Kitabı oku: «The Boss, and How He Came to Rule New York», sayfa 17
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.
The situation, thus phrased, called for neither intrigue nor labor on my own part. I had but to stay in my chair, and “reform” itself would drive the people into Tammany’s arms.
In those days I had but scanty glimpses of the Reverend Bronson. However, he now and then would visit me, and when he did, I think I read in his troubled brow the fear of machine success next time. Morton was there on one occasion when the Reverend Bronson came in. They were well known to one another, these two; also, they were friends as much as men might be whose lives and aims went wide apart.
“Now the trouble,” observed Morton, as the two discussed that backward popularity of the present rule, “lies in this: Your purist of politics is never practical. He walks the air; and for a principle, he fixes his eyes on a star. Besides,” concluded Morton, tapping the Reverend Bronson’s hand with that invaluable eyeglass, “you make a pet, at the expense of statutes more important, of some beggarly little law like the law against gambling.”
“My dear sir,” exclaimed the Reverend Bronson, “surely you do not defend gambling.”
“I defend nothing,” said Morton; “it’s too beastly tiresome, don’t y’ know. But, really, the public is no fool; and with a stock-ticker and a bucket shop on every corner, you will hardly excite folk to madness over roulette and policy.”
“The policy shops stretch forth their sordid palms for the pennies of the very poor,” said the Reverend Bronson earnestly.
“But, my boy,” retorted Morton, his drooping inanity gaining a color, “government should be concerned no more about the poor man’s penny than the rich man’s pound. However, if it be a reason, why not suppress the barrooms? Gad! what more than your doggery reaches for the pennies of the poor?”
“There is truth in what you say,” consented the Reverend Bronson regretfully. “Still, I count for but one as an axman in this wilderness of evil; I can fell but one tree at a time. I will tell you this, however: At the gates of you rich ones must lie the blame for most of the immoralities of the town. You are guilty of two wrongs: You are not benevolent; and you set a bad moral example.”
“Really!” replied Morton, “I, myself, think the rich a deuced bad lot; in fact, I hold them to be quite as bad as the poor, don’t y’ know. But you speak of benevolence – alms-giving, and that sort of thing. Now I’m against benevolence. There is an immorality in alms just in proportion as there’s a morality to labor. Folk work only because they lack money. Now you give a man ten dollars and the beggar will stop work.”
“Let me hear,” observed the Reverend Bronson, amused if not convinced, “what your remedy for the town’s bad morals would be.”
“Work!” replied Morton, with quite a flash of animation. “I’d make every fellow work – rich and poor alike. I’d invent fardels for the idle. The only difference between the rich and the poor is a difference of cooks and tailors – really! Idleness, don’t y’ know, is everywhere and among all classes the certain seed of vice.”
“You would have difficulty, I fear,” remarked the Reverend Bronson, “in convincing your gilded fellows of the virtuous propriety of labor.”
“I wouldn’t convince them, old chap, I’d club them to it. It is a mistake you dominies make, that you are all for persuading when you should be for driving. Gad! you should never coax where you can drive,” and Morton smiled vacantly.
“You would deal with men as you do with swine?”
“What should be more appropriate? Think of the points of resemblance. Both are obstinate, voracious, complaining, cowardly, ungrateful, selfish, cruel! One should ever deal with a man on a pig basis. Persuasion is useless, compliment a waste. You might make a bouquet for him – orchids and violets – and, gad! he would eat it, thinking it a cabbage. But note the pleasing, screaming, scurrying difference when you smite him with a brick. Your man and your hog were born knowing all about a brick.”
