In Dubious Battle

by John Steinbeck

  When the grey old tents were pitched Burton insisted that the canvas be scrubbed with soap and water. Dakin's truck brought barrels of water from Anderson's tank. The women washed the tents with old brooms.

  Anderson walked out and watched with worried eyes while his five acres was transformed into a camp. By noon it was ready; and nine hundred men went to work in the orchard, picking apples into their cooking kettles, into their hats, into gunny sacks. There were not nearly ladders enough. The men climbed up the trunks into the trees. By dark the crop was picked, the lines of boxes filled, the boxes trucked to Anderson's barn and stored.

  Dick had worked quickly. He sent a boy to ask for men and a truck to meet him in town, and the truck came back loaded with tents of all kinds--umbrella tents of pale brown canvas, pup-tents, low and peaked, big troop tents with room in them for ten men. And the truck brought two sacks of rolled oats and sacks of flour, cases of canned goods, sacks of potatoes and onions and a slaughtered cow.

  The new tents went up along the streets. Dr. Burton superintended the cooking arrangements. Trucks went out to the city dump and brought back three rusty, discarded stoves. Pieces of tin covered the gaping tops. Cooks were assigned, washtubs filled with water, the cow cut up and potatoes and onions set to cooking in tremendous stews. Buckets of beans were boiled. In the dusk, when the picking was over, the men came in and found tubs of stew waiting for them. They sat on the ground and ate from basins and cups and tin cans.

  As darkness fell, the motorcycle police were relieved by five deputy sheriffs armed with rifles. For a time they marched up and down the road in military manner, but finally they sat in the ditch and watched the men. There were few lights in the camp. Here and there a tent was lighted with a lantern. The flares of little fires threw shadows. At one end of the first street, so pitched that it was directly behind his shining green truck, stood Dakin's tent--a large, patented affair with a canvas wall in the middle, making two rooms. His folding table and chairs were set up. A ground cloth lay on the floor, and from the center pole a hissing gasoline lantern hung. Dakin lived in style and traveled in luxury. He had no vices; every cent he or his wife made went to his living, to his truck, to providing new equipment for his camp.

  When it was dark, London and Mac and Jim strolled to the tent and went in. With Dakin in the tent sat Burke, a lowering, sullen Irishman, and two short Italian men who looked very much alike. Mrs. Dakin had retired to the other side of the partition. Under the white light of the gasoline lamp Dakin's pink scalp showed through his blond hair. His secret eyes moved restlessly about. "Hello, boys, find some place to sit."

  London chose a chair, the only one left. Mac and Jim squatted on the ground; Mac brought out his Durham bag and made a cigarette. "Things seem to be goin' O.K.," he observed.

  Dakin's eyes flicked to him, and then away. "Yeah, they seem to be all right."

  "They got those cops here quick," said Burke. "I'd like to take a poke at a few of 'em."

  Dakin reproved him calmly. "Let cops alone till you can't no more. They ain't hurtin' a thing."

  Mac asked, "How the squads shapin'?"

  "All right. They all elected their chiefs. Some of 'em kicked out the chief and elected new ones already. Say, that Doc Burton is a swell guy."

  "Yeah," Mac said. "He's O.K. Wonder where he's at? You better have one of the squads watch out for him. When we get started, they'll try to get him out of here. If they can get him out, they can clear us out. 'Danger to public health,' they call it."

  Dakin turned to Burke. "Fix that up now, will you, Burke? Tell a good bunch to keep care o' Doc. The guys like him." Burke got up and went out of the tent.

  London said, "Tell 'im what you told me, Mac."

  "Well, the guys think this is a kind of a picnic, Dakin. Tomorrow morning the picnic's over. The fun begins."

  "Scabs?"

  "Yep, a train-load. I got a kid in town. He goes to the telegraph office for me. Got a wire tonight. A freight train-load of scabs is startin' out from the city today. Ought to be in some time in the mornin'."

  "Well," said Dakin. "Guess we better meet that train an' have a talk with the new guys. Might do some good, before they all get scattered."

  "That's what I thought," said Mac. "I've saw the time when a whole slough of scabs come over if you just told 'em how things was."

