A Poor Wise Man
Page 47
CHAPTER XLIX
Howard went back to the municipal building, driving furiously throughthe empty streets. The news was ominous. Small bodies of men, avoidingthe highways, were focusing at different points in the open country.The state police had been fired at from ambush, and two of them had beenkilled. They had ridden into and dispersed various gatherings in thedarkness, but only to have them re-form in other places. The enemy wasstill shadowy, elusive; it was apparently saving its ammunition. Itdid little shooting, but reports of the firing of farmhouses and ofbuildings in small, unprotected towns began to come in rapidly.
In a short time the messages began to be more significant, indicatingthat the groups were coalescing and that a revolutionary army, with thecity its objective, was coming down the river, evidently making for thebridge at Chester Street.
"They've lighted a fire they can't put out," was Howard's comment. Hismouth was very dry and his face twitching, for he saw, behind the frailbarrier of the Chester Street bridge, the quiet houses of the city, thesleeping children. He saw Grace and Lily, and Elinor. He was among thefirst to reach the river front.
All through the dawn volunteers labored at the bridge head. Membersof the Vigilance Committee, policemen and firemen, doctors, lawyers,clerks, shop-keepers, they looted the river wharves with willing,unskillful hands. They turned coal wagons on their sides, carriedpacking cases and boxes, and, under the direction of men who wore theLegion button, built skillfully and well. Willy Cameron toiled withthe others. He lifted and pulled and struggled, and in the midst ofhis labor he had again that old dream of the city. The city was a vastnumber of units, and those units were homes. Behind each of those menthere was, somewhere, in some quiet neighborhood, a home. It was fortheir homes they were fighting, for the right of children to play inpeaceful streets, for the right to go back at night to the rest they hadearned by honest labor, for the right of the hearth, of lamp-light andsunlight, of love, of happiness.
Then, in the flare of a gasoline torch, he came face to face with LouisAkers. The two men confronted each other, silently, with hostility.Neither moved aside, but it was Akers who spoke first.
"Always busy, Cameron," he said. "What'd the world do without you,anyhow?"
"Aren't you on the wrong side of this barricade?"
"Smart as ever," Akers observed, watching him intently. "As it happens,I'm here because I want to be, and because I can't get where I ought tobe."
For a furious moment Willy Cameron thought he was referring to his wife,but there was something strange in Akers' tone.
"I could be useful to you fellows," he was saying, "but it seems youdon't want help. I've been trying to see the Mayor all night."
"What do you want to see him about?"
"I'll tell him that."
Willy Cameron hesitated.
"I think it's a trick, Akers."
"All right. Then go to the devil!"
He turned away sullenly, leaving Willy Cameron still undecided. It wouldbe like the man as he knew him, this turning informer when he saw thestrength of the defense, and Cameron had a flash of intuition, too, thatAkers might see, in this new role, some possible chance to win back withLily Cardew. He saw how the man's cheap soul might dramatize itself.
"Akers!" he called.
Akers stopped, but he did not turn.
"I've got a car here. If you mean what you say, and it's straight, I'lltake you."
"Where's the car?"
On their way to it, threading in and out among the toiling crowd,Willy Cameron had a chance to observe the change in the other man, hisdrooping shoulders and the almost lassitude of his walk. He went ahead,charging the mass and going through it by sheer bulk and weight, hishands in his coat pockets, his soft hat pulled low over his face.Neither of them noticed that one of the former clerks of the MyersHousecleaning Company followed close behind, or that, holding to a tire,he rode on the rear of the Cardew automobile as it made its way into thecenter of the city.
In the car Akers spoke only once.
"Where is Howard Cardew?" he asked.
"With the Mayor, probably. I left him there."
It seemed to him that Akers found the answer satisfactory. He sat backin the deep seat, and lighted a cigarette.
The Municipal Building was under guard. Willy Cameron went up the stepsand spoke to the sentry there. It was while his back was turned that thesharp crack of a revolver rang out, and he whirled, in time to see LouisAkers fall forward on his face and lie still.
