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King Coal: A Novel, a novel by Upton Sinclair |
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Book 1. The Domain Of King Coal - Section 11 To Section 15 |
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_ SECTION 11. Before long Hal had a chance to see this system of espionage at work, and he began to understand something of the force which kept these silent and patient armies at their tasks. On a Sunday morning he was strolling with his mule-driver friend Tim Rafferty, a kindly lad with a pair of dreamy blue eyes in his coal-smutted face. They came to Tim's home, and he invited Hal to come in and meet his family. The father was a bowed and toil-worn man, but with tremendous strength in his solid frame, the product of many generations of labour in coal-mines. He was known as "Old Rafferty," despite the fact that he was well under fifty. He had been a pit-boy at the age of nine, and he showed Hal a faded leather album with pictures of his ancestors in the "oul' country"--men with sad, deeply lined faces, sitting very stiff and solemn to have their presentments made permanent for posterity. The mother of the family was a gaunt, grey-haired woman, with no teeth, but with a warm heart. Hal took to her, because her home was clean; he sat on the family door-step, amid a crowd of little Rafferties with newly-washed Sunday faces, and fascinated them with tales of adventures cribbed from Clark Russell and Captain Mayne Reid. As a reward he was invited to stay for dinner, and had a clean knife and fork, and a clean plate of steaming hot potatoes, with two slices of salt pork on the side. It was so wonderful that he forthwith inquired if he might forsake his company boarding-house and come and board with them. Mrs. Rafferty opened wide her eyes. "Sure," exclaimed she, "do you think you'd be let?" "Why not?" asked Hal. "Sure, 't would be a bad example for the others." "Do you mean I _have_ to board at Reminitsky's?" "There be six company boardin'-houses," said the woman. "And what would they do if I came to you?" "First you'd get a hint, and then you'd go down the canyon, and maybe us after ye." "But there's lots of people have boarders in shanty-town," objected Hal. "Oh! Them wops! Nobody counts them--they live any way they happen to fall. But you started at Reminitsky's, and 't would not be healthy for them that took ye away." "I see," laughed Hal. "There seem to be a lot of unhealthy things hereabouts." "Sure there be! They sent down Nick Ammons because his wife bought milk down the canyon. They had a sick baby, and it's not much you get in this thin stuff at the store. They put chalk in it, I think; any way, you can see somethin' white in the bottom." "So you have to trade at the store, too!" "I thought ye said ye'd worked in coal-mines," put in Old Rafferty, who had been a silent listener. "So I have," said Hal. "But it wasn't quite that bad." "Sure," said Mrs. Rafferty, "I'd like to know where 'twas then--in this country. Me and me old man spent weary years a-huntin'." Thus far the conversation had proceeded naturally; but suddenly it was as if a shadow passed over it--a shadow of fear. Hal saw Old Rafferty look at his wife, and frown and make signs to her. After all, what did they know about this handsome young stranger, who talked so glibly, and had been in so many parts of the world? "'Tis not complainin' we'd be," said the old man. And his wife made haste to add, "If they let peddlers and the like of them come in, 'twould be no end to it, I suppose. We find they treat us here as well as anywhere." "'Tis no joke, the life of workin' men, wherever ye try it," added the other; and when young Tim started to express an opinion, they shut him up with such evident anxiety that Hal's heart ached for them, and he made haste to change the subject.
