that Nolan was to place his name before the convention. He listened
an instant, but could not endure it long. He could not endure that
men should see him in the hour when his name was being thus laid
naked to the world. Reporters were writing it down, perhaps the crowd
would laugh or whistle or hiss. Besides, candidates do not remain in
the convention hall; they await the committee of notification in
some near-by saloon. He squeezed through the mass of men who stood on
tiptoes, stretching their necks to see and hear the old leader of the
First Ward, and fled.
The first ballot was taken--Conway, 31; Underwood, 30; Simmons, the
dark horse, 8; necessary to a choice, 35. The vote was unchanged for
twenty-six ballots, till the afternoon had worn away, and the trucks
had jolted off the cobblestones of Clark Street, till the lights were
flaring and hot tamale men, gamblers, beggars, street walkers, all
the denizens of darkness were shifting along the sidewalks, till the
policemen had been changed on their beats, and Pinkerton night watchmen
were trying the doors of stores, till Chinamen shuffled forth, and
Jewesses and Italian women emerged for their evening breath of air,
bringing swart and grimy children to play upon the heated flags. The
hall was lighted, just as if some Italian festival were to be held
there. The reporters’ places at the table were taken by the men who
did politics for the morning papers, themselves reduced at last to
the necessity of taking notes. They brought reports of the results in
other senatorial conventions held about town that day--it seemed to
be assured that John Skelley had carried the country towns, Lemont,
Riverside, Evanston, and so on. In certain west side districts this
man had won, in certain north side districts that man had been
successful. It looked as if the old gang was going to break back into
the legislature.
And so the interest in this one remaining convention deepened, the
strain tightened, the crowd thickened. The delegates, tired and sullen,
shed their waistcoats, tore off their moist and dirty collars and
settled down to an angry fight. The amphitheatrical arrangement of the
chairs had long been broken. The ward delegations now formed circles
about their leaders. The damp arabesques wrought by the janitor’s
superficial sprinkling-can had long since been superseded by arabesques
of tobacco juice. The floor was littered with scraps of paper, the
spent ballots with which the stubborn contest had been waged. The
First Ward delegation was in a solid ring, and in the center of it sat
Malachi Nolan, his elbows on his knees, tearing old ballots into tiny
specks of paper and strewing them on the floor, but keeping all the
while a surveying eye on the Fifth Ward delegation, now divided into
two groups, one of which surrounded Howe, the other huddling about
Grogan, the lawyer, who, with disheveled hair, a handkerchief about
his neck, stood glaring angrily at Nolan, his eyes shadowed by heavy
circles telling of weariness and the strain.
Now and then the leaders made desperate attempts to trade, harrying
Simmons, offering him everything for his seven votes. Simmons himself,
in his turn, tried to induce each faction to swing its strength to him.
But the situation remained unchanged.
Once Nolan sent for Underwood and whispered to him. He thought he
knew one or two Conway men who could be got very cheaply, but the
boy shook his head--the reformer within him demurred--and yet he
smiled sardonically at the reformer thinking of the primaries and the
convention itself.
Then Malachi Nolan caught the chairman’s shifty eye and moved an
adjournment until morning. But even as he spoke, Grogan scowled at
Muldoon, shook his head at his followers, and the room rang with their
hoarse shouts:
“No! no! no!”
Heartened by this confession of weakness on Nolan’s part, they kept on
yelling lustily:
“No! no! no!”
They even laughed, and Muldoon smote the table, to declare the motion
lost.
On the forty-seventh ballot, one of the Simmons votes went over to
Conway, and there was a faint cheer. On the forty-eighth, one of the
Simmons votes went to Underwood, and parity was restored. On the
forty-ninth, Underwood gained another of Simmons’ votes--Nolan, it
seemed, had promised to get him on the janitor’s pay-roll in the state
house--and the vote was tied. This ballot stood:
First Second Fifth
Ward Ward Ward Total
Conway -- 10 22 32
Underwood 21 4 7 32
Simmons -- 5 -- 5
The Simmons men were holding out, waiting to throw their strength to
the winner. When the sixty-seventh ballot had been taken, Muldoon,
squinting in the miserable light, at the secretary’s figures, hit the
table with the chair leg and said:
“On this ballot Conway receives 32, Underwood 32, Simmons 5. There
being no choice, you will prepare your ballots for another vote.”