  "We'll tell 'em, all right."

  "Listen," said Mac. "The cops'll try to head us off. Couldn't we let the guys kind of sneak off through the trees just before daylight, and leave them cops holding the bag here?"

  For a second Dakin's cold eyes twinkled. "Think that'd work, you guys?" They laughed delightedly. Dakin went on, "Well, go out an' tell the men about it."

  Mac said, "Wait a minute, Dakin. If you tell the guys tonight, it won't be no secret."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, you don't think we ain't got stools in the camp, do you? I bet there's at least five under cover, besides the guys that'd spill anything and hope to get a buck out of it. Hell, it's always that way. Don't tell 'em nothing till you're ready to start."

  "Don't trust the guys, huh?"

  "Well, if you want to take the chance, go ahead. I bet you find the cops comin' right along with us."

  Dakin asked, "What do you guys think?"

  "I guess he's right," said one of the little Italian men.

  "O.K. Now we got to leave a bunch to take care of the camp."

  "At least a hundred," Mac agreed. "If we leave the camp, they'll burn 'er, sure as hell."

  "The boys sure got Anderson's crop down quick."

  "Yeah," said Dakin. "There's two or three hundred of 'em out in the orchard next door right now. Anderson's goin' to have a bigger crop than he thought."

  "I hope they don't cause trouble yet," Mac said. "There'll be plenty later on."

  "How many scabs comin'? Did you find out?"

  "Somewheres between four and five hundred tomorrow. Be more later, I guess. Be sure an' tell the guys to take plenty of rocks in their pockets."

  "I'll tell 'em."

  Burke came back in. He said, "The Doc's goin' to sleep in one of them big army tents. There'll be ten guys sleepin' in the same tent with him."

  "Were's Doc at now?" Mac asked.

  "He's dug up a couple of ringworms on a guy. He's fixin' 'im over by the stoves."

  At that moment a chorus of yells broke out in the camp, and then a high, angry voice shouting. The six men ran out of the tent. The noise came from a group of men standing in front of the camp street that faced the road. Dakin pushed his way in among the men. "What th' hell's the matter here?"

  The angry voice answered, "I'll tell you. Your men started throwin' rocks. I'm tellin' you now if there's any more rocks we're goin' to start shootin', an' we don't care who we hit."

  Mac turned to Jim, standing beside him. He said softly, "I wish they would start shooting. This bunch of mugs is going to pieces, maybe, if something dirty doesn't happen pretty soon. They're feeling too good. They'll start fighting themselves."

  London walked fiercely into the crowd of men. "You guys get back," he cried. "You got enough to do without no kid tricks. Go on, now, get back where you belong." The authority of the man drove them sullenly back, but they dispersed reluctantly.

  The deputy shouted, "You keep those guys in order or we'll do it with Winchesters."

  Dakin said coldly, "You can pull in your neck and go back to sleep."

  Mac muttered to Jim, "Those cops are scared as hell. That makes 'em dangerous. Just like rattlesnakes when they're scared: they'll shoot at anything."

  The crowd had moved away now and the men were scattering to their tents. Mac said, "Let's go have a look at Doc, Jim. Come on over by the stoves." They found Dr. Burton sitting on a box, bandaging a man's arm. A kerosene lantern shed a thin yellow light on his work and illumined a small circle on the ground. He stuck down the bandage with adhesive.

  "There you are," he said. "Next time don't let it get so sore. You'
ll lose an arm some day, if you do."

  The man said, "Thanks, Doc," and went away, rolling down his sleeve.

  "Hello, Mac. Hello, Jim. I guess I'm finished."

  "Was that the ringworm?"

  "No, just a little cut, and a nice infection started. They won't learn to take care of cuts."

  Mac said, "If Doc could only find a case of small-pox now and set up a quarantine ward, he'd be perfectly happy. What're you going to do now, Doc?"

  The sad brown eyes looked tiredly up at Mac. "Well, I think I'm all through. I ought to go and see whether the squad disinfected the toilets the way I told them."

  "They smell disinfected," Mac said. "Why don't you get some sleep, Doc? You didn't have any last night."

