V.
For some days—just how many I don’t remember—I had been in the condition which often follows sudden illness, when the mind is groping about to connect things one with another, and to adjust relative values. But I was not delirious. I want to state that distinctly, because when, like a fool, I told the stripling hospital doctor what I am now about to relate, he smiled in sickly imitation of the veteran practitioner, and soothingly patted my counterpane. It makes me wild, even now, to recall that superior youth pretending to humour me—a grown man with a clear head and more experience than will be his in many a long year. The nurses are all right—God bless them, I say—but, good Lord, what do the sick in the hospitals not suffer from the tactless wisdom of the embryo physicians!
However, that’s neither here nor there, so I simply repeat I never was delirious, and when I say I saw these things, I know what I am talking about.
I lay perfectly still because I was tired. I don’t remember ever to have been so tired before or since.—Occasionally I dozed, but for the most part I gazed steadily, hour after hour, at the brass setting of the push-bell in the wall, too weary even to avert my gaze. I knew the room was a ward of some hospital, but I was too indifferent to ask which one. I could see the nurses passing back and forth. I felt one of them resettle my pillow, which allowed me to observe a screen placed around the adjoining bed. I knew what that meant. It was not cheerful, so I turned again to the brass disk and watched it in sunlight, shadow, twilight and darkness.
I was conscious too of all the different sounds about me—the stopping and starting of the elevator—the sliding and locking of its iron door—the rolling of the rubber-tire trucks about the halls—the creaking of a bed—the tinkle of a glass—the rattle and clatter of vehicles and horses in the street—even the peculiar rumble, rumble, rumble of the cart that passed the hospital and which I took to following through street after street, twisting and turning with it past towering tenements and squatting rookeries, plodding along under the broken roofs of the hissing elevated roads and over the singing trenches of the cables—through wide avenues and narrow alleys, until I found myself fairly launched into the sea of faces which spread out before me.
What a crowd that was! It is impossible to imagine such a scene. All the descriptions they’ve written fail to picture it, for the flaring lights with their play of shadows changed it every instant, darkening one group, illuminating another, running up and down lines of faces, flashing some individual into prominence for an instant, blotting him into the surging mass the next. And then the hum and mutter, rising to a babel of voices,—swelling into a shout, bursting with the shock of a world-tongued roar ending in a single piercing shriek, and the hush—the awful hush as Schrieber spoke his wondrous words—they’re all part of this tableau utterly beyond the power of pen or brush.
I stood there pinioned and upheld by the press about me which silently surged and swung with the motion of some sluggish sea. I felt the human steam hot upon my face—I breathed the fearful reek of that matted throng, but not for my life would I have missed one word of that which hushed those thousands. Pale and impassive I could see Sandy as he stood beside Schrieber on the tail-board of the cart. Once I thought he recognised me, but wedged in I could not signal, and the words I drank in held me speechless. What words!—If I could only remember them! But I cannot—and all the papers lie.
I heard them above the roar of the maddened crowd as it parted behind me, crushing some and trampling others under foot in its wild stampede. I saw the rush of uniformed men clearing the triangle back of Cooper Union and was hurled with the throng to Third Avenue. Then I heard Schrieber calling on us to form a procession and march to the Mayor’s house with our petition—heard him tell the Chief of Police that all should be orderly—heard the official warn the people not to cross Third Avenue at the peril of their lives.—I saw the dead-line formed and felt the onward surge of the crowd as it swept the thin sentry-line away and moved toward Broadway. I saw the glitter of levelled rifles as we neared the Cox statue, felt the mass hesitate and recoil. Then from out the ranks I saw Schrieber and Sandy emerge and start to cross the open space alone. I caught the sharp summons to halt, and even as I leaped toward them heard the crash of the volley before which they staggered and fell.
“Sandy!” I shrieked....
... “Sandy. Yes—that’s the name.—Who said that?—Sandy McWhiffle and the fellow Schrieber—they’re under arrest, you know, Mr. Superintendent,—and the Inspector orders me to take their statements,—me and my side partner here.”
A strange voice was speaking quite near me.
“Well, you can’t do it, Officer. Neither patient can be seen to-night.”
Was that Waldron’s voice?
“Can’t do it? What’s that mean? Me tell the Old Man that? Step one side please!—I guess you don’t know who I’m from!”
“Then you guess wrong, my man. They’re your prisoners, but they’re my patients, and, by God Almighty, so long as they are, it makes no difference whom you come from!”
I raised myself on my elbow and gazed at the speaker. Yes, there was Waldron. A nurse stepped up to him and whispered in his ear. He turned quickly on his heel.
“Officer, tell the Inspector you came too late,” he said.
I must have called out, for I remember the orderly hushed me, whispering that it was “nothing but a couple of rioting strikers, who’d just died of their wounds—which ought to stop such folly and teach the other fools a lesson.”
But I made no answer, recollecting something about “wise folly” and “foolish wisdom.” Then too I was wondering, quite as calmly as I am now, just how high and strong those embankments are which a restless, rising tide is ever lapping—lapping.