CHAPTER XXVII—GOLD CAME, AND DEATH STEPPED IN
NOW, when I went about refurnishing my steel box with new millions, I turned cautious as a fox. I considered concealment, and would hide my trail and walk in all the running water that I might. For one matter, I was sick and sore with the attacks made upon me by the papers, which grew in malignant violence as the days wore on, and as though it were a point of rivalry between them which should have the black honor of hating me the most. I preferred to court those type-cudgelings as little as stood possible, and still bring me to my ends.
The better to cover myself, and because the mere work of it would be too weary a charge for one head and that head ignorant of figures, I called into my service a cunning trio who were, one and all, born children of the machine. These three owned thorough training as husbandmen of politics, and were ones to mow even the fence corners. That profit of the game which escaped them must indeed be sly, and lie deep and close besides. Also, they were of the invaluable brood that has no tongue, and any one of the triangle would have been broken upon the wheel without a syllable of confession disgracing his lips.
These inveterate ones, who would be now as my hand in gathering together that wealth which I anticipated, were known in circles wherein they moved and had their dingy being, as Sing Sing Jacob, Puffy the Merchant, and Paddy the Priest. Paddy the Priest wore a look of sanctity, and it was this impression of holiness to confer upon him his title. It might have been more consistent with those virtues of rapine dominant of his nature, had he been hailed Paddy the Pirate, instead. Of Sing Sing Jacob, I should say, that he had not served in prison. His name was given him because, while he was never granted the privilege of stripes and irons, he often earned the same. In what manner or at what font Puffy the Merchant received baptism, I never learned. That he came fit for my purpose would find sufficient indication in a complaining compliment which Paddy the Priest once paid him, and who said in description of Puffy's devious genius, that if one were to drive a nail through his head it would come forth a corkscrew.
These men were to be my personal lieutenants, and collect my gold for me. And since they would pillage me with as scanty a scruple as though I were the foe himself, I must hit upon a device for invoking them to honesty in ny affairs. It was then I remembered the parting words of Big Kennedy. I would set one against the others; hating each other, they would watch; and each would be sharp with warning in my ear should either of his fellows seek to fill a purse at my expense.
To sow discord among my three offered no difficulties; I had but to say to one what the others told of him, and his ire was on permanent end. It was thus I separated them; and since I gave each his special domain of effort, while they worked near enough to one another to maintain a watch, they were not so thrown together as to bring down among them open war.
It will be required that I set forth in half-detail those various municipal fields and meadows that I laid out in my time, and from which the machine was to garner its harvest. You will note then, you who are innocent of politics in its practical expressions and rewards, how the town stood to me as does his plowlands to a farmer, and offered as various a list of crops to careful tillage. Take for example the knee-deep clover of the tax department. Each year there was made a whole valuation of personal property of say roundly nine billions of dollars. This estimate, within a dozen weeks of its making, would be reduced to fewer than one billion, on the word of individuals who made the law-required oaths. No, it need not have been so reduced; but the reduction ever occurred since the machine instructed its tax officers to act on the oath so furnished, and that without question.
That personage in tax peril was never put to fret in obtaining one to make the oath. If he himself lacked hardihood and hesitated at perjury, why then, the town abounded in folk of a daring easy veracity. Of all that was said and written, of that time, in any New York day, full ninety-five per cent, was falsehood or mistake. Among the members of a community, so affluent of error and mendacity, one would not long go seeking a witness who was ready, for shining reasons, to take whatever oath might be demanded. And thus it befell that the affidavits were ever made, and a reduction of eight billions and more, in the assessed valuation of personal property, came annually to be awarded. With a tax levy of, say, two per cent. I leave you to fix the total of those millions saved to ones assessed, and also to consider how far their gratitude might be expected to inure to the yellow welfare of the machine—the machine that makes no gift of either its forbearance or its help!
Speaking in particular of the town, and what opportunities of riches swung open to the machine, one should know at the start how the whole annual expense of the community was roughly one hundred and twenty-five millions. Of these millions twenty went for salaries to officials; forty were devoted to the purchase of supplies asked for by the public needs; while the balance, sixty-five millions, represented contracts for paving and building and similar construction whatnot, which the town was bound to execute in its affairs.
Against those twenty millions of salaries, the machine levied an annual private five per cent. Two-thirds of the million to arise therefrom, found their direct way to district leaders; the other one-third was paid into the general coffer. Also there were county officers, such as judges, clerks of court, a sheriff and his deputies: and these, likewise, were compelled from their incomes to a yearly generosity of not fewer than five per cent.
