Tongues of Flame (MacFarlane)/Chapter 33
ON THE streets of Edgewater shock had followed shock. The first swift-flying rumor that Judge Horace Allen, respected, venerated figure in the community, had been assassinated as he dealt out justice on the bench did not so much inflame as stagger. It was an assassination not of him but of every man. Why, why should this horror be—why have come to pass? So stunned minds demanded.
It is creditable to the people of Edgewater and the two adjoining towns to be able to record that this was their first reaction—a moment of profound self-examination. What was old Socatullo coming to, anyway? Only a week or two ago the assassination of their sheriff; only a day or two ago the moral collapse of that popular idol, Henry Harrington; next the discovery that he had been "collapsed" a long time ago, as indicated by the charge of embezzlement and murder; and now this Bolshevik, Soderman, shooting Judge Allen down upon the bench! These could not be mere sporadic, unrelated outbreaks of violence. There must be some underlying connection between them. They must be symptoms of some common disease.
The Blade got out an extra. The people read it and gazed dumbly from one to another. "What in the world!" they murmured, aghast; then girded up their souls.
But while the newsboys were crying the extra, a most astounding flash had come in over the Washington wire. Titmarsh read it and could hardly believe his eyes. Agitated, he let the flimsy flutter from his hand. He picked it up and read it again, slowly, chin trembling. A dispatch that the sun would cease to shine after today would hardly have startled him more. His impulse was to ring up Scanlon. "Look here, what in blazes is this darn thing?" he would have blundered hoarsely; but an instinct said, "No: wait a minute."
If the dispatch were correct, Scanlon was no man to consult. If it were true, John Boland was a colossus of hypocrisy, towering over the three towns, an arch-villain of his time. For twenty years the editor had looked to Boland for sustenance and profit. If Boland were a mere adventurer, building the fortunes of all of them upon a fraud—if Boland were ruined by this decision of the United States Supreme Court, why, he, Titmarsh, was ruined also. The ground his shop stood on was not his ground—the building that housed it was not his building—if everything that Boland had accumulated had been carried to pot by this one sweep of the gowned arm of justice, why, everything that he, Titmarsh, had accumulated, had been carried to pot also. So it seemed to his dizzy, recling mind. To him there came no speculation of pity for the broken buccaneer—he thought only of the victims, and among these victims, he felt first, and naturally, for himself.
A cold rage of resentment at Boland, a mighty impulse to revenge that was bigger than any emotion that had ever stirred in Titmarsh's pigeon breast, began to get hold of him. Instead of appealing to Scanlon, he hurried round the corner to Gaylord, President of the First National Bank—which was the actual respondent in the suit of Salzberg over a piece of land 60 × 120 the title to which, unsettled, unsettled everything and thus let loose the avalanche. Gaylord, Titmarsh judged, would have something direct, perhaps. But Gaylord did not—not yet. The great press service of the country had outspeeded all private sources of information.
The financial man stared, then read again and his face went white as paper. Titmarsh saw in its fleeting expression his own fears confirmed, saw the height and breadth and depth of a county-wide disaster paint its appalling significance upon the features of the banker—a man accustomed by profession to think of the concerns of others.
"The ———!" exclaimed James Hobson Gaylord, and when, white of eyes conspicuous, he turned his blanched face to the editor's, it revealed his own perception that John Boland was a mephistophelian cyclops. "Judas," they had called Henry Harrington five or six days ago, for voting against the interests of the community in a little matter of a prison contract. What would they call John Boland? There was no word to characterize him. He had beggared himself—that was his affair; but he had beggared every one else—that would be their affair. The whole community was landless—and on land everything is built. Everybody had been robbed of his or her title, which was to say, robbed of increment, robbed of homes, of business houses, robbed of thrift and frugality of thirty years, robbed of the things that had been bought with youth and toil and sacrifice—with the very substance of life itself; robbed of comfort now, robbed of that prospect of comfort in declining years which begins to look so sweet to people in middle life, who are the sort of people bankers come most to know and have sympathy with.
While the two men faced each other, a subeditor—who had marked some of the meaning of that first "flash," as well as noted his superior's agitation and whither he had gone bearing the flimsy in his hand—came hastily in with the more amplified account of what the United States Supreme Court had decided. Gaylord snatched and read it. It confirmed every implication his keen mind had seen in the first.
"What'll I do?" gulped Titmarsh, long trained to subserviency. Never had a piece of news affecting the welfare of Boland General come to him that he had not hurried with it to Scanlon for suggestion. He had printed or suppressed, garbled or construed, according to the effect of its publication upon the welfare of that great business operation of which every human being in the county was in some way or other a part. But Boland General was no more! It was no more than the remains of a bubble that had burst, which are not much. The two men exchanged glances; their eyes spoke before their lips could frame the words. They said: "John Boland is a dead one. The man whose personality has become a tradition, an institution—has fallen; that upreared, godlike figure has crashed to earth."
"Do?" blazed Jim Gaylord, independence of action flaming out in his decision as it had not done before in years. "Bulletin it! By God, bulletin it! It'll be every man for himself before night, and the devil take John Boland, if he don't want the mob to take him . . . the crooked old coyote!" Gaylord smashed down his fist upon his desk.
