The Boss, and How He Came to Rule New York

Morton, I remember, did not share my enthusiasm. It was when I suggested Gutterglory as counsel for Mulberry.

“But really now!” objected Morton, with just a taint of his old-time lisp, “the creature doesn’t know enough. He’s as shallow as a skimming dish, don’t y’ know.”

“Gutterglory is the most eloquent of men,” I protested.

“I grant you the beggar is quite a talker, and all that,” retorted Morton, twirling that potential eyeglass, “but the trouble is, old chap, that when we’ve said that, we’ve said all. Gutterglory is a mere rhetorical freak. He ought to take a rest, and give his brain a chance to grow up with his vocabulary.”

What Morton said had no effect on me; I clung to Gutterglory, and made his life worth while. I was given my return when I learned that for years he had gone about, unknown to me, extorting money from people with the use of my name. Scores have paid peace-money to Gutterglory, and thought it was I who bled them. So much are we at the mercy of rascals who win our confidence!

It was the fact of his learning that did it. I could never be called a good judge of one who knew books. I was over prone to think him of finest honor who wrote himself a man of letters, for it was my weakness to trust where I admired. In the end, I discovered the villain duplicity of Gutterglory, and cast him out; at that, the scoundrel was rich with six figures to his fortune, and every dime of it the harvest of some blackmail in my name.

He became a great fop, did Gutterglory; and when last I saw him – it being Easter Day, as I stepped from the Cathedral, where I’d been with Blossom – he was teetering along Fifth Avenue, face powdered and a glow of rouge on each cheekbone, stayed in at the waist, top hat, frock coat, checked trousers, snowy “spats” over his patent leathers, a violet in his buttonhole, a cane carried endwise in his hand, elbows crooked, shoulders bowed, the body pitched forward on his toes, a perfect picture of that most pitiful of things – an age-seamed doddering old dandy! This was he whom the Reverend Bronson vaunted as an ally!

“You are welcome to Gutterglory,” said I to my reverend visitor on that time when he named him as one to become eloquent for reform. “It but proves the truth of what Big John Kennedy so often said: Any rogue, kicked out of Tammany Hall for his scoundrelisms, can always be sure of a job as a ‘reformer.’”

“Really!” observed Morton, when a few days later I was telling him of the visit of the Reverend Bronson, “I’ve a vast respect for Bronson. I can’t say that I understand him – working for nothing among the scum and rubbish of humanity! – for personally I’ve no talent for religion, don’t y’ know! And so he thinks that honesty is the best policy!”

“He seemed to think it not open to contradiction.”

“Hallucination, positive hallucination, my boy! At-least, if taken in a money sense; and ‘pon my word! that’s the only sense in which it’s worth one’s while to take anything – really! Honesty the best policy! Why, our dominie should look about him. Some of our most profound scoundrels are our richest men. Money is so much like water, don’t y’ know, that it seems always to seek the lowest places;” and with that, Morton went his elegant way, yawning behind his hand, as if to so much exert his intelligence wearied him.

For over nine years – ever since the death of Big Kennedy – I had kept the town in my hands, and nothing strong enough to shake my hold upon it. This must have its end. It was not in the chapter of chance that anyone’s rule should be uninterrupted. Men turn themselves in bed, if for no reason than just to lie the other way; and so will your town turn on its couch of politics. Folk grow weary of a course or a conviction, and to rest themselves, they will put it aside and have another in its place. Then, after a bit, they return to the old.

In politics, these shifts, which are really made because the community would relax from some pose of policy and stretch itself in new directions, are ever given a pretense of morality as their excuse. There is a hysteria to arise from the crush and jostle of the great city. Men, in their crowded nervousness, will clamor for the new. This is also given the name of morals. And because I was aware how these conditions of restlessness and communal hysteria ever subsist, and like a magazine of powder ask but the match to fire them and explode into fragments whatever rule might at the time exist, I went sure that some day, somehow the machine would be overthrown. Also, I went equally certain how defeat would be only temporary, and that before all was done, the town would again come back to the machine.

