________________________________________________
_ The stoic Cowperwood, listening to the blare and excitement that
went with the fall campaign, was much more pained to learn of
Aileen's desertion than to know that he had arrayed a whole social
element against himself in Chicago. He could not forget the wonder
of those first days when Aileen was young, and love and hope had
been the substance of her being. The thought ran through all his
efforts and cogitations like a distantly orchestrated undertone.
In the main, in spite of his activity, he was an introspective
man, and art, drama, and the pathos of broken ideals were not
beyond him. He harbored in no way any grudge against Aileen--only
a kind of sorrow over the inevitable consequences of his own
ungovernable disposition, the will to freedom within himself.
Change! Change! the inevitable passing of things! Who parts with
a perfect thing, even if no more than an unreasoning love, without
a touch of self-pity?
But there followed swiftly the sixth of November, with its election,
noisy and irrational, and the latter resulted in a resounding
defeat. Out of the thirty-two Democratic aldermen nominated only
ten were elected, giving the opposition a full two-thirds majority
in council, Messrs. Tiernan and Kerrigan, of course, being safely
in their places. With them came a Republican mayor and all his
Republican associates on the ticket, who were now supposed to carry
out the theories of the respectable and the virtuous. Cowperwood
knew what it meant and prepared at once to make overtures to the
enemy. From McKenty and others he learned by degrees the full
story of Tiernan's and Kerrigan's treachery, but he did not store
it up bitterly against them. Such was life. They must be looked
after more carefully in future, or caught in some trap and utterly
undone. According to their own accounts, they had barely managed
to scrape through.
"Look at meself! I only won by three hundred votes," archly declared
Mr. Kerrigan, on divers and sundry occasions. "By God, I almost
lost me own ward!"
Mr. Tiernan was equally emphatic. "The police was no good to me,"
he declared, firmly. "They let the other fellows beat up me men.
I only polled six thousand when I should have had nine."
But no one believed them.
While McKenty meditated as to how in two years he should be able
to undo this temporary victory, and Cowperwood was deciding that
conciliation was the best policy for him, Schryhart, Hand, and
Arneel, joining hands with young MacDonald, were wondering how
they could make sure that this party victory would cripple Cowperwood
and permanently prevent him from returning to power. It was a
long, intricate fight that followed, but it involved (before
Cowperwood could possibly reach the new aldermen) a proposed
reintroduction and passage of the much-opposed General Electric
franchise, the granting of rights and privileges in outlying
districts to various minor companies, and last and worst--a thing
which had not previously dawned on Cowperwood as in any way
probable--the projection of an ordinance granting to a certain
South Side corporation the privilege of erecting and operating an
elevated road. This was as severe a blow as any that had yet been
dealt Cowperwood, for it introduced a new factor and complication
into the Chicago street-railway situation which had hitherto, for
all its troubles, been comparatively simple.
In order to make this plain it should be said that some eighteen
or twenty years before in New York there had been devised and
erected a series of elevated roads calculated to relieve the
congestion of traffic on the lower portion of that long and narrow
island, and they had proved an immense success. Cowperwood had
been interested in them, along with everything else which pertained
to public street traffic, from the very beginning. In his various
trips to New York he had made a careful physical inspection of
them. He knew all about their incorporation, backers, the expense
connected with them, their returns, and so forth. Personally, in
so far as New York was concerned, he considered them an ideal
solution of traffic on that crowded island. Here in Chicago,
where the population was as yet comparatively small--verging now
toward a million, and widely scattered over a great area--he did
not feel that they would be profitable--certainly not for some
years to come. What traffic they gained would be taken from the
surface lines, and if he built them he would be merely doubling
his expenses to halve his profits. From time to time he had
contemplated the possibility of their being built by other men
--providing they could secure a franchise, which previous to the
late election had not seemed probable--and in this connection he
had once said to Addison: "Let them sink their money, and about
the time the population is sufficient to support the lines they
will have been driven into the hands of receivers. That will
simply chase the game into my bag, and I can buy them for a mere
song." With this conclusion Addison had agreed. But since this
conversation circumstances made the construction of these elevated
roads far less problematic.
