“But there’s a lot of other folks here who only know me by what slander and jokes they’ve picked up around town or in the out-of-State newspapers. It’s these latter folks I’m talking to now. I want them to know the real me; not the uneducated crook and illiterate feller my p’litical enemies have made me out. They can’t think I’m all bad, or they wouldn’t be my guests. Would they, now? And a little frankness ought to do the rest.
“Some people say I’ve risen from the gutter. Well, I’ve risen from it, haven’t I? A lot of men on Pompton Avenue and in the big clubs are just where they started when they were born. Not a step in advance of where their fathers left ’em. Swell chance they’d have had if their parents had started ’em in the gutter as mine did, wouldn’t they? Where’d they be now?
“What does the start amount to? The finish line’s where the score’s counted. Gutter or palace.
“‘A man’s a man for a’ that,’ says a poet by the name of R. Burns. And he was right, even if he did waste his time on verse-stringing. Only it always seemed a pity to me those words wasn’t said by someone bigger’n a measly poet. Someone whose name carried weight, and whose words would be quoted more. Because then more folks might hear of it and believe it. I don’t suppose one person in fifty’s ever heard of this R. Burns person. (I never did, myself, till I bought a Famous Quotation book to use in one of my campaigns. That’s how I got familiar with the writings of R. Burns and Ibid and Byron and all those rhymer people.) Now, if some public character like Tom Platt, or Matt Quay, or someone else that everybody’s heard of, had said that quotation about a man being a man——”
Caleb paused to gather up the loose threads of his discourse. This caused him a moment of dull bewilderment, for he was not accustomed to digress, either in mind or talk, and the phenomenon puzzled him. He rallied and went on:
“But that isn’t the point. I was telling you about myself. I started in the gutter, just as the ‘knockers’ say I did. Or down by the freight yards, and that’s about the same thing. My mother took in washing—when she could get it. My father went to the penitentiary for freight-lifting when I was ten—he was a stevedore—and he died there. I was brought up on a street where the feller—man or boy—who couldn’t fight had to stay indoors. And indoors was one place I never stayed. I began as coal boy in the C. G. & X. elevators; then I got a job firing on a fast freight, and from that I took to braking on a local passenger run. Then I was yardmaster, and then in the sup’rintendent’s office, and then came the job of sup’rintendent and after that general manager, and I worked my way up till I ran the C. G. & X. road single-handed. Meantime I was looking after your city’s interests. Three times as Alderman and then once as Mayor, for the boys knew they could bank on me. I got hold of interests here and interests there. Cheap, run-down interests they were, for the most part, but I built ’em up. Take the C. G. & X., for instance. Biggest road in the State to-day. How’d it get so? I made it. It was all run down, and on its last legs when I took hold. I acquired it and——”
He paused once more, fighting back that queer tendency to let slip his grasp on his subject.
“I remember that C. G. & X. deal,” whispered Greer to his wife. “He juggled shares and pulled wires and spread calamity rumors till he was able to smash the stock down to a dollar-ten per. He scared out all the other big holders, gobbled their stock, reorganized, and reaped a clean five million on the deal.”
“Hush!” retorted Mrs. Greer. “This is too rich to miss. I must remember it all, to——”
“—So, you see,” Caleb was continuing, “I fought my way up. Every move was a fight, and every fight was a win. That’s my motto. Fight to win. An’ if you don’t win, let it be your executor, not you, that knows you lost. But the biggest fight of all was to come. I controlled the city. I helped control the State. I had all the money any man needed, and I was spending it right here in the town where it was earned. I was a successful man. But the man who’s satisfied with success would be satisfied with failure. And I wasn’t satisfied.