TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE Some minor changes to the text are noted at the
end of the book.
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_
Small capitals changed to all capitals
[Illustration: “IF YOU WILL ARGUE THIS MATTER WITH GUNS, YOU SHALL BE
ANSWERED WITH GUNS.” _Frontispiece. Page 440._]
THE
Mayor of New York
_A Romance of Days to Come_
BY
L. P. GRATACAP
Author of “The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars,”
“A Woman of the Ice Age,” “The
Evacuation of England.”
[Illustration: circular illustration of a wax seal or coin]
G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
_Copyright, 1910, By_
G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY
THE MAYOR OF NEW YORK
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Tom Ratler 9
II. Helen Lorimer 28
III. A Dinner in Carrara 48
IV. The Suicidarium 65
V. The Mayor 88
VI. The Beehive 110
VII. The Mayor’s Visit 135
VIII. The Chariot of Flight 168
IX. The Cardinal 195
X. The Mayor’s Courtship 225
XI. Amato’s Courtship 259
XII. The Trial 290
XIII. The Trial (continued) 321
XIV. The Great Riots 338
XV. An Up-to-Date Rescue 377
XVI. The Mayor’s Death 409
XVII. The Pope comes to America 447
ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
“IF YOU WILL ARGUE THIS MATTER WITH GUNS, YOU SHALL BE
ANSWERED WITH GUNS” _Frontispiece_ 440
“PAIN, PAIN, PAIN; NOTHING BUT PAIN” 79
“NO FUNNY BUSINESS, OR UP YOU GO IN SMOKE” 120
“HOW WONDERFULLY YOU HAVE INSPIRED ME” 240
THE MAYOR OF NEW YORK
CHAPTER I
TOM RATLER
It was a picture of wonderful beauty, with elements strangely
transporting. The sky was clear, with vaporous vestiges of a thunder
storm, whose dark draperies of lightning stricken depths lay
effectively on the southern horizon; the moon was at its full, and
its unimpeded rays burnished the waters of the harbor with a silver
splendor. A group of men and women on the upper and forward deck
of an incoming steamer were the silent spectators of this scene as
the steamer lay anchored towards the New Jersey shore of the harbor
of New York in the coming year of grace 2000, and as the lingering
spring, with an already lost freshness, was passing into the warmer
flushes of the summer. The margins of that great bay which once at
such a time had been dark with the clustering volumes of leaves
upon the arms of encircling forests, was now girdled with a zone of
artificial light. It did not encroach upon the domain of the moon’s
regnancy, but it seemed to throb nebulous and soft upon all those
shores like a titanic wheel of fire. It represented the last triumph
of electrical science. It was an electrification of the air above
the cities, and that air was palpitating with shooting wreaths of
color that gave, for each changing instant, a new festal brilliancy.
The gazers were shocked into an admiring astonishment, which only
had an audible expression in murmurs of delight, or took the form of
appreciative exclamations.
The particular glory of this crown of illumination over the cities
about the harbor was its irregular surface or outline. Above the
island of New York it rose far up into the outer spaces, burning with
an exquisite rosiness; above Staten Island, where it was carried
still higher, the color was a strangely mutable blue, and over
the lower regions of Long Island and New Jersey it lay in auroral
sheets, that every now and then, with a billowy exhalation, shot up
phosphorescent projections that seemed actually to detach themselves,
and float away like luminous clouds. It gave a spectral splendor
to everything and on the deck of the steamer, and at the feet of
the mute on-lookers its reflections for an instant shimmered and
vanished. But the moon, unchecked by this terrestrial rival, shone
on, and its limpid refulgence on the faintly rippling waters lost
none of its charm, in contrast with the schemes of artifice around
it. In the penumbral glory dark lines appeared, which may have been
unilluminated and cavernous streets, while its changing lustres
revealed many a towering turret, especially over Staten Island and
New York island, and terraces of light marked the arched bridges and
their precipitous piers, over the East and North rivers.
