Pearl Buck - Angry Wife

“I hold you responsible for your young mistress, Georgia!” he shouted. The train was moving and he did not hear her answer, whatever it was. He caught her smile, and had a pang of foreboding.

But there was no time to think of what he felt. Across the platform a group of guardsmen were carrying the body of a young man. They laid him down and Pierce saw that he was dead. He drew near and looked down at him. He was bleeding from a gunwound and his face was mangled to a pulp, the features wiped away.

“A brickbat out of the damned mob,” one of the men muttered.

Before Pierce could speak the mob surged into the station.

“Get out of here, sir!” the guardsmen begged him—“They’ll tear you to pieces — in that silk hat!”

They surrounded him and hurried him across the tracks, and he made his way alone by back streets to the offices where the directors awaited him.

Pierce had never before faced the Board without John. Now as he looked down the long mahogany table, lined with grim faces, he felt his resolution fade. The power was in the hands of these men. He had been all for wielding that power while he was in Malvern. What threatened Malvern threatened the world. But now in the great dim board room, hung with red velvet from ceiling to floor at every window and paneled with the portraits of dead directors, he was confused. Feelings that he had forgotten came crowding back into his mind, memories so distant that he would have said they had ceased to exist.

He remembered again the young men who had died under his command in the war. They had fought with heartbreaking bravery, the pure bravery of the young, who alone are unselfish enough to die for a cause. The young man whom he had just seen in the street had died, too. How uselessly! A brick flung at random had crushed him. He had been ordered out this morning to do his duty and now he was dead.

He was distracted by his memories, confused and mingled with the news in telegrams and messages which lay before him.

“Military action must be taken all along the railroad,” Henry Mallows was saying in his high clear cold voice. “Nothing else will suffice.”

“The mob has command,” Jim McCagney said. He had aged greatly in the years that he had sat on the Board. His bitter grey eyes were set deep under eyebrows like bunches of dry heather.

Daniel Rutherford, the youngest of them all, turned at the sound of an open door, and took an envelope from a messenger boy. He tore it open and read it. “The Mayor has sworn in three thousand citizens as special police,” he cried. “He promises that the ringleaders of the mob will be in jail tonight.”

“Tut!” Jim McCagney growled, “don’t give a hoot for citizens in a case like this. Mallows is right. Guns are what’s wanted.”

“A detachment of one hundred marines is expected this evening,” Baird Hancock said drily.

“It’s the shops I’m thinking of,” Jonathan Yates put in. He was the one man in the room who had come up from the ranks, a thin, tired-looking man in a broadcloth suit too large for him. The heavy, velvet-lined collar rode up the back of his head and now and again he struggled with it.

Pierce was staring at the dispatches before him. “Pittsburgh, Reading, Harrisburg, Shamokin, Hornellsville, Chicago, Cincinnati, Zanesville, Columbus, Fort Wayne, St. Louis, Kansas City,” he read the names aloud solemnly.

Murmurs of anger rose from the men around the table. Pierce lifted his head. “I came into this room as fixed as any of you in my determination to put down these strikes,” he said slowly. “Now, as I see these foes catching from one place to another clear across the country, I ask myself — what have we done that was wrong?”

“Man, it’s not us — it’s the Reds!” McCagney shouted. “Our men alone wouldn’t have dared! The foreign communists have used our honest working folk as a pretext for their infamous machinations to overthrow the government of the United States!” He leaped to his feet, towering six foot six, his white hair flying, his beard a tangle. He banged the table with his fists. “Ne’er-do-wells!” he bellowed. “Rascals — robbers — internationalists!” He ground out the last word between his teeth with special hatred.

Silence followed, and in the silence Pierce drove away his memories. What had the past to do with today? “If we have proof that these strikes are inspired by foreigners,” he said slowly, “then it is time to put on our uniforms again and fight.”

“Amen, amen—” The word roared around the table from mouth to mouth.

They sat far into the night, while messages continued to pour in from the four corners of the nation. At midnight a last message was sent by the mayor. Two hundred and fifty rebels had been imprisoned. “Upon inquiry,” the mayor reported, “it was found that not one of them had been a worker on the railroad.”

“If we needed any further proof of foreign machination,” Henry Mallows said looking about triumphantly, “here it is.”

Pierce looked back at him, and wished that he need not agree with him. He had disliked Henry Mallows increasingly throughout the evening. Mallows had grown more handsome and distinguished looking with the years. Worldliness became him. His smooth cheeks and well-cut mouth were still young. What had seemed timid and foreign in his youth had become hard and self-assured as he had become a native and a patriot in his own country. His foreign wife had grown into a silent and delicate creature, finicking and invalid. There had been no children.

Pierce turned away from this man of whom John MacBain had spoken so bitterly, and looked at the other listening, stubborn faces. “We must remember that the sympathies of the press and of the people, however, are with the workingmen,” he said. “If we act too severely or even too swiftly we may find ourselves condemned, though unjustly. We must distinguish between our own men and the communists.”

Silence fell about him as the directors digested this common sense.

“I move we adjourn,” Jim McCagney said abruptly.

“To meet again on Monday morning,” Henry Mallows amended.

Pierce seconded the amended motion and it was carried and the endless meeting was over.

Pierce slept deep in exhaustion through the night and was awakened just before dawn by a fire alarm. He got out of bed and without lighting the lamp he went to the window and looked down. The streets were swarming again with people. Trouble had begun again. Toward the west the sky blazed almost to the zenith.

The railroad shops!

He dressed himself hurriedly and went out bareheaded, fearing that his silk hat would betray him. The streets were so crowded that he could barely force his way westward. It was an hour before he reached the railroad shops and found that they had not yet caught fire. A train of oil cars was burning. The firemen had isolated the cars and so far had saved the shops. While they worked the mob turned to a lumberyard and planing mill a few blocks away and set it afire. In a few minutes the air was filled with smoke and the flames roared black-edged toward the sky.

Pierce stood back among the crowd, watching and helpless. He looked at the faces around him. Some were silent and grave, some were wild, some were drunken. He recognized no one and with a strange feeling that the whole world was burning to destruction he went back to the hotel. Downstairs the clerk gave him his door key and noted his return.

“Terrible, ain’t it, sir?” he murmured.

“Yes,” Pierce said.

He felt chilled although the night had been warm. But there was no hot water with which to warm himself. He was grimed with smoke and he washed himself in cold water and then put on his nightshirt again and got back into bed.