by Jack London
a baby boy. Perhaps the scab he shot in the stomach had a wife
and children. All seemed to be acquainted, members of a very
large family, and yet, because of their particular families, they
battered and killed each other. She had seen Chester Johnson kill
a scab, and now they were going to hang Chester Johnson, who had
married Kittie Brady out of the cannery, and she and Kittie Brady
had worked together years before in the paper box factory.
Vainly Saxon waked for Billy to say something that would show he
did not countenance the killing of the scabs.
"It was wrong," she ventured finally.
"They killed Bert," he countered. "An' a lot of others. An' Frank
Davis. Did you know he was dead? Had his whole lower jaw shot
away--died in the ambulance before they could get him to the
receiving hospital. There was never so much killin' at one time
in Oakland before."
"But it was their fault," she contended. "They began it. It was
murder."
Billy did not reply, but she heard him mutter hoarsely. She knew
he said "God damn them"; but when she asked, "What?" he made no
answer. His eyes were deep with troubled clouds, while the mouth
had hardened, and all his face was bleak.
To her it was a heart-stab. Was he, too, like the rest? Would he
kill other men who had families, like Bert, and Frank Davis, and
Chester Johnson had killed? Was he, too, a wild beast, a dog that
would snarl over a bone?
She sighed. Life was a strange puzzle. Perhaps Mercedes Higgins
was right in her cruel statement of the terms of existence.
"What of it," Billy laughed harshly, as if in answer to her
unuttered questions. "It's dog eat dog, I guess, and it's always
ben that way. Take that scrap outside there. They killed each
other just like the North an' South did in the Civil War."
"But workingmen can't win that way, Billy. You say yourself that
it spoiled their chance of winning."
"I suppose not," he admitted reluctantly. "But what other chance
they've got to win I don't see. Look at 'us. We'll be up against
it next."
"Not the teamsters?" she cried.
He nodded gloomily.
"The bosses are cuttin' loose all along the line for a high old
time. Say they're goin' to beat us to our knees till we come
crawlin' back a-beggin' for our jobs. They've bucked up real high
an' mighty what of all that killin' the other day. Havin' the
troops out is half the fight, along with havin' the preachers an'
the papers an' the public behind 'em. They're shootin' off their
mouths already about what they're goin' to do. They're sure
gunning for trouble. First, they're goin' to hang Chester Johnson
an' as many more of the fifteen as they can. They say that flat.
The Tribune, an' the Enquirer an' the Times keep sayin' it over
an over every day. They're all union-hustin' to beat the band. No
more closed shop. To hell with organized labor. Why, the dirty
little Intelligencer come out this morning an' said that every
union official in Oakland ought to be run outa town or stretched
up. Fine, eh? You bet it's fine.
"Look at us. It ain't a case any more of sympathetic strike for
the mill-workers. We got our own troubles. They've fired our four
best men--the ones that was always on the conference committees.
Did it without cause. They're lookin' for trouble, as I told you,
an' they'll get it, too, if they don't watch out. We got our tip
from the Frisco Water Front Confederation. With them backin' us
we'll go some."
"You mean you'll . . . strike?" Saxon asked.
He bent his head.
"But isn't that what they want you to do?--from the way they're
acting?"
"What's the difference?" Billy shrugged his shoulders, then
continued. "It's better to strike than to get fired. We beat 'em
to it, that's all, an' we catch 'em before they're ready. Don't
we know what they're doin'? They're collectin' gradin'-camp
drivers an' mule-skinners all up an' down the state. They got
forty of 'em, feedin' 'em in a hotel in Stockton right now, an'
ready to rush 'em in on us an' hundreds more like 'em. So this
Saturday's the last wages I'll likely bring home for some time."
Saxon closed her eyes and thought quietly for five minutes. It
was not her way to take things excitedly. The coolness of poise
that Billy so admired never deserted her in time of emergency.
She realized that she herself was no more than a mote caught up
in this tangled, nonunderstandable conflict of many motes.
"We'll have to draw from our savings to pay for this month's
rent," she said brightly.
Billy's face fell.
"We ain't got as much in the bank as you think," he confessed.
"Bert had to be buried, you know, an I coughed up what the others
couldn't raise."
"How much was it?"
"Forty dollars. I was goin' to stand off the butcher an' the rest
for a while. They knew I was good pay. But they put it to me
straight. They'd been carryin' the shopmen right along an was up
against it themselves. An' now with that strike smashed they're
pretty much smashed themselves. So I took it all out of the bank.
I knew you wouldn't mind. You don't, do you?"
She smiled bravely, and bravely overcame the sinking feeling at
her heart.
"It was the only right thing to do, Billy. I would have done it
if you were lying sick, and Bert would have done it for you an'
me if it had been the other way around."
His face was glowing.
"Gee, Saxon, a fellow can always count on you. You're like my
right hand. That's why I say no more babies. If I lose you I'm
crippled for life."
"We've got to economize," she mused, nodding her appreciation.
"How much is in bank?"
