by Frank Norris
“Put ’em out, put ’em out.”
“Order, order,” called Garnett, pounding with his gavel. The whole Opera House was in an uproar.
But the interruption of the Governor’s speech was evidently not unpremeditated. It began to look like a deliberate and planned attack. Persistently, doggedly, the group in the gallery vociferated: “Tell us how you bribed the delegates at Sacramento. Before you throw mud at the Railroad, let’s see if you are clean yourself.”
“Put ’em out, put ’em out.”
“Briber, briber — Magnus Derrick, unconvicted briber! Put him out.”
Keast, beside himself with anger, pushed down the aisle underneath where the recalcitrant group had its place and, shaking his fist, called up at them:
“You were paid to break up this meeting. If you have anything to say; you will be afforded the opportunity, but if you do not let the gentleman proceed, the police will be called upon to put you out.”
But at this, the man who had raised the first shout leaned over the balcony rail, and, his face flaming with wrath, shouted:
“YAH! talk to me of your police. Look out we don’t call on them first to arrest your President for bribery. You and your howl about law and justice and corruption! Here” — he turned to the audience— “read about him, read the story of how the Sacramento convention was bought by Magnus Derrick, President of the San Joaquin League. Here’s the facts printed and proved.”
With the words, he stooped down and from under his seat dragged forth a great package of extra editions of the “Bonneville Mercury,” not an hour off the presses. Other equally large bundles of the paper appeared in the hands of the surrounding group. The strings were cut and in handfuls and armfuls the papers were flung out over the heads of the audience underneath. The air was full of the flutter of the newly printed sheets. They swarmed over the rim of the gallery like clouds of monstrous, winged insects, settled upon the heads and into the hands of the audience, were passed swiftly from man to man, and within five minutes of the first outbreak every one in the Opera House had read Genslinger’s detailed and substantiated account of Magnus Derrick’s “deal” with the political bosses of the Sacramento convention.
Genslinger, after pocketing the Governor’s hush money, had “sold him out.”
Keast, one quiver of indignation, made his way back upon the stage. The Leaguers were in wild confusion. Half the assembly of them were on their feet, bewildered, shouting vaguely. From proscenium wall to foyer, the Opera House was a tumult of noise. The gleam of the thousands of the “Mercury” extras was like the flash of white caps on a troubled sea.
Keast faced the audience.
“Liars,” he shouted, striving with all the power of his voice to dominate the clamour, “liars and slanderers. Your paper is the paid organ of the corporation. You have not one shadow of proof to back you up. Do you choose this, of all times, to heap your calumny upon the head of an honourable gentleman, already prostrated by your murder of his son? Proofs — we demand your proofs!”
“We’ve got the very assemblymen themselves,” came back the answering shout. “Let Derrick speak. Where is he hiding? If this is a lie, let him deny it. Let HIM DISPROVE the charge.” “Derrick, Derrick,” thundered the Opera House.
Keast wheeled about. Where was Magnus? He was not in sight upon the stage. He had disappeared. Crowding through the throng of Leaguers, Keast got from off the stage into the wings. Here the crowd was no less dense. Nearly every one had a copy of the “Mercury.” It was being read aloud to groups here and there, and once Keast overheard the words, “Say, I wonder if this is true, after all?”
“Well, and even if it was,” cried Keast, turning upon the speaker, “we should be the last ones to kick. In any case, it was done for our benefit. It elected the Ranchers’ Commission.”
“A lot of benefit we got out of the Ranchers’ Commission,” retorted the other.
“And then,” protested a third speaker, “that ain’t the way to do — if he DID do it — bribing legislatures. Why, we were bucking against corrupt politics. We couldn’t afford to be corrupt.”
Keast turned away with a gesture of impatience. He pushed his way farther on. At last, opening a small door in a hallway back of the stage, he came upon Magnus.
The room was tiny. It was a dressing-room. Only two nights before it had been used by the leading actress of a comic opera troupe which had played for three nights at Bonneville. A tattered sofa and limping toilet table occupied a third of the space. The air was heavy with the smell of stale grease paint, ointments, and sachet. Faded photographs of young women in tights and gauzes ornamented the mirror and the walls. Underneath the sofa was an old pair of corsets. The spangled skirt of a pink dress, turned inside out, hung against the wall.
