1876 (37 page)

“Then you know that he has said, categorically, that I did not let him go because of his attacks on the Tweed Ring.”

“But
why
was he let go?”

“Other reasons entirely. But he is a splendid journalist and I compliment the two of you for what you have done in the way of illuminating Mr. Blaine. In fact ...” And so on.

My other publisher is more to my taste. I met Jamie at five o’clock at the Hoffman House, in what is reputedly the largest barroom in New York. This congenial place is much frequented by the most elegant of the politicians as well as the sportiest of the magnates.

Back of the long bar hangs a huge painting: ponderous nudes peek through bushes, all rendered in New York sepia. The bar itself is much gilded and medallioned, and not a square inch of ceiling or of wall is unmirrored or undecorated. I like it very much.

Before Jamie arrived, I visited the long table on which was arranged the city’s most elaborate free lunch. After helping myself to a lobster salad very nearly as good as Delmonico’s, I sat happily at a small table and drank a mint julep, and watched as the barroom began to fill with stout burghers.

I was in a mood of some euphoria (though—again—short of breath) due to a satisfactory visit to the Royal Havana Cigar Shop Co. just after my conference with Bryant. I don’t know whether or not it is simply the fine spring weather but I feel very much the young journalist again, and quite disregard the ominous difficulty that I have in breathing on the sensible ground it will one day be resolved by my simply dispensing altogether with this monotonous and ultimately futile labour.

Jamie was relatively sober; and highly pleased with himself and me. He was still shaking my hand when a razzle-dazzle was placed in front of him by an obsequious waiter. Obviously Jamie’s appearance in any bar in the city causes razzle-dazzles to form themselves of their own accord for the privilege of being poured down that youthful throat.

“I never thought you’d be such a winner, Charlie!”

“How flattering!” I was not pleased.

“No. No. I only meant you’re usually so serious. So much a—historian.” He said the word with true dislike. “And historians don’t have snap. But you do. You smoked out old Blaine like a possum. Now he’s in the open.”

“Partly in the open.”

Jamie frowned at the glass that had so recently been filled to the brim and was now, mysteriously, treacherously, empty. “You’re right there. Listen, you’re going back soon, aren’t you?”

“Well, we had agreed on six pieces ...”

“Charlie, I’m doubling your price, which was too high to begin with.”

“You will turn my head, dear boy.” And I turned my own head, having caught a glimpse of the elegant Collector of the Port and a few of his cronies.

“But you must go back before the end of the month. Then I’ll want you to cover the convention at Cincinnati.”

“I am too old to go to Cincinnati. Send Nordhoff.”

“Can’t. I’m sending him South. He’s going to write about the cotton states and ...”

“I don’t know that I should speak to the two of you,” spoke Collector Arthur, tall, smiling, brutally charming, with brown eyes aglimmer in the blazing gaslight (the Hoffman Bar is extravagantly lit all day and most of the night). We shook hands. The Stalwart cronies at the bar eyed us with disapproval.

“Chet, you’re a Conkling man, ain’t you?” Jamie enjoys politicians. But then, like Emma, he is spiritually African. “So be happy that Charlie here has gone and put Mr. Blaine in a pinewood box and sent him home to Maine.”

“I wouldn’t count on that, Jamie.” Arthur beamed at both of us as if he truly liked us; his manner is not unlike Blaine’s, though he lacks the master’s irony and mischievous self-deprecatory style. “We’re going to have quite a fine little dust-up at Cincinnati. Will you be there, Mr. Schuyler?”

“Indeed he will!” Jamie answered for me. “It’s Charlie’s dream to get to know the
real
America! The West. The rolling plains. The wide—uh, Missouri, isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t know.” The Collector gave a mock shudder. “For me it’s all Indians west of Jersey City.”

“Anyway tell Roscoe the
Herald’s
going to get him the nomination.”

“He’ll be delighted.”

“And then tell him how Tilden will beat him in November.”

“He’ll be amused—to hear that. I hope to see you in Cincinnati, Mr. Schuyler.”

The Collector joined his friends at the bar. “A good man, for a Stalwart. Don’t think he steals too much at the custom house. But he sure knows how to collect money for campaigns. Charlie, I’m serious. I want you to write about the Indians.”

