A NEW YORK TRAGEDY. RECALLED.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 11843, 21 December 1901, Page 2 (Supplement)

A NEW YORK TRAGEDY. RECALLED.

JIM FISKE AND ED- STOKES.

Some years ago, as I was walking up and down one of the streets of Carlsbad, I got a nudge from an American friend who was my companion,'and looking straight before mo I saw a. lady advancing who had very great charm of person and expression. .She had lovely light-brown hair, a cheek the rosiness of which would have done credit to a dairymaid,; bright brown eyes; and a look of innocent fresh gaiety that might bavo done credit to a child unspotted from the wcijid. And a . few moments after,' meeting an American lady, she told me that, seated at a concert in Carlsbad a few evenings before, she was attracted in the middle of the performance by a laughso loud, so fresh, so childlike in its sweetness an!d.frankness, that she instinctively looked around, and saw it was the lady whose face had just attracted my. attention. And then we both marvelled for the lady was she who used to be known in the seventies as Josie Mansfield.

And Josie Mansfield was one of the central figures in one of the moving and, at the same time, somewhat vulgar and squalid tragedies of modern New York. I was astonished a few days ago to find a young man of intelligence who had never heard the name of Jim Fiske : and I remember the time when the whole world resounded with the glories, the infamies, the audacities connected with that name. Jim Fiske was, in fact, the greatest of modern brigands. Getling possession in some way or other of the control of the Erie railway, he calmly put into his own pocket all the money of the shareholders large proportion of whom were English. It was in the palmy days of Boss Tweed, the then head of the Tammany organisation, and the friends ox Boss Tweed could defy, at that epoch, every law, human as well as divine. For Boss Tweed controlled some of the judges, all the police officers, and every other avenue of redress for the grievance of the plundered. And so Jim Fisk« was able to calmly divert tlio money of the Erie railroad to his own uses. And the fellow had such an opulence of imagination and • audacity that he proved in the modern world that the semicrazy fancies of a Sardanapalus came well within the limits of human desire and accomplishment. • Out of the vast funds of the Erie company he kept a huge Opera House, with a' magnificent ballet'; and he introduced into this part of the business methods which would have become an Oriental monarch who believed in the free-love doctrines of the Koran. And in everything else there was the same weird, audacious, crazy luxury of the thorough-going brigand : big carriages, fast horses, champagne suppers, and banquets on an equally huge scale of invitations and festivities. It was an acute, unprincipled, daring Yankee 'who " threw back"so to speakto the Roman Emperors or the Eastern satraps. But Fiske was so much of his time and country and milieu that he always had the power of winning the love of the mob. In big processions his huge ; Falstaffian buliv aiic! gaiety were always cheered loudly ; and he. had also a Falstaffian humour which sometimes made America laugh from one shore to the other. When, for instance, a deputation camo to him from his native village to ask him to provide railings for the graveyard there, Fiske replied that lie could not see the necessity for this safeguard ; he knew nobody that had ever come out and ho knew nobody that had ever voluntarily gone into that graveyard. Such was Jim Fiske; and then one fine day, in the very height and zenith of his infamous glory and omnipotence, the news came that he had been killed in the Grand Central Hotel in Broadway by a man known as "Ed Stokes." The secret history of the quarrel has never been entirely known; but, so far as one could gather, it was partly about love and partly gambling ; and Josie Mansfield, as she was called, was the lady whose charms had brought these two ir eu to this quarrel unto death. And there she was, nearly twenty years afterwards, in Carlsbad, fresh, girlish, full of the joy of life, as untouched by the tragedy in which she had figured, or by all the other experiences of life, as if she had never left a convent school— great creatures are women in their immense power of oblivion. I never saw Ed Stokes ; but I often dined at the splendid hotel which he kept in New York. He was tried 'ioi" the killing of! Fiske; was sentenced to death spent weeks if not months in the condemned cell where men await the last dread consummation of the law; and then managed to get an appeal and a remission to ten years' penal servitude; and then, after this, another remission to six years! • And after various adventures he got the capital to start what was at the time the most luxurious hotel in New York; a hotel where carpets were a foot thick, where there were, even in the public bar, great French masterpieces of nit, worth a king's ransom ; the glitter and gauds of a Byzantine palace, and prices which might make ever; a millionaire weep. Everybody -'it one time went- to the Hoffman House, for it had,a s£l°ndiu table and comfortable rooms, and uus situated in such a central spot, in the very core of Madison Square, that it was a great business and political resort in the evening where you were certain to see some man you wanted to meet. ; Stoke was not often seen, but he remained i always a picturesque figure, and, I. believe, was in some degree even a popular , one, Very tallsome inches above six —with hair that had once been black," but. that had turned, to snow-white under the stress of prison and the shadow of the scaffold ; with brilliant black eyes, with features" chiselled as in marble, and a bearing as graceful as that of an Apollo, he might be one of the figures that look out at us from the brilliant pages of Bret Harte—say. Jack Hamlin, or somo other such combination of the godlike' and the devilish. So great was the fascination Stokes exercised over men, and still more over women, that when he cjened his new hotel and gave a public receptionthe halls of the Hoffman House were crowded to suffocation. In later years, I believe, he was not prosperous ; and he was not old when he died, as we count age now. He is said to have carried to his dying day— spite of all his bravery of bearing—the awful impress of the killing lie had done. One night an old' gentleman— of rudeness, but forgetful and absent-minded — dressed Stokes as "Mr. Fiske;" he had got tho memory of the tragedy so much in his mind that he mixed up the two , names. Stokes confessed that he had had to drink a bottle of brandy that night to escape the horrid vision of the past. What a strange, almost incredible tragedy it all is, with the gigantic figure of Falstaff Fiske, and the Apollo slayer, and the mere girl of seventeen between the two— and mon,ey anil death —all the great passions of human life played out on a modern, stage with the ruthlessness and the grand manner of ancient Greece ; and yet all so modern, "with the robbed shareholders of a railway' and the opera house and the venal ballet, and the shooting down of the man in one hotel and the resurrection of the other man in a great, gaudy, New York drinking saloon! —M.A.P.