“The rich do a deal of harm,” remarked the Reverend Bronson thoughtfully. “Their squanderings, and the brazen spectacle thereof, should be enough of themselves to unhinge the morals of mankind. Think on their selfish vulgar aggressions! I’ve seen a lake, once the open joy of thousands, bought and fenced to be a play space for one rich man; I’ve looked on while a village where hundreds lived and loved and had their pleasant being, died and disappeared to give one rich man room; in the brag and bluster of his millions, I’ve beheld a rich man rearing a shelter for his crazy brain and body, and borne witness while he bought lumber yards and planing mills and stone quarries and brick concerns and lime kilns with a pretense of hastening his building. It is all a disquieting example to the poor man looking on. Such folk, dollar-loose and dollar-mad, frame disgrace for money, and make the better sentiment of better men fair loathe the name of dollar. And yet it is but a sickness, I suppose; a sort of rickets of riches – a Saint Vitus dance of vast wealth! Such go far, however, to bear out your parallel of the swine; and at the best, they but pile exaggeration on imitation and drink perfumed draff from trough of gold.”
The Reverend Bronson as he gave us this walked up and down the floor as more than once I’d seen him do when moved. Nor did he particularly address himself to either myself or Morton until the close, when he turned to that latter personage. Pausing in his walk, the Reverend Bronson contemplated Morton at some length; and then, as if his thoughts on money had taken another path, and shaking his finger in the manner of one who preferred an indictment, he said:
“Cato, the Censor, declared: ‘It is difficult to save that city from ruin where a fish sells for more than an ox.’ By the bad practices of your vulgar rich, that, to-day, is a description of New York. Still, from the public standpoint, I should not call the luxury it tells of, the worst effect of wealth, nor the riches which indulge in such luxury the most baleful riches. There be those other busy black-flag millions which maraud a people. They cut their way through bars and bolts of government with the saws and files and acids of their evil influence – an influence whose expression is ever, and simply, bribes. I speak of those millions that purchase the passage of one law or the downfall of another, and which buy the people’s officers like cattle to their will. But even as I reproach those criminal millions, I marvel at their blindness. Cannot such wealth see that in its treasons – for treason it does as much as any Arnold – it but undermines itself? Who should need strength and probity in government, and the shelter of them, more than Money? And yet in its rapacity without eyes, it must ever be using the criminal avarice of officials to pick the stones and mortar from the honest foundations of the state!”
The Reverend Bronson resumed his walking up and down. Morton, the imperturbable, lighted a cigarette and puffed bland puffs as though he in no fashion felt himself described. Not at all would he honor the notion that the reverend rhetorician was talking either of him or at him, in his condemnation of those pirate millions.
“I should feel alarmed for my country,” continued the Reverend Bronson, coming back to his chair, “if I did not remember that New York is not the nation, and how a sentiment here is never the sentiment there. The country at large has still its ideals; New York, I fear, has nothing save its appetites.”
“To shift discussion,” said Morton lightly, “a discussion that would seem academic rather than practical, and coming to the City and what you call its appetites, let me suggest this: Much of that trouble of which you speak arises by faults of politics as the latter science is practiced by the parties. Take yourself and our silent friend.” Here Morton indicated me: “Take the two parties you represent. Neither was ever known to propose an onward step. Each of you has for his sole issue the villainies of the other fellow; the whole of your cry is the iniquity of the opposition; it is really! I’ll give both of you this for a warning. The future is to see the man who, leaving a past to bury a. past, will cry ‘Public Ownership!’ or some equally engaging slogan. Gad! old chap, with that, the rabble will follow him as the rats followed the pied piper of Hamelin. The moralist and the grafter will both be left, don’t y’ know!” Morton here returned into that vapidity from which, for the moment, he had shaken himself free. “Gad!” he concluded, “you will never know what a passion to own things gnaws at your peasant in his blouse and wooden shoes until some prophetic beggar shouts ‘Public Ownership!’ you won’t, really!”
“Sticking to what you term the practical,” said the Reverend Bronson, “tell me wherein our reform administration has weakened itself.”
