by Frank Norris
“Ach, Mammy, did you hurt yourself?” asked Hilda.
“No, no.”
“Is that house where we get those bread’n milk?”
Hilda pointed to a single rambling building just visible in the night, that stood isolated upon the summit of the hill in a grove of trees.
“No, no, dere aindt no braid end miluk, leedle tochter.”
Hilda once more began to sob.
“Ach, Mammy, please, PLEASE, I want it. I’m hungry.”
The jangled nerves snapped at last under the tension, and Mrs. Hooven, suddenly shaking Hilda roughly, cried out: “Stop, stop. Doand say ut egen, you. My Gott, you kill me yet.”
But quick upon this came the reaction. The mother caught her little girl to her, sinking down upon her knees, putting her arms around her, holding her close.
“No, no, gry all so mudge es you want. Say dot you are hongry. Say ut egen, say ut all de dime, ofer end ofer egen. Say ut, poor, starfing, leedle babby. Oh, mein poor, leedle tochter. My Gott, oh, I go crazy bretty soon, I guess. I cen’t hellup you. I cen’t ged you noddings to eat, noddings, noddings. Hilda, we gowun to die togedder. Put der arms roundt me, soh, tighd, leedle babby. We gowun to die, we gowun to vind Popper. We aindt gowun to be hongry eny more.”
“Vair we go now?” demanded Hilda.
“No places. Mommer’s soh tiredt. We stop heir, leedle while, end rest.”
Underneath a large bush that afforded a little shelter from the wind, Mrs. Hooven lay down, taking Hilda in her arms and wrapping her shawl about her. The infinite, vast night expanded gigantic all around them. At this elevation they were far above the city. It was still. Close overhead whirled the chariots of the fog, galloping landward, smothering lights, blurring outlines. Soon all sight of the town was shut out; even the solitary house on the hilltop vanished. There was nothing left but grey, wheeling fog, and the mother and child, alone, shivering in a little strip of damp ground, an island drifting aimlessly in empty space.
Hilda’s fingers touched a leaf from the bush and instinctively closed upon it and carried it to her mouth.
“Mammy,” she said, “I’m eating those leaf. Is those good?”
Her mother did not reply.
“You going to sleep, Mammy?” inquired Hilda, touching her face.
Mrs. Hooven roused herself a little.
“Hey? Vat you say? Asleep? Yais, I guess I wass asleep.”
Her voice trailed unintelligibly to silence again. She was not, however, asleep. Her eyes were open. A grateful numbness had begun to creep over her, a pleasing semi-insensibility. She no longer felt the pain and cramps of her stomach, even the hunger was ceasing to bite.
“These stuffed artichokes are delicious, Mrs. Gerard,” murmured young Lambert, wiping his lips with a corner of his napkin. “Pardon me for mentioning it, but your dinner must be my excuse.”
“And this asparagus — since Mr. Lambert has set the bad example,” observed Mrs. Cedarquist, “so delicate, such an exquisite flavour. How do you manage?”
“We get all our asparagus from the southern part of the State, from one particular ranch,” explained Mrs. Gerard. “We order it by wire and get it only twenty hours after cutting. My husband sees to it that it is put on a special train. It stops at this ranch just to take on our asparagus. Extravagant, isn’t it, but I simply cannot eat asparagus that has been cut more than a day.”
“Nor I,” exclaimed Julian Lambert, who posed as an epicure. “I can tell to an hour just how long asparagus has been picked.”
“Fancy eating ordinary market asparagus,” said Mrs. Gerard, “that has been fingered by Heaven knows how many hands.”
“Mammy, mammy, wake up,” cried Hilda, trying to push open Mrs. Hooven’s eyelids, at last closed. “Mammy, don’t. You’re just trying to frighten me.”
Feebly Hilda shook her by the shoulder. At last Mrs. Hooven’s lips stirred. Putting her head down, Hilda distinguished the whispered words:
“I’m sick. Go to schleep....Sick....Noddings to eat.”
The dessert was a wonderful preparation of alternate layers of biscuit glaces, ice cream, and candied chestnuts.
