CHAPTER XXI

The outcome of the First Parliament of Man was hailed by the professional peace-makers as the sublimest achievement of the ages. A way had been found at last to banish war. The dream of the poet had been fulfilled. They called on all men to beat their guns into plowshares, their swords into pruning-hooks. They proclaimed the end of force, the dawn of the Age of Reason.

Our nation once more demonstrated its love for the orator who preaches smooth things. The Honorable Plato Barker praised the President for his brave stand for the rights and dignity of the Republic in his heroic defense of the Monroe Doctrine.

In the same breath he acclaimed the President of Chile who led the way to the court of reason as a new prophet of humanity. He would not yield one inch in the maintenance of the Monroe Doctrine--no! But it had been demonstrated that such issues could be settled by moral suasion! The next session of the august Parliament of Man, he declared, would ratify the decision of the Pan-American Congress without a dissenting voice.

The long pent energies of our nation drove us forward now at lightning speed. During the last year of the great war our commerce had practically come to dominate the world. Anticipating conditions at its close, Congress passed a new high tariff which closed our ports to the flood of cheap goods Europe was ready to dump on our shores. Every wheel in America was turning, every man at work, wages leaped upward with profits mounting to unheard-of figures. The distress in Europe from the glut of an overstocked market sent us millions of laborers and still our industries clamored for more.

A hundred million Americans went mad with prosperity. Our wealth had already mounted steadily during the war. We were not only the richest nation on earth, there was no rival in sight.

New York ascended her throne as the money center of the world, and wealth beyond the dreams of avarice poured into the coffers of her captains of industry.

The one thing on which we had failed to make relative progress was the development of our national defenses. We had more ships, more guns, more forts, more aircraft and more submarines than ever before, but our relative position in power of defense had dropped to the lowest record in history.

At the beginning of the great war in 1914 our navy stood third on the list in power and efficiency. Only Great Britain and Germany outranked us and Germany’s balance of power was so slight that our advantageous position was deemed sufficient to overcome it.

At the end of the great war we had sunk to sixth place among the nations in power and efficiency of defense.

Great Britain, Germany, France, Russia and Japan outranked us so far that we could not consider ourselves in their class. The armies of each of these powers were so tremendous in their aggregate the mind could not grasp the import of such figures.

In spite of all the losses, Germany’s mobile forces, ready at a moment’s notice, numbered 5,000,000 trained veterans with muscles of steel and equipment unparalleled in the history of warfare. Russia had 9,000,000 men armed and hardened by war, France had 3,000,000, Great Britain 3,000,000, Austria-Hungary 3,000,000, Japan 4,000,000.

The navies of the world had also grown by leaps and bounds in spite of the few ships that had been sunk in the conflict. Great Britain still stood first, Germany next and then France, Russia and Japan. The navies of each of these nations not only outranked us in the number of ships, submarines, hydroplanes and the range of their guns, but the complete and perfect organization of their governing and directing powers more than doubled their fighting efficiency as compared to ours, gun for gun and man for man.

We were still trusting to blind luck. We had no general staff whose business it is to study conditions and create plans of defense. We had no plans for conducting a war of defense at all either on land or sea. Our admirals had warned the Government and the people, under solemn oath before Congress, that it would require five years of superhuman effort properly to equip, man and train to battle efficiency a navy which could meet the ships of either of the five great nations with any hope of success.

And nothing had been done about it.

The energies of a hundred million people were now absorbed, under the guidance of Waldron and his associated groups of propagandists, preparing to celebrate the great Peace Jubilee the week preceding the meeting of the Pan-American Congress called to settle the problem of the Monroe Doctrine.

This celebration was planned on a scale of lavish expenditure, in pageantry, oratory, illuminations, processions, and revelry unheard of in our history. The programmes were identical in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Washington, Baltimore, Norfolk, New Orleans, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, Denver, San Francisco, and Los Angeles and a score of smaller cities.

John Vassar refused to accept the invitation of the Mayor of New York to address the mass meeting of naturalized Americans in the Madison Square Garden.

Virginia Holland not only refused to lead the grand Pageant of Peace in its march up Fifth Avenue to the speakers’ stand, but she resigned as president of the Woman’s Federation of Clubs of America, shut herself in her room at their country place on Long Island and refused to be interviewed.

John Vassar read the announcement with joy. The leaven of his ideas had begun to stir the depths of her brilliant mind and pure heart! The defeats of the past were as nothing if they brought her again into his life.

He wrote her a long, tender, passionate appeal that he might see her again.

