Tongues of Flame (MacFarlane)/Chapter 35
MORNING—gray, dismal morning, came to find the green earth scarred with blackened ruin. The blue of the inlet was bordered on both sides with a wide band of mourning which told where Boland's mills and docks and packing houses and lumber piles had been. There remained intact only isolated public structures like the courthouse and jail, the city hall, the high school and the library. Of the business district what stood up among the crumbling walls most sturdily was a stout three-story affair, its exterior scorched and blackened, its interior gutted, its glassless windows like hollow sockets in a skull—and this was the most that remained of all John Boland's business structures.
It was at the edges of the town that the refugees, dumping their domestic wreckage around them, had stopped their panicky flight; and daylight made all their miseries plainer. Comfortless, breakfastless, they turned back, singly and in family parties, disconsolate yet curious, toward their ruins. Before glowing pits of ashes, with gaunt chimneys standing tombstone-like over the graves of homes, they stared dumb, wretched, self-convicted. Lawlessness had punished lawlessness. They had sown the wind and reaped the whirlwind. But that was past. The question was—what should they do now?
That was what Salzberg himself was thinking. Leaving his children with the chance neighbors whom he had found beside him when morning came, he stumbled across the town, heart-heavy. Led by some strange fascination, his feet were guiding him to that fatal spot, the First National Bank site, the only piece of real estate to which he had ever laid the shadow of a claim. In defiance of his principles he had bought that alleged title, to annoy his economic enemy, the president of that bank. Out of sheer perversity he had been a tool of Hornblower to push that claim, pushing from court to court to—this.
His mind was as full of debris as the street through which he picked his way. He wasn't a Marxian any more—not for the present. He had no philosophy to cope with a situation like this; and his mind was still wabbling when he came to a stand before a stone building with marble casements; a gutted wreck that stood on a corner.
Behind this wreck was a seething basement, full of the junk of printing presses; in front of it, in the street, were the remains of rather lavish office fittings, highly polished desks and chairs of mahogany, lying as they had been dragged. Some articles had burned afterward; some had been badly blistered and scorched; others, unscathed of fire, had been broken by rough handling. It was just here that Salzberg's eyes, roving curiously, encountered that which gave him a start. Amid this street-wide, chaotic solitude of tangled wires, broken glass and wreckage of half-consumed furniture, with a dead horse adding its grisly note to the picture, there sat, uncannily, an impassive figure in a swivel chair—a stoutish man, well dressed, with shoulders bowed, and a green velour hat pulled low over his eyes. The crown and brim of the hat were lightly sprinkled with ashes. Immobile, elbows on chair-arms, fingers laced across his chest, he might have been dead, but that the drooping eyelids were not quite closed and the thumbs twiddled occasionally.
The man was Gaylord. The chair he sat in was his chair—the president's chair. Some dream had brought him back as near as possible to the scene of his business activities, and held him there absorbed—thinking, thinking, thinking. Thinking what it had all come to—this thirty years of his living, his striving; thinking what an insane complex a mob is, anyway; how unnecessary it had been to burn Boland's building: how much more complicated it had made the situation and speculating whether there was any relief, any way out. There must be, of course.
Salzberg's eyes narrowed at the sight of his ancient enemy. He bristled and gloated to see the man so overwhelmed. It was good to find one representative of the capitalistic class stripped to the clothes he wore, to the chair he sat in.
"Vell, Gaylord," he rasped, in that high, unfeeling tone of his. "Vell, Gay—" But the memory of his so recent grief checked this gloating challenge.
The banker started up aggressively. "Hello! It's you, is it?" he recognized, features hardening. "You started all this trouble, you know."
"Trouble!" ejaculated the man, with an absurdly hurt expression. "Vell, I don' vant no more; I got trouble enough py my own self." Then his fraying voice broke. "You—you can keep your tam lot," he blurted; "I don't vant nottings but my Hulda." His voice gulped and his eyes spurted tears. "I lost my Hul—da! She died on me last night already right py her sidevalk, ven ve vas moving out."
