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Title: The Strength of the Strong
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<p>Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
<h1>The Strength of the Strong</h1>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
<p>Contents:</p>
<p>The Strength of the Strong<br />South of the Slot<br />The Unparalleled
Invasion<br />The Enemy of All the World<br />The Dream of Debs<br />The
Sea-Farmer<br />Samuel</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>THE STRENGTH OF THE STRONG</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>“Parables don’t lie, but liars will parable.”—Lip-King.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>Old Long-Beard paused in his narrative, licked his greasy fingers,
and wiped them on his naked sides where his one piece of ragged bearskin
failed to cover him. Crouched around him, on their hams, were
three young men, his grandsons, Deer-Runner, Yellow-Head, and Afraid-of-the-Dark.
In appearance they were much the same. Skins of wild animals partly
covered them. They were lean and meagre of build, narrow-hipped
and crooked-legged, and at the same time deep-chested, with heavy arms
and enormous hands. There was much hair on their chests and shoulders,
and on the outsides of their arms and legs. Their heads were matted
with uncut hair, long locks of which often strayed before their eyes,
beady and black and glittering like the eyes of birds. They were
narrow between the eyes and broad between the cheeks, while their lower
jaws were projecting and massive.</p>
<p>It was a night of clear starlight, and below them, stretching away
remotely, lay range on range of forest-covered hills. In the distance
the heavens were red from the glow of a volcano. At their backs
yawned the black mouth of a cave, out of which, from time to time, blew
draughty gusts of wind. Immediately in front of them blazed a
fire. At one side, partly devoured, lay the carcass of a bear,
with about it, at a respectable distance, several large dogs, shaggy
and wolf-like. Beside each man lay his bow and arrows and a huge
club. In the cave-mouth a number of rude spears leaned against
the rock.</p>
<p>“So that was how we moved from the cave to the tree,”
old Long-Beard spoke up.</p>
<p>They laughed boisterously, like big children, at recollection of
a previous story his words called up. Long-Beard laughed, too,
the five-inch bodkin of bone, thrust midway through the cartilage of
his nose, leaping and dancing and adding to his ferocious appearance.
He did not exactly say the words recorded, but he made animal-like sounds
with his mouth that meant the same thing.</p>
<p>“And that is the first I remember of the Sea Valley,”
Long-Beard went on. “We were a very foolish crowd.
We did not know the secret of strength. For, behold, each family
lived by itself, and took care of itself. There were thirty families,
but we got no strength from one another. We were in fear of each
other all the time. No one ever paid visits. In the top
of our tree we built a grass house, and on the platform outside was
a pile of rocks, which were for the heads of any that might chance to
try to visit us. Also, we had our spears and arrows. We
never walked under the trees of the other families, either. My
brother did, once, under old Boo-oogh’s tree, and he got his head
broken and that was the end of him.</p>
<p>“Old Boo-oogh was very strong. It was said he could pull
a grown man’s head right off. I never heard of him doing
it, because no man would give him a chance. Father wouldn’t.
One day, when father was down on the beach, Boo-oogh took after mother.
She couldn’t run fast, for the day before she had got her leg
clawed by a bear when she was up on the mountain gathering berries.
So Boo-oogh caught her and carried her up into his tree. Father
never got her back. He was afraid. Old Boo-oogh made faces
at him.</p>
<p>“But father did not mind. Strong-Arm was another strong
man. He was one of the best fishermen. But one day, climbing
after sea-gull eggs, he had a fall from the cliff. He was never
strong after that. He coughed a great deal, and his shoulders
drew near to each other. So father took Strong-Arm’s wife.
When he came around and coughed under our tree, father laughed at him
and threw rocks at him. It was our way in those days. We
did not know how to add strength together and become strong.”</p>
<p>“Would a brother take a brother’s wife?” Deer-Runner
demanded.</p>
<p>“Yes, if he had gone to live in another tree by himself.”</p>
<p>“But we do not do such things now,” Afraid-of-the-Dark
objected.</p>
<p>“It is because I have taught your fathers better.”
Long-Beard thrust his hairy paw into the bear meat and drew out a handful
of suet, which he sucked with a meditative air. Again he wiped
his hands on his naked sides and went on. “What I am telling
you happened in the long ago, before we knew any better.”</p>
<p>“You must have been fools not to know better,” was Deer-Runner’s
comment, Yellow-Head grunting approval.</p>
<p>“So we were, but we became bigger fools, as you shall see.
Still, we did learn better, and this was the way of it. We Fish-Eaters
had not learned to add our strength until our strength was the strength
of all of us. But the Meat-Eaters, who lived across the divide
in the Big Valley, stood together, hunted together, fished together,
and fought together. One day they came into our valley.
Each family of us got into its own cave and tree. There were only
ten Meat-Eaters, but they fought together, and we fought, each family
by itself.”</p>
<p>Long-Beard counted long and perplexedly on his fingers.</p>
<p>“There were sixty men of us,” was what he managed to
say with fingers and lips combined. “And we were very strong,
only we did not know it. So we watched the ten men attack Boo-oogh’s
tree. He made a good fight, but he had no chance. We looked
on. When some of the Meat-Eaters tried to climb the tree, Boo-oogh
had to show himself in order to drop stones on their heads, whereupon
the other Meat-Eaters, who were waiting for that very thing, shot him
full of arrows. And that was the end of Boo-oogh.</p>
<p>“Next, the Meat-Eaters got One-Eye and his family in his cave.
They built a fire in the mouth and smoked him out, like we smoked out
the bear there to-day. Then they went after Six-Fingers, up his
tree, and, while they were killing him and his grown son, the rest of
us ran away. They caught some of our women, and killed two old
men who could not run fast and several children. The women they
carried away with them to the Big Valley.</p>
<p>“After that the rest of us crept back, and, somehow, perhaps
because we were in fear and felt the need for one another, we talked
the thing over. It was our first council—our first real
council. And in that council we formed our first tribe.
For we had learned the lesson. Of the ten Meat-Eaters, each man
had had the strength of ten, for the ten had fought as one man.
They had added their strength together. But of the thirty families
and the sixty men of us, we had had the strength of but one man, for
each had fought alone.</p>
<p>“It was a great talk we had, and it was hard talk, for we did
not have the words then as now with which to talk. The Bug made
some of the words long afterward, and so did others of us make words
from time to time. But in the end we agreed to add our strength
together and to be as one man when the Meat-Eaters came over the divide
to steal our women. And that was the tribe.</p>
<p>“We set two men on the divide, one for the day and one for
the night, to watch if the Meat-Eaters came. These were the eyes
of the tribe. Then, also, day and night, there were to be ten
men awake with their clubs and spears and arrows in their hands, ready
to fight. Before, when a man went after fish, or clams, or gull-eggs,
he carried his weapons with him, and half the time he was getting food
and half the time watching for fear some other man would get him.
Now that was all changed. The men went out without their weapons
and spent all their time getting food. Likewise, when the women
went into the mountains after roots and berries, five of the ten men
went with them to guard them. While all the time, day and night,
the eyes of the tribe watched from the top of the divide.</p>
<p>“But troubles came. As usual, it was about the women.
Men without wives wanted other men’s wives, and there was much
fighting between men, and now and again one got his head smashed or
a spear through his body. While one of the watchers was on top
of the divide, another man stole his wife, and he came down to fight.
Then the other watcher was in fear that some one would take his wife,
and he came down likewise. Also, there was trouble among the ten
men who carried always their weapons, and they fought five against five,
till some ran away down the coast and the others ran after them.</p>
<p>“So it was that the tribe was left without eyes or guards.
We had not the strength of sixty. We had no strength at all.
So we held a council and made our first laws. I was but a cub
at the time, but I remember. We said that, in order to be strong,
we must not fight one another, and we made a law that when a man killed
another him would the tribe kill. We made another law that whoso
stole another man’s wife him would the tribe kill. We said
that whatever man had too great strength, and by that strength hurt
his brothers in the tribe, him would we kill that his strength might
hurt no more. For, if we let his strength hurt, the brothers would
become afraid and the tribe would fall apart, and we would be as weak
as when the Meat-Eaters first came upon us and killed Boo-oogh.</p>
<p>“Knuckle-Bone was a strong man, a very strong man, and he knew
not law. He knew only his own strength, and in the fullness thereof
he went forth and took the wife of Three-Clams. Three-Clams tried
to fight, but Knuckle-Bone clubbed out his brains. Yet had Knuckle-Bone
forgotten that all the men of us had added our strength to keep the
law among us, and him we killed, at the foot of his tree, and hung his
body on a branch as a warning that the law was stronger than any man.
For we were the law, all of us, and no man was greater than the law.</p>
<p>“Then there were other troubles, for know, O Deer-Runner, and
Yellow-Head, and Afraid-of-the-Dark, that it is not easy to make a tribe.
There were many things, little things, that it was a great trouble to
call all the men together to have a council about. We were having
councils morning, noon, and night, and in the middle of the night.
We could find little time to go out and get food, because of the councils,
for there was always some little thing to be settled, such as naming
two new watchers to take the place of the old ones on the hill, or naming
how much food should fall to the share of the men who kept their weapons
always in their hands and got no food for themselves.</p>
<p>“We stood in need of a chief man to do these things, who would
be the voice of the council, and who would account to the council for
the things he did. So we named Fith-Fith the chief man.
He was a strong man, too, and very cunning, and when he was angry he
made noises just like that, <i>fith-fith</i>, like a wild-cat.</p>
<p>“The ten men who guarded the tribe were set to work making
a wall of stones across the narrow part of the valley. The women
and large children helped, as did other men, until the wall was strong.
After that, all the families came down out of their caves and trees
and built grass houses behind the shelter of the wall. These houses
were large and much better than the caves and trees, and everybody had
a better time of it because the men had added their strength together
and become a tribe. Because of the wall and the guards and the
watchers, there was more time to hunt and fish and pick roots and berries;
there was more food, and better food, and no one went hungry.
And Three-Legs, so named because his legs had been smashed when a boy
and who walked with a stick—Three-Legs got the seed of the wild
corn and planted it in the ground in the valley near his house.
Also, he tried planting fat roots and other things he found in the mountain
valleys.</p>
<p>“Because of the safety in the Sea Valley, which was because
of the wall and the watchers and the guards, and because there was food
in plenty for all without having to fight for it, many families came
in from the coast valleys on both sides and from the high back mountains
where they had lived more like wild animals than men. And it was
not long before the Sea Valley filled up, and in it were countless families.
But, before this happened, the land, which had been free to all and
belonged to all, was divided up. Three-Legs began it when he planted
corn. But most of us did not care about the land. We thought
the marking of the boundaries with fences of stone was a foolishness.
We had plenty to eat, and what more did we want? I remember that
my father and I built stone fences for Three-Legs and were given corn
in return.</p>
<p>“So only a few got all the land, and Three-Legs got most of
it. Also, others that had taken land gave it to the few that held
on, being paid in return with corn and fat roots, and bear-skins, and
fishes which the farmers got from the fishermen in exchange for corn.
And, the first thing we knew, all the land was gone.</p>
<p>“It was about this time that Fith-Fith died and Dog-Tooth,
his son, was made chief. He demanded to be made chief anyway,
because his father had been chief before him. Also, he looked
upon himself as a greater chief than his father. He was a good
chief at first, and worked hard, so that the council had less and less
to do. Then arose a new voice in the Sea Valley. It was
Twisted-Lip. We had never thought much of him, until he began
to talk with the spirits of the dead. Later we called him Big-Fat,
because he ate over-much, and did no work, and grew round and large.
One day Big-Fat told us that the secrets of the dead were his, and that
he was the voice of God. He became great friends with Dog-Tooth,
who commanded that we should build Big-Fat a grass house. And
Big-Fat put taboos all around this house and kept God inside.</p>
<p>“More and more Dog-Tooth became greater than the council, and
when the council grumbled and said it would name a new chief, Big-Fat
spoke with the voice of God and said no. Also, Three-Legs and
the others who held the land stood behind Dog-Tooth. Moreover,
the strongest man in the council was Sea-Lion, and him the land-owners
gave land to secretly, along with many bearskins and baskets of corn.
So Sea-Lion said that Big-Fat’s voice was truly the voice of God
and must be obeyed. And soon afterward Sea-Lion was named the
voice of Dog-Tooth and did most of his talking for him.</p>
<p>“Then there was Little-Belly, a little man, so thin in the
middle that he looked as if he had never had enough to eat. Inside
the mouth of the river, after the sand-bar had combed the strength of
the breakers, he built a big fish-trap. No man had ever seen or
dreamed a fish-trap before. He worked weeks on it, with his son
and his wife, while the rest of us laughed at their labours. But,
when it was done, the first day he caught more fish in it than could
the whole tribe in a week, whereat there was great rejoicing.
There was only one other place in the river for a fish-trap, but, when
my father and I and a dozen other men started to make a very large trap,
the guards came from the big grass-house we had built for Dog-Tooth.
And the guards poked us with their spears and told us begone, because
Little-Belly was going to build a trap there himself on the word of
Sea-Lion, who was the voice of Dog-Tooth.</p>
<p>“There was much grumbling, and my father called a council.
But, when he rose to speak, him the Sea-Lion thrust through the throat
with a spear and he died. And Dog-Tooth and Little-Belly, and
Three-Legs and all that held land said it was good. And Big-Fat
said it was the will of God. And after that all men were afraid
to stand up in the council, and there was no more council.</p>
<p>“Another man, Pig-Jaw, began to keep goats. He had heard
about it as among the Meat-Eaters, and it was not long before he had
many flocks. Other men, who had no land and no fish-traps, and
who else would have gone hungry, were glad to work for Pig-Jaw, caring
for his goats, guarding them from wild dogs and tigers, and driving
them to the feeding pastures in the mountains. In return, Pig-Jaw
gave them goat-meat to eat and goat-skins to wear, and sometimes they
traded the goat-meat for fish and corn and fat roots.</p>
<p>“It was this time that money came to be. Sea-Lion was
the man who first thought of it, and he talked it over with Dog-Tooth
and Big-Fat. You see, these three were the ones that got a share
of everything in the Sea Valley. One basket out of every three
of corn was theirs, one fish out of every three, one goat out of every
three. In return, they fed the guards and the watchers, and kept
the rest for themselves. Sometimes, when a big haul of fish was
made they did not know what to do with all their share. So Sea-Lion
set the women to making money out of shell—little round pieces,
with a hole in each one, and all made smooth and fine. These were
strung on strings, and the strings were called money.</p>
<p>“Each string was of the value of thirty fish, or forty fish,
but the women, who made a string a day, were given two fish each.
The fish came out of the shares of Dog-Tooth, Big-Fat, and Sea-Lion,
which they three did not eat. So all the money belonged to them.
Then they told Three-Legs and the other land-owners that they would
take their share of corn and roots in money, Little-Belly that they
would take their share of fish in money, Pig-Jaw that they would take
their share of goats and cheese in money. Thus, a man who had
nothing, worked for one who had, and was paid in money. With this
money he bought corn, and fish, and meat, and cheese. And Three-Legs
and all owners of things paid Dog-Tooth and Sea-Lion and Big-Fat their
share in money. And they paid the guards and watchers in money,
and the guards and watchers bought their food with the money.
And, because money was cheap, Dog-Tooth made many more men into guards.
And, because money was cheap to make, a number of men began to make
money out of shell themselves. But the guards stuck spears in
them and shot them full of arrows, because they were trying to break
up the tribe. It was bad to break up the tribe, for then the Meat-Eaters
would come over the divide and kill them all.</p>
<p>“Big-Fat was the voice of God, but he took Broken-Rib and made
him into a priest, so that he became the voice of Big-Fat and did most
of his talking for him. And both had other men to be servants
to them. So, also, did Little-Belly and Three-Legs and Pig-Jaw
have other men to lie in the sun about their grass houses and carry
messages for them and give commands. And more and more were men
taken away from work, so that those that were left worked harder than
ever before. It seemed that men desired to do no work and strove
to seek out other ways whereby men should work for them. Crooked-Eyes
found such a way. He made the first fire-brew out of corn.
And thereafter he worked no more, for he talked secretly with Dog-Tooth
and Big-Fat and the other masters, and it was agreed that he should
be the only one to make fire-brew. But Crooked-Eyes did no work
himself. Men made the brew for him, and he paid them in money.
Then he sold the fire-brew for money, and all men bought. And
many strings of money did he give Dog-Tooth and Sea-Lion and all of
them.</p>
<p>“Big-Fat and Broken-Rib stood by Dog-Tooth when he took his
second wife, and his third wife. They said Dog-Tooth was different
from other men and second only to God that Big-Fat kept in his taboo
house, and Dog-Tooth said so, too, and wanted to know who were they
to grumble about how many wives he took. Dog-Tooth had a big canoe
made, and, many more men he took from work, who did nothing and lay
in the sun, save only when Dog-Tooth went in the canoe, when they paddled
for him. And he made Tiger-Face head man over all the guards,
so that Tiger-Face became his right arm, and when he did not like a
man Tiger-Face killed that man for him. And Tiger-Face, also,
made another man to be his right arm, and to give commands, and to kill
for him.</p>
<p>“But this was the strange thing: as the days went by we who
were left worked harder and harder, and yet did we get less and less
to eat.”</p>
<p>“But what of the goats and the corn and the fat roots and the
fish-trap?” spoke up Afraid-of-the-Dark, “what of all this?
Was there not more food to be gained by man’s work?”</p>
<p>“It is so,” Long-Beard agreed. “Three men
on the fish-trap got more fish than the whole tribe before there was
a fish-trap. But have I not said we were fools? The more
food we were able to get, the less food did we have to eat.”</p>
<p>“But was it not plain that the many men who did not work ate
it all up?” Yellow-Head demanded.</p>
<p>Long-Beard nodded his head sadly.</p>
<p>“Dog-Tooth’s dogs were stuffed with meat, and the men
who lay in the sun and did no work were rolling in fat, and, at the
same time, there were little children crying themselves to sleep with
hunger biting them with every wail.”</p>
<p>Deer-Runner was spurred by the recital of famine to tear out a chunk
of bear-meat and broil it on a stick over the coals. This he devoured
with smacking lips, while Long-Beard went on:</p>
<p>“When we grumbled Big-Fat arose, and with the voice of God
said that God had chosen the wise men to own the land and the goats
and the fish-trap, and the fire-brew, and that without these wise men
we would all be animals, as in the days when we lived in trees.</p>
<p>“And there arose one who became a singer of songs for the king.
Him they called the Bug, because he was small and ungainly of face and
limb and excelled not in work or deed. He loved the fattest marrow
bones, the choicest fish, the milk warm from the goats, the first corn
that was ripe, and the snug place by the fire. And thus, becoming
singer of songs to the king, he found a way to do nothing and be fat.
And when the people grumbled more and more, and some threw stones at
the king’s grass house, the Bug sang a song of how good it was
to be a Fish-Eater. In his song he told that the Fish-Eaters were
the chosen of God and the finest men God had made. He sang of
the Meat-Eaters as pigs and crows, and sang how fine and good it was
for the Fish-Eaters to fight and die doing God’s work, which was
the killing of Meat-Eaters. The words of his song were like fire
in us, and we clamoured to be led against the Meat-Eaters. And
we forgot that we were hungry, and why we had grumbled, and were glad
to be led by Tiger-Face over the divide, where we killed many Meat-Eaters
and were content.</p>
<p>“But things were no better in the Sea Valley. The only
way to get food was to work for Three-Legs or Little-Belly or Pig-Jaw;
for there was no land that a man might plant with corn for himself.
And often there were more men than Three-Legs and the others had work
for. So these men went hungry, and so did their wives and children
and their old mothers. Tiger-Face said they could become guards
if they wanted to, and many of them did, and thereafter they did no
work except to poke spears in the men who did work and who grumbled
at feeding so many idlers.</p>
<p>“And when we grumbled, ever the Bug sang new songs. He
said that Three-Legs and Pig-Jaw and the rest were strong men, and that
that was why they had so much. He said that we should be glad
to have strong men with us, else would we perish of our own worthlessness
and the Meat-Eaters. Therefore, we should be glad to let such
strong men have all they could lay hands on. And Big-Fat and Pig-Jaw
and Tiger-Face and all the rest said it was true.</p>
<p>“‘All right,’ said Long-Fang, ‘then will
I, too, be a strong man.’ And he got himself corn, and began
to make fire-brew and sell it for strings of money. And, when
Crooked-Eyes complained, Long-Fang said that he was himself a strong
man, and that if Crooked-Eyes made any more noise he would bash his
brains out for him. Whereat Crooked-Eyes was afraid and went and
talked with Three-Legs and Pig-Jaw. And all three went and talked
to Dog-Tooth. And Dog-Tooth spoke to Sea-Lion, and Sea-Lion sent
a runner with a message to Tiger-Face. And Tiger-Face sent his
guards, who burned Long-Fang’s house along with the fire-brew
he had made. Also, they killed him and all his family. And
Big-Fat said it was good, and the Bug sang another song about how good
it was to observe the law, and what a fine land the Sea Valley was,
and how every man who loved the Sea Valley should go forth and kill
the bad Meat-Eaters. And again his song was as fire to us, and
we forgot to grumble.</p>
<p>“It was very strange. When Little-Belly caught too many
fish, so that it took a great many to sell for a little money, he threw
many of the fish back into the sea, so that more money would be paid
for what was left. And Three-Legs often let many large fields
lie idle so as to get more money for his corn. And the women,
making so much money out of shell that much money was needed to buy
with, Dog-Tooth stopped the making of money. And the women had
no work, so they took the places of the men. I worked on the fish-trap,
getting a string of money every five days. But my sister now did
my work, getting a string of money for every ten days. The women
worked cheaper, and there was less food, and Tiger-Face said we should
become guards. Only I could not become a guard because I was lame
of one leg and Tiger-Face would not have me. And there were many
like me. We were broken men and only fit to beg for work or to
take care of the babies while the women worked.”</p>
<p>Yellow-Head, too, was made hungry by the recital and broiled a piece
of bear-meat on the coals.</p>
<p>“But why didn’t you rise up, all of you, and kill Three-Legs
and Pig-Jaw and Big-Fat and the rest and get enough to eat?” Afraid-in-the-Dark
demanded.</p>
<p>“Because we could not understand,” Long-Beard answered.
“There was too much to think about, and, also, there were the
guards sticking spears into us, and Big-Fat talking about God, and the
Bug singing new songs. And when any man did think right, and said
so, Tiger-Face and the guards got him, and he was tied out to the rocks
at low tide so that the rising waters drowned him.</p>
<p>“It was a strange thing—the money. It was like
the Bug’s songs. It seemed all right, but it wasn’t,
and we were slow to understand. Dog-Tooth began to gather the
money in. He put it in a big pile, in a grass house, with guards
to watch it day and night. And the more money he piled in the
house the dearer money became, so that a man worked a longer time for
a string of money than before. Then, too, there was always talk
of war with the Meat-Eaters, and Dog-Tooth and Tiger-Face filled many
houses with corn, and dried fish, and smoked goat-meat, and cheese.
And with the food, piled there in mountains the people had not enough
to eat. But what did it matter? Whenever the people grumbled
too loudly the Bug sang a new song, and Big-Fat said it was God’s
word that we should kill Meat-Eaters, and Tiger-Face led us over the
divide to kill and be killed. I was not good enough to be a guard
and lie fat in the sun, but, when we made war, Tiger-Face was glad to
take me along. And when we had eaten, all the food stored in the
houses we stopped fighting and went back to work to pile up more food.”</p>
<p>“Then were you all crazy,” commented Deer-Runner.</p>
<p>“Then were we indeed all crazy,” Long-Beard agreed.
“It was strange, all of it. There was Split-Nose.
He said everything was wrong. He said it was true that we grew
strong by adding our strength together. And he said that, when
we first formed the tribe, it was right that the men whose strength
hurt the tribe should be shorn of their strength—men who bashed
their brothers’ heads and stole their brothers’ wives.
And now, he said, the tribe was not getting stronger, but was getting
weaker, because there were men with another kind of strength that were
hurting the tribe—men who had the strength of the land, like Three-Legs;
who had the strength of the fish-trap, like Little-Belly; who had the
strength of all the goat-meat, like Pig-Jaw. The thing to do,
Split-Nose said, was to shear these men of their evil strength; to make
them go to work, all of them, and to let no man eat who did not work.</p>
<p>“And the Bug sang another song about men like Split-Nose, who
wanted to go back, and live in trees.</p>
<p>“Yet Split-Nose said no; that he did not want to go back, but
ahead; that they grew strong only as they added their strength together;
and that, if the Fish-Eaters would add their strength to the Meat-Eaters,
there would be no more fighting and no more watchers and no more guards,
and that, with all men working, there would be so much food that each
man would have to work not more than two hours a day.</p>
<p>“Then the Bug sang again, and he sang that Split-Nose was lazy,
and he sang also the ‘Song of the Bees.’ It was a
strange song, and those who listened were made mad, as from the drinking
of strong fire-brew. The song was of a swarm of bees, and of a
robber wasp who had come in to live with the bees and who was stealing
all their honey. The wasp was lazy and told them there was no
need to work; also, he told them to make friends with the bears, who
were not honey-stealers but only very good friends. And the Bug
sang in crooked words, so that those who listened knew that the swarm
was the Sea Valley tribe, that the bears were the Meat-Eaters, and that
the lazy wasp was Split-Nose. And when the Bug sang that the bees
listened to the wasp till the swarm was near to perishing, the people
growled and snarled, and when the Bug sang that at last the good bees
arose and stung the wasp to death, the people picked up stones from
the ground and stoned Split-Nose to death till there was naught to be
seen of him but the heap of stones they had flung on top of him.
And there were many poor people who worked long and hard and had not
enough to eat that helped throw the stones on Split-Nose.</p>
<p>“And, after the death of Split-Nose, there was but one other
man that dared rise up and speak his mind, and that man was Hair-Face.
‘Where is the strength of the strong?’ he asked. ‘We
are the strong, all of us, and we are stronger than Dog-Tooth and Tiger-Face
and Three-Legs and Pig-Jaw and all the rest who do nothing and eat much
and weaken us by the hurt of their strength which is bad strength.
Men who are slaves are not strong. If the man who first found
the virtue and use of fire had used his strength we would have been
his slaves, as we are the slaves to-day of Little-Belly, who found the
virtue and use of the fish-trap; and of the men who found the virtue
and use of the land, and the goats, and the fire-brew. Before,
we lived in trees, my brothers, and no man was safe. But we fight
no more with one another. We have added our strength together.
Then let us fight no more with the Meat-Eaters. Let us add our
strength and their strength together. Then will we be indeed strong.
And then we will go out together, the Fish-Eaters and the Meat-Eaters,
and we will kill the tigers and the lions and the wolves and the wild
dogs, and we will pasture our goats on all the hill-sides and plant
our corn and fat roots in all the high mountain valleys. In that
day we will be so strong that all the wild animals will flee before
us and perish. And nothing will withstand us, for the strength
of each man will be the strength of all men in the world.’</p>
<p>“So said Hair-Face, and they killed him, because, they said,
he was a wild man and wanted to go back and live in a tree. It
was very strange. Whenever a man arose and wanted to go forward
all those that stood still said he went backward and should be killed.
And the poor people helped stone him, and were fools. We were
all fools, except those who were fat and did no work. The fools
were called wise, and the wise were stoned. Men who worked did
not get enough to eat, and the men who did not work ate too much.</p>
<p>“And the tribe went on losing strength. The children
were weak and sickly. And, because we ate not enough, strange
sicknesses came among us and we died like flies. And then the
Meat-Eaters came upon us. We had followed Tiger-Face too often
over the divide and killed them. And now they came to repay in
blood. We were too weak and sick to man the big wall. And
they killed us, all of us, except some of the women, which they took
away with them. The Bug and I escaped, and I hid in the wildest
places, and became a hunter of meat and went hungry no more. I
stole a wife from the Meat-Eaters, and went to live in the caves of
the high mountains where they could not find me. And we had three
sons, and each son stole a wife from the Meat-Eaters. And the
rest you know, for are you not the sons of my sons?”</p>
<p>“But the Bug?” queried Deer-Runner. “What
became of him?”</p>
<p>“He went to live with the Meat-Eaters and to be a singer of
songs to the king. He is an old man now, but he sings the same
old songs; and, when a man rises up to go forward, he sings that that
man is walking backward to live in a tree.”</p>
<p>Long-Beard dipped into the bear-carcass and sucked with toothless
gums at a fist of suet.</p>
<p>“Some day,” he said, wiping his hands on his sides, “all
the fools will be dead and then all live men will go forward.
The strength of the strong will be theirs, and they will add their strength
together, so that, of all the men in the world, not one will fight with
another. There will be no guards nor watchers on the walls.
And all the hunting animals will be killed, and, as Hair-Face said,
all the hill-sides will be pastured with goats and all the high mountain
valleys will be planted with corn and fat roots. And all men will
be brothers, and no man will lie idle in the sun and be fed by his fellows.
And all that will come to pass in the time when the fools are dead,
and when there will be no more singers to stand still and sing the ‘Song
of the Bees.’ Bees are not men.”</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>SOUTH OF THE SLOT</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>Old San Francisco, which is the San Francisco of only the other day,
the day before the Earthquake, was divided midway by the Slot.