And in the midst of such environment, surrounded by an excited group of men who gesticulated and shouted in his very face, pale, alert, agitated, his thin lips pressed tightly together, stood Magnus Derrick.
“Here,” cried Keast, as he entered, closing the door behind him, “where’s the Governor? Here, Magnus, I’ve been looking for you. The crowd has gone wild out there. You’ve got to talk ’em down. Come out there and give those blacklegs the lie. They are saying you are hiding.”
But before Magnus could reply, Garnett turned to Keast.
“Well, that’s what we want him to do, and he won’t do it.”
“Yes, yes,” cried the half-dozen men who crowded around Magnus, “yes, that’s what we want him to do.”
Keast turned to Magnus.
“Why, what’s all this, Governor?” he exclaimed. “You’ve got to answer that. Hey? why don’t you give ’em the lie?”
“I — I,” Magnus loosened the collar about his throat “it is a lie. I will not stoop — I would not — would be — it would be beneath my — my — it would be beneath me.”
Keast stared in amazement. Was this the Great Man the Leader, indomitable, of Roman integrity, of Roman valour, before whose voice whole conventions had quailed? Was it possible he was AFRAID to face those hired villifiers?
“Well, how about this?” demanded Garnett suddenly. “It is a lie, isn’t it? That Commission was elected honestly, wasn’t it?”
“How dare you, sir!” Magnus burst out. “How dare you question me — call me to account! Please understand, sir, that I tolerate — —”
“Oh, quit it!” cried a voice from the group. “You can’t scare us, Derrick. That sort of talk was well enough once, but it don’t go any more. We want a yes or no answer.”
It was gone — that old-time power of mastery, that faculty of command. The ground crumbled beneath his feet. Long since it had been, by his own hand, undermined. Authority was gone. Why keep up this miserable sham any longer? Could they not read the lie in his face, in his voice? What a folly to maintain the wretched pretence! He had failed. He was ruined. Harran was gone. His ranch would soon go; his money was gone. Lyman was worse than dead. His own honour had been prostituted. Gone, gone, everything he held dear, gone, lost, and swept away in that fierce struggle. And suddenly and all in a moment the last remaining shells of the fabric of his being, the sham that had stood already wonderfully long, cracked and collapsed.
“Was the Commission honestly elected?” insisted Garnett. “Were the delegates — did you bribe the delegates?”
“We were obliged to shut our eyes to means,” faltered Magnus. “There was no other way to—” Then suddenly and with the last dregs of his resolution, he concluded with: “Yes, I gave them two thousand dollars each.”
“Oh, hell! Oh, my God!” exclaimed Keast, sitting swiftly down upon the ragged sofa.
There was a long silence. A sense of poignant embarrassment descended upon those present. No one knew what to say or where to look. Garnett, with a laboured attempt at nonchalance, murmured:
“I see. Well, that’s what I was trying to get at. Yes, I see.”
“Well,” said Gethings at length, bestirring himself, “I guess I�
��LL go home.”
There was a movement. The group broke up, the men making for the door. One by one they went out. The last to go was Keast. He came up to Magnus and shook the Governor’s limp hand.
“Good-bye, Governor,” he said. “I’ll see you again pretty soon. Don’t let this discourage you. They’ll come around all right after a while. So long.”
He went out, shutting the door.
And seated in the one chair of the room, Magnus Derrick remained a long time, looking at his face in the cracked mirror that for so many years had reflected the painted faces of soubrettes, in this atmosphere of stale perfume and mouldy rice powder.
It had come — his fall, his ruin. After so many years of integrity and honest battle, his life had ended here — in an actress’s dressing-room, deserted by his friends, his son murdered, his dishonesty known, an old man, broken, discarded, discredited, and abandoned. Before nightfall of that day, Bonneville was further excited by an astonishing bit of news. S. Behrman lived in a detached house at some distance from the town, surrounded by a grove of live oak and eucalyptus trees. At a little after half-past six, as he was sitting down to his supper, a bomb was thrown through the window of his dining-room, exploding near the doorway leading into the hall. The room was wrecked and nearly every window of the house shattered. By a miracle, S. Behrman, himself, remained untouched.