  "Well, I'm tired, but I don't feel sleepy. For the last hour I've thought when I was through I might walk out into the orchard and sit down against a tree and rest."

  "Mind company?"

  "No. I'd like to have you." Burton stood up. "Wait till I wash my hands." He scrubbed his hands in a pan of warm water and covered them with green soap and rinsed them. "Let's stroll, then," he said.

  The three walked slowly away from the tent streets and toward the dark orchard. Their feet crunched softly on the crisp little clods of the plowed ground.

  "Mac," Burton said wearily. "You're a mystery to me. You imitate any speech you're taking part in. When you're with London and Dakin you talk the way they do. You're an actor."

  "No," said Mac. "I'm not an actor at all. Speech has a kind of a feel about it. I get the feel, and it comes out, perfectly naturally. I don't try to do it. I don't think I could help doing it. You know, Doc, men are suspicious of a man who doesn't talk their way. You can insult a man pretty badly by using a word he doesn't understand. Maybe he won't say anything, but he'll hate you for it. It's not the same thing in your case, Doc. You're supposed to be different. They wouldn't trust you if you weren't."

  They entered the arches under the trees, and the leaf clusters and the limbs were dark against the sky. The little murmuring noise of the camp was lost. A barn-owl, screeching overhead with a ripping sound, startled the men.

  "That's an owl, Jim," Mac explained. "He's hunting mice." And then to Burton, "Jim's never been in the country much. The things we know are new to him. Let's sit down here."

  Mac and the doctor sat on the ground and leaned against the big trunk of an old apple tree. Jim sat in front of them, folding his legs before him. The night was still. Above, the black leaves hung motionless in the quiet air.

  Mac spoke softly, for the night seemed to be listening. "You're a mystery to me, too, Doc."

  "Me? A mystery?"

  "Yes, you. You're not a Party man, but you work with us all the time; you never get anything for it. I don't know whether you believe in what we're doing or not, you never say, you just work. I've been out with you before, and I'm not sure you believe in the cause at all."

  Dr. Burton laughed softly. "It would be hard to say. I could tell you some of the things I think; you might not like them. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't like them."

  "Well, let's hear them, anyway."

  "Well, you say I don't believe in the cause. That's like not believing in the moon. There 've been communes before, and there will be again. But you people have an idea that if you can establish the thing, the job'll be done. Nothing stops, Mac. If you were able to put an idea into effect tomorrow, it would start changing right away. Establish a commune, and the same gradual flux will continue."

  "Then you don't think the cause is good?"

  Burton sighed. "You see? We're going to pile up on that old rock again. That's why I don't like to talk very often. Listen to me, Mac. My senses aren't above reproach, but they're all I have. I want to see the whole picture--as nearly as I can. I don't want to put on the blinders of 'good' and 'bad,' and limit my vision. If I used the term 'good' on a thing I'd lose my license to inspect it, because there might be bad in it. Don't you see? I want to be able to look at the whole thing."

  Mac broke in heatedly, "How about social injustice? The profit system? You have to say they're bad."

  Dr. Burton threw back his head and looked at the sky. "Mac," he said. "Look at the physiological injustice, the injustice of tetanus, the injustice of syphilis, the gangster methods of amoebic dysentery--that's my field.

  "Revolution and communism will cure social injustice."

  "Yes, and disinfection and prophylaxis will prevent the others."

  "It's different, though; men are doing one, and germs are doing the other."

  "I can't see much difference, Mac."

  "Well, damn it, Doc, there's lockjaw every place. You can find syphilis in Park Avenue. Why do you hang around with us if you aren't for us?"

  "I want to see," Burton said. "When you cut your finger, and streptococci get in the wound, there's a swelling and a soreness. That swelling is the fight your body puts up, the pain is the battle. You can't tell which one is going to win, but the wound is the first battleground. If the cells lose the first fight the streptococci invade, and the fight goes on up the arm. Mac, these little strikes are like the infection. Something has got into the men; a little fever had started and the lymphatic glands are shooting in reinforcements. I want to see, so I go to the seat of the wound."

  "You figure the strike is a wound?"

