as Barton, or as resourceful as he in finding
means of realizing them.
Barton is a lawyer and something of a cynic. I have never known a man
whose command of irony equaled his. He usually employed it, however,
with perfect good-nature, and it was impossible to ruffle him. In the
court-room I have seen him the target for attacks by a formidable array
of opposing counsel, and have heard him answer an hour’s argument in an
incisive reply compressed into ten minutes. His suggestions touching
municipal reforms we dismissed as impractical, which was absurd, for
Barton is essentially a practical man, as his professional successes
clearly proved before he was thirty.
He maintained that one capable man, working alone, could revolutionize a
city’s government if he set about it in the right spirit; and he
manifested the greatest scorn for 'movements,' committees of one
hundred, and that sort of thing. He had no great confidence in the mass
of mankind or in the soundness of the majority. His ideas were, we
thought, often fantastic, but it could never be said that he lacked the
courage of his convictions. He once assembled round a mahogany table the
presidents of the six principal banks and trust companies in our town,
and laid before them a plan by which, through the smothering of the
city’s credit, a particularly vicious administration might be brought to
terms. The city finances were in a bad way, and, as the result of a
policy of wastefulness and shortsightedness, the administration was
constantly seeking temporary loans, which the local banks were expected
to carry. Barton dissected the municipal budget before the financiers,
and proposed that, as another temporary accommodation was about to be
asked, they put the screws on the mayor and demand that he immediately
force the resignations of all his important appointees and replace them
with men to be designated by three citizens to be named by the bankers.
Barton had carefully formulated the whole matter, and he presented it
with his usual clarity and effectiveness; but rivalry between the banks
for the city’s business, and fear of incurring the displeasure of some
of their individual depositors who were closely allied with the bosses
of the bi-partisan machine, caused the scheme to be rejected. Our
lunch-table strategy board was highly amused by Barton’s failure, which
was just what we had predicted.
Barton accepted his defeat with equanimity and spoke kindly of the
bankers as good men but deficient in courage. But in the primaries the
following spring he got himself nominated for city councilman. No one
knew just how he had accomplished this. Of course, as things go in our
American cities, no one qualified for membership in a university club is
eligible for any municipal office, and no man of our acquaintance had
ever before offered himself for a position soiled through many years by
ignoble use.
Even more amazing than Barton’s nomination was Barton’s election. Our
councilmen are elected at large, and we had assumed that any strength he
might develop in the more prosperous residential districts would be
overbalanced by losses in industrial neighborhoods. The results proved
to be quite otherwise. Barton ran his own campaign. He made no speeches,
but spent the better part of two months personally appealing to
mechanics and laborers, usually in their homes or on their doorsteps. He
was at pains to keep out of the newspapers, and his own party
organization (he is a Republican) gave him only the most grudging
support.
We joked him a good deal about his election to an office that promised
nothing to a man of his character but annoyance and humiliation. His
associates on the Council were machine men, who had no knowledge
whatever of enlightened methods of conducting cities. The very
terminology in which municipal government is discussed by the informed
was as strange to them as Sanskrit. His Republican colleagues cheerfully
ignored him, and shut him out of their caucuses; the Democrats resented
his appearance in the Council chamber as an unwarranted
intrusion--'almost an indelicacy,' to use Barton’s own phrase.
The biggest joke of all was Barton’s appointment to the chairmanship of
the Committee on Municipal Art. That this was the only recognition his
associates accorded to the keenest lawyer in the state,--a man
possessing a broad knowledge of municipal methods, gathered in every
part of the world,--was ludicrous, it must be confessed; but Barton was
not in the least disturbed, and continued to suffer our chaff with his
usual good humor.
Barton is a secretive person, but we learned later that he had meekly
asked the president of the Council to give him this appointment. And it
was conferred upon him chiefly because no one else wanted it, there
being, obviously 'nothing in' municipal art discernible to the bleared
eye of the average councilman.
About that time old Sam Follonsby died, bequeathing half a million
dollars--twice as much as anybody knew he had--to be spent on fountains
and statues in the city parks and along the boulevards.
