OLD San Francisco, which is the San Francisco of only the other day, the
day before the Earthquake, was divided midway by the Slot. The Slot was
an iron crack that ran along the centre of Market Street, and from the
Slot arose the burr of the ceaseless, endless cable that was hitched at
will to the cars it dragged up and down. In truth, there were two slots,
but in the quick grammar of the West time was saved by calling them, and
much more that they stood for, “The Slot.” North of the Slot were the
theatres, hotels, and shopping district, the banks and the staid,
respectable business houses. South of the Slot were the factories,
slums, laundries, machine-shops, boiler works, and the abodes of the
working class.
The Slot was the metaphor that expressed the class cleavage of Society,
and no man crossed this metaphor, back and forth, more successfully than
Freddie Drummond. He made a practice of living in both worlds, and in
both worlds he lived signally well. Freddie Drummond was a professor in
the Sociology Department of the University of California, and it was as a
professor of sociology that he first crossed over the Slot, lived for six
mouths in the great labour-ghetto, and wrote _The Unskilled Labourer_—a
book that was hailed everywhere as an able contribution to the literature
of progress, and as a splendid reply to the literature of discontent.
Politically and economically it was nothing if not orthodox. Presidents
of great railway systems bought whole editions of it to give to their
employees. The Manufacturers’ Association alone distributed fifty
thousand copies of it. In a way, it was almost as immoral as the
far-famed and notorious _Message to Garcia_, while in its pernicious
preachment of thrift and content it ran _Mr. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch_
a close second.
At first, Freddie Drummond found it monstrously difficult to get along
among the working people. He was not used to their ways, and they
certainly were not used to his. They were suspicious. He had no
antecedents. He could talk of no previous jobs. His hands were soft.
His extraordinary politeness was ominous. His first idea of the rôle he
would play was that of a free and independent American who chose to work
with his hands and no explanations given. But it wouldn’t do, as he
quickly discovered. At the beginning they accepted him, very
provisionally, as a freak. A little later, as he began to know his way
about better, he insensibly drifted into the rôle that would work—namely,
he was a man who had seen better days, very much better days, but who was
down on his luck, though, to be sure, only temporarily.
He learned many things, and generalized much and often erroneously, all
of which can be found in the pages of _The Unskilled Labourer_. He saved
himself, however, after the sane and conservative manner of his kind, by
labelling his generalizations as “tentative.” One of his first
experiences was in the great Wilmax Cannery, where he was put on
piece-work making small packing cases. A box factory supplied the parts,
and all Freddie Drummond had to do was to fit the parts into a form and
drive in the wire nails with a light hammer.
It was not skilled labour, but it was piece-work. The ordinary labourers
in the cannery got a dollar and a half per day. Freddie Drummond found
the other men on the same job with him jogging along and earning a dollar
and seventy-five cents a day. By the third day he was able to earn the
same. But he was ambitious. He did not care to jog along and, being
unusually able and fit, on the fourth day earned two dollars.
The next day, having keyed himself up to an exhausting high-tension, he
earned two dollars and a half. His fellow workers favoured him with
scowls and black looks, and made remarks, slangily witty and which he did
not understand, about sucking up to the boss and pace-making and holding
her down, when the rains set in. He was astonished at their malingering
on piece-work, generalized about the inherent laziness of the unskilled
labourer, and proceeded next day to hammer out three dollars’ worth of
boxes.
And that night, coming out of the cannery, he was interviewed by his
fellow workmen, who were very angry and incoherently slangy. He failed
to comprehend the motive behind their action. The action itself was
strenuous. When he refused to ease down his pace and bleated about
freedom of contract, independent Americanism, and the dignity of toil,
they proceeded to spoil his pace-making ability. It was a fierce battle,
for Drummond was a large man and an athlete, but the crowd finally jumped
on his ribs, walked on his face, and stamped on his fingers, so that it
was only after lying in bed for a week that he was able to get up and
look for another job. All of which is duly narrated in that first book
of his, in the chapter entitled “The Tyranny of Labour.”
