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The Deluge, a novel by David Graham Phillips |
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Chapter 35. "Wild Week" |
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_ CHAPTER XXXV. "WILD WEEK" "The Seven" made their fatal move on treacherous Updegraff's treacherous advice, I suspect. But they would not have adopted his suggestion had it not been so exactly congenial to their own temper of arrogance and tyranny and contempt for the people who meekly, year after year, presented themselves for the shearing with fatuous bleats of enthusiasm. "The Seven," of course, controlled directly, or indirectly, all but a few of the newspapers with which I had advertising contracts. They also controlled the main sources through which the press was supplied with news--and often and well they had used this control, and surprisingly cautious had they been not so to abuse it that the editors and the public would become suspicious. When my war was at its height, when I was beginning to congratulate myself that the huge magazines of "The Seven" were empty almost to the point at which they must sue for peace on my own terms, all in four days forty-three of my sixty-seven newspapers--and they the most important--notified me that they would no longer carry out their contracts to publish my daily letter. They gave as their reason, not the real one, fear of "The Seven," but fear that I would involve them in ruinous libel suits. I who had _legal_ proof for every statement I made; I who was always careful to understate! Next, one press association after another ceased to send out my letter as news, though they had been doing so regularly for months. The public had grown tired of the "sensation," they said. I countered with a telegram to one or more newspapers in every city and large town in the United States: "'The Seven' are trying to cut the wires between the truth and the public. If you wish my daily letter, telegraph me direct and I will send it at my expense." The response should have warned "The Seven." But it did not. Under their orders the telegraph companies refused to transmit the letter. I got an injunction. It was obeyed in typical, corrupt corporation fashion--they sent my matter, but so garbled that it was unintelligible. I appealed to the courts. In vain. To me, it was clear as sun in cloudless noonday sky that there could be but one result of this insolent and despotic denial of my rights and the rights of the people, this public confession of the truth of my charges. I turned everything salable or mortgageable into cash, locked the cash up in my private vaults, and waited for the cataclysm. Thursday--Friday--Saturday. Apparently all was tranquil; apparently the people accepted the Wall Street theory that I was an "exploded sensation." "The Seven" began to preen themselves; the strain upon them to maintain prices, if no less than for three months past, was not notably greater; the crisis would pass, I and my exposures would be forgotten, the routine of reaping the harvests and leaving only the gleanings for the sowers would soon be placidly resumed. Sunday. Roebuck, taken ill as he was passing the basket in the church of which he was the shining light, died at midnight--a beautiful, peaceful death, they say, with his daughter reading the Bible aloud, and his lips moving in prayer. Some hold that, had he lived, the tranquillity would have continued; but this is the view of those who can not realize that the tide of affairs is no more controlled by the "great men" than is the river led down to the sea by its surface flotsam, by which we measure the speed and direction of its current. Under that terrific tension, which to the shallow seemed a calm, something had to give way. If the dam had not yielded where Roebuck stood guard, it must have yielded somewhere else, or might have gone all in one grand crash. Monday. You know the story of the artist and his Statue of Grief--how he molded the features a hundred times, always failing, always getting an anti-climax, until at last in despair he gave up the impossible and finished the statue with a veil over the face. I have tried again and again to assemble words that would give some not too inadequate impression of that tremendous week in which, with a succession of explosions, each like the crack of doom, the financial structure that housed eighty millions of people burst, collapsed, was engulfed. I can not. I must leave it to your memory or your imagination. For years the financial leaders, crazed by the excess of power which the people had in ignorance and over-confidence and slovenly good-nature permitted them to acquire, had been tearing out the honest foundations on which alone so vast a structure can hope to rest solid and secure. They had been substituting rotten beams painted to look like stone and iron. The crash had to come; the sooner, the better--when a thing is wrong, each day's delay compounds the cost of righting it. So, with all the horrors of "Wild Week" in mind, all its physical and mental suffering, all its ruin and rioting and bloodshed, I still can insist that I am justly proud of my share in bringing it about. The blame and the shame are wholly upon those who made "Wild Week" necessary and inevitable. In catastrophes, the cry is "Each for himself!" But in a cataclysm, the obvious wise selfishness is generosity, and the cry is, "Stand together, for, singly, we perish." This was a cataclysm. No one could save himself, except the few who, taking my often-urged advice and following my example, had entered the ark of ready money. Farmer and artisan and professional man and laborer owed merchant; merchant owed banker; banker owed depositor. No one could pay because no one could get what was due him or could realize upon his property. The endless chain of credit that binds together the whole of modern society had snapped in a thousand places. It must be repaired, instantly and securely. But how--and by whom? I issued a clear statement of the situation; I showed in minute detail how the people standing together under the leadership of the honest men of property could easily force the big bandits to consent to an honest, just, rock-founded, iron-built reconstruction. My statement appeared in all the morning papers throughout the land. Turn back to it; read it. You will say that I was right. Well-- Toward two o'clock Inspector Crawford came into my private office, escorted by Joe. I saw in Joe's seamed, green-gray face that some new danger had arisen. "You've got to get out of this," said he. "The mob in front of our place fills the three streets. It's made up of crowds turned away from the