Caesar's Column Part 27

And, oh, my G.o.d! what a scene below, in those close-packed streets, among those gaily dressed mult.i.tudes! The dreadful astonishment! The crash--the bang--the explosions; the uproar, the confusion; and, most horrible of all, the inevitable, invisible death by the poison.

The line of the barricade is alive with fire. With my gla.s.s I can almost see the dynamite bullets exploding in the soldiers, tearing them to pieces, like internal volcanoes.

An awful terror is upon them. They surge backward and forward; then they rush headlong down the streets. The farther barricades open upon them a hail of death; and the dark shadows above--so well named Demons--slide slowly after them; and drop, drop, drop, the deadly missiles fall again among them.

Back they surge. The poison is growing thicker. They scream for mercy; they throw away their guns; they are panic-stricken. They break open the doors of houses and hide themselves. But even here the devilish plan of Prince Cabano is followed out to the very letter.

The triumphant mob pour in through the back yards; and they bayonet the soldiers under beds, or in closets, or in cellars; or toss them, alive and shrieking, from windows or roofs, down into the deadly gulf below.

And still the bombs drop and crash, and drop and crash; and the barricades are furnaces of living fire. The dead lie in heaps and layers in the invisible, pernicious poison.

But, lo! the fire slackens; the bombs cease to fall; only now and then a victim flies out of the houses, cast into death. There is nothing left to shoot at. The grand army of the Plutocracy is annihilated; it is not.

"The Demons" moved slowly off. They had earned their money. The Mamelukes of the Air had turned the tables upon the Sultan. They retired to their armory, doubtless to divide the fifty millions equitably between them.

The mob stood still for a few minutes. They could scarcely realize that they were at last masters of the city. But quickly a full sense of all that their tremendous victory signified dawned upon them. The city lay prostrate, chained, waiting to be seized upon.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII.

"THE OCEAN OVERPEERS ITS LIST"

And then all avenues were open. And like a huge flood, long d.a.m.ned up, turbulent, turbid, muddy, loaded with wrecks and debris, the gigantic ma.s.s broke loose, full of foam and terror, and flowed in every direction. A foul and brutal and ravenous mult.i.tude it was, dark with dust and sweat, armed with the weapons of civilization, but possessing only the instincts of wild beasts.

At first they were under the control of some species of discipline and moved toward the houses of the condemned, of whom printed catalogues had been furnished the officers. The shouts, the yells, the delight were appalling.

Now and then some poor wretch, whose sole offense was that he was well-dressed, would take fright and start to run, and then, like hounds after a rabbit, they would follow in full cry; and when he was caught a hundred men would struggle to strike him, and he would disappear in a vortex of arms, clubs and bayonets, literally torn to pieces.

A sullen roar filled the air as this human cyclone moved onward, leaving only wrecks behind it. Now it pauses at a house. The captain consults his catalogue. "This is it," he cries; and doors and windows give way before the thunderous mob; and then the scenes are terrible.

Men are flung headlong, alive, out of the windows to the ravenous wretches below; now a dead body comes whirling down; then the terrified inhabitants fly to the roofs, and are pursued from house to house and butchered in sight of the delighted spectators. But when the condemned man--the head of the house--is at last found, hidden perhaps in some coal-hole or cellar, and is brought up, black with dust, and wild with terror, his clothes half torn from his back; and he is thrust forth, out of door or window, into the claws of the wild beasts, the very heavens ring with acclamations of delight; and happy is the man who can reach over his fellows and know that he has struck the victim.

Then up and away for another vengeance. Before them is solitude; shops and stores and residences are closed and barricaded; in the distance teams are seen flying and men scurrying to shelter; and through crevices in shutters the horrified people peer at the mob, as at an invasion of barbarians.

Behind them are dust, confusion, dead bodies, hammered and beaten out of all semblance of humanity; and, worse than all, the criminal cla.s.ses--that wretched and inexplicable residuum, who have no grievance against the world except their own existence--the base, the cowardly, the cruel, the sneaking, the inhuman, the horrible! These flock like jackals in the track of the lions. They rob the dead bodies; they break into houses; they kill if they are resisted; they fill their pockets. Their joy is unbounded. Elysium has descended upon earth for them this day. Pickpockets, sneak-thieves, confidence-men, burglars, robbers, a.s.sa.s.sins, the refuse and outpouring of grog-shops and brothels, all are here. And women, too--or creatures that pa.s.s for such--having the bodies of women and the habits of ruffians;--harpies--all claws and teeth and greed--bold--desperate--shameless--incapable of good. They, too, are here. They dart hither and thither; they swarm--they dance--they howl--they chatter--they quarrel and battle, like carrion-vultures, over the spoils.