Titmarsh hurried out. With his going, the banker lost something of his self-control. "My God!" he cried, raging to and fro in his glass-walled office. "My God! . . . That old devil lied to me. He's been lying to me all these years. Business man? He's a gambler. He must have known every minute what might happen—every minute for thirty years. Think of that, will you? And when Hornblower started this thing three years ago and we wanted to lynch him and Henry Harrington stopped it, the old hypocrite interfered on Harrington's side. My God, what a nerve! . . . Well, I suppose that was part of the game—he had to be like that to make suckers of us all, to dope us into the notion that he was God-a'mighty. What a gall!" Gaylord was still walking up and down, clapping the palms of his hands together excitedly. "What a gall!" he cried, almost admiringly. "That's why I couldn't be a great big crook myself; I just haven't got gall enough." Jim Gaylord sank, collar wilting, although it was not a warm day, into his chair, and began to swear, softly, fervently, almost unctuously.
Around the corner Titmarsh had stopped his press and was himself pounding feverishly upon a typewriter. He was preparing the bulletin. The rising venom in a small nature inflamed his mind, made him do the clearest, the most convincing piece of writing he had ever done in his life. Into one hundred words he got the succinct story of a colossal crime which, justly if tardily overtaking its perpetrator, had brought cataclysmic disaster upon innocent thousands.
Within five minutes a copy was pasted in the window and another was being transcribed by brush into huge sheets that could be read at fifty feet, while a third was being rapidly set in half-inch type—a size that would make the story all but fill the first page of the second extra of the Blade for that day.
Before the larger sheets could be pasted in the window, a group had gathered about the typewritten one; before its duplicate was past the typesetters, the sidewalk in front of the Blade office was blocked with people who had gathered to stare with straining eyes; and within ten minutes after the second extra was in the hands of newsboys hawking hoarsely, the street itself was blocked; not even police lines could have been established.
Messengers, automobiles, telephone wires hurried the news about. Housewives listened at the receiver sickly, or stared wide-eyed over back fences at the white faces of neighbor women who purveyed the story to them. These telephone conversations and over-the-back-fence group-discussions were alike exclamatory—fragmentary.
"Mr. Boland? Such a good man?" tone of utter incredulity.
"Well, if he's that kind of a man"
"I never could see why people were so crazy about that man"
"Of course, he'll have to pay it back."
"Why, he was little better than a robber."
"But can he pay it back?"
"He's rich."
"He's got millions."
"He's a beggar."
"But the decree says he has to pay back—make restitution for every log—every lath—every stick of timber—why, all he's got has to go back to the Government"
"Not to the Government—to the Salisheutte Indians. They're only a small tribe now."
And so the gossip went.
Men in offices and men in stores and men in shops and mills heard it and gazed at each other incredulously. "What's it mean?" they asked, and wet dry lips and felt a strange quaking in their hearts which seemed to sense or understand before their minds did. What does it mean to have the land, the foundation of society, plucked out from under? It means chaos—paralysis—Russia!
Telephones jingled more persistently, wives calling up husbands, husbands calling up wives who with their consorts had scraped and saved through tedious years of instalment and interest-paying, in order to call their homes their own—and now to learn that they had paid their money to a man who did not own what he had sold them. Lawyers were being consulted and they with grave, steadied voices gave grave, unsteadying opinions.
"If it's taken away from us, Boland will pay it back—that old hypocrite—or I'll dig his eyes out myself," one wife shrieked madly.
An excited small store-keeper closed his doors and went rushing to join the milling mass before the newspaper office. The example was contagious; others closed their doors. It became epidemic. The larger stores had emptied themselves of patrons; soon the very salespeople had begun to trickle out. A suspension of all business activities appeared to declare itself. By four o'clock Schuler's, the biggest store in town, had closed. Schuler was not there—he was closeted with Gaylord and Foster and other wiser heads—if there were any wiser—trying to make sure of understanding, trying to behave as rational beings instead of stripped savages. Their conference was in an upstairs room over the bank as affording greater privacy.
"There isn't a loan—there isn't a mortgage that I can foreclose," Gaylord was saying, "because—well, because the title isn't there—four hundred thousand loaned by the Savings Branch on real estate and I can't collect a dollar of it."
The banker turned to the window and gazed moodily out at the signs along the street, swinging so blandly unconscious that they irritated Gaylord. Didn't they know—the fools, Tuttle and Rogers, that that was not their drug store? Ryan, that that was not his plumbing shop? Ellison that "Oh, my Lord!" he groaned, and turned back to the group, as he recalled another phase. "The new improvement bonds! We'll never sell 'em now. And the Federal Reserve loans! Why, fellows, our credit is shot to pieces. It'll take years—years of litigation to"
"Aw, let's cool off until tomorrow and then see how it looks," urged Schuler.
"Tomorrow?" snorted Gaylord, angrily. "You fool! There ain't any tomorrow. Hark!" he interrupted himself and cocked a listening ear. "Hear that, will you?"
