The Thunders of Silence

Beforehand there was no announcement of the purpose to be accomplished. The men in charge of the plan and the men directly under them, whom they privily commissioned to carry out their intent, were all of them sworn to secrecy. And all of them kept the pledge. On a Monday Congressman Mallard's name appeared in practically every daily paper in America, for it was on that evening that he was to address a mass meeting at a hall on the Lower West Side of New York—a meeting ostensibly to be held under the auspices of a so-called society for world peace. But sometime during Monday every publisher of every newspaper and periodical, of every trade paper, every religious paper, every farm paper in America, received a telegram from a certain address in New York. This telegram was marked Confidential. It was signed by a formidable list of names. It was signed by three of the most distinguished editors in America; by the heads of all the important news-gathering and news-distributing agencies; by the responsible heads of the leading feature syndicates; by the presidents of the two principal telegraph companies; by the presidents of the biggest advertising agencies; by a former President of the United States; by a great Catholic dignitary; by a great Protestant evangelist, and by the most eloquent rabbi in America; by the head of the largest banking house on this continent; by a retired military officer of the highest rank; by a national leader of organised labour; by the presidents of four of the leading universities; and finally by a man who, though a private citizen, was popularly esteemed to be the mouthpiece of the National Administration.

While this blanket telegram was travelling over the wires a certain magazine publisher was stopping his presses to throw out a special article for the writing of which he had paid fifteen hundred dollars to the best satirical essayist in the country; and another publisher was countermanding the order he had given to a distinguished caricaturist for a series of cartoons all dealing with the same subject, and was tearing up two of the cartoons which had already been delivered and for which he already had paid. He offered to pay for the cartoons not yet drawn, but the artist declined to accept further payment when he was told in confidence the reason for the cancellation of the commission.

On a Monday morning Congressman Jason Mallard's name was in every paper; his picture was in many of them. On the day following– But I am getting ahead of my story. Monday evening comes before Tuesday morning, and first I should tell what befell on Monday evening down on the Lower West Side.

That Monday afternoon Mallard came up from Washington; only his secretary came with him. Three men—the owner of a publication lately suppressed by the Post Office Department for seditious utterances, a former clergyman whose attitude in the present crisis had cost him his pulpit, and a former college professor of avowedly anarchistic tendencies—met him at the Pennsylvania Station. Of the three only the clergyman had a name which bespoke Anglo-Saxon ancestry. These three men accompanied him to the home of the editor, where they dined together; and when the dinner was ended an automobile bore the party through a heavy snowstorm to the hall where Mallard was to speak.

That is to say, it bore the party to within a block and a half of the hall. It could get no nearer than that by reason of the fact that the narrow street from house line on one side to house line on the other was jammed with men and women, thousands of them, who, coming too late to secure admission to the hall—the hall was crowded as early as seven o'clock—had stayed on, outside, content to see their champion and to cheer him since they might not hear him. They were half frozen. The snow in which they stood had soaked their shoes and chilled their feet; there were holes in the shoes which some of them wore. The snow stuck to their hats and clung on their shoulders, making streaks there like fleecy epaulets done in the colour of peace, which also is the colour of cowardice and surrender. There was a cold wind which made them all shiver and set the teeth of many of them to chattering; but they had waited.

A squad of twenty-odd policemen, aligned in a triangular formation about Mallard and his sponsors and, with Captain Bull Hargis of the Traffic Squad as its massive apex, this human ploughshare literally slugged a path through the mob to the side entrance of the hall. By sheer force the living wedge made a furrow in the multitude—a furrow that instantly closed in behind it as it pressed forward. Undoubtedly the policemen saved Congressman Mallard from being crushed and buffeted down under the caressing hands of those who strove with his bodyguard to touch him, to embrace him, to clasp his hand. Foreign-born women, whose sons were in the draft, sought to kiss the hem of his garments when he passed them by, and as they stooped they were bowled over by the uniformed burlies and some of them were trampled. Disregarding the buffeting blows of the policemen's gloved fists, men, old, young and middle-aged, flung themselves against the escorts, crying out greetings. Above the hysterical yelling rose shrill cries of pain, curses, shrieks. Guttural sounds of cheering in snatchy fragments were mingled with terms of approval and of endearment and of affection uttered in English, in German, in Russian, in Yiddish and in Finnish.

