________________________________________________
_ The money requisite for the construction of elevated roads having
been thus pyrotechnically obtained, the acquisition of franchises
remained no easy matter. It involved, among other problems, the
taming of Chaffee Thayer Sluss, who, quite unconscious of the
evidence stored up against him, had begun to fulminate the moment
it was suggested in various secret political quarters that a new
ordinance was about to be introduced, and that Cowperwood was to
be the beneficiary. "Don't you let them do that, Mr. Sluss,"
observed Mr. Hand, who for purposes of conference had courteously
but firmly bidden his hireling, the mayor, to lunch. "Don't you
let them pass that if you can help it." (As chairman or president
of the city council Mr. Sluss held considerable manipulative power
over the machinery of procedure.) "Raise such a row that they won't
try to pass it over your head. Your political future really depends
on it--your standing with the people of Chicago. The newspapers
and the respectable financial and social elements will fully support
you in this. Otherwise they will wholly desert you. Things have
come to a handsome pass when men sworn and elected to perform given
services turn on their backers and betray them in this way!"
Mr. Hand was very wroth.
Mr. Sluss, immaculate in black broadcloth and white linen, was
very sure that he would fulfil to the letter all of Mr. Hand's
suggestions. The proposed ordinance should be denounced by him;
its legislative progress heartily opposed in council.
"They shall get no quarter from me!" he declared, emphatically.
"I know what the scheme is. They know that I know it."
He looked at Mr. Hand quite as one advocate of righteousness should
look at another, and the rich promoter went away satisfied that
the reins of government were in safe hands. Immediately afterward
Mr. Sluss gave out an interview in which he served warning on all
aldermen and councilmen that no such ordinance as the one in
question would ever be signed by him as mayor.
At half past ten on the same morning on which the interview appeared
--the hour at which Mr. Sluss usually reached his office--his
private telephone bell rang, and an assistant inquired if he would
be willing to speak with Mr. Frank A. Cowperwood. Mr. Sluss,
somehow anticipating fresh laurels of victory, gratified by the
front-page display given his announcement in the morning papers,
and swelling internally with civic pride, announced, solemnly:
"Yes; connect me."
"Mr. Sluss," began Cowperwood, at the other end, "this is Frank
A. Cowperwood."
"Yes. What can I do for you, Mr. Cowperwood?"
"I see by the morning papers that you state that you will have
nothing to do with any proposed ordinance which looks to giving
me a franchise for any elevated road on the North or West Side?"
"That is quite true," replied Mr. Sluss, loftily. "I will not."
"Don't you think it is rather premature, Mr. Sluss, to denounce
something which has only a rumored existence?" (Cowperwood, smiling
sweetly to himself, was quite like a cat playing with an unsuspicious
mouse.) "I should like very much to talk this whole matter over
with you personally before you take an irrevocable attitude. It
is just possible that after you have heard my side you may not be
so completely opposed to me. From time to time I have sent to you
several of my personal friends, but apparently you do not care to
receive them."
"Quite true," replied Mr. Sluss, loftily; "but you must remember
that I am a very busy man, Mr. Cowperwood, and, besides, I do not
see how I can serve any of your purposes. You are working for a
set of conditions to which I am morally and temperamentally opposed.
I am working for another. I do not see that we have any common
ground on which to meet. In fact, I do not see how I can be of
any service to you whatsoever."
"Just a moment, please, Mr. Mayor," replied Cowperwood, still very
sweetly, and fearing that Sluss might choose to hang up the receiver,
so superior was his tone. "There may be some common ground of
which you do not know. Wouldn't you like to come to lunch at my
residence or receive me at yours? Or let me come to your office
and talk this matter over. I believe you will find it the part
of wisdom as well as of courtesy to do this."
"I cannot possibly lunch with you to-day," replied Sluss, "and I
cannot see you, either. There are a number of things pressing for
my attention. I must say also that I cannot hold any back-room
conferences with you or your emissaries. If you come you must
submit to the presence of others."