suspended banks." I remembered the sullen faces and the hisses as I entered the office that morning earlier than usual. My windows were closed to keep out the street noises; but now that my mind was up from the work in which I had been absorbed, I could hear the sounds of many voices, even through the thick plate glass. "We've got two hundred policemen here," said the inspector. "Five hundred more are on the way. But--really, Mr. Blacklock, unless we can get you away, there'll be serious trouble. Those damn newspapers! Every one of them denounced you this morning, and the people are in a fury against you." I went toward the door. "Hold on, Matt!" cried Joe, springing at me and seizing me, "Where are you going?" "To tell them what I think of them," replied I, sweeping him aside. For my blood was up, and I was enraged against the poor cowardly fools. "For God's sake don't show yourself!" he begged. "If you don't care for your own life, think of the rest of us. We've fixed a route through buildings and under streets up to Broadway. Your electric is waiting for you there." "It won't do," I said. "I'll face 'em--it's the only way." I went to the window, and was about to throw up one of the sunblinds for a look at them; Crawford stopped me. "They'll stone the building and then storm it," said he. "You must go at once, by the route we've arranged." "Even if you tell them I'm gone, they won't believe it," replied I. "We can look out for that," said Joe, eager to save me, and caring nothing about consequences to himself. But I had unsettled the inspector. "Send for my electric to come down here," said I. "I'll go out alone and get in it and drive away." "That'll never do!" cried Joe. But the inspector said: "You're right, Mr. Blacklock. It's a bare chance. You may take 'em by surprise. Again, some fellow may yell and throw a stone and--" He did not need to finish. Joe looked wildly at me. "You mustn't do it, Matt!" he exclaimed. "You'll precipitate a riot, Crawford, if you permit this." But the inspector was telephoning for my electric. Then he went into the adjoining room, where he commanded a view of the entrance. Silence between Joe and me until he returned. "The electric is coming down the street," said he. I rose. "Good," said I. "I'm ready." "Wait until the other police get here," advised Crawford. "If the mob is in the temper you describe," said I, "the less that's done to irritate it the better. I must go out as if I hadn't a suspicion of danger." The inspector eyed me with an expression that was highly flattering to my vanity. "I'll go with you," said Joe, starting up from his stupor. "No," I replied. "You and the other fellows can take the underground route, if it's necessary." "It won't be necessary," put in the inspector. "As soon as I'm rid of you and have my additional force, I'll clear the streets." He went to the door. "Wait, Mr. Blacklock, until I've had time to get out to my men." Perhaps ten seconds after he disappeared, I, without further words, put on my hat, lit a cigar, shook Joe's wet, trembling hand, left in it my private keys and the memorandum of the combination of my private vault. Then I sallied forth. I had always had a ravenous appetite for excitement, and I had been in many a tight place; but for the first time there seemed to me to be an equilibrium between my internal energy and the outside situation. As I stepped from my street door and glanced about me, I had no feeling of danger. The whole situation seemed so simple. There stood the electric, just across the narrow stretch of sidewalk; there were the two hundred police, under Crawford's orders, scattered everywhere through the crowd, and good-naturedly jostling and pushing to create distraction. Without haste, I got into my machine. I calmly met the gaze of those thousands, quiet as so many barrels of gunpowder before the explosion. The chauffeur turned the machine. "Go slow," I called to him. "You might hurt somebody." But he had his orders from the inspector. He suddenly darted ahead at full speed. The mob scattered in every direction, and we were in Broadway, bound up town full-tilt, before I or the mob realized what he was about. I called to him to slow down. He paid not the slightest attention. I leaned from the window and looked up at him. It was not my chauffeur; it was a man who had the unmistakable but indescribable marks of the plain-clothes policeman. "Where are you going?" I shouted. "You'll find out when we arrive," he shouted back, grinning. I settled myself and waited--what else was there to do? Soon I guessed we were headed for the pier off which my yacht was anchored. As we dashed on to it, I saw that it was filled with police, both in uniform and in plain clothes. I descended. A detective sergeant stepped up to me. "We are here to help you to your yacht," he explained. "You wouldn't be safe anywhere in New York--no more would the place that harbored you." He had both common sense and force on his side. I got into the launch. Four detective sergeants accompanied me and went aboard with me. "Go ahead," said one of them to my captain. He looked at me for orders. "We are in the hands of our guests," said I. "Let them have their way." We steamed down the bay and out to sea. * * * * * From Maine to Texas the cry rose and swelled: "Blacklock is responsible! What does it matter whether he lied or told the truth? See the results of his crusade! He ought to be pilloried! He ought to be killed! He is the enemy of the human race. He has almost plunged the whole civilized world into bankruptcy and civil war." And they turned eagerly to the very autocrats who had been oppressing them. "You have the genius for finance and industry. Save us!" If you did not know, you could guess how those patriots with the "genius for finance and industry" responded. When they had done, when their program was in effect, Langdon, Melville and Updegraff were the three richest men in the country, and as powerful as Octavius, Antony and Lepidus after Philippi. They had saddled upon the reorganized finance and industry of the nation heavier taxes than ever, and a vaster and more expensive and more luxurious army of their parasites. The people had risen for financial and industrial freedom; they had paid its fearful price; then, in senseless panic and terror, they flung it away. I have read that one of the inscriptions on Apollo's temple at Delphi was, "Man, the fool of the farce." Truly, the gods must have created us for their amusement; and when Olympus palls, they ring up the curtain on some such screaming comedy as was that. It "makes the fancy chuckle, while the heart doth ache." _ |
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