Of those forty millions which were the measure for supplies, one-fifth under the guise of “commissions” went to the machine; while of the sixty-five millions, which represented the yearly contracts in payments made thereon, the machine came better off with, at the leanest of estimates, full forty per cent, of the whole.
Now I have set forth to you those direct returns which arose from the sure and fixed expenses of the town. Beyond that, and pushing for the furthest ounce of tallow, I inaugurated a novelty. I organized a guaranty company which made what bonds the law demanded from officials; and from men with contracts, and those others who furnished the town's supplies. The annual charge of the company for this act of warranty was two per cent, on the sum guaranteed; and since the aggregate thus carried came to about one hundred millions, the intake from such sources—being for the most part profit in the fingers of the machine—was annually a fair two millions. There were other rills to flow a revenue, and which were related to those money well-springs registered above, but they count too many and too small for mention here, albeit the round returns from them might make a poor man stare.
Of those other bottom-lands of profit which bent a nodding harvest to the sickle of the machine, let me make a rough enumeration. The returns—a bit sordid, these!—from poolrooms, faro banks and disorderly resorts and whereon the monthly charge imposed for each ran all the way from fifty to two thousand dollars, clinked into the yearly till, four millions. The grog shops, whereof at that time there was a staggering host of such in New York City of-the-many-sins! met each a draft of twenty monthly dollars. Then one should count “campaign contributions.” Of great companies who sued for favor there were, at a lowest census, five who sent as tribute from twenty to fifty thousand dollars each. Also there existed of smaller concerns and private persons, full one thousand who yielded over all a no less sum than one million. Next came the police, with appointment charges which began with a patrolman at four hundred dollars, and soared to twenty thousand when the matter was the making of a captain.
Here I shall close my recapitulation of former treasure for the machine; I am driven to warn you, however, that the half has not been told. Still, if you will but let your imagination have its head, remembering how the machine gives nothing away, and fails not to exert its pressures with every chance afforded it, you may supply what other chapters belong with the great history of graft.
When one considers a Tammany profit, one will perforce be driven to the question: What be the expenses of the machine? The common cost of an election should pause in the neighborhood of three hundred thousand dollars. Should peril crowd, and an imported vote be called for by the dangers of the day, the cost might carry vastly higher. No campaign, however, in the very nature of the enterprise and its possibilities of expense, can consume a greater fund than eight hundred thousand. That sum, subtracted from the income of the machine as taken from those sundry sources I've related, will show what in my time remained for distribution among my followers.
And now that brings one abreast the subject of riches to the Boss himself. One of the world's humorists puts into the mouth of a character the query: What does a king get? The answer would be no whit less difficult had he asked: What does a Boss get? One may take it, however, that the latter gets the lion's share. Long ago I said that the wealth of Ophir hung on the hazard of the town's election. You have now some slant as to how far my words should be regarded as hyperbole. Nor must I omit how the machine's delegation in a legislature, or the little flock it sends to nibble on the slopes of Congress, is each in the hand of the Boss to do with as he will, and it may go without a record that the opportunities so provided are neither neglected nor underpriced.
There you have the money story of Tammany in the bowels of the town. Those easy-chair economists who, over their morning coffee and waffles, engage themselves for purity, will at this point give honest rage the rein. Had I no sense of public duty? Was the last spark of any honesty burned out within my bosom? Was nothing left but dead embers to be a conscience to me? The Reverend Bronson—and I had a deep respect for that gentleman—put those questions in his time.
“Bear in mind,” said he when, after that last election, I again had the town in my grasp, “bear in mind the welfare and the wishes of the public, and use your power consistently therewith.”
“Now, why?” said I. “The public of which you tell me lies in two pieces, the minority and the majority. It is to the latter's welfare—the good of the machine—I shall address myself. Be sure, my acts will gain the plaudits of my own people, while I have only to go the road you speak of to be made the target of their anger. As to the minority—those who have vilified me, and who still would crush me if they but had the strength—why, then, as Morton says, I owe them no more than William owed the Saxons when after Hastings he had them under his feet.”
When the new administration was in easy swing, and I had time to look about me, I bethought me of Blackberry and those three millions taken from the weakness and the wickedness of young Van Flange. I would have those millions back or know the secret of it.