A little later, in another department of the Wilmax Cannery, lumping as a
fruit-distributor among the women, he essayed to carry two boxes of fruit
at a time, and was promptly reproached by the other fruit-lumpers. It
was palpable malingering; but he was there, he decided, not to change
conditions, but to observe. So he lumped one box thereafter, and so well
did he study the art of shirking that he wrote a special chapter on it,
with the last several paragraphs devoted to tentative generalizations.
In those six months he worked at many jobs and developed into a very good
imitation of a genuine worker. He was a natural linguist, and he kept
notebooks, making a scientific study of the workers’ slang or argot,
until he could talk quite intelligibly. This language also enabled him
more intimately to follow their mental processes, and thereby to gather
much data for a projected chapter in some future book which he planned to
entitle _Synthesis of Working-Class Psychology_.
Before he arose to the surface from that first plunge into the underworld
he discovered that he was a good actor and demonstrated the plasticity of
his nature. He was himself astonished at his own fluidity. Once having
mastered the language and conquered numerous fastidious qualms, he found
that he could flow into any nook of working-class life and fit it so
snugly as to feel comfortably at home. As he said, in the preface to his
second book, _The Toiler_, he endeavoured really to know the working
people, and the only possible way to achieve this was to work beside
them, eat their food, sleep in their beds, be amused with their
amusements, think their thoughts, and feel their feeling.
He was not a deep thinker. He had no faith in new theories. All his
norms and criteria were conventional. His Thesis on the French
Revolution was noteworthy in college annals, not merely for its
painstaking and voluminous accuracy, but for the fact that it was the
dryest, deadest, most formal, and most orthodox screed ever written on
the subject. He was a very reserved man, and his natural inhibition was
large in quantity and steel-like in quality. He had but few friends. He
was too undemonstrative, too frigid. He had no vices, nor had any one
ever discovered any temptations. Tobacco he detested, beer he abhorred,
and he was never known to drink anything stronger than an occasional
light wine at dinner.
When a freshman he had been baptized “Ice-Box” by his warmer-blooded
fellows. As a member of the faculty he was known as “Cold-Storage.” He
had but one grief, and that was “Freddie.” He had earned it when he
played full-back in the ‘Varsity eleven, and his formal soul had never
succeeded in living it down. “Freddie” he would ever be, except
officially, and through nightmare vistas he looked into a future when his
world would speak of him as “Old Freddie.”
For he was very young to be a doctor of sociology, only twenty-seven, and
he looked younger. In appearance and atmosphere he was a strapping big
college man, smooth-faced and easy-mannered, clean and simple and
wholesome, with a known record of being a splendid athlete and an implied
vast possession of cold culture of the inhibited sort. He never talked
shop out of class and committee rooms, except later on, when his books
showered him with distasteful public notice and he yielded to the extent
of reading occasional papers before certain literary and economic
societies.
He did everything right—too right; and in dress and comportment was
inevitably correct. Not that he was a dandy. Far from it. He was a
college man, in dress and carriage as like as a pea to the type that of
late years is being so generously turned out of our institutions of
higher learning. His handshake was satisfyingly strong and stiff. His
blue eyes were coldly blue and convincingly sincere. His voice, firm and
masculine, clean and crisp of enunciation, was pleasant to the ear. The
one drawback to Freddie Drummond was his inhibition. He never unbent.
In his football days, the higher the tension of the game, the cooler he
grew. He was noted as a boxer, but he was regarded as an automaton, with
the inhuman precision of a machine judging distance and timing blows,
guarding, blocking, and stalling. He was rarely punished himself, while
he rarely punished an opponent. He was too clever and too controlled to
permit himself to put a pound more weight into a punch than he intended.
With him it was a matter of exercise. It kept him fit.
As time went by, Freddie Drummond found himself more frequently crossing
the Slot and losing himself in South of Market. His summer and winter
holidays were spent there, and, whether it was a week or a week-end, he
found the time spent there to be valuable and enjoyable. And there was
so much material to be gathered. His third book, _Mass and Master_,
became a text-book in the American universities; and almost before he
knew it, he was at work on a fourth one, _The Fallacy of the
Inefficient_.
