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+Project Gutenberg's The Thunders of Silence, by Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Thunders of Silence
+
+Author: Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
+
+Release Date: March 29, 2008 [EBook #24936]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE THUNDERS OF SILENCE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jeannie Howse, Bryan Ness and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+_The Thunders of Silence_
+
+
+
+
+BY IRVIN S. COBB
+
+FICTION
+
+  THOSE TIMES AND THESE
+  LOCAL COLOR
+  OLD JUDGE PRIEST
+  FIBBLE, D.D.
+  BACK HOME
+  THE ESCAPE OF MR. TRIMM
+
+WIT AND HUMOR
+
+  "SPEAKING OF OPERATIONS----"
+  EUROPE REVISED
+  ROUGHING IT DE LUXE
+  COBB'S BILL OF FARE
+  COBB'S ANATOMY
+
+MISCELLANY
+
+  THE THUNDERS OF SILENCE
+  "SPEAKING OF PRUSSIANS----"
+  PATHS OF GLORY
+
+GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
+NEW YORK
+
+   [Illustration: THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ARE A MIGHTY PATIENT LOT.]
+
+
+
+
+_The Thunders
+of Silence_
+
+
+By
+_Irvin S. Cobb_
+
+Author of "Paths of Glory," "Speaking
+of Prussians----," etc.
+
+
+ILLUSTRATED
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+New York
+George H. Doran Company
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1918,
+BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY
+PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+
+
+
+
+_ILLUSTRATIONS_
+
+
+The American people are a mighty patient lot.      _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                             PAGE
+
+The lone wolf wasn't a lone wolf any longer. He had a pack
+  to rally about him                                           16
+
+That's the thing he feeds on--Vanity                           32
+
+He may or may not keep faith but you can bet he always
+  keeps a scrap-book                                           48
+
+
+
+
+_The Thunders of Silence_
+
+
+Some people said Congressman Mallard had gone mad. These were his
+friends, striving out of the goodness of their hearts to put the best
+face on what at best was a lamentable situation. Some said he was a
+traitor to his country. These were his enemies, personal, political
+and journalistic. Some called him a patriot who put humanity above
+nationality, a new John the Baptist come out of the wilderness to
+preach a sobering doctrine of world-peace to a world made drunk on
+war. And these were his followers. Of the first--his friends--there
+were not many left. Of the second group there were millions that
+multiplied themselves. Of the third there had been at the outset but a
+timorous and furtive few, and they mostly men and women who spoke
+English, if they spoke it at all, with the halting speech and the
+twisted idiom that betrayed their foreign birth; being persons who
+found it entirely consistent to applaud the preachment of planetic
+disarmament out of one side of their mouths, and out of the other side
+of their mouths to pray for the success at arms of the War Lord whose
+hand had shoved the universe over the rim of the chasm. But each
+passing day now saw them increasing in number and in audacity. Taking
+courage to themselves from the courage of their apostle, these, his
+disciples, were beginning to shout from the housetops what once they
+had only dared whisper beneath the eaves. Disloyalty no longer
+smouldered; it was blazing up. It crackled, and threw off firebrands.
+
+Of all those who sat in judgment upon the acts and the utterances of
+the man--and this classification would include every articulate
+creature in the United States who was old enough to be reasonable--or
+unreasonable--only a handful had the right diagnosis for the case.
+Here and there were to be found men who knew he was neither crazed nor
+inspired; and quite rightly they put no credence in the charge that he
+had sold himself for pieces of silver to the enemy of his own nation.
+They knew what ailed the Honourable Jason Mallard--that he was a
+victim of a strangulated ambition, of an egotistic hernia. He was
+hopelessly ruptured in his vanity. All his life he had lived on love
+of notoriety, and by that same perverted passion he was being eaten
+up. Once he had diligently besought the confidence and the affections
+of a majority of his fellow citizens; now he seemed bent upon
+consolidating their hate for him into a common flood and laving
+himself in it. Well, if such was his wish he was having it; there was
+no denying that.
+
+In the prime of his life, before he was fifty, it had seemed that
+almost for the asking the presidency might have been his. He had been
+born right, as the saying goes, and bred right, to make suitable
+presidential timber. He came of fine clean blends of blood. His father
+had been a descendant of Norman-English folk who settled in Maryland
+before the Revolution; the family name had originally been Maillard,
+afterward corrupted into Mallard. His mother's people were
+Scotch-Irish immigrants of the types that carved out their homesteads
+with axes on the spiny haunches of the Cumberlands. In the Civil War
+his father had fought for the Union, in a regiment of borderers; two
+of his uncles had been partisan rangers on the side of the
+Confederacy. If he was a trifle young to be of that generation of
+public men who were born in unchinked log cabins of the wilderness or
+prairie-sod shanties, at least he was to enjoy the subsequent
+political advantage of having come into the world in a two-room house
+of unpainted pine slabs on the sloped withers of a mountain in East
+Tennessee. As a child he had been taken by his parents to one of the
+states which are called pivotal states. There he had grown up--farm
+boy first, teacher of a district school, self-taught lawyer, county
+attorney, state legislator, governor, congressman for five terms, a
+floor leader of his party--so that by ancestry and environment, by the
+ethics of political expediency and political geography, by his own
+record and by the traditions of the time, he was formed to make an
+acceptable presidential aspirant.
+
+In person he was most admirably adapted for the rôle of statesman. He
+had a figure fit to set off a toga, a brow that might have worn a crown
+with dignity. As an orator he had no equal in Congress or, for that
+matter, out of it. He was a burning mountain of eloquence, a veritable
+human Vesuvius from whom, at will, flowed rhetoric or invective, satire
+or sentiment, as lava might flow from a living volcano. His mind
+spawned sonorous phrases as a roe shad spawns eggs. He was in all
+outward regards a shape of a man to catch the eye, with a voice to
+cajole the senses as with music of bugles, and an oratory to inspire.
+Moreover, the destiny which shaped his ends had mercifully denied him
+that which is a boon to common men but a curse to public men. Jason
+Mallard was without a sense of humour. He never laughed at others; he
+never laughed at himself. Certain of our public leaders have before now
+fallen into the woful error of doing one or both of these things.
+Wherefore they were forever after called humourists--and ruined. When
+they said anything serious their friends took it humorously, and when
+they said anything humorously their enemies took it seriously. But
+Congressman Mallard was safe enough there.
+
+Being what he was--a handsome bundle of selfishness, coated over with
+a fine gloss of seeming humility, a creature whose every instinct was
+richly mulched in self-conceit and yet one who simulated a deep
+devotion for mankind at large--he couldn't make either of these
+mistakes.
+
+Upon a time the presidential nomination of his party--the dominant
+party, too--had been almost within his grasp. That made his losing it
+all the more bitter. Thereafter he became an obstructionist, a fighter
+outside of the lines of his own party and not within the lines of the
+opposing party, a leader of the elements of national discontent and
+national discord, a mouthpiece for all those who would tear down the
+pillars of the temple because they dislike its present tenants. Once
+he had courted popularity; presently--this coming after his
+re-election to a sixth term--he went out of his way to win
+unpopularity. His invectives ate in like corrosives, his metaphors bit
+like adders. Always he had been like a sponge to sop up adulation; now
+he was to prove that when it came to withstanding denunciation his
+hide was the hide of a rhino.
+
+This war came along, and after more than two years of it came our
+entry into it. For the most part, in the national capital and out of
+it, artificial lines of partisan division were wiped out under a tidal
+wave of patriotism. So far as the generality of Americans were
+concerned, they for the time being were neither Democrats nor
+Republicans; neither were they Socialists nor Independents nor
+Prohibitionists. For the duration of the war they were Americans,
+actuated by a common purpose and stirred by a common danger. Afterward
+they might be, politically speaking, whatever they chose to be, but
+for the time being they were just Americans. Into this unique
+condition Jason Mallard projected himself, an upstanding reef of
+opposition to break the fine continuity of a mighty ground swell of
+national unity and national harmony.
+
+Brilliant, formidable, resourceful, seemingly invulnerable, armoured
+in apparent disdain for the contempt and the indignation of the masses
+of the citizenship, he fought against and voted against the breaking
+off of diplomatic relations with Germany; fought against the draft,
+fought against the war appropriations, fought against the plans for a
+bigger navy, the plans for a great army; fought the first Liberty Loan
+and the second; he fought, in December last, against a declaration of
+war with Austro-Hungary. And, so far as the members of Congress were
+concerned, he fought practically single-handed.
+
+His vote cast in opposition to the will of the majority meant nothing;
+his voice raised in opposition meant much. For very soon the avowed
+pacifists and the secret protagonists of Kultur, the blood-eyed
+anarchists and the lily-livered dissenters, the conscientious
+objectors and the conscienceless I.W.W. group, saw in him a buttress
+upon which to stay their cause. The lone wolf wasn't a lone wolf
+any longer--he had a pack to rally about him, yelping approval of his
+every word. Day by day he grew stronger and day by day the sinister
+elements behind him grew bolder, echoing his challenges against the
+Government and against the war. With practically every newspaper in
+America, big and little, fighting him; with every influential magazine
+fighting him; with the leaders of the Administration fighting him--he
+nevertheless loomed on the national sky line as a great sinister
+figure of defiance and rebellion.
+
+   [Illustration: THE LONE WOLF WASN'T A LONE WOLF ANY LONGER. HE
+   HAD A PACK TO RALLY ABOUT HIM.]
+
+Deft word chandlers of the magazines and the daily press coined terms
+of opprobrium for him. He was the King of Copperheads, the Junior
+Benedict Arnold, the Modern Judas, the Second Aaron Burr; these things
+and a hundred others they called him; and he laughed at hard names and
+in reply coined singularly apt and cruel synonyms for the more
+conspicuous of his critics. The oldest active editor in the
+country--and the most famous--called upon the body of which he was a
+member to impeach him for acts of disloyalty, tending to give aid and
+comfort to the common enemy. The great president of a great university
+suggested as a proper remedy for what seemed to ail this man Mallard
+that he be shot against a brick wall some fine morning at sunrise. At
+a monstrous mass meeting held in the chief city of Mallard's home
+state, a mass meeting presided over by the governor of that state,
+resolutions were unanimously adopted calling upon him to resign his
+commission as a representative. His answer to all three was a speech
+which, as translated, was shortly thereafter printed in pamphlet form
+by the Berlin Lokal-Anzeiger and circulated among the German soldiers
+at the Front.
+
+For you see Congressman Mallard felt safe, and Congressman Mallard was
+safe. His buckler was the right of free speech; his sword, the
+argument that he stood for peace through all the world, for
+arbitration and disarmament among all the peoples of the world.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was on the evening of a day in January of this present year that
+young Drayton, Washington correspondent for the New York Epoch, sat
+in the office of his bureau on the second floor of the Hibbett
+Building, revising his account of a scene he had witnessed that
+afternoon from the press gallery of the House. He had instructions
+from his managing editor to cover the story at length. At ten o'clock
+he had finished what would make two columns in type and was polishing
+off his opening paragraphs before putting the manuscript on the wire
+when the door of his room opened and a man came in--a shabby,
+tremulous figure. The comer was Quinlan.
+
+Quinlan was forty years old and looked fifty. Before whisky got him
+Quinlan had been a great newspaper man. Now that his habits made it
+impossible for him to hold a steady job he was become a sort of news
+tipster. Occasionally also he did small lobbying of a sort; his
+acquaintance with public men and his intimate knowledge of Washington
+officialdom served him in both these precarious fields of endeavour.
+The liquor he drank--whenever and wherever he could get it--had
+bloated his face out of all wholesome contour and had given to his
+stomach, a chronic distention, but had depleted his frame and shrunken
+his limbs so that physically he was that common enough type of the
+hopeless alcoholic--a meagre rack of a man burdened amidships by an
+unhealthy and dropsical plumpness.
+
+At times--when he was not completely sodden--when he had in him just
+enough whisky, to stimulate his soaked brain, and yet not enough of it
+to make him maudlin--he displayed flashes of a one-time brilliancy
+which by contrast with his usual state made the ruinous thing he had
+done to himself seem all the more pitiable.
+
+Drayton of the Epoch was one of the newspaper men upon whom he
+sponged. Always preserving the fiction, that he was borrowing because
+of temporary necessity, he got small sums of money out of Drayton from
+time to time, and, in exchange, gave the younger man bits of helpful
+information. It was not so much news that he furnished Drayton as it
+was insight into causes working behind political and diplomatic
+events. He came in now without knocking and stood looking at Drayton
+with an ingratiating flicker in his dulled eyes.
+
+"Hello, Quinlan!" said Drayton. "What's on your mind to-night?"
