The Thunders of Silence Part 1

The Thunders of Silence.

by Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb.

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 pa.s.sing 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 cla.s.sification 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 pa.s.sion 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 c.u.mberlands. 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 unc.h.i.n.ked 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 sp.a.w.ned sonorous phrases as a roe shad sp.a.w.ns 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 ma.s.ses 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 b.u.t.tress 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 ma.s.s meeting held in the chief city of Mallard's home state, a ma.s.s 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 ma.n.u.script 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.

"h.e.l.lo, 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 d.a.m.nable 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? n.o.body! 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-a.s.sembled, 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 nonent.i.ty, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 fort.i.tude 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 sc.r.a.pbook.

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."