You’ve seen a squall rumple and wrinkle and toss the bosom of a lake? If you had investigated, you would have learned how that storm-disturbance was wholly of the surface. It did not bite the depths below. When the gust had passed, the lake – whether for good or bad – re-settled to its usual, equal state. Now the natural conditions of New York are machine conditions. Wherefore, I realized, as I’ve written, that no gust of reformation could either trouble it deeply or last for long, and that the moment it had passed, the machine must at once succeed to the situation.

However, when the Reverend Bronson left me, vowing insurrection, I had no fears of the sort immediate. The times were not hysterical, nor ripe for change. I would re-carry the city; the Reverend Bronson – if his strength were to last that long – with those moralists he enlisted, might defeat me on some other distant day. But for the election at hand I was safe by every sign.

As I pored over the possibilities, I could discern no present argument in his favor. He himself might be morally sure of machine protection for those men of Barclay Street. But to the public he could offer no practical proof. Should he tell the ruin of young Van Flange, no one would pay peculiar heed. Such tales were of the frequent. Nor would the fate of young Van Flange, who had employed his name and his fortune solely as the bed-plates of an endless dissipation, evoke a sympathy. Indeed those who knew him best – those who had seen him then, and who saw him now at his Mulberry Traction desk, industrious, sober, respectable in a hall-bedroom way on his narrow nine hundred a year, did not scruple to declare that his so-called ruin was his regeneration, and that those card-criminals who took his money had but worked marvels for his good. No; I could not smell defeat in the contest coming down. I was safe for the next election; and the eyes of no politician, let me tell you, are strong enough to see further than the ballot just ahead. On these facts and their deductions, while I would have preferred peace between the Reverend Bronson and the machine, and might have conceded not a little to preserve it, I based no present fears of that earnest gentleman, nor of any fires of politics he might kindle.

And I would have come through as I forejudged, had it not been for that element of the unlooked-for to enter into the best arranged equation, and which this time fought against me. There came marching down upon me a sudden procession of blood in a sort of red lockstep of death. In it was carried away that boy of my door, Melting Moses, and I may say that his going clouded my eye. Gothecore went also; but I felt no sorrow for the death of that ignobility in blue, since it was the rock of his murderous, coarse brutality on which I split. There was a third to die, an innocent and a stranger; however, I might better give the story of it by beginning with a different strand.

In that day when the Reverend Bronson and Inspector McCue worked for the condemnation of those bandits of Barclay Street, there was one whom they proposed as a witness when a case should be called in court. This man had been a waiter in the restaurant which robbed young Van Flange, and in whose pillage Gothecore himself was said to have had his share.

After Inspector McCue was put away in the Bronx, and the Reverend Bronson made to give up his direct war upon the dens, this would-be witness was arrested and cast into a cell of the station where Gothecore held sway. The Reverend Bronson declared that the arrested one had been seized by order of Gothecore, and for revenge. Gothecore, ignorant, cruel, rapacious, violent, and with never a glimmer of innate fineness to teach him those external decencies which go between man and man as courtesy, gave by his conduct a deal of plausibility to the charge.

“Get out of my station!” cried Gothecore, with a rain of oath upon oath; “get out, or I’ll have you chucked out!” This was when the Reverend Bronson demanded the charge on which the former waiter was held. “Do a sneak!” roared Gothecore, as the Reverend Bronson stood in silent indignation. “I’ll have no pulpit-thumper doggin’ me! You show your mug in here ag’in, an’ you’ll get th’ next cell to that hash-slingin’ stoolpigeon of yours. You can bet your life, I aint called Clean Sweep Bill for fun!”

As though this were not enough, there arrived in its wake another bit of news that made me, who was on the threshold of my campaign to retain the town, bite my lip and dig my palms with the anger it unloosed within me. By way of added fuel to flames already high, that one waiter, but the day before prisoner to Gothecore, must be picked up dead in the streets, head club-battered to a pulp.

Who murdered the man?

Half the town said Gothecore.

For myself, I do not care to dwell upon that poor man’s butchery, and my veins run fire to only think of it. There arises the less call for elaboration, since within hours – for it was the night of that very day on which the murdered man was found – the life was stricken from the heart of Gothecore. He, too, was gone; and Melting Moses had gone with him. By his own choice, this last, as I have cause to know.

“I’ll do him before I’m through!” sobbed Melting Moses, as he was held back from Gothecore on the occasion when he would have gone foaming for his throat; “I’ll get him, if I have to go wit’ him!”

