Four eventful things happened in the course of the winter. Bert and Mary got married and rented a cottage in the neighborhood three blocks away. Billy's wages were cut, along with the wages of all the teamsters in Oakland. Billy took up shaving with a safety razor. And, finally, Saxon was proven a false prophet and Sarah a true one.
Saxon made up her mind, beyond any doubt, ere she confided the news to Billy. At first, while still suspecting, she had felt a frightened sinking of the heart and fear of the unknown and unexperienced. Then had come economic fear, as she contemplated the increased expense entailed. But by the time she had made surety doubly sure, all was swept away before a wave of passionate gladness. HERS AND BILLY'S! The phrase was continually in her mind, and each recurrent thought of it brought an actual physical pleasure-pang to her heart.
The night she told the news to Billy, he withheld his own news of the wage-cut, and joined with her in welcoming the little one.
“What'll we do? Go to the theater to celebrate?” he asked, relaxing the pressure of his embrace so that she might speak. “Or suppose we stay in, just you and me, and... and the three of us?”
“Stay in,” was her verdict. “I just want you to hold me, and hold me, and hold me.”
“That's what I wanted, too, only I wasn't sure, after bein' in the house all day, maybe you'd want to go out.”
There was frost in the air, and Billy brought the Morris chair in by the kitchen stove. She lay cuddled in his arms, her head on his shoulder, his cheek against her hair.
“We didn't make no mistake in our lightning marriage with only a week's courtin',” he reflected aloud. “Why, Saxon, we've been courtin' ever since just the same. And now... my God, Saxon, it's too wonderful to be true. Think of it! Ourn! The three of us! The little rascal! I bet he's goin' to be a boy. An' won't I learn 'm to put up his fists an' take care of himself! An' swimmin' too. If he don't know how to swim by the time he's six...”
“And if HE'S a girl?”
“SHE'S goin' to be a boy,” Billy retorted, joining in the playful misuse of pronouns.
And both laughed and kissed, and sighed with content. “I'm goin' to turn pincher, now,” he announced, after quite an interval of meditation. “No more drinks with the boys. It's me for the water wagon. And I'm goin' to ease down on smokes. Huh! Don't see why I can't roll my own cigarettes. They're ten times cheaper'n tailor-mades. An' I can grow a beard. The amount of money the barbers get out of a fellow in a year would keep a baby.”
“Just you let your beard grow, Mister Roberts, and I'll get a divorce,” Saxon threatened. “You're just too handsome and strong with a smooth face. I love your face too much to have it covered up.—Oh, you dear! you dear! Billy, I never knew what happiness was until I came to live with you.”
“Nor me neither.”
“And it's always going to be so?”
“You can just bet,” he assured her.
“I thought I was going to be happy married,” she went on; “but I never dreamed it would be like this.” She turned her head on his shoulder and kissed his cheek. “Billy, it isn't happiness. It's heaven.”
And Billy resolutely kept undivulged the cut in wages. Not until two weeks later, when it went into effect, and he poured the diminished sum into her lap, did he break it to her. The next day, Bert and Mary, already a month married, had Sunday dinner with them, and the matter came up for discussion. Bert was particularly pessimistic, and muttered dark hints of an impending strike in the railroad shops.
“If you'd all shut your traps, it'd be all right,” Mary criticized. “These union agitators get the railroad sore. They give me the cramp, the way they butt in an' stir up trouble. If I was boss I'd cut the wages of any man that listened to them.”
“Yet you belonged to the laundry workers' union,” Saxon rebuked gently.
“Because I had to or I wouldn't a-got work. An' much good it ever done me.”
“But look at Billy,” Bert argued. “The teamsters ain't ben sayin' a word, not a peep, an' everything lovely, and then, bang, right in the neck, a ten per cent cut. Oh, hell, what chance have we got? We lose. There's nothin' left for us in this country we've made and our fathers an' mothers before us. We're all shot to pieces. We can see our finish—we, the old stock, the children of the white people that broke away from England an' licked the tar outa her, that freed the slaves, an' fought the Indians, 'an made the West! Any gink with half an eye can see it comin'.”
“But what are we going to do about it?” Saxon questioned anxiously.
“Fight. That's all. The country's in the hands of a gang of robbers. Look at the Southern Pacific. It runs California.”
“Aw, rats, Bert,” Billy interrupted. “You're talkin' through your lid. No railroad can ran the government of California.”
“You're a bonehead,” Bert sneered. “And some day, when it's too late, you an' all the other boneheads'll realize the fact. Rotten? I tell you it stinks. Why, there ain't a man who wants to go to state legislature but has to make a trip to San Francisco, an' go into the S. P. offices, an' take his hat off, an' humbly ask permission. Why, the governors of California has been railroad governors since before you and I was born. Huh! You can't tell me. We're finished. We're licked to a frazzle. But it'd do my heart good to help string up some of the dirty thieves before I passed out. D'ye know what we are?—we old white stock that fought in the wars, an' broke the land, an' made all this? I'll tell you. We're the last of the Mohegans.”
