Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich (24 page)

So when Mr. Newberry said “It’s worse than Russia!” he meant it, every word.

Now just as Mr. Newberry and Mr. Dick Overend were finishing their discussion, the huge bulky form of Mayor McGrath came ponderously past them as they sat. He looked at them sideways out of his eyes, – he had eyes like plums in a mottled face, – and, being a born politician, he knew by the very look of them that they were talking of something that they had no business to be talking about. But, – being a politician, – he merely said, “Good evening, gentlemen,” without a sign of disturbance.

“Good evening, Mr. Mayor,” said Mr. Newberry, rubbing his hands feebly together and speaking in an ingratiating tone. There is no more pitiable spectacle than an honest man caught in the act of speaking boldly and fearlessly of the evil-doer.

“Good evening, Mr. Mayor,” echoed Mr. Dick Overend, also rubbing his hands; “warm evening, is it not?”

The mayor gave no other answer than that deep guttural grunt which is technically known in municipal interviews as refusing to commit oneself.

“Did he hear?” whispered Mr. Newberry as the mayor passed out of the club.

“I don’t care if he did,” whispered Mr. Dick Overend.

Half an hour later Mayor McGrath entered the premises of the Thomas Jefferson Club, which were situated in the rear end of a saloon and pool room far down in the town.

“Boys,” he said to Alderman O’Hooligan and Alderman Gorfinkel, who were playing freeze-out poker in the corner behind the pool tables, “you want to let the boys know to keep
pretty dark and go easy. There’s a lot of talk I don’t like about the elections going round the town. Let the boys know that just for a while the darker they keep the better.”

Whereupon the word was passed from the Thomas Jefferson Club to the George Washington Club and thence to the Eureka Club (coloured), and to the Kossuth Club (Hungarian), and to various other centres of civic patriotism in the lower parts of the city. And forthwith such a darkness began to spread over them that not even honest Diogenes with his lantern could have penetrated their doings.

“If them stiffs wants to make trouble,” said the president of the George Washington Club to Mayor McGrath a day or two later, “they won’t never know what they’ve bumped up against.”

“Well,” said the heavy mayor, speaking slowly and cautiously and eyeing his henchman with quiet scrutiny, “you want to go pretty easy now, I tell you.”

The look which the mayor directed to his satellite was much the same glance that Morgan the buccaneer might have given to one of his lieutenants before throwing him overboard.

Meantime the wave of civic enthusiasm as reflected in the conversation of Plutoria Avenue grew stronger with every day.

“The thing is a scandal,” said Mr. Lucullus Fyshe. “Why, these fellows down at the city hall are simply a pack of rogues. I had occasion to do some business there the other day (it was connected with the assessment of our soda factories) and do you know, I actually found that these fellows
take money
!”

“I say!” said Mr. Peter Spillikins, to whom he spoke, “I say! You don’t say!”

“It’s a fact,” repeated Mr. Fyshe. “They take money. I took the assistant treasurer aside and said, ‘I want such and
such done,’ and I slipped a fifty dollar bill into his hand. And the fellow took it, took it like a shot.”

“He took it!” gasped Mr. Spillikins.

“He did,” said Mr. Fyshe. “There ought to be a criminal law for that sort of thing.”

“I say!” exclaimed Mr. Spillikins, “they ought to go to jail for a thing like that.”

“And the infernal insolence of them,” Mr. Fyshe continued. “I went down the next day to see the deputy assistant (about a thing connected with the same matter), told him what I wanted and passed a fifty dollar bill across the counter and the fellow fairly threw it back at me, in a perfect rage. He refused it!”

“Refused it,” gasped Mr. Spillikins, “I say!”

Conversations such as this filled up the leisure and divided the business time of all the best people in the city.

In the general gloomy outlook, however, one bright spot was observable. The “wave” had evidently come just at the opportune moment. For not only were civic elections pending but just at this juncture four or five questions of supreme importance would have to be settled by the incoming council. There was, for instance, the question of the expropriation of the Traction Company (a matter involving many millions); there was the decision as to the renewal of the franchise of the Citizens’ Light Company, – a vital question; there was also the four hundred thousand dollar purchase of land for the new addition to the cemetery, a matter that must be settled. And it was felt, especially on Plutoria Avenue, to be a splendid thing that the city was waking up, in the moral sense, at the very time when these things were under discussion. All the shareholders of the Traction Company and the Citizens’ Light,
– and they included the very best, the most high-minded, people in the city, – felt that what was needed now was a great moral effort, to enable them to lift the city up and carry it with them, or, if not all of it, at any rate as much of it as they could.