It was the Chief of Police who brought me word. I had sent for him with a purpose of charges against Gothecore, preliminary to his dismissal from the force. Aside from my liking for the Reverend Bronson, and the resentment I felt for the outrage put upon him, Gothecore must go as a defensive move of politics.

The Chief’s eye, when he arrived, popped and stared with a fishy horror, and for all the coolness of the early morning his brow showed clammy and damp. I was in too hot a hurry to either notice or remark on these phenomena; I reeled off my commands before the visitor could find a chair.

“You’re too late, Gov’nor,” returned the Chief, munching uneasily, his fat jowls working. “For once in a way, you’ve gone to leeward of the lighthouse.”

“What do you mean?” said I.

Then he told the story; and how Gothecore and Melting Moses were taken from the river not four hours before.

“It was a fire in th’ box factory,” said the Chief; “that factory ‘buttin’ on th’ docks. Gothecore goes down from his station. The night’s as dark as the inside of a cow. He’s jimmin’ along th’ edge of th’ wharf, an’ no one noticin’ in particular. Then of a sudden, there’s an oath an’ a big splash.

“‘Man overboard!’ yells some guy.

“The man overboard is Gothecore. Two or three coves come chasin’ up to lend a hand.

“‘Some duck jumps after him to save him,’ says this party who yells ‘overboard!’ ‘First one, an’ then t’other, hits th’ water. They oughter be some’ers about.’

“That second party in th’ river was Melting Moses. An’ say! Gov’nor, he didn’t go after Gothecore to save him; not he! Melting Moses had shoved Gothecore in; an’ seein’ him swimmin’ hard, an’ likely to get ashore, he goes after him to cinch th’ play. I’ll tell you one thing: he cinches it. He piles himself on Gothecore’s back, an’ then he crooks his right arm about Gothecore’s neck – the reg’lar garotte hug! an’ enough to choke th’ life out by itself. That aint th’ worst.” Here the Chief’s voice sunk to a whisper. “Melting Moses had his teeth buried in Gothecore’s throat. Did you ever unlock a bulldog from his hold? Well, it was easy money compared to unhookin’ Melting Moses from Gothecore. Sure! both was dead as mackerels when they got ‘em out; they’re on th’ ice right now. Oh, well!” concluded the Chief; “I told Gothecore his finish more’n once. ‘Don’t rough people around so, Bill,’ I’d say; ‘you’ll dig up more snakes than you can kill.’ But he wouldn’t listen; he was all for th’ strong-arm, an’ th’ knock-about! It’s a bad system. Nothin’s lost by bein’ smooth, Gov’nor; nothin’s lost by bein’ smooth!” and the Chief sighed lugubriously; after which he mopped his forehead and looked pensively from the window.

Your river sailor, on the blackest night, will feel the tide for its ebb or flow by putting his hand in the water. In a manner of speaking, I could now as plainly feel the popular current setting against the machine. It was like a strong flood, and with my experience of the town and its tempers I knew that we were lost. That murdered man who might have been a witness, and the violence done to the Reverend Bronson, were arguments in everybody’s mouth.

And so the storm fell; the machine was swept away as by a flood. There was no sleight of the ballot that might have saved the day; our money proved no defense. The people fell upon Tammany and crushed it, and the town went from under my hand.

Morton had seen disaster on its way.

“And, really! I don’t half like it,” observed that lounging king of traction. “It will cost me a round fifty thousand dollars, don’t y’ know! Of course, I shall give Tammany the usual fifty thousand, if only for the memory of old days. But, by Jove! there’s those other chaps. Now they’re going to win, in the language of our departed friend, Mr. Kennedy, I’ll have to ‘sweeten’ them. It’s a deuced bore contributing to both parties, but this time I can’t avoid it – really!” and Morton stared feebly into space, as though the situation held him helpless with its perplexities.

There is one worth-while matter to be the offspring of defeat. A beaten man may tell the names of his friends. On the day after I scored a victory, my ante-rooms had been thronged. Following that disaster to the machine, just chronicled, I sat as much alone as though Fourteenth Street were the center of a pathless waste.

However, I was not to be wholly deserted. It was in the first shadows of the evening, when a soiled bit of paper doing crumpled duty as a card was brought me. I glanced at it indifferently. I had nothing to give; why should anyone seek me? There was no name, but my interest flared up at this line of identification:

“The Man of the Knife!”