Afterward Captain Bull Hargis said that never in his recollection of New York crowds had there been a crowd so hard to contend against or one so difficult to penetrate; he said this between gasps for breath while nursing a badly sprained thumb. The men under him agreed with him. The thing overpassed anything in their professional experiences. Several of them were veterans of the force too.

It was a dramatic entrance which Congressman Mallard made before his audience within the hall, packed as the hall was, with its air all hot and sticky with the animal heat of thousands of closely bestowed human bodies. Hardly could it have been a more dramatic entrance. From somewhere in the back he suddenly came out upon the stage. He was bareheaded and bare-throated. Outside in that living whirlpool his soft black hat had been plucked from his head and was gone. His collar, tie and all, had been torn from about his neck, and the same rudely affectionate hand that wrested the collar away had ripped his linen shirt open so that the white flesh of his chest showed through the gap of the tear. His great disorderly mop of bright red hair stood erect on his scalp like an oriflamme. His overcoat was half on and half off his back.

At sight of him the place rose at him, howling out its devotion. He flung off his overcoat, letting it fall upon the floor, and he strode forward almost to the trough of the footlights; and then for a space he stood there on the rounded apron of the platform, staring out into the troubled, tossing pool of contorted faces and tossing arms below him and about him. Demagogue he may have been; demigod he looked in that, his moment of supreme triumph, biding his time to play upon the passions and the prejudices of this multitude as a master organist would play upon the pipes of an organ. Here was clay, plastic to his supple fingers—here in this seething conglomerate of half-baked intellectuals, of emotional rebels against constituted authority, of alien enemies of malcontents and malingerers, of parlour anarchists from the studios of Bohemianism and authentic anarchists from the slums.

Ten blaring, exultant minutes passed before the ex-clergyman, who acted as chairman, could secure a measure of comparative quiet. At length there came a lull in the panting tumult. Then the chair made an announcement which brought forth in fuller volume than ever a responsive roar of approval. He announced that on the following night and on the night after, Congressman Mallard would speak at Madison Square Garden, under the largest roof on Manhattan Island. The committee in charge had been emboldened by the size of this present outpouring to engage the garden; the money to pay the rent for those two nights had already been subscribed; admission would be free; all would be welcome to come and—quoting the chairman—"to hear the truth about the war into which the Government, at the bidding of the capitalistic classes, had plunged the people of the nation." Then in ten words he introduced the speaker, and as the speaker raised his arms above his head invoking quiet, there fell, magically, a quick, deep, breathless hush upon the palpitant gathering.

"And this"—he began without preamble in that great resonant voice of his, that was like a blast of a trumpet—"and this, my countrymen, is the answer which the plain people of this great city make to the corrupted and misguided press that would crucify any man who dares defy it."

He spoke for more than an hour, and when he was done his hearers were as madmen and madwomen. And yet so skilfully had he phrased his utterances, so craftily had he injected the hot poison, so deftly had he avoided counselling outright disobedience to the law, that sundry secret-service men who had been detailed to attend the meeting and to arrest the speaker, United States representative though he be, in case he preached a single sentence of what might be interpreted as open treason, were completely circumvented.

It is said that on this night Congressman Mallard made the best speech he ever made in his whole life. But as to that we cannot be sure, and for this reason:

On Monday morning, as has twice been stated in this account, Congressman Mallard's name was in every paper, nearly, in America. On Tuesday morning not a line concerning him or concerning his speech or the remarkable demonstration of the night before—not a line of news, not a line of editorial comment, not a paragraph—appeared in any newspaper printed in the English language on this continent. The silent war had started.

Tuesday evening at eight-fifteen Congressman Mallard came to Madison Square Garden, accompanied by the honour guard of his sponsors. The police department, taking warning by what had happened on Monday night down on the West Side, had sent the police reserves of four precincts—six hundred uniformed men, under an inspector and three captains—to handle the expected congestion inside and outside the building. These six hundred men had little to do after they formed their lines and lanes except to twiddle their night sticks and to stamp their chilled feet.

