The Thunders of Silence. Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
adopted calling upon him to resign his commission as a representative. His answer to all three was a speech which, as translated, was shortly thereafter printed in pamphlet form by the Berlin Lokal-Anzeiger and circulated among the German soldiers at the Front.
For you see Congressman Mallard felt safe, and Congressman Mallard was safe. His buckler was the right of free speech; his sword, the argument that he stood for peace through all the world, for arbitration and disarmament among all the peoples of the world.
It was on the evening of a day in January of this present year that young Drayton, Washington correspondent for the New York Epoch, sat in the office of his bureau on the second floor of the Hibbett Building, revising his account of a scene he had witnessed that afternoon from the press gallery of the House. He had instructions from his managing editor to cover the story at length. At ten o'clock he had finished what would make two columns in type and was polishing off his opening paragraphs before putting the manuscript on the wire when the door of his room opened and a man came in—a shabby, tremulous figure. The comer was Quinlan.
Quinlan was forty years old and looked fifty. Before whisky got him Quinlan had been a great newspaper man. Now that his habits made it impossible for him to hold a steady job he was become a sort of news tipster. Occasionally also he did small lobbying of a sort; his acquaintance with public men and his intimate knowledge of Washington officialdom served him in both these precarious fields of endeavour. The liquor he drank—whenever and wherever he could get it—had bloated his face out of all wholesome contour and had given to his stomach, a chronic distention, but had depleted his frame and shrunken his limbs so that physically he was that common enough type of the hopeless alcoholic—a meagre rack of a man burdened amidships by an unhealthy and dropsical plumpness.
At times—when he was not completely sodden—when he had in him just enough whisky, to stimulate his soaked brain, and yet not enough of it to make him maudlin—he displayed flashes of a one-time brilliancy which by contrast with his usual state made the ruinous thing he had done to himself seem all the more pitiable.
Drayton of the Epoch was one of the newspaper men upon whom he sponged. Always preserving the fiction, that he was borrowing because of temporary necessity, he got small sums of money out of Drayton from time to time, and, in exchange, gave the younger man bits of helpful information. It was not so much news that he furnished Drayton as it was insight into causes working behind political and diplomatic events. He came in now without knocking and stood looking at Drayton with an ingratiating flicker in his dulled eyes.
"Hello, Quinlan!" said Drayton. "What's on your mind to-night?"
"Nothing, until you get done there," said Quinlan, letting himself flop down into a chair across the desk from Drayton. "Go ahead and get through. I've got nowhere to come but in, and nowhere to go but out."
"I'm just putting the final touches on my story of Congressman Mallard's speech," said Drayton. "Want to read my introduction?"
Privately Drayton was rather pleased with the job and craved approval for his craftsmanship from a man who still knew good writing when he saw it, even though he cold no longer write it.
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