The Slot was an iron crack that ran along the centre of Market Street,
and from the Slot arose the burr of the ceaseless, endless cable that
was hitched at will to the cars it dragged up and down. In truth,
there were two slots, but in the quick grammar of the West time was
saved by calling them, and much more that they stood for, “The
Slot.” North of the Slot were the theatres, hotels, and
shopping district, the banks and the staid, respectable business houses.
South of the Slot were the factories, slums, laundries, machine-shops,
boiler works, and the abodes of the working class.</p>
<p>The Slot was the metaphor that expressed the class cleavage of Society,
and no man crossed this metaphor, back and forth, more successfully
than Freddie Drummond. He made a practice of living in both worlds,
and in both worlds he lived signally well. Freddie Drummond was
a professor in the Sociology Department of the University of California,
and it was as a professor of sociology that he first crossed over the
Slot, lived for six mouths in the great labour-ghetto, and wrote <i>The
Unskilled Labourer—</i>a book that was hailed everywhere as an
able contribution to the literature of progress, and as a splendid reply
to the literature of discontent. Politically and economically
it was nothing if not orthodox. Presidents of great railway systems
bought whole editions of it to give to their employees. The Manufacturers’
Association alone distributed fifty thousand copies of it. In
a way, it was almost as immoral as the far-famed and notorious <i>Message
to Garcia</i>, while in its pernicious preachment of thrift and content
it ran <i>Mr. Wiggs of the Cabbage</i> <i>Patch</i> a close second.</p>
<p>At first, Freddie Drummond found it monstrously difficult to get
along among the working people. He was not used to their ways,
and they certainly were not used to his. They were suspicious.
He had no antecedents. He could talk of no previous jobs.
His hands were soft. His extraordinary politeness was ominous.
His first idea of the rôle he would play was that of a free and
independent American who chose to work with his hands and no explanations
given. But it wouldn’t do, as he quickly discovered.
At the beginning they accepted him, very provisionally, as a freak.
A little later, as he began to know his way about better, he insensibly
drifted into the rôle that would work—namely, he was a man
who had seen better days, very much better days, but who was down on
his luck, though, to be sure, only temporarily.</p>
<p>He learned many things, and generalized much and often erroneously,
all of which can be found in the pages of <i>The Unskilled Labourer</i>.
He saved himself, however, after the sane and conservative manner of
his kind, by labelling his generalizations as “tentative.”
One of his first experiences was in the great Wilmax Cannery, where
he was put on piece-work making small packing cases. A box factory
supplied the parts, and all Freddie Drummond had to do was to fit the
parts into a form and drive in the wire nails with a light hammer.</p>
<p>It was not skilled labour, but it was piece-work. The ordinary
labourers in the cannery got a dollar and a half per day. Freddie
Drummond found the other men on the same job with him jogging along
and earning a dollar and seventy-five cents a day. By the third
day he was able to earn the same. But he was ambitious.
He did not care to jog along and, being unusually able and fit, on the
fourth day earned two dollars.</p>
<p>The next day, having keyed himself up to an exhausting high-tension,
he earned two dollars and a half. His fellow workers favoured
him with scowls and black looks, and made remarks, slangily witty and
which he did not understand, about sucking up to the boss and pace-making
and holding her down, when the rains set in. He was astonished
at their malingering on piece-work, generalized about the inherent laziness
of the unskilled labourer, and proceeded next day to hammer out three
dollars’ worth of boxes.</p>
<p>And that night, coming out of the cannery, he was interviewed by
his fellow workmen, who were very angry and incoherently slangy.
He failed to comprehend the motive behind their action. The action
itself was strenuous. When he refused to ease down his pace and
bleated about freedom of contract, independent Americanism, and the
dignity of toil, they proceeded to spoil his pace-making ability.
It was a fierce battle, for Drummond was a large man and an athlete,
but the crowd finally jumped on his ribs, walked on his face, and stamped
on his fingers, so that it was only after lying in bed for a week that
he was able to get up and look for another job. All of which is
duly narrated in that first book of his, in the chapter entitled “The
Tyranny of Labour.”</p>
<p>A little later, in another department of the Wilmax Cannery, lumping
as a fruit-distributor among the women, he essayed to carry two boxes
of fruit at a time, and was promptly reproached by the other fruit-lumpers.
It was palpable malingering; but he was there, he decided, not to change
conditions, but to observe. So he lumped one box thereafter, and
so well did he study the art of shirking that he wrote a special chapter
on it, with the last several paragraphs devoted to tentative generalizations.</p>
<p>In those six months he worked at many jobs and developed into a very
good imitation of a genuine worker. He was a natural linguist,
and he kept notebooks, making a scientific study of the workers’
slang or argot, until he could talk quite intelligibly. This language
also enabled him more intimately to follow their mental processes, and
thereby to gather much data for a projected chapter in some future book
which he planned to entitle <i>Synthesis of Working</i>-<i>Class Psychology.</i></p>
<p>Before he arose to the surface from that first plunge into the underworld
he discovered that he was a good actor and demonstrated the plasticity
of his nature. He was himself astonished at his own fluidity.
Once having mastered the language and conquered numerous fastidious
qualms, he found that he could flow into any nook of working-class life
and fit it so snugly as to feel comfortably at home. As he said,
in the preface to his second book, <i>The Toiler</i>, he endeavoured
really to know the working people, and the only possible way to achieve
this was to work beside them, eat their food, sleep in their beds, be
amused with their amusements, think their thoughts, and feel their feeling.</p>
<p>He was not a deep thinker. He had no faith in new theories.
All his norms and criteria were conventional. His Thesis on the
French Revolution was noteworthy in college annals, not merely for its
painstaking and voluminous accuracy, but for the fact that it was the
dryest, deadest, most formal, and most orthodox screed ever written
on the subject. He was a very reserved man, and his natural inhibition
was large in quantity and steel-like in quality. He had but few
friends. He was too undemonstrative, too frigid. He had
no vices, nor had any one ever discovered any temptations. Tobacco
he detested, beer he abhorred, and he was never known to drink anything
stronger than an occasional light wine at dinner.</p>
<p>When a freshman he had been baptized “Ice-Box” by his
warmer-blooded fellows. As a member of the faculty he was known
as “Cold-Storage.” He had but one grief, and that
was “Freddie.” He had earned it when he played full-back
in the ‘Varsity eleven, and his formal soul had never succeeded
in living it down. “Freddie” he would ever be, except
officially, and through nightmare vistas he looked into a future when
his world would speak of him as “Old Freddie.”</p>
<p>For he was very young to be a doctor of sociology, only twenty-seven,
and he looked younger. In appearance and atmosphere he was a strapping
big college man, smooth-faced and easy-mannered, clean and simple and
wholesome, with a known record of being a splendid athlete and an implied
vast possession of cold culture of the inhibited sort. He never
talked shop out of class and committee rooms, except later on, when
his books showered him with distasteful public notice and he yielded
to the extent of reading occasional papers before certain literary and
economic societies.</p>
<p>He did everything right—too right; and in dress and comportment
was inevitably correct. Not that he was a dandy. Far from
it. He was a college man, in dress and carriage as like as a pea
to the type that of late years is being so generously turned out of
our institutions of higher learning. His handshake was satisfyingly
strong and stiff. His blue eyes were coldly blue and convincingly
sincere. His voice, firm and masculine, clean and crisp of enunciation,
was pleasant to the ear. The one drawback to Freddie Drummond
was his inhibition. He never unbent. In his football days,
the higher the tension of the game, the cooler he grew. He was
noted as a boxer, but he was regarded as an automaton, with the inhuman
precision of a machine judging distance and timing blows, guarding,
blocking, and stalling. He was rarely punished himself, while
he rarely punished an opponent. He was too clever and too controlled
to permit himself to put a pound more weight into a punch than he intended.
With him it was a matter of exercise. It kept him fit.</p>
<p>As time went by, Freddie Drummond found himself more frequently crossing
the Slot and losing himself in South of Market. His summer and
winter holidays were spent there, and, whether it was a week or a week-end,
he found the time spent there to be valuable and enjoyable. And
there was so much material to be gathered. His third book, <i>Mass
and Master</i>, became a text-book in the American universities; and
almost before he knew it, he was at work on a fourth one, <i>The Fallacy
of the Inefficient</i>.</p>
<p>Somewhere in his make-up there was a strange twist or quirk.
Perhaps it was a recoil from his environment and training, or from the
tempered seed of his ancestors, who had been book-men generation preceding
generation; but at any rate, he found enjoyment in being down in the
working-class world. In his own world he was “Cold-Storage,”
but down below he was “Big” Bill Totts, who could drink
and smoke, and slang and fight, and be an all-round favourite.
Everybody liked Bill, and more than one working girl made love to him.
At first he had been merely a good actor, but as time went on, simulation
became second nature. He no longer played a part, and he loved
sausages, sausages and bacon, than which, in his own proper sphere,
there was nothing more loathsome in the way of food.</p>
<p>From doing the thing for the need’s sake, he came to doing
the thing for the thing’s sake. He found himself regretting
as the time drew near for him to go back to his lecture-room and his
inhibition. And he often found himself waiting with anticipation
for the dreamy time to pass when he could cross the Slot and cut loose
and play the devil. He was not wicked, but as “Big”
Bill Totts he did a myriad things that Freddie Drummond would never
have been permitted to do. Moreover, Freddie Drummond never would
have wanted to do them. That was the strangest part of his discovery.
Freddie Drummond and Bill Totts were two totally different creatures.
The desires and tastes and impulses of each ran counter to the other’s.
Bill Totts could shirk at a job with clear conscience, while Freddie
Drummond condemned shirking as vicious, criminal, and un-American, and
devoted whole chapters to condemnation of the vice. Freddie Drummond
did not care for dancing, but Bill Totts never missed the nights at
the various dancing clubs, such as The Magnolia, The Western Star, and
The Elite; while he won a massive silver cup, standing thirty inches
high, for being the best-sustained character at the Butchers and Meat
Workers’ annual grand masked ball. And Bill Totts liked
the girls and the girls liked him, while Freddie Drummond enjoyed playing
the ascetic in this particular, was open in his opposition to equal
suffrage, and cynically bitter in his secret condemnation of coeducation.</p>
<p>Freddie Drummond changed his manners with his dress, and without
effort. When he entered the obscure little room used for his transformation
scenes, he carried himself just a bit too stiffly. He was too
erect, his shoulders were an inch too far back, while his face was grave,
almost harsh, and practically expressionless. But when he emerged
in Bill Totts’ clothes he was another creature. Bill Totts
did not slouch, but somehow his whole form limbered up and became graceful.
The very sound of the voice was changed, and the laugh was loud and
hearty, while loose speech and an occasional oath were as a matter of
course on his lips. Also, Bill Totts was a trifle inclined to
late hours, and at times, in saloons, to be good-naturedly bellicose
with other workmen. Then, too, at Sunday picnics or when coming
home from the show, either arm betrayed a practised familiarity in stealing
around girls’ waists, while he displayed a wit keen and delightful
in the flirtatious badinage that was expected of a good fellow in his
class.</p>
<p>So thoroughly was Bill Totts himself, so thoroughly a workman, a
genuine denizen of South of the Slot, that he was as class-conscious
as the average of his kind, and his hatred for a scab even exceeded
that of the average loyal union man. During the Water Front Strike,
Freddie Drummond was somehow able to stand apart from the unique combination,
and, coldly critical, watch Bill Totts hilariously slug scab longshoremen.
For Bill Totts was a dues-paying member of the Longshoremen Union and
had a right to be indignant with the usurpers of his job. “Big”
Bill Totts was so very big, and so very able, that it was “Big”
Bill to the front when trouble was brewing. From acting outraged
feelings, Freddie Drummond, in the rôle of his other self, came
to experience genuine outrage, and it was only when he returned to the
classic atmosphere of the university that he was able, sanely and conservatively,
to generalize upon his underworld experiences and put them down on paper
as a trained sociologist should. That Bill Totts lacked the perspective
to raise him above class-consciousness Freddie Drummond clearly saw.
But Bill Totts could not see it. When he saw a scab taking his
job away, he saw red at the same time, and little else did he see.
It was Freddie Drummond, irreproachably clothed and comported, seated
at his study desk or facing his class in <i>Sociology</i> 17, who saw
Bill Totts, and all around Bill Totts, and all around the whole scab
and union-labour problem and its relation to the economic welfare of
the United States in the struggle for the world market. Bill Totts
really wasn’t able to see beyond the next meal and the prize-fight
the following night at the Gaiety Athletic Club.</p>
<p>It was while gathering material for <i>Women and Work</i> that Freddie
received his first warning of the danger he was in. He was too
successful at living in both worlds. This strange dualism he had
developed was after all very unstable, and, as he sat in his study and
meditated, he saw that it could not endure. It was really a transition
stage, and if he persisted he saw that he would inevitably have to drop
one world or the other. He could not continue in both. And
as he looked at the row of volumes that graced the upper shelf of his
revolving book-case, his volumes, beginning with his Thesis and ending
with <i>Women and Work</i>, he decided that that was the world he would
hold to and stick by. Bill Totts had served his purpose, but he
had become a too dangerous accomplice. Bill Totts would have to
cease.</p>
<p>Freddie Drummond’s fright was due to Mary Condon, President
of the International Glove Workers’ Union No. 974. He had
seen her, first, from the spectators’ gallery, at the annual convention
of the Northwest Federation of Labour, and he had seen her through Bill
Totts’ eyes, and that individual had been most favourably impressed
by her. She was not Freddie Drummond’s sort at all.
What if she were a royal-bodied woman, graceful and sinewy as a panther,
with amazing black eyes that could fill with fire or laughter-love,
as the mood might dictate? He detested women with a too exuberant
vitality and a lack of . . . well, of inhibition. Freddie Drummond
accepted the doctrine of evolution because it was quite universally
accepted by college men, and he flatly believed that man had climbed
up the ladder of life out of the weltering muck and mess of lower and
monstrous organic things. But he was a trifle ashamed of this
genealogy, and preferred not to think of it. Wherefore, probably,
he practised his iron inhibition and preached it to others, and preferred
women of his own type, who could shake free of this bestial and regrettable
ancestral line and by discipline and control emphasize the wideness
of the gulf that separated them from what their dim forbears had been.</p>
<p>Bill Totts had none of these considerations. He had liked Mary
Condon from the moment his eyes first rested on her in the convention
hall, and he had made it a point, then and there, to find out who she
was. The next time he met her, and quite by accident, was when
he was driving an express waggon for Pat Morrissey. It was in
a lodging-house in Mission Street, where he had been called to take
a trunk into storage. The landlady’s daughter had called
him and led him to the little bedroom, the occupant of which, a glove-maker,
had just been removed to hospital. But Bill did not know this.
He stooped, up-ended the trunk, which was a large one, got it on his
shoulder, and struggled to his feet with his back toward the open door.
At that moment he heard a woman’s voice.</p>
<p>“Belong to the union?” was the question asked.</p>
<p>“Aw, what’s it to you?” he retorted. “Run
along now, an’ git outa my way. I wanta turn round.”</p>
<p>The next he know, big as he was, he was whirled half around and sent
reeling backward, the trunk overbalancing him, till he fetched up with
a crash against the wall. He started to swear, but at the same
instant found himself looking into Mary Condon’s flashing, angry
eyes.</p>
<p>“Of course I b’long to the union,” he said.
“I was only kiddin’ you.”</p>
<p>“Where’s your card?” she demanded in businesslike
tones.</p>
<p>“In my pocket. But I can’t git it out now.
This trunk’s too damn heavy. Come on down to the waggon
an’ I’ll show it to you.”</p>
<p>“Put that trunk down,” was the command.</p>
<p>“What for? I got a card, I’m tellin’ you.”</p>
<p>“Put it down, that’s all. No scab’s going
to handle that trunk. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, you
big coward, scabbing on honest men. Why don’t you join the
union and be a man?”</p>
<p>Mary Condon’s colour had left her face, and it was apparent
that she was in a rage.</p>
<p>“To think of a big man like you turning traitor to his class.
I suppose you’re aching to join the militia for a chance to shoot
down union drivers the next strike. You may belong to the militia
already, for that matter. You’re the sort—”</p>
<p>“Hold on, now, that’s too much!” Bill dropped
the trunk to the floor with a bang, straightened up, and thrust his
hand into his inside coat pocket. “I told you I was only
kiddin’. There, look at that.”</p>
<p>It was a union card properly enough.</p>
<p>“All right, take it along,” Mary Condon said. “And
the next time don’t kid.”</p>
<p>Her face relaxed as she noticed the ease with which he got the big
trunk to his shoulder, and her eyes glowed as they glanced over the
graceful massiveness of the man. But Bill did not see that.
He was too busy with the trunk.</p>
<p>The next time he saw Mary Condon was during the Laundry Strike.
The Laundry Workers, but recently organized, were green at the business,
and had petitioned Mary Condon to engineer the strike. Freddie
Drummond had had an inkling of what was coming, and had sent Bill Totts
to join the union and investigate. Bill’s job was in the
wash-room, and the men had been called out first, that morning, in order
to stiffen the courage of the girls; and Bill chanced to be near the
door to the mangle-room when Mary Condon started to enter. The
superintendent, who was both large and stout, barred her way.
He wasn’t going to have his girls called out, and he’d teach
her a lesson to mind her own business. And as Mary tried to squeeze
past him he thrust her back with a fat hand on her shoulder. She
glanced around and saw Bill.</p>
<p>“Here you, Mr. Totts,” she called. “Lend
a hand. I want to get in.”</p>
<p>Bill experienced a startle of warm surprise. She had remembered
his name from his union card. The next moment the superintendent
had been plucked from the doorway raving about rights under the law,
and the girls were deserting their machines. During the rest of
that short and successful strike, Bill constituted himself Mary Condon’s
henchman and messenger, and when it was over returned to the University
to be Freddie Drummond and to wonder what Bill Totts could see in such
a woman.</p>
<p>Freddie Drummond was entirely safe, but Bill had fallen in love.
There was no getting away from the fact of it, and it was this fact
that had given Freddie Drummond his warning. Well, he had done
his work, and his adventures could cease. There was no need for
him to cross the Slot again. All but the last three chapters of
his latest, <i>Labour Tactics and Strategy</i>, was finished, and he
had sufficient material on hand adequately to supply those chapters.</p>
<p>Another conclusion he arrived at, was that in order to sheet-anchor
himself as Freddie Drummond, closer ties and relations in his own social
nook were necessary. It was time that he was married, anyway,
and he was fully aware that if Freddie Drummond didn’t get married,
Bill Totts assuredly would, and the complications were too awful to
contemplate. And so, enters Catherine Van Vorst. She was
a college woman herself, and her father, the one wealthy member of the
faculty, was the head of the Philosophy Department as well. It
would be a wise marriage from every standpoint, Freddie Drummond concluded
when the engagement was consummated and announced. In appearance
cold and reserved, aristocratic and wholesomely conservative, Catherine
Van Vorst, though warm in her way, possessed an inhibition equal to
Drummond’s.</p>
<p>All seemed well with him, but Freddie Drummond could not quite shake
off the call of the underworld, the lure of the free and open, of the
unhampered, irresponsible life South of the Slot. As the time
of his marriage approached, he felt that he had indeed sowed wild oats,
and he felt, moreover, what a good thing it would be if he could have
but one wild fling more, play the good fellow and the wastrel one last
time, ere he settled down to grey lecture-rooms and sober matrimony.
And, further to tempt him, the very last chapter of <i>Labour Tactics
and Strategy</i> remained unwritten for lack of a trifle more of essential
data which he had neglected to gather.</p>
<p>So Freddie Drummond went down for the last time as Bill Totts, got
his data, and, unfortunately, encountered Mary Condon. Once more
installed in his study, it was not a pleasant thing to look back upon.
It made his warning doubly imperative. Bill Totts had behaved
abominably. Not only had he met Mary Condon at the Central Labour
Council, but he had stopped at a chop-house with her, on the way home,
and treated her to oysters. And before they parted at her door,
his arms had been about her, and he had kissed her on the lips and kissed
her repeatedly. And her last words in his ear, words uttered softly
with a catchy sob in the throat that was nothing more nor less than
a love cry, were “Bill . . . dear, dear Bill.”</p>
<p>Freddie Drummond shuddered at the recollection. He saw the
pit yawning for him. He was not by nature a polygamist, and he
was appalled at the possibilities of the situation. It would have
to be put an end to, and it would end in one only of two ways: either
he must become wholly Bill Totts and be married to Mary Condon, or he
must remain wholly Freddie Drummond and be married to Catherine Van
Vorst. Otherwise, his conduct would be beneath contempt and horrible.</p>
<p>In the several months that followed, San Francisco was torn with
labour strife. The unions and the employers’ associations
had locked horns with a determination that looked as if they intended
to settle the matter, one way or the other, for all time. But
Freddie Drummond corrected proofs, lectured classes, and did not budge.
He devoted himself to Catherine Van Vorst, and day by day found more
to respect and admire in her—nay, even to love in her. The
Street Car Strike tempted him, but not so severely as he would have
expected; and the great Meat Strike came on and left him cold.
The ghost of Bill Totts had been successfully laid, and Freddie Drummond
with rejuvenescent zeal tackled a brochure, long-planned, on the topic
of “diminishing returns.”</p>
<p>The wedding was two weeks off, when, one afternoon, in San Francisco,
Catherine Van Vorst picked him up and whisked him away to see a Boys’
Club, recently instituted by the settlement workers in whom she was
interested. It was her brother’s machine, but they were
alone with the exception of the chauffeur. At the junction with
Kearny Street, Market and Geary Streets intersect like the sides of
a sharp-angled letter “V.” They, in the auto, were
coming down Market with the intention of negotiating the sharp apex
and going up Geary. But they did not know what was coming down
Geary, timed by fate to meet them at the apex. While aware from
the papers that the Meat Strike was on and that it was an exceedingly
bitter one, all thought of it at that moment was farthest from Freddie
Drummond’s mind. Was he not seated beside Catherine?
And besides, he was carefully expositing to her his views on settlement
work—views that Bill Totts’ adventures had played a part
in formulating.</p>
<p>Coming down Geary Street were six meat waggons. Beside each
scab driver sat a policeman. Front and rear, and along each side
of this procession, marched a protecting escort of one hundred police.
Behind the police rearguard, at a respectful distance, was an orderly
but vociferous mob, several blocks in length, that congested the street
from sidewalk to sidewalk. The Beef Trust was making an effort
to supply the hotels, and, incidentally, to begin the breaking of the
strike. The St. Francis had already been supplied, at a cost of
many broken windows and broken heads, and the expedition was marching
to the relief of the Palace Hotel.</p>
<p>All unwitting, Drummond sat beside Catherine, talking settlement
work, as the auto, honking methodically and dodging traffic, swung in
a wide curve to get around the apex. A big coal waggon, loaded
with lump coal and drawn by four huge horses, just debouching from Kearny
Street as though to turn down Market, blocked their way. The driver
of the waggon seemed undecided, and the chauffeur, running slow but
disregarding some shouted warning from the crossing policemen, swerved
the auto to the left, violating the traffic rules, in order to pass
in front of the waggon.</p>
<p>At that moment Freddie Drummond discontinued his conversation.
Nor did he resume it again, for the situation was developing with the
rapidity of a transformation scene. He heard the roar of the mob
at the rear, and caught a glimpse of the helmeted police and the lurching
meat waggons. At the same moment, laying on his whip, and standing
up to his task, the coal driver rushed horses and waggon squarely in
front of the advancing procession, pulled the horses up sharply, and
put on the big brake. Then he made his lines fast to the brake-handle
and sat down with the air of one who had stopped to stay. The
auto had been brought to a stop, too, by his big panting leaders which
had jammed against it.</p>
<p>Before the chauffeur could back clear, an old Irishman, driving a
rickety express waggon and lashing his one horse to a gallop, had locked
wheels with the auto. Drummond recognized both horse and waggon,
for he had driven them often himself. The Irishman was Pat Morrissey.
On the other side a brewery waggon was locking with the coal waggon,
and an east-bound Kearny Street car, wildly clanging its gong, the motorman
shouting defiance at the crossing policeman, was dashing forward to
complete the blockade. And waggon after waggon was locking and
blocking and adding to the confusion. The meat waggons halted.
The police were trapped. The roar at the rear increased as the
mob came on to the attack, while the vanguard of the police charged
the obstructing waggons.</p>
<p>“We’re in for it,” Drummond remarked coolly to
Catherine.</p>
<p>“Yes,” she nodded, with equal coolness. “What
savages they are.”</p>
<p>His admiration for her doubled on itself. She was indeed his
sort. He would have been satisfied with her even if she had screamed,
and clung to him, but this—this was magnificent. She sat
in that storm centre as calmly as if it had been no more than a block
of carriages at the opera.</p>
<p>The police were struggling to clear a passage. The driver of
the coal waggon, a big man in shirt sleeves, lighted a pipe and sat
smoking. He glanced down complacently at a captain of police who
was raving and cursing at him, and his only acknowledgment was a shrug
of the shoulders. From the rear arose the rat-rat-tat of clubs
on heads and a pandemonium of cursing, yelling, and shouting.
A violent accession of noise proclaimed that the mob had broken through
and was dragging a scab from a waggon. The police captain reinforced
from his vanguard, and the mob at the rear was repelled. Meanwhile,
window after window in the high office building on the right had been
opened, and the class-conscious clerks were raining a shower of office
furniture down on the heads of police and scabs. Waste-baskets,
ink-bottles, paper-weights, type-writers—anything and everything
that came to hand was filling the air.</p>
<p>A policeman, under orders from his captain, clambered to the lofty
seat of the coal waggon to arrest the driver. And the driver,
rising leisurely and peacefully to meet him, suddenly crumpled him in
his arms and threw him down on top of the captain. The driver
was a young giant, and when he climbed on his load and poised a lump
of coal in both hands, a policeman, who was just scaling the waggon
from the side, let go and dropped back to earth. The captain ordered
half-a-dozen of his men to take the waggon. The teamster, scrambling
over the load from side to side, beat them down with huge lumps of coal.</p>
<p>The crowd on the sidewalks and the teamsters on the locked waggons
roared encouragement and their own delight. The motorman, smashing
helmets with his controller bar, was beaten into insensibility and dragged
from his platform. The captain of police, beside himself at the
repulse of his men, led the next assault on the coal waggon. A
score of police were swarming up the tall-sided fortress. But
the teamster multiplied himself. At times there were six or eight
policemen rolling on the pavement and under the waggon. Engaged
in repulsing an attack on the rear end of his fortress, the teamster
turned about to see the captain just in the act of stepping on to the
seat from the front end. He was still in the air and in most unstable
equilibrium, when the teamster hurled a thirty-pound lump of coal.
It caught the captain fairly on the chest, and he went over backward,
striking on a wheeler’s back, tumbling on to the ground, and jamming
against the rear wheel of the auto.</p>
<p>Catherine thought he was dead, but he picked himself up and charged
back. She reached out her gloved hand and patted the flank of
the snorting, quivering horse. But Drummond did not notice the
action. He had eyes for nothing save the battle of the coal waggon,
while somewhere in his complicated psychology, one Bill Totts was heaving
and straining in an effort to come to life. Drummond believed
in law and order and the maintenance of the established, but this riotous
savage within him would have none of it. Then, if ever, did Freddie
Drummond call upon his iron inhibition to save him. But it is
written that the house divided against itself must fall. And Freddie
Drummond found that he had divided all the will and force of him with
Bill Totts, and between them the entity that constituted the pair of
them was being wrenched in twain.</p>
<p>Freddie Drummond sat in the auto, quite composed, alongside Catherine
Van Vorst; but looking out of Freddie Drummond’s eyes was Bill
Totts, and somewhere behind those eyes, battling for the control of
their mutual body, were Freddie Drummond the sane and conservative sociologist,
and Bill Totts, the class-conscious and bellicose union working man.
It was Bill Totts, looking out of those eyes, who saw the inevitable
end of the battle on the coal waggon. He saw a policeman gain
the top of the load, a second, and a third. They lurched clumsily
on the loose footing, but their long riot-clubs were out and swinging.
One blow caught the teamster on the head. A second he dodged,
receiving it on the shoulder. For him the game was plainly up.
He dashed in suddenly, clutched two policemen in his arms, and hurled
himself a prisoner to the pavement, his hold never relaxing on his two
captors.</p>
<p>Catherine Van Vorst was sick and faint at sight of the blood and
brutal fighting. But her qualms were vanquished by the sensational
and most unexpected happening that followed. The man beside her
emitted an unearthly and uncultured yell and rose to his feet.
She saw him spring over the front seat, leap to the broad rump of the
wheeler, and from there gain the waggon. His onslaught was like
a whirlwind. Before the bewildered officer on the load could guess
the errand of this conventionally clad but excited-seeming gentleman,
he was the recipient of a punch that arched him back through the air
to the pavement. A kick in the face led an ascending policeman
to follow his example. A rush of three more gained the top and
locked with Bill Totts in a gigantic clinch, during which his scalp
was opened up by a club, and coat, vest, and half his starched shirt
were torn from him. But the three policemen were flung far and
wide, and Bill Totts, raining down lumps of coal, held the fort.</p>
<p>The captain led gallantly to the attack, but was bowled over by a
chunk of coal that burst on his head in black baptism. The need
of the police was to break the blockade in front before the mob could
break in at the rear, and Bill Totts’ need was to hold the waggon
till the mob did break through. So the battle of the coal went
on.</p>
<p>The crowd had recognized its champion. “Big” Bill,
as usual, had come to the front, and Catherine Van Vorst was bewildered
by the cries of “Bill! O you Bill!” that arose on
every hand. Pat Morrissey, on his waggon seat, was jumping and
screaming in an ecstasy, “Eat ’em, Bill! Eat ’em!
