The merrymakers were still in a jovial4 mood. What was one explosion more or less? A gas main had merely blown up—that was all. They took advantage of the darkness to kiss their girls and indulge in coarse jests.
A fat Johnny emerging from a restaurant shouted:
“Where was Moses when the light went out?”
A wag who was still able to carry his liquor to the street wailed5 in maudlin6 falsetto:
“The question ’fore the house is, ‘Who struck Billy Patterson?’ ”
A series of terrific explosions shook the earth in rapid succession, and the crowd began to scramble7 back into the banquet halls, or run in mad panic without a plan or purpose.
A company of soldiers in dull brown uniforms with helmets of the pattern of the ancient Romans swung suddenly into Broadway from a vacant building on a darkened side street and rushed northward8 at double quick.
“In God’s name, what regiment9’s that?” Vassar asked half to himself.
A gilded10 youth with battered11 hat slouched over his flushed face replied:
“Search me, brother—and what’s more I don’t give a damn—just so they turn on the lights and send me a cab—I’ve just gotter have a cab—I can’t travel without a cab—What t’ell’s the matter anyhow?”
Vassar left him muttering and followed the troops at a brisk trot12.
They turned into Sixty-second Street, into Columbus Avenue, and poured through the smashed doors at the Twelfth Regiment Armory13—they had been blown open with dynamite14.
A sentinel on the corner stopped him.
“Will you tell me what company just entered the Armory?”
The soldier answered in good English with a touch of foreign accent.
“ ‘In God’s name, what regiment’s that?’ ”
“ ‘In God’s name, what regiment’s that?’ ”
“Certainly, mein Herr—Company C, Twelfth Regiment of the Imperial Confederation, at present on garrison17 duty in the city of New York—”
“How the devil did you land?”
“We’ve been here for months awaiting orders—”
He saw the terrible truth in a flash. The secret agent of Imperial Europe had organized a royal army and armed them at his leisure, Villard acting18 under Waldron’s guidance. The six months’ delay in the meeting of the Pan-American Congress was made for this purpose. They were all trained soldiers. Their officers had landed during the past three months. The Peace Jubilee19 was the mask for their movements in every great center of population.
At a given signal they had blown in the doors of every armory in Greater New York, disarmed20 the National Guard and mounted machine guns on their parapets.
In ten minutes machine guns were bristling21 from the corners of every street leading to the captured armories22.
It was a master stroke! There were at least a million aliens, trained soldiers of Northern and Central Europe, living in the United States.
A single master mind could direct this army as one man.
He thanked God that his father and the girls were at Babylon. He had sent them there to avoid the scenes of the Peace Jubilee. He was too cautious now to play into the hands of the enemy.
He made his way to a telephone booth and attempted to call the Mayor’s house.
There was no answer from Central. The telephone system was out of commission.
He hurried to a Western union office to wire Washington. Every key was silent and the operators were standing23 in terror-stricken groups discussing the meaning of it all.
He hurried to the Times Building to try and reach the President by wireless24 and found the plant a wreck25.
It was ten o’clock next day before the extent of the night’s horror was known to little groups of leading men who had been lucky enough to escape arrest by the Imperial garrison.
Vassar stood among his friends in the dim back room of Schultz’s store pale and determined26, speaking in subdued27 tone.
Scrap28 by scrap the appalling29 situation had been revealed.
A federation16 of crowned heads of Northern and Central Europe had decided30 in caucus31 that the United States of America was the one fly in the ointment32 of world harmony. They determined to remove it at once, and extend the system of government by divine right not only into South America but North America as well. The great war had impoverished33 their treasuries34. The money had flowed into the vaults35 of the despised common herd36 of the United States. They would first indemnify themselves for the losses of the world war out of this exhaustless hoard37 and then organize the social and industrial chaos38 of the West into the imperial efficiency of a real civilization.
The result would make them the masters of the Western World for all time. Their system once organized would be invincible39. The slaves they had rescued from anarchy40 would kiss the hand of their conquerors41 at last.
This was the whispered message a trusted leader had received from an officer half drunk with wine and crazed by the victory they had already achieved for the approaching imperial fleet.
Their business was to arrest and hold as hostages every man of wealth in New York, guard the vaults and banks to prevent the removal of money, garrison and control the cities until the fleet had landed the imperial army.
