________________________________________________
_ The question of Sohlberg adjusted thus simply, if brutally,
Cowperwood turned his attention to Mrs. Sohlberg. But there was
nothing much to be done. He explained that he had now completely
subdued Aileen and Sohlberg, that the latter would make no more
trouble, that he was going to pension him, that Aileen would remain
permanently quiescent. He expressed the greatest solicitude for
her, but Rita was now sickened of this tangle. She had loved him,
as she thought, but through the rage of Aileen she saw him in a
different light, and she wanted to get away. His money, plentiful
as it was, did not mean as much to her as it might have meant to
some women; it simply spelled luxuries, without which she could
exist if she must. His charm for her had, perhaps, consisted
mostly in the atmosphere of flawless security, which seemed to
surround him--a glittering bubble of romance. That, by one fell
attack, was now burst. He was seen to be quite as other men,
subject to the same storms, the same danger of shipwreck. Only
he was a better sailor than most. She recuperated gradually; left
for home; left for Europe; details too long to be narrated.
Sohlberg, after much meditating and fuming, finally accepted the
offer of Cowperwood and returned to Denmark. Aileen, after a few
days of quarreling, in which he agreed to dispense with Antoinette
Nowak, returned home.
Cowperwood was in no wise pleased by this rough denouement. Aileen
had not raised her own attractions in his estimation, and yet,
strange to relate, he was not unsympathetic with her. He had no
desire to desert her as yet, though for some time he had been
growing in the feeling that Rita would have been a much better
type of wife for him. But what he could not have, he could not
have. He turned his attention with renewed force to his business;
but it was with many a backward glance at those radiant hours when,
with Rita in his presence or enfolded by his arms, he had seen life
from a new and poetic angle. She was so charming, so naive--but
what could he do?
For several years thereafter Cowperwood was busy following the
Chicago street-railway situation with increasing interest. He
knew it was useless to brood over Rita Sohlberg--she would not
return--and yet he could not help it; but he could work hard, and
that was something. His natural aptitude and affection for
street-railway work had long since been demonstrated, and it was
now making him restless. One might have said of him quite truly
that the tinkle of car-bells and the plop of plodding horses' feet
was in his blood. He surveyed these extending lines, with their
jingling cars, as he went about the city, with an almost hungry
eye. Chicago was growing fast, and these little horse-cars on
certain streets were crowded night and morning--fairly bulging
with people at the rush-hours. If he could only secure an
octopus-grip on one or all of them; if he could combine and control
them all! What a fortune! That, if nothing else, might salve him
for some of his woes--a tremendous fortune--nothing less. He
forever busied himself with various aspects of the scene quite as
a poet might have concerned himself with rocks and rills. To own
these street-railways! To own these street-railways! So rang the
song of his mind.
Like the gas situation, the Chicago street-railway situation was
divided into three parts--three companies representing and
corresponding with the three different sides or divisions of the
city. The Chicago City Railway Company, occupying the South Side
and extending as far south as Thirty-ninth Street, had been organized
in 1859, and represented in itself a mine of wealth. Already it
controlled some seventy miles of track, and was annually being
added to on Indiana Avenue, on Wabash Avenue, on State Street, and
on Archer Avenue. It owned over one hundred and fifty cars of the
old-fashioned, straw-strewn, no-stove type, and over one thousand
horses; it employed one hundred and seventy conductors, one hundred
and sixty drivers, a hundred stablemen, and blacksmiths, harness-makers,
and repairers in interesting numbers. Its snow-plows were busy
on the street in winter, its sprinkling-cars in summer. Cowperwood
calculated its shares, bonds, rolling-stock, and other physical
properties as totaling in the vicinity of over two million dollars.
The trouble with this company was that its outstanding stock was
principally controlled by Norman Schryhart, who was now decidedly
inimical to Cowperwood, or anything he might wish to do, and by
Anson Merrill, who had never manifested any signs of friendship.
He did not see how he was to get control of this property. Its
shares were selling around two hundred and fifty dollars.
The North Chicago City Railway was a corporation which had been
organized at the same time as the South Side company, but by a
different group of men. Its management was old, indifferent, and
incompetent, its equipment about the same. The Chicago West
Division Railway had originally been owned by the Chicago City or
South Side Railway, but was now a separate corporation. It was
not yet so profitable as the other divisions of the city, but all
sections of the city were growing. The horse-bell was heard
everywhere tinkling gaily.
Standing on the outside of this scene, contemplating its promise,
Cowperwood much more than any one else connected financially with
the future of these railways at this time was impressed with their
enormous possibilities--their enormous future if Chicago continued
to grow, and was concerned with the various factors which might
further or impede their progress.