* * * * *
The shadowy groups through the countryside had commenced to coalesce.Groups of twenty became a rabble of five hundred. The five hundred grew,and joined other five hundreds. From Baxter alone over two thousandrioters, mostly foreigners, started out, and by daylight the main bodyof the enemy reached the outskirts of the city, a long, irregular lineof laughing, jostling, shouting men, constantly renewed at the rearuntil the procession covered miles of roadway. They were of all racesand all types; individually they were, many of them, like boys playingtruant from school, not quite certain of themselves, smiling and yetuneasy, not entirely wicked in intent. But they were shepherded by menwith cunning eyes, men who knew well that a mob is greater than thesum of its parts, more wicked than the individuals who compose it, morecruel, more courageous.
As it marched it laughed. It was like a lion at play, ready to leap atthe first scratch that brought blood.
Where the street car line met the Friendship Road the advance was metby the Chief of Police, on horseback and followed by a guard of mountedmen, and ordered back. The van hesitated, but it was urged ahead,pushed on by the irresistible force behind it, and it came on no longersinging, but slowly, inevitably, sullenly protesting and muttering. Itsgood nature was gone.
As the Chief turned his horse was shot under him. He took another horsefrom one of his guard, and they retired, moving slowly and with drawnrevolvers. There was no further shooting at that time, nothing butthe irresistible advance. The police could no more have held the armedrabble than they could have held the invading hordes in Belgium. At theend of the street the Chief stopped and looked back. They had passedover his dead horse as though it were not there.
In the mill district, which they had now reached, they receivedreenforcements, justifying the judgment of the conference that to haveerected their barricades there would have been to expose the city'sdefenders to attack from the rear. And the mill district sufferedcomparatively little. It was the business portion of the city towardwhich they turned their covetous eyes, the great stores, the hotels andrestaurants, the homes of the wealthy.
Pleased by the lack of opposition the mob grew more cheerful. The lionplayed. They pressed forward, wanton and jeering, firing now and then atrandom, breaking windows as they passed, looting small shops which theystripped like locusts. Their pockets bulging, and the taste of pillageforecasting what was to come, they moved onward more rapidly, shootingat upper windows or into the air, laughing, yelling, cursing, talking.From the barricades, long before the miles-long column came into view,could be heard the ominous far-off muttering of the mob.
It was when they found the bridge barricaded on the far side, however,that the lion bared its teeth and snarled. Temporarily checked by theplay of machine guns which swept the bridge and kept it clear for atime, they commenced wild, wasteful firing, from the bridge-head andfrom along the Cardew wharves. Their leaders were prepared, and sentsnipers into the bridge towers, but the machine guns continued to fire.
That the struggle would be on the bridge Doyle and his Council hadanticipated from the reports of the night before. They were preparedto take a heavy loss on the bridges, but they had not prepared for thething that defeated them; that as the mob is braver than the individual,so also it is more cowardly.
Pushed forward from the rear and unable to retreat through the densemass behind that was every moment growing denser, a few hundredsfound themselves facing the steady machine-gun fire from behind theb
arricades, and unable either to advance or to retire. Thus trapped,they turned on their own forces behind them, and tried to fight theirway to safety, but the inexorable pressure kept on, and the defenders,watching and powerless, saw men fling themselves from the bridges anddisappear in the water below, rather than advance into the machine-gunzone. The guns were not firing into the rioters, but before them, tohold them back, and into that leaden stream there were no brave spiritsto hurl themselves.
The trapped men turned on their own and battled for escape. With thesame violence which had been directed toward the city they now foughteach other, and the bridge slowly cleared. But the mob did not disperse.
It spread out on the bank across, a howling, frustrated, futile mass,disorganized and demoralized, which fired its useless guns across theriver, which seethed and tossed and struggled, and spent itself in itsown wild fury. And all the time cool-eyed men, on the wharves across,watched and waited for the time to attack.