In the first place, public interest in the idea of elevated roads
was increasing. They were a novelty, a factor in the life of New
York; and at this time rivalry with the great cosmopolitan heart
was very keen in the mind of the average Chicago citizen. Public
sentiment in this direction, however naive or unworthy, was
nevertheless sufficient to make any elevated road in Chicago popular
for the time being. In the second place, it so happened that
because of this swelling tide of municipal enthusiasm, this
renaissance of the West, Chicago had finally been chosen, at a
date shortly preceding the present campaign, as the favored city
for an enormous international fair--quite the largest ever given
in America. Men such as Hand, Schryhart, Merrill, and Arneel, to
say nothing of the various newspaper publishers and editors, had
been enthusiastic supporters of the project, and in this Cowperwood
had been one with them. No sooner, however, had the award actually
been granted than Cowperwood's enemies made it their first concern
to utilize the situation against him.
To begin with, the site of the fair, by aid of the new anti-Cowperwood
council, was located on the South Side, at the terminus of the
Schryhart line, thus making the whole city pay tribute to that
corporation. Simultaneously the thought suddenly dawned upon the
Schryhart faction that it would be an excellent stroke of business
if the New York elevated-road idea were now introduced into the
city--not so much with the purpose of making money immediately,
but in order to bring the hated magnate to an understanding that
he had a formidable rival which might invade the territory that
he now monopolized, curtailing his and thus making it advisable
for him to close out his holdings and depart. Bland and interesting
were the conferences held by Mr. Schryhart with Mr. Hand, and by
Mr. Hand with Mr. Arneel on this subject. Their plan as first
outlined was to build an elevated road on the South Side--south of
the proposed fair-grounds--and once that was popular--having
previously secured franchises which would cover the entire field,
West, South, and North--to construct the others at their leisure,
and so to bid Mr. Cowperwood a sweet and smiling adieu.
Cowperwood, awaiting the assembling of the new city council one
month after election, did not propose to wait in peace and quiet
until the enemy should strike at him unprepared. Calling those
familiar agents, his corporation attorneys, around him, he was
shortly informed of the new elevated-road idea, and it gave him a
real shock. Obviously Hand and Schryhart were now in deadly
earnest. At once he dictated a letter to Mr. Gilgan asking him
to call at his office. At the same time he hurriedly adjured his
advisers to use due diligence in discovering what influences could
be brought to bear on the new mayor, the honorable Chaffee Thayer
Sluss, to cause him to veto the ordinances in case they came before
him--to effect in him, indeed, a total change of heart.
The Hon. Chaffee Thayer Sluss, whose attitude in this instance
was to prove crucial, was a tall, shapely, somewhat grandiloquent
person who took himself and his social and commercial opportunities
and doings in the most serious and, as it were, elevated light.
You know, perhaps, the type of man or woman who, raised in an
atmosphere of comparative comfort and some small social pretension,
and being short of those gray convolutions in the human brain-pan
which permit an individual to see life in all its fortuitousness
and uncertainty, proceed because of an absence of necessity and
the consequent lack of human experience to take themselves and all
that they do in the most reverential and Providence-protected spirit.
The Hon. Chaffee Thayer Sluss reasoned that, because of the splendid
ancestry on which he prided himself, he was an essentially honest
man. His father had amassed a small fortune in the wholesale
harness business. The wife whom at the age of twenty-eight he had
married--a pretty but inconsequential type of woman--was the daughter
of a pickle manufacturer, whose wares were in some demand and
whose children had been considered good "catches" in the neighborhood
from which the Hon. Chaffee Sluss emanated. There had been a
highly conservative wedding feast, and a honeymoon trip to the
Garden of the Gods and the Grand Canon. Then the sleek Chaffee,
much in the grace of both families because of his smug determination
to rise in the world, had returned to his business, which was
that of a paper-broker, and had begun with the greatest care to
amass a competence on his own account.
The Honorable Chaffee, be it admitted, had no particular faults,
unless those of smugness and a certain over-carefulness as to his
own prospects and opportunities can be counted as such. But he
had one weakness, which, in view of his young wife's stern and
somewhat Puritanic ideas and the religious propensities of his
father and father-in-law, was exceedingly disturbing to him. He
had an eye for the beauty of women in general, and particularly
for plump, blonde women with corn-colored hair. Now and then, in
spite of the fact that he had an ideal wife and two lovely children,
he would cast a meditative and speculative eye after those alluring
forms that cross the path of all men and that seem to beckon slyly
by implication if not by actual, open suggestion.