The completeness with which the uprising of royalist subjects had been executed was appalling. They had taken the trunk lines of every railroad in America. Not a train had arrived in New York from any point south of Newark, New Jersey42, and no train from the north had reached the city beyond Tarrytown on the Hudson or South Norwalk on the New York, New Haven43 and Hartford.
A motor-cycle reached New York from Philadelphia bearing to the Mayor the startling information that the Navy Yard had been captured, the Quaker City’s transportation system paralyzed and that the Mayor had surrendered to the commanding general of a full army corps44 of twenty thousand foreign soldiers.
An automobile45 arrived from Boston with the same startling information from the capital of New England. Not only had the Navy Yard at Boston fallen into the hands of the enemy but the Yard at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, as well.
Not a wheel was turning in the great terminal stations of New York. The telephone and telegraph and cable systems were in the hands of the enemy. To make the wreck of the means of communication complete every wireless plant which had not been blown up was in the hands of an officer of the imperial garrison.
It was impossible to communicate by wire, wireless or by mail with Baltimore or Washington, to say nothing of the cities further inland.
Hour by hour the startling items of news crept into the stricken metropolis46 by automobile and motor-cycle messengers. The motor-cycle had proven the only reliable means of communication. Pickets47 were now commandeering or destroying every automobile that attempted to pass the main highways. But one had gotten through from Boston. The motor-cycles had taken narrow paths and side-stepped the pickets.
Not only had the great cities and navy yards been betrayed into the hands of a foreign foe48 mobilized in a night, but every manufactory of arms and ammunition49, and every arsenal50 had been captured with trifling51 loss of life. The big gun factory at Troy, the stores of ammunition at Dover, New Jersey, the Bethlehem Iron Works, the great factories at Springfield, Bridgeport, Hartford, Ilion, Utica and Syracuse were defenseless and had fallen. In short, with the remorseless movement of fate every instrument for the manufacture of arms and ammunition was in the hands of our foes52, locked and barred with bristling machine guns thrusting their noses from every window and every street corner leading to their enclosures.
The thing had been done with a thoroughness and lightning rapidity that stunned53 the imagination of the men who had dared to think of resistance.
The only problem which confronted their commander was to hold what he had captured until the arrival of the fleet and transports bearing the first division of the regular army with its mighty54 guns, aeroplanes and submarines.
Unless this fleet and army should arrive and land within a reasonable time, the overwhelming numbers of the populated centers, the scattered55 forces of the regular army of the United States and the National Guard, with the volunteers who possessed56 rifles would present a dangerous problem. The amount of dynamite and other high explosives yet in the hands of the people could not be estimated.
They had yet to reckon with the regular army. The traitors57 had already found foemen worthy58 of their steel in the police force of New York. Our little army of ten thousand policemen had given a good account of themselves before the sun had risen on the fatal morning.
A force of five thousand reserves fought for six bloody59 hours to recapture the Armory of the Seventy-first Regiment at Park Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street. They used their own machine guns with terrible effect on a regiment that had been rushed to assist the garrison inside. This regiment had been annihilated60 as they emerged from the tunnel of the Fourth Avenue Street car system at Thirty-third Street. The police had received word that they were in the tunnel, placed their machine guns to rake its mouth and when the gray helmets emerged, they were met with a storm of death. Their bodies were piled in a ghastly heap that blocked the way of retreat. But the men inside were invisible. Their machine guns and sharpshooters piled our blue coats in dark heaps over Thirty-fourth Street, Fourth Avenue, Thirty-third Street and Lexington Avenue. At ten o’clock their commander determined to smash the barricade61 of the main entrance where the doors had been dynamited62 and take the armory or wipe out his force in the attempt.
In this armory had been stored enough guns for the new National Guard to equip an army large enough to dispute possession of the city with their foes. Behind the cases containing these rifles were piled five hundred machine guns whose value now was beyond estimate.
The Colonel of the regiment quartered inside knew their value even better than his assailant. The fight at the barricades63 of the door was to the death.
When the firing ceased, there was no bluecoat left to give the order to retreat. Their bodies were piled in a compact mass five feet high.
The police force of the metropolis were not defeated. They were simply annihilated. In pools of blood they had wiped out the jibes64 and slurs65 of an unhappy past. Not one who wore the blue surrendered. They had died to a man.