For a strange thing befell. Thousands had participated in the affair of the night before. By word of mouth these thousands most surely must have spread the word among many times their own number of sympathetic individuals. And yet—this was the strange part—by actual count less than fifteen hundred persons, exclusive of the policemen, who were there because their duty sent them there, attended Tuesday night's meeting. To be exact there were fourteen hundred and seventy-five of them. In the vast oval of the interior they made a ridiculously small clump set midway of the area, directly in front of the platform that had been put up. All about them were wide reaches of seating space—empty. The place was a huge vaulted cavern, cheerless as a cave, full of cold drafts and strange echoes. Congressman Mallard spoke less than an hour, and this time he did not make the speech of his life.

Wednesday night thirty policemen were on duty at Madison Square Garden, Acting Captain O'Hara of the West Thirtieth Street Station being in command. Over the telephone to headquarters O'Hara, at eight-thirty, reported that his tally accounted for two hundred and eighty-one persons present. Congressman Mallard, he stated, had not arrived yet, but was momentarily expected.

At eight-forty-five O'Hara telephoned again. Congressman Mallard had just sent word that he was ill and would not be able to speak. This message had been brought by Professor Rascovertus, the former college professor, who had come in a cab and had made the bare announcement to those on hand and then had driven away. The assembled two hundred and eighty-one had heard the statement in silence and forthwith had departed in a quiet and orderly manner. O'Hara asked permission to send his men back to the station house.

Congressman Mallard returned to Washington on the midnight train, his secretary accompanying him. Outwardly he did not bear himself like a sick man, but on his handsome face was a look which the secretary had never before seen on his employer's face. It was the look of a man who asks himself a question over and over again.

On Thursday, in conspicuous type, black faced and double-leaded, there appeared on the front page and again at the top of the editorial column of every daily paper, morning and evening, in the United States, and in every weekly and every monthly paper whose date of publication chanced to be Thursday, the following paragraph:

"There is a name which the press of America no longer prints. Let every true American, in public or in private, cease hereafter from uttering that name."

Invariably the caption over this paragraph was the one word:

SILENCE!

One week later, to the day, the wife of one of the richest men in America died of acute pneumonia at her home in Chicago. Practically all the daily papers in America carried notices of this lady's death; the wealth of her husband and her own prominence in social and philanthropic affairs justified this. At greater or at less length it was variously set forth that she was the niece of a former ambassador to the Court of St. James; that she was the national head of a great patriotic organisation; that she was said to have dispensed upward of fifty thousand dollars a year in charities; that she was born in such and such a year at such and such a place; that she left, besides a husband, three children and one grandchild; and so forth and so on.

But not a single paper in the United States stated that she was the only sister of Congressman Jason Mallard.

The remainder of this account must necessarily be in the nature of a description of episodes occurring at intervals during a period of about six weeks; these episodes, though separated by lapses of time, are nevertheless related.

Three days after the burial of his sister Congressman Mallard took part in a debate on a matter of war-tax legislation upon the floor of the House. As usual he voiced the sentiments of a minority of one, his vote being the only vote cast in the negative on the passage of the measure. His speech was quite brief. To his colleagues, listening in dead silence without sign of dissent or approval, it seemed exceedingly brief, seeing that nearly always before Mallard, when he spoke at all upon any question, spoke at length. While he spoke the men in the press gallery took no notes, and when he had finished and was leaving the chamber it was noted that the venerable Congressman Boulder, a man of nearly eighty, drew himself well into his seat, as though he feared Mallard in passing along the aisle might brush against him.

The only publication in America that carried a transcript of Congressman Mallard's remarks on this occasion was the Congressional Record.

At the next day's session Congressman Mallard's seat was vacant; the next day likewise, and the next it was vacant. It was rumoured that he had left Washington, his exact whereabouts being unknown. However, no one in Washington, so far as was known, in speaking of his disappearance, mentioned him by name. One man addressing another would merely say that he understood a certain person had left town or that he understood a certain person was still missing from town; the second man in all likelihood would merely nod understandingly and then by tacit agreement the subject would be changed.

