Lewis Alfred Henry
The Boss, and How He Came to Rule New York

CHAPTER XXII – THE MAN OF THE KNIFE

WHEN the first gust was over, the Reverend Bronson seemed sad rather than enraged. He reproached the machine for the failure of his effort against that gambling den.

“But why do you call yourself defeated?” I asked. It was no part of my purpose to concede, even by my silence, that either I or Tammany was opposed to the Reverend Bronson. “You should put the matter to the test of a trial before you say that.”

“What can I do without Inspector McCue? and he has been removed from the affair. I talked with him concerning it; he told me himself there was no hope.”

“Now, what were his words?” said I, for I was willing to discover how far Inspector McCue had used my name.

“Why, then,” returned the Reverend Bronson, with a faint smile at the recollection, “if I am to give you the precise words, our talk ran somewhat like this:

“‘Doctor, what’s the use?’ said Inspector McCue. ‘We’re up against it; we can’t move a wheel.’

“‘There’s such a word as law,’ said I, advancing much, the argument you have just now given me; ‘and such a thing as justice.’

“‘Not in the face of the machine,’ responded Inspector McCue. ‘The will of the machine stands for all the law and all the justice that we’re likely to get. The machine has the courts, the juries, the prosecuting officers, and the police. Every force we need is in its hands. Personally, of course, they couldn’t touch you; but if I were to so much as lift a finger, I’d be destroyed. Some day I, myself, may be chief; and if I am, for once in a way, I’ll guarantee the decent people of this town a run for their money.’

“‘And yet,’ said I, ‘we prate of liberty!’

“‘Liberty!’ cried he. ‘Doctor, our liberties are in hock to the politicians, and we’ve lost the ticket.’”

It was in my mind to presently have the stripes and buttons off the loquacious, honest Inspector McCue. The Reverend Bronson must have caught some gleam of it in my eye; he remonstrated with a gentle hand upon my arm.

“Promise me that no more harm shall come to McCue,” he said. “I ought not to have repeated his words. He has been banished to the Bronx; isn’t that punishment enough for doing right?”

“Yes,” I returned, after a pause; “I give you my word, your friend is in no further peril. You should tell him, however, to forget the name, ‘machine.’ Also, he has too many opinions for a policeman.”

The longer I considered, the more it was clear that it would not be a cautious policy to cashier McCue. It would make an uproar which I did not care to court when so near hand to an election. It was not difficult, therefore, to give the Reverend Bronson that promise, and I did it with a good grace.

Encouraged by my compliance, the Reverend Bronson pushed into an argument, the object of which was to bring me to his side for the town’s reform.

“Doctor,” said I, when he had set forth what he conceived to be my duty to the premises, “even if I were disposed to go with you, I would have to go alone. I could no more take Tammany Hall in the direction you describe, than I could take the East River. As I told you once before, you should consider our positions. It is the old quarrel of theory and practice. You proceed upon a theory that men are what they should be; I must practice existence upon the fact of men as they are.”

“There is a debt you owe Above!” returned the Reverend Bronson, the preacher within him beginning to struggle.

“And what debt should that be?” I cried, for my mind, on the moment, ran gloomily to Blossom. “What debt should I owe there? – I, who am the most unhappy man in the world!”

There came a look into the eyes of the Reverend Bronson that was at once sharp with interrogation and soft with sympathy. He saw that I had been hard wounded, although he could not know by what; and he owned the kindly tact to change the course of his remarks.

“There is one point, sure,” resumed the Reverend Bronson, going backward in his trend of thought, “and of that I warn you. I shall not give up this fight. I began with an attack upon those robbers, and I’ve been withstood by ones who should have strengthened my hands. I shall now assail, not alone the lawbreakers, but their protectors. I shall attack the machine and the police. I shall take this story into every paper that will print it; I shall summon the pulpits to my aid; I shall arouse the people, if they be not deaf or dead, to wage war on those who protect such vultures in their rapine for a share of its returns. There shall be a moral awakening; and you may yet conclude, when you sit down in the midst of defeat, that honesty is after all the best policy, and that virtue has its reward.”

The Reverend Bronson, in the heat of feeling, had risen from the chair, and declaimed rather than said this, while striding up and down. To him it was as though my floor were a rostrum, and the private office of Tammany’s Chief, a lecture room. I am afraid I smiled a bit cynically at his ardor and optimism, for he took me in sharp hand, “Oh! I shall not lack recruits,” said he, “and some will come from corners you might least suspect. I met your great orator, Mr. Gutterglory, but a moment ago; he gave me his hand, and promised his eloquence to the cause of reform.”

“Nor does that surprise me,” said I. Then, with a flush of wrath: “You may say to orator Gutterglory that I shall have something to remind him of when he takes the stump in your support.”

My anger over Gutterglory owned a certain propriety of foundation. He was that sodden Cicero who marred the scene when, long before, I called on Big Kennedy, with the reputable old gentleman and Morton, to consult over the Gas Company’s injunction antics touching Mulberry Traction. By some wonderful chance, Gutterglory had turned into sober walks. Big Kennedy, while he lived, and afterward I, myself, had upheld him, and put him in the way of money. He paid us with eloquence in conventions and campaigns, and on show occasions when Tammany would celebrate a holiday or a victory. From low he soared to high, and surely none was more pleased thereby than I. On every chance I thrust him forward; and I was sedulous to see that always a stream of dollar-profit went running his way.

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!”