The Boss was an awesome figure to up-state politicians, and Shelby
approached his place of business with a trepidation not wholly owing to
his tangled fortunes. It was his first visit. There had been meetings
between them at Saratoga conventions, and more times than a few he had
furthered the leader's indirect ends in the Albany committee-rooms and
on the floor of the Assembly; but greater than Shelby had found it
impossible to penetrate the great man's inner circle at Saratoga, and
their subterranean dealings in Albany and elsewhere had usually been
transacted by way of Bowers. The Boss's methods were circuitous, cog
fitting smoothly to cog till the remote agent rather than himself
seemed the prime mover. Only in emergencies was he direct.
His apparent aloofness multiplied his power. He held no office; he
made no speeches; he had no obvious axe to grind. He seemed to count
politics his diversion, not his business, and emphasized this attitude
by a strict supervision of the huge commercial enterprise whose head he
was. He arrived in this company's offices punctually at ten o'clock,
and here he was readily accessible throughout the working day, a figure
as politically unprofessional as one could imagine. Yet politically he
was as absolute as a boss ever is. At once the most abused, hated,
dreaded, liked, and respected man in the state, fables without number
clustered round his elusive personality. One account would paint him a
church deacon, frock-coated, smug; another with cloven hoof. He was
said to be a Hedonist, a Marcus Aurelius; a glutton, an ascetic; a
satyr, a pattern of domestic virtue; an illiterate Philistine, a
collector of book plates and first editions. A legend, widely current,
ran that he played chief bacchanalian at dinners whose vaudeville
accompaniments were too gross for a bill of particulars; while another,
equally plausible, had it that he lunched daily on a red-cheeked apple
raised on the farm which had cradled his undistinguished infancy. He
was popularly known as Old Silky.
Shelby's card barely preceded him into the Boss's presence. It was not
a sumptuous throne-room; an austere chamber rather, one might without
exaggeration say a roomy cell, with puritanic chairs and khaki-colored
regiments of letter files. There were two concessions to a softer
scheme of life,--a lounge and a bowl of red chrysanthemums, both with
associations. On the lounge, which parenthetically had lesser though
not less interesting memories, a President-to-be had sat a suppliant,
while the bowl, always flower-heaped, recalled an hour when a
tempestuous petticoat, his protege, had swept straight from operatic
triumphs to shower roses at his feet. This ruddy bowl lit a broad, low
desk from which now advanced a gray-haired man of a certain shy
friendliness and modulated tones.
"This is right obliging of you," he said over the hand-clasp. "Don't
tell me you've already lunched?"
Shelby had, but dissembled, his tone dropping in unconscious imitation
of the leader's. Every apprehension forgotten, he yielded instantly to
the charm of his unassuming friendliness.
"Then you must honor me. Five minutes with these papers and I'll be
with you." He turned to a pile of type-written letters awaiting his
signature, his whole demeanor a graceful protest against this retarding
of their pleasure. "Here are the afternoon papers if you care to look
them over; they come upon us before the ink is dry on the morning's
batch. No, no; not that uncomfortable chair, Mr. Shelby. Take the
lounge, I beg of you. Stand on no ceremony here. This is Liberty
Hall."
Somebody should write the philosophy of chairs. One may retain
convictions in furniture which is palpably vertebrate; lapped in
billowing upholstery it is a moot question; and like many a caller's
before him, Shelby's brain tissue became a jelly of flattered
complacency. It sufficed merely to simmer in a sense of equality with
the silver-haired gentleman at the desk. The Boss! He had heard that
the great man loathed the homely title his leadership entailed. It was
not pretty; but its rough forceful Americanism had never struck Shelby
as inept till this moment. Applied to this suave yet virile creature
it fell grotesquely short, missing the key-note of his supremacy. Set
back some centuries, this Boss would have been his Eminence the
Cardinal.
It may be doubted had the Boss actually worn the red hat whether a
procession of liveried messengers could have impressed Shelby more than
did a small desk telephone half concealed by the chrysanthemums. Its
bell tinkled incessantly, and with infinite patience the leader
interrupted his work again and again to answer it, seeming from
Shelby's vantage point to murmur secret messages into the petals of the
flowers. The dismembered half of a telephone conversation is not
ordinarily illuminating, and the Boss's words in themselves said
little. How tremendously much they might connote, the visitor as a
business man and a politician thoroughly appreciated, and his
imagination did the occasion something more than justice. Desk
telephones were unknown in the simpler Tuscarora world.