Gaylord's eyes had widened with amazement; now they rounded with sympathy. "Hulda? . . . By Jehosaphat, that's tough!" he exclaimed in shocked sincerity, springing to his feet. Before he knew it, Gaylord had laid a sympathetic hand upon the shoulder of this man whom he had for years regarded as the most dangerous citizen in the community—although to be sure, he had, in the last twenty-four hours, changed his mind as to who was the most dangerous citizen.
And Salzberg's heart craved sympathy; it was the loneliest, emptiest thing in all creation just now. "Py Gott, Gaylord," he cried brokenly, "I didn't know you vas human at all before. I didn't know dat any panker vas human." The great hulking fellow toppled upon Gaylord's shoulder, weeping out his grief for Hulda, who had never looked upon the banker in her life without putting out her tongue at him.
Gaylord was surprised to find himself not minding this damp embrace a bit—not finding it embarrassing even—honored by it rather. He wept a little too, and flung an arm about that stout longshoreman's frame which quivered now like a tree in a blast. "It's all right, Adolph," he comforted. "It's all right. Damned if I ever knew the president of a Socialist Local had any soft side to him either."
"I guess ve all got a soft side to us," apologized Salzberg, twisting his head to wipe an eye on Gaylord's shoulder, "ven somet'ing hits us hard enough already."
"We are all hit that hard today," suggested Gay lord, "we're all softened up a bit."
Now this was tactful and it might be prophetic, but it was not exactly accurate. The community heart was not softened—yet. It was mad, bewildered, sore. Just now, in particular, the town was hungry. Breakfastless, besides physically exhausted, it was irritably unable to cope with the problem of immediate needs—yet feeling peevishly that somebody should cope with them.
Babies were crying for milk and in all that blackened area there was no milk; children clamored for bread and there was no bread; citizens looked about for some vestige of organization or leadership and there was no organization. Mayor Foster, the chief of police, the chamber of commerce—they had been accustomed so long to look for leadership to that golden circle, the cabinet of Boland General, that they looked there now. But the golden circle today was brass. Today the cabinet was not active—in leadership at least. Calls to nearby cities should have gone out for succor. Had they? Nobody knew. A statement of what the condition and the needs of the populace would be this morning should have been flashed out by wire or radio or messenger to the governor of the state while yet the flames were burning. Had it? Nobody knew. Everybody wondered; everybody felt lonely, desolate, abandoned. Everybody was realizing, of course, that by now a charitable and sympathetic world was reading of their calamity and that by afternoon supplies of every sort would be rushing to them. But now?
No food—no stoves to cook the food on—no water to cook it with or wash it down—hunger, faintness, misery! And the first pangs of hunger are the sharpest, the most desolating. Empty-stomached the refugees turned and twisted in aimless, forlorn procession among their ruins—immensely cast down, immensely sore and irritable. Everything oppressed, the ashes, the debris, the ghostly marching columns of thick gray smoke from the smoldering embers. A certain stillness also oppressed.
This stillness was among the strange new things. The mills were accustomed to hum, the trolley cars to screech and clamor; but the mills were embers this morning and the trolley cars also, while the power lines were broken. So there spread a vast and mournful stillness over all. This reacted on the people. They spoke in hushed, funereal tones.
The very crying of the babies for milk had grown plaintive and hopeless and subdued; when in upon this gencral stillness there broke a rumbling sound. It was the trundle of heavy wheels and the roar of motor exhausts—a lot of wheels, a lot of motors, eight or ten of them at least—huge white-painted trucks, with a man in somewhat bedraggled business garments sitting beside the driver of the first, pointing here and there to pepperings of refugees amid the ashes, and then standing up and motioning with his arms to the convoy behind him—a truck down this street, a truck down that street and so on till the white trucks were scattering themselves through the chaos.
"Milk!" shouted somebody. "They're bringing milk."
"A quart to every family!" megaphoned drivers, through their hands. "Bring something to put it in—if you've got it."
