Pearl Buck - Angry Wife

“Market Street,” John ordered the driver.

“You don’t want to go there,” the driver remonstrated. “Why, there must be ten thousand people now in that mob.”

“That’s why I want to go,” John said grimly. “Put us down a block away and we’ll walk—”

They took the ride in silence, unwilling to reveal to the driver who they were. A block away he set them down and John paid the fare. They could hear the roar of the mob and the loud, shrieking harangue of voices. They turned the corner of Market Street and saw a sea of heads. “Good God, John,” Pierce muttered, “where have they come from?”

“By Gawd, the communists have forced everybody to stop work,” John said sternly. “We’ll wedge our way in — then you listen for yourself — and tell me what we ought to do, Pierce — if you can.”

They edged their way through the crowd. No one noticed them. The eyes of men and women alike were glazed and unseeing. There were six platforms along the street, a man haranguing on each, and to his astonishment Pierce heard German as well as English. He stood almost directly beneath a young man with blond uncombed hair and frenzied face.

“Better for a thousand of us to be shot in the streets than ten thousand of us to starve!” the young man screamed, and a deep roar rose from the mob.

He felt the mob respond to the wild words that were being thrown to them. They began to surge about him, to move in a terrible rhythm. He felt himself caught upon the waves, twisted and pressed upon. Yet no one knew him or cared who he was. The movement was bestial and mad, and he grew frightened.

“Let’s get out of this,” he muttered to John.

John nodded, and hooking arms they began to work their way out doggedly, breaking across the rhythm, silent in the midst of the roar, until they were free at last, staggering out of the mob as though a sea had thrown them upon a beach.

They went back to the hotel and Pierce stripped himself of his clothes. They stank of the mob. He bathed himself and dressed clean from head to foot.

“Go and wash and shave yourself, John,” he commanded. “You and I have got to get hold of things.”

An hour later they had eaten and Pierce was planning resolutely what must be done.

“This isn’t going to be finished within a day,” he told John. “You come with me and we’ll go and see the mayor.”

“You going to wear that hat?” John asked. Pierce had put on his silk top hat again.

“I am,” Pierce said with determination. “I don’t belong to the mob and I want everybody to know it.”

It was two o’clock in the afternoon and the mob had taken possession of the railroad yards. They had the news from a terrified clerk as they stepped from the hotel door.

“Half of them are drunk!” the fellow wailed to John.

“Get out of my way,” Pierce said contemptuously, and pushed him aside.

They drove to the mayor’s offices and found that he was at home. They were ushered into a great parlor where the mayor was staring out of the long windows, his hands in his pockets, his hat on the back of his head. About the room were his aides and secretaries.

“I have come to demand that the property of the railroad be protected by the Grand Army of the Republic,” Pierce said formally, when a doorman had announced them.

“Great guns!” the mayor replied, “I am thinking of the whole city! Why, sir, that mob will reach twenty thousand by night!”

“Why don’t you get the whole police force armed?” Pierce demanded.

“We haven’t guns enough,” the mayor groaned.

“There must be guns—” Pierce retorted. “Guns hidden in attics or hung on walls — relics from the war, if nothing else.”

His tall upright frame, his harsh voice, his bold blue eyes took command of the wavering and frightened men. The mayor yelled at his henchmen and they began to scurry from the room.

Pierce sat down by a rosewood table and banged it with his fist. “And now,” he said loudly, “send for the Army!”

The mayor hesitated and bit his nails.

“It isn’t of Chicago alone I’m thinking,” Pierce said, “nor of the railroad — it’s the nation we have to save. If this mob is unchecked, mobs will rise in a dozen other big cities.”

“I’ll do what I can,” the mayor promised. In an hour the order had gone and they waited for reply. It came before midnight. The Grand Army of the Republic was on its way. Meantime messengers brought more news of the mob. There had been a battle on Market Street, but the mob was dispersed. Four policemen were wounded, one dead. The railroad roundhouse had been taken back and the fires in the engines put out. An hour later there were five more dead. Again no one knew the number of the dead among the mob. Whenever a man fell, he was hidden.

Pierce and John slept in the mayor’s house that night. No meals were served in the great dining room but servants brought platters of sandwiches and cold meats into the parlor which had become the center of the city’s control, and the men ate little and drank much. Pierce went to bed in a stupor of weariness and was awakened again by gun shots in the morning. When he had dressed and hastened downstairs he found that the first contingents of the Army had arrived, had met the overflow of the mob in an open space near a hall, and had dispersed them. Meantime the meeting in the hall had gone on behind locked doors.

By noon six more policemen were wounded. Still no one knew or counted the number of wounded in the unarmed mob. The rioters continued to take their dead away as soon as they fell.

In the disordered parlor Pierce sat all day listening, suggesting, conferring, but underneath activity he was aware of a deep empty silence. What did this war mean, here in the heart of his country? Who were the enemies — and for whom did he fight? He left his own questions unanswered.

The strange war ended the next day in a foolish way which only confused him the more, A crowd of Bohemian women, angered because two of their lads had been killed the night before, gathered together from the small Bohemian villages on the outskirts of the city. They fought fiercely, out of outraged motherhood, until in the middle of the evening the hardbitten Regulars appeared and dispersed them. By the middle of the next day the rioters had been overcome and the city took stock of its wounds. Shops had been looted and men robbed. A farmer coming into the city with his vegetables had been waylaid and beaten and his little store of money taken away. To the unrest of the working people had been added the selfishness of petty thieves and the lawlessness of gangsters.

“We’ve licked them,” the mayor sighed, and wiped his bald head with a handkerchief so dirty that it left a smear of black across his face.

“Wait,” Pierce said and opened a telegram that a boy held at his elbow.

It announced the attack of a mob in San Francisco upon Chinatown.

“I’m going,” John said. “I’ll drive these communists into the Pacific Ocean and hold ’em under!”

“I am going home,” Pierce said heavily.

The strikes subsided and the war ended slowly as the weeks passed. Everywhere the mob was put down by Regulars from the Federal Army. In his library Pierce studied the newspapers and approved, but with deep disquiet. Of course the mob must be put down. Order must be upheld. He could not hide from himself that he was profoundly relieved when Malvern stood safe once more upon a subdued working class. But, out of his disquiet, he now recommended and worked for substantial wage increases. He wrote long, detailed letters to every member of the Board of Directors. To Henry Mallows he wrote with peculiar insistence: “I tell you, I have seen the faces of these men and women — yes, women, too. They are savage with despair. In the interest of our own security we must grant them enough for life, even if our own dividends shrink for a while.”