The steamer, whose occupants thought they had arrived at some
celestial fairy land, was a coast wise “tramp,” and had steamed
from Portland, Maine, with a cargo of stone and lumber. Among
its passengers was a sturdy youth from the lumber lands of that
state—lumber lands which yet, with decreasing resources, strove to
supply the markets—who had stolen away from home, and determined
to try the tempestuous and stirring arena of the huge metropolis,
that now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, expressing the
awfully expanded powers of man over material things, expressed too
his illimitable luxury, and held within its area an unfathomable
possibility of strife and devastating conflict; a city that had
become the centre of the world of thought, confining the seething
tides of a radicalism that pushed forward a militant atheism against
the still struggling standards of the Church; wherein too lay the
ripe and bursting seeds of an ambitious artistry that would scale
the heavens and reincarnate the flesh of man in an immortal youth,
while it lit all the torches of a brazen defiance of the moral law.
Tom Ratler had heard of this tremendous city, and his blood boiled
to meet its intoxications and his mind delighted in the dream that
he might scale its dazzling heights, and linger long beneath the
canopies of its indulgences. He possessed those things which go to
make the conquering man, pride, courage, an instinctive readiness
in danger, a supple mind, a compelling passion dressed in all the
allurements of a strong and noble form, his voice had chime and music
in it, and a certain spirited demeanor held attention and enforced
respect, and all this not unreasonably yoked with judgment and no
inconsiderable self-control.
Tom had been born in the Aroostook country of his native state, and
had lived the fresh healthful life of the fields. He had availed
himself of the advantages of a high school, had read, and, belonging
to a farmer family of excellent reputation and commercial prestige,
wore the garb of good manners, and listened to the incentives of good
taste. His mother was a woman of exceptional purity of heart, and
his father a rugged Ajax skilled in extemporaneous prayer, and not
unskillful in hammering an opponent to the ground. Tom was a young
giant perfectly moulded. His size did not surpass natural limits of
comeliness, but it filled with caution its unlucky antagonist. His
face was fair, and the rounded bullet-head not strikingly expressive
of scholarship—was sheathed in crisply curled hair like a Grecian
Apollo, his mouth broad and ingratiating held an armory of ivory
teeth—the charm of all mouths—and his eyes of chestnut, were sweet
and tempting, by the side of a straight nose and beneath a just
obviously receding forehead which however was a little narrow, while
at the union of the nose and forehead, a depression gathered a few
lines of tension around these formative kernels of flesh and bone,
which, to the phrenologist are the signals of observation.
None among those on the deck of the Barrymore had been more
astonished with the miracle of science and loveliness before
them than Tom, and he thirsted eagerly to reach this prospect of
delectation, and plunge into its weaving web of life confusion and
intrigue. As he leaned over the rail gloatingly feeding his eyes
on this vision of delight, and somewhat apart from the others, he
heard, and then he noticed a movement at the stern of the boat,
and on the side, which was followed by the swish of oars and the
emergent outlines of a row boat. He ran down the rail and whistled
softly. The next instant the row boat was alongside revealed from
stem to stern in the moonlight, with one figure in it, a Whitehall
fisherman or “dockrat,” who was looking for such chance opportunities
of profit as a newly arrived ship afforded in passengers, freight,
errands, or—less meritoriously—in “smuggle.” His keen ear had caught
the sibilant invitation of Tom, and he quickly brought his little
boat immediately beneath that interested person’s observation. Tom
whispered to him to “wait,” and then hastily disappeared, returning
in a few moments with his modest dress suit case, which vanished
as quickly as it had come over the side of the ship, and was
unceremoniously succeeded by its owner, the latter making use of a
loose rope fastened to the taffrail of the steamer. The row boat shot
out into clear water, and Tom then became the object of expostulation
and entreaty on the part of his former companions, who no less
eagerly than himself, wished to reach the planetary wonder before
them. Tom paid slight attention to these remonstrances, and urged his
guide to renewed efforts, while he seized an unused pair of oars, and
added an impetuous speed to the rocking and arrowy motion.
But Tom’s participation did not last longer than was necessary to
bring him closer to the docks of the city. Then he drew in his oars,
retired to the stern of the boat, and looked around him. And need
he had for he was within the scope of the opalescent marvel, and its
stupendous loveliness alternately crushed him with amazement, or
roused him to enthusiasm. His position may be understood from a few
contemporaneous land-marks.