I heard Indians as Africans and nodded; then realized that Jamie does not know of my joke with Emma;
then
realized that he had said “Indians.” “What on earth is one to write about Indians?”

“They’re out there, Charlie.” Jamie pointed in the general direction of Madison Square. “They’re wild, brutish. They hate the white man. Civilization. After Cincinnati, you take the cars to Chicago, then ...”

“Dear Jamie,
you
take the cars. I have no desire to see the Indians or the West.”

“But you’ll go to Cincinnati. That’s settled.” Somehow he got me to agree that I shall return to Washington at the end of the month and then on to Cincinnati for the Republican Convention in the second week of June. “But after that I go to Newport. I am through with journalism.”

“Surely, you’ll want to see your friend Governor Tilden nominated at the end of June. And of course you’ll be writing about the election in November. Are you absolutely certain that you don’t want to look at the Indians in between?”

“As certain as I shall be of anything.”

But Jamie was not listening; he was staring past me at the bar. I turned and saw that the stately Collector was talking intently with a dim-looking bearded gnome of a man. The Collector was leaning down from his great height as though eager, by diminishing himself, to elevate the little man.

“That,” said Jamie, “is Jay Gould.”

By cornering gold in ’69, Jay Gould helped bring on the Panic of ’73 that ruined so many of us. I was satisfied to observe that this true villain is as wretched a physical specimen as I have ever seen.

“I can tell you what they’re talking about, too.” Jamie waved for yet another of his terrible cocktails. “Chet is getting money from Gould for Conkling.”

“Will Gould give it?”

“Of course. Did you know that the House is investigating Blaine?” Jamie’s shifts in subject are swift. And one must be alert.

“There was talk of it. The Democrats ...”

“They’re meeting secretly now. It’s going to be just like the Belknap investigation.”

“Do they have anything
provable
against him?”

Jamie nodded. “If Mark Twain wasn’t so rich, I’d send
him
West. He’d be good on Indians. Show their savagery. Brutishness.” Jamie was now a bit drunk. “But he lives in Hartford. Can you imagine that? Mark Twain a Connecticut gentleman. It’s too much. On the other hand, that last book of his didn’t go over so well. Damn it, I’ll try him. Why not?”

In the best of humours, I walked (next door practically) to the Fifth Avenue Hotel. The early evening was unusually fine, with bright stars appearing one by one over Madison Park. At this hour the handsomest and most expensive of the prostitutes cruise up and down Fifth Avenue, dressed in the highest fashion (they are, in fact, known locally as “cruisers” or, in low quarters, as “hookers” from the way the girls will suddenly hook arms with a likely-looking suspect). But I was tranquil, beyond lust, as a result of this afternoon’s cigarine dalliance.

I went up to my single room, and found it rather lonely. Emma is now sharing the Sanford suite with Denise. Emma believes that Sanford has taken the bait and is even now at Washington making an alliance with Blaine. I hope so. I am not as confident of her ability to manipulate Sanford as she is. But whatever he is doing or not doing, at least he is away from New York, and Emma and Denise are like two school girls in the luxurious suite at the Brunswick where the Sanfords maintain
three
personal servants, housed under the hotel’s eaves.

Tonight Emma made a journey into Apgar-land, and I dined with John Bigelow in Gramercy Park. Dinner was set for the two of us in his study. The family is at his place up the Hudson.

“When I’m here, there’s no room for them. There’s hardly room for me. All the comings and goings.” He looked tired and strained. “This is the first time I’ve been alone all day.”

“Not quite alone.”

Bigelow was amiable; even produced claret for me as an Irish maid served us dinner. A vase filled with splendid purple iris made me sneeze uncontrollably but he took no notice. It’s curious that in some years the pollen of certain spring flowers will bring on these attacks of sneezing, while in other years I am not distressed.

I accepted with my by-now habitual greed Bigelow’s praise for the Blaine articles. I told him, using Nordhoff’s secret face, “There is more to come. I go back to Washington in a fortnight.”

“I cannot wait! Now if you’d do the same for Bristow ...”

“You fear the honest man?”

“Actually, we fear no one at all. The Governor is going to be nominated, and he is going to be elected by a good plurality. But ...” Bigelow frowned at the beef on his plate.

