Watt O'Hugh Underground: Being the Second Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh III Book 2)

by Steven S. Drachman

  Finally, a young woman, blond and cheerful, attended to a balancing siphon coffee brewer in the corner, humming gently, her lovely voice an irritant to all present. A flame flickered, and the coffee bubbled.

  “Gentlemen!” Morgan harrumphed, and they all sat, the banker landing in a wooden chair with a tremendous thud. The chair teetered precariously, creaked and cracked a bit, the legs nearly splintering with the great man’s force.

  All present inhaled nervously.

  The chair then righted itself and did not collapse, and thus neither did the world’s economy.

  “Mr. Morgan,” Sneed said. “We have a surprise for you. What I believe will be a tidy little war.”

  He smiled a toothy smile, but one laced with controlled rage. Sneed was in his element; brutally efficient, and angry. The others present enjoyed all this a bit less.

  “After this, we’re ready to take on the Oneida Community in New York, then perhaps Amana Colonies in Iowa. Then a full-scale assault on the Shakers, and then next perhaps the Amish. We’ll wipe out Utopianism for you, Mr. Morgan. And while we are at it, we will wipe out Hope itself.”

  “It’s not a joke to me, Mr. Sneed,” Morgan said softly, after some time had passed.

  The young woman brought the coffee, now thick, overcooked, burnt.

  “Coffee,” she whispered.

  Her voice was like wind chimes.

  She smiled.

  Her smile was angelic.

  Her name, appropriately, was Angela.

  Sneed patted her on the bottom, and Talzek averted his eyes. His lined face pained, he was excessively and unnecessarily discomforted by this very mild display of lust. I would meet Angela in 1905 (her angelic nature yet undiminished), in connection with the Battle of Sidonia, which is how I know of the events that occurred on Wall Street in September 1878, but she is otherwise irrelevant to our tale.

  Her coffee duly served, her bottom duly patted, she retreated to a stool in the corner of the room, where she sat and awaited further instructions, tingling slightly (it must be admitted) from the pat on the bottom.

  On her stool, she listened to the gentlemen plot, and she pretended not to understand what they were plotting.

  “It’s not a joke to me,” Morgan said again.

  Sneed reluctantly turned back to Morgan.

  “Not a joke,” he nodded. “Not a joke to you, Mr. Morgan.”

  Sneed agreed icily that in to-day’s United States – still suffering the after-effects of the prior decade – brother against brother, hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of faceless dead in muddy muddled fields of blood – no one could laugh at the idea of more Americans dying.

  Filbank sneezed; spittle flitted nimbly through the dusty air before falling to earth.

  Sneed ignored his colleague.

  “You did, however, request a surgical strike on the Sidonian outpost in Montana,” Sneed continued, “and I have returned to this most prestigious cigar company to tell you that the Hayes administration looks favorably on your proposal; or if not actually favorably on your actual proposal – which is, to be honest, rather ridiculous – then, at least, the Hayes administration looks highly unfavorably on the idea of angering you, with the resulting detritus of world economic breakdown, presidential assassination, and so on and so forth. Rich men have their idiosyncrasies, I suppose, eh? Nevertheless, this news should warrant a smile and a quiet thank you. We are not, after all, asking you to join in the fighting and to risk your life along with the boys of the lower classes. Heavens no, Morgan!” he exclaimed now. “We just ask that your Majesty enjoy it from afar, and with a smile, and a bit of useful gratitude.”

  Morgan nodded.

  “It comes without a price, then?” he muttered.

  “Of course not, my heroic Prince.”

  Sneed laid out the administration’s demands, which included support for the gold standard, improved working conditions on the railroads controlled by Drexel, Morgan to help keep the recently quelled riots of 1877 from re-kindling, and a number of favors addressing certain international disturbances, along with a guarantee of no further economic threats for the next decade and a half. This was to be Morgan’s one big governmental favor. The last one. No more wars fought just to please Mr. Morgan. No more eccentricities for the government to deal with.

  Morgan waved all this away without much thought.

  “And you will deliver Allen Jerome to me?” he asked.

  “Temporarily, yes. If he survives our invasion. And if we catch him. You may have him briefly.”

  “For a little chat,” Morgan agreed. “Yes. For just a brief, little chat.”

  Angela approached. She refilled the coffee cups. Then she retreated.

  The gentlemen talked politics for a few minutes, and they even talked about sports, and then J.P. Morgan raised one more topic, as though it were a mere after-thought.

  “One other thing,” he said, clearing his throat. “You may recall a gentleman named Walt Hugbert, something to that effect. Terrible man, horrible Wild West show some years ago, presented all sorts of terrible ideas. A ‘progressive’ of some sort. Hates America. An America-hater.”

  Sneed nodded. He knew that Morgan had mistaken my name, and I think he knew as well that Morgan knew it. But it was the job of the upper classes not to know too much about those of us who belonged to the 99%, as you might call it, if you are reading this in the 21st century. To know our names would be unseemly, and so Sneed did not correct him.