Civilization is gone, and all the devils are loose! No more courts, nor judges, nor constables, nor prisons! That which it took the world ten thousand years to create has gone in an hour.

And still the thunderous cyclones move on through a hundred streets.

Occasionally a house is fired; but this is not part of the programme, for they have decided to keep all these fine residences for themselves! They will be rich. They will do no more work. The rich man's daughters shall be their handmaidens; they will wear his purple and fine linen.

But now and then the flames rise up--perhaps a thief kindles the blaze--and it burns and burns; for who would leave the glorious work to put it out? It burns until the streets stop it and the block is consumed. Fortunately, or unfortunately, there is no wind to breed a general conflagration. The storms to-day are all on earth; and the powers of the air are looking down with hushed breath, horrified at the exceeding wickedness of the little crawlers on the planet we call men.

They do not, as a rule, steal. Revenge--revenge--is all their thought. And why should they steal? Is it not all their own? Now and then a too audacious thief is caught and stuck full of bayonets; or he is flung out of a window, and dies at the hands of the mob the death of the honest man for whom he is mistaken; and thus, by a horrible travesty of fate, he perishes for that which he never was nor could be.

Think of the disgust of a thief who finds himself being murdered for an honest man, an aristocrat, and can get no one to believe his a.s.severations that he is simply and truly a thief--and nothing more!

It is enough to make Death grin!

The rude and begrimed insurgents are raised by their terrible purposes to a certain dignity. They are the avengers of time--the G.o.d-sent--the righters of the world's wrongs--the punishers of the ineffably wicked. They do not mean to destroy the world; they will reform it--redeem it. They will make it a world where there shall be neither toil nor oppression. But, poor fellows! their arms are more potent for evil than their brains for good. They are omnipotent to destroy; they are powerless to create.

But still the work of ruin and slaughter goes on. The mighty city, with its ten million inhabitants, lies prostrate, chained, helpless, at the mercy of the enraged _canaille_. The dogs have become lions.

The people cannot comprehend it. They look around for their defenders--the police, the soldiery. "Where are they? Will not this dreadful nightmare pa.s.s away?" No; no; never--never. This is the culmination--this is the climax--"the century's aloe flowers to-day."

These are "the grapes of wrath" which G.o.d has stored up for the day of his vengeance; and now he is trampling them out, and this is the red juice--look you!--that flows so thick and fast in the very gutters.

You were blind, you were callous, you were indifferent to the sorrows of your kind. The cry of the poor did not touch you, and every pitiful appeal wrung from human souls, every groan and sob and shriek of men and women, and the little starving children--starving in body and starving in brain--rose up and gathered like a great cloud around the throne of G.o.d; and now, at last, in the fullness of time, it has burst and comes down upon your wretched heads, a storm of thunderbolts and blood.

You had money, you had power, you had leisure, you had intelligence, you possessed the earth; all things were possible unto you. Did you say to one another: "These poor souls are our brethren. For them Christ died on Calvary. What can we do to make their lives bright and happy?" No; no; you cried out, "'On with the dance!' Let them go down into the bottomless pit!"

And you smiled and said to one another, in the words of the first murderer, when he lied to G.o.d: "Am I my brother's keeper?" Nay, you said further to one another, "There is no G.o.d!" For you thought, if there was one, surely He would not permit the injustice manifest in the world. But, lo! He is here. Did you think to escape him? Did you think the great Father of Cause and Effect--the All-knowing, the universe-building G.o.d,--would pa.s.s you by?

As you sowed, so must you reap. Evil has but one child--Death! For hundreds of years you have nursed and nurtured Evil. Do you complain if her monstrous progeny is here now, with sword and torch? What else did you expect? Did you think she would breed angels?

Your ancestors, more than two centuries ago, established and permitted Slavery. What was the cry of the bondman to them? What the sobs of the mother torn from her child--the wife from her husband--on the auction block? Who among them cared for the lacerated bodies, the shameful and hopeless lives? They were merry; they sang and they danced; and they said, "G.o.ds sleeps."

But a day came when there was a corpse at every fireside. And not the corpse of the black stranger--the African--the slave;--but the corpses of fair, bright-faced men; their cultured, their manly, their n.o.ble, their best-loved. And, North and South, they sat, rocking themselves to and fro, in the midst of the shards and ashes of desolation, crying aloud for the lives that would come back to bless them never, nevermore.

G.o.d wipes out injustice with suffering; wrong with blood; sin with death. You can no more get beyond the reach of His hand than you can escape from the planet.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV.