SECTION 12. On the evening of the same Sunday Hal went to pay his promised call upon Mary Burke. She opened the front door of the cabin to let him in, and even by the dim rays of the little kerosene lamp, there came to him an impression of cheerfulness. "Hello," she said--just as she had said it when he had slid down the mountain into the family wash. He followed her into the room, and saw that the impression he had got of cheerfulness came from Mary herself. How bright and fresh she looked! The old blue calico, which had not been entirely clean, was newly laundered now, and on the shoulder where the rent had been was a neat patch of unfaded blue. There being only three rooms in Mary's home, two of these necessarily bed-rooms, she entertained her company in the kitchen. The room was bare, Hal saw--there was not even so much as a clock by way of ornament. The only charm the girl had been able to give to it, in preparation for company, was that of cleanness. The board floor had been newly sanded and scrubbed; the kitchen table also had been scrubbed, and the kettle on the stove, and the cracked tea-pot and bowls on the shelf. Mary's little brother and sister were in the room: Jennie, a dark-eyed, dark-haired little girl, frail, with a sad, rather frightened face; and Tommie, a round headed youngster, like a thousand other round headed and freckle-faced boys. Both of them were now sitting very straight in their chairs, staring at the visitor with a certain resentment, he thought. He suspected that they had been included in the general scrubbing. Inasmuch as it had been uncertain just when the visitor would come, they must have been required to do this every night, and he could imagine family disturbances, with arguments possibly not altogether complimentary to Mary's new "feller." There seemed to be a certain uneasiness in the place. Mary did not invite her company to a seat, but stood irresolute; and after Hal had ventured a couple of friendly remarks to the children, she said, abruptly, "Shall we be takin' that walk that we spoke of, Mr. Smith?" "Delighted!" said Hal; and while she pinned on her hat before the broken mirror on the shelf, he smiled at the children and quoted two lines from his Harrigan song-- "Oh, Mary-Jane, come out in the lane,
They went out. In the soft summer night it was pleasant to stroll under the moon--especially when they had come to the remoter parts of the village, where there were not so many weary people on door-steps and children playing noisily. There were other young couples walking here, under the same moon; the hardest day's toil could not so sap their energies that they did not feel the spell of this soft summer night. Hal, being tired, was content to stroll and enjoy the stillness; but Mary Burke sought information about the mysterious young man she was with. "Ye've not worked long in coal-mines, Mr. Smith?" she remarked. Hal was a trifle disconcerted. "How did you find that out?" "Ye don't look it--ye don't talk it. Ye're not like anybody or anything around here. I don't know how to say it, but ye make me think more of the poetry-books." Flattered as Hal was by this naive confession, he did not want to talk of the mystery of himself. He took refuge in a question about the "poetry-books." "I've read some," said the girl; "more than ye'd have thought, perhaps." This with a flash of her defiance. He asked more questions, and learned that she, like the Greek boy, "Andy," had come under the influence of that disturbing American institution, the public-school; she had learned to read, and the pretty young teacher had helped her, lending her books and magazines. Thus she had been given a key to a treasure-house, a magic carpet on which to travel over the world. These similes Mary herself used--for the Arabian Nights had been one of the books that were loaned to her. On rainy days she would hide behind the sofa, reading at a spot where the light crept in--so that she might be safe from small brothers and sisters! Joe Smith had read these same books, it appeared; and this seemed remarkable to Mary, for books cost money and were hard to get. She explained how she had searched the camp for new magic carpets, finding a "poetry-book" by Longfellow, and a book of American history, and a story called "David Copperfield," and last and strangest of all, another story called "Pride and Prejudice." A curious freak of fortune--the prim and sentimentally quivering Jane Austen in a coal-camp in a far Western wilderness! An adventure for Jane, as well as for Mary! What had Mary made of it, Hal wondered. Had she revelled, shop-girl fashion, in scenes of pallid ease? He learned that what she had made of it was despair. This world outside, with its freedom and cleanness, its people living gracious and worth-while lives, was not for her; she was chained to a scrub-pail in a coal-camp. Things had got so much worse since the death of her mother, she said. Her voice had become dull and hard--Hal thought that he had never heard a young voice express such hopelessness. "You've never been anywhere but here?" he asked. "I been in two other camps," she said--"first the Gordon, and then East Run. But they're all alike." "But you've been down to the towns?" "Only for a day, once or twice a year. Once I was in Sheridan, and in a church I heard a lady sing." She stopped for a moment, lost in this memory. Then suddenly her voice changed--and he could imagine in the darkness that she had tossed her head defiantly. "I'll not be entertainin' company with my troubles! Ye know how tiresome that is when ye hear it from somebody else--like my next-door neighbour, Mrs. Zamboni. D' ye know her?" "No," said Hal. "The poor old lady has troubles enough, God knows. Her man's not much good--he's troubled with the drink; and she's got eleven childer, and that's too many for one woman. Don't ye think so?" She asked this with a naivete which made Hal laugh. "Yes," he said, "I do." "Well, I think people'd help her more if she'd not complain so! And half of it in the Slavish language, that a body can't understand!" So Mary began to tell funny things about Mrs. Zamboni and her other polyglot neighbours, imitating their murdering of the Irish dialect. Hal thought her humour was naive and delightful, and he led her on to more cheerful gossip during the remainder of their walk.
