After that they considered themselves engaged, but they couldn’t get married, because Bonello’s printshop had been gutted with the rest of the block it stood in, and Mac was out of a job. Maisie used to let him kiss her and hug her in dark doorways when he took her home at night, but further than that he gave up trying to go.
In the fall he got a job on the Bulletin. That was night work and he hardly ever saw Maisie except Sundays, but they began to talk about getting married after Christmas. When he was away from her he felt somehow sore at Maisie most of the time, but when he was with her he melted absolutely. He tried to get her to read pamphlets on socialism, but she laughed and looked up at him with her big intimate blue eyes and said it was too deep for her. She liked to go to the theater and eat in restaurants where the linen was starched and there were waiters in dress suits.
About that time he went one night to hear Upton Sinclair speak about the Chicago stockyards. Next to him was a young man in dungarees. He had a nose like a hawk and gray eyes and deep creases under his cheekbones and talked in a slow drawl. His name was Fred Hoff. After the lecture they went and had a beer together and talked. Fred Hoff belonged to the new revolutionary organization called The Industrial Workers of the World. He read Mac the preamble over a second glass of beer. Fred Hoff had just hit town as donkeyengine man on a freighter. He was sick of the bum grub and hard life on the sea. He still had his pay in his pocket and he was bound he wouldn’t blow it in on a bust. He’d heard that there was a miners’ strike in Goldfield and he thought he’d go up there and see what he could do. He made Mac feel that he was leading a pretty stodgy life helping print lies against the working class. “Godalmighty, man, you’re just the kind o’ stuff we need out there. We’re goin’ to publish a paper in Goldfield, Nevada.”
That night Mac went round to the local and filled out a card, and went home to his boarding house with his head swimming. I was just on the point of selling out to the sons of bitches, he said to himself.
The next Sunday he and Maisie had been planning to go up the Scenic Railway to the top of Mount Tamalpais. Mac was terribly sleepy when his alarmclock got him out of bed. They had to start early because he had to be on the job again that night. As he walked to the ferrystation where he was going to meet her at nine the clank of the presses was still in his head, and the sour smell of ink and paper bruised under the presses, and on top of that the smell of the hall of the house he’d been in with a couple of the fellows, the smell of moldy rooms and sloppails and the smell of armpits and the dressingtable of the frizzyhaired girl he’d had on the clammy bed and the taste of the stale beer they’d drunk and the cooing mechanical voice, “Goodnight, dearie, come round soon.”
“God, I’m a swine,” he said to himself.
For once it was a clear morning, all the colors in the street shone like bits of glass. God, he was sick of whoring round. If Maisie would only be a sport, if Maisie was only a rebel you could talk to like you could to a friend. And how the hell was he going to tell her he was throwing up his job?
She was waiting for him at the ferry looking like a Gibson girl with her neat sailorblue dress and picture hat. They didn’t have time to say anything as they had to run for the ferry. Once on the ferryboat she lifted up her face to be kissed. Her lips were cool and her gloved hand rested so lightly on his. At Sausalito they took the trolleycar and changed and she kept smiling at him when they ran to get good places in the scenic car and they felt so alone in the roaring immensity of tawny mountain and blue sky and sea. They’d never been so happy together. She ran ahead of him all the way to the top. At the observatory they were both breathless. They stood against a wall out of sight of the other people and she let him kiss her all over her face, all over her face and neck.
Scraps of mist flew past cutting patches out of their view of the bay and the valleys and the shadowed mountains. When they went round to the seaward side an icy wind was shrilling through everything. A churning mass of fog was welling up from the sea like a tidal wave. She gripped his arm. “Oh, this scares me, Fainy!” Then suddenly he told her that he’d given up his job. She looked up at him frightened and shivering in the cold wind and little and helpless; tears began to run down either side of her nose. “But I thought you loved me, Fenian . . . Do you think it’s been easy for me waitin’ for you all this time, wantin’ you and lovin’ you? Oh, I thought you loved me!”
He put his arm round her. He couldn’t say anything. They started walking towards the gravity car.
“I don’t want all those people to see I’ve been crying. We were so happy before. Let’s walk down to Muir Woods.” “It’s pretty far, Maisie.” “I don’t care; I want to.” “Gee, you’re a good sport, Maisie.” They started down the footpath and the mist blotted out everything.
After a couple of hours they stopped to rest. They left the path and found a patch of grass in the middle of a big thicket of cistus. The mist was all around but it was bright overhead and they could feel the warmth of the sun through it. “Ouch, I’ve got blisters,” she said and made a funny face that made him laugh. “It can’t be so awful far now,” he said; “honest, Maisie.” He wanted to explain to her about the strike and the wobblies and why he was going to Goldfield, but he couldn’t. All he could do was kiss her. Her mouth clung to his lips and her arms were tight round his neck.
“Honest, it won’t make any difference about our gettin’ married; honest, it won’t . . . Maisie, I’m crazy about you . . . Maisie, do let me . . . You must let me . . . Honest, you don’t know how terrible it is for me, lovin’ you like this and you never lettin’ me.”
He got up and smoothed down her dress. She lay there with her eyes closed and her face white; he was afraid she had fainted. He kneeled down and kissed her gently on the cheek. She smiled ever so little and pulled his head down and ruffled his hair. “Little husband,” she said. After a while they got to their feet and walked through the redwood grove, without seeing it, to the trolleystation. Going home on the ferry they decided they’d get married inside of the week. Mac promised not to go to Nevada.
Next morning he got up feeling depressed. He was selling out. When he was shaving in the bathroom he looked at himself in the mirror and said, half aloud: “You bastard, you’re selling out to the sons of bitches.”
He went back to his room and wrote Maisie a letter.
DEAR MAISIE:
Honestly you mustn’t think for one minute I don’t love you ever so much, but I promised to go to Goldfield to help the gang run that paper and I’ve got to do it. I’ll send you my address as soon as I get there and if you really need me on account of anything, I’ll come right back, honestly I will.
A whole lot of kisses and love
FAINY
He went down to the Bulletin office and drew his pay, packed his bag and went down to the station to see when he could get a train for Goldfield, Nevada.
The Camera Eye (9)
all day the fertilizerfactories smelt something awful and at night the cabin was full of mosquitoes fit to carry you away but it was Crisfield on the Eastern Shore and if we had a gasoline boat to carry them across the bay here we could ship our tomatoes and corn and early peaches ship ’em clear to New York instead of being jipped by the commissionmerchants in Baltimore we’d run a truck farm ship early vegetables irrigate fertilize enrich the tobacco-exhausted land of the Northern Neck if we had a gasoline boat we’d run oysters in her in winter raise terrapin for the market
but up the freight siding I got talking to a young guy couldn’t have been much older ’n me was asleep in one of the boxcars asleep right there in the sun and the smell of cornstalks and the reek of rotting menhaden from the fertilizer factories he had curly hair and wisps of hay in it and through his open shirt you could see his body was burned brown to the waist I guess he wasn’t much account but he’d bummed all way from Minnesota he was going south and when I told him about Chesapeake Bay he wasn’t surprised but said I guess it’s too fur to swim it I’ll git a
job in a menhaden boat
Big Bill
Big Bill Haywood was born in sixty nine in a boardinghouse in Salt Lake City.
He was raised in Utah, got his schooling in Ophir a mining camp with shooting scrapes, faro Saturday nights, whisky spilled on pokertables piled with new silver dollars.
When he was eleven his mother bound him out to a farmer, he ran away because the farmer lashed him with a whip. That was his first strike.
He lost an eye whittling a slingshot out of scruboak.
He worked for storekeepers, ran a fruitstand, ushered in the Salt Lake Theatre, was a messengerboy, bellhop at the Continental Hotel.
When he was fifteen
he went out to the mines in Humboldt County, Nevada,
his outfit was overalls, a jumper, a blue shirt, mining boots, two pair of blankets, a set of chessmen, boxinggloves and a big lunch of plum pudding his mother fixed for him.
When he married he went to live in Fort McDermitt built in the old days against the Indians, abandoned now that there was no more frontier;
there his wife bore their first baby without doctor or midwife. Bill cut the navelstring, Bill buried the afterbirth;
the child lived. Bill earned money as he could surveying, haying in Paradise Valley, breaking colts, riding a wide rangy country.
One night at Thompson’s Mill, he was one of five men who met by chance and stopped the night in the abandoned ranch. Each of them had lost an eye, they were the only one-eyed men in the county.
They lost the homestead, things went to pieces, his wife was sick, he had children to support. He went to work as a miner at Silver City.
At Silver City, Idaho, he joined the W.F.M., there he held his first union office; he was delegate of the Silver City miners to the convention of the Western Federation of Miners held in Salt Lake City in ’98.
From then on he was an organizer, a speaker, an exhorter, the wants of all the miners were his wants; he fought Coeur D’Alenes, Telluride, Cripple Creek,
joined the Socialist Party, wrote and spoke through Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Montana, Colorado to miners striking for an eight hour day, better living, a share of the wealth they hacked out of the hills.
In Chicago in January 1905 a conference was called that met at the same hall in Lake Street where the Chicago anarchists had addressed meetings twenty years before.
William D. Haywood was permanent chairman. It was this conference that wrote the manifesto that brought into being the I.W.W.
When he got back to Denver he was kidnapped to Idaho and tried with Moyer and Pettibone for the murder of the sheepherder Steuenberg, exgovernor of Idaho, blown up by a bomb in his own home.
When they were acquitted at Boise (Darrow was their lawyer) Big Bill Haywood was known as a workingclass leader from coast to coast.
Now the wants of all the workers were his wants, he was the spokesman of the West, of the cowboys and the lumberjacks and the harvesthands and the miners.
(The steamdrill had thrown thousands of miners out of work; the steamdrill had thrown a scare into all the miners of the West.)
The W.F.M. was going conservative. Haywood worked with the I.W.W. building a new society in the shell of the old, campaigned for Debs for President in 1908 on the Red Special. He was in on all the big strikes in the East where revolutionary spirit was growing, Lawrence, Paterson, the strike of the Minnesota ironworkers.
They went over with the A.E.F. to save the Morgan loans, to save Wilsonian Democracy, they stood at Napoleon’s tomb and dreamed empire, they had champagne cocktails at the Ritz bar and slept with Russian countesses in Montmartre and dreamed empire, all over the country at American legion posts and business men’s luncheons it was worth money to make the eagle scream;
they lynched the pacifists and the proGermans and the wobblies and the reds and the bolsheviks.
Bill Haywood stood trial with the hundred and one at Chicago where Judge Landis the baseball czar
with the lack of formality of a traffic court
handed out his twenty year sentences and thirtythousand dollar fines.
After two years in Leavenworth they let them bail out Big Bill (he was fifty years old a heavy broken man), the war was over but they’d learned empire in the Hall of the Mirrors at Versailles;
the courts refused a new trial.
It was up to Haywood to jump his bail or to go back to prison for twenty years.
He was sick with diabetes, he had had a rough life, prison had broken down his health. Russia was a workers’ republic; he went to Russia and was in Moscow a couple of years but he wasn’t happy there, that world was too strange for him. He died there and they burned his big broken hulk of a body and buried the ashes under the Kremlin wall.
The Camera Eye (10)
the old major who used to take me to the Capitol when the Senate and the House of Representatives were in session had been in the commissary of the Confederate Army and had very beautiful manners so the attendants bowed to the old major except for the pages who were little boys not much older than your brother was a page in the Senate once and occasionally a Representative or a Senator would look at him with slit eyes may be somebody and bow or shake hearty or raise a hand
the old major dressed very well in a morningcoat and had muttonchop whiskers and we would walk very slowly through the flat sunlight in the Botanical Gardens and look at the little labels on the trees and shrubs and see the fat robins and the starlings hop across the grass and walk up the steps and through the flat air of the rotunda with the dead statues of different sizes and the Senate Chamber flat red and the committee room and the House flat green and the committee rooms and the Supreme Court I’ve forgotten what color the Supreme Court was and the committee rooms
and whispering behind the door of the visitors’ gallery and the dead air and a voice rattling under the glass skylights and desks slammed and the long corridors full of the dead air and our legs would get very tired and I thought of the starlings on the grass and the long streets full of dead air and my legs were tired and I had a pain between the eyes and the old men bowing with quick slit eyes
may be somebody and big slit unkind mouths and the dusty black felt and the smell of coatclosets and dead air and I wonder what the old major thought about and what I thought about maybe about that big picture at the Corcoran Art Gallery full of columns and steps and conspirators and Caesar in purple fallen flat called Caesar dead
Mac
Mac had hardly gotten off the train at Goldfield when a lanky man in khaki shirt and breeches, wearing canvas army leggins, went up to him. “If you don’t mind, what’s your business in this town, brother?” “I’m travelin’ in books.” “What kinda books?” “Schoolbooks and the like, for Truthseeker, Inc. of Chicago.” Mac rattled it off very fast, and the man seemed impressed. “I guess you’re all right,” he said. “Going up to the Eagle?” Mac nodded. “Plug’ll take ye up, the feller with the team . . . You see we’re looking out for these goddam agitators, the I Won’t Work outfit.”
Outside the Golden Eagle Hotel there were two soldiers on guard, toughlooking sawedoff men with their hats over their eyes. When Mac went in everybody at the bar turned and looked at him. He said “Good evening, gents,” as snappily as possible and went up to the proprietor to ask for a room. All the while he was wondering who the hell he dared ask where the office of the Nevada Workman was. “I guess I can fix you up with a bed. Travelin’ man?” “Yes,” said Mac. “In books.” Down at the end a big man with walrus whiskers was standing at the bar talking fast in a drunken whining voice, “If they’d only give me my head I’d run the bastards outa town soon enough. Too goddam many lawyers mixed up in this. Run the sonsobitches out. If they resists shoot ’em, that’s what I says to the Governor, but they’re all these sonsobitches a lawyers fussin’ everythin’ up all the time with warrants and habeas corpus and longwinded rigmarole. My ass to habeas corpus.” “All right, Joe, you tell ’em,” said the proprietor soothingly. Mac bought a cigar
and sauntered out. As the door closed behind him the big man was yelling out again, “I said, My ass to habeas corpus.”
It was nearly dark. An icy wind blew through the ramshackle clapboard streets. His feet stumbling in the mud of the deep ruts, Mac walked round several blocks looking up at dark windows. He walked all over the town but no sign of a newspaper office. When he found himself passing the same Chink hashjoint for the third time, he slackened his steps and stood irresolutely on the curb. At the end of the street the great jagged shank of a hill hung over the town. Across the street a young man, his head and ears huddled into the collar of a mackinaw, was loafing against the dark window of a hardware store. Mac decided he was a squarelooking stiff and went over to speak to him.
“Say, bo, where’s the office of the Nevada Workman?” “What the hell d’you wanter know for?” Mac and the other man looked at each other. “I want to see Fred Hoff . . . I came on from San Fran to help in the printin’.” “Got a red card?” Mac pulled out his I.W.W. membership card. “I’ve got my union card, too, if you want to see that.”
“Hell, no . . . I guess you’re all right, but, as the feller said, suppose I’d been a dick, you’d be in the bullpen now, bo.”
“I told ’em I was a friggin’ bookagent to get into the damn town. Spent my last quarter on a cigar to keep up the burjwa look.”