+
+"Nothing, until you get done there," said Quinlan, letting himself
+flop down into a chair across the desk from Drayton. "Go ahead and get
+through. I've got nowhere to come but in, and nowhere to go but out."
+
+"I'm just putting the final touches on my story of Congressman
+Mallard's speech," said Drayton. "Want to read my introduction?"
+
+Privately Drayton was rather pleased with the job and craved approval
+for his craftsmanship from a man who still knew good writing when he
+saw it, even though he cold no longer write it.
+
+"No, thank you," said Quinlan. "All I ever want to read about that man
+is his obituary."
+
+"You said it!" agreed Drayton. "It's what most of the decent people in
+this country are thinking, I guess, even if they haven't begun saying
+it out loud yet. It strikes me the American people are a mighty
+patient lot--putting up with that demagogue. That was a rotten thing
+that happened up on the hill to-day, Quinlan--a damnable thing. Here
+was Mallard making the best speech in the worst cause that ever I
+heard, and getting away with it too. And there was Richland trying to
+answer him and in comparison making a spectacle of himself--Richland
+with all the right and all the decency on his side and yet showing up
+like a perfect dub alongside Mallard, because he hasn't got one-tenth
+of Mallard's ability as a speaker or one-tenth of Mallard's personal
+fire or stage presence or magnetism or whatever it is that makes
+Mallard so plausible--and so dangerous."
+
+"That's all true enough, no doubt," said Quinlan; "and since it is
+true why don't the newspapers put Mallard out of business?"
+
+"Why don't the newspapers put him out of business!" echoed Drayton.
+"Why, good Lord, man, isn't that what they've all been trying to do
+for the last six months? They call him every name in the calendar, and
+it all rolls off him like water off a duck's back. He seems to get
+nourishment out of abuse that would kill any other man. He thrives on
+it, if I'm any judge. I believe a hiss is music to his ears and a
+curse is a hushaby, lullaby song. Put him out of business? Why say,
+doesn't nearly every editorial writer in the country jump on him every
+day, and don't all the paragraphers gibe at him, and don't all the
+cartoonists lampoon him, and don't all of us who write news from down
+here in Washington give him the worst of it in our despatches?... And
+what's the result? Mallard takes on flesh and every red-mouthed
+agitator in the country and every mushy-brained peace fanatic and
+every secret German sympathiser trails at his heels, repeating what he
+says. I'd like to know what the press of America hasn't done to put
+him out of business!
+
+"There never was a time, I guess, when the reputable press of this
+country was so united in its campaign to kill off a man as it is now
+in its campaign to kill off Mallard. No paper gives him countenance,
+except some of these foreign-language rags and these dirty little
+disloyal sheets; and until here just lately even they didn't dare to
+come out in the open and applaud him. Anyway, who reads them as
+compared with those who read the real newspapers and the real
+magazines? Nobody! And yet he gets stronger every day. He's a national
+menace--that's what he is."
+
+"You said it again, son," said Quinlan. "Six months ago he was a
+national nuisance and now he's a national menace; and who's
+responsible--or, rather, what's responsible--for him being a national
+menace? Well, I'm going to tell you; but first I'm going to tell you
+something about Mallard. I've known him for twelve years, more or
+less--ever since he came here to Washington in his long frock coat
+that didn't fit him and his big black slouch hat and his white string
+tie and in all the rest of the regalia of the counterfeit who's trying
+to fool people into believing he's part tribune and part peasant."
+
+"You wouldn't call Mallard a counterfeit, would you?--a man with the
+gifts he's got," broke in Drayton. "I've heard him called everything
+else nearly in the English language, but you're the first man that
+ever called him a counterfeit, to my knowledge!"
+
+"Counterfeit? why, he's as bogus as a pewter dime," said Quinlan. "I
+tell you I know the man. Because you don't know him he's got you
+fooled the same as he's got so many other people fooled. Because he
+looks like a steel engraving of Henry Clay you think he is a Henry
+Clay, I suppose--anyhow, a lot of other people do; but I'm telling you
+his resemblance to Henry Clay is all on the outside--it doesn't strike
+in any farther than the hair roots. He calls himself a self-made man.
+Well, he's not; he's self-assembled, that's all. He's made up of
+standardised and interchangeable parts. He's compounded of something
+borrowed from every political mountebank who's pulled that old bunk
+about being a friend of the great common people and gotten away with
+it during the last fifty years. He's not a real genius. He's a
+synthetic genius."
+
+"There are just two things about Mallard that are not spurious--two
+things that make up the real essence and tissue of him: One is his
+genius as a speaker and the other is his vanity; and the bigger of
+these, you take it from me, is his vanity. That's the thing he feeds
+on--vanity. It's the breath in his nostrils, it's the savour and the
+salt on his daily bread. He lives on publicity, on notoriety. And yet
+you, a newspaper man, sit here wondering how the newspapers could kill
+him, and never guessing the real answer."
+
+"Well, what is the answer then?" demanded Drayton.
+
+"Wait, I'm coming to that. The press is always prating about the power
+of the press, always nagging about pitiless publicity being potent to
+destroy an evil thing or a bad man, and all that sort of rot. And yet
+every day the newspapers give the lie to their own boastings. It's
+true, Drayton, that up to a certain point the newspapers can make a
+man by printing favourable things about him. By that same token they
+imagine they can tear him down by printing unfavourable things about
+him. They think they can, but they can't. Let them get together in a
+campaign of vituperation against a man, and at once they set everybody
+to talking about him. Then let them carry their campaign just over a
+psychological dividing line, and right away they begin, against their
+wills, to manufacture sentiment for him. The reactions of printer's
+ink are stronger somehow than its original actions--its chemical
+processes acquire added strength in the back kick. What has saved many
+a rotten criminal in this country from getting his just deserts? It
+wasn't the fact that the newspapers were all for him. It was the fact
+that all the newspapers were against him. The under dog may be ever so
+bad a dog, but only let enough of us start kicking him all together,
+and what's the result? Sympathy for him--that's what. Calling
+'Unclean, unclean!' after a leper never yet made people shun him. It
+only makes them crowd up closer to see his sores. I'll bet if the
+facts were known that was true two thousand years ago. Certainly it's
+true to-day, and human nature doesn't change.
+
+"But the newspapers have one weapon they've never yet used; at least
+as a unit they've never used it. It's the strongest weapon they've
+got, and the cheapest, and the most terrible, and yet they let it lie
+in its scabbard and rust. With that weapon they could destroy any
+human being of the type of Jason Mallard in one-twentieth of the time
+it takes them to build up public opinion for or against him. And yet
+they can't see it--or won't see that it's there, all forged and ready
+to their hands."
+
+"And that weapon is what?" asked Drayton.
+
+"Silence. Absolute, utter silence. Silence is the loudest thing in the
+world. It thunders louder than the thunder. And it's the deadliest.
+What drives men mad who are put in solitary confinement? The darkness?
+The solitude? Well, they help. But it's silence that does the
+trick--silence that roars in their ears until it cracks their eardrums
+and addles their brains."
+
+"Mallard is a national peril, we'll concede. Very well then, he should
+be destroyed. And the surest, quickest, best way for the newspapers to
+destroy him is to wall him up in silence, to put a vacuum bell of
+silence down over him, to lock him up in silence, to bury him alive in
+silence. And that's a simpler thing than it sounds. They have all of
+them, only to do one little thing--just quit printing his name."
+
+"But they can't quit printing his name, Quinlan!" exclaimed Drayton.
+"Mallard's news; he's the biggest figure in the news that there is
+to-day in this country."
+
+"That's the same foolish argument that the average newspaper man would
+make," said Quinlan scornfully. "Mallard is news because the
+newspapers make news of him--and for no other reason. Let them quit,
+and he isn't news any more--he's a nonentity, he's nothing at all,
+he's null and he's void. So far as public opinion goes he will cease
+to exist, and a thing that has ceased to exist is no longer news--once
+you've printed the funeral notice. Every popular thing, every
+conspicuous thing in the world is born of notoriety and fed on
+notoriety--newspaper notoriety. Notoriety is as essential to the
+object of notoriety itself as it is in fashioning the sentiments of
+those who read about it. And there's just one place where you can get
+wholesale, nation-wide notoriety to-day--out of the jaws of a printing
+press.
+
+"We call baseball our national pastime--granted! But let the
+newspapers, all of them, during one month of this coming spring, quit
+printing a word about baseball, and you'd see the parks closed up and
+the weeds growing on the base lines and the turnstiles rusting solid.
+You remember those deluded ladies who almost did the cause of suffrage
+some damage last year by picketing the White House and bothering the
+President when he was busy with the biggest job that any man had
+tackled in this country since Abe Lincoln? Remember how they raised
+such a hullabaloo when they were sent to the workhouse? Well, suppose
+the newspapers, instead of giving them front-page headlines and
+columns of space every day, had refused to print a line about them or
+even so much as to mention their names. Do you believe they would have
+stuck to the job week after week as they did stick to it? I tell you
+they'd have quit cold inside of forty-eight hours.
+
+"Son, your average latter-day martyr endures his captivity with
+fortitude because he knows the world, through the papers, is going to
+hear the pleasant clanking of his chains. Otherwise he'd burst from
+his cell with a disappointed yell and go out of the martyr business
+instanter. He may not fear the gallows or the stake or the pillory,
+but he certainly does love his press notices. He may or may not keep
+the faith, but you can bet he always keeps a scrapbook.
+Silence--that's the thing he fears more than hangman's nooses or
+firing squads.
+
+"And that's the cure for your friend, Jason Mallard, Esquire. Let the
+press of this country put the curse of silence on him and he's done
+for. Silence will kill off his cause and kill off his following and
+kill him off. It will kill him politically and figuratively. I'm not
+sure, knowing the man as I do, but what it will kill him actually.
+Entomb him in silence and he'll be a body of death and corruption in
+two weeks. Just let the newspapers and the magazines provide the
+grave, and the corpse will provide itself."
+
+Drayton felt himself catching the fever of Quinlan's fire. He broke in
+eagerly.
+
+"But, Quinlan, how could it be done?" he asked. "How could you get
+concerted action for a thing that's so revolutionary, so
+unprecedented, so----"
+
+"This happens to be one time in the history of the United States when
+you could get it," said the inebriate. "You could get it because the
+press is practically united to-day in favour of real Americanism. Let
+some man like your editor-in-chief, Fred Core, or like Carlos Seers of
+the Era, or Manuel Oxus of the Period, or Malcolm Flint of the A.P.
+call a private meeting in New York of the biggest individual
+publishers of daily papers and the leading magazine publishers and the
+heads of all the press associations and news syndicates, from the big
+fellows clear down to the shops that sell boiler plate to the country
+weeklies with patent insides. Through their concerted influence that
+crowd could put the thing over in twenty-four hours. They could line
+up the Authors' League, line up the defence societies, line up the
+national advertisers, line up organised labour in the printing
+trades--line up everybody and everything worth while. Oh, it could be
+done--make no mistake about that. Call it a boycott; call it coercion,
+mob law, lynch law, anything you please--it's justifiable. And there'd
+be no way out for Mallard. He couldn't bring an injunction suit to
+make a newspaper publisher print his name. He couldn't buy advertising
+space to tell about himself if nobody would sell it to him. There's
+only one thing he could do--and if I'm any judge he'd do it, sooner or
+later."
+
+   [Illustration: THAT'S THE THING HE FEEDS ON--VANITY.]
+
+Young Drayton stood up. His eyes were blazing.
+
+"Do you know what I'm going to do, Quinlan?" he asked. "I'm going to
+run up to New York on the midnight train. If I can't get a berth on a
+sleeper I'll sit up in a day coach. I'm going to rout Fred Core out of
+bed before breakfast time in the morning and put this thing up to him
+just as you've put it up to me here to-night. If I can make him see it
+as you've made me see it, he'll get busy. If he doesn't see it,
+there's no harm done. But in any event it's your idea, and I'll see
+to it that you're not cheated out of the credit for it."
+
+The dipsomaniac shook his head. The flame of inspiration had died out
+in Quinlan; he was a dead crater again--a drunkard quivering for the
+lack of stimulant.
+
+"Never mind the credit, son. What was it wise old Omar said--'Take the
+cash and let the credit go'?--something like that anyhow. You run
+along up to New York and kindle the fires. But before you start I wish
+you'd loan me about two dollars. Some of these days when my luck
+changes I'll pay it all back. I'm keeping track of what I owe you. Or
+say, Drayton--make it five dollars, won't you, if you can spare it?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+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.
+
+   [Illustration: HE MAY OR MAY NOT KEEP FAITH, BUT YOU CAN BET HE
+   ALWAYS KEEPS A SCRAP-BOOK.]
+
+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.
