LXI
They had got hold of a canvas-covered wagon, of the type of the old
"prairie-schooner." You still find these camped by our roadsides now
and then, with nomad families in them; and evidently one of these
families had been so ill advised as to come to town for the
convention. The rioters had hoisted their victim on top of the
wagon, having first dumped a gallon of red paint over his head, so
that everyone might know him for the Red Prophet they had been
reading about in the papers. They had tied a long rope to the shaft
of the wagon, and one or two hundred men had hold of it, and were
hauling it through the streets, dancing and singing, shouting
murder-threats against the "reds." Some ran ahead, to clear the
traffic; and then came the wagon, lumbering and rocking, so that the
prophet was thrown from side to side. Fortunately there was a hole
in the canvas, and he could hold to one of the wooden ribs.
The cortege came opposite to me. On each side was a guard of honor,
a line of men walking in lock-step, each with his hands on the
shoulders of the one in front; they had got up a sort of chant: "Hi!
Hi! The Bolsheviki prophet! Hi! Hi! The Bolsheviki prophet!" And
others would yell, "I won't work! I won't work!"--this being our
Mobland nickname for the I.W.W. Some one had daubed the letters on
the sides of the wagon, using the red paint; and a drunken fellow
standing near me shook his clenched fist at the wretch on top and
bellowed in a fog-horn voice: "Hey, there, you goddam Arnychist, if
you're a prophet, come down from that there wagon and cure my
venereal disease!" There was a roar of laughter from the throng, and
the drunken fellow liked the sensation so well that he walked
alongside, shouting his challenge again and again.
Then I heard a crash behind me, and a clatter of falling glass; I
turned to see a soldier, inside the Royal Hotel, engaged in chopping
out the plate-glass window of the lobby with a chair. There were
twenty or thirty uniformed men behind him, who wanted to get out and
see the fun; but the door of the hotel was blocked by the crowd, so
they were seeking a direct route to the goal of their desires.
I knew, of course, there was nothing I could do; one might as well
have tried to stop a hurricane by blowing one's breath. Carpenter
had wanted martyrdom, and now he was going to get it--of the
peculiar kind and in the peculiar fashion of our free and
independent and happy-go-lucky land. We have had many agitators and
disturbers of our self-satisfaction, and they have all "got theirs,"
in one form or another; but there had never been one who had done
quite so much to make himself odious as this "Bolsheviki prophet,"
who was now "getting his." "Treat 'em rough!" runs the formula of
the army; and I fell in step, watching, and thinking that later I
might serve as one of the stretcher-bearers.
Half way down the block we came to the Palace Hotel, and uniformed
men came pouring out of that. I heard the shrieks of a woman, and
put my foot on the edge of a store-window, and raised myself up by
an awning, to see over the heads of the crowd. Half a dozen rowdies
had got hold of a girl; I don't know what she had done--maybe her
skirts were too short, or maybe she had been saucy to one of the
gang; anyhow, they were tearing her clothes to shreds, and having
done this gaily, they took her on their shoulders, and ran her out
to the wagon, and tossed her up beside the Red Prophet. "There's a
girl for you!" they yelled; and the drunken fellow who wanted
Carpenter to cure him, suddenly thought of a new witticism: "Hey,
you goddam Bolsheviki, why don't you nationalize her?" Men laughed
and whooped over that; some of them were so tickled that they danced
about and waved their arms in the air. For, you see, they knew all
the details concerning the "nationalization of women in Russia," and
also they had read in the papers about Mary Magna, and Carpenter's
fondness for picture-actresses and other gay ladies. He stretched
out his hand to the girl, to save her from falling off; and at this
there went up such a roar from the mob, that it made me think of
wild beasts in the arena. So to my whirling brain came back the
words that Carpenter had spoken: "It is Rome! It is Rome! Rome that
never dies!"
The cortege came to the "Hippodrome," which is our biggest theatre,
and which, like everything else, had declared open house for Brigade
members during the convention. Some one in the crowd evidently knew
the building, and guided the procession down a side street, to the
stage-entrance. They have all kinds of shows in the "Hippodrome,"
and have a driveway by which they bring in automobiles, or
war-chariots, or wild animals in cages, or whatever they will. Now
the mob stormed the entrance, and brushed the door-keepers to one
side, and unbolted and swung back the big gates, and a swarm of
yelling maniacs rushed the lumbering prairie-schooner up the slope
into the building.
The unlucky girl rolled off at this point, and somebody caught her,
and mercifully carried her to one side. The wagon rolled on; the
advance guard swept everything out of the way, scenery as well as
stage-hands and actors, and to the vast astonishment of an audience
of a couple of thousand people, the long string of rope-pullers
marched across the stage, and after them came the canvas-covered
vehicle with the red-painted letters, and the red-painted victim
clinging to the top. The khaki-clad swarm gathered about him,
raising their deafening chant: "Hi! Hi! The Bolsheviki prophet. Hi!
Hi! The Bolsheviki prophet!"
I had got near enough so that I could see what happened. I don't
know whether Carpenter fainted; anyhow, he slipped from his perch,
and a score of upraised hands caught him. Some one tore down a
hanging from the walls of the stage set, and twenty or thirty men
formed a cirfcle about it, and put the prophet in the middle of it,
and began to toss him ten feet up into the air and catch him and
throw him again.
And that was all I could stand--I turned and went out by the rear
entrance of the theatre. The street in back was deserted; I stood
there, with my hands clasped to my head, sick with disgust; I found
myself repeating out loud, over and over again, those words of
Carpenter: "It is Rome! It is Rome! Rome that never dies!"
A moment later I heard a crash of glass up above me; I ducked, just
in time to avoid a shower of it. Then I looked up, and to my
consternation saw the red-painted head and the red and white
shoulders of Carpenter suddenly emerging. The shoulders were quickly
followed by the rest of him; but fortunately there was a narrow shed
between him and the ground. He struck the shed, and rolled, and as
he fell, I caught him, and let him down without harm.