“Delicious, is it not?” observed Julian Lambert, partly to himself, partly to Miss Cedarquist. “This Moscovite fouette — upon my word, I have never tasted its equal.”
“And you should know, shouldn’t you?” returned the young lady.
“Mammy, mammy, wake up,” cried Hilda. “Don’t sleep so. I’m frightenedt.”
Repeatedly she shook her; repeatedly she tried to raise the inert eyelids with the point of her finger. But her mother no longer stirred. The gaunt, lean body, with its bony face and sunken eye-sockets, lay back, prone upon the ground, the feet upturned and showing the ragged, worn soles of the shoes, the forehead and grey hair beaded with fog, the poor, faded bonnet awry, the poor, faded dress soiled and torn. Hilda drew close to her mother, kissing her face, twining her arms around her neck. For a long time, she lay that way, alternately sobbing and sleeping. Then, after a long time, there was a stir. She woke from a doze to find a police officer and two or three other men bending over her. Some one carried a lantern. Terrified, smitten dumb, she was unable to answer the questions put to her. Then a woman, evidently a mistress of the house on the top of the hill, arrived and took Hilda in her arms and cried over her.
“I’ll take the little girl,” she said to the police officer.
“But the mother, can you save her? Is she too far gone?”
“I’ve sent for a doctor,” replied the other.
Just before the ladies left the table, young Lambert raised his glass of Madeira. Turning towards the wife of the Railroad King, he said:
“My best compliments for a delightful dinner.”
The doctor who had been bending over Mrs. Hooven, rose.
“It’s no use,” he said; “she has been dead some time — exhaustion from starvation.”
CHAPTER IX
On Division Number Three of the Los Muertos ranch the wheat had already been cut, and S. Behrman on a certain morning in the first week of August drove across the open expanse of stubble toward the southwest, his eyes searching the horizon for the feather of smoke that would mark the location of the steam harvester. However, he saw nothing. The stubble extended onward apparently to the very margin of the world.
At length, S. Behrman halted his buggy and brought out his field glasses from beneath the seat. He stood up in his place and, adjusting the lenses, swept the prospect to the south and west. It was the same as though the sea of land were, in reality, the ocean, and he, lost in an open boat, were scanning the waste through his glasses, looking for the smoke of a steamer, hull down, below the horizon. “Wonder,” he muttered, “if they’re working on Four this morning?”
At length, he murmured an “Ah” of satisfaction. Far to the south into the white sheen of sky, immediately over the horizon, he made out a faint smudge — the harvester beyond doubt.
Thither S. Behrman turned his horse’s head. It was all of an hour’s drive over the uneven ground and through the crackling stubble, but at length he reached the harvester. He found, however, that it had been halted. The sack sewers, together with the header-man, were stretched on the ground in the shade of the machine, while the engineer and separator-man were pottering about a portion of the works.
“What’s the matter, Billy?” demanded S. Behrman reining up.
The engineer turned about.
“The grain is heavy in here. We thought we’d better increase the speed of the cup-carrier, and pulled up to put in a smaller sprocket.”
S. Behrman nodded to say that was all right, and added a question.
“How is she going?”
“Anywheres from twenty-five to thirty sacks to the acre right along here; nothing the matter with THAT I guess.”
“Nothing in the world, Bill.”
One of the sack sewers interposed:
“For the last half hour we’ve been throwing off three bags t
o the minute.”
“That’s good, that’s good.”
It was more than good; it was “bonanza,” and all that division of the great ranch was thick with just such wonderful wheat. Never had Los Muertos been more generous, never a season more successful. S. Behrman drew a long breath of satisfaction. He knew just how great was his share in the lands which had just been absorbed by the corporation he served, just how many thousands of bushels of this marvellous crop were his property. Through all these years of confusion, bickerings, open hostility and, at last, actual warfare he had waited, nursing his patience, calm with the firm assurance of ultimate success. The end, at length, had come; he had entered into his reward and saw himself at last installed in the place he had so long, so silently coveted; saw himself chief of a principality, the Master of the Wheat.
The sprocket adjusted, the engineer called up the gang and the men took their places. The fireman stoked vigorously, the two sack sewers resumed their posts on the sacking platform, putting on the goggles that kept the chaff from their eyes. The separator-man and header-man gripped their levers.