+
+"And you ain't got any charge to make against anybody for what was due
+to your own personal awkwardness, have you?" suggested the blue-coated
+prompter.
+
+"Certainly I ain't!" disclaimed Harris almost indignantly.
+
+Mallard broke in: "You can't do this--you men," he declared hoarsely.
+"I struck that man and I'm glad I did strike him--damn him! I wish I'd
+killed him. I'm willing to take the consequences. I demand that you
+make a report of this case to your superior officer."
+
+As though he had not heard him--as though he did not know a fourth
+person was present--the policeman, looking right past Mallard with a
+levelled, steady, contemptuous gaze, addressed the other two. His tone
+was quite casual, and yet somehow he managed to freight his words with
+a scorn too heavy to be expressed in mere words:
+
+"Boys," he said, "it seems-like to me the air in this room is so kind
+of foul that it ain't fitten for good Amuricans to be breathin' it.
+So I'm goin' to open up this here door and see if it don't purify
+itself--of its own accord."
+
+He stepped back and swung the door wide open; then stepped over and
+joined the station master and the sweeper. And there together they all
+three stood without a word from any one of them as the fourth man,
+with his face deadly white now where before it had been a passionate
+red, and his head lolling on his breast, though he strove to hold it
+rigidly erect, passed silently out of the little office. Through the
+opened door the trio with their eyes followed him while he crossed the
+concrete floor of the concourse and passed through a gate. They
+continued to watch until he had disappeared in the murk, going toward
+where a row of parked sleepers stood at the far end of the train shed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Yet another policeman is to figure in this recital of events. This
+policeman's name is Caleb Waggoner and this Caleb Waggoner was and
+still is the night marshal in a small town in Iowa on the Missouri
+River. He is one-half the police force of the town, the other half
+being a constable who does duty in the daytime. Waggoner suffers from
+an affection which in a large community might prevent him from holding
+such a job as the one he does hold. He has an impediment of the speech
+which at all times causes him to stammer badly. When he is excited it
+is only by a tremendous mental and physical effort and after repeated
+endeavours that he can form the words at all. In other regards he is a
+first-rate officer, sober, trustworthy and kindly.
+
+On the night of the eighteenth of February, at about half past eleven
+o'clock, Marshal Waggoner was completing his regular before-midnight
+round of the business district. The weather was nasty, with a raw wet
+wind blowing and half-melted slush underfoot. In his tour he had
+encountered not a single person. That dead dumb quiet which falls upon
+a sleeping town on a winter's night was all about him. But as he
+turned out of Main Street, which is the principal thoroughfare, into
+Sycamore Street, a short byway running down between scattered
+buildings and vacant lots to the river bank a short block away, he saw
+a man standing at the side door of the Eagle House, the town's
+second-best hotel. A gas lamp flaring raggedly above the doorway
+brought out the figure with distinctness. The man was not moving--he
+was just standing there, with the collar of a heavy overcoat turned up
+about his throat and a soft black hat with a wide brim drawn well down
+upon his head.
+
+Drawing nearer, Waggoner, who by name or by sight knew every resident
+of the town, made up his mind that the loiterer was a stranger. Now a
+stranger abroad at such an hour and apparently with no business to
+mind would at once be mentally catalogued by the vigilant night
+marshal as a suspicious person. So when he had come close up to the
+other, padding noiselessly in his heavy rubber boots, the officer
+halted and from a distance of six feet or so stared steadfastly at the
+suspect. The suspect returned the look.
+
+What Waggoner saw was a thin, haggard face covered to the upper bulge
+of the jaw-bones with a disfiguring growth of reddish whiskers and
+inclosed at the temples by shaggy, unkempt strands of red hair which
+protruded from beneath the black hat. Evidently the man had not been
+shaved for weeks; certainly his hair needed trimming and combing. But
+what at the moment impressed Waggoner more even than the general
+unkemptness of the stranger's aspect was the look out of his eyes.
+They were widespread eyes and bloodshot as though from lack of sleep,
+and they glared into Waggoner's with a peculiar, strained, hearkening
+expression. There was agony in them--misery unutterable.
+
+Thrusting his head forward then, the stranger cried out, and his
+voice, which in his first words was deep and musical, suddenly, before
+he had uttered a full sentence, turned to a sharp, half-hysterical
+falsetto:
+
+"Why don't you say something to me, man?" he cried at the startled
+Waggoner. "For God's sake, why don't you speak to me? Even if you do
+know me, why don't you speak? Why don't you call me by my name? I
+can't stand it--I can't stand it any longer, I tell you. You've got to
+speak."
+
+Astounded, Waggoner strove to answer. But, because he was startled and
+a bit apprehensive as well, his throat locked down on his faulty vocal
+cords. His face moved and his lips twisted convulsively, but no sound
+issued from his mouth.
+
+The stranger, glaring into Waggoner's face with those two goggling
+eyes of his, which were all eyeballs, threw up both arms at full
+length and gave a great gagging outcry.
+
+"It's come!" he shrieked; "it's come! The silence has done it at last.
+It deafens me--I'm deaf! I can't hear you! I can't hear you!"
+
+He turned and ran south--toward the river--and Waggoner, recovering
+himself, ran after him full bent. It was a strangely silent race these
+two ran through the empty little street, for in the half-melted snow
+their feet made no sounds at all. Waggoner, for obvious reasons, could
+utter no words; the other man did not.
+
+A scant ten feet in the lead the fugitive reached the high clay bank
+of the river. Without a backward glance at his pursuer, without
+checking his speed, he went off and over the edge and down out of
+sight into the darkness. Even at the end of the twenty-foot plunge the
+body in striking made almost no sound at all, for, as Waggoner
+afterward figured, it must have struck against a mass of shore ice,
+then instantly to slide off, with scarcely a splash, into the roiled
+yellow waters beyond.
+
+The policeman checked his own speed barely in time to save himself
+from following over the brink. He crouched on the verge of the frozen
+clay bluff, peering downward into the blackness and the quiet. He saw
+nothing and he heard nothing except his own laboured breathing.
+
+The body was never recovered. But at daylight a black soft hat was
+found on a half-rotted ice floe, where it had lodged close up against
+the bank. A name was stamped in the sweatband, and by this the
+identity of the suicide was established as that of Congressman Jason
+Mallard.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Thunders of Silence, by Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE THUNDERS OF SILENCE ***
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+
+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's The Thunders of Silence, by Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Thunders of Silence
+
+Author: Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
+
+Release Date: March 29, 2008 [EBook #24936]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE THUNDERS OF SILENCE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jeannie Howse, Bryan Ness and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+<div class="tr2">
+<p class="cen" style="font-weight: bold;">Transcriber's Note:</p>
+<p class="noin">Click on the images to see a larger version.</p>
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+<div class="img">
+<a href="images/inside.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/inside_th.jpg" width="85%" alt="inside cover" /></a>
+</div>
+
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h1><i>The Thunders of Silence</i></h1>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<div class="tr"><h2>BY IRVIN S. COBB</h2>
+
+<div class="block">
+<p>FICTION</p>
+
+<div class="block"><p class="noin sc">Those Times and These<br />
+Local Color<br />
+Old Judge Priest<br />
+Fibble, D.D.<br />
+Back Home<br />
+The Escape of Mr. Trimm</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>WIT AND HUMOR</p>
+
+<div class="block">
+<p class="noin sc">"Speaking of <span style="white-space: nowrap;">Operations&mdash;&mdash;"</span><br />
+Europe Revised<br />
+Roughing It de Luxe<br />
+Cobb's Bill of Fare<br />
+Cobb's Anatomy</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>MISCELLANY</p>
+
+<div class="block">
+<p class="noin sc">The Thunders of Silence<br />
+"Speaking of <span style="white-space: nowrap;">Prussians&mdash;&mdash;"</span><br />
+Paths of Glory</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="cen">GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY<br />
+NEW YORK</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+
+<div class="img"><a name="frontis" id="frontis"></a>
+<a href="images/frontis.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/frontis.jpg" width="52%" alt="The American People are a Mighty Patient Lot." /></a><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em; font-size: 90%;">THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ARE A MIGHTY PATIENT LOT.<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+<h1><i>The Thunders<br />
+of Silence</i></h1>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<h4><i>By</i></h4>
+<h3><i>Irvin S. Cobb</i></h3>
+
+<h4><i>Author of "Paths of Glory," "Speaking<br />
+of Prussians&mdash;&mdash;," etc.</i></h4>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h4>ILLUSTRATED</h4>
+
+<br />
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/deco.png" width="15%" alt="Publisher's mark" />
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<h5><i>New York<br />
+George H. Doran Company</i></h5>
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h5>COPYRIGHT, 1918,<br />
+BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY</h5>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h5>COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY<br />
+PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA</h5>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="toi" id="toi"></a><hr />
+<br />
+
+<h3><i>ILLUSTRATIONS</i></h3>
+<br />
+
+<div class="centered">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" width="80%" summary="List of Images">
+  <tr>
+  <td width="80%">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdr" width="20%" style="font-size: 80%;">PAGE</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl" width="80%"><a href="#frontis">The American people are a mighty patient lot.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr" width="20%"><i>Frontispiece</i></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><a href="#imagep016">The lone wolf wasn't a lone wolf any longer. He had a pack to rally about him</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">16</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><a href="#imagep032">That's the thing he feeds on&mdash;Vanity</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">32</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><a href="#imagep048">He may or may not keep faith but you can bet he always keeps a scrap-book</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">48</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h2><i>The Thunders of Silence</i></h2>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3><i>The Thunders of Silence</i></h3>
+<br />
+
+<p>Some people said Congressman Mallard had gone mad. These were his
+friends, striving out of the goodness of their hearts to put the best
+face on what at best was a lamentable situation. Some said he was a
+traitor to his country. These were his enemies, personal, political
+and journalistic. Some called him a patriot who put humanity above
+nationality, a new John the Baptist come out of the wilderness to
+preach a sobering doctrine of world-peace to a world made drunk on
+war. And these were his followers. Of the first&mdash;his friends&mdash;there
+were not many left. Of the second group there were millions that
+multiplied themselves. Of the third there had been at the outset but a
+timorous and furtive few, and they mostly men and women who spoke
+English, if they spoke it at all, with the halting speech and the
+twisted idiom that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span>betrayed their foreign birth; being persons who
+found it entirely consistent to applaud the preachment of planetic
+disarmament out of one side of their mouths, and out of the other side
+of their mouths to pray for the success at arms of the War Lord whose
+hand had shoved the universe over the rim of the chasm. But each
+passing day now saw them increasing in number and in audacity. Taking
+courage to themselves from the courage of their apostle, these, his
+disciples, were beginning to shout from the housetops what once they
+had only dared whisper beneath the eaves. Disloyalty no longer
+smouldered; it was blazing up. It crackled, and threw off firebrands.</p>
+
+<p>Of all those who sat in judgment upon the acts and the utterances of
+the man&mdash;and this classification would include every articulate
+creature in the United States who was old enough to be reasonable&mdash;or
+unreasonable&mdash;only a handful had the right diagnosis for the case.
+Here and there were to be found men who knew he was neither crazed nor
+inspired; and quite rightly they put no credence in the charge that he
+had <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span>sold himself for pieces of silver to the enemy of his own nation.
+They knew what ailed the Honourable Jason Mallard&mdash;that he was a
+victim of a strangulated ambition, of an egotistic hernia. He was
+hopelessly ruptured in his vanity. All his life he had lived on love
+of notoriety, and by that same perverted passion he was being eaten
+up. Once he had diligently besought the confidence and the affections
+of a majority of his fellow citizens; now he seemed bent upon
+consolidating their hate for him into a common flood and laving
+himself in it. Well, if such was his wish he was having it; there was
+no denying that.</p>
+
+<p>In the prime of his life, before he was fifty, it had seemed that
+almost for the asking the presidency might have been his. He had been
+born right, as the saying goes, and bred right, to make suitable
+presidential timber. He came of fine clean blends of blood. His father
+had been a descendant of Norman-English folk who settled in Maryland
+before the Revolution; the family name had originally been Maillard,
+afterward corrupted into Mallard. His <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span>mother's people were
+Scotch-Irish immigrants of the types that carved out their homesteads
+with axes on the spiny haunches of the Cumberlands. In the Civil War
+his father had fought for the Union, in a regiment of borderers; two
+of his uncles had been partisan rangers on the side of the
+Confederacy. If he was a trifle young to be of that generation of
+public men who were born in unchinked log cabins of the wilderness or
+prairie-sod shanties, at least he was to enjoy the subsequent
+political advantage of having come into the world in a two-room house
+of unpainted pine slabs on the sloped withers of a mountain in East
+Tennessee. As a child he had been taken by his parents to one of the
+states which are called pivotal states. There he had grown up&mdash;farm
+boy first, teacher of a district school, self-taught lawyer, county
+attorney, state legislator, governor, congressman for five terms, a
+floor leader of his party&mdash;so that by ancestry and environment, by the
+ethics of political expediency and political geography, by his own
+record and by the traditions of the time, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span>he was formed to make an
+acceptable presidential aspirant.</p>
+
+<p>In person he was most admirably adapted for the r&ocirc;le of statesman. He
+had a figure fit to set off a toga, a brow that might have worn a crown
+with dignity. As an orator he had no equal in Congress or, for that
+matter, out of it. He was a burning mountain of eloquence, a veritable
+human Vesuvius from whom, at will, flowed rhetoric or invective, satire
+or sentiment, as lava might flow from a living volcano. His mind
+spawned sonorous phrases as a roe shad spawns eggs. He was in all
+outward regards a shape of a man to catch the eye, with a voice to
+cajole the senses as with music of bugles, and an oratory to inspire.