CHAPTER VIII
On a certain afternoon in the early part of July, about a month after the fight at the irrigating ditch and the mass meeting at Bonneville, Cedarquist, at the moment opening his mail in his office in San Francisco, was genuinely surprised to receive a visit from Presley.
“Well, upon my word, Pres,” exclaimed the manufacturer, as the young man came in through the door that the office boy held open for him, “upon my word, have you been sick? Sit down, my boy. Have a glass of sherry. I always keep a bottle here.”
Presley accepted the wine and sank into the depths of a great leather chair near by.
“Sick?” he answered. “Yes, I have been sick. I’m sick now. I’m gone to pieces, sir.”
His manner was the extreme of listlessness — the listlessness of great fatigue. “Well, well,” observed the other. “I’m right sorry to hear that. What’s the trouble, Pres?”
“Oh, nerves mostly, I suppose, and my head, and insomnia, and weakness, a general collapse all along the line, the doctor tells me. ‘Over-cerebration,’ he says; ‘over-excitement.’ I fancy I rather narrowly missed brain fever.”
“Well, I can easily suppose it,” answered Cedarquist gravely, “after all you have been through.”
Presley closed his eyes — they were sunken in circles of dark brown flesh — and pressed a thin hand to the back of his head.
“It is a nightmare,” he murmured. “A frightful nightmare, and it’s not over yet. You have heard of it all only through the newspaper reports. But down there, at Bonneville, at Los Muertos — oh, you can have no idea of it, of the misery caused by the defeat of the ranchers and by this decision of the Supreme Court that dispossesses them all. We had gone on hoping to the last that we would win there. We had thought that in the Supreme Court of the United States, at least, we could find justice. And the news of its decision was the worst, last blow of all. For Magnus it was the last — positively the very last.”
“Poor, poor Derrick,” murmured Cedarquist. “Tell me about him, Pres. How does he take it? What is he going to do?”
“It beggars him, sir. He sunk a great deal more than any of us believed in his ranch, when he resolved to turn off most of the tenants and farm the ranch himself. Then the fight he made against the Railroad in the Courts and the political campaign he went into, to get Lyman on the Railroad Commission, took more of it. The money that Genslinger blackmailed him of, it seems, was about all he had left. He had been gambling — you know the Governor — on another bonanza crop this year to recoup him. Well, the bonanza came right enough — just in time for S. Behrman and the Railroad to grab it. Magnus is ruined.”
“What a tragedy! what a tragedy!” murmured the other. “Lyman turning rascal, Harran killed, and now this; and all within so short a time — all at the SAME time, you might almost say.”
“If it had only killed him,” continued Presley; “but that is the worst of it.”
“How the worst?”
“I’m afraid, honestly, I’m afraid it is going to turn his wits, sir. It’s broken him; oh, you should see him, you should see him. A shambling, stooping, trembling old man, in his dotage already. He sits all day in the dining-room, turning over papers, sorting them, tying them up, opening them again, forgetting them — all fumbling and mumbling and confused. And at table sometimes he forgets to eat. And, listen, you know, from the house we can hear the trains whistling for the Long Trestle. As often as that happens the Governor seems to be — oh, I don’t know, frightened. He will sink his head between his shoulders, as though he were dodging something, and he won’t fetch a long breath again till the train is out of hearing. He seems to have conceived an abject, unreasoned terror of the Railroad.”
“But he will have to leave Los Muertos now, of course?”
“Yes, they will all have to leave. They have a fortnight more. The few tenants that were still on Los Muertos are leaving. That is one thing that brings me to the city. The family of one of the men who was killed — Hooven was his name — have come to the city to find work. I think they are liable to be in great distress, unless they have been wonderfully lucky, and I am trying to find them in order to look after them.”
“You need looking after yourself, Pres.”
“Oh, once away from Bonneville and the sight of the ruin there, I’m better. But I intend to go away. And that makes me think, I came to ask you if you could help me. If you would let me take passage on one of your wheat ships. The Doctor says an ocean voyage would set me up.”
“Why, certainly, Pres,” declared Cedarquist. “But I’m sorry you’ll have to go. We expected to have you down in the country with us this winter.”
Presley shook his head. “No,” he answered. “I must go. Even if I had all my health, I could not bring myself to stay in California just now. If you can introduce me to one of your captains—”
“With pleasure. When do you want to go? You may have to wait a few weeks. Our first ship won’t clear till the end of the month.”