“As I’ve observed,” responded Morton, “you pick out a law and make a pet of it, to the neglect of criminal matters more important. It is your fad – your vanity of party, to do this. Also, it is your heel of Achilles, and through it will come your death-blow.” Then, as if weary of the serious, Morton went off at a lively tangent: “Someone – a very good person, too, I think, although I’ve mislaid his name – observed: ‘Oh, that mine enemy would write a book!’ Now I should make it: ‘Oh, that mine enemy would own a fad!’ Given a fellow’s fad, I’ve got him. Once upon a time, when I had a measure of great railway moment – really! one of those measures of black-flag millions, don’t y’ know! – pending before the legislature at Albany, I ran into a gentleman whose name was De Vallier. Most surprising creature, this De Vallier! Disgustingly honest, too; but above all, as proud as a Spanish Hidalgo of his name. Said his ancestors were nobles of France under the Grand Monarch, and that sort of thing. Gad! it was his fad – this name! And the bitterness wherewith he opposed my measure was positively shameful. Really, if the floor of the Assembly – the chap was in the Assembly, don’t y’ know – were left unguarded for a moment, De Vallier would occupy it, and call everybody but himself a venal rogue of bribes. There was never anything more shocking!
“But I hit upon an expedient. If I could but touch his fad – if I might but reach that name of De Vallier, I would have him on the hip. So with that, don’t y’ know, I had a bill introduced to change the fellow’s name to Dummeldinger. I did, ’pon my honor! The Assembly adopted it gladly. The Senate was about to do the same, when the horrified De Vallier threw himself at my feet. He would die if he were called Dummeldinger!
“The poor fellow’s grief affected me very much; my sympathies are easily excited – they are, really! And Dummeldinger was such a beastly name! I couldn’t withstand De Vallier’s pleadings. I caused the bill changing his name to be withdrawn, and in the fervor of his gratitude, De Vallier voted for that railway measure. It was my kindness that won him; in his relief to escape ‘Dummeldinger,’ De Vallier was ready to die for me.”
It was evening, and in the younger hours I had pulled my chair before the blaze, and was thinking on Apple Cheek, and how I would give the last I owned of money and power to have her by me. This was no uncommon train; I’ve seen few days since she died that did not fill my memory with her image.
Outside raged a threshing storm of snow that was like a threat for bitterness, and it made the sticks in the fireplace snap and sparkle in a kind of stout defiance, as though inviting it to do its worst.
In the next room were Anne and Blossom, and with them young Van Flange. I could hear the murmur of their voices, and at intervals a little laugh from him.
An hour went by; the door between opened, and young Van Flange, halting a bit with hesitation that was not without charm, stepped into my presence. He spoke with grace and courage, however, when once he was launched, and told me his love and asked for Blossom. Then my girl came, and pressed her face to mine. Anne, too, was there, like a blessing and a hope.
They were married: – my girl and young Van Flange. Morton came to my aid; and I must confess that it was he, with young Van Flange, who helped us to bridesmaids and ushers, and what others belong with weddings in their carrying out. I had none upon whom I might call when now I needed wares of such fine sort; while Blossom, for her part, living her frightened life of seclusion, was as devoid of acquaintances or friends among the fashionables as any abbess might have been.
The street was thronged with people when we drove up, and inside the church was such a jam of roses and folk as I had never beheld. Wide was the curious interest in the daughter of Tammany’s Chief; and Blossom must have felt it, for her hand fluttered like a bird on my arm as, with organ crashing a wedding march, I led her up the aisle. At the altar rail were the bishop and three priests. And so, I gave my girl away.
When the ceremony was done, we all went back to my house – Blossom’s house, since I had put it in her name – for I would have it that they must live with me. I was not to be cheated of my girl; she should not be lost out of my arms because she had found a husband’s. It wrought a mighty peace for me, this wedding, showing as it did so sure of happiness to Blossom. Nor will I say it did not feed my pride. Was it a slight thing that the blood of the Clonmel smith should unite itself with a strain, old and proud and blue beyond any in the town? We made one family of it; and when we were settled, my heart filled up with a feeling more akin to content than any that had dwelt there for many a sore day.