+Moreover, the destiny which shaped his ends had mercifully denied him
+that which is a boon to common men but a curse to public men. Jason
+Mallard was without a sense of humour. He never laughed at others; he
+never laughed at himself. Certain of our public leaders have before now
+fallen into the woful error of doing one or both of these things.
+Wherefore they were forever after <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span>called humourists&mdash;and ruined. When
+they said anything serious their friends took it humorously, and when
+they said anything humorously their enemies took it seriously. But
+Congressman Mallard was safe enough there.</p>
+
+<p>Being what he was&mdash;a handsome bundle of selfishness, coated over with
+a fine gloss of seeming humility, a creature whose every instinct was
+richly mulched in self-conceit and yet one who simulated a deep
+devotion for mankind at large&mdash;he couldn't make either of these
+mistakes.</p>
+
+<p>Upon a time the presidential nomination of his party&mdash;the dominant
+party, too&mdash;had been almost within his grasp. That made his losing it
+all the more bitter. Thereafter he became an obstructionist, a fighter
+outside of the lines of his own party and not within the lines of the
+opposing party, a leader of the elements of national discontent and
+national discord, a mouthpiece for all those who would tear down the
+pillars of the temple because they dislike its present tenants. Once
+he had courted popularity; presently&mdash;this coming after his
+re-election <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span>to a sixth term&mdash;he went out of his way to win
+unpopularity. His invectives ate in like corrosives, his metaphors bit
+like adders. Always he had been like a sponge to sop up adulation; now
+he was to prove that when it came to withstanding denunciation his
+hide was the hide of a rhino.</p>
+
+<p>This war came along, and after more than two years of it came our
+entry into it. For the most part, in the national capital and out of
+it, artificial lines of partisan division were wiped out under a tidal
+wave of patriotism. So far as the generality of Americans were
+concerned, they for the time being were neither Democrats nor
+Republicans; neither were they Socialists nor Independents nor
+Prohibitionists. For the duration of the war they were Americans,
+actuated by a common purpose and stirred by a common danger. Afterward
+they might be, politically speaking, whatever they chose to be, but
+for the time being they were just Americans. Into this unique
+condition Jason Mallard projected himself, an upstanding reef of
+opposition to break the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span>fine continuity of a mighty ground swell of
+national unity and national harmony.</p>
+
+<p>Brilliant, formidable, resourceful, seemingly invulnerable, armoured
+in apparent disdain for the contempt and the indignation of the masses
+of the citizenship, he fought against and voted against the breaking
+off of diplomatic relations with Germany; fought against the draft,
+fought against the war appropriations, fought against the plans for a
+bigger navy, the plans for a great army; fought the first Liberty Loan
+and the second; he fought, in December last, against a declaration of
+war with Austro-Hungary. And, so far as the members of Congress were
+concerned, he fought practically single-handed.</p>
+
+<p>His vote cast in opposition to the will of the majority meant nothing;
+his voice raised in opposition meant much. For very soon the avowed
+pacifists and the secret protagonists of Kultur, the blood-eyed
+anarchists and the lily-livered dissenters, the conscientious
+objectors and the conscienceless I.W.W. group, saw in him a buttress
+upon which to stay their cause. The lone wolf wasn't <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>a lone wolf
+any longer&mdash;he had a pack to rally about him, yelping approval of his
+every word. Day by day he grew stronger and day by day the sinister
+elements behind him grew bolder, echoing his challenges against the
+Government and against the war. With practically every newspaper in
+America, big and little, fighting him; with every influential magazine
+fighting him; with the leaders of the Administration fighting him&mdash;he
+nevertheless loomed on the national sky line as a great sinister
+figure of defiance and rebellion.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep016" id="imagep016"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep016.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep016.jpg" width="52%" alt="The Lone Wolf wasn't a Lone Wolf any Longer" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em; font-size: 90%;">THE LONE WOLF WASN'T A LONE WOLF ANY LONGER<br />
+HE HAD A PACK TO RALLY ABOUT HIM.<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Deft word chandlers of the magazines and the daily press coined terms
+of opprobrium for him. He was the King of Copperheads, the Junior
+Benedict Arnold, the Modern Judas, the Second Aaron Burr; these things
+and a hundred others they called him; and he laughed at hard names and
+in reply coined singularly apt and cruel synonyms for the more
+conspicuous of his critics. The oldest active editor in the
+country&mdash;and the most famous&mdash;called upon the body of which he was a
+member to impeach him for acts of disloyalty, tending to give aid <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span>and
+comfort to the common enemy. The great president of a great university
+suggested as a proper remedy for what seemed to ail this man Mallard
+that he be shot against a brick wall some fine morning at sunrise. At
+a monstrous mass meeting held in the chief city of Mallard's home
+state, a mass meeting presided over by the governor of that state,
+resolutions were unanimously adopted calling upon him to resign his
+commission as a representative. His answer to all three was a speech
+which, as translated, was shortly thereafter printed in pamphlet form
+by the Berlin Lokal-Anzeiger and circulated among the German soldiers
+at the Front.</p>
+
+<p>For you see Congressman Mallard felt safe, and Congressman Mallard was
+safe. His buckler was the right of free speech; his sword, the
+argument that he stood for peace through all the world, for
+arbitration and disarmament among all the peoples of the world.</p>
+
+<br />
+<hr style='width: 15%;' />
+<br />
+
+<p>It was on the evening of a day in January of this present year that
+young Drayton, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span>Washington correspondent for the New York Epoch, sat
+in the office of his bureau on the second floor of the Hibbett
+Building, revising his account of a scene he had witnessed that
+afternoon from the press gallery of the House. He had instructions
+from his managing editor to cover the story at length. At ten o'clock
+he had finished what would make two columns in type and was polishing
+off his opening paragraphs before putting the manuscript on the wire
+when the door of his room opened and a man came in&mdash;a shabby,
+tremulous figure. The comer was Quinlan.</p>
+
+<p>Quinlan was forty years old and looked fifty. Before whisky got him
+Quinlan had been a great newspaper man. Now that his habits made it
+impossible for him to hold a steady job he was become a sort of news
+tipster. Occasionally also he did small lobbying of a sort; his
+acquaintance with public men and his intimate knowledge of Washington
+officialdom served him in both these precarious fields of endeavour.
+The liquor he drank&mdash;whenever and wherever he could get it&mdash;had
+bloated his face out of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span>all wholesome contour and had given to his
+stomach, a chronic distention, but had depleted his frame and shrunken
+his limbs so that physically he was that common enough type of the
+hopeless alcoholic&mdash;a meagre rack of a man burdened amidships by an
+unhealthy and dropsical plumpness.</p>
+
+<p>At times&mdash;when he was not completely sodden&mdash;when he had in him just
+enough whisky, to stimulate his soaked brain, and yet not enough of it
+to make him maudlin&mdash;he displayed flashes of a one-time brilliancy
+which by contrast with his usual state made the ruinous thing he had
+done to himself seem all the more pitiable.</p>
+
+<p>Drayton of the Epoch was one of the newspaper men upon whom he
+sponged. Always preserving the fiction, that he was borrowing because
+of temporary necessity, he got small sums of money out of Drayton from
+time to time, and, in exchange, gave the younger man bits of helpful
+information. It was not so much news that he furnished Drayton as it
+was insight into causes working behind political and diplomatic
+events. He came in now without <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span>knocking and stood looking at Drayton
+with an ingratiating flicker in his dulled eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Hello, Quinlan!" said Drayton. "What's on your mind to-night?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing, until you get done there," said Quinlan, letting himself
+flop down into a chair across the desk from Drayton. "Go ahead and get
+through. I've got nowhere to come but in, and nowhere to go but out."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm just putting the final touches on my story of Congressman
+Mallard's speech," said Drayton. "Want to read my introduction?"</p>
+
+<p>Privately Drayton was rather pleased with the job and craved approval
+for his craftsmanship from a man who still knew good writing when he
+saw it, even though he cold no longer write it.</p>
+
+<p>"No, thank you," said Quinlan. "All I ever want to read about that man
+is his obituary."</p>
+
+<p>"You said it!" agreed Drayton. "It's what most of the decent people in
+this country are thinking, I guess, even if they haven't begun saying
+it out loud yet. It strikes me the American people are a mighty
+patient <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>lot&mdash;putting up with that demagogue. That was a rotten thing
+that happened up on the hill to-day, Quinlan&mdash;a damnable thing. Here
+was Mallard making the best speech in the worst cause that ever I
+heard, and getting away with it too. And there was Richland trying to
+answer him and in comparison making a spectacle of himself&mdash;Richland
+with all the right and all the decency on his side and yet showing up
+like a perfect dub alongside Mallard, because he hasn't got one-tenth
+of Mallard's ability as a speaker or one-tenth of Mallard's personal
+fire or stage presence or magnetism or whatever it is that makes
+Mallard so plausible&mdash;and so dangerous."</p>
+
+<p>"That's all true enough, no doubt," said Quinlan; "and since it is
+true why don't the newspapers put Mallard out of business?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why don't the newspapers put him out of business!" echoed Drayton.
+"Why, good Lord, man, isn't that what they've all been trying to do
+for the last six months? They call him every name in the calendar, and
+it all rolls off him like water off a duck's back. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>He seems to get
+nourishment out of abuse that would kill any other man. He thrives on
+it, if I'm any judge. I believe a hiss is music to his ears and a
+curse is a hushaby, lullaby song. Put him out of business? Why say,
+doesn't nearly every editorial writer in the country jump on him every
+day, and don't all the paragraphers gibe at him, and don't all the
+cartoonists lampoon him, and don't all of us who write news from down
+here in Washington give him the worst of it in our despatches?... And
+what's the result? Mallard takes on flesh and every red-mouthed
+agitator in the country and every mushy-brained peace fanatic and
+every secret German sympathiser trails at his heels, repeating what he
+says. I'd like to know what the press of America hasn't done to put
+him out of business!</p>
+
+<p>"There never was a time, I guess, when the reputable press of this
+country was so united in its campaign to kill off a man as it is now
+in its campaign to kill off Mallard. No paper gives him countenance,
+except some of these foreign-language rags and these dirty little
+disloyal sheets; and until <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span>here just lately even they didn't dare to
+come out in the open and applaud him. Anyway, who reads them as
+compared with those who read the real newspapers and the real
+magazines? Nobody! And yet he gets stronger every day. He's a national
+menace&mdash;that's what he is."</p>
+
+<p>"You said it again, son," said Quinlan. "Six months ago he was a
+national nuisance and now he's a national menace; and who's
+responsible&mdash;or, rather, what's responsible&mdash;for him being a national
+menace? Well, I'm going to tell you; but first I'm going to tell you
+something about Mallard. I've known him for twelve years, more or
+less&mdash;ever since he came here to Washington in his long frock coat
+that didn't fit him and his big black slouch hat and his white string
+tie and in all the rest of the regalia of the counterfeit who's trying
+to fool people into believing he's part tribune and part peasant."</p>
+
+<p>"You wouldn't call Mallard a counterfeit, would you?&mdash;a man with the
+gifts he's got," broke in Drayton. "I've heard him called everything
+else nearly in the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span>English language, but you're the first man that
+ever called him a counterfeit, to my knowledge!"</p>
+
+<p>"Counterfeit? why, he's as bogus as a pewter dime," said Quinlan. "I
+tell you I know the man. Because you don't know him he's got you
+fooled the same as he's got so many other people fooled. Because he
+looks like a steel engraving of Henry Clay you think he is a Henry
+Clay, I suppose&mdash;anyhow, a lot of other people do; but I'm telling you
+his resemblance to Henry Clay is all on the outside&mdash;it doesn't strike
+in any farther than the hair roots. He calls himself a self-made man.