Somewhere in his make-up there was a strange twist or quirk. Perhaps it
was a recoil from his environment and training, or from the tempered seed
of his ancestors, who had been book-men generation preceding generation;
but at any rate, he found enjoyment in being down in the working-class
world. In his own world he was “Cold-Storage,” but down below he was
“Big” Bill Totts, who could drink and smoke, and slang and fight, and be
an all-round favourite. Everybody liked Bill, and more than one working
girl made love to him. At first he had been merely a good actor, but as
time went on, simulation became second nature. He no longer played a
part, and he loved sausages, sausages and bacon, than which, in his own
proper sphere, there was nothing more loathsome in the way of food.
From doing the thing for the need’s sake, he came to doing the thing for
the thing’s sake. He found himself regretting as the time drew near for
him to go back to his lecture-room and his inhibition. And he often
found himself waiting with anticipation for the dreamy time to pass when
he could cross the Slot and cut loose and play the devil. He was not
wicked, but as “Big” Bill Totts he did a myriad things that Freddie
Drummond would never have been permitted to do. Moreover, Freddie
Drummond never would have wanted to do them. That was the strangest part
of his discovery. Freddie Drummond and Bill Totts were two totally
different creatures. The desires and tastes and impulses of each ran
counter to the other’s. Bill Totts could shirk at a job with clear
conscience, while Freddie Drummond condemned shirking as vicious,
criminal, and un-American, and devoted whole chapters to condemnation of
the vice. Freddie Drummond did not care for dancing, but Bill Totts
never missed the nights at the various dancing clubs, such as The
Magnolia, The Western Star, and The Elite; while he won a massive silver
cup, standing thirty inches high, for being the best-sustained character
at the Butchers and Meat Workers’ annual grand masked ball. And Bill
Totts liked the girls and the girls liked him, while Freddie Drummond
enjoyed playing the ascetic in this particular, was open in his
opposition to equal suffrage, and cynically bitter in his secret
condemnation of coeducation.
Freddie Drummond changed his manners with his dress, and without effort.
When he entered the obscure little room used for his transformation
scenes, he carried himself just a bit too stiffly. He was too erect, his
shoulders were an inch too far back, while his face was grave, almost
harsh, and practically expressionless. But when he emerged in Bill
Totts’ clothes he was another creature. Bill Totts did not slouch, but
somehow his whole form limbered up and became graceful. The very sound
of the voice was changed, and the laugh was loud and hearty, while loose
speech and an occasional oath were as a matter of course on his lips.
Also, Bill Totts was a trifle inclined to late hours, and at times, in
saloons, to be good-naturedly bellicose with other workmen. Then, too,
at Sunday picnics or when coming home from the show, either arm betrayed
a practised familiarity in stealing around girls’ waists, while he
displayed a wit keen and delightful in the flirtatious badinage that was
expected of a good fellow in his class.
So thoroughly was Bill Totts himself, so thoroughly a workman, a genuine
denizen of South of the Slot, that he was as class-conscious as the
average of his kind, and his hatred for a scab even exceeded that of the
average loyal union man. During the Water Front Strike, Freddie Drummond
was somehow able to stand apart from the unique combination, and, coldly
critical, watch Bill Totts hilariously slug scab longshoremen. For Bill
Totts was a dues-paying member of the Longshoremen Union and had a right
to be indignant with the usurpers of his job. “Big” Bill Totts was so
very big, and so very able, that it was “Big” Bill to the front when
trouble was brewing. From acting outraged feelings, Freddie Drummond, in
the rôle of his other self, came to experience genuine outrage, and it
was only when he returned to the classic atmosphere of the university
that he was able, sanely and conservatively, to generalize upon his
underworld experiences and put them down on paper as a trained
sociologist should. That Bill Totts lacked the perspective to raise him
above class-consciousness Freddie Drummond clearly saw. But Bill Totts
could not see it. When he saw a scab taking his job away, he saw red at
the same time, and little else did he see. It was Freddie Drummond,
irreproachably clothed and comported, seated at his study desk or facing
his class in _Sociology_ 17, who saw Bill Totts, and all around Bill
Totts, and all around the whole scab and union-labour problem and its
relation to the economic welfare of the United States in the struggle for
the world market. Bill Totts really wasn’t able to see beyond the next
meal and the prize-fight the following night at the Gaiety Athletic Club.