Just then one of the Conway men from the Second Ward left his
place, and touched one of Nolan’s fellows in the First Ward
delegation--Donahue--on the shoulder. Donahue started. The man
whispered in his ear, and returned to his delegation, keeping his eye
on Donahue. Underwood looked on breathlessly. Nolan, revolving slowly,
held his hat for every vote--last of all for Donahue’s. The man dropped
his folded ballot into the hat and hung his head. Nolan calmly picked
the ballot out of the hat and gave it back to Donahue, who looked up in
affected surprise.
“What’s the trouble, Malachi?” he said as innocently as he could. He
was not much of an actor.
“This won’t do,” Nolan said, giving the ballot back to the man.
“It’s all right, Malachi, honest to God it is!” protested Donahue.
“Thin I’ll just put this wan in for ye, heh?” said Nolan, drawing
another ballot from the pocket of his huge waistcoat and poising it
above the hat.
The crowd had pressed around the First Ward delegation. The convention
had risen to its feet, craning red necks, and out of the mass, Grogan
cried:
“Aw, here, Malachi Nolan, none o’ that now!”
Nolan turned his rugged face toward him and said simply:
“Who’s runnin’ this dillygation, you or me?”
“Well--none o’ your bulldozing--we won’t stand it!” replied Grogan
angrily, his blue eyes blazing.
“You get to hell out o’ this.” And so saying, Nolan dropped the ballot
into the hat and turned to face the chair.
“Have you all voted?” inquired Muldoon.
“First Ward!” the secretary called.
Nolan squared his shoulders, not having looked in his hat or counted
the ballots there, and said slowly and impressively:
“On behalf av the solid dillygation av the First Ward, I cast
twinty-wan votes for John W. Underwood.”
“Misther Chairman! Misther Chairman!” cried Grogan, waving his hand in
the air, “I challenge that vote! I challenge that vote!”
“The gentleman from the Fifth Ward challenges the vote--”
“Misther Chairman,” said Nolan, standing with one heavy foot on his
chair and leveling a forefinger at Muldoon, “a point of order! The
gintleman from the Fifth Ward has no right to challenge the vote av the
First Ward--he’s not a mimber of the dillygation!”
“Let the First Ward be polled,” calmly ruled Muldoon. Nolan took his
foot from his chair and stepped to Donahue’s side. Every man in the
First Ward delegation, as his name was called from the credentials,
cried “Underwood!” As the secretary neared the name of Donahue, Nolan
laid his hand heavily on the fellow’s shoulder.
“Donahue!” called the secretary.
The fellow squirmed under Nolan’s hand.
“Donahue!”
“Don’t let him bluff you!” cried some one from the Fifth Ward.
“Vote as you damn please, Jimmie!”
“T’row the boots into ’im, Donnie!”
“Soak him one!”
“Take your hands off him, Bull Nolan!”
So they bawled and Donahue wriggled. But the hand of Nolan, like the
hand of Douglas, was his own, and gripped fast. Grogan, his face red,
his eyes on fire, leaped from his place in his delegation, and started
across the chairs for Nolan. The big saloon-keeper gave him a look out
of his little eye. His left shoulder dipped, his left fist tightened.
Grogan halted.
“Vote, Jimmie, me lad,” said Nolan, in a soft voice.
“Underwood!” said Donahue, in a whisper. His weak, pinched, hungry
face turned appealingly toward Grogan. His blear eyes were filmy with
disappointment.
“He votes for John W. Underwood, Misther Chairman,” said Nolan
complacently. The vote was unchanged. The chairman ordered another
ballot.
And then, all at once, as if a breath from a sanded desert had been
blown into the room, Underwood was sensible of a change in the
atmosphere. The air was perhaps no hotter than it had been for hours
at the close of that stifling day, no bluer with tobacco smoke, no
heavier with the smell borne in from Clark Street on hot night winds
that had started cool and fresh from the lake four blocks away, a
smell compounded of many smells, the smell ascending from foul and dark
cellars beneath the sidewalk, the smell of stale beer, the ammoniac
smell of filthy pavements, mingled with the feculence of unclean bodies
that had sweated for hours in the vitiated air of that low-ceilinged,
crowded room. It had a strange moral density that oppressed him, that
oppressed all, even the politicians, for they ceased from cursing and
from speech, and now sat sullen, silent, suspiciously eying their
companions. It was an atmosphere charged with some ominous foreboding,
some awful fear. Underwood had never felt that atmosphere before, yet,
with a gasp that came not as an effect of the heat, he recognized its
meaning.