+Well, he's not; he's self-assembled, that's all. He's made up of
+standardised and interchangeable parts. He's compounded of something
+borrowed from every political mountebank who's pulled that old bunk
+about being a friend of the great common people and gotten away with
+it during the last fifty years. He's not a real genius. He's a
+synthetic genius."</p>
+
+<p>"There are just two things about Mallard that are not spurious&mdash;two
+things that make <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span>up the real essence and tissue of him: One is his
+genius as a speaker and the other is his vanity; and the bigger of
+these, you take it from me, is his vanity. That's the thing he feeds
+on&mdash;vanity. It's the breath in his nostrils, it's the savour and the
+salt on his daily bread. He lives on publicity, on notoriety. And yet
+you, a newspaper man, sit here wondering how the newspapers could kill
+him, and never guessing the real answer."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what is the answer then?" demanded Drayton.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait, I'm coming to that. The press is always prating about the power
+of the press, always nagging about pitiless publicity being potent to
+destroy an evil thing or a bad man, and all that sort of rot. And yet
+every day the newspapers give the lie to their own boastings. It's
+true, Drayton, that up to a certain point the newspapers can make a
+man by printing favourable things about him. By that same token they
+imagine they can tear him down by printing unfavourable things about
+him. They think they can, but they can't. Let them <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span>get together in a
+campaign of vituperation against a man, and at once they set everybody
+to talking about him. Then let them carry their campaign just over a
+psychological dividing line, and right away they begin, against their
+wills, to manufacture sentiment for him. The reactions of printer's
+ink are stronger somehow than its original actions&mdash;its chemical
+processes acquire added strength in the back kick. What has saved many
+a rotten criminal in this country from getting his just deserts? It
+wasn't the fact that the newspapers were all for him. It was the fact
+that all the newspapers were against him. The under dog may be ever so
+bad a dog, but only let enough of us start kicking him all together,
+and what's the result? Sympathy for him&mdash;that's what. Calling
+'Unclean, unclean!' after a leper never yet made people shun him. It
+only makes them crowd up closer to see his sores. I'll bet if the
+facts were known that was true two thousand years ago. Certainly it's
+true to-day, and human nature doesn't change.</p>
+
+<p>"But the newspapers have one weapon <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span>they've never yet used; at least
+as a unit they've never used it. It's the strongest weapon they've
+got, and the cheapest, and the most terrible, and yet they let it lie
+in its scabbard and rust. With that weapon they could destroy any
+human being of the type of Jason Mallard in one-twentieth of the time
+it takes them to build up public opinion for or against him. And yet
+they can't see it&mdash;or won't see that it's there, all forged and ready
+to their hands."</p>
+
+<p>"And that weapon is what?" asked Drayton.</p>
+
+<p>"Silence. Absolute, utter silence. Silence is the loudest thing in the
+world. It thunders louder than the thunder. And it's the deadliest.
+What drives men mad who are put in solitary confinement? The darkness?
+The solitude? Well, they help. But it's silence that does the
+trick&mdash;silence that roars in their ears until it cracks their eardrums
+and addles their brains."</p>
+
+<p>"Mallard is a national peril, we'll concede. Very well then, he should
+be destroyed. And the surest, quickest, best way for the newspapers to
+destroy him is to wall <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span>him up in silence, to put a vacuum bell of
+silence down over him, to lock him up in silence, to bury him alive in
+silence. And that's a simpler thing than it sounds. They have all of
+them, only to do one little thing&mdash;just quit printing his name."</p>
+
+<p>"But they can't quit printing his name, Quinlan!" exclaimed Drayton.
+"Mallard's news; he's the biggest figure in the news that there is
+to-day in this country."</p>
+
+<p>"That's the same foolish argument that the average newspaper man would
+make," said Quinlan scornfully. "Mallard is news because the
+newspapers make news of him&mdash;and for no other reason. Let them quit,
+and he isn't news any more&mdash;he's a nonentity, he's nothing at all,
+he's null and he's void. So far as public opinion goes he will cease
+to exist, and a thing that has ceased to exist is no longer news&mdash;once
+you've printed the funeral notice. Every popular thing, every
+conspicuous thing in the world is born of notoriety and fed on
+notoriety&mdash;newspaper notoriety. Notoriety is as essential to the
+object of notoriety itself as it is in fashioning the sentiments of
+those who read about <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span>it. And there's just one place where you can get
+wholesale, nation-wide notoriety to-day&mdash;out of the jaws of a printing
+press.</p>
+
+<p>"We call baseball our national pastime&mdash;granted! But let the
+newspapers, all of them, during one month of this coming spring, quit
+printing a word about baseball, and you'd see the parks closed up and
+the weeds growing on the base lines and the turnstiles rusting solid.
+You remember those deluded ladies who almost did the cause of suffrage
+some damage last year by picketing the White House and bothering the
+President when he was busy with the biggest job that any man had
+tackled in this country since Abe Lincoln? Remember how they raised
+such a hullabaloo when they were sent to the workhouse? Well, suppose
+the newspapers, instead of giving them front-page headlines and
+columns of space every day, had refused to print a line about them or
+even so much as to mention their names. Do you believe they would have
+stuck to the job week after week as they did stick to it? I tell you
+they'd have quit cold inside of forty-eight hours.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span>"Son, your average latter-day martyr endures his captivity with
+fortitude because he knows the world, through the papers, is going to
+hear the pleasant clanking of his chains. Otherwise he'd burst from
+his cell with a disappointed yell and go out of the martyr business
+instanter. He may not fear the gallows or the stake or the pillory,
+but he certainly does love his press notices. He may or may not keep
+the faith, but you can bet he always keeps a scrapbook.
+Silence&mdash;that's the thing he fears more than hangman's nooses or
+firing squads.</p>
+
+<p>"And that's the cure for your friend, Jason Mallard, Esquire. Let the
+press of this country put the curse of silence on him and he's done
+for. Silence will kill off his cause and kill off his following and
+kill him off. It will kill him politically and figuratively. I'm not
+sure, knowing the man as I do, but what it will kill him actually.
+Entomb him in silence and he'll be a body of death and corruption in
+two weeks. Just let the newspapers and the magazines provide the
+grave, and the corpse will provide itself."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span>Drayton felt himself catching the fever of Quinlan's fire. He broke in
+eagerly.</p>
+
+<p>"But, Quinlan, how could it be done?" he asked. "How could you get
+concerted action for a thing that's so revolutionary, so
+unprecedented, so&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"This happens to be one time in the history of the United States when
+you could get it," said the inebriate. "You could get it because the
+press is practically united to-day in favour of real Americanism. Let
+some man like your editor-in-chief, Fred Core, or like Carlos Seers of
+the Era, or Manuel Oxus of the Period, or Malcolm Flint of the A.P.
+call a private meeting in New York of the biggest individual
+publishers of daily papers and the leading magazine publishers and the
+heads of all the press associations and news syndicates, from the big
+fellows clear down to the shops that sell boiler plate to the country
+weeklies with patent insides. Through their concerted influence that
+crowd could put the thing over in twenty-four hours. They could line
+up the Authors' League, line up the defence societies, line up the
+national advertisers, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span>line up organised labour in the printing
+trades&mdash;line up everybody and everything worth while. Oh, it could be
+done&mdash;make no mistake about that. Call it a boycott; call it coercion,
+mob law, lynch law, anything you please&mdash;it's justifiable. And there'd
+be no way out for Mallard. He couldn't bring an injunction suit to
+make a newspaper publisher print his name. He couldn't buy advertising
+space to tell about himself if nobody would sell it to him. There's
+only one thing he could do&mdash;and if I'm any judge he'd do it, sooner or
+later."</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep032" id="imagep032"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep032.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep032.jpg" width="35%" alt="That's the Thing He Feeds on--vanity." /></a><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em; font-size: 90%;">THAT'S THE THING HE FEEDS ON&mdash;VANITY.<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Young Drayton stood up. His eyes were blazing.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know what I'm going to do, Quinlan?" he asked. "I'm going to
+run up to New York on the midnight train. If I can't get a berth on a
+sleeper I'll sit up in a day coach. I'm going to rout Fred Core out of
+bed before breakfast time in the morning and put this thing up to him
+just as you've put it up to me here to-night. If I can make him see it
+as you've made me see it, he'll get busy. If he doesn't see it,
+there's no harm done. But in any event <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span>it's your idea, and I'll see
+to it that you're not cheated out of the credit for it."</p>
+
+<p>The dipsomaniac shook his head. The flame of inspiration had died out
+in Quinlan; he was a dead crater again&mdash;a drunkard quivering for the
+lack of stimulant.</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind the credit, son. What was it wise old Omar said&mdash;'Take the
+cash and let the credit go'?&mdash;something like that anyhow. You run
+along up to New York and kindle the fires. But before you start I wish
+you'd loan me about two dollars. Some of these days when my luck
+changes I'll pay it all back. I'm keeping track of what I owe you. Or
+say, Drayton&mdash;make it five dollars, won't you, if you can spare it?"</p>
+
+<br />
+<hr style='width: 15%;' />
+<br />
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span>it was on that evening that he was to address a
+mass meeting at a hall on the Lower West Side of New York&mdash;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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>On a Monday morning Congressman Jason Mallard's name was in every
+paper; his picture was in many of them. On the day following&mdash;&mdash; But I
+am getting ahead <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>That Monday afternoon Mallard came up from Washington; only his
+secretary came with him. Three men&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span>jammed with men and women, thousands of them, who, coming too
+late to secure admission to the hall&mdash;the hall was crowded as early as
+seven o'clock&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a furrow
+that instantly closed in behind it <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span>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&mdash;quoting the chairman&mdash;"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.</p>
+
+<p>"And this"&mdash;he began without preamble in that great resonant voice of
+his, that was like a blast of a trumpet&mdash;"and this, my countrymen, is
+the answer which the plain <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span>people of this great city make to the
+corrupted and misguided press that would crucify any man who dares
+defy it."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span>before&mdash;not a line of news,
+not a line of editorial comment, not a paragraph&mdash;appeared in any
+newspaper printed in the English language on this continent. The
+silent war had started.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;six hundred uniformed men, under an inspector and three
+captains&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;this was the strange part&mdash;by actual count less
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>At eight-forty-five O'Hara telephoned <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span>paper whose date of
+publication chanced to be Thursday, the following paragraph:</p>
+
+<div class="block"><p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p>Invariably the caption over this paragraph was the one word:</p>
+
+<p class="cen">SILENCE!</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>But not a single paper in the United States stated that she was the
+only sister of Congressman Jason Mallard.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep048" id="imagep048"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep048.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep048.jpg" width="55%" alt="He May or May Not Keep Faith" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em; font-size: 90%;">HE MAY OR MAY NOT KEEP FAITH,<br />
+BUT YOU CAN BET HE ALWAYS KEEPS A SCRAP-BOOK.<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The only publication in America that carried a transcript of
+Congressman Mallard's remarks on this occasion was the Congressional
+Record.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span>understandingly and then by
+tacit agreement the subject would be changed.</p>
+
+<p>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 employ&eacute;&mdash;a sweeper and cleaner.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>For once a policeman was on the spot when trouble occurred. This
+particular <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span>knew. He asked the tall man for
+his name and business.</p>
+
+<p>"My name," said the prisoner, "is Jason C. Mallard. I am a member of
+Congress."</p>
+
+<p>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, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>on the very next day promoted him to be a sergeant.</p>
+
+<p>But when he spoke it was not to Mallard but to the sweeper.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here, Mel Harris," he said; "you call yourself a purty good
+Amurican, don't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"You bet your life I do!" was the answer. "Ain't I got a boy in camp
+soldierin'?"</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>For a moment the sweeper stared at his interrogator, dazed. Then a
+grin of appreciation bisected his homely red-streaked face.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, it was an accident, officer," he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span>answered. "I slipped down and
+hit my own self a wallop, jest like you said. Anyway, it don't amount
+to nothin'."</p>
+
+<p>"You seen what happened, didn't you?" went on the policeman,
+addressing the station master. "It was a pure accident, wasn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's what it was&mdash;a pure accident," stated the station master.</p>
+
+<p>"Then, to your knowledge, there wasn't no row of any sort occurring
+round here to-night?" went on the policeman.</p>
+
+<p>"Not that I heard of."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if there had a-been you'd a-heard of it, wouldn't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure I would!"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;no
+outsider&mdash;couldn't a-had nothin' to do with your gettin' hurt, could
+he?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not a thing in the world," replied Harris.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span>"Not a thing in the world," echoed the station master.</p>
+
+<p>"And you ain't got any charge to make against anybody for what was due
+to your own personal awkwardness, have you?" suggested the blue-coated
+prompter.</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly I ain't!" disclaimed Harris almost indignantly.</p>
+
+<p>Mallard broke in: "You can't do this&mdash;you men," he declared hoarsely.