  “You helped us put him away, if I recall,” Sneed smiled. “Mr. Hugglebert.”

  “Where he can no longer threaten America,” added Filbank, and his jowls trembled a bit as he spoke. Leaning forward confidentially, he seemed about to speak again, probably obsequiously, perhaps to praise Morgan for his patriotism and love of America, but upon raising a pointer finger to make his decisive and perhaps obsequious point, he slipped nervously from the chair and gracelessly flopped to the floor.[11] By the time he had climbed back up and righted himself, the conversation had moved on, and his moment had been lost forever.

  “Dead in Wyoming, I believe,” Sneed said, and Morgan shook his head.

  “Dead and not-dead, concurrently,” Morgan disagreed. “Remember? A most remarkable occurrence.”

  Sneed smiled and said that he remained a skeptic on such things.

  “I might need him pardoned,” Morgan went on. “No one knows whom Witt Hugleybrick actually killed in that passion crime, so there are no bereaved family members to complain.” And then, Morgan added another important thing that seemed to have just flitted into his head: it was entirely possible that Mr. Hugglebuggle would need assistance with the transfer of a rather large amount of cash to South America, and Morgan would appreciate it if the U.S. government would look the other way. It was, Morgan said, all in the name of a good cause, and the protection of the United States from foreign conspirators.

  All grunted approval.

  Out on the street, in the gentle afternoon chill, the little group of men prepared to go their separate ways. Morgan shook each man’s hand, and then he marched east. The others watched him. Talzek straightened his tie just from habit – his tie was not actually even slightly crooked – and he turned to Filbank and noted softly, “I was once a man of impeccable ethics. I made glassware. Fine expensive glassware for the rich. But I also made affordable glassware, so that everyone who needed glassware could have glassware. One could hardly object to a man who makes glassware.”

  And Talzek walked away sadly, his overcoat unbuttoned, flapping in the wind.

  Morgan arrived home in time for a late dinner, to a front parlor and living room filled with red and white roses, and lupines and lavateras in full bloom. Fanny smiled. He was glad to see her smile, and he held her hand. What had he done to warrant such a full-throated, self-flagellating apology? He had done something, of that he was sure. He did not love his second wife, Fanny, but he could still recall vividly the feelings of gratitude that he had felt in 1864 upon firs
t meeting the sweet, twenty-two year old Fanny at St. George’s Church. He had felt towards her such feelings of sweeping gratitude that they were almost exactly like love, and every bit as potent, and they temporarily – too temporarily – filled the void in his heart. And now she was like a wounded animal whom he did not wish to see suffer.

  She said a few things about the trip back from Cragston, and she asked him if he had made a decision about the yacht he wished to buy.

  She deserved to smile from time to time, he supposed, and a few things made her happy. Their coddled son, Jack, made her very happy, and the happier she was with Jack, the more she coddled him, and the more insufferable Morgan found him. Opium, and morphine, unfortunately, made her happy in these recent days. And, not least, seeing signs that he, Pierpont, knew that he mistreated her and was periodically sorry about it. These were things that made her happy.

  They sat together by the window, the light of the moon flowing in and drifting about the room like a bit of fog.

  “It is not such a terrible ordeal to be married to me, is it Pierpont?” she asked him, and Morgan said that it was not.

  “There are people in the world, after all,” he mused, “who have much worse lives. Boys who were shot in the head in the War, for example, and who live life with a bullet in their brains – blinding headaches, unable to think straight. There are babies in countries we have never heard of, who drown in agony in floods. No, when some perspective is put on the thing, it is not such an ordeal to be married to you, my dear.”

  Morgan’s thoughts tended to run this way. He had not intended to insult his wife, and not until a week from the following Tuesday did it occur to him that he might have expressed this sentiment a bit more tactfully.

  Still, Fanny was used to life with her Pierpont, and given his general disposition, this was not an unusually unkind thing for him to say, and so she rested her head on his shoulder.

  He put his arm about her and pulled her close, and he shut his eyes and listened to her breathe.

  Chapter 4

  I don’t really like to acknowledge it, but the villains of my story, Allen Jerome and especially Darryl Fawley, are actual human beings, and they both started out life as babies whose mothers loved them, babies who in all likelihood were charming in that way that babies tend to be, and had I been an adult at the time of their birth, their appearance – tiny and silly and adorably stupid, with little useless hands – would likely have made me smile. I hate acknowledging that they are human.

  Like all adults, they had to manage their business. For me, this would have been, at one time, scribbling away in a clerk’s office, or at other times, working a cattle drive across the west. For Allen Jerome and Darryl Fawley, managing their business meant attending to the demands of a kingdom poised on the cusp of empire.

  I imagine that Sidonia’s enemies – counter-Revolutionaries, the Sidonians would call them – might attempt to convince struggling little outposts that nothing like Sidonian riches could possible come without a terrible price, and they might argue that the price was eternal servitude. The businessman between our two villains, Allen Jerome, would have an easy response: If this is servitude, give me more – I’m still not satisfied! Harvard-educated mathematician, cold-blooded, humorless, impeccably dressed and coiffed and therefore handsome in his way, but untouchable and unappealing nonetheless.