It was while gathering material for _Women and Work_ that Freddie
received his first warning of the danger he was in. He was too
successful at living in both worlds. This strange dualism he had
developed was after all very unstable, and, as he sat in his study and
meditated, he saw that it could not endure. It was really a transition
stage, and if he persisted he saw that he would inevitably have to drop
one world or the other. He could not continue in both. And as he looked
at the row of volumes that graced the upper shelf of his revolving
book-case, his volumes, beginning with his Thesis and ending with _Women
and Work_, he decided that that was the world he would hold to and stick
by. Bill Totts had served his purpose, but he had become a too dangerous
accomplice. Bill Totts would have to cease.
Freddie Drummond’s fright was due to Mary Condon, President of the
International Glove Workers’ Union No. 974. He had seen her, first, from
the spectators’ gallery, at the annual convention of the Northwest
Federation of Labour, and he had seen her through Bill Totts’ eyes, and
that individual had been most favourably impressed by her. She was not
Freddie Drummond’s sort at all. What if she were a royal-bodied woman,
graceful and sinewy as a panther, with amazing black eyes that could fill
with fire or laughter-love, as the mood might dictate? He detested women
with a too exuberant vitality and a lack of . . . well, of inhibition.
Freddie Drummond accepted the doctrine of evolution because it was quite
universally accepted by college men, and he flatly believed that man had
climbed up the ladder of life out of the weltering muck and mess of lower
and monstrous organic things. But he was a trifle ashamed of this
genealogy, and preferred not to think of it. Wherefore, probably, he
practised his iron inhibition and preached it to others, and preferred
women of his own type, who could shake free of this bestial and
regrettable ancestral line and by discipline and control emphasize the
wideness of the gulf that separated them from what their dim forbears had
been.
Bill Totts had none of these considerations. He had liked Mary Condon
from the moment his eyes first rested on her in the convention hall, and
he had made it a point, then and there, to find out who she was. The
next time he met her, and quite by accident, was when he was driving an
express waggon for Pat Morrissey. It was in a lodging-house in Mission
Street, where he had been called to take a trunk into storage. The
landlady’s daughter had called him and led him to the little bedroom, the
occupant of which, a glove-maker, had just been removed to hospital. But
Bill did not know this. He stooped, up-ended the trunk, which was a
large one, got it on his shoulder, and struggled to his feet with his
back toward the open door. At that moment he heard a woman’s voice.
“Belong to the union?” was the question asked.
“Aw, what’s it to you?” he retorted. “Run along now, an’ git outa my
way. I wanta turn round.”
The next he know, big as he was, he was whirled half around and sent
reeling backward, the trunk overbalancing him, till he fetched up with a
crash against the wall. He started to swear, but at the same instant
found himself looking into Mary Condon’s flashing, angry eyes.
“Of course I b’long to the union,” he said. “I was only kiddin’ you.”
“Where’s your card?” she demanded in businesslike tones.
“In my pocket. But I can’t git it out now. This trunk’s too damn heavy.
Come on down to the waggon an’ I’ll show it to you.”
“Put that trunk down,” was the command.
“What for? I got a card, I’m tellin’ you.”
“Put it down, that’s all. No scab’s going to handle that trunk. You
ought to be ashamed of yourself, you big coward, scabbing on honest men.
Why don’t you join the union and be a man?”
Mary Condon’s colour had left her face, and it was apparent that she was
in a rage.
