Authors: Garet Garrett
The Driver
BY
AUTHOR OF “THE BLUE WOUND,” ETC.
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE
Copyright, 1922
By E. P. Dutton & Company
All Rights Reserved
First printing, September, 1922
Second printing, October, 1922
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CHAPTER I
PHANTASMA
i
I
T is Easter Sunday in the village of Massillon, Stark County, Ohio, fifty miles south by east from Cleveland. Fourth year of the soft Money Plague; 1894.
Time, about 10 o’clock.
The sky is low and brooding, with an untimely thought of snow. Church bells are ringing. They sound remote and disapproving. Almost nobody is mindful of their call. The soul may miss its feast; the eye of wonder shall not be cheated. The Comic God has published a decree. Here once more the sad biped, solemn, ludicrous and romantic, shall mount the gilded ass. It is a spectacle that will not wait. For weeks in all the newspapers of the country the fact has been advertised in a spirit of waggery. At this hour and from this place the Army of the Commonweal of Christ will set forth on foot in quest of the Economic Millennium.
The village is agog with people congregating to witness the fantasied event. In the main street natives and strangers mingle their feet gregariously. There are spasmodic sounds of laughter, retort, argument and ribaldry; and continually the shrill cries of youth in a frenzy of expectation. Buggies, two-wheelers, open carts and spring wagons line both sides of the street. The horses are blanketed. A damp, chill wind is blowing. Vendors from Chicago, lewd-looking men, working a hundred feet apart, are yelling: “Git a Christ army button here fer a nickel!” There is a composite smell of ham sandwiches, peanuts, oranges and cigars.
A shout rises at the far end of the street. The crowd that has been so thick there, filling the whole space, bursts open. A band begins playing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and the spectacle is present.
First comes a negro bearing the American flag.
Next, on a white horse, is a thick, close-bearded, self-regarding man with powerful, darting eyes and an air of fantastic vanity. He wears a buckskin coat with fringed sleeves; the breast is covered with gaudy medals. On his head is a large white sombrero. Around his neck swings a string of amber beads. He is cheered and rallied as he passes and bows continually.
Behind him walks a trumpeter, saluted as Windy Oliver. After the trumpeter walks the Astrologer, bearing the wand of his mysterious office. Then a band of seven pieces, very willing and enterprising.
And now, by the timbre and volume of the cheering, you recognize the Commander. He rides. Sitting so still and distant beside a negro driver in a buggy drawn by two mares he is disappointing to the eye. There is nothing obviously heroic about him. He wears spectacles. Above a thin, down-growing mustache the face is that of a man of ideas and action; the lower features, especially the mouth, denote a shy, secretive, sentimental, credulous man of mystical preoccupations. None of these qualities is more than commonplace. The type is well known to inland communities—the man who believes in perpetual motion, in the perfectibility of human nature, in miraculous interventions of deity, and makes a small living shrewdly. He might be the inventor of a washing machine. He is in fact the owner of a sandstone quarry and a breeder of horses.
But mark you, the ego may achieve grandeur in any habitat. It is not in the least particular. This inconsiderable man, ludicrously setting forth on Easter Sunday in command of a modern crusade, has one startling obsession. He believes that with the bandit-looking person on the white horse he
shares the reincarnation of Christ.
In a buggy following, with what thoughts we shall never know, rides the wife of this half of Christ reincarnated.
Next comes another negro bearing the banner of the Commonweal of Christ. In the center of it is a painted Christ head. The lettering, divided above and below the head, reads:
PEACE ON EARTH: GOOD WILL TO MEN
BUT
DEATH TO INTEREST BEARING BONDS
Then comes the Army of the Commonwealers. They are counted derisively. The Commander said there would be an hundred thousand, or at least ten thousand, or, at the start, not fewer than one thousand. Well, the number is one hundred scant. They are a weird lot—a grim, one-eyed miner from Ottumwa; a jockey from Lexington, a fanatical preacher of the raw gospel from Detroit, a heavy steel mill worker from Youngstown, a sinewy young farmer from near Sandusky, a Swede laborer from everywhere, one doctor, one lawyer, clerks, actors, paper hangers, blind ends, what-nots and tramps. There is not a fat man among them, nor one above forty. They march in order, looking straight ahead. A man in a blue overcoat and white trousers, riding a horse with a red saddle, moves up and down the line eyeing it importantly.
At the end of this strange procession are two wagons. One is called the commissariat wagon; it is loaded with a circus tent, some bales of hay for the horses and a few bags of provisions—hardly enough for one day. The other is a covered wagon painted blue. The sides are decorated with geometrical figures of incomprehensible meaning. This vehicle of mystery belongs to the precious being on the white horse ahead. He created it; inside are sliding panoramas which he has painted.
As these wagons pass, people on foot and in buggies and wagons to the number of more than a thousand fall into line and follow. Their curiosity is not yet sated. They cannot abandon the spectacle.