  Darryl Fawley was Allen Jerome’s business partner. English, elbow-patched, less exacting in demeanor, lanky and homely but friendlier in manner, he was the more beloved of the two among the masses, but they were both acknowledged as mere political leaders. Sidonian religious leaders were known as Pharsnips (Allen Jerome’s invention, which rhymed with parsnips and represented his contempt for religion). Along with a troupe of acrobats and clowns, the Pharsnips called the masses to daily prayer whether Fawley and Jerome were present in Sidonia or not.

  Fawley had joined the movement for two reasons: first, because he had married a woman whose love he did not believe he deserved, and he wished to put her on a throne, where he thought she belonged. (Instead, he put her in a grave, albeit through gross negligence rather than premeditation.) Second, because he was loaded down every minute of every day with guilt over everything, including guilt not only over the way his genial mediocrity had disappointed his mother (the now well-known Sidonie, after whom his town and movement were named), but a more political and intellectual guilt inspired by his rather minor financial inheritance, and for this he wished to compensate by pursuing social justice. If he could leave the world a better place, perhaps he would even things out a bit. It helped that the woman he wished to put on a throne desired social justice above all else.

  He was rumpled and friendly and balding, with a smile of crooked teeth, and not actually a bad fellow, all the way down deep inside of him, and under other circumstances – had he not taken a fateful trip to the far wild lands of China to discover a 2000-year-old mystery, had he not married a woman he did not rate – he would have deserved to have blokes buy him a pint at the pub in one of those little English hamlets where blokes buy other blokes pints, and he would have died with a bad liver at an appropriate age and a few people would have eulogized him briefly as a good bloke and then, I reckon, bought a few pints in his honor and staggered home and vomited on their battered copies of Wilkie Collins novels, or whatever it is they read before the advent of Sherlock Holmes. I’ve never spent any extended time in England, but this is what I imagine a good life and pleasant death would have been for an unremarkable and unbrilliant and not-evil bloke like Darryl Fawley.

  But that innocuous end was not to be.

  He did indeed love and adore and mourn the woman I also loved and adored and mourned, Lucy Billings, and perhaps as strongly as I, but although he mourned her, he had killed her, not willfully, but through inaction and through indecision and through greed and ambition, and because these were things that mattered more to him than Lucy did, which is why I hated Darryl Fawley, why I wished him dead, and why I wished to be the one to make him dead.

  When Darryl Fawley and Allen Jerome traveled to their slowly growing network of Sidonian satellite cities, Fawley would invariably stake a claim for the righteousness of their Sidonian Cause, and he would think of Lucy, and he would hope, somehow, that his crusade might have earned her approval, had she lived to witness it. He still loved her, as he would ever love her. And so on these missions, as Allen Jerome appealed to the heartless capitalism within the heartless heart of the ruling class of each of his satellite cities, the glad-handing Darryl Fawley spoke warmly of the benefits to society that their movement would bring, and he would think of Lucy.

  Maybe he even still believed it a little bit as late as the Fall of 1878, by which time he’d had abundant opportunity to witness the evils of Sidonism and the hopelessness of it all.

  On Monday, September 16, 1878, Darryl Fawley and Allen Jerome crossed the border into North Dakota territory for a couple days fishing under cloudy skies with the mayor of the small and not-yet-growing town of Dawsey, and his cherubic deputy mayor, and on Tuesday, September 17, 1878, at about ten in the morning, Fawley and Jerome sat with the mayor and deputy mayor in a rowboat in the middle of a pond just to the south of town.

  I am going to make a confession: a small bit of the following story is not fully accurate, because the mayor’s name has been utterly lost to history. A bachelor or a widower, I suppose, with no children, no living parents, and no one to pay for a memorial marker in place of a grave, given that his death was witnessed and confirmed without any doubt, but his body never found, other than the very top of his skull, and even that not recovered. I have decided to call him Mayor Figg, just so I will have something to call him, although that was almost certainly not his name. I imagine he was probably a little bit overweight, and that his manner was gruff, although I don’t know this with certainty – this is just how I picture him.

  I have it on good authority that he had a conscience, which guaranteed his doom. I imagi
ne that the day was probably a little bit nippy, and that Mayor Figg was wearing overalls.

  The deputy mayor, of course, was Angus Weatherford, and none of us will ever forget him.

  The fish weren’t biting that morning.

  “Why are you interested in a little town like ours?” Mayor Figg asked. “We’ve got about fifteen families and some not-very-good (it turns out) farmland. We’re surrounded by hostile injuns getting hostiler. If we’ve got a hunnert people this fall, we’ll have eighty next fall. We’re hoping for a grain elevator but … I don’t know.”

  “We have some pull with Jay Gould,” said Fawley. “What if I promised you that Dawsey would be a stop on the Milwaukee & Waukesha Rail Road?”

  Fawley wore an old sweater, which fit him loosely. His wisps of hair blew about in the wind.