However, it was not until several years after Mr. Sluss had married,
and when he might have been considered settled in the ways of
righteousness, that he actually essayed to any extent the role of
a gay Lothario. An experience or two with the less vigorous and
vicious girls of the streets, a tentative love affair with a girl
in his office who was not new to the practices she encouraged, and
he was fairly launched. He lent himself at first to the great
folly of pretending to love truly; but this was taken by one and
another intelligent young woman with a grain of salt. The
entertainment and preferment he could provide were accepted as
sufficient reward. One girl, however, actually seduced, had to
be compensated by five thousand dollars--and that after such
terrors and heartaches (his wife, her family, and his own looming
up horribly in the background) as should have cured him forever
of a penchant for stenographers and employees generally. Thereafter
for a long time he confined himself strictly to such acquaintances
as he could make through agents, brokers, and manufacturers who
did business with him, and who occasionally invited him to one
form of bacchanalian feast or another.
As time went on he became wiser, if, alas, a little more eager.
By association with merchants and some superior politicians whom
he chanced to encounter, and because the ward in which he lived
happened to be a pivotal one, he began to speak publicly on occasion
and to gather dimly the import of that logic which sees life as a
pagan wild, and religion and convention as the forms man puts on
or off to suit his fancy, mood, and whims during the onward drift
of the ages. Not for Chaffee Thayer Sluss to grasp the true meaning
of it all. His brain was not big enough. Men led dual lives, it
was true; but say what you would, and in the face of his own erring
conduct, this was very bad. On Sunday, when he went to church
with his wife, he felt that religion was essential and purifying.
In his own business he found himself frequently confronted by
various little flaws of logic relating to undue profits,
misrepresentations, and the like; but say what you would, nevertheless
and notwithstanding, God was God, morality was superior, the church
was important. It was wrong to yield to one's impulses, as he
found it so fascinating to do. One should be better than his
neighbor, or pretend to be.
What is to be done with such a rag-bag, moralistic ass as this?
In spite of all his philanderings, and the resultant qualms due
to his fear of being found out, he prospered in business and rose
to some eminence in his own community. As he had grown more lax
he had become somewhat more genial and tolerant, more generally
acceptable. He was a good Republican, a follower in the wake of
Norrie Simms and young Truman Leslie MacDonald. His father-in-law
was both rich and moderately influential. Having lent himself to
some campaign speaking, and to party work in general, he proved
quite an adept. Because of all these things--his ability, such
as it was, his pliability, and his thoroughly respectable savor
--he had been slated as candidate for mayor on the Republican
ticket, which had subsequently been elected.
Cowperwood was well aware, from remarks made in the previous
campaign, of the derogatory attitude of Mayor Sluss. Already he
had discussed it in a conversation with the Hon. Joel Avery
(ex-state senator), who was in his employ at the time. Avery had
recently been in all sorts of corporation work, and knew the ins
and outs of the courts--lawyers, judges, politicians--as he knew
his revised statutes. He was a very little man--not more than
five feet one inch tall--with a wide forehead, saffron hair and
brows, brown, cat-like eyes and a mushy underlip that occasionally
covered the upper one as he thought. After years and years Mr.
Avery had leamed to smile, but it was in a strange, exotic way.
Mostly he gazed steadily, folded his lower lip over his upper one,
and expressed his almost unchangeable conclusions in slow Addisonian
phrases. In the present crisis it was Mr. Avery who had a suggestion
to make.
"One thing that I think could be done," he said to Cowperwood one
day in a very confidential conference, "would be to have a look
into the--the--shall I say the heart affairs--of the Hon. Chaffee
Thayer Sluss." Mr. Avery's cat-like eyes gleamed sardonically.
"Unless I am greatly mistaken, judging the man by his personal
presence merely, he is the sort of person who probably has had,
or if not might readily be induced to have, some compromising
affair with a woman which would require considerable sacrifice
on his part to smooth over. We are all human and vulnerable"--up
went Mr. Avery's lower lip covering the upper one, and then down
again--"and it does not behoove any of us to be too severely
ethical and self-righteous. Mr. Sluss is a well-meaning man, but
a trifle sentimental, as I take it."