"Very well, Mr. Sluss," replied Cowperwood, cheerfully. "I will
not come to your office. But unless you come to mine before five
o'clock this afternoon you will face by noon to-morrow a suit for
breach of promise, and your letters to Mrs. Brandon will be given
to the public. I wish to remind you that an election is coming
on, and that Chicago favors a mayor who is privately moral as well
as publicly so. Good morning."
Mr. Cowperwood hung up his telephone receiver with a click, and
Mr. Sluss sensibly and visibly stiffened and paled. Mrs. Brandon!
The charming, lovable, discreet Mrs. Brandon who had so ungenerously
left him! Why should she be thinking of suing him for breach of
promise, and how did his letter to her come to be in Cowperwood's
hands? Good heavens--those mushy letters! His wife! His children!
His church and the owlish pastor thereof! Chicago! And its
conventional, moral, religious atmosphere! Come to think of it,
Mrs. Brandon had scarcely if ever written him a note of any kind.
He did not even know her history.
At the thought of Mrs. Sluss--her hard, cold, blue eyes--Mr. Sluss
arose, tall and distrait, and ran his hand through his hair. He
walked to the window, snapping his thumb and middle finger and
looking eagerly at the floor. He thought of the telephone switchboard
just outside his private office, and wondered whether his secretary,
a handsome young Presbyterian girl, had been listening, as usual.
Oh, this sad, sad world! If the North Side ever learned of this
--Hand, the newspapers, young MacDonald--would they protect him?
They would not. Would they run him for mayor again? Never! Could
the public be induced to vote for him with all the churches
fulminating against private immorality, hypocrites, and whited
sepulchers? Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord! And he was so very, very much
respected and looked up to--that was the worst of it all. This
terrible demon Cowperwood had descended on him, and he had thought
himself so secure. He had not even been civil to Cowperwood.
What if the latter chose to avenge the discourtesy?
Mr. Sluss went back to his chair, but he could not sit in it. He
went for his coat, took it down, hung it up again, took it down,
announced over the 'phone that he could not see any one for several
hours, and went out by a private door. Wearily he walked along
North Clark Street, looking at the hurly-burly of traffic, looking
at the dirty, crowded river, looking at the sky and smoke and gray
buildings, and wondering what he should do. The world was so hard
at times; it was so cruel. His wife, his family, his political
career. He could not conscientiously sign any ordinances for Mr.
Cowperwood--that would be immoral, dishonest, a scandal to the
city. Mr. Cowperwood was a notorious traitor to the public welfare.
At the same time he could not very well refuse, for here was Mrs.
Brandon, the charming and unscrupulous creature, playing into the
hands of Cowperwood. If he could only meet her, beg of her, plead;
but where was she? He had not seen her for months and months.
Could he go to Hand and confess all? But Hand was a hard, cold,
moral man also. Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord! He wondered and thought, and
sighed and pondered--all without avail.
Pity the poor earthling caught in the toils of the moral law. In
another country, perhaps, in another day, another age, such a
situation would have been capable of a solution, one not utterly
destructive to Mr. Sluss, and not entirely favorable to a man like
Cowperwood. But here in the United States, here in Chicago, the
ethical verities would all, as he knew, be lined up against him.
What Lake View would think, what his pastor would think, what Hand
and all his moral associates would think--ah, these were the
terrible, the incontrovertible consequences of his lapse from virtue.
At four o'clock, after Mr. Sluss had wandered for hours in the
snow and cold, belaboring himself for a fool and a knave, and while
Cowperwood was sitting at his desk signing papers, contemplating
a glowing fire, and wondering whether the mayor would deem it
advisable to put in an appearance, his office door opened and one
of his trim stenographers entered announcing Mr. Chaffee Thayer
Sluss. Enter Mayor Sluss, sad, heavy, subdued, shrunken, a very
different gentleman from the one who had talked so cavalierly over
the wires some five and a half hours before. Gray weather, severe
cold, and much contemplation of seemingly irreconcilable facts had
reduced his spirits greatly. He was a little pale and a little
restless. Mental distress has a reducing, congealing effect, and
Mayor Sluss seemed somewhat less than his usual self in height,
weight, and thickness. Cowperwood had seen him more than once on
various political platforms, but he had never met him. When the
troubled mayor entered he arose courteously and waved him to a
chair.