“That would do very well. Thank you, sir.”
But Cedarquist was still interested in the land troubles of the Bonneville farmers, and took the first occasion to ask:
“So, the Railroad are in possession on most of the ranches?” “On all of them,” returned Presley. “The League went all to pieces, so soon as Magnus was forced to resign. The old story — they got quarrelling among themselves. Somebody started a compromise party, and upon that issue a new president was elected. Then there were defections. The Railroad offered to lease the lands in question to the ranchers — the ranchers who owned them,” he exclaimed bitterly, “and because the terms were nominal — almost nothing — plenty of the men took the chance of saving themselves. And, of course, once signing the lease, they acknowledged the Railroad’s title. But the road would not lease to Magnus. S. Behrman takes over Los Muertos in a few weeks now.”
“No doubt, the road made over their title in the property to him,” observed Cedarquist, “as a reward of his services.”
“No doubt,” murmured Presley wearily. He rose to go.
“By the way,” said Cedarquist, “what have you on hand for, let us say, Friday evening? Won’t you dine with us then? The girls are going to the country Monday of next week, and you probably won’t see them again for some time if you take that ocean voyage of yours.”
“I’m afraid I shall be very poor company, sir,” hazarded Presley. “There’s no ‘go,’ no life in me at all these days. I am like a clock with a broken spring.”
“Not broken, Pres, my boy;” urged the other, “only run down. Try and see if we can’t wind you up a bit. Sa
y that we can expect you. We dine at seven.”
“Thank you, sir. Till Friday at seven, then.”
Regaining the street, Presley sent his valise to his club (where he had engaged a room) by a messenger boy, and boarded a Castro Street car. Before leaving Bonneville, he had ascertained, by strenuous enquiry, Mrs. Hooven’s address in the city, and thitherward he now directed his steps.
When Presley had told Cedarquist that he was ill, that he was jaded, worn out, he had only told half the truth. Exhausted he was, nerveless, weak, but this apathy was still invaded from time to time with fierce incursions of a spirit of unrest and revolt, reactions, momentary returns of the blind, undirected energy that at one time had prompted him to a vast desire to acquit himself of some terrible deed of readjustment, just what, he could not say, some terrifying martyrdom, some awe-inspiring immolation, consummate, incisive, conclusive. He fancied himself to be fired with the purblind, mistaken heroism of the anarchist, hurling his victim to destruction with full knowledge that the catastrophe shall sweep him also into the vortex it creates.
But his constitutional irresoluteness obstructed his path continually; brain-sick, weak of will, emotional, timid even, he temporised, procrastinated, brooded; came to decisions in the dark hours of the night, only to abandon them in the morning.
Once only he had ACTED. And at this moment, as he was carried through the windy, squalid streets, he trembled at the remembrance of it. The horror of “what might have been” incompatible with the vengeance whose minister he fancied he was, oppressed him. The scene perpetually reconstructed itself in his imagination. He saw himself under the shade of the encompassing trees and shrubbery, creeping on his belly toward the house, in the suburbs of Bonneville, watching his chances, seizing opportunities, spying upon the lighted windows where the raised curtains afforded a view of the interior. Then had come the appearance in the glare of the gas of the figure of the man for whom he waited. He saw himself rise and run forward. He remembered the feel and weight in his hand of Caraher’s bomb — the six inches of plugged gas pipe. His upraised arm shot forward. There was a shiver of smashed window-panes, then — a void — a red whirl of confusion, the air rent, the ground rocking, himself flung headlong, flung off the spinning circumference of things out into a place of terror and vacancy and darkness. And then after a long time the return of reason, the consciousness that his feet were set upon the road to Los Muertos, and that he was fleeing terror-stricken, gasping, all but insane with hysteria. Then the never-to-be-forgotten night that ensued, when he descended into the pit, horrified at what he supposed he had done, at one moment ridden with remorse, at another raging against his own feebleness, his lack of courage, his wretched, vacillating spirit. But morning had come, and with it the knowledge that he had failed, and the baser assurance that he was not even remotely suspected. His own escape had been no less miraculous than that of his enemy, and he had fallen on his knees in inarticulate prayer, weeping, pouring out his thanks to God for the deliverance from the gulf to the very brink of which his feet had been drawn.