Eat ’em alive!” From the sidewalk she heard a woman’s
voice cry out, “Look out, Bill—front end!” Bill
took the warning and with well-directed coal cleared the front end of
the waggon of assailants. Catherine Van Vorst turned her head
and saw on the curb of the sidewalk a woman with vivid colouring and
flashing black eyes who was staring with all her soul at the man who
had been Freddie Drummond a few minutes before.</p>
<p>The windows of the office building became vociferous with applause.
A fresh shower of office chairs and filing cabinets descended.
The mob had broken through on one side the line of waggons, and was
advancing, each segregated policeman the centre of a fighting group.
The scabs were torn from their seats, the traces of the horses cut,
and the frightened animals put in flight. Many policemen crawled
under the coal waggon for safety, while the loose horses, with here
and there a policeman on their backs or struggling at their heads to
hold them, surged across the sidewalk opposite the jam and broke into
Market Street.</p>
<p>Catherine Van Vorst heard the woman’s voice calling in warning.
She was back on the curb again, and crying out—</p>
<p>“Beat it, Bill! Now’s your time! Beat it!”</p>
<p>The police for the moment had been swept away. Bill Totts leaped
to the pavement and made his way to the woman on the sidewalk.
Catherine Van Vorst saw her throw her arms around him and kiss him on
the lips; and Catherine Van Vorst watched him curiously as he went on
down the sidewalk, one arm around the woman, both talking and laughing,
and he with a volubility and abandon she could never have dreamed possible.</p>
<p>The police were back again and clearing the jam while waiting for
reinforcements and new drivers and horses. The mob had done its
work and was scattering, and Catherine Van Vorst, still watching, could
see the man she had known as Freddie Drummond. He towered a head
above the crowd. His arm was still about the woman. And
she in the motor-car, watching, saw the pair cross Market Street, cross
the Slot, and disappear down Third Street into the labour ghetto.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>In the years that followed no more lectures were given in the University
of California by one Freddie Drummond, and no more books on economics
and the labour question appeared over the name of Frederick A. Drummond.
On the other hand there arose a new labour leader, William Totts by
name. He it was who married Mary Condon, President of the International
Glove Workers’ Union No. 974; and he it was who called the notorious
Cooks and Waiters’ Strike, which, before its successful termination,
brought out with it scores of other unions, among which, of the more
remotely allied, were the Chicken Pickers and the Undertakers.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>THE UNPARALLELED INVASION</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>It was in the year 1976 that the trouble between the world and China
reached its culmination. It was because of this that the celebration
of the Second Centennial of American Liberty was deferred. Many
other plans of the nations of the earth were twisted and tangled and
postponed for the same reason. The world awoke rather abruptly
to its danger; but for over seventy years, unperceived, affairs had
been shaping toward this very end.</p>
<p>The year 1904 logically marks the beginning of the development that,
seventy years later, was to bring consternation to the whole world.
The Japanese-Russian War took place in 1904, and the historians of the
time gravely noted it down that that event marked the entrance of Japan
into the comity of nations. What it really did mark was the awakening
of China. This awakening, long expected, had finally been given
up. The Western nations had tried to arouse China, and they had
failed. Out of their native optimism and race-egotism they had
therefore concluded that the task was impossible, that China would never
awaken.</p>
<p>What they had failed to take into account was this: <i>that between
them and China was no common psychological speech</i>. Their thought-processes
were radically dissimilar. There was no intimate vocabulary.
The Western mind penetrated the Chinese mind but a short distance when
it found itself in a fathomless maze. The Chinese mind penetrated
the Western mind an equally short distance when it fetched up against
a blank, incomprehensible wall. It was all a matter of language.
There was no way to communicate Western ideas to the Chinese mind.
China remained asleep. The material achievement and progress of
the West was a closed book to her; nor could the West open the book.
Back and deep down on the tie-ribs of consciousness, in the mind, say,
of the English-speaking race, was a capacity to thrill to short, Saxon
words; back and deep down on the tie-ribs of consciousness of the Chinese
mind was a capacity to thrill to its own hieroglyphics; but the Chinese
mind could not thrill to short, Saxon words; nor could the English-speaking
mind thrill to hieroglyphics. The fabrics of their minds were
woven from totally different stuffs. They were mental aliens.
And so it was that Western material achievement and progress made no
dent on the rounded sleep of China.</p>
<p>Came Japan and her victory over Russia in 1904. Now the Japanese
race was the freak and paradox among Eastern peoples. In some
strange way Japan was receptive to all the West had to offer.
Japan swiftly assimilated the Western ideas, and digested them, and
so capably applied them that she suddenly burst forth, full-panoplied,
a world-power. There is no explaining this peculiar openness of
Japan to the alien culture of the West. As well might be explained
any biological sport in the animal kingdom.</p>
<p>Having decisively thrashed the great Russian Empire, Japan promptly
set about dreaming a colossal dream of empire for herself. Korea
she had made into a granary and a colony; treaty privileges and vulpine
diplomacy gave her the monopoly of Manchuria. But Japan was not
satisfied. She turned her eyes upon China. There lay a vast
territory, and in that territory were the hugest deposits in the world
of iron and coal—the backbone of industrial civilization.
Given natural resources, the other great factor in industry is labour.
In that territory was a population of 400,000,000 souls—one quarter
of the then total population of the earth. Furthermore, the Chinese
were excellent workers, while their fatalistic philosophy (or religion)
and their stolid nervous organization constituted them splendid soldiers—if
they were properly managed. Needless to say, Japan was prepared
to furnish that management.</p>
<p>But best of all, from the standpoint of Japan, the Chinese was a
kindred race. The baffling enigma of the Chinese character to
the West was no baffling enigma to the Japanese. The Japanese
understood as we could never school ourselves or hope to understand.
Their mental processes were the same. The Japanese thought with
the same thought-symbols as did the Chinese, and they thought in the
same peculiar grooves. Into the Chinese mind the Japanese went
on where we were balked by the obstacle of incomprehension. They
took the turning which we could not perceive, twisted around the obstacle,
and were out of sight in the ramifications of the Chinese mind where
we could not follow. They were brothers. Long ago one had
borrowed the other’s written language, and, untold generations
before that, they had diverged from the common Mongol stock. There
had been changes, differentiations brought about by diverse conditions
and infusions of other blood; but down at the bottom of their beings,
twisted into the fibres of them, was a heritage in common, a sameness
in kind that time had not obliterated.</p>
<p>And so Japan took upon herself the management of China. In
the years immediately following the war with Russia, her agents swarmed
over the Chinese Empire. A thousand miles beyond the last mission
station toiled her engineers and spies, clad as coolies, under the guise
of itinerant merchants or proselytizing Buddhist priests, noting down
the horse-power of every waterfall, the likely sites for factories,
the heights of mountains and passes, the strategic advantages and weaknesses,
the wealth of the farming valleys, the number of bullocks in a district
or the number of labourers that could be collected by forced levies.
Never was there such a census, and it could have been taken by no other
people than the dogged, patient, patriotic Japanese.</p>
<p>But in a short time secrecy was thrown to the winds. Japan’s
officers reorganized the Chinese army; her drill sergeants made the
mediaeval warriors over into twentieth century soldiers, accustomed
to all the modern machinery of war and with a higher average of marksmanship
than the soldiers of any Western nation. The engineers of Japan
deepened and widened the intricate system of canals, built factories
and foundries, netted the empire with telegraphs and telephones, and
inaugurated the era of railroad-building. It was these same protagonists
of machine-civilization that discovered the great oil deposits of Chunsan,
the iron mountains of Whang-Sing, the copper ranges of Chinchi, and
they sank the gas wells of Wow-Wee, that most marvellous reservoir of
natural gas in all the world.</p>
<p>In China’s councils of empire were the Japanese emissaries.
In the ears of the statesmen whispered the Japanese statesmen.
The political reconstruction of the Empire was due to them. They
evicted the scholar class, which was violently reactionary, and put
into office progressive officials. And in every town and city
of the Empire newspapers were started. Of course, Japanese editors
ran the policy of these papers, which policy they got direct from Tokio.
It was these papers that educated and made progressive the great mass
of the population.</p>
<p>China was at last awake. Where the West had failed, Japan succeeded.
She had transmuted Western culture and achievement into terms that were
intelligible to the Chinese understanding. Japan herself, when
she so suddenly awakened, had astounded the world. But at the
time she was only forty millions strong. China’s awakening,
with her four hundred millions and the scientific advance of the world,
was frightfully astounding. She was the colossus of the nations,
and swiftly her voice was heard in no uncertain tones in the affairs
and councils of the nations. Japan egged her on, and the proud
Western peoples listened with respectful ears.</p>
<p>China’s swift and remarkable rise was due, perhaps more than
to anything else, to the superlative quality of her labour. The
Chinese was the perfect type of industry. He had always been that.
For sheer ability to work no worker in the world could compare with
him. Work was the breath of his nostrils. It was to him
what wandering and fighting in far lands and spiritual adventure had
been to other peoples. Liberty, to him, epitomized itself in access
to the means of toil. To till the soil and labour interminably
was all he asked of life and the powers that be. And the awakening
of China had given its vast population not merely free and unlimited
access to the means of toil, but access to the highest and most scientific
machine-means of toil.</p>
<p>China rejuvenescent! It was but a step to China rampant.
She discovered a new pride in herself and a will of her own. She
began to chafe under the guidance of Japan, but she did not chafe long.
On Japan’s advice, in the beginning, she had expelled from the
Empire all Western missionaries, engineers, drill sergeants, merchants,
and teachers. She now began to expel the similar representatives
of Japan. The latter’s advisory statesmen were showered
with honours and decorations, and sent home. The West had awakened
Japan, and, as Japan had then requited the West, Japan was not requited
by China. Japan was thanked for her kindly aid and flung out bag
and baggage by her gigantic protégé. The Western
nations chuckled. Japan’s rainbow dream had gone glimmering.
She grew angry. China laughed at her. The blood and the
swords of the Samurai would out, and Japan rashly went to war.
This occurred in 1922, and in seven bloody months Manchuria, Korea,
and Formosa were taken away from her and she was hurled back, bankrupt,
to stifle in her tiny, crowded islands. Exit Japan from the world
drama. Thereafter she devoted herself to art, and her task became
to please the world greatly with her creations of wonder and beauty.</p>
<p>Contrary to expectation, China did not prove warlike. She had
no Napoleonic dream, and was content to devote herself to the arts of
peace. After a time of disquiet, the idea was accepted that China
was to be feared, not in war, but in commerce. It will be seen
that the real danger was not apprehended. China went on consummating
her machine-civilization. Instead of a large standing army, she
developed an immensely larger and splendidly efficient militia.
Her navy was so small that it was the laughing stock of the world; nor
did she attempt to strengthen her navy. The treaty ports of the
world were never entered by her visiting battleships.</p>
<p>The real danger lay in the fecundity of her loins, and it was in
1970 that the first cry of alarm was raised. For some time all
territories adjacent to China had been grumbling at Chinese immigration;
but now it suddenly came home to the world that China’s population
was 500,000,000. She had increased by a hundred millions since
her awakening. Burchaldter called attention to the fact that there
were more Chinese in existence than white-skinned people. He performed
a simple sum in arithmetic. He added together the populations
of the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa,
England, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, European Russia, and all Scandinavia.
The result was 495,000,000. And the population of China overtopped
this tremendous total by 5,000,000. Burchaldter’s figures
went round the world, and the world shivered.</p>
<p>For many centuries China’s population had been constant.
Her territory had been saturated with population; that is to say, her
territory, with the primitive method of production, had supported the
maximum limit of population. But when she awoke and inaugurated
the machine-civilization, her productive power had been enormously increased.
Thus, on the same territory, she was able to support a far larger population.
At once the birth rate began to rise and the death rate to fall.
Before, when population pressed against the means of subsistence, the
excess population had been swept away by famine. But now, thanks
to the machine-civilization, China’s means of subsistence had
been enormously extended, and there were no famines; her population
followed on the heels of the increase in the means of subsistence.</p>
<p>During this time of transition and development of power, China had
entertained no dreams of conquest. The Chinese was not an imperial
race. It was industrious, thrifty, and peace-loving. War
was looked upon as an unpleasant but necessary task that at times must
be performed. And so, while the Western races had squabbled and
fought, and world-adventured against one another, China had calmly gone
on working at her machines and growing. Now she was spilling over
the boundaries of her Empire—that was all, just spilling over
into the adjacent territories with all the certainty and terrifying
slow momentum of a glacier.</p>
<p>Following upon the alarm raised by Burchaldter’s figures, in
1970 France made a long-threatened stand. French Indo-China had
been overrun, filled up, by Chinese immigrants. France called
a halt. The Chinese wave flowed on. France assembled a force
of a hundred thousand on the boundary between her unfortunate colony
and China, and China sent down an army of militia-soldiers a million
strong. Behind came the wives and sons and daughters and relatives,
with their personal household luggage, in a second army. The French
force was brushed aside like a fly. The Chinese militia-soldiers,
along with their families, over five millions all told, coolly took
possession of French Indo-China and settled down to stay for a few thousand
years.</p>
<p>Outraged France was in arms. She hurled fleet after fleet against
the coast of China, and nearly bankrupted herself by the effort.
China had no navy. She withdrew like a turtle into her shell.
For a year the French fleets blockaded the coast and bombarded exposed
towns and villages. China did not mind. She did not depend
upon the rest of the world for anything. She calmly kept out of
range of the French guns and went on working. France wept and
wailed, wrung her impotent hands and appealed to the dumfounded nations.
Then she landed a punitive expedition to march to Peking. It was
two hundred and fifty thousand strong, and it was the flower of France.
It landed without opposition and marched into the interior. And
that was the last ever seen of it. The line of communication was
snapped on the second day. Not a survivor came back to tell what
had happened. It had been swallowed up in China’s cavernous
maw, that was all.</p>
<p>In the five years that followed, China’s expansion, in all
land directions, went on apace. Siam was made part of the Empire,
and, in spite of all that England could do, Burma and the Malay Peninsula
were overrun; while all along the long south boundary of Siberia, Russia
was pressed severely by China’s advancing hordes. The process
was simple. First came the Chinese immigration (or, rather, it
was already there, having come there slowly and insidiously during the
previous years). Next came the clash of arms and the brushing
away of all opposition by a monster army of militia-soldiers, followed
by their families and household baggage. And finally came their
settling down as colonists in the conquered territory. Never was
there so strange and effective a method of world conquest.</p>
<p>Napal and Bhutan were overrun, and the whole northern boundary of
India pressed against by this fearful tide of life. To the west,
Bokhara, and, even to the south and west, Afghanistan, were swallowed
up. Persia, Turkestan, and all Central Asia felt the pressure
of the flood. It was at this time that Burchaldter revised his
figures. He had been mistaken. China’s population
must be seven hundred millions, eight hundred millions, nobody knew
how many millions, but at any rate it would soon be a billion.
There were two Chinese for every white-skinned human in the world, Burchaldter
announced, and the world trembled. China’s increase must
have begun immediately, in 1904. It was remembered that since
that date there had not been a single famine. At 5,000,000 a year
increase, her total increase in the intervening seventy years must be
350,000,000. But who was to know? It might be more.
Who was to know anything of this strange new menace of the twentieth
century—China, old China, rejuvenescent, fruitful, and militant!</p>
<p>The Convention of 1975 was called at Philadelphia. All the
Western nations, and some few of the Eastern, were represented.
Nothing was accomplished. There was talk of all countries putting
bounties on children to increase the birth rate, but it was laughed
to scorn by the arithmeticians, who pointed out that China was too far
in the lead in that direction. No feasible way of coping with
China was suggested. China was appealed to and threatened by the
United Powers, and that was all the Convention of Philadelphia came
to; and the Convention and the Powers were laughed at by China.
Li Tang Fwung, the power behind the Dragon Throne, deigned to reply.</p>
<p>“What does China care for the comity of nations?” said
Li Tang Fwung. “We are the most ancient, honourable, and
royal of races. We have our own destiny to accomplish. It
is unpleasant that our destiny does not tally with the destiny of the
rest of the world, but what would you? You have talked windily
about the royal races and the heritage of the earth, and we can only
reply that that remains to be seen. You cannot invade us.
Never mind about your navies. Don’t shout. We know
our navy is small. You see we use it for police purposes.
We do not care for the sea. Our strength is in our population,
which will soon be a billion. Thanks to you, we are equipped with
all modern war-machinery. Send your navies. We will not
notice them. Send your punitive expeditions, but first remember
France. To land half a million soldiers on our shores would strain
the resources of any of you. And our thousand millions would swallow
them down in a mouthful. Send a million; send five millions, and
we will swallow them down just as readily. Pouf! A mere
nothing, a meagre morsel. Destroy, as you have threatened, you
United States, the ten million coolies we have forced upon your shores—why,
the amount scarcely equals half of our excess birth rate for a year.”</p>
<p>So spoke Li Tang Fwung. The world was nonplussed, helpless,
terrified. Truly had he spoken. There was no combating China’s
amazing birth rate. If her population was a billion, and was increasing
twenty millions a year, in twenty-five years it would be a billion and
a half—equal to the total population of the world in 1904.
And nothing could be done. There was no way to dam up the over-spilling
monstrous flood of life. War was futile. China laughed at
a blockade of her coasts. She welcomed invasion. In her
capacious maw was room for all the hosts of earth that could be hurled
at her. And in the meantime her flood of yellow life poured out
and on over Asia. China laughed and read in their magazines the
learned lucubrations of the distracted Western scholars.</p>
<p>But there was one scholar China failed to reckon on—Jacobus
Laningdale. Not that he was a scholar, except in the widest sense.
Primarily, Jacobus Laningdale was a scientist, and, up to that time,
a very obscure scientist, a professor employed in the laboratories of
the Health Office of New York City. Jacobus Laningdale’s
head was very like any other head, but in that head was evolved an idea.
Also, in that head was the wisdom to keep that idea secret. He
did not write an article for the magazines. Instead, he asked
for a vacation. On September 19, 1975, he arrived in Washington.
It was evening, but he proceeded straight to the White House, for he
had already arranged an audience with the President. He was closeted
with President Moyer for three hours. What passed between them
was not learned by the rest of the world until long after; in fact,
at that time the world was not interested in Jacobus Laningdale.
Next day the President called in his Cabinet. Jacobus Laningdale
was present. The proceedings were kept secret. But that
very afternoon Rufus Cowdery, Secretary of State, left Washington, and
early the following morning sailed for England. The secret that
he carried began to spread, but it spread only among the heads of Governments.
Possibly half-a-dozen men in a nation were entrusted with the idea that
had formed in Jacobus Laningdale’s head. Following the spread
of the secret, sprang up great activity in all the dockyards, arsenals,
and navy-yards. The people of France and Austria became suspicious,
but so sincere were their Governments’ calls for confidence that
they acquiesced in the unknown project that was afoot.</p>
<p>This was the time of the Great Truce. All countries pledged
themselves solemnly not to go to war with any other country. The
first definite action was the gradual mobilization of the armies of
Russia, Germany, Austria, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. Then began
the eastward movement. All railroads into Asia were glutted with
troop trains. China was the objective, that was all that was known.
A little later began the great sea movement. Expeditions of warships
were launched from all countries. Fleet followed fleet, and all
proceeded to the coast of China. The nations cleaned out their
navy-yards. They sent their revenue cutters and dispatch boots
and lighthouse tenders, and they sent their last antiquated cruisers
and battleships. Not content with this, they impressed the merchant
marine. The statistics show that 58,640 merchant steamers, equipped
with searchlights and rapid-fire guns, were despatched by the various
nations to China.</p>
<p>And China smiled and waited. On her land side, along her boundaries,
were millions of the warriors of Europe. She mobilized five times
as many millions of her militia and awaited the invasion. On her
sea coasts she did the same. But China was puzzled. After
all this enormous preparation, there was no invasion. She could
not understand. Along the great Siberian frontier all was quiet.
Along her coasts the towns and villages were not even shelled.
Never, in the history of the world, had there been so mighty a gathering
of war fleets. The fleets of all the world were there, and day
and night millions of tons of battleships ploughed the brine of her
coasts, and nothing happened. Nothing was attempted. Did
they think to make her emerge from her shell? China smiled.
Did they think to tire her out, or starve her out? China smiled
again.</p>
<p>But on May 1, 1976, had the reader been in the imperial city of Peking,
with its then population of eleven millions, he would have witnessed
a curious sight. He would have seen the streets filled with the
chattering yellow populace, every queued head tilted back, every slant
eye turned skyward. And high up in the blue he would have beheld
a tiny dot of black, which, because of its orderly evolutions, he would
have identified as an airship. From this airship, as it curved
its flight back and forth over the city, fell missiles—strange,
harmless missiles, tubes of fragile glass that shattered into thousands
of fragments on the streets and house-tops. But there was nothing
deadly about these tubes of glass. Nothing happened. There
were no explosions. It is true, three Chinese were killed by the
tubes dropping on their heads from so enormous a height; but what were
three Chinese against an excess birth rate of twenty millions?
One tube struck perpendicularly in a fish-pond in a garden and was not
broken. It was dragged ashore by the master of the house.
He did not dare to open it, but, accompanied by his friends, and surrounded
by an ever-increasing crowd, he carried the mysterious tube to the magistrate
of the district. The latter was a brave man. With all eyes
upon him, he shattered the tube with a blow from his brass-bowled pipe.
Nothing happened. Of those who were very near, one or two thought
they saw some mosquitoes fly out. That was all. The crowd
set up a great laugh and dispersed.</p>
<p>As Peking was bombarded by glass tubes, so was all China. The
tiny airships, dispatched from the warships, contained but two men each,
and over all cities, towns, and villages they wheeled and curved, one
man directing the ship, the other man throwing over the glass tubes.</p>
<p>Had the reader again been in Peking, six weeks later, he would have
looked in vain for the eleven million inhabitants. Some few of
them he would have found, a few hundred thousand, perhaps, their carcasses
festering in the houses and in the deserted streets, and piled high
on the abandoned death-waggons. But for the rest he would have
had to seek along the highways and byways of the Empire. And not
all would he have found fleeing from plague-stricken Peking, for behind
them, by hundreds of thousands of unburied corpses by the wayside, he
could have marked their flight. And as it was with Peking, so
it was with all the cities, towns, and villages of the Empire.
The plague smote them all. Nor was it one plague, nor two plagues;
it was a score of plagues. Every virulent form of infectious death
stalked through the land. Too late the Chinese government apprehended
the meaning of the colossal preparations, the marshalling of the world-hosts,
the flights of the tin airships, and the rain of the tubes of glass.
The proclamations of the government were vain. They could not
stop the eleven million plague-stricken wretches, fleeing from the one
city of Peking to spread disease through all the land. The physicians
and health officers died at their posts; and death, the all-conqueror,
rode over the decrees of the Emperor and Li Tang Fwung. It rode
over them as well, for Li Tang Fwung died in the second week, and the
Emperor, hidden away in the Summer Palace, died in the fourth week.</p>
<p>Had there been one plague, China might have coped with it.
But from a score of plagues no creature was immune. The man who
escaped smallpox went down before scarlet fever. The man who was
immune to yellow fever was carried away by cholera; and if he were immune
to that, too, the Black Death, which was the bubonic plague, swept him
away. For it was these bacteria, and germs, and microbes, and
bacilli, cultured in the laboratories of the West, that had come down
upon China in the rain of glass.</p>
<p>All organization vanished. The government crumbled away.
Decrees and proclamations were useless when the men who made them and
signed them one moment were dead the next. Nor could the maddened
millions, spurred on to flight by death, pause to heed anything.
They fled from the cities to infect the country, and wherever they fled
they carried the plagues with them. The hot summer was on—Jacobus
Laningdale had selected the time shrewdly—and the plague festered
everywhere. Much is conjectured of what occurred, and much has
been learned from the stories of the few survivors. The wretched
creatures stormed across the Empire in many-millioned flight.
The vast armies China had collected on her frontiers melted away.
The farms were ravaged for food, and no more crops were planted, while
the crops already in were left unattended and never came to harvest.
The most remarkable thing, perhaps, was the flights. Many millions
engaged in them, charging to the bounds of the Empire to be met and
turned back by the gigantic armies of the West. The slaughter
of the mad hosts on the boundaries was stupendous. Time and again
the guarding line was drawn back twenty or thirty miles to escape the
contagion of the multitudinous dead.</p>
<p>Once the plague broke through and seized upon the German and Austrian
soldiers who were guarding the borders of Turkestan. Preparations
had been made for such a happening, and though sixty thousand soldiers
of Europe were carried off, the international corps of physicians isolated
the contagion and dammed it back. It was during this struggle
that it was suggested that a new plague-germ had originated, that in
some way or other a sort of hybridization between plague-germs had taken
place, producing a new and frightfully virulent germ. First suspected
by Vomberg, who became infected with it and died, it was later isolated
and studied by Stevens, Hazenfelt, Norman, and Landers.</p>
<p>Such was the unparalleled invasion of China. For that billion
of people there was no hope. Pent in their vast and festering
charnel-house, all organization and cohesion lost, they could do naught
but die. They could not escape. As they were flung back
from their land frontiers, so were they flung back from the sea.
Seventy-five thousand vessels patrolled the coasts. By day their
smoking funnels dimmed the sea-rim, and by night their flashing searchlights
ploughed the dark and harrowed it for the tiniest escaping junk.
The attempts of the immense fleets of junks were pitiful. Not
one ever got by the guarding sea-hounds. Modern war-machinery
held back the disorganized mass of China, while the plagues did the
work.</p>
<p>But old War was made a thing of laughter. Naught remained to
him but patrol duty. China had laughed at war, and war she was
getting, but it was ultra-modern war, twentieth century war, the war
of the scientist and the laboratory, the war of Jacobus Laningdale.
Hundred-ton guns were toys compared with the micro-organic projectiles
hurled from the laboratories, the messengers of death, the destroying
angels that stalked through the empire of a billion souls.</p>
<p>During all the summer and fall of 1976 China was an inferno.
There was no eluding the microscopic projectiles that sought out the
remotest hiding-places. The hundreds of millions of dead remained
unburied and the germs multiplied themselves, and, toward the last,
millions died daily of starvation. Besides, starvation weakened
the victims and destroyed their natural defences against the plagues.
Cannibalism, murder, and madness reigned. And so perished China.</p>
<p>Not until the following February, in the coldest weather, were the
first expeditions made. These expeditions were small, composed
of scientists and bodies of troops; but they entered China from every
side. In spite of the most elaborate precautions against infection,
numbers of soldiers and a few of the physicians were stricken.
But the exploration went bravely on. They found China devastated,
a howling wilderness through which wandered bands of wild dogs and desperate
bandits who had survived. All survivors were put to death wherever
found. And then began the great task, the sanitation of China.
Five years and hundreds of millions of treasure were consumed, and then
the world moved in—not in zones, as was the idea of Baron Albrecht,
but heterogeneously, according to the democratic American programme.
It was a vast and happy intermingling of nationalities that settled
down in China in 1982 and the years that followed—a tremendous
and successful experiment in cross-fertilization. We know to-day
the splendid mechanical, intellectual, and art output that followed.</p>
<p>It was in 1987, the Great Truce having been dissolved, that the ancient
quarrel between France and Germany over Alsace-Lorraine recrudesced.
The war-cloud grew dark and threatening in April, and on April 17 the
Convention of Copenhagen was called. The representatives of the
nations of the world, being present, all nations solemnly pledged themselves
never to use against one another the laboratory methods of warfare they
had employed in the invasion of China.</p>
<p>—Excerpt from Walt Mervin’s “<i>Certain Essays
in History</i>.”</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>THE ENEMY OF ALL THE WORLD</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>It was Silas Bannerman who finally ran down that scientific wizard
and arch-enemy of mankind, Emil Gluck. Gluck’s confession,
before he went to the electric chair, threw much light upon the series
of mysterious events, many apparently unrelated, that so perturbed the
world between the years 1933 and 1941. It was not until that remarkable
document was made public that the world dreamed of there being any connection
between the assassination of the King and Queen of Portugal and the
murders of the New York City police officers. While the deeds
of Emil Gluck were all that was abominable, we cannot but feel, to a
certain extent, pity for the unfortunate, malformed, and maltreated
genius. This side of his story has never been told before, and
from his confession and from the great mass of evidence and the documents
and records of the time we are able to construct a fairly accurate portrait
of him, and to discern the factors and pressures that moulded him into
the human monster he became and that drove him onward and downward along
the fearful path he trod.</p>
<p>Emil Gluck was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1895. His father,
Josephus Gluck, was a special policeman and night watchman, who, in
the year 1900, died suddenly of pneumonia. The mother, a pretty,
fragile creature, who, before her marriage, had been a milliner, grieved
herself to death over the loss of her husband. This sensitiveness
of the mother was the heritage that in the boy became morbid and horrible.</p>
<p>In 1901, the boy, Emil, then six years of age, went to live with
his aunt, Mrs. Ann Bartell. She was his mother’s sister,
but in her breast was no kindly feeling for the sensitive, shrinking
boy. Ann Bartell was a vain, shallow, and heartless woman.