CHAPTER XXIII – THE WEDDING OF BLOSSOM

GRAY, weather-worn, beaten of years, there in the door was my Sicilian! I observed, as he took a seat, how he limped, with one leg drawn and distorted. I had him in and gave him a chair.

My Sicilian and I sat looking one upon the other. It was well-nigh the full quarter of a century since I’d clapped eyes on him. And to me the thing marvelous was that I did not hate him. What a procession of disasters, and he to be its origin, was represented in that little weazened man, with his dark skin, monkey-face, and eyes to shine like beads! That heart-breaking trial for murder; the death of Apple Cheek; Blossom and the mark of the rope; – all from him! He was the reef upon which my life had been cast away! These thoughts ran in my head like a mill-race; and yet, I felt only a friendly warmth as though he were some good poor friend of long ago.

My Sicilian’s story was soon told. He had fallen into the hold of a vessel and broken his leg. It was mended in so bad a fashion that he must now be tied to the shore with it and never sail again. Could I find him work? – something, even a little, by which he might have food and shelter? He put this in a manner indescribably plaintive.

Then I took a thought full of the whimsical. I would see how far a beaten Chief of Tammany Hall might command. There were countless small berths about the public offices and courts, where a man might take a meager salary, perhaps five hundred dollars a year, for a no greater service than throwing up a window or arranging the papers on a desk. These were within the appointment of what judges or officers prevailed in the departments or courtrooms to which they belonged. I would offer my Sicilian for one.

And I had a plan. I knew what should be the fate of the fallen. I had met defeat; also, personally, I had been the target of every flinging slander which the enemy might invent. It was a time when men would fear my friendship as much as on another day they had feared my power. I was an Ishmael of politics. The timid and the time-serving would shrink away from me.

There might, however, be found one who possessed the courage and the gratitude, someone whom I had made and who remembered it, to take my orders. I decided to search for such a man. Likewise (and this was my plan) I resolved – for I knew better than most folk how the town would be in my hands again – to make that one mayor when a time should serve.

“Come with me,” said I. “You shall have a berth; and I’ve nothing now to do but seek for it.”

There was a somber comicality to the situation which came close to making me laugh – I, the late dictator, abroad begging a five-hundred-dollar place!

Twenty men I went to; and if I had been a leper I could not have filled them with a broader terror. One and all they would do nothing. These fools thought my downfall permanent; they owed everything to me, but forgot it on my day of loss. They were of the flock of that Frenchman who was grateful only for favors to come. Tarred with the Tammany stick as much as was I, myself, each had turned white in a night, and must mimic mugwumpery, when now the machine was overborne. Many were those whom I marked for slaughter that day; and I may tell you that in a later hour, one and all, I knocked them on the head.

Now in the finish of it, I discovered one of a gallant fidelity, and who was brave above mugwump threat. He was a judge; and, withal, a man indomitably honest. But as it is with many bred of the machine, his instinct was blindly military. Like Old Mike, he regarded politics as another name for war. To the last, he would execute my orders without demur.

With this judge, I left my Sicilian to dust tables and chairs for forty dollars a month. It was the wealth of Dives to the poor broken sailorman, and he thanked me with tears on his face. In a secret, lock-fast compartment of my memory I put away the name of that judge. He should be made first in the town for that one day’s work.

My late defeat meant, so far as my private matters were involved, nothing more serious than a jolt to my self-esteem. Nor hardly that, since I did not blame myself for the loss of the election. It was the fortune of battle; and because I had seen it on its way, that shaft of regret to pierce me was not sharpened of surprise.

My fortunes were rolling fat with at least three millions of dollars, for I had not held the town a decade to neglect my own good. If it had been Big Kennedy, now, he would have owned fourfold as much. But I was lavish of habit; besides being no such soul of business thrift as was my old captain. Three millions should carry me to the end of the journey, however, even though I took no more; there would arise no money-worry to bark at me. The loss of the town might thin the flanks of my sub-leaders of Tammany, but the famine could not touch me.