The Brooklyn Navy Yard escaped the fate of the yards at Boston and Portsmouth by a miracle.
The superdreadnought Pennsylvania had not been assigned to the fleet which had just been dispatched through the Panama Canal to the Pacific. She had entered the basin to receive slight repairs. By a curious piece of luck her Captain had refused shore leave to his men to attend the festivities of the Jubilee.
A premonition of disaster through some subtle sixth sense had caused him at the last moment to issue the order for every man to remain on the ship. The sailors had pleaded in vain. They had turned in cursing their superior for a fool and a tyrant66.
The explosions which wrecked67 the doors of the armories and paralyzed the traffic of the city found the Captain of the Pennsylvania awake, pacing her decks, unable to sleep.
When the division of the Imperial Guard assigned to storm the yard rushed it they ran squarely into the guns of the big gray monster, whose searchlights suddenly swept every nook and corner of the inclosure.
In ten minutes from the time they dynamited the gates and rushed the grounds the shells from the Pennsylvania were tearing them to pieces and incidentally reducing the Navy Yard to a junk heap.
When the Yard had been cleared, the Captain landed his marines, searched the ruins and picked up a wounded officer who in sheer bravado68, cocksure of ultimate victory, gave him the information he demanded.
“Who the hell are you anyhow?” the Captain asked.
“Lieutenant Colonel Harden of the Sixty-ninth Imperial Guard of the American Colonies—”
“Colonies, eh?”
The young officer smiled.
“From tonight, the United States of America disappears from the map of the world. It will be divided between the kingdoms comprising the Imperial Federation of Northern Europe. England and France are yet poisoned with your democratic ideas. They have remained neutral, following your illustrious example in the world war. We don’t need them. Our task is so easy it’s a joke. You have my sympathy, Captain. You’re a brave and capable man. You would do honor to the Imperial Navy. You surprised me tonight. I was informed—reliably informed—that you and your men were celebrating the reign15 of universal peace—”
“Who is your leader?”
“A great man, sir, known in New York as Charles Waldron. The Emperor in command of the forces of United Europe has been informed already by wireless that America is in his hands. Tomorrow morning this leader’s name will be Prince Karl von Waldron, Governor-General of the Imperial Provinces of North America.”
“So?”
“I advise you, Captain, to make the best terms you can with your new master.”
“Thank you,” was the dry reply.
The Captain dispatched a launch to Governor’s Island reporting to General Hood69 the remarkable70 information he had received. His guns had already roused the garrison. The launch met General Hood’s at the mouth of the basin.
The two men clasped hands in silence on the deck of the Pennsylvania.
“The first blow, a thunderbolt from the blue, General—without a declaration—”
“A blow below the belt too—a slave insurrection is honorable war compared to the treachery that would thus abuse our hospitality!”
They tried the telephones and telegraph stations in vain. A council of war was called and through the grim hours from two A. M. until dawn they sat in solemn session.
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1
hurled
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| v.猛投，用力掷( hurl的过去式和过去分词 )；大声叫骂 | |
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2
gaping
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| adj.口的；张口的；敞口的；多洞穴的v.目瞪口呆地凝视( gape的现在分词 )；张开，张大 | |
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3
cavern
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| n.洞穴，大山洞 | |
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jovial
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| adj.快乐的，好交际的 | |
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5
wailed
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| v.哭叫，哀号( wail的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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6
maudlin
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| adj.感情脆弱的，爱哭的 | |
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7
scramble
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| v.爬行，攀爬，杂乱蔓延，碎片，片段，废料 | |
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8
northward
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| adv.向北；n.北方的地区 | |
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9
regiment
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| n.团，多数，管理；v.组织，编成团，统制 | |
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gilded
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| a.镀金的，富有的 | |
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battered
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| adj.磨损的；v.连续猛击；磨损 | |
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12
trot
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| n.疾走，慢跑；n.老太婆；现成译本；(复数）trots:腹泻（与the 连用）；v.小跑，快步走，赶紧 | |
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13
armory
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| n.纹章，兵工厂，军械库 | |
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14
dynamite
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| n./vt.(用)炸药(爆破) | |
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15
reign
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| n.统治时期，统治，支配，盛行；v.占优势 | |
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16
federation
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| n.同盟，联邦，联合，联盟，联合会 | |
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17
garrison
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| n.卫戍部队；驻地，卫戍区；vt.派(兵)驻防 | |
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18
acting
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| n.演戏，行为，假装；adj.代理的，临时的，演出用的 | |
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19
jubilee
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| n.周年纪念；欢乐 | |
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20
disarmed
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| v.裁军( disarm的过去式和过去分词 )；使息怒 | |
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21
bristling
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| a.竖立的 | |
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22
armories
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| n.纹章( armory的名词复数 )；纹章学；兵工厂；军械库 | |
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23
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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24