"Just about thirty dollars. You see, I had to pay Martha Skelton
an' for the . . . a few other little things. An' the union took
time by the neck and levied a four dollar emergency assessment on
every member just to be ready if the strike was pulled off. But
Doc Hentley can wait. He said as much. He's the goods, if anybody
should ask you. How'd you like'm?"
"I liked him. But I don't know about doctors. He's the first I
ever had--except when I was vaccinated once, and then the city
did that."
"Looks like the street car men are goin' out, too. Dan Fallon's
come to town. Came all the way from New York. Tried to sneak in
on the quiet, but the fellows knew when he left New York, an'
kept track of him all the way acrost. They have to. He's
Johnny-on-the-Spot whenever street car men are licked into shape.
He's won lots of street car strikes for the bosses. Keeps an army
of strike breakers an' ships them all over the country on special
trains wherever they're needed. Oakland's never seen labor
troubles like she's got and is goin' to get. All hell's goin' to
break loose from the looks of it."
"Watch out for yourself, then, Billy. I don't want to lose you
either."
"Aw, that's all right. I
can take care of myself. An' besides, it
ain't as though we was licked. We got a good chance."
"But you'll lose if there is any killing."
"Yep; we gotta keep an eye out against that."
"No violence."
"No gun-fighting or dynamite," he assented. "But a heap of
scabs'll get their heads broke. That has to be."
"But you won't do any of that, Billy."
"Not so as any slob can testify before a court to havin' seen
me." Then, with a quick shift, he changed the subject. "Old Barry
Higgins is dead. I didn't want to tell you till you was outa bed.
Buried'm a week ago. An' the old woman's movin' to Frisco. She
told me she'd be in to say good-bye. She stuck by you pretty well
them first couple of days, an' she showed Martha Shelton a few
that made her hair curl. She got Martha's goat from the jump."
CHAPTER XI
With Billy on strike and away doing picket duty, and with the
departure of Mercedes and the death of Bert, Saxon was left much
to herself in a loneliness that even in one as healthy-minded as
she could not fail to produce morbidness. Mary, too, had left,
having spoken vaguely of taking a job at housework in Piedmont.
Billy could help Saxon little in her trouble. He dimly sansed her
suffering, without comprehending the scope and intensity of it.
He was too man-practical, and, by his very sex, too remote from
the intimate tragedy that was hers. He was an outsider at the
best, a friendly onlooker who saw little. To her the baby had
been quick and real. It was still quick and real. That was her
trouble. By no deliberate effort of will could she fill the
aching void of its absence. Its reality became, at times, an
hallucination. Somewhere it still was, and she must find it. She
would catch herself, on occasion, listening with strained ears
for the cry she had never heard, yet which, in fancy, she had
heard a thousand times in the happy months before the end. Twice
she left her bed in her sleep and went searching--each time
coming to herself beside her mother's chest of drawers in which
were the tiny garments. To herself, at such moments, she would
say, "I had a baby once." And she would say it, aloud, as she
watched the children playing in the street.
One day, on the Eighth street cars, a young mother sat beside
her, a crowing infant in her arms. And Saxon said to her:
"I had a baby once. It died."
The mother looked at her, startled, half-drew the baby tighter in
her arms, jealously, or as if in fear; then she softened as she
said:
"You poor thing."
"Yes," Saxon nodded. "It died."
Tear's welled into her eyes, and the telling of her grief seemed
to have brought relief. But all the day she suffered from an
almost overwhelming desire to recite her sorrow to the world--to
the paying teller at the bank, to the elderly floor-walker in
Salinger's, to the blind woman, guided by a little boy, who
played on the concertina--to every one save the policeman. The
police were new and terrible creatures to her now. She had seen
them kill the strikers as mercilessly as the strikers had killed
the scabs. And, unlike the strikers, the police were professional
killers. They were not fighting for jobs. They did it as a
business. They could have taken prisoners that day, in the angle
of her front steps and the house. But they had not.
Unconsciously, whenever approaching one, she edged across the
sidewalk so as to get as far as possible away from him. She did
not reason it out, but deeper than consciousness was the feeling
that they were typical of something inimical to her and hers.
At Eighth and Broadway, waiting for her car to return home, the
policeman on the corner recognized her and greeted her. She
turned white to the lips, and her heart fluttered painfully. It
was only Ned Hermanmann, fatter, bronder-faced, jollier looking
than ever. He had sat across the aisle from her for three terms
at school. He and she had been monitors together of the
composition books for one term. The day the powder works blew up
at Pinole, breaking every window in the school, he and she had
not joined in the panic rush for out-of-doors. Both had remained
in the room, and the irate principal had exhibited them, from
room to room, to the cowardly classes, and then rewarded them
with a month's holiday from school. And after that Ned Hermanmann
had become a policeman, and married Lena Highland, and Saxon had
heard they had five children.
But, in spite of all that, he was now a policeman, and Billy was
now a striker. Might not Ned Hermanmann some day club and shoot
Billy just as those other policemen clubbed and shot the strikers
by her front steps?
"What's the matter, Saxon?" he asked. "Sick?"
She nodded and choked, unable to speak, and started to move
toward her car which was coming to a stop.
"I'll help you," he offered.