Also, she was cursed with poverty and burdened with a husband who was
a lazy, erratic ne’er-do-well. Young Emil Gluck was not
wanted, and Ann Bartell could be trusted to impress this fact sufficiently
upon him. As an illustration of the treatment he received in that
early, formative period, the following instance is given.</p>
<p>When he had been living in the Bartell home a little more than a
year, he broke his leg. He sustained the injury through playing
on the forbidden roof—as all boys have done and will continue
to do to the end of time. The leg was broken in two places between
the knee and thigh. Emil, helped by his frightened playmates,
managed to drag himself to the front sidewalk, where he fainted.
The children of the neighbourhood were afraid of the hard-featured shrew
who presided over the Bartell house; but, summoning their resolution,
they rang the bell and told Ann Bartell of the accident. She did
not even look at the little lad who lay stricken on the sidewalk, but
slammed the door and went back to her wash-tub. The time passed.
A drizzle came on, and Emil Gluck, out of his faint, lay sobbing in
the rain. The leg should have been set immediately. As it
was, the inflammation rose rapidly and made a nasty case of it.
At the end of two hours, the indignant women of the neighbourhood protested
to Ann Bartell. This time she came out and looked at the lad.
Also she kicked him in the side as he lay helpless at her feet, and
she hysterically disowned him. He was not her child, she said,
and recommended that the ambulance be called to take him to the city
receiving hospital. Then she went back into the house.</p>
<p>It was a woman, Elizabeth Shepstone, who came along, learned the
situation, and had the boy placed on a shutter. It was she who
called the doctor, and who, brushing aside Ann Bartell, had the boy
carried into the house. When the doctor arrived, Ann Bartell promptly
warned him that she would not pay him for his services. For two
months the little Emil lay in bed, the first month on his back without
once being turned over; and he lay neglected and alone, save for the
occasional visits of the unremunerated and over-worked physician.
He had no toys, nothing with which to beguile the long and tedious hours.
No kind word was spoken to him, no soothing hand laid upon his brow,
no single touch or act of loving tenderness—naught but the reproaches
and harshness of Ann Bartell, and the continually reiterated information
that he was not wanted. And it can well be understood, in such
environment, how there was generated in the lonely, neglected boy much
of the bitterness and hostility for his kind that later was to express
itself in deeds so frightful as to terrify the world.</p>
<p>It would seem strange that, from the hands of Ann Bartell, Emil Gluck
should have received a college education; but the explanation is simple.
Her ne’er-do-well husband, deserting her, made a strike in the
Nevada goldfields, and returned to her a many-times millionaire.
Ann Bartell hated the boy, and immediately she sent him to the Farristown
Academy, a hundred miles away. Shy and sensitive, a lonely and
misunderstood little soul, he was more lonely than ever at Farristown.
He never came home, at vacation, and holidays, as the other boys did.
Instead, he wandered about the deserted buildings and grounds, befriended
and misunderstood by the servants and gardeners, reading much, it is
remembered, spending his days in the fields or before the fire-place
with his nose poked always in the pages of some book. It was at
this time that he over-used his eyes and was compelled to take up the
wearing of glasses, which same were so prominent in the photographs
of him published in the newspapers in 1941.</p>
<p>He was a remarkable student. Application such as his would
have taken him far; but he did not need application. A glance
at a text meant mastery for him. The result was that he did an
immense amount of collateral reading and acquired more in half a year
than did the average student in half-a-dozen years. In 1909, barely
fourteen years of age, he was ready—“more than ready”
the headmaster of the academy said—to enter Yale or Harvard.
His juvenility prevented him from entering those universities, and so,
in 1909, we find him a freshman at historic Bowdoin College. In
1913 he graduated with highest honours, and immediately afterward followed
Professor Bradlough to Berkeley, California. The one friend that
Emil Gluck discovered in all his life was Professor Bradlough.
The latter’s weak lungs had led him to exchange Maine for California,
the removal being facilitated by the offer of a professorship in the
State University. Throughout the year 1914, Emil Gluck resided
in Berkeley and took special scientific courses. Toward the end
of that year two deaths changed his prospects and his relations with
life. The death of Professor Bradlough took from him the one friend
he was ever to know, and the death of Ann Bartell left him penniless.
Hating the unfortunate lad to the last, she cut him off with one hundred
dollars.</p>
<p>The following year, at twenty years of age, Emil Gluck was enrolled
as an instructor of chemistry in the University of California.
Here the years passed quietly; he faithfully performed the drudgery
that brought him his salary, and, a student always, he took half-a-dozen
degrees. He was, among other things, a Doctor of Sociology, of
Philosophy, and of Science, though he was known to the world, in later
days, only as Professor Gluck.</p>
<p>He was twenty-seven years old when he first sprang into prominence
in the newspapers through the publication of his book, <i>Sex and Progress</i>.
The book remains to-day a milestone in the history and philosophy of
marriage. It is a heavy tome of over seven hundred pages, painfully
careful and accurate, and startlingly original. It was a book
for scientists, and not one calculated to make a stir. But Gluck,
in the last chapter, using barely three lines for it, mentioned the
hypothetical desirability of trial marriages. At once the newspapers
seized these three lines, “played them up yellow,” as the
slang was in those days, and set the whole world laughing at Emil Gluck,
the bespectacled young professor of twenty-seven. Photographers
snapped him, he was besieged by reporters, women’s clubs throughout
the land passed resolutions condemning him and his immoral theories;
and on the floor of the California Assembly, while discussing the state
appropriation to the University, a motion demanding the expulsion of
Gluck was made under threat of withholding the appropriation—of
course, none of his persecutors had read the book; the twisted newspaper
version of only three lines of it was enough for them. Here began
Emil Gluck’s hatred for newspaper men. By them his serious
and intrinsically valuable work of six years had been made a laughing-stock
and a notoriety. To his dying day, and to their everlasting regret,
he never forgave them.</p>
<p>It was the newspapers that were responsible for the next disaster
that befell him. For the five years following the publication
of his book he had remained silent, and silence for a lonely man is
not good. One can conjecture sympathetically the awful solitude
of Emil Gluck in that populous University; for he was without friends
and without sympathy. His only recourse was books, and he went
on reading and studying enormously. But in 1927 he accepted an
invitation to appear before the Human Interest Society of Emeryville.
He did not trust himself to speak, and as we write we have before us
a copy of his learned paper. It is sober, scholarly, and scientific,
and, it must also be added, conservative. But in one place he
dealt with, and I quote his words, “the industrial and social
revolution that is taking place in society.” A reporter
present seized upon the word “revolution,” divorced it from
the text, and wrote a garbled account that made Emil Gluck appear an
anarchist. At once, “Professor Gluck, anarchist,”
flamed over the wires and was appropriately “featured” in
all the newspapers in the land.</p>
<p>He had attempted to reply to the previous newspaper attack, but now
he remained silent. Bitterness had already corroded his soul.
The University faculty appealed to him to defend himself, but he sullenly
declined, even refusing to enter in defence a copy of his paper to save
himself from expulsion. He refused to resign, and was discharged
from the University faculty. It must be added that political pressure
had been put upon the University Regents and the President.</p>
<p>Persecuted, maligned, and misunderstood, the forlorn and lonely man
made no attempt at retaliation. All his life he had been sinned
against, and all his life he had sinned against no one. But his
cup of bitterness was not yet full to overflowing. Having lost
his position, and being without any income, he had to find work.
His first place was at the Union Iron Works, in San Francisco, where
he proved a most able draughtsman. It was here that he obtained
his firsthand knowledge of battleships and their construction.
But the reporters discovered him and featured him in his new vocation.
He immediately resigned and found another place; but after the reporters
had driven him away from half-a-dozen positions, he steeled himself
to brazen out the newspaper persecution. This occurred when he
started his electroplating establishment—in Oakland, on Telegraph
Avenue. It was a small shop, employing three men and two boys.
Gluck himself worked long hours. Night after night, as Policeman
Carew testified on the stand, he did not leave the shop till one and
two in the morning. It was during this period that he perfected
the improved ignition device for gas-engines, the royalties from which
ultimately made him wealthy.</p>
<p>He started his electroplating establishment early in the spring of
1928, and it was in the same year that he formed the disastrous love
attachment for Irene Tackley. Now it is not to be imagined that
an extraordinary creature such as Emil Gluck could be any other than
an extraordinary lover. In addition to his genius, his loneliness,
and his morbidness, it must be taken into consideration that he knew
nothing about women. Whatever tides of desire flooded his being,
he was unschooled in the conventional expression of them; while his
excessive timidity was bound to make his love-making unusual.
Irene Tackley was a rather pretty young woman, but shallow and light-headed.
At the time she worked in a small candy store across the street from
Gluck’s shop. He used to come in and drink ice-cream sodas
and lemon-squashes, and stare at her. It seems the girl did not
care for him, and merely played with him. He was “queer,”
she said; and at another time she called him a crank when describing
how he sat at the counter and peered at her through his spectacles,
blushing and stammering when she took notice of him, and often leaving
the shop in precipitate confusion.</p>
<p>Gluck made her the most amazing presents—a silver tea-service,
a diamond ring, a set of furs, opera-glasses, a ponderous <i>History
of the World</i> in many volumes, and a motor-cycle all silver-plated
in his own shop. Enters now the girl’s lover, putting his
foot down, showing great anger, compelling her to return Gluck’s
strange assortment of presents. This man, William Sherbourne,
was a gross and stolid creature, a heavy-jawed man of the working class
who had become a successful building-contractor in a small way.
Gluck did not understand. He tried to get an explanation, attempting
to speak with the girl when she went home from work in the evening.
She complained to Sherbourne, and one night he gave Gluck a beating.
It was a very severe beating, for it is on the records of the Red Cross
Emergency Hospital that Gluck was treated there that night and was unable
to leave the hospital for a week.</p>
<p>Still Gluck did not understand. He continued to seek an explanation
from the girl. In fear of Sherbourne, he applied to the Chief
of Police for permission to carry a revolver, which permission was refused,
the newspapers as usual playing it up sensationally. Then came
the murder of Irene Tackley, six days before her contemplated marriage
with Sherbourne. It was on a Saturday night. She had worked
late in the candy store, departing after eleven o’clock with her
week’s wages in her purse. She rode on a San Pablo Avenue
surface car to Thirty-fourth Street, where she alighted and started
to walk the three blocks to her home. That was the last seen of
her alive. Next morning she was found, strangled, in a vacant
lot.</p>
<p>Emil Gluck was immediately arrested. Nothing that he could
do could save him. He was convicted, not merely on circumstantial
evidence, but on evidence “cooked up” by the Oakland police.
There is no discussion but that a large portion of the evidence was
manufactured. The testimony of Captain Shehan was the sheerest
perjury, it being proved long afterward that on the night in question
he had not only not been in the vicinity of the murder, but that he
had been out of the city in a resort on the San Leandro Road.
The unfortunate Gluck received life imprisonment in San Quentin, while
the newspapers and the public held that it was a miscarriage of justice—that
the death penalty should have been visited upon him.</p>
<p>Gluck entered San Quentin prison on April 17, 1929. He was
then thirty-four years of age. And for three years and a half,
much of the time in solitary confinement, he was left to meditate upon
the injustice of man. It was during that period that his bitterness
corroded home and he became a hater of all his kind. Three other
things he did during the same period: he wrote his famous treatise,
<i>Human Morals</i>, his remarkable brochure, <i>The Criminal Sane</i>,
and he worked out his awful and monstrous scheme of revenge. It
was an episode that had occurred in his electroplating establishment
that suggested to him his unique weapon of revenge. As stated
in his confession, he worked every detail out theoretically during his
imprisonment, and was able, on his release, immediately to embark on
his career of vengeance.</p>
<p>His release was sensational. Also it was miserably and criminally
delayed by the soulless legal red tape then in vogue. On the night
of February 1, 1932, Tim Haswell, a hold-up man, was shot during an
attempted robbery by a citizen of Piedmont Heights. Tim Haswell
lingered three days, during which time he not only confessed to the
murder of Irene Tackley, but furnished conclusive proofs of the same.
Bert Danniker, a convict dying of consumption in Folsom Prison, was
implicated as accessory, and his confession followed. It is inconceivable
to us of to-day—the bungling, dilatory processes of justice a
generation ago. Emil Gluck was proved in February to be an innocent
man, yet he was not released until the following October. For
eight months, a greatly wronged man, he was compelled to undergo his
unmerited punishment. This was not conducive to sweetness and
light, and we can well imagine how he ate his soul with bitterness during
those dreary eight months.</p>
<p>He came back to the world in the fall of 1932, as usual a “feature”
topic in all the newspapers. The papers, instead of expressing
heartfelt regret, continued their old sensational persecution.
One paper did more—the <i>San Francisco Intelligencer</i>.
John Hartwell, its editor, elaborated an ingenious theory that got around
the confessions of the two criminals and went to show that Gluck was
responsible, after all, for the murder of Irene Tackley. Hartwell
died. And Sherbourne died too, while Policeman Phillipps was shot
in the leg and discharged from the Oakland police force.</p>
<p>The murder of Hartwell was long a mystery. He was alone in
his editorial office at the time. The reports of the revolver
were heard by the office boy, who rushed in to find Hartwell expiring
in his chair. What puzzled the police was the fact, not merely
that he had been shot with his own revolver, but that the revolver had
been exploded in the drawer of his desk. The bullets had torn
through the front of the drawer and entered his body. The police
scouted the theory of suicide, murder was dismissed as absurd, and the
blame was thrown upon the Eureka Smokeless Cartridge Company.
Spontaneous explosion was the police explanation, and the chemists of
the cartridge company were well bullied at the inquest. But what
the police did not know was that across the street, in the Mercer Building,
Room 633, rented by Emil Gluck, had been occupied by Emil Gluck at the
very moment Hartwell’s revolver so mysteriously exploded.</p>
<p>At the time, no connection was made between Hartwell’s death
and the death of William Sherbourne. Sherbourne had continued
to live in the home he had built for Irene Tackley, and one morning
in January, 1933, he was found dead. Suicide was the verdict of
the coroner’s inquest, for he had been shot by his own revolver.
The curious thing that happened that night was the shooting of Policeman
Phillipps on the sidewalk in front of Sherbourne’s house.
The policeman crawled to a police telephone on the corner and rang up
for an ambulance. He claimed that some one had shot him from behind
in the leg. The leg in question was so badly shattered by three
’38 calibre bullets that amputation was necessary. But when
the police discovered that the damage had been done by his own revolver,
a great laugh went up, and he was charged with having been drunk.
In spite of his denial of having touched a drop, and of his persistent
assertion that the revolver had been in his hip pocket and that he had
not laid a finger to it, he was discharged from the force. Emil
Gluck’s confession, six years later, cleared the unfortunate policeman
of disgrace, and he is alive to-day and in good health, the recipient
of a handsome pension from the city.</p>
<p>Emil Gluck, having disposed of his immediate enemies, now sought
a wider field, though his enmity for newspaper men and for the police
remained always active. The royalties on his ignition device for
gasolene-engines had mounted up while he lay in prison, and year by
year the earning power of his invention increased. He was independent,
able to travel wherever he willed over the earth and to glut his monstrous
appetite for revenge. He had become a monomaniac and an anarchist—not
a philosophic anarchist, merely, but a violent anarchist. Perhaps
the word is misused, and he is better described as a nihilist, or an
annihilist. It is known that he affiliated with none of the groups
of terrorists. He operated wholly alone, but he created a thousandfold
more terror and achieved a thousandfold more destruction than all the
terrorist groups added together.</p>
<p>He signalized his departure from California by blowing up Fort Mason.
In his confession he spoke of it as a little experiment—he was
merely trying his hand. For eight years he wandered over the earth,
a mysterious terror, destroying property to the tune of hundreds of
millions of dollars, and destroying countless lives. One good
result of his awful deeds was the destruction he wrought among the terrorists
themselves. Every time he did anything the terrorists in the vicinity
were gathered in by the police dragnet, and many of them were executed.
Seventeen were executed at Rome alone, following the assassination of
the Italian King.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most world-amazing achievement of his was the assassination
of the King and Queen of Portugal. It was their wedding day.
All possible precautions had been taken against the terrorists, and
the way from the cathedral, through Lisbon’s streets, was double-banked
with troops, while a squad of two hundred mounted troopers surrounded
the carriage. Suddenly the amazing thing happened. The automatic
rifles of the troopers began to go off, as well as the rifles, in the
immediate vicinity, of the double-banked infantry. In the excitement
the muzzles of the exploding rifles were turned in all directions.
The slaughter was terrible—horses, troops, spectators, and the
King and Queen, were riddled with bullets. To complicate the affair,
in different parts of the crowd behind the foot-soldiers, two terrorists
had bombs explode on their persons. These bombs they had intended
to throw if they got the opportunity. But who was to know this?
The frightful havoc wrought by the bursting bombs but added to the confusion;
it was considered part of the general attack.</p>
<p>One puzzling thing that could not be explained away was the conduct
of the troopers with their exploding rifles. It seemed impossible
that they should be in the plot, yet there were the hundreds their flying
bullets had slain, including the King and Queen. On the other
hand, more baffling than ever was the fact that seventy per cent. of
the troopers themselves had been killed or wounded. Some explained
this on the ground that the loyal foot-soldiers, witnessing the attack
on the royal carriage, had opened fire on the traitors. Yet not
one bit of evidence to verify this could be drawn from the survivors,
though many were put to the torture. They contended stubbornly
that they had not discharged their rifles at all, but that their rifles
had discharged themselves. They were laughed at by the chemists,
who held that, while it was just barely probable that a single cartridge,
charged with the new smokeless powder, might spontaneously explode,
it was beyond all probability and possibility for all the cartridges
in a given area, so charged, spontaneously to explode. And so,
in the end, no explanation of the amazing occurrence was reached.
The general opinion of the rest of the world was that the whole affair
was a blind panic of the feverish Latins, precipitated, it was true,
by the bursting of two terrorist bombs; and in this connection was recalled
the laughable encounter of long years before between the Russian fleet
and the English fishing boats.</p>
<p>And Emil Gluck chuckled and went his way. He knew. But
how was the world to know? He had stumbled upon the secret in
his old electroplating shop on Telegraph Avenue in the city of Oakland.
It happened, at that time, that a wireless telegraph station was established
by the Thurston Power Company close to his shop. In a short time
his electroplating vat was put out of order. The vat-wiring had
many bad joints, and, on investigation, Gluck discovered minute welds
at the joints in the wiring. These, by lowering the resistance,
had caused an excessive current to pass through the solution, “boiling”
it and spoiling the work. But what had caused the welds? was the
question in Gluck’s mind. His reasoning was simple.
Before the establishment of the wireless station, the vat had worked
well. Not until after the establishment of the wireless station
had the vat been ruined. Therefore the wireless station had been
the cause. But how? He quickly answered the question.
If an electric discharge was capable of operating a coherer across three
thousand miles of ocean, then, certainly, the electric discharges from
the wireless station four hundred feet away could produce coherer effects
on the bad joints in the vat-wiring.</p>
<p>Gluck thought no more about it at the time. He merely re-wired
his vat and went on electroplating. But afterwards, in prison,
he remembered the incident, and like a flash there came into his mind
the full significance of it. He saw in it the silent, secret weapon
with which to revenge himself on the world. His great discovery,
which died with him, was control over the direction and scope of the
electric discharge. At the time, this was the unsolved problem
of wireless telegraphy—as it still is to-day—but Emil Gluck,
in his prison cell, mastered it. And, when he was released, he
applied it. It was fairly simple, given the directing power that
was his, to introduce a spark into the powder-magazines of a fort, a
battleship, or a revolver. And not alone could he thus explode
powder at a distance, but he could ignite conflagrations. The
great Boston fire was started by him—quite by accident, however,
as he stated in his confession, adding that it was a pleasing accident
and that he had never had any reason to regret it.</p>
<p>It was Emil Gluck that caused the terrible German-American War, with
the loss of 800,000 lives and the consumption of almost incalculable
treasure. It will be remembered that in 1939, because of the Pickard
incident, strained relations existed between the two countries.
Germany, though aggrieved, was not anxious for war, and, as a peace
token, sent the Crown Prince and seven battleships on a friendly visit
to the United States. On the night of February 15, the seven warships
lay at anchor in the Hudson opposite New York City. And on that
night Emil Gluck, alone, with all his apparatus on board, was out in
a launch. This launch, it was afterwards proved, was bought by
him from the Ross Turner Company, while much of the apparatus he used
that night had been purchased from the Columbia Electric Works.
But this was not known at the time. All that was known was that
the seven battleships blew up, one after another, at regular four-minute
intervals. Ninety per cent. of the crews and officers, along with
the Crown Prince, perished. Many years before, the American battleship
<i>Maine</i> had been blown up in the harbour of Havana, and war with
Spain had immediately followed—though there has always existed
a reasonable doubt as to whether the explosion was due to conspiracy
or accident. But accident could not explain the blowing up of
the seven battleships on the Hudson at four-minute intervals.
Germany believed that it had been done by a submarine, and immediately
declared war. It was six months after Gluck’s confession
that she returned the Philippines and Hawaii to the United States.</p>
<p>In the meanwhile Emil Gluck, the malevolent wizard and arch-hater,
travelled his whirlwind path of destruction. He left no traces.
Scientifically thorough, he always cleaned up after himself. His
method was to rent a room or a house, and secretly to install his apparatus—which
apparatus, by the way, he so perfected and simplified that it occupied
little space. After he had accomplished his purpose he carefully
removed the apparatus. He bade fair to live out a long life of
horrible crime.</p>
<p>The epidemic of shooting of New York City policemen was a remarkable
affair. It became one of the horror mysteries of the time.
In two short weeks over a hundred policemen were shot in the legs by
their own revolvers. Inspector Jones did not solve the mystery,
but it was his idea that finally outwitted Gluck. On his recommendation
the policemen ceased carrying revolvers, and no more accidental shootings
occurred.</p>
<p>It was in the early spring of 1940 that Gluck destroyed the Mare
Island navy-yard. From a room in Vallejo he sent his electric
discharges across the Vallejo Straits to Mare Island. He first
played his flashes on the battleship <i>Maryland</i>. She lay
at the dock of one of the mine-magazines. On her forward deck,
on a huge temporary platform of timbers, were disposed over a hundred
mines. These mines were for the defence of the Golden Gate.
Any one of these mines was capable of destroying a dozen battleships,
and there were over a hundred mines. The destruction was terrific,
but it was only Gluck’s overture. He played his flashes
down the Mare Island shore, blowing up five torpedo boats, the torpedo
station, and the great magazine at the eastern end of the island.
Returning westward again, and scooping in occasional isolated magazines
on the high ground back from the shore, he blew up three cruisers and
the battleships <i>Oregon, Delaware, New Hampshire</i>, and <i>Florida</i>—the
latter had just gone into dry-dock, and the magnificent dry-dock was
destroyed along with her.</p>
<p>It was a frightful catastrophe, and a shiver of horror passed through
the land. But it was nothing to what was to follow. In the
late fall of that year Emil Gluck made a clean sweep of the Atlantic
seaboard from Maine to Florida. Nothing escaped. Forts,
mines, coast defences of all sorts, torpedo stations, magazines—everything
went up. Three months afterward, in midwinter, he smote the north
shore of the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Greece in the same stupefying
manner. A wail went up from the nations. It was clear that
human agency was behind all this destruction, and it was equally clear,
through Emil Gluck’s impartiality, that the destruction was not
the work of any particular nation. One thing was patent, namely,
that whoever was the human behind it all, that human was a menace to
the world. No nation was safe. There was no defence against
this unknown and all-powerful foe. Warfare was futile—nay,
not merely futile but itself the very essence of the peril. For
a twelve-month the manufacture of powder ceased, and all soldiers and
sailors were withdrawn from all fortifications and war vessels.
And even a world-disarmament was seriously considered at the Convention
of the Powers, held at The Hague at that time.</p>
<p>And then Silas Bannerman, a secret service agent of the United States,
leaped into world-fame by arresting Emil Gluck. At first Bannerman
was laughed at, but he had prepared his case well, and in a few weeks
the most sceptical were convinced of Emil Gluck’s guilt.
The one thing, however, that Silas Bannerman never succeeded in explaining,
even to his own satisfaction, was how first he came to connect Gluck
with the atrocious crimes. It is true, Bannerman was in Vallejo,
on secret government business, at the time of the destruction of Mare
Island; and it is true that on the streets of Vallejo Emil Gluck was
pointed out to him as a queer crank; but no impression was made at the
time. It was not until afterward, when on a vacation in the Rocky
Mountains and when reading the first published reports of the destruction
along the Atlantic Coast, that suddenly Bannerman thought of Emil Gluck.
And on the instant there flashed into his mind the connection between
Gluck and the destruction. It was only an hypothesis, but it was
sufficient. The great thing was the conception of the hypothesis,
in itself an act of unconscious cerebration—a thing as unaccountable
as the flashing, for instance, into Newton’s mind of the principle
of gravitation.</p>
<p>The rest was easy. Where was Gluck at the time of the destruction
along the Atlantic sea-board? was the question that formed in Bannerman’s
mind. By his own request he was put upon the case. In no
time he ascertained that Gluck had himself been up and down the Atlantic
Coast in the late fall of 1940. Also he ascertained that Gluck
had been in New York City during the epidemic of the shooting of police
officers. Where was Gluck now? was Bannerman’s next query.
And, as if in answer, came the wholesale destruction along the Mediterranean.
Gluck had sailed for Europe a month before—Bannerman knew that.
It was not necessary for Bannerman to go to Europe. By means of
cable messages and the co-operation of the European secret services,
he traced Gluck’s course along the Mediterranean and found that
in every instance it coincided with the blowing up of coast defences
and ships. Also, he learned that Gluck had just sailed on the
Green Star liner <i>Plutonic</i> for the United States.</p>
<p>The case was complete in Bannerman’s mind, though in the interval
of waiting he worked up the details. In this he was ably assisted
by George Brown, an operator employed by the Wood’s System of
Wireless Telegraphy. When the <i>Plutonic</i> arrived off Sandy
Hook she was boarded by Bannerman from a Government tug, and Emil Gluck
was made a prisoner. The trial and the confession followed.
In the confession Gluck professed regret only for one thing, namely,
that he had taken his time. As he said, had he dreamed that he
was ever to be discovered he would have worked more rapidly and accomplished
a thousand times the destruction he did. His secret died with
him, though it is now known that the French Government managed to get
access to him and offered him a billion francs for his invention wherewith
he was able to direct and closely to confine electric discharges.
“What!” was Gluck’s reply—“to sell to
you that which would enable you to enslave and maltreat suffering Humanity?”
And though the war departments of the nations have continued to experiment
in their secret laboratories, they have so far failed to light upon
the slightest trace of the secret. Emil Gluck was executed on
December 4, 1941, and so died, at the age of forty-six, one of the world’s
most unfortunate geniuses, a man of tremendous intellect, but whose
mighty powers, instead of making toward good, were so twisted and warped
that he became the most amazing of criminals.</p>
<p>—Culled from Mr. A. G. Burnside’s “Eccentricitics
of Crime,” by kind permission of the publishers, Messrs. Holiday
and Whitsund.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>THE DREAM OF DEBS</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>I awoke fully an hour before my customary time. This in itself
was remarkable, and I lay very wide awake, pondering over it.
Something was the matter, something was wrong—I knew not what.
I was oppressed by a premonition of something terrible that had happened
or was about to happen. But what was it? I strove to orient
myself. I remembered that at the time of the Great Earthquake
of 1906 many claimed they awakened some moments before the first shock
and that during these moments they experienced strange feelings of dread.
Was San Francisco again to be visited by earthquake?</p>
<p>I lay for a full minute, numbly expectant, but there occurred no
reeling of walls nor shock and grind of falling masonry. All was
quiet. That was it! The silence! No wonder I had been
perturbed. The hum of the great live city was strangely absent.
The surface cars passed along my street, at that time of day, on an
average of one every three minutes; but in the ten succeeding minutes
not a car passed. Perhaps it was a street-railway strike, was
my thought; or perhaps there had been an accident and the power was
shut off. But no, the silence was too profound. I heard
no jar and rattle of waggon wheels, nor stamp of iron-shod hoofs straining
up the steep cobble-stones.</p>
<p>Pressing the push-button beside my bed, I strove to hear the sound
of the bell, though I well knew it was impossible for the sound to rise
three stories to me even if the bell did ring. It rang all right,
for a few minutes later Brown entered with the tray and morning paper.
Though his features were impassive as ever, I noted a startled, apprehensive
light in his eyes. I noted, also, that there was no cream on the
tray.</p>
<p>“The Creamery did not deliver this morning,” he explained;
“nor did the bakery.”</p>
<p>I glanced again at the tray. There were no fresh French rolls—only
slices of stale graham bread from yesterday, the most detestable of
bread so far as I was concerned.</p>
<p>“Nothing was delivered this morning, sir,” Brown started
to explain apologetically; but I interrupted him.</p>
<p>“The paper?”</p>
<p>“Yes, sir, it was delivered, but it was the only thing, and
it is the last time, too. There won’t be any paper to-morrow.
