The Boss, and How He Came to Rule New York

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.

CHAPTER XXVIII – BEING THE EPILOGUE

WHAT should there be more? My house stands upon a hill; waving, sighing trees are ranked about it, while to the eastward I have the shimmering stretches of the river beneath my feet. From a wooden seat between two beeches, I may see the fog-loom born of the dust and smoke of the city far away. At night, when clouds lie thick and low, the red reflection of the city’s million lamps breaks on the sky as though a fire raged.

It is upon my seat between the beeches that I spend my days. Men would call my life a stagnant one; I care not, since I find it peace. I have neither hopes nor fears nor pains nor joys; there come no exaltations, no depressions; within me is a serenity – a kind of silence like the heart of nature.

At that I have no dimness; I roll and rock for hours on the dead swells of old days, while old faces and old scenes toss to and fro like seaweed with the tides of my memory. I am prey to no regrets, to no ambitions; my times own neither currents nor winds; I have outlived importance and the liking for it; and all those little noises that keep the world awake, I never hear.

My Sicilian, with his earrings and his crimson headwear of silk, is with me; for he could not have lived had I left him in town, being no more able to help himself than a ship ashore. Here he is busy and happy over nothing. He has whittled for himself a trio of little boats, and he sails them on the pond at the lawn’s foot. One of these he has named the Democrat, while the others are the Republican and the Mugwump. He sails them against each other; and I think that by some marine sleight he gives the Democrat the best of it, since it ever wins, which is not true of politics. My Sicilian has just limped up the hill with a story of how, in the last race, the Republican and the Mugwump ran into one another and capsized, while the Democrat finished bravely.

Save for my Sicilian, and a flock of sable ravens that by their tameness and a confident self-sufficiency have made themselves part of the household, I pass the day between my beeches undisturbed. The ravens are grown so proud with safety that, when I am walking, they often hold the path against me, picking about for the grains my Sicilian scatters, keeping upon me the while a truculent eye that is half cautious, half defiant. In the spring I watch these ravens throughout their nest-building, they living for the most part in the trees about my house. I’ve known them to be baffled during a whole two days, when winds were blowing and the swaying of the branches prevented their labors.

Now and then I have a visit from Morton and the Reverend Bronson. The pair are as they were, only more age-worn and of a grayer lock. They were with me the other day; Morton as faultless of garb as ever, and with eyeglass as much employed, the Reverend Bronson as anxious as in the old time for the betterment of humanity. The spirit of unselfishness never flags in that good man’s breast, although Morton is in constant bicker with him concerning the futility of his work.

“The fault isn’t in you, old chap,” said Morton, when last they were with me; “it isn’t, really. But humanity in the mass is such a beastly dullard, don’t y’ know, that to do anything in its favor is casting pearls before swine.”

“Why, then,” responded the Reverend Bronson with a smile, “if I were you, I should help mankind for the good it gave me, without once thinking on the object of my generosity.”

“But,” returned Morton, “I take no personal joy from helping people. Gad! it wearies me. Man is such a perverse beggar; he’s ever wrong end to in his affairs. The entire race is like a horse turned round in its stall, and with its tail in the fodder stands shouting for hay. If men, in what you call their troubles, would but face the other way about, nine times in ten they’d be all right. They wouldn’t need help – really!”

“And if what you say be true,” observed the Reverend Bronson, who was as fond of argument as was Morton, “then you have outlined your duty. You say folk are turned wrong in their affairs. Then you should help them to turn right.”

“Really now,” said Morton, imitating concern, “I wouldn’t for the world have such sentiments escape to the ears of my club, don’t y’ know, for it’s beastly bad form to even entertain them, but I lay the trouble you seek to relieve, old chap, to that humbug we call civilization; I do, ‘pon my word!”

“Do you cry out against civilization?”

“Gad! why not? I say it is an artifice, a mere deceit. Take ourselves: what has it done for any of us? Here is our friend” – Morton dropped his hand upon my shoulder – “who, taking advantage of what was offered of our civilization, came to be so far victorious as to have the town for his kickball. He was a dictator; his word was law among three millions – really! To-day he has riches, and could pave his grounds with gold. He was these things, and had these things, from the hand of civilization; and now, at the end, he sits in the center of sadness waiting for death. Consider my own case: I, too, at the close of my juice-drained days, am waiting for death; only, unlike our friend, I play the cynic and while I wait I laugh.”

“I was never much to laugh,” I interjected.

“The more strange, too, don’t y’ know,” continued Morton, “since you are aware of life and the mockery of it, as much as I. I may take it that I came crying into this world, for such I understand to be the beastly practice of the human young. Had I understood the empty jest of it, I should have laughed; I should, really!”

“Now with what do you charge civilization?” asked the Reverend Bronson.

“It has made me rich, and I complain of that. The load of my millions begins to bend my back. A decent, wholesome savagery would have presented no such burdens.”

“And do you uplift savagery?”

“I don’t wonder you’re shocked, old chap, for from our civilized standpoint savagery is such deuced bad form. But you should consider; you should, really! Gad! you know that civilized city where we dwell; you know its civilized millions, fretting like maggots, as many as four thousand in a block; you know the good and the evil ground of those civilized mills! Wherein lieth a triumph over the red savage who abode upon the spot three centuries ago? Who has liberty as had that savage? He owned laws and respected them; he had his tribe, and was a patriot fit to talk with William Tell. He fought his foe like a Richard of England, and loved his friend like a Jonathan. He paid neither homage to power nor taxes to men, and his privileges were as wide as the world’s rim. His franchises of fagot, vert, and venison had never a limit; he might kill a deer a day and burn a cord of wood to its cookery. As for his religion: the test of religion is death; and your savage met death with a fortitude, and what is fortitude but faith, which it would bother Christians to parallel. It may be said that he lived a happier life, saw more of freedom, and was more his own man, than any you are to meet in Broadway.”

Morton, beneath his fluff of cynicism, was a deal in earnest. The Reverend Bronson took advantage of it to say:

“Here, as you tell us, are we three, and all at the end of the journey. Here is that one who strove for power: here is that one who strove for wealth; here is that one who strove to help his fellow man. I give you the question: Brushing civilization and savagery aside as just no more than terms to mark some shadowy difference, I ask you: Who of the three lives most content? – for it is he who was right.”

“By the way!” said Morton, turning to me, as they were about to depart, and producing a scrap of newspaper, “this is what a scientist writes concerning you. The beggar must have paid you a call, don’t y’ know. At first, I thought it a beastly rude thing to put in print; but, gad! the more I dwell upon it, the more honorable it becomes. This is what he says of you:

“‘There was a look in his eye such as might burn in the eye of an old wolf that has crept away in solitude to die. As I gazed, there swept down upon me an astounding conviction. I felt that I was in the presence of the oldest thing in the world – a thing more ancient than the Sphinx or aged pyramids. This once Boss, silent and passive and white and old, and waiting for the digging of his grave, is what breeders call a “throw-back” – a throw-back, not of the generations, but of the ages. In what should arm him for a war of life against life, he is a creature of utter cunning, utter courage, utter strength. He is a troglodyte; he is that original one who lived with the cave bear, the mastodon, the sabertoothed tiger, and the Irish elk.’”

They went away, the Reverend Bronson and Morton, leaving me alone on my bench between the beeches, while the black ravens picked and strutted about my feet, and my Sicilian on the lake at the lawn’s foot matching his little ships for another race.

THE END