Just outside one of the lunch rooms in the Union Station at St. Louis late one night in the latter part of January an altercation occurred between two men. One was a tall, distinguished-looking man of middle age. The other was a railroad employé—a sweeper and cleaner.

It seemed that the tall man, coming out of the lunch room, and carrying a travelling bag and a cane, stumbled over the broom which the sweeper was using on the floor just beyond the doorway. The traveller, who appeared to have but poor control over his temper, or rather no control at all over it, accused the station hand of carelessness and cursed him. The station hand made an indignant and impertinent denial. At that the other flung down his bag, swung aloft his heavy walking stick and struck the sweeper across the head with force sufficient to lay open the victim's scalp in a two-inch gash, which bled freely.

For once a policeman was on the spot when trouble occurred. This particular policeman was passing through the train shed and he saw the blow delivered. He ran up and, to be on the safe side, put both men under technical arrest. The sweeper, who had been bowled over by the clout he had got, made a charge of unprovoked assault against the stranger; the latter expressed a blasphemous regret that he had not succeeded in cracking the sweeper's skull. He appeared to be in a highly nervous, highly irritable state. At any rate such was the interpretation which the patrolman put upon his aggressive prisoner's behaviour.

Walking between the pair to prevent further hostilities the policeman took both men into the station master's office, his intention being to telephone from there for a patrol wagon. The night station master accompanied them. Inside the room, while the station master was binding up the wound in the sweeper's forehead with a pocket handkerchief, it occurred to the policeman that in the flurry of excitement he had not found out the name of the tall and still excited belligerent. The sweeper he already knew. He asked the tall man for his name and business.

"My name," said the prisoner, "is Jason C. Mallard. I am a member of Congress."

The station master forgot to make the knot in the bandage he was tying about the sweeper's head. The sweeper forgot the pain of his new headache and the blood which trickled down his face and fell upon the front of his overalls. As though governed by the same set of wires these two swung about, and with the officer they stared at the stranger. And as they stared, recognition came into the eyes of all three, and they marvelled that before now none of them had discerned the identity of the owner of that splendid tousled head of hair and those clean-cut features, now swollen and red with an unreasonable choler. The policeman was the first to get his shocked and jostled senses back, and the first to speak. He proved himself a quick-witted person that night, this policeman did; and perhaps this helps to explain why his superior, the head of the St. Louis police department, on the very next day promoted him to be a sergeant.

But when he spoke it was not to Mallard but to the sweeper.

"Look here, Mel Harris," he said; "you call yourself a purty good Amurican, don't you?"

"You bet your life I do!" was the answer. "Ain't I got a boy in camp soldierin'?"

"Well, I got two there myself," said the policeman; "but that ain't the question now. I see you've got a kind of a little bruised place there on your head. Now then, as a good Amurican tryin' to do your duty to your country at all times, I want you to tell me how you come by that there bruise. Did somebody mebbe hit you, or as a matter of fact ain't it the truth that you jest slipped on a piece of banana peelin' or something of that nature, and fell up against the door jamb of that lunch room out yonder?"

For a moment the sweeper stared at his interrogator, dazed. Then a grin of appreciation bisected his homely red-streaked face.

"Why, it was an accident, officer," he answered. "I slipped down and hit my own self a wallop, jest like you said. Anyway, it don't amount to nothin'."

"You seen what happened, didn't you?" went on the policeman, addressing the station master. "It was a pure accident, wasn't it?"

"That's what it was—a pure accident," stated the station master.

"Then, to your knowledge, there wasn't no row of any sort occurring round here to-night?" went on the policeman.

"Not that I heard of."

"Well, if there had a-been you'd a-heard of it, wouldn't you?"

"Sure I would!"

"That's good," said the policeman. He jabbed a gloved thumb toward the two witnesses. "Then, see here, Harris! Bein' as it was an accident pure and simple and your own fault besides, nobody—no outsider—couldn't a-had nothin' to do with your gettin' hurt, could he?"

"Not a thing in the world," replied Harris.

"Not a thing in the world," echoed the station master.