But then, as they were on their way home, tragedy fell upon them. Hearing a step behind them, Mary turned and looked; then catching Hal by the arm, she drew him into the shadows at the side, whispering to him to be silent. The bent figure of a man went past them, lurching from side to side. When he had turned and gone into the house, Mary said, "It's my father. He's ugly when he's like that." And Hal could hear her quick breathing in the darkness. So that was Mary's trouble--the difficulty in her home life to which she had referred at their first meeting! Hal understood many things in a flash--why her home was bare of ornament, and why she did not invite her company to sit down. He stood silent, not knowing what to say. Before he could find the word, Mary burst out, "Oh, how I hate O'Callahan, that sells the stuff to my father! His home with plenty to eat in it, and his wife dressin' in silk and goin' down to mass every Sunday, and thinkin' herself too good for a common miner's daughter! Sometimes I think I'd like to kill them both." "That wouldn't help much," Hal ventured. "No, I know--there'd only be some other one in his place. Ye got to do more than that, to change things here. Ye got to get after them that make money out of O'Callahan." So Mary's mind was groping for causes! Hal had thought her excitement was due to humiliation, or to fear of a scene of violence when she reached home; but she was thinking of the deeper aspects of this terrible drink problem. There was still enough unconscious snobbery in Hal Warner for him to be surprised at this phenomenon in a common miner's daughter; and so, as at their first meeting, his pity was turned to intellectual interest. "They'll stop the drink business altogether some day," he said. He had not known that he was a Prohibitionist; he had become one suddenly! "Well," she answered, "they'd best stop it soon, if they don't want to he too late. 'Tis a sight to make your heart sick to see the young lads comin' home staggerin', too drunk even to fight." Hal had not had time to see much of this aspect of North Valley. "They sell to boys?" he asked. "Sure, who's to care? A boy's money's as good as a man's." "But I should think the company--" "The company lets the saloon-buildin'--that's all the company cares." "But they must care something about the efficiency of their hands!" "Sure, there's plenty more where they come from. When ye can't work, they fire ye, and that's all there is to it." "And is it so easy to get skilled men?" "It don't take much skill to get out coal. The skill is in keepin' your bones whole--and if you can stand breakin' 'em, the company can stand it." They had come to the little cabin. Mary stood for a moment in silence. "I'm talkin' bitter again!" she exclaimed suddenly. "And I promised ye me company manner! But things keep happening to set me off." And she turned abruptly and ran into the house. Hal stood for a moment wondering if she would return; then, deciding that she had meant that as good night, he went slowly up the street. He fought against a mood of real depression, the first he had known since his coming to North Valley. He had managed so far to keep a certain degree of aloofness, that he might see this industrial world without prejudice. But to-night his pity for Mary had involved him more deeply. To be sure, he might be able to help her, to find her work in some less crushing environment; but his mind went on to the question--how many girls might there be in mining-camps, young and eager, hungering for life, but crushed by poverty, and by the burden of the drink problem? A man walked past Hal, greeting him in the semi-darkness with a nod and a motion of the hand. It was the Reverend Spragg, the gentleman who was officially commissioned to combat the demon rum in North Valley. Hal had been to the little white church the Sunday before, and heard the Reverend Spragg preach a doctrinal sermon, in which the blood of the lamb was liberally sprinkled, and the congregation heard where and how they were to receive compensation for the distresses they endured in this vale of tears. What a mockery it seemed! Once, indubitably, people had believed such doctrines; they had been willing to go to the stake for them. But now nobody went to the stake for them--on the contrary, the company compelled every worker to contribute out of his scanty earnings towards the preaching of them. How could the most ignorant of zealots confront such an arrangement without suspicion of his own piety? Somewhere at the head of the great dividend-paying machine that was called the General Fuel Company must be some devilish intelligence that had worked it all out, that had given the orders to its ecclesiastical staff: "We want the present--we leave you the future! We want the bodies--we leave you the souls! Teach them what you will about heaven--so long as you let us plunder them on earth!" In accordance with this devil's program, the Reverend Spragg might denounce the demon rum, but he said nothing about dividends based on the renting of rum-shops, nor about local politicians maintained by company contributions, plus the profits of wholesale liquor. He said nothing about the conclusions of modern hygiene, concerning over-work as a cause of the craving for alcohol; the phrase "industrial drinking," it seemed, was not known in General Fuel Company theology! In fact, when you listened to such a sermon, you would never have guessed that the hearers of it had physical bodies at all; certainly you would never have guessed that the preacher had a body, which was nourished by food produced by the overworked and under-nourished wage-slaves whom he taught!