“He scares me to death, he's so violent,” Mary said with unconcealed hostility. “If he don't quit shootin' off his mouth he'll get fired from the shops. And then what'll we do? He don't consider me. But I can tell you one thing all right, all right. I'll not go back to the laundry.” She held her right hand up and spoke with the solemnity of an oath. “Not so's you can see it. Never again for yours truly.”
“Oh, I know what you're drivin' at,” Bert said with asperity. “An' all I can tell you is, livin' or dead, in a job or out, no matter what happens to me, if you will lead that way, you will, an' there's nothin' else to it.”
“I guess I kept straight before I met you,” she came back with a toss of the head. “And I kept straight after I met you, which is going some if anybody should ask you.”
Hot words were on Bert's tongue, but Saxon intervened and brought about peace. She was concerned over the outcome of their marriage. Both were highstrung, both were quick and irritable, and their continual clashes did not augur well for their future.
The safety razor was a great achievement for Saxon. Privily she conferred with a clerk she knew in Pierce's hardware store and made the purchase. On Sunday morning, after breakfast, when Billy was starting to go to the barber shop, she led him into the bedroom, whisked a towel aside, and revealed the razor box, shaving mug, soap, brush, and lather all ready. Billy recoiled, then came back to make curious investigation. He gazed pityingly at the safety razor.
“Huh! Call that a man's tool!”
“It'll do the work,” she said. “It does it for thousands of men every day.”
But Billy shook his head and backed away.
“You shave three times a week,” she urged. “That's forty-five cents. Call it half a dollar, and there are fifty-two weeks in the year. Twenty-six dollars a year just for shaving. Come on, dear, and try it. Lots of men swear by it.”
He shook his head mutinously, and the cloudy deeps of his eyes grew more cloudy. She loved that sullen handsomeness that made him look so boyish, and, laughing and kissing him, she forced him into a chair, got off his coat, and unbuttoned shirt and undershirt and turned them in.
Threatening him with, “If you open your mouth to kick I'll shove it in,” she coated his face with lather.
“Wait a minute,” she checked him, as he reached desperately for the razor. “I've been watching the barbers from the sidewalk. This is what they do after the lather is on.”
And thereupon she proceeded to rub the lather in with her fingers.
“There,” she said, when she had coated his face a second time. “You're ready to begin. Only remember, I'm not always going to do this for you. I'm just breaking you in, you see.”
With great outward show of rebellion, half genuine, half facetious, he made several tentative scrapes with the razor. He winced violently, and violently exclaimed:
“Holy jumping Jehosaphat!”
He examined his face in the glass, and a streak of blood showed in the midst of the lather.
“Cut!—by a safety razor, by God! Sure, men swear by it. Can't blame 'em. Cut! By a safety!”
“But wait a second,” Saxon pleaded. “They have to be regulated. The clerk told me. See those little screws. There.... That's it... turn them around.”
Again Billy applied the blade to his face. After a couple of scrapes, he looked at himself closely in the mirror, grinned, and went on shaving. With swiftness and dexterity he scraped his face clean of lather. Saxon clapped her hands.
“Fine,” Billy approved. “Great! Here. Give me your hand. See what a good job it made.”
He started to rub her hand against his cheek. Saxon jerked away with a little cry of disappointment, then examined him closely.
“It hasn't shaved at all,” she said.
“It's a fake, that's what it is. It cuts the hide, but not the hair. Me for the barber.”
But Saxon was persistent.
“You haven't given it a fair trial yet. It was regulated too much. Let me try my hand at it. There, that's it, betwixt and between. Now, lather again and try it.”
This time the unmistakable sand-papery sound of hair-severing could be heard.
“How is it?” she fluttered anxiously.
“It gets the—ouch!—hair,” Billy grunted, frowning and making faces. “But it—gee!—say!—ouch!—pulls like Sam Hill.”
“Stay with it,” she encouraged. “Don't give up the ship, big Injun with a scalplock. Remember what Bert says and be the last of the Mohegans.”
At the end of fifteen minutes he rinsed his face and dried it, sighing with relief.
“It's a shave, in a fashion, Saxon, but I can't say I'm stuck on it. It takes out the nerve. I'm as weak as a cat.”
He groaned with sudden discovery of fresh misfortune.
“What's the matter now?” she asked.
“The back of my neck—how can I shave the back of my neck? I'll have to pay a barber to do it.”
Saxon's consternation was tragic, but it only lasted a moment. She took the brush in her hand.
“Sit down, Billy.”
“What?—you?” he demanded indignantly.
“Yes; me. If any barber is good enough to shave your neck, and then I am, too.”
Billy moaned and groaned in the abjectness of humility and surrender, and let her have her way.