+"I struck that man and I'm glad I did strike him&mdash;damn him! I wish I'd
+killed him. I'm willing to take the consequences. I demand that you
+make a report of this case to your superior officer."</p>
+
+<p>As though he had not heard him&mdash;as though he did not know a fourth
+person was present&mdash;the policeman, looking right past Mallard with a
+levelled, steady, contemptuous gaze, addressed the other two. His tone
+was quite casual, and yet somehow he managed to freight his words with
+a scorn too heavy to be expressed in mere words:</p>
+
+<p>"Boys," he said, "it seems-like to me the air in this room is so kind
+of foul that it <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span>ain't fitten for good Amuricans to be breathin' it.
+So I'm goin' to open up this here door and see if it don't purify
+itself&mdash;of its own accord."</p>
+
+<p>He stepped back and swung the door wide open; then stepped over and
+joined the station master and the sweeper. And there together they all
+three stood without a word from any one of them as the fourth man,
+with his face deadly white now where before it had been a passionate
+red, and his head lolling on his breast, though he strove to hold it
+rigidly erect, passed silently out of the little office. Through the
+opened door the trio with their eyes followed him while he crossed the
+concrete floor of the concourse and passed through a gate. They
+continued to watch until he had disappeared in the murk, going toward
+where a row of parked sleepers stood at the far end of the train shed.</p>
+
+<br />
+<hr style='width: 15%;' />
+<br />
+
+<p>Yet another policeman is to figure in this recital of events. This
+policeman's name is Caleb Waggoner and this Caleb Waggoner was and
+still is the night marshal in a small <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span>town in Iowa on the Missouri
+River. He is one-half the police force of the town, the other half
+being a constable who does duty in the daytime. Waggoner suffers from
+an affection which in a large community might prevent him from holding
+such a job as the one he does hold. He has an impediment of the speech
+which at all times causes him to stammer badly. When he is excited it
+is only by a tremendous mental and physical effort and after repeated
+endeavours that he can form the words at all. In other regards he is a
+first-rate officer, sober, trustworthy and kindly.</p>
+
+<p>On the night of the eighteenth of February, at about half past eleven
+o'clock, Marshal Waggoner was completing his regular before-midnight
+round of the business district. The weather was nasty, with a raw wet
+wind blowing and half-melted slush underfoot. In his tour he had
+encountered not a single person. That dead dumb quiet which falls upon
+a sleeping town on a winter's night was all about him. But as he
+turned out of Main Street, which is the principal thoroughfare, into
+Sycamore <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span>Street, a short byway running down between scattered
+buildings and vacant lots to the river bank a short block away, he saw
+a man standing at the side door of the Eagle House, the town's
+second-best hotel. A gas lamp flaring raggedly above the doorway
+brought out the figure with distinctness. The man was not moving&mdash;he
+was just standing there, with the collar of a heavy overcoat turned up
+about his throat and a soft black hat with a wide brim drawn well down
+upon his head.</p>
+
+<p>Drawing nearer, Waggoner, who by name or by sight knew every resident
+of the town, made up his mind that the loiterer was a stranger. Now a
+stranger abroad at such an hour and apparently with no business to
+mind would at once be mentally catalogued by the vigilant night
+marshal as a suspicious person. So when he had come close up to the
+other, padding noiselessly in his heavy rubber boots, the officer
+halted and from a distance of six feet or so stared steadfastly at the
+suspect. The suspect returned the look.</p>
+
+<p>What Waggoner saw was a thin, haggard <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span>face covered to the upper bulge
+of the jaw-bones with a disfiguring growth of reddish whiskers and
+inclosed at the temples by shaggy, unkempt strands of red hair which
+protruded from beneath the black hat. Evidently the man had not been
+shaved for weeks; certainly his hair needed trimming and combing. But
+what at the moment impressed Waggoner more even than the general
+unkemptness of the stranger's aspect was the look out of his eyes.
+They were widespread eyes and bloodshot as though from lack of sleep,
+and they glared into Waggoner's with a peculiar, strained, hearkening
+expression. There was agony in them&mdash;misery unutterable.</p>
+
+<p>Thrusting his head forward then, the stranger cried out, and his
+voice, which in his first words was deep and musical, suddenly, before
+he had uttered a full sentence, turned to a sharp, half-hysterical
+falsetto:</p>
+
+<p>"Why don't you say something to me, man?" he cried at the startled
+Waggoner. "For God's sake, why don't you speak to me? Even if you do
+know me, why don't <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span>you speak? Why don't you call me by my name? I
+can't stand it&mdash;I can't stand it any longer, I tell you. You've got to
+speak."</p>
+
+<p>Astounded, Waggoner strove to answer. But, because he was startled and
+a bit apprehensive as well, his throat locked down on his faulty vocal
+cords. His face moved and his lips twisted convulsively, but no sound
+issued from his mouth.</p>
+
+<p>The stranger, glaring into Waggoner's face with those two goggling
+eyes of his, which were all eyeballs, threw up both arms at full
+length and gave a great gagging outcry.</p>
+
+<p>"It's come!" he shrieked; "it's come! The silence has done it at last.
+It deafens me&mdash;I'm deaf! I can't hear you! I can't hear you!"</p>
+
+<p>He turned and ran south&mdash;toward the river&mdash;and Waggoner, recovering
+himself, ran after him full bent. It was a strangely silent race these
+two ran through the empty little street, for in the half-melted snow
+their feet made no sounds at all. Waggoner, for obvious reasons, could
+utter no words; the other man did not.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span>A scant ten feet in the lead the fugitive reached the high clay bank
+of the river. Without a backward glance at his pursuer, without
+checking his speed, he went off and over the edge and down out of
+sight into the darkness. Even at the end of the twenty-foot plunge the
+body in striking made almost no sound at all, for, as Waggoner
+afterward figured, it must have struck against a mass of shore ice,
+then instantly to slide off, with scarcely a splash, into the roiled
+yellow waters beyond.</p>
+
+<p>The policeman checked his own speed barely in time to save himself
+from following over the brink. He crouched on the verge of the frozen
+clay bluff, peering downward into the blackness and the quiet. He saw
+nothing and he heard nothing except his own laboured breathing.</p>
+
+<p>The body was never recovered. But at daylight a black soft hat was
+found on a half-rotted ice floe, where it had lodged close up against
+the bank. A name was stamped in the sweatband, and by this the
+identity of the suicide was established as that of Congressman Jason
+Mallard.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Thunders of Silence, by Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
+
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+Project Gutenberg's The Thunders of Silence, by Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Thunders of Silence
+
+Author: Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
+
+Release Date: March 29, 2008 [EBook #24936]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE THUNDERS OF SILENCE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jeannie Howse, Bryan Ness and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+_The Thunders of Silence_
+
+
+
+
+BY IRVIN S. COBB
+
+FICTION
+
+  THOSE TIMES AND THESE
+  LOCAL COLOR
+  OLD JUDGE PRIEST
+  FIBBLE, D.D.
+  BACK HOME
+  THE ESCAPE OF MR. TRIMM
+
+WIT AND HUMOR
+
+  "SPEAKING OF OPERATIONS----"
+  EUROPE REVISED
+  ROUGHING IT DE LUXE
+  COBB'S BILL OF FARE
+  COBB'S ANATOMY
+
+MISCELLANY
+
+  THE THUNDERS OF SILENCE
+  "SPEAKING OF PRUSSIANS----"
+  PATHS OF GLORY
+
+GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
+NEW YORK
+
+   [Illustration: THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ARE A MIGHTY PATIENT LOT.]
+
+
+
+
+_The Thunders
+of Silence_
+
+
+By
+_Irvin S. Cobb_
+
+Author of "Paths of Glory," "Speaking
+of Prussians----," etc.
+
+
+ILLUSTRATED
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+New York
+George H. Doran Company
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1918,
+BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY
+PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+
+
+
+
+_ILLUSTRATIONS_
+
+
+The American people are a mighty patient lot.      _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                             PAGE
+
+The lone wolf wasn't a lone wolf any longer. He had a pack
+  to rally about him                                           16
+
+That's the thing he feeds on--Vanity                           32
+
+He may or may not keep faith but you can bet he always
+  keeps a scrap-book                                           48
+
+
+
+
+_The Thunders of Silence_
+
+
+Some people said Congressman Mallard had gone mad. These were his
+friends, striving out of the goodness of their hearts to put the best
+face on what at best was a lamentable situation. Some said he was a
+traitor to his country. These were his enemies, personal, political
+and journalistic. Some called him a patriot who put humanity above
+nationality, a new John the Baptist come out of the wilderness to
+preach a sobering doctrine of world-peace to a world made drunk on
+war. And these were his followers. Of the first--his friends--there
+were not many left. Of the second group there were millions that
+multiplied themselves. Of the third there had been at the outset but a
+timorous and furtive few, and they mostly men and women who spoke
+English, if they spoke it at all, with the halting speech and the
+twisted idiom that betrayed their foreign birth; being persons who
+found it entirely consistent to applaud the preachment of planetic
+disarmament out of one side of their mouths, and out of the other side
+of their mouths to pray for the success at arms of the War Lord whose
+hand had shoved the universe over the rim of the chasm. But each
+passing day now saw them increasing in number and in audacity. Taking
+courage to themselves from the courage of their apostle, these, his
+disciples, were beginning to shout from the housetops what once they
+had only dared whisper beneath the eaves. Disloyalty no longer
+smouldered; it was blazing up. It crackled, and threw off firebrands.
+
+Of all those who sat in judgment upon the acts and the utterances of
+the man--and this classification would include every articulate
+creature in the United States who was old enough to be reasonable--or
+unreasonable--only a handful had the right diagnosis for the case.
+Here and there were to be found men who knew he was neither crazed nor
+inspired; and quite rightly they put no credence in the charge that he
+had sold himself for pieces of silver to the enemy of his own nation.
+They knew what ailed the Honourable Jason Mallard--that he was a
+victim of a strangulated ambition, of an egotistic hernia. He was
+hopelessly ruptured in his vanity. All his life he had lived on love
+of notoriety, and by that same perverted passion he was being eaten
+up. Once he had diligently besought the confidence and the affections
+of a majority of his fellow citizens; now he seemed bent upon
+consolidating their hate for him into a common flood and laving
+himself in it. Well, if such was his wish he was having it; there was
+no denying that.
+
+In the prime of his life, before he was fifty, it had seemed that
+almost for the asking the presidency might have been his. He had been
+born right, as the saying goes, and bred right, to make suitable
+presidential timber. He came of fine clean blends of blood. His father
+had been a descendant of Norman-English folk who settled in Maryland
+before the Revolution; the family name had originally been Maillard,
+afterward corrupted into Mallard. His mother's people were
+Scotch-Irish immigrants of the types that carved out their homesteads
+with axes on the spiny haunches of the Cumberlands. In the Civil War
+his father had fought for the Union, in a regiment of borderers; two
+of his uncles had been partisan rangers on the side of the
+Confederacy. If he was a trifle young to be of that generation of
+public men who were born in unchinked log cabins of the wilderness or
+prairie-sod shanties, at least he was to enjoy the subsequent
+political advantage of having come into the world in a two-room house
+of unpainted pine slabs on the sloped withers of a mountain in East
+Tennessee. As a child he had been taken by his parents to one of the
+states which are called pivotal states. There he had grown up--farm
+boy first, teacher of a district school, self-taught lawyer, county
+attorney, state legislator, governor, congressman for five terms, a
+floor leader of his party--so that by ancestry and environment, by the
+ethics of political expediency and political geography, by his own
+record and by the traditions of the time, he was formed to make an
+acceptable presidential aspirant.
+
+In person he was most admirably adapted for the role of statesman. He
+had a figure fit to set off a toga, a brow that might have worn a crown
+with dignity. As an orator he had no equal in Congress or, for that
+matter, out of it. He was a burning mountain of eloquence, a veritable
+human Vesuvius from whom, at will, flowed rhetoric or invective, satire
+or sentiment, as lava might flow from a living volcano. His mind
+spawned sonorous phrases as a roe shad spawns eggs. He was in all
+outward regards a shape of a man to catch the eye, with a voice to
+cajole the senses as with music of bugles, and an oratory to inspire.
+Moreover, the destiny which shaped his ends had mercifully denied him
+that which is a boon to common men but a curse to public men. Jason
+Mallard was without a sense of humour. He never laughed at others; he
+never laughed at himself. Certain of our public leaders have before now
+fallen into the woful error of doing one or both of these things.
+Wherefore they were forever after called humourists--and ruined. When
+they said anything serious their friends took it humorously, and when
+they said anything humorously their enemies took it seriously. But
+Congressman Mallard was safe enough there.