The many attempts of the administration to divert the money to other
uses; the efforts of the mayor to throw the estate into the hands of a
hungry trust company in which he had friends--these matters need not be
recited here. Suffice it to say that Barton was equal to all the demands
made upon his legal genius. When the estate was settled at the end of a
year, Barton had won every point. Follonsby’s money was definitely set
aside by the court as a special fund for the objects specified by the
testator, and Barton, as the Chairman of the Committee on Municipal Art,
had so tied it up in a legal mesh of his own ingenious contriving that
it was, to all intents and purposes, subject only to his personal check.
It was now that Barton, long irritated by the indifference of our
people to the imperative need of municipal reform, devised a plan for
arousing the apathetic electorate. A philosopher, as well as a
connoisseur in the fine arts, he had concluded that our whole idea of
erecting statues to the good and noble serves no purpose in stirring
patriotic impulses in the bosoms of beholders. There were plenty of
statues and not a few tablets in our town, commemorating great-souled
men, but they suffered sadly from public neglect. And it must be
confessed that the average statue, no matter how splendid the
achievements of its subject, is little regarded and serves only
passively as a reminder of public duty.
With what has seemed to me a sublime cynicism, Barton proceeded to spend
Follonsby’s money in a manner at once novel and arresting. He
commissioned one of the most distinguished sculptors in the country to
design a statue; and at the end of his second year in the Council (he
had been elected for four years), it was set up on the new boulevard
that parallels the river.
His choice of a subject had never been made known, so that curiosity was
greatly excited on the day of the unveiling. Barton had brought the
governor of an adjoining state, who was just then much in the public eye
as a fighter of grafters, to deliver the oration. It was a speech with a
sting to it, but our people had long been hardened to such lashings. The
mayor spoke in praise of the civic spirit which had impelled Follonsby
to make so large a bequest to the public; and then, before five thousand
persons, a little schoolgirl pulled the cord, and the statue, a splendid
creation in heroic bronze, was exposed to the amazed populace.
I shall not undertake to depict the horror and chagrin of the assembled
citizens when they beheld, instead of the statute of Follonsby, which
they were prepared to see, or a symbolic representation of the city
itself as a flower-crowned maiden, the familiar pudgy figure,
reproduced with the most cruel fidelity, of Mike O’Grady, known as
'Silent Mike,' a big bi-partisan boss who had for years dominated
municipal affairs, and who had but lately gone to his reward. The
inscription in itself was an ironic masterstroke:--
To
MICHAEL P. O’GRADY
PROTECTOR OF SALOONS, FRIEND OF CROOKS
FOR TEN YEARS A CITY COUNCILMAN
DOMINATING THE AFFAIRS OF THE MUNICIPALITY
THIS STATUE IS ERECTED
BY GRATEFUL FELLOW-CITIZENS
IN RECOGNITION OF HIS PUBLIC SERVICES
The effect of this was tremendously disturbing, as may be imagined.
Every newspaper in America printed a picture of the O’Grady statue; our
rival cities made merry over it at our expense. The Chamber of Commerce,
incensed at the affront to the city’s good name, passed resolutions
condemning Barton in the bitterest terms; the local press howled; a mass
meeting was held in our biggest hall to voice public indignation. But
amid the clamor Barton remained calm, pointing to the stipulation in
Follonsby’s will that his money should be spent in memorials of men who
had enjoyed most fully the confidence of the people. And as O’Grady had
been permitted for years to run the town about as he liked, with only
feeble protests and occasional futile efforts to get rid of him, Barton
was able to defend himself against all comers.
Six months later Barton set up on the same boulevard a handsome tablet
commemorating the services of a mayor whose venality had brought the
city to the verge of bankruptcy, and who, when his term of office
expired, had betaken himself to parts unknown. This was greeted with
another outburst of rage, much to Barton’s delight. After a brief
interval another tablet was placed on one of the river bridges. The
building of that particular bridge had been attended with much scandal,
and the names of the councilmanic committee who were responsible for it
were set forth over these figures:--
_Cost to the People_, $49,000.00
_Cost to the Council_, 31,272.81
----------
_Graft_, $17,727.19
The figures were exact and a matter of record. An impudent prosecuting
attorney who had broken with the machine had laid them before the public
some time earlier; but his efforts to convict the culprits had been
frustrated by a judge of the criminal court who took orders from the
bosses. Barton broke his rule against talking through the newspapers by
issuing a caustic statement imploring the infuriated councilmen to sue
him for libel as they threatened to do.