Not long before he had discovered that one of the chief handicaps
to street-railway development, on the North and West Sides, lay
in the congestion of traffic at the bridges spanning the Chicago
River. Between the street ends that abutted on it and connected
the two sides of the city ran this amazing stream--dirty, odorous,
picturesque, compact of a heavy, delightful, constantly crowding
and moving boat traffic, which kept the various bridges momentarily
turning, and tied up the street traffic on either side of the
river until it seemed at times as though the tangle of teams and
boats would never any more be straightened out. It was lovely,
human, natural, Dickensesque--a fit subject for a Daumier, a Turner,
or a Whistler. The idlest of bridge-tenders judged for himself
when the boats and when the teams should be made to wait, and how
long, while in addition to the regular pedestrians a group of
idlers stood at gaze fascinated by the crowd of masts, the crush
of wagons, and the picturesque tugs in the foreground below.
Cowperwood, as he sat in his light runabout, annoyed by a delay,
or dashed swiftly forward to get over before a bridge turned, had
long since noted that the street-car service in the North and West
Sides was badly hampered. The unbroken South Side, unthreaded by
a river, had no such problem, and was growing rapidly.
Because of this he was naturally interested to observe one day,
in the course of his peregrinations, that there existed in two
places under the Chicago River--in the first place at La Salle
Street, running north and south, and in the second at Washington
Street, running east and west--two now soggy and rat-infested
tunnels which were never used by anybody--dark, dank, dripping
affairs only vaguely lighted with oil-lamp, and oozing with water.
Upon investigation he learned that they had been built years
before to accommodate this same tide of wagon traffic, which now
congested at the bridges, and which even then had been rapidly
rising. Being forced to pay a toll in time to which a slight toll
in cash, exacted for the privilege of using a tunnel, had seemed
to the investors and public infinitely to be preferred, this traffic
had been offered this opportunity of avoiding the delay. However,
like many another handsome commercial scheme on paper or bubbling
in the human brain, the plan did not work exactly. These tunnels
might have proved profitable if they had been properly built with
long, low-per-cent. grades, wide roadways, and a sufficiency of
light and air; but, as a matter of fact, they had not been judiciously
adapted to public convenience. Norman Schryhart's father had been
an investor in these tunnels, and Anson Merrill. When they had
proved unprofitable, after a long period of pointless manipulation
--cost, one million dollars--they had been sold to the city for
exactly that sum each, it being poetically deemed that a growing
city could better afford to lose so disturbing an amount than any
of its humble, ambitious, and respectable citizens. That was a
little affair by which members of council had profited years before;
but that also is another story.
After discovering these tunnels Cowperwood walked through them
several times--for though they were now boarded up, there was still
an uninterrupted footpath--and wondered why they could not be
utilized. It seemed to him that if the street-car traffic were
heavy enough, profitable enough, and these tunnels, for a reasonable
sum, could be made into a lower grade, one of the problems which
now hampered the growth of the North and West Sides would be
obviated. But how? He did not own the tunnels. He did not own
the street-railways. The cost of leasing and rebuilding the tunnels
would be enormous. Helpers and horses and extra drivers on any
grade, however slight, would have to be used, and that meant an
extra expense. With street-car horses as the only means of traction,
and with the long, expensive grades, he was not so sure that this
venture would be a profitable one.
However, in the fall of 1880, or a little earlier (when he was
still very much entangled with the preliminary sex affairs that
led eventually to Rita Sohlberg), he became aware of a new system
of traction relating to street-cars which, together with the arrival
of the arc-light, the telephone, and other inventions, seemed
destined to change the character of city life entirely.
Recently in San Francisco, where the presence of hills made the
movement of crowded street-railway cars exceedingly difficult, a
new type of traction had been introduced--that of the cable, which
was nothing more than a traveling rope of wire running over guttered
wheels in a conduit, and driven by immense engines, conveniently
located in adjacent stations or "power-houses." The cars carried
a readily manipulated "grip-lever," or steel hand, which reached
down through a slot into a conduit and "gripped" the moving cable.
This invention solved the problem of hauling heavily laden
street-cars up and down steep grades. About the same time he also
heard, in a roundabout way, that the Chicago City Railway, of
which Schryhart and Merrill were the principal owners, was about
to introduce this mode of traction on its lines--to cable State
Street, and attach the cars of other lines running farther out
into unprofitable districts as "trailers." At once the solution
of the North and West Side problems flashed upon him--cables.