+
+Being what he was--a handsome bundle of selfishness, coated over with
+a fine gloss of seeming humility, a creature whose every instinct was
+richly mulched in self-conceit and yet one who simulated a deep
+devotion for mankind at large--he couldn't make either of these
+mistakes.
+
+Upon a time the presidential nomination of his party--the dominant
+party, too--had been almost within his grasp. That made his losing it
+all the more bitter. Thereafter he became an obstructionist, a fighter
+outside of the lines of his own party and not within the lines of the
+opposing party, a leader of the elements of national discontent and
+national discord, a mouthpiece for all those who would tear down the
+pillars of the temple because they dislike its present tenants. Once
+he had courted popularity; presently--this coming after his
+re-election to a sixth term--he went out of his way to win
+unpopularity. His invectives ate in like corrosives, his metaphors bit
+like adders. Always he had been like a sponge to sop up adulation; now
+he was to prove that when it came to withstanding denunciation his
+hide was the hide of a rhino.
+
+This war came along, and after more than two years of it came our
+entry into it. For the most part, in the national capital and out of
+it, artificial lines of partisan division were wiped out under a tidal
+wave of patriotism. So far as the generality of Americans were
+concerned, they for the time being were neither Democrats nor
+Republicans; neither were they Socialists nor Independents nor
+Prohibitionists. For the duration of the war they were Americans,
+actuated by a common purpose and stirred by a common danger. Afterward
+they might be, politically speaking, whatever they chose to be, but
+for the time being they were just Americans. Into this unique
+condition Jason Mallard projected himself, an upstanding reef of
+opposition to break the fine continuity of a mighty ground swell of
+national unity and national harmony.
+
+Brilliant, formidable, resourceful, seemingly invulnerable, armoured
+in apparent disdain for the contempt and the indignation of the masses
+of the citizenship, he fought against and voted against the breaking
+off of diplomatic relations with Germany; fought against the draft,
+fought against the war appropriations, fought against the plans for a
+bigger navy, the plans for a great army; fought the first Liberty Loan
+and the second; he fought, in December last, against a declaration of
+war with Austro-Hungary. And, so far as the members of Congress were
+concerned, he fought practically single-handed.
+
+His vote cast in opposition to the will of the majority meant nothing;
+his voice raised in opposition meant much. For very soon the avowed
+pacifists and the secret protagonists of Kultur, the blood-eyed
+anarchists and the lily-livered dissenters, the conscientious
+objectors and the conscienceless I.W.W. group, saw in him a buttress
+upon which to stay their cause. The lone wolf wasn't a lone wolf
+any longer--he had a pack to rally about him, yelping approval of his
+every word. Day by day he grew stronger and day by day the sinister
+elements behind him grew bolder, echoing his challenges against the
+Government and against the war. With practically every newspaper in
+America, big and little, fighting him; with every influential magazine
+fighting him; with the leaders of the Administration fighting him--he
+nevertheless loomed on the national sky line as a great sinister
+figure of defiance and rebellion.
+
+   [Illustration: THE LONE WOLF WASN'T A LONE WOLF ANY LONGER. HE
+   HAD A PACK TO RALLY ABOUT HIM.]
+
+Deft word chandlers of the magazines and the daily press coined terms
+of opprobrium for him. He was the King of Copperheads, the Junior
+Benedict Arnold, the Modern Judas, the Second Aaron Burr; these things
+and a hundred others they called him; and he laughed at hard names and
+in reply coined singularly apt and cruel synonyms for the more
+conspicuous of his critics. The oldest active editor in the
+country--and the most famous--called upon the body of which he was a
+member to impeach him for acts of disloyalty, tending to give aid and
+comfort to the common enemy. The great president of a great university
+suggested as a proper remedy for what seemed to ail this man Mallard
+that he be shot against a brick wall some fine morning at sunrise. At
+a monstrous mass meeting held in the chief city of Mallard's home
+state, a mass meeting presided over by the governor of that state,
+resolutions were unanimously adopted calling upon him to resign his
+commission as a representative. His answer to all three was a speech
+which, as translated, was shortly thereafter printed in pamphlet form
+by the Berlin Lokal-Anzeiger and circulated among the German soldiers
+at the Front.
+
+For you see Congressman Mallard felt safe, and Congressman Mallard was
+safe. His buckler was the right of free speech; his sword, the
+argument that he stood for peace through all the world, for
+arbitration and disarmament among all the peoples of the world.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was on the evening of a day in January of this present year that
+young Drayton, Washington correspondent for the New York Epoch, sat
+in the office of his bureau on the second floor of the Hibbett
+Building, revising his account of a scene he had witnessed that
+afternoon from the press gallery of the House. He had instructions
+from his managing editor to cover the story at length. At ten o'clock
+he had finished what would make two columns in type and was polishing
+off his opening paragraphs before putting the manuscript on the wire
+when the door of his room opened and a man came in--a shabby,
+tremulous figure. The comer was Quinlan.
+
+Quinlan was forty years old and looked fifty. Before whisky got him
+Quinlan had been a great newspaper man. Now that his habits made it
+impossible for him to hold a steady job he was become a sort of news
+tipster. Occasionally also he did small lobbying of a sort; his
+acquaintance with public men and his intimate knowledge of Washington
+officialdom served him in both these precarious fields of endeavour.
+The liquor he drank--whenever and wherever he could get it--had
+bloated his face out of all wholesome contour and had given to his
+stomach, a chronic distention, but had depleted his frame and shrunken
+his limbs so that physically he was that common enough type of the
+hopeless alcoholic--a meagre rack of a man burdened amidships by an
+unhealthy and dropsical plumpness.
+
+At times--when he was not completely sodden--when he had in him just
+enough whisky, to stimulate his soaked brain, and yet not enough of it
+to make him maudlin--he displayed flashes of a one-time brilliancy
+which by contrast with his usual state made the ruinous thing he had
+done to himself seem all the more pitiable.
+
+Drayton of the Epoch was one of the newspaper men upon whom he
+sponged. Always preserving the fiction, that he was borrowing because
+of temporary necessity, he got small sums of money out of Drayton from
+time to time, and, in exchange, gave the younger man bits of helpful
+information. It was not so much news that he furnished Drayton as it
+was insight into causes working behind political and diplomatic
+events. He came in now without knocking and stood looking at Drayton
+with an ingratiating flicker in his dulled eyes.
+
+"Hello, Quinlan!" said Drayton. "What's on your mind to-night?"
+
+"Nothing, until you get done there," said Quinlan, letting himself
+flop down into a chair across the desk from Drayton. "Go ahead and get
+through. I've got nowhere to come but in, and nowhere to go but out."
+
+"I'm just putting the final touches on my story of Congressman
+Mallard's speech," said Drayton. "Want to read my introduction?"
+
+Privately Drayton was rather pleased with the job and craved approval
+for his craftsmanship from a man who still knew good writing when he
+saw it, even though he cold no longer write it.
+
+"No, thank you," said Quinlan. "All I ever want to read about that man
+is his obituary."
+
+"You said it!" agreed Drayton. "It's what most of the decent people in
+this country are thinking, I guess, even if they haven't begun saying
+it out loud yet. It strikes me the American people are a mighty
+patient lot--putting up with that demagogue. That was a rotten thing
+that happened up on the hill to-day, Quinlan--a damnable thing. Here
+was Mallard making the best speech in the worst cause that ever I
+heard, and getting away with it too. And there was Richland trying to
+answer him and in comparison making a spectacle of himself--Richland
+with all the right and all the decency on his side and yet showing up
+like a perfect dub alongside Mallard, because he hasn't got one-tenth
+of Mallard's ability as a speaker or one-tenth of Mallard's personal
+fire or stage presence or magnetism or whatever it is that makes
+Mallard so plausible--and so dangerous."
+
+"That's all true enough, no doubt," said Quinlan; "and since it is
+true why don't the newspapers put Mallard out of business?"
+
+"Why don't the newspapers put him out of business!" echoed Drayton.
+"Why, good Lord, man, isn't that what they've all been trying to do
+for the last six months? They call him every name in the calendar, and
+it all rolls off him like water off a duck's back. He seems to get
+nourishment out of abuse that would kill any other man. He thrives on
+it, if I'm any judge. I believe a hiss is music to his ears and a
+curse is a hushaby, lullaby song. Put him out of business? Why say,
+doesn't nearly every editorial writer in the country jump on him every
+day, and don't all the paragraphers gibe at him, and don't all the
+cartoonists lampoon him, and don't all of us who write news from down
+here in Washington give him the worst of it in our despatches?... And
+what's the result? Mallard takes on flesh and every red-mouthed
+agitator in the country and every mushy-brained peace fanatic and
+every secret German sympathiser trails at his heels, repeating what he
+says. I'd like to know what the press of America hasn't done to put
+him out of business!
+
+"There never was a time, I guess, when the reputable press of this
+country was so united in its campaign to kill off a man as it is now
+in its campaign to kill off Mallard. No paper gives him countenance,
+except some of these foreign-language rags and these dirty little
+disloyal sheets; and until here just lately even they didn't dare to
+come out in the open and applaud him. Anyway, who reads them as
+compared with those who read the real newspapers and the real
+magazines? Nobody! And yet he gets stronger every day. He's a national
+menace--that's what he is."
+
+"You said it again, son," said Quinlan. "Six months ago he was a
+national nuisance and now he's a national menace; and who's
+responsible--or, rather, what's responsible--for him being a national
+menace? Well, I'm going to tell you; but first I'm going to tell you
+something about Mallard. I've known him for twelve years, more or
+less--ever since he came here to Washington in his long frock coat
+that didn't fit him and his big black slouch hat and his white string
+tie and in all the rest of the regalia of the counterfeit who's trying
+to fool people into believing he's part tribune and part peasant."
+
+"You wouldn't call Mallard a counterfeit, would you?--a man with the
+gifts he's got," broke in Drayton. "I've heard him called everything
+else nearly in the English language, but you're the first man that
+ever called him a counterfeit, to my knowledge!"
+
+"Counterfeit? why, he's as bogus as a pewter dime," said Quinlan. "I
+tell you I know the man. Because you don't know him he's got you
+fooled the same as he's got so many other people fooled. Because he
+looks like a steel engraving of Henry Clay you think he is a Henry
+Clay, I suppose--anyhow, a lot of other people do; but I'm telling you
+his resemblance to Henry Clay is all on the outside--it doesn't strike
+in any farther than the hair roots. He calls himself a self-made man.
+Well, he's not; he's self-assembled, that's all. He's made up of
+standardised and interchangeable parts. He's compounded of something
+borrowed from every political mountebank who's pulled that old bunk
+about being a friend of the great common people and gotten away with
+it during the last fifty years. He's not a real genius. He's a
+synthetic genius."
+
+"There are just two things about Mallard that are not spurious--two
+things that make up the real essence and tissue of him: One is his
+genius as a speaker and the other is his vanity; and the bigger of
+these, you take it from me, is his vanity. That's the thing he feeds
+on--vanity. It's the breath in his nostrils, it's the savour and the
+salt on his daily bread. He lives on publicity, on notoriety. And yet
+you, a newspaper man, sit here wondering how the newspapers could kill
+him, and never guessing the real answer."
+
+"Well, what is the answer then?" demanded Drayton.
+
+"Wait, I'm coming to that. The press is always prating about the power
+of the press, always nagging about pitiless publicity being potent to
+destroy an evil thing or a bad man, and all that sort of rot. And yet
+every day the newspapers give the lie to their own boastings. It's
+true, Drayton, that up to a certain point the newspapers can make a
+man by printing favourable things about him. By that same token they
+imagine they can tear him down by printing unfavourable things about
+him. They think they can, but they can't. Let them get together in a
+campaign of vituperation against a man, and at once they set everybody
+to talking about him. Then let them carry their campaign just over a
+psychological dividing line, and right away they begin, against their
+wills, to manufacture sentiment for him. The reactions of printer's
+ink are stronger somehow than its original actions--its chemical
+processes acquire added strength in the back kick. What has saved many
+a rotten criminal in this country from getting his just deserts? It
+wasn't the fact that the newspapers were all for him. It was the fact
+that all the newspapers were against him. The under dog may be ever so
+bad a dog, but only let enough of us start kicking him all together,
+and what's the result? Sympathy for him--that's what. Calling
+'Unclean, unclean!' after a leper never yet made people shun him. It
+only makes them crowd up closer to see his sores. I'll bet if the
+facts were known that was true two thousand years ago. Certainly it's
+true to-day, and human nature doesn't change.