Yes—milk. Somebody had gone fifty miles to a highway leading toward a great city and cut off and commandeered by sheer power of personal persuasion a portion of that city's morning milk supply; and not only commandeered it, but personally conducted it, to the spot where it was needed. Yet it was doubtful if one of the townspeople, so intent with hurrying this distribution of the milk, recognized that nondescript figure standing beside the driver's seat of the foremost of these trucks, while his eyes surveyed again the smoking field of destruction. He might have been a hobo who had bummed a ride, and now was staring in mere curiosity.
Actually, his survey was swift and business-like. It had a military significance, and as he concluded it there sputtered up an army side-car, with its bathtub empty. At the same moment there appeared winding out of the green of the channel road, another and a longer line of trucks, dun-painted things this time, with men in khaki at the wheel.
The bedraggled man leaped down and stepped into the side-car which, quite as if it had come there for him, turned and sputtered back to meet this other column of trucks. These big dun-colored carriers were pyramided high with what might have been bricks, or tiles—odd-looking round, high-domed tiles. The man in the side-car waved these trucks one by one, out toward the bordering area where incipient camps sprang up and into the smoldering residence districts where hungry refugees knotted and grouped.
"Bread! It's bread!" shouted excited voices. A cheer was raised: "Bread! Hurrah for bread!" In a minute or two these jolly khaki fellows atop the trucks were tossing spinning loaves to hundreds of eager hands upraised to catch. The air was full of bread; and then all at once everybody's hands were full of it. Women clutched the dear loaves to their breasts and hurried to the little camps. Men bore it, all that their arms could hold of it, tossing off a loaf to whoever had none; boys broke the loaves open, dug the white centers out and crowded them into their mouths.
Behind this second detachment other motor traffic appeared, trundling more slowly over the highway—a seemingly endless procession of queer-looking things like stoves on wheels. Again the young man in the bedraggled business suit waved his arms.
There were more side-cars appearing now, carrying officers—men with captain's and lieutenant's bars upon their shoulders, and even one with a yellow maple leaf: and they all stopped where that bedraggled man was standing; they hailed him, some familiarly, all respectfully; they waited for his nod and then they gave their orders; for behind the field-kitchens were coming yet other huge trucks, caravan on caravan of them.
Presently there was a field kitchen in every block of the residence district and at intervals of one hundred yards around that circle of temporary camps and dumps of household goods; and from each stack there poured smoke and from each stove there floated tantalizing aromas. Huge caldrons of coffce and potatoes were boiling and huge caldrons of that noblest institution of army cookery, beef stew, were simmering and loosing their appetizing fragrances on the smoky air. And so it came to pass that before twelve o'clock every one of these refugees had had at least some portion of food, and some had had a gorge.
But long before that, too, lines of conical khaki tents were springing up; and by the time excited mayors of western cities could call together sympathetic meetings and arrange for those carloads and trainloads of supplies which generous-hearted people are always so quick to hurry to neighbors in distress, Edgewater had had one meal and knew that it would not miss another—knew also where it would sleep that night—on army beds with army mattresses and under army blankets.
There sprang up an instant feeling of gratitude for all this splendid succor and a marveling that it should have come so soon. Now, that it could come at all was due to the tolerable proximity of a vast army camp with its warehouses comfortably filled with supplies and its many thousand men available for this happy service of relief, which soldiers would much rather render than fight. But the red tape? Whose sharp shears had cut it so quickly? That answer was easy—a major-general. But what had so moved the major-general? That answer would have been more difficult for the people of Edgewater to comprehend. It was the bedraggled, scarce-noticed figure in the citizen's clothes—he it was and something in the past of him of which his townsmen were but faintly cognizant.
Nevertheless these stricken people speculated upon the fact. Some person or persons had rendered a tremendous service. Who was it? Talk of it ran from tent to tent. One thing became clear. Whoever brought the army, the army had brought the relief, and by one o'clock in the afternoon, a self-appointed delegation of three citizens of Edgewater was making its way to a largish oblong tent at the corner of Whitman Avenue and Tenth Street, in the very heart of the burned residential district. Before this tent stood a dun limousine, with two black stars painted on its side, and with sidecars parked about. Within the tent sat the general. Now there is something about a major-general in uniform standing up to greet visitors, which rather fills the picture. Foster, Gaylord and Titmarsh envisaged only the general.