“There, and a good job,” she informed him when she had finished. “As easy as falling off a log. And besides, it means twenty-six dollars a year. And you'll buy the crib, the baby buggy, the pinning blankets, and lots and lots of things with it. Now sit still a minute longer.”
She rinsed and dried the back of his neck and dusted it with talcum powder.
“You're as sweet as a clean little baby, Billy Boy.”
The unexpected and lingering impact of her lips on the back of his neck made him writhe with mingled feelings not all unpleasant.
Two days later, though vowing in the intervening time to have nothing further to do with the instrument of the devil, he permitted Saxon to assist him to a second shave. This time it went easier.
“It ain't so bad,” he admitted. “I'm gettin' the hang of it. It's all in the regulating. You can shave as close as you want an' no more close than you want. Barbers can't do that. Every once an' awhile they get my face sore.”
The third shave was an unqualified success, and the culminating bliss was reached when Saxon presented him with a bottle of witch hazel. After that he began active proselyting. He could not wait a visit from Bert, but carried the paraphernalia to the latter's house to demonstrate.
“We've ben boobs all these years, Bert, runnin' the chances of barber's itch an' everything. Look at this, eh? See her take hold. Smooth as silk. Just as easy.... There! Six minutes by the clock. Can you beat it? When I get my hand in, I can do it in three. It works in the dark. It works under water. You couldn't cut yourself if you tried. And it saves twenty-six dollars a year. Saxon figured it out, and she's a wonder, I tell you.”
The trafficking between Saxon and Mercedes increased. The latter commanded a ready market for all the fine work Saxon could supply, while Saxon was eager and happy in the work. The expected babe and the cut in Billy's wages had caused her to regard the economic phase of existence more seriously than ever. Too little money was being laid away in the bank, and her conscience pricked her as she considered how much she was laying out on the pretty necessaries for the household and herself. Also, for the first time in her life she was spending another's earnings. Since a young girl she had been used to spending her own, and now, thanks to Mercedes she was doing it again, and, out of her profits, assaying more expensive and delightful adventures in lingerie.
Mercedes suggested, and Saxon carried out and even bettered, the dainty things of thread and texture. She made ruffled chemises of sheer linen, with her own fine edgings and French embroidery on breast and shoulders; linen hand-made combination undersuits; and nightgowns, fairy and cobwebby, embroidered, trimmed with Irish lace. On Mercedes' instigation she executed an ambitious and wonderful breakfast cap for which the old woman returned her twelve dollars after deducting commission.
She was happy and busy every waking moment, nor was preparation for the little one neglected. The only ready made garments she bought were three fine little knit shirts. As for the rest, every bit was made by her own hands—featherstitched pinning blankets, a crocheted jacket and cap, knitted mittens, embroidered bonnets; slim little princess slips of sensible length; underskirts on absurd Lilliputian yokes; silk-embroidered white flannel petticoats; stockings and crocheted boots, seeming to burgeon before her eyes with wriggly pink toes and plump little calves; and last, but not least, many deliciously soft squares of bird's-eye linen. A little later, as a crowning masterpiece, she was guilty of a dress coat of white silk, embroidered. And into all the tiny garments, with every stitch, she sewed love. Yet this love, so unceasingly sewn, she knew when she came to consider and marvel, was more of Billy than of the nebulous, ungraspable new bit of life that eluded her fondest attempts at visioning.
“Huh,” was Billy's comment, as he went over the mite's wardrobe and came back to center on the little knit shirts, “they look more like a real kid than the whole kit an' caboodle. Why, I can see him in them regular manshirts.”
Saxon, with a sudden rush of happy, unshed tears, held one of the little shirts up to his lips. He kissed it solemnly, his eyes resting on Saxon's.
“That's some for the boy,” he said, “but a whole lot for you.”
But Saxon's money-earning was doomed to cease ignominiously and tragically. One day, to take advantage of a department store bargain sale, she crossed the bay to San Francisco. Passing along Sutter Street, her eye was attracted by a display in the small window of a small shop. At first she could not believe it; yet there, in the honored place of the window, was the wonderful breakfast cap for which she had received twelve dollars from Mercedes. It was marked twenty-eight dollars. Saxon went in and interviewed the shopkeeper, an emaciated, shrewd-eyed and middle-aged woman of foreign extraction.
“Oh, I don't want to buy anything,” Saxon said. “I make nice things like you have here, and I wanted to know what you pay for them—for that breakfast cap in the window, for instance.”
The woman darted a keen glance to Saxon's left hand, noted the innumerable tiny punctures in the ends of the first and second fingers, then appraised her clothing and her face.
“Can you do work like that?”
Saxon nodded.
“I paid twenty dollars to the woman that made that.” Saxon repressed an almost spasmodic gasp, and thought coolly for a space. Mercedes had given her twelve. Then Mercedes had pocketed eight, while she, Saxon, had furnished the material and labor.