The dancing row boat lay in that criss-crossed and vexed acre near
Governor’s Island, where the quarreling tides of the East and Hudson
rivers form a patch of troubled waters. On Tom’s right hand was the
island, now kept as a military reservation, but one hundred years
later forested and mantled with flowers, marked with paths, and
surmounted—in the old Fort Hancock—by a conservatory, while the
ancient keep of Castle William still remained, embraced in climbing
vines, with its roof converted into a garden of roses. On his left
the flaming pharos on Bedlow’s Island still burned, but in the hand
of the colossal figure there was no longer an electric star, but she
held a torch of flaming gas, whose long, wayward threads of fire the
winds now hurried upward, now stretched in horizontal films. Near
this dramatic station the immigration buildings on Ellis Island were
seen framed in light, and thence northward in all directions, along
the great rivers and in the median zone of Manhattan, tall structures
climbed upward, now dark by reason of the desertion of their human
households, but bathed over their summits with the descending rays
of that incredible aurora that filled the air above them. It was yet
early evening, and immediately in the foreground of this nocturnal
spectacle, was the old Battery park twinkling with lamps, in the
intervals of a renewed forestation which made it a dark spot on the
water’s edge, yet crisply dipt in a silver bath, that came from the
moon, mingled with a penumbral halo that came from the electric
arc far above it. Tom could now see the reason for the irregular
elevation of the luminous ceiling over the city. It was due to the
varying heights of the tall buildings that seemed to climb into the
skies.
The refulgence was also not everywhere; he could see that over broad
spaces of the peopled shores in Brooklyn and New York black lacunae
occurred where the shining curtain was absent. The boat had pushed
its way through the strife of waters and was nearing the little
Whitehall basin which then as now, afforded a retreat and harbor to
the battery boatman. Tom overwhelmed his pilot with a generous fare,
and jumped quickly to the landing, hurried up the stone stairs, and
was in New York, ready for adventure, not disinclined for mischief,
and fully committed to the wayward guidance of his fancies and his
fortune. His heart glowed with delight, and his mind leaped forward
in anticipations of forming a part in that shifting scene, which had
drawn to it the eyes of the world, for here again, as in ancient Rome
a tumult of social collisions had arisen, mingling with miscellaneous
and picturesque confusion with the last expressions of mechanical and
architectural daring, with the fevered promotions of every luxurious
taste, with erratic dissipations, and with a mental ferment of
scientific and literary and philosophic speculation.
Strangely there reverted to Tom’s mind from out of all his desultory
but avid reading the picture of Apollonius of Tyana arriving in Rome
in the cruel days of Nero. The book of Mr. Tredwell’s he had picked
up among a nondescript collection of odds and ends at a country-side
library to which gathered the tailings of private scholarship,
the chance offerings of missionary enterprises, an occasional
presentation copy from an enterprising publisher, and the discarded
extras of a newspaper office. Tom in a restless and skipping
manner had scoured these books for diversion, for instruction and
as youth will, for intimations, palatable but unhealthy, of the
currents of life in the channels where life moves most boisterously
and least restrained. Apollonius of Tyana quite caught his fancy.
That wandering figure, well furnished with the goods of the world,
appropriately screened from danger by a half supernatural grace,
wearing the garb of a preacher, and well drilled in local customs,
gentle with the bravado of spiritual superiority, and not averse
to finding out what the world contained, suited his own dreams of
action, though the companionable guardians of Tom’s fate in their
seclusion among the stars, might have smiled and shed tears over
the hazardous attempt to put Tom Ratler and Apollonius of Tyana in
the same category. Tom was not Apollonius, nor was New York in the
year 2000, the Rome of the year 50, though filled to the brim with
seditious, dissolute, serious and aggressively progressive elements.
Tom however—in his own thought—was seeing the world, or about to see
it. As he gazed upward that on-coming evening at the dark bulwarks of
the shrouded city, intermittently bathed on their summits and then
down their cliff-like sides by the aerial and diaphanous glows in the
skies, Tom felt the thrill of the unknown advancing towards him, and
all his eager senses reached out to receive its message and its gifts.