The paper says so. Can I send out and get you some condensed milk?”</p>
<p>I shook my head, accepted the coffee black, and spread open the paper.
The headlines explained everything—explained too much, in fact,
for the lengths of pessimism to which the journal went were ridiculous.
A general strike, it said, had been called all over the United States;
and most foreboding anxieties were expressed concerning the provisioning
of the great cities.</p>
<p>I read on hastily, skimming much and remembering much of labour troubles
in the past. For a generation the general strike had been the
dream of organized labour, which dream had arisen originally in the
mind of Debs, one of the great labour leaders of thirty years before.
I recollected that in my young college-settlement days I had even written
an article on the subject for one of the magazines and that I had entitled
it “The Dream of Debs.” And I must confess that I
had treated the idea very cavalierly and academically as a dream and
nothing more. Time and the world had rolled on, Gompers was gone,
the American Federation of Labour was gone, and gone was Debs with all
his wild revolutionary ideas; but the dream had persisted, and here
it was at last realized in fact. But I laughed, as I read, at
the journal’s gloomy outlook. I knew better. I had
seen organized labour worsted in too many conflicts. It would
be a matter only of days when the thing would be settled. This
was a national strike, and it wouldn’t take the Government long
to break it.</p>
<p>I threw the paper down and proceeded to dress. It would certainly
be interesting to be out in the streets of San Francisco when not a
wheel was turning and the whole city was taking an enforced vacation.</p>
<p>“I beg your pardon, sir,” Brown said, as he handed me
my cigar-case, “but Mr. Harmmed has asked to see you before you
go out.”</p>
<p>“Send him in right away,” I answered.</p>
<p>Harmmed was the butler. When he entered I could see he was
labouring under controlled excitement. He came at once to the
point.</p>
<p>“What shall I do, sir? There will be needed provisions,
and the delivery drivers are on strike. And the electricity is
shut off—I guess they’re on strike, too.”</p>
<p>“Are the shops open?” I asked.</p>
<p>“Only the small ones, sir. The retail clerks are out,
and the big ones can’t open; but the owners and their families
are running the little ones themselves.”</p>
<p>“Then take the machine,” I said, “and go the rounds
and make your purchases. Buy plenty of everything you need or
may need. Get a box of candles—no, get half-a-dozen boxes.
And, when you’re done, tell Harrison to bring the machine around
to the club for me—not later than eleven.”</p>
<p>Harmmed shook his head gravely. “Mr. Harrison has struck
along with the Chauffeurs’ Union, and I don’t know how to
run the machine myself.”</p>
<p>“Oh, ho, he has, has he?” said. “Well, when
next Mister Harrison happens around you tell him that he can look elsewhere
for a position.”</p>
<p>“Yes, sir.”</p>
<p>“You don’t happen to belong to a Butlers’ Union,
do you, Harmmed?”</p>
<p>“No, sir,” was the answer. “And even if I
did I’d not desert my employer in a crisis like this. No,
sir, I would—”</p>
<p>“All right, thank you,” I said. “Now you
get ready to accompany me. I’ll run the machine myself,
and we’ll lay in a stock of provisions to stand a siege.”</p>
<p>It was a beautiful first of May, even as May days go. The sky
was cloudless, there was no wind, and the air was warm—almost
balmy. Many autos were out, but the owners were driving them themselves.
The streets were crowded but quiet. The working class, dressed
in its Sunday best, was out taking the air and observing the effects
of the strike. It was all so unusual, and withal so peaceful,
that I found myself enjoying it. My nerves were tingling with
mild excitement. It was a sort of placid adventure. I passed
Miss Chickering. She was at the helm of her little runabout.
She swung around and came after me, catching me at the corner.</p>
<p>“Oh, Mr. Corf!”’ she hailed. “Do you
know where I can buy candles? I’ve been to a dozen shops,
and they’re all sold out. It’s dreadfully awful, isn’t
it?”</p>
<p>But her sparkling eyes gave the lie to her words. Like the
rest of us, she was enjoying it hugely. Quite an adventure it
was, getting those candles. It was not until we went across the
city and down into the working-class quarter south of Market Street
that we found small corner groceries that had not yet sold out.
Miss Chickering thought one box was sufficient, but I persuaded her
into taking four. My car was large, and I laid in a dozen boxes.
There was no telling what delays might arise in the settlement of the
strike. Also, I filled the car with sacks of flour, baking-powder,
tinned goods, and all the ordinary necessaries of life suggested by
Harmmed, who fussed around and clucked over the purchases like an anxious
old hen.</p>
<p>The remarkable thing, that first day of the strike, was that no one
really apprehended anything serious. The announcement of organized
labour in the morning papers that it was prepared to stay out a month
or three months was laughed at. And yet that very first day we
might have guessed as much from the fact that the working class took
practically no part in the great rush to buy provisions. Of course
not. For weeks and months, craftily and secretly, the whole working
class had been laying in private stocks of provisions. That was
why we were permitted to go down and buy out the little groceries in
the working-class neighbourhoods.</p>
<p>It was not until I arrived at the club that afternoon that I began
to feel the first alarm. Everything was in confusion. There
were no olives for the cocktails, and the service was by hitches and
jerks. Most of the men were angry, and all were worried.
A babel of voices greeted me as I entered. General Folsom, nursing
his capacious paunch in a window-seat in the smoking-room was defending
himself against half-a-dozen excited gentlemen who were demanding that
he should do something.</p>
<p>“What can I do more than I have done?” he was saying.
“There are no orders from Washington. If you gentlemen will
get a wire through I’ll do anything I am commanded to do.
But I don’t see what can be done. The first thing I did
this morning, as soon as I learned of the strike, was to order in the
troops from the Presidio—three thousand of them. They’re
guarding the banks, the Mint, the post office, and all the public buildings.
There is no disorder whatever. The strikers are keeping the peace
perfectly. You can’t expect me to shoot them down as they
walk along the streets with wives and children all in their best bib
and tucker.”</p>
<p>“I’d like to know what’s happening on Wall Street,”
I heard Jimmy Wombold say as I passed along. I could imagine his
anxiety, for I knew that he was deep in the big Consolidated-Western
deal.</p>
<p>“Say, Corf,” Atkinson bustled up to me, “is your
machine running?”</p>
<p>“Yes,” I answered, “but what’s the matter
with your own?”</p>
<p>“Broken down, and the garages are all closed. And my
wife’s somewhere around Truckee, I think, stalled on the overland.
Can’t get a wire to her for love or money. She should have
arrived this evening. She may be starving. Lend me your
machine.”</p>
<p>“Can’t get it across the bay,” Halstead spoke up.
“The ferries aren’t running. But I tell you what you
can do. There’s Rollinson—oh, Rollinson, come here
a moment. Atkinson wants to get a machine across the bay.
His wife is stuck on the overland at Truckee. Can’t you
bring the <i>Lurlette</i> across from Tiburon and carry the machine
over for him?”</p>
<p>The <i>Lurlette</i> was a two-hundred-ton, ocean-going schooner-yacht.</p>
<p>Rollinson shook his head. “You couldn’t get a longshoreman
to land the machine on board, even if I could get the <i>Lurlette</i>
over, which I can’t, for the crew are members of the Coast Seamen’s
Union, and they’re on strike along with the rest.”</p>
<p>“But my wife may be starving,” I could hear Atkinson
wailing as I moved on.</p>
<p>At the other end of the smoking-room I ran into a group of men bunched
excitedly and angrily around Bertie Messener. And Bertie was stirring
them up and prodding them in his cool, cynical way. Bertie didn’t
care about the strike. He didn’t care much about anything.
He was blasé—at least in all the clean things of life;
the nasty things had no attraction for him. He was worth twenty
millions, all of it in safe investments, and he had never done a tap
of productive work in his life—inherited it all from his father
and two uncles. He had been everywhere, seen everything, and done
everything but get married, and this last in the face of the grim and
determined attack of a few hundred ambitious mammas. For years
he had been the greatest catch, and as yet he had avoided being caught.
He was disgracefully eligible. On top of his wealth he was young,
handsome, and, as I said before, clean. He was a great athlete,
a young blond god that did everything perfectly and admirably with the
solitary exception of matrimony. And he didn’t care about
anything, had no ambitions, no passions, no desire to do the very things
he did so much better than other men.</p>
<p>“This is sedition!” one man in the group was crying.
Another called it revolt and revolution, and another called it anarchy.</p>
<p>“I can’t see it,” Bertie said. “I have
been out in the streets all morning. Perfect order reigns.
I never saw a more law-abiding populace. There’s no use
calling it names. It’s not any of those things. It’s
just what it claims to be, a general strike, and it’s your turn
to play, gentlemen.”</p>
<p>“And we’ll play all right!” cried Garfield, one
of the traction millionaires. “We’ll show this dirt
where its place is—the beasts! Wait till the Government
takes a hand.”</p>
<p>“But where is the Government?” Bertie interposed.
“It might as well be at the bottom of the sea so far as you’re
concerned. You don’t know what’s happening at Washington.
You don’t know whether you’ve got a Government or not.”</p>
<p>“Don’t you worry about that,” Garfield blurted
out.</p>
<p>“I assure you I’m not worrying,” Bertie smiled
languidly. “But it seems to me it’s what you fellows
are doing. Look in the glass, Garfield.”</p>
<p>Garfield did not look, but had he looked he would have seen a very
excited gentleman with rumpled, iron-grey hair, a flushed face, mouth
sullen and vindictive, and eyes wildly gleaming.</p>
<p>“It’s not right, I tell you,” little Hanover said;
and from his tone I was sure that he had already said it a number of
times.</p>
<p>“Now that’s going too far, Hanover,” Bertie replied.
“You fellows make me tired. You’re all open-shop men.
You’ve eroded my eardrums with your endless gabble for the open
shop and the right of a man to work. You’ve harangued along
those lines for years. Labour is doing nothing wrong in going
out on this general strike. It is violating no law of God nor
man. Don’t you talk, Hanover. You’ve been ringing
the changes too long on the God-given right to work . . . or not to
work; you can’t escape the corollary. It’s a dirty
little sordid scrap, that’s all the whole thing is. You’ve
got labour down and gouged it, and now labour’s got you down and
is gouging you, that’s all, and you’re squealing.”</p>
<p>Every man in the group broke out in indignant denials that labour
had ever been gouged.</p>
<p>“No, sir!” Garfield was shouting. “We’ve
done the best for labour. Instead of gouging it, we’ve given
it a chance to live. We’ve made work for it. Where
would labour be if it hadn’t been for us?”</p>
<p>“A whole lot better off,” Bertie sneered. “You’ve
got labour down and gouged it every time you got a chance, and you went
out of your way to make chances.”</p>
<p>“No! No!” were the cries.</p>
<p>“There was the teamsters’ strike, right here in San Francisco,”
Bertie went on imperturbably. “The Employers’ Association
precipitated that strike. You know that. And you know I
know it, too, for I’ve sat in these very rooms and heard the inside
talk and news of the fight. First you precipitated the strike,
then you bought the Mayor and the Chief of Police and broke the strike.
A pretty spectacle, you philanthropists getting the teamsters down and
gouging them.</p>
<p>“Hold on, I’m not through with you. It’s
only last year that the labour ticket of Colorado elected a governor.
He was never seated. You know why. You know how your brother
philanthropists and capitalists of Colorado worked it. It was
a case of getting labour down and gouging it. You kept the president
of the South-western Amalgamated Association of Miners in jail for three
years on trumped-up murder charges, and with him out of the way you
broke up the association. That was gouging labour, you’ll
admit. The third time the graduated income tax was declared unconstitutional
was a gouge. So was the eight-hour Bill you killed in the last
Congress.</p>
<p>“And of all unmitigated immoral gouges, your destruction of
the closed-shop principle was the limit. You know how it was done.
You bought out Farburg, the last president of the old American Federation
of Labour. He was your creature—or the creature of all the
trusts and employers’ associations, which is the same thing.
You precipitated the big closed-shop strike. Farburg betrayed
that strike. You won, and the old American Federation of Labour
crumbled to pieces. You follows destroyed it, and by so doing
undid yourselves; for right on top of it began the organization of the
I.L.W.—the biggest and solidest organization of labour the United
States has ever seen, and you are responsible for its existence and
for the present general strike. You smashed all the old federations
and drove labour into the I.L.W., and the I.L.W. called the general
strike—still fighting for the closed shop. And then you
have the effrontery to stand here face to face and tell me that you
never got labour down and gouged it. Bah!”</p>
<p>This time there were no denials. Garfield broke out in self-defence—</p>
<p>“We’ve done nothing we were not compelled to do, if we
were to win.”</p>
<p>“I’m not saying anything about that,” Bertie answered.
“What I am complaining about is your squealing now that you’re
getting a taste of your own medicine. How many strikes have you
won by starving labour into submission? Well, labour’s worked
out a scheme whereby to starve you into submission. It wants the
closed shop, and, if it can get it by starving you, why, starve you
shall.”</p>
<p>“I notice that you have profited in the past by those very
labour gouges you mention,” insinuated Brentwood, one of the wiliest
and most astute of our corporation lawyers. “The receiver
is as bad as the thief,” he sneered. “You had no hand
in the gouging, but you took your whack out of the gouge.”</p>
<p>“That is quite beside the question, Brentwood,” Bertie
drawled. “You’re as bad as Hanover, intruding the
moral element. I haven’t said that anything is right or
wrong. It’s all a rotten game, I know; and my sole kick
is that you fellows are squealing now that you’re down and labour’s
taking a gouge out of you. Of course I’ve taken the profits
from the gouging and, thanks to you, gentlemen, without having personally
to do the dirty work. You did that for me—oh, believe me,
not because I am more virtuous than you, but because my good father
and his various brothers left me a lot of money with which to pay for
the dirty work.”</p>
<p>“If you mean to insinuate—” Brentwood began hotly.</p>
<p>“Hold on, don’t get all-ruffled up,” Bertie interposed
insolently. “There’s no use in playing hypocrites
in this thieves’ den. The high and lofty is all right for
the newspapers, boys’ clubs, and Sunday schools—that’s
part of the game; but for heaven’s sake don’t let’s
play it on one another. You know, and you know that I know just
what jobbery was done in the building trades’ strike last fall,
who put up the money, who did the work, and who profited by it.”
(Brentwood flushed darkly.) “But we are all tarred with
the same brush, and the best thing for us to do is to leave morality
out of it. Again I repeat, play the game, play it to the last
finish, but for goodness’ sake don’t squeal when you get
hurt.”</p>
<p>When I left the group Bertie was off on a new tack tormenting them
with the more serious aspects of the situation, pointing out the shortage
of supplies that was already making itself felt, and asking them what
they were going to do about it. A little later I met him in the
cloak-room, leaving, and gave him a lift home in my machine.</p>
<p>“It’s a great stroke, this general strike,” he
said, as we bowled along through the crowded but orderly streets.
“It’s a smashing body-blow. Labour caught us napping
and struck at our weakest place, the stomach. I’m going
to get out of San Francisco, Corf. Take my advice and get out,
too. Head for the country, anywhere. You’ll have more
chance. Buy up a stock of supplies and get into a tent or a cabin
somewhere. Soon there’ll be nothing but starvation in this
city for such as we.”</p>
<p>How correct Bertie Messener was I never dreamed. I decided
that he was an alarmist. As for myself, I was content to remain
and watch the fun. After I dropped him, instead of going directly
home, I went on in a hunt for more food. To my surprise, I learned
that the small groceries where I had bought in the morning were sold
out. I extended my search to the Potrero, and by good luck managed
to pick up another box of candles, two sacks of wheat flour, ten pounds
of graham flour (which would do for the servants), a case of tinned
corn, and two cases of tinned tomatoes. It did look as though
there was going to be at least a temporary food shortage, and I hugged
myself over the goodly stock of provisions I had laid in.</p>
<p>The next morning I had my coffee in bed as usual, and, more than
the cream, I missed the daily paper. It was this absence of knowledge
of what was going on in the world that I found the chief hardship.
Down at the club there was little news. Rider had crossed from
Oakland in his launch, and Halstead had been down to San Jose and back
in his machine. They reported the same conditions in those places
as in San Francisco. Everything was tied up by the strike.
All grocery stocks had been bought out by the upper classes. And
perfect order reigned. But what was happening over the rest of
the country—in Chicago? New York? Washington?
Most probably the same things that were happening with us, we concluded;
but the fact that we did not know with absolute surety was irritating.</p>
<p>General Folsom had a bit of news. An attempt had been made
to place army telegraphers in the telegraph offices, but the wires had
been cut in every direction. This was, so far, the one unlawful
act committed by labour, and that it was a concerted act he was fully
convinced. He had communicated by wireless with the army post
at Benicia, the telegraph lines were even then being patrolled by soldiers
all the way to Sacramento. Once, for one short instant, they had
got the Sacramento call, then the wires, somewhere, were cut again.
General Folsom reasoned that similar attempts to open communication
were being made by the authorities all the way across the continent,
but he was non-committal as to whether or not he thought the attempt
would succeed. What worried him was the wire-cutting; he could
not but believe that it was an important part of the deep-laid labour
conspiracy. Also, he regretted that the Government had not long
since established its projected chain of wireless stations.</p>
<p>The days came and went, and for a while it was a humdrum time.
Nothing happened. The edge of excitement had become blunted.
The streets were not so crowded. The working class did not come
uptown any more to see how we were taking the strike. And there
were not so many automobiles running around. The repair-shops
and garages were closed, and whenever a machine broke down it went out
of commission. The clutch on mine broke, and neither love nor
money could get it repaired. Like the rest, I was now walking.
San Francisco lay dead, and we did not know what was happening over
the rest of the country. But from the very fact that we did not
know we could conclude only that the rest of the country lay as dead
as San Francisco. From time to time the city was placarded with
the proclamations of organized labour—these had been printed months
before, and evidenced how thoroughly the I.L.W. had prepared for the
strike. Every detail had been worked out long in advance.
No violence had occurred as yet, with the exception of the shooting
of a few wire-cutters by the soldiers, but the people of the slums were
starving and growing ominously restless.</p>
<p>The business men, the millionaires, and the professional class held
meetings and passed resolutions, but there was no way of making the
proclamations public. They could not even get them printed.
One result of these meetings, however, was that General Folsom was persuaded
into taking military possession of the wholesale houses and of all the
flour, grain, and food warehouses. It was high time, for suffering
was becoming acute in the homes of the rich, and bread-lines were necessary.
I knew that my servants were beginning to draw long faces, and it was
amazing—the hole they made in my stock of provisions. In
fact, as I afterward surmised, each servant was stealing from me and
secreting a private stock of provisions for himself.</p>
<p>But with the formation of the bread-lines came new troubles.
There was only so much of a food reserve in San Francisco, and at the
best it could not last long. Organized labour, we knew, had its
private supplies; nevertheless, the whole working class joined the bread-lines.
As a result, the provisions General Folsom had taken possession of diminished
with perilous rapidity. How were the soldiers to distinguish between
a shabby middle-class man, a member of the I.L.W., or a slum dweller?
The first and the last had to be fed, but the soldiers did not know
all the I.L.W. men in the city, much less the wives and sons and daughters
of the I.L.W. men. The employers helping, a few of the known union
men were flung out of the bread-lines; but that amounted to nothing.
To make matters worse, the Government tugs that had been hauling food
from the army depots on Mare Island to Angel Island found no more food
to haul. The soldiers now received their rations from the confiscated
provisions, and they received them first.</p>
<p>The beginning of the end was in sight. Violence was beginning
to show its face. Law and order were passing away, and passing
away, I must confess, among the slum people and the upper classes.
Organized labour still maintained perfect order. It could well
afford to—it had plenty to eat. I remember the afternoon
at the club when I caught Halstead and Brentwood whispering in a corner.
They took me in on the venture. Brentwood’s machine was
still in running order, and they were going out cow-stealing.
Halstead had a long butcher knife and a cleaver. We went out to
the outskirts of the city. Here and there were cows grazing, but
always they were guarded by their owners. We pursued our quest,
following along the fringe of the city to the east, and on the hills
near Hunter’s Point we came upon a cow guarded by a little girl.
There was also a young calf with the cow. We wasted no time on
preliminaries. The little girl ran away screaming, while we slaughtered
the cow. I omit the details, for they are not nice—we were
unaccustomed to such work, and we bungled it.</p>
<p>But in the midst of it, working with the haste of fear, we heard
cries, and we saw a number of men running toward us. We abandoned
the spoils and took to our heels. To our surprise we were not
pursued. Looking back, we saw the men hurriedly cutting up the
cow. They had been on the same lay as ourselves. We argued
that there was plenty for all, and ran back. The scene that followed
beggars description. We fought and squabbled over the division
like savages. Brentwood, I remember, was a perfect brute, snarling
and snapping and threatening that murder would be done if we did not
get our proper share.</p>
<p>And we were getting our share when there occurred a new irruption
on the scene. This time it was the dreaded peace officers of the
I.L.W. The little girl had brought them. They were armed
with whips and clubs, and there were a score of them. The little
girl danced up and down in anger, the tears streaming down her cheeks,
crying: “Give it to ’em! Give it to ’em!
That guy with the specs—he did it! Mash his face for him!
Mash his face!” That guy with the specs was I, and I got
my face mashed, too, though I had the presence of mind to take off my
glasses at the first. My! but we did receive a trouncing as we
scattered in all directions. Brentwood, Halstead, and I fled away
for the machine. Brentwood’s nose was bleeding, while Halstead’s
cheek was cut across with the scarlet slash of a black-snake whip.</p>
<p>And, lo, when the pursuit ceased and we had gained the machine, there,
hiding behind it, was the frightened calf. Brentwood warned us
to be cautious, and crept up on it like a wolf or tiger. Knife
and cleaver had been left behind, but Brentwood still had his hands,
and over and over on the ground he rolled with the poor little calf
as he throttled it. We threw the carcass into the machine, covered
it over with a robe, and started for home. But our misfortunes
had only begun. We blew out a tyre. There was no way of
fixing it, and twilight was coming on. We abandoned the machine,
Brentwood pulling and staggering along in advance, the calf, covered
by the robe, slung across his shoulders. We took turn about carrying
that calf, and it nearly killed us. Also, we lost our way.
And then, after hours of wandering and toil, we encountered a gang of
hoodlums. They were not I.L.W. men, and I guess they were as hungry
as we. At any rate, they got the calf and we got the thrashing.
Brentwood raged like a madman the rest of the way home, and he looked
like one, with his torn clothes, swollen nose, and blackened eyes.</p>
<p>There wasn’t any more cow-stealing after that. General
Folsom sent his troopers out and confiscated all the cows, and his troopers,
aided by the militia, ate most of the meat. General Folsom was
not to be blamed; it was his duty to maintain law and order, and he
maintained it by means of the soldiers, wherefore he was compelled to
feed them first of all.</p>
<p>It was about this time that the great panic occurred. The wealthy
classes precipitated the flight, and then the slum people caught the
contagion and stampeded wildly out of the city. General Folsom
was pleased. It was estimated that at least 200,000 had deserted
San Francisco, and by that much was his food problem solved. Well
do I remember that day. In the morning I had eaten a crust of
bread. Half of the afternoon I had stood in the bread-line; and
after dark I returned home, tired and miserable, carrying a quart of
rice and a slice of bacon. Brown met me at the door. His
face was worn and terrified. All the servants had fled, he informed
me. He alone remained. I was touched by his faithfulness
and, when I learned that he had eaten nothing all day, I divided my
food with him. We cooked half the rice and half the bacon, sharing
it equally and reserving the other half for morning. I went to
bed with my hunger, and tossed restlessly all night. In the morning
I found Brown had deserted me, and, greater misfortune still, he had
stolen what remained of the rice and bacon.</p>
<p>It was a gloomy handful of men that came together at the club that
morning. There was no service at all. The last servant was
gone. I noticed, too, that the silver was gone, and I learned
where it had gone. The servants had not taken it, for the reason,
I presume, that the club members got to it first. Their method
of disposing of it was simple. Down south of Market Street, in
the dwellings of the I.L.W., the housewives had given square meals in
exchange for it. I went back to my house. Yes, my silver
was gone—all but a massive pitcher. This I wrapped up and
carried down south of Market Street.</p>
<p>I felt better after the meal, and returned to the club to learn if
there was anything new in the situation. Hanover, Collins, and
Dakon were just leaving. There was no one inside, they told me,
and they invited me to come along with them. They were leaving
the city, they said, on Dakon’s horses, and there was a spare
one for me. Dakon had four magnificent carriage horses that he wanted
to save, and General Folsom had given him the tip that next morning
all the horses that remained in the city were to be confiscated for
food. There were not many horses left, for tens of thousands of
them had been turned loose into the country when the hay and grain gave
out during the first days. Birdall, I remember, who had great
draying interests, had turned loose three hundred dray horses.
At an average value of five hundred dollars, this had amounted to $150,000.
He had hoped, at first, to recover most of the horses after the strike
was over, but in the end he never recovered one of them. They
were all eaten by the people that fled from San Francisco. For
that matter, the killing of the army mules and horses for food had already
begun.</p>
<p>Fortunately for Dakon, he had had a plentiful supply of hay and grain
stored in his stable. We managed to raise four saddles, and we
found the animals in good condition and spirited, withal unused to being
ridden. I remembered the San Francisco of the great earthquake
as we rode through the streets, but this San Francisco was vastly more
pitiable. No cataclysm of nature had caused this, but, rather,
the tyranny of the labour unions. We rode down past Union Square
and through the theatre, hotel, and shopping districts. The streets
were deserted. Here and there stood automobiles, abandoned where
they had broken down or when the gasolene had given out. There
was no sign of life, save for the occasional policemen and the soldiers
guarding the banks and public buildings. Once we came upon an
I.L.W. man pasting up the latest proclamation. We stopped to read.
“We have maintained an orderly strike,” it ran; “and
we shall maintain order to the end. The end will come when our
demands are satisfied, and our demands will be satisfied when we have
starved our employers into submission, as we ourselves in the past have
often been starved into submission.”</p>
<p>“Messener’s very words,” Collins said. “And
I, for one, am ready to submit, only they won’t give me a chance
to submit. I haven’t had a full meal in an age. I
wonder what horse-meat tastes like?”</p>
<p>We stopped to read another proclamation: “When we think our
employers are ready to submit we shall open up the telegraphs and place
the employers’ associations of the United States in communication.
But only messages relating to peace terms shall be permitted over the
wires.”</p>
<p>We rode on, crossed Market Street, and a little later were passing
through the working-class district. Here the streets were not
deserted. Leaning over the gates or standing in groups were the
I.L.W. men. Happy, well-fed children were playing games, and stout
housewives sat on the front steps gossiping. One and all cast
amused glances at us. Little children ran after us, crying: “Hey,
mister, ain’t you hungry?” And one woman, nursing
a child at her breast, called to Dakon: “Say, Fatty, I’ll
give you a meal for your skate—ham and potatoes, currant jelly,
white bread, canned butter, and two cups of coffee.”</p>
<p>“Have you noticed, the last few days,” Hanover remarked
to me, “that there’s not been a stray dog in the streets?”</p>
<p>I had noticed, but I had not thought about it before. It was
high time to leave the unfortunate city. We at last managed to
connect with the San Bruno Road, along which we headed south.
I had a country place near Menlo, and it was our objective. But
soon we began to discover that the country was worse off and far more
dangerous than the city. There the soldiers and the I.L.W. kept
order; but the country had been turned over to anarchy. Two hundred
thousand people had fled from San Francisco, and we had countless evidences
that their flight had been like that of an army of locusts.</p>
<p>They had swept everything clean. There had been robbery and
fighting. Here and there we passed bodies by the roadside and
saw the blackened ruins of farm-houses. The fences were down,
and the crops had been trampled by the feet of a multitude. All
the vegetable patches had been rooted up by the famished hordes.
All the chickens and farm animals had been slaughtered. This was
true of all the main roads that led out of San Francisco. Here
and there, away from the roads, farmers had held their own with shotguns
and revolvers, and were still holding their own. They warned us
away and refused to parley with us. And all the destruction and
violence had been done by the slum-dwellers and the upper classes.
The I.L.W. men, with plentiful food supplies, remained quietly in their
homes in the cities.</p>
<p>Early in the ride we received concrete proof of how desperate was
the situation. To the right of us we heard cries and rifle-shots.
Bullets whistled dangerously near. There was a crashing in the
underbrush; then a magnificent black truck-horse broke across the road
in front of us and was gone. We had barely time to notice that
he was bleeding and lame. He was followed by three soldiers.
The chase went on among the trees on the left. We could hear the
soldiers calling to one another. A fourth soldier limped out upon
the road from the right, sat down on a boulder, and mopped the sweat
from his face.</p>
<p>“Militia,” Dakon whispered. “Deserters.”</p>
<p>The man grinned up at us and asked for a match. In reply to
Dakon’s “What’s the word?” he informed us that
the militiamen were deserting. “No grub,” he explained.
“They’re feedin’ it all to the regulars.”