As Mr. Avery paused Cowperwood merely contemplated him, amused no
less by his personal appearance than by his suggestion.
"Not a bad idea," he said, "though I don't like to mix heart affairs
with politics."
"Yes," said Mr. Avery, soulfully, "there may be something in it.
I don't know. You never can tell."
The upshot of this was that the task of obtaining an account of
Mr. Sluss's habits, tastes, and proclivities was assigned to that
now rather dignified legal personage, Mr. Burton Stimson, who in
turn assigned it to an assistant, a Mr. Marchbanks. It was an
amazing situation in some respects, but those who know anything
concerning the intricacies of politics, finance, and corporate
control, as they were practised in those palmy days, would never
marvel at the wells of subtlety, sinks of misery, and morasses of
disaster which they represented.
From another quarter, the Hon. Patrick Gilgan was not slow in
responding to Cowperwood's message. Whatever his political
connections and proclivities, he did not care to neglect so powerful
a man.
"And what can I be doing for you to-day, Mr. Cowperwood?" he
inquired, when he arrived looking nice and fresh, very spick and
span after his victory.
"Listen, Mr. Gilgan," said Cowperwood, simply, eying the Republican
county chairman very fixedly and twiddling his thumbs with fingers
interlocked, "are you going to let the city council jam through
the General Electric and that South Side 'L' road ordinance without
giving me a chance to say a word or do anything about it?"
Mr. Gilgan, so Cowperwood knew, was only one of a new quadrumvirate
setting out to rule the city, but he pretended to believe that he
was the last word--an all power and authority--after the fashion
of McKenty. "Me good man," replied Gilgan, archly, "you flatter
me. I haven't the city council in me vest pocket. I've been county
chairman, it's true, and helped to elect some of these men, but I
don't own 'em. Why shouldn't they pass the General Electric
ordinance? It's an honest ordinance, as far as I know. All the
newspapers have been for it. As for this 'L' road ordinance, I
haven't anything to do with it. It isn't anything I know much
about. Young MacDonald and Mr. Schryhart are looking after that."
As a matter of fact, all that Mr. Gilgan was saying was decidedly
true. A henchman of young MacDonald's who was beginning to learn
to play politics--an alderman bythe name of Klemm--had been scheduled
as a kind of field-marshal, and it was MacDonald--not Gilgan,
Tiernan, Kerrigan, or Edstrom--who was to round up the recalcitrant
aldermen, telling them their duty. Gilgan's quadrumvirate had not
as yet got their machine in good working order, though they were
doing their best to bring this about. "I helped to elect every
one of these men, it's true; but that doesn't mean I'm running 'em
by any means," concluded Gilgan. "Not yet, anyhow."
At the "not yet" Cowperwood smiled.
"Just the same, Mr. Gilgan," he went on, smoothly, "you're the
nominal head and front of this whole movement in opposition to me
at present, and you're the one I have to look to. You have this
present Republican situation almost entirely in your own fingers,
and you can do about as you like if you're so minded. If you
choose you can persuade the members of council to take considerable
more time than they otherwise would in passing these ordinances
--of that I'm sure. I don't know whether you know or not, Mr.
Gilgan, though I suppose you do, that this whole fight against me
is a strike campaign intended to drive me out of Chicago. Now
you're a man of sense and judgment and considerable business
experience, and I want to ask you if you think that is fair. I
came here some sixteen or seventeen years ago and went into the
gas business. It was an open field, the field I undertook to
develop--outlying towns on the North, South, and West sides. Yet
the moment I started the old-line companies began to fight me,
though I wasn't invading their territory at all at the time."
"I remember it well enough," replied Gilgan. "I was one of the
men that helped you to get your Hyde Park franchise. You'd never
have got it if it hadn't been for me. That fellow McKibben," added
Gilgan, with a grin, "a likely chap, him. He always walked as if
he had on rubber shoes. He's with you yet, I suppose?"
"Yes, he's around here somewhere," replied Cowperwood, loftily.
"But to go back to this other matter, most of the men that are
behind this General Electric ordinance and this 'L' road franchise
were in the gas business--Blackman, Jules, Baker, Schryhart, and
others--and they are angry because I came into their field, and
angrier still because they had eventually to buy me out. They're
angry because I reorganized these old-fashioned street-railway
companies here and put them on their feet. Merrill is angry
because I didn't run a loop around his store, and the others are
angry because I ever got a loop at all. They're all angry because
I managed to step in and do the things that they should have done
long before. I came here--and that's the whole story in a nutshell.