While young Van Flange had been the reason of a deal that was unhappy in my destinies, I had never met the boy. Now I was to see him. Morton sent him to me on an errand of business; he found me in my own house just as dinner was done. I was amiably struck with the look of him. He was tall and broad of shoulder, for he had been an athlete in his college and tugged at an oar in the boat.

My eye felt pleased with young Van Flange from the beginning; he was as graceful as an elm, and with a princely set of the head which to my mind told the story of good blood. His manner, as he met me, became the sublimation of deference, and I could discover in his air a tacit flattery that was as positive, even while as impalpable, as a perfume. In his attitude, and in all he did and said, one might observe the aristocrat. The high strain of him showed as plain as a page of print, and over all a clean delicacy that reminded one of a thoroughbred colt.

While we were together, Anne and Blossom came into the room. This last was a kind of office-place I had at home, where the two often visited with me in the evening.

It was strange, the color that painted itself in the shy face of Blossom. I thought, too, that young Van Flange’s interest stood a bit on tiptoe. It flashed over me in a moment:

“Suppose they were to love and wed?”

The question, self-put, discovered nothing rebellious in my breast. I would abhor myself as a matchmaker between a boy and a girl; and yet, if I did not help events, at least, I wouldn’t interrupt them. If it were to please Blossom to have him for a husband: why then, God bless the girl, and make her day a fair one!

Anne, who was quicker than I, must have read the new glow in Blossom’s face and the new shine in her eyes. But her own face seemed as friendly as though the picture gave her no pang, and it reassured me mightily to find it so.

Young Van Flange made no tiresome stay of it on this evening. But he came again, and still again; and once or twice we had him in to dinner. Our table appeared to be more complete when he was there; it served to bring an evenness and a balance, like a ship in trim. Finally he was in and out of the house as free as one of the family.

For the earliest time in life, a quiet brightness shone on Blossom that was as the sun through mists. As for myself, delight in young Van Flange crept upon me like a habit; nor was it made less when I saw how he had a fancy for my girl, and that it might turn to wedding bells. The thought gave a whiter prospect of hope for Blossom; also it fostered my own peace, since my happiness hung utterly by her.

One day I put the question of young Van Flange to Morton.

“Really, now!” said Morton, “I should like him vastly if he had a stronger under jaw, don’t y’ know. These fellows with chins like cats’ are a beastly lot in the long run.”

“But his habits are now good,” I urged. “And he is industrious, is he not?”

“Of course, the puppy works,” responded Morton; “that is, if you’re to call pottering at a desk by such a respectable term. As for his habits, they are the habits of a captive. He’s prisoner to his poverty. Gad! one can’t be so deucedly pernicious, don’t y’ know, on nine hundred a year.” Then, with a burst of eagerness: “I know what you would be thinking. But I say, old chap, you mustn’t bank on his blood. Good on both sides, it may be; but the blend is bad. Two very reputable drugs may be combined to make a poison, don’t y’ know!”

There the matter stuck; for I would not tell Morton of any feeling my girl might have for young Van Flange. However, Morton’s view in no wise changed my own; I considered that with the best of motives he might still suffer from some warping prejudice.

There arose a consideration, however, and one I could not look in the face. There was that dread birthmark! – the mark of the rope! At last I brought up the topic of my fears with Anne.

“Will he not loathe her?” said I. “Will his love not change to hate when he knows?”

“Did your love change?” Anne asked.

“But that is not the same.”

“Be at peace, then,” returned Anne, taking my hand in hers and pressing it. “I have told him. Nor shall I forget the nobleness of his reply: ‘I love Blossom,’ said he; ‘I love her for her heart.’”

When I remember these things, I cannot account for the infatuation of us two – Anne and myself. The blackest villain of earth imposed himself upon us as a saint! And I had had my warning. I should have known that he who broke a mother’s heart would break a wife’s.

Now when the forces of reform governed the town, affairs went badly for that superlative tribe, and each day offered additional claim for the return of the machine. Government is not meant to be a shepherd of morals. Its primal purposes are of the physical, being no more than to safeguard property and person. That is the theory; more strongly still must it become the practice if one would avoid the enmity of men. He whose morals are looked after by the powers that rule, grows impatient, and in the end, vindictive. No mouth likes the bit; a guardian is never loved. The reform folk made that error against which Old Mike warned Big Kennedy: They got between the public and its beer.