We also learned from him that the military prisoners had been released
from Alcatraz Island because they could no longer be fed.</p>
<p>I shall never forget the next sight we encountered. We came
upon it abruptly around a turn of the road. Overhead arched the
trees. The sunshine was filtering down through the branches.
Butterflies were fluttering by, and from the fields came the song of
larks. And there it stood, a powerful touring car. About
it and in it lay a number of corpses. It told its own tale.
Its occupants, fleeing from the city, had been attacked and dragged
down by a gang of slum dwellers—hoodlums. The thing had
occurred within twenty-four hours. Freshly opened meat and fruit
tins explained the reason for the attack. Dakon examined the bodies.</p>
<p>“I thought so,” he reported. “I’ve
ridden in that car. It was Perriton—the whole family.
We’ve got to watch out for ourselves from now on.”</p>
<p>“But we have no food with which to invite attack,” I
objected.</p>
<p>Dakon pointed to the horse I rode, and I understood.</p>
<p>Early in the day Dakon’s horse had cast a shoe. The delicate
hoof had split, and by noon the animal was limping. Dakon refused
to ride it farther, and refused to desert it. So, on his solicitation,
we went on. He would lead the horse and join us at my place.
That was the last we saw of him; nor did we ever learn his end.</p>
<p>By one o’clock we arrived at the town of Menlo, or, rather,
at the site of Menlo, for it was in ruins. Corpses lay everywhere.
The business part of the town, as well as part of the residences, had
been gutted by fire. Here and there a residence still held out;
but there was no getting near them. When we approached too closely
we were fired upon. We met a woman who was poking about in the
smoking ruins of her cottage. The first attack, she told us had
been on the stores, and as she talked we could picture that raging,
roaring, hungry mob flinging itself on the handful of townspeople.
Millionaires and paupers had fought side by side for the food, and then
fought with one another after they got it. The town of Palo Alto
and Stanford University had been sacked in similar fashion, we learned.
Ahead of us lay a desolate, wasted land; and we thought we were wise
in turning off to my place. It lay three miles to the west, snuggling
among the first rolling swells of the foothills.</p>
<p>But as we rode along we saw that the devastation was not confined
to the main roads. The van of the flight had kept to the roads,
sacking the small towns as it went; while those that followed had scattered
out and swept the whole countryside like a great broom. My place
was built of concrete, masonry, and tiles, and so had escaped being
burned, but it was gutted clean. We found the gardener’s
body in the windmill, littered around with empty shot-gun shells.
He had put up a good fight. But no trace could we find of the
two Italian labourers, nor of the house-keeper and her husband.
Not a live thing remained. The calves, the colts, all the fancy
poultry and thoroughbred stock, everything, was gone. The kitchen
and the fireplaces, where the mob had cooked, were a mess, while many
camp-fires outside bore witness to the large number that had fed and
spent the night. What they had not eaten they had carried away.
There was not a bite for us.</p>
<p>We spent the rest of the night vainly waiting for Dakon, and in the
morning, with our revolvers, fought off half-a-dozen marauders.
Then we killed one of Dakon’s horses, hiding for the future what
meat we did not immediately eat. In the afternoon Collins went
out for a walk, but failed to return. This was the last straw
to Hanover. He was for flight there and then, and I had great
difficulty in persuading him to wait for daylight. As for myself,
I was convinced that the end of the general strike was near, and I was
resolved to return to San Francisco. So, in the morning, we parted
company, Hanover heading south, fifty pounds of horse-meat strapped
to his saddle, while I, similarly loaded, headed north. Little
Hanover pulled through all right, and to the end of his life he will
persist, I know, in boring everybody with the narrative of his subsequent
adventures.</p>
<p>I got as far as Belmont, on the main road back, when I was robbed
of my horse-meat by three militiamen. There was no change in the
situation, they said, except that it was going from bad to worse.
The I.L.W. had plenty of provisions hidden away and could last out for
months. I managed to get as far as Baden, when my horse was taken
away from me by a dozen men. Two of them were San Francisco policemen,
and the remainder were regular soldiers. This was ominous.
The situation was certainly extreme when the regulars were beginning
to desert. When I continued my way on foot, they already had the
fire started, and the last of Dakon’s horses lay slaughtered on
the ground.</p>
<p>As luck would have it, I sprained my ankle, and succeeded in getting
no farther than South San Francisco. I lay there that night in
an out-house, shivering with the cold and at the same time burning with
fever. Two days I lay there, too sick to move, and on the third,
reeling and giddy, supporting myself on an extemporized crutch, I tottered
on toward San Francisco. I was weak as well, for it was the third
day since food had passed my lips. It was a day of nightmare and
torment. As in a dream I passed hundreds of regular soldiers drifting
along in the opposite direction, and many policemen, with their families,
organized in large groups for mutual protection.</p>
<p>As I entered the city I remembered the workman’s house at which
I had traded the silver pitcher, and in that direction my hunger drove
me. Twilight was falling when I came to the place. I passed
around by the alleyway and crawled up the black steps, on which I collapsed.
I managed to reach out with the crutch and knock on the door.
Then I must have fainted, for I came to in the kitchen, my face wet
with water, and whisky being poured down my throat. I choked and
spluttered and tried to talk. I began saying something about not
having any more silver pitchers, but that I would make it up to them
afterward if they would only give me something to eat. But the
housewife interrupted me.</p>
<p>“Why, you poor man,” she said, “haven’t you
heard? The strike was called off this afternoon. Of course
we’ll give you something to eat.”</p>
<p>She bustled around, opening a tin of breakfast bacon and preparing
to fry it.</p>
<p>“Let me have some now, please,” I begged; and I ate the
raw bacon on a slice of bread, while her husband explained that the
demands of the I.L.W. had been granted. The wires had been opened
up in the early afternoon, and everywhere the employers’ associations
had given in. There hadn’t been any employers left in San
Francisco, but General Folsom had spoken for them. The trains
and steamers would start running in the morning, and so would everything
else just as soon as system could be established.</p>
<p>And that was the end of the general strike. I never want to
see another one. It was worse than a war. A general strike
is a cruel and immoral thing, and the brain of man should be capable
of running industry in a more rational way. Harrison is still
my chauffeur. It was part of the conditions of the I.L.W. that
all of its members should be reinstated in their old positions.
Brown never came back, but the rest of the servants are with me.
I hadn’t the heart to discharge them—poor creatures, they
were pretty hard-pressed when they deserted with the food and silver.
And now I can’t discharge them. They have all been unionized
by the I.L.W. The tyranny of organized labour is getting beyond
human endurance. Something must be done.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>THE SEA-FARMER</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>“That wull be the doctor’s launch,” said Captain
MacElrath.</p>
<p>The pilot grunted, while the skipper swept on with his glass from
the launch to the strip of beach and to Kingston beyond, and then slowly
across the entrance to Howth Head on the northern side.</p>
<p>“The tide’s right, and we’ll have you docked in
two hours,” the pilot vouchsafed, with an effort at cheeriness.
“Ring’s End Basin, is it?”</p>
<p>This time the skipper grunted.</p>
<p>“A dirty Dublin day.”</p>
<p>Again the skipper grunted. He was weary with the night of wind
in the Irish Channel behind him, the unbroken hours of which he had
spent on the bridge. And he was weary with all the voyage behind
him—two years and four months between home port and home port,
eight hundred and fifty days by his log.</p>
<p>“Proper wunter weather,” he answered, after a silence.
“The town is undistinct. Ut wull be rainun’ guid an’
hearty for the day.”</p>
<p>Captain MacElrath was a small man, just comfortably able to peep
over the canvas dodger of the bridge. The pilot and third officer
loomed above him, as did the man at the wheel, a bulky German, deserted
from a warship, whom he had signed on in Rangoon. But his lack
of inches made Captain MacElrath a no less able man. At least
so the Company reckoned, and so would he have reckoned could he have
had access to the carefully and minutely compiled record of him filed
away in the office archives. But the Company had never given him
a hint of its faith in him. It was not the way of the Company,
for the Company went on the principle of never allowing an employee
to think himself indispensable or even exceedingly useful; wherefore,
while quick to censure, it never praised. What was Captain MacElrath,
anyway, save a skipper, one skipper of the eighty-odd skippers that
commanded the Company’s eighty-odd freighters on all the highways
and byways of the sea?</p>
<p>Beneath them, on the main deck, two Chinese stokers were carrying
breakfast for’ard across the rusty iron plates that told their
own grim story of weight and wash of sea. A sailor was taking
down the life-line that stretched from the forecastle, past the hatches
and cargo-winches, to the bridge-deck ladder.</p>
<p>“A rough voyage,” suggested the pilot.</p>
<p>“Aye, she was fair smokin’ ot times, but not thot I minded
thot so much as the lossin’ of time. I hate like onythun’
tull loss time.”</p>
<p>So saying, Captain MacElrath turned and glanced aft, aloft and alow,
and the pilot, following his gaze, saw the mute but convincing explanation
of that loss of time. The smoke-stack, buff-coloured underneath,
was white with salt, while the whistle-pipe glittered crystalline in
the random sunlight that broke for the instant through a cloud-rift.
The port lifeboat was missing, its iron davits, twisted and wrenched,
testifying to the mightiness of the blow that had been struck the old
<i>Tryapsic</i>. The starboard davits were also empty. The
shattered wreck of the lifeboat they had held lay on the fiddley beside
the smashed engine-room skylight, which was covered by a tarpaulin.
Below, to star-board, on the bridge deck, the pilot saw the crushed
mess-room door, roughly bulkheaded against the pounding seas.
Abreast of it, on the smokestack guys, and being taken down by the bos’n
and a sailor, hung the huge square of rope netting which had failed
to break those seas of their force.</p>
<p>“Twice afore I mentioned thot door tull the owners,”
said Captain MacElrath. “But they said ut would do.
There was bug seas thot time. They was uncreditable bug.
And thot buggest one dud the domage. Ut fair carried away the
door an’ laid ut flat on the mess table an’ smashed out
the chief’s room. He was a but sore about ut.”</p>
<p>“It must ’a’ been a big un,” the pilot remarked
sympathetically.</p>
<p>“Aye, ut was thot. Thungs was lively for a but.
Ut finished the mate. He was on the brudge wuth me, an’
I told hum tull take a look tull the wedges o’ number one hatch.
She was takin’ watter freely an’ I was no sure o’
number one. I dudna like the look o’ ut, an’ I was
fuggerin’ maybe tull heave to tull the marn, when she took ut
over abaft the brudge. My word, she was a bug one. We got
a but of ut ourselves on the brudge. I dudna miss the mate ot
the first, what o’ routin’ out Chips an’ bulkheadun’
thot door an’ stretchun’ the tarpaulin over the sky-light.
Then he was nowhere to be found. The men ot the wheel said as
he seen hum goin’ down the lodder just afore she hut us.
We looked for’ard, we looked tull hus room, aye looked tull the
engine-room, an’ we looked along aft on the lower deck, and there
he was, on both sides the cover to the steam-pipe runnun’ tull
the after-wunches.”</p>
<p>The pilot ejaculated an oath of amazement and horror.</p>
<p>“Aye,” the skipper went on wearily, “an’
on both sides the steam-pipe uz well. I tell ye he was in two
pieces, splut clean uz a herrin’. The sea must a-caught
hum on the upper brudge deck, carried hum clean across the fiddley,
an’ banged hum head-on tull the pipe cover. It sheered through
hum like so much butter, down atween the eyes, an’ along the middle
of hum, so that one leg an’ arm was fast tull the one piece of
hum, an’ one leg an’ arm fast tull the other piece of hum.
I tull ye ut was fair grewsome. We putt hum together an’
rolled hum in canvas uz we pulled hum out.”</p>
<p>The pilot swore again.</p>
<p>“Oh, ut wasna onythun’ tull greet about,” Captain
MacElrath assured him. “’Twas a guid ruddance.
He was no a sailor, thot mate-fellow. He was only fut for a pugsty,
an’ a dom puir apology for thot same.”</p>
<p>It is said that there are three kinds of Irish—Catholic, Protestant,
and North-of-Ireland—and that the North-of-Ireland Irishman is
a transplanted Scotchman. Captain MacElrath was a North-of-Ireland
man, and, talking for much of the world like a Scotchman, nothing aroused
his ire quicker than being mistaken for a Scotchman. Irish he
stoutly was, and Irish he stoutly abided, though it was with a faint
lip-lift of scorn that he mentioned mere South-of-Ireland men, or even
Orange-men. Himself he was Presbyterian, while in his own community
five men were all that ever mustered at a meeting in the Orange Men’s
Hall. His community was the Island McGill, where seven thousand
of his kind lived in such amity and sobriety that in the whole island
there was but one policeman and never a public-house at all.</p>
<p>Captain MacElrath did not like the sea, and had never liked it.
He wrung his livelihood from it, and that was all the sea was, the place
where he worked, as the mill, the shop, and the counting-house were
the places where other men worked. Romance never sang to him her
siren song, and Adventure had never shouted in his sluggish blood.
He lacked imagination. The wonders of the deep were without significance
to him. Tornadoes, hurricanes, waterspouts, and tidal waves were
so many obstacles to the way of a ship on the sea and of a master on
the bridge—they were that to him, and nothing more. He had
seen, and yet not seen, the many marvels and wonders of far lands.
Under his eyelids burned the brazen glories of the tropic seas, or ached
the bitter gales of the North Atlantic or far South Pacific; but his
memory of them was of mess-room doors stove in, of decks awash and hatches
threatened, of undue coal consumption, of long passages, and of fresh
paint-work spoiled by unexpected squalls of rain.</p>
<p>“I know my buzz’ness,” was the way he often put
it, and beyond his business was all that he did not know, all that he
had seen with the mortal eyes of him and yet that he never dreamed existed.
That he knew his business his owners were convinced, or at forty he
would not have held command of the <i>Tryapsic</i>, three thousand tons
net register, with a cargo capacity of nine thousand tons and valued
at fifty-thousand pounds.</p>
<p>He had taken up seafaring through no love of it, but because it had
been his destiny, because he had been the second son of his father instead
of the first. Island McGill was only so large, and the land could
support but a certain definite proportion of those that dwelt upon it.
The balance, and a large balance it was, was driven to the sea to seek
its bread. It had been so for generations. The eldest sons
took the farms from their fathers; to the other sons remained the sea
and its salt-ploughing. So it was that Donald MacElrath, farmer’s
son and farm-boy himself, had shifted from the soil he loved to the
sea he hated and which it was his destiny to farm. And farmed
it he had, for twenty years, shrewd, cool-headed, sober, industrious,
and thrifty, rising from ship’s boy and forecastle hand to mate
and master of sailing-ships and thence into steam, second officer, first,
and master, from small command to larger, and at last to the bridge
of the old <i>Tryapsic</i>—old, to be sure, but worth her fifty
thousand pounds and still able to bear up in all seas, and weather her
nine thousand tons of freight.</p>
<p>From the bridge of the <i>Tryapsic</i>, the high place he had gained
in the competition of men, he stared at Dublin harbour opening out,
at the town obscured by the dark sky of the dreary wind-driven day,
and at the tangled tracery of spars and rigging of the harbour shipping.
Back from twice around the world he was, and from interminable junketings
up and down on far stretches, home-coming to the wife he had not seen
in eight-and-twenty months, and to the child he had never seen and that
was already walking and talking. He saw the watch below of stokers
and trimmers bobbing out of the forecastle doors like rabbits from a
warren and making their way aft over the rusty deck to the mustering
of the port doctor. They were Chinese, with expressionless, Sphinx-like
faces, and they walked in peculiar shambling fashion, dragging their
feet as if the clumsy brogans were too heavy for their lean shanks.</p>
<p>He saw them and he did not see them, as he passed his hand beneath
his visored cap and scratched reflectively his mop of sandy hair.
For the scene before him was but the background in his brain for the
vision of peace that was his—a vision that was his often during
long nights on the bridge when the old <i>Tryapsic</i> wallowed on the
vexed ocean floor, her decks awash, her rigging thrumming in the gale
gusts or snow squalls or driving tropic rain. And the vision he
saw was of farm and farm-house and straw-thatched outbuildings, of children
playing in the sun, and the good wife at the door, of lowing kine, and
clucking fowls, and the stamp of horses in the stable, of his father’s
farm next to him, with, beyond, the woodless, rolling land and the hedged
fields, neat and orderly, extending to the crest of the smooth, soft
hills. It was his vision and his dream, his Romance and Adventure,
the goal of all his effort, the high reward for the salt-ploughing and
the long, long furrows he ran up and down the whole world around in
his farming of the sea.</p>
<p>In simple taste and homely inclination this much-travelled map was
more simple and homely than the veriest yokel. Seventy-one years
his father was, and had never slept a night out of his own bed in his
own house on Island McGill. That was the life ideal, so Captain
MacElrath considered, and he was prone to marvel that any man, not under
compulsion, should leave a farm to go to sea. To this much-travelled
man the whole world was as familiar as the village to the cobbler sitting
in his shop. To Captain MacElrath the world was a village.
In his mind’s eye he saw its streets a thousand leagues long,
aye, and longer; turnings that doubled earth’s stormiest headlands
or were the way to quiet inland ponds; cross-roads, taken one way, that
led to flower-lands and summer seas, and that led the other way to bitter,
ceaseless gales and the perilous bergs of the great west wind drift.
And the cities, bright with lights, were as shops on these long streets—shops
where business was transacted, where bunkers were replenished, cargoes
taken or shifted, and orders received from the owners in London town
to go elsewhere and beyond, ever along the long sea-lanes, seeking new
cargoes here, carrying new cargoes there, running freights wherever
shillings and pence beckoned and underwriters did not forbid.
But it was all a weariness to contemplate, and, save that he wrung from
it his bread, it was without profit under the sun.</p>
<p>The last good-bye to the wife had been at Cardiff, twenty-eight months
before, when he sailed for Valparaiso with coals—nine thousand
tons and down to his marks. From Valparaiso he had gone to Australia,
light, a matter of six thousand miles on end with a stormy passage and
running short of bunker coal. Coals again to Oregon, seven thousand
miles, and nigh as many more with general cargo for Japan and China.
Thence to Java, loading sugar for Marseilles, and back along the Mediterranean
to the Black Sea, and on to Baltimore, down to her marks with crome
ore, buffeted by hurricanes, short again of bunker coal and calling
at Bermuda to replenish. Then a time charter, Norfolk, Virginia,
loading mysterious contraband coal and sailing for South Africa under
orders of the mysterious German supercargo put on board by the charterers.
On to Madagascar, steaming four knots by the supercargo’s orders,
and the suspicion forming that the Russian fleet might want the coal.
Confusion and delays, long waits at sea, international complications,
the whole world excited over the old <i>Tryapsic</i> and her cargo of
contraband, and then on to Japan and the naval port of Sassebo.
Back to Australia, another time charter and general merchandise picked
up at Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide, and carried on to Mauritius,
Lourenço Marques, Durban, Algoa Bay, and Cape Town. To
Ceylon for orders, and from Ceylon to Rangoon to load rice for Rio Janeiro.
Thence to Buenos Aires and loading maize for the United Kingdom or the
Continent, stopping at St. Vincent, to receive orders to proceed to
Dublin. Two years and four months, eight hundred and fifty days
by the log, steaming up and down the thousand-league-long sea-lanes
and back again to Dublin town. And he was well aweary.</p>
<p>A little tug had laid hold of the <i>Tryapsic</i>, and with clang
and clatter and shouted command, with engines half-ahead, slow-speed,
or half-astern, the battered old sea-tramp was nudged and nosed and
shouldered through the dock-gates into Ring’s End Basin.
Lines were flung ashore, fore and aft, and a ’midship spring got
out. Already a small group of the happy shore-staying folk had
clustered on the dock.</p>
<p>“Ring off,” Captain MacElrath commanded in his slow thick
voice; and the third officer worked the lever of the engine-room telegraph.</p>
<p>“Gangway out!” called the second officer; and when this
was accomplished, “That will do.”</p>
<p>It was the last task of all, gangway out. “That will
do” was the dismissal. The voyage was ended, and the crew
shambled eagerly forward across the rusty decks to where their sea-bags
were packed and ready for the shore. The taste of the land was
strong in the men’s mouths, and strong it was in the skipper’s
mouth as he muttered a gruff good day to the departing pilot, and himself
went down to his cabin. Up the gangway were trooping the customs
officers, the surveyor, the agent’s clerk, and the stevedores.
Quick work disposed of these and cleared his cabin, the agent waiting
to take him to the office.</p>
<p>“Dud ye send word tull the wife?” had been his greeting
to the clerk.</p>
<p>“Yes, a telegram, as soon as you were reported.”</p>
<p>“She’ll likely be comin’ down on the marnin’
train,” the skipper had soliloquized, and gone inside to change
his clothes and wash.</p>
<p>He took a last glance about the room and at two photographs on the
wall, one of the wife the other of an infant—the child he had
never seen. He stepped out into the cabin, with its panelled walls
of cedar and maple, and with its long table that seated ten, and at
which he had eaten by himself through all the weary time. No laughter
and clatter and wordy argument of the mess-room had been his.
He had eaten silently, almost morosely, his silence emulated by the
noiseless Asiatic who had served him. It came to him suddenly,
the overwhelming realization of the loneliness of those two years and
more. All his vexations and anxieties had been his own.
He had shared them with no one. His two young officers were too
young and flighty, the mate too stupid. There was no consulting
with them. One tenant had shared the cabin with him, that tenant
his responsibility. They had dined and supped together, walked
the bridge together, and together they had bedded.</p>
<p>“Och!” he muttered to that grim companion, “I’m
quit of you, an’ wull quit . . . for a wee.”</p>
<p>Ashore he passed the last of the seamen with their bags, and, at
the agent’s, with the usual delays, put through his ship business.
When asked out by them to drink he took milk and soda.</p>
<p>“I am no teetotaler,” he explained; “but for the
life o’ me I canna bide beer or whusky.”</p>
<p>In the early afternoon, when he finished paying off his crew, he
hurried to the private office where he had been told his wife was waiting.</p>
<p>His eyes were for her first, though the temptation was great to have
more than a hurried glimpse of the child in the chair beside her.
He held her off from him after the long embrace, and looked into her
face long and steadily, drinking in every feature of it and wondering
that he could mark no changes of time. A warm man, his wife thought
him, though had the opinion of his officers been asked it would have
been: a harsh man and a bitter one.</p>
<p>“Wull, Annie, how is ut wi’ ye?” he queried, and
drew her to him again.</p>
<p>And again he held her away from him, this wife of ten years and of
whom he knew so little. She was almost a stranger—more a
stranger than his Chinese steward, and certainly far more a stranger
than his own officers whom he had seen every day, day and day, for eight
hundred and fifty days. Married ten years, and in that time he
had been with her nine weeks—scarcely a honeymoon. Each
time home had been a getting acquainted again with her. It was
the fate of the men who went out to the salt-ploughing. Little
they knew of their wives and less of their children. There was
his chief engineer—old, near-sighted MacPherson—who told
the story of returning home to be locked out of his house by his four-year
kiddie that never had laid eyes on him before.</p>
<p>“An’ thus ’ull be the loddie,” the skipper
said, reaching out a hesitant hand to the child’s cheek.</p>
<p>But the boy drew away from him, sheltering against the mother’s
side.</p>
<p>“Och!” she cried, “and he doesna know his own father.”</p>
<p>“Nor I hum. Heaven knows I could no a-picked hum out
of a crowd, though he’ll be havin’ your nose I’m thunkun’.”</p>
<p>“An’ your own eyes, Donald. Look ut them.
He’s your own father, laddie. Kiss hum like the little mon
ye are.”</p>
<p>But the child drew closer to her, his expression of fear and distrust
growing stronger, and when the father attempted to take him in his arms
he threatened to cry.</p>
<p>The skipper straightened up, and to conceal the pang at his heart
he drew out his watch and looked at it.</p>
<p>“Ut’s time to go, Annie,” he said. “Thot
train ’ull be startun’.”</p>
<p>He was silent on the train at first, divided between watching the
wife with the child going to sleep in her arms and looking out of the
window at the tilled fields and green unforested hills vague and indistinct
in the driving drizzle that had set in. They had the compartment
to themselves. When the boy slept she laid him out on the seat
and wrapped him warmly. And when the health of relatives and friends
had been inquired after, and the gossip of Island McGill narrated, along
with the weather and the price of land and crops, there was little left
to talk about save themselves, and Captain MacElrath took up the tale
brought home for the good wife from all his world’s-end wandering.
But it was not a tale of marvels he told, nor of beautiful flower-lands
nor mysterious Eastern cities.</p>
<p>“What like is Java?” she asked once.</p>
<p>“Full o’ fever. Half the crew down wuth ut an’
luttle work. Ut was quinine an’ quinine the whole blessed
time. Each marnun’ ’twas quinine an’ gin for
all hands on an empty stomach. An’ they who was no sick
made ut out to be hovun’ ut bad uz the rest.”</p>
<p>Another time she asked about Newcastle.</p>
<p>“Coals an’ coal-dust—thot’s all. No
a nice sutty. I lost two Chinks there, stokers the both of them.
An’ the owners paid a fine tull the Government of a hundred pounds
each for them. ‘We regret tull note,’ they wrut me—I
got the letter tull Oregon—‘We regret tull note the loss
o’ two Chinese members o’ yer crew ot Newcastle, an’
we recommend greater carefulness un the future.’ Greater
carefulness! And I could no a-been more careful. The Chinks
hod forty-five pounds each comun’ tull them in wages, an’
I was no a-thunkun’ they ’ud run.</p>
<p>“But thot’s their way—‘we regret tull note,’
‘we beg tull advise,’ ‘we recommend,’ ‘we
canna understand’—an’ the like o’ thot.
Domned cargo tank! An’ they would thunk I could drive her
like a <i>Lucania</i>, an’ wi’out burnun’ coals.
There was thot propeller. I was after them a guid while for ut.
The old one was iron, thuck on the edges, an’ we couldna make
our speed. An’ the new one was bronze—nine hundred
pounds ut cost, an’ then wantun’ their returns out o’
ut, an’ me wuth a bod passage an’ lossin’ time every
day. ‘We regret tull note your long passage from Voloparaiso
tull Sydney wuth an average daily run o’ only one hundred an’
suxty-seven. We hod expected better results wuth the new propeller.
You should a-made an average daily run o’ two hundred and suxteen.’</p>
<p>“An’ me on a wunter passage, blowin’ a luvin’
gale half the time, wuth hurricane force in atweenwhiles, an’
hove to sux days, wuth engines stopped an’ bunker coal runnun’
short, an’ me wuth a mate thot stupid he could no pass a shup’s
light ot night wi’out callun’ me tull the brudge.
I wrut an’ told ’em so. An’ then: ‘Our
nautical adviser suggests you kept too far south,’ an’ ‘We
are lookun’ for better results from thot propeller.’
Nautical adviser!—shore pilot! Ut was the regular latitude
for a wunter passage from Voloparaiso tull Sydney.</p>
<p>“An’ when I come un tull Auckland short o’ coal,
after lettun’ her druft sux days wuth the fires out tull save
the coal, an’ wuth only twenty tons in my bunkers, I was thunkun’
o’ the lossin’ o’ time an’ the expense, an’
tull save the owners I took her un an’ out wi’out pilotage.
Pilotage was no compulsory. An’ un Yokohama, who should
I meet but Captun Robinson o’ the <i>Dyapsic</i>. We got
a-talkun’ about ports an’ places down Australia-way, an’
first thing he says: ‘Speakun’ o’ Auckland—of
course, Captun, you was never un Auckland?’ ‘Yus,’
I says, ‘I was un there very recent.’ ‘Oh, ho,’
he says, very angry-like, ‘so you was the smart Aleck thot fetched
me thot letter from the owners: “We note item of fufteen pounds
for pilotage ot Auckland. A shup o’ ours was un tull Auckland
recently an’ uncurred no such charge. We beg tull advise
you thot we conseeder thus pilotage an onnecessary expense which should
no be uncurred un the future.’”</p>
<p>“But dud they say a word tull me for the fufteen pounds I saved
tull them? No a word. They send a letter tull Captun Robinson
for no savun’ them the fufteen pounds, an’ tull me: ‘We
note item of two guineas doctor’s fee at Auckland for crew.
Please explain thus onusual expunditure.’ Ut was two o’
the Chinks. I was thunkun’ they hod beri-beri, an’
thot was the why o’ sendun’ for the doctor. I buried
the two of them ot sea not a week after. But ut was: ‘Please
explain thus onusual expunditure,’ an’ tull Captun Robinson,
‘We beg tull advise you thot we conseeder thus pilotage an onnecessary
expense.’</p>
<p>“Dudna I cable them from Newcastle, tellun’ them the
old tank was thot foul she needed dry-dock? Seven months out o’
drydock, an’ the West Coast the quickest place for foulun’
un the world. But freights was up, an’ they hod a charter
o’ coals for Portland. The <i>Arrata</i>, one o’ the
Woor Line, left port the same day uz us, bound for Portland, an’
the old <i>Tryapsic</i> makun’ sux knots, seven ot the best.
An’ ut was ot Comox, takun’ un bunker coal, I got the letter
from the owners. The boss humself hod signed ut, an’ ot
the bottom he wrut un hus own bond: ‘The <i>Arrata</i> beat you
by four an’ a half days. Am dusappointed.’ Dusappointed!