I've had to have the city council with me to be able to do anything
at all, and because I managed to make it friendly and keep it so
they've turned on me in that section and gone into politics. I
know well enough, Mr. Gilgan," concluded Cowperwood, "who has been
behind you in this fight. I've known all along where the money
has been coming from. You've won, and you've won handsomely, and
I for one don't begrudge you your victory in the least; but what
I want to know now is, are you going to help them carry this fight
on against me in this way, or are you not? Are you going to give
me a fighting chance? There's going to be another election in two
years. Politics isn't a bed of roses that stays made just because
you make it once. These fellows that you have got in with are a
crowd of silk stockings. They haven't any sympathy with you or
any one like you. They're willing to be friendly with you now
--just long enough to get something out of you and club me to death.
But after that how long do you think they will have any use for
you--how long?"
"Not very long, maybe," replied Gilgan, simply and contemplatively,
"but the world is the world, and we have to take it as we find it."
"Quite so," replied Cowperwood, undismayed; "but Chicago is Chicago,
and I will be here as long as they will. Fighting me in this
fashion--building elevated roads to cut into my profits and giving
franchises to rival companies--isn't going to get me out or
seriously injure me, either. I'm here to stay, and the political
situation as it is to-day isn't going to remain the same forever
and ever. Now, you are an ambitious man; I can see that. You're
not in politics for your health--that I know. Tell me exactly
what it is you want and whether I can't get it for you as quick
if not quicker than these other fellows? What is it I can do for
you that will make you see that my side is just as good as theirs
and better? I am playing a legitimate game in Chicago. I've been
building up an excellent street-car service. I don't want to be
annoyed every fifteen minutes by a rival company coming into the
field. Now, what can I do to straighten this out? Isn't there
some way that you and I can come together without fighting at every
step? Can't you suggest some programme we can both follow that
will make things easier?"
Cowperwood paused, and Gilgan thought for a long time. It was
true, as Cowperwood said, that he was not in politics for his
health. The situation, as at present conditioned, was not inherently
favorable for the brilliant programme he had originally mapped out
for himself. Tiernan, Kerrigan, and Edstrom were friendly as yet;
but they were already making extravagant demands; and the reformers
--those who had been led by the newspapers to believe that Cowperwood
was a scoundrel and all his works vile--were demanding that a
strictly moral programme be adhered to in all the doings of council,
and that no jobs, contracts, or deals of any kind be entered into
without the full knowledge of the newspapers and of the public.
Gilgan, even after the first post-election conference with his
colleagues, had begun to feel that he was between the devil and
the deep sea, but he was feeling his way, and not inclined to be
in too much of a hurry.
"It's rather a flat proposition you're makin' me," he said softly,
after a time, "askin' me to throw down me friends the moment I've
won a victory for 'em. It's not the way I've been used to playin'
politics. There may be a lot of truth in what you say. Still, a
man can't be jumpin' around like a cat in a bag. He has to be
faithful to somebody sometime." Mr. Gilgan paused, considerably
nonplussed by his own position.
"Well," replied Cowperwood, sympathetically, "think it over. It's
difficult business, this business of politics. I'm in it, for
one, only because I have to be. If you see any way you can help
me, or I can help you, let me know. In the mean time don't take
in bad part what I've just said. I'm in the position of a man
with his hack to the wall. I'm fighting for my life. Naturally,
I'm going to fight. But you and I needn't be the worse friends
for that. We may become the best of friends yet."
"It's well I know that," said Gilgan, "and it's the best of friends
I'd like to be with you. But even if I could take care of the
aldermen, which I couldn't alone as yet, there's the mayor. I
don't know him at all except to say how-do-ye-do now and then; but
he's very much opposed to you, as I understand it. He'll be running
around most likely and talking in the papers. A man like that can
do a good deal."
"I may be able to arrange for that," replied Cowperwood. "Perhaps
Mr. Sluss can be reached. It may be that he isn't as opposed to
me as he thinks he is. You never can tell." _
Read next: chapter XXXIX - The New Administration
Read previous: chapter XXXVII - Aileen's Revenge
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