Nor was Tom a Nigel Olifaunt, the young Lord of Glenvarloch whose
adventures in London town at the beginning of the seventeenth
century Scott so humorously sets before his readers. He had come
upon no errand of restitution; and while his handy hand and emulous
spirits might engage him in some unlucky business, and his spirited
resentment bring him within the limits of a metropolitan Alsatia
he was not likely to become the victim of so unscrupulous a knave
as Lord Delgarno, nor run any risk of being tried for treason to
the state. If any comparison will help the reader to put Tom Ratler
in his proper phase of action let him recall Kenelm Chillingly’s
justification of his abrupt departure from his father’s home; “I go
in quest of adventure like Amadis of Gaul, like Don Quixote, like Gil
Blas, like Roderick Random; like, in short, the only people seeking
real life, the people who never existed except in books. I go on
foot; I go alone. I have provided myself with a larger amount of
money than I ought to spend, because every man must buy experience,
and the first fees are heavy.” Tom certainly bore little resemblance
to that accomplished cynic, and would have heartily derided—if he
understood them—most of his paradoxical conclusions, but like Kenelm
he had left home to see the world, and see it, where at the beginning
of the twentieth century it presented the most contrasted garniture
of forms and sentiments.
Tom noticed that while many persons were walking along the sea wall
of the Battery Park, and the settees were occupied by many couples
deeply interested in their mutual felicities, and a few families were
engaged in animated discussion of their household affairs, prospects,
and designs, the larger numbers were gathered around a central point,
whence the strains of very enlivening music proceeded. By reason of
its elevation, the band—evidently of large proportions—succeeded in
conveying these strains to the outskirts of its acoustic domain,
where Tom found himself. This concentration permitted him to walk
unimpeded around the wall, against the beautiful and shining bay,
looking towards monstrous beacons of light on the hills of Staten
Island, the shimmering walls of the Narrows and the nimbus of rays
that played over the populous shores of Bay Ridge, no longer retained
as a semi rural contour on the edge of the Harbor.
Scarcely conscious of any definite intentions, where all around him
invited him to continue a delighted and aimless ramble, Tom reached
the walls of the Aquarium, now occupying the old foundation of
Castle Garden, and, at the distant period to which we transport the
reader, yet retained, but immensely heightened and most inordinately
ornamented.
Tom could not clearly see the chase of zoological detail over the
glistening terra-cotta sides, though salient representations of
whales and porpoises, dolphins, tunas, tarpons, sword fish, and
sharks were descried by our traveller, whose astonished eyes however
were not always well enough informed to report their correct
identity. His eyes, bright and eager as they were, quite failed
to discern the wealth of marine naturalism, in sea urchins, coral
groups, medusas, hydroids, sea-cucumbers, molluscs, which encumbered
the ornamentation, mingled with the larger motifs, and luxuriantly
clustered at every interval between the swelling and pompous
immensity of the cetaceans, and the giant fish.
It was at this spot that Tom had reason to recall with gratitude the
agricultural training of his muscles, and to be roughly reminded that
the splendid city to which he had come was not unqualified in its
apparent possession of peace and order. In going round the circular
outskirt of this immense pavilion Tom reached its northern walls
approaching the confines of a great basin for the accommodation
of motor boats and naphtha launches, small pleasure yachts, and a
miscellaneous assortment of less definite water vehicles. Here the
shadow of the building was less successfully dispelled by the park
lamps, and as Tom turned to leave the angle, prompted to do so by
the deficiency of light, three figures seemed to spring from the
pavements, and with a consecutive movement too rapid to be easily
discerned, to fly at his back and front aiming fist blows at his head
and neck, and vicious kicks at his shins.