With a nod here and a hand-toss there—for the shrug of my shoulders or the lift of my brows had grown to have a definition among my people—I brewed tempests for Blackberry. The park department discovered it in a trespass; the health board gave it notice of the nonsanitary condition of its cars; the street commissioner badgered it with processes because of violations of laws and ordinances; the coroner, who commonly wore a gag, gave daily news of what folk were killed or maimed through the wantonness of Blackberry; while my corporation counsel bestirred himself as to whether or no, for this neglect or that invasion of public right, the Blackberry charter might not be revoked.
In the face of these, the president of Blackberry—he of the Hebrew cast and clutch—stood sullenly to his guns. He would not yield; he would not pay the price of peace; he would not return those millions, although he knew well the argument which was the ground-work of his griefs.
The storm I unchained beat sorely, but he made no white-flag signs. I admired his fortitude, while I multiplied my war.
It was Morton who pointed to that final feather which broke the camel's back.
“Really, old chap,” observed Morton, that immortal eyeglass on nose and languid hands outspread, “really, you haven't played your trumps, don't y' know.”
“What then?” cried I, for my heart was growing hot.
“You recall my saying to our friend Bronson that, when I had a chap against me whom I couldn't buy, I felt about to discover his fad or his fear—I was speaking about changing a beggar's name, and all that, don't y' know?”
“Yes,” said I, “it all comes back.”
“Exactly,” continued Morton. “Now the fear that keeps a street-railway company awake nights is its fear of a strike. There, my dear boy, you have your weapon. Convey the information to those Blackberry employees, that you think they get too little money and work too long a day. Let them understand how, should they strike, your police will not repress them in any crimes they see fit to commit. Really, I think I've hit upon a splendid idea! Those hirelings will go upon the warpath, don't y' know! And a strike is such a beastly thing!—such a deuced bore! It is, really!”
Within the fortnight every Blackberry wheel was stopped, and every employee rioting in the streets. Cars were sacked; what men offered for work were harried, and made to fly for very skins and bones. Meanwhile, the police stood afar off with virgin-batons, innocent of interference.
Four days of this, and those four millions were paid into my hand; the Blackberry president had yielded, and my triumph was complete. With that, my constabulary remembered law and order, and, descending upon the turbulent, calmed them with their clubs. The strike ended; again were the gongs of an unharassed Blackberry heard in the land.
And now I draw near the sorrowful, desperate end—the end at once of my labors and my latest hope. I had held the town since the last battle for well-nigh three and one-half years. Throughout this space affairs political preserved themselves as rippleless as a looking-glass, and nothing to ruffle with an adverse wind. Those henchmen—my boys of the belt, as it were—Sing Sing Jacob, Puffy the Merchant, and Paddy the Priest, went working like good retrievers at their task of bringing daily money to my feet.
Nor was I compelled to appear as one interested in the profits of the town's farming, and this of itself was comfort, since it served to keep me aloof from any mire of those methods that were employed.
It is wonderful how a vile source for a dollar will in no wise daunt a man, so that he be not made to pick it from the direct mud himself. If but one hand intervene between his own and that gutter which gave it up, both his conscience and his sensibilities are satisfied to receive it. Of all sophists, self-interest is the sophist surest of disciples; it will carry conviction triumphant against what fact or what deduction may come to stand in the way, and, with the last of it, “The smell of all money is sweet.”
But while it was isles of spice and summer seas with my politics, matters at home went ever darker with increasing threat. Blossom became weaker and still more weak, and wholly from a difficulty in her breathing. If she were to have had but her breath, her health would have been fair enough; and that I say by word of the physician who was there to attend her, and who was a gray deacon of his guild.
“It is her breathing,” said he; “otherwise her health is good for any call she might make upon it.”
It was the more strange to one looking on; for all this time while Blossom was made to creep from one room to another, and, for the most part, to lie panting upon a couch, her cheeks were round and red as peaches, and her eyes grew in size and brightness like stars when the night is dark.
“Would you have her sent away?” I asked of the physician. “Say but the place; I will take her there myself.”
“She is as well here,” said he. Then, as his brows knotted with the problem of it: “This is an unusual case; so unusual, indeed, that during forty years of practice I have never known its fellow. However, it is no question of climate, and she will be as well where she is. The better; since she has no breath with which to stand a journey.”