A hush fell. Muldoon, his black, curly locks shining with perspiration,
was leaning on his improvised gavel, his keen eye, the Irish eye that
so readily seizes such situations, darting into every face before him.
And suddenly came that for which they were waiting. A man entered
the hall and strode straight across the floor into the Fifth Ward
delegation, into the group where the Underwood men were clustered
about their leader. He wore evening clothes, his black dinner-coat
and white shirt bosom striking a vivid note in the scene. He walked
briskly, but his mind was so intent upon his pose that it was not
until he had removed his cigarette from his lips and had observed
Underwood, that his white teeth showed beneath his reddish mustache in
the well-known smile of George R. Baldwin. He elbowed his way into the
very midst of the Underwood men from the Fifth Ward, and leading one of
them aside, talked with him an instant, and then returned him, as it
were, to his place in the delegation. Then he brought forth another,
whispered to him for an earnest moment, and sent him back, with a smile
and a slap on the shoulder. The third delegate detained him longer,
and once, as he argued with him, the slightest shade of displeasure
crossed Baldwin’s face, but in an instant the smile replaced it, and he
talked--convincingly, it seemed. Before Baldwin returned this man to
his delegation, he shook hands with him.
The secretary was calling the wards, and Nolan had announced the result
in his delegation. The Fifth Ward was a long while in preparing its
ballots. There was trouble of some sort there, among the Underwood
men. Nolan was urging, expostulating, cursing, commanding. The air was
tense. It seemed to Underwood that it must inevitably be shattered by
some moral cataclysm in the soul of man. Grogan’s brow was knit, as he
waited, hat in hand. The delegates voted. Feverishly, with trembling
fingers, Grogan opened and counted the bits of paper. Then he sprang to
his feet, with a wild, glad light in his face.
“Misther Chairman!” he cried, “the Fifth Ward casts twenty-five votes
for Conway and four for Underwood!”
The three bolters in the Fifth Ward delegation sat with defiance
in their faces, but they could not sustain the expression, even by
huddling close together. They broke for the door, wriggling their
way through masses of men, who made their passage uncertain, almost
perilous. A billow of applause broke from the Conway men, and submerged
the convention. Delegates all over the hall were on their feet,
clamoring for recognition, but Malachi Nolan’s voice boomed heavily
above all other voices. His fist was in the air above all other fists.
“Misther Chairman!” he yelled, “I challenge that vote!”
“Misther Chairman!” yelled Grogan, “a point of order! The gentleman
isn’t a member of the Fifth Ward delegation and can not challenge its
vote!”
“The point of order is well taken,” promptly ruled the chair. “The
gentleman from the First Ward is out of order--he will take his seat.”
Men were screaming, brandishing fists, waving hats, coats, anything,
scraping chairs, pounding the floor with them. There were heavy, brutal
oaths, and, here and there, the smack of a fist on a face. In the
tumult, the five Simmons votes went to Conway. Muldoon was beating the
table with his club and crying:
“Order! order! order!”
“To hell with order!” bawled some one from the First Ward delegation.
“On this ballot,” Muldoon was calling, “there were sixty-nine votes
cast; necessary to a choice, thirty-five. James P. Conway has received
forty votes; John W. Underwood, twenty-nine, and George W. Simmons”--he
paused, as if to decipher the vote--“none. James P. Conway, having
received the necessary number of votes, is therefore declared the
nominee of this convention.”
Underwood was stunned. He staggered through the horrible uproar toward
the door. He longed for the air outside, even the heavy air of lower
Clark street, where the people surged along under the wild, dazzling
lights, in two opposite, ever-passing processions. His head reeled.
He lost the sense of things, the voices about him seemed far away and
vague, he felt himself detached, as it were, from all that had gone
before. But as he pressed his way through the crowd that blocked the
entrance, and plunged toward the stairs, he saw Baldwin, mopping the
red band on his white brow. Baldwin recognized him, and said, with his
everlasting smile:
“Sorry, my boy--next time!”
