The Octopus, Frank Norris [books you need to read txt] 📗

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.

“Goodbye, 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.

 

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. Say 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