While I said nothing to this, I made up my mind to have done with politics and take Blossom away. It would, at the worst, mean escape from scenes where we had met with so much misery. That my present rule of the town owned still six months of life before another battle, did not move me. I would give up my leadership and retire at once. It would lose me half a year of gold-heaping, but what should that concern? What mattered a handful of riches, more or less, as against the shoreless relief of seclusion, and Blossom in new scenes of quiet peace? The very newness would take up her thoughts; and with nothing about to recall what had been, or to whisper the name of that villain who hurt her heart to the death, she might have even the good fortune to forget. My decision was made, and I went quietly forward to bring my politics to a close.
It became no question of weeks nor even days; I convened my district leaders, and with the few words demanded of the time, returned them my chiefship and stepped down and out. Politics and I had parted; the machine and I were done.
At that, I cannot think I saw regret over my going in any of the faces which stared up at me. There was a formal sorrow of words; but the great expression to to seize upon each was that of selfish eagerness. I, with my lion's share of whatever prey was taken, would be no more; it was the thought of each that with such the free condition he would be like to find some special fatness not before his own.
Well! what else should I have looked for?—I, who had done only justice by them, why should I be loved? Let them exult; they have subserved my purpose and fulfilled my turn. I was retiring with the wealth of kings:—I, who am an ignorant man, and the son of an Irish smith! If my money had been put into gold it would have asked the strength of eighty teams, with a full ton of gold to a team, to have hauled it out of town—a solid procession of riches an easy half-mile in length! No Alexander, no Cæsar, no Napoleon in his swelling day of conquest, could have made the boast! I was master of every saffron inch of forty millions!
That evening I sat by Blossom's couch and told her of my plans. I made but the poor picture of it, for I have meager power of words, and am fettered with an imagination of no wings. Still, she smiled up at me as though with pleasure—for her want of breath was so urgent she could not speak aloud, but only whisper a syllable now and then—and, after a while, I kissed her, and left her with the physician and nurse for the night.
It was during the first hours of the morning when I awoke in a sweat of horror, as if something of masterful menace were in the room. With a chill in my blood like the touch of ice, I thought of Blossom; and with that I began to huddle on my clothes to go to her.
The physician met me at Blossom's door. He held me back with a gentle hand on my breast.
“Don't go in!” he said.
That hand, light as a woman's, withstood me like a wall. I drew back and sought a chair in the library—a chair of Blossom's, it was—and sat glooming into the darkness in a wonder of fear.
What wits I possess have broad feet, and are not easily to be staggered. That night, however, they swayed and rocked like drunken men, under the pressure of some evil apprehension of I knew not what. I suppose now I feared death for Blossom, and that my thoughts lacked courage to look the surmise in the face.
An hour went by, and I still in the darkened room. I wanted no lights. It was as though I were a fugitive, and sought in the simple darkness a refuge and a place wherein to hide myself. Death was in the house, robbing me of all I loved; I knew that, and yet I felt no stab of agony, but instead a fashion of dumb numbness like a paralysis.
In a vague way, this lack of sharp sensation worked upon my amazement. I remember that, in explanation of it, I recalled one of Morton's tales about a traveler whom a lion seized as he sat at his campfire; and how, while the lion crunched him in his jaws and dragged him to a distance, he still had no feel of pain, but—as I had then—only a numbness and fog of nerves.
While this went running in my head, I heard the rattle of someone at the street door, and was aware, I don't know how, that another physician had come. A moment later my ear overtook whisperings in the hall just beyond my own door.
Moved of an instinct that might have prompted some threatened animal to spy out what danger overhung him, I went, cat-foot, to the door and listened. It was the two physicians in talk.
“The girl is dead,” I heard one say.
“What malady?” asked the other.
“And there's the marvel of it!” cries the first. “No malady at all, as I'm a doctor! She died of suffocation. The case is without a parallel. Indubitably, it was that birthmark—that mark as of a rope upon her neck. Like the grip of destiny itself, the mark has been growing and tightening about her throat since ever she lay in her cradle, until now she dies of it. A most remarkable case! It is precisely as though she were hanged—the congested eye, the discolored face, the swollen tongue, aye! and about her throat, the very mark of the rope!”
Blossom dead! my girl dead! Apple Cheek, Anne, Blossom, all gone, and I to be left alone! Alone! The word echoed in the hollows of my empty heart as in a cavern! There came a blur, and then a fearful whirling; that gorilla strength was as the strength of children; my slow knees began to cripple down! That was the last I can recall; I fell as if struck by a giant's mallet, and all was black.