SECTION 14. For the most part the victims of this system were cowed and spoke of their wrongs only in whispers; but there was one place in the camp, Hal found, where they could not keep silence, where their sense of outrage battled with their fear. This place was the solar plexus of the mine-organism, the centre of its nervous energies; to change the simile, it was the judgment-seat, where the miner had sentence passed upon him--sentence either to plenty, or to starvation and despair. This place was the "tipple," where the coal that came out of the mine was weighed and recorded. Every digger, as he came from the cage, made for this spot. There was a bulletin-board, and on it his number, and the record of the weights of the cars he had sent out that day. And every man, no matter how ignorant, had learned enough English to read those figures. Hal had gradually come to realise that here was the place of drama. Most of the men would look, and then, without a sound or glance about, would slouch off with drooping shoulders. Others would mumble to themselves--or, what amounted to the same thing, would mumble to one another in barbarous dialects. But about one in five could speak English; and scarcely an evening passed that some man did not break loose, shaking his fist at the sky, or at the weigh-boss--behind the latter's back. He might gather a knot of fellow-grumblers about him; it was to be noted that the camp-marshal had the habit of being on hand at this hour. It was on one of these occasions that Hal first noticed Mike Sikoria, a grizzle-haired old Slovak, who had spent twenty years in the mines of these regions. All the bitterness of all the wrongs of all these years welled up in Old Mike, as he shouted his score aloud: "Nineteen, twenty-two, twenty-four, twenty! Is that my weight, Mister? You want me to believe that's my weight?" "That's your weight," said the weigh-boss, coldly. "Well, by Judas, your scale is off, Mister! Look at them cars--them cars is big! You measure them cars, Mister--seven feet long, three and a half feet high, four feet wide. And you tell me them don't go but twenty?" "You don't load them right," said the boss. "Don't load them right?" echoed the old miner; he became suddenly plaintive, as if more hurt than angered by such an insinuation. "You know all the years I work, and you tell me I don't know a load? When I load a car, I load him like a miner, I don't load him like a Jap, that don't know about a mine! I put it up--I chunk it up like a stack of hay. I load him square--like that." With gestures the old fellow was illustrating what he meant. "See there! There's a ton on the top, and a ton and a half on the bottom--and you tell me I get only nineteen, twenty!" "That's your weight," said the boss, implacably. "But, Mister, your scale is wrong! I tell you I used to get my weight. I used to get forty-five, forty-six on them cars. Here's my buddy--ask him if it ain't so. What is it, Bo?" "Um m m-mum," said Bo, who was a negro--though one could hardly be sure of this for the coal-dust on him. "I can't make a living no more!" exclaimed the old Slovak, his voice trembling and his wizened dark eyes full of pleading. "What you think I make? For fifteen days, fifty cents! I pay board, and so help me God, Mister--and I stand right here--I swear for God I make fifty cents. I dig the coal and I ain't got no weight, I ain't got nothing! Your scale is wrong!" "Get out!" said the weigh-boss, turning away. "But, Mister!" cried Old Mike, following behind him, and pouring his whole soul into his words. "What is this life, Mister? You work like a burro, and you don't get nothing for it! You burn your own powder--half a dollar a day powder--what you think of that? Crosscut--and you get nothing! Take the skip and a pillar, and you get nothing! Brush--and you get nothing! Here, by Judas, a poor man, going and working his body to the last point, and blood is run out! You starve me to death, I say! I have got to have something to eat, haven't I?" And suddenly the boss whirled upon him. "Get the hell out of here!" he shouted. "If you don't like it, get your time and quit. Shut your face, or I'll shut it for you." The old man quailed and fell silent. He stood for a moment more, biting his whiskered lips nervously; then his shoulders sank together, and he turned and slunk off, followed by his negro helper.