When I had cabled them from Newcastle. When she drydocked ot Portland,
there was whuskers on her a foot long, barnacles the size o’ me
fust, oysters like young sauce plates. Ut took them two days afterward
tull clean the dock o’ shells an’ muck.</p>
<p>“An’ there was the motter o’ them fire-bars ot
Newcastle. The firm ashore made them heavier than the engineer’s
speecifications, an’ then forgot tull charge for the dufference.
Ot the last moment, wuth me ashore gettun’ me clearance, they
come wuth the bill: ‘Tull error on fire-bars, sux pounds.’
They’d been tull the shup an’ MacPherson hod O.K.’d
ut. I said ut was strange an’ would no pay. ‘Then
you are dootun’ the chief engineer,’ says they. ‘I’m
no dootun’,’ says I, ‘but I canna see my way tull
sign. Come wuth me tull the shup. The launch wull cost ye
naught an’ ut ’ull brung ye back. An’ we wull
see what MacPherson says.’</p>
<p>“But they would no come. Ot Portland I got the bill un
a letter. I took no notice. Ot Hong-Kong I got a letter
from the owners. The bill hod been sent tull them. I wrut
them from Java explainun’. At Marseilles the owners wrut
me: ‘Tull extra work un engine-room, sux pounds. The engineer
has O.K.’d ut, an’ you have no O.K.’d ut. Are
you dootun’ the engineer’s honesty?’ I wrut
an’ told them I was no dootun’ his honesty; thot the bill
was for extra weight o’ fire-bars; an’ thot ut was O.K.
Dud they pay ut? They no dud. They must unvestigate.
An’ some clerk un the office took sick, an’ the bill was
lost. An’ there was more letters. I got letters from
the owners an’ the firm—‘Tull error on fire-bars,
sux pounds’—ot Baltimore, ot Delagoa Bay, ot Moji, ot Rangoon,
ot Rio, an’ ot Montevuddio. Ut uz no settled yut.
I tell ye, Annie, the owners are hard tull please.”</p>
<p>He communed with himself for a moment, and then muttered indignantly:
“Tull error on fire-bars, sux pounds.”</p>
<p>“Hov ye heard of Jamie?” his wife asked in the pause.</p>
<p>Captain MacElrath shook his head.</p>
<p>“He was washed off the poop wuth three seamen.”</p>
<p>“Whereabouts?”</p>
<p>“Off the Horn. ’Twas on the <i>Thornsby</i>.”</p>
<p>“They would be runnun’ homeward bound?”</p>
<p>“Aye,” she nodded. “We only got the word
three days gone. His wife is greetin’ like tull die.”</p>
<p>“A good lod, Jamie,” he commented, “but a stiff
one ot carryun’ on. I mind me when we was mates together
un the <i>Abion</i>. An’ so Jamie’s gone.”</p>
<p>Again a pause fell, to be broken by the wife.</p>
<p>“An’ ye will no a-heard o’ the <i>Bankshire</i>?
MacDougall lost her in Magellan Straits. ’Twas only yesterday
ut was in the paper.”</p>
<p>“A cruel place, them Magellan Straits,” he said.
“Dudna thot domned mate-fellow nigh putt me ashore twice on the
one passage through? He was a eediot, a lunatuc. I wouldna
have hum on the brudge a munut. Comun’ tull Narrow Reach,
thuck weather, wuth snow squalls, me un the chart-room, dudna I guv
hum the changed course? ‘South-east-by-east,’ I told
hum. ‘South-east-by-east, sir,’ says he. Fufteen
munuts after I comes on tull the brudge. ‘Funny,’
says thot mate-fellow, ‘I’m no rememberun’ ony islands
un the mouth o’ Narrow Reach. I took one look ot the islands
an’ yells, ‘Putt your wheel hard a-starboard,’ tull
the mon ot the wheel. An’ ye should a-seen the old <i>Tryapsic</i>
turnun’ the sharpest circle she ever turned. I waited for
the snow tull clear, an’ there was Narrow Reach, nice uz ye please,
tull the east’ard an’ the islands un the mouth o’
False Bay tull the south’ard. ‘What course was ye
steerun’?’ I says tull the mon ot the wheel. ‘South-by-east,
sir,’ says he. I looked tull the mate-fellow. What
could I say? I was thot wroth I could a-kult hum. Four points
dufference. Five munuts more an’ the old <i>Tryapsic</i>
would a-been funushed.</p>
<p>“An’ was ut no the same when we cleared the Straits tull
the east’ard? Four hours would a-seen us guid an’
clear. I was forty hours then on the brudge. I guv the mate
his course, an’ the bearun’ o’ the Askthar Light astern.
‘Don’t let her bear more tull the north’ard than west-by-north,’
I said tull hum, ’an’ ye wull be all right.’
An’ I went below an’ turned un. But I couldna sleep
for worryun’. After forty hours on the brudge, what was
four hours more? I thought. An’ for them four hours wull
ye be lettun’ the mate loss her on ye? ‘No,’
I says to myself. An’ wuth thot I got up, hod a wash an’
a cup o’ coffee, an’ went tull the brudge. I took
one look ot the bearun’ o’ Askthar Light. ’Twas
nor’west-by-west, and the old <i>Tryapsic</i> down on the shoals.
He was a eediot, thot mate-fellow. Ye could look overside an’
see the duscoloration of the watter. ’Twas a close call
for the old <i>Tryapsic</i> I’m tellun’ ye. Twice
un thirty hours he’d a-hod her ashore uf ut hod no been for me.”</p>
<p>Captain MacElrath fell to gazing at the sleeping child with mild
wonder in his small blue eyes, and his wife sought to divert him from
his woes.</p>
<p>“Ye remember Jummy MacCaul?” she asked. “Ye
went tull school wuth hus two boys. Old Jummy MacCaul thot hoz
the farm beyond Doctor Haythorn’s place.”</p>
<p>“Oh, aye, an’ what o’ hum? Uz he dead?”</p>
<p>“No, but he was after askun’ your father, when he sailed
last time for Voloparaiso, uf ye’d been there afore. An’
when your father says no, then Jummy says, ‘An’ how wull
he be knowun a’ tull find hus way?’ An’ with
thot your father says: ‘Verry sumple ut uz, Jummy. Supposun’
you was goin’ tull the mainland tull a mon who luved un Belfast.
Belfast uz a bug sutty, Jummy, an’ how would ye be findun’
your way?’ ‘By way o’ me tongue,’ says
Jummy; ‘I’d be askun’ the folk I met.’
‘I told ye ut was sumple,’ says your father. ‘Ut’s
the very same way my Donald finds the road tull Voloparaiso. He
asks every shup he meets upon the sea tull ot last he meets wuth a shup
thot’s been tull Voloparaiso, an’ the captun o’ thot
shup tells hum the way.’ An’ Jummy scratches hus head
an’ says he understands an’ thot ut’s a very sumple
motter after all.”</p>
<p>The skipper chuckled at the joke, and his tired blue eyes were merry
for the moment.</p>
<p>“He was a thun chap, thot mate-fellow, oz thun oz you an’
me putt together,” he remarked after a time, a slight twinkle
in his eye of appreciation of the bull. But the twinkle quickly
disappeared and the blue eyes took on a bleak and wintry look.
“What dud he do ot Voloparaiso but land sux hundred fathom o’
chain cable an’ take never a receipt from the lighter-mon.
I was gettun’ my clearance ot the time. When we got tull
sea, I found he hod no receipt for the cable.</p>
<p>“‘An’ ye no took a receipt for ut?’ says
I.</p>
<p>“‘No,’ says he. ‘Wasna ut goin’
direct tull the agents?’</p>
<p>“‘How long ha’ ye been goin’ tull sea,’
says I, ‘not tull be knowin’ the mate’s duty uz tull
deluver no cargo wuthout receipt for same? An’ on the West
Coast ot thot. What’s tull stop the lighter-mon from stealun’
a few lengths o’ ut?’</p>
<p>“An’ ut come out uz I said. Sux hundred hundred
went over the side, but four hundred an’ ninety-five was all the
agents received. The lighter-mon swore ut was all he received
from the mate—four hundred an’ ninety-five fathom.
I got a letter from the owners ot Portland. They no blamed the
mate for ut, but me, an’ me ashore ot the time on shup’s
buzz’ness. I could no be in the two places ot the one time.
An’ the letters from the owners an’ the agents uz still
comun’ tull me.</p>
<p>“Thot mate-fellow was no a proper sailor, an’ no a mon
tull work for owners. Dudna he want tull break me wuth the Board
of Trade for bein’ below my marks? He said as much tull
the bos’n. An’ he told me tull my face homeward bound
thot I’d been half an inch under my marks. ’Twas at
Portland, loadun’ cargo un fresh watter an’ goin’
tull Comox tull load bunker coal un salt watter. I tell ye, Annie,
ut takes close fuggerin’, an’ I <i>was</i> half an inch
under the load-line when the bunker coal was un. But I’m
no tellun’ any other body but you. An’ thot mate-fellow
untendun’ tull report me tull the Board o’ Trade, only for
thot he saw fut tull be sliced un two pieces on the steam-pipe cover.</p>
<p>“He was a fool. After loadun’ ot Portland I hod
tull take on suxty tons o’ coal tull last me tull Comox.
The charges for lighterun’ was heavy, an’ no room ot the
coal dock. A French barque was lyin’ alongside the dock
an’ I spoke tull the captun, askun’ hum what he would charge
when work for the day was done, tull haul clear for a couple o’
hours an’ let me un. ‘Twenty dollars,’ said
he. Ut was savun’ money on lighters tull the owner, an’
I gave ut tull hum. An’ thot night, after dark, I hauled
un an’ took on the coal. Then I started tull go out un the
stream an’ drop anchor—under me own steam, of course.</p>
<p>“We hod tull go out stern first, an’ somethun’
went wrong wuth the reversun’ gear. Old MacPherson said
he could work ut by hond, but very slow ot thot. An’ I said
‘All right.’ We started. The pilot was on board.
The tide was ebbun’ stuffly, an’ right abreast an’
a but below was a shup lyin’ wuth a lighter on each side.
I saw the shup’s ridun’ lights, but never a light on the
lighters. Ut was close quarters to shuft a bug vessel onder steam,
wuth MacPherson workun’ the reversun’ gear by hond.
We hod to come close down upon the shup afore I could go ahead an’
clear o’ the shups on the dock-ends. An’ we struck
the lighter stern-on, just uz I rung tull MacPherson half ahead.</p>
<p>“‘What was thot?’ says the pilot, when we struck
the lighter.</p>
<p>“‘I dunna know,’ says I, ‘an’ I’m
wonderun’.’</p>
<p>“The pilot was no keen, ye see, tull hus job. I went
on tull a guid place an’ dropped anchor, an’ ut would all
a-been well but for thot domned eediot mate.</p>
<p>“‘We smashed thot lighter,’ says he, comun’
up the lodder tull the brudge—an’ the pilot stondun’
there wuth his ears cocked tull hear.</p>
<p>“‘What lighter?’ says I.</p>
<p>“‘Thot lighter alongside the shup,’ says the mate.</p>
<p>“‘I dudna see no lighter,’ says I, and wuth thot
I steps on hus fut guid an’ hard.</p>
<p>“After the pilot was gone I says tull the mate: ‘Uf you
dunna know onythun’, old mon, for Heaven’s sake keep your
mouth shut.’</p>
<p>“‘But ye dud smash thot lighter, dudn’t ye?’
says he.</p>
<p>“‘Uf we dud,’ says I, ‘ut’s no your
buzz’ness tull be tellun’ the pilot—though, mind ye,
I’m no admuttun’ there was ony lighter.’</p>
<p>“An’ next marnun’, just uz I’m after dressun’,
the steward says, ‘A mon tull see ye, sir.’ ‘Fetch
hum un,’ says I. An’ un he come. ‘Sut
down,’ says I. An’ he sot down.</p>
<p>“He was the owner of the lighter, an’ when he hod told
hus story, I says, ‘I dudna see ony lighter.’</p>
<p>“‘What, mon?’ says he. ‘No see a two-hundred-ton
lighter, bug oz a house, alongside thot shup?’</p>
<p>“‘I was goin’ by the shup’s lights,’
says I, ‘an’ I dudna touch the shup, thot I know.’</p>
<p>“‘But ye dud touch the lighter,’ says he.
‘Ye smashed her. There’s a thousand dollars’
domage done, an’ I’ll see ye pay for ut.’</p>
<p>‘Look here, muster,’ says I, ‘when I’m shuftun’
a shup ot night I follow the law, an’ the law dustunctly says
I must regulate me actions by the lights o’ the shuppun’.
Your lighter never hod no ridun’ light, nor dud I look for ony
lighter wuthout lights tull show ut.’</p>
<p>“‘The mate says—’ he beguns.</p>
<p>“‘Domn the mate,’ says I. ‘Dud your
lighter hov a ridun’ light?’</p>
<p>“‘No, ut dud not,’ says he, ‘but ut was a
clear night wuth the moon a-showun’.’</p>
<p>“‘Ye seem tull know your buzz’ness,’ says
I. ‘But let me tell ye thot I know my buzz’ness uz
well, an’ thot I’m no a-lookun’ for lighters wuthout
lights. Uf ye thunk ye hov a case, go ahead. The steward
will show ye out. Guid day.’</p>
<p>“An’ thot was the end o’ ut. But ut wull
show ye what a puir fellow thot mate was. I call ut a blessun’
for all masters thot he was sliced un two on thot steam-pipe cover.
He had a pull un the office an’ thot was the why he was kept on.”</p>
<p>“The Wekley farm wull soon be for sale, so the agents be tellun’
me,” his wife remarked, slyly watching what effect her announcement
would have upon him.</p>
<p>His eyes flashed eagerly on the instant, and he straightened up as
might a man about to engage in some agreeable task. It was the
farm of his vision, adjoining his father’s, and her own people
farmed not a mile away.</p>
<p>“We wull be buyun’ ut,” he said, “though
we wull be no tellun’ a soul of ut ontul ut’s bought an’
the money paid down. I’ve savun’ consuderable these
days, though pickun’s uz no what they used to be, an’ we
hov a tidy nest-egg laid by. I wull see the father an’ hove
the money ready tull hus hond, so uf I’m ot sea he can buy whenever
the land offers.”</p>
<p>He rubbed the frosted moisture from the inside of the window and
peered out at the pouring rain, through which he could discern nothing.</p>
<p>“When I was a young men I used tull be afeard thot the owners
would guv me the sack. Stull afeard I am of the sack. But
once thot farm is mine I wull no be afeard ony longer. Ut’s
a puir job thus sea-farmun’. Me managin’ un all seas
an’ weather an’ perils o’ the deep a shup worth fufty
thousand pounds, wuth cargoes ot times worth fufty thousand more—a
hundred thousand pounds, half a million dollars uz the Yankees say,
an’ me wuth all the responsubility gettun’ a screw o’
twenty pounds a month. What mon ashore, managin’ a buz’ness
worth a hundred thousand pounds wull be gettun’ uz small a screw
uz twenty pounds? An’ wuth such masters uz a captun serves—the
owners, the underwriters, an’ the Board o’ Trade, all pullun’
an wantun’ dufferent thungs—the owners wantun’ quick
passages an’ domn the rusk, the underwriters wantun’ safe
passages an’ domn the delay, an’ the Board o’ Trade
wantun’ cautious passages an’ caution always meanun’
delay. Three dufferent masters, an’ all three able an’
wullun’ to break ye uf ye don’t serve their dufferent wushes.”</p>
<p>He felt the train slackening speed, and peered again through the
misty window. He stood up, buttoned his overcoat, turned up the
collar, and awkwardly gathered the child, still asleep, in his arms.</p>
<p>“I wull see the father,” he said, “an’ hov
the money ready tull hus hond so uf I’m ot sea when the land offers
he wull no muss the chance tull buy. An’ then the owners
can guv me the sack uz soon uz they like. Ut will be all night
un, an’ I wull be wuth you, Annie, an’ the sea can go tull
hell.”</p>
<p>Happiness was in both their faces at the prospect, and for a moment
both saw the same vision of peace. Annie leaned toward him, and
as the train stopped they kissed each other across the sleeping child.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>SAMUEL</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>Margaret Henan would have been a striking figure under any circumstances,
but never more so than when I first chanced upon her, a sack of grain
of fully a hundredweight on her shoulder, as she walked with sure though
tottering stride from the cart-tail to the stable, pausing for an instant
to gather strength at the foot of the steep steps that led to the grain-bin.
There were four of these steps, and she went up them, a step at a time,
slowly, unwaveringly, and with so dogged certitude that it never entered
my mind that her strength could fail her and let that hundred-weight
sack fall from the lean and withered frame that wellnigh doubled under
it. For she was patently an old woman, and it was her age that
made me linger by the cart and watch.</p>
<p>Six times she went between the cart and the stable, each time with
a full sack on her back, and beyond passing the time of day with me
she took no notice of my presence. Then, the cart empty, she fumbled
for matches and lighted a short clay pipe, pressing down the burning
surface of the tobacco with a calloused and apparently nerveless thumb.
The hands were noteworthy. They were large-knuckled, sinewy and
malformed by labour, rimed with callouses, the nails blunt and broken,
and with here and there cuts and bruises, healed and healing, such as
are common to the hands of hard-working men. On the back were
huge, upstanding veins, eloquent of age and toil. Looking at them,
it was hard to believe that they were the hands of the woman who had
once been the belle of Island McGill. This last, of course, I
learned later. At the time I knew neither her history nor her
identity.</p>
<p>She wore heavy man’s brogans. Her legs were stockingless,
and I had noticed when she walked that her bare feet were thrust into
the crinkly, iron-like shoes that sloshed about her lean ankles at every
step. Her figure, shapeless and waistless, was garbed in a rough
man’s shirt and in a ragged flannel petticoat that had once been
red. But it was her face, wrinkled, withered and weather-beaten,
surrounded by an aureole of unkempt and straggling wisps of greyish
hair, that caught and held me. Neither drifted hair nor serried
wrinkles could hide the splendid dome of a forehead, high and broad
without verging in the slightest on the abnormal.</p>
<p>The sunken cheeks and pinched nose told little of the quality of
the life that flickered behind those clear blue eyes of hers.
Despite the minutiae of wrinkle-work that somehow failed to weazen them,
her eyes were clear as a girl’s—clear, out-looking, and
far-seeing, and with an open and unblinking steadfastness of gaze that
was disconcerting. The remarkable thing was the distance between
them. It is a lucky man or woman who has the width of an eye between,
but with Margaret Henan the width between her eyes was fully that of
an eye and a half. Yet so symmetrically moulded was her face that
this remarkable feature produced no uncanny effect, and, for that matter,
would have escaped the casual observer’s notice. The mouth,
shapeless and toothless, with down-turned corners and lips dry and parchment-like,
nevertheless lacked the muscular slackness so usual with age.
The lips might have been those of a mummy, save for that impression
of rigid firmness they gave. Not that they were atrophied.
On the contrary, they seemed tense and set with a muscular and spiritual
determination. There, and in the eyes, was the secret of the certitude
with which she carried the heavy sacks up the steep steps, with never
a false step or overbalance, and emptied them in the grain-bin.</p>
<p>“You are an old woman to be working like this,” I ventured.</p>
<p>She looked at me with that strange, unblinking gaze, and she thought
and spoke with the slow deliberateness that characterized everything
about her, as if well aware of an eternity that was hers and in which
there was no need for haste. Again I was impressed by the enormous
certitude of her. In this eternity that seemed so indubitably
hers, there was time and to spare for safe-footing and stable equilibrium—for
certitude, in short. No more in her spiritual life than in carrying
the hundredweights of grain was there a possibility of a misstep or
an overbalancing. The feeling produced in me was uncanny.
Here was a human soul that, save for the most glimmering of contacts,
was beyond the humanness of me. And the more I learned of Margaret
Henan in the weeks that followed the more mysteriously remote she became.
She was as alien as a far-journeyer from some other star, and no hint
could she nor all the countryside give me of what forms of living, what
heats of feeling, or rules of philosophic contemplation actuated her
in all that she had been and was.</p>
<p>“I wull be suvunty-two come Guid Friday a fortnight,”
she said in reply to my question.</p>
<p>“But you are an old woman to be doing this man’s work,
and a strong man’s work at that,” I insisted.</p>
<p>Again she seemed to immerse herself in that atmosphere of contemplative
eternity, and so strangely did it affect me that I should not have been
surprised to have awaked a century or so later and found her just beginning
to enunciate her reply—</p>
<p>“The work hoz tull be done, an’ I am beholden tull no
one.”</p>
<p>“But have you no children, no family, relations?”</p>
<p>“Oh, aye, a-plenty o’ them, but they no see fut tull
be helpun’ me.”</p>
<p>She drew out her pipe for a moment, then added, with a nod of her
head toward the house, “I luv’ wuth meself.”</p>
<p>I glanced at the house, straw-thatched and commodious, at the large
stable, and at the large array of fields I knew must belong with the
place.</p>
<p>“It is a big bit of land for you to farm by yourself.”</p>
<p>“Oh, aye, a bug but, suvunty acres. Ut kept me old mon
buzzy, along wuth a son an’ a hired mon, tull say naught o’
extra honds un the harvest an’ a maid-servant un the house.”</p>
<p>She clambered into the cart, gathered the reins in her hands, and
quizzed me with her keen, shrewd eyes.</p>
<p>“Belike ye hail from over the watter—Ameruky, I’m
meanun’?”</p>
<p>“Yes, I’m a Yankee,” I answered.</p>
<p>“Ye wull no be findun’ mony Island McGill folk stoppun’
un Ameruky?”</p>
<p>“No; I don’t remember ever meeting one, in the States.”</p>
<p>She nodded her head.</p>
<p>“They are home-luvun’ bodies, though I wull no be sayin’
they are no fair-travelled. Yet they come home ot the last, them
oz are no lost ot sea or kult by fevers an’ such-like un foreign
parts.”</p>
<p>“Then your sons will have gone to sea and come home again?”
I queried.</p>
<p>“Oh, aye, all savun’ Samuel oz was drownded.”</p>
<p>At the mention of Samuel I could have sworn to a strange light in
her eyes, and it seemed to me, as by some telepathic flash, that I divined
in her a tremendous wistfulness, an immense yearning. It seemed
to me that here was the key to her inscrutableness, the clue that if
followed properly would make all her strangeness plain. It came
to me that here was a contact and that for the moment I was glimpsing
into the soul of her. The question was tickling on my tongue,
but she forestalled me.</p>
<p>She <i>tchk’d</i> to the horse, and with a “Guid day
tull you, sir,” drove off.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>A simple, homely people are the folk of Island McGill, and I doubt
if a more sober, thrifty, and industrious folk is to be found in all
the world. Meeting them abroad—and to meet them abroad one
must meet them on the sea, for a hybrid sea-faring and farmer breed
are they—one would never take them to be Irish. Irish they
claim to be, speaking of the North of Ireland with pride and sneering
at their Scottish brothers; yet Scotch they undoubtedly are, transplanted
Scotch of long ago, it is true, but none the less Scotch, with a thousand
traits, to say nothing of their tricks of speech and woolly utterance,
which nothing less than their Scotch clannishness could have preserved
to this late day.</p>
<p>A narrow loch, scarcely half a mile wide, separates Island McGill
from the mainland of Ireland; and, once across this loch, one finds
himself in an entirely different country. The Scotch impression
is strong, and the people, to commence with, are Presbyterians.
When it is considered that there is no public-house in all the island
and that seven thousand souls dwell therein, some idea may be gained
of the temperateness of the community. Wedded to old ways, public
opinion and the ministers are powerful influences, while fathers and
mothers are revered and obeyed as in few other places in this modern
world. Courting lasts never later than ten at night, and no girl
walks out with her young man without her parents’ knowledge and
consent.</p>
<p>The young men go down to the sea and sow their wild oats in the wicked
ports, returning periodically, between voyages, to live the old intensive
morality, to court till ten o’clock, to sit under the minister
each Sunday, and to listen at home to the same stern precepts that the
elders preached to them from the time they were laddies. Much
they learned of women in the ends of the earth, these seafaring sons,
yet a canny wisdom was theirs and they never brought wives home with
them. The one solitary exception to this had been the schoolmaster,
who had been guilty of bringing a wife from half a mile the other side
of the loch. For this he had never been forgiven, and he rested
under a cloud for the remainder of his days. At his death the
wife went back across the loch to her own people, and the blot on the
escutcheon of Island McGill was erased. In the end the sailor-men
married girls of their own homeland and settled down to become exemplars
of all the virtues for which the island was noted.</p>
<p>Island McGill was without a history. She boasted none of the
events that go to make history. There had never been any wearing
of the green, any Fenian conspiracies, any land disturbances.
There had been but one eviction, and that purely technical—a test
case, and on advice of the tenant’s lawyer. So Island McGill
was without annals. History had passed her by. She paid
her taxes, acknowledged her crowned rulers, and left the world alone;
all she asked in return was that the world should leave her alone.
The world was composed of two parts—Island McGill and the rest
of it. And whatever was not Island McGill was outlandish and barbarian;
and well she knew, for did not her seafaring sons bring home report
of that world and its ungodly ways?</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>It was from the skipper of a Glasgow tramp, as passenger from Colombo
to Rangoon, that I had first learned of the existence of Island McGill;
and it was from him that I had carried the letter that gave me entrance
to the house of Mrs. Ross, widow of a master mariner, with a daughter
living with her and with two sons, master mariners themselves and out
upon the sea. Mrs. Ross did not take in boarders, and it was Captain
Ross’s letter alone that had enabled me to get from her bed and
board. In the evening, after my encounter with Margaret Henan,
I questioned Mrs. Ross, and I knew on the instant that I had in truth
stumbled upon mystery.</p>
<p>Like all Island McGill folk, as I was soon to discover, Mrs. Ross
was at first averse to discussing Margaret Henan at all. Yet it
was from her I learned that evening that Margaret Henan had once been
one of the island belles. Herself the daughter of a well-to-do
farmer, she had married Thomas Henan, equally well-to-do. Beyond
the usual housewife’s tasks she had never been accustomed to work.
Unlike many of the island women, she had never lent a hand in the fields.</p>
<p>“But what of her children?” I asked.</p>
<p>“Two o’ the sons, Jamie an’ Timothy uz married
an’ be goun’ tull sea. Thot bug house close tull the
post office uz Jamie’s. The daughters thot ha’ no
married be luvun’ wuth them as dud marry. An’ the
rest be dead.”</p>
<p>“The Samuels,” Clara interpolated, with what I suspected
was a giggle.</p>
<p>She was Mrs. Ross’s daughter, a strapping young woman with
handsome features and remarkably handsome black eyes.</p>
<p>“’Tuz naught to be smuckerun’ ot,” her mother
reproved her.</p>
<p>“The Samuels?” I intervened. “I don’t
understand.”</p>
<p>“Her four sons thot died.”</p>
<p>“And were they all named Samuel?”</p>
<p>“Aye.”</p>
<p>“Strange,” I commented in the lagging silence.</p>
<p>“Very strange,” Mrs. Ross affirmed, proceeding stolidly
with the knitting of the woollen singlet on her knees—one of the
countless under-garments that she interminably knitted for her skipper
sons.</p>
<p>“And it was only the Samuels that died?” I queried, in
further attempt.</p>
<p>“The others luved,” was the answer. “A fine
fomuly—no finer on the island. No better lods ever sailed
out of Island McGill. The munuster held them up oz models tull
pottern after. Nor was ever a whusper breathed again’ the
girls.”</p>
<p>“But why is she left alone now in her old age?” I persisted.
“Why don’t her own flesh and blood look after her?
Why does she live alone? Don’t they ever go to see her or
care for her?”</p>
<p>“Never a one un twenty years an’ more now. She
fetched ut on tull herself. She drove them from the house just
oz she drove old Tom Henan, thot was her husband, tull hus death.”</p>
<p>“Drink?” I ventured.</p>
<p>Mrs. Ross shook her head scornfully, as if drink was a weakness beneath
the weakest of Island McGill.</p>
<p>A long pause followed, during which Mrs. Ross knitted stolidly on,
only nodding permission when Clara’s young man, mate on one of
the Shire Line sailing ships, came to walk out with her. I studied
the half-dozen ostrich eggs, hanging in the corner against the wall
like a cluster of some monstrous fruit. On each shell were painted
precipitous and impossible seas through which full-rigged ships foamed
with a lack of perspective only equalled by their sharp technical perfection.
On the mantelpiece stood two large pearl shells, obviously a pair, intricately
carved by the patient hands of New Caledonian convicts. In the
centre of the mantel was a stuffed bird-of-paradise, while about the
room were scattered gorgeous shells from the southern seas, delicate
sprays of coral sprouting from barnacled <i>pi-pi</i> shells and cased
in glass, assegais from South Africa, stone axes from New Guinea, huge
Alaskan tobacco-pouches beaded with heraldic totem designs, a boomerang
from Australia, divers ships in glass bottles, a cannibal <i>kai-kai</i>
bowl from the Marquesas, and fragile cabinets from China and the Indies
and inlaid with mother-of-pearl and precious woods.</p>
<p>I gazed at this varied trove brought home by sailor sons, and pondered
the mystery of Margaret Henan, who had driven her husband to his death
and been forsaken by all her kin. It was not the drink.
