by Frank Norris
Suddenly the fog shut down. The two vessels were shut from each other’s sight.
As Bennett stood leaning upon the rail of the bridge behind him, his hands deep in the pockets of his greatcoat, his eyes fixed on the visible strip of water just ahead of his ship’s prow, the sailing-master, Adler, approached and saluted.
“Beg pardon, sir,” he said, “we’re just clear of the last buoy; what’s our course now, sir?”
Bennett glanced at the chart that Adler held and then at the compass affixed to the rail of the bridge close at hand. Quietly he answered:
“Due north.”
THE OCTOPUS
A STORY OF CALIFORNIA
Frank Norris intended The Octopus: a Story of California, to be the first volume in a projected trilogy of novels entitled The Epic of the Wheat. The Pit: a Story of Chicago appeared posthumously. Norris never wrote the concluding novel, The Wolf, a Story of Europe. Doubleday, Page & Company published The Octopus in 1901. After conceiving the idea in 1899, Norris traveled to California to conduct research. He visited the sites in the San Joaquin Valley connected with the Mussel Slough Tragedy of 1880, documented on its historical marker as “a dispute over land titles between settlers and railroad. A fight broke out in which seven men lost lives – two deputy U.S. marshals and five ranchers. Legal struggle over titles finally compromised.” Norris used the tragedy as a basis for conflict in The Octopus between wheat growers and owners of the Pacific and Southwestern Railroad, who were attempting a land grab. An obituary published in the October 1902 issue of The University Chronicle remarked on Norris’ working methods which helped him achieve the heralded realism in his novels:
He was always gathering material and jotting down ideas in a little note book. In working up a theme, he made it a rule to get his impressions at first hand. In preparation for The Octopus he spent several weeks on Gaston Ashe’s ranch in Monterey county. He interviewed C. P. Huntington, and the pen-picture of Shelgrim is the result. When his material was gathered, he worked continuously till his task was done. It was as if he were under the whip.
Highly anticipated by critics and the public, The Octopus received numerous reviews, pointing out both Norris’ strengths and weaknesses, often couching the weaknesses in terms of the writer’s overall potential. Frederic Taber Cooper, in the May 1901 issue of The Bookman, believed that in some ways the novel was less realistic than Norris’ earlier work:
The truth is that The Octopus is a sort of vast allegory, an example of symbolism pushed to the extreme limit, rather than a picture of life. Mr. Norris has always had a fondness for big themes; they are better suited to the special qualities of his style, the sonority of his sentences, the insistent force of accumulated noun and adjective. This time he has conceived the ambitious idea of writing a trilogy of novels which, taken together, shall symbolise American life, not merely the life of some small corner of a single State, but American life as a whole, with all its hopes and aspirations and its tendencies, throughout the length and breadth of the continent. And for the central symbol he has taken wheat, as being quite literally and truly the staff of this life, the ultimate source of American power and prosperity. This first volume, The Octopus, dealing with the production of wheat, shows us a corner of California, the San Joachin Valley, where a handful of ranchmen are engaged in irrigating and ploughing, planting, reaping and harvesting, performing all the slow, arduous toil of cultivation, and at the same time carrying on a continuous warfare against the persistent encroachment of the railroad, whose steel arms are reaching out, octopus-like, to grasp, encircle and crush one after another all those who venture to oppose it. It is quite likely that Mr. Norris has been careful of his facts, that he has some basis for his presentment of the railway’s acts of aggression, the unjust increase of freight tariffs, the regrading of land values, the violent evictions — in short, that his novel is well documented. From the symbolic side, however, the literal truth is unimportant... It is full of enthusiasm and poetry and conscious strength. One can hardly read it without a responsive thrill of sympathy for the earnestness, the breadth of purpose, the verbal power of the man. But as a study of character, a picture of real life, of flesh and blood, it must be frankly owned that The Octopus is disappointing.