“Would you please show me other hand-made things -- nightgowns, chemises, and such things, and tell me the prices you pay?”
“Can you do such work?”
“Yes.”
“And will you sell to me?”
“Certainly,” Saxon answered. “That is why I am here.”
“We add only a small amount when we sell,” the woman went on; “you see, light and rent and such things, as well as a profit or else we could not be here.”
“It's only fair,” Saxon agreed.
Amongst the beautiful stuff Saxon went over, she found a nightgown and a combination undersuit of her own manufacture. For the former she had received eight dollars from Mercedes, it was marked eighteen, and the woman had paid fourteen; for the latter Saxon received six, it was marked fifteen, and the woman had paid eleven.
“Thank you,” Saxon said, as she drew on her gloves. “I should like to bring you some of my work at those prices.”
“And I shall be glad to buy it... if it is up to the mark.” The woman looked at her severely. “Mind you, it must be as good as this. And if it is, I often get special orders, and I'll give you a chance at them.”
Mercedes was unblushingly candid when Saxon reproached her.
“You told me you took only a commission,” was Saxon's accusation.
“So I did; and so I have.”
“But I did all the work and bought all the materials, yet you actually cleared more out of it than I did. You got the lion's share.”
“And why shouldn't I, my dear? I was the middleman. It's the way of the world. 'Tis the middlemen that get the lion's share.”
“It seems to me most unfair,” Saxon reflected, more in sadness than anger.
“That is your quarrel with the world, not with me,” Mercedes rejoined sharply, then immediately softened with one of her quick changes. “We mustn't quarrel, my dear. I like you so much. La la, it is nothing to you, who are young and strong with a man young and strong. Listen, I am an old woman. And old Barry can do little for me. He is on his last legs. His kidneys are 'most gone. Remember, 'tis I must bury him. And I do him honor, for beside me he'll have his last long sleep. A stupid, dull old man, heavy, an ox, 'tis true; but a good old fool with no trace of evil in him. The plot is bought and paid for—the final installment was made up, in part, out of my commissions from you. Then there are the funeral expenses. It must be done nicely. I have still much to save. And Barry may turn up his toes any day.”
Saxon sniffed the air carefully, and knew the old woman had been drinking again.
“Come, my dear, let me show you.” Leading Saxon to a large sea chest in the bedroom, Mercedes lifted the lid. A faint perfume, as of rose-petals, floated up. “Behold, my burial trousseau. Thus I shall wed the dust.”
Saxon's amazement increased, as, article by article, the old woman displayed the airiest, the daintiest, the most delicious and most complete of bridal outfits. Mercedes held up an ivory fan.
“In Venice 'twas given me, my dear.—See, this comb, turtle shell; Bruce Anstey made it for me the week before he drank his last bottle and scattered his brave mad brains with a Colt's 44.—This scarf. La la, a Liberty scarf—”
“And all that will be buried with you,” Saxon mused, “Oh, the extravagance of it!”
Mercedes laughed.
“Why not? I shall die as I have lived. It is my pleasure. I go to the dust as a bride. No cold and narrow bed for me. I would it were a coach, covered with the soft things of the East, and pillows, pillows, without end.”
“It would buy you twenty funerals and twenty plots,” Saxon protested, shocked by this blasphemy of conventional death. “It is downright wicked.”
“'Twill be as I have lived,” Mercedes said complacently. “And it's a fine bride old Barry'll have to come and lie beside him.” She closed the lid and sighed. “Though I wish it were Bruce Anstey, or any of the pick of my young men to lie with me in the great dark and to crumble with me to the dust that is the real death.”
She gazed at Saxon with eyes heated by alcohol and at the same time cool with the coolness of content.
“In the old days the great of earth were buried with their live slaves with them. I but take my flimsies, my dear.”
“Then you aren't afraid of death?... in the least?”
Mercedes shook her head emphatically.
“Death is brave, and good, and kind. I do not fear death. 'Tis of men I am afraid when I am dead. So I prepare. They shall not have me when I am dead.”
Saxon was puzzled.
“They would not want you then,” she said.
“Many are wanted,” was the answer. “Do you know what becomes of the aged poor who have no money for burial? They are not buried. Let me tell you. We stood before great doors. He was a queer man, a professor who ought to have been a pirate, a man who lectured in class rooms when he ought to have been storming walled cities or robbing banks. He was slender, like Don Juan. His hands were strong as steel. So was his spirit. And he was mad, a bit mad, as all my young men have been. 'Come, Mercedes,' he said; 'we will inspect our brethren and become humble, and glad that we are not as they—as yet not yet. And afterward, to-night, we will dine with a more devilish taste, and we will drink to them in golden wine that will be the more golden for having seen them. Come, Mercedes.'