The most listless admirer of self defense, or the least intrepid of
its critics, would have rejoiced to have witnessed the lightning-like
metamorphosis in our whilome inert wanderer. His valise dropped from
his hand, and the motionless arms—so long and powerfully braced
with muscle, multiplied themselves with incredible rapidity in a
Briarean thicket of appendages before whose centrifugal violence his
assailants quickly vanished. The scuffle attracted some notice not
divorced from a desire, on the part of many, to see the stranger
worsted, and this sentiment was reinforced by the sudden approach
of a policeman entrusted with the wardenship of this quarter. A
sullen group of men and boys, vaguely referable to the Syrian section
of Washington Street, followed Tom, and their inquisition of his
appearance grew less and leas favorable, while a few epithets,
accompanied by a chance and unsavory missile in the shape of rotten
fruit acquainted him with his unpopularity.
Tom experienced a faint sense of disappointment, but his own warlike
instincts, readily aroused, permitted no movement of retreat, and
his disdain of his cowardly critics finally prompted him to turn and
walk with threatening alacrity towards them. This movement served
to disperse them, and as Tom remarked their skulking shapes, he was
joined by a much older man who had watched with interest and sympathy
the shifting relations of Tom and his tormentors. The stranger spoke,
and his measured and pleasant tones fell refreshingly on Tom’s ears,
to whom, overwhelmed by the immensity of his new surroundings, the
incident had seemed painful and unlucky.
“I see you are quite able to take care of yourself. I was ready to
take a hand myself against this bunch of loafers. I guess that you
are a new-comer, but don’t misjudge us from this little adventure.
The city is fairly orderly, as much so as most large towns, and you
can safely ramble over it at any hour of the day or night, without
much danger of molestation, though”—here the speaker drew a cigar
case from his pocket and handed its open end to Tom who with a slight
hesitation engendered by unfamiliarity with smoking, took one of the
proffered Wizards, as his new friend continued;—“though in some ways
we are dangerously near a domestic conflict much more serious than
street brawls or the incivility of hoodlums and nocturnal poachers.
Come over to the sea wall and sit down. I don’t wish to presume upon
the acquaintance my admiration of your strength has given me, but as
an older man and one not indifferently acquainted with the conditions
and the opportunities of this city, you may welcome some friendly
directions and advice.”
“Indeed, sir” answered Tom now thoroughly interested, if not quite
assured as to the honorable intention of his interlocutor, “I should
feel grateful for that. I am not a baby, and I believe that I can
pull through easily enough, but a few pointers at the outset may save
one from dangerous or expensive blunders. What is learned without
cost can be used without loss, is an old saying with us in Maine.”
As the two men moved towards the edge of the reservation it was
easily seen that Tom surpassed his companion in height, and if
this were not a sufficient assurance, any incipient suspicion of
danger would have been dispelled by the striking visage of Tom’s
acquaintance. He was a man of middle life hardly showing any of the
usual symptoms of increasing years. His hair, the weakest defence
against time’s encroachments, was yet untouched with gray, his face
was unmarred by a single wrinkle, his eyes of a peculiar brilliancy,
betokened intelligence and frankness, and the broad mouth, firm and
rather narrow lips, the chin perhaps a little too massive, confirmed
the unmistakable impression that our young adventurer had fallen
in with an unusual man—a man of observation and experience and
convictions.
Tom had himself quickly noticed these details and his confidence
increased, and even a sudden impulse of affection sprang up in his
heart as the momentary sense of his extreme isolation deepened into a
half reminiscent sadness. They had come up to one of the many seats
facing the bay, and the older man motioning to a bench, cut up into
separate seats by iron straps, sat down, while the end of his cigar
shone vividly as he puffed away, apparently abstracted, and making no
further overtures at conversation. Tom himself had become thoughtful
and silent, though he fully expected that the dialogue would be
resumed without his encouragement, and his mind dreamingly fell into
that mixed revery and consciousness, which overcomes us at such
restful moments. The waters before them, dark and viscid in their
unctuous flow, with scolloped concavities glazed with the moonlight,
lapped softly against the stones of the wall, and the band of music,
recoiling from some tempestuous climax, was breathing over them an
enticing melody.
It was Tom who first broke the silence between them.
“I suppose I can expect good employment in New York, sir,” he said,
yet unwilling to expressly declare his purpose. There was no answer;
and Tom looked more inquisitively at his neighbor, fearing that his
favorable deductions might have been premature. Again he spoke; “I
had a fancy that in this city of rich people I might get a good job
as motorist; I understand machinery, have used a steamer myself at
home, (as indeed he had), and reading of fair pay given capable men
in New York came on for employment.”