The city was beginning to feel the edge of Barton’s little ironies. At
the club we all realized that he was animated by a definite and high
purpose in thus flaunting in enduring bronze the shame of the city.
'It is to such men as these,' said Barton, referring to the gentlemen he
had favored with his statue and tablets, 'that we confide all our
affairs. For years we have stupidly allowed a band of outlaws to run our
town. They spend our money; they hitch the saloons and brothels to the
city hall, and manage in their own way large affairs that concern all of
us. These scoundrels are our creatures, and we encourage and foster
them; they represent us and our ideals, and it’s only fitting that we
should publish their merits to the world.'
While Barton was fighting half a dozen injunction suits brought to
thwart the further expenditure of Follonsby’s money for memorials of
men of notorious misfeasance or malfeasance, another city election
rolled round. By this time there had been a revulsion of feeling. The
people began to see that after all there might be a way of escape. Even
the newspapers that had most bitterly assailed Barton declared that he
was just the man for the mayoralty, and he was fairly driven into office
at the head of a non-partisan municipal ticket.
The Boulevard of Rogues we called it for a time. But after Barton had
been in the mayor’s office a year he dumped the O’Grady statue into the
river, destroyed the tablets, and returned to the Follonsby Fund out of
his own pocket the money he had paid for them. Three noble statues of
honest patriots now adorn the boulevard, and half a dozen beautiful
fountains have been distributed among the parks.
The Barton plan is, I submit, worthy of all emulation. If every
boss-ridden, machine-managed American city could once visualize its
shame and folly as Barton compelled us to do, there would be less
complaint about the general failure of local government. There is, when
you come to think of it, nothing so preposterous in the idea of
perpetuating in outward and visible forms the public servants we humbly
permit to misgovern us. Nothing could be better calculated to quicken
the civic impulse in the lethargic citizen than the enforced
contemplation of a line of statues erected to the men he has allowed to
govern him and spend his money.
I am a little sorry, though, that Barton never carried out one of his
plans, which looked to the planting in the centre of a down-town park of
a symbolic figure of the city, felicitously expressed by a bar-room
loafer dozing on a beer-keg. I should have liked it; and Barton
confessed to me the other day that he was a good deal grieved himself
that he had not pulled it off!
WHAT HAPPENED TO ALANNA
BY KATHLEEN NORRIS
A CAPPED and aproned maid, with a martyred expression, had twice sounded
the dinner-bell in the stately halls of Costello, before any member of
the family saw fit to respond to it.
Then they all came at once, with a sudden pounding of young feet on the
stairs, an uproar of young voices, and much banging of doors. Jim and
Danny, twins of fourteen, to whom their mother was wont proudly to
allude as 'the top o' the line,' violently left their own sanctum on the
fourth floor, and coasted down such banisters as lay between that and
the dining-room. Teresa, an angel-faced twelve-year-old in a blue frock,
shut _The Wide, Wide World_ with a sigh, and climbed down from the
window-seat in the hall.
Teresa’s pious mother, in moments of exultation, loved to compare and
commend her offspring to such of the saints and martyrs as their
youthful virtues suggested. And Teresa at twelve had, as it were,
graduated from the little saints, Agnes and Rose and Cecilia, and was
now compared, in her mother’s secret heart, to the gracious Queen of all
the Saints. 'As she was when a little girl,' Mrs. Costello would add, to
herself, to excuse any undue boldness in the thought.
And indeed, Teresa, as she was to-night, her blue eyes still clouded
with Ellen Montgomery’s sorrows, her curls tumbled about her hot cheeks,
would have made a pretty foil in a picture of old Saint Anne.
But this story is about Alanna of the black eyes, the eight years, the
large irregular mouth, the large irregular features.
Alanna was outrunning lazy little Leo--her senior, but not her match at
anything--on their way to the dining-room. She was rendering desperate
the two smaller boys, Frank X., Jr., and John Henry Newman Costello, who
staggered hopelessly in her wake. They were all hungry, clean, and
good-natured, and Alanna’s voice led the other voices, even as her feet,
in twinkling patent leather, led their feet.
Following the children came their mother, fastening the rich silk and
lace at her wrists as she came. Her handsome kindly face and her big
shapely hands were still moist and glowing from soap and warm water, and
the shining rings of black hair at her temples were moist, too.