Outside of the bridge crush and the tunnels above mentioned, there
was one other special condition which had been for some time past
attracting Cowperwood's attention. This was the waning energy of
the North Chicago City Railway Company--the lack of foresight on
the part of its directors which prevented them from perceiving the
proper solution of their difficulties. The road was in a rather
unsatisfactory state financially--really open to a coup of some
sort. In the beginning it had been considered unprofitable, so
thinly populated was the territory they served, and so short the
distance from the business heart. Later, however, as the territory
filled up, they did better; only then the long waits at the bridges
occurred. The management, feeling that the lines were likely to
be poorly patronized, had put down poor, little, light-weight
rails, and run slimpsy cars which were as cold as ice in winter
and as hot as stove-ovens in summer. No attempt had been made to
extend the down-town terminus of the several lines into the business
center--they stopped just over the river which bordered it at the
north. (On the South Side Mr. Schryhart had done much better for
his patrons. He had already installed a loop for his cable about
Merrill's store.) As on the West Side, straw was strewn in the
bottom of all the cars in winter to keep the feet of the passengers
warm, and but few open cars were used in summer. The directors
were averse to introducing them because of the expense. So they
had gone on and on, adding lines only where they were sure they
would make a good profit from the start, putting down the same
style of cheap rail that had been used in the beginning, and
employing the same antique type of car which rattled and trembled
as it ran, until the patrons were enraged to the point of anarchy.
Only recently, because of various suits and complaints inaugurated,
the company had been greatly annoyed, but they scarcely knew what
to do, how to meet the onslaught. Though there was here and there
a man of sense--such as Terrence Mulgannon, the general superintendent;
Edwin Kaffrath, a director; William Johnson, the constructing engineer
of the company--yet such other men as Onias C. Skinner, the president,
and Walter Parker, the vice-president, were reactionaries of an
elderly character, conservative, meditative, stingy, and, worst of
all, fearful or without courage for great adventure. It is a sad
commentary that age almost invariably takes away the incentive to
new achievement and makes "Let well enough alone" the most appealing
motto.
Mindful of this, Cowperwood, with a now splendid scheme in his
mind, one day invited John J. McKenty over to his house to dinner
on a social pretext. When the latter, accompanied by his wife,
had arrived, and Aileen had smiled on them both sweetly, and was
doing her best to be nice to Mrs. McKenty, Cowperwood remarked:
"McKenty, do you know anything about these two tunnels that the
city owns under the river at Washington and La Salle streets?"
"I know that the city took them over when it didn't need them, and
that they're no good for anything. That was before my time, though,"
explained McKenty, cautiously. "I think the city paid a million
for them. Why?"
"Oh, nothing much," replied Cowperwood, evading the matter for the
present. "I was wondering whether they were in such condition
that they couldn't be used for anything. I see occasional references
in the papers to their uselessness."
"They're in pretty bad shape, I'm afraid," replied McKenty. "I
haven't been through either of them in years and years. The idea
was originally to let the wagons go through them and break up the
crowding at the bridges. But it didn't work. They made the grade
too steep and the tolls too high, and so the drivers preferred to
wait for the bridges. They were pretty hard on horses. I can
testify to that myself. I've driven a wagon-load through them
more than once. The city should never have taken them over at all
by rights. It was a deal. I don't know who all was in it. Carmody
was mayor then, and Aldrich was in charge of public works."
He relapsed into silence, and Cowperwood allowed the matter of the
tunnels to rest until after dinner when they had adjourned to the
library. There he placed a friendly hand on McKenty's arm, an act
of familiarity which the politician rather liked.
"You felt pretty well satisfied with the way that gas business
came out last year, didn't you?" he inquired.
"I did," replied McKenty, warmly. "Never more so. I told you
that at the time." The Irishman liked Cowperwood, and was grateful
for the swift manner in which he had been made richer by the sum
of several hundred thousand dollars.
"Well, now, McKenty," continued Cowperwood, abruptly, and with a
seeming lack of connection, "has it ever occurred to you that
things are shaping up for a big change in the street-railway
situation here? I can see it coming. There's going to be a new
motor power introduced on the South Side within a year or two.
You've heard of it?"
"I read something of it," replied McKenty, surprised and a little
questioning. He took a cigar and prepared to listen. Cowperwood,
never smoking, drew up a chair.
"Well, I'll tell you what that means," he explained. "It means
that eventually every mile of street-railway track in this city--to
say nothing of all the additional miles that will be built before
this change takes place--will have to be done over on an entirely
new basis. I mean this cable-conduit system. These old companies
that are hobbling along now with an old equipment will have to
make the change. They'll have to spend millions and millions
before they can bring their equipment up to date. If you've paid
any attention to the matter you must have seen what a condition
these North and West Side lines are in."
"It's pretty bad; I know that," commented McKenty.
"Just so," replied Cowperwood, emphatically. "Well, now, if I
know anything about these old managements from studying them,
they're going to have a hard time bringing themselves to do this.
Two to three million are two to three million, and it isn't going
to be an easy matter for them to raise the money--not as easy,
perhaps, as it would be for some of the rest of us, supposing we
wanted to go into the street-railway business."
"Yes, supposing," replied McKenty, jovially. "But how are you to
get in it? There's no stock for sale that I know of."