His companion woke up, or at least alighted from his soaring
meditations, turned a little towards Tom, and without the slightest
reference to Tom’s inquiry and declaration, began a deliberate sketch
of the social conditions of New York, its political dilemmas, and
its industrial power, almost as if, in response to some unheard
interrogation, he took advantage of the occasion to deliver himself
of a carefully prepared disquisition, though he conferred upon Tom
the honor of being the subject of that inaudible question.
“Yes, my friend,” he began, “New York has become the microcosm of the
whole world. Here are gathered together the nuclei of every school
of thought, every phase of social state is here; the abject poor,
the fabulously rich, and the industriously competent. Our population
is over sixteen millions. We are spreading to the furthest limits of
our territorial domain. Every art is practised here, and here each
art secures its highest rewards. Architecture has here risen to its
most stupendous and impossible tasks. Music finds here its greatest
audiences, and its exhibitions take place in the grandest temples.
Painting has here displaced the former superiority of France;
factories making every article that human ingenuity or human appetite
can invent for its satisfaction or its profit, are here in operation.
“We have become the cynosure of the world, and one million of
visitors a year has reversed the tide of curiosity from the old
world to the new; because our enormous wealth permits us to build
marvels and realize dreams. We have become a state, and this city
now possesses its own legislature, and frames laws for its own
government. Enormous universities furnish us with learning, and
under the impetus of an outrageous intellectualism large classes of
our population discard old habits of life, old creeds, old morals,
struggling with an impossible ardor to compass the meaning of life
in the surfeit of enjoyment and the rhapsodies of speculation.
The Catholic Church almost alone upholds the dogmas of the past;
Protestantism has deteriorated in Agnosticism, and Agnosticism
falls a prey to a devouring melancholy, which councils a happy
death, whenever life forgets its pleasures, or Age robs the senses
of their uses. Euthanasia, although a forbidden crime as the enemy
of the state, is secretly practised and from day to day sumptuous
Suicidariums are discovered and destroyed by the police.
“Science makes contributions, to our convenience, but is still dumb
on the questions of our purpose and origin. The transmutation of
metals is said to be almost discovered, and when gold can be made
from lead the tocsin of industrial activity will be sounded, and the
social machine, no longer able to maintain financial differences,
will run down, and, clotted with a metallic lubricant—no longer
serving its just ends,—will stop working, and our social state
resolve itself into a primordial protoplasm, whence the savage tribe
with chief and slaves, will slowly emerge, and the earth begin over
again its tiresome political evolution.
“But just now in this city the questions of policy grow daily more
complicated and dangerous. We have a gloriously rich class enjoying
the highest culture and withal benevolent, but living in undreamed
of splendor, and we have an educated class of operatives and middle
men with a proletariat of the very poor, who, often by their own
misdirection or proclivities, live stunted and desperate lives. These
classes form a vast body proclaiming a radical socialism and their
organization grows stronger and stronger with increasing population,
for family life, except within stringent limits, is discouraged by
the rich, and is despised by the _emancipated_.
“The balance of power will soon fall to the socialist, who lives
for breeding, and breeds by living. You have just come to our city
(and here the speaker for the first time turned directly to Tom, and
involved him directly in his allocution), at the close of a general
election for Mayor—the Mayor being the governor of our city-state.
It was a hot rancorous contest, and the successful candidate was
a compromise, a fusion brought about by the rich classes, the
moderately well off, and the Catholic labor vote. The new Mayor’s
position is a perilous one. He has hardly a bare majority in the
city Legislature. He himself is a dreamer, and over balanced with
metaphysical guesses, well trained in psychology, not inexperienced
in business, but at best a compromise, chosen to be the tool of
the rich, yet constitutionally a believer in some creed about the
Brotherhood of Man, and so without absolute direction, and without
force; and so also a farce, and a failure. Well—” (here the singular
monologue ended, and the speaker, who more and more astounded his
absorbed listener, stood up) “Yes—there are good chances for a
chauffeur of the right stamp in this city, where over ten per cent.
of the accidental deaths occur through motor accidents. Have you any
money?”