wireless
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| adj.无线的；n.无线电 | |
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25
wreck
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| n.失事，遇难；沉船；vt.(船等)失事，遇难 | |
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26
determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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27
subdued
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| adj. 屈服的，柔和的，减弱的 动词subdue的过去式和过去分词 | |
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28
scrap
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| n.碎片；废料；v.废弃，报废 | |
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29
appalling
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| adj.骇人听闻的，令人震惊的，可怕的 | |
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30
decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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31
caucus
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| n.秘密会议；干部会议；v.（参加）干部开会议 | |
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32
ointment
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| n.药膏，油膏，软膏 | |
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33
impoverished
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| adj.穷困的，无力的，用尽了的v.使（某人）贫穷( impoverish的过去式和过去分词 )；使（某物）贫瘠或恶化 | |
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34
treasuries
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| n.（政府的）财政部( treasury的名词复数 )；国库，金库 | |
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35
vaults
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| n.拱顶( vault的名词复数 )；地下室；撑物跳高；墓穴 | |
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36
herd
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| n.兽群，牧群；vt.使集中，把…赶在一起 | |
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37
hoard
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| n./v.窖藏，贮存，囤积 | |
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38
chaos
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| n.混乱，无秩序 | |
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39
invincible
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| adj.不可征服的，难以制服的 | |
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40
anarchy
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| n.无政府状态；社会秩序混乱，无秩序 | |
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41
conquerors
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| 征服者，占领者( conqueror的名词复数 ) | |
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42
jersey
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| n.运动衫 | |
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43
haven
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| n.安全的地方，避难所，庇护所 | |
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44
corps
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| n.(通信等兵种的)部队；(同类作的)一组 | |
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45
automobile
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| n.汽车，机动车 | |
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46
metropolis
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| n.首府；大城市 | |
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47
pickets
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| 罢工纠察员( picket的名词复数 ) | |
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48
foe
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| n.敌人，仇敌 | |
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49
ammunition
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| n.军火，弹药 | |
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50
arsenal
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| n.兵工厂，军械库 | |
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51
trifling
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| adj.微不足道的；没什么价值的 | |
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52
foes
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| 敌人，仇敌( foe的名词复数 ) | |
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53
stunned
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| adj. 震惊的，惊讶的 动词stun的过去式和过去分词 | |
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54
mighty
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| adj.强有力的；巨大的 | |
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55
scattered
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| adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的 | |
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56
possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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57
traitors
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| 卖国贼( traitor的名词复数 )； 叛徒； 背叛者； 背信弃义的人 | |
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58
worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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59
bloody
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| adj.非常的的；流血的；残忍的；adv.很；vt.血染 | |
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60
annihilated
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| v.（彻底）消灭( annihilate的过去式和过去分词 )；使无效；废止；彻底击溃 | |
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61
barricade
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| n.路障，栅栏，障碍；vt.设路障挡住 | |
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62
dynamited
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| v.（尤指用于采矿的）甘油炸药( dynamite的过去式和过去分词 )；会引起轰动的人[事物] | |
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63
barricades
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| 路障，障碍物( barricade的名词复数 ) | |
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64
jibes
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| n.与…一致( jibe的名词复数 )；（与…）相符；相匹配v.与…一致( jibe的第三人称单数 )；（与…）相符；相匹配 | |
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65
slurs
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| 含糊的发音( slur的名词复数 )； 玷污； 连奏线； 连唱线 | |
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66
tyrant
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| n.暴君，专制的君主，残暴的人 | |
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67
wrecked
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| adj.失事的，遇难的 | |
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68
bravado
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| n.虚张声势，故作勇敢，逞能 | |
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69
hood
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| n.头巾，兜帽，覆盖；v.罩上，以头巾覆盖 | |
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70
remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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