'This is all my doin', dad,' said she comfortably, as she and her flock
entered the dining-room. 'Put the soup on, Alma. I’m the one that was
goin' to be prompt at dinner, too!' she added, with a superintending
glance for all the children, as she tied on little John’s napkin.
F. X. Costello, Senior, undertaker by profession, and mayor by an
immense majority, was already at the head of the table.
'Late, eh, mommie?' said he, good-naturedly.
He threw his newspaper on the floor, cast a householder’s critical
glance at the lights and the fire, and pushed his neatly placed knives
and forks to right and left carelessly with both his fat hands.
The room was brilliantly lighted and warm. A great fire roared in the
old-fashioned black-marble grate, and electric lights blazed everywhere.
Everything in the room, and in the house, was costly, comfortable,
incongruous, and hideous. The Costellos were very rich, and had been
very poor; and certain people were fond of telling of the queer,
ridiculous things they did, in trying to spend their money. But they
were very happy, and thought their immense, ugly house was the finest in
the city, or in the world.
'Well, an’ what’s the news on the Rialter?' said the head of the house,
busy with his soup.
'You’ll have the laugh on me, dad,' his wife assured him placidly.
'After all my sayin' that nothing’d take me to Father Crowley’s
meetin'!'
'Oh, that was it?' said the mayor. 'What’s he goin' to have--a concert?'
'--_And_ a fair, too!' supplemented Mrs. Costello. There was an interval
devoted on her part to various bibs and trays, and a low aside to the
waitress. Then she went on: 'As you know, I went, meanin' to beg off. On
account of baby bein' so little, and Leo’s cough, and the paperers bein'
upstairs--and all! I thought I’d just make a donation, and let it go at
that. But the ladies all kind of hung back--there was very few
there--and I got talkin'--'
'Well, 't is but our dooty, after all,' said the mayor, nodding
approval.
'That’s all, Frank. Well! So finally Mrs. Kiljohn took the coffee, and
the Lemmon girls took the grab-bag. The Guild will look out for the
concert, and I took one fancy-work booth, and of course, the Children of
Mary’ll have the other, just like they always do.'
'Oh, was Grace there?' Teresa was eager to know.
'Grace was, darlin'.'
'And we’re to have the fancy-work! You’ll help us, won’t you, mother?
Goody--I’m in that!' exulted Teresa.
'I’m in that, too!' echoed Alanna quickly.
'A lot you are, you baby!' said Leo unkindly.
'You’re not a Child of Mary, Alanna,' Teresa said, promptly and
uneasily.
'Well--well--I can help!' protested Alanna, putting up her lip. '_Can’t
I_, mother? Can’t I, mother?'
'You can help me, dovey,' said her mother absently. 'I’m not goin' to
work as I did for Saint Patrick’s Bazaar, dad, and I said so! Mrs.
O’Connell and Mrs. King said they’d do all the work, if I’d just be the
nominal head. Mary Murray will do us some pillers--leather--with Gibsons
and Indians on them. And I’ll have Lizzie Bayne up here for a month,
makin' me aprons and little Jappy wrappers, and so on.'
She paused over the cutlets and the chicken pie, which she had been
helping with an amazing attention to personal preference. The young
Costellos chafed at the delay, but their mother’s fine eyes saw them
not.
'Kelley & Moffat ought to let me have materials at half price,' she
reflected aloud. 'My bill’s six or seven hundred a month!'
'You always say you’re not going to do a thing, and then get in and make
more than any other booth!' said Dan proudly.
'Oh, not this year, I won’t,' his mother assured him. But in her heart
she knew she would.
'Aren’t you glad it’s fancy-work?' said Teresa. 'It doesn’t get all
sloppy and mussy like ice-cream, does it, mother?'
'Gee, don’t you love fairs!' burst out Leo rapturously.
'Sliding up and down the floor before the dance begins, Dan, to work in
the wax?' suggested Jimmy, in pleasant anticipation. 'We go every day
and every night, don’t we, mother?'
'Ask your father,' said Mrs. Costello discreetly.
But the mayor’s attention just then was taken by Alanna, who had left
her chair to go and whisper in his ear.
'Why, here’s Alanna’s heart broken!' said he cheerfully, encircling her
little figure with a big arm.
Alanna shrank back suddenly against him, and put her wet cheek on his
shoulder.
'Now, whatever is it, darlin'?' wondered her mother, sympathetically but
without concern. 'You’ve not got a pain, have you, dear?'