“He thrust the great doors open, and by the hand led me in. It was a sad company. Twenty-four, that lay on marble slabs, or sat, half erect and propped, while many young men, bright of eye, bright little knives in their hands, glanced curiously at me from their work.”
“They were dead?” Saxon interrupted to gasp.
“They were the pauper dead, my dear. 'Come, Mercedes,' said he. 'There is more to show you that will make us glad we are alive.' And he took me down, down to the vats. The salt vats, my dear. I was not afraid. But it was in my mind, then, as I looked, how it would be with me when I was dead. And there they were, so many lumps of pork. And the order came, 'A woman; an old woman.' And the man who worked there fished in the vats. The first was a man he drew to see. Again he fished and stirred. Again a man. He was impatient, and grumbled at his luck. And then, up through the brine, he drew a woman, and by the face of her she was old, and he was satisfied.”
“It is not true!” Saxon cried out.
“I have seen, my dear, I know. And I tell you fear not the wrath of God when you are dead. Fear only the salt vats. And as I stood and looked, and as he who led me there looked at me and smiled and questioned and bedeviled me with those mad, black, tired-scholar's eyes of his, I knew that that was no way for my dear clay. Dear it is, my clay to me; dear it has been to others. La la, the salt vat is no place for my kissed lips and love-lavished body.” Mercedes lifted the lid of the chest and gazed fondly at her burial pretties. “So I have made my bed. So I shall lie in it. Some old philosopher said we know we must die; we do not believe it. But the old do believe. I believe.
“My dear, remember the salt vats, and do not be angry with me because my commissions have been heavy. To escape the vats I would stop at nothing -- steal the widow's mite, the orphan's crust, and pennies from a dead man's eyes.”
“Do you believe in God?” Saxon asked abruptly, holding herself together despite cold horror.
Mercedes dropped the lid and shrugged her shoulders.
“Who knows? I shall rest well.”
“And punishment?” Saxon probed, remembering the unthinkable tale of the other's life.
“Impossible, my dear. As some old poet said, 'God's a good fellow.' Some time I shall talk to you about God. Never be afraid of him. Be afraid only of the salt vats and the things men may do with your pretty flesh after you are dead.”
Billy quarreled with good fortune. He suspected he was too prosperous on the wages he received. What with the accumulating savings account, the paying of the monthly furniture installment and the house rent, the spending money in pocket, and the good fare he was eating, he was puzzled as to how Saxon managed to pay for the goods used in her fancy work. Several times he had suggested his inability to see how she did it, and been baffled each time by Saxon's mysterious laugh.
“I can't see how you do it on the money,” he was contending one evening.
He opened his mouth to speak further, then closed it and for five minutes thought with knitted brows.
“Say,” he said, “what's become of that frilly breakfast cap you was workin' on so hard, I ain't never seen you wear it, and it was sure too big for the kid.”
Saxon hesitated, with pursed lips and teasing eyes. With her, untruthfulness had always been a difficult matter. To Billy it was impossible. She could see the cloud-drift in his eyes deepening and his face hardening in the way she knew so well when he was vexed.
“Say, Saxon, you ain't... you ain't... sellin' your work?”
And thereat she related everything, not omitting Mercedes Higgins' part in the transaction, nor Mercedes Higgins' remarkable burial trousseau. But Billy was not to be led aside by the latter. In terms anything but uncertain he told Saxon that she was not to work for money.
“But I have so much spare time, Billy, dear,” she pleaded.
He shook his head.
“Nothing doing. I won't listen to it. I married you, and I'll take care of you. Nobody can say Bill Roberts' wife has to work. And I don't want to think it myself. Besides, it ain't necessary.”
“But Billy—” she began again.
“Nope. That's one thing I won't stand for, Saxon. Not that I don't like fancy work. I do. I like it like hell, every bit you make, but I like it on YOU. Go ahead and make all you want of it, for yourself, an' I'll put up for the goods. Why, I'm just whistlin' an' happy all day long, thinkin' of the boy an' seein' you at home here workin' away on all them nice things. Because I know how happy you are a-doin' it. But honest to God, Saxon, it'd all be spoiled if I knew you was doin' it to sell. You see, Bill Roberts' wife don't have to work. That's my brag—to myself, mind you. An' besides, it ain't right.”
“You're a dear,” she whispered, happy despite her disappointment.
“I want you to have all you want,” he continued. “An' you're goin' to get it as long as I got two hands stickin' on the ends of my arms. I guess I know how good the things are you wear—good to me, I mean, too. I'm dry behind the ears, an' maybe I've learned a few things I oughtn't to before I knew you. But I know what I'm talkin' about, and I want to say that outside the clothes down underneath, an' the clothes down underneath the outside ones, I never saw a woman like you. Oh—”
He threw up his hands as if despairing of ability to express what he thought and felt, then essayed a further attempt.