+
+"But the newspapers have one weapon they've never yet used; at least
+as a unit they've never used it. It's the strongest weapon they've
+got, and the cheapest, and the most terrible, and yet they let it lie
+in its scabbard and rust. With that weapon they could destroy any
+human being of the type of Jason Mallard in one-twentieth of the time
+it takes them to build up public opinion for or against him. And yet
+they can't see it--or won't see that it's there, all forged and ready
+to their hands."
+
+"And that weapon is what?" asked Drayton.
+
+"Silence. Absolute, utter silence. Silence is the loudest thing in the
+world. It thunders louder than the thunder. And it's the deadliest.
+What drives men mad who are put in solitary confinement? The darkness?
+The solitude? Well, they help. But it's silence that does the
+trick--silence that roars in their ears until it cracks their eardrums
+and addles their brains."
+
+"Mallard is a national peril, we'll concede. Very well then, he should
+be destroyed. And the surest, quickest, best way for the newspapers to
+destroy him is to wall him up in silence, to put a vacuum bell of
+silence down over him, to lock him up in silence, to bury him alive in
+silence. And that's a simpler thing than it sounds. They have all of
+them, only to do one little thing--just quit printing his name."
+
+"But they can't quit printing his name, Quinlan!" exclaimed Drayton.
+"Mallard's news; he's the biggest figure in the news that there is
+to-day in this country."
+
+"That's the same foolish argument that the average newspaper man would
+make," said Quinlan scornfully. "Mallard is news because the
+newspapers make news of him--and for no other reason. Let them quit,
+and he isn't news any more--he's a nonentity, he's nothing at all,
+he's null and he's void. So far as public opinion goes he will cease
+to exist, and a thing that has ceased to exist is no longer news--once
+you've printed the funeral notice. Every popular thing, every
+conspicuous thing in the world is born of notoriety and fed on
+notoriety--newspaper notoriety. Notoriety is as essential to the
+object of notoriety itself as it is in fashioning the sentiments of
+those who read about it. And there's just one place where you can get
+wholesale, nation-wide notoriety to-day--out of the jaws of a printing
+press.
+
+"We call baseball our national pastime--granted! But let the
+newspapers, all of them, during one month of this coming spring, quit
+printing a word about baseball, and you'd see the parks closed up and
+the weeds growing on the base lines and the turnstiles rusting solid.
+You remember those deluded ladies who almost did the cause of suffrage
+some damage last year by picketing the White House and bothering the
+President when he was busy with the biggest job that any man had
+tackled in this country since Abe Lincoln? Remember how they raised
+such a hullabaloo when they were sent to the workhouse? Well, suppose
+the newspapers, instead of giving them front-page headlines and
+columns of space every day, had refused to print a line about them or
+even so much as to mention their names. Do you believe they would have
+stuck to the job week after week as they did stick to it? I tell you
+they'd have quit cold inside of forty-eight hours.
+
+"Son, your average latter-day martyr endures his captivity with
+fortitude because he knows the world, through the papers, is going to
+hear the pleasant clanking of his chains. Otherwise he'd burst from
+his cell with a disappointed yell and go out of the martyr business
+instanter. He may not fear the gallows or the stake or the pillory,
+but he certainly does love his press notices. He may or may not keep
+the faith, but you can bet he always keeps a scrapbook.
+Silence--that's the thing he fears more than hangman's nooses or
+firing squads.
+
+"And that's the cure for your friend, Jason Mallard, Esquire. Let the
+press of this country put the curse of silence on him and he's done
+for. Silence will kill off his cause and kill off his following and
+kill him off. It will kill him politically and figuratively. I'm not
+sure, knowing the man as I do, but what it will kill him actually.
+Entomb him in silence and he'll be a body of death and corruption in
+two weeks. Just let the newspapers and the magazines provide the
+grave, and the corpse will provide itself."
+
+Drayton felt himself catching the fever of Quinlan's fire. He broke in
+eagerly.
+
+"But, Quinlan, how could it be done?" he asked. "How could you get
+concerted action for a thing that's so revolutionary, so
+unprecedented, so----"
+
+"This happens to be one time in the history of the United States when
+you could get it," said the inebriate. "You could get it because the
+press is practically united to-day in favour of real Americanism. Let
+some man like your editor-in-chief, Fred Core, or like Carlos Seers of
+the Era, or Manuel Oxus of the Period, or Malcolm Flint of the A.P.
+call a private meeting in New York of the biggest individual
+publishers of daily papers and the leading magazine publishers and the
+heads of all the press associations and news syndicates, from the big
+fellows clear down to the shops that sell boiler plate to the country
+weeklies with patent insides. Through their concerted influence that
+crowd could put the thing over in twenty-four hours. They could line
+up the Authors' League, line up the defence societies, line up the
+national advertisers, line up organised labour in the printing
+trades--line up everybody and everything worth while. Oh, it could be
+done--make no mistake about that. Call it a boycott; call it coercion,
+mob law, lynch law, anything you please--it's justifiable. And there'd
+be no way out for Mallard. He couldn't bring an injunction suit to
+make a newspaper publisher print his name. He couldn't buy advertising
+space to tell about himself if nobody would sell it to him. There's
+only one thing he could do--and if I'm any judge he'd do it, sooner or
+later."
+
+   [Illustration: THAT'S THE THING HE FEEDS ON--VANITY.]
+
+Young Drayton stood up. His eyes were blazing.
+
+"Do you know what I'm going to do, Quinlan?" he asked. "I'm going to
+run up to New York on the midnight train. If I can't get a berth on a
+sleeper I'll sit up in a day coach. I'm going to rout Fred Core out of
+bed before breakfast time in the morning and put this thing up to him
+just as you've put it up to me here to-night. If I can make him see it
+as you've made me see it, he'll get busy. If he doesn't see it,
+there's no harm done. But in any event it's your idea, and I'll see
+to it that you're not cheated out of the credit for it."
+
+The dipsomaniac shook his head. The flame of inspiration had died out
+in Quinlan; he was a dead crater again--a drunkard quivering for the
+lack of stimulant.
+
+"Never mind the credit, son. What was it wise old Omar said--'Take the
+cash and let the credit go'?--something like that anyhow. You run
+along up to New York and kindle the fires. But before you start I wish
+you'd loan me about two dollars. Some of these days when my luck
+changes I'll pay it all back. I'm keeping track of what I owe you. Or
+say, Drayton--make it five dollars, won't you, if you can spare it?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+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.
+
+   [Illustration: HE MAY OR MAY NOT KEEP FAITH, BUT YOU CAN BET HE
+   ALWAYS KEEPS A SCRAP-BOOK.]
+
+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 employe--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.
+
+"And you ain't got any charge to make against anybody for what was due
+to your own personal awkwardness, have you?" suggested the blue-coated
+prompter.
+
+"Certainly I ain't!" disclaimed Harris almost indignantly.
+
+Mallard broke in: "You can't do this--you men," he declared hoarsely.
+"I struck that man and I'm glad I did strike him--damn him! I wish I'd
+killed him. I'm willing to take the consequences. I demand that you
+make a report of this case to your superior officer."
+
+As though he had not heard him--as though he did not know a fourth
+person was present--the policeman, looking right past Mallard with a
+levelled, steady, contemptuous gaze, addressed the other two. His tone
+was quite casual, and yet somehow he managed to freight his words with
+a scorn too heavy to be expressed in mere words:
+
+"Boys," he said, "it seems-like to me the air in this room is so kind
+of foul that it ain't fitten for good Amuricans to be breathin' it.
+So I'm goin' to open up this here door and see if it don't purify
+itself--of its own accord."
+
+He stepped back and swung the door wide open; then stepped over and
+joined the station master and the sweeper. And there together they all
+three stood without a word from any one of them as the fourth man,
+with his face deadly white now where before it had been a passionate
+red, and his head lolling on his breast, though he strove to hold it
+rigidly erect, passed silently out of the little office. Through the
+opened door the trio with their eyes followed him while he crossed the
+concrete floor of the concourse and passed through a gate. They
+continued to watch until he had disappeared in the murk, going toward
+where a row of parked sleepers stood at the far end of the train shed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Yet another policeman is to figure in this recital of events. This
+policeman's name is Caleb Waggoner and this Caleb Waggoner was and
+still is the night marshal in a small town in Iowa on the Missouri
+River. He is one-half the police force of the town, the other half
+being a constable who does duty in the daytime. Waggoner suffers from
+an affection which in a large community might prevent him from holding
+such a job as the one he does hold. He has an impediment of the speech
+which at all times causes him to stammer badly. When he is excited it
+is only by a tremendous mental and physical effort and after repeated
+endeavours that he can form the words at all. In other regards he is a
+first-rate officer, sober, trustworthy and kindly.
+
+On the night of the eighteenth of February, at about half past eleven
+o'clock, Marshal Waggoner was completing his regular before-midnight
+round of the business district. The weather was nasty, with a raw wet
+wind blowing and half-melted slush underfoot. In his tour he had
+encountered not a single person. That dead dumb quiet which falls upon
+a sleeping town on a winter's night was all about him. But as he
+turned out of Main Street, which is the principal thoroughfare, into
+Sycamore Street, a short byway running down between scattered
+buildings and vacant lots to the river bank a short block away, he saw
+a man standing at the side door of the Eagle House, the town's
+second-best hotel. A gas lamp flaring raggedly above the doorway
+brought out the figure with distinctness. The man was not moving--he
+was just standing there, with the collar of a heavy overcoat turned up
+about his throat and a soft black hat with a wide brim drawn well down
+upon his head.
+
+Drawing nearer, Waggoner, who by name or by sight knew every resident
+of the town, made up his mind that the loiterer was a stranger. Now a
+stranger abroad at such an hour and apparently with no business to
+mind would at once be mentally catalogued by the vigilant night
+marshal as a suspicious person. So when he had come close up to the
+other, padding noiselessly in his heavy rubber boots, the officer
+halted and from a distance of six feet or so stared steadfastly at the
+suspect. The suspect returned the look.
+
+What Waggoner saw was a thin, haggard face covered to the upper bulge
+of the jaw-bones with a disfiguring growth of reddish whiskers and
+inclosed at the temples by shaggy, unkempt strands of red hair which
+protruded from beneath the black hat. Evidently the man had not been
+shaved for weeks; certainly his hair needed trimming and combing. But
+what at the moment impressed Waggoner more even than the general
+unkemptness of the stranger's aspect was the look out of his eyes.
+They were widespread eyes and bloodshot as though from lack of sleep,
+and they glared into Waggoner's with a peculiar, strained, hearkening
+expression. There was agony in them--misery unutterable.
+
+Thrusting his head forward then, the stranger cried out, and his
+voice, which in his first words was deep and musical, suddenly, before
+he had uttered a full sentence, turned to a sharp, half-hysterical
+falsetto:
+
+"Why don't you say something to me, man?" he cried at the startled
+Waggoner. "For God's sake, why don't you speak to me? Even if you do
+know me, why don't you speak? Why don't you call me by my name? I
+can't stand it--I can't stand it any longer, I tell you. You've got to
+speak."
+
+Astounded, Waggoner strove to answer. But, because he was startled and
+a bit apprehensive as well, his throat locked down on his faulty vocal
+cords. His face moved and his lips twisted convulsively, but no sound
+issued from his mouth.
+
+The stranger, glaring into Waggoner's face with those two goggling
+eyes of his, which were all eyeballs, threw up both arms at full
+length and gave a great gagging outcry.
+
+"It's come!" he shrieked; "it's come! The silence has done it at last.
+It deafens me--I'm deaf! I can't hear you! I can't hear you!"
+
+He turned and ran south--toward the river--and Waggoner, recovering
+himself, ran after him full bent. It was a strangely silent race these
+two ran through the empty little street, for in the half-melted snow
+their feet made no sounds at all. Waggoner, for obvious reasons, could
+utter no words; the other man did not.
+
+A scant ten feet in the lead the fugitive reached the high clay bank
+of the river. Without a backward glance at his pursuer, without
+checking his speed, he went off and over the edge and down out of
+sight into the darkness. Even at the end of the twenty-foot plunge the
+body in striking made almost no sound at all, for, as Waggoner
+afterward figured, it must have struck against a mass of shore ice,
+then instantly to slide off, with scarcely a splash, into the roiled
+yellow waters beyond.
+
+The policeman checked his own speed barely in time to save himself
+from following over the brink. He crouched on the verge of the frozen
+clay bluff, peering downward into the blackness and the quiet. He saw
+nothing and he heard nothing except his own laboured breathing.
+
+The body was never recovered. But at daylight a black soft hat was
+found on a half-rotted ice floe, where it had lodged close up against
+the bank. A name was stamped in the sweatband, and by this the
+identity of the suicide was established as that of Congressman Jason
+Mallard.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Thunders of Silence, by Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
+
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