Up from the streets came the roar of the angry throng, massing, milling, menacing.
Yet even up to this time there had been those who took the news quite calmly, young clerks in stores who owned nothing, workmen on the docks and in the mills who owned no real property nor hoped to. The land was still there, wasn't it? The stores still stood—and the mills. Somebody owned them—somebody would pay wages. So at the first it was only the propertied classes who were greatly excited beyond curiosity. But the unpropertied began to see that their self-interest was affected also. With values unsettled, business would be unstable; there would be less money to buy with, fewer goods to be purchased and fewer clerks needed to sell them; less work, less prosperity, less . . . It took not more than two hours for everybody to understand that this was everybody's calamity; that from the top scum to the bottom slime nobody in Socatullo County was immune. No logs from the hills meant no wages for taking them out; no lumber from the mills meant no wages for turning logs into dimension-stuff that went into the holds and onto the decks of ships; and no wages meant—starvation! And that is property catastrophe reduced to its final and inevitable terms.
Starvation! The mass thought of hunger makes for panic. Nobody had given the order to close Schuler's; it just closed. So with the other business places. And the same thing was happening on the docks; longshoremen dropped their hooks and slings swung empty from the booms of ships. It was happening in the very mills themselves. Saws turned and there were none to feed them, endless chains rattled but bore no grist of logs nor of lumber; suction pipes wheezed no streams of sawdust to the incinerators. The workingmen had sensed now the astounding significance of the news and the impulse to labor was paralyzed; they went out—to see about it.
The engineers heard this and turned off the power. They too went out. Silent, barn-like with only here and there the whirl of a wheel, the rhythmic exhaust of a jet of steam that itself seemed to pant discouraged: "What's the use! What's the use!" Those great hives of industry, for the first time unproducing, became huge cavernous solitudes.
But there was nothing of solitude about the streets of Edgewater. In front of the Blade office and about the corner by the First National they were a-jam and more or less a-rumble, the crowd more excited and excitable with every moment. Inflaming rumors flew about; nobody had all the information; some got fragments of it very vividly.
"What's it mean, Andy?" shouted one man, hopelessly wedged in a thick growth of shoulders, to an acquaintance who, peering from the vantage of a barrel, was getting a close-up of the latest bulletin.
"It just means our titles are gone—plumb gone—that's what!"
"Gone where?"—incredulously.
"Gone to thirty or forty dirty Indians. That's who we've been working for, fellows—a bunch of mangy bucks and rheumatic old squaws, and the guy that put us to work for 'em, that made us do it, was old John Boland."
The crowd was doubly, triply incensed: incensed because he whom they had venerated as a god had turned out a gigantic gambler; incensed because he had let the town grow and thrive in confidence when he knew it rested upon a trap-door to an abyss like this; besides they were incensed by their own fears, their own meannesses and malices, which any crisis of emotions may stir up in any group of human beings.
"Lynch him!" "Lynch the old devil!" The cry was lifted and carried far. Almost immediately a spray of humanity jetted out from the throng like the stream of a hose and led a mad dash to that squat three-story block-long building in which were the offices of Boland General.
But already J. B. had heard about the mob. "The ingrates!" he had been barking. "The cattle! They never think of my losses—it's theirs they worry about. Can't they see—dod gast 'em—they'll be protected? It'll all iron out somehow for everybody but me. It's me that's broke . . . but I'll come back. I'll show 'em—I'll show the whole dod-gasted"
A confused sound began to come to his windows from the street in front, and he was first of the little group of counselors to gather in his office—Scanlon, Quackenbaugh, Mead and others—to sense its meaning—a low mouthing that grew into a strident angry clamor and the shouting of a name.
"Go out to them! Make a speech to 'em!" rasped Mr. Boland excitedly at Scanlon. "Tell 'em it isn't clear yet; tell 'em we haven't had time to weigh all the implications; tell 'em I'll make good on everything. I always have and I always will. Anyway, pacify 'em, pacify 'em!"
"It's you they're paging," suggested the Chief Fixer drily.
"I'll go! Oh, I'll face them," fumed the ruined magnate, with another flare of his old imperiousness, and rising as if he would throw his window up and shout down to the menacing masses: "Here I am—answerable!"
"Better not, Mr. Boland," warned Scanlon soberly. "Better not—they're not themselves exactly. They're a bunch of Indians and they're getting worse. Better use the private exit and get away for an hour or two."
Scanlon's words were uttered in just the tone to carry conviction to a tenacious man who nevertheless believes in discretion. Mr. Boland fidgeted for a while, hating to show yellow and hating to be rash too. Eventually he took the Chief Fixer's advice; and it was well that he did, for thirty minutes later a geyser-burst of mad humanity roared up the stairway and streamed along the corridor into his private office, through doors which Oskison opened obsequiously and hastily, knowing that they would be battered down, if he did not.
Missing Old Two Blades, the mob took small vengeance on his property; disarranging, overturning, smashing and destroying, then rushing back downward to the street, leaving the upper purlieus of Boland General looking as if a herd of wild cattle had trampled through.