“To think of a big man like you turning traitor to his class. I suppose
you’re aching to join the militia for a chance to shoot down union
drivers the next strike. You may belong to the militia already, for that
matter. You’re the sort—”
“Hold on, now, that’s too much!” Bill dropped the trunk to the floor
with a bang, straightened up, and thrust his hand into his inside coat
pocket. “I told you I was only kiddin’. There, look at that.”
It was a union card properly enough.
“All right, take it along,” Mary Condon said. “And the next time don’t
kid.”
Her face relaxed as she noticed the ease with which he got the big trunk
to his shoulder, and her eyes glowed as they glanced over the graceful
massiveness of the man. But Bill did not see that. He was too busy with
the trunk.
The next time he saw Mary Condon was during the Laundry Strike. The
Laundry Workers, but recently organized, were green at the business, and
had petitioned Mary Condon to engineer the strike. Freddie Drummond had
had an inkling of what was coming, and had sent Bill Totts to join the
union and investigate. Bill’s job was in the wash-room, and the men had
been called out first, that morning, in order to stiffen the courage of
the girls; and Bill chanced to be near the door to the mangle-room when
Mary Condon started to enter. The superintendent, who was both large and
stout, barred her way. He wasn’t going to have his girls called out, and
he’d teach her a lesson to mind her own business. And as Mary tried to
squeeze past him he thrust her back with a fat hand on her shoulder. She
glanced around and saw Bill.
“Here you, Mr. Totts,” she called. “Lend a hand. I want to get in.”
Bill experienced a startle of warm surprise. She had remembered his name
from his union card. The next moment the superintendent had been plucked
from the doorway raving about rights under the law, and the girls were
deserting their machines. During the rest of that short and successful
strike, Bill constituted himself Mary Condon’s henchman and messenger,
and when it was over returned to the University to be Freddie Drummond
and to wonder what Bill Totts could see in such a woman.
Freddie Drummond was entirely safe, but Bill had fallen in love. There
was no getting away from the fact of it, and it was this fact that had
given Freddie Drummond his warning. Well, he had done his work, and his
adventures could cease. There was no need for him to cross the Slot
again. All but the last three chapters of his latest, _Labour Tactics
and Strategy_, was finished, and he had sufficient material on hand
adequately to supply those chapters.
Another conclusion he arrived at, was that in order to sheet-anchor
himself as Freddie Drummond, closer ties and relations in his own social
nook were necessary. It was time that he was married, anyway, and he was
fully aware that if Freddie Drummond didn’t get married, Bill Totts
assuredly would, and the complications were too awful to contemplate.
And so, enters Catherine Van Vorst. She was a college woman herself, and
her father, the one wealthy member of the faculty, was the head of the
Philosophy Department as well. It would be a wise marriage from every
standpoint, Freddie Drummond concluded when the engagement was
consummated and announced. In appearance cold and reserved, aristocratic
and wholesomely conservative, Catherine Van Vorst, though warm in her
way, possessed an inhibition equal to Drummond’s.
All seemed well with him, but Freddie Drummond could not quite shake off
the call of the underworld, the lure of the free and open, of the
unhampered, irresponsible life South of the Slot. As the time of his
marriage approached, he felt that he had indeed sowed wild oats, and he
felt, moreover, what a good thing it would be if he could have but one
wild fling more, play the good fellow and the wastrel one last time, ere
he settled down to grey lecture-rooms and sober matrimony. And, further
to tempt him, the very last chapter of _Labour Tactics and Strategy_
remained unwritten for lack of a trifle more of essential data which he
had neglected to gather.
So Freddie Drummond went down for the last time as Bill Totts, got his
data, and, unfortunately, encountered Mary Condon. Once more installed
in his study, it was not a pleasant thing to look back upon. It made his
warning doubly imperative. Bill Totts had behaved abominably. Not only
had he met Mary Condon at the Central Labour Council, but he had stopped
at a chop-house with her, on the way home, and treated her to oysters.
And before they parted at her door, his arms had been about her, and he
had kissed her on the lips and kissed her repeatedly. And her last words
in his ear, words uttered softly with a catchy sob in the throat that was
nothing more nor less than a love cry, were “Bill . . . dear, dear Bill.”