'She wants to help the Children of Mary!' said her father tenderly. 'She
wants to do as much as Tessie does!'
'Oh, but, dad, she _can’t_!' fretted Teresa. 'She’s not a Child of Mary!
She oughtn’t to want to tag that way. Now all the other girls' sisters
will tag!'
'They haven’t got sisters!' said Alanna, red-cheeked of a sudden.
'Why, Mary Alanna Costello, they have too! Jean has, and Stella has, and
Grace has her little cousins!' protested Teresa triumphantly.
'Never mind, baby,' said Mrs. Costello hurriedly. 'Mother’ll find you
something to do. There now! How’d you like to have a raffle-book on
something--a chair or a piller? And you could get all the names
yourself, and keep the money in a little bag--'
'Oh, my! I wish I could!' said Jim artfully. 'Think of the last night,
when the drawing comes! You’ll have the fun of looking up the winning
number in your book and calling it out in the hall.'
'Would I, dad?' said Alanna softly, but with dawning interest.
'And then, from the pulpit, when the returns are all in,' contributed
Dan warmly, 'Father Crowley will read out your name,--"With Mrs. Frank
Costello’s booth--raffle of sofa cushion, by Miss Alanna Costello,
twenty-six dollars and thirty-five cents!"
'Oo--would he, dad?' said Alanna, won to smiles and dimples by this
charming prospect.
'Of course he would!' said her father. 'Now go back to your seat,
machree, and eat your dinner. When mommer takes you and Tess to the
matinée to-morrow, ask her to bring you in to me first, and you and I’ll
step over to Paul’s, and pick out a table or a couch, or something. Eh,
mommie?'
'And what do you say?' said that lady to Alanna, as the radiant little
girl went back to her chair.
Whereupon Alanna breathed a bashful 'Thank you, dad,' into the ruffled
yoke of her frock, and the matter was settled.
The next day she trotted beside her father to Paul’s big furniture
store, and after long hesitation selected a little desk of shining brass
and dull oak.
'Now,' said her father, when they were back in his office, and Teresa
and Mrs. Costello were eager for the matinée, 'here’s your book of
numbers, Alanna. And here, I’ll tie a pencil and a string to it. Don’t
lose it. I’ve given you two hundred numbers, at two bits each, and mind,
the minute any one pays for one, you put their name down on the same
line!'
'Oo,--oo!' said Alanna, in pride. 'Two hundred! That’s lots of money,
isn’t it, dad? That’s eleven or fourteen dollars, isn’t it, dad?'
'That’s fifty dollars, goose!' said her father, making a dot with the
pencil on the tip of her upturned little nose.
'Oo!' said Teresa, awed. Hatted, furred, and muffed, she leaned on her
father’s shoulder.
'Oo--dad!' whispered Alanna, with scarlet cheeks.
'So _now_!' said her mother, with a little nod of encouragement and
warning. 'Put it right in your muff, lovey. Don’t lose it. Dan or Jim
will help you count your money, and keep things straight.'
'And to begin with, we’ll all take a chance!' said the mayor, bringing
his fat palm, full of silver, up from his pocket. 'How old are you,
mommie?'
'I’m thirty-seven--all but, as well you know, Frank!' said his wife
promptly.
'Thirty-six and thirty-seven for you, then!' He wrote her name opposite
both numbers. 'And here’s the mayor on the same page--forty-four! And
twelve for Tessie, and eight for this highbinder on my knee, here! And
now we’ll have one for little Gertie!'
Gertrude Costello was not yet three months old, her mother said.
'Well, she can have number one, any way!' said the mayor. 'You make a
rejooced rate for one family, I understand, Miss Costello?'
'I _don’t_!' chuckled Alanna, locking her thin little arms about his
neck, and digging her chin into his eye.
So he gave her full price, and she went off with her mother in a state
of great content, between rows and rows of coffins, and cases of plumes,
and handles and rosettes, and designs for monuments.
'Mrs. Church will want some chances, won’t she, mother?' she said
suddenly.
'Let Mrs. Church alone, darlin',' advised Mrs. Costello. 'She’s not a
Catholic, and there’s plenty to take chances without her!'
Alanna reluctantly assented; but she need not have worried. Mrs. Church
voluntarily took many chances, and became very enthusiastic about the
desk.