Then what was it?—some shocking cruelty? some amazing infidelity?
or some fearful, old-world peasant-crime?</p>
<p>I broached my theories, but to all Mrs. Ross shook her head.</p>
<p>“Ut was no thot,” she said. “Margaret was
a guid wife an’ a guid mother, an’ I doubt she would harm
a fly. She brought up her fomuly God-fearin’ an’ decent-minded.
Her trouble was thot she took lunatic—turned eediot.”</p>
<p>Mrs. Ross tapped significantly on her forehead to indicate a state
of addlement.</p>
<p>“But I talked with her this afternoon,” I objected, “and
I found her a sensible woman—remarkably bright for one of her
years.”</p>
<p>“Aye, an’ I’m grantun’ all thot you say,”
she went on calmly. “But I am no referrun’ tull thot.
I am referrun’ tull her wucked-headed an’ vucious stubbornness.
No more stubborn woman ever luv’d than Margaret Henan. Ut
was all on account o’ Samuel, which was the name o’ her
youngest an’ they do say her favourut brother—hum oz died
by hus own hond all through the munuster’s mustake un no registerun’
the new church ot Dublin. Ut was a lesson thot the name was musfortunate,
but she would no take ut, an’ there was talk when she called her
first child Samuel—hum thot died o’ the croup. An’
wuth thot what does she do but call the next one Samuel, an’ hum
only three when he fell un tull the tub o’ hot watter an’
was plain cooked tull death. Ut all come, I tell you, o’
her wucked-headed an’ foolush stubbornness. For a Samuel
she must hov; an’ ut was the death of the four of her sons.
After the first, dudna her own mother go down un the dirt tull her feet,
a-beggun’ an’ pleadun’ wuth her no tull name her next
one Samuel? But she was no tull be turned from her purpose.
Margaret Henan was always set on her ways, an’ never more so thon
on thot name Samuel.</p>
<p>“She was fair lunatuc on Samuel. Dudna her neighbours’
an’ all kuth an’ kun savun’ them thot luv’d
un the house wuth her, get up an’ walk out ot the christenun’
of the second—hum thot was cooked? Thot they dud, an’
ot the very moment the munuster asked what would the bairn’s name
be. ‘Samuel,’ says she; an’ wuth thot they got
up an’ walked out an’ left the house. An’ ot
the door dudna her Aunt Fannie, her mother’s suster, turn an’
say loud for all tull hear: ‘What for wull she be wantun’
tull murder the wee thing?’ The munuster heard fine, an’
dudna like ut, but, oz he told my Larry afterward, what could he do?
Ut was the woman’s wush, an’ there was no law again’
a mother callun’ her child accordun’ tull her wush.</p>
<p>“An’ then was there no the third Samuel? An’
when he was lost ot sea off the Cape, dudna she break all laws o’
nature tull hov a fourth? She was forty-seven, I’m tellun’
ye, an’ she hod a child ot forty-seven. Thunk on ut!
Ot forty-seven! Ut was fair scand’lous.”</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>From Clara, next morning, I got the tale of Margaret Henan’s
favourite brother; and from here and there, in the week that followed,
I pieced together the tragedy of Margaret Henan. Samuel Dundee
had been the youngest of Margaret’s four brothers, and, as Clara
told me, she had well-nigh worshipped him. He was going to sea
at the time, skipper of one of the sailing ships of the Bank Line, when
he married Agnes Hewitt. She was described as a slender wisp of
a girl, delicately featured and with a nervous organization of the supersensitive
order. Theirs had been the first marriage in the “new”
church, and after a two-weeks’ honeymoon Samuel had kissed his
bride good-bye and sailed in command of the <i>Loughbank</i>, a big
four-masted barque.</p>
<p>And it was because of the “new” church that the minister’s
blunder occurred. Nor was it the blunder of the minister alone,
as one of the elders later explained; for it was equally the blunder
of the whole Presbytery of Coughleen, which included fifteen churches
on Island McGill and the mainland. The old church, beyond repair,
had been torn down and the new one built on the original foundation.
Looking upon the foundation-stones as similar to a ship’s keel,
it never entered the minister’s nor the Presbytery’s head
that the new church was legally any other than the old church.</p>
<p>“An’ three couples was married the first week un the
new church,” Clara said. “First of all, Samuel Dundee
an’ Agnes Hewitt; the next day Albert Mahan an’ Minnie Duncan;
an’ by the week-end Eddie Troy and Flo Mackintosh—all sailor-men,
an’ un sux weeks’ time the last of them back tull their
ships an’ awa’, an’ no one o’ them dreamin’
of the wuckedness they’d been ot.”</p>
<p>The Imp of the Perverse must have chuckled at the situation.
All things favoured. The marriages had taken place in the first
week of May, and it was not till three months later that the minister,
as required by law, made his quarterly report to the civil authorities
in Dublin. Promptly came back the announcement that his church
had no legal existence, not being registered according to the law’s
demands. This was overcome by prompt registration; but the marriages
were not to be so easily remedied. The three sailor husbands were
away, and their wives, in short, were not their wives.</p>
<p>“But the munuster was no for alarmin’ the bodies,”
said Clara. “He kept hus council an’ bided hus time,
waitun’ for the lods tull be back from sea. Oz luck would
have ut, he was away across the island tull a christenun’ when
Albert Mahan arrives home onexpected, hus shup just docked ot Dublin.
Ut’s nine o’clock ot night when the munuster, un hus sluppers
an’ dressun’-gown, gets the news. Up he jumps an’
calls for horse an’ saddle, an’ awa’ he goes like
the wund for Albert Mahan’s. Albert uz just goun’
tull bed an’ hoz one shoe off when the munuster arrives.</p>
<p>“‘Come wuth me, the pair o’ ye,’ says he,
breathless-like. ‘What for, an’ me dead weary an’
goun’ tull bed?’ says Albert. ‘Yull be lawful
married,’ says the munuster. Albert looks black an’
says, ‘Now, munuster, ye wull be jokun’,’ but tull
humself, oz I’ve heard hum tell mony a time, he uz wonderun’
thot the munuster should a-took tull whusky ot hus time o’ life.</p>
<p>“’We be no married?’ says Minnie. He shook
his head. ‘An’ I om no Mussus Mahan?’
‘No,’ says he, ‘ye are no Mussus Mahan. Ye are
plain Muss Duncan.’ ‘But ye married ’us yoursel’,’
says she. ‘I dud an’ I dudna,’ says he.
An’ wuth thot he tells them the whole upshot, an’ Albert
puts on hus shoe, an’ they go wuth the munuster an’ are
married proper an’ lawful, an’ oz Albert Mahan says afterward
mony’s the time, ‘’Tus no every mon thot hoz two weddun’
nights on Island McGill.’”</p>
<p>Six months later Eddie Troy came home and was promptly remarried.
But Samuel Dundee was away on a three-years’ voyage and his ship
fell overdue. Further to complicate the situation, a baby boy,
past two years old, was waiting for him in the arms of his wife.
The months passed, and the wife grew thin with worrying. “Ut’s
no meself I’m thunkun’ on,” she is reported to have
said many times, “but ut’s the puir fatherless bairn.
Uf aught happened tull Samuel where wull the bairn stond?”</p>
<p>Lloyd’s posted the <i>Loughbank</i> as missing, and the owners
ceased the monthly remittance of Samuel’s half-pay to his wife.
It was the question of the child’s legitimacy that preyed on her
mind, and, when all hope of Samuel’s return was abandoned, she
drowned herself and the child in the loch. And here enters the
greater tragedy. The <i>Loughbank</i> was not lost. By a
series of sea disasters and delays too interminable to relate, she had
made one of those long, unsighted passages such as occur once or twice
in half a century. How the Imp must have held both his sides!
Back from the sea came Samuel, and when they broke the news to him something
else broke somewhere in his heart or head. Next morning they found
him where he had tried to kill himself across the grave of his wife
and child. Never in the history of Island McGill was there so
fearful a death-bed. He spat in the minister’s face and
reviled him, and died blaspheming so terribly that those that tended
on him did so with averted gaze and trembling hands.</p>
<p>And, in the face of all this, Margaret Henan named her first child
Samuel.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>How account for the woman’s stubbornness? Or was it a
morbid obsession that demanded a child of hers should be named Samuel?
Her third child was a girl, named after herself, and the fourth was
a boy again. Despite the strokes of fate that had already bereft
her, and despite the loss of friends and relatives, she persisted in
her resolve to name the child after her brother. She was shunned
at church by those who had grown up with her. Her mother, after
a final appeal, left her house with the warning that if the child were
so named she would never speak to her again. And though the old
lady lived thirty-odd years longer she kept her word. The minister
agreed to christen the child any name but Samuel, and every other minister
on Island McGill refused to christen it by the name she had chosen.
There was talk on the part of Margaret Henan of going to law at the
time, but in the end she carried the child to Belfast and there had
it christened Samuel.</p>
<p>And then nothing happened. The whole island was confuted.
The boy grew and prospered. The schoolmaster never ceased averring
that it was the brightest lad he had ever seen. Samuel had a splendid
constitution, a tremendous grip on life. To everybody’s
amazement he escaped the usual run of childish afflictions. Measles,
whooping-cough and mumps knew him not. He was armour-clad against
germs, immune to all disease. Headaches and earaches were things
unknown. “Never so much oz a boil or a pumple,” as
one of the old bodies told me, ever marred his healthy skin. He
broke school records in scholarship and athletics, and whipped every
boy of his size or years on Island McGill.</p>
<p>It was a triumph for Margaret Henan. This paragon was hers,
and it bore the cherished name. With the one exception of her
mother, friends and relatives drifted back and acknowledged that they
had been mistaken; though there were old crones who still abided by
their opinion and who shook their heads ominously over their cups of
tea. The boy was too wonderful to last. There was no escaping
the curse of the name his mother had wickedly laid upon him. The
young generation joined Margaret Henan in laughing at them, but the
old crones continued to shake their heads.</p>
<p>Other children followed. Margaret Henan’s fifth was a
boy, whom she called Jamie, and in rapid succession followed three girls,
Alice, Sara, and Nora, the boy Timothy, and two more girls, Florence
and Katie. Katie was the last and eleventh, and Margaret Henan,
at thirty-five, ceased from her exertions. She had done well by
Island McGill and the Queen. Nine healthy children were hers.
All prospered. It seemed her ill-luck had shot its bolt with the
deaths of her first two. Nine lived, and one of them was named
Samuel.</p>
<p>Jamie elected to follow the sea, though it was not so much a matter
of election as compulsion, for the eldest sons on Island McGill remained
on the land, while all other sons went to the salt-ploughing.
Timothy followed Jamie, and by the time the latter had got his first
command, a steamer in the Bay trade out of Cardiff, Timothy was mate
of a big sailing ship. Samuel, however, did not take kindly to
the soil. The farmer’s life had no attraction for him.
His brothers went to sea, not out of desire, but because it was the
only way for them to gain their bread; and he, who had no need to go,
envied them when, returned from far voyages, they sat by the kitchen
fire, and told their bold tales of the wonderlands beyond the sea-rim.</p>
<p>Samuel became a teacher, much to his father’s disgust, and
even took extra certificates, going to Belfast for his examinations.
When the old master retired, Samuel took over his school. Secretly,
however, he studied navigation, and it was Margaret’s delight
when he sat by the kitchen fire, and, despite their master’s tickets,
tangled up his brothers in the theoretics of their profession.
Tom Henan alone was outraged when Samuel, school teacher, gentleman,
and heir to the Henan farm, shipped to sea before the mast. Margaret
had an abiding faith in her son’s star, and whatever he did she
was sure was for the best. Like everything else connected with
his glorious personality, there had never been known so swift a rise
as in the case of Samuel. Barely with two years’ sea experience
before the mast, he was taken from the forecastle and made a provisional
second mate. This occurred in a fever port on the West Coast,
and the committee of skippers that examined him agreed that he knew
more of the science of navigation than they had remembered or forgotten.
Two years later he sailed from Liverpool, mate of the <i>Starry Grace</i>,
with both master’s and extra-master’s tickets in his possession.
And then it happened—the thing the old crones had been shaking
their heads over for years.</p>
<p>It was told me by Gavin McNab, bos’n of the <i>Starry Grace</i>
at the time, himself an Island McGill man.</p>
<p>“Wull do I remember ut,” he said. “We was
runnin’ our Eastun’ down, an’ makun’ heavy weather
of ut. Oz fine a sailor-mon oz ever walked was Samuel Henan.
I remember the look of hum wull thot last marnun’, a-watch-un’
them bug seas curlun’ up astern, an’ a-watchun’ the
old girl an’ seeun’ how she took them—the skupper
down below an’ drunkun’ for days. Ut was ot seven
thot Henan brought her up on tull the wund, not darun’ tull run
longer on thot fearful sea. Ot eight, after havun’ breakfast,
he turns un, an’ a half hour after up comes the skupper, bleary-eyed
an’ shaky an’ holdun’ on tull the companion.
Ut was fair smokun’, I om tellun’ ye, an’ there he
stood, blunkun’ an’ noddun’ an’ talkun’
tull humsel’. ‘Keep off,’ says he ot last tull
the mon ot the wheel. ‘My God!’ says the second mate,
standun’ beside hum. The skupper never looks tull hum ot
all, but keeps on mutterun” an’ jabberun’ tull humsel’.
All of a suddent-like he straightens up an’ throws hus head back,
an’ says: ‘Put your wheel over, me mon—now domn ye!
Are ye deef thot ye’ll no be hearun’ me?’</p>
<p>“Ut was a drunken mon’s luck, for the <i>Starry Grace</i>
wore off afore thot God-Almighty gale wuthout shuppun’ a bucket
o’ watter, the second mate shoutun’ orders an’ the
crew jumpun’ like mod. An’ wuth thot the skupper nods
contented-like tull humself an’ goes below after more whusky.
Ut was plain murder o’ the lives o’ all of us, for ut was
no the time for the buggest shup afloat tull be runnun’.
Run? Never hov I seen the like! Ut was beyond all thunkun’,
an’ me goun’ tull sea, boy an’ men, for forty year.
I tell you ut was fair awesome.</p>
<p>“The face o’ the second mate was white oz death, an’
he stood ut alone for half an hour, when ut was too much for hum an’
he went below an’ called Samuel an’ the third. Aye,
a fine sailor-mon thot Samuel, but ut was too much for hum. He
looked an’ studied, and looked an’ studied, but he could
no see hus way. He durst na heave tull. She would ha’
been sweeput o’ all honds an’ stucks an’ everythung
afore she could a-fetched up. There was naught tull do but keep
on runnun’. An’ uf ut worsened we were lost ony way,
for soon or late that overtakun’ sea was sure tull sweep us clear
over poop an’ all.</p>
<p>“Dud I say ut was a God-Almighty gale? Ut was worse nor
thot. The devil himself must ha’ hod a hond un the brewun’
o’ ut, ut was thot fearsome. I ha’ looked on some
sights, but I om no carun’ tull look on the like o’ thot
again. No mon dared tull be un hus bunk. No, nor no mon
on the decks. All honds of us stood on top the house an’
held on an’ watched. The three mates was on the poop, with
two men ot the wheel, an’ the only mon below was thot whusky-blighted
captain snorun’ drunk.</p>
<p>“An’ then I see ut comun’, a mile away, risun’
above all the waves like an island un the sea—the buggest wave
ever I looked upon. The three mates stood tulgether an’
watched ut comun’, a-prayun’ like we thot she would no break
un passun’ us. But ut was no tull be. Ot the last,
when she rose up like a mountain, curlun’ above the stern an’
blottun’ out the sky, the mates scattered, the second an’
third runnun’ for the mizzen-shrouds an’ climbun’
up, but the first runnun’ tull the wheel tull lend a hond.
He was a brave men, thot Samuel Henan. He run straight un tull
the face o’ thot father o’ all waves, no thunkun’
on humself but thunkun’ only o’ the shup. The two
men was lashed tull the wheel, but he would be ready tull hond un the
case they was kult. An’ then she took ut. We on the
house could no see the poop for the thousand tons o’ watter thot
hod hut ut. Thot wave cleaned them out, took everythung along
wuth ut—the two mates, climbun’ up the mizzen-ruggun’,
Samuel Henan runnun’ tull the wheel, the two men ot the wheel,
aye, an’ the wheel utself. We never saw aught o’ them,
for she broached tull what o’ the wheel goun’, an’
two men o’ us was drownded off the house, no tull mention the
carpenter thot we pucked up ot the break o’ the poop wuth every
bone o’ hus body broke tull he was like so much jelly.”</p>
<p>And here enters the marvel of it, the miraculous wonder of that woman’s
heroic spirit. Margaret Henan was forty-seven when the news came
home of the loss of Samuel; and it was not long after that the unbelievable
rumour went around Island McGill. I say unbelievable. Island
McGill would not believe. Doctor Hall pooh-pooh’d it.
Everybody laughed at it as a good joke. They traced back the gossip
to Sara Dack, servant to the Henans’, and who alone lived with
Margaret and her husband. But Sara Dack persisted in her assertion
and was called a low-mouthed liar. One or two dared question Tom
Henan himself, but beyond black looks and curses for their presumption
they elicited nothing from him.</p>
<p>The rumour died down, and the island fell to discussing in all its
ramifications the loss of the <i>Grenoble</i> in the China seas, with
all her officers and half her crew born and married on Island McGill.
But the rumour would not stay down. Sara Dack was louder in her
assertions, the looks Tom Henan cast about him were blacker than ever,
and Dr. Hall, after a visit to the Henan house, no longer pooh-pooh’d.
Then Island McGill sat up, and there was a tremendous wagging of tongues.
It was unnatural and ungodly. The like had never been heard.
And when, as time passed, the truth of Sara Dack’s utterances
was manifest, the island folk decided, like the bos’n of the <i>Starry
Grace</i>, that only the devil could have had a hand in so untoward
a happening. And the infatuated woman, so Sara Dack reported,
insisted that it would be a boy. “Eleven bairns ha’
I borne,” she said; “sux o’ them lossies an’
five o’ them loddies. An’ sunce there be balance un
all thungs, so wull there be balance wuth me. Sux o’ one
an’ half a dozen o’ the other—there uz the balance,
an’ oz sure oz the sun rises un the marnun’, thot sure wull
ut be a boy.”</p>
<p>And boy it was, and a prodigy. Dr. Hall raved about its unblemished
perfection and massive strength, and wrote a brochure on it for the
Dublin Medical Society as the most interesting case of the sort in his
long career. When Sara Dack gave the babe’s unbelievable
weight, Island McGill refused to believe and once again called her liar.
But when Doctor Hall attested that he had himself weighed it and seen
it tip that very notch, Island McGill held its breath and accepted whatever
report Sara Dack made of the infant’s progress or appetite.
And once again Margaret Henan carried a babe to Belfast and had it christened
Samuel.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>“Oz good oz gold ut was,” said Sara Dack to me.</p>
<p>Sara, at the time I met her, was a buxom, phlegmatic spinster of
sixty, equipped with an experience so tragic and unusual that though
her tongue ran on for decades its output would still be of imperishable
interest to her cronies.</p>
<p>“Oz good oz good,” said Sara Dack. “Ut never
fretted. Sut ut down un the sun by the hour an’ never a
sound ut would make oz long oz ut was no hungered! An’ thot
strong! The grup o’ uts honds was like a mon’s.
I mind me, when ut was but hours old, ut grupped me so mighty thot I
fetched a scream I was thot frightened. Ut was the punk o’
health. Ut slept an’ ate, an’ grew. Ut never
bothered. Never a night’s sleep ut lost tull no one, nor
ever a munut’s, an’ thot wuth cuttin’ uts teeth an’
all. An’ Margaret would dandle ut on her knee an’
ask was there ever so fine a loddie un the three Kungdoms.</p>
<p>“The way ut grew! Ut was un keepun’ wuth the way
ut ate. Ot a year ut was the size o’ a bairn of two.
Ut was slow tull walk an’ talk. Exceptun’ for gurgly
noises un uts throat an’ for creepun’ on all fours, ut dudna
monage much un the walkun’ an’ talkun’ line.
But thot was tull be expected from the way ut grew. Ut all went
tull growun’ strong an’ healthy. An’ even old
Tom Henan cheered up ot the might of ut an’ said was there ever
the like o’ ut un the three Kungdoms. Ut was Doctor Hall
thot first suspicioned, I mind me well, though ut was luttle I dreamt
what he was up tull ot the time. I seehum holdun’ thungs’
un fronto’ luttle Sammy’s eyes, an’ a-makun’
noises, loud an’ soft, an’ far an’ near, un luttle
Sammy’s ears. An’ then I see Doctor Hall go away,
wrunklun’ hus eyebrows an’ shakun’ hus head like the
bairn was ailun’. But he was no ailun’, oz I could
swear tull, me a-seeun’ hum eat an’ grow. But Doctor
Hall no said a word tull Margaret an’ I was no for guessun’
the why he was sore puzzled.</p>
<p>“I mind me when luttle Sammy first spoke. He was two
years old an’ the size of a child o five, though he could no monage
the walkun’ yet but went around on all fours, happy an’
contented-like an’ makun’ no trouble oz long oz he was fed
promptly, which was onusual often. I was hangun’ the wash
on the line ot the time when out he comes, on all fours, hus bug head
waggun’ tull an’ fro an’ blunkun’ un the sun.
An’ then, suddent, he talked. I was thot took a-back I near
died o’ fright, an’ fine I knew ut then, the shakun’
o’ Doctor Hall’s head. Talked? Never a bairn
on Island McGill talked so loud an’ tull such purpose. There
was no mustakun’ ut. I stood there all tremblun’ an’
shakun’. Little Sammy was brayun’. I tell you,
sir, he was brayun’ like an ass—just like thot,—loud
an’ long an’ cheerful tull ut seemed hus lungs ud crack.</p>
<p>“He was a eediot—a great, awful, monster eediot.
Ut was after he talked thot Doctor Hall told Margaret, but she would
no believe. Ut would all come right, she said. Ut was growun’
too fast for aught else. Guv ut time, said she, an’ we would
see. But old Tom Henan knew, an’ he never held up hus head
again. He could no abide the thung, an’ would no brung humsel’
tull touch ut, though I om no denyun’ he was fair fascinated by
ut. Mony the time, I see hum watchun’ of ut around a corner,
lookun’ ot ut tull hus eyes fair bulged wuth the horror; an’
when ut brayed old Tom ud stuck hus fungers tull hus ears an’
look thot miserable I could a-puttied hum.</p>
<p>“An’ bray ut could! Ut was the only thung ut could
do besides eat an’ grow. Whenever ut was hungry ut brayed,
an’ there was no stoppun’ ut save wuth food. An’
always of a marnun’, when first ut crawled tull the kutchen-door
an’ blunked out ot the sun, ut brayed. An’ ut was
brayun’ that brought about uts end.</p>
<p>“I mind me well. Ut was three years old an’ oz
bug oz a led o’ ten. Old Tom hed been goun’ from bed
tull worse, ploughun’ up an’ down the fields an’ talkun’
an’ mutterun’ tull humself. On the marnun’ o’
the day I mind me, he was suttun’ on the bench outside the kutchen,
a-futtun’ the handle tull a puck-axe. Unbeknown, the monster
eediot crawled tull the door an’ brayed after hus fashion ot the
sun. I see old Tom start up an’ look. An’ there
was the monster eediot, waggun’ uts bug head an’ blunkun’
an’ brayun’ like the great bug ass ut was. Ut was
too much for Tom. Somethun’ went wrong wuth hum suddent-like.
He jumped tull hus feet an’ fetched the puck-handle down on the
monster eediot’s head. An’ he hut ut again an’
again like ut was a mod dog an’ hum afeard o’ ut.
An’ he went straight tull the stable an’ hung humsel’
tull a rafter. An’ I was no for stoppun’ on after
such-like, an’ I went tull stay along wuth me suster thot was
married tull John Martin an’ comfortable-off.”</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>I sat on the bench by the kitchen door and regarded Margaret Henan,
while with her callous thumb she pressed down the live fire of her pipe
and gazed out across the twilight-sombred fields. It was the very
bench Tom Henan had sat upon that last sanguinary day of life.
And Margaret sat in the doorway where the monster, blinking at the sun,
had so often wagged its head and brayed. We had been talking for
an hour, she with that slow certitude of eternity that so befitted her;
and, for the life of me, I could lay no finger on the motives that ran
through the tangled warp and woof of her. Was she a martyr to
Truth? Did she have it in her to worship at so abstract a shrine?
Had she conceived Abstract Truth to be the one high goal of human endeavour
on that day of long ago when she named her first-born Samuel?
Or was hers the stubborn obstinacy of the ox? the fixity of purpose
of the balky horse? the stolidity of the self-willed peasant-mind?
Was it whim or fancy?—the one streak of lunacy in what was otherwise
an eminently rational mind? Or, reverting, was hers the spirit
of a Bruno? Was she convinced of the intellectual rightness of
the stand she had taken? Was hers a steady, enlightened opposition
to superstition? or—and a subtler thought—was she mastered
by some vaster, profounder superstition, a fetish-worship of which the
Alpha and the Omega was the cryptic <i>Samuel</i>?</p>
<p>“Wull ye be tellun’ me,” she said, “thot
uf the second Samuel hod been named Larry thot he would no hov fell
un the hot watter an’ drownded? Atween you an’ me,
sir, an’ ye are untellugent-lookun’ tull the eye, would
the name hov made ut onyways dufferent? Would the washun’
no be done thot day uf he hod been Larry or Michael? Would hot
watter no be hot, an’ would hot watter no burn uf he hod hod ony
other name but Samuel?”</p>
<p>I acknowledged the justice of her contention, and she went on.</p>
<p>“Do a wee but of a name change the plans o’ God?
Do the world run by hut or muss, an’ be God a weak, shully-shallyun’
creature thot ud alter the fate an’ destiny o’ thungs because
the worm Margaret Henan seen fut tull name her bairn Samuel? There
be my son Jamie. He wull no sign a Rooshan-Funn un hus crew because
o’ believun’ thot Rooshan-Funns do be monajun’ the
wunds an’ hov the makun’ o’ bod weather. Wull
you be thunkun’ so? Wull you be thunkun’ thot God
thot makes the wunds tull blow wull bend Hus head from on high tull
lussen tull the word o’ a greasy Rooshan-Funn un some dirty shup’s
fo’c’sle?”</p>
<p>I said no, certainly not; but she was not to be set aside from pressing
home the point of her argument.</p>
<p>“Then wull you be thunkun’ thot God thot directs the
stars un their courses, an’ tull whose mighty foot the world uz
but a footstool, wull you be thunkun’ thot He wull take a spite
again’ Margaret Henan an’ send a bug wave off the Cape tull
wash her son un tull eternity, all because she was for namun’
hum Samuel?”</p>
<p>“But why Samuel?” I asked.</p>
<p>“An’ thot I dinna know. I wantud ut so.”</p>
<p>“But <i>why</i> did you want it so?”</p>
<p>“An’ uz ut me thot would be answerun’ a such-like
question? Be there ony mon luvun’ or dead thot can answer?
Who can tell the <i>why</i> o’ like? My Jamie was fair daft
on buttermilk, he would drunk ut tull, oz he said humself, hus back
teeth was awash. But my Tumothy could no abide buttermilk.
I like tull lussen tull the thunder growlun’ an’ roarun’,
an’ rampajun’. My Katie could no abide the noise of
ut, but must scream an’ flutter an’ go runnun’ for
the mudmost o’ a feather-bed. Never yet hov I heard the
answer tull the <i>why</i> o’ like, God alone hoz thot answer.
You an’ me be mortal an’ we canna know. Enough for
us tull know what we like an’ what we duslike. I <i>like</i>—thot
uz the first word an’ the last. An’ behind thot like
no men can go an’ find the <i>why</i> o’ ut. I <i>like</i>
Samuel, an’ I like ut well. Ut uz a sweet name, an’
there be a rollun’ wonder un the sound o’ ut thot passes
onderstandun’.”</p>
<p>The twilight deepened, and in the silence I gazed upon that splendid
dome of a forehead which time could not mar, at the width between the
eyes, and at the eyes themselves—clear, out-looking, and wide-seeing.
She rose to her feet with an air of dismissing me, saying—</p>
<p>“Ut wull be a dark walk home, an’ there wull be more
thon a sprunkle o’ wet un the sky.”</p>
<p>“Have you any regrets, Margaret Henan?” I asked, suddenly
and without forethought.</p>
<p>She studied me a moment.</p>
<p>“Aye, thot I no ha’ borne another son.”</p>
<p>“And you would . . .?” I faltered.</p>
<p>“Aye, thot I would,” she answered. “Ut would
ha’ been hus name.”</p>
<p>I went down the dark road between the hawthorn hedges puzzling over
the why of like, repeating <i>Samuel</i> to myself and aloud and listening
to the rolling wonder in its sound that had charmed her soul and led
her life in tragic places. <i>Samuel</i>! There was a rolling
wonder in the sound. Aye, there was!</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
<p>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE STRENGTH OF THE STRONG ***</p>
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