"Don't thank me," protested that gallant officer, tersely. "Thank Harrington, there! Thank 'Hellfire'? The general gestured to where at a table sat a man in the uniform of a colonel. He was the general's chief-of-staff; and beside him, as he had been beside him all day long, making suggestions, approving plans, directing officers who came and went, was the man in the business suit—still looking somewhat bedraggled—Henry Harrington. That's the man you owe your thanks to for getting us here as promptly as we did."
The committee stared. It had almost forgotten Henry Harrington. Titmarsh remembered having heard a rumor that this lesser Judas was out of jail and had been seen around; but this—this sight of him in relations of intimacy with the major-general; this revelation that it was to him the town was indebted for not missing even a single meal, for the lives of many of its babies, for so swift a reduction of its inevitable physical suffering—this was rather overwhelming to Titmarsh. To Foster and Gaylord it was rebuking. They stared stiffly—old memories rising.
"Well," glared the general, "why don't you thank him?"
Gaylord was a brusque man, but capable of some fineness of perception. He was considerably shaken; but Foster was angered, as well as totally confounded.
"This man," he said protestingly to the general, "has broken out of jail."
"And lucky for you people, believe me!" barked the general.
"He is awaiting trial for murder; besides which he is" Foster began sullenly to argue.
"Don't talk that piffle to me!" roared the general, livid with wrath. "Don't have the effrontery to repeat one of those damn-fool charges against this man with which the papers have been full the last few days. I know they're lies if you don't. Henry Harrington couldn't do a dishonorable thing if he wanted to. That's probably why you've got him in jail. He offended this old hypocrite that you've all been saying your prayers to and he put him in jail. Get out of here before I become violent, please. I don't want your thanks and I'm damned sure Harrington doesn't."
When the community learned that Henry Harrington was out of jail; that he was being harbored in the general's tent; that he was advising and disposing and practically issuing orders; that, in fact, it was he who had got the army relief in here six or eight hours before the first of it could otherwise have arrived—to say nothing of having gone out and commandeered that truck-train of milk, which, everybody agreed, was a godsend, the pendulum began to swing—values to assume new proportions. The crime of Henry Harrington in betraying his constituents for a single day appeared insignificant compared with the crime of John Boland in betraying them all for a lifetime.
Indeed there was a kind of amnesty granted to Henry that very afternoon—so far as his crime against the community was concerned. There arose a feeling that he had wiped it out.
And when they heard late in the afternoon that he, after an affectionate good-by from the general, had walked calmly back into the jail, they began to feel that Henry Harrington was really a superior person although a murderer.
That night fifteen or twenty gaunt men and half a dozen worn, anxious women, leaders in the leaderless mass of burned out townspeople, met in the courthouse to take counsel what to do. Mayor Foster presided, and Lawyer Moses Duffield had the last word.
"It stands to reason that there is a remedy," he was summing up. "The Court has found what the law is; that's all it can do. But Congress can grant relief. What we'll need is somebody to represent us before Congress—somcebody that we all believe in—that we know is honest and that they know is honest back there; somebody good at convincing individual congressmen and individual senators; somebody that we could appoint a sort of commissioner to represent us and lobby for us—using that word in its good sense. It all depends on Congress."
Congress? They felt as helpless as before. Congress was such an august, inchoate, far-away body.
"Somebody we all believe in—and we all know is honest," reflected Herman Schuyler and pursed his lips.
"But it isn't only Congress," perceived Mayor Foster. "It's these dirty Siwashes we've got to deal with, isn't it, Moses?"
"The Salisheuttes? Yes; they are our landlords tonight," affirmed old Moses with simple conviction.
"It's got to be somebody that can deal with the Siwashes."
His auditors looked from one to another hopelessly. Where was there' such a man—whom they all could trust because they all knew he was honest? Since yesterday they hardly trusted themselves.
The meeting didn't exactly adjourn, it didn't exactly break up, it just wasted away; here and there a bewildered man, here and there a couple of gloomy women got up and went out to stumble through an area of broken bricks, clinking glass and ashes, guided by the faint gleams of candles in tents, until they came to where they and theirs would sleep that night.