However, in the May 1902 issue of The Arena, critic B.O. Flower proclaimed The Octopus as “a work of genius” and disagreed with Cooper’s assessment, especially about Norris’ realism and character development:
In “The Octopus,” Mr. Norris has produced a novel of American life exhibiting the strength, power, vividness, fidelity to truth, photographic accuracy in description, and marvelous insight in depicting human nature, together with that broad and philosophic grasp of the larger problems of life, that noble passion for justice, that characterizes the greatest work of Emile Zola, without that sexualism or repulsive naturalism which the French writer so frequently forces upon his readers, and which is so revolting to the refined and healthy imagination...”The Octopus” is a work so distinctly great that it justly entitles the author to rank among the very first American novelists. All the characters are real, living men and women, in whose veins runs the red blood of Nature.
The first edition
Title page of the first edition
CONTENTS
BOOK 1
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
BOOK II
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CONCLUSION
BOOK 1
CHAPTER I
Just after passing Caraher’s saloon, on the County Road that ran south from Bonneville, and that divided the Broderson ranch from that of Los Muertos, Presley was suddenly aware of the faint and prolonged blowing of a steam whistle that he knew must come from the railroad shops near the depot at Bonneville. In starting out from the ranch house that morning, he had forgotten his watch, and was now perplexed to know whether the whistle was blowing for twelve or for one o’clock. He hoped the former. Early that morning he had decided to make a long excursion through the neighbouring country, partly on foot and partly on his bicycle, and now noon was come already, and as yet he had hardly started. As he was leaving the house after breakfast, Mrs. Derrick had asked him to go for the mail at Bonneville, and he had not been able to refuse.
He took a firmer hold of the cork grips of his handlebars — the road being in a wretched condition after the recent hauling of the crop — and quickened his pace. He told himself that, no matter what the time was, he would not stop for luncheon at the ranch house, but would push on to Guadalajara and have a Spanish dinner at Solotari’s, as he had originally planned.
There had not been much of a crop to haul that year. Half of the wheat on the Broderson ranch had failed entirely, and Derrick himself had hardly raised more than enough to supply seed for the winter’s sowing. But such little hauling as there had been had reduced the roads thereabouts to a lamentable condition, and, during the dry season of the past few months, the layer of dust had deepened and thickened to such an extent that more than once Presley was obliged to dismount and trudge along on foot, pushing his bicycle in front of him.
It was the last half of September, the very end of the dry season, and all Tulare County, all the vast reaches of the San Joaquin Valley — in fact all South Central California, was bone dry, parched, and baked and crisped after four months of cloudless weather, when the day seemed always at noon, and the sun blazed white hot over the valley from the Coast Range in the west to the foothills of the Sierras in the east.
As Presley drew near to the point where what was known as the Lower Road struck off through the Rancho de Los Muertos, leading on to Guadalajara, he came upon one of the county wateri
ng-tanks, a great, iron-hooped tower of wood, straddling clumsily on its four uprights by the roadside. Since the day of its completion, the storekeepers and retailers of Bonneville had painted their advertisements upon it. It was a landmark. In that reach of level fields, the white letters upon it could be read for miles. A watering-trough stood near by, and, as he was very thirsty, Presley resolved to stop for a moment to get a drink.
He drew abreast of the tank and halted there, leaning his bicycle against the fence. A couple of men in white overalls were repainting the surface of the tank, seated on swinging platforms that hung by hooks from the roof. They were painting a sign — an advertisement. It was all but finished and read, “S. Behrman, Real Estate, Mortgages, Main Street, Bonneville, Opposite the Post Office.” On the horse-trough that stood in the shadow of the tank was another freshly painted inscription: “S. Behrman Has Something To Say To You.”
As Presley straightened up after drinking from the faucet at one end of the horse-trough, the watering-cart itself laboured into view around the turn of the Lower Road. Two mules and two horses, white with dust, strained leisurely in the traces, moving at a snail’s pace, their limp ears marking the time; while perched high upon the seat, under a yellow cotton wagon umbrella, Presley recognised Hooven, one of Derrick’s tenants, a German, whom every one called “Bismarck,” an excitable little man with a perpetual grievance and an endless flow of broken English.