The harvester, shooting a column of thick smoke straight upward, vibrating to the top of the stack, hissed, clanked, and lurched forward. Instantly, motion sprang to life in all its component parts; the header knives, cutting a thirty-six foot swath, gnashed like teeth; beltings slid and moved like smooth flowing streams; the separator whirred, the agitator jarred and crashed; cylinders, augers, fans, seeders and elevators, drapers and chaff-carriers clattered, rumbled, buzzed, and clanged. The steam hissed and rasped; the ground reverberated a hollow note, and the thousands upon thousands of wheat stalks sliced and slashed in the clashing shears of the header, rattled like dry rushes in a hurricane, as they fell inward, and were caught up by an endless belt, to disappear into the bowels of the vast brute that devoured them.
It was that and no less. It was the feeding of some prodigious monster, insatiable, with iron teeth, gnashing and threshing into the fields of standing wheat; devouring always, never glutted, never satiated, swallowing an entire harvest, snarling and slobbering in a welter of warm vapour, acrid smoke, and blinding, pungent clouds of chaff. It moved belly-deep in the standing grain, a hippopotamus, half-mired in river ooze, gorging rushes, snorting, sweating; a dinosaur wallowing through thick, hot grasses, floundering there, crouching, grovelling there as its vast jaws crushed and tore, and its enormous gullet swallowed, incessant, ravenous, and inordinate.
S. Behrman, very much amused, changed places with one of the sack sewers, allowing him to hold his horse while he mounted the sacking platform and took his place. The trepidation and jostling of the machine shook him till his teeth chattered in his head. His ears were shocked and assaulted by a myriad-tongued clamour, clashing steel, straining belts, jarring woodwork, while the impalpable chaff powder from the separators settled like dust in his hair, his ears, eyes, and mouth.
Directly in front of where he sat on the platform was the chute from the cleaner, and from this into the mouth of a half-full sack spouted an unending gush of grain, winnowed, cleaned, threshed, ready for the mill.
The pour from the chute of the cleaner had for S. Behrman an immense satisfaction. Without an instant’s pause, a thick rivulet of wheat rolled and dashed tumultuous into the sack. In half a minute — sometimes in twenty seconds — the sack was full, was passed over to the second sewer, the mouth reeved up, and the sack dumped out upon the ground, to be picked up by the wagons and hauled to the railroad.
S. Behrman, hypnotised, sat watching that river of grain. All that shrieking, bellowing machinery, all that gigantic organism, all the months of labour, the ploughing, the planting, the prayers for rain, the years of preparation, the heartaches, the anxiety, the foresight, all the whole business of the ranch, the work of horses, of steam, of men and boys, looked to this spot — the grain chute from the harvester into the sacks. Its volume was the index of failure or success, of riches or poverty. And at this point, the labour of the rancher ended. Here, at the lip of the chute, he parted company with his grain, and from here the wheat streamed forth to feed the world. The yawning mouths of the sacks might well stand for the unnumbered mouths of the People, all agape for food; and here, into these sacks, at first so lean, so flaccid, attenuated like starved stomachs, rushed the living stream of food, insistent, interminable, filling the empty, fattening the shrivelled, making it sleek and heavy and solid.
Half an hour later, the harvester stopped again. The men on the sacking platform had used up all the sacks. But S. Behrman’s foreman, a new man on Los Muertos, put in an appearance with the report that the wagon bringing a fresh supply was approaching.
“How is the grain elevator at Port Costa getting on, sir?”
“Finished,” replied S. Behrman.
The new master of Los Muertos had decided upon accumulating his grain in bulk in a great elevator at the tide-water port, where the grain ships for Liverpool and the East took on their cargoes. To this end, he had bought and greatly enlarged a building at Port Costa, that was already in use for that purpose, and to this elevator all the crop of Los Muertos was to be carried. The P. and S. W. made S. Behrman a special rate.
“By the way,” said S. Behrman to his superintendent, “we’re in luck. Fallon’s buyer was in Bonneville yesterday. He’s buying for Fallon and for Holt, too. I happened to run into him, and I’ve sold a ship load.”