MALACHI NOLAN
Malachi Nolan sat by the roll-top desk in the front window of his
saloon. The desk was unopened, for Malachi seldom had occasion to use
it. The only letters he ever wrote were to whisky houses in Peoria or
Louisville, and then the process was a painful one. His mighty haunches
completely filled the chair, which, in turn, completely filled the
space railed off in front of the partition that screened the bar. The
saloon was in a basement in Dearborn Street, and, to get to it, you had
to go down four stone steps, hollowed by countless feet in the long
years he had kept there. Outside, over the door, a long, black sign
bore his simple device--M. Nolan.
Malachi Nolan sat with his back to the window. His cropped gray hair
showed his red scalp, the hard red skin on his face was closely shaven
and shone on the points of his heavy jaw. In the round hole at the
corner of his broad mouth was one of the long succession of cigars that
had worn away the hole, sending up its perpetual incense. He never
removed the cigar and seldom puffed it. It seemed to smoke of its own
volition, and lasted a long time. When it consumed itself, Malachi
replaced it with another. No one had ever seen him without a cigar in
that hole at the side of his mouth. When he moved his thin lips to
speak the cigar would stand out rigidly between his teeth. He spoke
with his teeth clenched. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and his shirt
was clean and fresh, for he changed his linen daily, just as he shaved
himself, relentlessly, every morning with a dull razor. On his glossy
shirt front a great diamond, four carats in weight, sparkled leisurely
as his enormous chest slowly rose and fell with his heavy breathing.
This diamond was the central jewel of his alderman’s gold star,
presented by constituents years before. The setting was so contrived
that the stone could be unscrewed and made to serve as a stud. Malachi
seldom wore the star, unless he went to a fire, or to a prize-fight
across the Indiana line, or to the Olympic Theater, or got drunk.
As he sat there in his warm saloon on this raw March morning, Malachi
read his paper, read it carefully and slowly, first the front page,
column after column, then the second page, and so on, methodically,
through all the pages, except the editorials, which he skipped. His
lips moved slightly as he read, for he had to pronounce the words to
himself in order to get their full meaning. He read his paper thus
every morning of his life, and his paper was all he ever did read.
Malachi sat this morning, as on every other morning of the year, heavy,
imponderable and solemn. The hour was ten o’clock. It was too early for
business to begin in that saloon, so that the old bartender, who had
been with Malachi for fifteen years, sat with his apron in his lap,
against the whisky barrels that reached in rows from the slot machine
back to the wooden stalls where many a campaign in the city council had
been planned and its victory celebrated. The bartender was likewise
reading a paper, the sporting news chiefly claiming his attention. By
noon, aldermen and city hall employees would begin to drop in, and the
place would liven up, but now the monotonous ticking of the Western
Union clock on the wall could be heard all over the long room, and the
big Maltese cat snoozed lazily at one end of the bar.
Malachi was not feeling as well as usual this morning, though his
exterior was as clean and calm as ever. A fever burned beneath his
great waistcoat, and on coming down he had drunk a bottle of mineral
water. The truth is, that the night before, Malachi had so far departed
from the habit of his methodical life as to drink much whisky, a
thing he had not done for years, ever since the occasion, in fact,
when celebrating a reëlection to the council, he had drunk so much
that he was constrained to enter a barber shop in State Street, and
terrorize the barbers by sticking all the razors in the floor, like
a juggler he had seen playing with knives in a theater. The gang had
been in the saloon until three o’clock that morning. They had just
passed an ordinance granting a new franchise to the Metropolitan Motor
Company, and in one of the walnut stalls the bundle had been cut, as
the phrase is. The gang had grown so hilarious, as it always did on
such occasions, that it had proposed a song by Malachi. Now, in his
younger days, Malachi had been a great lad for song, and many a shindig
in Bridgeport had he gladdened with his voice, but in the latter years
it was seldom that he could be induced to exercise it. He would always
plead his age and his flesh, and such was the solemnity of manner
that had grown upon him with the years, that men in their sober hours
never had the temerity to suggest anything so unbecoming his dignity.