He posted it at midnight on the opening day of the Jubilee. He had read of her resignation only in the afternoon papers. The managers of the ceremonies had taken for granted her approval and announced that she would lead the pageant of symbolic floats on a snow-white horse as grand marshal.

Vassar waited with impatience for her answer the next day. If the mails were properly handled his letter should have reached her by noon. An immediate answer posted in Babylon at one o’clock might be delivered at Stuyvesant Square by six. He started at every call of the postman’s whistle in vain. He was sure an answer would come in the morning. Nothing came. He put his hand on the telephone once to call her and decided against the possibility of a second bungling of his cause.

Instead he called the post-office and learned that a congestion of mail, owing to the disorganization of the service by the Jubilee, had caused a delay of twenty-four hours in the delivery to points on Long Island.

He waited in vain another day. He walked alone through the crowded streets that night studying the curious contagion of hysteria which had swept the entire city from its moorings of an orderly sane life.

The din of horns and the shouts of boys and girls, crowding and jostling on the densely packed pavements, surpassed the orgies of any New Year’s riot he had ever witnessed. Every dance hall in Greater New York was thronged with merrymakers. The committee in charge of the Jubilee, supplied with unlimited money, had hired every foot of floor space that could be used for dancing and placed it at the disposal of the social organizations of the city. Wine was flowing like water. The police winked at folly. A world’s holiday was on for a week.

Vassar visited Jack’s, Maxim’s, Bustanoby’s, Rector’s, and Churchill’s to watch the orgie at its height. Every seat was filled and surging crowds were waiting their turn at the tables. Hundreds of pretty girls, flushed with wine, were throwing confetti and thrusting feathers into the faces of passing men. The bolder of them were seated on the laps of their sweethearts, shouting the joys of peaceful conquest.

Professional dancers led the revelry with excesses of suggestive step and pose that brought wild rounds of approval from the more reckless observers.

Vassar left the last place at 12:30 with a sense of sickening anger. The fun had only begun. It would not reach the climax before two o’clock. At three the girls who were throwing confetti would be too drunk to sit in their chairs.

He drew a deep breath of fresh air and started up Broadway for a turn in the park.

He paused in front of a vacant cab. The chauffeur tipped his cap.

“Cab, sir? Free for two hours. Take you anywhere you want to go for a song. All mine on the side. Engaged here for the night. They won’t be out till morning. They’ve just set down.”

A sudden impulse seized him to drive past Waldron’s castle and see its illumination. No doubt the place would be a blaze of dazzling electric lights.

He called his order mechanically and stepped into the cab. His mind was not on the glowing lights or pleasure mad crowds. He was dreaming of the woman who had taken him to that house a little more than two years before. Every detail of that ride and interview with Waldron stood out now in his imagination with startling vividness. His mind persisted in picturing the two corseted young men who stepped from the elevator so suddenly. He wondered again what the devil they had been doing there and where they came from--and above all why they were accompanied by Villard.

Before he realized that he had started the river flashed in view from the heights south of Waldron’s castle. He had told the chauffeur to keep off the Drive, stick to Broadway and turn up Fort Washington Avenue which ran through the center of Waldron’s estate.

To his amazement the banker’s house was dark save the light from a single window in the tower that gleamed like the eye of a demon crouching in the shadows of the skies. The tall steel flag staff on the tower had been lengthened to a hundred and fifty feet. Its white line could be distinctly seen against the stars. And from the top of this staff now hung the arm of a wireless station. Waldron had no doubt gone in for wireless experiments as another one of his fads.

Far up in the sky he caught the hum of an aeroplane motor. He leaped from the cab and listened. The sound was unmistakable. He had been on the Congressional committees and witnessed a hundred experiments by the Army Aviation Corps.

“What the devil can that mean at one o’clock at night?” he muttered.

He leaped into the cab, calling to his driver:

“Go back to Times Square and drop me at the Times Building--quick.”

He made up his mind to report this extraordinary discovery to the night editor and try by his wireless plant to get in touch with Waldron’s tower.

The cab was just sweeping down Broadway between two famous restaurants and the orgies inside were at their height. The shouts and songs and drunken calls, the clash of dishes, the pop of champagne corks and twang of music poured through the open windows.

The cab suddenly lurched, and rose into the air, lifted on a floor of asphalt. An explosion shook the earth and ripped the sky with a sword of flame.

The cab crashed downward and lit squarely on the flat roof of a low-pitched building right side up.

Vassar leaped out in time to hear the dull roar of the second explosion.

The first had blown up and blocked the subway and elevated systems. The second had destroyed the power plants of the surface lines.

It had come--the war he had vainly fought to prevent! And he knew with unerring certainty the hand and brain directing the first treacherous assault.