  "Yes. Group-men are always getting some kind of infection. This seems to be a bad one. I want to see, Mac. I want to watch these group-men, for they seem to me to be a new individual, not at all like single men. A man in a group isn't himself at all; he's a cell in an organism that isn't like him any more than the cells in your body are like you. I want to watch the group, and see what it's like. People have said, 'mobs are crazy, you can't tell what they'll do.' Why don't people look at mobs not as men, but as mobs? A mob nearly always seems to act reasonably, for a mob."

  "Well, what's this got to do with the cause?"

  "It might be like this, Mac: When group-man wants to move, he makes a standard. 'God wills that we re-capture the Holy-Land' or he says, 'We fight to make the world safe for democracy'; or he says, 'we will wipe out social injustice with communism.' But the group doesn't care about the Holy Land, or Democracy, or Communism. Maybe the group simply wants to move, to fight, and uses these words simply to reassure the brains of individual men. I say it might be like that, Mac."

  "Not with the cause, it isn't," Mac cried.

  "Maybe not, it's just the way I think of things."

  Mac said, "The trouble with you, Doc, is you're too God damn far left to be a communist. You go too far with collectivization. How do you account for people like me, directing things, moving things? That puts your group-man out."

  "You might be an effect as well as a cause, Mac. You might be an expression of group-man, a cell endowed with a special function, like an eye cell, drawing your force from group-man, and at the same time directing him, like an eye. Your eye both takes orders from and gives orders to your brain."

  "This isn't practical," Mac said disgustedly. "What's all this kind of talk got to do with hungry men, with layoffs and unemployment?"

  "It might have a great deal to do with them. It isn't a very long time since tetanus and lockjaw were not connected. There are still primitives in the world who don't know children are the result of intercourse. Yes, it might be worthwhile to know more about group-man, to know his nature, his ends, his desires. They're not the same as ours. The pleasure we get in scratching an itch causes death to a great number of cells. Maybe group-man gets pleasure when individual men are wiped out in a war. I simply want to see as much as I can, Mac, with the means I have."

  Mac stood up and brushed the seat of his pants. "If you see too darn much, you don't get anything done."

  Burton stood up too, chuckling softly. "Maybe some day--oh, let it go. I shouldn't have talked so much. But it does clarify a thought to get it spoken, even if no one listens."

  They started back over the crisp clods toward the sleeping camp
. "We can't look up at anything, Doc," Mac said. "We've got to whip a bunch of scabs in the morning."

  "Deus vult," said Burton. "Did you see those pointers of Anderson's? Beautiful dogs; they give me a sensual pleasure, almost sexual."

  A light still burned in Dakin's tent. The camp slept. Only a few coals of fire still burned in the streets. The silent line of old cars stood against the road, and in the road itself a clump of sparks waxed and waned, cigarettes of the watchful deputies.

  "D'you hear that, Jim? That'll show you what Burton is. Here's a couple of fine dogs, good hunting dogs, but they're not dogs to Doc, they're feelings. They're dogs, to me. And these guys sleeping here are men, with stomachs; but they're not men to Doc, they're a kind of a collective Colossus. If he wasn't a doctor, we couldn't have 'im around. We need his skill, but his brain just gets us into a mess."

  Burton laughed apologetically. "I don't know why I go on talking, then. You practical men always lead practical men with stomachs. And something always gets out of hand. Your men get out of hand, they don't follow the rules of common sense, and you practical men either deny that it is so, or refuse to think about it. And when someone wonders what it is that makes a man with a stomach something more than your rule allows, why you howl, 'Dreamer, mystic, metaphysician'. I don't know why I talk about it to a practical man. In all history there are no men who have come to such wild-eyed confusion and bewilderment as practical men leading men with stomachs."

  "We've a job to do," Mac insisted. "We've got no time to mess around with high-falutin' ideas."

  "Yes, and so you start your work not knowing your medium. And your ignorance trips you up every time."

  They were close to the tents now. "If you talked to other people that way," Mac said, "we'd have to kick you out."

  A dark figure arose suddenly from the ground. "Who is it?" a voice demanded; and then, "Oh, hello. I didn't know who it was coming in."