"They're sick at their stomachs now," said an old army sergeant,watching, to Willy Cameron. "The dirty devils! They'll be starting theirfilthy work over there soon, and that's the zero hour."
Willy Cameron nodded. He had seen one young Russian boy with achild-like face venture forward alone into the fire zone and drop. Hestill lay there, on the bridge. And all of Willy Cameron was in revolt.What had he been told, that boy, that had made him ready to pour outhis young life like wine? There were others like him in that millingmultitude on the river bank across, young men who had come to Americawith a dream in their hearts, and America had done this to them. Or hadshe? She had taken them in, but they were not her own, and now, sinceshe would not take them, they would take her. Was that it? Was it thatAmerica had made them her servants, but not her children? He did notknow.
* * * * *
Robbed of the city proper, the mob turned on the mill district ithad invaded. Its dream of lust and greed was over, but it could stilldestroy.
Like a battle charge, as indeed it was, the mounted city and statepolice crossed the bridge. It was followed by the state troops on foot,by city policemen in orderly files, and then by the armed citizens.The bridge vibrated to the step of marching men, going out to fight fortheir homes. The real battle was fought there, around the Cardew mills,a battle where the loyalists were greatly outnumbered, and where therioters fought, according to their teaching, with every trick they coulddevise. Posted in upper windows they fired down from comparative safety;ambulances crossed and re-crossed the bridges. The streets were filledwith rioting men, striking out murderously with bars and spikes. Firesflamed up and burned themselves out. In one place, eight blocks ofmill-workers' houses, with their furnishings, went in a quarter of anhour.
Willy Cameron was fighting like a demon. Long ago his reserve ofammunition had given out, and he was fighting with the butt end of hisrevolver. Around him had rallied some of the men he knew best, Pink andMr. Hendricks, Doctor Smalley, Dan and Joe Wilkinson, and they stayedtogether as, street by street, the revolutionists were driven back.There were dead and wounded everywhere, injured men who had crawled intothe shelter of doorways and sat or lay there, nursing their wounds.
Suddenly, to his amazement, Willy saw old Anthony Cardew. He had somehowachieved an upper window of the mill office building, and he was showinghimself fearlessly, a rifle in his hands; in his face was a great anger,but there was more than that. Willy Cameron, thinking it over later,decided that it was perplexity. He could not understand.
He never did understand. For other eyes also had seen old AnthonyCardew. Willy Cameron, breasting the mob and fighting madly toward thedoor of the building, with Pink behind him, heard a cheer and an angryroar, and, looking up, saw that the old man had disappeared. They foundhim there later on, the rifle beside him, his small and valiant figurelooking, with eyes no longer defiant, toward the Heaven which puts, forits own strange purpose, both evil and good into the same heart.
By eleven o'clock the revolution was over. Sodden groups of men,thoroughly cowed and frightened, were on their way by back roads to theplaces they had left a few hours before. They had no longer dreams ofempire. Behind them they could see, on the horizon, the city itself,the smoke from its chimneys, the spires of its churches. Both, homesand churches, they had meant to destroy, but behind both there was theindestructible. They had failed.
They turned, looked back, and went on.
* * * * *
On the crest of a hill-top overlooking the city a man was standing,looking down to where the softened towers of the great steel bridgesrose above the river mist like fairy towers. Below him lay the city,powerful, significant, important.
The man saw the city only as a vast crucible, into which he had flunghis all, and out of which had come only defeat and failure. But thecity was not a crucible. The melting pot of a nation is not a thing ofcities, but of the human soul.
The city was not a melting pot. It was a sanctuary. The man stood silentand morose, his chin dropped on his chest, and stared down.
Beside and somewhat behind him stood a woman, a somber, passionatefigure, waiting passively. His eyes traveled from the city to her, andrested on her, contemptuous, thwarted, cynical.
"You fool," he said, "I hate you, and you know it."
But she only smiled faintly. "We'd better get away now, Jim," she said.
He got into the car.