"Just the same," said Cowperwood, "we can if we want to, and I'll
show you how. But at present there's just one thing in particular
I'd like you to do for me. I want to know if there is any way
that we can get control of either of those two old tunnels that I
was talking to you about a little while ago. I'd like both if I
might. Do you suppose that is possible?"
"Why, yes," replied McKenty, wondering; "but what have they got
to do with it? They're not worth anything. Some of the boys were
talking about filling them in some time ago--blowing them up. The
police think crooks hide in them."
"Just the same, don't let any one touch them--don't lease them or
anything," replied Cowperwood, forcefully. "I'll tell you frankly
what I want to do. I want to get control, just as soon as possible,
of all the street-railway lines I can on the North and West
Sides--new or old franchises. Then you'll see where the tunnels
come in."
He paused to see whether McKenty caught the point of all he meant,
but the latter failed.
"You don't want much, do you?" he said, cheerfully. "But I don't
see how you can use the tunnels. However, that's no reason why I
shouldn't take care of them for you, if you think that's important."
"It's this way," said Cowperwood, thoughtfully. "I'll make you a
preferred partner in all the ventures that I control if you do as
I suggest. The street-railways, as they stand now, will have to
be taken up lock, stock, and barrel, and thrown into the scrap
heap within eight or nine years at the latest. You see what the
South Side company is beginning to do now. When it comes to the
West and North Side companies they won't find it so easy. They
aren't earning as much as the South Side, and besides they have
those bridges to cross. That means a severe inconvenience to a
cable line. In the first place, the bridges will have to be rebuilt
to stand the extra weight and strain. Now the question arises at
once--at whose expense? The city's?"
"That depends on who's asking for it," replied Mr. McKenty, amiably.
"Quite so," assented Cowperwood. "In the next place, this river
traffic is becoming impossible from the point of view of a decent
street-car service. There are waits now of from eight to fifteen
minutes while these tows and vessels get through. Chicago has
five hundred thousand populaion to-day. How much will it have in
1890? In 1900? How will it be when it has eight hundred thousand
or a million?"
"You're quite right," interpolated McKenty. "It will be pretty
bad."
"Exactly. But what is worse, the cable lines will carry trailers,
or single cars, from feeder lines. There won't be single cars
waiting at these draws--there will be trains,crowded trains. It
won't be advisable to delay a cable-train from eight to fifteen
minutes while boats are making their way through a draw. The
public won't stand for that very long, will it, do you think?"
"Not without making a row, probably," replied McKenty.
"Well, that means what, then?" asked Cowperwood. "Is the traffic
going to get any lighter? Is the river going to dry up?"
Mr. McKenty stared. Suddenly his face lighted. "Oh, I see," he
said, shrewdly. "It's those tunnels you're thinking about. Are
they in any shape to be used?"
"They can be made over cheaper than new ones can be built."
"True for you," replied McKenty, "and if they're in any sort of
repair they'd be just what you'd want." He was emphatic, almost
triumphant. "They belong to the city. They cost pretty near a
million apiece, those things."
"I know it," said Cowperwood. "Now, do you see what I'm driving
at?"
"Do I see!" smiled McKenty. "That's a real idea you have, Cowperwood.
I take off my hat to you. Say what you want."
"Well, then, in the first place," replied Cowperwood, genially,
"it is agreed that the city won't part with those two tunnels under
any circumstances until we can see what can be done about this
other matter?"
"It will not."
"In the next place, it is understood, is it, that you won't make
it any easier than you can possibly help for the North and West
Side companies to get ordinances extending their lines, or anything
else, from now on? I shall want to introduce some franchises for
feeders and outlying lines myself."
"Bring in your ordinances," replied McKenty, "and I'll do whatever
you say. I've worked with you before. I know that you keep your
word."
"Thanks," said Cowperwood, warmly. "I know the value of keeping
it. In the mean while I'll go ahead and see what can be done about
the other matter. I don't know just how many men I will need to
let in on this, or just what form the organization will take. But
you may depend upon it that your interests will be properly taken
care of, and that whatever is done will be done with your full
knowledge and consent."
"All very good," answered McKenty, thinking of the new field of
activity before them. A combination between himself and Cowperwood
in a matter like this must prove very beneficial to both. And he
was satisfied, because of their previous relations, that his own
interests would not be neglected.
"Shall we go and see if we can find the ladies?" asked Cowperwood,
jauntily, laying hold of the politician's arm.
"To be sure," assented McKenty, gaily. "It's a fine house you
have here--beautiful. And your wife is as pretty a woman as I
ever saw, if you'll pardon the familiarity."
"I have always thought she was rather attractive myself," replied
Cowperwood, innocently. _
Read next: chapter XXII - Street-railways at Last
Read previous: chapter XX - "Man and Superman"
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