“Hello, Bismarck,” said Presley, as Hooven brought his team to a standstill by the tank, preparatory to refilling.
“Yoost der men I look for, Mist’r Praicely,” cried the other, twisting the reins around the brake. “Yoost one minute, you wait, hey? I wanta talk mit you.”
Presley was impatient to be on his way again. A little more time wasted, and the day would be lost. He had nothing to do with the management of the ranch, and if Hooven wanted any advice from him, it was so much breath wasted. These uncouth brutes of farmhands and petty ranchers, grimed with the soil they worked upon, were odious to him beyond words. Never could he feel in sympathy with them, nor with their lives, their ways, their marriages, deaths, bickerings, and all the monotonous round of their sordid existence.
“Well, you must be quick about it, Bismarck,” he answered sharply. “I’m late for dinner, as it is.”
“Soh, now. Two minuten, und I be mit you.” He drew down the overhanging spout of the tank to the vent in the circumference of the cart and pulled the chain that let out the water. Then he climbed down from the seat, jumping from the tire of the wheel, and taking Presley by the arm led him a few steps down the road.
“Say,” he began. “Say, I want to hef some converzations mit you. Yoost der men I want to see. Say, Caraher, he tole me dis morgen — say, he tole me Mist’r Derrick gowun to farm der whole demn rench hisseluf der next yahr. No more tenants. Say, Caraher, he tole me all der tenants get der sach; Mist’r Derrick gowun to work der whole demn rench hisseluf, hey? ME, I get der sach alzoh, hey? You hef hear about dose ting? Say, me, I hef on der ranch been sieben yahr — seven yahr. Do I alzoh — —”
“You’ll have to see Derrick himself or Harran about that, Bismarck,” interrupted Presley, trying to draw away. “That’s something outside of me entirely.”
But Hooven was not to be put off. No doubt he had been meditating his speech all the morning, formulating his words, preparing his phrases.
“Say, no, no,” he continued. “Me, I wanta stay bei der place; seven yahr I hef stay. Mist’r Derrick, he doand want dot I should be ge-sacked. Who, den, will der ditch ge-tend? Say, you tell ‘um Bismarck hef gotta sure stay bei der place. Say, you hef der pull mit der Governor. You speak der gut word for me.”
“Harran is the man that has the pull with his father, Bismarck,” answered Presley. “You get Harran to speak for you, and you’re all right.”
“Sieben yahr I hef stay,” protested Hooven, “and who will der ditch ge-tend, und alle dem cettles drive?”
“Well, Harran’s your man,” answered Presley, preparing to mount his bicycle.
“Say, you hef hear about dose ting?”
“I don’t hear about anything, Bismarck. I don’t know the first thing about how the ranch is run.”
“UND DER PIPE-LINE GE-MEND,” Hooven burst out, suddenly remembering a forgotten argument. He waved an arm. “Ach, der pipe-line bei der Mission Greek, und der waater-hole for dose cettles. Say, he doand doo ut HIMSELLUF, berhaps, I doand tink.”
“Well, talk to Harran about it.”
“Say, he doand farm der whole demn rench bei hisseluf. Me, I gotta stay.”
But on a sudden the water in the cart gushed over the sides from the vent in the top with a smart sound of splashing. Hooven was forced to turn his attention to it. Presley got his wheel under way.
“I hef some converzations mit Herran,” Hooven called after him. “He doand doo ut bei hisseluf, den, Mist’r Derrick; ach, no. I stay bei der rench to drive dose cettles.”
He climbed back to his seat under the wagon umbrella, and, as he started his team again with great cracks of his long whip, turned to the painters still at work upon the sign and declared with some defiance:
“Sieben yahr; yais, sir, seiben yahr I hef been on dis rench. Git oop, you mule you, hoop!”