Thus the five minutes were lengthened out to ten, and then with
apologies to a quarter of an hour. Shelby's eyes dropped to the
newspapers on his knee and fastened on a headline--
"SHELBY AND THE DEMIJOHN."
It required a second reading. The absorbing present had for the moment
sponged the morning's happenings from his thoughts. To remember
explained without cheapening the sensation. He was used to a relative
prominence in the rural press, but neither this nor the talk with the
reporters had prepared him for inch-high capitals on the first page of
a metropolitan newspaper. What New Yorkers thought of this particular
newspaper was a detail.
SHELBY AND THE DEMIJOHN.
A Sidelight on the Storm Centre of
the Most Picturesque Political
Fight in the Empire State.
The Opponent of the Author of the Ode on the
Victory of Samothrace talks of his Rival
for Congressional Honors and his Book.
MR. SHELBY'S VIGOROUS VIEWS ON THE
ISSUES OF THE CAMPAIGN.
There followed a well-spiced "story" in which Shelby, with his diction
chastened and his colloquialisms omitted save where they lent a racy
strength, was made to say the things the reporter concluded he ought to
have said--it was a party organ--and to sparkle after a fashion which
is actually attained by few in the presence of the interviewer. Even
at his weakest he was caused to shine. A kindly platitude he had let
fall anent Graves's book astonished him as he met it again; the merest
crust upon the waters, under the reporter's manipulation, it returned
to him a filling loaf:--
"But," said Mr. Shelby, "is the production of literature, however
delightful, the fittest school for official life? This, I conceive, is
the whole issue between me and this gifted youth whose illness I
deplore."
It would have been well had he stopped here; but he turned to the other
papers. There was no repetition of the first page glory, his
eulogist's contemporaries entertaining other ideas of space; but he
found his name in most of them.
"MR. GRAVES'S OPPONENT HERE"
"That virtuous spellbinder of county fairs, the "Hon." C. R. Shelby,
reached the city to-day arm in arm with the notorious Jake Krantz. The
character of this aspirant for congressional preferment in the
so-called Demijohn District may be readily judged by the company he
keeps."
Shelby needed no plainer signpost than the style to warn him that he
had fallen foul of the caustic journal which had flayed his plagiarism.
He stole a glance toward the desk, wondering whether the Boss had read
these things. Then he ran hastily through the scurrilous perversion of
his words. Could nothing curb this tyranny?
Yet a greater indignity was in store. His cup brimmed at the discovery
that in the cherub also he had cherished a viper. His mortification
was too keen for the perusal of more than an occasional phrase: "Art's
New Patron"--"The Champion of Canals couches a lance against the tariff
on art"--"his naive canons of criticism"--"judges a picture by its area
of canvas--the bigger the better."
"Scoundrels!" he suddenly rapped out, crumpling the papers in his
disgust.
"I beg your pardon?" said the Boss, gently, peering over the
chrysanthemums.
"I beg yours. These--these reporters have misrepresented me."
"Dear me! Do you mind that? You shouldn't. One has to be Jekyll or
Hyde. There's no happy medium. But luckily the public takes care of
that. Trust the public to guess, Mr. Shelby, that you're neither an
art critic nor an ass. And don't be rough on the reporters," he added,
getting up. "They work hard for a living, poor boys. Caricature is
the press's peculiar tribute to the significant."
Outside the door of the private office Shelby's face suddenly froze.
Several newspaper men had gathered to question the Boss, and among them
the victim recognized one of his detractors. The impulse was strong to
snub, but taught by the leader's example, he smiled instead and dropped
a friendly nod.
"Seeking whom you may devour, gentlemen?" inquired the Boss. "So am I.
It's past my lunch hour, you know."
With a dozen words he outlined the matter over which they were
exercised, called one and another by name, shunted an inconvenient
question, told a little story, and had slipped out of the building with
Shelby before the pupil realized that the interview had fairly begun.
"I like the boys," he declared. "They slate me, but we're good
friends."