“It’s a splendid movement!” said Mr. Fyshe (he was a leading shareholder and director of The Citizens’ Light), “what a splendid thing to think that we shan’t have to deal for our new franchise with a set of corrupt rapscallions like these present aldermen. Do you know, Furlong, that when we approached them first with a proposition for a renewal for a hundred and fifty years they held us up! Said it was too long! Imagine that! A hundred and fifty years (only a century and a half) too long for the franchise! They expect us to instal all our poles, string our wires, set up our transformers in their streets and then perhaps at the end of a hundred years find ourselves compelled to sell out at a beggarly valuation. Of course we knew what they wanted. They meant us to hand them over fifty dollars each to stuff into their rascally pockets.”

“Outrageous!” said Mr. Furlong.

“And the same thing with the cemetery land deal,” went on Mr. Lucullus Fyshe. “Do you realise that, if the movement hadn’t come along and checked them, those scoundrels would have given that rogue Schwefeldampf four hundred thousand dollars for his fifty acres! Just think of it!”

“I don’t know,” said Mr. Furlong with a thoughtful look upon his face, “that four hundred thousand dollars is an excessive price, in and of itself, for that amount of land.”

“Certainly not,” said Mr. Fyshe, very quietly and decidedly, looking at Mr. Furlong in a searching way as he spoke. “It is
not
a high price. It seems to me, speaking purely as an
outsider, a very fair, reasonable price for fifty acres of suburban land, if it were the
right
land. If, for example, it were a case of making an offer for that very fine stretch of land, about twenty acres, is it not, which I believe your Corporation owns on the
other
side of the cemetery, I should say four hundred thousand is a most modest price.”

Mr. Furlong nodded his head reflectively.

“You had thought, had you not, of offering it to the city?” said Mr. Fyshe.

“We did,” said Mr. Furlong, “at a more or less nominal sum, – four hundred thousand or whatever it might be. We felt that for such a purpose, almost sacred as it were, one would want as little bargaining as possible.”

“Oh, none at all,” assented Mr. Fyshe.

“Our feeling was,” went on Mr. Furlong, “that if the city wanted our land for the cemetery extension, it might have it at its own figure, – four hundred thousand, half a million, in fact at absolutely any price, from four hundred thousand up, that they cared to put on it. We didn’t regard it as a commercial transaction at all. Our reward lay merely in the fact of selling it to them.”

“Exactly,” said Mr. Fyshe, “and of course your land was more desirable from every point of view. Schwefeldampf’s ground is encumbered with a growth of cypress and evergreens and weeping willows which make it quite unsuitable for an up-to-date cemetery; whereas yours, as I remember it, is bright and open, – a loose sandy soil with no trees and very little grass to overcome.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Furlong. “We thought too, that our ground, having the tanneries and the chemical factory along the further side of it, was an ideal place for, –” he paused, seeking a mode of expressing his thought.

“For the dead,” said Mr. Fyshe, with becoming reverence.

And after this conversation Mr. Fyshe and Mr. Furlong senior understood one another absolutely in regard to the new movement.

It was astonishing in fact how rapidly the light spread.

“Is Rasselyer-Brown with us?” asked some one of Mr. Fyshe a few days later.

“Heart and soul,” answered Mr. Fyshe. “He’s very bitter over the way these rascals have been plundering the city on its coal supply. He says that the city has been buying coal wholesale at the pit mouth at three fifty, – utterly worthless stuff, he tells me. He has heard it said that everyone of these scoundrels has been paid from twenty-five to fifty dollars a winter to connive at it.”

“Dear me,” said the listener.

