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: