Part 42 (1/2)

”Sure I can't do anything now?”

”Sure.”

”Well, good bye,” he smiled good humoredly. ”And tell that husband of yours to keep in good condition. I'm likely to make him need it all when he tangles up with me.”

”Oh, but you can't fight with him,” she warned. ”You mustn't. You haven't got a show.”

”Good for you,” he admired. ”That's the way for a woman to stand up for her man. Now the average woman would be so afraid he was going to get licked--”

”But I'm not afraid... for him. It's for you. He's a terrible fighter.

You wouldn't have any chance. It would be like... like...”

”Like taking candy from a baby?” Blanchard finished for her.

”Yes,” she nodded. ”That's just what he would call it. And whenever he tells you you are standing on your foot watch out for him. Now I must go. Good bye, and thank you again.”

She went on down the sidewalk, his cheery good bye ringing in her ears.

He was kind--she admitted it honestly; yet he was one of the clever ones, one of the masters, who, according to Billy, were responsible for all the cruelty to labor, for the hards.h.i.+ps of the women, for the punishment of the labor men who were wearing stripes in San Quentin or were in the death cells awaiting the scaffold. Yet he was kind, sweet natured, clean, good. She could read his character in his face. But how could this be, if he were responsible for so much evil? She shook her head wearily. There was no explanation, no understanding of this world which destroyed little babes and bruised women's b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

As for her having strayed into that neighborhood of fine residences, she was unsurprised. It was in line with her queerness. She did so many things without knowing that she did them. But she must be careful. It was better to wander on the marshes and the Rock Wall.

Especially she liked the Rock Wall. There was a freedom about it, a wide s.p.a.ciousness that she found herself instinctively trying to breathe, holding her arms out to embrace and make part of herself. It was a more natural world, a more rational world. She could understand it--understand the green crabs with white-bleached claws that scuttled before her and which she could see pasturing on green-weeded rocks when the tide was low. Here, hopelessly man-made as the great wall was, nothing seemed artificial. There were no men here, no laws nor conflicts of men. The tide flowed and ebbed; the sun rose and set; regularly each afternoon the brave west wind came romping in through the Golden Gate, darkening the water, cresting tiny wavelets, making the sailboats fly.

Everything ran with frictionless order. Everything was free. Firewood lay about for the taking. No man sold it by the sack. Small boys fished with poles from the rocks, with no one to drive them away for trespa.s.s, catching fish as Billy had caught fish, as Cal Hutchins had caught fish.

Billy had told her of the great perch Cal Hutchins caught on the day of the eclipse, when he had little dreamed the heart of his manhood would be spent in convict's garb.

And here was food, food that was free. She watched the small boys on a day when she had eaten nothing, and emulated them, gathering mussels from the rocks at low water, cooking them by placing them among the coals of a fire she built on top of the wall. They tasted particularly good. She learned to knock the small oysters from the rocks, and once she found a string of fresh-caught fish some small boy had forgotten to take home with him.

Here drifted evidences of man's sinister handiwork--from a distance, from the cities. One flood tide she found the water covered with muskmelons. They bobbed and b.u.mped along up the estuary in countless thousands. Where they stranded against the rocks she was able to get them. But each and every melon--and she patiently tried scores of them--had been spoiled by a sharp gash that let in the salt water.

She could not understand. She asked an old Portuguese woman gathering driftwood.

”They do it, the people who have too much,” the old woman explained, straightening her labor-stiffened back with such an effort that almost Saxon could hear it creak. The old woman's black eyes flashed angrily, and her wrinkled lips, drawn tightly across toothless gums, wry with bitterness. ”The people that have too much. It is to keep up the price.

They throw them overboard in San Francisco.”

”But why don't they give them away to the poor people?” Saxon asked.

”They must keep up the price.”

”But the poor people cannot buy them anyway,” Saxon objected. ”It would not hurt the price.”

The old woman shrugged her shoulders.

”I do not know. It is their way. They chop each melon so that the poor people cannot fish them out and eat anyway. They do the same with the oranges, with the apples. Ah, the fishermen! There is a trust. When the boats catch too much fish, the trust throws them overboard from Fisherman Wharf, boat-loads, and boat-loads, and boatloads of the beautiful fish. And the beautiful good fish sink and are gone. And no one gets them. Yet they are dead and only good to eat. Fish are very good to eat.”

And Saxon could not understand a world that did such things--a world in which some men possessed so much food that they threw it away, paying men for their labor of spoiling it before they threw it away; and in the same world so many people who did not have enough food, whose babies died because their mothers' milk was not nouris.h.i.+ng, whose young men fought and killed one another for the chance to work, whose old men and women went to the poorhouse because there was no food for them in the little shacks they wept at leaving. She wondered if all the world were that way, and remembered Mercedes' tales. Yes; all the world was that way. Had not Mercedes seen ten thousand families starve to death in that far away India, when, as she had said, her own jewels that she wore would have fed and saved them all? It was the poorhouse and the salt vats for the stupid, jewels and automobiles for the clever ones.

She was one of the stupid. She must be. The evidence all pointed that way. Yet Saxon refused to accept it. She was not stupid. Her mother had not been stupid, nor had the pioneer stock before her. Still it must be so. Here she sat, nothing to eat at home, her love-husband changed to a brute beast and lying in jail, her arms and heart empty of the babe that would have been there if only the stupid ones had not made a shambles of her front yard in their wrangling over jobs.

She sat there, racking her brain, the smudge of Oakland at her back, staring across the bay at the smudge of San Francisco. Yet the sun was good; the wind was good, as was the keen salt air in her nostrils; the blue sky, flecked with clouds, was good. All the natural world was right, and sensible, and beneficent. It was the man-world that was wrong, and mad, and horrible. Why were the stupid stupid? Was it a law of G.o.d? No; it could not be. G.o.d had made the wind, and air, and sun.

The man-world was made by man, and a rotten job it was. Yet, and she remembered it well, the teaching in the orphan asylum, G.o.d had made everything. Her mother, too, had believed this, had believed in this G.o.d. Things could not be different. It was ordained.