Tom no longer doubtful as to the integrity of his friend—his
rhetorical tirade convinced him that he was some one with
reservations of conscience—answered, as he also rose to his feet:
“I have three hundred dollars. Enough?”
The stranger had resumed his musings, looking away in the direction
of the Liberty Light whose flaring chords of flame now rose straight
into the sky like a contorted and tapering pinnacle of fire;—but he
heard; and turning again to Tom he said; “Very good. Go to the Hotel
Kohinoor near the Times Square. Get well lodged; Look well; Dress
well, and put an advertisement in the New York Times for a position
as a chauffeur. Give the hotel address. You will have answers to
choose from; mark me! Take my card! I will see you at any time.”
He handed Tom a card, and walked away after cordially shaking his
hand, though as he did it, he looked less at Tom, than at the
dispersing crowds who, no longer kept together by the band, were
dissolving in streams through the Battery grounds.
Tom moved to a lamp and read:
BENTON BRIGGS
(Secretary to the Mayor)
CITY HALL
Tom of course was duly impressed, and thanked his stars that the
assault on him had been made. He placed the card carefully in his
pocket book, and proceeded forthwith to find out the location of the
Hotel Kohinoor. He found the policeman who had aided in interrupting
the machinations of his enemies, and from him was directed to the
hotel which his informant assured him; “was the all-firedest most
expensive house in town.” Tom perhaps quailed a moment, but he
partially divined the philosophy of Mr. Briggs’ advice; he wanted a
rich employer, his own qualifications were, he knew, unimpeachable,
a little spurious distinction given to him by his handsome quarters
would not form a prejudice against him; on the other hand it was
intended by his adviser to form a direct appeal to the fastidious
personal tastes of the rich employer he was after. He intended to be
careful about his advertisement, and he had quite enough reliance
upon himself and his good looks to improve a favorable impression.
Ruminating over these things Tom found his way to the Subway which in
the year 2000 maintained its supremacy as an artery of travel, and
was flashed through its blazing conduit, to Forty-Second Street,
where he alighted. The hotel Kohinoor occupied the present combined
sites of the Metropole and the Saranac and represented the most
munificent expenditure of skill and fancy known to the publican world.
It was the marvel of two continents. The most daring mechanical
device had been united with the strangest and most defiant artistic
conceptions, and a result roundly denounced by the better taste of
the day, was also blazoned and paraded as the consummate expression
of the New School, a hackneyed phrase devoted at all periods of art,
to give distinction to oddity, if not to the vulgarity of empty
display.
It was a monstrous pagoda of stone and stucco, ornamented with
extraordinary grotesques of great size, and involved a curious use
of colored decoration with surprisingly copious development of
electrical illumination. At night the tapering structure, prolonged
upward to almost two hundred feet became a shimmering and splendid
spire of light by reason of chains of lamps swung from tip to tip of
its projecting antennae, each chain from top to bottom being swung,
as it were, by a mounting line of grinning goblins and laughing
nymphs, rendered in terra-cotta and affixed to the ends of the
antennae, which, on each story numbered twelve, making a sort of
angulation of the whole building, and these polygonal faces were
constructed to form as many façades, and a different treatment was
allotted to each in ornamentation and color.
This facetted and rather brilliant composition had suggested the
name Kohinoor and, as a term descriptive of scintillation and
gem-like glory, it applied well enough to the chromatic and photal
encrustation of this singular architecture, whose effrontery of
design drew to its doors and rooms the richest and the most eccentric
patrons.
The interior arrangement was not less striking nor less effective,
limiting that term to the range of ideas expressed in surprise and
disordered novelty. It consisted, in outline, of a central air
space, or well, reaching to the apical skylight—itself a fantastic
medley of colored glasses—conical in form. From the contracting areas
of the successive floors, encircled at each floor or story by a
gallery, whose edge upon the conical well was protected by a _rococo_
railing of brass, hung aprons of English ivy. The ascending floors
were designed as radial spaces with diverging corridors producing
rhomboidal rooms, and the corridors opened at their outside limit
upon a broad balcony, cut up into stalls, for the occupants of the
rooms.