“It's not a matter of bein' only clean, though that's a whole lot. Lots of women are clean. It ain't that. It's something more, an' different. It's... well, it's the look of it, so white, an' pretty, an' tasty. It gets on the imagination. It's something I can't get out of my thoughts of you. I want to tell you lots of men can't strip to advantage, an' lots of women, too. But you—well, you're a wonder, that's all, and you can't get too many of them nice things to suit me, and you can't get them too nice.
“For that matter, Saxon, you can just blow yourself. There's lots of easy money layin' around. I'm in great condition. Billy Murphy pulled down seventy-five round iron dollars only last week for puttin' away the Pride of North Beach. That's what ha paid us the fifty back out of.”
But this time it was Saxon who rebelled.
“There's Carl Hansen,” Billy argued. “The second Sharkey, the alfalfa sportin' writers are callin' him. An' he calls himself Champion of the United States Navy. Well, I got his number. He's just a big stiff. I've seen 'm fight, an' I can pass him the sleep medicine just as easy. The Secretary of the Sportin' Life Club offered to match me. An' a hundred iron dollars in it for the winner. And it'll all be yours to blow in any way you want. What d'ye say?”
“If I can't work for money, you can't fight,” was Saxon's ultimatum, immediately withdrawn. “But you and I don't drive bargains. Even if you'd let me work for money, I wouldn't let you fight. I've never forgotten what you told me about how prizefighters lose their silk. Well, you're not going to lose yours. It's half my silk, you know. And if you won't fight, I won't work—there. And more, I'll never do anything you don't want me to, Billy.”
“Same here,” Billy agreed. “Though just the same I'd like most to death to have just one go at that squarehead Hansen.” He smiled with pleasure at the thought. “Say, let's forget it all now, an' you sing me 'Harvest Days' on that dinky what-you-may-call-it.”
When she had complied, accompanying herself on the ukulele, she suggested his weird “Cowboy's Lament.” In some inexplicable way of love, she had come to like her husband's one song. Because he sang it, she liked its inanity and monotonousness; and most of all, it seemed to her, she loved his hopeless and adorable flatting of every note. She could even sing with him, flatting as accurately and deliciously as he. Nor did she undeceive him in his sublime faith.
“I guess Bert an' the rest have joshed me all the time,” he said.
“You and I get along together with it fine,” she equivocated; for in such matters she did not deem the untruth a wrong.
Spring was on when the strike came in the railroad shops. The Sunday before it was called, Saxon and Billy had dinner at Bert's house. Saxon's brother came, though he had found it impossible to bring Sarah, who refused to budge from her household rut. Bert was blackly pessimistic, and they found him singing with sardonic glee:
“Nobody loves a mil-yun-aire. Nobody likes his looks. Nobody'll share his slightest care, He classes with thugs and crooks. Thriftiness has become a crime, So spend everything you earn; We're living now in a funny time, When money is made to burn.”
Mary went about the dinner preparation, flaunting unmistakable signals of rebellion; and Saxon, rolling up her sleeves and tying on an apron, washed the breakfast dishes. Bert fetched a pitcher of steaming beer from the corner saloon, and the three men smoked and talked about the coming strike.
“It oughta come years ago,” was Bert's dictum. “It can't come any too quick now to suit me, but it's too late. We're beaten thumbs down. Here's where the last of the Mohegans gets theirs, in the neck, ker-whop!”
“Oh, I don't know,” Tom, who had been smoking his pipe gravely, began to counsel. “Organized labor's gettin' stronger every day. Why, I can remember when there wasn't any unions in California. Look at us now—wages, an' hours, an' everything.”
“You talk like an organizer,” Bert sneered, “shovin' the bull con on the boneheads. But we know different. Organized wages won't buy as much now as unorganized wages used to buy. They've got us whipsawed. Look at Frisco, the labor leaders doin' dirtier politics than the old parties, pawin' an' squabblin' over graft, an' goin' to San Quentin, while—what are the Frisco carpenters doin'? Let me tell you one thing, Tom Brown, if you listen to all you hear you'll hear that every Frisco carpenter is union an' gettin' full union wages. Do you believe it? It's a damn lie. There ain't a carpenter that don't rebate his wages Saturday night to the contractor. An' that's your buildin' trades in San Francisco, while the leaders are makin' trips to Europe on the earnings of the tenderloin—when they ain't coughing it up to the lawyers to get out of wearin' stripes.”
“That's all right,” Tom concurred. “Nobody's denyin' it. The trouble is labor ain't quite got its eyes open. It ought to play politics, but the politics ought to be the right kind.”
“Socialism, eh?” Bert caught him up with scorn. “Wouldn't they sell us out just as the Ruefs and Schmidts have?”
“Get men that are honest,” Billy said. “That's the whole trouble. Not that I stand for socialism. I don't. All our folks was a long time in America, an' I for one won't stand for a lot of fat Germans an' greasy Russian Jews tellin' me how to run my country when they can't speak English yet.”