“Abominable, is it not?” said Mr. Fyshe. “But as I said to Rasselyer-Brown, what can one do if the citizens themselves take no interest in these things. ‘Take your own case,’ I said to him, ‘how is it that you, a coal man, are not helping the city in this matter? Why don’t
you
supply the city?’ He shook his head, ‘I wouldn’t do it at three fifty,’ he said. ‘No,’ I answered, ‘but will you at five?’ He looked at me for a moment and then he said, ‘Fyshe, I’ll do it; at five, or at anything over that they like to name. If we get a new council in they may name their own figure.’ ‘Good,’ I said. ‘I hope all the other business men will be animated with the same spirit.’”

Thus it was that the light broke and spread and illuminated in all directions. People began to realise the needs of the city as they never had before. Mr. Boulder, who owned, among other things, a stone quarry and an asphalt company, felt that the paving of the streets was a disgrace. Mr. Skinyer, of Skinyer
and Beatem, shook his head and said that the whole legal department of the city needed reorganisation; it needed, he said, new blood. But he added always in a despairing tone, how could one expect to run a department with the head of it drawing only six thousand dollars; the thing was impossible. If, he argued, they could superannuate the present chief solicitor and get a man, a
good
man (Mr. Skinyer laid emphasis on this) at, say, fifteen thousand, there might be some hope.

“Of course,” said Mr. Skinyer to Mr. Newberry in discussing the topic, “one would need to give him a proper staff of assistants so as to take off his hands all the
routine
work, – the mere appearance in court, the preparation of briefs, the office consultation, the tax revision and the purely legal work. In that case he would have his hands free to devote himself entirely to those things, which, – in fact to turn his attention in whatever direction he might feel it was advisable to turn it.”

Within a week or two the public movement had found definite expression and embodied itself in the Clean Government Association. This was organised by a group of leading and disinterested citizens who held their first meeting in the largest upstairs room of the Mausoleum Club. Mr. Lucullus Fyshe, Mr. Boulder, and others keenly interested in obtaining simply justice for the stockholders of the Traction and the Citizens’ Light were prominent from the start. Mr. Rasselyer-Brown, Mr. Furlong senior and others were there, not from special interest in the light or traction questions, but, as they said themselves, from pure civic spirit. Dr. Boomer was there to represent the university with three of his most presentable professors, cultivated men who were able to sit in a first class club and drink whiskey and soda and talk as well as any business man present. Mr. Skinyer, Mr. Beatem and
others represented the bar. Dr. McTeague, blinking in the blue tobacco smoke, was there to stand for the church. There were all-round enthusiasts as well, such as Mr. Newberry and the Overend brothers and Mr. Peter Spillikins.

“Isn’t it fine,” whispered Mr. Spillikins to Mr. Newberry, “to see a set of men like these all going into a thing like this, not thinking of their own interests a bit?”

Mr. Fyshe, as chairman, addressed the meeting. He told them they were there to initiate a great free voluntary movement of the people. It had been thought wise, he said, to hold it with closed doors and keep it out of the newspapers. This would guarantee the league against the old underhand control by a clique that had hitherto disgraced every part of the administration of the city. He wanted, he said, to see everything done henceforth in broad day light: and for this purpose he had summoned them there at night to discuss ways and means of action. After they were once fully assured of exactly what they wanted to do and how they meant to do it, the league, he said, would invite the fullest and freest advice from all classes in the city. There were none, he said, amid great applause, that were so lowly that they would not be invited, – once the platform of the league was settled, – to advise and co-operate. All might help, even the poorest. Subscription lists would be prepared which would allow any sum at all, from one to five dollars, to be given to the treasurer. The league was to be democratic or nothing. The poorest might contribute as little as one dollar: even the richest would not be allowed to give more than five. Moreover he gave notice that he intended to propose that no actual official of the league should be allowed under its by-laws to give anything. He himself, – if they did him the honour to make him president as he had heard it hinted was their intention, – would be the first to bow
to this rule. He would efface himself. He would obliterate himself, content in the interests of all, to give nothing. He was able to announce similar pledges from his friends, Mr. Boulder, Mr. Furlong, Dr. Boomer and a number of others.

Quite a storm of applause greeted these remarks by Mr. Fyshe, who flushed with pride as he heard it.

“Now, gentlemen,” he went on, “this meeting is open for discussion. Remember it is quite informal, anyone may speak. I as chairman make no claim to control or monopolise the discussion. Let everyone understand –”