Freddie Drummond shuddered at the recollection. He saw the pit yawning
for him. He was not by nature a polygamist, and he was appalled at the
possibilities of the situation. It would have to be put an end to, and
it would end in one only of two ways: either he must become wholly Bill
Totts and be married to Mary Condon, or he must remain wholly Freddie
Drummond and be married to Catherine Van Vorst. Otherwise, his conduct
would be beneath contempt and horrible.
In the several months that followed, San Francisco was torn with labour
strife. The unions and the employers’ associations had locked horns with
a determination that looked as if they intended to settle the matter, one
way or the other, for all time. But Freddie Drummond corrected proofs,
lectured classes, and did not budge. He devoted himself to Catherine Van
Vorst, and day by day found more to respect and admire in her—nay, even
to love in her. The Street Car Strike tempted him, but not so severely
as he would have expected; and the great Meat Strike came on and left him
cold. The ghost of Bill Totts had been successfully laid, and Freddie
Drummond with rejuvenescent zeal tackled a brochure, long-planned, on the
topic of “diminishing returns.”
The wedding was two weeks off, when, one afternoon, in San Francisco,
Catherine Van Vorst picked him up and whisked him away to see a Boys’
Club, recently instituted by the settlement workers in whom she was
interested. It was her brother’s machine, but they were alone with the
exception of the chauffeur. At the junction with Kearny Street, Market
and Geary Streets intersect like the sides of a sharp-angled letter “V.”
They, in the auto, were coming down Market with the intention of
negotiating the sharp apex and going up Geary. But they did not know
what was coming down Geary, timed by fate to meet them at the apex.
While aware from the papers that the Meat Strike was on and that it was
an exceedingly bitter one, all thought of it at that moment was farthest
from Freddie Drummond’s mind. Was he not seated beside Catherine? And
besides, he was carefully expositing to her his views on settlement
work—views that Bill Totts’ adventures had played a part in formulating.
Coming down Geary Street were six meat waggons. Beside each scab driver
sat a policeman. Front and rear, and along each side of this procession,
marched a protecting escort of one hundred police. Behind the police
rearguard, at a respectful distance, was an orderly but vociferous mob,
several blocks in length, that congested the street from sidewalk to
sidewalk. The Beef Trust was making an effort to supply the hotels, and,
incidentally, to begin the breaking of the strike. The St. Francis had
already been supplied, at a cost of many broken windows and broken heads,
and the expedition was marching to the relief of the Palace Hotel.
All unwitting, Drummond sat beside Catherine, talking settlement work, as
the auto, honking methodically and dodging traffic, swung in a wide curve
to get around the apex. A big coal waggon, loaded with lump coal and
drawn by four huge horses, just debouching from Kearny Street as though
to turn down Market, blocked their way. The driver of the waggon seemed
undecided, and the chauffeur, running slow but disregarding some shouted
warning from the crossing policemen, swerved the auto to the left,
violating the traffic rules, in order to pass in front of the waggon.
At that moment Freddie Drummond discontinued his conversation. Nor did
he resume it again, for the situation was developing with the rapidity of
a transformation scene. He heard the roar of the mob at the rear, and
caught a glimpse of the helmeted police and the lurching meat waggons.
At the same moment, laying on his whip, and standing up to his task, the
coal driver rushed horses and waggon squarely in front of the advancing
procession, pulled the horses up sharply, and put on the big brake. Then
he made his lines fast to the brake-handle and sat down with the air of
one who had stopped to stay. The auto had been brought to a stop, too,
by his big panting leaders which had jammed against it.
Before the chauffeur could back clear, an old Irishman, driving a rickety
express waggon and lashing his one horse to a gallop, had locked wheels
with the auto. Drummond recognized both horse and waggon, for he had
driven them often himself. The Irishman was Pat Morrissey. On the other
side a brewery waggon was locking with the coal waggon, and an east-bound
Kearny Street car, wildly clanging its gong, the motorman shouting
defiance at the crossing policeman, was dashing forward to complete the
blockade. And waggon after waggon was locking and blocking and adding to
the confusion. The meat waggons halted. The police were trapped. The
roar at the rear increased as the mob came on to the attack, while the
vanguard of the police charged the obstructing waggons.