SECTION 15. Old Mike boarded at Reminitsky's, and after supper was over, Hal sought him out. He was easy to know, and proved an interesting acquaintance. With the help of his eloquence Hal wandered through a score of camps in the district. The old fellow had a temper that he could not manage, and so he was always on the move; but all places were alike, he said--there was always some trick by which a miner was cheated of his earnings. A miner was a little business man, a contractor who took a certain job, with its expenses and its chance of profit or loss. A "place" was assigned to him by the boss--and he undertook to get out the coal from it, being paid at the rate of fifty-five cents a ton for each ton of clean coal. In some "places" a man could earn good money, and in others he would work for weeks, and not be able to keep up with his store-account. It all depended upon the amount of rock and slate that was found with the coal. If the vein was low, the man had one or two feet of rock to take off the ceiling, and this had to be loaded on separate cars and taken away. This work was called "brushing," and for it the miner received no pay. Or perhaps it was necessary to cut through a new passage, and clean out the rock; or perhaps to "grade the bottom," and lay the ties and rails over which the cars were brought in to be loaded; or perhaps the vein ran into a "fault," a broken place where there was rock instead of coal--and this rock must be hewed away before the miner could get at the coal. All such work was called "dead-work," and it was the cause of unceasing war. In the old days the company had paid extra for it; now, since they had got the upper hand of the men, they were refusing to pay. And so it was important to the miner to have a "place" assigned him where there was not so much of this dead work. And the "place" a man got depended upon the boss; so here, at the very outset, was endless opportunity for favouritism and graft, for quarrelling, or "keeping in" with the boss. What chance did a man stand who was poor and old and ugly, and could not speak English good? inquired old Mike, with bitterness. The boss stole his cars and gave them to other people; he took the weight off the cars, and gave them to fellows who boarded with him, or treated him to drinks, or otherwise curried favour with him. "I work five days in the Southeastern," said Mike, and when I work them five days, so help me God, brother, if I don't get up out of this chair, fifteen cents I was still in the hole yet. Fourteen inches of rock! And the Mr. Bishop--that is the superintendent--I says, 'Do you pay something for that rock?' 'Huh?' says he. 'Well,' I says, 'if you don't pay nothing for the rock, I don't go ahead with it. I ain't got no place to put that rock.' 'Get the hell out of here,' says he, and when I started to fight he pull gun on me. And then I go to Cedar Mountain, and the super give me work there, and he says, 'You go Number Four,' and he says, 'Rail is in Number Three, and the ties.' And he says, 'I pay you for it when you put it in.' So I take it away and I put it in, and I work till twelve o'clock. Carried the three pair of rails and the ties, and I pulled all the spikes--" "Pulled the spikes?" asked Hal. "Got no good spikes. Got to use old spikes, what you pull out of them old ties. So then I says, 'What is my half day, what you promise me?' Says he, 'You ain't dug no coal yet!' 'But, mister,' says I, 'you promise me pay to pull them spikes and put in them ties!' Says he, 'Company pay nothin' for dead work--you know that,' says he, and that is all the satisfaction I get." "And you didn't get your half day's pay?" "Sure I get nothin'. Boss do just as he please in coal mine." _ |
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