The ground floor, entered from the street by ascending steps, was a
labyrinth of columns, arranged in stars, and holding between them
groined ceilings luxuriously painted with multitudes of enlacing
figures, borrowed from all the stages of life, the personages
of history, contemporaneous character, the idols of the theatre
the legends of poetry, figures of mythology; an intemperate
extravaganza of portraiture, in whose chaotic investiture and train
the impudence of the artist had placed politicians in compromising
union with goddesses, and mingled the decorum of the pulpit with the
bacchanalian antics of the chorus hall. Momentarily it was denounced
as a scandal and later it was welcomed as a joke, and at all times it
crowded the place with sightseers and gathered to it a spendthrift
retinue.
Lounging chairs and sofas of a deep cherry red, imitating coral stems
and growths, upholstered in a sea green tapestry, filled the space at
convenient intervals, and every hour was signalled by soft utterances
of music from a mammoth orchestrion. It was all in bad taste
relieved by extreme skill, but from top to bottom of the building,
and throughout its details the loosened revelry of libidinous fancy
was given full play. For want of a method it chased over the known
world for the exotic, the bizarre, the beautiful, and brought them
together in all phases of contact, producing a colossal maze of
features that could only, with trained artists, react in a monstrous
and terrifying weariness. It was principally a marvel of decorative
ingenuity, picking from the resources of industry every thing rare
and costly. What might have been styled a system of house gardening
prevailed within, and patches of flowers were installed in ample
vases and bowls, themselves richly conceived and executed, kept alive
by artifice, and stimulated by electric shades.
Into this unusual hostelry Tom Ratler came with no inconsiderable
trepidation, provoked, and naturally enough, by some apprehensions as
to the sufficiency of his pocket book to meet financial requirements
which might conform to so marvellous a place.
He found that however, in spite of its splendor, it could afford him
in its skyward limits a small room at, if not exactly a small price,
no ruinous toll. So he was whisked upward in the elevator tube that,
as a steel tube in open work, represented a towering and stupendous
palm, extended through the central air-space, with bridges at each
floor for the escape of its travellers.
The room was tiny but deliciously neat and, to Tom’s eyes,
ravishingly beautiful. It was in enamelled white, with a wall
paper that began at the bottom with a flush of white blossoms
on a dainty pink ground, and ended at the top in pendent boughs
bearing yellow—golden yellow—oranges. The furniture was made from
a delicately stained green wood, designed in patterns of rustic
simplicity; the windows were shaded by crisp chintz-like curtains,
whose figures represented various idylls of the country, from
chestnutting to May-day frolics. A soft downy red mat or rug covered
the floor, and water colors of charming freshness, delineating the
undressed pleasure of the seashore, decorated the walls. A little
bath room opened off this fascinating boudoir, and Tom standing
in the centre of the bewildering beauty and comfort, dropped his
hand valise, whistled softly, and for an instant thought of his own
plain bed-room at home, in which, were the reader able to follow
our friend’s dream, a well stored book-case, rude but serviceable,
occupying an entire wall, brimmingly filled with books of all sizes
and on all subjects, would have been revealed.
Tom at once attacked the task of preparing his advertisement. The
writing escritoire was supplied with pen, paper, and ink, and a few
moments only were necessary for the rough outlining of his “ad” which
changed a few times finally took this form;
WANTED—A position as a chauffeur by an experienced driver of
automobile cars. References furnished. Address Tom Ratler, Hotel
Kohinoor.
Tom again descended the elevator shaft; was directed to the
Times newspaper office opposite to the hotel itself, entered his
application, and, unwilling to yet trust himself to the throbbing
and blazing streets, retired to his exquisite aerie to think of his
new surroundings, and to gaze over that carpet of light punctuated
with brilliant orbs or crossed by sombre shafts of stone, that like
an undulous and phosphorescent scarf floated over and through the
Capital of the World.
And to Tom’s musing eyes there seemed to be at times speeding meteors
in trained or panoramic succession passing in the sky. And there was.
For to all other marvels of the growing years Science had added the
partial conquest of the air.