I sneezed into my napkin and softly blew my nose. I don’t think he noticed.

“We’re going to have difficulty carrying New York State.” I found this hard to believe, but as Bigelow explained it, I see that there is indeed some danger for the Governor, whose assaults on Tammany Hall have not made him popular with the braves, particularly with the leader of Tammany Hall, one John Kelly who delights in the misnomer “Honest John.” Kelly has vowed to make mischief at the convention. “And if he doesn’t stop the Governor at St. Louis—and he won’t—he’ll see to it that Tammany will let the city go to the Republicans.”

“What can you do?”

I was told at such elaborate length that I soon realized that there is nothing for the Tilden forces to do but hope to get so many votes elsewhere that the defection of Tammany will not matter.

“Outside New York we’re strong. Also, to be attacked by Tammany will prejudice many in our favour. And we have the South. We have California. We also have an excellent Newspaper Popularity Bureau.”

“I’m still ready to do the campaign biography.”

“What you’re doing now is far better. Anyway, we’ve hired someone named Cook, who’s busy pot-boiling away.” Bigelow wanted to know Bryant’s mood because “He is an odd creature and never exactly where you think he ought to be.”

Bigelow is also curious about the two hundred Liberal Republicans who are currently meeting at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Many of them are literary men, and all of them are reformers with names like Adams, Lodge, Godwin. They are preparing a denunciation of Grantism. But “they’re not ready to come over to us.” Bigelow was sad.

“Even when—if—when the Governor is nominated?”

Bigelow nodded. “They really believe in the Republican party.”

“So did you.”

“But when it outgrew its original purpose, I left it. They should, too.”

“Perhaps they’ll nominate their own candidate, as they did the last time.”

But Bigelow thought not, pointing out that when the Liberal Republicans bolted the party in ’72 in order to nominate Horace Greeley (who was also nominated by the Democrats), Grant’s victory over the forces of virtue was absolute. The American electorate deeply dislikes the idea of reform, of good government, of militant honesty. So let us hope this year they will see in Tilden something sinister, corrupt, American!

By the time our dinner was over, Green and a dozen other planners and advertisement-concocters had arrived. After a decent interval, during which I saw to it that each person would have his chance to praise my articles on Blaine (“Powerful work!” Mr. Green nearly broke my hand, so fervent was his clasp), I took my leave.

A MARVELLOUS AND ENTIRELY relaxing day that began with a noon rendezvous in the new Grand Central depot at Forty-second Street. This was the first time that I had been inside Commodore Vanderbilt’s monument to a lifetime of triumphant rascality; yet it must be said in the old villain’s favour that before he managed through theft, violence, and fraud to put together his railroad empire, a passenger from New York City to Chicago was obliged to change trains seventeen times during the course of the journey. Now, thanks to Vanderbilt’s ruthless elimination of his rivals, the public is better served.

The huge building, with its mansard-roofed towers, looks rather like the Tuileries, whilst the vast interior is reminiscent of the buildings at the Centennial Exhibition. But large as the depot is, it was filled with hurrying people. Americans seem always to be on the move these days. In my youth, we stayed at home.

With some difficulty I found the Sanford car, where Emma and Denise were waiting for me (my luggage had been sent on earlier by the hotel).

The two girls—I can’t think why I keep regarding these two women in their thirties as girls, but they seem so to me, and to themselves, too, from the most uncharacteristic (for Emma at least) way they giggle and whisper to each other as if just let out of school, no, convent, for a holiday in the country, which is exactly where we are now and what we are now doing.

There is a good deal to be said for being rich, particularly in this country. I begin to see now the reality behind my old friend Washington Irving’s memorable phrase “The Almighty Dollar.” Not only is there a fascination in amassing huge quantities of money, preferably by illegal means and at the expense of everyone else in the country, but there is also the marvellous comfort and privacy that these riches confer. In Europe we are used to splendid houses, servants, “tong” by the ton, but a private railway car is something enjoyed only by an emperor. Here this luxury is quite common—at least in the high circles we frequent!

With a sudden jerk our car was attached to a train just after noon. As we were borne north of the city, the hauntingly beautiful Hudson River was ever in our view while we contentedly dined.