“Your country!” Bert cried. “Why, you bonehead, you ain't got a country. That's a fairy story the grafters shove at you every time they want to rob you some more.”
“But don't vote for the grafters,” Billy contended. “If we selected honest men we'd get honest treatment.”
“I wish you'd come to some of our meetings, Billy,” Tom said wistfully. “If you would, you'd get your eyes open an' vote the socialist ticket next election.”
“Not on your life,” Billy declined. “When you catch me in a socialist meeting'll be when they can talk like white men.”
Bert was humming:
“We're living now in a funny time, When money is made to burn.”
Mary was too angry with her husband, because of the impending strike and his incendiary utterances, to hold conversation with Saxon, and the latter, bepuzzled, listened to the conflicting opinions of the men.
“Where are we at?” she asked them, with a merriness that concealed her anxiety at heart.
“We ain't at,” Bert snarled. “We're gone.”
“But meat and oil have gone up again,” she chafed. “And Billy's wages have been cut, and the shop men's were cut last year. Something must be done.”
“The only thing to do is fight like hell,” Bert answered. “Fight, an' go down fightin'. That's all. We're licked anyhow, but we can have a last run for our money.”
“That's no way to talk,” Tom rebuked.
“The time for talkin' 's past, old cock. The time for fightin' 's come.”
“A hell of a chance you'd have against regular troops and machine guns,” Billy retorted.
“Oh, not that way. There's such things as greasy sticks that go up with a loud noise and leave holes. There's such things as emery powder—”
“Oh, ho!” Mary burst out upon him, arms akimbo. “So that's what it means. That's what the emery in your vest pocket meant.”
Her husband ignored her. Tom smoked with a troubled air. Billy was hurt. It showed plainly in his face.
“You ain't ben doin' that, Bert?” he asked, his manner showing his expectancy of his friend's denial.
“Sure thing, if you want to know. I'd see'm all in hell if I could, before I go.”
“He's a bloody-minded anarchist,” Mary complained. “Men like him killed McKinley, and Garfield, an'—an' an' all the rest. He'll be hung. You'll see. Mark my words. I'm glad there's no children in sight, that's all.”
“It's hot air,” Billy comforted her.
“He's just teasing you,” Saxon soothed. “He always was a josher.”
But Mary shook her head.
“I know. I hear him talkin' in his sleep. He swears and curses something awful, an' grits his teeth. Listen to him now.”
Bert, his handsome face bitter and devil-may-care, had tilted his chair back against the wall and was singing
“Nobody loves a mil-yun-aire, Nobody likes his looks, Nobody'll share his slightest care, He classes with thugs and crooks.”
Tom was saying something about reasonableness and justice, and Bert ceased from singing to catch him up.
“Justice, eh? Another pipe-dream. I'll show you where the working class gets justice. You remember Forbes—J. Alliston Forbes—wrecked the Alta California Trust Company an' salted down two cold millions. I saw him yesterday, in a big hell-bent automobile. What'd he get? Eight years' sentence. How long did he serve? Less'n two years. Pardoned out on account of ill health. Ill hell! We'll be dead an' rotten before he kicks the bucket. Here. Look out this window. You see the back of that house with the broken porch rail. Mrs. Danaker lives there. She takes in washin'. Her old man was killed on the railroad. Nitsky on damages—contributory negligence, or fellow-servant-something-or-other flimflam. That's what the courts handed her. Her boy, Archie, was sixteen. He was on the road, a regular road-kid. He blew into Fresno an' rolled a drunk. Do you want to know how much he got? Two dollars and eighty cents. Get that?—Two-eighty. And what did the alfalfa judge hand'm? Fifty years. He's served eight of it already in San Quentin. And he'll go on serving it till he croaks. Mrs. Danaker says he's bad with consumption—caught it inside, but she ain't got the pull to get'm pardoned. Archie the Kid steals two dollars an' eighty cents from a drunk and gets fifty years. J. Alliston Forbes sticks up the Alta Trust for two millions en' gets less'n two years. Who's country is this anyway? Yourn an' Archie the Kid's? Guess again. It's J. Alliston Forbes'—Oh:
“Nobody likes a mil-yun-aire, Nobody likes his looks, Nobody'll share his slightest care, He classes with thugs and crooks.”
Mary, at the sink, where Saxon was just finishing the last dish, untied Saxon's apron and kissed her with the sympathy that women alone feel for each other under the shadow of maternity.
“Now you sit down, dear. You mustn't tire yourself, and it's a long way to go yet. I'll get your sewing for you, and you can listen to the men talk. But don't listen to Bert. He's crazy.”
Saxon sewed and listened, and Bert's face grew bleak and bitter as he contemplated the baby clothes in her lap.
“There you go,” he blurted out, “bringin' kids into the world when you ain't got any guarantee you can feed em.”
“You must a-had a souse last night,” Tom grinned.