Meanwhile Presley had turned into the Lower Road. He was now on Derrick’s land, division No. I, or, as it was called, the Home ranch, of the great Los Muertos Rancho. The road was better here, the dust laid after the passage of Hooven’s watering-cart, and, in a few minutes, he had come to the ranch house itself, with its white picket fence, its few flower beds, and grove of eucalyptus trees. On the lawn at the side of the house, he saw Harran in the act of setting out the automatic sprinkler. In the shade of the house, by the porch, were two or three of the greyhounds, part of the pack that were used to hunt down jack-rabbits, and Godfrey, Harran’s prize deerhound.
Presley wheeled up the driveway and met Harran by the horse-block. Harran was Magnus Derrick’s youngest son, a very well-looking young fellow of twenty-three or twenty-five. He had the fine carriage that marked his father, and still further resembled him in that he had the Derrick nose — hawk-like and prominent, such as one sees in the later portraits of the Duke of Wellington. He was blond, and incessant exposure to the sun had, instead of tanning him brown, merely heightened the colour of his cheeks. His yellow hair had a tendency to curl in a forward direction, just in front of the ears.
Beside him, Presley made the sharpest of contrasts. Presley seemed to have come of a mixed origin; appeared to have a nature more composite, a temperament more complex. Unlike Harran Derrick, he seemed more of a character than a type. The sun had browned his face till it was almost swarthy. His eyes were a dark brown, and his forehead was the forehead of the intellectual, wide and high, with a certain unmistakable lift about it that argued education, not only of himself, but of his people before him. The impression conveyed by his mouth and chin was that of a delicate and highly sensitive nature, the lips thin and loosely shut together, the chin small and rather receding. One guessed that Presley’s refinement had been gained only by a certain loss of strength. One expected to find him nervous, introspective, to discover that his mental life was not at all the result of impressions and sensations that came to him from without, but rather of thoughts and reflections germinating from within. Though morbidly sensitive to changes in his physical surroundings, he would be slow to act upon such sensations, would not prove impulsive, not because he was sluggish, but because he was merely irresolute. It could be foreseen that morally he was of that sort who avoid evil through good taste, lack of decision, and want of opportunity. His temperament was that of the poet; when he told himself he had been thinking, he deceived himself. He had, on such occasions, been only brooding.
Some eighteen months before this time, he had been threatened with consumption, and, taking advantage of a standing invitation on the part of Magnus Derrick, had come to stay in the dry, even climate of the San Joaquin for an inde
finite length of time. He was thirty years old, and had graduated and post-graduated with high honours from an Eastern college, where he had devoted himself to a passionate study of literature, and, more especially, of poetry.
It was his insatiable ambition to write verse. But up to this time, his work had been fugitive, ephemeral, a note here and there, heard, appreciated, and forgotten. He was in search of a subject; something magnificent, he did not know exactly what; some vast, tremendous theme, heroic, terrible, to be unrolled in all the thundering progression of hexameters.
But whatever he wrote, and in whatever fashion, Presley was determined that his poem should be of the West, that world’s frontier of Romance, where a new race, a new people — hardy, brave, and passionate — were building an empire; where the tumultuous life ran like fire from dawn to dark, and from dark to dawn again, primitive, brutal, honest, and without fear. Something (to his idea not much) had been done to catch at that life in passing, but its poet had not yet arisen. The few sporadic attempts, thus he told himself, had only touched the keynote. He strove for the diapason, the great song that should embrace in itself a whole epoch, a complete era, the voice of an entire people, wherein all people should be included — they and their legends, their folk lore, their fightings, their loves and their lusts, their blunt, grim humour, their stoicism under stress, their adventures, their treasures found in a day and gambled in a night, their direct, crude speech, their generosity and cruelty, their heroism and bestiality, their religion and profanity, their self-sacrifice and obscenity — a true and fearless setting forth of a passing phase of history, un-compromising, sincere; each group in its proper environment; the valley, the plain, and the mountain; the ranch, the range, and the mine — all this, all the traits and types of every community from the Dakotas to the Mexicos, from Winnipeg to Guadalupe, gathered together, swept together, welded and riven together in one single, mighty song, the Song of the West. That was what he dreamed, while things without names — thoughts for which no man had yet invented words, terrible formless shapes, vague figures, colossal, monstrous, distorted — whirled at a gallop through his imagination.