But on this night, heated by wine, and feeling, though they did not
of course analyze the feeling, that so many improprieties had been
committed that one more could not noticeably swell the score, they had
been emboldened to demand a song. Malachi, standing by his own bar in
his long frock coat and square-crowned stiff hat, twiddling his whisky
glass just as if he were a casual visitor there, had resolutely shaken
his head. But at two o’clock in the morning he had suddenly ordered the
drinks for the house, and then, when the gang had given over all hope
of his singing, save, perhaps, one or two who, deeper in their cups
than the rest, had monotonously persisted in the invitation, he had
spontaneously burst forth:
“Oh, Paddy, dear, and did you hear the news that’s going round?
The shamrock is forbid by law to grow on Irish ground.
St. Patrick’s day no more we’ll keep, his colors can’t be seen,
For there’s a bloody law ag’in the wearin’ of the green.
I met with Napper Tandy, and he took me by the hand,
And he said, ‘How’s poor old Ireland, and how does she stand?’”
And then the gang, unable to hold its enthusiasm, bellowed in chorus
with the sadly cracked voice, which, nevertheless, retained the true
old Irish lilt:
“She’s the most distressful country that ever yet was seen,
They are hangin’ men and women for the wearin’ of the green.”
They had sung it over and over, prolonging to a greater extent with
each repetition the high note upon which in the song the word “men”
falls. Once in tune, it was not so difficult to get Malachi to sing
other songs, and he gave them, with the genuine flavor of the old sod,
_Garryowen_. The gang became uproarious when he reached the stanza:
“Johnny Connell’s tall and straight,
And in his limbs he is complate,
He’ll pitch a bar of any weight
From Garryowen to Thomond gate.”
But the climax was reached when Malachi was at last induced to sing
_The Night Before Larry Was Stretched_. This had taken time and
diplomacy, for the more popular the song, the more difficult it was to
prevail upon him to sing it, though at last he yielded, and the gang
restrained itself as he began:
“The night before Larry was stretched,
The boys they all paid him a visit,
A bit in their sacks too they fetched,
They sweated their duds till they riz it:
For Larry was always the lad,
When a friend was condemned to the squeezer,
But he’d fence all the togs that he had
Just to help the poor boy to a sneezer,
And moisten his gob ’fore he died.”
The lagging last line was too much, and in their mad delight they began
to pound Malachi familiarly on the back. And then he froze stiffly,
drew himself up, ordered his cab and went home, and the song was never
finished.
But now that morning had come and reason had returned with the light,
he felt a chagrin at having suffered such a lapse in his dignity, and
such a break in the resolution of years, and so was more solemn than
ever.
When Malachi had read to the last line of the last column of the last
page of his newspaper, he did not fold it and lay it aside as he did
every other morning of the year. He turned to the first page and
studied the picture there. It was the daily cartoon, and the central
figure was intended for Malachi himself. That there could be no
question of identity, the prudent artist had labeled it “Bull Nolan.”
The figure was one that Malachi had seen in the newspapers in varying
situations for years, and the aldermanic paunch, with massive chain
and charm, the bullet head, with its stubble of hair and bell-crowned
hat, the checked and braided clothes, the broad-soled shoes and
checkered spats, the briskly radiating lines to symbolize his diamond,
were supposed to embody the popular conception of the alderman’s
personality. The inevitable cigar had fallen and lay fuming at his
feet, the eyes and mouth gaped in palpable fear, and with a fat hand
flashing other diamonds, this counterfeit presentment of Malachi Nolan
was trying to protect the First Ward--peeping on a ballot from his
waistcoat pocket--from a gentleman with high hat, side whiskers, gloves
and cane, who, labeled “Citizen,” obviously impersonated the better
element. The point of the cartoon was that the Municipal Reform League
had resolved that Malachi Nolan be retired from public life. The League
had had a banquet, and the speeches had breathed a zeal of reform such
as only champagne and truffles can inspire. The resolutions rang like
a declaration of independence; if the reform candidate, a gentleman
of prominent probity, were beaten in regular convention, they would
nominate him by petition.
Malachi studied the cartoon a long time, never changing expression,
and when he finished, he folded the paper carefully and laid it on
his desk, bestowed his spectacles in his waistcoat pocket, and then,
placing a hand on each knee, sat and stared with widening eyes straight
before him.
It was not a new experience to be thus caricatured. He had long
since acquired a politician’s stoicism and could affect a reassuring
indifference to attacks of the press; indeed, if a newspaper happened
to elude him and slip into Nora’s hands, he could even pretend to like
it. But this cartoon roused the fighting Irish in him.