THE PRINCE GIVES HIS LAST BRIBE

But it was when the mob reached the wealthier parts of the city that the horrors of the devastation really began. Here almost every grand house was the abode of one of the condemned. True, many of them had fled. But the cunning cripple--the vice-president--had provided for this too. At the railroad stations, at the bridges and ferries, even on the yachts of the princes, men were stationed who would recognize and seize them; and if they even escaped the dangers of the suburbs, and reached the country, there they found armed bands of desperate peasants, ranging about, slaying every one who did not bear on his face and person the traces of the same wretchedness which they themselves had so long endured. Nearly every rich man had, in his own household and among his own servants, some bitter foe, who hated him, and who had waited for this terrible day and followed him to the death.

The Prince of Cabano, through his innumerable spies, had early received word of the turn affairs had taken. He had hurriedly filled a large satchel with diamonds and other jewels of great value, and, slinging it over his shoulders, and arming himself with sword, knife and pistols, he had called Frederika to him (he had really some little love for his handsome concubine), and loading her pockets and his own with gold pieces, and taking her by the hand, he had fled in great terror to the river side. His fine yacht lay off in the stream.

He called and shouted until he was hoa.r.s.e, but no one replied from the vessel. He looked around. The wharves were deserted; the few boats visible were chained and padlocked to their iron rings. The master of many servants was helpless. He shouted, screamed, tore his hair, stamped and swore viciously. The man who had coolly doomed ten million human beings to death was horribly afraid he would have to die himself. He ran back, still clinging to Frederika, to hide in the thick shrubbery of his own garden; there, perhaps, he might find a faithful servant who would get him a boat and take him off to the yacht in safety.

But then, like the advancing thunder of a hurricane, when it champs the earth and tears the trees to pieces with its teeth, came on the awful mob.

Now it is at his gates. He buries himself and companion in a thick grove of cedars, and they crouch to the very ground. Oh, how humble is the lord of millions! How all the endowments of the world fall off from a man in his last extremity! He s.h.i.+vers, he trembles--yea, he prays! Through his bloodshot eyes he catches some glimpses of a G.o.d--of a merciful G.o.d who loves _all_ his creatures. Even Frederika, though she has neither love nor respect for him, pities him, as the bloated ma.s.s lies s.h.i.+vering beside her. Can this be the same lordly gentleman, every hair of whose mustache bespoke empire and dominion, who a few days since plotted the abas.e.m.e.nt of mankind?

But, hark! the awful tumult. The cras.h.i.+ng of gla.s.s, the breaking of furniture, the beating in of doors with axes; the _canaille_ have taken possession of the palace. They are looking for him everywhere.

They find him not.

Out into the grounds and garden; here, there, everywhere, they turn and wind and quarter, like bloodhounds that have lost the scent.

And then the Prince hears, quite near him, the piping voice of a little ragged boy--a bare-footed urchin--saying: "They came back from the river; they went in here.---(He is one of the cripple's spies, set upon him to watch him.)---This way, this way!" And the next instant, like a charge of wild cattle, the mob bursts through the cedars, led by a gigantic and ferocious figure, black with dust and mantled with blood--the blood of others.

The Prince rose from his lair as the yell of the pursuers told he was discovered; he turned as if to run; his trembling legs failed him; his eyes glared wildly; he tried to draw a weapon, but his hand shook so it was in vain. The next instant there was a crack of a pistol in the hands of one of the mob. The ball struck the Prince in the back of the neck, even in the same spot where, a century before, the avenging bullet smote the a.s.sa.s.sin of the good President Lincoln.

With a terrible shriek he fell down, and moaned in the most exquisite torture. His suffering was so great that, coward as he was, he cried out: "Kill me! kill me!" A workman, stirred by a human sentiment, stepped forward and pointed his pistol, but the cripple struck the weapon up.

"No, no," he said; "let him suffer for a few hours something of the misery he and his have inflicted on mankind during centuries. A thousand years of torture would not balance the account. The wound is mortal--his body is now paralyzed--only the sense of pain remains.

The d.a.m.ned in h.e.l.l do not suffer more. Come away."

But Caesar had seen a prize worth pursuing. Frederika had risen, and when the Prince was shot she fled. Caesar pursued her, cras.h.i.+ng through the shrubbery like an enraged mammoth; and soon the cripple laughed one of his dreadful laughs--for he saw the giant returning, dragging the fair girl after him, by the hair of her head, as we have seen, in the pictures, ogres hauling off captured children to destruction.

And still the Prince lay upon his back; and still he shrieked and moaned and screamed in agony, and begged for death.

An hour pa.s.sed, and there was dead silence save for his cries; the mob had swept off to new scenes of slaughter.