“We’re in for it,” Drummond remarked coolly to Catherine.
“Yes,” she nodded, with equal coolness. “What savages they are.”
His admiration for her doubled on itself. She was indeed his sort. He
would have been satisfied with her even if she had screamed, and clung to
him, but this—this was magnificent. She sat in that storm centre as
calmly as if it had been no more than a block of carriages at the opera.
The police were struggling to clear a passage. The driver of the coal
waggon, a big man in shirt sleeves, lighted a pipe and sat smoking. He
glanced down complacently at a captain of police who was raving and
cursing at him, and his only acknowledgment was a shrug of the shoulders.
From the rear arose the rat-rat-tat of clubs on heads and a pandemonium
of cursing, yelling, and shouting. A violent accession of noise
proclaimed that the mob had broken through and was dragging a scab from a
waggon. The police captain reinforced from his vanguard, and the mob at
the rear was repelled. Meanwhile, window after window in the high office
building on the right had been opened, and the class-conscious clerks
were raining a shower of office furniture down on the heads of police and
scabs. Waste-baskets, ink-bottles, paper-weights, type-writers—anything
and everything that came to hand was filling the air.
A policeman, under orders from his captain, clambered to the lofty seat
of the coal waggon to arrest the driver. And the driver, rising
leisurely and peacefully to meet him, suddenly crumpled him in his arms
and threw him down on top of the captain. The driver was a young giant,
and when he climbed on his load and poised a lump of coal in both hands,
a policeman, who was just scaling the waggon from the side, let go and
dropped back to earth. The captain ordered half-a-dozen of his men to
take the waggon. The teamster, scrambling over the load from side to
side, beat them down with huge lumps of coal.
The crowd on the sidewalks and the teamsters on the locked waggons roared
encouragement and their own delight. The motorman, smashing helmets with
his controller bar, was beaten into insensibility and dragged from his
platform. The captain of police, beside himself at the repulse of his
men, led the next assault on the coal waggon. A score of police were
swarming up the tall-sided fortress. But the teamster multiplied
himself. At times there were six or eight policemen rolling on the
pavement and under the waggon. Engaged in repulsing an attack on the
rear end of his fortress, the teamster turned about to see the captain
just in the act of stepping on to the seat from the front end. He was
still in the air and in most unstable equilibrium, when the teamster
hurled a thirty-pound lump of coal. It caught the captain fairly on the
chest, and he went over backward, striking on a wheeler’s back, tumbling
on to the ground, and jamming against the rear wheel of the auto.
Catherine thought he was dead, but he picked himself up and charged back.
She reached out her gloved hand and patted the flank of the snorting,
quivering horse. But Drummond did not notice the action. He had eyes
for nothing save the battle of the coal waggon, while somewhere in his
complicated psychology, one Bill Totts was heaving and straining in an
effort to come to life. Drummond believed in law and order and the
maintenance of the established, but this riotous savage within him would
have none of it. Then, if ever, did Freddie Drummond call upon his iron
inhibition to save him. But it is written that the house divided against
itself must fall. And Freddie Drummond found that he had divided all the
will and force of him with Bill Totts, and between them the entity that
constituted the pair of them was being wrenched in twain.
Freddie Drummond sat in the auto, quite composed, alongside Catherine Van
Vorst; but looking out of Freddie Drummond’s eyes was Bill Totts, and
somewhere behind those eyes, battling for the control of their mutual
body, were Freddie Drummond the sane and conservative sociologist, and
Bill Totts, the class-conscious and bellicose union working man. It was
Bill Totts, looking out of those eyes, who saw the inevitable end of the
battle on the coal waggon. He saw a policeman gain the top of the load,
a second, and a third. They lurched clumsily on the loose footing, but
their long riot-clubs were out and swinging. One blow caught the
teamster on the head. A second he dodged, receiving it on the shoulder.