“A ship load!”
“Of Los Muertos wheat. He’s acting for some Indian Famine Relief Committee — lot of women people up in the city — and wanted a whole cargo. I made a deal with him. There’s about fifty thousand tons of disengaged shipping in San Francisco Bay right now, and ships are fighting for charters. I wired McKissick and got a long distance telephone from him this morning. He got me a barque, the ‘Swanhilda.’ She’ll dock day after to-morrow, and begin loading.”
“Hadn’t I better take a run up,” observed the superintendent, “and keep an eye on things?”
“No,” answered S. Behrman, “I want you to stop down here, and see that those carpenters hustle the work in the ranch house. Derrick will be out by then. You see this deal is peculiar. I’m not selling to any middle-man — not to Fallon’s buyer. He only put me on to the thing. I’m acting direct with these women people, and I’ve got to have some hand in shipping this stuff myself. But I made my selling figure cover the price of a charter. It’s a queer, mixed-up deal, and I don’t fancy it much, but there’s boodle in it. I’ll go to Port Costa myself.”
A little later on in the day, when S. Behrman had satisfied himself that his harvesting was going forward favourably, he reentered his buggy and driving to the County Road turned southward towards the Los Muertos ranch house. He had not gone far, however, before he became aware of a familiar figure on horse-back, jogging slowly along ahead of him. He recognised Presley; he shook the reins over his horse’s back and very soon ranging up by the side of the young man passed the time of day with him.
“Well, what brings you down here again, Mr. Presley?” he observed. “I thought we had seen the last of you.”
“I came down to say good-bye to my friends,” answered Presley shortly.
“Going away?”
“Yes — to India.”
“Well, upon my word. For your health, hey?”
“Yes.”
“You LOOK knocked up,” asserted the other. “By the way,” he added, “I suppose you’ve heard the news?”
Presley shrank a little. Of late the reports of disasters had followed so swiftly upon one another that he had begun to tremble and to quail at every unexpected bit of information.
“What news do you mean?” he asked.
“About Dyke. He has been convicted. The judge sentenced him for life.”
For life! Riding on by the side of this man through the ranches by the County Road, Presley repeated these words to himself till the full effect of them burst at last upon him.
Jailed for life! No outlook. No hope for t
he future. Day after day, year after year, to tread the rounds of the same gloomy monotony. He saw the grey stone walls, the iron doors; the flagging of the “yard” bare of grass or trees — the cell, narrow, bald, cheerless; the prison garb, the prison fare, and round all the grim granite of insuperable barriers, shutting out the world, shutting in the man with outcasts, with the pariah dogs of society, thieves, murderers, men below the beasts, lost to all decency, drugged with opium, utter reprobates. To this, Dyke had been brought, Dyke, than whom no man had been more honest, more courageous, more jovial. This was the end of him, a prison; this was his final estate, a criminal.
Presley found an excuse for riding on, leaving S. Behrman behind him. He did not stop at Caraher’s saloon, for the heat of his rage had long since begun to cool, and dispassionately, he saw things in their true light. For all the tragedy of his wife’s death, Caraher was none the less an evil influence among the ranchers, an influence that worked only to the inciting of crime. Unwilling to venture himself, to risk his own life, the anarchist saloon-keeper had goaded Dyke and Presley both to murder; a bad man, a plague spot in the world of the ranchers, poisoning the farmers’ bodies with alcohol and their minds with discontent.
At last, Presley arrived at the ranch house of Los Muertos. The place was silent; the grass on the lawn was half dead and over a foot high; the beginnings of weeds showed here and there in the driveway. He tied his horse to a ring in the trunk of one of the larger eucalyptus trees and entered the house.
Mrs. Derrick met him in the dining-room. The old look of uneasiness, almost of terror, had gone from her wide-open brown eyes. There was in them instead, the expression of one to whom a contingency, long dreaded, has arrived and passed. The stolidity of a settled grief, of an irreparable calamity, of a despair from which there was no escape was in her look, her manner, her voice. She was listless, apathetic, calm with the calmness of a woman who knows she can suffer no further.