The incident impressed Shelby only less than the desk telephone, and
the walk to luncheon intensified his respect. The Boss explained that
he ate at a mid-air club rather remote from his place of business
because it compelled a chestful of fresh air; and Shelby underwent the
unique experience of promenading busiest Broadway with a man to whom
people bowed on every hand. The Boss took it all as equably as the
country lawyer might his morning salutations between his office and the
Tuscarora House; but to Shelby, from Trinity to St. Paul's, and from
the City Hall to the granite sky-scraper, whose elevator shot them
story after story to the roof, was a splendid triumphal progress. It
was a democratic people's homage to power.
The big green and white club dining room in the sky took up the
wondrous tale. Greetings everywhere, and jovial beckonings to join
this group and that. At the great man's instance, however, they were
placed at a table for two, whose outlook seemed to the stranger to
embrace the kingdoms of the earth. Life, pulsing life, as far as the
embarrassed eye could carry; life in the mazy streets below; life in
the forking estuary's tide; life, eager red-blooded life, to the crest
of the horizon's hills! Nerve ganglion of a continent, market-place of
a world! Shelby swept the panorama again and again as his host gave
his quiet orders to the waiter, tracing the Hudson from the
shipping-crowded bay till its blueness melted in the haze beyond which
lay the commonwealth, the empire, whose political destinies seemed to
rest in the hollow of this man's hand. It drugged the senses to
attempt to gauge his power.
The Boss was speaking of Tuscarora and the Demijohn. Out of painful
experience he had come to believe that the truest privacy is the
privacy of the crowd, and indeed the mounting chaff and chatter of the
lunch hour insured isolation most complete. He was speaking of
Tuscarora and the Demijohn, and it had begun over the salad, apropos of
Bowers.
"His political usefulness is at an end," said the leader. "There was
nothing tangible to be got from him at our last conference, and I
determined to send for you."
Shelby essayed a middle course between expectation and regret.
"He says it's his last campaign, poor old chap."
"Yes," concurred the Boss, without sentiment; "we talked it over. It
was our opinion that the organization requires younger blood--in fine,
your own."
"Mine?" The query was perfunctory.
"You logically succeed--on a condition."
"A condition?"
"Your election to Congress."
After a moment Shelby said:--
"It's an incentive to work."
"It's the least you've to work for, if you will permit me to say so."
"I don't understand."
The Boss was silent while the servant changed the course. Then he
searched the younger man's eyes.
"Let me point out what your election may mean," he went on. "It has
been an unusual contest. Mr. Graves's candidacy has interested an
audience which is fairly national in its scope. If victor, you will
take your seat a marked man, equipped with a prestige uncommon to
newcomers in Washington. You will have defeated a celebrity, and you
will stand accredited one of the party leaders of your state."
Shelby's eyes widened.
"One of the leaders?"
"I mean that I like you."
While the waiter brought the finger bowls the significance of the
simple words burned into Shelby's brain. The two men lit cigars and
waited; Shelby's was gnawed to shapelessness. Left to themselves
again, the Boss said softly:--
"Two years from this fall the governorship should go to your section."
Shelby's color mantled and ebbed, leaving him white.
"Our choice,"--the Boss's purring note sank--"our choice, if my poor
opinion should carry weight with the convention, our choice will be
you."
Before Shelby could force a broken word of acknowledgment from his dry
throat the Boss had plunged into a keen analysis of the situation in
the Demijohn. Local statistics, finances, patronage, men's names,
habits, and characteristics, the minutest details, were at his
finger-tips, and the conclusion of the whole matter drove home like a
sledge.
"Your election hangs on money; on your election hangs your future."
"I've spent every cent," returned Shelby, with slow distinctness.
"Yes; I know," was the quiet rejoinder. "I have hoped that the State
Committee would do something. The circumstances are, as you say,
unusual."
The Boss leaned across the table with a smile.
"Why mince matters, my dear fellow? You shall have any sum you ask if
you will assure us of one thing. You have left your friends in doubt
as to your attitude toward the River and Harbor unpleasantness. Not
even Bowers could enlighten us. Now as far as the enemy is concerned,
it doesn't matter, but it does matter to the organization. The project
was abused beyond all reason--though that is neither here nor there.
Whatever the captious may call it, the thing has become an organization
measure, and as such a test of loyalty. Are you loyal?"
Shelby turned his drawn face toward the window. Truly he had been
brought up into a high place and shown the kingdoms of the earth.
"Yes," he answered; "I'm loyal."