"Sit down, Mr. Sluss," he said, genially. "It's a disagreeable
day out, isn't it? I suppose you have come in regard to the matter
we were discussing this morning?"
Nor was this cordiality wholly assumed. One of the primal instincts
of Cowperwood's nature--for all his chicane and subtlety--was to
take no rough advantage of a beaten enemy. In the hour of victory
he was always courteous, bland, gentle, and even sympathetic; he
was so to-day, and quite honestly, too.
Mayor Sluss put down the high sugar-loaf hat he wore and said,
grandiosely, as was his manner even in the direst extremity: "Well,
you see, I am here, Mr. Cowperwood. What is it you wish me to do,
exactly?"
"Nothing unreasonable, I assure you, Mr. Sluss," replied Cowperwood.
"Your manner to me this morning was a little brusque, and, as I
have always wanted to have a sensible private talk with you, I
took this way of getting it. I should like you to dismiss from
your mind at once the thought that I am going to take an unfair
advantage of you in any way. I have no present intention of
publishing your correspondence with Mrs. Brandon." (As he said
this he took from his drawer a bundle of letters which Mayor Sluss
recognized at once as the enthusiastic missives which he had
sometime before penned to the fair Claudia. Mr. Sluss groaned as
he beheld this incriminating evidence.) "I am not trying," continued
Cowperwood, "to wreck your career, nor to make you do anything which
you do not feel that you can conscientiously undertake. The letters
that I have here, let me say, have come to me quite by accident.
I did not seek them. But, since I do have them, I thought I might
as well mention them as a basis for a possible talk and compromise
between us."
Cowperwood did not smile. He merely looked thoughtfully at Sluss;
then, by way of testifying to the truthfulness of what he had been
saying, thumped the letters up and down, just to show that they
were real.
"Yes," said Mr. Sluss, heavily, "I see."
He studied the bundle--a small, solid affair--while Cowperwood
looked discreetly elsewhere. He contemplated his own shoes, the
floor. He rubbed his hands and then his knees.
Cowperwood saw how completely he had collapsed. It was ridiculous,
pitiable.
"Come, Mr. Sluss," said Cowperwood, amiably, "cheer up. Things
are not nearly as desperate as you think. I give you my word right
now that nothing which you yourself, on mature thought, could say
was unfair will be done. You are the mayor of Chicago. I am a
citizen. I merely wish fair play from you. I merely ask you to
give me your word of honor that from now on you will take no part
in this fight which is one of pure spite against me. If you cannot
conscientiously aid me in what I consider to be a perfectly
legitimate demand for additional franchises, you will, at least,
not go out of your way to publicly attack me. I will put these
letters in my safe, and there they will stay until the next campaign
is over, when I will take them out and destroy them. I have no
personal feeling against you--none in the world. I do not ask you
to sign any ordinance which the council may pass giving me
elevated-road rights. What I do wish you to do at this time is
to refrain from stirring up public sentiment against me, especially
if the council should see fit to pass an ordinance over your veto.
Is that satisfactory?"
"But my friends? The public? The Republican party? Don't you see
it is expected of me that I should wage some form of campaign
against you?" queried Sluss, nervously.
"No, I don't," replied Cowperwood, succinctly, "and, anyhow, there
are ways and ways of waging a public campaign. Go through the
motions, if you wish, but don't put too much heart in it. And,
anyhow, see some one of my lawyers from time to time when they
call on you. Judge Dickensheets is an able and fair man. So is
General Van Sickle. Why not confer with them occasionally?--not
publicly, of course, but in some less conspicuous way. You will
find both of them most helpful."
Cowperwood smiled encouragingly, quite beneficently, and Chaffee
Thayer Sluss, his political hopes gone glimmering, sat and mused
for a few moments in a sad and helpless quandary.
"Very well," he said, at last, rubbing his hands feverishly. "It
is what I might have expected. I should have known. There is no
other way, but--" Hardly able to repress the hot tears now burning
beneath his eyelids, the Hon. Mr. Sluss picked up his hat and left
the room. Needless to add that his preachings against Cowperwood
were permanently silenced. _
Read next: chapter XLV - Changing Horizons
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