Among these followers are forty-three correspondents, representing newspapers from New York to San Francisco; four Western Union telegraph operators, and two linemen. The route to Jerusalem is uncertain. Something may happen on the open road, miles from a telegraph office. Hence the linemen, anywhere to climb a pole and tap the wires, and special operators to dispatch the news emergently! The reporters are to whoop the story up and be in on the crucifixion.
Could anything less seeming of reality be invented by the imagination? It has the pattern of a dream. Yet it is history.
This is how two fatuous spirits, charlatans maybe, visionaries certainly,—Carl Browne on the white horse and Jacob S. Coxey in the buggy,—led the, Army of the Commonweal of Christ (Coxey’s Army for short), out of Massillon, past the blacksmith shop, past the sandstone quarry, past the little house where the woman was who waved her apron with one hand and wiped her eyes with the other, out upon the easting highway, toward Washington, with the Easter chimes behind them.
And for what purpose? Merely this: to demand from Congress a law by which unlimited prosperity and human happiness might be established on earth.
ii
I, who am telling it, was one of the forty-three correspondents.
The road was ankle deep with that unguent kind of mud which lies on top of frost. Snow began to fall. Curiosity waned in the rear. The followers began to slough off, shouting words of encouragement as they turned back. Browne on his white horse, Coxey in his buggy and the man in the red saddle were immersed in vanity. But the marchers were extremely miserable. None of them was properly shod or dressed for it. They were untrained, unused to distance walking, and after a few miles a number of them began to limp on wet, blistered feet. The band played a great deal and the men sang, sometimes all together, sometimes in separate groups. The going was such that no sort of marching order could be maintained.
At one o’clock there was a stop for coffee and dry bread, served out of the commissariat wagon.
It was understood that the Army would live on the country as it went along, trusting to charity and providence; but the shrewdness of the Commander had forseen that the art of begging would have to be learned, and that in any case it could not begin successfully on the first few miles out.
The Commonwealers watched us curiously as we tapped the telegraph wires by the roadside to send off flash bulletins of progress. Both Browne and Coxey exhorted their followers to courage, challenged the weaklings to drop out, and the march was resumed with only two desertions. These were made good by accessions further on.
At four o’clock a halt was called near a village, the inhabitants of which made friendly gestures and brought forth bacons and hams which were gratefully added to the boiled potatoes and bread served out of the wagon. The tent was raised. Browne, astride his bespattered white horse, made a speech.
He was the more aggressive half of the reincarnation. Indeed, it came presently to be the opinion of the correspondents that he was the activating principle of the whole infatuation, and held the other in a spell. He was full of sound and rhetoric and moved himself to ecstacy with sonorous sayings. His talk was a wild compound of Scripture, Theosophy and Populism.
The Kingdom of Heaven on earth was at hand, he said. The conditions foretold in Revelations were fulfilled. The seven heads of the beast were the seven conspiracies against the money of the people. The ten horns of the beast were the ten monopolies nourished in Wall Street—the Sugar Trust, the Oil Trust, and so on.
“We are fast undermining the structure of monopoly in the hearts of the people,” he declaimed, reaching his peroration. “Like Cyrus of old we are fast tunnelling under the boodlers’ Euphrates and will soon be able to march under the walls of the second Babylon, and its mysteries, too. The infernal, blood-sucking bank system will be overthrown, for the handwriting is on the wall.”
The listeners, though they growled at the mention of Wall Street and cheered the fall of Babylon, received his interpretation of their role and errand with an uneasy, bothered air. Voices asked for Coxey. He spoke to them in a gentle manner, praised them for their courage and fortitude, emphasized the hardships yet to be endured, proposed a hymn to be sung, and then dismissed them to rest with some practical suggestions touching their physical comfort. Rest and comfort, under the circumstances, were terms full of irony, but nobody seemed to think of that. They cheered him heartily.
iii
In the village railroad station was a telegraph office, where our special operators cut in their instruments and received our copy. Among us we filed more than 40,000 words of narrative, incident, pathos and ridicule.
News is stranger than fiction not in what it tells but in how it happens. In a room twenty feet square, lighted by one kerosene lamp, we wrote our copy on our knees, against the wall, on each other’s backs, standing up and lying down, matching notes and exchanging information as we went along.
“What’s the name of this town?”
“Louisville.”
“Kentucky?”
“Kentucky, no. Hear him!—Ohio.”
“Didn’t know there was a Louisville, Ohio.”
“Write it anyway. It isn’t the first time you’ve written what you don’t know.”
Then silence, save for the clicking of the telegraph instruments and the cracking of copy paper.
“Who was the man in the red saddle?”
No answer.
Again: “Who was the guy in the red saddle?”
No answer.
Another voice, in the same difficulty, roaring: “Who in hell was the man in the red saddle?”
Now everybody for a minute stops writing. Nobody knows.
Voice: “Call him Smith: the man of mystery: the great unknown.”
We did. The man in the red saddle was Smith the Great Unknown to the end of his silly part.
There was a small hotel in the place, with only two bedrooms available, and these had been selfishly seized by three magazine writers who had no telegraph stuff to file. They had retired. The rest of us took possession of a fairly large lounging room and settled ourselves for the night on cots, pallets and chairs.