For him the game was plainly up. He dashed in suddenly, clutched two
policemen in his arms, and hurled himself a prisoner to the pavement, his
hold never relaxing on his two captors.
Catherine Van Vorst was sick and faint at sight of the blood and brutal
fighting. But her qualms were vanquished by the sensational and most
unexpected happening that followed. The man beside her emitted an
unearthly and uncultured yell and rose to his feet. She saw him spring
over the front seat, leap to the broad rump of the wheeler, and from
there gain the waggon. His onslaught was like a whirlwind. Before the
bewildered officer on the load could guess the errand of this
conventionally clad but excited-seeming gentleman, he was the recipient
of a punch that arched him back through the air to the pavement. A kick
in the face led an ascending policeman to follow his example. A rush of
three more gained the top and locked with Bill Totts in a gigantic
clinch, during which his scalp was opened up by a club, and coat, vest,
and half his starched shirt were torn from him. But the three policemen
were flung far and wide, and Bill Totts, raining down lumps of coal, held
the fort.
The captain led gallantly to the attack, but was bowled over by a chunk
of coal that burst on his head in black baptism. The need of the police
was to break the blockade in front before the mob could break in at the
rear, and Bill Totts’ need was to hold the waggon till the mob did break
through. So the battle of the coal went on.
The crowd had recognized its champion. “Big” Bill, as usual, had come to
the front, and Catherine Van Vorst was bewildered by the cries of “Bill!
O you Bill!” that arose on every hand. Pat Morrissey, on his waggon
seat, was jumping and screaming in an ecstasy, “Eat ’em, Bill! Eat ’em!
Eat ’em alive!” From the sidewalk she heard a woman’s voice cry out,
“Look out, Bill—front end!” Bill took the warning and with well-directed
coal cleared the front end of the waggon of assailants. Catherine Van
Vorst turned her head and saw on the curb of the sidewalk a woman with
vivid colouring and flashing black eyes who was staring with all her soul
at the man who had been Freddie Drummond a few minutes before.
The windows of the office building became vociferous with applause. A
fresh shower of office chairs and filing cabinets descended. The mob had
broken through on one side the line of waggons, and was advancing, each
segregated policeman the centre of a fighting group. The scabs were torn
from their seats, the traces of the horses cut, and the frightened
animals put in flight. Many policemen crawled under the coal waggon for
safety, while the loose horses, with here and there a policeman on their
backs or struggling at their heads to hold them, surged across the
sidewalk opposite the jam and broke into Market Street.
Catherine Van Vorst heard the woman’s voice calling in warning. She was
back on the curb again, and crying out—
“Beat it, Bill! Now’s your time! Beat it!”
The police for the moment had been swept away. Bill Totts leaped to the
pavement and made his way to the woman on the sidewalk. Catherine Van
Vorst saw her throw her arms around him and kiss him on the lips; and
Catherine Van Vorst watched him curiously as he went on down the
sidewalk, one arm around the woman, both talking and laughing, and he
with a volubility and abandon she could never have dreamed possible.
The police were back again and clearing the jam while waiting for
reinforcements and new drivers and horses. The mob had done its work and
was scattering, and Catherine Van Vorst, still watching, could see the
man she had known as Freddie Drummond. He towered a head above the
crowd. His arm was still about the woman. And she in the motor-car,
watching, saw the pair cross Market Street, cross the Slot, and disappear
down Third Street into the labour ghetto.
* * * * *
In the years that followed no more lectures were given in the University
of California by one Freddie Drummond, and no more books on economics and
the labour question appeared over the name of Frederick A. Drummond. On
the other hand there arose a new labour leader, William Totts by name.
He it was who married Mary Condon, President of the International Glove
Workers’ Union No. 974; and he it was who called the notorious Cooks and
Waiters’ Strike, which, before its successful termination, brought out
with it scores of other unions, among which, of the more remotely allied,
were the Chicken Pickers and the Undertakers.