Bert shook his head.
“Aw, what's the use of gettin' grouched?” Billy cheered. “It's a pretty good country.”
“It WAS a pretty good country,” Bert replied, “when we was all Mohegans. But not now. We're jiggerooed. We're hornswoggled. We're backed to a standstill. We're double-crossed to a fare-you-well. My folks fought for this country. So did yourn, all of you. We freed the niggers, killed the Indians, an starved, an' froze, an' sweat, an' fought. This land looked good to us. We cleared it, an' broke it, an' made the roads, an' built the cities. And there was plenty for everybody. And we went on fightin' for it. I had two uncles killed at Gettysburg. All of us was mixed up in that war. Listen to Saxon talk any time what her folks went through to get out here an' get ranches, an' horses, an' cattle, an' everything. And they got 'em. All our folks' got 'em, Mary's, too—”
“And if they'd ben smart they'd a-held on to them,” she interpolated.
“Sure thing,” Bert continued. “That's the very point. We're the losers. We've ben robbed. We couldn't mark cards, deal from the bottom, an' ring in cold decks like the others. We're the white folks that failed. You see, times changed, and there was two kinds of us, the lions and the plugs. The plugs only worked, the lions only gobbled. They gobbled the farms, the mines, the factories, an' now they've gobbled the government. We're the white folks an' the children of white folks, that was too busy being good to be smart. We're the white folks that lost out. We're the ones that's ben skinned. D'ye get me?”
“You'd make a good soap-boxer,” Tom commended, “if only you'd get the kinks straightened out in your reasoning.”
“It sounds all right, Bert,” Billy said, “only it ain't. Any man can get rich to-day—”
“Or be president of the United States,” Bert snapped. “Sure thing—if he's got it in him. Just the same I ain't heard you makin' a noise like a millionaire or a president. Why? You ain't got it in you. You're a bonehead. A plug. That's why. Skiddoo for you. Skiddoo for all of us.”
At the table, while they ate, Tom talked of the joys of farm-life he had known as a boy and as a young man, and confided that it was his dream to go and take up government land somewhere as his people had done before him. Unfortunately, as he explained, Sarah was set, so that the dream must remain a dream.
“It's all in the game,” Billy sighed. “It's played to rules. Some one has to get knocked out, I suppose.”
A little later, while Bert was off on a fresh diatribe, Billy became aware that he was making comparisons. This house was not like his house. Here was no satisfying atmosphere. Things seemed to run with a jar. He recollected that when they arrived the breakfast dishes had not yet been washed. With a man's general obliviousness of household affairs, he had not noted details; yet it had been borne in on him, all morning, in a myriad ways, that Mary was not the housekeeper Saxon was. He glanced proudly across at her, and felt the spur of an impulse to leave his seat, go around, and embrace her. She was a wife. He remembered her dainty undergarmenting, and on the instant, into his brain, leaped the image of her so appareled, only to be shattered by Bert.
“Hey, Bill, you seem to think I've got a grouch. Sure thing. I have. You ain't had my experiences. You've always done teamin' an' pulled down easy money prizefightin'. You ain't known hard times. You ain't ben through strikes. You ain't had to take care of an old mother an' swallow dirt on her account. It wasn't until after she died that I could rip loose an' take or leave as I felt like it.
“Take that time I tackled the Niles Electric an' see what a work-plug gets handed out to him. The Head Cheese sizes me up, pumps me a lot of questions, an' gives me an application blank. I make it out, payin' a dollar to a doctor they sent me to for a health certificate. Then I got to go to a picture garage an' get my mug taken for the Niles Electric rogues' gallery. And I cough up another dollar for the mug. The Head Squirt takes the blank, the health certificate, and the mug, an' fires more questions. DID I BELONG TO A LABOR UNION?—ME? Of course I told'm the truth I guess nit. I needed the job. The grocery wouldn't give me any more tick, and there was my mother.
“Huh, thinks I, here's where I'm a real carman. Back platform for me, where I can pick up the fancy skirts. Nitsky. Two dollars, please. Me—my two dollars. All for a pewter badge. Then there was the uniform—nineteen fifty, and get it anywhere else for fifteen. Only that was to be paid out of my first month. And then five dollars in change in my pocket, my own money. That was the rule.—I borrowed that five from Tom Donovan, the policeman. Then what? They worked me for two weeks without pay, breakin' me in.”
“Did you pick up any fancy skirts?” Saxon queried teasingly.
Bert shook his head glumly.
“I only worked a month. Then we organized, and they busted our union higher'n a kite.”
“And you boobs in the shops will be busted the same way if you go out on strike,” Mary informed him.
“That's what I've ben tellin' you all along,” Bert replied. “We ain't got a chance to win.”
“Then why go out?” was Saxon's question.
He looked at her with lackluster eyes for a moment, then answered
“Why did my two uncles get killed at Gettysburg?”