She shrank away from his hand.
"No; I'm all right," she gasped hurriedly. "I'm not going to take
it. I've forgotten something."
She turned away dizzily, up Broadway to Ninth. Two blocks along
Ninth, she turned down Clay and back to Eighth street, where she
waited for another car.
As the summer months dragged along, the industrial situation in
Oakland grew steadily worse. Capital everywhere seemed to have
selected this city for the battle with organized labor. So many
men in Oakland were out on strike, or were locked out, or were
unable to work because of the dependence of their trades on the
other tied-up trade's, that odd jobs at common labor were hard to
obtain. Billy occasionally got a day's work to do, but did not
earn enough to make both ends meet, despite the small strike
wages received at first, and despite the rigid economy he and
Saxon practiced.
The table she set had scarcely anything in common with that of
their first married year. Not alone was every item of cheaper
quality, but many items had disappeared. Meat, and the poorest,
was very seldom on the table. Cow's milk had given place to
condensed milk, and even the sparing use of the latter had
ceased. A roll of butter, when they had it, lasted half a dozen
times as long as formerly. Where Billy had been used to drinking
three cups of coffee for breakfast, he now drank one. Saxon
boiled this coffee an atrocious length of time, and she paid
twenty cents a pound for it.
The blight of hard times was on all the neighborhood. The
families not involved in one strike were touched by some other
strike or by the cessation of work in some dependent trade. Many
single young men who were lodgers had drifted away, thus
increasing the house rent of the families which had sheltered
them.
"Gott!" said the butcher to Saxon. "We working class all suffer
together. My wife she cannot get her teeth fixed now. Pretty soon
I go smash broke maybe."
Once, when Billy was preparing to pawn his watch, Saxon suggest
ed
his borrowing the money from Billy Murphy.
"I was plannin' that," Billy answered, "only I can't now. I
didn't tell you what happened Tuesday night at the Sporting Life
Club. You remember that squarehead Champion of the United States
Navy? Bill was matched with him, an' it was sure easy money. Bill
had 'm goin' south by the end of the sixth round, an' at the
seventh went in to finish 'm. And then--just his luck, for his
trade's idle now--he snaps his right forearm. Of course the
squarehead comes back at 'm on the jump, an' it's good night for
Bill. Gee! Us Mohegans are gettin' our bad luck handed to us in
chunks these days."
"Don't!" Saxon cried, shuddering involuntarily.
"What?" Billy asked with open mouth of surprise.
"Don't say that word again. Bert was always saying it."
"Oh, Mohegans. All right, I won't. You ain't superstitions, are
you?"
"No; but just the same there's too much truth in the word for me
to like it. Sometimes it seems as though he was right. Times have
changed. They've changed even since I was a little girl. We
crossed the plains and opened up this country, and now we're
losing even the chance to work for a living in it. And it's not
my fault, it's not your fault. We've got to live well or bad just
by luck, it seems. There's no other way to explain it."
"It beats me," Billy concurred. "Look at the way I worked last
year. Never missed a day. I'd want to never miss a day this year,
an' here I haven't done a tap for weeks an' weeks an' weeks. Say!
Who runs this country anyway?"
Saxon had stopped the morning paper, but frequently Maggie
Donahue's boy, who served a Tribune route, tossed an "extra" on
her steps. From its editorials Saxon gleaned that organized labor
was trying to run the country and that it was making a mess of
it. It was all the fault of domineering labor--so ran the
editorials, column by column, day by day; and Saxon was
convinced, yet remained unconvinced. The social puzzle of living
was too intricate.
The teamsters' strike, backed financially by the teamsters of San
Francisco and by the allied unions of the San Francisco Water
Front Confederation, promised to be long-drawn, whether or not it
was successful. The Oakland harness-washers and stablemen, with
few exceptions, had gone out with the teamsters. The teaming
firm's were not half-filling their contracts, but the employers'
association was helping them. In fact, half the employers'
associations of the Pacific Coast were helping the Oakland
Employers' Association.
Saxon was behind a month's rent, which, when it is considered
that rent was paid in advance, was equivalent to two months.
Likewise, she was two months behind in the installments on the
furniture. Yet she was not pressed very hard by Salinger's, the
furniture dealers.
"We're givin' you all the rope we can," said their collector. "My
orders is to make you dig up every cent I can and at the same
time not to be too hard. Salinger's are trying to do the right
thing, but they're up against it, too. You've no idea how many
accounts like yours they're carrying along. Sooner or later
they'll have to call a halt or get it in the neck themselves. And
in the meantime just see if you can't scrape up five dollars by
next week--just to cheer them along, you know."
One of the stablemen who had not gone out, Henderson by name,
worked at Billy's stables. Despite the urging of the bosses to
eat and sleep in the stable like the other men, Henderson had
persisted in coming home each morning to his little house around
the corner from Saxon's on Fifth street. Several times she had
seen him swinging along defiantly, his dinner pail in his hand,
while the neighborhood boys dogged his heels at a safe distance
and informed him in yapping chorus that he was a scab and no
good. But one evening, on his way to work, in a spirit of bravado